I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PETER SILBERMAN-Tiny Desk Concert #617 (May 5, 2017).

I didn’t realize that Peter Silberman was the singer for The Antlers.  I also had no idea about what happened to him:

Something happened to Peter Silberman — singer and guitarist for The Antlers, a band known for its loud, soaring crescendoes — that hushed his life. In a conversation we had, he described a medical condition related to tinnitus. He’d experienced the ringing before, but this was even more intense. “I don’t even know if ringing is really the right way to describe it, because it really sounded more like rushing water. This was at a level I’d never experienced before and it was really all-consuming, it took over. Playing music at all was out of the question. The sound of my own voice reverberating in my head was very painful — I had to just be more or less silent while this was happening.”

After a time, he tried to make music again. “I started trying to play again and trying to sing again, testing where the boundary was of the sensitivity and of the pain. What I found was that if I sang very quietly and if I played guitar very quietly, that this would be a path for me.” The result is his first solo album under his own name, a record called Impermanence. These are songs in slow motion; the builds are less about crescendo and more about subtle change. Peter is joined by Timothy Mislock, a former guitarist for The Antlers. It’s a set of songs meant to slow the pace of life. Have patience.

The blurb says that this may be the quietest Tiny Desk Concert, but it’s actually not all that quiet–perhaps it is just mic’d well.  What it is though is slow and delicate.

The Concert is 23 minutes long and they play 3 songs.  “Karuna” sets the tone: It’s ten minutes long.  There’s delicate chords and notes and Silberman’s voice.  It takes nearly 6 minutes before the second guitar comes in.  It doesn’t really have anything catchy in it and it’s so slow that I lost track of the words as well.

“Ahimsa” is 7 minutes long and is a little more catchy in the chorus: “no violence, no violence today.”

For the final song, “Maya,” it’s just him for 8 minutes.

These songs stretch out, are practically ambient and for me at least, kind of drift in an d out without leaving an y real impression.

[READ: February 21, 2017] “Ladies’ Lunch”

This is the story of Lotte.  Lotte lives in New York in an apartment that was “commodious” with a gorgeous view.   But Lotte hates the fact that she has a caregiver.  The caregiver was there to watch her and to make sure she didn’t eat too much bread.  Lotte was very deliberate in her dislike for this caregiver.

It is up to Lotte’s son, Sam, to make sure that Lotte is taken care of–and to deal with the problems when Lotte gets abusive to the caregivers.

The only thing that Lotte enjoys is her Ladies Lunch.  The lunch is five women who live in Manhattan and have grown old together.  They’ve met every month or so for the last thirty years.  They save all of their most exciting stories for the lunch.  The ladies ask Lotte whats wrong with this caregiver.  And Lotte explains: that’s she’s in my living room and my kitchen and my bathroom.

The ladies try to keep tabs on Lotte to see how she is doing, but they can tell that she is very angry about the situation. And things only get worse when Sam tells the ladies that he and his brother Gregor are planning to move her to as assisted living home.  And that it’s in the Hudson Valley

The ladies complain that they will have no way to visit her since none of them can drive.  Sam misunderstands and says that she will have plenty of people around.

Each lady in her own way tries to talk Sam out of it.  One even says that they will take turns staying with her.

He replies

–Things need to be done right.

–No they don’t ! Why do they need to be right?

But then Lotte falls and has to go tho the emergency room and that pretty much settles it.

Lotte has called Bridget asking her to bring her back home.  The ladies all set out a plan to bust Lotte out.  Farah has an 18-year-old grandson who is about to take his driving test.

Eventually Lotte starts telling them that she is dead, that she has died.  Sam says she means she’s dead to her old New York life.  Bessie asks is that’s really what he thinks she means.

But what can a group of older ladies do?

I’ve only read one other story by Lore and that one also had to do with an elderly woman in a nursing home and it was also rather sad and lonely.