Spotlit on: The Twentieth Century

It's an obvious pick, and soon we'll all get tired of rehashing the "significance" of the last millennium, specifically the last century. But somehow it never gets tiresome to keep learning from our modern patterns, the reactions to life that cause inventions, and the reactions in life to those inventions including that of the God-corpse (with apologies to Donald Barthelme)

In the last week or two I've been stumbling across gems from the past, including this book my new boss lent me in hopes that I would "dig it" as much as he. It's called Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, and check it under the Spotlit navbar thingy---> Czech writer Patrik Ourednik is no Howard Zinn--this is not your average prep school required reading. Neither is it Cat's Cradle. If anything it falls somewhere in between, a gray area of lyrical prose on par with Burroughs and David Foster Wallace. Clearly it is an absurdist take on the wars that made us confront other cultures and the revolutions that reformed the future. The tone is without whimsy or condescension (or condensation), and we're often forced to reread the same phrases on several pages, sometimes in making a discordant parallel to something very different.

Oh stay! three lives in one flea spare

Where we almost, yea more than married are.

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage-bed and marriage-temple is.

-John Donne, "The Flea"

I'm not fifty pages into it, but one of these passages struck me:

"Trees were important in cities as they ensured regeneration of oxygen and the ash from the corpses could be used as fertilizer in fruit orchards and vegetable gardens, because organic fertilizer was starting to be in short supply in Germany. The corpses in the ruins of buildings were huddled up together and sometimes two or three corpses were holding hands or hugging each other and had to be sawn apart to free them. And one woman did not want to cut apart corpses and the commander of the squad in charge of the operation wanted to have her shot for sabotage but in the meantime the soldiers who were supposed to shoot her had deserted." (20)

It's going to be a fast ride through this landscape, and I have a feeling it won't be all too comfortable.

While Mr. Zinn may have the socio-political field covered in terms of exhaustive historical archiving, we have two others that have arguably had equal impact on the arguably most impacting social/artistic phenomena, Rock'n'Roll: Joan Didion and Lester Bangs. Didion served a very important role as the pinprick to the giant pink balloon that was the capitalized Sixties. Her essay,Slouching Towards Bethlemmaintains a venerable position in the cannon of compassionate journalism, and I'll always look to her example of grace and integrity in her writing. It should be pretty obvious my affinity for Lester Bangs given my choice in quotes for the disclaimer of my blog. I became increasingly interested in rock journalism when I read--and subsequently forgot to return to my high school library--Rolling Stone'sIllustrated guide to Rock and Roll in which were included articles by Lester Bangs.

Then he appeared, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, in the 2000 movieAlmost Famous as the lovably brash mentor to William Miller. Anyway, somehow or another I caught onto his book on Blondie which I just bought, and which will hopefully be arriving on my doorstep, gently loved and awaiting me on top of the reading list.

Birthday Tunes

I've been working on a "Flora" playlist, which means those songs that make the little girl named Flora in my soulest of souls dance around the kitchen in front of a mirror with cookie dough all over her fingers. I'm still experimenting with Opendrive, so apologies if these links don't quite work at first. There's a Floyd track there that no one's probably listened to for a long time, but it's one of those little gems in the mid sixties that got lost in the weight of later epic concept albums. But the most significant of this playlist are definitely the spritely tracks from Sweden's de Montevert.

High On You.mp3


de-Montevert-Skyll-på-mig-www.esau_.se_.mp3

de-Montevert-The-Ghost-www.esau_.se_.mp3

Crumbling Land.mp3

04 I Want The World To Stop.mp3

And then, because I'm in a particularly wistful mood, a Best Coast song.

When I'm With You.mp3

Halloween Playlist

It is that happy time of year again when everything dies and all the spirits come out to lurk. I too have been lurking, and I've come up with a few gems. The following are tracks that I'll be using as the soundtrack for this, the season of death and renewal, and are the result of Googling "Halloween." Play close attention especially to my new Audiogasm track, which would be from the LA trio Halloween Swim Team. Also, note the prevalence of Danny E:lfman tracks, because after all he is IS the mayor of Halloweentown!

02 Pitch Black.mp3


01 Grey Matter.m4a

A little Kills:

03 Pull A U.mp3

More Danny Elfman:
Beetlejuice Theme (Kamei Halloween Edit).mp3

Punks do Halloween best (Misfits and Dead Kennedys)

Halloween.mp3

07 Halloween.mp3

Bmore Hearts Sticky!

Although this IS NOT A FOODIE BLOG by any means, I feel cheerfully obligated to announce that Sticky B'more is off the proverbial chain. By which I mean that the Baltimorian newcomers are coming to understand what it is to be truly Sticky in the sense that you know how to work hard/play hard and keep it classy. The Examiner concurs.

The new opening marks the third in a Northerly-encroaching creep up the East Coast, from RVA to DC to Bmore...will we one day add NYC to these charming abbreves? One can only hope...

We've been graced with the presence of DJs the likes of Dave Nada and Kom-Toki every weekend, and we've enjoyed cutting rugs with the back of house. The space is significant for many Baltimore natives who recall when it was a bar called Friends. A spacious room with booth/tables and the original grand ol' divey bar lead back to a little offshoot enclosed room with three small tables and stained glass reminiscent of cathedral decor is called the Church, and the Boom-Boom room has its own backroom-near-kitchen charm. Rickety warped stairs lead up past the beautiful stickycoyfish mural by House Party Dave to our office floor with dry storage, etc. The upper levels are currently being occupied by a few of the owners during extended workweeks, in addition to some surly brothel/addict hauntings, no doubt. This was the enduring charm of the bar Friends, which apparently everyone was sad to see go out, though not surprised (I've heard they gave away the bar). During the first few weeks we were open, our sandwich board read "Sticky Rice...We Can Be Your 'Friends' Too!"

So far we've enjoyed GREAT reviews on Yelp, and the LivingSocial promotion has brought out a lot of sushi lovers and curious casual diners. Dinner is delicious, but you really want to stay late and drink with us. I hear the staff gets kind of nuts. You might even get to bang on a gong.

Art in Death's Capital

Sometimes I get that weird little feeling as if the universe is conspiring in my favor...and today's events have definitely left me buzzing with pronoia...

I was eating a delicious portabella sandwich today at Liquid Earth on Aliceanna (basically next door to Sticky Rice), and picked up a copy of the Urbanite , my new favorite Baltimore rag to read a couple articles on local graf art. Naturally that put me in a sweat, but I was a total mess by the end of the second article where it so casually referenced an XTC song from the early eighties that has been adopted by local great Cuba. (Song would be "Living Through Another Cuba," and yes you would be correct in the assumption that it's brilliant)

But let me back up. Looks like there's a dude calls himself Gaia who has been throwing up beautiful drawings matted onto sagging overhangs and derelict building fronts. He's twenty-two and goes to MICA, where I just interviewed for a position at the Writing Studio. There's one of his grandfather on Park and Franklin, but other than that the are mostly figures with animal heads and human bodies and hands, usually wrenched in some sort of anguish, presumably because what was once a human head has gone animal. My plan is to become infatuated with spotting these around town now. My next stop is at W. North Ave. and Pennsylvania, but I'll have to take some breed of large male with me. The images, according to the article, are affixed with wheat paste and glue, and go up in a matter of seconds, (obviously he couldn't do the drawing on the buildings themselves for reasons of bad medium and the small legal issue), the way graffiti artists choose names that are short and sweet and go up fast under the cover of night before anyone can hear the tell-tale rattlerattlerattle, ch-shhhhhhhhh.

The next article was about this guy Cuba, an older head who also went to MICA, and was a good friend of the author's until he faded into legendary obscurity. The author, Charles Cohen, said last he'd heard of his boy, he'd O-Ded on heroin in like '82. Not only false, but a direct quote I'll take the liberty of snagging from the article went like this:

"Doing drugs was a way to do myself in and still enjoy it until I got close [to death]. Then I realize I ain't going out like that. I'll take a bullet in the head. No I won't. Fuck it, I'm never going to die."

...which I think really eloquently sums up the impetus these artists have for doing what they're doing. While the one motto goes, "nothing is sacred," in that most people who actually notice street art are liable to erase it, the other one is about marking out your space, the art making you immortal. In an environment particularly like Baltimore's where death marks just about everything (see R.I.P art), there are those who know their days are numbered. So what do you do? Write up your will, spit in the ocean, become a makeout bandit, make a baby, make a song, or imprint your soul on a slab of concrete that couldn't care less how you make it?

Even if you're not involved in a gang war, this is probably the most relatable existential fear, of the Nothing eating you alive, wiping you out forever with nothing to show for it. A professor from Pratt and a kind of friend of mine told me he started smoking cigarettes as a way to kill himself as slowly as possible, all the while

dutifully scribbling, etching the mirror of beauty he encounters for whomever will care about it later. When I think about the kind of writer I'll be known as, I know I won't be a Stephen King, who will survive the eons perhaps as a cultural icon, a genre writer who gave words to some of our darkest nightmares which necessarily illuminate our assumptions and attachments to the things we care about most. He's experimented with writing under a pseudonym to test out whether his success has been valid or just a clever marketing scheme. The essays still sold really well. So, props to him. He's no literary giant, just a guy with a great thing going. I've toyed with the idea of writing some great erotic trash to make my millions before The Cicada Killers breathes life of publication, but I can't see myself doing it. Nope, I'm going to fiddle and fuck around and produce some terrible trash until finally, on my deathbed, I produce my life-affirming work, only to be appreciated by a handful of maladjusted teenage art students decades after I die. And what's really sick about it all is that I've resigned myself only in hopes of the opposite actually happening.

These articles found me just a week after I bought Style Wars about the early hip hop/graf art scene in NYC, and two days after British street artist Banksy was commissioned to draft a new couch gag for this Sunday's episodes of The Simpsons.

I for one am impressed that no heads have rolled over this. Impressed and hopeful. We are fortunate to be so immersed in The Great Recession that (IMHO) the highest art forms like satire and street art have room and audience to thrive. I'm becoming very excited about living in Baltimore, where there are more gravestones than citizens, and there is an urgency to the art being produced. Live live urbania!

Spotlit on Tim Winton

I realize the lit portion of my blog has been somewhat lacking due to the influx of better and better jams, and the relative absence of good fiction out there. When I was down under, my sister turned me onto an Aussie writer Tim Winton, and his novels Breath (Penguin, 2008) and Cloudstreet (Penguin 1991). Two very different novels in almost every angle, but somewhat familiar in their apparent disconnect.

The character in Breath is a middle-aged paramedic who encounters a ghost from his adolescence in the form of a teen thrill gone wrong. Readers are transported back to the beginning of Bruce's friendship with insatiable risk-taking Loonie and the old surfer hero Sando who takes both young surfers under his wing. The language is brief, tragically clear. It's a quick read, and offers a lot of those "surprises" for which space and expectation is made early on. Specifically the story spoke to me on the levels of youth and the addiction to risk, the fear of mediocrity and the threat of being lost to the eons of ordinary. And to these extents it's very sexually driven, the danger, the bliss, the life pulsing through a skull and crossbones.

(excerpt)

Shoulder to shoulder in the cab, Loonie and I exchanged furtive looks. There was something of the classroom about Sando, the stink of chalk on him when he got going, but my mind was racing. I'd already begun to pose those questions to myself and feel the undertow of their logic. Was I serious? Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary? I'll bet my life that despite his scorn Loonie was doing likewise. We didn't know it yet, but we'd already imagined ourselves into a different life, another society, a state for which no raw boy has either words or experience to describe. Our minds had already gone out to meet it and we'd left the ordinary in our wake.

(p. 94)

I'm only about halfway through Cloudstreet, but already it's as if it were written by an entirely different writer.

The cheeky Aussie humor is abounding, but for starters, it's concerned with about ten major characters, all

of whom get POV in the third...except one, the boy named Fish whose heart stopped when he fell overboard

the fishing boat and got caught in the net. He survives, albeit with scrambled eggs for brains. His sections (the novel

is divided amongst the characters and the two families living together by small headed vignettes) are by far the most

beautiful and the most wrenching. They are written in second person, as a conversation across some great divide and always

addressed to Fish. Is "I" the author? I tend to doubt, as it would be tremendously risky with all the other characters

involved, to suddenly spring some sort of authorial involvement and crowd the novel.

At the risk of total literary blasphemy (and giddy is the thought!), I say these two juxtaposed works remind me

of none other than Joyce's Dubliners and Ulysses. Think about it. If I were to introduce Winton to a classroom, I would

most likely give them Breath to cut their teeth before they jump into a dual-family historical epic like Cloudstreet.

The stories in Dubliners mirror the close scope and developed private interiors of the Bruce character. (I think

Bruce and the boy from Arabia would have a fine time bitching about girls and sexual competence.) The

sheer breadth, volume, involvement and elevated-low-brow wash of language in Cloudstreet is an instant

likeness to the one-day spectacle that is Ulysses, the novel which Joyce claimed contained not a single extraneous

word. Deliberate is the word we're looking for, and we're sticking to the one, thanks J.J. I've stumbled

across some effortless beauty on page 164:

(excerpt)

Across the planes all things still play themselves out, all fun and fear, all the silliness and quaking effort,

all the bickering and twitching, all the people going about the relentless limited endeavour of human

business, and the sight of your body rolling like that, bursting with voice and doubleness, reminds you that the

worlds are still connected, the lives are still related and the Here still feels the pangs of history.

Obsessed as I am with "relentless limited endeavours" and of course the "pangs of history,"

this passage was meant just for me...and Fish, apparently. It's worthy of note that in spite of the grand

scope and the way the family names (Pickles and Lamb) are difficult at first to assign to the characters'

first names, one becomes very quickly entangled in the matters of the two trying to live under the same

roof during a time of great economic depression in Australia.

Oh, and flipping over my copy here, I notice Elizabeth Ward of the Washington Post, no less, has

already paid tribute to my undergraduate mentor: "Cloudstreet gets you inside the very skin of post-war working-class Australians the way Joyce makes you feel

like a turn-of-the-century Dubliner..."

She's right, but not as right as I am, of course, about the two novels back-to-back. And then there's

the wordplay...

I'll decide when I get to the end of this one if anyone else should bother reading it. I highly recommend

the first half, however, and it is up to you whether you'd like to continue on, asphyxiate your breath with the

witching rhythm of Winton's phrasing and the quivering potential for tragedy.

DJ's and Crust Punks

It was a very sweaty and dusty day at Merriweather Post last weekend for the Free Fest. We started off the day sipping lime flavored vodka and sprite under a tarp we strung between two cars. Everyone was wearing green bandanas around their nose and mouths because of the dust and smoke rising from the Dance Forest. People were sniffing the air and exchanging glances with their friends and then looking around suspiciously to see who the pot culprit was. Wow, we really are at a rock and roll festival, do ya smell that??
Joan Jett looks fantastic and sounds even better. It was bizarre to watch a rock concert so traditional when everything else we heard that day was inspired by ironic looks back at her genre. She played "Cherry Bomb" and "Crimson and Clover," and ripped up a guitar solo. I wonder what it must be like to be a grungy-ass crust punk one day and the next Hollywood is sucking at your fame teat, and casting teenage heartthrobs to play you in a movie about yourself, and how hot it is that you were a raging young lesbian rocker back in the day. It's gotta be weird. I'd hate to see that mainstream depiction of my private life while I'm still living. Must be creepy to see how Hollywood interprets your motivations in life and shit. I haven't yet seen Runaways, so I may be revising this assessment accordingly.

I think it's safe to say women really dominated this show. From Kim of Matt and Kim, who is irritatingly adorable standing on her drum stool, to Alexis Krauss of Sleigh Bells teaching the crowd how to scream, to the absolutely gorgeous albeit bitchy and demanding MIA, in my mind these were the best performances. Seeing Pavement back together was great, but after the mosh pit and crowd-surfing at Sleigh Bells, it was a sit-down show. LCD was fun but my friend couldn't stop punching at the "From this position..." song, so pretty soon it was more funny than badass. Neon Indian, as I previously predicted was my favorite in the electronic music. But Chromeo killed it, and seeing Dave 1 in person, it's clear now what look my friend John Q is going for, and apologies for the oversized photos.

Maryland brought out a funny crowd, mostly because it's a funny place. In the one section, you have hyper-functional teens growing up in Montgomery and Howard counties, being groomed for government and finance, journalism and medicine. Then you have the rest of Maryland, all hopped up on Starbucks and trash T.V. They've carved out existences in corn fields and cubicles, then show up to these shows after hitting the neighborhood tattoo parlor, and look like it's maybe the first time they've bothered to shower or leave their pet-infested apartments they share with their grab bag, significant-enough other. They show up way too early to each show to set up camp with the girl in the front and the dude with arms around from behind. The goal of this game is to try to stand perfectly still, no matter how awesome the music is or how everyone else is dancing.

I have a hard time understanding why these people bother to show up to anything. Stay at home with the comforting scents of cat piss and cock breath on your unwashed sheets.

I love going to shows, obviously. And a good festival where you're torn between great acts can be life-affirming. To be sure, the whole thing was the highlight of my month. Getting to dance hard in the middle of a bunch of other sweaty hard dancers is the stuff of ecstasy. I don't let the lame-asses giving me dirty looks for stepping on the blanket they plopped down in the middle of a standing crowd ruin my fun. But I will say that it's exhausting to have to look around at all the douchebags who you apparently have something in common with. I'm egalitarian as hell, but I like to think of myself as part of a group of genuine music appreciators, so it bums me out to be breathing the same air as some people I see at concerts. Sometimes I much prefer to blast out my apartment windows, get all dressed up and do my own music video in front of the mirror. The music fantasy transcends all the realities of band drama, egos and the sheep mentality of the bandwaggoners, and on some days I think this is how I prefer to keep it.

Speaking of crustiness, the last show I caught was Laughing Man opening for Wavves at the Rock and Roll Hotel, D.C.. LM is a trio, and I know of them through the drummer who is a server at Sticky Rice down there. Their sound is slightly psychedelic yet early funk-age, they've all got great chops and really tight style. And everyone should know by now how much I sweat Wavves, even though they put on a weird show. I ran into an old coworker who was wasted and trashing Nathan Williams regarding his stage water. Then they got onstage and I saw what he was talking about. He's the asshole you love to hate. He makes himself accessible that way, an easy target because he's goating you on and taking hits at everyone, everything, the venue, the crowd, themselves. So in between songs when the stage banter gets passed amongst him and his ex-Reatard rhythm section, and people are started to walk out, and others up front are yelling at them to play a fucking song already, some people are laughing including me and I'm kind of enjoying all the flack they're getting for not playing the show.

Fuck man, if you want to hear the songs, go the fuck home and listen to the album. You're here to see US, don't forget. This is who we are, and we are wasted, and the band leader is famously stoned and the drummer is on acid, and this is what you came for. This is the image you get off to, so deal with it.

I, for one, moshed the shit out of that show which I was not prepared for in boots and a threadbare see-thru T-shirt. All the dickbags ogling me in the five minutes I was at the bar I got to shove back into the shit and have them turn around and look completely baffled. The spooning couples got pushed out and shoved to the back or the sidelines. (Have I mentioned I hate concert couples??) The band members are complete and utter assholes, and pissed off nearly all my friends that night who either worked at the Hotel or were playing with them. The nice musicians in Laughing Man were taken aback, and the rock band Christmas Island from sunny Sandy Eggo were politely baffled at the rudeness of these Adolescents-wannabes who look like they haven't showered in weeks. And I'm loving all of it. Long live obnoxious punk rockers, but maybe should stick to the studio if a tour is just a good excuse to weed out the weak in your fanbase.