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Archive for the ‘Essays’ Category

Zadie Smith–Changing My Mind (2009)

Posted in Barack Obama, Book Reviews, Books about music, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, David Foster Wallace, Death, Dictionary, E.M. Forster, Essays, Film & TV, Franz Kafka, George Eliot, Holidays, Military, Mogwai, New Yorker, Racism, Roland Barthes, Suicide, Travel, Vladimir Nabokov, War, Zadie Smith, Zora Neale Hurston on March 27, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: MOGWAI-No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew) (1998).

This is a 3 song EP. The opener “Xmas Stripes” is one of my favorite early Mogwai songs.  The opening melody is really great, with a cool interesting bass and a nice guitar over the top.  At about 3:30 the song grows from a silent track to a menacing, growing beast until the drums start and the song and the main riff begins.  By 5 minutes it’s all out rock noise.  By 6 minutes the song is scaled back for the violin solo.  The remaining 7 (!) minutes are a denouement for the song.  Even though I love the track, I mostly love the first 8 or 9 minutes.  The ending tends to drag a bit.

But for all of their noise, Mogwai’s early releases were really quieter instrumentals, meditative songs that were really quite pretty.  “Rollerball” is a beautiful, sad three-minute track.

The last song “Small Children in the Background” continues in this quieter vein.  At nearly 7 minutes, it allows for a noisy middle section.  This noisy section is indeed mostly noise.  And yet the pretty melody of the rest of the track is just as loud throughout the mix, making for a very cool and very brief explosion mid-song.

Not all EPs are essential, but this one is pretty fantastic.  And I have Lar to thank for getting it for me.

[READ: March 10, 2011] Changing My Mind

It’s funny to me when that when I get into an author, I seem to wind up not reading the books that people most talk about until much later.  Take Zadie Smith.  Her debut, White Teeth, is something of a touchstone for many readers.  I missed it when it came out, but I loved On Beauty and figured I’d go back and read it.  That was almost a year ago.  And in that time I have read lots of little things by her and now this collection of essays.

Regardless, this collection of essays is a wonderful look in to the nonfiction world of a writer whom I admire.  And it was quite a treat.  Zadie is an intellectual, and that comes across in all of these paces.  Whether it’s the subjects she’s writing about, the footnotes she uses or just the acknowledgment that she likes art films and not blockbusters, we know where she’s speaking from.  And, of course, I’m right there with her.  The funny thing about this book then is how few of the subjects I know.

The book is broken down into five sections: Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling and Remembering.  The Reading section is basically book reviews.  The Being section is about her experiences.  The Seeing section is about films.  The Feeling section is about her father and the Remembering section is about David Foster Wallace. (more…)

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David Foster Wallace–original articles that comprise A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1991-1996)

Posted in Blue Velvet, Book Reviews, Books about writers, Boredom, Cigarettes, Consumerism, Corporate skewering, David Foster Wallace, David Lynch, Dune, Esquire, Essays, Fears, Funny (ha ha), Harper's, Harvard Book Review, Lost Highway, PJ Harvey, Premiere, Religion, Research, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Smarty Pants, Tennis, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Twin Peaks, Virginity (Loss of), Yuck! on March 21, 2011| 14 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: PJ HARVEY-4-Track Demos (1993).

After the intensity of the Steve Albini produced Rid of Me, Harvey releases this collection of demos.  The amazing thing is that these versions actually seem more intense than the Albini version. Or if not more intense, then certainly more raw.

The songs definitely have an unfinished feel about them, and yet they only vary from the final version in polish (and Albini’s stamp).

“Rid of Me” is just as quiet/loud, and has those high-pitched (and scary) backing vocals.  Speaking of scary vocals, her lead screams in “Legs” are far scarier here than on Rid of Me–like really creepy.  (Which sort of undermines that idea that this was released because Rid of Me was too intense for fans).   “Snake” actually features even creepier vocals–Harvey must have had a field day making these sounds!

I admit that I like the finished version of “50 Ft Queenie” better,”but there’s something about this version of “Yuri-G” that I like better.

The disc also has some tracks unreleased elsewhere.  “Reeling” is an organ-propelled song of female strength with the nice lyric: “Robert DeNiro sit on my face.”  “Hardly Wait” is a slow grinder that is fairly quiet for this time period.  “M-Bike” is a cool angry rocker about a guy and his motorcycle which is one of my favorite tracks on the disc.

It’s a great companion to Rid of Me.

[READ: end of February to early March]  original articles that comprise A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

As I mentioned last week, I decided to compare the articles in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again with the original publications to see what the differences were.  It quickly became obvious that there were a lot of additions to most of the articles, and it seems rather pointless (well, actually it seems exhausting and really outrageously time-consuming) to mention them all.  But what I did want to note was the things that are in the articles that have been removed from the book.   There’s not a lot but there are a few juicy tidbits (especially in the early articles) that are fun to note for anyone who read only the book and not the original articles.

My process for this was rather unthorough: I read the article and then right afterward I read the book.  If I noticed any changes, I made a note on the article version.  Many of them were surprisingly easy to note as DFW’s writing style (especially his idiosyncratic phrases) really stand out.  This is especially true in the Harper’s articles.  The academic ones were less notable, I believe, and I’m sure I missed a bunch.

I’m not sure in any way how these pieces were dealt with initially by the magazine or DFW.  I assume that DFW handed in the larger article (like we see in the book) and the magazine made suggested edits and DFW edited accordingly.  Then the book copies are probably the originals, bt which have also been updated in some way.

In most cases, it’s not really worth reading the original article, but I’m including links (thanks Howling Fantods), for the curious.

As for length, it’s hard to know exactly what the conversion from magazine article to book is.  The “Tornado Alley” tennis article is 8 pages (more like 4 pages when you take out the ads) and the book is 17.  Perhaps more accurately it seems like one Harper’s column = just under one book page.  I’ll try to figure out what the conversion is if I can.

One last note, whenever I say “article” I mean the original magazine version.  And obviously “book” means ASFTINDA. (more…)

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David Foster Wallace–A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997)

Posted in A.M. Homes, Andre Agassi, Balthazar Getty, Blue Velvet, Book Reviews, Boredom, Chess, Consumerism, Corporate skewering, David Lynch, Don DeLillo, Dune, Esquire, Essays, Fears, Funny (ha ha), George Gilder, H.L. Hix, Harper's, Harvard Book Review, Jay Cantor, Lobster, M*A*S*H, Mark Leyner, Max Apple, Meta, Michael Joyce, Michael Martone, Nine Inch Nails, Ping-Pong, PJ Harvey, Postmoderism, Premiere, Quentin Tarantino, Religion, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Robert Coover, Saturday Night Live, St. Elsewhere, Tennis, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Travel, Twin Peaks, Virginity (Loss of), William T. Vollmann, Yuck! on March 14, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: PJ HARVEY-Rid of Me (1993).

For Rid of Me, PJ Harvey jumped to the big leagues (relatively) by enlisting maniac Steve Albini as a producer.  And he takes the rawness of Dry one step further into a sound that is both raw and sharp.  He really highlights the differences between the highs and lows, the louds and quiets.  And man, when this came out I loved it.

Like NIN’s “March of the Pigs,” the opening of “Rid Of Me” is so quiet that you have to crank up the song really loud.  And then it simply blasts out of the speakers after two quiet verses.

“Legs” turns Harvey’s moan into a voice of distress, really accentuating the hurt in her voice.  And Harvey hasn’t lightened up her attitudes since Dry, especially in the song “Dry” which has the wonderfully disparaging chorus: “You leave me dry.”

“Rub Til It Bleeds” is a simple song that opens with a few guitars and drums but in true Albini fashion it turns into a noisy rocker.  “Man Size Quartet” is a creepy string version of the later song “Man Size” (I’ll bet the two together would sound great).  And the wonderful “Me Jane” is a great mix of rocking guitars and crazy guitar skronk.   Albini really highlights the high-pitched (male) backing vocals, which add an element of creepiness that is very cool.

For me the highlight is “50 Foot Queenie”.  It just absolutely rocks the house from start to finish.  The song is amazing, from the powerful…well…everything including the amazing guitar solo.  “Snake” is a fast rocker (all of 90 seconds long) and “Ecstasy” is a song that feels wrung out, stretched to capacity, like they’ve got nothing left.

It’s not an easy record by any means, but it is very rewarding.  This is a CD that really calls for reamastering.  Because it is too quiet by half, and could really use–not a change in production–just an aural boost.

[READ: end of February and beginning of March] A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

This is a collection of 7 essays that DFW wrote from 1990-1996.  Three were published in Harper’s, two in academic journals, one in Esquire and the last in Premiere.  I devoured this book when it came out (I had adored “Shipping Out” when it was published in Harper’s) and even saw DFW read in Boston (where he signed my copy!).

click to see larger

[Does anyone who was at the reading in Harvard Square…in the Brattle Theater I THINK…remember what excerpts he read?]

The epigram about these articles states: “The following essays have appeared previously (in somewhat different [and sometimes way shorter] forms:)”  It was the “way shorter” that intrigued me enough to check out the originals and compare them to the book versions.  Next week, I’ll be writing a post that compares the two versions, especially focusing on things that are in the articles but NOT in the book (WHA??).

But today I’m just taking about the book itself. (more…)

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Consider David Foster Wallace [essays 7-9] (2010)

Posted in Books about writers, David Foster Wallace, Essays, Laurence Sterne, Research, Swans, Word usage on March 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: SWANS-“Can’t Find My Way Home” (1989).

In the Swans review yesterday, I mentioned this as a song that was as far afield from early Swans as was imaginable.  This is a cover of the Blind Faith song and it is surprisingly faithful.  In fact, the original song features a voice that is so falsetto’d it’s almost higher than Jarboe’s.

The big difference here is that Jarboe is an unusual lady and her voice has a weird almost strangled quality to it which adds an air of longing to the song that the original doesn’t.   There’s also an ethereal quality to the music which contrasts with the original’s folk styling.  Not to mention that the production on this version is better.

I also happen to think that the Swan’s guitar intro (while less technically accomplished) is more intriguing.  Not bad for an industrial band.

[READ: February 20, 2011] Consider David Foster Wallace [essays 7-9]

The group read of this book seems to have come to a halt.  Coincidentally, so had my reading of it.  So, I decided to finish up the last few essays of the book to have it done in time for the April 15th release of The Pale King (yay!).

It’s been three months since I last posted about this book so I’ll give my disclaimer:  because I don’t have a lot to say about the pieces (I’m not an academic anymore), I’m only going to mention things that I found puzzling/confusing.  But be assured that if I don’t mention the vast majority of the article it’s because I found it interesting/compelling/believable.  I don’t feel comfortable paraphrasing the articles’ argument, so I won’t really summarize. (more…)

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William T. Vollmann–“Homeless in Sacramento” (Harper’s, March 2011)

Posted in Essays, Harper's, Homelessness, Sharon Van Etten, William T. Vollmann on March 4, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: SHARON VAN ETTEN-Epic (2010).

Sharon Van Etten caught my attention with the song “Don’t Do It,” which I love.  The rest of this album doesn’t have the intensity of that song, but rather, it gets under your skin with some great songs and interesting and subtle textures.

There’s only seven songs (running time just over 30 minutes), so “epic” is kind of a joke.  But she packs a lot into these songs.  The opening two songs are about 3 minutes each, and they are great alt-folk songs, especially “Peace Signs.”  They are sparse but effective.

“Save Yourself” adds more instrumentation, including a slide guitar.  But it’s the harmonies that really make the song great.  “DsharpG” is a cooly brooding song that never wears out its 6 minute length.   And “One Day” also has major potential to be a hit.

Of course for me the highlight is still “Don’t Do It” which gives me goosebumps with each listen.

What’s really impressive about the disc is how on the surface it seems like a simple folk album and yet every song has subtly different sounds and textures to makes this a really complex recording.

[READ: February 16, 2011] “Homeless in Sacramento”

Vollmann wrote a lengthy piece about death in the November issue of Harper’s.  Now, four months later, he’s back with an 18 page (!) article about homelessness. Now, normally I wouldn’t read an article about homelessness, because, well, because its a major bummer, but also because there isn’t anything that I can do about it and it doesn’t seem like there’s much new to say about it.

But I decided recently that I was going to try to read Vollmann whenever I encountered him, since it was unlikely that I’d ever go back and read his vast output.  So, here I am.

Vollmann does, in fact, manage to say something new about the homeless.  He begins by explaining that the house he bought had a vacant lot next to it.  And he has been tacitly encouraging homeless people to sleep there when they need to.  He has learned to like many of them and he finds that the frequent users have become “friends”–as much as you can in that situation. (more…)

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Douglas Coupland–Polaroids from the Dead (1996)

Posted in Big Dirty Band, Books about writers, Canadian Content, Canadian Music, Consumerism, Corporate skewering, Dead Kennedys, Die Mannequin, Douglas Coupland, Essays, Fables, Flash Fiction, Grateful Dead, Greed, James Rosenquist, Nostalgia, Photo Essays, Rheostatics, Rush, Short Story, The Clash, The Future, The Inbreds, The Tea Party, Threats, Travel, Video Games on February 28, 2011| 2 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: BIG DIRTY BAND-“I Fought the Law” (2006).

I just found out about this “supergroup” which was created for the Trailer Park Boys Movie.    The group consists of Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson from Rush, drummer Jeff Burrows from The Tea Party and three people I don’t know: the singer from Three Days Grace, the singer/guitarist from Thornley and on lead vocals Care Failure from Die Mannequin.

I have to say that I’m not that excited by this cover.  The song has been covered so many times (some very good: The Clash, some very clever: The Dead Kennedys, and some terrible: many others).  And frankly there’s not much that you can do with this song.  It’s simple in structure with potential for shouting (which everyone likes), but little else.

For Rush fans, you can’t tell that Geddy or Alex are even on it.  So really it’s just a kind of metal-ish version of this old song.

Oh well, they can’t all be zingers.  You can hear it here.

[READ: February 1, 2011] Polaroids from the Dead

After reading Shampoo Planet, I wanted to see if I remembered any of Coupland’s books.  So I read this one.  It’s entirely possible that when I bought this book I was disappointed that it was not a new novel and never read it.  Because I don’t remember a thing about this book.  (This is seriously calling into question my 90’s Coupland-love!).

But I’m glad I read it now.  It’s an interesting time-capsule of the mid-90s.  It’s funny to see how the mid 90s were a time of questioning authority, of trying to unmask fame and corporate mega-ness.  At the time it seemed so rebellious, like everything was changing, that facades were crumbling.  Now, after the 2000s, that attitude seems so quaint.   Reading these essays really makes me long for that time when people were willing to stand up for what they believed in and write books or music about it (sire nothing changed, but the soundtrack was good).

So, this collection is actually not all non-fiction.  Part One is the titular “Postcards from the Dead.”  It comprises ten vignettes about people at a Grateful Dead concert in California in 1991.  As Coupland points out in the intro to the book, this was right around their Shades of Grey album album In the Dark, and huge hit “Touch of Grey”, when they had inexplicable MTV success and it brought in a new generation of future Deadheads.  He also points out that this is before Jerry Garcia died (which is actually helpful at this removed distance).

These stories are what Coupland does best: character studies and brief exposes about people’s lives.  The stories introduce ten very different people, and he is able to create a very complex web of people in the parking lot of the show (we don’t see the concert at all).  As with most Coupland of this era, the characters fret about reality.  But what’s new is that he focuses on older characters more (in the first two novels adults were sort of peripheral, although as we saw in Shampoo, the mother did have millennial crises as well).  But in some of these stories the focus is on older people (Coupland was 30 in 1991, gasp!).  And the older folks fret about aging and status, just like the young kids do. (more…)

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Deb Olin Unferth–“Radical Will” [excerpt from Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War] (Harper’s, January 2011)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Culture Shock, Deb Olin Unferth, Essays, Harper's, Ludicra, Memoirs, Travel on January 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: LUDICRA-“A Larger Silence” (2010).

Ludicra’s The Tenant came in at #9 on Viking’s Top Ten.  Ludicra was the first band they played in the (downloadable) show and I knew that this was going to be a different Top Ten list as soon as it started.  Ludicra plays pounding black metal but they have a real difference: both of their singers are women.  True, they use the same growling screaming vocals (and I first thought it was a guy with a higher pitched voice) until the two-minute mark hits and both women harmonize beautifully.  Suddenly the song jumps several notches ahead of its peers.

It’s quite disconcerting to hear thudding double-bass drums and pounding snares behind two women who are harmonizing (a little creepily) over extended notes.  At the end of the track (about 5 minutes in) the song shifts gears into an acoustic guitar and drum thumping near-folk song.  It doesn’t last long, but the respite prepares you for the wailing end which features a really catchy guitar solo.

This is band I’d like to watch a live video of to see how they do their singing and harmonizing (oh, here ya go–wow, the singer looks inSANE!).  Man, I’d be afraid to see them live.

[READ: January 5, 2011] “Radical Will”

I’ve enjoyed Unferth’s fiction quite a bit.  And fortunately, this memoir uses her distinct writing style to huge advantage.  At age 18 (in 1987), Unferth ran away from college and traveled to Central America with her boyfriend to be in a revolutionary movement.

In this excerpt, Unferth and “George” travel to San Salvador.  Unlike other stories where the young, innocent Americans are stopped at gunpoint and left to endure excruciating torments, for the most part these two seem to be ignored.  By almost everyone. (more…)

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Zadie Smith–“Sweet Charity” (New Yorker, October 11, 2010)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Deathspell Omega, Essays, New Yorker, Pregnancy, Zadie Smith on January 21, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: DEATHSPELL OMEGA-“Abscission” (2010).

This album, Paracletus, came in at number 6 on Viking’s Top Ten album list.  The song is pretty straight ahead black metal.  It is noisy and growly and everything you might expect from the genre.  The first  surprise here is that the band is French.  The bigger surprise is how after a bout two minutes of pounding noise, a melody comes out of the darkness and brings a real structure to the bludgeoning.

Although I enjoyed the sing as far as black metal goes, I feel like the praise that he heaps on the album doesn’t seem deserved by this track. It’s a strong black metal song but it doesn’t seem either brilliant or confounding to me.

[READ: December 30, 2010] “Sweet Charity”

This is the fifth and final Something Borrowed story in this issue of The New Yorker.  I felt like this story provided a lot of personal background information about Zadie Smith.  The other short articles were certainly personal, but I feel like this one revealed things about her that I don’t know about most authors.

It seems that as a young lady, Smith was a total geek, playing the cello, dressing crazily (relatively) and often not really appropriate for her body size.  She also admits that she was financially very lucky, more so than many of the girls she went to school with.

In Zadie’s account, it is a friend who borrows money from her.  The friend is a fellow cello geek from school.  They agreed to be strong and not fall to the stereotypes of black teenage girls.  But their pledge to not get pregnant was not kept  by the friend.  She had the child and had to work very hard to make ends meet.   Finally, as she is about to be kicked out of her flat, she swallows her pride and asks Zadie for a loan. (more…)

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Jonathan Franzen–“Hissing of Summer Lawns” (New Yorker, October 11, 2010)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Essays, Funny (ha ha), Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker, Summer, The Fun Years on January 20, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: THE FUN YEARS-“Breech on the Bowstring” (2010).

This album (with the awesome title), God Was Like, No came in at number 5 on Viking’s Top Ten.  It is a kind of ambient music, except that the notes are a fast staccato instead of long-held notes.  According to the radio show, the band consists of just guitar effects and turntables (another duo!).  In the beginning of the song, it’s impossible to tell which is which with these noises.

The music is quite pretty if slightly unsettling.  Over the 7 minutes of the track, you can feel it building and building, getting louder and louder, without really changing the dynamic all that much (except you can hear more and more details in the music).  Although by the 6 minute mark, the noise tends to overpower the nicer earlier music and the wall of sound become more and more ominous.

It takes a couple of listens, but it gets better and better with each one.

[READ: December 30, 2010] “Hissing of Summer Lawns”

Just when I think I’m done with Franzen, he drags me back in.

This one page anecdote in the Something Borrowed category is actually the shortest of all of them.  It continues with my favorite aspect of Franzen’s writing: his young adulthood.

In this case, he talks about his struggling years, when he would borrow people’s houses.  He house sat for a professor who was on vacation and wanted someone to make sure their son didn’t party while they were away.  The son, who showed up after a couple of days, put Franzen in his place with a blistering stare.

But the main part of the story comes when he agrees to house sit for friends.  His only real duty was to mow their lawn which he immediately neglects to do.  Soon the lawn is out of control.  And worse, when he finally goes to cut the jungle, the lawn had been infected by earth-burrowing hornets. (more…)

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Jennifer Egan–”Dealing with the Dead” (New Yorker, October 11, 2010)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Death, Essays, Jennifer Egan, New Yorker, The Body on January 19, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: THE BODY-“Empty Heath” (2010).

This is Viking’s fourth pick for album of the year.  (I skipped number three because it is an acoustic finger picked-instrumental album which I liked fine but which wasn’t anything special to me).  The Body is a fascinating band, and they are hard to learn anything definitive about online.   But if you’re looking for the album, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, you can get it on Amazon, or (cheaper) from At a Loss Recordings.

This song opens quietly with a person saying “together.”   It’s followed by a fascinating chorus singing what sounds like possibly Peruvian throat singing.  And then the guitars bash in.  Heavy droning guitars (with a screaming “lead” vocalist buried in the mix).  The song often stutters to a halt only to pick up the doom and mysterious gloom.

The notes about this album say that it is a duo (why is some of the heaviest, most menacing music made by duos?)  At some point in the song, the music stops and you hear just the chanting (which now sounds like it’s reversed vocals).  I have no idea what to make of this song or if the rest of the disc sounds like this, but I’m really intrigued by it.  Viking calls it “the most surreal doom-metal record of 2010” and I agree.

[READ: December 30, 2010] ”Dealing with the Dead”

Jenifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is on my short list of books to read this January so I was intrigued to read this little piece by her.

Her Something Borrowed article (the third in the series) is quite different from the others.  It begins with a fairly shocking account of her mother’s robbery at gunpoint. She had been working in a gallery and the robbers thought they would have cash on hand (they didn’t).  There was talk of shooting them until they were inadvertently rescued by a delivery man.

This rather exciting story mellows out pretty quickly in to a far more reflective and mellow story. (more…)

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