I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE-“Complications” from Score! 20 Years of Merge Records: The Covers (2009).

I liked Broken Social Scene’s first album quite a lot.  This is their cover of a song by The Clean.  I know of The Clean from the Topless Women Talk about Their Lives soundtrack although not this particular song.  (What’s with all these New Zealand bands being on Merge?)  I found the original song online.  Interestingly, the original version is only 2 minutes long.  But Broken Social Scene always does things by double, so their version is 4 minutes long.

The cover version opens with a young person saying “This song was written before ‘Born to Run,'” although as far as I can tell “Complications” was written in 2001. So who knows.

The cover is a fuzzy, ramshackle mess of a song, which is not to say that it isn’t good (the original is kind of ramshackle, too).  The prominent melody doesn’t exactly remind me of “Born to Run” but I can see the connection.  The big question is, what does BSS do with the extra two minutes?  Well, mostly they jam, with some wild soloing–but it’s all mixed just under the fuzz of the noise.

This is another strangely faithful cover (5 in a row so far) for this covers album.  And once again, I think I like the cover a little better.

[READ: April 1, 2012] “Once an Empire”

Clearly I wasn’t reading every story that came in Harper’s back in 2010, because I know I skipped this one.  But now that I’m quite fond of Rivka Galchen, I decided it was time to go back and check it out.

How can you not like a story that starts out: “I’m a pretty normal woman, maybe even an extremely normal one.”  You know that normal things will not be afoot by the end of the story, right?  And so it is, by the second paragraph: “I never thought I’d be the victim of an especially unusual crime.  Or of any crime, really.”

You’re totally hooked, right? Me too!

The narrator takes her wonderfully sweet time getting to the crime: dithering over whether or not it was Tuesday night (“Every Tuesday night I go and see whatever is playing at the movie theater nearby.  I’m not choosy.  I’m happy to see what everyone else is going to see.”) or Wednesday morning. Talking about the giant clock/thermometer on the Jehovah’s Witness Watchtower that keeps her company.  And then describing her walk home.

She notices that her windows are dark–she always leaves her lights on.  And then, she notices that some thing–not something, some thing–is emerging from one of her windows.  And as she focuses, she realizes it is her ironing board.

Now, if you’re like me, you think that this is a strange way for a criminal to steal something.  But as you read on, the narrator reveals that the ironing board was leaving her of its own volition.  Followed by her brown velveteen recliner, her desk chair, her lamp and all of her possessions.  She watches them leave her.  She is really only struck when the miniature pink plastic handled fork with Colorado Rockies engraved on it goes past.

The remainder of the story is, given this occurrence, kind of normal.  She goes to the police to report the missing items–they offer little hope for her.  She can’t bear to be in her apartment with all of her things gone, so she sublets and then rents out a furnished apartment.  But she doesn’t tell anyone (even her mother) about the move.

Several months later, she sees her precious pink fork by a dumpster.  And when she goes to investigate, she finds more of her things.  Someone is selling them (this reminds me of King Missile’s “Detachable Penis”)

Then, as I walked down Second Avenue towards St. Mark’s Place,
where all those people sell used books and other junk on the street,
I saw my penis lying on a blanket
next to a broken toaster oven.
Some guy was selling it.
I had to buy it off him.

Of course, the story doesn’t end like that.  It ends in a weirder and funnier way.  Especially when she goes to report the finding of her stuff to the police.

This was definitely a weird story and probably not the best place to begin reading Galchen’s work, although it certainly gives you an idea of what she’s capable of.