"The Winds of War" Blows

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

Tree of Life

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

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

R.I.P. Jimmy Lerner

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

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

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.

² Which is still pretty adventurous, I guess.

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

⁴ If 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.”

⁶ As 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.

⁷ Advocates 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?

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

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

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...

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

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

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...

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...

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

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

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

Cinnamon Gum

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

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.

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.