My wife, baby kid and I have been on the road for nearly a month now and are flying back to Prague this evening. Currently, we’re holed up in my hometown of Belmont, MA, a town which – despite its close proximity to Boston – was once declared ‘Region’s Most Boring Town’ in a Boston Globe headline that I gleefully clipped out of the paper’s metro region section as a spiteful teenager. Belmont is so boring that, until recently, there was a law forbidding the sale of any booze within the teeny town confines, but that’s a blog rant for another day…
One of the poignant aspects of being home is all the Beavis-and-Butthead-type memories from junior high years that had nearly vanished from memory but come flooding back once I walk around the old neighborhood. This being my first trip back as a parent, these incidents somehow seem all the more comically juvenile and parochial in juxtaposition with my current ‘mature’ state.
Case in point: a few days ago, I walked by the bus stop where I used to idle away interminable periods waiting for the bus to come take me to more enlightened, boozing neighboring places like Cambridge and Boston. The site of the old bus stop immediately brought back a blazing hot summer day in 1989 or so when I was waiting around and spotted a big fat debauched-looking metalhead guy crossing the street with a brown paper bag under his arm and a weird dazed-yet-exalted expression on his face. ‘Hey, man,’ he cheerfully regaled me from halfway across the street. “What town is this?”
Always a good sign, I think as I yell back “Belmont!”
“Belmont,” he says, wincing slightly. “Last thing I remember, I was drinking at the Aku-Aku last night and musta blacked out…”
The Aku-Aku was an incredibly depressing-looking tiki bar located in cement mall in a corner of Cambridge near the Belmont border. It had a spinning plastic sign picturing the Easter Island statues that people had thrown innumerable rocks through. The Aku-Aku figures prominently in Caroline Knapp’s tell-all memoir of her years as a Boston-dwelling alcoholic, Drinking, A Love Story.
“… Next thing I know,” continues the metalhead, “I wake up and some fat bitch is on top of me, going… (mimes coitus)… so I said, (with great vigor:) ‘Get the fuck off me, give me some beer, some money and some sandwiches!'” At this point, he happily flashes open his paper bag to show me some beer and sandwiches lurking inside.
I spend a few minutes talking to this jolly reveler while we wait for the bus, eventually getting onto the subject of music and the Boston-area punk/metal band Bullet Lavolta in particular. He mentions being a big fan as well, and adds that they’ve had a big influence on his band. “Oh, what are you guys called?” I ask. “Sinister Minister,” he answers with great delectation.
At the time, this little meeting provided a much-appreciated rebuttal to the notion (apparently supported by Globe reportage) that nothing of interest EVER happened in this neighborhood. For a while, I would wait for the bus and look at the houses across the street, wondering where this sandwich-and-beer-dispensing seductress might live.
(Photo: corners of Belmont and Grove streets. Above-described incident happened in the left-hand corner of this scene).
Two weeks ago, we drove down south and met up with the wife’s family in a town called Henry’s Castle (Jindrichuv Hradec). The castle was nice, although I never learned who Henry was or how he came into a castle. Here are some weirdly-named towns and areas we’ve passed near or through in our last two road-trips (this one and the Austrian Alps trip) and their English translations:
• Sobeslav = Celebrate Yourself
• Tabor = Camp
• Pisek = Sand
• Velka Dobra = The Big Good
• Česká sibiř = Czech Siberia. Czech Siberia is a little hilly area near Tabor that tends to get colder weather and more snow than surrounding areas– something like that altitudinous stretch you hit about half an hour before hitting Los Angeles on Highway 5. To name it after a region that contains 8 time zones and 1/12th the world’s land mass is sort of an endearing stretch in my book. There’s also a ‘Czech Canada’, ‘Czech Switzerland’, ‘Czech Paradise’ and probably some others I’m forgetting.
Photo: short-lived Czech metal band Alarm. If there was really a song called “Highway to Hellichova”, I like to imagine that they would have made it.
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Unrelated rant:
This is all pretty subjective territory to wade into… but wasn’t 2009 the worst year for new music since, like, 1894? I was just looking at Pitchfork’s top 500 albums for 2009– off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of anything from this year that I was super excited about, but I figured there’d be a few gems I’d forgotten about. Nope. The Grizzly Bear album was probably the thing I like the most out of their top 50, and I don’t love that one. Like it a lot, but don’t love it. And it’s not like I’m a ‘Bah humbug, recent music isn’t as good as in my day‘ guy (or at least I hope not): 2008 was full of records I loved (Arthur Russell, David Byrne/Brian Eno, Fleet Foxes, pretty good Santogold all jump to mind, and that’s just off the top of my head).
Hey, it’s a rare sports-related post. Just when you thought it couldn’t get more bleak for Tiger, this appears on the front page of espn.com:
Heaven protect me from the moment when I’m experiencing a crushing personal crisis and the phone rings with a consoling Ron Artest on the other end. It’s the sports world equivalent of something like ‘Economists worried about falling dollar | Robert Mugabe offers support’
OK, I’m really excited to post this, although– WARNING– it’s incredibly crude and full of South Park-type sexual humor. If you’re not into that kind of thing, please move along to the more thinky, family-oriented content elsewhere in this blog…
Back in May of 2008, I was forwarded a hilariously offensive story written by a woman who decides to pass the time during the writers’ strike by sleeping with all three then-candidates for president. The origins of the story are something of a mystery to me: apparently, it was written by a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who writes for TV or screen… a comic genius, in any case, albeit of a highly puerile nature.
Just a few days ago, I discovered this site xtranormal.com that lets you easily make an animation from any text you choose to copy-and-paste. This text seemed like the perfect thing to turn into an raunchy animated monologue (although the 2008 campaign storyline is obviously pretty dated at this point). Anyway, without further ado, here’s ‘Little Mouth Cat, Where Have You Been Hiding?‘
I finished Roberto Bolano’s 2666 last night and felt the same disorienting feeling as after stumbling out of a David Lynch movie. This is the first Bolano I’ve read, but I get the distinct impression from reviews (for example, Jonathan Lethem’s, which also makes the Lynch comparison) that if Bolano books were Lynch movies, 2666 would be Lost Highway: expansive, shape-shifting, baffling and, at times, really scary. (Bolano’s last novel The Savage Detectives, meanwhile, sounds like Mullholand Drive– i.e., striking a more accessible balance between outre and grounded. But, I haven’t read it, so whatever…)
The book is made up of five separate novellas that are loosely intertwined and have blunt, descriptive names– ‘The Part About The Critics’, ‘The Part About the Crimes’, etc– that come across both as kind of joke and also as a huge relief, given how non-literal everything else in the book is. One of the most apt comments about I’ve read about 2666 is that it would actually make more sense if you read the five parts in reverse order, especially given that the last section actually happens first in chronological terms. So, yeah, it’s a bit… convoluted.
One weird thing about 2666 is that I can’t ever remember reading a long book that seems so short in immediate hindsight. And it’s not like this is a breezy page-turner or anything: the grueling ‘Part About The Crimes’ is a solid 200-page dossier-like account of dozens of rapes and murders plaguing the fictitious city of Santa Teresa, interspersed with occasional wacked-out digressions involving a Mexican television psychic, a turgid love affair between a cop and sanatorium manager and other curious narrative cul-de-sacs that lead nowhere at all. What makes the book seem so short is that it’s constructed like a paper accordion: viewed from a distance, you only see (or remember, as the case may be) one face, that being the events relating to the story line. Pick it up, though, and it expands into multiple faces, all connected together at the edges but facing off in their own directions. The events that drive the plot of 2666 can be summarized in maybe just 100 words, but are dispersed around countless accounts of characters and events and anecdotes-within-anecdotes that are totally extraneous and fascinating, and can be totally absorbing while you’re with them but then instantly forgettable as soon as you’re abruptly carried away to something else. In this way, the book feels frighteningly like real life, where people’s lives seem grotesquely over-stuffed with detail when viewed up close and then utterly inconsequential when looked at from some distance.
Meanwhile, the only things that seem real in Bolano’s vision are artistry and violence. Like Lynch, he makes a strong case for the essential primacy of horror– this is what is real; everything else people fill their lives with is just inane, civilized whistling-past-the-graveyard. In this sense, the use of anecdotes and digressions seems as clever and complex as the 18th century English literature I studied in college and can barely remember now (uh… Fielding, Sterne… those guys). The more vapid and diverting the digressions are, the more implicated we are as readers for clinging to them in the face of the brutal, toneless Part About The Crimes.
But, putting aside all the lit-crit stuff, the best thing about 2666 is that it’s so well written and has so many inventive, emotive or odd (and sometimes all three at the same time) passages that jerk you up in your seat. A few I dog-eared:
It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadranglar sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness.
Musicians often visited Grete, including an orchestra director who claimed that music was the fourth dimension and whom Halder respected greatly.
He craned his neck towards Reiter and leaned on one elbow and began to whisper and moan imagine scenes of splendor that together formed a chaotic assemblage of dark cubes stacked on top of the other.
That night, as he was working the door at he bar, he amused himself by thinking about a time with two speeds, one very slow, in which the movement of people and objects was lamost impercetible, and the other very fast, in which everything, even inert objects, glittered with speed. The first was called Paradise, the second Hell, and Archiimboldi’s only wish was never to inhabit either.
Lastly: most of 2666 takes place in the fictitious city of Santa Teresa that Bolano apparently based on Juarez (which did, in fact, experience a wave of rape-murder cases that were bunglingly misinvestigated). Between this and Dylan’s ‘Just Like Tom Thumb Blues’, it’s hard to think of a city that’s been more damningly portrayed than Juarez. You even kind of get the same impression from both book and song (nameless dread, weird malaise, so on and so forth). Don’t think I’ll be taking any vacations there soon.
Image: painting by Guiseppe Acimboldo (1527 – 1593, amazingly) whom Bolano’s main character renames himself after.
Also: see Ivan’s post on 2666 at Moonraking.
Inspired by recent TK references to ‘Fairytale of New York’, I thought I’d present my abridged list of Top 100 Christmas Songs. I’m ranking these according to a combination of (a) how good I think they actually are as songs and (b) holiday cheer factor:
1. ‘Good King Wenceslas’, Traditional. The class of the field in terms of Xmas carols. Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither! Bonus points for: establishing GKW as the most recognized Czech person in history. Loses points for: creating syllabic confusion about whether it’s ‘Good King Wenceslas looked out’ vs. ‘Good King Wencles last looked out’.
2. ‘Fairytale of New York’, Pogues. A close second— manages to be both heartwarming and bitterly cynical at the same time, which is quite an accomplishment. I’m embarrassed to admit that for a long time I had mentally combined Kirsty MacColl (the woman who shares vocals here) and Kylie Minogue into one person. This was before the latter became really famous; suddenly, when ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ was playing everywhere, I struggled to understand how this could be the same person who had once called Shane MacGowan a ‘cheap lousy faggot’. Only then did I realize the mistake behind my Krystie MacPogue confabulation.
3. ‘Jesus Christ’, Big Star. Here’s a good idea: once you strip the Nativity of all its religious gloss and worn-out piety, it just becomes a really rocking, kick-ass thing to write a song about. Which- hey- it was. Bonus points because you never know to what extent Alex Chilton is being sarcastic here.
4. ‘Christmas Wrapping’, The Waitresses. Another good idea: treating the holidays with New Wave’s signature attitude of cool detachment. Fun, dorky, smart.
5. ‘Christmas In Hollis’, RUN D.M.C. ‘Oh my god, it’s an ill reindeer’. Bonus points for: definitively being first holiday hip-hop track ever. Loses points for: the reality that a rap song can’t ever really put me in a holiday mood.
6. ‘Last Christmas’, Wham! Delightfully terrible from the moment George Michael hisses ‘Happy Christmas’ at you and the beat comes galloping in. Infectiously puts me in a holiday mood even as I desperately wish it didn’t. Simply the mention of this song would have earned this post the “actually good or just ironically ‘good'” tag if the speculation about Alex Chilton above hadn’t already put it in the running. Bonus points for: god-awful video, where the social norms of the 80s forced the Wham! lads to partake in a sham version of a prototypically heterosexual ski weekend.
7. ‘Ivan Meets G.I. Joe’, the Clash. Not a holiday song per se, but starts off with a few moments of what sounds like holiday shopping. And can loosely be construed to relate to Xmas in that it describes the Cold War and – thus, indirectly – our attempts to protect our holiday consumer culture against a Xmas-less enemy.
8-80: This is the part where I list songs that don’t actually do much for me but are about the holidays and are by bands that I like, so I have to mention them to prove that I’m not some idiot who sits around listening to Wham! all day. So: dBs, Beck, Belle & Sebastian, the Ronettes, Flaming Lips, XTC, etc.
81-98: This is reserved for holiday songs by artists I don’t care about at all, but who are worshipped by tons of people I know and like. Sufjan Stevens and Arcade Fire, come on down!
99. ‘Let It Snow’, Gloria Estefan. The ultimate Starbucks holiday jingle set to a demented Casiotone-sounding rumba. Rum-blegh.
100. ‘Silent Night’, Traditional. I had an extended conversation with my father a few months ago about how much we both dislike this song. Especially the sanctimonious lilt at the end of the verse (‘sleep in heavenly pe… eeeeeeeeeeeeeace!‘) Plus, it was composed by a slave trader (OK, I made that up). Get bent, ‘Silent Night’.
Felix turned six months old on Friday. As it fell on a Friday, I allowed the family a rare dress-down casual day and we celebrated with some local hemp microbrews in the conference room.
As I’ve written about many times before, I strongly believe in raising a family according to the same principles that you would use to build a successful corporation. With this in mind, it this seemed like an appropriate time to give Felix his first performance review to make sure we’re all on the same page moving forward. I’m happy to report that he met or surpassed nearly all of his expectations for Q3 and Q4 of 2009. Overall, his high performance scores indicate that he’ll be a valuable member of our “team” in the coming years. I did, however, lay out a few “growth areas” for him to work on over the next two quarters, especially regarding his erratic and sometimes tardy attendance record for our Monday morning staff meetings. I’m confident that he will be able to address these points in time for his next review.
(Sample performance review for a previous employee, no longer with the family)
My wife refused to participate in the review process, saying something about how it’s “wrong to treat a 6 month old child like an employee.” Whatever. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised given the occasional skepticism she’s voiced in the past about my family-as-corporation analogy. I can understand her perspective to a point, but it does disappoint me that Felix didn’t get the benefit of a full “360 degree performance review” so favored by today’s top management consultants.
And on that note, we’re off to the countryside for the weekend. Have a good one.
I should probably keep this to myself, but I’ve spent the last week avidly listening to Tusk by Fleetwood Mac, a band I’d never bothered to form an opinion about before. If you’re one of the zillions of people who grew up on Rumors, the notion of a guy in his mid-30s only just now catching up on Fleetwood Mac probably seems awkward at best. If you’re part of the equally large group that thinks the band is irredeemably cheesy, then my sudden devotion probably seems all the more heedless and shameful for being so late-to-the-ball. It guess it would be something like writing “I just found about this cultural phenomenon called ‘Burning Man’– I’m thinking about going next year!”– acotlytes and detractors alike would be nauseated, and nobody has a neutral attitude towards it. My only excuse is that I was a teenager in the late 80s in the Northeast: if there was ever a time and place hostile to late 70s smooth rock, that was it. So this genre became a sort of lingering blind spot for me, something I’ve only just caught up on in my 30s.
Anyway, I listened to Rumors a few times and it enjoyed it in the half-sincere/half-snide fashion that crops up over and over again in this blog (I’m probably going to have to add ‘things I’m not sure if I seriously or ironically enjoy’ to the tag list, but can’t figure out how to concisely phrase it). But then I moved on to Tusk, which is a legitimately great album– it has all the good things that Rumors has, but without the cloying-and-craning-for-stardom-and-success thing that makes Rumors a little bit annoying after a while. Believe me, I understand the dynamics that keep people from taking this band seriously: the multiple lineups, revolving front men, tacky intra-band romances and name formed from last names of band members— all of this seems a piece with the coke-fuelled arena-rocking supergroup zeitgeist of the late 70s. Then there’s whole cheesy/breezy LA thing (a Pitchfork staff list of best albums of the 1970s aptly likens Rumors to ‘a David Lynch LA’ with its ‘bowling lane-slick production’) and the Jefferson Starship-like 80s solo projects. There’s the Clintons and Gores prancing around victoriously to ‘Don’t Stop’ in ’94.
But once you peel aside all that compromising context, I don’t see why Tusk shouldn’t be a record that ‘serious’ music people listen to any less than, say, Big Star’s Sister Lovers: both are fractured, introspective, sprawling records by bands with brilliant songwriters, commercial aspirations and self-destructive trajectories, caught at a point when they had nothing to prove– albeit for opposite reasons. More than anything else, the difference between the records is Fleetwood Mac was coming off the highest-selling album in history, whereas Big Star had nothing to prove because they had no hope of stardom any more. Big Star never ‘made it’, and seem untainted partly as a result. With Fleetwood, we have to deal with all the grotesque flab of their successes, which is daunting indeed (I’m thinking specifically of Clinton’s big bobbing head here).
Another difference is that Big Star was never impersonated by a decoy band, a fate that befell Fleetwood Mac in one of the weirder episodes in rock promotion history. The band’s manager, Clifford Davis, frustrated by the band’s reluctance to tour, ridiculously claimed the legal rights to the band name and put together an imposter version of the band, then booked a series of concert dates and launched a U.S. tour. What? File this under Ruses That Wouldn’t Worked Out Nearly As Well In The Twitter Era. Given that this was the 1970s, word gradually began to leak out that the original members weren’t involved. I guess the fact that no women were involved in the lineup might have helped tip off audiences. Inevitably, the scam stalled as the real band members managed to get off their asses long enough to obtain a legal injunction against the rogue manager. Thus, the end of Fleetwood Mock.
Weirder still, the zombie Fleetwood Mac band– under new name Stretch– later released a hit single ‘Why Did You Do It? that’s actually good! Better yet, the song airs their grievances with real Fleetwood Mac drummer and namesake Mick Fleetwood (they had basically been sold the same bill of goods as the concert goers and expected that Mick was actually going to join them and legitimatize the project– whether Mick was complicit or not in the whole situation remains unclear and fiercely disputed). It’s a stolen identity grudge song! If you read the bio of fake Fleetwood guys, you’d never imagine that they’d be capable of going on to be a modest success in their own right– judging from the names of the bands they were recruited from– Status Quo, Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera, Curved Air (!)– it sounds like it’s gonna be the worst group in the history of the world. I’d known ‘Why Did You Do It?’ for years since my friend Sara put it on a mix for me and liked it OK without having any idea of the wacko history behind it.
Last thing, unrelated to above tangent: another convoluted chapter of the band’s history involves the hapless misfortunes of earlier frontman, Peter Green, who led the group a few incarnations before Buckingham and Nicks joined. Just for fun, if you unquestioningly accept the most sensationalistic version of each event reported on the internet, the story you wind up with is: Green’s mental health began to deteriorate after he unwittingly took acid in Munich, where he was hanging out at something called the ‘High-Fish-Community’ at the behest of two German promoters who wanted to stage a ‘Bavarian Woodstock’ (I can’t even type those last two words without giggling). As his sanity started to slip away, he insisted that the band members give all their money away to charity and quit once they refused, eventually joining the religious cult Children of God. This is the same outfit that Christopher Owens– front man of current indie darlings Girls– was born into and escaped from as a teenager. So: weird that there’s just one degree of separation (albeit a highly disturbing and un-fun one) separating Fleetwood Mac and Girls.
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Krafty adds: I suffered from the same “70s smooth rock blindspot” as Dan, and never truly appreciated FM until I saw this amazing documentary about the making of “Rumors.” It’s part of VH1’s “Classic Albums” series, where the filmmaker interviews band members, producers, and other people involved with the record, and there are always extended scenes in the studio where the master tracks are getting messed around with (so you get to hear the song with just the drums, then with the drums and bass, then with the backing vocals, etc.). I cannot recommend the “Rumors” installment highly enough: everybody in it (particularly Lindsey Buckingham) is amazingly articulate in describing what it was like to be the most popular band in the world, on lots of drugs, and also two couples in the process of breaking up and writing songs about the disintegration of the relationships that would become the most successful album in the world. If you set your Tivo to “Classic Albums,” it will record it within about six weeks (I’ve discovered this through erasing it by mistake periodically and the re-recording it).
