SOUNDTRACK: LIGHTNING DUST-Tiny Desk Concert #38 (December 7, 2009).
Lightning Dust is a side project of heavy psychedelic band Black Mountain. Lightning Dust is a kind of folk version of the band (with Amber Webber on vocals instead of Joshua Wells). Her voice is full of vibrato (she almost sounds nervous at times). The songs are simple, as folk songs tend to be, performed mainly on the acoustic guitar with organ backing tones.
“Antonia Jane” is very pretty, especially the tone of the organ that accompanies the acoustic guitar. “History” has a nice unexpected chord change when the chorus rolls around. For the final song, “I Knew”, Wells switches to 12 string guitar instead of keyboard–something he says he never does. The song is faster and more upbeat, not necessarily because of the extra guitar, but it really broadens the sound a lot and makes it even catchier (even if it does give it a more countryish feeling). And the backing vocals are quite wonderful.
I prefer Black Mountain to Lightning Dust but the songwriting is quite good.
[READ: May 27, 2014] “Camilo”
I don’t know Zambra’s work. This one was translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell and I thought it was terrific.
The story is fairly simple, although it is revealed via a lot of layers which is very interesting. It opens with a young man yelling “I’m Camilo…your daddy’s godson” and the narrator being suspicious of this statement. But it turns out to be true. This boy is his father’s godson.
The narrator’s father had been good friends with Camilo’s father Big Camilo. They were best friends until they had a huge fight and never spoke again. That was (obviously) after Camilo was born. But in addition to this fight and lack of talking, Big Camilo later left the country all together and moved to Paris where he started a new family, leaving Camilo and Camilo’s mother back in Chile.
Soon the narrator and Camilo became almost inseparable. Camilo was a few years older and was something of a protective presence for him. Even the narrator’s older sister was infatuated with him. In fact, even the narrator’s father liked him, although he did remind him a bit too much of Big Camilo. The one difference was that Big Camilo (and the narrator’s family) loved soccer, but Camilo didn’t know a thing about it.
This was a shame because the narrator’s father was obsessed with soccer and it was the only way the narrator spent any time with him–whether watching it on TV or watching as his father played goalie for thier local club. The father was a good goalie but he was very loud: always shouting and directing people “Pass it back!” which seemed to annoy a lot of his team.
But mostly the story is about the narrator and Camilo together–going to the narrator’s first concert, stealing a Talking Heads cassette (spontaneously). This led to the narrator later taking money from his parents and lying about what it was for (a mortal sin). He confessed to Camilo who said it was no big deal. Camilo even showed him (disastrously) how to chat up girls.
Eventually Camilo began enjoying soccer with them, even if he really knew nothing about it. Ultimately, to the dismay of everyone, he seemed to support the referees more than the teams.
The story then jumps ahead from this flashback to the year 2012, when the narrator is 22.
The narrator is in Amsterdam and he is going to meet Big Camilo for the first time. They talk soccer, they talk about him moving to Paris, they talk about Pinochet and then eventually they talk about the fight that Big Camilo had with the narrator’s father. I didn’t expect this revelation and it was quite astonishing. And then there’s an even more shocking revelation to come.
I enjoyed how this news was downplayed and how the narrator even seems disappointed in the way his own story ends, even though I thought it was very good.
This story also taught me about Condor Rojas the Argentinian soccer player who faked an injury rather than lose a match and was banned for life. And also about the man known for the Pato Yáñez gesture:
See how much fiction can teach you?
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