Friday, November 22, 2002
Here's what's been rocking my world lately:Pete took a sunflower seed from my hand today. I don't think Pete and Shelley are quite so scared of me anymore, although they still go into quite a frenzy whenever I try to pet one of them.
Does anyone remember those candies called Popping Rocks? You put them in your mouth and they tinkle like carbonated drinks. This flavor of ice cream called "Popping Stars" from Baskin Robbins has those popping rocks in red and green in vanilla and mint ice cream, and mixed with Perils of Praline (all sorts of nuts with praline in vanilla ice cream), it's a good reason to live for.
The Merge "Survive and Advance" Compilation has been gracing my speakers a lot, although not nearly as much as the Beatles and Luna. You know what's great about the Beatles? They have no clever gimmicks. They just have good, simple tunes that are plain in comparison to some other bands, and their lyrics have typical rhymes (really, anyone could rhyme 'by','high', and 'try'), but sometimes the clever rhymes get to be too much. I'll admit I love Stephin Merritt, and I love the way he rhymes 'silver' and 'pilfered', but sometimes his tagalog-speaking frogs get to be a little too much. The Beatles are the worn-out quilt from your childhood days, when your favorite color was pink (or blue if you were boy) and each of those cloth squares had scenes from the happy endings of fairy tales and you thought they were the best stories in the world. The Beatles are... I'll shut up now, before I go on to sound like another Beatles-worshipping pretend-music-journalist, because I'm not, and I'm not. I just like the Beatles for their happy simple music.
And Luna, whose music has also been grazing the ears of my mother in the morning when I am in the study and she is in the dining room reading her morning paper, Luna makes music to melt the heart. Luna's a bit more clever, because their lyrics are a bit strange (sometimes). But Dean Wareham sings those lyrics that go "I'm crying for you, you're crying for me, from station to station to station", and my heart becomes like butter that's been left out in the sun too long. No, wait. It becomes like freshly made, warm maple syrup that you can drip into pans of snow and make into candy. It's thick and viscous and it goes well with snow.
Maybe I should explain it another way.
When I hear those lyrics, I want to be in a small dingy public school classroom holding hands with a boy and not be paying any attention to the teacher. When school is over, I want to be walking hand in hand with that boy listening to the crunching of the snow underneath our feet and not saying a word, and I want it to not matter how bleak the neighborhood is because of the contentment and happiness I feel at that moment just holding hands with someone I love.
Maybe that boy will be like Toby McGuire in Wonder Boys, a quaint boy with a knack for writing and dusty overcoats. I didn't like Toby too much in Spiderman, though, which I finally watched last night. The movie was too long and Kirsten Dunst might as well have been naked in that rainy scene. But having recently read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon's latest novel for which he won a Pulitzer (I hate him for this, of course, but I love him, too), my fascination with comic books is at its peak and Spiderman, well... I re-read the comic books in my mind as I watched the movie.
Speaking of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon seems to have advanced far since his last novel, which, incidentally, was Wonder Boys. In Wonder Boys he was in a world he knew familiarly, and he covered topics that were overused (English professor, marijuana, quiet boy who turns out to be a genius, and a good gay friend). Kavalier and Clay, though... Wow. That blew me out of my mind. It got me far more excited and involved than pretty much anything I've read since the summer, and he definitely deserved the Pulitzer for the research he did on that one. I don't know if there have been many novels written about the boys who drew comic books post-the-Great-Depression, but Kavalier and Clay has been the first one I've run across and for some reason I strongly suspect that there aren't many others like it. Okay, so Chabon has a thing for one of the major characters being gay and another one being a taciturn fellow with strange habits and incredible talent, but set in the 1930s (through the 50s) in New York City instead of Pennsylvania (or namely Pittsburgh, where many or most of his stories take place), it gives off no hints of repetition, not even a remote one. Only having read them both and looking back on them can I remember the homosexual and the quiet talent similarity, and those characters are really all very different, all four of them.
I'm going into too much detail, and I'm probably not making much sense. I'll clear some of this up and write up reviews sometime, although they have no place to be published as my arts editor (EX-editor?) is refusing to acknowledge my existence, for reasons unknown and impossible to speculate upon. Oh well. If any of you know publications... (Because, you know, there's bound to be SOMEONE at Exeter whose father/aunt/some distant family owns a newspaper.)
I'm off now. Cheers, y'all.
posted by styrene at 8:15 AM-comment?
