Good Lieutenant

Present Perfect

2009-02-17T19:20:00.004-05:00

"...the pop star, as we knew her"--and here he bowed slightly, in her direction--"was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media."

"Of--?"

"Of a state in which 'mass' media existed, if you will, within the world."

"As opposed to?"

"Comprising it."

(From Spook Country by William Gibson)

I grew up with Mr. Gibson, I guess, seduced like everybody else by his Prettily Wasted nineteen-eighties version of the twenty-first century--conspicuously lacking flying cars and robots, but full of expensive drugs and more expensive computers. And I still like his recent stuff, too--although he's long since rejected the Future for the bleeding edge of the present. As that passage indicates, he now wants badly to be Don Delillo II, and in some ways he's better with the poetry of Waves and Radiation than Delillo could ever be. He's still trying to work with thriller plots, though; it seems to be what he's most comfortable with. And Spook Country is entertaining enough, as were the few books before it--but for thrillers they're pretty sedate. Not a whole lot seems at stake. But this book, at least, seems to be trying to jumpstart a series of some kind--at least I hope so. It seems perverse to invent a Supercool Cuban-Chinese Gangster Kid with mysterious Santeria-derived ninja skills, and then use him only to plug holes in a shipping container with magnets. (Don't ask.) There must be more non-futuristic adventures in store for that guy, and possibly for the novel's protagonist, Hollis Henry, an eighties underground rock star turned amateur spy. But all the paranoia and gadgetry and portentous pop-culture philosophizing made it worth the time, certainly. Plus, there's a character from Gibson's last, Pattern Recognition, back for a second engagement, and he has the wonderful name of Hubertus Bigend. What more do you want?

Winged Victory

2009-02-16T16:02:00.005-05:00

I'm not sure what I may or may not have told some of you in order to win your affection, but the truth is that I'm not really any kind of ornithologist. Birds are perfectly fine with me in the abstract--it's nice that they can fly around, and everything--but up close they tend to be a little bit scary and more than a little bit unhygienic. They don't seem to have any good reason to like us, and I'm usually pretty sure they don't.

But I still have to be sort of impressed when I walk a block or two from my house and come across a damned bald eagle. Well, "come across" makes the encounter sound more dramatic than it was--it was at the top of a very tall tree and paid no attention to us whatsoever.
But I'm a city boy at heart, and, you know...EAGLE! It was like an airbrushed painting from the back window of an F-150 pickup had sprung to life, right in my neighborhood! (There wasn't much mistaking it, in case you're quite rightly doubting my identification skills--my lousy cellphone photography doesn't do it justice. The bright white head, and the sheer intimidating size. Those are crows sitting there in that photo, eyeing the visitor with some alarm, not sparrows.

And on President's Day! Anybody else here proud to be an American? Huh? Am I right? For a moment I felt certain that it was the reincarnated spirit of Jimmy Carter, come to bestow blessing on us. Then, you know, I checked Wikipedia. Now I'm thinking William McKinley.

Bird songs:
(These are also walking-in-February songs, conveniently enough.)

"Rooks"
(Shearwater)

"The Funny Bird"
(Mercury Rev)

Prodigal

2009-02-04T22:25:00.005-05:00

Back at the Alma Mater—Bancroft High, Rust Belt University, whatever you prefer. I have not yet been seized, so presumably I'm still allowed on campus. Or else I haven't been spotted yet. I'm supposed to sit in on a fiction-writing class as an Elder Statesman, which will be fun unless someone lets on to the kids just how little fiction I've written. But it's pleasant and gratifying to linger here and wander through my old time-wasting haunts and drink tea and savor the fact that the place no longer has any power over me. Nobody within miles of me is allowed to impose any deadlines on me or require me to get up in the morning! Even when I was having fun here, I was always at least a third of the way to terrified at all times. There was a good chance, at any given moment, that there was something that I should be doing but wasn't.

Also wonderful is something I'd always loved but forgotten all about—our Student Union has the only ATM in the known world that actually asks you to "Input Desired Amount in Multiples of $1." Yes, one dollar. It looks like a programming error, but it's totally for real and legit. And it shows such concern for and understanding of the customer base, on the part of the financial institution responsible. Let me be the first to say that as an undergraduate, it often matters a great deal that you are able to withdraw, say, seventeen dollars instead of twenty. Sometimes twenty is too much. Sometimes ten is. I never actually tried to withdraw a dollar, but I hope that this machine would allow it.

What isn't pleasant is the fact that I no longer can get on the Rust Belt Wireless Network! I don't have an account; as far as this institution's Information Technology is concerned, I don't exist! For somebody like me, this is awful, like losing a limb. Like coming home at night and finding the locks changed. Let me be the first to make the public call for an official Alumnae Login. But anyway, this means that I won't post this till later.

Also, I was dismayed to find that the burger place in the student union that I remembered with guilty fondness was gone--replaced by some salad joint. Called "Croutons." Seriously, Croutons! Now, a lesser satirist would make some hackneyed decade-old point about health-obsessed Americans, as if I couldn't get plenty of other bad food within forty feet of Croutons. But I'll merely point out that you don't win friends with salad.

I hope I'm allowed to address the student body this evening. I have a speech ready.

Kids! Stay in school! I know you think that studying isn't "rad," or "dope." But getting mixed up with drugs and gangs isn't "cool" at all. By the time I was your age, I'd killed six guys. [Pause. Lift shirt, exposing surgical scar from 1978. Wait for gasps to die down.] ...And I'd come within inches of dying myself. But then I learned about a guy, a really Powerful guy, who doesn't care if you're "cool" or not. He's always there for you, and if you need somebody to turn to, well, he's your man.

His name...is Prince. And he is funky. Now do your homework!

Or I could just "scare them straight" about their study habits. I'm a cautionary tale!

Make It New

2009-01-01T23:16:00.002-05:00

Well, I had to do a New Year's post, didn't I? I can never just stay silent forever--I have a sense of Occasion to indulge! So, a good year to you, reader--those of you I have or haven't seen lately and those of you whom I never see. Hope everything is tolerable and calm. Hope you had more New Year excitement than I did, but not too much.

As for me, I literally drank herbal tea and went to bed. And this fact doesn't even bother me, which clearly must mean that I am Old. I can handle that. I plan to carefully hold all my Excitement in reserve until I really need it. Although you should still let me know if you're doing anything Exciting. Always.

A New Year's song, sort of:
This Year - The Mountain Goats
Darnielle, clever and wounded. My brother. But a lovely streak of stubborn defiance in this one; there's a hell of lot more fight in this kid than in most of his other characters. Part of why it seems more autobiographical, like a lot of the album it comes from.

And in keeping with Internet Tradition, here is a cute video of a four-year-old playing drums.

I swear that's me on guitar. You have no reason to believe me. That is, unless you were there. In which case you know that it's all too true.

Stay down, champion.

2008-12-06T10:58:00.004-05:00

"Tall Saint"
The National

It's a truism that Bonus Tracks aren't necessarily worth your time or money. The songs left over from the recording of an album that turn up on EPs and Special Editions a year after the original album makes a critical or commercial splash. Obviously, if you're a fan you have to buy them, and everybody involved knows that--but those songs got left out for a reason, and everybody knows that too.

The National's Virginia EP is a nice cut above average, in this respect. Took me a while to give it the attention it deserved, but now I'm really happy it's out there. Some live leftovers and unfinished fragments, but a few songs that stand proudly next to the real, known stuff--to "Mistaken For Strangers," and "Secret Meeting," and the rest. When you make a moment-capturing masterpiece like Boxer, you'll have some good stuff to spare. ("Blank Slate" is another dark/funny x-ray of the universal Matt Berninger character--"gonna jump out of a cake with my heart on a string." Full of questionable notions, but luckily too scared to carry them out. I sympathize.)

And "Tall Saint" is terrific--officially a "demo," but it sounds perfectly fine. Got its string part in place and everything. And it's an example of one of the Unacknowledged Secret Genres: the Lost Title Track. It's clear, if you're looking, that "Tall Saint" was meant to make it onto Boxer. It's certainly about the same sort of person, again, and those of us who actually have the physical CD have the textual evidence. No lyric sheet for Boxer, naturally--we have a distant B&W shot of the band apparently frolicking in a meadow. (Perhaps they've returned to Ohio for a Lost Afternoon. We can hope.) Printed, we've just got two cryptic lyric fragments: "Let them all have your neck," from "Ada," and, across from it, the sardonic anononymous advice that the speaker of "Pale Saint" hears as he lies stunned on the pavement. Stay down, champion, stay down. So, really, this guy is the "boxer" of the title, the stand-in for the rest of these haunted losers and for Berninger himself. Taking punishment for a living and getting back up when he probably shouldn't.

(No less a record than OK Computer is my Secret Genre-defining example. That awkward, cryptic title comes from outtake "Palo Alto," which eventually showed up on the Airbag/How's My Driving EP. Not a bad tune, but sounds too much like The Bends--and Radiohead having a song about Silicon Valley is just too literal-minded somehow. Like if Springsteen had a song about Chrysler.)

Say Yes to Michigan.

2008-12-04T08:51:00.006-05:00

I haven't written much, but here's a song. Maybe this is the way to go for a while--I have unlimited numbers of things to say about unlimited numbers of songs. And I found a place to host the files with minimum hassle. (You can't just right-click, I don't think. You have to go through a download page, so they can show you ads. But it's free. Pop-up Blockers On!) No pretentions to Randomness, here--that was supposed to be a fun exercise, but even the shuffle setting on iTunes was just putting Too Much Pressure on your poor, beleaguered Lieutenant. I'll write about the songs I pick.

"For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti."
Sufjan Stevens

You must love Sufjan, even if you are rolling your eyes as you do it. He's ours, after all. Midwestern, sad and sincere. Unapologetic mystic and unapologetic banjo-ist. Sort of arbitrarily elevated to Hip Pantheon four years ago by people who would probably be uncomfortable if a man wearing wings (!) came up to him on the street talking about the various things Sufjan likes to sing about. Saul Bellow and serial killers and the God of Abraham, etc.

This is an early song, from the first of his records to get wide attention. So it's comparatively sparse. Banjo, piano, trumpet, delicate vocal harmonies...wait, did I say sparse? But it's nice. And, naturally, it seems to be sung from God's point of view. Sufjan knows just how He feels.

And place names are their own poetry, of course, and Mr. Stevens knows that as deeply as I do. Even if he were wearing the wings, I know that I could just say Ypsilanti and we both would smile. Wouldn't be awkward at all. Ypsilanti is a frail, mysterious sort of name for a sad and weary sort of place. And I walked there, once. It took a day. I was young and excitable. I pretend to be different now. A long and silly story that is nonetheless so useful that I'm saving it.

The Blood-Dimmed Tide Is Loosed!

2008-11-08T13:52:00.003-05:00

Satisfyingly poetic: only days removed from my tirade about Yeats Abuse, I watched No Country For Old Men again. (Third time, I believe.) Whaddya think? Does Cormac Freaking McCarthy get a free pass to loot well-worn poems for his novel-titling purposes? I guess I'd decided that he did, without really thinking too hard about it. I was never even a huge fan of Corky McC's, but that's really a pretty good title. I wouldn't have been able to resist it either, if I wrote novels. And there's well-worn and there's well-worn, after all. It's not as if he called it Beauty Is Truth. Or, uh, The Sound and the Fury.

Is the title exactly spot-on appropriate? Eh, not so much. The title of the novel/film seems likely to refer to Ed Tom Bell, virtuous sheriff, the Tommy Lee Jones character from the movie, and to the "old-timers" whom he wants to emulate. He's freaked out and unmanned by his world's seemingly arbitrary descent into savagery--it's no longer any country for him, as you can tell from his increasingly haunted expression in the movie. The speaker of "Sailing to Byzantium" seems a bit more conventionally crotchety and snobbish. He just hates the young because they're constantly singing and having sex, and have no respect for Culture in the way that he does. Hence he's getting the hell out the West to go someplace Old and Religious. If you happen to be under sixty and a fan of "sensual music," it'd be easy to snicker at the guy. But that's what poetry is for--it's allowed to just be right, whatever might be absurd about what it's actually saying. Who's gonna argue with freakin' Yeats? Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is... Not me. Nice words. Pretty words. Keep saying words, Mr. William Butler sir.

Haven't even said anything about that movie. Pretty fine movie. No Lebowski, certainly. I'll get back to it.

Oh, wait! We do still suck!

2008-11-05T11:19:00.002-05:00

Damn these people to hell. (Sorry. Is that shrill?)

The tragic news casting a pall over the Obama victory last night is the passage of constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage in Florida, Arizona, and, it appears, California. In Florida, a state that went for Obama by a 51-49 percent margin, 62 percent of voters pulled the lever for the gay marriage ban. That means that the hardcore religious right, which fueled the placement of these bans on the ballot in all three states and spearheaded the campaigns for their passage, succeeded in not only mobilizing their followers -- who were led to believe that gay marriage would spell the end of religious liberty for Christians -- but in casting the issue in a way that appealed to more moderate voters as well.

I guess we can hope that this is a healthy slap in the face, a cold reminder, here in our Finest Hour. We might be living in the Future, now, but we can’t pretend it’s an unrecognizable place. They’re all still out there, the hardcore conservative true believers, with all of their vicious banality. The era of their freakishly hypertrophied power is done with, but they’re not going to go quietly or cleanly.

But damn. Think about all those eighty-year-old black people turning out to vote for Obama. They got born into a world where they were the objects of smirking contempt and hysterical fear—but redemption, they knew, was just around the corner. It was gonna be okay; Langston Hughes said so. Then skip forward a few depressing decades, and these same people are still thinking well, maybe in another generation or two it won’t matter so much. The ones who lived to see this morning are happy now, if “happy” is even the word for something like that. But there are other people feeling that bitter resignation all over the country this morning. Oh, well. Maybe our kids will get to marry whomever they feel like.

Well, that worked out okay.

2008-11-05T02:13:00.001-05:00

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Wm Wordsworth

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Some Arrogant Jerk

Come on if you think you can take us on…
You forget so easy
We ride tonight.
Radiohead

First thoughts, late:
The triumphalist narrative is that the nation has at last Redeemed Itself for all that slavery stuff—and that’s a bit over-the-top, but I’m all too happy to go with the exuberant moment. (You don’t get too many of them, after all.) But this redemption goes all the way down to the prosaic level, which makes it more satisfying. The popular and electoral vote margins are much higher than either of Bush’s. My state, which was National Shame Ground Zero four Novembers ago, has put the shame behind it—almost matching the national popular vote margin. And though I can barely believe it, my county, as white as the day is long, except on its state university campus, has surpassed the statewide margin of victory, and maybe the national margin. Too soon to tell.

And yeah, of course, like a certain number of other people embarrassed and appalled by the result the last time, I managed to do a couple things this time around to maybe improve that outcome a little. I’m not gonna take all the credit. But I parked cars for Senator Biden. And I canvassed the home of Major League Baseball manager Jim Leyland’s…nephew. There.

Let this be my annual reminder...

2008-11-03T22:14:00.003-05:00

...we could all be something bigger.

The Meek Shall Has Teh Urfs

2008-10-28T17:32:00.003-05:00

Whoa. That was a lotta comments all of a sudden. I didn't think that would be the post to energize my readership, but the signs are clear. I thought I was a pop culture specialist--but of course the pop culture I like isn't actually "popular." And now it seems the people have spoken, and they're saying make with the Highbrow, you pretentious fool! It's what you do!

Commenter Adm points to the LOLCat Bible, which will of course make you laugh if you're a student of this kind of Intertubes Esoterica, and if you aren't will make you back away in baffled horror like John McCain stumbling into a midnight Rocky Horror screening. E.g. Matthew 7:1, which I trust we're familiar with:

1 "If u juj u wil be jujded. So don't.2 Bcz u will be jujded teh saem az u jujded teh othr d00d.

Well, okay then. But I read around the texts, and of course the LOLCat Bible is a community translation project--if one person had done this on their own, it would be enormously disturbing. But of course that means that the quality and tone are all over the place. [Just like in the REAL Bible d00d!!!111 OMG!] I thought Psalm 137 was a bit disappointing. (By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept, etc.) It's even more overused than "Teh Second Coming," but it's been a deeply affecting poem for twenty-five centuries or so--you expect it to deliver the goods. And "Kthx fer teh fluids of Babylon we were all like, n0000000001!11!! when we faut back bout Zion?" OK, maybe.

But this is linguistically complicated. LOLspeak (I CAN HAS CHEESEBURGER?) isn't exactly the same as Message Board-speak which isn't quite the same as Gamer/ Hacker slang (pwnd!!11) which is not quite the same TextmessageSpeak, though obviously they're all closely related. And I'm not fluent in any of them, really. (Hell, when I have to send text messages I use commas and quotation marks and stuff because it hurts my brain not to.) But I guess you could look at this "Bible" as a noble attempt at some kind of Grand Synthesis of Post-Literate Digital Prose Styles.

I can sympathize. After all, I'm a Synthesizer by calling. I know approximately two facts about approximately every subject ever. I guess maybe I'm supposed to explain everybody to everybody else. Sigh.

It's like I'm Vexed to Nightmare, or something...

2008-10-27T08:46:00.003-05:00

Hey, I love Paul Krugman. I was super happy for him at his Big Moment--apparently he's really good at his old day job, too, that of professional economawhatsitronicologonomics. But of course the big prize is only obliquely related to the reasons that he's a contemporary hero, and to how he's made the past decade livable. He was overly fond of Senator Clinton, and he's kind of a cocky son of a bitch, but he's ours. And he's warmed up to the Big Guy by now.

That said: Dr. Krugman--Paul--this sort of thing must stop.

Economic data rarely inspire poetic thoughts. But as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

I'm going to right now declare a Mandatory Global Moratorium on the use of "The Second Coming" in any discussion of Current Events. Yes! Of course I've done it. We've all done it! It's so easy, and it always feels horrifyingly appropriate! But that's why it's a cliché! You think oh just this once, it won't hurt anyone; anyone can see that the tragedy is that THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION! How true that is! And things falling apart? Hell, that happens to me ALL THE TIME.

Really, anybody who's used that "worst are full of passionate intensity" bit in the past decade--and you know you have!--has to remind themself that they probably don't agree with old W.B., or he wouldn't agree with them, about who exactly the "worst" are. But that's not even the point! We've done him the courtesy of overlooking that whole Unfortunate Politics thing because of the whole Genius thing, and rightly so. But for the sake of decency, we also have to stop beating this creepy poem into the rhetorical ground.

So let's just leave it here. The center cannot hold. Fine. Let's all agree to find another way to point that out. No more blood-dimmed tides! No more mere anarchy loosed upon the world! And for the sake of all that is holy, no more slouching of any kind by anybody towards anywhere! There's a book on my shelf called Slouching Toward Fargo, for the love of god! About minor-league baseball! And of course one-time Supreme Court nominee (and present-day batshit crazy Mitt Romney fan) Robert Bork really did in all seriousness put out a book called Slouching Towards Gomorrah. (For somebody worried about the Decline of the West, that's a spectacularly incoherent mash-up of two different pseudo-Biblical tropes that have long since outlived their usefulness.)

(The same goes for any unironic citing of Polonius's advice to his children. Never do what that guy tells you! Go ahead, kids, be a borrower. It's fun!)

[Footnote: while typing this, I for one brief moment had the title of the poem written as "Teh Second Coming," which should provoke giggles in other online children like myself. That's the perfect shorthand for this kind of Media Yeats Abuse! Yeats r00l1z!!!!11 Ezra Pound is teh suck!]

The Usual Apology, and A Weird Tale

2008-10-24T22:25:00.003-05:00

A quick, guilty return to posting. Same excuses as ever. Lazy, dysfunctional, blah blah, you know the drill.

Anyway, here's a little story I wrote. Hadn't written any fiction since my schoolboy days--i.e. a year ago--and wasn't really sure I still could. But I was happily forced. Friend of a friend was running a Halloween themed art show, and I was told to come up with something seasonally appropriate, so they could maybe have some kind of "spooky" reading. Well, the show seemed to be a success, but the "reading" part apparently fell by the wayside--too loud and too many people, anyway. But I'd dashed off this little thing, just in case. And because it was just a lark, an exercise in creepy surrealism for its own sake, it was easy and fun to write instead of stressful and sickening. This might be the key to something. It still sounds like me, after all. (Aimless youth! Mournful guys making wisecracks!) No reason it couldn't become a "real" story of some kind, eventually.

I'd been reading H.P. Lovecraft at work, and I realized I could just inject that freaked-out paranoid aesthetic into my usual Mournful Inarticulate People world. And I could make it happen at Maumee Bay State Park. So I did.

The Yellow Island

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

(From "The Call of Cthulhu")

We were on the boardwalk at the edge of the lake and it was getting rapidly darker, when L told me the one about the island. L said a great many things that didn't make much sense to me, but I always believed her. I had to. Once she told me that there were gas stations all around the city that didn't sell gas—if you were lucky enough to stumble upon one, what came out of the pumps would be silver and opaque and give off a wild rich odor that you wouldn't recognize, and something would happen to your car that would be hard to put your finger on. It would just run better, somehow, or just feel more like it was yours. She said it had happened to her college roommate, but that she didn't have the girl's phone number any more.

She said you shouldn't let the silver stuff touch your skin. I pointed out that you shouldn't get regular gas all over your skin, either, but she just looked at me with something like pity. She knew things, things that it took a great deal out of you to know, and all I could do was point out the flaws in her peculiar little arguments. She never stopped telling me her stories, though.

Once she told me that her cousin was a werewolf—not the kind you're thinking of, she said, but wouldn't explain what kind she meant. She told me she knew a guy who'd gotten cancer because he used the wrong light bulbs. She told me her father was so nervous sometimes that you could see through him. Literally, she said. He shivers and you can see through the spaces between his atoms. Not much; you couldn't watch TV through him, or anything. But you can make out the color of the wall behind him.

And that day by the lake she told me about the yellow island. The wind was rattling the tall grass, and you couldn't see the lake at all until you were right on top of it. We all lived only a few miles from the lake, L pointed out, but we never saw it—it was hidden behind factories and weeds and ragged useless woods. Things could go on there that nobody knew about—and sure enough, things did.

We were at the end of the boardwalk, where you can climb a few feet up a few wooden stairs to a little platform, where suddenly there the lake is, like you just remembered something important. You can't see a whole lot, really. You can see lights on the shore to the west, getting dimmer as they get further to the north. You can't see the far side at all.

You can't see the yellow island, but L assured me it was there, just out of sight.

"How exactly is it yellow?" I asked, and she just looked at me. It wasn't the look of pity this time, and I knew that I believed every word she told me and that I always would. She was just looking, and her eyes were a sharper and harder green than I remembered.

"It is," she said. "Just yellow. Like some kid's drawing of the sun. Like crayon. You wouldn't know what you were looking at."

"Sounds just adorable," I said. "What a cute little island. I guess I'd like to see that."

"You wouldn't," she said. "You wouldn't like it if you did." I didn't laugh because I couldn't laugh while I looked at her.

"How do you know?" I said.

"I've seen it," she said. "Two summers ago. You didn't know me then. I went out after work with all these people from the bar I was working at. I didn't know anybody that well."

"What bar?" I asked.

"It's not there anymore," she said, simply. "But the owner's kid like to hang out with all of us deadbeats who worked there, sometimes—real asshole, but he had a lot of money to throw around, and he wanted to be cool. And this time he had brought this friend who nobody knew, some other rich kid, but this friend had a boat, and we all went out on the lake at night. Everybody drank a lot. People were telling stories about all the sick shit they and their friends had done—you know, stuff they'd stolen from their neighbors and what drugs you'd never heard of that their older brother could get. You know. I remember this one girl—Emily, I think was her name—she kind of freaked out, but I don't remember why.

"No, I do remember," she said, suddenly, interrupting herself. "It was that guy, the friend of the non-friend, the boat guy. He kept saying weird shit. But he was saying it to me, is what's funny, not to that Emily chick. He kinda fixated on me, and I was letting him. Not because I like him, but because I didn't care. But you know how some guys have to, like, point out constellations and stars and shit when they're out at night with a girl?"

"I do that," I said.

"I know," she said. "But it was like he got stuck. He kept pointing over my head, and saying Algol, like it was the only name he could remember. I still remember it, and I don't know anything about stars. Algol, he kept saying. You know that, right? Algol. The eye of the Gorgon. The winking demon. Winking. You know that, right? And I didn't do anything, but Emily started crying and throwing up over the side of the boat, and then I guess the subject got changed. I guess maybe we were all doing something else for a while, playing some stupid word-association game, or drinking game, or something.

"Then it was getting light," she said, "and I don't remember who noticed it first, but it seemed like really suddenly we could all see the yellow island, maybe a quarter mile away. Hard to tell distance on the water, you know? But the island, you could tell it wasn't supposed to be there, like that. Nothing's really that color, you know? It was just flat and empty, and I couldn't tell how big it was or what it was made of. It didn't look like, you know, dirt. It was—not shiny exactly, but it was reflecting too much light. It was too yellow. It was like all the yellow things that anybody ever lost were getting together in one place, they'd been piling up on the bottom of the lake for years and now they were above the surface. And it was familiar. I thought, oh, right, that. I've heard about that, even though I never had. Nobody knew what to say about it. I could tell we were all scared, sort of, but nobody said anything. The weird guy just turned the motor back on and pointed the boat back toward the city. Everybody was pretty drunk, and the sun really hurt my eyes. We all stumbled off and nobody talked about the island the next day, or any day after that. I couldn't remember the weird guy's name, and he never showed up again, and when I asked the owner's kid about him a couple months later—we were both drunk again, at some stupid party—he acted like he didn't know who I was talking about. And at first I thought he was just playing dumb, that he didn't want me knowing his friend for some reason, but then I sort of believed him."

She wasn't looking at me anymore. Just staring out across the lake. It was totally dark by then, and I couldn't see the horizon. There was one light out in the darkness. I know there's a lighthouse out there somewhere, but I've never seen it.

She looked to the east and pointed at the sky, and I followed her perfect small hand with my eyes.

"Algol," she said. "The winking demon." She sighed.

"So now, since then," she said, "I get sick at yellow traffic lights."

"I think I've heard about that," I said.

Ready on Day One

2008-09-18T08:54:00.004-05:00

Senator McCain pledges to firmly face down the threat posed by, uh, Spain.

Prime Minister Zapatero: Mr. President, my government offers our support in this crisis. I give you my word as a Spaniard.

President McCain, through clenched teeth: No good. I've known too many Spaniards.

McCain also promises to take a firm stand on aggression by the King of Siam, and to take swift and decisive action against the Barbary Pirates.

Black, Billowing, Shapeless.

2008-09-14T22:08:00.005-05:00

(David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008)

But in the importance and noise of tomorrow...
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

W.H. Auden

"But on this one afternoon, the fan's vibration combined with some set of notes I was practicing on the violin, and the two vibrations set up a resonance that made something happen in my head...it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner of my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not had the slightest inkling was there...it was a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space.
...
I understood on an intuive level why people killed themselves."
Infinite Jest (1996), 650

Yeah, he knew about this. And we knew he knew. Oddly and horribly, that makes it more shocking--you thought, this guy understands so intimately the stuff a mind can do to itself, and he can write about it more cleanly and funnier and more nakedly than, like, anybody else ever. And that made you think that he was ahead of the game, somehow, that he was smarter than all the awfulness and somehow that made him free from it. That he'd won. Doesn't work like that, and it's always obvious after the fact. Damn.

He never could finish a story, damn it. He was allergic to endings. He was mocking you for ever thinking that everything would ever wrap itself up neatly. This is either one Big Ending or one final Unfininished Story. Seems obscene to think of the end of somebody's life that way, but we're stuck with it. Fiction is what we do.

I wouldn't be writing phrases like "funnier than, like, anybody else ever" if it weren't for him. I also wouldn't have read a fraction of the stuff I've read since 1997, and therefore I wouldn't be here. So there's that.

...fully aware that the cliché that you can't ever truly know what's going on inside someone else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere...the realer, more enduring and sentimental part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if looking it levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, "Not another word."

"Good Old Neon" (2004)

The board will nod and you will go, and eyes of skin can cross blind into a cloud-blotched sky, punctured light emptying behind sharp stone that is forever. That is forever. Step into the skin and disappear.

Hello.

"Forever Overhead" (1999)

Bad.

2008-09-14T08:13:00.001-05:00

This sucks.

David Foster Wallace, whose darkly ironic novels, essays and short stories garnered him a large following and made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, was found dead in his California home on Friday, after apparently committing suicide, the authorities said.

Don't know what to say yet. And I have to go to work. Later.

all we gotta do is be brave and be kind...

Tonight, I call upon all Americans...

2008-09-04T21:33:00.003-05:00

...To get the hell off my lawn!

Liveblogging Senator McCain's big speech.

Blue screen! When they replay clips of this speech, he'll be on the battlefield of Gettysburg.

Crikey. He even says "Warshington." He probably sits on a "davenport." Senator, do you now or have you ever owned a davenport?

Camera found a black person!

He said "latina." I don't know why that's funny, but it is.

He said "culture of life" really slowly, like the secret code phrase that it is, while looking right at the camera. YES I AM ON YOUR SIDE YOU CRAZY JESUS NUTS. LEAVE ME ALONE.

Obama will raise your taxes. Because he's black.

Scary socialized medicine. Not convincing. He just can't do red meat; he just doesn't care enough. Crowd liked it okay.

Camera found a latino dude!

Obama "wishing away" the global economy? Huh. Why?

Boring clintonian worker retraining stuff.

"Education will be the civil right of this century." Not a bad line, but I don't think we're done getting all the other civil rights yet.

School choice. More demagoguery. But unexceptional.

"Obama" "bureaucrats" "unions" in the same sentence.

Biggest cheer yet--stop sending money to countries that don't like us! What's he even talking about? Foreign aid? A miniscule part of our budget? But nothing gets angry white people more riled up.

Drill! Everybody drill! Even bigger cheers. These people are parodying themselves. Make a joke about Hillary Clinton, John! They'll eat it up!

He will develop "electric horseless carriages."

"Reassembling the Russian Empire." Ooooooooooh. But apparently "our prayers" can help.

Seems a bit defensive. "I know how the world works. I am not afraid. I can handle it." Weird, hectoring tone.

"I hate war." Aw, don't lie, dude. You hate being in wars, everybody does. But planning wars is awesome--and you don't got to pretend for this crowd; they're with you.

Here's the line about the scars that everybody was talking about. They love it. Ecce homo.

"Let's try sharing." Wow. Also in favor of caring and good manners.

"Imperfect servant." Nice, actually. Still pretty messianic, but it works here.

Vietnam. Vietnam. Blah blah blah. "Hadn't any worry that morning." Sure.

Wow. John McCain was in Vietnam? That sounds like it was pretty horrible. What decade was that again?

Oh, it really was a good story the first thousand times. There's no way to say that that wasn't the Real Thing. (Unless he's been lying all along.) But it just...it just doesn't have anything do with the job he wants. There are all different kinds of Character.

Let's see if he tells the lying "cross in the dirt" story. Probably not. People called shenanigans on that one.

"Learned to love this country when I was a prisoner in someone else's." Good line. But has he ever really internalized, or publicly acknowledged the fact that it was, in fact, someone else's country? That even though he did his duty, and did it honorably, anyone looking honestly can now see that he never should have been there at all? Not to my knowledge.

Somebody had a sign with "maverick" spelled wrong. Love the GOP. Love 'em!

Stop saying "fight!" I thought you hated war!

Stand up, you pathetic sons of bitches! Pull yourselves together. We never quit! He needs to grab a weak-looking guy in the front row and slap him silly.

That's enough for me, I think. Really didn't seem all that great, especially by comparison with his opponent's big moment. But who knows how it'll play with the Mysterious Undecided Voters. I just really hope that some of them couldn't help giggling when he did his weird jerky arm gestures.

Clear and new -- both good things!

2008-09-04T08:34:00.004-05:00

I'd sorta given the Palin-blogging a rest after an enthusiastic start. It got to be like shooting dead fish in a barrel--and where's the fun when everybody's doing it? But this is just...it's just wonderful, is all. Josh Marshall brings something to our attention:

Anybody notice anything odd about this part of the transcript of the Palin speech released to the press?

Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we're going to lay more pipelines ... build more new-clear plants ... create jobs with clean coal ... and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal, and other alternative sources.

...and at first I thought, what? Seems innocuous. Sure, "clean coal" is bullshit, but Obama totally went with that line, too. But then...OMG. I got that beautiful warm feeling of liberal smugness that we get when everything we believe in is justified. You see? They spelled out "nuclear" PHONETICALLY! They were taking no chances! Yeah, we've got a lightweight on our hands, and yeah, she comes from state where "alternative fuel" refers to burning the furniture for heat. But we can't risk any more links with Bush! She's got to say it right!

(See, if only somebody had thought to do that for W ten years ago, this wouldn't be a problem. Oh, who knows? Maybe they did.)

And then somebody went and undid all of their excessive caution and made the situation a hundred times worse--they handed out the WRONG transcript! Thereby announcing that yes, we're pretty sure our candidate ain't too bright.

Jon Stewart better know about this. I want this joke pounded into the ground by the weekend.

Everybody's Having a Good Time! In Maine!

2008-09-03T09:45:00.003-05:00

You know, I'm not much of a journalist; I've only just now figured out that I can actually get paid for it. But I know enough to know that you can wait your whole lifetime for a chance to write a headline like this one:

8-foot mechanical ape missing, owner mystified

And if you're the ~~guy~~ woman who gets that assignment for the Bangor Daily News, you know perfectly well that you could go your whole career without your work getting picked up by the national wire services. Destiny is banging on your front door, and you'd best answer! I think Diana Graettinger rises to the occasion. And if you're the bored guy at the AP scanning headlines from all over all day long, you'd better believe your eyes are gonna light up at that one. County Commisioners Debate Sewer Proposal. Ball Bearing Warehouse to be Sold At Auction. GIANT FREAKIN' GORILLA MISSING!!!!

So what I'm saying is that a lot of people are having the best day of their lives. And we haven't even talked about the college guys who are high-fiving and cracking beers around the GIANT MECHANICAL GORILLA in their damned living room. They've never felt so alive! On a day like this one, you feel that there is hope for us all.

Apologies, followed by sneering condescension.

2008-08-29T11:25:00.005-05:00

I know, I know. I always said this wasn't a political blog--there are so many people who do that better than I could, and most of my likely readers probably aren't gonna find it as entertaining as I do. But you know, it's that time of year. It's officially general election season, as of last night, and you're going to be hearing about it more and more anyway, whether you care or not. So how could I bear to leave my two cents unspent? I seem to be on a roll today, anyway, so I'll keep it going.

So: I've already gotten my jokes in this morning, but let me just say in all seriousness how terrific this McCain VP thing is. My reaction was precisely the same as that of everyone in the world who isn't a conservative blogger. Who? Let this be a lesson: "Thinking Outside the Box" is the last refuge of fools and scoundrels, the sorts of people who say things like "let's Think Outside the Box on this one." The result is inevitably something like this--somebody comically unprepared being thrust into a situation where they're going to be ridiculed.

The sorts of people who worry about these things, who assume that the Democratic Party will always find a way to lose, well, they're worrying already. We can't ridicule her, they're saying. She's young and appealing and a Girl. We'll look mean. And hey, I'm normally as much of a worrier as anybody--but the hand-wringers should realize right away that we don't need to ridicule her. Play it straight, mildly question her experience and possible minor scandal, and let the situation take care of itself. It's Harriet Miers all over again, except that McCain isn't allowed to make her back out. McGovern tried that. Yeesh.

Clearly, this was a way not of countering the choice of Biden, but of making a desperate grab for an Obama-like figure. See? Our party's got a Dynamic Next Generation, too! Take that, you smug liberal elites! But you can see just how pathetically weak that line of attack is, and you can guess just how well it's gonna play. Seriously? You want people to mentally compare this woman to Barack Freakin' Obama? That's a bright idea. Our Dynamic Next Generation is a battle-hardened Chicago pol and US Senator and Blockbuster Author who just happens to also be Bigger Than Jesus at the moment. Theirs is a lightweight whack-job who's run a hick state for a year and a half.

It's Dan Quayle all over again, is what it is. (Hey wouldn't it be funny if Obama had picked Evan Bayh, the Democratic Dan Quayle? Okay, funny to me, maybe. Sigh.) And I know, I'm about the zillionth person to say that in the past few hours, and just as many people have said but...but...Dan Quayle WON! Yeah, but is anybody seriously suggesting that Bush 88 won because of Quayle? He was in the same box that McCain was in--all the viable options either weren't really viable, like Lieberman, or he just couldn't stand them. (Mittens Romney, just like Bob Dole was to Bush Sr.) Quayle was immediately dismissed as a joke, and rightly so.

Nah, Bush 88 won because of vicious race-baiting, as every schoolboy knows, and because Dukakis was sorta inept, which every schoolboy also knows. And hell yes you're gonna see some vicious race-baiting in the coming weeks. It's gonna be Scary Radical Black Celebrity Muslim pretty much non-stop, and McCain will have to cluck his tongue and act like he's Above All That, even though the size of the racist vote has always been his only real hope of winning. But it's not going to work. Because it's twenty years since Willie Horton, and the nation is, honestly, marginally less racist, if only because it's less white. And more importantly, because our guy is most definitely NOT inept. Did you happen to catch him on TV yesterday, addressing a few of his closest friends?

On the other hand...

2008-08-29T10:17:00.005-05:00

This could be a stroke of diabolical genius from McCain's people. Palin's a funny guy! Pontius Pilate! And as long as brings his Very Good Friend From Rome along, I'm in! You know who I'm talkin' about!

But seriously, is he a citizen?

Please please please...

2008-08-29T09:23:00.003-05:00

If the rumors are true...

McCain / Flick '08!

I mean, c'mon! Are Alaskans even citizens? Do they put America first?

I Did Some Wonder Loaf

2008-08-15T11:49:00.002-05:00

Okay, I haven't really done much of this sort of thing. But I'm gonna set aside all the philosophizing and rock-snobbery for a moment and post a damned embedded video. Because this is the funniest damned thing ever; I can't stop thinking about it. `

Shameless Self-Promotion

2008-08-13T15:32:00.002-05:00

Okay, sure, it's bad enough that I have one blog that I post to every once in a while Whenever I Freaking Feel Like It, Damn It! But now I've got two.

This one is entirely focused on my occasional workplace, which you might know something about. So the official Target Audience is just my co-workers, but it's perfectly possible that you might find it amusing from time to time. Lots of shop talk and insider politics, but hopefully at least some stuff that's entertaining to anybody. My job is funny. And that blog has exactly the focus and sense and purpose that this one has always lacked. All of us at that job really really hate our boss, you see--which is perfectly normal, but I'm hoping I can raise it to an art form. He fascinates me; we have such astonishingly different ideas about what it means to be a decent human being. I want to explore that; I want to raise my young co-workers' consciousness about the cruelty and absurdity of the working world; and I want to make myself more popular. :)

Of course, I can't ever link to it from this site again, since I don't want it to be any easier to tie all of this to me than it has to be. :-) Though really, anybody to whom I've ever sent an email would instantly recognize my sneering condescension and liberal use of adverbs. I just can't hide! :-)

We Gotta Start This One Off

2008-07-27T19:02:00.013-05:00

Now it's so competitive,
The sleeplessness and sedatives.
I know it sounds repetitive.
Every show can't be a benefit...

[bitchin' guitar solo]

Yeah, there's a new Hold Steady album. Yeah, I'm pretty happy.

Look, I won't do a real review here, not yet—what I really want to do is some sort of lengthy, pretentious survey of all four records. But for now I'll just say that when it was over I immediately hit "Play" again. I never do that. Even stuff I really love I have to give a rest after each listen or it just doesn't sound right. Familiarity breeds contempt, musically speaking. But I'm on about my fourth time through Stay Positive, and it's still working. I'll just say that after the Hold Steady followed up the bracing shock of Almost Killed Me and Separation Sunday with the lovable-but-spotty Boys and Girls in America, I felt that we couldn't be quite sure—but now there's no doubt that we're in the presence of Greatness. Fist-pumping, lighters-in-the-air, ten-thousand-hands-clapping-in-unison-type Greatness. It's difficult for the cynic in me—how can anybody still sing about teenagers and drugs and cars and Bad Boys in Love With Good Girls Gone Bad and keep a straight face? How can Craig Finn be this smart and still believe all his own Transcendent Power Of Rock and Roll bullshit? Then I remember—oh, yeah! It's all true.

Just a taste: "Let me know when you're ready" is rhymed with "John Cassavetes." And, of course, with "hold steady." Hell, yes.

This was the possibly only thing that could make me stop listening to the Mountain Goats, about whom I didn't even know until this year, except as yet another band with a silly animal-based name. But John Darnielle got there first (unless you count the Monkees.) He's been using that name for over a decade. And lately I've been feeling like the eleven-year-old finding out about Bruce Lee. I feel like I felt after Separation Sunday! And it might seem like a jarring shift—these bands superficially don't sound much alike. But I realize that it makes sense—Finn and John Darnielle may be the two best narrative songwriters in America. (Prove me wrong, Will Sheff! You're in the game, but we'll see how this new one turns out.) Both are drawn to the seamy and the hopeless the way their characters are drawn to opiates and fortified wines. And, of course, they've each got a voice that would peel paint.

Of course, Finn the Catholic badly wants his characters redeemed—he wants to redeem them personally! Darnielle's people are clearly going straight to hell and you can't stop them. But it's easy to imagine a Hold Steady version of the downtrodden-teen-lust anthem "This Year," or the thunderous blues of "See America Right." They totally should do that! But will probably cover "Born in the U.S.A." or "Piano Man," instead. Fair enough.

[Note: I had to change that profile photo. It always seems like it'd be delightfully whimsical to do "mock-thoughtful," but the irony doesn't necessarily translate and it's kind of a lame joke anyway. Like having a moustache that's meant to be funny. This one's a compromise. Not pretty. Not unflattering. Not funny at all.]

Heir to the Glimmering World

2008-07-10T21:09:00.007-05:00

Okay, The National are on board. They're selling official tie-in merchandise, which is pretty cool. Though obviously not too many people who'd understand the shirt are swing voters.
My sister actually told me they were using that song for endorsement purposes at the show she saw a few weeks back, though it's not as if the lyric is really applicable. It's sort of anxious and desperate, like most of their songs. (Though that "great white hope" thing takes on wonderful new comic meaning, doesn't it?) And "the English are waiting?" For what, like, a trans-Atlantic high-level diplomatic summit?

And Atrios made the connection some weeks back--maybe he got the idea from the band, but it'd be cool if it were the other way around. It's the best kind of endorsement, too: the highly qualified kind. Okay, you're the man. Don't blow it.

Best part, of course, is the half-hearted Photoshop job they did at Pitchfork. Obama's eight feet tall! He'll crush you!

Pulp Fiction

2008-07-10T13:45:00.006-05:00

Clearly, I’ve turned the Song of the Day into a hollow mockery of its name. And of course, if you’ve been paying attention, you absolutely knew that would happen sooner rather than later. Makes me think of something I read a while back, in Robert Stone’s memoir, Prime Green. (Sort of disappointing book, actually. From a guy who produces such harrowing, blood-drenched novels, it was a pretty laid-back, jokey affair. Stone just finds his own life vastly amusing, which I guess is healthy.) Anyway, Stone devotes a good chapter or two to his memories of his friend, the late countercultural icon, Ken Kesey, which is all very entertaining, even though I’ve never read anything Kesey wrote or much cared to. But in particular, Stone quotes a bit of self-justifying doggerel that Kesey used to recite: Of promising more than what I can deliver / I have a bad habit, it is true. / But I have to promise more than I deliver / To be able to deliver what I do.

Yes, Ken, exactly. You speak for us both. (Except I would never recite epigrammatic rhyming verse to my friends, you hippie hack!)

But anyway, here’s the next song in line. Not a Song of the Day. Just…a Song, I guess.

Some Words About a Random Song

“Mis-Shapes”
Pulp

Uh, is that title even a word? I dunno, but it's poetic justice that this is the song to come up for the post immediately following my enthusiastic Anglo-bashing. Which anybody who knows me had to find laughable anyway, since they know that I don't just own Coldplay albums, I own Travis albums. As well as the complete works of Morrissey.

And of course, it goes absolutely without saying that I own Different Class, surely one of the most English albums this side of the Village Green Preservation Society. Along with Oasis' Definitely Maybe and Blur's Parklife, it makes up one third of the Holy Trinity of Nineties Britpop. Though of the three, it's probably the least well-known in this country, since Oasis had their Arena Rock swagger and their tabloid headlines, and Blur, well, Blur had "Girls and Boys." Just try to get that shit out of your head.

So here you've got the opening blast off of the defining record of one of the quintessential Englishmen, Jarvis Cocker, who would soon become a hero to millions through his instantly-legendary public mocking of Michael Jackson. Like any British rock singer worth your time, Jarvis is just as useful as a character as he is for anything he's actually sung. Equal parts brainy misfit, swoony romantic, and leering seducer, and thinner and gawkier than seems physically possible. If he didn't exist, we'd have had to invent him.

Conveniently, this song is something of a call to arms, or manifesto—a wannabe generational anthem for all the "mis-shapes, mistakes, and misfits" who are destined to rise up and overthrow the ignorant, musclebound louts who are running things. Say what you like, the man knows his audience. "What's the point in being rich?" Cocker muses, over the jaunty music-hall verse, "if you can't think what to do with it? / 'Cause you're so bleeding thick?" Then the chorus—a little bit intense, a little bit scary. This guy's pretty witty, but is he really in control of his actions? "We want your homes, we want your lives / We want the things you won't allow us…" Yeah! I'm with the skinny guy!

…and I checked—"mis-shapes" is indeed a legitimate noun, though the OED calls it "obsolete." Shoulda known that overeducated maniac would've done his homework.

Self-Evident

2008-07-04T16:11:00.011-05:00

In honor of our nation's independence:

Reasons To Hate the British

Chris Martin!

Margaret Thatcher!

Colin Firth!

Colonialism!

Posh!

I'm happy to relate, also, that my adopted town puts on its fireworks display at Fort Meigs, built by General William Henry Harrison during the War of 1812. (Yeah, the future president who died of a cold! We love that guy around here!) So, the entire celebration is centered on a site devoted to the kicking of limey ass. Warms this patriotic heart.

It's adorable when they try to be clever.

2008-07-03T23:20:00.006-05:00

This got forwarded to me by an alert reader, who gets email, as we all do, from some retrograde relatives. You know who I'm talking about, right? Old, white uncle-and-grandpa-type dudes, watchin' them some Glenn Beck and packin' heat.
Heh. Cute, huh?

But, as I chuckled, I realized--hey, I get it--but a lot of things in this joke might seem weird, complicated, or just entirely opaque to younger readers. So I'm taking it on myself to be the younger generation's link with history, much as Senator McCain has done for people like me.

Here, in a nutshell, is what's going on:
Those are our two major-party presidential candidates. Sure, you knew that, right? And they're side-by-side, so you're meant to be comparing them in some way, that much is clear. But what, exactly, is the deal? Well, see how Senator McCain--that's the crusty old white guy, kids!--is wearing some sort of odd clothing? Well, that's his uniform. Senator McCain served in the United States Navy a very, very long time ago when he was a young man. (See how that photo's in black and white? Weird!) Anyway, he was in a war and some really terrible things happened to him, and he handled it pretty well, and has thus been trading on it ever since, although it has nothing much to do with any real job he's ever held. And that's not the point of the joke, anyway--the point is that he's wearing a uniform, which makes him seem rugged and manly, and older folks are into that, especially guys. And anyway, the real point is about the other dude, Senator Obama. He looks pretty cool, huh? Well, yeah, but the joke is that he's wearing some kind of Robe Thingy in that picture, which must be the Native Garb of some crazy foreign country or other, where people, like, jump around and throw spears. This is supposed to make you chuckle, first of all, because it's so much less rugged and manly than the Jumpsuit Thingy that McCain's got, but more importantly because it draws attention to the fact that Senator Obama's father came from the continent of Africa. Wait, you're saying. What's that got to do with it? Well, kids, what's funny is that being partly from Africa makes you black--see how he doesn't quite match the other guy? That's not just the color film! He really does look different! Isn't that hilarious?

No, seriously. Some people think that's funny, the kinda folks who don't spell so good. (Where it says "if your still thinking," I'm pretty sure they meant to write "you're." Now that's comedy.) Back in the twentieth century, people thought that was a kinda big deal--they thought folks from Africa were, like, all wild n' crazy, and had lots of sex and committed crimes and stuff. If you were "black" you couldn't even be president, because not enough people would like you. Weird, but true. Luckily, people are smarter these days.

Anyway, here are the two senators currently, just to clarify things:

He's Just No Good At All

2008-06-19T13:03:00.004-05:00

Talking with a former bandmate, who was happily watching an old Werner Herzog doc—Australia! Bugs! What could go wrong? (Well, see my review of another film.) But it got me excited again about seeing his new crazy Antarctica movie. The underwater Antarctica footage in Wild Blue Yonder was indeed pretty great—the problem was that it had Brad Dourif talking over it instead of Werner Freakin’ Herzog, making scary German pronouncements. What do these jellyfish dream in their frozen depths? Do they despise us?

But that made me look him up on IMDB to get some details, and I just about had a heart attack. Herzog’s remaking Bad Lieutenant! Supposedly. Or not remaking it, as he insists. He’s making a movie about a character sorta similar to Harvey Keitel’s indelible monster in Abel Ferarra’s cult-classic 1992 sleazefest, but doing different stuff. Yes, well, okay, Werner, but you clearly signed on to that particular title for a reason, and I’m anxious to see what it might be. Something tells me it won’t be wholesome good fun. Too bad it’s Nicolas Cage, but on the other hand, he’s got some skills, and he could atone for a lot with one memorably horrifying performance.

(Funny that Bad Lieutenant and The Piano were only a year apart, now that I’m thinking about it. It was the Golden Age of Naked Keitel!)

Don't Be Without One!

2008-06-18T20:29:00.007-05:00

On my drive to work, just before I arrive at the mighty Borders #653, there’s a giant hideous electronic billboard, which cycles through a number of ads in regular succession. This of course is a massive technological leap forward from the basic Stuff Painted On Wood system that was the basis for the traditional billboard, and indeed for just about every sign since the first Trespassers were warned about their imminent Prosecution, and the first Employees were admonished to Wash Hands. This crazy electric thing of course has to cost a lot more, and thus is automatically cooler, in a very lame and sad kind of way. We’re supposed to feel like we’re living in Blade Runner—and why would that be a good thing, anyway?—but ads are just…ads. Banal or oppressive, no matter how much processing power goes into them.

Except when somebody exercises poor judgment. Then you might get something disturbing enough to be entertaining. One of the paying customers for this particular eyesore is some sort of dentist’s office, and he or she or they want to make you feel insecure about your hideous teeth, and think about how much more successful and loved you’d be if they got cleaned up and straightened. But the slogan they’ve chosen is a problem: “Teeth,” it says. “The Ultimate Accessory.” Wait, accessory? Yeah, I guess, if you’re some kind of war criminal, or marauding Viking! And the woman on the sign looks so happy; it’s very unsettling to think about the enormous necklace of molars that she’s wearing, even if you can’t quite see it in the photo.

Song of the Day
“Something to Look Forward To”
Spoon

I have to say: this is going pretty well! My first two randomly selected songs have been entirely awesome, and the casual reader could very well conclude that I’m just being totally and painfully Hipper Than Thou, at least for Perrysburg OH. But fear not—my hard drive is plenty well-stocked with the bizarre and the determinedly square, and anybody who keeps checking will see some of it eventually. (I’m promising myself that I’m going to exercise the Executive Song Veto only in the direst cases, or what’s the point?) So stick around and you’re bound to see some 10,000 Maniacs, or perhaps “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

So here’s Spoon, meanwhile, with a tight little tune. Probably my favorite song on my least favorite album of theirs, if that makes any sense. Kill the Moonlight is where they stripped their ultra-cool pop down to the bone, and even if you feel forty-seven percent more With It while it’s playing, sometimes you feel like it’s a bit…ungenerous. So it’s appropriate that we’re looking at this particular song, a paean to the pleasures of delayed gratification. Two minutes, seventeen seconds, on an album where no song hits four minutes. Britt Daniel, in his breathy little Soulful White Guy yelp, warns somebody named “Carole” not to get ahead of herself, because he’ll take it “anywhere you let me go.” Not sure if this is meant to be some kind of Reverse Psychology gambit that’s actually supposed to get Mr. Daniel laid sooner rather than later.

But here you’ve got the essence of the Spoon sound, for better or for worse. That beautiful little stripped-down groove, for a few bars with just a little piano and that falsetto croon, then some stinging little guitar hits and you just know it’s building up to something, then at forty seconds it just unfolds for a second, all that funkiness relaxing into the Big Rock arpeggios, and you’re nodding your head, you’re happy, and here’s the chorus, and…wait, that was it? More drum and bass, no melody to speak of, no big payoff, and you’re left wondering if that was supposed to be the point, if you’re a sap for wanting more. “So many things we could say,” as Britt says, but “some things are best left unsaid.”

Also, only a Spoon song would include a line about “your Chicago Manual of Style.” Though at that point Daniel is laying on the Soulfulness so thick that I had absolutely no idea that that was what he was saying until just now. Huh.

All Manner of Things Shall Be Well

2008-06-16T22:02:00.004-05:00

Hi. Hope everybody’s okay. I want to join Holden in wishing everybody a truly blessed Bloomsday. Seems like as good a day as I’m likely to find to resume my quaint electronic scribblings. You may consider this a Relaunch, if you like—the Genesis of Good Lieutenant 2.0.

Hadn’t done a whole lot of this sort of thing lately. Maybe you’d noticed. I guess you presumably know me, if you’re reading this, so you know that I’m a decent writer but a wildly erratic one. And it seems as if I haven’t written anything that I wasn’t literally forced to write for some months now. I won’t say that I ever had any kind of method or system for any part of my life, let alone for writing, but whatever working compromise I had in place pretty much evaporated after last fall or so. I was making it up pretty much day to day, and this site was the least of my worries.

But I’m on to the next thing, now. No more Undergraduate Studies. (Vast relief.) No more Toledo. (Bittersweet.) Playing music again, reading the occasional novel. (Astounding.) It would be great if I could get some sort of full time job before I have to start paying loans back, but otherwise I have very little to fear or fret over, and I’m calming back down and backing away from my frenetic, chaotic school persona. Trying to reclaim the state of mind where writing stuff like this can be the purest kind of fun.

Anyway, I think I’m going to retool, like a sitcom adding a friendly robot and a cute kid. There’ll be a (much) more regular posting schedule, so it might actually be worth your time to check back here. I’m honestly going to shoot for every day, or at least five times a week or so. And I’ll still write whatever pops into my damned fool head, but as we corporate types like to say, I’m going to focus on my core competency. Which seems to me to be the music writing, though maybe you secretly think my musical taste sucks. (Thank you for sparing my feelings. I am delicate.) I’m always listening to something that I have deeply compelling opinions about, or think that I do. But it wasn’t just laziness that kept me away from sharing them—I’d just get scared by the size of the projects I kept thinking up, and go play video games instead. So I’m going to start with the small things, with the details wherein I’m told the devil is found, with the basic fundamental atoms of the musical universe that I’m stuck in. With the songs, basically.

I pledge to write about a different song every post. I’ll let iTunes select them at random, though I may exercise some kind of executive veto. Since I have about thirteen thousand of them in this lovely little machine, that should last us a while. And I’ll just set out writing in whatever direction the day’s song points me. That could be almost as many directions as I have songs. There are songs in this computer that I love, that are sacred texts to me, that I can subject to note-by-note close reading, and there are songs that I may have never heard before. Of course, there are plenty of songs here that I don’t even particularly like, which might present the most interesting challenges. Why are they here? Did I like them once, or never? What’s my relationship with them? Every one of these tiny little digital texts has intersected with my life in one way or another, and flipping through them in no particular order might leave us with some kind of Autobiography by Record Collection. (Which is all very Nick Hornby, of course. But there’s a reason guys like me read that book. He is Us.)
Right now I’m hearing “Tonight the Sky” from April, the new Sun Kil Moon record. It’s a terrific song, one of the best examples of Mark Kozelek’s Epic Midwestern Sentimentalism; "Tonight the Sky" totally earns its ten minutes and twenty-one seconds of throbbing and droning guitar. But that can’t be my Song of the Day. That would be cheating. Now I’m going to pick one at random, or let the computer pick it for me.

Deep Breath. Here it is.

Song of the Day, Inaugural Edition
“These Days Nothing But Sunshine”
The Clientele

Sigh of relief. I was so worried that the first one would be lame, and make me feel embarrassed about the whole thing. But this is good. I love the Clientele. Frail, literary, melancholic, extremely British. All their records seem to have been recorded on rainy days, which makes it funny that we’ve got the one with sunshine in the title. And it’s a lovely tune, one of the better ones on the somewhat poppier God Save the Clientele. I can’t find the lyric printed anywhere on the Internets, which is unusual, but I guess they aren’t exactly scaling giddy heights of fame. But it seems like a gentle song, a reassuring one, like its title. What stands out the most, really, is the shimmering pedal steel, which the album notes tell me is played by one Pete Finney. Who isn’t actually a member of the Clientele, ironically. But some quick research tells me that he’s apparently a Nashville veteran, appearing on albums by Patty Loveless, Allison Moorer, and somebody named Lonesome Bob. But he’s got one foot in Indie World, too, as we see—he’s on the new Bonnie “Prince” Billy record! I should get that album. Damn. I was at the record store today.

I did buy My Morning Jacket, though, and the new documentary about The National, which is exciting. Even more exciting, it comes with a 12 song bonus disc. So I’ll no doubt have some notes on those in the next week or so. But for now I’ve just decided to be glad to be back.

News From the Future

2008-03-20T21:11:00.003-05:00

January 2009 --

President Obama meets with the newly appointed Secretary of Interstellar Good Vibes and Ancillary Coordiator of Soap Bubbles.

...but, actually, Obama looks kinda pissed off, there. You think anybody told him Wayne Coyne was coming? You gotta tell a brother before you spring Wayne Freakin' Coyne!

The Huck Wants What it Wants

2008-02-06T11:41:00.000-05:00

It just occurred to me this morning, looking at the local news-paper, that this Intertube contraption of ours could possibly be used in some sort of editorial capacity. To comment on events of the day, and such. Politics? you're thinking. On the internet? But I really think it could work.

I don't think I'm really the one to do it, but I did have one thought. I may not be the first to consider this. Watching election returns, I see that Jeebus-loving Governor Huckabee continues to do surprisingly well with the Mouth-Breathing Rural Folk Component of the Republican electorate, bless their hearts. And, cinephile that I am, I thought what I'd thought before--how is it possible that none of these people have constructed some sort of campaign theme around the slogan "I (heart) Huckabee?" It just seemed like a no-brainer to me; it's a funny name and you'd think you'd want to play up any association it might have in people's minds.

Then, of course, I realized what an idiot I am. I feel like Pauline Kael in the apocryphal story, utterly confused about how Nixon managed to get elected, since nobody she knew had voted for him. I, to drastically understate the case, am not representative of the GOP base. And even among we decadent coastal-elite fifth-columnists, really very few people saw, and fewer liked, David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabee's. It's entirely possible that the set of people who have both seen that movie and who would consider voting for the jolly slimmed-down Arkansan contains literally no one. It's entirely possible that no Huck voter is aware that there is such a film. And that it contains actual Jewish folks, negroes, French people, and Mark Wahlberg.

Huckabee himself, of course, has seen the movie multiple times. He's a big Jude Law fan. Old school! eXistenZ, baby!

Geek Love

2008-02-01T12:09:00.000-05:00

Well, some of you might've heard or read my giddy babbling about my new computer, which I got as a combined birthday / graduation present. And let me be clear--I'm not some geeky bore obsessed with my gadgets! I'm cool! Honest!

But, on the other hand my laptop is so awesome. It is my friend. It understands me in a way that none of you do. So there. And anyway, am I the only one who wants to punch that hipster "Mac" guy from the commercials? I have a Mac! I just got done mentioning how awesome it is! But geez, just be nice to the pudgy geeky PC guy! Can't you see how uncomfortable he is?

Oh, god. I'm a dork. I admit it. Captain Picard rules!

Anyway, my point here is that now I don't have any excuse not to write stuff, like, all the time. This is serious business--the desk I used to try to work at just isn't very comfortable, and like any writer I will take ANY excuse not to write. But right now I'm literally in a La-Z-Boy recliner, with a cup of coffee. So there's really nowhere else to go, in terms of comfortable working environment--I might as well blog constantly now. So check back.

Chaos! Chaos and Murder!

2008-01-31T23:53:00.000-05:00

Werner Herzog’s The Wild Blue Yonder is a decidedly silly piece of work from a guy who’s made a lot of them. I couldn’t bring myself to hate it, though, even it is that rare thing, a movie that’s drastically overlong at seventy-five minutes. Herzog. Space travel. Math! How can that not be fun?

And it is fun, if exasperating, for just enough of the running time. In the opening titles, it calls itself a “science fiction fantasy,” which really just sounds like a shelving area of a chain bookstore, but I guess he had to call it something. It’s not a documentary, although most of it is made up of what you’d call documentary footage. It’s got a plot of sorts, though that’s generously stretching the term—Brad Dourif (you know, the weird looking kid from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? No? Grima Wormtongue? There you go.) who apparently is supposed to be an alien immigrant to Earth (don’t ask) narrates a funny little fable about a space voyage to another galaxy in search of a replacement Earth. (We’ve ruined ours, you see.) But the twist is that there aren’t any other actors—the astronauts are played by…astronauts. Somehow Herzog got a lot of hilariously banal footage from an actual space shuttle mission—the astronauts eat! sleep! exercise! take notes! self-consciously adjust their clothing for the camera!—and edited it along with Dourif’s voiceover to give the vague impression that NASA’s finest are in fact the “characters” on their quixotic journey. And to explain how such a mission is even “possible,” Herzog finds a gloriously oblivious group of real mathematicians who explain very earnestly about something called “chaotic transport”—which seems in real life to be some complicated theory of orbital mechanics, but is described in the narration as some sort of super-science teleportation strategy. The funniest joke in the film comes when Dourif, explaining the scientific breakthrough, intones “it was a rogue mathematician who discovered the secret,”—and we cut to the blank and gentle face of one Martin Lo, who seems decidedly un-rogue-like, and who clearly doesn’t know the camera is on.

The shuttle’s destination turns out to be Antarctica, I think—it’s supposed to be Dourif’s “home planet” in the Andromeda galaxy, but it’s entirely made up of icy underwater footage. A lot of which is quite startling and beautiful, but which goes on. Forever. Overlaid by Herzogian tribal chanting. Again, it’s sort of funny and sort of puzzling. Then the astronauts go home, and everyone else is dead. Except Brad Dourif. Or something.

So, this isn’t Grizzly Man, or Fitzcarraldo, is what I’m saying. But it would be worth a look some afternoon with the fast-forward button, especially if, like me, you watched a lot of space-shuttle footage as a child.

Speaking of Werner Herzog, this footage is way funnier than The Wild Blue Yonder. Herzog gets shot! On camera! In the middle of an interview! Which sounds horrifying, but is awesome because he’s essentially unharmed on account of being some sort of magical German superhero. And it was probably, you know, a BB gun. But still. His weirdly calm reaction—“what was that?”—as the cameramen dive for cover, is lovely. Even better is his confident assertion after the fact that it was not a significant bullet. I’m gonna have a band called Significant Bullet.

…and he saved Joaquin’s life. Just saying.

Pillar of Fire

2007-12-27T18:18:00.000-05:00

It’s been pointed out to me that for a literature major who works in a bookstore, I really don’t write about books a whole lot—the implication being that I’m some sort of a damned fraud. There is probably some truth to this. Especially since becoming a Scholar, I haven’t really kept up with the new fiction the way I used to. It’s been frustrating. If you’ve read my little Blogger profile, you’ve seen that I list a whole bunch of impressive highbrow novelists as my supposed favorites—but a significant number of those people have had new books out in the past year or two, and I’ve hardly read any of them. Don Delillo. Robert Stone. Martin Amis. William T. Vollmann. John Banville. Richard Powers. And so on. I did get through Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach a few months back, but that’s because it’s, like, sixty pages long. (It was okay, but forgettable for McEwan.)

But when I saw earlier this year that Denis Johnson had a novel coming out, his first in nearly a decade, I still couldn’t help getting a little bit excited. And when I saw that it was going to be six hundred pages long, I got a lot excited. And when Tree of Smoke was released and garnered extravagant praise, including Johnson’s best-ever reviews and the National Book Award, I couldn’t wait for my damned thesis project to be over so that I could read it.

Well, the thesis project is over with. And perhaps you’ve heard about how that didn’t go so great. But at least I finally got to read Tree of Smoke, and I can tell you that yeah, it really is that good. I finished it last week in a thrilled caffeinated overnight reading binge of the kind I hadn’t had in years, and I felt wrung out and wrecked. I felt like I was living in that novel for the rest of my sleep-deprived day. (Of course, large parts of Johnson’s book are set during the Vietnam War, and when you’re on the retail front lines in December it’s obscurely comforting to imagine that you’re in a combat zone.)

I have to start by saying that Johnson does something pretty remarkable here that only a tiny minority of his newly expanded readership will be able to appreciate. I didn’t appreciate it myself until I was most of the way through the novel—at about four AM, in other words. I got a sudden startled chill down my spine and had to leap up and go over to my bookshelf. What happened was that I suddenly recognized one of the novel’s secondary characters, a drunken and basically worthless enlisted Navy man, who seemed to command his own plot thread, which meandered around alongside the other threads for obscure reasons. In the novel’s last act, this guy returns to America, and takes to wandering the streets drinking, wearing a leather jacket with no shirt on, and he all at once seemed startlingly familiar. Wait a minute, I thought. Bill Houston? Bill Houston! And I went to the shelf and saw that I was right: Bill Houston was the drunken and basically worthless criminal antihero of Johnson’s debut novel, the searingly bleak Angels, which I’d read some seven or eight years ago. So Tree of Smoke exists in the same fallen world as Angels, which says an enormous amount if you’ve read that book, or indeed any of Johnson’s others.

Have you? If anything, you’ve read Jesus’ Son, which was by far his best known and best-loved work until now. I was talking about it with a co-worker, and we realized that we’d both lent our copies of it to other people and never gotten them back. It’s that sort of book. Jesus’ Son is something of a cult classic, a memoir-disguised-as-a-novel-disguised-as-a-story-collection, a heartbreaking and hilarious picture of a an aimless youth of violence and addiction, played out against a flat, sunlit Midwestern landscape that was entirely too familiar to me. (Maybe if anything you’ve seen the movie, with Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton, a perfectly adequate but uninspired attempt to turn a deranged, visionary work into something that people would watch in a movie theater.)

Anyway, after those two indelible books, Johnson had a long and quirky career as a novelist and poet in the eighties and nineties, with modest success and modest acclaim. He wrote an utterly bizarre post-apocalyptic fantasia, Fiskadoro, and a couple of novels, The Stars at Noon and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man that featured helpless and damned protagonists like the characters in Angels, but weren’t as much fun. Then he wrote the enormously fun and enormously underrated Already Dead: A California Gothic which had drugs and hippies and hitmen and cops and witches and demons and wannabe Nietzschean samurai übermenschen—everything you could ask for, basically. This was followed by an unremarkable novella, The Name of the World, which was followed by essentially nothing. I felt a bit cheated, frankly, like I’d discovered the guy just in time for him to decide that he was going to let his reputation dwindle to nothing, to become the guy who wrote that Drug Book that the kids like. But now he’s back, and the Literary Establishment has endorsed him; he’s won big prizes. I don’t think he’s been on Oprah yet, but it may only be a matter of time. If it happens, I forgive him.

So yeah, Tree of Smoke is indeed a Vietnam War epic, but it’s a hell of a lot more than that. Very early in the novel, William “Skip” Sands, naïve young CIA officer, thinks about his mentor and uncle, Colonel Francis X. Sands, whose shadow looms over the novel like a drunk and jovial Mr. Kurtz:

The colonel, his closest trainer, had made sure each of his recruits memorized “The Lee Shore” from Melville’s Moby-Dick:

But as in landlessness resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better it is to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!

Like the colonel, Johnson’s other characters live in a Melvillean sort of world, forever on difficult terms with a god who is alternately terrifying and terrifyingly absent. Skip Sands worshipfully follows his uncle first to the Philippines and then to Vietnam, and into an impenetrable moral fog from which he never really emerges. Colonel Sands is a force of nature, a greathearted national hero whose love of freedom is desperately sincere and principled—but he’s also a self-aggrandizing alcoholic, who may in fact be a rogue agent with his own private army. Skip is absorbed into the Colonel’s murky and unexplainable “psychological warfare” campaign against the Vietcong, but also into his death-struggle with the elements of the military and intelligence communities who have come to see him as worse than useless.

Parallel to Skip Sands’ story is the story of Private James Houston—brother of Seaman Bill Houston and also a secondary character in Angels. James is an archetypal Johnson character, innocent but out of control, who ends up an infantryman in Vietnam for lack of anything better to do, and gradually descends into his own heart of darkness. This would all be the stuff of a hundred ‘Nam-movie clichés if Johnson didn’t write the way he does—James’ journey into chaos is first grimly hilarious and then grimly horrifying. The confusion, the prostitutes, the peculiar incompetent officers, the endless boredom. (Thankfully there’s no Jimi Hendrix on the soundtrack. You’re free to imagine it if you like.) Houston of course ends up the recon platoon that has been bound through inexplicable bureaucratic channels into servitude to the mysterious Colonel Sands, and like everyone else is completely unprepared for the Tet Offensive, which is described in some of the most harrowing and terrifyingly funny combat scenes ever written. After Tet, James goes AWOL for a while, and seems to be offered a chance at redemption—in a moving sequence, he tries to keep a maimed soldier in a brothel from killing himself. But then, at a crucial point, Johnson puts him in the path of the Colonel, who clearly recognizes something useful and fatal in him. Colonel Sands helps him patch things up with his superiors and gets him attached to a long-range recon unit—essentially a band of marauders terrorizing the countryside, in the company of whom he descends into a circle of hell only imagined by the numb and wasted characters of Jesus’ Son.

Meanwhile, Skip Sands has a strange and diffident affair with a weird and god-haunted missionary, and spends a lot of time going through the personal effects of the dead French doctor who had lived in the safe house Skip is inhabiting while working for the Colonel. Skip, who has a talent for languages and a lot of time to kill, translates from French the doctor’s musings on Antonin Artaud. (This is why the novel is six hundred pages long. I’m not complaining.)

Eventually, of course, everybody’s position becomes untenable. That’s pretty much how that war ended up in real life, after all. But we’re given a brilliantly written and exciting climactic sequence of intrigue and violence, followed by a number of unexpectedly moving epilogues. The Colonel’s aide, Sergeant Jimmy Storm, who until this point has seemed to be some sort of court jester figure, a combination of the Dude and the surfer guy from Apocalypse Now, is permitted the most extravagantly redemptive gesture in the novel—a peculiar sacrifice on behalf of the Colonel and every other American.

Don’t want to say too much; probably I have already. But it’s just sort of great that Johnson has written a book this huge that fits so well into what he’d been doing all along. At one point, the Colonel’s Vietnamese pilot, Nguyen Minh, thinks about his brother, a Buddhist monk who has burned himself alive in protest:

He imagined his brother burning—he often did—Thu’s body in the flame, dreadful pain outside, going up his nostrils and in. And then as a monkey holds two branches for an instant, lets go of the first and clings to the new one, he was no longer the body, but the fire.

Read that, and remember the haunting final passage of Angels:

But that was just a story, something that people will tell themselves, something to pass the time it takes for the violence inside a man to wear him away, or to be consumed itself, depending on who is the candle and who is the light.

Yeah.

The Disorient Express

2007-11-10T21:49:00.000-05:00

A new Wes Anderson movie is something like a new Radiohead album. It doesn’t happen very often, and you greet it with anxious excitement. You know you’re emotionally vulnerable, here, and you don’t want to get hurt. This is somebody you’ve come to rely on, but at the same time you never know if this is going to be the time they break your heart.

(Sometimes people tell me I take this stuff too seriously. I don’t know what they could possibly mean.)

Okay, this is an absurd conceit, (not to mention one I’ve already used,) but I’m going to run with it. Bottle Rocket is The Bends, right? Precocious and startling. Rushmore of course is Ok Computer, life-altering and era-defining. The Royal Tenenbaums could be Kid A, I guess—an idiosyncratic style taken to its logical extreme. And Life Aquatic roughly corresponds to Hail to the Thief—a satisfying synthesis of what’s gone before, if you like it, self-parody if you don’t. (I like them both, but I think Hail to the Thief is more of a success.)

Sure, Pablo Honey is the anomaly, but it always has been. I guess it could be the short film version of Bottle Rocket, which I’ve still never seen. (It’ll have to make it onto DVD someday.)

Now, though, I have to find a way to fit a new pair of works into this little scheme of mine—and I can already see it falling into place. First In Rainbows and now The Darjeeling Limited—each announces the beginning of the artist’s All Grown Up phase. Neither startling, both traversing familiar territory, but both satisfying. My heart remains unbroken.

If you’re reading this you’ve probably seen some or all of these movies, so you’re at least roughly familiar with the components that make up the Wes Anderson Experience. Men. Sad men. Impulsive, grandiose, domineering men with a childlike vulnerability. Missing parents. Dead parents. Lost friends. Melancholy and whimsy in equal measure. Bill Murray.

It’s all here in The Darjeeling Limited, although Murray is held to a priceless cameo, his crumpled face saying as much as any five pages of the script. Another family story, another sad and shattered family like the Tenenbaums, but like them united against the rest of the world. Three wealthy, miserable brothers, played by Anderson regulars Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman, as well as new initiate Adrien Brody, take a quixotic “spiritual journey” across India—though it gradually emerges that they are looking for more than simply enlightenment.

I wasn’t sure going in how this Adrien Brody thing was going to work, since he’s been sort of an underachiever thus far. He made a big splash in The Pianist, but has been a puzzle ever since, mostly showing up in forgettable films. (Hollywoodland, anybody? The Village? ) And The Pianist was an impressive, if heavy, piece of work—but as it turned out, Brody wasn’t acting! He really is that thin! But Wes Anderson, just as he did with Bill Murray, has found the True Reason For Adrien Brody, given him a home. As a leading man, he was sort of absurd, but here, as Peter, he’s a wonder to behold, a glorious cartoon version of himself. A bundle of sticks wearing shades, with that astonishing nose stabbing out at the world. (Putting him opposite Owen Wilson was genius—it’s a clash of the Nose Titans; it’s the nasal version of Pacino and DeNiro in Heat.) We joked after seeing the trailer for this movie that Brody was clearly playing the Luke Wilson role, what with the long face and the dark glasses—but actually Peter is the character that you have to believe Anderson had Ben Stiller in mind for. He’s jagged and tightly wound and resentful, Chas Tenenbaum if he had two brothers to be driven to distraction by. And it works: in place of Stiller’s bristling compactness, we have Brody’s clumsy, angular disarray. (Damn it. You just can’t write about this guy without using the word “angular.” You try it!) To see him running for a train in loving, Andersonian slow-motion is a revelation—he’s aerodynamic!

The other two leads, of course, are known quantities in this context; in fact, Anderson essentially co-created them both, made them what they are. They’ve each played the essential Anderson leading man—hyperkinetic and perpetually grief-stricken—and for each of them it was a defining moment. Owen Wilson’s Dignan was his triumphant debut, and he still hasn’t equaled him—he was both utterly irresistible and utterly helpless. (They’ll never catch him, because he’s fucking innocent! ) And Schwartzman’s Max Fischer, of course, is an icon; he’s part of our collective unconscious now—a portrait of the artist as a love-starved human tornado. It’s good to see the two of them together onscreen, finally. They do well.

Schwartzman, post-Max, hasn’t exactly shown a lot of range—he can give you neurotic, bumbling, or neurotic and bumbling. But here Anderson makes a conscious decision to play him against type—Schwartzman’s Jack, behind his ridiculous moustache, is numb and disconnected; something’s been drained out of him. And this is the time to mention The Darjeeling Limited’s most distinctive structural quirk—which might just be a gimmick and might be completely new. Because Jack appears before either of his brothers, in a brief Parisian prologue, in which he has bitter post-breakup sex with Natalie Portman. This would be a perfectly fine way to start the movie—except that it’s not presented as part of the movie at all. Nominally, this little story is a short film called Hotel Chevalier; it’s got its own opening and closing credits, and when it’s over the studio logo is shown again before The Darjeeling Limited proper starts. It was indeed apparently filmed in Paris, and the Darjeeling Limited was really filmed in India, so they really were entirely separate shoots. And Hotel Chevalier was available for download on iTunes for weeks before the film was released. So it does actually have a life of its own. But in what sense is it a separate film, exactly? The Darjeeling Limited, as far as I know, has never been shown without it, and it provides important exposition, particularly about Schwartzman’s character. Indeed, it emerges during the film that the story of Hotel Chevalier is a story that Jack will write. So in a way Hotel Chevalier exists within the world of The Darjeeling Limited, and it’s hard to imagine separating them. (Of course, Quentin Tarantino has just released Death Proof as a stand-alone film, presumably so everybody involved can make just as much money again when Planet Terror comes out. But it’s hard to imagine even those guys trying to release Don’t! or Thanksgiving from Grindhouse as an independent work.) So Hotel Chevalier might be a bold experiment in narrative technique, or it might just be a very clever marketing scheme. It’s cool with me either way.

But that Paris-to-India leap reveals another subtle shift in Anderson’s vision: he’s brought the characters closer to his own world. Dignan and Max (and Eli Cash, for that matter) come from dingy and faded blue-collar environments, and a veiled class resentment is hidden inside their fierce ambition. But Peter, Jack, and Francis are rich, because their father was rich. None of them even have to work at all—though Francis at least might. They’re free to wander the earth and be miserable, just like Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman.

And just like Owen Wilson—and it’s Wilson’s performance that you remember from this movie. Which is a little surprising; after all, he’s the Movie Star of the group, and he drawled and sleepwalked his way through Life Aquatic. But he spends most of The Darjeeling Limited with his head swaddled in elaborate bandages in the aftermath of a rather curious car accident, and still manages to be both funny and unsettling. Yeah, it’s a little obvious to say that Francis’s bandages and scars are outward signs of the deep injuries all three of these guys are suffering from—but it works because he looks so ridiculous, and because he still plunges implacably forward like an older and angrier Dignan. And of course it’s impossible to watch this film and not get a little chill thinking about Wilson’s recent failed suicide attempt. Because the character Francis of course was written for him, just as Dignan was—and of course Wilson himself, as co-writer, had a hand in creating Dignan, and Richie Tenenbaum, and Eli Cash himself, lovesick , drug addled, and helpless in the face of his own absurd success.

I called it a Grown Up movie, I guess, because there’s a sharp and bitter streak at the heart of it that wasn’t there in Rushmore or Tenenbaums. Both of those movies had blood and tears in plenty, they had characters who were suffering, but they both had a careful structure that led them to a tipping point—Dirk comes to see Max to try to bring him back, Richie wakes up in the hospital—after which each film seems to relent, somehow, each delivering a final act constructed as a series of longed-for redemptions. In lesser hands this would be a manipulative or schmaltzy device, but because those movies are so funny and so sad it has a powerful and unique effect. I still get a bit weepy at the end of Rushmore—“I didn’t get hurt that bad.” In The Darjeeling Limited, I think consciously, Anderson doesn’t deliver the same carthartic recessional—all the redemptions are equivocal, and the film’s real climax is one more abandonment in a long series of abandonments. And when Francis finally takes off his wrappings and stares at his own ravaged face in a mirror, it could be a sentimental or overblown moment—but the stunned and haunted look on Wilson’s face makes us accept it. “I’ve still got some healing to do,” he says. Yeah. We get that.

(Okay, I’ve been thinking about this some more, and something was bothering me: what about The Eraser? Well, I came up with an answer of sorts: The Squid and the Whale is The Eraser. Because, you know, Noah Baumbach co-wrote Life Aquatic, and this is his solo project. And, it’s practically a Wes Anderson movie, right? Sad, pretentious young men with parental abandonment issues? Yeah, it’s a stretch, I know.)

(Also--I wrote approvingly of Owen Wilson's battered looks in this movie, but the use of a shockingly and visibly injured central character like this reminds me a lot of Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity, which in many ways is a similar kind of story. You think Eggers and Anderson have met? Have they been invited to the same parties? And if so, was Sufjan Stevens there? Picture the three of them eyeing each other warily. They'd have to have some kind of whimsical death match.)

Water Music

2007-10-26T12:45:00.000-05:00

…but actually, it’s a bit richer and stranger than that. Okkervil River turns out to be only one side of a peculiar and interesting coin. I knew all along, vaguely, that Sheff had a side project, Shearwater, and that I would probably check it out at some point. But I wasn’t in a big hurry. Finally, on impulse I bought Palo Santo, which was originally put out in 2006 but had just been re-released on Matador in entirely new packaging with a bonus disc and with some key songs actually re-recorded, apparently to be bigger and better. Didn’t know what to expect, exactly, but I understood Shearwater to be some kind of sedate folk outfit—an outlet for all the songs not rockin’ enough to make it onto the Okkervil records.

This, to put it mildly, was not correct.

To begin with, Shearwater isn’t really Sheff’s project, not any more at any rate. It began as a joint endeavor of Sheff and Okkervil River keyboardist Jonathan Meiburg, but as Okkervil has gained attention, Shearwater has become almost entirely Meiburg’s child—and it turns out to be a wild, naked child, with leaves in its hair and an alarming expression. Okkervil River build their serious adult tunes over what’s essentially a traditionalist folk-rock framework, but Shearwater is pure art-rock—song structure and catchy tunes be damned. Meiburg doesn’t have any use for any of my traditional record-review cliches: he’s passed right over Evocative and Gripping and gone straight for Mythic. It’s still pianos and strings and horns, but Meiburg’s defiantly eerie singing—in the Buckley/Yorke tradition, but creepier—is foregrounded throughout. (If you listened to The Stage Names, that’s Meiburg’s feral wail in the background of the “Sloop John B” coda—“in the way I had planned…”)

And what’s he singing about? Well, honestly, you’ve got me, but it sounds like something very important—which for this sort of thing is what really matters. This kind of record has to work, if it’s going to work, by suggestion and misdirection and esotericism. Whether it’s Ok Computer or In the Aeroplane Over the Sea—and if you know me, and you see me using those comparisons, then you’re going to sit up and pay attention—this kind of Epic Rock has to successfully seem to create a separate world, a world where something deeply signifigant is happening, even if we can’t quite tell what it is. And like Jeff Mangum’s mysterious private language on Aeroplane, Meiburg’s lyrical space is shot through with grief and loss, with missing and dead children, with grieving parents, and with a kind of elemental terror of nature, of the ocean and the sky. (The lyrics aren't printed, but apparently they were printed in the original European release, and this guy has helpfully transcribed them, if you're curious.) Palo Santo starts quiet, with just piano and an almost whispered vocal—“Something is breathing in the air / Something is moving in the water / And the winds in you are blowing.” Maybe a little unsettling, but at this point you could be excused for thinking that you were listening to a Pretty Record, if you’re even paying attention. Then, out of dead silence, a blood-freezing howl, “Bring back my boy!” And the song starts to stutter into life, but now you know that it’s real, that enormous things are apparently at stake. The stirring, scary “Red Sea, Black Sea” begins with a sinister banjo (not enough sinister banjo in the world!) and one insistent pounding drum—then Meiburg, deadly serious, tells us that “In place of the sun, In place of the moon / A terrible light will flood every room.” Something terrible is happening; this is Apocalypse Folk. Later, on “Nobody,” we hear that “the bombs finished falling / and ashes were drifting along the roads.” (This, along with the constant veiled presence of fathers and sons, makes me think both of Aeroplane and of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. That novel may have come out too late to be an influence, however.) Birds and the ocean are everywhere, right from the alarming cockatiel on the cover—in fact, though I initially thought that “Shearwater” was just a mysterious, evocative name, Wikipedia will tell you that it’s the name of a kind of seabird—one that lives longer than almost any other bird. The sea is terrifying—“That splintering wave takes so many lives / And now your hands are gripping the edge of such a waste,” on “Seventy-Four, Seventy-Five.”—but you can’t get away from it. And when all else fails, give a nod to The Tempest: “Took me out on the tide / To make pearls of my eyes,” in the monumental “White Waves.” (Of course that could be The Tempest by way of “The Waste Land.” There’s a thesis waiting to be written on how T.S. Eliot Rocks—pretentious singers just can’t help bringing “Prufrock,” or “The Hollow Men,” into the conversation, and I love them for it. Would have appalled the grouchy old bastard, however.)

This all probably seems a bit over-the-top. It’s just a proggy overserious chamber-folk-rock record, after all, without any of the luminous tunes of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, or the wit of a Decemberists record, say. But this feels like the Real Thing to me, a work of genuine vision, even if, like Aeroplane it is never successfully followed up. And then, put it alongside Black Sheep Boy, and it starts to seem like we’re looking at something Big, even if only a few of us ever know about it. Meiburg and Sheff have arrived at a peculiar symbiosis which is turning out to be incredibly fruitful. We’ll see which of them can come up with the next masterpiece. What rough beast slouches toward Austin to be born?

River Music

2007-10-16T23:43:00.000-05:00

The occult circuitry of the pop-culture unconscious: who can figure it out? Remember when there were two disaster movies at the same time about volcanoes? Or two disaster movies at the same time about asteroids? (That’s something we were all worried about in 1997, or whatever. Sure.) What does it mean when we have two indie-rock songs in the same year about the suicide of John Berryman? Is that a little odd?

Okay, so nobody feels bad, I’m going to come right out and admit that until last year I had only the vaguest notion of who John Berryman might be, so if you didn’t either, that’s cool. Some poet, right? Yeah, so Wikipedia told me. American poet, jumped off a bridge in 1972, considered central to the Confessional school of poetry, whatever that might be, best known for The Dream Songs. Unhappy guy. But apparently, though nobody knew it at the time, he totally rocked, because the rockers are paying him tribute. First we had the Hold Steady’s fist-pumping “Stuck Between Stations,” and now we have Okkervil River’s majestic album-closer, “John Allyn Smith Sails.”

These records came out only about eight months apart, and the bands work in different cities, so there’s no way anybody influenced anybody on this one—but it’s still right, somehow. In their own way, both bands are central to what’s happening Right Now, showing in their completely opposite ways how much can still be done with this music now that everything’s been done. And both have clearly read a lot of books. On the one hand you’ve got Craig Finn’s bruised retro-populism, just fake enough to be real (if that makes any sense.) Meatloaf with an MFA. And on the other, Will Sheff’s cracked folk grandeur—Conor Oberst if he knew about irony, Jeff Mangum if he could pull himself together. You’ve got Finn’s mordant “she said “you’re pretty good with words, but words won’t save your life,” / And they didn’t, so he died.” And Sheff’s mournful “I knew that my last lines were gone / While stupidly I lingered on…”

Which is all by way of asking: have I talked about Okkervil River? I haven’t. Maybe I tried to make you listen to them, but I haven’t written anything yet. (For that matter, my definitive Hold Steady piece has yet to be written, too. But I’ve thought about it. It’s called “This Was Supposed to Be a Party.”) Anyway, Okkervil River are an American indie-rock band, on Jagjaguwar, from New Hampshire by way of Austin, and they’re just starting to get real attention with their fourth LP proper, The Stage Names, which is terrific.

The basic idea has remained unchanged—they started in something of a countrified chamber-folk mode, with banjos and woodwinds and whatnot, on the self-released Stars Too Small to Use and their official debut Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See (2002), but this was always a song-based band whose success or failure depended entirely on their songwriter. And Will Sheff, while his singing is spectacularly shaky at the best of times, is a real, undeniable talent, who writes not only dense hyper-literate narrative songs, but also remarkable melodies, with lines that stretch out far longer than you think they’re going to, that make you sit up and pay attention.

Down the River of Golden Dreams (2003) is where I got on board, and it’ll always be my sentimental favorite, but it’s Black Sheep Boy (2005) that was the breakthrough, an inscrutable double song-cycle that seemed to be both about a failed relationship too sad and uncomfortable not to be real, and about the title character, the Black Sheep Boy, who seems both Satanic and kind of sympathetic. And The Stage Names, while it isn’t perfect, is a mature, satisfying piece of work that deserves the attention it’s gotten.

Black Sheep Boy was beautiful, but outside of “For Real” and “Black” it tended toward the funereal—the first surprising thing about The Stage Names is how much it rocks. Guitars and drums snap and crackle all over the place—though there’s still a very solid ballad in “A Girl in Port,” and also a bit of a weak link in “Savannah Smiles.” (As far as slow-as-molasses story songs go, both “Maine Island Lovers” and “Yellow” from Golden Dreams were better.) There seems to be some kind of theme, here—as the title indicates, there’s some kind of obsession with Performance, and Artifice—but it never gets pretentious. Indeed, there’s a sly wit in these songs that Sheff really hasn’t shown before, which is very encouraging. Consider especially the biting “You Can’t Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man” and the remarkable “Plus Ones.” That one, on paper, is a novelty song—a series of comic riffs that do well-worn numeric songs one better. The ninety-seventh tear, the hundredth luftballon, the seventeenth candle, etc. But it’s deadly serious, shot through with real life and real consequences: “the fifty-first way to leave your lover / Admittedly it doesn’t seem to be as gentle or as clean as all the others.”

Then, eventually, you get to “John Allyn Smith,” and you start to see how much is really going on here. For the first two minutes and thirty seconds, it’s a bitter but nimble lament in the voice of a dead poet: “by the second verse, dear friends / My head will burst, my life will end…” But then Berryman, and Sheff, make that leap—and something happens. The song slows down, and shifts to a different, simpler rhythm. A new melody suddenly bursts into being, as the dying Berryman remembers his own father’s suicide—“I hear my father fall / I hear my mother call…” But you think I know this tune, what’s going on? and then it hits you. Weirdly, impossibly, we’ve landed in a bleak alternate version of “The Sloop John B,” that old Beach-Boys-approved folk chestnut. It was always sort of mournful for a Beach Boys tune, anyway, but now it’s been alchemically transformed into a literal suicide note. This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on. Then a squeal of feedback, and The Stage Names surges to the finish line, as you realize—oh, wait, John B, it all makes some kind of weird impossible sense—and guitars and drums spill out some miserable guy’s last thoughts: I feel so broke up / I want to go home. Yeah, exactly.

Back to Save The Universe

2007-10-10T21:22:00.000-05:00

…oh, you thought I meant me? It’s true that I haven’t done this for a while. I’m a fragile, delicate flower, as you may know, and it’s been a good stretch of months since I felt like I could really write anything except the occasional email. Just wasn’t going to happen. And on top of all the suffering I know that this caused all six of you, or whatever, it was an especially bad thing since I’m supposed to be writing a thesis. But now, with the semester just about half over, I feel like I’m getting it back. Got up at 5:30AM yesterday and wrote a philosophy paper, which is so out of character that it’s in fact alarming. Actually wrote some pages today about Macbeth—my chosen thesis topic; don’t ask—and that was an enormous relief. Wrote a decent little scene for screenwriting class. Got a gold star. (She really gives gold stars, and when you crave approval as I do, this is no laughing matter.)

And now, just in time, I can write about the Event That Will Shake the Music Business to its Core, and Change Us All Forever. I’m referring of course, as you can tell from my title, to the peculiar unveiling of In Rainbows, Radiohead LP #7. You’ve heard about this. (It’s free, you know!) Internet only, for now. Sticking It to The Man, i.e. iTunes. (Didn’t Thom Yorke used to have an Apple sticker on his guitar?) Pay what you want. We ride tonight. We hope that you choke. Etc.

Since you’re asking, I gave them £5. Or “bob.” Or “quid,” as we call them. Which worked out to about ten bucks—seemed reasonable to me. Now that I’ve gotten through it one and a half times, I feel like maybe owe them a few more bucks.

Yeah, yeah, I’m a sap, you say. A fawning fan-boy. But you know, it was great to feel like that again, even for an hour and a half or so. It’d been a while. They’re the special case, you know? This enormous presence for a decade now, but somehow insular and unapproachable. None of the bands that have tried to sound like them are any good. (But, Matt, you own three Coldplay albums, I hear you saying. Yes. Yes I do. And they suck.) They don’t really sound like any of the bands that supposedly influenced them. They’ve always been exactly themselves—and I, and probably anybody bothering to read this, would be an entirely different person if OK Computer, say, did not exist.

So I couldn’t help feeling a little excited, and also plenty ready for disappointment. Because that’s the fear, isn’t it? You hear that they’re putting it out themselves, untouched by hand of record company, and you’re always half afraid it’s going to turn out to be their Jazz Odyssey. Twelve minute songs about fair trade, or the Kennedy assassination, or something. I dunno, accordions. (Actually, that would probably be good.) Especially after the long delay—you had to wonder what we were in for.

But so far, I’m really happy with it. It’s certainly not a dramatic departure from anything but a marketing standpoint. Nobody who’s listened to Hail to the Thief or The Eraser is going to be shocked by anything here. But it’s all assured and dense and powerful and not boring for a moment. There aren’t even any noodling experiments like “Treefingers” or “Hunting Bears.” It’s ten songs, start to finish, and they’re rock songs, all of them, with melodies and beats. It’s Radiohead, of course, so the beats are nervous, stuttering, and often counted with odd numbers, and the melodies are plaintive and unsettling—but that just makes the moments of sweetness, like the ravishing “All I Need” stand out more. “Nude” is the spooky child of “Sail to the Moon” and “Pyramid Song.” “Bodysnatchers” has an eye-opening “Paranoid Android” riff. “Faust Arp” (uh, great title, guys) carries on in the dizzy, word-drunk mode of “Wolf at the Door,” though it isn’t that sinister because nothing is. In the end, In Rainbows is icy, sharp, and bracing. It’s the middle of October and it’s been 80 degrees where I live for weeks, almost creepily summerlike, but today it was fifty, and damp, and I walked around in the wind and felt like I could breathe again. This album sounds like that.

Harry Potter Is Dead

2007-07-21T03:40:00.000-05:00

…well, not really. From what I can gather from reviews, at the end of Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, the eponymous wizard-boy is simply forced to grow up and lead a normal life. Evil vanquished--then the wife, the kids, the house. So he lives on. But we in the book business are finished with him. After tonight, he’s dead to us. And I, for one, could not be happier.

It’s funny—I’ve worked at bookstores throughout the ten year run of this series, but I’ve only had to work at release parties for the past two. It didn’t occur to anyone to keep a store open until midnight to sell a children’s book until Rowling’s fourth magical doorstop was released in 2000, and I managed to avoid having anything to with that event or the following one. But for volumes six and seven I’ve been unavoidably trapped at Borders #653 here in Toledo, giving up a Friday night to this thing that people who get paid to write about books invariably refer to as a Phenomenon. I just got back from The Last Harry Potter Party Ever, which is why I’m writing at a quarter to four in the morning, it was a dispiriting, exasperating experience, and I demand that everyone pity me.

You want to appreciate it; to see the fun in it. I do, a little. It’s nice to be able to sell somebody something they really want, and I got to do a lot of that tonight. All the shakingly eager kids are kind of endearing, if a little bit intense. But for some of the kids, and nearly all of the parents, the whole thing is clearly just another joyless, grubby pop-cultural hoop to be jumped through. You have to take the kids to see Shrek. You have to take them to a Mud Hens game, whether you know or care anything about baseball. And you have to buy them the Harry Potter book, whether it would ever have occurred to you to buy a book before the year 2000 or not. So many of them were appalled to realize that they would have to wait in line for an hour, apparently unable to work through the simple chain of reasoning: I am here at midnight because for whatever reason this book is a Big Deal. Therefore, many other people will be doing the same thing. This book should NOT be easy to get, because it is SO AWESOME. That is why we are all here. They couldn’t understand, probably because they don’t normally go to bookstores, that bookstores don’t normally have and aren’t really designed to handle a thousand customers at once, and things can’t really be expected to run with theme-park like precision. There was a lot of whining.

Pity me, I say!

And I’ve just been stunned from the beginning at the overwhelmingly arbitrary nature of this whole thing we’ve just lived through. At the end of the day, why these books? To the kids who grew up with them, they must have seemed like a one-of-a-kind life-altering thing that had dropped out of the skies one day in 1997—but there were so many adolescent fantasy novels being written, in 1997 and in every year before or since, and I really haven’t ever been able to believe that it was anything but dumb herd instinct that turned Rowling’s series into this monumental, generational thing. Into, yes, a Phenomenon.

I’m sure they’re not bad. That’s all I can say. I’ve seen them praised many times for being wildly inventive and involving. I’ve never seen anybody try to praise them as art. From the little I’ve seen, Rowling’s prose is workmanlike at best, and they seem just as derivative in theme as pretty much every other fantasy novel since Tolkien. When people ask me if I’ve read them, just because I, you know, work in a bookstore, I want to look at them like they’re crazy. Don’t they have any idea how many grown-up novels are published every month that I want to read and never will because I’ll never have time? I’m going to read eight-hundred page tomes about Wizard Boarding School?

As for them creating a generation of readers, I’m afraid that all they’ve done is create a generation of readers of bad books. I can guess this from my own bitter experience. I love The Lord of the Rings. I do. As an adult reader, I can see everything that’s silly and retrograde about it, but its dazzling level of invention and its author’s unembarrassed love for his own linguistic games had an enormous effect on me and on my literary sensibility in the long term. But in the short term, as an adolescent, it just made me want to read a whole lot of crappy imitations of The Lord of the Rings, of which there were many in the nineteen-eighties, and of which there are more all the time. The same thing will happen with these kids today—and Rowling is no Tolkien.

The last word on this subject was spoken some years ago, by Harold Bloom, of all people. In many ways he’s an absurd old crank, but I saw him on Charlie Rose once, and I’ll always remember it. At one point in the interview, he had his eyes closed as he leaned contentedly back in his chair and recited the last ten lines or so of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” and it made me want to give him a big hug. (“We are not now that strength which in old days / moved earth and heaven…”) And then Rose, trying to stick up for the present in the face of Bloom’s "Decline and Fall of Everything" rhetoric, mentioned the whole Phenomenon, and how it was making all these young folks read ever so many books instead of playing with their Pokemon or their cellphones or whatever. Bloom just sighed a huge Falstaffian sigh, and intoned, “…but that’s not literature, Charles.” Right on, Harold.

Cinema!

2007-05-28T23:09:00.000-05:00

Watched The Proposition. Sort of. Saw it in a roomful of people, with several conversations going on at all times. If you’ve been to one of these little film-watching events at my house than you know what I’m talking about—it’s a sort of controlled chaos that’s better suited to oddball genre stuff like The Calamari Wrestler (which we also watched). The kind of thing that you can look over at occasionally and wonder did I just see that? Was that an octopus fighting a squid? In a boxing ring? And then go back to whatever you were discussing. The Proposition, unfortunately, is an actual movie, one that I feel like I’ve seen a third of. Or seen all of with a third of my brain. I fully intend to write about it anyway, though, which is like one of those, what do you call ‘em, metaphors for what all of us are doing here on the Internets. Lecturing from a postion of ignorance—I recommend it!

Anyway, if you’re not familiar, The Proposition is the Nick Cave western—and that’s all the review you really need if you’re familiar with the western genre and the Cave ouevre (try saying that out loud.) Certainly it’s enough to make a lot of people edge away—I was careful not to mention the screenwriting credit when I was trying to get my guests to watch the thing. But that’s because there’s this caricature of Cave as some sort of absurd, self-important Goth Elvis (that’s Glenn Danzig!) rather than just a smart and funny guy who can write pretty damned well. Maybe it’s the moustache.

So, we’ve got an Australian western—which is a sub-genre well-steeped in insanity already. Sun. Flies. Dust. Blood. Sweat. Funny accents. Guy Pearce and Danny Huston are brothers and outlaws, Ray Winstone (or “Sexy Beast” as he will forever be known in my house) is a tormented and extremely unhealthy lawman, Emily Watson is his long-suffering wife, John Hurt is a spectacularly hammy bounty hunter. People get flogged, stomped to death, and shot in the head, although not in that order. Virtue and vice are both extravagantly punished. I think it’s pretty good.

Interesting connections: I read more than one review of this movie that tossed around the name of Cormac McCarthy. This is a slightly lazy comparison, based mainly on the western setting and the presence of lavish violence punctuated by philosophical musings, but it’s still interesting. It may just be coincidence, but Proposition director John Hillcoat is supposed to be in line to direct the movie of McCarthy’s most recent novel (and Oprah’s current Book Club pick!) The Road. Which could, you know, be pretty awesome. I just read The Road—for class, no less—and knowing what I knew, I couldn’t help but think that there was a certain Nick Cave vibe to the whole thing. I also thought it seemed pretty unfilmable—it’s mainly about scrounging for canned goods after the end of the world—but no one should ever let that stop them.

I See You've Played Knifey-Spooney Before.

2007-05-25T13:46:00.000-05:00

So, I mentioned Spoon earlier without mentioning the extremely important, extremely troubling fact that their upcoming album has a really stupid title. (Have I mentioned that titles matter? They do.) Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga? What’s that? Did I even get the correct number of “Ga’s?” They announced that title some months ago, and I kept waiting and hoping that somebody would come out and say “aw, we’re just messin’ with ya. We’re not really gonna call it that. It’s gonna be The Bloodening. Or Smell the Glove. Or something.” It didn’t happen. Apparently it’s for real. This is a problem, especially if the album turns out to be really great—which could very easily happen. I don’t want to be put in a position where, five years from now, I’ll have to stroke my chin thoughtfully and say something like “the piano part on this track is extremely reminiscent of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga-era Spoon.” Because, you know, I’m not going to do that.

This from the band that made Girls Can Tell. Now that’s a great title. Sigh.

The National Interest

2007-05-24T20:35:00.000-05:00

This guy has an admirable, if geeky, goal—he’s blogging every R.E.M. song. Not quite as ambitious as an album for every state, but still a hefty job of work. Sure, every reasonably popular band has one or more of those lousy “stories behind every song” books written about them, but those are inevitably just cash-in fan junk pasted together from interviews—this is more of a labor of love. I suspect some of you may recall that I was once quite the fan, back in the Clinton era; I had to suppress the urge to start posting comments immediately. (Hey, why all the hating on “Wendell Gee?” Pretty tune! Banjo! What more do you want? And “Can’t Get There From Here” is clearly the worst song on that album.)

Anyway, I could totally do that with Radiohead, but I’m sure that about 17,000 very serious teenagers already have. I might do it anyway; I’m smarter than those damned kids.

Plenty of non-nineties music to write about, though. It’s been a good spring, and it just got better. I got the Wilco album, and so far I’m pretty happy with it. It’s very easygoing and approachable, superficially nothing like the scary, sandblasted vibe of A Ghost Is Born. So—going back to the nineties for a moment—if Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was the “difficult but acclaimed” album, the OK Computer, if you will, and Ghost Is Born was the “pseudo-avant-garde-nervous-breakdown” album, the Kid A, then in theory this record should be Hail to the Thief. And frankly, I’m not hearing it. No “Myxomatosis” or “Wolf at the Door” here, just lots of laid-back tunes and really, really well-produced guitar playing. So maybe we can all relax about Wilco, is what I’m saying, and so much the better. They’re going to be okay!

(And yes, of course, that means that Summer Teeth is The Bends. Why wouldn't it be? "She's a Jar" = "Fake Plastic Trees." Obviously. Why is this so hard for you people?)

You may now get excited about the National, however, If you hadn’t already—I keep trying to force them on people. “You just haven’t seen my good side yet,” Matt Berninger pleaded anxiously on Alligator, their really excellent 2005 album, and he was pretty much exactly right. He was definitely not singing about his good side, and it was great. Alligator was dark, and funny, and seductive—thirteen songs spent in the very entertaining company of people you normally wouldn’t want to be in a room with. But Berninger may have been more right than he meant to be, because Boxer came out this week, and it may very well be better. I haven’t been able to stop listening to “Fake Empire,” the first song, since I downloaded it a month or two ago. (First of all, I’m a sucker for that whole three-over-four rhythm thing they do when the drums kick in—real muscians are no doubt completely unimpressed, but for me that works every time; it always feels like the song is trying desperately to fall into place and can’t quite do it.) They can play. And this guy can write, and he can sing. No spectacular vocal acrobatics here—for you nineties fans, Berninger’s cracked baritone is a distant descendant of the late lamented Mark Sandman’s (of Morphine) and today the closest match seems to be Britt Daniel of Spoon. But Spoon is inseparable from their icy, perfect minimalism—they’re the American indie-rock band as expensive brushed-aluminum coffeemaker; the National’s music is lusher, darker, and more romantic, and Berninger’s lyrics are more anxious and more arresting. “Tired and wired we ruin too easy,” and “it’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky,” and other weird and startling things that leap out at you as you listen. I’m still working my way into it. Somebody else get this, so we can argue about it.

(Also, that's a disturbing cover. I didn't have a wedding, but if I had, I'm not sure I would have invited the National to play. Might, you know, freak out the squares, what with all the songs about stalking. And drinking. And dancing naked on the coffee table.)

The Missing

2007-05-17T23:30:00.000-05:00

Hey, everybody. Been gone a month. Got married. The Departed was overrated.

Oh, don’t act so surprised. I’ve lived with her for seven years, and Scorsese clearly only got the Oscar out of pity. Sure, Raging Bull wasn’t “Best Picture,” and neither was Goodfellas, but if you get all your A-list friends together and make a big ol’ blood-soaked ball of silliness, Academy-love will follow. Every time.

That movie was okay, don’t get me wrong. It’s high time we all realized that Mark Wahlberg is a comic genius. Few people know this. I’m not sure that Mark Wahlberg himself does. But in the right hands, he’s a force to be reckoned with. Did you see I Heart Huckabees? Yeah, nobody much did, but ol’ Marky-Mark is a terrifyingly hilarious force of nature in that movie—the sort of person you should avoid at all costs. And in The Departed, he almost steals the show with a) his sincere, undying hatred of Matt Damon’s character, and b) his terrible haircut. Good stuff.

And if you’re reading this, you know where to send gifts. Not that I encourage that sort of thing.

Curtis Granderson Knows a Lot About the African-American Experience!

2007-04-12T23:41:00.000-05:00

Seriously, you've got to love this kid. First of all, unlike his teammate Nate Robertson, he actually writes his own blog. In his last post, he described, with his own blend of gee-whiz enthusiasm, about blogging from the official Tigers airplane. (!) On his laptop. (!!) And about how nobody on the team was quite sure how to get internet access from way up there. It was adorable.

He also updates, like, every couple of days. Unlike Robertson. And unlike me. All this while hitting 250/325/611. (And that's after an 0 for 4 tonight.)

Senator Inhofe Welcomes Our New Overlords

2007-03-21T19:11:00.000-05:00

NYT:

Gore Warns of "Planetary Emergency"

I know this is serious business and all, but I can't help but think that it had to be really exciting for whoever gets to write the headlines. How often do you get to write the words "planetary emergency?" And, if you're an ex-future-president, wouldn't you secretly love saying it, at least a little? Everyone will be doing it soon. If somebody declares a "galactic crisis" next week, I'll be suspicious. ("Our taxpayers should not have to bear the burden of repelling the Saucer People!")

...But they lost out to the dead guy.

2007-03-17T23:22:00.000-05:00

Neon Bible debuts at #2. David Marchese in Salon begins the most halfhearted backlash in history. ("Gee, everybody, are we sure about this?") Biggie firmly maintains his grip on the top spot from beyond the grave, so it's not like the world is really turned upside-down or anything. But it's still a funny moment--between this and the Shins (also #2), this music is officially big business. It's all kind of fun, but a hundred thousand would-be hipsters can now stop pretending to be on the cutting edge of anything. (You can include me in that category if you like, but nobody's ever accused me of being cool.)

...and look at the rest of that top 10! Reliant K? Yeesh. (Aren't they into Jesus?) Though I know that some of you are fingering your copiesw of Korn Unplugged as you read this, muttering resentfully. You know who you are.

Rebellion, Lies, Repeat

2007-03-08T23:41:00.000-05:00

So, today I went ahead and got the Most Important Album Ever to Be Released or That Ever Will Be. The cultural authorities told me to do it. (This guy too.) But hype aside, I’m pretty excited about it. I liked Funeral as much as the next fashion victim—and it really, really was that good. And the tracks I’ve heard so far from Neon Bible sound like more of the same, but bigger. (I didn’t see the SNL performance; I downloaded some of the audio. Everybody said it was great.) It’s on the headphones right now; I’m getting happy! Funny, I tried to turn on my friend’s radio show the other night and I heard this song that I'm listening to right now, “Keep the Car Running.” I immediately assumed it was some old Springsteen song I hadn’t heard, which would’ve made sense. Then I thought—hey, this is the Arcade Fire! Then I realized I was listening on the wrong night and that it was just some hipster doofus who’d decided to throw that on.

But while I’m on the subject I need to bring up a painful issue that we’re all going to have to face up to and resolve: just what exactly is the name of this band? It’s a problem! Do they have a “the” or not? For a long time it seemed as if they weren’t sure, or didn’t care. On the self-titled album, it said “Arcade Fire” on the front and “The Arcade Fire” on the spine. Funeral, I’m not sure. Writers have seemed to use both versions interchangeably—that NYT writer uses “the,” Frere-Jones at the New Yorker doesn’t. With this album they seem to have definitely dropped “the” across the board. (And Sasha F-J, uber-hipster, would’ve been sure to get it right. Though in the current issue he’s enthusiastically endorsing Fall Out Boy, so anything is possible.)

Anyway, it’s fine. Really. They can call themselves whatever they want. But they can’t pretend it doesn’t matter! Names matter!

Got the new Bloc Party a couple of weeks ago, and I just don't know what to say. Maybe it'll grow on me, but it felt like a pretty big disappointment. Silent Alarm used to get me so excited! There's a select group of albums that are exactly perfect for my usual fifteen-minute super-intense stationary bike workout--naturally, they're the albums that start with the perfect fifteen minutes. Primal Scream's XTRMNTR, Songs For the Deaf by Queens of the Stone Age. And at the absolute top of the list, Silent Alarm. I could listen to those first four songs all day. But apparently, for this new album, the band sat down and decided that what was good about Silent Alarm was...all the other songs. The slow ones. A Weekend In the City wants to be all big-sounding and serious--people have accused them of wanting to be U2, but this isn't even as much fun as a U2 record. I will say that "Hunting for Witches," and "I Still Remember" are almost as good as "Little Thoughts" from Silent Alarm, which was the fifth best song on that album. But that's all I'll say. I'm gonna go listen to "Helicopter" again.

The new Sparklehorse is pretty good. Please don't make me type the title; it's long and stupid. Just click the link. The songs are what you'd expect if you've heard the others: pretty and dusty, with occasional bursts of fuzz. But boy, this album just sounds great--Danger Mouse did the production; it's all rich and warm and crisp. Like a cookie, or something.

I got this Six Parts Seven album today, too. Never heard of them until a few weeks ago, but WOXY plays them a lot. I checked the album out on a listening station, then started downloading stuff. It's real pretty. Hypnotic, soothing instrumental rock stuff--guitars, pianos, whatnot. I need a certain amount of that in my life--and they're from Ohio! Who knew we had our own Mogwai? Though these guys never get scary like Mogwai or Explosions in the Sky, so they may be too soothing for a lot of tastes. But there's a scary viking dude on the cover! They're not tame! (This band has a "the" problem too, I have to add. Though it seems more clear cut: they definitely used to have a "the," and now they definitely don't.)

Links for all! (Right-click or control-click; you know the drill.)
Falling Over Evening -- Six Parts Seven (Gentle. But if that's not good enough...)
Welcome, Ghosts -- Explosions In the Sky (...here's something a little rougher. But still pretty.)
Black Mirror -- Arcade Fire (This is nowhere near the best on the album, but it's the free one.)
What Light -- Wilco (And a new Wilco track! Before you can buy it!)

Good Movie, Troubling Resemblance

2007-03-08T00:55:00.000-05:00

Hey, I really liked Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation. You probably should check that out. This is the second of two tiny-budget movies for Bujalski—2002’s Funny Ha Ha was the first. (Worst. Title. Ever.) They’re both rambling, elliptical, and defiantly deadpan. An aimless hipster musician arrives in New York to get a new band together, and bounces seemingly at random among parties and gigs and long conversations that don’t appear to go anywhere. Gradually he develops a crush on his best friend’s girlfriend. And that’s pretty much all that happens—some critic trying to be clever said that “every generation gets the Jim Jarmusch it deserves.” But that’s really pretty lazy—there’s not really a lot of common ground between the two except for a superficial minimalism. Bujalski doesn’t have any of Jarmusch’s cheerful surrealism, or his love of genres and types—his films are aggressively naturalistic, and they’re centered on very particular sorts of people.

The dialogue is what you notice first; it seems to be made to be as close as possible to actual speech without being unlistenable. Plenty of people would argue that it is unlistenable, there’s so many awkward pauses and so much muttering and stuttering and sighing. But for me, it works wonderfully, especially considering there are no real actors in these movies. It’s not at all like improvised dialogue, like you’d get in a Mike Leigh movie or something. You can tell it’s all as carefully, lovingly mapped out as a Whit Stillman or Noah Baumbach script; it’s just not mannered or clever like that. Bujalski is a poet of awkwardness, diffidence, and passive-aggression. Everybody in these movies is in constant emotional danger; they can’t help hurting each other and getting hurt. Justin Rice’s Alan can’t reject the clumsy advances of his drummer’s sister, but he can’t really go through with it, either. He’s likable and sincere, but there’s a blankness and a distance to him. He knows he’s fumbling around on borrowed time. Funny Ha Ha’s Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer) can’t escape her hopeless attraction to a completely unworthy friend, while Bujalski’s character Mitchell can’t stay away from her. Bujalski beautifully smudges the line between goofy-but-endearing and downright creepy—Mitchell suddenly dropping a full beer off of Marnie’s balcony when he starts to realize he’s not going to get the kind of attention he wants is hilarious, scary, and just embarrassing all at once.

This could be bleak material, but the movies have a kind of sweetness to them—Mutual Appreciation actually ends with a group hug, for crying out loud. Everything may or may not be okay for the three principals, but for a moment at least they all want it to be. You could believe that Bujalski maybe isn’t a million miles away from Lawrence, his Mutual Appreciation character, who just can’t be mad at his friends.

One more thing that I have to bring up. It’s a little disturbing.
Am I being completely paranoid here? Monsieur Bujalski, c'est moi!

Excuses!

2007-02-17T17:21:00.000-05:00

I know it’s gotta be totally lame and the mark of a true amateur to start every post by apologizing for the length of time since the last one, but here I am doing it again. It’s the last time, I swear! New leaf turned!

Really no excuses not to be writing this past week—after an ominously mild December and January, we finally had the Perfect Storm this past week. Snow actually closed the University; I hardly had any classes at all, so in theory I had lots of time for personal growth and artistic development. You can see how that turned out. But it was nice not to leave the house at all on Wednesday, even to get the mail. It was like house arrest, which I have to say has gotten a bad rap. I could go for a spell of house arrest.

I guess I’ve seen some movies. Which ones? Saw Pan’s Labyrinth, to complete the Great 2006 Mexican Trilogy, after Babel and Children of Men. Pretty damned solid. (I think I liked it better than Babel and not as much as Children.) Compared to those two movies, Pan’s Labyrinth is a stroll in the sunshine, which is saying something since it’s still pretty dark. Director Del Toro is working in part with fairy-tale material, but the movie earns its R-rating. The “real world” plot of the movie, in which a sadistic fascist officer (Sergi Lopez) tries to crush a band of leftist guerrillas in the hinterlands of civil-war Spain, is grimly thrilling and bloody as hell. The other half is the story of a little girl whose mother, in an act of spectacularly bad judgement, has married the creepy officer in question. The girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), like many a movie kid before her, is obsessed with faintly disturbing fairy tales, and we can’t help but notice that she has a life well suited to the genre. She has a Wicked Stepfather, after all, and she has been taken against her will to something like a castle in the forest, with the ominous—and unexplained—ruined stone labyrinth of the title lurking nearby. With all this to set her off, it’s not surprising that she builds an elaborate fantasy to hang out in, inhabited by delicate insectile fairies and a seven-foot faun who tells her that she is a princess, the daughter of the King of the Underworld. That sounds comforting, but Ofelia’s fantasy doesn’t seem like much of an escape—the faun seems capricious and cruel, another bad parent-figure, and the tasks that he sets her to prove herself seem arbitrary and strange. But Del Toro knows how to make disturbing creatures—even if you haven’t seen Mimic or (yikes) Blade II, you’ve at least seen pictures of the Eyeball Monster, right? Sure you have. Imagine being the sort of kid that would dream up that guy. But you believe that this girl would—she’s strange and compelling and wants so badly to be heroic. She’s so much better than the little wide-eyed screechy girl in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, which in many ways is the same movie.

Pan’s Labyrinth is sort of a companion piece, almost a sequel, to Del Toro’s 2001 film, The Devil’s Backbone, a ghost story set in a 1930’s Spanish orphanage. I sort of feel that he needs to make another movie, to complete a Spanish Trilogy of his own. These movies aren’t politically or historically sophisticated or anything, but he’s clearly got a way with this material and his heart’s in the right place. We’ll see.

Lots of new music and stuff, too, so plenty more to come this week. I have DSL now, which may be the greatest time-waster yet invented, but now I can get all kinds of free songs and stuff, so I’m having a fun time. Maybe I’ll put some links on here, when I’ve a moment.

Modest Expectations

2007-01-29T18:02:00.000-05:00

Class canceled! Jubilation reigns among the youth!

I tend to be disappointed when I get this excited about anything, but I have to say that I'm pretty excited about this. Modest Mouse album in two months, their first as Big Rock Stars, and there's a new guy in the band. Some English dude, maybe you've heard of him. Johnny Marr?

I mean, Johnny Marr, for feck's sake. It's like getting Hendrix to come back, or having Jesus as your shortstop. Never mind that you can't really remember anything he's played on in twenty years (Marr, not Jesus.) It just doesn't matter! "This Charming Man!" "What Difference Does It Make!" Gaaah!

(Also, that guy from the Shins apparently sings on it, so it's sure to change your life.)

Baby, We'll Be Fine

2007-01-25T22:15:00.000-05:00

In the dystopian future Britain of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, illegal immigrants are rounded up and herded into refugee camps by something called the Department of Homeland Security. It’s no Ministry of Love, but it’s a nice touch, a good solid Orwellian name—exactly the sort of thing you need for your science-fiction script. The joke, of course, is that we already have one of those Departments. That’s one of the many things this movie gets exactly right—if you want to make a good, bleak movie future, you have to stitch it together out of bits of Right Now. I don’t mean satire, either—it’s real easy to come up with fake future TV shows and have it be funny, but the trick is to play it absolutely straight. You know the premise of Children of Men, right? It’s the future, everybody’s infertile, humanity is doomed, etc. Pretty extreme stuff, but all the details are, well, not surprising at all. When the Youngest Person on Earth dies at the start of the film (in some kind of sordid bar fight, apparently) everything just kind of grinds to a halt; people call in sick to work, weep in public, and pile up flowers and stuffed animals against fences in exactly the way that they do when this kind of Media Death Frenzy actually happens. (Although you can argue that poor “Baby Diego” has a better claim to fame in the world of the film than Diana Spencer, say, had in ours.) The refugee camp looks like, well, a refugee camp, complete with the obligatory Angry Islamist Funeral. (It’s probably more shocking for British people, who might be familiar with this “Bexhill” place in the present day, before everything goes to hell.)

Plot-wise, the movie’s got a pretty standard chase/quest structure. (If, in this awful world, somebody could have babies, that’d be a pretty big deal, right? People would be interested?) It’s got a pretty standard Reluctant Hero (Clive Owen), who used to Have Ideals, but now drinks whiskey from his flask whenever he’s alone onscreen. He’s got a Wisecracking Old Mentor who must make a Noble Sacrifice (Michael Caine.) And yes, there is a scene in an abandoned elementary school—get it? And outside the school, there is a concrete statue of a triceratops—GET IT? Hard to avoid this sort of thing, I guess.

But if you get beyond all that, it’s pretty impressive. To begin with, Clive Owen kicks ass, as usual—there’s no comparable American actor right now who can just show up and be himself like that, without being funny or showing off, and still command attention. He doesn’t get a lot of room to maneuver in this movie, but he pulls it off. The action, when it comes, is convincing, something hardly any serious movie—and surprisingly few unserious ones—can pull off. (Hey, why did everybody like Little Miss Sunshine so much? Children of Men makes you understand what it means to really have to jump-start that car.) The violence, when it comes—and a lot of it comes—is hard and fast and unsentimental. Everybody who’s written about this movie has been awestruck by the final-act set piece, an endless street-battle in the aforementioned refugee camp, and I’m not gonna dissent. My girlfriend will get mad if I call it a tour de force, so I won’t—but by the end of one endless handheld shot, there’s fake blood and mud spattered all over the camera lens.

Your final opinion may depend on how you feel about the climactic scene, which is indeed a little hard to swallow. I’m not going to ruin the movie, but the entire plot hinges on one of those pseudo-religious scenes where Everyone Stands In Awestruck Silence Looking At Something Amazing. It’s not what I would have done, but I was willing to let it go—I felt the filmmakers had earned it by that point. Reasonable people may differ on this—one of the people I saw the movie with kept saying “you know, it’s just a baby.” She wasn’t wrong, but I still felt like I’d gotten my money’s worth.

More: in an aside, Owen’s character visits his brother (brother in law? something like that.) who is in charge of something called the Ark of the Arts—they’re trying to preserve humanity’s legacy in the face of extinction, so that aliens, presumably, can appreciate Shakespeare and Michelangelo’s David. But during the whole introduction of this sequence, the soundtrack is blaring “In the Court of the Crimson King,” by King Crimson. And when Owen and his brother, or brother-in-law, look out of the window of the Ark, for some reason we see the giant inflatable pig from the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals. Apparently, according to the filmmakers, an important part of humanity’s artistic legacy—the stuff we want the aliens listening to—is 1970’s prog rock. Curious.

Same As the Old Slang

2007-01-09T20:45:00.000-05:00

Back to the schooling this week--hopefully that doesn't mean I'll stop posting entirely. It's not as if I was wildly prolific even when I had a lot of time to kill. Now I'm going to have to spend more of my days reading really really long poems about shepherds, so I don't know what's going to happen. But here I am!

Anyway, this made me laugh, from the AV Club's wacky piece on defunct college football bowl games.

6. The Garden State Bowl

Mid-December in New Jersey? Not fun unless you're a Rutgers fan, and unfortunately, Rutgers only played in the inaugural edition of this game, in 1978. The remaining three years were far drearier, except for the time when the PA announcer played The Shins, and totally changed everyone's life.

Apparently that Garden State moment--when Princess Amidala makes JD put on the headphones--has achieved a lame kind of pop-culture transcendence. They're makin' jokes about it on the AV Club, and everybody writing a profile of the Shins feels like they have to at least mention it, if only to be incredulous. Really, Natalie? The Shins? But they seemed so polite!

But I was listening to "Phantom Limb," the new Shins song, on the way to class, and I really did have to, you know, stop and take stock of things. Because this song is basically "New Slang II!" (Or III, if you think that "Saint Simon" from Chutes Too Narrow already took that spot.) The quirky little melody, the "oooooo" chorus, all of that. It'll change your life again! It'll change it back to whatever it was before, maybe! Try it!

Good tune, though. I keep wanting to put it on and play it again, like Ms Portman in the waiting room. This is usually the sure sign of a song I'll be sick of quickly, but we'll see.

Best Music 2006!

2007-01-01T00:56:00.000-05:00

Well, I guess we did all we could. Not a bad year. Good election, bad World Series, that's the way it goes. But I'm going to take this last possible moment to give you my Big Final List.

Yeah, yeah, these things are a terrible cliché. But we need them, at least I know that I do. I’ve always been a sucker for a year-end list, if only because they’re so fun to sneer at. How could they leave off Donnie Darko / The Killers / Big Momma’s House II / [your favorite neglected masterpiece] we ask ourselves, and we feel like we’ve made some small stand. You can begin sneering at me in five minutes, as soon as you’ve read this. Sorry there aren't any pictures.

Camera Obscura Let’s Get Out of This Country
This list is going to have some obvious choices on it, the stuff that’s on everybody’s list, so I’ll start it off with a quirky one that’s maybe not particularly known. Though for me, this is a no-brainer. It’s quaint? And pretty? And Scottish? Belle & Sebastian protegés? Sign me up! Honestly, though, there weren’t many releases last year that gave me more simple pleasure, or made me sing quite so much like a lovelorn sixteen-year-old girl while washing the dishes. I will also take this opportunity to use the word “Glaswegian.” [A special nod to Matt C, who didn’t just recommend this album, he actually mailed it to my house.]

Belle & Sebastian The Life Pursuit
…and while we’re on the subject, here you go: not their best, but how could it be? This is hardly the same group that made If You’re Feeling Sinister at all, but they’re still a justly beloved institution, and they seem to only now be reaching the peak of their powers. The Life Pursuit is graceful and funny and soulful, and on songs like “Dress Up In You,” you can still hear the old bitter wistful charm.

Pernice Brothers Live A Little
Again, not their best, but so much better than other people. See my review elsewhere.

The Flaming Lips At War With the Mystics
Secure now in their transformation from vaguely punk-ish weirdos to inspirational postmodern hipster performance artists, the Flaming Lips release another solid collection of tunes. Not a great leap forward, maybe—the only twist seems to be a newfound sense of political irritation. (“Free Radicals,” “Haven’t Got a Clue,” and “The W.A.N.D,” can be read as some sort of anti-Bush trilogy.) But it’s all satisfying: “Pompeii A.M. Götterdämmerung,” is every bit as huge as the title requires; my only complaint is that it isn’t twelve minutes long. And “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion,” joins “Do You Realize???” and “Waitin’ For a Superman,” in their collection of what I have to call Uplifiting Death-Hymns, songs that dare to bluntly and cheerfully say that Everything is Not Going to Be Okay, but that somehow That’s Okay.

Granddaddy Just Like the Fambly Cat
Stupid title. And go ahead and skip the intro with the child asking about the cat over and over. I do. This is still a wonderful, sad, last collection from this dear departed California group. The basic formula never changed: thick sludgy guitar, silly childlike keyboards, and Jason Lytle’s tired Wayne Coyne-ish croon, singing about robots and trees. This might actually be their best album taken as a whole. “This is How It Always Starts,” shows everything they did right: the sweet washes of electronics, the swooning background vocals, and the bitter little lyric that soars off the ground without seeming to move a muscle. This is how it always ends, though. Too many good bands don’t make any money.

The Decemberists The Crane Wife
The Decemberists, on the other hand, seem to have had no trouble at all managing their career. They were nowhere five years ago, now they’re a world-bestriding colossus sporting a monocle and a cardigan. Luckily, they have the work to back up their every-magazine-cover ubiquity. I reviewed the record already. It’s good.

Sufjan Stevens The Avalanche
I’ve already used the word “ubiquity,” but here’s Sufjan again, everybody. He’s wormed his adorable banjo-plucking way into our hearts, and he’s here to stay. I gave his Christmas album to my mom. Yes, The Avalanche is supposed to be an outtakes album, like it says on the cover; it’s supposed to be leftovers from the Illinois record. But it’s still seventy minutes long, and it still made my top ten. There’s filler, sure—you can probably skip most of the instrumental stuff and two of the three additional versions of “Chicago.” Enough great songs are left to make you shake your head—Illinois was freakin’ long to begin with. This guy must drink a lot of coffee. Anyway, banjos, flutes, pianos, you know the drill by now. Listen to “The Mistress Witch From McClure,” and “No Man’s Land,” definitely. Then ask yourself: how many albums will California take?

Thom Yorke The Eraser
He’s a reasonable man; get off his case! I think everybody who might read this probably has The Eraser already. Radiohead has occupied their frosty, unapproachable place in our canon for so long that there was no way we could ignore this record. But that didn’t mean it had to be good. It is. We can mock Yorke all we want for being prickly and paranoid, not to mention hideous to behold, but he’s really honestly the real deal both as a singer and a writer. Even when he was singing alt-rock ballads in 1993, there was a unique, unstable tinge to how he sang “I want you to notice when I’m not around,” or “Can’t afford to breathe in this town.” Now that he’s surrounded himself with computers and keyboards, his face looking sickly in the pale light of his PowerBook, he sounds more in his element than ever. This is emphatically not an album of self-indulgent electronic noodling, any more than Kid A was back when people were complaining about it. These are actual songs, despite or even because of all the whirring and bleeping and clicking, songs with real, painful emotion in them. Listen to “Atoms For Peace”—I hear “no more going to the dark side with your flying-saucer eyes” and I remember 1995’s “Black Star,” and its same sense of helplessness in the face of someone else’s collapse. (“I get home from work and you’re still standing in your dressing gown…”) “Skip Divided,” isn’t catchy, but it hisses with menace, with Yorke’s threatening murmur “when you walk in the room I follow you around like a dog.” “Harrowdown Hill,” it turns out, is about the death of UK Defence Ministry official David Kelly, and it seems to endorse the conspiracy theory that he was killed by the Blair government for blowing the whistle on the exaggeration of the threat posed by Iraq. Is that important? Probably not, and it’s probably not true, anyway. Before I knew all that, I knew that song had an arresting sort of grief to it—it was clear enough that it was about somebody dying. Nothing to fear, nothing to doubt.

Neko Case Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Before this year, I mainly knew Neko Case from her singing with polite Canadians the New Pornographers, on whose records she stood out like a flashing red light. The songs were fairly consistent—wordy, ultra-clever, and polished to a high gloss. But singing these songs, you had two white guys—two Canadian guys—with standard inoffensive indie-rock voices, but then occasionally you had this woman, with her voice like a megaphone. She was their secret weapon! I knew she was actually American, and that she had a career of her own, but I didn’t really care until this record got so much praise. Turns out it was deserved. Besides the singing, the songs are solid almost all the way through, with some remarkably intricate, literate lyrics. Just listen to the first song, “Margaret Vs Pauline,” with its “girl with the parking lot eyes,” whose “jaw aches from wanting.” And then the black sting in the tail of it; it was a tiny little breathtaking moment for me. It’s all like that.

The Hold Steady Boys and Girls In America
Here it is, the worst Hold Steady album ever. I’m only about one-quarter joking. If you’ve heard Almost Killed Me and Separation Sunday (and here the nod goes to this guy, who gave me illicit copies of them,) then you know what I mean. Otherwise…well, just imagine a whole lot of 1970’s-era classic rock—Springsteen, AC/DC, Thin Lizzy—but with some guy growling an enormous quantity of very carefully thought-out words over it, words about teenagers, and drugs, and Billy Joel, and Jesus. This sounds like a terrible idea, but you have to hear it. And no, this album isn’t as viscerally satisfying as the other two, but that’s only because they were trying some things. The tunes got bigger, occassionally reaching near-Meatloaf levels. (One reviewer came right out and said “Sal Paradise by the dashboard light,” and I wanted to smack myself in the head. Why didn’t I think of that?) The production got bigger—they’ve been saddled with the label of the World’s Greatest Bar Band, and this album seems to be blasting out of the World’s Greatest Bar P.A. And the subject matter got a tiny bit lighter—the characters in “Chillout Tent,” just want to hook up at a concert, and they probably won’t even end up dead or in rehab. (Dave Pirner from Soul Asylum sings! Yikes!) One girl (in “Chips Ahoy,”) has a supernatural ability to pick the winner of horse races—but her boyfriend is irritated because he “can’t tell if she’s having a good time.” That's a shame.

But it gets plenty heavy, too—the Minnesota poet John Berryman kills himself in the opening song. (“He loved the Golden Gophers but he hated all the drawn-out winters.”) The snarling “Same Kooks,” is another missing piece of the Separation Sunday song cycle, with its stupid wasted Catholic kids moaning that “it’s hard to feel holy when you can’t get clean.” And “First Night” feels like the final end of that story, an epilogue or valediction. It leaves Charlemagne and Holly (from the first two albums) shaking in the streets and crying in the hospital, respectively, and leaves the singer trying to remember what they all used to look like when they first met. This sounds horribly sentimental if you haven’t heard all these songs; if you have, then you’re already sort of choked up thinking about it. It’s going to be okay. Just remember what somebody (Holly?) said to Berryman—“you’re pretty good with words, but words won’t save your life.”

Honorable Mentions—Band of Horses is good. (One reviewer called it “the Shins deep fried in My Morning Jacket.” The metaphor police have been notified and are proceeding on foot.) The Long Winters is good. Mogwai is good. Morrissey, bless his heart, had some good songs. The Raconteurs, sure, sure, fine, whatever.

Best Design: The Eraser (Fancy woodcuts!) Worst: Boys and Girls in America, ironically. What’s up with that cover?

Second Best Title On an Album I Didn’t Listen To: Return to Cookie Mountain, by TV On the Radio.

And the Best: I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass by Yo La Tengo. What, twenty years into their career and they’re still filled with rage? They’re talkin’ to you, Sonic Youth!

It Tastes Like Burning!

2006-12-28T22:13:00.000-05:00

Got The Simpsons Season 9 this past week. This is an item well worth having, of course, but following the essential and well-nigh-fundamental to-Western-Civilization seasons 4 through 7, and the still very fine season 8, the drop-off in quality starts to be clear. It’s sadly ironic, really, because it’s when these episodes were running, back in 1997-98, that I really became an enthusiast, feverishly collecting the reruns on tape and all of that. But even then I had the uncomfortable feeling that the newer shows just weren’t quite the same thing. I was sure it was temporary. (Dry chuckle here.)

Indeed, the second of episode of season 9, “The Principal and the Pauper,” was immediately upsetting to fans, and was frequently pointed to in later years as a possible shark-jumping moment (though that term hadn’t then come into its eventual all-too-wide use.) This is the infamous “Armin Tamzarian” episode, in which Principal Skinner is revealed to be—to have always been—a possibly-insane con man, who stole the identity of the “real” Seymour Skinner in Vietnam. The show’s humor comes from the unexpected reappearance of this “real” Skinner, and from the gleefully cynical conclusion in which the whole town, including Skinner’s mother, decides that they preferred the fraudulent one. This is actually sort of funny (I particularly like Superintendant Chalmers’ declaration that “Armin Tamzarian’s reign of terror is over,”) but it’s easy to see why it bothered people. Undermining the fundamental nature of a long-running character, and doing so in such a cheerfully callous way, seemed to a lot of people (including me at the time) to be doing a weird sort of violence to the show. We were kind of missing the point, though—the writers were making fun of the whole idea that the characters on a show like this could stay the same for so long, that every episode would always start afresh in exactly the same place as all the others. They were openly mocking the very idea that we could understand the characters on a show this absurd to in some way be actual persons. Was this clever? Well, I guess, at least the first few times. But it was never really all that funny. And there are plenty of other oddly unfunny episodes in this season: Homer becomes a carny! Bart joins a football team! A whole episode devoted to Ralph Wiggum! Jay Leno! Some of these I doubt I’ll be watching more than once.

Still, though, there are some great, great moments here, starting right at the beginning, with “The City of New York Vs. Homer Simpson.” Compared to all of the “The Simpsons are going to [insert name of exotic destination]!” episodes that followed, this one is both affectionate and still real funny. I love Homer’s flashback to his nightmarish time in Taxi Driver-era Manhattan, ending with his rueful “…and that’s when the C.H.U.Ds came at me.” It’s got the now-bittersweet set-piece at the World Trade Center, in which Homer buys a sketchy-looking ethnic delicacy named Khlav Kalash from a street vendor, and is faced with a terrible choice of beverages. “Mountain Dew, or crab juice?” the vendor asks. Homer makes a terrible face and orders the crab juice, as any of us would. This episode also features the word “malparkage” and the first appearance of Duffman. The Lord of the Flies parody “Das Bus” makes no sense at all, but has lots of great jokes. “Lisa the Simpson” is still sort of sweet, proving that not all the humanity had yet been drained from the characters. And there are many, many other bits I remember fondly, even from otherwise mediocre episodes: Homer’s gleeful “stealing a car for Moe” song in “Dumbbell Indemnity,” and the cinematic landmark Hail to the Chimp that we catch a glimpse of in that same episode. Homer calling the garbagemen “trash-eating stinkbags,” and then trying to weasel out of it, observing that “a lot of people were yellin’ stuff.” Homer compressing five pounds of spaghetti into one handy mouth-sized bar. (“Hospital, please.”) And of course, Mojo the helper monkey, whose cholesterol is “through the roof.” So many memories. If you’re a fan, definitely get this last glimpse of this show before the serious decadence set it. If you’re a casual viewer, please get season four.

Holiday Greetings, and the End of an Era

2006-12-26T00:12:00.000-05:00

Christmas will be over by the time I post this. I hope yours was good, if Christmas is something you do. Festivus will not be over until you’ve pinned the head of the household, so good luck.

Here I am tonight outside the doors of venerable Toledo dive/landmark Rocky’s Bar, doors that within a few hours will be closed for good. So really, this evening is the true end of Old Westgate, a place and time that I know a lot of you remember with fondness, irritation, or both. Rocky’s was noisy, smoky, and tiny, but it was very friendly and very very convenient. Nothing beat being able to walk there after work. Or during the occasional lunch hour. Or on at least one memorable occasion, during a ten-minute coffee break. It was also great to be able to walk home, as you could if you lived at Kenwood Gardens. Toledo will be a little less smoke-filled after today, but a lot more boring.

A Screaming Comes Across My Desk

2006-12-19T00:40:00.000-05:00

Just got off work at midnight, so now I won't be able to sleep for, like, three hours. The retail game gets a little exciting during the third week of December, as the reader can no doubt guess, so those of us out there on the frontlines get pretty fired up. We get home and we’re like Vietnam vets; we can’t fit back into normal society. Our faces are frozen in a pleasant, helpful expression. Our hands shake. Ask Tim Jensen—he saw me today; I was bouncing off the walls.

But school is done for now, so that’s good. I have no comment about my academic performance until my grades are officially posted, but at least now I can try to read books. Of course that means I immediately threw myself headlong into T.R. Pynchon’s new 1100-page monstrosity, Against the Day. The critics were not all kind to this one (some were) but for those of us who are fans it’s still a big deal. It’s weird now, though: we were so used to the idea of Pynchon as bizarre reclusive genius, but now we’ve gotten to know him as Wacky Guy on The Simpsons With a Bag on His Head. It’s like if the Pope went on Conan, or something. I'm sure that this is exactly what he's always wanted, but how will it affect our reading of this doorstop of a book? So far (page 200 or so) I think it’s pretty great, absolutely no surprises, lots of science and very long sentences and evil capitalists and musical numbers.

Got that Pernice Brothers album I was feeling guilty about a while back. Pretty good. If I made you listen to any of their others and you liked them, you should get this one too. If you’re new, here’s the deal: Joe Pernice is a Boston-based singer and songwriter with a small-but-devoted following. He does indeed have a brother, Bob, who sometimes plays on the records, but that’s still sort of a silly name for the band. He’s got a frail-but-pretty voice and he sings glum-but-perfectly-crafted little grown-up pop songs of the kind that some of us can’t get enough of. 2001’s The World Won’t End and 2003’s Yours, Mine & Ours are improbably wonderful little masterpieces. Get them.

Live a Little, the new album, is not quite up there on that level, but it’s got plenty of great moments. “Zero Refills” keeps the spirit of 70’s soft rock alive in winning fashion—and I have to say that title seems to betray a certain fascination with prescription medications that I’ve noticed before. (This is the guy who came up with one of my favorite song titles ever, “Prince Valium.” Great tune, too.) “PCH One” and “B.S. Johnson” are graceful and pretty despite not having good titles at all. "Somerville" is so perfect that you won't realize it until you're singing it three days later. There are some are some dull spots in the middle: Joe is showing a distressing tendency since Discover a Lovelier You towards mannered, overwritten lyrics and tunes that don’t quite make it. Those songs (“Microscopic View,” “Lightheaded”) are still in the minority, but it’s a little troubling when the most affecting moment here is “Grudge Fuck 2006,” which as the title indicates is a retooled version of a song Pernice originally recorded in 1996 with his first band, the Scud Mountain Boys. Direct, melodic, and self-lacerating, it reminds you how great of a songwriter this guy can be, and makes you wish he’d just remember that.

I also got that Joanna Newsom that I was so anxious about. Don’t know what to say yet. This is some crazy-weird stuff. If you’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more harp, this might be for you. It might be as good as everyone says. I’ll let you know.

Poll: Americans Not As Crazy As We Thought

2006-12-15T14:03:00.000-05:00

Maybe people will say anything to a pollster, but it's still hard not to find this encouraging:

Americans say they'd be more wary about electing a president who served in George W. Bush's Cabinet than they would be about voting a gay man or a lesbian into office...Only 38 percent of the poll's respondents said they'd be "enthusiastic" or "comfortable" in voting for a presidential candidate who's a Mormon -- the same number who said they'd be OK with voting for a member of Bush's Cabinet.

Another twenty years and we could have us a civilized little country, just like...I dunno, Canada, or something.

Cinema!

2006-12-09T23:04:00.000-05:00

Finally saw Babel today, the third film from Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and his screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. Shouldn’t I have seen this one already? As somebody who’s been talking up Amores Perros all decade long, and who will rush to defend 21 Grams despite its grotesque heavy-handedness, I’m a little embarrassed that I dragged my feet on this one. But you know, I just had this gut feeling that it wasn’t going to be a lighthearted romp. I was correct. I remember feeling, after watching 21 Grams, like someone had grabbed me by the collar and shaken me for two and a half hours; Babel at times has a similar effect.

Babel’s good, though, which was a relief—it could have gone either way. It’s flawed, but it’s so clearly the work of somebody in full command of their art that you’re willing to forgive it a lot of things. Iñárritu often almost seems to be showing off, in the contemptuous ease with which he shifts between his interrelated storylines; he’s taken the head-snapping transitions between the lives of the rich and poor characters in Amores Perros and spread them around the entire globe. Babel has affluent Americans (played by Hollywood stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett,) poor Mexicans, really really poor Moroccans, and a seemingly entirely separate story involving a deaf-mute Japanese girl (courageously played by someone named Rinko Kikuchi. Give her an award.) whose heartbreakingly random connection to the other stories only gradually becomes clear.

Iñárritu seems committed to the idea of Filmmaker as God, which may be why these stories seem curiously undramatic at times—he is so eager to show the centrality of chance and contingency that the characters mostly seem completely powerless. But it’s still pretty powerful just watching things happen to them. Pitt and Blanchett play the wealthy-but-miserable American couple who run into absurdly improbable misfortune on vacation in Morocco; meanwhile their two children and their illegal-immigrant Mexican caregiver run into equally improbable trouble back at home. But it’s all done in such a way that you’re never tempted to laugh at the silliness of it (as I occasionally wanted to laugh at Sean Penn in 21 Grams.) You just think, yeah, that could happen. And Iñárritu just excels at showing people in these Biblically dreadful situations; you just can’t look away, even as things get ever awfuller.

Clearly, too, the man has a way with actors, as witnessed by the astonishing operatic performances he got out of the three leads of 21 Grams and by the classy stars eager to be in this film. Brad Pitt’s certainly gotten a lot of praise for Babel, which is a bit much. This is possibly the first time I’ve ever seen him play a grown-up, and he doesn’t embarrass himself, let’s leave it at that—and that’s high praise since he has to share the screen with Ms. Blanchett. On any equal footing, of course, she would act him right off the map, but she essentially does this whole movie with one acting hand tied behind her back; it’s still pretty harrowing. Adriana Barraza, who as far as I know is unknown, is really great as the nanny, as are all the unknown Moroccans. Gael Garcia Bernal, who Innaritu gave to the world as Amores Perros’ doomed hero Octavio, turns in a tidy little cameo as the nanny’s good-for-nothing nephew. (Rachel, with typically sharp eyes, spotted one Peter Wight, the night watchman from Mike Leigh’s Naked, as one of the tourists.)

Also have to mention the cinematography, especially in the Morocco sequences. Sure, maybe it’s easy to film beautiful scenery, but this is still some pretty jaw-dropping stuff. This guy, Rodrigo Prieto, came up with Iñárritu and Amores Perros, and he’s made a nice little Hollywood career for himself—he did Brokeback Mountain, speaking of scenery—but Babel had to be a camera guy’s dream, and he made the most of it. Probably ninety percent of the movie is done handheld, and it’s hardly ever distracting, like it can be sometimes. And I still can’t figure out how they did the final shot, although it may just be CGI.

Anyway, check it out if you like this sort of thing. What with school and everything else, I feel like I hardly saw any of this year’s good movies, so I can’t tell you if this is the best one or anything. I probably still like Brick better, if it comes to that. But this is the real thing—sooner or later these guys will make another truly great movie, but Babel will do in the meantime.

Gardening At Night

2006-12-02T20:07:00.000-05:00

[Okay, this is long. But I thought I might as well go ahead and post some fiction here, now that I have it. This was written for class, and it shows in places. Some of it is clumsy. A few sentences I'm secretly terribly proud of. I'm not going to tell you which are the good bits because I hope somebody will read it all. -MD]

Barry saw her on the stairs as he drove away. It was only for a second, and there was no time to slow down - he was late for work already - but someone was definitely there, climbing towards his back door, and he was sure that no one had been nearby when he'd come out two minutes before. This seemed like information that he couldn't process; his stomach felt hollow and vile; he blinked and stretched his face furiously to clear the sleep from his head. The inside of the car smelled like grease and the damp corners of old dark basements. He rolled the window down angrily and tried again to look behind him, before he turned the corner onto Hillcrest, but the house was mostly out of sight, blocked by the sullen yellowed buckeye trees that lined the street. He couldn't see the second story at all, where his doorway was, and the then the traffic cleared and he turned and the neighborhood was behind him.

* * *

In the store the lights were humming and the lines at the cash register were long; he heard his name as soon as he was inside the doors.

"My man Barry knows what I'm talking about!" The voice made him want to speed up, but he slowed. Barely in the building, and Kale was bouncing gleefully at him, all shirttails and flying elbows. "Ain't that right, Barry?" Kale's pale, almost transparent moustache darkened when he grinned; the strap of his nametag was wrapped absurdly around his head. Clearly, his shift was over.

"What's that?" Barry said, voice flat and face stiff, trying for the perfect dead note of male nonchalance that would spare him the brunt of Kale's happy disdain - but Kale was half-gone already, thankfully, whirling through the exit doors. His grin flashed lewdly as he backed out.

"Barry knows! Poland and all that!" Kale cackled at nobody and was gone.

He clocked in; it was seven after. His eyes burned - another point. Three minutes late was a point. Three points and they talked to you; six points and you were fired. They'd already talked to him. Kale had thought that was hilarious, of course, like everything else. Poland. Marta was from Poland, the cashier. That wasn't funny, either.

He worked. Nora wanted him at the register, but Darrell was shift manager and he overruled her. "We need everybody we can get in LG" he told Barry flatly, not bothering to disguise how serious he felt the need must be to include even the likes of Barry Tomczak. LG was Lawn and Garden, and that was fine.

The store sold wood; the store sold pipes; the store sold sinks that didn't run yet and toilets that had never flushed. You could smell the wood as soon as you walked in the door; it was sweet, like something that had just been made. He'd loved that smell at first; now it made him faintly sick, like the first day of school. He didn't have anything to do with the wood, anyway. The men who cut and sold the wood didn't know his name, and he didn't know theirs. He'd never built anything. Mostly he ran the cash register; he unpacked boxes that someone else had unloaded; he wandered the concrete aisles slowly, clipboard in hand, and filled the spaces left among the tiny things - the light bulbs, the washers, the doorknobs.

Lawn and Garden was fine with Barry - some days that meant giant bags of topsoil or spectacularly sinister hedge-trimming tools that he didn't even know the names of, but this time it meant a lot of plants, and that was fine. The plants were on pallets, wrapped in plastic - you unwrapped them, you found a place for them, you watered them. Darrell seemed to think this was a job he was suited for, and Barry didn't care. He worked his cart carefully between the narrow parallel rows of cactuses and ferns and tiny misshapen trees, and tried to shake the feeling of strangeness from his head.

No one but him had climbed those steps outside his apartment for sixth months at least. But somebody had been there -- the picture was there in his head as he worked, the same way the fluorescent lights hummed their little hum all day long beneath the rumble and mutter of every other noise. He kept coming back to it, trying to force his mind's eye into focus, trying to fix on some detail of her clothes or hair, but he kept failing. The house, he could see, if he really tried. The white two-story house with peeling, indifferent paint; the wooden staircase, fifty years younger than the house, that led to his door - but the stranger's face as he drove by and then her back in his rearview mirror was a nervous, shivering blank. Neither old nor young; not wearing the perfect, crisp, modest clothes of the blank-eyed door-to-door church people or any kind of uniform that would mean she was there to read the meter or check for termites. Just clothes, invisible clothes, girl clothes - maybe some kind of jacket against the October chill? And was it something he had caught in her face in that part of a second, or something in her back, in the tilt of her shoulders as she climbed, that gave him the cold uneasy feeling that she had been angry? His hands were cold and stiff; his ankles hurt from crouching as he worked. No customers came near and he was glad. He was hungry and he wanted to be home.

* * *

When he got there, finally, she was waiting for him. A car door slammed behind him as he walked toward the stairs, and he stole a fearful backward glance. Terror flashed into the skin of his face in the instant he saw that someone was hurrying towards him; the menace always there in the dark silent street had turned solid and was making its move. The knife was there for him, the fist in the face, the guns in the shaky hands of washed-out trembling men - eventually it would happen to you. But he stopped, confused, when he saw it was the girl.

"Are you Barry Tomczak?" He stared at her in blank astonishment. There was no question it was the same woman, the woman from the afternoon. He was surprised by how small she was; she was looking up at him to meet his eyes, her sharp face framed by short dark blonde wisps of hair. He couldn't answer for a moment; he took a half-step backward. It was fully dark now, and the darkened crumbling houses seemed dull and faded under the streetlights. His hands were cold from the drive home; he'd forgotten his gloves.

"Yeah," he croaked, finally. He felt something hard in her look and he knew how he looked to her, with his flat stringy hair and his wide flat face. He wanted to keep moving; he wanted to be inside.

"Do you have a brother named Keith?" He stopped again. He felt himself blushing, angrily, suddenly ashamed without knowing why. So that was it. Of course. He let himself take another long look at her face, pale and ageless under the streetlights, and sighed.

"Have you been waiting here all day?" he asked.

* * *

In the end he had to invite her inside; there was nothing else to be done. He went ahead of her up the faintly creaking wooden stairs, feeling her eyes on his back, and let them in. He made coffee as quickly as he could, trying not to see his apartment as it must look to her - the bare yellow walls and colorless carpet, the blankets twisted damply on the couch that all-too-clearly doubled as a bed. Thankfully she stayed in the kitchen, which thankfully was clean. Her name was Maureen; she'd said her last name too, but he'd already forgotten. She drank her coffee silently for a moment. Inside she looked younger; she couldn't be more than twenty-five or so. His age, really. Her green hooded sweatshirt said "MSU."

"I haven't talked to Keith in a long time," he finally said. "Not since our mother - not for a year and a half, since our mother's funeral." No flicker of sympathy or embarrassment showed on her face; he wondered how much she knew already. Strange to think that this woman he had never seen before could know that his mother was dead. What else could Keith have told her, and what had she thought about as she sat in an empty car on his dark street, waiting for him?

"Were you at work?" She was looking at his chest, and he blushed again. Still wearing a nametag, of course. Still wearing a polyester orange vest. My Name Is Barry T - I am Happy to Assist You!

"Yeah," he said. He slipped the strap of his nametag over his head, and without looking threw it onto the counter in the corner of the kitchen, on top of a pile of junk-mail flyers.

"Does that totally suck?" she asked, in a tone of mild polite interest, like someone asking if it was still raining.

"Yeah," he said, and laughed. She laughed too, a tiny, silent laugh. He sat down heavily, finally, and rubbed his face fretfully for a moment. The deadly numbness of his workday was lifting; he was sitting at his kitchen table with a stranger, with a strange woman who was pretending not to notice his dishes from yesterday's lunch.

"See, I came by earlier and you weren't here," she said, and he wanted to break in - I saw you! -- but he let her continue. "I knocked downstairs and the guy told me you were probably at work."

"Jerry."

"That's the guy." She laughed. "He asked me if I wanted to smoke a bowl while I waited. I told him I'd come back later."

Barry breathed out heavily. "Jerry owns this place. I mean - it was his mom's and now it's his. He sells a lot of weed. A real prince."

She was grinning. "Yeah, I feel like I made the right decision. Which is not to say that if a gentleman like yourself were to offer that I wouldn't indulge..." She cocked her head with a little comic twist to her lips. He laughed again, a little more easily this time.

"You've got the wrong guy, lady," he said. "All I got is coffee."

"Fair enough." She leaned back and stretched, easily and unthinkingly. "So I came back around seven and waited. I was about to leave when you showed up - I knew it had to be you. You've got the same hair as Keith."

That made him stop. When he'd seen Keith last, his head had been shaved, but Barry supposed enough time had passed that he could have grown it out. But he couldn't remember a time when anyone had thought they'd looked alike - Keith was all angles and bone, and Barry was slow and soft and always had been. Keith had stolen magazines and been in car accidents; he had made speeches at school assemblies that had made the teachers shake their heads and the students roar with laughter. When Keith was sixteen, he had taken a lot of pills and missed two weeks of school - when he returned his aura was more ironclad and fiery than ever. That was when he'd taken up with Laura - Keith had been Laura's great project. Barry had been thirteen - he remembered sitting in the hospital with his weeping shaking mother and feeling glad that he was missing soccer practice, and feeling guilty that he was glad. He never did play soccer again after that.

"Why do you know my brother?" He had to ask it, after all. She took a long drink of coffee and sighed.

"Keith and me lived together for a while up in Detroit," she said. "Did you know he lived up there?" Barry shook his head. The last he'd heard, Keith was in Columbus trying to start a band. Maureen drew a little pattern on the table with a fingertip as she spoke. "You know how these things go." She paused. "Do you?"

Barry shook his head.

"Yeah," she sighed. "Anyway, we did. And people get crazy, you know they do. Things got a bit weird. And with one thing and another I haven't seen him in a little while, but I'd like to talk to him, if I can. And I didn't know where he went, but I knew he had a brother from this town, and I knew his brother's name, and that's your name." She pointed, comically, with both index fingers. "And you're in the phone book, but your phone, I couldn't help but noticing, is disconnected." They both looked at the telephone on the wall - dead beige plastic weight. Barry didn't see the point in paying the bill anymore so he hadn't. The girl gave a final little shadow of a smile. "So I got on the internet and I found your house and you gave me coffee. Is that a good enough story?"

It was. It made exactly the right kind and the right amount of sense - never mind that Keith had been in the north and not the south. It was still Keith, and there was still a woman in his wake, eager and baffled. It was like Laura, all of those times - why was it when Barry thought about his high-school years, that it was Keith and Keith's desperate perfect girlfriend who appeared in every scene? Keith and Laura on the porch, screaming at each other. Keith on the phone, crying. Their mother begging Barry to take their picture, the two of them dressed up for something - a prom? Someone else's wedding? He couldn't remember, but he remembered their faces in the photograph, frozen in some comic travesty of a happy moment. He remembered Laura crying. He looked up.

"Yeah," he said. "That's something. I wish I could help you more."

Maureen sighed, and something about her seemed to settle and condense. She put both hands on the table, palm-down, and stared straight at him. Her eyes were grey, with flecks of orange.

"I was really - I was hoping you could tell me something more," she said. "The thing is - well, here it is - the thing is, Barry, that I'm pregnant."

He stared at her for a moment, feeling it all make him sick. This was it; this was the final joke at everybody's expense. She was here at his house and she was the victim of his brother and she needed the only kind of help that he couldn't ever give her. He closed his eyes.

"I don't know where Keith is," he said. "I'm sorry, I really don't."

There wasn't anything else to say. He took her phone number, just in case, and watched her leave. He put the number on his refrigerator, with a magnet shaped like an apple.

* * *

Kale thought it was funny to talk about Marta, the cashier from Poland. Her English was delicate and peculiar, and she couldn't grasp more than a tenth of Kale's scattershot innuendo, so he never let it stop. He didn't know anything about Barry except that his name was Polish, but that was enough to make him an unwilling part of the joke.

"Barry Tomczak! My man!" Kale yelling cheerfully, coasting along with a hand cart, feet off of the ground. "Is the Polish sausage good and hot, yo? Are the troops massing on the Polish border?" Marta was two checkout lanes over, oblivious. Barry tried to laugh without laughing. A customer was staring at him, a man in a white t-shirt with an enormous moustache. He had a tape measure on his belt. Barry stared back.

He was happier an hour later when he was back in Lawn and Garden. Nobody tried to talk to him there. The only customers were women, brisk and businesslike, and they knew better than to try to ask him anything. Nothing about him would lead anyone to believe that he could help them with their orchids, or their hedges. Every silent signal in his face and his movements said I just work here.

He watered the plants. The plants spread out in a flat green space and the shelves towered over them. The shelves had to be thirty feet tall. It seemed unbelievable how high they were, how determined people were to fill up every inch of space. There were lawnmowers up there, and giant water tanks - enormously heavy things that he couldn't believe somebody wanted to find a place for so badly that they had to store them up by the ceiling. How did they do it? It happened at night; at night powerful competent men with big machines came out on the sales floor and bent the vertical space of the store to their will - if they wanted it stacked high, it would be stacked high. Barry watered the plants.

Somebody was talking to him. He heard someone talking.

"So, can you, like, sell me some fertilizer?" He stared. Keith was there, in a shapeless grey coat, smirking. His hair had grown out. His brother. Barry put the water tank down, and tried to clear his throat.

* * *

"So I didn't know where you were living, now, but I figured you still worked at this hellhole, so I came looking for you." Keith seemed cold; he wrapped his coat around himself tighter as they walked across the emptying parking lot. "Where are you living? You live by yourself? Any ladies in the picture?" He laughed, and did some kind of unrepeatable little dance step. Barry snorted.

"Ask Kale," he said, absently.

"Who?" Keith asked, jumping in place. "Look, can we go hang out at your place or something? I'll follow you. That's my car right there." He gestured with an elbow, hands in pockets. "Go to a gas station - I'll pick up some beer."

* * *

They sat in Barry's kitchen and drank beer. Keith wanted to talk. It had been three years and he wanted to explain himself, to make his interesting life seem even more interesting. He'd been in Columbus a long time, apparently. His band had gotten some national press - had Barry seen it? He hadn't. Barry didn't read the kinds of magazines that covered the kinds of bands Keith was in - apparently Keith had almost opened for Modest Mouse, and apparently that was good. Then there was trouble - the singer in the band had a girlfriend, she and Keith had become close. Things had happened. Incredibly, he'd been married, for three months.

"I tried to call you, man," Keith said, face red and shining over his black sweater. "I really did. But your phone was disconnected, and I swear to God I couldn't fucking call the old man to get ahold of you. I mean, put yourself in my shoes. You know? And then it all went to hell anyway." He got up, and swung his arms, back and forth. "But now, you know, I'm doing pretty okay. I've got a little money set aside, and I thought I'd stop back through town, you know? Thought I'd see what you were doing. I haven't seen you since - well, shit, since the..."

They both sat for a moment. Barry drank his beer, and made a sour face.

"You haven't been in Detroit?" he said, carefully.

Keith stopped swinging his arms, and laughed. He stared back at Barry.

"Detroit?" he said. He was still smiling, but something in his smile had stopped moving.

"Yeah." Barry let it hang in the air a moment. Keith stood still for a long moment, then spun around furiously, spinning till he faced Barry again.

"Fuck!" he yelled, and Barry glanced at the floor involuntarily. "Who's been talking to you? Can't people even leave my fucking family alone?" He grabbed his chair and slumped across it. He seemed quiet, suddenly, and earnest. "What happened, Barry, seriously? Nobody gave you any trouble, did they?"

"What kind of trouble?"

"No, you tell me what kind of trouble!" Keith was laughing again. "Somebody told you I was in Detroit? Who was it? Who the hell knows who you are? It wasn't..." he stopped, and stared. Barry felt his own face go flat, and blank, and he knew that Keith was reading it.

"Maureen," he said, and pounded the table with one palm. "I can't fucking believe it but I totally fucking believe it. Maureen." He jumped upright again and grabbed his beer bottle. "She looked you up? Maureen looked you up?"

"Yeah." There wasn't any point in not saying it.

"When? When did you talk to her?"

"Two days ago." Barry got up, too, and walked over to the window.

"Two days? That is just incredible, man, just incredible. I only left there last - what? - Saturday?" Keith was a blur, now, gesturing and drinking. "She did love her internet. She should've been a damned private eye. Of course she knew your name, because of course I told her all about you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. You know how it is, man - you tell them all that old high-school stuff, they never get tired of it. I told her all about you, and Laura, and, you know, about mom and all that. You've got to say something." He stopped. "Do you even know what I'm talking about? Do you talk to women?"

Barry looked down. He pulled at the label of his beer bottle. Something ached in his chest. What was it about him that left him always in this strange, humiliating place? It seemed like some sort of misunderstanding. He tried to gather himself.

"What did you tell her about me and Laura?" Why did that make him feel so tired and shaky? What was there to tell, anyway? Keith and Maureen, talking about Laura's hands, her voice, her endless unfixable grief.

Keith stared at him. "I don't even know what you mean. I told her about Laura, I told her about you, I told her you were the best of friends, I don't know! You're telling me you just talked to Maureen Walsch two days ago - why don't you tell me what she said?"

Barry told him. There was a long and dangerous pause. Keith walked out into the living room and back and then stopped, balanced on one leg in the doorframe between two rooms. He stared at Barry for a long moment. Then he laughed.

"There's no way." He pointed with a finger as he spoke. "There's just no way. That doesn't add up at all." He clapped his hands, and grinned. "Maureen's a liar, did you know that? Maybe you could tell; maybe you couldn't. She's pretty good. She had your number. Just like Laura did."

"What do you mean?" asked Barry, thickly. His throat was growing tighter, and the ache in his chest was sharp and dangerous. He couldn't seem to look up.

"You know what I mean. Walking all over you to get to me, with that little maiden-in-distress number? Don't you remember - what, how old were you back then, tenth grade? - Don't you remember how she would cry?"

Barry remembered.

"Yeah, but Maureen's something different," Keith went on. "You know what she wants?" He fumbled in his pockets, spilling his wallet out onto the table. He grabbed a handful of bills. "This is it. She wants this money. Because, well, frankly, she helped to steal it."

Barry didn't say anything. Keith's voice was like a car alarm, like a cash register; he sounded like Kale for a moment. Barry suddenly wanted badly to see something outside of the warm damp kitchen. He stood slowly and walked to the back door, bottle loose in two fingers.

"Yeah," Keith said, behind him. "Maureen's not pregnant. I don't believe that for a second. She's fucking married, and she and I stole a whole big pile of money from her husband, and now she wants a little more of it. But I'm done with all of that, and I'm really sorry I gave her your name, but there was about fifteen minutes there when I thought she was, you know, a little better than that."

Barry rested his face on the glass of the window. Keith had stopped talking. He stared down at the backyard. There was a yellow cat picking its way carefully between two garbage cans. The taillights of a car were receding down the block. In the store where he worked, right now, someone was working a forklift and raising impossible things impossibly high off the ground. Was everything happening when he wasn't looking? Laura's hands, and Maureen with her little crooked grin.

"I don't know," he said, still facing the outside. "Shouldn't you, maybe, give me some of that money? Just to make sure I don't call her?" He didn't hear anything. Keith had stopped moving.

"What are you talking about, Barry?" he asked, finally. There was a hard, quiet note in his voice.

"Well, you know," Barry said. "I'm susceptible to these sorts of things. Women manipulate me. I might tell her where she could find you, or something. Like I might have done with Laura."

Keith was suddenly a lot nearer, behind him. Barry didn't turn around.

"What about Laura?"

Barry smiled, a little, finally. He turned around. Keith was a foot away, staring at him, but something had gone out of him. He looked a lot older than twenty-eight.

"I think I've probably seen her more recently than you have," Barry said. "Did you know she came to Mom's funeral?" Keith wasn't moving. His hair fell black and dense around his face. His left hand shook. "She did. I think she waited until you were gone, but I saw her. I talked to her. We talked for a while. You know she always loved Mom, you remember-" and that was that, he was done talking; he was done breathing for a moment, and the room had moved in some peculiar way. Some uncounted seconds later he knew that Keith had punched him but it didn't really make sense, didn't really come together until he had already hit the floor, and the table and the beer bottles had come crashing down around him. (He was still remembering; he was in a car with Laura and she was handing him a cigarette. It was the last time he'd smoked. He'd never cried with anyone else before and he was sure in that instant that he would never see her again.) By the time his head was clear and he could see the cut on his hand and the bruise on his face, Keith was gone. A fifty-dollar bill was on the refrigerator, where Maureen's phone number had been.

* * *

He was at work; he was under the lights, and his head still ached where the table had caught it. He opened and closed his hand and felt the burning protest of his torn muscles. Marta said something to him as he walked past the cash registers but he couldn't understand her; her delicate accent was swallowed by the rattle of the machines and the steady growl of voices. The lines were long. The men were buying wood in long thin strips; the men were buying tile in stacks and linoleum in long rolls. Lightswitches that turned nothing on. They had white shirts and tape measures on their belts. The back wall, the far end of the building, was a long way off, but he found it; he found the restroom and locked the door and stared into the mirror at his own blank face with its reddened, colorless eyes until it was time to clock in and go to work.

There had been a big delivery; he dragged the crates and spread the sheets of plastic and carefully cut each new plant free and set it in the place he'd cleared for it. No one bothered him, and after two hours he stood with an empty cart, and the shelves around him more full than he'd ever seen them. It was something to look at, in a place like this; people would have to be impressed by the variety, by the selection, by the presentation. Darrell would have to agree that the merchandising was sound.

He looked down and saw that his hand was bleeding again. He looked up and saw the lawnmowers hovering near the ceiling and the shelves that held their impossible crippling weight. They were toppling so slowly that you couldn't even see it, but they would fall someday. The air smelled like water and wood, and nothing looked right under the lights. No one was around. He smelled earth and water and worms and something else, something clean and bright and green as he breathed out slowly and took off his vest and let himself gently down to the tile; the leaves were wet and green and the soil was dark and he lay down in the empty narrow aisle and the quiet leaves closed over his empty head.

People Call Me Circuit City

2006-11-30T00:19:00.000-05:00

Sorry. I know I've got to update, or you'll all stop checking. I'm going to make the usual school / holidays excuses and leave it at that. I'm lazy. If you've gotten this far, you know that.

Music stuff again -- I'm going to throw up my hands here and ask: have any of you out there heard this Joanna Newsom person? Apparently this is the new thing we're all supposed to be excited about. Like, if Sufjan were a girl, or something. I'm sold, but I can't get to the record store so often these days. Remember when we could walk to the record store on our lunch hour? That was nice. Now I don't even have the new Pernice Brothers album that's been out for a month and I'm like the guy's biggest supporter in Ohio. I could order it at Borders but how much of a part of the problem do I want to be?

Sufjan's got a Christmas album, if you care. I guess he hadn't put anything out in three months or so, so it's expected. We're playing it at Borders, and it's very pretty.

Bought Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- sounds good, but I haven't had time to judge it. The Long Winters album is solid but not particularly essential -- still a minor cousin to Death Cab and the Decemberists. I actually saw the Long Winters open for the Decemberists in '04 or so. It was good, as I recall. They played the terribly exciting "New Girl," but not their de facto signature tune, "Cinnamon." That's a good song, and you know why? It's got four verses. So many lazy songwriters think they can stop at two and we won't even notice. We do.

They'll Need a Crane

2006-11-16T22:30:00.000-05:00

(Review of The Crane Wife, by the Decemberists)

There comes a time when we all have to ask ourselves: how do we feel about songs about chimney sweeps? For plenty of people, that’s further than they’re willing to go – once a rock band brings up the chimney sweeps, or sailors, or Victorian street-urchins, they’re getting off the bus. It’s hard to blame them. If you’re a fan of the Decemberists, however, that’s where the trip begins. Over four albums or so now, Colin Meloy et al have carved out a distinctive niche – perfectly crafted, evocative little folk-rock ditties incorporating an absurdly elevated vocabulary, loads of period detail, and a healthy dose of pitch-black humor, all delivered in Meloy’s distinctive adenoidal croon.

The new album, The Crane Wife, will not surprise anybody who’s been paying attention. Sure, it’s got not one but two multi-part folk-prog epics: the title story, which is apparently based on some Japanese folktale, and nautical murder-ballad “The Island.” But this is a band that had epic ambitions from the beginning – the bleak, disturbing “Odalisque,” from 2001’s Castaways & Cutouts clearly pointed out that they had no intentions of being some sort of retro-joke act. The problem is that they’ve already taken this sort of thing as far as it could possibly go with their 18-minute Celtic-themed song-cycle The Tain. I like this new album, and I like “The Island,” but when I listen to “The Island,” what I mainly think is: boy, this makes me want to listen to The Tain. The Tain kicks ass! ("The Tain, Part 2" kicks so much ass that it is literally painful to sit down afterwards. It’s like Morrissey showed up to sing Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.”)

But the first part of “The Island” is mighty fine, despite wearing its progginess on its sleeve. Lots of organ and accordion and that sort of thing. (Rachel’s brother heard about two minutes of it and said “Jethro Tull!”) Return readers take note: it does give a nod to The Tempest – Sycorax gets a shout-out. And if you didn’t like rock bands singing things like “curlews carve their arabesques,” you would never have even considered touching this record. Parts two and three, well, they’re okay. A little cutesey, perhaps – is there really ever any reason to say that you were “a-ramble down by the water?”

What really matters to me are not the epics, but the regular tunes – I love The Tain, but for me this is the band of “Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect,” “Song for Myla Goldberg,” and “On the Bus Mall” – songs that essentially couldn’t be improved upon. And the tunes are there on The Crane Wife. Do they deliver? Well, yes, mostly. We’ve got a lovely Civil War death-duet, “Yankee Bayonet” – if you’re going to do a damned Civil War duet, it better be lovely, and I think they pull it off. We’ve got a West-Side-Story-type teen death ballad, “O, Valencia!” which is pretty fun. I love exclamation points in titles, and I love the poetic “O” – I’ll forgive a lot if you give me those things. “O, Valencia!” doesn’t quite do it, though – the chorus is big, but not big enough, and the subject matter is just so so tired that I don’t know how Meloy could let himself write it. I can see how it would probably be pretty majestic if you played it live; it really wants to rock. On the record it’s not quite there, but I’ll still take it over most pop songs. (Meloy said in an interview that the main guitar figure was supposed to sound like R.E.M.’s “Seven Chinese Brothers.” He went on to say, a little too proudly, that he’d asked Peter Buck’s permission to use it – presumably when they both were working on Scott McCaughey’s last Minus 5 album. Two things: Meloy’s vocal turn on that record, “Cemetery Row,” is by far the best thing on it and also as good as most any Decemberists song. And also, “O Valencia” makes me want to listen to Reckoning.)

And hey, we’ve got “Summersong.” I can’t complain about that one. One review I read called this song “insufferable,” but nobody who would think that has any business reviewing a Decemberists album. Is it precious? Oh my, yes! (“My girl / linen and curls / lips parting like a flag all unfurled?”) But that couldn’t be any less relevant – it’s a melody you can’t really argue with, unless maybe you think it reminds you of Oasis. If that’s the case, then please just try to forget everything you know about Oasis and remember why “Wonderwall” was a hit.

What else? There’s “Shankill Butchers,” an attempt at a creepy, Tim Burton-ish childrens’ song in the spirit of Castaways' hilariously indefensible “A Cautionary Song.” But that sort of thing is only slightly funny once. There are some admirable attempts at expanding the pallet – “The Perfect Crime #2” is an enormously fun, cartoonish little gangster tale, complete with an invocation of the Muse. I couldn’t help but think of Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, and of course it’s by far the funkiest thing this band has ever done by default. It’s a shame the chorus doesn’t deliver, or it would be a highlight. “When the War Came” is puzzling, but admirable; it seems to be an attempt at oblique political commentary in the vein of Picaresque’s much-more-sprightly “Sixteen Military Wives,” but it’s darker and thornier. One review called it “polite hard rock,” which I thought was a terribly backhanded compliment – in my opinion, when a band that sings about vengeful mariners and barrow boys decides to get heavy, then, well, it’s just that much heavier. “When the War Came” is pretty damned solid, I just don’t know what it’s saying, exactly. Why are parts of it in Latin? And how does this new “war is bad” message square with the “war is totally gay” message of Her Majesty The Decemberists’ “The Soldiering Life?”

The final verdict might depend on how you feel about the title song, or songs. “The Crane Wife 1 & 2” is long and slow, and if you can’t get into it than you may ultimately decide this album was a waste of time. But on its own terms, it manages to be graceful and affecting in spite of itself. “The Crane Wife 3” was chosen to start the album, out of sequence, and it’s a decision that makes a certain perfect sense, finally. It’s got the right mix of effortless wordplay (“under the boughs unbowed,” a line that only Colin Meloy could start a record with) and aching regret in the soaring chorus (“I will hang my head low.”)

Really, though, we’re all still waiting for the next step. Like their close associates and fellow Portlandites, Death Cab For Cutie, the Decemberists have won a loyal following and made the jump to a major label. They’ve got a dozen or so tunes, from “Shiny” to “Red Right Ankle” to “Summersong,” that anybody would be proud to have written. But at some point we’ll have to see whether they’re going to be remembered for more than singing about chimney sweeps.

This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine

2006-11-05T22:21:00.000-05:00

So. Here you are. Thanks. Apologies in advance. For everything.

Gonna start things off real nice and highbrow: I took in some theater this past week. Seriously. Technically it was for school, but really that's only my excuse. You see, Dr. Wikander at UT managed to secure a small number of tickets for the Royal Shakespeare Company's residency in Ann Arbor this week, and he offered them to his students first. I snapped one right up as quick as I could, and not just because I'm a literature dork. On this particular evening they were doing The Tempest, and the marquee star, doing his farewell tour with the RSC as Prospero, the retiring magician, was one Patrick Stewart.

That's right. Jean-Luc Freakin' Picard, in the flesh, hamming it up for the upper crust of the midwest. Good stuff. So much lovely pop-cultural resonance that you hardly know where to start. (Professor Charles Xavier, of X-Men, with his loyal army of mutants - how is he like Prospero with his spirits? Discuss.) What a lucky guy, Patrick Stewart, who took his stage training and admittedly awesome voice and did really, really well for himself out of American geek culture. But who can begrudge him? He totally carried Star Trek on his back for all those years - they'd never had a real actor before! - and he never passed up a chance to spout some Shakespeare whenever the galactic situation called for it. Does anybody remember him reciting Hamlet's "what a piece of work is man" speech at Q, the scenery-chewing alien supervillain who just wouldn't leave the Enterprise alone? (From a certain angle, that whole series was about the enmity between those two. Discuss.) Picard's trying his best to defend the human race's interstellar reputation, so he pulls out this well-worn set piece - "in form and moving how express and admirable," and so forth. But here's the thing: Hamlet didn't really mean it. He was a miserable guy, he'd lost all his mirth, and he was being sarcastic in front of his college buddies, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He wasn't any more fond of humanity than Q was. And it's only my surmise, but I think that Stewart knew this, and that it was he who insisted that Picard preface his speech by intoning "and what [Hamlet] said in irony, I say with conviction!" It was such an awkward, pedantic thing to say; nothing like what a Star Trek writer would have put there, but absolutely correct. I remember being very impressed by the whole thing, as a fifteen-year-old.

And it wasn't just Star Trek and X-Men! What about Gurney Halleck, from David Lynch's incomprehensible 80's Dune movie? Or Guinevere's Dad in John Boorman's bizarro Arthurian epic, Excalibur? Now that's a resumé. But put Dune and Excalibur together, and you just might have a story as ape-crazy-bananas as The Tempest.

What are we to make of this thing, now? It's beloved, we know, and not without reason, but what, exactly, is the deal? Shakespeare got a bit flaky there towards the end. He'd had a hell of a decade - who's had a better one? - doing stories about startlingly real people doing sort-of-realistic things while reciting some really staggering speeches. But as he wrapped up his career he wanted to do fairy tales and miracles. Was it just fashion? Because mostly it doesn't age well - only we specialists read A Winter's Tale or Cymbeline these days. But we have decided we love The Tempest - and I guess if you pin me down I can't blame us. Especially if it's got Captain Picard in it.

To begin with, they made it cold. That's almost perverse - so much of the poetry is about how lush and fertile Prospero's island is, but they set it in the Arctic. The set was made to look like fractured sheets of ice, and the shipwrecked characters spent the whole play shivering. And not only is it the Arctic, but it seems to be the American Arctic. The spirits chant in some lost tribal language, and Prospero is some kind of shaman; he summons the storm wearing a huge animal-skin robe with an elaborate pointy headpiece, his back to the audience. (It's an eerie moment that the play never quite lives up to.)

Ariel's not American - he's Goth. He's played as some sort of frost-demon in his white face-paint and floor-length Billy-Corgan-style trenchcoat, and he almost steals the show. The tense-but-productive relationship between him and Stewart's Prospero is the most convincing one onstage. He glides in and out of scenes without seeming to move his legs, and, in the show's one jaw-dropping moment, emerges dramatically out of the corpse of some kind of dead walrus-beast. (I wanted to check my text - where does it say "enter spirits with dead walrus?" I looked it up during the intermission; it turns out it was supposed to be a "banquet." I think Shakespeare would have dug the dead walrus.)

Anyway, Stewart is a bipolar kind of Prospero - he's erratic, he's moody. He's really powerful, and there's no telling what he'll do! His relationship with Miranda is sometimes touching and sometimes played for laughs. His most famous speech, "our revels now are ended," etc, is delivered in a state of distraction, half irritated, half in tears. Miranda un-selfconsciously hugs him when he hits "we are such stuff as dreams are made on," and it's a good, solid, lump-in-the-throat moment. The comic characters are not nearly funny enough for the amount of time they're onstage, but this is unavoidable. (Apparently this kind of thing was popular in 1610.) Ferdinand is a cipher, but that's how he's written. Antonio is a cipher of a villain, but that's how he's written. Alonso is confusing enough that he's kind of interesting, but he still doesn't make any sense. (He's sad his kid's dead, but not sad enough. He's happy his kid's alive, but not happy enough. And why is Prospero so eager to forgive him?) Sebastian is a little too good - he's one of those bad guys that Shakespeare couldn't resist giving the good lines to, and the actor made the most of it - but of course the character doesn't go anywhere.

And Caliban. What are we going to do about Caliban? We're stuck with him. He's a "thing of darkness," he's a slave who wants out, and you can't trust him with the white women. Shakespeare goes out of his way to make him not human - apparently he's kind of fish-like - but, honestly, does that really help the situation? He's a savage, created just about the time that white people started buying and selling them. All you can say in Shakespeare's defense is that at least Caliban's resentment is given to us bluntly, and at least he's allowed to speak in verse, which is more than can be said for his co-conspirators Stefano and Trunculo.

(Because the verse, after all, is why we care about this weird play, I suppose. "The isle is full of noises," and "I'll drown my book," and "our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." How can you argue with that? Especially me, who came at this thing all backwards - I got my Tempest and my Dante and my Ovid and my Spanish Tragedy and my Sanskrit when I was seventeen and fascinated with "The Waste Land." Eliot was trying to tell us that all of that was over, that he was the Last Word, but I guess I missed the point -- I remember those are pearls that were his eyes.)

...and do you remember the one where everybody thinks Data died in a shuttle accident but he's actually been kidnapped by some crazy gadget-collector guy? It's heartrending; everybody's in mourning. Picard is going through Data's personal effects, and he just can't help bringing Hamlet into it. "He was a man; take him for all in all," he muses. "I shall not look upon his like again." For sci-fi TV, a pretty effective, if pompous, moment -- especially since Data would be mightily flattered to be called a "man." But of course that's Hamlet on his late dad, which puts a whole new spin on the Picard-Data relationship. (And Data's miraculous "resurrection" has a real Shakespearean-romance flavor to it, doesn't it? "Weeping again the king my father's wrack..." We could do this all day.)

Which brings me back to the RSC, and the secret reason that Prospero and Ariel's labor-relations problem was so interesting. At the start of the last act, Prospero's got all of his enemies under his magical control; he can do whatever he wants to them, but he decides to be merciful and give everybody a happy ending. That's why it's a romance. It's hard to make this dramatic -- since nobody can really threaten Prospero, he's not much of a hero. You can make him tormented, like Stewart did. That's fine; it makes sense. But what they also did was unexpectedly make Ariel his conscience. It's there in the text, sort of -- Ariel does argue for mercy, and Prospero agrees. But this production really obviously made that moment the climax of the play. Ariel says: you know, if you could see how miserable these guys are now, your heart would just melt. Oh, do you think so? Prospero asks, and Stewart turns this into biting sarcasm; he doesn't believe it for a second. "Mine would," Ariel says, deadly serious, "were I [long pause] human." They stare at each other for about fifteen seconds, then Prospero starts weeping like a reformed drunk and talking about how he's going to kick the magic for good this time. Astonishing stuff, but especially astonishing because there had to be a significant part of the audience that, like me, was thinking: "Whoa! Ariel's Data!" He might be practically a god, but according to the creators of this show, (who must have watched Next Generation a time or two,) all Ariel wants is to be a real live boy. O strange new worlds, that have such people in them!

Good Lieutenant

Present Perfect

Winged Victory

Prodigal

Make It New

Stay down, champion.

Say Yes to Michigan.

The Blood-Dimmed Tide Is Loosed!

Oh, wait! We *do* still suck!

Well, that worked out okay.

Let this be my annual reminder...

The Meek Shall Has Teh Urfs

It's like I'm Vexed to Nightmare, or something...

The Usual Apology, and A Weird Tale

Ready on Day One

Black, Billowing, Shapeless.

Bad.

Tonight, I call upon all Americans...

Clear and new -- both good things!

Everybody's Having a Good Time! In Maine!

8-foot mechanical ape missing, owner mystified

Apologies, followed by sneering condescension.

On the other hand...

Please please please...

I Did Some Wonder Loaf

Shameless Self-Promotion

We Gotta Start This One Off

Heir to the Glimmering World

Pulp Fiction

Self-Evident

It's adorable when they try to be clever.

He's Just No Good At All

Don't Be Without One!

All Manner of Things Shall Be Well

News From the Future

The Huck Wants What it Wants

Geek Love

Chaos! Chaos and Murder!

Pillar of Fire

The Disorient Express

Water Music

River Music

Back to Save The Universe

Harry Potter Is Dead

Cinema!

I See You've Played Knifey-Spooney Before.

The National Interest

The Missing

Curtis Granderson Knows a Lot About the African-American Experience!

Senator Inhofe Welcomes Our New Overlords

...But they lost out to the dead guy.

Rebellion, Lies, Repeat

Good Movie, Troubling Resemblance

Excuses!

Modest Expectations

Baby, We'll Be Fine

Same As the Old Slang

Best Music 2006!

It Tastes Like Burning!

Holiday Greetings, and the End of an Era

A Screaming Comes Across My Desk

Poll: Americans Not As Crazy As We Thought

Cinema!

Gardening At Night

People Call Me Circuit City

They'll Need a Crane

This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine

Oh, wait! We do still suck!