Musical Wednesdays: Two Songs With Premonitions

I always find it weird when a song is written and then a line in it becomes weirdly predictive of something that happens later. I can't imagine it's too common, but two songs come to mind.

The first one is a few years old, a Hold Steady song off of Separation Sunday. It's a great album that I could write about for weeks if I had nothing else to do (or if, you know, the 33 and 1/3 people hired me to write about it) but one of my favorite songs is called "Don't Let Me Explode." There's a bit about Saint Barbara in there (patron saint of munition-men and other hazardous occupations), but the bulk of the song is this narrative about finding a home in America. It's a theme the band covered well in "Killer Parties" from their first album, but this song is different:

"Yeah, we didn't go to Dallas,
'Cause Jackie O'Nassis said
that it ain't safe for Catholics yet.
Think about what they pulled on Kennedy,
and then think about his security.
Then think about what they might try to pull on you and me."

It's more about a spiritual yearning than a catalog of places the narrator has partied through, and there's a line that has always, always struck me as odd.

"Yeah, and he said, 'What about New Orleans?'
She said, 'I don't think you understand what that means.'"

This album came out in May of 2005. And then two months later, the meaning of "New Orleans" changed. It's a strange bit of prophecy in a very Catholic band, and even though I know they weren't talking about what New Orleans came to mean, it still kind of haunts me.

The second one is a bit lighter: it's in the song "So Far Around the Bend" by the National, off of the Dark Was the Night compilation. It's about a lost and listless woman that the singer just can't seem to connect with (even as he describes her actions) and ends with a repeated line, "Now there's no leaving New York," which makes the song (for me) about a failure to connect in a city of millions. But the line that I noticed this weekend was this one: "Praying for Pavement to get back together." This compilation only came out a few months ago, and now? Prayer answered.

Are there any other songs that strangely predict the future? Let me know if you think of any.

Fiction Mondays: Brief Rainy September Update

I went away this weekend, so this post is going to be a little shorter than usual. First, my thoughts on pages 71-140 of Gravity's Rainbow (these thoughts are not very organized, but bear with me):

• The whole section about Katje and Gottfriend in the cabin in the woods was way too long. The guy who keeps them trapped (was it Blicero?) was far too unpleasant a character to be stuck with for so many pages.
• I really loved the whole scene with Roger Mexico and Jessica at the Advent Mass, and the whole world of associations it brings out as they consider Christmas at wartime.
• Was the story behind "the White Visitation" (the Angel seen in the sky) revealed in this section or early in the next one? Either way: I think it's interesting that we know, in reality, that Hitler was interested in the occult, but the general belief seems to be that he was interested in the dark side of the pseudosciences and psychic abilities. So what Pynchon does with the Angel and the White Visitation is set up a binary relationship--which comes up throughout the entire first section of the novel.

And now, onto other things:

I went down to the National Book Festival this weekend, where I met Junot Diaz. He signed my copy of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and said I had a cool name. He was incredibly friendly and great to all of his readers--he signed for an hour longer than he was supposed to, just so everyone in line could get their book signed, and made sure as many people as possible got under his signing tent when it started to rain.

Since the novel I have been working on takes place in and around DC, I got to revisit some of the significant places from the story, including Whistler's Peacock Room, one of my all-time favorite places in the city. What was strange was that I felt this weird nostalgia for things that never actually happened. I remembered moment from my book like they were real life.

I know there was something on HTMLGiant last week about how we still need a word for this feeling--nostalgia for things we never actually experienced. After sitting in the Peacock Room, thinking about the scenes that take place there, I completely agree.

Friday Films: 500 Days of Summer

Last night, I finally got to see "500 Days of Summer." I really hoped to see this movie before the first day of Autumn, but I live in a small town with three screens for independent films, so sometimes we have to wait. But I'm really happy to say it was worth the wait. It was really well made, great acting and writing and directing.

I think it got a lot right about being a geek and falling madly in love--from the tendency to take every little thing as a sign, to the crushing defeat of being "just friends"--but it got even more right about the way a relationship falls apart. A lot of the movie serves as a kind of autopsy for the relationship, with Tom (Joseph Gordon Levitt) trying to figure out where things went wrong with Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and trying to figure out how he might get her back. Moments are visited and revisited, looking for the first sign of trouble, where things really ended. Depending on the context, the same moment might be an embrace between two people in love or the same couple desperately holding on to something that can't be saved.

The movie is structured out-of-order--first we see the last scene, and then we jump back to the day of the breakup, and then back to the first day Tom and Summer meet. It jumps forward and backward, eventually revealing how their relationship starts. This is really effective in a lot of scenes: in one, Tom walks to work after he sleeps with Summer for the first time, and there's a big dance number to Hall and Oates' "You Make My Dreams Come True" (at one point in this scene, Tom catches his reflection and sees Harrison Ford as Han Solo looking back at him). It jumps to a few days after the break-up, Tom going to work again, now miserable. It works really well and gives Joseph Gordon Levitt a chance to show a really wide range. At another point, Tom and Summer are in Ikea toward the end of their relationship and Tom struggles to amuse Summer, but the fact that what he's doing is a reference to an earlier date isn't revealed until the next scene.

There are a lot of really fun touches throughout--I know some reviews weren't crazy about the voice-over narration, but I liked it. It gives details that wouldn't be there otherwise, whether it's the explanation that Tom's believe in soul mates stems from "an early exposure to sad British pop music and a total misreading of the movie 'The Graduate'," or the details of how when Summer quoted Belle and Sebastian's "The Boy With the Arab Strap" in her high school yearbook, sales of the album in her hometown skyrocketed. I liked these details, and who else would have provided them?

I was reminded, watching this movie, of two of my favorite "romantic comedies," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Annie Hall." It makes sense--both of these movies are presented out of chronological order, and each are about, in their own way, the dissolution of a relationship and how the relationship looks when you're thinking back on it. There were a lot of scenes that were heavily reminiscent of "Annie Hall," in a good way: an awkward embrace outside of the movie theater, the meeting shortly after the breakup where the protagonist thinks there might still be a chance, and throughout, a love and awareness of the movies that influenced this one. You can almost imagine Joseph Gordon-Levitt turning to the camera and saying, "After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go. But it was great seeing Summer again. I realized what a terrific person she was, and how much fun it was just knowing her."

Musical Wednesdays: Beatles Rock Band Edition

Now that I've had some time to play "The Beatles: Rock Band," I'm just going to say this: it's awesome. That's an overall, blanket kind of statement on it, but really, taking the whole game, it's fantastic. The trajectory from little band in the clubs to rock gods is really amazing, and the final song, "The End," in which an entire world springs into being from the Beatles' song is really fitting for some reason.

That said, it does have its flaws. There are tons of songs missing (I know these will be available for purchase in the Beatles: Rock Band store, but I want to play "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" now. And the last concert has a lot of songs that are...well, not the best. "Dig a Pony" and "I've Got a Feeling" are not the resonant kind of Beatles songs a game should go out on, although "Don't Let Me Down" and "Get Back" are fun.

The best part of the game, by far, are the Abbey Road "Dreamscapes," in which the scene transforms from the Abbey Road studios to...well, anything. The "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" is played in a gazebo which proceeds to transform into a hot air balloon for "With a Little Help From My Friends," and "Dear Prudence" has a black-and-white world transform with color as the song goes along.

And I know I made a Ringo joke when I first posted about it, but drumming is really fun. Especially leading up to the chorus of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

So this is all just to say: everyone is invited over to play. Because it's more fun with more people. And there are little Beatles jokes scattered throughout, as you unlock "Accomplishments" (one, for unlocking a certain number of photographs, is called "In Penny Lane there is a Barber). When you beat the game, there's one that borrows the joke from the end of "Get Back," John Lennon summing up the band's career by saying, "I'd like to thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition."

Fiction Mondays: Rainy September Check-In

Today marks the first check-in date for Rainy September, and I am currently ahead of schedule! So I thought today, I would post some thoughts on the first 70 pages (or so) of the novel. So if you don't want to hear my thoughts on Gravity's Rainbow, skip on ahead. But if you do...

There's a really interesting scene in these pages, toward the end of these pages, in which Pointsman, the Pavlovian doctor, worries that Roger Mexico, the statistician, and the rest of his generation will live outside of cause and effect after the war. This is severely terrifying to a Pavlovian, to whom cause and effect are essential:

"Will Postwar be nothing but "events," newly created one moment to the next?"

And the answer, according to the plot and structure of the novel, is yes. We jump from event to event, character to character, often with no link between. The mystery of Tyrone Slothrop (every place he has sex, a rocket hits) is picked apart by a group of pseudo-scientists and psychics trying to understand the reason, and the question they cannot answer is which is the cause and which is the effect. I really love how Pynchon mirrors this confusion in the structure of the book, for instance: Slothrop's extended hallucination (toward the end of these pages) is not explained until the next section. We are left flailing, hoping that the cause of this hallucination will be explained.

As far as the difficulty of this section, these pages were pretty tame. We had characters being developed, plots being set in motion. But the next one is not so easy. One section took my several days because the characters in it are so unsavory, and when it switches back to Pirate Prentice, it dives into what is (I think) another extended daydream he's looking into.

***End of Gravity's Rainbow section***

In other news, I have sent out my novel to my next readers. I was terrified to do it, but I'm excited to see what they say. I had no idea it would be so scary to send it out to people I know, but it makes sense--it's a lot easier to put the book in the hands of someone I have never met than to get feedback from people I know very well. But I think it's a strong draft. Not perfect, but strong. I think it's reached a point where I need other people to read it. I've spent so much time with it that I know it backwards and forward, and this familiarity can make me miss things.

Friday Films: A Flawed Maker Fairy Tale

Last Friday, I saw 9, the new animated film produced by Tim Burton and directed by Shane Acker. A few years ago, I saw the ten-minute short film it was based on and I really liked it, but I found the full-length movie kind of lacking.

Visually, it was really amazing and terrifying, with machines incorporating animal skulls and doll heads chasing the protagonists, and a post-apocalyptic landscape that seemed to imagine what would have happened if the world ended shortly after World War II. I don't know if anyone else got the sense that "the Machine" was this alternate-reality's version of "the Bomb," but that's what I thought every time they showed the blasted landscape.

This feeling of a post-apocalyptic past continued into the design of the characters, a group of little burlap robots, each with a painted number) who wake up as humanity ends. They're pretty old-fashioned, as far as robots go, made of watch parts and zippers and cloth (#6 is made of mattress ticking), and they seem more like Da Vinci-imagined automatons brought to life by some occult magic. Which is kind of true.

The movie is kind of a flawed steampunk maker/DIY fairy tale, in that the creator of the Burlap 9 is also the creator of the evil, humanity-destroying Machine, which is in turn a maker (of other, also evil, machines). Everybody is assembling something, whether it's a hat made of a candle, or a stick with a lightbulb, or a grappling hook made of a bunch of old fishhooks. This was something I actually liked about it, because the images of these little cobbled-together characters cobbling together their own inventions was a really great contrast to the efficient, evil machine, with its flawless assembly and glowing red eye. The last line of dialogue is kind of a testament to the promise of creation, as 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood) says that the world is what they make of it.

Unfortunately, the plot doesn't make any sense. It devolves into a bunch of weird, not-exactly explained black magic, another chase with the Machine, and an ending that left me asking what the point was. Are these burlap characters supposed to spend the rest of eternity hanging out, waiting to rust? At least in the short film, 9 went off on his own, bound for something. Or is there more to it, that last line as a comment on the whole movie being about making?

Still, it's hard to end on a hopeful note when all of humanity is wiped out. At least Wall-E had humans still alive, even if they were enormous, lazy, and stupid, so there was more to go on than a hopeful Elijah Wood Burlap-Bot stating that the desolate world is "whatever we make of it." What is the value of that line when it's already a wasteland?

Musical Wednesdays: Bands I Think I Might Like

There are a few bands that have been popping up on my radar (more specifically, on the Sirius/XM-U channel on satellite radio) that I really don't know if I like just yet. I think it's the fact that I've only heard one or two songs by each of these bands, and I'm not quite sold.

The first band is Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, whose new single, "Home" is on a loop in my brain. It's kind of genre-defying, but I guess you could say it falls on the hippie end of the folk spectrum. It's a really upbeat call-and-response love song, with one of the most unabashedly joyful choruses I've heard in a long time. It's about falling in love, and it really sounds like it. They had another song in rotation, "Janglin" that wasn't bad, but after watching some videos of the band performing and the official music video for home, I'm kind of on the fence. I get the sense that they're trying too hard, with the lead singer in a white robe in one performance video and the music video filmed through a surreal, strange lens that distorts the light and the figures:

I like the song, and I want to like the band, but I can't shake the feeling that there's something strange about it, like this group is playing at it. But maybe that's just what being a performer comes down to.

The second band is Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele (is there a trend here with these band names?), and the first song I heard, "Meet Me in the Garden," got insanely overplayed really quickly. It's weird and lounge-inspired. I heard another one a few nights ago, and I liked it a lot more, but I can't for the life of me remember the name. Here's the video for the first single:

So here I'm again wondering if I want to like this band. I mean, I already have a clever and talented ukulele player (ukulelist?) in my musical roster, and I really prefer Beirut because I think Zach Condon is a much better songwriter. He creates a more richly-imagined world in his albums, and he doesn't seem removed from the music, as the Dent May video does. I prefer beauty in music more than cleverness--I'm much more likely to be affected by a song like "Elephant Gun" or "Postcards from Italy" because I think the sentiments they contain are worth writing songs about.

So what do you think? Has anyone heard other songs by these bands? Are they worth my time?

I also want to take this opportunity to promote a friend of mine from college, Julian Lynch. He just came out with an album of 4-track recordings, and what I've heard so far is really dreamy and psychedelic. There are a lot of things I remember about hanging out with him, especially during my freshman year, but one of my favorites was a time my friend Paul and I found him in his room, recording on his computer, using anything he had nearby for percussion. He played back one of the songs for us, and during a quiet part, he turned to us and said, "This is where the chorus of Mexicans comes in." Hearing his record, it suddenly makes sense.