SOUNDTRACK: SILK ROAD ENSEMBLE–“Briel” (Field Recordings, March 26, 2014).
There have been many fun Field Recordings, but this one [Welcome to Yo-Yo’s Playhouse] is surely the most fun. The countless members of Silk Road Ensemble were taken to ACME Studio, a theatrical props warehouse in Brooklyn. They were given pretty much free reign to put on costumes, to bring out mannequins, to do whatever they wanted and that makes this session seem even bigger than it already is (and it’s already pretty big).
That’s all not to mention that the Silk Road Ensemble is a pretty amazing group of musicians:
cellist Yo-Yo Ma and some of the world’s premiere instrumentalists and composers, including members of Brooklyn Rider, Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, Iranian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor, Spanish bagpiper Cristina Pato, American percussionist Shane Shanahan and clarinetist Kinan Azmeh from Syria.
As we’ve had the opportunity to forge those bonds over time [many of these performers have done Tiny Desk Concerts], we’ve gotten to know the warm, generous-spirited personalities that come along with these immense talents. We thought that setting them loose in a props house, where they could pick and choose among the curiosities for little elements to bring into the camera frame, would bring those aspects of their personalities into sharper focus. What we wound up with was a magical afternoon of play in all senses of the word — not just having the chance to record these virtuosos and their instruments in a spirited performance of John Zorn’s Briel, here arranged by Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz, but also to capture them (and us) having an immense amount of fun.
I had no idea this was a John Zorn piece. It sounded like a Hebrew composition and now I understand why. But in the best world music tradition, this piece is arranged for musicians from all over the world–percussion, strings, brass and reed. There’s a bagpipe solo, a kamancheh solo and a field of percussion. The song is just way too short.
But to watch Yo-Yo Ma play the cello while holding a mannequin that looks like George Harrison is just one of the many highlights.
[READ: April 2018] Loner
Everything about the look of this book appealed to me. The title, the crappy cover, the backwards type, the size, it all just seemed like a light, funny story.
Perhaps something about it should have read “creepy” too.
David Federman is a New Jersey native. He went to Garret Hobart High School (named for New Jersey’s only vice president) He’s smart (he was accepted in to Harvard) but dull and, as we get to know him, pretty unlikable. He imagines that Harvard will be a place where he (and other geeks like him) will flourish and kick ass.
He’s not wrong in thinking that–everyone he meets seems to want to change. But no one wants to change by hanging out with David.
David winds up in a freshman group that he hates–the Matthews Marauders (who are anything but). In fact, nothing is going very well until he sees Veronica Wells. She is everything he desires–a sophisticated New Yorker with money, intelligence and beauty.
In fact this entire book is written to her. For Veronica is the “you” of this second-person story. It is somewhat confusing for a while–“before you could answer someone called your name across the Yard,” but we quickly get the gist.
The book opens with Teddy’s parents dropping him off at Harvard. His parents are encouraging, but not above pointing out some faults of his that he may want to work on. He has high hopes for his roommate, but Steven just got his braces put back on and is painfully unaware how dorky he is. When they head down to orientation, Steven scopes out the “cute girls.”
David tries to befriend anyone he can, including the boys who were clearly cool in high school. They turn out to be jocks. And that’s when we see David’s other quirk–he likes to reverse words in his mind. So Baseball becomes llabesab. He even wrote his school application essay about it. He intended to write the whole thing in reverse, but his parents talked him out of it and he wound up only doing the title “Backwords” backwards.
When David says to the baseball players Jake and Phil: “Ekaj and lihp” neither one is even remotely interested. Except when Veronica walks in. She ignores everyone except Jake and Phil who have saved her a space for the meeting. There are ice breakers–say your name with another word that has the same letter: Adamant Adam, Shy Sara. David says David Defiant (because he put his word second). Later when Veronica says Veronica Veritas, he takes it as a sign
The Marauders form a clique of six. Although as he points out “we were clearly freshmen who had missed out on the normal high school experience and were now attempting to simulate it in college.” Davids cowardly instinct was to cling to them but he wanted more.
One woman of the group, Sara, seems to like him. That night at a party he and Sara hit it off well even if David can only think about Veronica.
On the first day of classes while everyone shopped around, David had the brilliant idea to flow Veronica and sign up for whatever she did. This leads to some pitfalls and blunders, but they do wind up in the same literature class.
Then David learns that shy Sara, the Sara who was okay but boring, is Veronica’s roommate. Now suddenly he is much more interested in Sara.
Sara is a good person, so there is very little chance of them returning to her room either for sex or for David to scope out Veronica.
Basically, David is a horrible person. And yet, as you’re reading his take on things, he seems like maybe he’s not that horrible. Maybe he’s just awkward and a loner.
Since he couldn’t hang out with Veronica (her social calendar was very different from his, his only option was to help her academically. Obviously a pretty, social woman like her would need help with her classes. So after their lit class, he offers to help her with her first paper. She, no fool, took him up on the offer. When they work together, he tries that backwards name trick. She doesn’t mock him. She doesn’t lap it up or anything but later, she calls him Divad.
David and Sara get serious and start going out publicly, which should increase his cred somewhat. But when he’s given the opportunity to be in Sara’s room, he slips into Veronica’s room and steals a belt (monogrammed) from her bathrobe.
Through helping Veronica, David becomes a part of her circle–somewhat–he smokes, he gets invited to a Final Club with them. He starts to blow off Sara to go. Soon enough he makes his moves on Veronica, too.
As the book nears its conclusion there is an amazing moment of revelation. I was utterly shocked as was David:
Insert an empty page for my restroom-stall silence. printer
Teddy goes from being a somewhat sympathetic loser to a criminal over the course of these brief pages. And its hard to come away from the book feeling good about anything.
However, this article from Salon looks at the story in an interesting way, one which looks at Loner as a cautionary tale.
It’s a hard book to come away liking, but the writing is excellent and the character study is all too real.
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