I just discovered the Pixies this week. Where the fuck have I been? I inhaled their second album, Doolittle, after two days of not being able to get "Debaser" and "Wave of Mutilation" out of my head. I think it was lead singer Black Francis' "ha ha ha ho's" in the second verse of "Debaser" that did it. He doesn't have to apologize.
Also rediscovered the Breeders this past week after owning their Last Splash album for a million years and never really listening to it. I was crazy. Now, it's all I can do to keep from playing "Saints" and "I Just Wanna Get Along" right this very second.
Screw it, I'm too weak. "If you're so special, why aren't you dead?" I don't know, Kim Deal, but if I weren't married, would you care?
In all this classic indie rock goodness, the new Strokes album, First Impressions of Earth, has barely been a blip. Out of some perverted sense of obligation or pity to inanimate objects, I've forced myself to listen to it once or twice. It's good, not as good as their second album, Room on Fire (which I like the most) or their debut, Is This It?, but I'm sure I"ll absorb it later, just not now. Okay, maybe the opening track and "Juicebox", b/c they are so insanely catchy, but that's all for now. Pixies!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yet, in the midst of this Pixies love affair, I bought their debut album Surfer Rosa this week, even though I have a bajillion cd's to listen to, and I liked it very much, but still, Doolittle is all I have time for. "ha ha ha ho". Except for "Gigantic" from Surfer Rosa. Holy crap, Kim Deal, can I have a sex change so I can have your babies? (So that you understand, Kim Deal is the Pixies bassist who later started The Breeders, and she is a rock and roll goddess. "Cannonball", anyone?)
Downloaded 50 Foot Wave from some website that I"ll find a link to right now, hold on . . . http://www.50footwave.com/freemusic/. That took you a second to read but a minute for me to find.
Holy crap, there's more free stuff on that website to download! Crap! Anyway, it's very good for being free, good enough that I would've bought it. So yeah.
Ummm, I think that's all in terms of what's happening to me musically this past week. Sleater-Kinney still rock, they have free mp3's on their homepage, so please check them out.
Can I just say, a band offering free mp3's on their website is the best way for them to steal my money? B/c like, Sleater-Kinney used to be this band I'd heard was really good but never been able to hear, so I just kind of filed them away as "something to try" but there's a bajillion other things to do that are more immediate, so am I ever gonna go out of my way to listen to them? Not really. Except one day I'm bored and I go to their website b/c I'm crazy and I surf the internet all day and they have a free mp3 and I'm like, "cool, let me check them out" and I listen to it and it rocks my socks off and I'm in love and Sleater-Kinney's "Entertain" is the most played song on my iPod by a large margin and in the two months after I downloaded that song I bought two of their cd's and I can't wait to give them more of my money. All b/c of a free mp3.
Do you think the same thing is about to happen to 50 Foot Wave? Well, not so much, b/c I didn't like it as much, but they are definitely on the radar, you know? Christ, people, give me free music, I'll pay for it later b/c I'm such a music whore.
Movies. Still haven't seen King Kong. Instead I watched Bambi on dvd. "ha ha ha ho". It was actually pretty cool, but the movie is totally schizoid. You have the early scenes like with baby Bambi and Thumper and they are oh so cute, but then later, wow. Listen, I'm not even talking about Bambi's mother's death, but at the end, holy crap what happened to this movie? Man enters the forest, all the animals freak out, and there's this most disturbing sequence, a thrush is hiding out in the grass with her two friends and starts freaking out. They try to calm her down, tell her not to fly, but she can't take it. She panics, takes off. You hear the gunshot, and then her body falls to the ground.
WTF!
I think it could've only been worse if the corpse had been full of blood or something. Now listen, I'm not like all cartoons shouldn't be so adult and graphic, (puh-leeze, you know me) and I thought the sequence was very good. I actually really liked the whole movie. There was a depth to it that I wasn't expecting, a beauty to the animation and images that I didn't anticipate. B/c you hear about Bambi and you think about baby Bambi trying to walk and Thumper making fun of him and sounding like a 5 year old and fun and games (and of course you also think about the famous scene when Bambi's mother dies, but whatever, some tragedy is always to be expected in Disney movies), but then you get to the movie and there's such beauty and calm and danger. It's almost stoic. I forget how much classier old Disney movies were. I swear, there's this shot in Lady and the Tramp, just a darkened stairway, that just blew me away. The colors, the moodiness. It's not even a big scene, but it's so amazing how it looks and I think about new Disney movies and could they ever hope to dream to try to draw such an image?
And Bambi's the same. The quietest scenes are sometimes the most evocative. Like when Bambi's mom is out in the meadow, just walking slowly and trying to see if it's all copacetic. There's a calmness, a stillness, so full of danger. And then she says it's okay, and all the deers frolick, it's quite entertaining and moving. And then Man comes and it's all panic and pandemonium, this little eden coming crashing down, and you genuinely mourn the loss of the meadow.
I guess the animators knew what they were doing. And did they know how to create a villain. You never see Man, but you see how much he freaks out the animals, and there's always his gunshot. Holy crap, the way they use that. The screen always lingers on that empty scene the characters have just fled from as the gunshot echoes, as you ponder who may live or die. It's quite terrifying.
So yeah, I liked it, but it's hard for me to reconcile such scenes and the terrifying climax, exemplied by that thrush scene, with the super cutsy parts of the early movie, which are so cute it's almost unwatchable sometimes. Well, not really, but I was still slightly squirming whenever Thumper's mother corrected him and he had to repeat his lesson.
I can't get the death of that thrush out of my head. Damn.
Anyway, double big toes up from me! Ten fingers too!
What else?
I've been madly furiously reading books left and right since the beginning of Dec. Read a Ray Bradbury short story collection called "The Golden Apples of the Sun". I want to emulate Bradbury in my writing. My stupid writing professors were horrible teachers. They should have assigned us to read short stories by proven masters. Instead, let's all read each other's stories. How the hell am I suppossed to learn when the only stories we are dissecting are by other people as clueless as I am? I feel lke I've learned more about writing a short story reading Ernest Hemingway earlier this year and this Bradbury collection than I ever learned in those 4 writing classes. What a waste. But I know those writing teachers are too lazy and self-centered to give a toss about constructing a good class. I know I would be, if I were in their position. "Hey, fucker, I made it, now it's your turn. Oh, you want me to critique your story? You want advice? This paragraph is crap, you can't write out of a paper bag, go back to high school. Where's my money?"
Anway, the Bradbury collection is good. Standout stories are "The Fog Horn", in which a giant prehistoric leviathan seeking a mate is mistakenly called from the depths by a lighthouse foghorn, and "A Sound of Thunder", quite possibly the best time-travel story I've ever read, about a time-travelling safari service of the future that hunts dinosaurs. If only I could write half as good as Bradbury. I"m going to try, I'm coming up with ideas, they are probably all Bradbury esque, but so what, I'm learning.
What else? Finally read Dune. Don't really feel like talking about it, not b/c it was bad, quite the opposite, in fact, but just, there's too much I'd rather talk about.
Oh, shit, like The Sound and the Fury? Now that rocked my socks off. Blew my mind? Something. Once you get past the first chapter, a stream-of-consciousness of a retarded man. But then, when you read the rest of the book and figure it out, you re-read the first chapter. Or at least that's what I did. I used to not like stream-of consciousness writing, but this changed my mind. There's a rhythm to it that you have decode. And I think i like the non-sequitors.
I think back now, and i wonder if half the fun of the book wasn't trying to decipher the text to figure out wtf happened. I guess, but it has a lot to say anyway.
Finished reading The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. What can I say? Again, rocked and moved beyond all sense. (Yeah, I don't know what I'm saying either.) Anyway. Set in 1870's New York among the upper social class, where being unpleasant is the most unpardonable sin of all. Life is lived in a strict social code . . . Fuck, I'm butchering it. You're not getting a sense at all why this novel is so magnificent. Here, Wharton can write galaxies around me, let me get some excerpts that will show how her words were like super atomic arrows right to my heart that sliced like microscopoic sonic ribons of electronic filament. (The entire text is available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/541 , along with a bunch of other public domain works)
"They like and admire you--they
want to help you."
She shook her head and sighed. "Oh, I know--I
know! But on condition that they don't hear anything
unpleasant . . . Does no one want to know the truth
here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among
all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!"
I'll get back to more excerpts. Basically, it's about Newland Archer, recently engaged to May Weiland. And May is the perfect society girl: prim, proper, polite, groomed, beautiful. And Newland is the quintessential gentleman. But his vague dissatisfactions with his life and the truth-covering politeness of it all explode when May's unconventional cousin, Ellen Olenska, returns to New York to flee a bad marriage. Newland at first fights his attraction to Ellen, rushing into his marriage with May, but it's no use. So of course, it all blows up. In a way. See, there's never a scene or fight or anything, b/c it's Old New York, and it was "the way of people who dreaded
scandal more than disease, who placed decency above
courage, and who considered that nothing was more
ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those
who gave rise to them."
This leads to a hilarious yet disturbing sequence, where May and Newland have, I guess you have to say it's a confrontation about his secret desires for her cousin, but they never say so much as a word directly about it. Here, Newland has just lied and said he needs to go on a business trip to Washington:
"The change will do you good," May said simply,
when he had finished; "and you must be sure to go and
see Ellen," she added, looking him straight in the eyes
with her cloudless smile, and speaking in the tone she
might have employed in urging him not to neglect some
irksome family duty.
It was the only word that passed between them on
the subject; but in the code in which they had both
been trained it meant: "Of course you understand that
I know all that people have been saying about Ellen,
and heartily sympathise with my family in their effort
to get her to return to her husband. I also know that,
for some reason you have not chosen to tell me, you
have advised her against this course, which all the older
men of the family, as well as our grandmother, agree in
approving; and that it is owing to your encouragement
that Ellen defies us all, and exposes herself to the kind
of criticism of which Mr. Sillerton Jackson probably
gave you, this evening, the hint that has made you so
irritable. . . . Hints have indeed not been wanting; but
since you appear unwilling to take them from others, I
offer you this one myself, in the only form in which
well-bred people of our kind can communicate
unpleasant things to each other: by letting you understand
that I know you mean to see Ellen when you are in
Washington, and are perhaps going there expressly for
that purpose; and that, since you are sure to see her, I
wish you to do so with my full and explicit approval--
and to take the opportunity of letting her know what
the course of conduct you have encouraged her in is
likely to lead to."
Her hand was still on the key of the lamp when the
last word of this mute message reached him. She turned
the wick down, lifted off the globe, and breathed on
the sulky flame."
WTF!
That's one of the closest times you get to a fight in the whole novel. Martin Scorcese filmed an adaptation of this novel (and to be truthful, Ebert picking it for one of his recent Great Movies columns got me to rent it, and thus led to my reading the book). Anyway, at first this seems like an odd film for Scorcese to direct, but not when you think about the subject matter and Scorcese's taste. I mean, first it's New York, so bingo, but it's more than that. He's obviously obsessed with stories about the mob, but I think it's more b/c he likes stories about people boxed in by their social surroundings, living codes (which of course the mob is full of,) and the violence that occurs when one tries to break free. Here, in the world of Age of Innocence, that violence isn't in any physical kind, but in a wayward glance, an intentional snub, a raised eyebrow, a certain word, which in this society and this code is the equivalent of gunshots and baseball bats being broken over someone's head.
Don't think I'm original with all these thoughts, btw. This is all gleaned from the bajillion articles I've read about the book and movie over the past few months. I'm just condensing it to show you why this book has just blown me away and why it's so good. I guess b/c, and this is my own opinion, one of the most horrible things I can think that could happen to a person, on a level far below war death famine poverty, of course, is just living a wasted life. A fake life, not fulfilling your dreams or desires. I'm not quite sure if that's what Wharton was getting at in the book, b/c at times as she's exoriating this society with her wit she also sometimes seems to honor it. I don't know. But that dange r of a wasted life, Newland and Ellen's doomed love, how they willfully deny their true desires, it just breaks my heart, and the way Wharton writes about it just moves me to pieces.
Anyway, that's how I've been entertaining myself these past few weeks. Happy New Year!
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