SOUNDTRACK: BEAUTIFUL SOUTH-Superbi (2007).
I reviewed all of the Beautiful South records a few posts back. This one had not been released in the US at the time, and as far as I can tell has yet to be. But I ordered the import and here it is. Reviewing this is somewhat irrelevant as the Beautiful South have officially disbanded. It’s quite a pity as this album shows no sign of creative drop off. In fact, this album is one of their best.
The variety of styles in songs is really impressive. And each song contains the trademarks of The Beautiful South: incredibly poppy/happy sounding songs with good verses and catchy choruses combined with acerbic lyrics about relationships breaking up, and, interestingly, inanimate objects.
Some songs: “Manchester” is such a wonderfully winning song, with the great line, “if rain made England great it made Manchester yet greater.” All along, with such a great catchy chorus…. Even a bleak song like “When Romance is Dead” comes out beautifully in a striking duet. And speaking of duets, there’s a new female voice added to TBS on this record. Alison Wheeler is number three. I guess the bitterness of Heaton’s lyrics are hard to take sometimes. Wheeler does a great job. She has a strong voice and maintains a continuation of style to the previous women:
Paul Heaton, the singer and de facto leader, released a solo album a few years back under the name Biscuit Boy, and it was much the same, if slightly more dancey. Story is that he’s got a new solo album coming out in July, and I’ll bet its pretty great too.
[READ: April 2008] Superbad.
I ordered this book from McSweeney’s and, as you’ve heard before, I didn’t know much about it. I did know it was not related to the movie of the same name, however. In fact, here’s a pretty funny letter from Greenman to Seth Rogen about the name Superbad.
The interesting premise behind this book is that it has an introduction and comments from Laurence Onge, who is apparently Greenman’s writing teacher. What is unusual about that is that although Onge claims that Greenman was the best writer in his class, he doesn’t seem to really like Greenman’s work, and he seems to be a little obsessed with musicals. (More on Greenman’s musicals in a moment).
The book was described as being very funny. There were funny stories, but there were also rather moving stories, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the moving stories more.
Some of the funny stories were a style of humor that I just don’t appreciate. I think they are probably funnier to hear than to read. I find this problem with a lot of New Yorker short pieces as well: I feel that the short pieces are usually too long…they have to be X number of words, and usually the premise works for X-100 words. Cut off 100 words of the piece and you’d have a really tight jokey piece.
Despite this caveat, some of the funny ones are quite good: “Paint It Shimmering Coral” is a funny look at Mick Jagger’s lipstick line (clearly a New Yorker piece). “Getting Nearer to Nearism” is a pretty decent piece about a guy who makes exact copies of art but alters them slightly…in one he reproduces a page from the Yellow Pages but changes a digit or two of each phone number.
“Ten Kinds of Things A-H” was a weird list that took a lot of effort to be funny. “Notes to a Paper You Wouldn’t Understand,” and “Struggle in Nine” were short pieces that were quite abstract, and were funny, but not really ha ha funny.
But the short short pieces were often very funny. “Notes on Revising Last Nights Dream” is just that…several notes that are all quite funny (and only a page long). “Blurbs” was a list of blurbs blurbing the blurb for this story. “A Big Fight Scene Between Two Men with the Same Name” was much of what you would suspect…and quite funny. “Fun with Time” was a list of silly things to do with clocks and watches. And “What 100 People, Real and Fake, Believe about Doris” was just that–a list of 100 opinions about Doris from real and fictional characters.
The two longer, serious works were clearly the strongest ones. “In Shuvalov’s Library” was a great piece about cataloging art, and how one can become too obsessed with the cataloging and ultimately miss tyhe beuaty of what you are cataloging.
“Snapshot” was a beautiful story about longing and love, and the emotions that a photograph can stir. It was a surprisingly deep piece and very moving. It may also have been one of my favorite short stories in a long time. I was really surprised, given the silliness that abounds in the book how affecting this story was.
And then there’s the musicals: “Microsoft: The Musical!”; “Ivanka: The Musical!”; “Dylan: The Musical!”; “Elian: The Musical!”; “Election: The Musical!” and “The Death of the Musical: The Musical!”. Each one is a silly little piece about a cultural moment. The musicals were funny and absurd. I suppose these musicals could have written themselevs. Imagine, if you will, the musical you would write about the Gore/Bush hanging chad election fiasco. Or about the Elian Gonzales fiasco. The Ivanka musical is about one character’s desire to sleep with Ivanka Trump. Now after you imagine what you’d write about, change it so that the lyrics are witty and rhyming, and you’ve got these short musicals. And, thankfully they do not overstay their welcome. It was these pieces that the editor, Laurence Onge was most ecstatic about. This of course leads me to believe that Onge is fictional, too. (A brief Google search suggests that he is indeed fictional). And that would be the funniest part of the book.
I enjoyed the book and was amused by much of it, but I feel that it could have been stronger overall.
[…] knew Ben Gereenman from Superbad, a McSweeney’s book. I liked it a little—but it was more trickery than story telling. I had […]