SOUNDTRACK: CIRCLE TAKES THE SQUARE Live at Black Cat Washington DC, August 31, 2011 (2011).
I had never heard of Circle Takes the Square before seeing the link to this show on NPR (Thank you, Viking!). I like the band name (Hollywood Squares reference), and couldn’t imagine what they sounded like.
Song titles like “In the Nervous Light of Sunday” and “We’re Sustained by the Corpse of a Fallen Constellation” and even “Non-Objective Portrait of Karma” lead one in many possible directions. But it turns out that the band is sort of pigeonholed as screamo, a post-hardcore style that allows mostly for screamed vocals. And yet these guys also incorporate intricate playing, odd time signatures and some beautiful instrumental passages.
Even though the band plays fast, they don’t play only short songs. The shortest songs run about three minutes but they have two songs that are over 6 minutes, with several different sections.
I listened to this show a few times and I confess I never really got into it. I liked some of it but I was never fully able to grasp what was going on. It could have been the recording quality. Usually NPR shows are crystal clear, but this one was a bit muddy–which may have been intentional from the band as they are pretty raw sounding. I did like the split male/female vocals which added a cool depth to the songs. But mostly I was impressed by the kind and almost sweet attitude of the lead singer. He was polite and thankful to the audience (thanking them for braving the weather–the show was during Hurricane Irene–thanking them for coming from both far and near and talking about how excited he was about Pg. 99, the headliners. It’s funny to hear polite thankfulness and then screaming lyrics like: “Embrace the sweet sound of self-destruction.”
I’d like to hear a studio release before passing final judgment, because there was a lot to like here.
[READ: August 29, 2012] Habibi
I saw this book in a review by Zadie Smith in Harper’s a while back. I didn’t realize at the time that the author was the same person who did the wonderful Blankets.
This book is an amazing piece of art. And the story is very good too.
So this massive book (almost 700 pages) is the story of a woman born into a fictional Middle Eastern country called where the Qur’an is studied and women are more or less chattel. As the story opens Dodola is sold by her father to a wealthy man who becomes her husband. The scene of her deflowering, while not graphic at all, is very disturbing nonetheless. She is afraid of this man and cowers in the fear until they gradually start to see each other as human beings. And although their age difference is substantial (and yes, gross), she learns to appreciate him.
Until he his killed by the king’s men and Dodola is taken away to the king’s palace to be sold as a slave–her hair is tied to another girl’s hair so they cannot escape.
Through a series of events, she does escape, and when she is hiding out she manages to save the life of a black baby named Cham. She calls him Zam after the Well of Zamzam (Arabic: زمزم) in Mecca, the holiest place in Islam. And while she is only 12, she takes care of this 3-year-old boy and raises him as her own child. (more…)
