Last summer Black Wine released their second album, Summer of Indifference. I listened to it a lot and kept a journal. It’s part of a zine called Learning to Surf. Here is day seven.
Thinking of which writers go well with various songs reminded me of when the Dogfish Head brewery released a beer called Bitches Brew to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Miles Davis album. I thought the wine crowd, if anyone, would lead the way when it came to pairing beverages with jazz records. I asked my friend Brian Cogan to pair "Ocean's Skin," "Hand," and "Maycrowning" with beers.
"Ocean's Skin": There's a hint of Husker Du, so German beer, a lighter spaten or Captain Lawrence's Liquid Gold.
"Hand": More complex, maybe a Brooklyn Black Ops, a good stout with lots of aging potential.
"Maycrowning": a lighter yet aromatic Belgian, Westmalle Dubbel.
New York City is the literary capital of the world, but many of its neighborhoods are still without a community bookstore.
As the big box book retailers shutter (Borders) or contract (Barnes and Noble), the health of community bookshops is more important than ever. They provide access to harder-to-find small press material and, perhaps more crucially, a meeting place for neighborhood residents and artists.
The Washington Heights neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, despite its population and geographic size, has long been without an independent bookstore that provides a venue for author readings and performance.
A collection of features on notable revolutionaries, both in portrait and descriptive short essay form. The individuals contained within are an eclectic bunch, ranging from Muhammad Ali to Nina Simone. It’s an interesting and informative compilation, though sadly I’m self-hating enough that it doesn’t take long for the “Well, it’s good to know I’m doing nothing worthwhile with my life,” thoughts to kick in while searching through.
I’m pretty much always a fan of zine collections like this. Maybe its because I’ve been there myself, in my parents’ basement at three in the morning using their copier and my own stapler, all for a handful of copies of my own zine that I’ll inevitably just give away. It’s a lot of work, so I like to seeing things in a nice package like this.
Scam is a pretty long running zine in the vein of Cometbus. It’s primarily from the perspective of one person, Erik, then known as Iggy Scam as he lives in Southern Florida as cheaply as possible. There are travelogues, interviews with bands that he sees (or is just an enthusiastic fan of), and the staple being stories and how-to’s of the scams that affords him his cheap lifestyle, be it ways to eat for free, or just unorthodox entertainment.
Admittedly, I wasn’t reading the first time around so this was my first real exposure to it. While I was excited to finally read it, there were moments upon reading where I feel “man, I wouldn’t want to hang out with this guy.” Mostly it’s just little things where I think to myself “eh, I’m ok with spending fifty cents on a donut before taking a long shower,” but occasionally there’s a cringe worthy moment or two. Like a moment where he’s hitchhiking in the middle of the highway, and throws a rock at a car that doesn’t pick him up. I can’t help but feel a little annoyed by actions like that, but it’s nothing personal, we just have different lives. He’s a “never shower because that’s time I could be drinking coffee,” guy, I’m a “stick it out at a low level job while I do my own stuff on the side,” guy. Just apples and oranges. But, then he has the moment of “alright, that was a mistake,” which is a nice moment of redemption.
If I’d found out about Scam as a teenager, I definitely would’ve read it. The thought of being able to rip off soda machines is too tempting. It’s also a well rounded zine that’s equal parts personal and political that takes itself seriously enough to try, but not seriously enough to care. And even today, it’s an entertaining read, as a portrait of what was going on at the time. The fact that Screeching Weasel is interviewed in issue one is hilarious. “Do you go dumpster diving?” “No!”
Overall, it’s a great collection for those just getting into it, or if you’ve been following along the whole time. Think of it as a good coffee table book, whether you’re living in a squat, or a decent apartment paid for with a low rung temp job.
Friends, family, insomniacs who've stumbled across us for the first time,
Thanks for checking out the Go Metric website. We dig our web presence. Hope you do, too. All of its strengths are due to two factors: 1) Brett Essler, handler of all things technical and 2) our most excellent contributors.
However, we're going on hiatus. Brett is going back to school and I, Mike, am pleasantly swamped with writing projects. One of these is the next print issue of Go Metric. The first contributions are starting to roll in, including a comic from Sanden Totten and interviews with Todd Cong (Toys That Kill, Recess Records), Isaac Thotz, (The Arrivals), and Mark Ryan (Marked Men, Mind Spiders).
Have an idea to pitch? Yes, please. Send them to: gogometric@yahoo.com. Please put "Next issue" in the subject line.
Longtime readers know that when I say it'll be out "any time now" I mean roughly 6-8 months. Hang tight. Read Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, check out a minor league ballgame, enjoy a tasty beverage. We'll be back soon.
I’ve never quite understood the appeal of Antarctic exploration. Even when the Museum of Natural History put together an exhibit on Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic on his ship Endurance, I didn’t get it. His ship was trapped in pack ice and slowly crushed, and while no humans died, if I remember it correctly, all the sled dogs were eaten along with one crew member’s beloved cat named Mrs. Chippy. This is what I took away from it: the tragic loss of Mrs. Chippy, not the bravery and heroism the museum was trying to impress upon me.
I recently decided the easiest way to be a famous author is to write a blog about doing something every day for a year. However, as many people have already done this, finding an original idea was, shall we say, might prickly. What follows week is my new project: to think of 365 unworkable bad ideas, one a day for a year!
I'm doing a book tour of southern California in mid-February. I'll be joined by Todd Taylor (Razorcake), the Studds Terkel of punk rock and Matt Hart, the Sideshow Bob of punk rock. I've been labeled the Bob Newhart of punk rock. Good stories told well. Even if the Misfits reference doesn't work for you.
- Mike Faloon
Monday, February 14 Calimucho HQ 384 W. 15th St.(Go around the back of the big blue house) San Pedro, 90731
Tuesday, February 15 8:00 p.m. 12th & G Warehouse 13390 12th St. Chino, 91710 with Matt Hart
Wednesday, February16 8:00 p.m. Public Address (Highland Park) 1268 N. Ave 50 Los Angeles, CA with Matt Hart
Thursday, February 17 7:30 p.m. CSU Channel Islands Aliso Hall, Room 150 with Johnny Tsaur
Friday, February 18 8:00 p.m. Stories Books 1716 West Sunset Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90026 (Echo Park)
Saturday, February 19 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. San Diego Zine Workshop The Ink Spot Art Center Lofts 710 13th Street, Studio 210 San Diego, CA 92101
There’s a line in Edward Abbey’s 1988 novel, The Fool’s Progress, when Henry Lightcap, the novel’s cranky protagonist attempts to sum up the confusing condition of the modern American male in one succinct, if harsh, sentence: “They’re the new breed…Not exactly men, not exactly women, but something in between they call guys.” Twenty years later, Benjamin Percy plays with this question is his novel The Wilding, by placing a suburban, professional dad back in the wilderness he explored as a kid, just before it’s logged for development. The novel centers around a weekend camping trip Justin Caves takes with his father and young son, Graham, to a place called Echo Canyon. “Guy time,” Justin calls it when talking about the trip to his son, many pages before the trip goes horribly wrong. When Graham asks Justin to define the term he says, “You know what I mean. Hunting. Fishing. Camping. Hanging…Stepping outside your comfort zone and challenging yourself. Becoming a man.”
Justin is a 42 year-old high school English teacher living in Bend, Oregon—a place caught up in the wave of “progress” that reveals itself through new retail and housing developments at the expense of the wilderness just outside of town. His marriage is floundering. His wife refers to him as an idiot; his father calls him a “puss”. His only hope at finding any respect when we meet him is in his bookish, slight, twelve year-old son, Graham, whose allegiances start to turn the minute his grandfather hands him his first hunting rifle.
The trip is a last chance to visit their favorite camping grounds before the place is cleared for a new housing development. The heart-breaking irony is that Justin’s father’s has agreed to serve as the builder of the log homes that will go up in this new development, if only to hold on to the business he will surely lose if the contract goes to someone else. This is the new wilderness, too, Percy seems to be saying, that frightening place where you abandon your most cherished principles for financial security.
Percy scatters his story with markers that remind us of this shifting landscape of American manhood: Bonanza’s on the TV at a gas station; Justin whistles that banjo line from Deliverance. Justin is the kind of guy — and he is in some ways one of Lightcap’s “guys” — who grew up feeling ambivalent about the stereotypical expectations of men. He longs for the comforts of home while also reveling in the harsh beauty of the canyon and the river. He marvels at how comfortable his son is with a rifle while remembering how awkward he was with it at his age. When he and his father find a corpse at their old camping ground Justin literally runs while his father shrugs it off.
There are a couple of subplots that didn’t quite hit their marks: Justin’s disillusioned wife never quite acts out the way she seems to want to. There’s a side story about a man named Brian, a wounded Iraq vet who dresses up in a homemade bear suit constructed form the skins of animals he trapped himself runs the risk of being so odd it overshadows the very real panic and alienation he feels.
Where Percy’s most successful is in describing the landscape right down to the berry skins in the scat. It’s all beautiful and frightening and humbling. We’re on those trails, too, sharing that sense of awe as three generations of Caves stand at the bank of a river, or the uneasiness they feel as they take notice of the vicious claw marks on a tree left by the grizzly bear that’s lurking in the woods. When Justin and his father return to the place years later, at the development’s opening, he remembers a tree that used to stand in the place that is now a golf course. The wilderness has been tamed and reappointed for posterity and optimum financial return. It’s a tragedy and yet, after the picturesque terror Percy’s delivered to us prior to that moment, it’s also a relief.
It’s a weird coincidence that I finished reading Gary Shtyengart’s Super Sad True Love Story on the same day that six people were killed and 13 others were wounded in Tucson, Arizona. It’s also a weird coincidence that I found out about the shooting through Twitter. It’s not such a weird coincidence that I’ve been scanning tweets and clicking links for three days. I jump from one post to the next, experiencing little flickers of emotion in the course of my reading — horror, outrage, despair, confusion — and have this vague sense of a shared experience while still sitting alone, in silence, in my house.
Strange too, that I’m writing so seriously about a novel that made me laugh out loud for the first 280 pages, but comedy is serious business. In Shtyengart’s novel, Lenny Abramov and his girlfriend, Eunice Park, navigate a world reduced to random statistics and a tidal wave of data. Try not to see yourself in his descriptions of High or Low Net Worth Individuals, credit scores flashing on screens as characters walk down the street. Try to forget how much you may be like these people who are obsessed with their various rankings that change from minute to minute, depending on where they are and who they’re with. How many people follow you on Twitter?
No, skip that; don’t try to forget anything. Just laugh at it while it’s still funny, because this is Shtyengart’s point: gently implicating us in the confusion. After all, in his essay “Only Disconnect,” published last summer in the New York Times Book Review, he places himself squarely in the data stream as he tells the story of how he lost himself in his iPhone and his attempts to live beyond that tiny screen again. That same struggle made me wonder if I should write this this week; I wondered if I wanted to contribute to the stream of ideas — at this point a raging river — many half-formed. Certainly mine are. Then I thought it over and decided I should just go with it, accept my place in history. I’m just as much a character in this as anyone else.
What the novel becomes is a sort of blueprint for what’s been happening these last few days in response to the unfathomable events of last Saturday, this creation of a massive collection of information and opinion that must be sorted through, but ultimately never can be. Behind all the writing and tweeting and posting and talking are people, some of them gone, some of them wounded in ways most of us will never comprehend. All the writing in the world will never quite pin it down. By the way, what were we laughing about on Friday — can anyone remember?
In the novel, when New York is invaded by Venezuela, there’s a transition where the humor and the horror overlap and awkwardly coexist until life settles down, harder than it was before. Lenny and Eunice try to find their way back to each other, but they have other priorities now, more serious responsibilities than shopping for see-through jeans. Last Saturday afternoon I watched the postings and the retweets, the 140-character commentary, the misinformation about whether Gabrielle Giffords had survived. I also still caught the sex jokes, the recipe links, and the happy birthday wishes that also occur both on my computer and in real life as tragedies unfold. There were those few hours where it felt wrong to find anything funny.
Then on Sunday Facebook told me one of my friends had become a fan of the Clarence Dupnik Is My Hero group. Yes, I thought. Of course. Click here and something has been done. Press this and show that you felt something, or just to show that you exist. Those Twitter stars, Tumblr hearts and Facebook Fonzie thumbs provide us an electronic version of a reassuring nod, a comforting hand on a shoulder. A faint but hopeful sign of life.
Attention: The Go Metric "new ideas" tank is on "E."
Our response?
Rehash.
You beat us to the punchline. We know you did. Just like our staff, your sense of morality is centered around icons such as Don Henley, The Cars, and The Police, practitioners of the "Greatest Hits Album with One New Song."
Only we at Go Metric are going to do them one less. Thus, the following: a look back at 2010 with no new material! Happy Holidays!
