I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: IVY-“Beautiful” (1995).

Ivy was a trio consisting of Andy Chase and Adam Schlesinger.  They wrote beautiful gentle indie pop songs.  But what set them apart was singer Dominique Durand.  Dominique was from Paris, living in New York and studying English.  She sings in a delightfully accented style (not unlike Laetitia Sadler of Stereolab).

The band released five albums over about fifteen years and their sound morphed in different ways, although it never strayed from the blue print of gentle, catchy echoing melodies.

“Beautiful” was the song that introduced me to the band.  It’s a bit faster than some of their later songs, with a fast drum beat and some (relatively) loud guitar chords.

The chorus, with some ripping guitars over Durand’s gently soaring “Don’t you look beautiful,” so exemplifies the late 90s for me, that it should be locked in a time capsule.

And it’s all over in two and a half minutes.

Fascinatingly, this article from Variety lists seven of Ivy’s “best” songs and “Beautiful” is not one of them.  Shows what they know.

[READ: April 1, 2020] “Love Letter”

This is a tremendously political short story written as a letter.

The letter is written on February 22, 202_

It is from a grandfather to his grandson Robbie.  Robbie wrote an email but the grandfather is hand writing back (not sure emailing is the best move).

He uses initials so as not to cause any more trouble for G., M., or J. (good folks, all, we very much enjoyed meeting them).

Believe me, I am as disgusted as you are with all this.

He believes that “they” think that M. “should” have let someone in authority know about G. “since being here is a privilege and not a right.”  And what of J?  Even if J is a citizen, they may say she forfeited certain rights by declining to report G & M.

As the story progresses we learn a bit more about what has happened here.

The new attitude seems to be that a person is “no patriot” if he refuses to answer a “simple question” from “his own homeland government.”

A judge opposed, perhaps too energetically, the D.O.J.’s ouster of sitting judges. He endured much abuse in the press and his property was defaced.

The grandson seeks advice, wondering if he should do anything to help J.

The grandfather asks what exactly can he do? Your involvement will not help (especially if you don’t know where they have taken her, fed or state).

He begs his grandson not to underestimate the danger of this moment.  In the early days, he wrote critical letters to the editor and one day, a cop (nice guy, just a kid really) pulled him over and chatted with him and then said some of us heard you like to type….).

He sees that there was a critical time to act back when they never could have imagined what would happen.  They assumed that things would be undone and return to normal.

It did not seem that someone so clownish could disrupt something so noble and time-tested. … Because this destruction was emanating from such an inept source, who seemed (at that time) merely comically thuggish, who seemed to know so little about what he was disrupting, and … because every day he/they burst through some new gate of propriety, we soon found that no genuine outrage was available to us anymore.

And here is the metaphor for our times

a guy comes into a dinner party, takes a dump on the rug in the living room.  The guests get all excited, yell in protest.  He take a second dump. The guests feel, Well, yelling didn’t help.  (While some of them applaud his audacity).  He takes a third dump, on the table, and still no one throws him out.  A that point, the sky has become the limit in terms of future dumps.

It is with much resignation that he ends the letter talking about how precious and deer the country seemed once.  He wishes they could have passed it on intact  But he feels that his grandson is doing his best by simply rising in the morning, being as present and kind as possible and keeping the light of decency alive.  So that someday when (if) this thing passes, the country may find its way back to normalcy.

This story is so frighteningly plausible.