I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: HAMILTON LEITHAUSER-Tiny Desk Concert #375 (July 21, 2014).

Hamilton Leithause was the lead singer of The Walkmen.  When they went on hiatus, the guys in the band made solo records.  For this set, Leithauser is accompanied by The Walkmen’s Paul Maroon on guitar and Hugh McIntosh, who played drums in Leithauser’s old band The Recoys.

Leithauser has a big voice and these songs allow him to really wail (in a restrained and tasteful way).  “11 O’Clock Friday Night” has a very folkie feel to it with a big chorus of “you and me and everybody else.”

“Alexandra” is a bit more uptempo and rocking with a cool rumbling bass line provided by the electric guitar (he really gets to belt out the chorus and the bridge in this song).

“5AM” is a moody ballad which shows he can play mellow as well as big.

Incidentally perhaps it was back in 2014, but Leithauser was doing some kind of concert in Philly and they must have advertised it ten times a day for months.  I was rather tired of hearing his name (I didn’t know who he was at the time). I had to look him up and he was fine.  About the same as I felt during this show.

[READ: February 18, 2016] “The Lie”

I have really been enjoying Boyle’s stories.  He has a way of making his protagonists unlikable and yet somehow sympathetic.  But this time, I felt like his protagonist was just too much of an asshole.  He went too far.

Lonnie is a new dad.  He’s a young guy who has married a woman whose nighttime sleepwear is a Cramps shirt and nothing else.  Her name is Clover, but she hates that her hippie parents named her that and wants to change it to Cloris.  He says that Cloris sounds like a detergent and she hates him for that.

Anyway, he wakes up and doesn’t feel like going to his editing job (I may have been more sympathetic if the job were harder).  He is tired of hearing the same people recite the same dialogue every day.  He says he’s not rally an editor, he’s a logger.

Clover is a lawyer and the first day of the story, they both wake up and the baby is crying and Clover says she has to go.  Lonnie doesn’t feel like dealing with this, so he takes Xana (they named her after a character in a film he’d logged) and gets her dressed.  Then he drops her off at the babysitter (perhaps if he didn’t have a babysitter I wouldn’t have been as annoyed by him).  And then he calls in sick.

But since he has no sick days left he has to tell his boss that the baby is sick. His boss, Radko, an Eastern European man of indeterminate origin seems to not even realize that Lonnie had a baby.  And that’s when the lie grows worse–the baby is now in the hospital.

Lonnie goes off and has a good R & R day.  He drinks a beer, watches a movie, goes to the beach. It’s all okay.  Until the next morning when he needs to do it again.  And this time, the lie is even worse.

I simply couldn’t imagine anyone thinking that he wouldn’t get caught when doing this.  Or perhaps he didn’t care.  The whole thing spirals out of control as you knew it would.  And there’s no real saving grave at the end of the story.

It wasn’t a bad story exactly, in fact I enjoyed reading it, I just didn’t really buy it.