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Archive for the ‘Clare Sestanovich’ Category

Clare Sestanovich–“Annunciation” (Harper’s, July 2020)

Posted in Abortion, Becca Mancari, Clare Sestanovich, College, Coronavirus, Harper's, Huh?, Joseph, Marriage Trouble, Paramore, Pregnancy, Quarantine, Sex, Short Story, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert on August 11, 2020| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: BECCA MANCARI-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #62 (August 11, 2020)

I saw Becca Mancari open for Joseph a couple of years ago.  She really won us over with her diverse musical sound (even though it was just her and a pedal steel guitar player on stage).

This set, with a full band, sounds very different and even better.

At the show, she was funny and thoughtful.  That attitude continues now.

She postponed this concert when the Black Lives Matter protests began in May: “I wanted to be so careful of respecting an extremely important movement in our country both now and then. So, we decided to all wait, learn, grow, protest, and listen.”

She has a new album The Greatest Part from which these four songs are taken.

The band she has assembled is terrific.  Zac Farro on drums (he is also in Paramore) plays many terrific flourishes and fills.  Bassist Duncan Shea (this is filmed in his woodsy home studio) doesn’t show off, but adds some great accents and lines as needed.  Guitarist Juan Solorzano plays perfectly off of Mancari–whether it’s leads or just interesting sounds.

Mancari’s songs often seek to reveal the unspoken, and you can hear that process in the way Caleb Hickman’s inventive keyboard parts respond to Mancari’s voice and Juan Solorzano’s searching guitar lines. And keyboardist Caleb Hickman fleshes out the sound.

Several of these home concerts have featured a full band, but

It’s a joy, in this time of isolation, to see her band connect and build something beautiful, despite the masks. “The band and I have been in our own little Corona-pod, but we wanted to be extra safe,” Mancari says of the protective gear.

“Hunter” starts with quietly sung vocals and guitars. I love the way the drums kick in about a minute into the song with six slow, powerful thumps followed by Solorzano’s raw, rough guitars.  The surprising pitch shift into the catchy “whoo”-filled chorus really makes the song special.

Introducing “First Time,” she says, “I came out when I was pretty young and it went pretty badly.”  This slower song is written for people like her to feel included.  The song is simple, but once again, the band fleshes it out wonderfully.  I love the cool theremin-like sounds from Solorzano and the super catchy middle part with a guitar solo and fun bass lines that make the chorus sound even catchier.

“Bad Feeling” has a gentle echo on this more down-tempo song.  It has a nifty retro feel.  And so does “Like This” which opens with a slow thumping bass line and some wah wah guitars.  The synths sound like a flute and you could easily see a flute solo floating over the middle of the song.

She introduces the last song, “I’m Sorry,” by saying, “When I wrote this record it was about my own personal journey towards transforming from anger into forgiveness.  It’s about learning to say that you’re sorry to yourself and others around you.”  The song is slow as befits the title.   The middle of the song has surprisingly catchy chorus and a fun dah dah dah dah dah part.  As the song ends it really rocks out again with great drums from Farro.

I’m looking forward to seeing her again.

[READ: August 10, 2020] “Annunciation”

This story is about Iris and it seems to race through her life, focusing on a few moments of significance.

It starts with Iris on a plane.  Her seat mates are a married couple sitting on either side of her.  The wife likes the window, the husband liked the aisle, Iris in the middle.  But they are not fighting–when the woman comes back from the bathroom, she happily shows Iris and her husband a birth control strip–they are pregnant!

On the way home from the airport, Iris tells her mother about this and her mother is appalled. How could they say something so early?  That baby could still die (Iris believes that the baby has died from the way her mother says that).

Years later, when she is about to graduate from college, Iris is dating a virgin, Ben.  She can’t figure out why he is still a virgin–he’s not ugly or weird.  On the night before graduation, she changes that.

A few days later Iris’ friend Charlotte laughs at her: A one-night stand with a virgin and she gets pregnant.  The movie writes itself.  She doesn’t tell Ben.

Iris is staying at Charlotte’s house.  Charlotte’s parents paid for the abortion and she promises she’ll pay them back even though they say she doesn’t have to.

Iris finds a place to live–it’s a room in the apartment of a married couple.  A married couple who sleeps with another married couple.  Iris doesn’t ask anything about this arrangement but Charlotte wants to find out all that she can. So on New Years Eve, instead of going to Charlotte’s family’s house, Charlotte comes to Iris’ weird set up.  By the end of the night Charlotte has had sex with the married couples.

A few days later, Iris is walking down the street and she sees Ben in a restaurant.  He is with an old lady and seems just as surprised to see her as she is to see him,.

The old lady insists that Iris sit with them.

I’ve only read one other story by Sestanovich and I really liked the open ended nature of it.  It felt incomplete in an intriguing way.  This one felt incomplete in a frustrating way.  There was just too much left out and I didn’t really care about any of the characters.

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Clare Sestanovich–“Old Hope” (New Yorker, December 9, 2019)

Posted in Clare Sestanovich, Moonchild, New Yorker, Pregnancy, Set at School, Sex, Short Story, Tiny Desk Concert on December 26, 2019| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: MOONCHILD-Tiny Desk Concert #925 (December 16, 2019).

Here’s another band that I’ve never heard of.  I rather assumed with a name like Moonchild, that the band would be kind of trippy.  But that couldn’t be further from the truth.  What they are, though, are amazing musicians.  It’s almost comical when the camera cuts back to each one who always seem to be playing a different instrument.

Amber Navran, Max Bryk and Andris Mattson joined forces in 2012 at the University of Southern California and their debut album, Be Free soon followed. This year, they released their fourth album, Little Ghost, intricately meshing jazz, R&B and hip-hop sounds under Amber’s subtle vocal feats.

I love so many parts of these songs, that it’s a shame I don’t really like the songs themselves.

“Money” has some quietly funky music with cool bass sounds from Andris Mattson’s keyboard.  There’s also some interesting echoing sounds from Max Bryk’s keys.

But Amber Navran’s voice is just too 70s soft rock for me.  Even Efa Etoroma Jr. on the drums seems kind of wasted with the simple beat he is providing.  I really didn’t like the song once she started singing.  But then Bryk played a flute melody and Navran played a second flute melody at the same time (and I’m very much into flutes at the moment), so that was great.  There was also a very cool keyboard/bass line later in the song from Mattson.

The backing vocals from Erin Bentlage, Michael Mayo and Micah Robinson are very pretty.  But I really wasn’t digging it.

And then Bryk stops playing the keys and plays a saxophone melody.  Then they cut to Mattson and he is playing the fluegelhorn and the keybaord bass at the same time.  Then they cut back to Amber who is also playing a saxophone.  Wow.

I was blown away by them. I just didn’t like the song.

For “The Other Side” Mattson switches to acoustic guitar (is there anything he can’t do?) and Erin Bentlage picks up a ukulele.  They pay a lovely acoustic melody with nice piano sounds from Bryk.   It’s a shame this song went in the direction it did (the repeated lyric “the grass is always greener on the other side” isn’t terribly inspired either).  It’s so soft and gossamer that it could just float away.

After the is song, Amber

took advantage of the moment and amplified a cause near and dear to her heart. She asked us to “spend our privilege” and do more in the fight for people of color in the United States. They closed with a jam from 2017’s Voyager.

She spoke for a minute or so about finding a good cause that is helping people of color (even though she is not a person of color) and saying that if you earned something because of privilege it isn’t yours anyway, so it’s time to give it back.  I love the quote that “it’s not charity, its solidarity.”

The final song, “The List” is a jazzy number.  And once again I wish I liked it more, mostly because Amber is so nice.  As the blurb notes:

From the moment Amber walked into the building and throughout the performance, she wore a smile on her face and expressed sincere gratitude for the Tiny Desk platform.

I enjoyed the end of the song with the whistling.  There’s also an amusing moment when she says “give em some bass”  (there is no bassist) but Mattson plays a really funky bass line to take the song out.

[READ: December 5, 2019] “Old Hope”

I had been putting all of the New Yorker stories on the day the issue came out.  However, with the Short Story Advent Calendar taking up all of the Mondays in December, I figured I’d throw these pieces at the end of the year.

This is the kind of story that I really enjoy.  I’m not sure what about it speaks to me, but I enjoyed everything about it.

I like the vaguely specific opening of “When I was about halfway between twenty and thirty.”  The story is also chock full of details that I need to quote.  Like “I lived in a large, run-down house that other people thought was romantic.”  Her roommates are boys (not men, not really) who were often shirtless and smoked bongs that they didn’t clean.

One afternoon the narrator wrote an email to her high-school English teacher “because I remembered him as handsome in a remote way.”  She believed he went to a prep school, although “in college I learned that going to these schools entailed a lot of lacrosse and furtive blow jobs.” (more…)

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