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.]

What We Have Now We Are Unlikely To Have Again, or A New Way to Sell A White Kid Some Crack

Making my way from the Powell's technical bookstore on Broadway to Ground Kontrol (the locale hosting the celebration of Brian's 29th birthday) I feel the unexpected pressure of an arm across my shoulders. The arm belongs to someone I have never seen before, someone who must have slipped behind me while I was absentmindedly dreaming of places where lovers have wings, and as I remove the earbuds blasting white hot krautrock into my skullspace, this gentleman casually forces a tinfoil packet into my unoccupied hand.

Keep in mind that I had not said a single word to this individual. I hadn't even noticed him until his arm was on my person. Something about my obliviousness or my manner of dress attracted this fellow to me, and perhaps he believed that while I'd intended all along to score some rock that evening, I was too timid to approach a dealer myself. Surely, he'd note to himself, once the drugs were in my possession I'd be eternally thankful for his forthrightness in the matter.

Still a little befuddled, I look at my new friend and say something like "uh, hey there?"

Arm coiled 'round my body, he says (these ar "it's premium fucking shit, man. That's gonna fucking send you to the fucking moon, ya know?"

The best I muster is a monotone "Ok." There had been some doubt before that moment as to what, exactly, was going on, but I was now certain the tinfoil in my hand was not holstering some Orbitz gum. Still, I was unclear as to what illicit substance was being forcefully sold to me -- not marijuana, I'd surmised, so most likely bogus LSD?

"30, man, just 30 for that," he says, grinning like a machine designed only to grin and sling rock.

At this moment, he half takes the package out of my hand and begins to unwrap it, making sure the shit's still partially in my possession so I can't just bolt from his presence. Inside, three slightly yellow, misshapen objects of varying sizes gleam underneath streetlamp light.

Now, I've listened to a whole lot of Raekown's "Only Built For Cuban Linx," both parts I and II. The brothers Clipse have told me that, after you've added the Pyrex and watched it gel with the cocaine, a kitchen counter top can remind you of the first Noel. But now I am confronted with real crack cocaine outside the rap milieu, and I feel rather perturbed by it. I gently push the packet towards my pusher, but he's having none of that.

"C'mon, you want this. Just hold it. Hold it and tell me you don't want it." The drugs are fully in my possession now. The fight-or-flight response kicks in, along with a patently batshit crazy idea to run like hell with the dope, because, hey, free drugs. I didn't really want to use them myself (although I'm deluding myself to think I wouldn't have smoked that rock, having no willpower and a great enjoyment of cocaine), but surely I could use this fellow's aggressive technique on another sucker. That's 100% profit. This crack could be the Troubled Assets bit in a personal TARP fund.

Luckily, I notice a phalanx of my pusher's companions nearby - running now would surely result in a ruthless ass kicking, at the very least. Still, I wasn't going to buy fucking crack cocaine on the goddamn street. If nothing else, Street Fighter III Third Strike needs my money more than this dope slinger, and I have exactly 15 dollars in my wallet.

"You know what?" I say. "I'm not spending 30 bucks for drugs tonight." The words are too ambivalent and I deliver them sheepishly into my chest. This is taken not as an outright rejection, but rather an opportunity to barter. The price drops to 15. It dawns on me that I cannot expurgate myself from this without parting with something, be it money, cigarettes, or my "getting hit in the face by strangers" virginity, so I take out the three loose dollars in my jacket pocket and hand them over.

So that was weird.

As it was written, so it shall be. The external hard drive upon which my media lived has given up the ghost, and with it so too the 100 gigs of music I'd shoved on there in the last couple years. It could have been the little-death that brigs total obliteration.

I will face this. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where it has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Thank God for Last.fm, though. My library is more or less available there already, albeit in a less-than-ideal setup for browsing.

This has been one weird week. I don't think I've slept more than 3 hours a night, I've been so busy and energetic, and still so many things remain undone.

The Past is not dead. In fact, it isn't even past.

What I've been thinking about when I should be trying to line up my next freelance gig: the scattered history of my words the internet. Well, the unsolicited ones.

1997 - My first website. It may still exist, somewhere in the miasma, buried in digital rubble under Geocties. It was a class assignment. Hartwell was the instructor, if I remember correctly. He must have been 25 when he taught that class - my age. I believe the site was about the Knights Templar -- cannily, I just posted the text of some research paper I did in Social Sciences -- that instructor was also the faculty advisor of the middle school drama club, of which I was a charter member. I got perfect marks in his Social Studies class, if I remember correctly. I definately remember shotguning cans of Budweiser with a kid named... Justin I think? -- quite a number of times before attending his class.

I am willing to bet my first webpage had an animated .gif of Gokou doing a kamahamaha.

1998/1999 - I certainly continued to goof around with HTML during this time, but the only site that ever went live was a very 1998 "fansite" regarding Dan Simmons' Hugo award winning "Hyperion." The internet not being what it is today - my intelligence was equally primitive, at the time - I was oblivious to most of the allusions to classical and Romantic literature and philosophy. I just thought Keats was a cool name for a cyborg, and Hyperion an awesome name for a crazy science fiction planet.

I wish I still had those books.

2003-2007: Ah, the livejournal. It was everything a livejournal is known to be: angsty, hormonal, embarrassing in the earliest entries (must have been before spell check was standard in every browser), quaint, occastionally revelatory. Over four years, I posted nearly 700,000 words before nuking it. All saved on my hard drive, thank God.

2007+: Who knows? There's this thing, the videogame thing, the fiction thing, quite a few myspace blog posts of substance... it's a mess. And it's almost universally terrible writing, lazy and sloppy, usually written after drinking a little too much coffee or alchohol. If there is a hell, I imagine my punishment will involve hearing the innumerable message board posts I've stupidly made recited to me forevermore.

It's ninteen miles to the coast.

Grapefruit Spoons

He looked up.

"Well?" she whispered.

"There are men out there. Men with ambitions, great ones. I have no ambitions."

"You have that paper cutout of Will Smith's face."

"I cut out the eyes. Stuck thumb tacks in his ears. Thought it would remind me of someone."

"Did it?"

"You tell me."

A grapefruit spoon suddenly manifested itself in his hand.

Looking though my archives, I came to find my "fiction" folder - wherein my scraps of half completed novels and short fictions and one act plays and ill conceived screen treatments and NaNoWriMo projects and other ephemera rest on my portable hard drive - has gone nearly a year without any alterations.

This will not cotton, no sir, and *this I vow*: once a week, every friday, at least a sentence of narrative fiction will be posted. I can automate these blogger things, right? So that every week, at least one sentence will auto post at 1:00AM Saturday?

Let's hope so.

late afternoon

No DDR at the Avalon last night. That is a serious oversight, and I hope the goddamn place goes out of business ASAP. Keeps all the cabinets in atrocious condition, too. Ground Kontrol caters to its audience; Wunderland should have no audience.

Then to the Triple Nickel, already half asleep. Blitzgreg bought me a Jameson's, improving my mood and alertness exponentially. Unbeknownst at the time, he was to end the evening incoherently drunk. We were discussing our mutual love of German style board games in measured, reasonable, audible tones when his drunkenness overtook him with stunning rapidity, like a thunderstorm in April overtakes a sunny day. God, I love Greg. I love this entire gaggle of friends trivia hath brought unto me.

Jenny is an interesting case. She's dated Michael for a half year now, but I have only been in her company a dozen times, at most. Yet a mutual respect has developed between us, insofar as I can respect someone from Florida (the Notre Dame of states).

Not writing on the subjects I should be writing on, if I want to advance my freelance career. Just writing, though - that is the key. Get my reps in. Get back in the habit of writing something, anything, every day.

I should try to set up an interview with the people behind Foo Castle. It might generate an article of interest to me alone, but that's okay. The world needs more information about Foo Castle in their lives.

what 60 means

Yesterday, my father was 60 for the first time in his life. 60!.

This is alarming. This is a harbinger of things to come in my own life. My father is no longer young, ergo I am no longer young. As he begins slipping into the most undesirable target demographic, I have to accept the responsibility of adulthood, something I should have done a few years ago. Got to go to work, got to get a job -- during the worst recession in decades.

God, I want to work. I want the structure, the responsibility, the frustration inherent to all cogs in late stage American capitalism. The silly little dreams of my late teens and early twenties, conjured while under grotesquely unrealistic illusions of my own abilities and self worth, no longer hold much interest. Who cares if I become what I want to become? I just wanna subsist, man. Preferably in my own apartment, for Christ's sake.

Ford Walker turns 25 today. I am eager to showcase my Dance Dance Revolution skills before a throng of swooning female fans at his party -- at Wunderland! It's no Ground Kontrol, but I don't have any money, so it's moot anyway.

God, I'm tired.

2008 Music Wrap-up Stuff

Haven't written much about music lately. Must have gotten it out of my system, or something. Whereas 2005 and 2006 were dominated by analytical urges, desires to parse and examine my own instinctive or reactionary idiosyncrasies, and 2007 spent in evangelical furor, pushing whatever recent revelation I'd found to completely uninterested third parties with no rational, systematic thought beforehand, 2008 was a year of follow ups, and innovations therein: the quickie EP eclipsing a band's second LP in import, overblown indie hype darling-ism surging to new heights of preposterousness, more love for 'Lil Wayne. My personal proclivities were sasitiead above and beyond all expectations: more Wolf Parade, more Okkervil River, more Destroyer, more Shearwater, more Ryan Adams, more Will Oldham, more Mark Kozeleck, more Of Montreal (of which there will be much to say, later), more Boris (excuse me, BORIS), more Chad VanGaalen, more Constantines, more Mountain Goats. That's... kind of all I listen to, if we throw out classical music, which we are, because no one seeking out my writing cares what the performance of Mahler's ninth symphony I saw earlier this year was like.

At least give me this one sentence indulgence, a simple summation of my feelings towards the Ninth. Here goes: Listening to the final movement is like getting a preview of your own death, first terrifying, then mysterious and hopeful.

The trouble is, tradition dictates that I write some kind of music-y wrap up for the calendar year 2008 -- best of list, pithy introductory essay, that sort of thing. This would be the fifth anniversary of the livejournal post that started it all. To let yet another youthful, exuberant tradition wither in light of my growing apathy towards the internet in general and blogging in particular is just not an acceptable way for me to behave. But I don't have to be happy or rational about it.

So, whatever happens in the next few posts, happens. No backsies.

THE WHY THE FUCK IS THIS HAPPENING MOMENT OF THE YEAR
Skeletal Lamping, Of Montreal's grotesque, ambitious document of Kevin Barnes disappearance into his own asshole, might be the worst fucking thing ever conceived, musically or otherwise. The one positive quality the album possesses: it doesn't kill people, like the hydrogen bomb or the Soviet gulag. That's good news. However, just because the LP has yet to perpetrate mass murder does not exclude the possibility that it could.

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer, especially the second half, was about as successful as any white indie rock group is ever going to be at Prince mimicry, coming at the aural and the pansexual qualities of Prince from the perspective of a skinny white dude trying to get over his failing marriage. You wouldn't have thought it at the time, but Hissing Fauna was a remarkably cohesive and restrained record, and much better for it. Because, Christ Almighty, Skeletal Lamping.

Barnes, fairly early in the record, sings "I'm just a black she-male," and indeed, he wants us to believe it. Now, that shit is ballsy, but in execution it's an incredibly shallow conceit, pandering, and half-hearted, and if you're going to occupy this persona for an insufferable 58 minutes like Prince occupied all his different persona, remember that it was Prince's complete, heedless ownership of his words that made him a singular genius. When he wanted to be Camille, well - there she was. If he was going to get a hummer on his wedding day from his bride's sister, by golly, he was okay with it, because it didn't constitute adultery. No second thoughts, no ironic masking, just dirty, smutty, spoogy joy.

Oh, also: the songs were good. Prince created actual music, and you could dance to it. But Skeletal Lamping is a very personal record, I guess, because Barnes withholds from us any musical hooks to which we can use to drown out that other bullshit. Every time a halfway serviceable bit of songcraft manages to rise above all the ear fucking, like with "An Eludiarian Experience," some burst of nonsense comes from nowhere to derail it. Worst, it's like Barnes is taking a perverse joy from purposefully exploding his best instincts, gawking at us with the same bemused look on the face of a guy showing someone "2 girls 1 up," and videotaping their reaction.

This is hopefully a detour in the Of Montreal catalogue, something like "Metal Machine Music," because I would hate to see one of the interesting guys making pop music today continue self-sabatouging himself like this. We already have one Rivers Coumo.