May Grab Bag

Getting Things Back on Track with Some Odds and Ends

Now that I’m settled back home, ready to start my summer semester classes, it felt like a good time to do another potpourri of the various things I’ve been reading/watching/listening to lately.

More Pearl Jam…

Let’s get this out of the way since I just recently wrote quite a bit about this guys, but it’s because of that that you shouldn’t be surprised by this update as they’ve since released their new album and I’ve seen them live again for the first time in ten (heh heh) years.

The album is their best in quite a long time. There’s an immediacy to it that’s refreshing for a band in this stage of their career, and even the songs that at first listen seem a bit uncharacteristic have settled into authentic indications of where this group is musically in this era. Wreckage may be the song of the album; Something Special, the only track I didn’t initially love, is corny and on-the-nose in a way that an album track of theirs has never really been, but is also about the joys and heartbreak of being a parent and so I weep every time I hear it¹; Setting Sun is the one that has been growing most steadily in my estimation lately - originally a solid album-ender, its position as the de facto closing song on this tour has been elevating it to an all-timer for me. Its combination of introspection and soaring majesty is incredibly rare, and it also finds the perfect balance of mournful finality and - somehow - transcendent hope.

If you could see what I see now
You’d find a way to stay somehow

May our days be long ‘til kingdom come

We could become one last setting sun
Or be the sun at the break of dawn

The show itself was phenomenal. It was, as always, a thrill seeing them after so long, but they also sounded great and they seem to be in love with and excited by this new album in a way they haven’t been for quite a while.

The only picture I took of the show

Anyway, I promise that all future Pearl Jam ramblings will be reserved for the Discord group that I recently joined in part to get this all out of my system without subjecting you, my faithful readers, to it.

What I’ve Watched

I caught the remaster of Let it Be on one of my flights back from Portland last weekend. I had first seen it years ago on a very low-quality bootleg (the only way to see it, unless one happened to have an old Japanese laserdisc import, up until last week). This new release has been given the same visual upgrades as Get Back. That restorative work didn’t bother me with Jackson’s film the way it did some because it was a completely new entity. It feels trickier here, though - it not only further re-contextualizes the original film as a sliver of a much larger (and later) endeavor, but perhaps even does it a disservice by making it feel even more so like a hyper-condensed version of that larger masterpiece. So much of the larger context is missing that the earlier version now feels woefully incomplete. This plus the retroactive branding of The Beatles as Disney Legends gives the whole thing a fascinating air of cultural imperialism. I will say though that the film doesn’t paint nearly as negative a picture of the group’s relations as it did on first viewing - maybe because it no longer looks as dour and murky, or maybe because we’ve seen the more complete picture of this time period now.

I watched three episodes of the new Frasier on the last leg of my travels home. I found it to be a rather comforting banality, but I was also viewing it after being stranded in the DFW airport, further separated from the family I was already missing terribly even after only three days away, and so it gets an even more extreme watched-it-on-a-plane quality bump.

I had avoided I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson this long for a few reasons, those being mainly that 1) people who talk about comedy shows online are supremely annoying, 2) people explaining things they find funny is a sad display of futility, and 3) I felt like certain sketches had been memed to death and then hounded into the afterlife where their very souls were maimed even further. Anyway, I watched it for the first time last Saturday when my brother and his wife showed me a few segments on my last night in Portland and now I’m a bit obsessed. It’s the perfect show because it’s hilarious and its episodes average fifteen minutes (you can even make that shorter by only watching individual sketches!). I think I’ve watched the Driving Crooner sketch at least 17 times in the last week.

What I’m Reading

I got the bug to read more poetry this year in a big way, and it seemed like a great idea since I get so little free time lately - here was a form that comes in small pieces, the better to be able to dedicate what time I do get to a complete reading experience. Because of this I of course over-committed and currently have four volumes of verse stacked on my nightstand and am working diligently - yet slowly - through each.

• The Palm at the End of the Mind - I’ve always been a big Wallace Stevens fan. One of my proudest accomplishments in undergrad was getting an A from one of UGA’s notoriously tougher professors for a paper I wrote on Sunday Morning.

• view with a grain of sand (Wisława Szymborska) - I picked this at random and based on a couple of poems I read in the store, but I’ve been greatly enjoying it so far - her poems have a biting wit that often condenses human and political nuance to a single line.

• Japanese Death Poems (Various) - This jumped out to me from the shelf as I was browsing due to the directness of its title. It’s a collection of haiku written by zen monks at the moment of their passing and as you’d imagine is incredibly fascinating and compelling. The attitude of the poems ranges from solemn contemplation to zen acceptance to flippant irreverence.

• Notebook (Robert Lowell) - I had never read any Lowell and the conceit behind this, an entire year chronicled in a selection of poems, appealed to me.

I have also been making my way through The Dhammapada, as a follow-up to my reading of The Upanishads late last year/early this.

But the main thing I’ve been tearing through is Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Claire Dederer. Ostensibly a book about what to do with the art of terrible men, it actually proves to be something much richer and more complex than even that. For one thing, it is not prescriptive - she makes very clear from the beginning that this is her attempt to think through her own thoughts about and reactions to this question, particularly as some of these monsters’ work (Roman Polanski in particular) she still values a great deal. Ultimately, though, the book becomes an examination of how so much of our considerations in regard to not only this question but the value of art itself - or more to the point what we value in art, or the kind of art we value - has been shaped by a cultural history that is entirely male-centric. She makes the case for critical authority itself as something of a male imposition, which I found dovetailing somewhat with thoughts I’ve been entertaining myself lately. I’m still only about a third of the way through the book, but it is such a clearly reasoned and articulated exploration of a problem that has no real answer that I can’t wait to finish it and chew on it further.

I would say that’s it, but that’s actually quite a bit considering how jam-packed the last few weeks have been, with the end of the semester rolling right into a weekend trip to the west coast. As we wrap up another week, things have settled nicely right in time for my wife to go out of town for a work trip as I start summer classes.

In closing, a confession. While making the requisite visit to Powell’s City of Books in Portland last weekend, I had the chance to buy a copy of a book called Dinosaur Beach that had this cover…

…and, dear reader, I passed it up.

-cs

1. I’m somewhat more tolerant of this level of sentimentality not just because I’m a complete sap, but also because this is written by someone who’s first three songs for this band were a loose trilogy about the emotional and physical violence wrought from a disastrously broken household; additionally, because so much of Vedder’s early persona was defined in the shadow of an absent father it’s almost impossibly moving to see him become such a cheesy dad in his own old age.