Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Jeremiah and I rented the Lost House some time in 2001 because we wanted a bigger place that would hold us and our friend, Matt. The place was too big, so we had to get a roommate. Eventually, Jeremiah's cousin moved into a room in our house that was not that bigger than a closet. Another guy  moved in upstairs with Mat, and maybe I will discuss him in more detail in a future post. Needless to say the guy was a mess and caused us more stress than you could ever imagine.  We decorated the house in Punk and Industrial Chic, taping flyers, newspaper clippings, and comic strips to the dirty walls. It soon resembled  a larger version of my bedroom in high school. Much to my mother's dismay, I covered the walls of my room with clippings and pictures from floor to ceiling, tacking up whatever took my fancy from punk ads to clippings from old books. My room was on the second floor of the house, which earlier had been converted from an attic, so the lower half of the wall had pa...

I have only experienced recurring dreams once. When I was a kid, and remembered my dreams with more frequency, and in greater detail, I had a dream that kept coming back for a few weeks. It was very detailed, and in hindsight, I'm not sure if it was exactly the same, but it had many of the same features. I  remember being confused that I kept having it because it never had before. One funny thing about memory is that you believe something happened in a specific way, and it might not have. Remembering a dream is even more challenging because nobody but you remembers it, so you cannot ask them if it really happened that way.  Visually, the dream was striking, memorable, and very strange. It was like I was trapped in a Scooby-Doo episode, except the animation was crisper and more bizarre than the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. There were two witches that looked like they had escaped from The Wizard of Oz that flitted in and out and a sled race that led me back to the beginning of the dr...

I was walking through the needles today and thinking about fall, a season that used to be one of my favorites. Recently, I have found fall less appealing, probably because I am not used to the southern changes in season. I miss certain trees, and I miss the snow.  Watching the world turn gray but never seeing snow is distracting and strange. I never thought I would miss snow as much as I do, but fall affects me more positively if there is a snowfall that covers the brown leaves and points to change. Here in the south, I have to wait longer for this renewal as the world stays brown until spring arrives.  I should get used to these different seasonal shifts. The seasons change, but they are not as evident to someone who grew up with four distinct seasons with vast temperature changes. In Wisconsin, you get used to shifts in the weather that are shocking and quick. Winter is long and snowy and feels so different from the southern fall, which is not as cold or different from the s...

I used to see myself as an all-too-serious writer when it came to writing fiction. I always tried to write what in the past would have been considered the Great American Novel or those very serious stories that people would read in The New Yorker or The American Mercury . Apparently, I thought of myself as a modernist 1920s-1950s writer telling stories about characters in the vein of Gertrude Stein or J.D. Salinger, exploring the foibles of normal people. I slowly realized that my writing style is close to this vision but not in the way I thought. I am improving my process by writing earthy stories full of humor and straightforward storylines, covering the daily adventures of normal people. I really have no ambitions to write the Great American Novel anymore because I would rather write for myself and the average fiction reader. I am becoming more comfortable in my skin as a writer.  The narrative structures I was creating in more fiction were far different; in fact, I was dabbling...

I moved in that summer, not prepared for a hot, festering several months in a strange, small house that had seen its share of drunken, college parties. I moved in with three other guys who I had known awhile: Dave, Joe, and Jeremiah. We were a motley crew: a punk rock English major, a brusque music major, a science major, and an opinionated psychology major. I was the progressive English major that flirted with anarchism, like a less obnoxious version of Rik from The Young Ones . In some ways, we resembled that troupe, except with far less humor.   Joe was a more conservative psychology major who liked to argue. We were both from the same hometown and had honed our friendship as outsiders. Dave majored in teaching music; he was the authoritarian taskmaster that wanted to keep us in line. Jeremiah, the science major, added a new flavor to our little group of outsiders. We met Jeremiah when he took a room in the house the previous January. He and I would move into another house, T...

There is an age-old mixtape code that does not allow for much recopying. The tape you make for one person should not be given to another. This does not stop these tapes from being recopied if they are good, usually by the receiver of said tape without the knowledge of the author, carrying on the tradition of musical choices and adding more variety to one's musical taste. Tapes can throw a monkey wrench into the works and introduce an interesting theme that needs to be carried on, or a genre that has not been explored. One of these types of thematic tapes turned me on to power pop, and more recently music blogs have taken over some of the work of mixtapes, introducing me to older rock and country stuff that I would have missed.             Mixtape etiquette also assumes that the tape will be a labor of love. Now mixed CDs or playlists do not have to be listened to as they are made. Those old mixtapes required that the creator w...

"One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things." --Henry Miller. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957). "I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore." -- Cheryl Strayed. Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Life and Love from Dear Sugar (2012). We just moved to Arkansas so I could start my new teaching job, loading our belongings into a car and a 26-foot truck, trying against all odds to get rid of junk to make the move easier. While I did get rid of books and other nonessential items, the truck was packed (to the gills as the expression goes). I know, first world problems, right? There was barely room for anything else, and when we arrived in Arkansas there were a few damaged items. I...

There are days when I feel like I have told the same story to numerous people multiple times because I cannot stop dwelling on it. I have always struggled with letting things go. People tell me that I am too sensitive and that I just need to let things go. I battle with trying to forget the small injustices from twenty years ago, blaming others for being mean to me when they barely remember doing it. I think I tell stories to try to reorder my life and take control of situations that I cannot control. Of course, my inability to stop dwelling does not account for how I start forgetting minor details and adding others after years of telling stories. We all do this because memory is fallible and people like to entertain. The process of understanding what has happened to us throughout the years is hard to comprehend and understand, especially for those of us who have difficulty not dwelling on every detail. We blame others for the minor bumps in the road and we blame ourselves for im...

My memories of the first place I lived are fuzzy. I remember orange carpeting and brown walls in the trailer my parents rented the first three years of my life before we moved into the house on 6th Avenue that they still live in thirty years later. I remember a car my mom drove a few years later when she first got her license a little better. It was a tan sedan, a nondescript Ford or Mercury model with leather seats that smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke and oil, making my young mind think of the piles of dog poop soured by age that sat in the back yard of my parent's home until we got around to cleaning them up. I cannot remember if most of these experiences were truly real. I know that car was because I was around seven years old when my mother finally learned to drive. She had a series of cars that came from my grandfather's Ford dealership. Later she got her own, but my grandpa drove cars from his garage my entire life; they too smelled of cigarette smoke and old oil. ...

I often feel the pull of the written word, encouraging me to read and write fiction far more than I have time for. Yet I have so many stressors in my life, pulling me in all directions, halting my efforts and sapping my strength. It is all I can do to put a few words down on paper for a book chapter I am working on or scribble a few notes for my movie list. I write this from the standpoint of finishing my doctoral dissertation in the spring, teaching the equivalent of six courses, and trying my best to seek tenure. During these rough spells, I have been trying to read fiction and slowly writing a little. Someday I hope to get back to my manuscript and at least finish one novel or a few short stories or pull a few more of my grey hairs out. I take comfort in the fact that many are late bloomers to this fiction game. However, I have been writing fiction for more than two decades and have never taken it all that seriously. It is a given, but there is something to be said for sitting dow...

" One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the  'impossible,' come true.”  -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up , 1945 I should be working on many different things, including applications, revisions, and grading student papers. Yet I find myself at a cross roads, torn between doing the things I love and trying to keep food on the table. I struggle at being an academic, a teacher, a citizen of this mess of a country, while working sixteen hour days. I feel disappointed and broken if I take time to watch a movie or listen to a record. The mounting stress and anxiety bleeds into my work, etching my writing and my scholarship indelibly until the two become inseparable, a misshapen hulk of a thing, trending between monster, art, and commerce. I know that this will someday end at the inquisition or the tenur...

These days are increasingly fueled by an antiseptic need for withdrawal -- a calm pause before the perpetual storm. The work mounts, and I disappear into intoxication and minimal self-effacement, transferring my energy to fiction instead of mounting abstracts and applications. I write prose poetry about my lack of ambition, while i thumb through interminable drafts of student papers, failed fiction, and the occasional listicle written on tattered notebook pages.  I write lists like a man possessed, usually finishing the easy items or transferring them to another list, asking for nothing less than being done eternally. Yet my manic energies and anxieties compound such lists. I sit entranced at the computer screen, looking at another file, attempting madly to use all the ink in my listing pen.  Did an emo song or an old, lovelorn rock 'n' roll song start this way? A person at the end of their energies, writing about someone or something that done 'em wrong keeps on kee...

I first heard Grant Hart, who died on September 13, 2017 at the tragically young age of 56, on   Hüsker Dü ' s Candy Apple Grey , the band's underrated and oft-maligned major label debut from 1986. As a fan of Bob Mould's Sugar, I decided to finally take the plunge into  Hüsker Dü 's catalog, and this was the first album I was able to find. By Candy Apple Grey , the band had nearly perfected their poppy power trio attack, mixing heavy, buzzsaw guitars with power pop affectations. Those elements were always there, even on 1981's raucous, live album Land Speed Record and the hardcore, yet melodic, Everything Falls Apart.  By 1986, after several more seminal records ( Zen Arcade , New Day Rising ,  Flip Your Wig ) in the hardcore/indie cannon, they perfected the form. Alternating between Mould's generally faster songs that increasingly relied on pop sensibilities and Hart's more lyrically-and vocally-focused songwriter paeans, both revolving heavily around ...

I find myself thinking about the Barracudas's song "Grammar of A Misery" today as I work on lesson plans, abstracts, and the assorted flotsam and jetsam of academic life. The song is lyrically simple, yet holds complex emotional resonance for me. Jeremy Gluck sings in the chorus " Run From yourself for twenty years / Cry yourself a thousand tears / Call for help but no one's listening / At your grammar of misery." The sadness of going through the motions is evident as is the emotional pain of feeling alone in the void. The song makes evident how hard it can be to express our true feelings as we sink into a solipsistic state. Yet the song's propulsive drumming and ringing guitar chords coupled with the sheer energy of the Barracudas attack are hopeful. And check out that guitar solo and playful vocal effects that recall Generation X at their bounciest. However, The Barracudas are generally more complex than Billy Idol's first band. They tend to writ...

Each summer I rack up an amazing list of wasted opportunities, unproductive mishmashes of scattered writing, files full of mindless ramblings all in search of effectual copy. I write a lot and read even more in order to continually perfect my game, but fall under the weight of the work, ineffectually stumbling back months later and wondering where to begin. As writers many of us fall into this pattern, putting work down never to return to it or never able to quite pick up where we left off. Summer is the time for me to supposedly catch up, but life always gets in the way. Even my blog posts trickle recently as dissertation chapters take all of my time. Fiction and essay writing are relegated to brief meanderings as I focus all of my attention on one never-ending project. While I just finished my dissertation introduction, so now I plan on writing more, updating old posts and returning to music, film, comics, and the essayistic scene of the crime instead of dropping in every once in...

There were times when the nights seemed longer than days. We would walk for hours down the darkened paths, deliberate yet tentative, roaming like wild animals through the streets of the city. Deliberating, planning, and articulating what was wrong with the world. Elders would accuse us of trying to solve the world's problems. Joe's dad commended us for our forethought, yet tried to insinuate his ideas about life and how to live it into our framework. He was helpful and insightful at times. At others, we thought his observations a nuisance. What did we know? We were young, hanging out in schoolyards, behind houses, walking and walking, thinking and thinking. Young minds never at rest. The fulcrum of our existence resting on our discussions. The life experience would come later. A hard punch in the gut, better than a hard slug in the chest, it carried a force that brought me to my knees, staggered, bleeding, and ready for more. Lessons that I learned did not necessarily rest on...

Sundays used to be a time to relax with a good cup of hot cocoa. My grandfather would swing by our house for a cup of coffee. He would stay for a long time before going into work at the garage. Or I would climb into my dad's old red F-150 and we'd go partridge hunting down the back roads outside  town, prowling for startled birds. We would drive down those lonely old dirt roads for hours, searching for dinner, scouring in the musky air. Sundays have always held a peculiar fascination for me. Days of rest, maybe, but they can also be days of great excitement. Lately though, they're just more days to work. In front of a computer screen, I dole out the daily word count, wishing I could be up north or down south, any damn where but here. I'd rather be running through the woods, disc golfing, just walking down the street, and instead I'm here. I guess it's time to go. Johnny Cash - Sunday Morning Coming Down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED5s1-Fe9FA Kris Kr...

There are dreams and then, there are those dreams, shiny opalescent, glittery baubles bursting on the seashore of shattered horizons, the clattering of teeth in the cold dark, imaginary fingertips under blankets, stretched over my childhood bed. Recurring transactions with sandmen unknown, standing tall and imposing in darkened doorways, shuffling on flat feet, fidgeting in the early morning breeze, silvery frying pan in hand that turns slowly into a gold plated Ruger. Please mom, make it stop. I can't go on -- but I must, screaming with tattered voice, as the large visitor hovers, pointing its amorphous weapon. Paralyzed nightly, I see its slick face and fear that I might die, blanketed in a real cold sweat, trapped under the weight of lumbering fear. Is the door closed or open? Movement isn't an option anymore,  whether it ever was, trapped in stasis, awake or asleep, the gun or the knife. I can't see it, except in the periphery, behind my line of sight, yet clearly in my...

The first time I read Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung , I hunkered down for the long haul on the floor of the bathroom at my old house and read and read and read. Bangs' manic prose and uncompromising taste enthralled me, sucking me deeper into rock critic fandom. It was definitely the late '90s, and I was in the early, heady stages of compulsive record collecting. I had already worked my way through a large chunk of the Greil Marcus catalog, but I was mostly known for my love of Flipside , MRR , and later Punk Planet , the bigger punk rock fanzines, which I would read front to back in study hall, poring over obscure record reviews and tantalizing columns, not forgetting the letter page. As I read over his many obsessions that night and into the early hours of dawn, while I should have been preparing for some exam or other, I felt like a kindred soul. Though I never entirely agreed with Bangs, or always understood just where he was coming from, I un...

Ever since I started posting more and more often, expanding my posts to every two days at most, I haven't suffered for writing topics. Lately though, it hasn't been as easy. The length and coldness of this winter has made it tough to stay on schedule, but I have tried to keep it up, hoping beyond hope that my writing doesn't get too stagnant. I've even stooped to writing about writing,  trying not to get too meta. Here's to the Spring and a chance to shake off the metaphorical writing ring rust.