Mixed notes
The live version of the Knife's "Heartbeats" over at Said The Gramophone is incredible. As are José Gonzalez's and the original. This just might be the best song made in the past five years, and amazingly durable to boot.
The part in Ataxia's "Montreal" where Joe Lally(?) slurs out "Sold all my records/What a stupid thing to do" hits me right in the chest. I'm not sure why.
The intro to Destroyer's "Sick Priest Learns To Last Forever" is straight Neil Young, "Down By The River". The rest I'm not so keen on (sorry, Mike).
Finally finished Borges' Collected Fictions. Wow. Precisely as mindblowing as I'd expected/hoped from Labyrinths. Now I need to find his poetry and nonfiction.
Probably the singular thing for someone my age to take from V. (how could I have forgotten the period?) is that the twentieth century is not what we often think it is. I was born in 1981 and so my view of the "twentieth century" is the eighties and nineties - a fifth of it. And arguably not even close to the most representative fraction. The back of my edition of V. calls it "the wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century", and it was written in 1961, before so much of what we latecomers think of as the twentieth century. V. conjures up a world hidden beneath (not before - remember Faulkner!) ours, one that we could trace backwardsto from ours if we were smart enough (and maybe that's partly what he is doing). Pynchon writes of a world where, before the great upheavals of the 60s and beyond and the recent and still painfully present fever of millennialism, it felt like "Nothing was coming. Nothing was already here." It often feels like that, to those alive at the time. They're always wrong.
The part in Ataxia's "Montreal" where Joe Lally(?) slurs out "Sold all my records/What a stupid thing to do" hits me right in the chest. I'm not sure why.
The intro to Destroyer's "Sick Priest Learns To Last Forever" is straight Neil Young, "Down By The River". The rest I'm not so keen on (sorry, Mike).
Finally finished Borges' Collected Fictions. Wow. Precisely as mindblowing as I'd expected/hoped from Labyrinths. Now I need to find his poetry and nonfiction.
Probably the singular thing for someone my age to take from V. (how could I have forgotten the period?) is that the twentieth century is not what we often think it is. I was born in 1981 and so my view of the "twentieth century" is the eighties and nineties - a fifth of it. And arguably not even close to the most representative fraction. The back of my edition of V. calls it "the wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century", and it was written in 1961, before so much of what we latecomers think of as the twentieth century. V. conjures up a world hidden beneath (not before - remember Faulkner!) ours, one that we could trace backwardsto from ours if we were smart enough (and maybe that's partly what he is doing). Pynchon writes of a world where, before the great upheavals of the 60s and beyond and the recent and still painfully present fever of millennialism, it felt like "Nothing was coming. Nothing was already here." It often feels like that, to those alive at the time. They're always wrong.
have you heard the rex the dog remix of "heartbeats"?
Posted by
Jack Lucas |
10:00 PM
and yes, that live version is incredible.
Posted by
Jack Lucas |
10:09 PM
No, you must hook me up! "Heartbeats" is my crack.
Posted by
Ian |
10:35 PM
you should get an e-mail, but if not, it's here.
Posted by
Jack Lucas |
11:07 PM
I did get an email and you sir, are awesome.
Posted by
Ian |
11:15 PM
Not to mention the 21st century. The Valerie Plame/Flame/Wilson, etc. story is one straight out of a sequel to V.
Posted by
Anonymous |
2:25 AM