The new 2xCD reissue of COME's masterpiece 1992 record "Eleven: Eleven" came out yesterday, and is now available in better retail and online establishments. Good for Matador for recognizing what a criminally ignored record this one was, and how important it was that it was reevaluated by a new generation. Despite my having been more of a "garage punk" sort of music enthusiast when it came out (with dashes of indie and arty noise), "Eleven: Eleven" absolutely floored me from the moment I heard it, and, as I've said before, it's one of the two or three best records of the 90s. Now COME are touring in support of the reissue – so check that tour schedule and make sure you're front and center when they hit your town.
The band, whom I interviewed and put on the cover of my then-fanzine SUPERDOPE in 1993, were kind enough to ask me to write liner notes for the reissue of this album, which I did. Now that it's officially out, I thought I'd print them here. Brace yourself for hyperbole.
COME's "Eleven: Eleven"
I’ve been waiting for the club of slobbering, I-was-knocked-dead-in-’92 individuals who think Come’s “Eleven: Eleven” is one of the greatest of all possible rock and roll records to grow larger than it already has. It’s never been large enough. The record’s got its proverbial cult status for a few of us, sure, and I know I wear the memory of the two dizzying shows I got to see Come play on that tour like a scene-veteran merit badge. Yeah, there were dozens of bands who blew you & me away in our younger years and whose albums we pronounced as being totally rad for a few months after initial listen, but “Eleven: Eleven” felt like a subdued but howling, pained-birth masterpiece from the word go. It’s remained so for me and for our slowly growing club of dark-worshipping truth seekers. I’m exceedingly hopeful that this reissue will greatly expand our ranks.
Everything about this band, undeniable talents notwithstanding, was mood and feel. They created a near-cinematic vortex of crazed guitar interplay and thumping rhythm section and channeled it into something truly dense and wonderful. You didn’t even have to see them live to easily imagine them killing the club lights by half and then getting deeply lost in their own murky sonics. That’s exactly how it played out, just as the record prophesies. Come certainly weren’t a “Hello Cleveland” sort of band. If they talked, it was a mumbled thanks at best. Their sense of each other’s respective strengths, and how they each played off of & then sucked deeper power from those strengths, is aurally apparent on this record, and that’s what they were clearly focused on live as well.
Thalia Zedek was already a much-revered force of musical nature for both her swirling guitar work and tasted-life-to-its-fullest rasped voice of experience when she came to sing & play for Come in the early 90s, and it’s not shorting her decades of excellent subsequent work to call “Eleven: Eleven” something of an early-career denouement. She and guitarist Chris Brokaw had an unreal ability to interlock and hone in together on bleak, shimmering, whammy-bar-dominated guitar races that were both pulse-rushing and chilling in succession. In fact, those two so frequently used the whammy bars on their guitars, it was like the jangling key to a hidden portal that they just needed to slot correctly in order to drag us all down to places raw and unknown. I had never before, and have never since, seen a band wield the whammy as a secret weapon of jarring, tone-bending sound the way that Come did.
The hard-hitting, tight propulsion of the record, courtesy of drummer Arthur Johnson and bassist Sean O’Brien, also does it a ton of favors for posterity. The thing just plays huge, and its agonizing tension release is kicked up several pegs for not simply being a messy dynamic swirl, but a pounding, raw, firebreather. Eleven: Eleven even feels like a concept record (though I very much doubt this was their intent), as it is sequenced perfectly, from the scraping, burrowing-out first track “Submerged” to the careening, out-of-control climax of “Orbit”. When Thalia’s vocals come rasping in and out of various musical set pieces, it’s like a broader story of some sort’s being told, much like a torch song, except for this torch sounds like it’s in the process of being slowly snuffed out. Check out “Brand New Vein” for the “blues” that this band was supposedly creating, which was oft-remarked on at the time because “dark music” = “blues”, right? It’s cabaret, it’s blues, it’s depressing, it’s dynamic, it’s loud and it’s a total head trip all in one.
As alluded to before, it’s usually a combination of time and consensus that provides a record with its “masterpiece” status, but goddamn it, I just knew with this one. I still spend about every six months with it to this day, and let its cascading rawness envelop me for forty-five minutes – and this is absolutely me-time listening, not to be shared with others – before calling myself satiated, and off to search for the next record that might provide equivalent catharsis. There’ve been previous few, I’m sad to report, and nothing that scraped out the demons and summoned the ghosts the way that “Eleven: Eleven” did. And does.
My young life was filled with ridiculous amounts of television, live sports, and "media events" & media sensations that were imprinted upon my still-developing brain. There was a streaker during the closing ceremonies of the 1976 Montreal Olympics; there was "Rock N Rollen", the "Rainbow Man" with the John 3:16 signs at nationally-televised baseball games; and there were the left-wing speeches given by Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Dreyfuss at the 1978 Oscars (during which my dad memorably screamed at the TV, "Oh Vanessa you COMMIE!! Oh shut up Dreyfuss, you horrible PINKO!!").
Naturally, I also remember Morganna, the buxom "kissing bandit" who would run onto the field to kiss players during live baseball games, quite well. Her arrival on the field at the All-Star Game or World Series was always a bit of a surprise while retrospectively also being something of a fait accompli. Her infamy touches numerous 1970s attitudes that signify both good and ill – public event safety, female exploitation, mild-mannered softcore titillation; and Christian moral-majority reactionaries. She's now been immortalized in a short film about her exploits, complete with a where-is-she-now "reveal" at the end. Check it out if you've got 15 minutes today.
I read Greene's "The Heart of The Matter" in college, loved its dark and mysterious look at marriage, adultery, religious dogma and British imperialism, and for years have been looking for a reason to dig into Graham Greene's fiction again. I figured I'd start with his most renown novel, the one he called his favorite and which is considered the leading pillar in his series of "Catholic novels". Greene was a Catholic himself, though suffered from slings and arrows from the church for not kowtowing to the Vatican's flattery of itself. It's clear from this novel, and from what I know about Greene, that his own relationship with the church was conflicted and confused, yet something that he felt to be integral and very important to whom he was as a man.
So it is with "THE POWER AND THE GLORY" and its protagonist, an unnamed "whiskey priest" on the run in 1920s Mexico from the governmental forces cracking down on the Church. The book is a fugitive story, one in which the priest is running both from the law (he'll be immediately shot, if captured, as priests before him were) and from his own sin. At some level, he's even running from the church and its dogma. He loves to drink his brandy (some of the best passages in the book concern his desperate bargainings for alcohol), and he loves the fruit of his relationship that came from "laying down with a woman" while he was still a priest. The little girl that is his daughter is someone we meet early on in the novel, and she absolutely despises the suddenly-arrived man that she knows to be her father. Our priest is tormented in many ways by his past, his thoughts, and certainly by the oppressive government, but he compels himself to continue to run for his own sake throughout the book.
Greene's language and characters are masterful. Just as I was taught "The Heart of the Matter" in college as a great work of literature, so too is this book. It has made several "Best English-language Books of All Time" lists, for what it's worth. The squalor and heat of Mexico are vivid and achingly suffocating in Greene's telling. Beetles splatter against sun-baked walls and crackle to the ground. Men seek shade and hammocks, while starving children and women aimlessly shuffle around them. The poor people of the villages are painted as almost uniformly Catholic, almost to a person having to live a lie and renounce their faith lest they too be shot. Yet when the Priest arrives, everyone needs to confess their many welled-up sins to him, and they jostle for position and cajole him return to the priestly life, just this one time.
While you've got this sort of languid, meandering sort of storytelling, you've also got the urgency of the story, the narrative of the priest one step ahead of the men who want to capture and kill him, urging the story onward. It's fantastic stuff. I definitely understand this book's place in the canon, and would love your recommendations for the next Greene book I should read if you'd be so kind as to provide them.
I spent the better part of a quiet Tuesday evening holed up in a room creating the mix you can now download here - DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO PODCAST, Edition #13. I've been putting these together about every two weeks or so for the past five months, but if this is your first one, well - welcome to the show. I play songs I like, play-act at being a "DJ", mix-n-match songs on my Mac, talk into a computer, and generally try to keep all the shows to about an hour. You can download all 12 of the past editions here.
This one's got new stuff from RAW PRAWN, THE DELPHINES, CANDY HIGHWAY, SOCK PUPPETS and COLLEEN GREEN, along with super sub-underground weirdness, punk, garage, pop & more from The Moodists, Electric Eels, Icky Boyfriends, The Fall, Solger, Crash Course In Science and a bunch of other winners.
Download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio Podcast #13
Stream Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio Podcast #13
Track listing:
ASBEST - Family Care
THE DELPHINES - '71
RTFO BANDWAGON - New Jack
INTERNATIONAL STRIKE FORCE - Over The Credit Line
ELECTRIC EELS - You Crummy Fags
COLLEEN GREEN - You're So Cool
THE URINALS - I'm White and Middle Class
HANDGRENADES - Demo To London
SALLY SKULL - Bride of Frankenstein
DESPERATE BICYCLES - The Medium Was Tedium
CANDY HIGHWAY - Mad Glad
SOLGER - American Youth
RAW PRAWN - Wrong Place Wrong Time
HIGH TENSION WIRES - High Note
THE STITCHES - Cars of Today
ICKY BOYFRIENDS - Pay N Pak
LOLI & THE CHONES - Nazi Death Camp
VICIOUS VISIONS - I Beat You
SOCK PUPPETS - Hey Honey
CRASH COURSE IN SCIENCE - Kitchen Motors
SCORCHED EARTH POLICY - Too Far Gone
THE MOODISTS - The Disciples Know
THE FALL - I'm Into CB
With the express written consent of Byron Coley and Chris D, I'm posting an outstanding, well-recorded 45 minutes of THE FLESH EATERS, practicing new and recent songs in 1983, right before they broke up. I've had this on tape for a number of years, and it's a not only a ripping set of "heavy punk thunder from the lake of burning fire" (to coin a phrase), it's a fascinating look into what the band might have evolved into had they continued. As it was, they'd hit their proverbial limits, and shortly after this, Chris D put together his acoustic "Time Stands Still" album before getting a full-blown band together again with his wife Julie Christensen, THE DIVINE HORSEMEN.
After a few well-oiled, blowout "Hard Road To Follow" numbers (their album which had come out earlier that year), you get to hear sketches of songs Chris later put out with other bands, like "All I Have" with Stone By Stone, and "Love Call" & "Stone By Stone" with The Divine Horsemen. Fantastic stuff. Download it and share your Flesh Eaters stories in the comments – because, alas, I never saw 'em until they'd started up again seven years later.
Download THE FLESH EATERS – PRACTICE TAPE, 1983
Tracks:
1. Every Time I Call Your Name
2. Buried Treasure
3. Poison Arrow
4. Hard Road To Follow
5. Father of Lies
6. Louie Louie
7. All I Have
8. Down In The Ditch
9. Stone By Stone
10. Love Call
I'm no comedy nerd. I know it's a terrific time to be one. There's so much stuff to laff at on the internet – YouTube channels, media empires, podcasts, stand-up, sketch and so on – that it's gotta be impossible to pull the gold from the rough and feel like you've definitely hit paydirt. Unless that's all you want to do, of course. Like a lot of folks, I have to divide my cultural enrichment time between many different forms of low and high culture (music, books, film, websites and so on), all of which are more readily available, and in heaping quantities, than at any point in human history.
There's also the quality aspect to think about. Put bluntly, most "comedy" sucks, and there's plainly too much of it. Even for the funniest among us, it's nearly impossible to be funny all or even most of the time – or, more germane to today's topic, even within a single 1-hour podcast of your own making. I've tried out a bunch of them over the last couple of years. It has become quite the thing in comedy circles to have your own podcast. It's a low-cost way to stay creative and sharp, as well as to experiment, brand and market yourself, and get yourself inside the logrolling community of "comedians interviewing other comedians". Just look at Mark Maron, they all say. (I haven't heard them say this, but I can imagine them saying it). Maron's got his own TV show now, which rose out of podcast he records in his garage. Perhaps there's even hope for Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio on that front.
Anyway, the list of comedy podcasts I've tried, and then abandoned, is quite long. Some, like Maron's, aren't really even comedy podcasts – they're interview podcasts with people from across the cultural spectrum, a la FRESH AIR, with a funnier, albeit more annoying, host. I still listen to his "WTF", depending on the guest, so he doesn't count. I used to really enjoy "MIKE AND TOM EAT SNACKS", but then I got tired of Michael Ian Black's relentless snark and declining hit/miss ratio. After this year's annual San Francisco Sketchfest, which featured a ton of "hot" comedy podcasters from around the country recording their shows live, I decided to try every single one of 'em out. I learned that most comedy podcasts are awful.
The worst – I'm talking so unfunny that they were switched off and deleted from my device within minutes of pushing "play" - were RONNA & BEVERLY, SUPEREGO and COMEDY BANG BANG, the last of which made me want to slit my wrists.Tolerable ones included POD F. TOMPKAST, YOU MADE IT WEIRD and a couple of others I deleted anyway. For a short time I was into WALKING THE ROOM, with longtime comic Greg Behrendt (saw him live at least twelve years ago) and Dave Anthony, before becoming frustrated by their eternal bro-dom, constant stepping over each other's lines, the desperate search for the joke in everything, and Anthony's misanthropic persona, which is of course part of his schtick, but it's pretty wearing if you try and listen to it once a week. There were others as well, but I truly have forgotten their names.
And then there was one! One comedy podcast that I embraced from the get-go, have listened to every week for months now, and which I thought I'd tell you about in case we somehow have the same sort of comedy DNA and laugh at the same ridiculous things. This one's not even rip-roaring, over-the-top hilarious, but I can't stop listening to it – and I have, at times nearly run my car off the road with snorting, tearing laughter. Really! It's called THROWING SHADE. Erin Gibson and Brian Safi are a hell of a team. The show's ostensibly about "issues important to ladies – and gays" (and "heterosensitives" like me), and in many ways, it is a very socially progressive, vaguely political show that calls out idiocy from homophobes and sexists in no uncertain terms. What it's really about is these two – a woman and a gay man – riffing off of each other, playing weird personas, and having the sort of amazing, rapid-fire, brainwave-to-vocal-cord joke transfer that every one of us wishes we had.
When they're not funny, they're still funny. Or they'll just sing nonsense instead, at which point they edit their music in, and the "bit" or "segment" is over. Brian likes to play up his queerness into a frothing, stereotypical mess, just to get a reaction out of Erin (for instance, a loudly declaimed, "Ooooooo-ooooooo!", said in the gayest voice possible) – and she'll snark her way around whatever he's talking about, usually with about 800 obscure pop culture references, just to piss him off in the rare moments when he's trying to be serious. In fact bizarre pop culture is big in both of their worlds, and for me anyway, it's totally funny. Shoebox Greetings is big. Brand names of 80s and 90s products are big.
It's hard to even describe "Throwing Shade" effectively, other than to recommend it and hope you enjoy it. I know for certain that well over half of you will hate it the way I hate most of the other comedy podcasts, and I'm under no illusion that it's anything but an acquired taste. I'm even gonna go see them do their thing live next month, and if I survive that and still listen to their show afterward, I'll let ya know.
The yearly San Francisco International Film Festival may not be the most prestigious set of dates on the film elite's calendars, but for many years running it has been a first-rate place to catch film from some of the smaller corners of the world. Most of their films don't end of playing in wider release – and I think that's a good thing. Sure, they have the opening/closing films with big stars, high entry fees, afterparties and loads of media guests that help to pay the bills, but a typical Tuesday night will have all sorts of small-scale documentaries, Asian film, first-time French and Scandinavian directors and more. I make a point of going as many times as my schedule allows during the festival's two weeks. This year, alas, that was only 2 nights – but I feel like I did OK and saw a couple of things you might want to take your own gander at. Here goes.
"FILL THE VOID" - I could probably write a lengthy position paper on this Israeli film and the anger it brought up in me, but I'll curb my enthusiasm and temper it in a short film review instead. Director Rama Burshtein comes from Israel's ultra-orthodox Jewish community, and she characterized this film about an 18-year-old girl, Shira (excellently and subtly played by Hadas Yaron), who marries her dead sister's husband out of a sense of fidelity and continuity, as a "love story". OK, if you insist. The film shows a side of Israeli life that those of us who've seen some of the many secular films from that country have never seen, and it's to the film's immense credit that you're totally immersed in that timeless world, where men pray, study and chant all day and night, and women scurry out of sight and into their proper place of indentured servitude.
My atheistic and feministic nature was dumbstruck by the waste of human potential displayed in this community, where women exist merely to marry and birth children, and men exist merely to exalt a nonexistent god. But as Burshstein admonished us in her talk afterward, "it's hard for the secular to understand". You can say that again. Let me then proceed to enthusiastically recommend this film, as it is deliberately made, well-acted and quite a cultural head trip. You can read more about it in this recent New York Times profile.
"RENT A FAMILY, INC." - My wife and I chose this Danish-made documentary about a Japanese entrepreneur who operates a business that rents fake family members out for weddings and other uncomfortable events because we expected it to be a wacky, aren't-the-Japanese-something-else slice of life. Instead we got a major, major bummer of a documentary – a good one, true, but far more focused on Ryuichi (the businessman and husband) and his awful, depressed, uncomfortable life. There are likely many reasons the closed, careful and very inward-focused Ryuichi chose his rather interesting (and barely profitable) profession; the film doesn't speculate, and instead shows us how Ryuichi is at best tolerated and at worst loathed by his wife and two sons.
He has dreams – he just wants to go to Hawaii, on one trip – but he lacks the means nor the will to really change his lonely and very sad situation. It's all real, too – some of the rent-a-family scenes themselves are dramatizations, for understandable reasons – but filmmaker Kasper Astrup Schroder confirmed in the post-film Q&A that Ryuichi's every bit the man in real life that he is in this documentary about him. Somewhere in Tokyo, he's still plotting that trip to Hawaii, and I think everyone in our audience would heartily cheer if he finally got there.
Got a new mixtape/radio show/podcast that I've made just for you, and it's called DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO PODCAST, EDITION #12. I recorded it direct-to-laptop and completed it within the past five minutes, and it's got some real musical whoppers on it that I carefully curated for ya. You'll hear new stuff from Raw Prawn, White Fence, The Mentalettes and Veronica Falls, as well as a plethora of aggressive pop, nervous punk, wiry garage and far-out psych from the last five decades. I say this every time, but this twelfth one is absolutely, positively the best collection of music I've ever put together - including mixtapes made for girls.
Download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio Podcast #12
Stream Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio Podcast #12
Track listing:
STEVE TREATMENT - The Hippy Posed Engrosement
RAW PRAWN - None Left
DEAR NORA - Make You Smile
REVERSIBLE CORDS - Highway Tomorrow
THE 2x4s - Iron Line
BLAST OFF COUNTRY STYLE - Giggles & Gloom
THE SHITBIRDS - Schiessbird
WHITE FENCE - Trouble is Trouble Never Seen
THE STEREO SHOESTRING - On The Road South
BUBBLEGUM LEMONADE - Unsafe At Any Speed
SALVATION ARMY - Mind Gardens
100 FLOWERS - Motorboat To Hell
VERONICA FALLS - Timeless Melody
MICRAGIRLS - Electric Chair Twist
SOCK PUPPETS - Summer Jacket
BATHROOM RENOVATIONS - Apathetic Hell
TYRANNA - Shock Face
THE WHITEFRONTS - World's Fair
WARUM JOE - Tchang
SLUGFUCKERS - Rhizome
D.R.I. - Busted
SICK THINGS - Police
THE GERMS - The Slave
NUMBERS - Information
THE MENTALETTES - Fine Fine Fine
Download our past shows - each about an hour:
Download Show #11
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Download Show #7
Download Show #6
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Download Show #3
Download Show #2
Download Show #1
This collection of short stories is rather dubiously and sardonically titled "Love Stories", but of course, they're really nothing of the sort. Soviet/Russian writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya traffics in the sort of love in which children drift sadly apart from their parents, husbands and wives are continually philandering, alcohol poisons relationships and most everyone's grim, poor and barely holding it together. In other words, great Russian literature! I had a blast with this book. I read a review of it and instantly knew it was for me, and it didn't disappoint. It turns out Petrushevskaya's been writing for many years – she's now 70 – and her work was suppressed in the Soviet era; not because it was political, but because it was so dark, and because it showed a sad ordinariness in the broken lives and lost souls of the Communist system, the people who had to live within and under it for over 70 years. The stories collected here were written in spurts from the 1970s until just before the book's publication.
Petrushevskaya will typically, in these very short stories, quickly establish a central character – usually a girl or woman who lives in the tiny Moscow apartment blocks that the Soviets built en masse for the people. This girl or woman will often have conflict in her family; perhaps a loving mother (we learn in the translator's introduction that Petrushevskaya herself had a rotten childhood, redeemed by her mother's love) but not much else. Often her career is a dead end, and her romantic prospects are dismal; or, if she has a husband, he's a laggard, a liar or a drunk. When and if children come into the picture, it's not always a good thing, and it usually means that the father is either absent, or about to be.
One story that really grabbed me is called "Like Penelope", and strangely, it's one of the few semi-uplifting tales in the book. Our central character this time is Oksana, who lives with her mother Nina, who adores her, but "who is the only person who loved her". Through some interesting and strange family dynamics, she initially resists, then accepts a new dress her mom and grandmother-in-law have clumsily made her. Her confidence and beauty is transformed the moment she decides to embrace and wear it, at which point an estranged relative, her grandmother-in-law's grandson, bursts into the door during a drunken fight in the apartment downstairs that has just ended in murder. The relative is instantly captivated, and it's clear that Oksana will finally be loved by someone other than her mother. It's typical of Petrushevskaya to populate these stories with women like Nina, who want to do well and do right with their very limited means, only using their capacity for love in a place where there's not much of it to go around.
The picture one gets is probably one not much different from your conception of anonymous and desperate urban living on the margins of Russian society. It's a feminine take on the mundane day-to-day drabness of this sort of life, yet with life-changing moments like birth, death, marriage, divorce, heartbreak and familial inheritance that alter an individual's life dramatically; unfortunately, usually not for the better.
Some pals from work asked me to join their NHL playoff pool this morning, and it's forced the issue to your benefit. Now you get to be the beneficiary of my prognostications, as you were last year, when I correctly picked the Pittsburgh Penguins to beat the Nashville Predators and win the Cup. Wait, lemme check that. Right, I was a little off on that one. I will say that this has been one of my favorite hockey seasons ever; my guess is it only being a strike-shortened 48 games, as opposed to 82, might have something to do with it. I've been following pretty closely and I feel really good about my upset pick to win it all this year, The St. Louis Blues. (If they DO in fact win, I'm gonna win something like 2,000 Norwegian kroner, which is approximately 27 bucks).
Here's what you should be looking for in May and June, round by round:
Round 1
Pittsburgh over New York Islanders
Montreal over Ottawa
Washington over New York Rangers
Toronto over Boston
Chicago over Minnesota
Detroit over Anaheim
San Jose over Vancouver
St. Louis over Los Angeles
Quarterfinals
Pittsburgh over Montreal
Toronto over Washington
Chicago over Detroit
St. Louis over San Jose
Semifinals
Pittsburgh over Toronto
St. Louis over Chicago
Stanley Cup Finals
St. Louis over Pittsburgh
When I got out of college in 1989, my highest ambition was to be a copy editor, and ultimately a journalist of some kind. Maybe a beat writer for the San Francisco Giants? - nah, I hadn't gone that far. Something that paid 8 bucks an hour was much more like it. Alas, I couldn't get a copy editing job anywhere, even with my "highly desirable" degree in English that I'd just procured. So I answered a newspaper classified ad, and came to work at Monster Cable in South San Francisco, CA as a customer service rep, where I would spent the next 6 years. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this began my career as a frequent business traveler. I say it not in the braggy way that certain road warriors tote up their frequent flyer miles and exotic destinations, because certainly the trips I most frequently take are anything but exotic - Kansas and Atlanta have been big in recent years, for instance – I actually have many good things to say about both places, yet I'm guessing you're not squirming with jealously; nor should you be.
Being flown to the four corners of the US, and sometimes the globe, on company expense has certainly been a positive way more often than a negative. The very first trip Monster Cable sent me on would have been around 1991 or so, to Chicago for the then twice-a-year Consumer Electronics Show. I had the exhausting privilege of "working the booth" on my feet for ten hours a day, and I was once even asked to carry the CEO's briefcase for him (after I picked my jaw up off the floor, I did what I was told, of course). That was the first and only time I'd ever had to share a 2-double-beds room with a co-worker, which totally bummed me out, but thankfully I liked the guy. And I was in Chicago – for free! A revelation. Most business trips of this nature involve virtually zero fun time; yet we were able to fit in a quick round of beers at a microbrewery one night, and I bailed on a company party to walk to the Cabaret Metro to see the band Eleventh Dream Day. A decent start to road life.
Having, I guess, provided my mettle as a worker of trade shows, standing in front of people and telling them how great our products were, I then started flying all over the country to do the same. San Diego, Houston, New Jersey, Las Vegas and then some. When it ended with my leaving the company in 1995, so too did all company-subsidzed travel, and I missed it badly. You get really used to a perk that pulls you out of daily toil and drudgery, where you get to see a new city you've only read about, meet their yokels, compare notes in endless smalltalk on your respective cities, and so on. At my new company, nothing happened outside of our building for a year, and when I finally got asked to fly to San Diego for a meeting – a short day trip, with not even a hotel stay involved – I remember being so excited that I didn't sleep well the night before (which until very recently, continued to bedevil me the night before traveling).
My career, such that it was, started to be defined as a marketer and as an "account manager", which I loved because I didn't have to do any actual sales, but still got to travel to see the customer where he or she lived, to make sure things were going OK, hold very important meetings & work on plans and stuff. Frequent trips to destinations like Columbus, Portland, Phoenix and Riverside followed. Then in 2001 I started working for the large European wireless operator Vodafone, which put me onto international flights – and which was amazing. Vodafone flew everyone Business Class when they had to go overseas – no matter how low on the pole you were. The first international work trip I ever took, my boss came to me at 4pm on a Friday, and asked me if I could be in Karlskrona, Sweden the following Monday. I assured him that I could. I came back for a week, and then they sent me out there again for another week. Every time they'd send me overseas to someplace cool, I assumed it would be the last time, and after a trip to Tokyo in 2003, it was indeed the last time, and our entire marketing group got laid off. I've never flown business class ever since.
I reckon since then the business travel thing has kind of snowballed. I've somehow managed to have the perfect amount of travel; not enough to piss my wife off too much nor tire me out too badly, nor to rack up much more than a handful of Southwest frequent flyer rewards, yet enough to get me out of the office every couple of months and into a place I'm not too familiar with. My favorite trip I've ever done, outside of that first dose of Sweden with its side trip to Denmark, was probably a New York/Boston one a few years ago in which I spoke at two 9am conferences for thirty minutes, right at the start of the conference – but otherwise had 3 days of exploration split between the two cities, including a train trip to Boston from NY instead of a flight. One time I also got sent to Atlanta for the sole purpose of having one deluxe dinner at a top-tier steakhouse with the customer, simply because our company didn't want to be grossly outnumbered by all the people they invited, and therefore sent me out there to balance things out a little better. No complaints. Oh, and there was this promotion I ran in the same city where we gave away some ESPN-branded merchandise before 3 Atlanta Braves games, who just so happened to be playing my San Francisco Giants those same three games. Coincidence? I choose not to answer.
Worst trips? Just the many that consist of long flight, airport, long day of work, long dinner with customer, hotel, early flight out the next morning. Too many to count. That's when all of the glamor is leeched out by its polar opposite, tedium. Nothing awful's really happened, outside of interminable flight delays that happen to everyone. I guess the time I landed in Toronto, the plane screeched to a halt on the runway, and a fire truck came screaming up – and then just sat there for 20 minutes, with no announcement from the pilot – that was pretty lame. It was followed up by a totally pointless 90 minute stay in a Canadian customs office that didn't have air conditioning, because I'd been randomly chosen for secondary screening in the post-9/11 era. I made up for the indignities with good beer and a decent meal later that night, as I always try to do, with or without the customer. It all hasn't been too bad, all things considered.
This is almost certainly a boring post for anyone reading it, so I'll mercifully stop here. My aim with the blog isn't always to edify on cultural matters or whatever it is we do here; I'm also collecting anecdotes and thoughts for myself and for my fruitful lineage, who will themselves go forth and multiply (and read my blog hundreds of years from now). You never know when your mind will blow a gasket, and you'll forget everything that every happened to you, right? With that in hand, here's my to-the-best-of-my-knowledge inventory of the places I've been made to go for the purpose of making my companies (and capitalism!) far better, richer and stronger:
Domestic
Atlanta (appx. 8 times)
Bogalusa, LA
Boston (twice)
Burbank, CA (too many to count; over 20)
Chicago (5 times)
Cincinnati, OH
Columbus, OH
Dallas, TX (twice)
Houston, TX
Irvine, CA (3 times)
Las Vegas, NV (at least 10 times, which is 9 times too many)
Little Rock, AR
Los Angeles, CA (5 times)
Nashville, TN
Maryland (suburbs – I can't remember where – twice)
McLean, VA (5 times)
New Jersey (also suburbs, twice)
New Orleans, LA (twice)
New York, NY (appx. 12-15 times)
Omaha, NE
Orlando, FL (3 times)
Overland Park, KS (appx. 7 times)
Park City, UT
Pasadena, CA
Phoenix, AZ (twice)
Portland, OR (twice)
Riverside, CA
San Diego, CA (4 times)
Seattle, WA (appx. 8-10 times)
Washington, DC (twice)
International
Barcelona, Spain
Dublin, Ireland
Dusseldorf, Germany (twice)
Karlskrona, Sweden (twice)
London, England (twice)
Oslo, Norway
Tokyo, Japan
Toronto, Canada (twice)
I had a choice between reading the new Richard Hell memoir, about his days as a punk and a hedonistic poet in late 70s New York, and James Wolcott's very similar memoir, which is itself similar in many regards to Patti Smith's essential memoir "JUST KIDS". In fact, there are at least two other semi-recent memoirs of that wild NYC era of bankruptcy, innovative rock music, serial murderers who learn to kill from their dogs, and freewheeling, drug-fueled culture. There's even a fun book I read several years ago called "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE BRONX IS BURNING", which juxtaposes the world-beating New York Yankees baseball teams of the late 70s with the swirl of craziness happening in their city. It's certainly a fertile time to mine, and those writers still standing and with a story to tell are responding. Anyway, I decided to pass on Hell's book – I'm afraid from the blurbs and reviews I've read that it's going to be awful – and concentrated on James Wolcott's "LUCKING OUT" instead.
Now I couldn't have told you who Wolcott was before reading the book, only that I knew his name, but it's clear now that I've read his rock music and film reviews for many years in The Village Voice and elsewhere. He's a journalist who happened to surreptitiously fall into the beats he wanted to cover, even before he knew he wanted to cover them, and "Lucking Out" is essentially that story, as well as the story of certain strata and subcultures in 70s New York. Wolcott has a lot going for him, and I'll cut to the quick and say I enthusiastically recommend the book if you're interested in the subject matter, which I'll get to. He's excellent at turning a phrase, finding the right adjective, and making his prose jump off the page in ways that can be funny, cutting and frequently self-deprecating. I truly admire the guy's ability to stay sober in 1970s New York; in fact, if this had been a down-and-out junkie or alcoholic tale, I don't think I would have read it – but Wolcott kept his hands pretty clean; or as the title puts it, "semi-dirty".
Arriving in NYC in 1972 at Age 19, with no money and little more than the potential of working at The Village Voice based on a reference from Norman Mailer (!!), Wolcott actually started living his dream through a series of fortune accidents and his own pluck. Even when the newspaper was bought by a tony Manhattanite crowd who owned NEW YORK magazine – and totally alienated the hippie-era socialist gate crashers who toiled at The Voice – it ended up being the best thing that even happened to Wolcott, and he got to cover aspects of city life right when things started to get both messy and extremely interesting. He went to a Patti Smith show, was blown away, wrote about it, befriended her, and actually helped her star ascend rather quickly. She in turn introduced him to Television, and once he cottoned to them, he was a CBGBs regular. There's an entire chapter on the punk era, with short sections on The Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti, Television, Lester Bangs and others. Wolcott was a level-headed, unalcoholic presence within their scene, and he documented it well both in the Voice and in this book.
There's a slightly less compelling chapter on Wolcott's personal friendship with Pauline Kael; I guess it's annoying because he's nothing but rapturously worshipful of her, and he documents his part in her entourage during some of her peak years reviewing film at The New Yorker. They frequently went to seminal pictures together and drank afterward, with Wolcott always ordered a Coke. He acknowledges some of her foibles and quirks, but it's clear that Kael was/is almost a mythical mother figure for him, and perhaps the most important relationship he's ever had before or since, family and several spouses included. Let's be clear – I too love Pauline Kael, her writing at least, and I totally get it, but the chapter on her is a little clumsy and lacks clarity; I guess I'd just prefer that he summed up in simple English why he even chose to make tales of their friendship one of the most significant chapters – there are only 5 – in the book, rather than just rattling off anecdotes about Pauline and all the great things she said.
One chapter that is revealing, though, is Wolcott's admission of his addiction to 1970s-era, 42nd-street peep show porn. He first "infiltrated" the dirty theaters on assignment, and ended up liking the sleaze and the thrills he got from it that he just kept on showing up. He also went on assignment and covered the hardcore, pre-AIDS gay S&M subculture, though without the same level of participation and fascination. There are some great characters, too – Uncle Floyd, Robin Byrd and Al Goldstein – but before he gets too confessional, Wolcott shifts gears and tells the story of how he became a ballet aesthete right around the same time. He became quickly transfixed by NYC Ballet and the world surrounding it, and the porn chapter also turns into the highbrow dance chapter, and it captures two sides of New York's unique culture very well. That, and lots of journalistic shop talk and name-dropping, most of which isn't too dreadful. In many ways, it's a journalism insider book, but with enough grit and true tales of a lost era that it's something to definitely spend a couple of days with if you get the chance.
