I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE MUSIC TAPES-Tiny Desk Concert #182 (December 20, 2011).

Julian Koster released an album in 2008 called The Singing Saw at Christmastime.  It was a complete CD of Christmas songs played on the saw.  That should tell you that Koster is an unusual fellow. But that doesn’t prepare you for what he unleashes during his Tiny Desk Concert with The Music Tapes.

Koster has a very high-pitched voice (I have a recording of him doing “I’ve Got My Love to Keep me Warm,” which is almost unbearable.  His singing is really close to the fine line of unique and bad (and I imagine for many it crosses the line). He’s also got a fascinating way of looking at things and of storytelling.  So this Tiny Desk show winds up being quite long (20 minutes) with quite a lot of different things going on.

First he tells a lengthy story about his great grandpa.  And how his great grandpa told him that baby trees can walk.  But they are tethered to the ground by an umbilical cord. And when we cut them down, we sever the cord.  And a Christmas tree is adorned and worshiped for two weeks and then set free to roam the earth.  It is a warm and strange and delightful.

Then he and a second member of the group play “The First Noel” on two saws.  It’s weird ad wonderful.  At the end of the song he has his saw bow, and Bob says he didn’t know a saw could bow.  Julian says they do and in fact that singing saws sing by themselves but we encourage them by petting them and placing them in our laps.

I don’t enjoy everything Koster does, so the second song “Freeing Song For Reindeer,” a banjo based piece about a tired old reindeer transporting Santa is slow and kind of sad and not my thing.

But then he tells a story of growing up with all kinds of culture and Holiday traditions which leads into a version of Gavin Bryars’ “Jesus Blood.”  I enjoy the original and didn’t know what to expect here.  They begin with a tape loop of an old man singing the song (possibly the one Bryars used, but I don’t know).  And then Koster starts playing the banjo with a bow.  And then a second guy does the same. Then the percussionist stars playing the toy piano and the noises build.  He switches from piano to trumpet and plays along.  Meanwhile the second banjo player switches back to the saw for the end. It’s really quite a lovely performance.

“Takeshi And Elijah” is another slow and keening banjo based song.  It’s pretty long, I don’t really like it, but by the end, as it builds with trumpet and toy piano, he ends the song sith a puppet Santa doing a tap dance as percussion.  It’s a great ending to an okay song.

The final song is “Zat You, Santa Claus?”  It’s played on bowed banjo and sousaphone.  It’s a fun and crazy rendition.   It’s one of the weirdest Tiny Desk shows and certainly the weirdest Christmas set.

[READ: December 5, 2015] The Bassoon King

I really liked Rain Wilson in The Office, but I haven’t seen him in much else (I forgot he was in Six Feet Under and Galaxy Quest) . I wanted to like Backstrom, but it got cancelled before we even watched an episode.

So why did I check out this memoir of an actor I like a little bit?  Well, primarily for the title.  The Bassoon King had an absurd ring that I really gravitated towards.  When I saw there was an introduction by Dwight Kurt Schrute, I knew this would be a good book.

The introduction (by Dwight) is very funny.  I love Dwight and I love thinking to myself “FALSE!” whenever I disagree with someone.  Dwight wondered why anyone would read a biography of a young semi-famous actor.  “Fact. NO. ONE. CARES.”  But then says he doesn’t care either because he is making a lot of dollars per word for this thing.

Rainn begins his memoir by making fun of his big head (especially when he was a baby).  It’s pretty funny.  And then he describes his hippie family and his weird name.  His mom changed her named from Patricia to Shay in 1965.  She wanted to name Rainn “Thucydides.”  But his dad always liked Rainer Maria Rilke.  Now, they lived pretty close to Mt Rainier, so they went for Rainn (“Tack an extra letter on there for no apparent reason”).

Then his mom left them.  And he didn’t find out why for twenty some years.  Devastated, his dad moved to Central America and got remarried.

This is where he first starts talking about his religious upbringing.  He was raised in the Baha’i faith.  I had never heard of it.  Apparently there are millions of people who worship in the faith.  And I have to say that it sounds pretty awesome as far as religions go.

Back to Nicaragua.  Rainn’s life there was okay, although he has several stories of an alarming nature.  His step mom getting caught in quicksand, seeing a guy emerge from the ocean covered in jellyfish stings.  And then there’s the worm that was living in his stomach. (Gross).  He also says they had a pet sloth (which is as funny as it sounds).

They moved back to the States where Rainn grew up in the seventies (he includes a guide to parenting in the seventies, which is pretty funny and right on).  And like most kids of that era TV was his escape.

Interspersed throughout the book are chapters of lists–very funny lists at that.  Like the compendium of Comic Sidekicks (the ten greatest TV sidekicks of the 70s)–with commentary by Dwight.  Dwight’s comment of Radar from M*A*S*H “I liked the episode where Radar killed the enemy soldier by ripping his throat out with his bare hands.  Oh wait there was no such episode–because Radar was perhaps the biggest wuss ever to serve in the armed forces.”

Then we learn that Rainn’s dad used to write science fiction (and had one book published (Robert Wilson’ Tentacles of Dawn).  Rainn grew up loving sci-fi and Dungeons and Dragons.  He has a footnote bashing the popularly consumerist nature of “nerd culture” these days, and while he is correct, it is sure better than getting beaten up for being a nerd right?

And then he gets to the bassoon. He had played the sax but his music teacher told him, “you know what’s really cool and unique:  ehe bassoon!”  Rainn was hooked.  And then he tells why the bassoon is horrible and should be banned:

It takes an hour to assemble one. They’re enormous and are made out of Lincoln Logs, aluminum twigs and paper towel tubes.  There’s a strap that you actually have to sit on when you play so the whole thing doesn’t fall onto the floor like a bundle o garbage,  And, after all that folderol, it ends up sounding like an anemic donkey with laryngitis.

It just gets better though when his music teacher told the class that the bassoon was originally called fagotto in Italian because it resembled a faggot (bundle of sticks) when unassembled.  The school kids loved that.

Rainn started to get into acting and was inspired to ad lib by watching Elvis Costello on SNL when he played “Radio Radio” instead of the song they wanted him to play.  (Incidentally, Weird Al plays “Radio Radio” whenever they have a technical glitch for this same reason). Then he lists the greatest albums of the early 80s.

The Clash-London Calling
Talking Heads-The Name of This Band is Talking Heads
XTC-English Settlement
Squeeze-East Side Story
Elvis Costello-Imperial Bedroom
R.E.M.-Reckoning
Laurie Anderson-Big Science
Hüsker Dü-Zen Arcade
The Replacements-Let it Be
X-Wild Gift
Violent Femmes-Violent Femmes
The Smiths-The Smiths

Rainn says that he wanted to give real acting a try but he was always stiff and wooden.  And then “The entire course of my life changed outside of a multiplex during Christmas of 1985 after a viewing of one of the worst movies of the 198os.  (He is talking about A Chorus Line–the musical was great, the movie not so much).

He moves to New York, gets beaten up twice, but somehow manages to do okay.  He studies acting at NYU and mentions all the great  teachers he had.  And then he gives a hilarious chapter of all the shitty jobs he had.  (The chapter on his crappy apartment is very funny also).

By this time he had abandoned his religion and gotten into sex and drugs and rock n roll.  He talks about many of his acting jobs (some good stories there as well as a sad one).  And then he learns how to act for real–he gives some brief but effective tips on what makes an actor good and believable.

He talks a lot about his (hot) wife (Holiday Reinhorn)–which is quite sweet actually.  She is an author and has written a collection of short stories called Big Cats.

They moved to LA and he started a theater troupe called Bozena.

I enjoyed the section where he talks about the roles he has played (like The Rocker which was fun and unfairly compared to School of Rock and Super which I have ever seen but he swears we should all watch).  And then there two hilarious chapters about The Office. (including a list of other people who auditioned).

He began searching for spiritual answers again.  So he started the website Soul Pancake, which I had never heard of.  It is a site for talking about big philosophical questions (and launched Kid President).  It is meant to be an uplifting place on the internet and has become quite successful.

After all of his searching, Rainn regained his own religion.  He is once gain a practicing Baha’i.  He and Holiday traveled to Haiti and were appalled at the poverty.  Holiday had been invited to do an arts program with the girls there.  Rainn scoffed and said these girls needed much more than art, but after six weeks he saw home much the arts program brought the girls out of their shells and how much more powerful they felt.

This inspired them to create a charity The Lidè Foundation whose mission is empowerment through the arts for women and girls.  It’s a great charity and wholly worthwhile.

The addendum is an introduction to the Baha’i Faith, which I found highly informative and rather inspirational.   There is no need or clergy, and there is no heaven or hell, just moral laws to protect people.  I won’t bother summarizing it, but he insists that you not got to Wikipedia to learn about it–ask someone in the religion.

The book proved to be surprisingly sweet (for one that calls its readers idiots so much and which totally bashes (hilariously) Mindy Kaling every chance he gets.  (In a reddit conversation, he says of her: “I adore Mindy. She is a force of nature and a sweet sweet heart. We also give each other shit mercilessly.  Also, I hate her”).