SOUNDTRACK: PAUL WELLER-Tiny Desk Concert #457 (July 28, 2015).
Paul Weller is a highly regarded and well respected elder statesman of rock. Some of his songs with The Jam are my favorite songs from the 80s. Weller hops from genre to genre quite a lot, and I did not care for The Style Council at all. So even though he’s been making music forever, I haven’t really paid him much attention. In this tiny Desk, he brings a fairly large band (6 people (4 guitars!)) to sing an acoustic collection of songs. There’s a drums (just a snare) and a percussionist too. And everyone sings.
His voice sounds fantastic—older but still really strong.
They play four songs. Three are from his new album Saturns Pattern. Like “Dusk Til Dawn” which is a delightful folk song. The band sounds really loud, or not loud but big, like there are really 6 people out there. This is especially true on “I’m Where I Should Be” which also has some great harmony vocals and percussive guitar techniques. I love how much the harmonies contribute to the song and the general song structure is great.
“Out of the Sinking” goes back to Weller’s most popular album Stanley Road (which I don’t know). It’s a wonderful song. It showcases Weller’s gruffer vocals and nice finger picking. There’s some more great harmonies from the bongo player. And the song has a real nice campfire song feel (it reminds me a bit of Van Morrison’s folkier songs).
For “Going My Way” Weller switches to piano. It’s a simple song with some great backing vocals and harmonies, (and hand claps), although I prefer the middle two songs.
I hadn’t really given much thought to Weller in the last few decades, but this set was really enjoyable.
[READ: August 7, 2015] The Wallcreeper
This is Nell Zink’s first published novel (she has another novel, 1998’s Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats) which I read about that I would love to find, but I don’t think it has ever been published).
I really enjoyed Zink’s Mislaid and wanted to see what her earlier work was about. There was an article in the New Yorker which gave an interesting background to this story which involved a long correspondence with Jonathan Franzen and resulted in a book that I would suggest is not completely unlike something he might create–expect that it is way shorter and slightly more erratic.
Zink does not follow conventional story structure exactly. This is not to say that the story is weird or avant garde, not at all. She just doesn’t like to set things up conventionally. For instance, the first sentence of the story is: “I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage.”
It turns out that he swerved the car because he had seen a bird. Stephen is a bird watcher. He had swerved because of this bird which he then rescued and brought home. It was a wallcreeper and in the back in the back of the car it says “Twee!” (that’s when she knew he had been more concerned for the bird than for her). The bird lives with them for a time (they put pegboard on the wall so it can climb and perch). It even causes quite a stir when people see it flying around in the house. They name him Rudolph.
The protagonist is Tiffany, a young woman from Seattle who married Stephen (her parents loved him and thus the first time they had sex was on her parents’ pullout sofa). I mention this detail because sex plays a huge role in this book: “Now, all my life, I had fantasized about being used sexually in every way I could think of on the spur of the respective moment.” Of course, the first time Stephen clumsily attempts anal sex with her, she changes her mind a bit: “I knew with certainty that ‘pain’ is euphemism even more namby-pamby than ‘defilement.”
But Tiff doesn’t just take what happens. She says that after this incident, she had recovered: “I was no longer in love! My sense of depending on Stephen for my happiness had evaporated.”
They moved to Berne Switzerland where Stephen works in a vague sorta medical/scientific field (he is a “post-punk” pharmaceutical researcher). Tiff plans to do nothing (well, pretend to write a novel) while Stephen makes money for both of them. And soon enough, their relationship become purely a contract.
Zink’s lines are so bold–direct and powerful: “Marriage isn’t a sacrament,” Tiffany says; “it’s just a bunch of forms to fill out.” Pregnancy is “one of those things that happen when newlyweds get drunk.”
And speaking to her unconventional style, plot points and relocations happen in one sentence–as dramatic as that opening miscarriage. Suddenly Tiffany has changed apartments or towns, moved to Berlin and maybe gotten pregnant again.
She soon begins sleeping with a local Montenegrin man named Elvis. And frankly, (this is only 20 pages into the book), it starts to get much much harder to summarize the plot.
Over the course of the book (which is less than 200 pages), Stephen becomes more and more invested in the environmental movement. He starts with his love of birding–sometimes Tiff goes along but usually not (she’s usually with Elvis). Stephen suspects the affair but doesn’t seem to care. Indeed, their separate lives seems to bring them closer and she eventually talks to him about the earlier anal incident, and he apologizes for it.
They all start going out dancing at night–Stephen loves dubstep. He eventually meets Birke, a young girl who gets him involved with The Global Rivers Alliance, an environmental group whose goal is to reclaim German rivers (like the Elbe which has long been tapped for resources) for nature. And slowly, they start doing more than organizing to get their point across.
By the end of the book, Tiff has a few more lovers (including one who is not exactly a priest but is religious). But she has also begun doing hard labor–she has converted to the environmental cause–willing to go to extreme measures to secure her goals.
The eco-plotline of the story is not done in an “isn’t nature glorious” voice. Indeed nature is brutal to them–personally, when their beloved wallcreeper becomes a target. The ecological standpoint is more aggressive than sweet. At times it gets a little bogged down in details. And I’m not sure if it’s intentional, but many was the time when I wasn’t sure who they were trying to protect the rivers for or even from. Was there a contempt for organizations as well? It seemed like conflicting groups were after the same goal, or willing to take each other out regardless of the end. Is this confusion yet more commentary about the environmental movement? I like to think so.
The plot almost seems beside the point–it is so elliptical that it all seems plausible, even if realistically it probably isn’t (and there seems to be legal rules in Switzerland that I don’t quite get). But really the book is about a woman and her internal struggle with life, love, sex, work, marriage and much more. And of course, Zink writes wonderful sentences that are a treat to read.
This was a fast-paced and unusual story. There’s something about Zink that just seems slightly off, but in a really good way.
Leave a comment