I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: NAP EYES-“Mark Zuckerberg” (2020).

I really like Nap Eyes.  Their blend of deadpan singing combined with seriously rocking guitars makes a fantastic collection of quirky indie rock.

The earlier songs were lyrically introspective like:

But it’s easy to understand
What it is that makes me feel this way
It’s not so easy to make
All of my problems go away
Then again what else is there—

This newest song seems to go in a very different direction:

Is Mark Zuckerberg a ghost?
Maybe, maybe
Where are his hands?
And why don’t you ever see them public?

And what does he do with all that sand?
He collects sand, right?
I think I read that somewhere (Seems innocent enough).

It’s not clear if there’s any message in the song.  But when it is sung in Nigel Chapman’s melodic deadpan, it make the lyrics seem much more serious.

The melody is so incredibly catchy–a simple guitar riff completed by a distorted guitar riff following along.  It feels quiet and loud at the same time.

The middle part (about the sand) slows things down with a wonderfully haunting guitar lick.  Then the song returns to the fast opening riff once more.

Then the boys in a park are singing a beautiful sweet refrain of “transcendence is all around us.”

What a fantastic song that goes in several different directions all in less than three minutes.

The video is pretty great too.

[READ: January 20, 2020] Giant Days Vol. 7

It has been such a treat reading these Giant Days books in a row like this.  This story works so well when you don’t have gaps in between.

The book starts at Christmas time.  And it is time to meet Susan Ptolemy’s brood of a family.

In Chapter 25, first we meet Bobbie who picks Susan up at the bus station.  Bobbie sets the tone letting us know that Susan is the baby and that she and the other sisters all have lives of their own.  They don’t have time to worry about their parents–they can deal with their own problems.  Susan walks into her house and is immediately a little girl again because “six older sister is basically six deadly enemies who know everything about you.”

Susan calls her sisters to a pub to talk about their parents.  Btu they laugh at her that she just noticed how weird their parents are. Susan even tries to enlist the help of one her adorable nephews to encourage her parents to stay together..

Nothing seems to help and her parents are still fighting.  Until a woman with big frizzy hair and a child in a rucksack shows up at the door.  It is Susan’s sister Ellie, the prodigal daughter.  No one thought she would come for the holidays.  She crashes in and announces that she’s moving back home with her baby.  Esther asks if Susans’s parents “even feigned fury?”  Nope, they were just happy to have someone back in their house again.

Oh and, perhaps more importantly, Susan ran into McGraw on a night out.  But she was so drunk she doesn’t remember any of it.

Esther’s Christmas  was unusually eventful as her dad was out in the garden burning the living room carpet (we never find out why!!).

Chapter 26 is back at school and Dean is destroying the souls of poor Ed Gemmell and McGraw.  Dean is currently experimenting with sauerkraut.  And both of the boys love lives are in the toilet.  McGraw and Emilia have had “a talk” and Ed Gemmell’s date with Jenny was mostly her talking about her ex.  Perversely, Dean is the one in love.  Ed is distraught that Dean has found love and he hasn’t, until they learn that the two of them met in an MMORPG (the difference between real life and the game is amusing but not mean).

Things move very quickly and soon Dean is selling off his most precious comic books because…marriage beckons!  I am thrilled at how Max Sarin is able to convey Dean’s happy-but-not-really expression–masterful.

No matter how much Ed is angry with Dean he knows that Dean doesn’t really want to get married.  So he hatches a plan (with Esther) to undo the wedding…by literally slicing the fiance in half (in the MMORPG of course).

Chapter 27 sees Esther getting political.  A BestFresh is opening down the street from Esther’s work and she is thrilled with the promise of actual fresh food, not the crap you buy at the corner store.  But the rest of the employees set her straight on the origins of BestFresh and in a fantastic jump cut Esther is curled up in a blanket realizing she is an ill-informed sheeple.

In a flashback we see young Esther deGroot, star of the debating team.  But she was so roundly trounced that she gave up caring about anything and embraced darkness as a lifestyle.  So she and Ed agree to go to the protest of Best Foods.  She even comes up with the winning slogan “Worstfresh more like”!  She scores another victory with the new chant “Bestfresh and Satan, basically same thing.” The leader of the protest Joshua, has really taken a shine to our Esther.

So imagine the excitement when they actually win and BestFresh agrees not to build.  Esther invites hunky Joshua to dinner.  But as soon as they get back to her place, once Joshua sees the taxidermied animals and leather boot, he is out of there.  Esther is devastated and the only one home is Ingrid who tells her that a boy like that demands ideological purity–the impossible standard.  Esther relaxes and tells Ingrid how wise she is until she opens her eyes and sees what Ingrid has painted on the walls (revealed the next chapter).

The end of the chapter is a funny callback to the protest when they find out that instead of a BestFresh they will have an Organic Smorgasbord.  Which seems pretty good (and their Quinoa fruit cup is to die for), unless you look a little deeper..

Chapter 28 is an amusing bottle episode of a story involving the garage of of their apartment.  The landlord said it was off limits and they should forget about it.

Things are not well between Ingrid and Daisy.  Ingrid is furious about the painting on the wall (it’s really insane) and while Daisy can’t sleep she hears noises in the garage.  What could it be?  Daisy and Esther sneak around and are jumped by Susan who was “visiting the, er, night hospital.”  And yet it wasn’t her making the noise.

They need a white knight and Daisy calls McGraw of course.  He arrives immediately brandishing a baguette.  They are puzzled why he is fully dressed in the middle of the night.

Esther is convinced it is the entrance to an evil hyperloop station.  Which is what?  “An assassin climbs in at one end and is fired through at high speed emerging at the other end to shoot someone.”  McGraw, ever logical, declares it’s just not an efficient way to assassinate people.

The next night Daisy confides in Esther about her problems with Ingrid. Devil Esther wants to kill their love in the cradle, but sweet Esther says that maybe they can work things out without pointing the finger of blame.

The revelation of what is lurking in the garage is pretty spectacular.  As is the revelation that Susan clearly has something to hide and it concerns McGraw.

The drama!  The intrigue!  Thank goodness I have book eight already.