I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: JAPANDROIDS-Live on KEXP, June 16, 2009 (2009).

Back in 2009,  one of the guys from Japandroids had surgery and they had to cancel some dates.  That’s only relevant to this because when this set is over, the guitarist is bleeding from his scar.

Japandroids are two guys and they make a lot of noise.  I can recall jamming on guitar with my friend on drums and even when we were totally in synch, we never sounded this good.  It really sounds like there are four or five people playing.  This set has three songs from their debut album and an amazing cover of Big Black’s “Racer X.”

The three  songs are very good and the guys pay hard and fast and, as I said, they sound amazing.  It’s a great set.  You can hear the whole thing here.  There’s also video of the performance.  It’s broken  into two parts.  This is part two, with the blistering cover of “Racer X.”

[READ: September 17, 2012] Bluebeard

I’ve mentioned this book a few times in the last couple of days as something that I’d been struggling with.  And, indeed, I found it to be a little slow going.  I was excited to start reading it because, as the subtitle says, this is an autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, an artist who appeared in Breakfast of Champions–I love that Vonnegut keeps working within his own universe.  But there was something about the early pages of the story that were just not that compelling.

Rabo is having a hard time getting his book going, and while that is a dramatic effect, I had a hard time getting into the book too.  It’s not that complicated of a story.  There are really only about a half dozen characters in the book:

Rabo–he is an American Abstract Expressionist painter (contemporary of Jackson Pollack, Jasper Johns, et al).
Circe Berman–she is an author who writes under the pseudonym Polly Madison (ha).  Madison’s books look at the real life of American young people and are staggeringly popular.
Paul Slazinger–Rabo’s next door neighbor who spends most of his time in Rabo’s house, although he and Rabo mostly ignore each other.  Slazinger is a writer with a decades long writer’s block.
Dan Gregory–a famous artist for whom Rabo apprenticed.  Gregory was such a good detailist that he once created a perfect forgery of a bill (on a dare).  Gregory was also a terrible racist and philanderer and treated Rabo with contempt at best.
Marilee Kemp–Gregory’s mistress and sometime muse.  She inadvertently sends Rabo an encouraging letter on behalf of Gregory and then she and Rabo begin a writing relationship which blossoms when they eventually meet.

So the story unfolds that Rabo was to start writing about his life.  He himself was more of a footnote in the American art scene.  He used a cheap painted called Sateen Dura-Luxe.  He put tape on the paint which he imagined as representing real thing–but which no one else could see.  And yet his works were popular, until a few decades later when the cheap paint peeled off the canvases, even under perfect conditions, leaving his paintings ruined.  Nevertheless, he was friends with all of the artists in the scene, and when he lent them money, they paid him in paintings.  So he has all kinds of famous painting littering his property, for which he makes millions of dollars per piece.

But before they became valuable, Rabo’s first wife hated them.  Hated seeing them, hated that Rabo was wasting his life, his time, his space with them.  She hated that he was doing anything like painting; she even doubted that he could draw very well.  He only drew one thing for her, which she was blown away by and when she asked why he didn’t do more beautiful drawings like that, he said because it was too easy.  And so they divorced.

Rabo was much more compatible with his second wife, who arranged their house to properly display the impressionistic artwork.  She died not too long ago, and Rabo never really recovered.

Rabo’s autobiography was moving slowly until Circe Berman stumbled upon his property (Rabo has a beach front house in the Hamptons).  Berman basically settles in and decides that not only is she going to writer her next book there, she is going to more or less take over the house and “fix” Rabo.  She is nice to the live-in cook (whom Rabo calls “the cook” rather than her name, Alison White).  She learns about Alison’s daughter–she actually cares.  And when it looks like Circe might leave, Alison and her daughter threaten to leave because Rabo doesn’t even know their names, they’ve gotten used to be treated like human beings.  (Circe stays and so do Alison and her daughter).

But Rabo does write some of his autobiography interspersed with this “current” story.  He keeps apologizing that the present interrupts him.  His history is interesting–his parents were tricked into moving to a small town in California–where his father became a cobbler by an Armenian con man.  And there they languished.  Although Rabo proved to be a supremely talented artist as a child–he could draw with amazing precision–so he tried to find an apprentice–and he wrote to Gregory.  Gregory was a pompous ass, but Marilee took pity on his and sent him some of Gregory’s expensive paints –for which there would be consequences later.

And the story more or less progresses through the doldrums of Rabo’s later life.  When he is booted out of the house by Gregory, when he joins the army and fights in a war.  Where he sees death and where everything changes for him.

The elephant in the room is Rabo’s potato barn, which he keeps under a series of padlocks.  He has something very important there but he won’t tell anyone what it is.

And I’m going to admit that when the contents are finally revealed, it was as if the whole book blossomed into brilliance.  It’s not too often when you can say that the ending of the book saved it, but this one absolutely did.  I found the entire novel to be okay  a little preachy and pedantic until the revelation of what was in the potato barn.  And everything that followed it introduced the soul and humanity that Rabo was missing throughout his story.  It also retroactively made the story much better.  True, I feel like the story could have been a good deal shorter–these last few novels of Vonnegut’s are quite a bit longer than I think they need to be, and yet, that ending.  Wow.

I will be affected by this book for a long time.

Incidentally, Wikipedia suggests that this book has many themes in common with the story of Bluebeard by Charles Perrault.  I do not know that story well, although I understand the basic premise.  The idea of the secret room certainly bears out, but it seems like a stretch to draw extensive comparisons.