"Diptychs", Massive music dump

(Olympus Pen EES 1962)

Gchat with Thomas Pierce (2/9/09):

12:53 PM me: hey if you have anything that you think might fit that would be awesome

12:54 PM we might have enough for this issue, but i'd like to see them in any case

pierceta: sure, i can pass along a couple of photographs

i use a 1962 olympus pen-ee...

which takes 4x3 photos...

12:55 PM me: interesting...

pierceta: and then you print 2 to a 4x6

me: ah

ok

pierceta: so you get strange pairs

or diptychs

if you will.

me: heh

i like how you prefaced that

instead of just going out and saying "diptychs"

pierceta: ha

12:56 PM diptychs sounds pretentious

me: yes

---

Sick, apartment-ridden. Yesterday was spent playing Facebook Scrabble (annoyingly retitled "Lexulous") and listening to the "Lo-fi" station on Accuradio internet radio. This took place over the span of the entire day.

Over the past two weeks or so, I've been downloading and buying copious amounts of nmusic. Being sick and apartment-ridden has brought this music acquisition to a heightened state of activity.

Some of my more notable recent purchases and acquisitions, care of emusic, bittorrent, and the used record store:

1. Som Imaginario - Som Imaginario (1970). Tropicalia, psychedelic. Imported and for $20. I found this at my local used record store while searching for more music like Os Mutantes. There was a highly enthusiastic review of it on a note card, tucked in the front cover. The word "masterpiece" was used. It was not used lightly. "Nepal" available here.
   
2. Billy Nicholls - Selected Hits (2006, compiled from the 1960s). While at work the other week, I came across a shared iTunes that contained perhaps the greatest and most exotic assortment of music I've ever heard. I suspect it belongs to Sasha Frere-Jones, but have yet to confirm and possibly never will. One of the albums I found was Billy Nicholls's terrifyingly good, terrifyingly obscure album of released demos entitled "Snapshot". "Selected Hits" was the next closest thing available to me. The songs "Feeling Easy" and "Being Happy" are great. The story behind Nicholls's talent and obscurity is a disappointing and mysterious one. Why aren't these great songs more known? Who knows.
3. Beleza Tropical Brazil Classics Vol. 1 (1989) and Vol. 2 (2007). These were put out by David Byrne's label Luaka Bop. It's hard to articulate how beautiful and new this all sounds to me.
4. Elliott Smith - Self-titled (1995). I can't believe I haven't heard this one until now. Quieter and more sparse than his later material, yet totally urgent and possibly darker and angstier, despite the achingly beautiful and delicate sound. "Music as Attempt at Salvation" or something like that. An achievement. Fourteen years later, this album still sounds as fresh and essential to me (and people like me/you/us) as ever.
5. Shugo Tokumaru - l.s.t. (2008) and Night Piece (2006). My friend Jess recommended me to Shugo Tokumaru, touting him in a Gchat as "the Japanese Sufjan", which, upon listening, is a fairly accurate encapsulation. Or: "Sufjan, less Christian, more Japanese." His music is sometimes described as "experimental", but in a way that I feel is less angry professor, more child detective or something. "Vista" available for download here.
   
6. Vivian Girls - Self-titled (2008). I haven't listened to much of this so far, but the song "Where Do You Run To" is, I think, impossible not to love. Their voices sound good yet diffuse, messy, like showering in the morning after drinking a lot of beer and tea and water the night before. That wasn't what I think I was trying to say, but I won't delete it.
   
7. Guided by Voices - Under the Table Under the Stars (1996). Epic, massive, fractured. So, so many good songs on here. Some of them: "Rhine Jive Click", "Lord of Overstock", "Office of Hearts". I could see this one day becoming my favorite GBV album. Catchier than Alien Lanes, angstier and more desperate than Bee Thousand and also more consistent.
8. The Promise Ring - 30 Degrees Everywhere (1997). "Emo", "power-pop", "pop-punk"... have you stopped reading this yet? Despite those terms, which are, in many ways, fitting for The Promise Ring -- which also, by the way, deserves note as having the worst band name I've maybe ever come across -- the band is fantastic. Found 30 Degrees Everywhere through an AMG review by Blake Butler, found the band through a promotional video by Tao Lin using a webcam, an American Apparel hoodie, and the Promise Ring song "Nothing Feels Good", off the album of the same title.
9. Heartless Bastards - Stairs and Elevators (2005) and The Mountain (2008)
   
10. Serge Gainsbourgh - Initials SG (compilation 1958-1980)

Songs on albums not included but that are awesome nonetheless and also newly discovered (by me, at least):

- "Gila" - Beach House
- "Jorge Regula" - The Moldy Peaches (via Ben)
- "Party and Bullshit (Ratatat remix)" - Notorious B.I.G. (via Lincoln)

*Hopefully I will figure out a way for these will be available for download.

*UPDATE (2/9/09): I have figured out how to upload music files. However, I have also decided that it would make more sense to upload music from the albums I have talked about earlier. So here they are:

-Som Imaginario - "Nepal"
-Billy Nicholls - "Feeling Easy"
-Shugo Takomaru - "Vista"
-Guided By Voices - "Lord of Overstock"

Books I Read in 2008

Some might say a year-end booklist is something like a literary cock-showing contest. If that's true, then mine is short and incomplete. In an attempt to compensate, I've muscled up my reviews. (Thanks to Lincoln and Blake who inspired me to put this together.)

COMPLETED

1. The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño. Choked full of urgency and heart. A book that will leave you staggering around and emotionally tumescent (heart boner). Soul-crushing, life-altering. Everything you've read about it is true. A verifiable and bonafide masterpiece. I could go on forever about this one. I won't.

2. Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell. I've not read his other books but I like his articles a lot. This was possibly the most readable book I've ever read. Not as rigorous as I think I wanted it to be, but great and highly thought-provoking. The best part is in the middle when he talks about the guy with the off-the-charts IQ who is, essentially, doing nothing with it (he was a bouncer for awhile). Fascinating and heartbreaking. Also good is when he explains why Asians are so smart.

3. Personal Days - Ed Park. A tornado of increasing tragicomedic build-up that sucks you in and vomits you into a better place. Some killer one-liners in there. Tangentially lost my iPod because of this book.

4. Ray - Barry Hannah. Liquor-fueled literary mayhem. Hannah was, as the story goes, something of a drunk while writing this. I get lost at times, but on a scale of sheer linguistic originality and sharpness, unparalleled.

5. Last Evenings on Earth - Roberto Bolaño. What more can I say about Bolano? All the things that are working in The Savage Detectives are also present here. Perhaps more focused than TSD. Maybe more perfect and less staggering? If not a masterpiece, then close.

6. Barbarian In The Garden – Zbigniew Herbert. Brilliantly-written travelogues by a brilliant bastard. Sarcastic and humane.

7. Orality and Literacy - Walter J. Ong. As far as "non-fiction" thought-provokers go, this was my favorite of the year, over Outliers. Some pretty dense, heady stuff, though still highly readable. A lot of convincing arguments. Read it over the span of a night.

8. Drown - Junot Diaz. Seminal, formative work. Of great and convincing power. The story "Fiesta, 1980" makes me never want to be eleven again. The story "Edison, New Jersey" makes me never want to go to New Jersey again. I'm completely down with this book. This was a book for my class with Gary Shteyngart.

9. Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri. Pretty and dramatic. It was OK enough (you could not ask for more elegantly crafted sentences), but I guess wanted a little more grit, a little more blood in the stool. Shteyngart.

10. Pnin - Vladimir Nabakov. One of the best novels I've ever read. Maybe my favorite. Hilarious, sad, extremely well-written yet readable as well. "Written as all great literature should be -- which is, ecstatically," says Updike or some crap. And you know what? He's right. I was reading it in the stuffy quiet library on campus. The girl sitting next to me must have thought I was weird because I was so visibly enjoying the book. She kept looking over at me. Shteyngart.

11. Women - Charles Bukowski. You could probably call this one repetitive, but it killed just the same. Bukowski's ability for pith and one-liner is gas. People like to say Bukowski can't write, but them people are fools. If you could talk like him and Woody Allen, you could really go some places. Like to the bar, for example, or to the analyst.

12. The Quick and the Dead - Joy Williams. 80% through. Deadpan, odd, hard to pin down, deceptively unadorned and prosaic. Even banal. All of this done to great effect. Love it so far. Also very funny.

13. Actual Air - David Berman. I can't remember if I've finished this one, but there is so much weird beauty and heart in here, some of the poems I can't stop thinking about. The story about the guy "what's his name" haunts me to this day.

14. Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You - Frank Stanford. Only 1/3 of the way through this massive book, but I'm going to go ahead and declare it. Pound for pound heavyweight poetry champion of the world. Stanford has maybe the purest voice I've ever heard. Reading this is like drinking unfiltered nectar from the gods of youth and then careening on the rickety brokedown antebellum machinery of the heart. "Stanford is gas."

15. Notable American Women - Ben Marcus. 63% completed. This has on and off kicked my ass like a brain wearing a boot. The first section is cripplingly beautiful in its odd and moving sincerity, its life of heartbreak and disappointment disguised within the cruel and exacting tone of an science manual. Subversive. Sentences as sharp as the stick that carved them. Looking forward to getting back into it upon my return to NYC.

16. Home Land - Sam Lipsyte. Not done with yet, but some powerful, bruising shit in here. His first book Venus Drive is a beacon. Filthy good.

17. Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine. 95% through. Will finish when I get back to NYC. Another soul-staggerer.

18. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy. I think I'm halfway through. Liked it a lot so far. Lonely and elegant.

19. The Fermata - Nicholson Baker

20. No One Belongs Here More Than You - Miranda July. I've liked this book. Offbeat, quiet and beautiful.

21. Jesus' Son - Denis Johnson. Reread. Monstrous. Classic. A truly fundamental and formative book.

22. Red Calvary - Isaac Babel. Reread. Savage and visceral. This book will scramble what you think fiction is capable of in three pages. A triumph of speed and force and urgency.

23. 60 Stories - Donald Barthelme. There are probably still a few stories in here that I haven't read, but this collection absolutely kills. "The Balloon", "Me and Miss Mandible", "The School"...these are canon. Must-read for anyone who wants to do something "new" or "innovative" or "experiemental" or "literary".

OK, I'm tired of writing this. Maybe I'll finish. But probably I won't.

UPDATE:

24. Young Revolutionaries - Chelsea Martin, Catherine Lacey, Ellen Kennedy. I liked this chapbook a lot. Some really cool, fresh stuff being done. The best part in Kennedy's story is where the teenagers are watching the reality television show where the ex-wrestler slash host guy is talking about "'roid rage". Juvenile, genius.

25. Women and Children - The Royal Art Lodge. I liked this art book a lot. Dark yet light. Plain yet awesome. Funny yet sad. Bent.

26. Canteen Issue #2. Exactly what a journal should be. The content, both the prose and the art, is first-rate. The layout is clean. Everything about it, I love: the aesthetic vision of the magazine, the phenomenal color, the weight and paper used, even its smell. I particularly liked Peter Orner's shorts, Gina Gionfriddo's play about bear sex, and Todd Zuniga's story about "Life".

27. Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art #45

28. Noon #8