“Cake and ‘Cakes”

Curtis, for his part, meant no harm. He was in fact completely oblivious to what he had done until reading the conclusion to the previous episode of Soymilk Revolution himself,1 and even then one could say he didn’t do a damn thing at all. In truth, the only way Curtis ruptured my friendship with Marie was by having a nice voice.

It’s true. Sometimes we use people we know as little more than a literary device, a means of progressing a story — all people are authors, if not literally writing ones.2 And sometimes we use people we don’t know in much the same way, as I did just a week or so ago when I used one pop band as a mere way to set up my review of another pop band’s new album.3 Not long before that, for the means of progressing my Story, I used Curtis as a way of bridging the last piece into this one. A chapter that ends with a touch of suspense is what makes the reader abstain from his bookmark and turn the page, and a trick as simple as that is enough to convince some readers that what they’re reading is legitimately engaging (qualifying it as “good,” to most of those same some readers). It wasn’t really fair to Curtis, because my words were misleading,4 and the next chapter was not yet conceived, let alone written, let aloneliest ready to be read. It is now, and “Curtis” is the first word of this chapter just as it was the last word of the last, making for one of the easiest transitions I’ve made in recent months (having lately tried my hand at smoothing over a few).  So now you know that Curtis was in fact not to blame — and his voice only really was depending on how you decided to hear it.

Marie had a decent voice herself, but it wasn’t quite so nice as Curtis’, and they didn’t sound quite so right when they shared their voices in melodic motion. I, for my part, would have never imagined them singing together at all when I first met Curtis that fateful night at the Trocadero Theater, but it turns out it wouldn’t take long for me to be surprised.

Even now I’m surprised by how quickly I must have been surprised, back then. It goes without saying that different people will always remember things differently — unless you’re the short pompous asshole who first said that history is but a set of agreed-upon lies (or one of the pomp-ass aspirants who paraphrase him) — but one man’s recollection, diluted by the years, is almost always inferior to a document written just hours after the happening in question.5 And though my memory’s not the worst of all those present at the time, there’s only one person with access to such an ongoing history of this time-window in my life.

Wait for it–

Curtis was just the kind of kid to write in his journal every damn night about the damn day done, and though he isn’t that kind of kid anymore,6 he’s become the kind of guy who can look back on that time in his life and be able to say, “Oh yes, I remember that perfectly — that’d be in the White notebook.” Which is exactly what Curtis said to me when I asked him a question not long ago, and exactly what surprised me when he shared some of those notebook contents with me: KJ and I asked him to audition for our band a scant four nights after we met him at the Troc.

“Then I went online to get French homework, and ended up talking to KJ and Jacob [sic] for a long time about music, and I’m gonna audition for this band Dancefloor Diplomacy on Friday.” [White Journal, 4/24/07]

…

My life must have dripped molasses back then, for it felt like KJ and I had deliberated on whom next to audition for weeks.7 There had been the blond choir brah Ryan, who blew off his first audition and simply blew, in an anti-rock kind of fashion, at the second. And I still had in mind a jacked college kid from the local Ivy, for I knew that in one fell motion the chap could yowl a tune and do a backflip (whilst looking model-handsome in a white beater and plain jeans, no less) — but what the hell were we gonna do with a pro like him? Ask him to sing “El Scorcho?”

So by the end of a four-day eternity, we gave up and decided to ask Curtis. It wasn’t that we didn’t like him — he just seemed a little too quiet and sad to be what a bunch of party jam jokers like us needed from our mainman mic controller. Besides, on that night at the Troc KJ and I could each tell where he had bought every single item of his clothing, and for whatever reason that made the thought of him being in our band ring ridiculous. Who’d wanna see a party band fronted by some sad kid wearing an Urban Outfitters tee?

No matter. We asked the boy Green to hook us up with Curtis’ AIM credentials, and soon we were chatting with the emo candidate himself. He seemed like the kind of genuine dude his deeply blue eyes and (correctly) presumed passion for the Bright Eyes canon suggested he would be, and he was unabashedly excited by the prospect of being in a band — even one of our strange and ostensibly unoriginal kind. KJ asked him what he sounded like, and Curtis said he’d most had his voice compared to that of Thom “Radiohead” Yorke, which KJ found unlikely and we both found unfortunate. Who’d wanna see a party band fronted by some sad kid wearing an Urban Outfitters tee and sneering like a cat trapped in a sauna of existential angst?

Still, for all his enthusiasm and for all our non-existent alternatives, we agreed to audition him at the dawn of the weekend. In the long shadow cast by the Bowflex in Dilan’s work-out practice space, the young Curtis jammed with us on the requisite Pinkerton before treating us to lone takes on Bright Eyes’ “Lime Tree” and, of course, RadioYorke’s lovely “Karma Police.” KJ and I weren’t all too keen on the new Bright Eyes album that had provided Curtis with his tune of choice,8 but he sang it damn prettily and audibly knew his way around the guitar maybe almost as well as Dylan did — albeit with less a taste for the funk which KJ and I had unfairly prejudiced, and more for the kind of indie rock music that made our young souls sprout spiritual erections. As KJ had predicted, Curtis in fact sounded little like Yorke, and for our purposes this worked out well — he had a good, clean, dependable voice for a boy his age. Without a reason to hesitate and like KJ before him, he was thus asked to the next one.

The sun’s daily arc drew itself long and slow then, to be sure, but perhaps because of that it seemed like so much could happen between rise and set. Proving himself to be as unreasonable as any man, Dilan somehow managed to book us to play at the biggest and best of all local coffeeshops, Milkboy, for the date of June 28. Not only were we to play, but also we were to headline, with Dilan’s punk band Generic Youth opening,9 and Dilan’s punk band’s friends’ pop punk band Laidout playing between them and us. It was a pretty large venue, and the resident coffeebastards expected us to draw at least 100 paying customers (at $8 a pop) if we wanted any hope of not shriveling up and blowing out the door in a whisk of embarrassment. So that made us a band with nothing but a name and a few ridiculous pictures, hardly any actual material to speak of — certainly nothing recorded, or recordable — and a need to get at least 100 people to pay 8 dollars and 1 Thursday night (a summer night, no less) to see us. And that, of course, meant that we’d have to put on a proportionately worthwhile performance, to prevent the venue from becoming a roomful of riotous hatred and refundthirsty violence.

An avalanche of activity followed, and looking back on it our strategy seemed to be to hype the show up and get as many people into it as humanly possible — once that happened, I must have guessed the impetus to practice our asses off would follow naturally. So while musical progress did continue to slowly seep out of us, primary concerns seemed to be more superficial: on May 2, Curtis told us about the two cuties he managed to convince to get to work our merchtable (after all, what kind of band doesn’t have something to sell?); on May 12 we did a homespun photoshoot which I later managed to Photoshop into working promotional quality (the fliers of which are around somewhere, just not on my harddrive — I did recently hear about a girl who, long post-high school, still has a stolen one on her wall); on May 17 I made a Facebook event that still exists and promised incredible things for a band that had maybe a couple minutes of rehearsed material at the time; on May 19 Curtis shat a fearful, anxious brick into his White journal about just how many people had RSVP’ed as “Attending” and just how nervous these numbers made him; and on May 27 we had a full-band practice (well…as full as the band was, at the time), which Free Gilbis! bassist Drew filmed into a videotape that I would quickly edit into a brief promotional clip.

The video was slyly fashioned to make it seem like we had a lot of stuff rehearsed, but it’s actually just a disordered pastiche of rough-‘round-the-edge moments from what we called “Medley 1” (a.k.a. The First Medley), and then a few snippets of the first time we jammed on a cover of Haddaway’s cheese-as-fuck classic, “What Is Love?” It was based around a classical guitar-picking arrangement of the chord progression that Dylan10 had come up with and played at a school assembly around the time I decided to ask him to join the band.

So.

The June gig was scheduled before Curtis was even in the band, but in a way it wasn’t until he showed up that it all seemed remotely real or feasible. Curtis, as was the case at the beginning of this chapter (in 2010), had no idea he had effected such change — all he did was show up when asked (incredibly late more often than not). But he brought a talent that made the rest cohere — Dilan and Dylan were both great, but great drumming and great guitaring alone are seldom enough to feed our young (or veterans) — which is evident in that he provides pretty much all the memorable moments in the clip above, from his improvised solo over Gwen Stefani’s “Sweet Escape” to the pretty little nothings he guitar-whispered into Haddaway’s cold, lonely ears.

***

By this point, my life was in nigh-total flux. I had been ousted from my boat and my team (of which I had been captain) around the time that Curtis joined the band by force of the inexplicable and inhaler-irresolvable respiratory failures within me, and on the day this practice was taped my former boatmates and best friends were racing the river without me, long past the hope that I could ever rejoin them. It was an immense pain to feel what was once such a large part of my identity wither and keel like a pair of scorched lungs, something beyond what I could comprehend or force myself to face at that point, and I don’t doubt that’s why I delved as deep into the band as I did. I had gone from something I had rehearsed and gotten damn good at over the course of years, to being forced to replace that with a pursuit of something completely novel and unknown to me. It was depressing but catharsis, confusing and exhilarating — and the enthusiasm of the skilled musicians who came to serve my budding (yet still mostly shapeless) vision, mixed with the surreality of being forced to fit it all together in just another month, inspired in me something of an obsession. I threw myself at it with abandon.

Yet the change in me felt most pronounced not on May 27, this day of practice some thirty before the show itself, but on the day before — my birthday. Amidst the deep-spring warmth of the sun I returned to KJ’s backroom, the place where we had met, to find he had bought me a “blackout” cake — a reference to some slanguistic inside joke-talk of ours at the time, though neither of us ever blacked out — and a plastic camera that was all the hipster rage at the time. It seemed impossible to me, just how close I had gotten to this kid, two years younger than me but more mature and interesting and loyal than any other friend I ever had. We had known each other but two months and I was already closer to him than anyone else I’d met in all my four years of high school.

Marie got me some sweets as well, except the cupcakes she gave me were ones she had baked, iced and sprinkled herself. It couldn’t have occurred to me at the time, but in this way my nineteenth birthday became the point at which my best friend of the past and the best friend of my future crossed, intersecting at a vector of celebratory confections. The two desserts were equally delicious, and their respective qualities had nothing to do with the friendship revolution that was about to occur. If it had really come down to cake and ‘cakes, Marie would have won some decisive extra points for having made hers for me — but not long from this point she would be instant messaging KJ, telling him that she hates him, claiming that he stole my friendship from her, or else razed hers to make room for his own.

This, of course, was untrue. There was no reason I couldn’t have stayed close to both of them, no reason to have to lock one out to embrace the other. The turning point was something else entirely, and turned pointedly one night when Marie and I discussed her place in the band. She’d been our femme singer for the past couple months, but had blown off a great many practices for a few not-so-great reasons (saying she’d be over to Dilan’s in 30 minutes, then spontaneously combusting into a nap — caring not to alert anyone before or after — was one memorable instance), and with the show being less than a month away I wanted to resolve her commitment issues like a guy trying to make a ho a housewife.11 And as it turned out, she did not hesitate to tell me she had no interest in the band rehearsing or being any good: we had a show to worry about, true, but in her words she was just happy to be able to tell people she was in a fun band — and she only ever really showed up to practice because we were all attractive guys, anyway, and hanging out with five or six attractive guys through a conceit of music was a nice hobby to have. That this was not only the case, but also one she felt no shame in casually fessing to, struck me as somewhat astounding — especially considering she was a merely passable vocalist and lacked the grand surplus of talent that could have maybe made it hard to let her go. Given the circumstances, it seemed hopeless to resolve — no less so than my body’s submission to the igneous rocks of asthma suddenly lodged inside my chest.

I had no replacement in mind, but after what must have been a couple days of inner strife over the awkward friend vs. bandmate dynamic, I decided that I simply had to risk it. I’d like to imagine that I tried to find Marie on AIM or even lobbed her a couple missed calls before resorting to the Facebook inbox, but in the end I did it through a letter made of kilobytes and apologies. We may have been a dumb and aimless party band when Marie had joined, but with the introduction of Curtis and a concert date burnt into the calendar as imminent reality, we were now a dumb and aimless party band aspiring to greatness. Even a smallgirlsworth of give-a-damnless deadweight could be enough to fuck the whole thing to rubbish. In any event, my efforts at diplomacy were not well received, and I didn’t hear again from her in a long time.

It was a dumb reason to make a casualty of a friendship, but circumstance had made it hard to avoid, and as I drew closer to KJ by the bond of the band I don’t think I even allowed myself too much time to think about it then. Marie wasn’t my friend anymore, but I can’t remember if I ever paused to wonder who had really made the decision — the music or me.

  1. The last chapter, really — this is a pretend book, not pretend TV. [↩]
  2. Literally literally writing ones. [↩]
  3. Links to all “recent” “professional” writings will be posted here soon, but in the meantime there’s always this here. [↩]
  4. I began this literary blogthing inspired primarily by one of my idols, who at one point admitted there’s a ~30% chance that any given word of his prose is simply untrue. These words, taken as a whole, were ostensibly meant to serve as an ongoing (online) account of his life at the time, but the prose was good enough to justify the lies, and I suppose it was those very lies that allowed his prose to be so damn engaging (and actually good) in the first place. I now follow in his footsteps, but challenge myself to make my Story as interesting as his without ever lying. In one of his more self-reflexive pieces, he quoted a writing professor of his to say: “In order to tell a story, you first need a story to tell, and after that, you need a goal to accomplish with that story” — the goal being the point at which my idol decided he had to lie, and at which I’ve decided that I must be as truthful as possible. But here and now you’re learning that I’m not at all against the idea of turning up the distortion a little bit every now and then, if only to make the clear resolution sound that much sweeter. [↩]
  5. Retelling this Story as it happens (for it is 2010, and it is still happening — don’t worry, shit starts getting real good real soon!) would be much easier than what I’m doing now, struggling to recall just what the fuck happened in 0h-seven. The gap may soon be shortened considerably, however, as plans to jolt the heartrate of my recollections from “blue whale on benzos” to “regular person high on life” have been laid and are projected to begin one month from now, so long as I don’t keep falling into these swollen footnodes. Easy to get lost down here. [↩]
  6. The significance of which true disciples of the ‘Milk will learn some unreasonable number of chapters from now. [↩]
  7. Life’s tendency to accelerate with age is becoming a bit of a theme in my writings here. High school’s sunset seems to have also been the last rays of childhood’s endless glow of slow-simmer days, for me. [↩]
  8. I really dig half of it, now. [↩]
  9. Funny anecdote here. One day we came to practice and heard from Dilan that his father got an email from a clothing company also named Generic Youth, who demanded that the teen punks change their collective title. So one quick band meeting later and Dilan logged into Myspace to officially rename the group Fuck Generic Youth. This evidently failed to appease Generic Youth the clothesmiths, and Dilan’s father got another email, and so they settled on their third and certainly worst name, Free Gilbis! (exclamation theirs). Looking back on promo materials for the show, they in fact performed as Free Gilbis!, but I’m not sure I could’ve told this story had I just referred to them as such from the start. [↩]
  10. That’s the guitarist, not Dilan the drummer, for those keeping whores at home. [↩]
  11. Motherfucker must’ve forgot about Dre. [↩]

7 Comments / WRITTEN ON Apr 18.10

“Better Than Aliens”

“I know you’re not really a huge fan of them, but I’m sorry,” she said from behind the wheel. “Tonight’s a Radiohead night.”

She was right — especially at the time. But that night it made little difference to me. I could see where she was coming from, and even back then I had a hard time complaining when “My Iron Lung” was on the stereo. I cracked the passenger side window to let in some warm summer dusk, and put my free hands to use around the pliant neck of my imagined guitar. It was the only instrument I really knew my way around, but I looked smooth and polished as an MTV closeup as I synced my diving hair and fluid arms to the chords. Twisting the volume knob between us, she turned down my daydream when we rolled up to the drive-thru window, so she could ask the giant talking menu for some quick and easy ulcer food. The menu and its attendants stocked us up accordingly, and we soon returned to the suburban bends and alleys beyond the nearby treeline.

There we found our empty home, filled with other people’s furniture, possessions, and tailless dog. It was really only empty — and ours — thanks to the temporary absence of those other people, who usually owned the place in effect, and always on paper. These folks had entrusted the house and its resident dog to Marie, who was being paid some generous fee for keeping a lonesome and responsible watch over things. Except she had bent the rules in inviting me along at the last minute, to keep her company for a bit of the long and boring night ahead.

Boring in theory, at least. In practice it was the kind of summer evening that seemed lit from within, somehow free of the dark unease that nights are often wont to bring. That’s what I had accredited with the vaguely surreal vibe of our twilight drive, but it hung around even as we escaped the falling night between those four unfamiliar walls. As the lights flickered on to greet us, it felt sort of like walking out of a coma and into a married life — one filled with toasters and cutlery and other gifts from a wedding I couldn’t remember, couches and kitchen tables from a trip to Sears long forgotten.

This, of course, would make Marie my wife, and as we had only ever been friends I had to doubt that those housewarming lights evoked the same kind of feeling in her. The strange thought quickly passed as my attention turned to Petey, the dog who not only lacked a tail but a fourth leg, and compensated for both by being a goddamn friendly and lovable little thing.1 We fed him with attention and pork-oiled fries inbetween bites from the spoils we nabbed at the drive-thru, then slid our way into the basement, where a superior television set would entertain the DVD we had brought along.

The film was typical of high school era Marie, a dry documentary about a couple of strange and crusty old sisters who lived in a doddery squat of a house someplace Welsh or British — which, one way or another, had garnered them hipster cult status. I liked it well enough, and once it had passed we must have talked it over a bit as we sat on the carpeted basement floor. At one point or another I perused the bookshelves of audio documents the real Man of the Household had collected — live bootlegs of bands like Tool or Dave Matthews Band or some other mainstream-cum-subculture group that’s inspired folks to dedicate entire corners of homes to their archives. It was interesting for a time, and then it was not.

Sometime around the time it was not, Marie disappeared from the room and I turned my attention to the cheap magic of the chair she had been sitting in. It was magic because it had no legs, only the hard plastic seat and backing, but in sitting in it on the floor one could feel rather comfortably suspended in animation. The magic was cheap because it did not defy but rather relied on forces of nature (gravity, the size ratio of the average human body) in order to work, and looked like garish crap in the meantime. Absent-mindedly, I decided to do an experiment and place my head upon it, as though it were a pillow. This wasn’t comfortable, but it worked. A few moments later Marie returned, and decided to try an experiment of her own, sitting back down in her chair without first asking me to remove my head from its corner.

This also worked, but was much more comfortable. Somehow she had managed to sidle herself in with one smooth motion, and now my head was in her lap, my hair cushioned by her dress on one side and being gently sieved by her little hands on the other. Like so many other future self-absorbed male writers, I managed to remain eluded by the dead obvious intentions behind this feminine gesture, almost forcibly on my part. A ton of great things fell into my lap during high school, and I let most of them slip for all the strangest non-reasons.2

But now that things had fallen into her lap, she seemed to know what to do. Looking back on it, her taste in guys had probably earned her some decent experience with ones in the comically oblivious department, and she guided me through my quiet hesitance with grace. Soon enough we traded that tacky half-chair for the floor, our limbs entwined and our eyes set to the Spielberg sci-fi unfolding onscreen. That I felt comfortable enough to lean over her shoulder and interrupt her lips in the middle of some witty quip about aliens was a testament to her skill.

Our brief time together remains unique in my mind for how perfectly innocent it felt. No clothes were removed, and all we did was kiss. But there was something very loving and intimate to it, as if we had slipped into an alternate universe for a brief spell. By the time we looked at a clock it was almost daybreak, and I remember sitting on the couch in the first floor living room, the sun beginning to coat the TV screen in its reflected glare as she lay on my lap, bundled up and smiling peacefully in a shallow slumber.

“Wait a minute,” she said, behind the wheel again, watching the train pull away for the city without me. “I think there’s another station close to here that’s got one coming soon.” It must have taken some time to rouse ourselves from the empty home, get in the car and go driving, but it felt fast as snapping the spine of a dream.

“No worries,” I assured her, opening my door. “I don’t mind a wait.”

She insisted, and removed her foot from the brake with finality. Not to be outdone, I swung my legs out the open door and dropped my feet to the moving ground, the rubber sole of my Nike Dunks screaming dramatically against the asphalt.3 She acquiesced, shouted that I was crazy, and with a smile requited my farewell. My obsession with being as polite as possible in those days must have left a lot of confused girls in my wake.

***

I wasn’t so sure what was going to happen next at the time, but as it turned out this moment was never quite reprised between us — and for a long time, we never spoke a single word of it. But for just as long, the look in each other’s eyes that night sweetly lingered over our every minute together. Our friendship felt more complex and meaningful to me, and when we hung out I could sense that same feeling in her — as if there was some intimate knowledge between us that most great friends seldom got to share. The fact that we have now each written pieces about it means something, though I can’t be quite sure exactly what — I’ve never read hers.

But in those months that followed, my best friend Marie and I had never been closer. We discovered the funniest white hip-hop duo alive on a trip to Amish country, and we pored over Dig!, which for a damn long time was probably her and my favorite documentary. We made haphazard attempts at starting a t-shirt company and a radio show, and took tons of goofy pictures on her computer that, when uploaded to Facebook, would invariably make it seem like I was either dating her or gay. I hardly even gave a shit, such was our friendship.

Of course, after she joined my band to lend us her voice at high school’s end, things wound up getting more complicated. Just a couple months later, we wouldn’t even be on speaking terms anymore, and she blamed KJ — her “replacement” — for the death of our friendship. Which I knew because she had said as much to KJ herself.

But she was wrong about that. It wasn’t KJ who was responsible for my fallout with Marie, but none other than that sad, bright-eyed child Curtis.

  1. You’ve gotta dig how dogs all have their own little personalities, unlike those frigid felines. There’s a reason why “catty” means bitchy and “doggy” is a term of endearment! [↩]
  2. Of course, these non-reasons are actually real and pretty good ones, having to do with complicated things like the poorly timed rupture of my parents’ marriage, and the ensuing years of strictly all-boys education that followed. Which is a level of personal detail not even my friends would care to read on the Internet. [↩]
  3. They made a ridiculous sound, considering we can’t have been moving all too fast. [↩]

6 Comments / WRITTEN ON Mar 21.10

{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

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