Man sitting at home on a normal evening. A woman enters. The woman looks exactly like his wife, smells like his wife, sounds like his wife, behaves like his wife, but he's absolutely certain this is not his wife.
Alzheimer’s is a bitch.
That's not how Alzheimer's works, is it? There wouldn't be recognition of something but belief that it's a replica.
In any event, Atmospheric Disturbances has nothing to do with that. It's about identity, memory, relationships, and the behavior of those things within the reality-to-paranoiac spectrum.
It depends on who’s providing the perspective and there are varying degrees depending on how far into or past the dementia stage a person is in, but I was just kidding. It also could be considered paranoid abnormality too, but, yes, I understand the idea behind the novel.
The woman looks exactly like his wife, smells like his wife, sounds like his wife, behaves like his wife, but he's absolutely certain this is not his wife.
Does he at least end up figuring out where his large automobile is?
The woman looks exactly like his wife, smells like his wife, sounds like his wife, behaves like his wife, but he's absolutely certain this is not his wife.
Does he at least end up figuring out where his large automobile is?
The woman looks exactly like his wife, smells like his wife, sounds like his wife, behaves like his wife, but he's absolutely certain this is not his wife.
Does he at least end up figuring out where his large automobile is?
- Just about as perfect a set of short stories as ever I’ve read. A potent mix of dark social satire and lighthearted absurdity. Interlocking stories that truly build a sense of familiarity with the community, where little asides and hints resonate so much more as a result of Kawakami's layering. This is going to be one of those books I revisit every couple of years.
Willy Vlautin - "The Motel Life"
- The Richmond Fontaine songwriter has an unwavering talent for tunes about the hopeless, hapless, and strung out. It's a storytelling style that translates nicely to the fiction novel format.
Jennifer Clement - "Widow Basquiat"
- God did I love this book. Not much of a biography fan, but I'm over the moon with this one. There's a poetry to Clement's life-as-vignette delivery that floored me time and time again. This was an impulse purchase at the end of a book buying spree, and I'm so glad I didn't take a pass on it.
William Gibson - "Count Zero"
- I re-read "Neuromancer" every three years or so. It's a masterpiece and has lots of personal significance to me. However, this was the first time I revisited the second book in the trilogy since first reading it something like twenty-five years ago. It's enjoyable, but a far cry of the initial installment's majesty. I'll be giving book three (Mona Lisa Overdrive) a second read before too long, I'm sure. Y'know, I've always seen it referred to as a trilogy, but maybe the short story collection "Burning Chrome" should be considered part of that oeuvre.
A new look at recordings of Bruce and his band. I ordered in early July, but one package arrived empty and the second got lost at Customs in Belgium. Thankfully the third arrived yesterday!
I keep meaning to have a deep dive into my copy but TBH I'm struggling to keep up with my digital copies of Audion, plus The Wire and you know, real reading! Happily these days a lot of the albums can be heard on YouTube if nowherelse, which helps a lot. Have you made any interesting discoveries yet?
I think the best thing about books like this is that they're usually written by folks that are devoted, so you get details and cross-references that you'd might not have known before. For instance, I didn't know that Acqua Fragile (sampled by J. Dilla BTW, but they don't mention that) had reformed and put out another album not that long ago: it's not a very good album according to the book, but it's there for us to decide for ourselves (we do agree that "Mass Media Stars" is their best album, tho). The big Audion bundle is great, but I still buy books on individual "scenes" (countries, genres, etc.).
I'm celebrating my entrance into old fogeyville ("Medicare"), by having a special show next Wednesday featuring Deutsche elektronische musik for two hours. My age and Germany have little to do with each other - I just had to decide on which influence and we had a family of four visiting us from Köln this month. It's a special indulgence.
Some other books I've read over the past few months:
Yoko Ogawa, "The Memory Police"
-An unknown force causes the residents of an island to collectively forget an object (what is a clock, what is coffee). They Memory Police assist the residents to fully remove their attachment to the objects (clocks are burned, coffee crops are destroyed). In due time, the residents aren't even able to remember the objects, even if they're shown a picture. From my perspective, the dystopian backdrop was just a device to tell a story about the subtle power of memories and loss.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, "Sozaboy"
-Written from the perspective of a child soldier during the Nigerian-Biafran war (soza = soldier). The author, having lived through it, captures some essential, fascinating elements... like how communication was so poor back in the day that the civil war was viewed with only the vaguest understanding by many of the participants, who often were doing as told and what they had to survive. Also, the author (via the main character) writes in a hyper-atrophied Nigerian Pidgin, kind of a mix of native tongue, creole, and English, which was spoken during the years of occupation and in the years after Nigeria broke free from British colonization. But Saro-Wiwa makes it a bit more lingua franca-friendly, and also adds a poetic flair, resulting in a speaking voice that is seriously arresting and sometimes hypnotic.
Ho Sok Fong, "Lake Like a Mirror"
-Short stories. Sometimes absurd premises and sometimes terrifying reality. Plenty of dark humor, and borderline horror story. Tales of Malaysian women navigating the oppressive forces of government, society, more.
Ashton Politanoff, "You'll Like It Here"
-Upon the death of his mother, the author, a lifelong resident of Redondo Beach, California began a search of the digitalized local news and photo archives, perhaps attempting to capture some of his mother's early days in the area and as a way of strengthening his own sense of place in his hometown. But in the end, Politanoff recomposed news articles into story-like vignettes of life in Redondo Bearch in the early 1900's. Another happy find on the Dalkey Archive imprint.
Bernie Taupin's "Scattershot - Life, Music, Elton and Me"
"I loved writing, I loved chronicling life and every moment I was cogent, sober, or blitzed, I was forever feeding off my surroundings, making copious notes as ammunition for future compositions. . . . The thing is good, bad or indifferent I never stopped writing, it was as addictive as any drug."
Chet Baker - As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir
Adam Clair - Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery
The Baker memoir is a breezy read, nothing particularly insightful but nothing less than enjoyable. Little vignettes from pockets of his life, not like a comprehensive thing that spans his timeline. Been meaning to scoop this up for a very long time, but it dropped off my radar as things do, and I was recently reminded of it.
Adam Clair's oral history of the Elephant 6 Collective is a mess, and borderline unreadable. I'm not sure if this is a direct fault of Clair as interviewer or his editor(s). Probably both. It's pretty obvious that Clair, given some amazing access to the various Elephant 6 people from what I've read, just turned his tape recorder on and asked open-ended questions and let the musicians talk and talk and talk, figuring he could mine the recordings for gems to use in the book. The problem with that approach (aside from massive amounts of dictation and culling through all the mess for the true useful stuff) is that there's no guarantee the "good stuff" will actually fit the narrative of the book. He takes this weird approach of writing some history of E6 people and interjecting actual block quotes from the members as if they were cut-away shots in a film. It's jarring and rarely, if ever, do the quotes snap into place with the narrative preceding or following it. Sometimes it's multiple quotes from several people jammed in between the narrative and often the quotes don't make sense with each other. I can appreciate wanting to just let E6 people talk and talk into the mic and get an expansive oral history, but if a lot of what's coming out isn't particularly insightful or relevant, it's better to leave it out altogether. At the very least, the editor should've put the kibosh on it. And they may have tried. Clair admits in the book intro (which, by the way, is a lovely piece of writing) that this book, massive in the end, was four times as long before he and the editor got done with it.
There's also issues with how it's presented. In terms of timeline, it's all over the map. I get with so many people involved, it can be tricky to keep to a presentation that corresponds to a chronological timeline, but when Chapter C is talking about Person A's time in Denver in '95, and then that same person gets referenced in Chapter D in Athens but in the early 80s and you multiply that effect by many chapters and persons, the narrative gets unpleasantly scrambled. But this type of thing is representative of the book's lack of focus.
What Clair should've done is toss the whole thing in the trash and start over from scratch, and go into the interviews with specific questions to ask- questions targeted for the topics he was covering in the narrative, and he should've portioned out the book's focus to a few E6 people rather than try to be some comprehensive catch-all for All Things E6 (or, conversely, if he wanted to document every bit of E6 information, then don't present it as a narrative).
What's particularly frustrating about this is Clair, based on my impressions of this book, is a really good writer. Where he failed was as an interviewer and curator of the information he was collecting.
It's a shame. Personally disappointing for me, too. I was living in Denver in the 90s. I would go see bands like Apples In Stereo at neighborhood shows. The tag Elephant 6 didn't really mean much back then; They were just cool bands playing at joints a stone's throw from my front door. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if some of these peeps were friends or friends-of-friends and I don't remember. It wasn't until after I dropped out from things for a few years and later moved back to Chicago that Elephant 6 was presented to me as a Very Big Deal. (I think my life went through some changes just prior to In The Aeroplane exploding onto the scene, and I didn't get intro'd to that recording until ~2002 back in Chicago; My only association at that time with that band's recordings was On Avery Island). But I saw a bunch of these bands play a bunch of times in Denver- Pegasus Lounge, Lions Lair, Bluebird Theater, house shows, 15th St Tavern maybe), and I've got all kinds of nostalgia woven into the fabric of my heart for this music... It would've been nice to have a decent read of what happened. I was clued into this book's existence only because I had just seen the new Elephant 6 documentary at The Kentucky Theatre here in Lexington, and eagerly went and scooped up a new hardbound copy of the book at my local music store. But even in light of wanting something like this, though, my enthusiasm couldn't compel me to finish the book. I got maybe a third of the way through, maybe 25% in, and by then, reading it had become such a joyless exercise that I had to put it down.
That documentary, by the way, was excellent. You should check it out.
"A Fabulous Creation: How The LP Saved Our Lives" by David Hepworth.
A fascinating book about the period, 1966 to 1982, that Hepworth considers to be the heyday of the LP and how it impacted the music industry and the broader community.
Hepworth also authored another great book "1971: Never A Dull Moment" which is about what many consider to be the best ever year for rock.
"Fearless. The Making Of Post Rock" by Jeanette Leech
Amazon says "Post-rock is an anti-genre, impossible to fence in. Elevating texture over riff and ambiance over traditional rock hierarchies, its exponents used ideas of space and deconstruction to create music of enormous power. From Slint to Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tortoise to Fridge, Mogwai to Sigur Rós, the pioneers of post-rock are unified by an open-minded ambition that has proven hugely influential on everything from mainstream rock records to Hollywood soundtracks and beyond.
Drawing on dozens of new interviews and packed full of stories never before told, fearless explores how the strands of post-rock entwined, frayed, and created one of the most diverse bodies of music ever to huddle under one name."
Comments
Does he at least end up figuring out where his large automobile is?
Very clever.
A new look at recordings of Bruce and his band. I ordered in early July, but one package arrived empty and the second got lost at Customs in Belgium. Thankfully the third arrived yesterday!
I keep meaning to have a deep dive into my copy but TBH I'm struggling to keep up with my digital copies of Audion, plus The Wire and you know, real reading! Happily these days a lot of the albums can be heard on YouTube if nowherelse, which helps a lot. Have you made any interesting discoveries yet?
so you get details and cross-references that you'd might not have known before. For instance, I didn't know that Acqua Fragile (sampled by J. Dilla BTW, but they don't mention that) had reformed and put out another album not that long ago: it's not a very good album according to the book, but it's there for us to decide for ourselves (we do agree that "Mass Media Stars" is their best album, tho). The big Audion bundle is great, but I still buy books on individual "scenes" (countries, genres, etc.).
I'm celebrating my entrance into old fogeyville ("Medicare"), by having a special show next Wednesday featuring Deutsche elektronische musik for two hours. My age and Germany have little to do with each other - I just had to decide on which influence and we had a family of four visiting us from Köln this month. It's a special indulgence.
Every political leader or want to be leader should read this!
"I loved writing, I loved chronicling life and every moment I was cogent, sober, or blitzed, I was forever feeding off my surroundings, making copious notes as ammunition for future compositions. . . . The thing is good, bad or indifferent I never stopped writing, it was as addictive as any drug."
Enjoyed it but there is rather too much name dropping the more you progress through the book.
A fascinating book about the period, 1966 to 1982, that Hepworth considers to be the heyday of the LP and how it impacted the music industry and the broader community.
Hepworth also authored another great book "1971: Never A Dull Moment" which is about what many consider to be the best ever year for rock.
Amazon says "Post-rock is an anti-genre, impossible to fence in. Elevating texture over riff and ambiance over traditional rock hierarchies, its exponents used ideas of space and deconstruction to create music of enormous power. From Slint to Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tortoise to Fridge, Mogwai to Sigur Rós, the pioneers of post-rock are unified by an open-minded ambition that has proven hugely influential on everything from mainstream rock records to Hollywood soundtracks and beyond.
Drawing on dozens of new interviews and packed full of stories never before told, fearless explores how the strands of post-rock entwined, frayed, and created one of the most diverse bodies of music ever to huddle under one name."