SOUNDTRACK: Make the Load Lighter: Indie Rock for Haiti (2010).
I mentioned this disc a few days ago because it’s a benefit disc for the people of Haiti. I had encouraged people to order it ($10 to a good cause, eh?) but hadn’t fully listened to it yet.
Well, after playing the disc nonstop for the weekend, it’s time to chime in and say that this is a fantastic disc of indie rock, which spans the indie rock gamut from harder punk songs to beautiful heart-felt passionate tracks. Each and every track is catchy, and most of them have a cool twist or hook to push it beyond being “just” an indie song
The first three songs are really fast and really heavy. Footstone opens the disc. I don’t know a lot by them, but this sounds to me like their heaviest song ever. It comes across like a really hard edged punk song, but you know there’s a groove too.
Boss Jim Gettys (one of many wonderfully named bands) play a 2 minute punk metal blast that is notable for the cool guitar solo that breaks up the onslaught. The third heavy song is by Dromedary stalwarts cuppa joe (!?). “Taniqua” is a fast song with a rocking guitar intro. It thuds along for 2 and a half minutes and then ends with a wonderfully upbeat chord that leads nicely in to the fourth song. Moviola’s “Calling on the Line” is a poppy jangly college rock sounding song from the 90s. It pretty well epitomizes the Dromedary sound. The band has a bunch of records out which you can see here.
I wasn’t that impressed with Three Blind Wolves at first. It seemed a little lacking. But after about three listens I got it, and it’s now one of my favorite songs on the disc. The singer’s voice is varied and wonderful, warbling over a fairly spare musical intro (the occasional high notes are totally cool). But the chorus just rocks out wonderfully. Three Blind Wolves is one of four Scottish bands from what I rather assumed would be a Jersey based compilation.
Paula Corino’s song is okay. It’s my least favorite track on the disc, but only because it never really grabs me, and, while it’s a totally fine song, it gets a little lost amidst the rest of the tracks. It’s followed by Wallendas’ “Adrianne” a delightful poppy song like a modern day Byrds.
The next song, The Neutron Drivers’ “All Around the Sun” doesn’t have an original second in it. And yet it is easily the catchiest song on the whole disc. When you first hear the opening guitars you pretty much know exactly what the whole song (even the obvious guitar solo) will sound like. It’s like the uber-rocksong. And yet for all of its sounding familiar, it doesn’t sounds like any specific song. Amazing how they pulled that off.
The Dark Brothers’ “Knee Deep in Sin” is a weird and unsettling song in that it sounds like the singer from Social Distortion with a slide guitar. It’s got a majorly country feel, until about three minutes in when you get a guitar solo straight outta Teenage Fanclub’s “The Concept” and suddenly this country song is a slow burning rocker. Very cool.
The next two songs justify the price of the disc. There Will Be Fireworks’ (Scottish band #2) “Foreign Thoughts” is a fantastic, amazing song. It builds and builds with tension upon tension as the singer (with a wonderfully aggressive accent) spits the words over more and more instrumentation. It’s followed by the utterly amazing Gena Rowlands Band’s “Fuckups Of the World Unite.” This is like the great long lost American Music Club song. It’s vulgar and yet completely un-profane. It’s catchy, heartfelt and it blows me away each time I hear it, both lyrically and musically. The simple guitar paired with the opening couplet is amazing in an of itself but it’s even better when it closes the song.
The Mommyheads come next with a remixed version of “Spiders” from Flying Suit. I enjoyed the song on that disc, but it takes on a new life in this remixed version. It feels fuller and even slighty creepier.
On like my third or fourth listen, Scottish band #3, Farewell Singapore’s “Blue” grabbed me and said “HEY THIS SONG IS FUCKING GREAT YA BASTARD.” And man, is it ever. I’ve been walking around all weekend singing “Scotland’s as dark as it’s going to be” over and over. And I’ve no idea what it means. The sudden breaks in the song sound like there’s something wrong with the track given the propulsive nature of everything else. And the intense guitar solo that follows the glockenspiel bit is fantastic. Oh and the male/female vocals sound great together.
Jennifer Convertible (a wonderful band name which gently rips a regional chain store, which seems to have changed its name to the far less inspired Jennifer Sofas and Sofabeds) has a very cool song that opens like a latter R.E.M. track but brings in some wonderfully atmospheric guitar noise to add a real sense of foreboding to the song. The buzzing guitar solo is a nice touch, too.
lions.chase.tigers (4th and final Scottish band, with a downloadable EP on their website) sound a bit like an early Bob Mould track. Which is pretty good in itself, but what I love about the song is that it’s a cool jangly indie rock song with a great martial drum sound. And it bops along, in a minor key until we get a delicate guitar riff and then a rocking chorus. But the really interesting part is yet to come: the gentle guitars come back but they’re accompanied by a voice screaming its lungs out (and yet mixed way down, so it’s no louder than the guitar). And the song proceeds as if that isn’t a weird thing to add in. Man, it takes guts to write a song like that, and it pays off.
The disc ends with Stuyvesant’s song, “Salieri. It’s another slow builder, but it’s quite catchy and when the harmonies kick in in the last minute, it become quite the great song. And it ends the disc on a good note.
So, in sum, order the disc. It’s for a good cause, but even if you’re not into that sort of thing, you get some really great music for your money. There’s literally not a bad track on the disc, and the bulk of them are outstanding.
Even the liner notes are interesting (and provide a look at why and how this disc came about). My only complaint is that you get almost no information on the bands! Now, I realize that in the world of online downloads, you’re lucky enough to get album art (and the photos are sad and beautiful) but I’d love to know more about these bands, where they’re from, who they are, and if any of them are have websites or other discs or whatnot. But then, I actually read liner notes on discs!
Download the tracks, and the art, here. Do it! Now!
[READ: Week of February 15, 2010] 2666 [pg 231-290]
This week’s reading is the first half of the third Part: The Part About Fate. And I have to say thus far it is easily my favorite part of the book. I enjoyed it right from the start upon learning that the titular Fate is not an abstract Fate but a person named Fate. A nice twist right up front.
This section also deals quite directly with matters of race. Fate is black, and during his travels he is acutely aware of his color. Plus, many scenes pop up in which race is definitely a factor.
Fate’s real name is Quincy Williams. He is a 30 year-old reporter for Black Dawn, a magazine out of Harlem. Quincy is known as Oscar Fate; everyone calls him Fate.
As this part opens, Fate learns that his mother has just died. We get the impression that he is not terribly close with her. When he arrives at her apartment, very few people are still there (her neighbor–the one who found her–suffered a heart attack, and everyone is now with her at the hospital). The only people left in his mom’s place are a 15 year-old neighbor girl who leaves when he shows up and, creepily, his mom’s body.
The next morning the funeral home claims the body and the funeral goes off as planned. Fate hangs around his mom’s apartment reminiscing somewhat, but the memories aren’t great. He decides he will never watch the VHS tapes that he found by her TV. And when he uses her towel, likely the last towel she ever touched, he can’t smell any sign of her either.
He goes outside, has a meal at a Middle Eastern restaurant and is immediately sick in the alleyway. While wandering around, he sees a movie marquee, a cinema he used to go to all the time as a kid. Since he’s still woozy, he decides to go into the cool cinema. The movie playing shows a white man arrested by three black cops who work for the DEA. There’s underhanded work afoot, but it’s unclear just what’s going on. After that first scene ends, Fate leaves the theater.
But he doesn’t have a lot of time to gather his thoughts as he is off on an assignment to interview Barry Seaman in Detroit.
On the plane, Fate overhears a story of a man named Bobby who was fishing in a lake when his boat capsized. He was by himself, near death, when he became aware that a plane flying above was clearly about to crash. The plane landed in the lake that he was in, so he swam to the wreckage. When rescuers found him, he was assumed to be the only survivor of the plane crash. But when the they learned that he wasn’t even on the plane, they all seemed rather disappointed, even though they did save his life.
When he lands in Detroit, Fate learns that Barry Seaman is not home. So he goes to a bar to wait him out. The neighborhood is primarily black and there’s a large mural on the building across from the bar. Fate asks about the mural, but isn’t given a very good answer about it. So he hangs around the bar for a while. The Bartender tells Fate that he used to be a boxer, but he often took a dive because it paid better.
Fate finally gets to see Barry Seaman (and immediately throws up in his bathroom). Seaman has a huge collection of books including The Abridged French Encyclopedia (which Fate has never heard of–and which the Internet has never heard of either).
Barry Seaman was a founder of the Black Panthers (and there on the desk is a photo of him and Marius Newell).
[Now, I’m not sure exactly what’s meant to be going on here in terms of history. The two founders of the Black Panther party were Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. It’s evident that Bolaño is basing his characters on the actual men, but it seems odd that he would give his characters different names yet have most of the facts be the same. Okay, that itself is not weird, but having the characters be not only famous, but you know, be one of the founders of the Black Panthers?… I just wonder what’s up there. I also have to wonder if the other characters in the book who are based on other people are actually meant to be those people in a fictional setting. The other thing is that aside from the wisdom that Barry imparts, I’m not sure why he had to be this particular historical figure. Why not just make up a preacher or something? Not a complaint, just wondering what’s going on.]
Barry currently makes his money giving lectures (although years ago he published a book called Eating Ribs with Barry Seaman, a collection of recipes he had been gathering since his prison days. [Bobby Seale wrote a book called Barbeque’n with Bobby and has a website dedicated to his “bobbyque” recipes.]
But today, Seaman is heading to a church to give a sermon. In the sermon he addresses five subjects: DANGER, MONEY, FOOD, STARS, USEFULNESS.
Seaman begins by telling the crowd about how he and Newell formed the Black Panthers. And with all the things that happened (including Seaman’s arrest and Newell’s murder by a black man) he felt that they accomplished some good in the world. He notes that there are more and more black men and women in power.
As for money, he doesn’t like the way poor people spend money, showing of when they should be saving. As for food, pork chops saved his life (see the above book), but he also happily gives out a recipe for duck à l’orange. Stars, of course are metaphorical, and there are celebrity stars as well as meteorological stars. But the real star is the Sun. Up close the sun is a flaming hell but on our planet it is very useful.
This sermon isn’t all that original, but it is telling of Seaman’s character. He continues that nowadays nobody trusts a smile. Back in the day, a smile could open doors. But now teeth are mostly for dentists to fix up, foisting useless fixes on poor people.
So what’s good for people? Eating right. (He gives a recipe for Brussels Sprouts with lemon). Not watching too much TV. Reading books by black writers. He himself read everything he could get, both when he was in jail and since gaining his freedom. He even mentions a book that brought him peace: An Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire [again, nothing available about this on the web].
After the sermon, Fate returns to his hotel and watches some porn. The porn is in German, and he is surprised to see a black man speaking German in the film. Are there even black people in Germany? When he switches channels, he sees a trashy talk show in which a fat black man is yelling at his even fatter ex-wife while his slightly less fat new girlfriend eggs him on. Fate is surprised to hear the man call his ex-wife “fat.”
While Fate slept there was a report on the news about an American who disappeared in Santa Teresa. It is followed by a story about all of the women who have been murdered there. Meanwhile, Fate dreamed about the first story he had published in Black Dawn. It was about the lone remaining communist living in Brooklyn: Antonio Ulises Jones (known as Scotsboro Boy). [The Scotsboro Boys were twelve black defendants in a 1931 Scottsboro, Alabama rape case. Their trials were instrumental in establishing that criminal defendants are entitled to effective assistance of counsel and that people may not be de facto excluded from juries because of their race.]
Jones is still a communist, but he hates Stalin and Lenin. He loves Marx, however. He posits that The Internationale was an anthem that could have been written for black folks. And then he summarizes the tenure of Communists in Brooklyn: During WWII there were more than 1,000, which after the war rose to a height of about 1,300. But by the 70s there were barely 30. Jones says that he’s going to give Fate a book that will change his life (it’s not the Communist Manifesto), it’s by a white man, Hugh Thomas, and it is called The Slave Trade.
Before he left for Detroit, Fate went to a book store and bought another copy of The Slave Trade to read on the flight.
When he gets back to his hotel, his editor has left a message asking if he would cover a fight. Black Dawn’s sports editor was recently murdered in Chicago and they have no one to cover the fight. Fate agrees, thinking he’s heading for Chicago. However, they inform him that he fight is in Santa Teresa, Mexico.
Fate flies into Tuscon and rents a car to drive to Mexico. He stops in a diner and it dawns on him that he is the only black man there. He overhears two men talking. One of them is Professor Kessler. Kessler is being interviewed by someone. The interviewer is gushing about Kessler’s capture of a person called Jurevich who was a “careful killer” and therefore easy to catch. He then talks all about how death often remains hidden, especially for members outside of society. Even in Victorian times, when a society person was killed it made all the papers but when there was mass murders of slaves or anyone else on the fringe, no one cared or even gave it much thought.
He proceeds to talk (off the record) about Santa Teresa: “(a) everyone living in that city is outside of society, and everyone, I mean everyone is like the ancient Christians in the Roman Circus (b) the crimes have different signatures ; (c) the city seems to be booming, it seems to be moving ahead in some ineffable way, but the best thing would be for every last one of the people there to head out into the desert some night and cross the border”(267).
When Fate finally gets ready to leave, the cook in the diner offers him a drink and some chat. Fate takes a water and asks how long to get to Santa Teresa. He tells him it’ll take several hours (plus border checking) to get into Santa Teresa and that people tend to get lost in the dark of the desert. Fate goes ahead anyway and does get lost, but eventually makes it okay. He arrives in Santa Teresa unharmed and gets directions to the arena where the fight between Count Pickett and Mexico’s own light heavyweight El Merolino.
Fate meets some Mexican reporters and travels with them to Merolino’s sparring site, where Fate realizes that he’s a good boxer with a decent chance against the Count. Fate talks to Merolino’s sparring partner, a black man from California who has moved to Mexico because it’s so much cheaper.
On the way home, the reporters stop in a bar and Fate finds himself hanging around with Chucho Flores. Chucho is a storyteller who talks about everything, including how he wants to leave Mexico to travel to New York and work for a Spanish radio station there.
Some girls approach Chucho Flores. He welcomes them and then starts exaggerating his compatriots’ credentials (including Fate’s) to the women.
Chucho then tells a lengthy story about director Robert Rodriguez. How he’s got a videotape of an early film by him from when he was a loser who hung out with a pimp named El Perno (which means Penis or Cock). And even though his name isn’t anywhere on the film, you can tell it’s Rodriguez’ work from the camera angles.
Fate doesn’t care about the story [which is totally apocryphal] and he is suddenly making out with one of the girls who was earlier talking to Chucho.
Soon after, Fate drives back to his hotel. He wants to get a bit to eat but is told he has to go to the gas station across the way. He gets some hot dogs and a beer. There’s a fascinating peek into Mexican culture in that he has to pay for everything before he gets them (pesos not dollars) and the hot dog proves to be very tasty.
At this point he has a bit of an existential crisis. He told the girl at the gas station that he couldn’t speak Spanish, that he was American. But why not say African American? “Does this mean that in some places I’m American and in some places I’m African American, and in other placed, by logical extension, I’m nobody?” (283).
In the morning, Fate returns to the arena. Count Pickett is there, dressed in a tie, talking to reporters. He is getting all manner of questions, including one about whether it is politically correct for an American boxer to fight in Santa Teresa. Some squabbling ensues between the reporters, as epithets about women and Santa Teresa float in the air but it is all diffused before anything too terrible happens.
When Fate asks Chucho what that was all about, Chucho tells him about the 200 or so women who have been killed in Santa Teresa. Most are workers at the maquiladoras, who vanish into thin air. Until their bodies turn up in the desert.
Fate emails his boss that after the boxing match, he would like to write about these dead women (his boss ultimately says no).
Fate goes to another bar where he meets a cadre of American reporters all of whom say that Count Pickett is a shoo-in. One of them relates the story of the previous major heavyweight champion from Mexico, Hércules Carreño. He was six and a half feet tall, towering over just about everyone else in Mexico. He fought anyone and proved to be a formidable champion.
This sidetracks into an amazing discussion of breeding, rape and culture:
When men conquer a country, they rape the women in a attempt to spread their seed. And, in many respects, it is an attempt to make the victims whiter by introducing their European genes into their bloodstream. But inevitably the rape the poorest women. And those children, rather than becoming whiter, are left as poor children. When they have children, the whiteness is diluted over and over, nullifying the miscegenation.
Now, however, Mexican aristocracy is doing the wise thing: they are breeding with important people, and, as a result, the Mexican aristocracy is getting taller and taller. “[In the past] a Mexican president would come up to the American President’s shoulder, at most…. But now the Mexican upper class is changing. They’re getting richer and they go looking for wives north of the border. That’s what you call improving the race” (287).
Back to Hércules. He was doing so well, they took him to the U.S. where he pummeled a bunch of slovenly fighters. But they eventually pitted him against Arthur Ashley (The Sadist). He got this name from this fight (and I love the way the fight is described): “turning each round into a monograph, round three on the subject of his face, round four on the liver” (289). Hércules is knocked silly. He stops fighting and eventually becomes a bouncer and then a bum.
A little racist interlude then happens. Fate asks if the story teller is flacking for the Klan. Someone shouts, “we got ourselves another touchy jig” (289). The scene is diffused by Chuck Campbell of Sport Magazine. He says that sports is a boring beat and reporters will do or say just about anything for entertainment.
The week’s read ends with Campbell predicting that Merolino will go down before the third round.
COMMENTS
While I haven’t not enjoyed any part of the book, I felt like this one was really captivating. And I really can’t wait to see what is next in store for Fate.
Another thing that I think has become obvious as the book progresses: Bolaño is raising profound ideas: in this Part, racism, all the elements of the sermon. And in other parts: art, scholarship, families. I’m not yet sure what it’s all about, why these issues are being raised. But I trust that he’s onto something and I look forward to seeing what it is.
For ease of searching I include: Bolano.
Leave a comment