I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PET SHOP BOYS-Electric (2013).

After the sombre, more reflective Elysium, Pet Shop Boys came back with the far more upbeat and dancey Electric.  Right from the start, you know this is back to high energy fun (with of course sardonic lyrics). The opening track, “Axis,” is a major dance song with processed vocals and a great riff–I love how the song goes very electronic and artificial sounding around 4 minutes in.  “Bolshy” has a classic PSB sound–dancey keyboards and Neil Tennant’s ageless voice.  I don’t really quite know what the song is about but it is really fun to sing along to. It is followed by “Love is  Bourgeois Construct” (I sense a strangely political theme here–and I love that the follow-up line is “just like they said at University” ), I love the way the song gets really muddy while the synth line plays and that it emerges bigger and better than ever–the sound reminds me of the synth songs in A Clockwork Orange and the riff is on Michael Nyman’s “Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds.” The way the music is so epic-sounding for such a simple idea of a song is great,

“Flourescent” is a darker song, with big synths and cowbells ringing in the song.  It’s got a steampunky wheeze as the drum beat and a echoey synth note which all coalesces before Tennant’s vocals which come in–two minutes into the song.  It’s a very moody piece and even at 6 minutes doesn’t feel overly long.

“Inside a Dream” is a dancey song with a fast melody.  “The Last to Die” is a Bruce Springsteen song from his album Magic (I had no idea) which they electrify and make synthy, but not dancey exactly.  They do a very good job of capturing the Springsteen vibe in their own way.  “Shouting in the Evening” is a very dancey song, one of may favorites on the record–I love the way Chris Lowe distorts his keyboards on this track.  “Thursday” has a great vocal line–“It’s Thursday night, let’s get it right.  I want to know you’re gonna stay for the weekend.”  It’s a catchy song with the repeats of the days: “Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday.”  I could do without the rap (by Example) which reminds me way too much of Blondie’s rap in Rapture–stiff and kind of forced.

The final song “Vocal” I find odd in the lyrics.  It’s about songs that he likes, which is fine, but the line, “every track has a vocal, and that make a change” is weird–do dance songs not have vocals anymore?  Well, how would I know, i don’t listen to a lot of dance music.  Anyhow, it’s super catchy and dancey.  I like the way it builds to the big chorus even if the song isn’t very complex.

While I enjoyed the introspective Elysium, it’s great to have a big loud Pet Shop Boys album as a return to form.

[READ: October 22, 2014] Three Early Stories

I found this book on the shelf at work.  I had no idea that a) Salinger had written so many stories that have yet to be collected (according to Wikipedia there are about a dozen) or that these three had been collected in this very strange edition.  The book collects three stories and includes illustrations by Anna Rose Yoken.  The illustrations are fine, but not worth getting the book for (and feel a bit more like a children’s book illustration than a Salinger story).  The other strange thing is that the text is only on the right side pages, so although the book is 69 pages, there’s really only about 35 pages of story.

I had never read any of these stories, so I was glad to find this book.  They were written before Catcher in the Rye, and it’s interesting to see what was on his ind before he created Holden Caufield.  These stories seem to focus on college-aged women and the way they behave.  The portraits of these women are not flattering, but they are fairly realistic.

“The Young Folks” is set at a party (I can’t believe how many cigarettes are smoked in these three stories).  At 11PM during the party, Lucille Henderson, (the college-aged host) sees that her friend Edna Phillips is by herself, still.  So she introduces her to William Jameson.  Jameson is more interested in the laughing (and presumably drunk) blond girl who is sitting amid three guys from Rutgers who are hanging on her every word.

As soon as Jameson is introduced to Edna, he starts making excuses that he should leave the party–he has a theme due on Monday.  But Edna clings to him  with conversation. She asks about his theme, she tells him about the guy who was too forward with her–she’s no prude, but come on.  She offers him cigarettes and invites him to the balcony.  He is too polite to tell her off, but he is giving major signals that she must see and is perhaps saving up as ammunition for later.

The end of the story reveals that both parties were liars.  And I rather enjoyed the way it all tied up.  One thing I especially enjoyed was the way the dialogue really captured these students’ way of speaking while the rest of the story was so economical and efficient with words.

“Go See Eddie” is about a brother and sister.  Helen, who has long red hair, is in her room when her brother Bobby blusters in.  He gives her a hard time and says that she really needs to see Eddie because he is going to offer her a part in an upcoming show.  She’s clearly very pretty but she doesn’t want to be in just some chorus line or something.

Bobby insists that she go see Eddie, but she says she doesn’t want to.  When she asks what he’s going to do if she doesn’t he threatens to call up her boyfriend’s wife.  While he is seething, he says that he heard from someone else that she was seeing a different guy, Hanson Carpenter, although she swears she isn’t.

As the story ends, nothing is resolved with Eddie, but we find that Helen has a lot more going on than she pretends.

“Once a Week Won’t Kill You” was written in 1944 and it is about the war.

The two main characters are a married couple.  He is going off to war and she is certainly going to miss him (although she doesn’t seem as upset as you might think, in my opinion).  He doesn’t ask much of her, just that she look after his aunt once a week while he is gone (it wouldn’t kill her).  The aunt lives upstairs (I assume in her own apartment or something).  The wife complains that his aunt is getting funny and is hard to be with.  But he says to just take her out to the movies once a week or something.  She reluctantly agrees.

He then goes upstairs to talk to the aunt and we see that even though she is super nice, she is definitely a little confused–her heart is tn the right place, but the way she tries to help only seems to upset him.  I found this story to be a little more elliptical than the other two and consequently not as powerful.

It is a sad story, particularly in the way the war is so important to the story but has very little to do with the overriding emotions in the story.

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Like everyone else, I really enjoyed Catcher in the Rye back in college.  And I quickly read all of Salinger’s published work in a few weeks.  But it has been a pretty long time and reading these has inspired me to read his works again to see if I still like him–he’s a pretty easy author to be a completist for.