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Tom Bissell—“The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the mirages of Werner Herzog” (Harper’s, December 2006)

Posted in Acting, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Angels of the Universe, Bob Dylan, David Lynch, Don Williams, Essays, Fata Morgana, Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man, Harper's, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, Land of Silence and Darkness, Lessons of Darkness, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Rescue Dawn, Sigur Rós, Strozek, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner, The White Diamond, Tom Bissell, Werner Herzog, Wild Blue Yonder, Woyzeck on December 9, 2013| Leave a Comment »

dec2006SOUNDTRACK: HILMAR ÖRN HILMARSSON & SIGUR RÒS-Angels in the Universe (2000).

angelsThis disc often gets placed in the Sigur Rós discography even though it really isn’t one of their records. It is a soundtrack to the film Angels in the Universe, and it is primarily music composed and conducted by Hilmarsson.  There are 17 tracks on the disc and he is responsible for 15 of them.  The remaining 2 are indeed by Sigur Rós, but if you have the “Ny batteri” single, you’ve already got the two songs.

The Hilmarsson tracks are large airy string pieces (I don’t know the film or anything about it, but it makes it seem rather sad). There are some tracks in the middle that deviate somewhat–some drums and occasional bass, but for the most part the music sounds like a string score to a film.  Pretty, but not exceptional.  At no time does Sigur Rós play with the other performers.

It’s the last two track s that are by Sigur Rós.  “Bíum bíum bambaló” is a slow piece that begins with mostly percussion.  Apparently it is an Icelandic lullaby and their version is quite different from a lullaby.  By the end of the song, when the whole band kicks in it rocks really hard and proves to be a great song.  The final track, “Dánarfregnir og jarðarfarir” was a theme used for death announcements on Icelandic radio (whatever that means).  I love the way it builds from a simple melody into a full rock band version and then back again.  It’s very dramatic.  These songs are both really enjoyable.  I like them a lot.  But I’d just stick with the single.

[READ: November 9, 2013] “The Secret Mainstream”

This article was in Bissell’s book Magic Hours, which I read a while ago.  I recognized some of the material in the article, but not all of it, which I find disconcerting that I forgot so much.

This article is (as the subtitle states) all about Werner Herzog, a filmmaker whose films I have never seen.  Herzog is notorious both for his films (he has made over 50) and for his behavior (some rumors of which are true, others are not).

Bissell wonders what historians would make of our civilization if they based their understanding on Herzog’s work.

He also goes through many of Herzog’s film, starting with Fata Morgana, Herzog’s first overt confounding of the feature film/documentary boundary.  It is neither narrative not strictly factual.  In truth, what Herzog does is make a hyperrealized truth.  For instance, in a film about a blind woman he created images and had her say they were images she remembered).  David Lynch is a fan of Herzog and you can see elements of Herzog in Lynch’s filams (so maybe the adjective Lynchian could be Herzogian.

What Bissell is saying (and Herzog confirms) is that Herzog is an artist, not a journalist.  He is also quite funny.  The story about the 32 pound rooster and the two foot horse is very very funny.

And while Herzog takes his films seriously he doesn’t really plan them.  He says he doesn’t anticipate what his next project will be and he also doesn’t spend a lot of time working on his films.  Woyzeck (1979) was shot in 18 days and edited in four.  He also took less than a month to make Grizzly Man (probably his best known recent film).

And yet for a film like Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), a film about Spaniards searching for El Dorado and slowly going mad, Herzog’s crew and cast nearly went mad themselves.  Klaus Kinski, the lead actor has this to say in his autobiography: “I absolutely despise this murderous Herzog… Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes, gobble up his balls, penetrate his asshole and eat his guts.”  Herzog himself says that he helped Kinski write that and many other anti-Herzog sections of that autobiography.

Bissell cites The White Diamond (2004) as one of Herzog’s best films (it is a documentary about Dr Graham Dorrington a researcher who wants to film Guyana from an experimental blimp.  Or The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner (1974) which is about competitive ski jumpers and shows jump after jump after jump landing badly. Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) is about the escape of a pilot from a prison camp in 1966.  He has Dieter open and close his door three times before entering because “most people don’t realize how important it is to have the privilege that we have to be able to open and close the door.  That is the habit I got into and so be it.”  Which is moving and impressive and totally false.  Dieter doesn’t do that in real life.  But Dieter understood what Herzog was going for and believed in the truth of it even is it’s not strictly true.  Herzog calls it the ecstatic truth.

I don’t recall how I felt about Herzog after reading this the first time, but I am certainly thinking about watching a bunch of his films.

Some recommendations from the article:

  • Fata Morgana (1970)
  • Land of Silence and Darkness (1971)
  • Aguirre:  The Wrath of God (1972)
  • The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner (1974)
  • The Enigma of Kasper Hauser (1974)
  • Strozek (1976)
  • Woyzeck (1979)
  • Fitzcarraldo (1982)
  • Lessons of Darkness (1992)
  • Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)
  • Grizzly Man (2004)
  • The White Diamond (2004)
  • Wild Blue Yonder (2005)
  • Rescue Dawn (2006)—which Herzog was working at the time of the article and which had a fairly large budget (for Herzog) of $10 million.  He even has name stars in it (Christian Bale, for one).  Bissell makes it sound very interesting, and certainly fascinating to watch being filmed.

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David Foster Wallace–original articles that comprise Both Flesh and Not (1988-2006) [a comparison]

Posted in Apostolos Doxiadis, Book Reviews, Books about writers, Consumerism, Corporate skewering, David Foster Wallace, David Markson, Essays, Fears, Fiction Writer, Funny (ha ha), Might, Philibert Schogt, Premiere, Rain Taxi, Research, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Roger Federer, Salon.com, Science, Sigur Rós, Smarty Pants, Spin, Tennis, Terminator 2, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, War, Waterstone's, Wittgenstein's Halloween, Word usage, Zbigniew Herbert on December 5, 2013| Leave a Comment »

bothfleshSOUNDTRACK: SIGUR RÓS-Von brigði [Recycle Bin] (1998).

recycleAfter releasing their first album, Sigur Rós was approached by Icelandic musicians to remix the album. And thus came Recycle Bin.  I realized too late that I really just don’t like remix albums all that much–they’re mostly just faster drums plopped on top of existing songs.  And such is the case here.  Despite the interesting musical pedigrees of the remixers, there’s nothing anywhere near as interesting as on Von itself.  There are ten tracks, but only 5 songs.

”Syndir Guðs” gets two remixes:

Biogen keeps the bass but adds some more drumlike sounds.

Múm removes the bass, adds some wild drums and trippy textures and reduces the 7 minutes to 5.  It is quite pretty but very far from the original.

“Leit að lífi” gets three remixes

Plasmic takes a spacey 3 minute wordless noodle and turns it into a heavy fast dance song with speedy drums, big bass notes and with spacey sounds.

Thor brings in some fast skittery drums and keeps the spacey sounds (which sound sped up).  And of course bigger bass noises.

Sigur Rós recycle their own song into a dance song by adding funky bass and drums.

“Myrkur” gets two remixes.  the original is a fast-paced groovy track.

Ilo begins it as a spacey non-musical sounding piece.  After two minutes they add a beat of very mechanical-sounding drums.  It’s probably the most interesting remix here.

Dirty-Bix adds big, slow drums.  It keeps the same melody and vocals as the original but totally changes the rhythm and texture of the song, (removing the guitar completely).

The remaining three songs get one remix each.

The original “18 Sekúndur Fyrir Sólarupprás” is 18 seconds of silence.  Curver turns it into “180 Sekúndur Fyrir Sólarupprás” and makes a muffled drum beat and some other samples from the album, I think.  It constantly sounds like it is glitching apart until the end where it practically disintegrates–an interesting remix of silence.

“Hún Jörð” 7 min Hassbræður increases the drums and adds a more buzzsaw guitar sound and makes the vocals stand out a bit more.

“Von” has delicate strings and Jónsi voice.  The remix by Gusgus adds low end bass and drums making it a thumping rather than soaring track.

I prefer the original, but I much prefer their next album to the first one.

[READ: end of October to early November 2013]  original articles that comprise Both Flesh and Not

As I mentioned last week, I decided to compare the articles in Both Flesh and Not with the original publications to see what the differences were.  I had done this before with A Supposedly Fun Thing… and that was interesting and enlightening (about the editing process).

This time around the book has a lot more information than the original articles did.  Although as I come to understand it, the original DFW submitted article is likely what is being printed in the book with all of the editing done by the magazine (presumably with DFW’s approval).  So basically, if you had read the original articles and figured you didn’t need the book, this is what you’re missing.

Quite a lot of the changes are word choice changes (this seems to belie the idea that DFW approved the changes as they are often one word changes).  Most of the changes are dropped footnotes (at least in one article) or whole sections chopped out (in others).

For the most part the changes were that the book version added things that were left out or more likely removed from the article.  If the addition in the book is more than a sentence, I only include the first few words as I assume most readers have the book and can find it for themselves.  The way to read the construct below is that most of the time the first quote is from the original article.  The second quote is how it appears in Both Flesh and Not.  At the end of each bullet, I have put in parentheses the page in BFAN where you’ll find it.  I don’t include the page number of the article.  And when I specifically mention a footnote (FN 1, for example), I am referring to the book as many times the articles drop footnotes and they are not always in sync.

Note: I tried most of the time to put quotes around the text, but man is that labor intensive, so if I forgot, it’s not meant to be anything significant. (more…)

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#GivingTuesday–Craig Kielburger and Martha Payne

Posted in Charity, Craig Kielburger, Food, Giving Tuesday, Lucky Peach, Martha Payne on December 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »

givingtuesToday is #GivingTuesday.  Giving Tuesday is a campaign to create a national day of giving at the start of the annual holiday season.  It encourages a national day of giving to kick off the giving season added to the calendar on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

In honor of GivingTuesday I wanted to post about two young people whom I have encountered recently (in print, not in real life).  Each one of them has blown me away with his and her selflessness and resourcefulness.

freethechild

The first was in the book Breakfast on Mars and Other Essays (which will get a post tomorrow) from Craig Kielburger, a Canadian man who was just 12 when he made a difference.

Craig Kielburger wrote an essay called “A Single Story Can Change Many Lives.”  In it he recounts his own personal experience of outrage at reading a horrible news story.  In 1995, when he was 12 years old, Craig saw a headline in the Toronto Star newspaper that read “Battled child labour, boy, 12, murdered.” The accompanying story was about a young Pakistani boy named Iqbal Masih who was forced into bonded labour in a carpet factory at the age of four.  Masih eventually snuck out and began telling people about what had happened.  When he was 12 he was shot dead.

Kielburger, at age 12, immediately wanted to do something about this.  He took the article to school, gathered friends founded a group called the “Twelve-Twelve-Year-Olds.”  In December 1995 before he started eighth grade, he took two months off of school and backpacked through Asia, Kielburger traveled to Asia with Alam Rahman, a 25-year-old family friend from Bangladesh, to see the conditions for himself.  His group evolved into the Free The Children fund, and international organization.  And his foundation has to date built over 650 schools and school rooms and implemented projects in 45 developing countries through its approach of “children helping children”. The majority of the organization’s annual funding comes from funds raised by young people.

marys

The second story is in the most recent Lucky Peach Issue (#9).  In an insert entitled “Guts,” there is a story about Martha Payne, a Scottish ten year old girl who has made a huge difference.

Martha was nine years old and was asked for a class to write like a journalist.  She thought it would be fun to make a blog about her school meals (this would allow her to include pictures).  So she created NeverSeconds. In one of her posts she wrote “I need to concentrate all afternoon and I can’t do it on 1 croquette. Do any of you think you could?”  Her dad tweeted it and soon it was a sensation.  People really responded to the size of her meal.

And then someone posted that she was lucky to get a meal at all.  She had been helping to raise money for Mary’s Meals for years–in her words, “they provide free school dinners in a place of education in sixteen of the poorest countries in the world.  Children can go to school instead of working or looking for food.”

never secondsBecause of the attention, she set up a JustGiving page that sends money to Mary’s Meals.  She raised £2,000 in a short time.

Back at home, her school began improving their meals and she began rating them (one even got a 10 out of 10).  And she started gaining fame in the region, making the paper and meeting chefs who were curious about her.  And then her school told her she had to shut down her blog.  She wrote about it here.

Of course, that made her blog explode.  She received thousands of messages and emails and began raising more and more money.  She had hoped to raise £7,000, as I write this she has raised £131,219 (that’s 1874% of her goal)–remember, she’s only 10.

Martha notes that $20 will feed a child for a year.  Here’s that link again JustGiving.

It’s amazing what determination can do.  Happy holidays.

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Alix Hawley–“Daniel Boone, By Himself” (The Walrus, November 2013)

Posted in Alix Hawley, Death, Short Story, Sigur Rós, The Walrus, Violence, Yuck! on December 2, 2013| 1 Comment »

cover-10-9_largeSOUNDTRACK: SIGUR RÓS-“Svefn-g-englar” (1999).

220px-SvernCoverAThis was the first I heard of Sigur Rós.  I suspect my friend Lar told me about them and I was just blown away by the first track on this single–a 9 minute swelling, string-filled, otherworldly enterprise.

The first song on the single is “Svefn-g-englar.”  It opens with overlaying chords and the beat is kept by an echoing keyboard note.  It’s very spacey and mellow.  And the vocals are unlike anything i had heard before–not just falsetto, but practically alien falsetto.  There are noisy guitars but they work into the background washes of sound and don’t really register as guitars exactly.  Gorgeous soaring vocals on the chorus, which I’ve always heard as “its you” but is apparently “tjú.”  It’s otherworldly and beautiful  Then at 6:30 the drums kick in and the song gets grounded, taking on more gravitas as the chords grow louder.  This lasts for one minute as the song then slows itself back into its original style.

The second track is “Viðrar vel til loftárása.”  It has a louder bass and great chords.  This slow airy song is grounded by the acoustic piano–a very pretty melody with the strings behind it.  Jonsi’s vocal line is beautiful but mixed very low as if he is so far away.  The song ends with a great string section until the abrupt end.  It clocks in at 10 minutes.

Two live songs “Nýja lagið” and “Syndir Guðs” (live at the Icelandic Opera House, June 12, 1999) show that the band can work this magic live.  The guitar is more intense bring a bit more drama to the sound.  But Jonsi’s voice is still amazing in the live setting.  The first one is funny because you don’t really realize it’s live until the end when people start clapping.  And at 9 minutes it’s an amazing listen.  When it goes into a minor chord at around 5 minutes, it’s really something.

The final song “Syndir Guðs” comes from their debut album Von.  It is only 5 minutes, but it’s really quite good here.  It’s nice to see them translate their style to this older song.  The song is quite a short one for this EP, which totals nearly 35 minutes.  This is a great EP for fans of the band.  Hearing those live recordings is totally worth it.

[READ: December 2, 2013] “Daniel Boone, By Himself”

I don’t know a lot about Daniel Boone, truth be told.  So this story may be very accurate or maybe it’s based-on-actual-research about Boone’s possible mental state at the time of his death.  Or maybe he just made it all up.  Whatever the case, I did not enjoy it.

From the beginning, in which we learn the proper way to scalp someone, to the death of Boone’s son, the story was explicitly violent.  And while I’m no shrinking violet when it comes to violence, there just wasn’t much more to it. I’m sure that Boone’s life was nonstop violence, and that this story is not inaccurate in that way (I don’t even know if he had a son).

And perhaps it was that nonstop violence that prevented me from learning much about him in the first place. (more…)

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George Saunders reads Isaac Babel’s “You Must Know Everything” (New Yorker fiction podcast (#4) “Listen and Learn” August 2007)

Posted in Ernest Hemingway, George Saunders, Interviews, Isaac Babel, Jack Kerouac, New Yorker, New Yorker Fiction Podcast, Podcast, Short Story on November 27, 2013| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: November 21, 2013] “You Must Know Everything” podcast

podcastIn the fourth New Yorker fiction podcast, George Saunders reads Isaac Babel.  I know Saunders very well, although I knew next to nothing about Isaac Babel.

Saunders sets up this story very briefly before diving in to the read.  There’s something fantastic about the way Saunders read the story–full of emotion and affect.  He absolutely made the story come to life and his commentary at the end made the story even better.

Babel was 21 when he wrote this story (he was amazingly prolific–his Complete Works is over 1,000 pages), and Saunders is blown away by the amount of depth such a young writer fits into the story.  Saunders says that for him Babel is a combination of Hemingway and Kerouac–Hemingway because Babel edited his storied very intensely and Kerouac because he wasn’t afraid to add the occasional poetic touch.

In the story, a young boy is going to visit his grandmother.  As the story opens, he explains that he was always very observant.  He knew everything about the streets of his city, Odessa.  He knew the stores and the anomalies in the buildings.  He observed every new window.  Until someone teased him for looking in a lingerie store. (more…)

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Donald Antrim reads Donald Barthelme’s “I Bought a Little City” (New Yorker fiction podcast (#3) “Urban Planning” July 2007)

Posted in Dogs, Donald Antrim, Donald Barthelme, Interviews, New Yorker, New Yorker Fiction Podcast, Podcast, Short Story on November 26, 2013| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: November 20, 2013] “Urban Planning” podcast

podcastIn the third New Yorker fiction podcast, Donald Antrim reads Donald Barthelme.  I know both writers, but neither one all that well.

The story is absurdist and very funny.  In it, the narrator buys “a little city,”Galveston, Texas.  He keeps things pretty much the way they are–he doesn’t want anything too imaginative going on.  He tears down several houses and builds new developments (cut in the shape of puzzle pieces).  But he’s a little bored so he goes out and shoots 6,000 dogs, and then makes a front page announcement that he had done it.  This causes some upset (naturally), and he’s appreciative for the excitement.

But overall he is unsatisfied because he is in love with a married woman.  And she won’t leave her husband (and may not even know who the narrator is–except that he owns the city).  Eventually he had to sell the city back (and he took a real soaking financially on that deal).

The story has many many funny lines–laugh out loud funny–and (dog killing aside) it is a funny and delightfully weird story that retains its voice no matter how odd it seems. (more…)

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Edwidge Danticat discusses Junot Díaz’s “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie” (New Yorker fiction podcast (#2) “The Dating Game” June 2007)

Posted in Edwidge Danticat, Interviews, Junot Díaz, New Yorker, Podcast, Racism, Sex, Sexism, Short Story, Unreliable narrator on November 25, 2013| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: November 20, 2013] “The Dating Game” podcast

outkoudIn the second New Yorker fiction podcast, Edwidge Danticat doesn’t read Díaz’s story but rather she discusses it and her connection to Díaz after listening to the audio from the New Yorker Out Loud 2 CD (the story is read by Junot Díaz with Gail Thomas doing the female voices).

I have yet to read Díaz’s Drown (for no real reason, I just haven’t), which is where this story appears.  And I enjoyed that this story is written in the same style as his later stories about Junior (sure, I suppose he will need to move beyond Junior as a character but it seems like he has plenty of stories to tell).  And I found this story unsettling and very enjoyable.

The story is a funny/obnoxious (I mean, re-read the title) story about, as the title suggests, how to date a girl–there are different specifics depending on her race (white girls will put out, but local girls you need to take to the fancy restaurant).  And be sure to take the government cheese out of the fridge so she doesn’t see it–but be damn sure to put it back before your mom gets home.

The reading is wonderful and having Thomas do the female voices really adds a nice touch.  I would say more about the story, but Danticat says a lot of what I was thinking about it.  (more…)

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Richard Ford–“Reunion” (New Yorker, May 15, 2000)

Posted in Dr. Dog, Grateful Dead, John Cheever, Marriage Trouble, New Yorker, Reunion, Richard Ford, Sex, Short Story, Tiny Desk Concert on November 24, 2013| Leave a Comment »

2000_05_15_p323

SOUNDTRACK: DR. DOG-Tiny Desk Concert #7 (October 20, 2008).

drdog

I have been hearing a lot about Dr. Dog lately (they are from Philly and the radio station we listen to is from Philly, so that makes sense).  But I had assumed they were a new band.  So imagine my surprise to see that they were the 7th Tiny Desk Concert and the first full band to play the Tiny Desk.  (Their first album came out in 2005!).

It’s fun to watch a five piece band squeeze into the Tiny Desk (the drummer is playing a small pink suitcase) and the fifth member of the band is playing some various percussions (I wonder if he does more in the band).  It’s also funny when one of the guitars breaks a string and the singer says “son of a bitch.”

Dr. Dog proves to be quite interesting.  Their first song is “The Beach.”  It’s a rocking awesome track–the guitar is great and bassist Toby Leaman’s move is raspy and powerful.  I really like this song a lot.  The second song is quite different, it’s a bouncy boppy song that sounds a bit like a more rocking Grateful Dead (that bass).  This song has a different singer–Scott McMicken, who plays lead guitar on “The Beach,” but acoustic guitar here.  (The other guitarist, Frank McElroy  played acoustic on The Beach and electric on this one).

After a lengthy discussion they play the third song (in a different version from the record) “How Dare.”  This song opens with their great harmonies (a wonderful feature of the band).  It also has a jam band quality (Toby’s back on vocals but less raspy and powerful, and more bluesy)/on this track.

The band seemed to think they were only to play two songs, and frankly it’s a shame they only play 3. At 12 minutes it one of the shorter Tiny Desk concerts.  But I am a convert to Dr. Dog, and I need to hear more from them.

[READ: November 10, 2013] “Reunion”

After listening to Richard Ford in yesterday’s podcast, I decided I wanted to read his take on the Cheever story “Reunion.”  And while I can definitely see that it was inspired by a kernel of an idea in Cheever’s story, I probably never would have put the two together had I not known.

Ford’s story opens the same way as Cheever’s with someone waiting in Grand Central Station.  It turns out that the person is Mack Bolger.  Bolger is waiting intently for someone.  We quickly learn that the narrator who spies Bolger had had an affair with Bolger’s wife, Beth about a  year and a half prior to this meeting.  It ended abruptly when Mack confronted them in their hotel room (in St. Louis).  Mack (who is a large man) boxed the narrator’s ears a bit and sent him running from the room in varying stages of dress (and without a precious scarf which his mother had given him).

He had not seen Mack again, although he did see Beth on one final instance–a sort of final closure.  They met in a bar and tied up loose ends, and that was that.

So when the narrator sees Mack he gets this sudden urge to speak to him:

just as you might speak to anyone you casually knew and had unexpectedly but not unhappily encountered. And not to impart anything, or to set in motion any particular action (to clarify history, for instance, or make amends), but just to speak and create an event where before there was none.  (more…)

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Richard Ford reads John Cheever’s “Reunion” (New Yorker fiction podcast (#1) “Reunions” December 2006)

Posted in Drinking, Interviews, John Cheever, New Yorker, Podcast, Richard Ford, Short Story on November 23, 2013| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: November 19, 2013] “Reunions” podcast

podcastIn the very first New Yorker fiction podcast, Richard Ford reads a story by John Cheever from 1962.  This is an especially apt pairing because Ford explains that when he does author appearances, he often reads Cheever’s story “Reunion” before reading his own story “Reunion.”  The reason, he explains, is that the Cheever story inspired his own.  [I haven’t read the Ford story although it too appears in the New Yorker, but from the way he describes it, it doesn’t sound like it’s all that similar, just “inspired” by the Cheever piece].

I don’t know a lot of Cheever (which Ford says is a common and sad problem for American readers), but I have always loved his story “The Swimmer,” which I think is fantastic.

“Reunion” (the Cheever story) is very simple and yet it speaks a lot about family. (Both Ford and the New Yorker host talk about how remarkably short (about 1,000 words) and yet how powerfully concise it is.)  In the story, a young man has time to kill between trains in Gran Central Station.  He is en route from school and had about 90 minutes before his next train arrives. So he contacts his father to see about having lunch.  He hasn’t seen his father in about three years and he thinks this will be nice. (more…)

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Tom Bissell–“Improvised, Explosive, & Divisive: Searching in vain for a strategy in Iraq” (Harper’s, January 2006)

Posted in Bob Dylan, Bombs, Culture Shock, Don Williams, Essays, Harper's, Kurt Wagner, Lambchop, Military, Tiny Desk Concert, Tom Bissell, Translators, Video Games, Violence, War on November 22, 2013| 1 Comment »

jan2006 SOUNDTRACK: KURT WAGNER-Tiny Desk Concert #6 (October 8, 2008).

kurtI have never been a big fan of Lambchop.  It’s just not my kind of music—a little too slow for me.  But I really enjoyed Kurt Wagner in this Tiny Desk performance.  His guitar playing I really beautiful (I loved how he hit the high note on Bob Dylan’s  “You’re a Big Girl Now.”  He plays three Lambchop songs and two covers.

Wagner is from Nashville, and he has an air of Southern propriety about him–apologizing for taking up everyone’s time at work.  He sounds great doing the Dylan song, which I suppose is no real surprise.  The first Lambchop song is a pretty ballad called “Slipped Dissolved and Loosed.”

He is a charming and funny guy, joking about a few things (like working in an office) and then discussing about one of his songs, “National Talk Like a Pirate Day” (which is not as funny as the title might suggest).  Another song is titled “Sharing a Gibson with Martin Luther King Jr.” (and Wagner waves a fan of MLK Jr. (from a funeral home-(?)) to start the song.

The final song is a Don Williams song called “I Believe in You.”  I’ve never heard of him (and neither had anyone else in the studio).  It’s a really enjoyable, sweet song, and there’s a funny moment when sirens go past and he comments that at least they are in tune.  I still don’t think I’ll be listening to a lot of Lambchop, but I really liked this Tiny Desk show.

[READ: October 8, 2013] “Improvised, Explosive, & Divisive”

Two years after writing about his trip to Vietnam, Bissell returned to another war zone.  This time going to Iraq to get embedded (I suppose that’s the technical term for what he did) with some Marines at Camp Taqaddum in Iraq (17 miles from Baghdad).  This was during the Iraq war (and the Bush presidency), after Mission Accomplished, when the military was searching for a strategy for what to do in the situation.

This article shows interviews with Marines and makes assessments about our then current plans (such as they were) for how to extricate ourselves from a seemingly hopeless situation.  After Mission Accomplished the war went from a “war” to “stability and support operations against an insurgent element” or what is called MOOTW (military operations other than war).  And Bissell acknowledges that it barely seems like any resembling war in Iraq where the soldiers are headquartered.  They cannot drink alcohol, have sex or view pornography (they are trying to remain respectful of their host country), but at the same time they play softball and go to the gym, wear Co-Ed Naked Camel Watching T-shirts and have a Baskin-Robbins ice cream stand.  Not to mention DVD, video game consoles and Coke for sale in the PX.

Some of the article is technical—a side of the fighting that most readers probably don’t know. Like that the troops must be fully protected (and the vehicles as well) just to travel the relatively short distance between camps. (more…)

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