I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: S. CAREY-Live at Sasquatch Music Festival, May 29, 2011 (2011).

I learned about S. Carey through NPR.  S. Carey is the drummer for Bon Iver and he set out on his own playing these cool, atmospheric songs.  What I like best about them is that they feature the vibes.

The whole set has a cool, chilled out sound.  The vocals are slow and dream-like (I’m sure there are lyrics, but I don’t know them) and at times he sounds not unlike Dallas Green from City and Colour.

When Sean (he is the S.) Carey banters with the crowd, he’s very friendly and relaxed.  I especially like the anecdote about going to the Twin Peaks Cafe and hearing Audrey’s music from the show (which the band then plays).  The Twin Peaks sounds melds perfectly with their own sound, which should give you an idea of what the band sounds like.

The songs are about 4 or five minutes except for “Mothers” which tops out at over 8 minutes and actually gets pretty raucous by the end.  For this band it’s a wild song ending.  It’s a good set.  And the surprise cover of Björk’s “Unravel,” which melds perfectly with “All We Grow” is a nice treat.

I don’t know if I’d want to see them live (I like my shows a bit more uptempo) but it’s a great relaxing set.  Of course, having said that, the final track, “Leave” is the most conventional-sounding with a really catchy chorus and a somewhat faster pace.  It’s my favorite song of theirs.

[READ: July 13, 2011] “Homage to Hemingway”

Like the students in this story, I was initially put off by the title of this book because I have grown to dislike Hemingway (probably unfairly, more of a decades-long, knee-jerk reaction to him). But I’m glad I read it because of a couple of things.  One: it was a good story.  Two: it is actually an homage to one of Hemingway’s stories (called “Homage to Switzerland”) so it’s doubly meta-.

In “Homage to Switzerland,” there are three brief stories.  In each one an American man waits for a train in a Swiss station.  Each man follows the same basic trajectory in the story, meeting a waitress but having no real resolution.  Perhaps the men, even though they had different names, were maybe the same person.

Barnes’ story also has three parts, although it is pretty clear that the man is the same in each part, despite their different section titles.  In 1. The Novelist in the Countryside he helps students with their fiction (I rather like reading stories about fiction writing classes, as odd as that sounds).

In 2. The Professor in the Alps, he is an honored guest at a writing group (where he is called Herr Professor).  It’s in this class that he introduces “Homage to Switzerland” to the students (and the readers).

The third part builds on the previous two.  In 3. The Maestro in the Midwest, he is teaching American would be writers.  (I’m not sure where Barnes is from–I assumed England from Part 1, but he really nails the descriptions of the American students–I especially enjoyed the boy who aimed his finger/gun at whatever stories he didn’t like).  The American students are less in awe of him than his previous students–he is less famous here.  He reads them a passage from “Homage to Switzerland” and the women in the class jumps all over it for being sexist (why don’t the waitresses have names?). The narrator finds himself unable to fight the class on this.

And the final line is wonderful.

What I liked especially about this story is that these three pieces had overlapping aspects, even if they were somewhat disconnected.  You felt like you were reading multiple viewpoints of this one man, like a cubist portrait.  And as more details come out about his personal life (which are not tied to the narrative timeline) you get little surprises as you go along.  Papa Hemingway would probably have hated it, but I thought it was really good.