My Pet Monster

Here is something I wrote about my awesome buddy Julie. I am too lazy to put linx in for the appropriate things, but you know how the internet works. However, here is a link to her awesome book! Buy it, moneybags.


Those that hold Julie Buck in affection call her by her full name. Not Julie, Jules, or Miss Buck, and certainly not Mrs. Buck. She is Julie Buck. She talks fast. She has sass flashing in her eyes, like polished marbles. She is a habitual flirt, but it’s more of a self-defense mechanism, because she wants you to think that she is a raunchy, sex-driven, dangerous creature. She is not. But she does know a lot about smutty cinema.

Julie Buck bears exhaustive knowledge of silent films from a forgotten age. She tricked me into watching Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, a cartoon from 1928 that American celluloid labs reportedly refused to handle because of its over-endowed, lascivious characters and clothes-off approach to Western narratives. The footage had to be processed in Cuba so that the cartoonists could have a laugh at themselves in some cigar-choked hotel room way back when. The story is simple—a man, with an enormous and perpetually erect penis, wanders the countryside looking for things to fuck. Human, animal, vegetable—everything’s fair game, and there are plenty of wince-worthy accidents (including, but not limited to, cactus jabs) and uncomfortable situations. Julie Buck has implied that this may be the peak of hand-drawn animation. I had to know what kind of woman would devote so much time to such films.

“There was all this great stuff just buried in Harvard, old reels no one wanted to touch.” One such film, entitled Get Your Goat, was liberated by Julie Buck and is currently being kept warm in a metal can atop the spinning hard drives where my roommate Aaron stores his own movie making data. I have yet to see this particular reel, but Julie Buck assures me that the film is a pretty straightforward adaptation of the inherent innuendo of the title. As the former head of conservation at the Harvard Film Archive, Julie Buck is an expert on ancient porn (and other silent films, black and white movies, early experimental stuff, etc.). But to unearth the woman behind the filth, you must eat sushi together.

“Why give up the position of Film Czar at Harvard?” I ask as a piece of bean sprout sashimi approaches my mouth. “Maybe I was afraid of being financially secure and content….” Julie Buck suggests. Now she studies filmmaking at the well-renowned (“unless you live in Harlem,” she points out) Columbia University. Her focus is on producing, also known as the “the job no one wants.” This is because producing is like a dragon roll wrapped with phone calls, organizing, accounting, grip wrangling, and babysitting, which the producer is forced to gag down constantly. Everyone else in film tries to ignore these chores, hoping it all will untangle itself. But it doesn’t, and this is where people like Julie Buck come in. Producing is the kind of work that installs an ulcer early on: stressful and merciless. Demands fall like mortar. The keyboard grows into your fingers. The job isn’t so much to keep things from crumbling; rather, it’s to make sure the set crumbles gracefully, leaving a scrap of useable footage to cobble into a semblance of film. “Unfortunately,” Julie Buck cries, “I’m not very good at it.”

What is an artist without some anxieties? In this area, Julie Buck excels. Between sips of her saké, she asks if I want to be a mailman for her “Buster Keaton-esque silent short about a shitty job hunt.” Who doesn’t want to play between the frames once or twice in their life? But this can be boring work, and I am mostly left to watch from the sidelines as Julie Buck struggles with her own vision. For this exercise she is directing, which can be even more infuriating for her than producing. She is the captain of her own ship who, for some reason, seems to think that sinking would be in the project’s best interest. The crew does their best to convince her otherwise with threats and exasperation. I spend most of my time driving in circles, gnawing through my lower lip, and finding nowhere to park, all while Julie Buck shouts commands through a dying cell phone that would be unintelligible even if I were standing next to her.

New York is terrifying enough outside of a car, but behind a steering wheel the atmosphere suddenly turns tropical. I transform into a small rodent perched perilously low on the food chain. Every few minutes Julie Buck calls to tell me to drive here, or wait there, or come to this stoplight and pretend to hit the main actor who will be riding on his bike “but you know, don’t really hit him, just look like you’re hitting him, and give him the finger, but don’t yell because it’s a silent film anyways, and Rashi will wave when it’s time for you to go but call us when you get to the end of the block oh there you are ok get off the phone!” Most of this she sprays at me in a single breath. I will always remember the experience as a four-hour stress test with no bathroom breaks.

“Movies suck,” I tell her later. “Yes, but I make them anyways.” Julie Buck says. She does, and has done, plenty else as well. Of her many storied careers she proudly includes night janitor, but not just any night janitor: “I got the job just after high school, and I was the janitor of the high school from which I had just graduated.” What could this say about a woman like Julie Buck, that she had to clean the toilets used by those who only recently were her social inferiors? Such things don’t really matter to her. Besides, she’s since assumed varied superior positions with equally skull-throbbing results. “Most of the idiots I’ve met were patrons of the library where I worked as a reference librarian at the media desk.” Back in 1999, when VHS still ruled the land, she had one student ask, “Do you have a copy of Great Expectations starring Charles Dickens?” Julie Buck politely corrected the boy, saying that it was written by Mr. Dickens rather than starring him, but he insisted, “no I’m pretty sure he’s the star and besides I need to watch it for my English class so I can write my book report.” Or the other guy who asked for a photograph of William Shakespeare, to whom Julie Buck replied that photography wasn’t invented until the 1800’s, “they called me a liar and said their brother used to have a photo of Shakespeare.” Does this guy realize how much that photo is worth? “I didn’t ask,” Julie Buck sighs, “but then the kid said I was just being lazy because I didn’t want to help him.” This is pretty classic librarian stuff, though I ask if this kind of customer was particularly associated with Utah. Like the classy woman she is, Julie Buck refrains from badmouthing her former home entirely.

“I mean, there’s a reason I don’t really believe in Mormonism anymore, but Utah is an OK place. My family’s still pretty awesome.” Family plays a large role in some of Julie Buck’s other projects as well. Along with film scholarship and moviemaking, she is respected as a photographer and collage artist. One of these many distractions includes a book she is composing based on photos of her many friends and cousins. Composed entirely of headshots in mostly natural poses, Julie Buck has altered the pictures into strict monochrome, altering them into something like illustration or extreme photocopying, but with clean lines and almost ink-drawn shapes. She plans to write stories, dictation, anecdotes, and other forms of text over the dark portions of these portraits and compile them together. Words and photos aren’t really strangers, but Julie Buck is using script to create shape rather than just re-contextualizing differing pieces. It’s a task she “constantly returns to, especially when all this film stuff is overwhelming me and I kind of want to die a little.”

The thing about this book, and filmmaking, for Julie Buck, is that both require many relationships, which can be rewarding and stressful. She is not one to play the star. She’s willing to sacrifice herself for her friends’ own projects even if it disintegrates her own psyche. She won’t have it any other way. After a particularly traumatic week, Julie Buck is at my apartment, shouting despicably amusing things and drinking beer with Aaron and I. She insists that we break out the video games, and we do. She loses, pouts, screams and says many horribly funny things and this is why we all get along, because we can drop these barriers around each other. When you still are able to play with the ones you work with, it’s a job worth keeping. If she can help her friends to create the kind of challenging and inspirational work that she enjoys, then she’s done her part.

The Mayor is a Robot

Craig Arnold was as poetry professor, a doctor in title, at the University of Wyoming while I was gestating there. He disappeared on a volcanic island in Japan in late April of this year and in all probability is not coming back. I'm not really interested in talking about that situation, as there are other places with much more information that readers, if they haven't already, can peruse via the facebooks and infowebs. As far as Craig the man, there are definitely others who knew him more thoroughly than I, a former student of his. So, like any good blogger, there is only one angle left, the impact Craig had on me.



Craig wasn't my only poetry professor at UW: Paisley Rekdal, Mellisa Kwasny, and H.L. Hix were others who all had a great impact on me and my writing. But Craig was quite different than them (well, Paisley and he were pretty close in terms of hip-teacher-ness). He wore his leather jacket to class, organized and ran the poetry slam for a while, introduced me to thai food, held parties at his house for students and everyone. In Wyoming, this was definitely strange. In all situations Craig wore a smile that dominated his face.

I knew I liked English and theory a lot, enough to major in it, and that poetry was also something I dabbled in. I didn't really read much though, which is often a major flaw in the young writer/poet, but Craig turned me around. A world-traveler and reader, he put many new forms and voices in front of my eyes, and along with H.L. I found the more language-oriented niche that I would cozy myself into for the rest of my stay at UW. Craig led the poetry slams with a memorized invocation of the rules of slam, and later, when my buddy Luke and I were charged with leading the event while Craig was away in Rome, we stumbled through those same rules with barely a sliver of the charisma. And while I don't think I won a single slam (as I liked to complain, I was neither funny nor a lesbian), Craig always had something nice to say. He never overdid it, which was his main skill as a teacher: to find the best in your work and encourage it, no matter what you wrote or the level of familiarity you had with poetry. So really, he treated you like a card-carrying poet, an equal.

After I graduated from UW, I had no real idea what to do. I met with Craig, on his insistence, to talk about where to go from here, and he asked what grad schools I was considering. Frankly, I wasn't. I had no real idea what grad school was all about and was always too intimidated to ask anyone. Craig rattled off a few he thought would be good for me: Brown, Florida State, Iowa (requisite); I added NYU: I told him I wanted to experience New York and maybe branch out of my lang-po sphere for a while. When it came time to take the GRE, Craig paid for me since I was broke-ass with a new truck and school loans. When I didn't get accepted to UW for my MFA, I was insulted, but Craig assured me that I would be going somewhere else and that I had to leave Wyoming. He was definitely right. I wouldn't have gone to NYU (or any grad school) without his help.

I'm terrible at keeping correspondence with people. I spoke with Craig a few times, failing to secure a reading for him at NYU. But I did crash his NY birthday party and the book release gala for Made Flesh. There he introduced me to Mark Strand, his own mentor, and he told Mark that I was his "star pupil" at Wyoming, to which Mark barely grunted, but I had to check myself. Craig never made any indication of holding favorites, he kept everyone on equal footing. This was of particular importance for me since in Laramie I thought I ruled the roost and the peasants couldn't comprehend my work. No encouragement necessary, at least not on the surface. I think Craig understood my unspoken trepidation at scholarly life though but also recognized my commitment to poetry. I mean, maybe he said this about every former student, but it was nice to hear in the city of a million poets. Of course, that night I mostly hung out with Craig's son Robin, talking about the bands he was starting and life in Seattle.

In February I saw Craig briefly at AWP in Chicago. I got there late because JFK was built on a cursed graveyard, missing the first day and most of the night which was apparently the night to drink yourself into the future. So everyone the day after was pretty zombie-like. There was a fantastic panel on poetry and comics, and Craig snuck in late and sat in front of me. We chitchatted for a little while and I said I'd call him later, but it turned out I did not have the right number. That was the last time I saw or heard from him.

Check out Craig's volcano pilgrim blog, along with the poems available at poets.org and elsewhere. If there was a certification program for volcano explorers he would be running it I'm sure, which makes his loss that much more acute, that this was some sort of shitty accident. I haven't read Made Flesh because I am still a pisspoor and slow reader, and now it will be that much harder to go through but I'm looking forward to it. I may not have kept in regular contact with Craig but his absence in this world is distinctly felt, like a drop in the breeze, the day that much more hot and oppressive for want of his spirit.

The day is breaking –

one side of the mountain pink

one in cold shadow

Thank you, Craig.

Alfabet

Back home in the pseudo-D.R., Ladyfriend and I are dealing with some bullshit. Our neighbors are loud. You may have heard that Hamilton Heights, the neighborhood in which we technically reside, is the loudest neighborhood in New York city, at least according to the volume of noise complaints made to city-info-hotline 311. If this is truly the case, than we are a large contributor to said 311 database.

I've come to realize though that it's quite useless to expect the police to really do anything. They have bigger problems, especially in a city like this, and of course they would be annoyed to have to deal with neighbor bullshit. But as all of you probably know, sometimes there just isn't any talking to some people. Unfortunately, Ladyfriend was not having that mindset and tried to talk to some people, people who like their music loud and their front door open. Really, they should be paying more rent because they essentially have an extra very long room that connects from their front door to the main door of the apartment building. This room just happens to go right past our front door, as it is also known as the hallway, and the apartment down the hall sends their kids to play in the hallway as if it were their front yard or daycare or whatever.

Now, I'm not anti-kids, or anti-music (well, most of it) or anything. I want my neighbors to do what they want in the space they pay for--I don't have band practice in the hallway, and my stereo is never pumped to the max. But this isn't about me and it never has been. Some neighbors truly don't give a fuck, and there's nothing you can do about it, as we learned when Ladyfriend went over to ask as politely as she could that our neighbors at least close their door when rocking out. Apparently the neighbor lady glared at Ladyfriend all along the hallway, responded to the request by stating that she might close her door but she wasn't turning her music down, to which Ladyfriend said she would call the cops. And she did. And for once, the cops came! The one time we probably didn't want them to come in the forty+ times we've called in the last nine months.

Neighborly strife is one thing, but Ladyfriend and I suffer from that inexorable disease known as Liberal Guilt. We're both fairly well-educated, with socially responsible attitudes towards most things, and frankly we've been putting up with this shit for a long time. Thanks to our neighbors and their life in the hallway, we know quite a bit about them: the mother is angry and is often telling her three kids (two boys and one girl, all under five) about how she's going "to fuck [them] up", the kids call her a "fucking bitch" at the top of their own lungs when she locks them out of the apt. in the hallway, and more. Here is an average afternoon/evening with the kids:



So it's one thing to have a stereo blasting until 1 AM, and another to have kids blowing their tops all the time. Really both are not only annoying, but anxiety inducing. But as I mentioned, things have been stepped up. Since the cops actually came, the one time Ladyfriend actually confronted our neighbors about their noise, they're pretty pissed at us. And since they do everything in the hallway and at the top of their lungs, we can hear them scream "White Bitch!" after the cops came, and "I hate that bitch!" after the landlord called them. So they aren't fans of us, and they live in the hallway, which we have to walk through when we leave or come home, as is often the case with hallways, a major design flaw if you ask me.

Here is an example of the power of our neighbor's stereo:



I should have opened our door while filming that so you could truly hear the wave of noise that is being barely held back.

So, what do we do now? We don't hate our neighbors, but they clearly hate us. There is no reasoning with them because they seem to think we are mortal enemies. Ladyfriend couldn't even manage a simple conversation/request. We feel bad for the kids but frankly have yet to see any signs of physical abuse so there's nothing to be done there. It just seems that there is no reasoning to be done: our neighbors hate us, and we are passive-aggressive and unwilling to engage in direct confrontation, not that it would work anyways.

Things have been escalated thanks to the cops (which, admittedly, if we didn't want them to come, we shouldn't have called, but there was a history of non-response!) and Ladyfriend's direct approach, and now we get anxious whenever the kids start banging on the mailboxes or we hear their mom singing along with her music (in what has to be the most piercing high-pitched voice ever constructed) or yelling at a boyfriend or whatever. Ladyfriend will be moving soon, and the old 'mates will be back and may be more comfortable with direct confrontation but who knows if that will amount to anything.

Life in the city.

Wave

It's only appropriate that after a year of absence (originally intended as a sort of radio silence in case my students got curious and googled my name, which, as it turns out, probably would have yielded much more embarassing elements than this paltry blog) I should return fresh from Wyoming, having seen Nine Inch Nails last Denver show ever with Abe.

It seems like I am constantly preparing myself to defend a pro-NIN opinion in my mind, as if someone might stop me and ask my thoughts on the The Fragile at any moment and if I don't offer a well-reasoned critique then I lose a toe. What does it mean to constantly defend your tastes essentially to yourself as you are listening to them? I mean, no one else does this, right? People on the train unabashededly sing along to their showtunes as if the earphones actually muted their voices (or rather, they simply don't care), so what's so wrong with Nails?

I've had no fewer than four NIN shirts in my life time, a wicked downward spiral one being among my first band shirts, and while I am definitely not the fan that Abe is (or that guy who was crying in the aisles of Fiddler's Green during "Hurt"), NIN has been with me for a while and is still in a more regular rotation than other such artists (Smashing Pumpkins, Suicide Machines, uhhhh Goo Goo Dolls).

And frankly, though NIN was probably influenced themselves (or himself?) by Jane's Addiction, it was obvious at this show which one had fared time better. Jane's is completely coasting on whatever remains of their once influential nostalgia. Meanwhile, Trent/Co. were both spontaneous and stone-faced between songs, spontaneous and playing for themselves more than the fans, actually skipping a lot of classics (though really, most of NIN's catalog is pretty memorable and in it's own "I made out with that goth chick/dude to this song!" way consistently recollectable) and playing the songs they wanted to play.

It hardly felt like a goodbye, I guess. And it wasn't as visually spectaular as the last tour they did, all lights in the sky or whatever, which made this one a little more rooted in the songs themselves and how well they held up as a four person rock group. They held up well, which is why Trent could have toured yearly for the next twenty five years, and probably best that he didn't, because I can see why such a thing would drop a man's sanity like that.

Rusty!

BEAR THE BALLAST

I used to joke that I saw Trent Reznor more in the year 2005 than I saw my own father--true, and sad, but you know, still kind of funny. Thanks to my roommate Abe's fanaticism I got some good father-figure face time with the ex-heroin junkie and NIN mastermind himself, both very different experiences. Both fucking awesome.

Nine Inch Nails is very much a live experience and I have to say that those concerts (and they were concerts much more than they were mere shows [not that shows aren't grand/life-changing in their own way {back off with the brakets already!}]) were total sensory overloads and I didn't think it got much more saturated than that. I was wrong. Trent's stepped it up again, there's an article at wired.com (use your boolean search engines of choice! Do I have to do everything for you?) discussing the new "light show", though that phrase does little to describe it. I don't even really want to mention it except to point out how this man/band has reinvented itself over and over again while still remaining true to its core aesthetic. It's hard for the long-runners like that, I might even put NIN up there with da 'gazi in terms of long-running, functional evolution.

Anyways--the first Nails show I caught, I was running late because we'd also had our first Hott Knights show. (Sidestory--this HK show was weird as fuck for me. It was at Central High, not the high school I went to, and I had to be like 24 at the time, long past visiting hours if you know what I mean. Hamburger did much to fuck up the maturity rates of virile females in that time and I felt like a dirty old man. My band killed it despite Acacia's parents giving her mic advice and general crowd apathy. I called my dad later to say how strange it was being old and surrounded by illegal hotties, he said it's OK as long as you keep your hands to yourself. I probably posted on this story already but I try not to look back.) I rolled up all "I gotta find Abe or I'm going to die!" Turns out neither was going down. I tried to press up, rather boldy for myself I might say, but the megafans weren't having it. Some guy just held out his arm and said "nuh uh faggot" and the message was quite clear. So I scurried to the side and waited for the show to begin, which wasn't long. Suddenly I was on the right side of the stage, up front, staring into Trent's nostrils, laughing when Aaron North tried to grandstand on the monitor and slipped right on his face/guitar (hahaha it's still funny now!) and just generally losing my shit in a way that you only can in those big shows, the tent-burners, you know? I just remember sweating and singing a lot. I found Abe later, shirtless, his grin spanning the lobes, and we had one of those looks like, you know, yea, you know.


In other news: the great Ted L. and his Pharmacisticians have done it again--digitally fighting for the rights of the unsatisfied, the incomplacent. He's selling a four song (two new) EP through the Touch and Go website to raise money for Muderapolis' Food Not Bombs and Democracy Now! as per the aftermath of the RNC convention, which my good buddy Dylan has made note of.

Here's my little soapbox moment--are we in fucking China all of a sudden? I can barely form words over the actions of our goverment in this instance (and so many others). Arresting journalists, artists, bike riders, protestors, many of them before the convention even began based on "evidence" most likely gathered through wiretaps of questionable legality and unquestionable immorality. As Ted says, "Paranoia is never enough".

I like a man who backs up his artistic rhetoric. Sure it's a basement recording--that's where the punk cred comes in. OK, two of the songs are covers, but the Pharmacists are one of the few bands who's covers are actually worth listening to. What else do you want?

Ted Leo for President.

With Tina Fey as Co-President.

Peace please.

OLD DUDES

Bluetip reunited for some shows, one of which being last night here in Old New York, and it reminded me of why I like dudes with guitars. Those guys are getting older and I'm getting older but I'm not lamenting any of that buzz right now, rather, I want to revel a little bit. Punk rock played up, guitars that take their time coiling up and then still have a little shake when they snap out. Music that can be fast and smart, introspective and playful. Where these bands at anymore? Bar wasn't filled out but that's no surprise, and it's not like Dischord bands operate under some alchemical formula or something. As Jason said before playing Slovakia this stuff is going on everywhere, all over the world. Bills won't be paid but as the saying goes I won't regret time unspent in a movable cube. I miss this, really, but enough of that. Bluetip was wound tight, had fun, laughed off the hiccups. Tube it.

In other news. Oh man so much other news. Where to start? Other bands, I guess, that played last night included The Surrounding Areas, with the drummer from Jets to Brazil and Texas is the reason (geography themes anyone?) and maybe some other guys. They were down, doing the Wilco thing, you know that thing these graying young beards are going after--acoustic guitar, throaty vox, guy with a Marshall lickin' a rock-salt cube. It was fluffy. Quaint.

Retisonic is 1/2 Bluetip doing something a little more close-knit rock wise, since it's just Jason on guitar. It's safe to say that if you don't like one the other won't do much else for you, but obviously I have a soft spot for both. I haven't totally gotten into Retisonic but I like them and recognized most of the songs, but I suppose that's because their "new" album has been caught up in some sort of cog-relay system for the past two years that has hampered its release. Oh well. Their cover of 68 is pretty awesome--the way covers should be done, which is to say, Burger King style, I guess. 

Look up the Netherlands right now, and after you learn about black metal and ancient forests, there's this band that sounds like Dethklok on a binge of Dr. Roxo's finest Columbian. Guitarist looked like Zach Braff in a tiny cape, drenched his voice in all the hallucinations LSD could provide, and took the volume off the scale. Their songs were tight but the between-set tunings were a little too frequent. Random stage antics also spiced things up. I laughed a bit and I'm kicking myself for not grabbing a CD but we all make mistakes. 

Levi

I MISS MY BROTHER

But Chey-ville, the rest of your drama be stale. Man it's almost dinner time. Cheesy bread anyone? I am a horrendous vegetarian. 

Thoughts: based purely on the two songs over on their myspace, the new Young Widows record will likely be [superlative].