Marathon: Names Have Been Changed To Protect The Meth Mites (8 of 13)

Marathon's Names Have Been Changed… is a 40odd second song about two friends who's lives stopped intersecting with each other once one of them went to war. There's a line and I think it's the thesis: "Sometimes our beliefs get the glory, while our friends get the neglect."

So, of course, I think of Brooklyn's finest mosh band, Most Precious Blood. I used to love their 2003 record Our Lady Of Annihilation in high school, but once I went to college, they went inactive and I started listening to bands that didn't have that heavy, walloping sound, because, of course, I heard mosh bands weren't cool. (In my defense, I found most of the mosh bands I heard to be trite.)

Most Precious Blood got the neglect.

In early 2011, they released Do Not Resuscitate, their long-awaited followup to 2005's Merciless, and I listened to it once or twice, found what I found in college there and left it sitting on my iPod. Last week, I found it, again, in the blistering cold, going to the bar, to clear my head. The end of 2011's been rough and I've slept in places I wouldn't stand. I've done things this year that I'm ashamed of exponentially more than I've ever done before. Thus, I went to a bar and listened to some new songs from 2012 records, while people I only kind of know talked around me about punk rock. It wasn't a complete rejuvenation, but I needed to get out of my own head.

I left it on, returning from the bar, and settled on track three, Meth Mites. Listening to the rumbling, colossal, Meth Mites reminded me why I liked the genre in the first place. It reminded me there were big battles to fight and that, yes, you are equal to them. You just have to be willing to be bloodied.

The final two lines are delivered with the venom of a superhero who finally got to the lair of the villain, wants to dispense with the charade and fucking fight:

Open wide/and out with your tongue.

In those two lines, I found what I treasured in high school. I need now what I looked for then: That sometimes there's nothing left but to steel yourself, look into a 9 foot mouth filled with rows of keen, uncountable teeth and charge. Bring on 2012.




Yes, this one is super short, to reflect the length of the song itself. Here's Meth Mites, which is even more disgusting and grisly than its name implies.

Marathon: We Hide In Pixels (7 of 13)

It's been a while.

I cannot help but be influenced by my friends and somehow, these days: I'm eclipsed entirely by them. At least in the form notion now: Zach's got a blog in which he simply takes pictures of the update he wrote on a typewriter, which I think is a delicious piece of intertextuality and "just gotta plug away" nature of the form.

There was a series of posts called Marathon that I did in 2010 about the self titled Marathon record and its relation to my life. I stopped it because well, Rome happened, which meant this blog had to bloom and then wilt. My excuse for not keeping going with it was that I embedded a youtube version of the Marathon song in question being questioned. (Side note: My best interviews are cross-examinations, I've noticed.) Since they're not on YouTube anymore, I had to devote a couple hours or so to figuring out iMovie to put them back on YouTube and that was always priority #139 on a long list of not doing anything and then finding the brain space to play Silent Hill 2.

Because I was looking over the old stuff I did with Zach, I went back to the Marathon posts and saw: No, I totally didn't embed any Marathon songs into the post. So, back to the Marathon. I've been thinking about it more than I expected for a project that's gone to the list in my head labelled inactive.

Because of that: This song, called Where We Hide, is really, really stupid easy. It's about punk being played by privileged straight white kids. It's one of those really obvious points that gets overlooked in retrospect, but when you hear about it for the first time, it's mindblowing. There's a couple harmonies on the song that are placed quite well, the first one that leaps to mind is and we'll make it tasty with sweet melodies having a harmony on the words sweet melodies is one a neat moment of being metatextual with the song, if you know how to look.

The same off-key melody backing vocal hits during details that incriminate and that decision still makes me smile, two years after I noticed it. If you pay attention, the song repays your attention with cool moments like that.

I did something like the same thing for Overkill a college magazine. I named myself Charles Victor Szasz so that if anyone actually used Google, it would pretty quickly reveal I was a massive comic book nerd, and that would narrow the field considerably. But really: I didn't want to use my name for this stuff, because I didn't want to acknowledge the thoughts I had and defend them in public.

Our lives are not really as hopeless or as haunted as we'd like to think. We're just privileged brats. We barely understand it means to be oppressed. We just scrape something real to let out how we feel...

And it was really only with my final piece, an introduction to Overkill #10 that, looking back that I nailed finally my voice, or at least got it better than I did otherwise in previous issues. Not to say I was somehow meaningfully...let's say constrained. I just know now I could write these things better and had I admitted my name, I wouldn't have to apologize for some of this.

Overkill was a project that allowed me to say what I wanted to say. I just wasn't brave enough to say it with my name. The hiding allowed me the sham that I would be seriously inquired for the ideas fired out into the quite flammable collegiate ether like a flare. That these things didn't quite explode spectacularly is one of the things I can't tell if it's relieving or disappointing.

I did, as Aaron sang, pontificate. And in calling myself Charles Victor Szasz, I'm ashamed now that I did it with deniability. It wasn't really so scary. I thought I needed the balcony. Maybe, years later, it's enough to say perhaps I was wrong.



Since Youtube only has a couple Marathon songs easily available to find and it's not this one, take this track, from the singer's new project, Attica! Attica!. It's called "The Children Of Broken Glass." This one line made me love it:

we hid our hearts to shield them from disgrace
and injustice laughed aloud and rubbed it in our face.

Yes. And when I say yes, I mean a wide mouthed, saliva loosening yes!

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.