I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SLOTHRUST-7:30AM (2011).

This song is the opening theme to the FX show You’re the Worst, which I like very much.

The theme is only a few seconds long although the song (which has been around since at least 2011) is considerably longer (although it doesn’t reach 3 minutes).

Every time we’ve watched the show, I’ve tried to imagine who the guy is singing this song–he sounded strangely familiar.  Well, imagine my surprise to find out that the music from the band Slothrust is pretty much written and sung by a woman, Leah Wellbaum.  Well who would have guessed (it’s more evident in some of their other songs).

I love the simplicity of this song–repeated lyrics set to a ramshackle guitar which bursts forth into loud wailing in every repeated section.  There’s even a guitar solo (equally as uninhibited).  The band is a typically more punky than this folk song might hint, but you can feel all their glorious chaos in this one track.

 It’s funny and rather catchy.  Check out the song on bandcamp.

[READ: June 17, 2014] “Good Legs”

This year’s Summer Fiction issue of the New Yorker was subtitled Love Stories.  In addition to the two graphic stories, we have a series of five personal essays which fall under the heading of “My Old Flame.”  I liked that all five writers have slight variations in how they deal with this topic.

Joshia Ferris has written a number of things that I enjoyed.  This piece, which  found very peculiar, takes a very different approach than Kushner did.  Where Kushner focused on different people in her past, Ferris Ferris focuses on one old flame. Or is she?

He says he met her in the hallway of a dorm.  There’s this near-opening line that sets the tone: “I didn’t think much of her, but I was sure she had never seen anyone quite so handsome.”

It turns out that she was dating someone else anyhow.  And then she graduated, leaving him behind (perhaps unbeknownst to her).  He says, “I didn’t miss her,”  because he was “in this terrible on-off thing with Sisyphus, who kept dragging me up a pretty blond hill and hurtling me down.”

Then a few years later he and his old flame ran into each other in Chicago.  They had a meal, but she was dating someone else.  And when he insulted her at a Tom Waits concert, “it was ‘Rabbits to you!’ after that, at least for a while.”

Then his old flame moved to Cambridge and became a different person altogether except for those same good legs.  Eventually they moved to Brooklyn together.  And then later, they were married “to entirely different people.”

And it gets weirder from there.

I’m not sure what to do with this piece.