Got wind of an electronic outfit, Alaska in Winter, and took a listen to their debut album Dance Party in the Balkans. The title is a little bit confusing, because this could only count as a “dance party” if you were above the Arctic circle with a bunch of depressed Scandinavian teenagers who were too trigger-happy with the reverb pedal. In other words, this album is what you’d get if Trentemoller and Death Cab for Cutie had a love child and he was put on painkillers and given a turntable. You’d expect nothing short of total beauty. Zach Condon, a.k.a. Beirut, provides some haunting vocals.
Saturday. Just finished this Ian McEwan novel last night for an English class. Most people seemed to have liked it, although I’d lean more toward this guy:
Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.—are hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy.
[John Banville via The Elegant Variation]
There’s nothing more entertaining than reading a witty critic’s gleeful cruelty, but for me the novel has actually stuck. Henry Perowne’s dithering political stance — despite being an easy target for a reader’s self-righteousness — is more familiar than you’d like to think. It is nothing more than the tentative rationalism of a scientist in a society of scientists, naively transposed onto the messy, vociferously moral spit-fest that is public debate. Perowne’s literary philistinism is hyperbole, but not false. What self-conscious “educated” person has not tried to mask their distaste of an oeuvre, despite their presumed communion with all forms of art by virtue of social status? I don’t doubt Banville’s claim that Henry is a stitched-together bag of literary set-pieces. On the other hand, those pieces are what struck me as most paradoxical and interesting about the book.
Beirut. Based on the name of this guy and his rich, meandering tenor tinged with Eastern European pathos, you’d imagine a dark, mysterious 30-something Lebanese whose cosmopolitan upbringing has cultivated in him — and in his music — literary proportions of wanderlust and an unflagging sense of cultural disembodiment.
Nope. His name is Zach Condon, and he’s from Santa Fe, a random kid with a wrist injury and a penchant for dropping out of school. He can’t play guitar, so he’s channeled his musical obsessions into composition, ukelele, and traveling in Europe. Thank goodness. If he had embraced the plain-vanilla singing-songwriting of his American indie-rock forefathers, he wouldn’t be half as good at faking the NPR-worthy worldliness in his music that we’ve all come to love. But fortunately, he is good at faking it, so good that the only moments where the illusion fades is when you manage to make out a few sophomoric lyrics here and there. That’s when you should stop paying attention and just let the music play; the words will lose themselves in a lilting wash of French chanson and Balkan waltz, and conjure up nostalgia for places you — and he — have probably never been. You wish your young-adult life crisis turned out this well.
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