I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH-Tiny Desk Concert #888 (September 6, 2019).

I watched the first Tiny Desk Concert from The Tallest Man on Earth about five years ago and I’ve been a fan ever since.  He looks pretty different than he did back then.  But that’s because even though I watched it five years ago,

It’s 10 years almost to the day since we published The Tallest Man On Earth’s Tiny Desk in 2009. What I remember most about that performance was the intensity of Kristian Matsson and how astonished our audience was to discover him. I think of it as one of our very first viral videos.

It wasn’t viral for me in 2009, but I did really enjoy it.

Since then I have planned to see him on two occasions.  Back in 2018 I had a ticket for him at Union Transfer, but I wound up going on a Boy Scout hike that weekend.  This year, on October 2, he was supposed to play the Met Philly, but he cancelled the entire American tour.

So, maybe in 2020, it will finally happen, especially since he doesn’t live in Sweden exclusively.

The Swedish singer now splits his time between Djurås, Sweden and Brooklyn, N.Y., and has just put out his fifth studio album titled, I Love You. It’s a Fever Dream. 

I don’t honestly recall what first attracted me to his music (his voice and guitar playing, i suspect) although this observation is fascinating:

I think Kristian Matsson’s words are more focused, more observational and more appreciative of life than in the past.

I suppose it would have been interesting if he played one song that he played ten years ago to see if he did it any differently.  But it’s probably better that he plays three new songs with C.J. Camerieri on French horn and muted trumpet.

“What I’ve Been Kicking Around” opens with his fast finger-picking–there’s really quite a lot going on in this song.  He plays this one on electric guitar  and C.J is on French horn.  His voice is gruff but inviting with a vaguely Bob Dylanesque delivery.  There’s something about the way that minimal French horn accompaniment fills in the spaces between the songs that allows him to play his complex fingering and the song still feels full.

For “I’ll Be A Sky,” he switches to acoustic guitar and C.J. plays muted trumpet.  His fingerpicking style doesn’t change, but the song is a lot warmer.  I love the way he delivers these lines almost conversationally

I feel that I’m a little lost most of the time
But I don’t really mind, oh, when my heart feels young
I travel through the storms but then I hang to dry
And I don’t really mind, oh, when my arm is in the rain and the sun

For the the final song “”The Running Styles of New York,” he switches back to the electric guitar.  He has to tune it and jokes that he was trying to dumb it down by bringing fewer guitars.  The song

begins with, “I hear beauty in things / Like the neighbors return / To their love and pride / Their day like a wicked ride / But then to belong.”

Continuing with the muted trumpet, C.J. plays some solo melodies while Kristian plays his complicated fingerpicking.  There’s some really lovely harmonics on this song, too.

I hope all is well and he’s able to tour again soon.

[READ: August 14, 2019] Gone with the Mind

I’ve enjoyed most of what Mark Leyner has written to varying degrees.  He tends to be an over-the-top satirist of himself, of pop culture and of concepts like the novel.

He wrote two novels and three collections of short stories in the 1990s, was celebrated and vilified and then kind of disappeared.

He was primarily writing for magazines and TV and stuff behind the scenes.  Then he came back in 2012 with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack which I have yet to read.   Then he wrote this one.  I grabbed it from work a couple years back and finally got around to it and it was much like what I was expecting and miles away from what I imagined.

The book beings with an introduction from Mark’s mother Muriel.  She is reading aloud and explains that she is coordinating director of the Nonfiction and the Food Court Reading Series at the Woodcreek Plaza Mall.  She thanks various people for giving them such a nice location at the mall as well as the sponsors Panda Express, Master Wok, Au Bon Pain, Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, etc.

She sees two Panda Express workers and asks if they are There for the reading or just taking a beak.  They say they are taking a break.  She welcomes them anyway and thanks them for filling the otherwise empty seats in the food court.

Then the novel sets out to be a Mark Leyner novel. It talks about Mark Leyner in great detail.  Much of what he says is factual–his birthday is given, Muriel is his mother’s name, as well as many details from his childhood in Jersey City.

Then you wonder, but don’t really want to find out what is real.

Muriel continues her introduction with a detailed account of Mark’s birth and circumcision, as well as what he was like as a baby.  The crux is how much time they spent together and how she seems to have refused to let him out of her sight.  And how it almost seems like Baby Mark was caring for her during this trying time because she was so overwhelmed.   After some 30 pages she asks the workers if they would like to see pictures of how skinny she was when they went to Cape Cod, but they decline.

Part 2 comes around 40 pages in and it’s the beginning of Mark’s section.  He starts with his usual large words and attitude:

Before I start, I’d like to say Fuck everyone who said I was too paradoxical a hybrid of arrogant narcissism and vulnerable naivete to succeed in life (even though they were right).

He is set to read from his book Gone with My Mind.  But before he does, he’s going to give some background information.

The book was originally going to be an autobiography in the form of a first person shooter / flight-simulator game and it was going to start at a breakfast meeting with my old editor Michael Pietsch during which I’m either assassinated or ‘commit suicide’ in the men’s room.  And my ghost has to travel back in time, revisit each transformative event in my life, and execute or otherwise degrade or disable the central dramatis personae in order to get to the next (prior) event.  The, uh, goal of the game is to successfully reach my mother’s womb, in which I attempt to unravel or unzip my father’s and mother’s DNA in the zygote, which will free me of having to eternally repeat this life.

It’s during this stage of planning that the Imaginary Intern shows up.  It was clearly a delusion and yet he and the Imaginary Intern became the best of friends and coworkers.  He describes his writing and thinking and the various delusional stages of mind he went through while writing the book.

There is just far too much insanity to even try to note here, as he says”

everything we talked about, no matter how seemingly extraneous or irrelevant–Twizzlers commercials, the molecular basis of infrared detection in pit vipers, Betty Boop, Helen Keller, Jenna Jameson, parasitic worms, whatever–somehow or other wound its way back to our work.

but a few things are fun to include:

I’ve had an armpit fetish since I was a boy.

The Virgin Mary was not a Ferbering mother.

I think one of the first things I ever wrote was a puppet play.

When I was ten or so… maybe even younger, maybe, eight, nine, …I was already thinking to myself: Can a series of completely unrelated, violent, hypersexualized, scatological line of prose be a kind of writing,a kind of literature?

Soon after the Imaginary Intern left, I found a postcard from him

Indeed most of the book is about his time with the Imaginary Intern.

Whenever we’d disagree about something he’d say “Lets get our stories straight before the cops get here.”  Which I just thought was completely adorable.

The story is technically set up like a play.  So there are occasional interruptions with stage direction like:

(The PANDA EXPRESS WORKER and the SBARRO WORKER are paying absolutely no attention to anything MARK is saying)

(MARK motions for quiet as if to quell a stir his remarks have provoked, which they have not).

He even tries to engage with them.

Did either of you guys happen to see the movie Lake Little Lake that was on TV…I think it was Saturday…on Lifetime…this past Saturday night… Lake Little Lake?  Did you guys see that? … No?…

I’ve never seen a movie that makes being chemically castrated seem so appealing

Neither of you guys saw that… last Saturday…no?

(MARK sighs, flagging somewhat seeming for the first time, a little discouraged)

And every once in a while it seems like he is going to start reading from the book.  On page 101 he says, Okay…before I, uh..get started here….

Then more strange assertions:

The earliest known jokes had no punch lines.

The great Russian constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko–the original A-Rod.

When I was a little boy, I was so sensitive that the sound of beautiful music…would make me physically ill.

“Why do you think I’m obsessed with this idea of giving the world an alphabet-soup enema?”  (This was guy code language for wanting to be a writer).

Page 152:  Okay, last couple of things before I get started…

He then spends a bunch of time talking about his grandfather who developed a tendency to make these odd, completely gratuitous telephone calls, these peremptory rebukes that would just come out of nowhere.  The phone would ring, you’d answer, and without so much as a hello, he’d snarl, “Why aren’t you watching Golda Mier on Face the Nation, you dumb bastard?!” And he’d hang up.

Page 181  Finally, I just want to acknowledge and thank two people I haven’t mention thus far.

The joke that the workers are not paying him any attention is funny enough, but when he says things like this:

I don’t want to come here tonight as a panegyrist of my own bowel movements, believe me.

it’s funny enough on its own.

Perhaps the best summary of the book is a list (which I will not list) in which he describes his life (as well as this book)

You have no idea how many hours, days, weeks, months, in aggregate I spend just chewing gum and sullenly throwing a pink rubber ball against a concrete abutment and imagining random successions of things.

But it’s not all highfalutin ideas:

The obvious implication here is that your dead grandparents are watching you fuck.  Again this is probably something the government know and is suppressing.

At page 214 Mark’s mom cuts him off and says they have to save time for the Q&A, which is part III.

But the Q&A takes on a totally unexpected aspect because when Mark looks up everyone is gone and he is asking the question

Q: Mom are you here?

A: Yes.

And the whole Q&A is him talking to his mom.  They continue to talk about random things

There is, totally unexpectedly, a Part IV (with five pages left in the book). The IV is Adjournment and in it MARK now becomes LEYNER.  He is in a bathrobe, flushed from the exertion of the performance.   He wraps things up and says his grandest thanks.

Obviously, this book is crazy and your enjoyment will depend on how much you enjoy the absurd.  This is not a sustained laugh-out-loud kind of story, but there’s a lot of very funny surreal stuff here.  I’m glad Mark is back.