(Short fiction, shorter increments.)
Looper in the Dark: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11, no. 12
In the warehouse’s halls, Looper felt as if he were on an exotic vacation. “We’re mostly a factory now,” Mr. Brown, the manager, explained to him as they walked. They passed door after door. The snowy street seemed miles away. The collar of Mr. Brown’s red shirt jutted at an unusual angle, Looper thought. It was most pleasing.
“The upper floors are for specialty machines,” Mr. Brown pointed out, showing Looper the building map. “None gets used more than once or twice a month. There are rarely more than a half-dozen men up there at a time.” Looper nodded. The tone of Mr. Brown’s desk was one he could not name, like a shade from an early color photograph.
On the factory floor, high windows transformed the thin winter sun into something magnificent. Earphones muffled Looper’s ears. Mr. Brown pointed out the fire exits, professionally silent in the din. It occurred to Looper that he did not know the factory’s purpose. One machine was at least two stories tall. Two men tended to dials and counters at its base.
(Short fiction, shorter increments.)
Looper in the Dark: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11, no. 12
In fact, the warehouse looked especially normal. It was a perfect cube. The walls were a soft, white cinderblock. They met the sidewalk evenly, giving the entire block symmetry. The windows began on the third of the five stories. Looper could not find a doorbell. For a moment, he stood confused. He tried the knob. It was a silver sphere. Clean, very clean, and quite unlocked. There was no lock on the door at all, in fact.
Looper stepped into entry. It was empty. The ceiling was low, Looper observed. Lower than he would expect. The room was an olive green, the light warm. He felt welcome, which is not what he usually felt when it came to inspecting warehouses. A sliding window opened into an office, also empty.
The chair Looper sat in while he waited was of bright white leather, also welcoming. The arms were wooden, cut at sharp 90-degree angles. Looper relaxed into the room’s plainness. It washed over him like a sea breeze. When the secretary called at him from the window, he was not upset. He stood, still in reverie.
Looper in the Dark will continue next week…
(Short fiction, shorter increments.)
Looper in the Dark: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11, no. 12
It was perhaps on account of the offness that Looper was even there, in the other neighborhood. That is what he called it: the offness. Looper considered this as he walked west on 79th Avenue. To be fair, he had not yet called it that to anyone. He merely thought it. Nobody else seemed to do even that.
Like the new secretary. She reminded him of wool, dense wool. She was the one who sent him to the neighborhood. The printed dispatcher sheet was in his coat pocket. Its folds were uneven, of course, despite his best efforts. The destination was far afield, a distance from his office’s assigned territory. “That’s what the computer says,” the secretary shrugged, chewing her gum.
The wind was biting. Looper counted Salvation Army Santas. He looked for a pattern in their distribution. At least his scarf still worked as it should. He crossed a plaza. He remembered a farmer’s market he’d once been to there. On its far side, everything was normal again.
(Short fiction, shorter increments.)
Looper in the Dark: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11, no. 12
In the morning, everything remained flawed. The alarm rang at 6, as usual. It seemed too dark, however. Looper’s coffee was too strong. His toast was too burnt. Even his bootlaces were too short. Walking to the dispatcher’s office, all the world seemed askew. The newspaper headlines were off-center. The traffic signals hesitated before changing.
The time clock punched Looper’s card with an abnormally resounding thud. It echoed through the office. Looper looked around, though neither of the secretaries looked up from her desk. All day, Looper trudged about the neighborhood in the dirtying snow. None of the buildings failed his inspection, though each was wrong, as if it might remove a mask as soon as he was out of sight.
In the dark, later, he held the milk in his mouth. He could taste something else in it, as well. Besides milk. He swallowed it slowly. In his chair, he tried to feel the room around him. He did not want to feel the room. He just wanted to sit. Why should that be difficult?
(Short fiction, shorter increments.)
Looper in the Dark: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11, no. 12
Looper was in the dark. He was sitting, that was all. Outside, it snowed. The apartment sang in response. Steam rushed through the pipes, crying and hissing. Looper listened, though not that closely. He was happy to sit. From his green easy chair, he could see the heavy flakes falling. They were gray and muted through the glass.
The streetlamp was dim. Looper rose to see if the snow was accumulating on the cars and the fire escape. That was when he bumped into the corner of the table. He felt his thigh bruise. That should not be, he thought crossly. The table had not moved for decades. The snow was blanketing the street, unbroken by tire tracks or footprints. It was late. Nobody should be out anyway.
Before he went to bed, Looper drank a glass of milk. It was not cold enough. He’d been drinking milk from this refrigerator for some 33 years, since he first moved to the city. The dials indicated that there was nothing wrong, yet that was incorrect. Oddly temperatured milk and furniture not where it should be. Looper did not like it. The snow kept falling.
It’s always fun to go through old issues of Wired from early in the first cyberboom. On the hyper-colorful mess of an index for the May 1995 issue, they refer to cover subject Brian Eno as “a prototypical Renaissance 2.0 artist” — funny to see the 2.0 meme/self-image already in play, even then.
I was in high school at the time, so I didn’t really grasp most of the hilarious hippie optimism of the whole affair (nor all the details). Still, I quite uncynically read interviews with a lot of heady hitters. I didn’t consciously hear Eno’s music for another few years, but this quote stuck with me right away.
Try it with a British accent. It sounds more thoughtful.
So, what happened with recording is that suddenly you could hear exactly the same piece of music a thousand times, anywhere you chose to listen to it. And this of course gave rise to a while lot of new possibilities within music. I think the growth of jazz, especially improvised jazz, was entirely due to recordings, because you can make sense of something on several hearings — even things that sounds extremely weird and random on first hearing. I did an experiment myself last year in which I recorded a short piece of traffic noise on a street. It’s about three and a half minutes long, and I just kept listening to it to see if I could come to hear it as a piece of music. So, after listening to this recording many times, I’d say, Oh yes, there’s that car to the right, and there’s that door slamming to the left, and I would hear that person whistling, and there’s that baby coming by in the pram. After several weeks, I found I loved it like a piece of music.
Features:
“CBGB Closes” (audio slideshow for Associated Press, photos by Jack Chester)
Song reviews:
“Tio Minuter (Ten Minutes)” – Pärson Sound (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Good Things Are Coming” – New Sound of Numbers (PaperThinWalls.com)
“God Bless the Ottoman Empire” – A Hawk and a Hacksaw (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Untitled (Track 4)” – Talibam! (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Trial By Lasers” – Icy Demons (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Time Passing” – Max Richter feat. Robert Wyatt (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Soul Master” – Edwin Starr
“I’m Your Puppet” – Yo La Tengo
“I’d Love Just Once To See You” – The Beach Boys
“California” – Dr. Dog
““In a Different Light – The Bangles
Album reviews:
The Information – Beck
Live at the Warfield – Phil Lesh and Friends
Live reviews:
Of Montreal and Jamie Lidell at Irving Plaza, 26 September 2006
Yo La Tengo at Loews Jersey City, 29 September 2006
The Mountain Goats at the Bowery Ballroom, 1 October 2006
Columns and misc.:
BRAIN TUBA: Five Little Thoughts (It’s a Scientific Lifestyle
Two new Funny Cry Happy demos
Only in print:
o November Relix (Tenacious D cover): album reviews of Bob Dylan, Tortoise, Joanna Newsom, Four Tet; book review of 33 1/3 Greatest Hits
o Paste #26 (Beck cover): movie review of Fast Food Nation, DVD review of Jeff Tweedy
“In a Different Light” – The Bangles (download here)
from Different Light (1986)
released by Columbia Records (download here)
(file expires November 2nd)
My first exposure to the Bangles came through the radio show Kids America that my mother and I listened to, and where — being a kid-friendly novelty — “Walk Like An Egyptian” was a ceaseless hit. Not long after that, we bought a tape of the album. The songs disappeared into my memory until this summer, when my friend Paul convinced me to grab them from his iPod. The title track, whose chorus was one of the few bits of the album I remembered (along with Prince’s “Manic Monday” and “Walk Like An Egyptian”), remains awesome. Give or take a little bit of the production sheen, it doesn’t even sound too dated.
I can imagine walking into a bar on the Lower East Side and hearing some sub-Strokes band covering this. It’s garage-pop of the first order: pounding wah guitar intro, a chorus/hook that drops immediately, and — eventually — lyrics that run just deep enough to be meaningful as lyrics, but don’t strive to be anything deeper. The first verse, to me, is just plain effective: “I wanna make a movie / I wanna put you on the silver screen / Sit in a darkened room / and study you from a distance.” There’s no attempt at a backstory, it’s just an observation — an unrhyming one, too, which makes it even kinda elegant. (Funny that the other two verses do rhyme, but it’s really the first one that sets the tone.)
All the lyrics are about making some kind of art to explain the subject — a movie, a novel, a painting — but, in the end, it’s just a song, and not even one that really explains anything. It only gets at the feeling of wanting to explain — which is not only a more modest goal, but a more evocative one, and certainly more mysterious. Not everybody needs to be John Darnielle, y’know?, and “Bob” bless ’em for all that.
“California” – Dr. Dog (download here)
from Takers and Leavers EP (2006)
released by PTV Records (buy)
(file expires November 1st)
Been taking a leisurely slog through Writing Los Angeles, an anthology of great writing about the place. Here, in an essay titled “Paradise, ” Double Indemnity writer James M. Cain writes about what he thinks of as the shallowness of L.A.:
But what electric importance can be felt in a peddler of orange peelers? Or of a dozen ripe avocados, just plucked that morning? Or a confector of Bar-B-Q? Or the proprietor of a goldfish farm? Or a breeder of rabbit fryers? They give me no kick at all. They give themselves no kick. The whole place is overrun with nutty religions which are merely the effort of these people to inject some sort of point into their lives; if not on earth, then in the stars, in numbers, in vibrations, or whatever their fancy hits on.
Thing is, all those things do have kick: what a weird, mystical place southern California must have been in 1933, between the wars. Dr. Dog evokes it perfectly on this Western Swing-on-a-soundstage number from their Takers and Leavers EP.
