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Julian Barnes–“East Wind” (New Yorker, May 19, 2008)

August 9, 2016 by Paul Debraski

jean-jacques-sempe-the-new-yorker-cover-may-19-2008 SOUNDTRACK: IRENE DIAZ-Tiny Desk Concert #380 (August 9, 2014).

iremeVirtually no infomation is given about Diaz in the blurb for her Tiny Desk Concert.

“My Sweetest Sin” opens as a one minute acapella song before she sits down at the piano and is accompanied by Carolyn Cardoza strumming away intently on ukulele for “Crazy Love.”  Her voice sounds lovely by itself but it sounds even richer when accompanied by the spare instrumentation.

“Lover’s Sway” goes through several genres.  It opens with a jaunty showtune vibe and then slows down for the verses.  And then indeed it gets jaunty once again, in a very different way.

For the final song, “I Love You Madly” she switches to guitar.  She says it was her first love song because she used to write a lot of depressing songs.  This is a pretty, mellow song and she at times sounds a bit like a country singer and a bit like Natalie Merchant.  It’s a little too slow and long for my tastes, but it is very pretty.

Diaz is quite a talent with a nice range of styles.

[READ: February 24, 2016] “East Wind”

This is the story of Vernon, who had moved to an unspecified busy waterfront town just a few months earlier.  A recent spate of vandalism had caused some beach huts to be burned down.  The town was horrified, but he didn’t mind so much because it improved his view to the sea.

He is sitting in a restaurant, and when the waitress asks if he’s done he replies with the cryptic, “All the way from the Urals.” When the waitress is understandably confused he says that’s where the wind comes from.

The waitress, a strong-looking woman, pronounces it Oorals.  He assumes she is Eastern European, perhaps Polish.  He jokes with her that they should o for a swim.  She replies, no swim, although he hadn’t actually meant it.

He became a regular there.  And on another occasion he said to her that they should run away and live in a beach hut.  “I do not think,” she replied.  But then he asked her out and she said yes. Continue Reading »

Posted in Irene Diaz, Julian Barnes, Natalie Merchant, New Yorker, Romance, Sex, Short Story, Swimming, Tiny Desk Concert | Leave a Comment »

David Sedaris–“Letting Go” (New Yorker, May 5, 2008)

August 8, 2016 by Paul Debraski

may5SOUNDTRACK: THE FAMILY CREST-Tiny Desk Concert #379 (August 4, 2014).

familycerstI first heard The Family Crest on this Tiny Desk Concert back in 2014 and I immediately fell in love with them.  I received their album for Christmas, and it’s quite fantastic.

The band plays a wonderful mix of over the top chamber prog rock mixed with healthy doses of jazz.

There are seven people in the band, which is centered around guitarist and (amazing) vocalist Liam McCormick.  Their instruments include violin, cello, upright bass, flute, trombone, drums, and guitar but this band rocks hard (and McCormick can wail like the best of them).

The set begins with the jaw dropping “Beneath The Brine” which opens with a great cello riff and is quickly accompanied by violin and flute.  When the full band kicks in, grace notes are added to the riffs to really fill out he song (from the flute and the drums) and it builds until Liam starts singing.  His voice is powerful and strong with a great sense of melody.  The drums, by the way are playing wonderful jazzy patterns and accents.  But it’s around 2:30 that Liam shows just what he can do with his voice as he hits some amazingly powerful high notes.  As the song romps to an end, you can hear all of the instruments adding to the music before the final quite coda.  It’s fantastic.

“Howl” is inspired by jazz.  Liam was trained in opera (which explains a lot) and the band is full of classical fans, so he was excited to add Charlie the jazz drummer “hey man wanna listen to Miles David and drink whiskey?”  The song opens with a big trombone riff before settling into a snappy jazz song.  This song has a number of loud and quiet moments that work well together.  It’s even got a great “ba ba ba ba ba ba” section that is fun to sing along with.

 They ask “one more?”  And Bob says “or stay all day.”  So they play the final song, “Make Me a Boat.”  If you can forgive the little GoPro ad, it’s neat that this relatively unknown band has been embraced by the camera company.  “Make Me a Boat” doesn’t seem like the most obvious choice for a video since the beginning is kind of slow, bit the middle section is really pretty and has a great flowing feel that would work well with a video.  And in this live version Liam does some great improv singing of powerful high notes that really flesh out the melody which the rest of the is playing (no wonder he’s so sweaty by the end).

The album fleshes out the orchestral sense of the band with a 30 piece orchestra which makes these songs even more grand.  The Family Crest was a great find.

[READ: February 22, 2016] “Letting Go”

Sedaris is one of the funniest writers when the topic is smoking.  He is (or was, I suppose) and inveterate smoker.

And I love that he starts the essay with this paragraph:

When I was in fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham, NC.  There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world’s first elementary school.

He starts this essay talking about how much he hated smoking when he was a kid.  His mother smoked all her life and he just hated it.  Not the smoke so much but the smell–he found it depressing “the scent of neglect.”

Of course then he started smoking himself.  He talks about trying to decide which brand to use–the brand you chose was a statement back then.  He chose Viceroy.  And he started smoking them when he was in Vancouver. Continue Reading »

Posted in Cigarettes, Consumerism, David Sedaris, Essays, Funny (ha ha), Humiliation, Neurotics, New Yorker, The Family Crest, Tiny Desk Concert | Leave a Comment »

Pearl Jam (Fenway Park, Boston, MA, August 7, 2016 & Ten Club Screening of August 5 show, House of Blues, Boston, MA, August 6, 2016)

August 7, 2016 by Paul Debraski

[ATTENDED: August 7, 2016] Pearl Jam

2016-08-07 18.26.10After the excitement of seeing Pearl Jam at the Wells Fargo Center, we were psyched out of our minds to go to Fenway.  I didn’t realize that Fenway has a regular concert series.  I’d assumed that Pearl Jam were the first band to play there–they weren’t–but that didn’t detract in any way from the coolness of the venue.

Neither of us are baseball fans, although when I lived in Boston two decades ago, I did attend a couple of games at Fenway because it is a landmark (and when I was a kid I loved baseball, so duh).  But we knew that the venue would make the show even more special.

We’d have loved to have gone to both shows, but unlike some people, we couldn’t get tickets for both nights.  However, through a small piece of luck, I won tickets to a screening of Friday night’s show on Saturday night.  What?  Well, each night is filmed.  So the film crew filmed Friday night, then edited the footage together and had it ready on the next night as a really nicely edited package at the House of Blues (across the street from Fenway) on Saturday night.

It seemed kind of dumb to go to a music venue to watch a movie.  And Sarah and I were skeptical about going.  But we did and we had a  great time.  I’ve watched live DVDs and it’s always an okay thing to do–fun, but never like you were really there. But this was different. Having a group of some 600 people in a club–with bars and good lighting and excellent sound–it made it feel (almost) like a real concert.  And even though we laughed at the people who were clapping and cheering (as if the band were actually there), and taking videos of the screen (my battery died or I would have grabbed a few screen shots too), we were caught up in the excitement on several occasions as well. Continue Reading »

Posted in Aerosmith, Boston, MA, Dinosaur Jr., Fenway Park, Happy Birthday, House of Blues, J. Mascis, Neil Young, Pearl Jam, Phish, Pink Floyd, Rocky, Sleater-Kinney, The Ramones, The Who, Tom Waits, Victoria Williams, Wells Fargo Center, WMMR 93.3 FM--Philadelphia, PA | 1 Comment »

Yiyun Li–“A Man Like Him” (New Yorker, May 12, 2008)

August 6, 2016 by Paul Debraski

2008_05_12SOUNDTRACK: QUETZAL-Tiny Desk Concert #378 (August 2, 2014).

tzalQuetzal are a band from Southern California who have been performing in the Chicano scene for about 20 years.

Guitarist Quetzal Flores plays the Mexican jarana for both rhythm and melody, violinist Rocio Marron adds blues licks into Mexican folk runs and bassist Juan Perez provides a nimble and melodic bottom end.  And then there’s lead singer Martha Gonzalez who has a great voice and is quite the activist.

The first song, “Palomo Vagabundo” is pretty and sad.  The song means vagabond Pigeon and is a story about a beaten up pigeon who still tries to find love.  Quetzal says the whole album is about life of urban animals and how we relate to them.

They introduce the second song “Tragafuegor” which is about a fire breather they saw in Mexico.  He was putting himself in harm’s way to make some change but also shining light on reality.  This is a faster, livelier song with Gonzalez dancing on a box–like Saintseneca.  The dancing rhythms, the great violin and the cool robust bass really make this song stand out.  About the stomp box, this is a tarica from Veracruz, Mexico.  Quetzal explains that Martha is a percussionist by trade as well as a professor as Scripps College in Pomona.

The final song, “Todo Lo Que Tengo” is a beautiful ballad.  Again Martha’s voice soars above the music.

It’s always fascinating to “discover” a band who has been around for 20 years.

[READ: February 23, 2016] “A Man Like Him”

This is in unusual story in that the main character is a man who is obsessed with a story in a magazine.  Teacher Fei is an older man, unmarried and now living with his elderly mother.  She needs his care and he doesn’t mind giving it to her.

The story that he has become fixated on is about a nineteen year old girl who is set out to publicly humiliate her father.  The girl’s mother and father divorced three years ago.  And once the girl turned eighteen she sued her father, suspecting that another woman had seduced hm away from her mother.  She said that he should be punished for abandoning his family and for the immoral act of taking a mistress.

She had also created a website to humiliate the man.  She wanted him to lose his job, his freedom and his mistress. And this angered Teacher Fei (who didn’t know any of them) to distraction. Continue Reading »

Posted in Fears, Marriage Trouble, New Yorker, Parenting, Quetzal, Revenge, Saintseneca, Short Story, Tiny Desk Concert, Yiyun Li | Leave a Comment »

Annie Proulx–-“Them Old Cowboy Songs” (New Yorker, May 5, 2008)

August 5, 2016 by Paul Debraski

may5SOUNDTRACK: SAINTSENECA-Tiny Desk Concert #377 (July 29, 2014).

saintsenecaLike Highasakite, Saintesenca is another band who plays instruments that are unusual (and whose Tiny Desk Concert is way too short).  But before the music started, I was fascinated by the hair of the band.  Zac Little’s head is partially shaved and his beard is unshaven, but he also has an incredible mustache.  It’s so thick I couldn’t see his mouth moving when he started singing!  There’s also the co-lead singer, Maryn Jones’ hair which is equally fascinating.

And there’s also their instruments.  On the album, they play: banjo, baglama, bulbul, balalaika, bowed banjo, baritone ukulele, bass and bouzouki as well as a stomp box.  For the first song, “Happy Alone,” In this set there is a baglamas (played by Jones), while Little plays a Paul McCartney style bass.  There’s also drums and electric and acoustic guitars.

And their music is fantastic “Happy Alone” has a kind of Decemberists vibe.  There’s a great chorus (and two acoustic guitars accompanying).  The melody is catchy but by the time it comes around a second or third time, it’s a total ear worm.

Between songs they talk about the stompbox.  It’s a roughly 2’x2′ plywood floorboard meant for pounding the beat. The blurb says that “at a show just before this Tiny Desk Concert… Little put his boot right through that floorboard.”  There’s a hole in the box which Jones seems concerned about falling through.  The box also explains why Jones and Little both seem so outrageously tall at this show.

On “Fed Up with Hunger” Little plays a four-stringed guitar (I wish they would say what all of these instrument are).  He plays some wonderfully elaborate chords on it.  Jones sings lead in a very high-pitched delicate voice.  There’s an electric guitar added for the chorus but for the most part this is a stripped down song with some lovely harmonies in the end section.

The final song “Blood Bath” has three distinct parts and it is awesome.  Jones plays bass, Little plays acoustic and the other acoustic guitarist  plays a tiny triangular instrument (a balalaika?).  Little sings in a kind of broken falsetto.  After the first slow verse the whole band kicks in and the song really takes off.  But soon after, the whole band seems to deconstruct the song, playing a few seconds of utter noise before coming back in and following it with a really fast rocking and equally catchy section.  It’s pretty awesome.

I’m going to have to look for more from them.

[READ: May 5, 2008] “Them Old Cowboy Songs”

I was looking through older stories and saw that I had not finished a story by Proulx which was written in a June issue of the New Yorker in this ame year.  How did she ever get two stories within a month of each other?  (And they’re both really really long, too).

This story is dark. Very dark and brutal.  It is set in 1885 and looks at a young couple trying to make it out in the wilderness

Archie is a sixteen year old who lies and says he is 21 to try to get better jobs.  He works a cowboy in Dakota Territory.  In addition to being a hard worker, he is a consummate singer with a golden voice.  He marries a young girl (14), named Rose whose parents don’t approve of him or of her getting married at 14, and they settle in.  The narrator notes: “There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude.” Continue Reading »

Posted in Annie Proulx, Babies, Death, Highasakite, New Yorker, Saintseneca, Sex, Short Story, The Decemberists, Tiny Desk Concert, Violence, Yuck! | Leave a Comment »

Sana Krasikov–“The Repatriates” (New Yorker, April 21, 2008)

August 4, 2016 by Paul Debraski

2008_04_21-400SOUNDTRACK: HIGHASAKITE-Tiny Desk Concert #376 (July 25, 2014).

 highkiteFor some reason, some bands play a Tiny Desk Concert that is very short.  It’s especially disappointing when the band is unusual and interesting like Highasakite.

They play only two songs (for a total of 8 minutes), but they cram a lot of interesting sounds into these songs, including a flugabone.  Kristoffer Lo plays that mournful horn and Ingrid Helene Håvik compliments the yearning with words that are mysterious and somewhat dark.

For “The Man on the Ferry” the song opens with the horn playing mournful notes while the percussionist plays a tiny steel drum and Håvik plays a kind of autoharp.  There’s the fascinating lyric: “It made the Indian in me cry.”  (It’s especially interesting since the band is from Norway).

Håvik has an inflection something like Björk’s (although her singing style is very different) and there are some delightful harmonies.

The melody of the second song “Since Last Wednesday” is familiar to me.  Or the combination of steel drum and horn is just really compelling. It’s fascinating to watch the guitarist wield his horn in one hand while holding the guitar with the other and singing harmonies.  The song is also kind of mysterious (that horn again) with the lyrics:

He would never do graffiti or vandalize that house. And he would never be caught spray painting on those people’s walls. But no one has seen or heard from him since last Wednesday.

As the song progresses some really dark lyrics crop up, all under that beguiling melody.

The blurb lists some of their other titles: “Leaving No Traces,” “I, The Hand Grenade,” “The Man on the Ferry,” “Science & Blood Tests” which really says quite a lot about this interesting band.  I definitely want to hear more than eight minutes from them.

[READ: February 20, 2016] “The Repatriates”

I was fascinated by this story because I hadn’t really heard of the phenomenon of Russian emigres returning to Russia because they felt the conditions were better there than in America

The story starts by telling us that Grisha and Lera’s marriage has dissolved.  In 1994 Grisha’s visa had been processed and he was brought to America by Hewlett-Packard.  He found it demeaning and like servitude ans as soon as it was up her quit and got a new job with Morgan Stanley–building market models for mortgage traders (for those of us who doesn’t know what that is, it’s not rally that important).

But Grisha felt empty.  He said there as no spirituality in America (even though he himself was not spiritual)

Eventually Grisha started travelling back to Moscow (they had not been able to sell their apartment there, so he had a place to stay). He would visit old friends and make news ones.  He started going more frequently.  And then one of his trips lasted for two months. Continue Reading »

Posted in Bjork, Decadence, Highasakite, Marriage Trouble, New Yorker, Religion, Russia, Sana Krasikov, Short Story, Tiny Desk Concert | Leave a Comment »

Deftones (Sands Bethlehem Event Center, Bethlehem, PA, August 2, 2016)

August 3, 2016 by Paul Debraski

[ATTENDED: August 2, 2016] Deftones

2016-08-02 23.24.33I tend to not go to metal shows all that often, but there have been a few bands that I’ve really wanted to see.  Mastodon was one and Deftones was the other.  I’ve loved just about everything Deftones have done since the super heavy “My Own Summer” and then the major turn they took into an almost shoegaze vibe on their later albums.  They are never afraid to experiment and their albums are always compelling.  Much of that is due to singer Chino Moreno’s voice.  He can whisper and sing beautifully and he can scream like nobody I’ve ever heard.  And all of that was on display last night.

Top it off with Chino being an incredibly charming and gracious frontman (who seemed to be more than enjoying himself) and you have an outstanding show.

The band sounded great.  I was right in front of guitarist Stephen Carpenter and it was amazing to watch the sounds he was making out of his eight string (8!) guitar.  I couldn’t really see bassist Sergio Vega all that well, although I was delighted that he was wearing a Smiths shirt and was singing great harmonies. Continue Reading »

Posted in Bethlehem, PA, Deftones, Sands Bethlehem Event Center, The Smiths | Leave a Comment »

Refused (Sands Bethlehem Event Center, Bethlehem, PA, August 2, 2016) [DEFTONES]

August 2, 2016 by Paul Debraski

[ATTENDED: August 2, 2016] Refused

2016-08-02 21.06.30I had never heard of Refused before this show.  I looked them up and saw that they are a Swedish punk band who supports pretty radical ideas.  The thing I missed though was that their most well known album, The Shape of Punk to Come, came out in 1998!

The band broke up right after that album (their 3rd).  They reunited in 2012 with much the same lineup (there had been some different band member in the original days as well).  Last year they put out a new album and here they were touring with Deftones.

From the little I’d read, it sounded like they were a hardcore band.  So I had very specific expectations.  But they were instantly dashed when I heard the very metal riffage that the guitarists produced. Continue Reading »

Posted in Bethlehem, PA, Deftones, Refused, Sands Bethlehem Event Center, Spotlights | Leave a Comment »

Spotlights (Sands Bethlehem Event Center, Bethlehem, PA, August 2, 2016) [DEFTONES]

August 2, 2016 by Paul Debraski

[ATTENDED: August 2, 2016] Spotlights

2016-08-02 20.18.11I have been pretty excited to see Deftones for a while.  I knew they had an opening act called Refused, who I didn’t know, and just recently they added a third opening band called Spotlights, whom I’d also never heard of.

I looked them up online and saw them described as doomgaze or sludgegaze, which I loved.  And when I listened to one of their songs that was a pretty good description–a shoegaze vibe but with some seriously heavy low end rumble and heavy metal crunch.

Seeing them live, it was a bit of a different story.  Some of the shoegaze vibe and cool subtleties on their record got a little lost in the wall of noise at the Sands Event Center.

This is not to say that the set was bad (it wasn’t at all) but that the live show had a different feel than the record.  Primarily in that the vocals were a little buried.  (They’re kind of buried on the record too, but in a different way). Continue Reading »

Posted in Bethlehem, PA, Deftones, Kim Gordon, Refused, Sands Bethlehem Event Center, Spotlights | Leave a Comment »

T. Coraghessan Boyle–“The Lie” (New Yorker, April 14, 2008)

August 1, 2016 by Paul Debraski

TNY 4.14.08 cvr.indd SOUNDTRACK: HAMILTON LEITHAUSER-Tiny Desk Concert #375 (July 21, 2014).

hamleitHamilton Leithause was the lead singer of The Walkmen.  When they went on hiatus, the guys in the band made solo records.  For this set, Leithauser is accompanied by The Walkmen’s Paul Maroon on guitar and Hugh McIntosh, who played drums in Leithauser’s old band The Recoys.

Leithauser has a big voice and these songs allow him to really wail (in a restrained and tasteful way).  “11 O’Clock Friday Night” has a very folkie feel to it with a big chorus of “you and me and everybody else.”

“Alexandra” is a bit more uptempo and rocking with a cool rumbling bass line provided by the electric guitar (he really gets to belt out the chorus and the bridge in this song).

“5AM” is a moody ballad which shows he can play mellow as well as big.

Incidentally perhaps it was back in 2014, but Leithauser was doing some kind of concert in Philly and they must have advertised it ten times a day for months.  I was rather tired of hearing his name (I didn’t know who he was at the time). I had to look him up and he was fine.  About the same as I felt during this show.

[READ: February 18, 2016] “The Lie”

I have really been enjoying Boyle’s stories.  He has a way of making his protagonists unlikable and yet somehow sympathetic.  But this time, I felt like his protagonist was just too much of an asshole.  He went too far.

Lonnie is a new dad.  He’s a young guy who has married a woman whose nighttime sleepwear is a Cramps shirt and nothing else.  Her name is Clover, but she hates that her hippie parents named her that and wants to change it to Cloris.  He says that Cloris sounds like a detergent and she hates him for that.

Anyway, he wakes up and doesn’t feel like going to his editing job (I may have been more sympathetic if the job were harder).  He is tired of hearing the same people recite the same dialogue every day.  He says he’s not rally an editor, he’s a logger. Continue Reading »

Posted in Babies, Hamilton Leithauser, Marriage Trouble, New Yorker, Short Story, T. Coraghessan Boyle, T.C. Boyle, The Recoys, The Walkmen, Tiny Desk Concert | Leave a Comment »

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