I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: EXITMUSIC-Tiny Desk Concert #228 (July 2, 2012).

I’d published these posts without Soundtracks while I was reading the calendars.  But I decided to add Tiny Desk Concerts to them when I realized that I’d love to post about all of the remaining 100 or shows and this was a good way to knock out 25 of them.

I didn’t know Exitmusic before this show.  The band is a 4 piece and they make a really big sound .  In fact, when I was only listening to the show I forgot that they were at a Tiny Desk.  Their sound is not loud, but it’s enveloping.  They have two keyboards a guitar and an electronic drum.  The guitar is gauzy, playing high chords.  But it’s the keyboards, and washes of sound that really create the whole show.  Lead vocals are provided by Aleksa Palladino and her voice is stark and wavery, slightly scary and scared at the same time.

The blurb says that they tend to play big spaces, but

Palladino and Devon Church, the married couple behind Exitmusic, began playing music together several years ago in their New York home, layering textures and shimmering voices, each awash in echoes and cinematic anguish. To work within the challenges of our space, the two — along with new band members Dru Prentiss and Nicholas Shelestak — returned to their living room to practice a set in a pared-down configuration which still captured its essence.

I love at the end of “White Noise” as the keyboards aren’t changing what they are playing but the guitar changes chords—a repetitive downward progression that works perfectly with what everyone else is playing.

The second song, “The Modern Age” sounds like it could be a track from The xx, but her voice is so different that it totally changes the feel of the song.  Aleksa also switches guitar on this track, layering in fast chords.  And the chorus is wonderfully raw sounding.  The melody she sings is just great and the song builds accordingly.

It’s funny to see her smile so broadly after each song where she sings so dramatically and sounds heartbroken.

“The Cold” is a slow song (she’s on guitar again), short and moody while the final song “Storms” is much bigger.  On this track she is playing fast chords on a very quitter guitar while the other guitar plats slow, building chords over the top.   She make a funny comment at the end of the song: “I know I was all over the place timewise.” But it still sounded great.  They really won me over with this set.

[READ: December 13, 2016] “Obscure Objects”

Near the end of November, I found out about The Short Story Advent Calendar.  Which is what exactly?  Well…

The Short Story Advent Calendar returns, not a moment too soon, to spice up your holidays with another collection of 24 stories that readers open one by one on the mornings leading up to Christmas.  This year’s stories once again come from some of your favourite writers across the continent—plus a couple of new crushes you haven’t met yet. Most of the stories have never appeared in a book before. Some have never been published, period.

I already had plans for what to post about in December, but since this arrived I’ve decided to post about every story on each day.

This story was really cool, although I had to read it twice to make sure I knew exactly what was going on.

Told in first person, this is the story of a woman who has just come back to Canada after some time abroad.  She is a writer (published in literary magazines) and has a teacher’s certificate, but she needed a job quickly so she took one a:

a private ESL college that recruited students from all over Asia.

Or, it was a private tutoring agency that catered to children of wealthy immigrants and ADD-afflicted offspring on the Canadian born-rich.

I haven’t decided yet.

That’s the first clue that something is unusual about this story. 

The narrator describes her cubicle–the unfenestrated cubicle–and how she wound up getting plopped down next to Janine, a woman she had taken a writing class with.  The last thing she wanted to do was spend time reminiscing with Janine, so she was pleased when her other neighbor, Renata, poked her head over the cubical wall and said, “You’re a writer?”

The narrator and Renata became friends. They have lunch together and Renata tells her a story.

In fact the narrator tells us that Renata told her many stories.  The first one involved her hitchhiking to school and the fascinating way the driver was undressed.  She didn’t get out of the car because she didn’t want to be late for class.

Interspersed with Renata’s stories is the narrator’s own history of romantic failure.  An ex-boyfriend, X, (she won’t give him a pseudonym because she doesn’t want to encounter him in this story) was a terrible boyfriend.  But she was too timid to break up, until he grew bored with her.  Once they broke up, she fled to Ireland, ensuring that they couldn’t get back together.

Renata then gave the narrator an even juicier story.  But, she insisted that the narrator change her name (which she doesn’t…unless the whole story is the pseudonym) and insists that she make her something else: “Chinese or Italian.”  “How about Jewish?   I have serious Jew envy.”  “Better idea, say I’m dead.”

And so, at one point in this story, Renata is Italian, with golden hair–not like the darker-haired Italians who live at the sole of the boot.  Later, she is Chinese, un-trusted by her ESL students because she was Canadian-born and couldn’t speak Cantonese.  Still later she is Jewish, worried about her husband’s mother and refusing to tell Janine any of her stories because Janine is a schmuck.

The constant is that she has two kids.  But for much of the story they are girls.  And for one part they are boys.

It’s pretty confusing, but a second read through straightened it out (mostly).

The crux seems to be the affair that Renata had.  A fairly scandalous affair for a married mother of two.  But how is the narrator going to end this story?  She doesn’t know.  And will she be able to show it to Renata’s husband when she is done?

I loved how Adderson set up all of these fictions and was able to employ them all in one story–although just what is true, we’ll never know. But we can be pretty sure of what happened.