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Archive for March, 2012

Max Barry–“How I Met My Daughter” (The Bulletin, December 18, 2007-January 8, 2008)

Posted in Babies, Max Barry, Stereolab, The Beatles, The Bulletin, Unlikable main character on March 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: STEREOLAB-Chemical Chords (2008).

You never really know what you’re going to get with Stereolab. Well, that’s not entirely true, you know you’re going to get some unusual sounding loungey keyboard songs with lyrics that are either in French or in highly accented English.  But beyond that each Stereolab album tends to go in its own direction.

Chemical Chords creates its own poppy bouncy bliss, making it one of their most approachable albums.  “Neon Beanbag” even features the chorus: “there’s nothing to be sad about” over a set of the bounciest keyboard riffs around.  “Three Women” has a brisk pace and some bright horns.   “One Finger Symphony” has a minor key and as lightly sinister tone (but it’s only 2 minutes long).

The title track has some cool echoed vocals and a wonderful break in the song that allows a sweet little string section to sneak through.  “The Ecstatic Static” is another pulsing song that seems alive somehow and “Valley Hi!” is a short darker piece with cool sound effects.

“Silver Sands” is a wonderfully bubbly pop song–the kind that Stereolab does so well, with vocals that seem like they might belong to another song.  “Pop Molecule” is a great minor key instrumental, which is a nice introduction to the super pop of “Self Portrait with ‘Electric Brain'” another bubbly song with a cool break in it.  “Nous Vous Demandons Pardon” opens with a martial beat before it settles down into a groovy song with French lyrics.

“Daisy Click Clack” shows off Stereolab’s totally unexpected lyrics:  “Snap snap snap snap with your fingers/Off beat on time make it linger/Enriching the rhythm/Do away with skepticism/Come and join the hymn, tap/Sensing the symbiotic force.”  From nonsense to the sublime in just a few short lines.

The final song “Vortial Phonotheque” reminds me of “I am the Walrus” in the music, but the gentle lyrics change the tone completely.  It’s a wonderful disc full of all of the bright sounds Stereolab does so well.  This would be their second to last disc before they went on a hiatus.

[READ: February 28, 2012] “How I Met My Daughter”

Two baby stories in a row!

Those following closely think that I was done with Max Barry last week.  But there was one final piece for me to read.  Technically this doesn’t make the last post wrong because although this story was on his website, it was also published in a magazine called The Bulletin.

If I thought that last week’s “Cement” story was dark, it’s nothing compared to this one!  Barry, while a somewhat violent writer (his last book was all about surgical procedures), is usually quite funny as well.  But this story eschews all humor for a walk through the dark side of man’s nature.

It opens with this incredibly dark couple of sentences:

They dragged this bloody, howling thing from my wife’s abdomen, its limbs twitching and clawing, its face like an angry pumpkin, and asked me, “Do you want to take a photo?”

Yes. I want to take a photo, so I can look back on the end of my life.

This story explores the feeling that men apparently have when their baby is born–jealousy at the lack of attention they will now receive.  I didn’t experience this at all and frankly it seems like a fictional thing to me, because I don’t know of any men who felt real jealousy of their babies.  But it makes for an interesting story. (more…)

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Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer–“The Longest Detroyed Poem” (Numéro Cinq, August 24, 2010)

Posted in Babies, Canadian Content, Funny (ha ha), Funny (strange), Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Nick Cave, Numéro Cinq, Pregnancy, Sex, Short Story, The Road, The Walrus, Violence, Warren Ellis on March 1, 2012| 2 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: NICK CAVE AND WARREN ELLIS-The Road: Original Film Score (2009).

I haven’t seen The Road, and I probably never will.  Nor have I read it.  The only reason I was listening to the soundtrack was because I like Nick Cave.  So this is a contextless review.  Of course, I know what the book is about and I rather assume that the film is equally harrowing.  I expected the soundtrack to be full of desolation and horror.

So I was quite surprised that most of the main themes are played on a piano with gentle strings or simply violins.  True there is a sense of emptiness and loss in these songs (they’re not jaunty piano pieces or anything) but they are still unexpectedly pretty.

Of course,a song like “The Cannibals” is bound to be more disconcerting, which it is.  It starts with creepy scratchy violins and then tribal drums take over–all set over a buzzing background.  This is more of what I expected the whole score to be like.   Similarly, “The House” must be a very frightening scene, as the music is threatening, loud, intense and quite scary with, again, more creepy percussion.  Unsurprisingly, a track called “The Cellar” is also spooky; it is only a minute long.

But then songs like “The Church” are so delicate and beautiful and not even all that sad–it actually makes me wonder what the scene in the film is showing.  The end of the score feels like the end of a movie, which I know it is, but it feels like a conventional movie, with closure, something I’m led to believe the book doesn’t have a lot of.

Taken away from the movie, this soundtrack is quite nice.  Aside from the three scarier tracks, this would make for some nice listening on a sad, rainy Sunday.

[READ: February 28, 2012] “The Longest Destroyed Poem”

I enjoyed Kuitenbrouwer’s “Corpse” so much that I decided to see what else she had written.  It comes to three books and four uncollected short stories.  There’s “Corpse” from The Walrus, this one here, another one called “Laikas” (which has a different title on the site where it lives) and a fourth with a broken link.  Boo.

But that’s okay because I’ll certainly investigate her books too.

Like “Corpse,” this story explores women’s sexuality, but it explores it in a very different way.  In fact, I loved the way it was introduced–especially because of the wonderfully convoluted way the sentence reveals it (and how it’s not even the main point of the sentence):

She looked fabulous. Better than back then, when she’d thought she wanted to be an artist, and Victor had made a point — she realized this as she realized many many things, that is she realized it in retrospect — of dropping into the conversation — the one she hadn’t actually been having with him, because she was instead focused almost solely on the fact his much younger roommate had a hand under the blanket her crotch also happened to be under — that he was off to bed early so he could work on a poem he’d been having trouble with.

I had to read it twice because I thought it was funny the first time, and when I fully parsed it, it was even funnier.

So yes, sex.  But as the story opens, years after the above event, Rosa sees Victor and decides to crash into him with her car.  It’s shocking and it’s shockingly well told.

I love the way Kuitenbrouwer uses language.  I could probably quote from this story six or seven times, but I love this sentence that forecasts the trouble ahead:  “Victor noticed her in that split second, too, and he knew what Rosa was up to, for his face changed, channel surfing from neutral smug — well, this was his everyday face — to impending doom.”

As she’s about to ram him (with a Prius, no less), we flash back to their spirited relationship. (more…)

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