I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: GREAT LAKE SWIMMERS-Tiny Desk Concert #16 (June 8, 2009).

I knew of the Great Lake Swimmers from NPR, but only a song or two.  I found them to be pretty but a little too mellow for my liking.  In this Tiny Desk Concert, Great Lake Swimmer’s vocalist Tony Dekker stops by for a solo acoustic set.  His voice is delicate sounding and yet is powerful in its own way.

He plays three songs, the first two “Everything Is Moving So Fast” and “Pulling on a Line” both come from Great Lake Swimmers’ then recent album, Lost Channels.  Both Bob and Robin compliment his voice, which is really something (he says he grew comfortable with it about a year ago).   And there’s something about the way he sings that really draws you in here.

He is one of the first performers who talks about working in an office in Toronto. (He liked it and says people brought in guitars from time to time).

Then Bob mentions the “yelp machine”–the harmonica stand that Tony pulls out.  Bob says when a guitarist takes it out it makes fans go crazy, but Tony says that he finds it the banjo that makes people go nuts.  The final song, “Various Stages” features the harmonica, which although he says is easy for anyone to play, sure sounds good here.

[READ: January 7, 2014] “Labors”

This New Yorker has several small essays about work.  They are primarily from people who I wasn’t familiar with–only Amy Poehler saved the five from being unread.  When after reading all of them I enjoyed them enough to include them all here.

The pieces are labelled under “Work for Hire” and each talks about a humiliating job.

Rush is an author.  He has the longest article in this series (four whole columns!)  Rush talks about a number of jobs that he had over the years.  But mostly he says he chose jobs that would offer him free time enough to write.  Like picking cherries (?).

He has a funny(ish) story of his father demonstrating a laminating machine to a proud owner of a signed letter from President Eisenhower.  Sadly, after it was laminated, the signature was cut off. Ouch.

He had what sounds like  fascinating job as a market researcher (he met a guy who thought the inventor of the light bulb was Con Edison.  He also resorted to manual labor.  I have a very funny image of him walking down the road carrying a massive scythe.

His final job was working for the mistress of the Gotham Book Mart. It was believed that when the mistress died, she was going to will the bookstore to the employees for them to make it a co-op.  So they endured horrible conditions with high hopes–like poor Bob, the aspiring poet whom she hit with her cane–twice.  There’s no word whether she did give it to them (in this article anyhow), because  he left after 6 weeks.