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Sunday, 28 September 2008

Currently Listening
Infiniheart
By Chad VanGaalen
Clinically Dead
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Four dogs in the distance; each stands for a kindness.

What's getting me through this? The National. Billy Bragg. Belly. Something about the sonics of some records where there's loud, loud heavy drumming and delicate playing and instruments. Some kind of coronet and violin over a really pounding beat that starts The Geese Of Beverly Road by the National. It's a definite allusion to how life feels. It always goes on, it's unapologetic and hard to ignore, but laid over it is this kind of connectedness and beauty that makes it easier to bear. Safari by the Breeders too. It's loud and pounding, but on a dime it becomes a pop song about being lost and how to cope. Then it ends in blissful raging feedback, the kind of sound that makes Belly a staple of my playlists these days.

This kind of heartache is like being visited by my old self. The hopeless romantic with a doomed sense of being. The flawed and cracked glass that seems to inform my outlook as much as it influences what people see about me.

Wednesday, 19 September 2007

It's like at the circus, when you get lost in the crowd.

"How can I make my body shed for you?"

The lack of things to say. Hmm. Too tired to think of what I've been thinking about.

The new Kevin Drew album is excellent and I love it and it's very Broken Social Scene-y. The best parts are when the trumpets and violins sound like they're falling apart. It's the sound of things almost toppling over that Wilco used so greatly on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It's the demonstration of perfection; perfection is a virtual state, and it can only be achieve when a system is pushed to fracturing and still retains it's cohesion.

Laurie Anderson demonstrates that idea as well on O Superman, but instead of pushing the noise to it's limits, she tries to numb the listener with the repetetive loops and then when the climax arrives at the end of the song, it's just that much more shocking and emotional. Terrific.

"When love is gone, there's always justice.
When justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there's always mom.
Hi mom."

A lot of my favourite music sounds like it's decaying, like if a wax cylinder was being played under a hot light, or an AM signal was getting bounced around mountains. When something sounds like it's tearing itself apart to reach you, you take it more seriously than something that strolls.

"There will come a time when gigantic waves will crush the junk I've made... tra la la... "

Tuesday, 11 September 2007

Currently Listening
Good Morning Spider
By Sparklehorse
Sunshine
see related
Lovers in a dangerous time.

"When the moon will explode or floats away, I'll lose the souvenirs I've made."
So I read the Annie Proulx short story, Brokeback Mountain, last night. It comes in it's own little hardcover that you can get from a bargain bin for $4.99. It's probably one of the most famous short stories in the last 20 years, and definitely one of the most talked about movies. But the controversy overshadows how well written the story really is.
It's not perfect. But nothing great is perfect. The characters are so clearly revealed and the interactions are significant and very little is hidden under the surface of the language. Unlike say, Cormac McCarthy, who revels in a phantasmagoria of logophillic hodge-podge, Proulx chooses to beef up certain phrases only if it can illuminate a little more what emotion she's trying to get us to feel.
Her best moments are the most clearly conjured. Two ranch hands holding each other near a cold sunlit riverbank. A man discover his true love's boyhood haunts and the place where he kept his treasures. These are the moments that break your heart most because they cast aside the issues of how we define our love and focus on the effects it has on a person. When she lets go of the reins and the story takes us so organically through the emotional tangles of these men, we care more about them.
The only part of the story where she makes it easy on herself and the characters is in the relationship they share with their wives. She makes the women unlikable to a degree enough that it seems fair that Jack and Ennis would want to leave them. It seems like she's sacrificing some authenticity in the characters in order to soften up the fact that the infidelity seems like a reasonable reaction.
It's a brave story, told in a big and charitable style that makes you really feel like you're there. You know enough about these men to feel sorry for them in how doomed they are. And you walk away wondering about the reality of the men who lived it. And hope that maybe someday we'll be ready in all the corners for inexpressible desire to be realized.