I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: RUSH-“Garden Road” (1974).

So the bootleg that I mentioned yesterday was in fact incomplete.  On the Up the Downstair site, the track list includes “What You’re Doing” and “Garden Road.”  When I wrote to the cool host of Up the Downstair, he said that these two songs were available on You Tube and that he’d try to find them and add them to the site.

So in the meantime, I got to listen to the song on YouTube.  This is a song that the band wrote but which they never recorded (same is true for “Fancy Dancer”).  I have to imagine that they wrote these songs for their second album (along with “In the End” which they kept) around the time that Neil Peart joined the band.  Once they realized that Neil could write better lyrics, they scrapped these two heavy rockers.  Both songs have great riffs, even if lyrically they’re pretty poor.

The song rocks pretty well, although the solo seems to have been put to better use in “Working Man.”  I enjoy how the song breaks for the shouts of the Garden Road chorus (kind of like “Bad Boy”–perhaps it was a “thing” for them).  I rather like this song, and I think I like it better than a couple of the songs on Rush.

Check it out.

Maybe it’s time to release these old chestnuts for the fans?

[READ: August 10, 2011] Life After God

After the success of Shampoo Planet, Douglas Coupland wrote several short books (which were really short stories).  They were compiled in Life After God.  To me this book also stands out as another odd one from DC, because it is very tiny.  Not in length, but in height.  It’s a small book, about the size of a mass market paperback.  But it makes sense that it was made this short because it is written with lots of short paragraphs that lead to page breaks (kind of like Vonnegut).

For instance, the first story contains at most two paragraphs per “chapter” about–16 lines of text and then a page break.  At the top of each page is a drawing from DC himself which illustrates to a small degree the information on the page.  It leads to incredibly fast reading and even though the book is 360 pages, you can polish it off pretty quickly.

But what’s it about?  Well, mostly the stories seem autobiographical (even though they are classified as fiction.  And actually, I don’t know anything about DC’s personal life so I don’t know if they are based on anything real, although I do know he doesn’t have any kids, so those can’t be true at any rate).  There are eight stories.  They are all told from the first person and are more or less directed at “you.”  They all seem to deal with existential crises of some sort.  They are honest and emotional.  To my ear, sometimes they seem a little forced, maybe it’s contextual, but it’s hard to write this kind of massively introspective piece and have it sound “real.”  (But maybe I’m not very introspective about things like this myself).

“Little Creatures” is a short piece in which a father talks to his child.  It is told as a kind of reminiscence.  There are questions about humanity and animals.  The father reveals that his bedtime stories feature animals that don’t seem able to succeed, and it ends with the father wondering why his stories are so angsty (a question I was wondering as I was reading them).

“My Hotel Year” is broken into two parts.  The first deals with a couple: Cathy and Pup Tent.  He likes them both, but he doesn’t quite understand their relationship (neither does Cathy’s sister).  When it inevitably falls apart and Pup Tent splits, the narrator is there for her.  Her final act of “freedom” is so very Coupland–set in nature, hard to achieve, and a small gesture that is utterly meaningless, but which will stick with you for a long time.  The second part is about Donny, a young man who seems incapable of feeling.  But unlike cutters, he seeks his thrills by getting hurt by others.  The narrator likes all of these down and outers, despite not really being in their shoes.

“Things That Fly” is about birds, but it’s also about the human spirit.

“The Wrong Sun” is a two-part story that deals with nuclear annihilation. Coupland is slightly older than me, and it seems that people his age had to deal a bit more directly with the possibility of nuclear war.  At least, according to Coupland’s writings it has impacted him pretty significantly.  The second part of the piece is a series of people’s explanations of where they were when they died from the blast.

“Gettysburg” is also addressed to the narrator’s child. It’s a personal momento about the childs’ parents from the father’s point of view.

“In the Desert” is the first of the pieces that feels like a story, rather than a series of ideas.  In this piece the narrator is driving a box full of needles across the desert to its intended destination.  When he learns that his contact has been busted, he panics and tries to imagine what to do with the stash.  He drives through the desert looking for a secluded place.  But then he runs into a drifter and they have a brief but intense conversation.  The whole story feels really quite fake, but it’s still quite enjoyable.

“Patty Hearst” is a strange story indeed.  This is the kind of story that seems to encapsulate DC’s writing–an unusual family which is largely normal but just off enough to make a credible and interesting story.  There are several children in the family, but the story focuses on the narrator (the fourth born) and his sister Laurie (second born).  They bonded very well, but she eventually grew strange.  Drugs were definitely involved, but there was more to it.  She drifted from the family and then one day five years ago she ran away.  The plot is about the narrator following up on a clue that this sister is working nearby.  But mostly it is a reflection on families and relationships.  This is a good story to read if you ‘ve never read DC before and you want to know what he’s all about–family, loss, pop culture (the whole Patty Hearst thing is crazy) and wondering what has happened to the world.

“1,000 Years (Life After God)” is another microcosm of DC’s stories–this one is about several friends whose lives are completely intertwined at one point who draft apart as they grow older (that forms the basis of Generation X, Shampoo Planet and Microserfs).  The opening line either stayed with me for fifteen years (when I last read this  book) or I read it somewhere else recently (“As suburban children we floated at night in swimming pools the temperature of blood.”)

The story concerns the narrator and his friends: hip chick Stacey, silent strongman Mark, red-headed joke-machine Kristy, voice of reason Julie, ski bum Dana and prudish Todd.

For fans of David Foster Wallace, I found this quote to be quite relevant:

Life was charmed but without politics or religion. It was the life of children of the children of the pioneers – life after god – a life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven. Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life, – and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt.I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line.

I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.

The story itself takes place a decade and a half after the scene of the youngsters swimming naked in various people’s pools.  Scout, the narrator is now on anti-anxiety pills and he feels flat.  He wants to tell us something important, but he feels compelled to tell everyone else’s stories first, to ease us into it.  So we get their stories: how Mark tested HIV + and is now completely introspective; Stacey is a divorce aerobics instructor; Julie is married with kids and likes to keep her past safely distant; Dana, the crazy man, eventually moved away and married and settled down–cutting of all contact with his friends (indeed, when Scout runs into him, Todd is terrified of his truth coming out); Todd is a treeplanter, a hippie radical who eschews contemporary life; Kristy works with Scout at a software company [shades of Microserfs?]–she desires the unattainable (married smart men).

Scout concludes his story by describing a business trip from Vancouver to the East Coast.  Rather than flying back he decides to visit friends in Washington DC to watch Clinton’s inauguration and to kick the pills the doctor gave him.  When he returns home he is changed.  And while the ending is somewhat unsatisfying (Coupland’s stories never really end, they just kind of stop–more inexplicable nature embracing), the entire piece is quite enjoyable.

——

I had more or less forgotten what this book was all about, but I really enjoyed reading these stories.  I feel like you need to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy Coupland’s stories.  He is very unironic, which seems strange given his love of pop culture and his status as the voice of Generation X, but it’s true.  His stories embrace love and fear and trying to find the real underneath all of the commercials.  Sometimes they come across as if not preachy exactly, then perhaps a little too “moral,” but what’s a little guilt when the stories are this interesting?