I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BECK-“Gimme” (2013).

This was the final of the three singles that Beck released in 2013.

It is by far the weirdest of the three, and seems the most experimental.

The song is only 2 and a half minutes long.  It starts with vibraphone-like sounds. The vocals are layered and processed with random voices shouting “Gimme” throughout the track.  I have no idea what the lyrics are.

It is noisy and cluttered, although there is a melody under all of that.  And then it ends just as suddenly as it began.  This song may some end of the year lists, but it’s certainly not easy listening.

[READ: April 1, 2014] “Subject to Search”

Sarah recently brought home a copy of Lorrie Moore’s Bark, and I’ve put it on my to-read list (somewhere near the top).  So browsing through this back issue of Harper’s I saw this story and figured it was probably in Bark (it is), but I decided to read it anyhow.

The story begins with an amusing exchange.  A man sits down and says “I have to leave.”  He and the woman are in a restaurant and she wonders if he has time to eat.  He tells her to order lamb couscous and she worries about her pronunciation.  It turns out they are in France and her French is passable at best.  She worries that there is a distinction between lamb to eat and lamb as a pet (like between pork and pig) in French and that she may end up with something totally unacceptable.

When the man returns he explains to her that he has to fly back to the States, and to us that he is in “the intelligence game.”

As the story unfold we learn more about him from the way she has perceived him (she assumed he was a drug runner from his story about driving cars in Holland).  He escaped from Iran just before the hostage situation broke out in the 70s.  And he paid for everything in cash.  But we also learn that she has known him for years.

He says that he must go back home to deal with London troops and a Baghdad prison and that the prison will soon be as infamous as My Lai.  When he said the name of the prison she thought it sounded like something out of Jabberwocky.  The My Lai reference made me think this was set before Guantanamo (although he does have a John Kerry sticker on his briefcase).  But later he mentions Gitmo.   So, that’s weird.

There are so many things that happen in this story which are unconnected to this basic plot line.  Like that two years “later” the man had a chip implanted in his head–a headache cure–but he was in the placebo group.  And he also wouldn’t see her in the hospital.

We also learn that neither one of them is married any longer–which is good for them at last.  Especially since the story ends years earlier when they met at a party.

I have to admit I found this story so elliptical as to be unsure exactly what I was to think.  That seems to be the point–that he lives a very mysterious life–but I’m not sure it’s enough.  I get the way the opening scene played out.  And I loved their dialogue at the end of the story.  I’m just not sure how to put the other scenes from their past into the story.

I can also say that in this story, the man references the frog in a pot of boiling water.  I have declared a moratorium on using that particular example as a metaphor.  It has gone beyond useful into the realm of cliché and I feel like Moore shouldn’t have used it (unless the point is that the guy only speaks in cliché, but whatever).  Since this is the second time I’ve complained about this particular metaphor in four months, I’ve created a category for it to see how much more often it comes up.