SOUNDTRACK: THE DEAD SCIENCE-Villainaire (2008).
This is probably the most fascinating album that Constellation has released recently. I’d never heard of The Dead Science, but evidently they have a few disc out already.
The main thing one notices about this disc is the lead singer. His voice is fascinating: a sort of slow, whispered falsetto laced with an incredible vibrato. It almost sounds like he’s struggling to sing (although clearly he isn’t). So take this delicate voice and put it over a series of songs (each one very different) that feature rapid time changes, punk breaks, mellow guitars and/or a harp.
The music is definitely strange and yet I found it very engaging. I also thought that I wasn’t really absorbing the music since it was so esoteric, and yet after listening to it again today I realized I knew when all the breaks and interesting bits were coming up. The disc definitely needs repeated listens to get what’s going on, but it is a fascinating collection.
[READ: September 23, 2009] Generation X
As with many books with multiple covers, I never seem to be able to find a picture of my cover online (my copy is a nuclear green, which I’m sure I spent a few minutes selecting back then). I bought this book in November 1992 (I know this because that was back when I wrote the date I bought a book on the inside cover of the book). I know that I loved the book when it came out because it made me an instant fan of Douglas Coupland (I bought Shampoo Planet just one month later).
And Gen X is a generation-defining book. The margins of the book are filled with cartoons and slogans and definitions of Gen-X speak. Now, I’m not sure if anyone ever used these definitions or if Coupland made them up. I certainly never heard anyone say them. Nevertheless, real or not, they work well as a frame of reference for the way (some) 20somethings in the 90s thought about culture and their place in it.
And so, by proclamation, this book speaks to every slacker and is ever so grunge and slacker and ironic and slacker and…well, no.
I’m actually surprised that I enjoyed this story as much as I did back then, because I’m not sure how it spoke to my 23-year-old self. And from a vantage point of 17 years later, I’m surprised at how earnest and honest the book turns out to be.
The basic story is that Andy, Claire and Dag are platonic friends who live in neighboring bungalows in Palm Springs, Ca. They are all from somewhere else: Andy is from Oregon, and he was the first to move to the desert to get away from his corporate life. Claire is part of a wealthy, multi-siblinged family who were vacationing in Palm Springs. After talking with Andy, who was bartending at their resort, she convinced herself to drop out and move next to Andy (as friends only). It turns out that Andy is sort of the landlord of the bungalows where they live so he was able to score her one next door. And then there’s Dag. Dag is an expat from Ontario who also tried to escape his existence. He’s a minor vandal (vandalizing cars with obnoxious bumper stickers mostly) and is charming and rakish and is just the kind of person who really fills out a story like this.
And so these three twentysomethings live in this land of old people: a washed out desert with very little to show for itself. They live something of an ironic existence in that they each set up their bungalows in a certain way, with a taste for kitsch and camp. And they have slumming jobs which give them more time to do what they love to do best: hang out and tell stories.
It’s this storytelling which gets to the heart of the book. For even though these are stories, and some of them are made up, the stories they tell each other are their attempts to find truth, earnestness, honesty. No one is allowed to criticize the story while it’s in progress. They just listen, respectfully, to each others’ ideas.
And maybe that’s why this story appealed to me so much.
Because the rest was quite alien to me. Andy & Claire need to be away from their large families. Dag is something of a ne’er do well. As individuals, I couldn’t relate to them, and yet as people in search for meaning, I found them quite compelling.
There’s a nice contrast with Andy’s younger brother, who epitomizes a sort of Gen Y ethic: he always looks good, he’s more interested in material objects, he’s vibrant, and he always moves in a pack of friends. He rarely reveals his innermost thoughts, and when he does it comes as a shock to Andy. In some ways he’s an easy straw man against the “virtues” of Andy; but really he’s more of a foil as Andy’s brother (again, not a spokesperson for a generation).
And thus, not much happens in the book. (It’s quite short too, a very fast read). The main action happens at the holidays: Andy goes home for Christmas, Claire chases a man to New York and Dag stays at the bungalows.
Then before Claire returns, one of Dag’s acts of vandalism offers tension and some major black comedy.
When the three friends reconvene, they have set a plan in motion that will change all of their lives (and hopefully let them do something that they actually enjoy).
That ending seems superficial, and yet the whole point is that for a generation raised on irony, with no time for saccharine displays, it’s important that your job is something you enjoy. It seems weird in retrospect that this is the first “generation” to have thought that. I mean certainly the hippies had a similar idea, but the Gen X idea here is a backlash to what the hippies morphed into.
That this book supposedly speaks for a generation is absurd. And when you take the weight of that off of the book, it holds up as a story of three friends searching for meaning in a world that has overwhelmed them.
Seventeen years later, it feels like maybe we all keep pace with the world a little better, and these characters would seem rather eccentric to us for their dropping-out attitudes (not that they didn’t seem eccentric then). Nevertheless, the book was almost touching in its earnestness. Perhaps we have become more irony-drenched since 1991.
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