SOUNDTRACK: MAC AYERS-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #118 (November 30, 2020).
I’ve never heard of Mac Ayers and while I respect the fact that he plays everything in this Tiny Desk Home Concert (and syncs things up nicely) and even wears different clothes for each instrument, this 15 minute set was pretty torturous for me.
If you were to ask what kind of singing do I hate the most, my answer would now be Mac Ayers. I hate the tone of his voice, I hate the way he does those whiny ooooooh at the end of his lines (note in the first song the first verse the way he says “you” and then the way he ends the rhyming word do (he even makes a face like it hurts him as much as it hurts me.
Obviously my opinion is not the popular one, because Ayers is apparently a big star. But not in my house.
The 23-year-old Long Island native shot this in his basement back in September (hence the ‘register to vote’ comment). Mac’s modus operandi lends itself to the Tiny Desk naturally. No over-produced beats, lots of live instruments and a stunning vocal range — and he handles all duties: guitar, bass, keyboard and background harmonies for three songs from previous albums and the premiere of a new song, “Sometimes.”
He plays “She Won’t Stay Long” and then fiddles on the keyboard as he introduces “Walking Home.” This song is a little bit more enjoyable for me. There are fewer grace notes. Although I do dislike the chorus.
He talks to us from his guitar to introduce the third song (I like that he’s mixing things up).
“Sometimes” is a new song. It reminds me a lot of Billy Joel (not his voice, but the melody–must be a Long Island thing).
“Easy” has some terrific harmonies, although I hate the lead vocals. I give him a lot of credit for being an exceptional musician, I just hate the music he makes.
We were well on the way to hosting Mac Ayres at our D.C. offices until we had to shut down and pivot.
I hope this Home Tiny Desk means he doesn’t have to do one in the office.
[READ: December 13, 2020] Modern Times
I saw this book at work and, given some of the blurbs, I thought it might be, if not fun then at least unusual to read flash fiction from an Irish writer. I also prefer this Australian cover (right).
The book starts out with a bang. “A Love Story” is bizarre and memorable. In a page and a half, Sweeney talks about a woman who “loved her husband’s cock so much that she began taking it to work in her lunchbox.” The story is bittersweet and outrageous at the same time. It was a great opening.
But I feel like the rest of the book lost some steam. Possibly because I assumed all of the stories would be this short. It felt like the longer stories dragged on a bit (which is strange for stories about 4 pages long).
Interestingly, “The Woman With Too Many Mouths” even addresses this (to me anyway) as the narrator says, “I could expend many pages recounting my time…. but you would become bored, and worse, you would forget all about the woman with two many mouths.” The woman with too many mouths had moths (among other things) fly out of these mouths.
“A New Story Told Out of an Old Story” is, as the title suggests, a story within a story. It feels like a fairy tale with a Woodcutter and a Miller’s Daughter. There’s even a Grandmother and a Wolf. In the internal story, the wolf attacks the grandmother. She survives, but the scar from the wolf makes her husband not want to look at her and the villagers treat her badly. When you get to the Grandmother’s story, she has a different take on things.
This book is very current and I am reading “The Palace” as being about the pandemic. Specifically, the outrageous bungling of the response by the current (and soon to be ex!) administration in the U.S.
The palace was sick no one believed it, but it was true.
In the story the palace physically deteriorates. The king patches it up but doesn’t actually do anything about the problem.
Soon reports of the sickness were breaking in the news on a daily basis. The king gave a rousing speech about battling the forces of evil that had created the sickness and people screamed ‘Long live the King’ until they were hoarse.’
“The Death of Actaeon” is one of several stories broken down into many small “chapters.” In this one, a woman offers to have sex with her landlord to shave money off the rent. He is married and is at first reluctant, but then he agrees. Chapter Five in its entirety is “Five years pass.” The title comes from the woman’s daughter, an art critic, who shows her the titular painting.
I enjoyed “The Show Trial” probably because it was so short. A woman is on trial. She is in her underwear and is found guilty on two counts of poverty.
“The Story” is a lengthy story within a story again. This time the narrator and his family move into the house of the deceased Albert Solberg. While cleaning up, he finds a story that Solberg wrote. It contained pages and pages of how Solberg “took” a young maid and was “full of gratifying detail.”
Interestingly, this story (which is six pages) also felt long and also addressed this issue:
It is amazing how many words people use; words that require a third or fourth lifetime. It is as though they believe that words are immune to time.
“The Celebration” felt endless to me. It is a confusing story of several women and they way they interact with the narrator, a young boy and son of one of the women. The boy’s father may be having an affair with the other two women.
In “The Love Child” a woman with no children interacts sweetly with a child on a tram. The child’s mother:
looked at the woman as if to say ‘mind your own fucking business,’ or ‘get your own child, bitch.’
When the tram crashes, the child winds up with the nicer lady.
“The Cheerleader” was one of those super short stories that I did not like. The cheerleader was born to be a cheerleader. The final line? “Red skirt + white socks + pompoms = cheerleader”
“The Woman Whose Child Was A Very Old Man” was a very long story (for this book) and I thought it was great. A poor woman has a baby. What can she do with the baby while she goes to work? She found out (by accident) that if her baby got very cold it would freeze and turn into a doll. When the baby thawed out, it was fine. How convenient! Midway through the story the woman discovers that she has a gift for writing. She submits to a contest
And then the best (or worst) thing happened. Her story was accepted. She earned €€€.
But she forgot about her child!
“Flowers in Water” was overall pretty reasonable. A man makes movies with “an invisible camera.” I’m not sure what that means. His movies are very good. When his ex-wife drops off his daughter to live with him, his creativity fails. Until his daughter asks him to make a movie for her.
In “Alexander the Great,” the titular figure fell in love with is childhood friend Hephaestion. The narrator also fell in love with her best friend.
I don’t know if I only enjoyed Sweeney’s stories about sex, but I rather liked “Mad Love.” In this one a man only likes pornography from the silent movie era. The narrator is also amusing.
My friend says he does not mind having sex. I believe him. I tell him sex is overrated (I am married).
The man buys a vintage peep show machine.
While you look into the peep show machine, your legs grow stronger and your arms spring with muscles and your torso broadens. Air fills your lungs. Your arteries redden and your organs oxygenate until you feel you are made of iron.
In “A Theory of Forms” the narrator works in a school for adolescents with learning disabilities. She has sex with one of the boys. It’s a bit hard to get past that.
I thought that “The Chair” should have ended after the second paragraph.
We take turns in it now.
First I sit in the chair and my husband administers the shocks, and then a week or so later, I administer the shocks and my husband sits in the chair. Other couples have their own ways of doing things, but this is what suits us.
That tells the whole story. It didn’t need to be three pages longer.
I felt like “Blue” was a metaphor for something (a woman’s body slowly turns blue), but I couldn’t figure out what.
“Oranges” has an interesting premise. A woman eats an orange every day. When she goes away for a trip, one of the oranges rots. Her husband does not eat oranges. But while she is away, he fills his entire house with oranges. Then lets them all rot. But I felt like it didn’t do much with that premise.
“The Birthday Present” felt like a nice full story. It was odd, for sure, but it felt solid and was enjoyable. A woman buys a lifelike sex doll for her husband for his birthday. She is tired of sex and her husband wants it all the time. This woman also works in a school for adolescents with learning disabilities. That doesn’t really enter into the story though. When the couple’s children arrive for a visit, the woman has to conceal the sex doll (named Tina).
In “The Handyman” a woman wants to seduce the handyman but can’t seem to bring herself to do so.
“White” ends the book with a woman who wants to paint everything white. The visceral description of the paint as “smooth creamy milkiness” was very satisfying. But the woman is unsatisfied with her husband and is surprised and pleased to see a man that she went to high school with working at the hardware story. She had “given him a blow job once behind the sports hall.” It’s pretty twisted.
Overall, I didn’t love this book, even though I wanted to.
Table of Contents.
A Love Story
The Woman With Too Many Mouths
A New Story Told Out of an Old Story
The Palace
The Death of Actaeon
The Show Trial
The Story
The Celebration
The Love Child
The Cheerleader
The Woman Whose Child Was A Very Old Man
Flowers in Water
Alexander the Great
Mad Love
A Theory of Forms
The Chair
Blue
Oranges
The Birthday Present
The Handyman
White
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