Author Archives: admin

Dick move.

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Sometime early Monday morning, my old friend and collaborator Tommy Marth committed suicide.

What a prick.

And Tommy was a prick, make no mistake. It was his chief public characteristic. He was cynical, sarcastic, caustic as industrial solvent. The day he met my wife Rosalie, he walked up and said “So this is the stupid bitch who’s marrying you?” He was kidding, but one of Tommy’s greatest talents was the maintenance at all times of an absolute poker face.

I say one of his talents, because Tommy had quite a number of them. Like every member of his family, he was a gifted musician — in Tommy’s case, it was the saxophone. He was most known, in fact, for being the studio and live saxophonist for Las Vegas’s biggest music act, The Killers, playing on their records Sam’s Town and Day And Age. But he also played with a lot of less-known local acts like Black Camaro, Ryan Pardey’s up-and-coming Halloween Town…and me.

Tommy was possessed of one of the fiercest, most unrelenting minds I’ve ever encountered. It would be a mistake to say that Tommy didn’t suffer fools gladly; in point of fact, he didn’t suffer them at all. He had no patience with stupid people or the mentally lazy, and he didn’t bother to hide his contempt, which also contributed to his reputation as a gigantic raging asshole.

I met Tommy, I think, sometime in 2000 or possibly 1999, at Cafe Espresso Roma, where I met so many of the people who’ve become my good friends and family. Back then, Tommy was still modeling and accompanying casino club DJs on saxophone. My first impression was: prick. And he really was. Why not? He was a male model who literally had to fight off starlets like Tara Reid, who once walked up to him when he was playing at a club and stuck her tongue down his throat. He had no reason to be humble.

But then, slowly, I got to know him, and I discovered that underneath his abrasive exterior was a thoughtful, restless autodidact who was fiercely loyal and devoted to his friends and protective of his family. Tommy and I were very similar in many ways: avowed atheists, obsessive music lovers and makers (though Tommy was far more talented in this direction than I will ever be), voracious readers; deep romantics masquerading as dismissive cynics. Tommy sneered at the world because it consistently failed to live up to his expectations of what it could be.

For a few years there, we were close. I moved in with Tommy’s brother, Ryan, and Tommy and I would sit for hours and hours in Ryan’s condo, filled with instruments and recording gear and the detritus of a thousand electronic experiments, and watch movies or play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City endlessly, disregarding the built-in missions in favor of simply raining chaos down on the cops and whores of Vice City, stealing tanks and using them to demolish entire neighborhoods of the city while “Fascination” by the Human League played endlessly on the in-game radio station. (On at least one occasion when we finished a marathon gaming session by heading to nearby all-night bar and restaurant Ichabod’s, I nearly had to physically restrain Tommy from ramming a cop car, pulling the cop out, beating him up, stealing his cruiser, and going on a mayhem-filled joyride. It was that kind of game.)

We never paid to get into nightclubs or bars; Tommy knew everybody. We would stand back and critique the decor of the place, the layout, the DJ’s music choices, the lighting. For Tommy, the glamorous Vegas nightclub wasn’t fun, it was a job. He was one of those people who float through the places other people are desperate to get into, shaking hands with the club owner, the promotions manager, the barback, the DJ. Tommy knew everybody.

If you knew Tommy, you may have heard him called “Perfect” Tommy. That was my nickname for him, taken from a character in Buckaroo Banzai. He was “Perfect” Tommy because he was perfect. He was a pretty man who often inspired naked lust in women who encountered him, until they tried playing flirty and ditzy with him and he sent them away with a dismissive remark. (His rebuff to a supermodel who was desperately trying to engage his attention: “Are you the president of the Ron Perlman Lookalike Club, or just a member?”) He was perfect because he could back his bullshit up, because he was always the coolest guy in the room, whether the room in question was our kitchen or the dancefloor du jour. I even made “I (Heart) Perfect Tommy” t-shirts with an online printshop; to our delight and confusion, I sold one to somebody on the far side of the world.

We were close, and then we weren’t. Tommy was increasingly involved with his music career, and he seemed to spend less time out and about, more time in the studio or just hanging out with Ryan and their sister Melissa. We were close, and then life happened, the way it often does, and instead of hanging out with Tommy every night, I’d see him once a month, then once every few months. He got busy; I got married and quit drinking, which obviated the only two reasons I ever really made the scene. We just weren’t moving in the same places anymore. But he was still my friend.

When he went on tour with the Killers, we sat around Facebook and giggled at the pictures he sent from far-flung places: Tommy riding a bicycle in Paris looking like some kind of sinister homosexual prostitute in his everpresent (and utterly hetero-challenged) v-neck t-shirt, Tommy at the Acropolis in Athens, Tommy surrounded by adoring groupies backstage at a London show. It was funny to imagine Perfect Tommy hanging out with the bright young things of 2000s indie rock, still sneering, still the coolest guy in the room. (He once spent an evening in the NYC apartment of Strokes lead singer Fab Moretti, discomfiting Moretti’s then-girlfriend Drew Barrymore by endlessly giggling at how much she resembled his sister Melissa.)

Then he came back, and seemed to resume the path he’d been carving for himself for years: working at the Revolution Lounge and the Royal House and the Beauty Bar, handling nightlife promotion or managing the bar, still recording and playing gigs with friends. Since November, he’d been working as nightlife promotions manager at the Hard Rock Casino.

I found out that last part, by the way, by reading his obituary in the Las Vegas Weekly. The last time I really talked to Tommy was at his brother Ryan’s birthday party last year. I’d seen a couple of times since then, for brief moments, at the Beat Coffeeshop or outside the Griffin or at the Royal House, but we’d barely done more than hug and promise to catch up.

Every so often the last few years I’d call him and text him and email him to come and have coffee or get food, and he simply wouldn’t respond. It hurt my feelings, slightly, but Tommy was Tommy. He’d been having other problems as well, which I won’t go into here, and I was worried about him. But whenever I’d see him, he always seemed to be doing well, to be happy — or as happy as Tommy would ever allow himself to appear to be — to be enjoying himself. He was busy, living the dream, or so I thought.

Until yesterday, when my friend Carey Kaplan came into the Coffee Bean, where I was sitting and working on my laptop. (Where I’m sitting and writing this now, in fact.) Her eyes were red.

“How ya doin?” I asked her. She started to sniffle. “Not good.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked. She just looked at me. “It’s bad,” she said.

“Is it something I need to know?”

“You’ll find out anyway.”

“Well, what the hell is it?”

And she told me, and I felt the ground drop away from under me.

Last night, a few of his people came by my house. We sat on my front lawn in my cheap plastic patio chairs and drank Jameson’s and listened to the Pogues and told stories about the silly, mean, amazing shit Tommy had pulled in his brief life.

His brother Ryan came over late. We laughed about what a dick move Tommy had pulled. In fact, Ryan and I agreed, we should hang a banner at the entrance to his funeral that just read DICK MOVE in giant letters. I pulled out an old promotional ad I’d made for my erstwhile music store Mperia.com, featuring Tommy and Ryan and our friend Alex and myself as a sort of retarded fake boy band. Ryan was the Sensitive One, Alex the Pretty One; I was the Odd One, the one member of every boy band who seems utterly out of place. Tommy was the Tough One, throwing shapes in a pair of wraparound sunglasses and a Kangol hat.

We talked about the surreality of receiving condolence messages via the social networks from Killers fans; I was unaware that, for some time, Tommy helped to manage the Killers’ official fan club. It surprised me because it seemed totally at odds with the Perfect Tommy I knew, but many of the fans who messaged me or replied to my posts told me how sweet he was with the Victims, as they were called. (I joked with Ryan and TJ Styles, bassist for Big Friendly and a close family friend, that when I started getting messages about how nice Tommy was to the Victims, my first thought was “They knew about the victims? I thought Tommy had hid them away better than that.”)

Some of our friends seemed horrified by the fan messages, but I thought they were kind and respectful, and I understand them, I think. Tommy meant something to these people as well. Not the same things he meant to us, but he was still someone who had touched them, either through his music or by simply being nice after a gig, and I was grateful for their sympathies.

I asked Ryan, as delicately as I could, how they were planning to handle the funerary arrangements, as he and the rest of Tommy’s family are Christians and Tommy was a vicious atheist. “We’re gonna do the most religious ceremony we can,” Ryan laughed. “Because fuck him.” I suggested we get a Catholic priest and a Mormon elder and a voodoo houngan and a faith healer, and then get Richard Dawkins to piss on Tommy’s grave. It made Ryan laugh, and I was grateful for that.

My heart is broken, not just because my great friend is dead, but because his massive dick move has also broken the hearts of his brother and sister, who are two of my favorite people on Earth, and whose sweetness and good-naturedness have always stood in marked contrast to Tommy’s cynicism. They do not deserve this, nor do his parents, nor do any of us who cared about him.

I don’t know why Tommy chose to do this stupid thing, or if it was even something he considered for more time than it took to do it. I’d always known that Tommy was wounded by a world that never lived up to his expectations, but I’d always assumed his colossal ego, arrogance and intelligence would keep him moving, because fuck the lot of you. And I’d always sort of looked forward to seeing old Tommy: old, mellowed out Tommy. He would be calmer, less cruel, less dismissive…but he would still have been the coolest cat in the room.

And now we’ll never find out.

So we’re going to bury Tommy soon, and the rest of us are going to go on. He will never get any older, mellow out; his perpetual growth of stubble will never go gray, his bald head will never stoop. He will exist only in the memories of those who loved him, and who will always miss him, and always be furious at this, his last dick move, and I miss him like hell already.

Goodbye, brother.

Common People

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We’re rednecks, rednecks
We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground
Rednecks, rednecks,
We keepin’ the niggers down.
–Randy Newman, “Rednecks”

What do you have when you come from a poor-white background? And from a place where Reconstruction didn’t end until the 1950s. If you came from people often referred to on campuses as crackers and rednecks or, condescendingly, as blue collar or poor-white Appalachians. If even the uncertain gentility of the South, who accord physical work no dignity at all, refer to your people as peckerwoods – in what tradition do you find an example? That we whaled the piss out of them that first time at Bull Run? That Great-granddaddy did right at Vicksburg, that a corner of Shiloh is forever Yazoo City? There is much honor and more sense in having succeeded with what was left, making something with the damned forty acres and a muddy mule, but you have to be able to see that. No one will tell you.
–Thomas Harris,
Hannibal

I am increasingly cognizant, these days, of the notion of privilege, and the fact that, as a straight, physically large and intimidating white man, I possess quite a lot of it by default. It’s increased particularly since my marriage, oddly, because I am now acutely aware that my lovely and wonderful wife does not exist in the same universe I do.

In my universe, a dark and empty street holds no particular fear; as I always jokingly assure her when she tells me to be careful on a late-night walk to the store, I’m the thing to be afraid of in the dark. And it’s true. Nobody catcalls at me, or tries to get me to get in their car, or tries to put their hands on me. But people — men – do that to her, with a casualness and frequency which I find astonishing.

That astonishment may sound naive to you, and maybe it is. But the fact is that men don’t do that to her when I’m around. Men don’t do that to any women when I’m around. It’s not like I’m some kind of white knight; it simply literally does not happen in my presence, presumably because the kind of men who behave this way are the kind of cowards who wouldn’t dare harass a woman if there’s even the possibility that another man might call them out on it. I live in a world where that horrible shit doesn’t exist.

And of course, as I’ve become aware of this, I’ve become aware of all the other horrible shit that doesn’t happen to me; the shit that happens outside the edges of my peripheral vision. Nobody ever follows me suspiciously around a store because of the color of my skin; nobody ever talks to me as if I’m mentally challenged when I go into a bookstore; nobody ever calls me a faggot and threatens to kick my faggot ass (at least not anymore, but that’s a whole other story). Nobody ever makes snide half-muttered remarks about how I ought to go back to my own country. Nobody ever tells me that what I need is a big dick in my pussy to turn me straight.

I don’t even see this happening to other people. Maybe it’s just because I’m not mentally prepared to see it when it does happen, or even recognize that it’s happening. But I’m a pretty observant person, and by and large I think that it really doesn’t happen when I’m around, for the same reason that men don’t actively and aggressively harass women in my presence: because the people who are likely to do that sort of thing don’t want to take a chance that my big scary ass might step in on the situation. (On the rare occasions that anybody will make a bigoted or homophobic or sexist remark to me or around me, it’s usually someone who’s obviously chemically altered or just plain stupid, like some douchebag frat boy or a random tweaker on a bus — people whose sense of self-preservation is at a low.)

But there’s another facet to the notion of privilege that I have begun to think about and question, one that perhaps comes from the opposite side of that idea: namely, the automatic assumption that straight white people automatically possess infinite privilege, a sort of token Get Out Of Jail Free card that they can throw up whenever they need to. I notice it because I see this idea taken for granted by a lot of people, and it is my experience that it is simply and bluntly untrue.

I recently read and was struck by a 2010 piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates entitled “A Culture Of Poverty“, in which he discusses his own aggressive reaction to a rude, insistent critic, and how it was, at least in part, a product of his own upbringing in rough West Baltimore:

It defies logic to think that any group, in a generationaly entrenched position, would not develop codes and mores for how to survive in that position. African-Americans, themselves, from poor to bourgeois, are the harshest critics of the street mentality. Of course, most white people only pay attention when Bill Cosby or Barack Obama are making that criticism. The problem is that rarely do such critiques ask  why anyone would embrace such values. Moreover, they tend to assume that there’s something uniquely “black” about those values, and their the embrace.


He’s right, of course: there’s nothing “black” about the mentality of being willing to whip somebody’s ass for getting up in your face and disrespecting your shit. I recognized his reaction immediately – man, you best step the fuck off – because it’s probably the exact same thing I would have done in the same situation. Because it’s not a product of “black”; it’s a product of poor.

We don’t talk much about poor white folks in America, these days. In the sort of circles I run in — liberal, progressive, culturally tolerant and permissive — poor white trash are the last cultural group who can be stereotyped, lumped together, dismissed and ridiculed without fear of confrontation or social reprisal. We call these people “rednecks” and refer to the rural states they occupy as “flyover” country; we label them as bigots and small-minded, childish religious fanatics; we shake our heads as they consistently vote against their own best interests, whichever way the neo-conservatives tell them to. We act like they’re fools.

And we’re right, of course. They are fools. But they’re only fools in the same way that poor urban blacks are self-defeating fools who perpetuate their own misery indefinitely; in other words, that isn’t the whole story or even most of it. And as Coates rightly points out, the question that’s never asked is: why would anyone embrace that sort of foolishness?

I think I have a rather unique perspective on the issue, owing to my rather eclectic upbringing. It’s not worth getting into my whole family history, but the long and short is: sometimes I was well-off, and sometimes I wasn’t. At best we were upper middle class; at worst, we were barely clinging to the “working” part of the working class.

I’m fairly confident in saying that I’ve been exposed to pretty much every way of life a white guy can be in this country. My grandparents were friends of the Bush family, Texas jet-setters during the oil industry’s economic explosion of the 1970s and 1980s; I went to private middle school with kids whose parents were business partners of Ross Perot, kids who had their own small yachts to compliment those of their parents. For my seventh grade school trip, we took a bus from north Texas to Vail, Colorado; it was my first time snowboarding, as I remember.

And yet, a few years later, for complicated reasons, my mother and stepfather and I were living in a trailer outside of Hamilton, Montana. My dad was out of work for a couple of months, because the sawmill he worked in had been shut down by Greenpeace activists trying to save the spotted owl. I was expelled from school for mouthing off one too many times to my teachers, so he and I would go and cut down trees for friends in return for a share of the firewood. One winter, we all slept in the living room of the trailer because that’s where the wood-burning stove was; every few hours, during the night, one of us would have to get up and spray off the chimney pipe of the stove with a hair spritzer full of water, because it would get red hot and begin to smoulder where it met the roof if we didn’t. We slept huddled together, because if we didn’t, we would have quite literally frozen to death in the subzero temperatures of the Montana winter night.

I don’t mention this to make you feel sorry for me; I mention it because I feel like I probably have a pretty good handle on what it’s like to be a redneck, to be a flyover person in a flyover state — to live your life, as Jarvis Cocker says in the classic Pulp song “Common People”, without meaning or control. But I also see what it’s like to be the sort of white person that people refer to when they refer to “white people problems,” like not being able to get good wifi so you can download your podcast of This American Life. Ta-Nehisi Coates can tell you that not all black people are the same; I can tell you, with the same absolute assurance, that not all white people are the same, either.

*     *     *

So here you are, a teenage girl in the heart of America’s heart. You were born in the tiny emergency room of the same small rural town your people have lived in for at least a century. Your parents aren’t hardworking salt of the earth farmers or millworkers, the kind of people that get country songs written about them and whom politicians like to hold up as examples of the rugged American can-do spirit. They’re white trash. Your mom’s an alcoholic who’s recently discovered the joys of bathtub crank; God only knows where your daddy is or even who he is. He could really be any one of the fat bastards who prop up the bar down to the Brass Rail six nights a week, when they’re not bowling.

You live in a trailer with your fifty-five year old grandmother, who insists you call her Mae instead of Granny or Grandma — “because, fuck, honey, I ain’t that goddamn old” — and who works part-time doing nails for the rich bitches who live up the hill, and spends the rest of her time sitting around drinking Southern Comfort out of a tumbler she got with Camel Cash that has a picture of Joe Camel playing pool and smoking a cigarette on it. That’s when she’s not down at the Brass Rail, drinking Rolling Rock and putting quarters in the jukebox to hear Shania sing “Man, I Feel Like A Woman” for the thousandth time and waiting to see which one of the upstanding gentlemen will take her home and fuck her tonight. Hell, it might be the same one who took Momma home back when it was Garth Brooks instead of Daughtry on CMT; nobody knows for sure, and it wouldn’t matter if they did.

Momma’s never had any kind of real job; sometimes she works graveyard down at the Stop ‘N’ Shop out on the highway, but that’s only when they need an extra hand and it’s usually only one or two nights a week when they do. Most of the time, your little family subsists on what they tend to call “government assistance” around here, because “welfare” is for niggers. Your mother will self-righteously tell anybody that she’s a stay-at-home mom, but apparently “stay-at-home” doesn’t include staying at home at night or most weekends.

What she does do when she’s at home is get into shouting matches with Mae and bitch about those fuckin’ skinny bitches on the TV and occasionally sneak into the bathroom to snuffle up some of the shitty crank she gets from one of her boyfriends, who’s a nominal biker with a connection out of Bakersfield, California. Any parenting she does is limited to sending you down to the Vons with your food stamps to pick up a loaf of Wonder bread, some generic bologna with the red wrapping on the outside, and a couple of six packs of Diet Shasta, because if you get a fat ass now you ain’t never gonna lose it, honey. Since the Vons won’t take food stamps for her Camels and her generic vodka, she sends you along with a Ziploc baggie full of quarters for those items.

You’re not in such great shape yourself. You don’t read too good; it’s just hard to pay attention in school. Nobody gives a shit if you do good or not, because everybody knows your family are fucking worthless, so they pretty much let you slide; that fuckin’ No Child Left Behind bullshit doesn’t really apply out here. You think maybe you’d like to go to school to be a fashion designer, but you’re not really sure how somebody actually goes and does that. You’ll figure it out later. They’ve diagnosed you with ADD, but you think that’s full of shit. Doesn’t matter. It’s not like Momma can afford to buy the medicine they prescribed you anyway.

You’ve been sneaking your mom’s Camels since you were ten, and smoking pot since you were thirteen. Momma doesn’t know you dip into her crank a little bit, every so often, when you need a little pick-me-up to drag your ass out of bed and down to the high school. One time, Troy down the road gave you a line of coke in return for sucking his dick at a house party. Fuck, you wish you could afford to do that shit all the time. But you can only think of one way to get the money to have a coke habit, and that’s some shit you’re not really into.

You technically lost your virginity when you were nine, when one of your mom’s boyfriends got drunk and came in your bedroom and accidentally fucked you instead of her. Now that you think about it, it’s entirely possible that it was actually your father. But that was, like, just some shit that happened; you really lost your virginity when you were eleven, to a twenty-three year old mechanic named Toby you met at a party. You told him you were seventeen; girls in your family always did develop early, and besides, he was so fuckin’ drunk you could’ve told him you were Dolly Parton and he woulda believed it.

You “dated” Toby  – meaning you went over to his house and fucked him while Survivor played on his TV in the background – for three months, until somebody finally told him how old you were and he panicked. Not that he needed to; it’s not like Momma or Mae gave much of a shit. They said they liked having him around. Mae always wanted him to sit next to her on the couch when he came over.

You heard from Becky’s sister that Toby’s a total homo now, taking night classes at the community college three towns over. “Taking dick-sucking classes,” Becky’s sister said, but what the fuck does that bitch know anyway?

Last year you were going out with Mike, who’s way into hip-hop; he wants to be, like, the next Eminem, except he can’t rap for shit. But he was a good boyfriend and he never hit you or left you stranded out in the country or anything like that. He even told you he loved you, and you believed him. You thought maybe you loved him too, and maybe he was the one. But then he cheated on you with that fuckin’ whore Lorena and got her pregnant, and she went to live with her cousins in Reno and Mike had to go in the Army. He’s in Iraq now, and sometimes he posts pictures of the baby on his Facebook, which you occasionally check at the school library. Lorena’s a fat fuckin’ goddamn whore and you’ve sworn you were gonna fuckin’ stab her if she showed her fuckin’ face around again, but the baby’s cute. You want a baby of your own, maybe.

Sometimes, lying in your single bed in your trailer at night, surrounded by stuffed animals and listening to the wind howl endlessly outside, you dream about a whole other kind of life, somewhere else, like on TV, where people live by the ocean and go and do all that weird shit you can’t even imagine. That’s the life you want; that’s the life you ought to have. When Mae takes you to church on Sundays, that’s what you pray to Jesus for: dear Lord our God in Heaven, meek and mild, please please please take me away from here. I wanna be one of the TV people.

And sometimes you sit on the curb at the Stop ‘N’ Shop, drinking a raspberry Icee and smoking a Camel, and you look out at the highway, the way cars just disappear into the dark, and you’d do just about anything to be in one of them, going anywhere, anywhere but here.

*     *     *

If that little fictional sketch sounds dramatic to you, then you’ve never spent any time in small-town America. In point of fact, it’s based on specific details of people I knew and went to school with…as well as some people from my own family.

Whatever special favors are granted by white privilege in America, they don’t particularly apply to my little small-town sweetheart here. She’s as trapped by the circumstances of her birth as any African-American kid in South Central or Latino kid in the barrio in Phoenix.

I know these people. I came up with them. I saw how few of them escaped the black hole of being a poor white redneck piece of shit in America. I was lucky I had the resources I did; lucky I ended up living in Las Vegas with a good job and a beautiful wife and a great life, instead of working at a dying factory married to some idiot girl I’d knocked up my junior year, with a parcel of dirty children and a whole lot of potential and good intentions washed down the drain.

And even when they do get out, their escape velocity doesn’t usually take them all that far. For a lot of kids I knew, the Big Show wasn’t New York or Los Angeles or Chicago; it was goddamn Billings, Montana or Boulder, Colorado or Ogden, Utah. They’re the ones who show up for interviews in the HR office at your company wearing Wal-Mart suits and big clumpy work shoes, the ones whose alma mater is Pinedale Community College, who still put their high school membership in Future Farmers of America on their resumes, who never did an internship and have absolutely no work experience because the only jobs where they come from involve manning a cash register, cutting down trees or cooking meth in a bathtub.

When they walk out of the office after their hesitant, doomed interview, you look after them and laugh; you’d never ever think of sneering at a black dude who came for an interview, but you’ve got no problem going “Dude, what the fuck was up with Joe Dirt?” Because he’s white, and therefore he’s got privilege.

Yeah. Cletus the slack-jawed yokel from East Buttfuck Holler, Kentucky might never get racially profiled…but he’s fucked just the same. If his chances of success in modern America are any better than the kids Ta-Nehisi Coates came up with in West Ballmer, it ain’t by much of a margin.

I don’t claim to be one of these people. I’ll absolutely, readily admit that I had opportunities and chances most of them never even dreamed of; the older I get the more I understand that, and the more thankful I am. But I’m also less inclined to simply dismiss them as stupid fucking rednecks.

Are they bigoted, small-minded, racist and homophobic and usually sexist as all hell? Sure. No defending them on that front. But I’m pretty sure Ta-Nahisi Coates would tell you that the easiest way to get your ass whipped in West Baltimore back in the day was to suggest that another gentleman might, in fact, be a homosexual. I’m pretty sure the boys in the hood had some extremely odd ideas about how rich white motherfuckers spent their time too.

*     *     *

Here’s what I figured out a long time ago: poor white trash and poor black trash have far more in common with each other than they do with wealthier people of their own skin color. We always make it about race in America, when it really has a lot more to do with class than anything else.

Part of that is an incredible trick, perpetrated by the wealthy elite in this country in the years after the Civil War, when all of a sudden the poor white stratus of Scots-Irish former indentured servants and fieldhands were joined by the newly freed African-American slaves. It was a pivotal moment in our nation’s history, and there was a moment when the paddies and the darkies could’ve recognized their common situation — namely, that their indenture and slavery had been replaced by an unspoken de facto economic subjugation by the same privileged landowners who had held the deeds to their lives so recently — and banded together to level the playing field.

But the trick — that hideous, remarkable bit of probably unconscious legerdemain on the part of America’s rich white ubermenschen – was to whisper into the ear of all those hillbillies. Sure, you’re poor, uneducated; you don’t have anything and you probably never will. You’ll never come sit at our table, Bubba. But you know what? You’re still better than a nigger.

And that hatred was what those poor motherfuckers held on to…because they didn’t have anything else except that toxic measure of their own negligible worth. Still better than a nigger, right? Or some smartass queer in San Fagcisco with his fuckin’ Pride parade, running around in a pair of assless leather pants…or some spic motherfucker wants to come up here and steal my job…or some stupid loudmouth bitch whinin’ about, oooh, equal rights. I may be ignorant as dirt, I may be mean as a badger stuck down a hole, I may have absolutely not a goddamn thing that ain’t on layaway or owned by the bank, but I’m better than all o’ them.

And so on, for a century and a half. The descendants of those bigoted, hating and self-hating and hated servants fought and died alongside the descendants of those slaves on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, the foothills of Korea, the jungles of Vietnam and the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan, partially out of patriotism but mainly because it was a noble way to get the fuck out of the shithole ghettos and the shithole small towns that spawned them. They died for an America that lied to them and told them they were enemies.

Can you hate them for their small-mindedness, for their savage insistence that they’re God’s chosen people on Earth, despite every bit of evidence to the contrary? Of course you can. You can hate a mad dog for trying to bite you. But you’re not human if you don’t feel pity, too…even though they’ll hate you twice as hard for pitying them. They don’t want you or need you, and you don’t need them. But we all have to live in this country together.

Perhaps if we stopped looking at the deceptively simple barrier of race, if we stopped our centuries-old denial that America is a nation where class matters more than perhaps anything else; if we asked Coates’s all important question of why, maybe we would be able to find more common ground than we ever thought imaginable. Maybe we’d stop seeing shifty niggers and stupid cracker around every corner, and start looking up the ladder at the real bastards who are fucking all of us, the ones for whom the only color that really matters is green.

I know I’ll never fully understand how much grace is automatically afforded to me here, simply by virtue of a set of characteristics over which I’ve had no control. But I’ve also seen where the limits of that grace lie, and what a pathetic advantage it is in the long run. I was also fortunate in that I not only saw how to escape the trap of poor white trash America, but that I was even capable of understanding that there was a trap in the first place: that white privilege and straight privilege and male privilege, for all they confer upon their possessor, only go so far.

It’s a lesson much smarter people than me seem to often miss, one I think they desperately need to understand before any real healing can begin in this country; before we can truly find any common ground.

A review of Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die, in the guise of an open letter to music bloggers

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Dear hip music bloggers,

Fuck off and die.

I can just see all of you, sitting in your little rooms in the weeks since Lana Del Rey’s disastrous appearance on Saturday Night Live, coming up with the clever little bon mots you planned to sprinkle all throughout your review of Del Rey’s debut album, Born To Die, the day it dropped. How you giggled at your own oh-so-apt metaphors! How proud you were of your complex understanding of the nature of post-modernism and the Society of the Spectale as it related to Del Rey and her public persona! This, you thought, this is the review that’s finally going to make Pitchfork sit up and notice me!

You’re pathetic. You’re not clever. And none of you know a goddamn thing about music, because Born To Die is one of the best pop records I’ve heard in decades and perhaps in my entire life. If you don’t hear that, you don’t understand anything about what pop music is. Go back to masturbating every time some member of Animal Collective tries (and fails) to capture the syrupy, wretched exuberance of ELO’s playbook.

Fuck off and die.

We get so caught up now in the deconstruction of music and musicians that a lot of the time, we just forget entirely about what music is and how to judge it. It doesn’t matter one single fucking bit whether Lana Del Rey is really Lizzy Grant or Miley Cyrus or the ghost of Nina Simone. It doesn’t matter whether she’s rich or poor, whether she grew up in a New York penthouse or in a pig wallow in rural Alabama. It doesn’t matter if she writes her own songs, or arranges them. It doesn’t even really matter if she can perform them live or on TV, because pop music isn’t about live performance anyway, it’s about how you interact with the music in your car or your living room or the interior of your own head.

Pop music is about sex and intoxication and romance and beauty and sleaze and the ways we can transcend our own lives through these things, and by this standard, Born To Die is flawless. And make no mistake, not for a second: Lana Del Rey is a pop singer. She’s not an indie rocker, she’s not avant garde. She’s a pop singer like Britney Spears or, God help us, Ke$ha.

But unlike these lesser talents, Lana Del Rey obviously likes indie rock and alternative and avant garde music. She’s absorbed decades of Stereolab and Portishead and Cat Power and Fiona Apple and even Patti Smith, and taken bits and pieces of all of it and made it something that will appeal to the common denominator.

People say the same thing about Lady Gaga, but it’s not true, because Lady Gaga makes shitty fucking music. Look, you know it and I know it; the only reason anybody gives a shit about her is because she’s made her career selling faux controversy to people desperate for it. To paraphrase the film Se7en, just because Gaga rented The Cell on DVD once doesn’t make her Joel-Peter fucking Witkin. It’s still shite house music no matter how you spin it.

Lana Del Rey’s music is gorgeous. (And it doesn’t matter if we mean Lana Del Rey the girl, or Lana Del Rey the public face of a songwriting/production team, or anything else. Stop being boring and pay attention.) It’s a blend of Peggy Lee and Missy Elliot and Angelo Badalamenti, hip-hop beats filtered through the noir side of every bit of American pop since Pat Boone’s “Moody River”. It’s lush and intoxicating, like the smell of Chanel No. 5 and Marlboros. It’s drawing from everywhere, Bjork and Blue Velvet. The best thing about Lana Del Rey is that her influences are impeccable.

You know what? I was going to write a real review of this record, but I’m not going to, because I don’t want to convince you that it’s amazing. You’ll buy it or you won’t; you’ll like it or you won’t. In fact, I hope you don’t like it, because then it’ll still be my little secret, someone else’s music that belongs to me the way music used to belong to people before the relentless light of the Net was shined into every dark corner, before every useless snarky fuck with a Tumblr decided it was their personal job to either create or destroy artists, whilst never having the fucking guts or the soul to make art themselves.

Fuck you if you don’t like Born To Die, and fuck you if you do. Either way, it’s mine, and I love it, and that’s all that matters.

Recipe: Mac ‘n Cheese Stovetop Soufflé

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Ingredients

  • 1 package macaroni and cheese (brand is irrelevant)
  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1/2 cup grated Cheddar cheese
  • 1/4 cup grated Romano cheese (the kind in the can works too)
  • 1 cup frozen cut spinach
  • 1 cup frozen peas
  • 2 eggs

Directions

Cook macaroni in medium saucepan. (If you don’t know how to do this, find a gun and shoot yourself with it.)

When macaroni is done, drain macaroni in strainer over container, reserving about half of the leftover cooking water. Pour cooking water back into pot and let it get nearly boiling again.

Add spinach and peas. Cook them in the water until they’re not frozen anymore (it won’t take more than 2-3 minutes, generally.)

Drain spinach and peas into strainer with macaroni. Melt butter in the saucepan. When butter is completely melted, add milk and cheese powder stuff from macaroni package and whisk it until it’s all mixed up. (It’ll be a bit thinner than you’re used to. This is fine.)

Pour macaroni, spinach and peas back into saucepan and, using big wooden spoon, mix with cheese sauce stuff until it’s nice and all mixed around.

Add eggs and grated Cheddar and cook over medium high heat for roughly 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until eggs are solid and mixed thoroughly with noodles and cheese and veggies. (You should be able to tell when this happens.)

Add Romano. Mix thoroughly. Cook for another five minutes.

Serve.

It’s Just The Internet. It Doesn’t Matter.

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It’s been reported that Diaspora co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy committed suicide this week at 22 years of age; while no one is sure of the cause, of course, there has been a lot of speculation that Diaspora’s lack of traction might have been a trigger.

I certainly hope not. I wish he hadn’t done it in the first place, of course; I wish I could have talked to the guy. I wish I could have told him that there’s very little you can do at the age of 22 that’s not undoable, short of killing someone or having a kid; no matter how bleak your situation seems, you can always change it. More than that, though, I wish I could have told him: dude, it’s just a fucking social network. It doesn’t matter.

I think a lot of us lose perspective working in this industry. There’s a lot of hyperbolic and impossibly hypocritical rhetoric thrown around by tech founders and venture capitalists. The words “world-changing” and “revolutionary” get thrown around a lot, and it’s mostly at projects and products that don’t deserve these adjectives.

Diaspora had and has absolutely no chance at “changing the world”. It’s another social network, just like the ones that came before it and have now vanished into the ether. By and large, social networks are not changing and will not change the world, any more than message boards did before them. They’ll be the default exciting way that people interact online for a few years, then somebody will come up with some permutation that’s different enough to warrant another generalized term — “social whiteboard” or some other such ill-fitting metaphor — and Facebook and Diaspora and all their predecessors will be just part of the early history of the global network. This new world of ours is nothing if not ephemeral.

Most of the “revolutions” we generate in this industry are really just incremental improvements on communications technology…and most of the worldchanging we want to do involves the part of the world that is our own bank balance.

What’s really sad though — assuming that Ilya killed himself because he believed his project was a failure — is that failure is not the end of the world. Hell, it’s not even failure, as long as you understand that every new technology or idea is just something you throw at the fucking wall to see if it sticks.

I’ve been involved with two failed startups so far. Both of them were excellent ideas — because, after all, that’s all a startup really is: an idea. One of them never even got publicly announced, because the logistics required to solve the problem it was attempting to solve were simply too expensive and complex to achieve. The other one was probably eight years ahead of its time.

It sucked when they tanked. But you know what you learn, when you don’t kill yourself at 22 because your idea isn’t getting enough attention and it looks like you might not be the visionary you thought you were? You learn that failure is inevitable. And you learn that you simply brush yourself off, go “Oh, okay, that didn’t work,” and look to see what collateral you can salvage out of the thing that didn’t work. Sometimes you’ll find you’ve invented a new technology that might be useful in totally different ways than you originally considered; sometimes you’ll find you learned a new skill; more often than not, you’ll simply walk away with more experience about how the world works, and how it doesn’t.

I’m building my own little sandbox on the Internet right now, and I’m old enough and wise enough not to have any illusions about its potential to change the world or make me a millionaire. I know the odds are against it…the way they are against any startup. If it fails? That sucks, and I’m going to do everything to keep it from happening, but if it does, I’ll just move on to the next idea. I’m never short of ideas.

And I struggle with depression every day. Every day that investors fail to materialize, every day that passes that nobody uses this cool thing I’ve built, I feel like the world is ending, like I should just fling myself under a bus and get it over with. But you know what? The world’s not ending. It’s just the Internet. It doesn’t matter.

It’s a tragedy when anyone who is not terminally ill commits suicide, and it’s even worse when they have their whole lives ahead of them; and maybe there was other stuff going on with Ilya Zhitomirskiy that is not public (and nobody’s business, of course). But if the guy really did it because his stupid fucking social network wasn’t becoming the coolest thing since Cheez-Whiz, that’s even worse, because it means he did it for really no reason at all. It was a meaningless act by someone who lacked the life perspective to understand how absolutely trivial the success or failure of his project was.

If you’re one of us — people like me and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, who make up ideas for a living — never forget that. Never forget that there’s always tomorrow, always another idea, always something new and great to do. Don’t believe the hype, yours or anyone else’s. Fight another day.

 

Putting Out The (Notional) Guitar Case

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As many of you who are regular readers know, I was kind of an early innovator in the realm of crowdfunding. I also regularly record and release my own music, which doesn’t make me a lot of money, but enough to occasionally pay for groceries and that sort of thing. As you probably also know, I’m in the middle of starting what I think is an exciting new Web tool, Stikki. Things are moving along for Stikki, slowly but surely…but it’s the slowly part I wanted to talk to you about today.

Here’s the long and short of it: a couple of days ago, our car died. We haven’t had it towed to a mechanic, but I’m 90% certain that the problem is that the transmission is kaput — specifically, the torque converter. (The car won’t shift out of first gear. It’s not grinding, just chugging, and that’s basically a sign that the TC is cooked.)

This isn’t much of a problem for me, as I work out of my house or the local coffee shops…but it’s a very big problem for Rosalie, who just started a new job on the other side of town. Las Vegas is a southwestern city, which means it’s a sprawl city, so her bus ride would be an hour or more, and our public transportation is both unreliable and franklydangerous for a single young woman. (Almost every dodgy situation I’ve found myself in since I moved to Vegas has occurred while waiting for a bus, and I’m a big scary dude.)

So we need to buy a new car or replace the transmission in ours, which will basically be about the same amount — $2500 or so. (If we buy an older car, I can do the repair and upkeep myself; I’m not a motorhead, but I know what a Chilton’s manual is and I’ve done basic repair work on my own vehicles before.) But at the moment, it seems unlikely that we’ll have that kind of spare money any time soon. (I’ve got one possible project that would handle essentially all of our money problems, but that’s a whole other story. Let’s just say I’m not holding my breath.)

Many of you have been willing, in the past, to pay actual cash money for my writing or my music. So here’s what I’d like to throw out here: what can I offer you that you’d be willing to pay a dollar or two for? More music? Fiction? Non-fiction? Some kind of web app? Something that, even if you yourself couldn’t afford to pay for, you’d be willing to share with the world.

I actually want to do something that’s crowdcommissioned, that’s what people want to see, rather than something I come up with myself. It’s an interesting challenge, and knowing you maniacs I’m curious as to what you’d come up with.

So what do you think? Tweet at me or write in the comments here.

Random Thought

Aside

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This is from something else I’m writing, but it didn’t fit, so I’m throwing it out here: A sort of inverse version of Metcalfe’s Law is that any node that is not part of a network loses value proportionally as the network gains nodes. A computer without Internet access was no big deal when the Internet had a hundred computers on it; once that number swelled to hundreds of millions, any PC without a Net connection became an antiquated toy.

The same is true of humans. Ask your friend who refuses to have any social network profiles, and sits at home alone on Friday night wondering where the hell everybody went.

Family Business

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Family Business
a short story by Joshua Ellis

The iterating of these lines brings gold;
The framing of this circle on the ground
Brings whirlwinds, tempests, thunder, and lightning.
–Christopher Marlowe

There’s nothing strange about an axe with bloodstains in the barn
‘Cause there’s always some killing you got to do around the farm.
–Tom Waits

*   *   *

“There’s a demon in y’alls’s barn,” said Betsy as I came up the road.

I was all dirty from bringing in the pigs, and I washed my hands under the faucet next to the door — if I came in the house with my hands all dirty, Momma was like to throw a fit, even if I didn’t touch nothing.

“You hear me?” Betsy demanded. She was eleven going on twelve, and I was fourteen, almost grown up; I wouldn’t have ever talked to her except she lived down the road, and she was bossy, always putting her hands on her hips and yelling at me for getting up to dickens, like she was my momma or my boss or something. Like she was doing now. She pushed her glasses up her nose. They were too big for her, and made her look like a little blonde owl.

I finished up and looked at her. “I heard you,” I said. I decided to humor her. “What did it look like?”

She shrugged. “Like one a them out of your book,” she said. I winced. Right before Halloween I’d taken one of Daddy’s books out of his library and shown it to her, to scare her, like. Her momma’d come to the house and had a talk with Daddy, said Betsy’d been pissing the bed.

I thought he was gonna whip the hell out of me, but he just sat me down and told me I couldn’t ever tell nobody about the library, or any of the old family stuff. “People wouldn’t understand,” he said. “Wasn’t too long ago they was burning folks up North for being witches.”

“We ain’t witches,” I said, and he laughed. “I know that, boy,” he said, “but most folk can’t tell no difference. They wouldn’t understand, like me being friends with Jim Cowan.”

I thought it was over after that, but now here was little Betsy pushing up her owl glasses and standing in my dooryard talking about demons. Momma told me once that some mistakes you keep paying for long after you think you ought to be done paying, and I guessed this was the sort of thing she was talking about.

I looked up to the house, nervously. Daddy was inside with his best friend, Mr. Cowan, listening to the President on the radio talking about something he called a “New Deal”. I could hear Daddy laughing in there, but it didn’t sound like he thought it was funny.

“New Deal my ass,” he said to Mr. Cowan. “Ain’t never been no new deal for the working man. Always been the same Old Deal.”

“Shit,” Mr. Cowan said, only it was more like sheeeeit. “At least y’all got an old deal. Us niggers ain’t never had no kind of deal at all.” My daddy cracked up hard at that, and then Mr. Cowan started laughing too.

Mr. Cowan taught down at the Negro school on the other side of town. I think he was their only teacher. Daddy said he was a king hell piano player too; he played at church Sunday night, but Fridays and Saturdays he’d go down to the roadhouse down by the highway and play all night. I asked Daddy once  if we could go see him, if he was so good, but Daddy said no. I asked him if he was ashamed to be seen with a nigger, and that was the only time he ever laid a hand on me. He slapped me hard across the face, but a second later his face was all sad. I was more shocked than anything.

“I’m sorry, boy,” he said. “I didn’t mean to do that. But I don’t ever wanna hear you call anybody that, you hear? It ain’t right. Mr. Cowan’s as good as you or me, and maybe better than me, come to think of it.”

“Then why can’t we go down and hear him play?” I asked.

Daddy smiled, but it was all tight on his face. “Because you know and I know there ain’t nothing wrong with it,” he said, “but if somebody like them McCormicks saw us, they’d cause trouble.”

“Trouble for us?” I asked him. He nodded. “For us, but more for Jim,” he said. “And I ain’t gonna bring that down on nobody if I ain’t got no reason to.”

I could hear the clink of beer bottles inside, which was good; it meant nobody was paying attention to what I was doing…and nobody was gonna hear Betsy babblin’ about demons.

“Ain’t no damn demon in my barn,” I said to her. “Now run on home.” Her eyes opened wide; behind those glasses of hers, it looked like two moons rising. “There is too a demon,” she said, “and I’m gonna tell your momma you was swearin’.” She made like she was gonna run up to my porch, and I ran forward to intercept her.

“Alright, shut up,” I said. “Ain’t you a baby?”

“Come and see,” she said, and she actually grabbed my hand and started dragging me along. So I went and saw.

 

*   *   *

 

The barn was older than our house; it was already there when my great-granddaddy bought our land right after the War ended — the Union War, not the one Daddy fought in over in Europe. I think the barn was why he bought the land; it was weird looking, not a normal big square barn but in this strange shape. It had five sides, or maybe six, I could never keep in my head which: it seemed like every time I counted it was different, but I wasn’t sure. It was made out of some kind of weird wood that was nearly black and looked like some kind of stone, and it didn’t hold a coat of paint worth a damn. Daddy had tried to paint it red a couple of times — he called it “protective camouflage” — but every time he did, he’d come out the next day and all the paint would be puddled up on the ground like it had dripped off during the night. After a while he’d stopped trying. He seemed to think it was funny. But he never kept the animals in it at all — he built a whole pen for the pigs and the cows that was all the way on the other side of the house from the barn, which was about a quarter-mile down a trail from our yard. It didn’t make any sense to me.

It was just starting to get dark around that time, and the barn cast a long shadow across the fields. It made me feel weird, like I didn’t want to walk inside it…but I could see, even in the dim light, that the big double doors were open. Not all the way, but more open than they ought to be.

“Were you playing in there?” I asked Betsy. “Goddamnit, girl, don’t be doing that. My daddy’ll tan your hide and mine too if he catches you in there. It’s dangerous.”

But she was shaking her head, and didn’t even call me out for cussing. “I was just walkin’ by,” she said, “and them doors came open, and I heard somebody inside. They was calling my name. I thought it might be your daddy, so I went and poked my head in.”

“And what did you see?”

“Something real bad,” she said, and took my hand again.

It seemed like it was twenty degrees colder in the shadow of the barn, but I put my big boy face on and went to the doors. Betsy stood twenty feet away, looking like she was going to run. I peeked my head inside.

The demon was sitting in the middle of the pile of hay at the far side of the barn. It looked kind of like somebody had taken a man and skinned him up for meat, but there was other stuff done to it too, like some kind of scientist had been doing an experiment. It was rubbing its pecker, but kinda bored like.

It grinned when it saw me.

You’d think I would’ve screamed and run away then, but I didn’t. I hadn’t ever seen anything like that demon before, but I’d seen plenty of other peculiar stuff. You couldn’t help it, being part of my family.

I tensed up, ready to grab Betsy and run if it moved, but it didn’t do anything, just looked at me and grinned and stroked that big old hog-leg it had.

“What you want?” I called to it, trying to sound tough. I didn’t feel tough.

It didn’t say anything.

“You ain’t got no business here,” I told it, “and you better get the hell out of here before I call my Daddy. He’ll come down here and kick your ass for you.”

It smiled even wider. “By a strange coincidence,” it said, “your daddy is exactly who I want to see.” It sounded like one of them rich people from up North who pretend like they’re from England when they talk, but when it said daddy its voice went into a deep drawl, like it was making fun of me.

“Then why the hell you hidin’ out in the barn?” I asked it. “He doesn’t ever come down here. Ain’t even no cows in here.”

“I cannot traverse the boundaries of the circle,” it said.

I frowned. “You mean the barn?” I said. “Barn’s ain’t no circle. It has fi–six–a bunch of sides on it. What are you, a dummy?”

“Bravado,” it said. “Perhaps I’ll rape you before I eat you, so you learn something. The term ‘circle’ is symbolic. Go get your father.”

“Oh, I’ll go get him,” I said, “and he’s gonna come back here and whip the shit out of you. I might help him.”

“We’ll see,” the demon said. “Go now. I’m almost finished here,” and it started jerking itself harder.

I wrenched up my face in disgust and closed the door. Betsy stared at me.

“You was talking to it?” she whispered. “What’d it say?”

“Nothing,” I told her. “I got to go get my Daddy.” I hunkered down a bit, so my face was in front of hers. “Listen, Betsy,” I said, “you gotta swear to me you ain’t gonna tell nobody about this. Not even your momma or your daddy, okay?”

She whimpered, like a puppy. There were tears dripping down off her glasses. “It talked to me, too,” she said. “It said bad stuff. Dirty stuff. I was scared.”

I put my arms around her. “Don’t you worry,” I said, “it can’t come out of there.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. But it can’t. And I’m gonna fix this. You believe that?”

She nodded and sniffed, but she didn’t look sure. I tousled her head.

“It’s alright,” I said. “You just run along home, now.”

“Where you goin?” she asked me. I smiled at her.

“I’m gonna go get my Daddy,” I said.

 

*   *   *

 

“Boy, are you having fun with me?”

“No, Daddy,” I said. He and Mr. Cowan sat at the Formica kitchen table, both of them eyeing me like I was a prize turkey. “I swear to God, it’s true. That’s what it…he…said. Said to come get you.”

Daddy looked at Mr. Cowan. “Whatcha reckon, Jim?” he said.

Mr. Cowan rubbed his middle finger on his forehead, which I’d noticed he always did when anybody asked him something he had to think about. “It doesn’t sound like nothing I’m familiar with,” he said. “Nothing Christian. Maybe hermetic?”

Daddy seemed to think about it. “Could be,” he said.

“But why the hell is it in your damn barn?” Mr. Cowan said. “You been doin anything out there?”

Daddy leaned back in his chair and half-smiled. “What do you mean, exactly, by ‘doin anything’?” he asked.

Mr. Cowan gave him the same look, I figured, that he gave kids in his class who were getting sassy. “You know exactly what the hell I mean, Darius Harkness,” he said, “and don’t you go bein all coy on me. This shit is serious.”

Daddy sighed. “Alright,” he said. “Maybe I was going through the Libris Infernium. Maybe I was trying out some stuff. Nothing big.”

“Big enough,” said Mr. Cowan. “You summoned this, this whatever-the-hell-it-is, and it got pulled into the nearest circle of protection. Which, in this county, is that ugly goddamn barn of yours.”

He and Daddy looked at one another for a long minute, their faces stony and serious. Then they both started laughing, fit to beat the band. Daddy was howling and gasping for breath, so hard he slid off his chair and onto the floor.

“Oh, what the hell you two up to?” Momma called from the basement. She was down there putting up cans in the pickle cellar. She came up the stairs, wiping the dust off her hands onto her apron. Momma was nearly as tall as Daddy; he said it was because she was a big ol’ Nordic frost giant by way of Fort Worth, Texas, and she said he ought to know better than to say a woman was a big ol’ anything. She came into the kitchen and stood towering over him, and put her hands on her hips, the way little Betsy did.

“Well, honey,” Daddy said, still chuckling, “looks like I got some uninvited company up to the barn.” He looked at Mr. Cowan, and then they were both off again, Mr. Cowan’s big white teeth shining in his brown face as he slapped the table with his hand.

Momma groaned. “Goddamnit,” she said. She leaned over and whacked Daddy on his head and shoulders with her palm. He just kept laughing. “You ain’t got the sense God gave a gopher, Darius Harkness,” she said. “You ever think about what could happen to your family, you pulling this foolishness? You ever think about that?”

“Aw, hell, honey,” Daddy said, trying to pull himself to his feet. “It’s stuck in the damn barn. It can’t even walk through the doors.”

“But he can,” Momma said, pointing at me. “You ever think about what woulda happened if he’d gone playing down there?”

“Aw, Momma,” I said, “I don’t play no more.”

“You keep your trap shut,” she said to me, her lips tight, her eyes squinted down to slits. She turned back to Daddy. “If anything had happened to him–”

“Nothing happened, baby, and nothing ever would. He ain’t stupid. He knows better than to go fucking around in that barn–”

“Don’t you curse in front of the boy, Darius,” Momma said, and whacked him again, but this only had the effect of getting him laughing all over again. “The two of you better quit braying like a couple of goddamn donkeys and go down there and take care of this, you hear me? I ain’t kidding with you. Now, you hear me? Right now.”

“Y-yes, mother,” Daddy said, trying to contain his laughter. “Better see what we got in the library,” he said, and he and Mr. Cowan went into the library.

You wouldn’t expect, looking at our house from the outside, that it contained an actual library; we weren’t rich folk by any means, and even though Momma worked real hard to keep the place clean and looking respectable, the fact was that we lived in a broken-down old farmhouse with windows that didn’t close all the way and floorboards that you could see through into the basement, if you laid down on em and peeked your eye through.

I’d never quite figured out exactly how we did have a library, really. I’d walked around outside and looked at the house, and then walked inside and looked into the library, which was a largish room with a high ceiling, and I couldn’t exactly understand where it actually went, within the walls. It didn’t have any windows, which was weird, since it was — I was pretty sure — on the outside of the house. It just had shelves on every wall, nearly to the ceiling, and in the middle a table made of thick old oak planks that looked like something out of one of Daddy’s old pulp books about pirates. I wasn’t allowed in the library when Daddy wasn’t in it; Momma wouldn’t go in there at all, not even to clean things, though it never seemed dirty.

But sometimes I’d sneak in by myself when Daddy was in town or away on business — like the time I took that book to show Betsy — and whenever I did, I always had this weird feeling like I wasn’t really still in the house at all, or even Callum County — like I was in some kind of other place completely. Like I went in there once in the middle of July, and the whole time I was in there I could hear the wind howling outside like there was some kind of blizzard out there.

At least, I think it was the wind.

Daddy threw the doors open and went inside with Mr. Cowan, and I followed them. Daddy went to the shelf to the left of the door and started walking sideways like a crab, hunched down, running his finger across the spines of the books as he went.

“Dee and Kelly?” he said to Mr. Cowan, who was looking at the books on the right side of the door. Mr. Cowan laughed. “Them old frauds?” he said. “Not for this.”

Daddy kept looking, occasionally pulling a book from the shelves and tucking it under his arm. When he had five or six of them, he took them to the big table and plonked them down. Mr. Cowan brought a couple of his own books over, and they started poring over them.

This got real boring after a while, so I started wandering around, looking at the books myself. Most of them didn’t even seem to be in English. I wished I spoke Latin, but we weren’t Catholics or anything. (We didn’t go to church at all, actually, and when I asked Daddy what kind of people we were if we weren’t Catholics or Baptists or Lutherans, he laughed and told me he guessed we were Democrats.) If we had been Catholics, I might have been able to tell you what De Vermis Mysteriis was. The Mysterious Vermin, I guessed.

Finally, Daddy called me over. “Was this what you saw, boy?” he asked me, and held up a big book whose pages were yellowed with age. There was a woodcut in it, and I peered at it.

“I think so,” I said. “Only he ain’t got his pecker out in this one.”

Daddy and Mr. Cowan looked at each other, and Mr. Cowan whistled. “Sheeeit, boy,” he said to Daddy. “Looks like you hooked yourself one big goddamn catfish.”

Daddy closed the book and put it back on the pile. “Well, I guess we better go throw his ass back in the river. You got your shotgun?”

“I wanna go with you!” I said.

“Absolutely not,” Daddy said. “Your mother’d skin me and hang my hide on the wall for company to look at.”

“Aw, Daddy, come on, please?” I said. “How am I supposed to learn nothin if you won’t let me watch?”

“I don’t think your momma wants you learnin nothin,” Daddy said, but he looked at Mr. Cowan, who shrugged. “It ain’t really like the boy got much choice in the matter, is it?” he said. “Might as well start now, when you still got an eye on him, than later, when you don’t.”

Daddy looked at him, then back at me, for a long minute. Finally he nodded. “Alright,” he said, “but don’t let your momma see.”

He and Mr. Cowan swept out of the room, and I followed them. I realized nobody’d put the books back on the shelves, and I opened my mouth to say something, but then I heard a noise behind me.

When I turned around, the table was empty. I guess somebody put the books away.

 

*   *   *

 

It was full dark by then, and Daddy grabbed his Ray-O-Vac flashlight and his shotgun from out of the hall closet. Mr. Cowan had an electric lantern, and he picked up the machete Daddy used to cut the weeds in the fall.

My heart dropped about a hundred feet when we got outside and Momma was standing in the dooryard, but then I realized she’d taken off her apron and her sun dress and put on the overalls she kept for gardening, and tied up her hair with a length of rawhide. And she had Daddy’s Sears & Roebuck axe in her hand, which she was swinging around a little, like she was testing the heft of it.

“Hell you think you’re doing?” Daddy asked her.

“You think I’m letting you two idiots take my only boy down there without me, you must be drunk or stupid,” Momma said.

They stared at each other.

“Goddamn, that’s why I love you, woman,” Daddy said with a grin, and started off down the path to the barn. After a second, Mr. Cowan shook his head and followed. I looked at Momma, and flicked her hand at me.

“Well?” she said. “You’re the big demon hunter now, boy, get your ass moving.”

She followed me and I followed them, and five minutes later we were at the barn.

Even from outside, that demon sounded as pissed off as a prize bull with his nuts cut off. We could hear him banging around inside and throwing things around. Occasionally he’d let out this sound like a pig getting its throat cut. And he kept shouting something. It took me a second to recognize the sound of my own name.

“Harknesssssss!” it shrieked.

“God in Heaven,” Mr. Cowan said.

“For your sake, I damn sure hope so,” said Daddy, and he opened the barn doors.

As soon as he did it was silent, like somebody’d shut the door of a madhouse. I stood behind Daddy and Mr. Cowan and peered over their shoulders.

The demon was sitting in the middle of the barn’s floor with its legs crossed, like an Indian swami. It looked up, and I thought it was still grinning until Daddy put his flashlight on its face and I realized it hadn’t ever been grinning at all. It just didn’t have any lips.

“Harkness,” it said. “Harkness, your mother sucks cocks in Hell, Harknesssssssss.”

“Probably,” Daddy said. “She sure sucked enough of them on Earth, way I heard it.” Momma slapped him on his back from behind. “That ain’t no way to talk about your momma,” she said.

“How dare you?” the demon said. “How dare you summon me, like I was your dog? Do you know who I am?”

“I got a fair idea,” Daddy said. “I ain’t impressed.”

“You will be,” the demon said, licking the cauterized wounds around its mouth. “When I peel off your son’s face and use it as a condom while I sodomize your wife, you’ll be quite impressed, I think.”

“You hear the mouth on him?” Daddy said to Mr. Cowan. “Perverted sonofabitch, ain’t he?”

“Just do it,” Mr. Cowan said, “and quit fucking around.”

“Oh, alright,” Daddy said. “Priinceps gloriosissime cælestis militiæ–”

The demon reached a hand back between its legs, grunted, shit into its palm, and flung it at Daddy, who took it right across the face.

“You think you can dismiss me with that children’s nursery rhyme?” the demon said, sneering. “And I thought the Harkness family was possessed of power. How sweet it will be, when I drag your violated carcass down the road of razors that leads to the gates of Pandemonium, when I hang your head from a spike made from the penis of a blue whale for all to see, when I–”

“Enough, already, you’re giving me a goddamn headache,” said Daddy. He raised his shotgun.

“Oh, shit, cover your ears, baby,” Momma said, and she and I both did. Mr. Cowan winced and turned away.

Daddy pulled the trigger and half the demon’s head went spraying onto the wall of the barn. It stood there for a moment, its remaining eye wide in shock, and then it slowly spiraled and slid to the floor.

“Whew,” Daddy said. “It’s alright now.” He stepped into the barn and, after a moment, the rest of us followed him. We looked down at the dying creature, coughing blood all over its own face, or what remained of it.

“How…how did you…” it sputtered.

“You’re a plain goddamn fool,” Daddy said. “I invoked you into the material world. That makes you material too. What are you, stupid?”

“I told you my daddy was gonna whip your ass,” I said to the demon. “You shoulda listened to me.”

The demon looked up at me, into my face, and its eye focused on me. Its lips pulled back, and this time I could tell it was smiling.

“Guadalcanal,” it said. “Christmas. A bayonet in the throat. The last thing you’ll think of is Betsy and the baby.”

And then it fell back, and it was limp. A smell came up off of it like burnt sugar.

I looked at Daddy. “What the hell was it talking about?” I asked him. “Guadalupe? Was that what it said?”

He looked past me at Mr. Cowan, who shook his head just the tiniest bit, his eyes wide. Then he smiled and ruffled my hair.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not a goddamn thing. Let’s go get the shovels, Jim. I think there’s a hole needs digging, out back.”

“I’ll go make supper,” said Momma, but she had a strange cast to her eyes when she looked at me. “Why don’t you come back on up to the house and help me shell some peas. Maybe you…maybe you wanna invite that Betsy to come eat with us.”

“Sure, I guess,” I said. “She’s a pain, though. If it wasn’t for her we wouldn’t have gotten in this mess in the first place. And didn’t that nasty old thing say something about her anyway?”

“Did it?” Daddy said, staring at the shotgun as he ejected the spent shells and peered down the barrels. “I really didn’t notice.”

“You run along,” Momma said. “Be back in a half hour.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “See you later, Mr. Cowan.”

“I’ll–I’ll see you, boy,” Mr. Cowan said, but he didn’t turn around.

I ran out of the barn and back towards the road that led to Betsy’s house. I felt strangely proud, even though I hadn’t really done anything. For the first time, I felt like I was beginning to understand who I was, and what my place was in the universe.

I had my whole life ahead of me.

Coldplay – Mylo Xyloto

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I have a problem with Coldplay.

It’s not that they suck; they really don’t suck. They’re clearly talented musicians, and Chris Martin — as he proved all those centuries ago with “Yellow” — is clearly a talented singer.

What bothers me is not that Coldplay sucks, but that their records suck. I don’t understand why or how this happens. They’ve clearly got the skills to make really good records, and they’ve got Brian Eno producing them on this new one Mylo Xyloto and the last one, which I think was called A Perfectly Lovely Dinner Party With Friends or something similar. Eno is not known for producing crappy music. In point of fact, he’s known for goading relatively uninteresting bands (or rather band, or rather U2) into creating really good work. (For a comparison, look at the records U2 put out without Eno, which — aside from Boy and War – have all the charisma of an accounting seminar.)

So why in the name of Hell’s garbage truck is Mylo Xyloto so goddamn dull?

I have Coldplay on my iPod. I do. I’m comfortable enough with my sexuality to admit that, despite a decade of “You know how I know you’re gay, etc.” jokes about the band. Yes, they’re big ol’ pussies. And that’s okay. I find it amusing that people will crack endless jokes about Coldplay and yet have an artist like Bon Iver in constant rotation. I mean, Bon Iver is a giant pussy. Bon Iver makes Dan Fogelberg look like G.G. Allin. It’s music for girls with asymmetric haircuts to cry to when their boyfriend Tyler leaves them for his coke dealer, who is a dude. Apparently it’s okay to be a big pussy if you’re an American with a Grizzly Adams beard who records your albums in, I dunno, a fucking cabin in the middle of the Michigan forest or whatever the hell these kids think is “authentic”. But it’s not okay, it seems, if you’re a metrosexual Englishman permanently wrapped in Ben Sherman high streetwear whose family consists of a decreasingly famous actress and a child named after a computer company.

The Coldplay I have on my iPod consists of their previous album, which is actually called Viva La Vida (Death And All His Friends) (which we’ll get to in a minute) and a track from their first album called “Don’t Panic“. I really like this song a lot. It’s not just the Douglas Adams reference in the title (which Martin has done a couple of times); it’s the combination of the echoing guitar line and the lyrics and the way Martin sings “And we live in a beautiful world / yeah, we do, yeah, we do” in the chorus, in a way that suggests that he might not be telling the truth. It’s short as hell and lovely and I’ll fight anybody who suggests it’s not at least as good as a Radiohead song.

I don’t have “Yellow”, the band’s first big single, on my iPod, because it was impossible to be anywhere in the Westernized world in the early 00s and not hear that song playing. But it’s still a great pop single. The lyrics are odd without being irritating, the hooks are solid, and Martin’s voice is perfect, with that little falsetto yelp that approximates an Irish séan nos hiccup without actually being one.

So I know — I know, goddamnit — that Coldplay are or at least were capable of producing good music. Their position as a sort of diet caffeine-free version of Radiohead has been a running joke for a decade now, but that’s fine. They didn’t have to be Radiohead. But they could have been a really good Coldplay.

The problem, I suspect, is that Chris Martin wants to be liked by everybody. And, as Paul Carr pointed out to me the other day, people who want everyone to like them end up being liked by nobody at all, except Gwyneth Paltrow. Coldplay strike me as the type of band who remix their work endlessly and by committee, trying to achieve some kind of sonic Arcadia, a blissful aural landscape of perfectly stadium-friendly bottom end and hopeful, soaring guitars.

The result is a sort of musical version of the decorational accents they sell at Ikea in between the Billy bookshelves and the improbably small platform beds. It’s fine and nice and goes well with your lifestyle…but it’s devoid of any personality. It’s free from criticism because it offers nothing of itself. It’s wallpaper.

I got Viva La Vida because Eno produced it, and Eno is worshipped as a god in my household (or at least in the part of it that’s actually my head). I expected a revelation; I hoped that Viva La Vida would be Coldplay’s The Unforgettable Fire, the moment when they stepped up their game and became really interesting.

This was not the case. In fact, aside from the title track, the music slid off my brain like it was made of Teflon. Aside from the title track, I literally cannot remember any of Viva La Vida, despite having listened to it at least ten times all the way through. (Usually while cooking, which seems to be the ideal Coldplay listening situation, because their music is actually improved by the sound of sizzling hot oil.) “Viva La Vida” the song is almost interesting; to my ears, what it’s really missing is a harder beat, a more driving bassline. Without it, it’s music for car commercials.

I’m not going to tell you about Mylo Xyloto, because I got about three songs into it and turned it off. Like all of their post-Parachutes work, it was unlistenable, because it was completely devoid of any corners or edges for the mind to hook in to. It reminded me of those lifestyle-porn spreads in magazines like Dwell and Metropolis where bourgeois bohemians show off their exquisitely designed minimalist living spaces. It’s pretty to look at, but you have to wonder what kind of madness creeps in after a few months of living in a stainless steel-and-MDF universe. I imagine these people find themselves fighting the near-uncontrollable urge to grab a Sharpie and start drawing giant cocks on the unbroken expanses of off-white paneling that surround them. The same is true for Coldplay; I suspect that Mylo Xyloto would be endlessly improved by running it through a Squarepusher-style glitch plugin that caused it to skip and stammer.

Also, Rihanna sings on it. I know a lot of you are convinced that Rihanna is good, and that makes me want to go live in the goddamn Michigan forest with Bon Iver and the ghost of Mark Linkous and hoard a stack of Nina Simone records until you all come to your senses. Or die off like the dinosaurs.

This speaks to one of Chris Martin’s more annoying behaviors: namely, his public flirtation with American hip-hop and his bromances with guys like 50 Cent and Jay-Z. I have no idea whether this is all sincere and legitimate on a personal level, or some kind of surreal attempt to establish “street cred”, which is a concept completely orthogonal to the very notion of Coldplay, like the idea of the European Union attempting to look sexy at a party. Certainly his attempts to integrate American urban music into Coldplay’s oeuvre are an act of absurdist theater that would be offensive if it wasn’t such a fucking non sequitur.

And maybe a Coldplay record produced by Jay-Z might be interesting. (It’s a long shot, but hey, stranger things have happened.) I think Eno’s considerable talents are wasted on this source material. What I’d really love to hear is a Coldplay record produced by Squarepusher, or Burial — someone who could strip away the polish, make it ugly, confrontational in spots, make it not appeal to everyone.

They could do it, they really could. I’m convinced that, deep down, Coldplay has the talent to be remarkable. After all, who could have extrapolated Kid A from Pablo Honey, or Achtung Baby from Rattle & Hum, or the Gorillaz from “Boys And Girls”? Despite the reputation of the UK music press as being jeering and suspicious when a musical artist tries to rise above their station, British bands seem to have a lot more ambition at reinventing themselves every so often. And like U2 and Radiohead before them, Coldplay’s in a position to get their freak on if they so desire, to not only change their own artistic statement (or simply make one in the first place) but change the whole conversation of music.

If you’re not old like me, you don’t remember how completely goddamn weird Achtung Baby sounded after the stadium anthems of The Joshua Tree and the pompousness of Rattle & Hum. And yet, it was one of U2′s bestselling records…and you can see the way that it changed the musical landscape. Ditto with Kid A, which was the number one Billboard album for at least a couple of weeks despite being a skittering bleepy piece of Krautrock madness.

When you’ve gotten to a certain point, you can afford to fuck around, try new things, become a new idea. And I wish Coldplay would do it, because as it stands they’re poised to become the musical equivalent of a boutique hotel: a tasteful, lovely environment in which no one actually lives.

If you’re thinking of buying Mylo Xyloto, do yourself a favor and go buy the last couple of albums by Elbow and Jamie Woon‘s self-titled debut instead, and wait in hopes — as I do — that Coldplay will eventually produce something of lasting value, because this ain’t it.

Thoughts on Occupy Las Vegas

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I attended a meetup for the Occupy Las Vegas movement tonight, which is planning a protest march on the Las Vegas Strip on Thursday. By and large, I was glad to see so many people from so many different walks of life out to support this movement. However, I had some concerns and some suggestions to make sure everything runs smoothly. I recognize that with some of these issues I may sound paranoid…but I’d rather be absurdly wrong about the things I’m concerned about than be even slightly right.

In security analysis, one of the measurements you do is threat versus risk; in other words, what am I afraid is going to happen, and how likely is it to actually happen?

The risk here is pretty small; I hope and think that Thursday will be nice and peaceful. But there has apparently been some discussion about the possibility of interference by either black bloc anarchists or right-wing provocateurs. Unlikely as that may be, it raises the stakes a little. The black bloc goofballs can escalate a peaceful protest into a massive flaming shitstorm in short order; if you don’t believe me, ask anybody who was at the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. And hell, they’re nominally on the same side; if any of the wingnuts from Nevada’s Tea Party or Nazi groups show up and start getting rowdy it’d be even worse.

And while the risk is low, the threat is high. You’ve got a crowd that’s estimated to be between 500 – 700 people, mostly people who’ve never protested or participated in an event like this before; almost none of them, I’m willing to bet, have ever been in a protest that’s gone violent. If badness happened, most of them wouldn’t have any idea of what to do. There’s been a lot of discussion on OLV’s Facebook page about what to do in case of arrests…while at the same time, people are being invited to bring their children, which is frankly fucking idiotic. Don’t bring your kids if being arrested or being attacked is enough of a possibility that a bail bonds company is offering fee-free bail bonds to protesters. I mean, imagine if you did get arrested; in the heat of things, are you sure somebody would know to even tell your kid? And who would take responsibility for getting them home safely if that happened?

Also, something else to consider: though I understand that both the security teams for the adjacent casinos and Metro are apparently being helpful, don’t forget that their goals — keeping the tourists and their money moving and maintaining order, respectively — are at cross-purposes to this protest, which is designed to attract attention and disrupt the status quo.

There’s also the fact — which no one seems to have pointed out — that this is a protest against the excesses of capitalism that’s being held in the most excessively capitalist place on the entire planet. It’s like walking into Disneyland and calling Walt Disney a Nazi prick; you may have the right to do it, and nobody may stop you…but they’re not going to be on your side if things go wrong, either.

I could keep going, but I hope I’ve made it clear that the organizers of OLV cannot afford to be naive about this. Hope for the best — a nice day where people’s voices are heard and everyone has a peaceful, wonderful time — and at least make the minimum necessary preparations for the worst. So here’s my specific advice:

  • 1) Have your security/peacekeeping team walk your route. Estimate how long it’ll take the average protester (which means the mass of the group) to walk the route. Establish checkpoints along the route — say at the end of every city block. Assign one security person to each of those points, to remain there from the time the group leaves the starting point until the last person passes by. Figure out exit points in case something goes wrong — if there’s violence, you want to make sure people have alternative routes to get away from it. These routes should not involve entering the casinos, because once you do, you’re on their property and you can be arrested even if you’re not doing anything particularly wrong. Figure out how to get people between the casinos, or through their service driveways, out to Koval to the east or Dean Martin to the west, in case something goes wrong. If it does, make sure your security people know where to lead others to get away.
  • 2) Give your security people walkie-talkies. There was some suggestion that people could communicate via cell phones. Cell phones are a slow and unreliable tool. Walkie-talkies are cheap. Get some. Make sure everybody can talk to everybody else. If a fight breaks out at the front of the mass group, make sure the people at the back of the mass group don’t just keep walking towards or (God help you all) surround it.
  • 3) Watch the crowd. Think of a bouncer at a nightclub; the bouncer’s job is not to beat up somebody who gets rowdy, but to know who’s going to get rowdy and stop them peacefully before they can. Most of the people who are going to show up are going to be good, happy, peaceful people. But statistically speaking, the likelihood is good that at least one or two people are going to be absolutely stone fucking crazy or provocateurs or just drunk. Know who these people are before everything gets underway.
  • 4) Keep your cameras out. I had suggested that somebody track down one of those digital video cameras that always stores the last 30 seconds buffered in RAM, but that’s not going to happen before Thursday. So everybody keep your cameras out. If anything goes wrong, film it — video, still photos, whatever — and upload it offsite to Flickr or Facebook or Twitter as fast as you can. I don’t think Metro is going to start busting heads for no reason, but if they do, you want pictures of it on Twitter before anybody can grab your camera. The world may be watching, but only if you’re giving them something to watch.
  • 5) Keep families together. If people really do bring their kids (out of naivete or a lack of other options), keep the people with kids all together, preferably at the back of the group. That way, if anything bad happens, they’re not stuck in the middle of it, and they can break off and find safety.

Again, I’m sure I sound hyper-paranoid. Maybe I am. I hope so. But if I’m not, well…do you really want to see what happens when you take 500-700 of the fabled 99% and start blasting them with pepper spray? What would you do? Would you calmly sit down and wait for the nice policeman to put the zip ties on your hands…or would you blindly run into a street filled with cars driven by drunk tourists who are too busy staring at some goddamn fountain to notice you?

So take these simple precautions. It’s worth the minimal cost and effort. I’ll help, if I can, any way I can. But if these steps aren’t taken, I’m not going to be within a mile of the Strip on Thursday, because I won’t feel secure in my freedom or safety. This can all go off without a hitch with some careful planning…so let’s plan.