SOUNDTRACK: THURSTON MOORE-in studio at KEXP, March 11, 2008 (2008).
This interview was headlined ‘Thurston Moore: Not a “Real Guitar Player”?’ which is pretty funny. The Sonic Youth guys have been defying conventional guitar playing for years. And then in 2008 Thurston put out a solo album called Trees Outside the Academy, a beautiful delicate album of acoustic guitar songs.
The interview covers this very subject and concludes that maybe back when they started he wasn’t a guitar player, but now, 25 years later, he certainly is. Moore is charming and funny and relates a very amusing story about being on the cover of Guitar Player and then embarrassing himself in front of one of his idols.
But this download is all about the songs. Thurston (and violinist Samara Lubelski–who plays great accompaniment, but doesn’t really get any on air time to speak) play four songs from Trees: “Sliver>Blue,” “The Shape is in a Trance,” “Frozen Gtr” and “Fri/End.” He sounds great in this setting, especially under close scrutiny. I’d always assumed that there was a lot of improv in the SY guitar world, so to hear him play these (admittedly not difficult) songs flawlessly is pretty cool. I actually wondered if he’d be hesitant (he admits the acoustic guitar is a fairly new thing for him), but not at all (although he says he screwed up on a chorus, but I never heard it.
It’s a great set and its fun to hear Thurston so casual.
[READ: April 14, 2011] “Farther Away”
The subtitle of this essay is “‘Robinson Crusoe,’ David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude.” As with Franzen’s other recent essays, this one is also about birding.
Franzen explains that he is hot off the work of a book tour (for Freedom) and is looking for some solitude. He decides to travel by himself to the island of Alejandro Selkirk, a volcanic mass off the coast of Chile. The island is named after Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish explorer who is considered the basis for Robinson Crusoe. As such, Franzen decides to travel to the remote island, decompress and read Robinson Crusoe while he’s at it. The locals call the island Masafuera.
I haven’t read Robinson Crusoe as an adult, so I don’t know the ins and outs of the story. Franzen has a personal resonance with the story because it was the only novel that meant anything to his father (which must say something about Franzen’s father, no?). The upshot of what it meant to Franzen’s father was that his father took him and his brother camping a lot as a way to get away from everything.
However, for Franzen, on his first experience of being away from home for a few days (at 16 with a camping group), he had terrible homesickness. He was only able to deal with the homesickness by writing letters.
When he arrives on Masafuera, Franzen’s writing really takes off. He has some wonderful prose about this treacherous space. Although he comes off as something of a yutz for relying on a Google map to learn about the terrain and for bringing an old GPS which has more or less run out of battery. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 