SOUNDTRACK: ALTAR OF PLAGUES-“Scald Scar of Water” (2013).
I never think of death metal coming from Ireland. I think of punk and metal and obviously the Pogues, but noise metal? Unlikely. And yet here is some. And why shouldn’t Ireland produce music like this? There are fans everywhere.
I heard this from good old Lars at NPR. I’ve come to expect the unexpected from Lars’ picks. And this is no exception. The song is six minutes long. It has some traditional death metal stuff–growling vocals, incessant drumming and lots of noise. But there’s a lot more going on here. It opens with electronic noise and thudding drums. The drums are punctuated by alternating abrasive guitar riffs. The song meanders along until it settles down to some heavy heavy verses (I have no idea what the man is screaming about). After returning to the buzzsaw riffs, and repeating the verse, the song suddenly stops.
At 4 minutes the whole thing stops. There’s some scratchy noises and then some slow pulsing bass and suddenly the whole song turns into kind of alternative metal song, complete with chanting. It’s pretty unexpected. I can’t imagine what the rest of the album is like.
[READ: April 17, 2013] Between Heaven and Here
This was another book that I did not like in the beginning. Well, that’s not exactly true, I enjoyed the beginning but I really didn’t like the middle and really wanted it to end soon. Not a good way to feel about a book. The reason I didn’t stop is because it was so short. It turns out that an excerpt from this book was in a McSweeney’s issue that I recently read (and which I haven’t posted yet). I didn’t “get” the excerpt then, and while it makes more sense in context I still felt the section was really hard to follow.
And so was much of the book.
This is the story of Rio Seco, an area of California, and the citizens who live there. As the story opens we learn that Glorette Picard is dead. Glorette was a crack whore, the kind of girl who would get killed and no one would miss her. Except that people would miss her. She had a lot of friends and relatives who cared about her. She even had a son, Victor, who is 17 and studying his ass off to be able to go to college. When a boy in town finds Glorette’s body dumped in a shopping cart, he feels compelled to move her, to bring her to her Uncle Enrique because he knows that the police won’t care if some crack whore was killed. So he moves the body and that sets in place the rest of the story.
What was confusing to me was that the novel was constructed like a series of short episodes–different people and how they knew Glorette and how Glorette affected them. That’s not a problem, except that there’s very little indication that that’s what was happening. It felt increasingly difficult to know who was the main character was in each section, especially since so many characters overlapped. Which again wouldn’t have been a problem except that I really couldn’t tell which person was the narrator or at least focus of each section. Sometimes they were never identified, other times only after several pages. The chapter that was excerpted in McSweeney’s has virtually no names in it, it is just dialogue. And sure the dialogue was interesting and with the novel’s context made some sense, but I’m still not sure who was in the conversation.
I imagine that if you really devoted yourself to this book it would be a lot easier to know who was speaking at what time, but like the establishment I wasn’t all that interested in the story (just like Straight predicted) at first. I mean, I was intrigued by the general idea that Glorette was killed and maybe we’d find out who did it (we do). And I was certainly intrigued by the idea of her family wanting to bury her, rather than letting the police know. But for me it wasn’t until the last few chapters that book became really compelling.
The penultimate chapter began with Sisia and Glorette with Sisia saying she didn’t understand why Glorette wasted her time and money getting her nails done. We learn the ways that Sisia loved Glorette, and we also learn how New York, a transplant who was looking to get in on the whoring business picked fights with the local girls. (The one gripe I had was that New York calls soft drinks “pop” which no on in New York does). But it was the final chapter that was really the heart of the story for me. It was all about Victor. Victor knows what his mother does. He has the scars to prove it. But despite all his life throws at him, he knows he can escape. Earlier we saw him attempt to help another boy, Alfonso, with the SAT prep, but Alfonso wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time and was put in jail on the SAT Saturday. But Victor excelled. He was always near the top of his class and he took pride that he was doing so well even though he was the son of a crackhead. But of course nothing will ever be easy for Victor, and maybe he could just make more money parking cars.
I feel like if Victor’s story has been earlier in the book I would have wanted to read the book more. (Of course it works wonderfully as the end story). Indeed, after reading Victor’s story I wanted to go back and reread the parts that I didn’t enjoy so much to may be try to figure out just who was who and how everyone was related. Like Clarette, who works in the prison and had to see her nephew (the very same Alfonso) in there every day while he was incarcerated (her story was very good too). Or like Felonise (what the hell kind of name is that?). I never quite figured how she fit in.
In retrospect, I find the book a little more interesting writing about it than I did while reading it–I like that the different angles all comprise to make a full picture. And, these characters are characters that I never read about in other fiction, so that was a novel experience for me. I just wish I had been better prepared for how much work the book was going to make me do.
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