SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-Another Roadside Attraction: Cayuga Speedway – Hagersville, ON (July 20, 1995).
The band sounds kind of different for a festival like this, they downplay some of their weirder elements, to be sure, although maybe it’s just practical to play your more popular work to a wider audience. This looks like a pretty good festival, check out the line up –>
The beginning of the set is kind of muddy–mostly because you can hear audience chatter, but it clears up okay.
After a warm introduction (You’re gonna love these guys), they play a nice “Self Serve Gas Station”
For the next song Martin says, “This is a song about a kid writing a letter to Michael Jackson.”
After a nice “Soul Glue” Martin says “Dave, I’m the CN Tower. You be the Bank of Montreal.”
Before “California Dreamline,” Dave says, “That last song was about a lake, this next song is about an ocean.” During the song, Martin sings “spooning” instead of “fucking” in the dry sand–is that a festival decision?
There’s a lengthy, trippy, swirling opening to “Claire” with a Dave announcing: “Tim Vesely has gone electric, stop the presses.” Martin does a really wondrous guitar solo.
The most notable concession to “normalcy” is their cover of “One More Colour” which lessens some of its heaviest noises. The ending. which can go pretty far afield, is also pretty straightforward. “Dope Fiends and Boozehounds” sounds a little prettier than usual. The middle section has a kind of instrumental section with a drum solo and waves of sound. (This is the first show on this site with Don Kerr on drums, although no mention is made of him).
The end segues into RDA which is fast and cool but leaves off the final “Americas!”
This is a very unchatty show for the band, although at the end Dave says they’re playing at Woolsock (Woolstock?) on August 12 in beautiful Welling. Welling is in Alberta, but I find a Woolsock Music Festival listed in Nova Scotia, so I’m at a loss.
[READ: June 27, 2017] “Show Don’t Tell”
I can’t get over that Curtis Sittenfeld has had three stories published in the New Yorker in the span of about a year. This one is set in a graduate school writing program.
The narrator explains that the most prestigious fellowship one could earn at their school was the Peaslee–$8,800 with no work requirements. It was the gold standard. Other ones paid less and required a fairly heavy work load. Ruth is in her first year and, like everyone else, hopes desperately to win this fellowship.
No one knew exactly when the acceptance letters went out, but there was also a rumor, so Ruth waited in front of her mailbox to wait for the mailman.
When her neighbor heard the door shut, she assumed Ruth had left so she came out with her cigarette–something that she and Ruth had had words about several times.
When she’d first moved in, Lorraine’s smoking wasn’t too noticeable. Ruth had hooked up with a guy, Doug and spent so much time in blissful sex with him that she didn’t notice much. But when he broke up with her, Ruth became aware of everything around her, especially that smoke.
The way she and Doug broke up was pretty hilarious–they were both in the same class and often critiqued each other’s works. After he said a few words about her paper, she “delivered a seventeen minute monologue” about ways he could improve it. They were naked at the time. She believed the 17-minute monologue was an act of love, but “the difference between who I was then and who I am now is that now I never assume that anyone I encounter shares my opinion about anything.”
Even though they broke up, they were still in the same class and still had to write critiques. From this point on Doug would write a few lines and end it “Best, Doug.” She fumes, “How can someone who came inside me sign his critiques, ‘Best’?”
I really like Sittenfeld’s writing a lot.
On Friday of that week a “guy in his forties who wasn’t famous to the general population but had a cult following among my classmates and me” was coming to speak. The writer got half way through his reading and then said “Fuck man, I need a drink.” A few minutes later a beer was passed up to him. He drank and guzzled and said “That’s the stuff,” to wild applause. And in another great Sittenfeld line:
I found the man brilliant and wrote down three of his insights, but the beer thing made me uncomfortable in ways it would take between two days and twelve years to pinpoint.
There is an afterparty and we get to see some of the characters in the department. Bhadveer is a fellow student and he is there to spread the word that he and Larry both won Peaslees. Bhadveer says that Ruth has a chance because there’s not many women in the department and, besides beautiful women (like Aisha) are never good writers. She was stranegly comforted and understandably insulted by the statement. Throughout the party, she tosses out writers whom she believes are beautiful but he proceeds to bat each one away with laugh.
At the party she walks in on a couple making out in the bathroom. The woman is married but the guy is not–she fast forwards a bit and tells us that the woman divorced her husband and wound up marrying this man, becoming born again and then having six children!
That night since she was not drinking, someone asked her to bring the guest speaker to his hotel. So she did. Earlier someone said that he would publish anyone for a blowjob. This makes her tense during the car ride. There is no indication that he expects one, “I was both relieved and faintly, faintly insulted.”
The writer offers Ruth some advice and then some insight into small programs like these. He explained the infighting among groups whose members have far more in common than not. If two students of the program were actually at a big company they would become great friend because they had so much in common, but when there are so many kindred spirits to choose from, they become mortal enemies.
Since the whole story is a flashback, the end comes back to the “present.” Ruth has published seven books, all considered “women’s fiction” which means “something only slightly different from ‘gives off the vibe of ten year old girls at a slumber party.” She later went to a conference and ran into Bhadveer. His novels are prominently reviews and he has won prizes.
He’s the kind of writer, I trust, about whom current students in the program have heated opinions; I’m the kind of writer their mothers read while recovering from knee surgery. To be clear, I’m mocking neither my readers nor myself here—it took a long time, but eventually I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous.
The end of the story catches us up with the other students in the program and gives some more details about that Peaslee. It’s a very satisfying story and an interesting insight into writing programs.
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