I went to Las Vegas over the weekend. I've lost count of how many times I've made that trip. For the millions in Los Angeles, Las Vegas is sort of like our collective vacation home. An extension of LA culture, like Big Bear or Catalina Island. A lot of tourists, from all corners, don't often envision Vegas as having its own identity or community or culture, we see it for its function: a playground for people to let loose until the 12 o'clock check out.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011, in the interest of documenting the mundane routine of a typical day before the year ends. Also, blog fodder.I was fortunate enough to be a participant in voting for One Thirty BPM's Top 50 Albums of 2011. Having an inside look at a big site making their big year-end list really made me realize how divergent the opinions of the blogosphere illuminati can be. It seems like I should know that by now — that everyone has wildly different opinions and tastes — but when you're following the currents of the indie rock blogosphere, you sometimes wonder how all these people know what narrative to build. Is it a musical elite thing? Do they have skill sand knowledge and expertise that hone in on the same objectively good album?As it turns out, everyone's just true to their personal tastes, everyone will be apathetic to someone else's #1, and the best album of the year is just whatever landed as everyone's #7. Below is my top 10 albums for 2011 — or at least it is for right now. Arranging the music of an entire year into 10 spots is difficult and sometimes feels arbitrary, so it's hard to stick to one list for very long. This isn't even the exact order I voted on, and if I could go back and change it, this still might not be the order I want. There's a reason I submitted my votes under the wire.
But that's just the run of the mill trouble that comes with thinking about art. It's all just feelings and thoughts, chiseled into defined ideas until it feels right by us. These are the things I liked best in 2011, at this very moment. Card subject to change
10. The War on Drugs - Slave Ambient
When I listen to this album, I think of Bob Dylan. That's not the first touchstone people tend to name, but when I hear opener "Best Night" kick into high gear, it sounds like the modern iteration of the perfect wall of sound in "Like A Rolling Stone." Adam Granduciel doesn't write like Dylan, but there are constant moments where he hits a familiar inflection. He works so well in those strange, weary Dylan melodies, where the vocals don't play as you expect them to, they just sort of swerve and evaporate into the air. It's like if Prime Dylan was backed by Broken Social Scene singing someone else's songs.
I saw this online today. It's called "Martin Loofah King" — a loofah with an imprint of Martin Luther King, Jr. with the tag line, "I have a clean." There's nothing especially offensive about it, unless you think MLK is sort of a holy figure that shouldn't be touched. My thought on it was: this is the future. It's only a matter of time before MLK achieves such ubiquitous pop culture status that he becomes a tool for absurdist, non-sequitur humor, the wayAbraham Lincoln is used. We have enough temporal distance from Lincoln that he's no longer a person, just a figure in our culture, and so putting him in different contexts makes for easy laughs.
Some might label it as simply "randomness," but really, it's absurdism, and it really seems to be the flavor of popular humor right now. Grant Morrison had a blog for all of a few months where he briefly wrote about post-9/11 fiction, which was characterized by taking the audience to the edge and back (The Dark Knight and Lost and the tone of the Lord of the Rings film adaptations.) I wonder if maybe the increasing presence of absurdist humor is a progression from that. Maybe this is us coming back from the edge.
I know the solidifying of internet culture (and therefore internet humor) had a lot to do with it. Just look at memes: there are specific archetypes and images that are intrinsic to the humor of the internet, from cats, to pirates, to ninjas, to Abraham Lincoln, to Zombies, to Batman. You can kind of just take these elements and mix and match them and come up with various meme variations that make people tuned into internet culture hubs, like Tumblr and Reddit, laugh.
Los Campesinos! is a reliable band. The way they're going, I don't know if i'll get tired of them, on record or in concert. It's not that they've been keeping pace with a radical evolutionary arc, but their formula is a direct hit on my music sensibilities. Bone-deep guitar hooks, intricately anecdotal lyrics, a twee sheen with a punk snarl -- if this is your wheelhouse, Los Campesinos! never disappoints. They say you should be the bands you want to hear, but more and more LC is my ideal.
HELLO SADNESS is their 4th record, and, yeah, it's good. There are some noticeable differences if you're that deep into Los Campesinos! analysis. If not, you'll probably like it as much as you liked 2010's ROMANCE IS BORING. Some of these changes can't be helped. LC! is very much an ensemble band and since their last album, they've lost 3 members (two on good terms and one under mysterious circumstances.) The holes have been filled, but the calibration is different. As good as it gets, I wonder if it's missing something that was in their last 3 LPs.
I was hanging out for a couple of hours on Turntable FM, racking up invisible approval points awarded to me by anonymous cutesy avatars when I realized how my music consumption game was constantly changing. Turntable FM is just one method of interacting with similarly minded music fans and, I found out, discovering new songs. I get this question a lot: How do you find new music? More and more, it has come about through the dozens of music social media sites.
That's something big for me that's changed right under my nose. I forget a lot about how quickly things change, because my generation came into being at the tail end of analog technology, and we're conditioned to believe that things had always been this fast paced. We're the ones that got to see pre-paid plastic Nokia-bricks become widespread and then give way to touch screen iPods. It's not just that the old ways are dying, it's that the new ways have a increasingly shorter lifespan, and it's most evident to me when it comes to each new social music craze.
I don't yet fully understand stand-up comedy. I know what makes me laugh, and why I laugh, but I don't yet understand how the crafting of a joke works. My training as a fiction writer showed me that any kind of professional writing is deceptively simple. Although I know a lot of comics don't write out their acts, usually just bullet points to hit,they think in words and concepts the way writers do. We all have the same communicative muscles, they just do sprints and I learned middle distance.
Stand-up is one of those artforms that people like to point to as one of the rare original American arts. It's the simplest medium, resistant to the changing times, and that makes it seem all the more important. The styles and topics have evolved, but the core of it has been the same since vaudeville. It's a person using nothing but spoken words and force of personality to entertain an audience.
I like to go watch open mic nights as a way to engage in my fascination with stand-up. This is where everyone starts, at their very worst, working claustrophobic 3 to 5 minute sets in front of other aspiring comedians. The theory is that if you're good enough, you catch management's eye, and then they'll give you a spot on a show that people actually pay for. Every open mic I've ever been to has generally been unfunny but massively interesting. That's probably the worst possible reaction these upstarts could hope for, but I appreciate their evening's entertainment all the same.
I don't have a lot of important Halloween memories. It's just never been a meaningful day to me, even when I was a child. I assume that's because Halloween is the most social of holidays and, since I was a socially fragile child, I did not take to it as I did Christmas or any other consumerism-based event.
I did, however, dress up and go door to door for a few years with my small cousins, and on occasion I really enjoyed my costume. But it's the same thing that happens with birthdays when you get into your adolescence. All of a sudden the things you used to do as a child become passe. You try extra hard not to be childish, because you want to be cool, and children aren't cool. So you no longer hire clowns and moon-jumps for your party, and you no longer go to Kmart for costumes in mid-October.
I will tell you all the costumes I remember:
Except David Dondero. David Dondero is a Minnesotan singer-songwriter, one of the best alive, yet still pretty invisible. For some reason or another, I hadn't listened closely to Dondero in years. His song "Train Hop Flop" came up on shuffle the other day and I couldn't help but wonder where he's been, or why he slipped through the cracks.
I'm no Dondero expert, but the construction of his career seemed strange in my head. See, I found out about David Dondero because he was named as one of the direct, contemporary influences on Conor Oberst/Bright Eyes. In fact, I imagine that's how a lot of fans found his music. In fact, that fact gets repeated on every David Dondero album review on Pitchfork and I assume many other music review sites. That single fact was supposed to be a good rub, but the more it gets repeated, the more it seems like an inescapable ghost.
It's 2:30 in the morning and I am going to tell you as many secrets as I can until I am bare and clean and empty as the day I was born.
Do you know how long it has been since I used the "writing" tag? Nine months. Not that I haven't been writing in that time, but because a lot of the writing I've been done has been journalistic or bloggy, I haven't had the need to write about writing. Writing about writing has always been a sort of self-motivational tool. It helps me clarify and reaffirm, get through the lousy creative days, and even procrastinate my way through writing blocks and/or crippling fear. These obstacles only come about when I write fiction, and my last real, honest stab at solid short fiction was in 2010, and man, I abandoned that story on the 4th draft because that shit was poison.
But I'm trying again, mostly out of the need to do something that affords me some dignity in my continuing bout with unemployment. Writing is every bit as frustrating and depressing as I remember, even with the fire of several meaty ideas. It's also about validation -- I'm often thinking about what type of career path to struggle in, and my mind always looks back at when I was so sure I should be a literary fiction novelist. I'm still not sure that that's where I want to die, but I want to at least get published in something more substantial than No Readers Quarterly. I would be happy with that kind of validation, even though it's not something I should necessarily seek. I think I can do it; I think I have so much more knowledge than ever. It's just a matter of execution, discipline, and editing.
I'm in a weird downward funk. It's a funk that is necessary to coming up with the right emotionally resonant words, but it's draining as fuck, especially when it's a mode you inhabit for weeks. What a weird self-flagellating act that writers of sad stuff have to go through. Grant Morrison once described writing Darkseid, the cosmic god of all evil, as a dark and depressing place to be working in, something he couldn't keep up for very long without jeopardizing his mental health. Sometimes I wish I never come up with an idea that is as dark and in the ground, but then again, maybe that's just what I need to make something good.
I've been a big Anthony Jeselnik fan since late 2009 after I saw him do a segment on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. From time to time, I've had to kind of deconstruct that, because Jeselnik is the type of stand-up comedian whose stock-in-trade is offending people and grabbing taboos by the throat. It's never been that I've felt that taboos should be untouched, and that some topics are sacred. I've just always liked comedians that didn't have to play the offensive, that could get a thrill without pushing the big obvious button.
I've been compelled, on multiple occasions, to express my opinion on the cultural impact that all mass media entertainers have on the awareness, frame of reference, and understanding of the average person. Not that they have a responsibility to be careful with their power, although that would be great, but that they should be aware that they do have power and that if they use it to be an asshole, people (and sponsors) will respond accordingly. Responses, criticism and consequence are part of freedom of speech, too.
Offensive comedy has changed a lot about what pop culture deems to be funny and acceptable. That's fine, and it's a longstanding tradition evident in every comedian's reverence for Lenny Bruce. But these days, there's a certain kind of ugly laziness that comes in with offensive humor, where the only joke you need is, "I'm saying something I'm not supposed to!" with an ironic wink and shy giggle. When I was watching the Conan O'Brien documentary, Conan O'Brien Can't Stop, he runs into two kids before a show and, in an effort to make their hero laugh, one of the kids refers to being "jewed out" of some money. Conan gets them into his show on the condition that they stop saying that word.
I remember less and less about my initial 9/11 experience every year. I had barely started High School, which is an odd thought to consider, since it seems like I should have been much older. World changing events screw with your perception of time. They never seem too long ago, until you try and match it up with your actual life.
My first class in the morning was French. My routine consisted of putting my head down and napping until the bell rang and class started. The teacher usually had some morning show on, but once class was in session, he would turn it off and we would learn more numbers. On this day, he didn't. I looked up, and he was just letting us watch TV and talk amongst ourselves. I saw the World Trade Center on fire. I was a bit of a naive cynic then, and in a vain attempt to feel intellectual, I wrote it off as another disaster that I could disconnect from on an emotional level.
We had to watch for a few minute to see a replay of the actual plane colliding with the skyscraper. Even then, I had grown accustomed to the monthly news cycle of disasters. Every couple of years, there would be a cycle about a plane that had gone down, usually in the ocean, and we would all wait for the black box verdict. That's exactly what I thought it was; just another accident.
It wasn't until the second plane hit that I really understood it as an attack, and not a highly unlikely freak accident. In truth, I wasn't even really aware of the World Trade Center as a building, let alone an important one. I didn't understand the scope, size, or symbolism of it. If you had asked me on the 10th I would have guessed it was just a place in New York. There was a lot I didn't understand, and the gravity escaped me for the first few hours.
It took me forever to read this book. I'm not proud of it. It's the reason I have refused to update that sidebar, because the fact that this book cover was still posted under "Reading Up" was my punishment of public shame. I've always read slower than I should, and I thought maybe book status updates such as Goodreads or my sidebar would give me enough pressure to plow through more novels in shorter time. I was wrong. I am the worst of all things.
It's amazing what 20+ hour drives up the west coast will do, though. In truth, I should have knocked out this book in a week or two, even at a relaxed, casual pace. But what kept happening is that I would read the first section, about 40 pages or so, and then stop. For a couple of weeks. Inevitably, I'll want to start over, and read the first 40 pages, and then stop again. It was a cycle of forgetting and restarting and breaking too long out of lack of discipline. It is a pathetic thing.
I've also been hankering to do some music writing, because it's immediate and fun, but there haven't been any brand new releases that have spurred a lot of thoughts and deconstruction. There have been a lot that spurred thoughts in hindsight, but if I wasn't going to worry about timeliness any longer, maybe I should just go back to 2009 and talk about a favorite.
Hometowns is, centrally but not totally, about a change in location and a change in relationship. The bits and pieces of history are easy to gather: There is a guy, a girl, and a distance between them. The guy moves from far north of Edmonton to the bustling city of Toronto. What follows is relationship turbulence, the burden of disconnection from everything you've known, and the question of what to do when you're stranded.
I'm relatively new to the luxury of Netflix. My sister got an account for the Xbox only a couple of months ago, but already I am well versed in the common internal struggles of the everyday Netflix streamer. For example, every time I boot it up to watch something whilst I eat, I see a delicious queue full of movies I've always intended to watch or documentaries that will surely enrich my brain. But at the same time, I am not looking for a serious mental commitment at that very moment, seeking what Dan Harmon calls the least objectionable option. A movie I've already watched, or something dumb and fun like Star Trek or god forbid episodes of Pawn Stars. More often than not, I give in to the demons of sloth, because as much as I should see Rashomon, they've got episodes of 30 Rock I can re-watch in less than half an hour.
But I make progress. The easiest way to get things done is to just shut the fuck up (in your head) and do it. So I pulled up Me And You And Everyone We Know, Miranda July's film that I've had pegged for at least a year. Miranda July is a likeable artist. She works in a variety of mediums but her stock-in-trade is the weird, whimsical and quirky circumstances of lonely crazy people.
In 2009, I quit my retail job because I wanted my fucking soul back. It was a long time coming, and I had saved up enough to support me for an extended job hunt or unpaid internship. I turned in my 2 weeks notice, and when those days passed, I was overjoyed. Almost immediately, a good friend of mine offered a chance to tag along with him on a road trip to the very edge of Washington state. There's a storied romanticism surrounding the road trip: the new lands, the car bonding, and, of course, the mythical rebooting of the soul. The choice was easy.
I am terrible at not giving strangers money. Here's the problem: They ask. What am I supposed to do? Say no? Unless I can't because I have no change, I am a sucker for their buckets, paper cups, hats, and even their clipboards. I once encountered three separate people soliciting money in the span of two hours (two homeless guys and a dude collecting for a charity) and I gave to all three. This is not to say I am a good person; just weak. You'd better believe by the third guy I was thinking, I can't believe this shit is happening.
For some reason, I have a lot of weird memories involving various strangers asking for money. On more than one occasion, homeless folk have prefaced their money requests with this kind of oblivious, weird and unintentional racism. This is literally the exchange I have had at least three times:
"Hey," says a guy sitting on the floor wearing many layers of coats. "Do you speak English? English?"
I look at him and say yes.
"Do you have any money? I just need a couple dollars more, man."
So, inevitably, I give him a couple of dollars. Usually when I tell people this, they are appalled that I would even give the guy the time of day. "After he said that?!" they would say. My response is this: So what? What do you expect me to do? Not give him my spare change to teach him a lesson about cultural sensitivity?
I've been thinking a lot about the line between good taste and bad taste, between acceptable and offensive. Over the past couple of months, there have been a lot of developments in the cultural conversation about where this line sits, if it even exists at all. Everything from Tegan & Sara vs. Tyler the Creator to Tracy Morgan's Nashville show to the Supreme Court's ruling on violent video games are all really about The Line. It's a murky, difficult debate. Do we always look at these things as interconnected?
Although it's a month old, the controversy about Tracy Morgan's Nashville stand-up show is probably the most potent, useful example of why "political incorrectness" matters. First off, calling Morgan's act "politically incorrect" -- an act that says homosexuality is a choice, that he would stab his gay son and that Obama should man up and stop supporting gay rights -- is an understatement. Those kinds of statements should fall far beyond The Line, past decency, and past mere risque. Some people do disagree, mostly other stand-ups. While I'm usually inclined to agree with them, Morgan's situation is reprehensible in a very different way.
I just thought I should blog something.
The past week has been a struggle for productivity and discipline. One of my greatest personal failings, which I keep in my spiral tower of great personal failings, is my need for escapism. It comes in binges. I find comfort in being nothing but a vessel for an experience. Like other addictions, it is difficult to beat, results in long internal arguments and is a drain on my free time (and therefore the quality of my life.)