TWO CUTE ANIMALS, A GOOFY HAT, PIERCE BROSNAN AND THE WHITE STRIPES: A BRIEF TRIP TO GEORGIAAs you read this, I will have started work again after a month-and-a-half-long vacation/hiatus/unemployment period, which will somewhat ironically probably lead to an increase in blogging. But as I spent most of my break wearing out my TiVo, I decided to actually get out of my house for my final week of freedom. Therefore, I took a trip to the Boyhood Home in Georgia. This is what home looks like:
It's been a few years since I've seen it without a massive
Dickens Village display occupying most of the space behind the couch (one of these Christmases I'm going to convince my mom to let me recreate the Battle of Hoth on the outskirts of the Village). As you can see, currently that area houses part of the folk art collection. If you squint real hard, you can see a portrait of my dad by Howard Finster on the right-hand side of the photo.
Here is the first of two pictures of cute animals--Jojo, the larger and more masculine of my parents' two cats:
Jojo is angling hard to win Everything Idol.
While I was home, Uncle Ken, one of my former English teachers, presented me with a new hat:
We're currently accepting applications for fall semester. Keg cups are three dollars, dudebro.
After a few days at home I drove down to Athens to see
Chris,
Amy and
Ben. Amy graciously let me stay at her house for the trip. Here's me displaying my gratitude by drinking her bourbon:
And here's the second of the promised two cute animals--her dog, Moxie:
We all went out to
Clocked, which wasn't around the last time I was in Athens, and I had a peanut-butter-and-bacon burger, which was surprisingly delicious. The tater tots are also highly recommended. Then it was off to the Manhattan, which was in Athens the last time I was there, and then after consulting the
Flagpole (why Chris and Ben didn't have the
ABC section memorized already, I don't know) we discovered that the Go Bar hosts "Indie Rock Karaoke" on Thursday nights. The description of this event reads: "If you're sick of 'Baby Got Back,' wear your Chucks and come on by. Every Thursday, 10 p.m." I was already wearing Chucks. I was mocked by my friends--friends whom I haven't seen in months, friends I count on to be there for me in good times and bad. Someday, I will make them pay.
I've mentioned my
mild karaoke obsession before; in fact, reading through that earlier post, I discovered this little rumination: "I'm convinced that there's a fortune to be made in recording karaoke versions of relatively obscure alt-rock songs. I know it's fun to sing Bon Jovi, but if any karaoke place ever had a Pixies song in its selection, I would probably die of happiness." Well lo and fucking behold, someone has taken my suggestion, and that someone's name is DJ Geoff. The Go Bar's Indie Rock Karaoke songbook has a good half-page of Pixies songs sans vocals. And I didn't even die! I did, however, sing a frighteningly intense version of "Debaser." That was fun. (Somewhat inexplicably, the songbook also has a huge Dismemberment Plan selection. Also, it has explanations for why certain questionable songs, for example anything that might be heard on a Top 40 station, are included--i.e. "It came with the stand" or "Came with a White Stripes song.")
The next day I accompanied Amy to Vision Video to find some filmed entertainment to occupy her time after I left. At the store, we came acoss these two DVDs right next to each other. Let it never be said that Pierce Brosnan doesn't have range:
See, the slight smile on the
Thomas Crown Affair cover indicates that he will most likely make out with Rene Russo during the course of the film. Sorry, Geoffrey Rush.
On the way back from Athens I stopped in tha ATL to see
Chris 2 and talk about comics and
Star Wars; the consensus is that all the little inconsistencies and "what the hell?" moments are the result of poor filmmaking, but can be easily rationalized if you're deluded enough. As we are.
Chris also slipped me an advance copy of
Get Behind Me Satan, the new White Stripes album. The verdict? It's damn good. It's not a stone masterpiece like
Elephant; on first listen, it even sounds more like a collection of unfinished demos and halfway-thought-out ideas than a real album. But if you let it score your daily life for a few days, its charms reveal itself. Jack White's guitar, always the most powerful weapon in his arsenal, is relegated to backup duty or even set aside entirely in favor of piano (on most tracks) or marimba (on a couple). There are no blistering "Ball and Biscuit"-style solos, and few of the thunderous blues riffs that characterized earlier Stripes albums. There is, of course, the bludgeoning robot-cock-rock of the lead track and first single "Blue Orchid," which sounds like every 70s arena-rock band compressed into two-and-a-half minutes and rocks as hard as anything in the band's catalog. The "Blue Orchid" riff is really a work of art, as it recalls an entire decade and genre of music while being almost completely divorced from what an electric guitar actually sounds like. It's an abstract concept almost, this huge vibrating wave that sets off the triggers in the back of our heads labeled "Foreigner." "Blue Orchid" renders the "garage rock" label completely obsolete; any garage this was recorded in probably also housed a Millennium Falcon.
Aside from the two other lurching axe workouts "Instinct Blues" and "Red Rain,"
Get Behind Me Satan maintains a more subdued, if not exactly mellow, tone. The marimba-based "The Nurse" creates a creepy, menacing atmosphere, punctuated by tuneless bursts of guitar noise, but by the end it never really goes anywhere; you expect it to break out into a full-fledged classic Stripes barnburner, but it just builds and then ends. More successful are "My Doorbell" and "The Denial Twist," both built on Jack's Jerry Lee Lewis piano pounding and Meg White's cymbal-happy stomping. "The Denial Twist" even has what sounds like an honest-to-god bassline. That's one of the more interesting things about the album: while, in general, it sounds less complete and polished than
Elephant, these songs might be more difficult for Jack and Meg to replicate live. There was plenty of overdubbing on the previous album, but it was largely guitars on top of guitars; here it's two or three different instruments.
The
fair-to-negative reviews of
Get Behind Me Satan have largely focused on Jack's motives for making what the reviewers see as a sub-par album (i.e., is he deliberately sabotaging expectations a la Dylan's Self Portrait?), but that take assumes that Jack gives a shit what rock writers think about him. Reviewers have also used up a good bit of ink trying to discern which songs are about former paramour Renee Zellweger. Whereas on previous albums you just sort of assumed he was singing about Meg (or at least some nameless red-haired girl), here nearly every song is a breakup song (particularly the ballads "White Moon," "As Ugly as I Seem" and "Forever for Her (Is Over for Me"), and those that aren't seem to be about Rita Hayworth. Is Hayworth a stand-in for Zellweger? Is "Take, Take, Take," a jaunty little tale in which the narrator asks Hayworth for an autograph and becomes increasingly stalkerish as she refuses to take a picture with him or give him a lock of hair, really an extended metaphor for his relationship with Bridget Jones? It's possible, I guess. And, as usual, there's plenty of weirdness involving his relationship with Meg. On "Passive Manipulation," she sings "Women, listen to your mothers / Don't just succumb to the wishes of your brothers...You need to know the difference between a father and a lover," and on the album-closing "I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet)," Jack enumerates the charms of his mother, his sister, a homely girl with her hair in a net, and drowning, but stops himself from succumbing by singing the title.
So
Get Behind Me Satan is frustrating at times, and kind of a downer, but it's no less fascinating an addition to the White Stripes saga than any of their previous albums. But if you miss the exuberance of
Elephant or
White Blood Cells, take heart: Jack has apparently
found and married his "red hair with a curl" girl, so maybe the next disc will be a big happy weird love triangle instead of a big weird sad love triangle.
BONUS! Brief reviews of books I read on the trip:The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell - She's got a quick wit and a real thing for democracy and civic responsibility, but for the most part these essays just make me wish I was reading David Sedaris--he has a way of drawing larger conclusions from similarly mundane topics that give his essays more staying power than these slight ruminations.
Like the Red Panda by Andrea Seigel - Picked this up on a whim thanks to the title (the red panda and its spectacular cuteness was a recent conversation topic) and a back-cover blurb from Chuck Klosterman ("If Helen Fielding had been born in 1979 and become a hyper-precocious Goth kid whose favorite book was Prozac Nation, she probably would have ended up writing exactly like Andrea Seigel") that could easily be a backhanded compliment or even an outright diss. Occasionally funny but mainly just clever, and the big ending seems kind of forced, deliberately denying the reader hope of reconciliation (though the breakdown in the fictional conceit at the end is interesting). The best parts are the observations of high-school types, and main character Stella's skittish foster parents are some nicely drawn characters. Mainly this made me think "Wow! She was born in 1979! That's really young to have written a novel! That's my age! Oh wait, my age is 25! My age is no longer that young! Boy!"
Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence by Paul Feig - Feig created
Freaks & Geeks, and many of the experiences he recalls in this book must have served as direct inspiration for
F&G episodes. Feig isn't a great prose stylist, but his childhood was spectacularly embarrassing, and this book is frequently both hilarious and painful. You might like this more if you've seen
F&G, but however bad your adolescence was, you'll just be glad you weren't named Paul Feig.
