Chris Walter and the Rebel Spell Friday

Well, my apologies to the Her Jazz Noise Collective - fond as I am of them, I just couldn't make it to the Cobalt for Fake Jazz Wednesday last night. What can I say? I was home, warm, and comfy; I gotta work tomorrow; and I didn't have enough cash on hand for a bus trip home, so I woulda had to have walked. There's more of a chance I'll go see the Rebel Spell on Friday, with Chris Walter reading; I haven't seen them play since my Razorcake thing on them came out (now on the stands at, like, Chapters and shit - it's in the one with a Bev Davies pic of the Tranzmitors on the cover, with, by pleasing coincidence, a Chris Walter interview with them).

Now the BIG question on my mind is if I want to go see the New York Dolls on Saturday. It's one of those dangerous gigs, where the questions of "how lame could it be" and "how great could it be" equally provide compelling arguments for staying or going...

Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll be Better Tomorrow

Say what you will about him, there are at least three real contributions to my life that Henry Rollins has made, over and above that of his music (which I have enjoyed many times - Black Flag were probably my second musical love - after the Who at age 13...):

1. Turning me on to the Stooges' Fun House and the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat in a very early (1982?) article in Spin magazine. I was 14 and living in the suburbs, having heard of neither band (tho' I think I knew who Iggy Pop was at that point). It changed my listening forever and prepared me for much that was to come.

2. (For better or for worse - ask my friends): Vastly broadening my comfort about talking about masturbation. Hell, he may have even IMPROVED my masturbation, by lessening any leftover Catholic guilts about it through his own openness. I keep sending him letters of thanks, in fact, with a few stories of my own - like the one about how, at age 12, my not wanting to confess to a priest what I was doing in the bathroom for so long probably saved me from a Catholic adulthood, to say nothin' of the possibility of bein' raped by a MIB - but, heh, he never writes back.

3. Turning me on to the novels of Hubert Selby Jr. I don't think I would be quite the same person without having read the immensely painful, but immensely spiritually rewarding, book, Last Exit to Brooklyn, when I was a teen. It's up there with the films of John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman, for me, for providing a painfully honest, spiritually serious, questing and passionate take on the human condition, but it does so while resiliently maintaining a lower class perspective, which literature is so generally lacking. One of the people in this documentary I'm watching on Selby - an excellent little film that I highly recommend, called It/ll Be Better Tomorrow; official site here -- talks about Selby's language being the equivalent of the music of Charlie Parker, but anyone who REALLY knows his jazz knows that this is Albert Ayler territory. There are screams of love, pain, ecstacy, sorrow and need from the very depths of the human soul. Except it hurts a lot more than Ayler, noisy as he may get; Ayler's story is sadder, but his music is more rapturous, easier to take. It affirms life in joy; Selby affirms life in tears. In any event: the man deserves great respect.

Anyhow, I wanted to tell y'all about this anecdote from the DVD I'm watching. Selby's novels - especially Last Exit, written in the 1950's - were at times called obscene, because they frankly depict sexual activity (and drug use and violence and homosexuality/transsexualism, and, of course, deep human suffering) and because they have plentiful profanity. The novels are so aware of the pain of the characters that, for all of this, one is more likely to think of Christ's compassion for Magdalen than of pornography, tho'. Even I - a man who has, at times, "entertained himself" ala Rollins with the works of Bataille and de Sade - cannot imagine anyone ready Selby salaciously, whatever controversies his books may once have generated.

That's just the build up to the anecdote, tho': despite all this, one of the various writers interviewed for the film, Jerry Stahl, I believe, tells that when he first met Selby, he confessed that it was strange meeting him, since Selby was "the first writer I ever jerked off to." Selby apparently was taken aback and remarked, "You're sicker than I thought." Then - as Stahl tells it - Selby's voice raised in curiosity: "What part?"

One thing, tho' - don't believe the highfalutin' book critic in the film who tells you, like he thinks he KNOWS sumfin, that the irregular line lengths on Selby's page, where paragraphs stop and start irregularly, are indicative of the pauses between paragraphs. Obvious bullshit, I'm sure - even tho' I'm merely arrivin' at my own deduction here, I would bet dinars to dogshit that it's the correct one: remember that Selby used a MANUAL TYPEWRITER - observe his comments on apostrophes vs. slashes, also in the film, which center on this fact - and that the fastest and easiest way - and certainly the most hands-on way - to drop from one paragraph to another on a manual, rather than hitting the return key, would be to grab the fuckin' wheel at the side of the machine and crank it. I am absolutely positive that this is the method we're seeing at work; pauses my ass, this is sheer impatient pragmatism to get the stuff onto the page as quickly and purely as possible, and damn all the rest of that other meaningless shit.

Anyhow, this is a great documentary - even if you don't know the work of Hubert Selby Jr (and please don't judge it by exposure to any movies you may have seen; neither are very good, tho' Requiem is probably the better).

Post-script: I wonder if Chris Walter has read the book of Selby's stories I gave him? I really, really, really want Chris Walter to read Hubert Selby. Maybe he's the kind of guy, tho', who if you bugged him would dig in his heels? If I were a praying man, I think, I'd be down on my knees for this'un.

Post-script two: I wonder if Oprah is literate enough to have asked Cormac McCarthy what he thought of Selby? I haven't tracked down that fuckin' interview. One o' the Pulp Fiction guys sez it's on Youtube somewhere, but I really don't wanna see it. I mean, cripes, folks - McCarthy gives ONE SINGLE LONE FUCKIN' INTERVIEW post-success and it's with OPRAH? Fuck it.

Post-script three: and, uh, thanks, Henry.

Checkout Time at The Tower

Been thinking about the Tower this week - in more than one form. Someone started a discussion of the song on the Nomeansno Forum, mostly focusing on the coolness of the music (much as my fellow Nomeansno fans are a savvier bunch than, say, the Nickelback crew, literary and religious allusions are not their strong suit; no one even commented when I pointed out the allusion to Yeats in "Rags and Bones." Rob Wright is a big fan of Irish literature, especially James Joyce; the fact that anyone can read Ulysses stuns me. I have tried; it defeats me, time and again, and I somehow don't think his suggestion that I take a shot of whiskey before reading each page will help). Anyhow, I always thought the song on Wrong was one of Nomeansno's most successful ventures; it combines clear references to the above card ("from a burning building/a man leaps to his death") with a seeming awe/horror at sheer throbbing thrust of phallocentric industry, inner fascism, POWER... The song is one big erect cock, sticking out there for all to see. The conventional meaning of the card is well-explained on this site, if you scan through the card names on the left; phallocentric lust is not the main theme explored, but the card resonates with me, much like the Three of Wands was doing awhile back. I don't give a damn for divination but Tarot can be a useful tool for focusing. Creating the soul, doesn't Jod say? From the aforementioned site:

When you believe material objects are more powerful than spirit and mind, you
start building up a Tower of falsehoods on a very unstable foundation. If, by
some miracle of engineering, it does not collapse under its own weight, you will
eventually push it over yourself. The Tower falls not because Fate says so but
because something within can no longer endure the strain it must bear. Sooner or
later it will give out. This is a humbling experience because its lesson is that
no one is invincible. The problem for most people is that they concentrate on
the negatives and ignore the great opportunity that has been given to them.

Anyhow: my own personal tower is startin' to become apparent. I overindulge in film, music, literature, shopping, and food to comfort and entertain myself and distract myself from my own problems - including an expanding waistline, a substantial debt, and a growing sense that I'd like to do something other than my current job (ESL was always intended as a stopgap measure, a way to get some sense of control in my life, in contrast to the sinking murk, fear, and rather more destructive overindulgences of my 20's; and tho' as jobs go I don't mind it, it ain't much of a challenge anymore). Writing is perhaps a productive way to some other occupation, but it can also be a dangerous way of creating "false order" in my life - organizing ideas and thoughts about things OTHER than my own dilemma, which could use some dealing with. Been trying to slow down a bit, to find my own ass so I can pull my head out; as fun as writing is, on some level, it feels a bit of a distraction. Glorified Free Cell. Order for its own sake.

Anyhow, I haven't been writing so much lately on this blog. I DO have a ton of things coming out in the December/January Nerve Magazine and Discorder, though:

- My monthly Discorder column, focusing on some pretty dark and unhappy films to balance out the false cheer of the holidays.

- An interview with punk novelist Chris Walter, in Discorder (I loved his East Van and "just liked" his more recent Welfare Wednesdays; I've been poking around his Winnipeg memoir, I was a Punk before You were a Punk, and it seems to have more energetic prose than either of those. The plan is to interview Chris Walter for Razorcake, at some point).

- An interview with various people about the Portland Hotel Society and the Black Crow Project, again in Discorder (local artists supporting community-building efforts in the DTES, mostly focusing on social housing).

- an interview with Tony Bardach of the Pointed Sticks will also be appearing in the December/January Nerve. (Neither Discorder nor Nerve publish in the first month of the New Year, so I had to get this finished a lot faster than I expected - I just found out last week that the band will be playing at Richards on Richards on January 6th, as the follow up to their Japanese reunion tour. If you don't know about that, I'd suggest checking out Razorcake #36, due out in January.

Alas, none of this is going to help me lose weight, get a new job, or pay off my debts. In fact, since writing such things takes up a fair chunk of my time, it could be said to INTERFERE with the above - unless, of course, somehow this becomes lucrative. I doubt it will; the people who publish the stuff I want to write generally don't pay, and the people who pay generally don't want to publish what I want to write.

In the meantime, to return to the topic of Towers, I was reading this great little Howard Zinn article on the current state of the US vis-a-vis the rest of the world, and stumbled on what's got to be the quotable quote of the month:

Don’t people join Alcoholics Anonymous so that they can stand up and be honest about themselves? Maybe we ought to have an organization called Imperialists Anonymous, you know, and have the leaders of the country get up there on national television and say, “Well, it’s time, you know -- time to tell the truth.” It would be -- I don’t expect it to happen, but it would be refreshing.

Thought I would share. It may be a little while before I post again, so enjoy the snow...