Beware: It Could Happen to You!

OK something came up that's immediate. It has little to do with Thing-Fish and pretty much nothing to do with my trip to Hawaii, (which I will get back to within a week or so). But I have to deal with it here.

I'm here to tell you that there is a vast, sinister internet conspiracy goin' on. It dictates that if you maintain a blog, you may be tagged. If you are, and you're willing to play, here's what you're supposed to do:

1) At your blog, present a list of ten songs that you have been diggin' lately.

2) Then tag five more people.

Thanks to Jarrod for tagging me. Following his example, I'm cheating by adding an extra song:

Where Eagles Dare - The Misfits
Mary of Silence - Mazzy Star
Cocaine Blues - Johnny Cash
Gimme a Pigfoot - Bessie Smith
A Pox on You - Silver Apples
You Crummy - Lee "Scratch" Perry
Philosophy of the World - The Shaggs
Welfare Love - Kool Keith
White Blur 2 - Aphex Twin
A Cosmic Telephone - Kali Bahlu
Louie Louie - The Stooges (Hands down, the best version
of this song ever.)

I don't know many other people who maintain a blog. So I just kind of hunted down some blogs that sounded interesting. I'm off to tag their owners now and will list them here presently.

Thanks for playing...

The Grand Scheme of Things

So there I was, Sloth: driving endlessly across the big island of Hawaii, listening to Frank Zappa’s Thing-Fish, the only CD I had.

You may ask yourself how I ended up stuck with Thing-Fish as my only travel music. The fact of the matter is, it wasn’t my only travel music. I had my iPod, complete with radio transmitter, but the Hawaiian airwaves were surprisingly populated, and the Belkin radio transmitter’s reception is a little spotty. Driving around trying to listen to the thing meant an almost constant trip around the dial, which was not only annoying but hazardous as well, as I was traveling solo, and it’s hard to drive while you’re staring at the radio.

You may ask yourself why, if I had the iPod, I’d bothered to bring a CD copy of Thing-Fish in the first place. (It wasn’t the only CD I had brought with me from Chicago. I had a 3 CD box set of very late period Gary Numan stuff, but I could not, for the life of me, work up the will to listen to. ‘Matter of fact, though emblazoned with Gary’s intense, silently imploring face, it never once made it into my rental car. And despite the fact that I pretty much always have some shit playing, the rental car was the only place where I listened to music on this trip.) The truth is, I hadn’t decided if I even wanted Thing-Fish in my iTunes library, let alone on my iPod, where space is at a premium. (I have the big one, but the fucking thing is still almost full. An armageddon of b-list music is at hand, but I’m staving it off till the last possible minute. You never know when b-list stuff might find a new connection to you and thus leap to a-status, or vise versa.) On this trip, I’d decided, Thing-Fish and I were going to have it out. One way or another, we were going to come to at least a general understanding of where we stood in relation to each other. For reasons other than limited space, I didn’t wanna let this album sit in my library, unless I was sure it belonged there. And I wasn’t.

(The Gary Numan set was there for the same purpose, though there the question of whether or not to include it in my library had more to do with the relatively simple question of had Gary Numan’s declined so much at that point that none of it was worth salvaging? Imagine slogging through 3 CDs of bad to mediocre Gary Numan, and you may understand why I stuck with the more difficult Thing-Fish problem.)

You may ask yourself why I am so ambivalent about Thing-Fish, and, life being notoriously short, why I was wasting my time thinking about it. It isn’t as though there isn’t enough other music, good and bad, to keep me occupied for several lifetimes. Well, see, the thing is, whatever else you want to say about it, Thing-Fish is a major piece of work by an important musical artist. Now, some of you may quibble with one part or the other of that statement. I know that a lot of Zappa enthusiasts don’t give much thought to Thing-Fish. They are disappointed by the way in which it casts a handful of mostly older Zappa songs into new arrangements that are then used as a backdrop for the album’s story. I have less of a problem with this, as I don’t feel that he arbitrarily threw the stuff together. I feel like he choose the material for a reason—placing it in a new context in which it could stand out in a new relationship to the narrative, which in turn is rendered more powerful thanks to the music. It’s like a bas-relief type thing.

As far as Zappa the important artist goes, well, a lotta people, both prominent and not, would beg to differ. Lester Bangs, who I greatly admire, went so far as to pretty much hate Zappa, as did, Bangs’s hero, the wise man Lou Reed. (Who, ironically, was chosen to induct Zappa into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.) I’m not gonna go into my reasons for respecting Zappa, because we’ll never get to the matters at hand, if I do. (Besides, though he’s kinda cerebral, a lot of my admiration for Zappa is intuitive, emotional, etc.) Just suffice it to say that, while he ain’t no Pablo Picasso or Miles Davis, he is, I believe important.

So on the one hand, I had problems with Thing-Fish. On the other, I recognized its potential value. And that was a pain in the ass. In fact, it was such a pain in the ass that if circumstance hadn’t pushed me to work this matter out, I might’ve just given up.

You may ask yourself just what the fuck I was doing in Hawaii in the first place, and along with that you may ask yourself the corollary question: if I was in Hawaii, why was I on the big island? At least, that’s what a lot of people have asked me since I got back. That’s unfortunate, because the big island is amazing. As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the time I spent there. I’m told it doesn’t have the resorts that Oahu or Maui have. (In that respect, I throw people off even further when I tell them that I stayed in the Hilo area—all the way across the island from Kona, where its most prominent resorts are .) But OK, I’m not answering the question. And this one, at least, has a simple answer: I was on a job. A missing person case that got pretty messy, but professional ethics forbid from saying much about it.

A less than comprehensive list of things that I have obsessed over during the course of my life: the phrasing of the preceding clause; the ubiquitousness of Brian Dennehy in the American cinema of the 80s; the assholery of Lou Reed, Ariel Sharon, DW Griffith—arguable father of cinema or not—and (regrettably—because he helped bring ya a lot of great modern literature that might otherwise be lost in the ether, like The Wasteland and Ulysses,) Ezra Pound—I’m not gonna get into Hitler, Stalin & C., because it sorta goes without saying that they are way worse; (besides which, I think our whole culture is obsessed with them;) the writing of Thomas Pynchon, (I stole the word “assholery” from him, by the way;) Bon Jovi, bon fires, bon bons, and bon mots; the indentation at the center of a woman’s throat; Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Ford’s The Searchers, and Ray’s In a Lonely Place; (I have this whole theory that links ‘em up as each film intentionally calls into question the validity of a major cinematic icon’s shtick—Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, and Humphrey Bogart respectively;) the tragic life and death of Dana Plato; the moral problems posed by the murder of Jeffery Dahmer; (my initial response when I heard about it: “Good;” along with everyone else who knew me at the time, I was disturbed by this bit of vehemence, but it just came out of my mouth—sorta like this one time when someone asked me how I could like Burger King more than McDonalds, and I unconsciously answered, “It just tastes better” —how’s that for disturbing?) cockroaches; my inability to reconcile myself to Buddhism; (it seems very cool and all, but I have problems with that whole self negation thing;) smelly, crappy doody; smoking cigarettes; (it took me approximately 57,326 attempts before I finally quit;) the Chicago Cubs—my most unhealthy obsession; (I tell ya, any day now, I’m gonna have an aneurysm over their fumbling seemingly Keystone Kop inspired take on the game of baseball—Why do I take it seriously? Year after year, why do I care? Someone please make it stop! I’m sick sick sick sick!!!) And, as any sensitive reader of this chronicle knows, most preponderantly, prominently, eternally, longingly, George Clooney’s ass (q.v. the prior entry (The Point) of Diminishing Returns).

And more recently, Zappa’s “rock musical” Thing-Fish. I’m calling it a rock musical, not just as a means of dodging associations with that most bloated, silly artifact of the bloated, silly musical style we call “classic rock,” (another fucking stupid label, while we’re on the subject,) the “rock opera.” (I freakin’ loathe Tommy—am in fact, with a few exceptions, not particularly fond of The Who. I mean, at least The Wall is so pompous and narcissistic that it’s unintentionally funny.) See, it’s a play within a play in which a married couple attend a performance of a Broadway musical that eventually draws them in, both literally—they’re kidnapped by members of the cast—and figuratively: while maintaining their role as audience, the also enter the reality of the production they’re watching, becoming characters on more than one level. If that makes any sense. If sense can be made of Thing-Fish, perhaps it can only be sensed. (Thank you, King Missile.)

But first a glimpse into my personal history with Thing-Fish: in times of yore, when I was but a humble undergrad, I started checking out Zappa. My hometown radio was pretty meat n’ potatoes, and none of my friends or older relatives had any Zappa in their record collections that I could steal or at least listen to a whole lot. Thus I’d had little prior exposure to him, but when it comes to music, I dig around a lot, for better or worse.

(Sometimes I worry that my record collection’s going to absorb me in some Twilight Zonian way, so I’d become, like, a sentient CD or some shit Rod Serling would come up with. Serling rules! by the way. Or maybe I could be more like a sentient mp3 file—that’d be more of the moment—though I’d make it an AAC file, cuz I like Macs better. And I could be trapped in my iPod that some callous asshole like me would carry, thus enacting the sort of karmic cycle you usually find on The Twilight Zone—or in a more straightforward way, in EC comics. Or maybe I could end up like an endlessly replicating self at some music sharing site. And then, like, I could get loose all over the internet and become omnipotent and smack all of civilization ‘neath my digital heel, sorta like that guy in Lawnmower Man . Or maybe not.)

So like, there I am, hungry for more music. And I’m away from home for the first time, and I’m meeting all these people and reading all this stuff—some of it (and them) describing music I’ve never heard of or have, but only in a cursory sort of way. And pretty soon, I’m running around chasing after this motley assortment of records and CDs. And somewhere in there was Zappa.

I don’t know why I started with Joe’s Garage, his 1979 rock opera. (This time, in a tongue-in-cheek way, the term fits.) As Zappa’s music goes, it’s a bit anomalous. He rarely worked in narrative terms—frequently, he didn’t even work in traditional songs—but here you had a three-act epic, in which our dystopian society (maybe it’s in the near future, but Frank never says so,) censors all music. It is stupid. It is profound. I loved it.

And it’s way more accessible than Thing-Fish, which I chased down after finding out that it was another rock musical/opera/whatever “starring” most of the cast of Joe’s Garage. Eagerly did I throw it into my CD player. 80 or so minutes later, after I had consumed both parts of this two-disc set, I was stunned. (OK, I wasn’t nonverbal. I didn’t have a concussion or anything like that. ) And I wasn’t just put off by the way in which Thing-Fish betrayed my expectations. I was put off by it. I don’t even think I was thinking of Joe’s Garage much, if at all. I was trying to figure out what the fuck this was, with all of its stereotyping of African Americans, women and gay men, in all of its absurd and truly perverse sexual abuse—not to mention its vicious ridicule of Broadway musicals and its (?sarcastic?) paranoid references to government-engineered disease. What was Zappa saying? I mean, while not all Zappa is topical, Joe’s Garage certainly was, and with all of its arguably offensive cultural baggage, Thing-Fish had to be as well. Didn’t it? I mean, you don’t roll all of this stuff out in the service of a gag. Do you? And if you do, haven’t you maybe crossed some sort of moral line, if not, at least, the boundaries of good taste?

Welp. That’s a question we’ll have to consider in the next entry, because in the interest of updating in a more timely fashion, I’m going to do things differently. In case you haven’t noticed, I tend to write in very long chunks. What’s more, I’m pretty obsessive when it comes to editing. Taken together, all of this means that it takes me a long time to finish anything. Thus the infrequent updating.

As far as writing about the complicated and interlocking subjects of my struggles with Thing-Fish and my trip to Hawaii, it would take forever to do things this way. Fortunately, the trip, at least, can be broken into distinct pieces. Thing-Fish is another matter, but I think my ideas about it can be made to fit into a more episodic approach. So more episodic it shall be. That way, I’ll be able to update much more frequently—I hope. Maybe once a week!

(Woo hoo! I know a lot of people are able to update a couple of times a week. But if you want the highly polished product you’re used to getting from Steve Forceman, you’re just gonna have to accept this time frame. Anyway, it’ll be faster than normal, for what it’s worth.)

That’ll make for shorter entries, and it may take some things a few entries to resolve themselves, but I think it’ll work. We’ll see. Anyway, Sloth, and whoever else may be reading, I’ll be back soon. Really. With pictures too! (I'm finally figuring out the finer points of this blogging thing! See image above: of me snorkeling! I took it myself! How about that!) Seriously! Bye for now! Really! Take care! Etc. etc. etc!!!!!!!!!!

I am still a lameass...

It figures.

For several months my blog receives few hits, and my guest book is absolutely silent. Figuring no one is paying attention anyway, I become lackadaisical about updating. Then I go out of town for 2 weeks, (on a working vacation to the big island of Hawaii,) and the blog is getting hit more than it has, like, ever, and some of these kind people actually sign the guest book! Thanks, all, for visiting. Really.

About those updates: I will make them more frequently. I'll shoot for weekly, though I write very slowly in an anal, nitpicky sort of way. I really hope that at least some of you will continue to visit.

Later this week, I'll have something up about what I was doing while I was away. (What I did during summer vacation?) And about Frank Zappa's Thing Fish, which, I listened to about 5,000 times, because it was the only CD that made it to the big island with me.

This trip was marked by some really bizarre moments. Some of it was awful, but most of it was wonderful. And you were there. And you. And you. (Or whatever the hell Dorothy said after coming out of a coma, apparently suffering from a really severe sort of head trauma.) I'll also try to get back to that list of 35 things that have made my life worth living, though I worry that I'm not doing justice to most of them.

Thanks, thanks, thanks for stopping by...

A World of Good

I’ll bet you’ve all been wondering just when the hell I was going to update this thing. You’ve probably been going through withdrawal, sweating, with the shakes, pink elephants dancing in front of your eyes to demented melodies no Disney hack composer ever dreamed of.

I mean, check out that guest book. People sign it like there’s no tomorrow. Like that limey who’s not even here to look at my blog. No, he wants to tell me some shit about googlewhacks, for chrissake. I gotta google for him to whack. (Actually, I thought that was sorta cool and have a great reverence for the British people.)

As for explanations, I won’t whine about my personal life. I’ll just say one thing: I’ve been obsessing over this fucking blog entry, or rather the series of blog entries I’m about to commit to the electronic ether. I’ve been sitting around with an ever accumulating pile of sheets torn from a small army of yellow legal pads, classifying, agonizing, hewing away at things I love. All for this stupid blog.

Remember that 35 thing? You know—where I was gonna laud 35 things that have made my life worth living? Well… you’d be surprised how hard it is to narrow a list of that shit down to just 35 items. Early on, I even excluded my favorite material to jerk off to. I want to keep that special and private, because photographic images from my own colonoscopy, for example, have great spiritual significance to me, and it would cheapen them and render them less arousing to describe them.

So I limited myself to material drawn from various creative media, since, as you’ve probably figured out if you’ve read very much of this blog, I waste a lotta time on print, music, film, and the visual arts.

Even within this very limited set of categories, they are not my 35 favorite items, and they will not be presented in any significant order. If I’d tried to approach my material this way, I’d still be writing on Judgment Day—completely oblivious to a simultaneous Ragnarok, Armageddon. Mass Ascension on Divine Spaceships and a Cubs World Series victory or what ever other form(s) It took. Existence as we know it would end, and I’d still be sitting here, weeping insanely into a mound of yellow sheets. (Of paper, I mean. Not on my bed. I am not a bed wetter. Really.)

One last procedural note: there are other things I’d like to write about and other things I’d like to do with my life, for that matter I’m gonna do this in installments of seven items per entry. I’ll try to do them weekly, maybe biweekly. We’ll see. Also, in the interest of moving this shit along, I’m only going to provide brief notes for 5-6 of them. I’ll write at more length about 1-2 per installment.

That’s it. Let’s get down to the first set. The very loosely unifying topic of this first installment is self-love, I guess. Here goes:




The Reputation-

are a power pop band here in Chicago. They haven’t broken into mainstream radio. Yet. Give ‘em time. But they have achieved a reasonable amount of recognition on the indie circuit, especially locally.

The actions of the group are dictated by one Elizabeth Elmore, an amply talented, possibly megalomaniacal singer, songwriter and musician (guitar and keyboard). Liz is an ambitious, intense mastermind. (She probably hates being called Liz, but I feel like I know her well enough to take some liberties. I’m probably wrong, and she’d hand me my balls in a sling if she ever read this. But she won’t, and I’m willing to live dangerously where she’s concerned. She deserves no less.) She’s also a remarkably motivated woman, who juggles her music with a career in law.

I’m fascinated by Liz and her music—I’ll admit it. A larger-than-life persona has she. Not iconic, like say, Robert Johnson is iconic, but she is big—maybe even approaching Morrissey or Gary Numan, who are more analogous not just in emotional stature, but in their unabashed self-pity and grandiosity.

Liz—or the musical persona she puts forward—seems to lack much in the way of a sense of humor. I’ve seen her play live a number of times, and though she frequently mingles with fans after a performance, I’ve always been afraid to approach her. (Yes, granite jawed Steve Forceman, flees from Liz’s biting wit and terrible gaze.) But clearly, she ain’t unapproachable, and that’s to her credit, given the wall that many performers—even less established local type acts—build between themselves and their admirers.


I’ve seen her (them, sorry) live whenever I can, and I’ve listened to their first self-titled release more than I care to reveal. A lot. Though after one or two listenings, the group’s second release, To Force a Fate, has been relegated to my second string pile—meaning I may never listen to it again, unless I’m desperate for new material to absorb. That first album, though, is brilliant.

Music wise, Liz and her band are pretty great. They’ve got chops to spare, and don’t just caress you with pretty little songs. No, titanic passion is the rule of the day here, and you better believe they kick out some noise—especially live, where they’ll really pummel you. For a pop mainstream type pop band. Because one of the things I’m trying to say is that, noise aside, it is pop. Good pop.

Liz has always had the hooks. And they’re great hooks. You better believe she’s got a way with melody and song structure. She’ll have you humming along with her stuff in no time, even when, as is frequently the case at the live shows, things get pumped up a little close to 11. It’s still kinda noisy music! How great is that?

I don’t mean to give you the impression that they’re Sabbath or the Stooges, but they’re not afraid to be loud, or use feedback and shit like that. (Check out the ludicrously indulgent noise breakdown just before the climax of “For the Win.”) The truly excellent musical reference website The All Music Guide suggests that Liz’s previous band Sarge is similar to the Go-Go's and Sleater-Kinney, to name only a few from the list. I might go so far to say that if Sonic Youth and Olivia Newton-John had a love child, it’d be The Reputation, which may sound ludicrously extreme on either side, but if you average things out… Well, Liz is weird, and confused about what she wants musically, I’d guess, but that’s half the fun of being her fan.

The other half might be that first record. The Reputation opens with “Either Coast,” a sunny interpretation of that perennial rock n roll favorite, the car song. If it’s good enough for Chuck Berry, Liz figures it’s good enough for her. And with all the Deuce Coupes, Roadrunners, Pink Cadillacs and Thunderbirds out there, Liz is in fine company. You can bid farewell to your youth in your car, like Neil Young did in his old hearse, or start a revolution from the driver’s seat, like Public Enemy did in their 98 Oldsmobile.

Even if you’re just out cruising, it’s American glory, but Liz is onto something bigger than that. Like Bob Seger before her—another deeply analogous figure, if not a conscious influence—Liz is on the run. She’s fleeing all the pain in the ass and /or heart shit we all have to deal with everyday. But where Seger is focused on the poignancy of the situation, Liz is more concerned with the joy of escape, and she presents it to you expertly, with chugging guitars and pure beautiful swooping vocals.

It’s a masterful opener, introducing not just the infectious energy of the band, but the larger-than-life, operatically “confessional” Liz persona, which will quickly blossom in the second track, a rumination on weekend singles bar pathos. This one has a pretty melody that comes across as queasy, thanks to a slightly atonal lead guitar. It’s a fine bit of onimonapoetia that sets you right in the middle of the experience. This song also contains my favorite Reputation couplet: “a certain inept licentiousness/ an artless gluttony for squalidness and heated promises…” Try saying that one 3 times fast.

And I’m afraid we need to pause here to consider a characteristic of Liz’s lyrics: their literary aspirations. I don’t mean to be an asshole or unfair, though I may have crossed that line somewhere a few paragraphs back, but when confronted with language like the above quote, it’s hard not to picture Liz pulling out her dictionary and looking for something cool that rhymes with “promises.” At least for me.

Really though, the problem isn’t that the vocabulary is especially difficult. It’s more Liz’s use of it—the constructions—that frequently make the lyrics feel a little, uh, pretentious for a rock song. Not to mention muddled. A few examples from other tracks on the album: “Won’t waste my mind on things that can’t remain/ Same latent flaw keeps coursing through my veins…” (from “The Uselessness of Friends”—sounds suspiciously like those old United Negro College Fund, don’t it? ) From “Misery by Design, (a song that reveals Liz’s downright frightening hostility toward former lovers, a subject that I’ll touch on again in a minute): “ground the things we set aloft and burned them through a wasted premise: ‘we…’”

I’m a great believer in the value of nonsensical but suggestive imagery in rock. Despite my objections toward literary pomposity, I do like lyrics that take themselves seriously. As Run-DMC once pointed out, though, “It’s tricky to rock a rhyme that’s right on time…” Unfortunately, when they go in this direction, Liz’s aren’t. I like her best when she’s straightforward—just tells you the story. She can be damned powerful, if ever emotionally one-sided. Somehow, at these moments, her feelings seem more real—less contrived. Take “For the Win,” say, where she’s at the top of her game.

The worst song of all in this respect is “The Truth. “The first time I saw the Reputation, this one was my favorite number because of its downright punk rock potency and downright lovely melody. Then I found out what the lyrics were. I’ll spare you the quotes and just tell you that it’s some gibberish about Liz puking up the bad stuff inside her. I’m convinced that she wrote it as an exercise for her shrink, thought it was cool, and ran out and recorded it right away. One can only hope that, on later reflection, she was embarrassed, but given the fact that she still plays the song at shows, that seems unlikely.

An enormous chunk of the first record’s appeal is in its glorious marriage of a bit of punk noise to a bit of pop glory. On the second record, the balance has been lost, and that’s why it’s such a bummer. I understand that Liz wants some much-deserved recognition—and I don’t mean just a local nod, but an embrace by national chain record stores and radio stations. (She’s even been given a few nods by the national press—a blurb in Rolling Stone, even an interview in Playboy. Neither of which seems to’ve amounted to much, but is pretty impressive, you gotta admit.) Somewhere inside To Force a Fate, there’s still a vague edge, but you really have to dig, and who has the time for that when there’s still real passion in some of the new music out there? I won’t point the sellout finger here, but I will say that it’s unfortunate that Liz has chosen to pursue said recognition by watering her music down to something very close to AOR pap.

Given the assurance of the first release, the second one feels like a conscious cop out. It gives the (I believe mistaken) impression that Liz is so desperate for a hit record that she’ll go to almost any lengths musically to achieve it. (Almost, I say. She’s not as desperate as that other, already much-maligned Chicago Liz—Phair, I mean, whom the AMG also lists as a similar artist.) If, as a simple fan, I could tell Liz one thing, I would express my honest regret that she’s steering her ship this way, because I think it’s dangerously close to scuttling itself on some reef of mediocrity. (Not like that last metaphor, which was so laughably pompous and muddled that I had to leave it in. ) I loved the first record. The second one’s like mayonnaise on cardboard, and I hope it’s not an indication of where The Reputation is headed, cuz I don’t think I’ll be willing to follow.

(If I could say something else to Liz, I would plea with her to email me if she reads this. Despite my criticisms, which come from nothing but love by the way, she machine guns me. No other way to say it. I’m completely enamored. Though not in a creepy way, Liz.)

In one area, at least, Liz still refuses to compromise. If you so much as step on her toes, Liz has got a song for you, and you better believe that it’ll squash you into a sniveling blop of jelly. Man, I’d hate to have her pissed at me. I’d probably change my name, cosmetically alter my face and flee to Mexico. Liz doesn’t fuck around. Fortunately, in performance, the vitriol of these lyrics is undercut by over demonstrative look-I-took singing-lessons type diction, or the whole thing would be downright terrifying.

In her lyrics, Liz has never been about the other schlub, who’s usually a two-dimensional (one hopes) sketch of a lover. She’s about self –and generally self-pity at that—though she will hit an occasional rest stop for some self-aggrandizement. In part, at least, by goring you with a dismissal of your “simpering diatribes” (And again with the pompous lyrics! She’s beginning to sound like the pop toonz of Tantric enthusiast Sting for crissakes!)

If you think it sounds like Liz is less than compassionate, you’re right. But that’s OK. Hey, sometimes you need to wallow in narcissism, and when you do, Liz is there for you, offering emotional comfort food—a sort of pizza of the soul. But don’t, for a second, believe that she’s doing it out of sympathy. I hate to say it, but I don’t think Liz gives a crap one about you or me—except insofar as we might buy her records and give her fame. From her scramblings for mainstream success to her egotistical tantrums, Liz is in it for the win. And if you want a piece of that catharsis, you’re gonna have to come to her.

The Reputation is a deeply dorky record that embraces the values of contemporary pop music: the worship of me myself and I—my perspective, my pain. Its exponents are like the characters in Rashomon—deeply committed to their own self-serving view of “the facts.” But man, is it addictive. If you want my advice, I say go out and buy it now. (But avoid the second record like unprotected sex with a Siberian yak.) Handle with care. If its operatically staged emotion doesn’t pulverize you, you’ll thank me.




OK, so briefly now, six other things that have made my life more worth living:




Rashomon-

Nice segueway, right? Not a very obscure film by any means, so I hope I’m not gonna bore you by adding my own thoughts on Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 film commented on the individual’s tendency toward immersion in self. Just like ol’ Liz, the characters in this film see events exclusively, willfully from their own point-of-view. Somehow, each character’s recounting of a rape and murder is radically different. Invariably, in the telling, the speaker’s culpability decreases proportionally to a dramatic increase in the moral justification of his or her behavior. Unlike The Reputation’s music the film looks at this trick of perspective from the outside. In this way, we can see this “trick” in its unfettered, loathsome glory. Kurosawa maintains that it’s really a willfully compounded lie we tell ourselves. Reiterated enough times, the lie becomes truth, allowing us to maintain our often deceptive images of ourselves as “good people.”

At this point, the film probably sounds like an absolute bummer. For all its bleakness, Rashomon ends with a small, hopeful human moment. What’s more, it’s a profoundly beautiful film—beautifully shot, written, edited and acted. If you haven’t seen it, and it’s sounded over hyped to you, it isn’t. It really is one of the greatest films of all time.




Dante’s Inferno-

Think Rashomon sounds cynical? Moralistic? Misanthropic? Malmoogious? Well Alighieri, next to the Divine Comedy, it’s like an episode of Little House on the Prairie. Sure, Dante’s colossal paean to the glory of God ends beautifully, ecstatically, but along the way, it has some pretty vicious things to say about human nature. Its judgments are exceedingly harsh. And in part, bizarrely enough, it’s a rejection of compassion for the damned—a fixation on the well-being of the self—that wins the salvation of an individual soul. It’s about your personal relationship to God, and there’s little room for the distractions provided by other people—especially those who’ve lost their own way in the dark forest Dante wanders into at the poem’s opening.

Disagree with my assessment? Well, consider this:

Dante’s passage through Hell is meant to represent a refinement of the soul, a purging of all that is sinful or for that matter worldly. One of the qualities that has to be jettisoned the tendency to look at the suffering in the world around you and ask why. In doing so, you are questioning God’s wisdom.

There’s a moment in the Inferno that beautifully bears this idea out. Dante is horrified in the fourth circle of Hell to find that those who sought to see the future have had their heads turned around 180 degrees. They are always looking behind them as they wander about. Dante weeps, and Virgil scolds him saying:

Still like the other fools? There is no place
for pity here. Who is more arrogant
within his soul, who is more impious
than one who dares to sorrow at God’s judgment?

-Canto XX, lines 26-30

Not very evangelical, is it? (Maybe that’s a good thing. If I have to deal with one more frickin’ Jehovah’s witness proselytizing at my door, I’m gonna have an aneurysm and enter the kingdom of God or Satan early—probably headed to the latter, ‘cause I’ve been pretty lax in building a relationship to God.) That being said, the comedy blows me away, and it does reveal the love of God, (who apparently doesn’t want you to follow His example in terms of sympathy for your fellow souls).

I’ve been reading the John Ciardi translation. A poet in his own right, Ciardi’s gone to great lengths to maintain the spirit of the original. (Or at least that’s what he says.) He’s also provided ample notes and appendixes to clarify references and place the poem in context. It’s eminently readable, but beautiful, varying language within the text to suit the matters at hand—which I guess Dante was all about as well. I’ve been very grateful for it. It’s reminded me of the pleasures of reading.




Coffin Joe in At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul-

Yep—there’s scant hope or mercy to be found if you’re an unrepentant sinner. And yet, some people go out of their way to thumb their noses at God. (At least in the narrative arts.) What’s up with that? Are these people just two-dimensional caricatures—sorta like the villains lurking in Saturday morning cartoons, who feel compelled to remind us that they’re evil! Evil! EVIL!!!???

Well, apparently some of ‘em are, or we wouldn’t have Saturday morning cartoon villains, right? (Unless you don’t consider these to be artifacts of “the narrative arts,” which, let’s face it, is a pretty shaky concept when you get down to it. One person’s art is another person’s twaddle, making the establishment of artistic criteria into a sorta esthetic Rashomon. You’re sure you saw art lining the complete works of Stanley Kubrick like a esthetic corona, whereas I saw nothing—except maybe in isolated bits of A Clockwork Orange and 2001. Meanwhile, you don’t understand how I can appreciate the writing of Thomas Pynchon, which, to you, is a buncha of pretentious, muddled crap.

But then, I’ve gotten off-topic, haven’t I? Must be the peyote. Back to all these weighty questions about this hostility and/or contempt some people feel toward God, whether or not it’s based on evil, how it’s been represented in the “narrative arts, “etc., etc. Well, I don’t buy the evil thing. I believe actions can be evil, but not people.

I do believe in the conscious decision to indulge in evil behavior and in the idea that this choice is frequently linked to an abiding anger or disgust that the person in question feels for the basic nature of things, which may or may not be God, according to your own belief system. And certainly, this is often the shtick in the “narrative arts.” Here we find a legion of disgruntled misanthropes engaging in antisocial and sometimes downright immoral behavior. There’s Ahab. And Gladys Kravitz. (What bug crawled up her ass, anyway?) And the Joker. And J-Lo. And Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And Iago. And Goneril and Regan. And Claudius. (Obviously Shakespeare was preoccupied by these questions of human evil.)

And then there’s Coffin Joe.

Coffin Joe, whose name is Za du Caixao in Portuguese, is the onscreen doppelganger of Brazilian director/screenwriter/actor Jose Mojica Marins, and he is one bad mother fucker. We first meet Za in the excellent film At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul. (I’m going to stick to this first film, of a lengthy series, by the way. Otherwise I’ll never finish this crapbunglin thing. ) Za’s an undertaker, and the physical horror’s he’s witnessed while plying his trade seem to’ve scuttled any sense of ultimate meaning he might once have harbored. And man, is he brassed of at God.

Well, actually, maybe his problem has less to do with anger toward the Creator, (though it’s definitely a contributing factor,) than it does with a deep, abiding disdain for all human life. It comes across as a sort of nihilism—the kind that’s particularly intoxicating to lapsed Catholics, which one assumes Za is, given the images that preoccupy him . However, while on the surface, Za’s preoccupations come across as a sort of petty rebellion—the shattering of some taboos in a thrill-seeking teenaged sorta way—he definitely takes it further than that.

Pretty soon, he’s blaspheming into the faces of his devout neighbors. He thinks God is a phony, he says, a coward, and quite possibly non-existent. The townsfolk are terrified and begin avoiding him, especially after he acts out violently toward one of them who challenges him. His pride grows in step with his bitterness and cynicism. And we all know that pride is the sin that got ol’ Lucifer tossed out of heaven like some cosmic drunk in the hands of a cosmic bouncer.

Anyway, Za embraces absolute cynicism—and though he doesn’t acknowledge its existence—evil. He takes what he wants—let the dignity, the desires—even the lives—of others get hanged.

And one thing Za really wants is a son. And not just any son. He wants to sire the little fella with his ideal woman, a local, terribly hot young girl. There are some obstacles facing Za however. For one thing, he’s married to a basically good woman. She’s gotta go, and with the help of an extra large tarantula, go she does. But there are still some kinks in Za’s plans, like the fact that his beloved, while not married is happily engaged to Za’s best friend. And she more or less loathes Za. So it becomes necessary for him to really do some work.

At this point, Za’s passing beyond cruelty and callousness and into sadism. He’s getting off on the pain of others, and this change pretty much confirms his transformation into an agent of pure evil, triggering a gypsy curse that stirs the dead, who carry Za down to his ultimate fate.

So what do we have here? Well, we’ve established that Za’s contempt for God becomes so vicious that it boils over into hatred for His/Its/Whatever’s creations. Is this simple Catholic schoolboy rebellion or cheap horror movie titillation? I guess I think there’s something deeper at work here—otherwise, Za’s misadventures would be nothing more than bathetic, and draw nothing more than laughs in the watching. They do draw laughs, its true, but they are uneasy laughs.

Still, what does it mean? For better or worst, this film is one more expression of self, the individual, (and it’s worth noting again that Za is Marins both physically and fictionally). Except here, the aggrandizement of self is, I think a front.—one that is harvested from Za’s own fear of death. Looking into a howling Nothing, he tries to put a brave face on it by denying It, thumbing his nose at It. But in the end, Za flinches and he is consumed. Like every one of us will be, sooner or later. Pop culture it may be—silly? in places, but as with so many of these obsessive meditations on I, the tragedy and the horror do register in the end—at least to me. (Cf. Gary Numan, Liz Elmore and an army of others, though I do have my limits. E.g.: contemporary fiction, i.e., Russell Banks.)

So take it or leave it, I’d advise you to march right down to your local specialty video store—or find one on the internet—and delve into the strange world of Coffin Joe. But as the great Neil Young once said: “Take my advice: Don’t listen to me.”




Ingmar Bergman-

Generally speaking, I find it difficult to single out “favorites.” Mood has so much to do with what grabs me at any given moment, and whether the matter in question is food or colors or sexual positions, there always seems to be some valid possibilities I overlook at these same moments. And though I’m a person who’s had to learn to function with a lot of self-doubt, with great certainty, I can tell you that Ingmar Bergman is, by far, my favorite filmmaker.

Maybe it’s self-doubt that makes the whole thing work. Certainly that’s one of Bergman’s defining traits, and the connection here is deeply personal. Coming to Bergman’s films is, for me, like coming home, in a sense. His characters seethe with pain, weakness, love and anger—with an almost insufferable humanity. In spite of what you may have heard though, his films do, ,often achieve great warmth. Check out Fanny & Alexander or Wild Strawberries for obvious examples. but all of his films are shot through with the same sense of closeness. It’s a bleak, but welcoming universe, where I feel safe, understood.

Again, Berman’s films are all about self, but here it is the self looking both inward and out—a self that first of all is most concerned with its discovery of true self, ugly as it may be, and then placing this in relation to its often painful surroundings. in this way, Bergman faces the same void Za de Caixao looks into, but instead of cursing it, cowering from it, Bergman’s characters reach out into it, all the while aware of their own flawed nature and hope that some other being, whose flaws also they can also see quite clearly, may touch their hand with something like warmth. (And in Bergman, hands and faces become colossal with emotional significance—to an unsurpassed degree.

My reaction to Bergman’s work doesn’t appear be to universal. In college, after reading his excellent autobiography The Magic Lantern, I descended on some classmates waving the book like a Baptist preacher, and said, “Holy crap! Didn’t he describe childhood perfectly? Wasn’t it exactly what yours was like?” They looked at me with a rich mixture of pity, fear and amusement. “Uh, no,” they said.

If you’re interested, I’d say read the book—it’s that rare autobiography that transcends fan interest and becomes something like literature. (If not literature.) More importantly, see the films. But don’t rush to The 7th Seal . It’s not bad, but despite its reputation, there are better Bergman films. I’d say go to Wild Strawberries or Through a Glass Darkly I first, though if you’re feeling really adventurous, try Persona. It’s great, but may be difficult, if you’re not into Bergman already.




Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume 2- To fully describe the difference these two discs have made in my life would be a monumental task. I’ll have to limit myself to something really short then, though it seems criminal to do so.

This disc contains several pieces of ambient electronic music, produced by one guy, Richard D. James, in his own home. Theoretically, it’s meant to lurk in the background, while you live your life. It doesn’t, because like Bergman, James finds something profound in introspection.

In some of my most troubled moments, this music has helped me find peace. To you, it may sound like new age in some places and like dissonant noise in others. I don’t care much for labels, so I’ll leave it at this: However he works, in this set, harshly or gently, James creates beauty. It’s a fine pair of discs, highly recommended.




So that’s it for this go around. I hope you’ll forgive me if I sign off sort of abruptly, as I’m burnt out from writing this shit. I hope anyone who read it dug some of it. And that you are well. Signing off now, but more installments are on the way…

I am a lameass...

At the risk of sounding vain... To anyone stopping by: Hi. Despite recent delays, a new entry is almost ready...

It's been 90% done for about a week now. Since then, work picked up, but has fallen off again. Look for the completed entry within the following week. It'll be there. Really.

Hope all is cool wherever you are... If you have time, sign my guest book. The link's at the bottom of the page.

Thanks...

Steve Forceman

Bad Rubbish

Where do they all go, the lost socks? A parallel universe? Behind heavy furniture into the dust traps of the world? (There, my lost True Love, Princess Lintguard lies, lovely and virtuous. Her chaste legs guard dried, powdery loins that will now never know my passion. I will never again kiss her dust-caked lips, and the Kingdom of the Dust People will know no Lord, who might sit with the Lady in the Chamber of the Cobweb Thrones, ruling beneficently, where she, heartbroken, now governs with neglect.

I want to part those dry legs. I want to bury my engorged cock amidst the pubic lint that lines her cunt. I want to lap at her dry, flaking nipples. I want to lick her dirty ass. She is everything to me, the Princess of Dust. But she is lost.)



So I’ve stumbled onto another weekend on earth. That’ll make for approximately 1827 weekends I’ve spent, variously, suckling at the Teat; (as both infant and sexually active adult—funny how you come full circle like that;) attending college football games; spending the night at the homes of my childhood friends; getting tanked; staying sober; smoking pot; renting movies; (including, but not limited to pornography, martial arts extravaganzas, foreign “art house” stuff, low budget independent features, documentaries, Hollywood blockbusters and classics, and Italian zombie flicks;) playing video, computer and/or role-playing games; attending parties; taking in live performances of various kinds of music and theater; cooking; walking dogs; camping; traveling; cleaning; sleeping in; studying; delivering newspapers; (The New York Times AND The Flint Journal;) working in a juice bar, a coffee shop, University of Michigan dorm food service, the equipment checkout facility of the School of the Art Institute’s film department; (to name just a few distinguished places of employment;) practicing the guitar; balancing the checkbook; reading; sledding; canoeing; masturbating; crusading; jihading; impaling vampires on wooden stakes; shooting lycanthropes with silver bullets; destroying the brains of the walking dead; repelling Gojira from Tokyo; doin’ the Jughead; and most importantly, competing in Quiz Bowl. Mustn’t forget that.

Whatta life it’s been! And if I achieve the average lifespan enjoyed by the inhabitants here in these glorious United States—where we not only live better, but longer than the rest of the world—and only at the expense of our immortal souls!!!—(Thanks for all that slave labor, you little brown people out there! Thanks for lettin’ us mow you down, trees! Thanks for sucking on a club, baby seals, ‘n’ wolves, ‘n’ elephants, ‘n’ stuff!) (Fuck—whatta a set of stupid, hypocritical hippie clichés!!! I'm turning into Sting or Bono or some other idiot. My apologies to anyone who’s still reading this sorry shit.)—then I’m not even halfway through my allotment of weekends!!! ‘Course, about 1/3 of ‘em will probably be spent crappin’ in my drawers and trying to hear when my aid’s already turned up to 11.

Yep. Gotta whole lot to look forward to. And with that, my ungrateful ass bids you adieu.

Next Time: Maybe: If I ever update this thing again: (Note the regularity of my recent postings:) In commemoration of my 35th birthday: I may, may, may try to talk about my 35 favorite record albums: Which may be followed by my 35 fave books: and the my 35 favorite films: Or maybe I’ll just glom into one list of my 35 favorite things that have kept me around to see my 35th birthday. Or maybe I’ll just hold forth on the plight of our noble native people here in the U.S., or of the rapidly dying oceans, or the sorry state of our public schools, or the terrible legacy of colonialism in Africa. Hey!!! I could make a list of my 35 favorite things to whine about!!! #1: My Hard Life. But that would just be too heartbreaking for anyone reading (anyone???) out there, I’m sure. Or I could record a lotta dumb adolescent fantasies of a scatological and/or sexual nature. That’d be different.

Anyway, as you can see, there are a lotta laughs on the way. Stick with me...

The Tragical Blistery Tour

Sorry, Sloth. I've been MIA for a while. Business got, well, busy. Anyway, now I'm back, and it's time to talk about one of the greatest musical phenoms of all time. We're talkin' John Cale droning away on viola, organ or whatever else was at hand. We're talkin' Mo Tucker tap-tapping into some primal rhythmic vein on her drums. We're talkin' Sterlin Morrison's prismatic, serpentine lead guitar. We're talkin' Nico croaking out love songs like some drugged but randy frog. And of course, we're talking about Lou Reed, speaking, in his insectival buzz, of previously unspeakable things.

We're talkin' the Velvet Underground.

So let's get down to it: For years I’ve listened to their music—in various moods, in various states of consciousness, in many different people in many different places. I can’t begin to assess what these records have meant to me.

Still for the life of me, I can’t figure out Loaded. To quote Lester Bangs’s remarkable piece “Kind of Grim,” which dealt with the similarly chameleonic—and problematic—career of Miles Davis: “Perhaps an expository dissection of my confusion can be instructive to you, if you care.” (With considerable emphasis on that last phrase, since I ain’t no Lester Bangs. I lack his insight and so wouldn’t presume to instruct anyone else. But what the fuck…)

I can’t understand why so many people find it to be a great record. I mean, maybe it is a great record—of its kind—but is it a great Velvet Underground record?

The answer to that question depends entirely on what you think the Velvet Underground was or meant as a band. During the group’s very brief existence, it radically changed directions. You can split its recorded output almost perfectly into two pieces: The first two studio albums are a striking experimental assault on the forms and subject matter of popular music. It’s some of the most powerful noise ever made—thrillingly, deeply alive—like nothing that came before it—and its influence on punk and various other types of “alternative” music can’t be calculated.

(Hate that label. It’s lost all meaning. Alternative to what? At this point, most stuff that’s set aside as “alternative” sounds exactly the same as all the other shit on the radio.)

For the most part, the last two albums revel in exactly the mainstream conventions that their predecessors attempted to subvert, with Loaded pushing this trend toward its most extreme point. At best, this approach sought to perfect the pop song, and it resulted in very good music: achingly beautiful ballads, e.g., “Pale Blue Eyes,” alternating with warm, infectious rock and roll like “Cool It Down.”

Now the Velvets were not the first indie-type band to self-consciously pursue a hit record after toiling away in obscurity for some time, as it seems Lou Reed was doing here. And we are talking about Lou, who had absolutely taken over the band at this point. He’d always been responsible for the songwriting, but, depending on who you believe, John Cale had just as great an influence on the sound of the Velvets’ first two records. It makes a lot of sense, when you consider how, increasingly, the band pursued a more commercial direction thereafter. (Except for maybe like, “The Murder Mystery,” but I think that’s just an atavistic fluke—and not particularly relevant to what they were doing at that point.)

We’ll never know exactly why—it could’ve been insecurity about losing his authority, disagreement about the direction the group was going in, or just a simple personal grudge—but ol’ Lou issued an ultimatum to the band’s other two members, Maureen Tucker and Sterling Morrison. Cale was out, or Lou was leaving. They reluctantly complied with his wishes.

Of course, the Velvets weren't the first band to undergo such a dramatic change in personnel either, but with a mere four record discography, and one member dropping off per album, the stability of the band’s sound was never really great. (Count with me: Nico, Cale, and then Tucker. Andy Warhol’s influence, of course, had also abruptly faded, which may or may not be relevant.) When you look at it this way, it seems odd that listeners often point toward a Velvet Underground influence in the music of other artists. They’re usually referring to only one of the records.

Luna, for example, came so close to the sound of the penultimate Velvets album that they asked Sterling Morrison to guest on a couple of tracks. It’s a nice homage, but they could have just as easily requested permission to sample him, because his leads sound exactly like the ones he plays on songs like “Pale Blue Eyes,” “What Goes On,” and “Beginning to See the Light.” (And of course, this might tend to answer the question of which of the band’s guitarists played the leads in the first place.)

As such, it skirts the dangerously pathetic territory of playacting—creating a Velvet Underground Revue, sorta like Beatlemania and/or that Stars on 45’s Beatles medley that you might remember from your worst nightmares of the 1970s. (And obviously, that's not the only parallel between these two bands that were more than the sum of their parts. When you consider the spotty solo careers of, say, McCartney and Reed, on one side, and Lennon and Cale on the other-- with Harrison, as always, somewhere in the middle-- this principle becomes a given.)

It’s an endeavor that makes everyone involved look a little desperate. Here’s Sterling Morrison, holding onto that one shining moment when, by being caught up in creative forces (not to mention egos) he probably didn’t even understand—he was actually, momentarily relevant in a larger sense. Yep. Bet he never lived that shit down. And worse: here’s Luna franticly clutching someone else’s golden moment like some kinda cultural ghoul and/or little children pretending they are the Velvets in the same way that you or I might have imagined ourselves to be Batman, the Lone Ranger or the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. (Sorta the same way in which, in their later years, the Velvets often pretended they were a doo-wop group from the 1950s.)
But that’s probably material best left for some other consideration.

Anyhoo, back to the Velvets themselves—and here comes that cynical studio hack Doug Yule, replete in black top hat and cloak, twirling a well-waxed mustache as he creeps in to finish off the band through a cruel exploitation of Lou Reed’s escalating hubris.

The change in direction seems even more shocking and painful when you consider that the Velvets were such a breath of fresh air on those first two records—a challenge not only to the increasingly decadent pop music of the day, (and yeah, I know there were lots of great things being done in, say, psychedelia and Motown, just to name two random examples,) but to the increasingly oppressive and elitist hippie subculture. They were an utterly unique squall of noise and words that shifted, abruptly, in the last two albums to insipid warblings like “Who loves the sun?/ Who cares what it does/ Since you broke my heart?” backed by overproduced folk-lite or quasi-white-R&B grooves.

It’s not that the Velvets couldn’t produce a reasonably affecting love song in their later years—for instance, Loaded’s “New Age.” Maybe that’s not even the point. It just seems that they settled into this middle of the road groove, cranking out insipid pop songs, as lifeless and forgettable as most of the other crap on the radio. They’d become the Dan Fogelberg of their day, except the radio still did not notice them, which is sorta like poetic justice, I guess.

Ah, fuck it. I don’t know what to say that doesn’t sound like some stupidass cliché—as bad as the worst late Velvet Underground song. That’s why I can’t get at the later Velvets. I can’t even express it. I’m sorry, if you care. It’s beyond me.

We were driving to the grocery store with the iPod on shuffle, and “Oh! Sweet Nothin’” came on. There were the trilling, pseudo-soulful lyrics, (“Say a prayuh fo’ Jimmy Brown…” (What th’ fuck is this, Amos & Andy?) There was the meandering arrangement—while it might have been great primal noise making when the Velvets went for, like, 10 minutes in the old days in songs like “Sister Ray,” here, it had been cleaned up and emasculated, it just seemed simply bloated and indulgent. All of it sorta made me want to puke, frankly. It left me cold and added to my distaste for Lou Reed, who’s repeatedly insisted that the Velvets were his brainchild—his genius. Yeah—whatever. That’s why the last two records blow.

And let me acknowledge that the first two records had some pretty saccharine stuff on 'em too-- "Femme Fatale" and "I'll Be Your Mirror" spring immediately to mind, but come on, freakin Nico sang 'em, which in and of itself forced you to reasses them as songs. Her flat, hoarse rendering is so unexpected, so refreshing, that the songs become simultaneously parodic and touching. It's a remarkable achievement.

Meanwhile, "Sunday Morning" sounds nice and pretty and all that, but there's a lurking paranoia there. Sorta makes sense when you consider Reed's admission that the song is about walking around outside after dropping acid.

So here’s my gist about the Velvet Underground: Don’t make excuses for them, no matter how thankful you might be for those first 2 records and what they did for popular music. Listen to something else—something that’s at least sort of emotionally real and not just an inept bid for a hit by someone who should really know better. I’m talking about Reed—in case that’s not obvious—who would go onto a spotty solo career—not that I’d express much appreciation for what Cale’s done since. (Though he did offer some remarkable turns as a producer of artists like The Stooges, Patti Smith and Nico herself.)

At the outset, I said that all of this was about which Velvet Underground you embrace. I had a friend once, (I no longer do—and while our opinions about the Velvet Underground weren’t the thing that caused the demise of our relationship, I do think they were indicative of a gulf between us,) who, after a rant like this, asked me if we couldn’t have both Velvet Undergrounds. He would never say so, but I believe he preferred the last two records. That was his Velvet Underground. Whenever he’d mention the songs he dug, this was the body of work from which they were drawn. If he put a Velvets record on, it’d be one of these.

Of course, the answer to his question is that you can have both, if you like. But for the most part, I don’t see much reason to waste my time on those last two records. If they’re what get you, have at ‘em. Nothing personal. There’s no accounting for taste. I only speak for myself, but those first two records are some of the best music made, I think. As for the other two, if I’m being honest, I think they are a sneering hat trick with a dead, brittle core—and redundant in the face of better, more heartfelt pop stuff.

I suspect that if these two albums hadn’t followed The Velvet Underground & Nico and White Light/White Heat, the Velvets wouldn’t be a towering archetype in the history of rock. They’d be an obscure footnote—sorta like a band you might find on Nuggets. You’d hear “Jesus” and think, “Hey, that’s not a bad little song,” and that’d be the end of it.

If you wanted to hear good, emotionally raw pop music, there was certainly better stuff out there. (If you want my free advice, that is.) Try the Supremes or Wilson Pickett; try Nick Drake or Joni Mitchell. Try strychnine or the frickin’ neutron bomb, but do yourself a favor and see these records for what they are: utter crap by a great band—or by the remnants thereof anyway, since, apparently, it was less about a group of musicians working together and more like an ever-shifting franchise, like the Detroit Tigers or McDonald’s hamburgers, that’s really nothing more than a brand name.

(Interestingly enough, Doug Yule went on to make another “Velvet Underground” record sans Reed, which, is, I think, only appropriate.)

Try music that was so powerfully delivered that you more than forgave any triteness or cynicism in the lyrics. ‘Matter of fact, it was so powerful that you forgot who you were, listening to something so scarily fucking real. (Where were you the first time you heard, say, “Dock of the Bay?”) No, you embrace those words as emblems of your own human pain.

At it’s best, music’s about heart, and the late Velvets stuff seems virtually heartless.

OK, so having thoroughly bored anyone who might be reading this, lemme move onto a coupla blog-related matters before I go. First, I am gonna change the poll question soon. The old one's been up for, like, ever, and I'm sure any of you returning visitors are probably damn sick of it, if you've seen it at all. (It's way the hell down on the bottom of the page. There's a guestbook down there too, if you're inclined to let me know you were here. All of it may be moved to the top of the page soon, if I ever get off my lazy ass.)

If anyone (hello? anyone?) has an idea for a new poll question, I'd be exceedingly grateful to hear about it, as I haven't been able to come up with dick. (Well, OK, I have been able to come up with dick, but only my own, sadly.) Just post a comment to this entry, if you will, or sign the guestbook. Thanks much.

My second and last blog "annoucment": (Ha! How dumb does that sound?) I've found a place that'll house picture for free, so I may put a few up soon. Consider that a warning or a joyous pronouncement, as you will.

Till next time, Steve Forceman's on the road again...

(The Point of) Diminishing Returns

Sorry, Sloth. I haven’t updated in a while, because I was sucking that glass dick. Yes, I’m afraid it’s true: Steve Forceman has become addicted to crack cocaine. And opium. And peyote (which, technically, I know, is not addictive and is, in fact, viewed as sacred by many cultures that are just as valid as our Western European-derived model—possibly more valid. Do you see Native Americans deforesting the planet or re-making Solaris without even acknowledging the existence of Tarkovsky’s original? What’s more, that movie repeatedly demands that you look at George Clooney’s ass, which I find really irresponsible, as I’m also addicted to George Clooney’s ass and have conscientiously tried to avoid looking at, fantasizing about, making sculptures and/or other artistic renderings of, smelling, licking, devouring, fucking, pissing on, picking my nose and wiping it on, fondling, kissing, writing sonnets and/or light or heavy operas concerning, producing video games or reality TV shows or music videos or documentaries about George Clooney’s ass. Oh yeah—and Western culture also refuses to provide adequate care for its sick and elderly.)

And crystal meth. And methadone. And Malomars. And porn featuring road kill— prominently featuring road kill—because until you’ve shoved your dick into a flattened raccoons corpse during the height of summer, when it’s especially fragrant and draws a sweet cloud of flies—slide it right into that rotting asshole, amidst internal bleeding and the compacted turds that were part of its last bowel movement, but didn’t quite make it out, because its death was so sudden and violent—you haven’t lived, buddy.

And smack. And PCP. And nicotine gum. And chewing gum. And bubble gum. And spirit gum. And the mysteries of Agatha Christie. And chocolate. And dangerous sex with complete strangers. (Last night, sans DentalDam, I sucked a Hassidic rabbi’s cock in the middle of a blizzard in front of the American Nazi Part HQ, here in Chicago. But no one noticed, so all I got out of it was a mouthful of semen and braided pubic hair.)

And Valium. And Librium. And laudanum. And alcohol. And earwax. And CNN’s election coverage. And collecting stuff from the Franklin Mint. And hashish. And shopping (at stores, off television or online). And gambling. And skiing. And belching. In fact, the only thing I don’t feel a compelling need to compulsively immerse myself in and/or take into my body is cigarettes. That habit, I’ve finally kicked. Unfortunately, with all the other habits I’ve added in kicking cigarettes, the doctor’s only giving me 6 more hours to live.

Which reminds me of this dream I had about actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, star of, among other things, the classic French New Wave film, Breathless (of which there is also a shitty American remake, BTW). I’d been thinking about Belmondo a lot lately—mostly flashing on Pierrot le Fou—I kept finding myself quoting his line about how “There are days, it seems, when one meets nothing but squares.”

So then I had this bizarre dream, in which fascinatingly ugly Belmondo was leering at me without a cigarette protruding from one corner of his mouth. It was ridiculous! But see, there was the doctor, telling Belmondo he’s gotta quit smoking, or, you know, Belmondo’ll die. And macho as he is, Belmondo’s a little squeamish about cancer. See, he’s known a person or 2 who’ve clamped their lips to that fetid monster’s in a long, agonizing kiss of death, and, well, he’s not so sure he’s up to that. So he decides he’s gotta quit.

Now this is no small thing—not nearly as light a decision as it was or would be for you or me. Nope. This Jean-Paul Belmondo. Smoking isn’t just what this motherfucker does; it’s what he is. And he’s not just a man, he’s an icon of cool—almost godlike, in spite of or because of his awkward widow’s peak, his sad sack demeanor, and the fact that he’s French and about as suave as Al Bundy. (Well, OK, a little more suave than that.) And in my dream here, Belmondo’s he’s still youngish. It’s not like his iconic days are over. (Wonder if ol’ Belmondo really has quit by this time.)

Anyhoo… There’s our Belmondo, and he knows it’s over either way. If he goes on smoking, he won’t even enjoy what time he has left before he gets sick. He’ll be too busy anticipating the end—too busy living with the fear of death. And if he quits—well, he can’t live with the world watching him become uncool. He doesn’t wanna go out like Marcello Marcello Mastroianni, who was less cool to begin with, (though maybe more suave,) and who, by the end, was often reduced to these cuddly teddy bearish old man parts, and that’s, like, pretty degrading. Besides which, though he’s cooler, Belmondo just isn’t as cute and/or handsome as Mastroianni, which would be kinda important as he aged and made his transition to the lovable old fart roles, so his career would doubtlessly founder anyway. I mean, again, who the fuck wants to look at a smokeless Belmondo? It’d be like looking at a Jimmy Durante without a huge nose or an Aquaman without his bumpy orange, skintight shirt, black trunks, and finned yellow boots (which, come on, you gotta admit, is pretty hot. I know it gets me goin’). It’s an abomination—or worse, it’s an act of anemia. (And yeah, Steve Forceman knows that anemia is not active at all, but OK, it could be the result of an act of vampirism, say, and that’s pretty active. So fuck off.)

So Belmondo knows what he has to do. He packs up a few things, and without a word to anyone, he hops in his corvette and drives to the airport. He charters a plane to America—Phoenix—and here, he rents a car. Not a convertible, though he woulda preferred it. It wouldn’t do him much good in the desert. Without a map, he just drives—eventually moving from freeway to two-lane highway to small rural route to unmarked dirt road. As he moves. In the rearview mirror, his eyes channel back a deeper desolation—needs that will never again be filled.

Then he sees it: a roadside diner. There are no signs outside, but when he pulls up outside, he can see a large piece of cardboard in the window. It’s black and bears a bright orange legend: NO SMOKING.

Belmondo sighs and gets out of the car, reflexively reaching to his breast pocket, where his cigarettes aren’t. He walks up to the place, opens the door, and from the cool, shady interior, they greet him in a depressed chorus: Bogie, Jackie Gleason, Lucille Ball, The Duke and so many others, their sallow skin almost glowing in the shadows. A heavy, dark eyed waitress with orange hair steps forward, chewing on a piece of gum, to take Belmondo’s order. Behind him, the door closes. Forever.

Cage Match: Peter Cottontail vs. Ema Saiko!!!

Leo Tolstoy wrote: “The aim of art is to infect people with a feeling experienced by the artist.” My own experience has borne out the truth of this statement. This’ll sound really cornball, Sloth, but there is something profound and damn near inexplicable that happens when I connect with a piece of art. I encounter an idea or feeling that has been expressed so accurately (according to my own experience of life) that I am overwhelmed with gratitude. I feel as though I’m taking part in a kind of communion, or if you prefer, like I’ve been infected with a virus, because isn’t that more or less analogous to the potential for life—a mingling of biological materials from two different sources? So art makes life. And when your own personal lust for life is beginning to run low, that’s when a booster shot of the old art virus can be quite valuable. Take the day when I stumbled across Ema Saiko.

It was about 2 years back, when I was still living in Pilsen and hadn’t yet become a private investigator. I had settled in to spend the afternoon writing. Not that I could see the point. My sense of literary purpose had been flagging lately. I mean, who the hell cared what I thought? Like there weren’t thousands more of me out there to parrot the same semi-masticated pulp of half-ideas and proto-feelings.

I’d been out of college for a while, so there was no one paid to argue that literature mattered to me. And while I still loved it, was in awe of it, I wasn’t sure that the feeling was reciprocated. And besides, literature was most assuredly not putting a tiger in my tank or a steak on my table. I had a crappy job temping in the mail room of a sinister n’ monolithic ad agency; a lot of stories floating around in the slush files of various literary magazines; a psychotic cat; a classically dysfunctional family back in Michigan somewhere; a romantic companion who was actually kind but not boring, but to whom I felt my mood swings, insecurity, poverty and general lack of sex appeal were probably just a burden; and few friends left. Much as I wanted to believe that writing mattered, I was having a hard enough time believing that life mattered.

Still, I sat at my desk, and I tried to write. Just to amuse myself, I tried to come up with something really ridiculous. Sometimes I’ve had luck with that when my ideas were running low or not at all. I envision the most absurd situation possible—preferably one that called for tremendously bad writing—and somehow, I relax to a point where I can just enjoy the act of writing again. But on this day, nothing was working. A gaggle of men in cowboy outfits—no pants, just chaps, with gun belts and ten gallon hats—hip-hop dancin’ to beat the band and all wearing Groucho Marx glasses. Nothing. Not even a smile.

I looked out the window, hoping that some detail from somebody else’s life might strike me as noble somehow, or at least less futile. The street was empty. It was one of those shitty autumn days—the crisp leaves and warm tones were gone. From here on out, it would be mulch, cold rain and winds that carry an ache with them. You can feel winter lurking somewhere in front of you, and with it, the end of another year, in which your accomplishments had fallen a little short of what you’d envisioned, when, at the beginning of the year, borne up on a wave of self-hatred, you’d told yourself (and actually believed, which is the kind of naïve optimism for which you were always dismissing the masses around you,) that you were going to consciously make an effort to change for the better. And here you were—a little heavier, balder and older—wondering just where the fuck your passion and sense of faith in yourself had gone.

And inevitably, at some point, your eyes would brush one of those rejection letters that you always stupidly leave lying around, as if you need some further reminder of your mediocrity, some objective, external voice to tell you what you already believed in your hearts inner core of cores—that you don’t matter, are superfluous, just more surplus population. That if you measured you net worth, say in terms of resources consumed—clothing and other goods squeezed out by various sweat shops in various desperate places that you had the good fortune to not even have to think about if you didn’t want to, (and why the fuck would you want to?) oxygen consumed from an atmosphere that’s already befouled by the exhaust fumes generated in the name of carting around your flabby ass to buy even more goods, food consumed, including, but not limited to the butchered remains of various living creatures, that, for all you know, had appreciated life as much or more than you do, and produce plucked by starving migrant laborers from field and orchards saturated in carcinogenic insecticidal agents, tons of garbage sitting permanently in landfills all around the country—if you were to weigh all the riches you were taking and all of the poisons you secreted or excreted or that were being produced on your behalf against the dubious good that you’d done for the world or its inhabitants—there was that bum you gave a dollar to so that he’d shut up, say, or the letter you wrote your lonely, fragile grandmother in her dusty, boxlike home on the outskirts of lovely Flint, Michigan, the balance might be a bit shaky.

Because you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and what is an egg, but a symbol of life—maybe a fun Easter trophy? And here comes Peter Cottontail, a clutch of rotting eggs hidden away in his basket, which has of course been lined with plastic grass that will not break down in your lifetime. And he’s got some candy for you. Maybe a six-pack of Bass ale to take your mind off of all this morbid free-associating on a topic that is so clear in a mathematical sense. As if you need to question your worth, whether in a net way, you are good or bad for anyone but yourself. You’re bad, motherfucker—not to be confused with a bad motherfucker, because you sure the hell aren’t that—and you know it.

But no, drinking alone in the middle of the day is no answer. (Nor is suicide, unless you have the balls. And you haven’t.) So Peter Cottontail will have to peddle his wares somewhere else on up the bunny trail. (And notice, as he hops away, how suspiciously his skin drags and flops, as though it were a costume. Like, maybe, that isn’t a bunny there at all, which you had to kind of wonder about anyway, given his roughly human height. Like maybe it was all just a con—whose, I couldn’t say. The government, the media, corporate America are all suspect. It lacks the drama of an al-Queda type action, but then those guys are pretty hostile toward Christian symbols, and is not Easter one of the two most significant days on the Christian calendar? And viewed from that perspective, what is old Peter Cottontail, but sort of like a goodwill ambassador for Christ. Sort of like his spokesperson for marketing purposes. Sort of like the Trix rabbit is for the Kellogg Corporation.)

No, while I recognized that on this day, writing was getting me nowhere, even if I was going to take a break, I was going to have to find a healthier way of doing it. TV, beer, mescaline, internet porn, computer games would all just lead to further self-loathing, which would lead to further paralysis, which would lead to no writing done, which would lead to further anxiety, which would lead to further feelings of pointlessness. And you do the hokey pokey & turn yourself about & C… It was a vicious cycle, and I needed break out of it. I needed clean, healthy inspiration. And I knew I couldn’t think in my apartment. I’d been alone there for too long and was beginning to feel not just irrelevant, but non-existent.

Although going outside sounded like a terribly laborious prospect, I needed to get away. Movement would be good, might even feel good, I reasoned, once I built up some momentum. At the time, I lived in a low rent, crime-ridden Chicago neighborhood. There were holes in the sidewalk through which you could glimpse garbage and lost toys lying in the dirt below. It was not uncommon to meet an unattended dog wandering about, weaving occasionally into or out of traffic. While this area offered plenty of fascinating sights, sounds and smells, it could be sort of a downer if you were already feeling inclined toward melancholia or morbidity.

I decided to head into the Loop, thinking I’d hit the Art Institute or something like that. Maybe someone else’s inspiration would inspire me. After all, it’d worked before. I’d gazed at a sculpture of, say, Vishnu, dancing on a demon’s head—something wrought by someone living in India about a thousand years before—and something in it somewhere would speak to me, in spite of the gulfs between me and the artist.

So I headed over the subway, doing my level best to look at and think about nothing, to just be Zen.

Before long, I was on the El platform. I lived near the end of the line, which meant that trains did not always arrive and depart in a timely fashion. It was cold up there, exposed to the winter wind. A pigeon was rooting about between the boards at my feet, finding very little, it seemed. It was fat, and its feathers were falling off in patches. Unsettling—only a moment before, I’d been studying the carcasses of this bird’s relatives decomposing in the gap between the platform and an adjacent building behind me. It was like a guano-encrusted mass grave for pigeons. And now, this live bird is looking at me with confused anger—a gaze not unlike those of seemingly every human being I’d passed on my way to the train. I imagined my own eyes weren’t that different.

We stood there, staring each other down for a while. Then the bird abruptly launched itself into the air, still level with my feet, heading toward the opposite platform at a terrific speed. It flew over it and would have gone past, but the Plexiglas barrier behind stopped it with an audible thump. The bird just sat there. I thought it was dead, but then it stood. Its bleary eyes found me again. Then it waddled off, up the platform, not in any kind of a hurry at all.

I rode into the city, the train leaning in close to the walls around me. I watched the sunlight glinting off of the skyline, making everything look cold and hard. I really needed that Indian sculpture now, or maybe a decent van Gogh. Thing is, when I got to the museum, there was a really long line outside. Tourists in salt-stained winter coats fended off the street vendors, their breath showing in gray clouds.

Screw that. I’d had enough depersonalization for one day, so I headed up the street, without the slightest idea where to go. This little field trip wasn’t working out at all. If anything, it was just confirming my feelings of alienation and futility. I had to find some comfort soon, or I was going to hurtle myself into the Michigan Avenue traffic, and there wasn’t a cab in the city that would hit its brakes. I came across a Border’s, and in desperation, went inside.

Usually, I avoid bookstores. They’re dangerous places for me, because I often have trouble controlling my enthusiasm. I’m immediately transformed into something like a sugar-addled ten year old, jogging from one section to the next with an ever-taller stack of books in my hands. I can’t even stand still long enough to read more than a sentence or two, but that, sometimes abetted by my standing admiration for an author, is enough to compel me to buy a book. I feel an undeniable need to take it home and tear it apart, read every word, (even the preface and introduction, if any,) shred the binding, underline phrases that I find awe-inspiring—(when I come down later, my enthusiasm in this area often seems a little unbalanced)— spill coffee on its pages and otherwise begin building my personal relationship with it.

It’s only when I hit the register and watch the cost of my purchases rise to some truly alarming number, that I have any second thoughts. However, I’m far too easily embarrassed to back down at that point. I just take my bloated plastic bag and head home, assuring myself that I will never buy another book, that I already have too damn many of them and have no idea where I’ll put more, and that it’s hard to read anyway when you’re distracted by inconveniences like eviction or starvation because you’ve spent all your money on things you don’t really need and have nothing left to put toward your bills.

I could already tell that this visit to the bookstore would be different, and that worried me. I felt nothing—or so it seemed. I really wasn’t sure. It was like I didn’t have access to myself—like I was invisible to my own eyes—a concept, rather than a person—something without blood and arteries and neural impulses—or viewed from the other end of the spectrum, a soul, mind, or heart to be affected by the expressions of others. I was beginning to think I might just dissipate right there in Borders, that I’d lost enough cohesion to even exist anymore. Whatever else you wanted to say about my friend the pigeon, at least it was clearly alive. It might be sick, crawling with parasites, freezing, hungry and unable to write a sentence, (which at the time, didn’t seem to like a very valuable ability anyway). He could hate. He had viscera, and therefore, he had feelings. It was beginning to seem that I did not.

Well, OK, that’s not entirely true. There was some small, tenuous fear of dissolution left. I was trying to hold onto it, to nurture it as a means of making myself move. I was getting a little too comfortable standing there, about 5 paces through the anti-theft gates, disappearing. I couldn’t feel my arms or legs already, and I was pretty sure I’d imagined it, but some matronly, fur-clad Michigan Avenue type had seemed to walk through me only a moment ago.

And there were the walls of books, but they were just objects, subject to the same physical principles as everything else. (Except, maybe, for myself, the reality of which seemed to be dissipating.) Truth and beauty and all that jazz did not necessarily dwell in them. Might do just as well to go looking for hope (or whatever the fuck it was I was looking for) in a slab of concrete or a pile of dog shit or one of those plastic caddy things they put in the middle of a pizza when they deliver it to you. Mightn’t you?

I couldn’t escape the feeling that knew that if I didn’t do something fast, I really was going to fade out. I stepped into the closest aisle and picked up the first book my hand touched, grateful that my extremities still seemed to be there, for the moment. The title was Breeze through Bamboo, and the name of the author and illustrator was Ema Saiko. (‘Course, I’ve no idea what the original stuff reads like, but translator Hiroaki Sato rendered them beautifully.) I’d never heard of her. I opened the book and read from a page near the middle:

Solitary Living in Early Winter

This innermost room with little to do,
is adequate to commit my plain life to.
Drink a bit, and I forget my clothes are thin,
an idea, and I let my brush run aslant…

I can’t say what it was exactly, but something in these words and the ones that followed them stirred me. To me, they seemed both musical and vivid. What’s more, they were marked by a personality, something that gave them greater weight than their literal meaning or their phonetic sound. It was that same feeling I’d mentioned earlier—that connection. As absurdly sentimental as it may sound, I felt that for a moment, long dead Ema Saiko, who had lived in a way I could never conceive of, as a woman in Tokugawa Japan, had reached out to touch me. She had infected me with her point of view. I felt that I was no longer seeing my day through my own bleary eyes—blind to color and shape, kindness and stupidity; finding only mud and ashes—but with eyes that were clean. They were not Ema Saiko’s eyes—(come to think of it, that woulda been sort of disturbing—me walking around with some dead chick’s eyes in my head)—better than that, they were my own, cleared by her influence, strengthened by her insight and rejuvenated by her compassion. It’s hard to express my feelings about this without waxing rhapsodic, but I assure you that my gratitude and my relief were genuine.

I went on to read more of Ema Saiko’s kanshi poetry. It tells simply of the life she led. She finds beauty in the domestically mundane and joy in the subtlest movements of nature. I won’t lie and say I don’t still have a tendency to become morbid, pessimistic and/or jaded, but I have managed to remain corporeal since I ran across this book. I like to think that the infection has spread throughout my person, making me calmer and more appreciative of the world around me. It’s like a gift that Ema Saiko gave me, though as Denis Johnson once said, “She probably couldn’t have imagined me.” It mingled with other influences, drawn from various points of view, cultures and circumstances, but nevertheless, contributing to my understanding of myself.

That’s a consideerable strength, I think, to cull from a single poem. And in this way, there is a real and positive process of infection in art.

Well… BURRPP… That was certainly profound, wasn’t it? If there’s anyone left out there who hasn’t fallen into a diabetic coma, or just plain dozed off, I’m gonna say goodbye for now. Steve Forceman sez: Over & out.