Today’s Musical Obsession: Wooden Shjips – “Clouds Over Earthquake”
This one’s a subterranean drone, a trippy Sixties jam, a lost experimental song by The Doors covered by Sonic Youth. It will take you sweeping over strange landscapes. It will place kaleidoscopes in front of your eyes. It will cause your co-workers to think you’ve lost your mind. But you won’t care. Once you’ve traversed its four-and-a-half minutes you will have returned from some magical country where trees are purple and cats are kings, and you will have secrets.
Today’s Musical Obsession: NO – “Another Life”
My obsession with The National is well-documented, and I’ve already been obsessed by NO’s “Stay With Me”, which uses those same layered guitars and that low, disaffected voice that’s really about as cool as it gets. This kind of stuff could resolve all international conflicts if piped into the U.N. General Assembly. That’s a serious proposition. Now here’s a second song off NO’s EP “Don’t Worry, You’ll Be Forever”, as addictive as the first track and even more National-like. By the time everybody comes in “Oh-ing” after the two-minute mark, all your little worries will have disappeared entirely. It’s that joy-in-heartbreak technique again. The music soars even as the words say it’s over: “I’ll see you in another life…you don’t walk this way anymore.”
Reading: How To Write The Great American Novel
Overall, this is some pretty good advice for writers, and it’s also good for a laugh. Here are the ten steps to success:
1. Move out of Brooklyn
2. Drop out of school
3. Stop writing in Starbucks
4. Adultery is boring
5. Stop writing books told from the point of view of children
6. Stop wasting time on the internet
7. We need more novels written from the point of view of cats
8. Don’t listen to anyone’s opinions
9. Stop drinking and doing coke
10. No more anti-heroes
11. Never stop writing
I agree with almost all of them, except 4 (which would eliminate more than half of the classics), 7 (obvious), and maybe 10 (heroes are often worse).
Today’s Musical Obsession: Big Deal – “Talk”
The album is called “Lights Out”, and the band is a duo from London. The song reminds me of The XX – clear male/female vocals at the center of some churning, syncopated guitars. It takes you into a cozy room where two lovers eye each other warily, and you want to stick around watching to find out if it turns into a total disaster.
Reading: The God of Gamblers
Here’s a fascinating article on gambling in Macau from the most recent New Yorker. It’s about the differences between East and West, rich and poor, and faith and science. Do you win because you know the percentages or because you know what color to wear? Who knows….
The New Yorker: The God of Gamblers
Today’s Musical Obsession: The Lumineers – “Ho Hey”
This one’s highly addictive, and the album’s out this week. The Lumineers are based in Denver, and this song is bound to blow up and be one that people play on guitars at downbeat college parties for another decade or two. Listen to it three times and stop yourself from singing along – you’ve got more self-control than me.
Reading: Exiles
Over the past few years, I think Roberto Bolaño has given me more pleasure than any other writer, and here’s a brilliant essay on exile and writing that typically meanders off into a dozen digressions for which your English teacher would have marked you down, but which Bolaño uses to get beyond structured habits of thought towards something more ineffable:
“In any case, the point is that the writer works wherever he is, even while he sleeps, which isn’t true of those in other professions. Actors, it can be said, are always working, but it isn’t the same: the writer writes and is conscious of writing, whereas the actor, under great duress, only howls. Policemen are always policemen, but that isn’t the same either, because it’s one thing to be and another to work. The writer is and works in any situation. The policeman only is. The same is true of the professional assassin, the soldier, the banker. Whores, perhaps, come closest in the exercise of their profession to the practice of literature.”
The New York Review of Books: Exiles
Today’s Musical Obsession: The National – “Bloodbuzz Ohio”
This is getting ridiculous. The song’s two years old and I’m still hopelessly obsessed. In this moment, with the song in my earphones, it’s also my favorite of the past two years.
You’re getting fed up with my The National fixation, but I don’t care. Addicts behave like this. These are the telltale signs. You’ve probably heard the song a dozen times. If you haven’t, there’s hope, and this one’s for you. Then we can all join each other in rehab, announce our names, and tell each other our stories.
Reading: The Godfather Wars
This would make a good movie. It’s the story of how the real mob got mixed up in the making of the mob movie, first threatening to shut it down, then becoming enamored by the idea that their catch phrases might go down in history and make them legendary.
“In many ways, the men who made The Godfather—director Francis Ford Coppola, producer Al Ruddy, Paramount executives Robert Evans and Peter Bart, and Gulf & Western boss Charles Bluhdorn—were as ruthless as the gangsters in Mario Puzo’s blockbuster. After violent disputes over the casting of Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, they tangled with the real-life Mob, which didn’t want the movie made at all. The author recalls how the clash of Hollywood sharks, Mafia kingpins, and cinematic geniuses shaped a Hollywood masterpiece.”
Vanity Fair: The Godfather Wars
Today’s Musical Obsession: Lower Dens – “Brains”
Atmosphere is everything. Conspire to enter the right one, and you’ll be remade. Enter this song, and everyone in the room in which you now sit will turn endlessly interesting. You’ll fall in love, you’ll fall out of love, the walls will shimmer with some strange substance you can’t quite seem to touch, then melt away entirely, and when the party’s over you’ll walk through the night feeling as if it’s all directly connected into you.
Lower Dens have a new album coming out soon, and this is the first song off it. I can’t wait to surround myself with the rest.
Reading: Love, Boxing, and Hunter S. Thompson
Here’s a long, beautifully written piece by a guy named John Kaye, who knew Hunter Thompson, yes, but was even braver than that, and also lived a life out of one of Hunter Thompson’s books. Bald, impulsive flight attendants, hotel receptionists from Sweden, and armed men in drag – this one’s got it all.
Los Angeles Review of Books: Love, Boxing, and Hunter S. Thompson
Today’s Musical Obsession: We Are Augustines – “Juarez”
I’m still constantly listening to We Are Augustines, and this is the song off the album (“Rise Ye Sunken Ships”) that I skipped over at first for the more obvious pleasures, but that has now become my favorite of all. I can’t think of another time I’ve heard such guts poured into just a few lines, repeated over and over again. I can’t listen to it too often. I start having mood swings. I think I’m a boxer. I’m running guns through Juarez.
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