SOUNDTRACK: COURTNEY BARNETT AND KURT VILE-Tiny Desk Concert #682 (December 8, 2017).
Kurt and Courtney were the unexpected hit pairing of 2017. Enough has been said about how they don’t exactly seem like they should fit but how well they do.
I’ve said that I wish the album rocked a bit harder, but really it’s live that this duo is terrific. We saw them a few months back and it was a lot of fun.
But this Tiny Desk Concert is twice as fun because of how unserious they are. As the blurb says:
Put your love of perfection outside the office door and come in for some office fun. This collaboration between Philadelphia’s Kurt Vile and Melbourne’s Courtney Barnett is more about newfound friends poking jabs, goofing around and having fun with words than reaching any new musical heights. It’s a much welcome injection of humor in the world of rock music and if you’ve heard their collaborative album Lotta Sea Lice, you’ll find this Tiny Desk performance musically even more casual. It’s akin to hearing friends play after a few afternoon beers, which is kind of what happened. (We actually had to page folks in the building hoping for some brew and were quite surprised at what the NPR staff had stashed in the fridge.)
They start with their hit “Over Everything.” It sounds great even if they are very casual about it. There’s lot of laughing between them, and their harmonies sound fantastic. After the song Kurt pops open a beer (clearly his second).
Courtney apologies for all the tuning they’ll have to do. “Good thing I don’t have all 12 strings.”
I love the sentiments and melodies of “Continental Breakfast”
Then Bob says, “Thanks to everyone who donated beer to make this concert possible.” Courtney: “Yea, that happened very quickly. Everyone has one beer hidden in their desk here.”
Kurt takes off his denim jacket and says, “Don’t mind my muscle shirt–I was working out.”
Kurt and Courtney tend to bring out the adolescence in one another, inspiring Kurt to pick out a song he wrote when he was roughly fourteen called “Blue Cheese” about, well, I’m not sure. But lines like, “I didn’t mean to cough on her/Forgot to add the fabric softener,” just make me laugh; and in 2017, in a deeply serious political landscape, I find that quite refreshing.
They joke their way through “Blue Cheese,” as you must. He plays a harmonica solo and admits, “that was terrible.” When it’s over he says, “I wrote that song when I was 12.”
The final song “Let It Go,” has Courtney on lead while Kurt sings some nice high backing vocals.
The whole show is light-hearted and fun, but they never make a mockery of the music. It’s just a casual good time.
[READ: November 1, 2017] Spinning
This is a memoir about competitive ice skating. But it is much more than that.
Interestingly, I found the intensity of the ice skating competitions to be a perfectly satisfying and compelling story in and of itself. So at first, when Walden began adding other things from her life, I wasn’t sure if these (rather important) aspects of her life could be shoehorned into a story about ice skating.
But it soon became apparent that the skating, which was such a big part of her life, was in fact, a rather small part of her life.
Of course, the fact that Walden is 21 and stopped skating when she was 18 shows just how big a part of her life the skating was.
Strangely, this story could have been timeless except for a few moments when she adds very date-able details. (Specifically surrounding the Twilight books).
Each chapter title is named after a particular skating move (with Tillie’s recollection of its challenges).
The book begins with the horrible life of a competitive skater (Tillie was originally from New Jersey), getting up at 4AM to go to the ice. Having friends who were more like competitors and then getting berated for not doing something perfectly.
And then she and her twin brothers discover they are moving to Texas once they finish 5th grade that year.
Texas is very different (of course). Two new rinks to go to (one is in a mall) and a whole new group of friends and enemies to navigate.
The first 70 pages talk about the struggles of being in competitive ice skating. Unlike many other kids’ parents, hers were not very active in her skating–unclear why. Her mom is described as always angry. Her father drove her to skating but didn’t stick around. So she never had a skating mom bearing down in her, but she also never had the support system. She seems to get more hugs from her (nicer) coaches than from her family.
It’s a good indictment of the skating world (not being able to wear underwear). Judges looking at you so carefully. (Wearing band aids on your nipples) and being scrutinized if your tights are the wrong color. Crazy.
But then on page 70 Tillie reveals that she is attracted to girls. This was a little surprising only because 70 pages haven’t said a word about it. Was this a story about growing up gay or about ice skating? Well, a bit of both. Tillie skated before school every single morning. It was her daily life more than anything else. So this new addition of her being gay was just part of it. Being surrounded by girls, many of whom she was attracted to but would never say anything to was part of her life.
In Texas she moved to a private school to get away from bullies–no one seemed to realize that there would be bullies there too.
Actually of all of the things that I fond surprising about this story it is the utterly retrograde attitudes that are present in the 2000s in Austin. I have a hard time believing that a bully would be so tolerated in a private school–did no one tell about Grace (later in the book, we find that not only did Grace hit people, she did sexual stuff to them too–I can;t imagine that it didn’t get reported by someone).
Eventually she has her first girlfriend. That is broken up when the girl’s mother reads her emails.
All this time Tillie was a successful skater. She won many competitions and placed in many more. She was even moved up to the “adult league” at a young age. She had a lot of promise, but she really didn’t enjoy the whole process much.
This new situation caused nothing but trouble for her. She didn’t really have her friends anymore, the older girls didn’t really warm up to her and since she had no parents with her she was looked at askance as if she had no right to be there. The scene where a mom forces her to pay for the use of the ice is really painful.
When Tillie came out to people (at 15) I was kind of surprised by everyone’s reactions (again, in Austin). Although I guess in the world she inhabited it was a toxic and brave admission. At least her coach is nice about it (even if her family isn’t).
When she gets to high school, she discovers art and cello–two things that make her happy in a way that ice skating doesn’t. By the time she’s ready to graduate she is preparing for the SATs. Her mother expects perfection even if she doesn’t want to go to college.
Just to complicate her life (and the story a little), she is sexually harassed by her tutor. That seems to be a breaking point for her.
And then its time to choose what she’s going to do next.
I was a little disappointed that several of the stories lines had no closure. Obviously, it’s a memoir so there’s just wasn’t any when certain people left her life. But like how her parents are dealing with her now would have been a satisfying conclusion.
But otherwise this was a great coming of age story with a lot of great details.
Walden’s drawing style is wonderful. She uses a very elliptical style. Maybe that’s not right, exactly. It seems like a lot of her drawings are spare, but they aren’t. There is just enough detail for you to pick out shapes and personal details. I’m looking at some of her pictures and even though they are complete, and you wouldn’t need to add anything more to them, they feel so fragile. And maybe that’s the word rather than elliptical. The drawings look fragile and delicate the lines are thin, the colors are washes. Even the darks are purples rather than black, Some scenes feel more like hints of a scene or the reflection in the ice rather than the actual item.
This works perfectly almost every time. There are some scenes with a lot of girls (especially when they are skating and all look the same) when it is a little hard to tell who is who or who is doing what. But those scene are few, and since Tillie wears glasses, it’s always easy to pick her out.
She also uses some splashes of orange/yellow that really have a huge impact on the design of the book.
I found this story really affecting and powerful. I was of course utterly shocked to realize that someone who is 21 could have enough of a memoir to write nearly 400 pages, but she succeeds.
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