I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK : PHISH-Live Bait: Vol 2 (2010).

Phish has been releasing live concert downloads  for years now.  And now that they’ve started touring again, they have a whole bunch of new ones.  I’m not going to be downloading new shows, (I have a  bunch of old ones that I really never listen to).  But what I like is that they are giving away a few tracks from these shows.  And what I love is that they’re calling the freebies, Live Bait.

This set is a few tracks from shows recorded in August of 2010.  There’s nine tracks  ranging from 90 seconds (“NO2” ) to 17 minutes (“Twenty Years Later”).

Although this show is from 2010, this bait contains only two songs from their last album, Joy. The older songs are fan favorites (“Wilson, “Possum”) and weird interludes (“Kung”).  The band sounds fresh and really into what they’re doing and the old songs sound rejuvenated and fun.

Nevertheless, since most of the other live releases are older, it’s so nice to have the two new songs.  You can’t be choosy on a free sample, but I’d have loved to hear them do “Time Turns Elastic.”  If you’re new to Phish, this is a good place to get a free sample of their live shows.  Three volumes of bait have been released so far.

[READ: February 16, 2011] Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!

I discovered this book when I read the short story “Samson and Delilah in The Walrus.  I liked, but didn’t love, the short story, but I was intrigued enough to want to see how the other Bible stories would stack up.  And since we had the book on the shelf, I decided to check it out.

So this book is a retelling of several stories from the Old Testament.  What Goldstein does is create a backstory for these biblical characters who are really just sketches.  The stories are funny, serious, weird and often enjoyable.

The introduction is a very funny kvetch about at being a Jew and having dinner in the Grey Derby; waiting online for hours with so many other Jewish families, eating kosher food with your own family, fighting over the check, pointing fingers, calling each other names and, ultimately, leaving by 5:30 PM.  It made me laugh out loud in the best Woody Allen tradition.

With no real introduction, he moves right into his new versions of Bible stories.

The biblical stories that Goldstein updates include:

• Adam and Eve
• Cain and Abel
• Noah and the Ark
• The Tower of Babel
• Jacob and Esau
• The Golden Calf
• Samson and Delilah
• King David
• part 1: Goliath
• part 2: Bathsheba
• part 3: Absalom
• Jonah and the Big Fish
• My Troubles (A Work in Progress, by Joseph of N–)

What you get is the basic plot of the biblical stories (Jonah winds up in the whale, Cain slays Abel, David kills Goliath) with a whole bunch of stuff presented as background for the familiar story.  Obviously, knowledge of the biblical stories helps a lot, but I think most of the stories are familiar enough to anyone to appreciate these versions on some level.

I hesitate to call these stories parodies, because they are not.  The original Biblical part stays true.  Really, he’s just fleshing them out.  Although the language he uses (especially in dialogue) is contemporary, and there are a lot of humorous anachronisms (but nothing too outrageous, like no TV or anything).  In the Adam and Eve story Adam is kind of a dope.  In the Jacob and Esau story, their mother clearly loves Jacob more and tells him so.  This feeds into the anger that builds between them.  And in the most complex invented backstory, Jonah’s brother touched his penis when he was a baby.  When Jonah turns out to be a backwards, introspective kid, his brother believes that that one incident has caused all of Jonah’s troubles.  He spends the rest of his life trying to make it up to Jonah, by setting him up on dates and such, and then the whale gets him.

The Jacob and Esau story was the longest and I think went on way too long.  It had moments of greatness, but just dragged a bit.

The stories of King David were all very good.  The underlying premise of these stories is that David wants more than anything else to be funny.  He imagined that when he knocked out Goliath, the sight of a small guy knocking over a giant with a slingshot would make everyone laugh and laugh.  It didn’t.  And despite being king, he was always sad that he couldn’t make people laugh.  Later, when his son Absalom proves to have a natural gift for humor, David is somewhat jealous.  It’s an interesting take on a familiar story.

The weird thing about the stories is that after the really funny introduction, the stories kind of fall flat because they’re not really funny.   Some things certainly are, and it seems like some of the stories are designed to be funnier than the others.  The scene of Jacob wrestling the angel is really quite funny, despite the rest of the story being too long.

The Golden Calf story, by contrast, is pretty funny straight through.  It concerns a young man whose father sells golden calves and who refuses to be intimidated by monotheism.  But again, the ending isn’t funny at all, and it’s not meant to be.  So it is a comic story or not?

The final piece is a diary from Joseph (Jesus’ dad).  It covers the concerns that many comedians have covered: right, an angel knocked you up, sure.  But he adds a few spins to it which take it in a different, and much better direction.  (Joseph’s reaction to the stable is very funny).  It’s a good story to end with.

The book is a fast read and I did enjoy the creativity behind the stories.  I was just never entirely clear how much I was meant to laugh.  It enjoyed a lot of the book but I really hoped to enjoy it more than I did.