The Words We Say And The Words I Hear

A clearinghouse of the things in my head that have to do with presentation. Two, then I'm off. Lady Gaga's self-designation as a geek and Ryan McKenney of Trap Them.

The original title of this was: James, stop being insecure about Gaga being a geek. That's really about the size of it. But some background is important.

Gaga calls herself a nerd or geek on her latest record and that sent me for a loop. I tend not to think of an artist that's gone diamond (10 million copies sold) as being a geek. That seems counter intuitive. That kind of colossal success is antithetical to geekdom, or so I'm trained to think. Geekness has definite boundaries and borders to me. I think of it as outsider culture, or at least a fashionably unreasonable focus on a particular piece of culture.

Of course I'm wrong. But I'm getting there.

Joss Whedon has a relentlessly positive online fanbase. Want to know how many of them watched Firefly when it came out? Answer: Significantly less than 10 million.

Gaga got my friends talking about Degas and threw straight up Starcraft, C&C and Dune references in her sprawling, gargantuan video featuring another hugely successful female solo artist/singer about girls going dancing and ignoring men calling them on their cell phones. Also: She could have thrown Dance Dance Revolution references in there and that would have been just as useful to her point. Games are still games and a geek thing even if they're not about killing people. More to the point: If Vin Diesel is one of us, then how the fuck is Gaga not? Vin Diesel is the ultimate dumb jock actor and this is a guy that played tons of Dungeons and Dragons and still talks about it. Plus, the guy's got his own videogame studio.

Point is: Because of her success, I don't think of her as a geek. I'm wrong in that. Her eccentricities have not been sandpapered out, but instead amplified, sometimes literally. She has turned those eccentricities and occasionally bizarre behavior into something incredibly profitable figuratively and literally. Figuratively in that she is perhaps the biggest female pop singer around with a message of tolerance, love and solidarity and literally in that she makes shitloads of money.

...and I'm still thinking of geek as a positive designation.


Second part: Ryan McKenney of Trap Them. I've talked about Mr. McKenney and the band he's in before, and man, seeing them live reinforces to me just how amazing they are. Short version is thrash metal bang your head wait queens of the stone age part oh shit hurricane of hydrocholric acid. Trap Them, ladies and gents.

Their new record, Darker Handcraft, is really good. But again: Language of thrash metal. You're not meant to be in awe of Darker Handcraft, you're meant to be murdered by it. I saw them live and at one point I was genuinely terrified when I realized one of my earplugs had fallen out. In between songs, he didn't talk that much except to say, yes, I've got anti-social tendencies despite the fact that I'm a frontman for a metal band and...I don't believe I have anything to say. I'm not an teacher or a [something else, it escapes me.], so I'm not going to say anything.

These statements he makes are all true, in that yes, he yells for a metal band, he is not a teacher but the conclusion is wrongheaded. Teachers and educators generally are not the only people who have wisdom. Even if they did, though, there's a slightly less straightforward one: People came here because they wanted to see your band, because they heard your band, liked it and want to hear more of it and are, presumably, far more willing to listen to what you have to say than the average person.

The point is, you can have something to say without being a teacher or educator and dude should give himself more credit. It's not merely in what he yells that shows it, but what he's a) able to say with it and b) has a series of paintings (the link goes to Fucking Viva, by the way) based on his lyrics. Most of it is Pollock influenced, features black, red and white and I suppose I could talk about the merits of the paintings themselves, but there's this: I can't think of many other lyricists that have a strong enough vision of words in their heads that they literally paint each song.

That, I think, speaks far better and more eloquently than his peers and contemporaries.



From the new Wonder Years LP, Suburbia I've Given You All And Now I'm Nothing. Play loud and wait for the three part harmony. Also, those racing guitar leads!

Back to the Marathon.

I left the Marathon thing unfinished and now, I'm trying to figure out how to put it back together. I'll explain. My old blog I did with a couple other kids, by the end of it, the other kids stopped and I was left to my own devices. One of the devices I came up with was the Marathon series of blogs. It's a series dedicated to applying the songs from Marathon's self-titled record to my own life.

Since the death (or at least deep hibernation) of that old project Eleven Names, the songs themselves aren't available to me on the internet, so I have to go back to the iPod for them, which doesn't sound too bad except that I crave, in this case, the synchronicity of having my music on the same screen as my everything else. There's less to manage, and with the history of my Marathon pieces, getting started is the hardest part.

I know if I write long enough, or cruise on the internet, I'll find something to pin the song to and it will get done. But now, if it's going to come out, it's going to have to be here. Eleven Names isn't under my direct control, and one of the other parts of the triumvirate (Zach, Tom and I) is unreliable (Zach) and impossible to get a hold of for any period of time where I can... Hell. All this is backstory. I did Subsidized Sincerity so I can get away from it, but the past ain't through with me. Or, the two projects are similar enough that James writing flows from one thing to the other. Ultimately, I'm going to have to bring it here if I want to keep it alive.

And I thought all that, when I went out, on Sunday night, to chew on the details of Marathon number 7, Names Have Been Changed To Protect the Guilty. I threw on the Strike Anywhere hoodie (heaven sent, truly) and went out to get gelato to figure out how I was gonna apply the 45ish second song to my own life. I didn't want to get gelato from the place in the campus, I needed the air. I eventually settled on the topic of Eleven Names founder Zach. He's a year or two older than me and I wanted to impress him back in the day. I wonder if I still do now. But, like I said, we don't talk anymore and I miss him. So, I get to the first gelato place (it has a orange awning), and it's closed. Alright. It's a little further down the hill to a nicer one that's probably more expensive.

I walk a little further, wave back to a group of fellow students in a restaurant that miraculously is still open and keep walking. Only a block now. Down the street from the second gelato place, I don't see any lights on in the windows and I lose hope. It turns out the nicer one is closed too. (I left the compound at 1o p.m. I never said I was real bright.)

Up until this point, I was listening to an acoustic version of Gaga's Alejandro, and eventually, got off that song while walking back up to campus. I listened to a little Latterman, a gruff, silly punk band outta Long Island with songs like My Bedroom Is Like For Artists Pt. 2, For Someone So Easygoing, You Sure Wear Pants A Lot and If Batman Was Real, He Would Have Beat the Shit Out Of My Friends. After that, I finally decided I should listen again to Names Have Been Changed, to see what I can gleam from it, from the perspective of the distance between Zach and I.

It is as this point that I feel an unfortunate smoothness at my next step and see that I've stepped in dog feces. For the record: It is hard to be pensive and angsty when you're wiping dog shit off the underside of your shoe.

Dog turd scraped off, I scroll down to the song, and I see something I didn't realize: I didn't leave off at Names, I left off at the song before it, Where We Hide. Where We Hide has lyrics like "we just scrape at something real to let out how we feel" and talks about basically being posers because they haven't really faced oppression and hide themselves in the songs and every so often peek out and see if anyone is catching on.

Well, shit, that sounds perfect. I've been leading double lives for years and truth is always something I've meted out like I'm a propagandist. It is almost impossibly well themed for the feature's crossover to Subsidized Sincerity.

Hopefully, it's moments like this that validate my "write long enough with a fuck all deadline over your head and the answer will be found" thesis. This is obviously only something that will show up, or not, in retrospect. But from right here? I'm not real bright, but this is my broken clock moment. It might only be twice a day, but right now is that moment and it feels pretty good.




Yeah, today's song is the acoustic version of Lady Gaga's Alejandro. If all the acoustic versions are as good as this one, I'd actually be more interested in Gaga stripped down than I am in the regular songs.