Mutant Down'ds*

*Short for 'downloads'; rhymes with 'sounds'

MUSIC

I try to avoid all those full album blogs that flood the internets, as they are so overwhelming and morally reprehensible (kidding), but I give in every once in a while. Any lover of music and blogs at least ought to know about Mutant Sounds and the more narrow-focused Commercial Zone, and that gems like the following are waiting on the hard drives of some MegaUpload or RapidShare computer farm out in Wisconsin:

--Confetti are rightly compared to Young Marble Giants, but I would say they have a slightly more maximalist approach to minimalism. Give them a few more pieces of musical equipment and some club beats, and you might have Saint Etienne. I really love this stuff, the Sarah Records sound (a label Confetti had nothing to do with), music so pleasant and pretty and quiet as to be totally audacious. Their take on Josef K’s “It’s Kinda Funny” from their Retrospective LP both improves the melody and drowns it in groovy, yet barely there, atmosphere, and not long after that, there are three (3!) Wedding Present covers lying in wait.

--Spent Bullets is the second straight Adam Franklin solo album that starts with a hazy and off-kilter pop gem and ventures into territory so hazy and off-kilter as to transcend the category of “pop gem.” This guy’s good at what he does.

--Crazy Rhythms-era The Feelies had succumbed to the rise of jangle by the time they released their second album, The Good Earth, in 1986. Thank God, as this is canonical jangle, and features “When Company Comes,” a mostly wordless tangle of jangle that is even moodier and less beholden to conventional song structure than their similarly instrumental-ish greatest song ever, 1980’s “Raised Eyebrows.” This is leafy greens music, very humid.

--The Gun Club: Are they The Leaving Trains with a deeper sense of American imagery, or The Leaving Trains with less memorable tunes? It was The Leaving Trains who advised us to kill tunes, while The Gun Club’s Fire of Love sounds like corpse music, walking undead blues or something. Very good.


On the legal front, I went to the best but most out of my way TC record store, Treehouse, the other day, and bought a compilation by the great 60s British psych rock band Kaleidoscope called Dive Into Yesterday. That’s an unfair genre tag, though, as these guys, unconventional though they were, aren’t nearly self-indulgent enough to manage much in the mind-melting department. Theirs is a gentler pop touch. When you stumble across an 8-minute track called “The Sky Children” from a 1967 album called Tangerine Dream, you naturally expect a thoroughly boring psychedelic jam, correct? But Kaleidoscope take a page from “Desolation Row” and “Visions of Johanna,” and their epic album closer is instead mellow and lilting, repeating its pretty refrain for the duration. I suppose that’s its own sort of self-indulgence, and the lyrics aren’t worth tuning in for, something about “fluffy white tears,” etc., but the band recognizes a soothing melody and how long to sustain it.

Anyway, this is a peculiar comp, as it contains only seven-elevenths of Kaleidoscope’s highly revered debut but the entirety of their slightly less revered follow-up. There are a few singles thrown in too, and those are pretty special. I’d already heard “Flight From Ashiya,” which actually might melt your brain, restrained though it is, one of those songs that seems to be happening at the bottom of the ocean. “Jenny Artichoke” is clearly an attempt to cash in on the rise of Donovan, but this band is so lively and has such good taste that they’re incapable of embarrassing themselves. The shoulda-been-the-A-side B-side, “Just How Much You Are,” is the sweetest piece of orchestral pop I’ve heard in a decent while. Well, I’m always a bit surprised when I hear such savvy music from the 60s that isn’t by The Beatles or The Kinks, as if I didn’t already know that most of what I like originated among that decade’s unsung heroes. I need to make sure I never let the 60s become quaint, and Kaleidoscope certainly helps.

MOVIES

500 Days of Summer, for all its post-modern playfulness, is the most innocent, chaste and conservative love story in ages, and knows it. There’s something almost charming about a movie that tells you, with voiceover narration, that there are two kinds of people in the world, “men” and “women” (or was it “boys” and “girls”?) and that each is meant for the other. In fact, all straight love stories should be required to define themselves in this way, right? It seems like movies, in the 1930s say, used to do that implicitly. So here’s a very self-aware movie; that quality can sometimes be detrimental on the narrative level, but it also results in some perceptive moments, particularly those that acknowledge that our ideas about love are completely dependent upon our experiences with love.

A caveat: This was advertised as a movie about a boy who likes sad 80s British bands, and I am sad to report that’s not what it is. After all, no one’s really clamoring for that movie to be made (though were the masses really clamoring for a Joseph Gordon Levitt-Zooey Deschanel love story?). Anyway, the movie culminates in a scene in which our Smiths-loving protagonist realizes he bought in at an early age to the myth of love and true happiness, and that post-punk is really what cursed him. I guess I’ve always felt that Morrissey’s denial of the possibility of happiness outweighs his belief in the ideal of love, but I believe this movie knows what it’s talking about (what with its plethora of vintage band t-shirts) and would’ve liked to see this developed more. Perhaps they saved that angle for the 500 Days of Summer music blog.

I re-watched two of my favorites of 2005, Mysterious Skin and Me and You and Everyone We Know, which are about—this is singular—real people.

BOOKS

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte : There’s scarcely a mention of England in Wuthering Heights, its interior spaces are very lightly rendered, as are its exterior spaces, so it won’t fit into any category of 19th century British literature that I can think of. I don’t know what to make of it except to cherish it as a glorious fever dream. Charlotte Bronte probably learned how to write by reading, and Emily Bronte learned by hiding in caves.

Private Lives and Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward : I’ll quote myself from an e-mail and say that Noel Coward “charms the pantalones [sic] off me, perhaps only literally.” I don’t know what I meant by that, but I will say that I was messily eating popcorn last night and felt utterly boorish, having just finished Act One of Private Lives. I will have to compile a list of the wittiest lines.

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt : I was wondering if I could banish any lingering traces of unfulfilled expectation from childhood, so I read this for the first time. It’s a nice piece of writing, with a great prologue that describes with remarkable precision what the first week of August feels like. Most children’s stories at their root are about the first important events of childhood that can’t be communicated to adults, leaving the child feeling lonelier and wiser. That story is told well here, and how lovely that the fountain of youth is described as left over from “some other plan for the way the world should be.”

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams : Williams has been parodied to death, but no one ever tells you how plausible these characters are.

Unbeatable, or Nearly So

1) If Kathryn Bigelow doesn’t win the Best Director Oscar next year, the glass ceiling will have another 18 million cracks in it, as a result of the sheer awesomeness of her achievement. Also, I will weep. Roger Ebert called The Hurt Locker “a return to strong, exciting narrative” and “a film shot clearly so that we know exactly who everybody is and where they are and what they're doing and why.” That’s no small point, and I’m glad critics have been picking up on this. The Hurt Locker is not only the best-directed movie in a while, but also the rare action movie that seems to have been directed at all, rather than assembled from barely usable fragments in the editing room.

Note: I’ve just learned that Yogurt agrees, generally, though maybe not with all my wretched phrasings.

2) That a song as huge as “Funnel Cloud” was made by a trio (The Sleepover Disaster), and seemingly with a minimum of overdubs, is a fact almost more astonishing than the song itself. Here’s a perfectly patterned rock song, one that’s simultaneously monstrous and beautiful. It’s the best song this year and the crowning achievement on Hover, which alternately recalls a number of diverse vintage shoegazing bands, while always proving the musicians versatile and virtuosic, never generic. Rock.

3) I’m finally catching up with For Against’s Shade Side Sunny Side, which already strikes me, belatedly, as one of the best albums of 2008. For (not against) newcomers, the band formed in Lincoln, Nebraska in the mid 80s, sounding much more like the British post-punk bands of five years before (Chameleons, Comsat Angels, Cure, Sound) than like anything that was happening in America at the time. Blame it on Nebraska. 1988’s December is every bit as gloomy as that other Lincoln fable, Boys Don’t Cry. And I don’t mean the Cure album, though I would compare December to that band’s Seventeen Seconds, with its sharp melodies set against a dismal landscape. For Against always set their own style though. The drums with those super-tight toms; Jeffrey Runnings’ sweet, clear, choirboy voice.

Twenty years later, the band are contemporaries of Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr, bands that realize that the dense, deep, intricate guitar rock of their youths is good enough to spend a whole life pursuing. All these bands have ceased pushing musical boundaries, but continue to explore new emotional terrain. And speaking of emotional terrain, Shade Side Sunny Side is a peculiar title. 2002’s Coalesced walked the sunny side, with its considerable jangle quotient, while the new disc seems all shade. It’s some of the most enveloping late night headphone guitar-drums-and-voice music I’ve heard in ages.

Note: All the aforementioned For Against albums are available from Words on Music, located down on University Ave in Minneapolis. Words on Music was also responsible for an attractive reissue of The Lucy Show’s Mania a couple years ago. The label doesn’t seem to do much more than re-release lost post-punk classics and release new For Against albums. But they do those two things very well, and they have a $5 summer sale.

4) I’m a bit surprised, but not too much, that an album with ambitions as modest as Jeremy Jay’s Slow Dance continues to be my favorite of this year. It has a winning romantic sensibility, and an idea about the world. It ostensibly takes place in some L.A. where it’s never very warm, where angels walk the streets and solemn couples dance by the fireplace (or where lonely men long to do so). Even so, and despite the album’s slick and simple pop songs, you might imagine Jeremy Jay hunkered down in the Chelsea Hotel in the mid 70s, looking out at the dark and lonely night and smiling about the loveliness of it all. There has certainly been more accomplished music released this year, but Slow Dance is a singular experience that can tell you what life is worth.

5) Wuthering Heights is weird, in all meanings of the word. Mostly those having to do with the supernatural, the strange, and the fated. I don’t know how to account for half of the violent and bizarre behavior in the novel (except as it relates to the incestuousness of life on the moors) but it bewitches me utterly. I picked the book up while reading The Book of Night Women, after realizing I was out of practice with older British prose. Marlon James’ style has much more in common with the books that would have been available to his characters, than it does with anything being written today.

6) My life has become consumed completely by the spectre of Bradford Cox. Despite not knowing the guy, I feel I can say what Catherine says about Heathcliff: “I am Bradford.” There’s this interview where he talks about his childhood and his loves, there’s his very cool blog, and there’s his new album cover, which is either brave or brazen, and very selective about what it reveals. His music is great, too.



Bonus: Three more rad songs

a) The Fiery Furnaces’ “Lost At Sea” has some of the best Pavement crunch I’ve heard in a while.

b) Rediscovering Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville has been groovy, especially now that I am the same height as the first song.

c) Lloyd Cole’s “Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?” isn’t the best song on Rattlesnakes, and I was initially suspicious of its oversold charms. But: its loveliness is ultimately undeniable. Highlights include the spot-on lyrics about cynical friends, and, well, the hook, after that opening guitar picking. Woosh.

Also, download this and get with this.

The Merriest Month of July

MOVIES

I’ve been a bit surprised by the critical reception of Bruno, and wonder how it might be viewed differently if Sacha Baron Cohen was a gay Alabaman. Well, he’s not, so I guess that’s a silly question, but even as a Jewish Englishman, his duty to properly represent a group of people is no greater. GLAAD wants a vision of homosexual normality in Bruno, which is insane, since Cohen’s first allegiance is to comedy, regardless of how many people see his movie and with what false motives. That said, Bruno strikes me as an entirely less troubling, more tolerant, and much funnier movie than (the over-praised) Borat, because its central characters exist in a somewhat recognizable comic universe. Who can truly deny that the love story with Lutz is kind of sweet, and that the family that comes into being at the end, with young OJ, is as close to normal as any family needs to be?

When GLAAD says that Bruno doesn’t “help America understand the hundreds of thousands of gay families who get up every day, do the carpool then rush home to make dinner and be with their children,” I believe they are simply saying that sex is bad and marriage is good (which is not a surprising position for them to take when marriage has become the entire focus of the gay rights movement). Granted, much of the gay sex depicted in Bruno is far from realistic, but GLAAD’s attitude allows critics to continue calling the film “cringe-worthy” because they are unable to differentiate between what is simply good fun and what is absurd theater. I never felt that Cohen was denigrating anyone’s sexuality or sex practices; the only truly cringe-worthy moment is a scene with Ron Paul (simply because the film makes him look foolish in a way that has nothing to do with the point of the satire, so you sit there distracted by the downcast eyes of poor Ron Paul) and the only depicted sex that seems capable of endangering anyone is the humorless business at a swingers party.

Public Enemies tells its story efficiently, but has no real interest in any of the elements that make the story worth telling: the Great Depression, John Dillinger’s fame, motivations, the minutiae of criminal life. The movie is great to look at, and at least we have Michael Mann to show us what digital video can do. He’s a great stylist, but the look of Public Enemies sits uncomfortably with a typical Hollywood score, overbearing sound effects, and bad bad bad CGI at the crucial moment (Mann could stand to spend some time at the Dogme 95 school). It’s not all bad: it has the best crowd head-turning scene since Strangers on a Train. The actors are good, but Christian Bale’s role is so limited that you might wonder why his character went on to kill himself 30 years after the events of the story, why you should care, and why the movie has chosen to tell you this.

BOOKS

Currently:

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James : A thrilling narrative so far, in the midst of all its colors and violence. Take blog-approved John Crow’s Devil and multiply it by two, and you’ll have this in length and power.

Other recent reads:

Passing by Nella Larsen : Great in all the expected ways, and timely in a couple of unexpected ways. First, it fits in well with the new science-fiction-of-the-mentally-ill genre that I noted a while back, at least in the way that the narrator is finally so overcome with her perception of meaning that her last act is to faint. What did that mean? As she began to work it out in her numbed mind, she was shaken with another hideous trembling. Not that! Oh, not that! I would be surprised if any reader has ever been able to divine what the narrator has discovered in these sentences. She is not mentally ill, just unable to cope in a world of passing.

Second, the character Clare Kendry, in light of recent news, reads like the original of Michael Jackson. The ways her patterns of behavior might be interpreted are the same as the ways Jackson’s life has been interpreted in recent weeks—the loneliness, the desperate need for attention. Whether or not passing was the central dilemma of Jackson’s life, he seems to exist in this book from time to time.

Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin : I had hoped that John would decide between sin and salvation in a way that sprang organically out of the story, but then there’s that long scene on the threshing floor in which he’s inhabited by a spirit and has the choice made for him. I balked at first, but it becomes apparent that this spirit or curse is something that’s existed in the speech of his ancestors for generations, and his choice will always be defined by history and things out of his control. And there’s more at stake than salvation; religion is the realm of family for John, so choosing the opposite denies much more than God. But salvation is a continual process, so with my mind always on Baldwin, I know that he may fail immediately after the story ends.

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin : Maybe the best collection of short stories I’ve read, and “Sonny’s Blues” is without a doubt the single best short story I’ve read. The latter makes evident, both explicitly and through the forcefulness and honesty of its telling, the reason these stories need to be told. “Come Out the Wilderness” is a nice companion to recently viewed My Dinner With Andre, suggesting that we are all lost and don’t know what we’re doing, but maintain an illusion that we know because we’re afraid to find out that everyone else is lost. There’s such a variety of narrators in these stories, a variety of attitudes about black people and white people, an awareness that even the enlightened few have blinders on, that I have to wonder who was this man James Baldwin? How was he so brilliant?

MUSIC

1) Unless they have an undiscovered classic I’m unaware of, I wonder why The Everly Brothers never recorded their own Pet Sounds in the early 60s, defining “the album” as an art form, swapping ideas with The Beatles, and leaving The Beach Boys mere forgotten hitmakers. The Everlys’ best songs of the late 50s have all sorts of neat twists and turns, and “Cathy’s Clown” (1960) is a thrilling arrangement and has the best harmonies I’ve ever heard outside of “God Only Knows.” But I guess the brothers were always just a couple of country singers.

2) In the past 12 days, I’ve seen live performances by Elvis Costello, Meat Puppets, No Age, local acts Gay Beast and Baby Guts, and a veritable cavalcade of opening acts (Gay Witch Abortion, Knife World, Manimal Quartet, Mayor Daley, Pterodactyl, Tiger Gash, Atomic Annie, Kill to Kill, the not-noisy-in-the-least Kate Voegele) for a grand total of $19, which also got me a delicious falafel sandwich. Either this is the way things go in the summer, or I’ve just been lucky. All those local bands almost give the impression that there’s a vibrant music scene here, but I’m still not sure.

Wild for Idle

MUSIC

Best albums of June:


Idlewild, Post Electric Blues : Whoa! Is the title a reference to the fact that this latest album was dispatched directly to fans? Because while these “blues” are mellower than much of the band’s discography, they’re still more “electric” than “post electric” (what would that even mean?). I received my pre-order copy (and am named in the liner notes!) yesterday, and while I don’t have much sense of the band’s popularity in their native UK, I feel that this could be a big album for them when it finds general release later this year. I’ve been waiting for Idlewild to finally be recognized in the US, at least critically, and that’s made them seem perpetually young. But with Post Electric Blues, here’s what you might call the “classic Idlewild sound.” A fine melding of their Americana, Scottish folk, post-punk and chamber pop influences, this is a more successful attempt than 2005’s (still fine) Warnings/Promises to diversify their sound, and unlike that album, this one really coheres.

Here’s a breakdown of the highlights: “Readers & Writers” is the sure-thing lead single, propelled by one of those Los Campesinos! multi-instrumental hyper drum rolls (duly noted by Idlewild skeptic Aaron); “Take Me Back to the Islands” rewrites The Lemonheads’ best ever “My Drug Buddy,” with beautiful results, more fully orchestrated, a bit less profound; “Post-Electric” builds to the type of cataclysmic guitar riff that featured so prominently on 2007’s Make Another World; some vintage Johnny Marr guitar is tucked inside “All Over the Town,” very low in the mix, a minor feature where another band might make it the point of the song; “Circles in Stars” has some of that “Readers & Writers” shuffle, but is unlike anything they’ve ever done, and maybe only their second song whose groovy bass line is its defining feature; closer “Take Me Back In Time” could have earned a place on The Joshua Tree, which may sound like a diss as I’ve never much cared for that album or known anyone who does. Still, they might have just pulled a “With or Without You.”

If we’re looking back to 1987, though, let’s recall that R.E.M. became bona fide celebrities that year, with the release of Document. It’s become easy to think of Idlewild in terms of R.E.M., not because they sound much alike, but because they’ve been making the same progress from album to album as R.E.M. did in their early years. Well, Post Electric Blues is a better Idlewild album than Document is an R.E.M. album, and it sounds like a summation of their career thus far, a template for future successes. Here’s hoping. It’ll probably turn out to be another one “for the fans.”


Patrick Wolf, The Bachelor : He is, to quote Wolf skeptic Ola, a “cutie,” but off-Broadway vocals or not, he’s no Adam Lambert (speaking of, has there ever been a more legitimate and deserved pop star on Idol, only to lose the title?!); Wolf has always been a bit inaccessible, kept himself at a distance, and after the vivacious Magic Position, gloom again predominates on the new Bachelor. I’m currently hooked on “Damaris,” which would have you screaming “Kate Bush!” if Wolf wasn’t a real musician—nay, artist—but this album’s all about those choral swells, or whatever it takes to enliven Wolf’s more than metaphorical “dead meat.”

At the Fine Line last weekend (after three interminable opening acts), Wolf was a charmer, telling tales of his teenage love for 90s indie rockers That Dog (featuring the great Petra Haden), singing along in his bedroom to their anthem “Minneapolis.” There’s no evidence of that influence on The Bachelor—you may instead imagine a dour boy who’s spent his whole life wandering rainy lowlands. As much as he prostitutes himself in his vids, on-stage he comes across as humble and shy, at least until the rail-grinding dance moves of “Vulture”—and what else can you do during a song produced by Alec Empire? Anyway, The Bachelor amounts to a very fine album, one of the year’s best, thanks in large part to Wolf’s immaculate vocals—not off-Broadway at all, not after you’ve heard him tumble through the chorus of “Augustine” live, where you can verify he’s not a robot.


Sonic Youth, The Eternal : They’re indulging some of their lesser impulses here, resulting in an album that has more in common with the terrible NYC Ghosts and Flowers than anything else they’ve released this decade. Why are the lyrics of “Anti-Orgasm” so bad? When did this band turn 50 going on 19? But if this is more jam session than belabored album, well, that’s part of its success. Because Sonic Youth never forgot how to rock, and this is one of their most whip-quick hours. But when I chalk up their ten greatest albums (as inspired by Rockaliser’s tribute to Bob Dylan) I find that The Eternal just doesn’t have the riffs, the intricacies, or the rifficacies to make the cut.

1. Daydream Nation
Well, you could live here.
2. Sister
You could live here too, but it’s easy to forget that Sonic Youth once made punk records as concise as those of their peers.
3. Goo
Lee Ranaldo typically writes two of the three best songs on any SY album, and here we have “Mote” and “Disappearer,” the greyest and raddest rock songs evah. “Mildred Pierce” is crazier than Joan Crawford in a wire hanger factory.
4. Murray Street
A noble attempt at economy, here’s one of their shorter records, with four of its seven songs bordering on epic. A labor of love, equal parts labor and love.
5. Dirty
Sonic Youth post-grunge: they remind everyone they invented grunge, and that they’re cooler than all you suckers. “Sugar Kane” is in competition for best ever, and “Theresa’s Sound World” is close behind.
6. Washing Machine
The first SY record I loved, the one that gave birth to my frequent defense: “No, they do more than just feedback!”
7. Sonic Nurse
Longer, more erratic than Murray Street, but don’t be fooled: they’re not just wandering, they’re looking for something.
8. EVOL
They’ve never done the art-damaged thing better, or been more mesmerizing, than on “Tom Violence” and “Shadow of a Doubt,” but the trance gives way to sleep all too quickly.
9. Rather Ripped
A bona fide pop album, or as close as they’ll come. “Do You Believe in Rapture” is like a treatise on restraint.
10. A Thousand Leaves
Sometimes Sonic Youth get lost too, but then they stumble upon some wonders: “Sunday,” “Wildflower Soul.”

Also:

If you’re spending your summer in the city, The Dils are just about the only band you need to hear. The L.A. band recorded a mere three singles from 1977-1979, resulting in eight songs that are among the best in the punk canon. The band’s defining feature is their goddamned weirdness, which doesn’t manifest itself in the music so much as in your lingering suspicion about their earnestness when they sing lines like “I hate the rich” and “I don’t listen to the cops, I wish they all were dead.” Well, they’re bona fide punkers, so I guess I believe it, but it’s hardly surprising that they went on to form a cowpunk band called Rank and File and remove the bit about cops when they rerecorded their own “Sound of the Rain.” That song’s got a major hook, and there’s a melodic buzz to all their singles that has less to do with sexual frustration (a la the Buzzcocks) than it does with walkin’ round in the city, feelin’ cool, sun shinin’ down on the parkin’ lot.

Save them for a sunny day, though. If it’s overcast, you’ll want the third album by The Comsat Angels, Fiction (its predecessor, Sleep No More, is just too oppressive for summertime). Here’s your ideal spacious post-punk record, before or after a rainfall. These recommendations have both been scientifically tested on my iPod on the streets of St. Paul, so you can’t lose. If you’re locked in your bedroom all summer, you might try some of those Atlas Sound virtual 7-inches.

BOOKS

Currently:

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin : I have to wonder how much of Baldwin is in this book. Does John, his fictional self, end up choosing the narrow path or Broadway? Baldwin chose the latter, so I must ask, When did he stop believing himself to be sinful? John is clearly in love with Elisha, and I appreciate how John’s feelings about this love change throughout the novel’s opening without being clearly anticipated. One moment he seems determined to submerge his sexuality in the church, and the next he remembers he loves blonde movie stars too much. He knows his mind as much as any 15-year old.

Other recent reads:

Post Office by Charles Bukowski : Classic novel about the cruelty of employment. Bukowski alter-ego Chinaski has pretty much the right attitude about his situation, which is the situation of most people—overtime, unreasonable superiors, numbness and pain as a result of monotonous tasks. I shouldn’t talk, but I’ll need a job soon myself, so this is timely. Chinaski, despite his misogyny and racial anxieties, is a charming guy, and if he can get through it, there’s hope for us yet. Did I mention it’s funny?

The Arrival by Shaun Tan : Fantastic wordless novel, more linear and straightforward in its telling than the woodcut novels of the 20s and 30s with which I’m familiar, but with a similar dreamlike quality. The objects that immigrants bring with them to a new country, the way our environment determines the objects we invent, the way immigrants take ownership of the new objects they encounter–all of this is conveyed in a language simultaneously literal and symbolic, in a way that only pictures allow. Those fantastical landscapes—are they really there, are they how a newcomer sees the world, are they symbolic representations of the landscapes’ meanings? I think the way the ending parallels the beginning suggests it’s all real.

The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers : Has there ever been a more empathetic (or better) writer than Carson McCullers? The goings-on in this novella are essentially a vehicle for statements like the following: “The good people thought that if those two had found some satisfaction of the flesh between themselves, then it was a matter concerning them and God alone”; “Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.” The story has its charms though, and does what stories are supposed to do, which is describe a world in which people act, strangely or not, with or without motive. I can’t express how much I love this writer. Only Truman Capote and James Baldwin are in her league.

The Merrier Month of June

This blog has been going for a year. How did you celebrate?

BOOKS

I picked up We Got the Neutron Bomb again and found this gem courtesy of Gerber (a.k.a. Michelle Bell):

“We [Gerber and Darby Crash] were trying to figure out sexually if we were actually human beings. We’d look at ourselves naked in this full-length mirror with Bowie lyrics cut out and glued on it. On acid it was as if I didn’t believe I was a human being.”

I’m making up my summer reading list. Recommend me something.

Other recent reads:

Lowboy by John Wray : This is a very good novel, and having read it close on the heels of Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances and Scott Heim’s We Disappear, I feel that I’ve detected a new trend in science fiction writing. None of these novels are SF per se, but they do seem to indicate that the only relevant SF plots in this modern era of confusion and doubt might be those that exist in the minds of the mentally ill. Galchen’s narrator believes his wife has been replaced by a doppelganger, Heim’s narrator’s mother believes she can save all the missing children of Kansas, and Lowboy believes he can save the world from apocalypse by losing his virginity. I don’t think that the irrational beliefs of the characters in these stories signals a critique of the irrational extrapolations of SF itself (I’ve never known there to be a high incidence of schizophrenia among SF writers). Rather, these writers have a sincere wish to illuminate the way that the human mind creates meaning, and the immense faulty (or true) structures it is capable of sustaining. These are books about characters who peer dangerously beneath the surface of things, who read meaning in every element of their environments—“lit up like fireworks by the ideas inside them,” as Wray puts it—and narrators who don’t question them, who come to accept their hostile view of the world. This approach might be nothing new—Philip K. Dick made a career of it—but these three books together make up a persuasive trilogy for 2009.

It might be worth noting that Lowboy and We Disappear are twinned in another way—their depiction of mother-son relationships. Lowboy is the more psychologically acute novel—We Disappear is an emotional work first and foremost—but both throw out “child is the father of the man” for “mother is the mother of the son.” That’s a clunky phrase that won’t be adopted by the psychiatric community anytime soon, but it’s there from page one in both works, whether or not Lowboy’s ending blindsides you.

Skinwalkers is the ideal mystery: crime in chapter one, motive in chapter two, and if you’re like me, no solution until the very end. That’s satisfying enough, but what’s better is Hillerman’s deep sense of his characters and the way they are defined by their environment. It’s in the details; he even knows what day the mail comes.

The best stories in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned come at the end, when Wells Tower strays from his comfort zone, away from forty-ish divorced male narrators and blatant metaphors (though I will say that the rotten meat in “Retreat” is important not so much as a metaphor as it is for the way it tests the characters). The eighty-ish single male narrator in “Door in Your Eye,” the spiteful young boy in “Leopard,” and the insecure teenage girl in “Wild America” are all beautiful creations, giving such crystalline shape to their stories that I have to take back what I said earlier: with characters like these, the short story can never exhaust its possibilities. “Wild America” is the standout, so loaded with details of being thirteen and unwanted that you might have to cry. The title story overcomes its own silliness and is crucial to the collection, putting in plain view all the subtle cruelties that simmer through the rest of the book.

MUSIC

1) They played “Baby, I Love Your Way”—the Big Mountain version from the Reality Bites soundtrack, I think—at the CVS in Helena recently and I realized that it’s not often that I haven’t thought about a song since the last time I heard it. I bet I’ve even thought about Lisa Loeb since the last time I heard “Stay.”

2) I was remembering how wonderful Oh, Inverted World is, and how unfair it is that The Shins are often associated with Garden State (decent movie though it is), and how incorrect it is that that movie’s use of their songs is often equated with The Graduate’s Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack. The Shins owe something to Bookends, I suppose, but if the impenetrable and mumbly “New Slang” is this generation’s equivalent of the easily legible “Sound of Silence,” does that mean that life’s meanings are no longer apparent? I choose not to believe it. “New Slang” has nothing to say to you, except that pop music is very beautiful. Nor does it want to be a definitive song, or anything but a chilling lead-in to “The Celibate Life,” the most sublime minute-and-a-half of earphoria since the Television Personalities.

3) The word “dated” doesn’t compute for me, at least not as an indicator of quality. I am pretty good at determining the age of songs, but my favorite old songs aren’t those that have aged the best but those that are the best. Erasure doesn’t have better synths than Spandau Ballet, just better songs.

True Grit!

Currently:

The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D’Ambrosio : These stories, set in the present-day, seem to inhabit some shadowy bygone era of the Pacific Northwest, as if Washingtonians are still living in the blurry, rainy world of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. I love that mood. D’Ambrosio strikes a reverential tone and finds beautiful images in his final sentences in a way that most writers would kill for. His endings don’t blindside you though. They’re the sort of perfection you expect to find every so often, the sort of genius that seems available to everyone—like the melody of a great pop song—but that very few possess.

Astro City: Life in the Big City by Kurt Busiek et al : Busiek says in the introduction that if Watchmen was the deconstruction of the superhero comic, Astro City is the series that put the pieces back together. That’s about right; the fullness and detail of the metropolis are similar, but the tone is flipped, rollicking and freewheeling but sacrificing none of the intelligence of late 80s comixistentialism. The Spirit is another point of reference, in the way that each Astro City story ends with a punchline that signals narrative completion.

Other recent reads:

They Came Like Swallows is another small miracle from William Maxwell, who beautifully captures the strange and inescapable fact of being alive. That may sound like a blurb, but it’s true.

Keyboard Presents The Best of the 80s: The Artists, Instruments & Techniques of an Era is a collection of interviews from Keyboard magazine in the 1980s, in which all your favorite synth pop artists talk about their interests, their gear, their live shows, and more. I read the articles about OMD, Erasure and The Human League, and the common factors in their worldviews seem to be these: rejection of punk rock instrumentation but a desire to channel its energy; interest in synthesizers not for the sake of the technology but because “we like the way they sound,” and because synths allow autonomy and don’t require great musical skill. All valid reasons, but the proof is in the music, and these are three of my favorite bands ever. They didn’t use keyboard presets, but built all their sounds from scratch, and it shows in the warmth of their recordings. Andy McCluskey of OMD made a prediction in 1982 that the synthesizer would become the cliché instrument of the 80s for all the wrong reasons, and he was right.

Note: When my WMCN membership expires, I will have to reconfigure this as a music blog, so it’s good I’ve been writing a lot about music-related books recently.

Other recent curiosities:

“The Pavement Tapes” by Alex Ross originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1997 and can now be found in that very cool Brighten the Corners reissue that came out last year. Ross writes about how the meaninglessness (or the meaningfulness that defies meaning) of Pavement’s lyrics is one of the band’s greatest qualities, which I completely agree with. I rarely listen to lyrics except when I feel the music urging me to (making Brighten the Corners one of the few albums I can quote) or when the message is especially tied to my worldview (The Queen is Dead and Pet Sounds being two more albums I can quote). The sound of the words usually takes precedence over the words themselves, and as Bob Dylan might have said, rock ‘n’ roll’s meaninglessness is holy. But Alex Ross writes about meaning/words/holiness much more eloquently than I.

Basically I’ve just been thinking a lot again about the genius of Pavement. I never noticed until recently how absurdly (and subtly) elaborate their song structures are (did they ever write a simple verse-chorus-verse?), and (as The Man Who Invented Himself and I discovered) how much wisdom is embedded in a song as seemingly random as “Gold Soundz.” You can never quarantine a past. You’re empty, and I’m empty. They’re coming to the chorus now. But I don’t want my appreciation to become too academic, because that would negate the deep feeling I’ve always had for them.

I was sent a William Saroyan story called “Dentist and Patient” with my Beefheart, and found that it reinforced what I love about Saroyan (whose novel The Human Comedy is one of my favorites). This, in a nutshell, is what happens: the patient refers to himself as a cheater to the dentist, but the dentist, unwilling to believe him, fails to realize he has been cheated by the patient. Saroyan has been criticized as a naïve writer, or one unwilling to recognize the existence of evil (in the way that Roberto Benigni’s fictional denial of evil in Life is Beautiful makes the film itself evil (supposedly), or whatever). In “Dentist and Patient,” Saroyan seems to be casting himself as the naïve dentist, celebrating his own ignorant optimism. If evil in the world makes optimism wrong, does good in the world make pessimism wrong?

I finally watched the feminist masterwork True Grit, whose central character is an androgynous lesbian teenager (Kim Darby, my new icon) who recruits an alcoholic marshal (John Wayne) to help avenge her father’s murder. The film doesn’t quite deliver on its initial promise as a playful and progressive Western; Wayne, being such a dominating personality, eventually takes the spotlight, and while it’s a thrill to watch him do any old thing, it’s at the expense of Darby’s own “true grit.” Even so, the film puts most “revisionist” Westerns made in the 40 years since to shame, and has a touching denouement. Wayne and Darby stand by the dead father’s grave, and Darby says that one day she will be buried in this plot, and that she would like Wayne to be buried beside her, as he doesn’t have any family of his own. “But you should be buried next to your husband and children,” Wayne says, and Darby doesn’t respond. Here’s what she wants to say:

“You know I’ll never have a family. This country, in this unenlightened era, won’t let me marry who I want to marry, nor adopt children. You and me, we’re meant to be alone. You, because you’re just a loner, and me, because I like womenfolk. Let’s be each other’s family.”

Blogging About Architecture

Currently:

They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell : Just barely begun, but the Maxwell touch is already evident in this, his second novel, published 43 years before So Long, See You Tomorrow. Again, the narrative perspective is impossible to define (third person close? retrospective first person with swapped pronouns?) and even seems to break rules, but rendered with such authority that it needs only be defined by the story itself. There is a strange blend of child and adult points-of-view here. Maxwell is not David Gordon Green, making his child characters wise beyond their years. Instead, he shows them following codes, trying to be good, with a sadness and complexity usually reserved for grown-up characters.

Other recent reads:

The Commitments by Roddy Doyle : The thing I admire most about this book, Doyle’s first, is its complete lack of hesitation when attempting to represent the power of music in words. The novel chronicles the career of an 80s era Dublin soul band who mostly play Motown classics, and the lyrics to those songs are sprawled across at least a quarter of the book’s pages with such reckless enthusiasm that the ability of soul music to excite and inspire is always right at the surface. That famous line that says writing about music is like dancing about architecture becomes almost laughable when you see what Doyle can do. Never let anyone tell you music can’t be written about, or that it can’t change lives.

Also admirable is the book’s narrow focus: it moves from the band’s inception to their first practice, rehearsal to rehearsal, gig to gig, with no subplots outside of these distinct scenes. Doyle is a master of what might be called micro-scenes, two or three sentences that accomplish as much as two or three pages by any other writer. For these and other reasons, it might be wrong to call The Commitments a novel (under that category, you might find it “insubstantial”). It doesn’t concern individual characters so much as an entire community (not unlike one of the band’s covers, “Chain Gang,” a song about collective struggle, not any individual man’s). The book is very much about how community grows and how it falls apart, and what’s left behind when it does.

The Commitments’ music might be seen as white appropriation of black culture, but that would be wrong. Instead, it’s a recognition of kinship not previously suspected. There’s a beautiful moment early on when the teenage boys who will soon form The Commitments listen to James Brown’s “Sex Machine” for the first time. There are these white lads listening to the record, and the black lads who sing backup for James, and pretty soon the pronouns start to merge and it becomes one collective musical experience. Black and white disappear; it all takes place via a record player anyway. Then we get this great parenthetical: “The lads (in Jimmy’s bedroom) smiled at each other. This was it.”

By book’s end, The Commitments have dissolved and the remains of the band are looking now to the sound of The Byrds. They’re searching for a new style that can make them famous, sure, but Doyle isn’t being cynical: they really did like soul music, and now they really like jangle rock (notice how the lyrics are represented the same for both styles; that’s the language of love). When Doyle says The Byrds are “the best they’d ever heard,” the boys are simply succumbing to the hyperbole that any music lover who lives in the moment knows.

I could say some of the same things about Mystery Train (which I have finally finished). For one, Greil Marcus often falls victim to the hyperbole of the present moment. There are dozens of songs he believes to be the “most frightening” he’s ever heard. That doesn’t bother me. I do it myself. What does bother me a bit is the way he relies on lines like this, to describe the power in any and every blues vocal: “He sounds as if he has already lost more than anyone can return.” Nobody knows what that means, but it sounds nice, and evokes a tantalizing cult of masculinity that Marcus of course can’t help but get behind in his very masculine book.

But I admire his approach to music writing (like I do Doyle’s). Marcus truly believes that music can tell us what it means to live, and that these meanings can be put into words (only once does he describe a song as “too beautiful for words”). I would happily read his thoughts on anything. Moving through the distinct sections of his book, anticipating what he might say about the next artist—Sly Stone…Randy Newman…Elvis—I had that childhood feeling of playing a video game, progressing through the levels, breathlessly awaiting the next boss. A weird metaphor, I know, but true.

Home Land had many more laughs, some unbelievable carnage, and ended on a cosmic “this is what life means” level, unexpected but satisfying proof that the author was all along aware of the philosophies embedded in his absurd scenes. Hicksville wasn’t as full of laughs or carnage, but while comics tend to be more ambiguous in their meanings, it also reached its own cosmic closure. Hicksville’s library of unpublished comics is one of the great fictional places, like Oz or the Death Star or Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama.

Sam Barry progress:

80 pages.