I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE KNIFE-“Old Dreams Waiting to be Realized” (2013).

With the release of The Knife’s new album, the New Yorker review that I mentioned yesterday pointed out just how radically different this new disc is from the synth pop of yore.  Sasha Frere-Jones talked about the weird instrumentation that they use (and made themselves) and the processed vocals that often defy gender.  But he mostly focused on this, a 19 minute song.

What’s so radically different for The Knife is that the song isn’t really a song so much as a series of slow washes of keyboards which rise and fall.  There’s no melody at all and no singing either.  It’s basically an uneasy ambient song–quite a departure from the three-minute pop of “Heartbeats.”  There’s also a bunch of percussion, also seemingly random.  It sounds like a bleak landscape–the moon perhaps.

At around 10 minutes, the washes of sound (which have been pretty constant and low volume) are eclipsed by a processed steel drum sound which play a little melody and just as quickly goes away.  Helicopter-ish sounds come to the fore around 13 minutes.  And that louder noise stays with us for a couple of minutes until it is replaced by a very mechanical-sounding moaning.

After 19 minutes of this, it simply vanishes leaving a minute or so of silence at the end of the track.  You’re not going to get too many fans playing music like that.

 [READ: April 28, 2013] “Long Way Home”

In this piece, Sedaris revisits a moment that has got to be a major fear for a lot of people—the theft of a passport.  Sedaris has a British passport with an Indefinite Leave to Remain sticker on it.  This basically allows him (and partner Hugh) freedom to come and go as they please in the UK—a handy thing for a traveling author.  When the passport is stolen, it means that rather than waltzing back home, he has to go through the same old scrutiny (a writer, eh?) and very real threats that they could simply not allow him back in.

Evidently receiving this sticker is a laborious process not for the faint of heart (and not for those whose grasp of English is not perfect).  Which is why David let Hugh do all the prep work for it (although David did ace the test).  There’s a very funny sequence in which he wonders how non Westerners might deal with the question, “How might you stop young people playing tricks on you at Halloween?”  Needless to say, not having that sticker was a major hassle, but reapplying for it meant surrendering the new passport for several months while bureaucracy got its sticker together.  Which is what he eventually had to do.

But the main thrust of the story is the theft of said passport.  He was on vacation in Hawaii (Hawaii??) and it was stolen out of the place they were staying.  Actually, his laptop was stolen, and the bag contained his checkbook and passport (not the smartest thing, David, I mean…a checkbook?).  After it was stolen, he assumed the laptop was gone but that the thieves would simply discard the bag and/or passport nearby. [Interestingly, when we had a similar theft, police and passersby did find discarded effects very close to our house].

Sedaris imagines what kind of person would do this.  He idly hopes it is someone with a sick grandmother who needs an operation.  But he knows that it’s just a junkie.

Sedaris’ story, much like our own, ended with a Samaritan returning his effects (his was much more dramatic more dramatic since his passport went from Hawaii to England, whereas ours was just around the corner) and Sedaris once again feeling that humanity is decent.

This was a great piece, which obviously resonated with me because of our personal situation.  But it was funny too—a few things made me laugh out loud (the shit comment was hilarious)—which is what you want from Sedaris!