SOUNDTRACK: WE ARE AUGUSTINES-“New Drink for the Old Drunk” (Field Recordings, September 5, 2012).
I have never heard of We Are Augustines (and I’m pretty amazed to see them referenced with Titus Andronicus as if they were big enough to be known back in 2012. Were they?)
For this Field Recording [We Are Augustines: Somewhere Over The Mountain], the three guys are on top of a mountain outside of the Sasquatch! Music Festival (where it is very windy, they keep saying).
The singer starts singing a song (perhaps an improv) and the band joins in briefly. Then with two guitars and a box drum, they move on to their song proper.
The Brooklyn band We Are Augustines wouldn’t seem to lend itself to windblown acoustic sing-alongs: The songs on 2011’s Rise Ye Sunken Shipssongs bellow and soar in the electric, anthemic spirit of, say, Titus Andronicus. But for this Field Recording, captured during the closest thing to a quiet moment at the 2012 Sasquatch! Music Festival, the trio strapped on acoustic guitars — and grabbed a box for percussion — long enough to perform a cover of Crooked Fingers’ “New Drink for the Old Drunk.”
This has a good raw powerful feel and their style suits an acoustic performance–of course, this is a cover, so I still know little about them. They were able to drown out the actual Festival (not far away at all), which you can hear as the song comes to and end.
[READ: January 7, 2017] “Save a Horse Ride a Cowgirl”
I really enjoyed this story a lot although I found it hard to follow a bit. This was primarily because the protagonist of the story is not the person who opens the story.
It opens with Sterne crashing his car into the car of two young girls, Heidi and Bree. We stay at the scene for a few paragraphs and we soon learn that Sterne was not at fault–the girls had been texting while driving.
We find this out through Sterne’s brother, Bradley, a lawyer. And this story s all about Bradley.
Bradley’s wife had died two years earlier because a nurse had given her the wrong medication. He had wanted to keep living in the house, but there were too many memories, so he bought a smaller house across the river from their old place.
Near his old house, was an eccentric man named Miller who no one ever saw. He had lost his job on Wall Street and moved to this summer house in Maine He spoke to no one. The other neighbors saw Bradley from time to time and said they’d missed him since they only had Crazy Miller to deal with.
Lots of times there are lines in stories that I like more than the story itself This one had
They decided on grilled swordfish with a mango compote (“compote” basically meant a little cup containing not enough of a substance), French fries, and lemon-peel arugula “slaw.” Why the menu put the last word in quotation marks was open to interpretation.
With binoculars, Bradley could see his old place–and he did look from time to time. It was weird, perhaps, but he liked the security it provided. And of course he could keep an eye on his old neighbors. The story lately was that Miller was building some kind of high crossbars with netting underneath. And once night during a hailstorm, Miller was seen dancing around in his underwear.
The next night he saw Miller and a woman dancing down the street. In the middle of the night.
Soon he ran into his old neighbors who confirmed that Miller had a live-in girlfriend (they met on Match.com). The girl had been named for a woman in the Donald Sutherland movie Klute. They speculated whether the contraption he was building was connected to the girl.
In the middle of the story, there’s an amusing section where he accidentally (out of habit) goes to his old house. He’s about to drive out when his realtor shows up with clients. The realtor is pretty upset but the prospective buyers are delighted to get his take on his old house. The scene devolves quickly but is very funny. The title of the story comes from a bumper sticker that I felt was kind of shoehorned into the story, but it did serve a purpose a little later.
The story had a lot going for it but it felt like it kind of slowly wound down instead of coming to a satisfying conclusion.
I Just Read About That... 
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