SOUNDTRACK: BRIGHT EYES-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #86 (September 28, 2020)
I was never a fan of Bright Eyes. Something about them just never quite appealed to me. And since Conor Oberst was so prolific, I got tired of him too.
But then he made better Oblivion Community Center with phoebe Bridgers and I really liked the album and the live show. So I’ve rethunk Bright Eyes.
They were supposed to play a show in Bethlehem this summer with Lucy Dacus. I was more interested in seeing Lucy, but I would have certainly gone.
So here’s Bright Eyes with their first new album in almost ten years.
They recorded this Tiny Desk (home) concert with Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis at ARC Studios in Omaha, Neb., while Nate sits 1,500 miles away at Lucy’s Meat Market, a well-equipped studio in Los Angeles filled with sweet-sounding vintage keyboards. Singing and seated behind him is Becky Stark, better known as Lavender Diamond, along with their daughter.
The three songs they perform from Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was, are intense, with stripped back rawness and lyrics that are not always decipherable, filled with struggle and hope.
They open with “Mariana Trench” in which Mogis is on pedal steel, Walcott is on piano and Becky and daughter sing backing vocals. Oberst’s voice sounds as strong and confident as ever.
Up next is “Pan and Broom.” Nate starts the drum machine and then plays the organ. Meanwhile Mike is playing the Marxophone which is a kind of tiny echoing sounding zither machine.
“Persona Non Grata” is about being insane enough that people don’t want you around. Conor sits at the Moog, while Nate stays on the organ and Mike goes back to the pedal steel. Oberst plays a cool-sounding solo while Mike plays a pedal steel solo along with him. It sounds really good.
“Shell Games” is an older song. Mike switches to the guitar and Nate jumps over to the Casio. The guitar is quiet but adds a cool fuzziness underneath the synth sounds. This song also seems to be a bit more intense than the others.
This feels like a stripped down sound, but I don’t actually know what the recorded versions sound like.
[READ: September 26, 2020] “A Logic Named Joe”
During the COVID Quarantine, venerable publisher Hingston & Olsen created, under the editorship of Rebecca Romney, a gorgeous box of 12 stories. It has a die-cut opening to allow the top book’s central image to show through (each book’s center is different). You can get a copy here.
This is a collection of science fiction stories written from 1836 to 1998. Each story imagines the future–some further into the future than others.
As it says on the back of the box
Their future. Our present. From social reforms to climate change, video chat to the new face of fascism, Projections is a collection of 12 sci-fi stories that anticipated life in the present day.
About this story, Romney writes
Murray Leinster was one of the most prolific writers in the heyday of science-fiction pulps. … It reads like a creative exercise in conditional statements, with just a touch of black humor thrown in. … My favorite aspect is the implication that AI is evil because we, humans, make it evil, not because some robot has gone rogue.
The other stories in this collection so far have been more of a detailed explanation of a utopian future. This story is an actual story–and an exciting one.
It’s a shame that the central motivator of the narrator is a sexist trope, but otherwise the story is really cool and amazingly prescient when it comes to technology.
The story jumps right in and doesn’t fully explain what’s going on just yet.
The narrator works at Logic Company as maintenance worker. On August 3rd, a Logic called Joe came off the assembly line. Two days later Laurine came into town, and that’s when the narrator saved the world.
The narrator is married and Laurine is the woman he dated before he met his wife Laurine “is a blonde that I was crazy about once–and crazy is the word.” She dumped her exes and even killed one of them.
So, yes, a sexist underpinning to this story.
But the technology is impressive. Logic invented a trick circuit that will select “any of ‘steenteen million other circuits hooked up to the tank-and-integrator set up and they were connecting all the businesses in the country.”
Everyone has a logic in their house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only its got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get.
You can get TV channels, you can talk to other people’s logics in their house, you can get the weather forecast, or who won today’s races or even who was mistress of the White House during Garfield’s administration.
Logics changed civilization.
Joe should have been a normal Logic but something went wrong. It made Joe an individual. He was installed in the Korlanovitch house on Saturday night. On Sunday morning the kids turned Joe on and left him on all day. Joe was buzzing and meditating and the narrator thinks when went exploring in the tanks
Joe ain’t vicious, he just wants to work. And he discovered new things. He connected to the other machines and installed a new service: “if you want to do something and don’t know how to do it, ask your logic.”
Normally if you ask certain things, you get an error “Public Policy Forbids This Service.”
You have to have censor blocks or the kiddies will be askin’ detailed questions about things they’re too young to know.
One of the maintenance working that works with the narrator had just had a fight with his girlfriend when they heard about this new “feature” that Joe had installed. So he jokingly asked the work Logic how he could get rid of her. The logic thought and then spat out an actual answer which concluded with “You cannot be convicted of murder. It is improbable that you will be suspected.”
Then all around the country people were punches in questions like “How can I make a lotta money fast.” A woman asked “How can I tell if Oswald it s true to me.
Laurine came into town and her hotel room had a logic. When it asked her the above question, she asked how she could find Ducky (the narrator). Her logic doesn’t know but will work on it.
Soon after, the narrator’s wife calls to say that her logic started asking for personal information. When it knew who she was it reeled off her name, sex, coloring, credit debt and arrest records. She is furious that all of this is known, but doesn’t want it to go away until she can find out the scoop on her neighbors.
This is followed by his logic at work patching in Laurene. She says she misses him and they so that they should get married. He tells her that he’s already married and Laurine sayss he’ll have to talk to his wife about that. Now how will she find his wife?
As he realizes the trouble he’ll be in with his wife if Laurine shows up, he decides to get on it. He suggests they turn off the tank, but that would destroy civilization as they know it. They are going to have to get to Joe.
This was a funny and clever story that predicts the Internet pretty impressively.
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