Geek Love

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!

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

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

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

…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

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

…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.