I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SIGUR RÓS-Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do (2004).

I didn’t realize that this was a soundtrack to Merce Cunningham’s dance piece Split Sides.  That doesn’t really change my opinion of the music, although it does make me wonder just what kind of dance this would have been.

There are three tracks on this short EP.  The primary instrument seems to be the music box.  There are no real vocals on the album, except for what sounds like sampled children and a few spoken words in the final track (the words are the title of the EP sampled and thrown around, apparently spoken by Cunningham).  Of course, it’s not all music box, there are synths and interesting percussive sounds (what sounds like the winding up of said music boxes).  The first two songs are quite similar, with the second being a bit more fleshed out.

The final track, with the sampled words, sounds much different and feel a bit more aggressive, although that is all relative of course.  The whole EP is about 20 minutes long.  Of all of Sigur Rós’ varied output (singles and EPs) this is probably the least essential one that is all new music.

[READ: November 8, 2013] “City of Clowns”

I had printed out all of the New Yorker stories that Alarcón had written because I enjoyed his previous ones so much. This was the first and I was blown away by how good it was.

It is a long and somewhat complicated story.

It opens with Oscarcito going to the hospital because his father died the night before.  He finds his mother mopping floors because his father’s bill was unpaid.  And in that very first paragraph, she introduces her son to Carmela—the woman whom his father left them for.  She was mopping the floor with Oscarcito’s  mother.  He is confused and enraged by this.

His half brothers are also there.  He had never met them before, preferring to stay away from his father’s other life.  But he saw them in front of him and clearly saw that they were related to him.  But the most galling thing was that although he was the oldest of all the children, they were clearly the chosen children—after all, his father stayed with them.

Then we learn about his father’s life.  He was born in Cerro de Pasco and moved to Lima when his young family was still young.  He worked hard in semi legitimate businesses and then brought his family to the city.  Young Oscarcito, age 8, loved it.  But his mother hated missing her family in Cerro de Pasco.  And now they we reliving with his father who was practically a stranger. His father worked hard and succeeded, but he was rarely home.

Between flashbacks to his father’s story we see that Oscarcito is now a reporter for the local newspaper and he has been asked to write about the clowns that are prevalent around the city.  Oscarcito is on a bus when a clown approaches.  The clown is pelted by water balloon but still manages to climb aboard the bus and peddle his wares—gaining a few coins for his “act.”  Oscarcito is not interested in the subject and puts it off.

So he travels to his mother’s house to see how she is doing, but a neighbor there tells him she has been living with Carmela since his father got sick.  But his mother is embarrassed by this and asked her not to say anything to him.  His mother had been a cleaning lady since they moved to Lima.  She worked for the Azcártes, a wealthy local family who treated her very well and treated Oscarcito practically like their own son.

A flashback then shows that Oscarcito went to work with his father doing construction on a few occasions—they worked very hard on expansions of people’s houses—working hard and working well and making good improvements.  But all the while, waiting patiently until they could rob them of all of their fine things.  Oscar was even sent to a nice school where he was welcomed until they realized where he was from.  Gangs would steal anything from anyone, and were called Piranhas.  And that became Oscar’s nickname at school.  And soon he was made fun of by just about everyone, but especially one boy.

So when he found his father working for that man, he wanted in, and he stole the boy’s suit–the very one that the boy wore to school all day.  And Oscarcito wore it to his first real job interview.  Which he got.

Finally, after putting off his article for ages, Oscarcito meets and interviews a clown.  And that clown tells him how he started and invites him along.  And Oscarcito does.  He finds that he likes the anonymity of the job.

All of the threads come to a head as the story reaches its close—where Oscar will confront his mother and deal with his newfound joy at being a clown.

The ending was very powerful and I enjoyed this story immensely.