I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SNARKY PUPPY-Tiny Desk Concert #913 (November 20, 2019).

I feel like I’ve been hearing a lot about Snarky Puppy lately.  So much so that I assumed they were a new band.  Wrong:

Snarky Puppy has been a force for a while now, earning the ears of millions for more than a decade.  The band started as college friends in the jazz program at the University of North Texas back in 2003. But the formative era came a few years later, after Michael League [bassist and bandleader] became a part of the gospel scene in Dallas and eventually brought the jazz students to church, where music plays a different role than it does in the classroom. In the pulpit, it’s a channel for spiritual healing, a communal experience between players and congregation. As an experiment, League pulled his jazz friends and his gospel bandmates into one ensemble, where the two groups bonded together and established ground-zero for building the sonic identity of Snarky Puppy

I also had an idea that (because the name sounds similar to Skinny Puppy) that they might be a, what, young bratty dark punk band?  Wrong again.

Their secret sauce? A long-simmered recipe of jazz, funk and gospel.  Thirteen albums later, you can still hear these gospel and jazz orbits crashing into each other.

Oh, and one more thing.  They only play instrumentals.

They’re a band whose lyric-less melodies are still yelled (sung back) to them at their concerts around the world, as a shared catharsis for everyone in the room.

I really couldn’t have gotten that more wrong.

The band plays two songs in this lengthy set.

The first is called “Tarova.”  It opens with a wonderful sequence of keyboards.  Shaun Martin plays the keyboards with that talk box thing (made famous by Peter Frampton).  He seems to be having a kind of call and response solo with Bobby Sparks.  Sparks has the most fascinating thing on his keyboard.  A very large whammy bar/lever that he is able to push really far down to bend notes far more than any keyboard I’ve ever heard.  It was so much fun watching him do this, I was very glad he was up front.

During all of this, “JT” Thomas is keeping time on drums.  The song proper jumps in with a fun funky riff with lots of trumpets.  Everybody gets to do something impressive in this song and there’s a bunch of solos as well.

I really like the middle funky section that’s mostly bass and keys.

The song builds to a moment when everyone stops–after a two second pause which makes everyone clap, they resume with a great percussion solo from Nate Werth.

When the song ends, League introduces everyone and says who soloed.  He jokes, “That’s what you;re supposed to do in jazz, right, say who soloed n case anyone was confused that there were solos going on.”

Then he addresses the crowd.  He says that most people there are employees and family and an abundance of interns.  He wants to turn the cameras around for a minute (only one or two turn around) and force you into a musical rhythmic experiment.  Turns out that

Seconds before we hit record, Snarky Puppy’s bandleader, Michael League leaned in to ask if he could “do a little crowd work.” I suspect he waited until the last second on purpose, but it’s been easy to trust this band when they have an idea, judging by the three Grammy Awards they get to dust off at home after every tour run.

What resulted was a Tiny Desk first: League divided the audience into two sections, one side clapping out a 3/4 beat and the other half a 4/4 beat, creating a polyrhythm that I’m sure a handful of coworkers didn’t feel so confident trying to pull off. But this band pulls you in with simple instruction and a little faith.

League says, “we’re going to a polyrhythm because things have to get nerdy and unenjoyable.”  The crowd does admirably well with the two rhythms going on.  They are aided by Nate Werth on percussion who is really amazing (not necessarily here, but in the two songs).  I believe that they are creating 7/4.

The audience is warned that this polyrhythm will be used in the second song “Xavi,” dedicated to their friends in Morocco.

The song opens a funky bass and a lovely flute melody from Chris Bullock.  Then after a short guitar lick by Chris McQueen the whole band jumps in with a really funky melody.  The riff is taken over by two trumpets Justin Stanton (whose trumpet has a mute) and Jay Jennings (no mute) and Chris Bullock who is now on sax.

I was going to say you really don’t hear much of the violin in this set as it gets kind of melded with everything else.  Then mid way through the song, Zach Brock takes a wild and, often, effects-riddled solo in the middle of the song.  It might be my favorite part of a set that has many highlights.

The clapping part is used twice.  In the first one, the band is kind of quiet and the clapping is aided with great percussion from Werth and another lovely flute.

The guitar and bass in this song are fantastic even if they are never entirely prominent.  There’s also a very cool keyboard solo from trumpeter Justin Stanton.

Then the clapping comes around a second time.  During this one, there’s a guitar and keyboard making all kinds of sounds while the drums keep hitting everything, there;s more percussion and a little more flute.

The whole set is tremendous fun.  Totally not what I was expecting and so much better.

[READ: August 15, 2019] The Idiot

I grabbed this book because I had written down the author’s name as someone I wanted to read.  I also got a kick out of the title (and the obvious allusion to Dostoevsky).

I started the book and enjoyed it and then realized that I had read an excerpt from this story already.  And that is why I had written the author’s name down.

This book was written as a kind of response to her first book.  In an essay in The Guardian, she explained that:

In her first book, The Possessed, New Yorker journalist Elif Batuman complained that as an incipient novelist she was always being told to eschew books and focus on life. Literature since Don Quixote had been seen as false and sterile; disconnected from lived experience. After years as a graduate student of Russian literature, she decided to challenge this by writing an account of her own haphazard attempt to live with and through books.

Of the excerpt I wrote quite a lot (and quite a lot that almost gets left behind after the excerpt):

I enjoyed this story very much.  It is the story of a girl who is off to Harvard.  The story is set in the early 1990s–in the time of Discman and the beginning of e-mail.  It even opens with the fascinating line:

I didn’t know what e-mail was until I got to college. I had heard of e-mail, and knew that in some sense I would “have” it. “You’ll be so fancy,” said my mother’s sister, who had married a computer scientist, “sending your e-mails.”

The girl, Selin, has been hearing all about the World Wide Web from her father. He described that he was in the Met and one second later he was in Anitkabir in Ankara.

When she gets to school she was given an Ethernet cable and asked, “What do we do with this, hang ourselves?”

This sense of flat, cluelessness pervades the story and the narrator is so detached that it was an interesting perspective to read about.  It also made Harvard sound awful.

When she gets to school, she is living in a triple. Her roommates are already there.  Hannah Park is whistling along to Blues Traveler, while Angela, their other roommate had been playing The Last of the Mohicans soundtrack on repeat since she got here.  And since she got there first, she claimed the one bedroom and hadn’t come out.   The girls agree that they will split the one bedroom in shifts of three.

Hannah tells Selin that she should bring a poster–preferably psychedelic.  But they don’t have any, so she buys one of Einstein–Hannah’s second choice.  But that poster proves to be nothing but terrible for her (ans she doesn’t even care about it).

The Harvard students hated Einstein–he had invented the atomic bomb, mistreated dogs, neglected his child.  There were many greater geniuses than Einstein.

Finally getting sick of the abuse she retaliated “maybe he really is the best and even jealous mudslingers can’t hide his star quality.” Nietzsche would say that such/a great genius is entitled to beat his wife.

Then it was time to sing up for classes. She signed up for a literature seminar.  But the professor said her essay was so creative, he worried that she was more creative than academic.  She says very little : “I like words.”  And then doesn’t get into the class.

She did get into a Film class and an art class called Constructed Worlds.   The art teacher is a jerk:  His first questions is how old she is.  When she says 18 he replies,  “Oh for Christ’s sake, This isn’t a freshman class.”  But when he offered her the class she hesitantly took it.

She also signed up for a Russian class.  The teacher explained that her name (Barbara) would be Varvara.  The students were to take names and a girl named Svetlana said she wanted a different name than that.  She wanted to be Zinaida.  But the teacher wouldn’t let her.  When Selin said that she should be Zinaida, Svetlana agreed, that she would be a perfect Zinaida, but the teacher refused her as well and named her Sonya.

Svetlana and Sonya became friends.   Svetlana tells her of a horrifying episode in her past.  In Yugolsavia her father was a psychoanalyst.  Two of his patients became opposition leaders and had soldiers search their apartments.  Fortunately, he had no indictments because he had a photographic memory.  Svetlana has a graphographic memory and needs to take notes about everything

We learn a lot about the Constructed Worlds class.  In addition to showing slides, Gary talks about artifice.  Who selects what we see?  Museums, which we think of as the gateway to art, are actually the main agents of hiding art from the public. Museums owned 100 times as many paintings as they exhibited.  He told them that they have Harvard IDs and should go into all of the museums and demand to see what they aren’t showing.  “Let’s do it” a student shouted.

Eventually they go to the Museum of Comparative Zoology and demand to see behind the scenes.  This proves to be mostly torn up taxidermy.  But Gary was unflappable–you think it’s any different at the Met?

Svetlana and Selin take the T to the Russian neighborhood in Brookline to see abut renting Russian VHS tapes.

“Names [like Alewife and Braintree] were unheard of in New Jersey, where everything was called Ridgefield, Glen Ridge, Ridgewood or Woodbridge” (19).  [Don’t forget Bridgewater].

Svetlana is far more open, telling Selin that she always imagines the man she will lose her virginity to–what if she knows him already?  Selin says she never thought about it.  She did wonder on what day she would die but never the question about sex.

We get to the crux of Selin’s problem near the end of the story: In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish too.

The final project for Constructed Worlds was an art project.  But Gary said they couldn’t use the studio and couldn’t use the school’s art supplies because that was “like life.”

Final exams are after the Christmas holiday break, and we see her home in New Jersey (an amusing scene) and then her return to Boston

As I describe this story it’s very clear that not much happens.  But the narrator is strange and engaging and I really loved it.  This could easily be a novel and I would love to read it.

So it obviously was a novel and I did enjoy reading it.

Even though I assumed from the excerpt that it was the Constructed Worlds story line that would be most prominent.  It quickly falls aside as she starts to focus more on Russian.

Selin has no real use for the internet until she realizes that she can have an email relationship with a boy.  Ivan is a Hungarian boy in class with her.  They are reading this primer, “Nina in Siberia,” a story that Selin regards as ridiculous.  It is obviously rudimentary for rudimentary students, but the concepts in it–love, loss, fear–seem to be too much for new students.

“Where is Ivan?”
“God alone knows,” said Ivan;s father.

There is also a lost lost component–the whole story seems to be about Nina’s quest for this Ivan.  Since Selin’s classmate is also Ivan, the connection is inescapable.

In the classroom story, Ivan has written Nina a letter that says he has gone to Siberia.  Selin says that she read and reread the letter as if it was written to her.

Amazingly, despite how much time the Ivan story takes up, there is a lot more going on in Selin’s life.  There’s some interesting tensions with her family.  She runs out of money.  Her mother is willing to provide for her but Selin doesn’t want to take money from her.   So she gets a job teaching high school equivalency math.  She wanted to teach ESL but they needed math teachers.

The interactions with the students who don’t really want to be there are darkly comic and sad at the same time.  She doesn’t last very long.

After about 100 pages, we move to the Spring semester.  Selin has fallen for Ivan but she is unclear if he reciprocates.  So as Selin starts writing emails to Ivan she begins insinuating the class story onto their own lives.  Their blossoming relationship is as oddly stilted as the one in the classroom book.  In the classroom book it is stilted because they can only use the present tense. In Selin’s emails, neither one seems to be asking the other anything of consequence.  And the replies are just as foolish.   Indeed, I found Ivan to be very frustrating as a character.

She probes his feelings by writing cryptic questions.

Why does a Greek hero have to fight his fate?
Are dice a lethal weapon?

Often with one real question tucked in like, “Why did you stop coming to math?”

He would respond to her hints at affection with sentences like this:

The seduced atom has energies that seduce people and these rarely get lost.

But because she has always loved texts, she spends as much time with his emails as she does with her classwork.  This “relationship” takes up a lot of her time, but she doesn’t have much else to do anyhow.

Selin as a narrator was really compelling to me.  Remote and distant but sort of fascinated with everything.  She also has a dry sense of humor that makes the way she describes things to be engaging and sometimes laugh out loud funny.  Since we have come to care about Selin it’s easy to be appalled at how much Ivan leads her around.  It’s not clear if Ivan knows what he is doing to her or not.  Is he an emotionally stunted man or is he a real (as one reviewer put it) “fuckboy.”

It’s hard to know for sure because the story comes from Selin’s point of view.  She is always reading things into his actions.  However, it is clear that he has a girlfriend.  And he does tell her about the girlfriend with regularity.

Then Ivan winds up going away (not to Siberia though).

When they are both on campus again, they begin spending a lot of time together, but everything is still cryptic, and he still has a girlfriend.

As the summer approaches, Selin wants to do anything but go home.  She applies to Let’s Go, the travel guidebook to be a researcher for Russia, Spain, or Latin America.  Svetlana later told her that everyone who did Let’s Go had a nervous breakdown.

And that’s all Part One.

I found many aspects of the first part of the story to be very satisfying.  I was in college in the 90s in Boston, so there was a lot of familiarity.  The Harvard aspect introduced a lot of newness to what I felt then.  Selin also reminded me of people who you knew in college who seem really self confident and who seem so assured in their decisions, but whose decisions are so perplexingly dumb that you can’t figure out what’s going on.  She needs to get out of her own way.

Things are very different in Part Two and I found I didn’t enjoy it as much.

Rather than doing Let’s Go, she ultimately decides to spend the summer in Hungary (where Ivan is from) teaching English in remote villages.

She travels to Paris (her mom is elated that she is going to Paris) to stay with Svetlana and her aunt before her trip to Hungary.  But when she tells of her plan to go to Hungary the aunt says, the boy who convinced you to go to Hungary, he must be very handsome.  But even Svetlana is wary of Ivan: “I think you see yourself as an automaton in the hands of Ivan”

When she travels to Hungary there’s some kids from the ESL school on the flight.  They are a minor port in a storm of an unfamiliar country.  Especially when she runs into Ivan and he becomes her guide in his home country–even helping to bring things to the hostel where she is staying.  He eventually brings her to meet his family, and she stays there for a time.  She is now spread very thin with her few things in a hostel and at Ivan’s house.

But her job teaching is in a remote village–not close to Ivan and far from the hostel.  She is staying with a family to teach them English.  Her life becomes very different as she tries to learn as much Hungarian while teaching English.

It’s amazing how the story goes from an insular story about college to a globe-trotting exploration all within the confines of an unconventional romance.

I really enjoyed Selin as a narrator, even if Was really disappointed in her as a character.