I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE POSTAL SERVICE-“A Tattered Line of String” (2013).

I enjoyed The Postal Service record but I wasn’t as big of a Death Cab for Cutie fan at the time.  Now, having enjoyed DCFC so much in the last couple of years, this song sounds much more like a DCFC song but with keyboards (Ben’s voice is so distinctive).

This song has been released with the reissue of the Postal Service album.  It’s not on the original but it also sounds like it might be a remix (the skittery backing vocals make me think remix).

Either way this is a supremely catchy song (Gibbard knows from melody) and when you throw the keyboards and dancey beats on it, it’s even more poppy than DCFC’s stuff.  I wonder why the album wasn’t bigger when it came out.

[READ: April 21, 2013] “Valentine”

Tessa Hadley has written another story that I enjoyed–with that same quaint feeling of love in 1970s England.

The story opens with the narrator Stella and her friend Madeleine waiting at the bus stop.  They are fifteen, have never kissed boys, and think about nothing else (especially since they go to an all girls school).   Madeleine is willowy with long curls a “kitten face” and “luscious breasts” while Stella is small, plump and shapeless.

As they wait for the bus, Valentine approaches (yes I though the title was about the day not a person).  He is in school as well but he is new to them.  Valentine has just moved to the area from Malaya.  And, as he sizes them up, offering them each a smoke, when it comes down to it, amazingly, he chooses Stella.

She likes him because he is different as she is different–they are clearly soulmates.  While her parents (well, Gerry is her stepdad) don’t ‘t approve of him (his hair, his dress, his attitude).  He barely talks to her parents when they interrogate him and then he imitates their voices when they are alone.  Regardless of what others thought or really, because if it, they are soon hanging out all the time.  And soon he is her boyfriend.  And soon enough she had lost weight (because all they did was talk and smoke), they died their hair black (a proto-goth in the hippie 70s) and they basically began to look alike.

Valentine was a  promising student, especially to his English teacher Mr Harper.  Except, Val didn’t really want to bother anymore, he’d had it with studying.   But not with Mr Harper, whom he talked of as if “he were a portal to higher things.”  Despite the fact that he was rumpled and pear-shaped and had a bald patch.

As with any kids whose parents disapprove, it made them stringer together.  They talked about moving to Europe, to Paris.  They defended communism to her parents.  He mocked her parents (and ignored his own). And yet for all this time, they never did more than kiss and cuddle (and those weird times when his mother called downstairs and he grabbed Stella’s hand and shoved it down his pants just before he left the room).

But they spend impossible amounts of time together.  So Gerry spies on them (and overhears Valentine call him a cunt).  Which culminates in a big fight the night her parents are supposed to go out to an important function.  Stella is supposed to babysit her younger brother but her mom says that Valentine is not allowed over if she’s not home.  Things explode and the parents miss their engagement.  This makes Stella walk out–daring them to stop her, which they do not.

She goes to Val, but his mother don’t want her there either.  So they crash at another flat–the guy who Val buys his drugs from.  And that’s when truth comes crashing through the window.  Things that we may have suspected all along come out and the narrator is wiser but no smarter.

Hadley really creates a scene–it is full and real and very complex.  And her stories are really captivating even if nothing really happens in them.  And that’s why I like her.