SOUNDTRACK: BECK-Mutations (1998).
This is the first album that shows a wholly different side to Beck. It is pretty much an entirely traditional album. There’s no samples, just consistently strong songwriting. The overall feel is mellow and it comes as quite a shock after the chaos of Odelay!
Although the album has a very consistent vibe, it’s not all samey. There’s a lot of different instrumentation like the harpsichord on “Lazy Flies,” and the old-timey piano and slide guitar on “Canceled Check” which has a very country feel. It’s not all simple and normal though, as “Check” ends with a strange musical breakdown that keeps it from being a smooth song. “We Live Again” is a very mellow track with Beck singing sweetly over the waves of music.
As befits the name “Tropicalia” has a very tropical feel, it’s totally danceable and was a very wise choice as a sample. “Dead Melodies” has a classical music feel (with vocals of course). “Bottle of Blues” is, unsurprisingly, a somewhat rowdy blues song. “O Maria” is a slow but upbeat piano song that also feels old timey. “Sing It Again” has a melody that is similar to “Norwegian Wood,” but the song is nothing like that Beatles classic. This is gently sung and played acoustic guitar number. And “Static” is a quiet disc ender.
This disc also feature a “bonus” track, and this is the first one that is actually enjoyable. It is a fleshed out song (and a good one at that). It is comparatively rambunctious and noisy and quite different from anything else on the disc. It’s called “Diamond Bollocks” and has a great bass line and cool backing vocals. This song could easily have been a hit if it weren’t tucked away at the end of the disc. (Well, and there are some weird moments to, but overall, easily a hit).
Despite all that Beck is known for his crazy songs and samples, Mutations is an extremely cohesive record with enough diversity to keep it from ever getting dull. It’s a great record and is somewhat overlooked in his catalog.
[READ: March 16, 2014] The Unknown University
This is a collection of almost all of Roberto Bolaño’s poetry. Some (but not all) of the poems from his collection The Romantic Dogs are included here, although some of those are apparently modified a little. It also includes what was earlier released as Antwerp but is here called “People Walking Away.” (I found Antwerp and “People” to be quite unusual and would never remember what is the same in the two. But translator Laura Healy says that she more or less uses Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Antwerp for the parts that are the same (a task which must have been harder than it sounds if the two pieces weren’t exactly the same).
This book is 830 pages with facing pages of Spanish and English. According to the publisher’s note, this collection was found on Bolaño’s computer as is—a collection of all of his poems from throughout his career.
Most of the early poems were written when Bolaño was young (in his 20s). Even at such a young age, he writes powerfully. Not all of his poems are great of course (how could they be when there are so many) but there are dozens and dozens of poems that I thought were fantastic. I’m going to include some below, but I also wanted to get some criticisms out of the way too.
He tends to revisit ideas quite a lot, which is normal for a poet, but it seems weird to revisit an idea in subsequent poems (especially when the poems are just a few lines long each). It almost feels like he fixated on a subject and thought of a number of ways to work with it and rather than make one long poem, he made several short ones. Like this strange occurrence:
Page 273 (untitled, shown here in its entirety):
Death is an automobile
with two or three distant friends
Page 577 (untitled, shown here in its entirety)
Death is an automobile with two or three distant friends.
Faces.
I can’t forget: Cerulean, cold, just one step away from dusk.
Death is an automobile out driving the avenues of Mexico City
uselessly searching for your house: a carbon trail, a carbon
tail, carbon fingers sinking into darkness. Death
is R.B. and L.J.’s lips in the backseat of a minibus: now I know
no one escapes those avenues. I’ll leave it as collateral:
the end of my childhood.
So that first poem was short but good. So why leave it ion its own when you expound on its o well later. As with a lot of Bolaño (especially since he’s dead) there’s a feeling of trying to wring out as much as possible in print.
But I read the first batch of poems with real admiration—the poems were concrete and very real and did not try to drift into an ethereal nothingness that some poets do. They also weren’t abstract (in a bad way) or so internal as to be rendered meaningless). True Bolaño is a major name dropper and I don’t know most of the people he’s talking about, but that is more my problem than his.
What I really admired about his poetry is how easily translatable they seem (not to say that Healy had an easy job at all, but that when I see the Spanish it seems like the words more or less come easily). Of course, having said that and then having searched for the very next poem online a found a translation that was similar but not as powerful. The “criticized advised energized” was something different and far less powerful. So, Healy clearly does wonderful work to make these poems sing, but I feel like the concreteness makes them a lot easier to work with than some other poets might be.
Back to young Bolaño. Some of these early poems are simultaneously embarrassingly earnest and yet powerful too. Like “This is the Honest Truth.”
I grew up next to puritan revolutionaries
I’ve been criticized advised energized by heroes
of lyric poetry
and the teeter-totter of death.
What I’m trying to say is my lyricism is DIFFERENT
(that’s all there is to it but let me
add one thing more).
Swimming in the swamps of sentimentality
Is, to me, like a mercurial Acapulco
a fish-blood Acapulco
an underwater Disneyland
where I’m at peace with myself.
Or this untitled piece (there are far too many untitled pieces for my liking)
In a thousand years nothing will be left
of all that’s been written this century.
they’ll read loose sentences, traces
of lost women,
fragments of motionless children,
your slow green eyes
simply will not exit.
It will be like the Greek Anthology,
but even further away,
like a beach in winter
for another wonder, another indifference.
And one of the most lyrical and simple is “The Wigs of Barcelona”
I’d just like to write about the women
of the District 5 boarding houses
in a way that’s real and kind and honest
so that when my mother reads it
she’ll say that’s just what it’s like
and then I’ll finally be able to laugh
and open the windows
and let in the wigs
the colors.
I generally dislike very short poems, and there are few here that I dislike but I do like this one (untitled, page 85):
Sleep my abyss, reflexes may tell me
detachment is total
but even in dreams you say we’re all
in this together, we all
deserve to be saved
And even something as simple and short as (untitled, page 137):
Fever falls like snowflakes
Green eyed snowflakes
is quite powerful despite its brevity.
The middle poems seem to have more thematic consistencies which I don’t always understand. A hunchback appears in about a dozen poems in the middle sections, which I find odd. It’s not clear whether he wrote these poems in this order, but, as with many section where there are several poems about the same topic, it seems strange to have poem entitled “For Victoria Ávalos” and then one called “Victoria Ávalos and I.”
A later section is obviously poems he wrote when he was working in a campground. It’s interesting to see the location of his works change so drastically. And one assumes that “Molly” is a girl he met at the campground, and her poem is descriptive but not terribly inspired
A girl with Irish pounds
and a green backpack.
143 pesetas to the Irish pound,
that’s a lot, right?
Not bad.
And two beers on a terrace
In Barcelona.
And seagulls.
Not bad.
But not all of Bolaño’s poems are short. Not by a long shot, Indeed somethings seems to range for dozens of pages and may or may not be all one poem. The section entitled “Fat Chance, Hon” uses that particularly phrase a lot. These are all…prose? Maybe? Lots of ellipses and left and right justified texts, but they’re not really stories. So maybe they are poems? And “Prose from Autumn in Gerona” also seems to be connected despite the fact each (untitled) page has only a paragraph or two. So we get a page with “The protagonist I left with adventure and saying ‘It’s started snowing, boss.’” Which is clearly not a poem or really much of anything. This appeared in Tres, where it made more sense as a connected entity.
The book also includes the lengthy “Mexican Manifesto” which I enjoyed a lot and “The Neochileans” which I also enjoyed a lot. And that excerpt from Antwerp which I enjoyed somewhat less. The longer poems also include a lot of sex–something you would think the younger poems would have had. The sex can be very explicit–and rather shocking after the earlier more chaste poems. Although if you’ve read his novels, the sex is pretty on par with those books.
Overall, I really enjoyed this collection a lot. I find Bolaño’s poetry to be very powerful, often funny and quite enjoyable. And while I never purchased Romantic Dogs, I would consider getting this one, because it would be interesting to have access to these translations–like a Spanish poetic dictionary.
For ease of searching I include: Bolano, Victoria Avalos
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