I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH-Live at KEXP (September 8, 2012).

The Tallest Man on Earth is Kristian Matsson a Swedish singer songwriter.  His albums have a very full sound, but when he plays live, it’s just him and his guitar.  And man, is he a compelling performer.  His guitar playing (primarily classical-sounding but often heavy and mostly rocking) is gorgeous–fast and pretty.  And his voice is gravelly and powerful.  I’ve enjoyed the studio songs I’ve heard, but he is transcendent live.

This set opens with a buzzy guitar that sounds like the show is not recorded well.  But that quickly goes away and the songs shine.  Matsson is a charming and self depreciating performer and when he has a malfunction as in “Love is All”and at the end he says “that was kind of embarrassing.”  But he not bothered by it and plays on with a great, short set.

The set includes some (then) new songs and a few older ones as well: “A Field of Birds,” “King of Spain”, “Tangle in This Trampled Wheat,” “Thrown Right at Me,” “The Gardener” and “Like a Wheel.”  It’s a great introduction to the guy and his amazing voice. which you can enjoy at KEXP.

 [READ: August 20, 2013] Miss Wyoming

I first read the book during my trip to Vancouver on the eve of Y2K (the best flight I’ve ever had—mostly empty and we were given champagne).  I started reading it on the plane and then in the second chapter the heroine is in a plane crash.  So I stopped reading.  I’m sure I finished it later, although I didn’t remember much of anything about it.

I read it again now and I was a little disappointed when I started reading it.  The first few chapters are so full of similes it is insane.  The word “like” is tossed around at an incredulous pace.  Like:

• John’s teeth were big and white, like pearls of baby corn
• …his skin like brown leather.
• His eyes looked like those of somebody who’s lost big.
• They crossed San Vicente Blvd, passing buildings and roads that once held stories for each of them, but which now seemed transient and disconnected from their lives, like window displays.
• Susan was wrapped in a pale light fabric, cool and comfortable, like a pageant winner’s sash.
• John was sweating like a lemonade pitcher,
• …his jeans, gingham shirt and black hair soaking up heat like desert stones.
• John felt as close to Susan as paint is to a wall.
• Staring at the pavement, like Prince William behind his mother’s coffin.
• This man with sad pale yes, like snowy TV sets

That’s all in the first chapter!

Now, I have come to see that the story is cyclical and it’s about people looking for their real selves.  So it’s possible that the simile heavy beginning is meant to reflect the fact that the protagonists are looking for themselves—they have no substance so they can only be compared to other things.  But man, it is hard going with that many comparisons.

The other major problem I had with the story was the really aggressive use of coincidence.  Susan and John both end up eating out of fast food dumpsters; just as Susan’s mother wants to sell their house, a pile of garbage from an airplane falls on it.  Right after we learn of a guy hoarding gasoline, the house explodes.  Again there are arguments for why these things might happen in this story (numerology is an important aspect of the book), but it seems too…easy.

But once the story starts moving the actual plot is really interesting and compelling.

There are two main characters—Susan Colgate and John Johnson.  Susan’s mother was a pageant mom (Coupland has a lot of fun with pageant moms long before they got their own reality show).  We see Susan growing up in the horrific world of beauty pageants where she excels, in part through he mother (and her plastic surgery) and in part because she has a gift for this sort of thing.  The story is told in a very nonlinear fashion, but I’m going to summarize in a relatively straight manner.  Susan hates the life and one day rebels.  She tells her mother to stuff the winnings and she heads out for California.  She hangs out with her oldest friend (who has changed her name to Dreama and has been practicing numerology) and then meets a movie producer.  He puts her into a TV show where she plays the youngest daughter and she becomes a huge success.

Until she realizes that’s she can’t act anymore.  Her show is cancelled, her manager no longer wants to talk to her (or anything else), and she hooks up with a musician.  He needs a green card so she marries him and is rewarded for doing so.  But her star has been fading fast.  And that’s when she gets in the plane crash that I mentioned.  She is presumed dead and uses the opportunity to escape from her life for a while.

John Johnson is a huge star (with a fascinating back story).  He does all of the requisite scummy things (drugs and whatnot) and eventually winds up in the hospital.  Searching for any kind of meaning, he gives up everything he has—literally even the cash in his pocket–and decides to set off for truth.  He quickly learns how tough that is and winds up dumpster diving and getting beaten up by all manner of people.

But Susan and John are connected in various ways.  First, they almost met at a party when they were both famous.  Second, when he was recovering from some injuries in the hospital, he came to and saw Susan’s face telling him to find meaning in his life (it turns out to have been a rerun from her show but he doesn’t cop on to that until much later).  And third, they actually do meet in a café in the present.  They sense lostness in each others’ eyes and really hit it off.  They go for a walk until a car speeds up and tells Susan that she has to leave immediately.  She gives John her number and then flees.

John is utterly smitten and we enter the present primarily with his story.  First he runs into Ryan, a  clerk at West Coast video who made a shrine to Susan when she was presumed to have died in the plane crash.  John is so smitten with Susan that he asks to buy the shrine.  The clerk agrees but only if John will read his script.  He does.  It’s good.  John and Ryan start hanging out a bit.  Then the police come to John’s door to say that Susan has disappeared (again) and since his car was parked outside of her house last night, they wonder if he knows anything.  John freaks out and is terribly worried about Susan.  So Ryan introduces Vanessa his über smart girlfriend (who has the most interesting backstory (set in Bergen County NJ!) of anyone.  She has all kinds of connections and technology at her disposal.  And the bulk of the end of the story concerns their attempts to track down Susan and to figure out what happened to her.

From a slow story full of similes, it develops into quite an exciting mystery.  There’s false identities, amnesia, secret lovers, kidnapping, pageant life, explosions, a shitsicle, and data entry.  There’s lies, deception, unbelievable cruelty to family members and a shocking disregard for love.

By the end of the story I couldn’t put the book down.  There were certainly a few more coincidences, but by and large the story rang true, and we find that (like in most Coupland stories) the search for meaning comes out on top.  Indeed, in this book, the search seems to be to find truth amid all of the proto-Y2K absurdities of life—how we are data mined (yup, Coupland knew it long before the U.S. government admitted it).  But it is quite different from Coupland’s other stories which were largely about people telling stories and simply trying to relate to each other.  This one offers a real plot, and an exciting one at that, which is a nice change of pace.

It would be interesting to chart the linearity of this story, which start near the end and then flashes back and then flashes forward and then flashes sideways and introduces  few new characters and then flashes back on them as well.  It makes for a disjointed but ultimately very compelling story.

I printed this cover here because I think my copy had this upside photo on it (made as a half slip cover?).  It no longer does, making it very hard to recognize as Miss Wyoming when you look at the cover at the top.