kill at karaoke

It rained and it rained and it rained last night and the old spongy world just took it.

Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Songs: Ohia, Didn't It Rain
Magnolia Electric Co., Fading Trails
The Orchestra Of The S.E.M. Ensemble, Morton Feldman: Turfan Fragments (Thanks ROOT BLOG!)

My friend and esteemed novelist Chris put me on a Songs: Ohia kick this morning. I interviewed former Governor of Ohia Jason Molia ages back and he was perfectly prickly artiste to deal with, kinda how you want someone like him to be unless they have some Keith Richards-grade stories to relate. I say this because I am in the immediate process of coming up with things I have to ask a certain two-hit-wonder from decades past, like he's only got two songs you know, but you know these songs, the kind that my wife deftly pointed out this morning would kill at karaoke. I wonder how "Captain Badass" would do in that arena?



I suspect you'd have to have the right, hip-enough audience and they'd ruin it, plus it is like ten minutes long. That endless build up of the guitar riff and the drums with you just swaying up there, microphone in hand, just feelin' it, would be pretty funny in a Beckett, not funny way. Now that I think about it, I was supposed to go see Godot with Chris a while back and didn't make it and now, just now, ROOT BLOG, internet oracle above all others, posted a recording of Morton Feldman's For Samuel Beckett which I went looking for the other day and never found. I'm liking Molloy, esp. the bit about the farts I posted yesterday; I can see the influence of these novels on a lot of the novels I like even though nobody is really willing to go there like Beckett and when they do, it's terrible. It's like a bad karaoke moment, you just want it to be over and it never is, the opposite of the Beckett stasis where you want something to happen and it never starts. None of these concurrences mean much and none of this is helping me come up with interview questions, but I'm scretly hoping that he'll say that one massive power ballad, the one to which you made out with someone in a church basement or darkened skating rink, was inspired by the sense of loss (emotional and physical) in Krapp's Last Tape and if he does, I'll let out a little shriek loud enough you'll hear it over the rain. But don't count on it happening.