Author: Ivan Kreilkamp

You can contact me at ivan812 AT gmail.com

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

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Why do I love Swedish police procedurals?

I’ve already written here about my addiction to Henning Mankell’s novels.  I’ve recently gone back a few decades to the series that I believe inspired him, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Martin Beck novels (they were a married couple) from the late 1960s and 70s, which have been reissued in nice Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard editions.  In the last week or two I read the first two, Roseanna and The Man Who Went Up in Smoke.  I preferred the first but I’ll select this random passage towards the end of the second to evoke some of the appeal of these novels for me.  Martin Beck is back in Stockholm from an investigation in Hungary, talking with his partner Kollberg:

“A dreadful thought suddenly occurred to me,” said Kollberg.  “It’s five days since the opening of the crayfish season and you probably haven’t eaten a single one.  Or do they have crayfish in Hungary?

“Not so far as I know,” said Martin Beck.  “I didn’t see any.”

“Get yourself dressed.  I’ve ordered a table.”

The dining room was crowded, but a corner table had been reserved for them and laid for a crayfish dinner.  On each of their plates lay a paper hat and a bib, and each of the bibs had a verse printed in red across it.  They sat down and Martin Beck looked dismally at his hat, made of blue crepe paper, with a shiny blue visor and POLICE in gold letters above the visor.

Amy Poehler as Kaitlin

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I’ve only seen the first episode of Parks and Recreation so far.  This is the (sort of) spin-off of The Office, a mockumentary starring Amy Poehler as Leslie Knopes, a very enthusiastic parks-and-recreation officer in the fictional Indiana town of Pawnee.  Indiana’s national reputation took a boost when we went blue last November, but this show won’t do a lot to improve the state’s image on the coasts.  One detail I admired in the pilot was the big Bob Knight poster in the office of Knopes’ boss, who does not believe the city government should be involved in creating or maintaining parks, and who thinks the entire town should be privatized and run by Chuck E. Cheese.

Anyway, I found myself watching the SNL Amy Poehler special last night which reminded me that she’s kind of a comic genius.  My all-time favorite Poehler character is Kaitlin, the manic/hyperactive 10 year old girl who drives her sweetly beleaguered step-dad Rick crazy.  She is just brilliant.  Here’s a great one: Kaitlin choosing an instrument to play at the mall music shop with the help of Rick’s friend Chaz, played by Paul Giamatti.  I’m especially partial to Kaitlin’s impromtu performance of the Black Crowes’ “Hard to Handle” (just a few seconds into this clip).  Also check out Giamatti almost losing it as Kaitlin tells him about how she almost died doing a backflip in rollerskates on a trampoline.

Other than the Kaitlin clip, my favorite moments from the highlight show were Poehler with a stalkerish crush on Justin Timberlake, and her heavily-pregnant Sarah Palin rap performance.  I think I somehow never watched that at the time.  It’s kind of amazing that it actually happened in the final weeks of the Presidential campaign.  Surreal to watch Palin bobbing her head to the faux hip-hop.  How desperate must McCain-Palin have been to think that this would be a good idea.

My Dinosaur Jr. problem

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Went to see Dinosaur Jr. last night.  They’re touring with the full original lineup, including Lou Barlow, whose bitter split with J. Mascis constituted one of indie rock’s best-known melodramas back in the 90s.  (It’s compellingly chronicled in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life.) Now almost 20 years on (!), after various kinds of solo careers and other projects, they are back together, tempted, I assume, by reunion cash & attention.

I think I over-invested, emotionally, in the band back in the day, such that I now find it difficult just to enjoy them in an uncomplicated way.  They were pretty much my favorite band around the time of the first two albums.  I loved Dinosaur, the first one, and was involved in bringing them to play to my college.  When You’re Living All Over Me came out I felt vindicated in my belief that they were pretty unique — some kind of strange amalgam of Neil Young, Black Sabbath, the Cure, Meat Puppets? –and I enjoyed seeing them get the recognition they deserved.  I saw J. Mascis as a post-punk Neil Young; deeply soulful, albeit semi-autistic seeming; completely inarticulate in person, but able to channel deep, weird emotions and let them out in the form of music that was at once overwhelmingly loud and somehow melodic, pretty, even sweet.   I still think songs like “In a Jar,” “Little Fury Things,” “Repulsion,” et al. are amazing and unmatched.

I was actually one of what couldn’t have been more than a few dozen people in the audience to witness the onstage fight Azerrad describes between J. and Lou in Naugatuck, CT in 1988 at a weird little strip-mall disco kind of place.  They smashed their guitars together, screamed at each other and stormed off the stage.  If I recall correctly, they came back in a couple minutes and did a sloppy Minor Threat cover as an encore.  (My friend Dan and I, who worshiped the band, were completely freaked out.)  Barlow said to Azerrad that the fight made him “psychotically happy…  I felt he’d finally proven to me that he had feelings.  He would never react to anything at all, ever”(372).

Maybe I just took the spurned Lou’s side in the divorce, but I ended up feeling that Mascis in fact contained no soulful depths, that he was, as far as I could see, a narcissistic & emotionally manipulative guy primarily into guitar and skiing/snowboarding equipment.   One of the songs they played last night, the one that goes, “I feel the pain of everyone, and then I feel nothing,” over and over, kind of sums it up.  On the one hand, this vivid, sometimes excruciating emotionality, conveyed through waves of sculpted guitar noise; on the other, a  passive-aggressive affectless and lack of real engagement or meaning.

Few of the songs are ultimately about much of anything other than emotional frozenness or inability to feel/connect, and I guess that stance seems less interesting or powerful than it once did to me.  Also, a 21 year old who experiences those feelings and expresses them musically is maybe inherently a lot more sympathetic than the same person who seems unchanged 20 years on.  There’s probably a kind of nostalgia/revulsion dynamic going on too where I associate them so strongly with myself at age 20.  I’ll freely admit that my reaction now is very likely a result of over-projecting into their music originally and having always wanted it to be be/mean more than it really was.

Also, J. Mascis now has this slightly pudgy, freaky-grandpa look which kind of kills the mystique he used to convey:

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I’m slightly amazed that there’s actually a market for Dinosaur Jr. sneakers.

Lou, on the other hand, doesn’t look too different from the way he did in 1988, and it was fun to see him perform.  His psychedelic ballad “Forget the Swan” was a surprising highlight of the night.

All that said, it was cool to hear all those great songs from the first two albums; I just felt kind of ambivalent about the whole thing.

Seed Sharing Gone Bad

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From our local paper today (not sure what accounts for the several-week delay on this news being reported; perhaps there was an attempted hush-up):

A spring party intended to be an opportunity for friends to exchange seeds landed one woman in the hospital after she ate some of the seeds.

Monroe County Sheriff’s deputies were called at 12:10 a.m. March 22 to the 9300 block of East Woodview Drive. The 30-year-old homeowner told police she was hosting a spring solstice party where about 15 people got together to exchange seeds for planting in their gardens. The hostess said numerous types of seeds were in a party-style bag which each guest received.

As the partygoers socialized, someone noticed the 34-year-old victim take a handful of seeds out of her bag and swallow them. Police said others began telling the woman that it wasn’t a good idea to do that since some seeds are toxic. Other partygoers were able to learn that the woman had swallowed purple moonflower seeds. After a few minutes, the woman became intoxicated and began to fall unconscious.

When the deputy arrived, she found the victim was lying on the bathroom floor. According to the report, the woman appeared extremely intoxicated, was incoherent and appeared to be having hallucinations.

The best part:

Police said the woman kept picking at things on her shirt, the deputy’s clothing and out of the air that were not there. She was taken to Bloomington Hospital where she was treated and released.

According to the report, purple moonflower seeds are very toxic and can lead to coma or death.

This is hilarious b/c Sarah has actually been involved in some seed-sharing parties… Little did I suspect what kinds of danger and bad behavior can be involved in such illicit gatherings.  That “party-style bag” should’ve been a tip-off.

Letdown of Ozma of Oz

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We recently got through Ozma of Oz, L. Frank Baum’s 1907 followup to The Wizard of Oz.  Actually there was another book in between, The Marvelous Land of Oz, which does not feature Dorothy, but I decided we’d just pick up Dorothy’s continuing adventures.

It was a bit of a let-down.  The art is fantastic: ravishing, Japanese-influenced paintings by John Neill, who replaced W.W. Denslow after he and Baum had a falling out.  Wikipedia tells us that

Dorothy drawn by Denslow appeared to be a chubby five or six year old with long brown hair in two braids. Neill chose to illustrate a new Dorothy in 1907 when the character was reintroduced in Ozma of Oz. He illustrated the young girl in a more fashionable appearance. She is shown to be about ten years old, dressed in contemporary American fashions, with blonde hair cut in a fashionable bob. A similar modernization was given other female characters.

The whole book is very fashion/glamour-conscious, in fact, as in the flighty Princess Langwidere, who decides every morning which head to wear, from a closet full of dozens of gorgeous options.  She always wears the same simple white dress, however, indulging all of her need for fashion and variety in choice of head alone.  The girls found this quite interesting.

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The book has its moments.  I liked the scary (but ultimately cowardly/ harmless) Wheelers, who leave the eerie message “Beware the Wheelers” written in the sand (could this have inspired Walter Benn Michaels’s “Against Theory,” with its image of the Wordsworth poem written in the sand on the beach?).  They are subsequently satisfyingly routed by the robot Tiktok who hits them over the head with the dinner pails that grow on the food tree they guard.

But too much of the book is devoted to the tiresome Nome King (who looks a lot like Dr. Suess’s Grinch — I suspect plagiarism, in fact) and his elaborate sadistic game in which Dorothy and her friends have to guess which of the “decorations” in his castle are members of the royal family under the king’s curse.  It goes on and on and has something of the contrived feel of a Batman episode.  The book also has some weird/offputting recurring bits or jokes, like the hungry tiger who is constantly talking about how much he would like to devour a human baby (but he’s too virtuous to give into his urges).

Also irritating: Dorothy’s new tendency to speak in lispish childish colloqualisms: “A lunch isn’t zactly breakfast… I’m sure it was ripe… all, that is, ‘cept the pickle” (chosen from a random page).

When I started reading, I was thinking, “gosh, with so many books, why aren’t there more Oz movies,” but by the end I understood.  However: “It has been announced that director John Boorman will create a new CGI film of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It is set for release in 2010.”  Makes sense that they’d do a new version.  I’m more interested in this, though: “Aysecik ve Sihirli Cüceler Rüyalar Ülkesinde is a 1971 Turkish film, directed by Tunç Basaran (known to bootleggers as “The Turkish Wizard of Oz”).”

Here’s Ozma of Oz on Google Books.

Mountain Goats in Bloomington

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Went to see the Mountain Goats.  If you don’t know them, the Mountain Goats is John Darnielle, a literate Pitzer College grad, former emergency room nurse, who used to record very primitive songs on boom boxes but since 2002 or so has been producing more polished, “produced” (even orchestral) music.  He tends towards the ambitious and high-concept in his recordings.  For example, there are various “series” of songs, across different albums, that constitute coherent or at least linked narratives of one sort or another; e.g. (from Wikipedia) the “Alpha Series”:

Songs in this category concern the same fictional couple, described as a heterosexual lower-middle-class man and woman who originally loved each other genuinely, and held generally ordinary concerns for one another’s well-being, but whose relationship has degraded for a variety of reasons, most often a series of fights or drug and/or alcohol abuse, possibly both. Whatever the causes for their current situation, their love has not so much died as warped into the sincere, all-consuming desire of each of them to see the other drink themselves to death; thus, to facilitate this “walk down to the bottom”, as described in the liner notes, the couple keep whatever liquor they can afford on hand for each other and stay together….The album Tallahassee, being entirely about the Alpha couple, begins with the pair buying a run-down house in the eponymous capital of Florida, follows their degradation, and ends with a vision of the house and both of them being consumed in flames.

Darnielle has something in common with the Decembrists’ Colin Meloy (whose sister is a novelist, Maile Meloy) in the way he thinks about lyrics in an almost novelistic or at least literary kind of way.  Anyway, I saw the Mountain Goats/ Darnielle in Boston with Jane a year ago at the Museum of Fine Arts and didn’t entirely love it.  The crowd was devoted and rapt in a slightly precious indie-rock mode, and Darnielle seemed deeply awkward to me, almost so much as to suggest the possibility of a touch of Asberger’s.   I enjoyed the show this week more — he was still awkward and nerdy, but he seemed comfortable and upbeat and was actually amusing & charming in his extended between-song patter (about such topics as his childhood love for pro wrestling, his own depression, meth addiction).

Darnielle was born in Bloomington, I haven’t completely figured out why; I think he said something on stage about his step-father’s father having been an English professor here?  Or was his step-father a grad student?  They moved to California when he was a toddler.  He chatted a lot about this connection; he said something about Bloomington having always had magical associations for him, and claimed that the lyrics to “Love Love Love” were inspired by/based on these associations with the town, I’m not sure how or why:

King Saul fell on his sword when it all went wrong,
and Joseph’s brothers sold him down the river for a song,
and Sonny Liston rubbed some tiger balm into his glove.
some things you do for money and some you do for love love love.

Raskolnikov felt sick but he couldn’t say why
when he saw his face reflected in his victim’s twinkling eye.
some things you’ll do for money and some you’ll do for fun,
but the things you do for love are going to come back to you one by one.

Love love is going to lead you by the hand
into a white and soundless place.
now we see things as in a mirror dimly.
then we shall see each other face to face.

Is Bloomington the “white and soundless place” for Darnielle, maybe?  Darnielle also has an entertaining blog, Last Train to Jakarta, largely devoted to his scholarly love for heavy metal music, and he has also published a book about Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality that takes the form of a diary written by a teenager in a Southern California mental hospital.

So in other words, just another flash in the pan rock star, seen one, seen ’em all…

Anyway — really good show; he has a million great songs so there are a lot to choose from.

Cup of coffee as baby lamb

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Dialogue this morning around 8 a.m.  I’ve been up for 40 minutes, Sarah for ten.

Sarah, casting her eyes around the room with mild alarm: “whatever you do, don’t throw out my cup of coffee.”

Me: “I’d sooner tear away the baby lamb from the claws of the fierce tiger.”

Sarah: looks at me blankly.  “What?  Why wouldn’t you save the baby lamb?”  Thinks.  “Oh, because I’m like the ferocious tiger before I’ve had my coffee.”  Shrugs and gets her coffee.

I guess it was a weird metaphor.  You don’t want to get between Sarah and her first cup of coffee, though.

Flea Circus

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We all went to this Lotus Blossoms kids’ fair event yesterday.  (Lotus is the big Fall world music festival, and it has occasional spin-off events throughout the year).  I was charmed and impressed.  A big elementary school gym filled with booths offering different crafts & activities from world cultures.  Some pretty neat stuff: making masks following traditional Indian Diwali patterns; learning about African drumming; etc. Sarah was helping to man the booth of C&I’s preschool which featured tile painting prints, a kind of magnetized drying rack to experiment with magnets, and the tank with their classroom’s two axelotles (salamanders).

One highlight was Jungle Joe’s Flea Circus.  It was basically a riff on a kind of carnival scam.  Jungle Joe was an amusingly hammy ring-master guy in a grass skirt who walked his various prize fleas — Fleatini, Fleaberry, etc — through their stunts and tricks: diving from a little platform into a tiny pool, balancing on a chair on his foot, and so on. He also had a stuffed flea and some illustrations of flea anatomy.

He’d take out his magnifying glass and check to be sure Fleatini was doing OK after her last stunt.  There were, however, no actual fleas.  Celie and Iris did not pick up on this. After the show they asked Jungle Joe if they could see the fleas and he had to explain that they were resting.

Iris was on my shoulders for most of the show.  At one point Jungle Joe explained that he was going to do a handstand on a chair with one of the fleas balancing on a tiny chair attached to his shoe.  Iris tapped my shoulder and leaned over to observe, “Daddy, he must be very professional if he can do that!”

My other favorite aspect of the event: no commerce of any kind.  Nothing to buy.  No tickets.  No snacks (except for some free samples of exotic fruits).  Not even any representational transactions — no FREE tickets, even.  I thought that was fantastic and completely changed the tone, as compared with typical school-fair sort of thing which for the kids revolves absolutely around the tickets and the snack food.

Full of Kitten

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I read an interesting book this week by a political theorist named Jane Bennett called The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics.  It’s basically an argument against the Weberian theory that modern life is characterized above all by “disenchantment.”  One of the categories of modern “enchantment” she considers concerns what she calls cross- or inter-species encounters:

Their magic lies in their mobility, that is, in their capacity to travel, fly, or transform themselves; in their morphing transits…. Metamorphosing creatures enact the very possibility of change; their presence carries with it the trace of dangerous but also exciting and exhilarating migrations.  To live among or as a crossing is to have motion called to mind, and this reminding is also a somatic event.  My hunch is this: hybrids enchant for the same reason that moving one’s body in space can carry one away — think of dancing or the rush after a hard push on the swing.

Living with cats allows a kind of cross-species enchantment.  Everything in the house that means one thing for us, the people, means something different for the cats: couch, rug, chair are caves and bridges; bottle cap, shoe, sweater are prey or toy.  Having cats in the house means continual unexpected transformation and movement.  I think maybe there’s something fundamentally anti-depressant in this quality, the way the inert domestic space is animated and enlivened by surprising movements, leaps and jumps, stretches.  (And sounds: light thumps, coos, tussles, mieows.)  Anywhere you look you might find a creature prowling or patrolling; motion is called to mind.  This can be true of any domestic pet allowed free run of the house, but compared to dogs, cats seem to me more unpredictably other in their species-being and habits, in their own world.

I put my foot out yesterday to push down a corner of the rug that had bunched up, and it turned out that Pot Luck was curled up inside it.

The other day Celie picked up both cats on the porch to bring them inside and asked me to open the door: “I’m full of kitten,” she said.

Christopher Smart:

For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion….

For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadrupede.


Todd Snider, Tree huggin’ lazy-ass hippie

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Todd Snider seems to come to town every year around spring break for two nights of shows, and I’ve always missed him, but finally caught him last night.  Snider is in his early 40s and has been playing for almost 20 years; is from Portland Oregon originally, started his career in Austin as a devotee of Jerry Jeff Walker, Kris Kristofferson, Bill Joe Shaver, and John Prine, and is based in Nashville these days.  I have two of his albums, both really great, The Devil You Know and East Nashville Skyline (the latter a Dylan joke of course).

We (Sarah and Judith and I) couldn’t quite figure out who the audience was.  It was probably the most enthusiastic and loving crowd I’ve experienced in long while — it seemed as if everyone but us knew most of the lyrics.  There was a lot of singing along, shouting requests, and behavior like randomly standing up on a chair for a couple minutes in appreciation of a favorite song.  Definitely not a college crowd (maybe he comes during spring break on purpose?), maybe libertarian, pot-smoking country music fans?

Probably the most obvious comparisons to Snider would be John Prine and Steve Earle (with a bit of Arlo Guthrie and James McMurtry).  His songs are funny/witty with shaggy-dog elements and a populist/political edge, a few of them about stoned/drunken misbehavior ending up in the holding tank.  He ambled on stage in bare feet, baggy jeans and preppy sweater and a crushed felt hat.  Came on a bit like a street busker, inviting requests, chatting a lot.

This song seems like his theme — everyone sings along:

“Conservative Christian, right wing Republican, straight, white, American male.
Gay bashin’, black fearin’, poor fightin’, tree killin’, regional leaders of the South
Frat housin’, keg tappin’, shirt tuckin’, back slappin’ haters of hippies like me.
Tree huggin’, peace lovin’, pot smokin’, porn watchin’ lazyass hippies like me.
Tree huggin’, love makin’, pro choicen, gay weddin’, widespread diggin’ hippies like me.
Skin color-blinded, conspiracy-minded, protestors of corporate greed,
We who have nothing and most likely will ‘till we all wind up locked up in jails
By conservative Christian, right wing Republican, straight, white, American males.”

Here’s an interview — I was charmed by Snider’s explanation of his approach to his finances:

I have to admit that I’m pretty blind to all the money and everything.  I’ve always given mine to this guy named Chuck.  I went to the Jerry Lee Lewis school of music business.  You can have my publishing  for a bong hit and a ride back.  Which some people may think makes me poorer than I should be…. A guy with a guitar doesn’t need a boat.  What rich guy in his right mind, doesn’t want some drunk scamp with an acoustic guitar on his boat? …I got into music by giving up on that part of the world, and promised myself I’d keep it that way.  I knew when I was 19 that I wanted to forget about money forever.

Here’s a video of Snider in a Nashville record store playing “You Got Away With It” a.k.a. “the Tale of two Fraternity Brothers”: