SOUNDTRACK: THE MOMMYHEADS-“Needmore, PA” (2010).
This is the first single from The Mommyheads’ new Dromedary release Finest Specimens. The album (which is sort of a greatest hits, but not) comes out next month, but until then you can hear th is new track at a number of places, including the blog largehearted boy (which has all kinds of cool free listens on it).
This is a 7 minute (live) track. It opens with some cool keyboards. They feature what I’ve come to think of as Mommyheads style, in which the bass and guitars (or in this case keyboards) play different things that seem unrelated but which work together. A great chorus pulls it all together.
This live song has about 3 minutes of instrumental jamminess at the end. It doesn’t really help the memorableness of the song (as you’ve long forgotten the catchy “That’s right” hook by the end of it), but man they sound great jamming together like that: a tight, psychedelic freakout that just builds in coolness. It’s almost like two songs in one.
[READ: September 11, 2010] “The Tuber”
This essay is about Wells Tower riding the rivers of Southern Florida in a tube. It’s also about John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.”
One of the things that I like about Wells Tower is that even in his non-fiction, he ties things together with literary substance. And so, he sets up this adventure as a twisted take on Cheever’s Neddy Merrill swimming the 8 miles of swimming pools in suburban New York: Tower wants to try to tube the rivers of Florida all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, like with the pools in “The Swimmer,” the rivers aren’t connected, so it’s not a challenge of connectivity. It’s more of a stupid challenge to take his dangerous homemade craft through croc-infested waters and come out a better person for it (or something like that). He has a chaperone with him (Miss Bennett) who is accompanying him in a much more sensible canoe (which he climbs into when the waters get too dangerous).
And about this dangerous craft: He has taken a TubePro (we bought two of them this year for our snow sledding purposes and they are awesome) and has outfitted it with some amenities:
With calipers, compasses, and a Delta upright bandsaw, we cut a 20-inch birch-ply deck to support a seat back and armrests (butchered from a lawn chair) and an extremely bitching adjustable sun canopy.
As the article opens, he is in high spirits, enjoying the funny looks, feeling superior to the boaters polluting the river with their gasoline and their Van Halen, and waiting for the free drinks to come plying on board. By the end, just like in Cheever, he feels exhausted and more than a little foolish.
He tackles some interesting bodies of water, and eventually even reaches his destination. But as he is paddling his tube into yet another headwind, he can’t help but wonder just what in the hell he’s doing.
It’s a funny look at purposeless challenges and what we’ll do to achieve them. And it’s also a pretty riveting story, too.
It’s available here.
Leave a comment