SOUNDTRACK: KUINKA-Tiny Desk Concert #716 (March 9, 2018).
Kuinka are a happy band. Smiles are on all four members’ faces as they play their three songs.
Miranda Zickler says that they spend all of their time in the van listening to NPR, so this is pretty exciting for them.
The blurb says:
Last year I came across Kuinka (coo-WINK-uh), a band from Seattle… Kuinka’s live performance knocked me out even more than the creative video they’d submitted for the contest.
Since then, Brothers Zach (guitar) and Nathan (mandolin) Hamer, along with Miranda Zickler (keys) and Jillian Walker (cello), have come to D.C. for an official performance at the Tiny Desk, bringing with them their great harmonies and unique blend of energetic, string-band music with a dose of synth.
I’m not sure what the band sounds like normally–if they typically play electronic drums or what, but as the blurb notes
The songs are performed here on relatively tiny instruments, including a ukulele, a drum pad, a small synth, a mandolin and a banjo, along with an electric guitar. But the performance is fleshed out beautifully with rousing vocal harmonies.
All three tracks performed here are from Kuinka’s 2017 EP Stay Up Late, and each one has its own charm.
“Curious Hands” has lead vocals by Miranda. There’s a cello, keys and Nathan playing a small acoustic six string guitar (or ukulele?). He gets a pretty big (largely percussive) sound out of that little thing. But it’s the harmonies that are really spectacular. I feel like the electronic drums are a little too electronic for this largely folk band but whatever.
For “Spaces,” Zach switches from electronic drums to electric guitar. He also sings lead with an unexpected twang. Nathan has switched to mandolin which gives the whole song a kind of Americana vibe. The electronic drums sound they chose is awful, but there’s a really cool synth sound between verses that prevents this from being overtly in one genre.
Miranda “explains” the name of the band: Kuinka is like kuinka-dink but it doesn’t have anything to do with that, it’s just a coincidence [that’s our ‘bit’].
The blurb’s recommendation to stay until “Mistakenly Brave” is a good one as it is the most rousing song. They revert back to previous instruments, although Miranda plays banjo. The harmonies are terrific (much better than the solo vocals, honestly). It’s got that whole The Head and the Heart vibe going on. Big soaring vocals and a cool break that leads to a rollicking coda. Mid way through, Zach switches back to electric guitar to add some oomph.
[READ: April 20, 2016] Endpoint
John Updike died in January 2009 after decades of writing for the New Yorker and elsewhere. As the news settled in the magazine ran this tribute to him in the March 16 issue.
Rather than running a story, they published a ten-poem sequence called “Endpoint,” (I didn’t even know he wrote poetry). Most of these poems were written in 2008, while presumably, he knew he was dying from lung cancer.
Endpoint
“Spirit of ’76” concludes with this powerful image:
My imitation of a proper man,
white-haired and wed to aging loveliness,
has fit me like a store-bought suit,
not quite my skin, but wearing well enough
until,at ceremony’s end, my wife points out
I don’t know how to use a finger bowl.
“A Lightened Life” looks at handing in his final novel proofs:
back-and-forthing till all adjectives seemed wrong,
It ends with the yearning, “Whats up? Whats left of me?”
“Euonymus,” written in November 2008 states:
My house is now a cage
I prowl, window to window, as I wait
for time to take away the cloud within.
It concludes:
“Is this an end? I hang, half-healthy, here and wait to see.”
“Oblong Ghosts” sees him getting the news
A wakeup call? It seems that death has found
the portals it will enter by: my lungs,
pathetic oblong ghosts, one paler than
the other on the doctor’s viewing screen.
Showing his lucidity (and perhaps the good news that he didn’t live to see trump):
“our President Obama waits/ downstairs to be unwrapped”
“Hospital” contains eight stanzas as he waits in Mass General.
Mass. General, Boston, November 23-27, 2008
Benign big blond machine beyond all price,
it swallows us up and slowly spits us out
half-deafened and our blood still dyed: all this
to mask the simple dismal fact that we
decay and find our term of life is fixed.
“The City Outside” was written December 2008, this poems looks at the city outside his windows and asks
“So whence the world’s beauty? Was I deceived?”
“Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth” was my favorite of the bunch, even if I don’t know Updike’s fiction well enough to know exactly what he’s writing about here.
It opens with “They’ve been in my fiction; both now dead.” He talks of how creating these characters allowed him to escape his own death, perhaps. First Peggy:
what a peppy knockout Peggy was!—
cheerleader, hockey star, May Queen, RN.
Pigtailed in kindergarten, she caught my mother’s
eye, but she was too much girl for me.
Then Fred:
Fred’s slight wild streak
was tamed by diabetes. …
With health
he might have soared. As was, he taught me smarts.
And then a thank you to his past:
Dear friends of childhood, classmates, thank you,
scant hundred of you, for providing a
sufficiency of human types: beauty,
bully, hanger-on, natural,twin, and fatso—all a writer needs,
It ends:
“I had to move to beautiful New England…to learn how dear and deadly life could be”
The final three were all written on December 22, 2008.
“Needle Biopsy” begins
All praise be Valium in Jesus’ name
and ends
Days later, the results came casually through:
the gland, biopsied, showed metastasis”
“Creeper” has a wonderfully apt description of Virginia Creeper:
the feeblest tug brings down a sheaf of leaves kite-high
and
Next spring
the hairy rootlets left unpulled
snake out a leafy afterlife
up that same smooth-barked oak.
“Fine Point” is, I assume his final written poem. It ends
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.
It’s not often that such a good writer has the opportunity to reflect on his own death while still lucid enough to do it so poetically.
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