Things I Noticed

I recently plugged my brother’s name into Google along with his first rock band Love Child. These are the things I do sometimes which might creep out my brother. I found an assessment of the band on Mystical Beast, which is an mp3 blog I go to--though for some reason mp3s now open up as a real player file instead of a separate screen: this annoys me. Anyway, Love Child were pure indie-rock, the Velvet Underground that never were, mixed in with Jonathan Richman and other things…she conveniently has Love Child mp3s up so you can hear. I read Kurt Cobain’s journals when they came out--actually my brother bought it for me for Christmas. In it, he had mix tapes he made and Love Child was featured on a couple of them which was pretty fucking cool.

I gotta disagree with the reviewer that they recorded too many songs. The best thing about their record "Okay?" is that it has 20 some songs on it and they’re all different--some with loud guitars, some weird K records cute with female vocals, other frantic love songs by my brother. It is a strange, sloppy, perfect indie rock record.

So listen and learn about Love Child on Mystical Beast.

Leonard Lopate

Something else to listen to, especially for those people who don’t live in New York City. When I lived in NYC, I used to listen to the Leonard Lopate show religiously, every day at 12 noon. He interviews all sorts of hyper-intelligent people--he’s an artist at it. Check the archives. Back then I thought if I’m ever interviewed by Leonard Lopate I’ll have made it as a writer. Still haven’t yet. L.A. public radio sucks miserably, so I still listen to the show, though not as much as I once did. I used to aspire to it like the "New Yorker" which I now realize has nothing to do with me--except to make me jealous. It’s still comforting to hear smart people talk.

Show You

I’m not doing much blogging so in the meantime does everyone know about the power of Kikkoman soy sauce? This is a pretty old internet thing but it needs to be seen. I first found out about this at the King of France links page which has a really good collection of links, and not just cause I’m on it.

Stories

From the library this weekend:

Bruce Jay Friedman- Far From the City of Class
Jean Stafford- The Collected Stories
Peter Taylor- Miss Leonora
R.V. Cassill- Collected Stories

All story collections and all writers who crossed Richard Yates’ life in some way. I can’t actually remember how. I don’t have the headspace right now to work on anything but a short piece. The instant fix of publishing is good too. I need to complete something. I unearthed an old story that I’d abandoned and I’m going to work on it. If I don’t, never come back here.

Bunnies

This picture comes from a book of my daughter’s called "Bunnies and their Hobbies." Teaching young children that work is depressing.

My daughter’s out of daycare for Passover break. She goes to a Jewish daycare center, if I haven’t mentioned it, and she comes back singing songs in Hebrew. She knows this whole other language that we can’t understand. Every Friday she comes home with a roll of Challah bread. She loves it there. Every time I turn around there’s another holiday. I can’t blog much while she’s out.

Ash Tree

Why do I get dozens of hits every day for "Ash Tree"? Those are just the people who bothered to click on my link. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people are searching for the ash tree every day. It’s a weirdly big world we live in. People search for "Picture of an ash tree," "Ash tree disease," "Ash tree borer," and others. I don’t even want to write these words out because it’ll bring in more people who are going to be sorely disappointed. I should have named this site "Pulitzer prize."

I’ve also gotten many hits for "Tortilla Curtain." I stopped reading it after part one. The Mexican immigrant gets raped, predictably, at the end of the section and I thought I’ve had enough. One disaster after another. My wife has a pet peeve about movies where every thing goes wrong for the characters. Usually this is happens in bad comedies, oftentimes criminals who screw everything up. It’s an amusing pet peeve and I might have adopted it. Tortilla Curtain’s a drama, mostly, but every last thing goes wrong. She finally makes some money, then loses it…

I need to start catering my blog posts using keywords that will bring in people who might actually like my writing--mixed in with some sex searches which really brings them in. Here I go.

Indie rock charles bukowski
Jim Thompson The Killer Inside Me
Fiction pornographer
The Vanity Plate Killer
Philip K. Dick Exegesis
Taxi Driver Travis Bickle Iris
UFO porn
Apocalypse Novel
lo-fi recording
handjob!
minimalist prose hard-on
Celebrity stalker novel, best
tragic undiscovered genius history
self-important writer
publishing can go to hell

It’s a new kind of poetry. Please help me out. The comments are indexed by Google as well.

Concordance?

Amazon has gone nuts. Now you can see stats based on the number of polysyllabic words that are in a book and other information. In the future, this is what all reviews will look like. Apparently, my novel can be read by people with only a fourth grade education. That’s if you want your nine-year-old to go out and start killing people.

Man

Man, I’m glad the comments in the last post are over. Brief, but it made me feel like shit. The first bad blood to happen on this site. I hate actual conflict.

I’ve known a couple of wife beaters in my life. I’m not saying the guy from that post is, but that’s just the direction I’m going. One was a friend of mine who I lived with in Brooklyn and Northampton, Mass. There was a rumor that he had date-raped a girl in college but was falsely accused. I took his side but I wasn’t sure. In Northampton, I fell asleep--probably drunk, I don’t remember--on the couch with his girlfriend. We weren’t anywhere near each other on the couch, but he took this as his opportunity to hit her and break things in the house. I tried to stop it but it was a fucking mess that lasted the entire night. The man’s eyes had gone from blue to black. A real demonic kind of sociopath. I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard he had killed somebody.

Our friendship was fine in the beginning, nice even. We were all writers living in a broken-down Boerum Hill house. It was the house where I wrote my novel Oscar Caliber Gun in a spastic month. He was very charismatic, women loved him, which probably fits the profile. The second guy I knew was my sister-in-law’s husband. Also a manly little-boy demon, charming to everyone else, but possessed by something deeply bad. They’ve since divorced.

This is depressing, why am I writing about this? The last comments got me thinking. I used to be a misogynist myself--not a wife-beater, please, just not all that in favor of women. It’s a really complicated experience to be sexually attracted to someone you don’t like personally. This is the experience of a lot of hard-up guys in their twenties.

Now, I’m the opposite. I once aspired to a Hemingway-esque masculine ideal. I find real men’s lack of emotional awareness sort of brain-damaged. Male aggression is infantile. I used to think bookish intelligence was all that mattered. I’m not saying that women can’t be bookishly intelligent, just that men are more competitive about making it known--like an intellectual bar fight. Women are more interesting to me. Intuition is more interesting to me. There are plenty of awful women out there, just as there are plenty of awful men. But men have been a whole lot worse to this planet than women.

Vision

Last night I watched "Don’t Say A Word" on TV, with commercials. This morning I unplugged my TV.

Dinosaur

Things I did last night: watched "Alien vs. Predator." I liked watching the Alien and Predator fight each other.

Also saw Dinosaur Jr. on the talk show that now follows David Letterman. That’s Dinosaur W/ Lou Barlow--the same guy who wrote "The Freed Pig" about J. Mascis, though it’s mainly hard on himself. They seemed sloppy and unrehearsed and maybe like they still hate each other, but I’m probably reading into it.

Weird that I’m so old that a band like Dinosaur Jr. can reform and it seems like the Rolling Stones reforming for another show. Indie rock is the new classic rock. Can't really fault them for getting back together. They can sell out a lot of shows.

Speaking of which, Our Band Could Be Your Life is a great book--about the eighties underground/indie rock scene, mostly about SST: Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Minutemen, etc.



Made me appreciate the bands that I grew up with as an actual phenomenon. I spent most of my time thinking how much better the sixties were, not realizing I was sitting on top of something that was just as vibrant. The chapter on Dinosaur Jr. is the funniest--Lou Barlow phallicly chewing on a pen making J. Mascis nervous. Reading that book kind of opened up my world. I started reassessing a lot music I liked, and looked into new bands, realizing I could be missing something. It even indirectly led me to researching underground subjects like UFOs, magick and so on which are going into my novel.

The writer of Our Band, Michael Azerrad, plays in my friend’s band The King of France. I once recorded drums with the songwriter at a half-built house in Vermont. Our payment for using the house was to dig a ditch for an outhouse. I now appreciate how hard it is to dig a six-foot wide/deep hole in the ground. We had to move the massive, shit-stained outhouse over the hole we had dug. I also got a spider bite which made the back of my head swell up. There were no showers and we had to bathe in a drum full of rainwater. Made some nice recordings though.