I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PHISH-Farmhouse (2000).

This album has a very acoustic feel to it and I really enjoy this disc.  It is one of their most “mature” records and I feel a lot of fans don’t enjoy it as much, but I think the songs are really pretty.

“Farmhouse” is another one of my favorite Phish songs.  I love the harmonies and the melody is beautiful.  The end of the song with the two singers doing different lines of vocals is just beautiful.  “Twist” is a live favorite although here it opens with percussion only before Trey starts singing.  But then the song proper starts and it is just a riot of fun. Woo!

“Bug” is a mellow contemplative song about God.  It a little long and I must admit, a little dull.  “Back on the Train” is usually much faster live—it sounds like a slow train here.  “Heavy Things” returns the album to excellence, it’s a wonderful uptempo song that is fun to sing along to.  “Gotta Jibboo” is a silly dancey song with horns.  It’s a long jam about 5 minutes most of which is instrumental.  “Dirt” is a piano ballad.

“Piper” is a wonderful round with a melody that circles around the song, I really enjoy this song live and it’s fun to hear how fast they do it here.  I love the way the “words and words I say” gets cycled through.  “Sleep” is a 2 minute gentle ballad.  And “The Inlaw Josie Wales” is a pretty acoustic guitar/piano instrumental.  “Sand” is a funkier number that brings up the tempo.  Of all the songs on the album, I don’t know this one all that well, but it is very Phish like.  “First Tube” ends the disc with a staccato guitar riff that sounds very much like Santana to me.  It’s got a great beat and is very cool.

Perhaps I’m showing my age but I so is Phish, and I think this is a really solid album.

[READ: November 4, 2013] The Slippage

I knew Ben Gereenman from Superbad, a McSweeney’s book.  I liked it a little—but it was more trickery than story telling.  I had gotten it in my head that The Slippage was a good novel (I’m not sure why), and when I saw it at work on Friday, I grabbed it in hopes of reading it before I got back to work on Monday.  And I am pleased to say that I polished off this 288 book in a weekend (and suffered for my lack of sleep).  But I didn’t only finish it because of a self-imposed challenge, I really got into the story.

For this book Greenman’s style is simple and straightforward (a far cry from his earlier, more deliberately challenging work) and the story itself is also rather simple.  But it is engaging, funny and emotionally exhausting.  So the simple story is one of suburban discontent.  The blurb that stayed with me was “If Emma Bovary had lived in the ‘burbs, she would have left a novel like this in her wake.”

The main characters in the story are William Day, his wife Louisa and her brother Tom.  Indeed, the book is really about William and how he handles suburban discontent.  We meet all of the Day’s friends.  In addition to these people there is Emma, the woman who William has an affair with.

The story opens with the explanation of how Louisa and William were married.  They dated for a time and then broke up.  She dated another man but then broke up with him and returned to William.  They do not have any children, but they have a dog and a nice suburban house (with claw footed bathtubs in the backyard as party pieces). William absolutely loves the deck of his house and ensures that every party eventually leads there.

Things are tense between William and Louisa—she is definitely acting distant and weird.  William finds bags full of weeks worth of mail in different rooms.  And when they host a party for her brother—he is returning to the area after living elsewhere—she doesn’t come out of her bedroom all night.

Add to this some other stressors in his life: his job is sorta fine.  But there are grumblings of discontent there.  His supervisor is an ass and big name clients are starting to leave.  His brother-in-law is an artist and a rather pompous ass.  [I loved his art—he makes a series of graphs with captions like “How well you understand this graph over time” with a graph that rises to a peak and then quickly drops off.]  And there is also an arsonist running around town burning down buildings.  The arson subplot seemed like a weird addition until Greenman pulls it together in two very specific ways.

Back to William’s affair.  Linda sees that there is an upcoming convention about decks and deck supplies in Chicago.  She knows that a deck geek like William would love to attend it, so she buys him a ticket.  He flies out there and enjoys himself.  And then he meets Emma, an attractive woman who, despite seeing his ring and despite being married herself, invites him back to her hotel room.  The experience is thrilling for him, but he immediately feels badly about what happened.  Nevertheless it is a one night stand and while he considers telling Linda, he thinks better of it.

Nevertheless, he thinks about Emma all the time.  He is able to keep his secret to himself because he develops another secret: his job is in jeopardy.  This has come at an especially bad time because Linda has just bought a new piece of land and wants to build a new house on it.

William does not want to build a new house, but then he gets a phone call from Emma.  She and her husband are moving to his town.  In fact, they are moving to the house across the street–the house that has been unsold for almost a year (it’s a slightly far fetched coincidence, but there is enough talk of the house being for sale for a long time that it’s believable).

So what will happen when this woman whom he has not stopped thinking about arrives in his town?  And what will happen with his job?  And what about the arsonist?  And, yes, Tom the artist has an engaging subplot as well.

As I said, I couldn’t put the book down and I really enjoyed digesting a book in such a short time.  It made this tale all the more immediate.  I’m definitely going to have to see what else Greenman has been up to since Superbad.