I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BEIRUT-Live at KEXP, October 3, 2007 (2007).  

Beirut plays a fuller set here for KEXP than in the Tiny Desk concert.  They open with “Cherbourg” an accordion-based song that lurches along happily before the full band kicks in and begins rocking the song.   “Sunday Smile” feels very cinematic although when the martial beats begin the song takes quite a different sound.  “Cocek” opens with horns and accordion.  This is clearly not a typical rock set up at all, and it quickly turns into an awesomely shambolic dance instrumental.  My favorite track is “Forks and Knives (La Fete),” with it’s wonderful violin melody and falsetto’d lyrics.

NPR has given me a really great appreciation for this band.  They sound wonderful live.  I wonder if it translates well to studio albums?  You can hear this set here.

[READ: December 3, 2012] “Bear”

The December 3 issue of the New Yorker is The Food Issue.  Generally I don’t get that excited by this special issue, and this was no real exception.  But I wound up with some extra time so I delved into the four “Gut Course” articles in the magazine.

Gourevitch’s article is indeed about a bear.

He describes the “Summer of his twentieth year” (weird style there) in which he was in the mountains of Wyoming and got a job as an animal skinner.  He had no experience of skinning animals but he “moved through life with a dauntlessness born of cluelessness” (I like that) and he needed a job.

The place where he worked was a game-processing plant.  It was used primarily by tourists who killed for sport, so there was a lot of extra meat in the freezer. He and the other kid working there often liberated some frozen meat understanding that it would just get freezer-burned if they didn’t.  And then there came the bear.

A man had killed a bear.  And I love this detail, the owner of the Cold Storage facility was oh so impressed.  Until the man left and he poo-pooed that the bear was tiny and that it was shot in a dump–not a manly kill at all.  Since nobody eats bear meat, not even the Indians, with a bear you skin it for the rug and toss the rest. And it was the narrator’s time to skin a bear.

He botched it up terribly.  And there’s a rumination about the sacredness of an animal etc.  The ending is pretty funny, and I found myself rather engrossed by this story.