Success

Or You Took My Love and I'd Like You to Return It, Please. (If You Can Read This then I'm Giving You Yours Back, too)

Chris Isaak is a successful musician.
Chris Isaak has a single top ten album. (Wicked Game was the first "Best of Chris Isaak" album, released by Warner Bros, like, right after Heart-Shaped World.) He has a number of songs that made it into top ten charts, like "Wicked Game" and "Somebody's Crying," which crawled into my head at some point between reading Kara's blog and seeing my old roommate yesterday.

People love Chris Isaak. Of all the people that were palling around on the radio in the eighties>nineties jump, Chris Isaak was (obviously) different. Sure, he did this "rockabilly" thing, which guaranteed him a niche market and I hate the people who do that when I assess "the Artist as a Product-Producer" and subsequently "Chris Isaak the Product." That said:

Assuming "Chris Isaak chose rockabilly because 'shit, there'll always be some people that love suits and shirts with huge, unbuttoned collars, pompadours, and brown guitars with white fretboards" is a reflective assumption.
Yes. That approach would dehumanize Chris Isaak, or any other musician, into a product. It also tacitly assumes that Chris Isaak thought,¹ and that I think, all people who buy things are consumers without any sort of critical capacity.

What about Chris Isaak makes him different from all the other Rockabilliers?(probably not even remotely a word) I'm going to assume there are minuscule differences that only matter to people who really care about rockabilly. (A subset of "people" which I do not belong to) I am, instead, going to tell you a story.

A woman I'll call Sonja and I lived together for two years. Over the course of our cohabitation, we bought a rug and got a pair of dogs together. I have come to the conclusion, through ownership of this rug, that dogs are like children in that they destroy things without really understanding what words like "value" and "destroy" mean. Getting angry at a dog, or a child, is about as pointless as getting angry at God. God, the infinite Architect of Events or the mere Prime Mover, has no idea that you suffer because It has no idea what your suffering feels like. Why should I be angry at the Dog for eating my jacket? Dog has no concept of "expensive leather." If anything, Dog thinks "chewwwy."

Ultimately, it was easier to be angry at Sonja, as the architect of the dog-ownership idea, rather than to be angry at the dogs, or to resolve my own powerlessness regarding dog-intellect. In the meantime, Sonja developed a symmetrical complex focused at me, which I can only assume reduced me to "mean, obsessive in [my] petty battles, and over-privileged." I'm only certain about the "mean" criticism. Sonja told me that I was 'mean, so mean" in the same conversation that she told me that I was arrogant and that I never loved her. ("You don't even know what love is.")
Everything else is just projected anxiety.

But what the fuck does Sonja know? Love's one of those intangibles, like art, American exceptionalism, and gravity. Is the measure of love the quotient of the weight of the heart divided by the weight of the brain? Is it something, like art and (tangentially) pornography, that you'll only recognize when you see it? Or is it like gravity, American exceptionalism, and the rest of the set of scientific theories? We know whether or not love is real because we experience its effects and we can make reference to its root causes in history? Art/Porn theory and Theory theory both sound good to me. It's possible that we're able to recognize love because we're good at looking for causal connections. It's possible that love is merely a theory designed to combat casual connections. I like knowing that there are people like Chris Isaak, getting money while they work their suspicions about the metaphysical nature of love into their art.²

David Lynch loves Chris Isaak. If you needed some other proof of success, then there you have it. David Lynch has some strange fetish for the 1950's/1990's fame disconnect and Chris Isaak fits into that somehow. I realize that the 1950's are a little bygone era when people made plans instead of using cell phones and power dynamics were clearly delineated both in public and private spheres. Everything that society hated could be covered up rather than addressed. Make-up sales were huge and undeclared income was a given. I still have no idea what David Lynch thinks (a) about Chris Isaak (b) about the nineteen-fifties and (c) in general.

But aside from record sales, length of career, metaphysical ponderings, and acceptance in the larger artistic community, I still maintain, and will continue to maintain in the face of anyone who might counter-maintain, that Chris Isaak is succesful, and assert that he is successful because he has accomplished what he set out to do: Redefine Imitations of Elvis.
For the majority of the time I had "Somebody's Crying" stuck in my head, I really only had the chorus rattling around. In replaying those lyrics, I apparently knocked loose the first verse of "Suspicious Minds" and set about melding these songs into a now-inseparable ballad. I began to write a detective story about this Suspicious Minds/Somebody's Crying hybrid, and only stopped when I googled "return the love you took from me" and found myself reading Chris Isaak's name a lot. I was certain at least one of these sites would tell me that Chris Isaak loved amphetamines and was born along with a dead twin and that the twin didn't really die until he took Chris' place on a toilet in Graceland.

I'm not going to build a shrine to Chris Isaak. (Or Elvis.) I may imagine, or even pray, that someday there will be an Elvis-like figure who can pull my heart's strings like Chris Isaak can. I may hope for a Chris-Isaak-like figure who appears completely unphased by his aging and widening body and inspires my own sense of culinary exploration with snacks like "corned beef hash tots" or "fried ham and baloney poppers."
What do I want in my music then? When I look through the musicians on my computer I can't really see a pattern.³ There may be a disproportionate number of suit-wearing performers. There's a 1:3.5 ratio of female:male lead singers, which is noteworthy because I usually tell people "male vocalists" when they ask what kind of music I listen to. Maybe I simply want my music to cause some sort of emotional or intellectual shift. Aside from Radiohead, there's not much I listen to because I think it sounds cool. (And yet! "I keep falling over, I keep passing out, when I see a face like you" is a brick truck hit.) I wouldn't be so bold as to suggest that music made without the intent of creating this response is pornography because there's artistic merit in any use of a tool. I would instead suggest that I am not listening to music as an artist but as a sentimentalist.
Fictional Scientists tell me that time travel to the past is impossible, or at least time travel to the past of "before the mechanism used to travel through time existed." Music, then, seems to be a time ark for me. I will always have a couple of Sublime CDs solely for use in August, because that music carries with it a lot of associations related to the mystique of knowing Spanish, high school anxiety, and thinking about what being drunk must feel like. I will always have a copy of "Forever Blue" because I don't want to forget that love is an idea and there's no cost in exchanging it.
I don't care what you have to say about the scope of the record industry. I will always have access to my memories because of its pervasiveness.
---------------

¹Here, the use of "Chris Isaak" is divisive. Chris Isaak was an active "independent musician" prior to his record deal with W.B. That said, I'm willing to admit that there's no way to tell whether any person is acting as they would like to act or as they believe they should act (or, in the case of a person with an agent, how they are explicitly told they should act) for "the greater good" (in hopes that the greater portion of people who may or may not be interested in them will reflect on them favorably.) I still consider the possibility of ambiguity moot, as some person's choice to act in favor of adjusting humanity-at-large's perception of them doesn't negate that they're still acting as they wish. I am, however, open to claims of misinterpretation re: "the false face" and "the genuine face."
²It occurs to me that this blog could just as likely have been inspired by Haddaway's "What is Love?" (Or at least these paragraphs of this blog.) Also, how awesome was Beyonce on SNL last night? I'm not so into the music of Beyonce, but it's recently occurred to me that I may just not like overly produced music. The first song was nice. Simple. The other one ("Single Ladies") I'm going to put forward succinctly as "over-the-top."
³ Amy Winehouse, Black Sabbath, Bob Marley, Cat Power, (just "the covers record") Chris Isaak, The Clash, Cowboy Junkies, (just "trinity sessions") Elvis Costello, Hole, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Lauryn Hill, (just "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill") Led Zepplin, Leonard Cohen, Liz Phair, (just "Whip-Smart") The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Ministry, (just "Cover Up") Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Pixies, Pavement, PJ Harvey, Prince, Radiohead, The Smiths, Tom Waits, Toots & the Maytals, the Weepies, (just "Say I am You") and Weezer. (just "Pinkerton")

"Just think about it. Deeply. Then forget about it. And an idea will jump up in your face." - Don Draper

What I'm Doing when I'm not Writing
(or On Bad Television and Its Manifold Charms)

I haven't been writing. For shame, I know. This admission is fiction. I've put together a terrible essay on Nick Hornby's use of fragmentation in his writing and the theme of death or the fear of it. It has "potential." There will be "revising." One day. Some day. Days. The worst of the potential future days.

I hate revising.

I have been watching a lot of stolen television. I've made some terrific progress through the fascinating life of dr. temperance brennan and her friend and partner seeley booth. (played by angel, an old friend from btvs and an eponymous show of his own) Soon I'll be through the third season and I'll be able to move on. It's worth noting that I think Bones is total crap. They do this thing where the plot of the episode will track alongside some story which is eerily resonant with something you remember from the news, like the blair witch project, or the hurricane katrina fallout and the sorting of bodies, or the pressures from the prolonged iraq war on national guardspeople, or the pregnant corpse that washed ashore and the investigation into her late husband, (et cetera). The first writing workshop I was in, someone did this with what's her name... Terri Schiavo. In first person. (No, I don't think it was biased. Why do you ask?) And sometime they ask questions, apparently rhetorical, like "is she crying because he's dead or because she lost a mansion?" And really I'd like to just be entertained by my stolen TeeVee. And the characters are kinda boring. Everyone has quick solutions for problems with their super-genius intellects and 1 to 2 ratio of multi-millionaire characters to characters making enough money to wear new three piece ensembles hourly.

Oddly enough, I'm comfortable with the 2-d leads. It increases the contrast when the inevitable character arc episodes come along. It's nice. I can do other things.

SO why am I watching this thing I hate?
1) I just like David Boreanaz.
2) Anthropology is part of the background for a short story i'm writing, and I can JSTOR or google anything that sounds weird/interesting.*
3) Rampant love stories. It's like watching the x-files if Mulder and Scully were in a soap opera, and there were less UFOs.**
4) Billy Gibbons cameos.
5) I'm not really sure.

I haven't minded watching Mad Men.
Does anyone have thoughts on the flying car?
Or things that end up being collected unintentionally?

*Re: police procedurals, BONES still has it's go-to gadgets for solving crimes. The maggots, the uv light, the swabby juice for blood, but they have an anthro vocabulary too. I appreciate that.
**There have been two stories that referenced UFOs. One involved a man falling from space (also involved a jealous astronaut) and another involving a pair of kids buried alive in a keg that looked like gray aliens.

A double-bind

Inside one of those really unfairly marketed BMW M(3)s is a blonde woman,**** driving down High St. past Elena's. I've just walked by Waterbeds n' Stuff, which is selling a framed Dark Knight poster (Why So Serious?) for $25.99.* The scene where the Joker kills Gambol is replaying in my head. (Why So Serious?) My lips are moving around the words "why so serious." I look up and there's the woman: blonde hair, inconclusively dark skin, maybe from the fact that the sky is about the piss on Columbus, maybe from an adolescence of acne, maybe she tans, and she's looking at me. Is it because I'm talking to myself? Is it because I'm just so damn attractive? Is it because I'm slightly more interesting to look at than traffic?

Earlier in the week, I came back from Pittsburgh with some "dry goods. An innovation the Americans have put a lot of research into perfecting." My parents were kind enough to pick them up. Three peaches and a can of tuna rolled out of the passenger side of my truck when I pulled out my laundry hamper. I wasn't really sure what to take in first.

Food
I need food to continue living. And my continued possession of a shelter, which becomes more difficult if I have to buy food again, is somewhat meaningless if I don't have food. Food is universally desirable. If you're going to steal it, you don't have to pawn it, you can use it yourself and think "hey, I just saved some cash."
Clothing
Clothing is less necessary than Food. It is a form of Shelter, in that it provides protection from the elements, and there will come a time when I have a stupid amount of money and can do stupid things like have meals delivered to my door and ten pairs of boxers and twenty outfits and my hermetical aspirations will be realized. Until then, the potential theft of my laundry is a real threat. My hamper is more difficult to move than even the entirety of my groceries, but they also have less immediate value. Stealing my hamper is an investment of time, both to move it and to get practical rewards out of it.** I don't imagine an attendant at a consignment store will ask anyone hard questions that are generated by the intuition of "these clearly would never fit [your body-type/gender,]" but it's not like the thief is going to drop of everything at once with out saying, "I'm punishing my boyfriend/husband/brother/roommate/adulterous employer. Would you like to join me in my righteous justice."
Really, though, food is the important thing. I have clothing. Clean clothing, that I could wear, and enough of it that I wouldn't need to replace anything but boxers.

I've been thinking about this for most of the week. The order we prioritize things in. I had an ethics class in high school, a good bit of it was dogmatic, some of it was "wrong."*** We talked about instinct, which was ironically juxtaposed against a discussion of justified true beliefs three weeks later. (You're right, that's not really a juxtaposition. It was in the same class though. It's possible I merely like the word "juxtaposition." It, along with "conversely," "subsequently," "ambiguous," and "delicious," are words I use, what's the word? Often.) This was one of the things that came up. The hierarchy of happiness. I looked for it on the internet (where everything is) and I found something similar under "Need" but it wasn't exactly like that. "Love & friendship" instead of "significant primary relationships with others" & "safe birth control and child-bearing," nothing about health care or an appropriate cross-cultural education. But otherwise, that was it. Happiness is safety. Happiness is security. Happiness is knowing that when you die, some people are still living to remember you were there. To think about where you are now.

Imagine how happy I was, seeing the women in the expensive, dishonestly marketed car, knowing that now I could finish this. An epiphany. Not really. But still, sometimes writing is something I do, it's Bliss.

*Yes, I finally saw "The Dark Knight" in the theaters. The sense-replacement effect of the movies is so necessary. [I have other great things to say about the movie, which I have praised before, but I feel like praising something so heavily reviewed beyond the feelings it evoke re: my personal history is redundant. Whatever, it's good. I'll lose a significant portion of my free time when it shows up in the dollar theater.
**all of my clothing is 38-40 in the waist, XX-XXXL in shirts. I do not believe my clothing is practically useful to the great majority of the population of Columbus. It would merely be a means to an end.
***"wrong" meaning I do not believe it exists and moreover, I have a good reason to believe it does not exist. This may be pointless in an ethics class, but we talked more about instinct than I thought was necessary. Yes, even at seventeen. We started talking about maternal instinct, mostly because its name (maternal instinct) meant that it didn't show up in men: Men are clearly meant to be nomadic, to spread seed, to be serially monogamous, etc. Arguments like "human instinct is limited to a fear of heights and the instinct to root. there are no other instincts. "maternal instinct" is a taught behavior." (not that well drawn-out) fell on unmoved ears. Whatever, man.
[**** The ad, called BMW-Independence, is to sell BMW 3-series cars. (it's really selling BMWs) It talks about what they didn't try to do. What I don't like about it is it doesn't show the product until the end, building tension right?¹ But it's not showing 3-series bmws, its showing a variety of BMWs, including a 320i with body art by Roy Lichtenstien. (Which it turns out is a 3 series, but it has an m-series engine, so I feel slightly vindicated, but not really, I just don't think there's much overlap between M3's and 3's and yet they sell them as such.)
¹What gets on my nerves about advertisements, specifically this advertisement, is this tactic, policy, subterfuge (whatever) of showing something else, like cars that aren't even old versions of the car your selling but simply cars you've put your seal on. And I guess a lot of people do this. From the people that brought you the iPod and the iPhone: here's the MacBook Air. A meritocracy, yes? We've done well before, We'll do well again. We can prove it.(You know, with our previous track record. (I watched mad men this weekend. It's actually how I ended up seeing the BMW ad in the first place. (they have an "exclusive advertising agreement"(WTF?)))) Race Car drivers are employed for much the same reason. I think we all know that the Rally, F1, and NAS cars driving really fast on TV aren't for sale in, especially in, dealerships. What's the purpose of the brand on the race car? Money from sponsors? added 08.14.08, because PQ1000 pointed out I was being vague.]

8 minute post on why I'll never be a poet.

I'm rearranging the apartment now: Desk stays in big room, bed moves there too, Wingbacks and TV move to small room, where the closet is. Bookcase moves with chairs, even though it's across the room. Not now. Everything that's going has been compressed together so I can move the bed in. I keep telling myself one table has to stay with the bed, but I can't figure out which one. It makes sense to leave the table that's in the old bedroom there, it'll fit over the bookcase I'll have a new dimension of books, but the other table goes with the chairs. I think of them as a unit. The only alternative I imagine, other than placing the chairs back-to-winged-back (Drama!) is buying a new table for the chairs or my bedside. It hasn't even occurred to me that I could move, like, the drawer that's next to my desk until now, or you know, something like that. Maybe fix that table I found. Modules and obsessions. Eight minutes.

bean brain

There are times when I'm convinced that the brain cell I use to store one byte of information either overlaps or is the same as the brain cell I use to store another byte of information. (Yes, that sentence gets a little hairy in the middle.) Allow me to illustrate.

















You were totally expecting a picture, weren't you? No, I'm going to give you an example. It's a true-to-life one though. George Orwell. Everytime I think of George Orwell, I think of Animal Farm and fighting with socialists in Spain. Then, I start to think of radio broadcast, War of the Worlds, Rosebud, and a variety of desperate advertisements meant to keep a fat man afloat in the twilight of his career. There's a reason I'm using examples instead of a name, that's because I can't think of it. The fact is, I can't remember (excuse me while i visit wikipedia) Orson Welles' name if I think of George Orwell's name first, and vice versa. It's a common experience that I attribute the creation of Animal Farm to Orson Welles, however, I have an explanation for this. Ever notice how Orson Welles had that Fidel Castro beard once he got older, that might make the Animal Farm thing more believable. All things considered, ORson WELLes isn't not at all mistakeable for George orwell. I don't know how I keep getting them mixed up all the damn time. In times of doubt, I blame comic books, they've always played with my perception of time and continuity.

Anybody else get people, places or things mixed up? For that matter, is a place just an immobile thing? Discuss-thing!