I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SOUAD MASSI-Tiny Desk Concert #231 (July 15, 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.

Souad Massi has a fascinating story:

Born in Algeria to a Berber (Kabyle) family in 1972, Massi grew up in the capital city of Algiers. On her way to rehearsals with her rock band as a teenager, men used to spit at and harass her for wearing jeans and toting a guitar. When civil war erupted in 1992, life became even more dangerous for Massi: After she released her first album, she was targeted for assassination by Islamic fundamentalists.  Now based in Paris, she’s since become one of the major musical stars of the Arab world: Massi has sold hundreds of thousands of albums across Europe and North Africa,

She sings unflinching, deeply intimate songs in a mix of North African Arabic, Berber and French

Since I don’t know what she’s singing I’m going to use some of the blurbs

• “Raoui” (Storyteller) is a beautiful delicate song with lyrics like: “Every one of us has a story in his heart… Storyteller, tell us stories to make us forget our reality. Leave us in the world of once upon a time.”
• “Ghir Enta” (No One but You)  has a faster tempo–Confessional love songs like “Ghir Enta”bear little resemblance to the sappy sentiments that dominate Arab pop ballads. There’s a trembling note of fragility within: “Now you’re by my side,” she sings, “But tomorrow, who knows? That’s how the world is — sweet and bitter at the same time.”
• “Amessa” (A Day Will Come) a much faster track in which she says she needs help with the rhythm, which the crowd provides.  You can still feel the North African undercurrent which propels the song that was sung in Arabic in the beginning and in Berber in the second part
• “Le Bien et le mal” (The Good and the Evil)  is a pretty, slow song with lyrics like: “There are people who lament over their destiny, people who cry on their own tombstones while they are still alive … There are people who grow old before their time. We’re fed up with this life.”

Massi’s voice is really lovely on top of it.

[READ: December 14, 2016] “Blue Light, Red Light”

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.

I have read an enjoyed J. Robert Lennon’s stories in the past.  But as with yesterday’s story, this one had the potential of being very dark indeed.

This is the story of a 7-year-old boy.  When his baby sister is born he is quite jealous of her.  But he soon grows affectionate towards the little creature who stares at him so intently and for so long.

One night, when the boy can’t sleep, he goes downstairs to his parents. They let him sit with them for a while in front of the TV. The parents fall asleep but the boy does not.  And on comes a real-crime show.  In this show, which the boy is mesmerized by, a man breaks into a house and kills an entire family, including a baby.

The boy doesn’t say anything about the show but it stays on his mind all the time.  And he becomes very concerned about his sister.  He takes to locking her door (one time locking his parents out of the baby’s room).  He begins locking all the windows (which upsets the parents).  He even starts sleeping in front of her door.

As a solution, the parents buy a blue glowing nightlight thing.  They tell the boy that as long as it is blue, the baby is safe from anything–monsters, or any other threat.  The boy isn’t convinced and is shocked that his parents aren’t constantly monitoring the color of the light.

So the boy tries to test the light by seeing just how it recognizes a threat.  He play-fights in front of it and then he decides to try something really dangerous.

Given what the boy had been through I thought I knew where the story was going to go, but Lennon took it in a slightly different direction.  The family’s life could have gone horribly, horribly wrong, but fortunately for them (and frankly, for us) he pulls us back from sheer horror.  But it’s still a pretty harrowing story.