SOUNDTRACK: TAME IMPALA-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #69 (August 24, 2020).
With so many artists that I’ve never heard of doing really long Home Tiny Desk Concerts, why on earth did Tame Impala, one of the biggest bands around, only play for 16 minutes?
The studio version of Tame Impala is pretty simple on paper: All songs are written, produced and performed by Kevin Parker. For the live version, Parker is still front and center but surrounded by a host of musicians who interpret his recorded work almost to a tee.
For his Tiny Desk (Home) Concert or his “Tame Impala Soundsystem” Parker brought Jay Watson and Dom Simper together to
do this kind of electronic jam with heaps of equipment around us and we’ll recreate the songs with samplers and sequencers. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while and thought Tiny Desk would be the opportunity to do it.
So the three of them are in a room with banks of keyboards and all kinds of buttons to push and knobs to twist. There’s even a guitar (most notably on “Is It True”).
They play two songs from this year’s The Slow Rush. They open with “Breathe Deeper.” The most interesting part of the song comes at the end when Parker starts messing around with the mixer in front of him and he starts generating drum beats and manipulating the sound of the entire song.
“Is It True” is similarly dancey and Parker’s soaring falsetto rides over the top of the song nicely.
They end the set with “Patience” a fantastic 2019 single that for some reason, didn’t make it to The Slow Rush. This is my favorite song of the three. The melody is great and with the pace slowed a bit it makes the song a bit more memorable.
When I saw then live, their show felt massive. This show sounds massive too, yet it’s all confined to a tiny room.
[READ: August 20, 2020] Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Getaway
I was looking forward to reading this book after really enjoying Book 12. But I felt like this one wasn’t quote as laugh out loud funny as some of the others. I find Greg’s family dynamic to be the funniest part of these books and his family doesn’t feature all that much in this one.
This book is all about snow. And snow means snow days from school, sledding and snowball fights.
The book begins with some environmental concern about global warming (it is unseasonably hot that winter). Despite the genuine concern for global warming, Greg’s take is always a little warped–he’s concerned that if the ice caps melt there could be a giant monster hiding in there.
There’s a side story about Greg forgetting to do his presentation for International Day. He wanted Italy because he loves pizza. But so does everyone else, so in a lottery, he wound up with Malta. Of course, he knows nothing about Malta–but then neither does anyone else. So he tries to whip up a project on the day it is due. His “authentic” clothing is picked from the lost and found box and the “authentic” food comes from the cafeteria: a hot dog wrapped in meatloaf. The punchline, that a kid in his class is from Malta, is a pretty darn funny
What’s interesting in this book is that a lot of the bad things that happen aren’t Greg’s fault. Yes, he forgot to do his project but the reason the whole room descends into chaos is because Brazil and Bulgaria get into a fight.
Greg’s mom has been implementing screen-free weekends which obviously sucks. Greg, as we know, loves technology. He plans to be on the robots’ side when they eventually take over.
Screen-free weekends mean that he has to spend most of his time outside, which he doesn’t like. Parents always say it’s fun to play out in the snow, but you don’t see them doing it very much.
I think this is the first time we’ve head that Greg lives on a hill–half way up Surrey Street. The book then details a ton of kids who live on his street. It’s fun for Kinney to create and mock a whole bunch of new characters. But its hard to believe there can be quite so many kids on one street.
One of the weirdest characters in the series is Fregley. He’s awesome in small doses. Like when Greg walks past his house and Fregley’s head is on top of a snow man body and Fregley asks “wanna finish ‘building’ me? The mind reels.
Some of these new kids include Mitchell Pickett who sells snowballs and makes a fortune; a kid named Speed Bump (ha); and Baby Gibson. I love when Kinney draws kids who are preposterously small. But Baby Gibson is great because he never seems to get any older. (“For all I know Baby Gibson is thirty-two years old and he’s got kids of his own”).
There’s also the Garza twins and the Marlee sisters who randomly attack people who come into their yard. There’s also Trevor Nix who used to live up on the hill and then moved to lower Surrey street–now neither group of kids likes him. He plays an important part in the snowball war at the end.
The crux is that the kids at the bottom of Surrey Street (Lower Surrey Street) live on the flat part and jealously guard it from the kids on the hill (Upper Surrey Street). Since the Lower Surrey Street kids live on flat ground, most of them are athletes. The kids on Upper Surrey Street never get to play with a ball because it always rolls down the hill.
Winter time is revenge for the Upper Surrey Street kids, though because they can refuse to let the Lower Surrey Street kids use the hill for sledding.
Winter also means kids getting sick and not covering their mouths. It also means kids trying to see if their spit would freeze when it hit the ground (there’s a lot of bodily fluids in this book). There’s also the hilarious story of a kid who covered his sneeze and he blew his head clean off. The kid then went on to get a job with no head–could this be true??
But mostly winter is about being cold. Greg an Rowley have along walk home from school. There’s different ways to warm up on the walk–although the pizza man gets mad if you don’t buy anything and the library makes you read books (not really). It’s also unlikely that any houses on the street will let you warm up (or use their bathroom).
The alternative is to stop in an Greg’s grandma’s house. She is in Florida for the winter (and sends pictures of her and her friends in their bathing suits!). But while his grandma (and her dog!) are warm and toasty, their house is empty. So Greg and Rowley pop in to warm up. Of course the heat is not on, so they turn it up and put thier clothes in the dryer.
Things are fine until Greg’s mom shows up to do laundry. What could she possibly think they were doing?
There’s always some wonderfully absurd thing that Greg’s mom does that comes back to haunt him. Like when he cant find gloves to wear to school and he uncovers Mr Morsel, the puppet his mom used to get him to eat his vegetables. Well, it will keep his hand warm, so he wears it to school. The fact that it returns later in the story is one of the great things about Kinney’s story telling.
I also love Manny because he is so awful. But in this case I love his truly horrifying snowman friends.
There’s also a nice call back to the safety patrol, which Greg was in once. But now all the safety patrol are girls (because the boys are terrible at it(). The girls are wonderfully strict and vindictive.
For me the best parts of these book are when things go to absurd extremes. If the first half of the book was a little slow, the second half makes up for it.
It starts with the kids in school having to take their boots off because they were making the floors wet. Then everyone’s socks got wet. It made the school smell so bad that the janitor left the windows open and the school was really cold the next day. The kids did anything to keep warm, and when they saw snow falling very hard outside, they feared they’d be locked in the cold school all night, so they started rioting for food.
The last fifty or so pages of the book do what Kinney does best–take a scene and make it escalate so far out of control that you can’t believe he thought it all up. Greg and Rowley build an igloo which automatically makes the other kids come and pile on it. When Greg’s dad says they have to stand their ground and he encourages them to build a fort and even to put a flag up on it.
As soon as they do, the whole neighborhood comes to pound them with snowballs. When Greg and Rowley leave to get more supplies the rest of the kids all decide to make their own forts and soon an all out snowball war begins.
Soon enough, the kids from down the hill get involved and it’s like a hundred kids all hurling things at each other. Kinney even gets to do a full two page spread of the chaos (almost like a Where’s Waldo). It is hilarious. Although perhaps the only thing that is funnier is when the snow plow comes through and all of the kids go flying–there’s something about Kinney’s silhouettes of kids flying through the air that really cracks me up.
So yes, this one wasn’t my favorite book, but there were still a lot of very funny moments in it.
And I’ve already got book fourteen to read.
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