SOUNDTRACK: BTS-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #82 (September 21, 2020).
BTS is the biggest band in the world right now. As the news the next morning said
Korean boy band BTS played its first Tiny Desk Concert on Monday — and broke the series record for most YouTube views on its first day, which happened in about 25 minutes.
When I was younger I hated all boy bands on principle–they were fake creations with no soul. But either I’ve mellowed with age (true) or I’m less exposed to pop music so no longer sick of it (true) or maybe I just get a kick out of band from South Korea making people excited in the U.S. Whatever the reason, BTS makes me smile.
Partly, it’s the band members themselves:
V; Jin; Jimin; J-Hope; RM; SUGA and Jungkook [I have no idea if that’s a left to right listing or just a random assortment of names] all seem to be really enjoying themselves and each other. Perhaps all boy bands have this camaraderie (I’ve never watched enough to notice), but these guys are pretty entertaining–right down to their fabulous clothing choices.
The little I’ve seen of BTS makes me think that they are known by their hair color choices: the blue one, the purple one, the blond one, the brown one, but in this set, aside from a blue and a blonde, the rest of the guys have black or brown hair. So instead, you have to go by their voices I guess.
One of them (on the right) has a really fantastic falsetto, another has a much deeper voice. One of them seems to be a rapper. The rest I can’t really tell apart–I’m not entirely sure if it makes sense for there to be seven of them, but it works.
With BTS cooped up in Seoul, the group held true to the series’ spirit by convening a live band for its Tiny Desk debut, and even arranged to perform in a workspace with a music-friendly backdrop: the record store VINYL & PLASTIC by Hyundai Card in BTS’s hometown.
The following introduction makes me laugh because I have literally never heard this song (or really any BTS song, as far as I know)
Opening with this summer’s inescapable “Dynamite” — the group’s first single to hit No. 1 in the U.S., as well as its first song to be fully recorded in English
“Dynamite” has a real disco vibe and is really catchy. Moreso than the other two songs, I feel. Perhaps because its in English, but I don’t think so. The melody and delivery is really spot on. And I love the whoohoos and heys.
I really like their live band. It’s kind of hard to pay attention to them when you have seven guys singing and dancing around in front. I don’t know if they normally play with a live band, but the guitar from Shyun is really grooving. He also plays a lot of unobtrusive but wild solos throughout the songs. The bass from Kim Kiwook is really smooth and funky
They introduce the next song in English.
From there, the group dipped into its back catalog, seizing on the opportunity to showcase its quieter side while (mostly) staying uncharacteristically seated. The breezily propulsive “Save ME,” from 2016,
starts with a squeaky keyboard sound from DOCSKIM followed by the falsetto guy on the end (who seems to sing more than anyone else–I wonder if he’s the favorite) but they can all do some impressive falsetto notes in the verses as well. I get a kick out of how they have a really hard time staying seated–with one or more of them seeming to need get up and dance.
This song has a rap verse (in Korean I guess) which is pretty interesting to hear.
They discuss the song in Korean (with subtitles) and then introduce the final song in English.
It’s the full-on power ballad, 2017’s reflective “Spring Day,”
which seemed especially true to BTS’s hopeful nature: Introduced with a few optimistic words from rapper and singer RM (“It’s been the roughest summer ever, but we know that spring will come”), the song reflects on a need to wait out hard times, even as the weight of present-day pain feels oppressive.
The song builds from a slow intro to a pretty big ending with some notably solid drumming from KHAN.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this tiny concert.
[READ: September 22, 2020] Birthday
Birthday is not a novel, it is an autobiographical essay. It’s important that this distinction is made because many of Aira’s novels feel autobiographical. But this one is meditative and a very personal–it was translated by Chris Andrews.
Aira turned 50 in 1999 (he dated this work July 18, 1999). He imagined it as an opportunity to prepare for the future. But nothing really changed. He went on as usual.
It was a short time later, when walking with his wife, Liliana, when he stated that the phases of the moon could not be produced by the earth’s shadow as he had learned. But his wife said there was no way anyone thought that’s how the moon’s phases were created. He felt so dumb for thinking this, that he spent the next several days going over in his head what else he didn’t know. He spends most of the book mocking himself for his ignorance.
In the second chapter he has traveled to Pringles (his home town) for a week. He went to a café to write and the waitress there said she was also a writer. She watched him and talked about her aspirations. The rest of the time there he returned to the same café–he is a creature of habit–but the girl was never there again.
The remainder of the chapters are him musing about various subjects.
He reads some stories by H.G. Wells and marvels at how he got the future so wrong, but in interesting ways.
Half the time, he stopped short, failing to imagine, for example, that technology would advance beyond the phonograph and the light bulb, and half the time he miscalculated the directions that progress would take. … Wells makes a gross error when he assumes that in the twenty second century women will still be submitting to their husbands, and unmarried girls will still be accompanied by chaperones, and so on.
I also enjoyed his observation about astronomy and “primitive” cultures and how ethnologists tend to do an incomplete translation of these languages.
Somebody translating from their language is bound to write “Five moons ago” when what the person really said was “five months ago” [the translator would not consider that the word “moon” could signify two things]. That’s how the Indians in ethnological studies and later on in novels and films end up saying “Five moons no raining” (since the idea is to make them sound stupid, they’re not allowed to conjugate verbs either)…. A proper translation is a complete translation. In their language the Indians say “It hasn’t rained for five months,” exactly as we would
He then moves on to death and the mythical Last Judgment. If the dead have to wait for Judgment Day, then they have to wait until the end of time. So that time in between must be blank–there can’t be a second timeline. “People can’t be definitely judged at the moment of their death, because they go on affecting the present via the continuing reverberation of their deeds and works.”
However, when that person dies, the time between death and the last judgment seems to her like an instant, because if you think of that time as a dark waiting room, a new timeline seems excessive.
Each person falls asleep separately and wakes up together.
He discusses the mathematician Évariste Galois who was twenty years old at the time of his death. He had been provoked into an argument about a woman and the loudmouth challenged him to duel the following day at noon.
Galois spent the intervening hours writing feverishly in order to leave a record of his revolutionary mathematical discoveries. He was able to do this in a few hours and in the space of a few pages. Galois could do it because he was a mathematician: mathematical notation made it possible.
However, a novelist under the same circumstances, would have been doomed to failure. You can’t write a novel the night before dying. “Not even one of the very short novels that I write.” A novel requires and accumulation of time, a succession of different days, without that, it isn’t a novel.
He then talks about a spring–he actually quoted this passage from himself in On Contemporary Art. If you have a 36 inch spring and put a 3 pound weight on it, it will shrink down to 4 inches. But to make it go down another inch you would have to put about 300 pounds on it, and then more and more.
And this is true of all original thinkers. In On Contemporary Art he used the analogy while talking about Marcel Duchamp, but here he uses it to talk about Euclid. Once he had the fundamental idea, geometry was done. In the 2,000 years since then innumerable geometers, could add only a few superfluous details. This is true of other pioneers like Darwin and Freud as well.
Aira compares this to writing. He says some writers claim not to worry about success but he says it was very important to him as a way of justifying his writing to his family.
He considered ceasing to write novels .
This is what I spent my life doing; it’s all I now how to do. And now I don’t want to do it. Maybe I should change direction, find a new activity. But I really don’t know how to do anything else so if I stopped writing.. what would I do? Live?
This is amusing because since 1999 when he wrote this he has written nearly 50 novels. I’m glad I wasn’t this reflective on my birthday.
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