Posts from — January 2009

Great. I just updated WordPress, and now all the comments are gone. Technology giveth…

Long before getting food poisoning last Sunday night and its subsequent vomitus Monday morning, before there was Sarah Palin or "Obama Girl," before Baby had been conceived or Bookfraud had made its debut, before Steve Bartman had his date with infamy, before the non-plague of Y2K or the real plague known as "Bush Cheney 2000," even before Girlfriend became Wife, I saw a Neil LaBute film called "Your Friends and Neighbors."

Besides seeing Ben Stiller with a goatee, "Your Friends and Neighbors" was notable for the music accompanying the title sequence: disturbing, basso profundo violence of what sounded like a string quartet whose instruments were on ‘roids. It was loud, cacophonous, and was the most memoriable aspect of the movie (other than Jason Patric playing football with a baby doll).

Move ahead 10 years, to Saturday, 36 hours prior to consuming the extremely bad scallops that led to a 5:30 a.m. technicolor yawn. A friend of Wife’s is a cellist, and upon learning that Baby is about a music-besotted 21-month old as can be, graciously lugged her instrument to our home and gave Baby a concert that included a Bach cello suite, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," and several cat-death notes created when Baby tugged on the strings.

For some reason, I thought of "Your Friends and Neighbors" and the soundtrack. The cellist friend didn’t know what I was talking about (though we did note that a group she was in and Kronos Quartet both had covered "Purple Haze").

Following further research that day, I finally discovered the source of the music after a decade. It was a trio who play heavy metal on the cello.

Yes, that you read that correctly.

Apocalyptica (see pictures above and below) are three classically trained cellists (I imagine there’s no other kind) plus a drummer. Of course, they’d have to be from Finland.

Though I am not familiar with Apocalyptica’s entire body of work, and will not become familiar with Apocalyptica’s entire body of work in this or any other lifetime, they are known for playing covers of Metallica songs, including "Enter Sandman," the song from "Your Friends and Neighbors" that had perplexed me all these years.

Even longer before I had seen this movie, I had written in a stupdendously bad novel (one of three stupendously bad novels that have flowed from my fingers) a scene involving a tuba quartet:

“Gerard’s Tuba Quartet No. 3, ‘The dance of the piglets’” the program read.  “A T.U.B.A. command performance.”  Yves Gerard’s third Tuba quartet,  The dance of the piglets, c.1989, represents a return to form for the great French composer.  It reflects Gerard’s obsession with livestock and the deconstruction of agriculture as metaphor, a theme reflected also in his Tuba Concerto in C-major (the “Farmer St. Jean” Concerto) and his famed “Barnyard suite.”

I don’t repeat these silly lines to show the craptastic nature of my writing, but to illustrate that no matter what I or anyone else writes, reality will trump it. Philip Roth’s famous screed that fiction writers cannot compete with the news of the day ("The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist") is made flesh each day: reality beggars the writer’s imagination.

Look at this picture; try not to laugh

This is really why I like to blog, not only to comment on the literary life, because given my literary successes, this would have been a short blog indeed. It’s things like Apocalyptica—I mean, if I had made up such a thing and put it in a short story, the derision from my fiction workshop would have been palpable.

After several months of unemployment, things are looking better. I’ve got a few job leads and some steady freelance work. The worst president since Harding (Nixon included) is gone. Baby is healthy and happy, and Wife hasn’t left me (yet) for the gainfully employed. It’s only a month before Spring Training and the cycle of happiness-despair known as the Chicago Cubs 2009 Season.

In other words, I don’t have a reason to wash myself in the bathos of self-pity, a state that allows me wide leeway not to blog, not to write. You see, I’ve tried to blog; I even wrote some heartfelt encomiums to our new president. But the writing wasn’t any good, and it wasn’t anything you couldn’t have read in 8 billion other blogs.

It’s because of things like Apocalyptica that remind me just why I do this.

So let us give thanks that Obama is president, and greater thanks for heavy metal cello. Rock on, Eicca, Pavvo, Perttu, and Mikko.