I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: TAYLOR SWIFT-Tiny Desk Concert #902 (October 16, 2019).

Most Tiny Desk Concerts are from musicians that few people have heard of.

Not this one!

It’s hard to imagine exactly how it happened that Tiny Desk Concert managed to get Taylor Swift to play.  And to play with just a acoustic guitar and piano.  “It’s just me. There’s no dancers, unfortunately,” she quipped.

I have seen people already complain that Tiny Desk is supposed to be for unknown artists blah blah blah.  But I think it’s pretty awesome that a) Taylor Swift is a fan of NPR and Tiny Desk and b) that this show will bring more notoriety to Tiny Desk and potentially other bands.

Plus–I had no idea that Taylor Swift was not a studio creation–that she’s actually a real and thoughtful person who wrote her own music.

She talks confidently and casually about songwriting and she seems pretty genuinely pleased to be there.

As she settled in for her Tiny Desk, she looked out at the 300-plus NPR employees and guests. “Wow! This is a lot of people in a tiny office!” she said. “I love it!”

She delightfully says, “It’s great to be in DC.  You guys had anything exciting going on in the last couple of weeks?  Any possible changes in play?”

And, hey, she writes good songs, too.

I’ve never really listened to her music–although I love “Shake It Off.”  I haven’t actually heard anything of her new album so this was all new to me.

After introducing herself, she explained her objective: “I just decided to take this as an opportunity to show you guys how the songs sounded when I first wrote them.”

She talks a lot about each song and why she wrote them.

Opening with an acoustic rendition of “The Man,” from her 2019 album Lover, Swift delivered a critique of gender double-standards with a sense of humor (and a perfectly deployed hair toss), Leonardo DiCaprio name-check and all.

She says she has been thinking about the topic for many years and it was something she wanted to write about conceptually for a very long time because we have a bit of double standard issue in our society.  She wondered if there was a concise and catchy way to write a song about this?  So she decided to imagine what her life would be like if she said and did all the same things but if she was a man.

While not an original idea, she tackles it really well.  And I like that she’s using her platform to address the issue

I would be complex
I would be cool
They’d say I played the field before
I found someone to commit to
And that would be okay
For me to do
Every conquest I had made
Would make me more of a boss to you
I’d be a fearless leader
I’d be an alpha type
When everyone believes ya…
What’s that like?

And it’s really catchy too.

At the end of the song she gives her pick to a little one in the audience (to a room full of awws).  Then she switches instruments.

She talks about the process of writing songs–when something comes and its easy, that’s wonderful.  But most days you show up… and the idea doesn’t.  Then you have to know the craft of songwriting–you’re not always going to be inspired and that’s okay.

Turning to the piano for Lover‘s title track, with a smile, she explained the guitar-string scars of the song’s bridge.

She says that she has scars on her hands from playing guitar when she was young–when she played until her fingers bled or when a string snapped and cut her.  In your life you received all kinds of scars–emotional and physical and if someone is going to take your hand, they’d better take your hand scars and all.

It’s a pretty piano ballad and her voice is really pure.

After the song she removes her blazer to reveal a velvet top (she must have been very hot).  “You guys ever had costume changes at Tiny Desk?” She then finds three more guitar picks to give to three other kids, one of whom you can quickly see is pretty darn excited.

Picking up the guitar again for “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” Swift confronted a question that she says has haunted her career: What will you ever do if you get happy?

She receives this question over and over that “has the potential to seriously deteriorate my mental health.”  “What will you ever do if you get happy?  Will you just never be able to write a song again?    She says she used to reply that she started off when she was 12, she was writing songs about things she had no idea what she was talking about.  She wrote songs about heartbreak based on movies and books and character studies.  So she would say, “If stuff is going on in the world maybe she could hey inspiration from that.

But then she really asked herself that question.  “Would I not be able to write break up songs?  I love break up songs!  They’re so fun to write.”  She says she had friends going through breakups and she was watching movie and reading books about breakups and these ideas came to her.  She woke up with heartbreak lyrics in her head and realized “It’s still here!”

Across the song’s run-on thoughts and relentless searching, Swift offered an answer: She’ll continue to excel at crafting superb story-songs.

I rather like her songs on acoustic guitar–even if I’m not much of a fan of break up songs.

Before the final song, “All to Well,” she talks about how she never googles herself–she recommends you not do it either.  But her dad does.  He sends her links to lists that people rank her songs (she finds it very nice that people care enough to do that).  When the Red album came out, she said there’s a song and “I’m the only one who loves this song this much–because it happens to me and its personal.”  But it turns out that this song tops everyone’s favorite list.  “I’m happy that my opinion lines up with your opinion on that.”

I actually didn’t know this song at all–I guess I am really isolated from pop music.

She says, “here’s a sad song about fall.”  It’s very pretty on piano and once again her voice is really great.  I really like the way the words unfold and then reflect back on themselves.  It’s a really wonderfully crafted song.

This Tiny Desk Concert may not introduce Taylor Swift to a lot of people, but it pretty much did introduce me to her music.  And I was really impressed.

[READ: August 19, 2019] Lost Empress

I loved Sergio De la Pava’s A Naked Singularity. It was complicated and funny and clever and bizarre and thoroughly engaging.

Lost Empress is even better.

There’s a story about a woman running a football team–and being overlooked because she is a woman.

There is a storyline about 911 operators, and the guy who transcribes them.

The third story is about a tough, smart guy who is in jail.  He is his own defense for trying to get out.  And he hatches a plan that involves stealing artwork, the Paterson Falls and the Super Bowl.

I enjoyed it in part because much of it is set in Paterson, NJ.  I grew up next to Paterson and the city has for most of my life been in a state of decline.  Despite all of the great things it has to offer (like the Paterson Falls! which get a shout out in this book), Paterson gets no respect.  This book doesn’t exactly aim to correct that, but it does give the city something cool–a football team.

It also jokes about “what the hell is up with Paterson?”  The city had once tried to rebrand itself in which they staged a contest  for “an official slogan for the troubled city.”  Proposals emerged: “the verifiably untrue, the unintentionally insulting/intentionally insulating, the so vague that sense fails to be created, the rhyme or alliteration for its own sake, and the technically true but not even conceivably relevant.”

Options:

Paterson, Come Home Again (if you’re from here)
Paterson, Home is Where the Hard Is
Paterson, Take a Seat
Paterson, It Happened
Paterson, What Happened?
Paterson, You Bet
Paterson, Wanna Bet?
Paterson, Where the Passaic River Goes to Party
Paterson, A City
Paterson, There, We Said It
Paterson, What You Looking AT?
Paterson, We’re History
Paterson, Son of Pater, Cousin of Progress
Paterson, We Don;t Stand Pat
Paterson, It’s Really No One Else’ Business
Paterson, Giving You the Business
Paterson, At Least We’re Not Camden.

With all of these choices, the committee had to resort to “Welcome to Patterson” (typo left in).

The book starts with a Logue.   Whether pro- or epi- is hard to determine because the next chapter is 88.  Which begins, “Let us have, in these pages, an entertainment.”

It then states that “thick women are he highest life-form…” and this story is going to focus on “Tall, thick, impossibly magnetic Nina Gill.”

About a week after Super Bowl XLIX in February 2015, Nina Gill walked into BALLS in Hoboken, NJ.   On the TV is her brother, Daniel Gill, president of the Dallas Cowboys.  Everybody in the bar bristles that they still call the Cowboys “America’s Team” (and really, how did that happen?).  While they are watching the TV, the owenr of the bar Henri comes in and, to the delight of the room, proposes to Nina.

She declines.

While absorbing this shock he accuses her of being old and says “remember, you’re a woman, every day you get less attractive.”  Her response, “That’s okay, every night I recover.”

But the bigger bombshell comes on the screen. Nina’s brother is being interviewed and when the interviewer asks him if it is actually Nina who has the sports brains in the family, that it is her acumen who powered the Cowboys to three wins in a row, Daniel demurs and says that while she contributed no one is greater than the organization.

At which time she hurls a shotglass trough the TV.

Later she meets with Daniel and his lawyers about something big.  The big news is that her father is dying and his inheritance is at stake. Which means the Dallas Cowboys.

Daniel and his team mock Nina for not having a lawyer, she says she does, that her lawyer is outside.  She walks outside and grabs the first woman she sees–a woman delivering fast food.  She is wearing a Brown sweatshirt which is good enough.  This woman, Dia, is now Nina’s lawyer.

Nina is thrilled to hear that she will be given the football team.  Only not the Dallas Cowboys, the Paterson Pork. The Paterson Pork are a team in the IFL.   Daniel will be getting the Cowboys.   Cue explosion of rage.  She then hires Dia as her sidekick.  And doubles her current salary.

The second thread in the story is about 911 operators.  Sharon Seaborg was, and still is, bothered by “ghost calls.”  Ghost calls are calls that come in, provide no information and then hang up.  She would fill in the silence… but with horrors.  The next day she would check the papers for confirmation: “Legless woman runs out of time.”  But even a ghost call is better than one where people give some information and then abdicate.

The third thread involves Nuno deAngeles.  Nuno is bring transported to Riker’s island. Nuno is highly educated and philosophical (his only ally now is Rene Descartes).  He also has a reputation.  When the guard asks if he is getting protective custody, Nuno says that the 50,000 inmates (12,000 he is corrected) are going to need protective custody from him.

Turns out The IFL headquarters are also Paterson.  Nina plans to take over the IFL (by force if she has to).

As soon as she hears that her brother and the rest of the NFL owners are not going to meet NFL player demands–meaning strike is imminent–she has the clever idea to make the IFL the place for NFL fans to turn while the NFL is on strike.  She promises that the IFL will be on Sunday, on all major networks and bringing in a ton of revenue.  Once the laughter dies down, people realize that she is not joking.

So, like a more vulgar Bad News Bears, Nina Gill works on turning the Paterson Pork–last place laughing stock of a laughing stock league–into a juggernaut…one that could even beat her brother’s Dallas Cowboys.

Another story line follows Feniz Heredia a young man who lives with his grandmother.  Feniz leaves the house twice a day to get fresh milk for his grandmother’s coffee.  She doesn’t leave the house and he has to look after her, as he has done for years.  It is Feniz’s story that celebrates the Paterson Great Falls.

Chapter 69 (remember we are going in reverse) is also written in reverse–sort of.  It covers Salvador Dali’s death to birth.  Nina loves Dali.  She also loves Joni Mitchell and makes Dia listen to her music exclusively. But the important thing to take away about Dali is that he donated a painting to Rikers Island in 1965.  In 2003 it was stolen.  The thieves were caught but the painting was never recovered.

Back at Rikers, Nuno is accosted by a man named Solomon.  Nuno is instantly ready to fight him, but Solomon isn’t intimidated and he, being wise, starts imparting some knowledge to Nuno.  Knowledge of a way that Nuno can get out of Rikers–impossible though it may seem.  Nuno really has nothing to get out for though, not since his ideal woman, Dia, left him.

Nuno also plays the judicial system in hilarious (but with a underlying truth that is pretty brutal) ways.  De La Pava is also a public defender and he does wondrous things with the legal system and court documents.  It’s spectacular–Chapter 5 is the entire document of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Grand Jury of the Court of New York v Nuno deAngeles.

There’s also an interesting connection in that Hugh Seaborg, Sharon’s ex-husband, works at Rikers and deals directly with Nuno.

Speaking of possible romances, Sharon and Feniz live on the same street and, unlike most people in the city, actually start talking to each other one day,

De La Pava writes intriguing and wondrous stories, but he also adds wondrous details that are fantastical and whimsical not unlike David Foster Wallace.  So Chapter 50 is all about a  man who records and transcribes 911 calls.  This man worked at the District Attorney’s Office in New York.  His name was Sylvester Scarpetti.  No one knows when he started, but at some point he joined the herd of uncredentialed twenty-somethings whose job it was to transcribe these calls.

The more Scarpetti worked, the more he started experimenting with how he would sign his transcripts.  He started with the Scaro and then The Scar, he morphed into the less defensible Scar tissue and then S Squared.  People raised an eyebrow but forgave him because  the transcripts were so good.  “The work being produced was extraordinary.”  The rest of the chapter talk about how amazing these transcripts were–that they were filled with passion and importance.  People began requesting that he do their transcripts.

But this fanciful story is not without point because the next chapter shows one of his transcriptions.  And Sharon Seaborg is the call recipient.

I don’t know if its because the chapters are counting down instead of up, but the numbers going down feels like a countdown.

In the football season–which is funny and exciting (Radiohead will be the halftime band for the playoffs!)–the Paterson Pork start to amaze everyone and are actually going to take on the Dallas Cowboys.  The end chapters detail this exciting game.

The ancillary stories which are less funny but no less exiting.  With a prison break out of monumental importance, and the possibility of Nuno and Dia being reunited, chapter Zero cleverly coordinates all of the stories –football, prison and the Great Falls.

This book was laugh out loud funny.  But it was also thoughtful and philosophical.  It tackles sexism, institutional racism, the prison system, love and even has an exciting sporting event.