Kelly Davio–Burn This House (2013)

SOUNDTRACK: THE KNIFE-”Heartbeats” (2002).

I learned of this song from the José González cover that was featured in the (very cool) Sony video with the bouncing balls.  The song turned me on to González, but not necessarily the song itself.  I knew The Knife did the original  and I remember when I first heard it, I didn’t like it nearly as much as the González version.

It’s been a few years and there’s a new The Knife album out and in the New Yorker review of it Sasha Frere-Jones mentioned this song again.  So I wanted to listen to it without the cover so prominent.  And indeed, the González cover is quite straightforward (acoustic guitar rather than mega synth, but otherwise pretty spot on). The Knife’s version is very retro synth-sounding .  It reminds me of a wacky 80s song.  Or perhaps a 2000’s Europop song.

The vocals are high-pitched and a wee bit over the top, but all in all it’s very catchy.  Frere-Jones said that The Knife version was very popular but evidently I didn’t travel in those circles because I don’t recognize it as being huge.

And I still like José’s version better.

I know it’s not really cool to show the video of the cover version when I’m talking about the original, and it’s really not that cool to use a commercial as a video, but it is still very fun to watch.

[READ: April 30, 2013] Burn This House

For the last day of April, the last day of poetry month, I read a new book of poetry that came across my desk today.  This is Kelly Davio’s first collection.  She is an MFA and quite an accomplished poet (managing editor and Pushcart nominee).  I also thought that I would see if she was a “modern, weird” poet or a more traditional one (I secretly hoped for more traditional as I’d burnt out on wacky ones).  For the most part she is more traditional and I liked most of her poems quite a lot.

The book was divided into five sections.  And I have to admit that the final few sections contained poems which seems a little forced to me (more on that later).  For it was in the early pages that I thought the poetry was most magnificent.

Although when I first started reading I was afraid that the poetry was going to be ponderous without enough concrete detail.  Like in “auguries” which showed a series of potential omens (Davio seems to have a thing with birds crashing into windows) which were effective, but I didn’t like the ending: “To what /significance such eroded things?” It seemed too vague to be powerful.

But the poems that came right after were just wonderful with detail like in “The First Lines” which had this description of a scarecrow:

Read Full Post »

Five Dials Number 27B: Pedagogic Poems (27 April 2013)

SOUNDTRACK:  FREEGAL MUSIC (2013).

Not only am I a librarian, I’m also a patron of libraries (we currently use four!).  I’m also a huge advocate of library usage.  Everyone knows you can get free books at the library.  And many people know (but many people don’t) that you can get free CDs and DVDs from the library.  Well, I’m advocating a new service that many libraries have implemented (both the library where I worked and my local library have it).

It’s called Freegal and it allows you to download (and keep) three songs a week.  The selection is quite impressive, as they have made agreements with 10,000 record labels.  That’s 10,000 LABELS, not artists, so huge numbers of songs are available. I did a few random searches and was delighted by how much was there.

Even their genre divisions are impressive.  Just check out this sample selection from the B’s: BeBop Big Band Black Metal Bluegrass Blues Bolero Bollywood Brasil Soul Brazilian Breakbeat BritPop Broadway.

So check out to see if your library subscribes.   You get three free songs every Monday morning!  Not bad for the price of a free library card.

[READ: July 3, 3011] Five Dials Number 27B

I haven’t posted about a Five Dials in a couple of issues, primarily because I find writing about anthologies is very time consuming (I have recently read three McSweeney’s which I haven’t had the time to edit together into posts).  The good news is that I have only missed two issues, but I know that at least one of them is pretty large.  I was a little bummed to see another new one already, but then I saw that this issue was not only short, it was full of poetry.  And, since this is my poetry month, why not end the month with a little more poetry.

I enjoyed the offputting cartoon on the cover of this issue which is creepy and funny at the same time.  (Illustrations are by Sophia Augusta, Hannah Bagshaw, Kyle Platts, Tom Rees and Joe Prendergast.  I assume Augusta did the cover).

There was no letter from the editor or any of the usual suspects in this issue.  Rather this issue opens with a Letter from the Poetry Editor.  It is shaped like a poem but isn’t one.

SAM BUCHAN-WATTS-On Parenting Poems
Mentioning a 1954 parenting guide (from Elizabeth Longfellow), Buchan-Watts says that they asked eight young poets to choose a chapter heading from Longfellow’s book Points for Parents, and to make a poem starting from that title.

And it’s now that I admit that these poems have set me back terribly in my appreciation of poetry which I have been nurturing all month.  If ever there was a collection of seemingly random words, it is these.

Read Full Post »

Dan Chelotti–X (2013)

SOUNDTRACK: PETER GABRIEL-”The Book of Love” (2010).

This is a cover of the Magnetic Fields’ song (not the fifties song).  I have this strange relationship with the Magnetic Fields.  I love the songs that Stephin Merritt writes.  His melodies are simple but timeless.  And his lyrics are usually wonderful.  Like from this song:

The book of love has music in it
In fact that’s where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb

And then there’s Merritt’s voice.  It is deep.  Almost comically deep, especially when he sings slowly, it brings on a strange profundity to these words.  And it works pretty well.  Although sometimes I want the songs to be…more.  And that’s where the covers seem to come in.

Gabriel’s cover doesn’t change the song really at all.  But it has Gabriel’s voice, which soars and it has Gabriel’s sense of instrumentation, which also soars.  Perhaps it’s that Merritt’s songs deserve bigger and lusher treatments–they practically scream for Broadway.    And while Gabriel’s version is nowhere near Broadway over-the-topness, it fleshes things out nicely.

Of course, it may very well be that Merritt’s understatement (and oftentimes, just one instrument) provide a successful counterpoint to the spectacle that the song could be.  And maybe that’s why they are so successful.

But Gabriel’s version is really great, too.

[READ: April 20, 2013] X

One more book of poetry for April, this one by Dan Chelotti.  It is Chelotti’s debut, and Chelotti’s poetry is wild and weird and often quite funny.  It is also unapologetically modern.  As you can see from the first poem “Ball Lightning”

I am looking out over
one of the first real gray
days of autumn listening
to a podcast in which
these two men are talking about
the phenomenon of ball lightning.

Or, more sadly in “ Grieving in the Modern World” in which he compares the way people’s grief in the old days was so public, but now it seems so small and insignificant, oh and besides:

…the microwave is
almost finished heating
my dinner , and the newshour
is about to begin.

Read Full Post »

Margaret Atwood–The Circle Game (1966)

SOUNDTRACK: BOB MOULD-Black Sheets of Rain (1990).

I tend to think of this as a very dark and claustrophobic album, which it is.  And yet it is also unavoidably Bob Mould, meaning that there are pop elements all over it.  There’s also some very cool, simple bass lines that tend to spruce up some moments of the album making it a bit more fun than it would be without them.

Even if the title track is over seven minutes long, with some really blistering guitar solos, there are still really poppy elements to the chorus.  As for claustrophobic, the title and cover make this seem like it would be really quiet and insular.  But a song like “Black Guard” is quite inviting.  And the third song, “It’s Too Late” is one of the poppiest songs that Mould has written.  The opening chords are so obvious and recall so many classic rock songs that it’s almost too pop for its own good.

“One Good Reason” is another longer song and it, too, has a catchy chorus.  “Stop Your Crying” is one of Mould’s great songs–a nasty-seeming minor chord structure with Mould’s screamed lyrics.  And yet he still manages to make you want to sing along.

The largely acoustic (with disconcerting organ) “The Last Night” is a breakup song.  A major downer with the odd lyric: “Tonight’s the last night that I will ever spend with you.  Please don’t ask me why cause I don’t know, yea.”  A similar kind of breakup song is “Out of Your Life.”  The difference is that “Out of Your Life” is incredibly poppy.  A major key with bouncy bass and super sing along chorus.  It’s two sides of an idea.  “Disappointed” sounds very much like earlier Hüsker Dü with that buzzy guitar that is unmistakably Mould.  The album ends with “Sacrifice/Let There be Peace” in which the dichotomy of Mould’s sounds are in full evidence.  Mould’s voice sounds completely shot by the end as she screams and growls (it’s amazing he could even speak after recording some of these songs).  The lyrics are practically impossible to understand and yet in the background Mould is chanting/singing a very steady chorus of “Sacrifice” and there’s a very melodic guitar line going on.

It’s an interesting ending to a very schizophrenic album.  It’s nowhere near as dark as I remember, but not exactly a cheery walk in the park either.

[READ: April 10, 2013] The Circle Game

It’s funny that I’m reading so much poetry, as I don’t typically enjoy it.  Well, April is National Poetry Month after all, so why not.  I received this Atwood book at work.  I really like Margaret Atwood a lot and I hope to delve into her oeuvre more.  So why not take the opportunity to scan this brief volume of poetry (which I thought was new, although I now see is from the sixties).

I’ve read a lot of different types of poetry this month and I found that I really enjoyed Atwood’s work a lot.  Could it be because it’s 40 some years old and not “new” poetry?  I don’t know.  Could it be that she uses parentheses a lot (could be).  Or is it just that she is a great writer.

Her poems actually made me think about the nature of poetry itself.  Why does a fiction writer write poetry?  It seems like some of these poems are simply very short stories.  Is that all a poem is?  A very short story (I mentioned how flash fiction has arisen as a genre, and some of these pieces feel like they could be rendered as flash fiction.  I often find flash fiction unsatisfying and I think it’s because poetry is even tighter and more effective than a flash fiction piece.

I’m also intrigued by Atwood’s poetry because she is writing about atypical stuff (as is Atwood’ wont).  So there’s not a lot of “love” here, except under the guise of something else.

Read Full Post »

The Mays XX (2013)

SOUNDTRACK: QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE-”My God is the Sun” (2013)

After a six-year hiatus, QotSA is back with this slinky song.  It has the sleazy feel that Homme does so well (how does he do that?).  This song feels a little more guitar based (meaning it is a bit more trebly–with interesting echoes on the guitars).  It’s not as immediately catchy as their bigger hits, but it’s got all the elements you look for from QotSA.

It opens with some slashing sounds and then the riff kicks in.  The song is propulsive but somehow doesn’t feel as fast as some of their earlier tracks.  Which is not to say it’s mellow at all.  And once Homme starts singing, well, it’s like they never went away.  There’s a lengthy middle instrumental section which is quite interesting and otherworldly, but it never gives up the propulsion, especially as the end gets faster and faster.

[READ: April 8, 2013] The Mays XX

This is another book that I saw at work and wanted to read (this job is wrecking my already long list of books to read).  I had some difficulty cataloging it (for various reasons), which meant I had to pour over contents.  And the more I looked it over the more I realized that I wanted to read it.

So The Mays Anthology publishes the best new student writing and art from Cambridge and Oxford Universities.  Read more about it at their website.  I’d never heard of The Mays before, but when I saw that John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats was a guest editor, I thought it might be a fun collection tread through.

Issue 20 features poetry, a graphic novel, photography and prose.  The other editors are Andrew Griffin (general), Sebastiano Barassi (Visual Arts), Tao Lin and Toby Litt (Prose) and of course, Darnielle (Poetry).

I was really delighted with the prose in this issue.  None of the stories are more than 1,000 words, which I decided is a wonderful length for a story.  I’m going to talk about the stories, but not so much about the poetry or art.

Darnielle’s introduction to the poetry section was excellent and really resonated with me because of my ideas and fears about poetry (how we feel stupid if we don’t get poetry).  He then explained the things that he looked for in this poetry and I imagined that i would love every piece here.  I didn’t, but on the whole I really liked the poetry.

Read Full Post »

Dean Young–Embryoyo (2007)

SOUNDTRACK: QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE with EDDIE VEDDER-”Little Sister” (live) (2013).

This is a live song from Chile (from what I gather it’s a Lollapalooza show–is that even still around?).  I have no idea if Pearl Jam were in Chile at the time, but what a strange thing to bring Eddie Vedder out on stage and then have him only sing backup vocals and play the cowbell.

The song sounds very much like the record, although a little sloppier.  I’m a bit surprised at that as I think of Homme as running a tight ship (but the sloppiness comes from him, so he has no one to blame but himself).  You’d never know Vedder was even there.  It’s one of the strangest guest appearances since Paul McCartney munched carrots and celery for the Super Furry Animals song “Receptacle for the Respectable.”

[READ: April 3, 2013] Embryoyo

Embryoyo is the final book of poetry I’m going to read for a while.  This book came out a few years ago but McSweeney’s had a garage sale version that I found for cheap.  I’ve always been intrigued by the title (so silly and odd) that I decided to give it a ago.  The blurbs on the back (and I know, no one should read blurbs) are telling: “Dean Young’s work will delight only two kinds of people: those who generally read poetry and those who generally don’t”  And, “No one is unsure if they’ve read a poem by Dean Young.”

I probably concur with the first but I definitely do with the second.  Because Young’s poetry is quite unusual.  And Embryoyo proves to be a demonstrative title.  Not that it means anything specifically, but in the way Young creates portmanteau words, which Young uses liberally.  Like the title ”Empheroptera.”

I’m going to give some examples of his poetry that I found really enjoyable:

Read Full Post »

Rebecca Lindenberg–Love, An Index (2012)

SOUNDTRACK: KURT VILE-”Wakin on a Pretty Day” (2013).

I don’t really know that much about Kurt Vile.  I’ve been hearing about him for a while. I assumed his name was a kind of joke–like he was a comical metal guy, maybe like Alice Cooper.   That appears to be far from the truth.  I also wasn’t sure if he was well-known outside of the Philly area, but I do know that NPR has championed him for a while.

Well, he has a new album out and since NPR was streaming it, what better time to hear what the long- haired dude is all about.

There is much talk bout his voice (NPR says: There’s something about Kurt Vile’s voice that transcends whatever comes out of his mouth.).  But the whole time I listened to this song (which was a while, as it is over 9 minutes long), I kept thinking that he sounds just like the guy from House of Love, an underrated band here in the States. (He sounds even more like him in Kv Crimes”) It’s not necessarily a bad thing to sound like someone else (often times it can’t be helped I suppose), but it is a little distracting to me.

So this song is kind of groovy.  I like it musically more than vocally (there’s so many “Yeah…yeah yeah yeahs” that I lost the point of the song).  But the music is really good, including Vile’s lengthy guitar solos.  Interestingly, I was kind of bored by the song after about 45 seconds, but by 8 minutes I was really grooving it.  Subsequent listens have made me like it more, it has a kind of Neil Young or maybe Meat Puppets vibe.

My head says there’s really nothing special about this guy and yet after more and more listens, there’s something that draws me to him.  Weird.

[READ: April 2, 2013] Love, An Index

The back of Lindenberg’s book explains that the man she loved, poet Craig Arnold, disappeared in a volcano while traveling in Japan.  For such a very specific kind of event, I don’t think I would have gotten anything quite like that from these poems.  Indeed, for a book that is so specifically created about this man, there’s very little sense of the exact nature of the loss.  In some ways that’s good, it could have been a very maudlin, ungraceful collection of poems if she explicitly talked about volcanoes, but at the same time, the feeling of loss that comes across is less about death and more about abandonment (I would have presumed that the guy had left her).

I really enjoyed these poems even though I have a  really hard time accepting the bulk of these, in particular the thirty-four page title poem, as poetry.

“Love, An Index” is thirty-four pages and it is an index.  Literally, she lists words alphabetically and writes a little “definition” for each one.  There are arbitrary line breaks in the definitions but in no way does it feel like a poem.  Even the individual entries are not very poetic.  Like “Compromise, I will get up early with you/so long as you’ve made coffee.”  Okay, so that’s funny/sweet, but it’s not a poem.  But then what it is?  Yes, it is part of a greater whole and removing part of it diminishes that whole.  But again, what is the whole?  Genre defying I suppose.  Which is cool.  And despite my criticism, I really enjoyed this index.  There were personal notes that I would have no idea about, there were commonplace ideas that are familiar to all.  There’s also a ton of quotes from other poets.  And it all works together to create a beautiful portrait of a relationship.

Read Full Post »

Allan Peterson–Fragile Acts (2012)

SOUNDTRACK: ATOMS FOR PEACE-”What the Eyeballs Did” (2013)

This is a secret track that you can download from the Atoms for Peace website (well some people can, I don’t seem to be able to) or you can listen to it on NPR.

Atoms for Peace is Thom York’s band (with Flea from RHCP on bass). This song sounds a lot like Radiohead.  So much so that it could easily be a Radiohead song (one of those newer more electronic ones).  The bass is cool and while Flea does a great job playing it, it sees like it should be a little dull for him to play a rather repetitive bit over and over.

And yet the song works very well in the electronic, claustrophobic way that Yorke has.

I love just about anything that Yorke and Co do, and I like this as well, it just doesn’t seem all that much different–why not use Flea for all of his manic intensity?

[READ: April 1, 2013] Fragile Acts

After yesterday’s poetry book, I wasn’t quite prepared for this one.  Zubair Ahmed is a young writer (a wunderkind as he is described).  Allan Peterson is a much older writer.  He is retired and has clearly had a lot more experiences from which to draw.  I also found his poems to be much more profound and lyrical, much more beautiful and evocative.

Yes, it could be because his poems are longer (that’s a terrible quality to judge a poem by, and it’s certainly not always true, but those shorty ones do tend to lack a bit of substance).  Of course, the poems that were really long (he had three that were multi-part and multi-page) didn’t hold together all that well for me.  So length doesn’t have much to do with it.

Many of these poems were amazing and they really reminded me of what good poetry can do.  Poetry that is not just a sentence with line breaks, poetry that doesn’t call out to be read in a sing-song voice.  To the point: poetry that sings on its own.

Read Full Post »

Zubair Ahmed–City of Rivers (2012)

SOUNDTRACK: SIGUR RÓS-”Brennisteinn” (2013).

What is that sound?  Low end electronic…noise?  Coming from a Sigur Rós song?  Typically you get a band in the ether, but here’s the band with loud pounding drums and almost glitchy music.  Of course, Jonsi’s voice tells you you’ve got Sigur Rós.  And yet, he’s not singing in his otherworldly falsetto–it seems like an almost human voice.

There’s a very distinctive chorus which is actually catchy in an almost poppy way.  And then, after four minutes, the Sigur Rós of old comes in–Jonsi’s voice soars, and the music reaches for the heavens (but with drums and some crazy sound effects) added in.

And then it grows haunting as the song slows down and distant horns come swelling in, keeping that soundtrack feel that the band does so well.  The video is creepy/cool interspersed with the band playing live.  I love watching them make the sounds they make (there’s a bowed guitar at some point).  I really like this a lot, and can’t wait for the rest of the album.

[READ: March 30, 2013] City of Rivers

I have said before that I don’t really like poetry.  It makes me feel stupid.  This is mostly because I have taken poetry classes and I know what good poetry should be, and yet I see so much poetry published which I think is not very good.  And yet, if it has been published, doesn’t that mean it’s good?  Have I missed something?

I’m not a total old school poetry boor, I don’t need my poetry to be in iambic pentameter, nor does it even need to rhyme, and yet sometimes a lot of contemporary poetry seems like a sentence, not really a poem.  I also suspect that the ascendance of flash fiction has made the ascendance of this flash poetry acceptable too.  Don’t get me wrong, I know a haiku is short as well, but there are lots of constrictions to haiku, whereas some free verse short poems really lack in the substance department.

I am also nonobjective about poetry because of all of the poetry slams that I have witnessed in college and since, in which basically anything is  poem if you e-nun-ci-ate it interestingly (something I doubt Keats was doing).

In an attempt to appreciate new poetry more, I decided to get a few books from the McSweeney’s poetry series.

Read Full Post »

Paul Legault–The Emily Dickinson Reader (2012)

SOUNDTRACK: JOHN DOE AND EXENE CERVENKA at KEXP December 31, 2010 (2010).

X toured the Los Angeles album back in 2010–the 30th anniversary of the album.  John Doe and Exene Cervenka came to KEXP to do an acoustic set and to talk…a lot.  The DJ tells them of when he saw them at age 16.  He had his camera and wanted to be a rock photographer.  He was getting pushed around in the pit and Exene pulled him onstage (he got great photos which I’d love to see).  Surprisingly, Exene does not seem as moved as one might expect by that story.

This is a simple, acoustic set–John with his guitar and he and Exene singing.  They play a few songs from across their career: “Because I Do,” “In This House That I Call Home” (a personal favorite), “True Love” (another favorite) and “See How We Are.”  John still sounds great, although Exene’s voice sounds a little worn on “Because I Do” and is actually hard to listen to on “True Love.”

There’s some really long interviews–talking about drugs and The Germs and the heyday and how Exene can’t wait for 2011 to start.

[READ: August 27, 2012] The Emily Dickinson Reader

This book is “an English-to-English translation of Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems.”  What?  Well, basically Paul Legualt has taken all of the “poetry” out of Dickinson’s poems and has left us with what the poems might mean to contemporary readers.  But he also reduced them to basically one line summaries as well–or as McSweeney’s says: “ingenious and madcap one-line renderings.”

So you get “translations” like: #314

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops – at all -

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet – never – in Extremity, It asked a crumb – of me.

Which Legault translates as: “Hope is kind of like birds. In that I don’t have any.”

Read Full Post »