I don’t want to give away my next novel, though I have it in my head, which is always a reassuring feeling. I know the major beats. I know the people in it. It may not even be my next novel, given Cura Te Ipsum (did I say that out loud?), but it’s there, like the story for Anamerican. I’ve had Anamerican for years now, and I don’t write it, simply because I know it’s so compact and ready I can do it at any time. I’m going to save it for times when the well is dry. It may never be written.
But the next novel has such a strong and stirring theme in my head that I think about it a lot, and draw parallels as to why I’d want to write a novel like that. It’s because I spend my life in a 12X12ish box, always looking outside, trying to wrestle my inner demons.
It occurred to me this morning that it’s why I find two scenes, though not particularly effective or memorable, so incredibly powerful for me that I can’t watch them without weeping (usually with emotional relation, not so much sadness). This is one, House detoxing:
It’s backwards for some reason, but works mostly the same. It’s better when he throws the cup to her on the opposite side, but stylistically, it conveys my point.
This is another, Desmond saving the world by pressing six meaningless buttons, every hour and a half. The music is what really makes it unintentionally powerful. I mean, it’s obviously meant to display Desmond as this freaky fuck that you wonder what he’s doing, but I’m sitting there like, “With you, Desmond! Good choice of music.” The ratcheting cut to people looking in on him like he’s crazy is equally jarring. When REAL PEOPLE appear, he arms himself and prepares for battle. There’s enough in that reaction to write a book to. I will.
Are writers in prison? Are they institutionalized? Can a person do that to themselves consciously and enjoy it? Or at least snow themselves enough to believe it’s not a prison? Is it prison if you don’t want to leave? Etc.
I didn’t realize why I so loved these scenes until today, when I thought of them in the context of the mains being me. With House, it’s a culmination of five years of work, but that’s not why I enjoy the scene. I enjoy it because sometimes I just feel strapped to a desk, sweating out the bad medicine. I feel like I’m riding a stationary treadmill and trying to save the world with numbers no one will ever see. I feel like Winston Smith.
There is a great beauty and fear in this concept, and I intend to exploit it. I intend to put a man in a tiny room from which he cannot escape, a room he will come to embrace, and then a room he will have to leave.
Yeah, today. You thought you’d get me, didn’t you? Started out with utter despair, unmitigated funk, and then I turned you around and pounded out three thousand words. What you got, today? Nothing!
EVIDENCE.
Now I must turn off my phone, because if I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that bragging about turning a day around leads to dogs dying, guilt calls, or bad news.
But thank you, Muse, for saving me today from myself. I was in a bad place.
Writing really does keep me alive. If anyone really understood the depths of that, I might not catch so much shit from 9-5ers. But at any rate, living is its own reward in that capacity.
There really is no better feeling than thinking you’re going to lose a day to the funk, and then suddenly not. Usually there’s a catalyst. Today it was my new wall, on my desk, which I’ll post about soon. It basically has a graffiti area where I can write lines that come to me, and I popped a couple up that cheered me and pushed me forward. Stupid shit, but it works. Today’s work is brought to you by the line:
“Stop being sad. Just kick against the pricks. Trust me.”
Courtesy half me, half Johnny Cash, but it works either way.
It’s not an optimistic song, and it’s a religious song, making it a strange song to save my day. But it’s also a song about misery coming to reap for the best man in his world, and a good enough man for any world, by Cash’s context. It’s a song about eventual success in the wash of a wave of destruction. It’s a song that acknowledges our peril of death, but puts forth the hope that somehow all will be right, even if the process may not always be what we want or our interpretation of truth. That’s conflict. That’s life in the midst of death.
But anyway, this song, a song I listened to a lot when I was walking to class in college, given that I felt my soul was literally being jacked from my chest at times, is a great lead-in song to write as well, especially for Hal. The lyrics are pretty good in relation to the stories, and it’s also got enough me to help me subsume into characters.
So click here, because they don’t want you to see it for free anywhere, except, uh, here.
Welcome to 1996. I’ve just gotten my first CD player, and I spend most of my weekends when I should be getting ready for school on Monday listening to 120 Minutes, with Matt Pinfield, learning all there is to know about my generation of music.
Then this little piece of shit country sounding band comes on, sounds a little like the Gin Blossoms, but with a little more ass kicking, and more importantly, a reference to Jean-Luc Picard:
Then, one day, looking around Tower Records, I find the album for six fucking bucks. Score. Enter another of my favorite songs of all time. The lyrics are pretty key in most of their songs to the appeal:
Cut to today, six or eight albums later, and a new name (Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers), and we have one Neal, surprised that they’re a relatively obscure band while shit like Lady Gaga pervades.
In other words, if you don’t pick up an album by either The Refreshments or Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, I fear you will never be inspired by any muse ever again. Plus, you’ll get gonorrhea.
So do. Here’s one more reason why, and probably the best way I can express how inadequate I often feel in the face of telling Kristen I love her:
Or, for those of you less romantic, more into awesome lyrics. This is effectively Bitch’s Theme, if there’s ever a Hal movie:
My baby looks like the above, only with a black guard.
When you take a break in the writing to center your brain (which I do occasionally when I hit a passage I just can’t break, or when a really good song comes on the tunes), some people eat, some go for a walk.
I pick up Boner, my guitar, and hit a few songs.
Sometimes you find songs you think would be really elaborate that are quite simple and make your day better.
“Hiroshima” not only serves to make the book better for listening while writing, but to play it on guitar is a thing of beauty. Four chords, very simple, you can rock out without looking stupid. Very much the same thrill one gets from Rock Band.
Musicians turn their nose up at Rock Band, and I can see why. It’s like the NaNoWriMo pisses me off, because it’s a bunch of people who just say, out of the blue, “Yeah, I can do what you’ve trained a decade to do in my spare time, and as a hobby!”
But speaking as a guy who does both, I know why Rock Band is so successful thereby. It makes you feel like you can do what Eddie Van Halen can do without any work.
The parallel being, Hiroshima is one of those songs on the guitar that doesn’t make you feel learning impaired. You pick up, you play, you sing along, and it has that joy of Rock Band. Don’t get me wrong, there are many songs worth working for, but as a warmup and a joy, I just played it three times without feeling like I should stop.
I’m trying to figure out if this is sardonic or loving about God.
Tell me?
Either way, it’s beautiful.
One thing I note is that she has this penchant in her songs to do what I do in my poetry, which is to beautifully lead you through one line of thought and then slam you with an inherent contradiction. It’s one of my favorite tactics, because it shows you how easily the mind can be lulled, and how we must be consciously aware.
In my continuing tradition of harping on the music coming out this year that’s kicking my ass, I present the new Rancid. It started off very lukewarm for me, but gets better with every listen, a lot like Life Won’t Wait did. Initially I despised their fourth, favoring the old approach, but after a few listens it grew on me. Same with this one, as it goes along. I wonder how that happens, really, because it’s the same music. It’s beautiful, and it intrigues me.
I believe I may have inadvertently gotten my twist for the next Hal book… from Ann Coulter. I can’t say anything else without giving it away, but hot shit, I think it’s a damned good one. It’s going to be a novel on the docks, and Hal’s going to have to solve his own father’s murder. I also have the opening scene in my head already. I am having nightmares that the first book won’t go over well, because I am so in love with this character that it’s a darling I’d have a real hard time killing, but I live in hope, and I have faith, and things are changing for me.
Anyway, back to the point. I heard the album before I bought it (I couldn’t wait, and a, uh, FRIEND illegally downloaded it and let me listen at his house, which is not my house for legal purposes).
Today was payday, so I went and got it, along with Eels, and the album is a fucking STEAL. I scored it for 14 bucks (in the MALL, no less), and it has six posters, four guitar picks (FUCK YES), and THREE discs, including a making of and an acoustic take on most of the album. I was looking for the redemption coupon for a blowjob from the entire band, but that seems like the only thing they didn’t offer. Even if the music sucks for you, it’s a hell of a smear, and it’s mixed at Skywalker, so it sounds pretty rad.
More on Eels as we go, but DAMN, have I missed music I can lean toward endorsing lately.
Also got Macbeth, another Guitar Hero guitar, and I’m off to get my fishing license and pay the rent. I feel very American today.
If you haven’t bought 21st yet from good ole Green Day, I offer you another fine little chunk that you can scream in your car and feel better about the bad things:
I want to take a ride to the great divide
Beyond the up to date and the neogentrified
The high definition for the low resident
Where the value of your mind is not held in contempt
I can hear the sound of a beating heart
That bleeds beyond a system that’s fallen apart
With money to burn on a minum wage
I don’t give a shit about the modern age
If you’re of the type to write things or make art, I can also speak from experience that it increases speed, stamina, and faith in the work at hand.
I’ve decided to not speak to my thoughts about Star Trek at all, given that it’s controversial, given that it doesn’t really matter, and given that I’m much more obsessed with the nuance and minutae of another piece of material.
It’s a bad time to be talking about it right now, given that I’m fighting some fucking gnarly food poisoning, but because of it I can’t sleep, so why not?
In short, I’ve been a Green Day fan since they saved my fucking life. Sounds like a joke, sounds like a cliche, but I don’t give a solid shit. They did. Artists can do that, and some artists can do it in a heartbeat, and Green Day have always been that band for me. You can make your valid and sound arguments that they took money for their work (and there’s still something to be said for money not being a motivating factor, despite the aging rational punk inside of me sneering at Johnny Rotten’s butter commercial compared to Sid’s lonely grave). You can make the argument that if one goes from three minutes or less to mostly five (as 21st is) and forsake the grinding guitars in favor of piano ballads, you’re a differing genre and thusly contradictory in some fashion. I’ve heard all of the arguments.
I used to fight them when I was a kid, I mean, I really did. I used to stand by DIY and fucking punk vs. poseur and it was a hill I would have been proud to die on. I don’t know if it was my violent, irrational, visceral reaction to grunge, a bias I’ve since gotten over, or maybe it was because punk broke for the second time (third if you count the hardcore period) in the early nineties just as I was on the cusp of the apotheosis of my relative dysfunctions, but Green Day came at just the right time for me.
I wrote some of my first poems to Dookie. I used to walk streets in the early morning with nothing but a tape recorder with the volume turned low blaring Basket Case. It used to get me complaints from my customers, though I kept it quiet. A few understood.
I wanted to kill myself that year, which is something I don’t really admit to hardly anyone, because then I sound like a fucking emo kid, but it’s true. I tried once. Didn’t work out. I didn’t even get to the implement, and it’s not a good story for public consumption outside of, say, stuff I’ll write later.
David Byrne says: I’ll tell you later!
Dookie was the first tape I ever played so much that it skipped. People laugh when I tell them that. They don’t realize that if you play tapes enough, they will fucking skip.
At any rate, Welcome to Paradise, a song about wanting to leave home, She, a song about a woman who seeks to find fault in argument and sow chaos, Fuck Off and Die, a song about being sick of people, they all made sense at the time. I remember being 23, which is about how old the members of the band were when they wrote that album, and thinking, shit. Look where they were, and look where I am. I was ashamed and humbled. People look at Orson Welles and think that. I look at Green Day.
Insomniac comforted me in a very angry period. Nimrod brought me peace after a bad breakup, and helped me acknowledge that the rigid structured set of things I thought made a thing a thing (in this case, punk) could be annihilated and still survive if the spirit was strong. Warning helped me cope with another bad breakup (with the woman I’m still with today). And then, there was a long silence. Billie Joe got arrested for a DUI. I thought the old constant was something I’d have to reminisce on. I was dealing with Bush and the fucking war and all of the awful things that made me leave college a week before I would have graduated.
Then American Idiot.
To this day, it’s my dream project. I wrote a script based around it, a kind of new Tommy, and I would quite literally kill most any of you for the shot to have it made. It’s that close to my heart. I am a man with ten thousand songs in my damned music player, and a rack full of CDs fine and foul that would probably change your life. And if you don’t have a rack like that you could share with me as well, then shame on you. That’s the only place where I think it’s fair to keep music elite.
I considered it then, and I still consider it the finest piece of rock music pressed to plastic. And now vinyl, apparently. Fuckin’ kids.
So, 21st.
The new album hit me at a convergence of bankruptcy, artistic success, and most importantly, going from a neighbor who pounded the walls and made me turn off my bass, to my new house, where the rad lady next door characterized herself as “loud people.” So I upped the bass to human enjoyment levels, and the first full album I listened to in my new monitor womb was an album I waited five years for.
There is only one song on it that’s even remotely average, and of course, that’s the one they’re playing on the radio, just like they did with American Idiot.
There’s one song that’s only above average, and that’s Christian’s Inferno. But it grows on my every time I hear it, because it’s an important part of the narrative.
The narrative in this album is much, much thinner and vague than American Idiot. But that’s fine, because though it’s billed as a rock opera, the album is really just more of an album with interconnected thematics. There are characters, but it’s not like American Idiot, where there was a clear beginning, middle, end, and connecting tissue that my mind was able to instantly string into a beautiful story.
Instead, it’s a mallet that hits you in the head repeatedly with blue collar working class post-modern apathy, angst, and hope, often all in the same song. And usually the way Jesus intended it, with three chords and a fucking chorus that the most lowly working class man or woman could hit.
See, I don’t truck with the idea that Beethoven is the highest art. I can understand the beauty of the music, and I love it myself, but I like bringing it down and keeping it high. Meaning, I think Issa and Basho had a point when they point out the most zen fucking thing on Earth is farting and cleaning outhouses, and a poet’s job is to make that thankless task beautiful and have a point.
Green Day swings it.
I don’t know where it stands in terms of American Idiot, but I know it’s easily number 2 all-time right now. It may become number one as the broader points come to root in my subconscious and I can see the work of the lyrics more instead of getting caught in the music.
Most albums have good music and shitty lyrics at least half the time. Really, most all artists suffer from that. I can’t think of many examples. Usually, one outweighs the other enough to be forgiven, though. My absolute faves rock both, because unlike most, I pay damned close attention to the lyrics with the ear of a guy who’s written a fuckton of poetry.
Good at both, generally, almost always: Rancid, Green Day, Bad Religion, Roger Clyne, Regina Spektor
There are many other bands I listen to, but the above have a fucking ear for the verse.
I think, if American Idiot is my favorite album, I would have to say that 21st has the best lyrics I’ve ever read on an album. Top to bottom. Much thought, time, revision, and care went into it, beyond Know Your Enemy. That track relies more on the creativity with transposing matching verses, which works to a degree, but it’s about average.
Some of the lyrics flat out make you cry if you listen through with an honest heart, the first time. At very least, if you’re not a pussy like me, you’ll get gooseflesh.
I honestly expected to be disappointed, because there’s sure as shit no way to find the concordance of the last album in my life again.
I do, however, have a mischievous little narrative flow in my head for this one. As I listen, I’ll see what develops. If the title track isn’t a cynical Shakespeare style muse about to introduce a tragic drama, I don’t know what is.
My inkling is that it’s a story of the father becoming the son. It’s about the class of ‘13, but it starts out telling how a guy was born into Nixon and moves into the story of a couple of kids born into Bush.
But either way, if you can listen to Before the Lobotomy without busting up a little inside, I pity your cemented heart. Go here and read along.
I have broader commentary and longer thoughts, but my stomach is no longer upset, and I’m either preaching to the converted or being considered an aping sellout, so meh. Point being, if there’s a lesson I can pass along from these thoughts, it’s to fuck what you heard, it’s to not give a shit about what the fuck internet message boards say. Give this one a shot, you won’t regret it.
