I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE HIVE DWELLERS-“My Noise” from Score! 20 Years of Merge Records: The Covers (2009).

The Score! collection finally produced a cover I do not like.  I don’t know anything about The Hive Dwellers, but this feels more like a joke than a cover.  The voice is the voice I make when I’m making fun of a song.  And the instrumentation is a series of strange keyboard notes and random drum noises.  I might like it if it weren’t a cover–and I guess I do respect them for going so different from the original.  But man there’s not much to recommend here.

Go for the Superchunk original, without a doubt.

[READ: April 27, 2012] “case notes of a medical student, east harlem, psychiatric ER, winter 2002”

I try not to have the same author two days in a row, but I included this to show what a fascinating career Galchen has had and how incredibly different her published works can be.  So, yesterday it was an article about Borges.  Today it’s about her work in a psychiatric ward.

Triple Canopy is an online journal of some kind–I’ve actually never heard of it before.  It’s graphically interesting with lots of pictures and a cool interface.

This article is about nine slides long.  It printed on one page with very small type.  Galchen offers an introduction as to just what she was doing in the ER (exhaustion from three years of medical school and an opportunity to stop touching people for a month).  Although she admits her heart wasn’t in it.

Galchen describes 8 patients, all of whom entered the psychiatric ER (one was on the phone).  Some of them are quite clearly crazy (it’s always interesting to see what thoughts go through people’s minds).  Although one, a 14-year-old male was brought in because he was fighting with his grandmother because she refused to buy him a scooter.

As a piece of writing this is nothing special–it’s basically just notes.  But as an insight into Galchen and the kind of life experiences she’s had, this is a cool picture.  And I wonder if it points to any kind of things she may write about in the future.  I actually don’t know if she ever finished medical school.  It’s kind of fun not knowing and waiting to see if it ever gets revealed in her essays.

Check it out here and see the accompanying slides.