I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SHIGETO-“Ringleader” (2013).

The cover of this album gives you an idea of what lies within–and yet the complexity in this one song alone makes me wonder just how much is hidden by those clouds.

The song opens with delicate bells and a persistent pinging metronome.  Then come a series of complex notes—seemingly rando…but not.  Add to this some watery sounds.  And then some buzzing percussion.  That’s the first minute of this six-minute instrumental.

The song begins with a  very delicate vibe, and yet once the tribal drums come to the fore the song takes on a very different feel.

By the middle of the song that original sound is more or less gone, replaced by a more classic “new age” sound.  But again, things change around 3:45 when the song quiets down a bit, allowing new percussion to enter and giving it a kind of world music feel.

I enjoy how at the end, when the drums stop it actually sounds like real drumsticks clattering together—as if the whole song were played by a drummer and not a machine.

[READ: June 17, 2013] “From the Diaries of Pussy-Cake”

This is labelled as a memoir, so I assume it is true (and I wonder if he is writing his memoirs, or if this is just an amusing story for this issue).  Gary talks about his life a teen when he was in love with a girl named Pamela (not her real name).  She was an urban hermit and an unreformed shoplifter.

She was totally in control of the relationship because he was utterly smitten. He sums up their relationship with a typo that he sent her.  He left out the “at” and wrote: “I am your disposal.” (HA).  And so their relationship was very much like that.

She had an ex-boyfriend whom she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) finish it up with–his parents loved her and she wanted to keep up pretenses, so she would be with him quite often.  Although the rest of the time she was with Gary, and that’s because she was always in charge with when she was with him.  I loved this description:

When I fall ill she tells me she loves thinking of me as a feverish little nineteenth-century child with her playing the role of the horny older caregiver.

Obviously this relationship isn’t very good, but its the only one he’s got and he is still proud of it.

This goes on for a long while with him getting more and more upset about her ex (Kevin, not his real name) and how he is not allowed to be around her when Kevin comes in from NJ.  So finally he gets very drunk at a bar near her house and then goes to her house knowing Kevin is there.  He pounds on the front door and stumbles his way upstairs and the rest is a blur.  But suffice it to say she kicks him out of the relationship.

And he is upset even though he should know better.  But this is a crime issue, so where’s the crime?  The crime comes later.

After breaking up with him she called him a few times and even asked him out for New Year’s Eve.  But he blew her off.  So she left NY and went to school in Florida.  While in Florida she saw a man in a bar, followed him into the bathroom and bashed him in the head with a hammer.  Supposedly it was her ex boyfriend, but when he was told the story the person said the man looked a lot like him.

Interestingly, Gary takes something away from this as a writer, and I rather liked his final thoughts on the matter.  I like Gary’s writing style as well and I look forward to reading more by him.