Portastatic
Satellite Ballroom
Tuesday, October 17
music A brief history of Portastatic:
Way back in the early ‘90s, there was this guy from Chapel Hill, Mac McCaughan, who wrote songs and sang in this band, Superchunk. Great band—had what I consider the single best anti-authoritarian anthem of the ‘90s, “Slack Motherfucker” (yes, it was better than “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” because the lyrics actually made sense). Anyway, in his spare time, Mac was recording these great, rough-yet-rococo pop songs in his kitchen, and pretty soon his fanzine-publishing pal, Tom Scharpling, persuaded him to press a 7" for his label, 18 Wheeler. And thus Portastatic was born.
Fast-forward 14 years, and Superchunk is, sadly, no more (or, at the very least, they’re on an extremely extended hiatus). On the plus side, however, Portastatic just keeps getting better and better, and has released Be Still Please, an album of ecstatic, polished pop brilliance. McCaughan, true to his reputation as the hardest-workin’ man in indie rock, takes time off from overseeing his super-successful Merge Records label to travel with his orchestral caravan up and down the East Coast. On October 17, the band motors into Charlottesville, and plays an epic, almost criminally satisfying set at the Satellite Ballroom. I’ll leave it to Mac himself (writing on the band’s blog) to describe the scene:
13 people in a room that holds 500 isn’t really a recipe for a barnburner of a rock show, but as the old Jim Wilbur rallying cry goes, “you play the show not the crowd”… Actually I often think about all the great shows I’ve seen where I was one of a handful in the audience and the band or artist still totally kicked out the jams, and then you feel like you really got to see something special, as opposed to being one of 600 people sharing the same experience (which can be great as well, just different).
If anything, McCaughan is underselling the level of effort, professionalism and, yes, pure joy that Portastatic brought to this gig. From the echoing power of their new single, “Sour Shores,” to the aching romanticism of “Full of Stars” to the crooning bossa-nova ballad “Sweetness and Light,” (on which the band brought practically the entire audience up on stage to play shakers and maracas), the band filled the Satellite as if it were headlining the cavernous JPJ. In fact, by the time McCaughan retook the stage, to thunderous (well, as thunderous as 13 delighted music fans can be) applause for an encore (a solo acoustic rendition of “Spying on the Spys”), the show tipped the balance from “great” to “unforgettable.”
And right across the street, a sprawling campus of 15,000 potential music fans sat silent, sleeping the slumber of the dead. —Dan Catalano
Thirteen Moons
By Charles Frazier
Random House, 422 pages
words It must suck to be Charles Frazier. His debut novel, Cold Mountain, was published to critical and public praise, and even trumped Don DeLillo’s (far superior) Underworld for 1997’s National Book Award. Random House gave Frazier $8 million for his second book, and now—after almost a decade of hype—we have Thirteen Moons. And no, it’s not like Cold Mountain; in fact, Thirteen Moons pales in comparison to its predecessor. The question is: does that make it a bad novel?
Thirteen Moons can’t decide whether it wants to be epic or intimate—which is problematic, since Frazier is so adept at handling both scales. If Cold Mountain entrenched an intimate love story within the larger framework of the Civil War, then (Moons protagonist) Will Cooper’s string of adventures throughout the dissolving Indian nation attempts to repeat the same situation. All too often, however, Cooper’s personal migration is displaced and overshadowed by larger historical patterns—we see Cooper roaming around the American frontier, but at times it’s like trying to focus on a single ant in a field of tall grass.
Frazier’s hero (based on the real William Holland Thomas) is a veritable renaissance man: store-owner, Confederate colonel, bounty hunter, tribal chief, senator and amateur intellectual. The problem with a jack-of-all-trades like this, however, is their continual elusiveness: Cooper is a mystery not only to himself, but to us—his only constant being a deep connection to the Indian culture that adopted him from childhood. Even the on-again/off-again relationship between Cooper and his mysterious beloved, Claire—who flits in and out of his life like a hummingbird to a feeder—is awkward and confusing, for both character and reader alike.
Unnecessary love story aside (and boy does it feel tacked on, as if Frazier needed to cross “epic romance” off of his literary checklist), Thirteen Moons is ripe with the kind of set pieces and transcendental atmosphere that made Cold Mountain such a pleasure to read—and that alone makes this second novel a worthwhile trek through rambling territory. An unsuccessful duel between Cooper and Featherstone, the guardian/husband of Clair, is told in three differing interpretations, for example—and the final days of Charley, a rebellious Indian hunted down by Cooper and a cluster of U.S. soldiers, are intense enough to trump any of Cooper’s own dark nights of the soul.
Frazier’s writing, so honed and given to rich detail and language, certainly makes your salivary glands pulsate. When a character eats an orange, he “peeled it slowly and studied the differing sides of the peels and smelled them and smelled his fingers. Then he ate each section very slowly, sniffing each one before he put it in his mouth. He savored every moment of his consumption of that orange. When he was done he collected all the pieces of the peel and dried them in the sun like deer jerky.”
And so, while his protagonist may be lost inside it, Frazier’s rendition of 18th century America—tottering between naturalism and industrialism, perfectly rendered and undeniably savory—makes the journey an undeniable, if fitful, pleasure. —Zak M. Salih