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Quick Life News, Work News, Writing, Music (Tame Impala, Spoon's Britt Daniel is the Hemingway of Indie Rock), Hemingway V Callaghan, Hemingway V the Inexorable March of Time
Life.
This is me @ 35. On December 3rd I’ll be 36.Finally took my wedding band off a few days ago. Took me over a year and a half since the separation, though not for lack of trying. I’ve tugged at it for months. Used syrup, WD40, axel grease, etc. I was tempted to interpret the fact that it would not come off as a sign. Under my own little “faint hope” clause, we still stood a chance. I love it when boring corporate or contract speech yields an interesting phrase. Inherent Vice? How could one resist?
Then a few days ago I’m hanging with my best friend Tyler, who brought me the biggest screen TV in the fucking world, btw, and we hang out and he meets Cookie. Am hour or so later the ring just slips right off my finger…
I was too tired to go nuts like “OMFG woah! I been trying fer munnz to get that ring off!” so my reaction was disproportionate to the occasion but damn, it’s about time. ___ and I separated over a year and a half ago.1
I think it’s safe to say she’s been seeing other people, or plans to.
That’s not why I was clinging to it though, in the hopes that I’d induce some kind of monogamy curse on her. I just couldn’t bear to remove it. Wasn’t ready. But now I am. I am slowly healing from the break-up.
We must move forward, not backward!
Backward, not forward!
And always twirling…twirling…twiiiirlling toward freedom.Work
Work’s been okay except: NOBODY wears masks at these events we’re working. NOBODY. So bartending, I get to hide behind a plexiglass sheath, but my co-workers don’t. I’ve seen a lot of them go home due to safety concerns. And they’re crying. They have families. The question they are wrestling with is: “Do I risk my health and put my family in jeopardy to make $, or do I just stay home and stay poor until guests are mandated to wear masks at crowded events?'“
Our managers can ask if a host’s guests have been vaccinated and if they say “yup,” that’s where the grievance ends. So I’m working, but unsafely, and sporadically. Still applying to about 50 jobs a week. Just applied to 4 positions each in the TTC & City of Toronto, and I applied for a job teaching inmates the general Core Curriculum here of Ontario, the same one I did, through Correctional Service of Canada. This is my dream job. Helping people get education so they don’t reoffend. (I don’t have any data via the recidivism rate with inmates who take this class V. those who don’t, but I’d love to see it.)
3. Writing
2 hours writing a day. 2 hours editing. A fifth hour reviewing what has been done V what still needs to be done.
4. Music
Spoon.
The cover below is for 2014’s They Want My Soul, an album I listened to probably 5-6 times a day in August 2014
So many musicians of my generation, whether consciously or unconsciously, have been influenced by Dr Dre’s production on 2001. As the release date for They Want My Soul approached and the beautiful single “Inside Out” was dropped, Spoon’s Britt Daniel told UNCUT “We had a demo that was me singing on top of an eight-note toy piano - I was obsessed with Dr Dre, so this is our interpretation of him. I have this attraction to melancholy in music, the bitter longing in songs,” he continued. “On ‘Inside Out,’ the chord changes alone evoke that.”
This might be my fav Spoon song ever, in a three-way tie with “The Ghost of You Lingers” and “I Summon You.”
Britt Daniel’s method of songwriting is to begin with the bare bones of the song and then add things later. He’s an indie rock Hemingway. Seriously, have you heard “The Ghost of You Lingers”? If there was any less going on musically, it would be Britt Daniel talking to himself in the recording studio.
Stephen King told The Paris Review in the fall of 2006 that he has two types of books. Books that go “out,” involving quests or investigations or whatever. In typical King fashion, he reverted to childlike language here. The “out” books are “outties” an the “in” books are “innies,” like how kids talk about their bellybuttons. For King, the “outties” are It, The Dark Tower series, Mr. Mercedes, Revival, etc. His “innies” list is shorter, but those books, like Dolores Claiborne, Misery, and Gerald’s Game, lost him a lot of fans, because the terror was coming from inside a single person. As King himself shrugged:
Misery was just two characters in a bedroom, but Gerald’s Game goes that one better—one character in a bedroom. I was thinking that eventually there’s going to be another book that will just be called Bedroom. There won’t be any characters at all.
Maybe one day Britt Daniel and his ambitious production will bring us a song that cannot be heard, but til now he resides faithfully within the band of EQ that the human ear can access, diagnose, and decide (or not): “Hey! I like this!”
But seriously, The Ghost of You Lingers” gave Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga its name, as Daniels explained what he wanted the piano to sound/play like throughout the entirety of the song.
But the song, and accompanying album also became sort of a mission statement for Spoon. For Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is a weird album. If you’re a musician, or musically inclined, it’s like listening to “The Making of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” while simultaneously listening to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.
It sounds crazy, but I’m far from the first to feel this way.
Take, for example, “You got Yr. Cherry Bomb.”
For starters. I don’t know a single Spoon fan who dislikes this song. It’s just so good. It’s an uptempo, kinda waltzy indie rock tune. And it’s undeniable. On tour with my former band, the four of us actually agreed on Spoon, a rarity on par with Haley’s Comet. And we all loved this song. (Conversely, most Spoon fans I know cannot stand “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case” and think the album would have been flawless without it. I don’t hate the song, but I do agree: It did not need to be on the album.)
In it. Daniels either buries the guitar or there is none. He also cranks the horns (he made good use of them on SNL.) Not as good as Radiohead using the SNL horn section for “The National Anthem” good, not Paul Westerberg using it for a solo rendition of “Can’t Hardly Wait, rather than burying or panning them like any other producer, and he also keeps a few random “Huhs!” soaked in reverb, one @ 1:07, another @ 1:14.
A friend of mine swears Daniels is saying “C’mon!” really quickly. Or what about when the song stops for a moment at the two minute mark and Daniels, beneath the songs “Life could so fair” shouts “Lie!” I used to think it was “Why?” but now I’m not so sure.
It’s @ What is up with that? I think Daniels wanted to make a meticulous record full of mistakes that he then kept, and produced, into order to better mix them into the Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga soup. They are a band that loves and uses space, pauses between notes, and even random parts cut out without warning - this happens at least 4 times on the underrated Transference, Spoon-heads opined that it was a way for Daniels to, as Neil Young had done years earlier on “Computer Age,” demonstrate his inability to communicate properly.
Wanna play a fun game? Try to guess which down picked slaps on “Eddie’s Ragga” will have reverb and which one’s are dry. It’s impossible. There is no pattern. Just some have reverb, with nice long trails, and other don’t:
Very few bands can use the element of surprise as an effective tool on their songs/records. Because you’d think it would get old. But it never does for me. Like. in “Eddie’s Ragga,” starting at 2:36, what are those strange smacking sounds soaked in verb? Just sounds like a drumstick hitting a wall. I was hugely influenced by this kinda stuff. I remember recoding a Big City Nights song and really wanting the sound of a guitar being unplugged, but reverb’d up to 10. So I did one. You can hear the effect I’m talking about, which is just a patch cord being taken out of a guitar during the recording, right at 0:02, again but much louder @ 1:05, then three in quick succession: a distant sounding one @ 1:55, a LOUD one a second later @ 1:56, and one more at 1:59. There’s one more @ 2:13.
You might think it’s dumb, dull, or pointless. You might say I overdid it with five of them.
Read the following in Milhouse’s voice: I think it sounds cool.
I’ve been convinced by Spoon that ear candy like that can make a good song more interesting. After Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Daniel’s got even more interested in production, and spent an unusually long amount of time on the follow-up album, 2010’s Transference (which happens to be the last CD I ever bought, ever). At first listen, the chord progression to “Don’t Make Me A Target,” Ga’s opening song, was disturbingly similar to “The Beast and Dragon, Adored.” Daniel’s make no such mistake here, with the downbeat “Before Destruction” hinting at a much stranger, weirder album.
At the end of “Is Love Forever,” as Daniels is screaming (screaming, for him, more like shouting for other vocalists) is cut off mid-sentence as he goes “Oh n- (if that link doesn’t work, the part I’m talking about is @ 156-1:57. The very next song has the same “trick,” if you wanna call it that…I think it’s more of a thesis…a central thematic insistence on communication breakdown), and it’s right @ the end too. The guitar solo in “Written In Reverse” is another example. I’ve started the below video @ 2:48 but the guitar solo proper doesn’t begin til 3:03 or so.
It’s almost as if Daniel’s fingers got stuck. But as he begins to pound harder on the strings and slowly…ever so slowly…bend the strings, you begin to hear that he’s trying to stay still while moving. Or move while staying still. It is a brutal guitar solo, matched that decade in sheer angular onslaught of chaotic “agggh”, in my opinion, by the guitar solo in the latter half of Wilco’s “At Least That’s What You Said.”
But all the songs on Transference are about getting stuck. About being unable to convey a meaning. A sentiment. Some kind of barricade. Picture Transference as a house. It’s not much from the outside but once you’re in…it’s a big house.
I’ve also been listening to a lot of Tame Impala, the live stuff, particularly the “Let It Happen” rendition from Live @ CONAN:
Is it me, or does this morose Australian kid sound exactly like John Lennon when he sings? I’m not the first to make this comparison, people have been saying so since their first major hit “Feels Like We Always Go Backwards.” But this is something else. To me, a nobody from nowhere, this is the definitive version of the song. Better than the album, better than the Glastonbury rendition. This CONAN version is fucking it. I love the vocoder @ 2:49. I love it EVEN MORE when the backup keyboard dude keeps singing the vocoder part (mixed much lower, natch…we know whose shows this is) and the lead singer returns to that gorgeous falsetto line @ 3:35. It’s like John Lennon incarnate leading a bunch of Ozzies (Aussies?) through a beautiful piece of music. Y’know how Britt Daniel said “Inside Out” was a sad song?
Yeah well, all my fav songs are sad songs. All of ‘em. Sad songs don’t make me sad. They are cathartic. After my first girlfriend in Grade 7, a punk rocker named Sheena (yes, like The Ramones song), I cried and listened to “November Rain” like 40 times in a row. Nothing else on that record. I should’ve at least tried “Don’t Cry,” no?
One last thing about this Tame Impala song: Dig how block-like the drums sound. Similar to how Bloc Party mixed the drums on Silent Alarm. (I don’t love Block Party. And I’m not theorizing that they named their band over how block-like their drums sound. I just remember the drums sounding like boxes on their debut full length…as close to a drum machine as you can get without actually using one.)
There’s a story about Slint’s Britt Walford asking Albini to “make the bass drum sound like a ham being slapped by a [baseball] catcher’s mitt.” That was on Tweez, however. One of Albini’s great regrets in life is that he didn’t get to record Spiderland.
You can’t be there for everything. You’re gonna miss good stuff and good times and good people. It’s the way of the world. And so this album, which included an address on the back that a young Polly Jean Harvey wrote to asking if she could perform vocals. Her letter went unanswered.
Slint’s Britt moved to NYC in the latter 1990s and learned how to make erotic cakes. (I have to believe he’d simply apprenticed himself to a pastry chef/cake maker, with the erotic cakes a funny & inevitable consequence.) No one actually sets out to make dick cake, do they?
But according to the documentary Breadcrumbs, and some dude who calls himself L.C.D. Soundsystem, Britt took his new career seriously. He wanted to be the best at everything he did, whether it was drumming, baking, or whatever.
This inner drive-chain (or demon?) moves all the greats to whatever greatness they aspire to, whatever greatness they shove out into the world. But it’s surprising how many such greats get distracted from their true calling to do something else.
Slint’s Britt Walford spending the 90s baking cakes, some of them erotic.
Mickey Rourke spending much of the 90s boxing, destroying his face in the process.
Be honest, if you looked like this:
Why would you take up a sport whose primary purpose is to hit someone in the face, and in turn getting hit in the face yourself.
He may have been fantastic in The Wrestler, but he never capitalized on its success, did he? He’s right back where he started. And how many scripts is Mickey gonna find that have the reason for his facial disfigurement written into the script? Sin City had it. The Wrestler too. How many other is he legitimately expected to find?
Rourke quitting acting for boxing in 1991, claiming that In 1991, Rourke decided that he “had no respect for [himself as] an actor.” Surprisingly, he did well. According to Wikipedia Rourke went “undefeated in eight fights, with six wins (four by knockout) and two draws. He fought internationally in countries including Spain, Japan, and Germany. During his boxing career, Rourke suffered a number of injuries, including a broken nose, toe, and ribs, a split tongue, and a compressed cheekbone. He also suffered from short-term memory loss.”
All of these things impacted his acting career when he finally returned. Not just his shattered mug, but a newfound ability to remember lines. Rourke used to stay up night after night before shooting commenced, acting both sides of a scene, and was known for knowing his lines, despite whatever other difficulties he may have had on-set with directors and camera operators. Rumours that the sex scenes in Wild Orchid (1989) were not simulated (ie: real) did not do much for his career, though it is doubtful Rourke ever planned to appear in PG13 fare for kids.
He was still capable of great moments after his return though, like the final scene in Spun, where he relates a scene of severe childhood trauma to a meth head who either can’t hear him because he’s dozing or just doesn’t care. *SPOILER ALERT* This scene pretty much is the last one of the movie. Don’t watch it if you are planning to see Spun one day. *SPOILER ALERT*
That little giggle at the end! So world weary. So perfect for the tone.
But there have always been masters of craft who get distracted from what they’re supposed to be doing. Boxing seems to have this particular allure, especially for public figures who have a masculine, tough-guy image. Which brings me to:
Hemingway V Fitzgerald
And as great a writer Hemingway was, and perhaps given false confidence by his “anyone who can go 3 rounds with me” invitation when he moved to Cuba, and invitation several men took him up on, and Hemingway beat all comers. This is part of the Hemingway myth, but it is true. It actually happened.
After a day of drunken fishing, Hemingway was pulling shore in his beloved Pilar when a mocking voice called out, “aren’t you the guy who claims to catch all the fish?”
Surprised, Hemingway replied that he caught his share. But the heckler’s hectoring continued, culminating with him calling Ernest a “big fat slob.”
The following account is from the South Florida Sentinel:
“Finally a barefoot Hemingway leaped up to the dock and clipped the heckler with several lefts, but the man didn't go down.
‘Then I backed off and really got the weight of a pivot swing into the old Sunday punch,’ added Hemingway. ‘He landed, and his ass and head hit the planking at the same time.’
The ‘mouthy drunk’ lay unconscious on the dock, while a crowd of some 60 people looked on. The crew from the drunk's boat, Storm King, carried him aboard and rushed him to Miami for medical treatment.
That night [Hemingway] worried about how seriously his antagonist had been hurt. He was even more worried when he found out who the man was. Joseph Knapp was the owner and publisher of such major American magazines as Collier's, Woman's Home Companion, The American Magazine and several other publications. That's what I call limiting your magazine markets," Hemingway said.
The fight, however, even more than his fishing triumphs, transformed him into a legend on the island. Calypso singer Nattie Saunders wrote a song called Big Fat Slob.
Big Fat Slob in the Harbor,
This the night we have fun
oh, the Big Fat Slob in Bimini.
This the night we got fun
Mr. Knapp called Mr. Ernest Hemingway
A Big Fat Slob
Mr. Ernest Hemingway batted his fist and gave him a knob.”
In the States Hemingway was a venerated writer, the archetypical masculine writer. He could gut a fish, shoot a deer (hell, shoot a lion…see Green Hills of Africa or True At First Light).
But if Hemingway was venerated and respected in America, he was a living legend in Cuba. Statues of him still exist today, an honour shared by no other American, neither President nor peasant. Hemingway could do no wrong. Nobody could last 3 rounds with him in Bimini, and several men had tried.
He’d knocked out a heckling Joseph Knapp seriously enough to hasten the latter’s immediate return to the United States. Despite his constant drinking and overeating and lack of a basic exercise regimen, he had no reason to believe his boxing skills had diminished over time. He expected to make short work of Callaghan once the two had set up a time and place.
It must always be remembered that the invitation to box three rounds2 had initially been a friendly one from Hemingway, not Callaghan. Callaghan knew he was a better boxer than Hemingway, and once inside the ring he wasted no time putting this fact into practice.
Hemingway, realizing by the second round that he was in danger of getting obliterated (by decision…I don’t think, even now, that Callaghan would have won by KO, though whether this was due to the gentlemanly nature of the invitation (“two friends boxing,” as Hemingway had put it beforehand) or because Hemingway was still a decent boxer, even when getting his clock cleaned, he started fighting back in the late second round and all throughout the third and was close to tying his opponent in blows when F. Scott Fitzgerald, mesmerized by the fight, finally called “time,” a few seconds too late. Hemingway, like all sports aficionados, blamed the referee. From Luciano Moggi to Ernest Hemingway, from soccer to sand volleyball, if you lose you blame the ref.
Morley, knowing damn well he’d won, tried like hell to get out of there in a hurry but was dragged to a bar, where Ernest pointedly ignored both men, sulking as he drank saucer after saucer of beer.3
Finally, after 8 saucers, Morley gave up. He wasn’t going to be forced into keeping up with this raving lunatic whose maturity level was lower than the morning tide at Smyrna.
“Whatever he did,” Callaghan would say much later in life. “He had to be the best.”
Hemingway’s father had brought him up to be that way. If he couldn’t be the best? Why, you took yourself out of the game. Hence Hemingway’s father’s suicide. And Hemingway’s suicide. And his granddaughter Margaux’s suicide.
Callahan wasn’t going to sit in that cafe all night and try to outdrink an alcoholic. It was well-known around town that Ernest had a serious drinking problem. He’d knocked Ernest to the canvas but still didn’t trust him. A night with him could end with a sucker punch to the solar plexus and Hemingway patting his back with disingenuous advice about staying alert.
According to the Globe and Mail, “[Hemingway’s] ego never really recovered, nor did his friendship with Morley Callaghan. Years later, Callaghan wrote about the match in his memoir That Summer in Paris. The prolific Toronto author would complain that he'd rather be remembered for his novels than for that fight.”
I’ve read two Callaghan novels: Such Is My Beloved (1934) and More Joy In Heaven (1937) and enjoyed both, though neither left the lasting impression on me that Hemingway’s best books have. I can remember so much more about Hemingway’s books, whereas I can only remember (WITHOUT Googling) that Such Is My Beloved is about a priest named Father Dowling who is approached by a prostitute in the streets because he is wearing a hooded coat…the hooker never would have approached a priest in those days if his collar had been visible. The two of them strike up a friendship that eventually leads to gossip and Father Dowling’s demise.
More Joy In Heaven, I think (I’m not Googling it) is about a recently released prisoner whose crimes were sensational enough that the media coverage surrounding his release causes enough pressure that the risk of his recidivism is increased. I don’t remember the prisoners name. I suppose the title comes from his realization that the so-called “freedom” he yearned for all those years he was locked up is not available here in the “real world” and that perhaps there is “more joy in heaven.” *SPOILER ALERT* I am fairly certain that he ends up committing a crime that leads to capital punishment, having given up on finding normalcy in this world, or perhaps not wishing to settle for such dull normalcy. *SPOILER ALERT*
It’s important to note that both of these novels were released when Hemingway’s fame was on the wane, though Hemingway did not seem outwardly jealous. He read Callaghan’s writing and called it, with characteristic curtness, “fine work.”
A Farewell To Arms had just been released that summer Hemingway and Callaghan had their ill-fated boxing match. But Callaghan was writing and publishing short stories and made no secret of his ambitions to be a novelist. So perhaps Hemingway saw in Callaghan more than just a sparring partner, but a literary competitor.
Like Hemingway, Callaghan had a family. Unlike Hemingway, Callaghan liked to spend time with them. His stories4 were selling steadily in the Saturday Evening Post, and every Saturday the CBC wanted me on TV to pontificate on what I’d dubbed ‘our own national drama:’ ice hockey, which I loved much more than boxing.”
Here is a photo taken of Callaghan in 1925, 4 years before the fight.
Callaghan didn’t need to try and outdrink Ernest Hemingway in Paris. He was nearly half a decade older than the man but Hemingway acted far younger. Impetuous. Rude. Arrogant.
Despite his reputation as a sportsman, Ernest was a remarkably sore loser. Despite his reputation as a tough guy, he was prone to sore throats, broken bones, concussions, prolonged bouts of gastrointestinal problems, moderate-to-severe alcoholism (to which he finally succumbed sometime after 1950), and a laundry list of other ailments5. The almost universally hostile reviews of Across the River & Into the Trees (1950) wounded him, with many critics lamenting that the book had appeared so late in Hemingway’s career; the implication being he wouldn’t be able to write something better in time.
But, perhaps like Mickey Rourke, whose ex-wife recently said “"He is at his best when he's on the floor, bleeding. That's when he gets up and says, 'Watch out, I'm back'. That's why his role in The Wrestler is so fitting,” Hemingway worked best when everybody counted him out.
So he temporarily abandoned the four-part novel he’d been working on in his Cuba years, and made Part IV itself a standalone novella, which became The Old Man and the Sea (1952). It was his last major work published work in his lifetime, but it brought him much praise.
VI: Hemingway V the Inexorable March of Time
For a strangely riveting read of Hemingway’s final years, which consisted of bouncing back and forth from his home in Ketchum, Idaho and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, click on this sentence. It captures Hemingway’s final months, a hodgepodge of false diagnoses, attempted suicides, Ernest escaping from the compound to go drinking in random Minnesota towns (one sheriff notes that he met the writer in a random bar about five miles from Mayo, and that he was slurring something fierce.)
After his death, Mary Hemingway took the largely intact first three pieces and shaped them into her dead husband’s first posthumous novel: Islands in the Stream (1970). The Garden of Eden, much-celebrated in Queer Lit classes for its sexual ambiguity and the androgynous appearance of the two main characters, followed in 1986, followed by one last non-fiction book in 1999, True At First Light.
The collection was edited (controversially) by his son Patrick, and details a trip to Africa he’d taken with Mary in the mid 1950s. But Green Hills of Africa already existed, making a second safari book more than a little redundant.
More pertinent to the Hemingways themselves, Ernest and Mary survived not one but two plane crashes on that African trip. Ernest was reported dead by the international press, and his condition was not known until he arrived in Europe a few months later, by which time he was exhibiting strange symptoms.
By the time they got home to Ketchum, Idaho Ernest’s behaviour had become erratic and unpredictable. Mary as sole caregiver was proving untenable. She had to take him (not send him, she drove him both there and back) to the Mayo Clinic for shock therapy which, according to her husband, “put [me] out of business.”
He never wrote anything of length or substance again.
But he left behind one of the more fascinating bodies of work in American Letters, plus a new way of writing, one full of understatement and tension that left his fellow writers in awe. Even Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the latter of whom described “A lean, Well-Lighted Place” as “masterly” gave him positive reviews.
Hemingway may have lost the fight to Callaghan, but he will be read in 500 years. I’m not sure I can say the same for Morley, who seems to already be relegated to the same heap as Somerset Maugham and John Dos Passos.
Forgotten writers, each of whom will one day have a final reader, the last person to ever open, read, and then close of their books.
I hope that reader enjoys what he finds there. Just because an artist or writer lacks an audience, doesn’t mean he/she/they don’t deserve one, or could sustain one.
July 15 2020
Hemingway had a thing for three.
“They called them saucers but they were more like half-pint glasses.”
See “Rigmarole” in which Callaghan in careful not to name the urban setting, so as not to alienate American readers. The city in the story could be Cleveland, Detroit, Kingston, Ithica, any good-sized city. Callaghan was crafty that way. They’d call it branding now. Back then it was more about adapting ones skills to maintain a career and earn income.
The Mayo Clinic would eventually learn that Hemingway had a rare disorder which meant he was unable to digest iron, which can lead too all kinds of complications.