I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DESTROYER-Live on KEXP, March 19, 2011 (2011).

I enjoyed Destroyer’s Rubies album quite a bit.  And when Kaputt came out it was heralded as a masterpiece.  But I have to admit it’s a little two smooth jazz for my tastes.  The DJ in this interview describes it as being like George Michael (well, really, Wham), but George Michael knew howto write pop hits which made the smoothness more palatable.  This is kind of like extended jams of smooth jazz, which is…disconcerting.

They play two songs from Kaputt, “Downtown,” and “Song for America.” “Downtown” has a ton of cheesey sounding sax (and instrument I am growing to dislike more and more).  “Song for America” eschews much of the sax and is catchy with its pulsing bass line.  They also play “Certain Things You Ought to Know,” from Your Blues, an album I don’t know very well.  The song is kind of slow, but it tones down the cheese somewhat.  And “Painter in Your Pocket” from Rubies, a song I like very much gets a new treatment here.  It’s much more sparse, and I think I like it a little less.  Maybe Destroyer should just remain one album for me.

You can hear it here.

[READ: November 15, 2012] “Chore List of Champions”

Even though I said I was going to put off Vonnegut for a little while (there was certainly some burn out by the end), this letter appeared in Harper’s (and is in his newly released book Letters).

As the intro explains, this is a contract that Vonnegut signed with his then pregnant wife Jane, in 1947.

I think of marriage contracts these days as being crazily offensive and mercenary, as being things that would embarrass right-thinking people.  And geez, in 1947, what could he possibly have been asking.

Well, Vonnegut proves that he was a cool dude all along.  And all of the points in the contract are things that he pledges that will do, couched in his own hilarious manner.

Some examples:

“With the agreement that my wife will not nag, heckle or otherwise disturb me on the subject, I promise to scrub the bathroom and kitchen floors once a week, on a day and hour of my own choosing.

“After shaving I will put my shaving equipment back in the medicine cabinet

“taking out the garbage… as any fool knows, had better not wait … long.  I will take out the garbage within three hours after the need for disposal has been pointed out to me by my wife.  It would be nice, however  if, upon observing the need for disposal with my own two eyes, I should perform this particular task upon my own initiative.

And so it goes.

I kind of get the impression that this contract was designed for the duration of her pregnancy (and probably not for longer) but that’s still a pretty awesome list of things to agree to (some of which I wouldn’t agree to, frankly).  Although I am comforted to see that many of my own domestic foibles were foibles back in the mid 1940s as well.