I walked into Lot 1 and sat at the counter. This was a few weeks ago. When nothing interesting happens to you over the course of a few weeks you have to remember something uninteresting that happened and pretend that it was interesting so you can write about it. You'll probably have to embellish a few details, but that's fine. No one ever got into heaven for being honest.
I said hello to Jason and I ordered a Pabst. The girl in the next chair--mid 20s, glasses, light brown skin--asked me, "Did you just order a PBR?"
"Yes," I said. "Is that a problem?"
She sighed. "You walk in here looking so sophisticated in your coat and your tie. I think you must be a man of taste. And then you go and order a PBR." She sipped from a chalice of St. Bernardus, which costs ten dollars and tastes like monk feet, but it fucks you up pretty fast. "It's disappointing."
I don't need to defend my beer choices to anyone, and I grant others the same privilege, but I decided to play along. "PBR is two bucks before nine." It was 8:40. "I thought I'd save a little money until then. Is that okay with you?"
She stared at me a moment. Preparing a contrite response, I assumed. Who was she to scorn frugality? A two dollar beer is a two dollar beer. Drinking expensive ales while two dollar swill is available is morally unacceptable when right outside people starve.
"There's a bug on your jacket," she said, flicking away a winged creeping thing on my arm.
She asked me my name and I told her. "I've never met a Greg before," she said.
"Well. You're in for a treat."
She stood up and asked me to watch her drink. "This means I trust you not to roofie me," she said. It's remarkable how many times those exact words have been spoken to me.
"Don't worry," I said. "I'm more harmless than you could possibly imagine."
"I know," she said, and she walked away.
*
Twenty minutes later I sat outside smoking. She had followed me but soon got distracted by a man drinking an IPA while his newborn son dozed in a BabyBjorn. I kept my distance. Since I had gotten there first I had the right to blow smoke wherever I pleased, but I wasn't too crazy about exhaling cancer into an infant's face.
"Look at you," she said to me. "I bet you hate babies."
I shrugged. Babies frighten me and they're much less cute than their animal counterparts and if I ever accidentally make one I'll probably kill myself, but hate is too strong a word. I sympathize with their plight from a comfortable distance. "Nah," I said. "Babies are okay with me."
She asked me to watch her drink again. "I'm still trusting you not to roofie me," she said.
"If I was going to I would have by now," I said, which might have sounded like an insult.
She reached down to hug me. She pulled my head into her breasts and clutched the hair on the back of my head. She held my head there long enough for it to stop feeling nice and start feeling weird, and then she kept holding it there long enough for it to start feeling nice again, at which point she released and said, "Be right back."
*
"It just drives me crazy," she said. We were standing right outside the door. I wanted to go inside and drink more.
"Right," I said. "You're right."
"I spend a lot of time with prostitutes, and no one--I mean no one--ever bothers to listen to them or help them or understand where they're coming from."
"Yeah."
"And they just get persecuted and arrested. It's insane. It's literally insane."
She sounded on the verge of tears and I admired her righteous passion but I was very thirsty.
"Sorry," she said. "Sorry. I get weird about this sort of thing and it kind of freaks people out. There I go again. Don't mind me."
Her positions on prostitution were hardly freaking my out. I agreed with everything she said, and I think both of my parents would have too. But I had been looking forward to getting drunk that night, and her monologues were impeding my progress. "You're not freaking me out. Hey," I said, as though it had just occurred to me, "I'm gonna get another beer."
"Another PBR?"
It was after nine and they were no longer two dollars, but I decided to be difficult. "Yes," I said.
I stood by the counter and she started talking to some friends of mine across the room. I couldn't hear what they were saying until she said, "And this is my husband." She pulled me over to her and kissed me hard, so hard I stumbled into the empty chairs behind me. We all clattered but stayed upright.
When I regained my footing she kissed me again. It was long this time and I didn't fall. We separated. She looked at me and she wiped her mouth. "Wanna go somewhere?" she asked.
I was fine where I was, but I said okay.
*
We were walking and her arm was hooked through mine and her head was on my shoulder and the button on her top wouldn't stay buttoned. "Have you ever been to the Gold Room?" she asked.
"Sure," I said.
"Do you want to go there?"
"No."
*
After we left the Gold Room she noticed a nice looking young man walking near us. "Oh my God," she said to him. "You're so handsome! Look at this guy!" she said to me. She turned back to him. "You must be gay," she said. "Straight guys don't look as good as you." He didn't disagree. He just smiled and walked a little faster.
*
"You know what bothers me about this neighborhood?" she asked me.
"No," I said, and I hoped the answer would be interesting, but I wasn't optimistic, "what?"
"Hipsters," she said.
"Ah."
"Like this guy," she said, gesturing to a guy in tight jeans and a denim jacket coming out of the liquor store. "This fucking hipster! Fuck this guy! What's his problem? Hey, what's your problem?"
The hipster in question was standing right next to us at this point. "I'm sorry?" he asked.
"Oh come on," I said. "I'm sure he's a nice guy."
"You're right," she said, "you're right. He's fine. Have a good night!" She waved to his back as he walked away.
*
After she picked a fight with the owner of Little Joy over the bar's recent renovations, we ended up back outside Lot 1.
"Have you ever been to the Echo?" she asked me.
"Yes," I said, "I've been to the Echo."
"You want to go there? They have Rastafari music tonight."
I pointed inside Lot 1. "I kind of just want to get drunk here."
"Okay," she said, "I'll be back." She sprinted down Sunset toward the Echo. I waited but I never saw her again.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Monday, April 22, 2013
Disturbance - April 19, 2013
And on your way home, a little bit before Vine Street, when the man stood in front of your bus and refused to let it move, you started to wonder if it was all worth it.
You enjoyed yourself well enough at Taix that night. Subsequent reports will indicate that you were in good spirits. You chatted with those dear to you and drank reasonably priced beer. The music was good. You wore your coat and tie because you recently discovered that all you need is one sport coat and three or four neckties and people will give you credit for making an effort, plus if you pass out on the bus people will just assume that you had a hard day at the office. So you were looking sharp. But still, there you were, miles from home and feeling the first pangs of encroaching urinary discomfort, and a crazy person had to go and Tiananman Square your bus. At times like those, anyone would doubt the wisdom of your lifestyle.
You're a laid back kind of drunk, so you accepted your fate and settled in to wait for the LAPD to come and escort the lone protester away. You and your fellow passengers--the ragtaggest group of ragtag misfits you've ever seen--could have banded together and settled the matter yourselves, but no charismatic figure volunteered to lead, and you were in no shape to fill that role.
But it would have been nice, you thought. A bus full of disparate characters answering to no authority but their own, solving their own transportation woes without appealing to the paternalistic authority of the police. Taking this idiot out all by yourselves. What a connection you would have forged! You may never have learned each other's names, and you no doubt would not have stayed in touch, but you would always share that common memory of accomplishment and self-reliance. The monolith of loneliness would lose a tiny but unlikely chunk.
Which, you realized, had to be why you still bothered leaving the house, and why you still tried to convince yourself that it was all worth it. With iPods and Netflix and box after box of the World's Most Popular Wine, entertainment is never inaccessible. There are centuries of books to read and, on occasion, your own brain produces words that aren't entirely misbegotten. And if all that fails, there's always heroin. So it doesn't take much money or energy to feel good for a couple hours at the end of the day, all in your very own room. But still, going on four years since you started, you're still making that trek across town, you're still spending money that has more practical uses, you're still getting stranded in absurd situations at Santa Monica and Vine as a man stands in front of your bus and refuses to let it move.
It's clearly not about the music. A look at the last twelve Echo residents proves that the music scene has passed you by. And really, even in your prime, how many shows did you remember primarily for the music?
(Three.)
It's always been about the hope that you might connect. Maybe you'll meet someone who will become a close friend and enlighten and inspire you. Maybe you'll meet someone you will soon see naked. Or maybe there will just be someone you'll laugh with and never see again, or see again but not remember. Your time on this wretched blue testicle is quite limited; it's unwise to pass up too many opportunities to meet someone who might change your life, even a little.
After the LAPD escorted the man away and your bus continued on its route, once you had made your way into Century City, the homeless woman in the seat behind you pooped her pants.
Shortly after you noticed the odor, the man who had been shooting the breeze with the driver perceived it as well. "Oh my God," he said. "Let me off this bus. I can't handle that smell."
He turned around to see you sitting there, your hand casually covering your nose with the sophisticated bearing of a man who's experienced his share of poop buses.
The man started to laugh. "This guy!" he said. "This guy knows what I'm talking about." And he gave you a fist bump.
And there it was: your connection for the night. Two men, divided by age and race and potentially by class and blood alcohol content, and for that one moment you were comrades, brothers in a struggle, united by your common displeasure at the smell of feces.
*
Here's the band that played that night:
You enjoyed yourself well enough at Taix that night. Subsequent reports will indicate that you were in good spirits. You chatted with those dear to you and drank reasonably priced beer. The music was good. You wore your coat and tie because you recently discovered that all you need is one sport coat and three or four neckties and people will give you credit for making an effort, plus if you pass out on the bus people will just assume that you had a hard day at the office. So you were looking sharp. But still, there you were, miles from home and feeling the first pangs of encroaching urinary discomfort, and a crazy person had to go and Tiananman Square your bus. At times like those, anyone would doubt the wisdom of your lifestyle.
You're a laid back kind of drunk, so you accepted your fate and settled in to wait for the LAPD to come and escort the lone protester away. You and your fellow passengers--the ragtaggest group of ragtag misfits you've ever seen--could have banded together and settled the matter yourselves, but no charismatic figure volunteered to lead, and you were in no shape to fill that role.
But it would have been nice, you thought. A bus full of disparate characters answering to no authority but their own, solving their own transportation woes without appealing to the paternalistic authority of the police. Taking this idiot out all by yourselves. What a connection you would have forged! You may never have learned each other's names, and you no doubt would not have stayed in touch, but you would always share that common memory of accomplishment and self-reliance. The monolith of loneliness would lose a tiny but unlikely chunk.
Which, you realized, had to be why you still bothered leaving the house, and why you still tried to convince yourself that it was all worth it. With iPods and Netflix and box after box of the World's Most Popular Wine, entertainment is never inaccessible. There are centuries of books to read and, on occasion, your own brain produces words that aren't entirely misbegotten. And if all that fails, there's always heroin. So it doesn't take much money or energy to feel good for a couple hours at the end of the day, all in your very own room. But still, going on four years since you started, you're still making that trek across town, you're still spending money that has more practical uses, you're still getting stranded in absurd situations at Santa Monica and Vine as a man stands in front of your bus and refuses to let it move.
It's clearly not about the music. A look at the last twelve Echo residents proves that the music scene has passed you by. And really, even in your prime, how many shows did you remember primarily for the music?
(Three.)
It's always been about the hope that you might connect. Maybe you'll meet someone who will become a close friend and enlighten and inspire you. Maybe you'll meet someone you will soon see naked. Or maybe there will just be someone you'll laugh with and never see again, or see again but not remember. Your time on this wretched blue testicle is quite limited; it's unwise to pass up too many opportunities to meet someone who might change your life, even a little.
After the LAPD escorted the man away and your bus continued on its route, once you had made your way into Century City, the homeless woman in the seat behind you pooped her pants.
Shortly after you noticed the odor, the man who had been shooting the breeze with the driver perceived it as well. "Oh my God," he said. "Let me off this bus. I can't handle that smell."
He turned around to see you sitting there, your hand casually covering your nose with the sophisticated bearing of a man who's experienced his share of poop buses.
The man started to laugh. "This guy!" he said. "This guy knows what I'm talking about." And he gave you a fist bump.
And there it was: your connection for the night. Two men, divided by age and race and potentially by class and blood alcohol content, and for that one moment you were comrades, brothers in a struggle, united by your common displeasure at the smell of feces.
*
Here's the band that played that night:
Friday, March 15, 2013
The Second Anniversary of the First Anniversary of the 704
"If everything is broken, perhaps it is because for the moment we like it better that way."
-Jonathan Lethem
When I noticed that today's date had a certain resonance for me, and when I further realized the reason why, I started to text my friend Nick: "It's been three years since I started the 704. I'm going to do a commemorative post that's just a video of me kicking myself in the balls over and over."
I decided not to send the text. It wasn't amusing enough to disturb anyone over, and Nick probably knows that I don't have the technological capacity to post such a video, nor the dexterity to kick myself in the balls that many times. I'd have to get a suitable camera, and hire someone else to do the ball kicking, and now we're talking about a serious financial outlay that I'm not in any position to make, especially since I couldn't expect any real return on the investment. You can't deposit other people's joy in a bank account. Not even at a credit union. I checked.
And anyway, I'm not sure if the metaphor would be apt. Writing on the internet--or anywhere else, but the internet is the only place where I've publicized my jottings, so let's stick with that--doesn't really resemble getting kicked in the balls, by yourself or anyone else. It's closer to expecting to get kicked in the balls while secretly hoping that you'll get a blow job instead and ending up with a limp handshake and a pat on the shoulder.
*
You generally get what you deserve.
*
I thought it would be funny to open every section of this post by quoting the mean things people have written in the comment section here over the past three years. So I started going back through the archives to collect them--which is not to imply that I know exactly where they all are, even though I totally do--but they started to hurt my feelings all over again, so I had to put my computer aside for a half hour and lie down, and then I decided that maybe I wouldn't write this post after all, since heaven knows it doesn't need to be written, and as of this moment I don't know what the point of it is, or where it's leading, if anywhere. But not knowing what the point of it is, or where it's leading, if anywhere, sounds like the condition of any given person waking up in the morning, and most of the time we still get out of bed.
*
On second thought, I will quote one mean comment someone left--the very first one, in fact, from the summer of 2010. For some reason, it did not wound my ego too badly:
Is it really that obvious?
*
The 704 is effectively dead, and has been for a while, so it's ridiculous to even acknowledge its anniversary. (But then, given what we're to understand about the universe, it's ridiculous to do anything, except perhaps to wail and cry, or, when that runs its course, comfort someone else who's wailing and crying.) You know that this blog has been a zombie for two years, but those two years have brought us the only decent writing I've ever done here, so go figure. Perhaps the afterlife really is where it's at, where the best things happen, where things occasionally turn out right. Verily I say unto thee....
Or maybe you only get good at what you do once you're dead.
*
Two years ago I went to South by Southwest, because you have to try new things in this life, to waste your time actively for a change, even if the whole experience could be duplicated for cheap closer home, simply by drinking lousy beer in a sauna while staring at photos of billboards and listening to a playlist put together by someone with questionable taste.
As is my style, I enjoyed the journey there and back much more than the event itself. On our way home, we spent the night in Deming, New Mexico. After eating breakfast in the diner attached to our motel--where the guys in bolo ties gave us curious looks but the game-legged waitress was very sweet and my red chili omelette exceeded anything I deserved--we walked across the gravelly road to a thrift shop. The wind blew so hard.
Once inside, Katya checked out the clothes, Matt riffled through the records, and I looked at the books. "Bibles and religious books are free," said the sign posted over a low, tucked away bookshelf. I knelt down and picked up a New Testament. As I flipped through the pages a small newspaper clipping fell to the floor. On one side was a partial panel of a Zits comic strip. On the other side was an obituary:
*
Death to Anders no longer exists. Pizza! and Big Whup no longer exist. One Trick Pony no longer exists. Red Cortez, Mississippi Man, the Deadly Syndrome. The 60 Watt Kid diaspora has grown to include N O W, Skyline Drive, Pageants. Future Ghost is Missing Teen. Some variation of the Union Line has become Mt. Ossa. Johnny left Seasons. Manhattan Murder Mystery has six members. Who knows what's happening with the Monolators and the Henry Clay People. Joey Siara now plays rousing rock and roll anthems solo to rooms full of the staid and the polite. Web in Front no longer exists. Mouse is married. Time keeps doing that weird thing it does: passing.
*
Cremation has taken place and no services are planned.
*
I love you.
*
Here's a song I like a lot:
-Jonathan Lethem
When I noticed that today's date had a certain resonance for me, and when I further realized the reason why, I started to text my friend Nick: "It's been three years since I started the 704. I'm going to do a commemorative post that's just a video of me kicking myself in the balls over and over."
I decided not to send the text. It wasn't amusing enough to disturb anyone over, and Nick probably knows that I don't have the technological capacity to post such a video, nor the dexterity to kick myself in the balls that many times. I'd have to get a suitable camera, and hire someone else to do the ball kicking, and now we're talking about a serious financial outlay that I'm not in any position to make, especially since I couldn't expect any real return on the investment. You can't deposit other people's joy in a bank account. Not even at a credit union. I checked.
And anyway, I'm not sure if the metaphor would be apt. Writing on the internet--or anywhere else, but the internet is the only place where I've publicized my jottings, so let's stick with that--doesn't really resemble getting kicked in the balls, by yourself or anyone else. It's closer to expecting to get kicked in the balls while secretly hoping that you'll get a blow job instead and ending up with a limp handshake and a pat on the shoulder.
*
You generally get what you deserve.
*
I thought it would be funny to open every section of this post by quoting the mean things people have written in the comment section here over the past three years. So I started going back through the archives to collect them--which is not to imply that I know exactly where they all are, even though I totally do--but they started to hurt my feelings all over again, so I had to put my computer aside for a half hour and lie down, and then I decided that maybe I wouldn't write this post after all, since heaven knows it doesn't need to be written, and as of this moment I don't know what the point of it is, or where it's leading, if anywhere. But not knowing what the point of it is, or where it's leading, if anywhere, sounds like the condition of any given person waking up in the morning, and most of the time we still get out of bed.
*
On second thought, I will quote one mean comment someone left--the very first one, in fact, from the summer of 2010. For some reason, it did not wound my ego too badly:
"u r obviously a DOUCHEBAG."
Is it really that obvious?
*
The 704 is effectively dead, and has been for a while, so it's ridiculous to even acknowledge its anniversary. (But then, given what we're to understand about the universe, it's ridiculous to do anything, except perhaps to wail and cry, or, when that runs its course, comfort someone else who's wailing and crying.) You know that this blog has been a zombie for two years, but those two years have brought us the only decent writing I've ever done here, so go figure. Perhaps the afterlife really is where it's at, where the best things happen, where things occasionally turn out right. Verily I say unto thee....
Or maybe you only get good at what you do once you're dead.
*
Two years ago I went to South by Southwest, because you have to try new things in this life, to waste your time actively for a change, even if the whole experience could be duplicated for cheap closer home, simply by drinking lousy beer in a sauna while staring at photos of billboards and listening to a playlist put together by someone with questionable taste.
As is my style, I enjoyed the journey there and back much more than the event itself. On our way home, we spent the night in Deming, New Mexico. After eating breakfast in the diner attached to our motel--where the guys in bolo ties gave us curious looks but the game-legged waitress was very sweet and my red chili omelette exceeded anything I deserved--we walked across the gravelly road to a thrift shop. The wind blew so hard.
Once inside, Katya checked out the clothes, Matt riffled through the records, and I looked at the books. "Bibles and religious books are free," said the sign posted over a low, tucked away bookshelf. I knelt down and picked up a New Testament. As I flipped through the pages a small newspaper clipping fell to the floor. On one side was a partial panel of a Zits comic strip. On the other side was an obituary:
Amy Sewell, 76, passed away Friday December 31, 2004 at Sunshine Haven Nursing Home in Lordsburg.
Cremation has taken place and no services are planned.
Amy was born August 24, 1928 in Texas. She left Texas thirty years ago and came to the Land of Enchantment. She enjoyed making friends, being a homemaker and being a part of the Bethel Baptist Church.
She is survived by her sister-in-law Phyllis Sewell and her family and friends at Bethel Baptist Church.
Entrusted to the care of Baca's Funeral Chapels of Deming.I returned the New Testament to the shelf and slipped the clipping into my wallet, where it remains.
*
Death to Anders no longer exists. Pizza! and Big Whup no longer exist. One Trick Pony no longer exists. Red Cortez, Mississippi Man, the Deadly Syndrome. The 60 Watt Kid diaspora has grown to include N O W, Skyline Drive, Pageants. Future Ghost is Missing Teen. Some variation of the Union Line has become Mt. Ossa. Johnny left Seasons. Manhattan Murder Mystery has six members. Who knows what's happening with the Monolators and the Henry Clay People. Joey Siara now plays rousing rock and roll anthems solo to rooms full of the staid and the polite. Web in Front no longer exists. Mouse is married. Time keeps doing that weird thing it does: passing.
*
Cremation has taken place and no services are planned.
*
I love you.
*
Here's a song I like a lot:
Monday, February 4, 2013
George Glass - Lot 1 - Saturday, February 2, 2013
So there's this knucklehead from Sioux Falls--I could give you his name, but he seems like the type of guy who's probably got a Google Alert set for himself, and at this point in my career I simply can't deal with getting any more weird emails from people responding to the weird things I write--like that time I made an oddball reference to the old radio DJ M*rray the K and I got an email from the proprietor of m*rraythek.com informing me that M*rray the K was a devoted father and a maverick and a civil rights hero or something and that I should treat his legacy with respect, and I was like, "Hey, wow, I didn't know that, thanks, it's fun to learn things, you're doing great work by educating people who write dumb things on dumb blogs...."
Anyway. So there's this knucklehead from Sioux Falls who, about seven years ago, was tossing the ol' football around with his buddies by the pool. He wanted to make some kind of flashy diving catch, because that's what us normal dudes like to do when we're chillin' poolside with our bros. But, according to the article I read, he made a "grave miscalculation" and smashed his head against floor of the pool. (I'm not entirely sure how the mechanics of that worked out, but that's not important right now.)
He busted up his brain, got a little crazy, lost some of his hearing, started having headaches and memory problems, and, four days after the accident, discovered that he could play the piano. He'd never had any musical training or exhibited any natural skill. Yet suddenly, after his evening of horseplay gone terribly awry, the keyboard spoke to him, and his fingers knew exactly where to go, and the only way he could exorcise his post-traumatic anxiety was to lose himself in the sounds of this newfound skill that brain damage had bestowed upon him. He went on to record a couple albums and to spend a lot of time trying to get on TV.
So what's the punchline?
He's really not very good. I mean, I haven't heard his work personally. This is all just stuff I read about on the bus the other night. But by all accounts he's a fairly mediocre musician. He's competent--miraculously so, given his utter lack of training. And yet he's incapable of producing anything anyone discerning would care to hear if they didn't know his bizarre story.
Can you imagine? A traumatic injury rewires your brain in such a way that whatever was inhibiting your potential is gone, you discover that you can do something beautiful, contribute to the world, show yourself to be a genius, a man of destiny, and what happens? It turns out you kind of suck. God's middle finger rises in the strangest places.
(I might be relating this to you as some kind of symbol or metaphor or something--for the pain you must suffer in order to create, and the two-fold pain that commences once you loose your creation on an indifferent world, a world where, if the people collectively decide that you're ordinary, then you're ordinary, because it's called democracy, look it up, and it doesn't make a difference whether you've toiled for years in the noise mines of Silver Lake and Echo Park or you broke your brain in a swimming pool--but I doubt it.)
*
Sunset Boulevard, 9:25 p.m.
"I'd let her cut my hair."
"Oh yeah?"
"Oh yeah. She'd probably touch my shoulder with her boobs."
"How could she not?"
*
Full disclosure: Nick Ceglio--bug-eyed Sicilian, recovering Petra fan, frontman of the local rock and roll outfit George Glass--is a friend of mine. When he was homeless I let him sleep on my couch one time, because I'm a good friend. (Actually, I think that might have been before he was homeless. Nevermind. I'm a bad friend.) When I was drunk he let me pass out on his futon and then the next day we drank shitty beer and ate shitty pizza, which was cool, but we also watched football, which wasn't, but it wasn't too bad because I got to make insightful comments like "How do you get half a sack?" and "That's why they call him 'Sneaky' Kruger!" I inadvertently co-wrote his latest song. He bought me a copy of House of Leaves, for which I eventually forgave him. A few months ago we were going to go see The Master together until I bailed at the last minute because I was having one of my episodes. When he recently played a character based on Groucho Marx in a musical theater production in Santa Cruz, I used my expertise to serve as his dance adviser. We're good enough friends that I know for a fact that, contrary to what the sticker on his guitar would have you believe, he is not in reality the proud parent of a sailor. (He's actually quite ashamed of his sailor son.) I know that his mother calls him Nitty.
Which is all to say that you have no reason to believe me when I gush about the energy of George Glass's live shows, or the majesty of their forthcoming album Welcome Home. But that'll be your loss, and the void left in your life by your resistance to their music will be your overdue comeuppance for being such a mistrustful naysayer. Embrace the world. Trust people. Say yes. That's what I do.
*
Sunset Boulevard, 9:35 p.m.
"Well, if Karen Centerfold's here, this show must be the place to be."
"Yeah, I guess so."
"Maybe she'll introduce you before your set. Or hey, do you need a tambourine player tonight? I'm sure she'd be up for that."
"No, no. We're not Manhattan Murder Mystery."
"A couple months ago I saw her play with the Happy Casualties at Casey's. She played tambourine and sang backing vocals, even though she didn't seem to know any of the words. She just murmured stuff like, 'Black tar heroiiiiin.'"
"Huh."
"And Casey's isn't really to most Karen-friendly venue. Bros from the other room kept walking in and having their minds blown. An everyday occurrence for us was probably a life-changing event for them. Then she sang 'I Wanna Be Your Dog.' It was pretty good."
*
The last time I saw George Glass perform--the last time anyone saw George Glass perform--was at my high school. It was part of an event where a bunch of normal people got together to eat from food trucks and watch The Big Lebowski on a big inflatable screen after politely sitting through a band's performance which most in the audience would have preferred to skip so they could get to the part of the evening where they hilariously shout, "Shut the fuck up, Donny," or whatever it is people do.
That's right: After years of dues-paying toil, George Glass finally graced the stage of the Greek Theater at Santa Monica High School, a stage once graced by legends like those idiots who sang that stupid Green Day "time of your life" song at my graduation. "It's lonely living at the top," as the man says.
Seeing my pals play their indie rock songs at my old high school struck me as an emotionally fraught proposition. I figured being back at the place where I spent four years that I don't think about too often anymore would get me characteristically maudlin. I would weep over all the wasted years, all the unbearable memories. I'd write something boring about it on my blog.
But it didn't work out that way. It turns out that, once enough time passes, your old high school is just another place to see George Glass play, another place to drink beers in a parked car. And when you live in a city long enough, you can't go anywhere without encountering some unbearable memories. You're used to it and you don't even realize it.
*
Lot 1, sometime between 10:00 p.m. and midnight
"Oh, you know. I'm doing my best."
"Uh huh."
"It's just really hard sometimes."
"I know."
"Like, sometimes I can do it. Sometimes it's okay."
"Right."
"Sometimes I feel with my entire being that I'm walking in the glow of God's infinite grace."
"..."
"And I approach everything that comes, every day, with humility and gratitude."
"Right."
"It's just hard to maintain that."
"I know."
*
What is it about George Glass? What's made me want to proselytize about them ever since I first saw them on that dark night at Three Clubs in 2010? What makes me think that they deserve considerably more acclaim than your average brain damaged piano mediocrity, even in the face of a world whose indifference makes a compelling case that I'm wrong?
I don't know, man. Stop asking dumb questions.
Their live show--as they demonstrated at Lot 1--is a big part of it. Nick falls seamlessly into his mad scientist mode, his whole bearing exuding an odd mix of prophecy and anxiety, like he urgently needs to get his point across before the high sheriff catches up with him. Then there's Peter, strangling the life out of his bass when he's not providing an affable counterpoint to the crazy person next to him, expressing between-song gratitude and reminding everyone of the band's name.
Nathan and Todd are really good too.
And on top of that, they seem to strive for--and, with Welcome Home, I think they've come close to achieving--some sort of rock and roll beau ideal: instantly etched hooks tempered by encroaching chaos, lyrics both airy and sadsack. It's trendless, music from artists who don't expect a lot of return on their investment, who are surprised and therefore truly grateful when anyone bothers to care about the songs they record with all eyes set firmly on posterity, which, with each passing day, seems more and more like their best bet.
But who knows? Who knows anything? Maybe the world will catch on soon and see what I'm pretty sure I see. Maybe brain damaged Sioux Falls guy is the most visionary pianist of his generation and we're just slow to catch on. The world is a mysterious place.
My favorite song on Welcome Home is called "Future Former." I was looking forward to seeing them perform it live.
*
Lot 1, 11:35 p.m.
"We have to apologize to Greg because I told him we were gonna play his favorite song and now we're not going to."
"Ahh, fuck you!"
"Yeah, sorry about that."
"Jesus Christ."
*
Here is "Sporto":
Anyway. So there's this knucklehead from Sioux Falls who, about seven years ago, was tossing the ol' football around with his buddies by the pool. He wanted to make some kind of flashy diving catch, because that's what us normal dudes like to do when we're chillin' poolside with our bros. But, according to the article I read, he made a "grave miscalculation" and smashed his head against floor of the pool. (I'm not entirely sure how the mechanics of that worked out, but that's not important right now.)
He busted up his brain, got a little crazy, lost some of his hearing, started having headaches and memory problems, and, four days after the accident, discovered that he could play the piano. He'd never had any musical training or exhibited any natural skill. Yet suddenly, after his evening of horseplay gone terribly awry, the keyboard spoke to him, and his fingers knew exactly where to go, and the only way he could exorcise his post-traumatic anxiety was to lose himself in the sounds of this newfound skill that brain damage had bestowed upon him. He went on to record a couple albums and to spend a lot of time trying to get on TV.
So what's the punchline?
He's really not very good. I mean, I haven't heard his work personally. This is all just stuff I read about on the bus the other night. But by all accounts he's a fairly mediocre musician. He's competent--miraculously so, given his utter lack of training. And yet he's incapable of producing anything anyone discerning would care to hear if they didn't know his bizarre story.
Can you imagine? A traumatic injury rewires your brain in such a way that whatever was inhibiting your potential is gone, you discover that you can do something beautiful, contribute to the world, show yourself to be a genius, a man of destiny, and what happens? It turns out you kind of suck. God's middle finger rises in the strangest places.
(I might be relating this to you as some kind of symbol or metaphor or something--for the pain you must suffer in order to create, and the two-fold pain that commences once you loose your creation on an indifferent world, a world where, if the people collectively decide that you're ordinary, then you're ordinary, because it's called democracy, look it up, and it doesn't make a difference whether you've toiled for years in the noise mines of Silver Lake and Echo Park or you broke your brain in a swimming pool--but I doubt it.)
*
Sunset Boulevard, 9:25 p.m.
"I'd let her cut my hair."
"Oh yeah?"
"Oh yeah. She'd probably touch my shoulder with her boobs."
"How could she not?"
*
Full disclosure: Nick Ceglio--bug-eyed Sicilian, recovering Petra fan, frontman of the local rock and roll outfit George Glass--is a friend of mine. When he was homeless I let him sleep on my couch one time, because I'm a good friend. (Actually, I think that might have been before he was homeless. Nevermind. I'm a bad friend.) When I was drunk he let me pass out on his futon and then the next day we drank shitty beer and ate shitty pizza, which was cool, but we also watched football, which wasn't, but it wasn't too bad because I got to make insightful comments like "How do you get half a sack?" and "That's why they call him 'Sneaky' Kruger!" I inadvertently co-wrote his latest song. He bought me a copy of House of Leaves, for which I eventually forgave him. A few months ago we were going to go see The Master together until I bailed at the last minute because I was having one of my episodes. When he recently played a character based on Groucho Marx in a musical theater production in Santa Cruz, I used my expertise to serve as his dance adviser. We're good enough friends that I know for a fact that, contrary to what the sticker on his guitar would have you believe, he is not in reality the proud parent of a sailor. (He's actually quite ashamed of his sailor son.) I know that his mother calls him Nitty.
Which is all to say that you have no reason to believe me when I gush about the energy of George Glass's live shows, or the majesty of their forthcoming album Welcome Home. But that'll be your loss, and the void left in your life by your resistance to their music will be your overdue comeuppance for being such a mistrustful naysayer. Embrace the world. Trust people. Say yes. That's what I do.
*
Sunset Boulevard, 9:35 p.m.
"Well, if Karen Centerfold's here, this show must be the place to be."
"Yeah, I guess so."
"Maybe she'll introduce you before your set. Or hey, do you need a tambourine player tonight? I'm sure she'd be up for that."
"No, no. We're not Manhattan Murder Mystery."
"A couple months ago I saw her play with the Happy Casualties at Casey's. She played tambourine and sang backing vocals, even though she didn't seem to know any of the words. She just murmured stuff like, 'Black tar heroiiiiin.'"
"Huh."
"And Casey's isn't really to most Karen-friendly venue. Bros from the other room kept walking in and having their minds blown. An everyday occurrence for us was probably a life-changing event for them. Then she sang 'I Wanna Be Your Dog.' It was pretty good."
*
The last time I saw George Glass perform--the last time anyone saw George Glass perform--was at my high school. It was part of an event where a bunch of normal people got together to eat from food trucks and watch The Big Lebowski on a big inflatable screen after politely sitting through a band's performance which most in the audience would have preferred to skip so they could get to the part of the evening where they hilariously shout, "Shut the fuck up, Donny," or whatever it is people do.
That's right: After years of dues-paying toil, George Glass finally graced the stage of the Greek Theater at Santa Monica High School, a stage once graced by legends like those idiots who sang that stupid Green Day "time of your life" song at my graduation. "It's lonely living at the top," as the man says.
Seeing my pals play their indie rock songs at my old high school struck me as an emotionally fraught proposition. I figured being back at the place where I spent four years that I don't think about too often anymore would get me characteristically maudlin. I would weep over all the wasted years, all the unbearable memories. I'd write something boring about it on my blog.
But it didn't work out that way. It turns out that, once enough time passes, your old high school is just another place to see George Glass play, another place to drink beers in a parked car. And when you live in a city long enough, you can't go anywhere without encountering some unbearable memories. You're used to it and you don't even realize it.
*
Lot 1, sometime between 10:00 p.m. and midnight
"Oh, you know. I'm doing my best."
"Uh huh."
"It's just really hard sometimes."
"I know."
"Like, sometimes I can do it. Sometimes it's okay."
"Right."
"Sometimes I feel with my entire being that I'm walking in the glow of God's infinite grace."
"..."
"And I approach everything that comes, every day, with humility and gratitude."
"Right."
"It's just hard to maintain that."
"I know."
*
What is it about George Glass? What's made me want to proselytize about them ever since I first saw them on that dark night at Three Clubs in 2010? What makes me think that they deserve considerably more acclaim than your average brain damaged piano mediocrity, even in the face of a world whose indifference makes a compelling case that I'm wrong?
I don't know, man. Stop asking dumb questions.
Their live show--as they demonstrated at Lot 1--is a big part of it. Nick falls seamlessly into his mad scientist mode, his whole bearing exuding an odd mix of prophecy and anxiety, like he urgently needs to get his point across before the high sheriff catches up with him. Then there's Peter, strangling the life out of his bass when he's not providing an affable counterpoint to the crazy person next to him, expressing between-song gratitude and reminding everyone of the band's name.
Nathan and Todd are really good too.
And on top of that, they seem to strive for--and, with Welcome Home, I think they've come close to achieving--some sort of rock and roll beau ideal: instantly etched hooks tempered by encroaching chaos, lyrics both airy and sadsack. It's trendless, music from artists who don't expect a lot of return on their investment, who are surprised and therefore truly grateful when anyone bothers to care about the songs they record with all eyes set firmly on posterity, which, with each passing day, seems more and more like their best bet.
But who knows? Who knows anything? Maybe the world will catch on soon and see what I'm pretty sure I see. Maybe brain damaged Sioux Falls guy is the most visionary pianist of his generation and we're just slow to catch on. The world is a mysterious place.
My favorite song on Welcome Home is called "Future Former." I was looking forward to seeing them perform it live.
*
Lot 1, 11:35 p.m.
"We have to apologize to Greg because I told him we were gonna play his favorite song and now we're not going to."
"Ahh, fuck you!"
"Yeah, sorry about that."
"Jesus Christ."
*
Here is "Sporto":
Friday, January 18, 2013
Emperor X - The Satellite - Wednesday, January 16, 2013
"Shut shut
Shut shut up
Shut shut up
You're not dying inside"
-Emperor X (and also me, every morning, to the bathroom mirror)
A message to the crazy guy who was on the bus Wednesday night: Fuck you, crazy guy, fuck you, because you did not hold up your end of the bargain, by which I mean the longstanding arrangement between crazy bus people and normies (those of us who choose not to drive/can't afford a car/like to get super drunk at shows) wherein you promised that if you are going to make a scene on the bus--particularly a bus that I happen to occupy--you have to at least be interesting, you have to give me a decent story to tell, you have to encapsulate a humane response to brutal violence through song, or you have to demonstrate the frailty of human life and the insanity of our day-to-day responses to looming oblivion, or you have to hungrily pick flakes of psoriatic skin off your bare hammer toes, or you have to furiously masturbate to Transtit TV, but you, crazy guy on the bus Wednesday night, you did no such thing, you just let fly with a neverending stream of methamphetamine incoherence, loudly, you were even harder to follow than the Gary Lutz stories I was trying to read, and nothing you said made sense, the only factoid I was able to pluck from your murky logorrhea was that you really dislike Jamaicans, which, I mean, is that even a thing, anti-Jamaicanism or Rastaphobia or whatever, I mean, I guess it is, evidently, but that's just a bizarre prejudice to have, and not in an interesting way, it's not the sort of thing I can spin into a yarn that will provide rare insight into the human condition that can only be attained via long hours on public transportation, and plus I think you spit on me a little bit, so even though I quickly sanitized the affected area I probably have hepatitis now or something, but anyway, you gave me nothing, nothing to work with, even given your curious theory that your Jamaican nemesis's dreadlocks were fake, so I guess I'll have to try to write about music. Thanks a lot, jerk.
*
Chad Matheny, aka Emperor X, though he's a brilliant artist, maybe even some kind of genius, appears to be a fairly happy, well-adjusted guy, I mean, I certainly can't say for sure, since I'm basing this judgment on his songs and his performances and his social media persona and a few instances of idle chitchat outside of various venues over the past ten months, so I could be wrong, and the smiling guy who appears to be tickled to death just to see his alias gracing the Satellite marquee may be a pose that masks a miserable wretch who casually injects speed between his toes while making a scene on public transportation, ranting that after hundreds of thousands of miles traversed and brilliant album after brilliant album he's got nothing to show for it but a couple of high-7s from Pitchfork and that at his age instead of being a noted physicist he's instead an itinerant troubadour and world champion couch-surfer, but that strikes me as unlikely, I'm pretty sure Matheny's drug of choice is copious amounts of caffeine and he seems cheerful about his chosen path, riding buses and trains across the continents to sing his songs, from pehrspace to Wichita morning news broadcasts to wherever it is one plays when one plays in Ljubljana, and this happy outlook is not an outlook I understand--though I myself would very much like to sing original compositions for people in Ljubljana but only in a theoretical sort of way, like maybe if it were to happen in a really vivid dream that would be enough for me--but then again there's much that I don't understand about Emperor X, something about where the power of his songs lies, since while his voice is clear and affable, he's not the sort of confessional songwriter who makes you feel like he gets you, that he's writing just for you, that given the chance you could be best buds, but still, he drills into your head and, while his tunes can be tricky and cockeyed, there's nothing sonically groundbreaking going on, I mean, there's the occasional noisy lo-fi freakout, but still it's all stuff that can be replicated solo or with a hastily prepared drummer, and yet these songs are vivid, they live with you--I mean, who among us does not harbor precious memories of speeding down Orange County freeways and blasting "Allahu Akbar" and crying out to the heavens, your lungs full of smoke, "SEND US AN AVALANCHE"?--so his influence on his listeners must have much to do with his lyrics, but even then, it's hard to figure out where that comes from, since Matheny's point of view often comes off like that of a robot or a space alien who has, contrary to SF cliche, come to fully understand the human concept of love, but everything else that would fill out a normal pop song doesn't seem to concern him at all, so even if you don't know what he's talking about, or if you know what he's talking about but can't for the life of you figure out why he's talking about it, you know you're hearing something no one else will give you, songs filled with broken compressors and Cylons and British thermal units and calcium carbonate and a recurring concern for the plight of the Ummah--which leads to a staple of his shows, that unique achievement: a room full of white people in various states of inebriation chanting "Allahu akbar!"--and, once the dissonance wears off, you come to appreciate that you're in the presence of something rare, an artist who is truly different and perceives the world in a way that you can only fail to understand, a singer who can belt out a perfect couplet of rock and roll aggression like, "So let's set fire to both sides / Let's leave a message they'll hear, let's scream," and he follows it up with, "Let's send a signal through co-ax," and all you can do is shake your head and think, "Emperor X, you glorious nerd."
*
Anyway. The Satellite show was really good. I mean, my new year's resolution was to "stay the course," so I was pretty drunk, but I think my judgment in this case is valid. Emperor X and whatever friends he can wrangle together play at pehrspace on Sunday, January 27th. A good time will be had by me.
*
This song contains solid advice that neither you nor I will take:
Shut shut up
Shut shut up
You're not dying inside"
-Emperor X (and also me, every morning, to the bathroom mirror)
A message to the crazy guy who was on the bus Wednesday night: Fuck you, crazy guy, fuck you, because you did not hold up your end of the bargain, by which I mean the longstanding arrangement between crazy bus people and normies (those of us who choose not to drive/can't afford a car/like to get super drunk at shows) wherein you promised that if you are going to make a scene on the bus--particularly a bus that I happen to occupy--you have to at least be interesting, you have to give me a decent story to tell, you have to encapsulate a humane response to brutal violence through song, or you have to demonstrate the frailty of human life and the insanity of our day-to-day responses to looming oblivion, or you have to hungrily pick flakes of psoriatic skin off your bare hammer toes, or you have to furiously masturbate to Transtit TV, but you, crazy guy on the bus Wednesday night, you did no such thing, you just let fly with a neverending stream of methamphetamine incoherence, loudly, you were even harder to follow than the Gary Lutz stories I was trying to read, and nothing you said made sense, the only factoid I was able to pluck from your murky logorrhea was that you really dislike Jamaicans, which, I mean, is that even a thing, anti-Jamaicanism or Rastaphobia or whatever, I mean, I guess it is, evidently, but that's just a bizarre prejudice to have, and not in an interesting way, it's not the sort of thing I can spin into a yarn that will provide rare insight into the human condition that can only be attained via long hours on public transportation, and plus I think you spit on me a little bit, so even though I quickly sanitized the affected area I probably have hepatitis now or something, but anyway, you gave me nothing, nothing to work with, even given your curious theory that your Jamaican nemesis's dreadlocks were fake, so I guess I'll have to try to write about music. Thanks a lot, jerk.
*
Chad Matheny, aka Emperor X, though he's a brilliant artist, maybe even some kind of genius, appears to be a fairly happy, well-adjusted guy, I mean, I certainly can't say for sure, since I'm basing this judgment on his songs and his performances and his social media persona and a few instances of idle chitchat outside of various venues over the past ten months, so I could be wrong, and the smiling guy who appears to be tickled to death just to see his alias gracing the Satellite marquee may be a pose that masks a miserable wretch who casually injects speed between his toes while making a scene on public transportation, ranting that after hundreds of thousands of miles traversed and brilliant album after brilliant album he's got nothing to show for it but a couple of high-7s from Pitchfork and that at his age instead of being a noted physicist he's instead an itinerant troubadour and world champion couch-surfer, but that strikes me as unlikely, I'm pretty sure Matheny's drug of choice is copious amounts of caffeine and he seems cheerful about his chosen path, riding buses and trains across the continents to sing his songs, from pehrspace to Wichita morning news broadcasts to wherever it is one plays when one plays in Ljubljana, and this happy outlook is not an outlook I understand--though I myself would very much like to sing original compositions for people in Ljubljana but only in a theoretical sort of way, like maybe if it were to happen in a really vivid dream that would be enough for me--but then again there's much that I don't understand about Emperor X, something about where the power of his songs lies, since while his voice is clear and affable, he's not the sort of confessional songwriter who makes you feel like he gets you, that he's writing just for you, that given the chance you could be best buds, but still, he drills into your head and, while his tunes can be tricky and cockeyed, there's nothing sonically groundbreaking going on, I mean, there's the occasional noisy lo-fi freakout, but still it's all stuff that can be replicated solo or with a hastily prepared drummer, and yet these songs are vivid, they live with you--I mean, who among us does not harbor precious memories of speeding down Orange County freeways and blasting "Allahu Akbar" and crying out to the heavens, your lungs full of smoke, "SEND US AN AVALANCHE"?--so his influence on his listeners must have much to do with his lyrics, but even then, it's hard to figure out where that comes from, since Matheny's point of view often comes off like that of a robot or a space alien who has, contrary to SF cliche, come to fully understand the human concept of love, but everything else that would fill out a normal pop song doesn't seem to concern him at all, so even if you don't know what he's talking about, or if you know what he's talking about but can't for the life of you figure out why he's talking about it, you know you're hearing something no one else will give you, songs filled with broken compressors and Cylons and British thermal units and calcium carbonate and a recurring concern for the plight of the Ummah--which leads to a staple of his shows, that unique achievement: a room full of white people in various states of inebriation chanting "Allahu akbar!"--and, once the dissonance wears off, you come to appreciate that you're in the presence of something rare, an artist who is truly different and perceives the world in a way that you can only fail to understand, a singer who can belt out a perfect couplet of rock and roll aggression like, "So let's set fire to both sides / Let's leave a message they'll hear, let's scream," and he follows it up with, "Let's send a signal through co-ax," and all you can do is shake your head and think, "Emperor X, you glorious nerd."
*
Anyway. The Satellite show was really good. I mean, my new year's resolution was to "stay the course," so I was pretty drunk, but I think my judgment in this case is valid. Emperor X and whatever friends he can wrangle together play at pehrspace on Sunday, January 27th. A good time will be had by me.
*
This song contains solid advice that neither you nor I will take:
Thursday, January 3, 2013
The Henry Clay People - December, 2012
We'll see how this goes. It's difficult to predict. Most things are.
It's January 2, 2013. Another unrepentantly drunken December has just passed--spurred on by birthdays, weddings, several two-bottle nights at pehrspace, holiday melancholy, regular melancholy, and of course the Henry Clay People residency. My body--which has held up better than it had any right to--is finally breaking down, letting in each of the seasonal viruses that have been plaguing everyone I know since the weather turned cold. I can't complain. This corpus has stood me in good stead up till now, particularly in light of the abuse I've subjected it to, both alcoholically and during those long trips on that clammy tube of disease we call the bus. But, at any rate, as it stands I've consumed about 400 calories over the past two days, very little water has filtered through my charred and swollen throat, and nicotine deprivation is approaching critical levels. I'm operating on three hours of fitful sleep. So I am not thinking clearly. Or, rather, it feels as though I'm thinking exceptionally clearly, but I retain just enough clarity to recognize that this is a fevered illusion.
These considerations may factor into the quality of this post.
Another consideration: I very much want to write about the Henry Clay People on this, the occasion of their potential demise, or metamorphosis, or whatever it is. One should have something to say after such a band provided the raucous, blearily remembered soundtrack to such a curious and fun month. But I feel like I'll have trouble doing so, because until very recently (a month ago? four days ago? the moment I decided to write this thing?) I never really cared about them.
Which is not to say I disliked them. Barring the existence of a personal vendetta (many of which no doubt exist, since you can't inhabit a music scene for such a long time without engendering bitterness, some of it undeserved, some of it maybe not so undeserved, since everyone really is kind of an asshole when you get down to it) (that's not an allusion to anything specific; it's just that we all have someone out there who hates us for a very good reason) (let's move on), it's hard to imagine anyone disliking the Henry Clay People. I've listened to their records frequently and experienced oddly consistent bouts of joy at so many of their sets over the past three years, whether they were playing headlining gigs at the Bootleg or they were sneaking onstage for not-so-secret midnight shows under pseudonyms of ever-fluctuating taste: the Elk (sure), Hank and the Ear Worms (makes sense), Toilet Babies (gross), the James Polk Folk (double-gross). I never passed up the opportunity to see them without a good reason (sickness; conflicting Manhattan Murder Mystery show; fell asleep).
So it seems unfair and inaccurate to claim that I never cared about them. If they were any other band, I'd insist that of course I care about them--to the extent that you ever care about a bunch of seemingly nice guys who play cool songs in dark rooms while you drink beer and tap your toe and move your head semi-rhythmically and sometimes achieve something approaching a dance. However, I must question my devotion because I have dear friends with impeccable taste who really, really care about the Henry Clay People a lot. (I won't name names, but I will say that most of them had blogs.) So I've long felt like my understanding of the band's raison d'etre lacked something essential. If you will, consider: I thought Somewhere on the Golden Coast was a terrific record. It didn't strike me as a disappointment at all. So, obviously, I've been missing something.
Perhaps it's my incipient nihilism that holds me back and prevents me from believing in rock and roll or feeling enthusiasm for its prophets and potential saviors. The dubstep generation can have the keys, as far as I'm concerned, and they can drive the whole damn popular music car straight into the fucking ocean amid an orgy of MDMA and stupid hair. It's fine with me. This too shall pass. If the Good Lord doesn't care that rock and roll is as passe and irrelevant as music blogging, then neither do I.
That might not be the problem, though. I mean come on. Of course I believe in rock and roll. The rock and roll we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity. (Sometimes I wonder, though....)
Perhaps--more likely--my disconnect from the band has something to do with the wizened maturity that Joey Siara has brought to even his wryest takes on being alive in America at this time in history. The Henry Clay People are, of course, a super-fun party band whose members pass whiskey bottles around the stage, and Andy Siara has a magnetic attraction to anything he can climb atop, and Joey often resembles a cannonball intent on disemboweling his brother, and some of their more iconic work concerns getting drunk and calling in sick to dead-end jobs and bumming around grimy clubs in the traditionally juvenile pursuit of discovering a good band that you might want to see again. But there's something about Joey's droll distance from this material, his clear-eyed view of his lifestyle's triumphs and, more palpably, its limitations. Even back when he was literally twenty-five, it was a decidedly adult point of view. Somewhere between the sentiments of "I like your band, when are you playing again?" and "It's just a place to be," he found his truth: The potential joy and community and solace of this cloistered little corner of a music scene; and yet, always lingering within the frame, its unbearable dumbness.
When dealing with the same issues, I've always preferred art that responds with despair rather than wisdom and equanimity. That's on me, though. That's my damage. Perhaps by the time I'm forty or so, I'll achieve the maturity and acceptance that the Siaras and company stumbled upon during their time together. If so, I'll be sure to write about it here. I'll probably have upgraded to Tumblr by then. Maybe. Probably not.
*
"If this world were fair I wouldn't be allowed to pay rent doing what I do. I would have to work a lot harder and maybe the band would have been sacrificed before now."
-Joey Siara, 2012
Joey Siara is thirty-ish, from what I gather, which makes him an elder statesman of what we're led to believe is the most insufferably entitled generation in the history of mankind. But he sure doesn't sound like it here.
I tend to think he's got it backwards, but then again, I'm a bit of a dreamer. Even still, it strikes me that, in a truly fair world, if you work your ass off for the better part of a decade to create music--instead of far more lucrative endeavors, such as creating pollution, or death, or wealth, or all three at once--and you use this music to tirelessly provide enjoyment and inspiration and relief to people in dingy bars and shiny arenas and sweltering fairgrounds wherever they'll have you, then maybe you would be allowed to earn a living. You wouldn't deserve to be wealthy--no one does--but you would deserve to survive.
That's not the world we've inherited, of course, and probably not the world that we have it in our power to create. But it's a world that's worth striving for without embarrassment or modesty.
It's true that most Americans our age were taught at some point that every human life has value--or, to use the grotesquely cliched dismissal that the clever hordes love to resort to, "that everyone is a special little snowflake." And we're told that this is our major problem, and as such many of us are bashful about this aspect of our upbringings. Still, it's depressing to consider how such a lovely idea has become controversial or, to some, even insidious. But, really, it's unsurprising that the acceptance of each human's inherent value could not be sustained amid the inexorable logic of capitalism or the violence of empire. So here we are.
So yes, we're reminded day after day--regardless of what Mommy or the kindergarten teacher or Mr. Rogers told us--that none of us is unique, that we're on this planet to be put to use by our owners and to reproduce and to spend and to ignore the bodies piling up below us. And if you don't fit into that system, if maybe you want to create something beautiful instead of staking out your niche in the service economy, and if you somehow earn a living wage at it through a combination of luck and talent, you're made to feel like you put one over on the world, that you're the one who's not being fair to the backward and psychotic society you were unlucky enough to be born into.
The world, of course, doesn't owe anyone anything. But we can still aspire to make it a bit more flexible. When someone works hard at art and makes a livable--if impoverished--wage, let's agree to look at that as a rare instance of the world actually being fair.
Or--well, most importantly, what I'm really getting at is that the Henry Clay People should keep playing shows and making music because it's fun and it's important and fuck capitalism and fuck growing up and fuck any society that doesn't value its artists.
This is easy for me to say, of course. I don't ever anticipate paying any Henry Clay Person's rent. But still. As my man Lao Tzu once said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with some jerk with a fever and residual alcohol psychosis running his mouth off on a blog."
(Of course, there's Joey's chronic tinnitus to consider. If that causes the ultimate demise of the band, I can't complain. That's the fault of a cruel, uncaring God, not a backwards society. And there's not a whole lot we can do about that. Unless you have any ideas. Do you have any ideas?)
*
*
Should I change the name of the 704 to the Flarn Barn? I've toyed with this idea. My gut tells me yes but my brain also tells me yes. And I don't trust either of those.
My heart abstained.
*
Noted rogue Travis Woods (formerly of WebInFront dot net, currently of MyFistUpsideHisJawbone dot org) steals umbrellas. He's an unrepentant umbrella thief. Ask anyone.
*
Okay, I'm starting to lose my mind a little. I'm talking nonsense. It's been a long year and a very long day. I'm very ill.
Pull it together, L.G. You can do this. You live for this. Switch to the second person for the rest of the post if it helps. It usually does.
*
*
You know what? Sometimes life works out quite nicely. You're normally loath to admit this fact, of course, because you like to maintain a consistent worldview, and you don't want to jinx anything. But sometimes you can't deny it.
For example, back in 2009, when you were digging though the archives of Classical Geek Theatre (that's the old school Blogger URL, for the sake of precision) to find out which Los Angeles bands were worthy of your time, you never anticipated that a few years later you'd be having the time of your life at Ben "Mouse" McShane's wedding reception, hanging out with friends and smoking cigarettes with Ben's dad. But this past Saturday, just such a delightful turn of events came to pass.
Watching a peer get hitched can be unnerving. Not altogether, of course. It's fun and inspiring to celebrate the love of people you like, to see their families coming together, to see all your fellow degenerate music-scene goons all dressed up in their finest in a context far away from the Satellite. But the hopelessly self-absorbed part of you--which wavers between nine and ninety-nine percent of your psyche--can't help but start an uncomfortable process of questioning all your assumptions about life, love, and the trappings of adulthood.
While you would never advise anyone else against such institutions as marriage and procreation, you long ago decided they weren't for you. We all die alone anyway, right? Who needs some decrepit oldster sitting at their bedside when it happens, just to create some illusion of company? Subjecting some poor woman to a lifetime of you? That's not right. And spawning--imposing life on a brand new human being, who will no doubt have just as difficult a time maneuvering through this shitshow as you do? No way. Not with your depressed, alcoholic genes. Yuck. No thanks, hotshot. You'll take a raincheck on that one, pally.
And yet. Unless you're as hard-hearted as you like to pretend to be, it's hard to witness such a quantity of unmitigated joy as there was at this wedding reception without questioning the underpinnings of your values. Maybe, you wonder, there's a reason people do this? Maybe conventional milestones are worth pursuing? Maybe adulthood--the sociological kind, not the chronological kind--isn't so bad?
You're sitting there slumped over at table 26 when these thoughts become unbearably heavy. Just then you notice the Henry Clay People--twenty-five for the rest of their lives--all set up on the Seafood World stage, ready to entertain Ben and Cindy's family and friends with a brutally fun set of covers. And, with courage provided by whiskey and then wine and then more wine and then more whiskey and then that nefarious Kraken, you meet your favorite partner out on the floor, and you dance dance dance.
And everything's fine.
*
And before you know it it's fifty-seven hours later, 7:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, New Year's Day, 2013. You wake up on a friend's couch after four hours of sleep. By the feel of your uvula--swollen to the size and hardness of a middle toe--you know that you had gone way beyond traditional snoring the previous night, that whatever noises you were making in your whiskey sleep were more porcine than human, and, consequently, whatever bridge you built to this friend's couch has probably been burned.
That's what you get for sleeping drunk on your back. Then again, worse things have happened to drunk people sleeping on their backs.
You gather your things together and walk outside. You throw away a McDonald's bag full of untouched food, and, lighting a cigarette in spite of your uvula's protests, you walk down the hill.
You return to the night before.
The Henry Clay People and their friends on stage at the Satellite--Spaceland--jamming until two, their last show in their current incarnation, maybe their last show ever, artists driven to the verge of oblivion by bum luck and subsistence wages, ringing ears and adulthood.
There's the fans, the ones whose devotion precedes yours by years, crammed onto the floor and witnessing the end of something that--in a universe devoid of objective meaning--meant something to them. Whether embracing such a feeling was wise or foolish--it was as real as anything else that happens inside us.
There's the drunk people, the sad people, the ones who were certain that 2013 would be their year and all of a sudden aren't so sure, kissless at midnight but putting up a good front. There are the happy people, the ones who still believe 2013 is theirs for the taking, who will soon be disappointed. Some will die. There's the guy lurking by the side of the stage, silently composing the Missed Connection he will post on craigslist the next day.
And you blink and it's morning again. You're on Sunset. You're still drunk from the night before, and your throat hurts, and you can't really focus, and you feel like you might be coming down with something, and suddenly, looking both back and forward, it's all too much. You stand at the bus stop and wipe your eyes.
You return to what happened after the show.
You are gloriously, disgracefully drunk, piled into a car with friends. Somehow, through the torrents of alcohol, McDonald's sounds like an acceptable idea to everyone, so you end up in line at the drive-thru, which is mobbed with a massive stream of New Year's Eve revelers. The whiskey and beer is thick in your brain and it's affecting your sense of time, but the line of cars seems to be moving impossibly slow. But this is fine. You have nowhere you'd rather be. You finally arrive at the order board where you order food that you'll never find the energy or motivation to eat. And the long wait begins again. And it's after two in the morning and it's a new year and you're drunk with your friends and everyone is happy and you all like each other and you just spent a long night at a great rock and roll show and now you're waiting in line for junk food you don't really want....
And a part of you knows that if you're not already too old for this kind of thing, you will be very soon, but you don't want to be, you really don't want to be, and if the line lasts long enough, if these cars persist in not moving, as they seem intent on doing, maybe you'll be there for another hour, maybe two, or four, or eight, and maybe even more, maybe forever, and as you sit there waiting for food that you're never going to eat anyway, nothing will have to end. No regrets, no hangovers, no broken up bands. Drunk in the drive-thru for the rest of our lives.
It's January 2, 2013. Another unrepentantly drunken December has just passed--spurred on by birthdays, weddings, several two-bottle nights at pehrspace, holiday melancholy, regular melancholy, and of course the Henry Clay People residency. My body--which has held up better than it had any right to--is finally breaking down, letting in each of the seasonal viruses that have been plaguing everyone I know since the weather turned cold. I can't complain. This corpus has stood me in good stead up till now, particularly in light of the abuse I've subjected it to, both alcoholically and during those long trips on that clammy tube of disease we call the bus. But, at any rate, as it stands I've consumed about 400 calories over the past two days, very little water has filtered through my charred and swollen throat, and nicotine deprivation is approaching critical levels. I'm operating on three hours of fitful sleep. So I am not thinking clearly. Or, rather, it feels as though I'm thinking exceptionally clearly, but I retain just enough clarity to recognize that this is a fevered illusion.
These considerations may factor into the quality of this post.
Another consideration: I very much want to write about the Henry Clay People on this, the occasion of their potential demise, or metamorphosis, or whatever it is. One should have something to say after such a band provided the raucous, blearily remembered soundtrack to such a curious and fun month. But I feel like I'll have trouble doing so, because until very recently (a month ago? four days ago? the moment I decided to write this thing?) I never really cared about them.
Which is not to say I disliked them. Barring the existence of a personal vendetta (many of which no doubt exist, since you can't inhabit a music scene for such a long time without engendering bitterness, some of it undeserved, some of it maybe not so undeserved, since everyone really is kind of an asshole when you get down to it) (that's not an allusion to anything specific; it's just that we all have someone out there who hates us for a very good reason) (let's move on), it's hard to imagine anyone disliking the Henry Clay People. I've listened to their records frequently and experienced oddly consistent bouts of joy at so many of their sets over the past three years, whether they were playing headlining gigs at the Bootleg or they were sneaking onstage for not-so-secret midnight shows under pseudonyms of ever-fluctuating taste: the Elk (sure), Hank and the Ear Worms (makes sense), Toilet Babies (gross), the James Polk Folk (double-gross). I never passed up the opportunity to see them without a good reason (sickness; conflicting Manhattan Murder Mystery show; fell asleep).
So it seems unfair and inaccurate to claim that I never cared about them. If they were any other band, I'd insist that of course I care about them--to the extent that you ever care about a bunch of seemingly nice guys who play cool songs in dark rooms while you drink beer and tap your toe and move your head semi-rhythmically and sometimes achieve something approaching a dance. However, I must question my devotion because I have dear friends with impeccable taste who really, really care about the Henry Clay People a lot. (I won't name names, but I will say that most of them had blogs.) So I've long felt like my understanding of the band's raison d'etre lacked something essential. If you will, consider: I thought Somewhere on the Golden Coast was a terrific record. It didn't strike me as a disappointment at all. So, obviously, I've been missing something.
Perhaps it's my incipient nihilism that holds me back and prevents me from believing in rock and roll or feeling enthusiasm for its prophets and potential saviors. The dubstep generation can have the keys, as far as I'm concerned, and they can drive the whole damn popular music car straight into the fucking ocean amid an orgy of MDMA and stupid hair. It's fine with me. This too shall pass. If the Good Lord doesn't care that rock and roll is as passe and irrelevant as music blogging, then neither do I.
That might not be the problem, though. I mean come on. Of course I believe in rock and roll. The rock and roll we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity. (Sometimes I wonder, though....)
Perhaps--more likely--my disconnect from the band has something to do with the wizened maturity that Joey Siara has brought to even his wryest takes on being alive in America at this time in history. The Henry Clay People are, of course, a super-fun party band whose members pass whiskey bottles around the stage, and Andy Siara has a magnetic attraction to anything he can climb atop, and Joey often resembles a cannonball intent on disemboweling his brother, and some of their more iconic work concerns getting drunk and calling in sick to dead-end jobs and bumming around grimy clubs in the traditionally juvenile pursuit of discovering a good band that you might want to see again. But there's something about Joey's droll distance from this material, his clear-eyed view of his lifestyle's triumphs and, more palpably, its limitations. Even back when he was literally twenty-five, it was a decidedly adult point of view. Somewhere between the sentiments of "I like your band, when are you playing again?" and "It's just a place to be," he found his truth: The potential joy and community and solace of this cloistered little corner of a music scene; and yet, always lingering within the frame, its unbearable dumbness.
When dealing with the same issues, I've always preferred art that responds with despair rather than wisdom and equanimity. That's on me, though. That's my damage. Perhaps by the time I'm forty or so, I'll achieve the maturity and acceptance that the Siaras and company stumbled upon during their time together. If so, I'll be sure to write about it here. I'll probably have upgraded to Tumblr by then. Maybe. Probably not.
*
"If this world were fair I wouldn't be allowed to pay rent doing what I do. I would have to work a lot harder and maybe the band would have been sacrificed before now."
-Joey Siara, 2012
Joey Siara is thirty-ish, from what I gather, which makes him an elder statesman of what we're led to believe is the most insufferably entitled generation in the history of mankind. But he sure doesn't sound like it here.
I tend to think he's got it backwards, but then again, I'm a bit of a dreamer. Even still, it strikes me that, in a truly fair world, if you work your ass off for the better part of a decade to create music--instead of far more lucrative endeavors, such as creating pollution, or death, or wealth, or all three at once--and you use this music to tirelessly provide enjoyment and inspiration and relief to people in dingy bars and shiny arenas and sweltering fairgrounds wherever they'll have you, then maybe you would be allowed to earn a living. You wouldn't deserve to be wealthy--no one does--but you would deserve to survive.
That's not the world we've inherited, of course, and probably not the world that we have it in our power to create. But it's a world that's worth striving for without embarrassment or modesty.
It's true that most Americans our age were taught at some point that every human life has value--or, to use the grotesquely cliched dismissal that the clever hordes love to resort to, "that everyone is a special little snowflake." And we're told that this is our major problem, and as such many of us are bashful about this aspect of our upbringings. Still, it's depressing to consider how such a lovely idea has become controversial or, to some, even insidious. But, really, it's unsurprising that the acceptance of each human's inherent value could not be sustained amid the inexorable logic of capitalism or the violence of empire. So here we are.
So yes, we're reminded day after day--regardless of what Mommy or the kindergarten teacher or Mr. Rogers told us--that none of us is unique, that we're on this planet to be put to use by our owners and to reproduce and to spend and to ignore the bodies piling up below us. And if you don't fit into that system, if maybe you want to create something beautiful instead of staking out your niche in the service economy, and if you somehow earn a living wage at it through a combination of luck and talent, you're made to feel like you put one over on the world, that you're the one who's not being fair to the backward and psychotic society you were unlucky enough to be born into.
The world, of course, doesn't owe anyone anything. But we can still aspire to make it a bit more flexible. When someone works hard at art and makes a livable--if impoverished--wage, let's agree to look at that as a rare instance of the world actually being fair.
Or--well, most importantly, what I'm really getting at is that the Henry Clay People should keep playing shows and making music because it's fun and it's important and fuck capitalism and fuck growing up and fuck any society that doesn't value its artists.
This is easy for me to say, of course. I don't ever anticipate paying any Henry Clay Person's rent. But still. As my man Lao Tzu once said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with some jerk with a fever and residual alcohol psychosis running his mouth off on a blog."
(Of course, there's Joey's chronic tinnitus to consider. If that causes the ultimate demise of the band, I can't complain. That's the fault of a cruel, uncaring God, not a backwards society. And there's not a whole lot we can do about that. Unless you have any ideas. Do you have any ideas?)
*
*
Should I change the name of the 704 to the Flarn Barn? I've toyed with this idea. My gut tells me yes but my brain also tells me yes. And I don't trust either of those.
My heart abstained.
*
Noted rogue Travis Woods (formerly of WebInFront dot net, currently of MyFistUpsideHisJawbone dot org) steals umbrellas. He's an unrepentant umbrella thief. Ask anyone.
*
Okay, I'm starting to lose my mind a little. I'm talking nonsense. It's been a long year and a very long day. I'm very ill.
Pull it together, L.G. You can do this. You live for this. Switch to the second person for the rest of the post if it helps. It usually does.
*
*
You know what? Sometimes life works out quite nicely. You're normally loath to admit this fact, of course, because you like to maintain a consistent worldview, and you don't want to jinx anything. But sometimes you can't deny it.
For example, back in 2009, when you were digging though the archives of Classical Geek Theatre (that's the old school Blogger URL, for the sake of precision) to find out which Los Angeles bands were worthy of your time, you never anticipated that a few years later you'd be having the time of your life at Ben "Mouse" McShane's wedding reception, hanging out with friends and smoking cigarettes with Ben's dad. But this past Saturday, just such a delightful turn of events came to pass.
Watching a peer get hitched can be unnerving. Not altogether, of course. It's fun and inspiring to celebrate the love of people you like, to see their families coming together, to see all your fellow degenerate music-scene goons all dressed up in their finest in a context far away from the Satellite. But the hopelessly self-absorbed part of you--which wavers between nine and ninety-nine percent of your psyche--can't help but start an uncomfortable process of questioning all your assumptions about life, love, and the trappings of adulthood.
While you would never advise anyone else against such institutions as marriage and procreation, you long ago decided they weren't for you. We all die alone anyway, right? Who needs some decrepit oldster sitting at their bedside when it happens, just to create some illusion of company? Subjecting some poor woman to a lifetime of you? That's not right. And spawning--imposing life on a brand new human being, who will no doubt have just as difficult a time maneuvering through this shitshow as you do? No way. Not with your depressed, alcoholic genes. Yuck. No thanks, hotshot. You'll take a raincheck on that one, pally.
And yet. Unless you're as hard-hearted as you like to pretend to be, it's hard to witness such a quantity of unmitigated joy as there was at this wedding reception without questioning the underpinnings of your values. Maybe, you wonder, there's a reason people do this? Maybe conventional milestones are worth pursuing? Maybe adulthood--the sociological kind, not the chronological kind--isn't so bad?
You're sitting there slumped over at table 26 when these thoughts become unbearably heavy. Just then you notice the Henry Clay People--twenty-five for the rest of their lives--all set up on the Seafood World stage, ready to entertain Ben and Cindy's family and friends with a brutally fun set of covers. And, with courage provided by whiskey and then wine and then more wine and then more whiskey and then that nefarious Kraken, you meet your favorite partner out on the floor, and you dance dance dance.
And everything's fine.
*
And before you know it it's fifty-seven hours later, 7:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, New Year's Day, 2013. You wake up on a friend's couch after four hours of sleep. By the feel of your uvula--swollen to the size and hardness of a middle toe--you know that you had gone way beyond traditional snoring the previous night, that whatever noises you were making in your whiskey sleep were more porcine than human, and, consequently, whatever bridge you built to this friend's couch has probably been burned.
That's what you get for sleeping drunk on your back. Then again, worse things have happened to drunk people sleeping on their backs.
You gather your things together and walk outside. You throw away a McDonald's bag full of untouched food, and, lighting a cigarette in spite of your uvula's protests, you walk down the hill.
You return to the night before.
The Henry Clay People and their friends on stage at the Satellite--Spaceland--jamming until two, their last show in their current incarnation, maybe their last show ever, artists driven to the verge of oblivion by bum luck and subsistence wages, ringing ears and adulthood.
There's the fans, the ones whose devotion precedes yours by years, crammed onto the floor and witnessing the end of something that--in a universe devoid of objective meaning--meant something to them. Whether embracing such a feeling was wise or foolish--it was as real as anything else that happens inside us.
There's the drunk people, the sad people, the ones who were certain that 2013 would be their year and all of a sudden aren't so sure, kissless at midnight but putting up a good front. There are the happy people, the ones who still believe 2013 is theirs for the taking, who will soon be disappointed. Some will die. There's the guy lurking by the side of the stage, silently composing the Missed Connection he will post on craigslist the next day.
And you blink and it's morning again. You're on Sunset. You're still drunk from the night before, and your throat hurts, and you can't really focus, and you feel like you might be coming down with something, and suddenly, looking both back and forward, it's all too much. You stand at the bus stop and wipe your eyes.
You return to what happened after the show.
You are gloriously, disgracefully drunk, piled into a car with friends. Somehow, through the torrents of alcohol, McDonald's sounds like an acceptable idea to everyone, so you end up in line at the drive-thru, which is mobbed with a massive stream of New Year's Eve revelers. The whiskey and beer is thick in your brain and it's affecting your sense of time, but the line of cars seems to be moving impossibly slow. But this is fine. You have nowhere you'd rather be. You finally arrive at the order board where you order food that you'll never find the energy or motivation to eat. And the long wait begins again. And it's after two in the morning and it's a new year and you're drunk with your friends and everyone is happy and you all like each other and you just spent a long night at a great rock and roll show and now you're waiting in line for junk food you don't really want....
And a part of you knows that if you're not already too old for this kind of thing, you will be very soon, but you don't want to be, you really don't want to be, and if the line lasts long enough, if these cars persist in not moving, as they seem intent on doing, maybe you'll be there for another hour, maybe two, or four, or eight, and maybe even more, maybe forever, and as you sit there waiting for food that you're never going to eat anyway, nothing will have to end. No regrets, no hangovers, no broken up bands. Drunk in the drive-thru for the rest of our lives.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Eastbound 704 Bus - Friday, December 14, 2012 - 8:00 p.m.
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"
-T.S. Eliot
The Last Sane Man In America wears a white t-shirt tucked into lime green shorts. His blond hair rises in mid-length spikes, and wide Band-Aids straddle his forehead and cheek. He stands in the center of the bus. He turns to face the rear.
"Will someone sing with me?" he says. His voice is booming and strident, but still it trembles. "Please."
His eyes dart around in search of cooperation. Unlike every bus ranter who has come before, The Last Sane Man In America knows that his behavior strays from the accepted propriety of public transportation, that he's disturbing people recovering from their long days--the shop employee whose ride home to Silver Lake fell through, the nurse who just completed her third straight twelve hour shift, the John Bender-looking rebel sipping brazenly from his bottle of Charles Shaw--but he doesn't care. Later that night, he knows--over dinner, or cocktails, or maybe even on blog posts--people will dismiss him as the latest in a long line of MTA loons, just one more incentive to save up enough cash to buy a car. But The Last Sane Man In America has more righteous concerns. His fellow riders' judgments--which he lucidly perceives in every eyeroll, every smirk, every uncomfortable shift, every obstinate stare at the floor--have no bearing on the urgency of his truth.
"Please," he repeats. "Does everyone know 'The Greatest Love of All'? Will someone sing 'The Greatest Love of All' with me?" The only reply he receives is silence.
His gaze zeros in on the man sitting in the rear center seat: a thirtyish white guy with indifferently kempt hair and a scraggly beard, the sideburns of which don't quite reach the top, who's wearing a gray hoodie with a Big Joy Records button pinned to it. He's pretending to read an essay in The Believer about art and commerce. A typically soulless jerk.
"You, sir," The Last Sane Man In America says to him. "Please. Can you look at me? Can you wake up and look at me?" The man in the back continues to stare down at his magazine, not even bothering to read the same sentence over and over, simply eyeing the text as though it signified nothing.
The Last Sane Man In America approaches the rear section of the bus, ascending the steps. "You all must know the song 'The Greatest Love of All', right?"
A bald man sitting on the sideways seats, with a bemused okay-I'll-bite grin, decides to engage. "The Whitney Houston song?" he asks. "The 'I believe the children are our future....'"
"Yes. Stop. I can't even hear...." The Last Sane Man In America trails off. The words he's so desperate to sing, when pronounced, shank his equilibrium. Recovering, he proclaims, "This is the saddest day in American history. I know there was 9/11 and the shooting in Tucson and then in Colorado. But this ... this is different. This is worse. Children...." He trails off again, overwhelmed.
After a beat, his voice comes alive with prophecy. "What's the matter with us?" he shouts. "I'll go over the fiscal cliff, I don't care. I'll be the first one. Who's with me? The fiscal cliff? Like that matters? I'll run and jump straight off it. We need to take away guns. I'll say it. I'm not afraid to say it. Guns are destroying us. We need laws that will get these guns off the streets. Who's with me?"
Many on the bus are with him. But no one says so.
The Last Sane Man In America returns to the bald man, the only person so far who has acknowledged his existence. "Will you sing with me?" he asks, a condemned man yearning for mercy.
"I'm afraid I'm not much of a singer," the bald man says, his snide grin pasted on lest anyone think he's taking this turn of events seriously. It's all a goof. "I'd like to hear you sing it, though."
"I can't."
"I can help you with the words," the bald man says.
"It's not that. I know the words. I can't sing it alone. It's too sad. I need everyone to sing it with me."
The Last Sane Man In America gets off at the next stop. Perhaps, one can hope, he found his chorus later that night, other voices to lift him and us all toward redemption in the face of the unspeakable. But, one can assume, he almost certainly did not. Not in this world.
-T.S. Eliot
The Last Sane Man In America wears a white t-shirt tucked into lime green shorts. His blond hair rises in mid-length spikes, and wide Band-Aids straddle his forehead and cheek. He stands in the center of the bus. He turns to face the rear.
"Will someone sing with me?" he says. His voice is booming and strident, but still it trembles. "Please."
His eyes dart around in search of cooperation. Unlike every bus ranter who has come before, The Last Sane Man In America knows that his behavior strays from the accepted propriety of public transportation, that he's disturbing people recovering from their long days--the shop employee whose ride home to Silver Lake fell through, the nurse who just completed her third straight twelve hour shift, the John Bender-looking rebel sipping brazenly from his bottle of Charles Shaw--but he doesn't care. Later that night, he knows--over dinner, or cocktails, or maybe even on blog posts--people will dismiss him as the latest in a long line of MTA loons, just one more incentive to save up enough cash to buy a car. But The Last Sane Man In America has more righteous concerns. His fellow riders' judgments--which he lucidly perceives in every eyeroll, every smirk, every uncomfortable shift, every obstinate stare at the floor--have no bearing on the urgency of his truth.
"Please," he repeats. "Does everyone know 'The Greatest Love of All'? Will someone sing 'The Greatest Love of All' with me?" The only reply he receives is silence.
His gaze zeros in on the man sitting in the rear center seat: a thirtyish white guy with indifferently kempt hair and a scraggly beard, the sideburns of which don't quite reach the top, who's wearing a gray hoodie with a Big Joy Records button pinned to it. He's pretending to read an essay in The Believer about art and commerce. A typically soulless jerk.
"You, sir," The Last Sane Man In America says to him. "Please. Can you look at me? Can you wake up and look at me?" The man in the back continues to stare down at his magazine, not even bothering to read the same sentence over and over, simply eyeing the text as though it signified nothing.
The Last Sane Man In America approaches the rear section of the bus, ascending the steps. "You all must know the song 'The Greatest Love of All', right?"
A bald man sitting on the sideways seats, with a bemused okay-I'll-bite grin, decides to engage. "The Whitney Houston song?" he asks. "The 'I believe the children are our future....'"
"Yes. Stop. I can't even hear...." The Last Sane Man In America trails off. The words he's so desperate to sing, when pronounced, shank his equilibrium. Recovering, he proclaims, "This is the saddest day in American history. I know there was 9/11 and the shooting in Tucson and then in Colorado. But this ... this is different. This is worse. Children...." He trails off again, overwhelmed.
After a beat, his voice comes alive with prophecy. "What's the matter with us?" he shouts. "I'll go over the fiscal cliff, I don't care. I'll be the first one. Who's with me? The fiscal cliff? Like that matters? I'll run and jump straight off it. We need to take away guns. I'll say it. I'm not afraid to say it. Guns are destroying us. We need laws that will get these guns off the streets. Who's with me?"
Many on the bus are with him. But no one says so.
The Last Sane Man In America returns to the bald man, the only person so far who has acknowledged his existence. "Will you sing with me?" he asks, a condemned man yearning for mercy.
"I'm afraid I'm not much of a singer," the bald man says, his snide grin pasted on lest anyone think he's taking this turn of events seriously. It's all a goof. "I'd like to hear you sing it, though."
"I can't."
"I can help you with the words," the bald man says.
"It's not that. I know the words. I can't sing it alone. It's too sad. I need everyone to sing it with me."
The Last Sane Man In America gets off at the next stop. Perhaps, one can hope, he found his chorus later that night, other voices to lift him and us all toward redemption in the face of the unspeakable. But, one can assume, he almost certainly did not. Not in this world.
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