a grammar

some things i do like

It’s never much fun to write a negative review of something — not unless you’re ready to just dismiss the thing on its face. If you lack that useful skill, writing a negative review represents the opposite of fun: it represents sitting down and listening, closely, over and over, to music you’re not really enjoying, trying to understand as much as you can about it, trying to find a way to like it, trying to find the ways other people might like it, hoping you’ll at least work up enough Stockholm Syndrome to put yourself on its side. And it represents coming away from all that without having found many reasons to call the experience rewarding, which usually feels more like a failure than anything else.

All that comes by way of telling you that I reviewed Interpol’s new album for Pitchfork, and thought the record was, simply put, kind of a drag. Each time I listened through it, the first half would make me think that assessment was unfair, but by the time I got to the end I’d be right back where I started: drag city, via Matador. That’s like an indie-rock Uncle Joke, if you missed it.

So now, before I get around to explaining how I felt about Franzen’s book, I feel a need to do some penance by listing some things I do like:

Being married. I don’t think I ever mentioned on here that I got married last month, which is cool, because now I can make Uncle Jokes (these are different from Dad Jokes) safe in the knowledge that I’m now actually someone’s weird uncle.

The Private Lives of Trees, by Alejandro Zambra. He’s a Chilean writer, and seems to have gotten a lot of U.S. press because he’s easy to package as the opposite of Bolano — someone writing tiny, airy novels instead of sprawling, bloody ones. Alternately: the other night we were having dinner with a friend of my wife’s from Argentina, and she said Chileans have a lot of good writers, but they’re also good at marketing themselves — writers, wine, whatever. (This made me happy I hadn’t ordered the Chilean sea bass, originally known as “Patagonian toothfish.”) Regardless: I believe this is Zambra’s second book, and it was the first, Bonsai, which made more of a splash, though I haven’t found a copy yet. Reading something short and spare in translation is always odd — all this time has been put into small choices that might get lost — but something about this book got me. It read, to me, strangely like good Kundera, the bits where he pays this kind of abstracted attention to the small bits of lives, where every detail feels like a condensed diagrammatic example illustrating a larger question.

White Collar, which pretends to be a TV show on USA but is basically a menswear showcase with a general fetish for finely made things. It’s about an extremely handsome and rakish art thief/con man who winds up working with the FBI to solve crimes similar to the ones he committed, and has to wear really, really nice clothes in order to look better than his FBI partner, who is supposed to seem more drab but wears pretty decent suits himself, and is reassuringly manly in a sort of middle-aged Harrison Ford kind of way. (Sometimes the handsome thief Goes Too Far by involving a bad hat or trying something over-the-top with his ties or trouser/jacket pairings.) I’d estimate that about 40% of my viewings of this show are accompanied by idly shopping for clothes online.

William Brittelle’s Television Landscape. This album comes from a place I find alternately fascinating and confusing, which is the borderland some people call “alt-classical” or “indie-classical.” Neither is a great term, I don’t think. But what it is, a lot of the time, is properly trained composers and musicians — conservatory-type folks, new-music folks — trying things that fall outside genres, often tinkering with pop modes. In New York there’s a scene in this territory. My experience with it is limited; it mostly comes from the label New Amsterdam and a friend who covers such things. But I think that often, the results work a lot like “progressive” indie or electronic music, offering interesting new visions of how pop stuff might sound … and then sometimes they’re totally mystifying to me, like really bland studious constipated versions of pop — and then I’ll ask a better-trained person what’s supposed to be good about it, and maybe she’ll say “ah well did you notice that microtonal bit and the playful harmonic references to Debussy,” and I will say, umm, no, I am not that bright. So some of this stuff exists for the audience of classical/new-music people, and is talking to them in a way I don’t have access to. But William Brittelle’s Television Landscape is not! It’s an effort to make a big squishy proggy soft-rock album, and it has a relaxed, breezy, stonery vibe that reminds me of late-90s stuff like Chicago post-rock (Jim O’Rourke, Sea & Cake) and Mercury Rev’s See You on the Other Side, and some of the songs are shot through with wonderfully nerdy guitar solos that I like to imagine, if you notated them on paper, would wind up making the shapes of unicorns in leather jackets.

Finally reading Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, just in time to watch people have vastly different reactions to his new book, C. (Or maybe it’s just Kakutani leading the less-satisfied voices.)

The upgraded speed of change-sorting machines at the nearest bank that has them. Seriously, because these things are LOUD and often set up right near the tellers, and back when I was broke a lot I would always feel really bad about spending 15 minutes clanking and pouring and jingling, trying to convert all the loose change in my apartment into grocery money for a few weeks. I haven’t been super-broke in a long while, which means my excess change had been piling up like nobody’s business, so when I headed to the bank this morning with almost too much change to even carry down the street, I was a little anxious about the whole thing. But apparently they have souped those things up, and the one I was using got through an epic, almost embarrassing amount of loose change with alacrity. Except for the part where one of the bags filled up and I had to call an employee over to change it out.