SOUNDTRACK: PEARL JAM-Austin City Limits (2009).
Pearl Jam records (and sells) most of their shows and they occasionally videotape them as well. But they don’t do TV all that much (excepting the recent Late Late Show episodes). There seemed to be something special, or at least different, about Pearl Jam on Austin City Limits. Think of it almost like Unplugged Updated.
It opens slow with Eddie on an acoustic guitar and strings behind him. In fact, the whole set seems less heavy than many of their sets. But that’s not to say that the band doesn’t rock out, because they do.
The first six songs of the set come from Backspacer. And then they bust out “Army Reserve” (which makes sense given who is in the audience, see below). Then there’s a wonderfully raucous version of “Do the Evolution” (one of my favorite PJ songs).
After that riotous track, they bring the strings out for one more song. It’s a rather funny little joke because it’s just the strings and Eddie on acoustic guitar playing “Lukin,” the 80-second song that is so fast you can barely hear the words.
[READ: November 20, 2011] “Perchance to Dream”
A while back I read all of the Jonathan Franzen articles that were published in The New Yorker. I thought I had read everything he’d published until I realized I had forgotten to read this piece (possibly his most famous) that was published in Harper’s. It fits in well with this weekend’s theme because it was mentioned in Evan Hughes’ article that I talked about yesterday and because David Foster Wallace is mentioned in it.
As with most of Franzen’s non-fiction, it’s not easy to write about critically unless I want to argue with him, which I don’t necessarily want to do. So instead, I’ll try to summarize. Of course, this is a long and somewhat difficult article, so let’s see what we can do with it.
The first surreal thing is when you see the byline: “Jonathan Franzen is the author of two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, and is writing a third.” It’s hard to imagine he got a huge article in Harper’s before he wrote The Corrections.
The second surreal thing comes in the text: It opens with “The country was preparing for war ecstatically, whipped on by William Safire (for whom Saddam Hussein was ‘this generation’s Hitler’) and George Bush, whose approval stood at 89 percent.” And it is only a few paragraphs later when he mentions Patriot missiles that it clicked that this was written in 1996 and not 2001 and that he was talking about the 1991 Iraq invasion. He mentions this as a prelude, saying that he was trying to sequester himself in order to start writing again.
Then he talks about Paula Fox’s novel Desperate Characters as a benchmark in terms of insight and personal conflict, even if it is so crazily outdated (that someone would throw an inkwell!). He talks about this book quite a bit. I’m, not sure I found it compelling enough to want to read, but it’s always interesting to hear a fan write about a book I’ve never heard of. He will return to this book throughout the essay. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 