That bird is a bat

One night in the fall of 1993, I came home late after drinking with friends. Home was a shared house that I had only just moved into that day or maybe the day before, and I’m pretty sure I was the only one there that night – most of my roommates hadn’t even moved in yet.

I was puttering around in my room and close to crashing when I noticed a shadowy motion just off to the side, at about eye level. Good God, I thought, is there a bird in here? Oh, man – that’s a bat.

I leapt out of my room and shut the door. Reckoning that I’d trapped the little beast in there, I decided to hide under some coats have a bowl of cereal while, um, figuring out what to do about the bat. (I’ve been a late-night cereal-eater all my life.)

So I was standing in the kitchen, munching Shreddies, when I heard a disturbance in the air out in the living room. I leaned my head in. There it was again, that fluttering shadow, and Jesus, now it was coming right at me.

Propelled by nothing more than a base instinct to put something between me and the bat (OK, we can probably simplify all that as “mindless fear”), I abandoned my Shreddies and made it back into my room, pushed the door shut, leaned against it, panting. Reality seemed to be sliding around on me. Hadn’t I shut the door before? How the hell did it get out there? Were there two of them?

While I paced for a few seconds, I could hear the thing flapping around out there in the living room with what sounded like increasing vehemence, and the whooshing started to mix in with strange knocking sounds. Was it bumping up against the door? Then there was silence, and then a flurry of low bumping and rustling, and then I watched the bat crawl under the door and rise up and come at me.

The next hour or so resembled a French farce, but with a foul-faced flying rodent instead of an ingénue in a nightgown. Doors were slammed; rooms were fled from and returned to; corners were peered around apprehensively. It all ended with me barricaded inside my room, still-packed boxes shoved flush against the bottom of the door, a towel stuffed into the seam at the top. Every light in my room blazed. I fell asleep on my futon, fully clothed, still a little drunk, clutching a plunger in an outstretched arm.

• Mahjongg, “Those Birds Are Bats”

Mahjongg (great name) are new to me; they’re on good old K Records and they’re apparently from Missouri. This song is pretty atypical of Kontpab (bad name), the album it sits on, most of which has a chunky electro vibe that vibrates back & forth between hypnotic polyrhythms and grooveless clatter.

But “Those Birds Are Bats” (great title) is more like No Age or Times New Viking in its MO: galloping, tuneful exuberance shrouded in a haze of hiss. (The shrouding presumably serves the strategic purpose of giving the track a more evocative, mysterious patina than just some regular old pop song. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – hey, it works.)

You can buy the album here and it appears that for now, at least, you can stream the whole thing here.

Trip, Wind, Dude

As an evocation of the partly trancelike and partly nerve-churning properties of an hourlong back-country drive through sideways snow & occasional whiteout & bullying, shrieking winds, this one by Black Dice is pretty good. Probably wasn’t intended that way, but still.

• Black Dice, “Trip Dude Delay” (buy Miles of Smiles here)
  
  

Characters and words

From Thomas Jones’ review of James Woods’ How Fiction Works (which is new in the U.K, forthcoming in North America):

Characters, as well as readers, are surely entitled to perceptions, thoughts and feelings that they are unable to put into words. But because words are the medium of fiction, the writer uses the best words available to him to convey to the reader the character's state of mind.

As Henry James put it in the Preface to the New York Edition of What Maisie Knew, a novel Wood singles out for praise: 'Small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary.'

The most powerful siren song

Deborah Eisenberg, in an interview in Tin House #34:

For a long time when I’m working on something, I can’t look at what my hand has produced the day or week or month before, because it’s just hideously phony. You’d think that phoniness would be something that’s achieved with work – that the natural would precede the artificial – but it’s actually the opposite for most writers, I think. There are famous exceptions, of course. But generally, unphoniness is what you achieve with work. The first impulse is always a cliché, or something that’s inaccurate. It’s a kind of inaccuracy that is the most powerful siren song, because although it’s very difficult even to approximate something it is actually possible. And you’re so proud of yourself for having approximated it, you think, Well, that’s pretty good.

I love LA!

My favourite songs so far of this young year are Erykah Badu’s “The Healer” (produced by Madlib), Xiu Xiu’s cover of “Under Pressure” (with Michael Gira), and this thing by Sarah Silverman (with special guest).

We don’t know how, we don’t know when

• Scout Niblett, “Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death” (buy I Am here)

Doesn’t get much simpler than this – a ragged drumbeat, a melodic warble, a couple tiny scraps of lyric about Death. I’m ready to ride it straight into the ground, a mile down to some spooky damp cavern half-lit by green-glowing moss.

Jens Lekman covers the song for a comp for his label, and he does the death masque as a ballroom promenade – puts his suave croon out front, dresses up the tune all pretty, the backbeat a syncopated wiggle, the keyboards blowing bubbles. There’s even a choir in there. Not that I don’t like it – I do – but there’s something more inviting about the cold comfort of the original, the green moss against the rock in the dark.

• Jens Lekman, “Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death” (buy SC100 here)