In addition to writing thousands upon thousands of words that I can hardly imagine anyone cares about, I also dabble in design and have been trying with varying degrees of effort, but always the same degree of success (which is to say, failure), to shoot a movie.
I don’t know if this is something specific to people who fancy themselves writers, or if it applies generally to all creative folk, but I typically hate the things I make. I gave up a while ago on needing validation from others about the things that I make and do. Despite the fact that other people’s negative criticism is still bound to sting (and, for that matter, the positive criticism to inflate my sense of self-worth) and may affect what I do in the future, the fact is that if I’ve seen something to completion, I did it for me, and that can’t be changed.
(The problem is that in doing things for me, I can’t logically expect to ever be financially successful in any sort of creative endeavor. I’ve come to terms with that, and am willing to work a job that doesn’t bring me any joy if that’s what I must do. But I digress.)
Unfortunately, even in creating for an audience of me, I typically despise the end product. I can pick it apart forever, marking this sentence or that line or whatever down as flawed in my mind. Whether I can correct said flaw or not isn’t important; it is in fact entirely beside the point.
The point being, I guess, that I’m crazy.
I’ve never written anything longer form than a feature length screenplay, and even as we speak I’m working out how to fix the ones I’ve “finished” on their next rewrite. I actually got physically ill rereading the first one I wrote in advance of beginning to rewrite it. (To be fair, I think it might have been the combination of lack of sleep and overcaffeination that caused the nausea moreso than the script, but they’re still linked in my mind.)
I’ve designed a few websites beyond my own. Visiting them now, even the one that I finished most recently, I can’t help but see every amateurish mistake I made and where I’ll have to tweak the code.
George Lucas once said, “Movies are never finished, only abandoned.” In his case, maybe some of the movies should have been abandoned a little sooner, like before they started production, but the spirit of what he said is entirely accurate across all creative projects, at least from my perspective. I’ve never looked at anything I’ve done and thought, “Ah, perfect!” It just does not apply to me, I guess.
I had a conversation with a friend who’s offered to help me with an upcoming project about my tendency to self loathing when it comes to the things I’ve made. She does not appear to have this problem, and I did a bad job of explaining it to her; she took it to mean that I assumed everything I did would fail. To her credit, I did say the words “I’ve never not failed” in the course of the conversation, but what I meant to say and how the words sounded were quite different.
This is a problem I have a lot.
This conversation turned into a argument, and I got pretty substantially taken down. I had to concede in the end, because my argument such as it was had no basis in anything other than my head.
I don’t really know how to cope with this tendency; it’s entirely instinctual, and I can’t remember ever feeling any differently. Nevertheless, it surely can’t be helpful; even if I don’t have a negative attitude about what I’m doing as I’m doing it (and I sometimes do, which is a whole other issue), denigrating it after the fact isn’t going to win me any supporters, either.
There’s probably some deep seated psychological or emotional reason for the way I view my own work. Surely someone out there enjoys their own output, someone who sells themselves relentlessly and wants the spotlight enough to take it when necessary.
I’m not that kind of narcissist.
I like to think I have a pretty good handle on my attributes, that my self judgment is both fair and accurate. But maybe it’s not, at least not about everything. Maybe I am, in fact, underselling myself on the quality of my work. Although I’m unlikely to be convinced of that.
Still, isn’t that better than the alternative? Do the people like someone who’s humble to the point of self-abasement over someone who’s braggadocios to the point of obnoxiousness?
This song made me cry over someone else once, someone who was lying right beside me when it happened.
That was over within a year. But it was still years before I could listen to the song without hurting.
Now I can. Sometimes, I feel bad about it.
What happens when you love a song more than you respect the memory of what it stood for? It was ours, but I had to make it not ours after a while. There had been other “us”s by then, and presumably other songs, but that one had always stayed where it belonged.
I never made a decision to take it back for myself, to use it for my own selfish gains, to listen to it again without feeling all the hard things that it had made me feel.
That doesn’t change the fact that sometimes I listen to it and feel like I stole something from someone, that I took something that doesn’t belong to me.
I don’t think that I will ever feel completely free of guilt.
I’ve known of Pavement a lot longer than I’ve known Pavement.
When I was growing up, even when I started exploring my own musical taste, I really only had the radio on which to rely. The best friend I had whose musical taste I knew was a huge Metallica fan; while I do legitimately love them, metal isn’t really my forte. My other friends either had terrible taste, or taste I didn’t know. That meant that Z104.5 The Edge was leading me along.
That, consequently, meant I didn’t hear any Pavement. And I missed out for that.
If you catch me on the right day, in the right mood, I might argue that Pavement are the greatest band in the world. Their contentious history, curious musical decisions, and all around weird behavior may, under whatever self-imposed circumstances I devise, define them as the most “rock and roll” band of the ’90s. And since everything about my musical taste is defined by that decade, that means something to me.
It’s a bit odd, then, that once I finally made it to them in my musical education, it took me some time to see what all the fuss was about. Sure, they may have been writing great songs; hell, they may even have been technically talented somewhere in there.
But they were fucking terrible. Couldn’t play for shit.
It took me a long time to get past that.
Eventually, I did, and I understood. I came to see all the things mentioned above, how much the fact of how they play doesn’t mean anything compared to what they play, and why. The reason I didn’t get them at first was because they were making music for the person I would eventually be, not the person I was at 12, or at 17.
They were making music for the alleged grown up version of me.
So why do I wish I could play their music? Because they are certainly all better musicians than me; you don’t write and play songs as good as their best work without being better than someone who can’t play at all. But I could absolutely pick up a given instrument and learn a fairly significant portion of their songbook.
I would hate it, though.
The way they play would never work with my personality. There’s only the most superficial structure. The way it sounds to me, if anyone has any ideas, they are free to go off and explore for a bit without the rest of the band getting on their case. The playing is sloppy, allowing mistakes to become part of the music, rather than something that needs to be smoothed out.
In short, Pavement run against my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and I love them for it. I wish to anything that I could let myself go, let my art lead me, rather than trying to lead my art.
They’re an example I’ll always wish I could follow, but probably never will.
This one is a little different, a little special. There’s no YouTube video for this song, because it’s never been released. Not never been released as a single, either. I mean that it’s never been released for public consumption, beyond being excerpted briefly on a TV show and maybe existing on a streaming site somewhere or other for a short while.
I first found Schatzi back when people used P2P networks to find music. I was looking for music to make a mixtape featuring the names of my friends. I already had my own song; pretty much everyone I’ve ever met has sung it to me at one point or another.
In the end, the idea came to naught. There simply weren’t enough songs with my friends’ names to make a long enough mix, and then as now, I’d rather scrap a project than complete a compromised version of it.
That’s not good for my self-esteem, I don’t suppose.
I did listen to the songs I found, though. Sir Paul’s “Heather” was lackluster, in the way of a lot of his post-Beatles work. Obviously, the Pixies’ “Tony’s Theme” was great. But the SwAmpee hadn’t yet written “Andey”, and there were slim pickings on most of the other names as well.
There was one standout, though, that caught me immediately, a power pop number called “Song for Stephanie” by a band I’d never heard of.
I didn’t realize yet that my life would be different.
I downloaded as much of the rest of their work as there was to find, and struck out into the wilds of the 2002 internet to find out as much about them as I could. I saw that they had a record coming out in about six weeks, and an EP that was of recent vintage. I tracked down the EP in a record store (remember those?) and got familiar.
On Valentine’s Day, I went to see Jimmy Eat World with my friends. It was immediately after “The Middle” became the biggest song in the world, and the venue was full of people who didn’t quite have the history with these guys that I did. I was annoyed.
The show was still great, though.
After the lights came up, workers at the venue were handing out flyers for upcoming shows. A superhero named Tony came up to me excitedly clutching one for the Promise Ring in a few weeks.
“Cool. You want to go?”
“Look who’s opening.”
An amazing coincidence. We had tickets to see Schatzi play before we got out the door.
We got there early that day, actively ready to see the opening band. It was a weird situation, but hey. Their set was as impressive as their EP had been, which was a good sign. I also shouted out for them to play “Nadine”, one of their older songs. They hadn’t rehearsed it, but they still knew it, and that was great.
Yes, I realize I was That Guy. But I totally looked the part. Still do, in fact.
In the way of small bands in small venues, they came down and hung out with the crowd a little after the show. I met three of the four band members; the drummer was from my hometown and was talking to his parents. Chris and Montez, the two frontmen, were unsurprisingly the more gregarious members of the band. Marc, the bassist, was more subdued. They were all awesome dudes.
On the way out of the show, we saw that each car had a flyer put up under the windshield wiper: another Schatzi show in a few weeks in Norman.
I drove down with a few friends to see. In the meantime, their album, 50 Reasons to Explode, had been released, and I made myself familiar with it. I saw Chris unloading equipment before the show, and asked if they were going to play my favorite song, “Delta”.
“Yeah, I think so. Montez wrote that, I’ll be sure to tell him you asked about it.”
Ouch. That was embarrassing. And then my friend called me a brown noser. I had to agree with that assessment.
Again, they put on a great show, and again, I talked with them a bit afterward. Again, I found out they were playing soon.
There were three more shows over the next several months. They opened for Ultimate Fakebook on their farewell tour. I saw the last show, saw the Schatzi guys get duct tape mummified and have flour dumped on the drum set. (Incidentally, Ultimate Fakebook have since reunited and are releasing a new record in the near future.)
A few weeks later, Schatzi played at one of those venues that changes its name, but not its function, every few months. I remember Montez loved the place because they were the only bar in the world (as far as he knew) that had one of his old bands on the jukebox.
My favorite, though, was the time I saw them alone. I drove down over an hour to see them, got a flat on the way, made the rest of the drive on the donut spare. When I got to the venue, the show had started. Chris recognized me when I walked in and nodded to me, touching his lip to the mic and getting a shock. Apparently there was a short somewhere in the line, because it happened a few more times until he finally had the bright idea to pull a sock over the mic and provide some insulation.
As always, they were great, and this was the most intimate setting in which I’d seen them, in the sense that the few dozen people in the space were right up against the “stage”, such as it was. A small space, a close space.
Afterward, I bought a couple of compilations that Schatzi appeared on from Marc. We got to talking, spent an hour or so shooting the shit until the band decided to go to Waffle House. They invited the fans who’d stuck around to come with them, but I couldn’t stay any later, given the state of my flat tire.
Not long after, they went further afield on their tour and I wasn’t able to see them again. I kept up with their exploits via their tour diaries, which I found out were written by Marc, and which weren’t your average tour diaries.
He didn’t really write about the places they played, or the people, or the other bands, or the travel, or being stuck in the van. All of these things were mentioned, obviously, but that’s not what the writing was about. It was about how it felt to be in this band on the road, working together.
It was something else.
Not long after, Marc started writing a personal LiveJournal. I read it for a while, kind of in awe of this guy. I knew him, a little. I knew he was a kickass bassist, I knew he had sweet dreadlocks, I knew he seemed shy but was a smart guy and a great conversationalist once you got him out of his shell a little bit.
I hadn’t heretofore realized that he was a genius.
I wrote him an email, just telling him what I thought, how impressed I was by him and what his band meant to me. He responded, and we became friends after a fashion. He told me they were going into the studio in Lincoln, Nebraska to work with Mike Mogis, he of Saddle Creek Records production fame, as well as, you know, being in Bright Eyes and Monsters of Folk. It sounded like Schatzi were ready to take the next step, and I was fucking pumped.
The recording sessions were harrowing. Lincoln in the winter is not exactly heaven on earth; it could charitably be considered a wintry wasteland, I suspect. But I’m biased against Nebraska, so maybe don’t take my word for it.
Marc continued to write, about the recording process, about himself, about the band, about the everything. About life. I was in my early 20s, a kid, and I am not ashamed to say that I was learning about life, the inner workings of being an artist, from this guy. A guy I knew, a guy that I’d spoken to, a guy I’d call a friend.
It was a weird experience.
Marc watched a lot of Travel Channel while they were holed up in Lincoln. He became smitten with Samantha Brown, the host of Passport to Great Weekends. He decided to name a song after her.
The band finally finished the record and struck out on tour again. They prepared for a new release. They were at the top of their game.
Then, not.
Disney bought their record label, and with it the rights to their unreleased album. It remains unreleased; the Machine Breaks Down, as foretold by the song of that title on said unreleased record.
Meanwhile, on that tour, Montez discovered he was going to be a father. He left the group to prepare, leaving them as a power trio in an awkward situation.
After they finished the tour, they returned to Austin. Schatzi was on the cusp, and circumstance had derailed them. I kept in contact with Marc, and not long after, he sent me a burned copy of their unreleased record.
It is, tragically, as good as I’d hoped it would be.
I still talk to Marc to this day. In fact, I asked him to upload the song so I could use it for this post.
And Marc Fort is one of my heroes. A true example of a gentleman and scholar, one of the coolest dudes I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, and someone I wouldn’t mind being more like. A writer whom I respect. A musician whose work and tastes I love; his most recent release is as part of the dreampop band Norushi Minx; you should go buy now. Hell, buy two.
Schatzi are one of a few bands who have literally changed my life. I’ll champion them, always. I hope that they return someday, able to do for someone new what they were able to do for me.
Even if they don’t, though, they’ll always represent for me one of the best things about music, the way that you can accidentally discover someone with no previous presence in your life and they can be the greatest band in the world. Most people who love music have a similar experience, I’d bet; maybe Bowie on the turntable when you were a kid, R.E.M. at a bar before anyone knew their name, some bar band whose name no one else would ever remember.
If you love music, there’s music that helped shape you. There are others that I’ve mentioned in other of these posts, and others that will be mentioned. But more than any other, Schatzi the band and Marc Fort the person are that music for me.
This idea is difficult for me, possibly the most difficult post of this entire project.
I am frequently a deeply insecure person. I can know objectively that something I do is worthwhile, but in my heart of hearts I’ll never believe it.
One advantage of this, I suppose, is that I’m often quite good at accepting criticism. After all, if I believe in my heart that there’s nothing redeeming about a piece of work, then a few hypothetical red marks on the page can’t possibly be as bad as what I’m imagining.
However, it has the opposite effect with concern to value judgments. If someone tells me they don’t like something, or even that they prefer something else I’ve done that I consider not as good, I tend to take it extremely personally.
I used to describe myself as highly self-confident, but with no self-esteem whatsoever. It is a vast oversimplification of how the situation really is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate. There’s definitely a bit of truth to be pieced together from it if you can parse what exactly I mean by it. Which shouldn’t be hard, since I told you as much in the second paragraph.
All of this is paralyzing for a writer. Of course, I don’t know any writers who aren’t at least a little neurotic; it follows, in its way, that a person who had the tendency and desire to create other eyes through which to see the world, or to describe what is seen in the world in another way, would be a person with a tendency towards any of a number of certain neuroses. (Hell, for all I know, most of them share my paralyzing fears and specific doubts.)
This is what it ultimately comes down to, I suppose: the way I accept value judgments makes me loathe to show my work to other people. That would be fine, if I were writing for an audience of one, but I’m not. I write for myself, but not just; the things I write are, I guess, typically supposed to be read. So you can see how not wanting to show my work to others might be a negative for my creative process. I wish I could get past it, could accept that some people just aren’t going to like Thing X and move on, that I could let their opinions bounce off of me.
Wait a minute… that sounded curiously like THE POINT: for all the many and varied other ways the song can be read and applied to me, how it describes me is the most simple explanation possible, and only barely a metaphor.
I woke up that day the same, sort of, as many other days, with my mom rousing me to wake up and get dressed. I’d just started college a few weeks before, still living with my parents, still getting into the rhythm, and still amazed by how early a 9:30 am class could seem even though I had been used to getting up for school that started at 7:50 for many years.
There was something different that day, though, a note of panic and surprise. “Someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center!”
In my barely conscious state, I thought distinctly “no they didn’t”. I did not understand how or why or who or anything else, any better than anyone else did before that day. I didn’t understand how quickly the world can change completely while remaining exactly the same.
I got up just in time for her to tell me that another plane had hit the second tower. She said she’d thought they were coming in to drop water on the first conflagration; instead, she saw live the moment when people started to understand. I figured it out then.
On the way to school, I put Clarity in my CD player and pressed play, the opening hum and beat and chime and strum and pretty words all fading into just the right lines: “It happens too fast to make sense of it, make it last.”
That’s exactly what I was trying to do when I got to my class building. The lobby was jammed with people, necks craned up to see the small television hanging in the corner.
We all watched the first tower fall, then the second. The world changed before our very eyes, too fast to make sense of it.
It was cold there, that late in the winter and that close to the water. I didn’t expect the first time I ever saw seagulls to be concurrent with a snowfall; I’d always associated them with warmer climates and those beaches that I still had not ever visited. Yet there they were, wheeling through the air in their presumably inexorable search for food, occasionally blowing out of existence when the wind gusted and threw a blast of snow across the scene.
I was huddled in the tunnel under the pedestrian bridge in the park at East End Avenue. It was the only place I could go to get away from my house, not the most wonderful place in the world at the time.
I hadn’t yet grown accustomed to living in a city where I was actually exposed to the weather. I didn’t own an umbrella yet, something I managed to regret every time it rained hard. I only had a scarf because I’d received one as a gift, and a hat because they’d given them out at Domino’s in the winter time when I was delivering for them. Most crucially for me under that bridge, though, I didn’t have any gloves.
I palmed my CD player and thrust my hands deep into my pockets, hoping to keep them warm long enough for the storm inside to blow over so I could go back home. I sat; I must have looked for all the world like a scared, cold kid to every passerby. I was 21, older than I’d ever been, and now I’m even older, and I thought I was dealing with the situation in as adult a way as I was going to manage.
I didn’t want to go wait inside the coffee shop where I worked, even though it wasn’t far. I, for some reason possibly related to my pride, felt it was a better idea to stay close to home and let myself suffer. Maybe I wanted to be a martyr. Maybe I wanted to prove a point. That was never going to work, something disastrously easy to see in hindsight.
I put on “Hustle Rose” by Metric and moved to the melody line of the vocal, trying to keep warm to its repetition and rhythm. The third or fourth time through, I started to get more cognizant of the song’s component parts, the keyboard or organ or whatever line that traced the vocal in the background of the opening, the complex changes engineered by altering the song’s instrumentation, things I’d learned to notice by spending almost all my time around and among musicians for as long as I’d had the slightest shred of independence.
It was clear in retrospect that I should have tried harder at music myself.
Emily Haines sings “throw me a bone” and I can follow her wherever she wants to go. I hadn’t heard of Metric before a random unexpected instant message from a friend of mine earlier that fall had implored me to look them up. We weren’t quite to the torrenting stage yet; I must’ve downloaded their EP and first full length from a peer to peer network, back before those became so laughably archaic that the record labels figured out how to beat them.
I hadn’t heard of them, sure, but no mixtape I made that winter didn’t have a Metric song on it, and since the only thing I could afford to give for gifts over those first far from home holidays were mixes, I used most of the songs they had at the time. It was obviously love at first sight.
I dared to expose the bare pale skin of my hand to the biting cold so I could tap a few buttons on my CD player and set the song to repeat; there were other songs that day, but none of them mattered.
None of them mattered.
I wonder if I knew even then that I was imprinting a memory on my mind, defining a moment of my life, embossing one of those things that would come to explain what New York is to me into the flat stock of my life. I don’t think I did; I wasn’t that smart.
I imagine I was just cold and lonely and alone in a city I barely knew aside from a few too many nights spent at a gay bar with $10 all you can drink on Thursdays and a few too many regrets that didn’t involve nearly enough bad decisions.
Sitting behind the passenger’s seat of the car on that hot day, displaced by the only person who trumped me in the best friend rule, and who I would have gladly given up shotgun for a hundred times out of a hundred anyway, I should’ve already known there was nothing there.
I was seventeen, and I thought I was in love. The fact that I might have no idea what love actually may be never entered my mind; it becomes clear to me later that the reason every teenager makes the same mistakes is because there are certain things you have to experience for yourself. For me, one of those things was hanging myself up on a girl for half a decade.
We’d had the whole relationship in a flash, cycling through the whole process. Meet, flirt, kiss, girlfriend/boyfriend, make out some more, “I love you”… answered with evasion. Too stupid, too soon.
I made promises then that I had no reason to make, no way to know if I could actually keep. Some of them are seared into my mind, repeated so often in memory that I can’t honestly tell you if they truly happened or if I just imagined they should have and made them part of the story. Others are lost entirely to me; in my mind, it is a linear narrative, and when you’re crafting a narrative, it is often best to jettison anything that doesn’t further the plot.
It’s not easy living your life that way. When you expect everything to have exposition followed by rising action followed by climax followed by falling action followed by denouement, it has a way of being self fulfilling.
Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad for someone who also believed in happy endings, but I happen to believe that everyone gets, at most, one of those.
She wasn’t mine.
In the back seat of that car, I put my hands over the seat and on her shoulders when “Enjoy the Silence” came up on whomever’s mixtape was in the deck that night. I sang along with the song, “all I ever wanted, all I ever needed…” and I felt her stiffen and I sat back, in my place, by myself.
That night she pulled me aside and said she wanted to talk to me. I knew what was coming; even then I could read the signs.
And Depeche Mode can take me back to that night any time I’m in the right mood.
An example of just how wrong pleated pants can be, from amansworldco.com
The thing about pleated pants is that they are disastrously unattractive. I don’t know what it is about certain people that makes them think that this phenomenon does not apply to them — a lack of style? a failed understanding of the very concept of aesthetic beauty? — but they exist.
When I was younger, I miscategorized many things, from how fancy a given sit-down restaurant was to my own socioeconomic class. Among those things miscategorized was pants. I thought there were two types of pants: nice pants and not nice pants. I didn’t like to go outside in sweat pants and I hadn’t yet discovered that jeans came in any fit other than spandex-tight. (Turns out my mom didn’t understand that not being able to put my hands into the pockets meant maybe I needed a bigger size. Who knew?) So, for reasons of comfort and looks, I wore “nice pants”, and at the time, I thought “nice” meant pleated.
I also had a rattail and listened to Cinderella at a certain point in my life. Don’t you fucking judge me.
But I digress. Yes, I was the kid in school who didn’t wear jeans. That made me lame. Even more unfortunately, I didn’t dress up. That’s right, I wore “nice pants” with t-shirts. Every day.
I had friends. I do not understand why.
Eventually, when I started having a say in what I wore, I realized jeans suited me better. When, for Christmas when I was 12 years old, I asked for jeans, my mom rejoiced. I ensured that I specified size and fit (Levi’s 550 relaxed fit, 30 waist/30 inseam), and I stopped wearing nice pants. Only then did I see the evils of pleats.
As specified in this post on It’s a Man’s World Consulting, pleats distort your hips, making you look significantly wider than you are. Hey, guess what, America! Most of us are fucking fat! We don’t need wider hips. And guess what: if you need pleated pants because flat fronts don’t fit you properly, it’s time to get on the treadmill, tubby. Even little kids shouldn’t dress that way; the person I am now would, if given the opprtunity, beat some sense into my younger self, for this and many other reasons.
Luckily, it seems that most people agree with me on the pleated front. (See what I did there?) A friend of mine used to work at the GAP. She and her coworkers always made sure to bury the pleated pants at the bottom of the piles of clothes that people might conceivably look good wearing. Every time I’ve mentioned my strong anti-pleat stance to anyone who was buying me clothes in the past decade or so (read: girlfriends), the response has been as powerful or moreso than my own revulsion. (The best one: “Do you think I’d be sleeping with you if you wore pleated pants?” Touché, girl who I later realized was crazy.) I don’t personally know anyone under the age of 50 who wears pleated pants that I can recall off the top of my head, although that may be selective amnesia. I do see people on the street wearing them, though, and on occasion I’ve been moved to dwell on just what the fuck possessed them that morning to put on something so fucking stupid. I should probably just ask one of these days.
That said, if we’re lucky, maybe pleats will go the way of the dodo. Except, you know, without all the mythologizing and lament for their passing and metaphorical meaning and stuff.
Awake, late, hot, naked, reading a couple hundred pages of someone else’s dream and wondering how I got here, but we both know that’s exactly the kind of half-secret half-mystery that I’m never going to be able to answer.
