Daily Archives: June 9, 2008

Patheticness of the Day

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This really pretty, beautifully melodic, lovely song off Joe Purdy’s latest album is TOTALLY MAKING ME CRY. And the worst part is, it’s called “Ode to Sad Clown.” COME ON NOW PEOPLE. It is an ode to a sad clown and the lyrics are totally making me cry. Can you get more pathetic and stereotypic than that? I think I better go to bed.

(Nonetheless, I assure you it is a good song. Regardless of the pathetic person listening to it.)

I used to hear the children play
used to hear the birds sing
one day they just stopped
and I don’t hear them anymore…
I got caught in this whistling wind
doin my best to regret these sins
Lord would you forgive me
if you know I’m gonna do it again
it’s not that I’m not sorry Lord,
it’s just that I’m not strong
Oh ’cause when that woman looks at me
I cant remember right from wrong…

In Concert: Nada Surf

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Given that this was a free show at Ribfest, I knew better than to expect a great mix or clear soundsystem. That said, although I thought the lead guitar was amped too loud and the vocals too low, “See These Bones” sounded even better than I imagined it would be (damn I love that song a ridiculous amount of love), and I really enjoyed the energy of the rest of the show (the rest that came before it, See These Bones being saved for almost the very end). “Ice on the Wing” and “Beautiful Beat” were other highlights. Lowlights were primarily a) the Amazon who kept shifting to stand in front of me no matter where I moved and b) her incessant pawing of her equally Amazonian boyfriend. Ew.

Big Screen: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

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As lame and predictable as you would expect. Total schmaltz. Some of it was fun because it pointed back to those old (much better) movies: say, for example, the bit with the snake. But some of it was so ludicrously off pitch, it stuck out like a sore thumb: say, for example, the bits with the gophers. And the monkeys.

I always expect lame dialogue from anything that George Lucas is in anyway connected to, but the animal bits were pure Disney channel. Trying to attract a younger audience? Then perhaps you should have rethought using your original star, who certainly looks his age, if not more.
It was fine for staying in out of the alternate periods of a) torrential rain and b) torrential heat that strafed the city yesterday. Enjoyable enough for that, I guess. But unless you find yourself in similar straits, I couldn’t recommend it.

Fiction: War with the Newts, by Karel Capek

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Our June challenge book.

Really sharp political/societal commentary. First section is really rollicking fun. Second and third, a bit darker. Sometimes very sad.

Poignantly predictable, in a way, given world history now in 2008, but probably less predictable and more predictive in its time (first published in 1936).

Loved it.

By the way, Capek is the dude who came up with (created? originated? whateva!) the word “Robot” (in his play R.U.R.). This is also the first book to cause some random stranger to come up and talk to me on public transportation IN MY LIFE and given that I have 5 yrs in Chitown and 13 yrs in NYC reading on public transit every work day, that’s saying something.

Short Stories: The Collected Stories, by Isaac Bashevis Singer

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The May challenge book. I had the ’96 Farrar Straus edition so we went off its TOC for what we read (Dad has the Complete vs. the Collected).

Very entertaining, really liked a lot of them. Intensely detailed, plotted down to the last moment (even when there’s not much of a plot), really great dialogue, and lots and lots of crazy neurotics (“The Admirer”, for example. nuts!).

That said, they were arranged (way) too thematically. I mean four or five stories into dybbuks and devils tormenting innocent jews (I really didn’t realize there were that many devils in Judaic tradition) and they all start to seem a little too much the same (and you’ve still got another 20 on that topic to go). Then at the other end of the book, all the NYC stories were lumped together as well. Mixing the disparate types together might have made it an more enjoyable read (or I could have instituted my own mix and read out of order, but how was I to know they were grouped by type?) — not that it wasn’t enjoyable, but there were definitely stories where I thought “another one of these? just like the last four? really?”.

When you get to the NYC stories, there are quite a few where you suddenly see the influence he’s had on Philip Roth. “Old Love” for example shares so many of Roth’s current themes and similar personal details on the part of the protagonist. Dad thinks Singer (rather than Malamud) is really the model for Roth’s E.I. Lonoff (an elder writer who appears in some of Roth’s Zuckerman books).