I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: KAWABATA MAKOTO [河端一]-That Awaking: Good​-​bye Me (2020).

Recently, Kawabata Makoto [河端一], mastermind behind Acid Mothers Temple, revealed a new bandcamp site for some newer releases.

This album is his most recent release (and I believe the impetus for this new site).

This album has two sons, each over a half an hour.

On “Summoning Souls To Meet” (35:47), a quiet, pretty acoustic guitar melody plays throughout the background while on top comes a series of electric guitar noises an explorations.  It’s a pretty improvisational song that never goes too crazy in the experimentation (although there are a few times when he plays some wild solos).  That acoustic melody keeps it grounded.

“That Awaking : Good-bye Me” (31.29) opens with a piercing sound which slowly morphs into another beautiful acoustic melody.  He then overdubs a pretty electric wah wah guitar solo.  It’s a lovely piece of music, although I wish that piercing ringing note was not there (it wouldn’t be Kawabata if there weren’t some high frequency sound floating around).  Eventually, you lose that high note amid the wonderful soloing he’s doing.  It’s soaring and psychedelic, sometimes fast sometimes echoing.  The last ten minutes or so seem to have some backwards looping going on.

Kawabata Makoto recorded this in May 2020 using electric guitar, acoustic guitar, and driftbox.

[READ: June 13, 2020] “White Noise”

This story is about Harvey Weinstein, except that it technically isn’t.

It’s about a movie mogul named Harvey who is on trial for abusing women.  It basically covers a short time before his verdict.

I wondered why Cline would feel compelled to write this fictionalized account of such a dreadful man.  I don’t often read the accompanying interviews with writers (I guess I should). The important takeaway is that “Curiosity about a consciousness doesn’t translate into endorsement.”

Because the story is mostly just about Harvey in his own mind while he awaits the verdict, her observations about the story fill in enough details.  She had read an article about Harvey

waiting out the last days of the trial in a borrowed house in, I think, Connecticut. And either I imagined or read in this article that he was watching a lot of Netflix and Googling himself obsessively. Something about that was so piteous and human. I wrote the majority of the novella going off whatever I already sort of knew, or vaguely knew, about Harvey, the broad outlines. But I didn’t, for example, Google whether the real Harvey had children.

She imagined that he was the kind of person who had two daughters (one who supported him a bit and the other one who dismissed him outright).  She imagined a granddaughter who was as aloof as anyone else to him.  (I love that she imagines his children as daughters which makes things even more unfathomable).  She also imagined him getting ketamine injections.

But mostly she was interested in his own mind.

This character, Harvey, is a predator, but he doesn’t see himself that way. He’s also irritable, hungry, bored, self-pitying, scared. I’m interested in exploring those moments of humanity, the banality and self-delusion, the recognizable foibles. Fictional Harvey is petty in the way we are all petty, he’s lonely and afraid. If anything, this humanity makes his acts of predation more ominous, or underscores their deviance—it’s not as though he’s nothing more than an Evil Man. It’s much more—frightening? disturbing?—to me that characters like the fictional Harvey might experience themselves as victims, pitiable and under attack, or that we can see elements of ourselves in this fictional Harvey.

The one component of the story that is sort of a plot point is that Harvey looks out the window and believes that the man living across the street is author Don DeLillo.  he is inspired by this connection to believe that he can option the writes to film DeLillo’s (unfilmable) novel White Noise.  I love the detail that he remembers the first line of White Noise as “A screaming comes across the sky” which is actually the first line from Gravity’s Rainbow.

This delusional idea of filming this book is the only thing that keeps Harvey going, until finally at the end of the story he has the courage of his conviction to actually talk to DeLillo himself.

Perhaps it is too soon to read this story and really get the full fictional impact.  Maybe in a few years when the Weinstein story isn’t so fresh, it will be an even “better” story.