My Aardvark book box subscription scores again; the books from this service have consistently surprised me with their quality, especially the horror novels, which have produced some of my favorite books of the year– books that I’d never have come across were it not for the club.
I need to get something out of the way first, though. This is a haunted house book. It’s a pretty damn effective haunted house book. You can really stop reading here if you want! You probably already know if you like good haunted house books, and if you are that guy, go grab this.
That said: the verb that keeps getting used throughout this book about what the house does to people is eats. The house eats people. The main character is Jessie Campanelli, fourteen years old at the start of the book (and living in a neighborhood near where I lived in Chicago, and in high school in 1994, which was the year I graduated, so this book hits home in a few places) and sick at home in bed, when she dares her annoying little brother to get a couple of his friends and go spend half an hour in the creepy old house down the road.
One of his friends loses an arm. Paulie is never seen again. The house ate him. And it’s immensely creepy and atmospheric in the book, but God help me, every time I saw a reference to the house eating someone, I was reminded of this:
(Forgive me, please, Christina Henry; your book is way way better than Death Bed: The Bed that Eats, which Oswalt gets the name of wrong every time he mentions it, but I couldn’t get past the eating.)
Jessie, who is an adult with an elementary-aged child by the end of the book, spends her life living in the house she grew up in, and Paulie’s death reverberates throughout the book, leaving scars that eventually rob her of her entire family and bring her one of her own. The book does a great job of capturing the kind of working-class, multi-generational families that Chicago’s neighborhoods are known for, and the relationships, bad or good, between Jessie and the rest of the characters in the book are a definite highlight. Jessie herself is kind of a mess, but she’s earned it, and her determination to better herself and keep her son safe is kind of inspiring.
I read this book in about four hours, a hundred pages before bed and the rest this morning before I was able to do anything else. It’s hard to put down, and the pacing is masterful. It’s creepy as hell throughout, and if anything I could have gone for another fifty pages or so to beef up the ending a bit. The book doesn’t quite fumble the finish, but the ending does feel a little bit rushed, which is my only real complaint.
I missed spooky season with this one– I should have read it in October– but you should check it out anyway.
(Okay, one thing: to be completely clear, there are gonna be some dying and/or threatened children in this book? Paulie isn’t the only one. If that’s not your bag, avoid. Consider this your trigger warning.)
I had a twelve hour day today and I’m exhausted, so this is gonna be a quick hit, but I just saw an article that called REM “arguably the biggest band in the world” for “about five years” in the nineties.
I call bullshit. They were big, certainly, and those years were definitely the band’s biggest years, but the biggest band in the world? Not in any version of the nineties where U2 existed, and I’m pretty sure I could come up with a few other examples if I spent some time thinking about it.
Pearl Jam, otherwise known as the greatest band on the planet, is on tour right now in support of Dark Matter, their most recent release, which somehow is one of the best albums they’ve ever done. Bands that had their first release in 1991 aren’t allowed to release one of their best albums in 2024. This doesn’t make any sense. They did it anyway.
Anyway, tickets to Deer Creek– fuck you, I don’t know what the hell the Ruoff Center is, it’s Deer Creek– were absolutely fucking ludicrous when the show got announced. Like $600+ for lawn seats.
I’ve been keeping an eye on them anyway, and … well, they’ll be at Deer Creek next week and tickets on the lawn (which, at Deer Creek, are still pretty damn good seats) are down to a much more reasonable $120 apiece, and even actual seats are at a price I’m willing to pay for them.
Now, note that I said “next week.” What do you think that implies about the actual date of the show? Or, more relevantly, the day of the week?
Because the Goddamned show is on a Monday. And I’m sorry, even building in taking the next day off, I absolutely cannot go to a rock concert on a Monday night when I am 48 years old. I just can’t. I have seen these guys in concert three or four times (I am so old I can’t immediately tell you exactly how many) and I have still somehow never seen them play Black live so I absolutely have to see them at least one more time before I die or one of them does, but I genuinely think I could get free tickets and the creeping existential horror that takes over when I even contemplate going out on a Monday night, much less to something I have to drive a couple of hours to, would keep me from going.
I mourn my lost youth. Not a lot; I didn’t really use it that well when I had it, but still.
A secret about me: my opinions cannot always be trusted.
I was wandering through old posts the other day, as I am occasionally known to do, and I came across a post where I described Pearl Jam’s last album, Gigaton, as “forgettable” and had very high praise for Binaural, an album that I just said was possibly my least favorite of their albums. So … sometimes my opinions change! This is a thing that happens. In Gigaton’s case I am much more fond of it than I was when it first came out (this has been known to be a thing with their work, I’ll admit it) and while I don’t have anything bad to say about Binaural I was apparently really in the mood for it when I wrote that other paragraph.
So if you want to take me saying that Dark Matter is Pearl Jam’s best album since Vitalogy with a bit of salt, I will not look askance upon you. I will say this: the last time I remember being this floored by an album, the last time it ran through my head constantly for two weeks, the last time I listened to nearly nothing else (other than a few Taylor Swift spins, mostly under duress) for this length of time since it came out, was the Dave Matthews Band’s Crash in 1996.
I will have this entire album memorized soon. I don’t think there’s a single weak track. There’s one song, Something Special, where you could make an argument that it belongs more on an Eddie Vedder solo album than a Pearl Jam album, and one song has a bridge that I feel like sounds like a transition into another one of their songs, but that’s all the criticism I can muster.
It’s amazing. It’s their best work in, literally, two decades. I cannot wait to hear it live, and if you have ever been a Pearl Jam fan you owe it to yourself to pick this up. I’d go through song by song, but somehow I have another hockey game to go to in a few minutes, so this is the best I can do for now. If I’ve still got it on 24/7 rotation in another week or so I’ll go ahead and do that. For now, Scared of Fear, Wreckage, Won’t Tell and Waiting for Stevie are my favorite tracks, but again: there are no skips here. I love it I love it I love it.
It hit us sometime this week that we hadn’t even considered the idea that our son might want to join us at the Pearl Jam Dark Matter Theatrical Experience. He didn’t, and he wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but it got me briefly looking at tickets again, which entertained me greatly. Our showing, the sole one available when the email went out from Ten Club in the first place, was nearly sold out, with only a few stray seats available. Ironically, one of them ended up being next to us, so the boy would have had a place to sit while he was simultaneously bored out of his mind and paralyzed by loud.
At some point they’d added a second screening and not told anyone. That one was happening at 8:45 PM, and it had sold about eight seats, which entertained me, as it suggested that a) everyone who wanted seats had bought them for the first show, and b) the vast majority of Pearl Jam fans are roughly my age, their late forties if not older, and had absolutely no interest in going to an 8:45 PM anything on a goddamned Tuesday.
I didn’t take the picture above– I snagged it from Reddit– but it gives you a pretty good idea of how the thing went. I am provisionally very happy with the album, more than I thought I’d be, and as a music lover the notion of sitting in the dark in a theater with a good sound system (critical, it turns out, and apparently some of the theaters weren’t well-chosen, but ours was fine) and listening to a new album by a band I love for the first time is pretty Goddamned appealing.
Unfortunately, the second listen, the one with the “mesmerizing visuals,” was a little half-assed. They put the lyrics on the screen, which was nice, as if you know PJ you’re already aware of how close to impossible Eddie can be to decipher on an early listen, but the visuals themselves basically amounted to a different high-res, movie-screen-sized screen saver for each song. They weren’t particularly thematically linked and they weren’t, like, in time with the music or reacting to it or anything. And for some reason the lyrics weren’t there for half of one of the later songs, for no clear reason. This appears to have been the print and not somehow the result of our theater, as there were other gripes about it on Reddit.
The point was the music, though, and again, I’m a big fan of the album. I’ll talk about it more once I’ve had a chance to listen to it at home– and, while I’m griping, it wouldn’t have killed them to put the name of the damn song up in the corner of the screen during the second listen, either– but it’s solid, and possibly their best work since Avocado. We’ll see.
There’s a new Pearl Jam album out this week, and unless something has gone very wrong, by the time you see this I should be sitting in the dark with a bunch of other flannel-clad nineties dorks listening to it. They’re doing this limited-engagement one-night-only movie theater thing, where they play the album, which is called Dark Matter, in complete darkness, and then play it again with what they’re calling “mesmerizing visuals.” So by the time I get home, I’ll have heard it twice, and hopefully I won’t stink of weed or have a headache. We’ll see.
Pearl Jam has been my favorite band for a very, very long time. During that time I have formed Opinions. And I saw a Reddit thread the other day that was asking if you could only keep two tracks from each Pearl Jam album, which ones would they be?
None of you care, I know, and this will absolutely take longer to write than will be worth it– I’m starting it on Monday night– but it’ll be fun, and oh also I have no intention of sticking to two songs, so here we go:
TEN (1991)
Best Song: Black, my favorite song, period. Indispensable Songs: Black, Jeremy, Alive, Release Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: This might be their only album I can name every song from.
Let’s be real: every song on Ten must be kept, but if you put a gun to my head, it’d have to be those four. I could maybe — maybe— do without Oceans. But I can’t.
Vs. (1993)
Best Song: Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town, my second-favorite song. Indispensable Songs: EWBtCiaST, Animal, Daughter, WMA Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Go, because Pearl Jam also has Why Go and it messes with my head.
Vs. is another album that is burned into my head forever and I need damn near every song. I mean, maybe I could lose Glorified G in a pinch, or maybe Leash, but that’s about it.
Vitalogy (1994)
Best Song: Better Man Indispensable Songs: Better Man, Nothingman, Whipping, Corduroy, Bugs Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Stupid Mop, which I swear to God and sunny Jesus was called Hey foxymophandlemama, it’s me on the original album release.
Fun fact: Vitalogy is actually my favorite Pearl Jam album. I walked across Bloomington at midnight to buy a copy of this album on release date and then stayed up to listen to it, pissing my roommate off to no end. I am literally the world’s biggest fan of the song Bugs. I love this album.
No Code (1996)
Best Song: In My Tree Indispensable Songs: In My Tree, Red Mosquito, Off He Goes Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Red Mosquito
I didn’t like No Code the first time I heard it. I’m not sure what the hell I was thinking. I have every word of Red Mosquito memorized and I have no idea why I can never remember the damn song’s name. It’s literally in the first line. I’m not very bright sometimes.
Yield (1998)
Best Song: Wishlist Indispensable Songs: Wishlist, Given to Fly, Low Light, All Those Yesterdays, Faithful Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Brain of J.
I was in the middle of a heavy hip-hop phase when Yield came out, so it’s one of the very few Pearl Jam albums I didn’t pick up immediately upon release. And it took a while for it to click, as did a lot of the middle-career Pearl Jam albums. But it’s got some amazing stuff on it, especially when played live and Eddie can never get the words to Wishlist right.
Binaural (2000)
Best Song: Nothing As It Seems Indispensable Songs: Nothing As It Seems, Insignificance, Of the Girl, Parting Ways Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: n/a
Binaural is one of the few Pearl Jam albums where I’m known to skip tracks, mostly because most of my favorite songs on this one are better live so honestly I don’t listen to it very often. I think it might be my least favorite of their studio albums, which doesn’t mean I don’t like it (I listened to it today on the way home from work, in fact) but something has to be my least favorite album.
Riot Act (2002)
Best Song: Love Boat Captain Indispensable Songs: Love Boat Captain, I am Mine, All or None, Cropduster Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Absolutely fucking Cropduster.
Love Boat Captain was our song at our wedding, and was quoted in the program: Hold me, and make it the truth/ That when all is lost, there will be you. This entire album is indispensable.
Fun fact: I’ve spelled indispensable wrong every single time I’ve typed it in this post, including that time, where I accidentally put an “e” after the “d.”
Lost Dogs (2003)
Best Song: Down Indispensable Songs: Down, Yellow Ledbetter, Hard to Imagine, Dead Man Walking, Last Kiss Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Drifting, because they also have a song called Drifting Away
Technically a two-disc collection of rarities and b-sides and not a true studio album, Lost Dogs is still a fantastic collection even if the ludicrous Gremmie Out of Control and Dirty Frank are on it.
Pearl Jam (2006)
Best Song: Oh god this is hard World Wide Suicide Indispensable Songs: World Wide Suicide, Life Wasted, Gone, Come Back, Inside Job Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of:None on this one
My god, I love this album. Affectionately known as the Avocado Album, I saw them at Lollapalooza while they were touring for this release, and I love it. I love it all. Absolutely the best of their post-nineties releases.
Backspacer (2009)
Best Song: Just Breathe Indispensable Songs: Just Breathe, Unthought Known, Amongst the Waves Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Force of Nature
I also saw them on tour for this one, at Deer Creek. Backspacer has always felt like them stepping back and taking a breath after Avocado, but there’s definitely some good stuff on here. It’s super short at only 37 minutes, though, so there’s no way for it not to feel a little unimportant in comparison.
Lightning Bolt (2013)
Best Song: Sirens Indispensable Songs: Sirens, Swallowed Whole, Sleeping By Myself, Yellow Moon, Future Days Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Swallowed Whole
I don’t give Lightning Bolt enough credit, I think, because it’s organized so oddly– all of the best songs are in the back half of the album, and other than Sirens I don’t really love any of the first six or seven tracks. That last third or so, though, is phenomenal.
Gigaton (2020)
Best Song: Dance of the Clairvoyants Indispensable Songs: Dance of the Clairvoyants, Seven O’Clock, Comes Then Goes, River Cross Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Seven O’Clock
I really love Gigaton, although I admit I don’t know it nearly as well as many of their other albums– probably because I’m not buying the concert bootlegs as fanatically as I used to and so I don’t have live recordings of any of the songs on it. Every time I listen to it I’m surprised at how good it is, which you’d think I’d have gotten over after four years. It’s not as lopsided as Lightning Bolt, either, so I really don’t have an excuse.
And there you have it. I’ll have heard Dark Matter by now, or at least be listening to it, and I am a big fan of the first two tracks, but we’ll see. The environment might have me come out raving about it or if it’s not as positive as I want it to be, it might hurt my opinion of the album. I can also imagine a world where I’m tired from work (ILEARN started today) and don’t really want to be out in public. I’m sure there will be a review of it soon one way or another.
We’re about to have another dumpster fire of a town-hall debate, in about an hour or so, and I’m going to attempt to liveblog the thing again, although I continue to make no promises that I’ll actually survive the thing. I wanted to get one thing out of the way before the debate starts, however, in anticipation of a certain participant attempting to make hay of Bill Clinton’s record with women.
I had a conversation with my wife the other day about, were Clinton somehow younger than he is now and not so obviously addled (I really do think the man is seriously unhealthy) and if he ran for President– you can see how this hypothetical gets convoluted quickly– knowing what we know, or suspect, about him, would either of us vote for him? Bill Clinton was the first Presidential candidate I ever cast a ballot for, in 1996. I wasn’t old enough to vote for him in 1992, but I would have.
We ended up agreeing that, with his we’ll say shady reputation, it was highly unlikely that nowadays he’d even manage to get the nomination in the first place. My wife brought up the example of John Edwards, who you may have heard of, but certainly not recently. For the non-family-values party, the Dems certainly don’t seem too big on adulterers.
But: I voted for a guy in 1996 who has been accused of rape and multiple instances of sexual harassment, and would have voted for him again in 2000 had the Constitution not prevented it, and by that time he’d not only been accused of rape and sexual harassment but he’d been caught in an affair that was at best squicky about the power relationship between the two legally-consenting adults involved.(*)
I would not, in 2016, vote for a man with such a record. I suspect in 1996 I simply brushed the entire thing off. In 2016 the number of women involved and the skeevery of the affair we know he had are more than enough to prevent me from ever voting for him again, or anyone like him now. I don’t know what the hell happened with Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, or any of the rest of them, but one of the big differences between me now and me in 1996 is my deliberately cultivated habit of believing women when they accuse people of this shit now. I will still defend Clinton’s presidency. I will not defend him as a person, and I wouldn’t vote for him again. Those three things can all be true at the same time.
And it should go without saying that not a bit of this has any reflection on the job Hillary Clinton would do as president. None of us are being asked to vote for Bill again, and Bill’s nature as a sexual harasser is not a relevant issue to Hillary’s suitability for the presidency. Trump will try and confuse the issue; he should be scoffed at. Hillary is no more responsible for Bill’s activities than any of Trump’s three wives (one of whom has sworn under oath that he raped her, by the way) are responsible for his. Hillary has chosen to remain married to her husband; her reasons are hers, and are none of my business.
Still glad that I get to vote on Wednesday, by the way.
(*) I looked up the timeline: I coulda sworn this happened earlier, but apparently Broaddrick’s allegation that Clinton had raped her happened in 1999, after both of his elections, and she denied it happening while being questioned under oath during the Paula Jones case. I’m not interested right now in digging further to see if I’m thinking of a different person, and I don’t think the timeline changes much, honestly.
We’re about to have another dumpster fire of a town-hall debate, in about an hour or so, and I’m going to attempt to liveblog the thing again, although I continue to make no promises that I’ll actually survive the thing. I wanted to get one thing out of the way before the debate starts, however, in anticipation of a certain participant attempting to make hay of Bill Clinton’s record with women.
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