Pretty Goes with Pretty

Enjoy the Weekend: Harry Belafonte

Harry Belafonte: Jump in the Line

Enjoy.

The New Low (Yes, That's a Pun)

I was an obsessive Low fan from the moment I accidentally bought I Could Live in Hope back in 1995. From that point on I bought every album, every EP, every 7”, and got my hands on every compilation appearance. That said, Things We Lost in the Fire was the last album I bought by them. It was good, but I guess I’d finally hit my limit—the band started to resemble a past me. It wasn’t so much the band’s fault as my own personal growth. Certain songs, albums, or bands are indelibly tied to an era in one’s life. Such was Low for me.

I’ve kept up with the band from afar, sort of the way you might google an ex-girlfriend every once in a while. I listened to a few songs from Trust and thought it sounded great—I just couldn’t go there. Then I heard most of The Great Destroyer, which was okay but not great. Now we come to Drums and Guns. The AV Club posted the video for “Breaker,” and Silence is a Rhythm Too has two other mp3s, “Always Fade” and “Hatchet.”

And what the fuck? All three of these songs are terrible. Terrible! I mean, I’m shocked that a band I once loved so much is capable of such awful stuff. It’s not just the drum machine—in fact that might be the least of it. Sparhawk’s vocals are overbearing, particularly on “Breaker.” And the lyrics to “Hatchet” render it unlistenable for me. Ugh, the whole thing is a trainwreck. I’ve been seeing decent reviews for this album; am I missing something?

Graham Greene: The Man Within

As I mentioned last week, I’ve given myself the task of reading all of Graham Greene’s novels, from first to last. That’s twenty-four novels, starting in 1929 and ending in 1988. He’s also got four books of autobiography, numerous short stories, three travel books, and many plays and screenplays. I won’t commit to reading all of those as well unless they really pique my interest as I come upon them chronologically. At the rate I read, twenty-four novels is more than enough to last me a while.

So, we begin at the beginning: The Man Within. Greene started this book when he was twenty-one, and it took him a couple of years to write. Actually he had written two additional novels prior to this, neither of which were picked up by a publisher. It’s also worth noting that the next two novels of Greene’s to be published were disowned by the author, never to reprinted. This puts The Man Within in a lonely place within Greene’s oeuvre, flanked on each side by two pairs of failures. Greene himself acknowledged this up front when The Man Within was reprinted in the 1950s, noting that it really only existed for posterity, nothing more. The book was published “with inexplicable success,” he said in his author’s note. The statement sounds humble but indeed he was embarrassed by the novel within just a year or two of its publication. He goes on:

I tried to revise [the novel] for this edition, but when I had finished my sad and hopeless task, the story remained just as embarrassingly romantic, the style as derivative, and I had eliminated perhaps the only quality it possessed—its youth…. Why reprint then? I can offer no real excuse, but perhaps an author may be allowed one sentimental gesture towards his own past, the period of ambition and hope.

Greene is exactly right in his self-critique: the novel is in print for posterity, and it should be read for posterity. The whole of The Man Within feels like a first novel. The angst and self-loathing experienced by Andrews, the main character, is two-dimensional, and often Greene’s authorial voice lets that of his influences creep in. Almost nothing about this book, beyond the broadest strokes, would indicate that the same author had The Quiet American or The Power and the Glory in his future.

Picture a lesser-drawn version of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man careening through Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn, and you’ve pretty much got The Man Within. Lots of inner turmoil, lots of fog, lots of lousy men. The novel opens with its protagonist, Andrews, on the run through the night fog of coastal England. Andrews is a smuggler, but he’s double-crossed his crew by alerting the local authorities of the place and time at which the smuggler’s boat, The Good Chance, was to dock. In the ensuing scuffle one lawman is killed and six of the smugglers are arrested. Three get away, however, including the ringleader, Carlyon, who was a surrogate father of sorts to Andrews. Their relationship, which nearly hints at something more intimate than a father/son bond, makes Andrews’s betrayal particularly perplexing, both to Carlyon and his crew and to Andrews himself.

The betrayal is rooted in Andrews’s father issues, which is also where the book’s title comes from. The epigraph, a quote from Sir Thomas Browne, reads “There’s another man within me that’s angry with me.” Andrews recognizes an inner critic, one that sabotages every noble gesture he imagines, filling him with an unredeemable self-loathing. The voice is borne from his real father, once the leader of the band of smugglers now led by Carlyon. Andrews’s father is revered by the criminals, his reputation growing more mythic with each passing day. But in reality he was an abusive monster who bred fear and cowardice into his son and whose beastly attitude likely caused his wife’s too-soon death. Upon his death he leaves all of his possessions—most notably The Good Chance—not to Andrews but to Carlyon. So from one perspective the two could be seen as boys in competition for a father’s attention, but Andrews sees it instead as two fathers battling for the son. Carlyon, perhaps out of guilt, recruits Andrews to join his ship, and though the two develop a strong bond, the rest of the crew, the boat, the smuggler’s life in general, is a nasty reminder to Andrews of his hated father. His betrayal of the crew is an act of rebellion against his dead father, but the result is not victory but flight, cowardice. It is not so simple to destroy one’s demons.

The whole of the book concerns Andrews’s attempt to do just that. On the run from Carlyon, he breaks into an isolated cottage belonging to Elizabeth, a young woman whose own father figure has died just days earlier; in fact his corpse is still in the house when Andrews breaks in. Elizabeth has her own ghost, it seems. The man was possessive of her—like Carlyon, he is a father figure who is also nearly a spouse. The man did not want Elizabeth to be with anyone other than him; likewise Andrews is soon torn between the two “songs” of Elizabeth and Carlyon. Both Elizabeth and Andrews must acknowledge the end of their respective affairs. Inevitably they fall in love, of course. Andrews attaches an impossibly saint-like devotion to Elizabeth, largely because she offers him temporary solace from the outside world, and because he can confess his cowardice to her without fear of her punishment.

Cowardice. It is Andrews’s ultimate fault, as he constantly reminds anyone who’ll listen. Elizabeth is the only person or thing in the novel that gives him courage, and for that he regards her with ferocious religiosity. But her goodness is like a fire: it only provides warmth when nearby. The moment Andrews leaves the house—goaded by Elizabeth to see his betrayal through in order to start his life anew by heading into the city of Lewes, where the six men are on trial, to testify against them—his cowardice returns. And without Elizabeth there, we, the reader, are subject to Andrews reminding us yet again how despicable he is. Perhaps if he were to ultimately find redemption, then The Man Within could be fulfilling. But by novel’s end, while there is resolution, there is no redemption. Andrews’s cowardice destroys Elizabeth, leaves Carlyon without ship or crew (and therefore without purpose), and finally destroys himself. Greene’s novels are known for the Catholic undertones, but The Man Within shows that Greene hadn’t yet learned to grapple with those issues of his religion head on. The themes of the novel—fathers and sons, cowardice and bravery, sin and redemption—are alternatively muddled or cliché. The seeds for many of Greene’s novels are present here, such as the hunted man or the atheist/agnostic touching salvation, but Greene seems not to have known yet what he himself was getting at.

The Song is the Single and the Single Sucks

Heard this song on the radio yesterday and got a kick out of it. It reminded me of my malaise.

Barr, "The Song is the Single" [video].

Enjoy the Weekend: Etta James & Harvey Fuqua

Thought I'd give you a song that'll put a smile on your face. Hopefully it'll start your weekend on the right note.

Etta James & Harvey Fuqua: If I Can't Have You (from Etta James: Her Best: The Chess 50th Anniversary Collection)

Enjoy.

Simple Pleasures: Plot and Character, Prose and Structure

Maybe the previous post is being too reductive. Probably is. But what spurred me to post, in addition to the correspondence I mentioned there, was a second correspondence I was having with another friend, on a different subject entirely. We were talking books and I mentioned my current obsession with Graham Greene. I mean it: I am obsessed with the guy. After reading two books in the last six months I’ve become addicted to his books like they’re Girl Scout cookies. A couple chapters into re-reading The Power and the Glory, I put it down and decided to do this obsession right. I’m starting from the beginning and reading through his entire oeuvre. I may even read his three-volume biography concurrently. What I mean is, I’m obsessed.

The last time I was this obsessed with an author, I was in college and the author was Donald Barthelme. To this day it’s difficult for guests to be in my living room and not comment on the number of Barthelme books around. But how did I get from Barthelme, where concept, language, and a collagist approach to prose squash such traditional notions as plot and character, to Greene—who is known for nothing if not taut plots and the inner turmoil of his characters? I read The Power and the Glory as a freshman in college and enjoyed it, but at the time it struck me as solid but nothing special. “Special” was something like the chronologically fluid Catch-22 or Barthelme’s absurd and abstract treatment of Snow White.

There’s a parallel there with my taste in music then and now. While I was so in love with Can or even Low—groups that in their own way were deconstructing the song to reveal certain elements buried under the more obvious, more tangible ones—I was also reveling in Barthelme, the Fiction Collective, Pynchon, Sorrentino. The mechanics of writing were the thing—the means, not the ends. Ronald Sukenick’s Long Talking Bad Condition Blues had not a single dot of punctuation; Mark Amerika’s Kafka Chronicles was a stream-of-consciousness hail of noise. Now, whenever I pick up a novel that seems more pleased with its structure than with its story, I toss it aside. Mark Danielewski is the heir to the tradition right now. Some are touting him as a genius but I just want to throw his books across the room. It’s too labored. At least Mark Amerika realized (rightly) that his vision belonged on the web. It’s beyond print; why try to constrain your vision, so driven by typographic dances and a hyper-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure structure, to a book format?

Yes, it makes me cranky. The same way Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s new record made me cranky for its faux-experimentation. But like I said yesterday, that’s not to say I can’t appreciate it when it’s done right. Look at an author like David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas is a technically exhilarating novel, but all the bravura Mitchell displays in the actual writing is in support of a plot, of characters, of a larger theme—in other words, of telling an absorbing story. Musically you need look no further than Bjork to see someone go about as far out there as you can get yet still retain emotion, never mind a melody.

A far less extreme but much more unlikely example is the newest hot shit, Peter Bjorn & John. Who would think that a band responsible for the earworm of the year, “Young Folks,” would effortlessly drop in more cerebral tracks like “Poor Cow,” “Start to Melt,” or the album highlight “Roll the Credits” ? These guys ably demonstrate that it’s easy to have a handle on your mechanics without sacrificing heart. They’re not reinventing the wheel, but that’s the point: you don’t have to try so hard!

Which brings me back to Graham Greene. If ever there was an author who had such complete control over his mechanics, put to perfect use in support of the story he wants to tell, it’s Greene. No element overpowers the other. One of the books I read last year that has spurred me on this kick, The End of the Affair, is the perfect example. After setting up all three sides of a triangle, giving us tantalizing scenes and memorable supporting characters, Greene flips it two-thirds in and gives us a brand-new narrator. In lesser hands it would feel forced, artificial. Take for instance Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, a perfectly excellent novel that nearly derails at the two-thirds mark when it shifts from third to first person. But Greene pulls it off, leading to great emotional payoff. Thus far the books I’ve read by Greene don’t feel Big and Important—there’s no aspiration to Nobel here—but when I’m finished with the book all I want to do is go back to page one and start over. What more should a book, or a record, wish to accomplish?

Simple Pleasures: Melody and Harmony, Hiss and Hum

A month or two back a friend of mine, who I’ve known since college, read my year-end post on the musical blind spots I filled in during 2006. “Your blind spots are like my top ten of all time,” he said. Not that it was his intention, but I knew when I made that post that I’d be subject to some degree of shame—how can I be thirty years old and consider myself a music nerd and not know Marquee Moon? I worked in a record store the entire time I was in college, ferchrissakes!

His email made me reconsider—what the hell was I listening to back then, when I wasn’t discovering Television, wasn’t listening to the Byrds, Big Star, the Kinks? I was busy buying up Fat Cat 12”s, clicky electronica, and krautrock. When I worked in that record store a co-worker and I would have “space rock Fridays,” where we would just listen to stuff distributed by Forced Exposure—records full of tones and buzzes. We’d scour the promo racks for anything that looked vaguely experimental and if it turned out to have—gasp!—song structure, we’d fall over each other on the way to the eject button as if a seven-year-old had just walked in while Wu-tang was on. Verse-chorus-verse, harmony, melody—it was anathema. Give us sound, no more.

Jump ahead ten or twelve years and, while I can still appreciate and adore a great ambient record, true joy at the record store comes when I pick up an album, new or old, that I can sing along to. It's not sudden; I've been singing along for years.  But lately I'm particularly aware of the simple pleasures to be found in simple tunes. I'm not rejecting the wish—need, in the best cases— to experiment with form or sound, but right now I find the most enjoyment in songwriters that possess the confidence to not use deconstruction or abstraction to make some larger statement, particularly if the songwriter in question has the talent or ability to do so. Employing the right flourish at the right time, in a way that enhances the song but doesn’t draw attention to itself, that’s craft. This is the element that’s been missing, in one way or another, from a lot of new records I’ve been buying lately, for instance Clap Your Hands, Arcade Fire, or in a smaller way the Shins. Each album seems burdened by overcompensation, a misguided lack of confidence or an irrational need to self-rebel.

I'm getting a little bit off track. I didn’t begin this post with the intention of figuring out what’s “wrong” with these bands. Frankly they may not think anything is wrong, other than with me. And in fact that’s closer to what I’m trying to ascertain. The emails my friend and I exchanged about blind spots was just one of many conversations I’ve had with him, with my wife, and with other friends, all about different things but all adding up to my own perception of how my relationship with music, indeed with other artforms as well, has changed in the last ten years. I’m fumbling around a point here; more tomorrow [here].

Further on the New Arcade Fire

Little babies? Let’s go!

Women and Children? Let’s go!

Old folks? Let’s go!

I don’t know where we're going!

I listened to the whole thing straight through this morning as I walked to work (it’s a long walk). I think I can narrow my beef with this album down to the string of songs toward the end, “Antichrist Television Blues,” “Windowsill,” and “No Cars Go.” I think the fact that they come in succession, severely weighing down the whole second half of the record, is what bothers me about the album as a whole. It gives the impression that the whole album is more flawed than it actually is. As I walked I was making a little checklist in my mind: “I like this song, I like this song, this song’s okay, this song’s growing on me,” etc. Not until “Antichrist...” did I really start lamenting the lyrics, not to mention I was starting to feel bogged down by the overall sound of the record. By the time I got to “My Body is a Cage,” which has fast become my favorite on the disc, I almost feel sorry for it, since it has to follow the dregs.

The Maps of Louisa Bufardeci

Archlog points to this map of the world as floor plan.  The map was done by Louisa Bufardeci, who has some other great works at her site. Another map-inspired piece is Governing Values, from 2004. The maps are created by substituting longitude and latitude with the x and y axes of statistical data.

Check out her site for a more detailed explanation, more maps, and other works.

Unearthing the Velvets

Under the guise of a book review, n+1 editor Mark Greif turns in a thoroughly illuminating analysis of the Velvet Underground for the London Review of Books, drawing comparisons of (among other things) Reed and Cale, the VU and the Grateful Dead, and the influence of LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela vs. that of Warhol. The whole thing is a great piece of music writing.