Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Hour Between by Sebastian Stuart Boston Queer History. In the academic year preceding the Summer of Love, a young man named Arthur who struggles with his sexuality, is thrown out of Collegiate, a private school in Manhattan. His distant parents deport him to a boarding school in Connecticut in the hope that he will make friends and do some work. He is a skinny, thoughtful kid who’d just as soon leave the frantic pace of the city, if only to take a breath. In 1973, I too, was all but ousted from a private school in Manhattan and sent off to a boarding school in Connecticut by a distant parent. I also was a skinny, overly sensitive kid who worried about being gay, the state of the world, and many other things that got in the way of a good time. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I needed to take a breath from the city, too. Once at the boarding school, Arthur meets Katrina, a fascinating but troubled daughter of a movie star who seems to know him better than he knows himself. Katrina is a kind of 16 year-old Judy Garland — small, fragile, but also larger than life. Her eyes are huge and almost too expressive. Her hair is short, jet-black and she pushes it back whenever she is nervous. She is spookily intuitive and broadly knowledgable but she rarely reads and never studies. All in all, Katrina is the kind of miraculous person you can meet when you’re a teenager because you still believe such a person exists. In keeping with the ever-present upheaval of the time, the boarding school itself is undergoing turmoil as the faculty has split into two camps: the lenient, pro-creativity side vs. the traditional, bed-check side. Was it David Olgilvy, the late, loquacious adman, who laid down the challenge that he could devise an ad that anyone in the world would stop and read? (If you find it was someone else, please write.) When asked how he could do this, Olgilvy said something like, “If I put your name in the ad, you’ll stop to look at it.” Well, yes, but you’d have to make almost 7 billion ads, one for every person on earth. But of course, that’s too literal. I assume Olilvy’s point was to create an ad that could speak to you in such a personal way that you’d have to stop and read it. For me, T he Hour Between is that kind of book. It had my name on it. Is its appeal universal enough for a larger audience? I think so. It is a coming of age book, full of interesting characters who illuminate a time when everything was changing. Even when Sebastian Stuart’s characters are at their snottiest, elitist worst, their vulnerability saves them. You care about what will happen to them and you mourn the ones you suspect won’t survive the cynicism and drugs that formed the dark side of the Age of Aquarius. A beginner’s guide to the music of Belle And Sebastian. “Belle And Sebastian were the product of botched capitalism. It would be nice to say they were the children of socialism, but it would be a fib.” So begins a typically wry paragraph in the liner-note “biography” that accompanies If You’re Feeling Sinister , a spot-on album that did as much to build the legend of Belle And Sebastian as any of the playfully arch myth-making the band members undertook in lieu of traditional promotional efforts around its 1996 release in the band’s native Scotland. (’97 in the United States, brought across the pond by EMI subsidiary The Enclave, which was in the process of collapsing by the time the band made its own Stateside trip.) But such crass shilling would seem out of place next to the 10 songs of the band’s second LP, its first recorded as a proper band. Retiringly composed and literately clever, If You’re Feeling Sinister sprung primarily from the pen of band leader Stuart Murdoch, who’d spun the group out of a university course a few years before the record’s release. Yet even this early in his recording career, Murdoch exhibited a preternatural gift with bittersweet melody and the even rarer talent for jumping into the minds of his song’s characters: outcasts, dreamers, and inveterate wasters of potential suited to an author who spent years bedridden by an ailment commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome. Never growing any louder than the playground yelps sampled at the start of its title track, If You’re Feeling Sinister nevertheless touched off plenty of noise among record collectors, message-board dwellers, and the British music press—a curiosity pushed along by Murdoch and company’s refusal to give interviews to the British press, leaving the NME and Melody Maker to splash around in the final, turbid waves of Britpop. It’s just as well, as the world of If You’re Feeling Sinister feels light-years removed from Cool Britannia, its arrangements at turns baroque and unsophisticated, Murdoch’s half-whispered lilt lacking any trace of swagger. In essence, the band was forcing its small-but-passionate following— appropriate for a record where the word “cult” jumps out at the listener from the opening lyric—to give a close listen to songs that still feel impeccably crafted and impossibly intimate 17 years on. Band members eventually started speaking more freely about their music to the press, but there remains a thrill to, say, sussing out the relationship between the titular characters of “Me And The Major” or contemplating the lonely majesty of the protagonists in “The Fox In The Snow.” There are Belle And Sebastian fans who argue that Murdoch would never best the likes of If You’re Feeling Sinister standouts like “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” or “Judy And The Dream Of Horses.” And while that argument may have some merit, it ignores the rest of Belle And Sebastian’s stunning mid-’90s creative tear, a period where albums like If You’re Feeling Sinister and its predecessor, Tigermilk , were supplemented by a series of EPs that were just as crucial to the band’s development and mystique—and the development of its mystique. Later repackaged as a three-disc box set (and then sequenced as the first disc of the indispensable compilation Push Barman To Open Old Wounds ), the non-album releases Dog On Wheels , Lazy Line Painter Jane , and 3.. 6.. 9 Seconds Of Light are of a piece with their long-playing contemporaries. But they also map conventions established by those records onto new directions Belle And Sebastian would pursue in later years, directions laid out by the triumphant girl-group chug of “Lazy Line Painter Jane” or the spy-guitar summer-reading list of “Le Pastie De La Bourgeoisie.” Similarly of note are the increased contributions from the likes of vocalist-cellist Isobel Campbell and bassist Stuart David, moves that would eventually have their own, stratifying effects on Belle And Sebastian. While Tigermilk was Belle And Sebastian’s first album, it was definitely not the first one that most people heard. Recorded for a music-business school project at Stow College in Glasgow, the album was initially (and barely) released in a limited edition of just a thousand copies. Those records didn’t make it too far out of Scotland, but copies were carefully placed into the hands of influential DJs, who played it enough that it attracted the attention of record labels, thus launching Belle And Sebastian as a going concern. For a solid couple of years after If You’re Feeling Sinister , it was incredibly hard to come by a copy of Tigermilk . Fans traded coveted cassettes —there were no torrents, MP3s, or ZIP files to be had in those days—and marveled at both the scarcity and the songs. What they learned: Tigermilk was every bit as good as Sinister , and in spots it’s even better. The band actually agreed, at least to a degree: Paul Whitelaw’s detailed bio Belle And Sebastian: Just A Modern Rock Story claims that the band members much preferred the first album to the legendary second. The truth is that they’re massively similar, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering they were both released in 1996. Both find Murdoch at an untouchable place with his songwriting: Wistful, gorgeous songs like “The State I Am In” and “Expectations” nakedly explored coming of age in the U.K. in the ’90s, and they’re as timeless as anything written early on by one of Murdoch’s idols, Morrissey. (It’s no surprise that Belle And Sebastian found a readymade fan base among Smiths disciples.) Advanced Studies As the proper follow-up to If You’re Feeling Sinister , The Boy With The Arab Strap faced an uphill battle. Murdoch increased that challenge by encouraging his band members to contribute their own songs to the mix, which provides moments both complementary (Campbell’s lead on the lovely “Is It Wicked Not To Care?”) and jarring (Stevie Jackson’s lead on the shoulda-been-a-B-side “Seymour Stein”). Still, there are enough absolutely fantastic songs on The Boy With The Arab Strap —which was named in honor of the fellow Scottish band, who weren’t too happy about it—that it’s worth exploring after exhausting the earlier discs.