Davy Jones R.I.P.

The excellent work The Monkees did as musicians and songwriters once they wrested control away from their handlers has thankfully provided some balance to their only partially deserved reputation as a pre-fab proto-boy-band manufactured product, though the earlier songs were pretty great, too, thanks to the top songwriters and session musicians who created them. Whether you prefer the pop-tart TV entertainers of the mid-1960s or the pop/psych/country experimentalists of the late '60s, you have to concede that either version of the band is pretty damn likable and it's sad to see one of them go. Here's Davy Jones' big moment from Bob Rafelson's highly recommended Head (1968):

Michael Davis R.I.P.

MC5 bassist Michael Davis died of liver failure on the 17th. I was lucky enough to see him play with the other surviving MC5 members seven or eight years ago. It was a great show, but I wish I could have seen them in their full pomp and glory between 1968 and 1972.

A song for every year of my life #19: 1995

Remember all that jive I was laying down about the fancy new phones of the day destroying society, human interaction, and life as we know it? Boy, is my face red. When I was volunteering for a film festival back in October, the twentysomething manboys and womangirls made fun of my outdated cell phone, which I used only under protest in highly specific circumstances. They told me to get hip. I told them to fuck off. Nevertheless, when a pretty 20-year-old makes fun of your technology, you have two choices: 1) put on some suspenders, check into a nursing home, and watch sitcoms until you die of inertia or 2) get with the now and buy the items that today's metrosexuals, extreme sports stars, reality celebutantes, and screamo bands need to survive in the future of the now. Well, I got one of these Satanic new robot droid smart phones because I was tired of feeling like Andy Rooney, and I take back all the bad things I said about them. Since age 21, when I decided I liked things the way they were, I have violently resisted every technological advance. When it becomes more work to fight than to join, I reluctantly join. I'm always wrong. I need to be more like the Scorpions and embrace the winds of change. I get it now. I like this phone. It makes my life better. I can avoid all kinds of small talk by pointing my face at it in public. I can check the Internet and play games and shit. But you know all this already. You bought one two years ago.
Here's an epic 1995 dinosaur jam from yesteryear, Yo La Tengo's "Blue Line Swinger," loved by me, one of today's oldtimers.



Alternate choice: Pavement's "Half a Canyon," another classic oldie from the sock hop and cave stomp days of the mid-1990s, back when we were all swinging on the flippity flop and macking on lizard butts. I think I finished high school at some point in this song's six-plus minutes. Matt Pinfield is in the trunk of my car.

A song for every year of my life #18: 1994

Like a lot of misfit teenage music-loving loners stuck in small towns in the early 1990s, I was obsessed with Kurt Cobain. I'm embarrassed to admit I was devastated by his 1994 suicide, taking it almost as hard as a death in my own family. Really, I just needed a girlfriend, but any of you who shared my circumstances can probably relate. Now, I think of Kurt Cobain as a selfish, immature celebrity junkie who wasted his talent and cruelly left behind a young daughter, and I think of Nirvana as a really good band who made a few really good records and probably could have made even more instead of as one of my primary reasons for living. Teenagers are some melodramatic, inexperienced fools, and that's why I have affection for them. Still, my pain was real, though misguided, and Nirvana's records got me through my naive period of mourning for the famous man-boy who created those records. Music can get you through some hard shit.
Now that I'm a grown man ("grown-ass man" now needing to be retired in the storage shed of overused white hipster slang alongside forebears like "batshit" and "word up"), I've had to cope with bigger problems than teen angst and celebrity death. My parents' divorce, deaths in the family, unemployment, depression, real adult alienation from the world replacing mannered teen ennui, lack of opportunity, money troubles, periods of strained relationships with both parents, Zooey Deschanel's divorce from Ben Gibbard (gotcha), et al. These problems put my teenage depression into perspective and taught me that life is mostly hard and brutal, though it's spattered with fleeting beautiful moments where the light comes in and the bullshit temporarily disappears.
What happened to an acquaintance less than a week ago, a close friend of several of my close friends, on New Year's Eve has put my difficult last four years in the same kind of perspective those difficult years put on my immature teen angst. A stranger murdered this woman in her own home after she celebrated the new year watching bands play two blocks from where she lived. I didn't know her well, only enough to say hello in the grocery store or a rock club or a friend's party in those hello-friend-of-friend moments of recognition, but many of my good friends in this usually safe city adored her. She was a friend to one of my bandmates, and she saw us play a few times. Like me, she was a drummer and a music freak who had planned to be a teacher. She was a special education assistant in an elementary school and a volunteer at a rock camp for pre-teen and teen girls. She was only 29, and I don't understand it. I've always been fascinated by true crime and real-life murder mysteries, but I hate this one. I hate it.
We lie to ourselves sometimes, but most of us know the deal. We know that death is part of the gamble of getting out of bed and getting on with our lives, day following day. We could drive too fast, step off a curb without looking, fall off a balcony, get some disease from smoking or drinking or sitting on our asses too much or just having lousy genes. Most of us just get too damn old. But each one of us should have the right to take this gamble without some pigfucking cretin fixing the odds just because he can. She deserved to get home safe and didn't because this world is such an unfair place. The news channels are calling this murder a tragedy and it is, but I don't like this juxtaposition of her life and name next to the word "tragedy." She made my friends happy and taught young girls to rock and inspired her students and supported tons of great local bands. That's not a life of tragedy. The tragedy is that her killer's mother didn't have an abortion.
My 1994 song, and my alternate choice, is dedicated to my friends and her. I hope I didn't pick a song she hated.

Sebadoh - "S. Soup" This is a real shit soup of a new year so far.



Alternate choice: The Magnetic Fields - "Swinging London"

Ironic Song Titles #1 and #2

Collect them all!

Ike & Tina Turner - "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"
Loudon Wainwright III - "Rufus Is a Tit Man"

A song for every year of my life #17: 1993

I got my driver's license in 1993. I didn't have a car so I spent a lot of time driving my parents', a brown station wagon that was nobody's idea of any adjective used to describe an automobile worth describing. I drove it alone at night many times, feeling sad and bitter and self-righteous and lonely and superior and inferior, antsy to finish high school and get the fuck out of town. I dubbed a lot of my favorite CDs onto cassette and listened to them as I drove the brown station wagon aimlessly around town and on nearby highways and country roads. Frank Black's first album, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, and Dinosaur Jr's Where You Been got heavy repeat play. 1993 was also the year I started listening to a lot of female artists. The grunge boys club of my recent private hit parade started making room for PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, and Kim Deal, among many others. Music journalists at the time often wrote about how blunt and scary and intimidating Harvey and Phair and Kathleen Hanna's lyrics were. I never understood all this verbal pantswetting from grown men (if rock critics can ever really be grown men). I felt a kinship to Harvey, Phair, Deal, etc., and idolized them just like I did their male counterparts. I didn't find them or their words scary. On the other hand, high school girls terrified the shit out of me. They were the scary ones. I didn't know where they were coming from, and most of the time I felt like they were brazenly making fun of me in code. Oh, the terror. High school is a bad four years that can go on forever if you let it. On a related note, no one really understands what the fuck happened to Liz Phair.
Hey everybody, it's The Breeders' "Invisible Man."



Alternate choice: "My Curse." One of the most male of bands, The Afghan Whigs, give a woman, Marcy Mays from Scrawl, the floor for five minutes on one of their most male of albums (Gentlemen), and it's probably the greatest five minutes of her career as well as a definite highlight from one of my favorite records of the 1990s.

I haven't posted in a while so here are some James Baldwin quotes because he was a much better writer than I'll ever be

I started reading James Baldwin's collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, yesterday, and I'm finding much to admire. I'm only 45 pages in, but here are a handful of quotes that appeal to my sensibility.

"... Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. ..."

"...the avowed aim of the American protest novel is to bring greater freedom to the oppressed. [Writers of protest novels] are forgiven, on the strength of these good intentions, whatever violence they do to language, whatever excessive demands they make of credibility. It is, indeed, considered the sign of a frivolity so intense as to approach decadence to suggest that these books are both badly written and wildly improbable. One is told to put first things first, the good of society coming before niceties of style or characterization. Even if this were incontestable -- for what exactly is the 'good' of society? -- it argues an insuperable confusion, since literature and sociology are not one and the same; it is impossible to discuss them as if they were. Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of meaning. Those categories which were meant to define and control the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos; in which limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions. ..."

"It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. ..."

"... Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. ..."

"... Leaving aside the considerable question of what relationship precisely the artist bears to the revolutionary, the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms; and who has, moreover, as [Richard] Wright had, the necessity thrust on him of being the representative of some thirteen million people. It is a false responsibility (since writers are not congressmen) and impossible, by its nature, of fulfillment. The unlucky shepherd soon finds that, so far from being able to feed the hungry sheep, he has lost the wherewithal for his own nourishment: having not been allowed -- so fearful was his burden, so present his audience! -- to recreate his own experience. ..."

A song for every year of my life #16: 1992

Guided By Voices' "Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox" is the greatest anthem of Midwest teenage bedroom air guitar stale beer ditch weed unrequited emotion explosion church of rock and roll praise and worship in the history of sound, recorded or otherwise, on this planet or any other, in any time predating, concurrent with, or postdating 1992, forever and ever. I can say, without hyperbole, that this song will destroy an entire metro area if played on more than 20 simultaneous ghettoblasters.



Alternate Choice: Faith No More - "Caffeine"
I don't really understand why Faith No More is such an object of sneering derision for most people I know. I think their music has aged better than a lot of other stuff from the 1989-1996 era, and I also think they were a boundlessly creative band that wrote really good songs and played those songs really well. Too many people lump them in with either the horrible funk-metal or even more horrible nu-metal thing based on their one novelty hit, but these people are categorizing the band inaccurately based on their own limited knowledge and experience of their work. The essence of their sound, to me, was a singular and unexpected combination of the best parts of heavy metal, prog rock, mainstream pop, and late-night cable access TV, and an openness to try anything. This was a band, in the true sense of that term, made up of disparate, contradictory individuals with different musical tastes and interests who somehow managed to collaborate effectively. As Andy Rooney said, moments before passing away: "Faith No More are way better than most of that other shit. I could never say shit on television."

A song for every year of my life #15: 1991

In 1991, as all of you know, one album by one band came along and changed everything about popular music. This year marks its 20th anniversary, and the articles, reissues, and tributes have been numerous. In one week, the hair metal bands died forever and the boy bands took a six-year hiatus. The pop culture landscape changed overnight, and an underground movement became commodified by the mainstream. This album was hugely important to me, and millions like me. It was my first year of high school. Three years later, the primary architect behind this record was dead by his own hand and the radio and MTV were full of dreary, shitty copycats. Of course, that record I'm talking about is MC Skat Kat's The Adventures of MC Skat Kat and the Stray Mob. I'm not going to play anything from that record because the wounds are still too deep, so fuck it, here's a far more important band: Mudhoney.



Alternate choice: Since I can't find anything from Mindfunk, here's a funk-metal classic from Vic Chesnutt, "Lucinda Williams," instead. If that previous sentence is bullshit, the following one isn't. This man's songs are so beautiful they're painful.

Public service announcement ... with keytars

Yo suckers,
Thanks for not fucking off. It's been a rough time. Even if you can't get me a job, keep reading my indulgent spew if you're the kind of masochist or connoisseur of sloppy writing or supportive humanitarian that can't help but tolerate my verbal diarrhea (known in West Virginia as "word squirts").

On that note, I've been volunteering this week as a driver for a film festival. It's been a good thing for me. I've earned enough volunteer hours to get a free pass to the festival, and I took advantage of that today by attending some Nicholas Ray-related business. I might get into that later, but I just wanted to relay a few things I heard today on the bus and the downtown streets while I was heading to my shift and/or leaving a film screening.

Guy on cell phone: "If she's not turning tricks already, she will be by tonight." (hangs up phone, then immediately calls someone else) "Hey, this is Rhonda's friend, Glenn, the guy with all the Adderall."

Guy on bus, to other guy: "Me and my old lady are having some problems. When I went to jail, the only instruction I had for my wife was to take care of my car, and she sold it."
Other guy: "Why'd you go to jail?"
Guy: "I took too much Xanax and drove a new car into a mailbox."
Other guy: "Oh yeah?"
Guy: "Yeah, man. I'm usually cool with Xanax but I got some basement Xanax and I was in my attic, fighting off aliens with a baseball bat."
These two guys later had a conversation about how they would gladly cheat on their wives if offered sex by "hot chicks."

I'm starting to feel a little better about myself.

I'm out of ideas

What I want to write:
"Unemployment is dragging me down. I'm exploding with stress and I feel about as hopeless as I've ever felt. If you read this blog, enjoy it, and are in some kind of position to offer me any kind of employment, please do it. Send me a message, and help my ass out. If you can't help me out, fuck off."

What I will write instead:
"Bluh?"

Another day, another absence of dollars

Unless I hear otherwise tomorrow, I have most likely failed to wow yet another group of interviewers and will continue to be unemployed for the foreseeable future. I can keep on staring into the gaping maw of uncertainty indefinitely. Stare into that gaping maw! Stare into it! It's really gaping. I've never seen a maw so agape. Thanks, pointless unending wars, every American politician, corporate CEOs, and big banks for bleeding this country dry for the benefit of a baker's handful of bloated, greedy pigs and keeping me and thousands of other Americans like me out of work so you fuckers can buy some more ceremonial yachts where you pray to your god, the Invisible Hand. At least some day we will all be dead. Thank Christ, Superman, Mom, and U2 drummer Larry Mullen, Jr., for that.
At least it's not as goddamn unbearable and parched and on fire outside as it has been for months and months, am I right, fellow Texans? I took a two-hour walk in the neighborhood today because it was beautiful out and my wife emailed me and asked me to get some beer. Normally, I don't cotton to unexpected errands, but she had me at "beer." As I was walking to the convenience store through the neighborhood, I felt a strange sensation. I think it's called "wonder." I've grown used to feeling only angry desperation or that absence of feeling I believe is known as "dead-inside" in certain billiards halls and salmon farms these past few years, so I was momentarily confused. I eventually got hip to what the day was throwing down. The circle of life picked one of the streets in my neighborhood to put on an exhibition. A dead squirrel in the middle of the road had attracted four large turkey vultures, one on the street getting deep into some squirrel eye socket and three in the adjacent trees. I generally only see vultures eating dead stuff in our neighborhood early in the morning and they tend to get lost as soon as they see people or cars, but this was a bright, sunny afternoon with automobiles and people passing by every fifteen or twenty seconds. I stopped and watched their Dark Crystal-looking asses for a long while. A drifter with a rolled-up sleeping bag on his back stood across the street watching them, too. He looked at me and started gesturing, so I took off my headphones and walked over to him. He began to mouth words silently and mimic the vulture eating some expired roadmeat. I nodded and smiled. He kept doing it. I was wondering how long this was going to continue and how to extricate myself politely when a pickup pulled up. The driver began taking photos of the vultures. Then the pickup pulled up even further until they were right beside us. Two older, rough-looking, drunk-smelling men were in the pickup. The homeless man I'd been having the weird non-conversation with started mouthing soundless words and mimicking the vulture again, this time to the passenger in the pickup. To my mild amazement, the old man started doing the same thing back. Then the men began talking in sign language. Apparently, they knew each other and were deaf and dumb. To paraphrase my dad, they were some rough-looking characters, so I resumed my walk to the convenience store, a shiver running through me as I passed the large vulture chewing on some squirrel. I didn't want my eyes pecked out once they realized I was unemployed.
At the convenience store, I bought a six-pack of tallboys and a lottery ticket. I won 2 bucks, exchanged it for another ticket, won 2 bucks again, exchanged it for another ticket, and lost everything. Then I walked to a different convenience store and bought a Gatorade. On my way there, I nearly stepped in a wholly intact, freshly dead raccoon. I wanted to text the vultures, but none of us had our cellphones. They were crowding around a snack when a feast was two blocks away, theirs for the taking, and the poor carcass-eating bastards had no idea. A non-smushed dead raccoon must be worth at least eight partial squirrels.
There is no moral to this story, but if you're the type who likes high school English-style reductive symbolism, the dead squirrel and the three lottery tickets represent the American worker and the Gatorade represents the futility of human endeavor.

Bert Jansch R.I.P.

Bert Jansch died of cancer this morning. I was fortunate enough to see him open for Neil Young last year. Young and Jansch both played unaccompanied solo sets, and they both killed it. Jansch mixed his originals with some beautiful Karen Dalton and Jackson C. Frank covers. He was already ill with cancer on the Neil Young tour, but it didn't affect his odd but lovely voice and his inventive acoustic guitar playing.

The history of right now

Home on break from college a handful of days before or after Christmas one late-grunge evening, my mother reading on the couch, I placed my CD (remember those?) copy of Beggars Banquet in my parents' booming stereo system, pressed play, and leaned back on the couch as the percussive intro of "Sympathy for the Devil" recognizably filled the available airspace and hairspace. (That tasty stereo now sits unplayed in storage next to the garage in the home my father shares with a woman who is not my mother in the only open space not occupied by 17 hairless cats or a handful of small dogs, though a caged Malaysian serama mini-chicken is the stereo's roommate, for reasons only a divine creator could understand. My step"mother" likes to accumulate small, hairless, and/or plentiful animals, though she doesn't seem to enjoy them much once she has them.) My dad, coming home from work a few seconds later, entered the room, greeted my mother and me, listened for a few minutes, then asked me, "Who's this?"
"The Rolling Stones," I replied casually, mentally appending a silent "duh" or "no duh," possibly even reaching back six or seven years to junior high's "doy" or "no doy" or the dreaded "uhhh-DOYYY!!"
Maybe he wasn't paying much attention, I thought, but his next question was the real gobsmacker:
"Is this their new album?"
I was struck dumb. This song, bouncing off the walls of his home a few short years after the new jack swing-murphy brown-schindler's list era, originally bounced off the walls of every American and British teenager's home in late 1968, when my father was a junior in high school. A classic rock staple, a massive worldwide hit, a cultural flashpoint, a big rock song by a big rock band, the second most famous rock band in the world then and now, in a time when rock hadn't yet fragmented into a bajillion little pieces and subgenres and scenes and dogmas and traditions and specializations, and my dad couldn't place it. He was impervious and oblivious to its omnipresence (said Don King). The old man and I clearly had different ideas about religion, rock and roll being mine, none of my business being his.
My sister was privy to a recent conversation between my father and his wife about something I no longer remember, but the kicker is my father's defiant response: "None of my kids have ever, ever smoked marijuana in their entire lives!" The naive trust in this response is almost sweet, and my dad's own cultural illiteracy, high and low, fear of the unknown, even an unknown as benign as a joint on a friend's couch in 1970, and his general obliviousness to anything not happening in the same room as him, gives you some idea where he's coming from. In beatnik terms, my old man is a square, an apple, a clyde. He stays close to the pad, and he won't pick up on the action you're laying down. Becker was his favorite TV show, The Bucket List and Rambo high in his cinematic pantheon, Larry the Cable Guy his top comedian. He admired Steve McQueen until he found out from an A&E True Hollywood Story that McQueen loved pot. "Man, that guy was my hee-roe," he told me dejectedly over the phone. His favorite musical group is ZZ Top. Not for their sound. For their giant beards, sunglasses, and souped-up classic cars.
It's really no surprise, then, that my father had no idea I was a teenage midnight toker. He couldn't interpret the signs. My best friend had long hair and drove a van with tinted windows. I didn't play sports. Girls didn't like me. My room's contents included a drum set, a waterbed, metal magazines, posters of junkie rock stars, unread Carlos Castaneda books, well-read copies of Naked Lunch and a history of LSD and Bukowski and Vonnegut and Ginsberg and Tom Robbins and Jim Carroll, a stolen emergency traffic light (still blinking for a few months), and a boatload of cassettes and CDs, including the White Album, Sabbath, Hendrix, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Clash, Sex Pistols, and various other classic rock, metal, punk, indie, and mainstream alternative stuff. (Bonus anecdote: One summer afternoon, I rode my bike from my friend's basement to my backyard with reams of weed-stench rising from me like cartoon stinklines and eyes like dirty fishtanks, and I ran smack into my dad. I had a conversation with him I gigglingly recognized even then as stunningly incoherent. He never caught on.) I was a lonely, sad, pissed off, and curious teenager. What did he think I was doing? Playing Uno? 2011 postscript: I can't even remember the last time I smoked pot, and I played Uno two weeks ago.
Three years ago, he forgot my birthday. The next year, he wished me a happy birthday a month too early. He called me once and wished me a happy Mother's Day. It was Mother's Day, but I can think of at least three things wrong with this gesture. If you held a gun to my father's head and asked him to name ten things about my life, he wouldn't be able to do it.
I bring these anecdotes/criticisms/observations up not to belittle or embarrass my father, but to point out that this guy, despite his obliviousness, cultural illiteracy, ignorance, and distanced half-ass parenting has one huge leg up on me and on most of us rubes in the iPhone/iPad/iPhuck era. He never once, not once, started a Facebook page. My dad's a genius in this regard. Yes, I know he can't type, doesn't even have an email account, hasn't read anything longer than a classified ad since he was in high school, and I have my doubts he read any English assignment even then, and he most likely didn't open a Facebook account out of pure lazy indifference, but intent is irrelevant here. His move was right. His inaction was the best action. Oh, how I regret my entrance into the unhallowed halls of Zuckerbergiana. Facebook, Facebook, Mind-Erase Book. Yowzah, I know too many things about friends and relatives and friendly acquaintances I didn't want to know, never wanted to know, regret knowing now. I feel dumber and sadder every time I visit the place (no-place). "Then why don't you quit going there, you big dummy? Why don't you just cancel your account, you big palookah?" You're right to ask these questions, and I'm as stupid as anyone. These things are indisputable. But, I'm hooked. I'm caught up in this ridiculous age of constant babble-chatter and e-sucking and i-fucking and simu-living and irrele-pooting. I have three blogs, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, two email accounts, and some ghostly floating Friendster pages. (The cyber-wind still robo-whispers the name Adult Condor.) In my own tiny way, I'm a selfish egomaniac who needs to be heard by my single digits of fans and needs some reparations for my high school loserdom and invisibility. I need people to tell me I'm funny and interesting. I also like to stay in touch with some fantastic people I probably won't ever see in meatspace ever again, and I need that Facebook account to keep the connection alive.
Here are some tiny examples of what I hate in the Facebook, Facebook, This Is No Place-book.
Irrelevance in Real Time: "Eating lobster poolside at Fancypantsateria. Here's a photo of this delicious food." 17 Likes! 4 Comments! Comment 1: "That looks delish, guys. Have fun!"
You have an audience, Facebookers. Many of us are looking for jobs. Even if we weren't, even if I was CEO of World's Largest Moneypile and Blowjob Factory, Inc, even if my life was creamy, dreamy perfection, I still would not give a fuck about what you had for lunch. Stop taking pictures of your damn food and eat it. Eat it! It's getting cold!
Cut and Pasters: "Some of you won't have the guts to repost this, but many people you know and love are afflicted with Shaky Dangler Syndrome and a fear of petting zoos. Cut and paste this message and copy it to your status or you are a terrible friend who doesn't care about me." 128 Likes! 72 friends have shared this!
Deranged politics and stupidity: I had the misfortune of growing up with and occasionally being related by blood or marriage to a lot of perfectly enjoyable people with bizarre ultra-right-wing views. The combination of Sept. 11 and the recession and hysterical Fox News drumbeating have turned them from moderates to paranoid freakshow lunatics. I don't want to have the paranoid, stupid, ignorant, emotional, thoughtless parts of them thrust in my face every day. I like these people, believe it or not. (Believe it.) I don't like these parts of them.
My cousin's wife, from one of those cut-and-paste jobs: "Only Jesus Christ and the American serviceman have ever offered to lay down their lives for you." And on and on, every fucking day.
Ugly reactionary posturing and loudmouthism: A recent tragedy near my hometown saw a man kidnap and murder a young girl. This family's grief has turned into a lot of loud, stupid soapboxing. From a former coworker with American flags all over his page: "I say we skip the trial and just shoot the SOB right now." 80 Billion Likes! Yeah, because a cornerstone of the American ideology you want everyone to know you constantly ejaculate over is executing people without a trial, you dumb shit! "I say we cut the bastard's balls off with a rusty knife. Hell, I'll volunteer right now." 90 Likes! (including my uncle's wife, who should know better). Look at this genius. This guy hates the murder of a small child! He hates it more than you other wimps! He's taking a stand! He hates child murder so, so much! What a giant of the scene! What a man! What a hero! What a refreshing, unusual, controversial stand on such a divisive issue!
What a dumb fuck. Even child murderers think child murder is wrong. Put some of that energy into reading a book or buying a Malaysian mini-chicken. Why are you encouraging this stupidity, uncle's wife? You're an educator. Embarrassing.
Am I kidding myself? Is this the same old stupid on new technology, or are things getting worse? On at least ten occasions in the last two years, I have looked up from a table at a bar downtown when the conversation stopped only to see every other person's face balls-deep (Mel Brooks' Faceballs) in their iPhones, and I don't even go out that much anymore since I've been out of work. It's dark comedy and tragedy at once. Remember seeking things out? Remember the thrill of the chase? Remember being somewhere and actually being there? Remember being present? Now you don't have to take the effort or even bother to shape your personality at all. No more happy accidents or bitter disappointments. Everything is bite-size content, all equivalent, all meaningless. We click like on Life instead of living it. Says a guy with three blogs, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, two email addresses, and a deep ass-groove in the chair in front of my computer.
You can't escape mediocrity offline, either. Middlebrow middleminds are the middlemen at every institution on Earth. I've spent many lunch hours in teachers' lounges in the past few years and whoo boy. The main topics of conversation: Dr. House, Glee, Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, weight loss and gain, shit-talking about the teachers who weren't in the room, Oscar winners, which movie stars are purty. These are the educators of our youth. These are the people who believe they have a firm grasp on culture. You know what these people laugh at, pooh-pooh, sneer condescendingly at? High culture and low culture. The former is the province of the poseur and the snob, the latter the dirty rabble beneath, they tell each other over their beloved Lean Cuisine. They just don't want to do the real work. The pleasure of getting your hands and brain dirty in the real upper reaches of human achievement or in the beautiful, thriving sleaze of the gutter. They don't know, can't know, will never understand that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Supervixens or Vigilante or Swinging Cheerleaders has more vitality and invention and urgency and sweet, sweet life than any 100 English Patients or King's Speeches or Slumdog Millionaires or Beautiful Minds or Paul Haggis Crashes or any other visually dead, respectable flatterer of the middle mind. Any good, really good, professional wrestling villain since the 1950s can show you more about life than any high school English syllabus. The sweet, beautiful purity of a pro wrestling villain, a guy who can make an entire building full of people hate his guts, that's art. That's low culture at its best.
Lincoln, Nebraska. 1997. I'm in the crowd for Eddie Guerrero vs. Ric Flair. Guerrero grabs the mic and confidently announces with some of the best manufactured contempt I've ever seen, "It's a real disappointment that I have to wrestle tonight in Lincoln, Nebraska, home of the worst college football team in the world." At the time, as most of you know, Nebraska had one of the best college football teams in the world. Guerrero whipped that crowd into an orgiastic frenzy of hate with one sentence. Most of those suckers knew the show was a choreographed spectacle of preplanned show business, but one sentence and they all forgot. They lost their damn minds. They pelted the ring with full beers, empty beers, cups, programs, food, candy, spit wads, gum. The ring, in just thirty seconds, was covered in shit. They had to stop the match and clear the ring out. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.
Guerrero later died in a hotel room from a life of steroids, speed, booze, road food, lack of sleep, and a job that required him to take hard falls on his back, knees, elbows, and face. These guys are better Christ figures than most literature and film examples you want to throw my way. They live it. They die for our sins, our lazy, fat-assed need for spectacle and entertainment. They're forced to die for our sins by their god, Vince McMahon. I grew up in the middle of a golden age of professional wrestling, a time of quality regional promotions and healthy competition. A time of polytheism. Now, we're back to the corporate status quo of Vince McMahon's monotheistic monopoly, but these guys are still out there, destroying themselves for you. When's the last time Dame Judi Dench put her life on the line to make you lose your damn mind and throw your full beer at a fictional representation of evil? That's art, baby. That's better than any app on your iPhone.
Disclaimer: Everything in this post is ridiculous and not ridiculous.

A song for every year of my life #14: 1990

1990 really was a time of weeping, metaphorical or otherwise. At the year's start, I was short, cadaver-skinny, mulleted (I thought I had long hair but I didn't know you had to grow out the front part, too), lousy at sports, invisible to girls, easily intimidated, and short-changed by the slow onset of puberty. It was not my favorite year, though most of them have been lousy if we're going to be honest about life and its inherent crumminess, but it taught me a lot about how power is structured and acquired and how weak and puny most people's ethics are when they're insecure about whether or not other people think they're hot stuff. Plop! By year's end, I remained cadaver-skinny, lousy at sports, and invisible to girls, but I was much taller, no longer easily intimidated, funnier, and my haircut was better. I'm still lousy at sports, but now I have a beer-drinker's paunch and some muscle tone. Plus, anyone who cares about sports is as boring as the sex life of a fundamentalist preacher's wife. Weep with me, peers.
Blixa Bargeld and I shared an awful haircut in 1990. He was probably having a better time, though. Paddling around with Nick Cave and singing songs about weeping is higher on my list of possible fun times than listening to a redneck math teacher tell me I looked like a woman and would probably do poorly in his class because I was a shitty athlete. Teachers could still say these things out loud in 1990. It didn't hurt my self-esteem because just look at that guy with his crew-cut and dim, poorly ventilated classroom. Just look at him.



Alternate choice: Motherfuckin' "Painkiller" by Judas Fuckin' Priest, because why the fuck not?

A song for every year of my life #13: 1989

I'm still trying to find a job and still trying to blast through the degradation, frustration, and monotony of that search, but I thought I'd been managing okay when I got sideswiped a few weeks ago by the return of my depression. It came on gradually. My wife noticed it before I did. Last night, it got so thick I could physically feel this imaginary murky, brown soup surrounding my brain, making my thinking paranoid and incoherent. Unfortunately, I was hanging out with a crowd of people. Bad timing. That's one of my many middle names.
I stumbled onto a trailer for a book (they do those now?) by a doctor dying of cancer. He passed away a few days ago. The book is about his gradual peaceful acceptance of his terminal illness and how he learned to live with it instead of fight with it. It became another part of his life, rather than something from the outside destroying it. This trailer made me feel ashamed of my lack of enthusiasm for my own life. I'm here now. It's not all going to be a good time, but I need to love it more. I need to be a little more present. This is basic stuff, and I'm an idiot to have to keep relearning it all the time, but this fog just comes in and surrounds my brain and I have to work to get rid of it.
You know what's good, though? Music.
"In the mind of Ronald Reagan/Wheels they turn and gears they grind/Buildings collapse in slow motion/And trains collide/Everything is fine/Everything is fine."



Alternate choice: John Zorn w/ Naked City - "I Want To Live"

Ugh

It's best to just ignore these things because they tend to go away on their own if we do, but I also think GQ needs a public shaming for hiring Natasha Vargas-Cooper as a film columnist. Read this typo-plagued column and see if you agree with me that this woman is the worst writer and stupidest thinker ever to appear in an international publication.
I have a strong personal belief that critics need to understand the history and canonical works of the medium they choose to write about, which is unfortunately unfashionable with a certain breed of loud, twentysomething critics who are surprisingly getting work from a lot of mainstream and prominent alternative publications terrified about the future of print media and scrambling for relevance in all the wrong places. I like long, thoughtful pieces from critics with a lot of knowledge. I guess I'm a dinosaur. If Vargas-Cooper, Karina Longworth, and Nathan Rabin are the future, I'm happy being a dinosaur. Also, hire a fucking copy editor, GQ.
Here are some highlights (lowlights?) from Vargas-Cooper's column if you have better things to do than read the whole thing (and everyone clearly does have better things to do):

"Let the film school prigs, art house snobs, and the better half of film critics publishing today slavishly catalogue the classics and engage in numbing debates over who did it first and who did it better. Whether reverence for movies from a bygone era is rooted in merit, nostalgia, or neurosis about film being an inferior medium to literature, movies keep pace with social mores of a time and deserve to be free of the tastes and prejudices of people who grew up without Quentin Tarantino."

"Let's be untethered from history, ignore the tug of the familiar, and resolve that any movie made before, say, 1986 has received its due respect and move on."

"History does not inform the value of a film; you need never see a stylized Godard flick or Cary Grant comedy to understand the enthralling power of Fargo or Independence Day."

"This column will survey the new movie canon. The rules of the game (Ha! That's the name of a classic movie I have never seen. Eat it ,1939!)"

Boy, I bet 1939 is really stewing over that zinger. She really stuck it to 1939 good. Yeah, she really did say that "any move made before ... 1986" has received its due respect and should no longer be discussed. I can think of at least 500 pre-1986 movies off the top of my head that haven't received their due respect. Finding these films has been one of my life's greatest joys. Isn't the Internet saturated with more writing about post-1986 films anyway? I think you'll find that The Dark Knight has already received its due respect and then some, while Raoul Walsh's The Man I Love (1947) or Wim Wenders' The State of Things (1982), to pick just two random examples that came to me quickly, haven't been written about enough or even released on DVD in this country. When Joe Strummer sang, "No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones in 1977," he was making his case for the present and the future in a way that Vargas-Cooper may think she's doing now. They're similar positions, I guess. The difference is, Strummer knew his history, was a hell of a lot more eloquent, had more at stake, and knew he was being a bit of a liar. (He loved those three artists.) Strummer spent the rest of his musical career incorporating the rich history of the past into the present and the future. Vargas-Cooper brags about her lack of knowledge of film history like it's some kind of intellectual badge of honor. That's a stupid thing to do. Why close yourself off from any part of the past or the present? Why be proud of narrowing your interests? Why gloat about it? I've already given her more of my time than she deserves. Articles like these don't matter much. The proliferation of articles like these, though, matters a lot in the long run. If our culture decides the present is the only thing worth investing in, the past becomes economically unattractive and some of it disappears from availability. Everything is not available on the Internet, despite a sometimes overwhelming belief in this myth. I don't expect most people to care about esoteric 1940s films. We have different hobbies and interests. I don't care much about furniture or baseball. Some people live for those things, though, and I don't want their passions and histories to disappear.

A song for every year of my life #12: 1988

I heard a few Dinosaur Jr songs when I was 14 and wasn't impressed. 14-year-olds are idiots. I heard some more Dinosaur Jr songs when I was a weary, battle-scarred, streetwise 15-year-old, and it all made sense. J Mascis is my spirit guide. Maybe that's why I'm unemployed, depressed, and kind of a failure, but I wouldn't trade my Dinosaur Jr albums for happiness or a job or even a never-ending supply of tacos and donuts. Get your own Dinosaur Jr albums, I say. "Yeah We Know."



Alternate choice: Womack & Womack - "Teardrops"
Sorry to those of you sobbing because I didn't choose The Beach Boys' "Kokomo" or something from Y Kant Tori Read. The culling is brutal around here. Some of you may find this song cheesy. It does have a slight Velveeta quality to it, but I don't care. I like it. It was a rare late 1980s R&B song that didn't suffer from massive overproduction and soulless gloss. I like the unarguably cheesy video, too. 1980s videos made the studio look like a great place to be. Everyone was having a good time, nodding their heads and twiddling various knobs and dancing around. We should all be twiddling knobs instead of working for the man. Knob twiddle!

Portion of a telephone conversation with my father from a few weeks ago

My dad: Say, did you watch any of the MTV Video Awards last night?
Me: No. I don't usually watch stuff like that, and I don't have cable.
My dad: We watched about 20 minutes of it, but I don't care for that kind of music.
Me: Yeah.
My dad: I never did like that rap... (long pause) ... or hip-hop is I guess what they call it now.
Me: Yeah.
My dad: Some of those guys are real wild-looking characters.

A song for every year of my life #11: 1987

Mainstream top 40 radio was at one of its lowest points in 1987. The first half of the 1980s was full of great pop singles, but look at this lackluster collection of overproduced inessentiality. The late 1980s was the first time in my tiny little life that pop radio stopped meaning something to me. I turned off my radio and began listening to a lot of hard rock and metal instead. It would have been a fine choice, except I listened to a lot of shitty metal instead of the good stuff, though I wouldn't figure that out until I became the embittered, prematurely aged curmudgeon of today's future yesterdays of tomorrow today you all know and love/hate/ignore/like/have no opinion about/are planning to kill, cook, and eat. 1987 became an important musical year for me in the mid-1990s, when I discovered a lot of records I missed out on while I was listening to Whitesnake and Faster Pussycat, including the debut albums from Guided By Voices, Eric B. & Rakim, and Public Enemy, Big Black's Songs About Fucking, Negativland's Escape from Noise, Dinosaur Jr's You're Living All Over Me, Prince's Sign O the Times, and Sonic Youth's Sister. And so on.
I did listen to the shit out of one great record in 1987, Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction. "It's So Easy" is a weird song. It doesn't sound like anybody else's stuff, though you can hear the influences, none of which should belong together this cohesively. I don't feel like getting into a debate, internal or otherwise, about the lack of political correctness in the lyrics, because I really don't give a fuck about that shit in art, except when I do. Some of the lines make me wince, but I'm a form and structure guy, not a subject matter guy, and I think it's better to creatively spew your inner dirtbag instead of suppressing it. I just want people to be honest in their work. A lot of hip hop artists are just as sexist but get more of a free pass from cultural critics because of white liberal guilt. It's a lot less complicated for Pitchfork writers, etc., to criticize Axl Rose. I'm off the subject, though. This record is so finely produced compared to the expensive wall of shit, cavernous yet empty sound prevalent in 1987. It's a big rock record, but it's stripped down. The drums sound like drums. The guitars sound like guitars. It hasn't dated like so many records from this time period have dated. These guys had their own thing going. They weren't Poison. I'm still on board. I just don't get tired of this record.



Alternate choice: Butthole Surfers - "Sweat Loaf"
I wish my father would have had this talk with me. I regret too many things I haven't done. For example, I was at the park one day, and I thought maybe I should SATAN SATAN SATAN!