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!

That Day Ten Years Ago

I'm having a hard time coming up with things/ideas that aren't better put here by smarter people. So go read that Guardian piece if you want insightful commentary.

Instead, I want to talk about three of the good things that have happened around the day of of 11 Sept 01 and then get out. First: My Chemical Romance got started. This may not sound like much and up until the Black Parade, they were an interesting piece of errata, a band that started out in the Ink and Dagger school of goth/punk darkness, so the descent of the scene into badly aging macabre imagery was something they came by honestly.

Then they put out the Black Parade, a record I ignore outside of three songs, the title track for it's Queen-esque bombast, "Teenagers" because it's got a great hook and an even better chorus "teenagers scare the living shit out of me" and the hidden track "Blood" for it's bizarre-ness, even on a record called the Black Parade.

Then...Danger Days and everything changed with Thought Bubble 2010. The dance floor at TB 2010 for "NaNaNaNaNa"was absolutely massive and had me screaming my lungs out. Put simply, that single song restored my faith in adjective-less punk rock. It's a mission statement. It's a threat. It's superhero punk rock for want of a better phrase. When taken with the album intro, Look Alive Sunshine, puts an Invisibles style bounce in my step and deserves to be played as loud as possible from any speaker capable of being jury-rigged and stolen.

Danger Days is My Chemical Romance retooling itself after the scope of ...Parade and finding a different muse in genre playing. When they play the Cure ("Summertime"), it's worthy of the comparison, when they play Bon Jovi, it's done with the two images being a bulletproof heart and a hollow-point smile. With that, how can I resist?

Second, a very good friend of mine proposed one year ago today.

Third, Adorno was born today.

Finally. I'm going to take Ed Brubaker's advice and find something beautiful in my world today. Joy beats oppression, so I've heard...




...but oppression will make you pay. A song called "Paul Robeson" from the World/Inferno Friendship Society's record Red-Eyed Soul.

Protein

What to say about Trin Loch? J-school student? Nah. Likes cooking? Nah. Proud Pi? Nah. The thing, if I'm going to properly introduce you to her is that she's not what she's doing now, she's most precisely understood as what she's planning for in the future.

There. Now you're introduced. This is written by her. Wait five years and she'll be telling you the news from wherever it's happening. Particularly if there's cupcakes.

I looked forward to buying Tina Fey’s Bossypants for weeks. When it was finally mine, I immediately pored over every page, hungry for all the jokes and hair-secrets that must have fueled my devotion to Ms. Fey since age eleven.

But I didn’t laugh once. Not once! I was engaged the whole way through because it was clever, honest writing and had lots of jokes on every page, but it wasn’t funny. I did love her stories about Alec Baldwin and Lorne Michaels and I did crack a smile during the Sarah Palin chapter, but for a former SNL Head Writer/30 Rock powerhouse, some of her writing frankly sucked. A whole chapter of politely acrid letters to her "haters" on perezhilton.com? Tina, you're better than that.

Many people much smarter and older than I am have waxed philosophical about what makes humor humor. Comedy’s in the wide shot and all that. Mr. Straw, my 9th grade global studies teacher, rattled off some behavioral psychology bullshit I only remember because it was so fucking pretentious: “Laughter is merely the response to a violation of the anticipatory set.” (Say that aloud in a British accent to sound like the world’s biggest tool.)

But I’m starting to think Mr. Straw was unfortunately right, at least for my sense of humor. I anticipated what Tina had to offer. I anticipated lots of fart jokes, improv war stories and feminism. I expected most of the book to be about food. It was all of those things, totally, and I was left both fully satisfied and completely disappointed.

I never laugh at sitcoms, but I do laugh when someone walks into a wall. I never laugh at comic strips, but I do laugh when waitresses drop all their plates. I’m the asshole that claps and yells, “Job opening!” And this frightens me, because with every day, I’ll get more used to the world and fewer things will violate my anticipatory set. Will I laugh less and less? Will I get so comfortable that nothing surprises me anymore, and I will never laugh again? Maybe those old grumpy grandpeople who never smile or laugh aren’t miserable…maybe they’re just incredibly well-adjusted. But there's a lot to appreciate about smart humor that's not ha-ha funny, so maybe they spend all their time appreciating instead of laughing.

The most recent violation of my anticipatory set was in the last Doctor Who episode called “A Good Man Goes to War." Amy Pond was gingerly holding her baby in the middle of a crossfire when it spontaneously melted (it was a fleshy doppelganger non-baby) and went “Pbbbbt” and all this jelly flesh landed on the ground with a plop. I laughed for ages. It was supposedly a moving, horrifying scene, but while Amy screamed a blood-curdling howl, I dissolved into hysterics: That baby went "Pbbbbt!"

It was funny because I didn't see it coming and it was totally bizarre. So, weird shit makes me laugh the most. But most people aren’t that weird, or maybe a lot of them are, and I’m not patient or kind enough to find out. This might be why I cut ties so brutally. I end friendships quickly. Graduation happens and I’m off, gone. I keep five or so people close-close-close because I know they’ll continue to surprise me and intrigue me, while the rest I can’t be sure of. I just want really weird, interesting friends who can make me laugh. I'm afraid people will go all boring on me and I’m even more scared of going all boring on myself. The qualities I value most in a person are eccentricity, creativity, spontaneity and an enthusiasm for all those things. If I’m not creating something new with friends, sometimes I feel like I’m wasting time. (The opportunity to share thoughts on Subsidized Sincerity is quite a lovely way to collaborate with a friend, so my thanks go out to James, for this and for never being boring.)

In Tina’s defense, I had huge expectations for the book, which completely disobeys her cardinal rule: always have low expectations. Memoirs aren’t her thing. Mom pants are. And so is improv, which is all about spontaneous creativity, so I'll still keep her on my List of Heroes, right under Fareed Zakaria but still above Lois Lane.

Here's “Many Moons” by Janelle Monae, another name on that list, who always delivers a healthy dose of weird whimsy on a boring day.

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!

The Common Clearinghouse

Usually, I'm more nuanced than this, but Common's appearance at the White House and subsequent Fox News pants-shitting based on the "burn a Bush" line has only two sides for me: You either understand Common's rhymes in the context it was written and then compare that to his entire discography or you don't. This is one of the few times where black OR white thinking is completely correct. There's right and there's wrong. It's clear, Fox News is on the second side.
Oh, and this is obviously manufactured outrage. No one ought to be surprised.

(Also: I use rhymes here as opposed to lyrics not because I want to devalue the message in hip-hop, but I instead don't want to use rock parlance to describe hip-hop where I don't have to.)

The song that got Fox News' knickers in a twist, "A Letter To the Law", based on its last part is, explicitly, about moving beyond that kind of violent language and rhetoric the news organization took for the song's core aim, to make a better, more safe world as a community. Period. There is no grey area on this one. I accept none. So let's use this as a test: Are you for Common or Fox News? Life hardly ever gives us these clear choices, these easy distinctions between knee-jerk crank yankerism and you know, truth, bolstered by accuracy. Take this moment and hold onto it.

Side point: Since when does anybody, for any reason, go to Fox News for any meaningful critical dissection of art? Seriously: When was the last time you or any of your friends thought "There's a new record from [Artist H] coming out. What does Fox News think of it?"

Then, Ron Grossman wrote in the Chicago Tribune an idiotic op-ed with the point that hey, Common, as a rapper, is not a poet. And his poetry isn't really that good. He's certainly no Keats, and thus Common ought not to be mistaken for a poet. To support his point, he chose the line I'm a renegade. I ain't never been afraid, I'm fresh and gettin' paid.

Now: Let's ignore the Grossman sheltering himself in his description of himself as a fuddy-duddy. I'll get to that later. What he's doing is using a particularly, say, bad line of Common's and saying it's indicative of the quality of his rhymes. It's not, of course. I don't even listen to Common and I can smoke this guy. Here. I spent an entire...3 minutes on rap genius and found this one: so many raps about rims, I'm surprised niggas ain't become tires.

The genius of rap genius is that you can click on the rhyme itself and get the explanation of it, sooooo, when I click on that, here's what comes up: [Common]’s surprised that even after rapping about rims so much, people aren’t tired of it. Also, play on the words raps/wraps. What wraps around a rim? A tire, of course.

That is some wordplay that Grossman dismisses entirely. Shit, most of rap's best lines are double, triple and quadruple-entendres that you need to be in the community to get. And pursuant to sharpening my point, I don't even listen to that much hip-hop! The two I listen to most often are Dessa and P.O.S., not exactly Hall Of Fame material. I don't even LISTEN to Common! I know he's Kanye's friend from Chicago that isn't Lupe Fiasco. I bought one of Common's CDs, Universal Mind Control, for my brother, for Christmas. That's it. That's the extent of my Common knowledge.

Now: Let's get back to the point about Grossman sheltering himself in the phrase fuddy-duddy. He's old. He doesn't understand kids these days. It's a phrase to give him wiggle room, to show that, well, he might not have everything right, but he has the gist. Fucking wrong. If he's going to call out Common for being bad with language and saying he's an old teacher, then he should at least have the temerity to back up his "Common isn't Keats because Common occassionally writes lyrics that are putrid" statement with his full authority. Plus, I'm Keats wrote subpar stuff and it doesn't get collected with his best work. Why not the same for Common?

And, finally, a recursive point, independent of Common's ability as a poet, just because he's bad doesn't make him not a poet. One can do things and be bad at them. What all of this boils down to is vivid: Common's getting a lot of flak that he simply does not deserve. That it is this simple is something that does not happen terribly often.




This song is by Common. It's called the Corner. It's about the corner and its importance in black culture. Enjoy.

That Guy Who Is Now Dead

I'm not happy with the announcement that Usama Bin Laden was killed.

Don't get me wrong, Usama Bin Laden killed a lot of people. I hate that. I don't like it, not one bit. But the President announcing it was the wrong thing to do. Yes, it gets a bunch of political points and by now you've probably seen the .jpg at right in five different places, but hey, hopefully it's still new, even if it's not fresh.

(Quick aside: It's a sign of the times that an image that hasn't been out 24 hours is already old news. Or maybe it's just me.)

I'll even go so far as to say I don't mind that he's dead. But dude, Al Qai'da sticks around even after Usama's gone and it's already adrift from being largely left out of the uprisings in the Middle East. With their symbol's death, it will almost certainly galvanize them to some kind of reprisals, and guess what, that's exactly the kind of shot in the arm a terrorist organization need to realign its priorities.

Let me say now, by the way, that I'm okay with the U.S. finding and killing Usama Bin Laden, let's call it an assassination, if we're to be honest. But announcing that he's dead and you've killed him makes him a martyr. Hopefully, this assasination, which again, few people in their right mind are going to argue against, is the above the water bit of the iceberg that is Al-Qai'da's declining importance and not the thing that gave Al-Qai'da their M.O. back.