SOUNDTRACK: GRACIE AND RACHEL-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #98 (October 19, 2020).
I only know Gracie and Rachel from a previous Tiny Desk Concert. I was entranced by that performance and am similarly entranced by this one.
Gracie and Rachel are perfect musical mates. Their styles conjure contrast, with Gracie Coates’ more pop-leaning keyboard melodies alongside Rachel Ruggles’ classical background. They’ve been honing their orchestral pop sound since high school. These days they share space in a NYC apartment and are grateful to be able to “commute from their bedrooms” at a time when so many collaborators can’t be together.
They open with “Strangers.” Gracie plays the keyboards and sings lead with a wonderfully breathy voice. Rachel plays the violin and then starts adding in percussion and singing higher (sometime haunting) backing vocals.
They’ve just released their second album, Hello Weakness, You Make Me Strong. The title of the album reflects their positive attitude despite angst. The duo made much of this music in the past year and a half, in the very room they’re performing this Tiny Desk (home) concert
On “Ideas,” they sing together a classical melody with a tinge of autotune. Then the song shifts to the delicacy of Gracie’s keys and Rachel’s pizzicato violin.
The lyrics to “Ideas” highlights that attitude by encouraging us to dig inside ourselves and discover our creative spirit” “So take your little ideas / Make them a little bit stronger / Throw out the ones you can’t / You don’t need them any longer.”
When the drums come in they are deep and heavy and there’s a very cool bass slide (triggered by Rachel on the SPD-SX sampling pad). I love the highs and lows of this song.
“Sidelines” features Rachel playing the drums live (on the sampling pad with mallets) while Gracie sings and plays the keyboard melody. For the bridge, their voices intertwine in a lovely way, weaving in and out of each others melodies. Then Rachel picks up the violin and adds some more lovely pizzicato to the song. When she adds her soaring backing vocals its really quite angelic.
“Underneath” is a song about getting underneath ourselves. Rachel plays squeaky, haunting violin melodies to accompany the keys. There are several parts to this song and I love the way they sound so different–from the strummed violin in the bridge to the rising vocal line of the chorus.
These songs are definitely poppy but they have an unusual sensibility that must come from Rachel’s classical ideas. The songs are really wonderful and I’m curious what they sound like when fully fleshed out on record.
[READ: December 1, 2020] “Over the Plum-Pudding”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my fifth time reading the Calendar. I didn’t know about the first one until it was long out of print (sigh), but each year since has been very enjoyable. Here’s what they say this year
You know the drill by now. The 2020 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories from some of the best writers in North America.
This year’s slipcase is a thing of beauty, too, with electric-yellow lining and spot-glossed lettering. It also comes wrapped in two rubber bands to keep those booklets snug in their beds.
As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check back here to read an exclusive interview with the author.
It’s December 1. To officially kick off the 2020 Short Story Advent Calendar, here’s a story about truth, fiction, and characters who can’t tell the difference from the late author and humourist John Kendrick Bangs. [Click the link to the H&O extras for the story].
This story contains some parodies of other writers and uses them as an excuse for why the editor’s own Christmas collection did not get published on time.
It opens with a note from Horace Wilkinson, the editor at Hawkins, Wilkes & Speedway Publishing. He sets out to explain why the advertised Christmas book “Over the Plum-Pudding or, Tales Told Under the Mistletoe, by Sundry Tattlers” was never published. He has been getting questions from the authors who were supposed to be paid for their work when the collection was published. He wants to publicly set the record straight.
Right off the bat, he places the blame entirely on the shoulders of Rudyard Kipling. This made me chuckle.
Unfortunately, much of the humor depends on knowing not only Rudyard Kipling, but also a couple other authors as well.
There are a lot of asides in this story that made me smile as well. Like that the book he was going to publish
was to be unique among modern publications in that, while professing to be a Christmas books, the tales were to be full of Christmas spirit. The idea struck me as a very original one. …it occured to me that a Christmas publication containing some reference to the Christmas season would strike the public as novel.
Obviously, in 2020, this sentiment is hilariously absurd, but I wonder how absurd it was in 1901.
The book was to contain stories from Mr. Hall Caine, Dr. Doyle, Mr. Kipling, Richard Harding Davis, Andrew Lang, George Meredith and a few others.***
Mr. Caine’s contribution was a charming little fancy originally written for children (!) called “The Inebriate Santa Claus.” He includes an excerpt in which Sanat is drunk, but having success with a complicated chimney has helped to sober him up a bit.
Mr. Meredith’s story was next. To call it dictinionaryesque is not too high praise to bestow upon it. What it was about, he never really gathered. The excerpt is full of lengthy sentences and very long words.
the vaguely infinite, beyond which, unconscious of the perils of the inspired homecoming lies that of which homogeneous men may speculate but never by reason of its inflated limitations, approximate without expletion.
Mr. Davis’ contribution was a sketches of the inimitable Van Bibber. Van Bibber sees a poor child freezing in the street, he takes off his dress coat and wraps the child in it. But this means that when he goes to the cotillion he will not have an dress coat, only a fur-lined overcoat. What’s a man to do.
Up next was a Sherlock Holmes story from Dr. Doyle. In this one, he comes back from the dead–because he wasn’t dead, he’d just had amnesia and has no idea who he is. Later at dinner, he finds a diamond brooch in a turkey gizzard which “convinced me that I am Sherlock Holmes. Such a thing could happen to no other.”
Andrew Lang’s story was one of his charming made-over fairy tales and introduced a fearsome dragon named Fafner into the story.
But he then moves on to Kipling. Kipling chose to contribute a Mulvaney story. Mulvaney and his companions Ortheris and Learoyd start on a Christmas spree. But Kipling drew these characters so vividly and vigorously that these three musketeers of the British army got beyond his control and broke loose from their story.
They rushed through the other stories in the book. They drank Santas’ whiskey and let Fafner lose. Fafner killed the trio and then rushed through the other stores, burning down everything in sight. On the morning the book was to be published there was nothing left–no characters, just smoking ruins.
There’s postscript but it doesn’t really add much to the story. Nevertheless, this bit of metafiction was really fun (probably a lot more fun in 1901), and a great start to the holiday season.
***I have heard of some of these authors that he parodies here. But I had not heard of these guys. So, from Wikipedia:
Hall Caine:
Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine CH KBE (14 May 1853 – 31 August 1931), usually known as Hall Caine, was a British novelist, dramatist, short story writer, poet and critic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Caine’s popularity during his lifetime was unprecedented. He wrote fifteen novels on subjects of adultery, divorce, domestic violence, illegitimacy, infanticide, religious bigotry and women’s rights, became an international literary celebrity, and sold a total of ten million books. Caine was the most highly paid novelist of his day. The Eternal City is the first novel to have sold over a million copies worldwide
Richard Harding Davis
Richard Harding Davis (April 18, 1864 – April 11, 1916) was an American journalist and writer of fiction and drama, known foremost as the first American war correspondent to cover the Spanish–American War, the Second Boer War, and the First World War.[1] His writing greatly assisted the political career of Theodore Roosevelt. He also played a major role in the evolution of the American magazine. His influence extended to the world of fashion, and he is credited with making the clean-shaven look popular among men at the turn of the 20th century.
Andrew Lang
Andrew Lang FBA (31 March 1844 – 20 July 1912) was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. The Andrew Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews are named after him.
George Meredith
George Meredith OM (12 February 1828 – 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times.
And for completion’s sake:
Dr. Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and medical doctor. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. Doyle was a prolific writer; other than Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels. One of Doyle’s early short stories, “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” (1884), helped to popularise the mystery of the Mary Celeste.
As for Sherlock Holmes’ death, this story is somewhat prescient!
Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in a final battle with the criminal mastermind Professor James Moriarty in “The Final Problem” (published 1893, but set in 1891), as Conan Doyle felt that “my literary energies should not be directed too much into one channel.” However, the reaction of the public surprised Doyle very much. Distressed readers wrote anguished letters to The Strand Magazine, which suffered a terrible blow when 20,000 people canceled their subscriptions to the magazine in protest. Conan Doyle himself received many protest letters, and one lady even began her letter with “You brute”. The recorded public reaction to Holmes’s death was unlike anything previously seen for fictional events. After resisting public pressure for eight years, Conan Doyle wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles (serialised in 1901–02, with an implicit setting before Holmes’s death). In 1903, Conan Doyle wrote “The Adventure of the Empty House”; set in 1894, Holmes reappears, explaining to a stunned Watson that he had faked his death to fool his enemies.
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He was born in India, which inspired much of his work. Kipling’s works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888). His poems include “Mandalay” (1890), “Gunga Din” (1890), “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” (1919), “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), and “If—” (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story. His children’s books are classics; one critic noted “a versatile and luminous narrative gift.”
The characters that are mentioned here were unfamiliar to me though, so:
Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris
Rudyard Kipling introduces, in the story The Three Musketeers (1888) three characters who were to reappear in many stories, and to give their name to his next collection Soldiers Three. Their characters are given in the sentence that follows: “Collectively, I think, but am not certain, they are the worst men in the regiment so far as genial blackguardism goes”—that is, they are ‘trouble’ to authority, and always on the lookout for petty gain; but Kipling is at pains never to suggest that they are evil or immoral. They are representative of the admiration he has for the British Army—which he never sought to idealise as in any way perfect—as in the poems collected in Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), and also show his interest in, and respect for the ‘uneducated’ classes. Kipling has great respect for the independence of mind, initiative and common sense of the three—and their cunning.
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