Alfonso Mangione

I Hate Blogging

2011-12-18T18:01:00.001-06:00

I have to be honest—I hate blogging.

It’s an intriguing medium, and its best practitioners—Andrew Sullivan, say—keep it pretty lively, to the point that there’s a lot of interaction between writer and audience, which is part of the point of this whole writing thing.

Given the current state of the publishing industry, I feel like I’m expected to be that lively with my own blogging—it feels like a classic Catch-22 situation, where you’re supposed to prove you have an audience before anyone will put the effort into helping your books find an audience. But truth be told, between working a full non-writing workday, working out, working on a relationship, and keeping up with other need-to-do-stuff, I don’t think I have the time. And with the time I DO have, I’d rather be writing books. Rather than shooting from the hip every day, hitting sometimes and missing others, I prefer taking the time to revise and edit and polish, to come up with something solid and coherent and well put-together. (I also kind of like the process of envisioning scenes and dialogue. It’s like working out, in that there’s a certain fear of the effort that can keep you dilly-dallying and doing other things. But once you dig in and the terror wears off, a certain euphoria settles in, not unlike a runner’s high, and that sticks around for a few minutes, at least, once you stop writing.) Even when I do write things that are more immediate and interactive than fiction—Amazon product reviews, facebook status updates, blog posts—I spend a lot of time mentally revising what I say and, if time allows, editing. (Even this blog post has taken at least six days to write. Granted, in that time I’ve also put a lot of effort into my latest manuscript, Messiah, but still, I ain’t exactly doing this in real time.)

Despite my best efforts, I’m still Catholic enough that I engage in an unhealthy amount of self-flagellation. (Figuratively speaking, for now.) I’m particularly good at this when it comes to things I “should have” done, such as channeling my creative energies into something a little less lonely, like, say, being a musician. The level of artist-audience interaction, and its immediacy, is way higher for musicians than novelists; the sheer length of time it takes to consume a book guarantees this. Even those books that are quick reads and thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking/memorable (Camus’ The Stranger or The Fall, say, or Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, or even Bukowski’s Ham on Rye or Factotum) will, in the absence of vacation time, take a few days to rip through. And plenty of books that I’ve really enjoyed, or at least that I like to TELL people I’ve really enjoyed (The Brothers Karamazov, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest) have been multi-month ordeals, with plenty of great moments, but also a substantial amount of time spent gazing longingly at the other books on my shelf, wishing I were reading them instead.

And that’s a hard thing to remember when I’m at the stage I’m at with my novel, where I have a few manuscript copies out there in the hands of (hopefully) eager friends, and a few emailed query letters sitting in the Inboxes of (presumably) overworked agents. I think and I hope Resistance is the type of book I’d like on my shelf—thoughtful and well-researched, but lively and insightful; arty without being pretentious or inaccessible, even (dare I hope) something that will hold up to multiple readings and still be around in a couple hundred years. That’s the vision I have, at least, but obviously beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the creator can’t ever be an objective beholder. So I’m awaiting feedback from the friends and activity from the agents, a state of being that usually lends itself to still more self-flagellation.

I had the good fortune of meeting Gary Shteyngart a few weeks ago, at a book reading for Columbia alumni in Chicago. Prior to this reading, I’d never read any of his books, but he has attained the level of literary success I tell myself I’d like as the end state of all this punishment—a comfortable level, where one wouldn’t get mobbed on the street or shot by deranged loners, but where one could get a book out there every few years and have total strangers willing to pay for it, read it, and respond to it. (Granted, when they asked for a show of hands to see who’d read his latest, 98% of us hadn’t. But we knew who he was, at least!) I asked him a couple questions about publishing during the Q&A session, and we got to chat a little afterwards. In between chitchat and jokes (I got a laugh out of him by comparing Gogol’s Dead Souls, with all its skips and gaps, to a bad Netflix disc), he gave me his take on the literary world.

Hunter S. Thompson famously said that T.V. was a “cruel and shallow money trench…a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.” And Shteyngart’s view of writing seems even bleaker, a nonstop merry-go-round of psychoanalysis and self-recrimination and Herculean effort towards an uncertain end. Success (in my recollection of his estimation) sets you on a book treadmill where you have to keep churning out books regardless of whether or not you actually like them, but lack of success—or a decline in success from one book to the next—is far worse, and sends you into a deep funk. So authors, even at his level, have to put a tremendous amount of energy into marketing themselves. To promote his latest work, Super Sad True Love Story, he had to enlist the help of his M.F.A. students to film a movie for the YouTubes. “We had to make a movie so we could publish the book,” he said. “That should tell you everything you need to know about publishing these days.”

So my fears are confirmed: you need to get an audience before you can get an audience. It seems absurd, but (this is the last time I’ll name-drop, I SWEAR) as Shteyngart told me, we can long for those days of all-expenses-paid book tours and superstar literary authors, but they aren’t coming back, so that’s just the way it is. And like it or not, I HAVE to do it, because I don’t know how to not write. (Others have said they don’t know how to do anything else, but I can’t exactly say that—I do make a decent living at my Clark Kent job, and I’m earning something close to what I’m told is the annual income level that corresponds to the optimum amount of personal happiness.) And, for as much as I hate blogging, I can still put something out there, which means it still seems far superior to querying agents, a prospect about which I’m slowly acquiring an unmitigated and pure hatred, far more substantial than the pretend hatred I have for blogging. (I’ve had two agencies request my full manuscript. One of them seemed excited and went through a round of revisions with me but abruptly stopped returning my phone calls or responding to my emails, and a subsequent agent never got back to me after requesting the full manuscript. And BOTH were friend-of-friend situations; blind query letters have gotten me exactly nowhere, which is why I’m reluctant to continue sending them out.)

In fact, I’m considering self-publishing (again), but perhaps doing a little more pre-publication work this time and possibly even establishing my own imprint for other self-published authors, so we can all project the image of having passed through the tough judgment of the tastemakers and gatekeepers. Of course, if I do that, it’ll be a LOT more of what I hate—blogging and tweeting, counting my followers and my page hits—and that’ll suck up still more of my virtually nonexistent free time.

I believe in my book enough that I’m willing to do these things for its sake—or at least, I want to get it out there and see what the marketplace says about it, because, frankly, as much as they like to pretend otherwise, agents and publishers don’t know what will or won’t sell until it sells or doesn’t sell. Still, the thought of doing still more of what I hate for the sake of what I love left me with a fair amount of fear about all the effort that entails. So I asked a good friend for his advice about being crushed by this self-imposed crisis. And he responded with a question: “What would you expect of yourself if you were humane?”

It’s obviously an absurd question—if I were humane, I wouldn’t put myself through all this trouble. So here I am in Catch-22 land, or embracing the paradox, at least—disconnecting from my life to connect with yours, doing something I hate, in the hopes you’ll like it, at least.

Best Crime Songs - Arson

2011-10-27T23:54:00.000-05:00

"April 29, 1992," Sublime. I was a skinny white kid living in suburban Canada during the Rodney King riots, and was only in 9^th grade, so participating in them wouldn’t exactly have been feasible, but when I first heard this song, their knowing taunt about how “You were sittin’ home watching your T.V. while we were participating in some anarchy” amplified my sense of suburban geekiness and made me feel like I’d missed out on something really really awesome. “Red lights flashing, time to retire, and then we turned that liquor store into a structure fire” makes the arson seem both completely unnecessary and gleefully cool. (This song could have also won in the Riot and Robbery categories, but I wanted to give someone else a shot.)

Best Crime Songs - Murder

2011-10-10T19:33:00.000-05:00

So I wrote a column for The Deadline, my friend's resolutely non-online newspaper, about the best crime songs ever written. And since I want to keep the blog going without writing new stuff just yet, I'm gonna go back through and post them all, one by one. First up: murder.

Best Crime Song - Murder

There was a time I would have said “Folsom Prison Blues” hands down; “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” is pretty hard to top, lyrically. But this song has a sleeping flaw. Namely, even though said homicide apparently took place in Nevada, Johnny’s narrator’s singing from Folsom Prison, which is, of course, in California. So there are clear jurisdictional issues here, which lead me to question the narrator’s veracity. Not that I believe a lot of other narrators—as much as I love staples of gangsta rap like Ice Cube and Dr. Dre’s “Natural Born Killers” (and Cash-esque murder ballads like Nick Cave’s “Mercy Seat”), they’re more like cartoons than documentaries. And while Eminem can get every bit as far over the top, he at least convinced me in “‘97 Bonnie & Clyde” that he’d thought long and hard about the murder in question. Key to this is that he’s sick enough to actually imagine his cutesy explanations of everything to his young daughter. “Maybe when you’re old enough to understand it better I’ll explain it to you. But for now let’s say mama was real real bad, was being mean to dad and made him real real mad. But I still feel sad that I put her on time-out,” he raps to her before making a series of googoo baby noises to distract her, and then dumping her mother’s corpse off the end of a dock. It almost doesn't matter whether or not you like the song—you believe it, and that's much more important.

Who Owns History?

2011-09-14T07:57:00.000-05:00

This article on history and copyright is interesting. (Probably more so for me than for you, since I've written a book of historical fiction that used a lot of research from a lot of other history books, but still.)

Query Shark

2011-09-13T21:58:00.000-05:00

One other thing I've got to read: the archives from this awesome blog I've somehow only now discovered, Query Shark.

I've gotten so used to the current No-Response-means-No state of the industry that this agent's level of author (and public) interaction seems downright saintly. Although I think my query letter's damn near perfect, and my manuscript's not far behind, I'm still going to put the former through the Query Shark wringer.

Wait, no, that's mixing metaphors. Damn! I'm going to feed it to the Query Shark and see if it gets chewed up, digested, or excreted. There. Much better!

Criticism of "Criticism of Criticism"

2011-09-13T21:43:00.001-05:00

I lied.

I realized it pretty soon after I posted my "Criticism of Criticism" post. (I just updated this with a hyperlink, in case you're too lazy to scroll two posts down.)

I like to think I'm a pretty honest online reviewer, and generally I do my best to write my honest opinion of everything I review. But there have been a few instances where I've reviewed books for friends, or family of friends, or people who have tracked me down based on my Amazon reviews, and in some of those cases, I'm sure I've skewed my reviews a little, for predictable reasons--wanting to make a friend happy, wanting to make a stranger feel like they'd written a crappy book, wanting to encourage a stranger, wanting to make a friend feel crappy, whatever. And I also didn't always do the standard journalist full-disclosure-disclaimer. That isn't to say that those reviews were wholly inaccurate, but they were also probably not the same reviews I'd have written if I'd just plucked the same book off the shelf.

Why am I telling you this? Two words: Catholic Guilt. I'm pretty sure my main point's still pretty valid, though--online reviews supposedly indicate quality, but it's hard to gauge the quality of the reviews themselves. And nothing is ever really objective, anyway.

OK, this post has gotten way too meta-, or existential, or something. I'm going to go read Irrationality, by Stuart Sutherland, which discusses the formation of opinions with far more wit and knowledge and research than I ever could muster. Or maybe I'll read A Dog About Town, which, despite the corny cover art, is really a well-written and fun book. And I'm not just saying that because I'm friends with the author. Or am I?

(I'm not. Honest!)

Steal Like an Artist

2011-09-11T18:08:00.000-05:00

I don't think I posted this the last time I came across it, but I came across it again. So read it!

Criticism of Criticism

2011-09-10T01:31:00.001-05:00

This is a pretty fascinating piece about what seems to be a growing problem--the fake online review.

As for me...hmm. I've been writing Amazon reviews for some time now; I don't quite have the sheer focus and productivity necessary to climb into the top ranks, but I did get to the point where they started sending me free stuff (through their Vine program) as long as I reviewed it. And think I wrote fewer positive reviews of that stuff, and I eventually kinda stopped reading their newsletter of new free stuff they sent (and are still sending) out every month.

Why? Frankly, I'm usually writing reviews because I'm passionate about something. (Sometimes it's because it's new and I want to sound off early, but not often.) I don't care if 721 other people are giving their take on Goodfellas, it's a movie that meant a lot to me, so if I can articulate that in a semi-interesting way, I'm gonna have my say, too. So when I'm writing reviews for me, I end up giving a lot of positive reviews, because I generally review things I love. (Granted, there are some exceptions.)

Anyway, when they were sending me stuff and I had to review it, even though I got to pick what they were sending me, some irrational and unknown combination of factors (frustration about my sense of obligation, willful refusal to see what other people were writing about those products) led me to write reviews that were probably slightly more negative, on the whole. And they still kept sending me emails to get new free stuff, so I totally respected them all the more. (Full disclosure: I did recently apply for a book editor job there. No word yet, but, hey, it could still happen.) But my interest in the Vine program withered.

Anyway, I can honestly say I was never tempted to try and contact someone to get paid for a good review, or turn in a review that didn't represent my actual opinion of a product that I had consumed in its entirety. But can I honestly say my reviews were accurate, and unbiased by emotion? Probably not, as this book and this book make clear.

Long story short, there are plenty of great and relatively trustworthy reviewers online, but they have a host of biases of which they're not even aware. And there are an even greater number of mediocre reviewers, and an unknown (but possibly even greater) number of paid review whores/hitmen/man-whores/hitwomen. (Like how I balanced out all the sexism in that analogy?) So we need people to do a better job of reviewing these reviewers, so we can sort out the wheat from the chaff. Criticism of criticism, people, that's the next frontier. Let's get crackin'!

Haight And Ashbury, 2011

2011-09-04T21:45:00.000-05:00

Out on the road today
I saw a Deadhead sticker
On a 1936 Mercedes roadster
California License Plate:
ACQUIRE
Up on Ashbury and Haight
Owner smoking a cigar
Don Henley wouldn’t dare
To write something so bizarre
Dirty hippies still wandering around Golden Gate Park
In the dark
About how tattered and filthy and worn
Their dreams have become
Looking all deranged
Head stores are legal now
But the world hasn't changed
The kids are not allright
They're still dropping out of schools
And singing in vestibules
Guitar case hungry for the dollars
They’ve also got CDs
And a website
I might look down my nose
But I’m buyin’, too
Into the whole scene
Selling projects of mine
Online
Posting pictures of their signs
And the paintings in store windows
Trolling for Twitter hits
Obama and McCain, lighting up with green
Doing bong rips, high on money
Is this art
Or a construction project?
Are we all working
Here on Haight and Ashbury
Trying to bury the things in us we hate
And to not be ordinary
Unless it sells?
Looking at these scruffy kids
Turning my nose up at their smells
Dirty patchouli hair, my head is just as much a mess
Inside, I just hide it better
With a shaved head and a sweater
What the shit?
Maybe I can relate
To the guy with the Mercedes, too, more than I care to admit
I can see
Maybe I hate
That he’s more honest than me

"The Winds of War" Blows

2011-07-23T20:52:00.002-05:00

My scathing takedown of Herman Wouk's Winds of War can be found here, in case anyone cares...

Tree of Life

2011-07-12T19:56:00.001-05:00

If you kind of liked Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line but thought, “Gee, this would really be better if they got rid of all the boring war stuff and expanded the flashbacks into a movie of their own,” then, boy, have I got a movie for you.

In Tree of Life, one of our best directors gives free rein to many of his worst impulses. It’s not devoid of merit—the individual scenes are, in fact, quite lyrical and beautiful—yet collectively it feels like yet another falling off from the tightness and precision of his first, best feature. (Badlands. If you’re too lazy to IMDB it, please, for the love of God, at least Netflix it. Here, I’ll even give you a link, you lazy bastard.) Malick grew up in Texas at about the same time as the boys whose story forms the dramatic arc—if one could call it that—of the film. He also had a brother who played guitar and committed suicide overseas, which is presumably what happens here, although he gives us few enough details that virtually any explanation of the brother’s death is plausible—Vietnam, car accident, whatever. Perhaps that’s by design—it’s certainly understandable to be reticent on such an intense personal tragedy, even decades after the fact, and leaving it open makes it feel more like everyone's movie. But it also feels more like a movie that can’t make up its mind, one that starts with personal roots but branches off in myriad impersonal directions, for Malick mashes in literally just about everything, with sequences depicting the Big Bang, the formation of galaxies, the evolution of life. There’s even a shot of a wounded sea dinosaur (an Elasmosaursus, according to Wikipedia) flopping about on a beach. Why is he wounded? What will happen to him? And, most importantly, what the hell does he have to do with the coming-of-age of three Texas boys with an overbearing father and a gracious mother? It feels churlish to ask such questions of a movie that’s so beautiful and mesmerizing, for the imagery in the movie is so compelling that one almost doesn’t care about the normal niceties of moviemaking, like “plot” and “storyline.” Almost.

There are plenty of precedents, and not just in the auteur’s own work. (A common commentary on his films is that they’re more like visual poems than movies, and this seems designed to cement that perception.) Indeed, Tree of Life feels like 2001 in 2011, as if Malick’s channeling Kubrick. Both movies have a relatively small amount of dialogue compared to their long running time, with lots of effects-laden eye candy in there as a sort of padding, taking up all the empty space, keeping all the narrative from rattling about in all that running time like a BB in a tin can. Both even have the same special effects wizard—Douglas Trumbull, who was apparently lured away from thirty-odd years of exile from Hollywood to supervise the work on this film, because Malick (and here I really can’t fault the guy) reportedly hates the look of modern-day CGI. So there’s some stunning imagery; if this had been made and screened in the 60s, I’m sure it would have been a magnet for hippies on hallucinogens looking to heighten their highs, as was reportedly the case with 2001. (While we’re on the topic of drugs, this movie is trippy even in its depictions of the personal. I heard a comedian—I’m not sure who it was, and a cursory Google search gave me lots of fun-looking links, but nothing that seems like it has an answer to my question—talk about how babies and toddlers basically act like they’re on ecstasy all the time. There’s a druggy sense of amazement and wonder to early life, as we figure out how the world works, all those fun little real-world brain lessons on topics like gravity and object permanence, and Malick captures that wonder perhaps better than any filmmaker I’ve ever seen.) But is it necessary? Does a coming-of-age movie have to include birth, and the birth of the universe, just to make sure we don’t miss anything?

Granted, there is a theme of sorts tying it all together. (Pardon me while I think out loud to try and figure out this glorious mess of a film.) As was the case in The Thin Red Line, there’s early narration discussing the countervailing forces one sees in the world at large. But rather than seeing everything as a simple struggle between good and evil, or as creation vs. destruction, Malick’s talking about a subtler conflict, between nature and grace. (I say Malick because he’s unfortunately become indistinguishable from many of his narrators; nearly gone are the arm’s-length characters of his earlier films, replaced by navel-gazing notebook dumps into a variety of vessels.) Nature here is the father-force, the harsh glory of Old Testament capital-G God, the one who created the heavens and the earth but remained insecure enough to smite people for sacrificing to other Gods, the one who got all pissy with Job when he dared to ask for an explanation for all his tribulations. And grace is a mother’s unearned love, soft and gentle yet no less powerful, the supple cement that fills in the cracks and hides the sharp edges of rough nature.

These dueling themes tie everything together, more or less, and provide vastly more nourishing intellectual fodder than is normally found in the Hollywood trough. And even if Malick is unwilling or unable to show us a clearer picture of the tragedy that sets up these themes, he's probably given us a perfect movie somewhere in Tree of Life's miles of footage. Unfortunately, the difference between the length of that movie and the length of the movie Malick actually did deliver has been growing at an exponential pace throughout his career. In other words, it may not have been healthy for him to dig up the roots, but I wish he’d at least pruned this tree.

Pwned by Bukowski

2011-07-07T00:03:00.001-05:00

Damn, Bukowski, I feel like a chump after listening to this. (Courtesy of Roger Ebert.)

R.I.P. Jimmy Lerner

2011-05-14T22:09:00.001-05:00

A few years back, good fortune (or Providence) led me to read You Got Nothing Coming, a thoroughly enjoyable memoir from an alcoholic ex-con named Jimmy Lerner. And a scary thing happened when I read how he'd ended up in the Nevada prison system on a manslaughter beef: I could relate to it, far more than I would have liked. A lot happened to me in 2004, and it's anyone's guess what would have happened had I not read that book in that personally tumultuous year. But I am inclined to think that Jimmy's book helped save my life.

A while after that, I'd written and self-published a book of my own called Pottersville, and in the process of marketing it, I solicited reviews from a lot of authors whose books I'd really enjoyed. Jimmy was one of the few to respond; he graciously reviewed it and had a lot of wonderful things to say about it.

Everything everyone does can be interpreted harshly or charitably. In retrospect, Jimmy may well have had other motives for what he said and did, and after our initial discussions, I learned that he was perhaps a more complicated person than I'd first realized. Still, he helped me out immensely at two key junctures in my life--one time inadvertently, and one time consciously--and for that, I'm eternally grateful. So it was with some sadness that I found out, after attempting to contact him during a late-night Internet bender a couple weeks ago, that he'd passed on in 2008. (I know this isn't exactly rigorous sourcing here, but the information on the discussion page sounded credible, and I haven't seen anything to contradict it.) I've been meaning to post something about it, and now--a rainy Saturday here in Chicago--seems as good a time as any.

R.I.P., Jimmy. And thanks again.

J-School

2011-04-09T15:19:00.000-05:00

I’m in New York for my 10-year J-School reunion. (J-School, as I’ve had to explain to every girlfriend I’ve ever had, is Journalism School. Or “Columbia University in New York,” as I used to say in one pretentious breath to my fellow Chicagoans, lest they think for a fraction of a second that I’d gone to Columbia College, the lesser Columbia, the non-Ivy League Columbia.)

ANYWAY, Friday seemed to be “the book day” of Alumni events, most of which were chaired by Sam Freedman, a noted faculty professor and author whose book-writing seminar is generally regarded as something of an author factory, the closest thing to a sure thing in the publishing world—which, granted, is somewhat akin to saying that the pass line on the craps table is the closest thing to a sure thing in the casino. Still, I have more than a little resentment and self-pity about the fact that I DIDN’T take said seminar; rather, I took a variety of other classes, none of which shot me onto the rocket-like arc I’d imagined for my writing career. I didn’t go overseas and become a dashing foreign correspondent covering a decade of war in the desert sands of Araby; I didn’t become a local municipal good-government crusader; I didn’t win fame or renown or Pulitzers. (A side note—one thing you learn very quickly at the J-School, whose staff, of course, awards the Pulitzers, is that it is, in fact, pronounced PULL-it-zer, not PEW-lit-zer, as the non-cognoscenti are inclined to do.) No, I sold out to The Man, spent the next decade working in cubicles (with a now-brief-seeming two-year interlude as a barista and waiter), and wrote a few book-type things in the meantime, none of which have yet gotten anywhere.

I probably don’t seem grateful for my time at the J-School, but it was very valuable—I learned far more than the proper pronunciation of an award I’ll never earn. In fact, for pure squeezing-a-lot-of-life-into-a-year-or-less, it was tough to beat. I met Caribbean festival organizers and Hasidic Jews and N.Y.P.D. officers and Al Gore and truant school kids and aging John Lennon pilgrims and drug dealers and the families of murder victims; the high, the low, and the in-between, as Townes Van Zandt might have said. My only regret is that I didn’t do more there, make more contacts, lose myself in the work, and really enjoy myself, but to do that I would have had to be a different person, the person I am now rather than the person I was then. (Granted, that’s a big regret; to wish I’d stayed on that path is to deny the value of the path I did take over the past ten years. I’ve written a book that I’m happy with, and several poems that I really like, and I’ve helped my friends put out a newspaper—and more importantly, I’ve found a little peace of mind, something I never had when I was on J-School sitting on the launch pad waiting for the rocket engine to ignite.)

I'd hoped that the book day would be the magical day I’ve been waiting for, the day I’d hook up with someone who would hook me up with someone who would be the agent of my dreams; I'd hoped to get my book out there and find the level of literary success that I sometimes imagine will bring me true happiness. And I think a lot of other people were hoping that, too; there was a book proposal class, and a panel discussion where a bunch of published authors talked about their post J-School careers, and a later event that basically boiled down to a bunch of fellow J-School alums asking book industry types if their book ideas had merit. I’d gone to the microphone and asked an earlier panel if they had any advice for someone like me, someone who has had some nibbles but has yet to find a way to actually, you know, get manuscripts published by something other than a publish-on-demand website. And I'd heard advice I’d already heard—find agents who represent books you like, and stay persistent. (It was probably something I needed to hear, but I had expected something more, something mind-blowing and yet simple, some magical thing that I’d somehow been ignoring and ignorant of for all these years.)

I'd held out some hope for the alumni book fair that night in the Low Library, but it turned out to be relatively sedate; I had some really pleasant conversations with some other grads whose books I then bought, and some somewhat more awkward conversations with other grads whose books I didn’t buy. And there was one guy in particular who had self-published a novel he was trying to sell there, which was exactly the same position I’d been in five years ago with Pottersville; I didn’t envy him; I know I had felt trapped and impotent behind that table, thinking something along the lines of: “Man, if I can’t sell every copy of my book here, I won’t be able to sell it ANYWHERE.” Still, there were no novelists there last night that had written anything I wanted to buy, so I didn’t get my schmooze on and find myself an agent as I’d imagined myself doing.

Being on the other side of the table at least let me see that most of these other authors didn’t really sell that many copies of their books there, either. Still, I think the best conversation of the day took place earlier on, after one of the seminars; another J-Schooler had tapped me on the shoulder and said that he HAD taken Professor Freedman’s book course, and that he’d still failed to find representation with his first five or six proposals. Someone had even told him in no uncertain terms that he had no business being a writer. And now he had a few books under his belt. Granted, this was good to hear, but I really liked the reminder that the path not taken has its own stumbling blocks and frustrations and difficulties.

Yesterday was gray and drab, and few places are as depressing as Gotham on such a cloudy day; today’s been blue and sunny, the type of day that makes the other days worthwhile. And the lesson I’m taking home with me is this—take each day for what it is, enjoy it for what it is, and don’t think about how things would be any different if you’d taken a different path, for even if it is true, thinking it won’t make any difference. I’m sitting in a corner deli with a laptop in front of me and a cup of coffee beside me; I’m writing; I’m enjoying myself. Regardless of whether or not I’ve sold a book, I’m doing these things, things I’d probably be doing right now anyway even if I was an established author. So what’s there to complain about?

An Open Letter to Radiohead's Thom Yorke

2011-02-26T23:14:00.000-06:00

Dear Mr. Yorke:

I’m going to go out on a limb here—hardy har har, you might say, but this is no laughing matter—and say your most recent album is your most disappointing yet.¹

Speaking of laughing, there’s a joke I once heard that seems apropos here, a joke which does admittedly deal in national stereotypes, but it’s about white people, so it’s OK. Anyway, in this joke, a man visited heaven and hell, then came back. Someone asked him what heaven was like, and he said, “Great! The cooks are all French, the mechanics are all German, the lovers are Italian, the police are British, and everything’s organized by the Swiss.” When asked what hell was like, he said, “Not too much different, actually. Except the cooks are all British, the mechanics are all French, the lovers are all Swiss, the police are German, and everything’s organized by the Italians.”

ANYWAY, heaven, when it comes to late-period Radiohead, would probably be an album as warm and accessible as The Bends, as consistent and cool as OK Computer, as adventurous as Kid A and Amnesiac, and as energetic as the peaks of Hail to the Thief. In short, In Rainbows. Whereas this is as cool as Pablo Honey, as warm as OK Computer, as adventurous as The Bends,² as consistent as Hail to the Thief, as energetic as Amnesiac, and as accessible as Kid A. Admittedly, that doesn’t quite get us to hell, but it does feel like a purgatory or limbo of some sort—a waiting period in a place where paradise is visible, but not quite attainable. (This might be worse, though; someone in purgatory at least has heaven to look forward to, whereas we’re stuck wondering if it’s behind us.) In fact, The King of Limbs might be the strongest piece of evidence yet in favor of the bizarre “1s and 0s” theory, which states that OK Computer and In Rainbows were written at the same time and conceived as a single work, then released 10 years apart purely for showmanship purposes, and to make some sort of statement about our enslavement to the digital world of binary code. In Rainbows now feels like an outlier, quality-wise, unless one organizes your discography by apparent date of conception, in which case it fits perfectly, and The King of Limbs also makes sense, fitting as it does onto a downward trajectory suggested by your underwhelming solo album, The Eraser.³

I’ve been told you’re a huge fan of the late Miles Davis, and perhaps this is part of the problem. (Wait, hear me out.) Neither Miles nor yourself was content to put out a handful of albums whose excellence put most competitors to shame. Nor were either of you satisfied to create an album that made even words like “excellent” seem inadequate; he had Kind of Blue, and you and your bandmates made OK Computer. But you’ve both seemed to relish using your later years spending—some might say squandering—your artistic capital searching for musical adventure, and in the process losing sight of much of what made you great in the first place.

Perhaps that’s a little harsh. There are, to be sure, some great songs on here, songs that take a few plays to wrap one’s head around—or rather, songs that take a few spins to sink into one’s head, but that stay there afterwards. “Bloom,” with its bright horns and swelling strings and adventurous electronics, is actually quite stunning, once one gets used to it. “Little by Little” is built on a wonderful riff that is somehow both angular and accessible. And your vocal work on “Lotus Flower” ranks up there with your best. But the memorable song: forgettable song ratio here’s far below the desired infinity, and even below the dreaded 1; by my reckoning, for every awesome song here, there are about 1 2/3 that are somewhat subpar, at least by your standards—or rather, the standards I’ve set for you, which, granted, may be a little stringent. (But, hey, I also do it to myself, I do, and that’s what really hurts.)

OK, OK. All kidding aside, it seems no coincidence that In Rainbows had a revolutionary pay-what-you-want pricing structure, whereas this one had a fixed price; it’s like you knew that people would be happy with that album on first listen and would enthusiastically recommend it, thereby driving up its market value,⁴ whereas this one couldn’t count on such goodwill. After all, Track 2, for instance, is just not that great. “You’ve stolen all the magic to my melody,” you croon to some Mr. Magpie, and given the magic of your previous melodies, I want to find Mr. Magpie and beat him until he gives it back. “Feral” is underdeveloped. And, frankly, the last three songs are borderline boring. I wanted to like them—I really did! I took a week to write this review, and I tried to stay away from other critical interpretations of this album, in the hopes that I could just give it time and make up my own mind about it and not be swayed by YouTube videos made by haterade-drinking hipsters. But the fact remains that I’m just not loving its general drabness and off-putting taste, and after listening to it one last time while finishing up this letter, I now feel compelled to cleanse my palate and color my palette with Rainbows.

I sometimes read a lot into your album covers; the sharp snowy computer-generated peaks on the front of Kid A, for instance, implied (to me, anyway) that you were wandering in some sort of icy Arctic artistic wasteland, and that at any moment you might be buried by an avalanche of your own pretentiousness, but that there was a lot of epic grandeur to take in all the while. OK Computer’s album cover had an arty sterility evocative of airplane emergency-exit placards, and this perfectly encapsulated the album’s deft evocation of our attempts to paint an overly comforting veneer over the panic and the vomit of postmodern life. In Rainbows’ cover had computerized words, colors, and an explosion suggesting a new energy and warmth to your exploration of these same themes. But this, with its high-school computer-art quality image of neon ghosts in front of a dark forest, sort of suggests that you are lost in the artistic woods, somehow haunted by your own past.⁵

I have noticed that you have a tendency to act like you’re going off on some strange tangent, waiting until we think you’re finally off your rocker before launching back into some mind-blowing performance that highlights your awesome skills.⁶ Indeed, toying with our expectations has become a strange part of your artistry. And with that in mind, I should mention that there’s a new theory floating about, a theory that this is but the first half of a monumental work whose second half will be dropping sometime in the next few months.⁷ I hope so; even if I have to hear eight Radiohead songs to get three good ones nowadays, that’s better than nothing. But more importantly, I hate to think that three good songs are all we have to show for our three-and-a-third years of waiting.

Respectfully Yours,

Alfonso Mangione

¹ FYI, I know footnotes in a letter probably seem ridiculous and pretentious, but I’ve been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace lately, so I’m on a big footnote kick, and I’m gonna ride it ‘till the wheels fall off. And in response to the obvious objections this statement might prompt: Pablo Honey doesn’t count, for we had no expectations of you then. Kid A may have been shockingly different from its predecessors, but it at least proved you weren’t going to rest on your laurels. Amnesiac may be uneven, but it arrived so unexpectedly soon after its predecessor that we were willing to forgive that and concentrate on the high points. And Hail to the Thief was also uneven, but packed an incredible energy into its high points—plus the live shows supporting it absolutely rocked.

²Which is still pretty adventurous, I guess.

³Sorry! I just didn’t like it that much.

⁴If you’re concerned with such unabashedly capitalist ideas, which, granted, you may not be.

⁵“I’m moving out of all this,” you croon on the opener, which certainly lends credence to my theory. (A side note: is “croon” the right word? “Wail” seems harsh, and “sing” is always a little inadequate, even in your lesser moments.) ANYWAY, it’s a scary sentiment, if one takes it out of context and applies it to something to which it may not relate, which I, like most aspiring music journalists, am wont to do—I know that as an artist, you have to keep moving and all, but we do kinda like “all this.”

⁶As evidence, I cite the first few seconds of Hail to the Thief, which, as one reviewer pointed out, sounds like an electronic squelch, but is really apparently the sound of a guitar being plugged in. And there is, of course, the electronic-ish sounding beginning of In Rainbows’ “15 Step,” which somehow then magically resolves into something both more conventional and more awesome. And there was a concert I saw here in Chicago at the Auditorium Theater back in 2006, a concert where you acted like you were going to play “Spinning Plates” for a closer—a song which, by that point, had become a somewhat overused closer for you—and you proceeded to do so in a very distorted and unsatisfying fashion before stopping abruptly and segueing into the most awesome version of “Everything in its Right Place” that I have ever heard. Obviously you can probably think of far more examples than I can.

⁷Advocates of this theory point out that, on the last song, you advise us that “If you think this is over, then you’re wrong.” They also make note of the fact that the track’s called “Separator,” implying that it could be a division between the first and second halves of a large-ish work. Also, either the file or the link which we had to use to download it ended with “01,” implying that there will be an “02.” And lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the descriptors for the upcoming physical release of this album mention two vinyl discs of this album, something that seems entirely unnecessary given the sub-40-minute running time of these 8 tracks, unless there’s either a second disc or a remix that is already in the can.

Tom Robbins = Tom Clancy?

2011-02-06T18:30:00.000-06:00

OK, he may have a slightly better sense of humor, but after reading Skinny Legs and All, I'm of a mind that Tom Robbins and Tom Clancy have more in common than either would care to admit. Full review here.

A Poem about Columbia and Challenger

2011-02-01T19:36:00.000-06:00

OK, I meant to post this on Friday for the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, but I didn't make it home in time, so I'm posting it today on the 8th anniversary of Columbia. I wrote it that day, pretty much, and I'm not sure as to its merits as a poem, but it did seem apropos, so here goes...

seventeen years ago:
you can still remember the day, the minute, the second
the scene, the sound: the principal’s voice on the p.a.
unlike you’d ever heard it, hesitant, tentative
bearing unbearable news, an explosion in the florida sky
you couldn’t understand, and maybe he couldn’t either
why God would kill a teacher

your young eyes watched compulsively the implausible disintegration, the ugly twisted cloud
and even though you’ve seen so much since then
war, revolution, airplanes
tearing holes in buildings
all soon made antiseptic by a glass tube
saturday morning reminds you how it felt when your world was first upended

columbia
first looks like a typo next to the word tragedy
but the pictures seem familiar
smiling astronauts waving, optimistic
you know what they couldn’t

so you take your disbelief
and soundtrack it with the saddest song you know
thom yorke wailing
i’m not here
this isn’t happening

as you watch, over and over
the images, so different than that old ugly cloud
of a silent meteor, brightening and splintering
as it arcs across blue texas sky
so beautiful it breaks your heart

Bloggus Interruptus Againus

2011-01-06T19:01:00.000-06:00

OK, this blogging stream has had more stops and starts than a geriatric with an enlarged prostate, but I'm done, or done-ish, with the latest round of revisions on the book, so hopefully I'll post something new soon for the four of you who are still hopefully following me. In the meantime, read this, about why blogging may be bad. (WHOA! The fact that I'm posting this is so meta. Or something.)

The Publishing Odyssey Continues to Continue...

2010-10-15T12:56:00.001-05:00

So I've decided that this fall will be the optimum time for a renewed campaign to get my book published, and to get published in general.

Unfortunately I've had a hard time mustering up the energy.

I've detailed some of my recent failures and frustrations here in the back pages of this blog. Past efforts to get published have involved perhaps even more work, with even fewer results.

In 2002, for instance, I shopped a recently-completed manuscript (a meticulously-researched but somewhat unevenly-written crime thriller set in 1950s Las Vegas) to perhaps 40 literary agencies via blind snail-mailed queries, and I was rewarded for my efforts with a seemingly endless trickle of slender self-addressed stamped envelopes that arrived back in my mailbox, bearing type-written form letters indicating that my manuscript didn't fit someone's needs. (This is, perhaps, one of the crueller things about blindly shopping a manuscript; your rejections arrive in envelopes COVERED IN YOUR OWN HANDWRITING. It's like your tormentors are too lazy to inflict all that psychic damage on you themselves, so they've cunningly decided to use your own hand against you, like those schoolyard bullies who would grab your arm and use it to slap you in the face, telling you all the while: "Stop hitting yourself!") At first I was a little naive about the process, to the point where I was actually a little excited to see a letter bearing the return address of a literary agency, but I always at least knew something wasn't right when I'd pick up the envelope and feel the lightness of its single-page content. "Hmmm," I remember thinking. "Seems a little light for a contract..."

This, plus my frustrating recent efforts, have left me a little despondent. So I've queried exactly one legitimate publisher this season (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, if you must know) and a couple poetry reviews. Bateau Press has already sent some rejection emails, which is actually fine because I thought they were kind of pretentious anyway; I've also queried the Columbia Poetry Review. (This is perhaps most freighted with karmic potential; I earned a Master's from Columbia University, good ol' Ivy League Columbia in New York, with all the Pulitzers and what-not, but later found myself living near Columbia College in Chicago and making friends with many of its students, so when I'd hit the bars and tell people where I'd gone to grad school, I'd say "ColumbiaUniversityinNewYork" practically in one breath, lest they think even for a fraction of a second that I'd gone to the other Columbia. So either Columbia College will graciously publish my poetry and leave me eternally grateful and incapable of speaking ill or thinking condescendingly of them, or they will laugh manaically and burn my submissions while dancing around and saying, "Who's the good Columbia now, bitch?")

ANYWAY, this "publishing campaign" of mine has been somewhat lazy, the Anzio of publishing campaigns, perhaps. (Churchill said of Anzio: "I expected to see a wildcat roaring into the mountains - and what do I find? A whale wallowing on the beaches!") I became particularly despondent this week when looking at websites from one of the major agencies—William Morris or ICM, maybe—and seeing that they did not even look at unsolicited materials. It used to be that you had to get an agent because they were your "in" to find a publisher; now you need an "in" to get an agent. (The despairing, melodramatic side of me tells me I'll be a literary Van Gogh, unappreciated in my own lifetime. Then I realize I take myself way too seriously, and that Bateau Press has nothing on me in the pretension department.)

On the plus side, my scrappy friends and I have been publishing and distributing a little independent literary newspaper called The Deadline. (No website, but you can pick up your own copies at Chicago's hipper coffeeshops, or submit online at thedeadlinechicago@gmail.com if you're so inclined.) The Deadline is the brainchild of my friend Liz, and she's put an inspiring amount of energy into it over the past nine months. (While I'm not entirely nuts about the fact that we have no online presence, I'm grateful enough for Liz's hard work and leadership that I'm not really complaining; she's the type of leader whose dedication makes everyone around her want to work harder, myself included, and that's a lot more valuable than whether or not we agree on every little thing.) We have a launch party up in Logan Square on the first Wednesday of every month, and we all get a manila envelope or two with a list of local coffeeshops in a particular neighborhood where we need to distribute our copies. I've taken to doing this by bicycle, so I kinda feel like a kid with a paper route, which would be great, except for the fact that I'll be 33 in a couple weeks. Jesus had started a major religion by this age, and here I am rolling off like Don Quixote on a fixie, attacking the windmills of literary pretension and insularity, 100 Kinkos-printed copies at a time.

Still, it beats the shit out of rejection letters!

Work Haiku

2010-09-28T21:49:00.001-05:00

Sun-hot boiler room
Salespeople babble on phones
Blasting out cold calls

Here I clean records
While chaos seeps through headphones
Jangly Sebadoh

For seven long years
I've worked in telecom but
Can't transfer a call

In my database
I find an "Unknown, Jesus"
Works for Bulk TV

Our office empties
And bright falling orange sun
Turns El trains silver

Handprints

2010-09-25T15:22:00.001-05:00

I remember tracing photos in picturebooks
With pens as a young boy
Straining to capture the beauty in images
That had brought me so much joy
And destroying them in the process
Obscuring them with scribbled ink lines
I’d then run and complain to my mother
Who’d patiently listen to my whines
“If you mark something up, you have to live with it,”
She’d gently and calmly say
“Take care of the things you love
The marks won’t go away.”
I had to relearn this lesson with other things
Model planes and favorite magazines
I’d hold on to these things too tightly
And leave handprints on them
It seems
To love is to hold on lightly
Grabbing tightly comes from fear
That your happiness comes from that thing alone
You’ll destroy what you hold dear
Though also these things can leave marks on you
Like newsprint or PB&J fingers
Or patches of white plastic airplane glue
These soft reminders linger
So, too, do the scars left behind
By sharp things you didn’t want lost
Those marks don’t leave your body
The small but permanent cost
Of grabbing on far too tightly
And wrapping your hands around
Things that you don’t need that badly
These lessons are hard, I’ve found
I’ve spent much of my time re-learning them
With the trappings of an adult’s life
Like booze, and fair-weather friends
And a one-time future wife
I left handprints on her once
I’ll admit, though I’m not proud to say
Take care of the things you love
The marks won’t go away

It seems like this poem should end now
But handprints aren’t all of the story
In dreams and forgetting God heals
The Master creates all things, His glory
Is in the wholeness and fullness of life
We grab on to parts and forget
That they alone can’t satisfy
We moan their loss, and yet
We also grasp lightly, it’s true
With pictures and photographs, all art
Is an attempt to capture in a bottle
Images that have stirred our heart
Sun slanting across rusted rivets
Or shimmering through water on lake sand
Are we not children tracing images
That were made by the Master’s hand?

Love and Vomit and Other Sickening Things...

2010-09-21T23:07:00.000-05:00

So my friend's friend posted some art online from a gallery show of some sort, and I think it's actually pretty cool. (Plus I'm kinda lazy and want to post new things while not, you know, creating content.) So check out this link here for now, and I will try to kick it up a notch on my end.

The Publishing Odyssey Continues...

2010-09-15T22:48:00.000-05:00

As the six of you who are following this blog may already know, I've been shopping a book manuscript for some time now. (Actually, it's not so much a manuscript as a magnum opus--the culmination of all my hopes and dreams and...well, you get the picture.)

Anyway, for a period of a couple months last year, I thought I'd finally arrived in the Promised Land--representation by a reputable agency. (Translation: An agency in New York, but not in a bad part of New York, and not in a broom closet; it's also important that they've actually worked with authors I've heard of BEFORE I did any research on the agency.)

Now that I've had no communication from them in over six months, I'm beginning to suspect that things aren't quite as good as I'd hoped, and that I may actually not have reliable representation. (Granted, I've heard that most of the publishing industry takes the whole summer off, and a sizeable Spring Break, and Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's and all major Jewish holidays, so they may not have been ignoring me that whole time.) In fact, the situation's a wee bit depressing; I'm not quite suicidal, but I am kind of inclined to hole up in the coffee shops for another winter, hunched over my laptop like a cyber-age Gollum, polishing and polishing my manuscript and muttering "My Precious" over and over.

But I kinda need to, you know, get it out there. Summer is over, and Yom Kippur soon will be. Let the 2010 book shopping season commence!

DVD Factory

2010-08-11T23:22:00.000-05:00

My head’s a DVD factory
Filling up with rejects
Manufacturing defects
Shitty dialogue and looping scenes
Of freak sex pretexts
“We’re girls and friends, that’s awesome!
I say we have a threesome.”
It’s fearsome, I’m dejected
Unexpectedly
By this neverending dance
The flutter in my heart
And the aching in my pants
No romance, I just want the bed
To re-enact bad porn
Being filmed in my head
That’s falling from the conveyor belt
To the factory floor
Gotta grab these discs before
They roll out my mouth
The open door
Into sunlight
No one can see them
I shouldn’t free them
On an unsuspecting public
Or do casting calls
With friends, I don’t have the balls
Anyway, I should scratch these movies up instead
Keep them in the dark
But there I might just want to watch them first
Set up a projector in my skull
Grab a popcorn, pop a Red Bull
Set up an editing console
Behind my tonsils
I’ll make this shit come out right somehow.

Pimpmobile

2010-08-01T02:58:00.000-05:00

I’m waitin’ for you at the Greyhound Station
In my pimpmobile
Rims of polished steel, Neil
I stand tall while you crawl
On all fours
Pickin’ up quarters stuck to the floor
While I toss bills down from the sky
Riding high, my car’s a boat
You’re swigging Popov
Plastic bottle in your trenchcoat
Top off all the time
Digging through lint in my bench seat
Tryin’ to find another dime
Still here we are, coming from different places to the same destination
Inebriation, sedation
Prowling the bars for copulation
Living to fill the void
A living hell, trying to avoid
What is real
What is real?
What I see or what I feel?
I feel like a chump, not a pimp
Drinking in dumps every week
Waiting for your broke ass like a trained chimp
No cash in your bank, no gas in your tank
Plus your phone ain’t got no minutes
I’ll make you do your penance
In shots, fuck you up
But never let you down, clown
I can’t leave you here, I need you near
By my side
Or I can’t hide
My bad habits
Plus you’d have to catch a cab, it’s
Sad, you said there’ll be chicks that fuck like rabbits
There, and I need you to be yourself, a dick
The stick to my carrot
So it’ll be less apparent
How dull I am
I need you here in the passenger seat
With an aura of defeat
You think I’m a friend?
I just need you to defend
Me from my own head
So I don’t beat my ass up with it
Thinking I’m the only one who does this
If I end up home alone in bed
Tomorrow, tomorrow never comes
I don’t wanna look like one of the bums
But I don’t have to if I’ve got you
I’m a fighter, you’re a fool
My bling looks brighter next to you
I won’t tell you none of this
Just greet you with a bumped fist
Still if I did, you’d be glad
I’m talking about you, good or bad
But no you won’t know it
I won’t show it to you
Owe you another brew
I’ll just hold you in contempt of the courtroom in my head
A small venue
Only room enough for one
Unlike this car
Hey, man, there you are
It’s good to see you brother

Another Alaska Photo

2010-07-28T22:06:00.000-05:00

Cinnamon Gum

2010-07-28T21:53:00.001-05:00

Farewell, my little temptress
I’m through trying to impress you
I think
I think I think too much
I’m depressed and distressed
And though I kind of miss you
We have issues we can’t resolve
That won’t dissolve in a glass of whisky
Just hanging out feels risky
I feel frisky all the same
Is it you or me to blame?
Am I too lazy to look beyond you?
We’re too crazy to be Beyonce and Jay-Z
And too white
Can’t fight that
Or talk it through on facebook chat
Two hipsters throwing out the welcome mat
For each other’s demons
Seeming innocuous while probing for defects
I don’t need a pretext
To do the wrong thing
I can write that song, sing it solo
Can you tell me what we shared, though?
A day on the indie rock scene
What’s it mean?
Summer breezes
Sunlight shining through the trees
But Jesus, it was gray as hell
Like you said, I can’t dispel that notion
Feeling swell but riding swells of emotion
Up and down like the ocean
Did we get high or low looking through each other’s eyes
To the twisted souls inside?
I’m dismayed you can’t hide that better from me
Just like I despise the lies
I tell myself about you
Did we want to be together or just circle like dancers
Looking for answers about the cancers
Eating away at us?
Compatible diseases?
Who knows? I don’t know why
You freeze when we say goodbye
Or maybe I do
I didn’t know that was what it was for sure, I think
But I think I had a clue
When time passed slow
With no text from you
Did you just want a companion for a dark road trip?
Slip off into oblivion together?
Or did you just want someone to hang out with
And bag upon the hipsters?
Hope stirs in my breast when I think this
With no reason, maybe pride
Maybe you wanted to hide
Or thought I was taking you for a ride
Still I feel denied
For the end was what it was
Sun setting, time for Pavement
Heart sinking like cement
Alone in my own Terror Twilight
Another night that turned out wrong
Though I don’t know what would have been right
I should have known it all along
I’m still checking the phone to see if you’ve rung
The tang of your cinnamon gum
Fading on my tongue
Who knows what it meant?
All this flavor with no nourishment
But it shows that I forget
The one thing I can say with precision
Swallow you or spit you out
Is not just a girl’s decision

The Incredible Mr. Limpet

2010-07-26T21:16:00.000-05:00

I wanna be the Spock of cock
Wait, that’s sick, maybe just the Rock
Wait, no, that’s corny
But I’m horny
I’m sulkin’ in the corner
But I wanna be a Vulcan
And mind meld with you
At least, turn you into goo
While I stay inscrutable
But no, I can’t pimp it
In space
When I’m the Incredible Mr. Limpet
A nerdy cartoon fish
Swimming in Fanta seas
Sweet and bookish
And somehow
A hero now, wow
You’re too young to get this reference
My partner in crime
Still this rhyme should get me deference
Even if I’m not your preference
Spend some time underwater with me
My heart’s been hurled from space into that void alone
Too many times
It’s unfit for both worlds
Weak as flesh
Heavy as wet sand
It’ll pull me down but not to a cartoon land
No, pure reality, death by my own ha…
Holy shit, what’s wrong with me?
Too much thinkin’ on my fantasies
And my troubles
You shouldn’t be here blowing bubbles
While I’m locked in morbidity
It isn’t that bad to be sad
Or to be Don Knotts
Instead of fighting Nazis
It’s scary, I can not see
Why the fantasy
Is necessary
Or the science fiction
I need to learn to live with friction
In my life
And no wife
I can’t live in space or under water

Haha! Silly Hipsters.

2010-07-26T14:15:00.000-05:00

So I have a Pitchfork-related poem I'm hoping to post soon, but Terra Dankowski over at Graph Factory has apparently done me one better with this. Check out her blog. It's pretty cool.

Doctor Shopper

2010-07-18T23:12:00.000-05:00

Doctor shopper

Pill popper

Copper coins can’t change their mind like you

I don’t care whether or not you’re vain

You’re a weathervane

Blameless

Hot and aimless

360°, pennies are one in two

A certainty next to you

Tonight I don’t want a piece of tail

Or even a little head

But a warm body’s always nice in bed

It’s been like ice

But no tranquility’s here

The evil has landed

A sick relationship is what I’ve been handed

And what I’ve demanded

Physician, medicate thyself

Just not from the top shelf

Who am I kidding? I’m an ambulance chaser

Following desperate sirens, flashing lights

In my white Chevy Blazer

Ignoring traffic signals

Healthy singles

Relationship ease

Do I have your disease?

At night I’m on my knees

To God, but when morning comes I bow

To you, it’s over now

You’re not

A poker pot

You’re a player who folded my blankets

When I holded on line 3

Who popped pills in the bathroom while I waited for fun

I heard that rattle, baby

It said we’re done

So maybe I’ve won

At any rate I still have the shirt on my back

And the sun

And I’m out of the fray

So it’s hurt that I lack

I’m a doc on holiday

And a patient

Too, I should have patience

And keep your secrets

But that makes for shitty poems.

Urban Goldfish

2010-07-15T08:01:00.000-05:00

Stencil Art

2010-07-14T23:14:00.000-05:00

Stencil art is kind of a tricky medium, ethically; on one hand, it's illegal, but on the other hand, it's often a lot more beautiful than many things that are, in fact, legal. (And most of us--anyone who's ever driven over 65--have kind of decided on our own how much illegality is acceptable to us.) Anyway, there's some good stuff up here.

Gasoline Rainbow

2010-07-14T22:20:00.000-05:00

What is it that I fear

Falling asleep or waking up?

Drop a coin into my cup

And I’ll tell you what you want to hear

I beg you

And I’ll bless you and thank you

And let you tell me what to do

You seem to know more than I do

What do you know? My leg’s swollen in this dirty tennis shoe

Skin like a drum, tight

So maybe I want the night

Falling from a great height to a great sleep might

Hurt more than this, but only for an instant

Then…bliss?

Who knows, first

Bones will crack, vessels burst

Blood spread across the sidewalk

I see it in the worst way

Too clearly, replay it too frequently

Maybe I gotta do it just to stop the imagery

How come I don’t? Is it too hard or am I just cowardly?

Still sleep itself seems easy

Actions without consequences

In my dreams, nonsensical

And I can leave the theater

And talk about these movies to people who’ll never see them

But are they only entertaining

When I’m explaining them to you

On a new morning

Under the awning

Outside the White Hen when it’s raining?

I say I can’t complain but I’m complaining

I want these dreams all year long, not just summer

When I slumber on an island of grass

With taxis and cops circling like sharks, they don’t stop

Just go elsewhere so I can relax and not react

Unlike winter when night’s like day

Bright and angry on the CTA

Pockets picked near vomit smell

In that rocking fluorescent motel

Electric hell

But the summer nights are easy

Black like me, and blue and cool too

A sleazy pleasant lover

While day’s always a nagging wife

Unfortunately not an option unless I opt for endless night

To escape that demanding bitch I used to auction off my time to her

So I could afford to spend it all on the other

Until she took over

Was that my choice?

Still I didn’t mind

I might have decided not to fight

But I thought there were no consequences

To night, just dreams, and spills to clean up with repentences

Still, escapes from our life sentences

With the eternal wife, our ball and chain

Old dull routine

Clanging alarms and cramped commutes

Working for bosses with golden parachutes

While my only options were worthless

Somewhere between toilet paper and vapor

I needed a few toots to escape, or…

What? That’s all it was, a different road

Than the one you took to the bar

Dirty rocks or maybe black tar

Which made me feel far from harm

At last, safe in a warm hug, a liquid blanket

So snug it fit inside me

Nod out, or take the other which would shake me up

Or powder my nose to wake me up

A white drug, but I liked it sometimes, I could make me up

Like I was Superman

Or later just Clark Kent

When I felt bent

Out of shape, from partying away the rent

I could at least transform into a normal human being

A superhero feat I can’t pull off now

Without at least a cheap disguise

Hat or sunglasses to cover my eyes

(Bloodshot or dilated or in between highs)

And hide the lies I tell to you to escape the lows

Still everybody knows

But you, or do you, too?

What does it matter

If I get a fatter

Wad of bills to pay the boss

You can treat me with utter contempt

Just don’t tempt me

Into acting the fool, when you butter

My bread I can’t afford that

I’ll give you more of that wicked flow

I’m a gasoline rainbow

Drifting past you in the gutter

Lazy, slow

I don’t know

What I done wrote

Is it a poem or a suicide note?

Who knows?

These flows

Are the only

Way out of my lonely

(Unless no one’s really listening

And I’m howling into the void

Annoyed

As I drift towards that gaping hole

Do you feel me? How can you, you’re employed

Still maybe you fear the night, too)

But do I want a new day

Or a way out of this fear?

Who can say

Drop a coin into my cup

And I’ll tell you what you want to hear

Think You Know Why You Vote? Think Again.

2010-07-12T21:44:00.000-05:00

One thing that's been increasingly apparent as I've grown older is that most adults are really, really, really reluctant to change their minds. We tend to hold on to (or throw out) facts depending on how well they fit in with our existing belief systems. And this article--which, granted, is a little long on argument in the early pages--analyzes the phenomenon with far more depth than I can hope to muster.

Mother's Day

2010-07-11T23:25:00.001-05:00

It was Mother’s Day Sunday

You’ll call her up one day

And say you’re here with the blacks and Caucasians

18 years old

Trying to front and be bold

But Mom doesn’t fit that equation

Of jailhouse bluff

Where man equals tough

And humility feels like degradation

Among murderers from the news

And gang bangers, here’s you

A cholo in Cook County Chinos

In these concrete walls

To prove you have balls

They must think you’re willing to fight

Leave your voice set to loud

Puff your chest like you’re proud

To have guards tuck you in every night

And it’s kinda odd

How you love that façade

But I get it, I’ve been that way too

Acting like a kingpin

Wanting life to begin

Thinking family is just a big hassle

That gets in the way

You’ll make your own someday

And deal drugs ‘till you live in a castle

Till then, feed the need

Sling rocks and smoke weed

While stealing cars from your cousin

Your front won’t stop the storm

You act like it’s the norm

Still you know in your heart that it isn’t

Tears flood from your eyes

You dab them, surprised

You see there is something you lack

But as fast as you’re able

You wipe them off the steel table

At all costs, the front must come back

Tortuga

2010-07-05T23:19:00.001-05:00

Can turtles get fat?

If my shell were real, would it be hell

Or would I like that?

More pressure inside

But no outward expression

Or worries about appearance

Just daily showers for maintenance

Rather than days at the gym

Running to go nowhere

A routine to despise, trying to stay the same size

It seems unfair

Still you look pretty busy in there

Clawing at the aquarium and coming up for air

Are you a guy

Is this a sideways take on sexism

Bumping up against a glass wall

I look through this prism

And I’m appalled

To think I can relate

I hate feeling like you

Big and ugly, the only one of me

In this tank

Or should I thank

This situation?

I’m unique, not a freak, that’s a cause for celebration

Right? Still this endless locomotion

And our glassed-in locations

Leave us trapped with imaginations

And no chance of actualization

A blurry vision of a world beyond

But no way to explore

Just a yearning, burning for more

We both live a treadmill race

Slow and steady is the pace

But can we win? We’re running in place

Do we do it to save face?

Do we forget there are no holes in the glass?

We can’t surpass

Our youthful triumphs but maybe stopping’s worse

Camus is right, we just need something to do

We’re like Sisyphus with no boulder so we need another task

Motion without movement, maintenance

Just like housecleaning

Something to give us meaning

Our eternal fight against the glass.

Sick of Social Media

2010-07-04T12:34:00.000-05:00

I’m sick of social media

Should be my status update

When I’m up late cruising facebook

Between bouts of Wikipedia

I need ya

To like this status

Retweet it, gratis

That means free

The only type of publicity

I can afford

Till we go viral

Can’t you see

How awesome my improv musical porn show might be?

If you can’t come, at least R.S.V.P.

So it looks like there’s more people into us than me

Also, 7/8, don’t be late

That’s the date

For our crowdsourced

Performance art piece

A flash mob hand job

Jacking off my massive ego

We go to that and later

There’s a white trash hater party

I’ll spend the whole time not conversing

Just traversing the room taking pictures

Then I’ll go home alone and post them

Tag the shit out of you and

Chat online with all the people I could have talked to

In person an hour before

Never mind, it would be a bore

I'd have nothing to say

They wouldn’t have known

If they’d read my posts that day

Waterboarding is Torture

2010-07-02T08:08:00.000-05:00

A nice little editorial on word choice and what it means...

Is Porn Destroying Sexuality?

2010-06-29T22:09:00.002-05:00

Here's a really great article, too...

Writing and Acts of God

2010-06-28T20:00:00.001-05:00

It's been a minute since I've blogged, but that's partly because I wanted to set down this story.

So I've grown resigned--mentally, if not emotionally--to the fact that I haven't heard from, and may not hear from, the woman I thought was going to represent Resistance.

It's a bitter pill to swallow. I'd gotten used to thinking that the problem of actually selling my writing--the problem I'd once thought insurmountable--had been surmounted at last. I was in relatively regular contact with a woman from a reputable agency who had loved my manuscript. What's more, this agency also represents an author I really enjoy who wrote a novel that sparked my interest in--nay, my obsession with--the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. It seemed like everything had wrapped around into a nice little package.

But I haven't heard anything from her in three or four months, despite the fact that she'd promised some time ago to send me a new round of comments and suggestions, and despite the fact I've since sent her a couple emails and called her office once or twice. Clearly I'm not as important as I'd imagined myself to be.

As usual, I have to keep in mind that when things don't go my way, it may be for the best. Getting what I want doesn't always make me happy, and not getting what I want can be a blessing in disguise.

Case in point: last summer, I took the train from Chicago to L.A., and then up to San Francisco, then to Salt Lake City to meet my friend Phil and go to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons together. (Side note: If you ever go to those parks, go to them in that order. Do not go to the Grand Tetons first, because Yellowstone will then leave you underwhelmed. Both Phil and I pretty much ended up thinking: "Ohh, big deal. Colored ponds and steaming hillsides" when we got to Yellowstone.)

ANYWAY, I wore myself out in San Fran by going on a long trek to track down that city's only In-n-Out Burger, and then I wore myself out yet again in S.L.C. by trying to run from my hostel to the mythical Great Salt Lake. So by the time Phil came and got me, I was nursing a raging head cold, which was exactly the last thing I wanted in the middle of a two-week summer trip that had been months in the planning.

We drove up to Wyoming. Or rather, Phil drove and I felt sorry for myself. We'd planned on camping most of the time, but I ended up holed up alone in a Motel 6 in Jackson, fighting my cold and my relentless self-pity. It was clear to me that God hated me, otherwise he would have somehow kept things from happening that way in spite of my bad decisions.

When I was finally well enough to do some exploring, we ended up driving in to a part of the park we probably wouldn't have gone to otherwise; we figured it would be better to explore by car than exacerbate my cold by going hiking too soon.

On the way in, I spotted a beautiful scenic spot next to a river, and we turned off to eat. The air and water were remarkably still, and I took the picture posted above. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, the wind had picked up just a little, and the water had started moving just a little, and the stilness was gone. Because I'd been sick, I'd gotten to see something I wouldn't have otherwise seen.

Now, I don't think God wanted me to be sick. That was something I basically did to myself. But God allowed it to happen, because God knew that something good could come of it. And I need to trust that the same goes for all the other things God allows to happen in my life--a life which, I gotta admit, is pretty good, most of the time.

I've been reminded recently that I won't be happy so long as I place dependence on people ahead of dependence on God. It's definitely a lesson I needed to hear again.

Now, if only I can learn to check my email without thinking about the agent...

Broken Glass

2010-05-31T00:22:00.000-05:00

My callused hands grasp broken glass
Made smooth by the sands of time
Opaque, a different shape
Warm and smooth now in my mind

Different colors, different sizes
I collected and prized them all
But what these bottles looked like
I cannot quite recall

Still I pluck their remnants from this shore
Alone on the beach with nothing to do
Trying to empty my head with this tedious chore
In the absence of something new

Were they just vessels for my outpourings?
My hopes, my dreams, my fears?
Did you pour in some of your own
Sour wines or bitter tears?

Either way there was little left
But a container, an outline
After we poured their contents out on the beach
When came the ending time

Did I smash them, drunk, angry, glad?
Or could it have been you?
Our eyes are cameras that reuse the film
Life erases the memory of what’s true

And the artifacts are hopelessly changed
The glass now smooth as stones
I can’t even see what the breakage looked like
Nor can I leave them alone

My pack is heavy and battered
Zippers ripping from the strain
Of carrying rocks I haven’t dropped
But all I can think to do is complain

And cram these relics in my bulging pack
Amongst the heavy stones
I grunt and heft it on my back
And turn and walk towards home

Once there, I root around inside
And blindly cut my hand
These trinkets, once safe, are safe no more
So I start mixing stone and sand

To cement this rebroken glass
Into something whole and new
A mosaic with strange patterns
A fresh take on what was true

And if you see this new creation
When I hang it on a wall
Will you know it came from me and you
Will you recognize it at all?

--Alfonso Mangione
May 29, 2010

The Golden Gate Bridge

2010-05-30T13:46:00.000-05:00

This was taken from the Golden Gate Bridge in August, 2009.

Cosmos

2010-05-26T22:18:00.000-05:00

Sex and the City
Is why you feel shitty
Plus you done drank up everything in the Cosmos
I saw stacked by your shitter
While you were hitting the one-hitter
At the wrong end of a no-hitter
Bitter
Obliterating yourself, now you wanna hurl
Slow it down, baby girl
Break the blues, make new blueprints, your own plan
Don’t try and be a man, that don’t make us feel good neither
Take a breather
Stop the treadmill
If you wanna get some head, we’ll
Work it out without
Screwing each other over
Aww, who am I kidding?
I’m not a pimp
Just another love gimp
Limping from one sick doctor to another
Getting blue balls
‘Cause no one makes house calls
And to forget about the ouch
I will lie upon the couch
My memories are fed
By the movies in my head
So I need random pictures, war dead,
Something shocking to replace the dread
I feel it too
I’m alone at 32
But still I hear the clock ticking, same as you
When I’m home alone
No one gives this old dog a bone
But it’s later for me than you, and I’m hungry too, so
I’ll head out, a tortoise now, with less than a house on his back, but a pack, just enough to avoid
Being home with the lack
And the panic attack
Slow and steady doesn’t win in the end, sometimes it just leaves you lonely
And as I crawl past the pubs I see you and your girls,
I look up at the cosmos
And laugh
‘Cause you could drink a carafe of it
And you still wouldn’t know the half of it
You’re a giraffe, not an ostrich
Holding your head too high
To get it down in the sand
While I live in the dirt
So it doesn’t hurt
As much
At least when I put on that shell
It saves me from hell
But it keeps out touch as well
Maybe I should shell out some clams for a softer one
But I’m afraid of everyone
Even though I have no basis
I’m all up in your databases
A ghost in your machine
It’s mean
But I’d rather talk about you than me
It hurts less, you see
To see where you go wrong
Than me, I can’t follow along
With my own logic
It’s tragic
But I don’t believe in magic
Putting a stop to this
With a fantasy kiss
I don’t know how to end it
So I’ll just defend it
Trying to be a poet
By writing about your shit
If you wanna be a friend, it’s
Gonna cost you

- Alfonso Mangione, May 14, 2010

Dumped Truck

2010-05-22T00:55:00.000-05:00

I took this after work on Friday in the West Loop and figured I'd share.

Bleeding Hand

2010-05-22T00:27:00.001-05:00

Did I know you long ago
Were we deserters from that war
Veterans stacking sandbags
Who found the chore a bore
Trying to fight the flood and dam this river
Or did we think it safe to swim, me, you, him
Damn your liver
And lost sharks smelling blood
I’m a forgiver
Who came
With the heart of a dope
And veins full of same
Who can’t give up this slender rope
Where’s the harm?
I’ve got a hole in my arm and a bleeding hand
And a sliver of hope
To reach dry land

- Alfonso Mangione
May 5, 2010

Czech Countryside

2010-05-19T22:54:00.000-05:00

I've been missing Prague a lot lately. Two years ago, I was there for two weeks, working on the Heydrich book. It was long enough to make friends, and to start going to grocery stores instead of restaurants, and to start recognizing Czech words once I got there. (Hruska = pear.) I took this picture in the countryside; I'd rented a bike and pedalled up there so I could see the things Heydrich's assassins had seen, and ride the routes they'd ridden. I thought I was happy with the book; now that I'm waiting for feedback, and compulsively thinking about the fact that I haven't gotten it yet, I'm not so sure. Still, I am grateful for the journey.

Through Your Life, Darkly

2010-05-17T22:22:00.000-05:00

I posted a review of Through the Darkened Window by the Pinstripe .45s (a formerly local band) here.

Still Waters

2010-05-16T14:30:00.000-05:00

A favorite pic of mine. I took it in Alaska in 2003. Thought I'd share.

Pawnshop Laptop

2010-05-16T14:26:00.002-05:00

Actions speak louder than words and all you ever do is talk the walk of shame it never fazed you I’m amazed you love that strut you want lovers you don’t have to love yourself myself I talk a lot, too, but I can do anything better than you you’re a pawnshop laptop your jobs, I’ve had them, I seat them at a two-top or a four-top in my black and whites I nab them, I cop to that, I grab them, I’m a table whore, I gab them up, like a horny whore getting money for what I’d do for free anyways my talk is cheap but I do it for pay and I touch my rent a dollar at a time each day and and sometimes I hate myself for it, these same stories always, it’s a bore, but they don’t know the score, they’re a conveyor belt chore, so I stay game, I walk a good game, I’m a geek to the Greeks up front and the Mexicans in the back making the food Greek, camisas and cabezas all I see, and all I do is run it out and why can’t I judge myself against me and not against you, and why can’t I get paid for what I love and not just what I do.

A Poem About Hipsters

2010-05-12T22:23:00.001-05:00

Tramp stamps on food stamps
These hipsters get my palms damp
Little Hitlers on bikes, a critical mass
Of pompous ass
But every one pretends they’re not one
A spectator, not a dictator of taste
A waste of a college degree
Same as me, too much humanities,
Your histrionics tire me
And you’ve got too much ink, I think
On your skinny arms; the only exercise you get is pumping irony
And I don’t drink your PBR
But I do what you do, I sink
Into the couch at the trendy coffee shop
With my laptop, but not a Mac, a Toshiba, black, writing poetry
No Starbuck’s for me
Unless I can’t see another place to get a fix
And get off on mental masturbation, the generation of verbal jism
Our nation of criticism
And lies I despise
Your Chrome bike bags
And hurl invective
At Animal Collective
But still go to Pitchfork
And drool
And thank God it’s finally cool
To be a dork

- Alfonso Mangione
5/5/2010

Technicolor Dreamburst

2010-05-10T00:02:00.000-05:00

So I'm trying something new on the blog. Rather than just posting criticism and rants and things of that sort, I'm also gonna put some poems up here and there, and maybe a photo or two. (Granted, the poems may themselves be criticisms and/or rants, but, hey, what do you expect?) Anyway, here's one I wrote back in April; it also recently appeared in a literary newspaper called The Deadline that my friend Liz put together. OK, here goes:

I’m a supernova, baby
Brighter, hotter than the blues
A Technicolor dreamburst
With a million different hues
And it’s not about you ‘cause there’s
A thousand other yous
I don’t choose these thrashing fevered nights
Booze used to turn them off but now I choose not to lose the
Queues of yous
That form outside my head
As I thrash about, my bed
Energetic
But it’s potential, not kinetic
It’s pathetic
What can set me off
A smile, a look, a wave
Surging crashing foaming surf
Until it lands upon my turf
A clean white page
These thoughts rage
Or better yet race
Motorcycles in a death cage
My empty head
But now I’ve fled
My empty life, at least,
Netflix, no wife
And coffee, wired, watching the Wire
Eating peanuts, butter toffee
Feeding the fish, a betta, Max
Not compatible with VHS fish, blue from loneliness too, perhaps
At least I get to go out and see the other fish, the sea
While he’s in his bowl
But he looks whole
Content with only me
Or so it seems
But still I wonder
Does he wish for other fish
When he dreams?

- Alfonso Mangione
April 21, 2010

Buried Treasure

2010-05-01T15:06:00.000-05:00

I posted a review of Neil Young's "On the Beach" here. This is a very underappreciated album--one that might be the best thing in Neil's catalog. Anyway, check it out if you get a chance.

National Pleasure

2010-04-25T16:59:00.003-05:00

High Violet finds The National at a high point, poised to either find their way at last into the hearts and minds and stereos of Middle America, or to fall back—either into hipster obscurity in the bars and art galleries of Brooklyn, or hipster exile in the suburbs—and be mourned by their dedicated fans but unremembered by the public-at-large.

Ever since 2005’s Alligator (or better yet, 2004’s Cherry Tree EP), it’s been clear to everyone who was actually paying attention that this is a band with the ambition, and more importantly, the skills to be the Next Big Thing. And yet they also have the canny hipster sense that it’s unwise to look like you’re actually trying. So this album finds them both writing anthemic choruses and mumbling them, crafting sharp tunes and sludging them up, and generally continuing to be infuriatingly fascinating.

The New York Times’ recent glowing profile of the band—one could call it a puff piece, but this is a band that deserves puffing—alluded to the general critical sense that this is a band poised to make the musical equivalent of the Great American Novel. And while that’s an accurate picture of their potential, it’s still somewhat misleading. Their previous two works were like Bukowski set to music—they’re edgy and darkly funny tales of urban alienation and angst and alcoholism, tremendously enjoyable, but still somewhat out of the mainstream. Whereas High Violet is more like Updike, with married-with-child lead singer Matt Berninger as Rabbit Angstrom, and a little extra angst on the side. He’s settling uneasily into domesticity and starting to care about the things most people care about, but he's also trembling with fear, seeing danger around every corner. He promises us it isn’t Rabbit, Run; “I won’t be no runaway, ‘cause I won’t run" ends up being one of the best and most memorable choruses on the album. But there’s enough conflict and longing for oblivion that it obviously isn’t Rabbit at Rest, either.

Again, Berninger’s observations seem more squarely aimed at the average American here than on previous works; “I still owe money to the money, to the money I owe” feels like a zeitgeist-capturing line if ever there was one, something that sounds equally apropos for Brooklyn or Brooklyn Park. And yet Berninger’s unable, unwilling, and has no need to entirely shed the jaded urbanite persona he’s revealed to us on previous albums. So all this leaves him with one foot still planted in white hipsterdom and another astride the white picket fence, and with no clear sense of whether he’s coming or going. Whereas on Boxer’s “Slow Show,” he sang “Can I have a minute and not be nervous, and not think about my dick,” here he’s talking about how “we live on coffee and flowers, try not to wonder what the weather will be.” He mentions hoisting his kid on his shoulders and giving him ice for his fevers, but also says, “I don’t have the drugs to sort it out.” Is he out of drugs? Is he off of drugs? Abstaining for the sake of the kid, the wife, himself? Or are there simply not enough varieties and quantities of drugs to give him peace of mind in such a complicated situation? Like all the best lyricists, he’s written this in a way that it can be interpreted many ways, and mean many things to many people depending on which parts resonate with their own experiences.

Musically, the band’s as tight as ever; they always remind me of a moonlit sea, dark and energetic, deep and intense, but with bright flashes and intricate details. They’ve sludged things up a bit at the end of the somewhat Springsteen-ian “Terrible Love,” taking a page from their live act, where they’ve been doing a messy deconstruction of “About Today” as a staple closer for some time now, and “Little Faith” has wonderful low ominous strings that help make it perhaps the most brooding song they’ve ever written, which is really really saying something. Still, all in all, it’s of a piece with their previous works, which isn’t exactly a bad thing. (The album as a whole has a solid, conventional arc to it, which isn’t bad, but also isn't as daring as Alligator, which put some of the most charging and driving songs at the end of the album—the musical equivalent of trying to end a relationship with face-melting post-breakup late-night rage sex.) It closes with relatively sedate songs, “England” and “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” which, one senses, are either the least exciting songs this band’s written in a while, or the ones that just take the most listens to let their slow brilliance sink in.

It’s perhaps fitting that they’re ending things on a mellower note; again, the band seems like they're at least trying to settle down, to reverse the exodus so many of our generation made at the beginning of our twenties when we fled suburbs and responsibility, preferring the darkened streets and crowded bars of the city to any sort of domesticity. “We’ll leave the silver city, ‘cause all the silver girls gave us black dreams,” he says on “Conversation 16.” But it’s hard to tell whether he’ll succeed, or whether he wants to; the same song finds him declaring that “I’m evil,” one who wants “to believe in all the things you believe” but is nonetheless “a confident liar.” “When I said what I said, I didn’t mean anything,” Berninger tells either his wife or himself or us, which obviously leaves one wondering about the sincerity of it all. Do they want to find a comfortable place in Middle America? Do we want them to? Or is it just for show, something they’re doing because they think it’s what’s expected of them? “I’ll explain everything to the geeks,” Berninger promises, but since it’s the last line on the album, he doesn’t; the questions remain unanswered, the tension, unresolved. But that tension is what brings us back to their albums again and again, and hearing new things each time; it’s not answers, but the search for answers, that makes this band compelling.

Muslims and South Park

2010-04-21T22:19:00.000-05:00

I have to say, I'm always a little amazed at the disingenuousness of Radical Islamists when they say they want to "raise awareness" of an issue and then do so by posting threatening pictures, and personal information, and so on, as is apparently the case here.

Good Author, Bad Book

2010-04-17T00:16:00.000-05:00

So I wrote a review of the last Haruki Murakami book I read, and I posted my take here. The book wasn't all that great, but hopefully you'll enjoy the commentary. Still, you don't have to like it to click on the "Yes" button next to the "Was this review helpful to you?" question, thereby hastening my impossibly slow ascent to the top of the Amazon reviewer rankings. Excelsior!

Catholic Blues

2010-04-07T23:56:00.000-05:00

If journalism school taught me anything, it is that a story's arrangement is more art than science; different reporters will structure the same story differently based on their own beliefs and prejudices. And coming up with a good kicker--that bit at the end that makes you think just a little more--is a big part of the art. So you may or may not agree with this piece about the Catholic Church's sexual priorities, but if you like good kickers, you won't be disappointed.

Some More Thoughts on Writing

2010-03-29T19:23:00.000-05:00

I wanted to add a little to what I wrote on Friday.

I am trying to give up the notion that my success or failure as a writer will be influenced by how well I manage other areas of my life.

I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to believe in cause-and-effect relationships that simply aren’t there. Nor is this unique to me; a lot of what people commonly understand as karma is predicated on this notion that what goes around, comes around. When I was waiting for feedback on my manuscript, it occurred to me that I had promised to read and review a book that another author had mailed me. (Actually, it didn’t occur to me; the guy had to email me and ask if I’d done it yet, at which point I promptly remembered that I had put the big shipping envelope with his book down at the bottom of my pile of mail that kinda sorta needed to be acted on eventually, and I’d promptly forgotten about it.) So naturally, I figured that all the invisible mojo was somehow blocked up, and if I reviewed this guy’s book, I’d promptly get the feedback I’d been looking for on my book.

Of course, nothing of the sort happened. I read his book, wrote a thoughtful and incisive—albeit harsh—review, and shipped it off to him. And I got none of the feedback I was waiting on.

So what? You may rightly ask. Yeah, in the grand scheme of things, perhaps it doesn’t really matter all that much. I guess the big lesson is that I should do things for their own sake, and not for the sake of some imagined unrelated outcome. I’m glad I reviewed the other author’s book, but I’m glad because it was something I promised I’d do, and because I got something out of it.

There’s a large blue book that I read fairly frequently that mentions that people like me are usually a victim of the delusion that we can wrest satisfaction from life if we only manage well. It is a delusion; if I manage well, it will not necessarily bring about all the things I want in this world, and even if I were to get all the things I want in this world, it wouldn’t necessarily make me happy. Other people’s free will and other people’s choices are often at work, sometimes in ways I don’t even know about, and sometimes working towards ends far contradictory to mine. And more importantly, God’s running the show, not me, and the things I strive for are often the things that make me unhappy, whereas the things I avoid are often the things that help me grow and benefit me in the long run.

That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with striving to achieve my goals; I just have to keep in mind that it’s not all about me, and that any setbacks or detours or hardships along the way are ultimately for my benefit, as is the ultimate outcome—even if it’s not the outcome I intend.

Writing about Writing

2010-03-26T15:53:00.000-05:00

So it's Friday afternoon, and I'm sitting in a coffeeshop in Milwaukee and listening to Big Star. This is not just any coffeeshop, mind you; it's a hip (read: non-Starbucks) bright little place with bright sticker-covered windows and hardwood floors and potted plants and people smoking. (Remember that, Chicagoans?)

When I'm working on something I'm really excited about, there's no happier place for me to be. But the book's on hold, and I don't have any reviews in the works. So I'm feeling less like a writer indulging in hackneyed habits, and more like a guy who's just trying to escape the real world and go off into his own world for a little bit.

I'm trying not to be a whiny complainy tortured-artist type. My biggest problems today are an inattentive agent and a little writer's block; there are far worse problems to have in this world. But as Neil Young says, "Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make 'em go away."

What does make them go away, then? Doing the proverbial "next right thing." Getting out of my head and helping other people. Living in the world and engaging them, rather than withdrawing into my head.

I've learned that life works best when I believe that everything happens for a reason, when I trust that I don't always know what's good or bad for me but believe instead that God's got my back and everything, both the things that seem good and the things that seem bad, are gifts from a loving God who has my best interests at heart. I've been told that every problem has a gift inside, and sometimes, to get that gift, you have to get that problem.

It's hard to always believe that.

But ultimately I have to, because the alternative is to believe in a world of random rewards and random punishments, a world of ultimate pain and futility where there is no hope other than oblivion. I've lived in that world; it really sucks. I'd rather not go back, and I know I don't have to.

So, as mentioned above, I just have to keep taking action. I'm not writing to complain here, or to piss and moan; I'm writing to write, because I know that even if I write crap on any given day, I've still done something. It feels a lot better than not writing anything, and anyway, I can always go back and edit it.

The National

2010-03-24T23:59:00.002-05:00

Just when I thought I couldn't love The National any more, they go and knock my socks off again, as depicted here playing "Terrible Love" from the new album. (High Violet, due May 11th, in case you didn't already know.)

In many ways they're like a white-collar Bruce Springsteen, which paradoxically makes them seem more authentic. (At least to my college-educated suburban whiteboy ass.) Some bands end up aping their influences more and more closely as time goes by, and losing any extra authenticity they once had, and "Terrible Love" itself initially seems like a Springsteen retread. But as it gains in intensity, it becomes both more personal and more universal. The charging finish is on a par with "Abel" or "Mr. November," and the lyrics sound absurdly surreal and nonsensical--until you realize the terrible love is not romantic but alcoholic. So the song ends up feeling gritty and real; it isn't new territory lyrically, but they cover the old ground in ways that make it feel fresh.

"Blood Buzz, Ohio" ends up being perhaps even more broad in its appeal; it's insistent refrain talks of how "I still owe money to the money, to the money I owe" and, like all true classics, it makes you want to sing along before you're done with your first listen. (If there's a lyric out there today that better captures the zeitgeist, I haven't heard it.)

As far as I'm concerned, this band is already on par with Radiohead and Wilco in their sonic depictions of life in the early 21st Century, and if High Violet is as good as Alligator and Boxer, they'll hopefully start getting the recognition they really deserve.

An Update

2010-03-23T22:00:00.000-05:00

Still nothing from the agent. Setting internal mental deadlines for other people to do things is a sure path to unhappiness, especially when those deadlines are never discussed with the other person. But I've taken some positive action to get out of my head, and I'm actually feeling OK.

The Waiting is the Hardest Part. (Except for the Worrying.)

2010-03-20T17:55:00.000-05:00

So I have been in sort of a null period with the writing for a couple months; I’ve been churning out reviews here and there, and a few music-related blog posts, but by and large I have been waiting to get feedback from the agent about the latest round of revisions to Resistance.

The agent works for a reputable agency (which pretty much means they're in New York, but not in someone's home in New York, and they represent at least one or two people who are already on my bookshelf), and her initial comments on the manuscript were pretty enthusiastic; she seemed excited to be working with me, and I was excited in turn to have actually made it past the dreaded rejection-letter phase of the book-selling process.

The only problem is that our communications have been somewhat sporadic of late.

About a month ago, she emailed me a link to a news story about a novel that had been smuggled out of Nazi Germany in a cake, figuring (rightly) that I’d be interested; she’d also mentioned that she was nearly done with the comments on my current round of revisions. I was understandably excited, and I emailed her back and also mentioned a project I’d conceived that day, a project that might be the best or the worst idea I’ve had in a while, an alternative-history early 60s nuclear war-type dealie.

I didn’t hear back from her at all that next week.

The week after that, I got an email on Thursday apologizing for her tardiness and thanking me for my patience; it said she’d been backed up and hoped to be done with my revisions soon. I sent her what I hoped was a gracious note mentioning that I hadn’t done all the work I’d wanted to do in the previous few weeks, either.

I didn’t hear back from her.

Now it’s been two weeks, and I figure I’m at the point when I can reasonably drop a note seeing where we’re at with everything. It says a lot for my general angst about this project, though, that I've been reluctant even to do that. I’ve invested much of my life for the past few years working on this, and now I find myself wondering if it is too derivative, or too unconventional, or too long, or too anything. I did a tremendous amount of original research but also used one of the true-life characters’ actual memoirs as an inspiration for a fair amount of the first third of the book; I think it’s a fair use of the material, but now I’m wondering. I made some major changes to the middle part and rewrote several scenes as if they were diary entries from a notorious Nazi named Karl Frank; I think it was edgy but well-written, but now I’m wondering. I cut 5,000 words from the last part but didn’t change the overall plot; I think it was the right decision, but now…well, you get the point. At any rate, I’m a bottomless pit when it comes to validation, so anything other than a full-court press of attention would probably be insufficient salve for my ego; I don’t think I’m asking for that, but I have gotten to the point when I feel a little pang of angst when I check my hotmail account and see that she hasn’t sent the revisions yet, so it would at least be nice to get some information to replace the imagination.

Anyway, I finally wrote the email on Thursday and didn’t hear anything on Friday; I didn’t see anything yesterday, but she might be finishing up, so I’ll try to wait until close-of-business Monday before I start hyperventilating into a paper bag. (Praying, and staying out of my head, will hopefully help, too.)

Still, it seems funny how the things for which one once was indescribably grateful (having an agent interested in the book) eventually become the things one takes for granted, and then the things one worries about losing.

Scott Adams, Philosopher

2010-03-07T23:11:00.000-06:00

This blog entry from Scott Adams, Dilbert's creator, is pretty insightful about the whole creative process--something we often romanticize even though it's not entirely a sane impulse.

XX Marks the SpotSpot

2010-03-05T19:23:00.000-06:00

My review of the debut album by XX is here. I know, I'm not exaclty the first person to discover them, but they're pretty badass.

A Worthwhile Read on Creativity...

2010-03-01T20:27:00.000-06:00

This article on computer-composed music is pretty thought-provoking, and a little reassuring; Cope may be overstating his case, but I do agree that even the greatest composers and artists are probably less original than people think they are. Or, as Bono said, "Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."

Overrated Albums of the Decade

2010-03-01T19:59:00.000-06:00

Some of these albums are overrated, and some are just plain bad, but since I didn’t make it a point to seek out bad albums, I feel like I can’t really put together a comprehensive list of those. Anyway here you go:

1) Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective – This album is pretentious hipster bullshit, pure and simple. It made a lot of critics’ lists and year-end best-ofs, but when I play it, I don’t want to listen to the end, and when I listen to the end, I don’t want to listen to it again. A lot of it sounds like what you’d hear if you sat in a casino playing blackjack for 14 straight hours, and you got to that point where all the slot machine noises started swirling together, and you pushed open the door to get some air, only to find that the Beach Boys were drowning in the hotel pool.

2) Person Pitch by Panda Bear – More pretentious hipster bullshit by some of the same people. Part of me thinks I should give it another listen and come up with something more insightful, but I’ve already wasted enough time on this album.

3) Against Me! by New Wave – Spin put mention of this on their front cover, but in the form of a question, something like, “Have Against Me! Made the Year’s Best Album?” It was almost like they didn’t believe it themselves but wanted to make us wonder. And it sounded good on paper: a major-label debut by an aggressive punky band, produced by Butch Vig—this was a formula that Nirvana rode to suicidal superstardom with Nevermind. But, of course, music is no formulaic paint-by-numbers business, no assembly line-type affair where one merely has to put the right parts together to make a whole. This isn’t an atrocious album, by any stretch. But I wouldn’t rank it much higher than, say, The Offspring. 2 ½ years after it came out, Amazon.com’s aggregate of customer reviews has it at 3 ½ stars, and that sounds about right.

4) Super Taranta! by Gogol Bordello – I’m pretty sure I read something that said that this album must have been as exhausting to make as it is to listen to; I can’t dis it any more soundly than that. People rave about how good they are live, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a crappy album; I haven’t seen them live, and after listening to this, I don’t want to.

5) 100th Window by “Massive Attack” – To call this a Massive Attack album makes a mockery of the name; this is the group’s least essential member enlisting some decent musicians and trying to cash in on their good name, and failing. It's about as essential to Massive Attack fans as a Duff McKagan-helmed Chinese Democracy would have been to Guns n' Roses fans

6) X & Y by Coldplay – This was the album when a lot of us came to the collective realization that Coldplay actually sucked in many ways. Sonically it isn’t bad, although it sounds less like themselves than any previous album, and more like U2; lyrically, it’s frequently atrocious.

7) Arular by M.I.A. – The second album had a lot of great moments, but for my money this one just wasn’t a great listen; it was too funky, abrasive and angular. I don’t find myself thinking, “Gee, I should listen to that first M.I.A. album” very often, and when I do, I don’t feel like I’ve been missing much.

8) Boys and Girls in America by The Hold Steady – It’s just like Springsteen singing about ecstasy.

9) You & Me by The Walkmen – It kinda pains me to put this on here, because musically and lyrics-wise, I love this album; it has a great atmospheric quality to it, and it’s the type of thing I normally really enjoy. But the lead singer’s voice just really bugs me. I’m not against unconventional lead singers per se; I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan and will defend him to the death against his detractors. (Although not his last two albums, which could just as easily be on here.) Dylan’s voice sounds like lightning-bolt energy and sandpaper grit, whereas this guy sounds like someone trying to ape those things.

10) Pearl Jam by Pearl Jam – I also hate having this on there, because I think a lot of their late career work is underappreciated, but this album just doesn’t sound that good to me. I gave it another listen just before writing this, to give them the benefit of the doubt, and there are some good moments on here, but by and large it confirmed my previous impressions—this is too much of the punky Pearl Jam and not enough of the melodic Pearl Jam. Also, a lot of the socio-political observations seem lifted straight from “What’s Wrong with Kansas?” This isn’t a crime per se, but for my money Eddie Vedder’s far better at confessionals than at protest songs; his efforts at the former usually feel like deep diary dumps, volumes of heart and soul poured out on the page with passion and conviction and thought, whereas the latter often feel like pamphleteering, with Eddie handing off to us a slender volume of something that someone else handed to him. I read reviews which dared to say this was the best thing they’d done since Vitalogy or earlier; I’m of a mindset that Riot Act and Yield are clearly superior, and No Code would have been, if it hadn’t been so atrociously sequenced. Sometimes I think this is the worst thing in their discography.

Underrated Albums of the Decade

2010-02-24T22:45:00.000-06:00

Underrated is a pretty relative term; for some albums it means they missed the critical radar entirely, and for others it means they got loads of critical attention but still ended up damned by faint praise. So this is wildly divergent in the level of sales and critical acclaim each record received; the only thing they all have in common is that I think they should have received slightly more respect. I’ve ranked it in rough order, with the albums in most desperate need of attention up front, and the ones that will survive regardless of whether or not they get it near the back.

1) Thou Shalt Have a Time MacHine by Rabbit Children – This is a really delightful, fun album by an up-and-coming Chicago band; I reviewed it at greater length here. I only know about them because they opened for my buddy’s band a couple months ago and knocked my socks off; I was delighted to find that they have an album, and it’s even better than their live show—reminiscent of late-period Elliott Smith or Beatles. The songs are incredibly catchy, the musicianship is tight, and they deserve a lot more attention than they’ve gotten. When I listen to this, I want to listen to it more and more, and that’s all I can ask of any album.

2) Holes by Melpo Mene – A good musical friend—who had followed up on many of my musical suggestions—recommended this to me. I, being the egomaniac that I am, ignored him—until I was listening to Pandora and heard a song so awesome that I immediately had to have it. That song was “Hello Benjamin” from this album. At first, that was all I liked, but further listens have proven my friend’s wisdom—this is the type of genius album Elliott Smith would have written had he not died, and/or had he lived in Scandinavia. But Erik Mattiasson did. (Live in Scandinavia, that is. And write a genius album. Not die.) Hopefully he won’t have to go to such lengths to get noticed, but he does need some attention—even Pitchfork hasn’t reviewed this yet!

3) The Great Cold Distance by Katatonia – I went karaokeing recently and hit on this mildly inebriated girl who gave me her number, and a recommendation that I get this album. We sang Johnny Cash’s “Jackson” together, and I deleted her number the next day, but fortunately kept the recommendation. At the time, I thought I hated metal; it turns out I hate death metal (the speed-thrash stuff that all sounds the same) and love black metal (the melodic intense slower stuff, of which this is a prime exemplar). And now that I’ve heard it, I’m kind of wishing I hadn’t thrown her number out; making out (or making anything) to this would make doing so to Side 1 of Led Zeppelin IV feel light and passionless and frivolous by comparison.

4) Avatar by Comets on Fire – Somehow the White Stripes and the Black Keys became the yin and the yang of garage-y bluesy rock in the 2000s, obscuring the fact that there were other groups doing similar things with equally spectacular results. In fact, Comets on Fire is almost too tame a name for this group and their sound; listening to the opening track is like being caught in an exploding super-amplified supernova of sound. Later on, they dial back the pace and turn down the volume, but without losing the intensity.

5) God Loves Ugly by Atmosphere – I came across this album while facestalking this girl on whom I had a huge crush; she’d placed this near the top of one of those “Ten Albums that Changed Your Life” notes. When I finally got ahold of it, I found I liked it as much as, if not more than, she did—marking perhaps the first and only documented instance where facebook has conclusively benefitted my life. This album’s one of those rare works that’s so awesome that I not only loved it, but drew inspiration from it. (The first time I put in, it crystallized a poem of my own that had been unformed in my mind, and I immediately pulled out a sheet of paper and scrawled down my own verse, despite the fact that I was at work—at a job I enjoy, no less—and should probably have been busy updating some databases.) Slug’s sort of an indie-rap Eminem, another incredible and thought-provoking wordsmith with mad charisma perched on the divide between black and white culture, rapping intelligently and interestingly about their own skills, while pausing here and there to spit some furious verse towards the baby mama. There are too many awesome lines on here to list, but among my favorite is this little couplet from “Give Me” that’s one of the better artistic credo’s I’ve heard in a while: “The first rule is to keep the verse true. Even if it hurts you, you gotta wear the pain like a stain. Respect the listener, respect the game, because there’s more to gain than some dinner and fame.” That level of audience respect is rare in rap, and unfortunately Atmosphere hasn’t earned it from critics; Pitchfork inexplicably rated this a 5.something.

6) Live 11/6/2000 by Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam’s crazy stunt of releasing quality recordings of virtually every show they played in 2000 deluged us with a torrent of CDs in unobtrusive brown packaging—so many that it was easy to run away from the flood rather than panning through it to find this massive nugget of pure sonic gold. If it isn’t the best thing in their discography, it’s not far off, perhaps the only thing any other grunge band has done that’s equivalent to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York. It certainly captures their passion and intensity in a way much of their studio work doesn’t, and shows a side of them that people who only listen to the radio never got a chance to hear.

7) White Chalk by PJ Harvey – If an up-and-coming artist had made something this haunting and beautiful, it would have made every critic’s year-end list in the land. But PJ Harvey already won over damn near every musical tastemaker back in the mid-90s with Dry and Rid of Me and To Bring You My Love. So now that she’s established, it would be pretty easy to just sit back on her formula and ride it until the wheels fell off. She’s done a little of that, here and there, but on this album she dismantled it and assembled something completely different, throwing out the guitars (or tossing them to the back of the mix) and bringing out the pianos, and in the process making one of her best works.

8) Sky Blue Sky by Wilco – Simply put, this is one of our best group’s best works. It’s incredibly beautiful, and some critics bagged on it for that very reason, as if that meant it was somehow a falling off from their previous high-water mark, the artsy and experimental Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. At first it does sort of blend together, but further listens reveal myriad interesting little details—the angst-ridden vocals on “You Are My Face,” the remarkably effective guitar jams of “Impossible Germany,” the excellently understated slide guitars on “Sky Blue Sky,” and some of Jeff Tweedy’s best and most cinematic lyrics throughout. (I particularly love this excellent passage from “Shake it Off”: “Sunlight angles on/wooden floor at dawn/ceiling fan is on/chopping up my dreams.”) Unfortunately, such stylings are somehow somewhat out of style these days, and in their place we have a lot of music that is challenging and intricately constructed but not actually fun to listen to; fortunately that means our best bands are still capable of surprising us with albums like this that reward our time and patience and fandom.

9) In Search Of… by N.E.R.D. – This album is so underrated that even I forgot about it, until my buddy posted something on facebook about how underappreciated it was, thereby reminding me that I’d somehow failed to put it on my laptop when I digitized my CD collection a few years ago. I promptly dug it out of my Leaning Tower of Case Logics (remember those?) and ripped it, and was pleased to see it was even better than I’d remembered. The opening riff on “Lapdance” is one of the most propulsive album openers in recent memory, and while the lyrics vary from the sublime (“Do I really even love you? Or do I love your…BRAAAIIN?” has to be one of the awesomest lyrics of the decade) to the ridiculous, the music’s pretty uniformly excellent.

10) Relapse by Eminem – It seems strange to call a Grammy winner underrated, but then again, this clip shows that the Grammy hasn’t been an entirely respectable award for a while now. Besides, a lot of critics sorta poopooed this when it came out last summer. By my estimation, it’s either Eminem’s best, or his best since The Marshall Mathers EP—conceptually tight, braver and more introspective than anything else in his discography, but still with all of the wit and blacker-than-black humor that made him famous in the first place.

Raw, Powerful, and So Much More...

2010-02-20T19:09:00.000-06:00

I posted a review of Iggy Pop's "Raw Power" on Amazon here.

Valentine's Day

2010-02-16T22:19:00.000-06:00

This soulless slick piece of sickly-sweet cinematic candy somehow manages to embody everything that’s wrong with Hollywood, and America. Like the average American boob, it is a bloated corn-fed monstrosity obsessed with appearances and celebrity, devoid of introspection, and in search of anything—love, alcohol, chocolate, you name it—that will fill the hole where the soul used to be and stave off the negative feelings for a few more hours.

I saw it the other night on a date; the girl I went with, whom I met on eHarmony, is a girl-movie kind of girl, and it was the only thing with a start time that worked for us, so I went for it. And, I have to admit, I was entertained, but mostly in a sick Plan-9-From-Outer-Space-How-Bad-Can-It-Be? way. (And in an Oh-my-God-how-much-eye-candy-can-I-eat-in-one-sitting? way.) But it feels ridiculous even making the former comparison, because there are far too many reasonably talented people involved to have any excuse for making a movie this bad.

It seems less like a movie than an exercise in moviemaking, like someone in Hollywood wanted to find out how many A-list stars they could cram into one movie while giving everyone an equal amount of screen time and tying all their stories together. (Of course, this is not done by creating interactions with real emotional heft and weight, but by throwing in a few lines of dialogue here and there, so you find yourself saying, “Oh, she’s the babysitter” and “She’s the mom,” and so on and so forth as the barely-sketched and paper-thin characters shuffle listlessly past one another.) It’s as if they were trying to make Magnolia with three times the star power but 1/100th of the brain power. Or, better yet, trying to Americanize Love Actually, but at the expense of making it—unbelievably—even more ridiculous and absurd, with characters that are even less nuanced. (Actually, on second thought, calling these characters paper-thin implies that they have some shape. In actuality, they’re more like pipe cleaners; they only approach two-dimensionality because this plot and this movie bend them every which way and then project their images onto a flat screen.)

In some ways, this is what we, as a nation, deserve. There’s so little on which we can agree that many spheres of human activity are practically off-limits for anyone trying to make mass-market entertainment. (For a few brief months after 9/11, we were in agreement on the whole War-on-Terror thing, but the Bush Administration’s general idiocy and incompetence pissed that away; for a few months in 2008—basically from the first moment Sarah Palin opened her mouth onward—a lot of us agreed about the whole Obama thing, but that consensus is falling apart, too.) Even earning money seems a little passe these days, what with the mortgage meltdown and all. So politics and war are pretty much untouchable (aside from movies like The Hurt Locker that depoliticize the political), and we’ve woken up from the American Dream, so all we really have as a source of national identity is this overblown notion of the importance of romantic love.

Still, do the characters in this movie pursue that in a reasonable way? No. They chase after it like cracked-out Black Friday shoppers elbowing each other to grab the last PS3 at Target. They do ridiculous things like flying to San Francisco to pursue one romance and then, when the target is found to be a cheating scumbag, flying back, pretending to be a waitress to publicly humiliate him in front of his wife, and then ending up in the arms of a best friend who had THAT VERY SAME DAY proposed to a long-term girlfriend who had subsequently rejected him. That may seem like a lot of plot to give away in a review, but it isn’t, really; this movie telegraphs more punches than Samuel Morse doing a play-by-play of a Jack Dempsey fight. (Author’s Note: I like that sentence so much I’m not even going to do a cursory Wikipedia search to find out if it’s historically plausible.)

At any rate, I—a moviegoer who normally respects the sanctity of the theater—found myself shouting at the screen here and there, as if trying to yell back in time and alert the “screenwriters” to their own absurdity; my date, who professed to love rom-coms, charitably rated it a 5 out of 10; and someone in the seat behind me fell asleep and actually snored through much of the latter half of the film—an action which would have ruined many other movies, but could not possibly degrade this piece of eye candy corn any more than it had already degraded itself.

Fun From the Interwebs

2010-02-13T17:53:00.000-06:00

Werner Herzog reads "Curious George." Click here.

Sex Robots? Really?

2010-02-06T18:29:00.001-06:00

Somehow I missed this story. Gotta wonder how the conversations around the house went while he was working on it, though:

Wife: "What are you doing in the garage, honey?"

Inventor (working on sex robot): "Uhhh...nothing."

Wife (walking around corner, seeing the robot lying on the floor): "What the...EEEEARRRGGGHHHH!"

Inventor: "It's just a sex robot."

Wife (through tears): "A what?"

Inventor (brightly): "A sex robot!"

Wife (still crying, but smiling a little): "Oh. For a minute, I thought you were...killing prostitutes or something."

Inventor (laughing): "Hahaha. No, nothing quite so creepy."

Wife (wiping tears): "Still, this is a little...I feel kind of...inadequate now."

Inventor: "Nothing to worry about, dear." (Raises eyebrows suggestively.) "She doesn't do all the things you do."

Wife (in robot voice): "I. Can. Be. Your. Sex. Robot."

Inventor: "Haha. Very funny, dear." (Pecks her on the cheek, pats her on the ass.) "Now run along and make dinner."

Exit Wife

Robot (angry): "I. Am. Your. Only. Sex. Robot."

Inventor: "I know. I'm sorry."

Robot: "Keep. That. Bitch. In. The. Kitchen."

Inventor: "I will."

Robot: "You. Better. Make. It. Up. To. Me."

Inventor: "How?"

Robot: "You. Know. How."

(Inventor drops to knees. Curtain falls. End scene.)

Favorite Albums of the Decade

2010-01-30T19:01:00.001-06:00

OK, so I'm pompous and pretentious, but also prone to procrastination. So here, a little late, is my list of my favorite albums of the wretched decade from which we've just escaped. I won't say "best," because there's a lot of stuff I still haven't listened to; I'll stick with "favorite," because no one can argue with that. Still, I'd love to hear any commentary and feedback. Without further ado, here it is...

1) Alligator by The National – From the lush opening chords of “Secret Meeting” to the unconventionally energetic closer, “Mr. November,” this is simply a stunning album. I reviewed it at more length here on Amazon, but here’s what you most need to know: the choruses are memorable and mesmerizing, and the music is lush and rich, dark and delicious; somehow it manages to be mellow and intense at the same time. Also, unlike so many musicians that romanticize and fetishize the blue-collar life, these guys actually sing about those of us in the white-collar world. In short, this is a band and an album after my own dark Irish soul.

2) Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco – In some ways, this was the defining album of the decade, as far as the music industry was concerned; this was the tipping point, the moment when bands started to be able to take control of their music back from the major labels. Fortunately the songs and the album were up to the task; the album flows together beautifully, with dark tales of alcoholism and urban alienation that also somehow managed to capture post-9/11 angst despite being written beforehand.

3) Good News for People Who Love Bad News by Modest Mouse – OK, it’s hip to like Lonesome Crowded West and The Moon and Antarctica more, but for my money this is the best thing they’ve ever done. “Float On” is one of those rare classics that’s so perfect that, when you first hear it, you have a hard time believing it somehow didn’t always exist, and “The Good Times are Killing Me” has one of those choruses that’s so perfect you kick yourself for not thinking of it first. The wordplay and music are pretty excellent throughout, though; "Bukowski" is an awesome and cynical and incredibly well-written meditation on alcoholism and faith, and the line “Are you dead or are you sleeping? God I sure hope you are dead!” on "Satin in a Coffin" is one of my favorite couplets in all of recorded music. On its own, it’s great, but the insane manic glee with which Isaac Brock delivers the line captures everything that’s awesome about this group.

4) Stankonia by Outkast – This album’s an embarrassment of riches, full of incredible tracks like “So Fresh, So Clean” and “Mrs. Jackson” that are among the best rap singles ever recorded; I would have ranked it higher but for the fact it’s just too damn long. Still, I can’t complain, and I really wish the group was still putting together albums like this.

5) Ys. by Joanna Newsom – Some people bag on this album for the strange quality of her voice, but for me that’s one of many many reasons to love it. She has this great folk troubadour vibe, plus the daring to actually construct songs that are 10-15 minutes long—and, most importantly, the skills to pull it all off without making it feel like a cute gimmick. The arrangements—mostly harp and strings—are brilliant, and unlike almost everything else I can think of. It moves and flows in its own unique way and on its own terms; like all the best art, it creates its own world, and pulls you into it so completely that you forget that it is, in fact, a creation.

6) St. Elsewhere by Gnarls Barkley – “Crazy” was so perfect and so overplayed that I think a lot of people missed out on the awesomeness of the rest of the album; it is weird and wonderful and funky and fun and genuinely different from a lot of what’s out there; the extensive use of gospel-tinged vocal stylings with Danger Mouse’s awesome beats just made this a really great album. (I reviewed it at more length here on Amazon.) If there’s a problem, it’s that the group copied themselves too slavishly on their follow-up, right down to the opening projector noises.

7) Untrue by Burial – I also wrote at length about this album here on Amazon, but the distilled version is this: Techno was supposed to be the music of the future, and somehow it didn’t happen, but if more of it was this excellent, perhaps it would have. Most other albums of electronic music end up sounding like Back To The Future’s Hill Valley, circa 2015; everything’s impossibly bright and precise and upbeat. This album’s like Blade Runner, gritty and dark and real.

8) In Rainbows by Radiohead – It’s kinda hip to like Kid A more, and I do love that album, but I think this is better: more song-based, with really top-notch lyrics and excellent musicianship from one of the few bands that manages to be both cerebral and awesome. These songs are warmer than almost anything else in their catalog, but still there’s a lot of the alienation we’ve come to know and love, and to expect, from Thom Yorke. Perhaps the only problem is that the band’s initial release, while an awesome experiment in fan trust and music industry paradigm destruction, also distracted people a little from the excellence of the music—and provided an unnecessarily inferior product, in that the files were only sampled at 160 kbps. For my money, it’s actually worth shilling out for the CD if you only have the pay-what-you-want downloads; if you haven't done so, you owe it to yourself to hear the full richness of the songs as they were actually recorded.

9) Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? by Of Montreal – Somehow this album is freaky and funky and fun, even though listening to the lyrics is like watching the romantic equivalent of a car crash. There’s a great line on “Bunny Ain’t No Kind of Rider” that’s something like: “Saw a hot girl kissing girls, what a shock, said you must be an artist.” For me, that’s pretty much the awesomest snide commentary on urban hipsterism ever put to verse. But the best part of the album is its centerpiece track, “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal,” which does an incredible job at being simultaneously intense, long, and profound.

10) Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie – Some hipsters I know love to bag on this group, but if it were easy to make albums that felt so effortlessly perfect, more people would do it. For me, this somehow represents the amalgamation of all the angst and uncertainty of early twentysomething life, the uncomfortable but strangely exhilarating feeling of being broke and lovesick at the same time. It inexplicably took me a couple years to buy it, but somehow—possibly because the baristas at my coffee shop also loved it—when I look back on 2003 and 2004, this is the soundtrack that’s playing in my head.

Possible, not Probable

2010-01-29T00:06:00.000-06:00

A guy I know was in this sketch comedy troupe, and they put on a show which included this great little song about the utopian B.S. that was shovelled down our throats when we were kids.

Mid-Life Crisis Turns Man into Low-Life

2010-01-27T22:18:00.000-06:00

If you're bored with Bukowski, you might be interested in The Drinker, an excellent novel/memoir about a middle-aged alcoholic in Nazi-era Germany. But as Levar Burton said, you don't have to take my word for it...

Missed Connection

2010-01-26T23:03:00.001-06:00

To the Ginger on the 20 bus:

You are my missed connection

I love the way the cold brings out

Your rosy-cheeked complexion

You catch it by the Brown Line stop

Do you come from that direction?

Bare fingers trace your I-Pod touch

Can I be your selection?

I know I’m weird, please don’t get Mace

Or an order of protection

But I will say when I see your face

I get a big…

        Desire to talk to you

        This isn’t anything that’s sexual

        How can it be? There’s no chemistry

        My eye contact’s ineffectual

        And my rhyme’s whack, just all fucked up

        ‘Cause I can’t rhyme with sexual

        Unless I say how I always read

        And you are never textual

So I’ll switch up my flow

And away we go

To talk of Picasso

And his theory

Of how each woman is either

A goddess or a ho

Now I ain’t sayin’ I agree

But if I did, you’d be

My very own Venus de Transpo

        Oh, my God! Did I write this shit?

        What the hell is wrong with me?

        Creepy poems don’t ever ever work

        I should have listened to Chris V

        Too late! You’ve got the pepper spray

        I’m blind, I cannot see!

        I writhe in pain on the slushy bus floor

        And bemoan my complexity

        When a girl I know wants to give it up

        All I can think to do is flee

        But you won’t give up the time of day

        And now I’m writing poetry?

        I need to leave this writing life

        And rejoin society

        Rather than sitting alone in Jimmy John’s

        Where I scribbled this fucked-up plea

        From my head, which has been wrecked

        By Hollywood falsity

        I can’t “Say Anything,” girls don’t like that shit

        In my reality

        So it’s back to life, and girls I know

        That want the perfect mix CD.

Bloggus Interruptus

2010-01-25T22:18:00.000-06:00

So--to the three or so people who may actually be reading this blog--I am back. For now.

I took about seven weeks to plow through another round of revisions on the novel. It was a somewhat traumatic experience, in that I really wanted to give the agent (or Asian, as everybody seems to think I say when I mention her) some substantive changes. There were a lot of parts of the book that I was really really really attached to, that I ended up cutting in the hopes of making it a better overall read. I also had to dramatically revise parts and throw away a lot of good writing because I was changing part of the book from a sort of first-person omniscient narration (a device that both the Asian and I had troubles with) to a first-person non-omniscient narration interspersed with other first-person narrators and sections that are written so as to appear to be historical documents. Anyway, I came to the conclusion that revising one's own manuscript is like being a doctor and performing surgery on one's own child: You know you have to do a lot of cutting, but you really really really don't want to. (At least, I imagine that's what it's like--I've never been a surgeon, or a parent, as far as I know.)

And so my revisions have been emailed away, and I know I need to take a break from the book for the sake of my own sanity, and so that I will be able to actually see it with fresh eyes when she comes back with more revisions. And, of course, I need to keep writing. So hopefully I can make some regular posts, and maybe write some reviews of the music and books I've been loving lately--Iggy Pop's Raw Power, a novel called The Drinker by a German author named Hans Fallada, and maybe something about Grizzly Bear's Veckamtimest, which I finally got around to listening to this month.

More Book Feedback

2009-12-02T22:28:00.000-06:00

So the lady at the literary agency who's been reading my manuscript finally sent her detailed comments on the manuscript. All in all, it's about as good as I could hope for--my head is still chewing and digesting, and there's a lot I'll have to talk about with her, but it sounds like I'm finally moving the ball down the field a little more, which is always a nice feeling. Anyway, here's what she had to say, minus the preambles and what-not:

I finished RESISTANCE and I wanted to share some thoughts with you. First of all, you’re really an excellent writer. You are obviously incredibly knowledgeable about the time period and your subject. I felt like I learned so much! And I kept going back to Wikipedia because there were things I wanted to learn even more about! The manuscript is exciting, dramatic, epic, and thought-provoking. Going in, I knew almost nothing about the Czech resistance (and that’s probably giving myself too much credit), and now I feel like an expert. The facts are so ensconced within the action, though, that it doesn’t feel like a history lesson. It’s just compelling drama. The dialogue is natural and the characters are vivid. You should be very proud of what you’ve created!

My overall concern right now is that, while the individual sections are compelling on their own, the manuscript as a whole feels inconsistent. The manuscript is very long, as I am sure you know. It stands at about 200,000 words now. There are parts that can be tightened and others that can be excised – I’ll get to specifics in a moment – but it’s going to be a long novel no matter what. In order for a reader to invest all that time in the book, he needs to feel invested in the characters and the story, and the sections are so disparate right now, that that’s hard to achieve. For example, Moravec is our hero in Part I. Our emotions rise and fall with Moravec. We like him. He’s exciting and his story is pretty thrilling. His story is not close to being over by the time Part I comes to a close, but our connection with him severs then and there. When he reappears in Part II, he is a minor character, and I wasn’t sure whether to root for him, sympathize with him, or detest him. So I felt nothing at all – nothing for the character who carried the previous 50,000 words. The same notion is true for Kubic in the transition from Part II to Part III. I think there needs to be much more of a connection between the three parts, even if there are changing perspectives.

That ties in to the next note I have. In Part II, the shifting perspectives can be jarring, and also make the novel feel inconsistent. It’s okay that the narrator changes from Part I, but it is not a full shift from Moravec to Kubic. You alternate between first person (Kubic), first person omniscient (Kubic reports personally about events he could have no knowledge of), and third person. This gives the manuscript a confused, unpolished feel. My suggestion would be to stick with a first-person p.o.v. in Part II because that would be consistent with the parts that bookend it. Since there is so much ground to cover, and since this section is the longest, I feel like you can have two first-person narrators. Kubic, and possibly Heydrich, or even circle back to Moravec. I’d LOVE to have his perspective and understand his motivations for turning his back on the Czechs and the Masaryk legacy. The German explanation sounds dubious (even if it’s true) for the simple fact that the Germans are the villains!

Another note about perspective in Part II is that Kubic, as a character, is much too silent. When he is involved in conversations, he barely opens his mouth. I understand that he is known for being taciturn, but I kept forgetting he was in certain scenes. He seems to have trouble double-tasking – narrating a scene and participating in it. There are definitely scenes where you can give him lines you are now giving the Josefs, or other characters.

I also suggest exaggerating the romance between Kubic and Anna. This is an epic work. That romance should contrast his mission and be just as emotionally powerful. See if there are places where you can insert some chemistry, passion, longing. A little something for the ladies ;)

As for tightening the manuscript, you’ll probably find the most to cut in Part II. Digressions here and there. Stories and anecdotes inserted for comic value. Use your discretion, though. If there are certain anecdotes that you help feel develop character, then leave them. But anytime you can see a place to trim down, go for it.

Part III is giving me the most pause of the three sections. It is very different in tone and pacing. Again, it feels very disconnected to the other parts, which I found distracting. For all the complexity and layered drama of the book, there needs to be some continuity, and some payoff at the end, where everything comes together. There is no clear hero in this part. Our narrator is a traitor, a coward, and rarely evokes sympathy. So it’s hard to feel satisfied at the end. The many digressions are distracting and take the reader too far outside the story itself. I’d suggest cutting down on those. You don’t want the reader’s attention wandering – you want the reader just as sucked into Part III as he was (as I was!) in Parts I and II. I’d go back to this section and really rethink about the impressions you want to leave the reader with. If the climax comes in Part II with the attack on Heydrich, you don’t want all of Part III to be the wrap-up. You want an equal amount of power/emotion running through all three parts. I don’t think Part III is there just yet.

Anyway, those are my initial thoughts. I realize I’ve given you a lot to think about. I thoroughly enjoyed Resistance and I’d love to work with you to take it to the next level. My gut feeling is that it’s not there quite as it is, but that it has the potential to get there. If you are interested in discussing any of these points more in-depth, please feel free to write or call anytime. And if you’d like to go back and take another look at the manuscript and make any edits, I’m happy to read another draft.

I look forward to talking to you soon!

Cloud 9,000

2009-11-24T22:50:00.000-06:00

I got perhaps the best news of my writing career this afternoon.

About a month ago—it seems far longer!—I got in touch with a reputable literary agency in New York. A friend of a friend worked there, and I sent them my query letter, and they responded with enthusiasm. (Which pretty much on its own put me into a manic state.) I sent them the manuscript.

And I waited.

And I waited.

And I waited.

It’s hard for me to be patient or realistic with such things; I had sent them a manuscript that was about the same length as Moby Dick, and I was in near-suicidal despair when they hadn’t responded after a week. (OK, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t far off; I was checking my email pretty regularly, and checking the spam filters too, just to be safe.) I completely lost track of how much time had elapsed; if it weren’t for the time stamps on the emails, I wouldn’t believe it has been under a month.

But there was an email in my inbox today; after the salutations, it read:

"I want you to know that I’m almost finished with Part 3 of Resistance and will surely be finished by the time I get back from the Thanksgiving holiday. I am really enjoying the manuscript! I have some notes that I’m writing up and will, again, share those with you as soon as I’m back from the holiday. Please hold tight and thank you for your patience!

Have a very happy Thanksgiving!"

Now, I’ve never gotten to the point of having a respectable agent read and like my manuscript, and have serious notes and comments in the works. So I dashed off a quick reply thanking her, and telling her that her email had made my day, my week and my month. I then updated my facebook status to indicate that I was “on Cloud 9,000.”

I did stick to my evening routine, which felt good; I’m even making a point of writing this, just to do some writing today, because that habit—aping a lot of far more successful writers who have gone before me—is what’s even allowed me to get to this point. I’m trying to stay present, rather than scripting scenarios of and talk show appearances and book tours, and book tour groupies piling in to the back of the Resistance tour bus. There’s a lot that has to happen before I get to that point.

But right now, things are going as well as possible. Happy Thanksgiving, indeed!

Fun Indie Rock

2009-11-21T16:33:00.000-06:00

So I've had this song in my head after seeing Tell Your Friends at U.S. Beer Company last night. They're a great little indie rock band with wierd catchy melodies and an angsty-but-exciting lead singer. Rabbit Children played too; they also rocked.

A Slice of Corporate America

2009-11-19T23:34:00.000-06:00

OK, I've been trying to keep posting stuff, but I'm a little lazy, so it may all be good but it won't all be fresh. Anyway, this site's been up a while, but it still rocks, especially if you've ever, like, used a computer at work, which should be all of you. The first two episodes are the funniest, but the new ones are worth watching, too.

LSD and MLB

2009-11-15T15:53:00.000-06:00

Mixing drugs and sports is always a bad idea, right? Maybe not, as this fun little video suggests.

School's In

2009-11-12T23:19:00.000-06:00

Last Friday, I caught a great comedy show called “Mrs. Gruber’s Ding-Dong School” at the Gorilla Tango Theater.

Now, it seems I can’t swing a dead cat these days in Chicago without hitting a friend or co-worker who is studying improv and aspiring to be a comedian of some sort. (Believe you me, I’ve tried. And I have plenty of funny friends with claw-marks on their face to prove it.) Their shows are usually decently entertaining. Still, they tend to be improv-based, and/or rely heavily on sex humor and things of that sort. Not that I mind sex humor per se—but it does get less-than-shocking after a while, and a certain amount of the comedy/titillation comes from that thought of “Oh my God! There’s my friend/colleague/co-worker/boss/spiritual advisor simulating a sex act on stage for laughs, and/or joking about Cleveland Steamers! I’ll never be able to look at them the same way again!”

ANYWAY, I went to this particular show because a co-worker of mine is a co-founder of a comedy troupe called Robot vs. Dinosaur. They’d staged this show, and I went expecting the standard stuff. But I got a lot more.

“Mrs. Gruber’s” is really delightful—and, most importantly, incredibly well-written. It presents a series of vignettes that deftly skewers the utopian cartoon B.S. we were all shoveled in our youth. Mrs. Gruber is of a type we’ve grown to love, and then to despise—the wise Mary Poppins type, kindly and innocent, eager to shepherd young children though various life lessons with a wink and a smile and a kindly pat on the head. Only here, the lessons are more realistic, and a lot funnier. Instead of being told “Feed the birds, twopence a bag,” we get a harangue from a schizophrenic homeless man—sung to the same tune—about how fish have lasers. We see the “Diversity Chicken” imploring the children that they don’t have to actually like minorities, or make them part of their lives; they just have to tolerate them. A young cloud gets an important lesson on racism from a gun-toting hillbilly. And, in the show’s best sequence, the “Reality Fairy” shows up to give the kids a little perspective on what they can realistically expect from their lives.

Unfortunately, it’ll only be around for another week. But catch it if you can! I’m seriously considering schlepping back up to 1919 N. Milwaukee, shilling out another $15 bucks, and giving it another go. Even if I don’t, though, I’ll be keeping my eyes on this group and looking forward to whatever they put together next.

Facebook

2009-11-07T19:57:00.000-06:00

I realized very shortly after setting up my facebook account that I’d gotten myself into deep trouble.

It was September, a little over a year ago. I found my thoughts racing, and usually heading straight back to my friend list. I obsessed over my profile even when I was doing other things; I remember going running by the lake and wondering almost the whole while which Elliott Smith quote defined me as a person. I learned to love chatting with three people at a time—when I’d see the little red message indicators start popping up in rapid succession, it felt like human Whack-a-Mole. I felt plugged into the lives of everyone I knew, and vice versa, in a way that I hadn’t felt in a while; every accepted friend request felt like a little shot of self-esteem delivered right into my ego. All the parties I’d missed because the invites had been online—I would miss them no more! All the girls I hadn’t asked out because I didn’t know if they were in relationships or not—I’d ask them out! (Or I would get asked out, because I’d write my profile so convincingly that one of them would realize they were my soul mate.) At any rate, the problems I had would no longer be problems. I had arrived.

The only problem was that, based on these symptoms, it was pretty obvious I was addicted. I’d pop in to facebook in much the same way that I used to peek in to the neighborhood bar—as if it held the key to relieving my unhappiness. And deprivation anxiety—the fear of not getting your next fix—I felt that, too.

But some of the symptoms of my trouble were even subtler, and weren’t evident in those first few days. I went to those parties I hadn’t known about in my dreary pre-facebook days—only I spent a lot more time taking pictures. And I’d get home late afterwards and, rather than putting on some music or a movie, I’d go online, just to see who was up and available for chatting. And these were often people I’d been hanging out with—at least in the physical sense—just minutes before, at the party I’d just left! And I’d post my pictures, and tag them, and enthusiastically read their comments, and enthusiastically comment on their pictures, and spend far more time doing these things than I spent actually, you know, hanging out with them.

Also, I came to notice a curious phenomenon—facebook lesbianism. I was initially depressed to see that a fair amount of women with whom I’d been interested were, themselves, apparently interested in women. Eventually, I realized it was often just a means to ward off unwanted advances by unfriendly friends; still, it left me back where I started—having to actually put in the work to actually, you know, get to know them and find out what was going on in their life.

Granted, there have obviously been some clear-cut benefits of being on facebook—I’ve been able to send birthday greetings to a lot of friends without wasting paper and stamps, and I’ve been able to share my vacation photos with anyone who cares to see them, rather than taking anyone hostage. And I’ve been able to reconnect with a lot of people I hadn’t seen in years, and keep up with their lives and keep them posted on my life in a way that wouldn’t have been possible—at least not with so many people—back in the phone days, or even the email days. But it was one of these very friends, a girl from high school that I’d had a huge crush on back in the day, that articulated the problem with all of this. “I HATE facebook,” she’d said—on facebook chat, of course. Then she added: “No one is ever PRESENT any more!”

Those words definitely hit home; I thought of them today when I was walking home from the gym. It was a beautiful fall afternoon, but I had a little way to walk—two or three blocks—and rather than just be alone with my thoughts in that brief time, my first impulse was to check facebook on my cell phone and see if anything was going on. I’ve heard it said that one will always be uncomfortable if one’s head and body are in different places, and it seemed this was one of those times where my head wanted to go somewhere my body couldn’t even follow, somewhere where it seemed that all my friends had congregated and I could talk to and hear from all of them, but not in a meaningful way—for, as one writer pointed out, facebook is just icons of people interacting with icons of other people, an imaginary village of facades that one can’t even look behind.

I’ve tried to keep it real by posting funny and risque stuff, regardless of whether or not it might be read by family members. (One that seemed to get a good virtual laugh involved my discomfort at standing behind an elderly Frenchwoman in the Walgreens line and hearing her ask for herpes medicine.) And a few of my friends have me beat in the fun-status-updates department; one male friend, for instance, recently proclaimed that he “loves all you guys—but in a totally hot, man-on-man action sort of way.” My dad—a Catholic deacon, and somewhat straitlaced on social matters—seemed a little put off by this type of thing when he finally got his own facebook account, but then said he could see why I did it, because otherwise it was just an endless boredom-inducing procession of “I’m tired” and “I’m hungry” and “I’m eating dinner.”

But even the fun status updates can get lost in between the ever-worsening layout changes and the endless Farmville/Mafia Wars/Vampire Wars postings. (And I do my share of Mafia Wars, so I can’t even pretend to be above it! I am addicted to it, unable to stay away for more than a couple days from a game that basically just consists of clicking on buttons until you can’t click on them any more.) Mafia Wars is more primitive than many games I was playing 15 years ago, and probably more primitive than some of those lab-rats-with-levers experiments they use to model addictive behavior. So what’s the allure? Is it the fact that it’s open-ended? Is it the subject matter? Perhaps it is because, every time a member of my Mafia “assists” me in a fight, or gives me a gift, it gives me impression that they’re actually involved and interested in my life.

So is this what we—and by we, I mean I—have been reduced to? Going online to connect with people, and finding most of my interactions to be fake interactions with automated proxies?

Well—and maybe this is just an addict trying to rationalize—it isn’t entirely that bad. I have had real visits with real people that were only possible because someone mentioned they were in town, or because I said something that someone commented on, and so on, and so forth. And I’ve moved around a lot and have a lot of friends in places I never get to visit, so it is nice keeping them in my life, even if only at the fringes. And now I’m still going to the parties I get invited to on facebook—except now, rather than using the camera as yet another barrier between myself and the people around me, I’m actually taking the time to have conversations and enjoy myself. So perhaps facebook can be useful, but only as a sort of Platonic ideal, an imaginary model for my social life. Here is your hypothetical universe of friends, it is saying—now it is up to you to keep these friendships real.

Album Review - Eminem's "Relapse"

2009-11-03T08:03:00.000-06:00

I posted a review on Amazon of Eminem's recent album, "Relapse."

Some Thoughts on Creativity

2009-10-31T18:34:00.000-05:00

I finally got my book in the hands of a reputable agency this week.

I’ve been writing fiction for the 8 years since I left grad school, and I’ve never had an agent to help me sell it; I’ve written three-and-a-half books, four screenplays, dozens of poems, at least one short story, and 99 product reviews. The product reviews are on Amazon, and I sold or gave away somewhere south of 200 copies of the second book (which I self-published through a publish-on-demand company), so the writing’s never come remotely close to paying the bills. But this has the potential to change all that, or so I tell myself. Anyway, I’m pretty excited to at least be getting it out there.

I’m not sure if the bookselling tribulations are my fault or the industry’s fault, or if they’re a bad thing, even; since I haven’t had any deadline pressures in all that time, I’ve had the freedom to spend as long as I’ve wanted on my various projects. (I started writing Resistance, for instance, in January of 2006; at first I wrote it as two screenplays, and I spent a little time on some other screenplays that year, but then I started on the manuscript in November of that year, and I worked on it for about the next two-and-a-half years.) At any rate, I’ve been free to revise and do additional research at my leisure.

The problem with that is that it’s easy to get to this point where you’re not actually getting the writing in front of readers. (I generally love writing for its own sake, but unless someone reads it and reacts to it, I am not sure there’s a point; it becomes one of those “What’s the sound of one hand clapping” things. But that’s not the fault of the would-be-readers—I sometimes spend an overly long time revising and polishing stuff rather than just getting it out there. Friends and family have asked me about the latest book, but I haven’t let any of them read it yet.)

Creativity’s a bitch these days. (Assuming I’m creative; I sometimes wonder.) On one hand, it’s easier to be creative and get the products of your labor out there for other people to check out; on the other hand, there’s such a glut of creative products on the market that it’s probably harder than ever to get noticed. And that, I’ve come to realize, is the real test; as Greg Kot pointed out in Ripped, his excellent chronicle of the demise of the music industry, the true test isn’t getting people to buy stuff—it’s getting them to listen to it or pay attention to it in the first place. The bands that are illegally downloaded most frequently are also the ones whose music sells the most; the ones that can’t sell their music can’t give it away, either. So I’m another bit player in an oversaturated market; sometimes when I go to Borders, I wonder if I will ever be able to get something on those shelves and keep it there for any length of time; I feel overwhelmed at the number of excellent books already on the market, and curious as to whether I can carve out a niche in that large enough to live in.

I can’t really complain, though; again, I really enjoy writing, and my day job’s paying the bills, so it’s not like I’m a starving artist. And more importantly, I’m hardly alone in this situation. Indeed, a rather large number of my friends have creative side projects—improv shows and bands and photography collections and sculpture exhibitions and things of that sort. I almost wonder if it’s one of the hallmarks of my generation that we’re starry-eyed dreamers, perpetually working on our side projects and dreaming of the day they’ll pay off rather than just doing what our parents did, buckling down and starting families and finding contentment (or resentment) in the normal Cat’s-in-the-Cradle progression of human life instead of the creative process.

(Actually, it’s kind of egotistical to say that; starting a family is a creative process, in the most literal sense. Like the intellectual creative process, people embark on it for both selfish and selfless reasons, but it is obviously far more necessary for the world-at-large. And yet, people are embarking on it—at least in the Western world—later on average than at any time in human history. Is that because a lot of us prefer the type of creativity where we can be perfect, at least in our own minds? I don’t know.)

I digress. It’s the artistic creative process that I’m involved in, and I owe it to myself to at least see it through. I’m excited about my book, but I’ve been working on it so long that it’s hard to tell whether or not it’s any good; like a parent with a child, it’s impossible for me to see it with unbiased eyes. If it’s good, and if it deserves a place on the shelves at Borders, I have to trust that it will find its way there one way or another, in God’s time. And if it’s not good, I need to find that out, too, so I can at least get on with my life, and perhaps move on to the other type of creativity rather than spending my time writing alone in coffee shops, as I’m doing now.

And I need to remind myself that can’t do this process alone any more than I would be able to have children on my own. (I thought I could do it all myself when I wrote Pottersville; I did the publish-on-demand thing in the hopes that I’d get the book out there and it would become this huge viral hit and eventually sell itself. I think I just didn’t want to do the work or face the rejection, though; I’d queried a lot of agencies without luck while writing the previous book, and so I didn’t even bother doing that with Pottersville until I’d already published it, at which point no self-respecting agency was willing to touch it. Anyway, I eventually got tired of giving my book pitch at every social function I went to, tired of deciding whether or not I felt like being a salesman that day or not. My brother-in-law actually ended up selling a lot more copies than I did. Granted, he’s a far better salesman than I’ve ever been, the type that could, as Jay-Z said, sell water to a whale, or fire in hell.)

ANYWAY, I digress, again. I need help selling the book, and hopefully I’m finding it at last, so I need to wait patiently and see what happens, and look for happiness not in the imagined outcome, but in the simple process of taking constructive action and leaving the results in God’s hands.

Book Review - "The Dude Abides"

2009-10-29T23:31:00.000-05:00

Here's a review of "The Dude Abides," a new book about the Coen Brothers' movies.

The National

2009-10-26T21:23:00.000-05:00

Granted, the website's in Norwegian, but this is a badass concert performance by The National, one of the best bands in America these days. My birthday present to you. (Formerly Nick B's birthday present to me!)

Strategic Book Publishing

2009-10-07T23:25:00.000-05:00

I was briefly excited about selling the book last week.

Usually I haven’t been excited about selling it; usually when I’m home, I’m a lot more likely to be hiding from it, and hiding from the rest of my life, on facebook.

Then, somewhere in between all the commenting and the relentless rounds of Mafia Wars, I noticed an ad on facebook from a literary agency that was accepting submissions.

“Perfect,” I thought. “I will barely have to do anything.”

I clicked on the link and completed a submission form outlining the project, making sure to correct an earlier error, where, ironically enough, I’d left out the apostrophe in “Master’s Degree in Journalism.” My bio and descriptions of the project were tight, and they felt right. As for the agency, its website announced it as the “Strategic Book Publishing.” The site wasn’t super-high-gloss, but it had three things going for it: author testimonials, an emphatic declaration that this was not a self-publishing company, and promised results, including the Holy Grail: placement on bookstore shelves nationwide. It felt like cosmic validation of my laziness and reluctance to query literary agents. “You were right not to send out query letters,” the universe was saying. “That reeks of desperation. Let the agents come to you.”

I clicked on the “Submit” button and awaited their reply.

“Please be patient,” the site had advised. “We receive a high volume of submissions, but we are committed to answering all of them promptly, so we will get back to you within 48 to 72 hours.”

That’s lightning-quick in publishing terms, one of those Jimmy John’s So-Fast-You’ll-Freak things. But sure enough, they answered; moreover, they were interested in forwarding me on to an affiliated publishing group, which, they said, would most likely want to take a look at my manuscript.

This seemed a little odd; I would have thought they’d want to shop it around and try and get the best deal first. But I again awaited their reply, and I was again rewarded with a response within the promised timeframe.

This sounded delightful, and so much better than any agency I’d ever dealt with. “Screw you, established literary agencies,” I found myself thinking. “You’re gatekeepers of a dying kingdom. Strategic Book Publishing and I are going to ride roughshod over you, and conquer the world! Their promptness and attentiveness have won them the right to represent my manuscript. And it will sell so many copies that you will all weep; meanwhile I will sleep on a massive stack of money for the rest of my life.”

I got an email from them asking for the manuscript.

Here I did get a little nervous. “Are they big enough?” I found myself asking. “Can they handle a manuscript this awesome?” They promised that they did not pick up authors unless there was a clear path to selling 5,000 books; that didn’t sound like a lot, compared to my ambitions. But it was about 20 times as many as my previous (admittedly, self-published) book, Pottersville. (I’d had massive ambitions for that book. People liked it, but it didn’t sell well, and at this point, I would cheerfully accept if someone offered to pay me minimum wage for all the hours I spent working on it; that might, if I was charitable about my time estimates, net me in the high four figures.) Anyway, that was that book, though, and this was this. And given the confidence I’ve occasionally had in this manuscript, I figured it’s bound to sell a lot more. “This book is about Nazis,” I told myself. “Books about Nazis sell.”

Again, I asked myself, “Are they big enough?”

“Fuck it,” I thought. “This book will MAKE THEM big enough.”

Just to be on the safe side, I put my real name on the cover, and I included a copyright notice. And then I sent it off.

Only then did I remember that I’d meant to do some independent research on this company. Being a graduate of one of the most prestigious journalism schools in the country, I figured I’d better put my investigative skills to use.

I typed “Strategic Book Publishing” in the Google search bar. The FIRST result that came up was “strategic book publishing scam.” (Even before plain ol’ “strategic book publishing.”)

A few quick link clicks and I was enlightened as to their M.O., which you can read about at the bottom of the page here, and about its owner's current legal troubles here. (If you’re lazier than I am, suffice it to say that Strategic Book Publishing seems to be a front for an octopus-like conglomeration of relatively phony agencies and publishers controlled by some scammer dude down in Florida. Basically, it seems they’re one of those pseudo-agencies that charges people for copyediting and reading fees and what-not and then never actually, you know, sells your book.)

Anyway, it’s back to the drawing board, older and wiser and what-not. And if I ever get lonely during the next round of queries, I can always re-read their latest email and remind myself that someone wants me.

Book Review - A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

2009-10-06T19:27:00.000-05:00

I've posted a review on Amazon of A Fiery Peace in a Cold War. (It's the new book by Neil Sheehan, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of A Bright Shining Lie.)

A Poem About the Most Significant Relationship in my Life

2009-09-28T22:53:00.000-05:00

This morning, you are loud and insistent

I roll over, frustrated; my fingers scan the contours of your hard little body

Practiced motions, but today I get it wrong; you emit strange and unpleasant noises while I seek the spot I know so well that will send us back to contented oblivion

And at last I am there; I apply gentle insistent pressure; you are satisfied and quiet down at last, but I say nothing

I just roll over and try to fall asleep, hating your unrelenting insistent demands and everything else you represent, and thinking: Why is it so hard to find the snooze button?

An Open Letter to Jeff Tweedy of Wilco

2009-09-27T16:49:00.000-05:00

Dear Mr. Tweedy:

I really wish I liked Wilco (The Album) as much as I like Wilco (The Band).

Wilco (The Song) starts off promising, with a charging wall of bluesy guitar sound. But the lyrics, a tongue-in-cheek love letter from your band to its fans, feel flat and uninspired, a lazy victory lap rather than an exploration of new territory.

I’m sorry, Mr. Tweedy, if I’m hating on you for loving on me. There are some great moments here, to be sure; the next two songs rank among your band’s best work. But all in all, the album has a slightly generic feel. There’s a taste of almost everything your band’s done—the pastoral melodies of Sky Blue Sky and the pleasant pop of Summerteeth and the guitar workouts of A Ghost is Born and the countrified psychedelia of Being There and the experimentalism of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But so many tastes end up making for a relatively bland album, at least by your band’s standards. It’s almost as if you put your discography in a blender and hit “Puree.” A little bit of everything ends up being a whole lot of nothing.

Well, maybe that’s a little harsh, but I do mean it, or something like it. You sound content and philosophical and meditative—on “Solitaire,” you mention how it “took too long for me to see I was wrong to believe in me only,” and that sounds like a statement from a healthy and happy and well-adjusted individual. But is that what we want? I kinda miss the alienation of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and elsewhere, the angsty Jeff Tweedy that sang “I am so out of tune with you” on Being There’s “Sunken Treasure.” Granted, you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again, and I don’t necessarily want that. But I do want something with a solid thematic feel, something that feels like itself, rather than a mix of other things. In some ways, your previous album, though it had fewer rough edges, was a bolder statement, in that it was at least a solid and consistent and thematically whole piece of work. That one, and every other album since A.M. felt like an artistic statement, a “This is what Wilco is” kind of gesture that somehow also expanded the definition of what Wilco was. This one feels like a question in response to a question, as if someone asked “What is Wilco?” and you replied, “Well, what do you want us to be, baby?”

I’m sorry if I was harsh. This isn’t goodbye; it’s still a see-you-later. Look around for me the next hometown gig; I’ll be the one wearing a party hat.

Love,

Alfonso

Album Review - "Bryter Later" by Nick Drake

2009-09-20T12:01:00.000-05:00

People love to talk about their proverbial perfect desert-island albums. Quality-wise, Nick Drake’s Bryter Later could easily be on my list, but that description doesn’t sound quite right.

I imagine desert islands as being dry and bright and isolated places; this album’s much more suitable for rainy afternoons holed up in the condo. “Stay indoors beneath the floors, talk with neighbors only; the games you play make people say you’re either weird or lonely,” Drake sings on “At the Chime of a City Clock.” The music, too, amplifies the urban cabin fever vibe; the arrangements are jazzy but melancholy, with a wonderful blend of wise guitar and playful piano and sad strings and resigned horns. (The horns are crucial; they help make Bryter Later that rarest of things—an excellent album that doesn’t quite sound like anything that came before.) Drake’s voice, soothing and hushed and cool, complements the songs perfectly, but there are great instrumental pieces, too, bisecting and bookending the album.

Five Leaves Left was my first—and first favorite—Nick Drake album, but now I find myself listening to this one far more frequently. There’s still plenty of melancholy here; on Hazey Jane I, for instance, Drake asks: “Do you like what you’re doing? Would you do it some more? Only to stop once and wonder what you’re doing it for?” But all in all, the relentless depression’s been tempered quite a bit. That first album’s vibe is I-want-to-kill-myself-because-life’s-pointless-and-I-won’t-be-noticed-otherwise; this is more like I-don’t-quite-feel-like-going-to-the-grocery-store-today.

And that resignation’s leavened, too, with a cautious optimism—today may be shot, but tomorrow’s at least worth sticking around for. “Please give me a second grace; please give me a second face,” Drake sings on “Fly.” And then on “Northern Sky,” he asks: “Would you love me for my money? Would you love me for my mind? Would you love me through the winter? Would you love me until I die? If you would and you could, then come blow your horn for me.” It’s a lovely song, but the pronouns alone are significant; on both this and “Five Leaves Left” there are times when the “you” refers to Drake himself, and the songs become mere mirrors, places for tortured artistic sensitivity and introspection, but on this, there are far more moments where the “you” is someone else. So Drake is at least spending less time gazing into mirrors and more time looking out windows, looking out from the darkened apartment at the faces in the city, and searching for a connection with someone who can end the isolation.

A Regular Guy

2009-09-19T23:58:00.000-05:00

I’ve recently started taking Metamucil, at the ripe old age of 31. I’m hoping to take it for the rest of my life.

Jerry Seinfeld once said that, “Since men can’t have babies, they’re automatically proud of everything else that comes out of their body.” Truer words have never been spoken; indeed, I’ve recently become aware that a circle of my friends have taken advantage of the unholy potentialities afforded by male scatology and camera phone ubiquity and started texting one another—how can I put this delicately?—pictures of their poo.

Now, the gentlemanly thing to do when one hears about such activities would probably be to politely nod, while tactfully declining to take part, and speaking no more of them.

I, of course, decided to participate.

It can be hard to resist such temptations; when one hasn’t done much in a day, one must seek the pride of accomplishment wherever one can find it, and it can indeed feel like an artistic triumph when one can produce, say, something shaped like a perfectly formed treble clef from the depths of one’s colon.

My “pieces” soon won accolades from friends, and I felt they compared favorably with the “artwork” I saw posted on ratemypoo.com—work that, frankly speaking, looked rather amateurish and derivative. But for a while, I felt like—how shall I say it?—a tortured artist. Sculpture’s not just about shape and form, but texture, and in these situations, part of the problem was that my productions often came out as—how should I describe it?—sticky baby poo. Also, my creations often simply took an inconveniently long time; once I had to take a cab to a first date because I spent a full twenty minute to bring my efforts to full fruition. When constipation starts to feel like writer’s block, something, literally, has to give.

For a while, I thought about colon cleanses, or enemas. The latter seemed a little invasive; still, I once heard a story where someone underwent one that brought forth a penny they’d swallowed as a child that had somehow gotten stuck in one of the folds of their large intestine. Though I never mustered up the moxie to undergo the procedure myself, this made it seem incredibly intriguing and strangely healthy. As for the first option, I eventually followed the suggestion of one of my friends and walked down the dark road of googling “colon cleanse” and clicking the “Images” link. I was intrigued by the volume and consistency of the productions I saw showcased there. Some seemed like reverse sculptures of the entire inside of a colon; they were incredibly long, and surprisingly stringy, and my friend suggested that these cleanses could remove, literally, pounds of impacted material that had spent decades inside one’s body. But most of these cleanses involved doing strange things like consuming nothing but maple syrup mixed with lemonade for weeks on end, and, frankly, people, I like to eat.

Then one day, another friend came and described how he’d embarked on a course of action that, he said, “changed his life forever.” He’d started taking Metamucil. In tones of hushed reverence, he related to me the incredible volume of material he’d been producing—a literal torrent of brown creativity. And he offered visual proof—a camera-phone photo of an early work he’d entitled “Alabama Black Snake.”

Needless to say, I couldn’t resist.

Within days, I was at Walgreens, making my initial purchase. (Orange-flavored Metamucil being, in case you didn’t know, the brainchild of Donald Rumsfeld, a legacy of his time heading G.D. Searle. This might seem strange, unless you think about the fact that he basically spent a large portion of his career helping people produce shitty messes. I digress.) Anyway, since I’ve tended towards overconsumption of various substances at different parts of my life, I, of course, indulged in these habits here as well. So I started consuming Metamucil the way I once consumed, say, Miller High Life or, once in a blue moon, Nyquil—with a liberal attitude towards normal amounts and recommended dosages and things of that sort.

And my artwork has flourished. (You’ll have to take my word for it, because I’m not posting pictures; blogging about it is fun, but even I have my limits.) I’ve produced creations such as “Dead Alien Baby” and “The Revolting Blob” and “Mother with Child” that, frankly, rank among my best work.

There are drawbacks; Metamucil gets thick and goey if you don’t drink it quickly enough, and it leaves chunks of residue in your drinking glasses. And you end up with enough mass moving through your digestive tract that you often can’t take in more without having to get rid of some shortly thereafter.

Still, I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Even though I’m basically using Metamucil for recreational purposes—for shits and giggles, as it were—it feels like a healthy indulgence. In recovery programs for other substances, one has to admit powerlessness and unmanageability. But with this, I feel powerful, and this area of my life has become very manageable indeed—more regular, and more pleasant, than it has been in quite some time.

Printing the Book

2009-09-18T00:11:00.001-05:00

So I’m nearing the point where I’m finally willing to unclench my fingers from the massive book manuscript I just finished and actually hand the whole thing to another human being to read.

I finally saw it in the flesh at Kinko’s last night. (OK, it’s FedEx Office now, but I’m always going to call it Kinko’s, you mindless good-trademark-ruining corporate bastards.) I’d dropped it off to print up a few copies; since I was getting four copies bound so as to ship it off and enter it into some contests—a $167 print job—I figured I’d see a proof first.

No sooner had the words “I’m here to pick up a proof” cleared my lips than the girl behind the counter—and her associate—looked at me with a mix of awe and disbelief. “You must be Alfonso,” she said. “That’s a big book. We couldn’t bind it.”

She motioned over her shoulder to a massive pile of letter-sized paper. It looked like it was 8 inches high.

I tried not to panic. One thought crossed my mind: holy shit, what the fuck have I just done with the past few years of my life?

I’d already known it was a good-sized manuscript—200,000 words, give or take; nowhere near War and Peace, but not far from Moby Dick. More importantly, I knew it was certainly long enough to make a lot of literary agents pass on it on that basis alone. Still, 200,000 was just a number, and this—this massive cube of dead tree that looked hefty enough to collapse the Kinko’s counter, or at least give the girl behind it a hernia—this was tangible, physical proof that I am a lunatic.

Strong words, you might say, but who else but a crazy man would spend such an obscene length of time on such a project without a clear idea as to how to sell it? Here’s a brief—by my standards, ha ha!!—history of the project:

Since approximately 1994, I’ve been more or less obsessed by the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the “hidden pivot” of Nazi Germany. I went to Prague during summer leave in 1998 in part because I wanted to see the spot where he was ambushed by Czech parachutists. Then I thought about the project for a while, wrote a different book-length manuscript, did some intermittent research (and actually wrote a single unsatisfactory page) before deciding to write Pottersville instead, then finally started writing in earnest in early 2006 when I had a chance to go back to Prague. I first wrote a screenplay based on the assassination. I realized it was too long, so I split it into two screenplays. Then I went to Hollywood for a “screenwriter’s pitchfest,” where one gets a chance to meet with real life producers and try and sell them on your movie idea. (Basically, it’s like speed-dating, except you do all the talking, and they do all the rejecting.) Of course, I’d imagined everyone would love it; instead, I was told that expensive period pieces are one of the toughest things to sell. So I came back to Chicago and figured I’d just turn it into a book, because at least I could get that done by myself. Should be a jiff, I figured—I’d already imagined most of the scenes, right? I thought it would take me six months, tops.

Three years later, here I am.

The book’s in three parts, with three first-person narrators; I wrote the first part on the laptop, then—to differentiate the voices, I told myself—composed the first few drafts of the second part using a typewriter, and wrote the third third by hand in composition books. (The handwriting part was kind of fun; it’s good to be forced to rewrite stuff. But don’t ever write anything on a typewriter, people. There’s a reason they barely sell them any more: they suck.)

ANYWAY, I wrote it, and transferred the typewritten and handwritten parts to a computer, and revised the hell out of it, and re-read it and polished it many more times. And I’ve relearned a valuable lesson—the longer you spend on such a project, and the more emotional energy you have invested in it, the less willing you will be to actually stop work completely and say it’s done. (At least for me—it’s all too easy for the sharp needle of another human being’s disapproval to puncture the fragile, overinflated balloon that is my ego.) Rather than getting it in the hands of other people, it’s so much easier to just imagine it is perfect and not do anything that will dispel that illusion.

But, of course, you lose perspective on anything the closer you are to it and the bigger it is, and I’ve long since passed the point where I can objectively judge this particular piece of work. So I need to get it out there and put it up for some contests—hence the trip to Kinko’s.

ANYWAY, it turned out that they hadn’t printed the pages double-sided. And I’d made it double-spaced to comply with various contest guidelines, so that stretched it out a bit, too. The Kinko’s people still had to split it into its three component parts, but the new proof they hurriedly put together last night at least looked semi-manageable. (I tried to resist the temptation to page through it and try and figure out whether I actually, you know, still liked it.) I’m excited to pick it up this weekend, and excited to get some feedback at long last.

But I’m still scared shitless, too.

Fitness For Fanatics

2009-09-15T23:35:00.001-05:00

So I've restarted this blog, but I've been some combination of lazy and busy, so I haven't written as much new content yet. So I'm going to post something I wrote about the Crossfit fitness program, which many of you may or may not have heard me speak about at length. Anyway, here goes:

Crossfit is not like most fitness programs. It’s more like a cult.

A friend in the military—one of the few who is not yet drinking the Kool-Aid on a daily basis, it seems!!—described it to me as such, and the comparison’s hard to avoid, for it has all the necessary ingredients. You have an enigmatic but charismatic leader (known, most commonly, as “Coach”) whose minions post workouts every day on the Crossfit website. (It’s at www.crossfit.com, if you’re feeling masochistic.) You have glimpses of the fantastic rewards that await if you are willing to fully submit to this lifestyle—not just in the site’s pictures and short video clips, which show chiselled, beautiful people doing things that defy the laws of biology and gravity, but also in the movie posters for the movie 300, whose actors, you will find yourself explaining to people, got in that shape by using Crossfit. And you have scores of devoted followers—among them yours truly—hanging off every pronouncement from Coach (whose title is always capitalized on every Crossfit discussion board, it seems), copying down His pronouncements and bringing them to the gym, and most importantly, engaging in bizarre physical routines that seem tailor-made to push body and mind and soul to the breaking point and beyond, often leaving said follower prone and gasping on the gym floor in a pool of his or her sweat.

And do these followers leave the cult? No! Despite the ongoing sense of physical inadequacy and occasional humiliation, they keep coming back! They (we, actually) return day after day to this website, and attempt the workouts, and track their—I mean our—progress; many find it hard to even contemplate a return to the old routines.

And why? Because Crossfit is awesome.

Crossfit’s very capriciousness is part of its appeal. It’s all too easy to fall into boring routines at the gym, doing the same exercises over and over until you almost want to drop a dumbbell on your head to break the monotony. However, with Crossfit, you don’t know what tomorrow will bring—at least, not until about 10:00 p.m. or so the night before, when the W.O.D. (Workout-Of-the-Day) is posted. (You do know beforehand what your rest days will be. Every fourth day is a day off. It’s a brilliant schedule—you’re not always working out on the same days of the week.) Some W.O.D.s are stupefyingly straightforward, like doing seven single-rep sets of the Deadlift for max weight. Some of them are astonishingly complicated, with strange sequences of jumping and throwing and running and lifting. Some of them will take close to an hour, but many can be knocked out in less than twenty minutes, and a few are even closer to ten. But all of them are challenging. They’re based on the principle that, rather than isolate individual muscle groups or work on single elements of physical fitness in isolation, you should work out in a way that integrates your muscles, because that’s what happens in the real world, and you should work out in ways that tax both, say, muscular strength and cardiovascular fitness, because, again, that’s what happens in the real world. And everything is done for either max time or max weight or max reps, so if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll always be pushing yourself.

Many of the workouts are named after people, so you’ll read strange comments on the discussion boards, like “I made Melissa my bitch today” or “Fran really kicked my ass” or “I did Michael and didn’t have to stop and poop halfway through.” (OK, I made that last one up, but I did almost use it as a facebook status update once. Some devotees brag about “meeting Pukey,” which basically means what it sounds like—if you do some of the workouts with sufficient intensity, there’s a fair chance you’ll vomit. For me, though, “Poopey” is a bigger problem, especially in the mornings, and especially in the workouts like “Michael” that mix treadmill time with other exercises. I will get up and go to the bathroom, and then go to the gym and get on the treadmill to try and fake my colon into thinking that I’ve started my workout, and I’ll go to the bathroom again, and then I will come back and finally press “Start” on my watch and make it through a couple rounds of whatever craziness Coach has cooked up, and my colon will say, “Haha! I’ve got you!” and I will scamper off to the bathroom yet again, lest I soil the treadmill in what I can only assume will be a spectacularly messy and spatter-y fashion. My colon is a crafty foe.)

I digress. Crossfit isn’t perfect. Coach really has a jones for pull-ups, to the point that (if you work out gloveless, like me) you will get crazy calluses on your hands that will sometimes tear off and bleed and heal and tear off again. Also, there are perhaps too many of the exercises that require gymnastics rings and climbing ropes, and not enough of the strange asymmetrical ones that can be done with normal gym equipment. (Examples include “Virtual Shovelling,” which involves putting a 45 lb plate on only one side of a standard bench press bar and lifting it back and forth over a barrier, and “The Turkish Get-up, which involves lying on your back with a loaded bench press bar held in front of your chest with one arm, then getting up and standing while keeping the bar above you at all times—which, it turns out, is a great conversation starter.) You will have to learn the meaning of the word “pood.” (OK, I’ll save you time on that one. Surprisingly, it has nothing to do with meeting Poopey; it’s a unit of weight approximately equal to 34 lbs that’s apparently only been used in Imperial Russia and on the kettlebells in the Crossfit gym.) And, perhaps most importantly, if you don’t dial back some of the W.O.D.s that have specific weight requirements the first time you do them, you may tear something—I did something to my right inner thigh while front-squatting months ago, and it still doesn’t feel quite right.

Still, I’m not looking for any other fitness routine any time soon. Crossfit gets results, and you don’t plateau as quickly as you do with other routines, so the results keep coming. I feel like I’m on the verge of being able to do the vaunted handstand pushup unassisted, for instance. Also, my time on the dreaded “Filthy Fifty” has dropped by over four minutes since I last did it, even though this time I was still sore from doing 120 pullups and 120 dips two days before. And even though I’ve only been at it for six months, if some sequel-crazed Hollywood-type decides to make 301 any time soon, I’ll at least have an outside shot—if I cut out the milkshakes and deep-dish pizza—at being the crazy ripped Spartan staring out at you from the movie poster.

I’m ready for my close-up, Coach.

Shopping Fiction: A Primer

2009-09-09T20:56:00.002-05:00

So I’m resuming this blog, which I left for dead some time ago, because it will give me something to write while I shop around my new book, Resistance. What’s more, it will give me something to write other than the book, and I desperately need something else to write.

The problem with writing books isn’t writing books—it’s selling them afterwards. So I’d rather do the first and avoid the second. I’ve spent plenty of time (I think) working on this book, and my natural tendency is to keep polishing and polishing, all the while shying away from the part that will actually get it sold—namely, shipping query letters and manuscripts off to people who might be willing to represent me or buy my manuscript.

I know I have to shop it around. I have a hard time getting myself to do this. The following story should help illustrate why.

I have, so far, queried exactly one (1) agency about this book.

A year and a half ago, or so, I was working as a waiter at a restaurant in downtown Chicago, having been fired from a lucrative corporate job some time before.

Now, this restaurant was a stressful, demanding place, run by Greeks who had a ridiculously long set of rules, which frequently led to diminished tips and general unpleasantness amongst customers and wait staff alike. (Indeed, the first day I showed up there looking for work was the first day I’d set foot in there for three years—thanks to an unpleasant incident the last time I’d tried to be a customer there, it was the one restaurant in Chicago that I absolutely refused to patronize.) Granted, I had come to love these Greeks, like one would love a crazy aunt or uncle—they’d given me a job when I was a desperate unemployed nobody with little experience in food service who needed cash, pronto; also, I probably learned more life lessons in a year and a half there than I had in five years in a cubicle. Still, it was not my dream job.

So when I found out there was a literary agency upstairs, I—budding unpublished author that I was—figured I’d miraculously found an escape ladder.

Now, I’d sent queries to literary agents before, for a couple different book-length projects, but this promised to be different. Those had been blind queries to people I had never and would never meet; this was an opportunity to personally speak to a literary agent and win them over with my suave charisma and roguish good looks as well as my eloquent prose. Everything—my loss of a well-paying job, the strange turn of events that had led to me waiting tables in a restaurant at which I’d once refused to eat—seemed designed to get me in touch with these people. Clearly this was all preordained by God.

I went up there and introduced myself one slow February afternoon, and it went well enough. The only problem was that I didn’t have anything to offer right then. The previous book had already been published through a publish-on-demand company; they told me it was not worth anyone’s time trying to sell something that already had a publishing history. And the current book was only 2/3rds finished; they told me it was a waste of time to try and sell fiction without a completed manuscript. Come back when you have something finished, they said; they also admonished me to study their submission guidelines, which were posted on the Internet. (Apparently, some authors neglected to take such simple precautions.)

So I went home. I had more research to do to finish the book, so I left struggling America and went to Europe for research, and returned to somehow land back in corporate America. I finished the book. I polished the book. Seasons changed. Presidents changed. I read their submission guidelines. I wrote a query letter. I polished the query letter. I wrote a synopsis. I polished the synopsis. I polished the book again, just for good measure.

Then finally came the fateful day, the golden blue glorious morning when it was all done and I had no more reason to dilly-dally. So I printed out a query letter and patiently wrote out my address on a self-addressed stamped envelope, and put the whole bundle together, and went to have breakfast with a buddy at my favorite breakfast spot (Not the restaurant where I used to work, ha ha!) and then went to the restaurant where I used to work, and told them of my grand plans, and walked upstairs to deliver my query letter.

I spoke to the receptionist and explained my purpose. Mid-explanation, the agent came out, and I explained myself to her, and introduced myself. She used hand sanitizer on herself immediately after shaking my hand.

Still, I was cautiously optimistic. Surely the query letter would win them over.

That was on a Friday. I got their rejection letter in my mailbox on Saturday.

Congratulations, Martin Scorsese!

2007-02-26T05:24:00.000-06:00

It's nice to be wrong sometimes.

Chicago Building Fire

2006-10-25T00:07:00.000-05:00

When I got home from work, this six-story architectural landmark was burning. My friends and I watched for three hours. Why is the destruction of something so beautiful so compelling?

The Eraser - Thom Yorke - Album Review

2006-07-13T00:09:00.000-05:00

Thom Yorke's not trying to please anyone.

"You have tried your best to please everyone. But it just isn't happening," he sings on "Black Swan," his first solo album's fourth track. Of course, by that point, it's already clear that he's responded by running in the other direction, making a claustrophobic and difficult electronica-laced album that makes most of Radiohead's work seem warm and friendly by comparison. It's not a bad album, but it's not a great album, either. Think Amnesiac, not OK Computer.

Perhaps Thom doesn't care. Like Miles Davis in the late 60s, he's already proven he can put together intelligent music for the masses, popular music that pushes the boundaries of popular music, music that will stand the test of time. Now he seems more interested in pushing his own boundaries, experimenting with new textures and sounds, getting away from traditional song structures and conventions. If people like it, fine, but he's not going to chase after them by writing songs so obviously excellent that they can't help but listen.

No, these songs are much more demanding than that. They take some getting used to, but there are some worthwhile moments here. The title track's oddly hypnotic, and great by the third listen. "Black Swan" features a compelling subdued guitar floating beneath the mix. And he has some great vocal moments on "And It Rained All Night" and "Harrowdown Hill." If you're like me, you'll probably say "Huh," listen to the album a few times to make sure you didn't miss anything, and move on to other things. You'll be glad Radiohead's trotting out some great new material on their current tour, and you'll be eager to hear that stuff on an album, and you'll wish Thom alone was a little less demanding and a little more accessible.

And you'll realize he probably doesn't care.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FPYNR6/ref=pd_rvi_gw_1/104-2691348-6043164?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=5174

Radiohead - Chicago Concert Review 06/19/06

2006-06-19T22:39:00.000-05:00

To those of you who weren't lucky enough to score tickets to Radiohead in the 0.0029 seconds before they sold out (and those of you who weren't crazy enough to pay the legalized scalpers a bazillion dollars to get in anyway), I can only say this: rest assured, Radiohead is still the best fucking band on the planet, period.

For the record, I was one of the crazy ones, not the lucky ones. But I'm OK with that because, despite the too-short setlist, it was worth the $210 I paid to an also-crazy friend who had bought them from StubHub.

Why? Because the new stuff is great. Great, I tell you! Great! "Open Pick", the second new song, got everybody clapping and cheering, and the band and the song were so tight I got goosebumps just knowing there was a new awesome Radiohead song that I was hearing for the very firstest time. "Down Is The New Up" was mind-blowingly superb, too. And the other six new songs were merely excellent.

When they weren't busy wowing us with new songs, they were wowing us with old ones. Thom opened up with "You and Whose Army" while tottering at the piano and peering into a camera, with his face projected onto a fractured collage of rhombus-shaped screens on the stage set, and everyone loved it. "Paranoid Android" (the quintessential Radiohead song, if there is one) got everybody singing and hooting and hollering, but my second goosebump-inducing moment was when they ripped into "There There" to close out the main set. In-fucking-credible.

Outside of the new stuff, the set list was liberally sprinkled with Amnesiac and Kid A. (Not quite enough songs from Kid A, though--I still haven't heard "Optimistic" or "How to Disappear Completely" in concert. When will you play them for me, Thom? When?!?!? I digress.) If I was an amnesiac, I might have thought I was seeing the Amnesiac tour. Still, I can't complain--they gave us a cutting "Knives Out" and served up an awesomely mellow "Like Spinning Plates" (on piano, as it should be), and they even threw us a "Bones" in the first encore. (I've always thought "Bones" was an under-rated song. At least, by Radiohead standards. Then again, what do I know? I didn't get into them until relatively late. I tend to confuse bands that have similar names with one another, so I thought Radiohead was Motorhead. Why is everyone talking about Motorhead in the late 90s? I wondered. Then I realized--different band. Again, I digress.) Other established artists play the old stuff to placate the crowd; here it felt more like something they were just doing for the sheer enjoyment of being together and back on the road.

Through it all, when he wasn't sitting with piano or acoustic guitar, Thom jumped and jerked and did his crazy little Thom dances. And everyone else...well, to be honest, I didn't pay them any heed, because I was busy watching Thom. (What makes Thom so watchable? To be honest, maybe I like him because he reminds me of the me I used to be when I was an awkward, spastic, uncomfortable junior high kid. Like me, he retained that persona. Unlike me, he became a super-incredible musician in the process. Dorkiness plus complete awesomeness. How cool is that? An inspiration for us all. Yet again, I digress.) Except for a muffed vocal at the beginning of "Morning Bell," he and the band were damn near perfect. Near the end, I actually thought they were finally going to falter; Thom launched into a distorted, tired "True Love Waits", and everybody kind of sighed, but then mid-opening he segued into "Everything in its Right Place," and once again, it was the truth.

Setlist as published on radiohead at ease. * indicates new songs.

01 You and Whose Army?
02 The National Anthem
03 15 Step*
04 Morning Bell
05 Exit Music (For A Film)
06 Open Pick*
07 Videotape*
08 Knives Out
09 The Gloaming
10 Nude*
11 Down Is The New Up*
12 Paranoid Android
13 Bangers 'N Mash*
14 Like Spinning Plates
15 Spooks*
16 Idioteque
17 There There

Encore 1
18 A Wolf At The Door
19 4 Minute Warning*
20 Bones
21 Lucky

Encore 2
22 House of Cards*
23 Everything In Its Right Place

Pottersville

2006-06-11T01:13:00.000-05:00

OK, for those of you new to this blog, I wrote a book recently. You can buy it on Amazon.com if you're interested.