Baths

Terrible Cell Phone pic, sorry. There were fake candles all over the place.

This guy is a lot of fun. And that’s saying a lot considering I generally don’t think much of those electronic artists who might as well press the “play” button on iTunes when they perform live. Now, I’m not an idiot. I know that a lot of those artists do crazy things, mixing “tracks” with soundboards and… stuff, and I’ve seen some really sophisticated, fast-thinking music-makers get up on stage and impress the hell out of an audience, most notably at the Seattle Laptop Battle a few years ago (and DARNIT, I just realized I missed it this year — it was last night), but the fact remains that they could provide virtually the same experience by simply pre-recording the track, and then… dancing around on stage?

This is pretty much what one of the openers, Teen Daze, did. Peeling off layer after layer of ironic hipster attire a la Girl Talk (and yes, I’m talking about his clothes, this is not some weird metaphor about music), he could barely get himself enthused enough to tap a toe, and the beats he pumped out were decidedly too “chillwave” to provoke any kind of response in the audience.

Then Baths came out. First, I have to say that he is an attractive man. Becca, a girl I’m trying to impress, was, I hope, only slightly weirded out by my repeated remarks about how “I would go gay for him.” He is a little chubby, yes, but he exudes a self-confidence that allows him to reclaim that as part of his character, kind of like the Wife of Bath — haaaa, PUNS. In any case, his music is bomb: He makes kind of woozy beats with lots of falsetto, amounting to love songs tinged with electro-underpinnings. And on top of all that, it’s very pop-y and “listenable”; the experiment in genre-blurring doesn’t sacrifice the listener’s experience at all.

I first encountered Baths two summers ago when I was in LA; he got written up in the LA Weekly, and I went to a concert to investigate. I liked him enough to get his album, Cerulean, which was new at the time, but then I kind of forgot about him until Capitol Hill Block Party this last summer. Unfortunately, he was playing at the same time as TV on the Radio, so I only caught the last few songs of his set, but they were predictably dope. In retrospect, I might even have skipped TVOTR entirely to see the whole thing.

Then, a few days ago, when I heard he was coming to Seattle again (as a make-up concert for a gig he missed due to illness during Decibel Fest, apparently) and that he would be playing in the Neptune Theater — which used to be a favorite movie theater of mine, and was recently converted into a concert venue by Seattle Theater Group — I flipped shit. And, as it turns out, Baths delivered again. An all-around repeatable experience. The Neptune, by the way, was also excellent; kudos to STG for their work restoring the place.

Here are a few of his tracks:

• “Plea”
• “Indoorsy”
• “Apologetic Shoulder Blades”

Miss Representation

EVERYONE IN AMERICA NEEDS TO SEE THIS MOVIE. I mean this 100% literally. The film documents in excruciating detail the often ignored or trivialized problem of just how terribly the media in this country portrays women, and also delves deep into the assumptions and biases surrounding that portrayal. It is a massive and provocative indictment of phallocentric status quo in the entertainment industry today, and has the potential to bring about huge, important changes.

I first learned of the film a couple of months ago, when the trailer was going viral on facebook and tumblr, and while I was thoroughly shocked by the issues it raised, I remember thinking that in reality, I would probably be too lazy to actually get out and see it. I’M SO GLAD I WASN’T! (The trailer, by the way, is essentially a mini-version of the overall documentary–I’d highly recommend watching it RIGHT NOW).

The only problem with a film like this that makes its argument so cogently, that articulates so well what people have been trying for years to say, is that it makes for poor post-movie conversation. On the way out, I overheard a conversation that went something like this: “Well, shit. They already said it so well. I have literally nothing to add.” However, the more I digest the experience, the more I want to continue the dialogue it starts. The film is, more than anything else, a powerful call to action, and its Web site, missrepresentation.org, details specific steps you can take toward curbing the wildly inappropriate, demeaning, and counterproductive way that the mainstream media portrays women. Please check it out.

And now, since I can’t say anything else even remotely meaningful, I’ll leave you with a quote featured in the movie from Pat Robertson, ultra-conservative nut-job and host of The 700 Club:

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians”

And he said this in NINETEEN-NINETY FUCKING TWO! How long is it going to be until such bigoted viewpoints become marginalized enough that we don’t have to put up with them on TV? Sheesh.

(Okay, now I promise this is the last thing: a really interesting article about weird prejudices that still DOMINATE Hollywood).

My Generation

It was a piece today on All Things Considered that finally pushed me to write about it, but I’ve been noticing for a while that all sorts of people (the media, commentators, bloggers, etc.) have become suddenly very interested in “the millennials”–the generation now in its mid-twenties that seems to be shit out of luck at every turn. The main reason people find us so damn interesting: we are massively unemployed. I can’t have a conversation with an older person now without the topic somehow shifting to the awkward subject of my current endeavors, which are embarrassingly few: applying to graduate school, doing some freelance work, and waiting to start an internship in January. I’ve had this conversation so many times, I’ve got it down to a finely-tuned routine that I can recite without thinking, and that conveniently glosses over my embarrassing lack of employment. And then the inevitable response: “Yep, you young people sure have it rough these days. It’s just such an unfortunate time to graduate from college. Sucks to be you.” As if I didn’t know.

Anyway, I’m not going to pretend I understand my own generation, but a lot of smart people are thinking about us (and some not so smart ones, too). Here are some interesting articles about Gen Y. If you know of any good ones I missed, hit me up in the comments section.

• A New York Magazine cover story last month, “The Kids Are Actually, Sort of, Alright“
• The All Things Considered story that sparked this whole post
• A piece in The Atlantic from several months back, which is actually more about parenting than Gen Y — but it does have interesting things to say about the “culture of self esteem” that we grew up in
• Another NPR story on the subject
• Apparently, the Pew Research Center did (and is continuing to do) a series of reports / articles on the millennials

The Sense of an Ending

By Julian Barnes, 2011

I picked this book up last week, shortly after hearing it had won the Booker prize. I didn’t have terribly high hopes for it, but I figured that, having won a major prize, it would at least provide an enjoyable break from the other book I’m working on right now, Ulysses, which is fun to read, but also thoroughly exhausting. And at only about 150 pages, Barnes’s novel is short enough to be gulped down whole, even by a hopelessly slow reader like myself.

Of the novel’s many concerns, memory is by far the most prominent. How does it work? When and why does it undermine or contradict itself? How does the process of weaving a story distort what little sense of objectivity there can be in memory? This last question, of course, points to the narrator’s motive in asking such questions in the first place: He is a knowingly unreliable storyteller contemplating his own duplicity. Yet, despite this elaboration on a classic device, we may be tempted to think that the unreliable narrator has been played out. From Ford’s narrator in The Good Soldier to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, we seem to have seen every possible variation of the deceitful, nostalgic, or revisionist narrator. But what we have—until now—lacked, and what Barnes provides in Tony Webster, is a narrator who really, truly understands the nuances and shortcomings inherent in the act of retrospectively spinning fragments into narrative.

I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s necessary to give a rough outline of the plot if I’m to continue talking about the rich intellectual fabric of this novel. Consciously or not, it takes its basic layout from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: there are two larger sections that expand and zoom in on relatively short periods of time, separated by a much shorter, compressed section in which a great amount of time passes. In The Sense of an Ending, the first of these sections gives us the story of Webster’s youth, the story of that time when, as he puts it “we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives.” In university, he gets a girlfriend, breaks up with her, and has sex with her (in that order). She starts seeing a close friend of his who’s always seemed just a little more intelligent and mature, and of course, he becomes delightfully melodramatic, writing a particularly nasty letter addressed to both of them. Webster then glosses over his entire adulthood—all 40 years of it, including an unsuccessful marriage, a child, and a grandchild—in a single page. In the final section of the novel, he writes about the process of making amends with his old friends, and coming to terms with his own nastiness.

In the first section (my favorite), Barnes achieves a tone that impresses me for both its exactness and its self-awareness. His technique, the way he knowingly and purposefully exaggerates the distorting effect of his narrator’s attempts to wrestle bald events into narrative, reminds me of the way an impressionist paints: not as an exact, uncompromising reproduction or mirror, but in a way that respects the facts while knowingly departing from them. The result is an elegant, sustained paraphrase of youth. But beyond any of this, the real reason this section is my favorite is that it’s the most angst-y and melodramatic—qualities that, at 23, I revel in.

The final section conceals and its last pages half-reveal a HUGE secret. If you’re clever enough and you’ve been paying enough attention, you’ll figure it out (eventually) and it will BLOW YOUR MIND. But until you do, it really is the most frustrating thing ever. Throughout this section, a character who I find extremely annoying and vindictive continually taunts Webster (and us) for just not getting it. “You still don’t get it. You never have and you never will. So stop even trying.” You really can’t help but feel her words are directed at you as well, making her all the more unlikable. But there’s nothing like a good challenge, and after thinking about it a few minutes, and maybe rereading a few passages, the secret tying this whole novel together becomes apparent.

SOOO much traveling

It was recently pointed out to me that I have travelled every weekend for the last three weeks, and that I’m very likely going to travel next weekend. I’m doing this mostly to avoid the depressing reality that is my daily life in Seattle, but I’m not going to embarrass myself and bore you by describing it here. Instead, I’ll talk about the only interesting part of my life as of late: the travels!

1. Weekend before last, I took the GRE Literature in English Subject Exam in Walla Walla (where I went to undergrad, if you didn’t know). In case you were wondering, it is not correct to call this test the “English Literature Subject Exam.” A very kind and socially well-adjusted ETS representative told me this recently on the phone, when I called to ask about my scores, which STILL will not be available for several weeks. As much as this guy annoyed me it actually does make sense — their exam tests lots of world literature, but obviously doesn’t make you read it in a language other than English. Anyway, I had a wonderful time in Walla Walla. I stayed with my dear friends Gillian and Alex, went to The Green, and saw lots of old friends.
2. Last weekend, I flew to Vegas to see TFA friends. A couple of the guys down there (including my old roommate, Jack) were having a joint birthday party at The Cosmopolitan, which was amazing. They rented out a ridiculously nice suite with a balcony that looked out over the Bellagio fountain. I also hosted a dinner party of sorts the night before at a friend’s apartment. It was fun to catch up!
3. This weekend, I drove down to Eugene, Oregon, to hang out with my friend Margaux and see what real hippies look like. Eugene did not disappoint. We went to a grocery store that makes Whole Foods and PCC look like evil, artificial-ingredient-using corporations, walked around the UO campus, and bought a $3.00 copy of Absalom, Absalom! from a crazy cool used books store. The last night I stayed there, we went to a bar in a garage where performers played toy piano and accordion.
4.  Finally, next weekend, I’m going to drive down to Portland and spend what will be my fourth consecutive Saturday on the road attending my friend Mimi’s birthday party. She’s quite a cook, and I believe it will be a dinner party, so I’m excited to see what she comes up with.

Everything is Illuminated

By Jonathan Safran Foer, 2002

This is a book that I’ve been meaning to read for a long, long time. Everyone says it’s awesome, but college kind of dominated my reading selections for, like, four years, and then I forgot about it until about a month ago. I’ve been waiting awhile since then to write about it because I felt I needed to properly digest it and remove myself from the experience of reading it.

I think one element of this novel that often distracts people from its real contributions is the bizarre, thesaurus-powered language of one of the main characters, Alex. One of the glowing recommendations on the back cover even compares this language to A Clockwork Orange‘s subversive patois, nadsat. I think that’s going a bit far. Burgess’s made-up language does so many other interesting things that make it more worth examining, and I think Foer’s delightful misuse of the English language is mainly a comedic device.

As is usually the case with remarkable novels, Everything is Illuminated is impressive both in its form, and in the complex, nuanced ideas it develops through that form. Maybe that’s how I’ll structure the rest of this post: I’ll talk about form first, then content. Here we go:

1. Form

Yes, there’s the whole funny, “going-way-too-far-with-a-thesaurus” language. It’s cool, but I’m over it. What impresses me about this novel is that Foer manages to appropriate (and make good use of) kaleidoscopic effects that have — since Joyce — only been practical for filmmakers. People throw around the descriptor “virtuosic” all the time, but I think this novel really deserves it. What makes a performer or an artist virtuosic, I think, is an aptitude for improvisation — a knack for choosing strategies, arrangements, and devices that are appropriate to the situation in real time, and putting them to work at the precise moment they are needed. Foer’s ability to do this is exceptional. The novel shifts (as if it ain’t no thang) from letter to myth to traditional narration to folk story to invented encyclopedia to (at times) a bizarre script-like form that reminds me of the Aeolus chapter from Joyce’s Ulysses. And each of these modes of storytelling is so perfectly suited to what it’s describing that you’re left wondering HOW THE HELL DID HE THINK OF THAT? Always a sign of good writing.

2. Content

The parts of the book that interest me most are the bits of the novel within a novel that the character, Jonathan Safran Foer, is writing and sending to his friend, Alex. These loosely connected stories (which all center around his grandfather and the small village where he grew up) are so effortlessly allegorical, mythological even, that they remind me of Jorge Luis Borges’s fables. Of particular interest to me are the stories that describe the multi-volume “Book of Antecedents,” a collection of all knowledge, which was “once annually updated” and then became “continually updated.” When I read that, I was like, “WHOAAAA, 2002′s when Wikipedia started becoming popular, DAAAMN.” I also thought about Borges’s 1:1 map and about how things like Facebook and Twitter bring about a dialogue between actual events as they happen, and the reporting of those things on the internet. At one point, Foer quotes the “Book of Antecedents” for almost two whole pages as it repeats over and over again the self-affirmative phrase of encyclopedists everywhere, “We are writing … We are writing … We are writing.” When I read that, I was like, “DAAAMN, that’s exactly what everyone writes on Twitter!” (This reminds me of an SNL skit).

I won’t even try to talk about this intellectually (because, as Zizek says of violence, we cannot truly examine it “academically” without becoming implicated in it through our necessarily emotional response) but, this novel contains some of the most powerful depictions of the Holocaust I have ever seen. Somehow, it’s way more than just a depiction of violence that elicits an emotional response. Somehow, Foer captures both the scope and magnitude of this enormous act of violence through the specifics of it. Somehow, this incredibly abstract novel gives a more precise account of the Holocaust than any history book I’ve ever read. Pretty amazing stuff. I’m definitely getting his second novel.

OOooh, pretty!!

Last week, I spent a day on Bainbridge Island, repairing the roof of my grandparents’ tiny beach cabin over there. Talking with my dad about it later, I learned that the roof had not been repaired, re-done, or altered in any way for 20 years. And before that, it hadn’t been touched since the cabin was built almost 60 years ago!

Anyway, the main point here is that one of things I did to the roof was to apply an aluminized protective coating. It comes it these giant buckets, and has to be thoroughly mixed before use. Basically, it’s silver paint, but it looks really cool:

The aluminized coating, before mixing

Pesto Pizza

So this is kind of turning into a cooking blog now, which is not really my intent, but whenever I make something (or am in the presence of someone who is making something) delicious, I feel the need to share it with everyone — aka the void of the internet. This is from Saturday night, when I travelled down to Portland for an “end of summer” dinner party that my friend Mimi was throwing. Choosing to contribute in the laziest way possible, I brought wine and cheese. The above photo is Mimi’s brilliant pesto pizza with fresh mozzarella and heirloom tomatoes. I can take absolutely no credit for it, but it was delicious nonetheless.

 

Heirloom Toma-om-nom-nom-nom-atoes!!

Today, my dear friend and former-housemate Mimi came up to Seattle, and I took the opportunity to show her around. She picked an absolutely beautiful day to come (one of, like, 3 we’ve had all summer); for lunch we made caprese with some yellow heirlooms I found at the farmer’s market this morning. TOMATOES ARE SO GOOD. That is all.

 

Shredded Beef Salad?

So I’ve been cooking my way through Rick Bayless’s Mexican cookbook this summer, “Julie & Julia” style. Today was a shredded beef salad with avocado and chipotle sauce.