Some Favorite Music of 2011 Part 2

Cut Copy - Zonoscope: Dumber than a sack of hammers, Cut Copy make dance music roughly one hundred million times better than Barry Gordy's relatives. New Order would have killed to make some of these tracks. Standout track "Need You Now" is pharmaceutical grade disco.

EMA - Past Lives Martyred Saints: I'm a proud supporter of Sad Bastard music, especially the strain that draws inspiration from Suicide and Nick Cave as opposed to Nick Drake and Elliot Smith.  EMA echos some of the Birthday Party's no wave sensibilities without all that Flannery O'Connor Southern Gothic stuff. There's more than a hint of "16" Gold Blade" in standout track "Butterfly Knife": "Only God can make it right/ in the desert underneath the light/ 20 kisses with a butterfly knife," which is frankly an awesome thing to sing in a song.

Fucked Up - The Life of David: The Life of David is very long (19 tracks over 1 hour and 21 minutes) very loud (punishingly so), very ambitious (It is a concept album - nay, it a ROCK OPERA, with an incomprehensible plot line with 80's anarchists blowing up light bulb factories), very baroque (some of these songs have pretty dense structures for pop songs - intro, verse, bridge, chorus, verse, verse, bridge, callback to an earlier song, chorus, solo, chorus, coda), and sometimes very grating (lead singer Pink Eye is an oldskool hardcore screamer, and he's not bad at it, but there's a LOT of incomprehensible screaming going on here). Still, it's pretty fucking great.

Jay-Z & Kayne West - The Three Great Songs on Watch The Throne: "No Church in the Wild." "N*ggers in Paris." "Otis." Those are some freaking great songs. Otherwise, eh.

Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo (with bonus addition of War on Drugs - Slave Ambient): Kurt Vile's got

Radiohead - The King of Limbs: No one cares what I think about Radiohead's last record, but I will tell you that I like it. If Neu! had continued to make music after Neu! ‘75 (and if one of the two dudes wasn’t dead), “The King of Limbs” is what I’d imagine they would sound like today.

The Rural Alberta Advantage - Departings: There’s something upsetting and addictive about the Rural Alberta Advantage’s second record - a collection of propulsive anthems about young love and small town ennui, subjects I thought I had no need to hear sung about ever again. The bleating voice of lead singer Nils Edenloff has some of the nasal urgency of Jeff Mangum, as most reviewers have observed, but his songwriting doesn’t have the same holy resonance or mystical overtones of Neutral Milk Hotel, which may be good for Nils and his mental health, but which renders all NMH comparisons moot. No, these songs are the kind of things one wants to shout along to at some 500 person capacity venue no matter how dirt stupid it makes one look. The reason any of this works is because the drumming is something like 400 times better than your average indie-rock band. That’s my theory, anyway. All I know is that I could not stop listening to this record. “Under the Knife” and “Tornado of ‘87” are under my skin, repeated endlessly while I’m on my excercycle (is that a thing real people use, or is it just something I say to amuse myself because it sounds preposterous? I don’t really need to know). I also know I’m actively mad at how much I like those songs, because it feels like something a 15 year old should love, and I am not 15.

Some Favorite Music Records of 2011 Part 1

These will be in some sort of order, alphabetic or otherwise - although definitely not in some ill defined Order of Quality. However, a proviso: Spotify has kind of fucked up my ability to think about music by making almost everything even more free and super easy to access. I no longer have any grip on what constitutes An Important Record outside of the very obvious (basically, it boils down to "is Kayne involved? What about Drake?"). I still think it is useful to spend time with Important Records, and to think about them with some of the critical thinking skills our elementary school teachers tried to impart on us, because popular music is in many ways the most base of all the arts, because it connects with us in the subterranean recesses of our brains and bodies, because there are many people who enjoy Kreayshawn and LMFAO in non-ironic ways, because I'll admit to enjoying Kreayshawn in an ironic way, because enjoying anything ironically is the first step towards being an awful and irredeemable person, because that is the moment curiosity and investment in the larger cultural conversation dies, because music once was such a central pillar of my life and my self definition, because I fucking love writing and recording my own music, because I've always been as attracted to criticism as I've been to the text itself... just because, obviously. As I grow older, I grow more aware that my opinion is basically worthless. Still, I need to express it - and in the process, my opinion gains gravitas, and my skill at expressing it improves. So, onward we trudge:

Battles - Gloss Drop: Battles is not a dubstep band. They never employ wobble bass. However, they do know how to engineer a Heavy Drop that would be the envy of, I dunno, Joy Oribison. While some of their compositions on this record rely a little to heavily on making squiggly noises for the sake of making a squiggly noise, the propulsive, cascading repetitions and interlocked sheets of noise congealed into one of the most satisfying experiences I've had listening to music while walking home from the bus station after midnight in years. "Sundome" is the standout track, with guest vocalist and Boredoms leader Yamantaka Eye howling euphoric nonsense over a colossal groove until the seams of sanity unravel at the song's climax. 

James Blake - James Blake: As happens every year since the founding of Pitchfork Media some fifteen years ago, some preposterously named new genre of music built awareness and bewildered my parents by having the audacity to exist. This year, Chillwave seemed to rise above the miasma, at least until bitter people started yelling at Lana Del Rey (I still don't know what a Lana Del Rey is). James Blake sort of became the consensus "best Chillwave guy" early this year after releasing his self titled debut, as far as I can understand, and with reason. Although I'm only slightly more comfortable talking about Chillwave than I was talking about Lana Del Rey, it seems to be a sparse, skittish type of late-period Portishead music with a lot of treated vocals and loneliness. "Limit to Your Love" is the standout track, a staggeringly beautiful track driven by a simple R&B piano vamp and a hugely impressive vocal performance from the young Englishman with the same name as the somewhat famous American tennis player who went to high school with John Mayer.

Bill Callahan - Apocalypse: The former Smog, Callahan has had one of the longest, most consistent careers in independent music, well known for his opaque black humor ("Dress Sexy at My Funeral," "Prince Alone in the Studio") his weirdly moving explorations of strange things ("Teenage Spaceship"), and his dating of gorgeous indie darlings (Chan Marshall, Joanna Newsom). Apocalypse is probably his best record, eight long songs dominated by Callahan's creakily honeyed baritone and oblique and unknowable lyrics that veer from plainspoken ("Drover") to simultaneously stupid and borderline genius ("America!").  This is Callahan's sparsest record since dropping the "Smog" moniker after "A River Ain't to Deep to Love," although the arrangements are still gorgeous, especially on the standout track, "Baby's Breath," a shambling, tempo-shifting song that seems to be about spousal murder or gardening, or maybe both. 

Blackout Beach - Fuck Death: Cary Mercer's obsessive quest to tackle every huge topic in the history of human thought continues on Fuck Death, which subjects war, honor, and valor with the same verve and historic sweep as Blackout Beach's last record, Skin of Evil, tackled love, obsession, and jealousy. However, like that last Blackout Beach record, this weighty subject matter is handled without quite the same baroque grandiosity that can make the primary outlet for Mercer's obsessions, the band Frog Eyes, such a hard sell for those who haven't already bought into his very idiosyncratic style. While the very high degree of difficulty in deciphering Mercer's cryptic, allusion-laced lyrics has been lessened somewhat on this record, these aren't exactly Pete Seeger songs, friends. He even sings "you should be ashamed, Philistine" before embarking on the most cacophonous jumble of lyrics on this record, "Hornet's Fury Into the Bandit's Mouth," - the hell if I know what the fuck that refers to - and although "the grace of flight is alright" might be my favorite single line this year, I'm fairly perplexed as to what it means. Shouldn't the grace of flight be something more than merely alright? The standout track on the record is it's centerpiece, "Be Forewarned, The Night Has Come," a song that opens with the buzzing synthesizers that dominate this record before shifting suddenly into a jagged explosion of guitars that sound like they're being played though dying amplifiers.

Chad VanGaalen - Diaper Island: Chad VanGaalen would be grandfathered into this year's best record list simply because he was instrumental in last year's best record, "Public Strains" by Women. Even if "Diaper Island" was not up to the Canadian's usual standards. Even if it was awful. No reason to worry: "Diaper Island" is just as beguiling as VanGaalen's historic output, a screwy lo-fi collection of pop masterpieces. Standout tracks abound, from the haunting "Sara" to the spiky "Freedom for a Police Man" but my favorite is "Heavy Stones," for inexpressible reasons.

Crystal Antlers - Two-Way Mirror:  Crystal Antlers are mining a vein of 60's garage rock like that cataloged in the Nuggets box sets with uneven results, but Two-Way Mirror's highs are so high they induce vertigo. "Jules' Story" kicks things off as well as any first track in the history of long players, and that segues directly into "Seance," a carnival-esque ditty that must be what Organ Grinders play in Hell. While there's a lot of aimless noise that doesn't amount to much following those knockouts, it still gets a mention in this list.

David Thomas Broughton - Outbreeding: "The Complete Guide to Insufficiency," is one of those holy records for me, like "In An Aeroplane Over the Sea" or "Black Sheep Boy" or "Third/Sister Lovers." It means something. It was recorded live in a single take at a church in Leeds - church bells can be heard in the background sometimes - and while it incorporated bits of written songs, much of it was improvised and looped into Broughton's pedals, with flubbed notes or bad ideas repeating until they bled into the fabric of the music. Anchoring that beautiful disorder: his baritone, which sounds so little like any other musician I can't quite find a reference to it in the vast catalog of weird singers I love. The Yorkshire accent is very prominent in both pronunciation - "fucked" becomes "fooked" - and sentiment - "God loves a murderer; there's so much sin to forgive" - although I'm basing that latter observation without knowing any Yorkshire-men personally. It just seems like the kind of thing a guy from Yorkshire would think. Here's a clip from a few years ago of Broughton on Spanish television:

"Outbreeding" is not like "Insufficiency." He's not alone, for one. There're other musicians playing some loosely defined arrangements in all but one song, and the exciting spontaneity of Broughton's live performance feels forced into weird places, like the circuit bent toy blurts that arrive unannounced in "Perfect Louse" and exit before they've time to explain themselves. The blips work in that live clip because you can clearly see how little thought went into putting them in the song beforehand; here, in a studio setting, one can sense some calculation and editing that robs that kind of thing of it's power. Still, a lot has been gained in the transition: "Nature" has a force that nothing Broughton had done heretofore because of the rhythm section, accenting his wry dour humor more effectively than a random Mario sound drop ever could. My standout track is the seemingly little loved "Onward We Trudge," whose title does adequately describe the sensation one gets listening to it - but it's a hypnotic trudge, and at the conclusion one is surprised to find themselves a better person for having trudged though it. 

THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF CHAZZ FREDRICKS: SCENE II

So about six years ago, I saw this strange Bigfoot movie on some local UPN affiliate or whatever in Eugene. My roommate Steve and I got insanely into it. Shortly thereafter, while riding a train, I started to compose a one act play sequel to this opus, The Continuing Adventures of Chazz Fredricks. Flash forward to... maybe early September? I was in the company of Jon, of the Beaverton Clay's and Stephanie, of the Walnut Creek Lee's, and after grabbing some delightful coffee at a nearby coffee establishment named Delightful Coffee, Somehow, we fell into a conversation about bad movies or Sasquash (I forget what prompted this) and I recalled to the best of my abilities the events of this movie, the name of which had long ago escaped my memory. Stephanie, to the delight of everyone who has ever lived, went out and found a DVD copy of this movie -- called Bigfoot: The Unforgettable Encounter -- and having seen it again fairly recently I can state unequivocally that it holds up.   So I rummaged though some old documents and sadly found only a fragment of the (never finished) sequel I penned. I was kind of shocked at how gross some parts of it were (concerning the death of Chazz's wife, many years before his first unforgettable encounter with Bigfoot), but I thought it would be a treat to throw it up again so Stephanie could see how addled that movie made my brain. Because I posted this once before on my long dead livejournal page, it has some HTML markups that I'm too lazy to go & remove, so bear with those.  

Scene II

Curtain (or, um, camera) rises on an austere, ornate study. It looks as though the room is usually very orderly, but it currently appears as though it has recently been (slightly) trashed. Piles of books are strewn around the room. In the back left corner, a poorly constructed suit of Bigfoot stands, nearly 6 feet in height. The head appears to be robotic, and the rest of the suit has been stuffed. One could mistake the suit for an anamotronic robot in the style of the Old Time-y Country Bears attraction at Disneyland. In the right corner, a towering shrine rests in the shadows. It is barely visible to the audience. Between the two, a large, Mohogany desk. Above the desk, on the wall, sit a handful of framed documents. Near the Bigfoot, two sturdy-looking doors. They open outward, towards offstage. This side represents the hallway. On the side with the altar, there is one small door.  In the front of the study, near the audience,  CHAZZ and FELICITY stand, staring intensely at one another. 

There is a 5-10 second pause. Little movement. Then:

FELICITY: Why did you do that?

CHAZZ: boldlyI WANTED TO!

CHAZZ begins to dart, like a viper, towards FELICITY.

FELICITY: Don't even! Don't fucking even! I can't believe this. 

CHAZZ: What's so hard to believe, Felicity? I SAW him. I almost had him. I almost had him in my grasps, you know. 

FELICITY: What, you almost had a freakish, anamotronic Bigfoot carcass? Well -- you do have it, now! And don't change the subject!

CHAZZ: It was no robot! I saw the evil glare in his eyes!

FELICITY: You realize that kid with Down Syndrome was lying to you, right?

CHAZZ: Actually, robots would have evil glares in their eyes, too.

FELICITY: Are you listening to me? 

CHAZZ (sharply): Why would I be? 

FELICITY (ignoring the last comment): Just tell me, Dad, why are you still obsessed with this Bigfoot? I mean, spending time in jail for firing that shotgun on a federal wildlife preserve didn't set you straight? 

CHAZZ is silent. He stares at FELICITY. Three heartbeats worth of stillness

FELICITY: You should still be in jail, too! I can't believe how light your sentence was! You hired those smelly rednecks, and you nearly killed a park ranger. Not to mention that kid with Down Syndrome we'd never met before you punched him in the face. On the steps of the courthouse, no less!

Another beat. CHAZZ turns and looks at his Bigfoot replica.

FELICITY: I'm hungry, Dad.

Another beat. Bigfoot moves very slightly. CHAZZ does not obviously react.

FELICITY (sotto voce): What a cretin. 

CHAZZ (quietly, but with much enthusiasm): Did you see that?

FELICITY: See what, you jackass? 

CHAZZ (assuredly): Bigfoot. He - he moved. I saw it. 

FELICITY: How could that damn thing move? I mean, just tell me how that robot you knifed at Knott's Berry Farm could move.

CHAZZ: It wasn't a robot, actually. It was a suit. Some punk kid was inside it. 

FELICITY: Wait - you stabbed a kid? 

CHAZZ: No - no. No, it was magic. 

FELICITY: Wait - you STABBED some kid? 

CHAZZ: Listen. It wasn't a kid. When I stabbed it, I saw it change. That... that beast shrank back inhumanly. He moved so quickly, so gracefully... it was beautiful, FELICITY, it was moving poetry! No human could move like that. Also -- those howls, those shrieks were like nothing I had ever heard. They were... they were scary. Scary noises. (pause). Bigfoot noises, the lore reports, are scary.  I stabbed Bigfoot!  He must have... have shaved himself. And stapled - 

FELICITY: Bigfoot doesn't know how to staple things. In none of the lore does Bigfoot carry a stapler. 

CHAZZ: THE LORE IS WRONG! It must be! (Emphatically) He must have stapled his hide to that kid. 

FELICITY: How many times did you stab, uh, "Bigfoot"? 

CHAZZ: I don't know, baby. I'm too cool for numbers. 

FELICITY: So - you can't count? 

CHAZZ: If I could count, would I have offered those rednecks billions of dollars to help me kill Bigfoot? 

FELICITY: Good point. 

CHAZZ: But I didn't stab that kid - the one they found in the hog pen the next day. No way.

FELICITY: How did you get away from the Knott's security team? 

CHAZZ: Oh, that wasn't too hard. Snoopy is easy to bribe. 

FELICITY: But Charlie Brown is so honest. 

CHAZZ: Charlie Brown is a believer. He is. Just look -- look at that kite eating tree. It must have gotten a meal of Bigfoot at some point in it's existence. 

FELICITY: I thought it only eats kites. 

CHAZZ: Well - it only eats kites because it's so full of Bigfoot. It --

FELICITY: Touche - one more --

CHAZZ: But - yeah. I did smuggle the carcass out of there.

FELICITY: That wasn't what I was going to ask - anyway, the entertainers aren’t the --

CHAZZ: You should have. It's a good story. 

FELICITY: Really? 

CHAZZ: No. 

pause.  

Also, that kid - the one with Down Syndrome - well. He doesn't have it.

FELICITY: Have what? 

CHAZZ: Down Syndrome. 

FELICITY: God, really? He’s so ugly, though! 

CHAZZ: He’s crafty, is what he is. 

FELICITY: I mean, look at this altar you built. His pictures are all over it. I think there’s one where he’s in a swimsuit. 

CHAZZ: I built an altar? 

FELICITY: Yeah, Dad. I helped you build it. 

CHAZZ: Why would you do that? 

FELICITY: You promised to buy me an airplane if I helped you. I haven't gotten it yet, by the way.

CHAZZ: Deal’s off! Anyway, is it legal for women to fly airplanes?

FELICITY: Uh - yeah, Dad. Don't you remember sending me to piloting school? 

CHAZZ: I only did that because I thought you were a boy until earlier today. (pause) 

When I broke into your bathroom. 

FELICITY: When I was taking a shower. 

CHAZZ: Yeah. When you were taking a shower. 

FELICITY: Anyway - wait, you're lying about that. I know it. You framed my birth certificate - it's hanging, right on your wall. You look right at it when you're sitting at your desk!

CHAZZ saunters over to his wall and gently picks FELICITY's birth certificate off the wall. He examines it closely, squinting at it. Soon, a frustrated look consumes his face. Slightly grudgingly, he reaches into the left drawer of his desk and pulls out a magnifying glass. He examines the certificate again. The frustration drains from his face. 

CHAZZ (triumpantly): It says right here - you're a boy! 

FELICITY (leaning over CHAZZ to examine the document): Mom wrote that. 

CHAZZ: Hogwash! I did no such thing. 

FELICITY: I didn't say you wrote it.  Mom wrote it. In purple crayon. 

CHAZZ: Hospitals have crayons in them. Doctors have crayons.

FELICITY: Dad - Mom wrote it. 

CHAZZ: She was a doctor.

FELICITY: No - she was a stripper. At a Bigfoot-themed strip club. You met her during one of your Bigfoot hunts. 

CHAZZ: There weren't any Bigfoots there - I demanded that your Mom - you know, her maiden name was Bozangas - I ordered that woman: "give me a refund, foul wench..." - well, you know the story... but... I remember so clearly how your Mom always called herself Dr. Bozongas!

FELICITY: (calmly, but with malice) No, you called her Dr. Bazongas no matter how many times she told you otherwise. I remember family dinners back then. She used to pick at her food, smoking her cigarettes. You told your business partners all sorts of things about her. She'd always say - very gently, too - "Honey, sweetie, CHAZZ: stop telling your friends those silly things! I was just dressed as a nurse when you met me!" Her name was Nancy West, not Sunrise Bazongas. 

CHAZZ: Sunrise Bozongas! That was her name - that's how you got your name, even, Mrs. FELICITY Fredrik-Bazongas! 

FELICITY: I’m married now, Dad. You never listen to me. Didn't you ever listen to her? Her medical degree was obviously fake (glances at the document-papered wall) - wait, is that it? You framed it? 

CHAZZ: You have to stop telling me there isn't a doctorate program at Big Al's Busty Angel Palace College located in idyllic upstate Hardfist NY - I won't believe it. 

FELICITY: (exhausted, quick, desperate incredulity) There’s a doctorate program there - (with emphasis) there's not a THERE, there, Dad. It isn't a real college. Or a word, for that matter. 

CHAZZ: Native Amercans think it's a word. And Native Americans believe in Bigfoot.

FELICITY: Native Americans don't think it's a word. 

CHAZZ: I am sure Native Americans think it's a word. I employ one who thinks it's a word. 

FELICITY: Yeah, I remember meeting him.  You called Sisters of the Woeful Countenance during my senior year and told them my mother had died.

CHAZZ: Well, that wasn't a lie at all! 

FELICITY: Yeah, but she died when I was, like, 8. 

CHAZZ: She died doing what she loved. She died doctoring the sick. 

FELICITY: No - I don't want to talk about this right --

CHAZZ: Doctoring my cock! 

FELICITY: Let's not talk about it. 

CHAZZ: Taking samples of my semen! 

FELICITY: You're proud of killing Mom, aren’t you? 

CHAZZ: I know the viscosity of my juice - I still am glad to know it! It was a shame that your mother died of it - I cry about it every time I think of her - but I am not going to pretend that I am not proud of the semen that killed her. It is wonderful, glorious stuff. Still - maybe the thickness is why I still only have one child. Which is you, my sweet, wonderful son. 

FELICITY: "My sweet, wonderful daughter," you mean. 

CHAZZ: Whatever. 

FELICITY: You took me out of school so you could take me to see a "shaman," back then. 

CHAZZ: Yes - the enigmatic Harry The Big Chief Running Creek Von Baron. His aide in my quest for Bigfoot has been indispensable!

FELICITY: You throw bottles of wine at him all the time.

CHAZZ: To start the Fire Dance! To start the Fire Dance! The Fire Dance is Bigfoot's favorite dance!

FELICITY: After you left to give that scientific lecture, he told me you paid him $70 bucks to tell me "Bazongas" was an authentic Native American name - but he couldn't do it. 

pause.

CHAZZ (absentmindedly): So when is that gay lover of yours coming over? 

FELICITY: My husband should be here soon. 

CHAZZ: Oh. Right - you're a girl. Wait - Harry The Big Chief Running Creek Von Baron told you I paid him to say that? 

FELICITY: Uh - yeah. 

CHAZZ: That... that Judas! That Irish Catholic bastard! I -- I don't believe it. (presses the intercom on his desk). Julie? Julie? Could you draft a letter to the Pope for me? Yes - I want the text to read "Your Excellent Pope-ery: For many years, I have supported your Church with my vast fortune - but until you ex-communicate Harry The Big Chief Running Creek Von Baron, I regretfully must suspend my donations. Faithfully Yours, CHAZZ. And Julie? Make sure to dot all the i's with hearts this time!  (lifts his fingers from the intercom).

Julie (just her voice): Yes, sir. Also - Jake's car has just pulled up to the security fence. Do you want me to send DiCarlo to throw talc on it again? 

CHAZZ presses the button, but before he can speak, FELICITY starts.

FELICITY: Hey, Julie - no, don't bother doing that. He just got the car waxed after his last visit.

CHAZZ starts, but Julie shoots him a look. He steps back, with the look and manner of a wounded puppy. As he steps back, his finger rises from the intercom. FELICITY expresses boastful triumph. Silence for 3 seconds. CHAZZ steps towards FELICITY slowly and cautiously. FELICITY's triumphant manner quickly dissolves into weary affection for CHAZZ. Despite all his eccentricities, despite his singular, Ahab-esque monomania regarding Bigfoot, CHAZZ has been fundamentally good to her for her entire life. Neither person moves for half a second.

FELICITY steps towards her father with her arms extended, cautiously. CHAZZ’s face contorts with joy. They hug. 

FELICITY (still hugging CHAZZ): Oh, Dad. You’re a good person - you’re a good person. You were so happy at my wedding! 

CHAZZ (while ending the hug): I was so proud of you, baby. I can’t believe you sweet-talked that judge into that day-release, even after he learned that I had been sending threatening letters and gay porn to that Bigfoot kid. 

FELICITY: I wish you hadn’t invited those rednecks, though. 

CHAZZ: But they’re my friends! 

FELICITY: I know - I know. The cops didn’t like it much when you offered to pay them $500,000 to beat up the Bigfoot kid, though. 

CHAZZ: Those cops had to have been Cambodians. They couldn’t understand my harsh Northeastern accent.

FELICITY: Um - I went to school with one of them, remember? Her name was Rachel - she was going to inherit the Buddenbrook fortune until her dad disowned her.

CHAZZ: Oh - I remember her, now. She’s rad. 

FELICITY: She is rad. And you don't have a Northeastern accent. 

FELICITY hugs her father again. While they embrace, Jake enters the room from the hallway.

Jake: Sweetie!

FELICITY (quickly releasing CHAZZ to rush over to Jake. FELICITY jumps into his arms; Jake cradles her in his arms): Jakey-Boy! How did you get into the study so easily?

CHAZZ (his features hard, his manner obviously upset): That is something I would like to know. (he presses the intercom) Julie? Did you forget to release the dogs again?  

Jake (genuinely - he must be disregarding CHAZZ's previous comment): Mr. Fredrick, always a pleasure to be in your company. 

He bows, putting down FELICITY while honoring CHAZZ in one elegant motion.

CHAZZ (no longer upset): Why, I had forgotten! It really is such a pleasure to be near me, isn’t it? I am still fabulously wealthy, still monstrously handsome, and I’m so close to achieving my boyhood dream of capturing my own Bigfoot, aren’t I? 

FELICITY: So - where do you want to go to dinner, Dad? 

CHAZZ: Oh, I don’t know - (knowingly) Knott’s Berry Farm? 

Jake: Sounds good to me. They got fried chicken. 

FELICITY: But - oh, hell. Okay, Dad. 

The three leave the study. Mumbling heard - CHAZZ and Jake are talking. Then, louder:

Jake (Offstage): FELICITY, you never told me your mom was a doctor!

Curtain (or - again - Camera).

How Chuck Klosterman Discredited One of My Stupider Habits

A few nights ago, I spent an evening inside Powell's WORLD FAMOUS City of Books. There were other people there, of course. Far too many others, in fact, to fit inside the Pearl Room. Most of them were somewhere between 16 and 40, dressed in their finest vintage concert t-shirts. The large majority were attractive, or at least not unattractive - no rolls of underarm fat undulating as people moved. There was a bit of very quiet, almost sotto voce chatter that never rose above a kind of verbal Spackling, as people had little conversations into their own chests about how great their opinions were.

One man was talking to himself in this manner, with a microphone in front of him so the entire group could be privy to his thoughts, and he was the guest speaker of the evening, the author of Fargo Rock City, Killing Yourself to Live, Eating the Dinosaur, and the Visible Man, among other things.    

Chuck Klosterman was by some measure the most notable person there. Hie was advertised on the marquee outside, after all. If there were any other comparable writers at the lecture, they did not make themselves known. Tom Bissell could have been hanging around for all I know. At one point, Klosterman paused, flabbergasted to recognize a few people he knew from his North Dakota youth standing in the corner. The people he recognized were equally perplexed, because they had never been to North Dakota in their lives and were certain they hadn't attended school with Mr. Klosterman. The show went on.

Not to say this reading and Q&A session were anything but excellent. Klosterman's oeuvre of intriguing, slippery essays are both very good, and very likely to grab many people who love self identifying themselves as "Portlanders," as though that were a fucking excuse or explanation for anything. His self-reflectionate profiles of pop stars and his magazine essays are anathema to what usually passes as punditry and criticism in 2011. Instead of sermonizing and condemning all of popular culture (cf "The Closing of the American Mind") or championing it as somehow vital to our evolution (cf "Everyingthing Bad is Good for You"), Klosterman writes deliberately contemplative stuff that finds oblique pathways to contextualize  the not-exactly-empheral, not-exactly-important stuff he (and a lot of other people, myself included) spend too much of our lives grappling with. He has a contrarian streak, but not a pedantic or bullying way of expressing it, as is the contrarian's wont.  His essays about popular culture and the very complex relationship our post-modern, post-structuralist society has between this hyper-fractured consumerist society and the phenomenological ramifications of how we live is the most overblown bullshit way I can state that I do love Klosterman the essayist. It's "first rate second rate" writing.

Anyway, most likely you know what Klosterman is, and if you like him qutie a bit or find his refusal to take a stand on any idea he brings up annoying as hell, well, that's how it goes. What you might not know (what I sure didn't know) before the reading is that - hey, he can write fiction! The excerpt from his new novel "The Visible Man," which I had no intention of ever reading before this visit - just as I never had any intention of reading Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson's novels - was not some radical departure from the expected tone of Klosterman, but the story sounded pretty interesting and just as vital a path towards knowledge

So why have I always shied away from critics, essayists, and "public intellectuals" ¹ fictional output? What a weird bias to have! I will gobble up Virginia Woolf, Orwell - hell, I even like reading Steven King in Entertainment Weekly. It's a weird and stupid oversight on my part.

So the first thing I'm going to do after I get off this weird mid 20th century history kick is find a copy of Memoirs of Hecate County. The second thing I'm going to do is finish Castlevania Symphony of the Night again. And then I'll read it.





¹ - Klosterman most likely doesn't qualify as a 'public intellectual', although I'd sure rather read his essays than, say, late period Gore Vidal. I certainly never shy away from Flann O'Brien's newspaper criticism, or Orwell's vast body of brilliant essays. Actually, Orwell was a much better essayist than he ever was a novelist - and since his fiction is infinity times better than, say, Snooki's debut novel or Norman Mailer's "Tough Guys Don't Wear Plaid," that puts him in some esteemed company

Maybe My Lowest Moment

I use my bike to get around. I enjoy riding it, theoretically. In the vacuum of space, I can imagine the wonderful time I could have on a 10-speed in the handful of seconds before my lungs explode, likely causing my death. If I was ever caught in "Time Enough at Last," that Twilight Zone episode where all humanity disappears save one book loving nearsighted gentleman, you can't even fathom how much joy biking would bring me. 

However, I'm biking in the real world, with cars and pedestrians and other bikers. They are not all assholes. Well, all the other bikers are assholes, but I can understand why they develop their unpleasant personality traits with each bike journey I take. 

It does not help that I am not a skilled cyclist. I may never become one. To the best of my knowledge, I am the clumsiest human in the state of Oregon. Couple that with the self diagnosed developmental topographical disorientation I'm pretty sure I suffer from, and you have a recipe for quadriplegia at some later date. 

Still, I try to make the best of it. Whenever I need to take a left hand turn, I go to the sidewalk, get off my bike, and wait for the pedestrian lights to tell me what's what. I don't ride my bike across the crosswalk, because I'm a stickler for the law. In fact, much of my bike riding is more bike walking, as though I treat my bike as a sentient and exotic pet. 

What I'm getting to is, I am absolutely horrified during most bike related commutes. It does not matter how often I do it. I may be getting more skilled and less likely to cause a terrible accident, but I don't feel it. 

I discovered something about myself while biking earlier today that I wish to share with you. This is what happened: 

I rode my bike up Lombard, in the suburbs of Beaverton. I just passed Stars Cabaret. I was in my bike lane - the right one this time, the one that goes with traffic, and I felt pretty okay about myself. Then - 

HAAAAAAAY!!!!!!

was yelled directly into my ear. It needs to be seen as an independent paragraph, larger and bolded, to convey just how unexpected and jarring this yelling was to me. My inadequacies are so acute on a bike that I must be hyper attenuated to the sounds of the road if I want to live, so this screech - already bellowed with the volume of a My Bloody Valentine live show - really fucked with me. 

It is at this point we learn the difference between me on a bike and me in everyday life. As a bipedal, I shy from conflict. As a biker, I am like Craig T. Nelson: I run crew deep, and if you fuck with Dauber, I will take you out. 

 

I turned around, got off my bike, and confronted these two girls who I now recognize were high school students on their way home. 

"Excuse me," I said with extraordinary forced politeness, like Henry Rollins or something. "Why did you just yell at me like that? I wasn't doing anything and you really should be a human being and not screw around with people." 

Those may not have been my exact words, but I was not swearing or yelling. Not at that point. 

The two girls, of course, started giggling to each other as I wrapped up my introductory remarks. Now, it was at that point that I went waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay beyond the pale. I attacked their appearances. I attacked their parent's proficiency at sexual intercourse (for some reason). Did "cunt" slip out my lips? Why yes, it did. Did I call these kids "whores" & "sluts" in the same sentence I hypothesized they would "die virgins?" You bet! 

It felt good for about 3 seconds to let all that frustration out. Then it felt horrible. I didn't let that stop me. I didn't stop. I looked preposterous, flinging my bike helmut to the ground, yelling the worst things I could think of at teenage girls. Now I was too far in it to extricate myself with any kind of grace from the encounter. I wasn't going to leave these two high school girls until I'd hurt them bad with my cutting, Oscar Wilde like wit. 

Also, these fucking kids wouldn't apologize for yelling at me! I'm well aware that I had long ago ceased as the aggrieved party, but what was in it for these two chuckleheads? What did they gain by holding their "sorry" inside their dumb fat little teenage heads? In retrospect, I'm pretty sure they were too scared to say anything at the raving lunatic in front of them.

It took me far longer than it should have to notice the countenance of these two kids betrayed real fear. Yes. I scared the hell out of two teenage girls as I'd never scared anyone before in my life. And then I just turned around and left on my bike. And here I am now, typing it up. 

And now I'm going to play guitar or something to soothe this stuff out.

AGE 27 SEASON MUSINGS

When you are young you are invariably stupid, because you are so sure that the dumb and underdeveloped intuitions percolating in your silly little head are the correct and the only possible way to interpret the world, of which you are the center. Every social and/or legal milestone - 16, 18, 21, even the rarely considered 65 - seem like they will never arrive, and that seems so unfair, because you know everything you'll ever need to know, now that you've engaged in some awkward heavy petting in between heats at the track meet, now that you've read five pages of Nitchze, now that you are aware movies exist outside of comic book and toy properties.   

Eventually - and "eventually" arrives before you know it, of course, nothing in life happens as if properly calibrated - you're legally responsible for all your actions, up to and especially including your overdraft fees. Still, now you can finally buy your own goddamn liquor and cigarettes. You are free to share living space with a couple of fellows (or ladies, or a combo thereof). You can have a bunch of great ideas for websites, none of which will ever generate a profit. If a companion shares your bed for an evening, if you are attractive or pleasant or funny or persistent enough in the eyes of another, who the fuck is going to bother you about it? The Pope? How could he know, unless he was some kind of Spy Pope? Who would suspect the Pope is a spy?

The insipid overconfidence of youth begins its metamorphosis into something richer. You mature if you are doing things right. If you are doing things wrong, you are libel to curdle, to become a caricature of arrested development, lacking in self-awareness and generosity of spirit. Most people do things kind of right and kind of wrong, because most people are basically wonderful and beautiful things, capable of bringing overwhelming joy to those that love them, catastrophically flawed in some minor way that isn't of much concern to their friends and loves.

Before long, the passing milestones cease to have legal ramifications, but my stars, the physic ramifications can brutalize.

The first thing this writer noticed as he entered his mid 20's was the NBA Draft was populated solely by people younger than he. A few years later, it dawned on him that the Beatles had already filmed Hard Day's Night and Help! when they were a little younger, in aggregate, than he was that day. He remembered reading a biography of Orson Wells as a 14 year-old youngster and thinking to himself how weird it was that the man was considered a "boy genius" when he didn't make Citizen Kane as a boy; why, he was already 26 years old! Wells should've been balls deep into his grotesquely strange career by then! 

At 26, this writer was well aware he wasn't ever going to make a Citizen Kane - he wasn't even in the running to be "the Lester Bangs of videogames," which was the closest he was to being a thing, much to his chagrin - and to his satisfaction, if he's honest with himself. 

Then came 27. As the writer knows well, this is a big one. The Age 27 Season. As legendary baseball analysis and inventor of sabermetrics Bill James discovered in one of his yearly Baseball Abstracts, the age 27 season is almost always the best year of a player's career. The player has seen pretty much all there is to see, and he has learned from his 3000+ at-bats or pitches. Best of all, his body has yet to break down, and can still withstand the many strange, violent and unnatural motions that make baseball the thing it is. 

Will my Age 27 Season be the best of my life career? Maybe. Maybe not. I've found a lot of comfort thinking that it will be totally okay either way. If this is the year I become a Great Dane, wearing eight chains, I think I could handle the success. If nothing much changes, and I'm still searching my couch cushions for quarters, even knowing I'd already mined that vein dry, I won't be too bummed out. I have so many people who genuinely enjoy spending time with me, and I already have the guitars and keyboards and organs that make me so happy when I use them I can't even fathom it. I feel a bit like Adam Scott's character on Party Down, okay with settling for what works, but not entirely comfortable staying still.

All I need now is a Lizzy Caplin. Or a Kristen Bell, but she's kind of a bitch on Party Down. Now, a Veronica Mars... is out of my league. So are Lizzy Caplin & Kristen Bell. 

Also, seriously. Why do I still have celebrity crushes, like a 14 year old girl? You know what else bothers me? People who get bummed out at a celebrity marriage or pregnancy.  Christ, like you were going to get Natalie Portman pregnant. 

here it is. your kids will just call it LDBFA, that's how ubiquitous it'll be

"Potential" is such a troublesome thing. If you're still hearing friends or co-workers talking about your potential well into your 26th year, there's a good chance you never had all that much potential - you just gave off just the right mixture of perception, ambition, perspicacity, and guile that tricked people into thinking beyond whatever you are capable of -- not maliciously, exactly, just...

This is what I'm realizing now, that all that positive reinforcement I got in late adolescence calcified and poisoned me. All that praise heaped upon my "humor columns" the Sunset Scroll (my high school newspaper of record) does not make me a writer any more than your driver's license makes you Paul Newman. I don't get to act like a Method actor as seriously intense as Daniel Day Lewis just because I did an okay job in my 8th grade drama club rehearsal of the Dumb Waiter. At an International School in the Netherlands. As the only native English speaker.


 To assess your personhood forthrightly, you have to contextualize all the things your supportive family members and faculty advisers and cognitive therapists have taught you to believe about yourself. They aren't wrong, exactly, but they aren't privy to the abject horror your brain is capable of summoning up when left to its own devices. Listen closely to those internal monologues drone like Metal Machine Music when you enter that twilight between sleep and confusion. Embrace it - not always, but accept it.

There's rough honesty in that brutal self flagellation. You are telling yourself important things. There was never a greatness struggling against your worst, most mediocre tendencies and habits. You are merely the aggregate of the experiences you've accrued so far in your life -- something value neutral, essentially. Value, greatness, moral turpitude, merit -- these are legacy concerns, and while one might find the allure of veneration throughout history tempting... sometimes you have to spend a summer recording a concept album about The Bio Force Ape.

Sometimes you have to have an idea so profoundly stupid it excites you. Everyone can be dumb; it takes a little more je ne se quoi than that to make a The Bio Force Ape thing. These are the important things: be dumb; get excited at how dumb you are; spend dozens of hours painstakingly crafting a monument to that dumbness; and share that monument to the world.

So "The Life & Death of the Bio Force Ape," is an answer to a question no one ever wanted answered: What if someone took Emerson Lake & Palmer's "Tarkus" - the concept album about a tank that happens to also be an armadillo... an armadillo that hates nuclear war - as some sort of challenge to make an even more ludicrous concept record? What if the Protomen wrote rock operas not about one of the most iconic videogame creations in the nascent medium's history, but about the star of a never finished, unreleased NES game? Hell, these aren't the questions no one wanted answered -- these are the questions NO ONE EVER ASKED.


Here is "The Life & Death of the Bio Force Ape," presented to you free of charge.

You see why no one should have ever encouraged me to pursue any aspect of the creative arts. Or you will see. (Or maybe you won't. I'm not making you. But I'll be super jazzed if you did!)

Look. Not every magazine profile can be "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Not every short story can be "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Not every opera can be "Parsifal."And not every transcendentally foolish idea can blossom into "The Life & Death of the Bio Force Ape".



[Self-evaluations always bring out the worst in me.]