I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE SHINS-Tiny Desk Concert #639 (July 24, 2017).

Although this is billed as The Shins, it is actually James Mercer solo (although really The Shins are more or less Mercer’s solo gig anyway).

Mercer plays three songs with just his voice and acoustic guitar: two new tracks and one that reached back to 2003 from the album Chutes Too Narrow.

The first two are slow and very folky–I don’t know the new album yet.

“Mildenhall” has a country flare and is something of an autobiography.  “I thought my flattop was so new wave until it melted away.”  The chorus is nice: A kid in class passed me a tape a later chorus reveals: “a band called Jesus and Mary Chain.”     Started playing his dads guitar and that’s how we get to where we are now.”  I love the unexpected ending chord.

“The Fear” is a delicate, simple song that fits perfectly with his voice.  It’s also quite sad.

“Young Pilgrims” is the recognizable song from Chutes to Narrow (the song even mentions that phrase).  It doesn’t sound that different in this stripped down format–there’ some missing extra guitars bit other wise the acoustic format fits it well. The biggest difference is that he seems to be singing in lower register here.

In fact none of the songs sounded like him exactly and I think that’s why– he usually sings in more of a kind of higher pitch, so it’s interesting to hear it slower and lower.

[READ: June 29, 2017] “The Mustache in 2010”

I really enjoyed the story.  I loved the strange way it was constructed and that even though it didn’t seem to start as a story, it certainly was one.

It begins

Social historians will record that in the early twenty-first century, the fashion for a clean-shaven face lost its dominance in metropolitan North American Bourgeoisie society.

After some lengthy discussion about the merits of various facial hair construction ,we meet Alex, a youngish (36 is youngish in New York City) businessman.  He availed himself of this trend by shaving only every third Monday.  His growth was dense and black.

One morning he realizes that he had left large sideburns, which amused him.  Thereafter he “subtracted facial hair so as to create an amusing residue.”  He never wore the stylized looks outside, they were private jokes for him and his wife.  Although there was always a scream of horror because he would sneak up on her.

This all l leads to some more details about Alex.  He was Québécois living in New York.  His English was fine but “fell just short of the level required for wittiness.”  This left him with an unjustly wooden personality.  So his wife was always looking for nonverbal diversion for him.

Now, returning to sociology, the narrator begins to talk about the “strange rise of the ‘double down’ trope,” a powerful maneuver of political argumentation:

In former times, if White clearly proved that an assertion made by Black was incorrect, Black’s options were to either (a) withdraw his assertion or (b) appear dishonest. Now Black had a third option: He could double down on his incorrect assertion, i.e., reiterate it more forcefully than ever—and yet not appear dishonest. This was because a person who acted in transparently bad faith was, by virtue of the transparency, now deemed to be relatively honest. Also, by doubling down Black would put White in an impossible position. Precisely because White’s position was correct, it was not susceptible to being doubled down on. She was therefore stuck with the role of the reasoner rather than the straightforward liar, her good faith necessarily remained opaque, and a relative deviousness automatically attached itself to her. Moreover, any attempt by White to contradict Black’s doubling down would make her appear foolish as well as dishonest. That is, White would be perceived to be committing what logicians of the future might term the liberal fallacy: arguing on the false, naïve, and finally ridiculous assumption that the laws of thought are applicable to the argument.

Back in the story, Alex and his wife went to a school fundraising auction.  The narrator wants us to stay on topic though: “We must be careful here to avoid a certain irrelevance. The unsatisfactory acoustics of the event space, the kinds of food prepared by the parents, the sociological and anthropological minutiae of the occasion, the auctioneer’s strange attire: These are not our concern.”

They sat with some friends and had some drinks.  Their friend’s parents were there as well, and introductions were made.  The dad was a storyteller and he told a story–directly to Alex not Viv  about being a police offer.   The story involved himself and his partner getting shot on a call.  His partner was wearing a vest and the bullet ricocheted into Dad’s leg. When Viv asked what happened to the man, dad said he already said what happened.    Dad smiled at Alex:

This smile, Viv would maintain, was one of those man-to-man, isn’t-the-little-lady-something smiles that she hadn’t seen in years.

And this begins a little contest between Viv and Dad about a particular item up for bid–something that neither one of them needs.  But the bidding gets out of control.

The next morning, both hungover, Alex appeared behind her with his mustache shaved in what might be called a Charlie Chaplin square…or maybe something else.

After all of this and more goes down we finally meet the narrator.  She is a friend of Viv’s who learned about all of this from Viv at lunch a few days later.

Then we learn that that lunch took place seven years ago.  And the narrator tells her husband that she has been thinking about the incident.

He tells her often that she should mediate, practice mindfulness to reduce her stress.  She wonders,

Mindfulness, if I understand it correctly, means paying very, very close attention to the continuance of one’s subjectivity….. Since when did “meditate,” which in my book means to think something over, come to mean its opposite? He is in effect asking me to perform a renunciation.  This word, “renunciation,” which in one sense is an antonym of “doubling-down,” has fallen into relative disuse.

I loved everything about the whole story until the end where it just seemed to fizzle out, which was a little disappointing.