(Pat’s B.B.Q. in Salt Lake City)

Finally, that Alvin and the Chipmunks / Manheim Steamroller collaboration we’ve all been waiting for! Basically sounding the same as a walk past the entrance of a Kay Bee Toys, try this album if you enjoy xylophones, talking robots, the demo button on that old synthesizer at Grandpa’s house, motion-activated cackling witches, xylophones, Max Headroom, battery-powered monkeys banging cymbals together, a dog barking “Jingle Bells,” video game soundtracks of the early 90s, and xylophones. This is crazed carnival clown music taken to a new sample-laden, frenetic frenzy. Full of blooping, looping, endless repetition, two-year-olds may really get into this. Unfortunately we may never know, since I don’t have children yet and I don’t feel good about subjecting my nieces and nephews to this, nor their parents, nor random children at a school playground, because that would just be creepy. Two stars; unless you are in the mood for something really obnoxious (I get that mood myself from time to time) or you want to send a stressed-out person into an actual nervous breakdown, in which case it goes up to four stars. Merry Christmas!

Dan Deacon: Bromst
Carpark Records
Released March 24, 2009

Try “Woof Woof” ( Track 8 ) right here right now for some fun, free, immediate gratification. It’s just as easy as pushing that button your parents really don’t want you to push. Go ahead, push the button. PUSH THE BUTTON!

Nayeli, a recent high school graduate who works at a taco shop/internet cafe in the tiny tropical town of Tres Camarones in Sinaloa, Mexico, arrives one day at a startling realization: there are no men in Tres Camarones. Her own father, formerly the only cop in town, left several years ago for the fabled United States, and so did all the others. Not only do Nayeli and her girlfriends have no one to date and eventually marry, but now they have no one to protect them from the bottom-feeding narcos and bandidos who, anxious for their own territory, have recently moved in on the remote, defenseless village. Watching The Magnificent Seven at the local movie house, Nayeli is inspired with the solution to the plight of Tres Camerones: she will travel North to “Los Yunaites” and round up her father and other able-bodied men to return to Mexico and save their village.  So, with support from the village, Nayeli and three friends begin their hilarious and harrowing journey through Mexico to Tijuana and eventually, hopefully, to the United States, where they expect to quickly enlist seven Mexican “soldiers and policeman” to repatriate and save their village in short order.

This book is at once a winning comedy and an epic adventure tale of a journey into mysterious, dangerous lands (such as Tijuana, Las Vegas, and the Colorado Rockies).  It is also injected with striking moments of social realism, depicting the poverty and desperation of both those who cross the borders and those who stay behind.  It provides a fascinating outsiders’ perspective on the United States as well as a Mexican perspective on border-crossing and immigration. Having read and loved several instances of Americans on adventures or misadventures in Mexico (e.g. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses / Border Trilogy and Kerouac’s On the Road), it was refreshing to read of Mexicans on an adventure in the exotic United States.

This story is filled to overflowing with endearing, memorable and quirky characters (examples: Nayeli’s formidable Aunt Irma, nicknamed La Osa (“the she-bear”), in her younger years a Mexican bowling champion, now running for mayor or Tres Camerones; and Atómiko, a self-made samurai warrior and superhero refuse picker of the Tijuana garbage dump who gives new meaning to “trash talk.”  The mood of much of this book is such that Jared Hess (writer/director of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre) just might be an ideal choice as director of a film version.  Though the characters are amusing and likeable, many of them are a little bit one-dimensional.  The characters’ lack of depth holds the novel back from perfection, but is serviceable enough in a comedic adventure context.

Although marketed as an adult novel, the book might have great appeal to teenage readers because of the age and sentiments of its protagonists, its humorous and exciting storyline, and numerous youth culture references.  Indeed, I almost wonder if, had this been Urrea’s first novel, a publisher might have marketed it as a young adult book. The cover art, though tasteful, does not seem to properly represent the book’s lighthearted tone and contemporary, adventurous story, and was probably designed to visually tie the book to Urrea’s successful adult novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter, which I have not yet read.  It appears as though, in attempting to market this book to Urrea’s existing literary audience, they may have missed out on a potential new and different audience in teenagers.  Furthermore, a quick survey of Internet reviews suggests that, because of this marketing misstep, some readers expecting “serious literature” have been turned off by the comedic elements and simple characterizations, two things that may actually work in its favor as a young adult book.  All in all, I think I would actually recommend this book first and foremost as a book for teenagers; it would be at home in contemporary YA literature.

[Note: the book does contain some explicit language and, of course, an irritating, not-really-necessary and not-entirely-condoned but nonetheless-apparently-obligatory-in-contemporary-literature sex scene. Unfortunately, it's nothing out of the ordinary even for YA literature.]

In her search for heroes, Nayeli becomes the true heroine of the story, her journey rife with ordeals, excitement, distractions, and sorrows. She saves the mission and their lives on numerous occasions, and after trying the hard and dangerous way, always manages to find the help they need in the most unlikely of places and people.  The tragicomic, foreign, and fresh view of both Mexico and the U.S.A. that Urrea portrays through the journey of Nayeli and her companions will stay with the reader for a long time.  Four stars.

Into the Beautiful North: A Novel
written by Luis Alberto Urrea
Little, Brown and Company
342 pages
ISBN: 978-0-316-02527-0
Release Date: May 19, 2009
www.luisurrea.com

Beyond the fact that I was getting paid and hanging out with the cool kids, Preston actually turned out to be a very pleasant and beautiful little place.  Between what I’d seen of Southern Idaho from driving on I-84 and my impressions of Preston as it is portrayed in a little indie flick you may or may not remember from a few years back, I had kind of low expectations.  So I was surprised.  Preston shares the pastoral Cache Valley with Logan, Utah, and it’s possible it may actually have the prettier end of it.  The aforementioned family cabin was nestled in rolling mountain foothills next to a nice little reservoir.  The area is pretty much an all-american idyllic landscape.  I can still smell the hay just thinking about the drive to get there.  I’m really wishing I had gotten my camera out and tried to take some pictures, because now I have a head full of barns, rolling hills, tractors, old small town main street storefronts, and brown/purple mountain ranges in all directions.

It was hard not to feel the pressure of one the great cult comedies of my generation weighing down on me as we drove through town.  I felt that perhaps I somehow diminished or stereotyped the town and its good people by hoping for them to conform to my “Hollywood” expectations.  And yet despite such moral misgivings I persisted in my fantasies.  When some of my co-workers were about to go golfing at the close of our meeting day, I suggested that perhaps tetherball would be a more appropriate recreational activity.  I searched storefronts for the famous Deseret Industries thrift store, where in the past such incomparable treasures as nun-chucks, a dance instruction VHS published in 1982, and a really swank polyester suit had been found.  I was tempted to ask the waitress at Pizza Villa, where we ate lunch, if I could have an order of tater tots.  (They have pretty good pizza, by the way.)  I kept my eyes open for a llama.  Over the years I have seen llamas in so many small towns throughout Utah that they have ceased to be very remarkable to me, and yet in Preston I inexplicably kept my eyes open for a llama.  Behind each grassy knoll we passed I expected to see a camper van parked and perhaps a mustachioed man throwing a football into the fields for a camcorder.  As we pulled out of town and started driving south, I truly felt kind of ashamed for my pathetic, touristy behavior in regards to this place.

The gorgeous drive on S.R. 34 northeast of Preston, originally uploaded by Ken Lund.

Since I didn’t have any pictures of Preston to take home with me, I decided to turn to flickr to fulfill my visual needs.  To my surprise I discovered that a good portion of the photos tagged ‘preston idaho’ on flickr pertain directly to scene locales of the allegedly abominable film.  Looking through the images, you will see the school steps upon which a boy drew a liger in a notepad, the house of Pedro, the Rex Kwan Do center, and so on, and so on.  You will also occasionally see glimpses of that idyllic landscape I was talking about.  Upon further research in the sacrosanct annals of Wikipedia, I discovered that Preston has fully embraced this humble motion picture as the central mythos of their town, as it has given rise to an annual grand celebration.  A schedule of events from 2006 indicates a literary/media-inspired ritual that could come to rival even Dublin’s Bloomsday, complete with bus tours of significant filming sites, a moon boot dance contest and tater tot eating contest, and numerous performances by the Happy Hands Club.  I now feel somewhat relieved and vindicated in looking at the environs of Preston through the eyes of Napoleon’s storytellers.  After all, it is not many towns of less than 5,000 residents that are so honored and immortalized with such a sweet film.  I wouldn’t be too surprised if that waitress had brought me out some tater tots without a second’s question if I’d actually asked for them.

Prestonidaho.org – Preston, Idaho Chamber of Commerce Home Page
Photos Taken in Preston, Idaho – flickr.com
Napoleon Dynamite – official site

P.S. This is also my excuse for not having anything new written and posted — I spent most of the day yesterday preparing said taxes, and earlier this week I was working 9-11 hour days. The prior post, a reprise of a little thing I wrote for our wedding one year ago, I had programmed to automatically post itself on the morning of our anniversary. Anyway, I will get to finishing up my favorite winter album reviews and posting some more pictures muy pronto. Thanks for watching.

I guess I have to admit that hot dogs are a personal favorite food.  I now recognize this because, when I’m left to my own devices at the grocery store and/or subsequently at home, as I am tonight, I have a great tendency to buy them, cook them, and eat them.

Hot dogs really have a lot going for them.  They have a great flavor. They are inexpensive and extremely easy to prepare.  They give one the satisfying impression that one is eating something meaty and substantial.

But that’s not all; in addition to aroma, they exude nostalgia.  The frankfurter has a storied history that is deeply entwined with many pleasant elements of American culture: baseball, barbecues, camping, street vendors, amusement parks, drive-ins, kids meals, and our desire to give things new names when we decide we don’t like the country they came from.

And yet, examined without all these culinary and cultural trappings, the hot dog is quickly revealed as one of the most bizarre food items imaginable.  Processed from the vaguest of origins and with a truly nonsensical name, the hot dog is far more abstract a food than any other sausage I can think of, except perhaps bologna.  They contain high amounts of sodium, fat, and preservatives called nitrites, which I know nothing about but are supposed to be unhealthy when ingested in high concentrations.  These strangenesses and apparent flaws, one can easily argue, originate only in the admirable desire to make good use of all resources and plan for the future.

However, in a culture where fat and salt are readily available and we can preserve food through refrigeration, the hot dog has a new reason for its particular form and function.  A food often marketed and fed to children in a culture in which many are completely detached and ignorant of the sources and production of the food we eat, the hot dog is one of our most successful attempts at nullifying and mollifying ourselves out of recognizing the animal-ness and living-ness of our food sources, perhaps more so even than the hamburger or the chicken “nugget”  or “strip.”  Now more than ever, the hot dog is an iconic American food item.  Let’s please not start discussing the corn dog, though, or we’ll be here all night.

There it is, that special feeling just hit.  There are several more hot dogs left in package in the fridge;  I am sure that I will be eating them sometime soon, in the days ahead.  I don’t like to to let food go to waste.  But still, my stomach roils and rises up in a cry of betrayal, just now realizing that it has been tricked yet again.

[Ball Park Franks]