Turning Writers into Motherf*cking Rock Stars by Chuck Wendig at terribleminds dot com

Face it, right now, the reading of books in this country is not exactly looked at as a valuable use of time by a significant portion of the population. Book stores are going under. I picked the bones of two different Borders locations this week, and have one more visit on the agenda.

Perhaps what we need is a little less politeness and quiet dignity from our modern crop of authors in order to drum up interest in reading and draw attention away from relentless reality show trash. We need our writers to take on the aspect of rock stars in order to save the literary art form.

to wit:

Epic rock star personalities make way for epic rock star beefs. David Lee Roth versus Van Halen. Jay-Z versus Nas. Foo Fighters versus the entire TV show “Glee.”

The authorial world demands this. And we’re not talking about some little Twitter snit, some online battle oozing across a handful of Livejournal comments. It’s not enough for Stephen King to talk to Entertainment Weekly and be all like, “Well, Stephenie Meyer is no J.K. Rowling, pfft.” I’m talking, Terry Pratchett needs to go and take a shit in Dan Brown’s mailbox.

Seriously, just go and read this thing. Now. You shall laugh and laugh.

This weekend brings a new box of CDs to the car, and thus, a new edition of this particular series, in which I examine my somewhat questionable musical taste, as expressed via the great variety of compact discs I’ve accumulated over the course of my life. If anything, this little project of mine shows that I really shouldn’t judge anyone else’s musical taste…even if that taste involves front row seats to the Train-Maroon 5 tour (aka “lowestcommondenominatorpalooza”) currently circling the nation, luring in the nation’s supposedly hip soccer moms and pukka shell wearing frat boys to central locations for possibly nefarious purposes:

I’ve even included an extra review this time…bonus!

♦- Heart – Brigade: To repeat a common refrain from this series, I don’t necessarily remember buying this record; I suspect this one came into the collection via my lovely wife. In any case, this record is arguably the peak of the band’s 80s resurgence. For those who didn’t see the relevant “Behind the Music,” Heart started out in the 70s, and logged several big classic rock hits, but despite how badass “Barracuda” was, they were always sort of pigeonholed as a “girl act.” After floundering through the early 1980s, they hit big with a slicker, commercial rock sound and a stack of power ballads. This record includes a bunch of surprisingly good hard rock-ish tunes (“I Didn’t Want to Need You” and “Wild Child” are highlights), and features the huge hit “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You,” which always felt kind of skeevy to me, even as a teenager. Listening to it now, however, it comes off as more sinister, since it leaves open the interpretation that the song’s narrator was “in love…with another man!” before the song started, and the whole anonymous hotel tryst with the vagabond hitchhiker was totally premeditated by woman and her partner as a low-cost means to conceive via a 3rd party sperm donor because the spouse was shooting blanks. I have fun imagining another verse involving lawsuits, movie rights negotiations with Lifetime Television, and 24 hour coverage by Nancy Grace.

♦- Avril Lavigne – Live Acoustic: I picked this EP up off of the clearance rack at my local Target for a buck and change. That said, it’s really very good. Six tracks off of her early records, recorded live, apparently in a mall, just Avril and a guy playing acoustic guitar and doing some harmony vocals. Despite being recorded in a mall, and Avril’s popular reputation at being a totally disposable studio-crafted pop star, I have to say I’m impressed with the fact that this record got released; it’s pretty raw – no processing on the vocals beyond a little reverb on the PA. Putting it out there shows definite confidence. There are a couple of bum notes, but the little imperfections are what make the songs work; often better than their studio album counterparts. It doesn’t quite save “Sk8er Boi” from still being trite despite it’s catchiness, but “He Wasn’t” and “Take Me Away” both work better here than in their original versions.

♦- Barenaked Ladies – Rock Spectacle: This live record, recorded during the “Born on a Pirate Ship” tour, covers a lot of the highlights of the band’s first three studio records, but the real treasure here is that it manages to capture some of the feel of the band’s live shows, which are/were at least as much about comedic improvisation as much as really tight musicianship and performance. The record will never replace the experience of a live show, featuring long impromptu rap performances about whatever happened on the way to the venue that day and the flying mac and cheese (“don’t open the cheese pouch!”), but the record does include some of that (sadly, at the end as bonus tracks, which are often clipped off on modern CD players which can choke on the “enhanced CD” bonus videos wedged in as a ROM segment on the disc), as well as some great live versions of “Straw Hat and Dirty Old Hank,” “Jane,” “Brian Wilson,” and “What A Good Boy,” a mostly forgotten deep cut from Gordon that I’ve occasionally dusted off for open mic sets.

♦- Billy Thorpe – Children of the Sun…Revisisted: During my college summers, I spent way too much time in the back of a mobile kitchen cooking and slinging french fries to patrons at many of central Pennsylvania’s finest fireman’s carnivals and scholastic athletic competitions. One of the common threads across those summers was the constant presence of the local classic rock station playing in the background behind the drone of roiling fryers and wobbling exhaust fans. Amidst the soup of BTO, Aerosmith and Molly Hatchet, I’d occasionally hear the title track from this record, with it’s percussive guitar riff and soaring vocals about spaceships. It intrigued me enough to track it down. The whole package is a 1979 space opera concept record about benevolent aliens coming to rescue humanity from a dying earth in the early 1990s. Really. It’s weird, but in that strange 70s concept album way that you can’t help but appreciate. The title track, which is really the focus here, is seven minutes of impressive studio wizardry, with lots of great stereo panning effects, over-the-top guitar work, and plenty of Beatle-esque harmony. The rest of the record is padded out with some of Thorpe’s (who more or less quit pop music in the early 80s to start toy companies and score television shows, including ST:TNG) other work from the period, through 82’s East of Eden’s Gate, which is interesting, and still fits with the space opera concept the original record had going for it.

♦ – Tori Amos – Tales of a Librarian: This is essentially a greatest hits package put out by Atlantic after Tori left the label. It’s a pretty comprehensive collection, allegedy organized according to the Dewey Decimal System, and includes a nice cross-section of Tori’s output. I’ve always been a fan of her sound (I love the piano and ethereal, unearthly vocals) but I’ve never waded fully into Tori fandom, which can be voluminous,obsessive and a little intimidating. As such, never really heard the songs in their original contexts with any regularity – it’s been songs in isolation, and in the live setting (though we had to leave that show early, because an in utero @fairiedaughter was being particularly difficult to her mother that night). I really need to go back and start listening to the albums one of these days. Still, most of the significant tunes from the period are here: “Cornflake Girl,” “Crucify,” and “Silent All These Years,” which is probably my personal favorite, as well as the excellent but really depressing and uncomfortable composition, “Me and A Gun.” Come to think of it, “excellent but depressing and uncomfortable” kind of describes most of the Tori Amos catalog, but that’s part of why we love it so.

…but that’s not really going to stop me.

I’m not geographically where I’d like to be this week, and that truly sucks. In the end, I shall manage, but so far, the universe appears to be holding a grudge, assuming that it could acutally do such things. Lots of little (and not so little) annoyances are getting in the way of progress. Be they physical, technological, biological, or the result of poor urban planning, they are going our of their way to get into mine. I really wish they’d stop that.

Also, my standing Monday engagement, the one event that would have made this week’s unexpected displacement pleasant and not totally inconvenient, isn’t happening. Boo.

That said, the weekend wasn’t totally awful. I got all my kids back (a mixed blessing sometimes, but still a net positive), got to spend some time without kids with the spouse (something that doesn’t happen often enough), had a nice meal out with friends, and also had a nice bike ride, finding both excellent fresh bread and produce, and a 20 year old AD&D manual (yard sales are sometimes cool) along the way.

Additionally, I finished two books and saw Captain America, which is a really good film, not just a good comic book film (though it definitely is one of those). Consider it recommended.

Yes. It’s hot, people. Drink some water. stay inside. don’t waste electricity. I get it. We all get it.

I really don’t mind a general reminder in the name of public service, really, but I’d rather with the media wouldn’t rant and rave and make the young and/or gullible amongst us think the world is ending. It is, after all, July in the mid-Atlantic; it grazes 100° this time every year. We all should expect this.

Oh well, I’ve got a long drive ahead of me today. Let’s hope it goes well. In the meantime, here are some tunes:

1. “Mansinneedof” – Sarah Jarosz
2. “Milk” – Garbage
3. “Sweet Georgia Brown” – Les Paul
4. “Mercury” – The Clarks
5. “Flynn Lives” – Daft Punk
6. “Alcohol” – Dropkick Murphys
7. “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” – Lady GaGa
8. “There Was A Time” – Guns N’ Roses
9. “Let It Be” – The Beatles
10. “The Wrong Man Was Convicted” – Barenaked Ladies

The space shuttle changed the way we view the world and changed the way we view the universe. We have emotion today but one thing is indisputable: America is not going to stop exploring. Thank you Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Endeavour and our ship Atlantis. Thank you for protecting us and bringing this program to such a fitting end. God bless all of you. God bless the United States of America.

And with those words from Shuttle Commander Chris Ferguson this morning, the US Space Shuttle program came to an end.

I’m thirty-six. The shuttle program has been there in the background of my life for most of that. I’ve got hazy elementary school remembrances of the first launch of Columbia. I remember the grief in ’86 when the Challenger exploded after liftoff. I remember the Saturday morning in ’03 wrecked by the news that Columbia broke up on re-entry. Still, the program kept going. It’s always been there.

Sure, the Shuttle’s technology is outdated, and in the scheme of things, it was never much more than a pick-up truck to low Earth orbit. But, when you need to haul parts and tools someplace, a reliable old pickup truck is exactly what you nee to do the job. Because of the shuttle, for example, NASA’s kept the Hubble running for much longer than anyone ever expected, providing scientists with amazing information with which to expand our understanding of the universe. Because of the shuttle program, the planet’s got a pretty kick-ass space station that will continue to provide valuable data from experiments, and real-world experience in how humans handle long-term space living, which will, ideally, help us to craft better plans for further exploration.

And, of course, space ships are just cool.

No one expected these shuttles to last forever. Machines break down, and technology marches on. However, the biggest shame of all this is that there’s nothing definitive in the pipeline to replace the shuttle. For probably the next decade, American astronauts are going to have to hitch a ride with the Russians to get up into orbit. And, if we’re ever going to get out beyond Earth orbit,to places like Mars or moons of Jupiter and Saturn, it makes a lot more sense to start that trip already out of Earth’s gravity well. And here we are, without that trusty old pickup truck to haul up all the stuff we’d need to start building a longer-range spacecraft, and the best vehicle we can borrow right now is the equivalent of a remarkably durable 1970 Datsun hatchback.

In short, we need a new ride, and it’s unlikely that the US space program will be in a position to come up with one any time soon.

If anything good comes from this situation, it’ll be that all of the private space launch companies cropping up will finally get a shot to step up and deliver the new technological advancements to make this work. Some of them are already doing unmanned launches at a lower cost than NASA’s managed. Maybe it’s time to hand the mechanics of getting scientists and explorers into space to private companies…I don’t know.

I hope that the Rutans and Bransons and Musks of the world are up to it; I want them to come up with something game-changing, and I look forward to where they’ll hopefully take us. At the moment, though, I’m still kinda bummed that NASA’s stuck hitching a ride.

Totally by accident, I found out via twitter that something interesting an dare I say magical? (yeah, probably shouldn’t have done that) was going down in DC this afternoon. I had sort of settled on a plan for a quiet evening chilling in the hotel room – it’s really hot outside, and I’m not feeling all that great (summer viruses suck), but when word got to me through a musician acquaintance that the reigning kings of an obscure genre of music were playing a free show, I kind of had to go, didn’t I?

So, after leaving the office for the day and changing into something a little more comfortable, I headed out to the Metro station and across the Potomac for Harry and the Potters:

The genre, as you might have guessed, is wizard rock, a strange offshoot of filk devoted to Potter fandom. It’s a lot of fun. I’m only tangentially a part of this, but given how popular the works of JK Rowling are in my house, I’ve had one or two run-ins (the musical acquaintance mentioned above is another wizard rock artist I met at a convention last year) with this corner of the music world.

These guys, as I said, are pretty much the leaders of the wizard rock pack, or at least the most prominent and popular performers. Part of the schtick is that lots of these band pretend to be characters from the novels – these guys, by virtue of their appearance, both pretend to be Harry Potter himself, one as Harry year 4, the other as Harry year 7. It’s weird, but it works. They write funny, hooky punk rock songs about things like Hagrid’s beard and Harry’s first date.

Also, being reasonably attractive young guys, they have become sort of sex symbols. And, their audience is kind of self-selecting toward teen and slightly older bookish geeky girls. I imagine these guys are up to their lightning scars in cute nerd groupies (why didn’t I think of that racket when I was a younger man?). I kind of felt like a dirty old man just being there, because, yeah, I kind of have a thing for the cute nerdy type – after all, I married one.

I’d heard some of their recordings before, but it really surprised me how punk rock they actually were; there’s a lot of Weezer and Ramones in their stuff, but some of it’s got more than a hint of Black Flag buried in there. It was kind of strange watching a bunch of teenage girls squealing and pogo-ing to what was essentially a hardcore song about werewolves!

Oh well; I had fun, and it was a nice adventure. Now I am going to bed, because I feel awful.

With the release of the last Harry Potter film-of-the-book this week, and it’s total domination of everything, the internet’s once again abuzz with talk of the wizarding world, despite the fact that the books were done and over with years ago. Like most everyone else, I saw the film over the weekend (Friday night, at a drive-in, which was a nice treat), and pronounce it, like I’ve pronounced most of the others, “okay.” None of the adaptations have been particularly effective translations, really – they simply all rely too much on the audience’s previous knowledge of the books. The early ones focused too much on little kids gawking at special effects and glossed over (or forgot to mention altogether) important things that affect the narrative in important ways later. The last four movies directed by David Yates were comfortingly consistent visually, which was nice (the muted blues and grays is a good look for the darker themes of the later volumes), though those films spent a lot of time tripping over little problems resulting from earlier missteps. For every great little film moment (Harry in the all night coffee shop at the beginning of HBP, Hermione erasing her existence from her parents’ minds to protect them from what’s to come), there’s a significant dangling thread sacrificed in order to get to the next set piece (Who created the Marauders’ Map, What was the deal with that piece of broken mirror) that just didn’t quite work. That said, 7.2 looked beautiful in it’s desolation, hit most of the right notes, and didn’t totally drop the ball on Matthew Lewis’s Neville Longbottom, who got his suitably badass moment after getting shafted the last couple of films. If Rowling ever goes back to the Potter well, she could do a lot worse than exploring the latter years of the series from Neville’s point of view…his adventures organizing and leading the resistance at Hogwarts is probably a more interesting story than Harry’s horcrux hunt.

In any case, I didn’t intend this post to be a review of the film; I wanted simply to point out a couple of interesting bits of writing and analysis on the series that have been cropping up. I’m sure there are plenty of others out there (if you’ve happened upon anything interesting, drop a link in the comments; I’d love to read it, I just don’t have that much time to go hunting), but this is what I’ve found interesting over the last week or so.

First and foremost, a couple of posts from pandagon, the most recent one dealing with the political elements of the series as an interesting allegory to the whole Tea Party business (unintentional, given the fact that this was all written well before that beast reared its ugly, misspelled and hand-painted head), and how Rowling manages to effectively come up with a totally realistic portrayal about how even fundamentally good folks (including both real life people and the protagonists of novels) have serious blind spots about the tribe they’re part of, and how those blind spots hold back real progress*.

Earlier in the week, Amanda also hit another interesting angle on the Potter series, pointing out that despite all the fandom and cosplay and general nerdiness associated with the series, Harry Potter’s not a geek, but a jock, which is actually kind of true, but as usual, it’s a little more complicated than that. The post and its resulting comments get into all sorts of things, including, but not limited to the archetypes that Rowling appropriates which are inherently British and kind of alien to many American fans, who latch onto different cues and draw different conclusions about what the underlying ideas are. There’s also some interesting discussion about both fandom, fanfic, and social class in the UK.

Finally, for something a little less heavy, the av club had a nice piece talking about their writers’ take on the great and not so great moments from both the films and the books. They come up with some interesting conclusions and commentary, and while you may not agree with their positions, that’s half the fun of the whole pop culture criticism thing, isn’t it?

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* –That’s actually one of the things I was fully expecting to play out in my initial reading of the books – for a long time, I was sure that the plot was leading toward Harry making using his dual nature (being a child of two worlds, both wizard and muggle) to come up with a means of defeating Voldemort that would short circuit the prophecy, and end up ushering in a new age of Wizard-Muggle cooperation that would improve the world for everyone – there are just too many ridiculous scenes of Wizards not understanding Muggle culture, I assumed it had to pay off at some point. Mostly, Hermoine got this role, and while she was effective in isolated situations, it never became a significant plot point).

So, I’m at it again, with more record reviews. I think it’s kind of fun that I’ve seen all of these artists live at least once, and I’m reasonably sure that I’ve seen three of them on the same stage, but never on the same night. Come to think of it, that would be a killer show…the only question is who would be the headliner?

♦ The Clarks – Let It Go: I’m reasonably sure most people are aware of the concept of desert island discs* (If not, I’ve included a handy asterisk and a link to context). Well, this record is one of mine. It doesn’t matter that it was recorded in by a regional bar band from Pittsburgh on an indie label that didn’t get much play outside the rust belt northeast; in my not entirely humble opinion, it really ought to go down as one of the great modern rock records. From start to finish, it hits all the right notes for me: the snappy guitar tone, the literate (but not too cerebral) lyrics, Blasey’s wry delivery, it just all wraps up into a great listening package. “Better of Without You,” “Snowman,” “Let It Go”…every one of these tunes should’ve been international monster hits; they’re better than most of the big radio hits of the time (summer 2000). I discovered the Clarks a few years before this came out, when they were expanding their touring circle east, being the Stones to the Badlees’ Beatles, and generally bringing a bit of Iron City flavor to Yeungling country, and became a lifelong fan. Sure, as a couple of my friends who were geographically lucky enough to see these guys rise from the depths have said, the newer records aren’t as good as the old ones, and they may be right, but I still believe this one’s just about perfect.

♦ Patty Griffin – Living With Ghosts: These days, Patty Griffin is probably one of the more respected and prolific songwriters and collaborators in the folk/americana business; having penned hits for Emmylou Harris, Dixie Chicks, and a slew of others, with a stack of awards (including at least one Grammy) to her credit. I saw her live in a bar/hotel ballroom right after this record came out, just a tiny little redhead with a beat-up leather jacket and an acoustic guitar on a mostly bare stage. The experience was amazing, and it sounded pretty much exactly like this record does; as it’s essentially a re-worked version of the demo tape that got her signed; just her, an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and hardly any overdubbing. And she doesn’t need anything else. The songs are powerful, beautiful, and affecting; despite the sparse instrumentation, they sound big (maybe even bigger than anything off of Flaming Red, the follow-up that was a more straight ahead rock record, and still damned good), thanks to the dynamic voice and percussive guitar accompaniment. I’ll take the version of “Let Him Fly” from this record over any of the covers that were bigger hits, and then I’d listen to “Every Little Bit” again, because it’s a great piece of songwriting and performance.

♦ Robert Reilly – Becoming Undone: Yet another mid-nineties record from an artist I discovered when they opened up for The Badlees on some little dive stage in Central Pennsylvania. At the time, he’d just gone solo after the demise of the band 78 West, after kicking around other parts of the country for several years. The tunes on this one are all excellent electric singer-songwriter stuff that probably should have gotten more attention, but just didn’t. It’s a shame, because tunes like “When We Were Young” and “Becoming Undone” are great uptempo crowd-pleasers, and “Given It All Away” and “Quickly As You Can” are equally engaging and heartbreaking ballads. I forgot how much I liked this record; it disappeared into the memory hole in the way that some of the other stuff from that scene (like, say, The Clarks) didn’t – listening to it recently, it all came back. It doesn’t have my favorite Reilly tune on it (which would be “Satisfied”, which you can get on another Central PA compilation disc I’ll probably get to one of these days), nor does it have that crowd pleasing song about the pot smoking schoolbus driver, but it’s well worth tracking down if you can find it.

♦ Indigo Girls: Everybody knows this one for “Closer to Fine,” the signature tune that even non-fans recognize. This record is the first on a major label, and kicked off a long and successful career that is still going strong today. While they’ve consistently progressed in a more rock/alternative direction since (they sound more than a little like the Replacements now sometimes), with this record (and on through “Rites of Passage” before they consistently started working with a band), it’s still very much a folk duo thing; which is the sound that pulled me in initially, and kept me listening. Lots of great harmonies between Amy’s rough rock voice and Emily’s purer folkie, which have always been the consistent hallmark of the group’s sound, regardless of instrumentation, though it almost feels like the vocal interplay stands out more with this kind of instrumentation. The Indigo Girls have never completely fallen off my radar – I still tend to pick up all the records, and I’ve seen them live twice (the spouse saw them more recently, as a re-scheduled show forced me into babysitting duty – she took the eldest, who loved the experience) since; but I tend to listen more to the mid-period records, and haven’t come back to this one in quite some time. I was pleasantly surprised to remember the appearance of Michael Stipe (and what sounds like Peter Buck on guitar at least a little bit) from R.E.M. (both groups are from the Athens GA scene) on “Kid Fears” falling in as a third voice in the harmonic picture that really adds something. I’ll have to play it for the eldest (who’s become a big R.E.M. fan) and see if she catches on.

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* – Imagine you’re stuck on a desert island or somewhere else isolated for the rest of your days. Assuming, for some reason, you could bodge together a solar-powered CD player out of coconut shells and palm fronds or something, what handful of records (usually five to eight, depending on who’s facilitating the exercise) would you pick if you knew that these were the only records you’d be able to listen to for the rest of your life? Why? It can make for some great discussion amongst a group of opinionated music fans, or, you know, a long-running radio programme on the BBC.

Today I have been married to my spouse for thirteen years. Which is pretty cool, really.

What’s cooler is that based on the (possibly flawed) math in my head, we’ve actually been something resembling a unit for about six years longer than that; something like not quite nineteen years. Doing some further math, given that my age is not quite thirty-seven, we’ve been together for pretty much half of my life.

That’s actually kind of mind blowing. No wonder I can’t fathom what life would be like without her, because really, the actual time without her, at least some of which I do remember, is smaller (and will continue to be come smaller) relative to the expanding period of time when she’s actually been there. Time, of course, is relative according to the position of the observer. though now, reality will forever more trend toward my relative perception of time.

Circumstances have arranged themselves such that reality supports my perception of it! I have bent the universe to my will! I am like unto a god!

…sorry, my inner mad scientist/supervillan got out of his Negative Zone prison there for a minute. He’s safely stowed now. I’m going to wrap thsi post up….

Leave it to me to ..ahem.. wed marriage and romance to relativity. But then, she’d actually expect that, and probably appreciate it (or at least pretend that she does), and that’s one of the reasons why I love her.