L.A. #47 (The Oh Sounds Singers Make)
When you’ve been drinking beer, sometimes a burp burns your nose. That’s a statement, and statements are loneliness rolled together like a sweatshirt. I’m speaking for someone else, though. Don’t call the fire department or anything like that. I reviewed Ryan Adams’s show at the Disney Hall this weekend. He’s interesting to me because he’s a guy who has stuff curling up around inside himself (used to more than now) and he took the forked road of art and destruction for about a decade, and right now I’m the stumpy little shit 20 years old with that decade on top of my head. And he boozed, drugged but never claimed to sleep on a doorstep, because he didn’t. Sometimes you feel compelled to make yourself seem worse, because we need our worlds to be worse for us to scrape up vulnerability in front of people with relaxed faces. (Mayakovsky’s line about horror being his face when’s calm.) Also, Ryan Adams isn’t a genius. He just works really hard to have a lot of ideas. Writer’s block is deciding you’re not a genius because you can’t come up with an idea, or letting your lack of genius block those ideas, or letting your ideas sit in the back of your head like girls you’re too shy to talk to. Denis Johnson read at USC last week, too, and I got some really great news on Monday I think it was. For one and one half week beer is a celebration, on the good half of the pail. ”You’re nobody, girl.”
My friend Chloe Caldwell’s book is coming out in April. I’m going to interview her again for it sometime soon. Chloe, part of my favorite things about Ryan Adams are his album covers.
If you’re having a concert with someone good in your house let me know and I’ll come review it for L.A.’s finest online media site Neon Tommy, and I’ll tell you what rock & roll means in context of your sofa and what’s in your refrigerator. If you’ve got some beer, you’re set.
Bloodshot For Sure: The Bloody Red Sun of Fantastic L.A.
PUBLISHED ON NEON TOMMY, FROM YOUNG ROOMS AS: “The Bloody Red Sun of Fantastic L.A.”:
I could watch television or I could read, or: go stroll down Jefferson to the crosslight, walk to Heritage Hall to watch the dancers practice to hip-hop and tribal shit, hear their laughs, stand there like a detective in mild mist. I’m reading Danny Sugerman’s Wonderland Avenue, the book the fly came out of when I opened it to random page 110 or so. Sugerman’s one of the few people I know of in history whose fame was summed up partly as being a “fan” of a major band like The Doors. He managed The Doors and Iggy Pop, had a fucked up wealthy kid childhood, nearly died at 21 when he had it all and wrote two definitive books of note in modern rock, including one of the best music biographies ever in No One Here Gets Out Alive, and it’s marvelous that he’s remembered for being such a fan of Jim Morrison and The Doors, that someone can pull that off. Right there on the New York Times obit when he died from lung cancer: “Danny Sugerman, 50, Fan and Manager of Doors.” From reading his memoir it’s easy to realize how there’re perhaps few other people more tailored to feel spoken to by rock & roll and especially Morrison than Danny Sugerman, and that’s a beautiful thing it was there. Mostly I feel sad for him. Not sorry, but sad. You don’t have much sympathy for Morrison because he wouldn’t want any, but Sugerman seems like the other side of the Wild Child coin, all vulnerability, without the fully developed sociopathic teeth and claws nature gave Morrison.
I had a dream that my friend and I were sitting on the sidewalk on Jefferson Blvd. and I had to convince him not to propose to his girlfriend. I had a dream that a porn actress was tutoring me in Social Studies in my first girlfriend’s house. I had a dream that I was in the same house, and people were coming to pick me up and I didn’t want to leave, but there weren’t any other people in the house with me and nothing was happening. I dreamt the dragged-out dry lake where I went to summer camp as a kid got filled with criminals and I had to make it to the other side with my high school friends, given only liquor.
The next girl I kiss I’m gonna call “Suzie Q,” sing this while rattling her around the room: “I like-a way you walk / I like-a way you talk / I like-a way you walk, like-a way you talk / Suzie Q.” In AP English in high school my senior year our teacher played rock songs for us while we did our class journals, a time at the beginning of class that I cherished more than anything else my senior year. When he told stories about previous students he’d always refer to them as “Johnny B. Goode” and their prom dates as “Suzie Q.” Cool guy I didn’t take for granted. I’d write him into my newspaper columns till the moderator called my cell phone one night I was in line at In-N-Out to tell me it was getting “a bit sycophantic,” she said with her neurotic shrill. I dreamt my newspaper moderator called me again with more complaints, her voice in my subconscious ear as if from a radio.
Smells like someone lit a candle in our living room, which would be unorthodox. Sugerman’s book’s spine’s brittle, in use since the 90s. Can’t treat him like a normal book unless I want him to crack. When it came in the mail, a slip of paper was still tucked inside with a handwritten letter from a previous owner, saying how much her friend would enjoy reading the book for his birthday. I liked thinking about the wine party in ’93 or so where it was given to some kind of jivin’ guy the woman thought would enjoy a rock & roll story. She called it a beautiful book, or something gentle like that. The tone of the letter made it seem like he was an old friend, or someone she had a crush on, something unresolved from adolescence.
But I hate projecting, because a writer doesn’t give a reader the credit of trusting that he or she will read into the projections, understanding how personal they are to the writer. Projections seem weak, flaccid as salmon on ice in the supermarket. I wrote in a poem once that a woman’s face crying, puffy and red looked like raw fish, like that bright orange-pink salmon on ice in the supermarket. The workshop strained to understand. Then I strained to understand. Fish on ice, no matter how similar in color, doesn’t steam like a woman’s fraught face. You put your hand over her cheek and your hands feel cold. You take your hand away and the white outlines of your fingers fade back to red like in a sunburn.
One night I did this. I was over her looking down, and I was thinking how I had all these people swimming around as angels and demons in my consciousness of the room, all the writers, musicians and actors she only knew from my versions of them, in my enthusiasm and in her attempt to know me fully. I thought of all the snow that must be swimming around in hers, all the white cold and standardization, and I thought, maybe for the first time, “We’re fucked,” and batted the idea away like shame. In between us I rolled the covers, lay on top of them next to her, huffing a sigh in the way I do when I’m at that stupid loss in between words with someone I’d meant to love. That huff doesn’t sound as male as I want it to, or as confident. 4 a.m. every Saturday I walked across the parking lot back home to sleep.
Besides Sugerman, I’m doing a lot of reading for my classes. It’s the best semester of school I’ve ever had. In high school I had high hopes for college, expecting it to be a controlled form of “real life,” which young people so demand. I’m sort of breathing easy at the thought that I haven’t had to see the real Jim Morrison as a father figure. Danny Sugerman wanted Jim to be his dad, it seems like, or his older brother. That’s the tallest drink to order. Can you imagine.
Wonderland Avenue
I opened up a book tonight and a small fly came out of it, perfectly from that page.
Bosnian Bedrooms
Xmas tree sap on my fingers. All-you-can-eat pizza and salad special for 7 dollars with the blue collar crowd–electricians, plumbers, people I don’t spend much time around anywhere but especially not at home. They remind me of soldiers, as in men whose occupation is a full framed character. A muscleman with his Hispanic nurse girlfriend in scrubs wearing a shirt that said: “Keep A Breast” with buxom bikinis and hot rods steaming. No smile when I got to the newly placed pepperoni first. M. and I talking about “the male outsider” and the Bosnian War, which I’m reading about now.
One of my new favorite writers–likely someone who’ll keep me company for awhile–keeps a blog in Bosnian though he’s lived in the United States for about fifteen years. Translations, free ones online, give you a jumbled syntax, like someone who’s trying to speak a language he doesn’t know very well. But I use them to see what he’s talking about. Blogs about seeing two people he knows standing naked together in a hotel room across the street, about watching soccer when books can’t match up to his melancholy. Without knowing a thing, I think Bosnian looks beautiful standing alone. Paragraphs like paintings, calligraphy in plain type.
Think about smokers in war zones. An ROTC guy at school once told me, “Everyone smokes in the field. It’s not even considered smoking.” Cigarettes are a replacement for things inexpressible. When you see people smoking in the city, in Los Angeles, you know there’s something very desperate about them.
The Lakers lost on television, Kobe with a hurt wrist still turning the ball over. The city came to scoop up all the leftover leaves and sticks from the mythic winds a few weeks ago. They took our Xmas tree away.
Also, on July 4th I visited Jim Morrison’s house on Love Street in Laurel Canyon with my good friend B. The arsonist just burned it. The male model who owns it plans to rebuild.
All the Things You Could Be Now If Gandhi Had Been Your Dad
In Pasadena every front lawn has a bunch of tree parts sawed (by now) into thick logs with brown musky leaves and aphids nibbling. One-story homes got broken into by fallen limbs. People couldn’t go to school or work because forests had fallen onto their driveways. Where was this storm when I was in high school? In true form my alma mater was the only Pasadena-populace private school to keep its doors open for the day, sticking to the familiar Jesuit edict, the Lord hath spake: “If it didn’t happen here it didn’t happen anywhere, you’re shit outta luck.” Many area parents, boxed into their impressive homes, were faced with the plain shock of hearing “Oh. Well, alright.” upon informing the desk secretaries that not only were their sons not coming to school but that they were also unsure if they’d be able to even stay safely at home. There should be an album cover of a bunch of impounded Catholic school kids swan diving into a thicket of storm thorns. ”In Search of a Crown in Order to Pass: The Boys School Story.”
To reiterate something I said earlier on Twitter, I hope Newt Gingrich gets eaten by snakes.
Attention all enzymes, synapses, stabilizers, brain sponges, IV units, cardiac patients, asthmatics, nurses, waivers, tuition tabs, and patient waitresses: It’s final exam week! The Saturday of, in fact. Everyone’s last chance to get drunk. The last night to wear heels. Get on the phone, get your gear ready, get your prescription tablets out, put on the child locks, hide the swallow-able toys, dip all your cigarettes in codeine, expect plenty of patients. How many people have died recently that the university hasn’t said shit about? About four, five? They’re using kids’ coffins as safes to hide their money. Finally football’s doing well again. Jersey sales, flu shots at the health center, sanctioned parties where the school pays for the booze by letting it happen.
All the things you could be now if gandhi had been your dad / daddy needs a drink to deal with all the beauty.
Last night I tried to sleep at home without the two most essential crutches a man with the smoky sniffles could have: television and Benadryll. I stayed awake till two in the morning wrestling with how dark and stuffy a bedroom with no TV glow can be. I would’ve liked to have been out by about 12. It’s finals and all.
My interview with Megan Boyle, the author of a new book that gives me hope for writers with tendencies like mine (which I can’t wrap my head around to tell you about because I’ll regret it later), got published today on Thought Catalog, the only online literary/culture site I’ve heard of random people I know at school reading at their leisure.
Love & Music/Disney Hall/My friends turning 21
I got really lucky today, the day before Thanksgiving. I have books coming in the mail and I got published on my friend Chloe Caldwell’s column over at The Faster Times. Neon Tommy published my review of the Bob Mould tribute at Disney Hall. I spent all day in the car (not so nice) but in a parking lot on the very edge of Pasadena by the San Gabriel Mountains I realized that Thanksgiving’s something tangible that’s easy to let slip by. To me, the idea behind Thanksgiving is a version of prayer, a very agnostic idea of prayer. I believe in God because of all the feelings I have in my life, and all the people who teach me how to be a better version of myself. Prayer! That’s it, man. It’s a religious feeling. It’s a holy moment there while my mom and sister are buying a turkey inside, getting the needles and strings to sew it up.
The train come in the station…and I looked her in the eye
There’s not much I can do at night with an essay due that doesn’t involve the computer. People wonder why college is so chocked full of alcohol and prescription drugs. If you stopped giving homework everyone would get drunk for a week and then go on road trips and then wonder what to do once they’d been to Lake Havasu and Mexico (where they’d almost die) and back again. Life’s full of this shit. Responsibility and sin. And thank god. I guess the great charm of writing for me is that I always have this thing invented for myself. I won’t ever sit in the middle of the living room for days on end going “What’ll I do…What’ll I do…” unless I’ve already had my time in the notebook and my eyes need to stare into space for a bit. They say you need that, to stare into long distances. Reading’ll make you blind or blurry.
Tomorrow night I’m seeing Amiri Baraka on campus, which is a joy.
I like Occupy Wall Street simply because it seems like people are tired and angry, so they’ve found this forum. That seems like the simple way to go with protesting. It seemed like the country was really bloated before this all happened. Now at least there’s a problem in the prosaic rib cage…poking at them…one tent or two at a time. I’ve always sort of thought that this world’s set of people (especially people of my generation) are always derivative of the golden eras of the 20th Century. Even Occupy seems like a 60s attempt. As if everyone involved thought “what would the sixties folks do…?” And really that’s a good thing. Maybe a flower will grow out of all this.
I’ve been writing a lot of poetry lately, so hold onto your daughters.
Thanks,
Mike
Season of the Witch
I’m listening to really, and now let me tell you a really, spot-on record right now: a three-way between Mike Bloomfield/Al Kooper/Stephen Stills…that’s like three shamans telling each other secrets, or at least that’s how it sounds. I’ve always loved the blues. Californians need to import this shit into our lives every chance we get.
I talked on the phone with a man named Harvey Kubernik tonight for about 40 minutes. He and his brother Kenneth have written A Perfect Haze: The Illustrated History of the Monterey International Pop Festival. It’s a real beauty, this book. It’s on my bed right now, a splash of color with dead shamans on the cover…Janis, Otis, Jimi, Brian Jones. I’m reviewing the book and profiling Harvey for the Daily Trojan. The first Doors record changed his life. I shook hands with him at Jim Morrison’s house on the 4th of July.
Speaking of Jim Morrison, I was in poetry workshop on Thursday and we were talking about the Oedipal complex and all that in regards to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and she (the poet in charge) asked if anyone knew what it was. ”Yeah,” I sort of almost blurted out. ”Kill the father, fuck the mother,” which would’ve been direct reference to how Jim said it. I’m so used to that expression of it by now. Had to keep it under wraps. This isn’t the Whisky…and they didn’t even like it there.
Lots of stuff going on…I’ve got about sixty-five-thousand things to write up before the world can end. I turn 21 in 2012…what a shame it’d be if it ended then.
So if you’ve got any good songs you wanna share just send them my way.
Thanks,
Tonight’s MJ
