Life As A Published Author b/w Greenland Dreaming

By
Larry Livermore
Published: June 11, 2013Posted in: Blog, Featured, Spy Rock MemoriesTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Life As A Published Author b/w Greenland Dreaming

It’s been over a week now since Spy Rock Memories was officially released. No one has come right out and asked me, “How has your life changed now that you’re a published author,” but in case they do, I’ve concocted an answer, one which most of you will have seen coming: not much at all, at least that I’ve noticed.

To be fair, this is far from the first time I’ve seen my name and/or my writing in print. I published 40 (and a half) issues of Lookout magazine, and wrote columns or articles for at least half a dozen other magazines.

I’ve also contributed essays or interviews to several books, but that doesn’t come close to the sensation of seeing your own book in print, and I’d like to thank Joe and Zach at Don Giovanni Records for taking a chance on me and making it all possible.

Zach in particular worked hand in hand with me on the editing process, which wound up taking a LOT longer than I imagined it could, but which I think was well worth it. Aaron Cometbus and Emily Rems also gave the text thorough goings-over, catching a fair few errors and glitches that Zach and I managed to miss.

Once it was finally out, a brief flurry of excitement—a few really thoughtful and nice reviews like this one and this one, some interviews, and a sudden spike in Twitter followers—was followed by a plummet back to normality. Not that there’s anything so terribly wrong with normal. And not that, given the checkered and turbulent course my life has taken pretty much ever since I started having a life, I’d be likely to notice the difference.

There’s still plenty—potentially, an open-ended amount—of work to do. When Jon Ginoli’s book was published, he set out on a personal odyssey that saw him crisscrossing the nation’s bookstores for the better part of the year that followed.

Whether or not that helped him sell more books, it sounded like a great adventure, the sort I’d look forward to if I ever had a book of my own. Other writers, Aaron Cometbus, for example, simply release their work into the wild, confident or at least in hopes that it will be able to fend for itself. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of personal appearances Aaron has made to market his writing and come up with a couple digits of change.

Surely there’s no one right way of doing it. It’s true of music, too: it’s an article of faith that you’ve got to tour relentlessly to sell records, but Operation Ivy broke up a week after releasing their one and only album, never played another show to promote it, yet went on to sell over a million copies and go down in punk rock history.

As a newcomer to the publishing world, I’m not sure how often that happens with books. Seldom, I suspect. And yet part of me wants to hope Spy Rock Memories reaches its audience by osmosis or old-fashioned word of mouth so that I can retreat into my study and start/continue plowing away at my next project(s).

I already have two of them, in fact, both already in progress. But I’m kind of hamstrung at the moment over the question of whether I can or should try to write two separate books at once. The result is that for the past couple of weeks, I haven’t written anything for either one.

For years people have been asking, expecting, demanding that I write my version of the history of Lookout Records. It seemed like the logical next step, and I had finally got started on doing just that. I even had an opening chapter ready to release here on the blog, just as I did with Spy Rock Memories.

But on a recent trip, during which I was fortunate enough to see Helen Mirren’s excellent, excellent play, The Audience, I was seized with an inspiration about how I could do something I’ve long wanted to do, but couldn’t quite get my head around: write about London.

I’d held back in the past because no matter how much time I’d spent in London, I was ultimately an outsider. I felt like I owed the place more respect than to come charging in with the attitude of, “Okay, London, I’ve been visiting you for 38 years and lived in you for 10, so I think I know what your deal is now…”

London is so vast and complex that even someone who’d spent his whole life there, and devoted that life to unraveling the skein of mystery, mundanity, intrigue, and banality that comprise the sum of its parts, would struggle to delve more deeply than its sufficiently fascinating surface.

But I think I’ve come up with an angle. It occurred to me while chatting at the interval with a blue-haired Home Counties lady of undoubtedly long-standing Tory lineage.

As we talked I marveled at how I, an American who’d grown up in a time and place where few people ventured more than a couple hundred miles from home and were content to remain blithely indifferent to any goings-on that unfolded on foreign shores, had come to know and love England with at least as great a passion as I’d ever known for my native land.

Part of it was due to the greatly increased mobility of the working and middle classes that came about in the latter part of the 20th century, but it was equally a function of the way I came to feel at home there. My sense of humor, for example, which frequently elicited blank stares or threats of violence from Americans, actually made sense to Londoners, and their droll, ironic or completely over-the-top excursions into absurdity resonated equally well with me.

In fact, one of the few remaining characteristics that brazenly marks me out as a non-Englishman is my unrestrained enthusiasm for the place and its people: no real English person, in the unlikely event of succumbing to such a patriotic upwelling, would publicly admit to it.

Anyway, that’s more or less what the book’s about, but I’ll say no more until I’ve actually written the thing. At the moment I’m stuck in the interim phases of getting ready to continue writing it, while meanwhile catching up with this long-neglected blog.

But there’s something else on my mind as well. As some of you will know, I’ve always had a fondness for hiking, a fondness that only grew during my years in England and my many journeys around London and the South East, through the Cotswolds, and across the moors in the company of the West Country Walking Society.

If all goes well this is one of the delightfully bleak landscapes I'll be clambering over in a couple months' time.

If all goes well this is one of the delightfully bleak landscapes I’ll be clambering over in a couple months’ time.

One of the only things better than just plain walking, in my opinion, is walking in places where few if any people have walked before. Given the absence of affordable space travel, I’m forced to seek out the ever-dwindling number of such spots here on planet Earth. One of them is Greenland.

I first visited there two years ago, and heard a few locals say that once you’ve touched Greenlandic soil, you have no choice but to return again and again. If that were true you’d think the world’s biggest island would have a population considerably larger than 55,000. Be that as it may, I know I’ve been unable to stop thinking about the place. In a couple months, I’ll be going back for my second visit, and I doubt it will be my last.

Last time I spent all but a couple days in the Arctic town of Ilulissat, at sea sailing alongside the Greenlandic coast, and in the historically unlovely capital, Nuuk. This year I plan to focus on South Greenland’s “banana belt,” where temperatures can sometimes compare favorably with those of a San Francisco winter (or summer, for that matter, not that there’s all that much difference).

It’s the area where Viking explorers first settled 1,000 years ago, seduced into a false and fatal confidence by the Medieval Warm Period, only to be frozen out 400 years later by the Little Ice Age and supplanted by the Inuit Greenlanders who today comprise more than 80% of the country’s population.

Even today, with global warming rapidly shrinking the Greenland ice cap and raising sea levels, the “banana belt” effect really only means that it’s now possible to grow small trees (no, not banana trees, silly!) and a handful of root crops. Most of the greenery you’ll see consists of grass and moss, which take on a dark, brooding color from the bluish-black stone that forms the backbone of the land.

But it was sufficiently green to inspire the Vikings, early masters of the real estate scam, to name their new home Greenland in hopes of luring settlers from nearby Iceland, which actually has a milder climate, far less ice, and in summer, at least, is greener than even Ireland’s Emerald Isle.

Both Iceland and Greenland are among the most beautiful places on earth, and, while they’re the closest of neighbors, are completely different from each other topographically, geologically, and culturally. Film companies looking for the perfect location for their next extraterrestrial sci-fi flick would do very well to choose either of them, but Greenland’s beauty is of a particularly other-worldly variety, compounded—or, some might say, augmented—by the harsh, unblinking and unforgiving stolidity of its precipitous and often impassable terrain.

It called out to me the first time I laid eyes on it, during a flight from London to San Francisco more than 20 years ago, and when I finally got there, did not disappoint. I’m looking forward to some astounding hikes, as well as some long internet-free (Greenland does in fact have the internet, but it’s so heart-stoppingly expensive that it might as well not) opportunities to work on my next big writing projects.

Before that, though, I’ll hopefully be coming to at least some of your towns and bookstores to talk about Spy Rock Memories, sign some books, and give you a chance, if you’ve already read it, to tell me what you thought about it. If you know a shop—or better yet, own one—get in touch and we’ll see if we can work something out. The only event definitely scheduled so far is July 12 at Brooklyn’s Book Thug Nation, but sometime either just before or after that, I hope to see a lot of you out on the West Coast, especially in the Emerald Triangle.

Spy Rock Memories: The Book

By
Larry Livermore
Published: March 3, 2013Posted in: Blog, Spy Rock MemoriesTags: , , , , , , , , ,
Spy Rock Memories: The Book

So I guess it’s now official: the book I’ve been working on for more years than I care to remember will finally be coming out this June on Don Giovanni, and if you thought Don Giovanni was a record label, well, yeah, they are, and a very good one, but they’re now branching out into publishing.  So hopefully you’ll buy my book, or else they might start thinking that publishing books wasn’t such a good idea after all, and in these days, we don’t need people thinking things like that.

spyrockcover2reworkSome of you have been reading a preliminary version of Spy Rock Memories here on the website as it was being written.  Out of consideration for my publishers, I’ve now taken all but the first chapter down, since I want to give them at least a fighting chance of being able to sell copies of the book.  Also, although the basic format and story line remains the same, every chapter has been substantially, and in some cases completely rewritten since it first appeared here.  Chapter 1, which you can still read here on the website, is the original, not the rewritten version.

I’m especially excited about the cover art, which was done by my niece, the wonderful, amazing, luminously talented Gabrielle Bell, who, though she was born in London, grew up on Spy Rock.  The house portrayed on the cover is where I lived, and where Gabrielle often visited as a child.  As crazy, maddening and bizarre as Spy Rock life could be, there must have been something in that mountain air or water (or maybe it was just the vibes, man), because out of that remote canyon, home to only an intrepid handful of back-to-the-landers, ranchers, outcasts and misfits, came at least two certified geniuses, Gabrielle being one and Grammy-winning drummer Tre Cool being another.

There were others, too, certifiable if not certified, and as those of you who’ve read some of the previews or have had the privilege to spend time on Spy Rock yourself will know, it’s an amazing and unique place, in some of the best and worst possible ways.  Living there was easily the most formative experience of my life, and I can say without hesitation that everything I’ve done since my arrival on Spy Rock at the beginning of the 1980s has been colored, shaped, and, really, made possible by what went on in those mountains up on the back of beyond.

As I’ve heard many writers say, there comes a point with any piece of work where you just want it to be done and out before the public so you can move on to the next project, but at the same time, there’s a tendency to cling to it, to rewrite and re-think every aspect of it.  And even once it is done and on its way to the printer, it’s possible – even probable – that you’ll wake up in the middle of the night thinking, “Oh no, I totally forgot to write about ____”  Believe me, I’ve had more than a few of those moments.

I also had to give careful consideration to how much or how little information to reveal about people who were part of my story, whether as friends, neighbors, or family members, and who may not be as thrilled to be in a book as I was to write about them.  In the end, if I erred, it was on the side of caution.  So I did have to leave out some stories that would have certainly helped sell books and entertain the masses, but maybe don’t need to be in print for anyone and everyone to see.  In many cases, I don’t even give people’s names at all, which, if you’re familiar with Spy Rock culture (or the tale of the posse of pot growers who showed up on my driveway threatening to burn down my house if I kept writing about the area in my magazine), you’ll know is probably exactly how they’d like it.

Cover artist Gabrielle Bell and her brother Jethro on Spy Rock in the 1980s.

Cover artist Gabrielle Bell and her brother Jethro on Spy Rock in the 1980s.

Taking all that into account, though, I still think it’s a pretty good read.  Rolling Stone and other music-oriented media are naturally focusing on the Lookout Records and Green Day connection (it was, contrary to the Rolling Stone story, in the remote mountains of Mendocino County, not at Gilman Street, where I first met and saw Green Day), but although both those things play a significant part in the story, it’s not a music book per se.  In fact, the bulk of it focuses more on a hapless city slicker (that would be me) who bumbles his way into the wilderness without the faintest clue of how to survive there, and has to learn for the first time in his life to take care of and be responsible for himself.

I went to the mountains, as I note in the book, in search of something “real.”  There was plenty of that, to be sure, but I found a hefty dose of wildly improbable unreality as well, some of which I’m still trying to digest all these years and miles down the road.  It’s a sunny late-winter morning here in Brooklyn, somebody outside is pointlessly revving up his engine and the overly loud hum of the refrigerator and the various clicks and beeps and flashing lights of 21st century technology remind me just how far I’ve wandered from those solar-powered days where the loudest sounds on most mornings came from buzzing insects and the occasional pine cone dropping onto the roof.

Being wrapped up in writing about Spy Rock these past couple years has been like a form of time travel, enabling me to experience that life again, minus the life or sanity-threatening consequences that sometimes came with it.  It’s come in a way to haunt me, to make me desperately nostalgic for a time and a place that I can’t and probably wouldn’t want to go back to.  It’s been quite a journey, but I’m glad the time has come to move on.  I do hope you’ll read my book, because I’ve already started writing another one, and you wouldn’t want my publishers to be disappointed in me, would you?

Aaron Cometbus: Pen Pals

By
Larry Livermore
Published: February 11, 2013Posted in: Blog, Featured, MusicTags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Aaron Cometbus: Pen Pals

Home is where the heart is, at least as long as you can pay the rent.  But I always preferred a loose paraphrase of the Robert Frost definition: it’s the place where, when you go there, they have to let you in.

Discovering and defining that place has been a central theme of Aaron Cometbus’s writing for at least as long as I’ve known him, which is a couple years longer than the 25 years spanned by his latest—and possibly greatest—work, Pen Pals, aka Cometbus 55.

 That might not be how some of his longtime readers see it.  Aaron has been—occasionally to his chagrin, and largely because of a handful of pieces he wrote in the long-ago 1990s—variously pigeonholed as a dumpster-diving ragamuffin or a lonesome drifter who turns up unpredictably in one obscure town or another, hangs about at the local coffee shop and/or copy shop, then departs with a notebook full of memories and observations that may or may not turn into the next Cometbus.

cometbus55There might once have been some substance to that image; perhaps a little bit of it remains.  But as he pointed out in a 2001 interview, “I like to live places for a few months at a time.  To other people that sounds like traveling.  I understand that.  But when I live places, I live there.”

I’ll admit to once having been one of those “other people.”  During my years in Berkeley, the city where Aaron grew up, and with which he’s still associated in many people’s minds, I used to think of him like the tide, rolling out of town one season, rolling back a season or three later.  At the time many of us were still in love with Berkeley and the East Bay, still saw it as the center of the punk rock universe.  It was hard to picture where else Aaron might be going or why.

 I was shocked when, around the time of the first—only—Crimpshrine tour, Aaron confided in me that he’d long dreamed of getting out of Berkeley, and had merely been waiting for the opportunity to do so.  In those heady days, when Gilman Street was new and the East Bay “scene” and “sound” were still taking shape—our little community felt like the ultimate destination.  Why would someone who’d been lucky enough to be born there be so eager to leave?

 In light of all that’s happened since—I left Berkeley long ago, too, and despite many happy memories, have no desire to go back—I wonder if Aaron was, even in 1988, consciously or unconsciously, beginning his search for the place where he truly belonged.

 People in thrall to the old Cometbus image sometimes express surprise that Aaron even lives in a house, let alone calls somewhere home.  But as far back as Double Duce, the 1997 issue of Cometbus that became his first novel, or in his chronicles of the House-O-Toast years before that, he was already exploring what it meant to live in community with others, and puzzling over how and why it never quite seemed to work out.

 As Pen Pals begins, Aaron—or somebody very much like him; he’s always refused to say where his characters stand on the continuum between fiction and memoir—he’s hanging out in downtown Berkeley, pondering those same sorts of questions on a physical as well as a metaphysical plane.

He’s frustrated that he and his friends, even those who’ve lived there all their lives, can’t find their way into Berkeley society.  He feels like part of an orphan generation, cut off, ignored, all but abandoned by the aging hippies, New Leftists and baby boomers who appear to have put the town on permanent lockdown for their own exclusive use.

 He’s joined by a young woman who laughs at his concerns, mocks his ever-widening but largely hopeless quest to make contact with older writers, philosophers and agitators, and with whom he’s about to form a lifelong relationship that, as the title suggests, will be played out more in pen and ink than flesh and blood.

Many years later he awakens, almost as from a dream, on the other side of the country, on another street corner, realizing with tentative satisfaction that he’s found the purpose—part of it anyway—and perhaps the place he’d been seeking.  He’s made it from callow youth to middle age without having to surrender to the compromises he once feared, with hopes and values largely intact, and the tenuous outlines of a meaningful future beginning to take shape.

It’s a gentle, almost poetic journey that, because of its loping, discursive pace and its deceptively dyspeptic asides, hits all the harder when the reader discovers—just as Aaron himself does—where this has been going all along.  The point is not —never has been—what town or what neighborhood he ends up living in, nor what job or jobs he ends up doing.  What counts is the connections he learns to make, often through painful trial and error, with those who have come before and will come after him, and, ultimately, with society, community and life itself.

 I’ve been reading Cometbus since I found a copy of it on San Francisco’s 43 Masonic bus in 1985, a year before I would meet Aaron in person, and this stuff is truly inspiring.  I say that as someone who’s long been an avid supporter of his work, but who’s also at times been an unnecessarily harsh critic.

Like many well-intentioned but misguided fans, I’ve wasted my breath urging him to adapt to modern times, maybe get a web presence or do an e-book, make the changes that would ensure his writing gets out to the millions rather than the thousands who enjoy it today.

And maybe someday that will happen.  It could be that one of the mega-publishers or Hollywood movie studios will come knocking and Aaron will finally relent and allow them to make him a household name.  It’s not as though he’s a Luddite.  It’s been years, for example, since he gave up hand lettering his books and magazines in favor of computerized typesetting.  But what’s essential to know about Aaron Cometbus is that anything he does, any changes he makes, will happen in his own time and on his own terms.

It’s a hell of a way to do business, you might think, and in light of the many trivial and insignificant writers who’ve rocketed to fame and fortune while Aaron languished in relative obscurity, you might have a point.  But what some might call stubbornness or a refusal to engage with the modern world, others would see as a deeply principled integrity.  It’s the same integrity, in fact, that has informed, and resided at the heart of all his work.  What holds him back from achieving the full recognition he deserves might be and probably is the same thing that makes him worthy of that recognition.

Graphic © Gabrielle Bell, from The Voyeurs, published 201 by Uncivilized Books, PO Box 6534, Minneapolis MN 55406

Graphic © Gabrielle Bell, from The Voyeurs, published 2012 by Uncivilized Books, PO Box 6534, Minneapolis MN 55406

Meanwhile, seemingly unaffected by any quest for literary glory, Aaron carries on as if the internet never happened, schlepping bags and boxes full of magazines to post offices and shops in this town and others, most often by bike, bus, or subway—the legendary traveler never learned to drive—and bit by bit, issue by issue, year after year, his thoughts and experiences weave their way into those of his readers, and into the fabric of their lives.

You have to wonder whether Aaron sees something of himself in the quixotic crusaders who kept pumping forth their denunciations of capitalism and conformity long after everyone appeared to have stopped listening.  Their single-pointed devotion to what most people dismissed as a lost cause intrigued Aaron enough to set him on what has turned out to be his own lifetime path.

Besides, Aaron—his literary alter ego, anyway—has long reveled in the futility of lost causes.  That tendency will probably never be wholly extirpated—it’s too essential to both his persona and style—but it’s becoming less noticeable as he acquires a new, more confident and compassionate voice in middle life.

This is true of Pen Pals; it was similarly in evidence in 2011’s In China With Green Day.  In lesser hands that story could have devolved into a sensationalized and highly commercial behind-the-scenes look at one of the world’s biggest rock bands.  Instead it turned into a low-key, occasionally melancholy but ultimately warm-hearted meditation on the unexpected twists and bizarre turns of long-term friendship.

It’s tempting at times to see Aaron as the lonely protagonist of the John K. Samson-penned Weakerthans song, “Pamphleteer,” pouring out his heart “to the beat of the Gestetner.”  But it’s no longer true, if it ever was.  His is a voice that should be heard, is being heard, and will be heard by many more.  His insistence on doing things the hard way may delay that outcome, but can’t forestall it forever.  He’s one of the best and most important writers of his generation.  Anybody who hasn’t yet figured that out needs to wise up to the fact.

Camus vs. Harry Potter

By
Larry Livermore
Published: February 7, 2013Posted in: Blog, FeaturedTags: , , , , , , , ,
Camus vs. Harry Potter

Like many aspiring members of New York’s chattering class (I’ve got the chattering down; it’s the class I still struggle with), I’m a supporter of WNYC, the local public radio station, and as a membership perk, I also receive an annual subscription to that apotheosis of left-liberal literary journalism, The New Yorker.  There was a time, I’ll admit, when I found The New Yorker a bit much to take.  Too dense, perhaps, a little full of itself?  Or, perhaps I lacked the depth or patience to appreciate it?

Whatever the reason, my thinking has changed, perhaps as a result of living in New York, more likely from getting older, and I have become one of those people I used to taunt and skewer for their pretentiousness, a devoted, dedicated, cover-t0-cover reader.

When I have time, that is.  I’m that unlikely individual who often complains that his subway rides are too short, because it’s on the subway that I do most of my reading.  Apart from an occasional one-page Shouts And Murmurs or an item from Talk Of The Town, it’s a rare New Yorker feature that can be consumed between Williamsburg and Manhattan, even if the train is late in arriving and I’m riding all the way to 8th Avenue.

The unfortunate result is that I always have a stack of two, three, sometimes five or even ten New Yorkers sitting on the kitchen table waiting for me to do some catch-up reading.  At points it gets ridiculous: it was snowing heavily the day I finished the issue with the midsummer beach-themed cover, and we were homing in on Valentine’s Day when I tackled October’s coverage of the Presidential election.

Few publications had so vociferously and persistently ridiculed and vilified Mitt Romney; since I believed this to be a fundamental duty of any reputable media outlet, I wasn’t about to miss anything The New Yorker had written about him.  I was chagrined to find a thoughtful and insightful Nicholas Lemann piece about the now all but forgotten candidate that had me on the verge of thinking maybe Romney wasn’t so bad after all.  I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t read it before voting, because I get a lot more enjoyment out of casting my ballot when it’s unambiguous.

Then I moved on to a profile of J.K. Rowling, an author I admire greatly because, well, all right, because I enjoyed the Harry Potter series greatly, but also because of her success in turning a generation of children into voracious readers when, in the age of ubiquitous electronic media, you wouldn’t have thought that possible.  And the more I read about her, the more I liked her and the more I enjoyed the article.

Until, that is, I ran into this clunker, this sour note, this sad fart of an ill-considered opinion from one Alan Taylor, editor of the Scottish Review of Books.  Taylor ”despaired of Rowling’s ‘tin ear’ and said of her readers, ‘They were giving their childhood to this woman! They were starting at seven, and by the time they were sixteen they were still reading bloody Harry Potter—sixteen-year-olds, wearing wizard outfits, who should have been shagging behind the bike shed and smoking marijuana and reading Camus.’”

What a truly ugly—and idiotic—statement.  I hadn’t heard of this Taylor fellow before, so I looked him up.  Seems to be about my age, seems to be embittered that life has been or is about to begin passing him by, and can’t pass up an opportunity to try to impose his time-tattered, threadbare values on a generation younger, smarter and better-looking than his own.

Let’s be honest: any of us who’ve reached a certain age has also acquired certain ideas, ones we’re sure would greatly improve the quality of, well, practically everything, if only the nincompoops in charge could be compelled to put them into effect.

Foremost among such ideas tend to be those beginning with “When I was your age” and consisting almost entirely of prescriptions for how today’s young people could more profitably and pleasurably comport themselves.  Whether it’s urging them to study hard and pick a good university, or to acquire a couple of STDs and a drug habit before considering themselves “done” with high school, it’s inevitably reads like the sour-grapes wisdom of people who didn’t get to do everything they wanted when they were young, and so are now demanding that the next generation carry on where they left off.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone my age, but in my defense, I’m at least conscious of the tendency, and try to rein it in.  Not so this Taylor character, who, not content with rubbishing the joy brought to literally hundreds of millions of readers by the Harry Potter series, suggests that that joy should be replaced by the tedious clichés of his own pseudo-rebellious youth.

Was there once something to be said for “shagging behind the bike shed, smoking marijuana and reading Camus”?  No doubt.  After all, Taylor (and I) grew up in a time when, at least for a while, there wasn’t a lot else going on.

But we live in a bolder, brighter world today, one that presents infinitely more options to young people, whether they be of a rebellious bent or (and I think this is what really gets to curmudgeonly aging baby boomers like Taylor) they’re actually rather happy with their friends, families, schools and life prospects.  Obviously shagging is never going out of style, but the furtive and often disappointing and destructive liaisons behind Taylor’s beloved bike sheds are as often as not being replaced by open and loving relationships that don’t have to be hidden away or hastily conducted.

Marijuana?  Well, I tried it.  In abundance, as did most people I knew.  Some of us managed to get through it all right, even after we were sure we’d seen God and been assigned a special mission that just happened to be incomprensible to parents, teachers, authority figures and, truth be told, ourselves.  Many of us didn’t do so well: a great number of damaged individuals, incapable of carrying a coherent thought from one end of a sentence to the other, can be seen picking their way disconsolately through the garbage cans—figuratively or literally—of Main Street America.

And Camus?  Come on, it’s the 21st century.  Yes, it seemed very daring and radical back in the day to slog through a bunch of French gobbledygook in hopes of appearing “intellectual,” but seriously, who needs that crap today?

Certainly not kids who enjoy their lives and don’t confuse angst with authenticity.  Sure, kids will always find ways to screw up as well as ways to pursue ecstasy (I don’t mean the drug, though I suppose for some it will work that way) and enlightenment.  But let’s let them find their own ways, and stop trying to shoehorn them into the corny scenarios just because they seemed exciting to us half a century ago.

And for the record: I read Harry Potter in my 50s, Camus in my 40s.  I learned far, far more from Harry Potter.

Calling Out The Merchants Of Death

By
Larry Livermore
Published: December 20, 2012Posted in: Blog, FeaturedTags:
Calling Out The Merchants Of Death

There comes a time when insanity and injustice becomes so rampant that it reeks to high heaven.  To remain silent in the face of it is to become complicit.

Such is the case with the collective meltdown of the American psyche evidenced by the latest mass shooting(s) (I hesitate even to name a specific one because chances are that by the time I post this, there will have been another one – or two, or three).

We Americans as a whole tend to be be more tolerant of differences than we’re given credit for, managing to (for the most part) coexist peacefully with neighbors holding diametrically opposed religious, political or social views.  Most of the time, this is something to take pride in, something that helps define the unique qualities of what it is to be American.

But this 21st century version of the old hippie “You do your thing and I’ll do mine” ethos, while fundamentally sound, has its limitations.  At some point it stops being a blessing and turns into the curse now besetting out nation: whether through benign tolerance or malign neglect, we have abdicated our moral responsibility and allowed—indeed, virtually encouraged—evil to flourish.

When we were a frontier nation, when large numbers of our people hunted for survival and lived in far-flung homesteads where they could not always count on the government to protect them against animal or human interlopers, then of course it made sense to have a relatively relaxed attitude toward gun ownership.  Today, with 82% of our population living in cities or suburbs, only a maniac seriously believes that unlimited access to high-powered weaponry and ammunition is either desirable or necessary.

Scratch that: there are other interest groups who remain avid supporters of the firearms industry: the merchants who share in the profits, which easily reach into the several billions, the lobbyists—like the National Rifle Association’s chief liar-for-hire Wayne LaPierre, who pulls down in the neighborhood of a million bucks a year for his Goebbels-like exculpations of mass murder, and the bought-and-sold politicians who, in Congress and the Supreme Court, have successfully resisted even the most moderate adjustments to our wildly inadequate gun laws, and have gone even further to weaken our existing ones.

The time has come to stop wringing our hands and saying “Isn’t it awful?” on the near-weekly occasions when innocent and broken young bodies are once more hauled out en masse to the charnel house.  These savage killings are not something that just “happens,” the way tornadoes do in Kansas or hurricanes in Florida.  They are not simply a matter of bad luck or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

No, they are a wholly predictable and more or less inevitable outcome of policies and actions embarked upon, whether innocently or not so, by our neighbors and maybe even our friends, people who live and work in our communities, who we may see at church or at the ball game or even at a rally for our favorite political candidate.  They may from all appearances be perfectly nice, genial people, helpful, honest, the salt of the earth, but it’s time to stop mincing words: every time children (or people of any age) die in another senseless shooting, these “nice” folks have hands that are dripping with blood.

What’s more all-American than Walmart, for example?  They have a widespread reputation for low prices, family values (they won’t even sell records containing “dirty” words), but they will sell you weapons and ammo capable of murdering everyone on your street in about 30 seconds.

What about the “good old boys” of the NRA?  Many of them are very simply guys (or ladies) who like to hunt, and share an interest in the firearms necessary for hunting, and all the best to them.  But when they (and of course it’s nowhere near all of them) almost violently oppose ANY restrictions on how, where, when and why guns can be sold, then they are saying, in effect, “Yeah, tough luck about all the dead six-year-olds, but my ‘freedom’ is more important.”

Your “freedom” to do exactly what?  Almost nobody is seriously proposing that guns be banned or greatly curtailed.  The proposed laws that induce apoplectic fits in the NRA honchos are typically nothing more radical than the notion that someone should have to identify himself when buying a weapon, to pass a background check, to be responsible for the safekeeping of the weapons they already own.  These do not seem like radical infringements on anyone’s freedom.  At least not when compared with a mother’s or father’s freedom to cherish a living child rather than a mangled corpse.

Yes, these are harsh words, but they need to be spoken: you, Wayne LaPierre, you, stockholders and executives and, yes, even customers of vast weapons emporiums like Walmart, have blood on your hands.  Granted, no single action that we take as individuals or even as a society can solve all problems or resolve all injustices, but that does not mean we shouldn’t do what we can, however little or much that should be.

So if you’re an NRA member and you don’t support the mass murder of small children, let the NRA know you’re not paying any further dues until they moderate their stance and begin working with the government to develop sane laws that protect gun ownership but don’t put the rest of the society at risk to do so.  If you’re a Walmart shopper, let them know they won’t be seeing any more of your business until they stop trafficking in murder.

What would a reasonable gun policy look like?  And how do we avoid getting bogged down for years in Talmudic squabbles over what constitutes an “assault” rifle (ghoulish lobbyists and politicians relish these definitional fights because they can spin them into millions of dollars of legal fees and endless delays and obstructions, during which time hundreds or thousands more will die waiting for justice to be served)?

Here’s some basics:

1. All guns, and I mean ALL guns will have to be registered, with the owner having identified him or herself, passed a background check, and furnished the regulating agency with the address at which the weapon is being kept.  The weapon can not be sold or transferred to anyone else without the same procedures being followed.

2. As long as a weapon is registered in your name, YOU are fully responsible for any damage it does.  If you leave it lying around the house and one of your kids or a neighbor’s kid gets hold of it and kills himself or someone else, YOU’RE going to jail.  This also means, obviously, that you keep it under lock and key AT ALL TIMES when you’re not using it.

3. With that in mind, anyone owning any kind of firearm needs to have a liability insurance policy safeguarding against damage done by that gun—the same as you presumably have on your car, which is probably less likely to end up seriously injuring or killing someone.  We’re probably talking about a million dollars coverage here, which is not unusual for an auto insurance policy.  What price would you put on another human life, and do you have enough in the bank to pay it?

4.  You can buy all the ammunition you want, but you’ve got to show ID and your gun registration, and fill out a form showing where the ammo will be kept (if not on the same premises as your gun(s).  Also, the price of ammo should be dramatically increased, partly to cover the administrative costs of this program, but also because any “normal” use of weapons (whether hunting, target shooting or self-defense) does not require military-size caches of bullets or shells.  Even a hunter who’s a really poor shot is not going to use more than a few dozen bullets (and if he does, maybe the cost of ammo will inspire him to take some lessons and become a better shot).

5.  Oh yeah, speaking of courses, any gun owner will have to pass a basic competency exam on the use and care of firearms, not unlike what anyone is expected to undergo before driving an automobile.

There are other things that can be done—we can certainly have that debate about how large an ammo clip is “necessary” before a defensive weapon turns into an offensive one, but these five proposals, if enacted, would go a long way toward bringing America into the 21st century and at least beginning to put an end to our national madness.  You’ll notice that none of them, in any way, interferes with an individual’s right to hunt, target shoot, or keep a weapon in his or her home for self-defense.

If you still protest that there is something un-American about requiring people to be responsible and accountable for their weapons, then I respectfully submit that it may in fact be you who is un-American.  “Freedom” is only one half of the equation that makes America what it is, and it was never meant to be utterly untrammeled freedom, freedom that concerns itself only with our own immediate desires and remains oblivious to the needs and desires of others.

A look at our history—or at common sense—tells us that we cannot enjoy freedom in a vacuum, and that even if you could, it would not be the sort of freedom any sane person would relish.  In the wake of the Connecticut school tragedy, I have literally heard people say that the deaths of 20 small children, while unfortunate, was a “relatively small” price to pay for what they considered the “freedom” of unlimited and unregulated gun ownership.  Such an notion literally sickens me, and I think—in fact am quite sure—that a large majority of Americans feels the same way.  It’s time that make ourselves heard, time that we demand an end to this senseless and shameful slaughter.

The Moral Case For Not Voting

By
Larry Livermore
Published: November 5, 2012Posted in: Blog, FeaturedTags: , , , , , , , ,
The Moral Case For Not Voting

Twice in my adult life I chose not to vote in a general election, and on a third occasion, I almost didn’t vote, only doing so with great reluctance at the last minute.

Each time my reason for not voting (or, in the latter case, almost not voting), was the same: I had become convinced that both candidates were bad, or that there was not sufficient difference between them to make it worth my while to take a side.

And each time I was completely, terribly wrong.  In 1968 I refused to vote for Hubert Humphrey; the winner, Richard Nixon, presided over a pointless extension of the Vietnam War that cost 28,000 American lives and probably hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian lives.  He also mired the White House in such a cesspool of corruption and chicanery that the reputation of America’s system of government has still not fully recovered.

The next time I chose not to vote was when Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter.  As a longtime California resident, I knew all the havoc that Reagan had wreaked on that state, knew how his sunny smile masked a callous indifference to human rights and liberties and a dogged determination to dismantle the New Deal, that bit of social engineering cobbled together as a response to the Great Depression that transformed and bettered the lives of millions of Americans.

But I just didn’t like Jimmy Carter, and in my stubbornness and youthful certitude, refused to consider that Reagan might be (as he proved to be) infinitely worse.

In the year 2000, I felt similarly about Al Gore, only dragging myself to the polls at the last minute, with extreme reluctance, because even in my muddle-headed state at the time, I had an inkling that George Bush might spell serious trouble.

We know how that turned out.  Bush became the worst president of the modern era, possibly the worst ever.  It was only because the government he inherited was in relatively good shape, the budget balanced, the economy thriving, that the damage he inflicted was not even worse.

But Bush’s wildly incompetent mismanagement and malfeasance—on a scale, I think history buffs would agree—comparable to that of the latter-day Roman emperors—took our country close to the brink of collapse.  And because of the globally interconnected age we live in, it would have taken a large part of the world with it.

We’re not out of the woods yet, not by a long shot.  In fact, even after the gradual stabilization that has taken place during the past four years, I still wouldn’t rate our chances of avoiding an economic and societal meltdown at much better than 50-50.  Bush’s bankrupting the national treasury to pay for giant tax cuts for millionaires and two insanely expensive and pointless wars was, again, on a par with the follies the sealed the fate of ancient Rome.

And that is precisely why this year’s election is so vital.  In a normal year, in a year when our finances and our social structure were on a sound footing, we could afford four or maybe even eight years of a cynical, mercenary buffoon like Mitt Romney.  We’ve had presidents like him before—Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover come to mind—and survived.

But our position is far more precarious now, very likely as precarious as it’s ever been.  Romney’s plan to apply the Bain Capital model to government—ruthless downsizing and outsourcing, looting the national pension system (aka Social Security and Medicare), and skimming off huge profits for a handful of the best-connected—would be stupid and brutal at any time, but in an economy as fragile as ours, it would be fatal.

I can’t say that strongly enough: if Mitt Romney gets his hands on our government, I think it’s unlikely that our system as we’ve known it will survive.  It’s not just political rhetoric to point out that his so-called economic plan is a poisonous fantasy; any rational economist will acknowledge that it is mathematically impossible to accomplish his goals without massively impoverishing the working and middle classes and/or massively expanding an already almost unmanageable debt.

What does this mean for the average American?  Very possibly a total wipe-out.  It’s not just a matter of losing your health insurance—Romney has already promised millions of you will do that—or getting stuck with lower pay and poorer working conditions.

I’m talking about total collapse, where your money—unless, of course, you were smart enough to stash a few hundred million in offshore accounts—could become literally worthless, where a government stripped of its resources and income by the avarice of Romney and their ilk will no longer be able to provide you with the most fundamental of services.

Yes, I know that sound dramatic and alarmist, and I hope and pray that I’m wrong.  But I’ve been following and studying politics and economics and history on at least an avocational level for some 50 years now.  I’m no professor, no certified expert, but I can hold my own on these subjects, and everything I’ve learned leads me to believe that yes, the situation is indeed that dire.

I’m voting for Barack Obama.  In fact, I already have, and I urge every single American who cares at all about the future of this country and this planet to do the same.  You don’t have to agree with everything he says or does—I certainly don’t—and you don’t even have to like the guy.  But it’s the least you can do, the bare minimum, to help save our country from falling into the hands of people who, whether from greed, megalomania, or sheer, bloody ignorance, might very well destroy it.

Now there are those of you—some of you are even my good friends—who will cling to nostrums like “A pox on both their houses” or “No matter who you vote for, the government wins.”  I say to you, in the strongest possible terms, please consider that it may be time, at least for now, to put aside that kind of thinking.

In 1942, George Orwell wrote an essay condemning British pacifists who refused to participate in the war effort to defend Britain against a Nazi invasion.  He said, in no uncertain words, that under the conditions existing at that time, pacifism was “objectively pro-Fascist.”  You could not remain aloof from the struggle, he argued, as long as there was no realistic option to either a British or a Nazi triumph.

Similarly you can not remain aloof from the present struggle to prevent the devastation that Mitt Romney and his backers would unleash on this country.  You can trumpet your third parties or your principled abstinence from electoral politics as some sort of moral stance, but in fact—and this is, as Orwell put it, “elementary common sense”—you are voting for Mitt Romney just as effectively as any Tea Party fanatic or theocracy-fancying fundamentalist.

You can’t wriggle out of this one.  The Greens aren’t going to win this election.  Nor are the Libertarians, nor a coalition of anarcho-syndicalist communes.  Beginning November 7, this country will either be in the hands of fanatics, criminals and crazy people, or it will remain in the hands of those who have demonstrated at least some degree of sanity and some degree of responsibility to the people who elected them.

So what is the moral case for not voting?  This year, there is none.  Not just for yourselves, but for your children, for the future of this flawed but still inspiring experiment in democracy, please, I beg of you, drag yourself to the polls.  Regardless of whether you do so with a song in your heart or with one hand firmly holding your nose, it’s the least you can do.  I believe—as passionately as I’ve ever believed anything—that this is one time when failing to act is a luxury none of us can afford.

Waving, Not Drowning

By
Larry Livermore
Published: November 4, 2012Posted in: Blog, FeaturedTags: , , , , , , ,
Waving, Not Drowning

When I first started considering moving to the East Coast of America, the weather was  certainly something I considered.  I was mainly concerned whether, after 40 years spent in California and England, I was ready to face the rigors of a full-on Northern Hemisphere winter.  I could still remember that wretched February day in February 1967, when I struggled across the Diag in Ann Arbor into the teeth of an Arctic gale, cursing every step of the way.

In the spirit of Scarlett O’Hara at the end of Gone With The Wind, I declared then and there, with as firm a resolve as I’d ever applied to anything in my then relatively young life, that I would never, ever be that cold again.  And with a few notable exceptions, like getting stranded in blizzards atop Spy Rock, I pretty much lived up to that ambition.

But times change, and so did I.  Besides, New York City, surrounded by the moderating influence of the sea, doesn’t get as cold as Detroit, and the worst part of its winters is maybe a month shorter.  Now that I’ve spent six years there, I have to admit it’s really not bad.  I’ve even come to appreciate all four of the seasons in a way I never imagined possible.

One factor I didn’t give a lot of thought to, though, was hurricanes.  I was familiar enough with history and climatology to know that they occasionally strike New York, but given that the last major one was in 1938, I didn’t feel I had to spend a lot of time scanning the horizon for the next one.

There’s a part of me, a very childish part, obviously, that revels in disaster, that secretly hopes the tornado or the hurricane or the blizzard will come our way, just for the excitement.  It’s shameful to admit, especially when you consider that this “excitement” often comes at the cost of lives lost or drastically upended, and I guess what I really hope for is that I’ll get to experience the drama without any damage to myself or others.

And, I’ve found, when the weather map shows that disaster is actually headed my way, I quickly change my tune, as I did last year when it briefly looked like Hurricane Irene might make a direct hit on Brooklyn.  I barricaded myself in my house, filled the requisite bottles, pans and bathtub with fresh water, and put in a stock of candles and canned food.

When I woke the following morning with the power still on, my house still intact, and little harm done to my block apart from a potted palm blown over across the street, I was greatly relieved, but also slightly disappointed.  I mean, it could have been a little worse without really hurting anyone, couldn’t it?

Maybe I’m finally growing up a little, because this year I didn’t for a minute hope that Hurricane Sandy would come our way.  In fact, I actively cheered for it to turn out to sea as northbound hurricanes normally do.  Irene had provided enough of a scare, and a graphic illustration of how much suffering even a hurricane downgraded to a tropical storm can cause, as illustrated by the havoc wreaked on the people of New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont.

Besides—and wouldn’t you know I had a selfish motive as well—I was hoping to get out of town to attend the annual convention of the Guang Ping Yang T’ai Chi Association and to visit my mom in California.  In the end, I made the decision, call it cowardly or call it prudent, to beat it out of town just ahead of Sandy.  I caught one of the last NJ Transit trains out of Penn Station and one of the last planes out of Newark, and followed the unfolding disaster mostly via Twitter.

On board the California Zephyr en route to the Sierra Nevada.

Phone service was patchy to nonexistent, so I couldn’t check in with friends I’d left behind, and though they’re now all accounted for, quite a few are still without power or heat, and some are struggling to deal with major damage to their homes or workplaces.  Seeing the ruins of places like the Rockaways, Long Beach, Asbury Park, and the eastern shore of Staten Island, where only months ago I was strolling in the sunshine, is absolutely heartbreaking.

At the GPYTCA conference.

So yeah, I feel guilty for not being there, guilty that my own neighborhood was once again spared any significant problems, and most guilty that I’m not there to join the thousands of New Yorkers who are heroically pitching in to help the afflicted and clean up the wreckage.

It’s also kind of embarrassing to have to tell the many people who combined birthday wishes (I spent my b-day making my escape from New York) with anxious inquiries about my well-being that I’ve been safely holed up in the Sierra Nevada doing t’ai chi and basking in the (admittedly slightly chilly) California sunshine.

Speaking of embarrassing, it’s also a little awkward having to explain to people why they haven’t seen an update to my blog in, oh, I don’t know, half a year or so.  I’ll try to explain as best as I can what I’ve been up to, but I still can’t help feeling I’ve fallen down on the job, even if it’s a job I don’t get paid for except by the occasional “well done” or “Livermore, you’re an idiot.”

This past year has been mostly consumed by two projects that you may or may not have heard about.  The first, which should have been done long ago, but still isn’t quite, is preparing the manuscript of Spy Rock Memories for publication.  I’m working with a real solid editor, and the process has been thoroughly enjoyable, but also painfully slow, in large part because I decided that whole sections of the book needed to be completely rewritten.

Where I spent the hurricane.

But I’m through with the hardest part (I hope), and right now we’re just giving the text a final going-over.  With any luck, the book should be out next spring, only a year late.  Which also leaves me a year behind on starting my next book, the subject of which will have to remain secret for now, but which I’m very excited about.

Oh, and among the other details to be worked out: a decision on whether to change the title.  I’d be happy to hear from any of my readers on this question: do you think it should be Spy Rock Memories or Spy Rock Road?

My other project was a compilation record that Billie Joe Armstrong asked me to put together for his Adeline Records label.  Billie’s often expressed an interest in the pop punk and punk rock bands I’ve told him about, especially those who’ve been part of the scene centered around the annual Insubordination Fest and the infamous Pop Punk Message Board.

I hadn’t planned to get back into the record business, and probably won’t on any kind of permanent basis, but it was fun to do it once.  Although it was time-consuming, it turned out to be surprisingly easy and enjoyable.  Either bands these days are more together and dependable, or I’ve matured and learned a more about how to work with people.  Most likely a bit of both.

The Thing That Ate Larry Livermore, artwork by Patrick Hynes.

Even more enjoyable was the chance to work with Patrick Hynes again.  Patrick, as many of you will know, was one of my partners in Lookout Records, and was responsible for some of the iconic art by which people remember Lookout’s heyday.  I got him to reprise a 1991 Lookout magazine cover and update it for the 2010s; in tribute to The Thing That Ate Floyd, the 1988 compilation that David Hayes and I assembled, the new record was called The Thing That Ate Larry Livermore.

Nine months of work culminated with a series of record release parties in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn, and then, after being constantly immersed in overseeing every aspect of production, everything went eerily quiet.  The reviews were great, the music was great, the shows were packed and amazing, and then the record slipped off into the ether.  I’d like to think it will go on to be a classic—many of the bands contributed what I consider among their best songs ever, and all the songs were original and exclusive to the comp—but who knows these days?  The record business, while still exciting and rewarding in its way, is nothing like it used to be, for better or worse.

Which reminds me, I still have a few copies of both the record and the CD, as well as some t-shirts featuring the Patrick Hynes artwork.  I’ve been meaning to set up a web store to offer them to the public, but that’s just one more thing that’s gone by the board during these months of staying indoors writing and editing and producing.

I missed most of the summer and, with the cold weather starting to settle in now, most of the fall as well.  No doubt it will all pay off in the end, though in what form, it remains to be seen.  I’m at a stage in life where work seems to have become more important than it ever was before—though given my long career of procrastination and job-dodging, that wouldn’t be hard—and sometimes that makes me very tired.

But I console myself with the thought that I spent much of my earlier life goofing off, and that I should have expected the work would catch up with me sooner or later.  Besides, I always thought it was kind of backward to expect young people to work like dogs to save up enough so they could retire at an age when they no longer had the energy or ability to do many of the things they most wanted to.  So who knows, maybe I blundered into doing it the right way after all?

Year Without A Winter

By
Larry Livermore
Published: March 19, 2012Posted in: Blog, Featured, MusicTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Year Without A Winter

If you’d known me as a boy, you could be forgiven for never knowing quite what what to expect of me.  I had no idea either.

If you saw me hanging around the street corner with my gang, you might figure me for a moronic, mindless thug; apart from the fact that I was too scrawny and weak to do any real damage without some genuinely tough guys to back me up, you wouldn’t have been far from the truth.  Look a little deeper, though, and you would have also discovered a shy, sensitive geek who could sing every lyric from Carousel or My Fair Lady and conjugate Latin verbs till the cows came home.

I discovered this ability to pivot abruptly between (among?) personas when, barely 10 years old, I founded my neighborhood’s first street gang, the fearsomely named Night Raiders.  I don’t know where I got the idea; this was years before West Side Story imbued me with the desire to go pirouetting off fire escapes and stabbing people in back alleys.  But I managed to enlist every 8 through 10 year-old on the block, with the exception of my best friend Rob, who, older and wiser (11 going on 12), warned me I might be biting off something I wouldn’t want to chew.  He ended up becoming a priest, if that tells you anything.

The Night Raiders rampaged up and down Carter Street for the better part of a week before the other boys’ parents got wind of it and banned them from playing with me.  Upon discovering that being the leader of a one-man gang was less than thrilling, I converted the Night Raiders into the more respectable-sounding Meteorology Club, which got the neighborhood fatwa against me lifted, but bored the hell out of the boys, most of whom couldn’t pronounce “meteorology,” let alone tell you what it meant.

Sitting around my basement studying the nuances of weather systems and cloud patterns couldn’t compete with the heady excitement of tearing laundry off clotheslines and letting air out of people’s tires.  The Meteorology Club struggled from the start, and once again I was reduced to a one-man operation.  I mention this not only to illustrate how my sociopathic tendencies were, from the beginning, interlaced with nerdly ones, but also to explain the origins of my curious obsession with weather.

If it weren’t for that obsession, I might never have heard about The Year Without A Summer, but in fact I am unnervingly familiar with it.  If you missed out on it yourself, it happened in 1816, when volcanic eruptions and other uncertain factors subjected much of the Northern Hemisphere to dramatic climate fluctuations that included midsummer frosts and snowfalls.  Crops failed, and considerable suffering, illness and death ensued.

Most of us – especially if we’ve ever lived in England – have seen summers of such dubious quality that they might as well be termed nonexistent, but the harm done seldom extended beyond disappointing beach holidays and a vague, overarching angst and resentment.  But this year the situation has been the opposite.  With the official start of spring less than a week away, we’re on the verge of having passed through The Year Without A Winter.

Here in New York we had a freak snowstorm at Halloween when it was effectively still late summer, with trees in full leaf.  Apart from a minor, very short-lived snowfall in December, that was it.  For the rest of the “winter” temperature seldom fell below freezing.  Even in January there were times when no more than a light jacket or sweater was needed, and February and March have already seen several t-shirt and shorts days.  Daffodils and cherry blossoms were more than a month ahead of schedule, and if the current weather keeps up – which is what’s being predicted – we should see most of the city’s trees in leaf before April.

These tulips were actually blooming in July in Iceland (you think our seasons are screwed up?), but we'll be seeing similar sights in a matter of weeks here in New York if this weather carries on like it has.

As much as I enjoy spring and summer, and as little as I savor the ice, snow and cold of winter, it’s disturbing.  Not just because it feels unnatural – a number of locals, bearing in mind the so-called Mayan prophecy, have taken to calling it “end of days weather” – but because it’s disruptive to the seasonal rhythm of work and hibernation.

A few years ago Aaron Cometbus and I were meandering around Carroll Gardens in early April as I enthused about the oncoming spring.  Aaron demurred.  ”It’s too soon,” he declared.  ”You can’t really enjoy spring and summer until you’ve had enough time hiding out indoors to get your winter work done.”  Being a fan neither of winter nor work, I argued vehemently against this viewpoint, but I’ve since come around to his way of thinking.

So how do you get your “winter work” done when there’s little or no winter at all?  I’ve got a ton of indoor things in front of me: the final editing of Spy Rock Memories is already months behind schedule, and tying up the bits and pieces of The Thing That Ate Larry Livermore which, thankfully, is on schedule, but still demands considerable attention.  Both invigorating tasks, to be sure, but hard to keep your mind on when it’s sunny and 70 degrees outside in the first week of March.  In a normal year, it might make sense to drop everything and run outdoors to take advantage of the day on the grounds that it might be weeks or months before there’s another one like it.  But this year has seen day after day of stunning weather, leading to the temptation to put off all work until, oh, next December, maybe.

Not that I need excuses.  I’ve never had difficulty finding those, come rain, shine or foreshadowings of the apocalypse.  Putting things off to the last possible minute seems to be intrinsic to the human condition, or at least my human condition. For years – all my life, really – I’ve wondered why I do this, especially when the end result is so often a piece of work I’m less than fully satisfied with, and which I tell myself would have been so much better “if only I’d had more time.”

In 95% of those cases, I did have more time, sometimes tons of it, but chose instead to stare out the window, peruse internet message boards, or catch up on Law And Order reruns.  None of which I really enjoyed because I was too conscious of the what I needed – and, in my heart, wanted – to be doing instead.

I’ve read and heard many explanations for why I operate like this, but the one that makes the most sense is fear.  Yes, there’s the perhaps more obvious idea – often suggested to me by parents, teachers and bosses – that I was just plain lazy, but I think laziness is just shorthand for procrastination, and that both of them are ways of avoiding coming to grips with our fear of failure – or, if you want to get all woo-woo about it, fear of success.

As long as a task remains uncompleted, it can’t be judged a failure or success.  In fact, it can’t be judged at all, because, we tell ourselves, even a team trailing 18-0 could always pull out 19 runs in the bottom of the 9th.  This happens, if it happens at all, once or twicea century, but until we play those last three outs, nobody can prove it won’t happen.  Which makes it somewhat understandable why, when told it’s time to take the field, we respond with “What’s the hurry?”

So what are we talking about here?  Perfectionism?  Or the weather, which often serves as surreptitious metaphor for matters less salubrious?  As Oscar Wilde put it: “Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else.  And that makes me so nervous.”

Well, the weather is making me nervous, and not because it might be a harbinger of the global warming that supposedly will see millions of us coastal dwellers erecting dikes and/or donning aqualungs.  At my age chances are great I won’t be around when New York becomes New Venice.  From a purely selfish standpoint, I should welcome the city’s long-dreamed-of (by me, anyway) transition from intemperate to semi-tropical.

But pleasant as it’s been not having to hunker down in scarves and snowboots, there remains something unsettling about it, something that can’t be explained away by ignoring the calendar and celebrating spring in February.  Even if calendars had never been invented, our inbuilt conditioning would tell us something is out of kilter when flowers luxuriate under balmy zephyrs while the sun still hangs low in the wintry sky.  It reminds me of when California would go through a winter with little or no rain.  People unfamiliar with the natural rhythms of the seasons or, more to the point, where their drinking water came from, would exult over the succession of warm, sunny days in mid-January.  Those of us who lived closer to the land would fear the wilting crops and dying forests of a drought-year summer.

The East Coast gets rain all year round and is blessed with abundant sources of water upstate and upstream, so it’s hardly in danger of drying up and blowing away.  And this being mid-March, it’s still possible some morning could find us buried under a late-season blizzard.  But I doubt it.  Just as, while I know it’s possible, I doubt this unnaturally warm winter will be followed by an unbearably hot summer (that might only be because for me, “too hot” is a nebulous, almost nonexistent concept).  I look forward instead to a long, awesome summer whose main problem will be convincing myself to go indoors long enough to write something now and then.  Or perhaps it will finally be time to hook myself up with that solar-powered computer and just live on the beach.

In other news, this has been a very special week musically. Two artists I recently wrote about here and here came to town; both lived up to and surpassed my expectations.  John K. Samson was at the Bowery Ballroom on Thursday; as much and as long as I’ve loved the Weakerthans, he has broken through to a whole new level on his own, with an even greater eloquence and ease of manner.  He played two encores and would have played several more if the crowd had had its way.  He performed his final song, the heartrending “Virtute The Cat Explains Her Departure,” without benefit of microphone or amplifier, counting on the audience, in the spirit of the Occupy mic check, to render it audible throughout the building by singing lustily but gently along.

Had they not known and loved those lyrics, or had John’s charisma and trust not been sufficient to carry them along, it could have been embarrassing, but instead it was transcendent and triumphant.  I once watched Billie Joe Armstrong, armed with only an acoustic guitar, hold 20,000 fans enraptured at Madison Square Garden, and thought that was a marvelous feat.  But acoustic guitar or not, he still had a multi-million dollar sound system to fall back on; to divest oneself of even that advantage, as John did, must take incredible courage and confidence.  It could have failed, but it didn’t, and the payoff was profound and terrific.

Then on Saturday Jesse Michaels and the Classics Of Love played a sold-out show at Death By Audio.  I almost didn’t go because of the venue’s policy of allowing indoor smoking (disgruntled patrons have renamed it Death By Asphyxiation).  But thanks to the request (or insistence; I don’t know the full story) of the performers and cooperation of DBA management, I was able to attend an entirely smoke-free event.  It was heavenly, and with any luck will cause both fans and management to realize, “Hey, we could have been doing this all along!”

The Classics played a short, fast and furious set that was as riveting and breathtaking as anything I’ve seen since Jesse’s days with Operation Ivy 25 years ago.  The lithe energy,  the impassioned leaps, the lilting, vulnerable vocals that danced between a rasp and a growl and held melody in thrall to a scream: it was as though Jesse had been reborn after years of wandering in the wilderness.  Offstage, he was personable, relaxed, even outgoing, a far remove from the years when his legions of admirers sometimes seemed to depress and even terrify him.  It added up to two of the best nights of music I’ve seen in years, and in the same half of one week.  If that’s how the year is shaping up, what the heck: it might as well be spring.

 

 

 

 

Canada’s Poet Laureate

By
Larry Livermore
Published: March 15, 2012Posted in: Blog, Featured, MusicTags: , , , , , , , ,
Canada’s Poet Laureate

I seem to recall a time – maybe I’m imagining it, but probably not – when people earnestly argued over whether song lyrics constituted “real” poetry.  Most likely it was during the 1960s, when Bob Dylan’s visionary, amphetamine-fueled rants (I don’t have any inside info with regard to drug use, but they did go on a bit) seemed to blow away the dry-as-dust literary maunderings sold to us as poetry in textbooks and highbrow journals.

If the issue was ever resolved – as opposed to people getting bored with abstract definitions and moving on to more tangible discussions about how to overthrow the government or organize their polyamorous communes or whatever else it was that post-hippies used to get het up about – I don’t remember how it came out.  Like many young people, I arrived at a point where I began to be embarrassed over taking a folk singer so seriously and tried to find new outlets and postures through which I could show the world how cultured and sophisticated I was.  By the time I was in the 30s found myself even more embarrassed by that.

By then, fortunately, the world was awash in punk rock, which only idiots and journalists took seriously, and I no longer had the slightest impetus to trouble myself over what constituted true literature or art or poetry.  From time to time I’d get out the acoustic guitar, strum an old Dylan tune or two, and muse on the fact that certain of his lyrics had stuck with me throughout my life in a way that no academically certified “poem” ever had, but by the same token, most of his later work had become something of an embarrassment in itself, the sort of thing you’d expect Dad to produce upon re-uniting his garage band after all the kids have left home.

But eventually certain artists with roots in the punk scene, none more notable than John K. Samson, who’d started out with agit-pop rabble rousers Propaghandi, started catching my attention with lyrics that were powerful, poignant, and – at least in my view – undeniably poetic.  Having never been much of a Propagandhi fan, I first encountered Samson through his work with the Weakerthans, a long-running and much-loved Canadian combo who wowed me not only with their instrumental virtuosity and lilting, haunting melodies, but also with the way they could inveigle a normally rowdy punk rock audience into respectfully, even reverently singing – in some cases almost whispering – along with every single word of their songs.

In 2001 I interviewed Samson for Punk Planet, and we had a wide-ranging discussion, sometimes almost verging on argument, on a number of subjects, primarily but not exclusively political.  In addition to his performing and publishing careers – his “other” job is at Arbeiter Ring, a self-described left-leaning press – Samson is also a renowned activist with, for such a seemingly mild-mannered fellow, surprisingly strident views.  One question we touched upon briefly, and which I’ve periodically attempted to bring up again during our occasional meetings over the years, was the old “can song lyrics be poetry?” one, because I felt – increasingly so with each new album – that his work emphatically demonstrated that they could and were.

John K. Samson contemplating his Southern Manitoba prairies.

He demurred then (“I don’t think my songs can be defined as poetry, because they are coupled with music, and that gives an extra structure to them that poetry doesn’t have.  I personally think the most daring writing is poetry, because it’s just a blank canvas for words…”), and has continued to do so, while acknowledging that he considered some of Dylan’s work to be poetry.

Whether this is a literary point or simply a surfeit of modesty on his part, I can’t say.  I do know that at my very traditional Catholic school, with very traditional standards for just about everything, literature included, I was taught that the defining characteristics of poetry were “rhyme, meter and imagery,” all of which are richly imbued in Samson’s while, while much of what is formally recognized as modern poetry possesses few or none of them.

Another aspect of Samson’s writing that we talked about was his instantly recognizable sense of place, something missing from much modern writing.  Perhaps the internet’s ability to convince us that, no longer constrained by physicality, we are capable of being located both everywhere and nowhere, coupled with the ever greater homogenization of (in particular) Western society, has left us less likely to appreciate an evocation of a specific time and place that is anchored by the sights, sounds, smells and memories that only someone who has been there can fully recognize, but that anyone, even if they’ll never set foot on those streets or fields, can appreciate and aspire to.

Samson’s particular stomping grounds are the prairies of Manitoba and, especially, his native Winnipeg, a lovely but slightly forlorn city in the midst of the vast emptiness that is central Canada, from which, as his song “Longitudinal Centre” put its it, “the Atlantic and Pacific are the very same far away.”  While taking me on a tour of his town some years ago, he told me how Winnipeg was once envisioned as “the Chicago of the North,” but that people eventually realized there was already a Chicago, and another, far less conveniently situated one, wasn’t really necessary.

Winnipeg has, nonetheless, soldiered on, producing, despite its isolation, a startling number of talented artists, musicians and visionaries, and while some members of his band have left for the bright lights of Toronto (which, like Vancouver, has always beckoned to and drawn away from the heartland many of Canada’s best and brightest), Samson has stayed put.  Not without ambivalence, granted: see his “One Great City” (subtitled “I Hate Winnipeg”), which consists mostly of chronicling the small and larger miseries of a hardscrabble town locked into longer and bleaker winters than anyone should have to endure while counterpointing and overriding them all with his heartfelt lament for those who laugh and “watch the North End die.”

The North End is also home to Samson’s “Pamphleteer,” a, one suspects, semi-autobiographical character who becomes, pace Karl Marx, “a spectre haunting Albert Street,” trying to foist upon passersby the tracts and leaflets that even he himself might no longer comprehend but cannot stop producing.  But as much as he can poetically characterize the bleak cityscape, Samson excels equally at capturing the sometimes seductive, sometimes terrifying emptiness of the vast open spaces surrounding Winnipeg.  When, for instance, he sings about “Southern Manitoba prairie’s pulling at the pants leg of your bad disguise,” I never fail to feel the warm, rambunctious breeze that traveled a thousand kilometers across Alberta and Saskatchewan to slap me gently but relentlessly in the face the first time I visited one early summer.

I have had to, more than once, go back and re-read those lyrics to confirm that they said absolutely nothing about a breeze or a wind, or dust or corn fields, or grain silos or stillness, and yet those few simple words manage to evoke all of those things for me with a realness and substance that might surpass the experience of actually being there.  That is the mark of a true poet, and what for me makes John K. Samson one of Canada’s national treasures.

Apparently – I did, admittedly, have to look this up – Canada already has a reigning poet laureate, but they’ll be missing a sure bet if they don’t eventually get around to naming Samson to that post, and I’ll be losing a bet (made, it’s true, only with myself) that he’ll eventually make it.  There’s time – Samson is not yet 40 – but meanwhile, I recommend investigating and cherishing his new solo record, Provincial (Anti, 2012).  Call it poetry, call it prose, call it simply some lovely words set to beautiful music: it’s a window into a world that you should very much like to know.

Scene Of The Crime

By
Larry Livermore
Published: March 15, 2012Posted in: Blog, Featured, MusicTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Scene Of The Crime

Between the time when Operation Ivy broke up in 1989 and Rancid formed in 1991, Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman formed several other bands.  One of them, Dance Hall Crashers, went on to enjoy considerable success, but without Armstrong and Freeman, whose involvement was brief.  Two others, Generator and Downfall, appeared and disappeared so quickly that if you didn’t live in the Bay Area and have some connection to the scene they inhabited, your chances of ever having seen or heard them would be slim indeed.

Both Operation Ivy and Rancid eventually achieved such iconic status that the in-between bands were almost completely overshadowed, but one of them, Downfall, has maintained a legendary if shadowy presence on the music scene for well over 20 years.  There’s a reason for that, and it’s not just that they were a great band, which they were.  It’s also that most of their music has only been available in the form of scratchy and tinny 8th-generation bootlegs, good enough to pique people’s curiosity, but not to satisfy it.  There’s a reason for that, too, and during my days at Lookout Records, questions to the effect of “When’s the Downfall record coming out?” (yes, for those of you who weren’t around in those days, there was a Downfall record; no, it was never released) became so frequent and inevitable that they became a running joke with Lookout staffers.  Not because they thought it was funny that so many people had ordered a record they never got, but because the question had become so utterly unanswerable.

Here’s the story as best as I can tell it: Downfall recorded an album (a 10″ LP was the original plan), the release date (it would have been Lookout 99) was announced, orders came flooding in, and then, well, nothing happened for a long time.  The cover art didn’t get drawn, the center labels (we were still doing everything on vinyl then) didn’t materialize, and somewhere in the middle of all the delays and uncertainty, Rancid started creating a lot of excitement for themselves.  Between doing a 7″ for us and their first album for Epitaph, Downfall seemed to get lost in the shuffle.

It wasn’t the first time a record had been delayed for unforeseen reasons, so Lookout employees, acting on the assumption that Downfall’s Get Ready For Action would be along sooner or later, issued credit slips to everyone who ordered it.  From time to time, all these years later, I still run into people either literally or figuratively brandishing one of those credit slips and demanding, “Where’s my record?”

But wait.  That wasn’t the end of the story.  Two, three, four – I don’t even know anymore – years after the original release had been scheduled, Tim and Matt announced that they were at last ready to release the record, but that first it had to be remixed.  Epitaph Records’ Brett Gurewitz took on this task and after some months handed back a topnotch product that sounded far more polished and professional than the hastily done original recording.  Everyone who heard it was excited, and since by this time both Operation Ivy and Rancid were far more well known than they’d been a few years earlier, it was assumed that the Downfall record would be nothing less than massive when it finally hit the stores.

Downfall at Gilman Street, October 1989, photo by Murray Bowles.

And yet… it never happened.  This time, the culprit, as near as anyone could tell, was Rancid’s breakthrough into the world of MTV and major label courtship.  Bear in mind that this was during the time, following in the wake of the runaway, game-changing success of Green Day and the Offspring, that punk rock finally made it through to the masses.  Madonna was backstage trying to sign Rancid to her new label, and she had plenty of competition.  In the midst of all this, getting Tim or Matt on the phone became far more difficult, and running into them at Gilman considerably less likely.  When I did talk to one or the other of them, I’d be assured that yeah, the Downfall record was still happening, but would have to wait until the current flurry of Rancid excitement settled down.  When might that be?  Oh, probably once the new Rancid album was released.

The new album turned out to be And Out Come The Wolves, the biggest Rancid record ever, and among the top 10 or so biggest punk rock records ever.  This did not help the excitement to “settle down,” instead launching Rancid into a nonstop round of touring and recording that was still going on when I left Lookout Records in 1997.  I assumed the people who took over Lookout after my departure would continue to push for the record to be released – it was really too big not to – and that eventually it would be, but it was no longer my job to worry about it.

I had my own personal copy to listen to – or did, until it got lost when I was moving house – and from time to time, when I ran into Tim or Matt, I’d ask them when it was going to happen, but eventually they got bored with answering or I got tired of asking, and that was more or less that.  By then bootleg copies had begun to emerge, but they were mostly of the original recording, not the Gurewitz remix, and since they’d all originated on some ancient cassette and been reproduced countless times, the quality was decidedly substandard.  And then of course, the new Lookout owners stopped paying royalties to most of their bands, the former members of Operation Ivy took back ownership of their records and severed all relations with Lookout, and any remaining chance of the Downfall release seeing daylight, at least on that label, vanished.

A couple of Downfall songs did make it into semi-wide release by way of compilations, and probably the best-known of them is “North Berkeley,” which appeared on Lookout’s Can Of Pork in 1992.  The lyrics, half-sung, half-rapped by Tim in what was to become his inimitable (though it didn’t stop people trying) and sometime impenetrable style, were the subject of some bemusement at the time, particularly the part that began, “North Berkeley, scene of the crime.”

What made it especially curious was the line that followed, or at least what a lot of people thought they heard: “There was a party, Adeline,” Adeline being a major thoroughfare on the the other side of town that didn’t go anywhere near North Berkeley.  Eventually someone suggested that it sounded more like “out of line,” but with Tim’s patented marbles-in-mouth enunciation, it was never possible to know for sure.  Anyway, the other part of the joke was that North Berkeley was about the least likely part of town for any crime scene to unfold.

West Berkeley, sure, South Berkeley, even more so, and South Campus provided easy pickings for muggers who preyed on clueless and often pie-eyed college students.  Even downtown, where I lived, could get a little rough, too, but North Berkeley?  That was where the rich folks and the professors and the people with maids and gardeners lived.  Well, maybe I exaggerate slightly about the maids and gardeners, but that was the way it looked to those of us from the other side of University Avenue.

Oh, but a couple years earlier, I’d moved into a room in a house on Berkeley Way.  Though still well within reach of downtown’s urban ills, including a tribe of squatters in the backyard cottage and a one-family ghetto across the street, it was a block north of University Avenue.  Its location led to an uproarious but eventually hilarious bustup with Tim or, as I was probably still calling him at the time, Lint.

We were talking about ideas for record cover art.  Tim wanted to use a big picture of a gun, and I was trying to persuade him not to.  This was in the heyday of gangster rap, remember, as well as the crack cocaine wars, and I thought it sent a bad message.

“Yo, you don’t understand, Larry,” Tim told me, “See, this is the reality of life on the streets down on my side of town.  You live in North Berkeley, that’s why you don’t get it.”

It’s true that Tim had recently moved into a room above a liquor store in one of the grittier parts of South Berkeley, but he’d spent most of his life in the very placid and tranquil suburb of Albany, which is even north of North Berkeley.  I pointed this out, adding that my $100 a month room one block past University was not likely to qualify me for membership in the early 90s version of the 1%, but he wasn’t having it, and stuck fast to his definition: “North Berkeley starts north of University, and you’re north of University.”  It’s not that often that someone can reduce me to an inarticulate mashup of laughter, outrage, and flabbergastedness, but Lint certainly managed it that day.

Eventually he got his gun on a record cover.  No one was murdered as a result, at least as far as I know, and the record sold in the hundreds of thousands.  Whether or not that disproved my original point remains open to discussion, but I suspect most people would feel it did.  Just as almost everyone would agree I’d been famously wrong when I’d tried to talk Lint out of naming his new band Rancid.

“Do you even know what the word ‘rancid’ means?” I asked during a fervent contretemps out front of Gilman.  ”Foul, rotten, stinking, disgusting.  Is that what you want people to think of when they hear your band name?”

“Yo, Larry, that don’t matter, cuz we’ll give it a new meaning,” was his answer, and I guess he turned out to be right again.

The damndest thing is that I started out to write this article about crime in Berkeley – yes, even in North Berkeley – and how the old town isn’t what it used to be.  The Downfall reference was meant to be no more than a hook to hang it on, but somehow turned into the whole story, and now I’m out of space and time.  Which is probably for the best, because Bay Areans get mighty butthurt at the slightest suggestion that their little slice of Northern California is anything less than an enduring countercultural nirvana, and I really don’t have the energy to argue with them about it.

Besides, someone recently handed me a digital copy of the Downfall remix to replace the one I lost so many years ago, and I’ve been letting the music and the memories wash over me to the point where you know what?  I can’t, at least for now, get that fired up about the socio-cultural ramifications of Berkeley’s drug and idealism-addled admixture of benign tolerance and malign neglect (or maybe I’ve got that backward?).  But I will have to say that Downfall were a pretty decent band, and those were some interesting times to live through.

 

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