Van Halen!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.