I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: JULIAN KOSTER-“Frosty the Snowman” (2008).

The name of this track doesn’t prepare you for what lies inside.  For that, you need the album title: Singing Saw at Christmas.  Julian Koster (who is part of the Elephant 6 collective) and has a love it or hate it voice, also plays the singing saw (another love it or hate it sound).

And so, in 2008 he released an album of Singing Saw Christmas Carols.  And NPR played it on their Holiday Show.  The version is simultaneously beautiful and terribly unsettling.  It’s hard to even know what it is if you aren’t aware that it is a saw (I at first guessed theremin).

I enjoy hearing it (and it is very short), but I don’t think I could bring myself to listen to a whole album.

Koster released a short holiday video in which he plays a song and tells a story.  To watch him play the saw (with a fellow saw player, tune in around 3:50).

[READ: December 6, 2013] Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure at the Abbey Grange

Since I’m going to write about a few of these, I’ll keep up this little intro bit so I don’t have to re-write the general ideas/criticisms.

These are indeed the actual Arthur Conan Doyle stories just severely edited and truncated.  In other words, a lot of the story is cut out and yet the original language is still in place (at least I hope it is, I hope contemporary writers didn’t write the dialogue), so for young kids I think the wording is a little confusing.  The drawings are a little too simple for my liking as well.  They do effectively convey the story, but I didn’t like the very basicness of them.  I feel they make the stories seems a little more childlike than they actually are.

Having said all that however, I found the graphic novels to be a compelling introduction to Sherlock Holmes’ shorter stories (although not for my 8-year-old apparently).

This story also struck me as unusual (perhaps I just have certain expectations of Holmes’ that are not quite right).  Holmes usually comes across as cocky (and frankly, obnoxious) when he finds a clue.  In this case he seemed almost deferential to the police (maybe the modern interpretations of Holmes show him to be more obnoxious).  Even though he felt things were not right about the clues, he didn’t insist upon correcting them immediately.  He even took the police’s word for things (unheard of!).  Although perhaps that was all planned out because of what happens at the end.

In this story, Holmes is called out for a burglary and murder.  The mistress said that three men broke in.  Her husband fought with them and they killed him.  They tied up and then they stole the silver.  They did not hurt her because she pretended to be unconscious.  But she woke up while they celebrated by drinking some of their expensive wine.  She identified the three crooks and the police believe they have their men.

But Holmes investigates and notices some things that don’t seem right.  Like, why would they tie up the woman with the bell pull which, if they pulled it, may have rung the bells and woken the housekeepers.  And why would the crooks drink wine when there were people at home.  And furthermore, why were there only bits from the wine in two of the three glasses.  So he doesn’t believe her story, but he also knows that she could not have killed her husband because the killer had to be very strong.  So what strong man could have done this?

Holmes uses some logic (that I’m sure must have been better explained in the story) to track down a sailor.  And things are revealed.  What’s interesting about this is that Holmes acts as judge and jury for the case and decides to see if the police can figure out the truth from the clues he has given them.  But otherwise he lets them both free, suggesting the murder was done in self-defense.

It’s an interesting look at Holmes’ more humane side.  But it’s also an interesting look at his deductive processes.