SOUNDTRACK: KING PRINCESS-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #6 (April 8, 2020).
I’ve heard a lot of buzz around King Princess–that she’s fun and puts on a wild show.
This home Tiny Desk is not wild in any way.
“Welcome to the quarantine shed!” King Princess exclaims. She’s in jogging pants and sitting on a fluffy white chair, with two guitars, an amp and a tiny keyboard at her side. “I’m in Hawaii and brought as much gear in the carry-on of my plane ride as possible.”
She calls herself KP, which I rather like. These songs are really quiet. She plays “the three songs from her late 2019 album, Cheap Queen, in ways I never would have imagined.”
“Isabel’s Moment” is played on a quiet keyboard. She says it’s an homage to people experiencing quarantine thirstiness–texting their exes and ex friends and everyone. It’s my least favorite of the three because I don’t like the keyboard sound she chose. But her voice is excellent.
“Prophet” is played on one of her guitars (with lots of echo and slightly out of tune she admits). The chorus turns surprisingly bright. She says it’s about the entertainment business and it is now more relevant than ever. We’re all out of jobs right now.
She says this is back to making music in my room, trying to find that creative spark we had as children, when I could sit in my room and make things for hours.
“Homegirl” is also on that guitar and sounds really pretty, too. I really like her singing voice quite a lot. It holds up well in this quiet setting–so if Bob says that it’s very different from what he’s used to, I’m very curious about what her live show is like.
But I really don’t like her speaking voice, I must admit.
[READ: February 2020] Burning Bridges to Light the Way
Evidently I asked S. for a book by David Thorne a few years ago. I don’t know what book it was, I don’t recognize any of his titles and I didn’t even recognize his name when I saw this book. She didn’t get me the book then, but she did get me one this past Christmas.
Turns out that David Thorne is an Australian smart ass.
As the foreword from Peter Goers puts it, this book is full of “barely coherent rants about friends, family, and colleagues.” He continues,
David isn’t a dreadful human being all the time. He has to sleep and I know he cares a lot about squirrels. There are parts of this book that even hint at a certain degree of empathy for other human beings. Some human beings, not all of them, maybe three.
I’m not sure who Peter Goers is, but his introduction is very funny. Don’t skip it:
I once asked David if he’s autistic and he replied, “It’s pronounced artistic and no, not really, I can draw a cat though.” I assume he was joking but it’s hard to tell with David.
In the first essay, David says that every year when he releases a new book friends and associates say that they are going to sue him if he says anything derogatory about them in his book. But he’s not worried. Nobody he knows has enough money to hire a lawyer.
Once his associates, Simon threatened him by calling him and putting on a Scottish accent and saying that he had 48 hours to remove the post or else.
Or else what Simon?
This isn’t Simon. It’s one of Simon’s friends
Please. You don’t have any friends.
Yes I do, arsehole.
He then rags on his coworker Ben who asked that he no longer writes that he has progeria. And his Coworker Melissa Peter who asked that he not use her last name.
A former coworker once said of him “Humour born of someone else’s humiliation is just easy humour”. This “isn’t a great quote and doesn’t make a lot of sense but words were never Thomas’ strong point.”
He then proceeds to list dozens of people and an embarrassing or horrible thing they have done.
Number 20 is its own chapter about his childhood friend Michael who told a story about an old guy and oral sex and fifty dollars. The story changed over time and as they got older David had more and more (hilarious) questions about it.
He then mocks two people who vape and only care about comics. Also a friend’s ex-girlfriend who once posted on Facebook: “I;m feeling sad about myself. Can all my friends please say something they like about me?”
I mean, come on. How is this acceptable?
So David is mean about all of these people (are they real? Who knows). But he’s also mean about himself”
I’ve never had a large network of friends. I’ve told myself over the years that it’s better to invest my time and energy in one or two good friends, rather than collect the whole set, but the truth is, I’m a bit of a selfish dick and far too lazy to put in the effort.
Spliced between these people are little “stories.” They are usually one page pieces that might have something to so with something else going on in the book or might not.
In “23andMe” he tells of people having an intervention for Holly who has been shouting Italian phrases left and right. Like “Mamma Mia, Whatsa this?” Turns out that 23andMe said she was 3% Italian and 2$% Scandinavian, “Itsa why I tan easily and like Volvos.”
The “Office Fight” section is a hilarious blow by blow account of two women in an office fight. It grows from passive aggressive to actually violent. Eventually there’s an HR consultation.
David writes a piece about Keith Flint from Prodigy committing suicide and of the time he and a friend went to a Prodigy show and David bought a concert shirt that was too small. But had to wear it because his other shirt fell in the toilet. It’s hilarious how absurd the story gets.
He gives advice on home haircuts (for your children and yourself) and a very funny story about being on first class and sitting next to an asshole who gave the stewardess hard time when she asked for an autograph. David called the man a dickhead and tempers flared. It was later on that David saw an article in the in-flight magazine about the man. It was Daniel Day Lewis. The rest of the story slags off DDL for just about everything in the most hilarious way.
He has a photo story about his son called “The Exciting Adventures of Seb” which I can relate to.
Photo one is the back of his head as he stares at a video game.
Frame two has the same picture with a text box saying “Make me a Hot Pocket.”
He then has a chapter called “Lies Thomas Has Told on Dating Websites” which is seven pages of just what the title says.
Near the end of the book, David talks about his friend JM who hates liberals and posts about them on his Facebook account. David constantly picks him apart because his dumb conservative memes are dumb. “Usually when JM shares a stupid meme, I make a sarcastic comment and he sends me a fourteen paragraph angry message and doesn’t talk to me for a week.”
Once he shared a meme about ‘illegal Mexican farm workers,’ I commented with an image of his face Photoshopped onto a head of corn with a speech bubble saying ‘They took our cobs.’ And he actual unfriended me.
David has a funny crack at the NRA
It’s true of course, guns don’t kill people. The guns would be perfectly safe if people left them alone. The NRA has always said this, and they’ve always been correct, but somehow they don’t understand the implications of what they’re saying and have avoided their own conclusion. The fact that such a slogan is so evidently contradictory to the interests of a Gun Club says a lot about the institution and its place in the political process. But hey, it doesn’t contain words over two syllables and fits on a bumper sticker.
This book had me laughing pretty much throughout in shock or in genuine appreciation for the humor. This is David’s 7th book (according to his cats at the end of the book) and I will definitely be looking for his earlier ones.
I Just Read About That... 
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