I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE HOLMES BROTHERS-Tiny Desk Concert #71 (August 2, 2010).

I’ve never heard of The Holmes Brothers.  So I was a little surprised to hear that they have been playing together for 30 years.

The trio consists of Sherman Holmes on bass, Wendell Holmes on guitar and Popsy Dixon on drums (in this case, just a snare and a lot of rim shots).

They play soul music steeped in Baptist hymns, blues and spirituals.  Wendell is a great guitarist, playing effortless solos–playing with the volume and creating interesting effects.  Sherman plays a fun bass with some cool bass lines (although felt he may have been a tad too loud in the mix).  And Dixon keeps the beat–nothing fancy, but he propels the song along and it would never sound as good without him.

They play three songs from their then new album.  Sherman sings lead on “Dark Cloud” while Wendell sings lead on “Pledging My Love” and “Feed My Soul.”  Especially noteworthy on the latter two tracks is Dixon’s falsetto which is really amazing (I thought they had a female backing vocalist hidden somewhere).  In fact, the three of them sound like there might be four or five people in the band.

They put on quite a show.

[READ: August 7, 2015] That Thing You Do with Your Mouth

I often don’t know what McSweeney’s books are about before I read them.  I had a vague inkling that this book was about sex (I’d read that Matthews did voice over for Italian porn), but I didn’t know that this was going to be a kind of biography of Matthews and her history of sexual abuse.

According to the introduction, Matthews told her story to David Shields (author and also Matthews’ cousin) who says that the interview garnered 700 pages worth of material.  Thank goodness he edited it.  I felt this book (which comes in at 113 large print pages) was way too long as it is.

Despite all of the accolades on the cover, Matthews is not a very compelling individual.  It’s strange to read personal incidents from a person that you’ve never heard of or, for that matter, was someone who hadn’t done anything terribly interesting.

Matthews is an actress (although I’ve never seen her in anything) and although she is American she now lives in Barcelona.

The story of her childhood abuse by her stepbrothers is horrifying.  And it’s weird that it is thrown more or less in the middle of this story which is mostly about her having sex–or wanting to have sex.

She details the boyfriends (and girlfriends) that she had over the years and talks about how so few of them were kind to her and how even fewer of them satisfied her sexually.

But the thing is I had just read Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper which is pretty much wall to wall details about sex and sexuality.  And, as often happens, the fictional story was more real and more insightful than this memoir.

Whereas Zink is writing compelling sentences about fidelity and the pitfalls of marriage, Matthews is saying things like: “The thing is, marriage–any relationship–is just really complicated, for men and women, and everyone seems to pay lip service to that reality without actually believing it.  Or something.  What do I know?  What’s your take?”

So, yeah, not terribly compelling or insightful.

And there was very little about the Italian pron industry anyway.

This was pretty disappointing.