Welcome! We have everything.

Somehow I've made my way back here to Internet Writing Land. Things look terrible; they also look occasionally wonderful. It seems like we have everything, though in ten years our everything will have been chucked into the garbage and we'll have a new set of even more of everything. It's hard to know where anything begins.

I was going to link to articles or stories that lately have rattled my soul in one way or another, but if you're up for it I'd much rather have you stay here for a few minutes if you can follow my brain's logarithmic spiral. I'm no neuroscientist, but I do work with a few, editing some of their reports and trying to make them sound like more normal humans. This is surely not news to you, but our brains are pretty ridiculous, and I have a lot of fun learning something new about them every day. Our brains are frighteningly powerful, and almost unimaginably fragile.

Brains are phenomenal at attaching human meaning to things, and this is great because without them we wouldn't be the only humans (that we know of). But they also attach meaning to shit that is simply not there, because it is so easy for the Brain to do. The big problem is that it becomes particularly hard to accept that in a chaotic, ever-expanding Universe, accidental things happen that don't necessarily have any universal meaning. I'm remembering now a powerful quote from a former Marine in Ken Burns' fantastic documentary The War, talking about the very young idealistic soldiers who came into his unit at one point. He said, "They honestly thought that if you did Good you would be safe and get rewarded. They had no idea of life's accidents."

Maybe you're like me and you have trouble coming up with things that are always Good, given every context. Or things that are always Right, or Wrong. Everything has a context; things may look the same, but only to us in a given moment. Probably without even knowing it, the greatest trick our Brains play on us is the very convincing idea that any one emotion will last infinitely. Our perception of stuff can change dramatically based only on how much sleep we got the night before. If the frontal lobe runs low on the fuel it gets from a decent night's sleep, you start having trouble distinguishing between past and present emotions; and folks' brains with more extreme sleep deprivation start convincing themselves they live in an "eternal present" according to one study I proofread.

It's with all these things in mind that I try to keep big, cosmic-seeming events from boiling over in my Brain. Though this is very hard and some days it just doesn't work. But it's important to try, especially when it seems hardest, because without trying your Brain retreats into what it's pre-programmed to do, which is to find patterns and keep itself alive at all costs. This is the difference between our Brains and a whole lot of other animal Brains we've studied. We get the opportunity to try very hard to find the context that shapes whatever it is that has happened; if you don't do this, you risk getting your Brain caught in easy loops, running deep grooves that can take generations to wash away.

One real deep groove that we're having a whole lot of trouble washing away is this constant narrative of Us vs. Them. Whenever something frightening happens, especially now that media and opinions are ubiquitous things, the collective InternetBrain whirrs alive and starts churning out lowest common denominator horseshit, stuff that you might notice isn't a whole lot different from major motion picture blockbusters. Some people claim this is the big bad media attempting to control us via fear, and there is probably some truth to that, but it's also likely that it's as simple as folks in control noticing how many billions of our dollars we pour into Us vs. Them-type entertainment, so why not make the "real" news look the same? It's almost a little too easy.

Unless I have a beer in one hand, popcorn in the other, and my feet up on a coffee table, Us vs. Them narratives either make me uncomfortable or are plain boring; it seems so obvious that the truth is always way more nuanced. I really think most people know this on an individual level. Put people face-to-face, and I honestly believe a majority of folks from all walks of life would treat each other with respect and love, sharing emotional similarities while learning about cultural differences. This admittedly feels a little naive spoken by what on paper is a suburban-raised white kid who was lucky enough to attend a private university. Then again, if that's all somebody decides to judge me on, they're making exactly the kinds of mistakes I'm trying to be aware of myself.
  
Collectively, though, we've got some strange new issues to confront, to go along with plenty of old ones. What's becoming clearer to me is how often I need to take breaks from Internet Reading & Writing Land. The overabundance of opinions (and opinions about opinions) isn't just exhausting, a lot of it is basically meaningless. This doesn't mean you can't find remarkable stuff out there--of course you can. We've got pretty much everything available (or what we think right now is Everything), but what's happening at this moment in Time is a whole lot of people needing to scream and shout that, Hey! Everything's Here! There's no filter! AHHHHHHHHHH!"

Don't worry too much; I think we'll grow up sometime. After all the U.S.A is still basically a baby at 200+ years old or something. My plan is to let 'em keep on chuggin', anyone who thinks they've got It All figured out. Follow me into the abyss if you like: Dare to be confused! Bask in the glow of unfixed opinions! It's a little dark in here, but to me it's like the clandestine moment in a theater when the lights finally go poof and the chattering crowd around you disappears. Now you can be yourself, nobody's watching.


Now, if you've made it this far, go grab a copy of Denim Skin #3 and dive into the first half of a new short story of mine called "The Old You." Do it!

The slippery middle ground

I'm a big proponent of balance. I think probably most people are, too, if you get them to open up enough. Somehow I kind of doubt most people enjoy being one-sided and ornery; certain things kick up your dander for a bit, but once the crazy emotions subside you realize it's much more beneficial (and feels good for longer periods of time) when you come to a reasoned, balanced viewpoint.

I'm usually hesitant to write at any lengths about political stuff because, A. I don't follow it all that closely, B. I don't usually have firm opinions (I'm almost always able to see reason in multiple points of view), and C. what political knowledge I do have comes from The West Wing, which (although awesome) is not real.

So I'm not going to write at length about political stuff. I'm just going to re-post President Obama's speech last night on immigration, because I think it's one of the more thoughtful and balanced responses to a contentious issue that I've heard in a while. Try, even though it's hard, to block out all the one-sided opinions this speech will bring out of the woodwork and simply listen to the words. (Or, read them, here's the transcript). Entertainment thrives on winners and losers, one party vs. another, and those things are fun in the right context. But when it comes to serious stuff, me vs. you is not just boring, it's insane. Think about why sportscasters and athletes are always only able to say the same things over and over...

For some reason it seems like a lot of folks dislike President Obama (despite the economy not imploding, gas being under $3 a gallon, more of our troops being at Home and not abroad...the list goes on) but I'm again not really sure about what it seems like. It's tough being moderate. Everybody's shouting at you to pick a side, when the real world isn't me vs. you. What it seems like is a lot of loud people with rigid opinions not liking him.

The thing about loud people is that they shout because they don't want to give anyone the time to stop and think about what it is they're actually saying.

Alright I wrote a little more than I intended; please feel free to yell about that.

Pay Attention, Read, Think, Thank You

There are days when I'm convinced everyone's crazy--I'm sure you've experienced this sensation--when in reality I'm just paying attention to the wrong things. Probably I'm a little bit crazy.

I was at a Halloween party and overheard somebody, drunk, say, "Literature just ain't what it used to be!" which is a truly awesome thing to say. I'm assuming they meant that literature is no good now, compared to...who knows when. But part of me wants to believe they were making a literal comment on the fact that 'literature' (whatever that all encompassing word even means) is constantly evolving. In which case, yes, people alive and writing now are certainly different people than those who wrote before. Well said!

But without booze in the veins, thinking less cynically/sarcastically, I'm now choosing to focus on the fact that at a Halloween party, with sobriety compromised, somebody was talking about books. Neat!

Anyway, should you ever find yourself of the opinion that today's writing isn't on par with the great writers of the past, just know that you are crazy and have probably completely given up searching, which is sad. I try to read and write every day; while I don't think everybody really needs to do that, if you are going to have bold, all encompassing opinions (that party was not nearly the first time I've heard the "ain't what it used to be!" argument), you really ought to go out and read a ton first.

So I figure I should share some of the billion wonderful stories I've stumbled on over the years--here's a start with something from The Kenyon Review from 2003. This story is about two Turks running a struggling pizza and kebab shop in Dresden fifty years after Allied planes pretty much erased the city. They encounter neo-Nazi skinheads and drunks who defile their restaurant on a nightly basis. Then they meet one otherworldly young woman.

As far as I'm concerned these are real characters, written ferociously one minute, then intensely compassionate the next. Check out some of these sentences:

"When one of the skins came into the shop, Amar felt the hummingbird in his ribs trying to fly its way out. The skinhead’s vomit-brown pants were ripped from knee to foot, he smelled of kerosene, and he had tiny beads of dark blue in the piss-yellow whites of his eyes."

"Dresden, parts of it with a new veneer of cobble and mortar, except everyone knew about the cracks underneath and, more important, about how the stones had not been sturdy enough before. Dresden, with its streets snaking through his veins, from the days when he pushed the lunch cart, which had become the restaurant, which threatened to become a bankruptcy of empty bricks. Dresden, and Amar never even went to the church, which the Germans refused to refurbish, where the angels still kept their broken faces, but he knew all about it. After Amar put Benji to bed, those angels wrinkled up their concrete half-noses at him as if they were about to whisper. Amar was not sure if it were he or their rubbled tongues that never allowed them to speak."

"How at night Amar took Benji home and made him dinner and cleaned his corduroys and played imaginary games with a child’s rules, flexible and fantastic, as if every event would turn out OK as long as Benji had a little more time to think."

Anyway, swim on over and READ: Daniel A. Hoyt's 'Amar' in The Kenyon Review.

Down in Ol' Virginny

Ms. Melvin Ralsh and I are taking a trip down to the homeland, Fairfax, VA! It's been a little while since I've been back home. I'm a bit of a Civil War nerd and for some reason didn't nearly appreciate the historical turf I grew up on while I was there. One of the first major skirmishes of the war happened at the Fairfax City Courthouse, only a couple miles from my parents' house. During that skirmish, the first Confederate officer was killed, and Quincy Marr Drive in my subdivision is named for him.

Anyway, I wrote this short story as a fun exercise, and it's moderately based on that courthouse skirmish, though is mostly fiction. Check 'er ouuut.


Home Again
by Kevin Walsh

                On the occasion of I find myself here on this besparkled floor of the formerly Fairfax County Courthouse turned battalion headquarters, here with my fine brother who may soon bleed to death.

                Well the first thing we did was disobey Pa, who has this terrifying way of getting angry only in short bursts of the most intense fury. Reminds me of like the time me an’ Gilly forgot whose turn it was to milk Henrietta, for like a week, then there was that awful mess. Anyway Pa made it perfectly clear enlistment was not an option of viable character, owing to there was so much to be done around the farm anyway what with us forgetting milking as it is, and so forth; and furthermore we weren’t even technically old enough to be enlisting. But we did anyway.

                The Rebs aren’t exactly bursting at the gullet on a banquet of able-bodied boys, but it’s early yet. Both sides still hanging back at the barndance, too scared to mingle more than a few whoops and hollers. Of course you got the seriously better funded Union boys yonder ‘cross the river with actual ammunition fer their guns, which is what one might call Essential. So no way the Johnnie Rebs were about to turn down a couple able-bodied farm boys with finely tuned arms and legs.

                So Gilly and I we sneaked out with Pa’s rifles and ended up being I think two of about twelve fellers with ammo. The rest were getting themselves orientated in the art of rattling a saber or bayonet loud enough to scare away a seriously better equipped Union boy should one come riding over yonder. And but they stole our Minies anyway for so-called ‘professional marksmen’, who in reality couldn’t hit a cows behind with a shovel if it walked right in front of ‘em.

                That night we got hiked off to picket duty, which actually wasn’t so bad. Me and Gilly stationed all clandestine-like, which was just like we used to pretend play. They gave us a bullet each for emergency recourse and said when all else fails to fire that Minie then holler n run like a whipped mule. They hiked us up Little River Turnpike, maybe a quarter-mile up thinking that’d be the road the Union boys might venture, on the so-called ‘lowest of low chances’ that there’d be any barnstorming that night. Normally you got a couple dozen or so on picket duty, but nobody figgered any attack was imminent.

                Well let me tell you it was a god-damned ambush and by all rights should have been a complete massacre except owing to the fact of the Union boys can’t shoot neither. Me an’ Gilly were dug in playing Spit when Gilly tells me to shush and did you hear that. And what we hear sounds like a god-damned stampede of Savages, I ‘member Pa telling us about the War of the Indians and how you’d hear ‘em whooping it up from miles away, sounding like they was already all around you and ready to turn yer noggin into a gruesome headdress. But well informed of the knowledge that our forbearers had brutally removed most of the Savages already, Gilly and me figured this was the big Union line finally making a first push toward Richmond on nearly the eve of Independence Day. A symbolic push to flatten us dissenters. And it was.

                Well sort of. Gilly yelled a ‘Halt!’ but the words stuck in his barely post-pubic throat at too high a register, and something went ZING right past his ear, then little pockets of dirt danced all around us. The hollering got to an unkind decibel of great proportions and, well, I am ashamed to say I fired my one shot and then high-tailed it down the Turnpike back to the courthouse as was strongly suggested. Unfortunately my brother of blood Gilly did not make it back with me, to which I was unawares until my pulse stopped ringing in my ears after sufficient time. Before collapsing I squeaked out ‘the enemy is upon us!’ and Capt. Marr, who commanded the Warrenton Rifles, tried to rouse his boys, on whom you could smell the stench of true fear.

                What I did then was climb the highest tower I could find, of which there was only one in the courthouse, so as to survey the scene. Except owing to a blanket covering the stars and moon there was very little light other than the flashes of rifles and the oily streak of a lantern or two. What I could see was all chaos punctuated by Capt. Marr’s prodigious yelling, until the yelling ominously stopped and boys in gray coats started in to flailing about like a herd of sheep given chase by a coyote. What saved us were the good folk of Fairfax City, taking battle into their own hands and firing volleys out darkened windows at the lunatic band of Union boys, whom I have no proof but I know what a man looks like when he’s riding a horse completely wallpapered, and these Union boys were drunker than all get out. It’s a wonder they didn’t slaughter each other with their own wayward volleys.  

                I want to say the Union boys made three charges and were repelled each time by the aforementioned superbly pinpointed locals. Though what they were after I couldn’t clearly tell. There couldn’t have been more than 20 of ‘em, but they certainly kept the locals busier than a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest for a few hours. At some point I collapsed once again in the tower and only woke up when the sun’s rays peeked over the maples across the Turnpike. What I felt was not pleasure or gratefulness at being alive. There was no metaphorical attributation of the sun’s rays being the Lord Himself’s fingers tickling the feeble consciousness of my mind, or what not.

No, I just felt like a coward. Plain and simple.

I went down with the other privates to search the area for Capt. Marr. It took an hour of scourin but we found him face up in a delicate patch of clover, honey bees buzzin round his ears. His eyes were still open, absent of that special light and staring off into whatever awaited him in the middle of the night. His hands were locked stiff across his breast covering a horrific purpley bloom, but no open wound the eyes could see. One of the privates speculated an indirect hit, probably even friendly fire in the chaos of the Union boys’ drunken assault.

I wanted Home and I wanted it bad but all I could think of was my lost brother and what a coward I’d been the night before. I took another search party out by our picket station and searched all up and down without finding any trace of poor Gilly.

You know how the old stories of war and battle talk about things happening so fast that even with horrific events there isn’t time sit and let the sadness wash over you? Well that’s a goddamned lie I’m here to tell you. There is nuthin but time to sit and reason why; there is also time to do and die, as the poem goes. Please let it sink in that battle is hour upon hour of boredom punctuated by the flashes of rifles in the dark and barely time to act at all. It’s all instinct, and yours truly’s instinct was to cut and run. Then you get nothing but nightfall to ponder your cowardice.

I volunteered for picket duty this time, determined to prove some amount of worth to myself at the very least. And maybe there would be the slim chance of Gilly’s reappearing from behind enemy lines. I had the slimmest of hopes he was hiding until the cover of dark. So I got out there with my new pardner, who didn’t have much to say, which is fine by me. I’d rather a silent sentry pardner than somebody chatterin on and on about their miserable life til the rooster calls.

In the quiet you got all sorts of time to have yerself a good think. I thought about how we had disobeyed Pa and what a wreck he and Ma must have been back at home. I thought about the time Gilly came back from farmer Payne’s lot with this practically sparkling herb he called True Divination, and we mixed it into our pipe tobacco then I promptly went and got Pa’s wagon stuck in Woody’s Creek. Gilly heard me hollerin Help! Help! due to figurin I’d broken many a bone, the fear catchin me like wild. Turned out not a thing was wrong with my body and Gilly pulled both me and the wagon out of the creek like it was nothin.

He always kept his head cool no matter what was going on, and no matter what might have been churning inside him. This here is real sad and he never much chattered about it, but he had a little love fever for farmer Payne’s daughter Millicent for a real long time. Always took over fresh herbs and vegetables for their family when we had extra (which was often), but I know it was under the guise of seeing her. Farmer Payne was always trying to set her up with some needle-nosed suck-up at the church he ran up the hill, so half the time Gilly went over there some Catholic numb-nuts was sparkin her up a storm. Then last winter Millie took to a raging fever and went so quickly it’s like the Lord Himself scrubbed her from life’s record. Gilly didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye, went over one night to an empty bed haloed in her fever-sweat. 

After that, there was something a little more tired about Gilly. Like he was there physically but his moorings weren’t tied so tight anymore. I wish I’d been able to parlez with him but talking things out was never my strong suit. Things like that’d get me so uncomfortable, I’d just laugh in a way that isn’t funny and say something like “Well ‘least now you don’t have to worry about folks givin you guff for being Millie and Gilly.” Wasn’t too long after that that Gilly, known our whole lives to hold a skeptical and unpopular brain between his ears on the subject of religion, started in on joining up the Rebel cause mainly as a way to get a glimpse of, Gilly’s words, ‘the Lord Almighty Incarnate Himself Gen. Robert E. Lee.’ Which sounded exactly like the kind of balderdash that farmer Payne would spout and Gilly would make fun of behind his back.

But love fever is a gravitational force of its own and puts a man through the mill, especially on account of the object of your fever practically evaporating before anyone knows what’s going on. And I’d never been one to question Gilly before and certainly wasn’t about to in his time of low spirits. Now Gilly was in serious trouble and I needed to stuff all my courage together and help him.

It was at this point that my silent sentry pardner gave me a tap on the shoulder and a little “Did you hear that?” nod of the head in the direction of some woods up the Turnpike. I had in fact heard a rustling, so the two of us quickly fixed bayonets to go clandestinely investigate. Odds were it was some type of small animal, or a deer, but my body was filling with adrenaline hoping I’d get my hands on a Union boy for some old fashioned redemption.

We plopped down behind some thick brush and heard the noise again, but this night the moonlight was just strong enough to make out several figures against the tree line maybe 20 yards away. My pardner and I gave each other a look and held our ground. This was it, the second ambush, and one of us needed to warn the camp, except on account of what happened last night neither of us wanted to leave the other alone. One of the figures was slowly moving this way while the others seemed to lag back where they stood. When it got to about 10 yards away I gathered up my courage and aimed my rifle, shouting, “Halt there! Identify yourself or we’ll open the ball!” Normally you’d have 30 or 40 guys running a picket so I added a little bluff to my call-out, “We got a whole line of muskets trained on yer position, identify yerself!”

But nothing happened. The figure looked a little unsteady, but was moving even closer despite my warnings. I didn’t actually have any ammunition, though my pardner did. I told him to cover me and I went out from my position and started sneakin to where the figure was moving. I got close enough to where in the moonlight I could see the figure’s blue coat and kepi hat (ours were rag-tag forage caps). I didn’t know what the hell this Union muggins was doing but he was just about on my pardner’s position when the phenomenal crack of a rifle shattered the night silence and sent me into a momentary conniption. I charged at the Union boy with the whoop of a savage and got him right in the bread basket with my pig sticker. A couple more shots rang out as me and the Union boy sank to the ground. I felt a terrific rush, then terror at the reality of my actions, that I had actually just charged this countryman of mine with animalistic fury with the simple aim of ending his life. I felt quite peaked.

On top of the boy with my bayonet still lodged under his breast bone, a familiar scent hit me and I immediately recoiled stronger than any rifle. I dragged the boy over into a little clearing where the moonlight showed what my heart already knew.

It was Gilly, blindfolded, gagged and dressed up in a Yankee uniform.

Now they say we’re moving out, that the actual General Lee everyone seems to believe is some kind of walking deity is taking us down to Manassas where he’s staging a real build up of Confederate men with an actual battle plan. Only it’s a bit hard to know if either side really knows what it is they’re fighting for. Only time’s fullness can tell if there is something here truly worth fighting for; but right now there’s all this anguish for what seems like dumb macho pride more than anything else.

All I know now is poor Gilly here, dying of wounds committed by my hand, just wants a glimpse of the General before he passes on to wherever it is his girl Millie went. And I’ll be damned if he slips under before seeing him, even if it strikes me as a notion of insane proportions. But at least he believed in something before the end.

You hear that, Gilly? Stay with us just a bit longer, hold on tight brother, the General's comin to take you home again.   

WRONG!

Does anyone remember The McLaughlin Group? I'm sure you do. My parents would put this on when we got home from church on Sunday during that interval between getting home and football being on, and it was pretty much just background noise while we made lunch. All the show's pundits really ever did was yell at each other.

There was something mildly endearing about the show; they yelled at each other but they at least had to do it face-to-face. And they had that rule where the pundits were supposed to yield anytime John McLaughlin spoke. You can tell McLaughlin likes being ridiculous. (Wow, just finding out this show is still on!) There's clearly something that's kept it going for three decades and it isn't just people turning it on for background noise. It was kind of surreal and entertaining to me as a teenager, plus McLaughlin's face looks like a bulldog's.

I think everyone to some degree secretly wants to be their own version of John McLaughlin, and ideology doesn't really matter as long as you yell loud enough. Just about everybody's got an easy way to yell something out and there's a whole mess of websites dedicated to telling us what certain people yelled. I suppose it's kind of always been this way at least on some level, but there's something dark beneath the excess of it all.

Please feel free to tell me that I'm just getting older and that things aren't always what they seem, but here's a thought: in the time before Mega-Internet's 24-hour social media/fake news and the 1 Million ways to Personalize every aspect of everything, the majority of issues/stories that rose to national attention seemed a bit more important. Sure you'd get hyper-media stuff like OJ Simpson's car chase, or Marv Albert being insane and biting women, or whatever, but things like that in national media weren't a daily occurrence.

Now there's more like an hourly occurrence of something made to seem vital to your experience as a human, somebody shouting their very firm beliefs, somebody else shouting back. Yesterday's NY Times made me laugh out loud with the headline "Maine Nurse Goes for Defiant Bike Ride" -- sure Ebola's important, but until we've got shorelines crawling with infected folks I don't think I need to know the hourly whereabouts of somebody who might not even have the disease. Look at this shit; this got feature story billing for a bit:

"She rode down a quiet paved road with her boyfriend, Ted Wilbur, followed closely by the police and a caravan of reporters. The couple rode less than a mile, then turned onto a graded gravel trail on a former railroad right of way flanked by pines. Ms. Hickox and Mr. Wilbur, wearing jackets in the crisp Maine morning, returned to the house an hour later."

The crisp Maine morning! Man that is stupid. That piece got two by-lines, by the way.

But on to the darker thing: regular ol' folks getting their random doings somehow published all over creation gives false hope to this weird desire we all have to be famous. That dang woman Hickox got her defiant bike ride covered! Then the universe starts to shrink and the possibility of me, me, me being at the center of everything seems somehow stronger. The carrot is just about in reach. All I have to do is be a little more opinionated, daring, or outrageous and everyone might watch me, too! Then everything will be OK.

But most people won't get noticed, at least not in the way they're hoping. Then there's a nasty letdown and really important things get pushed aside. It's a little hard to see where this all leads; it's not like it's necessarily bad to be entertained, but to be made to feel like you're not successful if enough people aren't watching/reading what you're doing is deeply sad.

My great hope is that it leads to whole swaths of people getting phenomenally bored with this lukewarm entertainment. I think it's already starting to happen, though I don't have any firm data to present. It's just a feeling. Everything looks a little upside-down at the moment, but it's a welcome new perspective. It's a good time to not really give a shit and do whatever you want; maybe nobody's looking but I think that's all the better. It definitely feels more real that way, and if nobody's listening you don't have to yell.

'Til next time; bye-BYYYE.

It's a liar...so everything it says is a lie.

Today I almost threw caution to the wind and submitted a very short thing I wrote to this new...thing; I'm not sure what to call it other than a Website:

www.really-short-stories.com

Short stuff is wonderful. In more recent memory, a fantastic short story by George Saunders called "Sticks" in his collection Tenth of December was one of my favorite things consumed in 2013. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's very short novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold is tied in my mind with Crime and Punishment as the coolest thing I read junior year in high school. Some of those Pixar short films they show before the full deal movie are nearly as good as the full feature.

So it's not really about length (haaa), right? It's about what you say; the ol' cliche, which turns out to be unequivocally true.

But boy does this website suck. They talk about wanting to compete with Buzzfeed lists and Vine videos; that's like putting a raw onion in the candy bar aisle. They call it Short Fiction for the A.D.D. Generation, and go on to say, "No, this won't be exactly like getting published, so think of it more as contributing to a collective of young writers looking to create fiction that your peers will actually read in it's [sic] entirety."

So you're gonna bash a whole generation for not reading--then ask them to read? I'm pretty sure the folks running this site don't really read too much either. If they did, they would know that the American short story is doing just fine. There's something like a billion and a half literary journals out there now and you have to just, you know, read and find the good stuff. Turns out when you do even a little exploring, there's plenty of brilliant writing to go around. All lengths and sizes are represented in wonderful ways (heeeee).

Besides, the real competitor to Buzzfeed doesn't even give a shit; and knocks short stuff out of the park anyway. 

And, hey, my own short thing is getting longer! (Is this bad joke getting old?) Not too long, though, and when it's done I'll probably post it here instead of submitting to some grubby website that wants to compete with tabloids.

But while you're here, check out another drum video I did a month or so ago and forgot to post:

I Did This

It's OK It's OK It's OK It's OK...

Here's a smattering of recent headlines that have nearly convinced me that most major media outlets are pretty close to giving up by simply making each of their headlines read, "HELP! PLEASE NOTICE ME! PLEASE! WE'RE COOL, RIGHT?!"

"Everything You Know About Breakfast Is Wrong" [Outside Magazine]

"Let's be honest: Hillary Clinton is Running for President" -- Subhead: "I mean, seriously." [Washington Post]

"Learning to Love Sugar Again" [The Atlantic] (Actual article title is 'Being Happy With Sugar,' which is just as dull, but the editors apparently felt they needed to, ahem, spice up the link title.)

"The Girl Who Was Raised By Monkeys?" [NPR] (insert inflection) This is a question? Were they expecting an answer?

"This Clever Site Tells You If Your Favorite Bar Patio Is Sunny" [Gizmodo] Well thank god; massive white-person problem = Solved.

I definitely don't think people are getting less creative, even though these headlines lack any creative effort. But there's so much content out there and major editors/publishers are just losing their minds. I do tend to think young, expendable web editors get hired in massive numbers, are overloaded with horrifying pressure to generate clicks, so they basically write bullshit. I believe this because I was one of these folks for a couple different institutions. My jobs didn't last and paid basically nothing--huh.

The worse side of this freak out by editors/publishers is that they'll tend to publish insanely extreme opinions (from any viewpoint) simply because they know it'll generate InternetOutrage, meaning clicks, money, and a lot of dumb stuff.

Take this recent George Will column in the Washington Post; only the most insane, clueless, downright evil-spirited person would not think twice about writing the phrase, "supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a 'sexual assault.'" (Just thinking about using snarky air quotes for "sexual assault" in a serious way, like Will does, makes me hyperventilate.)

It's easy to go on about how vile that column is: e.g. he tries to use his own arithmetic to tell you that sexual assault statistics are grossly exaggerated, when if you use your brain at all with the knowledge that it's pretty impossible to know exactly how many sexual assaults occur for any number of reasons, arithmetic kind of becomes useless; or this sentence: "...capacious definitions of sexual assault that can include not only forcible sexual penetration but also non-consensual touching." Dear George: 1). you are a Grown White Man complaining that non-consensual sexual touching ought to be OK? 2). your "capacious definitions" are both things that only terrible people do.

But the publishers know exactly how vile that column is; it's why they published it. They know there'll be a whole slew of subsequent rebuttal columns and internet arguments about the whole thing, and they'll laugh all the way to the bank while nobody really learns a thing. I'm probably even feeding into it just a bit by writing about it myself. But I think it's massively important to be aware of how it's in many media outlets' best interests to generate nothing but outrage, fear, and anxiety; and it's equally important to exercise your free will to turn away from these articles (and in many cases the media outlets themselves) as fast as you can. Because...

The world, as a whole, isn't as bad as it seems through these lenses. This is not to say that there are not vast swaths of people who struggle for survival on a daily basis. In real life, there is an unassailable fact that not everybody is going to have everything they need. But a lot of things point toward a world that is considerably safer than it used to be, and we are, more or less, pretty unaware of it. These are really hopeful trends that should keep us moving and innovating into the future.

But I think we need an innovation of thought, because the negative things that are on the rise are not so easily tackled with major advances of media and technology. While gun homicides might be down over the last decade, gun suicides are way up. Diagnoses of anxiety disorders, particularly in the US, have skyrocketed over the last decade (this is more complicated than this little sentence, but still). Like Tom Waits says, way too many people seem to be confusing information with knowledge, and it's rattling their brains apart.

You know me, I won't ever claim to have all the answers, and sometimes I'll claim to have exactly zero answers. But I do believe that one major factor is a problem of perspective and mindset. If you do not believe things are going to be OK, you're probably never going to be very satisfied with what life hands you. If you always expect things to be perfectly shaped, you're going to miss a lot of the weird accidental beauty that's out there. If you can't see things from other people's perspectives, you're bound to run into trouble with some of the 6+ billion people in our contained sphere from which there are few escapes.

If you french fry when you're supposed to pizza, you're gonna have a bad time.

I am reminded of the character of Mario Incandenza in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest on an almost daily basis. He is physically and mentally deformed, is unintentionally hilarious, and is the single most compassionate, hopeful character in the book. He has a whole lot to be hopeless about, but it rarely shows.

I'm working on a little song that's based on a line of Mario's. For a little context, it's a kind of alternate reality and giant fans ('Air-Displacement Effectuators') surround Metro Boston and blow pollution up to Canada. Mario's roommate and brother Hal is losing his mind as they fall asleep talking, and Mario, in his own little way, is trying to calm Hal down:

"I like the fans' sound at night. Do you? It's like somebody big far away goes like: It'sOKit'sOKit'sOKit'sOK over and over. From very far away."

Then later in the same conversation, while not understanding a word Hal's just said in an anxious rant, Mario says:

"Hal, pretty much all I do is love you and be glad I have an excellent brother in every way, Hal."

To see with eyes unclouded

A quick update featuring things that have made my brain hiccup over the last month or so...

1. Here's a fun game to play; I call it Out of Context Anime:

Last night I re-watched Princess Mononoke after having downloaded it for the ultra low price of nothing. But webstealing (my new word) has its downsides, one of them being translation. A quick search finds the probably better-translated sentence in that scene as "Well, they say happy women make a happy village."

2. NPR recently covered a certain state's supreme court striking down said state's ban on same-sex marriage. (I'm refusing to look it up at the moment because I think it's actually remarkable that I can't remember off the top of my head what state it is, because these bans have been falling in so many places lately and that makes me happy). Within that coverage, NPR reported on how both sides felt. This included an audio snippet of a man from a Christian organization who disagreed with the ruling, saying without even the slightest hint of irony in his voice, that it's "not right for one side to feel persecuted against, to be made to feel like they are just wrong."

3. Overheard teenage conversation in CVS: "You smoked pot? Don't you know it gives you warts in your mouth?"


But in more uplifting news (burying the lede here just a bit), I'm having a story published in a new NYC-based journal called DenimSkin Review! The story is called Unsound and, since it's a bit long, they're spreading it out across a couple issues. The inaugural issue is out this Friday, May 30--if you're in the NYC area, apparently it will be in certain bookstores, cafes, etc. But no worries if not, you can also order one online. Check out their website or Facebook for more info on how to nab a copy.

Only bored as I get older

First, I'm going to apologize (because that's what I do); I usually like to be a little more optimistic than I think this post is going to sound. But it's Monday and life is again real, and these florescent lights are a little more irritating than usual.

One of the most boring things to me is when writers write about what just happened on TV. There was a MAJOR plot twist in The Good Wife! Somebody got annihilated on Game of Thrones! Robin Williams voices the genie AND the merchant at the beginning of Aladdin! (Just go with it.) What does it meeeeeaaannn?



Who is reading this shit? (Probably a lot of people, hence the articles' existence and their many accompanying advertisements...)

I don't particularly care about spoilers, though I do think it's odd that some people seem to need so strongly to blab. But I'm not really the kind of reader/watcher who gets upset knowing the basic plot points or even 'major' twists (I enjoyed Titanic just fine, thank you); and at least as far as mainstream TV is concerned, you can see a lot of these things from miles away. Like the Chekhov rule, when a gun is introduced to the story you can bet your ass it's getting fired. But I'm probably in the minority here; I can certainly understand people not wanting details given away.

So if you didn't watch the show, there's absolutely no reason to read the recap and plenty of reasons to avoid it. If you did watch the show, there's still no particular reason to read the recap. Other than to be told what it all meant, what it could have possibly meant, who did it, why did they do it, who else might have done it, where do we go from here, what was the setup, what's the fallout...these are all things the talented writers who created these shows are already doing for you, and will continue to do for you as you watch their story unfold. I get the desire to talk about it all, but it's not a need (just a very strong desire to not feel so lonely in this world...sorry, sorry that's the existential psychiatrist in me).

Most shows that make it to the popularity of things like Game of Thrones/Mad Men/The Good Wife/True Detective/whatever are there because, on some level, they are great and created by talented people. You should be damn sure that these talented people usually know how to make all things unfold with time (unless it's Lost and everybody's just making up nonsense), and eventually they make you realize that what happens isn't nearly as fun or important as why something happens and why the characters involved are so interesting.

I think this is the right moment to say what anyone reading this likely already knows: I'm way more of a reader than a watcher. So feel free to tell me that I'm perfectly capable of ignoring articles I find boring. You are correct. But should I have to? I don't know exactly what it says about our silly First World that two of the four main-slot articles on today's theatlantic.com are about TV shows, but I don't think it's entirely good. I know I can swim to safer Internet waters, but sometimes the thought of doing that is like standing in the supermarket's soup aisle confronted by a thousand different versions of tomato soup, and I haven't even looked at other kinds of soups and already I just want a fucking blanket and a pacifier...

Actually, I think I'm going to read outside. This has been Melvin Ralsh's florescent Monday morning; 'til next time, folks!

I Have a Question

Do you think people make up their own minds less often than they used to?

This is kind of an overly general question, the type I'm not usually too fond of, but I do wonder about some stuff...

When I was in college and liked writing music reviews a whole lot more than I do now, I had trouble shaking a bad habit of checking out other reviews of the same album to see where my opinion landed in the vast nothingness of music reviews. If I didn't like an album, I needed to double-check that other folks didn't like it either to make sure I wasn't an idiot, and this was way too easy to do. YouTube didn't even exist, and there weren't nearly as many blogs n stuff, but there was already an overload of opinions out there to Google. I could not stop doing this, but I can understand being younger, insecure, and not very confident about my musical taste/opinions. There were even a couple times I softened a review based, at least a little, on the fact that a bunch of 'professional' people had liked something I didn't. That's pretty hard to understand now.

So does the overabundance of Opinions out there mostly serve to feed our insecurities?

Are people actually more Opinionated now than ever before, or does it just feel that way because I spend a shitload of time on the internet, where Opinion is king?

Sometimes I get the feeling there are folks who get outraged by stuff only because a lot of other people got outraged by it; maybe this is no different than Time Before Internet, but it sure as hell seems to happen a whole lot faster and in larger quantities. Then it goes away and things move on more or less the same, but LO, we have ENTERTAINED ourselves. And probably somebody made a buck or two off it.

I have a question.

Boy child grows up

Strange happenings are afoot. My body is changing! Between the ages of 27-30 I think I grew at least an inch. My BoyChild brain is evolving, too.

Every once in a while I like to binge on YouTube comments, which can sometimes be serene and mesmerizing. I know this sounds odd. But I get all giddy imagining a commenter listening to a song, having a moment, one so intense it can't possibly be contained, and which Must be shared with the world OR ELSE. Most of 'em are like those folks at live shows who can't stand the deafening silence in their own brains between songs and must shout WOO. So you get really deep shit sometimes, like these ones from Caribou's 'Niobe:'

EarlKrempe

1 year ago

did not like

Loibeloire Hammes

1 year ago

my body feel like fucking tripping but my head is still oke

runjuliarunjuliarun

1 year ago

music is very much like... math, actually. it is a language and has a lot of math in it. it is a truly special and difficult art.

BluHart

1 year ago

its unmistakable, these guys are just musically gifted. I think they use mathematical equations to implement the vibrations...and they align very well with my taste. Keep steady on this path gentlemen it will suit you well.

To implement the vibrations! Man, what is it like to so powerfully need to post that? Probably a lot of people are lonely. But I think the strongest reason so many people post this stuff--stuff that not many are likely to read, and those that do read either already agree with you or hate you/themselves and are only there to troll; there's rarely a fertile middle ground where discussion and actual learning thrive--the reason there's so much of it is that it's incredibly easy to do. You go tap beep boop (like I'm, um, doing right now), click that satisfying Publish button, then smile at your own perceived wit/intelligence. Mmmmm, feels good.

It is so easy to find Anything, and equally easy to tell everyone (or at least feel like you're telling everyone; it's anyone's guess as to who's actually listening) how you feel about it. I don't think this is entirely good. Beck, who just released a great album, went to chat with the Boiling Bob over at NPR and had this to say:

"The rise of internet and all the blogs and the sort of internet criticism, I think it's affected a lot of musicians. There's sort of this critical voice in their head, like somebody's pointed a camera or a mirror at you, and you're a little more self-conscious. I feel like I've felt it in music over the last, you know, 10 or 12 years. When I started out, you were just throwing stuff out there; you had no idea what people thought. There would be a couple of record reviews, but you really were completely ignorant and unaware of what people actually thought. Unless you were at a show — you know, you could play a song and people didn't like it. That happened plenty of times."

Imagine that! Hearing something played live for the first time. Sure, you could boo the guy/gal, but as a human that's a little harder to do right to someone's face. You don't generally have somebody like EarlKrempe (see above) standing next to you on stage, arms folded, saying, "Did not like."

But see, I'm beginning to feel like the quintessential Olderish-Person-Who-Looks-Down-On-Younger-Generations. This is also not good. Because, clearly, not every musical appreciator is like that. YouTube-comments-as-societal-blueprint isn't exactly validated research. But what I do know is that music is laughably easy to find for free, chew for a bit, skip that song you don't like, write about how it wasn't what you wanted, pretend like you know exactly what the artist was trying to achieve, then spit on the floor having digested very little.

One of my band-mates in a new song talks about how instant evaluation is starting to crush his enjoyment of different types of art, and I could not agree more. It seems simple to just ignore it all, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to do as more and more folks use the Internet as a way of finding their own voice. Remember in high school how it kind of sucked and made you feel empty when everybody started loving that band you'd been following for forever? It's similar to the feeling you get when somebody tells you whatever book or movie they just devoured was the best thing ever. Your brain is instantly setup to have its expectations swung at and missed, because no one thing is the best thing ever, which transitions nicely into my next thought:

The overabundance of particular types of media might be leading a certain percentage of the population to believe that their lives aren't as worthwhile if they are not cinematic enough**, if certain moments aren't "the best thing ever." It makes people take fewer risks and retreat into what they already know they'll enjoy or, worse, what they know everybody else already enjoys. And because everybody's so keen on expressing why they love or hate something, there's all this media catering to extreme points of view, which this feller thinks tends to drown out that fertile middle ground where you can actually learn something.

Here's some quick examples: Bad Internet [note: please don't read much of this] vs. Good Internet [please read all of this]

So, if you're like me you're probably wondering what the hell to do. Unfortunately, if you know me at all you probably know I'm not entirely sure. All I can do is point you in the direction of folks I've enjoyed and who've made me think about how to handle things that make me uncomfortable. On the surface, these quotes don't directly pertain to media consumption, but I think they offer a path away from extreme points of view (and thus away from a lot of bad media), and I often find myself returning to them:

"Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you. What is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher."
~David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

"To know one's own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one's own face with one's own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one's reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all."
~Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

"Don't get set into one form; adapt it and build your own, and let it grow; be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless--like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle; you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend."
~Bruce Lee

Some of the things I take away from those quotes are: Don't be afraid to feel stupid, and be wary of folks pushing agendas that claim to have all the answers; Look for stuff that feels genuine to you (and remember that authenticity and originality don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, and that's OK); Little things are infinitely important.

And for the sake of all that is holy to you, please don't you dare listen to music via YouTube at anything less than 480p.




_________________________________________________________________________________
**This is something I want to think about a lot more in another post, and one thing that comes to mind is how often you'll hear the same song used across different movies/TV shows/commericials to generate emotion in a given scene, and then when something similar to that scene happens in your real life, but you don't have the music to go along with it, it might not have as strong an impact on you.

Words that inspire a feeling of impending doom

"Is this ad relevant to you?"

"Art can be a slippery slope"

Pretty much anything involving the word "evoke"

"World music"

"Whether or not"

"Recommended for you"

"Activist"

"An Open Letter to..."

"I'm sorry, but..."

"MFW/MRW"

"Retweet"

"That awkward moment" [oh god, this is a movie]

Music described as "lush" and "sprawling"

"An air of sophistication"

Alright that's probably enough doom for one day.

Sure you do, pal. Suurrre you do.

Man, everybody's so smart on the Internet! It can be pretty daunting to even know what to write about sometimes. You don't have to search that deep and you can find basically any opinion on any topic, and of course a bunch of folks arguing about it all, sounding so sure of themselves.

What if you've never felt quite so sure about yourself? Or anything, for that matter. What do you write about? And where do you write about it? Is anyone interested in hiring a writer who has only questions and not answers? I have a few strong opinions, but not really too much drive to convince people of them, because I'm not entirely sure (ha) that type of stuff matters at all. I get confused by people who seem to spend a solid chunk of their lives working to convince others of their version of the Truth (which may not necessarily be bad. Though, don't a lot of those people seem to be pushing some kind of short-term agenda? It's very small numbers of these folks who appear to care about You.) So, let's say you convince enough people of your agenda, and then let's say you get some money, or time in the spotlight, or whatever the hell it is that you wanted. Then what? I'd guess that feels good for a while. But does it feel good enough? Isn't it way more exciting to want than to have? It feels like history has that pretty much proven solid. So, what do you want next after you got what you wanted?

I think I'd love it, for instance, if people listened to way less digital music and spent more time with what I think is a more fulfilling sound (records and tapes), but I don't have any desire to be the kind of guy who tells you what's best, because I really only know what's best for me, given 30 years of experience living inside this body and mind. I have yet to live inside someone else's body/brain, as far as I know. Even if I did honestly feel like I knew what was best for you, I'd rather you discovered it on your own anyway.

This seems to be turning into an exercise in writing whatever pops into my noggin.

I think what I wanted when I was younger was to tour in a rock band and write novels and stories, and my desires didn't really go much farther than that. So far I've done both of those to varying degrees of success, depending on your perspective. I consider myself truly lucky, so I'm a happy guy (I'm also in a fair amount of debt). When I think about it, I'm utterly overwhelmed by how many folks want to do these things that I love, by how much media gets created on an hourly basis. A lot of it's completely devoid of actual human feelings and just wants to be noticed, a lot of it is truly fantastic, and potentially the cream eventually rises to the top, but I am becoming less sure (here were are again) of that. I love what I'm creating, but it's hard to feel good about adding even more to the big ol' pile of creativity.

I don't enjoy self-promotion, though I still do it from time to time. It's a strange space to be in, wanting simultaneously to be noticed for things I've created and for everyone to just go away and leave me in my imagined writer's cabin (but please oh please come back and purchase my things so I can eat and pay off that debt!). And then there's the anxiety that my negative desire to self-promote could be interpreted by my friends and family as a fervent desire to keep them utterly in the dark about the things I've created. That's so far from the truth it's kind of funny, and somehow I doubt anyone I know believes that about me, but that's the thing about anxiety...it lies to you.

This post is a lot like most of the things I create in that it's purest intention is just to be something for me, and I'd usually tuck it away without posting. But I'm beginning to want to share all these thoughts, and share more of the stuff I've been creating for the last 10 years or so. Maybe in 2014 I'll actually share this novel I've been working on for so long. It could happen! Anyway, in the sharing spirit here's a couple tunes I was a part of that came out in 2013, and I am Quite proud to share them with ya'll.

MoneyMoneyMoney...I'm Bored

Ahh, music & money. I love it when these two things mix and everyone gets all InternetIndignant. There's this latest article about Spotify that folks are talking about, and it's the same ol' stuff about how the artist gets screwed. The artist sure does get completely man-handled, but I'd be very excited for someone to point me to a time in the history of our world where the majority of artists weren't entirely bonked over the head financially. Maybe this time exists; I have not found it.

I'm only 30 years old and I feel like people have been talking about this forever. 'Member this wonderful article Steve Albini wrote in the 90s about how major labels were totally ravaging most of the bands they signed?

Ben "Ziggy" Franklin by Sergio Rodriguez, via MakeYourFranklin.com

Here's the thing: 99 times out of 100, if you are becoming an artist--more specifically a musician because that's what I can speak to--if you are doing this to make decent sums of money you are borderline insane. I am already skeptical of you. I can smell it in what you create and, 99 times of out 100, your stuff is either trite or it's manipulative in all the wrong ways. It's not you. My band-mates and I last night were talking about Jon Brion, and how somebody somewhere asked him what he looks for in an artist he's hoping to work with; his answer was something along the lines of: I look for folks who aren't trying to be artists. [UPDATE, here's the video with his thoughts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnhbHFgagIM; merci, MrJonBraun]

Speaking of Jon Brion, this is a really wonderful AV Club interview with him.

Is it frustrating that in 10 years of playing and recording music I haven't made a dime? Sure. But do I actually care and am I going to use that as a reason to stop doing it? I'm laughing at that. I'm not in this shit to be "noticed", to have people incessantly Googling my name, to be on the covers of magazines that won't exist in 10 years, to be blogged about by who-even-cares-who. Would that be neat? Hell yes, I am a human being after all. But if that's your main reason for doing this stuff, you are setting yourself up for utter failure and a lifetime of bullshit. Also, we can spot you from a million miles away. You may even get what you want, score that sweet hit Thing, and maybe even McDonald's will help promote your music! Maybe that's what you truly want (??)... even if you do, it's just not going to last very long and you still won't make much money off it.

Here's a big, cold spoon of truth from that Jon Brion interview up there:

"For every Radiohead, there's 10,000 supposedly modern rock bands who aren't a tenth that creative, or a tenth that emotional. For every Elliott Smith, there are 10,000 people who think they're sensitive poets. For every 10,000 people who have a drum machine and run things through a filter box, there's an Aphex Twin." 

I'm already an incredibly lucky person in that I've never truly worried about money, not in the way that people quite literally scrapping by are. Thanks to my parents, and their parents before them, I have a great education, and the even more empowering knowledge that, whatever I think I know, I don't actually know shit.

One of the few things I'm fairly certain I know is how icky it makes me feel that phrases like "you have to market yourself" have leaked into modern vernacular, masked as sage wisdom for how any artist ought to go about presenting themselves. Don't just be you, be the You calculated to generate the most page-views! Awesome.

I make songs and write stories because it feels so good to do it. It gives me Life. It makes me think and feel ways about stuff.

All this talk about money & artists just bores the hell out of me. Feel free to have that discussion, but my eyes will glaze over and I'll eventually melt into a wall. If you need me, I'll be in your basement writing a song or a story about that dusty old 1970s Fisher-Price toy castle you've got down there, or something.

Conspiracies abound/Love is everywhere/Germs, too

Well I've been a little sick like everyone around me and it tends to make my brain work a little differently. It's pretty neat, but also a little frightening when you consider how easily something can make the world's palette look a bit warped.

I've also been diving into JFK assassination conspiracy theory vortices, along with reading articles about how the mind is pretty easily capable of creating false memories, so sometimes I start to feel like the little kid they call "Postal Weight" in Infinite Jest who's just wailing in the locker room, "NOTHING'S TRUE" and has to get comforted by Pemulis.

The novel I'm working on has a lot to do with memory, nostalgia, sentimentality...all that good stuff. I think I'm attacking it pretty well, but really who knows. Then I found another author I love who had a character say some really lovely stuff that hit home, and thought I'd share:

"Perhaps history this century...is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated...at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which comes to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroys any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30s, the curious fashions of the '20s, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see."

Dumb Assumptions

Well it took something that moderately pissed me off to remember that I had a blog.

I have a VOICE. This is supposedly empowering but I'm not sure.

What pissed me off was this Pitchfork review of The Dismemberment Plan's new LP Uncanney Valley. I'll just tell you straight up I pretty much love this band, grew up listening to them in DC, so obviously I'm biased but so is everybody so that shouldn't matter too much as long as I'm aware of it. Consider me aware.

That the review pans the album with a 4.5 score doesn't really bother me so much, because I generally think music criticism is a waste of time. There's certainly good critical music writing out there, but there's also a whole glut of it that stinks of people thinking and assuming too much, and also trying so very hard to sound like they know something you don't.

What bothers me is something I keep seeing in a lot of music & writing criticism: Why do lots of folks seem to assume that a writer or a lyricist is always writing from their own point of view? I really don't get this. Writers love playing a role, creating characters, acting out, whatever. Why is it assumed these are all the actual thoughts of the writer him/herself and not the writer acting out a role?

Paul Thompson hated Travis Morrison's lyrics on the new 'Plan album. Fine, fair enough. I happen to like them for all their weirdness, but who really cares. I hate pickles and olives and I bet Thompson doesn't really care. But why is he assuming Morrison is singing about himself the whole time? Here's part of his review:

All over Uncanney Valley, Morrison—once one of indie rock's most incisive, identifiable lyricists—cracks wise, veers off erratically, shoehorns in dated slang or beside-the-point chanting. "Well, look who it is—been a little while since you been up in my 'biz," he sputters as "Waiting" whirrs to a start, coming off like a "cool dad" in a lousy sitcom. "I am not an inhibited man—try to keep it in my pants when I can," he admits on lowlight "White Collar White Trash", before rattling off a far-too-long list of places he's been "doin' it in."

I think his use of the superlative "one of rock's most incisive, identifiable lyricists" is a pretty dumb thing to say (to my calculations there's roughly 400 million incisive indie rock lyricists). It's one of those things you can just say and don't have to defend because it's impossible to prove or refute. But whatever to that, too. (P.S. "whirrs" up there with the two Rs is really British usage and somehow I don't think he's British...sorry, can't help myself).

Anyway, I'm not trying to say that I'm sure Morrison isn't singing about himself. You'd have to ask him and if I know anything about writers, I'm pretty sure he won't tell you. But to just assume he's only singing about himself is lazy and surface level.

That's kind of my biggest problem with these real quick reviews that lots of sites like to post. An album gets listened to a few times, maybe, and then you write about it and try to put it in galactic context with superlatives of "Best New" Whatever. Maybe I'm an old fart but that just seems laughably myopic.

Everybody just calm down. Enjoy stuff, or don't. It doesn't matter. Not everything has to be the absolute best or worst. Shh...Shh...It's all gonna be OK.

Melv learns about the Civil War

"Any minute now it would all begin. All hell would break loose and then no more worrying and fretting and fuming; he'd hit straight up that road with everything he had. Never been afraid of that. Never been afraid to lose it all if necessary. Longstreet knew himself. There was no fear there. The only fear was not of death, was not of the war, was of blind stupid human frailty, of blind proud foolishness that could lose it all. He was thinking very clearly now. Mind seemed to uncloud like washed glass. Everything cool and crystal."

--Michael Shaara, from The Killer Angels, channeling a solitary pre-battle moment with Confederate General James Longstreet, possibly the CSA's most logical brain, and the one nobody wanted to listen to.

So many of those battles were fought pretty much right on the land I grew up on, and it's all just utterly fascinating and overwhelmingly tragic.

Friday songs

TW Walsh, a man who shares my family name and one of my brothers' first names, is currently mastering the debut album of a band I'm singing and drumming in called The Most Americans. Check out this Pedro the Lion song (TW, I believe, did the drumming and probably lots of other stuff for that band, since he's a real life Wizard), and try to picture my then-20-year-old jaw dropping at the line "But I trust T. William Walsh, and I'm not afraid to die."



And here's a great solo tune of TW's from looks like late 2011:

"Laughing in the dark..."

Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent guest column in the New York Times made me feel things. It's an honest, emotional piece about his reaction to Forest Whitaker's incredibly upsetting frisking incident at the Milano Market in NYC.

Of course it's also about so much more. I see it as written by a person who isn't mad anymore (maybe he is, but if so he has beautifully tamed it in his writing), but rather is deeply, passionately disappointed. It's written by a person with life stories that I won't ever be able experience in the same way.

I tried, though. Still trying quite hard, actually, to relate to exactly what Coates must be feeling. I've found that I have an intense need to do this, to try to experience things in the exact way that others must have experienced them so I can feel their emotions. This is generally a losing battle, but it's worth the effort. His post made me desperately realize that I can't ever get to that exact place, that so many things are out of my control, and that so much history is prescribed into the way we all think and act, at least on some level.

His post did what all good writing should do, it provoked deep thought into the weird, murky areas of my life, past and present. 

I've been called homophobic slurs by however many Allston, MA bros just like most other Boston musicians who dress a certain way. In fact, in high school lots of folks assumed I was gay because my voice is higher and I can tend to be effeminate. People would just say this out loud like it was nothing, and use Gay as if it were a bad word. I thought about how I've never really let it bother me, using the defense that I'm not actually gay, so whatever. But I think there's something much worse at work here: I'm conditioned to people being that offensive toward homosexuals. That actually really frightens me now that I've written it down.

I do partly understand the Louis C.K. theory that words are words, and that you have the power to choose not to be affected by what ignorant, offensive people sling your way. But in his 2008 special Chewed Up, Louis himself jokingly/seriously notes, "I'm a white man, you can't even hurt my feelings! What can you call a white man that really digs deep? Hey, uh, Cracker?" God, does he hit the nail on the head of our little societal blueprint. (I don't want to go off on a total tangent here, but it really is amazing to watch Louis C.K. rip the power away from certain words, at least for a moment, by overly insulting everyone, himself included. That's an incredibly rare feat, and people like him do not come around very often.)

But think about it: We laugh when a white guy is called a cracker. I cannot even begin to imagine what the slurs must feel like for someone who's race or sexual orientation has been slighted their whole life (in visible or invisible ways). I will never be able to put myself in those shoes. Because of history, words are more than just a combination of letters. They can be compassionately powerful, and they can be poison. Because of history, the reality we live in today is that so much is etched into our subconscious, all these emotions the words carry along with them.

The flip side to all of this, of course, is that Coates can't ever realistically put himself in my shoes either. But I think his point goes deeper than that. Of course he doesn't know what it's like being a white kid growing up in the suburbs in the 80s/90s. 

I thought about another point in high school when I was the only white kid on a basketball team in Northern Virginia. Racial paranoia consumed my every thought for the first few practices; I distinctly remember feeling shame over that. I had grown up being vaguely taught that "we're all the same! yay!" But here, clearly, I came from a completely different neighborhood. Sure, we shared so many similarities like lots of teenagers, but there was absolutely no getting around the fact that we were not at all "the same" like I'd been taught. I never once wondered if my education had failed me. 

There were so many other elements at work here, though. I was also the new guy, and I basically became their little brother in the way that all sports-team newcomers are initiated. The other guys used to jokingly call me Whitey, or even sometimes LWB (Little White Bitch). I'm sure some folks would call that racism, and I guess I wouldn't call them wrong. I just never thought about it like that. I don't know how to clearly explain that this was done in a loving way, the kind of camaraderie that happens in tight knit groups of boys like that. Just like how my older brothers back home would pick on me, it told me that I'd been accepted into the team. It also kind of helped that I could play. My teammate J used to do a totally side-splitting, fake play-by-play: "Whitey passes it to Darkie; Darkie dribbles, passes to other Darkie; other Darkie tries alley-oop back to Whitey but, folks, Whitey cannot jump! He cannot jump! His feet are nailed to the floor!"

I don't mean to make it out as even a thing, like it happened every day or something. We were just all able to see how strikingly odd and hilarious the reality was, how I literally stuck out on the team. (When we took the team pictures, J pointed at me in the photo saying, "Whoa where'd that ghost come from?! You guys see that ghost?!" and we all just about died laughing.) We would have done anything for each other, just like brothers, and that included making fun of each other. We knew we were similar in many ways, but also quite different, and I think we tried to embrace it all. The key here is that, in the moment, we never really thought about it. After those first few days, racial paranoia ceased living in my own brain, at least.

Sadly, real life just isn't like that for everybody. I will always truly and strongly believe that the quiet, compassionate people in this world outnumber the small-minded racists, homophobes, etc. But, again, I'm not sure that's Coates' point. His point, I think, is that our world has this blueprint that can makes some people feel uncomfortable in certain situations with people of color (and/or makes people of color feel uncomfortable with all these unspoken, subliminal things going around), and these same people tend to use the defense of still being a "good" person when what they're actually doing is racist. It's just a cold, hard truth, and ignoring that only makes it worse. It doesn't mean that white people don't suffer from reverse discrimination, too, but that's not an argument worth having or winning. Any type of discrimination like that is awful. But what you cannot avoid is this: It happens more to people of color than it does to white people. Sure, this is a generalization, but try to tell yourself it's not true. It just doesn't work. Ignoring the history of our country is a very scary thing to do.

Seriously. Think about Coates' statements: "...it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner." Or, "I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark."

I saw this video a while back and it was terrifying:



I'm not even entirely sure what the point of my post is. I know there are also myriad examples of Irish, Italians, Polish, Jews, and so many other folks being discriminated against; Hell, even lots of Southerners get lumped into one big "racist South," which just isn't true, down to the person, either. Thinking there's an easy answer (or even just one answer) is naive. But I'm certainly not trying to make this a competition. All I know is I was moved to write all this down because of Coates' piece, and I think what's so moving about it is that he's still trying so hard to be compassionate and forgiving, even with the burden of history all around him. I cannot imagine how hard this must be. You can feel his utter desperation in those last sentences, "And right then, I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I can take."

I cannot blame him for feeling that way, and his honesty is so powerful. Even me sitting here writing all this down feels somehow self-indulgent. But I think it's important. Please don't give up. There are some truly Righteous people out there from all walks of life and, to paraphrase my man J.R.R. Tolkien, they are eternally worth fighting for.