{a post-proem interlude}

You’re forgiven, if you forgot about how this webpage is meant to be telling a specific Story — or if you forgot about the thing altogether. The last three entries have been transitional bits and pieces, the most recent of which is more than two months old. That entry, for its part, was meant to be a “proem on rock,” a brief preamble before getting back into the no-nonsense business of hard, objective bloglifejournalism. I never followed through, instead seeking refuge from the cold in my cozy dorm room and the Virgin Islands, in which places I wrote a small book’s worth of analysis of and criticism on everything from Kafka to hip-hop, middle English poetry to contemporary music and law.1 Now I’m back, and instead of continuing the Story, I’m here weaving yet another strand of connective tissue. This is akin to placing an “Interlude” after an “Intro” on your record, a dim move that even a glue-sniffing, wife-betraying asswipe like Usher wouldn’t make, and yet here I am, insulting Usher like he’s the damn fool.2

Who’s the fool? Well, there can be more than one, and right now I’m owning up to my place at the table. I want to write the Story, to revel in the fond memories and exorcised demons, to get it out of my system already, and yet I’ve done a historically awful job of keeping up. A New Year’s Resolution probably can’t make my track record any better, but a guy can try — although things only seem to be ramping up, with ever-increasing band duties, a growing freelance writing palette (yes!), a new stride in my academics,3 and more than I care to even think about right now. But 2009 was a quantum leap from 2008, The Worst Year of My Life, and if I can keep vaultin’ in oh-Ten, it’s gonna be a damn fine year as well. I’m amped.

What were we talking about? Oh right, nothing: and New Year’s, kind of. It was a decent Eve, though couldn’t help but pale in comparison to some recent ones.4 I spent some of the afternoon on a freeway while reading Hunter S. Thompson and listening to Usher’s Confessions, which attentive readers of Soymilk Revolution and careful listeners of music will by now know is a bad album — one of the most syrupy logs of shitschmaltz I’ve ever forced myself to ingest — and I spent some of the evening walking around NYC’s snow-dampened streets, wet like a descending mountaineer’s defrosting nostrils. Relentless wind chills pierced my woolen exterior with ease, making me yearn for the shabby, clotted veins of the city’s arterial subway system, the relative warmth of still air and collective body heat. My modest desires were appeased several times over the course of the evening, affording my friends and I not only warmth but also the occasional platform jazz solo, improvised music for an improvised crowd. During this time I was writing furiously in my notebook and thinking about how Hunter S. Thompson’s hilarious brand of Gonzo journalism is perhaps the earliest form of “citizen journalism,” especially as seen in his On the Campaign Trail ‘72 book, really especially as regards Edmund Muskie and the drug Ibogaine. Hm.

Musical collaborator/good friend Zach and I spent some time with friends in a friend’s apartment that night, discussing the difference between the Bolt Bus and the Chinatown bus. Zach paraphrased what I had said on a Chinatown bus earlier that day, unaccredited, in noting that the Bolt Bus is simply the Chinatown bus for white xenophobes who don’t like hearing a small Asian woman scream about how the next departing bus is on its way to “D.C., Washington,” or “Delphia, Philly.” I continued my pilfered thought by pointing out how the various Chinatown bus companies are actually often owned by rival gangs, a sort of Triads vs. whoever-the-fuck-else deal that appears at least sufficiently sane on the surface but is actually heavily steeped in a competition so fierce that the businessmen and women involved are liable to kill each other for your tattered $10 bill. However, I had to admit that the most dangerous things I’ve ever witnessed in all my years of Chinatown bussing is a fat urban couple who filled a blast radius of twenty seat aisles with a stench that smelled like fried chicken via fiery, vengeful asshole, and a hook-up between two friends of mine that I wouldn’t have imagined ever hooking up, at least not on a bus. So perhaps those Chinatown buses aren’t all that dangerous, after all — though those two things happened on the same bus ride, to tell you the truth. If nothing else, that’s a little fucked up.

A lot of other things happened that New Year’s in New York. For the occasion I became an insatiable vortex, into which-whom disappeared two hot dogs, a papaya smoothie, three slices of mysterious and delicious defrost pizza, three courses at a decent Chinese restaurant, cheap boxed wine, a 600-calorie bomb in the form of a Crumbs carrot cake cupcake, a fair amount of Jack Daniels, a bullshit “les petits” bottle of Evian and two novelty-sized slices of fresh pizza, in that order. I also spent the two hours before, the moment during, and the half hour after the turn of the decade watching a jam band play, of all things.

It was a southern rock/gospel-influenced jam band, so I guess that was interesting. I’ve never been much for jam bands — it speaks more to the side of music I could give a shit less about (intense virtuosity) and less to the side I couldn’t love more (direct, moving songwriting) — let alone when it costs me $50 to witness, but the strange bastards onstage had their moments. The crowd was also intriguing: I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a more varied crowd of people at a show before, the vast majority of whom seemed to be genuinely enjoying the hell out of the proceedings. People of all creeds and races, heights, person-genres, et al: a rotund little midget who was swigging ale and grooving to the band almost entirely out of his field of vision; grey-haired folks who were not there because of younger relatives; the kind of scenesters you’d more commonly see owning the dancefloor at a fashionable club somewhere;  and a very, very cute young woman in my immediate vicinity who was dancing her heart out and has left a small impression on my mind that will probably recall itself every time I am faced by the prospect of a jam band again for at least the next few years of my life. Which will be damn infrequent, lord willing.

For the most part, I tried to focus on the music but couldn’t keep those kinds of thoughts out of my head. And the music itself inspired more than enough thoughts on its own, thoughts like:

“Jam” music presents the rock band as pornographic, orgiastic release. Each musician is given a moment in the sun to play with his or her self, and after a few vamps and runs of auto-stimulation, the whole lecherous lot unites and gets off together in a great big communal climax. To their credit, they can come many times without going limp — though from certain perspectives, it would look as if they weren’t ever too virile to begin with. Whatever.

Listening to a jam band play is like reading a paper by a pretty smart kid who nevertheless refers to his thesaurus at least twice per sentence. It’s easy to dig on the pyrotechnical vocabulary and the florid prettiness of the individual elements, but the sum is far less impressive than any of its given parts — or even the potential of what each “author” (literary or musical) could be doing with what he or she’s got going on. This is why so many fans of this kind of music can listen to one of, say, Guided By Voices or Weezer’s best records, scratch their heads, and spit about how it “doesn’t do anything new.” It misses the point entirely, not just of the music in question but as far as I care music in general — though perhaps I just never inhaled enough Cali ‘dro to get the point of jam music, and nobody’s got anybody to blame for that except me. Different strokes for different bloats.

Blokes, I meant. Folks. Willis Jackson? Speaking of differing tastes, mine have been changing a lot recently as far as music goes. I still love most of the shit I’ve been loving for the past few years, but in general I feel like I’ve been experiencing something of a “genre awakening.” I like reggae now. I love dub, and in the past few weeks I think I’ve been starting to appreciate hip-hop on the face of its universally acknowledged merits and not just the occasional overlaps it has with my more entrenched musical tastes/leanings. My Last.Fm, if you can find it, is pretty ridiculous…If it tells you anything, my two favorite releases of last year are by rap-punk bastard child P.O.S. and mainstream star/gender- and genre-bending pop thing Lady GaGa. I’m either broadening my horizons or losing them entirely.

What the fuck is this interlude supposed to accomplish, anyway? And what kind of aesthetic dolt/delinquent make his interludes as long as his real tracks? (Or, in my case, posts — the last ‘real’ one being “Nights It Came Together,” about half a dang year old now.) Well, this has gotten me into the swing of writing about myself again, which is something I suppose. More to come soon? Maybe. In the meantime, I’m still writing for one of the top 20 most popular newspapers in the country, and am now just beginning to write for one of the top 5 coolest music websites in the world. I’ll show you some clips soon! And no, I’m not going to share the new Spoon album with you! haha lol

Holy hell, this Outkast album is good. What’s crazy is that I’ve always felt Big Boi is the lesser half of the group, but man, Speakerboxx is so on point. It’s an old album, dated 2003, and I guess that’s pretty old by today’s hyperactive sociocultural torrent-standards. I just experienced what my dad calls my first “geezer moment” the other day, when I was hanging in the Order Room of my friend KJ’s house, where his little 14-year-old squash prodigy, future electronic drummer brother Ian was cruising the net hard. It was a Saturday night, roundabouts 11pm, and the little dude was video-chatting with the scores of friends he had online at that very moment. He hopped into one chat with a group of young teen girls in the neighborhood, took some unflattering screencaps of them mid-sentence amidst some stifled fits of laughter, then X’ed out and blew down the information superhighway to yet another girlcluster somewhere else on the Mainline.

“Do you still like Andrew?” he asked one of the young’uns. She blushed, tossed her hair and admitted that her thing for him had faltered ever since he lost his eyebrows in some unfortunate prank that involved sleeping bags and duct tape. “Let’s get him in here,” Ian replied, and soon Andrew was flown into the chat, flustered and indeed eyebrowless as a newborn baby. Ian put his computer on mute, snapped a few more screencaps, quickly assembled an awkward collage of Andrew and the girls and a few Google Image’d hearts in Photoshop, uploaded it to Facebook much to the assembled company’s chagrin, then exited the digital carousal with a mischievous laugh.

Back in my day, online conversation was limited to text, and although some of us Skype and videochat nowadays, it’s not the same kind of social function that the young teens and tweens of today seem to have made out of it. It was the first time I, or KJ, ever felt like we were a part of “the older generation,” and it was a fascinating and frightful little sensation. I’m old enough to get into bars legally, and I guess that’s pretty damn old…Life speeds up, time gets thinner, and I need more of it than ever. Let’s see if there’s any magic left to be found in this strange new world.5

2010 is still green and fresh, but some pretty unreasonable things have happened already. For one thing, I’ve taken a $100 swig of a $1700 bottle of cognac, and breathed a fire so damn potent and strong it had women two and a half times my age hitting on me the only way those kind of women at my age can do — horrifyingly.6 It was some damn good cognac, though, and the moment made not a damn lick of sense, which has me thinking that 2010 might just be the Year of Unreason, or at least the least reasonable year of my life thus far. Could this be the start of the Decade of Unreason? Don’t touch that dial unless you’re trying to rip it off.

yes. ronnie.
don’t pull the thang out, unless you plan to bang.

  1. Some of that “small book” is among the best stuff I’ve ever written about anything. I’ll show you sometime, especially if you ask! [↩]
  2. I recently listened to his Confessions album, and the vitriol’s still fresh. What a maddeningly crap record. [↩]
  3. 6 classes and 6 A’s later, all I can say is: take time off from college if you’re considering it. A rebirth, in more ways than one. [↩]
  4. 2005 was spent in all-white threads, atop a skyscraper with tons of family, a live band filling the 75-degree air some 25 stories above the Rio de Janeiro coast. 2007 was spent watching the goddamn Jonas Brothers lip-sync a mediocre pop song on “live” TV, but that was at least book-ended by some great sex. And 2008 ended with a party surrounded by colleagues and friends with whom I had recently become very close and appreciative of, which was heartwarming in its own way. 2006 was weird, now that I remember it, but also involved a girl that made me pretty happy at the time, and at the end of the year that’s all one could really want. [↩]
  5. I’ve got it, don’t sweat. [↩]
  6. These women are what I now call “grinchy.” Talk to me in the streets or on the lines to find out more about this phenomenal new slang. [↩]

1 Comment / WRITTEN ON Jan 09.10

{the complete fragment, the incomplete whole}

Unfinished fragments, regretted wholes — I can’t count the number of times I’ve written something in this little box, only to have it wind up in the Saved Drafts graveyard, or perhaps the mausoleum of private entries next door. Sometimes I think too much and write a whole lot more; sometimes I write a little bit of nothing, and even that feels like excess. I don’t take forever to put something on this page because I spend a lot of time writing it, I take forever to not put that something on this page because I spend too much time writing it. Franz Kafka, sometime before he died (that is, before he ever had the chance to become famous), wrote in his journal that the only effective way to write is through “a complete opening out of the body and the soul,” uninterrupted and unhealthy and usually happening while the writer ought to be asleep. And while nothing I have written in my blog could ever compare to what he might have written in his,1 I feel as though the only way I ever find the give-a-damn to finish a piece outside the influence of deadlines and paychecks is to do it all in one sitting. Sometimes you need to feel like you have to write something in order to see it through.

I don’t feel like I have to write anything right now. Tellingly, the above paragraph is stolen from an entry I began writing about a month ago, only to shove its incomplete body down a long tube where it will remain untouched for approximately the next year and a half. Which is quite a shame, because it was a pretty good and timely piece; it had to do with the strange and harrowing confluence of events that centered around a single weekend in September, wherein 1) the remains of a young woman named Annie was found in one of the graduate buildings of the university where I study, 2) one of the people I’ve been closest to in this life was struck suddenly by an unlit car that sent her broken limbs flying through fifteen feet of dark, rainy sky, and 3) I developed an appreciation for dub music that briefly possessed me. This confluence meant a terrible lot of things to me, far beyond the pale of any reasonable coincidence, and something I really felt like putting to paper. I think you’ll like it, once it’s finally resurrected and finished — if you stick around that long, of course.

A year and a half is a long time, for anyone not dead. Every year and a half of my life, since the age of 15,2 has felt like an individual little life, although each one of them gets a little smaller as a unit every time. By the end of each time I feel like my context, as a human-being, has changed very thoroughly, most often in ways I failed to anticipate — the context changes, and those changes make their mark on me, but what really lies at my center has remained roughly unchanged. Somebody I once met and spent a lot of time with for a while told me, one Year And A Half later, something to that effect. His insight stung momentarily though he meant no offense by it, and reassured me that this was in fact a very good thing; I thought about it for a couple minutes and saw it his way, and so it was. Which is all a very long-winded way of me saying that I guess I actually don’t know where I will be in another Year And A Half, or whether or not I will then be finishing a journal entry I left incomplete here a month ago. So my previous paragraph may have ended with a lie; I apologize for that rather than delete it, because I like the way I arrived at this apology, as people sometimes do. But I hate lying almost as much as I hate being lied to, even when I’m writing and I know that a few smart, carefully placed lies can make good literature become great literature.

This is all bullshit, and it’s not what I came here to write. I just thought that this would be a good time to present to you

A BRIEF PROEM ON ROCK
Which is a bit of a misnomer because the music I make is not definitively “rock,” although rock it indeed does.3 My music does more than it is, when it comes to rock, while also containing many rock ingredients and flavors. And I’m bringing it up because I want to clarify something: in my last real entry (which means I haven’t really updated in 4 months; fuck), I briefly promoted a show I was organizing wherein my band was headlining. To avoid temporal confusion, I now stress that this is not the same show I will begin talking about in the next couple installments of The Story that lies at the heart of this website. To clarify, that show happened in the summer of 2007; the one I promoted here in the summer of 2009 happened in the summer of 2009, as planned.4 I could say more, but in the interest of keeping this proem brief (as advertised), I’ll stop here.

Sometimes it can’t hurt to explain things a little.

Speaking of that same last real entry, in it I mentioned that I would be writing for a very large publication soon. That did indeed happen, and here is some evidence. There was also a second concert review that, because of a deadline misunderstanding, I had to write in two hours, and I guess it’s pretty decent considering that. More little bits and pieces like these should be surfacing soon, both in this same publication and elsewhere. I wish my current schedule permitted me to branch out and do a little more, but I also enjoy sleeping nowadays.

That’s really all I have to say, and in the interest of having something new on this website again, I’m going to go ahead and hit the “Publish” button very soon. Which I feel bad about, because this really wasn’t very interesting. But I promise to come back and write something Real very soon, and in the meantime, I want to bring attention to the fact that last.fm is my favorite Internet technodoodad service right now, so if you have one go ahead and use it to verb-friend me. And if you don’t have one, you can at least check out what I’ve been hearing lately…Other than the very odd, bleating harmonies that appear to be happening between two (possibly Middle Eastern) men somewhere not far outside my window. I think this is getting “Published” now so that I can plug my laptop back into my speakers and choose to hear something else.

More soon!

plan d getting money.

(plan d getting money.)

  1. A LiveJournal, I’d wager. [↩]
  2. 15ish, to be more accurate. [↩]
  3. And this isn’t really a “proem,” in its traditional sense, either. [↩]
  4. Thanks if you came! [↩]

No Comments / WRITTEN ON Oct 30.09

{before he made the movie, he lived the life}

Bent over the moan of a broken bass, above a stage built and drenched by the sweat of my open pores; smothered by rain and wind so densely focused that my shallow lungs threatened to slim like their thinning frame; floating aimlessly about an empty airport, a loose aggregate of ripped denim, split nerves, tangled sinews. My body has been a lot of things lately.

It would be harder to describe what’s been going on inside.

I should be grateful, then, that I’m so goddamn far behind the present day in putting the events of my life into words. Those most recent make it hard to find the right ones to use — if these happenings are at all literary, it’s yet unclear what makes them literature. Things will come into focus over time, as they always do, but for now I will simply go back and continue detailing the fading Story as best my tired mind can manage, presuming all the while that these things really matter one way or another at the end of the day. Either way, whatever the present happens to mean in the long run, it certainly feels like a condemnation in the moment. More than a few times, lately, I’ve shaken a fist at the grey and spitting expanse above me.

Right at the very moment, I’m 38 thousand above a black ocean, and much further below its darker, distant mirror image. Sleepless and anguished (first physically and then mentally), I want nothing more than to shut off for a very good long while. But such a concise and friendly coma seems a bit much to ask, at this point, and I can only hope this ireful land toward which I drift decides to take it easy on me.  My time there will be brief.

3 Comments / WRITTEN ON Aug 03.09

{microthoughts, vol. 3 — “teenage victory song”}

It was a little over half a year ago when I threw it all away, trading what little was left for a train ticket to take me as far from the site of my collapse as I could go. Inbetween the moment I feebly surrendered and the moment I stepped onto that train and placed a most literary phone-call, I bought a little black book with nothing in it. When I returned to From Where I Came, I settled back into my room with a thin sigh and cracked the journal’s spine with weary purpose. Beaten but not defeated, I focused the best handwriting I could muster for a title page of what was next to come. I forget how I put it, exactly, but “Recovery” might have been one of the words in that title. “Redemption” certainly was.

But, man. If you read that book you’d probably think I hardly experienced either — though not because I didn’t. At first I maintained a steady stream of thoughts, observations and musings, but this daily document soon degenerated into a place to vent exclusively when things were going wrong. I only ever bled ink to those pages when I felt like I myself was bleeding; and as the wounds became less frequent, so did the ink. Up until just a few minutes ago, I’d just about forgotten the book existed. I’m not even sure where it is.

I’m not detailing those messy pages now, that’s not why I bring it up. It’s just that that was so me, back then, to only ever say something to complain. I didn’t like that about myself, and the propensity to continue that habit is something I keep not liking. And that’s why I’m taking the time to write this blog entry right now, even if that’s time I have to make: things are just going so right, and I’d be remiss to not say something about it. Recovery and Redemption, baby.

This feels like a good time for a list. I’m not going to mention everything that’s been going right recently, because if I did you’d think I’m some kind of viciously lucky asshole. But the most of it goes a little something like…

I could go on, but as swell as my life has been to me lately, it now demands a sausage-egg-and-cheese sandwich — my seventh or eighth in as many days. And so:

TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER

I’m live-blogging and devouring cancerous protein bombs from the fine dump of a city that is New Haven,3 as previously insinuated. And it’s all about to come to an end; I come home Friday night. This month has been a return to form, of sorts, for me. It feels good, being back in this form. Semi-tangentially, I’m really going to miss the gym here. But I will be back in the fall, which would definitely come as a relief to those of you who know me well enough to know what that means and/or to care. (Hell, you’ve read this far, haven’t you?) It’s a thought that makes me brim with confidence and optimism, as if I wasn’t sweating/crying/puking the stuff as it is. Which is a good thing, people; never forget that that’s a good thing.

Part of what excites me about this development is the rather cool experiences I’ve been afforded being here this past month, finally able to really appreciate them for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long. (My life?) The most recent of which being an open table discussion I had with one inspired multi-talent by the name of Luc Sante, whose bookography I will soon be purchasing as I’ve just finished my last great pursuit of literary appreciation. One thing he said to me and a spare dozen others, which spoke to me in particular, was his commentary on the function of the blog to the writer. He called his own sporadically updated4 little web journal something of a “public labratory,” a place to “take ridiculous chances” without so much as a paycheck or the pressure of six-digit circulation to keep you on your toes. Which is, in far less words than my garrulous ass could usually hope to muster, a pretty nice summary of how I’ve always felt about this little website of mine. So good on you, Sante — I will be buying Kill All Your Darlings and emailing you all about it right quick.

Second to final thought: I just did mention that I recently finished reading a book, and I kind of want to talk about that for a moment, up in here.5 The book is a rock tome of roughly Biblical size, and it’s little coincidence that its author chose the subtitle “Testament for the Electric Church.” Even more brilliantly, he chose the title Rock And The Pop Narcotic, and as someone who’s been religiously feasting upon music literature ever since my delicious encounter with Our Band Could Be Your Life well over half a decade ago, I can say that this is the title of the best book on music I have ever read. It’s roughly four-hundred pages of densely gorgeous prose on the rock format and what makes it tick, and throughout it all you’re becoming increasingly aware of what he — Joe Carducci — means when he says Pop Narcotic. But then comes the Afterword, unassuming as fuck, and it just blows everything you thought you knew about this guy, this book, and — indeed — this life into beautiful little aparts. As I began reading the first paragraph of this oh holiest of Afterwords, I realized that this would be a spiritual moment, and I complied by putting an unknown Beach Boys a capella track lost from the Smile era on a constant loop. I’ve listened to roughly 700 Beach Boys songs in the past three days, and the hymnal repetition of this “Uknown Track” constituted listens 605 through 614 (approximately). I had been highlighting the particularly meaningful, relevant sentences of Carducci’s great literature rather sparingly up to that point, but over the course of these most enchanted final pages I could not put the highlighter down. These pages — they bled highlight, soaked through-and-through in their golden brilliance. Those beautiful words of Joe’s, those otherworldly harmonies of Brian’s…It was truly a Godly moment.

Buy this book. Or least of all, find it at your local print-den and read the end of it. I’ve never had my core beliefs about so many things ever so poignantly and lucidly reflected in the words of another.

Actually probably the final thought: I sit here writing (some of) these words in this newly-discovered Trumbull library, periodically stopping to read a little bit of this newly-discovered campus Literary Magazine. The library endears in a classically enchanting way, and the litmag is looking sharp and making me want to submit something to and through its gorgeous layout and page design.6 As I sit here and ponder these things, I feel at home, and like I’m truly in the place I envisioned when I applied to this college a two-year lifetime ago. This is something I could get used to. Finally.

  1. This Story, for those who’ve been paying only partial/recent attention, begins not-quite-chronologically here. It also happens to be my favorite installment in the Story thus far, as far as literature goes. Please do us both a favor and catch up now, though, as I promise that the literary aspects of this Story are about to approach cinema. [↩]
  2. Or hell, even in comparison to what we were sounding like a month ago. [↩]
  3. Sausage-egg-and-cheese sandwich plus Haribo raspberry gummis and b-relaxed Vitamin Water makes for a surprisingly regal meal. [↩]
  4. Sounds familiar.. [↩]
  5. Up in here. [↩]
  6. Looking at the masthead, it turns out that my good friend Sophia even works for them. Who knew? [↩]

2 Comments / WRITTEN ON Jul 01.09

“Nights It Came Together”

When a non-musician aspires to lofty heights of musical accomplishment, any number of things can happen. Occasionally a pretty face or a limited talent is propped up by someone1 who can fill out the soundscape either to highlight a star’s unique ability or mask his or her lack thereof. Sometimes an absence of theoretical training is trumped by sheer force of will, and the non-musician strikes an artistic and commercial nerve as a Nirvana or an Oasis. Less significantly (but at least as admirably), a guy like Robert Pollard can spend many long years and albums toiling in expensive obscurity before catching the world’s ear with something like Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand, creating an ingenious piece of music while essentially remaining a non-musician.2 By and large, we tend to view these kinds of people as having been possessed by some innate gift or power, and wrap them up in enough magazine mythology to make them seem mystifying, otherworldly, untouchable.

But perhaps they’re not meant to elude the rest of us, but rather to empower, as a kind of reminder that with enough drive and determination, anyone can do something truly wonderful. After all, there’s no shortage of bad Oasis or Pollard records to remind us that even after creating transcendent works of rock’n’roll art, these people remain regular people. It was many years ago that I first publicly stated my belief that any band in the world is capable of creating at least one truly great song for the records, if they really want to try. Or, to paraphrase Joe Carducci: “never underestimate four randomly selected Americans’ ability to come up with listenable shit.”

Well.

Personally speaking, it’s hard to tell exactly what happens when that non-musician is me: The Story could already fill a small book, but remains largely unwritten as both literature and life-in-the-making. (In some minor way, this blog is a rough draft recollection of the ongoing tale.) Regardless of what the outcome winds up being, it was a literary moment that spring of 2007, when an unwashed disciple of hipster cynicism approached me at school and said in passing,

“Your ambition far outweighs your talent.”

The fact that he saw this as an insult rather than an asset spoke louder words than the barbed ones he spat my way, but I’d have to admit I could feel the sting as he turned and walked away. Good old Pollard could probably relate, having endured these kinds of insults in backwoods Ohio for years before the outside world took a listen and were convinced otherwise.

Which is not to say that this kind of criticism is unwarranted, or at all unhealthy for the criticized: in truth, most of Guided By Voices’ early records are largely disposable, and even though that lightly greased hipster had no way of really knowing it, my band sort of deserved his jeers. In essence, we were little more than a very sincere joke in those days: we would dress in flamboyantly stupid “rock clothes” and get together a couple times a week at Dilan’s practice space, him drumming and Dylan guitaring (very eloquently) whilst I would play the bass and my exceptional friend Pete sang (very not so much). Hence photos now exist of me wearing tattered mesh jersey, Dilan flaunting vintage Boston Bruins headgear, Pete looking studious in a labcoat and 3D spectacles, Dylan in various stages of hairy cross-dress, et cetera. Weezer’s “El Scorcho” was butchered many times, a detail thankfully omitted by the photos — although it should be little surprise that someone might see these photographs and ascertain that we sucked.

And such conclusions were far from inaccurate, then. Which is why it’s rather remarkable, just how much that music changed the life of the non-musician me. Over the couple quick months that would ensue, the force behind DFD would forge beautiful friendships while torching others; provide me with experiences both unforgettable and regrettable; introduce me to people I would love and disdain in equal measure; and any number of other literary clichés that are unremarkable in fiction, but quite a trip to actually live out. All this in the pursuit of something that was, at the time, little more than a bad weekly jam session.

I still remember how Dilan introduced KJ to me, for purposes unrelated to Dancefloor but rather to a film Dilan and I had made about denim jackets and orange juice. I had decided that this was a work of art too great for iMovie, and so Dilan — who possessed some expensive software he put to no particular use, but not Final Cut — brought me to KJ’s house one night, claiming that he was the kind of kid to have Final Cut installed on his laptop. He did; he was also the kind of kid to lend that laptop to me for a weekend without ever having met me before. As it turns out, KJ thought I would be a person worth knowing after he saw a schoolwide showing of one of my videos a few months prior, so perhaps his generosity had an ulterior motive. Either way, the gambit worked: I was intrigued by this curly-haired introvert so willing to give his laptop away to a total stranger, and in the span of an evening his unique image lightly burnt itself into my psyche.

It happened like this: When we arrived, KJ was pacing impatiently about his backroom — an extension to his house that at night functions as a sort of illuminated fishbowl in his backyard. His parents weren’t home, and he felt comfortable chain-smoking inside his own home — a decision he would soon regret, when the effects of the Adderall began to wear off (which was apparently what he had popped shortly before we arrived). Dilan was flying sober insofar that I knew, but his demeanor seemed more drugged than KJ’s subtle high let on: he fell asleep during Pulp Fiction, woke up to drum sedative rhythms on KJ’s dilapidated kit (which KJ could not play), strummed questionable chords on the guitar (which KJ could play), kneeled briefly in a rainy driveway to no discernible end, channel surfed his way to a showing of Kindergarten Cop that seemed to briefly hypnotize him, snored loudly while attempting to rest his bare feet on KJ’s face, and ate the most pizza of anyone in the house by a large margin. I can’t remember if he left or expired on the couch, but he did fade from the memory of the night rather quickly.

Meanwhile, KJ and I spent the many dark hours commiserating in shared insomnia. The demons haunting me probably lingered from another disappointing morning on the river, a reminder of my health’s recent and inexplicable deterioration. As for KJ, I’d imagine the torrent of nicotine and amphetamine salts weren’t helping him find peace. To remedy the issue, he dropped some Air into his stereo and let the pretty French melodies mix with the marijuana smoke soon exiting his lungs. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about throughout the night — just the kind of thoughts and details you wouldn’t normally reveal to someone you just met. The words trailed off around when the Air did, evaporating gently into morning dew and birdsong.

KJ had disappeared by the time I woke up, but kept himself lodged in my mind with a well-placed email that, in its brief two lines, reflected a much deeper character and kinder heart than I had found in any other schoolmate of mine over the past four years. Still, borrowing his laptop and occasionally gallivanting with him to rock shows would have meant little if not for the context of our own rock; KJ, after finding out I had a band, begged me for a place in it relentlessly. I had my initial reservations, but eventually invited him to fill in for Dylan at a lead male singer audition.

That potential lead singer wound up flaking in favor of a 16-and-over night at a laughable club downtown,3 but KJ twanged his way through “El Scorcho” and handled his acoustic guitar well enough. He seemed capable of adding some solid rhythmic support behind Dylan’s impressive lead work, and so he was invited to the next one.

Conceivably, the next one could be called “the night it all came together.” At least literally: all past practices had been conducted on the fly, the instruments on the floor picked up and plugged in by whoever was around to play them, but this was the night that the whole team made it. Crucially, Pete met KJ, and the two commemorated what would soon become a rich friendship by indulging in a great din on Dilan’s keyboard and drumset. I missed what they would tell me were rather good “primal jams” when I returned, however, as I was off getting Marie.

Marie had been my best friend for about a year or two. We met during the earlier half of high school through a confluence of mutual friends and the internet that found her posting nice compliments to me in the form of Xanga comments (complete with eProps) at a time when I was on the precipice of a bizarre long distance relationship and had someone to feel jealous for me.4 I visited her house one day with friends Melanie and Melissa, and Marie briefly interviewed me before them about my musical tastes, how I made mixtapes (mine were extravagant productions, in those days), and asked me questions about my first kiss (which I was still a few months off from having), among other similar details I wasn’t very used to talking about least of all with strangers. It made her interesting to me, a little bit edgy, and while I didn’t start hanging out with her regularly till more than half a year later, there was enough intrigue to leave open the possibility of a great friendship.

By the time I had drafted her as the girly voice in my band, that possibility had already blossomed into something pretty lovely, as far as friendships go. Having her at practice felt right, and she provided a nice dose of estrogen to the wildly imbalanced chemical makeup of our practices. By the time I brought her back to Dilan’s space that night, the guys were already warmed up and ready to start trying out some vague ideas. Of course, there was the inevitable reading of “El Scorcho.”

Dilan’s friend Drew was around to film the proceedings, thankfully, and I quickly pieced together a small document of the evening on some cheap editing software discovered on Dilan’s PC. Looking back on it, there’s little to appreciate here musically — it’s essentially just a group of friends in a room having fun playing whatever, and for that reason I took it off the internet a very long time ago — but it’s such a great little memento of what was a very sunny side of my life back then. Pete’s pill bottle percussion (and our tentative attempts at vocal input), Dylan’s stylistic foray into gender-bending patriotism and funk solos, a rare appearance of KJ on the keys, Marie’s reminiscence on Dig!, and my early efforts to figure out the instrument hanging from my neck as anything more than a fashion accessory made for quite the ramshackle menagerie, held together against all odds by Dilan’s sturdy drumwork. It was not a bad place to start for an aspiring non-musician, filled with curiosity and ideas just small enough to express in such limited vocabulary. You could only tell I was reaching for bigger thoughts and dreams by the way my hands fumbled up and off the fretboard.

  1. Traditionally called a “producer,” but perhaps just good friends turned bandmates. [↩]
  2. Without getting too academic, I’m defining “non-musician” pretty harshly here. Frankly I would call anyone who’s made a good song a musician, but for the sake of leaving this paragraph as it is, “musician” here means someone who has a real understanding of theory, or could at least make a living as a session player if synthetic sound hadn’t so crippled the profession. For what it’s worth, Mr. Pollard has taken the label “musician” as an insult before, while the Gallagher brothers assert that playing your first chord qualifies as musical christening. [↩]
  3. Either that or he showed up and timidly flubbed his way through the couple songs he hadn’t learned at home. I seem to remember both of these things happening. [↩]
  4. I miss that Xanga. [↩]

4 Comments / WRITTEN ON Jun 23.09

{the hardest art}

Just a couple days ago, my friend Rob — who I haven’t seen in roughly a decade, around the time he made a noncommital attempt on my life in a crowded day-camp pool — made a very kind and generous comment on the most recent of my bloggish prattle. In it, he complimented what I had written in ways both inspiring and unwarranted, which he prefaced with a striking thesis:

Of the forms of expression… from music to painting to movies… writing strikes me as one of the hardest mediums to transform into something truly original and therefore worthwhile.

I looked him up on the old social networking cable device and began to write a sentence’s thought in response, which wound up becoming a paragraph I felt better suited to a reply on the original comment thread fabric, which wound up becoming the kind of bloggish prattle I like to spew loose on the World Wide Web every now and then. So here we are.

My first reaction to his comment was to disagree, if only because I’ve done a whole lot of writing in my life and very little music or filmmaking.1 But the more I thought about it, I realized that Rob isn’t wrong: writing is, in terms of focused works that have been preserved and replicated across time, the oldest form of artistic expression we have. The Epic of Gilgamesh is aged around three millenniums now, and we still remember plenty of novels and written stories that were made long before the first real printing press began slowly to make the idea of writing a book far more accessible. That happened circa 1450 in Europe, and even earlier in the eastern world — which is a pretty huge head start when you compare that to when similar creative revolutions happened in the mediums of music and film. Considering writing and painting are the two oldest forms of expression that have been practiced by a considerable number of people and produced for a considerable amount of time, it makes sense that there would be more work on record in those two mediums than the others — which would, at least logically, make it harder to be original in those forms today. Because photography and film were art forms invented and made possible by relatively recent innovations in technology, they’re at a historical disadvantage — even before recording, classical composers at least had sheet music.

But it’s around this point in my line of thinking that I realize I might not be weighting these different mediums fairly. After all, it’s hard to quantify an art or even estimate the amount of time/love/effort a piece of art would take to make, but if we were to define the standard units of creativity in each of these art mediums, we could simplify it as…

Writing: the book
Music: the album
Handmade art: the exhibit
Photography: also an exhibit (or maybe photo album…Flickr set?)
Film: the movie

Most of these are generally roughly basically equivalent — it seems to take most artists an average of about two years to come up with a book, album, or art exhibit that is actually worth other folks’ time. And some truly inspired individuals can make astonishing creative works in far less time.2 Though music is generally more collaborative than the novel or the art exhibit, great pieces of music can certainly be the work of just one artist. But no matter what, a filmmaker can seldom make a great film all by his lonesome, or any film at all — and if he chooses to, that severely limits his creative palette. When you consider that most films today (even independents) are often made possible by the hard work of hundreds and the wallets of at least one very rich man, the combined inputs and man hours to yield your standard unit of creativity is pretty astronomical. Even if we scale back our unit of creativity to, say, a (very) short film, far more people and far more effort is generally involved there than it takes to write a short story, pen a song, or take/make a picture. So it’s not really fair to dismiss the film as an easier route for originality on the premise of its youth as an art form, considering that even getting the chance to take a shot at originality is pretty damn hard.

Things get hairier still when we consider how one painting (or record, or writing) can be far more ambitious than another, usually extending the time it takes to be finished. I could wax on and wax off all night, but I’m more curious to hear what you have to say. If anybody’s still reading at this point: What is, to you, the hardest art to make worthwhile? And what is the art form you most appreciate and respect when it’s done as well as it can be? That’s a pretty heavy question and I think I’ve knotted myself up thinking about this stuff as it is, so I’m going to let that kick around my head a little longer. Maybe your thoughts will spur mine.

Back to Rob’s comment (nice and full circle-like), I’m more comfortable disagreeing with his claim that art has to be “truly original” in order to be worthwhile — plenty of art I’ve read and seen and heard has been far from original, at times even pointedly derivative, and I’ve scrutinized plenty of art that is wholly original but still absolute shit. But that’s some prattle for another day.

  1. Sadly. Yet. [↩]
  2. The Beatles pretty much clinch the Best Band Ever title in my mind when I consider that they churned those albums out at a pace of roughly one every six months. [↩]

6 Comments / WRITTEN ON Apr 14.09

{the spain, the spain}

Sitting in the passenger seat of my father’s car, I remembered to ask about a stranger. It was a brief ride, and for the five minute distance between the train station and the parking lot he and I shot the breeze with enough script-dialogue pretension to sound like some kind of a dress rehearsal. The last time I had asked him about his work, he mentioned that this stranger — somewhat less a stranger to him, as his co-worker — was about to get fired by the pencil pushers with the fancier pencils.

I asked if she had been “put on ice” yet, seeing as dad was taking a quick respite from the office for the purposes of this modest drive, and he remarked that, well, it seemed as if she had been “saved by the bell.”1 The lady who had been lined up to take her job after the pink slip offed her was herself in risk of being offed by a pink slip from some higher office: fresh complications from her recent brush with cancer surged through her with a vengeance, and word was that it would take her at least a year to recover – if she recovers at all. It’s a peculiar world, I guessed: one woman’s malignant tumor is another woman’s paycheck. I spoke this thought aloud, and the Camera of Life made a hard cut from one scene to the next:

A few weeks later, I’m in a warmer nation with a radiant laptop cradled comfortably in my lap, hoping I don’t become someone else’s paycheck. It’s probable that I might get a tan here, in this Nation of the Suns, which like just about everything else is a carcinogen, nowadays. But shall my skin bronze, I will not loathe it — it would be my first tan in a couple-or-few years, pretty much ever since I had to set down my oars for the last time. A healthy, shaded pallor wouldn’t be a thing to rue, no, not at all.

I might as well just come out and say it: I’m pretty deep in the Spain right now, folks, and that’s no lie. If you also find yourself in the Spain sometime in, say, the next week, contact me immediately and we’ll break it down and build it back up again. You can get in touch with me this way or that, it matters not.

It wasn’t easy, to get this deep into the Spain this fast. Most of the transition was spent on some vehemently shitty little plane, where I was confronted by a rotating cast of breathing horrors and weirdmen. The most prominent weirdman was a graying old boy whose hairline was also being hit by the recession, as I discerned when he woke me up to ask me a very important question that went like:

“I’ve been told that the seat you’re sitting in has an armrest that doesn’t go up. Is this accurate?”

After I spent a moment grappling with this daft douche’s apparent social disability and pungent stench of argyle, I verified with him this information, watched in unmasked wonder as he returned to his seat in coach (not first class or even the relatively poor man’s business class, as his Entitled Asshole routine had suggested), and considered briefly the impact of this grand recession on the loins of humanity. It’s hard for me to tell, shielded semi-college boy that I am, but all indications lead me to believe it’s been one powerful sack whack to remember.

These thoughts were interrupted by visions of a stewardess who had the facial geometry of a transvestite. Her face (and the voice that came from it) suggested the otherworldliness of a former man, though most of her other features appeared distinctly womanesque. She told people to put their seatbelts on with curt authority, offered me a choice between plastic pasta and microwave roadkill with curt authority, and complained to a nearby co-worker when the alarm of the plane’s cabin service failed to shut the fuck up after some twenty-odd minutes of uninterrupted beeping.

Which has become something of a theme in my life in these past 24 hours: uninterrupted beeping. Before those long hours inside that rambling airplane, there was the alarm in my house, which would not stop screaming while I packed clothes and books to feed the Spain all day long. Later, on that same verbose plane, some sleeping body’s forgotten cellphone alarm chimed with the subtle menace of Chinese water torture. It was a gentle, nearly silent drone, but its automated persistence made for a slow and maddening attrition. The damn thing nourished my insomnia and kept me conscious, all across the night and sea.

One way or another, the ringing hasn’t stopped. Is it a sign? It’s sure as hell annoying, now that it’s a telephone in my Madrid hotel digs’ bathroom, shouting when it wants to (often) and stopping when it doesn’t (less so). It’s hot as a bitch in here, so I keep the door to the balcony open at all times, and across the way there’s a family doing the same thing, a family that includes a child who screams and cries with the rhythm and clarity of a bell. Speaking of cancer, this kid bawls and weeps the way an adult would only if something truly disastrous, truly terrible like cancer were to happen. Though knowing it’s a kid, he’s probably just pissed that the TV channels here suck, or something. I wouldn’t know: I don’t know Spanish, and I don’t know television.

I’m not letting it bother me, though — not even when his endless tirades are punctured like clockwork every 15 minutes by the feedback of some phantom guitar.2 I’ve been drowning it down with some chilled-out Miles Davis and some laid-back Nas, along with the inner monologue that plays out in my head concurrently with the way my fingers play it out on this laptop keyboard. It works well enough, when I’m in this hotel.

When I’m not, I’m drinking cups of chocolate in cafe basements, eating miniature meals in restaurant lobbies, and admiring pretty performers performing pretty things in the street.3 This is what the Spain is, at least as far as Day One is concerned. Day One is one of Nine. I’m not really sure where the rest of those days will take me. Definitely this Madrid business I’ve gotten myself into, for a bit longer, but maybe some Barcelona as well — if the train passes and logistics can be worked out easily enough. You can have some say in this too, if you’re in the Spain and ready/willing to hear the real music. But we’ve been over this before.

Right now I’m back in bed, tired as fuck and eating sugared teeth. They aren’t very good — but I come to you with a purpose. I’ve been up to a few things, Belgium, and I think they’re going to please you. If you would only just listen!

  1. ”Too cliche,” says the director’s note in the margin, mentioning an inadvertent association with Screech for the Gen X demographic. “Needs revision.” [↩]
  2. The sound is also, alternatively and very possibly, the whine of a bus braking upon a bus stop. That would be less interesting, though. [↩]
  3. Most notably a young girl who was very good at flamenco and artful gyrating. [↩]
  4. We’re both on vacation so it’s gone without an update for a little bit. This will change in a matter of days. [↩]

5 Comments / WRITTEN ON Mar 24.09

{on disease, diets and town-hitting}

Sticky-thumbed and warmly dressed, I write to you with pen and paper in the good old-fashioned way. I’m in a train station, swigging a pretty-nasty bubble tea and ruefully patronizing the transportation service that has done wrong by me oh so many a time,1 finally writing again in a small black journal I bought on the eve of a momentous occasion now a few months old. I’ll probably be copying these ink-leaden words one by one in a small box on a large bright screen in a few hours, so that it may be appreciated by a modest few people via means of the Internet machine.

I’m still young, by most technical standards, but I realize that this is something I’ve been doing — feeding words into the great big Internet machine — since I was roughly half the age I am now. That’s an awful lot of words, and it does two things: it reminds me of when I could still count my age on one hand and my then-uncle, who was a farming man, exploited my budding interest in dinosaurs by telling me that his barn was in fact itself a dinosaur, of sorts, and one that could only be fed with large heaps of hay and manual labor — and hence the very young me was conscripted to a sunny afternoon of hay-heaving and child labor law-breaking; and it also makes me wonder what the logical conclusion to all this wordmaking is. Will I still be doing this ten years from now, writing publicly for a small rotating audience of curious friends and appreciated voyeurs? Or will this whole wordmaking thing lead “somewhere,” a place where I might declare myself some success, as measured by a large and still-booming readership? Perhaps even paychecks larger than the cute little ones I bring home every now and then, these days? This is all rhetoric, of course, and I know what I’m working towards. A guy just has to wonder sometimes.

I’ve done a lot more wandering than wondering lately. Wandering from sick bed to sick couch, watching sick movies in a sick house, all because I’ve been quite sick lately. Last week I had a vengeful kind of virus, the kind that made me kneel before a toilet and vomit in morse code dispatches at irregular intervals (where these messages went after I flushed, I do not know — I missed the sanitation center field trip in 2nd grade). Your brain has a hard time thinking when the body that frames it is sweltering at a temperature that looks like a hip-hop/R&B radio station frequency, so the wondering comes pretty sparingly then, replaced by things like consecutive viewings of the Back To The Future movies2 and sleep. I did have to write a lead story at 1 a.m. while searing at a 102.1 (my thermometer was picking up strains of that gimmicky new Kelly Clarkson song), which was not a lot of fun at all. The song or the article-writing.

Before that miserable and fiery week, I spent a comparable amount of time wincing from an over-ambitious day at the gym, whereupon I applied a medicine ball and the forces of gravity to devastating effect on my abdominal muscles. They spent many days after that bitter and bleeding, refusing to budge so much as an inch (and complaining with many pains and aches when forced). Aspirin and honey helped me sweat it out, but now that I feel better and can again wonder, I’m left asking the question: what’s a good diet for a thin, ectomorphic, rather freshly lactose intolerant young man looking to put some meat on the bones? Drinking protein shakes and mainlining Creatine into the ass just ain’t my scene, so if someone can recommend me some naturally weight-gaining foodstuffs to my body’s prissy/choosy specifications, that would be most appreciated. The foodstuffs can taste like shit, for all I care; the advice can be email or comments, for care I all.

(It’s a bit odd to be writing that, pen- and paper-like, in a private journal for my and my eyes only ((yeahh!!), but this is being broadcast on the World Wide Web later, so yes. Unless you’ve found my journal and have cracked the code of my chickenshit chickenscratch, in which chase check out the cool doodle I did half a dozen pages back!)

Yes people, it follows logic that I have been out of the Life Game for pretty much the whole of February now. I’ve been up to things still, of course — managing a very winsome and darling little band, writing lots and lots for a forthcoming new website, wasting tree pages with a handful of paid and printed-matter articles, playing music with a roomful of other folk — and I’ll share with you the bounties of these endeavors soon. But I’ve been holed up indoors and listening to 7 grand’s worth of borrowed music for all too long now — I’m looking for some fun. If you’re ever in the city or know of something cool that’s going around, get at me and we’ll hit the town. Or maybe you’ll just give me the idea and I’ll hit the town without you; whatever you prefer, I’m just looking to give the town a good hitting again, finally. Flaming insides and whining abs can make a boy restless!

Next post is gonna be about some microthoughts, I think. We haven’t done that in a little while.


(wobbling and swaying at the top of the world)

  1. Though the one time I had to talk with them as human-faced, human-voiced beings they were nice as you’d want them to be. So they’re not that bad. [↩]
  2. I loved them all. The documentary My Kid Could Paint That was pretty heavy but also great; the Gonzo doc about Hunter S. Thompson wasn’t, but it did convince me to very much want to read some of his work. Recommended starting place, anyone? [↩]

2 Comments / WRITTEN ON Feb 26.09

“Something To Follow”

At long last, we plugged round cords into round sockets, and reveled in the sound of our amplified selves. It had been a long time since we had last done it this way — for a week’s eternity, we had been practicing with acoustic instruments only — and it felt like a momentous release, perhaps like finally having someone to share your sexual energy with after having wasted it on yourself for so long. The electric catharsis was in the air, and in our sound: we started loud and, in transitioning from the first movement to the second, grew louder still, played harder still, grinned wider still, happier and happier —

Suddenly, it all fell apart. Dilan drummed one of his cymbals to the floor, Curtis defected a microphone, Pete made quick work a new tambourine that had recently cost its weight in gold, and Ian — thoroughly drunk and out of place — had stumbled into the room and stepped on a cord, splitting it off and jamming the amp KJ’s guitar was using. In the span of five minutes, some several hundred dollars worth of damage had been done.

In truth, I was no musician and never had been — at least not until very recently, and very technically. It was late March of 2007, and I had been unmusical for the entirety of my 18 years alive to that point. From ages 8 to 12, I struggled to achieve vague mediocrity with the violin, an instrument I hated and practiced simply because I had been coerced to care. Around the time my first violin teacher tried to teach me Hitler’s theme song — to be performed at a middle school recital (where there would no doubt be a few historians and Jewish grandparents in attendance) — I found my second violin teacher; around the time my second violin teacher made me walk on a balance beam across his sweltering-hot apartment, in order to teach me “how to balance,” I stopped playing violin altogether. In 8th grade, I attempted to learn guitar from a strange young hippie, and instead wound up learning that I sucked. It was around this time I gave up on performing music, and decided to be a record label executive instead. I signed my first band that same month, and released their first album a couple seasons later.

After spending some of my free time as a 15-year-old releasing pretty terrible music by adults 1.5 times my age, I wound up becoming a 16, 17, 18-year-old who worked with some pretty legitimately great acts.1 But, I wound up being bound to a somewhat fair contract with some extremely unfair people who served as our national distributor, and who completely violated the terms of our legal writ, arbitrarily deleted all my account records from their database, and robbed me of roughly three thousand dollars. This was around the fall of 2006, when I was forced into record industry beef with a band who were expected by many to become “the next Nirvana or Weezer,” and were expected by few (themselves) to be “the next Beatles.”2 They wound up flopping miserably, my label wound up getting robbed, and I was too busy worried about getting into college to file an expensive lawsuit; then the seasons changed and my body stopped working the way it had previously, and suddenly I had to stop rowing. It was a very trying time.3

In the meantime, a record called Night Ripper had taught me to love all kinds of music. The transformation was quick and profound. I can remember, in the October of 2006, visiting the Yale crew team and buying overpriced Japanese candy and Americanized hoagies from the local mini-mart, hearing “SexyBack” on the intercom. My large, lug-headed host began to jitter his sculpted legs to the beat, and asked me if I liked the song.

“Maybe sarcastically,” I replied, and he sneered at me like the little bitch I was being. Precisely three months later, I was listening to “SexyBack” on the radio (still!) and imagining how I would interpret it on my own stage, were I the one playing it. I had imagined something, and I wanted to make it real.

This became the basic inspiration behind the band I wanted to form, which I quickly began calling Dancefloor Diplomacy. In addition to loving the myriad shades of pop, Night Ripper had also taught me that attention-spanless music could sometimes be better than the relatively longform format of a 3-or-4-minute pop song. And so, momentarily, I decided I wanted to make a band that re-envisioned a series of pop song covers, albeit chopped apart and stretched into one long medley — each movement roughly the length of an iTunes sample clip. At its most honest, it was not meant to be anything more than a simple, fun novelty; at its most pretentious, something of a simple experiment in modern pop. Finding common strains between disparate compositions (like Gwen Stefani’s “Sweet Escape” and Blur’s “Song 2”), and exploiting those vague similarities to make a seamless transition.4

Almost immediately after imagining the idea, I mentioned it to my friend Dilan. Dilan was a talented drummer, a rower of great promise, and the younger brother of Ian, a young man with whom I was once photographed in a hospital smock and a pair of boxers, my arm around the neck of a bewildered and reluctantly peace-signing cop. Ian had a habit of coming up with great ideas and never following through on them — like our reckless teenage variety show, “Blame Mass Media” — and Dilan thought my rock band idea was as clever as any other being tossed around by his older brother that week. Figuring that my idea actually had a chance of happening, he became my first musician recruit on the spot. Realizing I needed to play an instrument in order to be in my own band, I borrowed a friend’s bass guitar — figuring it was the easiest to bullshit — and we had our first practice that weekend.

The experience wound up opening my eyes wide. As we made our way to his garage-based rehearsal space (which was really much nicer than what your imagination is picturing right now), I warned him not to expect much, as I had never really played my instrument of choice before, and had never played with anyone in my life.5 I was expecting it to take several months for me to be able to play in time with him, fumbling helplessly along the bass neck and trying to tap my foot to his steady beat with spectacular incompetence.

Instead, I locked into his beat almost immediately, and together we forged a groove that didn’t’ sound half bad.

For a good 10 or 20 minutes, we jammed on my improvised rendition of a bassline for Ludacris’ “Moneymaker.” It was repetitive, but not monotonous — in fact, it was the most fun I’d had in a long time. My luck with the ladies hadn’t been too swell, and my deteriorating ability to row certainly didn’t help: I hadn’t had much reason to smile for a little while.

Now I was remembering what a grin felt like.

That sensation of locking into a rhythm with another person — in a lot of ways, it was the perfect substitute for the catch and slide of rowing. In the boat, the person in front is called the “stroke man,” because he sets the cadence (that is, “stroke rate”) for those behind him. If he’s not keeping a steady beat, someone in the boat might shout, “Hey — give me something to follow.” Your average stroke man might offer a cuss word or two in return; a good one will refresh his focus and try to find his place in the measures of the tide below.

And like a good stroke man, with his precise beats and smooth fills, Dilan was giving me something to follow. It’s no coincidence that I would begin to take the idea of this peculiar band more and more seriously as my condition worsened to its eventual conclusion: stepping out of the boat, lungs heavy and heaving, and never going back.

The music stopped, my grin reclined comfortably into a smile, and we looked at each other. Dilan was used to playing with more seasoned musicians, but he could admit that it sounded pretty good. Together, we admitted it was pretty good enough to start recruiting some more followers.

  1. Although it’s by no means worth massive bragging rights, the fact that one of those records earned a 7.3 on today’s tastemaker music website is a decent indication of how far we got as an operation. [↩]
  2. That’s something you just don’t say. Or think. [↩]
  3. For more details, tune into some SoyRev reruns from last season! [↩]
  4. Hypothetically seamless, at least. [↩]
  5. Excepting a couple very-terrible middle school orchestras I used to rock poorly. Probably the worst was the one that my school ran; there exists from that time a pretty good tape recording of me and my unwilling collaborator, Ned, doing a remix of the Charlie Brown theme song on the piano. [↩]

4 Comments / WRITTEN ON Feb 06.09

{3 quick deals}

Remember a few weeks ago, when I promised that the next post would be the next installment of the The Story that began with “the unreasonable” and most recently continued with “the final cuts?” That was three whole posts ago. It’s about to be four. I promise you, the next one will be it. It’s pretty much already written, I just gotta decide how I’m going to handle one certain something. In the meantime, I want to divert your attention to 3 completely unrelated things:

1) As previously alluded, I write other places, sometimes. The local paper for which I write just today published my largest piece of published journalism to date. It’s some thousand words, it earned me some decent dollars, and you can read it right here. Or, if you’re in the area, you can pick it up in this week’s City Paper. It has the black Grammy chick on the cover, and my piece can be found on page 3. (Page 8 including ads!)

2) I write other places, too. One of the most embarrassing things that I’ll readily admit to is the fact that I’m a bit of an obsessive Weezer fan. One of those Weezer fans who lights up when he sees you have them on your iPod, then deflates (maybe fights tears, even)1 when he discovers that you only have “Beverly Hills.” One of those Weezer fans who can’t get over The Blue Album,2 much less Pinkerton.3 And something I’ve been doing for a little while, in my very spare time, is maintain a blog where I intend to write long, winding essays about every Weezer song ever. It’s called Teenage Victory Songs, and I’ve done nearly 60 songs so far. Am I nuts? Yes. Am I regretting ever starting it? Maybe a little. But hey, check it out, make fun of me, maybe comment on a post or two if you actually know what the hell I’m talking about.4 If you’re already my friend, please don’t stop being one; if you aren’t my friend, try not to think of this too much if you ever meet me. Really, it’s one of the stranger things I do. Promise.

3) All right, that’s a lie. Stranger still: My old bass teacher Lenny emailed me today, and gave me a little present. It’s from back when we used to bass together. For my last lesson, he taught me how to use a home recording device for future reference. As he showed me, I would record things: bass, which I hardly knew how to play; guitar, which I didn’t and still don’t; and a little bit of “whoo!”-ing, at which I consider myself adept and still practice frequently. I played all of these parts separate from one another without hearing the others, which you’d probably have a hard time telling, listening along. You can download it now, for a limited time, by finding and clicking a secret location link hidden somewhere on this page. I wish you luck in your search for the buried treasure. Your ears will be rewarded greatly for your mind’s persistence.5

That said! Enough nonsense, I promise. (Though I do hope you enjoyed the song in the previous post…at time of press, I listen to it first thing when I wake up and last thing before going to bed.) The next post will be kind of a real “piece.” I’m not going to let myself post until that happens. So rest easy, dear readers, and remember: “Even in a bastion of anti-cruise fodder…There is cruise.” May you find it well.

bikes in china. better believe theres cruise here

(bikes in china. better believe there's cruise here.)

  1. No, not really. [↩]
  2. ”Only In Dreams” contains one of the most beautiful passages of music ever recorded. [↩]
  3. Maybe my personal favorite album ever — I can’t help but rock out or sing along when one of those 10 songs comes on. It gets to be a problem every now and then. [↩]
  4. If you don’t, let me know. I’d be happy to buy you a copy of Pinkerton, or maybe just burn you a good mix. [↩]
  5. If you do find it, keep in mind that it was a terrible joke at the time, and not much has changed since. Lenny and I laughed for a good 20 minutes upon playback, and we were right. [↩]

11 Comments / WRITTEN ON Feb 05.09

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