I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: CLINIC-Funf (2007).

I received this disc when it was donated to our library.  Clinic is an art-punk band from Liverpool.  This is a collection of B-Sides (that’s an unusual place to start when you’ve never heard a band before). As such, it’s hard to tell if this is what the band sounds like or if these are crazy experiments (because the songs are pretty crazy).  Even if they are experiments, they’ve got me very interested in hearing what the rest of their stuff sounds like.  And since these songs are all over the map I’m still not sure what their albums may sound like.

There are twelve songs on the record: only three are over 3 minutes long, the rest are just over 2 minutes (with a couple under 2 minutes).  This whole collection is under half an hour.  And yet it feels like they take you all over the place, music-wise.  The collection covers from 1999-2007, but they’re not in chronological order, so you can’t even tell if any of this is a progression in musical styles or just a bunch of experiments.  The willful obscurity is quite exciting.

“The Majestic” is a grand, building monstrosity.  It is full of pomp, which is immediately deflated by the slightly off-key organ.  “Nicht” is a 180 degree turn—a blistering hardcore song. It’s played very fast and yet it is not sloppy (and it’s 90 seconds long).  “Christmas” flips the sound again, with a delicate, slow song about, yes, Christmas.  “The Castle” has a lot of organ sounds, which reminds me of early weirder Who songs and even Stereolab.  “You Can’t Hurt You Anymore” is an instrumental (with cowbell!).  “Dissolution” has a distorted guitar and tribal drums.  It breaks after a few riffs to showcase some bizarre distorted spoken words.

Speaking of lyrics.  A lyric sheet is included which is very helpful because the lyrics are utter nonsense: “Pork pie had to know uncle now you can elope” “Diktat no fat fun eyebrow shhhh for the one and the one with horrors”  “Cheat the bored, cheat thee sup at the toast.”  I suspect they are just making sounds while they play and then figuring out what the words might be later.

“Magic Boots” returns to that punk sound with distorted guitar solos at the front (and distorted vocals in the back).  “The Scythe” has a kind of western guitar feel (simple, but interesting).  “Lee Shan” is the slowest song on the disc (spoken/chanting vocals are low in the mix).  “J.O.” is a slow keyboard song.  “Circle I” is another blistering noisy punk song. The collection ends with “Golden Rectangle” which is a slowish surf-sounding song, but with keyboards.

It amazes me that this band has so many full length records out.  They must have a cult following, even though I’d never heard of them before.  I’d really like to check out what their main releases sound like.

[READ: March 11, 2012] “A Rooting Interest”

Hot on the heels of Jonathan Fraznen saying he hates Twitter, I get to read how much he loves Edith Wharton.

It’s no secret that Franzen is a curmudgeon–he is an emotional guy who believes in authenticity; there is absolutely no surprise that he would hate Twitter.  And, while I think Twitter is good for some things, he is absolutely correct when he says, “Twitter stands for everything I oppose…it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters…it’s like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis.”  [Actually I’m not sure that that simile is apt, but I get the point.]

He may be a little overstepping with the rest: “Or it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’…It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium … People I care about are readers…particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves.”  I think there is some fun to be had yakking about ourselves, but the point is well taken.

It also seems quite appropriate for this article in The New Yorker in which he lauds a writer who wrote almost one hundred years ago.

I admit that I have never read any Edith Wharton (not even Ethan Frome).  But Franzen makes a very compelling case for her three bigger novels: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country and The Age of Innocence.  He even says that they are clear precursors to the likes of The Great Gatsby.

What Franzen finds so intriguing about the novels is that Wharton fails almost every test of the “sympathy” vote.  Franzen tells us that he (and most readers I’m sure) tend to read writers we finding sympathetic in some way–whatever appeals to us about their humanity.  But Wharton really has nothing appealing about her.  She was utterly privileged: touring Europe in private yacht with chauffeurs, and she was deeply conservative: opposed to unions, socialism and women’s suffrage.  She even left America in 1914 because it was too vulgar. My favorite example of her unsympathetic nature:  she was often “writing in bed after breakfast and tossing the completed pages on the floor, to be sorted and typed up by her secretary.”

She wasn’t even pretty (that one thing that always seems to excuse bad behavior).

But despite all that, her novels are engaging and hard to put down (and her main characters are often very pretty).  I’m, not going to summarize his summaries of the books, but he does cite compelling reasons for reading them, not the least of which is the wonderful character names she creates:  Undine Spragg, Lily Bart, Ethan Frome.

But what Franzen says is compelling about these stories is that you root for the protagonists despite themselves.  Lily Bart is profoundly self-involved and incapable of true charity; Undine Spragg is spoiled, ignorant, shallow and amoral.  Wharton even sets The Age of Innocence at a time when divorce was unthinkable–even though she herself had just had one (and divorce is commonplace in The Custom of the Country.

This issue of divorce is fascinating to me because I am currently reading Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot and in this very article Franzen writes that “The Custom of the Country: is by no means the earliest novel in which marriages are dissolved, but it’s the first novel in the Western canon to put serial divorce at its center, and in doing it sounds the death knell of “the marriage plot” that had invigorated countless narratives in centurions past.  The once high stakes of choosing a spouse are dramatically lowered when every mistake can be,,,undone by divorce”

So the article proved timely for me for two reasons.  I don’t know when I’ll be able to read Wharton, but Franzen certainly makes me want to.