Ash Tree

HB.com

2011-01-22T08:51:00.000-08:00

Finally created an author site for myself. Take a look: henrybaum.com.

Isolated Tracks

2010-12-04T15:00:00.001-08:00

I started a new blog devoted to the most amazing new phenomenon of being able to hear songs broken down by track: Studio Multitracks.

Apocalyptic Fiction

2009-11-15T18:50:00.001-08:00

Now blogging at The American Book of the Dead.

Backword Books

2009-06-16T10:48:00.001-07:00

Please check out the newly-formed book collective, Backword Books. As it says there:

Backword Books is a collective of self-published authors. We’re not quite a literary press because all of us use different services to publish (Lightning Source, Lulu, iUniverse, and CreateSpace to name a few). In short, we’re a unique collective that has yet to be done on any large scale, using a medium that is losing stigma and gaining credibility.

We all believe in our writing, and it’s been tested by those who know well: readers and reviewers. We also believe in the potential of self-publishing on the whole. In one sense, we’re refugees from an increasingly competitive landscape in traditional publishing, but we also don’t think of self-publishing as a type of defeat. Quite the opposite.

There’s strength in numbers and Backword Books hopes to create a new model for self-publishers to reach readers: a combination of self-publishing and the traditional literary press.

Update: Recently written up in Publishers Weekly. Check out the Backword Books contest - win 7 books by 7 authors. More info about us here:

Nailin

2009-06-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

There's something very perverse about the Letterman-Palin fued, and the perversion's coming from the Palin side. Todd Palin already said that Letterman shouldn't joke about "raping" his daughter, as if all sex is rape. They had to clarify that he meant "statutory rape." And then today Palin said,

I would say that you and anybody else are extremely naive to believe that very convenient excuse of David Letterman's the other day. He took a couple of days for him to think of that excuse that, oh, no, he wasn't talking about my daughter who was there with me at the (Yankees) game, the 14-year-old. Well, I think it's a weak excuse.

Most normal reasonable parents would say - well, good, he wasn't talking about having sex with my 14-year-old daughter, that's a relief. But she wants to continue the attack as if she wants him to be talking about "raping" her 14-year-old. Everyone knows who he was talking about - the daughter whose pregnancy is all over the news. The true perversion belongs to the Palins.

I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said a thousand times - that the Palins are exploiting their daughters far more than Letterman did with a joke, but he deserves all the support he can get, and the Palins need more criticism.

Perhaps this just boils down to terrible, terrible political instincts. Like Rush Limbaugh stating that the Holocaust Museum shooter is a product of the left, not the right. To any thinking person, and probably people who don't think too much, this is transparent spin and a lie, and not the kind of spin that's kind of impressive in its boldness, but a lie that borders on delusion.

I guess this is all good news, really. The right has no idea how to speak to people.

End O' the World

2009-06-09T16:17:00.001-07:00

I believe the children are our future...What's striking about this Max Blumenthal video is not the racism against Obama, it's finding out that Jews can be this stupid.

On a related apocalyptic note, this is very awesome and soon to be released:

Update: After the shooting at the Holocaust Museum, I feel bad about the Jew quip, even if I was saying that Jews are usually smart. I'm Jewish by the way, or I would be if - you know - I ever went to temple. I'm more of a Woody Allen Jew.

In another related note, someone just sent me a self-published book - an old occult manifesto that includes Hitler's highlighting of his favorite passages. Yep.

Up Review

2009-06-01T12:36:00.000-07:00

An unnecessary review, why spend so much time on a kid’s movie? Because people are for some reason loving this movie. And I have to say there’s something strange and sort of wrong that there were more adults at the screening for Up than parents with kids – including Ray Liotta, though he was with his kids.

I can deal with the fact that in the first ten minutes you find out the wife is barren and can’t have children – even though my daughter looked over at me and asked, “Why is she crying,” when she’s weeping in the doctor’s office. What do you answer to a six-year-old – because she can’t have children: she doesn’t yet know that people are unable to have children, and it’s not really necessary for her to know that. Certainly not within the confines of a children’s movie. You could say it’s good that these movies toughen kids up for the real world, but there is so much that is fantastical in this movie that the juxtaposition is beyond comic relief to being totally uneven. And then the wife dies.

But that’s not my problem with the movie. The movie’s about unfulfilled dreams – the wife dreams of going to an exotic locale in South America, so the husband attaches balloons to his house to fly there after she dies. Great! Imagination run wild! A fine premise. But when he gets to South America he finds that his and his wife’s childhood hero, an explorer, turns out to be a sinister villain.

So what is the lesson here? Don’t meet your heroes because they are not as good as they seem. OK, that’s a possible lesson – but it’s sandwiched onto a message of unfulfilled dreams. And the explorer also happens to be highly inventive – he’s invented a collar so dogs can speak. These dogs are also capable of flying airplanes. It’s another triumph of the imagination, except the explorer inexplicably is bent on killing the old man. It’s totally disappointing.

The movie would have been fine if maybe the old explorer gets hurt and needs to be saved somehow, rather than him dying from falling out of the sky, which is how this movie ends – a fight scene that had the kid next to me crying in fear. Why turn the explorer into a villain - the old man takes an entire lifetime to break away from the confines of his life, only to be pursued by someone who wants to kill him. It would have made a lot more sense for the old man and the explorer to commiserate somehow - to invent something together, not just become a routine chase movie, in which you're worried about an old man, a child, a flightless bird and her children, all being killed.

Why both writing a serious review? Because it was the first time my daughter left a movie and said, “I didn’t like that.” A movie cliche I would like to end right now: everything’s going great for the characters, they finally have a chance to relax – and inevitably something terrible happens. The characters don’t get five seconds to enjoy themselves. That’s why my daughter didn’t like this. I don’t want to use the word “bleak” or “dark” because that makes it sound kind of deep and she couldn’t take the imagery. It’s got talking dogs, it’s fundamentally silly, not a realistic portrait. The problem is because its bleakness is boring and frustrating and doesn’t fit the rest of the story.

All in all, I think this is an example of critics don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Because, you know, I’m right and they’re wrong. I think maybe they’re just desperate to like something, but all the positive reviews – in newspapers, IMDB, and Twitter, is kind of depressing. The movie has some problems.

Sara Jane Moore

2009-05-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

This is fascinating...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Cheap Kindle Fiction

2009-05-21T16:19:00.003-07:00

Yes, I'm trying to play with Google search queries, but I like how this looks:

Besides ebook uploading, I got a new job, working for Savings.com. Makes me very happy - an hourly job, with benefits, still working at home. No more hustling so hard to find freelance writing work. I was getting very nervous because a freelance outlet I was working for went from content writing to web design. I've seen countless web start-ups fall through, but this one's on the way up and growing. A long time coming, this sense of stability. I had a day last week where I thought the bottom could have been dropping out. Bad time to be looking for work, but I had a couple of interviews and got the job. Nicely faith restoring. Life never makes me rich, but it gives me what I need. I knock on wood.

Dreams

2009-05-20T09:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was feeling particularly toxic, which was worrying me. As I’ve written about, my health isn’t so great. Last night I had a dream about beating up my ex-wife’s new boyfriend, who turned out to be very tan and sinewy (haven’t met the guy), and then hanging out with Henry Rollins and my daughter, where diamonds littered the pavement. This morning I woke up feeling fine and refreshed, even though I woke up at 6:30 and didn’t actually get a lot of sleep. I think my health has as much to do with how I input and process information as it does with potassium, protein, salt, and everything else I need to watch. That’s true for everyone, but for me toxicity is a deeper issue.

Note: The American Book of the Dead is about a writer who resurrects his faith in himself through a series of prophetic dreams.

Read North of Sunset

2009-05-19T18:59:00.000-07:00

Uploading North of Sunset to all the ebook sites, in preparation for doing the same with The American Book of the Dead. Here it is from Scribd:

North of Sunset

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Novels Creative Writing satirical fiction hollywood novel

Dan Baum

2009-05-19T12:04:00.000-07:00

If you haven’t read Dan Baum’s (no relation) Twitter tale about working for and getting fired by The New Yorker, it is good reading. $90,000 a year for 30,000 words? Incredible. I should be a millionaire for the number of words I write a year – albeit nothing 1% as good or as necessary as The New Yorker (web content). But seems an absurd figure for the # of staff writers they have. A window into writing on that level:

New Yorker stories are so easy to read. Of course, the magazine does run everything through the deflavorizer, following

Samuel Johnson’s immortal advice: “Read what you have written, and when you come across a passage you think

Is particularly fine, strike it out.”

Finally:

Remnick called to say he wouldn’t renew my contract come September. He said he didn’t like my work. There were those five long stories that were killed.

That’s a lot in three years, he said.

I argued that in all five cases, the quality of the work wasn’t the problem

Writers have problems at the top and the bottom.

Hollywood Novel

2009-05-18T18:13:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Smashwords, you can now download North of Sunset in a number of formats - you set the price.

Lotsa Logic Here

2009-05-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Moral Kombat

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

Typos

2009-05-11T14:56:00.000-07:00

Potentially burning a bridge. Do I really want to criticize my current agent? Probably not, but do I really think I’m going to publish traditionally again? Probably not. If I do, it will be because a book I’ve put out myself was successful, in which case the criticism of my agent today won’t mean much. But my agent rejected my novel based on typos. She mentioned other things, but the fact that she mentioned typos at all is extremely very puzzling. Would an editor reject a book based on typos? It would be a day’s worth of work to fix.

The full criticism is:

That being said, I am afraid that I cannot accept your novel for representation at this time. There are several grammatical errors and typos that require editing, and I would also consider rewriting your introduction. Also, I fear you spell things out for your reader that would be better served being subtly hinted at. Since you possess such strong skills in character development, many of Eugene’s spoken opinions are unnecessary because you expose them in his interactions and dialogue.

I’ll accept everything else she said, but typos is just bizarre to me. Even if she was looking for some way to let me down easy, typos shouldn’t enter into the equation: because they can be fixed and fixed easily. Anyway, it’s confirmed now that I’m releasing the novel myself. I really, truly need the money of a book deal, but I really, truly don’t see how this is possible in the current state of things.

Star Trek & Me

2009-05-09T17:29:00.001-07:00

J.J. Abram's dad was the landlord of the house I grew up in. I went to high school with writer Alex Kurtzman, a year below me:

Alex Kurtzman & Bob Orci Interview - Star Trek from FirstShowing.net on Vimeo.

Literary Worth

2009-05-09T11:05:00.000-07:00

I wrote one of my favorite posts I’ve written for the Self-Publishing Review. One of the reasons I’m so attracted to self-publishing is that it is so maligned. The same goes for UFOs. Something with such profound implications is treated as a joke. Self-Publishing is the UFO of literature. People mock it, denigrate it, but at its core it is such a great development: all writers have the ability to reach readers. No one is without a voice, no one is locked out.

That type of free expression should be celebrated, but it is more often criticized. It is a total mystery. Self-publishing’s not perfect by any means, but its positive implications outweigh its flaws.

So I wrote a post about how writers have often not been accepted during their own time. The method of publication should not determine a book’s artistic worth. The book had the same value before and after it was accepted by the artistic establishment. To say otherwise is to say that money determines artistic value. Just wrong. I write:

On the Road was written in 1951 – but it was not published until 1957, towards the end of the decade. Jack Kerouac did most of the writing that’s part of his legacy before On the Road was ever published. Is On the Road a better book in 1957 than it was when it was initially written in 1951? I think most people would say no: publication doesn’t determine worth. The book is the book.

There is something to be said for the magic of a movement. Kerouac’s On the Road wouldn’t have meant the same if it wasn’t a literary phenomenon that represented an entire generation. An argument could be made that if Kerouac was able to self-publish via print on demand in 1951 this would have limited his artistic impact. That’s a fair point, but it says nothing about whether or not the book is more or less worthwhile once it hit it big.

In our world, crap rises to the top- the lowest common denominator is often the most successful, so to say that success equals literary worth makes no sense at all. And who knows, maybe self-publishing can be a literary movement like the Beats, giving rise to artists taking over the system. In this day and age, maybe an On the Road being released through Lulu is exactly what leads to that book’s reputation. It’s a much different environment than 1951. If that’s even a possibility then self-publishing’s got merit, which is why people should let up with the criticism.

The Wesleyan Murder

2009-05-08T10:17:00.000-07:00

In my novel, The Golden Calf, the lead character, Ray, gets a job working as a security guard in a liberal arts college and becomes infatuated with a student named Helen. He begins writing her letters:

You don't know me. I've seen you around campus and I'd like to meet you but I don't know how to go about doing it. I'm shy in my own way. The reason I'm writing this is because I think we have something in common. We both want something out of life and we can't find it here. I thought we could meet sometime. Help each other out. Save ourselves.

Helen doesn’t answer his letters and he becomes infuriated, breaking into her room and delivering this letter:

I saw you with that boyfriend of yours. Who is he? Does he care about you? Not like me. I would care for you like you've never been cared for before. I know the pains of the world so I know how to avoid them. I could have been your shelter. But you ignored me. If only you knew what you were ignoring. One day I'm going to be great and you'll regret you ever let me go. I'm the one. Do you have so much better to do? I've seen your friends. They're not very interesting, like most people here. They care only about themselves. And what do they care about? Frail, vile, boring people like themselves. Maybe like you. I thought you wanted to get away. I was wrong. You're just as weak. You don't even deserve my time. You're just as selfish because you won't even write me back. But remember, I've got the upper hand. I know who you are but you don't know me. I'm the one and you didn't realize it. You're too petty. Maybe the best way to get back is to get revenge.

The murderer of the girl at Wesleyan has echoes of this. Whenever these things happen – the VA tech murders, Wesleyan – I think that I’ve justified abhorrent behavior by making it entertaining. Ray’s a fun character. Disturbing, but amusing. This isn't fun at all in reality, and the book was written during a time when school murders weren't happening every other week.

So I wrote a scene in The American Book where the father finds his daughter doing porn online. He confronts her, saying:

“This isn’t only about beauty, or intelligence, or experience, Sophia, or what I’ve written as fiction. It’s about something just being plainly wrong. Murder is illegal for a reason. I’m sure to murder someone would be a significant learning experience, but that does not make it right. The world is disintegrating—it is becoming more of a stupid, terrible, violent place and it is better to not contribute to it. I know when I was younger I liked to write about violence, even about sexuality. But that was when violence and rampant sexuality were not so common as they are today. Believe me, Sophia, you know I’m no conservative. I just think that with the world heading where it is, it is important to fight the good fight.”

The worse the world gets, the less dark fiction serves a purpose - maybe. That's an inner dialog I'm having. You know, this is nothing though. I wrote a book that is echoed by stuff that’s happened in real life. All I did was predict some people’s instincts. I don’t know what it would be like to be J.D. Salinger and have your novel actually inspire Mark David Chapman to kill John Lennon, one of the best people to ever live. I’d want to go into hiding as well. I’d want to kill myself.

So, no, I don’t want to disown my book, not at all, but it’s tough to feel like you're glorifying something that has led to the death of actual people.

District 9

2009-05-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

The movie "District 9" may have the best viral marketing campaign ever. Check out:

D-9.com
http://www.multinationalunited.com
http://www.mnuspreadslies.com
http://www.mathsfromouterspace.com/

And a protest video:

The Elephant in the Room and the 800 lb. Gorilla Get into a Fight

2009-05-06T14:43:00.000-07:00

A little bit about where some of my misanthropy comes from. And some of my urgency. I’ve had one of the most fucked up years on record. Not relative to people who live in a warzone, but relative to my life. Last winter I found out that my health had deteriorated considerably. It’s something I’d known about since my early twenties, but my body was failing to a deeper degree. I have kidney disease. It’s something I’ve rarely written about here because it’s sometimes not healthy to obsess about it. But it’s a major part of my life. My kidneys are at 20% capacity, which means I'm low enough to be on the waiting list for a transplant.

Sometimes I feel like crap, sometimes I feel normal – though I have a feeling my version of normal is a healthy person’s version of toxic. Think about how you feel after eating junk food, drinking too much, and not sleeping: like that. Cold on the inside, bad. So I’m on medication everyday. And I’m on a stupidly difficult diet. It’s not just that I can’t eat a lot of protein or cholesterol or salt, I also can’t eat potassium, which is in a lot of healthy food: spinach, tomatoes, chocolate, bananas, potatoes. Almost everything has potassium in it and I can only eat so much a day. Hear that Brian Spaeth? Baked potatoes are my enemy. Potassium Chloride is what they give people on death row to stop their heart.

Hearing about my health was just a total blow to my worldview. I’d spent years upon years struggling as a writer, struggling through a difficult marriage, living by the faith that at some point I'd see some reward and some leisure, only to find that my body was falling apart. It felt like a deeply unfair epilogue.

This sense of my body falling apart has been core to my writing. As my body deteriorates, so too is the world. I didn’t write an apocalyptic novel by accident. Everything around me and in me seemed to be fading. I didn’t make the lead character sick, though he is autobiographical to some extent – me in 20 years time, but more me right now. But I didn’t want to make him sick because it would make him less universal. But anyone who reads the book should know where I’m coming from. I think about life and death a lot. Figuring out what might happen after you die – a key component of The American Book of the Dead – hits me somewhere deep.

I did make the character in the novel struggling in a marriage, however. Which is what happened. My wife and I separated last June. I take care of my daughter every other week. I’ve been going to incredibly depressing “transplant classes” surrounded by people who are 70 and over. Learning how to be a father and mother both, living on my own again, without much of a support network as I face this extraordinarily difficult time.

Meanwhile, my writing career is stagnant. At a point last year, around the time of diagnosis, I was thinking about never writing again. I’d given it my shot – nothing was going to happen. I thought something had died in me. Thankfully it hadn’t – and a positive result of the separation is that I worked on and finished my novel. Starting the Self-Publishing Review in December was in a way to will myself back into the publishing game – to care about industry stuff again, which I once followed.

But my anger about the state of publishing, and the vitriol I display against agents, is because I feel an incredible sense of urgency more than I even did in the past about not wasting the rest of my days writing for other people and being able to have more freedom to write for myself. And I think I’ve got a unique perspective – writer, songwriter, chronically ill. At least when writing about life and death and sickness, I’ve got some credibility. It’s why I've written songs like this one to my daughter with the lyrics:

When you hear this song remember
All that I wanted to say
Like your soul, it is infinite
And I won’t ever go away
I will never go away

I have to live my life feeling like maybe my daughter won’t be able to watch me watch her grow up. No, my life’s not over, and people with kidney disease lead very productive lives. But I feel sicker one day and think oh, shit, now it begins. I feel a pain in my arm and wonder if my heart’s going to fail. I’m like a hypochondriac who’s actually sick.

I’m convinced that because I’m more physically toxic, I tend to get more emotionally toxic as well. I get very misanthropic about the state of things – but strangely enough this misanthropy is justified by how people treat each other. But greater than that, I see people’s devaluing of writing, as targeted in that agent post, as part of the overall fabric of devaluing life, devaluing the earth, devaluing intelligence, and so on. Humans are brutal. And perhaps because my health is poor it may give me a skewed sense of the health of everything else. Or perhaps I'm right.

So I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. It gives a perspective on where I’m coming from. And when The American Book’s released, I can’t point to it and let people know what my life was like while I was writing the book.

Watch Hugo the Hippo

2009-05-06T13:38:00.000-07:00

I wrote a post a while back about "Hugo the Hippo," a movie my dad wrote. He also wrote the book. Back then there weren't any Youtubes of the movie. Now there are many. Revel in the weirdness. That's Jimmie Osmond singing:

Commenters say things like:

"This film is so freaky!! I used to watch it when I was younger and It still scares me..."

and

"this film made me cry for weeks"

You can hear and download all the songs as well. Check out Zing Zong - like something from "Hair" and "Jesus Christ Superstar." Andrew Lloyd Webber isn't all bad.

Samantha Brown is Not Naked

2009-05-05T21:33:00.000-07:00

I'm getting tired of the number of "Samantha Brown naked" referrals I get to this blog, based on this post a long time ago and an off-hand comment. Never seen Samantha Brown on TV with clothes or without. But for all perverts, here's a picture of Samantha Brown looking at you as if you're naked:

King Kong Theory

2009-05-05T20:16:00.000-07:00

I like this quote from this interview on Dogmatika:

Anger is not depression, anger is working with desire and humour. Anger is destructive, but very active.

I’d never heard of the film or the book written by Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory:

Gives an account of how Despentes became notorious: reviled and admired in equal measure for her rape-revenge novel turned film, "Baise-Moi", she is the poster girl for modern female rebellion. This book describes the ways her ideas have been shaped by her experiences of rape, prostitution and working in the porn industry.

The movie has porn-like scenes of rape, mixed with intense violence. Frankly, I don’t know if I care to ever see the movie or anything like it. I’m becoming increasingly a pansy when it comes to darkness in film and lit. Me, who’s written books about killing a celebrity, a porn star who joins a suicide cult, a serial killer, and recently, human extinction. Why I like her quote is people have totally misinterpreted the anger in my first novel (or even the last post) – not understanding there’s a kind of humor, and even joy, in certain types of anger. Basically, it’s another form of passion.

I like where she's coming from, I just don't know if I like where she's going. Her movie seems to only exist to disturb. A reviewer on IMDB says,

“Somehow, everything was so much overdone that I couldn't take this film seriously anymore. There was so much sex and violence that I got the strong impression that the film was trying very, very hard to be offensive, as if it was aiming at superlatives in ugliness, rather than in telling a convincing tale about two women caught in a spiral of crime.”

Life is shit. Daily, there are people murdering their entire family because of unemployment, driving a car into a group of strangers, stoning a girl to death because she’s been raped, etc. Why then is putting these types of images into a fictional film at all necessary. It’s understandable if art starts to reflect how degraded we’ve become, but really all this does is add to the degradation. Even if it takes a moral position – this behavior is bad – so what? Does anybody need to be taught that rape and murder are bad?

It’s tough, because it’s a conservative position. It’s not much different than people’s reactions to Stravinsky – too dissonant. Why, that’s just noise! But at what point does extraordinary violence in movies actually do harm? Imagine a world where you have snuff-film type violence, porn-style sex, on free TV. The taboos have been broken.

The problem is not the taboos. Porn could be on TV (this is actually in my science fiction novel, a porn sitcom comes on TV called “Stick it to Me”), which could be seen as a kind of progress: sex is natural and shouldn’t be hidden away. But that’s in an ideal world, where people would take rape and violence on TV as a justification. Adding more desensitizing images on public TV isn’t necessarily a sign of progress because people are too stupid to process the information. It’s an argument for censorship - saving people from themselves. There's an inevitable slippery slope when you start doing that, but the first instinct is not necessarily corrupt.

So, I don’t know. The world is likely going to have many more tragedies. Depicting these tragedies in art doesn’t necessarily transcend those tragedies. Just reminds you that life can be shit, nothing more. I’m not sure the use of that. I love transgressive art – it’s what I aim for. But with the world potentially coming to an end – for real – unredeemebly bleak work seems fairly redundant. I’m more interested in maybe finding some way to drive us out of this mess and not have art devolve right along with everything else.

Storming the Gatekeepers

2009-05-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

On Nathan Bransford’s blog comes one of the worst blog entries ever penned by an agent. It perfectly summarizes the vast stupidity rampant in the gatekeepers of publishing. I’ve written screeds before about how agents themselves aren’t that talented. They can’t necessarily recognize talent because they don’t really care about writing as art. They care about writing as money.

He begins:

One of the more unique aspects of writing is the way people associate themselves and their identities with their words on the page. People don't just spend time in the evening reflecting on the capricious vicissitudes of life and/or zombie killers from another planet. It somehow becomes more than that.

You can see this in the way people talk about writing: some people compare it to oxygen, i.e. something that they can't live without. They don't say, "I like to write, it's fun, I enjoy it." They say, unequivocally, "I am a writer. It's who I am."

I'm going to be honest here and say that while I don't judge people when they define themselves as writer, whatever their publication status, I find it a little unsettling when they make it an overly intrinsic part of their identity.

First of all, people just don't tend to define themselves by their hobbies. You don't hear anyone shout to the rafters, "I AM STAMP COLLECTOR!" or "I AM A CONNOISSEUR OF REALITY TELEVISION!" And until you're making a living at it, writing is a hobby. It's something you do in your spare time. (Right?)

Let’s put aside the phrase “overly intrinsic” for a moment, which is kind of like saying “darkly opaque.” But how on earth is a person who thinks writing is a hobby supposed to separate good writing from crap? Writing is a vocation. Great art is an expression of a person’s soul – and an expression of the audience’s soul as well. To say you can achieve that in a mere hobby is seriously not understanding what it takes to create art. And if you don’t understand that writing’s a hell of a lot deeper than a hobby, you’re never going to be able to recognize writing that has any longevity.

Have I created a great work of art? I can’t say I have, but I know what it is to believe in writing like it’s a religion. I know that I write to reach beyond myself, not to pass the time. And if you’re not trying to do that, chances are you’re not writing something worth reading. It also implies that writing only becomes a vocation when you make a living at it. This is gatekeeper-think: that the gate is more important than the process.

Do I take rejection too close to heart? Absolutely. This entry is anger-filled in a way that I wouldn’t be if I’d been readily accepted by the publishing establishment. But I have such limited faith in that happening that ideas like this go very deep under my skin. I don't like seeing the system die. This is regressive thinking: it’s just art. Art matters. To say otherwise is actually kind of tragic.

Unsurprisingly, the entry has a bunch of cheerleaders. One of the curious things about the popular agent blogs is that they’re populated by people who write commercial fiction:

I think of my writing as a product, so I don't take it so personally when I et rejected. when you're producing widgets off an assembly line, it's hard to get all choked up when when of 'em doesn't sell, because you know there's another one about to fall off the line.

That’s a real comment, not a parody of a comment. The entry is an embarrassment, but I’m glad that it was written. It makes me believe more and more that I shouldn’t put my literary future in the hands of people who don’t understand what drives me as a writer.

I’m sure there are agents out there who understand that agents like this are lightweights, who understand that writing’s deeply important. But these are the agents that are the most vocal online and have the biggest fan club. Hopefully the old school agents aren't a dying breed.

Transcendent Man

2009-05-04T16:38:00.000-07:00

This looks fairly awesome.

Floyd the Barber

2009-05-01T10:50:00.001-07:00

Other lyrics you probably haven't paid attention to. "Floyd the Barber" by Nirvana:

Bell on door clangs, come on in
Floyd observes my hairy chin
Sit down chair don't be afraid
Steamed hot towel on my face

I was Shaved
I was Shaved
I was Shaved

Barney ties me to the chair
I can't see I'm really scared
Floyd breathes hard I hear a zip
Pee pee pressed against my lips

I was Shamed
I was Shamed
I was Shamed

I sense others in the room
Opey, Aunt Bee, I presume
They take turns and cut me up
I died smothered in Aunt Bee's muff.

I was Shaved
I was Shaved
I was Shaved

Taj Mahal

2009-04-30T17:08:00.000-07:00

Is better.

ZZ Top

2009-04-30T13:39:00.001-07:00

Don't suck though. Not a good sign to see a confederate flag being waved in Germany. They already had their beards (1980):

1976:

Brown Sugar

2009-04-30T08:41:00.000-07:00

Really interesting discussion going on at Stuff White People Do (found via Kristen Tsetsi) about the lyrics to the Rolling Stones song “Brown Sugar” – something I’d never really paid attention to. Pretty shocking:

Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields
Sold in a market down in New Orleans
Scarred old slaver knows he's doing alright
Hear him with the women just around midnight

Brown sugar how come you taste so good?
Brown sugar just like a young girl should

Drums beating, cold English blood runs hot
Lady of the house wonderin' where it's gonna stop
House boy knows that he's doing alright
You shoulda heard him just around midnight

Brown sugar how come you taste so good, now?
Brown sugar just like a young girl should, now

Ah, get along, brown sugar how come you taste so good, baby?
Ah, got me feelin' now, brown sugar just like a black girl should

I bet your mama was a tent show queen
Had all the boyfriends at sweet sixteen
I'm no schoolboy but I know what I like
You shoulda heard me just around midnight

Brown sugar how come you taste so good, baby?
Ah, brown sugar just like a young girl should, yeah

I said yeah, yeah, yeah, woo
How come you...how come you taste so good?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, woo
Just like a...just like a black girl should
Yeah, yeah, yeah, woo

Some claim this is outright racism, some say it’s literary license – just because you write from the point of view of fictional character doesn’t mean you endorse that character. Only this song is sung with no melancholy at all, it’s a celebration. Most people hear the song and think it’s a song about loving black women. That’s all I thought it was about. It’s sort of like finding out that Nabokov literally had a thing for 12-year-old girls. No, Mick Jagger never enslaved anyone, but he certainly had his way with many teenage girls, with a kind of unfettered freedom. Yeah, rock n roll’s supposed to be shocking, and in the 70’s Elvis’s swiveling hips wasn’t doing it anymore, but this may cross the line into being actually dumbly offensive.

Someone there also brings up that “Brown Sugar” is a euphemism for heroin. The Stones were junkies and heroin enslaves its addicts, so that has to be thrown in there as well. Another poster brings up "Sail Away" by Randy Newman, which does a much better job with the satire. Though you could also get offended.

In America you'll get food to eat
Won't have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It's great to be an American

Ain't no lions or tigers
Ain't no mamba snake
Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake
Ev'rybody is as happy as a man can be
Climb aboard, little wog
Sail away with me

Sail away
Sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away
Sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family
You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree
You're all gonna be an American

Sail away
Sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away
Sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

The difference? Sung with melancholy, unlike “Brown Sugar.”

The other day I was listening to the best of ZZ Top. My car only has a tape player and recently I uncovered all these tapes from high school and I listened to ZZ Top then – pre-MTV ZZ Top. I was pretty startled by the song, “Francine,” which when I was 15 meant nothing to me. It starts:

Got a girl, her name's Francine,
finest thing you ever seen.
And I love her, she's all that I want.
And I need her, she's all that I need.

That’s fine, no problem with that. But it ends:

My Francine just turned thirteen,
she's my angelic teenage queen.
And I love her, she's all that I want.
And I need her, she's all that I need.

These are guys who sing songs like “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” so it’s not quite surprising. But I dunno, since I’ve had a daughter I’ve become more and more PC with little tolerance for stuff like this. Keep ZZ Top the hell away from my daughter.

Open-Mindedness

2009-04-29T13:12:00.000-07:00

This video annoys me a lot:

Amusingly, the guy is proving his own theory of closed-mindedness by making blanket generalizations about what open-mindedness to supernatural phenomena signifies. He lumps together all advocates of supernatural phenomena as being like his retarded neighbor who sees evidence of a moving lampshade as evidence of a ghost – thereby discounting the more serious-minded research into supernatural phenomena that does exist. This is the problem with the UFO issue in that it has been overtaken by morons who’ll believe anything, overshadowing those researchers who take the subject very seriously.

I’ll agree with him that people are making retarded claims without evidence and that holding too emphatically to these ideas is a closed-minded sort of fundamentalism. But his examples of people who “believe” seem more than a little condescending and don’t take into account the actual evidence gathered together by scientifically-minded smart people. It conveniently discounts actual evidence. That’s very, I don’t know, closed-minded. Given the guy’s stance in the video, he probably doesn’t want to believe, which is the case with a lot of skeptics.

Thousands upon thousands of people have witnessed UFOs – including pilots, doctors, politicians, etc. Even if half a percent of those are true, it’s something. The video brings up a court of law, where this type of evidence wouldn’t hold water. Actually, witnesses have sent people to jail for less testimony than there is about UFOs. It tragically devalues people’s sense of perception to discount what so many have seen. The government’s explanations for these sightings is so strangely off-base (swamp gas, Venus) that it just adds more confusion. If it doesn’t exist, why have such a stupid explanation?

Open mindedness is basically just believing things are possible, even without mountains of direct evidence. Not believing these things exist, believing they’re possible. To do otherwise sucks some of the magic out of life. A world where UFOs exist is way cooler than a world without them. Denying yourself that possibility is sort of sad and sort of boring. It's a lot more fun to dream.

Well made video though.

Rilke on Torture

2009-04-28T08:46:00.000-07:00

An epigraph in The Heaven Virus by Cliff Pickover, read last night. Dick Cheney has this quote framed on the wall in his office. I imagine.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us

—Rainer Maria Rilke, “Duino Elegies”

There’s more power to bringing someone to the edge of death than actually killing them, because then they’re safe. That’s not what Rilke is saying, but that’s how someone like Cheney would read it. Reminds me of this quote:

The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.

Torture is liberating.

Maxwell's Silver Hammer

2009-04-27T16:23:00.001-07:00

I linked the Beatles "Piggies" in the last post, which has these lyrics:

In their sties with all their backing
They don't care what goes on around
In their eyes there's something lacking
What they need's a damn good whacking.

If you didn't know, Manson used "damn good whacking" to justify the murders, among other songs, but that was a big one.

I don't know why I haven't put this together before, but "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" was recorded July 9, 1969, the summer of the Manson murders. The song has this lyric:

Rose and Valerie, screaming from the gallery
Say he must go free (Maxwell must go free)
The judge does not agree and he tells them
So, oh, oh, oh

Which is very much like the Manson courtroom, with Manson Family members holding vigil. The trial didn't start until 1970, while Abbey Road was released in September 1969. Still, releasing a whimsical song about a serial killer, after a lunatic was inspired by "The White Album," seems like something the Beatles might have wanted to stay away from. Eerie, though, that the song was recorded that summer. This cartoon animates just how demented the song is:

The Swine Flu

2009-04-27T14:29:00.000-07:00

Man, if this happened during the Bush Administration, I would have been extremely paranoid that this was a plot to halt immigration from Mexico. Now Obama’s in power so I can be more reasonable. But there’s something very mysterious about this. How often do you think about SARS and the bird flu? For a moment, it was the next terrifying thing. Now it’s an afterthought. Too many of these crying wolf situations and people are going to stop caring. 35,000 people die from the flu every year. So the dozens who have died from this do not seem like something to fear. More people will die from car accidents today. Certainly, this is a bad strain of the flu – and as someone with a health problems (been meaning to write a long post about that) and a daughter in a school of 500 – it is worrisome. But the story behind this is not the flu itself but the strange and immediate media frenzy, as if that’s the real disease we should be worried about.

On some level, people like to be afraid. It’s fun, it makes life seem larger than life, so long as you’re not dying. It triggers adrenaline and endorphins. It’s why people like going to horror movies. So the media plays into that. But the idea that the media triggers fear to up the ratings seems insufficient to me. Because it’s so dangerous for our general well-being: it will keep people from traveling, hurting the already-suffering travel business, it’ll increase the distance between people, make people more suspicious of each other. Why the media would want this is really a mystery.

I can understand Drudge rolling with this story. He seems to actively want to halt progress. He’s a really dark force in this country; truly. Huffington Post, the liberal Drudge, but more reasonable and more varied, has been just as bad, screaming terrifying headlines. It will just trigger hysteria and hostility, not vigilance.

Found at Gotcha Media, this ain’t new:

Why does this always happen? I guess Occam’s Razor is the reason: follow the money. This will lead to increased viewership and lines around the block waiting to get a shot or buy over the counter products. Ironically, the thing that may have led to swine flu – factory farming – is the same instinct that fuels media hysteria: money. Maybe one day we’ll look to sustainability over profit. Right now, this is a swine flu on many levels: spread by pigs of industry.

Confessions of a Superhero

2009-04-25T14:31:00.001-07:00

Saw this last night – free on the Sundance Channel on On Demand, so check it out if you've got it. A story about the people who dress up as movie characters around the Mann's Chinese Theater for tips. Tragically sad in some places, and sometimes verges on condescending – like when it shows the footage from the B-movie roles of the Hulk and Batman, you can just hear the mocking laughter that would erupt from the hipster audience. The filmmaker got a lot of access to the four main people (Superman, Batman, Hulk, and Wonder Woman), including access to Batman’s sessions with a shrink, in which he confesses to Soprano’s style murder that may or may not be real (probably not). It’s generally sympathetic and a great portrait of people who are cast aside by the Hollywood machine. Don’t understand some of the reviews on IMDB, which are somewhat lukewarm. I found it totally riveting.

Other scenes on Youtube, including a press interview with the cast, for geeks of the movie.

Update: the full movie can be watched on Hulu - something which I haven't really explored, mostly because I already spend too much of my time on the computer.

Inner Paths to Outer Space

2009-04-23T12:38:00.000-07:00

This book looks very much up my alley, like insanely. Rick Strassman, who contributed to this book, wrote one of the most fascinating books on psychedelic research ever written, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, about his government-funded research into the psychedelic compound, DMT (which occurs naturally in our brains). Amazing sober-minded research. From a (horribly formatted, though it reads like strange prose poetry) interview on Reality Sandwich:

Something that comes up time and time again in people's experiences in your book, DMT - The Spirit Molecule, is that when volunteers are being injected with DMT, they experience UFO's, alternate technologies, and really sci-fi kind of material, so I can see how that would definitely speak to people who are interested in science fiction. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what those kinds of experiences were like for people and what they were encountering.

I had taken about 1000 pages of notes by the beside of the volunteers - 400 DMT sessions that we gave them over the space of about 5 years - and in reviewing people's accounts of their experiences, probably half, maybe more, reported having the experience of being in some sort of contact, some sort of relationship, more or less passive, more or less active, with these free standing, discretely demarcated, sentient sort of beings. I ended up calling them "beings" rather than "entities" or "aliens" or any of that sort of thing because it seemed like the most neutral term to use, but they were described in various shapes and forms and guises. Sometimes they were humanoid, sometimes they were insectoid, sometimes they were reptilian, and sometimes plant-like. They were more or less aware of the volunteers. Oftentimes they seemed to be expecting the volunteers and were glad to see them, and then began interacting with them.

Other times they seemed surprised and angry that the volunteers' consciousness, at the very least, had intruded upon the sphere of activity of that particular being. Sometimes the volunteers were treated or experimented on. Sometimes they experienced some type of sexual intercourse with the beings. Some were told scenarios of the future. Others were marked somehow or another for future reference in a way. Others showered light and love onto them. Others were guides to lead them to some other place, like through a tunnel leading to a typical near death or mystical experience. So it was the whole gamut of what you might expect.

Some of the motifs were pretty classical science fiction - kind of flying toward a space station or a space ship, or automatons or robots were busily doing their business. Sometimes they would see very hard to describe hybrid entities - machine/animal, even furniture kinds of conglomerates of beings.

If I ran the world, this is the kind of research that would lead the local and national news. Screw the billion-dollar space program, funnel research into substances where you can travel to other universes without leaving your chair and possibly prove the nature of reality. The backwardness of our priorities is mesmerizing, but at least there are some people who address such an important subject with a critical, scientific eye.

Strassman’s Cottonwood Research is a great development in serious-minded psychedelic research and if I had the money I’d donate. It’d be great if an insane eccentric millionaire could fund that project – sort of like the guy in “Contact” who funds the space project. Think of it: going into outer space without moving, researching our potential psychic evolution and place in the universe, nothing’s more important.

Update: Bought it.

Shepherd Smith

2009-04-22T19:13:00.000-07:00

...says the truth and then sees his career die before his eyes.

The Craigslist Killer

2009-04-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

This student is a hero of observation. She says about the Craigslist Killer:

But Markoff's former medical school lab partner at Boston University said she is not surprised that he's a suspect in the case because he had profound mood swings and often appeared "disturbed."

Markoff would appear warm and friendly one day, then be brooding and depressed the next day, Tiffany Montgomery told The Boston Globe. She was so troubled that she considered alerting school counselors that he might be suicidal.

He spoke only when someone else initiated a conversation, and although he seemed nice, he was also "strange in a dark way," she said.

Meanwhile, everyone else is saying how perfectly normal he is, which is probably more a comment on their powers of observation than a comment on him. And “wouldn’t harm a fly” should never, ever be used again in defense of a murderer.

The whole thing is eerily like an episode of “Law and Order” or “Criminal Minds.” Watching those shows, you’re led to wonder just what these ridiculous cases would look like in real life. And now here’s a case that’s straight from TV, as if fiction is blending into reality.

To tie this into my daily ranting about literary agents. The dumbest note I ever got from an agent was regarding the paragraph below. This particular agent – actually a young guy working for the agent – asked to read the manuscript then sent it back with red marks on every other sentence, most incredibly misguided. I’ve saved this manuscript over the years so one day I can have vindication and publicly ridicule the agent. Actually, I can’t remember the agency, but I’ll still have the vindication. Here's the paragraph from North of Sunset:

Even if there were witnesses, which for these crimes there weren’t many, they very often steered him wrong. Witlesses he called them – sometimes they confirmed what he already thought, that people weren’t very thoughtful or observant. At least not as observant as him. Most people who lived next door to a murderer usually said later, “I’m surprised. He seemed nice, kept to himself.” Didn’t they notice that his eyeballs shook when he walked? That he often came home with bags of knives?

The note on this paragraph: “How can the neighbors see what’s in the bag?” Truly stupid and contributes daily to my distrust of the publishing industry.

Lit Agents

2009-04-21T17:47:00.000-07:00

I just left a comment on The Talent Killers: How literary agents are destroying literature, and what publishers can do to stop them that's not nearly as mean as my first draft:

I have no problem with her calling out genre fiction. When I read that, I saw it as certain types of straight genre - not Lethem, Atwood, or the more serious-minded purveyors of the medium. But plain old genre writing that does nothing unique or new with the medium. It's strange to see the genre writers get so offended by this. Someone on Janet Reid's blog called Mary a snob like the people in the art community who thumb their noses at Thomas Kincade. THOMAS KINCADE. All writing/art/music isn't equal, and perhaps the viceral reaction some genre writers have to this is they know their writing isn't all that ambitious.

I'm also struck by how mean people are - correcting her grammar, calling her uncharismatic. Or people saying how she’s sabotaging her writing career. In what universe is a rant on the web going to hurt her chances with every agent working today? If anything, it’ll get her positive attention for striking a chord with people. There’s really a wealth of strange internet hostility happening here.

The problem is that the agents aren’t much more talented than their list of writers. There are probably as many genius agents as there are genius writers – i.e. not that many. It’s not that they’re sabotaging better writing, it’s that they have no idea about what makes better writing. I've seen some of Janet Reid's list. Nothing all that great - it's OK, not offensively bad, but unchallenging, which means it’ll be palatable to more people. Surprised too by quality of writers attracted to Bransford's blog. People who take Twilight seriously. I’m a snob. I think Twilight is for teenagers. Because it is.

What it might come down to is not the agenting system, or editors not taking a leap, but the interest of the reading public. They're the ones setting the tone, shelling out the money. It's not as though if Borders put Dostoevsky and Kafka out front, that’s what people would buy. They’d ask, “Where’s the Koontz?” The “Fast and Furious” is the #1 movie for a reason, because people have horrible taste. That’s not entirely the fault of the publishing industry. It’s what people like to read and there’s a dwindling number of people who even read mainstream fiction.

The system is flawed. It's not dead, but it has problems. Good books get published. Weirder books have less of a chance, but worse - writers are gauged on a book by book level, rather than factoring in their entire career. An agent who guages a writer only on one book has a limited idea of what it is to write. Writing is a life-long vocation – and rejecting a writer based on one book is myopic, short-sighted, basically everything wrong with our current system. Not just publishing, but everything: looking five minutes ahead, not towards the future. It’s why the economy fell apart – and publishing’s short-sightedness is not unrelated.

A writer's best work may be three novels away, but if his next book doesn't sell, he's done. People keep saying, "Maybe you need to write a better book." There’s so much blaming the writer for a broken system. In this climate, please define “better.” It doesn’t always equate with “good.” Meanwhile, publishers complain that no one reads books anymore. If you oversaturate the market with less-than-inspiring work, people are going to stop paying attention.

That’s a long way of saying: yes.

Torture

2009-04-21T14:48:00.000-07:00

Because I’m an avowed conspiracy theorist, I believe there’s got to be more to the torture story than merely “trying to get information.” When you’re waterboarding someone 183 times, there’s something else happening. What is the conversation that ensues on waterboard 163? They drag the guy out of his cell. He’s taken to the waterboarding room and knows what’s going to happen. The hundredth time he probably doesn’t fight it – it’s become routine. He knows he’s not going to die, but he knows it’s going to be terrible. What could he possibly give up after waterboard 150 that he didn’t give up during waterboard 128? This really seems like pure sadism at work – or possibly practicing the technique to be used on other people. Or seeing the effect of multiple bouts of torture on the human psyche – i.e. experimentation, nothing to do with gaining information.

Or, and here I get crazy, messing around with the power of life and death in an occultic way, as if torturing somebody becomes a kind of prayer to a demonic force, or studying what happens to the brain when on the brink of death, studying near death experiences. Some other reason than just getting information about terrorism. They had an insane license to experiment like during the Holocaust, so they went with it. This is what leads to conspiracy theory, this is what leads to David Icke-style paranoia, because waterboarding someone 183 times is so purposeless on its surface, there’s got to be a deeper cause. “To gain information” seems like the least likely reason.

Even the idea that torture was used to justify the Iraq war makes little sense. If the Bush Administration was this intent on going to war in Iraq, why would they need a false confession to justify the invasion? Would a prisoner need to utter the words, "There's a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda"? If the Administration was this intent on war, they could just manufacture that someone made the link - i.e. false evidence of a confession. I think there's more plain sadism at work.

The detractors who say torture isn’t such a big deal are showing their true intentions. They’ve lost all credibility. I’ve liked Peggy Noonan in the past, even if I disagree with her, same with Bill Bennet, because even when they’re maddening, they’re still articulate. But Peggy Noonan saying, basically, “Sometimes you just need to look the other way” is a kind of career ender. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to take what she says seriously again. Even Rush Limbaugh used to be kind of threatening – because he’s such an unrepentant asshole with a loyal audience – but rationalizing torture to this degree strips him of his power. If this was torture under Democratic leadership, there would be calls for impeachment. Everybody who is defending or rationalizing torture has lost the credibility to have another opinion, because obviously they’re not coming from a place of sincerity. They’re blind and professional liars.

Cut Ups

2009-04-21T13:50:00.000-07:00

Cut-Ups from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo.

(via Posthuman Blues)

Auction for Soldiers

2009-04-20T14:15:00.000-07:00

Kristen Tsetsi, who wrote my favorite novel I've read for the Self-Publishing Review, is auctioning the novel to raise money for Soldiers' Angels. Spread the word, and the video.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

2009-04-20T14:07:00.000-07:00

This movie probably doesn’t deserve a review, but it’s about my two main topics: UFO’s and the apocalypse. The interesting thing about this movie is it follows the premise of my own novel, as I outline in this depressing post, that the only way (possibly) to save the planet is to kill off the people who are killing it. And that’s different than the premise of the original "Day the Earth Stood Still" – which is killing off the human race before they can take their warfare into space via an atomic rocket.

So DTESS #1 is about the cold war and stopping our childish ways so we can progress as a species. DTESS #2 is about global warming and how we need to curb what we’re doing to the environment if we hope to survive. #2 could have added the fear of the other element, because there are so many parallels between paranoia about Russia and terrorism, though I’ll admit people might’ve believed that the Russians could land here in a spaceship. No one’s going to believe that Al Qaeda has any type of advanced technology.

So they went with global warming instead. SPOILER: in the first movie the day the earth stood still is a warning about what the alien race can achieve with its technology – shut all electricity down for a half hour – so people will pay attention to what Klaatu has to say. In the second movie, it’s the movie’s last image: all electricity shuts down permanently because that’s the only way to save the planet. That’s an interesting update.

The movie was criticized because the CGI was bad. There’s really not that much CGI till the end, which makes it more interesting than another “Independence Day,” which is what I’d been expecting. The thing that bugs me is that Keanu Reeves comes to understand that humans are A-OK and shouldn’t be destroyed by witnessing Jennifer Connely and her son for a couple of days. A son who keeps fucking things up, by the way. Is that Will Smith’s kid? Checking...yes. As if an advanced alien race wouldn’t have boned up on the human race before deciding to destroy it. He meets with a guy and they talk for five minutes - in a McDonald's - about how humans suck but are worth saving. Why exactly was the guy on earth for 70 years if not to shed some light on what humans are capable of. The entire climax of the movie rests on Keanu Reeves having a sudden change of heart, which isn’t in the first movie and has very little logic in the second.

Why bother: this is a basically-stupid B-movie that doesn’t really deserve this much attention here, but I find the subject of alien life and the apocalypse more interesting than most everything else, so I’m going on. So much potential there, annoying to see it wasted.

And this is how much the internet rules. You can watch the 1951 version in its entirety online (starts immediately).

A Very Special Different Strokes

2009-04-20T08:36:00.000-07:00

I was raised by "Different Strokes":

...which led me to this, by the same guy. I was also raised by "The Empire Strikes Back":

...which wouldn't be so hilarious to me if I hadn't recently discovered Parry Gripp:

Susan Boyle

2009-04-20T08:33:00.000-07:00

I wish I could have something of what the world is smoking. It’s a nice story and I don’t think it’s a bad message to say: ugly people are people too! Because the next time someone comes around who’s less attractive, they’ll be given a fairer shake. We are so backwards in our conception of beauty that it takes moments like this to break the stupid ice.

My problem is this: Andrew Lloyd Webber is crap. You get the best actor on earth to read a Hallmark card and it’s still a Hallmark card. No matter how great her performance is, the song is an aural lobotomy. Which is why the whole American Idol phenomenon is baffling to me. I’m not protesting it out of self-righteousness – I really authentically don’t care about watching bad songs being performed, no matter how well they’re done. Sucks sometimes being a curmudgeon because millions of people are driven to tears, lauding her as an angel, I watch it and think: OK, there's that.

I get it – the world’s in a dour place right now and people were desperate for a feel good story. Sort of like the Beatles who arrived in America shortly after Kennedy was assassinated. But Andrew Lloyd Webber isn’t the Beatles by a long shot. It'd be nice sometimes if I wasn’t so critical and could just lay back and enjoy it.

Dead on Time

2009-04-17T14:53:00.001-07:00

This is the best Queen song ever. At one point in my life I could play this on guitar. Not anymore. That is all.

Apocalypse Sandwich

2009-04-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

What amazing irony that a day after people are screaming about an imagined “tyranny” that is the by-product of the Bush administration, there is evidence of actual despot-style tyranny in the torture memos. As always, Andrew Sullivan has the most cogent takedown of the torture memos – really the best blogger writing.

Lest you think that I think Obama’s above criticism, there’s an interesting post at Reality Sandwich that echoes some of my own thoughts: that Obama’s a great and hopeful figure, but also merely fixing a system that is intrinsically damaging:

Because the president we elected -- out of so much hope for a definitive break with what came before -- is not who he seems. It's true that unlike the previous inhabitant of the White House (remember him?), Barack Obama is sane, intelligent, and mature. He's responsive to what others think. He hopes to institute real change in education, health care, the environment.

But even with his great charisma and silver tongue, he's a proper soldier for the system which is ravishing the planet. As he said in his inauguration speech in January, already aware of the huge financial mess he was inheriting, "We will not apologize for our way of life."

What do these words mean? They mean that the mall-i-zation of the planet will continue. They mean that the commercialization of all of life will not stop. They mean that our massive so-called footprint will never be substantially downsized.

All Obama’s doing is stopping the bleeding – I always thought this way, even when I was obsessed with the election and seeing him elected. When I say obsessed, I mean I was glued to every single detail to an insane degree. But Obama’s tasked with rescuing a system that’s killing the planet. It’s better to have him in power so that the degradation of this country occurs more gradually, but he may do it without the sweeping change that’s needed.

Right now we at least have someone bent on saving the system rather than someone actively trying to destroy it. The irony is the very far left wants to see the system destroyed as well, and if McCain/Palin were in power, that’s very well what could have happened. So it’s complicated, but better to have someone in charge of the country who represents the country’s better instincts, than the idiot cowboy instincts of the past administration.

I do think that Obama’s a progressive – a pragmatic progressive. The uptick of 20,000 soldiers in Afghanistan shows his military mettle so that he can get other things passed. A left wing agenda cannot happen overnight or else there would be revolt from moderates – and right now Obama has moderates – so he has to do this as death by a thousand cuts. That doesn’t justify increased military action, but it at least explains it. The question is if he’ll ever go far enough with progressive legislation, and chances are probably not because too much has to be done in eight years.

The other question is if progressive legislation will even work. The world’s a drastic fucking mess. Even if we were able to solve the world hunger crisis, find a cure for cancer, or other utopian scenarios, this would only hurt the planet’s ecology even further by ballooning an already-problematic population problem. One of the tragedies I write about in The American Book of the Dead is that depopulation is necessary to save the planet and save the human species. In a demented way, the Bush Administration’s apocalyptic policies, which had no regard for the long-term prospects of human life, make sense if we’re talking about needing to totally rearrange our current civilization. Bush almost killed capitalism – something that has been raping the planet. Obama’s mainly trying to make sure the current one survives, and if this system survives, the human race may not.

The apocalypse, in some sense, needs to happen because it’s going to come anyway via environmental collapse. As the Cheney character says in my novel, it’s “burning away the forest to save the trees.’” Killing off the population before that population kills us off via overuse of resources. I don’t believe this needs to happen – or at least I hope to not believe it – but the logic does make sense. Hopefully there’s enough time left that slow progress can fix what ails us. At the very least, it’s comforting to have someone who’s not willfully destructive at the helm, and can speak a clear sentence, rather than people who had such a limited regard for human life.

The Tea Baggers

2009-04-16T12:56:00.001-07:00

You know, I’m not saying anything that’s not blatantly obvious, but I’ll lend my piece. This is the core message behind the teabaggers – not taxation.

This could be the kind of thing that around December 2009 we can look back and laugh about the crazy, stupid things that happened during the year, but many of these people are a lot more scary than that – Columbine kind of scary. These “revolts” have arisen because of a sense of powerlessness, and they’re the minority, but it takes no power to wield a weapon. And people who believe something so contrary to logic – that this is Obama’s fault – are capable of much worse leaps than holding an offensive sign.

Andrew Sullivan has the best takedown of the Tea Party Tantrum.

And this guy's a hero:

Conspiracy Theory

2009-04-14T12:15:00.000-07:00

One of the weirder things to have happened recently is that the right wing has recently adopted the exact same rhetoric of the left under George Bush – with no sense of perspective of what was done when their team was in power. They throw out words like “tyranny,” without regard for the warrrantless wiretapping, war under false pretenses, etc. etc. under the Bush administration. I mean, do you remember this? It was like the Bush administration was taunting conspiracy theorists.

Now, I’m a conspiracy minded person. My novel, The American Book of the Dead, came out of some devout paranoia that sprung a leak after 9-11. I’ve entertained 9-11 truth theories and think Dick Cheney is capable of anything. Still, it was disappointing to me to see the conspiracy minded so seamlessly switch from Bush to Obama. RA Wilson called conspiracy theorists, “adrenaline addicts,” and it seems a pretty obvious example of that: these people want to fear those in power. It actually gives some sense of order to think that there’s a discernible enemy. But thinking Obama is equal to Bush is, how to put this: very stupid. I do have to admit, though, that if Bush released a report on left-wing extremism that said something like:

Many rightwing extremists are antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use. Rightwing extremists are increasingly galvanized by these concerns and leverage them as drivers for recruitment.

...then people at the Daily Kos would be equally incensed that Bush was targeting “liberals” and not just extremists – as this quote from the report is not really about extreme ideology. Many reasonable Republicans don’t like “social programs,” so it’s understandable if they feel targeted – especially if they want to feel targeted. But the turnaround to see conservatives say “Big Brother is Watching You,” without irony after the Bush Administration kind of diminishes their credibility. On Drudge right now:

Ridiculous. What’s troubling though is that the loony right is much more powerful than the loony left. Timothy McVeigh killed hundreds of people. The Weather Underground, not as much. And the right fringe is actually in power. Michelle Bachmann is often called crazy, but this quote is really...crazy. The woman is actually in a place of power and makes it onto talk shows. She says,

I believe that there is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service. And the real concerns is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.

I mean that’s scary paranoid. It’s OK for David Icke, Alex Jones, et al. to say this, but intensely strange to be coming from a congressperson. And very dangerous. Even Glenn Beck can get away with it because he’s – basically – an entertainer. A fuckwit and also dangerous, but this quote from Michelle Bachmann is on another level. She’s empty enough to not know or care about the impact this could have, but all of the talk of “socialism” and Palin-led hysteria from the election is going to have a very long echo. Something awful is probably going to happen. Maybe I'd be this paranoid too if my people weren't in power, but Obama seems eminently more reasonable than Dick Cheney.

You know, I didn’t really have to write any of this – it was all said very well by the Daily Show, so watch it:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Baracknophobia - Obey

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

Addendum

2009-04-13T21:22:00.000-07:00

Addendum to this afternoon’s tirade. If it’s not immediately apparent, I’m worried about how my new novel is going to be perceived, so the agent’s criticism cut me somewhere that was already bothering me. If North of Sunset was misread then I don’t how people are going to take The American Book. North of Sunset’s about a movie star who kills people with vanity plates – a ridiculous premise. Many people read the book and laugh. Others though have read it as “hard-boiled,” which was an early taste of how things get easily misinterpreted. And if NoS got misinterpreted, a book that’s nearly over the top satirical, I don’t what people are going to do with this one.

Tessa Dick – Philip K. Dick’s last wife, who I interviewed – offered this quote for the book: "If you read Lolita or A Clockwork Orange without drop-kicking the book out into the garden on a rainy day, this novel is for you." It’s strangely, subtly negative in its way but it at least sets up what I’m going for – the character is as much Humbert Humbert as a story about a guy who dreams reality. Like Lolita (proportions kept, of course) the book’s about the creative process and creative obsession. Yet there are still people out there who think Lolita’s about a guy who molests his stepdaughter. People are insane literalists. My book’s also about creative obsession, as well as the demise of a marriage – two things that are not blatantly apparent but a driving force behind the book, given where I was coming from when I wrote it– i.e. “the end of the world” is the guy’s personal life coming to an end, in which he concocts a fantasy to rescue himself from his damaged marriage and damaged world. And in the book, the writer ends up becoming a messianic figure, as if to counter his sense of powerlessness.

I probably shouldn’t be revealing this about the book, but what the fuck. If you read my book literally, you might be led to think it’s a book about how fantastic I think I am – you know, messiah-caliber. Which is absurd – but no less absurd than thinking North of Sunset’s not a satire. So the book’s going to be met with some criticism, I have to face that.

I also have to face the sort of narrow readership who might dig this type of book. I mean, even Robert Anton Wilson was published on obscure presses. The Daniel Pinchbeck crowd might like it, maybe, Douglas Rushkoff readers. Though it’s not too acid-soaked. There are plenty of Philip K. Dick-heads, and I’ve got a Tessa Dick quote on the book. So, yeah, maybe it’ll find a groove. It’s possible. OK, I feel better. Thank you.

How I Dislike the Publishing Industry

2009-04-13T13:27:00.000-07:00

I thought about submitting my novel to a few agents to try my luck. As I wrote in this piece on the Self-Publishing Review, self-publishing sucks. I love the freedom it provides, but given that you’re going to have to troll the web to market a book anyway, might as well get published traditionally – with traditional distribution and the potential for reviews without having the beg for it – and do additional marketing work, instead of having to do everything yourself. Plus, some kind of advance is better than nothing. So I thought about submitting to agents; felt responsible.

I knew going in that I was in for a rough road, and this is the reason I wasn’t even going to bother. It’s a book with science fiction elements, though it’s not straight sci-fi, and I’m not a science fiction writer. I’ve written a book about a stalker and another about a movie star who becomes a serial killer. This one’s about a novelist (me in 20 years) who starts dreaming and writing things that turn out to be real. North of Sunset was criticized for being “too literary” and “too commercial,” which was sort of the idea – to straddle the line between the two. This one was going to be rejected for being “too sci-fi” and “not sci-fi enough” while also being “too literary” and “not literary enough.” In other words a kind of no man’s land, which I see as a kind of badge – it’s a land that hasn’t been done a lot. If you so easily fit into a genre, you’re doing something wrong. A book should be more about the writing than the plot.

I say this again and again: the protagonist in the book is not the lead character, it’s the writer. The plot isn’t so important as how that plot is expressed. So terms like “likeability” are retarded – is the writing likable, is the book well expressed? Plot is the most superficial part of a book – if your book is only about the plot with no subtext, you’re also doing something wrong.

So....long story short, I got back a rejection that was totally unsurprising to me. And that lack of surprise is annoying. The agent said,

Thank you so much for writing to me about your latest book. You are clearly very talented and I love finding material from self-published authors because it tends to be the kind of idiosyncratic work that I like best. But this one isn't a fit, I'm afraid. It's not the writing, which is excellent; rather, it's this kind of futuristic, Phillip K. Dick genre that doesn't work for me.

In short, I like your writing, but I don’t like the plot. Nevermind what I may be able to accomplish over my entire career. Nevermind the story I’m trying to tell over several books, the agent doesn’t like the genre. I understand not wanting to represent something that you’re not totally in love with, but too often writers are measured per book and how easily that book can sell, rather than the writer’s long-term prospects. Yes, the agent could have been looking for a way to let me down easy, but this is a common type of response: looking at plot and genre before the strength of the writing. This is like judging someone on their body and not their brain.

Another agent agreed to read the entire manuscript, so I’ll see where that goes. If not, I’m releasing it myself, confident in the knowledge that publishing is broken.

Hesed Books

2009-04-08T10:39:00.001-07:00

I can't figure out what Hesed Books is all about, but I want to steal their logo:

Mad

2009-04-03T16:09:00.001-07:00

The comments in this post about self-published book reviewing are entertainingly mean-spirited. Also this one about agents. Writers are mad.

Obama and the Queen

2009-04-02T11:34:00.001-07:00

I find this profoundly weird. I still can't quite believe that Obama's actually president.

Parry Gripp

2009-03-31T13:50:00.000-07:00

The web is the most awesome pet repository. Via Andrew Sullivan, a dog playing a keyboard and howling.

I am new to Parry Gripp – I come to memes late. He writes songs to videos like the dog video. The best stuff is like Ween for kids. Sorta genius using the viral web like this. He's only seconds away from getting bought up by a major advertiser, and he's on the way. But I cannot tell you how much my daughter laughs at this:

and:

Goferboy

2009-03-30T13:18:00.001-07:00

There's another Henry Baum making music - he goes by the name Goferboy and composes chiptune music like Rebound Girl, which is really good. Poking around 8bit, I found this cover of the Benefit of Mr. Kite, also good and amusing.

I'd never heard of chiptune. The kids today.

Women of the World Take Over

2009-03-26T14:55:00.000-07:00

Don’t know why the women have to be fashion model beautiful, but one of the most beautiful recordings ever made. Has its origins in this song by Ivor Cutler:

Obama on Legalization

2009-03-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

This is a disappointing answer from Obama about legalizing pot – up there with saying bloggers all wear pajamas and live in their mother’s basement. Just really square, dismissive, and old-fashioned.

This poster at Huffington Post says it best:

The dismissive answer that the President gave to the questions regarding pot laws shows a willingness to stereotype the issue as one of Cheech and Chong pushing for the legal right to get stoned and be lazy. The truth of the matter is that the prohibition like laws against pot affect the entire country. Families are without parents due to jail time imposed for simple possession, this leads to lower incomes for these families even after time has been served because of the permanently attached criminal record. Prison overcrowding is a big deal in this country and we currently incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in the world, even China. Drug violence on the Mexican-American border is only increasing and this affects hundreds of communities on both sides of the border, on a personal level. The sheer amount of money spent on the war on drugs is overwhelming, even though supply has not diminished over the last few decades, instead it has increased. To ignore all of these issues and a host of others to get a laugh is a cheap oversimplification of a very serious issue for families and communities. I had hoped for a more serious approach from this president, at least the ability to have a serious discussion of the issue, I guess it's still too scary an issue for even a popular and reforming politician, who has admitted to using it in the past, to touch. When will we grow up?

Same time though we’re on the edge of a precipice. What would the Cantors of the world do if Obama suddenly went pro-legalization? It’s just not politically viable right now, even if economically necessary. It’ll happen eventually. The seeds are being sown (being separated from the shake, couldn't resist). Marijuana prohibition is too stupid a policy to not one day be overturned.

Jacking the Ball

2009-03-26T10:16:00.000-07:00

I saw a Citibank commercial using the song “Jacking the Ball” by The Sea and Cake and was all set to embed the video and write an angry diatribe about how selling out is now meaningless. But instead found this nice performance from 1993.

The Flaming Lips also seem to sell out left and right, being featured in an ad for salad dressing among others. Instead, here’s a nice B-side from “At War with the Mystics,” with the refrain, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Where the Wild Things Are Trailer

2009-03-25T15:53:00.000-07:00

This trailer’s making the rounds today and further indisputable proof that I’m totally out of sorts with the zeitgeist. I mean, a melancholy song by Arcade Fire? Don’t know if that’s quite in keeping with the spirit of Maurice Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are is like a kid’s first acid trip. Spike Jonze is still interesting, but this seems a tad too mournful and serious. Where the Wild Things Are is not "Lost."

Vote on My Book Cover

2009-03-24T18:45:00.000-07:00

My cover designer has come up with two different covers for my novel. Please vote below.

Knowing Review

2009-03-23T12:42:00.000-07:00

I’m going to be back blogging again. I have a book coming out soon and want to express some things about where the book came from – beyond what I’m writing for the Self-Publishing Review, which is somewhat limited in scope, though interesting.

I saw ‘Knowing’ last night, took myself. When I first heard about it I was worried that it basically scooped my novel. And there are some very interesting similarities (probably some spoiler warnings in here). My novel’s about a writer who starts dreaming things that turn out to be true, including an insane President’s plan for the apocalypse. “Knowing” is about an astrophysicist who learns about coming disasters, including the apocalypse. In one point during “Knowing,” the lead character contacts a woman to make sense of what’s happening and shows her his college I.D. to appear legitimate. In my novel, the writer does the same, showing a woman a card saying he’s a writing professor. Minor, but interesting. Mostly the similarities have to do with how the movie ends (SPOILER) – it climaxes with a UFO landing, same as my novel. Perhaps I shouldn’t’ be spoiling my own novel, but anyway. Generally, I don’t feel I’ve been scooped because the mood of my novel is so different, and there’s the whole matter of the insane President, which is nowhere to be found in “Knowing.”

The movie had a profound effect on me – yes, even a pulp science fiction movie, not just because of the similarities with what I’d written (a novel started six years ago when my daughter was just born), but because these outlandish ideas about the end of the world are hardly outlandish anymore. One of the more disgusting and disturbing things Steven Spielberg said about “War of the Worlds” was that he was trying to exploit people’s fears about 9-11. In “War of the Worlds” there’s a plane crash, but it’s off camera, the crash is implied. This movie shows the plane crash in vivid detail and it’s one of the more awful things put onto celluloid. Later there’s a subway crash in which people rise from the subway tunnel covered in gray ash. In this movie 9-11 is everywhere and I don’t believe that’s particularly healthy; it may even be damaging.

The reason I started my novel about The End was because I was in downtown New York during 9-11 and saw the planes hit in real time. Broke me open in a serious way – including devout paranoia, which began seeming less like paranoia the deeper we got into the Bush Administration. But 9-11 happened, plane crashes happen, people have died this way, and putting that into a science fiction thriller seems irresponsible. Images are a lot more affecting than words. I can write: The plane crashed into the ground. People fled the wreckage screaming, on fire....But watch that in a movie? A totally different experience.

Jean Luc Godard said the worst thing about “Schindler’s List” (again Spielberg) is that it recreated Auschwitz. There’s no such thing as “just a movie” as all of the actors are drumming up horrible parts of their lives to convey fear and despair, and it’s recreating the worst moment in human history. The plane crash in “Knowing” doesn’t accomplish a lot except to make you sickened and fearful, and I’m not sure that’s very useful.

That said, I think “Knowing” is an important development in movies because the aliens in this movie are benevolent – which is something that is sorely missing from pop culture. Very bored with marauding aliens. If an advanced race of Ufonauts wanted us dead, we would be. So it’s a good development in the depiction of aliens in the mainstream, as well as exploring our place in the universe - really, I think, the most important issues going. Much of the other stuff seems like a distraction.

But all told my novel comes from a very different place. It’s not a book that fetishizes fear, even if it’s about the end of the world. I’ve written how much I dislike The Road, as well, which does the same. And the reason I’m self-publishing without even dealing with the agenting process is because overserious fearmongering is what sells now. I just generally don’t care about the crazy overseriousness that passes for drama: Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Dark Knight – totally unwatchable, might be the most incoherent popular movie ever made. It’s a Batman movie, get over it.

Anyway. My novel’s about how humanity might be able to save our own hide and not rely on being swept up by benevolent beings from the universe (though I’ve entertained the idea that this is the only way out), it’s about the evolution of human consciousness, a totally different type of apocalypse than this movie. I think “Knowing”’s an important movie – I really do. It says a lot about how we see ourselves and our future – both enormously tragic, but still hopeful, which is probably pretty close to how things are going to unfold.

So, yes, I’ve got a lot to say about where this novel came from. Here’s a preliminary cover for the novel – probably not going to end up being a white cover, but I like what she’s done - Cathi @ Book Cover Express. Didn’t want a glossy science fiction style cover. Cool thing is I wrote Anomalist Books to get permission for the image, which comes from Jacques Vallee’s Confrontations. The image is “Classification of anomalies related to UFOs.” Jacques Vallee gave me permission, so long as I quote the source.

Original image:

Rudy Rucker

2009-02-19T13:45:00.000-08:00

There's a new interview with Rudy Rucker up at the Self-Publishing Review. And this site's becoming a kind of overgrown Twitter account. Speaking of which: @selfpubreview.

Interview with Tessa Dick, Philip K. Dick's Last Wife

2009-02-12T16:34:00.000-08:00

I interviewed Tessa Dick for the Self-Publishing Review. Awesomely cool that she contacted the site and awesomely strange she self-published.

Soon enough I'm going to finish my Philip K. Dick-inspired novel. Yes, soon.

Update: Most amazingly, this interview has made the

L.A. Times
The Guardian
The New York Times

Tuesday Shorts

2009-02-05T16:46:00.000-08:00

I've been interviewed on Tuesday Shorts. Check it out. My response to this interview here.

So Long

2009-02-01T10:58:00.000-08:00

I wrote this a while ago, before "All Apologies" came out, which it resembles, but I wrote the lyrics last week. If you're following along, I recently got separated, which means only seeing my daughter every other week. I woke up in the middle of night the night after she left for the week humming lyrics to this song - a song which I hadn't thought about in a while. So I have new fodder for all my old incomplete songs.

So Long - Ash Tree

Feed

2009-01-04T15:44:00.001-08:00

Back to recording music. The hardest six months of my life are coming to a close. Be glad I wasn't blogging during that period. Recording this brought me back.

Now I begin to see the light
I'm not one to put out a fire

Feed - Ash Tree

Self-Publishing Reviews

2009-01-04T15:07:00.000-08:00

I’ve started a new site devoted to self-publishing: The Self-Publishing Review. I’m gearing up to finish a book and I don’t have the heart or stomach to deal with the querying process again. Mainly because the novel has some of the same issues as North of Sunset – it’s sort of in no man’s land in terms of genre. North of Sunset was criticized for being both “too commercial” and “too literary,” which I took as a compliment. The new novel is part science fiction, but I’m not a science fiction writer. Also, though, the thought of “making it” as a writer is not really my guiding principle anymore. I just don’t have that kind of ambition or that kind of belief. So I’m going to release the book myself.

Excited about the prospects for this site – an attempt to legitimize self-publishing. There’s plenty of great writing that goes this route. I’ve been connecting with writers for the site. First review/interview is for the novel, Homefront, by Kristen Tsetsi. Incredibly good, inspiring, makes me feel good about this project.

If anyone out there wants to write for the site, please contact me. Need writers in all areas, but especially book reviewers. There’s no way I can handle reviewing books all by myself. I want to be critical of bad books too, believe me. Check out the site.

Shock Therapy

2008-11-10T10:50:00.000-08:00

Go see my father's play. It is good:

Three psychotherapists. A painter.
A runaway daughter.
And an ex-con with a major score to settle.
Welcome to the party.

with CECE ANTOINETTE THEO BREAUX
MATTHEW GLAVE GREGG HENRY
SCOTT PAULIN LISA ROBINS SOPHIE ULLETT

NOV 8-DECEMBER 7
Thu-Sat 8pm Sun 7pm
Previews Nov 1, 2, 6, 7
Sunday matinees Nov 30/Dec 7 2pm

THE LILLIAN THEATRE
1076 N. LILLIAN WAY L.A. 90038
Tickets and information:
(323) 960-4420
Discounted tickets available through:
http://www.plays411.net/shocktherapy

Baum on Palin

2008-09-18T08:59:00.000-07:00

I just want to say, with a kind of demented pride, that this woman is a member of my family:

I Didn't Know

2008-09-03T10:56:00.001-07:00

I Didnt Know -

Go Out and Stay Out

2008-08-15T20:16:00.000-07:00

All right, so I wasn’t up to diving back into this. I’ve been incredibly busy in ways that I don’t necessary want to blog about it. Don’t want to be overly morose or divorce-and-tell about a marriage that went sour. Doesn’t feel right. Instead I’ll blog in song. It’s all been very good fodder for songwriting. I’m going to go Elvis Costello “Blood & Chocolate” and write a record about my divorce. Here’s the latest song, first song written and recorded in my new place, which conveniently has an extra office space that I’ve turned into a studio.

Go Out and Stay Out - Ash Tree

Also, in other news, The Golden Calf got a really nice review @ Oxyfication. Click that Golden Calf link and you can read the book for free.

Legendary

2008-07-25T17:33:00.001-07:00

I think I’ve posted this before, but here again it makes sense because it basically explains the story of my marriage. Almost word for word.

Hero of the Underground

2008-07-21T12:48:00.000-07:00

Tony O'Neill's got a new book out. A memoir he ghosted about a football player who turned dope addict. Actually, not ghosted, withed. I haven't read it yet, but given Digging the Vein was one of the best books I've read in the last ten years, I'm gonna get this one:

Update: Tony O'Neill's started a blog. I may actually get to blogging myself if I can get a moment.

Music Box

2008-07-17T19:00:00.000-07:00

Last night I was woken up at 2 a.m. by a music box starting to play, out of nowhere. The sound of a music box is eerie, no matter how nice the song, especially being woken up by it. Last week when my daughter was here, I was beat tired. She very sweetly put a blanket on me, gave me a stuffed animal, and cranked the music box so it would play. Because she rules. There's no reason that the music box should start playing out of the blue a week later after it had wound down. My theory: she was dreaming about the music box, which set the music box going in my place. I ended up dreaming about her.

Tompkins

2008-07-16T21:55:00.001-07:00

I love this, got it for my brother last Christmas. I’m not all morose at A.T.:

Peanut Brittle - Paul F. Tompkins

Blue

2008-07-16T16:51:00.000-07:00

Writing going well. Not much more to say than that. While listening to: Afro Blue - John Coltrane

Also got the check for my car from the insurance company today, which allows me to breathe. Had to shell out a lot of money to move into this place, a larger security deposit than most. But I love the place. Wood floors. Found nice furniture cheap, an entire bedroom set for a girl for all of $200. The move, aside from the car accident, which had its own disguised blessing, had a lot of hints that it was the right thing to do. I’d lost some of my faith that I could will things to be better. Getting diagnosed with a worsening illness was a real fucking insult: you’ve worked very hard, in your life, on your marriage, for your daughter, and here’s your reward. Depressed me horribly around wintertime. But it’s also given me some perspective on what matters, brought back some of my urgency. And the move went in such a way that I’ve felt somewhat taken care of, no matter what’s happening, which is something that I’d pretty devoutly lost.

Tabula Rasa

2008-07-16T09:25:00.000-07:00

I love Imeem. Used to be Youtube was the best way to find music, now Imeem. Don’t see how they can post copyrighted material without getting arrested, but in the meantime…I often put this on when I’m starting over in some way. Because of the title and the way it hits the bloodstream.

Arvo Part - Tabula Rasa

Crash

2008-07-15T15:33:00.000-07:00

A picture of my car, a fair estimation of my life. Actually, not that bad. Got a good night of writing in last night. Moved here with a major project to do – over the spring I wrote most of a novel longhand in a notebook. Didn’t want to plug the novel in earlier because I wanted to have the project when I moved in. And last night I finally started. Reworking the novel that I’ve been sitting on for five years. Wrote a screenplay last fall, partially based on that novel, but better mapped together. Using the plot of the screenplay mixed with the ideas, some of the writing, of the novel that never really came together. I’m thinking a screenplay is the best way to outline a novel. At least for me. My dirty secret. So some good things coming from parts of my life getting totally demolished.

Amazon

2008-07-14T18:12:00.000-07:00

I’ve started selling half my things. The money’ll be nice, but getting rid of the cluttter is also important. Moving 1000 books here was just such a pain in the ass. Those things were bought pre-Internet, back when if you found something in a used bookstore, you had to buy it, because you never knew when you’d see it again. Now you can find anything in five seconds online. Also: CD burners. But don’t tell anyone.

Just a few things listed so far. Might list hundreds. So if you want a copy of the DSM-IV or Joy Division’s Closer, go to it.

The New Yorker

2008-07-14T17:56:00.000-07:00

Crazy life I am leading now. Back and forth between the person I was when I was twenty-five to being a full-time father the following week. I would be disingenuous to say that I’m not grateful for the space, especially coming out of a difficult time, going on years. I’m a better father when I’m alone, when I can’t rely on anyone else, and she likes the undivided attention. I had her last week in the apartment for the first time, and it went well. She’s adapting as well as possible. Misses me but also likes new things. Her cousin and closest friend are kids of divorce, so it’s not entirely foreign to her. I’m not a kid of divorce, so it’s foreign to me, but a change was desperately necessary.

Here I am single again prepared for anything, divorced with a kid, a different kind of single, with different priorities because much of what single people desire is, in a way, behind me. I think about this a lot because this neighborhood is teaming with single people, young L.A. ambitious types, compared to the neighborhood I came from full of orthodox Jewish families, the women in wigs, their kids off limits, like living in someone else’s country. And now the country I’m living in is full of young hot L.A., very strange, though women don’t make me nervous like they might’ve ten years ago. It’s like - if I knew then what I know now, and I do. But I want a girlfriend not at all, I want to write a book.

I just never managed to be so prolific a writer after my daughter was born. I got some things done, but not when I was in my twenties, holed up like a hermit, with nothing else to think about. I never managed to be one of those people who wakes at five just to get writing in. I tend to write like crazy for a month and then spend more months recovering, but I need that month to get it all down, and it never came b/c my wife and I were always struggling, financially, personally. I’d be lying if I that didn’t weigh on me and the marriage, because it did, I’m human, and an ambitious human. That’s not why the marriage broke up – it was that and many other reasons. Back when I was blogging most profusely, we were in trouble in ways I didn’t mention, but I used the blog to escape it.

…much like I used the primary election in the past 6 months, as the marriage dissolved. Probably best that I didn’t blog then, but I wrote a hell of a lot of Kos comments. As my marriage was sinking, there’s Hillary Clinton, unrelenting and critical of the guy I was supporting, got under my skin like the rest of the country, like souls were at battle. Now I care very little about the election, seeing it as a way for people to feel self-righteous. The New Yorker cover today is a perfect example. The over-sensitivity is very boring, manufactured, not even frustrating. The rest of the election is probably going to unfold the same way. People desperate for an outrage. It just ain’t as fun as the Clintons, who are like fictional characters. The Internet is boring me, but that’s probably for the best.

So…I’m alone in the apartment for a week, two weeks out of every month. I can’t screw this up. I’ve been given some free time, no matter how it came about, and I can’t fail the separation and myself, now that I’ve got to figure out why I’m here on my own.

Car

2008-07-09T13:16:00.000-07:00

I am freakishly tired. No time to think about much of anything except what needs to get done. In two weeks time, found a place, bought furniture, shopped for whatever else, worked when I could. Finally got myself a car yesterday. A big relief, bleeding money to rent a car was no fun. And the new car rules:

A 91 Volvo 240, black. Can’t be too many of them around. Previously had this (Not the actual car):

Homely, but worked. Except the brakes screeched like an old lady and the radio didn’t work. Wish I had taken a cellphone picture of the car after the accident. The right front was smashed in, couldn’t even roll to the tow truck. Never been in an accident – both airbags deployed, sprinkling some kind of dust in my face that I smelled for hours afterwards, everything seemed to turn white. Corner of my eye saw a woman at the streetcorner backing out of the way. Hit so hard that my car nearly spun around, rolling into a newspaper box. Corner of Bedford and Olympic, which I now try to avoid. First couple of days driving sucked, nervous, thought it might stay that way. But I’m back driving without much problem. And the Volvo drives like a tank, so it feels safe, and slow enough that I can never be impatient.

Blog

2008-07-03T14:10:00.000-07:00

I guess now is as good a time as any to talk about the ongoing insanity that is my life:

Going through a divorce.
Only going to see my daughter half-time.
Found out in the recent months that my health has deteriorated. I feel all right, generally, but my future health is pretty uncertain. Bad kidneys, so you know. With no long-term health insurance.
Next, on the way back from a move to my new apartment, I got into a car accident, totaling my car.
The day before my birthday.
Yes, rough.

Things are very weird and nerve-wracking right now, but good too, moving on and forward in a way that was meant to be. The marriage couldn’t last. May or may not write about that. So fucking much to do right now, pretty overwhelming. But I think I want to get writing here again, as I’ve got a different type of time to kill. Nice new template to break it in.

I also owe it to my publishers to be more visible again. Good timing, really, that the reprint of my novel came out now, as this big change is here. So buy it. It’s a base price of $4. $4!!! And then add whatever you want to the price above that. The book looks fucking great, proud of it. And it’s FREE TO READ online. Read it and make whatever donation you think is right afterwards, that’s how they work.

I’ve got a lot to say, so I will. That song I posted last week puts it in perspective, didn’t want to write about it then. First verse is to myself about not seeing my daughter. Second verse is to my daughter, should she ever lose me permanently. Heavy, heavy times, but I’ve got much hope and will.

Here it is again:

Muse - Ash Tree

I don’t need a song about her
She exists in more than name
But the song might be permanent
And I don’t want her to go away, away

When you hear this song remember
All that I wanted to say
Like your soul – it is infinite
And that I won’t ever go away
I will never go away, today

OK, that’s my life story. I’m off to see a shrink.

TGC15

2008-06-16T08:56:00.000-07:00

The Golden Calf is out!

From:

Which means you can read it for free online – but not yet. Currently, you can read the first two chapters online at the bottom of the page. I’ll update this once the whole book’s up.

I’m going to be blogging soon, back in it. A lot going on now but can’t get into it yet. So stay tuned, buy a book, listen to a song.

Muse

2008-06-11T09:30:00.001-07:00

Muse - Ash Tree

Come On

2008-03-20T16:35:00.000-07:00

Finally finished this song, the first one with Logic Express 8 and an electronic drumset. Took me forever to set up the drumset, long story. And I have so many toys at my disposal now that I’ve been fiddling with this song endlessly. But I gotta finish something. Much more thought out than other recordings, but problems here and there that could be better.

I think I’m out of practice not playing in a band for so long. Gives me new appreciation for musicians who are able to play any kind of music flawlessly. I’ll get better at this. Quit denigrating myself. Here it is.

Come On - Ash Tree

A remake of this song, posted last year. Man, I don’t remember it being that slow:

Come One

lyrics:

come on inside
sit by the fire
it’s on tv
and we can make believe
we’re watching news.

let’s take a ride
on our hard drive
we’ll cure the virus
spreading like the measles
of our youth

don’t we both just paint a picture
of people don’t want to be known
two people will make one except if
that person doesn’t reach out
to the only one they know

come on we’ll
reap what we scythe
and sleep through the night
at home
come on we’ll
seem like we’re right
and be who we want
to know

come on let’s fight
about our life
we’ll reach a truce
when we realize the world
is not alone

it’s a delight
to be alive
in time we’ll find that we
can be on top of
what we love

Preorder

2008-03-10T22:15:00.000-07:00

New template and news. My novel, The Golden Calf, is ready for preorder.

People say about it:

“This pacy, tightly written novel is like ‘Taxi Driver’ meets Charles Bukowski’s Factotum.”
-Uncut

“An amusing, persuasive insight into obsession, stalking and the disintegration of sanity. Highly recommended to anyone with a bitter hatred of Tom Cruise and Hollywood stars in general.”
-Butterfly

“A marvel of pace and comic timing….Much of Baum’s narrative bears a similarity to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.”
-Daily Telegraph

“With a superb narrative control, Baum paints a portrait of male dysfunction set to explode.”
-The List

“Ray is nearly as good a portrait of post-collegiate angst as has been painted so far.”
-New York Press

“Explores the hazy junction where the teeth of the daily grind sink into the day-dreamt certainties of life’s true bell-head sounds.”
-Lee Ranaldo, member of Sonic Youth

3 AM

2008-02-28T18:47:00.000-08:00

I’m in this, a story, “Thirteen Mississippi.” I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s available here. Thanks to 3AM and Social Disease.

If anyone’s wondering what I’m up to: I have plans to post some music here soon but it’s taking a while. Now that I’ve decided to take songwriting more seriously, and I can play anything I want to: drums, strings, whatever, I’ve become a fairly insane perfectionist. I’m on, like, the eighth draft of the same song. I need to admit that it might not be possible to record a totally clean recording by myself. I’m thinking of a Dinosaur Jr. record called “Whatever’s Cool with Me,” where J. Mascis plays the drums. The drums are strangely, but interestingly, off. I’m deep into it, though, and enjoying it, the main thing I think about. Anyway, I hope to have something done in the next week or so.

Book Cover

2008-02-08T11:38:00.001-08:00

Me like it:

Van Halen!

2008-01-29T10:03:00.000-08:00

Oh man, this is one of the most amazing things I’ve heard online. David Lee Roth’s vocals isolated for “Runnin’ with the Devil.” Click it, amazing. He’s like John Coltrane playing three notes at once. How in the hell does he do that with his voice?

Runnin with the Devil (via)

After reading DLR’s autobiography a couple months ago, I got obsessed with Van Halen. Played every record. Found good Youtube stuff. Like Ice Cream Man.

Or Eddie Van Halen, wasted, destroying a guitar.

I’d love to see them live, way cooler than seeing Led Zeppelin reform, they ain’t nothing without John Bonham.

Been listening to more drum-heavy music, now that I've got a drumset. Almost got it working. Almost. Sort of painful getting it set up. I'll probably write a review of my drum set-up because I've been nerding so heavily about V-drums and software. Playing drums again has been a nice sense memory of what it was like when I was 25. Don't know what you've been missing til you've got it back. Realize it was the main thing keeping me from considering myself as a songwriter. Always thought a band would come down the pike at some point, time in a recording studio, but I kind of like the idea of playing everything myself. Recording to come soon. I may sign up for this.

Darryl's Library

2008-01-28T09:03:00.000-08:00

North of Sunset has a new review, possibly the last one, a good one, by Darryl Sloan, author of the novel Chion. He digs the character of Detective Stein. A lot of people have told me that, don’t like that he doesn’t get a final word.

He also offered to make North of Sunset a free download. I actually tried to change the download cost at Lulu, but they wouldn’t let me. This is better, comes with this nice graphic. Click it to download and read the PDF.

Hollywood

2008-01-17T09:00:00.000-08:00

I wish the fucking writer’s strike would end already. I’ve still got a screenplay lying dormant.

Meanwhile, yes, Tom Cruise is a lunatic. That look in his eyes throughout this interview is everything North of Sunset is about.

Someone should give me a million dollars for being prescient about celebrity. 2007 was the year of the celebrity meltdown. I am getting published though, so good news there. Here’s the initial sketch for the re-release of The Golden Calf:

Notes

2008-01-10T08:49:00.000-08:00

A note to everyone, RW Hedges record, which I reviewed, is out now. The best record I’ve heard in years.

Meanwhile, I’ve become totally obsessed with the election, much like 2004, much to my wife’s chagrin, an election which crushed me emotionally. Some zealotry for Obama here.

Thirdly, I just went into debt and bought a drumset, which is seriously going to change my recording life.

Still figuring it out how to make it talk to Logic Express 8, which I also bought, but drums are the main thing that’s been holding me back. I’m a drummer first, before being a songwriter. I just could never get a song to sound like I wanted it to sound.

Resolution

2008-01-03T19:20:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year. I’ve got resolutions:

1. Record a lot of music
2. Make headway on my novel
3. Don’t fuck around anymore

I’ve had three blog entries written in the past coupla weeks and I haven’t posted them, which says something. I just don’t want to put anything too nakedly confessional right now, creeps me out too much. Don’t know want to spread myself too thin maybe. But the reason I’ve sort of resurrected the blog is because I’m going to start posting music here again. Probably what I’ll use it for primarily. I just bought myself a copy of Logic Express 8 for Christmas. Amazing, $100 new on Ebay. I’m going to get my songs done right finally. I listened back to some of my songs and I’m sort of embarrassed by their sloppiness. The stuff I’ve posted so far is pretty thin, demos, half-ideas. I need to put in the same kind of time I’ve put into other writing. For some reason, it’s taken me this long to figure that out.

Jim O'Rourke w/ Sonic Youth

2007-12-19T16:04:00.001-08:00

I had a whole Jim O’Rourke fanboy post written but never posted it, for whatever reason. I was seriously obsessed with him for a while a couple of months ago, reading everything I could. He even wrote back to me on Myspace. That is cool, even if it wasn’t really him—a fake Jim O’Rourke wrote to me! That’s the kind of fanboy I became. That post’ll have to come later. Today, surfing around, bored, trying not to work, I found this of him playing with Sonic Youth, a great performance from one of my favorite Sonic Youth records, nicely symphonic:

Steve Martin

2007-12-17T14:06:00.000-08:00

Got and read this book this past weekend, an early Christmas gift. Made me regret a post I wrote earlier. I’m still in the top ten for the search “Gern Blanston,” so people will read that little anecdote I wrote about him. In the acknowledgements he thanks “The Internet,” so I have the supreme delusion that he read my blog post, saw how some were appreciating his earlier work and decided to reevaluate it. Yep, I feed on delusions such as that. The book does make it seem like he hasn’t even thought about those early routines in 30 years. He writes about them as if remembering them again, though someone like me has a lot of that stuff memorized.

I don’t know why Steve Martin’s early humor hits me the way it does, more than any other comic, but the memoir proves that he isn’t just a major talent, but a major brain as well. I haven’t really dug his New Yorker stuff, seeing it as him trying to be sophisticated, trying to be Woody Allen, who went from “earlier, funnier movies” (from Stardust Memories) to more thoughtful, less spastic stuff. But it’s less natural, more like he was negating who he really was, trying to disown it. Which is true, to a point, but this memoir shows that he was an intellectual all along, and the reason he’s so good is because he took it seriously. He’s a real writer at work, but also a musician, using his own weird cadence—I’m not talking about the banjo, but the way he speaks. Makes sense, though, that he’s also a musician, as is Woody Allen. Comedy’s all about……………………………………timing. It’ll be interesting to see if his movies get more funny, now that he seems to not be disowning who he was when he was at his funniest.

I devoured the book in a night. Sucks when I do that because these days books are few and far between. I realize I still want to write fiction, but I just can’t read it right now. I took back to the library “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,” a look at literary life in Los Angeles by Aldous Huxley, which should interest the hell out of me, but I couldn’t get into it. There’s a distance in fiction I can’t seem to get around. People show a different honesty when writing about their real lives (when they do it well). Even when they’re embellishing themselves, it’s how they want to appear personally, not how they want to appear artistically: different. So I’ve set aside a pile of journals, autobiographies, and letters collections to get me reading again.

After reading the Steve Martin book, I also dusted off the typewriter. My wife bought it for me a few years ago, $10 at a Goodwill. I thanked her, poked at it, but never really had the urge. One of my least favorite chores in life is to plug in barely-readable long-hand into the computer. I can’t bear typing straight to a screen. So I’m getting into typewriting, something I’ve never really done. I’m a much better typist now than I used to be. I calculated recently that I’ve been writing 60,000+ words a month for non-fiction related work, that’s a novel a month. I can type better now, and it’s created a certain work ethic for writing.

On that typewriter, I started getting down my own autobiography, which could be presumptuous, but I’m wondering how much my life story has a real narrative to tell. When reading a famous, successful person’s memoir, it all appears to be leading to some point. I’m not there yet, but if I ever do become successful as I’d like, there’s a lot in there that makes sense: Hollywood high school, parents working in the industry, being a musician, etc. I’ve always felt that I had a shit-poor memory for my life, which is why I make up mostly-outlandish stories in fiction. I found though in the four pages I wrote, before the ribbon gave out, I remember more than I’ve let on. Thankfully, you can buy any typewriter ribbon that’s ever been made. I don’t know why exactly, who uses a typewriter?

That’s my Ash Tree-style review of Steve Martin’s comedy memoir. If you love those years of Steve Martin, read it. It’s also a good portrait of the sixties and seventies. Really, it’s the portrait of a writer who became a rockstar.

TGC Cover

2007-12-13T11:58:00.000-08:00

The book cover designer for The Golden Calf has been decided. It’s really coming together. I went through the artists at Black Market Culture and Another Sky’s Invision collection and was most into the work of Keith Rosson. The guy in this painting is a good representation of the novel:

Go to Keith Rosson’s site and poke around his zine covers, flyers, paintings, say hello. Good stuff there.

NBCC

2007-12-12T09:46:00.000-08:00

Interesting vitriol about self-publishing spewed in the comments about The National Book Critics Circle's survey of reviewers : “60.5 percent think it's okay for a newspaper book section or magazine to ignore self-published books that authors submit to them, e.g., iUniverse type books.”

They write a lot so I don’t have to.

The Golden Calf

2007-12-11T15:16:00.000-08:00

By the way, good news on the publishing front. I haven’t wanted to mention it because I wasn’t 100% sure yet, never am. My first novel, Oscar Caliber Gun, now called The Golden Calf, is going to be reprinted by Another Sky Press – the same press that put out the Falling from the Sky anthology.

The way they do things: the book is free for a download. If you want it printed, you can buy it at cost or add an extra donation. Like how Radiohead put out their last record. They are cool, good people, support them by clicking here, reading/buying:

So I said I was dour about fiction writing a couple posts back. I was lying, or at least it was an impermanent thought – much why I want to come back here to blog, I make those negative thoughts less important by getting them out into the open. Since then I've gotten back to work on my book.

Getting published is also a salve. Anyone who tells you it’s all about the writing and not the publication is a saintly freak, or a bad writer, a person who trumps themselves up before finishing anything. Wait, I do that. Anyway, I'm happy.

The Guardian

2007-12-11T09:01:00.000-08:00

Interesting post on a British blog written by a San Diego publisher/writer about L.A. fiction. Led me to some of Tony O’Neill’s recent blogs. Good stuff about Hubert Selby and Frederick Exley.

I could have written this as a comment on the L.A. post, but I didn’t. There’s still a major hangup about Hollywood fiction, as if because there’s some intellectual weightlessness surrounding L.A., any writing about the topic is going to be equally slim and glib. I’ve gotten this reaction from publishers, notably Soft Skull’s new honcho, who said he couldn’t get into “L.A. stories.” Maybe that was his way of brushing me off, but he said it. Even the person who wrote that Guardian blog piece told me he couldn’t get into my novel because he doesn’t like “genre fiction.” People who get my novel see it as more than a book about murder and even more than about this city. I keep imploring to people, Hollywood is the true heart of the West, the beast that’s taking over the globe. Writing about Hollywood is way more than provincial. But New York’s got a hangup about writing about Hollywood, much like the movie business doesn’t like to make movies skewering itself.

Yes, I’m back blogging.

Modern Sheila

2007-12-10T11:09:00.000-08:00

This weekend, the family went to Santee Alley, a place in downtown L.A. where they sell counterfeit designer products, like a Prada bag for $30. I won’t tell you what we got. We’re always on the lookout for cheap, knock-off toys that always have terrible translations. We were really close to buying “Benign Girl,” a sweet, sleazy-looking Barbie rip-off. Nothing will ever match Modern Sheila, the best dollar store toy you will ever see. My wife explains here.