Grandmother 2

My parents brought back another painting of my grandmother’s from New Jersey. This painting is hanging over my desk. Anyone know what this painting is? My dad think it’s a reproduction of an impressionist painting. My art history knowledge is non-existent.

I’m pretty tired of the "naked grandmother" searches coming in after the first grandmother post.

I Didn't Know

I like this picture. Recording in North Carolina:



New song. Actually, a fairly old song that I wrote for my wife, then girlfriend. I didn’t get around to recording it decently until last week, for our anniversary. Bittersweet, again, but that’s what comes outta me.

I Didn't Know

I have it my mind to do a lot of recording now. Once the novel is out of the way, which is imminent (hopefully) I’m going to concentrate on recording. Been getting the urge. I should be getting more into songwriting while I’m young. I can write fiction when I’m old and gray. Not that I’m dropping out of fiction writing, but one deep obsession at a time is enough. If I write fiction, I'll probably stick with writing stories.

I have to figure out how to make my recording more atmospheric--which is fairly hard to do with eight tracks. My recording thus far has been pretty basic, just getting the songs down. They’re like the idea of the song, not a complete recording. I’ve always had the fantasy that these were demo recordings that ONE day I’d take into the studio with a producer and make them 3-dimensional. Might never happen, so I need to spend more time getting the songs down. I should figure out how to record on the computer, but I really don’t want another reason to stay on the computer.

Also getting the urge to want to be in the world, rather than hide from it. Working on this novel has kept me secluded, again. Music is social. Want to meet some receptive people in this damn city. These are my thoughts today. May change tomorrow.

John Fowles

John Fowles died. I recommend The Collector.



A stalker novel that was recommended to me and I read after I wrote my own stalker novel. The Collector is better. Other novels of his like The Magus or A Maggot are way over my head.

In other stalker news, Lindsay Lohan and Jared "I wanted to destroy something beautiful" Leto are starring in a movie about Mark David Chapman’s life. Doesn’t seem right. But that might be only because my stalker novel is based on Chapman. Still, I don’t think this is only jealousy at work. I don't trust Jared Leto after Requiem for a Dream. The Collector, on the other hand, is a good movie with Terrence "General Zod" Stamp. Don't know what Selby or Fowles thought of those movies.

Advertisements for Myself

The signed, numbered edition of my story, "Gentleman Reptile," can now be pre-ordered. You can also see an author photo of me here.

I should rename this blog "Advertisements for Myself."

Montag

While I’m going down musical memory lane. Time to embarrass someone. Or make him pleased, I’m not sure. I got hold of a tape player so I can burn songs from cassette: the demo tape of the band I was in with Empty Drum, called Montag. His real name’s Steven Brent. We were a band for about a year, and we should have put out 90s records on Matador, or Merge, or Drag City, or some other ultra-cool label but it never happened. Steve is that good a songwriter. He’s up there with Lou Barlow, Steven Malkmus, Beck, and other indie rock superstars. The band fell apart due to…reasons. We didn't work at it long enough and we only got shows at the shittiest club in downtown NYC, the Spiral.

These songs comes from a demo we recorded at Slaughterhouse studios in Northampton, Mass.--where Sebadoh recorded a lot. We lived in Northampton for one strange, difficult summer and then moved back down to NY. It’s the best example of me playing drums. I want to finally post some of Steve’s old stuff. He’s abandoned it to work on newer songs. He is a great great songwriter and his songs deserve to be heard. These songs only touch on the number and variety of songs he’s written.

A song about aliens:


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A song about leashes:


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Laming Flips

It’s been rockumentary time in the Baum household. A great one, I recommend it, if you like the Flaming Lips. The Flaming Lips rule so it was good to watch. Sort of like pro-Flaming Lips propaganda. Actually, it was kind of profound to see a documentary about current heroes rather than a movie about Bob Dylan or the Beatles who seem almost like fictional characters. I've spent a lot of time believing all good things are in the past. Made me want to be a rock star again, or at least to play out live. I’ve got to do something about this.

By the way, best heavy metal record: "Peace Sells But Who’s Buying" by Megadeth.



I’ve seen Megadeth live twice, one time opening up for Motorhead. At the Motorhead show, I was short and couldn’t see much. Some huge, biker-type guy picked me up and put me on his shoulders so I could see. That was rocking. After the Megadeth show we went to the gas station across from the Santa Monica Civic and Megadeth were there with their heavy metal girlfriends buying beer and cigarettes. That was also rocking.

Bullfight

Around six months ago I submitted a novella I hadn’t read in two years to the Bullfight Little Book Prize. I lost. Here are the finalists.

Bullshit!

Punk Rock

Proof that I was in a punk rock band. Here’s a song by my high school punk rock band, Caustic.


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"Gnarled fingers search for release." I didn’t write this song. I’m playing drums. I don’t think I can move my arms that fast anymore. This was recorded the summer after high school.

I designed the 7-inch. It was before design programs so I had to do a lot of cutting and pasting with glue sticks and scratch-on lettering. Remember scratch-on lettering? It was a pain. Here’s the Caustic 7-inch.



That’s a picture from Vietnam. The pressing of the record sounds much worse than the original tape. The cymbals are all distorted. It was a cheap place so what can you do. Caustic played one show--in our high school parking lot at lunchtime.

Aeon

There’s a reason I know my heavy metal. When I was 15 I hung around mostly with a crowd of heavy metal delinquents. They listened to a lot of Motley Crue, Iron Maiden, and then moved on to Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Metallica, Venom, Slayer, and more! The leader of the group was a guy named Aeon--not Ian, like Aeons of time, he always had to say. He had a delinquent mom who let us smoke pot in the house. He was a kind of king--he could do anything he wanted. It was like he had his own house.

We started drifting apart because Aeon was slowly losing his mind. One night when I wasn’t there, he dropped acid and lost it completely. The next day I saw him he was wearing a lot of rings, bracelets, and necklaces, a striped shirt, and singing along with The Doors: a different person. Soon after, he’d be in the back of history class while we learned about the civil war and he’d make sounds of bombs dropping and exploding until the teacher kicked him out. The administration had him sent to a mental hospital, where I visited him a few times. He was surrounded by girls with eating disorders and suicidals. I actually kind of liked it there--you were allowed to be a freak. They pumped him so full of drugs--both uppers and downers--that they made him much, much worse. He was never the same again.

It was like he was trying to live up to the expectations of being a lunatic. He was acting the part, and eventually it became his personality. It does take a certain degree of lunacy to act like a lunatic all the time. He was always an extremely gifted and intelligent guy. He was a drummer, which was one of the major things we shared. I’d get calls from him through the years. He’d call me from Juvy Hall and say he got put in there for dumping a bunch of dead leaves on a female neighbor’s doorstep. He wanted me to break him out. I don’t know, Aeon, I’d say. Eventually, he started getting disability from the government and his mom kept him around to pay the rent. I haven’t heard from him in around ten years. Sometimes I look at homeless people and wonder if it’s him.

This was my best friend in high school. A year later I discovered punk rock and withdrew.

Some Kind of Monster

This movie rules. But it’s also kind of pathetic. You could laugh at it and all the "Spinal Tap" parallels, and there are a crazy lot of them, but these are real people and they’re overcome by a weird amount of insecurity. Which is what makes the documentary interesting. I mean, these guys made "Ride the Lightning," "Master of Puppets" (Pastor of Muppets), "And Justice for All" and "Garage Days," they’ve sold 90 million records, and they’re insecure like they’re 19-year-olds just starting out. There’s no pride about what they’ve accomplished--only hysteria about what’s in front of them.

It’s sort of like watching "Let it Be"--the camera acting like a magnifying glass showing just how much these guys hate each other. The main moment I remember from "Let it Be" is Paul McCartney saying, "I think we can be the next Stravinsky" and John Lennon cowering under a table. The difference between "Let it Be" and "Some Kind of Monster" is that The Beatles were at their peak--they were recording "Don’t Let Me Down," "Let it Be" and the rest. There’s not one song in "Some Kind of Monster" that comes anywhere near what they’d done before.

That’s the main thing that’s not touched on in the movie. If you aren’t familiar with the movie--the documentary follows around Metallica during the recording of a record while they’re also going through group therapy with a shrink. The shrink is a total hack shystering them for $40,000 a month, and I’m sure he doesn’t know the difference between their new songs and old songs. Watching him trying to bob his head along with the music is one of the real amusements. It’s not really mentioned that the reason they’re freaking out so heavily is because they can’t write songs anymore.

For some reason the movie really stuck with me. It’s kind of heartening to have it more together than people who have accomplished everything they set out to do. I’ve written here before how rock stars seem to lose their talent after a while. If you’re in Metallica--40-years-old and wildly rich, it’s gotta scare the shit out of you if the band is over. You can only go on so many vacations for the rest of your life. Being that rich and comfortable seems to kill something important. Also, Metallica wrote their best songs when they were raging drunks. I kind of lost interest with "Smell the Glove"--I mean, "The Black Album." When they cleaned out, their songs started getting boring. That’s not a great message to live by. All in all: great rockumentary.