Hi. I wanted to explore some of my problems. This won't take up much of your time, but that is my problem.
My Problem
My problem isn't you, my problem is me.
I want you to listen for more then thirty seconds or 250 characters. That's MY problem.
My problem is that I want you to not get bored when it's not about you.
My problem is that I want you to enjoy nuance, difference, difficulty, and long sentences, inclusive of commas and semicolons.
My problem is that you fear the unfamiliar.
MY problem is that you neither know what you want nor have ever explored why you want it.
I don't care why you're overwhelmed by your job, my problem is that you are overwhelmed by the fact that you're overwhelmed by your job, don't have the tools to talk about it, and pretend that you are not and that you do.
My problem is that you are so afraid of the truth about your life that you cling to demonstrably absurd "truths" about your life that hurt and destroy others, daily, rather than consider any alternative.
The day was late, the sun was setting, and the plane pulled itself across the low sky over countless suburban ranch houses, each with a single, very tall palm tree in the front yard, each palm like an enormous Bob-Barker microphone.
The sky was orange and blue, the light was all-golden, and all I could think about was of the countless beautiful people who had come to Los Angeles to be movie stars, didn't, met each other, moved into homes like these, and had beautiful children. It was the most dire pronouncement on humanity, and it suddenly made me feel an undefinable emotion for this town of dreams, this town of broken dreams.
I had thought that town was New York. I know New York really is the town of broken dreams, now--they are different dreams, though, broken in different ways for different dreamers of different dreams--but then, I condescended to this other proposition, which I still, by the way, believe, entirely. "Los Angeles" just means "The Angels," it is only its proximity to English that we feel it to be the city of lost angels. Which, of course, it very much is, as well.
The capital of the 19th Century was Paris--they say (Walter Benjamin may have been the first)--and New York, the capital of the 20th. Los Angeles was foretold to be the capital of the 21st. I think we all know this optimism was misplaced. The capital of the 21st Century will be outside the United States, probably in China, or some other sleeping giant our leaders have neglected to identify correctly. It wouldn't be the first time and it certainly won't be the last. I digress.
The first time I came to LA, it was to visit two friends who lived there. I visited the same friends the second time, as well, several years later. The first time was in the late 1990s, and I stayed with an ex, sleeping on the couch, at his basement apartment in (the, to me, ironically-enough named) Manhattan Beach--he and his boyfriend had sex on the bed next to the couch on the second morning, which I slept through. The three of us went to a West Hollywood bar, so I could take in the local fauna: a place where I, quite literally, looked like no one else--long hair, beard, an old, black Ohio State tank top, chest hair. I don't think I ever felt so completely invisible in my life, so studiously I was ignored. Recounting it later, for years, I dismissively described the experience by saying I had "too much texture" for LA. I now think that assessment was completely wrong for being so correct. The only person I didn't know who engaged with me was a doctor from New Orleans on a tour of California hospitals and cities, looking for a new world after his residency. Reader, he ended up in San Francisco, but to tell you how I know that would require another paragraph I'm unwilling to write, but I will say that I never saw or had contact with him again.
After these minor mis-non-adventures, I stayed with the other friend, a lawyer from Akron I met in Chicago, who lived in Beverly Hills. It was he who told me that LA would be the capital of the 21st Century, as he drove me around his city in his Cadillac one night, a gin and tonic in his lap. He was impressed that when stopping at a gas station, I cleaned his car windows with the station squeegee, while he filled his car tank. I felt like I was on the cover of a 1960s science fiction novel: a crashed spaceship, half submerged in the tundra of a dead planet under a black, starry sky. I left Los Angeles believing it to be the loneliest place on earth.
The third time I went to LA, my brother's wife was living there, with my brother. I was there for work, staying at an ornate and old, haunted hotel, where the first Oscars were held, in the neglected downtown. I was within walking distance of an amazing indoor market that has tons of produce, sea food, and many dead animals, all perfect for eating, and all at great prices. I had an interaction with a stranger in my huge hotel room, which proved unsatisfying.
One night, a close friend and I went to visit my brother's wife and my brother at their home in the hills surrounding a park. After a time, we decided to go for a drive to, first, a favorite taco cart off an empty supermarket parking lot. Everything we ate was delicious. I got one tongue and one intestine taco. I wouldn't have had it any other way.
Then we drove to a strange French/French-American restaurant, which was decorated more or less in the style of my parents' ancient Toledo Tudor house, circa 1976, only with a lot more deep reds in the palette--it was positively Medieval in the best of all possible ways. The food was great--we got frites and maybe something disgusting I would love--and drinks. A sessions-musicians band played classic rock with superb style.
But the part I'm leaving out is what happened on the way. As the four of us wound down and up and around the hills around Echo Park, a fog clung to the tarmac; shrouded the lush, dark, tree branches, clinging like another layer of ghost-leaves upon the leaves; and hung as sheets on a line at every dip or decline in the road. The car windows were open and the air was cool, damp, succulent, full of spectres, and scented with some indefinable sense of danger. It was then that I remembered that Los Angeles is the mother of film noir. And I suddenly felt a rush of love for this strange, sad, fabulous, beautiful, spooky town of dreams and broken dreams.
And now, for the song.
Screenwriter's Blues
Exits to freeways twisted like knots
on the fingers
Jewels cleaving skin between
breasts
Your Cadillac breathes four hundred horses over blue lines
You are going to Reseda to make love to a model from Ohio
Whose real name
you don't know
You spin
like the Cadillac was overturning down a cliff
on television
And the radio is on
And the radioman is speaking
And the radioman says
women were a curse
So men built
Paramount studios
And men built
Columbia studios
And men built
Los Angeles
It is 5 a.m.
and you are listening
to Los Angeles
It is 5 a.m.
and you are listening
to Los Angeles
And the radioman says
it is a beautiful night out there
And the radioman says
rock and roll lives
And the radioman says
it is a beautiful night out there
in Los Angeles
You live
in Los Angeles
and you are going to Reseda
We are all in some way or another going to Reseda someday
to die
And the radioman laughs
because the radioman
fucks a model, too
Gone savage
for teenagers with automatic weapons and boundless love
Gone savage
for teenagers who are aesthetically pleasing
In other words fly
Los Angeles beckons
The teenagers
to come
to her
on buses
Los Angeles loves love
It is 5 a.m.
and you are listening to Los Angeles
It is 5 a.m.
and you are listening to Los Angeles
I am going to Los Angeles
to build a screenplay about
Lovers who murder each other
I am going to Los Angeles
to see my own name on a screen
Five-feet-long and luminous
As the radioman says
it is 5 a.m.
and the sun has charred
The other side of the world
and come back to us
And painted the smoke over our heads
an imperial violet
It is 5 a.m., and you are listening to Los Angeles
It is 5 a.m., and you are listening to Los Angeles
You are lissstening
You are lisssstening
You are lisssssstening
You are lissssssstening
You are lissssssstening
You are lisssssssstening
You are lisssssstening
You are lisssssssstening
You are lisssssssstening
You are lissssssstening
You are lissssssstening
You are lissssssssstening
You are lisssssstening
You are lissssss-
tening
To Los Angeles
"Screenwriter's Blues" is track #7 on the album, Ruby Vroom, and track #1 on the album, Lust In Phaze: The Best Of Soul Coughing. It was written by Michael Doughty, Mark Degliantoni, Yuval Gabay, and Sebastian Steinberg. They were Soul Coughing.
I take a very long time putting together song lists of this sort. I began with the idea that Easter is coming, and that Jesus is Love. And so, I proceed through songs that explicitly mention the Lord but also love songs, with all of Love's disappointments, excitements, false leads, re-routs, blind faith, and Faith. This list leads through reversals, achievements, passions, angers, understandings, misunderstandings, word-associations, and deeply-felt connections.
To love Jesus is its own love affair; and we would do a lot better than to stop denying that that is the case. It's a long story, and it deserves all the backtracking, backsliding, intuition, and insight that comes with any long relationship. This is a very personal, perverse, and real grouping of songs on a theme. I hope you are able to enjoy it and understand it.
Jesus is just alright with me, as long as he looks just like you.
I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.
My mom worries about me, because her heart is so, so huge, and, like me, she looks for the good in things; my father worries too; they worry because they love me and because I will always be their little boy--at 46 I still am their little boy, and this is a fate I have given up trying to escape.
I live a life they don't entirely understand; I move in a world different from theirs. It worries them because it is mysterious to them. But I am happy. I am a writer. They made me so, somehow, in a way ineffable, as they made my brother a musician (I cannot speak to what they made my brilliant, beautiful sisters, here, for it is much more complex than a word, but at the very least I can say they gave them an enormous talent for parenthood).
I am a writer, and it falls to us--and we are all writers, all of us--to think and see, to worry and wonder, to pick apart and put together, to--as my students used to accuse me--"over-think." There is no over-thought, no over thinking; that is the nonsense of people who neither like to think nor want you to think, anything.
We writers stray into dangerous neighborhoods and territories because, it is eventually true, that you can't know good until you have at least met evil; hope without meeting hopelessness. It is an unpleasant enterprise. We stray to watch and learn, to see and know, somehow, something, to know anything. This is literature; this is art. It is our job to see, to watch, to learn, to know: The Terrifying Other; most especially when that Other turns out to be Ourselves.
Get close to lies and see the truth. See evil and know what not to do. This is the world of art and literature, which gives us a chance to provisionally try out other options and see why they are so awful. This is why art, history, and literature are so important: they are the lab of ethics and behavior. Do not fail these lessons because we are all writers, writing the world. Listen to Ursula LeGuin, who is so much wiser than I have ever been.
The BBC doc, Running Up that Hill, has made me relisten to some Late Bush.
As a serious fan of the woman, I must confess, The Red Shoes, Aerial, and Director's Cut did not receive a very fair listen from me when they came out. This was a mistake. This was a mistake that I have rectified over time.
Aerial is a stupendous album that I am ashamed to have ever neglected. The Red Shoes has grown on me in ways I never expected. Director's Cut--which one friend dubbed "a crime against music" at the time, based primarily on the new version of "Deeper Understanding" (and, at the time, Reader, I didn't disagree), and which another friend defended powerfully, though he was troubled by 50 Words for Snow in ways I couldn't comprehend--is also a secret gem, especially the extended version.
This case in point--Director's Cut is entirely a revisit to earlier material from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes (two albums that dovetail into each other all over the place)--with remasters and re-recordings of songs that were already well-known to me, and I didn't get it; I didn't understand the album. Leaving anything and everything else behind that one might want to say about the disc (or the 3 disc set, which is the definitive option), the remaster of "You're the One" is a staggering piece. With Gary Brooker nailing your mind and heart to the wall with the Hammond organ, in a rather Motown/Atlantic R and B fashion, actually--which in the remaster melts into the Trio Bulgarka, in this really extraordinary way--and the straightforward, prosaic, heart-rending, mind-bending lyrics and voice from Kate Bush, this song is a truly special thing. A wrenching, break-up song, with Bush screaming "SUGAR!" at the end.
I wept today, listening to it--I am unashamed to say--on the bus to visit an old friend. I had to hide my tears.
It's alright,
I'll come round
when you're
not in;
And I'll pick up
all my things.
Everything
I have,
I bought
with you.
But that's
alright, too.
It's just,
everything
I do,
We did,
together.
And there's
a little
piece
of
you,
In whatever.
I got everything
I need,
I got petrol
in the car.
I got some money
with me.
There's just
one problem:
You're the only one I want,
You're the only one I want;
You're the only one I want,
You're the only one I want.
It's alright,
I know
where I'm
goin'. I'm goin'
to stay
with my
friend.
Mmm, yes,
he's very
good-looking.
The only trouble is:
He's not
you.
He can't do
what you
do.
He can't
make me
laugh
an' cry, at
the same time.
Let's
change things.
Let's
danger it up.
We're
crazy enough.
I
just can't take it.
You're the only one I want.
You're the only one I want.
You're the only one I want.
You're the only one I want.
I know
where
I'm goin', but
I don't
wanna leave.
I just
have one problem:
We're best friends,
yeah;
We tied ourselves in
knots,
Doing cartwheels 'cross the
floor.
Just forget it, all
right.
Sugar!
Honey.
Sugar!
Running down!
Sugar.
Sugar!
"You're The One (Remastered)" is track #12 on disc 3 of Directors Cut (Collectors Edition). Music and lyrics by Kate Bush. The song features Jeff Beck on guitar, Gary Brooker on Hammond organ, and The Trio Bulgarka on backing vocals.
"You're The One" originally appeared as track #12 on the album The Red Shoes. Music and lyrics by Kate Bush.
Watching this delightful BBC documentary on Kate Bush today, Running Up that Hill, I heard many people talk about her music, her output--many of them you've heard of--Annie Clark (of/is St Vincent), Neil Gaiman, Tori Amos, Peter Gabriel, Tricky, David Gilmour, Big Boi (of Outkast)--speaking very personally about their relationship to this music, these albums, these songs. She is, in fact, a musician's musician. Artists we--you and I--are fans of, are fans of hers: example, Prince. The thing about this woman is that we all, each of us, who are beguiled by her, are so beguiled individually and alone. We listen to these songs, over and over, for hours, for years, for ourselves, and it seals a certain place within us, that is only for us, as we puzzle over the words and become lost and found and lost in these sounds. It is only for us; it is only for me; I have dreamed some of these songs, quite literally. Sometimes, I can't tell whether I'm dreaming or not, listening to her. Reality becomes less real, unreal. It's very personal, and it's work, too. She doesn't let you in easily; she doesn't let you in at all. You have to find your own way in, and that makes every entry hard-won and personal and so, so very, very worth it. The thing about Kate Bush is that you don't have to like her; you don't have to like what she does, what she makes. She's going to do it anyway, and you can follow where she goes but never leads. It's up to you. And that is why, when you meet a fellow-traveller, they are like family, in this very queer way. Because you have taken this journey alone, and when you meet someone else who has also made this difficult trek, that moment of recognition is instantaneous and exciting, because you can share what you've learned with each other, and close a circuit here and here in these extraordinary songs. When someone reveals to me that they have a relationship to this music, it feels very much to me like what we're saying to each other is--as if, in a line never written, never uttered, never read, in The Velveteen Rabbit--"Oh, you're real, too!"
It was around 1:30 am last Tuesday night, and as I was walking an empty bottle to the recycling bin at the end of my parents' driveway, I was struck by the light on the garage, so I had a smoke and snapped a few pictures over the course of 10 to 15 minutes. I had to lie down on the driveway to get some shots of the grass and some low angle pics of the garage. When I was done, it was time for bed, so I turned off the lights as I went through the house, ending up in my bedroom, which faces the front yard, where I stripped to my underwear, got into bed, and turned out the light.
Lying in the darkness, I scrolled through the pictures on my phone to see if I'd gotten anything interesting, when I heard an odd sound of voices, almost as though over a walkie talkie, and suddenly a bright light shone in the window behind my right shoulder, and a voice from right on the other side of the screen forcefully asked, "SIR, WERE YOU JUST OUTSIDE NOW?" I said something like, "HOLY SHIT!" as I jumped out of bed, where I stood, face-to-face, in my underwear, with two police officers standing in my mother's flower bed on the other side of the window. "Could you come to the door, please?" one asked. "REALLY? I'm, um, just in my, uh, underwear," I said. "Can you put some clothes on and meet us at the front door, sir?" "I guess so."
I pulled on my shorts and walked past my parents' bedroom door, expecting to see my mom standing there--my mom usually wakes up if a fly sneezes--but the door stayed closed. Shirtless and barefoot, I opened the front door to see about five police officers arrayed on or near the porch. "Sir, WHO ARE you?" "I'm L--------, this is my parents' house, I'm visiting from New York, and, yes, I was just lying in the driveway taking pictures of the garage."
They did not seem amused.
"If you'd like to speak to my folks, I can wake them up, but I'd really rather not over something like this." They decided that wasn't necessary, but they did copy down info from my driver's license. I thanked them profusely for responding so quickly and taking the safety of the citizens of Winesburg, Ohio so seriously.
This neither amused nor pleased them, either. Nevertheless, they slinked off into the night, disappointedly.
The next morning, I told my astonished parents the whole story. My mother's only real comment was, "I hope this doesn't make the police blotter...."
Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
A special Academy Award. Of merit. Was bestowed upon on ALL the men. And women. Who have worked in film laboratories since movies were invented. Director Christopher Nolan accepted on their behalf.
Are you kidding me? THESE people are the people who make film happen. And the fact that the "Academy"-- which is a nominal insult, literally and nominally, to Plato, at the very least--feels it's acceptable to belatedly recognize, in such an offhand fashion, tonight, the numberless, nameless people who have slaved under the yolk of this nonsense, "since movies were invented," is the bend sinister of all Oscar ceremonies, heretofore. But what do I know? I haven't lived for all time, after all, nor have I lived since movies were invented. Please.
Please give me the sacred monsters of yesteryear--please give me movie stars like Burt Lancaster and Marlene Dietrich and Bette Davis--actors who at least understood that, while these people went unnamed, they were the only reason movie stars had a career. That silence measures more greatly than this current too-little-too-late propaganda treatment with no individuals to name. Not one. Not a one.
Where is your "Schindler's List"? Where are the people you have saved from death and forgetfulness? You don't even have one. As much as that film repels me, in an almost meaningless way Schindler's List at least did remember the "Schindler Jews." Can you imagine such a term? "The Schindler Jews." Child, this is the world we live in.
It's almost--almost, and I distinctly said "almost"--like the half-hearted recognition of war heroes or victims of Shoah that we hear of every day, these days, which is also quite, quite, and very, very much too late. Only the problem is this: those earlier sacrifices weren't done willingly. Yet, in peacetime or war, under National Socialism or Holyrood, the late-term memory of the machine that grinds us into dirt for worms, that only belatedly remembers we existed at all at any point--seventy, fifty, twenty years, ten years later--doesn't redeem any of them in any way, whatsoever. Good luck. Good luck with this "Oscars'" world. I only hope you could ever do better with it than I ever could.
It is indispensably disgusting. And this message of history is what you should take home, in my, very humble, opinion. History never leaves us. You only have to read it. But apparently it never means you won't repeat it.
I have had many, many, arguments with friends and relatives who have told me they want to have their own baby over the years. Not so astonishingly, no one wants to hear you suggest that adopting or just not having children is an option that helps the planet, or that not reproducing might be the correct ethical choice. Why do I think this?
Well, when I was a kid there were 4 billion people on the planet, and it was only a little while ago that the world population passed 6 billion. We live on a finite planet, each new person takes from every other person in terms of resources, plus we live in a terrible time where choosing to bring a new person into the world invokes a whole series of questions about why we might want to do this, plus there are already people here living in shitty conditions who would benefit from a nice parent who wants to care for them, and lastly, I never understood what was so special about anyone's specific DNA that forced them to reproduce that code.
In short, the magnamity that causes a person to want to have a child is somewhat called into question by their need to own that child, to be certain that it is their child. Raising a kid is a huge deal, but to disavow it unless it belongs to you genetically conjures notions of property and immortality that make me very uncomfortable. If you don't want to take care of a kid unless it's "yours," then by my lights, you probably shouldn't be having children. What's so damn special about your DNA anyway? All kids need a good parent, an education, food, and a home. If you can provide these things, why can't you take on someone who is already here?
Anyway, the GayProf says it better than I can and hence this post. Here is my favorite part:
In the seventies and eighties, the nation had explicit discussions about the notion of zero population growth and suggested that people needed to carefully consider the consequences of bringing new humans into an overpopulated world (This idea has seemingly become so unpopular in recent years that the organization Zero Population Growth changed its name in 2002 to “Population Connection”).
The earth, however, is still overpopulated. Since 1980, the earth’s population has grown 30 percent. More people mean more consumption and more waste. It means already exhausted urban structures are going to be pushed to the breaking point.
The United States, which accounts for just 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes 25 percent of the word’s resources and produces 25 percent of greenhouse gases. One new human born in the United States will consume 30 times more than a brand new human born in India and 20 times more than a new human in Africa. Much like the individual who imagines it’s not their SUV or giant pickup truck that is the problem, parents in the U.S. assume no accountability that their individual decisions to have children have broader environmental consequences. Actually, in many cases, children become a justification for a gas guzzling SUV.
No, I am not begrudging people in the U.S. who have children, nor am I interested in the government or anybody else meddling in people’s reproductive decisions. As a nation, though, we need to remember that having children is a choice. Nobody is required to have children. Nobody. End of story.
As a fairly dyed-in-the-wool anti-metaphysician, this post by my pal, Brett, in Toronto--you know, the one in Canada--warmed the cockles of my tiny, cold, evil heart. I never make a post about someone else's post, but this one, this one is special. Thank you, Brett.
