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Archive for the ‘Tiny Desk Concert’ Category

Haruki Murakami–“U.F.O. in Kushiro” (New Yorker, March 28, 2011)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Death, Earthquakes, Gogol Bordello, Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin, Marriage Trouble, Natural Disasters, New Yorker, Short Story, Tiny Desk Concert, U.F.O., UFOs on May 4, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: GOGOL BORDELLO-Tiny Desk Concert #66 (June 28, 2010).

I had heard a few minutes of Gogol Bordello before this concert but it was during a TV show that I was half watching.  When I sat down and listened to this show, I was blown away by hem and immediately bought two of their CDs. Gogol Bordello is a multi-piece, multi ethic band that plays rocked-up Russian folk music (mor or less).  The sound is very traditional, with a kind of gypsy edge sprinkled onto it.  I’m not sure how many people are in the band, or how may people showed up for this concert but it sounds like about 100 in the tint room.  This is also the longest Tiny Desk show that I’ve heard (it runs almost 25 minutes).

The band plays five songs (and there’s a little chatting in between) and as the session goes on the band gets more rowdy (and more fun).  The video (also available at the same site) shows the singer sitting in the laps of the NPR folks and jumping on some desks and just having a blast.  And even though I enjoy shoegazing music, this is the kind of rollicking fun that I would love to see in concert.

The songs are political, but not overtly so, it’s more of a communal feel, of people uniting (which is indeed political).  I think they could get old kind of quickly, but in small doses the band is energizing and wonderful.

[READ: March 27, 2011] “U.F.O. in Kushiro”

This story was originally published in the March 19, 2001 issue and was inspired by the incidents of the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan.  It was reprinted here to memorialize the recent earthquake in Japan.  The story is accompanied by rather devastating photos (and some surreal ones) of the aftermath of the earthquake in Kobe.

The story (translated by Jay Rubin) opens a few days after the Kobe Earthquake.  And even five days after the Kobe earthquake, Komura’s wife is still engrossed in the TV footage from Kobe.  She never leaves the set.  He doesn’t see her eat or even go to the bathroom.  When he returns from work on the sixth day, she is gone.  She has left a note to the effect that she’s not coming back and that she wants a divorce.  Komura’s wind is knocked out of him. (more…)

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Ramona Ausubel–“Atria” (New Yorker, April 4, 2011)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Funny (strange), New Yorker, Ramona Ausubel, Richard Thompson, Sex, Short Story, Tiny Desk Concert, Unreliable narrator, Virginity (Loss of) on May 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: RICHARD THOMPSON-Tiny Desk Concert #107 (February 1, 2011).

This Tiny Desk concert sees Richard Thompson playing three songs from his most recent disc Dream Attic.  I really enjoyed this album, but because it was recorded live, and there’s lots of instrumentation on it, I wasn’t sure how well these songs would translate to a simple acoustic guitar.

I needn’t have worried.  RT is a master songsmith and even stripped down to just him and his guitar the songs swell where they should and haunt when they ought.  “The Money Shuffle” doesn’t need the horns that accompany the original (he supplies the power with his voice), and “Stumble On,” a gorgeous ballad, works fine solo.  I appreciated the introduction he gives to the final song “Demons in Her Dancing Shoes” as I didn’t realize it was about something specific.  He plays all the fast bits (including a brief solo) wonderfully on that acoustic guitar, too.

This is not to say that I think these songs are better solo than with the band.  It’s just to say that RT can play anything and make it sound great.  It’s an excellent (if not brief) set.

[READ: April 4, 2011] “Atria”

I hated this story as I read it.  I felt like it was deliberately trying to manipulate me.  I felt like it was playing some very obvious cards and leading to an obvious conclusion.  By the end I wanted to scream at it, yet it kept surprising me.

The story is about Hazel, a sophomore in high school.  She has not had any kind of experience with sex until one afternoon when circumstances conspire for her to have sex behind a 7-11.  She doesn’t really enjoy it but she didn’t really protest it either.  She was just sort of there.

Soon afterward, she is raped (I know), by a man who is clearly not all there.  The rape occurs behind the church (I know), and once again, she probably could have gotten away, but she was just sort of there.

Now, of course she’s pregnant (I know).  She doesn’t know who the father is obviously, but now she has a scapegoat.  The man is vilified but never found (the police artist was a joke).  The town puts up a bunch of Hazel-inspired alert phones all over town (fat lot of good they do her now).

She is treated with kid gloves in school.  Even the religious girl doesn’t blame her for being raped (I know).  All the time she is pregnant she imagines the kind of animal that will come out of her.  It’s never a baby, just different kinds of animals: birds with beaks pecking at her and having multiple babies themselves–which are crushing each other, even a four-legged beast.  It’s very trippy, and she seems to be as well.

When the baby is finally born she determines that it is a seal.  And she realizes that it needs to be kept wet.

The ending of the story was very, VERY disturbing and I simply couldn’t believe what I was reading.  And yet for all of the obvious (and by contrast highly disturbing) stuff that happened, I didn’t want to stop.  There’s was something strangely compelling about this story.  I will keep an eye out for her in the future.

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David Foster Wallace–The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel (2011)

Posted in Boredom, Culture Shock, David Foster Wallace, Funny (ha ha), Humiliation, Marriage Trouble, Morality, New Yorker, Oddities, Suicide, Tiny Desk Concert, Wu Man on May 2, 2011| 2 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: WU MAN-Tiny Desk Concert #124 (April 27, 2011).

Wu Man is considered the master of the pipa. If that sentence was complete gibberish, the pipa is a 4 stringed lute-like instrument and Wu Man is a Chinese virtuosi of the instrument.  This Tiny Desk Concert shows Wu Man playing three songs, solo.

The songs are, if not traditional Chinese songs, then at least traditional in style.  Needless to say they are not for everyone (and really, they’re not even my cup of tea–I’m not downloading it, just watching it), but watching her fingers move on this instrument and really paying attention to the kind of things she’s doing with four strings, it’s quite an impressive feat.

She doesn’t sing, and the songs do not follow western musical structure at all.  But it’s an interesting look into Chinese musical culture.

Even if you only watch the first song, it’s worth the time.

[READ: April 29, 2011] The Pale King

[Note: this review is pretty much free from spoilers–some details are given but I don;t think they ruin anything–but it is full of speculation and imaginings of what could have been]

I finished The Pale King today.  It took about a month, but that was because I only read it at lunch hour.  And I was surprised to find that, unlike with other books, I didn’t always feel up to pushing my lunch hour a few extra minutes to get some extra pages in.  Not because I didn’t like the book, but I think it was just really dense and often quite intense.

I’ll also state that I hadn’t been making any kind of notations when I started.  Then, a bit of the way through, when I realized there were a lot of characters, I started jotting down some names and characteristics.  But then I stopped again, because it was interfering with my absorption of the story as a story (such as it is).  So, this review is based on an initial read (yes, I’ll be reading it again in the not too distant future, that’s for sure), without any real note taking.

Is note taking necessary?  Well, yes, at least to keep the characters straight.  There are many many characters and most of them do not interact (or at least not explicitly) so it’s not always easy to know who is who or which person’s weird characteristics are showing up in any given chapter.  Plus, there are dozens of chapters in which unnamed people are described.  It’s hard to know how deliberate that was or how much of it is just the fact that book was unfinished.

The other thing is the ending, of course.  DFW fiction is notorious for its “lack” of endings.  Broom of the System ends mid-sentence, Infinite Jest ends in the middle of a scene, so who can imagine what The Pale King would have ended.  As such, we have only to go by editor Michael Pietsch’s placement of chapters.

So, in many respects, this book is very much Pietsch’s project.  Sure, DFW wrote all the words, but it was Pietsch’s job to piece them together.  Who is to say that DFW would have wanted §50 to end the book?  Pietsch also includes about ten pages of notes at the end of the book all showing ideas that DFW had asked himself about the nature of the finished product.  Some of these questions are minor, but others are quite significant, and would effect not only connections in the novel, but also the overall shape of the book.  It also implies that there could have been as much as another 500 pages coming.

The book feels like a kind of culmination of all of the things that he has been putting into his work for the past few collections.  There are character sketches based on interviews (Brief Interviews), there are lengthy sections of bureaucratic minutiae, lovingly rendered (“Mr Squishy”), there are scenes of conformist office work (“The Soul is Not a Smithy”) and there is redemption in the everyday (“This is Water”).  The mind reels at what this could have been had it been finished.

So this book is obviously, radically unfinished (and yet it’s still over 500 pages long).  So, why bother reading it?

(Here’s where the review really starts).

Because what is here is amazing. (more…)

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Terry Moore–Echo #25 & #26 (2010)

Posted in Adventure, Death, Los Campesinos!, Mad Scientists, Military, Smarty Pants, Strangers in Paradise, Supernatural, Technology, Terry Moore, Threats, Tiny Desk Concert, Violence, Yuck! on January 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: LOS CAMPESINOS!-Tiny Desk Concert #67 (July 5, 2010).

This Tiny Desk show really accentuates what fun can be had with the Tiny Desk format. Los Campesinos! are an eight piece band, but only four of them could come (or could fit, anyhow) in the tiny office.  And so we get a hugely stripped down set from the wonderful Welsh band.

One of the real benefits of these Tiny Desk shows is that it really highlights the songs themselves.  I enjoy Los Campesinos!, but sometimes I feel like their songs are so busy it’s not always easy to know exactly what’s going on.  This set shows how cool and interesting these three songs are underneath all the wild sounds and effects.

It’s also fascinating to watch these four folks perform in this room with nothing to hide behind.  The singer doesn’t even have a microphone, he’s just standing there with his arms behind his back singing to a small room.  And how odd it must be to sing to a dozen or strangers the a capella ending of “Straight in at 101.”

The three tracks all come from Romance is Boring and include the wonderfully titled: “A Heat Rash In The Shape Of The Show Me State; Or, Letters From Me To Charlotte”, “Straight In At 101” and “The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future.”

As you might be able to guess from the titles, the band is wordy and articulate.  What you might not be able to guess is just how sexually explicit their lyrics are.  Not dirty (well, a little dirty) just unabashedly frank (and its made even more so in this quiet setting).

You can watch (and download here).

[READ: December 15, 2010] Echo #25 & #26

These next two books in the series are really fantastic.  Issue #25 brings the confrontation with Cain to a head.  It almost comes too quickly–there has been so much lead-up to it that when they finally meet the confrontation is (necessarily) brief and explosive.  They finally meet at the top of a mountain (where yet another really gruesome act is done to someone–although really it pales to what happened to the guy who was practically a skeleton).  The intensity of the confrontation, and the excitement of the denouement made me think that the series was just about to end.

But them comes Issue #26 in which the final panel changes the entire game!  (more…)

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Lauren Hall (editor)–I Live Real Close to Where You Used to Live: Kids’ Letters to Michelle Obama (and to Sasha, Malia, and Bo) (2010)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Barack Obama, Children's Books, Funny (ha ha), Heather Woods Broderick, Holidays, Lauren Hall, McSweeney's, Michele Obama, Political Humor, Sharon Van Etten, Short Books, Tiny Desk Concert on December 31, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: SHARON VAN ETTEN-Tiny Desk Concert #91 (November 14, 2010).

I was introduced to Sharon Van Etten via NPR’s All Songs Considered, so it’s no surprise that they would have her on a Tiny Desk Concert as well.  I loved her song, “Save Yourself” more than I could imagine.  There was something about the way the intensity built and built that really blew me away.  The rest of her album is really enjoyable, but it has less intensity. It’s almost like an acoustic album.

So it’s funny that I find her Tiny Desk show mildly disappointing because it is also an acoustic set. In fact, it is just her and her guitar (and her singing partner who sings wonderful harmonies).

Okay, I shouldn’t really say disappointed because the set is quote good.  Her guitar laying is fine and her voice, he unique and slightly unsettling voice is in fine form here.  There’s just something about the stripped down nature that takes away that extra sparkle that I really love about the disc.  I imagine that if I hadn’t heard the whole CD first, I would have been blown away by this live recording.

The four songs (“Peace Signs,” “Save Yourself,” “One Day,” “For You”) are all from Epic, and they’re all really good.  It’s a nice accompaniment to the album, but I think the album is a bit better.

[READ: December 13, 2010] I Live Real Close to Where You Used to Live

Back in early 2009, McSweeney’s published Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country: Kids’ Letters to President Obama as a friendly kick off to the President’s new term. We’re now at the end of the second year of that term and the “Have Fun” part seems to be rather unlikely.  But just in time for the rise of Boehner, McSweeney’s has published this companion piece, letters to the rest of the Obama family.  And it is just as sweet, clever and at times odd as the first.

The kids from 826 National in several cities were asked to write letters to the first family.  It’s interesting to see how the different regions ask different questions, but perhaps more interesting is how some things seem to resonate no matter where the kids are from.  Two kids ask about Pokémon Black and White (this must be the hot new game).  Several kids ask how many rooms there are in the White House.  Naturally, several ask about her garden (what she has in it or what kind of fruits and veggies she likes).

But the most fun is the advice the kids give.  My favorite is the girl who says that her aunt thinks Mrs Obama should have one more child (but only if she wants to).

Sadder are the children who are clearly having a rough time.  One child talks about her parents’ separation, and another’s entire letter is: “Can you help my family? We’re about to lose our house. Make the world a better place. What is your favorite food?”  It must be tough to be a prominent person who clearly wants to help yet who is for the most part, impotent to do anything.

And for me that has to be the hardest part about writing to the first lady.  She has no clear “role.”  She’s a public figure and she advocates for good, but she can’t really “do” anything.  And that has to be hard to grasp.  Although judging by what the kids say, maybe they have no problem with it. (more…)

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Jonathan Franzen–“Good Neighbors” (New Yorker, June 8 & 15, 2009)

Posted in Jonathan Franzen, Marriage Trouble, Minnesota, New Yorker, Tiny Desk Concert on December 29, 2010| 2 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: PHOENIX-Tiny Desk Concert #60 (May 18, 2010).

I’m really enjoying these Tiny Desk concerts.  They’re sort of unplugged, but even less so, because they just don’t give the band room enough for more than guitars and small accessories. If you watch the video, you can see that they are literally in someone’s office!

This set comes during Phoenix’s American tour of Wolfganag Amadeus Phoenix.  They play four songs: “Lisztomania” “Armistice” and “1901” from the album.  The big surprise at the end is a cover of Air’s “Playground Love” from The Virgin Suicides.  (I can’t confirm this, but the page notes say that Phoenix (or at least the singer) was involved with the original).  All four songs sound great.  Even though the album is very electronic and very keyboard heavy, these simple stripped down acoustic versions show how wonderful the songs are.  And of course “Playground Love” is a wonderfully unexpected treat.

[READ: December 14, 2010] “Good Neighbors”

This is one of the final two pieces by Franzen that are from the New Yorker.  This (and the other) is a short story that I am fairly certain is an excerpt from Freedom.  I believe that the main character of this piece is in Freedom, but I don’t know if this passage (or story arc) is in the book.  (I’ll be reading Freedom sometime in 2011).

It’s nice to get back to Franzen’s fiction after reading so much of his non-fiction; I am forever more of a fan of fiction than non-.  This story is about Patty Berglund and her family.  They were the first white family to move to the Ramsey Hill section of St. Paul, Minn.   Despite the abuse that her family took, they stuck it out and built up their home, investing their life into it and the community.

Slowly, the neighborhood grew more affluent (ie., white).  Yet for all of Patty’s pioneering work, she was never widely embraced by the new community members.   She was accepted, of course, and people wouldn’t say anything bad about her, but she never opened up enough  for people to feel they really knew her.

And that may be the moral of the story. (more…)

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Jeff Kinney–Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth [#5] (2010)

Posted in "Weird Al" Yankovic, All Songs Considered, Children's Books, Fears, Jeff Kinney, Queen, Set at School, Short Books, The White Stripes, Tiny Desk Concert on December 2, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC-Tiny Desk Concert #65 (June 22, 2010).

I can remember when Weird Al’s first album came out.  I heard about it on the radio (but hadn’t actually heard the song…I think they just talked about it being very funny) and went to my local Pathmark (which sold LPs) and asked the clueless clerk where the album with “Another One Rides the Bus” is.  Of course, he brought me to Queen.  I think I learned how to be sarcastic that day.  That was back in 1983.  Here it is 27 years later and Al is still popular enough to be invited to do an acoustic show on NPR (well, actually, the number of links about Al indicate that he may just be a perennial guest).

The Tiny Desk series is a 15 minute (or so) concert that’s all acoustic and appears to be in front of an audience of about ten (how lucky!).

This set is a fascinating look at three of Al’s songs.  The first song is “You Don’t Love Me Anymore.”  This was the ballad whose video was a parody of Extreme’s “More Than Words” video.  It is perfectly appropriate in this setting and still gets a number of laughs even though it’s from 1992.  I was astonished to hear the next song, “Good Old Days” (from 1988!).  It’s not one of my favorite songs by him, but it works well in this context.  I just can’t believe they dusted it off for the set.

The final song is a new one (he says it’s from “The Leaked Project,” ha ha) called “CNR” which is about Charles Nelson Riley.  What’s especially amusing about this performance is that the original is a style parody of The White Stripes.  Now, an acoustic version of a White Stripes song completely undermines the parodic nature of the song.  And yet it still shows the songcraft (it is an original tune after all) but also that his vocal skills are still top-notch.

These three songs aren’t his best songs, but this is a fun (albeit brief) tour through some of his more esoteric tracks.  You can listen (and download) and watch the video of it!! here.  There’s also a leaked copy of an Al song that never made it to an album.  “You’re Pitiful,” a parody of James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” can be streamed here.

[READ: November 25, 2010] The Ugly Truth

As I’ve said before, I love the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.  It never fails to make me laugh.  I’m kind of impressed at how many knock-offs it has spawned.  And all for simple line drawings and really funny pre-teen observations.

I was a little down on the previous book because it was about the summer, and I think the really funny bits are school related.  This book returns to school, and within the first few pages it had me laughing really hard again.

The “Ugly Truth” of the title is alluded to on the cover (Greg holding an egg); it’s that time for the girls and boys to have their own separate talks.  And there’s very little that is funnier than kids and “the talk.”  Unless of course, you’re having a kids overnight lock down at the school. (more…)

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