Like most youth trends, the incidence of lo-fi garage rock seems to occur in closer and closer intervals. It used to take maybe ten years for the pendulum to swing from prog to adolescence, but now gracias de Urban Outfitters the whole thing is a mass of supra-coded polaroid pictures, wah-pedals, and songs about dudes who don’t care, and the beach. WTF is with the beach lately? Are we all looking out at the ocean and imagining the future that could have been were it not for our insistence upon the latest safest BMW? Well, I’m obviously being speculative because I think beemers are for d-bags, but I think you take my point. We have somehow fucked it all up and now wish for the elemental truthiness of water meeting land. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. It’s true.
Because, why else the psychedelia? Why else the fascination with fake-ass indian shit? You can call it “hybridity” if you want to, but I am on to your game, man. You can also call it “pills,” “reverb,” and “23 years old.” Every iteration of the damn thing gets more savvy, which is why you need to become the heavy in your life. Be the one who takes out the trash and doesn’t bitch about it. Be the one who has a job, or shit, be the one who tries to have one. As long as you don’t design jewelry or make Burger King slogans for a living, you are ahead in the millions.
AND ALSO, P.S.
YOGA ROTS BRAINS,
SARAH
This is about us. We are well aware. The tent worm situation in the upper midwest isn’t the half of it. Today is day 100 of the catastrophic oil problem, which you probably already knew because news anchors always use Day 100 for a fresh angle on a catastrophic problem. I think I dressed up as Snow White today by accident. I keep applying for jobs that would require me to wear a polo shirt, and I keep not getting those jobs. We’re getting into the late-model Roman shit. In the last month I have shotgunned a beer that had been shot with a pellet gun and hopped a fence to swim in a public pool at night and attended a party populated by extras from the popular television show, “Friday Night Lights,” although I think there may have also been some key grips there. I repeat my themes. I read a book about mutants at the gym. I buy egg whites in a carton and try not to feel like that’s a really sad thing to do. If I’m lucky I will be a pizza waitress again. Maybe you will also be a pizza waitress again, even if you weren’t the first time around. I played the tambourine and left bruises on my leg. Europe is great, but everything is too humane. Even the military cemeteries. I like this better, even though it means all of my friends panic every other day. It’s fucked but we’re still getting it right. All we need is some bowling and some candy-flavored malt beverages. Obviously we are full of faith. This is about us. It’s a weird kind of faith.
I was a finalist for Provincetown! Sure, you might say, finalist means a pat on the back and a punch in the boobs, but I’ll take it. Then I went to the pool and swam 20 laps and read Philip Larkin during that blissfully exhausted post-swim state, which makes me pretty sure I am winning at life. Although I should note that I don’t always follow my own rules listed in the previous WAYS 2 STAY OKAY post, but I usually muddle something feasible together.
Part of that current feasible thing is Marnie Stern. She is a self-taught-in-her-mid-20s guitar player who shreds to death and sings lines like “I’m like a raging animation/I’ve wondered what it’s like to be one” in her girly voice, in her super positive songs that are full of SHRED. Like, grade A Van Halen quality shred. It’s incredible. And I’m not going to issue some unilateral dictate that you must listen to her, but if you’re around me in the next few weeks I will probably make you listen in the car or at least talk about her. So deal. This is clearly kind of because I’m currently learning how to play guitar and I’m sort of infatuated with all of the things it can do–I mean, chord-based instruments! You can play them with friends who are interested in a wide variety of musical styles! You can google tabs or chords for a song you love and know how to play it in two minutes! Anthony makes the very valid point that while it might be the best (physical) instrument ever based on its versatility, its styles and temperaments (at least regarding electronic guitar) tend to fall into one potentially (very) stale idiom. I completely believe this, since my initial attempts at writing songs have left me with some super rudimentary chord progressions, partially because those progressions just sound like what guitars are supposed to do and partially because the G and Em chords are pretty much the easiest to play the moment. But I like Marnie Stern so much because she’s up to this completely idiosyncratic finger-tapping Van Halen thing and is really down to earth about not knowing no damn music theory and she’s writing these crazy complicated songs. It’s encouraging.
But maybe more than that, it’s got me listening to this album in that obsessive teenage way, and I don’t get that way so much lately. I miss it, honestly. I’m probably not remembering it completely right, but it seemed like at one point I listened to all music with this degree of intensity, moving from one favorite to another like leaping from rock to rock across a crick. There was some kind of forward motion to it and I was never lacking a totally essentialized version of myself in CD form. I kept it up all the way through college, which was probably a case of my staying-too-late-at-the-party tendency, but it was fun and kind of instructive. Liking stuff that much gave me a foil for ideas that existed in other genres or didn’t exist at all until I found a way to draw them out based on, say, Cristina’s brash/creepy Peggy Lee covers. I can’t help but think this sort of attention is useful in some nearly invisible holistic way regarding the making of other things.
Maybe the real goal here is to isolate the behavioral element that enables teenagers to be so totally INTO IT because it’s also a thing that goes away. And shoot, I have no idea what that is except maybe having an emotional life that is so confusing it can only find expression in objects that exist outside of it. And if you can remember it, you can remember how much that sucked. So, this time around I’m not being nearly as prescriptive. I can’t tell you that obsessive attention to music will make you have a better time of it. But it’s probably true. Oh damn.
First, read this New York Times profile of Brooklyn’s new Poet Laureate.
Now, read the following, my profile of Hyde Park’s new Poet Laureate:
A Poet Who Doesn’t Do Yoga: S.E. Smith, Poet Laureate of Hyde Park
After S.E. Smith puts her battered espresso pot on the stove, she pads nearly barefoot, still wearing last night’s tights, about four feet over to her office, where a desk cohabits with three full ashtrays and dirty coffee cups. She takes in the sights and sounds of her neighborhood, Hyde Park in Austin: yuppies chastising their unfortunately-named children for sitting in the dirt, day laborers fixing the roof next door, self-satisfied bourgeois hippies opening bottles of kombucha. She opens her laptop and stares at a blank new document for a few hours. One day she started with the title GIRLS CHOIR WITH EXTRA AIR but it didn’t work, another day, with the title ARCTIC LONER ROCK, which also didn’t work.
“Then something takes over,” Smith says, “usually after two hours of catatonic silence and a few pots of espresso.” Over days like this, her usually bizarre inside jokes with herself turn into poems, none of which are about childbirth, such as “Trace Means Trail in Western America:”
Dummy, where are you?
All around us the future
prepares us for each other.
I am sick of everything,
even the things I haven’t
done yet.
Ms. Smith is no ordinary scribbler: she is an editor, published author, and Hyde Park’s new poet laureate, the first person and first woman to fill the austere, if self-bestowed post. But don’t be intimidated. One of her chief goals is to “fuck it up 2010.”
“People use the words, ‘okay, whatever’ a lot when they think of a poet,” she said between bites of a fried egg sandwich made by her imaginary boyfriend Renaldo, who quit his job as a Disney Imagineer to become Smith’s full time house husband. “But being a poet is anything but okay whatever.”
S.E. Smith, the Hyde Park Poetry Commission president, who, with the help of a selection committee, chose Ms. Smith from two applicants, said she was taken by her own unwavering enthusiasm for poetry in spite of massive apathy and her embodiment of Hyde Park’s principle demographic: over-educated people under the age of thirty who can’t get jobs and enjoy New Wave German cinema. It did not hurt that she was unfazed by the lack of salary, stipend, office or budget. “It’s like I gave her a fried egg sandwich, she was so happy,” Smith said of herself.
Hyde Park was the first of Austin’s neighborhoods to appoint an official bard, in 2010. The rest have not followed suit.
With enormously frizzy dishwater blond hair and a remarkable ability to pull off miniskirts and unwashed black tights, Ms. Smith is a particularly glamorous ambassador of an art form most often publicly celebrated only in modelesque mainstream body types with form-fitting leather pants in their closets. She speaks loudly, having grown up, she said, as an only child with a lot of gregarious imaginary friends. And the tights, she notes, are cheap chic, from Target.
Ms. Smith would love to see poems carved into Civil War statues and chiseled into Darque Tan billboards throughout Airport Boulevard; mindful of money woes, she might settle for Frederick Seidel poems muttered on the bus, “only to be washed away in a replica of people’s constant cycle of talking shit and talking more shit,” as she wrote in her winning application. She hopes to create a website to spotlight other Hyde Park poets if she can find any who aren’t afraid of the internet, and she yearns to bring them into the neighborhood’s coffee shops full of emotionally stunted man-children.
“I love that age, when it’s sort of a middle ground between being a teenager and still trying to be a teenager even though you’re 35 and work at the video rental store,” she said. “They won’t be afraid to put themselves at the center of things because they still haven’t yet learned that they aren’t actually the center.”
Even many of Ms. Smith’s writer friends find poetry okay and whatever, she said. But this is not about them.
Meet the new lion, same as the old lion.
Lately I want to increase the amount of pickled eggs in my life, especially red pickled eggs with beets. Why is Texas deficient in having big jars of beet pickled eggs in bars or grocery stores, I want to know. Or is it? Maybe I go to the wrong places. Maybe they don’t pickle the eggs with the aid of beets and I can’t ever tell the difference? Maybe the pickled eggs are in some terrifying aisle of the supermarket that I normally avoid? Once I asked my mom to buy us a jar of beet pickled eggs at Bell’s Grocery in Hundred, West Virginia and she said sure even though she knew I hadn’t tried them before and also would turn down my request for other exotic foods like the jars of peanut butter and jelly mixed together in stripes. I think I wanted the eggs because they were pink. I ate one sitting on the floor in front of the cupboard and put the rest back on the furthest shelf, which they shared with a jar of pickled pigs’ feet that had been there as long as I had, as far as I can tell, and which might be there still. Now I want to make them myself since I like beets so much all of a sudden and I miss the strange Western Pennsylvania foods that I didn’t even really care for when I lived there. Like cabbage soup. Every kind of cabbage. Whenever in the future I have a roommate again, they are going to be so puzzled about my foods. I am gonna be a roommate blocking up the refrigerator with big jars of beet pickled eggs and stinking up the house with pan-fried pork chops.
In other news, waiting for everything to happen feels more dignified in March, even though nothing happens and it seems like everybody in the world has heard back something one way or the other from PhD programs except for me. And the book contests, I especially don’t want to think about them. Two hours from now I won’t be down about it, and then the feeling of doom will come back briefly while I’m doing something innocuous like looking at my bookshelf or getting mail that is only cable bills and alumni newsletters. But March feels better already, even if it’s for no reason, or if the reason is a future of beets and vinegar. I’ll take it.
So, it’s that time of year when I worry about my future a lot. I know, that time of the year already? Wasn’t that supposed to be last year, right before you graduated? Didn’t it stop when you got a job? No, yes. Whatever, it never ended. And right about now is when most of those book contests and PhD applications and other hopeful stuff ideally calls you up and lets you know that all of your dreams are gonna come true. In spite of how ridiculous it is to structure an entire life around school, that sure is what I’ve done so far. I’m ambivalent about how wise it is to continue in such a fashion, but I also applied for PhDs in writing, and my applications reflected my ambivalence by being kind of shoddy, and now I’m in this bizarre state of mind, both wanting to get into schools just to stoke my ego and not knowing if that’s exactly right for me. ME ME ME. Considering, also, that if I get flat-out rejected across the board it isn’t going to sit very well with me and I will have to come up with another life plan and solve the implicit question of how to structure a life without school, all at once. Daunting.
So my mom suggested that I make a list of jobs I could have or things I could do that would satisfy the requirement. No holding back. Crazy options included, and in fact encouraged. Here is the beginning of that list:
1. Bartend at a VFW hall or Lions Club. I have always deeply deeply wanted to do this for some reason.
2. Apply to Akademie Schloss Solitude, which has the benefit of not even accepting applications from current students.
3. Move to dang-old Germany anyway. Take intensive language course, translate technical documents.
4. Secretary for academic department.
5. Start a poetry press, or work for one. (DREAM JOB, I think.)
6. Hotel night clerk.
7. House cleaner (would be havoc on nails though).
8. Personal assistant for wealthy invalid/eccentric.
9. Museum docent?
Okay, I think I need to reconsider the full-tilt no holds aspect, because these are pretty pedestrian. But I’ll have to get back to you on that because I had four cups of espresso and I need to get away from the computer STAT.
Wednesday Round-Up:
+Now I have my own basil plant, and also my own thyme plant. I haven’t used either of them yet because I want them to come into their own as plants before I tear off their leaves to season my food, even though my mother tells me that the best thing you could do for a basil plant is to cut it, which sounds equally suspect and true to me, like the old saw about how children need structure.
+Sometimes I think blogs are dumb and then don’t write anything for like three months. Oops.
+Today a guy threw his sweatshirt at me, and when I gave it back with a WTF? look, he said, “I’m sorry, I was trying to get your attention. Have a nice day anyway.”
+Now I am a member of 24 Hour Fitness, which, in Austin anyway, has a big fake “Live Strong” bracelet hanging over the front counter.
+Apparently I am just as mean as I feared because I think regretsy.com is really funny.
+Discretion is the better part of aesthetics, fucking trust me.
+The soundtrack to Serpico sounds pretty hot, actually.
+I was just playing; children really do need structure.
+Today after much deliberation I came to the conclusion that I like Rihanna a lot, kind of mostly because she does this really low EHHHN EHHHN UHHHHN thing with her voice that I think is cool.
+Lately a lot people have been asking me for my business card as if it is a totally normal thing for a 26-year-old individual temporarily employed by an annual literary magazine to have a card. Am I missing something? Am I allowed to give out cards that just show a screen shot of google with my name entered into the dialogue box?
+My nails are so long and freaking immaculate now that I am often asked if they are fake. Which makes me proud, so proud. Although the nail on my right middle finger broke off partially when I was re-seasoning my cast iron pan last week.
+Hot tea and bourbon.
I am going to Europe in a few weeks. Austin to Chicago to Frankfurt to Barcelona, bitches. And then somehow to Berlin. And then back home. WTFFFFFF!!!! OMG. It’s been a long time since I’ve been over there, and I’ve never traveled by myself as an adult, so whoa, that’s going to be some other shit. Those of you who are major cosmopolitan jet-setters, got any advice for me? Except, of course, to only bring one duffel bag full of ratty dresses yeah. That’s what I’m about to do. And crush dem with the gayest science of all, which is funtimes.
Things that weigh as much as the Stanley Cup:
1.) 140 quarter pounders sans bun, cheese, condiments, or fixings
2.) 37.2 cans of Hill Country Fare black beans
3.) Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones’ Diary MINUS regular Renee Zellweger with the creepy shoulders
4.) Seven Pizza Hut Pizzones (actually I’m just guesstimating here, but I was top hoss in estimation at Mathlympics in middle school, so trust me)
5.) One Samsonite rolling suitcase containing the following: one pink denim skirt, one black cheerleader skirt with the panties sewn in, one blue knit skirt, three t-shirts, two cardigans, one pair of tennis shoes, seven pairs of underwear, one pair of socks, one jumprope, two resistance bands, three necklaces, two elastic belts, a toothbrush, a flat iron, a bottle of charcoal pills, and a mint condition Morris Day record
I only mention it because when my dad took me to the airport today, he told me that my suitcase weighed 35 pounds, the same as the Stanley Cup. And I was like, “How can you tell how much my suitcase weighs?” and he was like, “I lift 70 pounds of free weights at the gym” and I was like, “Okay, that’s pretty cool.” He was worried I would crush my neck getting my stuff down from the overhead luggage compartment, which for the record I did not do.
OH PS GO PENNNNSSSSSSS