SOUNDTRACK: SONIC YOUTH-SYR8: Andre Sider Af Sonic Youth (2008).
This final (so far) SYR release is another live recording and it sees the bands joined by saxophonist Mats Gustaffson and electronic wunderkind Merzbow. This EP comes from the 2005 Roskilde Festival in Denmark (and the language is all written in Danish). According to the SY website, the day before this, they had performed a set in support of Sonic Nurse. However, this set, “The Other Side of Sonic Youth” is an hour or so improvisation. It is basically broken down into 5 minute intervals:
1 min. Kim (guitar) & Steve (drums) start
5 min. Thurston (guitar) joins
10 min. Lee (more guitar) joins
15 min. Jim O’ Rourke (bass/synth?) joins
20 min. Mats Gustaffson (saxophone) joins
25 min. Merzbow (laptop) joins
30 min. Kim & Steve leave
35 min. Thurston leaves
40 min. Lee leaves
45 min. Mats leaves
50 min. Merzbow finishes
All times are approximate, and even listening to the disc it’s not entirely clear when the new players come on (or when they leave). For the most part, the set is varying levels of noise and dissonance. But it’s not just a wall of chaos. It starts fairly simply with the guitar and drums (although when Kim and Steve play it’s never really simple). By the time Jim comes out, the band has morphed into all manner of sound scapes.
When Mats comes in and that saxophone starts squealing, it’s a whole new ballgame. I don’t find Merzbow’s entrance to be all that noteworthy, but by the end, when it’s just him and Mats (or him by himself) he’s doing some pretty amazing stuff.
It’s hard to imagine what the Roskilde people thought of this (although crowd noise seems to be positive). This set was followed by Black Sabbath, which in and of itself is pretty funny. Especially since the SY set seems far more dissonant.
[READ: September 6, 2009] Samuel Johnson is Indignant
This collection of Davis’ work contains fifty-six of stories. The stories range from one sentence (!) to some twenty pages.
The book is disconcerting in that it opens with several of the one to two page stories, leading you to suspect that they will all be that length. Then, when you actually get to the longer pieces it kind of throws you.
Those first stories are I guess what you’d call flash fiction. Except that for the most part, it’s hard to tell whether the pieces are even meant to be fiction. They are aphoristic, often. Talking about neighbors and friends, uncomfortable moments, and mostly, lots of thinking about everyday activities. Some of them are funny. Some of them are thought-provoking. Some of them are just weird. And some of them make you wonder why they were written at all, or more to the point, why she would name this collection Samuel Johnson is Indignant, when this story,consists of this:
“Samuel Johnson is Indignant: that Scotland has so few trees.”
Or
“Examples of Remember“:
Remember that thou art but dust.
I shall try to bear it in mind.
It’s hard to know what to think of that.
Or else there’s something silly like “Oral History (with Hiccups)” which gives a brief history of a person with several blank spaces where the hiccups are meant to be. Kind of a joke, but I’m not sure how successful it is beyond the typographic one.
And then after this amalgam of short and really short pieces, you get the first long one, “Old Mother and the Grouch.” After reading this I was all set to write how her short pieces are fun but her long ones are kind of annoying. This piece basically reiterates over and over and over the things that Old Mother and the Grouch argue over. It was kind of irritating in that there isn’t really a resolution, albeit a subtle change takes place over them.
However, some of the longer pieces do redeem the book. A later short piece “Letter To A Funeral Parlor” which again is a letter, not really a story, I found very good, especially for the complaint about the word cremains (which funeral companies just made up).
The next long piece (about 16 pages) “Thyroid Diary” was interesting. It is a (true?) accounting of a woman with an under active thyroid. The woman is a translator (as is Davis) although I don’t know any other details about Davis’ actual life to cite any other parallels. It dragged a bit but overall was quite a good look into medical paranoia.
Two pieces come from McSweeney’s (“Mown Lawn” and “Marie Curie, Honorable Woman”) the latter misses out on any explanatory notes (that appeared in McSweeney’s #5, so you are left wondering why the language is so bad.
“In a Northern Country” is a unique story in the collection in that it doesn’t concern herself or abstract ideas. Rather it is a flesh and blood story about an old man who goes to a distant land (Silit, Karsovy, Trsk…these are all fake, right?) to find his brother. His brother went to this land to study the near-extinct language of the people. It is a story of failure, death and lack of communication. And it was quite gripping.
The only story that I found more gripping was “The Furnace” which is something of a history of herself and her father (and her father’s old house and furnace). As the story moves along it grows more and more personal, with her father’s state of mind getting called into question. A very moving piece.
So now, after having read the whole thing, I don’t know exactly what to think. Some of the pieces were fun. Some of them were irritating (I feel basically that any piece that compared two people overstayed its welcome). And then some other stories were quite gripping.
Your tolerance for short short stories will definitely impact your enjoyment of the book.
[…] DAVIS-”Oral History with Hiccups” This story was in Lydia Davis’ book Samuel Johnson is Indignant. I found this to be one of her lesser pieces, although it is mildly amusing. There are graphic […]