Russ.

Move along

2009-10-01T06:43:00.001-07:00

Blog and full Russ Marshalek/RussComm site now at russ at squarespace

Taylor Swift Boated

2009-09-14T12:35:00.000-07:00

(10:43(2:22:27 PM) dr zachary: vmas are pretty much about politics, awards quotas
(2:22:46 PM) dr zachary: kanye’s moment was a single stark mote of
authenticity
(2:22:58 PM) dr zachary: the only real instance of artistic
integrity in the thing

The only real commentary on last night's VMA debacle that matters, at all

Absentee Survivor's Guilt

2009-09-11T06:56:00.000-07:00

It's September 11 in New York, and it's cold, rainy and disgusting outside. A man shoved me arbitrarily as he was walking down Canal street this morning, and my expensive (to my pocket) Metropolitan Museum of Art umbrella was fucked like a deboned chicken hunk in the random hurricane gust that greeted me as I crossed the street to my office.

All of these, I realize, are minor issues that can ruin someone's day but that, today, are supposed to be set aside.

On the train this morning, at work today, it's like a funeral. As though everyone is mourning the death of a mutual friend I never knew.

When September 11 2001 happened, I was in college in Atlanta, GA. I was fighting with my grandparents via phone - they were disapproving of my decision to pursue a minor in gender theory and feminist studies - and getting ready to go to a monologue class with one of the professors who had the greatest impact on me during my time at Oglethorpe, Troy Dwyer. One of my roomates, Rob, had been born and raised on Long Island. Other than my brief and unremembered time in an incubator in Albany and my yankee family that I obviously never developed ties to, he was my primary connection to New York.

I remember the fight with my grandmother, her screeching in the way she did down the line, being cut off suddenly when she told me to turn on the news and hung up.

I did. And the rest of the day, for Rob, myself and our other two dorm-mates, disappeared into history.

Watching Peter Jennings narrate the entire thing, I felt...

I felt disconnected.

And today, that disconnect is nibbling at me. Because where was I when 9/11 went down? I was at a private liberal arts school in Atlanta, having never set conscious foot in New York, trying very very hard to believe anything going on was real.

I mentioned this on Facebook earlier and a friend, author Robert Goolrick, posted the following:

"Sorry to say, Russ. You will never EVER understand what it was like -- for starters, it was the most beautiful day in history. The skies were immaculately blue forever and ever. And then.....

The day never comes that I don't think of and play Patty Griffin singing "Forgiveness," a song I first heard that night, when the smoke and the fumes from the electrical fires were stifling, and the dar was filled with the howl of fire trucks and useless ambulances on the West Side Highway. And I first met Monica Lewinsky, who lived in my building... Read More. I wish there were some way to get you to grasp it, but imagine not being able to breathe and listening to Patty -- We are swimming with the snakes at the bottom of the well. And she promised we would make it through the night, and we did. But nothing was ever the same, or will be."

And I recognize that. I also recognize that I'm ignoring discussing the politics of 9/11/01, and that's completely intentional-this isn't about the political, it's solely about the personal. A personal that never actually hit me at home.

And so I pass through today like a ghost, keeping my head down, quiet and silent for those who lost and for those who remember. Me? I'm at work, and that's what I'm doing. I've smiled today, I've laughed today, and I've cursed, too-and for everything I do, for every time I lift my eyes, I feel guilty that I'm not immobile, that I'm able to go on about my day. But also incredibly grateful. Grateful to be here, and yes, grateful to be able to smile, and laugh, and swear. Guilty that I'm not wracked with or wrecked by emotion today, guilty that I'm putting one foot in front of the other, that the uncle or cousin that everyone on the subway seemed to be mourning this morning wasn't mine, had never and will never be mine.

And so?

So I keep going. Never forget, sure, but remember that this is the gift we have: to keep going.

Sorta Homecoming

2009-09-08T08:32:00.000-07:00

I have to note that I am writing this on the flight from Atlanta back to New York. As such, this is an unexpectedly retrospective perspective on the past few days, mainly because, um, I’ve had a welcome respite from the internet out of necessity.

Arriving in Athens, GA to find a lack of internet’s not necessarily what I expected from this trip south, but honestly it’s not something that’s found me bothered, either.

I KNOW WEIRD RIGHT?

The past 24 hours have found me strangely removed from what’s become, in recent years, my chosen forms of communication-email, Facebook, Twitter (I’d say Myspace but really who the fuck goes on Myspace anymore?), with even my phone refusing to hold a charge, and as such able to focus on that which is what I came back to Georgia for:

Face-to-face communication.
I mean, I have TRIED to hack the wi-fi signals available here from Zach’s apartment in Athens. I have. I have tried accessing this one account, “Rena”, with the following passwords:
Rena
Rena123
Renarena
Arenafranklin
Renamacentire
Boobookittyfuck (what, it’s fucking ATHENS GA. I assure you at least 65% of households with password-protected wifi have this as their password. Try it for yourself.)

But to no avail. And, at some point, when my phone won’t charge on K’s blackberry charger and there’s no internet? It’s time to live without any of it. And that? That, combined with seeing so many people I’ve missed, has made for one hell of an escape.

That said, I’m sure once I do finally figure out what the fuck is wrong with my phone, my voicemail is going to be overflowing with messages from those threatening to
a) kill me/my children/my family
b) never again send me their book/manuscript/cd/collection of hangable photographic prints of vegetables masquerading as theater patrons
c) wreck a piece of chicken for real

because I’ve been completely unable to access it since early yesterday.

The past day has been filled with a warm, weird sort of nostalgia, walking around Decatur-the city I spent so much time in fighting what felt like an uphill battle for a sense of place and purpose-and finding in it a new sense of charm and peace I had never seen before, but also being struck, really really definitively, by the fact that, sooner or later, I’d have moved north anyway, regardless of timing/job market/relationship status.

That’s a weird realization for me to make, as it was accompanied by the suddenly acknowledgment that, in a way, I’ve been blaming New York a lot, assigning it a place in my heart as a sole alternative to Decatur only realized as a result of the worst possible situation occurring, like a parent losing a child to Social Services as a result of a drug habit.

Ok, that’s actually the worst possible analogy ever, but…wait, no, I have a worse one.

When my friend, who I’ll refer to henceforth as “K” (for the fact that it’s close enough to her real name to not be a cheap veil but also far away enough so that her legal team won’t every be able to file a cease-and-desist on this blog should anything…go astray. You know what I mean. We’ve been through this before, dear readers.) and I got to La Guardia (in a cab, naturally), after having, independent of one another, incredibly difficult and pressure-filled days (inner…city….pressure), we immediately, after navigating our way through a surprisingly uneventful security check given the mad amount of electronics we were carrying, we made our way immediately to the La Guardia B Terminal bar.

For those of you who’ve never flown from La Guardia, simple fact 1: the “b” gate stands for broke-ass traveling. It’s mainly the Air Tran gate, known formerly as “Valu-Jet”, and it’s basically the cheapest way to get in the air and somewhere else and back, as long as “back” doesn’t include going through Hartsfield because that fucking hellhole is like a curse on humanity. As such, the “B” terminal bar, “New York Sports Bar”, everything that its name implies I assure you, struck me as way less desirable than what I began to imagine lay in other concourses for those travelers lucky enough to gain access to them: “Jimmy Ray’s Free Vodka Emporium”, “The Lush Lounge Bar and Vegetarian Grille”, “An Airport Bar That Doesn’t Suck and Hey Also Has Awesome and Inexpensive Drinks”. Regardless, K and I grabbed beers-a Sam Adams Light for her (wtf, those exist?) and a Corona Light for me (wtf, I drink that?). Seated at the bar directly to our right-ok, my right her left whatever-was a perfect example of the saddest form of bro-dude: that too-oft spotted Post Collegiate Broseph, decked out in the attire of his Alma Mater (based on his behavior I’m guessing it was Guna Roofie U)who was attempting to impress the girls at the bar by discussing his time playing college sports and his current job “in sales”, and by throwing out incredible pick-up lines like “do you girls like athletes?” I mean, come ON, girls, that’s a mating call on par with the Beastie Boys’ Ad Rock calling out his is ultra-nasal voice “HEEEEY LAAAADIIIIIIES”-what self-respecting woman ISN’T going to drop panty at that?

The clincher, though, the ultimate win, was when Mr Athlete BroDude (Jr.) was attempting to explain to the bar(while doing the absolutely opposite of holding court, mind you) his perspective on dating. “Women in NY only like jerks,” he said disdainfully, “so I’ve had to become a jerk.”

Right, like that’s been a difficult change, braphistopheles .

(Sorry, temporary break-pilot just announced that “thanks to a nice lil’ tail wind” we’re going to be landing in NY about 30-40 minutes early. This basically means I have to pick up the pace writing this because, let’s face it, if I don’t finish this on the plane and post it tonight it’s never going to get written. See also: my memoir. See also: my novel. See also: everything else ever.)

Continuing on with his anti-NY women rant and his attempt at explaining his shitty fucking attitude, Airport Bar Bro (III) said, and I quote here: “let me give you an analogy, ladies: fish don’t like steak.”

See, that? THAT IS A BAD ANALOGY. ALSO NOT A FUCKING ANALOGY.

Anyway.

So, my sort-of homecoming. My Labor Day weekend excursion with K. My past few days.:

Relaxing. Exhilarating. Drunk. Happy.

Saturday was spent entirely at the Decatur Book Fest. After thinking momentarily about possibly hopping in to join the lecture by Charlaine “True Blood” Harris, the sight of the line, to get in, a couple of blocks long, shut that idea down.

As such, after seeing Zach read from Anointed to a decently-sized crowd (as he told me later he almost said: “It’s really nice to read to a group of people who haven’t already heard this.”), I took K on a walking tour of the Decatur Square-which, truth be told, has slowly gone downhill in the time since I’ve seen it. Things had been shaky with businesses coming and going since before Wordsmiths opened, but in the time since the bookstore closed it seems a few central focal points, including Saba and the Wordsmiths building itself, have emptied and remained so.

(The new Atlas Sound album, Logos, is playing in my Ipod right now. I think I’m falling in love with the sun-kissed bubbly goodness, but I worry about this album as winter approaches New York. I wonder if I’ll have the time and the mood to love it as I begin switching stuff like it out for Julian Plenti and other darker, more ominous sounds.)

The prevailing mood of the Square and of the entire book fest was one of merriment, and so, despite the tightness in my chest that arose from seeing the building that once house Wordsmiths still empty, I let myself get swept up in it. And in the alcohol. Jesus Christ. We. Fucking. Drank. A. LOT.

(Shock.)

Twain’s Pub, a Decatur mainstay/the sight of my going away party was a major part of Saturday and Sunday, as both night friends came and went and beers (I KNOW WTF I DRANK BEER Y’ALL)came and went and I have never felt more grateful for the family I’ve assembled of my own choosing.

Sunday, after finally visiting Athens vegetarian standard The Grit for the first time ever, my friends, K and I went to the GA town of my birth-Marietta-to accomplish a few things.

One: to see the Big Chicken.

Two: to visit the trailer park I grew up in.

I keep getting my Big Chicken history twisted. For the longest time, apparently, I’ve been operating under the misapprehension that the Big Chicken itself (actually a giant landmark atop an operating Kentucky Fried Chicken “quickserve” food establishment…to, uh, put it nicely) was erected as a grotesque monument to a lynching.

Um…I was wrong. Sorry, y’all.

The trip from the Big Chicken to the trailer park I grew up in-on, as one of my friends so conveniently put it, on the “aptly-named” Powder Springs Road-was one of constant pressure on my throat. Having not been back there, having not gone to what I guess normal human beings are supposed to consider “home”, in many, many years, seeing the area remain basically unchanged, a fucked-up dreamless time capsule of unrest and apathetic lethargy-snapped me to attention and snapped my nerve endings, too.

There are pictures and they are here and that is all I have to say other than they are courtesy of K:

(The Big Chicken)

(what is now in the space of the trailer I grew up in)

(...)

So, on the flight back-an incredible, relaxed, amazing weekend, seeing the loved ones I’ve come to consider my real family again, eating far too much wonderful food and drinking far too much and exposing K to southern culture the proper way-you know, like the fact that you can’t ask a Waffle House waitress to seat you and your "party of 4"-made for an absolutely perfect trip.

But also…also…something I came to realize very, very early Saturday:

I think...I think…I know…I know now. I now know. That I would have eventually left the south anyway. There’s something about the pace, the pull the constant fucking challenge of New York that’s been racing throughout my heart and my brain since K and I left Friday evening. And I love my friends (who, as I’ve said, are my family), and I love the work I did, we did, in the city of Decatur. I love what’s still going on. But I also know that the amount I’ve fallen in love with New York can’t be competed with.

It took seeing Decatur again, in and for all that is, for that to register fully.

And so now I return, and in about half an hour K and I will touch the tarmac of La Guardia. I have work to do: I owe Collin Kelley and Karen Head book reviews and interview questions. I have a lot of emails to catch up on. I have unpacking to do, and tshirts-purchased from the Book Fest and from my beloved Little Shop of Stories, honestly the best kids book store anywhere-to wash/wear.

"I have unpacking to do." I wish that sounded poetic enough for a last line here. It doesn’t, though, does it? I had hoped that, on this flight, I'd end up with some sort of emotionally wrecking revelations from the past four days-instead, I find a happy, sleepy, tired sort of peace. Or maybe that's the onset of the worst fucking hangover I've ever had.

So hey-thanks, Decatur, for the evenings and the stumbling and the picking back up and the laughs and for being everything you are. And I will, in fact, see you again.

Homeward Bound 2: 2 Fast 2 Furious

2009-09-04T06:07:00.000-07:00

You Can Never Go Home Again has been on my shelf forever, but I've never read it. As such, when I, like most people, quote the title, it comes with only the barest working knowledge of the story contained inside.

In a matter of hours, I'll be returning to Atlanta after making my home elsewhere for the second time in my life. The first was after I made an ill-fated relocation to Las Vegas, which saw me returning life asunder and tail between my legs.

This time, though, things are a little different-as in, this time I won't end up in a tortured relationship that finds me writing bad high school-ish poetry on the floor of an apartment that isn't mine at 4am while watching the Grey's Anatomy season finale on repeat. When my friend/former boss/in some weird ways authorclient of mine Zach Steele ended up in the Decatur Book Festival, it was pretty much a guarantee I'd be heading south for Labor Day.

Add into that the opportunity to, as a birthday present, show The South to a dear friend who has probably never been further south than, say, Philadelphia (sorry, but Florida doesn't count as "The South", not in quotes and with capital letters and sweet tea and 'y'all' and hats and gloves and fried chicken/porch swings/girls named Mary wearing dresses that blow in the breeze when screen doors slam...and shit like that. What? That's not your "The South"?), and, basically, you have a labor day weekend extravaganza. Seeing the Big Chicken. Eating a biscuit. Walking really, really slowly. What better way to celebrate the holiday that we Americans know is in honor of the time, in 1849, Christopher Columbus sailed across the pacific to bring pear trees to the Native Americans.

Shut up. I went to a public high school in Marietta.

That's the other thing, too-in Georgia, I always felt like I was very much NOT southern, but after moving to NY I'm fully aware of the eccentricities that part of the country bred into me-you know, like how I like my tea sweet and my women quiet.

Kidding.

About the tea.

(not kidding about the tea)

I wish I could quote Flannery O'Connor here, but I'm fighting a serious sleeping pill hangover, so forgive my lack of hyper-literary southern gothic whatthefuckever, the point is this:

I haven't stepped foot in Georgia since March 27 of this year. Things have changed for everyone. Let's see how this goes. This is, basically, "Russ Goes Home Again Take 2" or something, and it's a little emotional to me. In 2009 I saw Wordsmiths and a major relationship in my life come and go and left a bunch of friends and a handful of really good bands behind (though I'm doing my damndest to relocate the bands...what, friends come and go but Tealights are forever!), and honestly I'm not even sure the depths to which the daily fight that is being on the grind in NYC has changed me. Some, maybepossibly? Not sure. I'm not the one to judge that.

So in a few hours, we depart for the awesome wonderland of a shitshow that is flying into Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, and I leave you and end this opening missive with my book list for the trip:

The Time Traveler's Wife (there's a reason behind this, and no I won't tell you if you don't already know)

The Secret History (nope, haven't read it)

Tao Lin's Shoplifting From American Apparel

a loved-up, dog-eared copy of Karen Head's Sassing

and, what I'm reading now: a gift from Unbridled Books that my lawyers have advised me not to discuss. It's so good though, y'all.

And, with that...hey, Georgia, how you doin'?

Open Letter #1.

2009-08-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

Dear New York:

It's been a while since we had a real conversation, hasn't it? Last time we talked I don't really think it ended well, and we both decided to give it some time-a few months, if my memory recollects correctly, and until the year's end to be specific-and then revisit this relationship and see how things were working.

At the time, New York, I came to you like a lapsed Catholic, only seeking solace in confession when things were going wrong. I would pound the pavement of your stone heart and beg for something, anything, to give, for a handhold or a foothold or just the opportunity for one night to fall asleep with a peace in my heart and in my head.

I was told I shouldn't openly write about or discuss how you were kicking my ass, New York. That it, that my search for some sort of truth or lesson in the experiences I was having, was making me look bad. I only bring this up (I didn't care then and I care less now) because there was talk, whispered hushes that we'd engage in particularly when I was drunk and sad, feeling lost and adrift in a sea of lights and movement that neither welcomed me nor rejected me but rather, as though in full awareness of my life's biggest fear, acted with utter apathy towards my existence, of us parting ways for good. You and I had decidedly amicably and with little fanfare that, at the end of 2009, if we couldn't make this twisted, fucked-up relationship that vacillates from love to hate and back 'round again work, I was going to cut my losses and leave. You'd get to keep what was rightfully yours-namely, everything (though what I didn't tell you then and I hesitate to even tell you now is that you weren't at all aware you'd recently taken ownership of my heart, though I'm willing to bet the stars in my eyes give that game away), and I'd go-well, hell, we never got that far, did we? I'm a runner, as in I like to be able to, and an escape artist of sorts, and I like my opt-outs and my clauses and I've become adapt at skirting out of parties with a "I just need to...I'll be right back" only to retreat to safe grounds of my choosing.

With you, New York, there is no safe ground, and nothing's easy. Being in a relationship with you is fucked up and sado-masochistic in a way, but not without its rewards. I used to swear by the Atlanta skyline at night (particularly when driving into the city with Outkast playing), but in 5 months yours has won me over.

In 5 months, New York, I've lived a lifetime of adventures, good and bad. And when, after meeting a friend/soon-to-be vlog partner for drinks in Brooklyn this week, I hailed a car to take me back to Astoria. When the driver somehow thought "Astoria" meant "Babycakes" and I ended up deep in Manhattan (cough cough WRONG WAY cough), I slammed my palm against the window and sighed, heavily, "I just fucking want to be home."

I only bring this up because today is my last day in the apartment which has acted as harbor for me for the entirety of our time together, New York, and not for the reasons I'd ever thought. I'm moving, yes, but just down the road-you see, I find Astoria agreeable to me. Yes, New York, it's where I feel like home.

Home. I've lived a nomadic fucking life, New York (one of my favorite Ani Difranco quotes: "I don't keep much stuff around/I value my portability"), and I have to ask:

who the fuck are you to wrap yourself around my brain and my heart and suddenly, without me even knowing, become my definition of "home"?

You've taught me gratitude, New York, in our 5 months together. So much has happened, so much magic and wonder and fucked-up shit and beauty and did I say magic already because magic. You've taught me some debts-like what I owe all those who opened their lives to me-will never be repaid simply because they can't be, there's no currency, tangible or not, in the world that can come close to functioning on that level.

In the past 5 months, I've achieved successes I never thought possible, and felt myself dropped to levels that, though I would love to never again reach, I know I'll approach again. I was never one to wax poetic on a city, New York, but I can do nothing but credit you for the good and the bad. For the rise and the fall, and the rise again. I moved from feeling like everything was crumbling around me in Atlanta to a couch in Queens through the grace of friends, and that one simple act has taught me the definition of "friendship". And now? Now my life just keeps going...and growing.

Between my freelance work and my full-time work, New York...I've clawed, tooth and nail, and I feel like I'm on something. The cusp of something. And I know we'll fight again. But, New York, as I pack the last of my stuff for a move I never dared to dream could happen, namely one that wasn't me leaving you for good? I just have to offer you up a word of thanks. I know now I can never conquer you, but tiny victories inside your boundaries are possible on a daily basis. This is my last day on 24th Ave, New York. And god, what a beautiful, humbling, unexpected experience it's been. And I know there's more.

Fuck you, New York. I love you. And thank you.

Love,

-Russ

2009-06-29T14:41:00.001-07:00

This blog, like everything else, is changing.

Watch.

If it is to BEA...

2009-05-27T05:20:00.000-07:00

All right, folks, I'm off to Book Expo America, aka #BEA09, aka "I wonder how many free books I can stuff into various pockets".

Watch for my liveblog of the conference at BabyGotBooks, and hopefully I'll see you at the "people's party" (Publisher's Lunch)/the "new media afterparty" (other places)/"damn, this was some work"(everyone involved)-the BEA Tweetup

Worker Bee Thousand

2009-05-19T07:03:00.000-07:00

I am busy with stuff.

Here is a list of that stuff.

In the words of the great Arthur Dent, "I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle." For someone seeking full-time employment (or, as I've come to say, "going in-house somewhere"), I am seriously, seriously busy.

First: this Saturday, May 23, the second monthly Resonator Magazine live music showcase in Manhattan takes form of: RESrawk!

All the info is here, the facebook event (complete with sheep-drinking-from-water-fountain flyer) is here, and my interview with Elizabeth Elkins, of Ghost of Summer Suns & The Swear, is here .

Then: Book Expo America, and the BEA Tweetup. Info's here.

Finally, I'm involved in the 140 Character Conference on Twitter.

OH WAIT-one last thing (like Steve Jobs says):

"Just Working On My Novel"

this is why i have not written a thousand words on tori amos. yet.

Unn-plugge'd

2009-05-15T07:19:00.000-07:00

Edited, from an email I sent this morning to my dear friend, aka the person who is responsible for me not being homeless in NY:

I have pushed myself, in the past day or so, to the point of two nervous breakdowns, one at one point where I was convinced that I've made the absolutely worst mistake possible, that New York hates me, that you hate me, that the rest of my friends hate me, and that I need to get the fuck out-move to ******, work at ***** for 22k a year and just live a miserable life.

I then...got really sick, and cried listening to the new Tori Amos album on repeat like five times.

So basically my last 24 hours have been akin to my high school experience, only at that point in my life I'd have induced the vomiting myself.

(It's worth noting that now's when I should repeat to myself "Panini Time")

It's not that things are bad-they aren't. I just feel like my parachute's the wrong color, like my cheese has been moved, like despite all my rage I may or may not be a caged rodent.

And so I am spending the next few days (gasp) offline. Disconnecting. Unplugging like I was Natalie Merchant, you guys were all the 10,000 Maniacs and this was MTV.

Basically hibernating and not being on the fucking internet and gathering my pieces back to center.

This may or may not include binging on the Tori Amos' Abnormally Attracted To Sin, it may or may not include my first trip to Coney Island. It will not include hot dogs.

Friends, Romans, Clients: you've all been notified. BEA is coming up, I have a bunch of projects that begin on Monday, and oh, next weekend is the next Resonator Magazine party.

So,if I were to not do this, I'd probably, by the middle of next week, end up shivering in a corner mumbling "Pinkberry BEA Pinkberry BEA" over and over again, drooling on myself and listening to Bat For Lashes on repeat.

So-no fbook. No twitter. Zilch.

When I return, I'll probably write like 18,000 words on the Tori album. You're stoked like the fires in my heart, I know.

(Oh, and you should read this. I wrote it for Creative Loafing's Summer Guide, and apparently it's really, really good. I don't know, I just realy like Meat Loaf. I intend on one day making my karaoke debut with my rendition of "I Would Do Anything For Love".)

Don't think it's slipped my attention that I blogged about not being online.

Sure I'm sober, sure I'm sane

2009-05-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

It's funny, when I set out to try and post something here-to bring context to what's going on with me, in New York, right now (because my life is so damn riveting-no, really, it is, it's more than a collection of unread book galleys and empty wine bottles, but if one was to snapshot any unspecified moment you'd think otherwise-or maybe that's just my creeping self-doubt that cripples me and keeps me from writing. It's way easier to think the former, though, because it negates any sense of personal responsibility to this blog), it hasn't worked as of late.

And then I woke up this morning with a melancholy in the back of my throat, like the natural progression of sinus congestion or too much crying (or, yeah, too much red wine). The flurry of Facebook status updates reminded me of what day it is-Mother's Day (or is it Mothers' Day? Are we celebrating the royal, ultimate, Platonic concept of Mother, or is that too pagan/hippie/Ani Difranco concert and granola-shoes for mass consumption?). That explained it. And, like a pensive teenage girl just informed that I can't go to the Tokio Hotel concert with my BFF Jill, I've run to my blog to sort it out.

There are two holidays that rip me up and under, front-to-back but gently and only on the inside, as though my emotions were trying to speed forward over those road spikes used to prevent cars from being stolen off of rental lots.......and those two holidays are Christmas and today. Granted, you could be argue the relative importance of each of those is, well, just that, relative-societally constructed, greeting-card-company-manufactured and all that Freakenomics Free-Market Major/Finance Venture Capitalist minor crap that has my eyes glass over when it comes up as a bar topic.

I mean, first off, you'd be right, and secondly I once got through three interviews to do copywriting and marketing for a not-going-to-be-named greeting card and gifts manufacturer, and in the course of those three interviews I realized that I would, in fact, love nothing more than to spend the rest of my life writing

(outside flap)"So you're six" (inside) "PICK UP STICKS...AND HAVE A GREAT BIRTHDAY!" (picture of clown holding chocolate cake with bunny on head)

and churning out cheap clichéd joy and cards for bridge club ladies to take to their ill friends in lieu of actually caring.

I can, in fact, mentally acknowledge that Mother's Day is all fluff, hype and marketing, just like Valentines Day, Greek Easter and the band Passion Pit. That doesn't stop the simple fact from sinking to the pit of my stomach every Mother's Day that I don't have a mother.

Ok, that's not exactly true-I mean, obv. I have a mother. Semen and eggs and all that shit, right? In the words of Jay-Z, explaining the birds and the bees:

"I was conceived
by Gloria Carter and Agnes Reeves
who made love under a sycamore tree
which makes me
a more sicker MC"

(hah, sycamore/more sicker. get that? God I love him)

I'm not a freak of nature (well, at least not in the "not born of human mother" sense...but wait, her womb was "untimely ripped"...which means, if I was Scottish, I could kill Macbet...I mean, "that Scottish play"), and my mom didn't give some sort of virgin birth. But, in terms of actual maternal figure-someone I can call on, someone I can write to, someone I even know the actual physical street address of-non-existent in my life. And sometimes-not always, not often, not really ever other than when it's waved in my face when I'm trying to shop for bread and the fucking Key Foods keeps the greeting cards, paper products and rat traps on the same fucking aisle-that fact presses a little, just enough, into that space in my chest between my ribs and makes it hard to breathe.

My mom was a single parent after my birth father, a Spaniard, fled this country for his own immediately upon learning of my conception (man, writing it like that fucks with my head-"the dude who fathered me left the United States when he found out that I was a concept"? That's how that reads to me). After weighing the options basically deciding that abortion, like a bud light, tasted great AND was less filling, my fate had seemingly been decided...until my grandparents stepped in and offered to raise me for my mom.

For my mom, possessing a dull wit, a rebellious, partying nature, a weirdly fucked-up affinity to adhere to Catholicism and nothing more than a high school degree, this was the ideal situation.

For a while, my mother and I lived with my grandparents, in a doublewide trailer in Marietta, Georgia, which is just like Atlanta only stupider, fatter and with more bacon-grease. This arrangement allowed my mother to come and go as she saw fit, and "as she saw fit" was defined by essentially sleeping until mid-afternoon and then immediately heading out with a different guy every night.

My grandparents (who had their own issues, but that's a therapy session/blog for another time) didn't take kindly to what they saw as my mother's, um, abject fucking refusal to do a damn thing with her life? Yeah, let's call it that. So, they kicked her out, with the understanding that she and my grandparents would share custody of me-my mom would get me on weekends, and, during the week, my grandparents would keep me and she'd look for work.

I remember the first apartment my mother moved into mostly for the fact that it's where I developed my need for background noise in order to fall asleep. With the windows open (she couldn't afford air conditioning, and fuck you New York, you think you know dry, stagnant heat? Try not having A/C in the SOUTH in the summer), I'd drift off every Friday and Saturday night to the sounds of police cars and what only in my later years I realized were gunshots. Often I'd spend these nights alone in the apartment, as my mom wouldn't return from her job as a waitress at Old Country Buffet, choosing instead to go home with...well, anyone, really, I guess. I wouldn't know. I never met any of her guys. So I'd lay in her bed on weekend nights, alone, listening to the popping caps and the wails in the dank, hot night.

Once, my mom did bring a man around for me to meet. He showed either how little he'd asked or how little he'd been told about me by showing up, with her, to the apartment on a sunny Sunday afternoon, before I was to be taken back to my grandparents, with a football to "throw around".

This is way funnier if you know me, trust me. I don't "throw around" a "football". Never have. Never. Will. Plus, at this point I was fat.

I appreciated the effort, though, as my mother let bags of cheetos and MTV (the latter of which was fruit highly forbidden by my grandparents) do the majority of entertaining when I was with her. As far as throwing anything around, she preferred to throw things at me rather then with me. Sometimes, the object that got thrown was me.

Let me say this-I understand entirely my mother's position in resorting to physical abuse with me. I had been unwanted from the start, an accident (as she would tell me many times) and then a thwarted abortion. The stress of being a single parent, of working a job that paid, at best, $2 with minimal tips (coming from the fact that it was a fucking BUFFET RESTAURANT) and being saddled with the societal obligation that is the phrase "good mother". Also, she was very, very frustrated by the fact that, with my only visiting her on weekends, she wasn't really the one doing the raising of me, and as such wasn't really a contributing force on molding me into anything. The fruit of her womb was falling far from the tree as I, directed by my grandparents, fell in love with books (which she hated) and became a sissy (her words), and so she resorted to the only thing she knew to do-rather than gently mold the clay of my forming personality, she decided to pound the living shit out of it.

I can honestly say I've been hit in the face with a hairbrush more times than I can remember, and that's probably because a few of those times knocked me out. The physical abuse was really bad one specific night, when she came home from work (a little drunk, it seems) and found me not-yet-ready for bed. When I had trouble removing my shirt to put my pajamas on and asked for help, she began foaming at the mouth and raging about how I needed to be "mature" (a word she'd always pronounce as "matte-your", sounding very close to "manure"). Her anger escalating, she threw me into a dresser. Or a bookcase. Or a door? Fuck, I don't know. I remember waking up in the shower, cold water covering my head, as my mom touched my face in a gentle way that could only ever be a result, the reaction to an action that had come before-it never, ever happened unprompted.

I remember the ride to my grandparents house that night as my mom realized there was no way she could take care of me. I remember being taken to the hospital because the bleeding wouldn't stop.

Long story short, as I got older, my mother and I ceased communication. My one serious pass at therapy found my therapist confronting my mother with the fact that she'd never be a maternal figure in my life, and the best she could hope was to be my friend.

These are the memories of my mother that float under the surface, like watching fish swimming underneath a sheet of ice on a frozen pond. They're always there, but I don't really ever have to deal with them except on a day like today.

I've had girlfriends try to have me assimilate their moms into being mine. It works to varying degrees of success. The fact is, though, having grown up without a maternal figure, I tend to just genuinely appreciate the kindness.

(I had one girlfriend who actually told me I needed to fix my family so that she and I could get married. Suffice to say, I bolted the fucking shit out of that relationship.)

Child abuse stories, shattered families, etc, are a dime a dozen. If one was to gather up mine and nine others, you'd be able to get soda from a vending machine. There's more to all of this, little facets and fragments and pieces that fall out of the boxes that I've put on the shelves inside me, like emotional packing peanuts. The last time I spoke to my mother was in 2006. She called to tell me she'd lost her job as a waitress at a steakhouse, and wanted to know what, at 47, she should do with her life, because she didn't want to "end up a failure" like me. Her words. I didn't quote the last bit because, well, ok, here's the exact wording, sticklers:

"I don't want to end up a failure like you."

And then she probably said my full name, Russell, to ensure that I was aware she specifically meant me. Her son. The failure.

I hung up. I cried. And that was it.

So when I made the decision to move to New York, I debated: do I tell her that I'm leaving the state? The only address she'd had for me for years was Wordsmiths, having seen my name associated with it in the paper many times (which, ahem, is nothing but a testament to my own major awesomeness at promotion), and I wondered-what if? What if she dies? What would I say-like Tracy Bonham, would I just be "calling to say hello"? What if she's right-I'm unemployed. I'm a failure. She won. What if. What if. What...

and then I realized I just...didn't care. That part of me, where a mom goes, isn't "hollow" or "empty"-it's just non-existent. If there was once a pot hole there, it's been paved over for so long the entire thing has grafted together naturally.

It feels like this is a conversation I've been having a lot lately, that of family and origin and and and Wolverine? No not Wolverine. But of family. I blame the conversation I had with Evan Mandery the other week for uncorking the bottle of ponderance that I'm still pouring out.

So no, I don't have a mother's day card for my mom. I don't know where she is or how to get in touch with her, and I really have no desire to. I have friends that have sweat and bled for me in my life that are across the country that I neglect, never call or write to-what moves my mother higher up than they on the list of people who should get my attention simply because she birthed me?

Now that I've said all of this, my hands are literally shaking in nervousness to hurry me on to say the following:

In Heartbreaking Work, Dave Eggers wrestles with the idea of his personal pain making him special, elevating him to a higher level. I'm the opposite: I do not think any of my familial bullshit makes me any better, worse, or different from anyone else. This is not art. This is everyone's story, everyone has that weird list of things that, if this was Dungeons and Dragons, would be easily listable on a character sheet. I'm just -10 family, really, and I don't regret it. It's not some party-killer, the thing that gets dropped like a bomb at a bar and sends everyone scattering (that's a terminal disease, not my useless fucking family). I've learned self-reliance as a result. And, frankly, if that's her one lasting gift to me (other than an affinity for substances and a fear of everything I ever love leaving me), forced or not? It's the best thing I ever could have been given.

And to those of you who have mothers-loving mothers, who you hate sometimes and who frustrate you to ponder murder sometimes but who you could, who you can, go home to? Hug them. Fuck it-yes it's a Hallmark holiday, so hug them tomorrow, too.

And yeah. Everything's fine.

Under a sheet of rain in my heart

2009-05-05T10:47:00.000-07:00

I can't stop listening to this song, and, despite David Letterman's utterly inane not-story, I think this may be the definitive version.

Seriously, Bat For Lashes (and you all have to forgive me, I didn't pay attention to Natasha "B4L"'s first record, so I've spent much of this year calling her collective BatS, plural, For Lashes...not "Bats Plural", just "Bats". Sort of like how it's not "Mister Manager", it's just "manager") has one of the greatest futuretro albums I've heard in 2009-Two Suns is beautiful and heart-wrenching and witchy, like a freakfolk-doused Stevie Nicks/Kate Bush amalgam. I can replay the entire thing endlessly for hours and get lost.

(I know, I know, a real update is coming here soon).

Blog-hopping

2009-04-21T08:02:00.000-07:00

Ok, in my ongoing quest to have a venue to bitch about what irks me in every corner of webspace, I just turned in my first post for Creative Loafing's Culture Surfing blog.

And it's about Dan Brown.

Also, I penned my bimonthly entry for A Good Blog Is Hard To Find. Like all the best things, that piece is entirely about me.

One of my favorite albums this year so far is Telepathe's Dance Mother, a jerky, jilted electronic storm, and I wrote a little on it for Resonator Mag.

Last but not least, I most recently talked about sex, bodily functions and a new literary hottie over at BabyGotBooks.

It is my goal to translate net-ubiquitousness to money. Stay tuned for how that happens (it won't).

And when it was good, it was really really good. And when it was bad...

2009-04-19T06:26:00.000-07:00

...So, I had this experience, making a Babycakes run before the REStart show last Saturday, which apparently is commonly shared schema for New York amongst most people who've lived here for any extended period of time:

In the cold, blustery, where-the-fuck-is-the-wicked-fucking-witch torrential downpour of rain that is, apparently, the ONLY setting New York has for liquid precipitation (like, what, there's no gentle summer rain here, is there? Oh, right, that's called a "southern rain" for a reason...), as I (kinda grossly, considering the weather) happily jaunted along my way in the nasty, nasty weather, anxious for my Babycakes fix and to be the vessel which provided it for others, my umbrella, apparently deciding that it did not, in fact, want to do the one fucking function it was created for, flipped inside out.

At that moment, I knew not only how Joan of Arc felt but also what it must have been like to find out and actually care that Milli Vanilli were fake-everything true and dear about the way the world operates, good and bad, right and wrong, soycheese and all, had been, literally, turned inside out.

Oh god, bad pun. Ready for another?

...
...
...
...
...

Blame it on the rain.

Told you. Anyway, so...

So after talking to Suzan and Choyce, my Resonator Mag co-conspirators and, more importantly, people who do this New York shit every day and have been doing so for a while, I discovered that this whole "umbrella making itself stupid and useless" thing happens pretty regularly, and is, in fact, a major deterrent from spending, say, $55 on a Madonna 2008 Tour Umbrella (not that I would, mind you, but I know a guy).

This, to me, was just one more unexpected twist in a script that I'm sure is being shopped around, tagged "southern boy who isn't really all that southern, or doesn't think he is, moved to the big city and says stuff like 'this sure is pretty' and 'all the flashy lights' and 'do y'all have Firefly Sweet Tea vodka' and 'what do you mean the Yeah Yeah Yeahs show is sold out?', and everyone laughs". Maybe I'm old-fashioned, maybe I'm just a good ol' boy at heart who on a daily basis misses cornbread and laughs at Larry The Cable Guy jokes (I am particularly fond of the one where he objectifies women and insinuates that all blue-collar southern workers are beer-swilling wife-beating belching trailer trash,that one's really hilarious), but where I come from umbrellas do one damn thing and they do it well.

Umbrellas as disposable product, like toilet paper, tampons or books (oh, sorry, too soon? Too soon)? That's not something I can fully support. Also, it kinda freaks me out to think that something that I only used once or twice in my life in Atlanta (seriously, I'm not a fan of sunglasses or umbrellas, though god that Rihanna song kinda haunts this entire post so far, hm?) is now constantly on my mind in New York:

"Should I take my umbrella? Will I leave my umbrella? Did I lose my umbrella? Is that bar playing 'Umbrella?'"

(ok, there's your one reference to it. Sorry, had to.)

Finally, though, Suzan made a comment that resonated (get it, Resonator Mag, resonated, ha ha it's funny ok I give up):

"Living in New York is so awesome", she said, "that God has to punish the people who live here daily." I think she then compared umbrellas turning inside-out to the MTA.

Despite the layer of snarkcasm frosting the comment, it really, really struck me how damn lucky I am to be living in New York. It's something that just, I guess, kind of gets glossed over when I complain about stuff like cafes not having wi-fi. Like, I wrote about that as opposed to writing about how, say, I got to meet Maud effing Newton.

And I guess...I guess I wanted to put something down about the positives. It all kind of hit me last night, when I made my first trek to Bergen St Comics, a place I plan on frequenting often. It's been far too long since I've had a real comic shop or the impetus to actually completely geek out inside one, and Bergen St kinda unleashed that, to the point where I actually got down on my hands and knees to flip through the collected set of Alan Moore's run on Wildcats.

I'll shut up with the geekdom, sorry.

The point, though, is when I was introduced to one of the owners (courtesy of Bookavore, who happens to be manager at what's quickly become another favorite place of mine, Greenpoint bookstore Word)as a new NYC transplant, she casually brought up the New York Magazine "Arrivals" article that I (to a middling extent) was a part of. When I mentioned that, the conversation reached the inevitable point of the question "so, how's New York treating you so far?"

When I gave my honest answer of "well, other than trying to find a full-time job, it's gorgeous and glorious and hard and frustrating and I love every second of it", I realized, right then, that the truth that I'm living doesn't always necessarily come out in this blog. That, like, yeah, I'm cobbling myself together on freelance work and staying with friends. That, yes, I'm seeking a full-time job like whoever it was in that Madonna movie was seeking Susan (I dunno, never seen it).

But by the same token, I've made friends and have seen things and have done things and am in the process of doing things, living things, that I never, ever, ever thought possible. And maybe it's the fact that it's the third consecutive gorgeous day in a row in New York. Maybe it's the fact that my coffee this morning was really good. Maybe it's the fact that I just listened to that one Coldplay song. You know, that one. YES, that one. But, right now, right at this very moment, yeah-New York is cruel and heartless and mean and absolutely lovely and I know I will at some point call this statement right now premature but I will then go back later and say no it wasn't and I'll probably vacillate on it for the rest of my life but at my center will know I mean this, this right now:

I am kinda falling in love with New York. Little by little. And sometimes, the fact that I've had a job of some sort pretty much since I was 15, constantly basing my worth and my sense of purpose, happiness and well-being around that and nothing else but that, clouds my ability to seriously sit down and say things like "this, right now, is fucking amazing" or "last night, just being out with people I can talk to about how the way to save publishing is through _____ (it changes nightly)" or "oh my hellish damn god that is Lemony Snicket". The flurry, the exchange of ideas and the pace and the constant motion and and and and I think this is what, when I was in high school, I'd always hoped college would be (it wasn't). And yes, it's harsh and cruel but damn it if I don't think it is, and shall continue to be, worth it. And it's funny how one revelatory moment in an awesome comic shop made me realize that yes, indeed, I am falling for New York. Hard.

I mean, I see that sign pretty much every day. How could I not be falling for NY? Panini time? Yes PLS.

When I lost my job at Wordsmiths and people heard I was moving to New York to find work, I bristled at the number of times the word "congratulations" came up-as though everyone was seemingly unaware that, in what was my ideal world, I wouldn't, in fact, be moving. That there was absolutely nothing to congratulate me on. I saw myself as an unemployed loser sleeping on a couch and hoping to make something of himself in a city that eats people daily.

Maybe, just maybe, I'm starting to get it now.

Henceforth, when I lose my shit, when I become emotionally unhinged at the seams and begin taking serious hacks into my own self-worth, be it over looking for or having or not having or wanting or needing whatever, I will make my new mantra "panini time", and hope it reminds me of this, right here and right now.

Y So Wifiless

2009-04-16T15:04:00.000-07:00

I realize that, in terms of recent entries on here, I'm jumping in chronology a bit by talking about something that just happened, like a topic that I'm still in the process of relieving the resulting back tension from. But I feel it is vital, and urgent, and vitally urgent, that I allow the universal governing force, GodBuddhaStalinBono,to use me as its mouthpiece and speak out on the single biggest plague facing New York right now...

NO FUCKING INDEPENDENT COFFEESHOPS HAVE WIFI!

Not to turn into Jerry Seinfeld (but, I mean, really, fuck is the deal with airline food, for real?) here, but this is the third consecutive time I've had to claw, kick, bite and spit in Manhattan to sit down in a cafe, open my laptop and get any sort of work done. I genuinely don't understand what the hell New York freelancers do with their days, but I guarantee you one thing: my ventures into the coffee wilderness here have yielded nothing but shoulders rubbed raw from my laptop back, fractured emotional nerves and weird debit card charges from my assuming a cafe has wi-fi, buying a latte and then tossing it only to find out that I have to trudge on to another coffeeshop because the one I'm at has no public internet. I then, at the next stop on my "tour of indie coffee places", buy ANOTHER latte (since I wouldn't DARE enter one indie with another's beverage), sit at a table and find the exact same problem-no wifi.

Eventually, I just end up at Starbucks. I've actually upped my T-Mobile/Blackberry plan to include a monthly T-Mobile HotSpot plan since this eventual Evil Coffee Empire endpoint seems unavoidable, and, frankly, I've lost too many potentially productive days to inept New York coffee shops.

Yup, inept. Sorry. In this economy (oh my god he said the phrase!), any independent of any breed whatsoever needs support. I'll agree with that. But they also need to, regardless of what type of store it is-sporting goods, books, coffee, cream cheese sculpture-foster a sense of community. This is something my initial read on New York had me praising. The neighborhood bar that my friend with whom I'm currently staying took me to in Astoria had wifi.

A bar! With wifi! Where I come from (Y'allsville Cornbreadnation, I mean, erm, Atlanta), that's unheard of. "What community", I thought. "What a fostering of brand loyalty in what's truly the global economy that's contained within New York."

Yeah, calling bullshit on myself for that one. I think I spoke too soon.

Every indie coffeeshop in New York that doesn't have WiFi is begging for the steamroller of Starbucks to come through and crush it. For everyone one B Cup Cafe that I've found, where I'm invited in, given a slip of paper with the WiFi password and thusly positioned myself to stay a few hours (spending money as I do so), there are a billion others-every other one, really, that I've encountered-where this simple acknowledgement of what the cafe/coffeeshop/whateveryoucall it is at this moment in time-less a venue for the "perfect cup of coffee" and more a thirdspace. Not work, not home, but a location away from either and made to feel reminiscent of both and oh, shit, I just regurgitated Starbucks' marketing material, didn't I?

Hm. Food for thought, innit?

All I know is this: when Wordsmiths, which never in its time actually achieved the cafe that it wanted (and perhaps that could have changed things, perhaps not), was in the initial planning stages, there was never even a question that part of its commitment to community-building and relationship-fostering would necessitate wifi and comfortable seating. This "get the hell in and get the hell out" attitude that seems pervasive of so many independent coffee shops, restaurants and, sadly, bookstores (I can name one book store specifically, in Atlanta, that is the single least-friendly establishment ever created, ever, like the Roman Coliseum was more hospitable) right now signals to me that this idea of community is falling by the indie wayside into the gutter, to be picked up and capitalized on by those who pay attention. Unfortunately, most of those who are paying attention in my field of vision are the Starbucks, the McDonalds (they all have free wifi), the Popeyes Chicken (ditto). In the words of the great 12th Century metallurgist and poet James Hetfield, "it's sad but true".

So, c'mon, indie coffee joints, step your game up. You can justify, as one of my favorite indie coffee places in New York that actually doesn't have wifi but that does have cupcakes provided by the comedienne who is unaware that I've adopted her as my mother does, that to invoke the beckoning call of "free wireless internet" would only encourage customers to camp out all day (some not actually ever even engaging in the act of commerce with the establishment, thus not really counting as a "customer" at all). I can understand that logic, I can. For the record, every venue I plop myself to pilfer the wireless net-tubes gets some of my hard-earned government-provided unemployment check, because, well, I've been on the side of the indies. I cried at the loss of an indie that put my blood, sweat and tears into. I root for the underdog. And, well, I'm a socialist.

But Jesus H Christonacross, do you really think that "oh, people might come and stay" is a valid point for not providing a service? Also, do I have to illustrate what seems painfully obvious to capitalist me-the longer people stay, the more they will either need more of or may possibly need for the first time the goods you purvey. Isn't making a first-time customer of someone who's taken up nothing but ass-space and oxygen in your establishment (and the potential of repeat business and brand loyalty from said ass-space-taker) better than never having that person come in?

I don't know. I can't answer that question. I do know this, though: until a bunch indie coffee places wise up like that Aimee Mann song, I'm going to be seeing this a lot more:

Starbucks. Third Place. Wifi. Loyalty. There's a lesson in business to be learned there.

REStart photo recap

2009-04-14T05:46:00.000-07:00

In the long list of things that I have yet to recap, Saturday's Resonator Magazine party is one of them. And now, the photo recap from the party is up. And there are some great, great photos.

Taster:

New York The First

2009-04-08T06:09:00.000-07:00

Oh, hello, I didn't see you there.

So, it would appear (in case you haven't heard) that I'm in New York. The Big Apple. The center of the universe. The place, really, where they make the salsa. But not that you'd know, dear reader (he arrived), because I haven't been blogging.

To quote Ani Difranco's banter on the Living In Clip album (a record I used to listen to obsessively before she cost me a week of my life and like 10 lbs), I walked around NY with my mouth hanging open for about three days. Though, honestly, that's a gross underestimation, because my mouth is, in fact, still hanging open.

But I'm jumping ahead of myself...

That's the one-way ticket.

(The first one-way ticket that I've ever purchased. There's something weirdly emotive and poetic in that, and I just chose to ignore it.)

To briefly recap the story of our protagonist thus far, for those who either are unfamiliar with it or (more likely) just really don't pay attention:

Moved from Atlanta to NYC to "pursue opportunities", which is polished and spit-shined verbiage for "job hunting". Staying with a dear friend in Astoria who, once I actually acquire enough funds for my own abode, will be repaid in spades. Not WITH spades, though, because really what kind of appreciative gift is a fucking garden tool?

Anyway-in the couple of weeks I've been here thus far, everything's happened in a bit of whirlwind rush, to the point where, having this massively-delayed blog being as, um, massively delayed, as it is, has only resulted in everything smearing and smudging in my brain and in my (poorly kept) notes, like so much fingerpaint on butcher paper. Rather than attempt to string this out and back together, I'm going to resort to getting this birthed through poorly-captioned cameraphone photos and brief anecdotes. So, basically, like my life.

To begin with, immediately upon landing in LaGuardia I splurged and took a cab (omg, a cab) from the airport to my friend's apartment in Astoria. Lest you raise an eyebrow at this extravagant indulgence for someone living on government cheese (what I call my unemployment benefits), realize: I was traveling with the single most obnoxious suitcase ever, as a result of me, stupidly, replacing a worn and battered carry-on suitcase with a suitcase even smaller than the original. In addition to that, I had my full-to-the-point-of-exploding laptop case. So a cab was beyond a luxury-it was a necessity for my own sanity.

Speaking of sanity, and the keeping/losing of it: I arrive at the apartment building in Astoria. I make it inside the first door. My mind turns off at the excitement of finally being able to put my heavy bags down. Also, lest you need reminding, at the excitement of being in New Fucking York, which is what the entire state is henceforth retitled.

I walk to the apartment door. I attempt to open it with the keys my friend had passed to me on my last New York trip. The door, my friends, the door-it does not open.

I can assure you, good folks, that that was the loudest not-opening door I've ever heard. My brain was screaming. I tried scratching at the locks, I tried running my debit card (credit card? What's that? Oh those things that mean you don't have to actually have money to buy things? Yeah, those are bad) through the side of the door, I stopped for a minute and checked my phone to see if I had the cellular number of either Jack Bauer or MacFuckingGyver (who gets a similar re-titling to the state of New Fucking York).

I called my friend whose apartment I was trying to get into. Who was at work. She, politely and calmly, apologized to me, explaining that, not being 100% sure she'd checked both keys before she gave them to me, my inability to open the apartment door was entirely her fault. I shushed her, we hung up, I spent another two hours clawing, crying and fighting the damn door to try to get in. I sliced the top of my right hand open from trying to force a key that didn't fit into a lock that didn't want it.

All together now-story of my life.

Finally, after having given up, restarted my assault on the apartment door, given up again, begun trying to read a book, and then repeated the entire scenario several times, I made a frantic phone call to a different NYC friend. After she calmed me (for the record, it took like every person I encountered that Friday to calm me, including, like, various homeless people), she told me that I was, in fact, in a safe area, and that I should leave my awfully-full suitcase, take what I needed, and go to Brooklyn, where I had plans that night. After confirming with my friend whose apartment I couldn't get into that she'd bring my suitcase and such inside later that evening, I left my suitcase outside the apartment door and took off, bloody hand and all, to go to Brooklyn.

(Does anyone else think "To Brooklyn With A Bloody Hand" would make a great album name?)

The next morning, I awoke to the most amazing revelation. A voicemail from my friend informing me that, amusingly, she'd found my suitcase, but that it was outside the wrong apartment. She gave me the benefit of the doubt-that I was obviously super-intelligent and knew which apartment I should've been trying to get into.

Obviously NOT, folks. OBVIOUSLY. NOT.

My very first night in New York, and I had spent two solid hours trying to get into the wrong apartment. Break into, actually. If whomever actually lives in that apartment had come home, they'd have had every single legal right to call the cops and have me arrested for attempted break-in.

Me, to New York: Let's be friends.

New York: Fuck. OFFfffffffffff.

The rest of the past couple of weeks has been a weird juxtaposition of insane, theme park ride-ish heights (running into Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler in a Starbucks) and equally insane, bipolar freakouts as a result of my inability to find a full-time job.

There was also last Friday's very, very strange and unexpected New York magazine "Arrivals" photo shoot (for new/recent arrivals to NYC), which I participated in and is sort-of online here. Excuse the fact that the quote they pulled from my written interview basically makes me look as though I'm a serious loser by trade and by choice, and also excuse the fact that the photo is basically the promotional still for my forthcoming film, "Russ Goes To Prison".

For a photo representative of that day, I much prefer this:

Yeah. New York Magazine couldn't afford real name tags that weren't mailing labels. Whatever. And whatever to the awful quote and the atrocious Nick Nolte-worthy mugshot. I haven't found a full-time job yet, I'm still imposing on the good graces of wonderful folks for a living situation, but, fact of the matter is, I am, to some extent, in an issue of New York Magazine. And, unless you're one of the two famous people who read my blog, you're not.

And, for having barely put my bag down yet? That's not too damn bad.

In terms of my recap? We'll stop there for today. There's more to come, involving fucked-up flipped-and-destroyed umbrellas, a potential mugging, and drunken DJing. But that can wait til next missive.

Now, um, about that job...

Once more into the shameless self-promotion

2009-04-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

You have a week to plan:

Further info is here. Yes, that does mean I'll be DJing.

Alive.

2009-04-02T08:10:00.000-07:00

I am, indeed, in New York. And alive-ish. Not as "so alive" as that Love and Rockets song, nor am I as alive as Frampton was (and I don't have that cool talkboxy thing that turns your guitar and voice into a robot anthem).

And I am getting sick. Apparently everything in New York is a functioning disease buffet for my southern immune system. Smallpox subways, indeed.

Don't bother clicking the "continued" link below, this is it. There's an update coming. Until then, go read this.

Last day of the Farewell Tour (the future of the future)

2009-03-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

Years ago:

I remember feeling young, free and so damn alive, driving I-85 into the bright lights of Atlanta listening to Outkast's "Cruisin' in the ATL" album interlude, having those four words (ok, three words and one abbreviation) speak to me like words dripping from the God of the Wasted, the Wild and the Unforgettable.

I couldn't yet legally buy alcohol but I was city-drunk, on possibilities, on potential, on hope and on reckless abandon.

(Strange disclosure to let the record show, vol 1 of what is sure to be many: I once made out with my improv teacher, a woman then about 20+ years my senior, on the top of the Equitable building.)

At the time, it-all of it, those cars those lights- felt like something that no one outside of this city would ever understand.

And I possessed that and turned it into something. Whether that something has legs, wheels or wings-well, that's about to be tested, now, isn't it?

Bye, Atlanta. You ate some of my dreams and gave me new ones.

I don't believe in long goodbyes, I don't believe in goodbyes at all, actually. But I feel I'd be remiss without taking a second to acknowledge the give-and-take in the relationship we've had for the past 26 years.

You gave me an almost ridiculous love for hip-hop and took my faith in the world to naturally right itself. You took my naive and impassioned love for theater and replaced it with the fledgling kernels of undying, endless self-reliance.

(also, for the record, ATL? You pumped like 8 million dollars into a PR campaign I could've improved in my sleep, but, as Tupac said, I ain't mad atcha. Wait, this is about you, isn't it, Hotlanta? I should quote a southern rapper. As such, insert all of T.I.'s "Dead and Gone" here.)

You told me there were things that would never happen, things I'd never be able to do and never be able to know, as long as I was contained within your walls, and then you offered me the opportunity to make my own path.

I'll see you again, I'm sure.

What my life is worth (last days in Atlanta)

2009-03-24T06:54:00.000-07:00

I feel like I have a massive, mad amount of catching up to do, in terms with chronicling the Amazing Adventures Of Russ As He Moves To The North (TM). Fact of the matter is, though, I feel less "amazing" at the present moment (cue a Kanye West rant from his VH-1 "Storytellers": "Russell Stovers-AMAZING. Russ Marshalek-AMAZING. Russ, you know that company that makes the stuffed animals you buy at the greeting card stores? Are they not amazing?") than I do "in stasis". Things feel weird , because every activity I engage in in Atlanta is the "last". The "last" time I'll ever go to Your (mine?) Dekalb Farmers Market, aka the Greatest Damn Place On Earth. The "last" time I'll ever walk to the Decatur square and get angry about all the happy people. The last time I'll ever say "oh, dear, this is the last time I'm..." And really, what good does any of that serve? Basically, my brain is fabricating nostalgia at this point. "Hey, remember the time I ran into the Indigo Girls while I was shopping for coffee at Target?" No, because that didn't happen. I've run into an Indigo Girl ONCE in my entire time in Decatur (a city that they, like, own, or something. Shhhh. I'm trying to tell you something 'bout my life.). My "getting sassed by Michael Stipe" quotient is like eight times that, and Stipe lives in, like, an underground cave carved to resemble an independent coffee shop somewhere below the 40 Watt in Athens, GA, right?

Right...

Anyway, things feel weird. I'm four days from landing in LaGuardia, hopefully on-time, maybe even early (yeah, right, flying out of Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is like actually attempting to coherently make your way through all of Roberto Bolano's 2666: essentially, have fun with that and call me when it's over). My entire life (six boxes of books and four of clothes) has, thanks to the child-like wondrous unicorn magic of UPS,been assigned a monetary value.

My life is officially worth $177 dollars.

I think I spent that much on the high-gravity beers that I consumed far, far too many of at my going away party...which, um, you can read about here. Basically it looked like this

only plus or minus about another 20 people throughout the course of the evening, and me seriously embarrassing myself only thrice or four times. Oh, and not all squished up due to Blogger's size restrictions. That would have sucked, huh?

(It's flattering, though, that every person I can point to in the peripheral of that photo was there for me. I mean, that's what I *think*. Some of my friends may have just been like "ooooh crap that's right Russ's thing is here....ooooooh we better say hiiiii.......dammit he saw us" etc.)

"So Russ: your life is en-route to Queens via UPS, you've had a going-away party where you basically consumed your body weight and your bank account in alcohol AND there's four days left of your time in Atlanta, what are you going to do now?"

Well, first I'mma watch Twilight. And I did. And oh, god, it was bad.

(For the record, that whole "dazzling" vampire-in-the-sun-glittering bit was WAY less impressive than it should've been. Less "dazzling", more "I think Henrietta in styling used too much body glitter on R Patz".

Also, the acting. Oh, god, the acting. There's more sexual tension in a nursing home on shuffle board day than there was between Edward and Bella.)

And second? I'm going to see one of my favorite Atlanta bands, Tealights, on Wednesday. I wrote a brief bit about that on Resonator. You should read it. There's a song there, too, It's incredibly pretty and about traveling and I am avoiding at all costs applying it to my (worth $177!) life because that would just end with me being stupidly emotional.

Too late?

Four days left and counting.

futureproofisinthepudding

2009-03-19T07:16:00.000-07:00

Not to completely overwhelm you, gentle heart, with Russ-generated content all at once, but my BabyGotBooks interview with N. Frank Daniels is up right now.

Daniels is the author of a stunning, harrowing first novel, titled futureproof. Whether you care about that or not is irrelevant; read the interview anyway, as it's one of the most blissfully candid takes on the current state of the publishing industry that you'll experience anywhere:

...More than anything because I only recently realized that the ’story’ behind futureproof’s being published was the main reason why HarperCollins decided to pursue me to publish this book.

Read the rest at BabyGotBooks.

The Old Apartment

2009-03-19T06:34:00.000-07:00

My very first girlfriend, in 10th grade(I know, right, I was a slow bloomer but I, um, flowered, or rather, deflowered, quickly...and...often? Oh, god, very veiled reference to me being a teenage slut), was a huge fan of The Barenaked Ladies. Before you go rolling your eyes at me for ever having been involved with someone possessing such mainstream oriented rock tastes, know a couple of things:

1) I really like Fleetwood Mac. So much so that I call them "Tha Fleet" both affectionately and with reverence.

2) I really, really like u2. So much so that I call them "Tha Fleet" both affectionately and with reverence. Also I really still am convinced that I can grow up one day to be Bono.

(HELLO HELLO! See, that's me practicing to be Bono.)

Besides, this was right as the Barenaked Ladies' Rock Spectacle live album was just starting to get a push, mainly on heels of that one single on there about the fat dude from Animal Collective going belly-up at a Chinese buffet, what was it called...oh, yeah, "Brian Wilson".

Anyway, Barenaked Ladies were coming to Atlanta on tour right around the time of Miss M's birthday, and so I thought, like the good puppy dog boyfriend I was at the time, I'd get tickets for us to go see them. The morning of the ticket on-sale date, I went to my local Ticketbastard affiliate (aka the grocery store across the street from the trailer park, excuse me, mobile home community) and proceeded to ask the woman behind the customer service desk for two tickets to the Barenaked Ladies.

Her mouth dropped. "Son, what you wanna see?" she asked me.

"Um, the Barenaked Ladies. Two tickets, please, to the Bare.."

I couldn't finish. She was laughing so hard tears were streaming down her face. "Y'all be wantin' to see some buttnekkid women? Charlene, Charlene get outta the office and come out here, this kid wants tickets to see some buttnekkid women!"

Needless to say, Charlene came out and also marveled at the fact that I was apparently willing to pay $25 plus service charge for tickets to see some, ahem, unclothed members of the female persuasion. They laughed. They hooted. They hollered. They slapped various parts of their very large bodies and chuckled 'til we were all red-faced. Make no mistake, though, I was not amused.

(I was also probably wearing an Indigo Girls t-shirt at the time, which makes things all the worse, always. )

The show was sold out anyway.

All of this is a roundabout way of introducing the fact that, a week and a day prior to relocating from Atlanta to New York (you know, the place they make the salsa), there are a couple of photos from my Flickr account that I need, for my own emotional sanity and mental house-keeping, to put here and caption.

Soundtracked, appropriately, by...

....the Barenaked Ladies' song "The Old Apartment"

The Old Apartment (Live Album Version) - BARENAKED LADIES

As we were cleaning out the industrial, converted-icehouse studio that had held our lives for the past 2/12 years, for me, this song kept playing in my head. A friend/excellent photographer and I recently went back to Icehouse take photos of me (everyone needs professional-quality Facebook photos, yes?), and it started up again. Probably because, like the song's narrator details, the location of past-home holds a certain romance for all the trials, tribulation and heartbreak contained therein. "Broke into the old apartment/this is where we used to live", and all that.

(SHUT UP IT'S DEEP AND MEANINGFUL RIGHT NOW TO ME)

And, despite the mom-jam status that Barenaked Ladies have, well, the song's not leaving my head any time soon.

Thing 1 and Thing 2, respectively (aka the reason for this post, aka documents submitted for your review regarding what once was):

Thing 1

A living-room dumpster scene made with all the Ikea furniture that didn't go with us. That lamp, man, if I could tell you how far that lamp has traveled with me...it's heartbreak, it's change, it's art. I call it "Merriweather Post Pavilion".

Thing 2

This, indeed, is the old apartment. Taken at 10am on the 27th of Feb, 2009. I then shut that door for the last time.

(get it, it's a metaphor?)

In the words of the Barenaked Ladies:
Only memories, fading memories
Blending into dull tableaux

It's all different from here.

Resonator Magazine presets: REStart-the birthday party

2009-03-09T11:16:00.000-07:00

One of my other projects, Resonator Magazine (which I'm one of the co-owners of and write for under my thinly-veiled pseudonym Shaun Bateman) is having a birthday party and launching a new live music monthly, about a week after I relocate to New York city:

For more info and MP3s from all involved bands, check the Res post.

A fish with a bicycle on myspace is still a fish with a bicycle

2009-03-08T05:43:00.000-07:00

I generally tend to shy away from posting about my chosen industry, that of publishing (if one can define "chosen industry" to mean something akin to what you'd call it if you keep sticking your finger into the exact same electrical socket, possibly with each new insertion choosing a different angle to approach said outlet, thinking that a new approach, a different technique, might warrant something other than heart-breaking, bone-frying shock), here. It hasn't really been much of a conscious effort, rather my world, after becoming "underemployed", has focused on three things: one, my moving, two, my chronicling of it, and three, finding a full-time job in New York, preferably even before I'm there.

In regards to the third, thanks to a spiffy resume remix by my good friend Wayne Fishell of the wayne fishell experiment and cleaning expert slash resume-rejiggerer for hire extraordinaire, I'm feeling as though what was told to me by the GA Dept Of Labor's Unemployment Office, henceforth called the "unemploymentarium", just might be true: things are looking up.

Don't know what those "things" are yet, or in what relative direction this "up" might be, but it's the name of one of my favorite R.E.M. albums so it has to be good.

About the rest: admittedly, I've not done a very good job of writing about that here, either. Improvements in timeliness and topicalness shall be made on all fronts. To wit, yesterday I fulfilled a year's-outstanding obligation and gave a lecture (I really don't like the word "lecture", it makes me feel like what I was doing was talking in harsh tones to a room full of 3 year olds about why one shouldn't eat dirt and that the poo poo should go in the poo poo place and all that...which, I mean, having taught for a few years, I can honestly say that sometimes rooms full of high school students need to be told the exact same things) on the topics, and oh yes I do mean topics, of book marketing, publicity and events in this weird age of skies falling in and books that you can read on your computer and social networks being more important than leaving the house, at the 2009 Spring Book Show in Atlanta. I put that bit in bold and put it right before the cut so that, in case you're finding this blog as a result of picking up one of my cards at the lecture, you know you're in the right place. Continuing on...

I'd initially been scheduled to talk at the 2008 Spring Book Show, but I ended up breaking the hell out of my foot (that's right, my foot had hell in it and it needed to be released) a week before, and as such I couldn't make it. This year, though, it felt pretty vital for me to wrap my head around what I was going to say-not having a post like Wordsmiths to tie my ship to or some other horse/nautical metaphor that means "not having a steady job means I need to get my ideas out in front of as many people as possible", injected a serious sense of urgency into me to make sure my points coalsced. Ask any of my former students from years ago, or, hell, anyone who has ever held a conversation with me ever-I can digress. I OWN digression.

As you can see, I was scheduled to begin right after Hollis Gillespie ended.

Now, Hollis is someone I'm a bit of a fan of. Reading her collections of very, very personal, very trashy and sometimes heartbreaking essays enlightened me as to the format I want my forthcoming memoir ("forthcoming" as in "whenever the hell I decide I'm going to write the damn thing so shut up") We Give Ourselves Habits In Order To Live, to take. Also, she's a huge draw consistently in this area for the exact reasons I listed above-trashy, heartbreaking, brilliant, successful, CONSISTENTLY PUBLISHED. That last one's key, by the way. In 2008, I was actually supposed to lecture concurrently to her, and it terrified me that I'd be speaking to a room full of those tiny glass bottles of Coke that convention centers love to fill the buffets with and nothing/no-one else. I have no comment as to whether or not that fear actually caused me to break my foot.

NO. COMMENT.

Anyway, lingering outside my classroom, going over my notes, head both in the clouds and attempting to get focused, low and behold I saw Hollis, in a rare moment of respite from book-signing/advice-giving. Without thinking, I approached her. Again, without thinking, I actually let myself speak.

"Hollis", I stammered, words falling out of my mouth accidentally like change through a hole in a coat pocket, "I...I...I'm your friend on Facebook!"

This is a nationally syndicated columnist, a best-selling author, someone who has fucking been on Jay fucking Leno for fuck's sake. Your mom's cat is her friend on Facebook, and so too probably is Tori fucking Amos.

The conversation went down hill from there as I proceeded to basically blather all over her. She took it kindly and in-stride, since I can't possibly be the only drooling idiot to ever tell her that her books have "made me think it's ok to write my story about growing up in Marietta eating ketchup off of paper plates."

I immediately had to jump, red-faced from the fan-boy moment, into a sense of authority and give my talk.

The lecture I'd prepared (and I use the word "prepared" very loosely) I titled "A fish with a bicycle on myspace is still a fish with a bicycle" as a way to frame out the thesis statement of all of my points made therein, which was this:

There's no simple solution, no easy way, no quick and fast solution to marketing yourself and your book that works for everyone, all the time, without fail. As such, authors and publishers, playing the game (which is what it is, possibly a highly-intellectual game but also one that's dirty and cutthroat) and wanting to play it well, must be ready and willing to make themselves able to play on any field, with any tools, by any means necessary, at any time.

I asked Barbara Friend Ish, who, with her Mercury Retrograde Press, is a Sci-Fi/Fantasy publisher and one of the few in the industry I've found whose ideas for utilizing new means to make reading a fully immersive and interactive experience for all involved far outweigh what current technology is capable of doing, to accompany me and offer her insights as an editor, writer and publisher. Together, we touched on a handful of points that I know we both feel are essential to the publishing world today: about the value of treating people with respect and dignity, the slow dismissal of the negative connotations of self-publishing (fuck, if Wil Wheaton's self-publishing, why shouldn't you?), and my personal feelings on how Borders is now the single most abjectly useless bookstore in existence. Mostly, though, our joint message orbited around the point that one cannot take for granted the value of relationships. With bookstores, with publishers, with publicists, with authors, the nasty, dirty, lovely game of books is all about relationships.

See, you know I mean it because I have that part in bold.

Lecture concluded, questions answered, I gave out nearly all the RussComm business cards I came with, so I feel as though it was a success. I mean, if I'd come across as an uneducated twat no one would've wanted my card, right?

I'm going to keep thinking that.

Seriously, though, I feel that a publishing shock doctrine: forcing folks to wake up into cold water and realize that the industry has changed so much that adaptations, accommodation and assimilation must be made and made immediately, that there's no time to sit and ponder the ramifications of, for instance, a Facebook page, helps way more than it hurts. But by that same token, there is not, and there will never be, one hard and fast answer to what's going to "properly promote books" or "save" publishing. Although, if one vendor at the Spring Book Show I happened to overhear is to be believed, the salvation for the entire publishing industry will come in the form of crockpot cookbooks.

The night of the eggplant parm

2009-03-01T06:00:00.000-08:00

In the past few days, I have moved. Vacated one life and am now in a holding pattern until the next begins. Scary times strange steps and a lot of the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs record holding my hand in a way the first one didn't but the last one more than did.

This is where I'd post a picture of the page from my old black spiral Mead notebook on which I scrawled, in landscape orientation (that's a little page layout humor, yo!), "I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE NOT TO GO BACK TO YOU. NO MYSTERIES.", but I got freaked out living in a moment between past and the future like that Kate Bush song says and deleted my entire old Flickr account the other night, so that picture's long fucking gone.

I don't think I have the emotional or mental reserves at the present moment to get to anything major. Too tired. Too hung over. Too much of one thing and not enough of another, with all of that being some sort of obnoxiously vague metaphor for something. I'm reaching here, people.

Rather than have this sound like a bad LiveJournal...

...I'll give a big "thank you" to the super-awesome Megan "SuperBadass" Volpert and the restorative powers of her eggplant parmesan for making the tail end of a really, really long set of days something that will eventually inspire a self-referential prose piece entirely composed as a parenthetical aside and called "(Had never really had eggplant parm before but even if I had 'twould not compare, nor shine as bright nor flicker like the firefly's tail glistening against that reflective surface, to this incredible creation of magic and wonder and OMFG IT WAS GOOD Y'ALL)".

(Side-note about parenthetical asides: an ill-executed one will fucking keep me up at night. While reading an advance copy of Jennifer Egan's The Keep, I came across a passage which was prefaced by an open parenthesis...that was never closed. Ever. Now, granted, that's why Advance Reading Copies, or ARCs in the stupid world of stupid publishing that I love so stupidly with all my stupid heart and it makes me so angry and frustrated and I even love that and anyway I digress, have gigantic slappy copy all over them reading "THIS IS AN UNFINISHED COPY. UNFINISHED. IT MEANS NOT DONE. NO ONE HAS PROOFED THIS EXCEPT FOR THE INTERN, AND WE FIRED HER THOUGH REALLY WE SHOULDN'T HAVE SINCE SHE WORKS FOR FREE AND AS SUCH IF WE POPULATED ALL OF THE PUBLISHING HOUSES JUST WITH UNPAID INTERNS WE COULD SAVE PUBLISHING"-because, um, they've not been proofed. So typos happen. Words are misspelled. The ARC I have of the forthcoming English translation of the late Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire has a bunch of oddly typeset underscores prefacing random words. But when a parenthesis isn't closed? How is someone raised on a diet of modern and post-modern lit and literary criticism NOT supposed to just ASSUME the entire book, from the open parenthesis on, ad infinitum, doesn't take place as an aside? Seriously, I say this with as much calmness as I can muster when even thinking about it makes my hands shake and brow sweat again, the unclosed parenthesis in the ARC of The Keep kept me up all night, tossing and turning. To assuage my fears, I had to both reassure myself that the next time a closed parenthesis appeared it would, in turn, close the initial open one also AND hunt down a finished copy in a Borders later to prove to my obsessive-compulsive brain that, in fact, the entire book actually did happen in real-time and not as some digression.)

In the fridge right now sits this:

A tiny bit of left-over love from the night of the eggplant parm. A little more of that, and a little more thought-gathering, and I'll be ready to, erm, write down the bones? I think after this year I'll never be allowed to say that again.

In the past 24 hours...

2009-02-24T05:09:00.000-08:00

In the past 24 hours, my life has been a blur of

this

and this

And, no doubt as a result of angst from the former being relieved by the latter, I wrote this as a part of my bi-monthly tour of duty over at A Good Blog Is Hard To Find

Axes fall. So do chips. So does the sky. The bottom? It drops like my stomach does when I use the word "unemployed" to refer to my status in the current socioeconomic climate. A friend on twitter (or a "twal" as they're referred to in the arcane infantile rebranding of babytalk portmanteaus that passes for a network-specific "language" on there)has informed me that I need to be more sensitive (let's say sensitiver) to the branding needs of all of us super-literate now-jobless folks awash on the dirty, jellyfish-laden shore of the book world. As such, at my friend's request, I am not "unemployed", I am "self-employed". Actually, in terms of putting a big, bright, ravey-yellow smiley face sticker over the stigma of being jobless, I by far prefer the term "under-employed".

At the moment, I am MOST DEFINITELY under-employed...

You should read the rest. It introduces a Springsteen comparison that it fails to fully utilize or flesh out. But that's how I roll (failing to ever fully utilize or flesh out...anything).

Fragments and reminents of a book launch event, or "did anyone get the number of the Sav. Blanc truck "

2009-02-22T06:03:00.001-08:00

Anointed was birthed, kicking, screaming and telling bad jokes, into the world this past Saturday night, and as the publicist for the book (and the author, but mostly just the book really), it was pretty much damn required of me to finish an entire bottle of Charles Shaw Sauvignon Blanc by myself in an hour.

Ok, in under an hour.

Ok, in like fifteen minutes.

What's important to note, though, is that the following brief and mostly pictorial recap of the night focuses less on author/client of mine Zachary Steele and more on...

...the insanity that was this opening "discussion"/"debate" held between myself and a former colleague/current friend who won't be named because, um, he hates it when he uses the "internet" to "read things about himself". That said, I probably could name names, because his idea of "the internet" involves "logging on" via a graphing calculator, so he'd never know. But for the sake of (avoiding any) argument, I'll respect his wishes.

There were several topics of discussion in this debate, the sole purpose of which was to amuse Zach on the night of his first novel's debut. See, this aforementioned "colleague" and I have a history of barbed, sarcastic banter that very rarely takes place in private and has been known to be supremely publicly offensive...and also greatly entertaining. Our points of contention tend to revolve around historical fiction (I hate it, he loves it), food (I've been a vegetarian for about 13 years now), author pin-up Marisha Pessl (that link takes you to my interview with her for my old work blog, I'm eventually going to port it over here), and, well, one of us being right and the other being stupid.

Now, I thought my preparation- opening remarks involving my reading the Websters definition of "right" from the dictionary, my beginning every answer to each question with a "before I answer your question" reframing, my bringing an annotated copy of Pessl's Special Topics In Calamity Physics to read from when the topic of her either being brilliant or flash-in-the-pan inevitably arose-would at the very least put me ahead in terms of sheer "prop" factor in the debate.

But oh, no.

Granted, I managed to work in my reading from Special Topics

but there was absolutely no way I could win when my formidable opponent arrived with the following pieces of propaganda:

Yes, folks, that is a hybrid MARISHA (I excuse my opponent misspelling her name here ONLY because I was too drunk to call him on it at the time) and Sarah Palin...

and

Suffice to say, I didn't win the debate. "Crushed by a damn landslide" was the term I think I recall Brett, Zach's editor on Anointed, using. I drowned my sorrows in brownies and cheap wine that night, indeed I did.

Oh, and oh yeah-the rest of the evening? A cheap wine-induced blur of hilarity, good times, and me seriously wondering about the phallic nature of those sausages on the "Russ Needs Meat" poster.

The reconnaissance mission

2009-02-20T06:10:00.000-08:00

So, I'm sitting alone in Wordsmiths, drinking my first cup of coffee of the day in total solitude and listening to the new (read as: oh god so awful in some parts) U2 album, for the last time. I mean, it's not my last cup of coffee-of the day or ever, god no-and I'm far too much of a masochist and a Bonoist to not listen to No Line On The Horizon again (despite its title being the universal statement for "this party's over, folks"). No, this is my last day at Wordsmiths as Marketing/PR director, and in a month I'm gone from Atlanta, too. And I still haven't found a job. Like, I can hear my mom's voice in my head worrying over me-or at least what I imagine would be her voice if she'd ever actually inquired about my well-being.

My trip to New York, my new and future home, last weekend, went well. It was really more of a reconnaissance mission (and her "mission" has to be drawn out in a Bjork-ish voice so that it sounds like "mess-see-awn"), a "must get x, y and z done in a very limited amount of time, on limited funds and with minimal airline fuckups" set of days. And, despite that last bit-the minimal airline fuckups-almost taking a turn for the worst (hey, hey Airtran, I mean Val-U-Jet, I'm talking to you: FOUR gate changes? At six in the morning? That's beyond annoying, that's obscene on par with, like, you having graphic sex with my grandmother while I'm in the next room. And then a delay? I was prepped to have to miss my job interview on Friday and blame it ENTIRELY on Airtran, force them to rebook me for a later flight back to Atlanta from NYC on Tuesday to allot for a rescheduling of said interview that would be missed, and I'd expect a god damned cookie with it, too, but fortunately it didn't come to that. I would have treated that customer service rep as though he or she was a student loans collection agent-and that's *not* a good thing. Are you still out there Miss Blair, my favorite student loans collection agent of all time ever?), I must say that the trip was a success...

I spent my Sunday afternoon with my wonderful internet friend who is now obviously my real-life-friend Kelly, aka the person nice/crazy enough to allow me to crash on her couch for a month while I, um, acclimate to New York. And by "acclimate" what I actually mean is "find a job". And by "find a job" what I actually mean is "holy hell, I am moving like 900 miles and at the moment I am unemployed, so unemployed in fact that I didn't even dare to abbreviate the previously-written 'at the moment' with my usual 'ATM' because 'ATM' conjures images of money and oh my god I have no job".

My first day in New York, though, I was greeted with this:

"What the hell?", you're probably asking aloud. No? Well, dammit, do it. Ok, there-I'm glad you asked! It just so happens the above is self-explaining:

That's right: now you don't have to separate your beloved popcorn chicken and your awesome large cola!

(Side-note: chicken in a cup reminds me of the now-infamous "chicken in a box in a wok" scene from R Kelly's "Trapped In The Closet". Ok, look, my definition of "infamous" is "constantly cited by my friends and myself". Also, I mean really, "Trapped In The Closet" is a work of genius, a masterstroke only capable of being executed by the master thespian that is Robert Sylvester Kelly.)

Any city that can capitalize on my southern-bred love for laziness AND gross food combinations is a city after my own heart. And my wallet. Whether it's empty or not. Which, at the moment (again, no ATM abbreviations here), is painfully, frighteningly empty.

It's funny, though, because despite having gone on interviews, being jobless and looking out at the bleak market through the lens of someone getting ready to slog to the Unemployment office and say "yeah, I'll have one with everything", I seem to have more projects to work on than ever. However, saying "oh, I'm super-busy" only makes me feel that much lamer when there's no actual money coming in at the moment. AGAIN WITH THE NO ATM. Because "no ATM" is how I'm going to be living my life for the foreseeable future. Maybe I should have listened to my family and gone into, um, "computer repair". There's certainly more money in that than in publishing, marketing and publicity. I think...

Oh, a quick anecdote that makes me feel better: while in NY, I got to listen to a superstar A-list renowned author that I've never read and will never read complain, at a benefit event/museum reading, IN A MUSEUM MIND YOU, AND FOR A BENEFIT, that he didn't get any free alcoholic beverages.

IN A MUSEUM. FOR A BENEFIT.

He then asked for "baby foie gras". You know what that is. Think about it.

I may be poor, but at least I have tact.

Best compliment I've ever received

2009-02-19T13:43:00.001-08:00

Courtesy of Lauterhaus

Always Be My Baby

2009-02-11T08:11:00.000-08:00

So, today sees me having finally finished what I think is going to be the last "going away" entry I actually find it necessary to write (other than my inevitable "A freshly-unemployed Publishing Professional Reviews The New Springsteen" post for my next go-round at A Good Blog Is Hard To Find), and this one's the hard one. I just signed, sealed and delivered (or some other cliché about being done with something-"nail, coffin" anyone?) my final blog for the Wordsmiths store blog.

*heavy sigh*.

There's been some good that came of today, though-in addition to me writing my three-line bio for BabyGotBooks, some exciting things arrived in the mail (and if I was a faux-Anglophile who said things like "trainers" and "cuppa" I would have said "popped in the Post" or such):

Not to be all like Kanye West screaming "HEY GUYS CHECK OUT THIS FLY-ASS PEACOAT Y'ALL", but those are my new, super-hawt RussComm business cards designed by Amanda Lauter(haus).

Oh, and, also...what's that? What did someone send me to review for Resonator?

MARIAH. CAREY. THE. BALLADS.

I am CONFUSED as to how "Dreamlover" snuck onto a Mariah compilation titled Ballads , but that as possible Mariah Carey compilation trespasses go, that one's minor.

(Gonna overlook the fact that "Always Be My Baby", aka ALSO NOT A BALLAD, is on here as well. If we're going to play "Not A Ballad" Mariah Carey compilation making time, where the hell is "Emotions" and/or "All I Want For Christmas is You"?)

I mean, there's "Hero", I song I played the hell out of when I had it on cassingle, and, by god, "One Sweet Day". The meeting of the brilliant, flaxen-voiced lovebutter-on-silk-on-creme Mariah "The Pipes" Carey with Boyz "The Pipes" II "More Pipes" Men.

Come on, "One Sweet Day" was my and my first girlfriend ever's song.

Now, granted, that song was about a dead Grandma or old yeller or Jesus or Clinton something, but still, I get all misty-eyed and romantic when I hear it, thinking about holding hands and walking the mall, heading straight for Bath and Body Works to watch her buy Peaberry lotion with a gift certificate.

Now that is love. And that is obviously what this fine compilation of brilliant songs hopes to conjur: true, Peaberry-lotion-scented teenage love. Mariah-you, miss, will always be my baby.

I get your point.

2009-02-08T06:36:00.000-08:00

As I was trying to post that last entry here (you know, the super-emo "OMG WOE-IS-I" one about leaving Georgia for New York, becoming unemployed, my relationship ending, etc etc the tiniest violin in the world, with my name etched on it, playing "Hearts and Flowers" or some Bright Eyes song) to my Facebook (that whole "maximum visability neu-media" thing that I hear so much about), feeling both super-accomplished and empowered having finally "written down the bones" or "chewed on the bones" or "boiled the bones to make a stock" or whatever it is one does when one writes a lengthy, personal blog post about the collapse of a way of life, I was given the following Facebook authentication code request:

Apparently Facebook thinks I'm a slut. Or that I should go into the phone sex trade.

Suffice to say, I get your point, Facebook. Thanks. Thanks a *lot*.

As long as I'm avoiding getting my Sunday started and not doing anything i should be doing, i.e.laundry, packing for my New York trip this coming weekend, continuing to pass wavering positive/negative judgment on the new Animal Collective album, uh...getting started on hitting the vodka+oj?...

Yesterday, I happened upon this fantastic signpost at the McDonalds here in Decatur:

Jesus God and Baby Jesus, if there's one thing I do *not* want to see happen, it's the current burgere couture fad altering the way McDonalds does business. I need to count on Mickey D's being cheap, gross and grease-pounding. So yeah, while this instance of "the $250 McMuttin" is just an awesome example of what do do when it's your shift to change the signboard because the Dora the Explorer happymeal toys have run out and you don't have any more "f"s, it seriously can't be too long before it's an actual menu item. Soon, the menu boards will be split between the "dollar" menu items (small fries, small sodas, vanilla ice cream cones, bag-o-grease) and the "big ballin' menu", complete with a logo of rapper T.I. happily consuming a "Millionaire McFlurry" (made with endangered goat's milk that had been collected by one individual monk living on a cliff in some remote part of wherever it is that there are cliffs and monks and goats), proclaiming "Whoa, Kimosabe, Big Ballin' is my hobby", and featuring the $250 McMuttin, the $300 Dodo Egg McMuttin and Cave-aged Gruyere served on a biscuit crafted from individually cracked wheat grains and drizzled with honey milked by hand from the glands of bees one-at-a-time, and the $800 Cristal-spiked milkshake, served in a diamond-encrusted pimp-cup.

Mark my words, it's only a matter of time.

Title comes first

2009-02-05T10:31:00.000-08:00

I'm really relatively unsure as to how to begin this. When I started this blog, I'd decided that, rather than fill it with sappy mush at a furious pace in the beginning, only to leave it sad and unattended like a petulant child refused its own birthday cake and locked in the closet, I would attend to it with a minor degree of professionalism. As professional as a "blog" with a heavy swear-word count and an open letter to Tori Amos asking her to leave her trash bag and publicly denounce Sarah Palin can possibly be. However, the other place on the internet where my words tend to go, my LiveJournal, lay sadly dormant for a while even before the news of its eventual and impending collapse, and now I'm trying to port anything of any interest, relevance or hilarity over here before I wake up one day to find that any and all trace of my internet "blog" (read as: open diary) presence since 2000 has been wiped by disgruntled LJ employees. As such, I kinda feel necessity, like gravity in that R.E.M. song, pulling me to actually write "down the bones" (a Jeanette Winterson-I-think-not-going-to-google-it MFA class phrase that I hate, because I had a poetry professor as an undergrad at Oglethorpe who used it all the time to describe the type of disclosure she demanded in every piece handed in to her. To boycott, or as protest, or simply because I was bored and had to turn something in for a grade, I wrote a poem about how, when I was like 8 years old, I had a hamster that committed suicide. True story. She loved it. I read it aloud for the class.) here in terms of my current life situation.

So, with that typical digression aside, I've been sitting here trying to reconcile talking openly and not in a voice at all about "things", and have been finding it extremely difficult. Usually, with any/everything I write, be it blog post or, uh, blog post (or that "memoir" I'm writing/not-writing), the title comes first.

I have no title for this entry, and I probably won't even once it's finished. So rather than continue to pretend that my pre-apologies and asides are at all compelling, I'll get to those Winterson-esque bones (which, when written as such, makes her sound like a pro-Anorexia postergirl):

Like a giant oak covered in pictures of obscenely-to-the-point-of-hilariously obese cats and filled with far too many books, the past three years of my life are uprooting as we speak.

For the past three years of my life, I've lived in Decatur, GA, which is a little Birkenstock-clad, tofu-eating, super-artsy suburb of Atlanta. Also, for the past three-ish give or take, years of my life, in addition to various other projects (like, you know, collecting those pictures of obscenely fat cats), I've put my marketing and publicity degree to use by mainly serving as the Marketing/PR director for Wordsmiths, a local indie bookstore that I helped conceptualize.

And now I find that position coming to an end. I mean, the economy's super-awesome and publishing is doing really well at the moment, so of course it's a total shocker to me. Note the sarcasm, because as you may not know the economy and job market are both awful, and publishing as an industry keeps taking hit after hit and then scrambling to use words like "monetize" and "twitter".

Running concurrently with this, the two-plus year live-in relationship I've been in has also run its course.

This is where, dear readers, your mental soundtracking should cue Lauryn Hill's voice singing "when it all/all faaaallls down..."...

As such, on March 27th, I do something that, for the longest time, I swore I'd never do: I become a cliche, pack up everything I can't sell for pretzel money and move to New York.

I've lived in Georiga my entire life, with a minor accidental digression to Las Vegas (where I had to beg a random girl in a Barnes and Noble to go on a date with me-ask me about that later, k?), so this is a little...a bit...um...

it's fucking terrifying, is what it is.

I am a fucking southerner. I like screen doors, porch swings, iced tea (with splenda thx), fried green tomatoes...ok, granted, I DO enjoy a good vegan cupcake, but, hell, I say "y'all". And I can't STOP saying "y'all".

I have a place to stay for a brief period of time, and I have...um, well, basically that's about it. I'm hunting and gathering job prospects, but the whole thing has given rise to me finally launching my industrious, cheeky approach to the freelance media/pr/marketing game: RussCommunications, aka RussCommTM.

Check out the awesome logo:

(super-small version, obv)

designed by my friend Amanda Lauter, of MailChimp and LauterHausProductions LLC TLC OPP. I'll obviously be a success, because, um, hello, no one with a sweet-ass logo has ever failed at anything.

(She's promising me business cards, too. I eagerly await them. NO PRESSURE, LAUTER.)

One of my first "clients" (that's what you call them, right, clients? I misplaced my "Communications In The Aughts" handbook) is my former boss Zach Steele's awesome, hilarious and offensive-only-if-you-don't-read-it first novel, Anointed. You can become a fan of RussCommTM on Facebook-forgive the lack of, well, of anything, really, going on with that page, because, um, I still have this to deal with:

that's right. The past years of my life, as seen as books going into boxes.

Obviously only some of my books, my babies, are going to make the trip north with me. It's that culling, the "do I take things I haven't read and risk them sucking? Do I take old favorites? Do I just re-read Special Topics In Calamity Physics over and over again and sigh myself to sleep every night?", that is making it rough.

Right, Russ. That's the ONE thing making the sorting through and packing up of everything tough. Trying to choose which damn John Updike books to keep.

So, I mean, I guess all this is to say that that, in fact, is what's going on in my life at the moment. A lot of listening to Fever Ray. A lot of Grouper, which you may have read already read about. I'll still be writing here, chronicling the "journey", but when I say "journey" I don't mean it like those women who read Eat, Pray, Love but skip the last two bits and then gush over Elizabeth Gilbert saying "thanks for the journey". Or maybe I do? Dunno. Regardless, that will be here.

I'll still be writing about music at Resonator, and hopefully my relocation to New York, finally again close to the two friends with whom Resonator was begun, will allow Res to become a more active community force. I'll still be writing for the fantastic, literary collective group blogA Good Blog Is Hard To Find. Also, as of today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be doing book reviews and writing for BabyGotBooks, the lit blog that I joined forces with in my previous position to throw some seriously cool rock-n-roll book party extravaganza things.

So, I mean, that's me. Right now. With the emotion swept aside for the moment, and the boxes, like the future, looming. Expect to see more pictures of those boxes.

And yes. I am making this sound way easier than it's going to be.

That Real-Life Wall

2009-01-30T06:33:00.000-08:00

It has been suggested that I utilize this method of communication and break the third wall (fourth? I don't know, I'm not good at counting and equally bad at construction), and actually discuss the massive personal and professional changes occurring in my life at the moment.

My initial response to that: "Pshaw, what, is this LiveJournal?"

While, thankfully, it isn't (though I can't and won't front-I <3 LJ like whoa, always have, always will), there's some validity to the assertion that, if I'm going to keep this blog, and have it basically use my name and nothing else, then I really should talk about things other than how awful the Atlanta paper is, particularly given the whirlwind I find myself in. While this turmoil is both positive and negative AND pretty much entirely self-inflicted, I find that, in order to do this properly I need to actually attend to a few things first.

All of this is a long way of saying: there's some serious real shizz coming. Soon-ish. In the meantime?

'Nuff said.

(Also, I really will figure out how to disable the "read more" links being on every post. I promise.)

It was sunrise when we started

2009-01-27T09:38:00.001-08:00

Over at Resonator, I had the sad task today of posting about the death of Charlie Cooper, of the New Orleans/Chicago-based electronic pop group Telefon Tel Aviv. If you're not familiar with TTA under that name, you've heard their work: they've had their hands all over stuff by Nine Inch Nails, just to cherrypick one name.

The official announcement is over there. For those that care, I had the good fortune to cover *two* Telefon records, both 2004's Map Of What Is Effortless and this year's Immolate Yourself. If you like gorgeous, dark electronic pop compositions, with seriously intense production work, both of these albums are pretty much perfect. In 2004 I spent a day with the two guys in Telefon, Josh Eustis and Charlie Cooper, for a now-defunct electronic music magazine, and ended up writing a rather large piece on the sheer brilliance of Map Of What Is Effortless's chopped, spliced R&B vocals and micro-processed drums for a now-defunct electronic music magazine. For my efforts, they sent me a signed, one-sided, hand-stamped 12" record of their song "My Week Beats Your Year". I played the hell out of it when I had turntables. That version, the exact same recording as the one on the album, always sounded better to me.

I've already declared Immolate Yourself as one of my top albums of 2009. It came out really recently, possibly today even, on one of my favorite record labels in the world-Ellen Allien's Bpitch Control, a home, a haven really, for smart, forward-thinking electronic pop compositions.

I had hoped to see them tour again.

The brilliance of Josh and Charlie, together, as Telefon Tel Aviv, was a weird sort of brother/lover interplay that the two had, where they would, within the course of a live set or a studio album, fight and curse and smile and cry and fall apart and rebuild and pour their souls into what they were crafting, and that's exactly what their music sounds like.

I encourage you to scroll through the Res Mag stuff posted on TTA, and have a listen. My interview with Josh Eustis (the surviving half of TTA) from late last year is up (it was because of this interview, solely from Josh's recommendation therein, that I picked up the Grouper album that I've grown to fall oh-so in love with), and there are a bunch of individual TTA songs, including my favorite Telefon song ever: "I Lied".

I've done, here, an awful job at eulogizing a person I really didn't know, and so instead I choose to let their music, beautiful and pensive and dark and at-times-frustrating and always-heady and also pretty much nearly always perfect, do the talking.

Rovepocalypse Now.

2009-01-21T06:30:00.000-08:00

I tend to take following/friending folks on Twitter a little more seriously and selectively than I do on Facebook (where, like, anyone I could have ever possibly met allowed in to be privy to tasty, juicy, personal fact-gossip like...how I dreamed of Indigo Girls songs last night. What, you got a problem with "Least Complicated"?) or Livejournal (on which the migration away from, like birds from...something that birds migrate away from rapidly, and demise of, I fully intend on writing about at some point). Mostly that's because with every social network I invest myself in I tend to censor myself a little less, to the point where I can pretty much assure everyone that whatever comes three steps after Twitter will find me basically screaming drunken obscenities about how fucking awful The Catcher In The Rye is and how Salinger can bite me, yes, bite me, if he genuinely thinks that I couldn't capture the essence of teenage angst better than he and that, in fact, his fucking face is the fucking problem, is what it is.

So that's why when Jill told me that the Dark Lord of the Bush administration himself, Karl Rove, has a Twitter account that basically seems pretty much authentic, I had to add him.

This has nothing to do with the fact that I will add any celebrity who maintains their own Twitter feed (see: the brilliant, zen-koan awesome nuggets, which are like McNuggets only with more real meat, that are Shaquille O'Neal's Twitter updates).Or maybe it does. Or maybe I'm just a fan of Rove's now-legendary rap skills (which, debatably, just may surpass Shaq's. Don't tell Shaq I said that).

Also, like many sick, twisted, masochistic Americans, I've been morbidly obsessed with the inner workings of the Bush administration for quite some time now.

(Before I go off on the evils of Bu$h,a brief detour into little-known facts about me , volume XIVVV: I was raised a flag-waving, card-carrying Rush Limbaugh fanatic, and actually called into his show several times to applaud his use of the word "feminazi" and his detraction of the damn "bleeding heart liberals". I was like ten, I had no idea what he was saying and was basically mouthing "mega-dittos" phonetically because it made my Grandfather proud. I can't decide which is worse, that period in my life or the time I was a Parrothead.)

Upon being pointed to Rove's Tweets, which sounds like the worst and most-poisoned-ever-with-the-blood-of-trees candy shoppe ever to exist, I immediately posted a little something and began following Rove. The next morning, I had a flock, a gaggle, a bevvy, a what-do-you-call-a-massive-grouping-of Conservative Twitter Pundits who had suddenly added me. I could understand that, and can now even more after spending the day yesterday watching Fox News' snarky, jilted-lover coverage of the inauguration of President Obama (damn that feels good to type). Sample quip: "we're hoping to get a cameraman over to that route soon. Since hope is all that's required these days."

What I don't understand is what I woke up to this morning, in my gmail inbox:

OH. MY. GOD. Like Rockwell said, somebody's watching me. And that somebody is Karl Effing Rove.

A sure sign of the apocalypse, or just an indication that, um...crap, I really don't know. I can assure you that if, as of this moment, I fall off the face of the earth, Rove, having begun his plan to monitor my every move so as to re-indoctrinate me into the First Church Of Latter-Day Limbaugh (my thoughts: the term "feminazi"? No thanks, especially not with my minor in gender theory. The painkillers? YES PLEASE!) will tie me up in a secret lair somewhere underneath a waterfall and force me to listen to those god-awful offensive song parodies from Rush's program, or Klaus Nomi, ohwaitsamething, so watch the skies: if I get in trouble I'll shine the Rachel Maddow symbol in the air.

There really should be a Maddow hand-signal, akin to Jay-Z's "Rock-a-fella" sign, so that one could, feasibly, "throw they Maddows in tha sky". And then Rachel Maddow can best MC Rove in a rap-battle and finally put out an album with Jean Grae and then they'll tour as Maddow-Grae and then...and then...and then...

Whoops. I think I just wrote Politi-Hop fan-fiction.

Let me also note that, in a tweet-vs-tweet contest, Maddow wins hands-down. Her commentary on the inauguration? All it needed to be. Two words. Short, simple, poetically stated and brilliant, a majestic summary of all that America as a country has come through over the past 8 years and the sweeping changes needed by Barack Obama to turn it all around, encapsulating the hope, tears and emotions of all Americans united for a moment as one:

"Holy mackerel!"

You couldn't have said it better yourself.

As a minor foot-note, I'd like to encourage everyone to check out Jill's downloadable Jock-Jams compilation, just because it's both awesome and has nothing at all to do with the republican party or Rush Limbaugh.

My Fellow 'Mericans

2009-01-20T10:29:00.001-08:00

Today was a historic day.

The day I became a fan of croutons on Facebook.

(Thx Lauter)

This one's called 'Outlaw'

2009-01-19T06:41:00.000-08:00

For me, there's something about waking up to a new U2 song that is kind of unfortunately like Christmas morning. I say "unfortunately" because, where I come from, Christmas morning is always a serious coin-flip as to if what's under the tree reeks of whiskey or Wal-Mart lay-away. The former would indicate something last-minute, thrown together and ultimately far more expensive (guilt may be a useless emotion but, in terms of gifts from my family it has proven to be both a powerful force and a wonderful thing), whereas the latter would indicate something planned and sensible-like a blanket, socks, or a bag of cheese-puffs. Not crunchy Cheetos, no-to wake up on Christmas morning to a bag of the slender, thin, snap-crackle-pop-in-your-mouth with neon-orange-cheeze-ee-goodness wrapped ever-so-haphazardly would indicate that one or both of my parents actually had any idea what my preferences for super-fattening fake cheese snack products were. Instead, I'd wake up to either a $20 Target gift card smelling like pot smoke and cheap booze or a bag of thrift-store-brand Cheesy Puffs. You know, the super-rotund air-puffed kind that spread their Crayola "Orange Peel"-colored jizzm over fingers and counter tops and clothing without any taste ever actually being imparted into the mouth of the consumer.

The. Worst. Kind. Of. Cheese. Puffs.

A new U2 song, particularly the first song released from an as-yet-unheard new album, falls exactly into that dichotomy of afore-stated Christmas potential: it's either going to be quick and useful or...or, well, gift-wrapped 99-cent Cheese Puffs.

I'm not the world's biggest U2 fan. I'm not going to write a Matthew Perpetua-esque dissertation on "Joshing The Joshua Tree: Bono's Myriad Voices Throughout The Ages". I don't know art but I know what sort of bombastic grandiosity I like, and I don't know much but I know I love Bono and I tend to let that be all there is to know. That said? Achtung, Baby, with the impeccable Brian Eno production, the lush musical textures and Bono's wry, cutting, sarcastic, sadistic love-lorn lyrics, is one of my favorite albums ever. The rest of U2's output I can take or leave, and I tend to cherrypick through all of it. For instance, the pretty-much-universally-hated POP album has its moments, and for my musical dollar (aka free, downloaded via Soulseek...erm, um, I mean I SUPPORTMUSICIBUYWHATILIKE or something like that)they are more plentiful then the obligatory millennium "Return To Form" record that was All That You Can't Leave Behind. What both of those albums have in common, though, is that their first singles were these giant, massive, explosive, world-affirming (well, ok, "This-Is-Bono's-World" affirming) statements of shapeless, boundless, formless platitudes like Hope and Trust and Faith and Woo-Hoo and Hey-Yeah and Change and Love and All Right All Right and other similar big ideas.

That's why this new U2 single, "Strap Your Momma To Ireland" or whatever it's called, is such an insane disappointment. It's not just that the guitar riff unfortunately conjures thoughts of lost 90's flannel-rockers Collective Soul (and let's be honest there, there is no way to conjure thoughts of Collective Soul that can be deemed "fortunate"), or that Bono's vocal pacing pretty much splits the embarrassing difference between Madonna's rap about shopping at Fresh Market and using non-dairy creamer on "American Life" and, well, and the ENTIRETY of Escape Club's "Wild Wild West". It's the fact that there is not a moment in this song in which Bono reminds us-you, me, the world, HIS world long live the King may his name be praised and worshiped and glorified-reminds us of, ya know, Hope. Faith. Love. Art. Any of those big-ticket items.

It's like that moment in American Psycho when Pat Bateman finds religion via Bono at a U2 concert, and immediately shuts down and rejects everything he's been filled with. U2 is meant to be stupidly uplifting, unjustifiably inspiring, full of platitudes unfettered by longitude or latitude. U2, the musical collective hivemind of the Edge, Bono, and those other two dudes with the glasses who did the song for that Tom Cruise movie, are supposed to function as a mirror to the world's collective souls, not sound LIKE Collective Soul (oh, schnap! Yes! HIGH FIVE, RUSS, HIGH FIVE!). If the first single can be said to operate as a new album's harbinger, the Silver Surfer to the Galactus that is the forthcoming U2 record, which will inevitably be titled Bono Sings! For You or Segways In The Garden Of Allah , then this...this...this new song indicates that any following album certainly will not rattle, and it most assuredly will not hum. This is going to be less a booze-scented gift card to somewhere and more a hastily-wrapped bag of convenience store junkfood.

If only one good thing comes from the release of a new CD from Bono & Co (which sounds like the best Sunday morning political talk-show ever, co-starring Rachel Maddow, yes please), it will be the fact that my friend Jill, the originator and maintainer of the Bono Photoshop blog, will be forced into further creative action. She is truly an artist of the highest caliber.

(from Jill's Bono Photoshop blog)

Frankly, I'm kind of pulling for a photoshop of Bono in a bag of Cheese Puffs. The big, fat, air-filled kind. Gift-wrapped. Under a Christmas Tree. Because frankly that's what this sounds like.

Still on that Microcastle tish

2009-01-09T08:20:00.000-08:00

It isn't often in conversation that I mention the fact that I'm one of the co-owners of the music blog Resonator Magazine (or, if you're one of the cool kids, which I most certainly am not, it's "Res Mag", because abbreviations are so hip for 2009, particularly if they're three letters long and, um, if there are two of them). This is for a few reasons. One is the fact that my writing there is done under the pseudonym of Shaun Bateman-an homage to a recurrent character in the fiction writing of Bret Easton Ellis, who, yes, I am always talking about.

The other is that, um...it's RESONATOR. It's not exactly like we're talking Superfamous IndieRock Review of Ye Musicks That Is For The Listenings, or anything like that. I mean, Resonator has had some mentions here or there...mentions which, if given the proper opportunity, or a few vodka tonics (which basically ends up equaling "the proper opportunity" when all's said and done), we will trot out and trump up again. And again. And again.

Ask me about the time NY Magazine mentioned us. Do it. And then ask me again, because I'll repeat it.

So that's why, when last night at Bookhouse, which has become my new favorite little Atlanta spot to nurse something which, when imbibed, will cause me to lose all fear of the police, I distinctly heard, in a booth across from my friends and I, discussion involving Res Mag. So distinctly, in fact, that my friends all perked up to listen.

I mean, one would assume that, were one to operate a music blog, that there's like one billionth of a hundredth of a chance that one person might read it, and that an operator of said blog could, potentially, be in the exact same room as said blog's one reader at some point. However, chances are exponentially better that you'd die in a fiery plane crash, and as a result I'm now I'm never, ever, flying again.

I use all of this as an overly-wordy intro to the fact that, though I feel that my writing on Res has gotten away from waxing intellisophical on whatever I'm currently listening to and moved more towards a "this is new. here you go. form an opinion" mindset, which I fault squarely on the fact that most blog-based music writing is awful, artless and has absolutely no grounds to call itself "criticism". This isn't to say that my music writing is, or has ever been, artful or well-done, but hell, at least I try. Tried. Try. Still try, honestly, just not as often as I should.

And that's why I wanted to point a little link to some musings I did over on Res recently regarding the album that was, and still is, tops of the year for me: Deerhunter's Microcastle.

I began thinking both of how totally Proustian (read as: bedroom-ridden and bedroom-written) most of the album's lyrics are, and how my favorite song on the album (and my favorite song of al of last year), "Nothing Ever Happened", is totally the first forward-motion on the album, conjuring, for me, thoughts of my childhood hometown of Marietta, Georgia, and my need/desire to escape it.

In fact, I actually wrote, over on Res, something akin to:

The lyrics, like “focus on the depths that were never there/eliminate what you can’t repair”, take the rest of Microcastle’s Proustian qualities of bedroom stasis and actually force it into a sort of hesitant motion, in which you get the feeling that the song is pulling Bradford, rather than operating under his direction.

Pretentious? Oh god yes I am. And I don't deny it. But, to me, that's a better analysis of a piece of music than 'HEY D00DZ CHECK DIS", which is what I'm seeing so much of in terms of blog music writing these days. I don't know, maybe that doesn't bother you. But also, maybe, you're really a damn LOLcat...in which case, AWWWWWWWW!

You can read the rest of it, if you so desire, and also hear "Nothing Ever Happened" and a few more Deerhunter songs, at Resonator. Res Mag. Res.

We really need to figure out what abbreviation we're going to use and stick with it.

Fiction Contest...correction

2009-01-07T10:28:00.000-08:00

Ok so I was super-wrong. Or "premature". Hey, I'm told it happens to everyone sometimes.

The Creative Loafing 2009 Fiction Issue is online RIGHT NOW. And you NEED TO READ "Medicine". And you need to do so immediately, if not sooner.

And you need to avoid the silliest photo of me ever.

I am going somewhere to learn how to teach myself to begin learning to not talk with my hands like that. I was discussing Bret Easton Ellis, probably. Since apparently that's all I ever do.

The fiction contest

2009-01-07T06:24:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if Creative Loafing Atlanta has any intent on making the 2009 Fiction Contest winners available online (and if that happens, I'll update this), but I did want to say that the winning essay, Laurah Raines' "Medicine", was seriously heads-and-feet-and-tails above anything else I was given to read for the contest this year. If you are a publisher, and, um, you still have anyone working in your offices (too soon? too soon.), Raines, undoubtedly, has a collection of short stories in her that I'll go ahead and call "emotionally taut and moving, with more than hint of bite". You can blurb me on that now.

(I am going to avoid encountering, at all costs, the photo of my next to my bio in the Fiction Issue, which is out today and can't disappear fast enough, because, um, I think I'm supposed to look "wacky". I was sick, and I don't do wacky.)

As I've already said, there's a party for this whole thing going down tomorrow (Thursday, Jan 8th). I may or may not sign baby pictures.

Simple Truths

2009-01-06T13:09:00.000-08:00

On the left, me. On the right, miss Amanda waxmuseum Lauter.

Simple iChat truths.

originally posted over yonder.

Best Books of 2008

2009-01-06T12:39:00.000-08:00

So, I finally finished my "Best Books of 2008" list. And you can read that over here.

Rather than simply syndicate the whole damn thing, I figured...linkage is good. Linkage works. Tie all the projects together. All that jazz-hot-baby stuff.

However, I did want to throw up my top fiction and non-fiction for '08...which I, of course, am pulling directly from the aforementioned blog post elsewhere.

Favorite Fiction of 2008:

James Collins, Beginners Greek

This is the sort of book that's instantly a classic, both intellectually and emotionally, from the first word. Collins, a 49-year-old first novelist, writes the sort of inspiring, "love conquers all" story that parts the clouds on stormy days and reinvigorates the English language. This story, of executive-of-something (even he's unsure what he does) Peter Russell as he fumbles through his life and loves, chasing the realization that the girl in his head and heart isn't the girl he's married to, unfolds with the most jaw-dropping, breath-stopping prose you've read in ages. Everyone in Beginner's Greek is in love with someone else, and everyone's someone else is, also. A massive, glorious literary update of the black-and-white film romance, Beginner's Greek fills sloppy hearts with love of language, love of reading, love of celebration, love of love. Sheer brilliance.

Favorite Non-Fiction (or as close as anything comes to non-fiction these days) of 2008:

Dan Kennedy, Rock On

There are myriad books written on the music industry. This is one of them. This one, however, doesn’t stink -- in fact, as the title explains, it does, indeed, rock. What causes the aforementioned and proclaimed “rocking,” you ask? Former major music label marketing exec Dan Kennedy’s hilarious, self-effacing, and ALWAYS tongue-in-cheek observations on the crumbling insanity that is a 9-5 in the music biz. “Biz,” see, that’s an industry-type term. You learn those from perusing these pages. You also learn, for instance, that Fat Joe doesn’t consider crudités “food” when filming a video, that The Darkness should never be called a “joke” (to their faces, at least), and that Phil Collins, while overblown, isn’t a bad guy. All of these observations, and more, can be assimilated by you, the reader, and thusly you, too, can Rock On.

Ask me nicely and I'll tell you about the worst book I read in 2008. Both tact and my desire to never again be punched in the face by a book publicist forbid me from posting such things here.

Ok, I lie about one of those two above. I have no tact.

POP.

2009-01-05T10:34:00.001-08:00

So, I really should have posted something on this before (because if there's one thing I don't do nearly enough it's, erm, toot my own horn? That just sounds vulgar and like something I should in fact be doing far more often), but I've been pulled into (quite honorable) duty as a judge for this year's Creative Loafing Atlanta Fiction Contest, which is having the celebratory party at the Eyedrum in Atlanta this Thursday, Jan 8th, at 7 P.M. It is free and I will be there doing something that probably won't amount to much other than looking awkward in public, but I can tell you that I know who won and the winning stories are pretty much works of that magical short-story genius that results from being able to not be overly verbose and conjure words that have emotional punch and resonance.

No, really, these stories are good. I will tell you my favorite later (because I have a favorite and it was gooder than good. It was better.)

I've been waiting to see what sorts of horrendous lies that I've added to my bio actually get reprinted before I said anything on here, but, in the sake of timeliness, I'll link to the Facebook event page and just re-post whatever ends up in print and online about yours truly.

Since it is writ-and-thus-mote-be that I'll be "signing books", which, um, I haven't written yet, (I'm the only one of the three judges, the other two being Carmen Deedy and Phillip DePoy, both published authors, so that's one thing they both have over me, and Phillip has multiple last-name capitalizations and therefore TWO things over me), it has been suggested that I make print-outs of a childhood photograph of myself for autographing. This would, apparently, make me both feel more a part of the whole "the famous people are going to sign things for those in attendance" facet of the evening and also allow for the fact that I don't think Carmen Deedy will let me sign copies of Martina The Beautiful Cockroach. Specifically, it has been suggested I autograph prints of this photo:

There is a very, very sad, tragic and almost-kinda-halfway-funny-if-you-like-tortured-upbringing-tales story behind that photo, so I will probably just inscribe copies of Less Than Zero with "If I'd written this I would be even more into how awesome I am than I already am" or something else equally self-referential and partially true. Or maybe I will just pass out copies of favorite blog entries of mine. Or maybe I'll just sign my hand, lick it and rub it onto the hands of others as though it was a club-entry stamp and everyone was underage (see also: that Blues Traveler video).

Or maybe I will sign baby pictures of myself.

So this is the new year....

2009-01-01T07:11:00.001-08:00

Resolution for 2009: Finish best of 2008 list.

Yeah, I can start that tomorrow, right? The FIRST day of the new year doesn't actually count for anything.

I am sad, though, that I didn't miss the slutty hot mess that must have been Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin on CNN.

I'm going back to bed, with coffee, an awful book that both tact and my career forbid me from naming but that I am going to pretend was written by Meg Cabot because, though it was not written by Meg Cabot, not only is the cover done in the same super-cute quirky chick-lit-esque-but-with-brains-because-everyone-knows-it's-forward-thinking-to-assume-girls-can-do-math-and-don't-need-princes color scheme, and not only is the premise kinda the same (hey quirky kinda-screwed-in-the-head chick, you can find love too and then you'll be a-ok, even if you are a size 14 because that's not fat unless you're trying to size jeans at Forever21), but, for some reason, the thought of reading a Meg Cabot book right now in secret kinda intellectually gets me off a little similar to the way you put little chocolate pieces on your pizza when you think no one's looking and then scarf the damn thing down, and hunker down and probably listen to that Death Cab For Cutie album that I keep thinking about and pseudo-referencing but not actually wanting to re-download until now and just letting today pass by.

Don't assume my lack of super-enthusiastic "there's no 'I' in 'team' but there is an 'I' in 'all of these are my accomplIshments' " motivational calendar self-help-speaker-who-adds-everyone-on-Twitter 'whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right as long as you remember to always be closing' espousing is indicative of any lack of enthusiasm for 2009 on my part.

I just tend to think it's both unrealistic and, um, almost kinda slightly pagan, really (seriously...a drunken orgiastic gathering to celebrate...an almost arbitrary changing of numbers in increments of one?), to confine the potentials of life to a set grouped number of days. Honestly, something awesome could have happened at 11:59 pm yesterday evening and then it would have been 2008 and then wouldn't all the potential positivity of 09 have been wasted on one splurt and then oh god what's the point of living, etc? It's like resolutions-why only give yourself 365 days to do something good for yourself or others? The whole thing feels, to me, like the concept of "yes we DID" vs "yes we CAN". "Did" implies that all requisite accomplishments have been reached, whereas the potential of "can" is both powerful and infinite.

Can>Did.

But, whatever, I didn't major in math.

Or, to put it in the words of Kate Bush: "I just know that something good is gonna happen. I don't know when. But saying it could even make it happen."

Ok, granted, the song was about crazy-as-fuck Wilhelm Reich thinking that if he buried glowing objects in his yard the government wouldn't lock him away from his family, but the sentiment remains the same.

The sentiment. And the outcome.

As I wrote this, I received an email from Pizza Hut informing me that the "best way" to "spend" my "New Years Day" would be to order a pizza from (natch) Pizza Hut now-featuring "all-natural pepperoni".

As you can clearly see, you know the processed fakeymeaty porky fattystuffs are now "all-natural" because there is WHEAT in the "all natural" logo.

Of course. Fifteen points to Oglivy or Wieden & Kennedy or whoever it was that makes like 100k more a year than I do to focus-group concepts like "Ok so if we attach a piece of wheat to the logo will it be immediately evident to you, Mr and Mrs Joe Pizzabuyer, that our pepperoni is now all-natural? Peeerrrrefect."

Actually, make that 20 points for the additional suggestion that I rush out right now, on New Years Day Morning or whatever it's called, to procure said pizza. Apparently, if one is to believe both Pizza Hut and Bono, all is quiet on New Years Day...other than the ringing of phones placing orders for the new all-natural super-awesome Jesus-cured-pepperoni pizza. Yes, Jesus is actually IN the back room of every single Pizza Hut, simultaneously (he can bi-locate, after all), curing the all-natural pepperoni. Jesus AND Bono. Same person. But only today. Only on New Years Day can one acquire said holiest of holy pork product. Again: you know it's holy because there's iconography of wheat in the logo.

If that's how I am supposed to spend my new years day? Then, yes, in fact, I am going back to bed. Me and Meg Cabot.

Not actually Meg Cabot. But I can pretend.

It's comin' on Christmas. They're cuttin' down trees...

2008-12-25T07:50:00.000-08:00

You know, it's sad when you wake up alone on Christmas morning wishing you'd joined your friends for an early-a.m. Waffle House breakfast ambush, despite how your random upper respiratory tract infection-snacking has been impacting your body image, simply because you need to hear the half-toothed waitresses (waitressi?) call you "honey" and feign affection.

Truth be told it's not like I can spend the money-I can't. Seriously, three dollars for hash browns? You must be mistaking me for a pre-recession Russ. A Russ unconcerned with where his next paycheck's coming from (if from anywhere indeed). But I guess in a fashion akin to that used-up literary throwback of Holden Caulfield paying the hooker to talk to him (or not paying, really), I'd be willing to throw down for something warm, tasty, filling and greasy as hell if it's accompanied by a side-helping of someone pretending to care that, this Christmas, the only friend I really have is Joni Fucking Mitchell.

It's not like I listen to that much folk music in general, or much Joni Mitchell in particular, but Blue is an album that is intricately, almost synaesthetically, linked, for me, to winter. I had long conversations with that album cover yesterday, the first day of this year that I've actually listened to it straight through. Blue is the epitome of the sad, mournful holiday album, despite the fact that it affects a certain sort of almost-embarrassingly humble folky groove a little way through (see: "Carey"). Even the more upbeat moments, like "All I Want", mask a serious longing.

"I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
Looking for the key to set me free
Oh the jealousy, the greed is the unraveling
Its the unraveling
And it undoes all the joy that could be"

This album is, I guess, this year, the Christmas present to myself to cap off a year where everything has changed. But then, it's the same present I give myself every year about this time. I always talk about Blue as a use-once-and-destroy album, and maybe what I mean is that, as opposed to being a throw-away album, it's the sort of record that I can only listen to during this time of the year. When there's no family to reach out to, no tree no lights nothing really? There's this record. This is the record that starts playing inside my head when the box of useless junk my mother sent to my work address because it's the only way she knows how to get in touch with me anymore arrives, and I have to bite my nails to the quick (which, these days, given how withered and brittle I've left my cuticles, doesn't take much) before finally deciding to open the package-boxed, of course, in a left-over industrial-sized box of napkins no doubt acquired from her job as a waitress or hostess at a cafeteria-style restaurant somewhere...I wouldn't know. I can't tell you the last time we've spoken.

Blue is too much red wine and a headache, it's cinnamon-scented coffee and waking up in the throws of a fever and peppermint tea and it's really the only way I know to spend the winter: me and this record. I don't actually own a copy of it for more than two or three months out of the year-there's no point for me, honestly. It's like wearing a wool sweater in the summer, or baking gingerbread cookies at Easter, or vacuuming to celebrate a birthday. Blue, for me, any time other than the long stretch of gray lonely that is the winter months , is completely anachronistic.

I understand why "River" gets cherry-picked for everyone's holiday compilations (though I don't understand how it ends up on, like, the Starbuxxx Super Merry Mega Happy Save Now Sale-A-Thon-For-Christ Compilation 8!!!!!, it's such a suicide song), but really the entirety of Blue is about a year ending, making resolutions, and longing for that which can't be had-which, frankly, is my schema for Christmas. Even the songs that should be totally dismissible, like "This Flight Tonight", come with forlorn gems in the middle:

"Sometimes I think love is just mythical
Up there's a heaven
Down there's a town
Blackness everywhere and little lights shine
Oh, blackness, blackness dragging me down
Come on light the candle in this poor heart of mine"

Anyway. I shouldn't still be sitting here, in my pajamas, with the Disney Parade or whatever the hell the network stations are showing on Christmas for families to have on in the background while they squeal with glee and smile over tea as presents are unwrapped and good will and joy and cheer and all that crap is spread around, on mute, choosing instead to have Joni sing to me about how she's so hard to handle because she's selfish and she's sad. There's a lukewarm Southern Christmas Wonderland outside, of closed shops and damp puddles and temperatures akin to early fall.

This is what I know of Christmas.

"Just before our love got lost you said
'I am as constant as a northern star'
And I said, 'Constantly in the darkness
Where's that at?
If you want me I'll be in the bar'"

Joni Mitchell never lies.

2008 in music (for me)

2008-12-24T16:41:00.000-08:00

As usual, with anything I could potentially be involved with, my Top Albums Of 2008 list is, well, a little late. And....this isn't even it. I still have superlatives, and books, and things of that nature, to add. But I try to, in times like this, remember the old saying about eating an elephant...it sucks. Entirely. And you shouldn't do it.

Russ's Top Catorce Albums of 2008
(why catorce? because, years ago, it was good enough for Bono, and that's still good enough for me)

1) Deerhunter, Microcastle/Weird Era Cont
Proustian meditation on southern small-town ennui, stasis, and the pains of being the world’s most pure-at-heart blogrock superstar. I had no idea these kids were capable of making an album this beautiful, this brilliant and this weird and out-right stunning…ever.

2) Kanye West, 808s And Heartbreak
God, when have I not been talking about this album lately? Even IF you divorce the ego from the music, you still get a stunning, stark, risk-taking album from a modern rap maverick. Leave what you know about Kanye in place, though, and you get something even more-the knowledge that this, what should have been a bedroom album catharsis about his breakup with his fiancée and the death of his mother (that he blames on her following his own love of excess and the trappings of fame), is publicly consumable.

3)Goldfrapp, Seventh Tree
Eschewing the glittery electro-stomp that they’d built their names and bank accounts on, this year Goldfrapp went wry, sincere and pastoral-ambient. I will admit to having listened to this album and nothing but this album for like a month as soon as I figured out the lyrics to “A&E”.

4)Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III
Say what the hell you want about Weezy: boy is off his freaking rocker in all the right ways. Everyone looks for comparisons to justify their love for Lil Wayne, and mine is simple enough: Kool Keith. Wayne is the second coming of the multi-personality-laden, utterly unhinged and just-not-caring Keith.

5) Leila, Blood Looms and Blooms
Another early 2008 favorite, Leila’s “Blood, Looms and Blooms” is like a night-time visit to a moon-lit wax museum: child-like, haunting, and frightening.

6)School of 7 Bells, Alpinisms

This is what I think I wanted the High Places record to be: less ambience, more epic, world-music-informed emotive drone passages.

7)Portishead, Third
Jesus Christ who saw this one coming? The band that invented the salon-rock triphop genre suddenly returned from a length hiatus with…this. A stunning, bleak landscape of harsh sounds balances with Beth Gibbons’ unmistakably beautiful and fragile voice.

8)Lykke Li, Youth Novels
This album fell of my radar later in 2008, but early in the year I was all about this oddball Swede-pop chanteuse, so much so that to NOT have this on my tops of 08 would be utterly turning my back on the first half of the year.

9) Tie for nine: Now, Now Every Children, Cars/Atlas Sound, Let The Blind Lead Those Who See But Cannot Feel

Now, Now Every Children is a band that busted up into my listening habits, literally, a month before making this list. Their debut full-length, though, is so damn good that it shot up into the top ten-full of epic, sprawling and heartfelt songs like a more ramshackle Arcade Fire.

Atlas Sound is the flip-side of the coin from Bradford Cox, frontman of Deerhunter. Atlas Sound is his ambient/experimental project, which, at first listened, sounded like coins loose in an echo chamber to me. Played back-to-front with the new Deerhunter, though, Let the Blind sounds less like self-important electronic noodling and more like creepy, brain-infecting variations on the music from Twin Peaks.

10)TI, Paper Trail
OHMYGOD what an album. Every single song on this record bangs, both lyrically and beat-wise, and I have no doubt it’s because he did exactly what he said he would never do again-actually wrote his lyrics down. From the utterly cheesy (“Whatever You Like”) to the instantly pummeling (“Swagga Like Us”), this was the southern rap throw-down T.I. has been threatening to make.

11)Amanda Palmer, Who Killed Amanda Palmer?
It’s not often in my older years that I can say an album “saved my life”. In middle and high school, I used to think various singer-songwriter records were keeping me from slitting my wrists (granted, I never tried, and even if I had I would have cut across the vein as opposed to with, and, I mean, probably would have had some stupid stitches and been bullied worse upon returning to school), but it’s not an experience that happens to me much anymore. Amanda Palmer’s solo record saved me this year, and really that’s all I need to say.

12)Magnetic Fields, Distortion

It doesn’t matter how much distortion you bury Stephin Merritt’s tongue-in-cheek, brilliant lyrics under, they still come through…though, for my taste, I PREFER the pounds upon pounds of Jesus and Mary Chain-homage fuzz that Distortion saw the ‘Fields warping their pop tunes in.

13) REM, Accelerate

God, in an ideal world I would have liked this album SO MUCH MORE. Monster, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Up, Reveal-they all were within the top five albums of the year for me when they each came out.

(We won’t discuss Around The Sun.)

It’s not that Accelerate is a BAD record-far from it. But, in the band’s attempt to reclaim the meat-and-potatoes rock fans that basically haven’t given a crap in years, they eschewed the playful experimentation that made earlier (and, granted, less popular) albums so much fun. That said, there’s still some classic R.E.M. here-the whole album, in fact. I just wish it wasn’t so straight-forward.

14) Tie for Catorce: Atmosphere, When Life Gives You Lemons Paint That Shit Gold/Vampire Weekend, S/T
Slug from Atmosphere is my emo bro. Seriously-there’s no one in modern music who can lay out a verse about being done wrong by a woman and have me empathize so closely. I didn’t give it the proper listen upon release, but When Life held strong through the end of the year.

Vampire Weekend? Oh come on I can’t even pretend to be able to justify this.

Most. Rushed. Year-End. List. I've. Ever. Compiled. But I hold to it.

A tweeter who twits?

2008-12-20T13:20:00.000-08:00

Shocking, stunning, fasci-freaking-nating news:

I have joined the cult of twitter. I am now one of those twitterers who twitters via tweets.

Which, following the vernacular pattern, makes me a twat.

https://twitter.com/russmarshalek

Color me late to the damn party, but showing up with my own liquor (half of it already open and consumed).

Headlines like the Spice Girls said

2008-10-18T07:56:00.001-07:00

From the Atlanta Journal this morning, which, in recent days/weeks/months/years has become a hard-hitting paragon of southern journalism (no, seriously, if you only click one of those make it the "journalism" link): the single greatest headline in recent memory

Jesus, if that's front-page 26-point font news? The entire cheerleading team...troupe...gaggle...phalanx...what do you call a collective set of cheerleaders...(answer: cheap trick!...oh, sorry)...of my highschool should've ended up making the AP wire ages ago. Now I think they all just sweep hair at the Cutz-Barn and have babies. Simultaneously.

See Rock City! The Heartbeat Of America! Today's Chevy Truck fights terrorism!

2008-09-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

I need a vacation. Badly. With thoughts of said "vacation", completely unattainable, dancing in my head for no good reason , I decided to Google the one place I know would be a decent day's trip and also encapsulate my redneck youth, something I could technically consider "research" for my memoir...

rock city!

For those of you who don't have a Southern United States redneck past nipping at your heels, this is a brief description of the "wonders of SEEING ROCK CITY", note that it means seeing as an act you are doing not that the rock city itself is seeing because they are ROCKS they don't see a GOT DAMN THING SON, from the seerockcitydotcom website:

Start your morning with a biscuit and hot coffee at the Big Rock Grill. Journey along the Enchanted Trail through the Grand Corridor. Follow the stone path that winds through massive rock boulders. Each step is a discovery!

Thread yourself through the amazing Needle's Eye, shoulder-to-shoulder with tall boulders that allow only slivers of sunlight to penetrate the shadows. Listen to the hush of nature where cardinals and finches flutter. Will you cross the thrilling Swing-A-Long Bridge or rock-solid Stone Bridge? Either choice rewards you with awesome views.

Cast your wish upon the 140-foot High Falls. See if you can spot the Stone Face, keeping watch over the Chattanooga Valley and Missionary Ridge. Stand mightily upon world-famous Lover's Leap or Eagle's Nest and wrap yourself in the magnificent view. Remember to stop by our Gift Shop and buy a world-famous See Rock City birdhouse!

now, pictures:

THIS IS A PICTURE OF AN ELF GNOME THING.

THIS IS AMERICA! AND ALSO JESUS!

FALLOPIAN TUBES? NOPE, A MAP OF "LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN, GA"

America, Freedom, and the free market all slumber inside these:

In the early days, Colonial Buford C Butternutt of the Southern Fried Order of Hominy and Grits Incorporated, named "rock city" the 9th wonder of the world. they took another count, killed some folks, and suddenly it moved up a notch!

THIS IS SO MUCH FUN YOU GUYS I CAN SEE A SAMMICH DOWN THERE!

"we came here to save our marriage by doing furries, apparently"

Also, wasn't ruby falls, like, just a tap-water fountain with rave lights? We only had the $$$ to actually go to *that* part of the tour once in my youth, and I don't remember it looking like this:

which is something I'd expect, like, Jill to photoshop Bono jumping out of.

Anyway. I want to go to Rock City again is all I'm saying.

Debate thoughts upon waking

2008-09-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

I am reading so much about last night, and I don't understand anyone, especially folks on my big blue socialist side of the fence, who think Obama scored some sort of massive, knock-down drag-out victory.

He proved again that he is who he is and who we've fallen in love with: someone brilliant, thoughtful, an engaging speaker and an orator on-par with the best of them. However, it's reaching out into hayseed America that wants blood, white and blue, because this is 'merica and 'merica is 'merica, who only respond to teeth and claws. Mccain is psy-fucking-chotic, and, yeah, by just refusing to press his buttons and staying cool, calm, and collected, even being overly humanist, Obama let some of Mccain's frankenweenie tendencies shine through. but how, how how how, did they come to a middle-ground that is that America, as a country, is SAFER than it was years ago on ACCOUNT OF the massive government invasions of privacy into our everyday lives? Obama, this is NOT what we stand for, we're better than this and you know it.

Grace is a simple, beautiful and powerful force, and Obama applied it last night in debating a human being while John Mccain acted like Grandpappy Sourmilk. Yes yes yes, we know there was no eye contact from Diaperville to the Hope-Train, but haystack America? The folks who play "born in the u.s.a" at weddings graduations funerals church sunday suppers and have never once realized Springsteen's blood beats as blue as the fucking ocean? They don't respond to gestures, to the theater of politics. they need words, bold ones and not big ones. And Obama's still just pandering to those of us who are fucking going to vote for him anyway.

Now, I hold out hope for two things. thing 1: bama and Uncle Longpants have two more rounds. I'm hoping that, like the drama geek he is, Obama's setting John up for a massive fucking "WTFEV, go on HOME, pappa warbreath, your bedtime's long since come and gone" trouncing in the next two, maybe even leading up to a "bitch, PLEASE" in the final debate when Mccain's like "OH HAI GUYZ I CAN HAZ PEEE OWWWE DOUBLEWE!?!?!" (one of the best moments of the night: "fool, shut your whore trap. i have a fucking bracelet too").

The second, and honestly this remains regardless: Biden vs Palin. Oh GOD THAT WILL BE AMAZING. I hope she brings a puppy, a stick of dynamite and three unwed 16 year old mothers-to-be as back up, she'll need them.

On David Foster Wallace, or Something I'm Unqualified To Write

2008-09-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace is dead, and on the floor by the bed lays my copy of Infinite Jest, unloved since I first bought it when I thought that, maybe one day, I'd fall in love with someone who'd be attracted to me solely for my owning the book.

Fortunately, that didn't come to pass. What did come to pass, however, last night, as I too-drunkenly and too-full thumbed my way through the pages, is the stark and utter realization that things like this happens. Great minds expire in a puff of smoke. And this, this happening on the same day I first turned the first page in the first Amy Hempel book I ever picked up, only to, two pages later, have to throw the book on the floor from the inability to not shake from the fucking beauty her sentences unleash in the world.

Someone comes to town, someone leaves town-that, apparently, is how it goes.

DFW's non-fiction and short stories had placed him in my top 10, with Infinite Jest being that work that always hung around, that was always on the bookshelf but had never made it any closer to the bedside, if only because the time was just never there. I feel like it's a neglected friend now that I'm supposed to say a few kind words about when the neglecting had been entirely my fault. That's insane, I fucking know, but if you don't have personal relationships with your books I don't understand you and would rather not try to.

I spent last night drunk, seeking consolation from the cold stark-bare minimalism of Amy Hempel's "at the gates of the animal kingdom" stories (thank you Mister Palahniuk for that), finding nothing but bones and limbs and this

"I want him to know what it clearly seems to me: that if it's true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive."

A friend's blog reminded me about the existence of Dear Mr Henshaw, and how I desperately want to read that book again. It was always a favorite of mine since long before I could understand what it meant-everyone comes from mire and muck, there's hope nowhere unless you find it-and it seems about right right now.

I've had several people-old colleagues, etc-tell me how DFW's death being suicide has placed him in questionable status for them, for their students, for his students, for anyone who looked up to him. I recognize that, I do. I won't get into a dissection of suicide, other than to say that there's not a person who can say they've never thought of it. No one. Not a soul. But there's a difference...thought vs action...and it's his work that's going to live on, as Infinite Jest continues to stare up at me from the floor by my bedside.

I will find the time.

Oh Tori, Where Art Thou?

2008-09-06T07:11:00.000-07:00

Dear Tori Amos:

WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU? No, really, I know that you were last seen sporting a trash bag on loan from Missy Elliot and signing comic books inspired by what happens when artists listen to ecstasy and take Boys For Pele…or, wait, maybe it’s the other way around. Anyway, you’ve been M.I.A. in a way that only she should be, but even Maya Arulpragasam’s been more up in my face this election year, talking about “blop blop” and “pow pow” and probably something about Mr Plow, also, cause that’s his name, that name again is Mister Plow...

(L-R: some guy, some guy, a woman, Tori and her Hefty Synch-Sack, Some Guy, Baseball cap dude)
Regardless:

SARAH FUCKING PALIN. I know you’ve heard of her, Trans-Am. I know you have. She’s from a state so boring even Sufjan Stevens refuses to write a song about it, she wouldn’t let her daughter have an abortion even if the baby was conceived via rape, and, oh, yeah, she thinks doing public or community service work is for “pigeon-toed sissywhackers ( I may be misquoting).

(l-r: A bunch of guys named Njord or Thor or Thjord, Sarah Palin, more guys named Fnjord)
That’s the sort of utter and complete assbag insanity that would normally have you frothing at the mouth, Tee-Aim. Isn’t this where you hop on some platform, either Letterman or Leno or something fat dude with a lisp in a baby blue/black ringer tee three sizes too small who writes for a fanzine called “Breakfast Every Hour”** or “Civilized Syllabub”*** or “Freakish Pancake Amistad”**** clutching a voice recorder, a pen and a doll he made from scraps of your hair he gathered over the course of sneaking backstage approximately five hundred and seventy two times in the past six years (and he can tell you about each and every time-what shoes you were wearing, how many choc-o-nana-crispies he had to bribe the guards with, whether or not you played “leather”…and you always played “leather”), and start spouting complete and utter nonsense that ends up with deep, passionate truth attributed to it out of sheer and utter incoherence? Stuff like “if I was a tigress, that bitch would be a panda cub and in my safari…no, no, listen…in *my* safari, we eat the flesh. We. Eat. The. Flesh” or “It’s like the state of ketchup being met with a ice cream float on a tuesday…and I will not stand for anything less than a hamburger. We have to protect our sundaes, and our meats, before the convenience-stand vendors in power begin coleslawing through the milk chocolate.” Or something like that.

(Hey Y’all Tori Amos dressed like a sheep once)
WHERE ARE YOUR POLITICAL QUOTABLES, Tiggity-T? where is your “I would set fire to that bitch’s igloo with the pom-pom in my wampum”? I GREW UP THINKING THAT THE ONLY OPINION THAT MATTERED WAS YOURS, which is why i care SO MUCH ABOUT ICE CREAM FLAVORS, SHOES, and LED ZEPPELIN. In what could possibly be the most important, at least the most memorable, election of my generation’s lives, I want to hear you mutter completely senseless but partially and almost-epically brilliant noun/verb/wild animal/clothing store half-phrases that both empower and befuddle.

(optional caption 1: “KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF MY SWINE”

optional caption 2: “AMERICA FUCK YEAH”

optional caption 3: “This is a statement about the current political climate, the bush administration, and oh crap that’s areola”

optional caption 4: “it’s the economy, stupid”)

Fuck, Ori-Tay, you shoulda been a pundit. You make at least as much sense as O’Reilly, and I’m fairly sure at one point or another you compared evil drunken Grandpa Bill to “a lost goose sliding down a mountain of graham cracker pudding into a world of shitstorms and bound feet” OR SOMETHING. AND THAT IS BRILLIANT. People think “it’s the economy, stupid” is quotable til infinity? Give you a half-bottle of red wine, two lines and the opportunity to use the words “shoes”, “track-horse” and “milk-maid” in one sentence and we’d all have our new political mantra.

In the words of the great god-poet of the sky Yeezy: tori, we needja right now.

Tuna rubber a little blubber in my igloo*****, which probably means OBAMA 08 MUTHAFUCKAS,
-Shaun

**an actual tori lyric, probably not a fan-zine name

***see above

****i’m just fuckin’ with you now.

*****nope, she said that.

Originally posted at Resonator Mag

How to help old men stalk teenagers.

2008-05-06T14:32:00.000-07:00

This is why I refuse to take the suit-and-tie Superprofessional 100k-a-year ad and marketing industry too seriously.

from my subscription to AdAge (or "adage", which, amusingly enough, rings akin to "sewage"), comes this:

WHAT TEENS WANT: THE AD AND MARKETING CONFERENCE

Held in ~~a fat, weird guy's mom's basement~~ New York, but still incredibly, horrifyingly creepy in everything from concept to any potential execution. I envision something like that convention the Corinthian was a part of in Sandman.

From the conference's promotional mailing:

TOP 5 REASONS TO ATTEND:
• Discover how to use social networking and other online marketing tools to build a big buzz
about your brands on a small budget
• Hear exclusive research from Nielsen Mobile and The N/The MTVN Kids & Family Group
• Learn how to anticipate major market trends in order to keep your brands relevant
to teen consumers
• Get straight answers to your questions from a live panel of teen boys and girls
• Connect with leading brand and agency experts at the MarTEENi Networking Reception

...The enticement to attend is that THERE WILL BE "LIVE TEENS"? Sweet. So this is just like being a predator on AOLCHAT, only way easier and in a higher income bracket!

Sports like Huey Lewis

2008-02-04T14:52:00.000-08:00

Maine, where my girlfriend is from, has the best baseball mascot ever:

A MER-DOG! Named Sluggo. Or Slugger. Or Slurm.

Something like that.

Now, if I had a Baseball team, my mascot would either be

and be called "Super-hittin' Snackyfriends",

Or

and be the "Morrissey Mopers".

As a third option, I would, as Baseball Team Leader(...Manager? Project Manager? Do baseball teams have project managers? Executive Assistants? CEOs?)/Project Manager, consider:

"The Jessica Fletchers".

Ignore the safari hat: she KNOWS. Trust me, scum, she knows.

When will some two-bit American wanna-be-electro duo call themselves "Jessica Fletcher" and dance around onstage in pink panty/bra sets playing keytars? Anyone with friends in a band can take this one for free. I'm glad to be of service.