I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BEACH SLANG-Tiny Desk Concert #431 (April 10, 2015)

I had never heard of Beach Slang before watching this Tiny Desk Concert.  Evidently they are a new band with only a couple EPs out.  The write up says they are a punk band.  But in this Tiny Desk show, it’s just lead dude James Snyder and his guitar.

He plays four songs.  They are all sort of jaunty acoustic songs.  They are almost anthemic, but not quite.  The strangest thing is Snyder’s super-raspy singing voice, especially since his speaking voice is gentle and his laugh is kind of high-pitched. He is very funny and nervous when he talks, which I enjoyed quite a bit.

Exploring a little their bandcamp site, I see that they do a cover of the Psychedelic Furs’ Love My Way, and that sound is pretty apt.

Their recorded versions are heavier and actually sound a bit like the Goo Goo Dolls.

This is a brief but enjoyable set.  I find him so charming that I like it more than I might normally.

[READ: April 1, 2015] Five Dials 31

It has been quite a while since I’ve read a Five Dials.  And that’s no fault of the magazine–its all on me.  I always think, I’ll just put it off till I have time, and then I realize that I can always find something to read…so I just need to actually make time for Five Dials because it is totally worth it.

So this issue came out about a year ago.  Maybe that’s not too bad?

It begins with the contributors page and is followed by the Unable to Contribute page which lists five journalists who are currently in prison (find out more at the Committee to Protect Journalists).  Page 5 is a Table of Contents which I feel they haven’t done before.  It has a cool drawing on the bottom.  All drawings from this issue came from The Public Domain Collection of the British Library.

Then there’s a Frequently Asked Questions page.  Many pertain to corresponding with Five Dials, but others, well:

How did Samantha find out about this magazine in the first place? We were close when we were children. We drifted – it’s what happens to cousins – but I’d still like to know how she found out about Five Dials.
ANSWER: The Guardian.

I’m looking for that book where everyone’s working for a tech firm in California and they’re like – oh, nothing should be private. Red cover?
ANSWER: Dave Eggers The Circle.

I’d like to buy a sexy book. Could you help me with that?
ANSWER: The Victoria System by Eric Reinhardt.

I have written a trilogy of fantasy novels. What would be your top names for the elven characters?
ANSWER: Elf Name Generator.

Have you got any moody Camus videos to show me?
ANSWER: From The Nowness    [this link gave me a blank page].

What have you all been listening to these days?
ANSWER: The Notwist.

How much money do writers make?
ANSWER: read this.

How do you feel about the whole Snowden thing?
ANSWER:  A book from Penguin.

What’s that song where someone mixes in snippets of different Montreal bands?
ANSWER: Fauna Flage.

What’s Zadie Smith been up to lately?
ANSWER: A book review.

Then comes Notices from Our Glorious Readers and other sources.  This substitutes for the usual letter from the editor.  They print some raves about the journal from the Twitterverse and elsewhere.

The main articles include:

Our Town which has an illustration of Old Street December 14 2013 by JULIA DINAN
ZADIE SMITH-Yates Lane, NW8.  Uses Google Maps then doesn’t.
Column one shows the direction from Point A to point B from Google Maps and then From A to B redux shows her own view of what she sees en route (more detailed obviously).

JAY BARNETT-“Schwimmer Bites Kebab” Stike, Newington, N16
Late at night Jay walks to the kebab shop.  The place is abuzz because minutes before David Schwimmer was in the shop and everyone got a picture with him.

PAUL EWEN-steps out of The Cock and into the light  East Poultry Avenue, EC1A
The Cock is a bar that is open at 6AM, mostly for people who work in the meat packing district and get off at sunrise.  There are no windows and very little in the way of jokes.  But its neat to be able to get drunk before work, eh?

LYDIA DAVIS-“The Language of Things in the House”
This may be the longest thing I’ve ever seen from Davis.  It is a list of the sounds that the things in her house make:  For examples, the washing machine spin cycle: “Pakistani Pakistani.”  I like this list a lot and she talks about how the sounds we hear are formed by how we perceive sounds in general–if you listen for words you will hear them.  I hear words in bird song.  There’ sa bird in my area that goes CHEESEburger CHEESEburger.  And an other that goes WORKit WORKit WORKit.

CHRIS GARRECHT-WILLIAMS on the manual labours of love from Paris: “Stade de’Amour”
Chris has gone to Paris for love–like so many other people.  But he still needs money so he has to work a shit job.  His job os to screw down floorboards in a football stadium so the grass isn’t destroyed by the upcoming Bruce Springsteen concert–this Sisyphean task must be done all summer long.

NOTHING TO HIDE this is a page of Tweets by various people about how they have nothing to hide from the NSA.  They are accompanied by illustrations from BECKY BARNICOAT

ANN ARBOR has a poem which is basically names of court cases.

ADS that look like Ads are actually ads for books while ADS THAT DON’T LOOK LIKE ADS are pictures but we’re unsure for what.

TREVOR QUIRK-“Source of Light: Astronomy is a passive science.”  You can never get There.  The light must bring There to you.
Before getting into the piece , there are a few question for him–When did you start writing the essay?  Are solitary people drawn to astronomy?  How important are constellations to you now?
Trevor talks about astronomy. Going to school for it. Hating it but still doing it.   But mostly he talks about what it was like to be in these classes at twilight with people–staring up at the sky, being close with others sharing these weird solitary experiences.  The final section talks about his Vitiglio, a skin condition that made it dangerous for him to be in the sunlight.

PHILIP LANGESKOV-“A Distraction”
This short story was cool the way it slowly built to something and then very rapidly turned into something else.  And then something else entirely.

Umberto is excited because his ring has finally been finished and he is going to pick it up at the silversmiths.  We learn about Umberto and his soon to be fiance and even a bit about some of the people he knows at his job.  Like Gina, the co-worker her slept with and how they split up amiably and quietly several years ago.  Once he picks up the ring (he told Maddalena to meet him in the center of town by the fountain at 7PM sharp) he heads to the center of town. He is a few hours early.  Then he sees Luca, a man he needs to confront about something.  But he certainly doesn’t want to today and he really doesn’t want him messing up his plans.  So he follows Luca around town. It’s a tense few paragraphs as he trails the man, wondering what he is up to.  When Umberto feels it is safe he heads back into town, but there seems to be something going on–the square is filling with people and he can’t see Maddalena anywhere.  What is going on, why is this simple plan so complicated?

JOE MORAN-“The Slaying of the Ice Monsters”
Whatever happened to television masts?  In this eulogy for the past, Moran wonders about old TV towers.  The essay begins with some aerials that caused huge damages when they were covered in ice and then and broke off. It’s an interesting look at something that was once ubiquitous and employed many people but which is now more or less gone.

RACHAEL ALLEN–Untitled & Old Fears are Still Valid
Two poems that I liked.

LEANNE SHARPTON-Darkness at the Edge of Film
Sharpton presents five dark stills from famous movies.  She talks about how every film has many frames of darkness in them: a full length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness.  She answers five questions and then there are five prints of darkness from Beauty and the Beast (1946), Dracula (1931), Night of the Hunter (1955), Brief Encounter (1945), A Woman is a Woman (1961), and a proper picture from Le Ronde (1950).

CHAD HARBACH-How It Gets Done interview
Harbach talks about authors who influenced him–Melville, Thoreau and Emerson.  And he loved the fictitious hero of Absalom Absalom. The interviewer comments that The Art of Fielding embraces a  Victorian style and Harbach says he wanted to write a meta- nineteenth century novel.  He also says people will be invoking David Foster Wallace in 100 years.  The Art of Fielding is a novel about baseball and he says one of the people he was thinking of was Steve Blass who had recently called him (after the book was out).  The first thing the message said was “Don’t worry…I’m reading the novel and would like to chat with you….”  He says there are some superstitions that a writer does, like “Oh, I got all this work done yesterday and I had chicken salad for lunch So I m going to have chicken salad again today.”

PHILIP OLTERMANN–Struggling: on reading he ‘bestseller that no one has read.’
Oltermann talks about Mein Kampf.  He has an interesting perspective on its usefulness and how it was a huge bestseller in Germany.  Sales took off when his political career took off (at its peak it may have earned him as much as $1 million a year).  But really how many people have read it?  A scholar says it is very surprising that he ultimately came to power given how much of his plans were in the book.  His anti-Semitic passages are very precise: describing a Jewish conspiracy to enslave Germany and attain world rule through Bolshevist internationalism and stock-market capitalism and he accuses the Jews of “bringing the negroes into the Rhineland” in order to weaken the white race and of spreading syphilis through prostitution..  But he also points out that it was poorly written.  He gives some quotes: “Hitler Junior: ‘I did not want to be a civil servant.  No , and again no.  Hitler senior: ‘Artist, no never, as long as I live!”  Oltermann says he was embarrassed to be seen reading it in the library.  And yet to restrict its circulation lends it a glamorous quality of illegitimacy.  His last observation: “the more closely you read it, the less dangerous it feels. It vaporizes.”

JOHN UPDIKE
The next item is a photo of an old album called John Updike Reading from his Works:  The Centaur (excerpt) “Lifeguard” and Poems.  And the back cover shows all the other authors in  this series.

GEORGE SIMENON-How to write a letter ‘You endured life.  You didn’t live it.”
This is a letter to his mother three years after she died.  It is a sad and touching letter in which he says that even as a child he knew his mother’s smile had melancholy in it.  But by the end he talks about how little she seemed to care about him.  When he found out that his mother was dying, he traveled hundreds of miles to see her and she said to him, “Why have you come, George.”

SIMON WROE-A Nail in the First Act  What happens in a professional kitchen during the power hour?
This is an excerpt from his novel Chop Chop which is an intense look at the world of high stakes cooking.  Since I have been reading Lucky Peach, I believe all of this to be true.  But as with all of those cooking shows, there is no reason I would ever want to be involved in that world, and frankly I don’t think I’d wan to read this novel after reading this excerpt–a scary look at high pressure, no reward, and lot of name calling.

EVGENY ZAMYATIN-“We” ‘But I want even that pain…let it happen”  translated by Clarence Brown
This is an excerpt from the first novel banned in Soviet Russia.  It is set in a futuristic homeland of OneState and the protagonist is known as D-503.  He starts out believing in control rather than the messiness of freedom.  But he starts to wonder about his individuality.  This book was inspirational for a lot of dystopian novels.  It’ hard to really get the transformation given that this is just a few excerpts–I’m not sure if that is the end of the story or not.  I enjoyed the trashing of the West (especially the bits about secret elections), and yet the transformation is quite subtle–but I can see that it would greatly upset the Communists.

LAURENCE HOWARTH-Five Minutes to Midnight.  A series on the end of days.
This final section looks at the last five minutes before midnight–and the food decisions that one has–a greasy fry up, fast food, or waiting 45 minutes to make something properly.