I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: IRON & WINE-Tiny Desk Concert #105 (January 21, 2011).

I have enjoyed Iron & Wine, but not extensively.  I knew that it was more or less a Sam Beam project (until recently, as the band has since grown in size).  And I knew that he sang beautiful folk songs. I did not know that he was such an amiable and sweet fellow.

For this Tiny Desk, Beam plays four songs.  Three are from his then new album, Kiss Each Other Clean, and they are great.  Beam’s voice sounds fantastic and his playing is excellent too.

After the first song, “Half Moon,” Bob Boilen asks him when he has time to write songs and Beam replies that he has less and less time.  He has to get up early to take the kids to school, so he works like a day job for song writing.

For the second song, “Big Burned Hand” he begins with the capo on fret five and then switches it to fret four apologizing that it’s early.  It’s another beautiful song.  At the end he apologizes for the word “fucking” in the final line (“the lion and the lamb are fucking in the back row”) but says that no other word would have had the same impact.  He doesn’t use words like that lightly in his songs.

He says that “Tree By The River” is a song he had been writing for ten years.  He was afraid it was always turning out saccharine, but thinks he finally got it.

Before playing the final song, Robin Hilton requests an old song (I can’t hear it) which Beam says he will butcher.  Robin says he will die happy if Beam plays it, but Beam says he’ll die unhappy if he plays it badly.  So instead, the final song is an older one, “Naked As We Came,” which has become a set-ender for the band.   Stephen Thompson says it’s great to hear this in this stripped down acoustic format instead of the full band version that has been common now.

And speaking of the full band, when Kiss Each Other Clean came out, the full band of Iron & Wine performed it live on WNYC (you can hear all four of these songs with the full band). And NPR has archived that performance, which you can download here.

[READ: January 7, 2015] “Wakefield”

I have always intended to read more from Doctorow, but he always seems to fall off my radar.  So I don’t know how this compares to his other works.  I really enjoyed it even if I felt like I had to suspend my disbelief a number of times in what was otherwise a somewhat realistic story.

Realistic or not, I really loved the conceit behind it.  The narrator and his wife of many years have had a fight about something stupid.  He went off to work as usual, but on the way home strange things happened.  First there is a problem with is train and he winds up arriving home much later than usual.  And then he finds there’s a power failure (it was interesting to read this right after Updike’s power failure story last week).

He gets out of his car and sees that there are raccoons behind the garage so he chases them away.  When he goes upstairs in the garage he sees that there are baby raccoons there too.  He chases them away and, since the power is still out and he is mentally taxed, he sits in a tattered rocking chair.

He only wakes up the next morning.  And he knows that his wife will never believe the truth.

So rather than going inside, he watches his house from the garage and anticipates what will happen.  Like when she calls the police on him and when the friends come to console her that he is missing.  He checks the garbage and sees that she threw his dinner away in a pile–clearly disgusted with him.  He tries to imagine what his wife and kids are thinking.

He flashes back to how he and Diana wound up dating.  Diana was dating his best friend Dirk. And that made her desirable to him.  And soon he was trying to separate them.  And then he gets under Dirk’s skin and the ensuing fight removed Dirk from contention.  He wasn’t sure how much he still desired her after he “won,” but soon Diana was pregnant and that was that.

He decides that he is going to stay in the garage and not “come home.”  He is going to blow off his job and his family and everything else.  He pads up the garage to sleep on.  And although he can go into the house to get some things, he decides not to risk anything.  He eats from garbage cans (he lives in a wealthy neighborhood with yummy food thrown away).  And evidently neither his wife nor his daughters ever look in the garage, so he is able to camp out there pretty well.

He becomes a nocturnal creature checking out the neighborhood and keeping an eye on his house from the safety of his hidey-hole.

It is only when the winter comes along that he realizes he might be in trouble.

It turns out that the next door neighbor is a doctor.  He houses disabled people in a converted room in his basement–some sort of therapy (details are not gone into).  One night, as the narrator flees from sight, he decides to take cover in the doctor’s basement and that’s when he encounters the two people who live there.  I’m not exactly sure how I feel about their part in the story, although on a practical level, having people who wouldn’t be able to talk about meeting him allows his project to continue.

After several months, he notices that Diana is seeming a bit more happy.  And this upsets him.  And then suddenly he finds out why.  He suspects it is another man, and he is right.  And that snaps him out of his behavior.

There was so much odd male fantasy in this story that on one level I take a serious exception to it.  And yet it was so well told and such an interesting look at a midlife crisis that I thoroughly enjoyed it, too.