Ultraviolet
“The true life of a believer,” Bono says, “is one of a longer, more hazardous uphill pilgrimage where you uncover slowly the illumination for your next step.”
Somewhere between running the New Jersey Half Marathon, watching the documentary, “So Goes The Nation,” shopping for furniture and doing two loads of laundry, I finished “Bono: In Conversation.”
The 323 page Q&A between the U2 front man (born Paul David Hewson in Dublin, Ireland, on May 10, 1960) and longtime French music journo, Michka Assayas, occurred via a series of interviews and correspondences as the singer wrapped tracking on the band’s tenth recording, “How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb.”
The spine of the book had been taunting me from a colleague’s bookshelf for weeks. I finally asked to borrow it recently, and raced through it in a matter of days.
Despite my day job, it’s rare that I come to a band early. I discovered REM just before they graduated from IRS to Warner Bros. (and thus from “college alternative rock” to the mainstream). Likewise, I came to U2 — like most — upon the release of the band’s seminal “The Joshua Tree.” As a sixteen-year-old, it was the height of rock ‘n roll decadence to dance around a raging bonfire on a beach in Mexico singing “In God’s Country” at the top of my lungs.
To some degree, the band music and imagery helped shape my vision of the American West. On my first trip to California as an adult, I bypassed San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles completely, and headed straight to the high desert.
The band’s constant evolution and consistent cultural relevance has cut a wide path through my life. Their music has framed and illuminated my experiences, from that deserted beach to midnight drives on deserted highways (“Stay (Faraway So Close)”). Last winter, I even got to talk songwriting with The Edge.
Through it all, though, it has been Bono’s voice, Bono’s melodies, and Bono’s exploration of The Big Themes — God, Love, Existence — that has kept me in the band. Whether he’s Man of the Year, man of the hour, or just a man, I find him fairly extraordinary. And whether I agree with everything he says or not, he says a lot, and it’s usually pretty articulate, and pretty interesting.
And so the book will return vigorously dog-eared to its rightful owner. Bono is, in short, a quote machine. And many of his finer quotations speak to some of my more current anxieties (see also: “How Not To Disappear”). Of the youth obsession of the genre he says, “We expect our rock stars to set fire to themselves. If they don’t die on a cross, age thirty-three, we want our money back.”
Of the tendency for aging rockers to lose their gift he says:
How did this person who set fire to my imagination end up with no new ideas, and, actually, incapable of their old ones? Here’s my theory: When people are absorbed in the culture, and they’re going out, they’re listening to music, they’re in the clubs, music is just part of their every waking moment, and as a result part of their sleeping times, in their dreams. The life is empty of other lovers. Unless you’re in love with the music, or you stop struggling with it in your dreams, you have other lovers. You dream about moving houses, about whatever ventures your involved in.
He is, of course, 100% correct. I wrote my best songs (“Dear Elizabeth,” “Hollywood Arms”) when I was half-asleep. I recorded my finest work (“Crash Site”, “Almost Home,” “Love & Other Indoor Games”) when music was my one true love. Now, though… well, the verdict is out.
It was a brief passage on Bono’s songwriting process, though, that I found most gratifying.
When U2 songs are written, I don’t write them in English. I write them in what the band calls, “Bongelese.” I just sing melodies and the words form in my mouth, later to be deciphered.
“Bono and I,” I though to myself, “write songs the same way!”
Whether sitting on the basement floor with a yellow legal pad mumbling over Smokey Junglefrog, or pacing my roof with my own ProTool creations in my ear, I have always let the lyrics and the melody find me. The best place to find them, I think, is on the edge between thinking and dreaming. The more I relinquish logic and form, and embrace incoherent, melodic gibberish, the more likely I am to find myself with a rough gem that just requires a bit of logos-centric polish.
Moreover, the more I relinquish myself to dreams, to the unconscious, to that place on the edge of sleep where Rumi says “There are ghosts passing outside the window sill,” the more likely I am to find meaning in things.
Such was the case Saturday morning. I was strumming an Em like a thousand Saturday mornings before. I closed my eyes, opened my mouth, and let the words find me…
Hours later, my laptop strewn across the closet floor, I had captured something; a sliver of my unconscious caught on tape.
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Slipping under what? Fear? Old age? The relentlessness of life?
Let what get away? My fianc? My songs? Myself?
Rocket science? No. Grammy winner? Probably not. Evidence that I still have something to say? That my dreams can still light the way?
“Pop lyrics,” Bono says, “are just a rough direction that you sketch for where the listener must think towards.”
“That’s it,” he says. “The rest is up to you.”
(I Won’t Let You) Get Away From Me – MP3
ProTools has finally made it out of its box in the closet of my new apartment to the floor of the closet of my new apartment. Just in time to capture this new idea (which is sorely in need of a Chris Abad solo) that hit me Saturday morning.
The form and structure is super-familiar (I can just hear Chris saying, “It’s such a Benjamin Wagner song!”), kinda’ “Milk & Honey” in reverse.
It’s the melody that excited me.
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Of Gold Watches & Tortoise Shell Combs
Listen, I know my life isn’t all sturm und drang.
I had lunch with a longtime colleague of mine today. Now, I rarely do lunch. I usually eat a salad at my desk. But lately, that I can combine a work conversation with a change of scenery (that is, something other than my computer monitor) is a huge revelation, and relief. So anyway, I’m at The Lodge, Viacom’s fairly lame cafeteria. But the fairly lame cafeteria has a deck about seventy-five feet above Times Square. So I was basically sitting parallel to that huge NASDAQ sign you see all the time on TV.
Anyway, Paul asks me how I’m doing. I’ve known Paula long time, so I proceed to unload, leading with something like, “I’m strugglin’ dude.” And while that’s maybe a hair melodramatic, well, I kinda’ am. A little bit. So we talk, and — as a husband and father — he offers some decent perspective (as many of my male friends have of late). Most of all, though, he just listens, which is kind of invaluable in its own right. So, just before I reign it all in and start talking about meetings, work flow, and the network’s product development process, I say, “Yunno, when we were eight-years-old, our legs ached at night. That’s how we knew we were growing.” The metaphor kinda’ stuck.
Tonight, I walked home in a warm drizzle listening to “This American Life.” I wasn’t really feeling the episode (“The Missing Parents”) in concept, but the sound of Ira Glass’ voice backed by the dull rush of tires on wet pavement was somehow soothing.
I ducked into D’Agostino and called Abbi.
“I’m at the D’Agostino. Need anything?”
“I’m at Whole Foods,” she replied. “Do you need anything?”
And I thought there was some nice, vaguely “Gift of the Magi” symetry going on there.
Back home at The Westport, Abbi walked me down to the gym and introduced me to Gary the, um, I dunno — The Guy Who Runs The Gym. Anyway, Gary signs me up, and teaches me how to use the fingerprint recognition system that gains me entry to work out. Yeah, you heard me. Fingerprint Recognition System. That’s some crazy Daniel Craig level shit.
Then Gary, The Guy Who Runs The Gym, shows me (and Abbi, and my Cannondale M900) to the bike room. First coup: my ($125 a year) parking spot is right by the door. But it get’s better. There’s a compressed air pump right there in the bike room! Bad ass.
So upstairs, Abbi microwaves some coconutty chicken dish and pours salad from a bag and we settle down in front of the boob tube and what’s on? Bill Moyers Journal. Damned if we didn’t skip American Idol and Lost to revel in Mr. Moyers thoughtful deconstruction of media’s failure in the march to war. Even Abbi, who’s a tad more conservative than I like to admit, had to laugh when she heard Bush utter the phrase “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” for the fourth, fifth, and seixth time.
So my legs ache a little bit (yunno, metaphorically), but, all and all, not a bad day.
Oh, wait. Here’s the clincher. Bubba Gump Shrimp Company manager Carly Shanklin finally got back to me.
Hello Benjamin!
I am SO sorry. Since the beginning of spring break this place has been a mad house and I have not gotten around to writing you back. Ok, so I went back outside to the restaurant and showed Tom your picture that was on the inside of the CD and this is what happened:
Tom: Ummmm, Carly, thats not the guy who left me the note with the CD. Who is that?
Carly: OH MY GOSH!!!!! Thats the artist from that CD and I just sent him an e-mail about how his marketing ploy worked! I am such a doofuss!
Tom: You really sent that guy an e-mail?!
Carly: Sure did, oh well… Everyone thinks Im crazy, whats one more person gonna hurt?
And that my friend is pretty much where this story ends. Sorry to disappoint you. I wish I could of wrote a tale of all tales that involved laughter, tears and triumph, but sadly this story ends with merely a shrug of the shoulders and an e-mail.
Nuttin but the best of luck to ya!
Carly
The mystery is solved. Mistaken identity. Now I can go to sleep, and dream sweet dreams of massive productivity, prolificness, and, um… prosperity. And the cover of The Rolling Stone.
Sleep tight!
How Not To Disappear
I feel like I’m fading away.
There’s only one section of my interview with “Generation X” Douglas Coupland that didn’t make the MTV News article or even my complete transcript.
Towards the end of our conversation, he told me (as he did The UK Register a few weeks prior) that “For about four months back in the ’90s I kept what was once called a diary, and I enjoyed doing it. But what happened was — and I think this is a very common response — when you start living your life inside your diary, you become quite mercenary, and it’s all about ‘Will this make a good entry?’”
To that end, Dear Reader, I’ve puzzled for days as to what to write following Saturday’s great reiteration of my anxiety provoked by my imminent irrelevance. Nothing, however, seemed substantive enough.
Truth is, there’s plenty of substantive stuff going on. Tons, in fact. Making a new home with someone is full of twists and turns and surprises and all sorts of unexpected revelations about both of us. That’s the hard part. Someone making your coffee exactly how you like it? Kinda’ cool. Someone to lean on? To share with? Very cool.
The bulk of my burgeoning domestic life, though — not to mention wedding planning, which you know from every E! show ever premiered (not to mention a good 1/5 of my previous five years of posting) is loaded with all sorts of baggage — feels off limits. As it is, the fact that four out of six (inadvertent) respondents Saturday night said of my “Under The Red, White & Blue” post (below), “Yeah I read that” freaked me out more than a little bit. If I blog about everything, what’s left for me? (Not to mention if I blog about Abbi and me, what’s left for us?) Moreover, if some student who wants me to hire them reads in my blog that “I feel old and irrelevant,” where’s the boundary?
So, with that caveat, there are no real headlines. Nothing is happening, at least nothing that makes a pithy, witty, or “deep thought” entry. We’re relaunching MTV News, and I’m relaunching my life. That’s it. That accounts for the eighteen or so hours a day I’m not sleeping, but it doesn’t tell you much.
Last night, a friend of mine mentioned a book she’d just finished, Nicole Krauss’ “The History of Love.” The novel’s protagonist, Leo Gursky, is a retired locksmith who immigrates to New York after escaping SS officers in his native Poland, only to spend the last stage of his life terrified that no one will notice when he dies. “I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I’m out, I’ll buy a juice even though I’m not thirsty.”
It occurred to me then — and I told my friend — that maybe that has something to do with why I write songs and post these blog entries, and why I feel so invisible these days. It’s been a constant refrain in The Daily Journal: how not to disappear. I’ve always worried about being a tree falling in an empty forest. Now I’m worried about being just another tree in a crowded forest.
For years, my life has been centered around making stuff: songs, words, movies, photos, paintings — anything. Somehow, that stuff confirmed my existence. Right now, though, the stuff I’m making is invisible, intangiable, and personal. I don’t have time for the other stuff. Heck, I hardly have any ideas. And so I feel like a ghost.
I know in my mind that this is temporary. The pendulum has swung one way, and will swing back. I will find a new balance. Jason Walsmith makes marriage, fatherhood and rock ‘n roll work. So does Bono. So can I.
Meantime, poke me, prod me, push me. Remind me that I’m here.
That God Shaped Hole
I am staring out the window, watching the city pass me by, when I tell her that I feel old and irrelevant.
Abbi and I are in the back of a yellow cab. The clock is creeping towards one o’clock. We’re on our way back uptown from Jeff Jacobson’s CD release show at Rockwood.
We arrived late, waylayed by an errant M train. Jeff was already on stage. The room was packed. Casey was — for once — playing the role of Jeff’s sidekick. Both were beaming brightly. We wedged ourself into a corner by the door, ordered a drink, and did our best to bob and weave to the beat, space notwithstanding.
Jeff is a remarkable guitarist. He possesses a smooth, understated tenor. He is, without a doubt, Casey and The Heavyweights’ secret weapon. His songcraft, sharpened by years of note-for-note transcription of songs by everyone from Metallica and John Mayer, is next-level good. His chord changes and forms are well beyond what Bono calls “three chords and the truth.” Which is not to say that Jeff’s songs lack truth. They don’t. They’re painted with a broad lyrical brush that is at once universal, and succinct. Moreover, though, Jeff is a sweetheart: immensly talented, mild-mannered, and humble.
Standing there in the corner, though, for the third time in as many weeks, I felt woefully lost. Here, a musical community was burgeoning: Jeff, Casey Shea, Was Hutchinson, The Heavyweights, Family Records. It is everything I wished for when I moved to New York in 1994: rock ‘n roll, comradery, support, brotherhood. I’m am proud of them, and happy for them. But it’s not mine. It’s theirs. I’m the guy in the suit. I’m the elder statesman, the also-ran, the sell out.
I’m not sure they’d say that. In fact, I’m pretty sure they haven’t given it any thought.
I have.
I slept in this morning later than I have in months: 10:39. I got up and, before even putting on my glasses to see, began playing guitar for the first time in my new apartment… and for the first time in my new life.
I played a few chords, hoping to stumble upon inspiration, but my voice felt muted. No words formed on my lips. Through dreams, though, came the words and music of the elders, of my heroes…
Them’s got ears, let them hear
Them’s got eyes, let them see
Turn your eyes to the lord of the skies
Take this airline plane
It’ll take you home again
To your home behind the skies
I listened to my voice bounce around the empty, hardened room, feeling sadness and some relief in a song that I sang before I knew any better.
Now young faces grow sad and old
And hearts of fire grow cold
We swore blood brothers against the wind
Now I’m ready to grow young again
I slowed it down, arpegiated the chords, turned the lyrics sadder still, and let goosebumps wash over me.
And hear your sister’s voice calling us home
Across the open yards
Well maybe we’ll cut someplace of own
With these drums and these guitars
In the 1989 Conestoga Pioneer yearbook, adjacent to my photo, is printed the lyric, “Jerod sang his song a weapon in the hands of love.” It was all I could wish for when I was seventeen-years-old: to be some kind of wandering, musical poet fighting some Biblical fight against oppression, hate, and fear with only my music and my wit.
Just a few weeks ago, over eighteen years later, I came to find that my interpretation of the lyric — and the lyric itself — was wrong. “Jara sang,” Bono sings, “his song a weapon in the hands of one.”
The lyric is, of course, from “One Tree Hill,” the ninth track (and final single) off of the band’s 1987 smash, “The Joshua Tree.” The lyric doesn’t reference the Bible at all, but instead refers to Chilean folk singer Victor Jara. Jara was murdered shortly after the September 11, 1973, coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power, transforming the man and his music into a symbol of struggle against military repression across Latin America.
In the book, “Bono In Conversation,” the U2 frontman tells his friend, Frech journalist Michka Assayas, that “A rock star is someone with a hole in his heart almost the size of his ego.”
“But it’s impossible to meet God with sunglasses on,” he says. “It’s impossible to meet God without abandon, without exposing yourself, without being raw.”
Last night, this morning, and still this afternoon — sun shining, windows thrown wide — I am exposed, and raw. And right now, I don’t know if anything will ever fill that hole.
Maybe it will pass. Maybe what’s left to should really does grow weightless. Maybe I will get used to it.
Or maybe I still have something to say.
Douglas Coupland On ‘Everything’s Gone Green,’ Beaver Dams, Siberia
Making a great playlist is hard to do.
First, you need to nail the music. Pissed off? Try a little Rage Against the Machine. Confounded? Death Cab for Cutie. Crestfallen? Sprinkle in some Laura Veirs.
Next you need to find the perfect lyric. Intense love might call for Dashboard Confessional’s “Hands Down,” as sung by Chris Carrabba (“Your kiss might kill me/ So won’t you kill me”). Soul-crushing heartbreak might find solace in All-American Rejects’ “Move Along,” as sung by Tyson Ritter (“Even when your hope is gone/ Move along”).
What do you play, then, when you’re on your way to interview the guy who popularized the phrase “Generation X”? The guy who turned a Smiths song (“Girlfriend in a Coma”) into a 288-page novel about the end of the world? The guy who finds magical reality (plane crashes, Martian abductions, meteorites) by peeking beneath the well-pruned lawns of suburbia? The guy who recently — and emphatically — proclaimed, “F— interviews!”?
I recently strode through midtown Manhattan in New York seeking the perfect soundtrack to a postmodern (he did, after all, write the book “Life After God”), fully transparent (he is, in fact, in the business of promoting his first film, “Everything’s Gone Green”) conversation with one of my literary heroes: author, screenwriter and visual artist Douglas Coupland.
Don’t know him? Fair enough. Consider:
Without Douglas Coupland, there might not be Chuck Klosterman.
Without “Generation X,” there might not be “The Real World.”
And without Coupland’s “Miss Wyoming,” there might not have been a “Donnie Darko.”
I settle on a three-song set to repeat (it’s just a few blocks from MTV’s Times Square offices to Coupland’s East Side hotel): Air’s “Alone in Kyoto,” Massive Attack’s “Inertia Creeps” and Joan Osborne’s “One of Us.” Musically, the songs create a pensive and atmospheric whole. Lyrically, they speak to faith and sex and God in the belly of a black-winged bird — straight up Coupland’s alley.
As I near his hotel, though, my soundtrack and his unique storytelling sensibilities begin to play tricks on me. Suddenly, the streets around me are alive with quirky, symbolic, double-take-worthy sightings. First, a woman sprints by wearing one prosthetic leg and carrying another. Next, I pass a homeless man pushing a cart with a boombox blaring Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right.” Finally, in nearby Madison Square Park, workers are assembling a gigantic public sculpture: Roxy Paine’s four-story stainless steel tree.
Seconds after we settle into conversation, I share all of this with Coupland.
“That’s so weird,” he says. “I’m working on a chrome beaver dam for a park in Vancouver [British Columbia]. It’s a parabola, probably 18 feet across, and there’s a slate, flat surface where water is going to come down into an infinity pool.”
Um, weird.
“Yeah,” he says.
Why?
“The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there’s nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It’s the absolute cutoff point between man and nature. I used to think nothing of it. But now I think it’s made me sensitized to places where man and nature just collide, sometimes beautifully and sometimes not so.”
And then he pauses, tilts his head, and says, “This is a really weird thing to say to you, and it’s only because the light is really strange behind you, but your ears are really asymmetrical.”
Which is kind of how it goes with Coupland. Within 60 seconds, you’re awash in the serendipity, specificity and Big Themes that are the hallmark of his work.
The Canadian author’s genre-defining first novel, “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture,” defined a post-Baby Boom, pre-Millennial aesthetic in a way few other works of art did. The novel’s protagonists — a zany, rootless, product-saturated quartet of post-collegiate friends — were virtual blueprints for the 20-something archetype Richard Linklater would later come to call “slackers” in the ’90s.
Unlike other ’90s artists who inadvertently or otherwise captured a cultural moment and then disappeared (Kurt Cobain, Shannon Hoon and, ahem, Ben Stiller), though, Coupland has gone on to notable and accomplished second, third and fourth acts. One of his earlier novels, “Microserfs,” captured software-cube culture just as Bill Gates became a household name. His most-recent, “JPod,” captured gaming culture just as consoles began to outpace CD players. As one People magazine writer snarkily put it, “Coupland is 45 minutes in the future.”
“Everything’s Gone Green,” then, finds the author in familiar territory. Twenty-something Ryan (“Road Trip” co-star Paulo Costanzo) — he of the perpetual five o’clock shadow — wakes up to find that he has been dumped by his overly ambitious girlfriend, fired from his dead-end job, and eventually and inadvertently embroiled in a money-laundering racket for Japanese gangsters. Hilarity — and the kind of minor epiphanies that only long drives through untouched Pacific Northwest evergreen forests can inspire — ensues.
And just as Coupland describes his own experiences at the intersection of civilization and nature, Ryan too is on the edge of something far greater than himself.
“The film takes place in Vancouver,” Coupland says, “where so many of the forces defining the new century are playing themselves out at full volume. Nobody makes anything. I call it pushing electrons around with a stick. We make video games. We flip real estate. And Ryan is a 29-year-old who is a very 20th-century person who hasn’t figured out that everyone else is in the new century.”
Moreover, like most of the characters in Coupland’s oeuvre (and Jim Stark, Holden Caulfield, Lelaina Pierce before his subject), Ryan is teetering precariously on the edge of (prolonged) adolescence and newfangled adulthood.
“Whatever happened to just being real?” he asks. “Why aren’t we just… content?”
Whether driven by the overwhelmingly symbolic image of a massive whale washed up on a city beach (something Coupland says he pulled straight from his own experiences), or a subtle nudge from a love interest (in Ryan’s case, Jet Li’s forthcoming “War” co-star Steph Song), those inevitable collisions — civilization and nature, past and future, adolescence and adulthood — eventually subside.
“It never really ends, though,” Coupland says. “You just get used to it.”
He pauses, absent-mindedly arranges his wallet, sunglasses and pen in a straight line on the table between us, and then continues.
“That may sound depressing, but it’s not. It’s the way we’re made.”
This article first appeared on MTV News.
Under The Red, White & Blue
In my younger and more vulnerable years, I often walked home along Ninth Avenue. I lived just east of Tenth then. The extra few steps mattered.
Though real estate agents will tell you otherwise, the neighborhood between 34th and 57th Streets west of Eight Avenue has long been referred to as Hell’s Kitchen. This, it struck me when moving here in 1994, bode well for my bio. Iowa kid in Hell’s Kitchen? There’s a contrast.
Most trace the origin of the Hell’s Kitchen moniker to the apocryphal story of Dutch Fred The Cop. The veteran policeman was supposed to have been watching a small riot on West 39th Street near Tenth Avenue. His rookie turned to him and said, “This place is hell itself.”
“Hell’s a mild climate,” Fred replied. “This is Hell’s Kitchen.”
Neighborhoods — like lives — change. Hell’s Kitchen has undergone radical transformation even since Chris and I first moved into our $1200/month railroad on 56th between Ninth & Tenth. Where, for example, a few rough and tumble bars once stood alongside brownstone tenaments, dozens of chic watering holes and swank eateries with names like Zanzibar, Latitudes, Whymm, and Eaterie have sprung up beneath the shadow of great, generic steel and glass towers with names like Archstone, The Biltmore, and The Westport.
Despite developers best efforts, though, there is some authenticity left on Tenth. Squint a little bit, and it might as well be 1937. And so I spend my new communte like a tourist, relishing each footfall like its my first.
Walking home after our first full day covering the increasingly bizarre Virginia Tech story for MTV News Monday night, I looked up to see the dense, billowing storm clouds part for an instant to reveal a sliver of sunset against clear, blue skies. Just below, glowing red like a beacon, I spotted a five red squares cut like a cross into a low-rise, brick edifice. Despite the death toll, and for just a moment, I felt lighter. For just an instant, I felt hopeful.
On Tuesday, of course, the story shifted radically. That Cho Seung-Hui had inexplicably paused between killings to shoot and encode video, photos, and a “manifesto,” then drop the package in the mail was almost inconceivable. That the media gobbled it up, well, wasn’t.
Lately, I’ve been passing my fourteen block, 1.03 mile, thirty-two minute round-trip communte listening to Public Radio International’s Studio 360. This week, host Kurt Anderson explores “The Great Gatsby.”
Just weeks prior to publication of his great american novel, it ends up, F Scott Fitzgerald drafted a frantic telegram to his editor, Maxwell Perkins. “Is it too late to change title?” he asked. Fitzgerald, it ends up, wanted to call the novel “Under The Red, White & Blue.” Cooler heads prevailed.
I went out of my way to pass that building again this morning. It is, I’ve come to learn, The Red Cross’ new New York City headquarters. As I passed, Anderson happened to be reading the closing passages of Fitzgerald’s defining work:
His dream must have seemed so close that he had hardly failed to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark field of the republic roll on under the night.”
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that, year by year, recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter tomorrow. We will run faster, stretch our arms farther. And one fine morning…
So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.
I’m not sure what it all means, exactly, or how it all connects. But walking to work this morning, somehow, it did. Maybe it’s like the song says: “We all wanna’ be big stars, but we don’t know why, and we don’t know how.” Maybe it’s more of a “Bowling For Columbine” thing. Or maybe Bo is right: our children are the angriest, most violent children who have ever been born.
Why can’t Anderson Cooper make the connection between the first two headlines in his Tuesday broadcast? A 23-year-old gunman kills 33 students. Half a world a way in Bagdad, four bombs kill 164.
Meaning is made in difference; by juxtaposing two things and puzzling out what matches, what doesn’t, and what is made new by their proximity. From what source, then, does red springs forth? Is it so close we can’t even grasp it? Are we doomed to refrain again, and again, and again?
We beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.
Three Simple Ideas
I was discussing the installation of lipstick, keyhole, and robotic cameras at yet another entertainment awards show when a colleague looked down at his Blackberry and said, “I think the fact that the number of dead just rose from two to twenty-two warrants our coverage.”
Barely twenty-four hours later, we have a crew of ten on site, a live show in edit, and a slew of online reportage. And while I have told my colleagues more than once that it is in these difficult moments that our efforts to demonstrate empathy and build community make me most proud, I can’t help but feel conflicted. Why is it that networks pull most of their advertising at times like these? Because most of their advertising messages the very action inflicted upon unwitting Virginia Tech students yesterday.
Moreover, I feel a deep sense of deja vu. Last June, Chris and I interviewed author and mystic Bo Lozoff for our “Mister Rogers & Me” documentary. Bo put it thusly:
We’re a society who, rather than sitting down with some Walter Cronkite or Mister Rogers figure and saying “We gotta take stock of the fact that our children are the angriest, most violent children who have ever been born, we’re the most depressed adults, and our life goes so fast every day and everything is so rushed and hurried that we’re labeling a lot of people as ADD and ADHD and maybe, maybe it’s not them…”
What do we do instead of that? We throw our children into the system. We drug them. We sacrifice our children at the alter of consumerism.
I was sitting with my wife in Fred Rodger’s office talking with the staff of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood about children and violence on a Tuesday — the very moment that the shootings at Columbine were happening. We went out to our car, we turned on the radio, and we heard about this thing that had just happened in Columbine, Colorado. And it’s exactly what we were just talking about: children seem to be losing all hope. And what I had said was, “You know, there’s three simple ideas that you could apply to a rich life: there’s something beautiful, something noble, and something sacred.”
Something beautiful: the sun set, if we allow it to touch us. Do you and I take time in our daily lives — I’m talking about seconds, to consciously be moved or touched by something we consider beautiful?
All I have to do is pick up my guitar and I’m in beauty. The Arts, to me, are a link between the temporal, the mundane world, and the eternal, the mystical. The arts get us a little bit out of our mind, whether that’s music or performing arts or visual art. Something beautiful is something that touches us. Something you say, “Oh, my. Oh, my.”
Something noble. By that I mean, like that second principle of all the great spiritual traditions, something we believe in is larger than us, something we look up to. A cause, an idea, a person, an elder, a bird nature. But something that we consider is worth sacrificing for, or worth taking a risk for, worth getting something out for.
Something sacred. Do we have those moments when our heads are truly bowed in humility at the grandeur, the greatness and the vastness, the incompressibility of what this human life is everyday.
And when I said it on that Tuesday, the day of Columbine was, “If either of those two kids thought there was a single thing in the world — a word, an idea, a song, a rock group, a movie, a bird, a person, a religion — if there was a single thing in the world that either of those kids thought was beautiful, noble or sacred, they never could have done what they did.”
And then I just realized with a shudder, “Oh my God. Not everybody is out killing their schoolmates, but is it possible that tens of millions of Americans don’t feel they have any time for beautiful, noble or sacred?”
I the vicious crushing pace of this life about wanting stuff and getting stuff and having stuff and using stuff and buying stuff and then of course replacing stuff, repairing stuff, protecting stuff defending stuff, you know? It’s so vicious. It’s anti-life.
I think that’s what Mister Rogers meant when he told me, “I feel so strongly that deep and simple are far, far more essential than shallow and complex.” I think that’s what Mister Rogers was talking about when he talked with Amy Hollingsworth about Madaket sunsets.
The whole thing makes me feel sad.
Better Best To Rearrange
“Cartagena? Angel, you are hell and gone from Cartagena!”
Michael Douglas issued that reality check to Kathleen Turner from the side of a muddy, Columbian hillside in the 1984 20th Century Fox film, “Romancing The Stone,” which I’m watching on WE as I type.
My best friend, Sibby, and I used to recite portions of the film line for line way back in junior high school. We had a strange (and square) sense of humor, I guess (though Michael Douglas, Danny DeVito, and — for that matter — Alfonso Arau did have some pretty good lines).
Kathleen Turner was thirty-years-old the year the film was released. Michael Douglas was forty-years-old. They were, arguably, at the peak of their powers. I, on the other hand, was thirteen and, ergo, at the nadir of mine. I’m thirty-five now — right in the middle of their age difference then.
I ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon Saturday morning. According to my New York Road Runners Club records, it was my thirty-sixth 13.1 mile race since my first (the Queens Half) in 1999.
It was a beautiful morning in Coney Island when the car service dropped, Chris, Jen and I at the intersection of Ocean and Surf Avenues (Abbi was home babysitting Ethan and Edward as she had dress fittings in the afternoon). It was more first long run of the season, once I should have probably sat out considering that my orthopedist prescribed me six weeks of physical therapy in February and I haven’t gone yet (hell, I haven’t even found five minutes to call and make an appointment).
I (inadvertently) lost Chris and Jen just a few steps off the start, so spent the remaining two hours (one hour fifty-two minutes and forty-six seconds, to be exact) with my own thoughts. I spent a fair portion of the time trying to rediscover my stride and my pace. I was also feeling my knees out. Both of them ache these days, presumably as I’m over-compensating on the left for the tendonitis on the right.
Finally, though, I was trying to pass the time thinking of good wedding music. That is, I’ve asked many of my musician friends to perform at the weddings (to hell with generic, cheesy, pre-packaged wedding bands!). Thing is, most of the songs we all play (covers or original) tend to be neither danceable nor terribly upbeat. (Go ahead: browse my catalogue. I defy you to find more than three songs that fit either criteria.)
Somewhere around mile nine, though — right about the time I noticed my splits were getting more, not less, efficient (and right about the time Chris typically pops up on my heels) — the soundtrack in my head flipped from a Beatles medley to REM’s “The Finest Worksong.”
My first band, Neoteric Youth, closed the Junior Variety Show with a rousing performance of the song (track one off of “Document”). Sibby’s little sister later remarked of the performance, “I thought you were going to have a seizure.” I trotted it out again year’s later when I played Mercury Lounge for the first time.
It’s not exactly The Hives or G ‘n R or whatever else people listen to when they run, but it works for me. It sounds something like a Soviet-era marching song as performed by a guitar army comprised of guys from Minneapolis and Seattle. It’s super angular, but flows and drones. The key, though, is Michael Stipe’s lyric:
The time to rise has been engaged
We’re better best to rearrange
I’m talking here to me alone
I listen to the finest worksong
Whereas the boardwalk and Ocean Boulevard are flat, though, Prospect Park is punctuated by hills. Which is where the third verse came in, and where I imagined turning it up to eleven.
Take your instinct by the reins
Better best to rearrange
What we want and what we need
Has been confused, been confused
The final mile, then, was absolutely exhilarating. I was floating, flying even. I was picking off runners like nobody’s business. My legs were moving in circles like the Road Runner’s. It was great. I can through the tape so strong, in fact, that the announcer said something to the crowd like, “Look at that strong finisher! Let’s give him a hand!”
I ran that last mile — my imaginary REM soundtrack blaring in my ears — in 7:26.
Afterwards, as I sat and stretched in the sun, I wondered what my legs used to feel like after a long run. I vaguely recall having a difficult time finishing at all when I first started running distance (especially if I’d only been training eleven or twelve miles a week, as I have been lately), but I’m not sure my hips or knees ever felt like this.
Tonight, as the Nor’easter swallowed Midtown in great sheets of rain and set the forsythia swaying outside my window, I continued transcribing last week’s interview with author Douglas Coupland click here to read the full transcript). While we were together, ostensibly, to promote his new film, we spoke as well about broader, deeper themes. Somehow, the conversation led to the following Coupland monologue:
Thirty to thirty-five are probably the best years of your life. Not that the rest of you’re life isn’t going to be fulfilling or happy. But you’re going to go through a really fucked up period for about five or six years now. Everyone goes through it: rich or poor, whether you live in the Indian Subcontinent or here. Here’s what’s going to happen.
You’re gonna sit and micro-obsess on every decision you ever made, some of which you’ll be grateful for and others you’ll start having regrets over — oh, this is when you start having regrets.
You’re gonna become hyper-competitive with every guy you ever meet or read about. Like, I’m sure you’re competitive now but wait until that kicks in.
And you’ll probably make one or two super-major life decisions. Usually it’s a geographical move. Like, you’ll move to New Mexico or something. And you’ll still do what you do, but you’ll learn something else. And then you’ll turn soft and weak!
I told him that his prognosticating was pretty well timed, that I’d recently gone and gotten engaged. “Congratulations!” he said, dragging out the “s.”
“You’re smart,” he said. “You’re gonna do fine.”
I will. Fucked up or not, I’ll take my instincts by the reigns.
And I’ll rearrange again, and again, and again.
The Way We’re Made
Making a great playlist is hard to do.
First, you need to nail the music. Pissed off? Try a little Rage Against The Machine. Confounded? Death Cab For Cutie. Crestfallen? Sprinkle in some Laura Veirs.
Next you need to find the perfect lyric. Intense love might call for Chris Carrabba’s “Hands Down” (“Your kiss might kill me/So won’t you kill me”). Soul crushing heartbreak might find solace in Tyson Ritter’s “Move Along” (“Even when you’re hope is gone/Move along”).
What do you play, then, when you’re on your way to interview the guy who popularized the phrase “Generation X”? The guy who turned a Smith’s song (“Girlfriend In A Coma”) into a 288-page novel about the end of the world? The guy who finds magical reality (plane crashes, Martian abductions, meteorites) by peaking beneath the well-pruned lawns of suburbia? The guy who recently — and emphatically — proclaimed “F**k interviews!”?
I strode through Midtown Manhattan yesterday seeking the perfect soundtrack to a post-modern (he did, after all, write the book, “Life After God”), fully-transparent (he is, in fact, in the business of promoting his first film, “Everything’s Gone Green”) conversation with one of my literary heroes, author, screenwriter, and visual artist Douglas Coupland.
Don’t know him? Fair enough. Consider:
Without Douglas Coupland, there might not be Chuck Klosterman.
Without “Generation X” there might not be “Real World.”
And without Coupland’s “Miss Wyoming,” there might not have been a “Donnie Darko.”
I settle on a three songs set to repeat (its just a few blocks from MTV’s Times Square offices to Coupland’s East Side hotel): Air’s “Lost In Kyoto,” Massive Attack’s “Inertia Creeps,” and Joan Osborne’s “One of Us.” Musically, the songs create a pensive and atmospheric whole. Lyrically, they speak to faith and sex and God in the belly of a black-winged bird — straight up Coupland’s ally.
As I near his hotel, though, my soundtrack and his unique storytelling sensibilities begin to play tricks on me. Suddenly, the streets around me are alive with quirky, symbolic, double-take worthy sightings. First, a woman sprints by wearing one prosthetic leg, and carrying another. Next, I pass a homeless man pushing a cart with a boom box blaring Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right.” Finally, in nearby Madison Square Park, workers are assembling a gigantic public sculplture: Roxy Paine’s four-story stainless steel tree.
Seconds after we settle into conversation, I share all of this with Coupland.
“That’s so weird,” he says. “I’m working on a chrome beaver damn for a park in Vancouver. It’s a parabola, probably eighteen feet across and there’s a slate, flat surface where water is going to come down into an infinity pool.”
Um, weird.
“Yeah,” he says.
Why?
“The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there’s nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It’s the absolute cutoff point between man and nature. I used to think nothing of it. But now I think it’s made me sensitized to places where man and nature just collide sometimes beautifully and sometimes not so.”
And then he pauses, tilts his head, and says, “This is a really weird thing to say to you, and it’s only because the light is really strange behind you, but your ears are really asymmetrical.”
Which is kind of how it goes with Coupland. Within sixty seconds you’re awash in the serendipity, specificity and Big Themes that are the hallmark of his work.
The Canadian author’s genre defining first novel, “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture,” defined a post-Baby Boom, pre-Millennial aesthetic in a way few other works of art did. The novel’s protagonists, a zany, rootless, product-saturated quartet of post-collegiate friends, were virtual blueprints for the ’90s twentysomething archetype Richard Linklater would later come to call, “slackers.”
Unlike other ’90s artists who inadvertently or otherwise captured a cultural moment and then disappearing (Kurt Cobain, Shannon Hoon, Ben Stiller), though, Coupland has gone on to notable and accomplished second, third, and fourth acts. His sophomore novel, “Microserfs,” captured software cube culture just as Bill Gates became a household name. His most-recent, “Jpod,” captured gaming culture just as consoles began to outpace CD players. As one People Magazine writer snarkily put it, “Coupland is 45 minutes in the future.”
“Everything’s Gone Green,” then, finds the author in familiar territory. Twentysomething Ryan (“Road Trip” co-star Paulo Costanzo) — he of the perpetual five o’clock shadow — wakes up to find that he has been dumped by his overly-ambitious girlfriend, fired from his dead end job, and eventually and inadvertently embroiled in a money laundering racket for Japanese gangsters. Hilarity — and the kind of minor epiphanies that only long drives through untouched stands of Pacific Northwest evergreen forests can inspire — ensues.
And just as Coupland describes his own experiences at the intersection of civilization and nature, Ryan too is on the edge of something far greater than himself.
“The film takes place in Vancouver,” Coupland says, “where so many of the forces defining the new century are playing themselves out at full volume. Nobody makes anything. I call it pushing electrons around with a stick. We make video games. We flip real estate. And Ryan is a twenty-nine-year-old who is a very 20th century person who hasn’t figured out that everyone else is in the new century.”
Moreover, like most of the characters in Coupland’s oeuvre (and Jim Stark, Holden Caulfield, Lelaina Pierce before him), Ryan is teetering precariously on the edge of (prolonged) adolescence and newfangled adulthood.
“Whatever happened to just being real?” he asks. “Why aren’t we just… content?”
Whether driven by the overwhelmingly symbolic image of a massive whale washed up on a city beach (something Coupland says he pulled straight from his own experiences), or a subtle nudge from a love interest (in Ryan’s case, Jet Li’s forthcoming “War” co-star Steph Song), those inevitable collisions — civilization and nature, past and future, adolescence and adulthood — eventually subside.
“It never really ends though,” Coupland says. “You just get used to it.”
He pauses, absent-mindedly arranges his wallet, sunglasses, and pen in a straight line on the table between us, and then continues.
“That may sound depressing, but its not. It’s the way we’re made.”
