777 times lovelier than I'd ever seen
April 2004
April 22, 2004
Nameless Number Headman / Channels / Retisonic
Nameless Number Headman / Channels / Retisonic (Retisonic record release party), the Warehouse Next Door, 4/16
We were looking for a way to celebate V.'s successful completion of her qualifying exams, and the great J. Robbins was playing a date on Friday with his new band, Channels. So off we went to the Warehouse Next Door, a teeny performance space in Northwest. The opening act was Namelessnumberheadman, a good band from Kansas City with a genuinely dreadful name. They were a three-piece -- every band we saw Friday was a three-piece -- with a drummer, a keyboardist, and a guitarist/keyboardist. The drummer and the guitarist shared vocalist duties. For an opening band I'd never heard of, these guys were shockingly good. V. and I discussed briefly who they reminded us of -- I threw out the Long Winters or Death Cab, but V. responded that they seemed to be shooting for a bigger, post-rock-ier sound. A little bit later, I think I settled on them sounding a bit like Olivia Tremor Control. They've got some MP3s up on their website; you can check them out and decide for yourself.
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April 18, 2004
The Great War and Modern Memory
Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory is a survey of literature about World War I and written in reaction to it. That's an incredibly broad topic, so Fussell has narrowed his focus. He's writing almost entirely about British authors (Gravity's Rainbow, a recent phenomenon when Fussell wrote this book in 1975, crops up a few times despite being about the wrong war entirely, and Mailer and Ginsberg are unnecessarily wedged in), and he's concerned almost exclusively with line officers in the British army. The Navy and such air combat as there was in World War I is entirely ignored. Fussell explains this, sensibly enough, as a product of personal interest: he was a line officer in the infantry in World War II, so the literature of his predecessors of a generation earlier was what fascinated him. I can't say that this is a bad decision; the war poets and their novelist and memoirist brethren were largely officers in the infantry. It does mean that the brilliant Isaac Rosenberg -- a working class, enlisted Jew, and thus an outlier from the rest of the war poets -- gets slighted, despite Fussell's entirely defensible claim that Rosenberg was the best poet of the war. Still, that's an incredibly broad topic, so Fussell divides it further; each chapter is devoted to a particular motif that Fussell sees as broadly shared across the British literature of the Great War: satire, irony, and gallows humor; the tunnel-dwelling underground (literally as the trenches and figuratively as the grave); a sense of Germans as both twins and diametric opposites; mythic allusion; self-consciously literary allusion (and shaping of the narrative); theatrical touches (not just in the literature of the war, but in the many contemporaneous references to music hall by the soldiers themselves); homoeroticism; an attention to the pastoral; and the explicit investigation of memory.
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