through restriction and repetition I'm growing old

so I thought that taking a creative writing workshop would make me write more but it hasn't. I can't write anything. I've tried, some would say maybe not enough. Even when I demarcate the hours and the caffeine to sit there nothing happens.  Nothing remotely worth sharing with the world is dribbling out of my brain.  All the streams of story have dried up and gotten tangled, khattam shud.

It's nobody's fault but mine, of course. The prompts are good, there are some gifted folks and I've got a notebook full of inspiring concepts about the craft but it's just not working, it's not working at all. At least twenty false starts in Google Docs and sundry notebooks, what the hell, I think too much and even when I try to crank it out I despise the end result so much, because I know it's not true, because if I don't like it how could anyone else?

Discontent with mediocrity, how many short stories have I read that were so uncompelling and self-consciously clever, characters I couldn't care about, incidents uninteresting, endings unsatisfactory.  How many novels that unravelled and fell apart halfway through, go all the way or not at all, and I don't have the endurance and for that honestly a sense of shame.

It's like when I've tried doing the band thing, and the songs are so profoundly mediocre that I feel the life being sucked out of me as I play the chords or basslines, why bother? Why contribute more mess and averageness. 

At least in art class you can keep throwing paint at the canvas, scrawl missives in pen and colored pencil on the canvas, collage the hell out of that trouble spot or at least smother it under a coating of white and start over again. With this it's harder to cheat. Either it's there or it's not and it's just not there.

I used to listen to a lot of Idlewild from the summer between junior and senior year all the way through my English litster undergrad and realize that they really need to make their way back into my Tuesday morning music rotations. I'm glad I caught them on their last tour through Clevelandia almost ten years ago now, because they haven't returned since and are now on hiatus. I was kind of pretentious about my punk rock back then to the point of being a jerk, but I still don't understand why this band never got big, cursed by falling through major label cracks and being a bit too brainy I guess. Songs about being socially awkward and reading books probably weren't quite as accessible maybe as songs about making out and getting cheated on. These tunes were what I once tried to write to. If only I could recapture that creative thirst again.

coming down the mountain

A good record, a so-so record, a few odd-and-sods, an awful side project, a non-sucky side project, and two lukewarm comeback records, Jane's Addiction is no candidate for Greatest Band in the World, but damn if much of Nothing's Shocking isn't feeling strangely relevant right now, in part because Farrell isn't being nearly as OMG-So-Edgy as he was on Ritual. With the general culture war absurdity and tribal posturing on both sides, I think I know what I'll be listening to when I get home tonight.

 You know that man you hate? You look more like him every day everyday...

I got into Jane's Addiction slightly later in life, if only because the rock and roll radio in Clevelandia was dominated by nu-metal and I knew that the gratuitous nudity of the cover art would not pass muster with the folks, not to mention some of the lyrical content. Not a whole lot of redeeming social value to be found here.

When we want something and we don't wanna pay for it... 
 My pastor when I lived in Kent was a huge Jane's fan, and we used to jam on these and U2 and Alice in Chains after practicing the music for church, and he dressed up as Perry Farrell for Halloween once when he was in college. The first night I played music with him, I was playing bass at the time and started noodling around with opening lines from this song.

We moved into a new building the last year I was living down there, taking over the space from the local fundie cult that would frequently harass the campus Westboro-lite with tracts strewn in the bibliotheque's queer studies section and signs about Impending Doom. They'd also show up on Sunday nights and tell us all we were going to hell, no doubt due to our college aspirations, piercings, tattoos, and heathen rock and roll music. Murals were painted in the new space, and we listened to Alice's MTV Unplugged, Paul's Boutique, and the Rev comp while making the area look good.

 
I shouldn't like it as much as I do, because it's bloated and somewhat ridiculous. Perry Farrell's a consummate businessman as it is, with a voice of an exuberant little kid spinning twisted tales of drugs and deviance and general weirdness, and I still ask God why Dave Navarro's still alive and Layne Staley is dead, because dude might be the Vainest Man Alive and is still prettier than me despite doing heroin for awhile.

 hum hum along with me, hum along with the TV...
But those jazzy chords at the beginning and the non-stop energy, that guitar solo so over the top yet perfect in context, the way it ends so fast, grabbed me the first time I heard this. It sounded infinitely more vital than anything else pulsating through the airwaves at the time even though this was almost a decade after when it came out. I put this on the jukebox at a somewhat twee-ish indie rock show at the Grog Shop and watched everyone look really confused like what is this guitar playing what the hell?

Such a classic girl, gives her man a great idea
Hears you tell your friends,
"Hey man, why don't you listen to my great idea!"

Oh yeah, how often has that happened? I lived with a guy that summer in a house that felt like The Real World since none of us really knew each other, and there were the two crazy girls, and the frat guy and his on-and-off-again girlfriend. Dan cooked for me every night, stayed up all night playing video games, we listened to a lot of Elastica, Nine Inch Nails, Jane's Addiction and Kyuss and hung out on the porch. It was an extremely hot summer with no air conditioning and no fans. I remember laying in bed listening to 'Ocean Size' drowning out the Kenny Chesney and Ludacris that my neighbors preferred. 

Wish I was ocean size, they cannot move you, man, no one tries

My roommates the next year weren't into this kind of thing, so I'd listen to Nothing's Shocking when I was home alone painting. Having been raised on grunge and the heavier strains of classic rock, I'm not averse to rock star excess if the tunes are good, and this one is just sublime.

They're playing a few days from now, and I probably won't go unless someone scores fantastically cheap tickets but if Randal's got King Diamond for his camp, I've got this...

I wanna be your Thurston Moore

BDR points out that today is Thurston's birthday, someone who's been one of my guitar heroes for a good while now even if I can't call myself the world's biggest fan as much as some.

I got some Sonic Youth albums from the library in the formative years but it was the lesser works in their career, the Silver Sessions of straight feedback and Experimental Jet Set which didn't stick at the time. One of my classmates junior year wore his sister's Sonic Youth shirt and his Rollins Band hoodie almost daily, and told me that Teen Age Riot changed his life. Most of my crew's inside jokes involved obscure references to Nirvana and Black Flag, geeky teens that we were. The first time I heard that song on the radio, at 2am on a hot summer night, it was revelatory for me too, though the band was one that we more talked about than actually listened to, because there is a difference. I wanted to play guitar that weird, and had a brief all female band that tried to be like Sonic Youth but we weren't so good and like most things, it fell apart.

My freshman year as an art major with oil paint in my chopped-up hair at a small conservative school in the heartland was made bearable by the art majors several years my senior who liked weird Brazilian movies and similar tuneage. One of our professors was a Fluxus alumnus who traded art in the mail with Yoko Ono and it was the most wonderful artistic community I've ever been around, and I would have maybe stayed if all the people I really liked weren't 26 to my 19 and on their way to graduating or getting the hell out. There was probably a reason why the campus tours never came to the art building, where we oddball Jesusheads with our grungy clothes and piercings congregated to talk theology and books and listen to Ani Difranco and Bjork and Sonic Youth. The year Murray Street came out, we gathered in a classroom late at night after painting and blissed out to Rain on Tin.

There was someone I had a small and of course unrequited crush on during those days and we drove up with one of his other friends to Cleveland one night listening to Washing Machine. I still remember him singing along to the guitars at the end. I was too shy to say much to him then, and I probably still would be now.

I transferred to Kent the following year due to economics, profound loneliness, and coming near to a nervous breakdown from the prior year. I made friends with a girl who loved loud tuneage as much as me and we lived together two years, went to shows, and watched old VHS tapes of MuchMusic and Daria and wish that we were as cool as Kim Gordon. I had MySpace for a couple weeks with a picture of her up instead of me, and got lots of "friend requests" from dudes who didn't know better and realized this whole social networking thing with strangers is kind of stupid.

She had copies of Goo and Dirty. I have to admit that I prefer their more accessible material to the more arty-farty stuff. It's not that I don't like things that are a little more complex, but sometimes I felt like it was just too arty, and I wanted a verse-chorus-verse and some fabulously squalling guitars and jams. I still don't don't own any of their albums, and compiled my favorite tracks onto a cassette tape that I listened to when I shelved library books at work.

Some friends of mine who lived out of town came in for a festival our old alt-rock station had. We met up and I had the closest thing to a romantic moment I've ever had with anyone sitting drenched on a lawn and listening to Schizophrenia.  Incidentally, the guy ended up having a breakdown a year or so later and this song kind of haunts me now.

I realized then I'm not a super-fan when I didn't hear the songs that I wanted to hear, which were these.

. I never could do Kim's voice, finding her songs generally uninteresting, but I loved Thurston's guitar work, in part because I couldn't figure out how he did it, and how he managed to sound so epic without being technical. Celebrity followers have their own couples, but for a lot of us, there was Thurston and Kim, making music and having a kid and being arty and old and still cool. My dad refers to the band as "Sonic Old" which may not be entirely inaccurate. It was kind of surprising that they split, because I dropped out of the loop on those things for awhile, but I'm past the point of assuming that things last forever most of the time as it is.