New Blog Location

Coerce You is now located at Http://coerceyou.com. This site will remain as an archive of the first 2 1/2 years of Coerce You.

The National: Boxer

Review here.

Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt OR God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died this past week, but it is not true to say that we suffered a terrible loss with his passing.

There can be no question that his passing will be noted. If not all of us collectively, I, at least, will certainly miss him. But Mr. Vonnegut described to us throughout his life the one true, terrible loss we all suffer without exception. His work was an obituary he wrote to us over and over to remind us of a thing that was already gone, but one that he exhorted us to become aware of. His reminders were intended to move us, finally, to take the steps in our power to gain that thing back.

Our true loss is our discarded humanity. It is our shared international cultural goal to slip out of the bonds of kindness, rationality, and responsibility to one another faster than the next human in the race. In short, our terrible loss is our missed chance to be good.

We should be bereaved to see our curmudgeonly kind man of letters pass. He treated us as a friend, and we need as many of those as we can get. But do not take off the black crepe when the customary time for mourning a man and a friend has elapsed. Mourn then that in his stead among men of letters in our day there are few but dandies. Mourn then that among men of peace there are few with influence. Mourn then that, because of this, once our selfishness has seen to it that we’ve used up the means to support everything we’ve become, once we’ve surpassed our capabilities to replenish all the clever devices that support who we are, and once our balance of mutual enmity passes into a permanent and irreconcilable surplus- our computers, our stereos, our printing presses, our guitar amplifiers, our televisions, our automobiles, our trains, our refrigerators, our airplanes, our libraries, our roads, our post offices, our museums, our clean water, our food, our stories, our poetry, our art, our love, our families, our cultures, our cities, our civilisation- all of this, even the letters that make up the words you’re reading now, will probably be irretrievably lost.

And then, Goddamnit, stop mourning. Be different. Be kind. Be good. We don’t have any more time to waste.

Thank you, Mr. Vonnegut! Would that you could have said at the end, “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” Would that it might one day be true.

April 18, 2007
New York

Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt.

Hi-ho.

We knew a time like this would come to pass. It wasn't the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. who left us with our contemporary literary dandies in lieu of Voices. That is a parting gift we have left ourselves.


It is late now to remember to thank you, but thank you, Mr. Vonnegut.

lower east side demise

Mornings and Churches

The sky here in Manhattan has that blue-r than blue island quality to it this morning, and my walk home brought me past some archival footage of churches.

This photo was taken with my lovely phone.

Apologies for crookedness.

The Ghosts of Loves Unfinished

"Know this thing for certain," these the first words he forms in his mind as though they could be spoken when he wakes in the dark, though he does not actually speak, "Dreams will always betray you and how you think things are going."

When for weeks life was workaday, now those things whose constance was assured and assented to have been summarily brought back under review by the subconscious committee and rejected for fitness in one decisive motion.  In a meeting held as he slept, no less.

His compromise with life is to operate on scale.  His new job could be worse than it is.  The fact that it is better than his last job gives him a solace that will, for a time, function in lieu of success.  His wife is loyal and loves him honestly.  When he imagines his wife's love and the love of the woman he had let come before as neutral red foam bars rising up from the ground beside each other as though they are part of a bar graph quantifying and comparing the two varieties of intimacy and relationship, the sum total of his wife's kindness and honesty stands very noticeably taller than hers, the one he had committed to before,  she who was brilliant but prone to boredom, who had been very adept at digging him hollow like a native's canoe when his jokes and drinking were no longer funny and paddling him ably up shit creek.

Dreams will not re-read the pages of chapters written to their finish and ask what might have been.  Here the length and breadth of the betrayal of a dream is limited to wistful remembering, a fresh taste of the variety of loneliness that that one left you with unameliorated by time or rationalization.  The worst these dreams can do is sit on your chest like a succubus until you've shaken their weight off.  But that weight will always come off.  Demons you have exorcised will drop in for tea now and again, after all, but abide by a politeness not observed in that first breaking and entering.

When dreams team with the phantasms of loves that end by no impetus more robust than circumstance, however, there is the formula that dissolves the palliatives binding prosaic life like an enzyme, a perfect equation suited to the task of digesting the patchwork of acceptance of the way things have become until it appears ragged as resignation.

The dream brought her to him again, she whom he had been happy enough to see off, in whose bon voyage he carried little enough outward culpability, in the acceptance of whose departure he bowed to finance and a nascent career he wasn't particularly interested in.  She, too, young as she was, shrugged off the blow, apparently.

"I'll never know." he speaks aloud this time, lying on his back.

Greater than the hunger that is now awakening in his belly, and harsher than the weird lack of the caffeine his waking mind is beginning to crave, he feels the want to stop the feeling that he's been absolutely thorough in his life only in the pursuit of the wrong thing.

Almost all of his regrets begin with ellipses:

...and that's why I have to go to work in an office every day.
...and that's why I've never been published.
...and that's why I'm not free now to do what I want.

Only one of them, this morning, begins with gold blonde hair and eyes as big and blue and portending of a coming lack as they were once present and tangible in one summer in his life.  Only one of them makes him crave to hear French spoken to him early in the morning as he heard again as he was sleeping that night.

"J'embrasse, mon petit coeur."

Technorati Tags: Fiction

Murakami Magically Comes Around

I've said before that I could never tell if Murakami, with all his meticulously cataloged insight into people, was just fucking with us as he wrote each of his dull and unflinching, non-plussed heroes into some diamond-studded corner of miracles to let amazing experiences wash over them without blessing them with a single iota of an outlook-bending epiphany of self-awareness before eventually killing them. My struggle with Murakami has always been over that: Does he champion an insidious point, or is he winking and laughing as he plays the infidel, dishing up his perfectly socialized characters inured to their impossible fates by boredom in order to injure our own sense of order? Is the meat of his insight served not from the charming, off-beat magic of his fantasy worlds, but instead from the infuriating repetition of menu items, sandwich contents, beverage counts, technical recountings of deeds done and only thought about as weird fate closes in on a character not so much hapless, but wholly unmotivated to question or attempt to thwart his or her own end?

Well, I had given Murkami up for a fantastic nihilist, one whose charming descriptions of horrible fates wholly unavoided in some way advocated complacency. That was the conclusion I had come to even though it was thinking on his books that first brought to my mind the concept of didactic wrongdoing.

I'm still not sure exactly where he stands, but I am about 14 chapters into Kafka on the Shore now, and he's addressed this question more or less head-on. The main character, Kafka Tamura, is discussing his opinion of Soseki Natsume's The Miner. In discussion of the hero of that novel, Tamura complains that "...eventually, he gets out and goes back to his old life... But nothing in the novel shows he learned anything from these experiences, that his life changed, that he thought deeply now about the meaning of life or started questioning society or anything... He's totally passive. But I think in real life people are like that."

Aha! Murakami is, at least in some sense, aware of what he is doing! But, the second person in that conversation retorts with:

"But people need to cling to something... it's like Goethe said: Everything's a metaphor."

So which one is Murakami? Is he directly confronting critics like me here and then offering a one-liner pithy rejoinder for how his characters can remain so broken-spirited and Japanese to the end, come what may: talking cats, mad science, or sado-masochism? Or perhaps the metaphor as transparent as that: this character whose lack of ambition is so grating is YOU, social man, and the story I'm telling is supposed to feel wrong. Didactic wrongdoing is such a stretch, though, and it smacks of naive hero-worship of the author who brought me Pinball, 1973 and Norwegian Wood. Murakami could just as easily be as gifted and equally stunted by the violence of his socialization as Dostoevsky, another unflinching diarist of the human soul.

In any event, my curiosity is piqued.

What It Must Be Like to Record on a Quantum Avogadro's Number Track

I don't think I own another record more complexly committed to archival matter than Kahimi Karie's K.K.K.K.K.K.K.

The Weird Passion

In the recent batch of CDs I picked up at my local Virgin Megastore was A Bestiary of by the Creatures, a compilation of Robert Smith contemporaries the Creatures' early catalog of the Wild Things EP from '81, the Feast LP from '83, and the and Miss the Girl and Right Now/Weathercade singles from '83.

The Creatures are Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Banshees drummer, Budgie. Comprised thus of only rhythm and vox, this disc is an exploration of the textures evoked by layering complicated percussive patterns, spectral pads, cross-cultural/multi-lingual vocal samples, and Siousie's dirging... (Ok, I'm picturing Futurama's Zap Branigan saying this) ...eroticism. Listening through to the end of the disc yields the bonus of the final track, Right Now, a surprise horn-adorned jog into sexual immediacy's gape that, despite the horn line, still seems to rely more on vocal texture and drums than anything else to move the song along.

Now, how to describe all this without using all the same stock phrases that all goth reviews have used usque ad nauseum to express just how Siouxsie's choice of phrase and her unmistakable inflection (interspersed with assorted moans and sundry impassioned escaped utterings) combine to impart the certainty of a dire last chance irrespective of her subject matter?

This is a great disc, holding the attention with spare arrangements and experimental instrumentation and Siouxsie's timelessly terrible (in the old-testament sense) sex, a taste nailed on the tongue as she tickles the ears.


Siouxsie Photos

ignored monument to love, 14th st. and 1st ave, 50 degrees, clear skies and sunny.

Trans-Am Wanks Back to Life

As mentioned in the previous post, I picked up Trans Am's new disc the other day. What I like about Trans Am is that even what is apparently simple about their sound is, to the ear, beyond exacting. Trans Am are post-rock wank wunderkinder. They are a band that is just as likely to wow you with the tightness, subtletly, and complexity of their riffs as use their considerable talents for playing their instruments and manipulating the recording process to fuck with you as they explore an exaggerated iteration of some tangent of rock that has been fascinating them. Trans Am is on a two-record hot streak of solid playability. You cue Sex Change in your media util and there is no need to touch, shuffle, skip ahead, or in any other way molest the cool, reptilian confidence of the recording's progress from frame 00:00:00 to finish. Unlike Thrilljockey labelmates and fellow post-rock accused Tortoise or The Sea and Cake, Trans Am has always kept a strongly symmetrical and Krauty backbone to their rhythm section, along with an allegiance to eerie, aetherial synthesizers. The result is that, instead of producing rock music with the mutant shuffle of math and jazz flourishes, Trans Am assembles rhythmic rock songs of a length unoffensive to the pop-trained attention span, but with all the flourish, artistry, obvious skill, and penchant for oscillation between compatible time signatures and heretofore incompatible styles of instrumentation (distorted Vs. clean guitar, et & c.) of prog. Oh, and sometimes they chill you cold like Kraftwerk. The occasionally tongue-in-cheekiness of the lyrics is interestingly backdropped by the evident effort put into their elaborate instrumentation. Their wank is uncluttered and expansive on Sex Change. Particularly noticeable on this release is their development of their surgical metal guitar and their eerie, 70's prog church choruses. Standout track "Shining Path" grinds from start to finish through an aural world of driving light. Final track "Triangular Pyramid" sounds like it must feel to be thrown, as a titan, upon the merciless crags of some ancient mountain range as gold light pours from your god's wounds.

These guys know their shit and they know how to make a great album. Also check out Futureworld, Surrender to the Night, and the amazing paranoia-fest Liberation.

Wonderful

Ah, router troubles have ended. The long, local freakout appears to be ended. I picked up a few albums in recent days:

Mythmaker:Skinny Puppy
A Bestiary of:The Creatures
Sex Change:Trans Am
Telekon:Gary Numan

Reviews to follow. I feel like I've been cooped up in a box the size of a peanut. My mind is the magazine, my mouth is the AK- watch me spray. Ya'll.

Of Robots, Once Judged

I'm a little late getting to the criticism of the recent auto manufacturer advertisement featuring an assembly line robot being fired. The critical party has already kicked off with a fervor that has apparently produced results, but I'm still going to weigh in with my two cents. The argument and the results that it achieved were neither the argument that needed to be raised as a result of the commercials, nor were the results that were achieved appropriate.

The furor that was portrayed as erupting in the popular media over the recent ads, these ads having been first unveiled during one of the many big games of one of the many incarnations of the (!Sports Bowl!), were raised by an organization for the prevention of suicide whose charter includes, not surprisingly, raising awareness of and increasing prevention of suicide. Their primary beef with the ad in question is that in the course of the advertisement's short storyline, a redundant robot, unable to find fulfilling or fitting gainful employment following getting the pink slip for workplace incompetence, throws itself off a bridge, kissing all prospects a wistful goodbye in the hopes of a shameless oblivion.

The offended organization objected to the ad based on the portrayal of suicide. The auto manufacturer made an amendment to the end of the ad in question in response, removing the automaton's final act of surrender from the short story arc of the commercial spot's montage.

In the new version of the commercial, the robot does not "kill himself", but the overarching message of the commercial's plot remains intact. That is the insidious thing.

The commercial's portrayal of a robot being fired from its assembly line job for a single act of incompetence most willfully calls to mind the original automation of operations this conglomerate of conveyance manufacturers' undertook- the push for automation that vaporized Flint, Michigan, the story of which is recounted in filmmaker Michael Moore's breakthrough documentary, Roger & Me.

In the commercial, human and robot coworkers alike, apparently working in a peaceful and accepting harmony, look on sorrowfully as the management types eject the robot from employment for dropping a screw. This creates the first false impression of the ad, the impression that humans and robots on the assembly line are equals and can and do recognize each other as such, in spite of the acrimonious history between workers and management over the introduction of automated labor devices to the factory setting.

Workers and robots are not on an equal footing. For one, robots are obviously not human. They do not have human needs such as the need to eat or the need to support a family. They do, however, displace workers who, for a few generations were brought up solely to work in the plants of the auto manufacturers.

The second false impression created by the commercial is the apparent legitimization of the company's hiring and firing practices. In the commercial, the management is seen to be fair, in that it runs its business according to the same middle class values as its human workers- when someone is incompetent, they are not allowed to ascend to the acme of success, but are instead penalized with redundancy. However, can it be said that this company's drive toward profit for a few, one that cost so many livelihoods, was legitimate in its execution? Can it be said that the automation of the assembly lines and the ensuing loss of jobs was predicated on the same values as the middle class laborers whose lives were altered?

The third false impression perpetuated by the commercial is that the replacement of the workers and the atomization of the community the company supported, apparently undertaken under the directives of middle class values, was legitimate intrinsically, and not undertaken irresponsibly because automation was based on rags-to-riches, hard work will get you everywhere middle class values.

Overall, the commercial also serves to trivialize the induced sublimation of Michigan's prospects from stuff to vapor in its portrayal of human workers comfortably working alongside their replacements as though it is a natural state of things that has always been accepted. One of the very gripes brought up in Michael Moore's documentary Roger & Me was that this manufacturer attempted to herald its commitment to progress once before with an Epcot-like display of humans and robots working happily side by side singing some song about, essentially, moving forward at the cost of the human laborers' own displacement. In poor taste then, and no less so now, It's obviously not something that the company has put to bed as far as talking points and the influence of public opinion are concerned.

Robots cannot kill themselves. To suggest that they can and that it is funny is to mock the plight of the mob of unemployed laborers this company created. Robots would never feel pressed to review that as an option, unlike the laborers their implementation displaced.

San Fran in the morning.

Tata Steel

Tata Steel, as mentioned in the article the fellows from New York Reggae band Steel Pulse will link you on your mellow way to, has acquired Corus Steel. No word on whether the Tatas will seek to acquire New York Reggae band Steel Pulse, but it is a sure bet that members of New York Reggae band Steel Pulse would like to acquire some tatas. Am I right, fellas? Am I right?

pete's place

pete's place

One Thing, Having Occurred to Me...

A thing occurred to me altogether of a sudden whilst I stood singing in the shower this morning:
The National's "Baby We'll Be Fine" is an update of the Go-Go's "Our Lips Are Sealed". Oh, holiest of shit.

Tighten the Bunions, Screw Down the Tennis Shoes, Make Fast Loose Tread

So, into Friday. Are our teeth loose yet? We're burning up on entry to R&R, and I'm so tired I can hardly see straight.


Lambchop's Damaged came out in August of 2006. You might remember it as "The Summer What Meltede My Face Like Soe Muche Gumme, Oy Vey, What Withe Alle This Uff Da Heate."

I personally thought the summer before was worse, but then I didn't have an air conditioner that summer.

I have made this Lambchop recording a part of my daily ablutions. I know what you might be thinking- "What, another band that started with an adjusted country twang and has since shot well into the experimental left field? I have a LOT of Wilco records, thank you."

Well, alright. However, if you travel that pernicious path, traveler, you will not know the rich sentimental tonality of Kurt Wagner's nearly spoken, rumbling musings. You will not be treated with intimacy by the wry sense of humor that is the spool of yarn from which the songs are darned. You will not meander, fork in hand, through this garden to the feast of non-sequiturs, surprise revelations, instantaneous understandings of things past, that a story as then currently unfolding brought to the singer's memory.

It was the final track on the record that came on my headphones during a shuffle play sometime in the recent few months that remembered the album to me- the track "The Decline of Country and Western Civilization". It's a surprise cloudburst, erupting from a clear atmosphere of noise into something so dramatic it ought to be on stage evoking tears from the aristocracy. But, then, I'm a sucker for songs that subjugate all the most evil tendencies of humanity in order to tell an object of affection how good-looking they are.

This is a drum. Today you can buy it from Musician's Friend for $69.99 in American Currency (or the approximation of said currency floating in digital internets your web browser draws pictures of when you log on to your bank account).

When you hit this, everything becomes more awesome. That especially applies to rock band practice, which we had last night, and which included a guy who was nice enough to hit- not one of these, but a whole set of them- not once, but many, many times. I needn't tell you how much more awesome everything became with each successive strike of drumstick to drum. When you're a member of a band that has been seeking a drummer for a couple of months following the departure of your original drummer after your first show at the now-defunct Siberia, you get a real hard-on for having a drummer in band practice. Everything just fell together with the drunken synergy of a group of people who are on the same page, squeezing the juice that is music from our respective instruments like so many fucking amazing oranges into very tastefully designed juice glasses- perhaps the kind one might buy at Crate & Barrel.

I have been a fan of the glassware for sale at Crate & Barrel for some time. Very classy.

Man, my ears are ringing.



In addition to the above-mentioned Lambchop record, I have also been hearting Destroyer's Rubies by Destroyer. Hearting is something my girlfriend says, and it's pretty cool. It's when you replace your blood with something else, and your heart pumps that through your circulatory system, instead. Did you know that there is about 60,000 miles worth of tubing that comprises the human circulatory system? Needless to say, Destroyer's Rubies is really tired. Sorry, Destroyer's Rubies- you're going around a few more times, I'm afraid.

It's Friday, ya'll. Catch the girls, kiss them and make them cry.

GEARHORNY

Witness, the new offering from Keiyo Organ (KORG to the uninitiated), available in May. Rarr! The R3.

The Activity that Necessitates Women Covering their Heads

Last night I braved the straits of late adolescence and shambled to Sin-e here on the Lower East Side to take in a performance by one Joel Bravo and his Sex with an Angel.

In the early morning of the religions we know (the Christian religions) women were bade cover their pates, tresses, for fear that the greater beings watching them from Heaven, the Angels, would become so tempted by the shine and sway of woman's hair that they would lose their heads and give the earth girls the shag they were so obviously gagging for.

Early in the world we didn't widely have condoms. So, when the Angels would knock the bottoms out they hoes, they hoes would sometimes give birth to monsters and demigods- the giant Cyclops, for example.

No such monsters will issue from the efforts colliding in the union of Mr. Bravo's lush musicality and his current willing cadre of fellow traveler musicians. It was a brilliant end-cap to a disappointing night of pseudo-irony and the poorly executed inside jokes of privileged white kids a bit drunk with a little bit of musical knowledge, flush with a willing scene of kids excited to be out and sexy, and just enough self-awareness to know they thought it was funny they were scamming folks out of $8 at the door. To summarize- Joel Bravo/Sex with an Angel: Talented. Opening bands- Fucking idiots, working through some identity stuff, sons of nobility.

Keep it up, Mr. Bravo. Your theatricality is sincere. Your backup singers- (and I wouldn't just say this because one of them is my roommate)- a superb group that keep your vision vast and pretty. Thanks for getting up on the stage, playing a well-executed set, and not overstaying your welcome. Thanks for trying. Your effort is evident.

Belvedere is to Tactical Disadvantage as Retirement in Resplendence is to the Ghetto of the Now

Consigned to the ghetto of the present, it is obvious to me that our forebears could have gotten nothing done had they been prescient.

Or, then again- look at the psychopaths littering the path of prescience throughout written history. Mojave 3 has a song, Return to Sender, goes something like "The word on the street/is that hell is complete/when you think that you know where you're going."

But whose hell would that be? Suppose that depends on who the "you" is in the song. Did you force everyone into 5-year-plans or gulags? Did you find it to be a good idea to gather all your bits of science like kindling to build a burning black hole the size of a quarter on Long Island?

Memory is a prism, a honeycomb of mirrors- looking down the right rabbit's cubbyhole can steel you at the crucial hour or break you on the jagged ends of doubt.

Curse|Oath

Oath: 1. a. A solemn or formal declaration invoking God (or a god, or other object of reverence) as witness to the truth of a statement, or to the binding nature of a promise or undertaking

Curse: 1. a. An utterance consigning, or supposed or intended to consign, (a person or thing) to spiritual and temporal evil, the vengeance of the deity, the blasting of malignant fate, etc. It may be uttered by the deity, or by persons supposed to speak in his name, or to be listened to by him.

She was enamored with the curses she learned in her Spanish class. There was one she felt particularly privileged to know, something to do with cutting the candles at- what was it? What ceremony? Your funeral? Your wedding? Your birthday? Already my bland ethnocentrism, my midwestern-ness was creeping in to my fourth-level understanding of my 3rd-generation daughter of Little Italy girlfriend's 3rd-level understanding of her Spanish instructor's 2nd-level understanding of pinto beans, sea breezes, things more passionate, less rational, more colorful- ah, again, I'm there again- in the way of everything Latin.
I see small plates. I see women.

I see women everywhere.

And that was a curse. That was the curse she told me about, over and over again, excited, incredulous.

"Can you imagine saying something like that?"

No, no- we didn't have the tools. I was too tired, for one, and my language didn't rest on an old tapestry of traditions, symbols stretching back to cave walls that became wine cellars. I spoke English- I had long summers, I had miles of cornfields I never worked in a day in my life, big meals that came from boxes or needed salt. On top of that, I needed sleep. It was college. I always needed sleep. I was none too quick on the uptake. What was I taking up? Where would I be going with it?

Maybe it was on my graduation from high school that my family took me to dinner at a big German restaurant in Peoria built to look like a castle, decorated darkly and heavily with German antiques up and down every floor. It really was a castle. There was a long wooden buffet table, one of very dark wood, behind me. Upon it stood a candelabra whose every candlestick at one point during the meal suddenly snapped in half with a crack. Did one of those halves land on my shoulder? Had I missed something, some missile in the form of a champagne cork that had made its miraculous mark above and behind me as I sat eating something German?

That was the instance I would remember when she would tell me about the curses her Spanish instructor would teach to her class.

She was a sad one. I was a sad one. We lived our lives like they were curses. I wonder if she ever got happier.

We mocked real human suffering with the zealous, excited abandon of the village's tolerated ignoramus, with our youth, with our fascination with curses- with the way we lived our life with our mouths turned down like our life itself was a curse. Like something that twisted in our fresh viscera then would be big outside of us and our getting bigger, big enough that God would listen.

Life could have been weirder then. We didn't have much to be sad about.

And then we become a little older, and hopefully not as sad, and remembering the girl that scared you with her bohemian wreck of a lifestyle becomes the project that requires seriously undertaken veracity. Not romantic, not painful, but an act of witness. The labor comes through more as an oath, a testament that things are in this world, a slightly funny, backhanded smile at your own expense that is a record and also a redemption.

Eventually, you tell yourself, you learn not to manufacture your woes.

To the center

Halfway through Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart, and I'm at the point where the tease of fairy-tale wonder is rearing its erection. (ah! but too late! Too late again, Haruki! Why do you insist on page after page of descriptions of your meals???)
All the way through glass two of a nip of Suntory Yamazaki 12-year, and I am at the point where fairy tale wonder is wreaking havoc on my liver.
The day came to it's Monday's end with all possible haste. I am here, and here I will remain until laundry calls me to even more prosaic duty.
I'm reduced to observing things, merely observing things.
I am elevated to an appreciation of Lambchop's Damaged robust as Babe the Blue Ox, and a full hand higher if it's an inch.
I don't mix my metaphors- they mix reflexively, like verbs in sing-songy languages. Not passively like in my surgical English.

DJ For Hire

DJ For Hire: S/T


It's good to step out of a scene obsessed with itself, good to get away from feeling bored, good to get away from conceits like status, nostalgia, the dictates of history, and the rules of composure. It's good because once you're there, you can't go back.

Try this:
Turn on your CD player or boot your computer. Put the DJ For Hire S/T in the tray. Load up the playlist in your digital playback platform of choice. Back away. You can't.

Big hooks and guitar virtuosity layered over waves of noise and distortion- oases of directed chaos between stretches of sparse pop- have obscured the way back to the affect of disaffected malaise. Tiny notes in furious succession beating needlepricks of color on your tympani are heralds for the hum washing up behind.

The excitement that I felt, signing up for a rotation as a DJ at my college radio station, as I was pulled off the axis of corporate radio and major label distribution, stemmed from my discovery of a universe of finished, real, fantastic music that was living, breathing, and throwing parties without so much as a "how's your father" to any judge but enjoyment, wherever it happened to be executed. Cities as nearby to me then as Champaign, Illinois and as distant from where I was, but just as cut off from much else (excepting the Vast Expanse) as the towns I was living in (Omaha?), were the physical site of cultural frontiers, epicenters of changes that scared the limits of the mind into retreat.

From the first notes of DJ for Hire's opening track, Pensive Purple Porpoises, there's that same taste of fresh discontinuity with everything you've unwittingly become comfortable with. The break is there in the Japanese influence of many notes plucked from guitar strings in succession, the break is there in the narrative themes that backbone the songs. My Grandmother Hitchhiked in the Sidecar of a Nazi BMW R-75 Military Motorcycle points to the wonder that could at anytime spring from prosaic roots. Track Bum is an energetic standout showcase of guitar virtuosity and a boisterous anti-apology for prolonged insouciance. Passion without conceit, the music of Fukuoka, Japan's DJ for Hire carries that weird change of kilter that brightens you awake with the youth hidden in what you know. Fukuoka, Japan, home to DJ For Hire, is now hard-coded into the authoritative astral version of google maps under the search strings "where it's happening," "Where it's at," and "that ain't no bullshit."

Look for them on itunes or at their website.

Things Are Qualitatively Different

You can now direct your browsers to coerceyou.com, foregoing the inclusion of .blogspot. from the address of Coerce You. Questions/comments, direct them to the usual channels.

Propellers: Fernand Leger

A few hiccups

The next few days will probably see a few lapses in content- not to worry. I'm figuring out how to get this thing hosted on my own domain, so please bear with me. Soon you'll be able to just head to coerceyou.com, leaving the ".blogspot." out of the equation.

Culture: The after the fact

Culture: The after the fact ostensibly meaningful configuration of necessitated daily practice.

They Were Mercenaries Under Contract to Cheap Thrills

The mob was a thrifty lot. They didn't get their rocks off unless there was going to be a landslide. They didn't go for broke, they went for insolvency. They didn't spill blood unless they were going to wash the streets with it, do the dishes with it, brush their teeth with it, pour it on their Wheaties-- their Wheaties poured from a novelty oversized box from CostCo. That's the kind of crowd this was. They took their thrills in bulk.

"Life is short," they chanted. "You have to sweeten it through concentration." They lived it like it was vanilla extract- sweet, sweet nectar, 90% alcohol. They lived it like it was cologne: a few fragrant ounces to cover the smoke of whole tens of years going up with the glory of roman candles bought by the shipping crate. Also 90% alcohol. They lived it like they could hardly stand up. They could hardly stand up.

Everything was shocking. Nothing was shocking. You couldn't put anything past these rubes. They saw you coming- They saw you going. Occasionally you saw them going. On the sidewalk.

Forget double-fisting, they drank with their feet.

They lived fast- forget horse pills, they wanted cheetah pills.

They hung so loose they couldn't tie their shoes.

Their double dates made Mormon Moonie weddings look like a fallout shelter under a battered woman's halfway house. At the end of the world.

They were mercenaries under contract to cheap thrills- thrills so cheap, they'd go dutch twice in one date.

Their orgies ended at 2- why go all night long when they could get it done in half the time?

They didn't drink like it was going out of style. The only drank when it was out of style.

Their ladies had been around the block more than once. Mostly in order to find an ATM to pay the cabbie.

They didn't buy rounds of drinks, they bought crescents.

They lost their virginity on the way to the prom to save time.

The abducted my kid sister in Saskatoon, and by the time I caught up with them her hair had turned a premature off-white, old-ish before her years.

Talk was cheap, so they talked a lot- and that's how they convinced my kid sis to ride with them- to give them a ride- to the next drinking establishment.

They were mercenaries under contract to cheap thrills. They answered to no one between the hours of 6 am and 9 pm.

We need a drummer

Broadway N/W stop, Astoria, Queens. On my way to practice. We still don't have a drummer. Anybody know someone?

Surrendering to the Lure of the Great Known

The meeting occurred like every moment that changes life. It began as though it had been planned. No one was aware it was happening until someone lost an eye, or brushed a nipple, the gist being that it resulted in that deformation of a moment commonly packaged under the nomenclature "impropriety".

So, in the moment after he had glanced at a new placard pasted up on the plywood shell of some new scaffold, overcome in that moment of marketing genius when the second and third glances at the shirtless girl photographed there, while failing to produce a better or more substantial view of the breasts she so provocatively managed to cover with an arm while still granting the voyeur full access to the knowledge that her breasts were very significantly present (very significantly), in that moment when he was contemplating the contradiction that had arisen between his desire to understand why he would be driven into a state of limitless potential action by this particular variety of beauty despite all that he knows that he has already and his awareness of his knowledge of the sudden object of his desires in reality (the Russian is no more than a girl, her beauty is cold in its perfection, her eyes are round and staring, bold but lacking the investment to care enough to know they are bold, her cheeks- the perfect skin is so new- are high, and fear of want and early, perpetual envy have made her limitlessly cruel in her new and weaponized beauty-it's clear!) and his surrender to this evoked desire, in that moment when he is overcome by the urge to fuck an attractive stranger, the woman who is not his girlfriend recognizes him.

They knew one another in earlier days, and the two were strangers then- both to each other and to themselves. They ended as strangers, and only strangers, can end. They parted vaguely, and on good terms.

So it was a few drinks later, she was telling of trying to make it as a writer in a bar he had chosen and, until then, had kept familiar only to himself, and they were distracting themselves by faking wonder at the truths, witnessed or passed to them through hearsay, that were so much stranger than the fiction they churned out- the fiction that they secretly felt revealed how paltry their talent, as well as the world's real need for writers, really was. That's what they were doing with all those words. Faking wonder and keeping secrets, dancing a long white lie and spending time with an extravagant wastefulness unbefitting of their station.

She, being a woman, beautiful, had the more interesting story.

"I had a friend, someone I had met through the club somehow..."

He knew about the loose association of drunks and part-time recidivists to respectability she mingled with from before, from when it could be said he knew her, the changing cloud of bleariness and impressions of social memories she referred to as the "club". He had been a droplet in one of those nimbuses at some indeterminate time in the infinite before, himself, around when he met her, though it wasn't how he had met her.

"She was a "dancer"," she spoke so that he could hear the quotes, "and she just lived to have fun. She had tried going to school, she had moved around, she had "serious" "relationships"," again with the audible quotes, "and eventually she learned she had to live with herself as someone who realized she only enjoyed one thing or hate herself for the rest of her miserable life."

"I can imagine the conversation you were having. The cockfight of sincerities, I call it. I'm trying to work it into a story. It's where two drunks meet and try to out-sincere each other with vasty declarations of common bonds. Always amusing. Always amusing in hindsight."

At the word cockfight, her eyes raised at the same time as her glass.

"I suppose we're having one of those right now?"

"No, but I think we're moving in that direction. So, finish your story."

"So, she realizes that, for better or for worse, and she knows it's shallow, she knows there is a world of depth to be reached just by acknowledging one iota of the contrivedness and eventual emptiness of the life she is living... the only thing she enjoys doing is stripping, being sexy in a totally contained environment set aside for nothing but. All she cares about is having fun and that's all she thinks is fun."

"That's it?"

"That's it. And then one time I run into a friend of hers, she comes up in conversation, and all anyone can say is that they think she moved home. Or somewhere equally conceptually far away from here and now."

The warm reciprocation of description, of aiding in adding to the narrative was kicking in, so he threw in,

"Forever. That's it."

She used it.

"Forever. That's it. And do you know why?" She ended her sentence like she was sharing a secret. She was getting a bit sincere.

"Pregnancy? Death in the family? Nervous breakdown?"

"Nope. One day, for no reason, she started to get nauseous when she was cold. Not even cold, really. She'd get nauseous when she had a chill. At goosebumps. And that was it. She couldn't parade her terrific tits out in front of anyone anymore."

She, the attractive stranger, the woman who was not his girlfriend, had had really terrific tits. She still did. He had always remembered them and her own fondness of them and awareness of just how terrific they were with a wistful sort of sentimental horniness. He liked that she was letting it happen that the two of them were able to share that memory together again, finishing the story like that, with those words and with her terrific tits right there at the table with them as a visual reminder.

She put her glass down. She had those lips that were red without lipstick when she was a little flushed, a little excited. She stared a little past nothing, pursed her lips and blew.

"And then one day you stop being able to enjoy the one thing you love," she said as though writing it down. Speaking in the expository style.

They both sat still for a moment and really thought about how lousy and undeserving they were as writers, then about their age, and then their peers.

"Stupid." He said.

Stupid that someone would live so willfully shallow a life, stupid that life would reciprocate by demolishing the foundations of that contrivance. Stupid how the two of them suffered for their romantic ideas of success as writers among their small professional circle of the envious.

They reserved a split second of guilt and reassurance for crimes as yet uncommitted, then the teenage gameshow wash of surrender to pounding hearts and mystery outcomes hidden in boxes. Mystery mostly hidden in shaved boxes, with a trim of light blonde hair.

The Lonely Nature of Episodic Existence

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel


The cliche when reviewing the work of New York City writer Amy Hempel is to praise her sentences, to turn in orbit on her tell-tale calling card turns of phrase, to always take pains that the praise lays on the concise wit of what she says. Though not without merit, and certainly not undeserved, this criticism should be put to assay, for we may look at her incontrovertible appeal in another, perhaps more proper, way.

The appeal of the writing of Amy Hempel is inherent in its shocking accessibility, the surprise of the moment when the prosaic narration makes the concatenation of outwardly unrelated cause and effect a matter of fact, the only available taxonomy of the world the narrator describes, if the reader were to be held faithful to the evidences her narrators make available, despite the oft disconcerting, nearly non-sequitur-esque jumps between squirm-inducing memories or events and the emotionless realizations that make up a person's duties as curator and office manager of the independent self.

There, in the cuts between the realms of adjacent sentences, therein the reader will find the factor that cements the appeal of Hempel's writing. The quality of the sentences that leaves readers in a reel is the brutality of distanced adjacency.

from April 27th 2006 Powell's interview: "I don't know that I'm not good at as much as I'm not interested in the big picture in any given story. I like the moment the thing changes. I like the aftermath of the big event more than I like to portray the event itself."

It is because of the reward the reader feels following along with her often ill-elucidated mise-en-scenes when the endorphins and hormones drop from the normally responsible hand of the all-controlling ego to the carpet of the bloodstream that Hempel is able to bring us along to the aftermath of her events. Lesser writers would have to explain themselves, would be chastised for opening a story mid-plot and never stopping to fill the reader in. It is because of this that I think it is possible that Hempel misrepresents herself in- or that the reader could misread the meaning of- the quote from the Powell's interview above. She absolutely does love the aftermath of the event more than she prefers to describe it, but she is more intent on illiciting the aftermath of the event, the reaction, in the reader than writing it.

The aftermath of all events in Hempel's stories are emotional, internal, ruminative. The solitary and terrible matter-of-factness with which her narrators deliver their deadpan realizations or conclusions is bell-jar like. Lonely. The reason Hempel can avoid laying out every architectural detail of the physical aspects of one of her stories is that they are meant to function as memories, they are meant to knock the wind out of us using the same internal cues our memories might- they are stories told as we remember our own stories. Milemarkers are stuck haphazardly along the mutable forks of the paths and they show nadirs and acmes of fear, love, hate, surprise, disappointment. It's how she circumvents heeding her own discouragement below, taken from the the same Powell's interview referenced above:

"Why are you telling me this? Someone out there will be asking, and you better have a very compelling answer, or reason.

There are people who have been raised by loving parents to believe that the world awaits their every thought and sentence, and I'm not one of them. So I respond to that. Is this essential? The question might be, Is this something only you can say—or, only you can say it this way? Is this going to make anyone's life better, or make anyone's day better? And I don't mean the writer's day."

Hempel's characters move in montages of huge snippeted group conversations among old friends and easy neighbors and intuited, half-described, alluded revelations of internal significance. On the first page of the novella Tumble Home contained in this collection, she sums up her guiding principle, or the concept the awareness of and the struggle with which guides her writing:

If I understand it, the Western Tradition is this: Put your cards on the table.

This is easier , I think, when your life has been tipped over and poured out. Things matter less; there is the joy of being less polite, and of being less-- not more-- careful. We can say everything.

Although maybe not. Like in fishing? The lighter the line, the easier it is to get your lure down deep. (233)

Hempel writes straight ahead, finishing most of her stories in a single stroke, leaving the impression that each one was more like a single extended coup de grace than a telling of events yoking the service of more than one set of punctuation marks. The loneliness of the world of dying friends, remembrances of near-drownings on illicit escapades with married men, the obsessively compulsive companionship of dogs, the solitude of coming to conclusions while mired in quotidian tasks or old age: these intimate the actions and the chronologically verb-laden events that predicate the pen coming to paper. She withholds nothing of importance in her brevity. That she struggles with the appearance of a simple, resigned retelling of the tortures of the many kinds of solitude a human being can experience and wish to alleviate speaks the silences and gaps and pauses and cuts not hopeless, but tellable, personable. The stories are sad, but for this author are points of connection.

Excited to get hold of a loft this weekend to finally start making my room a livable space. Been so goddamned long since I've lived in one.