SOUNDTRACK: CLAIRO-“Bags” (2019).
It seems like 2019 is the year of lo-fi women. There’s a lot of great songs but great artists mining the same field of guitar-based, quietly sung catchy songs.
Clairo’s “Bags” is the latest of this style of song.
There’s a shoegaze vibe to the song both in the woozy guitars and Clairo’s distant vocals. The melody is catchy but the big hook comes from what I assumed was a whispery, vibratoed synth line, but which a live video tells me is actually a guitar line. It’s 11 notes long and meanders in a rather compelling way.
I’m curious what the rest of the album will sound like.
[READ: August 2019] The Fifty Year Sword
I’ve really enjoyed Mark Z. Danielewski’s meta fictional books. He makes the book itself, not just the words, part of the story.
This book is a novella. Even though it’s nearly 300 pages, most of the right pages are blank and the left pages are mostly written in a poem-fashion with lots of white space.
(It’s a huge waste of paper, because the book would still work of text was on left and right, but whatever).
Neverthless, the design is really pretty.
This story has a design element that means there are a lot of colors in the book.
The conceit is that there are five orphans telling this story. Each is designated by a different colored quotation mark. The orphans interrupt each other constantly (which is what gives the pages the look of poetry).
I honestly don’t know why these narrators are set up this way. There doesn’t appear to be any reason to the narration style. I don’t think you can read only the quotes from orphan 3 for instance to get another story.
What’s neat though is that the quotation marks are stitched. And stitching is a huge part of this book.
The main character, Chintana, is a local seamstress. The opening and closing pages show bundles of thread and, throughout the book, there are actually stitched pictures. There’s butterflies, swords, latches and lots of abstract images.
I watched a promo video that said that the team of Atelier Z did the stitching on very large pieces of paper. They are Regina Gonzales, Claire Kohne, Michele Reverte and Danielewski himself.
The story itself is set on Halloween. Chintana is invited to a party by the 112 year old Mose Dettledown.
Chintana wasn’t sure she wanted to go, but her sister encouraged her to get out of the house. Chintana was recently divorced–her husband Pravat had left her. The writing style is poetic, so it’s not entirely clear to me what happened, but Belinda Kite was definitely involved in the divorce in some way.
Chintana arrived at the party and the first person she saw was Belinda Kite. This almost made her turn right around, but she decided to stay.
Amid all of the drinking and talking (I love the way snippets of boring conversation pass by us), she learns that it is Belinda’s 50th birthday at midnight.
As she’s contemplating leaving, she meets five orphans at the party. Mose has arranged entertainment for them–a storyteller. Chintana and the orphans’ Social Worker head up to the room where the storyteller is set to begin.
The orphans are named Tarff, Ezade, Iniedia, Sithiss and Micit and the Storyteller is a creepy man for sure. The kids seem intimidated by him at first, but they soon settle into the creepy story.
The man says “I am a bad man with a very black heart.” Something happened to make him go in search of a weapon. He won’t say what and he hopes they never learn the truth either.
He went in search of the perfect weapon. He searched high and low until he finally found someone who told him about the great weapon maker himself. When the man told him everything he knew about the weapon maker, the Storyteller killed him.
This story seemed very dark and Chintana was going to put a stop to it, but the Social Worker didn’t seem upset so Chintana said nothing.
The Storyteller continued. He walked through the Valley of Salt (cool stitching included), the Forest of Falling Notes (more cool stitching) and finally the Mountain of Manyone Paths. It was there that he met The Man with No Arms, the weapons maker.
The Man with No Arms had a lot of swords. There was one that killed the taste of salt, one that killed the smell of evening primrose, one that killed the color green.
The Man with No Arms said that the Storyteller could not afford most of them. For one of the swords, the price was that the wielder must die before it can be used.
But the sword that the Man with No Arms had for him was the Fifty Year Sword. The price is a memory that you have that would have outlived you.
The Storyteller had a box in front of him the whole time and of course the children wanted to know what was in it. They each opened a latch and the man took out… something. It looked like nothing, but when he picked it up and wielded it at them, they all cowered.
Until Belinda Kite stopped the man
how easily too it seemed she had just reached out of the shadows and plucked free from his glacial grasp the end of his story
Chintana was pleased even as she wondered what could have prompted such a display of uncommon heroics. Was it instinct to help these orphans
or was it just more evidence of Belinda Kite’s natural predisposition to spoil a pretty gripping moment?
At the end of the story, the actual hired Storyteller showed up very late–he was caught by the snow. Belinda, meanwhile, prepares to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. The year should not be lost on any reader.
This story was elliptical and creepy. Danielewski has a wonderful way with building tension and psychological horror, even if the way he writes leads to confusion more than clarity sometimes (maybe that’s why it’s so interesting).
Danielewski’s next project is called The Familiar. It is designed as 27 volumes long with each volume being 880 pages. The first five were published, but the publisher has stopped printing the rest of the series. I wonder if it’s worth investigating?
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