Are you punk enough for our soy latte?: Soundtracks of the Cafes of Bloomington, IN

Soma cafe, Bloomington; photo from Seriouseats.com

I find it interesting/ amusing that if you were placed blindfolded in one of the main downtown cafes of Bloomington, you could likely tell which one it was by hearing 20 seconds of the soundtrack.

The Scholars Inn Bakehouse (on the square): something very mainstream.  I’m here right now, and it’s been total classic hits of the corniest/ most old-school variety.  Sam Cooke’s “She was Only 16,” something by Linda Ronstadt, a Steely Dan song, “Shake Your Booty,” Creedence, etc. Absolutely zero gestures towards contemporary hipness of any kind.  It’s as if they’re aiming for visiting parents or even grandparents of IU students.  I have to admit I’m finding the bland medley somewhat soothing and non-distracting as I read, however.  (Right now, I kid you not, Seals and Crofts’ “Diamond Girl”!)

Soma.  In the back room, attempted deathly, library-like silence that can become very uncomfortable if someone actually has the temerity to have a conversation.  (I have to admit that I once participated in a conversation about Derrida (!) here as 15 people tried to work; it was kind of excruciating.)  In the front room, something very- to ridiculously hip/hipster.  Old Sonic Youth, say.  Usually great stuff, although once in a while it feels to me as if they’re trying too hard, and/or the music just gets too grating and distracting, and I wish for just a touch of Bakehouse-style corniness/ background tuneage.  A friend once characterized Soma’s vibe as: “are you punk rock enough for our soy latte?”

Starbucks.  You know what they play there.  Interestingly, this is likely to be much “hipper” than what you’ll be hearing in the (local, non-corporate) Bakehouse.  Something NPR-approved, the Shins or Neko Case or some such, perhaps.  (I generally like it.)  In case you needed to be reminded of the degree to which corporate America has adopted the signifiers of hip.

The Pourhouse.  This is perhaps the most interesting case.  The Pourhouse soundtrack seems to me to tend to cluster in a Venn Diagram overlap where “hipster/ indie/ alternative” overlaps with Christian rock.  Or, let’s say, indie-alt music that would be potentially palatable to someone who likes Christian rock.  Sufjean Stevens would be an obvious example. I find the Pourhouse overall a very pleasant place to work, and it used to be my go-to cafe, but lately I’ve cut back so thoroughly on post-breakfast caffeine that I get through the afternoons on peppermint tea, which they do not stock.

I realize I’m forgetting Rachael’s Cafe.  I haven’t been there for a while and I can’t recall offhand what they’re usually playing.

I tease out of love, cafes of Bloomington.  Rock on!

Finnish Sauna Bowdlerized!

Sarah brought home this book from our (great) local public library, the Monroe County Public Library:

Finnish Sauna by Allan Konya.  London: the Architectural Press, 1987. Selling for $64 and up on Amazon.  Here’s the sole review posted there (which a perfect 15 of 15 people found “helpful”):

Allan Konya has written the most complete text on the Finnish sauna, covering the broad spectrum from the origins and rituals (something often overlooked), design and construction, materials, siting and layout. Every facet of the subject is thoroughly covered in detail and one comes away feeling he has finally understood what it takes to make a “good” sauna. This book follows quite closely the earlier text; “The International Handbook of Finnish Sauna” written by Allan Konya and Alewyn Burger. Anyone interested in designing, building or using a sauna should try to locate this book. It is the “bible” of the Finnish Sauna and is far superior to any other text on the subject. I have designed and built several saunas and still find useful information and inspiration in this book.

Not entirely sure why it caught Sarah’s eye, but anyway, when she got it home she discovered something we both found hilarious: some reader has taken it upon themselves to render the book more American-family-friendly by censoring (or Bowdlerizing), with a black Sharpie, the book’s images of nude Finns lounging in saunas.

Here are some examples:

Only a small amount of water should be thrown at a time!

What is that?  Is she carrying a baguette?

Wow, nothing made it but the legs on that second girl!

I hate to tell you, concerned library user circa 1988, but you have taken what was a wholesome guide to Finnish saunas and those who enjoy them, and turned it into a very kinky volume– these images have become so much more erotic, as it is now impossible not to imagine precisely what lies under the tantalizingly thorough black ink.

Now to learn more about the often-overlooked rituals of the Finnish sauna…

Marc Maron: Cats know more than we can understand

Marc Maron with Boomer: [Photo by Dimitri von Klein from Catster]

I kind of wished I’d blogged about Marc Maron before he suddenly became ubiquitous… I’ve been listening to his podcast WTF (I get it on iTunes) occasionally but regularly for the past year or two.  I’m not sure what his secret is, but some of these conversations have been really memorable, so much so that I can remember where I was walking the dog or walking home as I listened to some of them. David Cross, Fiona Apple, Pamela Adlon, Mike White, John Oliver, Stephen Merchant, ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, Diablo Cody… I guess those are the ones I remember most vividly. Maron is an over-sharer, he’s self-laceratingly critical and confessional, smart but insecure about his knowledge & status, obviously needy and competitive, but not too aggressively so, melancholic, eager to connect… And he seems to bring out a similarly confessional, over-sharing spirit in his guests.  Part of it may simply be the podcast’s length and flexible structure — it’s an open-ended conversation (conducted in Maron’s garage studio, which is now immortalized in the opening credits of his t.v. show), and as far as I can tell, he’s not aiming for a particular length, so the exchange can go into some slow patches, and then can pick up or open out into something new. (For example, I was feeling disappointed by his Lucinda Williams podcast– he seemed nervous, and interrupted her too often — but then eventually she got into fascinating stories about life as a child with her bipolar, alcoholic mother.)  The Mike White conversation was especially great, with some pretty startling moments of self-revelation on White’s part (but I am a huge fan of his anyway- he’s the creator of Enlightened as well as movies like Chuck and Buck).

Btw, one tip — although I know this makes Maron mad: every podcast begins with about 10 minutes of him riffing and ranting and promoting Stamps.com, so if you mostly want to hear the interview, you need to fast-forward.  (There’s often good stuff in the rants, though!)

I also just read Maron’s memoir, Attempting Normal, which is good.  You have to have a certain degree of patience for incessant discussion about his grim-hotel-room (and other) masturbation habits — generally pretty amusing, though.  The book more or less tells the story of his comedy career, his two marriages, his career slide and serious depression that preceded his comeback that began with his beginning WTF.  It’s episodic, though, and many of the chapters are basically little mini-essays or fragments, some of them artfully constructed.  The chapter “the Clown and the Chair,” about the role played by a particular piece of thrift store furniture in the endgame of his second marriage, is excellent, for example.  I also really liked his discussions of the weird, exhausting, and often alienating life he led in the late 80s and 90s as a “road comic” playing casinos, restaurants, and small clubs, in his case mostly around New England. There’s an amazing story about a comedian, Frankie Bastille, who’s since died, who snorted heroin in the passenger seat as Maron drove them to a show out of town (Maron was opening); when they got to the club, Maron had to physically haul in the seemingly comatose Bastille, who then proceeded to deliver a killer show, and then nodded out again on heroin on the drive home.

One thing that struck me, and that I found refreshing, is the degree to which Maron is basically a male Crazy Cat Lady.  The chapter “Cats” explains how he acquired his collection of formerly feral pets; they come up repeatedly elsewhere, and the book ends with a moving tribute to Boomer, his favorite cat who disappeared right when Maron was beginning to tape his new IFC show, Maron. [That is Boomer in the photo above.]

Why he vanished just as my life was changing drastically demands interpretation. I am not religious or spiritual, but I am prone to connecting dots in equations so that they defy coincidence.  Someone suggested that maybe this was the end of our journey together, that he had taken me as far as he could and that it was time for him to move on. I like that angle….

If you are awake and alive, sadness is a fluctuating constant. Hope is fleeting, a decision you make out of faith, desire, or desperation. Cats know more than we can understand. I don’t care about biology or brain size.

Sniff…

So far I’ve seen two episodes of his new show, #3 and #4.  I give it a 7.5 so far… or maybe an 8… It’s good and smart in some ways, and funny, but he and his story feel a bit constrained by the scripted sitcom format, and a lot of it feels a bit like a slight variation on Curb Your Enthusiasm: needy, narcissistic comedian in L.A. playing a just slightly fictionalized version of himself.  Louie too, I guess (Maron and Louie C.K. are old friends; there’s an amazing conversation about how they had a falling out and kind of patched it up on Maron’s recent Fresh Air interview), but so far I don’t think Maron has managed to get to the kind of raw insight, formal innovations, and originality that Louie offers.

The last episode, in which Maron decides to date “an age-appropriate woman” for once (i.e. not in her early/mid 20s), was seeming not-so-great to me, and then it took a twist and actually became much better than I expected. Maybe Maron is Marc Maron’s Lucky Louie and he needs to have this one cancelled and then regroup for his next great one. Or maybe this one will get better as it goes.

Ai Weiwei and African Textiles & Art in Indianapolis

Road trip to Indianapolis.  First, to the Indianapolis Museum of Art and, to start, the Ai Weiwei show: According to What?  This photo is of the kids looking at “a new sculpture made from steel rebar that was salvaged from schools that collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.”  He and collaborators/assistants painstakingly bent all the rebar back so that it was perfectly straight and arranged it in a kind of rising and falling wave pattern.  Behind, you can see a list on the wall of the names of the many hundreds of victims of the earthquake, names you can also hear recited out loud from a speaker in the corner.

I liked the show — I think we all did — although I find Ai Weiwei’s work comes across pretty effectively on video and in description, i.e. it’s not totally transformative to see it in person.  I guess this is to say that he’s basically a conceptual/ relational artist whose work is as much about the social dynamics and processes that lie behind it as about its physical instantiation. So, seeing the documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, for example, I’m not sure you get so much less of an authentic experience of his work than you do from going to the show. With the steel rebar piece above, part of the point is that it looks like a minimalist abstract work, but is in fact much more a polemical, political statement that exists in relation to, and as a sort of record of, all of Ai Weiwei’s other activities related to his protest of the Chinese government’s response to the earthquake.

Sarah made the point that in some ways his approach to art resembles Jeff Koons’; like Koons, he has (or had) a big studio and a lot of assistants whom he oversees as they produce large, sculptural works based on the ideas he comes up with.  There’s definitely not a whole lot of emphasis on individual craft skill or anything like that.  (Of course, his ideas are much more interesting and affecting than Koons’, which seem to mostly just be about the ubiquity of commercial culture.)

Actually one part of the show I liked a lot were the walls of his photos taken during his years in the mid-late 1980s through 1992 or so he spent living in NYC on the Lower East Side.  It’s fun and fascinating to see these glimpses into his life as an expat unknown Chinese would-be artist, chronicling the Tompkins Square riots and the like. There are big group dinners in what look like cheap Chinatown restaurants, scenes in peoples’ tiny bedrooms, hanging out with Allen Ginsburg.  Makes you wonder to what degree his later political activism was some kind of syncretic blend of Chinese/ U.S. practices coming out of those Lower East Side years.

Anyway, all that said, I think he’s a fascinating & important figure, and needless to say a powerful voice of dissent, but I don’t personally love the artworks as art.  For sheer sensuous/aesthetic pleasure, they were kind of blown away for me by the stuff on display in the Majestic African Textiles exhibit next door.  When I saw these (below) across the room I actually said to Sarah, “oh, look, they have some Nick Cave soundsuits!” [see my post about those, with some images, here]- but these were in fact Nigerian mid-20th century masquerade/dance costumes of the sort that must have inspired Cave’s soundsuits.

These are so spectacular!

Check out the penis & boobs on this one:

And then these gorgeous, sometimes scary masks & figurines:

Call me a traditionalist formalist, but at the end of the day I’ll probably always take the art that, when you’re in the room with it, overwhelms you with sensuous/ tactile/ visual  qualities that you can’t experience the same way in reproduction.

So, go see the Ai Weiwei show, but be sure also to visit the Majestic African Textiles show.

Elena Ferrante and the Novel of Female Rage

I learned about Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, four of whose books are out in English translation on Europa Editions, from James Wood’s good piece on her work in the January 21, 2013 New Yorker.  That Wood is a fan makes me pretty sure that Ferrante’s work influenced his wife Claire Messud’s new novel The Woman Upstairs; I haven’t read that yet, but I’ve heard several interviews with Messud in which she explains her desire to write a novel in a voice of female rage, of a kind familiar from ranting-narrator books like Notes from Underground, but much less familiar in a woman’s voice.

Maybe or maybe not, but Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment is definitely a novel of female rage — and of female abjection, humiliation, disgust.  Wood writes that “the literary excitement of The Days of Abandonment lies in the picture it gives of a mind in emergency, at the very limits of coherence and decency, a mind that has become a battlefield between reason and insanity, survival and explosion.” The plot is simple: the narrator Olga, a 38 year-old woman, a mother of two young kids who had published one book in her 20s, but in recent years has more or less abandoned her vocation as a writer (this also reminiscent of the Messud novel’s themes), is suddenly left by her husband Mario with no real explanation.  Mario takes up with the 20 year-old daughter of a former close friend, and Olga is left alone with the kids and an unhappy German Shepherd, struggling to keep the household and her mental state in any kind of working order.

Most of the novel takes place in and around Olga’s increasingly claustrophobic apartment; the novel sometimes reminded of Roman Polanski’s great, disturbing psychological horror movie The Tenant. More to prove that she can than out of any real desire, Olga has a one-night stand with a kind but seedy downstairs classical musician, one of the greatest Really Bad Sex scenes I can recall. It’s very graphic, but what’s shockingly memorable are the embarrassing, intimate details of what goes down between them.  Bodily fluids of various kinds, not just sexual but also vomit and human and dog blood, spill out throughout the book, always emphasizing Olga’s sense of dismay and lack of control over the boundaries between herself and others, and her own inside and outside.

Women don’t often get to rant in novels, Messud has been commenting — and/but The Days of Abandonment is one long, sometimes unhinged, mesmerizing rant.  “Obscenity came to my lips naturally… As soon as I opened my mouth I felt the wish to mock, smear, defile Mario and his slut.”  She’s haunted by a childhood memory, recurring throughout the narrative, of a neighbor her mother had called the “poverella,” that “poor woman,” who was left by her husband and descended into despair, eventually drowning herself.

I haven’t really conveyed the ways the novel is, implausibly, also somewhat hilarious at times. Hard to take at moments — the plot involving the German Shepherd Otto is upsetting, for example — but a great read.  And not as much of a downer in the end as you fear.

I should also mention that Ferrante is an author of Thomas Pynchon-like mystery; her name is a pseudonym, and virtually nothing is known about her personally. Rumors apparently swirl about who she may really be. Must be hard these days to maintain that kind of secrecy.  Here’s a brief interview with her (conducted via email). And her 2008 NYT Op-Ed about the “stinking, polluted filth” of her hometown of Naples.

I want to read her most recent, My Brilliant Friend, apparently the first book in a trilogy.

Addendum to Douchiest Guitarists post

Can a 14-y.o. girl be a douchey guitar shredder?  I think it may be impossible, judging by Tina S.  (Thanks to Gawker for this one.) She has all the moves and even the facial expressions, but it’s just not annoying in the same way.

Here she is 5 years ago in 2008.  Aww!

Shredding: Top Ten Douchiest Guitarists of All Time

I found Sound of the City’s “Top Ten Douchiest Guitarists of All Time” very edifying in general, but I especially treasured these two amazing clips.  Michael Angelo Batio I had never even heard of, so this was a particular revelation.  So much of it is in the facial expressions.  And the double (or more) guitars.

When you’re a world-class guitar player and you know it, there’s a fine line between sexy and, well, douchey. You know, that rocker who poses on his knees for just a little too long, gives us just a little too much “O” face during every solo and is hell bent to show us all how many guitars he/she can play at once. History (namely the 80s) is full of these guys, but Douchey Guitar Player Disease (a/k/a DGPD) is still a scourge on the music industry today. With that in mind, we’d like to present our list of the Top 10 Douchiest Guitar Players of All Time.

Steve Vai

Michael Angelo Batio

“Batio was voted the “No. 1 Shredder of All Time” by Guitar One Magazine in 2003.He was also listed as one of the “Top 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists of All Time” by Guitar World Magazine, for which he wrote the column Time to Burn, and one of the “20 Greatest Shredders of All Time” by Total Guitar Magazine, both in April 2008…. In 2011, Michael debuted his multi media show “Hands Without Shadows – A Tribute to Rock Guitar” in Las Vegas. In 2012 Michael toured the world with this show. It is a chronological tribute to rock guitar. Michael is touring the world with his tribute to rock guitar show in 2013 as well” – wiki.