I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: KING-“Supernatural” (Field Recordings, September 17, 2014).

This Field Recording [KING Makes A Record Lover’s Paradise Even Better] was created before Prince died.  Hard to believe that was two years ago already!

I mention this because the women of KING (Paris and Amber Strother and Anita Bias) speak of him in the present tense.  Which is strangely comforting.

The women mention Prince because evidently he heard a song from their debut EP and contacted them out of the blue.  His manager sent them a one line email: “Would you be interested in meeting Prince?”  Get outta here!

On a steamy morning upstairs in a record lover’s paradise KING laid down a gorgeous version of “Supernatural,” one of the songs that lit up Twitter three years ago.  While customers quietly thumbed through LPs — then stopped to stare — the singers gently and precisely intertwined their three voices in service of a love song.

Their voices and harmonies are quite lovely.  Although this is not a type of music I enjoy.

[READ: January 19, 2018] “In the United States of Africa”

This is an excerpt from a novel originally written in French and translated by David and Nicole Bell.

The blurb says that the novel opens with “a brief account of the origins of our [African] prosperity and the reasons that have thrown the Caucasians onto the paths of exile.”

This excerpt is not terribly compelling.  There’s a hint of a cool story there but it seems to be overtaken by philosophical musings.

The weather is getting cooler, the rain is coming and the Caucasians are turning over the soil.

But the focus here is on a stranger.  A man with a cap on his head and a bag in his hand.  He stood there diagonally across from the house saying nothing to anyone.

People speak about him of course–where they think he came from, how he doesn’t know the language.  It’s a worry, this stranger in a neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else .  When he begins to walk away, they assume that he won’t survive the heat, the night.  But the next day he is back, looking at his feet for hours.

I enjoyed this line:

“Speaking to him would be like speaking to an unplugged computer.”

But the excerpt no longer speaks of the man after that.  It speaks of the sky and living rooms and how death expands and contracts.

So, while obviously much more is going on, I  was not inspired to look into it any further.