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Archive for the ‘Sex’ Category

Garth Greenwell–“The Frog King” (New Yorker, November 26, 2018)

Posted in Bulgaria, Field Recordings, Garth Greenwell, LGBTQ, Micachu & The Shapes, NPR/PRI/PBS, Sex, Short Story on November 26, 2018| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: MICACHU & THE SHAPES-“Love or Leave” (Field Recordings, September 19, 2012).

This Field Recording [Micachu & The Shapes: Weeds In The Forest] gets back to the style of the ones I first saw–a band wandering through the woods.  In this case, the three members of Micachu & The Shapes plod through the woods to sit on a tree stump.

Mica plays a very simple melody on a very simple (but surprisingly loud) guitar (held around her neck with a piece of rope tied around the body of the guitar).  I love that she is able to bend a note during his chord (not hard, but cool).

As it opens, backing singer Raisa Khan says “I saw a deer.” Mica asks, “Did you?”

The three of them sing so wonderfully together–the ahhs and oohs fill in the music perfectly with her voice.  The middle section is also a lot of fun when they all sing together in almost deadpan British accent “Cannot wait for my holiday / I’ve had my work cut out for me.”

Why have I never heard of Micachu before?  I don’t know.

Experimental musician Mica Levi, a.k.a. Micachu, doesn’t exactly fit comfortably into her surroundings: She cuts a vaguely otherworldly, not-so-vaguely androgynous figure, and sings strangely pretty, jagged little songs with the aid of odd tunings and a tiny guitar, which dangles from crudely tied twine. She identifies herself as a pop singer, but while her songs are catchy enough, they’re no one’s idea of pop-radio fodder.

But I love this song and I need to hear more.

Taking Micachu on a hike into the sun-dappled woods of Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park makes as much sense as it would to surround her with modern everyday life. So we sat her on a log in the open air, where she sang “Holiday” — from her new album Never — while flanked by Raisa Khan and Marc Pell from her band The Shapes. Together, the three musicians complement the majesty of their surroundings with everything that makes their music work: disarmingly plainspoken charm, ragged beauty, and uniqueness that blooms as naturally as the trees themselves.

I can’t wait to lean more about her.

[READ: November 20, 2018] “The Frog King”

The previous story I read by Greenwell was also about an American teacher living in Sofia, Bulgaria.  That story also dealt with the difficulty of being homosexual, or at least the perception of it in this country.

In this one, however, there is at least some consummation.

This story is quite simple in terms of plot.  In fact, there really isn’t much of one.  Rather, this is a story all about passion and the intensity of first love.

The narrator, an American teacher, has been living with a student, R., for a couple of weeks during the holiday break.  It’s unclear if they are teacher and student themselves or not, but that’s not relevant. (more…)

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David Gilbert–“The Sightseers” (New Yorker, November 20, 2017)

Posted in Cannonball Run., David Gilbert, Dogs, Field Recordings, Humiliation, Mark Rothko, Marriage Trouble, New Yorker, NPR/PRI/PBS, Parenting, Reignwolf, Sasquatch Music Festival, Sex, Sexting, Short Story, Technology, Travel, Wicked on November 20, 2018| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: REIGNWOLF-“In the Dark” (Field Recordings, June 29, 2012).

This is another Field Recording set at Sasquatch! Music Festival [Reignwolf: A One-Man Rock Show].

I’d never heard of Reignwolf and I’m still not sure if Reignwold is typically a solo project–like here or a band.  “In the Dark” is a simple blues rock song–like Led Zep via the White Stripes.

Jordan Cook plays a noisy, distorted guitar with a metal slide so that there’s pretty much always something coming out of the amp.  After some pretty simple verses he plays a wild, sloppy (broken stringed) solo.

The way he was tearing it up during an impromptu set at the Sasquatch Music Festival, you’d barely notice that Jordan Cook, a.k.a. Reignwolf, broke a string midway through his fiery rendition of “In the Dark” — that is, until you saw the mangled remnants of his guitar, smoldering on the ground after he’d wrenched every wailing chord from its guts.

The song works best when he plays the kick drum.  It adds just enough oomph to make it not seem like a guy playing a guitar.

The Saskatoon native and recent Seattle transplant never misses a beat — literally. When he’s not with a band, he accompanies himself on kick drum and makes enough noise to match a dozen metalheads. In this video, recorded at the artist campground between sets at the festival, Reignwolf causes a ruckus beside his RV and rousts a crowd of sleepy campers into dancing and cheering.

The soloing goes on for a while and the people around him seem to like it.  Although the soloing behind his head is a bit much, but hey, if you can do it, then go ahead!

[READ: February 1, 2017] “The Sightseers”

I really liked a main aspect of this story, and so many of the details.

The story begins with an overprivileged New York family.  They have a maid/cook/gofer named Kiki from Tibet and the husband marvels at Kiki and “their calm, those people.”

The father, Robert, is happy that they no longer go to North East Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving–the round nephews and the piles and piles of food.  For their Thanksgiving they would be having salmon as Robert was training five times a week with a Navy Seal.

When the salmon turns out to be halibut, the son says that wasn’t on the menu (the menus were designed ahead of time to limit daily stress by preparing the children for their dinners ahead of time–there would be no surprises.  The son asks if the next time they have halibut it will be salmon.  The father thinks that’s an excellent suggestion. (more…)

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Thomas McGuane–“Riddle” (New Yorker, November 13, 2017)

Posted in Cars, Filastine, New Yorker, Sex, Short Story, Thomas McGuane, Vince Hannemann, Violence on November 13, 2018| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: FILASTINE-“Btalla” and “Dance of the Garbagemen.” (Field Recordings, April 4, 2012).

When I first saw the title of this Field Recording, [Filastine And The Cathedral Of Junk], I assumed it was going to be all found sounds.  So I was surpirsed that there was so much electronic music.

“Btalla” starts with some electronic drums and noises and Grey Filastine playing the hand drum–a very nice organic component. Its also surprising that the other musician is a cellist. She is almost lost in the din, but you can hear her slow notes throughout the piece–until he starts manipulating her sounds in very cool ways.

He’d say he was a radical before he’d say he was a musician — a laptop artist with a love of grit and noise. Grey Filastine, once based in Seattle but now a nomad loosely based in Barcelona, is a creative soul. He seems to also love a good party, a beat and a shopping cart wired for sound.

For the second piece, “Dance of the Garbagemen.”, it’s just him manipulating sounds and then using a shopping cart for added percussion.

With that in mind, we asked Filastine to perform at a junkyard in Austin — not just any junkyard, either, but a place called “The Cathedral of Junk.” It’s a home for more than 60 tons of unwanted consumer has-been items, transformed into art installations by Vince Hannemann.

With a song title like that and the location he’s in, it feels like something of a lost opportunity that he doesn’t use a lot more junk.  But it is fun to see him make music from and amid refuse (and art).

[READ: November 15, 2017] “Riddle”

This was yet another story that I felt was just kind of a big, What?  There’s a lot of action, but the story seems to stay in the mind of the protagonist who has other things to think about.

The whole story is told in this haze of confusion: “I must have been renting a place on H Street.”  “I was an architect.”  He talks about the area being slowly abandoned and his upstairs neighbor walking up a rickety outdoor staircase.  But all of these details seem irrelevant to the story.

He says he went drinking and came out of the bar only to see a “crippled old cowboy” walking the street.  He had seen the man before and he thought there weren’t many people like him left in town.  But then he heard a young boy, an urchin call out Hey Jack!  They seemed to experience pure joy talking to each other.  The narrator was quite taken with it. (more…)

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Tenacious D (The Fillmore, Philadelphia, PA, November 8, 2018)

Posted in Dio, Hall and Oates, Jack Black, Kyle Gass, Philadelphia, PA, Post-Apocalypto, Sex, Tenacious D, The Fillmore Philadelphia on November 8, 2018| Leave a Comment »

[ATTENDED: November 8, 2018] Tenacious D

I loved the first Tenacious D record and enjoyed the goofy film The Pick of Destiny.  It amuses me to no end that kid-favorite Jack Black is in one of the most vulgar comedy-metal bands ever.  I could barely find 30 seconds of curse-free material to show my kids.

I also didn’t realize that the band toured at all.  This is mostly just an oversight on my part, because it’s obvious that they do and have toured several times as a duo and a full band.

Well, S. and I were super excited to see them, even if I haven’t listened to their more recent stuff and she apparently only knew “Tribute.”  But hey it’s Jables and Rage Kage!

The crowd was very male (S. noted) and very tall.  We arrived later than we wanted to and were a little further back than was practical for people of our heights.  We probably should have moved to the side, especially when a group of really loud people moved in around us.  But we stuck it out and waited for the show to begin.

Opening act Wynchester told us we’ve never seen a show like this.  And they were right. (more…)

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T. Coraghessan Boyle–“Are We Not Men?” (New Yorker, November 7, 2016)

Posted in Crowparrots, Dogcats, Dogs, Field Recordings, Gil Shaham, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Johann Sebastian Bach, Marriage Trouble, New Yorker, NPR/PRI/PBS, Oddities, Pigs, Sci-fi, Science, Sex, Short Story, T.C. Boyle, Technology, Teenagers on November 7, 2018| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: GIL SHAHAM-“Partitat No. 2 “Gavotte en Rondeau” by J.S. Bach” (Field Recordings, January 12, 2012).

This was the very first Field Recording posted on the NPR site back in 2012 [Gil Shaham: A Violinist’s Day At The Museum].

Shaham plays Bach in the Hirshiorn Museum.

As Gil Shaham wandered through the back offices of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., he said he felt “like Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum.” For this impromptu Bach mini-recital, the violin superstar momentarily became part of the art, bathed in the modish lighting and projections of a multimedia installation during the performance.

He is introduced with the rather amusing:  “A world famous, world renowned violinist who, by the way, starts every morning with a bowlful of Cap’n Crunch.  He told me that.”

I love that this first Field Recording was, like many of NPR’s best things, a spontaneous idea:

A crowd packed the exhibit room to watch as Shaham launched into Bach’s third partita. After the performance, the violinist greeted fans in the museum, many of whom were headed to his concert at the Kennedy Center that night. He seemed surprised and delighted that the guerrilla concert, announced only on local classical station WETA and Twitter that day, drew so many people willing to hear Bach in the afternoon.

[READ: January 22, 2017] “Are We Not Men”

Boyle’s stories aren’t usually as fanciful as this.  But I loved it just as much as many of his other more down to earth stories.  I particularly enjoyed that it was set in the future, although there was no real statement of that until late in the story.  There were hints, which seem obvious in retrospect, but which at first just seemed like hyperbolic or metaphorical.

Like “the dog was the color of a maraschino cherry” or that the lawn incorporated “a gene from a species of algae that allowed it to glow under the porch light at night.”

The story opens with the cherry-colored dog killing an animal in the narrator  Roy’s front yard (on that grass).  He wanted to chase the dog away because it might ruin his grass.  Then he noticed that what the dog had killed was his neighbor Alison’s pig.  She loved that pig and anthropomorphized it.  To try to salvage the pig, he ran up to the dog waving his arms.  It immediately latched onto his forearm instead.

As Roy fights with the dog, the dog’s owner, well, the daughter of the owner, came running across the street.  She looked like a teenager but was actually 11 or 12.  When the girl says, “You hit my dog,” he replies that she bit him.  The girl says Ruby would never do that–she’s just playing.

Amid this horrorshow of blood and violence and death, and a sprinkling of genetic splicing, Boyle throws in a very funny experiment gone wrong.  Crowparrots were a modified bird which blended crows with the invasive parrot population.  It believed that the experiment would turn the parrots into carrion eaters.  But instead it made their calls loud and more frequent.  And they mimicked, so they “were everywhere, cursing fluidly, (“Bad bird! Fuck, fuck, fuck!“).” (more…)

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Bryan Washington–Waugh” (New Yorker, October 29, 2018)

Posted in Bill Callahan, Bryan Washington, Death, Field Recordings, Houston Astros, LGBTQ, New York City, New Yorker, NPR/PRI/PBS, Sex, Short Story, Smog on October 29, 2018| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: BILL CALLAHAN-“Small Plane” (Field Recordings, November 11, 2013).

Many episodes in the Field Recordings series travel far and wide to exotic locations.  For this Field Recording [Bill Callahan Sings ‘Small Plane’ In A Serene City] Bill Callahan travel to exotic downtown New York City.

When we first approached Bill Callahan to do a Field Recording in New York City, we asked him if he had any special place in mind. His reply surprised me: “A community garden.” I guess I’d stereotyped him in my head, because after all those years of dark, thoughtful songwriting — first as Smog and then on the pensive records he’s made under his own name — I’d imagined a library, someplace quiet and dark.

The video starts with the hustle and bustle of the city and then slowly moves into a quiet, peaceful garden, complete with a pond (and turtles jumping into it), birds, tomatoes, and a microphone.

As it turned out, the brightly lit 6th & B Community Garden, with its lush greenery and mellow wildlife, provided just the right setting. The noise of cabs, buses, trucks and the occasional siren wound up punctuating Callahan’s calm, deep baritone, but he makes it easy to ignore.

He sings about being a lucky man flying this small plane.  And he setting compliments his contentment.  It’s just him and his quiet electric guitar and all is well.

[READ: October 26, 2018] “Waugh”

Last week’s New Yorker story was called “Flaubert Again.”  This week’s is called “Waugh.”  The last one was tangentially about Flaubert but this one is (as far as I can tell) not about Evelyn Waugh at all.

This was one of those fascinating stories that was very simple but in which all of the details about the story were so vague that I couldn’t figure anything about it for many many pages.

This is a story of five unrelated boys who live together–they all pull tricks to make rent.  Rod was their defacto leader–not their pimp exactly, because he tricked too, but more like an elder watchmen.  He was tough and very strict.  You could be kicked out of the house for many infractions, and at the first sign of Sickness.

I assumed that this story was set in the 1970s in San Francisco.

Then one of the boys is named Google, so clearly it can’t be set in the 70s. (more…)

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Janet Fox–“Witches” (published 1983) [Ghost Box II] (2018)

Posted in Canadian Content, Fears, Halloween, Hingston & Olsen, Hotels, Patton Oswalt, Sex, Short Story, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Ghost Box, Witches on October 27, 2018| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES-“Halloween” (1981).

For all of the Halloween songs that are not really about Halloween (even songs that are called Halloween), this one is about Halloween (and more).

Siouxsie and the Banshees created some really catchy songs that they swathed in layers of creepiness.  The chorus of this song is “trick or treat trick or treat the bitter and the sweet.”  It’s catchy, but not treacly.

The night is still

And the frost it bites my face
I wear my silence like a mask
And murmur like a ghost
“Trick or Treat”
“Trick or Treat”
The bitter and the sweet

Just listen to that jagged guitar that introduces the the verses.  Then during the verses, it’s pretty in a minor key way.  About midway through the song the bass takes a few fast runs up and down the fret board to create a tense moment that is followed by a tribal drum section.

And just so you know that this is more bitter than sweet, the next part:

I wander though your sadness
Gazing at you with scorpion eyes
Halloween……Halloween

Seals the deal that this is a goth/post-punk song after all.

[READ: October 26, 2018] “Witches”

Just in time for Halloween, from the people who brought me The Short Story Advent Calendar and The Ghost Box. comes Ghost Box II.

This is once again a nifty little box (with a magnetic opening and a ribbon) which contains 11 stories for Halloween.  It is lovingly described thusly:

The Ghost Box returns, like a mummy or a batman, to once again make your pupils dilate and the hair on your arms stand straight up—it’s another collection of individually bound scary stories, edited and introduced by comedian and spooky specialist Patton Oswalt.

There is no explicit “order” to these books; however, Patton Oswalt will be reviewing a book a day on his Facebook page.

Much respect to Oswalt, but I will not be following his order.  So there. (more…)

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Dagoberto Gilb–“Willows Village” (Harper’s, September 2008)

Posted in Brandee Younger, Dagoberto Gilb, Field Recordings, Money, NPR/PRI/PBS, Sex, Short Story, Taxidermy, Work on October 27, 2018| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: BRANDEE YOUNGER-“Hortense” (Field Recordings, June 6, 2013).

I had never heard of anyone playing jazz harp before.  At first I thought that it was just going to be harp music with an upright bass giving it a jazzy feel, but no.  Younger is playing a beautiful lead melody on the harp while Dezron Douglas’ upright bass adds a real boho jazz element.  Basically, this is in no way new age harp music.

But this Field Recording [Brandee Younger: Taxidermy, Two-Headed Skeletons And Jazz Harp] seems to get more than a little distracted by its surroundings.  And who can blame the filmers?

Among the vestment racks, satchel purveyors and art galleries of New York’s SoHo neighborhood lies a small merchant unlike its neighbors. It’s called The Evolution Store, and it peddles, um, natural-history collectibles. You know, preserved insects, taxidermy, skulls and bones, remnants of marine creatures. It’s as if a museum ran out of space and started putting its sloths and tarantulas in the gift shop.

We’re not quite sure what any of this has to do with Brandee Younger [who doesn’t know a sloth when she sees one], though she is a rare breed in her world: a jazz harpist.

A bit more about Younger:

She’s classically trained, and plays her share of freelance and wedding gigs — in her C.V. are recordings for rappers Common and Drake — but like predecessors Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby, she’s also developed a way to improvise and truly groove on the harp.

I really enjoy the minimalism of this piece.  I am quite fond of the harp. So I’m intrigued to read:

With a full band, the song heard here, “Hortense,” takes on a distinct Caribbean bounce, a one-drop reggae beat anchoring Dezron Douglas’ bass line. Stripped down to a duo, it wafts and glides, all arpeggios and plucked wires.

I’m not sure I would enjoy the full band version as much, so I’m glad I got this one–bizarre as the surroundings may be.

[READ: January 25, 2018] “Willows Village”

This is the story of Guillermo, call him Billy, who has moved to Santa Ana to live with his Aunt Maggy.  Billy has a wife and a child in El Paso, but he doesn’t have a job and he thought he could move to a more wealthy part of the country, get a job and send a lot of money home to his family.  His Aunt Maggy is his mother’s sister and while he has heard a lot of gossip about her, he will still ask for the favor of her hospitality.

He hasn’t seen her in years and he is surprised at how good she looks–she’s actually pretty hot, which he finds disturbing but true.  And she welcomes him with open arms.  She gives him a room and whatever food or drink he wants.

Maggy proves to be quite the character  She drinks.  A lot.  She has a ton of money–when she opens her purse to pay a delivery guy, money just falls out of it.  And she seems to eat one bite  of food and store the rest in the fridge, until it spoils.

She tells Billy that Lorena is also staying with her.  She is a good friend and has been having marital trouble, so Maggy put her up in the guest room.  She put Billy–Guillermo she will call him–in her “playroom,” a pink room with dolls and make up boxes and photos.  It was weird. (more…)

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Teddy Wayne–Loner (2016)

Posted in College, Cristina Pato, Field Recordings, John Zorn, Kayhan Kalhor, Liars, NPR/PRI/PBS, Salon.com, Set at School, Sex, Sexism, Short Books, Silk Road Ensemble, Unlikable main character, Unreliable narrator, Wu Man, Yo-Yo Ma, Yuck! on October 18, 2018| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: SILK ROAD ENSEMBLE–“Briel” (Field Recordings, March 26, 2014).

There have been many fun Field Recordings, but this one [Welcome to Yo-Yo’s Playhouse] is surely the most fun. The countless members of Silk Road Ensemble were taken to ACME Studio, a theatrical props warehouse in Brooklyn.  They were given pretty much free reign to put on costumes, to bring out mannequins, to do whatever they wanted and that makes this session seem even bigger than it already is (and it’s already pretty big).

That’s all not to mention that the Silk Road Ensemble is a pretty amazing group of musicians:

cellist Yo-Yo Ma and some of the world’s premiere instrumentalists and composers, including members of Brooklyn Rider, Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, Iranian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor, Spanish bagpiper Cristina Pato, American percussionist Shane Shanahan and clarinetist Kinan Azmeh from Syria.

As we’ve had the opportunity to forge those bonds over time [many of these performers have done Tiny Desk Concerts], we’ve gotten to know the warm, generous-spirited personalities that come along with these immense talents. We thought that setting them loose in a props house, where they could pick and choose among the curiosities for little elements to bring into the camera frame, would bring those aspects of their personalities into sharper focus. What we wound up with was a magical afternoon of play in all senses of the word — not just having the chance to record these virtuosos and their instruments in a spirited performance of John Zorn’s Briel, here arranged by Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz, but also to capture them (and us) having an immense amount of fun.

I had no idea this was a John Zorn piece.  It sounded like a Hebrew composition and now I understand why.  But in the best world music tradition, this piece is arranged for musicians from all over the world–percussion, strings, brass and reed.  There’s a bagpipe solo, a kamancheh solo and a field of percussion.  The song is just way too short.

But to watch Yo-Yo Ma play the cello while holding a mannequin that looks like George Harrison is just one of the many highlights.

[READ: April 2018] Loner

Everything about the look of this book appealed to me.  The title, the crappy cover, the backwards type, the size, it all just seemed like a light, funny story.

Perhaps something about it should have read “creepy” too.

David Federman is a New Jersey native.  He went to Garret Hobart High School (named for New Jersey’s only vice president) He’s smart (he was accepted in to Harvard) but dull and, as we get to know him, pretty unlikable.  He imagines that Harvard will be a place where he (and other geeks like him) will flourish and kick ass.

He’s not wrong in thinking that–everyone he meets  seems to want to change.  But no one wants to change by hanging out with David.

David winds up in a freshman group that he hates–the Matthews Marauders (who are anything but).  In fact, nothing is going very well until he sees Veronica Wells.  She is everything he desires–a sophisticated New Yorker with money, intelligence and beauty. (more…)

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Kevin Barry-“The Coast of Leitrim” (New Yorker, October 15, 2018)

Posted in Big Boi, Funny (ha ha), Humiliation, Irish Writer, Kevin Barry, New Yorker, OutKast, Poland, Sex, Tiny Desk Concert on October 15, 2018| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: BIG BOI-Tiny Desk Concert #793 (October 9, 2018).

Like everyone is America, I loved OutKast’s “Hey Ya” when it came out (still do).  And that album was pretty great (if a little long).  And then they kind of imploded.

I was always more of a fan of Andre 3000’s trippy side than Big Boi’s pop side.  And yet for this Tiny Desk, Big Boi is  aton of fun and the songs are really catchy.

These guys helped redefine the sound and style of hip-hop in the ’90s, incorporating funk and psychedelia while transcending genre boundaries. As half of OutKast — still the only rap group ever to take home Album of the Year at the Grammys —

The energy in the room was buoyant and vibrant from the moment they walked in the door. OutKast star Big Boi, Sleepy Brown of the prolific Atlanta production collective Organized Noize, and their eight-member backing band have been working together for 20-plus years, and their chemistry is instantaneous and undeniable.

And Big Boi is hilarious from the get go:

We have come from the planet of Stankonia to give y’all three big songs behind a tiny-ass desk.

The set starts with OutKast’s: “So Fresh, So Clean.”  It sounds as good as it did in 2000, and possibly a little better live.  Big Boi’s voice instantly sounds like it does on the record (the way he echoes clean).  The bass (Preston Crump) sound great running through the song and the gently echoing guitar (David Brown) sounds great.

The backing vocals (Keisha Williams and Terrance “Scar” Smith) are spot on.  Perhaps the biggest surprise comes from the trumpets (Jason Freeman and Jerry Freeman).  It didn’t occur to me that he’d use them, but they really make the track.

After the track, he cracks up the room by saying “the Tiny Desk needs a Tiny fan” (of course they are all wearing matching hoodies that say TRAP HOUSE (in the style of WAFFLE HOUSE).

Big Boi continues to thrive as a solo act, riding the charts with last year’s Boomiverse and its hit single “All Night.”

He describes the song as a “current pop smash hit with L.A. Reid–the first hit to launch that label.”  It opens with a super catchy and fun piano riff (very old-school sounding). The piano is a sample which DJ Cutmaster Swift plays on his Mac and then scratches it on the turntable.

Holy cow is that song catchy.  I love at the end when Big Boi and his rapping partner Sleepy Brown mime the piano part perfectly.

The final song is “The Way You Move” from 2003’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.  He describes it in a hilariously casual way as “one of the biggest things we’ve ever done.”  It opens with some great scratching and the snappy drums from Omar Phillips.  This is a song that was a little too poppy for me on the record, but man it’s an undeniable track.

It’s a terrific set and one that I wish was ten minutes longer.

[READ: October 14, 2018] “The Coast of Leitrim”

This story seems like a simple case of a loser-ish guy trying desperately to woo a woman.

Seamus Ferris is thirty-five.  He lives alone in an inherited house and he has fallen hard for a Polish woman who works in a cafe down in Carrick.  He has no mortgage, which is a plus, but he’s not especially exciting, generally speaking.

He feels that the situation is like a vast love affair, although he has never spoken to her–more than ordering anyway.  But he knew that she was sensitive, with a “dreamy distracted air” and she was “at a remove from the other mullockers who worked in the cafe.”  She was pretty but no supermodel–Seamus admitted he himself was not hideous.

Using some sly detective work–he peeked at the work schedule while using the toilet, he learned her name and then did some research on Instagram.  Her full name Katharine Zeileinski was unique enough for him to be able to narrow down the account quickly.  She didn’t post much, but what she did suggested she was single. That’s all he wanted. (more…)

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