Fire from the Heartland sounds amazing: “Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann tells the story of working and saving for years to afford a pair of contacts only to lose them shortly after while riding her bike. This story was an example of one of the ways she learned how much more you value things when you have to work hard and save to get them.”

The folks at Harper’s have announced that writer Zadie Smith will be the magazine’s new book critic as of the March 2011 issue.

by Seth Colter Walls

Mac McCaughan was in the middle of singing a song at a record store while his wife was struggling to keep their 3-year-old son from tumbling headfirst out of her grasp. This took place yesterday, a little after 1 p.m., during an acoustic set-the sort of thing reliably advertised as “intimate”-which McCaughan was playing with two of his Superchunk bandmates, over at New York’s Other Music. (The band’s bassist, Laura Ballance, appeared to only have electric gear on this trip, and so was watching this performance from the back wall.) McCaughan’s wife and their two children (ages 3 and 7) had been either standing, hoisted or seated on the floor about two feet in front of him, along with nearly 100 semi-early risers who all waited in the deceptively strong September sun for over an hour.

Superchunk’s weekend in New York was already fair to describe as a success.

Just 13 hours ago, the entire band had completed a ripping, double-encore set at the sold-out Bowery Ballroom. And like their new record, “Majesty Shredding,” the whole thing was a startlingly alive sort of thing for a band this deep into-and oh, wait a second, it wasn’t time to write the story yet, because this 3-year-old, all limbs and shoes in motion, was preparing to dive from his mother’s arms and fall right on top of his sister, seated on the floor below. McCaughan had been noodling his way through a solo, his face curled skyward in that thoughtful-but-blissed-out way of playing acoustically, but then the song became McCaughan’s second order of concern, at least according to the scorecard of wrinkles right above his eyebrows. Would he ditch the tune altogether, if it looked like something really bad (and preventable) was about to happen?

The situation does not play out so dramatically. McCaughan’s partner handles the kid-juggling act like a pro, guiding their 3-year-old to the floor with a practiced grace that drags his fidgeting gestures out into what looks like slo-mo speed. “I just felt bad that she was having to deal with them crawling all over her, by herself,” McCaughan said later.

We walked to McCaughan’s hotel on Rivington, and we did all the boring “how did getting the band back together for an album after 9 years work?” questions right away. (Boilerplate answer: it all took some doing, since the Superchunkers don’t live in the same town these days. McCaughan cut demos and sent them to the other members, all of whom reconvened over a stray weekend to record a single — “Crossed Wires” — which went well enough for everyone to sign on for enough weekend recording sessions to complete a full record. Then they found a mutually agreeable time to squeeze in a short tour, and targeted the release date to drop just before that run of dates. The end.)

“Can we walk in the shade here?” he asked, on Bowery, between answering these questions for the unknownth time on this trip. “It’s hot out.”

* * *

Here’s something like a thesis: the understated way that Superchunk goes about being great frustrates the act of criticism. There are no large upheavals or aesthetic tear-down jobs from album to album, merely well-thought-through tinkerings and evolutions. Not many bands can sound so much like themselves whether it’s Steve Albini or Jim O’Rourke behind the boards. But then this radical dependability, presented once and again over many a year, tends to be peg-resistant and “take”-discouraging. I suspect there’s a reason — contrary to the up-and-down, many-bullet-pointed arc of his Sonic Youth appreciation — that Robert Christgau has only had two things to say about Superchunk in his Consumer Guide over the last 21 years. (That would be one correct observation — namely, that “Slack Motherfucker” is a keeper of a single-and one questionably ho-hum assessment of the album “Foolish.”)

So, what? You like Superchunk? So do I. What else you got? Lotsa critical reaction to “Majesty Shredding” focuses on what, at first blush, appears to be the band’s reinvigorated, early 90s-sense of themselves: up-tempo and hooky — supposedly at the expense of those progressively delicate arrangements on the band’s final, pre-hiatus albums. But then Superchunk’s two full, electric sets in New York argue against a clean division between their old and less-old sounds. For instance, they show us there are a few corkers on “Indoor Living” we might have forgotten. And that a song from “Here’s to Shutting Up” can work in a stripped-down arrangement.

“If it is maybe more in the punk rock mode than the last couple records, that made sense to me,” McCaughan said. “If we were going to make a record for the first time in nine years, I wanted it to be this thing that people couldn’t just be like ‘Oh, I waited for this?’ You might not like it, but I wanted it to be pretty relentless, sonically, from start to finish. But at the same time, when I hear our music, I don’t think: ‘Whoa, it’s old-sounding!’ When I see these people writing ‘it’s ’93 all over again,’ I think … well, our records in ’93 kinda sounded kinda like records in ‘78! So, to me, it’s a weird thing. I don’t really think of stuff in that way. I acknowledge that that’s how some people have to think about that stuff. But if I hear a record and I like it I’m less concerned….”

It seems reasonable to place a reminder here that McCaughan is, along with Ballance, also co-president of Merge Records; he stops and thinks for a second.

“If I hear about some band,” he said, “and someone tells me they’re part of this whole blah-blah scene, I kind of assume I’m not gonna like it.”

Is this a band’s fault, usually?

“No, it’s not the bands, it’s just….”

Music writers.

“Exactly! When I say ‘some people’ have to think about it that way, I mean: You.” He laughed.

“Whatever, people writing about it need labels to refer to things,” he said. “And ‘indie’ is the same way. It’s a convenient term; it gives you a very general idea what they’re talking about.”

* * *

McCaughan never uses the “shuffle” feature on his iPod. “It’s not interesting to me,” he said.

Curated playlists are acceptable, however. “One of the appliances I don’t want to let go of is my 5-CD changer. I mean, it’s not very good. If I really love CDs so much, I’d get a fancy CD player. But they only make those for one CD. I like having five in there: it’s a good, reasonable amount for my brain to handle… to concentrate on at a time. A friend of mine recently just said: ‘Fuck it, I can’t bring my iPod with me. Whenever I’m listening to it, I think, I bet there’s something else that would be even better to listen to.’ Now he travels a lot, and he brings CDs in a wallet with him. That’s not appealing to me, either, carrying around a CD wallet. But I understand the mindset.”

“The physical world is still really important,” he said. “Not just for bands and labels and whatever — but as consumers of music. One of our jobs as a record label is to create music fans. And that’s harder to do without music stores.”

One of the jobs of a record label is to create music fans? That is a charming idea! But now, it seems it is also time to talk about the Internet.

“It’s weird. In some ways things just balance out,” he said. “When we first started, we went out on a tour with just a 7-inch, or two 7-inches. It’s hard to do that now. It was easier to get people’s attention then. Now you have the tools to access a wide group of people, but so does everyone. So it’s a wash. It’s not as though ‘the Internet is bad’ or ‘the Internet is perfect for this.’”

But isn’t it still true that — even as everyone has access to more tools, and bands draw from larger and larger pools of influences — there is an ever-narrowing amount of attention paid to the not-new? As in: there’s lots of pressure to really be up on the new Flying Lotus record, because it supposedly (though not really) embraces “free jazz” as an element, and because he’s related to Alice Coltrane. Though good luck getting anyone to listen to…

“… an Alice Coltrane record. Yeah,” he said. “Well, I think it’s hard to get people to pay attention to something for any length of time. And something like jazz requires more attention.”

“Like, there could be the greatest review of a band on Pitchfork,” he said. “And the next day: there’s five new reviews. And what I think that transmits is: ‘this is great…’ and then the next day, ‘this is great…’ and the next day, ‘no, wait: this thing’s great.’ Which projects this idea that you don’t really need to pay attention to for anything for too long, even if it’s great. Because there will be something else great tomorrow. How are people supposed to be invested in anything when that’s the attitude that’s put out there? Going back to our job of creating music fans: I think people become attached to things and invested in things when they can learn about it and focus on it. Go in a record store. Pick it up….. You’re making a real decision there. You don’t get that from looking at shit online.”

* * *

One thing that some people do get attached to and invested in are those old Superchunk songs. On Saturday at Bowery Ballroom, our long-held attention spans were proven out by the crowd falsetto that filled the room during the exposed notes in “Like a Fool,” and by our in-key contributions to “For Tension.”

But the odd thing is how, even though the band’s first three records have just been remastered and re-released, the Bowery show featured more songs from 1997’s “Indoor Living” than, say, 1993’s “On the Mouth.” McCaughan says the band started making a Google Doc of songs to have ready for each and every show during this tour, but after they hit 75 songs, “Laura said, ‘we’ve gotta stop adding songs.’”

On Sunday, after the acoustic in-store performance, I helpfully remind Mac that the band neglected to play “Skip Steps 1 and 3” the other night.

“Oh, we didn’t? We did it in D.C.” (That D.C. show, you might like to know, is currently available for download from NPR Music.)

Later on Sunday night, in Williamsburg, one man screams for “Precision Auto” right from the drop — another number that didn’t make Saturday’s setlist. And yet, the second song, much to my bliss, is “Skip.” Once it’s over, the “Precision Auto” guy screams for his favorite again.

He asks for it all night. And when he finally gets it, a lot of us cheer for him and what we hope is his satisfaction. During the encore, comedian Todd Barry gets behind the drums to beat out The Misfits’ “Horror Business” with the band, while Jon Wurster takes over lead vocal duties. “Psycho ‘78!” we all sing, delighted by something we wanted that we didn’t even know about. This thing’s great! No wait: this other thing’s great! We’re all wriggly little kids, jostling and kicking with inarticulate desire, right up until the moment Superchunk sets us down on the floor and we’re all exhausted from doing the pogo. So what if it’s not a springboard for a lot of impressive, timely, well-packaged critical insights? Superchunk is playing again.

Seth Colter Walls is a fan boy.

If you are in the neighborhood it you should probably stop by Union Square to check out Sukkah City. A sukkah, for the unfamiliar, is “an ephemeral, elemental shelter, erected for one week each fall, in which it is customary to share meals, entertain, sleep, and rejoice,” and Sukkah City is:

an international design competition to re-imagine this ancient phenomenon, develop new methods of material practice and parametric design, and propose radical possibilities for traditional design constraints in a contemporary urban site. Twelve finalists were selected by a panel of celebrated architects, designers, and critics to be constructed in a visionary village in Union Square Park from September 19–20, 2010.

My terrible photo here does not do any of these justice. You can find much better images at the Sukkah City website, but you really ought to check them out in person. Hurry up, though, it’s over at 8 tonight.

You don’t see a horror movie to have a nice time. You don’t go to lace fingers with your sweetie and laugh at the witty repartee and sniffle into your shirtsleeve during the climactic emotional breakthroughs and gradually be lulled into halcyon repose filled with reassurance that humanity is all roses and puppies and gold lamé jumpsuits. You go to have your consciousness assaulted, your moral grounding questioned, and your niggling suspicion that our species is teetering on the edge of total depravity confirmed. You go to be right-hooked out of the day-to-day complacency of post-industrial Western life. And above all, you go to have your motherf&%#ing balls scared off.

Which is why it’s so exciting when a horror film touches on that rarest of achievements-a unique, truly scary cinematic moment. And why it’s so eye-gouge-ingly frustrating when the filmmaker chickens out and ruins that moment by upending a full Port-a-Potty of religious BS on top of it.

But before we get into religious ruination, let’s talk about M. Night Shyamalan. There’s no way to discuss Devil without first noting that he’s involved with this movie. It’s like the STD convo on the third date-there’s just no moving forward until it’s addressed.

If anything, the Shyamster is a perfect example of the fragility of modern reputations. He’s like the poster child for creative destruction. I’m not going to dissect the awfulness of each of his last umpteen cinematic calamities-suffice it to say the entire collective consciousness agrees they sucked beyond the bounds of comprehension.

Still, in defense of Sir Shyamalot, I will say that in most of his movies, hidden somewhere in the pulpy depths of eye-gouging dialogue and fecal plotlines, there is usually an intriguing idea. Take The Happening-yes, watching it was a bit like having your liver munched by zombie crows. But there was something raw and amazing about those first few scenes-the notion of masses of human beings completely losing their will to survive. It’s fascinatingly counterintuitive, and most importantly, it hadn’t been done to death, and was memorable.

Of course, it all typically goes to sh#t somewhere around 15 minutes in, when his characters start uttering lines like, “Why don’t you suck a butt” as an attempt to establish background. Somewhere in the writing process, rubbish starts to flow from his pen like raw sewage from a Staten Island treatment plant. (And don’t even get me started on the mandatory ‘Cameo in His Own Films’ rule-and yes, it pisses me off when Tarantino does it too.)

Which brings us to Devil. ShyamSuperman didn’t direct it-that honor went to John Eric Dowdle, whose resume includes Quarantine, a decent remake of the Spanish zombie film REC. In particular, Dowdle plays well with the dark-how it tricks our perception, alters our sense of reality, and generally scares the crap out of us. But M. Night did nab writing and producing credits-and slapping “From M. Night Shyamalan” on the trailer was enough to elicit groans and catcalls from the sold-out crowd when it played before Inception. As with all Shyamalan projects, it has a promising premise-five people are trapped in an elevator, and one of them gets murderous. Add moments of electrical-failure darkness, and you’ve got a situation of squirm-worthy pressure and fear. Which is EXACTLY where we want a good horror movie to go.

Except then Dowdle and his puppetmaster totally puss-er, uh, chicken out-or, more accurately, they assume the AUDIENCE will chicken out and be incapable of handling the situation they’ve oh-so-masterfully created. So at the moments of unbearable tension and horror (the gruesome death of the first victim, the awful confrontation when just (no spoilers!) x number people are left) the film flitters off into some preternatural mess where security guards are muttering prayers in Spanish and the flaccid husband from Julie & Julia is blubbering about his dead son.

And therein lies the crucial Shyamalan mistake: Rather than simply give us a basic, uncomplicated, and yet completely scary premise-people trapped in a tight, enclosed space with a homicidal monster-he has to mix in a fetid grab-bag of various supernatural explanations-or, in this case, silly Biblical dogma. Blah blah it’s really SATAN in the elevator and he’s here to punish your unconfessed sins blah blah blah yawn. Little matter that the non-supernatural idea-that you could get stuck in an elevator with a psychopathic murderer-is both highly possible and a relatively universal fear, and therefore works perfectly well on its own.

No, somehow Shyamalan and his enablers assume we want-no, NEED-the idea of a spectral chassis of evil, that we cling to the standard lore of a Devil because it’s more appealing than the truth, which is that evil is a vast universe of moral relativisms and perspectives, and that one man’s heroism in Afghanistan may have created five orphans that will grow up viewing him and his blond, corn-fed brethren as the embodiments of amoral vileness.

No, in Shyamster’s world, a big scary Satan with all-black eyes and evil goals is easier for moviegoers to swallow-and apparently more appealing than an actual flesh and blood human with no capacity to care whether you’re uninterested in being murdered today. No, real people can’t fly through high rises in Downtown Philly and magically short out electrical wiring and make toast fall jelly-side down (seriously-this is a plot point). No, these things can only be done by the Devil himself, and he will come to punish you for your lack of self-awareness and failure to take personal responsibility for your actions and, most of all, your UNFAIR MEAN NASTY CRITICISM OF UNAPPRECIATED FILMMAKERS WHO HAD SUCH BRILLIANT DEBUTS I MEAN YOU TOTALLY LOVED SIXTH SENSE DON’T EVEN LIE SO WHY DON’T YOU ASSH&*#ES LOVE ME ANYMORE AAAAHHHHHGGGHH?????

Um, yeah, I’ll take the murderer-inhabited steel box any day.

Melissa Lafsky has had it with these @*&% snakes on this @*&% plane.

“Bentley Motors is recalling 596 vehicles in the United States because of a rust problem with the flying ‘B’ hood ornament…. As a result of a part rusting, the ‘B’ may not retract when struck, causing additional injury to a pedestrian,” according to this snarky Times blog report.

Great news for all my cat-loving friends! “It is perfectly legal for a private individual to own a tiger-no license required-in nine U.S. states, including Idaho, Ohio, Alabama and North Carolina. (An additional thirteen states require private owners to obtain a permit to keep a wild animal.)”

“Whereas once comedians could be easily placed into three very broad categories — ‘Men,’ ‘Women,’ or ‘Black People’ — and marketed accordingly, now there are a seemingly infinite number of niche subcultures within the comedy community, each with its own unique demographics and strat. Before you worry about writing down a single joke or trying to have an original thought, it is crucial for you to first decide on a unique comedy ‘brand’ so you can easily market/promote yourself.”

Local blogger Lydia Davis is blogging about translation, in anticipation of her new translation of Madame Bovary: “We say to ourselves, complacently looking to Darwin, that [translations] will compete with one another and the fittest will survive. But a significant problem is that the fittest will not necessarily be the best, although it, or they, may be. The ones that survive may be the best edited, and/or the best promoted, and/or the cheapest, and/or the ones accompanied by the most useful apparatus….”

Things to do: Awl pal Noah Tarnow hosts “The New York City Clash of the Trivia Champions” next Monday (September 27th) at the Highline Ballroom. First prize is $1000, which, you know, who wouldn’t want that? Head here for details.