I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: WILD BEASTS-A Simple Beautiful Truth” (Field Recordings, October 23, 2014).

I don’t know if there was an initial mission statement for Field Recordings, but I feel like this one fits my model of Field Recordings perfectly.  For this Field Recording [A ‘Beautiful Truth’ In A Beautiful Bar], NPR brought a band into Grand Central Station to play a song.

Of course, they can’t have the band play in the middle of Grand Central Station (well they could and that would be awesome–but not if they want a lush version of the song, which they do).  So they had them play in The Cambell Apartment, a bar tucked into Grand Central Station. What?

You can be 10 feet from The Campbell Apartment, a bar tucked into the corner of New York’s Grand Central Station, and not have any idea it’s there. The office of a member of the New York Central Railroad’s Board Of Directors in the 1920s (and later a storage closet and a jail), the room is intimate in spite of its 25-foot ceilings and the enormous leaded-glass window that faces Vanderbilt Avenue.

The band Wild Beasts does not in any way live up to their name.  There’s hardly anything wild or beastly about them.  They play a kind of new wave, almost old-time music (Roxy Music-ish): “The band’s sound — from the street-urchin-inspired lyrics of its early songs to the new-wave synths woven through its latest album, Present Tense — arrived fully intact via time machine.”

“A Simple Beautiful Truth” has a delicate synth line and loud electronic drums.  It wouldn’t make sense in Grand Central Station.  I’m not entirely sure it make seen here, but the band’s overall vibe does make sense in this old-timey bar.

[READ: October 10, 2017] “A Report on Our Recent Troubles”

This story is indeed written as a report.  The recent troubles are a euphemism for the rampant suicide that has struck a village.

But because the story is written as a report, it has a formal, detached tone that really allows for much thinking about suicide.  The suicide is so rampant that families have moved away, leaving those who remain to deal with their shattered existence.

The town was once pleasant–connected to the city and culture and yet with a rural sensibility.

They the undersigned are reluctant to look for one thing that changed everything but they can’t help but note that when Richard And Suzanne Lory killed themselves, things seemed to change.  Each in their early fifties, happily married and with lots of friends.  They killed themselves and left no note. An investigation turned up no scandal.

Two weeks later a 74-year-old retired high school math teacher killed himself.  He had been diagnosed with cancer of the liver.  This was less scandalous and almost understandable.

But four days later two high school juniors killed themselves.  They lay side by side on the ping-pong table–bullet wounds from two handguns.  Their note said they were celebrating their love and apologized for any distress this might cause.

Some time later two more children killed themselves–patterned after the first two.  A few days later three groups of students two, two, and three were all found dead.

“A passion for spectacular suicide now seized our sons and daughters.”

A group called The Black Rose took hold.  Their motto seemed to be Suicide as a method of imposing a design on the randomness of life

This story is only four pages long but as you can imagine it his tough reading.  Especially as more and more children kill themselves.

Soon adults started following their children and a group for adults called The Blue Iris was formed, seeming to glorify suicide by claiming that death was the culminating moment of existence the climactic event to which every life aspired.

The solution proposed by this committee was that things which have been hidden for too long be brought back:

a return to public hangings, on the hill behind the high school; we support gladiatorial contests between men and maddened pit bulls, the restoration of outlawed forms of public punishment, such as stoning and flaying. We recommend a return to the stake, to fire and blood. We propose that once a year a child be chosen by lot and ritually murdered on the town green before the town hall, as a reminder to our citizens that we walk on the bones of the dead.

This is a disturbing story I normally enjoy Millhuaser’s work, but this one was tough going.