Got one!

Rejected, that is. Here's the response, short 'n sweet:

"Kevin,

Thanks for sending along your work, but this piece isn't quite right for us.

Best of luck,

The Editors"

So was it almost right? I'll never know! They did try to make it personal with the "Kevin" in the beginning, but then I wish they'd signed off as somebody's name (even if they just made it up, like: "Best of luck, Mark Ruffalo") instead of just "The Editors" unless it was actually the British band Editors. Yeah, that's what I'm going to believe. Editors read (and didn't quite enjoy) my piece! Well, Editors, I don't quite enjoy your music so I guess we're even-Steven.

i like the way you look tonight

Dunno why but writers tend to like to tell people when they've been writing a lot; whether it's true doesn't seem to matter. And this is kind of what this post is, because I have been writing a lot, just clearly not on this blog! ha ha!

bleh, that's how it feels knowing you need to tell people something they more than likely couldn't care less about. But I NEED this! har har, Anyway - just shipped off a new short story to some journals and writing contest things and am eagerly anticipating the thoughtfully worded rejection letters (or the generic ones they send to everybody, or ooooh a really mean one would be kind of awesome on some level), which I'll happily post here when they come.

So, what else? Been reading a bunch as always:

- Just finished Don DeLillo's 1985 novel White Noise (not to be confused with the terrible 2005 movie of the same name starring Michael Keaton)

- Antoine Wilson's short story "Everyone Else" from the fall 2004 Paris Review, which made me immediately order his 2007 novel The Interloper. (Seriously, do your eyes and pocketbook a favor and just buy a real fucking book, $4 at Powell's. Having to turn your iPad or iPhone off and stop reading during taxi, takeoff, and landing is a HUGE drag.)

- James Lasdun's short story "The Hollow" also from Paris Review.

And I can't really say enough about these next few excerpts from David Foster Wallace's soon-to-be-here-but-not-nearly-soon-enough last and sadly unfinished novel The Pale King.

"Good People" (published in the New Yorker). A snippet:

What it really felt like was a taste of the reality of what might be meant by Hell. Lane Dean had never believed in Hell as a lake of fire or a loving God consigning folks to a burning lake of fire—he knew in his heart this was not true. What he believed in was a living God of compassion and love and the possibility of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through whom this love was enacted in human time. But sitting here beside this girl as unknown to him now as outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of Hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle—the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other, and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, could not hear each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their face looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two-hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.

"The Compliance Branch" [PDF Link] (From Harper's Feb. 2008 issue). The first paragraph:

My audit group's Group Manager and his wife have an infant I can describe only as fierce. Its expression is fierce; its demeanor is fierce; its gaze over bottle or pacifier or finger-fierce, intimidating, aggressive. I have never heard it cry. When it feeds or sleeps, its pale face reddens, which makes it look all the fiercer. On those workdays when our Group Manager, Mr. Yeagle, brought it in to the District office, hanging papoose-style in a nylon device on his back, the infant appeared to be riding him as a mahout does an elephant. It hung there, radiating authority. Its back lay directly against Mr. Yeagle's, its large head resting in the hollow of its father's neck and forcing our Group Manager's head out and down into a posture of classic oppression. They made a creature with two faces, one of which was calm and blandly adult and the other unformed and yet emphatically fierce. The infant never wiggled or fussed in the device. Its gaze around the corridor at the rest of us gathered waiting for the morning elevator was level and unblinking and (it seemed) almost accusing. The infant's face, as I experienced it, was mostly eyes and lower lip, its nose a mere pinch, its forehead milky and domed, its pale red hair wispy, no eyebrows or lashes or even eyelids I could see. I never saw it blink. Its features seemed suggestions only. It had roughly as much face as a whale does. I did not like it at all.

Go read, I'll have some more stuff soon. Promise. Happy Holidays!

Excerpt 2, FINALLY

Alright here we go, forward motion. This is the second excerpt from the much larger something I'm working on. I think it's probably time I started calling it a novel; for whatever reason I get anxious when I see the look on people's faces when I say "I'm writing a novel." I think it's because everyone inevitably asks what it's about and while I know what it's about, it's also about quite a lot of things, and so I get sort of halfway through explaining what it's about and I start to get all self-conscious and blah blah blah so that to the next person who asks what I'm writing I just say "Oh this longish thing" and don't go into much more detail, and oddly still kind of end up feeling the same way. So here's excerpt 2 of my NOVEL! Yay.

DOWNLOAD PDF (it'll be up there for 7 days)

Neglect

Oh god I've neglected the blog! Here go read this, it's interesting and written by somebody else: Sigur Ros: Homage or Fromage?

Happy Birthday Mr. Sexton!

One of my all-time favorites turns 40 today! And while I have to admit that I don't listen to much 311 anymore these days (and really, aside from a few tracks, most everything after Transistor was fairly wince-inducing), but I can still see what hit me so hard from basically age 10 - 18 or whatever. And here it is 2010 and they are still a band, which says...something.

This solo is from 1997, the hey-day, when Mr. Sexton still played OCDP drums, when OCDP drums weren't yet completely infatuated with Travis Barker, and when Chad's snare drum didn't sound like a real nasty post-Maine Lobster Fest fart. Listen to those open rolls! And the stick flip near the end! All that drum corps influence really shines through here. Terrible video, but just listen:

Visualsssssssssssssss

Real quick post, though there isn't much one needs to say about these guys: 2010 DCI (Drum Corps International, for ya'll newcomers) champs the Blue Devils of Concord, CA. Have a look at their awards list; basically they win everything, a lot. This is a neat camera view of the drumline warming up in the lot with some tremendously cool stick tricks, and call me a nerd but I'm diggin' the uniforms:

Geeking out on drumlines

Alright I missed a post yesterday, but that was really because I spent most of the day doing what the title of this post suggests. So now I'm ready to unload several videos for the nerd drummer in you.

First one is the Santa Clara Vanguard from 2004 doing what the Internet tells me is Murray Gusseck's version of a popular cadence, pre-show warm-up thing they do called Double Beat. It's pretty much water-tight.



MP3 of the full thing from 2004

And here's the 2009 Santa Clara Vanguard doing a slightly different version:



Annnnnd the 2009 Cadets looking really cocky but, you know, being incredible so sure why not? Be cocksure. (If you're not familiar, there's a whole kind of messy and convoluted underbelly to the drum corps world, and sometimes drumming in general. Certain stereotypes do exist for a reason. It's hard to even really begin to describe. I'm not trying to say these Cadets are jerks or anything; that would be stupid, I've never met them. It's really just one or two guys that look the part; there's always that one guy.

But there is definitely pressure from day 1 of drumline camp to basically be a cocky asshole. It's weird, and I don't feel like getting knee deep in it right now, possibly sometime later. I've been fortunate enough to have some phenomenal percussion instructors, two in particular from elementary through high school. But I've played in drumlines with some interesting people, people you sometimes want to shake or slap their foreheads and explain the reality that most of the world could care less that you can play like 240+ hybrid rudiments and thinks you're a complete nerd for thinking that's cool.)

But, yeah, the video - the Cadets really are incredible here (and so are the equipment dudes in the background in matching "uniforms" of bare chest and blue shorts):



And finally this one's fantastic for two tiny things. The center snare drops his stick at 00:10, and the judge picks it up and throws it back to him! But while you're watching that happen, you're likely missing the poor horn player who face plants at 00:19.

ODaD: "the percussion just raped my mind"

The above youtube comment sounds violent and unpleasant, but I promise you Chris Ward's drumming is definitely not the latter. Though I suppose if you'd stood where this cameraperson was standing you'd probably feel like yer mind had just been R'd:



Chris Ward is the bespectacled, bearded man in Pattern Is Movement and is probably tired of being referred to as such, but it's Tuesday and my own personal mind has been getting R'd all day with end of the month work stuff so...alright you don't care, I don't care, I'll stop.

Chris is a phenomenal, powerhouse drummer with the feel of a gazelle in its prime. Or maybe an impala, I think I saw one of those on a Planet Earth re-run the other night. It didn't get away from the lion. And Chris was the lion. Wait. Ok, another video!



That most youtube comments about these guys fall somewhere along the lines of "drummer is sick" or "man, drummer is a beast" should not be a surprise.

One drummer a day: Antonio Sanchez

So...this next drummer...Antonio Sanchez. I'm really not even sure how to articulate, other than to say that he's so good it hurts. I've been fortunate enough to see him live with Pat Metheny four times. The first time I had this grand idea of interviewing Antonio after the show for my college newspaper, but couldn't come up with anything but "What planet are you from?" and so I never mustered up the courage to approach him. In the vid below there's a point where the camera focuses on Metheny waiting in the wings during the drum solo and even he can't believe what he's watching. That's how good Mr. Sanchez is.

One drummer a day: Frankie Dunlop

In an effort to make sure I keep posting stuff and writing, I'm going to try to post a little video or audio clip of some of my favorite drummers, one a day if at all possible (on weekends all bets are off, but you never know).

So let's get going with the man behind the kit for Thelonious Monk: Frankie Dunlop. Though Dunlop also played with Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins, Lionel Hampton, Maynard Ferguson, and by the time he retired in 1984 he'd played on about 100 or more albums. Check out this solo from a Monk set in Belgium, would have been sometime between 1960-64 I think:



So awesomely musical, and tells a solid story in that solo. And don't you get the impression, watching him play with such joy, that he's just a genuinely nice and approachable guy?

Good Eats, Good People: Highland Kitchen, Somerville, MA

A few years ago my friend Andrew and I played a very small, very empty show at a brand new place on Highland Ave in Somerville called Madison's on the Ave. This show is memorable for a few reasons: one being that it was pretty much completely empty except for our very patient, very kind lady-friends (yet the manager of the place still paid us something like $100), and another reason being that the aforementioned manager was not exactly a nice person. I particularly remember him giving me a ridiculously hard time about needing some kind of rug on which to place my drums or else I was going to tear up his nice new hardwood floor with my drums sliding all over creation. There were several rugs in other areas of the very empty restaurant.

Anyway, Madison's didn't last more than a year at best and I wasn't surprised. Running a restaurant on bad vibes and mediocre food isn't going to get you very far. Fast-forward to the present and Madison's is now the Highland Kitchen and, presumably, under new management. Last week my lady and I walked up and the place was packed. Somehow we stole some seats at the bar while we waited for a table (and didn't wait more than 20 mins) and ordered the Devils on Horseback, which -- just please get up and go there now and eat them, stop reading. If you're not familiar, Devils on Horseback are giant dates, stuffed with some real gnarly (aka great) blue cheese and probably lots of other cool things, wrapped in bacon. See the very dark photo above taken by candlelight at our table . I believe they get baked, though maybe they were grilled? I don't know and I don't think I really care; they were in my belly in a heartbeat. My friends Amy & Bryan made these once filled with goat cheese, which was also incredible.

So for dinner I had the buttermilk friend pork chops with garlic mashed potatoes, a ham hoc gravy, and smoky collards. All delicious and buttermilky (mmm), really my only complaint was that the pork chops were a tiny bit too dry, though honestly it wasn't that big of a deal because they were still delicious. Julie had the special, which was a grilled Sea Bass that was just a tiny bit over-blackened for our tastes, but the inside was lush and perfectly cooked .

But here comes the best part. We're kind of slow eaters, and as our dinner went on several tables on either side of us opened up. We'd just finished up dinner and had ordered a banana bread pudding with vanilla ice cream to split for dessert when the manager gently touched my shoulder and asked, with a pained expression, if we wouldn't mind moving two tables over so they could push a couple other tables together for a bigger party. I said sure thing, no problemo, and then he offered to buy our dessert. "But of course," I said, though he really didn't need to. And so while we were eating the dessert (about which I think I really only need to say man oh man oh man, but I really love banana bread, reminds me of mom's cookin' oh man!) our waitress brought over two glasses of sherry on the house, still apologizing for the table swap thing. The only thing that sort of concerns me about this is whether I was correctly projecting my inner feelings, which were that it was no big deal to have moved tables. Did I scowl or something? I don't think I did.

Anyway, really good people, really good food, everybody wins. Check out the Highland Kitchen.

Good Reads: J. Robert Lennon

J. Robert Lennon is relatively new to me; the first thing I read was this excellent short story in the Paris Review this past Spring. So I was hooked after that and did the most logical thing I could think of, which was to devour two of his books this Summer. Literally eat them. I hang-glided to the Porter Sq Book Store and picked up his 2004 novel Mailman, and also his most recent novel Castle. Both books are well-crafted with unique (uniquenewyork) characters, yet they're written in such drastically distinct voices that you wouldn't be a complete moron for assuming they were written by two different authors.

I am not at all a fan of book reviews giving away plot details, so I'm not going to tell you anything. Besides, I think people can tend to trust other people's opinions too often. In fact this isn't really even a review, it's more of a demand. I demand of you to read either of these books, preferably both. And I'd humbly suggest opening Mailman first, but you're an adult - you can do whatever you want.

One chunk of something much larger

There's a strange portion of my brain that doesn't really care about anything and has been calling this thing "Danny hates U2, but still hasn't found what he's looking for," which yes I know is kind of a remarkably stupid title but, hey, welcome to my world.

So anyway, this is part of something much larger I've been working on for a while now, and if all the planets and moons line up with my motivation level, and if Nintendo would stop putting out such entertaining little gems for the 10-year-old trapped inside me (ie. Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Metroid: Other M in a month or so), I might just one day finish the damn thing.

EXCERPT #1: DOWNLOAD PDF

[That fractal art up there is by artist magnusti78 over at DeviantArt, who's stuff you should really seriously check out because it's incredible. And hopefully magnusti78 doesn't mind too much that I've posted it here, but if for some reason you, magnusti78, somehow stumble upon this page and you're pissed just post me a little comment and I'll take it down. Promise.]

Short Story # 2

The Worried Ant

The ant has a family and he worries about them constantly. He worries he'll get squished before he's able to fully provide for them. Or, worse, that they'll get squished before he gets squished, and then his short life won't have any more purpose.

Everything he does is with his family in mind. Every morsel he comes across and hefts back to their lair even though it weighs twice what he weighs is for his family, not himself. He has no life ambitions, or I suppose you could say that his family is his one life ambition.

Every so often he wanders out in twilight to the Great Sea and is sensuously overwhelmed. He thinks it might be nice to float on his back and breathe lightly and let his legs sort of flail uncontrollably with the wind and drift in whatever direction it is that the Great Sea drifts. Or maybe this Great Sea drifts to an even Greater Sea, he thinks. And maybe that Greater Sea is just a speck that, to some other being, is just as small as he thinks he is. And then maybe there's like an even larger and obscenely swollen pouch carrying all this mess...though, carrying where? And then what if that pouch is in the hands of some behemoth thing that itself isn't moving so everything's really just...wait, how'd I know what 'behemoth' means? the ant wonders.

And then he thinks about his family and goes back to work.

Those Wolves Actually Happened

I play drums and sing in this band, and we've just released our debut album! Pick it up for free if you want right here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/eq35b3 or if you have some money and don't mind donating it to us go here: http://thosewolvesactuallyhappened.bandcamp.com Bandcamp has some nice high quality digital formats, whereas that free sendspace link is yer run of the mill 192k MP3.

Come find us and be friends: facebook.com/thosewolves

hooray!

Autolux - "Supertoys"

Hello, Autolux. [insert Audrey Tautou-as-Amélie grin] Nice to have you back, we've been waiting.

DOWNLOAD "SUPERTOYS" MP3

Transit, Transit is out August 3 on TBD Records in the continent called North America, ATP will distribute to the rest of the world...that means YOU Antarctica.

Tracklist:

01 “Transit Transit”
02 “Census”
03 “Highchair”
04 “Supertoys”
05 “Spots”
06 “The Bouncing Wall”
07 “Audience No. 2″
08 “Kissproof”
09 “Headless Sky”
10 “The Science Of Imaginary Solutions”

"Supertoys" was known to us previously as "Let it be Broken":




Audience No. 2 was released for free back in 2008, just surf the Internet, which is a series of tubes, and you'll find it, promise.

Short Story # 1

Here's the first of hopefully many little things I'll publish here:

His daily morning ritual

(This actually starts the night before just minutes before his head hits the pillow with the laying out of tomorrow's jeans and the new white cotton v-neck t-shirt that'll go under the polo shirt, the setting of the alarm for ten minutes before he actually wants to get up, the teeth brushing -- my god the teeth brushing! I don't think there's enough space here to get into the teeth brushing...so but anyway, here we go...)

His alarm goes off with a 240 BPM quarter-note CAW! CAW! kinda thing but he hits the snooze and rolls to his right, unconsciously breathes in that sticky sweet morning smell of her hair pressed against a pillow (and there's her own personal sensuous smell mixed in there, too, we can't forget) that soothes him into 7 more minutes of not quite a dream but more like an atmosphere, like the aesthetic embodiment of the womb, carried on for a little bit longer, before his alarm goes CAW! again and it gets real. First thought always: ugh. Maybe 2-3 seconds of that tops. Second thought: hungry/thirsty/need to urinate. There is no third thought; next it's all a chain reaction. Legs swing out and he sits at the side of the bed, full mug of water on the night stand (oh this is also put in place the night before), chugs whole mug, goes AAH, and finds bath towel on the hook on the back of the door and wanders downstairs to the bathroom making sure to step over the cat and not on her as he crosses the hall. Fan turns on first with a switch outside the bathroom, he thinks that's stupid, the switch being outside the bathroom. The light inside switches on from the inside next to the mirror. His roommate has not hung the bath mat so it's damp and cold under his feet. In the shower he washes from the top down (mostly to avoid washing his face after having washed his ass crack): hair, face, gets a good lather around his balls and then hits the arms, armpit, chest, thighs, ass, calves, then feet. (Never really gets around to his back; that's more of a Saturday morning-type thing where all morning ritual rules get thrown out the window.) He's outta there in roughly 3 minutes and 45 seconds, which his girl simply doesn't understand. Out of the shower he always does a fly-by of the coffee-maker while it hisses and sputters finishing up the fresh brew; the aroma wakes him a little more. Back upstairs he gently opens the door to their room because he knows if you push too hard it'll squeak like a mouse from hell and wake up his girl, who's really probably half awake anyway but he wants to let her have that cherished 30 more minutes of uterine-like stasis before her own personal alarm goes off (which, by the way, sounds more like KEY! KEY! and is at a speed somewhere between a 257 and 260 BPM quarter note). So next he lotions is hands, then face, then his arms but only a little there; he makes sure to spray his Axe body spray outside their room so she doesn't wake with that over-concentrated just-sprayed taste in her mouth, then he rolls the Old Spice Pure Sport on his armpits, down-up strokes 7 times (for Mickey Mantle) where each downstroke is a 1. All this is done naked. Next the boxers go on, then the pre-laid pants, the v-neck, then the polo. The last minute out the door is a blur of keys, wallet, iPhone, coffee, somehow he's backed the car out of their narrow driveway in a haze and again managed to not hit the pedestrians who all seem to assume he's paying attention and won't accidentally eliminate their maps on the spot.

And so if he doesn't follow through on all these little things one-by-one the morning is shot to hell and he's grumpy toward his co-workers and, later, possibly even grumpy toward the motherly immigrant sandwich lady who then won't take quite the care as is needed to properly make his roast beef/swiss cheese/tomato/lettuce/mayo/mustard on pumpernickle, and probably some mustard will poop out onto his shirt, and then the whole afternoon's shot and he starts thinking about how to rectify it all by properly following through the next morning, so the evening's spent going over the day's mistakes, that is until she holds him and says, "honey baby boo it's all right i love you" and they fall asleep more or less in each others arms, forgetting the laying out of the clothes, and the water mug, or even the setting of the alarm, and they both know and don't care that tomorrow's going to be a sick day.

The inaugural post!

Here it is, for no one and everyone! The great beginning! Must pick initial sentences carefully, be grammatically correct and witty and tell everyone that this is where I'll post stuff that I do, see, smell, and think is interesting. Ok ok what I really want to start with is this drum set, a Coke Bottle Green C&C custom acrylic. Snazzy. Me want play. Speaking of drums, I play them, in bands: Those Wolves Actually Happened and Pretty & Nice. Check 'em out if that's your sorta thing.