SOUNDTRACK: SONIC YOUTH-Made in USA (1986 released in 1995).
The liner notes explain a lot of what was behind this disc. The then largely unknown Sonic Youth was asked to score a cool indie film, which later became a less cool more mainstream film and ultimately went straight to video.
The CD is mostly background music, but it is notable for how mainstream it sounds (for Sonic Youth in the mid-80s) and for how bad it sounds–like it was recorded in a can.
It’s mostly completely listenable soundtrack mood music. It’s nothing to rush out and buy, especially if you like the noisier SY stuff, but, and this is something of a shock, its sounds quite nice, almost ambient at times.
If you’re interested in this sort of thing, it’s worth noting that “Secret Girl” from EVOL appears in a slightly different form (twice actually).
[READ: July 29, 2009] The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature
This is the first book published by McSweeney’s Books. And it is indeed handsome, with a nice yellow ribbon for marking your page.
And so, who is Neal Pollack? Well, as you all know, Neal Pollack is the greatest living writer today. He has been writing for decades and has written some of the most important books, and the most important articles that anyone has ever read. His book on life as an African America has not only impressed Oprah, but it has inspired Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates.
And, as you can see from the back of the book, everyone from Hunter S. Thompson to Normal Mailer sings his praises.
And the more you look into his work, the more impressive it is. The Chronology at the beginning of the book shows just how prolific he has been since his first published essay in fourth grade(!): “Does Faulkner Write Too Many Novels?” Since then he has traveled the globe on assignment for many famous magazines; he has slept with over 500 women and has even befriended a middle class black woman.
But what inspires him to write? It was the murder of his beloved roommate Wally Trumbull that keeps him writing with skill and dexterity unmatched in American letters.
The world would be a far worse place if Neal Pollack had not been born, that’s for sure.
Or at least, that’s what this book would have you believe.
Neal Pollack’s essays are all pretty amusing. In virtually every one he is on assignment from a major American magazine. And he clearly has a lot of fun with the topics he has chosen to write about. In each piece his narrator is either arrogantly impressive or strangely clueless (and yet arrogant about it). So, in “The Burden of Internet Celebrity” he is exhausted at what massive internet fame (and a million hits a day on his web-cam-enabled site) can bring, and yet when he learns that boys in third world country are learning about masturbation from watching him, he knows it is a burden worth bearing. But then in “Letter from Paris” he nearly starves because he doesn’t understand why no one will accept his dollars.
The earlier, shorter pieces of the book are the best. The longer pieces, while keeping up a solid level of storytelling, are a little exhausting. “Teenagers: The Enemy Within” takes an unexpected turn as it nears the end, which reinvigorates what was becoming a slightly tedious story. The other fun thing about his stories is that he has clearly read and seen a lot and he references these works in his stories. There’s a parody of Eyes Wide Shut (which is right on, actually) in “Why Am I So Handsome?”, and a “tribute” to the end of Ulysses in “To Search for the Celtic Tiger.”
He also has fun with the Spanish language in “It is Easy to Take Lover in Cuba” by listing the locale there as: “Santa Puta de la Chingada” and by naming the autonomous community in Chiapas Mexico as “Santa Pendejo” (in “The Subcomandante Rides at Dawn”).
And so, Neal Pollack may or may not be for you. If this type of humor–arrogant buffoonery–is your thing, then this book is chock full of it. I think it works well in small doses.
[…] NEAL POLLOCK-”Trinity” These stories are part of the Neal Pollack Anthology if American Literature. […]