I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BARENAKED LADIES-Live from Mountain Stage (Jan 19, 1995).

This is wonderful show from 1995 (it was recorded on Super Bowl Sunday, which explains the football jokes…including the Baltimore football team that played in the CFL for literally one year). Having seen BNL recently (and enjoyed them), I forgot how much more bouncey and fun their earlier shows were (as their earlier songs were in general more bouncey and fun).  This show is also interesting because Andy Creeggan is still in the band.  Andy is Tim (bass) Creeggan’s brother.  And I have to wonder if he is doing some of the great harmonies (especially on “Alternative Girlfriend,” which I’ve never heard anywhere else).

I love each of the four songs they play here: “Life in a Nutshell,” “Jane” (a song where their harmonies are absolutely wonderful).  “Great Provider” slows things down but allows for Tim’s great bass work.  The set ends with one of my favorite songs “Alternative Girlfriend.”  They disingenuously announce that they will be playing the Mountain Stage theme song and I think everyone is a little bummed that they didn’t.  But I was just as happy to hear “Alternative Girlfriend and this is where those great unexpected harmonies come in.  They even throw in a smidgen of “My Sharona” for fun.

I’ll be seeing BNL again in a month.  After seeing them this summer, I wanted to tell them to dig deep into their catalog for some of their middle albums tracks (like the ones here).  Since most people who see them are die hards, we’d all love some of these older tracks!

Enjoy the set here.  Sadly, you only get to see Steven Page’s glorious mustache in this photo.

[READ: August 24, 2013] Not Just for Christmas

In addition to writing a lot of novels, Roddy Doyle has written a number of smaller books.  Like this one.  This was actually written for The Open Door series which is a series of six books by different authors that are designed to help adult readers who have trouble reading.  The stories are meant to be short, engaging and relatively easy to read.

I wasn’t conscious of this story being easy to read, but it is certainly simple.  It is 77 pages with big print and probably counts more like a short story, although I think it gets classified as a novella.

Simplicity aside, the story is a very good one.  Danny and Jimmy Murphy are brothers.  But they haven’t seen each other in twenty years.    When they were younger, they were inseparable and, although they were a year apart, people assumed they were twins.  We see a few instances from their childhood where they finished each others’ sentences and had a kind of psychic connection.

But then things went bad. Doyle gives us a couple of incidents in which (from Jimmy’s point of view), Danny (who goes by Dan now) hurt him.  Then later we see the same scene from Danny’s point of view.  It’s interesting to see how one incident in particular–their attempt to become blood brothers, was remembered in very different ways by each brother.

Late in the story we see the reason that Danny has been in England for the last twenty years.  While he does call and come back to Ireland from time to time, Jimmy is always been away on purpose when he does.  Of course, as in any story in which family reunite after decades apart, we know something must be wrong.  And that’s when Danny lays it out.

Doyle plays at our tears (both in the setting, which is awesome) and the story.  The title (which is family to those in the UK and Ireland as from the SPCA telling you that if you buy a dog it’s not just for Christmas, it’s for life) is used in a very unexpected way.

I found this story quite moving–perhaps a little manipulative-but enjoyable nonetheless.