Crowd of Ghosts

Why Kids Are Rude, the 21st Century by the Chili Peppers

2012-01-23T09:34:00.000-08:00

I believe that it's a defensible statement to say that kids these days--meaning me especially--are more rude than kids ever have been. We conduct ourselves with the confidence of a people who live in an unshakable world. We might screw up our own lives, we seem to think, but that won't affect too much, so why worry about it? As a result we treat our elders with less awe than we ever have. Our elders are as they have always been better educated, more experienced, possessing greater qualifications. As in all ages before, the generations that precede the youth built the world as it is, its badness and all its greatness. As ever, our parents, teachers, grandparents, bosses, and all those old folks deserve our respect. Unlike ever before my generation acts per capita with less decorum than any other period. Refinement is falling away. We are rude kids.

It's a truth I think, if taken objectively. We are rude kids. As with many behaviors, something motivates our lack of refinement. There is a reason for how we seem to be so awfully ungrateful and inconsiderate. It's different, I have discovered from my research, than the motivation behind what they called the "Me" generation during the '70s. Hippies had a pretense of rebuilding what they saw as a broken system. It is the wont of every generation to rebuild the world as they see fit. Accepting this sociological fact simplifies things. In the '70s there was a mood of pacific revolution--all you knucking need is cucking love, let it be and all that jazz. The difference here between my generation and the flower power kiddos has everything to do with attitude. Gone seems to be all sense of amorphous "we need to do something!" Do what? we ask. "I don't know. Something!" That's gone.

Don't be growing some sense of hope that my generation has any idea what we're doing either. We have no idea. Almost less, maybe, because we're a bunch of coffee addicted sillies living a cushy life. We have a different idiom, though. The paradigm of amorphous passivity has been superceded by many different frames of thought and it has now taken a frame of situational skepticism. We are not a generation of doubters and we are not a generation of vaguely shifting take-what-we're-fed either. We've found some strange balance between the two. If given a proposition we almost always trust it and question it at the same time based on different circumstances, for instance what authority feeds us the information, what priod knowledge we have, our mood and the weather, if we're hungry and other physical factors, our upbringing. We might be a rude generation but in some ways we are more respectful than ever because we have actually learned from the past. We don't doubt everything, we don't hate everything, nor do we accept or love it all. Things, people, must prove themselves to us. Usually we will approach new situations without strong disposition. Maybe we'll be a little wary of things we think may go wrong or excited about things we've experienced that have gone right in the past. In general, though, we arrive and observe and wait for the situation to prove itself to us. That goes double for people. Sure we come across as rude. We're often neutral, waiting for newly met elders to invent themselves to us one way or the other. If you win our dismay then we will not feel it necessary to hide it. But if you win our respect we can be more loyal than the rising stars.

There are a lot of contributing factors to this and I think I'll write about them in a few days.

Tah.

Small-Time Fame, Fragmentation of Community, and the American Dream

2012-01-11T14:25:00.000-08:00

In the 1950s, America went through an economic boom. That show Happy Days got it pretty close to right--ironically Happy Days was made twenty years after the Baby Boomer generation, in the seventies when everything about it was sarcastic and meant to justify discomania and to make America feel guilty about the Rolling Stones and doing drugs. In the fifties, a module of the ideal American family became created: two parents and one and a half kids. A stupid average, but that was the average. Suburbs started being built to support the average, McDonalds and the rest of the fast food industry went on a skyrocket trip, and America started to generate a particular image of "normal." You lived in a suburb with your mom and dad and your half a sibling, your dad went to work, your mom kept house, your half a sibling made do with one shoe, half a pair of pants, and a weird set of nicknames. You got a job by the time your were in high school and you started buying yourself cars and radios and records and clothes, and everything was happy days.

This model of "normal" endures in the American imagination, for some reason. A lot of people still live in suburbs, they go to Starbucks and shop at J.C. Penny's. They have a job when they're in high school and they start buying things for themselves as soon as they can. America is trying to be homogenized across the board. Whether you're in Chicago, Florida, freaking Denver, or Houston, you can still find those suburbs designed for one set of parents and their one and a half kids. These people expect that America is all suburbs. Suburbs hold a lot of America's population. One hot and steamy pile of happy to be normal.

All of this is made possible because of pop icons. Pop icons are only possible through mass media: TV and radio and internet make it so Californians and Dakotans and fucking Brits can have the same damn ideas about that Bieber kid and his ilk without ever trying very hard to discover what they actually like. Multi-national pop icons are not so because of talent but only because everyone knows them as such. They caught a marketing break. Good on to them.

Meanwhile there is a layer of fame below the international pop icon, probably six or seven steps down. This layer includes authors like Tim Powers and Diane Duane and David Brin and musicians like Coheed and Cambria and Cage the Elephant. At this level, the kids might have a fan base of several hundred thousand. These several hundred thousand are loyal as all hell, but scattered across the globe. So if you find that you're a huge fan of Coheed and Cambria, you might have a couple hundred Coheed and Cambria fans living within fifty miles of you but not many more. And you might not ever find many of them if you live in a reasonably large city. Additionally, this presents a marketing problem for Coheed and Cambria. Coheed and Cambria need to first market themselves to the masses in order to attract the few that really like them. That takes a lot of time, money, and energy. Hopefully the return on investment is worth it. In their case it seems to be.

This all makes me wonder about bipassing the attempt to draw a massive, multi-state/multi-national audience. I wonder why at least at first one might condense one's efforts. If, say, you live in Denver, as I do. The population of Denver is over six hundred thousand. That's just a bit less than the fan base of Coheed and Cambria--according to the facespace. I wonder how it would be if, rather than beginning by trying to appeal to the massive market of everyone, you tried appealing to the immediate market of your town and nearby towns. One of the things about marketing is that customers buy products from people they like. In my case, my product is my stories. If I'm going to sell my stories then they'll have to like me. I can't very easily nor quickly market myself to a massive audience. But I can more easily market myself to a local audience, an audience of six hundred thousand in Denver and more if I include the satellite states--which I will. Many of my favorite authors have quite small fan bases on the interwebs--less than ten thousand, by the study of a few moments. If I can get one in fifty people in Denver and the outlying areas to think I'm cool then I could be reckoned as successful as many of my role models.

I suppose that's a bit optimistic. Still, it makes me wonder. Conquering my hometown sounds much easier than attempting to conquer the world.

Which brings me back to my original thought: Homogenized America. See, the thing is about homogenizing anything is it makes everything the same. If everything is the same then how do you know what you like? It's all the same. So you don't know your neighbors because they're like you. Everyone wants to find what they like, but nobody can because there's just too damn much to sort through. So the pop icons become more famous because they've floated to the top so they can be found easily. Everyone knows of them, everyone likes them, so everyone feels as if they have this community because they can see that everyone likes what they like. The cycle continues as American homogenization continues.

The whole cycle makes originality very difficult. There may be a lot of people in the world who think that what you're creating is the cat's meow. Good luck finding them in the mass market. Unless--here's the clincher--you think about how big certain areas are, and, conversely, how they could still be manageable. If just the Denver and surrounding areas chunk is considered I could very possibly find a sizable amount of people interested in exactly the product I'm pushing, enough to make a scene.

This is exactly what the American Homogenization Comity--also known as the government--does not want you to figure out. What I could possibly be doing is setting out on the first steps of promoting local community. Le gasp!

'Tis a thought.

I'm not over!

Fish

2012-01-09T20:32:00.000-08:00

In the name of efficiency, I'm shortening the damn word to "fish." So shut up.

"Fish" is when you get shit done fast without leaving shit out. (I'm listening to Keith Richards' autobiography read by Johnny Depp. Cope.) Ain't much needs be said about fish. Everyone's got their own idea about how to do it, but the damn word means doing shit fast without leaving shit out however the hell you do it. Weird part is when cats run around ignoring rules of fish for their own no doubt nefarious reasons. There's skeazeballs everywhere guilty of flagrant unfishincy--left-lane grannies, coffee shop nerve-wrecks, diner Sallies. In literature cats ignoring good fish spend their energies in fantasy, building worlds that ought to take care of themselves and explaining fascinating characters that capture the imagination and never do a damn thing till you've pissed off to watch some film or other. Fantasy bloat they call the act of spitting on good fish. Fucking annoying.

Whether I succeed or nay, my pledge to you my droogs, made with blood and piss and fuck all, is to make a hell of a charge at a smooth story. If it burns on reentry then it'll be a bright show.

"Immortality" by Seether Is a Cover

2012-01-01T15:25:00.000-08:00

This is a skillful cover of "Immortality" by Pearl Jam. I like this song. I like the Pearl Jam version too. They're different but both good.

I'm featuring the Pearl Jam version in the sort of meditation soundtrack thingy to my novel. I'm not sure what purpose it will serve or how it will be executed but I'm compiling a soundtrack to my novel. I like music. It helps me think in pictures and I think that the poetry sometimes adds to the story. "Immortality" for instance is about the darker side of immortality, which is a major theme in my novel. I've decided to make Pearl Jam's "Immortality" the opening track of my novel's soundtrack--a decision I may rethink, but it's a good idea right now. This decision has led me to ask myself a few questions. First, is this too obvious a choice so that people will be tipped off about the whole rest of some of the more mysterious parts of the novel? Second, will anyone even notice ever? Third, does anyone ever think about this kind of stuff? I don't know.

Okay, yeah, go new year!

"Road Zombie" by Social Distortion

2011-12-27T08:14:00.000-08:00

QI XL - How Ironic is That?

2011-12-26T12:42:00.000-08:00

"Take Your Tyrant" by Týr

2011-12-26T07:56:00.001-08:00

"Funeral Motet" by Tomas Luis de Victoria

2011-12-23T08:03:00.000-08:00

For no particular reason. I just like it.

"Vodka" by Korpiklaani

2011-12-22T10:03:00.000-08:00

Keep warm.

"Wake Up" by Coheed And Cambria.

2011-12-20T11:08:00.000-08:00

For some reason it took me a long time to find this song.

"Run to the Hills" by Iron Maiden Is Politically Specific and Annoying

2011-12-17T08:13:00.001-08:00

My little brother is asking whether the songs of the day are ever inspired by stuff that's going on in my life. They pretty much aren't, except sometimes, and that's rarely. Anyhow, here's "Run to the Hills," a politically specific song that speaks for Native Americans. Native Americans are a minority group sometimes over represented by the rock and roll community. The whole hippie movement tried to live in a Native American inspired way without understanding what that meant. This song always annoys me because Iron Maiden are white dudes. (Weird thing to say--Iron Maiden are white dudes. Heh. Grammar.) As far as I know none of them have any real relationship to any Native American group. I could be wrong, though. Politically preachy songs annoy me unless they can truthfully speak from the group for which they are appealing.

Good guitar riffs, though.

"Kali Yuga III" by Therion and the Truth in Scope

2011-12-15T08:41:00.000-08:00

Updated my novel. This song has been playing in my head today.

So today I'm thinking about the advantages of partaking of literature far from the type of literature you are trying to produce. If you are writing a fantasy for disenfranchised teens, for instance, you might spend some time watching film noir from the '50s.

That's my situation. I feel driven to watch movies and read books that have little stylistic similarity to the books I'm writing. I'm writing a distinctly gothic fantasy, basically in the same style as The Crow with Brandon Lee and Underworld with Kate Beckinsale. I've watched those movies and I'll reference back to them periodically when I'm thinking of how mood and imagery mingle. I spend most of my research time on totally distant things, though. Like I've been reading poetry recently--Keats--and taking some cues from that. And I've been watching obscure and less obscure movies--noir flicks from the '50s, H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man and its sequel, Nosferatu, Brom Stoker's Dracula by Scorsese or whoever. It's all providing valuable contribution to what's feeling like a more complete whole, as a result. It feels like doing the right thing.

It is interesting.

"Even Flow" by Pearl Jam (This Particular One)

2011-12-14T08:34:00.001-08:00

This is the song of the day--this particular album version. I like Eddie Vedder's yell at the beginning.

This version is less sculpted than the one off Ten. The one off Ten gets more radio play though.

"Fly like and Eagle" by Steve Miller Band

2011-12-13T07:53:00.000-08:00

"Only" by Nine Inch Nails Helps Me Appreciate Music

2011-12-12T08:27:00.000-08:00

I've decided to try to be more conscious of what intention musicians seem to have. I'll try to listen to poetry and pay attention to lyrics and to the visuals musicians choose to include with the music they're making. There's more intention and meaning than I used to think, and I used to have a lot of respect for rock stars. It's all very interesting.

Yeah.

"The World at Large" by Modest Mouse

2011-12-10T06:56:00.001-08:00

Sometimes quiet, trippy music is better.

"Burden My Hand" by Soundgarden Is Part of Grunge

2011-12-09T07:10:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I told my little brother that my favorite genre is grunge. He said that makes no sense, seeing as my favorite band is not a grunge band. I had trouble answering him, really.

Oh well.

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana for Class

2011-12-08T15:09:00.000-08:00

Just finished taking Cultural History of Rock and Roll at school. College is cool like that. We finished the class with a discussion of Seattle grunge and especially Nirvana. My teacher decided to end there because it's kind of the most recent big deal in rock and roll, the whole slacker scene and the celebration of depression and impotence and being able to get a kick out of life without any big ideas. It was profound. The last question posed in class was what's happened in the rock scene since the nineties? The class inspired two thoughts.

The first thought I'm thinking is an answer to what's happening in rock and roll since the nineties. It's a fair question. The easy answer is quite a lot. Bands are always appearing on the scene and ripping up the stage, feeding us the next new and hip thing, and sticking it to whichever man they've decided to lampoon. After the hardcore scene during the eighties, however, and the college rock grew from rock and rollers who weren't as angry--R.E.M. and such--and Seattle spawned grunge in the eighties, pretty much all boundaries broke. Nothing is sacred anymore and everything is fair game. Everything is in equal amounts shocking to someone, which makes everything, really, equally tame. Whatever your taste is, there is that kind of rock and roll somewhere. All you have to do is wade through everything else till you find it. One answer to "what's happening with rock and roll?": everything. Everything that was happening is now happening. Now, different than ever, it's all allowed. Kind of strange but true.

A nuance on this idea that everything goes is everything goes everywhere. Rock and roll, always a global thing, has mostly been produced in America. Britain tended to absorb and speed up and push the envelope for any new movement that arose--the spirit of fun in the early boogie rockers like Berry and Little Richard got tightened by the Beatles and the Stones, the punk of the Ramones and Patti Smith assumed the really active directed anger it always needed at the hands of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. As a result, we talked in class almost exclusively about the U.S. and England and only ever mentioned other countries as they related to the Americans and Brits who went there, except on very rare occasions--like when we talked about Bob Marley and Santana. Everyone in the world makes rock and roll, though. We never talked about J-rock, a whole scene that has done some of the best punk/glam meld of anyone, or the folk metal groups that are howling at the world from northern Europe, directly pulling from libraries of mythology and folklore creating strangely primordial hard metal. These are nuances on a theme and not really anything new. But they're good, and will be worth noting in the Cultural History of Rock and Roll class I will teach in twenty years.

The other thought that occurs to me is how strange it is to think about an album--Nevermind--released in 1992 as a piece of history. Twenty years ago. Holy sheet.

Enjoy.

"Nutmeg Phantasy" by Macy Grey, Ironic Fight Song

2011-12-07T07:55:00.001-08:00

I'd like to see a fight scene staged to this song.

Speaking of which, updated my novel: http://lithnmark.blogspot.com/2011/12/chapter-two-part-three.html

First of many ironic fight scenes.

"Float on" by Modest Mouse Helps Explain Rock and Roll to Aliens

2011-12-06T17:53:00.001-08:00

I have to think of ten songs that I'd give to an alien to answer the question, "What is rock and roll?" I think I'll start with some Human Abstract.

"Lots of Drops of Brandy" by The Chieftains and Their Talent for Coaxing

2011-12-05T08:51:00.000-08:00

Today's literary concept: Coaxing.

There are two ways of educating people: hammer tactics, and magic tricks. Hammer tactics are things like dramatic demonstrations and perfectly outlined theses and stuff where argument and thought are impossible. Magic tricks are far more insidious.

To educate with a magic trick, the student must believe they came up with the answer themselves. They must be caught and led to an answer and feel like they figured it out half a moment before the teacher gives them the last detail.

Of course, sometimes the tactics are the same.

"Lots of Drops of Brandy" wasn't supposed to be the song of the day. The song of the day doesn't exist on youtube, though, so the literary concept is not very well supported.

"Far" by Coheed and Cambria Demonstrates Words Juxtaposed against Pictures

2011-12-04T13:05:00.001-08:00

A continuation of thinking about irony.

When the scene has little to do with the words being said it produces a different effect than that produced by scene and words agreeing. Words and pictures impact us differently. Where words cause us to think and attempt to think in reasoned lines, pictures can evoke instinct, emotion, and ambiguity or diversity in conclusions. Which becomes interesting when the pictures are described in our stories. We require words to show the pictures. In scene setting, our attempt is always to generate some sense of solidity with the slippery words that we have selected as our tool.

Hopefully, our description seems solid. We might all describe the same castle. The stones--the grit--the icicles--hopefully, we all succeed in conveying the coarse, cold touch, immense silence, the chalky smell of mortar; hopefully we give a distinct image of castle. We might opt to use language that is vague, soft, weak. Hopefully, the objective image "castle" becomes communicated anyway, though we might leave the audience thinking about jello, or something.

It's a thought. The ambiguity of language is our tool. If you want to make an institution look philosophically weak and physically impregnable, you might describe their Nazi architectural style with soft-sounding syllables and ambiguous words. A strong description ought to give the objective solidity of scene setting and, through word choice, it ought also to juxtapose an ambiguity.

"Burn" by Three Days Grace on a Snowy Day

2011-12-03T09:35:00.001-08:00

Today's literary concept: Irony. I know of irony that literary critics are impressed by good executions of it; I know that irony contributes to storytelling. I'm still exploring how. In order to do that, I'll try defining irony then start thinking about how it's used in literature.

Definition from the Oxford English Dictionry of "irony": A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used; usually taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to imply condemnation or contempt.

This definition would seem to imply that irony, as a literary tool, can be used to provide a critique of just about anything. Successful irony, it would seem, comes about when an author might spend a great deal of time seeming to praise something, like cannibalism, while demonstrating how horrible it is. Scathing social criticism comes about through successful irony.

Or, perhaps like my song of the day, irony can be used to complain about weather. It's snowing here. I have a song about fire on the mind. Ironic, perhaps. Perhaps not, though.

I shall revisit the concept of irony. Fear not.

Heralds updated: http://lithnmark.blogspot.com/2011/12/chapter-two-part-one.html

"Lukin" by Pearl Jam AND Yesterday on Heralds

2011-12-02T11:08:00.001-08:00

"Lukin" is such an odd song. Yeah...

Yesterday on Heralds (http://lithnmark.blogspot.com/2011/12/chapter-one-part-four.html):

Twig dscovered that his various stays that he relied on to guide his action compass, as it were, do not exist. His army, the Zombie Corps, is lost--the War has been over for years--his family wants nothing to do with him. All he has left is a granddaughter's wish that the cold world might be warmed, and he has a name to put to a faceless enemy: Ferryman. Ferryman is the god of death. Not that our hero finds that disouraging in the slightest.

This is a variation on the classic Call to Adventure portion in the Hero's Journey defined by Joseph Campbell. Campbell's observations of myth suggest that the hero ought to deny the call to adventure. I'm writing it so that Twig embraces adventure. He has been left in the cold, literally and figuratively, by the mightier-than-thou powers that be who would have called him to adventure. Left to his own devices, Twig decides his own adventure, Jason Bourne style.

Granola of the day: Cinnamon Raison.

"Ready for This" by Tim Minchin AND Glimpse of Eternity

2011-12-01T08:27:00.001-08:00

Here we are, on the first of December: another of the arbitrary dividers
we've imposed between now and earlier. Paranoia about the continuity of time
does very little for us except worry us that those moments will never come back.
That's one way of looking at it. Another, perhaps more comforting way, is to
remember that a version of you is earlier than now, still being alive then.
Perhaps a confusing thought, but if you really think it through you get a
glimpse of eternity. This is a true truth.

Tim Minchin. Funny man.