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Archive for the ‘Culture Shock’ Category

Arthur Bradford–Dogwalker (2001)

Posted in Arthur Bradford, Culture Shock, Deafness, Death, Dogs, Drugs, Funny (strange), Huh?, Kiss, McSweeney's, Oddities, Short Books, The Beatles, Unlikable main character, Yuck! on October 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: KISS-Rock and Roll Over (1976).

After Alive!, Kiss released what I think of as the cartoon albums.  These next three discs all had cartoon covers, which also coincides with their huge ascent into fame.  I tend to think of Destroyer and Love Gun more than this one (maybe full-bodied pictures are more memorable than just their faces), even though this one has a huge share of important Kiss songs like “I Want You” (which has an amazingly long version on Alive II). 

I never really liked “Take Me,” there’s something about the chanting backing vocals that irks me (although “Put your hand in my pocket, grab onto my rocket” is one of my favorite Kiss couplets).  But “Calling Dr. Love” is a wonderful twisted song (the falsetto backing vocals are so doo wop, it’s funny to contemplate the band’s musical direction at this point).  I loved this song so much it even features in one of my first short stories. 

As an eight year old, I could never figure out what Gene would be doing in the “Ladies Room”–since he was a boy and all.  Naiveté is a wonderful thing to have as a young person listening to Kiss–I had no idea what was going on in most of the songs–I wonder if my parents bothered to listen to the lyrics at all.

I also never really liked “Baby Driver” all that much–I don’t know if it’s Peter’s voice, or that I can’t figure out what the hell this song is about but it’s still just okay to me–although I like the guitars at the end.   I love the solo in “Love ‘Em Leave ‘Em”–although the sentiment is not the best.  Of course, the sentiment in “Mr. Speed” cracks me up: “I’m so fast, that’s why the ladies call me Mr. Speed.”  Did that mean something different in 1976?

“See You in Your Dreams” was covered by Gene on his solo album, and I think I like that version better (it’s more theatrical).  Although this one has very interesting use of Beatlesesque harmonies.  “Hard Luck Woman” is wonderful song, and I do like Peter’s voice here, yes.  But who the hell is Rhett?  “Making Love” ends the disc.  I like the break in the middle and the awesome guitar solo.  Also, Paul’s vocals have some cool effects on them. 

This is a fun album.  Even the songs I don’t love are still songs that I like quite a bit.  It’s a nice contrast from the bombast of Destroyer.  The amazing thing is that both this album and Destroyer are barely over 30 minutes long.  Were they making albums so frequently that they didn’t have any more songs, or were they just following the Beatles model: make an album every 7 months to stay in the public’s eye?

[READ: October 2, 2011] Dogwalker

I can’t believe how quickly I read this book.  I wasn’t even planning on reading the whole thing just yet, but I started the first story and it was so quick to read and so enjoyable that I couldn’t stop.  I finished the whole book in a couple of hours (it helps that a number of stories are barely 4 pages and that it’s barely 150 pages).  The title of the book is something of a mystery as there are a lot of dogs in the stories, but walking is about the furthest thing from what happens to them.  I was also somewhat surprised to see how many of these pieces I had already read (Bradford was in five of the first six McSweeney’s issues). 

This collection is certainly not for everyone.  In fact when I recounted the story “Dogs,” Sarah was disgusted and said she would never read the story.  Bradford definitely pushes some boundaries, but they’re mostly in an attempt to find humor, so I think that’s cool. Sarah even admitted that the end of “Dogs” sounded funny (although she was still disgusted).  The two things I found odd about the stories were that two of them featured a three-legged dog, which seems a little lazy to me–although I don’t know what the dog might signify.  And two of them featured someone or something singing unexpectedly and the narrator getting a tape recorder to surreptitiously save this special recording.  Again, it’s a really unusual thing to happen at all, but to have that happen in two stories?

Aside from those little complaints, the stories were fun, funny and certainly weird. (more…)

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Yi Mun-Yol–“An Anonymous Island” (New Yorker, September 12, 2011)

Posted in Culture Shock, Foreign Books, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Marriage Trouble, Monty Python's Flying Circus, New Yorker, Poetry, Sex, Short Story, The Eagles, Tom Waits, Translation, Yi Mun-Yol on October 1, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: TOM WAITS–The Heart of Saturday Night (1974).

What would be more shocking–hearing this and then going to Bone Machine, or listening to Bone Machine and then hearing this. Holy cow. Tom’s voice is so NOT Tom Waits on this record. It kept me thinking of The Eagles or something. The tone, the pacing, I kept expecting him to bust out “Desperado.”  He also has some crazy beat-inspired poetry (what the kids today call spoken-word pieces)  Indeed, these spoken pieces would stay with him in one form or another for his whole career.  But seriously, how much a man can change in thirty years!

Like Closing Time, this album has several different styles.  Primarily, it has a sloppy, bar sound, the sound that Closing Time‘s cover conveyed.  And that sound is all over “New Coat of Paint.”   But there’s also piano ballads.  And those ballads, combined with Waits’ non-gravelly voice, give “San Diego Serenade” and “Shiver Me Timbers” that Eagles’ ballady sound.  And then “Semi Suite” brings back that muted trumpet. 

“Diamonds on My Windshield” is a beat poem set to a walking bass.  It’s clichéd, except that no one actually does it as well as Waits.  And although I don’t really like the blues in general, I enjoyed “Fumblin’ with Blues” quite a bit.  There’s something about Waits’ sloppy (but not) style  that makes the song interesting.  Even though this is considered a classic, this album is just not really my style and it’s one I listen to quite infrequently.

[READ: September 21, 2011] “An Anonymous Island”

This story is translated from Korean by Heinz Insu Fenkl.  

I felt like the heart of this story was completely unoriginal in content; and yet I can’t tell if it is a common story, if it is a kind of folklorish story, if it’s sort of a story from ancient writings or if it’s just something that happens.

The beginning of the story shows a woman listening to her husband.  He is watching the television,bemoaning the fact that anyone can be anonymous these days (this struck me as a funny sentiment given how much everyone in America bemoans the lack of privacy or the fact that everyone is on the internet).  You can get off at one bus stop past your own and no one knows you.  Back when he was a kid everyone knew everyone else, a village was a family.  And as the woman listens, she flashes back.

The flashback is to when she was a teacher in a small village.  A village where everyone is related.  Everyone treats each other with respect and deference.  Except for one man, Ggaecheol.  Ggaecheol is a bum–he has no job, he has no home.  The village tolerates him because he is an idiot and he is impotent.  But whenever he wants a meal, he simply walks into someone’s house and sits down and says, feed me.  Which they do.  Typically he sleeps outside, but when it’s cold, he walks into someone’s house and sits at the foot of their bed.  He says he wants to keep the woman warm, so the men, amused by his impotence, allow this.

There’s an old Monty Python skit in which the town idiot, despite being mocked by all, does great with women.  The punch line, showing the idiot with a couple of hot girls in bed with him: “I may be an idiot, but I’m no fool.”  And so it is with this story.  The bum is sleeping with everyone in town.  (more…)

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Jeffrey Eugenidies–“Asleep in the Lord” (New Yorker, June 13 & 20, 2011)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Culture Shock, Dinosaur Jr., Jeffrey Eugenides, Lemonheads, Megafaun, My Bloody Valentine, New Yorker, Religion, Short Story, Travel on September 13, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: MEGAFAUN-“Get Right” (2011).

I’ve never heard of Megafaun before, but this song is just wonderful.  It’s an 8 minute blast of psychedelia that covers and sometimes obscures a beautiful poppy song.  I hear overtones of Dinosaur Jr (but more for J. Mascis’ seemingly lazy style than for his crazy guitar riffing) and a bit of the Lemonheads in the folky pop feel.  Throw in a dose of My Bloody Valentine for the waves of sound and you get a perfectly lovely track.

The opening is a fairly simple, straightforward melody.  And his voice is so familiar-sounding.  There’s some cool squeaky/feedbacky guitars layered over the top of a hazy distorted sound.  By about four minutes, the song turns into an instrumental, with a guitar solo that comes in an out of the hazy chords.

This is a great song, and although the NPR write-up says this is the longest track, I imagine the rest must be equally as exciting.  Preview it on NPR.

[READ: September 1, 2011] “Asleep in the Lord”

This is a story about Mitchell, a formerly unhelpful person who never changed a diaper or helped a sick friend.  He has decided to change that, so he goes to Calcutta with the intention of joining Mother Teresa’s mission (and just how many stories involve Mother Teresa these days?—she even makes an appearance in the piece!).  He’s reluctant to do anything majorly gross, but he’s happy to hand out medicines (for what good they do).

After a few days, Mitchell is still somewhat surprised by his decision to go to Calcutta at all.  Then he meets Mike and Herb.  Herb is following the Bhagwan, but Mike is less grounded in who he is following here in India .  He came here because the economy tanked back home and he wanted somewhere to hide out for a few years.   As we learn more about Mitchell, we see that his intentions are understandably confused.  For really, like Mike, he also came to India to wait out the recession.   However, unlike Mike, he honestly did come to seek some kind of spiritual guidance.  Mike seems to be here for the easy sex–he has a picture of a young woman from Thailand who wanted “to marry him.”   (more…)

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George Saunders–“My Chivalric Fiasco” (Harper’s, September 2011)

Posted in Anachronisms, Corporate skewering, Culture Shock, From the Basement, Funny (ha ha), Funny (strange), George Saunders, Harper's, Humiliation, Morrissey, Sex, Sparks, Technology, The Smiths on September 12, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: SPARKS-“Good Morning” (From the Basement) (2008).

I’ve enjoyed Sparks for a long time.  But I never got around to getting the album that this song comes from (Exotic Creatures from the Deep–which has two wonderful song titles: “Lighten Up, Morrissey” and “I Can’t Believe That You Would Fall for All The Crap In This Song.” 

“Good Morning” was the first single from the album.  It features a very bouncy keyboard opening which reminds me of Strangeways-era Smiths.  And then Russel Mael’s crazy falsetto comes pounding in on top of the whole thing. 

Visually, Sparks are fascinating because Ron Mael looks exactly the same as he has since day one: slicked back hair, thick glasses and a crazy little moustache.  This band is doubly fascinating because the two guitarists and bassist all have shoulder length hair and are wearing T-shirts with the new album cover on them.  In fact, the bassist and one guitarist look like they could be twins (the other guitarist is wearing a hat, so he messes with the identical-ness).  It’s an amusing scene to see.

This is a strange song, it’s catchy in its repetitiveness, but it’s got a cool bridge that breaks up the song into different parts (and the backing guys hit the high falsetto notes perfectly–I think I would have assumed they were women!).  This seems like a strange choice for a single and I can see wh it wasn’t a big hit.  (Most Sparks songs are kind of strange, so who knows which of their songs will catch on).  Of course, I don’t know the rest of the album so I don’t know if there was a more likely choice.  Nevertheless, I may have to investiagate this disc a bit more.

[READ: August 31, 2011] “My Chivalric Fiasco”

This is the second Saunders piece in a couple of weeks in two different publications (this seems to happen to him a lot–do I smell a new book coming out?).  This is one another of Saunders’ more corporate-mocking pieces.  He plays around with name brands and has a lot of trademarked and capitalized words.

But it starts off very unlike that whole realm. It seems to be set at a Ren Faire or some such thing.  On TorchLightNight the narrator sees Martha running through the woods saying, that guy is my boss.  Don Murray comes out of the woods after her, and it clear that something has gone on between them.  When Ted, the narrator, asks them what’s going on, they admit to a “voluntary” fling.  Then Don tells Ted that he has been promoted out of Janitorial; he is now a Pacing Guard.

The next day, Ted is given some KnightLyfe, a pill that helps him with medieval improv.  Until the pill kicks in, Ted is horrible in his role, but once it does, he (and the story) switch into a  kind of crazy Ren Faire “Olde” English: “Quoth Don Murray with a glassome wink, Ted you know what you and me should do sometime?” (more…)

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9/11 + 10 (New Yorker, September 12, 2011)

Posted in Airlines, Colum McCann, Culture Shock, Daniyal Mueenuddin, David Remnick, Death, Duran Duran, Edward Conlon, Edwidge Danticat, Elif Batuman, Essays, Explosions in the Sky, Fears, Friday Night Lights, Harry Potter, Hisham Matar, Ian Frazier, Ian Parker, J.K. Rowling, Jonathan Safran Foer, Lorrie Moore, Mogwai, New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten, Play (Drama), Threats, TSA, Zadie Smith on September 11, 2011| 2 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY-Take Care, Take Care, Take Care (2011).

I found out about Explosions in the Sky because of the events of 9/11.  Back when everyone was looking for albums to point fingers at in some kind of hysteria (that’s also how I found out about I am the World Trade Center who are not as exciting as Explosions…).

EITS make beautiful epic instrumental music (as well as the soundtrack for Friday Night Lights).  They play music in a similar vein to Mogwai, but they take their epic instrumentals in a different direction.  And this album is perhaps their most commercial to date (as commercial as you can be when you write 10 minute instrumentals).  And while “commercial” is not usually an adjective that I give as praise, for this album it is indeed.

Take Care, Take Care Take Care is a terrific album.  It ‘s not as visceral as past releases; rather, it seems like a more experienced band playing with their sound and tweaking it in subtle ways to make it less obviously dramatic but somehow more powerful.

On “Last Known Surroundings,” there are soaring guitars that give way to simple, pretty guitar riffs.  Martial drums propel the songs forward, even if they lead to unexpected places.  It’s soundtrack music that’s not background music.

Perhaps the biggest difference with this album and previous ones is that this album doesn’t quite live up to the band’s name.  There’s no major explosive crescendos.  There are noisy bits but they’re not climactic per se.   “Human Qualities” slows to a quiet drum beat and while you’d expect to come out of that with a cacophonous explosion, it doesn’t.  The explosion does come later, but only after it has worked up to it again.

“Trembling Hands” features “voices.”  Or maybe just one voice.  It’s on a loop that becomes more of a sound than a voice.  The song is only 3 minutes long, but it’s an intense 3 minutes–more great drum work on this one.

“Be Comfortable, Creature” has a beautiful delicate guitar opening that drifts into a kind of solo.  After 3 minutes it settles into the main riff, a winding guitar line that send you on a journey.  “Postcard from 1952” is a great song. It begins as quiet intertwining guitars and slowly builds and builds into a gorgeous rocking conclusion.  7 minutes of steady growth with a nice epilogue at the end.

The final song, “Let Me Back In” also has kind of spooky voices that appears throughout the song (distorted and repeated).  But you know this song is a winner from the get go (even if the opening chord structure is a bit like Duran Duran’s “Come Undone.”)  It’s a slow builder, a cool, moody ten minute piece.  When you get to the beautiful descending guitar riff that shoots out after about 2 minutes, it’s an ecstatic moment–air guitars are mandatory.

And let’s talk packaging.  The album comes in a gate-fold type of cardboard.  If you open it up all the way it can be folded into a little house (with windows and a door and a chimney).  That’s pretty cool, guys.

If I have one compliant about the album it’s that the quiets are really quiet and he louds are really loud.  That makes this a very difficult album to listen to say, at work, or basically anywhere where other people will be blown away by your speakers.  The middle of “Human Qualities” for instance, is really quiet, you feel like you need to turn it up to hear the drum beat–there’s too much volume fiddling (listening in the car by yourself negates any reason for this complaint, of course).

Keep it up, guys.

More “controversy” from the band

[READ: September 10, 2011] New Yorker essays

Ten years ago, The New Yorker published several short essays by famous and (to me anyway) not so famous writers.  They were all written directly in the aftermath of the attacks and they were moving and powerful.  I was going to wait until today to re-read them and post about them, but for various reasons, I decided to do it on May 12.

Now, ten years later, The New Yorker has published several more essays by famous and (to me anyway) not so famous writers.  I note that none of the authors are the same (that might have been interesting) although Zadie Smith does quote from John Updike’s piece of ten years ago.

The strange thing to me about these pieces is that ten years seems to have hindered the writers’ ability to focus on the incident and to talk about What It Means.  In this collection of essays, we have a few that talk about an individual and how his life has changed since 9/11.  These are pretty powerful, although it’s odd that they would talk about another person and not themselves. We have a couple of essays that talk about the writer him or herself, but these seem kind of unfocused.  And then we have ones that talk about the state oft he world; honestly, what can you say about that.

It’s possible that I’m jaded or in a bad mood and that’s why I didn’t appreciate these essays.  Or perhaps I’m just facing the futility of things.

This is not to say that I think that writing about 9/11 is easy (you’ll notice I’m not doing it).  Indeed, I think talking about it in any kind of meaningful, non-strident, non-cliched way is nigh impossible.

But these writers do give it a try.  And I am grateful for that. (more…)

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Judith Schalansky–Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Island I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will (2009)

Posted in 18th Century, 19th Century, Adventure, All Songs Considered, Christine Lo, Culture Shock, Death, Foreign Books, History, Judith Schalansky, Metric, Nature, Russia, The Flaming Lips, The Swell Season, Translation, Travel on August 29, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: METRIC-Live at the 9:30 Club, June 18, 2009 (2009).

I love the new Metric album and this tour supported that disc, so, it’s a win-win for me!  Metric sound great live, and the notes on the NPR page where I downloaded this give a fascinating history of the band.  Evidently they burnt out in 2005 while touring for Live It Out.  So they made solo records and kind of went their separate ways.  Then:

in March 2008, Haines was on stage, in the middle of a live solo performance, when she had an epiphany: She was tired of being sad. While playing one of the standout cuts from her gloomy but beautiful album Knives Don’t Have Your Back, Haines stopped, turned to the audience and said, “I don’t want to play these songs anymore.” Instead, she spent the rest of the show performing her favorite Metric tunes.

The band reunited and made Fantasies, the poptastic album that I love so much.

This show plays pretty much all of the album (except “Collect Call” and “Blindness”) and they rock the house!  The only odd part for me is the opening track, “Satellite Mind.”  The band chose to have the first half of the song performed with just the keyboards, so it has no bottom end at all.  It sounds kind of tinny and weird.  Then when the guitars and bass kick in (for the rest of the show, thankfully), the band sounds whole again.

The other weird thing is Emily Haines’ banter.  I like chatty lead singers (–The Swell Season’s banter is great, Wayne Coyne’s banter is emotional but enjoyable), but there’s something about Haines’ musing that are just kind of…lame.  She’s very earnest, but her thoughts are kind of, well, vapid.  So, I just skip past all the chatter and enjoy the music.

It’s a really great, rocking set and the crowd is very into it.

[READ: August 25, 2011] Atlas of Remote Islands

If you need an unusual but doubtlessly cool book, my brother-in-law Ben is your man.  For my birthday and Christmases he often gets me books that I have never heard of but that are weird and interesting.

This book is no exception.  As the subtitle states, this is a book about fifty remote islands that virtually no one lives on.  True, some are inhabited, but many are not.  And a goodly amount of them are little more than icebergs (I wonder how they will survive global warming).  There’s even one that the accompanying story implies was created from bird droppings. (more…)

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Five Dials 19: The Parenting Issue (28 April 2011)

Posted in Advice, Alain de Botton, Alexandra Styron, Arthur Bradford, Books about writers, Cars, Christoph Niemann, Consumerism, Craig Taylor, Culture Shock, Darin Strauss, Diedre Dolan, Essays, Excerpt, Fears, Five Dials, Fretful Mother, Funny (ha ha), Heidi Julavits, Hugh Gallagher, Humiliation, Jim Windolf, John Kenney, Katha Pollitt, Kevin Baker, Kraftwerk, Manuals, Marriage (Happy), Marriage Trouble, Neil Young, Peter Melhman, Piers Paul Read, Religion, Rush, Sarah Miller, Short Story, The Simpsons, Tucker Nichols, William Berlind, William Styron on August 27, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: NEIL YOUNG-Trans (1982).

By most standards this Neil Young album is a disaster.  It’s so bad that despite updating his entire catalog and releasing all kinds of bootleg concerts, he has never issued this disc on CD in the States.  So, just what’s so awful about this disc?

Well, mostly it’s awful as a Neil Young disc.  Meaning, if you like Neil Young (either flavor: country/folk or hard rock/grunge) this disc is a big fat HUH??  Neil Young has gone all synthy?  And not just synth but computerized synthy–sometimes his voice is utterly like a computer.  It’s a travesty, it’s a shame, it’s an incredible surprise.  Unless you listen to it without thinking of it as a Neil Young record.

But after all that introduction, the biggest surprise is the first song.  You’ve been prepped for this weird album full of computer nonsense and you get the fairly standard (if a little dull) rockabilly type music of “A Little Thing Called Love.”  It’s a pretty standard Neil Young song for the time.  Hmm, maybe the album isn’t that weird.

Well, then comes “Computer Age” and the keyboards kick in.  Interestingly, to me anyhow, this is the year that Rush released Signals.  Signals was the album where Rush fans said Woah, what’s with the keyboards guys.  Similarly, “Computer Age” makes you say, geez, was there a sale on keyboards in Canada?  The keyboards are kind of thin and wheedly, but the real surprise comes in the processed vocals (Rush never went that far).  The vocals are basically the 1980s equivalent of auto-tune (no idea how they did this back then).  Because the song is all about the computer age it kind of makes sense that he would use this weird robotic voice.  Sometimes it’s the only voice, although he also uses the computer voice as a high-pitched harmony over his normal singing voice.

“We R in Control” sounds like it might be a heavy rocker (anemic production notwithstanding) until we get more computer vocals.  Again, conceptually it works (its all about the dominance of CCTV), but it is pretty weird as a Neil Young song.

And then comes yet another shock, “Transformer Man.”  Yes, THAT “Transformer Man,” except not.  This original version of the song is sung entirely in a processed super high pitched computer voice that is almost hard to understand).  The only “normal’ part of the song is the occasional chorus and the “do do do dos.”  It sounds like a weird cover.  Sarah, who loves Neil Young, practically ran out of the room when she heard this version.

“Computer Cowboy (aka Syscrusher)” continues in that same vein.  Musically it’s a bit more experimental (and the computer vocals are in a much lower register).  Although I think it’s probably the least interesting of these songs.

Just to confuse the listener further, “Hold On to Your Love” is a conventional poppy song–no computer anything (aside from occasional keyboard notes).  Then comes the 8 minute “Sample and Hold” the most computerized song of the bunch and one of the weirder, cooler songs on the disc.  It really feels like a complete song–all vocodered out with multiple layers of vocals, not thin and lacking substance like some of the tracks.  It opens with personal stats (hair: blonde, eyes: blue) and proceeds through a litany of repeated “new design, new design” motifs.

This is followed by a remake of “Mr Soul” previously only on Decade.  This is a new vocodered-harmonies version of the song.

The biggest failure of the disc to me is “Like an Inca” it’s nine minutes of virtually the same guitar riff.  The chorus is pretty wonderful, but it’s a very minor part of the song itself.  It is fairly traditional Neil song, I just wish it were much shorter.

So, this travesty of a disc is actually pretty interesting and, for me, pretty enjoyable.  Most of these synthy songs sound kind of weak but I think that has more to do with the production of the time. I’d love to hear newly recorded versions of these songs (with or without the vocoder) to see what he could do with a great production team behind him.

Trans is not a Neil Young disc in any conventional sense, but as an experiment, as a document of early 80s synth music, it not only holds up, it actually pushes a lot of envelopes.   I’m not saying he was trying to out Kraftwerk Kraftwerk or anything like that, but for a folk/rock singer to take chances like this was pretty admirable.  Shame everybody hated it.

[READ: July 5, 2011] Five Dials 19

Five Dials 19 is the Parenting Issue.  But rather than offering parenting advice, the writers simply talk about what it’s like to be a parent, or to have a parent.  It was one of the most enjoyable Five Dials issues I have read so far.

CRAIG TAYLOR & DIEDRE DOLAN-On Foreign Bureuas and Parenting Issues
I enjoyed Taylor’s introduction, in which he explains that he is not very useful for a parenting issue   That most of the duties will be taken on by Diedre Dolan in NYC.  They are currently in her house working while her daughter plays in the next room.  His ending comment was hilarious:

Also, as is traditional at most newsweeklies, someone just put a plastic tiara on my head and then ran away laughing at me.

I resist Parenting magazines, from Parents to Parenting to Fretful Mother, they all offer some sound advice but only after they offer heaps and heaps of guilt and impossible standards.  So I was delighted to see that Five Dials would take an approach to parenting that I fully approve of.  Dolan writes:

Nobody knows what works. Most people just make some choices and defend them for the next 18 to 50 years – claiming nurture (good manners) or nature (crippling shyness) when it suits them best.

And indeed, the magazine made me feel a lot better about my skills (or lack) as a parent. (more…)

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Gene Luen Yang–Level Up (2011)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Culture Shock, First Second :01, Gene Luen Yang, Glen Hansard, Graphic Novel, Marketa Irglova, Set at School, Short Books, The Swell Season, Thien Pham, Tim Buckley, Van Morrison, Video Games on August 25, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: THE SWELL SEASON-Live at the Newport Folk Festival, August 1, 2010 (2010).

This is the second show by the Swell Season that I downloaded from NPR (even though it is not chronologically second).  The Newport Folk Festival proves to be an excellent venue for Glen Hansard and The Frames.  For yes, in this show, The Frames play with them.  A (very brief) history: Glen Hansard was the red-haired dude from The Commitments (yes, seriously).  After that movie, he started The Frames and they were HUGE (in Ireland and Czechoslovakia).  They even released a record with a few songs that appear in the film Once.  Then Glen met Marketa and formed The Swell Season, which was really just the two of them.  And they recorded a couple of those Frames songs for their debut album.  And then they made Once, and they rerecorded some of those songs for the Soundtrack.  So you can get quite a few versions of a couple of these songs.  The Swell Season was originally just the two of them.  But as of late they’ve been playing with the Frames as well.  So it’s like a full circle, sort of.

The big opens space of Newport, combined with a rowdy but appreciative crowd prove a perfect venue for them.  Glen is in wonderful storytelling mode, regaling the crowd with funny introductions to songs (that was Elijah!) and dealing with an overzealous fan (who I believe calls Glen a red-headed bastard–out of love: Hansard replies “I liked you for about two comments…I’ve been wanting to play here forever, you’re kind of wrecking my day….  I’m kidding”).

But it’s the music that is so good.  I’ve thought that he sounds not unlike Van Morrison, and this version of “Low Rising” that opens the set brings out the Van.  Its’ really outstanding.  The really makes some of the songs rock out, too, like when he burst into a chorus of “Love Reign O’er Me” during the otherwise mellow “Back Broke.”  Also, the full band version of “When Your Mind’s Made Up” is tremendous–when the band is rocking out and then stops on a dime for that final “So” I am blown away every time.  And yet, despite the presence of the band, some of their solo songs are the most striking.  Marketa’s, “If You Want Me” holds the crowd rapt.  And Glen’s emotionally gut wrenching “Leave” is stunning–and a little hair-raising.

Interestingly, when you download the show (by subscribing to NPR podcasts), you only get 43 minutes, rather than the entire 62 minutes of the show.  I assume they didn’t have the rights to give us the covers that the band played.  They open the set with Tim Buckley’s “Buzzin’ Fly,” and he plays Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” while they tune some strings and they rock out Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” (this furthers my assertion that there’s a Van Morrison connection here, although I didn’t know this was played live until I streamed the concert.

The Swell Season seems like an awesome band to see live.

[READ: August 21, 2011] Level Up.

Gene Luen Yang is also a wonderful storyteller.  His book American Born Chinese is fantastic.  This is another slice of life story, although I suspect it can’t be true about himself (well, I mean there are angels that do his laundry so obviously it isn’t true).  But I don’t know a thing about him personally so maybe he is a video game champion and a gastroenterologist as well as a novel writer.

Anyhow, the story is a fairly simple one: When Dennis is six years old, he sees a Pac Man video game console and he is instantly hooked.  The problem is that his parents want him to be a successful student–specifically, they want him to become a doctor–so there’s no fooling around with video games.  He gets good grades in school.  But when his father dies, he finally feels free to get a video game console and he finds himself playing more video games than studying.  And by the time he gets to university he actually flunks out.

His mother doesn’t learn about this disgrace because before he can do anything more drastic, the aforementioned angels threaten the dean of admissions until she lets him back into school.  They angels (who came to life from a card his father had given him) then monitor him carefully, doing all of his chores for him while ensuring that he studies his brains out.  Which he does.

And he gets into med school! (more…)

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Douglas Coupland–Life After God (1994)

Posted in Airlines, Boredom, Canadian Content, Canadian Music, Consumerism, Corporate skewering, Culture Shock, David Foster Wallace, Decadence, Douglas Coupland, Drinking, Drugs, Environmentalism, Religion, Rush, Short Books, Technology, The Future, Travel on August 17, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: RUSH-“Garden Road” (1974).

So the bootleg that I mentioned yesterday was in fact incomplete.  On the Up the Downstair site, the track list includes “What You’re Doing” and “Garden Road.”  When I wrote to the cool host of Up the Downstair, he said that these two songs were available on You Tube and that he’d try to find them and add them to the site.

So in the meantime, I got to listen to the song on YouTube.  This is a song that the band wrote but which they never recorded (same is true for “Fancy Dancer”).  I have to imagine that they wrote these songs for their second album (along with “In the End” which they kept) around the time that Neil Peart joined the band.  Once they realized that Neil could write better lyrics, they scrapped these two heavy rockers.  Both songs have great riffs, even if lyrically they’re pretty poor.

The song rocks pretty well, although the solo seems to have been put to better use in “Working Man.”  I enjoy how the song breaks for the shouts of the Garden Road chorus (kind of like “Bad Boy”–perhaps it was a “thing” for them).  I rather like this song, and I think I like it better than a couple of the songs on Rush.

Check it out.

Maybe it’s time to release these old chestnuts for the fans?

[READ: August 10, 2011] Life After God

After the success of Shampoo Planet, Douglas Coupland wrote several short books (which were really short stories).  They were compiled in Life After God.  To me this book also stands out as another odd one from DC, because it is very tiny.  Not in length, but in height.  It’s a small book, about the size of a mass market paperback.  But it makes sense that it was made this short because it is written with lots of short paragraphs that lead to page breaks (kind of like Vonnegut).

For instance, the first story contains at most two paragraphs per “chapter” about–16 lines of text and then a page break.  At the top of each page is a drawing from DC himself which illustrates to a small degree the information on the page.  It leads to incredibly fast reading and even though the book is 360 pages, you can polish it off pretty quickly.

But what’s it about?  Well, mostly the stories seem autobiographical (even though they are classified as fiction.  And actually, I don’t know anything about DC’s personal life so I don’t know if they are based on anything real, although I do know he doesn’t have any kids, so those can’t be true at any rate).  There are eight stories.  They are all told from the first person and are more or less directed at “you.”  They all seem to deal with existential crises of some sort.  They are honest and emotional.  To my ear, sometimes they seem a little forced, maybe it’s contextual, but it’s hard to write this kind of massively introspective piece and have it sound “real.”  (But maybe I’m not very introspective about things like this myself). (more…)

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Five Dials Number 17: In Jaipur (23 January 2011)

Posted in Abha Dawesar, Arranged Marriage, Books about writers, Craig Taylor, Culture Shock, Death, Essays, Faiza Sultan Khan, Five Dials, Henning Mankell, James Kelman, Kamila Shamsie, Leila Abouela, Live from the Artist's Den, M.K. Gandhi, Manju Kapur, Namita Devidayal, Patrick French, Robert Johnsson, Roma Tearne, Simon Prosser, Tishani Doshi, Tori Amos on August 13, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: TORI AMOS-Live from the Artist’s Den (2010).

I think my relationship with Tori Amos has come to an end.  I haven’t enjoyed her more recent albums all that much lately, but I was excited to see that this live and intimate set was on PBS.  After all, it was just her with a piano and what turned out to be a really cheesy organ.

I was pretty thrilled by the setlist, which goes all the way back to her debut album (with “Girl” and “China”).  I was even more excited to hear “Bells for Her” one of my favorite songs by her and even “Concertina” one of her more mellow tracks that worked well for this show which was primarily mellow songs.

There were a lot of newer songs which I don’t know that well, and a few newer songs which I know okay.   I don’t love her newer stuff, but I was even disappointed with the presentation of her older songs.  She has definitely taken on a new technique where she reeeeeaaaaaalllllllllyyyyy streeeeeeeeeeeetches the songs out. And, as I’ve complained on other recent posts, she mis-pronounces or mis-enunciates words that she used to say perfectly fine.  I find it maddening.

It took me two days to watch this 50 minute show because I kept falling asleep.  Gadzooks.

Now I totally respect an artist’s desire to change her songs.  Indeed, there are some live versions of her songs that I have enjoyed more than the originals.  But there’s something about the way these are drawn out that it feels like the life has been sucked from them.  The melody of “Ruby Through the Looking Glass” loses its impact when it is slowed down so much.

I’m also really disappointed with the synth that she chose.  Synthesizers can make any sound in the world, so why did they program this keyboard to play utterly anemic strings?  The conclusion of “Girl” which is so dramatic on record actually sounds worse with the thin washes than it would if it were played on just piano.

And as for the way she sings words now…  “Bells for Her” to give just one example, has her mangling the word “you” so that when she sings “not even you” we get something like “not even yaow” which I don’t understand.  I mean, listen to the awesome live version on To Venus and Back–she didn’t used to do that.  So wha happa?

I used to think that I liked her solo better.  I always enjoyed the little quiet time section of the concerts when she would play a song or two by herself.  But I feel like now, when she’s by herself, she loses any sense of editing.  The band seemed to keep her on pace.  And it’s a shame to see her drift so much.

Because Tori was an important part of my music youth, I’ll give her one more chance–she has a new album due out reasonably soon, but I’m not holding out much hope for it.   I think we may just be on very different planes of existence anymore.

[READ: July 19, 2011] Five Dials Number 17

The brevity of the Christmas issue is followed up by the somewhat longer Five Dials Number 17.  (This issue also has 7 pages of photos at the end of the issue).  I admit I didn’t know where Jaipur was (it’s sort of north west-ish in India, not terribly far from New Delhi).

This is also the first issue of 2011 (I’m nearly caught up!).  So the issue opens with New Year’s Resolutions.  The letter is also from editors, plural, for a change.

CRAIG TAYLOR & SIMON PROSSER-Letter from the Editors
The letter opens with some enjoyably self-deprecating comments about resolutions (and how they made theirs now, instead of at the end of the year).  But what I enjoyed most was the collective list of resolutions that the entire staff made.  They are listed as one person, which makes for wonderfully contradictory resolutions.  I was particularly pleased by: “stop making that face when my brother makes a suggestion.” (more…)

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