If You’re Feeling Sinister
By Scott Plagenhoef
33 1/3

This book is a bunch of bullshit. I love Belle and Sebastian more than anybody in the world probably, but here’s the thing about them: They are BORING. Beautiful music, boring people. I mean, not personally. I’m sure they’re superfun to hang out with (maybe), but to read about them, who cares? I read their other bio and it was a snooze parade. It’s a bunch of nice people in a nice band. There are no TVs whizzing through hotel windows or satanic spells making knives fly through the air at Jimmy Page’s house (or was it Keith Richards’s?) or Ozzy Osbourne snorting a line of ants up his nose or David Crosby almost burning down his private jet with a meth torch. Stuart Murdoch likes to go to church and drink tea. That’s it. And don’t get me wrong, that’s great! He keeps an infrequent diary on the band’s website and that’s mostly what he writes about—different kinds of herbal tea and singing in his church choir. Occasionally he catches a cold or receives a letter in the mail. And he jogs. He likes jogging and looking at nature. Actually, his diary is very charming. THAT would make a good book. I would happily read a collection of his online diary entries in book form. But this is just a 105-page press release written by a (no joke) Pitchfork editor. I do not give a fuck about the “critical reception” of Tigermilk or in what specific ways the band is influenced by the Smiths (dur, anyway). How about trying to write something at least half as compelling as one single Belle and Sebastian song? You can’t, can you?

AMY KELLNER


Of Walking in Ice
By Werner Herzog
Free Association

In November of 1974, Werner Herzog learned that Lotte Eisner was dying in Paris. He was in Munich, but took a compass, a jacket, and a few necessities and began to make his way to Paris on foot, believing that if he walked to her, she would not die. He kept a notebook as he walked and had not intended to publish it, but as he explains in the introduction, he read the notebook four years later and was “strangely touched, and the desire to show this text to others unknown to me outweighs the dread, the timidity to open the door wide to unfamiliar eyes.”

In this book, you find the Herzog of Burden of Dreams, who spoke of the agony of a bird’s cry. He writes, “A tractor approaches me, monstrous and threatening, hoping to maul me, to run me over, but I stand firm… The region I’m traversing is infested with rabies.” You will hear as well the arrogance and absurd beauty that you see in any picture of his face. But there is also an unfamiliar person, a shy kid. Sometimes, after walking without speaking for a time, he can’t find his voice. He is often embarrassed about his appearance, and hides from passersby or is afraid to meet a waitress’s eye. Twice he goes to a mirror to confirm that he still looks human. The bulk of this book is notes on what appears before him, written with the care and intensity of a person in love. Basically, everything hurts him. He writes, “A roebuck jumped across the road and slipped on the asphalt, as if it was a polished parquet floor… A branch has grown through a tree trunk; over this I lost my composure, plus there was a barking of dogs from some dead village.”

He writes of his intense loneliness and the miniskirts of village girls. He records his dreams without saying, “This was a dream, not real,” thereby giving them the same reality as he gives a woman he sees outside a farmhouse, crawling on all fours. You get the sense he has come a bit unstuck and is letting it happen, never doubting his mission (he should not).

Also, he says things like this: “I see ever so many mice. No one has the vaguest idea just how many mice there are in the world, it’s unimaginable.” And: “When Santa appeared with his sunglasses on top of the balcony, I was completely convulsed with a paroxysm of laughter.” And when he arrives in Lotte Eisner’s room and speaks high Herzogian nonsense, “Together we shall boil fire and stop fish,” she neither rolls her eyes at him nor pretends to understand. Rather, gently, she slides him a chair. And then there is the final sentence of the book, which you may wish not to read yet, but if you know you won’t buy it, it is below.

“Open the window. From these last days onward I can fly.”

AMIE BARRODALE