Thursday, August 06, 2009
Something scurried by in the heart of darkness
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
1,000,000 words
During a recent session of my bi-weekly writing group, while commiserating about what a long, rejection-laden road getting published can be, one of our members mentioned the notion that it’s not until you’ve written a million words that you’re even starting to get good.
While that sounded rather daunting, it reminded me of something I’d read in various Kerouac biographies. When Jack Kerouac first met William S. Burroughs in 1944, he apparently told Burroughs that he’d already written a million words. That always caught my imagination, impressing me with the relentless incandescence of his output, the drive to just get it out, out, out, at all costs. It also always made me feel like a big, fat failure, and a lethargic one to boot, since he would have only been 22 at the time.
I wondered if anybody else had an opinion about this “million words” idea. I found several people citing a quote from Henry Miller’s “On Writing” to the effect that it takes writing a million words to find your voice. Crime writer Elmore Leonard, who certainly ought to know a thing or two about good strong writing attributes it to the widely-revered John D. McDonald and says:
John D. McDonald said that you had to write a million words before you really knew what you were doing. A million words is ten years. By that time you should have a definite idea of what you want your writing to sound like. That’s the main thing. I don’t think many writers today begin with that goal: to write a certain way that has a definite sound to it.
Science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, in an essay about how to get his job, helpfully notes that being an author is a really easy job. Unfortunately, nobody pays you to be an author until you first become a writer, which turns out to take work and time. In fact the work is mostly time, according to him:
I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material.
Pushcart prize-winning poet and novelist Ward Kelley had this intriguing wrinkle to contribute:
There’s that old saw about becoming a writer–if you want to be one, you first have to write a million words. While it’s an old saw, I believe it to be true. However, you seldom hear mentioned what should be tagged to the end of it. The axiom should include the reason for the million words: all these practice words put a writer in position to use the best literary advice I ever discovered. That advice is "don’t think."
Okay. Fine.
Where, I wondered, was I against this benchmark? I started to tally up the various things I’ve written since I recommitted to my childhood dream of writing following my divorce in 2002. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, between the manuscript of my novel, a not-yet completed new novel, print and online essays and articles, my short film screenplays, poetry, as-yet unpublished short stories, blog postings, and journals, I am closing in on 800,000 words. At this pace, in another two to three years I’ll reach 1 million and actually be starting to produce something worthwhile. Hooray!
That honestly doesn’t seem so bad now that I’ve come this far. And if I’ll be almost twenty years older at that point than Kerouac was when he reached one million, maybe my remaining creative (not to mention physical) lifespan will at least match the 25 years that lay ahead of him at 22. Not too bad, not too bad…
Friday, July 10, 2009
Man has invented more doom!
Robot scientists can think for themselves
Mind-Reading Device Sends Twitter Messages
DNA Nanotechnology making custom shapes
Genetically engineered monkeys pass on glow to offspring
Human Language Gene Changes the Sound of Mouse Squeaks
Synthetic fiber may cure blindness
Robot displaying emotions unveiled
Robot surgeon finds tiny shrapnel
Australian scientists kill cancer cells with "Trojan horse"
So what do you think? Has man, as Bob Dylan puts it in License to Kill, "Invented his doom"? What does "doom" mean in this context? Unparalleled disaster, or a bold new change?
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
July (and June!) Writing News
Yes, we’ve gone into extended two-month issues for the summer. You know how it is, what with family visiting and being out of town and moving in with girlfriends and all. At least that’s what I did on my summer vacation! In between, some creative activity has occurred as well. To whit:
Film- “Geek Wars”, one part of my three-part short film “Triptych” (formerly “Three Conversations About No Thing”) screened at the Victoria Theatre on June 7th. The audience seemed to enjoy it. You might too! You can see it on the Scary Cow website, project #33: http://www.scarycow.com/videos/round0008/round008.html . You can also catch me playing the pizza delivery guy briefly at the beginning of #22, “Just Super”, which I did set management & costuming for as well. The crew is currently working on editing the remainder of Triptych, which we’ll screen during Scary Cow’s next quarterly screening this fall. I’ll announce more as the time approaches...
Publication- I’m at 22 submissions for the first half of the year, not far off my goal of one a week, and already higher than all of 2008! The acceptance rate is currently at 9% versus 2008’s eventual 14.3%, for those of you with a statistical interest. Two of the latest fruits of this labor to appear are “Post-separation alone at night listening to Patti Smith sing “Dancing Barefoot” while thinking of mistakes I made while living in Hong Kong blues” in Lit Up Magazine (posted May 30th): http://litupmagazine.wordpress.com/ and “Twelve Steps to the New Israel of the Beats” in the July issue of SoMa Literary Review: http://www.somalit.com/New_Israel.html
Performance- I read at the Café Brainwash open mic on May 18th, my fourth public reading so far this year. It was a really fun, boisterous venue, and I got to be all prophetic by reading a new poem on autoerotic asphyxiation before that whole David Carradine business. My next targets are to read at Magnet’s “Smackdab” reading series on Wednesday July 15th and at the Gallery Café poetry series on Monday August 3rd. See you there?
Novel- I’m currently absorbing the manuscript evaluation feedback from the freelance editor I met at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference in February regarding my novel, Out in the Neon Night. What she advises would be some significant structural reworking, but it is intriguing, I just need to figure out if I agree and if I’m up for it. Until then, you can read the first chapter on my blog: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/2009/02/first-chapter-of-my-novel-in-neon-night.html
Blog- Did I just say Blog? Yes I did! You can catch up with my attempt to write 40 poems in 40 days, musings on Dylan, and other topics at: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/ Definitely check it out in August, when I’ll be traveling in
I look forward to sharing more with you in all these areas now that we’re in the second half of the year!
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Forty Poems in 40 days-sputtered out at 35.
************************************************
Two shakes of a lamb’s tail
Urban Dictionary:
Where did the phrase come from?
Answer Girl:
No one seems to know.
Her dark matter:
One who has seen, sees readily.
The Maven’s Word of the Day:
Visualize those little tails
constantly thrashing
back and forth.
Book of Love
Who, they ask
(understand, despite
my coming disparagement
of it,
that it remains
a damn fine question)
who,
who wrote the book of love.
Who wrote it?
We ought to ask:
Has anybody ever read
the motherfucker?
The world has
by and large
seems to have
left it on the shelf.
But you and I,
You and I…
Meeting Abbey’s Mom
Curtain pulled to one side
staring out morning window
with the cat.
Hand on doorknob
deep breath before opening
warm flannel
deep bosom hug.
Amused smile
sideways glances
holding her hand.
Hearing of
embarrassing childhood
stories
now warming
to possibilities.
Do it now!
Turn down the dog
Switch off the cat
Floss your pants
Fluff the driveway
Put on your groceries
Unzip the TV
Slip on your car
Make the garden
Water your bed
Fold the eggs
Whatever word is given
Act don’t think
Do it now
Concrete Poem
one square
gray
with hints
of silver and white
smooth plane
marred by chunks
scratches
and lumps of age
spotted with pads
of squashed black
sticky gum
white splatter
left by
passing bird
and green-yellow scrub
growing at the margins
Ergonome’s 12 Golden Rules for safe keyboard use #11 & 12 work well for life in general too
When you travel
from Home,
don’t resist
natural movement
When you’re not traveling,
Rest at Home
Church Street Café
Back when it was Muddy Waters
this place
used to be
a train-wreck,
each pitted, scarred table
a coach carrying
a choir of whores
who gargled
waterfalls of scorn,
their filth lodged
in every crevice
of the cracked,
blackened brick wall.
When it was renamed
a gong must have struck
in some eternal realm
sparking a baptism,
the whole place born again
as a respectable haunt
of laptop computers
and advertising execs
talking independent film.
Morning commute, 28 Fort Mason
Bank of dirty brown-gray cloud behind
Stonestown pull of the magnet from the
journal clasp on the pen ivy-choked parking
lot fence work crew shoveling piles of tar
into hole in the road hedges look like an
80s rapper’s haircut San Francisco Masonic
Center glares through lack of windows
Taraval Vietnamese place orange green
red splash of color on the corner Sunset
lettered avenues a sea of pastel houses
squat peach Jiffy Lube guards Noriega’s
slope down to the sea growing crowd of
elderly Chinese at the front of the bus
broken by lone Russian newspaper reader
“wet paint” sign by the barrel-chested
green trash can on Judah chipped paint on
a forlorn tan house between Iriving and
Lincoln thick green trees on either side of
the fast route through the park clear smell
of eucalyptus through the window blue-suited
crews watering & pruning he rose garden at
Fulton the girl on at Balboa long straight
blonde hair mass exodus at Geary as always
California connection to Chinatown finishes
off the stragglers white arrows point toward
narrow lanes green walls climb the side
toward the tunnel flickering halogen light in
concrete tube on the other side tall trees in
the Presidio like matchsticks white clock and
red lights on the toll booth steel gray bay and
red thrust of bridge up into foggy
disappearance ivy ripples in the wind at the
turnaround Coast Guard ship clipping white
trail through the Bay Palace dome with white
city dully gleaming in background light is
transparent here at the stop.
ST:TMP
The first twenty minutes
always makes me cry
With the medal cast
on the burning sands
The Golden Gate
And the shuttle
with the admiral
circling the ship
like a lover
approaching the beloved
with hushed reverence
Changing Viewpoints
We are flat, and
it moves around us.
We are round, and
it moves around us.
We move around it,
in epicycles.
We move around it,
in ellipses.
We move around it,
in ellipses, determined by
the force of gravity.
We, and it, and millions of others
are all gathered together.
Billions of others, all gathered
together in a giant pinwheel.
Our pinwheel just one of billions.
Just one of billions
all expanding outward
from a single point.
From a single point,
that’s a quantum fluctuation.
Quantum fluctuations
are influenced by observers.
It moves around us?
This seat is mine motherfucker!
Surge of adrenaline
and leap to the feet
from the crappy side-facing seat
as the bus slams to a stop.
Launch down the aisle
icy stare-down of the old man
bounding my way,
proceed
with no regard
for little old ladies
boarding in the back.
Slide in to the last forward-facing seat
for the long ride to come,
panic finally subsiding.
(untitled)
from pointing straight up
to shriveled
can happen in six seconds flat
when she pulls a gun
Ode to Sinatra and Sean Combs in Hell
I see k.d. lang
on TV screen
singing with Tony Bennet
and I like her less.
What’s she doing
with that thug?
Then I realize I’m confusing
Tony Bennet
with Dean Martin
and I like them both again.
And really
I only feel that way
about Dean Martin
because he palled around with
Frank Sinatra.
So maybe
he’s innocent too.
Regardless,
my contempt for P. Puff-diddly Comb
and his whole genocidal crew
remains undimmed.
I guess I just don’t like gangsters.
Every day in recovery is like this
The bee on my shoulder
buzzes.
It is his nature,
he means no particular harm.
I move to swat.
It is instinct,
I contemplate it without malice.
Pausing,
I use the umbrella strap
to brush him off.
A new day has dawned.
Singing the lease
walking from room to room
checking the fixtures
your ghost was on me
like a rabid Pomeranian
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Forty Poems in Forty Days- part II
************************************************
Day 11 called for no punctuation
The thing is (comma)
it’s not hard for me to do (period)
It’s easy (exclamation point)
I often leave punctuation out
in my poems (semi-colon)
commas (comma)
semicolons (comma)
even periods
or question marks (period)
Doesn’t everyone (question mark)
Bacon!
It’s a
wonderment
of
red,
orange
and
sienna
proteins,
with
twisty white
fatty
pathways
leading
to heaven.
It all makes sense now…
All the mother wounds
God-shaped holes
shifty obsessions
and cat love.
Even the Disappearing Mine
when I was ten
and the meaning
of the Green Flash incident.
I understand it all,
the secret.
The key lies in realizing
that your whole life
is actually—
Ah, but I don’t need
to tell you.
You can see for yourself
just do what I did:
In Microsoft Excel 2009
go to the menu, click on “tools”
choose “data analytics” from the dropdown
install the “analyze my whole damn life” toolpack
then use the help menu
to write the “understand everything” equation.
Minor Hues
Everybody knows
about ochre,
umber
and burnt sienna.
But who respects beaver?
What praise draws timberwolf?
Wherefore not into glory goes cornflower?
Is there a palette
that will honor
these marginal shades
before Crayola
shuffles off
their mortal coil?
The Ideal Man
You can keep
your
Apollo,
Adonis
and young Ganymede
buggered by Jupiter.
Give me
William Shatner,
circa 1967,
yellow-green tunic
torn at the shoulder,
wiping blood
off of his knuckle-busted
Elvis sneer
before teaching
a quarrelsome Klingon
the facts of life.
(untitled haiku)
Poop? Poop! Coprolites?
Maybe in a few million
Shit hardened years
Summer of Hate
I hear it was
really something
that first summer of 1967.
Peace and Flowers
positive vibrations
all that happy hippy bullshit.
But within a few years
the hippies switched
from LSD to speed
started killing cats for food
and the streets
filled with real shit.
Ever since then
it’s been
a Summer of Hate.
A Summer of
yellow-eyed
disease infected homeless
in crap-caked clothes.
A summer of
sneering teen gutter punks
from the burbs
playing homeless for the weekend
spitting on passersby
who don’t give them change.
A Summer of
abscess ridden junkies
leaving their fluids in the gutter
and port-a-potties overflowing
with the orange caps
of their syringes
A Summer of
Those who never made it out
of the Sixties
wandering emaciated
food and dried slobber-ridden
birds nest beards shaking
as they rant to thin air.
A Summer of
faux nostalgia head shops
yuppie ice cream parlors
and comodified counterculture
drawing in
fat, complacent onlookers.
Summer in and Summer out
for almost 40 years now
an Endless Summer
of Haight.
Autoerotic asphyxiation
Every time I think of you
I pull the plastic tubing
a little tighter
swell another half inch
and reach for the lube
How I Know I’m In Love
Sometimes it comes
In little things transformed:
Your earplugs on the dresser
Coated with dried wax
Beautiful to me
Captain! Oh Conservative captain!
(with all due apologies to Walt Whitman and Abe Lincoln)
This twentieth day of May
Two Thousand and Nine
you left us, dear Rush.
Call me no more, you said
the titular head
of the party Republican.
“I never sought it.
I give it back.”
Oh sweet selfless prince!
At the thought of politics
shorn of your presence
I weep, unashamed, like a woman,
and tear my shirt in grief.
“Mention me not,”
you told MSNBC,
“for an entire month!”
An entire month!
Scarcely can I imagine one day
without you by my side
to stem the Liberal tide.
The dark days ahead
seem to me as grim
as to you must seem
the thought of life
without oxycontin.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Project Dylan: Bringing it All Back Home (1965)
****************************************
In standard Dylan exegesis, Bringing It All Back Home is where Dylan breaks with the folkie/protest singer identity of his earlier work. Not only is he already turning electric here, well before he gets to “Like a Rolling Stone”, but his artistic focus turns to an inner symbolic world where his vision reaches the surreal new levels that mark him as the poet of his generation. I suppose that’s all true as far as it goes, but what I hear throughout this album is seething protest. The protest is now bigger, and more fundamental, than civil rights or the anti-war movement. It’s nothing less than a repudiation of the way things are, the entire way society is organized.
“Subterranean Homesick Blues” kicks in to it with full tilt electrified blues, rock and roll by any other name, that in just over two minutes flat of rapid-fire verse paints a picture of a society that one can only hide out from in basements as it seeks to put you on the day shift. And what else is it but the whole system of expectations itself that he doesn’t want to labor for anymore in “Maggie’s Farm”: Well, I try my best/ To be just like I am/ But everybody wants you/ To be just like them/ They sing while you slave and I just get bored/ I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more? The pervasive rebellion reaches a high point on “Outlaw Blues”, an echoing steely blues song that warns off all comers: Don't ask me nothin' about nothin'/ I just might tell you the truth.
The whole argument comes to a conclusion in the masterful incisive poetic stream of consciousness that is “It’s Alright Ma’ (I’m Only Bleeding)”. I won’t go into its rich detail here except to note that the poet, even while admitting: If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine, still asserts: Although the masters make the rules/ For the wise men and the fools/ I got nothing, Ma, to live up to. Read the rest when you have a chance, and see if it doesn’t ring even more true in the aftermath of financial and consumer collapse in 2009 than it did in 1965.
Even a song that is clearly comedic, like “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”, where Dylan actually busts up laughing at the beginning, uses absurdism and rhyme to lay bare the genocide and thievery at the heart of the founding of the country. The joking “On the Road Again” similarly insists on opting out of the great big out-of-control American nightmare: You ask why I don’t live here?/ Honey how come you don’t move? So too with the seemingly abstract poetry of “Mister Tambourine Man” and “Gates of Eden” which nonetheless seek out realms beyond the straightjacket of everyday life.
There are more personal moments too, including what I think is one of the most beautiful love songs ever written, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”. My heart aches every time I hear the lines: My love she speaks like silence/ Without ideals or violence/ She doesn't have to say she's faithful/ Yet she's true, like ice, like fire, not least because I know nothing I write will ever touch it. “She Belongs to Me” shimmers with line after line of beautiful poetry subtly undercut by the servitude to the woman it portrays. Words also fail to describe the bitter beauty of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, a breakup song that assigns longing and melancholy regret for the breakup to the other party, surely a neat trick if there every was one. It also seems a kind of bridge to the albums larger theme of protest, the bereft woman as American society itself, told to leave failed excess behind and begin again:
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you.
The vagabond who's rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
Strike another match, go start anew
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.
Monday, May 11, 2009
40 Poems in 40 Days!
This whole venture sounded like fun, and fit nicely with my own intention for the year to re-connect with my muse. I knew I would be busy in March and April with my film project, so I decided I’d give it a try starting in May. And here we are! Being a confessionalist in my writing, I’ve decided to share the process with you, my hapless victims. The first ten day’s worth are below, more to follow…
Warning: These are meant to be exercises, and some of the prompts that inspired them are intentionally nonsensical. Proceed at your own risk…
Hot Water
(for Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”)
Some said fire, some said ice
but Frost (great seer)
got it right on both counts:
the lineaments
of our slaughter
are even now
being traced
by the drip, drip, drip
of hot water
A Truth Beyond All Truths
(owing something to Wallace Stevens’ “Landscape with Boat”)
Anti-matter, florid, eccentric
Meets its opposite and wipes out all things
Leaving behind the scintillating blue array
Of particle trails
Rushing out from a point that is no point
Primeval blank vacuum field
In the Night before all nights
Something erupted there,
Or nothing,
Whichever, kept expanding
Into all the things that now are
The truth, even now,
Is that these things are still the nothing
They once were,
Even we are that nothing
Which is to say something
We, all, the empty space
From which pours infinite creation
untitled
I would lie there
twelve years old
on the sand
between the dusty spread legs
of two oak covered hills
yearning for something
that stirred
like the slit-eyed leopard sharks
in the crusted salt
brackish tang
and sinuous twist
of the slough before me
Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu
All 200 patients
of the Denton Regional Medical Center
in Denton, Texas
have custom headphones
built into their beds
that play every Aerosmith song
ever recorded
on demand
Since most of the patients are older
classics are popular
In Cardiology, Radiation Oncology and
Geriatric Neurology
it’s strictly
“Sweet Emotion”, “Dream On”
and “Mama Kin”
Even down in Progressive Care
and the Adolescent Unit
they still have the good sense
to pick it up with the Run-DMC remix
of “Walk This Way”
and cut it off circa 1994
with “Cryin’”
Only in the Psych Ward
in the basement
does anybody have the
bad taste, or derangement
to listen to
“I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”
Nightmare of myself given childhood encouragement and high school confidence
He feels nothing but satisfaction,
a kind of ownership,
as he slaps the behind
of the lithe young blonde
lounging in satin
on his way to the shower.
More of the same
in the streamlined gleam
of his sports utility vehicle
gliding down LA freeways.
The feeling reaches a peak
in the glass-walled office
where all eyes at the trading desk
behold him with nervous regard
while his view
sweeps the city
that the electronic millions
he commands
courses through
as he confidently ignores
their expected reverence.
ellipsis
Of all the…
I have ever…
the one
that endures is…
Even now… rises
at the memory of… …
lying… on the…
as we… the width
and breadth
of…
until…
ran its course
and…
took its weary toll
It’s Surprising to Me Too
Legions of menstruating grandmothers for Obama
Will have their final battle
With the spider monkeys of doom
On the caldera of an Icelandic volcano
On July 4, 1876
For reasons that are yet obscure
But will one day be the subject
Of Applied Chronametrics term papers
Flashed through cerebral upload academies
By eight year olds
600 Montgomery
It squats at the bottom
like a giant marble bullfrog
The functionless top scratches heaven
with its ornamental cement pylons
In-between
stack upon stack
of white stone, black window
options narrow
Question to the Taiwanese birders I met at the Explorer’s Inn, Tambomachay, Peru
Do grebes float
In the Rio Tambobo?
Venturers
through a fluidic space
whose muddy bottom
is as bone-littered
as the Chauchilla Cemetery,
do they brave caiman,
giant river otters
and threats whose taxonomy
I can’t even name
and then emerge
to build nests
in green jungles
abutting sandy riverbanks?
I began to seek the way out long before
We lived in Salinas, I was only six or seven. I was not allowed to go to the 7-11 by myself. I snuck there anyway with my next-door neighbor. On the way back we cut through an abandoned lot. We got away with it! Home, no evidence, parents never even knew—“What happened to your foot?” I looked down to find my right foot covered in blood. I must have cut it on broken glass in the lot. I didn’t feel it before, but as soon as I saw it, I screamed and cried. Pain? Yes. But almost as bad— Caught! Lying, guilt, doing what I wasn’t supposed to. My foot throbbed and pumped out crimson. The blood shooting up the dropper’s neck, in my system even then. It left behind a triangular scar that remains to this day.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
May Writing News
Film- We finished seven days of shooting in April for the short film that I’m writing and producing, “Three Conversations About No Thing”. This month the crew is working on editing, and we’ll screen the film, or some portion thereof, during Scary Cow’s quarterly screening at the Victoria Theatre on Sunday June 7th. Invitations will be headed your way once tickets go on sale! And, as if that’s not enough, I’ll also be appearing at the screening (briefly) as a pizza delivery guy in “Just Super”, someone else’s project that I did some crew work on.
Publication- I’m at 14 submissions year to date, not quite one a week, but still a pretty good pace. The acceptance rate is currently hovering around 7%, which hopefully will revert toward last year’s mean later in the year and net a few more publications. Meanwhile, a poem I submitted last year has just appeared in the SoMa Literary Review, which I’m very excited about: http://www.somalit.com/(untitled).html . I also continue to write for LEGENDmag, an online and offline publication covering the progressive urban independent lifestyle. You can read one of my latest here: http://legendmag.net/thelegendonline/2009/04/16/i-make-movies/
Performance- I read at the Café International open mic on April 24th. At first the whole scene there seemed very chaotic, but it grew on me by the end of the evening. Furthering my pledge to read somewhere once a month, I’m aiming to hit Brainwash’s open mic Monday May 18th. Details to follow…
Novel- I’m expecting to hear back this month from a freelance editor I met at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference in February, who’s doing an evaluation of the manuscript of my novel, Out In The Neon Night. Hopefully this will help me plan the next step of targeting a new round of agents and publishers. In the meantime, you can read the first chapter on my blog: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/2009/02/first-chapter-of-my-novel-in-neon-night.html
Blog- And then there’s the blog. Fascination and fear at future evolution, thoughts about being a man and reflections on personal holidays can all be found here: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/
Back in June, at which point the year will be almost half over! I promise I’ll get off this passage of time trope soon…
Monday, May 04, 2009
Independence Day
I think it’s quite as important to have private holidays as public ones.
Thanksgiving, Easter, Memorial Day and their kin can, perhaps, bring us together as a community and help us remember important things. But there are also private dates of remembrance that can bring us together with ourselves. These dates of ritual observance can remind us about where we’ve been and give us occasion to think about where we’re going.
Yesterday, for example, was my Independence Day.
On May 3, 2002 I went to stay with friends for the weekend while my wife moved out of our apartment. Regarding the specifics, I’ll only say that she had her reasons, she did it after two and a half years of trying to get me to do it, and nothing we did to try to hold it together in the interim had worked.
At the time I was melancholy, and vaguely terrified, but looking back it was a profound gift. Within a few months, things that I had put on hold for years had reawakened. I was writing again, buying new music, getting out in the town to try a hundred new things. Our separation lengthened into divorce and I began the baffling process of learning to love again.
Other things reawakened to, old demons of depression and addiction, and the past seven years have had their share of heartbreak and turmoil. But I grew through them, and, looking back, everything that I think of now as who I am- the people I know, the things I do, what’s most important to me in life, came about after this date. I’m so grateful that life (and to be fair, her) gave me the kick in the butt I needed to start to become a whole person.
I treasure this wholeness now, and want to use this seven-year anniversary to reaffirm my commitment to continue to pursue it no matter what.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Men's Stories
The MSP aims to gather these voices together and give them a place to be heard. So far they’ve made a short film, produced several public events and even put together a training manual so new groups can be started in various locales. And put together this event in Berkeley where sixteen men presented their stories in spoken work, performance art, dance and monologue on issues including overcoming a life of violence, surviving testicular cancer, struggling with how being gay or disabled fits with being a “black man”, and fear of peeing in public.
I can hardly tell you how moved I was by this.
As a child who was soft-spoken, sensitive and couldn’t catch a ball to save my life, I never felt like I belonged with the other boys. Plenty of them felt the same way and made sure I got the message through exclusion, taunting and bullying. Years of being lost in the woods of drugs, alcohol and sexual and romantic obsession were all ways of trying to bridge this gap internally, but it still never quite felt “right”. To this day I have zero interest in sports, no mechanical aptitude and otherwise frequently feel alienated from my own internalized idea of being a “real man”. Despite being straight, I prefer the company of women and gay men and am as likely as not to identify with their concerns socially and politically.
To see a group of men onstage exploring there own experiences of mismatch and struggle with the traditional idea of masculinity was tremendously affirming. It underscored for me the right and need to define what being a man is on my own terms. Making space for the creation and affirmation of one’s own identity is what freedom movements are all about after all, and men (even straight ones (even white ones)) are as in need of it as anyone else. At least I am!
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Man has invented his doom…
Those of you who know me well know that I am a follower of the prophet Bob Dylan. He, of course, hates to be thought of in those terms, and I can entirely see his point vis-à-vis never intending that status for himself or wanting others to see him that way. As any devotee of the Old Testament can tell you, though, prophets are always reluctant. The initial response to the prophetic call (cf. Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc.) can be summarized as, “Whoa, hey, wait a minute, I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”
The marker of prophethood is really more the quality of the revelation that demands to be expressed through the prophet rather than the prophet’s giving assent to bear that message. In that sense, I will go ahead and consider Dylan a prophet, and will proceed to cite one of the passages from his 1983 song “License to Kill”:
Man has invented his doom,The first step was touching the moon.
I always found this refrain to be particularly evocative. It brings to mind a consistent theme in classical apocalyptic literature, that a fundamental rearrangement in human affairs is at hand, and that it is augured in by signs in the heavens. It also features one of the motifs of post-modern apocalypticism, that our own technological overreaching is responsible for the setting the final sequence of events in motion.
This is more or less what I think is already occurring: between advances in computers, human-machine interactions and genetic engineering, the seeds are being laid for the creation of a post-human state that will fundamentally change our existence as we know it. Before the end of the century, we will give birth to (or become (or both, simultaneously)) a new species that will exceed us. Our “doom”, if not necessarily in the sense of destruction, then in the sense of “destined end”. And new beginning…
So, inspired by Dylan and in honor of the recent end of Battlestar Galactica, which itself explored this idea of the consequences of a technological apotheosis and riffed off of Dylan, I’d like to share some links I’ve collected from the first quarter of this year that perhaps show our future, even now, taking form:
Brain-computer interface for gaming http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/08/Futureofgaming/index.html
Quantum releportation over 1 meter distance http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090122141137.htm
Breakthrough makes human cloning more likely http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/human-clones-ap.html
FDA approves first drugs from genetically altered animals http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090206/ap_on_he_me/gene_drug_altered_animals
Contact lens TV http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/121134
Picture overview of robot developments http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/03/robots.html#photo26
Man sees with bionic eye http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7919645.stm
Quick charging batteries could revolutionize world http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/12/mits-quick-charging-batteries-could-revolutionize-the-world-ma/
Brain Scans Can Read Minds http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090313/sc_livescience/brainscanscanreadmemories
Sugar-coated nanoparticles find hidden tumors http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/30/nanoparticles-cancer.html
Robot scientists can think for themselves http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090402/sc_nm/us_science_robots
Sunday, April 05, 2009
April Writing News
Hard to believe that the year is now 25% over! As a constant generator of internalized time-pressure, this of course fills me with a vague sense of unease about my progress year-to-date. Fortunately, I have these monthly updates, so I can now replace that vague feeling with a very concrete unease about exactly where I am, and share it with all of you!
Film- I’m now fully into the swing of producing the short film that I’ve written, “Three Conversations About No Thing”, for Scary Cow, the independent film-making co-op that I’m part of. It’s looking to be about twenty minutes, and the crew and I just completed the first week of filming, and will shoot more next week. Then follows several weeks of post-production, and a screening at the Victoria Theatre on June 7th. I’m super-excited about the great director, crew and actors working on it, and looking forward to seeing the final, which you can bet I’ll be pushing tickets for on all of you when the time comes.
Publication- My pledge to submit something somewhere every week in 2009 is still in pretty good shape, minus a week here and there. Acceptance and rejection rates are tied at 10% each, with 80% “the sound of one hand clapping”. I currently seem to be on hiatus with the online culture magazine The Rumpus, but if they come back begging me for more and I deign to accept, I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, I continue to write for LEGENDmag, an online and offline publication covering the progressive urban independent lifestyle. You can read my March 4th discovery of my identity here: http://legendmag.net/thelegendonline/2009/03/04/quisp-like-me-the-queer-identified-straight-person/
Performance- Okay, okay, see, work and movie-making both got crazy in March. So I didn’t end up reading anywhere. I’ll get back to it this month, I promise! Let’s say the last Friday of the month, April 24th, at the Café International open mic (Haight & Fillmore)? I’ll see you there…
Novel- I’m taking the plunge and submitting the manuscript of my novel, Out In The Neon Night, to a freelance editor I met at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference in February. She’s going to help me evaluate its readiness to be submitted to agents and publishers, and possibly also target a select list of them. In the meantime, you can read the first chapter on my blog here: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/2009/02/first-chapter-of-my-novel-in-neon-night.html
Blog- Speaking of my blog, see my desperate excuse making in the “Performance” section above. I may not have posted much there is the past month, but what I have you can find here: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/
I’ll get back in touch with you at the beginning of May, at which point the year will be 1/3 over. Egads!
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
March Writing News
Film- I’ve taken the plunge, and am producing a short film that I wrote for Scary Cow, the independent film-making co-op that I’m part of. The working title is “Three Conversations About No Thing”, and it depicts three conversations about relationship-centered topics that take place in and around a restaurant at the same time. We’re having our first production team meeting this week, and beginning casting this weekend. Assuming we finish, it will show at the Castro on June 7th as part of the Scary Cow screening there. I’ll keep you posted on the latest production news between now and then.
Publication- So far for 2009 I’m doing pretty good keeping up my pledge to submit on a weekly basis. I’m at 7 submissions, with a 14% acceptance rate. That also equals 1 for those of you mathematically inclined, and that one has led to my semi-regular gig with the new online culture magazine The Rumpus.net: http://therumpus.net/author/chris-west/. I continue to write for LEGENDmag, an online and offline publication covering the progressive urban independent lifestyle. You can read my February 12th musing on Hipsters that I wrote for them here: http://legendmag.net/thelegendonline/2009/02/12/hipsters-hipster/ .
Performance- I’m good through February on my commitment to read in public at least once a month, since I read three poems at Sacred Grounds weekly Thursday night poetry reading last week. It was good clean fun, and I think I was the second youngest reader there that night, which is a nice treat at 38. For March I have my eye on Brainwash Café, I’ll let you know the date when I settle on it.
Novel- I speed-dated my novel Out in the Neon Night with agents at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference last month. While nothing concrete came of it, it gave me an opportunity to develop and sharpen a pitch; I met some great writers from all over the country, and was totally inspired in general. One person I met there was a former editor now freelance agent who I’m going to have provide a professional evaluation of the manuscript, which hopefully will help me target agents and publishers. In the mean time, I’ve put the first chapter online, in case anybody wants to see a sample: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/2009/02/first-chapter-of-my-novel-in-neon-night.html
Blog- My blog gathers steam, with two entries in January and three in February. Perhaps we’ll see four in March? If so, you’ll find them here: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/
I’ll be back with more in April!
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
First chapter of my novel, "Out in the Neon Night"
The novel is set in California, Japan and Hong Kong during a fifteen year period from the late 80s through the early 2000s and tells the story of Carl, a young man who descends into a life of romantic and sexual obsession in his teens and twenties, and then has a painful spiritual emergence from it in his thirties. It's made up of five story arcs that take place at discrete points during the fifteen year period, and interweave with each other as they unfold. It's also surprisingly funny in places despite the subject matter, and informed throughout by the rock music of the era.
This is the first chapter, in which Carl is just starting out on the downward spiral...
***********************************************************************************
1. Shot Right Through With a Bolt of Blue
Coming to the Welcome Dance was a mistake.
Carl felt sure of that even before the guy knocked over the table behind him and hit him in the back.
To begin with, wasn’t it a mistake to come out at all? Out into the night where the air waited like a hungry ghost to suck out his breath and suspend it in an icy cloud before him. A cloud that pointed out into the bright and hollow sky, under which he searched, yearned, churned, for…
What? Carl didn’t know. When had the search ever worked for him? What made him think it would work tonight? What explosion would finally happen at the end of the fuse lit by this night if it didn’t fizzle out?
He ran a hand through his long blonde hair, pulled it together behind his head, and surveyed the dance. Nothing but a fizzle seemed likely here in this big box of a room. What could happen among the guys with short haircuts in sweats and shirts bearing names of sports teams, and lean and blonde girls likely straight out of Southern California? He stood there among them in a torn punk-rock t-shirt, baggy pants, and black leather shoes with buckles and shiny steel tips.
This was just as bad as the minimum-security prison masquerading as a high school that he came from. My God, the room even looked like a gym converted into the site of a high school dance! Berkeley should not be like this. Here in the land of the Free Speech Movement, People’s Park and the Third World Strike there should be freedom from the syndicate of jocks, politburo of the popular and oligarchy of rich kids who bought all the right clothes.
Carl shifted his weight from foot to foot. He found it hard to stand up straight so long with no support. But maybe he didn’t look manly enough with his hip out to one side. He shifted, back and forth, back and forth. Should he try to talk to people? Ask someone to dance despite the awful boom-boom-boom of the vapid dance music? All ew baby baby without a single real feeling in any of the songs. Without a person in the whole room who loved the rainyday music of English moors and pale windswept Northumberland towns. Or at least knew the words to a few Depeche Mode songs. Come on already!
If only there were people here he could relate to, then he could move out into the room. Instead he backed away from the crowd and further into the stricture inside his chest. His thoughts twisted tighter and tighter, wrapping him away from the world. A wallflower indeed and he would actually be up against the wall in a moment, with just another step or two backwards—
Which is when the small square brown table tumbled over and hit his back with a glancing blow.
“Fuck this shit!”
As shock staggered Carl forward, the guy who’d knocked over the table continued to curse and wave his arms around in inarticulate rage.
It was hard to see in the dim light, but the guy didn’t look that big. It was a lean frame that poked through his sweatshirt. He was intimidating nonetheless, as he shook his head and seethed disapproval of something. Carl stood rooted to the spot. Maybe he should get out of there; the guy could still be dangerous. Two friends tried to drag the irate table-tosser back, but he jerked his shoulders around and threw them off.
One friend stood in front of him and talked softly with a hand on his chest. Seeing the whole group was black, the thought flashed through Carl’s mind— did the guy throw the table at him because he was white? The group succeeded at last in calming their friend down enough that they could lead him away toward the glow of the exit sign.
Carl stood there for some time afterward. An image of himself flashed through his mind— long hair, dressed funny, and standing with his hip out to one side. Did the guy think he was gay because of the long hair? His bruised back throbbed in time to the music. Boom-boom-boom. Why did this shit always happen to him? Same old high school bully crap— he tried to be okay around people and what did he get for it? Whacked in the back with a table. Fuck this shit indeed.
He wandered back out into the main body of the dance, away from the table-flipping corner of danger. Some movement in the corner of his field of vision caught his eye. A girl.
Not just any girl.
She dressed differently now. A thin white blouse highlighted with green, yellow and orange flowers. A shiny black short skirt. Combat boots. A ghostly gossamer scarf around her neck. Her hair in a bob, buzzed short in the back and long in front, angled downwards to a point on each side of her face. But the round cherubic face framed by her rich dark hair was the same.
Gina Onizuka. Gina, who Carl had a crush on since freshman year of high school. Gina, who, resplendent in long braided pigtails and thick horn-rimmed glasses, sat in the seat in front of him for the duration of the English honor students’ bus trip to the Ashland Shakespeare festival. Fueled by the Vivarin he took in high school to be able speak to people without freezing up, he talked with her non-stop for 17 hours on the way to Oregon. Gina had— that’s right, she had! — come to Berkeley for college. And she was here now, a few feet away. It was perfect, because—
Crap! No, it was not perfect. At least he didn’t think Keisha, the girlfriend mired in junior year of high school back in his hometown at this very moment, would think it was perfect. Keisha, dumbshit, remember? The one he wrote the eighteen-page letter to earlier today? The one he was going to call tomorrow, as soon as the phone was hooked up. Probably before he even called his parents. No, definitely before he called his parents.
Yes, he remembered.
But. But the letter to Keisha was comfortable homesickness. Keisha herself represented pent up pages of love built up over years of never having a girl like him as more than a friend. It had to go to somebody, anybody, and Keisha was the anybody who finally said yes. His feelings for her had grown, by and by, into the hearts and flowers of wholesome first love and awkward innocent sex.
Gina, though, was last year’s Homecoming Dance. He went to every high school dance, just in case the thing that was supposed to happen finally happened that night. She went for reasons unknown to him, perhaps simply because freshman in college are supposed to go back to their high school Homecoming Dance.
Carl remembered the shock when she asked him to dance. This college woman, a whole year older than him, asked him to dance. She, the angel all dressed in black, the very essence of antidote to the obvious unattainable cheerful blondes he didn’t even dare to yearn for. She was not a sweet training-wheel girlfriend like Keisha. No, she was the real thing.
At the end of their dance he grabbed her hand, her perfectly soft hand, impelled by what, he didn’t even know, and squeezed it.
As the throb in his back returned him to the current dance, he could almost feel the warmth of her hand from a year ago. He glanced around the room and saw Gina headed for the exit. Dwarfed against the aircraft hanger ceilings, she was a tiny figure, almost at the door and moving fast. Too fast for him to take time with thoughts of Keisha, shyness or pain from recent airborne table injury. Too fast for anything but the electric impulse that launched him across the room after her.
He dodged near collisions with legions of bright young revelers on the way to the door and out into the dark, cold clarity of night. He found her leaning on the metal railing and staring out in the direction of the elephantine marble pillars of Sproul Hall. With a stealth borne of years of escaping the notice of bullies, he stood beside her without her even realizing.
“Excuse me, miss?”
She turned, her face set with a hard plastic ‘Who is this jerk?’ preparation for dismissal. Then her demeanor shifted and her girlish cheeks dimpled into a smile. She threw herself on him for a hug. As they parted, the softness of her nicely rounded body and the flower-sweet yet sweat-sharp tang of her scent clung to him in cottony ribbons.
“Carl! Hey! You’re at Berkeley now too?”
“I am! I’m glad I ran into you. I heard you were going here.”
“Yeah! Were you at the dance just now?”
“Yeah. Pretty lame music, huh?”
“Yeah.” Her nose wrinkled up and her full coral lips narrowed. He’d seen the same face once on a cat that had eaten a moth.
“So what are you up to?” He stared at her as he asked. Even the breath that shimmered into cold white clouds in front of her seemed beautiful.
“Oh, I don’t know. Hanging out, waiting for classes to start. Going to a lot of shows. Hey, have you been to Gilman Street?”
“Uh, no, I don’t think so.” What the hell was Gilman Street?
“It’s this club; all these local punk bands play there. I’ve gone a lot this summer.”
“Oh cool. Hey, do you still read comics?” That should bring him onto firmer ground. Their common love of comics had animated the discussion on the Oregon bus trip, after all.
“Yeah I do, but not so much Marvel stuff anymore. I tried to keep reading New Mutants, but it sucks dick now. I’m really into Love and Rockets. How about you?”
Man, Love and Rockets. That was one of those alternative, underground comics, wasn’t it? He felt off-balance, even more so because it was the first time he had ever heard a girl use the phrase “sucks dick”. On top of that, here he still read the X-Men and Spider-man. Kids stuff. It took him a second to compose his answer, and he thought it still sounded far too lame.
“Oh, you know, different things, I read different things.”
From inside the dance, an orchestral flourish followed by a regular mechanical computer simulation of an empty tin can beat signaled the start of New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle.
“They’re finally playing something decent!”
“Yeah. Hey, want to dance?” He flashed back to high school as she looked at him for his answer, and then nodded.
Back through the double doors they found a space in the midst of the dance floor. Which wasn’t too hard, the music had sent much of the crowd off to the sidelines. This was no song for bland perfect people. This was a song that Top 40 radio would never play. This was their song.
Every time I think of you
I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue
Shot he was. He let the sway into his body, unsure of how to catch the dit-de-duh-dit-duh-duh-dit of the beat. Utterly unlike Gina, a perfection of motion to the music, with none of the sweet young shallow sexuality that Keisha wore like an old pair of leggings. Gina’s curved hips and small round breasts, snug in her floral print blouse, rolled and flowed like water. This shocked first awareness of sinuous womanhood that seemed to course with the very power of the Universe stuck in Carl’s mind for years to come.
The lights of the dance swirled across her face. It seemed set and impassive now, a formal beauty made even more insistent and present by its distance. The stillness in her face seemed to hint at a whole world of feeling underneath, a direct electric connection to the tragedy of life. His tragedy, and she knew it too. She must know it too. But he felt a faint tickle of unease.
I’m not sure what this could mean
I don’t think you’re what you seem
I do admit to myself
That if I hurt someone else
Then I’ll never see just what we’re meant to be
Carl mouthed the words, but missed the point entirely.
As the Buddhists that he had just begun to read said, by your thoughts you make the world. That night he forged the first link in a chain of co-dependent origination. The wheel of dharma began to spin.
All he knew is that this was surely it, the moment he had waited for through years of being unloved, unlovable. All to be recouped in one fell stroke by Gina, who was punk rock, cool comics, a dangerous roll and tumble of curves. She could inhabit the space inside, the empty space that had been there for as long as he knew. She could fill it.
As the song reached its crescendo through the peaks and troughs of synthesizer waves, he wondered, doubted, felt sure:
She was the reason he came out into the night.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
I’m in Decompression from the San Francisco Writer’s Conference!
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
February 2009 Writing News
Film- I’ve been low activity in the last two rounds of Scary Cow, the independent film-making co-op that I’m part of. But I was script supervisor and production assistant on a video for a song by local musician Tony Maddox, “The Waiting Game”, which will air at their screening this Saturday (February 7th) at the Castro Theatre. It’s always worth checking out, you can get tickets here: http://scarycow.com/news_pages/2008-12-round7Screening.html . I am approaching 90% likelihood of writing and producing my own short film in their upcoming round, I’ll keep you posted.
Publication- Through the second half of last year I made a pledge to myself to submit something somewhere on a weekly basis, which I kept to pretty well. I am hereby extending that into 2009! For those of you interested in statistics, the 2008 effort has so far led to a 14% acceptance rate, 25% rejection rate and 61% eerie whistling silence rate. 2009 is still in its infancy, but has already yielded one might-become semi-regular outing blogging on music for the ‘around the web” section of the new online culture magazine The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/sections/music/ . And I’m continuing to write for LEGENDmag, an online and offline publication covering the progressive urban independent lifestyle, where I’ve just become a regular Thursday contributor. You can read my January 9th grouchy musical New Year’s resolution column for them here: http://legendmag.net/thelegendonline/2009/01/09/musical-years-resolutions-san-francisco-09
Performance- I’m making a commitment to read in public at least once a month this year. My first outing was an open mic at the Bazaar Café this past Thursday. My February installment will likely be at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference (for more about which, see below). I’ll update you on where I’ll be in March and going forward. If anybody has some good venue suggestions, let me know!
Novel- After a year of working together, things with my agent seem to be winding down. So, despite the fact that the publishing industry is collapsing along with the rest of the economy, I’ll be trying various new means to find a publisher for my novel Out In The Neon Night this coming year. The first of these is attending the San Francisco Writer’s Conference this month (http://www.sfwriters.org/ ), which includes “speed dating” events with agents and publishers. If nothing else, it should make for a fun story…
Blog- Forty one blog entires in 2008, and two so far in 2009, for better or for worse. You can read them in any or all of the following three locations: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/, http://chrisw-insf.livejournal.com/, http://www.myspace.com/chriswest_writerinsf
That’s it for now, see you in March!
Monday, January 19, 2009
Three Intentions for 2009
1. To invest more in myself physically- I’ve always done gangbusters investing in my mental life, and the last few years I’ve been getting much better with doing the same emotionally and spiritually. My physical life has always been the least developed- sometimes I’ve even thought fondly about being a brain in a jar hooked up to a supercomputer. So, I think this is a year to work on that. What does that mean? Beats me, it’s just a general intention! Seriously, I imagine it will mean all kinds of things about diet, about exercise, about consciously investing in clothes and wardrobe, and about trying new physical activities. Maybe yoga wind surfing?
2. To reconnect with my Muse- While I’ve done a lot of writing in the last two years, and even started and completed some brand new stories, I haven’t really felt the fire (as one example, I haven’t written any new poetry) since going in to rehab at the end of 2006. I think that’s a pretty natural result of having to focus on recovery first these last two years, and I mostly have patience with it as part of a natural ebb and flow. But I do think this is my year to get back in touch with it, while staying safe and sober. So, I’m re-reading old journals to see what’s there that I can connect with, starting to learn music, reading new poetry, creating more time for writing in my weekly schedule and just generally inviting the Muse to alight. Tell her if you see her!
3. To be a little less self-obsessed and a little more connected to other people- Recovery literature regularly talks about most of our problems coming back to self-obsessed suffering, and for me this is definitely true. My external life has really gotten to be pretty darn good these last two years, and the only things I really suffer from these days are old patterns of thinking and feeling that still unspool in my head. So the solution, I have heard, is to spend a little less time there and a little more focusing on other people. Not to mention I might do something nice for others in the process. So tell me, what’s going on with you? Maybe I can take you out to lunch soon…
Those are my intentions for 2009. How about you?
Friday, January 09, 2009
Eight From 2008
While it’s not standard for year-end countdowns, I’ve decided that a top eight albums is the best approach to take for 2008. What can I say? I’m a sucker for numbers and symmetry. Here, in alphabetical order, are my top picks:
1. Get Awkward (Be Your Own Pet)- They’re punk and garage with a dash of metal. Their songs are simultaneously tongue-in cheek and brash, slapping you to the mat from the start and keeping you there throughout. They’re fronted by a brash blonde girl. They’re from Nashville. What on Earth is not to like?
2. Brighter Than Creation’s Dark (Drive-By Truckers)- This album has it all. Male lead vocals. Female lead vocals. Straight-up country. Rock that reminds one of the Seventies in a good way. Music that sounds like storm clouds brooding. And as good as it is musically, it’s even better lyrically. The 19 tracks herein include heartfelt paeans to family, subtle evocations of domestic discontent, a soldier musing on the unknown life of the unnamed foe he’s just killed, and a song from the viewpoint of someone who has had it with a friend’s (family member’s? spouses?) crystal meth addiction.
3. Lust, Lust, Lust (the Raveonettes) There was a good case to be made with their previous album, Pretty in Black, that the Raveonettes had lost their mind. On this album they find it again and the lust, menace, and shimmering clouds of guitar feedback are ours to enjoy.
4. Narrow Stairs (Death Cab for Cutie)- I’ve been a late convert to Death Cab, but like many an infatuation acquired in later life, I’ve made up for it by falling hard. A song like “I Will Posses Your Heart” that starts with a four minute drum intro shouldn’t hold your attention, but in their hands it keeps you rapt, and brings a shiver when the lyrics finally kicks in with their mixture of romanticism and dark obsession. And really, at the end of the day, anybody who writes a bleak, piercing song about searching for Kerouac’s ghost can call me their bitch.
5. & 6. Nouns (No Age), Rip It Off (Times New Viking)- These two bands are probably tired of being mentioned in the same breath, but they really are two peas in one wonderful lo-fi pod. Of the two, No Age brings more melody and traditional pop structure in their navigations of ragged walls of sonic distortion. This makes Nouns more consistently listenable, but Rip It Off more exciting and challenging.
7. Stop Drop and Roll! (the Foxboro Hot Tubs)- Yes, okay, it’s really Greenday in musical drag buying time while they try to figure out how to follow American Idiot. But what glorious drag it is! Their roaring, rocking success at producing rock in the Kinks/Who/Hollies et al vein makes me wonder why rock ever stopped sounding like that.
8. We Started Nothing (the Ting Tings)- Dance music with the form and attitude of rock, this album is just good clean fun from start to finish.
Those are my picks, but in the interest of full disclosure, Bruce Springsteen’s Magic only made honorable mention on my 2007 list, and it’s turned out to be one of the few albums from that year that I still regularly listen to. I reserve the right to listen further… And so should you!
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Project Dylan: Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964)
When I finally got it sorted out, not only did I repent of my earlier avoidance, it answered many questions I had about classic songs that I knew were from Dylan’s prime but that I couldn’t place on any of the albums I knew about. “My Back Pages” would be chief among these. That song, and this whole album in general, seems like a repudiation of the topical political tone of the album that preceded it: Good and bad, I define these terms/Quite clear, no doubt, somehow./Ah, but I was so much older then,/I'm younger than that now. Dylan isn’t disavowing his positions here, but instead signaling a turn into a realm of inner exploration.
And indeed, political commentary does show up in the songs here, but shot through with humor and satire. In fact, there are three tracks on the album that would qualify for my fantasy “Dylan cracks up” play list, songs in which he can’t quite deliver a line straight and ends up laughing.
Overall, the sense the album conveys is one of restless rambling through his range, from an “I Shall be Free No. 10” that could have fit on Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan to the surreal “Motorpsycho Nitemare” that’s like a preview of the next three albums. Along the way, we get the poetic blues of “Black Crow Blues”, the folk ballad “Ramona”, one of the classic bitter breakup songs (and is he breaking up with just Joan Baez here, or the folk scene in general?) “It Ain’t Me Babe” and one of my all-time favorites, the aching romantic searching of the “Spanish Harlem Incident”: I am homeless, come and take me/Into reach of your rattling drums./Let me know, babe, about my fortune/Down along my restless palms.
It’s almost like Dylan is surveying the ground he built up in his first three albums, and trying to spy the direction for a bold new breakout. Which will bring us to our next review…