Slow Learner

Album Review: “No One Loves You Like I Do” by The Life and Times

No One Loves You Like I Do, the eagerly anticipated new record from Missouri-based space rockers The Life And Times, was released last week, and it’s by far the band’s most cohesive and comprehensive release to date, leaving me wondering if Kansas City, the band’s hometown, has municipal water services that filter the city’s drinking water through moon rocks. (If this album isn’t from another planet, then the players on it certainly must be tapping into something literally otherworldly.)  Having seemingly maxed out the sonic spectrum  with lush and dreamy riffs that still manage to be heavy (not to mention catchy) on their previous full-length, The Tragic Boogie, the Life and Times boys have somehow outdone themselves once again here. 

From the echo-soaked opening notes of “Day Six,” to the subtle hooks on “Day Nine,”  to the blazing (but wholly and remarkably un-wanky) guitar harmonies on “Day One,” to the Failure-esque, sludged-out moodiness of “Day Twelve,” No One Loves You Like I Do affords the listener a layered and unique audio experience with each sitting. The buried metronome, barely audible even through headphones, on “Day Five,” for example, permits the audience a closeness with the recording process so intimate that we might as well be in the specially designed studio on the Mars colony along with the band.

With their third LP, The Life and Times don’t just knock it out of the park. They send it into orbit around the stratosphere.

Book Review: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

“Ethical meat is a promissory note, not a reality.”

-Jonathan Safran Foer

 

In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer makes, quite simply, one of the most compelling, focused, clearly articulated, and well researched arguments for vegetarianism I’ve ever read.  Discussing the environmental and ethical implications of eating meat, the grim reality and utter lack of sustainability  of the factory farming system, and the importance of seemingly minor decisions like what we eat at family dinners, Safran Foer’s Eating Animals is totalizing and (thankfully) wholly missing any proselytizing.    

Where Safran Foer succeeds, in my opinion, is that he avoids two very large and frequently unavoided snares in discussions of the ethics of eating: 

1.) He openly acknowledges his vulnerability, admitting that throughout his life he has shifted from being vegetarian, to secretly eating meat, to eating meat exclusively at family gatherings, and back to vegetarianism.  Safran Foer has struggled with this issue, and he doesn’t encourage his reader to point blank accept a vegetarian lifestyle without questioning his ideas and considering them for him or herself. Unlike some other writers in this field (the titles Diet For A New America by John Robbins, Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, and, perhaps the least well known but most egregious case, Meat is for Pussies, by John Joseph all jump to mind here) Safran Foer is of the mindset that “conversations about meat tend to make people feel cornered, [but] not all vegetarians are prostelytizers.” And it’s safe to assume that Safran Foer is in the latter group.

2.) Perhaps due to his lack of allegiances with any specific camps in the “pro-/anti-vegetarian” debate, Safran Foer is not afraid to address issues often overlooked (perhaps deliberately) by both camps. In the sub-section titled “A Case for Eating Dogs,” for example, he discusses how eating dogs, while considered socially and ethically taboo in America to both politically extreme vegans and vocally prolific carnivores, would provide a perfectly edible source of food from  animals that overpopulate kennels so severely that we must euthanized them by the millions each year. (A side note, but consider, briefly, the number of people, who are not vegetarians but who were appalled at Michael Vick’s mistreatment of dogs.  It’s undeniable that pigs are very intelligent animals, perhaps smarter than dogs. When someone is mistreating dogs—creatures that our culture has accepted as companions, not sources of protein—it makes the national news.  If we were to extend the same amount of press coverage to mistreated pigs, there would be virtually no room left in the newspaper for other news.) Refusing to stop there, however, in his entertainment of counterarguments, Safran Foer goes far beyond simply highlighting the hideousness of factory farming.  His investment is in demonstrating to the reader exactly how complicated this topic is by doing things like interviewing financially struggling family farmers, rather than simply breaking into ConAgra plants (which he also does) to show that factory farming is detrimental to our society. 

 

I received my copy of Eating Animals as a gift from my mother, who herself received as a bonus for buying so many books from her mail-order book club, and—I’ll be honest—I didn’t think I was going to bother reading it.  I thought, “Honestly, what else is there to say about this issue?” After having read it, I’m not only very glad that I did, but (unlike other books about vegetarianism) I would comfortably recommend it to not only other vegetarians, but also vocal meat eaters. After all, as Safran Foer points out, regardless of how you feel about the issues raised in this book, while some of us are in the habit of consuming animal protein, we are all creatures kept alive by the consumption of food, and we are, therefore, all, in a sense, eating animals.

A Completely Unasked For, Unordered, Incomplete, and Superfluous List of Good Records That Came Out This Year

Alas, another year has come and gone, and it wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t compile all the memorable music that came out this year into a list, so here it is in no particular order:

Psychic Teens-“Teen”: Psychic Teens play music that is equal parts moody, angry, and heavy, and they do it all with subtlety and humor. “Teen” is without a doubt the best record to come out of Philadelphia in recent years.  I would strongly recommend you check them out at one of the many shows they play, but beware if you’re predisposed to having seizures, since their light show is enough to make the unafflicted swallow their tongues.  And don’t plan on holding a conversation with anyone the next day, since they’ll mutilate your hearing even if you’re wearing ear plugs. Oh, and if it bugs you to watch equipment get smashed on stage, I’d advise you to go see another band.

Pulling Teeth-“Funerary”: (See my review below). Sonically, if you put Integrity and Left For Dead in a blender, you’d get Pulling Teeth.  Their newest release gets better with each listen.

The Life And Times-“Day II” b/w “Day III”: Keeping the space rock sub-genre alive, The Life and Times give us two new cuts from their upcoming album “No One Loves You Like I Do.”  My only complaint here is that we have to wait until mid-January to hear the rest of the record.

Mastodon-“The Hunter”: Somewhere vaguely between Entombed’s “Left Hand Path” and The Melvins’ “Houdini” you get Mastodon’s mix of pure metal and art rock.  “The Hunter” reigns in the proggier aspects of “Crack the Skye,” their previous release, and manages to do so without watering it down.

Office of Future Plans-ST: Jay Robbins strikes again, and this time he brings a cello into the ensemble.

Fucked Up-“David Comes To Life”: I should preface this choice by saying I wanted very badly to dislike this band since their inception for the following reasons: their unfortunate name; their superstar lineup; their regularly gimmicky performances that entail stuff like 24 hour concerts; the fact that “Hidden World” was still kind of an uninventive street punk record that was hailed as genius by many sources.  But I really have to hand it to them, much to my chagrin, this record is one of the best of the year.  While I’m not necessarily interested in the “concept” part of the album (some silly narrative about a factory worker who falls in love or something), the album’s urgency and lush guitar work are enough to forgive Fucked Up for their attempted pretensions and to keep me coming back.

Real Estate-“Days”: This album takes notes from early REM, The Feelies, and even a little Teenage Fanclub, and it is, therefore, after my own heart.  You can’t deny that “It’s Real” is one of the catchiest songs of 2011.

Omegas-“Blasts of Lunacy”: This Canadian hardcore band keep it simple and sincere—no “Yo, Boy!” tongue-in-cheek lyrics, and no phony posturing. Omegas are the real article, and this record proves it.

Tom Waits-“Bad As Me”: It’s always a good year when Mr. Waits steps into the studio.

New Day Rising

Book Review: I Drink for A Reason by David Cross

In one of my all time favorite Mr. Show sketches, a character played by Bob Odenkirk is hooked up to a polygraph machine and four or five people, one of which is played by David Cross, are barraging him with questions in order to test his integrity and honesty as a potential future employee of a company that remains unnamed until the end of the sketch.  During his interview, the shirt-sleeves-and-neck-tie-wearing interviewers begin to grimly interrogate Odenkirk’s character about any potential history he may have had with drug use, asking him if he has done a series of increasingly severe drugs (alcohol, marijuana, coke, and right on up the list).  By the time the interviewers get to crack cocaine on this list—and Odenkirk’s character says, yes, in fact, he has smoked crack—they break from their roles as objective, scientific, suited men who are administering a polygraph test and excitedly ask Bob Odenkirk’s character what it was like to smoke crack, with the implication that they think it’s really cool that he’s done this drug.  Odenkirk’s character then coolly answers something to the effect of “Ehh, It’s crack; it gets you real high.”

And, of course, the point of Odenkirk’s character’s too-cool response in this scene is that the stimuli you consume, no matter how intense that stimuli may be, sometimes has the exact effect you anticipate.  In essence, smoking crack, according to the character, will be underwhelming for the new user in that it will get you exactly as high as you expect it to; no more, no less.

Having found Mr. Cross’s book, I Drink for A Reason, on sale in (of all places) Urban Outfitters, I grabbed it, shelled out the five bucks, and eagerly awaited to have a similar response as his former co-star’s recreational-crack-smoking character—thinking this book will do nothing more or less than just hit the spot.  It won’t blow my mind, but I won’t want to run it through a paper shredder, page-by-page, in an act of misdirected revenge on its author. (See: my graduate school experience with The Wasteland. It involved fire and a scorched Norton Critical Edition.)

Thankfully, I Drink for A Reason ended up doing exactly what I thought: perfecctly meeting my expectations.  At times it had me laughing out loud in public; at other times it was trying way too hard to accuse the “average American” of being a moronic philistine; at times it was childishly funny, and at other times it was childish and unfunny.  In short, I Drink for A Reason is representative of Mr. Cross’s other work: sometimes it’s perfect in its biting insight and other times its agonizingly cute and unfocused in its sarcastic aggression.

For a comedian who prides himself on his political awareness and on his being informed about religious hypocrisy, American news media, and civil procedure, I found the funniest stuff in the book (and generally in Cross’s career) to be his less heady stuff, specifically the material that dealt with the world of entertainment.  His rant about Larry the Cable Guy, for example, is Cross at his best: informed, entertaining, and unforgiving to his subject.  If anything, this book is worth picking up for the frequent gags at the expense of Jim Belushi (which comprises about 45% of the book).

As for Mr. Cross’s repeatedly vilifying Fox News and Rupert Murdoch, I feel like this is not only boring, but too easy for him.  I get it: News Corp is bad. Just make fun of Dane Cook some more, please.

If you’re a fan of David Cross’s other material, I would recommend picking this book up, but check your expectations at the book store check out counter.  Will it blow your mind? No, but it will keep you occupied until the Arrested Development movie finally gets made.

Underworld by Don DeLillo (Book Review)

With some unexpected time off a few months ago, I decided to buckle down and do something I wouldn’t otherwise have the time for.  The question to consider, however, was what, exactly, I should do.  I initially entertained the idea of starting a weekly soccer game, but this only got about as far as casually recruiting a few friends and acquaintances.  What I ended up doing was grabbing the copy of Don DeLillo’s Underworld that my sister got me for my birthday a few years ago.

At 827 pages, I honestly didn’t think I could do it.  I thought I no longer had the patience to read postmodern tomes.  “What more could DeLillo have to say about late capitalism and the sublime beauty of industrialism and technology that hasn’t already been said?” I thought.  Within about 20 pages, however, my question was answered and my skepticism was shattered.

Covering such topics  as celebrity, the cult of serial killers, the construction of the World Trade Center, the ways in which the American collective unconscious fixates on nostalgia, and the sublime excess of  waste mater in the world, DeLillo’s novel here is at once totalizing and accessible.  While Underworld covers a dizzying amount turf— practically brimming with both large chunks and minuscule tidbits from American history—what makes this novel so compelling is the depth of its characters.  Our focal character, Nick Shay, is a wizened manager of a waste management company, but he is a man with numerous skeletons in his closet.  His brother, Matty, develops nuclear weapons, but his concerns about the moral issues with the job are at odds with the stability of the pay check it provides him.  Even DeLillo’s fictionalized version of J. Edgar Hoover is dealing with his germaphobia and sexual identity issues.  Unlike the more recent efforts from some of his contemporaries, like Thomas Pynchon for example, DeLillo writes characters, not caricatures, here.  On one hand, Underworld is a novel about people who are dealing with the breathtaking awe of living in a technologized, postindustrial world.  But on the other hand,  Underworld is simply about being a human and, therefore, being prone to have character flaws and repent for mistakes and inadvertantly injuring the ones we love while we try to make sense of it all.  And this (at least for me) is its most compelling quality. 

Simply put, Underworld is a superb novel that I highly recommend to anyone who has lived in American in the past hundred years.  Needless to say, it is also an excellent birthday present for an older sister to give her little brother.

I Am Not Sidney Portier by Percival Everett (Book Review)

“What’s your name?” a kid would ask.

“Not Sidney,” I would say

“Okay, then what is it?”

—Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Portier

Abounding with Abbott-and-Costello-type set ups that are as clever as they are wonderfully cheesy, Percival Everett’s most recent novel, I Am Not Sidney Portier, is about a young black man who not only bears an unfortunate and striking resemblance to the actual Sidney Portier, but who is also given the conversationally problematic name Not Sidney Portier. In between forcing his titular character to endure the above interaction with a cast of ex-cons, angry cops, and erratic and sex-crazed teachers (almost all of whom are unabashedly racist), Everett runs Not Sidney through a series of Monty-Python-esque trials, during which he is placed in the nurturing care of media mogul Ted Turner, meets a fictionalized version of the novel’s real-life author (i.e. Percival Everett himself), and ends up in a series of situations that look suspiciously like the plots of Sidney Portier’s most famous movies.

The novel is ripe with transgressive racial stereotypes—and, of course, commentary on those stereotypes—as Everett scathingly handles issues of race in America and addresses how those issues are complicated by the media. In one of my favorite moments in the book, for example, the protagonist has a dream that is an intensified mash-up of various racial stereotypes: auctioneers are selling off slaves; black men fall into lives of excess and risk, and choruses of black men and women sing both negro spirituals and Bob Marley tunes in harmony to narrate these events.

Everett’s commentary on the media’s control of racial stereotypes is laid on quite thick here, evident in the protagonist’s name, or Everett’s placing that protagonist under the care of one of the most instrumental figures in television, Ted Turner. Indeed, what Everett has done here is almost deliberately anti-subtle: Not Sidney Portier, who is endlessly confused for the prototypical black screen actor (i.e. the actual Sidney Portier), is placed under the wealthy care and guidance (albeit very passive care and guidance) of Ted “The Mouth of the South” Turner (AKA “Captain Outrageous”), a man who has written the programming for 70% of what every American has seen in the past 30 years, and who has, by proxy, controlled cultural conceptions of all human relations, including how we perceive race. As the real-life Ted Turner strongly yet passively influences our depictions of race, Everett’s fictional Ted Turner controls the novel’s most racially important character.  Yet subtlety doesn’t seem to be what Everett is shooting for here.  In a small but important moment in the novel, as Not Sidney is standing up to his girlfriend’s unbearable parents over Thanksgiving dinner, the narration describes “silence [falling] on the table like a bad simile.”  And those “bad simile[s]” (manifest in characters who think that their experiences with racial issues are “just like” some movie about someone having similar experiences) are the vehicles of the novel’s critique.  In a book that makes joke after joke about character’s buffoonishly confusing televised depictions of African Americans with actual African Americans, Everett is taking his readers to a place where we are reminded just how pervasive these stereotypes are.

I highly recommend I Am Not Sidney Portier to any reader of current fiction, especially those who are self-proclaimingly “not racist.”

New Record from My Band

Hello, again!  I’ve been busy working on my band’s new record.  We’re called Quiet Arcs, and our new album is called Morphine Derivatives.  We had a lot of fun making it, and I certainly hope you enjoy listening to it.  You are welcome to download it for free if you’d like.  Thank you.