DOG EAT DOG

~ lawrencegriffin5 ~ Leave a comment

I thought ANORA was a really well-done piece of film. I think it had something to say about class underneath all its shenanigans and the quite good comedy of it all. The lead character played by Mikey Madison is this really tense person. I think she’s putting on airs most of the whole movie and almost every time she speaks is this really delicate line tread between blustery bravado and the insecurity of someone who’s living hand-to-mouth and could lose it all. Either she’s shakily asserting herself against these mafia guys trying to keep her footing with this rich kid she married, or she’s at the strip club putting on airs, smiling, flirting for some tips. You get a lot of the interiority, the insecurity and the sorrow, in the rare quiet moment the film affords her. Little scenes where she’s sitting on a porch stoop or walking behind everybody else. It’s powerful stuff. Subtle, the direction and the acting just playing off one another like atoms exploding.

I heard a few people online saying they thought the character didn’t have much of a personality or you didn’t see much of what she was thinking. After seeing it, I think that’s by design. She’s out there fighting to make money and survive. There’s no room for anything else. It’s a real Maslow hierarchy of needs type of deal. She doesn’t have the space in her life to grow and develop as a person because she’s fighting for scraps in this brutal capitalist economy in the modern U.S., where everything’s expensive, where day to day all you can think about is how much you have and when’s the next time you’ll get any more pay.

I was reading this Esquire feature about an ex-news reporter who’s been homeless for a while, riddled with various ailments. It goes into the whole thing of escalating crises and decay. The guy just does his best to get by every day but once you’re falling through the cracks it’s hard to get out of that spiral. Dental work, medication issues, it all costs money. Nothing’s free because that doesn’t create value for the shareholders. It’s a pretty bracing read if you have the time, though I understand if you don’t. The guy’s a good writer and he lays out his struggles pretty plainly. And maybe life shouldn’t be that hard all the time. Maybe a lot of it comes down to needless red tape that doesn’t have to define the world and yet does anyway.

In the election that just ended, there were plenty of people raising the alarm about fascism. Somehow I was a bit numb to it all. I didn’t want Trump to win, but somehow when he did, I just didn’t really care all that much, not like the first time. If your country is one that routinely leaves people dangling off the cliff of death via things being too expensive to live, then the leap to fascism wasn’t far off anyway. It’s all a lot of nihilism and death either way, is all I mean. If your country is one that lets faceless corporations buy up the housing and makes the people spend all their income on unaffordable rents where the landlord can just cut ties if he feels like it, what’s worth defending?

The reactions to this healthcare CEO getting shot down in the street have been pretty crazy to see, mostly because I would’ve expected it to be a lot more temperate than it was. A lot more people than I thought were clowning on the guy and on the draconian, soulless meatgrinder of the insurance industry. I suppose that’s one of the easiest things to get radicalized on. These stories about bills in the tens of thousands for ambulance rides where you were unconscious. It’s not that hard to be against. And a lot of people are hurting. It’s expensive to breathe these days. Paychecks don’t go so far and jobs feel more tenuous, layoffs imminent like stormclouds. It’s tough for a lot of people to see a reward for participating in society.

In a world where things were more fair, nobody would deserve to die for being a business CEO, but the world as it is is hanging on by threads and rubber bands and paperclips. Kamala Harris said she wouldn’t fundamentally change anything from what Biden was doing, and people didn’t want “no fundamental change.” Not right now.

People are making the jokes and reposting the memes bashing this guy because there are impenetrable, monolithic institutions that are making the world a brutal hellhole. In the absence of any reform or chance of relief, well, sure, they’ll make the jokes – this is the world these titans of industry were fine with creating. Too bad.

FOR ASHEVILLE

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Four years ago I came to Asheville mostly full of steroids and alcohol and spent a few days wandering around there, staying in hotels, drinking, visiting arcades and writing. Truth be told I only have very hazy memories of what I did on that first trip.

I remember I had breakfast at Louise’s Kitchen in Black Mountain and drove on the Blue Ridge Parkway amid just this crazy array of golds and reds and oranges. You didn’t get that in Florida. On my way out of town I got to go to Summit Coffee by the river and read with a coffee and a muffin. There was just something about the place. I made an offhand comment to a friend on Facebook somewhere that maybe I’d just move to Asheville, and then six months later I did.

All of it was purely a lark. I didn’t know anyone there. I spent that first summer in 2021 hanging by the river and finding all the good dive bars and driving to random nature retreats to hike or swim. The comedy scene was still coming back from Covid. It was all fledgling. Struggling to come back. The world seemed brand new and wide open again.

I’d found it this real nice, arty vibe – the West Asheville, the river arts district, it was a really good fresh breath of air for me after Orlando, which had become so over-grown and crowded that I barely recognized it anymore. I’d say Asheville had a hippie vibe and the locals would sort of disagree, since they had all this touristy stuff there and almost any city government anywhere ends up just trying to illegalize the homeless, which is as anti-hippie as you can get. Bunch of corporate nonsense every city you can name, really. But the energy and the people there – I got into it. I found people there and the community was one I could really fit into, unlike in Florida where it seemed like everything was just pushing me out.

I’ve since moved around a little for work, since the nature of my job as a reporter necessitates moving around. I’ve become accustomed to setting up camp in small towns and writing about them. But I was still near Asheville. The region in general had become a home. I grew to like the whole mountainous area and the peculiar unique vibe of the western NC area. It was all pretty cool.

Then Hurricane Helene happened about two months ago now, and I’d not really been living in town, so it was pretty shocking after a few days without internet that I started to see the extent of the damage. Worse than Katrina – I could hardly believe it. There’s a whole lot that could be written about the climate change and about the institutional failures. The deaths – it’s unfathomable, really. I can’t even really fully conceptualize it. I did some driving around the region recently. It’s really brutal and awful to see, and it’ll take so long for this region to come back to anything like it used to be. Watching it all unfold has been a whirlwind and I haven’t really known how to talk about the full scope, and maybe it’s difficult to do that.

We did lose some wonderful places I had great memories in. Great times. The Root Bar in Swannanoa was a classic dive bar. A weirdo place with some vinyls hung on the walls and a pool table and cheap beer and liquor, and outside people played a made-up ball game in a sand pit. But then again, all ball games are made up, so who’s to say? Inside we did comedy every Sunday night. It was about the ultimate example of a classic open mic, with a handful of drunks listening and if you could get them to chuckle then you knew you were maybe onto something. Or maybe they were just laughing among themselves coincidentally when you finished your punchline. You never knew. It was a room that tested the mettle of a comic – if you started to crumble up there, if you couldn’t handle the silence of saying those jokes to a room three-quarters empty, then you had more work to do. It was a ‘fuck around’ room and it was also kinda the ultimate comedy experience since a lot of a room like this is down to learning to vibe with it, to improvise a little. A canned, stiff act can easily fall flat there. Then it’s a long, lonely drive home sitting with your open mic set. So you learn to give and take with the room.

Getaway River Bar was this great tiki bar by the river. Literally right there. I’d get drinks and go sit by the river and read. They used to do mics there. I’d get up there and just let out the id. I would let loose. Sometimes comedy comes out of the improvisation and when you get into a corner. There were several nights early on in my time in Asheville when the comics would just hang outside by the river. Those were great fucking nights. I was still getting to know everyone and those nights were really great to help that along.

Finally there’s Grail Moviehouse, which was this great indie movie theater right on the river – it had the right vibe of an artsy indie theater and I have fond memories of seeing all kinds of things there. Movies I couldn’t have seen anywhere else in the area, sometimes. The place was always packed out and that was always proof to me that theaters are still cool. Maybe not everybody is just scrolling and ordering takeout at home after all and maybe community will go on. I did some wonderful comedy shows there. They’re the real deal.

I’d originally thought that would seem more trivial. But a big part of a town is the whole community of it, the places where things happen. It’s going on four years since I moved here full-time and these places were great but also just small parts. There have been so many people I found here and some varying scenes for what I like – left-wing politics, comedy, writing. I’ve run comedy shows, I’ve marched for some social causes. It’s a full life. If you can find a good place to settle down then you give it a shot.

And now this horrific stuff has happened and I’m pretty much just in it for the long haul now. I haven’t really been able to do as much as I’d like to help out with the recovery, but I think we can come back from it all. We lost so much more than some great venues, but I do see the community doing its thing. I went down there a few days after the worst of the storm was done. Everything was fucked and there was no water, and in West Asheville there was signs everywhere telling people where to go, where to get food and internet and showers. Food trucks everywhere. Supplies everywhere. It was a community really coming together and they fucking nailed it, and I hope I’m around for some more of it in the coming years.

10 Years of Scrounging

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Here we go again with some more self indulgence. I’ve recently had a short story accepted for an anthology. It’s a horror story that incorporates the 2020 quarantine. I just loved that idea, about a horror story where the fear is compounded by debilitating illness, queasiness, a kind of unsureness of what’s happening. I had fun with it. Try the e-book here, or buy a paperback there.

It’s been 10 years since I was first a reporter in the badlands of the Bakken in North Dakota. The oil boom days. Men flocking all across the country to live in the plains and work the oilfields – the money, that was the main reason for it. It’s always the money. These guys would go and live out there in “man camps” and burn themselves out working on the oilfields. They were so desperate to get me to their paper that they set me up with housing immediately – a trailer among rows and rows of them out in those plains. Business as a slapdash thing. They were just doing whatever at the time. Everything moved so fast they couldn’t see where they were going, and so there was a shitload of crime that came with it all. Just crazy chaos, people doing drugs, crashing cars into fences, stealing.

Then it got really serious. A woman around my mom’s age came into the newsroom in maybe May or June 2013. Sad and vulnerable, wanting everything we could give, no illusions. She was the mother of this kid who had gone missing in the area a while previously. This guy, James Henrikson, was arrested for hiring a hit on the guy, who he came up to the oilfields to work on, business partners, the two of them. I was barely there a month before this and they were organizing a whole day in June or so to look for this guy’s body. I wrote up a quick story and got drawn into it all. Obsessed! Henrikson was on the run then. He was involved with a lot of random business bullshit and other crimes. Criminals aren’t smart. Everyone knew he was behind it even back then. I drove around the desert and made phone calls. I remember actually being afraid of writing about this stuff in the paper – we were the biggest paper in that area. But fortunately nothing happened since, apparently, life isn’t 1:1 with a crime novel I’d be interested in.

One of the guys I worked with wasn’t sure why we were pursuing the case. But I couldn’t quit. This was the most interesting thing bar none. I got some information from the Feds which I put in an exhaustive article back then, and then it got used in this book Yellow Bird years and years later by a writer who put in much more work than I did. That’s a good enough legacy for me. That was a good book. I think you all should give it a read.

The rest of the time back then, in North Dakota, it was a lot of wandering. I’d travel just for the sake of getting out of town. Long stretches of flatlands and nothing. There were mostly a lot of bars and steakhouses in Williston. A ramshackle little town that was ballooned by force because they found gold in the ground. Story old as time. I remember there were murmurs of it being like the Wild West and it was the closest I ever got. My editor sent us out there to interview these oil workers, one a week. Guys whose stories were mostly all just “had to make money, left my family, came across the country to break my back and stain my hands in these fields.” I spent a lot of time doing increasingly dour, suffocating stories about the crime. Traveled a few times to Bismarck to do things – a four hour drive from me then. I think at some point, I’d done everything I could do living in that area. There are reasons people move to big cities.

To pass the time, I’d just hang out at bars, walk the town, hang in my own place and watch movies. Got used to the solitude. The transitory nature of that place made it hard to date or even make friends outside of the small circle who hung together at the paper. Everyone was a transient. From somewhere else and going somewhere else, still. It became a natural state for myself, too, to be always traveling or in motion somehow. I’m still doing it today.

I never really found a home in Williston. It was a dusty little place at the edge of the world and there was a lot of commotion there for a short time. I look back on it fondly, but I remember talking to guys who were leaving that dry old desert wasteland as quick as possible. I had some good times with a few friends back then, driving around, hitting up bars that might as well have been old West saloons. I read a lot, watched a lot of movies. The work days were full of conferences to cover, meetings with old men sitting at tables deliberating over the future, man-on-the-street interviews, lots of days in the courthouse covering random trials and things. That courthouse was something. A great construct of polished floors and quiet, regal courtrooms for the judges – you have to have good places for them to do their work.

I discovered standup comedy there. Imagine that. All the way out to the edge of North Dakota, two hours to the Canadian border, to learn I wanted to do comedy myself. It started in the basement of this trashy dive bar right down the road from me, the kind of place where the wood’s all stained with beer and the daylight made it all look just fucking sad. Nobody under 50 in there except for their dance party nights, and on those, the music blared over shitty cheap speakers. But it was what they had. Bars of that kind exist all over the country in the vast nothing and they’re always so interesting to me, those and the random seedy motels. Just fascinating.

But this guy had a comedy night where he brought in road-dog headliners to do some time, occasionally with some local people. It was fascinating because it was new to me. I’d seen comedies, but didn’t like all of them as well as some. And I’d watched some Robin Williams, some George Carlin, loved Louis CK in college. Watching standup in that dingy bar basement every week, often drunk as shit because there was so little else I had to do. It was just a 10 minute drive home. Don’t drive drunk, though. I started comedy in 2015 when my life was at a much less stable place. That was the genesis, though – a little bar in North Dakota.

I left in 2014 in April. The second to last day there was the most snow I ever saw there. Early April and a blanket of white. I’d set off for a long drive across the country and have some interesting times. Back then, it was always interesting at least. Life with no definition yet. I think your early 20s can be something cool and I tried to make mine that way. And maybe my 30s will be interesting too. I guess all you can do is try.

Reset

~ lawrencegriffin5 ~ Leave a comment

The last two things I posted on this thing were pretty low-effort. I ought to have tried harder.

I always inevitably fall back into not posting much on this thing. It was supposed to be a site to promote my own works, but life gets in the way, sometimes you go long stretches with no bookings, and sometimes it’s a long time before you get more writing published. And I got pretty one-note myopic about the political issues, the anticapitalist anger. Not that I was wrong, but you need to have some levity somewhere in your life anyway. Or at least channel your rage into really doing stuff off the internet. You get too one-note myopic and that’s probably a way to get cancer faster. The body and the mind are connected. Shit can happen.

I’ve always thought it vain to post a bunch of stuff like the world’s waiting with bated breath. Seems tacky. But then again it’s just the human impulse. Otherwise, we never would have let social media happen. We all tell ourselves stories and like sharing. Communal-like.

I am working on the edits for my book CAREER MAN. I think a lot of this I was trying to make into one of those old early 1900s books where there’s a lot of just talking. Conversations. That can be rich. Hemingway style – I wrote it in Key West originally and the story’s about Key West too. And the Cormac McCarthy books that just came out do this better than maybe anyone I’ve ever read.

It’s pretty hard to do though. With this much dialogue, there’s a bigger chance more of it will sound fake or whatever. It’s tough to nail how people talk. Lots of fragments. Not really saying what they mean sometimes. That’s the challenge of it. But I like that challenge – it ought to be a bit difficult, making things. It’s good to put yourself in a predicament and see how you can dig yourself out of it. That can result in some pretty brilliant things.

Reading some of the edits for this, then comparing it to the McCarthy books or the James Baldwin one I just started – it’s funny how they’ll flag stuff in my book that other publishers thought was OK for some of these other authors.

It’s just how it goes. Different standards. Big wide world out there.

It’s a whole other world to be working this seriously on something fictional. You spend enough years toiling away on the stuff in your free time, and you don’t really ever expect it on some level. But then it does happen and you can see the whole circuitry and mechanics of the writing through an editor’s eyes. It puts you in a larger context outside of your own head. Lets you see how it will be seen by others. That’s valuable.

I’m also doing a bunch of other projects like always. I can never quit. There’s always an idea somewhere or some old thing to edit and make better. If anything, I spend too much time on editing these things and starting new stuff. But you have to take that time. I’d rather not put anything half-assed out. If I can get any of the stuff I’ve been tinkering with published it’ll be great. That’s all I can hope for from doing all this. To have it available somewhere.

And all this art we do doesn’t just live in a bubble. I like rewatching movies I’ve seen and rereading books from time to time. Seeing what new things come of it. What new inspiration. Music’s huge for me. Most people will talk about writing playlists or specific types of music to write with. Never been an issue for me. It’s part of a big continuum. Creation and artistic expression. It’s all connected and it fuels me to keep on watching, reading, listening, etc. I think everyone should do that to whatever extent they want to.

I’ve been set back from comedy for a little while, but I’m always out there somewhere doing a set. I’ve come to realize you don’t have to race to have the most clout. Just enjoy doing it. It is what you make of it, comedy and writing and all of it. I think there’s just large chunks of it that you can only learn by doing. How-to books and classes can’t hit all of that. I am the anti-teacher. Writing or getting on stage. You learn by the doing. Put the time in and try it. Do the work. Whatever a class might tell you, you have to be doing stuff on your own time to advance, too. That’s the only lesson I would have for anybody. I wouldn’t make very much money running my own class.

I think that’s a solid place to stop. I’m starting two jobs this week. It’s amazing how that can go. Nothing at all and then all of it at once. I’m doing newspaper reporting as well as writing features for the movie site Collider. It feels like a chance to really start over after all this pandemic stuff, and many things that happened in my life since then. The past three years have been like some kind of warped mirror universe. It is starting to feel a bit like it used to again. These things don’t mean very much to most people besides oneself. But it’s interesting, the way things change and change, on and on.

Real Dystopias

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I’ve always had something of a problem with dystopian fiction. It’s just in the extreme nature of it. I get why this stuff was important half a century ago – show us the perils of where we’ll head if fascism gets in, and all of that. I understand. But these days it’s really become a style – the rugged burned out wastelands, people running around in scavenging packs, forming primitive tribal alliances. It can be done well, but it’s also spawned this whole genre of person who thinks they’d be the one on top in that scenario.

It just seems deluded to me. This fucking survivalist nutjob mindset, but not quite crazy enough to actually go off-grid and live in the woods and shit in a bucket. It’s these guys who pride themselves on owning guns and being conservative because “when the shit comes down, THEY’LL be the ones you’ll run to!” It’s the implicit thing where it’s saying you shouldn’t have certain values because things will inevitably collapse into anarchy. It’s a weird toxic strain of individualism. A convenient way to shrug off any opposing, challenging ideas.

And it’s also just like, the dystopian future’s already here. There isn’t going to be some quick collapse where we’re all left with nothing – not in America at large anyway. Or not because of reasons that aren’t natural disasters brought on by climate change. For most of us, this is already it. The gradual privatization and homogenization of various things. We’re inundated with scam calls, our information’s always at risk of being stolen. Everything more expensive, wages still stagnant, all of us just seeing a little bit worse quality of life as time goes on. But we’ll have streaming services. So that’s always good.

These conservative reactionaries won’t be leading a pack – they’ll go to work and make shit wages like the rest of us. It’s these guys who say they’re proud capitalists but don’t actually really own anything. No real power.

And work is such a grueling thing really. I read there was a post card making company in Florida that wanted people to come into work while the fucking hurricane was bearing down. This stuff is just lunacy. The CEO even just came out and said they wanted a “good end to the quarter.” Well, in THAT case I guess it’s OK that you’re a psycho. This country has such a Stockholm Syndrome thing with work. It’s not that important, a job. It’s something you do to get paid and we make it too hard to not have one.

But oh well. I’m trying to do more on the local level. Last night’s DSA meeting had a guy here talking about how to fight back against exorbitant tourist spending in Asheville. A lot of talk about how the workers are left behind while everything gets more expensive and caters to rich out of towners. I was an out of towner here not too long ago. I visited first as a tourist back in October 2020. I didn’t stay in one of the super-expensive hotels, but I did have fun cavorting about town with no responsibility. But we all have to figure out our own ways to have the responsibility, to be part of a community. That’s the longevity and shit that you really need.

And I’m taking my art more into my own hands. Selling some short stories here for whatever price people want. I don’t know who’ll read these, but I think it’s a great thing, to have this DIY way of peddling my wares. So much of what’s good doesn’t ever make it to big markets. I never liked the idea anyway. I’d still be glad to get noticed. But a lot of the best stuff is put out on smaller scales. I want to be in control of everything I do. Head over to the FREE WORKS tab and check ’em out.

It’s almost Halloween season again, so I’ll probably be watching an overload of horror stuff going forward. There’s just something great about it all – the cooler weather, the campy aesthetics, horror films full of old ghosts and rituals and zombies and shit like that. I can never get enough. I’m going to check out BLONDE on Netflix before things really get Halloweeny though. I read this great interview with the director – he really seemed to have some ideas about this. High concept stuff. I’ve heard it’s absolutely nuts. This’ll be funny later on if I end up hating it.

There’s something to that interview, though. I like a good interview. You should always try and dig as deep as you can when you’re doing one of those. No PR shit or easy softball questions – or not many of them. I always liked doing a good interview myself.

The Perfect Is The Enemy Of…

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There’s a pretty agitating phrase that goes around when you talk about politics in the U.S. (maybe other places too, but I wouldn’t be an expert on any of that.) It’s when they say “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” and it always seems to come up whenever a progressive doesn’t like some sort of sniveling centrist sort of compromise, something that won’t move the needle very much. Right now it’s being used to go after Bernie Sanders for not supporting this bill without a bunch of additional insane things like adding dental and hearing and vision to our health care benefits – what a crazy notion! What pie in the sky stuff! Do we want everyone to just have a GOOD QUALITY OF LIFE? Very absurd notions, I’ll say.

I’m being pithy there, but I mean, it is really just so telling about where we are. These rich assholes in the government won’t vote for basic shit like that and there’s only one guy sticking up for what should be very easy improvements to health care. Say what you want about Bernie, but he at least does care about health care and isn’t just kow-towing to the leech-like middlemen of the insurance industry.

And then we get the usual disingenuous argument of “well, there’s good stuff in there, you can’t just expect perfection.” This is said any time we ask for any improvements to things. We’re told to swallow our wants for a better world and accept the morsels. Tiny incremental improvements that, coincidentally, do not inconvenience or challenge the real power in the country, don’t make any concessions for workers or good health care. They will sometimes go even more obnoxious and compare it to “asking for unicorns” or something. To these folks, it’s really true, though. They want the system the way it is. These people are tribal team members. Not serious to debate. Politics to them is a game where they want their team to win and that’s it. Disgusting and despicable.

The politicians are trying to pass something, but I think at this point we all see how futile it is when the something they want has so little of real progress. I guess if I had to choose, I’d rather this bill go forward than a Republican one making it legal to slap puppies in the face. But that’s not a real choice and it’s not something to be proud of. The Democrats want to pass stuff to keep their clout and keep the system the way it is mostly. Maybe little adjustments. Is that the best we can hope for? I think Bernie and anyone else who identifies as progressive ought to keep doing it this way. Obstruct them and sink everything until we fucking get healthcare and more of a piece of the pie in this country.

I guess it’s all just going back to my larger political philosophy. I’ve been much less concerned for some time now about what they’re doing in DC. It’s worth it to know, but I don’t really attach as much significance to it now. Real political change isn’t going to come from these people. I’ll be glad to back progressive challengers, but until we get a lot more of them up there, it’s just not the be-all end-all to care about the Hill too much. I think a lot of those people are soulless careerists and they aren’t willing to really do anything about the actual powers in this country, the corporatists, the billionaires. But yeah, I guess I’m just expecting perfection!

Art/Money

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I’ve been thinking about art and how the pay works. There was some talk about pirating works recently on Twitter. And then that spiraled into another discussion about how streaming and whatnot affects artists. I’m not in a band, but I do travel for comedy. I am at what you’d call a somewhat lower level – no one is demanding that I headline or anything, and I’m just one guy sending out avails to bookers like everybody else. Both bands and comedy involve a lot of slumming it. Lots of nights driving to and from places. The money isn’t great, as you’d expect from bar shows doing it out of passion – dingy Irish pubs, cheap beers, cool out of the way spaces like book shows and art galleries. That’s the stuff; it’s not corporate gigs and it shouldn’t be. I once said I made enough money doing comedy to survive in the specific lifestyle portrayed in the 50s book MIDNIGHT COWBOY, where most of the characters are homeless drifters. I stand by that and it hasn’t changed.

It’s funny how it works – I’d really like to be able to go travel and do comedy way more. I’m at least good enough to get booked consistently now. But the gas prices don’t care about that. It might be going down a little now. $4.49 for gas seeming like a bargain – what a world. It’s still just not worth it to go and drive more than a few hours. Even driving two hours, while doable, I’m losing money. It’s more out of passion and playing a long game – if I travel enough and get seen enough, I can build momentum. Or that’s what I tell myself. But with the insane gas prices and everything else being so fucking expensive, I just had to start really calculating things. I’m pretty awful at math, but it seems like I just have to be way more choosy about where I go. It’s a cost benefit thing. Then again, since I started this piece, gas prices are mildly down at like $4 a gallon now. We live in the lap of luxury.

And this isn’t a new thing I just invented or thought of. Any artists or bands will tell you it’s a fucking criminal thing, the pay and all of that. We’re out there making a go of it and if we don’t have rich parents to help us live in LA or NY and get the right connections, we’re all pretty indie for the most part. For comedy you can do the cruise ships or the corporate gigs, but really, not everybody’s cut out for that. Not everybody really wants to do the board room lunchtime gigs where everyone’s eating gas station tuna sandwiches and apples and drinking Cokes in the middle of the day. A buddy of mine said you do those shows to do the comedy you really want to do later. I can respect that.

Read a NYT piece recently about Janeane Garofalo, whose work I’m not familiar with. It basically went into her strident devotion to being “alt.” Back in the 90s that was all the rage. It spilled over into the early ’00s when I was finally becoming culturally conscious in small and weird ways – I remember loving all the weird movies I could find, getting into heavy metal, all this stuff; I was really into that sense of finding something “other.” It’s a very pure instinct.

The Garofalo article makes mention of how she would never even repeat bits that did too well – “anything that was successful, she didn’t want to do.” I love that. There’s something in it, a spunk, that really speaks to me, because it’s sort of the essence of comedy to me. The going-out-on-a-limb. The adventurousness. I do repeat bits that work, as do a lot of comics, but that Garofalo anecdote really spoke to me about what the most exciting part of it is, which is the failing. When you come up with a good bit and throw it out in the void of a crowd at a mic, not knowing whether there’ll be any return. Especially for more long-winded or complicated bits. That’s what I like about doing this. I think it should be valid just to like doing something to do it. The Mike Birbiglia movie DON’T THINK TWICE was about that.

But everyone needs art in their lives. And as a whole it does have an industry. Just taking a cursory glance at the statistics for Florida’s arts and culture economy:

“The industry generated $166.3 billion of economic activity and $63.8 billion by the nation’s nonprofit arts and culture organizations. This economic activity supports 4.6 million full-time jobs and generates $49.4 billion in resident household income. The arts and culture industry also generates $27.5 billion in revenue to local, state, and federal governments—a yield well beyond their collective $5 billion in arts allocations.”

Quite a hefty thing. The report ends up saying the arts have a ripple sort of effect on everything else. You go out to the arts and then you pay for parking, dinner, a bunch of stuff. But there’s also a wide gulf there because there’s so many artists out there, and the big respectable money isn’t funneled in every direction equally. Then they cut the arts funding for schools and kids. Spotify will cut peoples’ comedy albums off their service and hoard all their money for a bodybuilding anti-vaxxer. There’s not a lot of equity going around. Never has been.

And it just goes into another thing I just read yesterday – this Carmen Maria Machado piece about why it’s OK for artists to not rush into the business side of things. It talks a lot about how sometimes really good art takes a while to marinate. But the rush is understandable because, again, we all need the money and we want to try and climb that ladder and open doors. I always thought this too. Why rush? Why promote a product that isn’t really as good as it could be yet? Of course, now we have to contend with the burning Earth. How much time do we really have left? Who knows?

But it’d be nice if we could all just have the time and license to do whatever we want more often.

Nothing I’m saying here is going to change anything. It probably comes off as a lot of bitching. But I think about this stuff a lot.

A Weird Comedy Adventure Chronicle – 7/22/22

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Amanda and Steve met me at the Hickory Tavern. She wanted us all to meet at the Olde Hickory Taproom – a different place, we both realized too late. But the Hickory Tavern was closer to the venue we were doing this mic at, so they came to meet me there. We were informed pretty soon that the kitchen was closed temporarily, which was a weird way of putting it. Pretty soon it became apparent there was something horribly wrong going on in the kitchen. Nobody’s food was coming out quick at all. A line of angry customers, like a mob, formed at the counter waiting for to-go orders. Did most of the kitchen staff walk off the job? Was it like an old Stephen King story where a normal appliance came to life and started killing everyone?

We never found out. There was no food around really so we just went to the show at Fyreside Taproom – another place with a sort of similar name to Hickory Tavern and Olde Hickory Taproom. I saw another similarly-named bar when I was leaving. This fucking town isn’t big on the creativity. Another comic got confused too. I got pretzels at the venue which I ate out of a paper bowl while navigating the giant crowd and listening to comedy. Never say I shy away from fine dining when I go on the road.

The place was completely packed, wall to wall, nowhere to sit at all really. This whole huge fucking crowd was out for the open mic, maybe thinking it was some sort of pro, polished show? No idea. There was also a sign on the door saying the whole bar was closing the next day and moving to a new location. Maybe that was something to do with it. There was something funny about that, doing what we did tonight as the venue was preparing to shut down forever.

The sets were mostly pretty muted – the comedy was fine but the crowd was sort of just staring at us like we were zoo exhibits and sort of passively taking it in. Just another thing to do. Could’ve easily been watching commercials or a fish tank or something. They were fine; I’m glad they stayed, even if their comedy tastes were different from mine. The first 20-minute spot of the night was an older guy than me, this country sort of comic – he did very well. I thought it was funny that he had this very typical Southern classic dude sort of vibe, some jokes that you might expect that hit well with this crowd, mixed in with COVID-conscious stuff about masks and how the pandemic wasn’t over. Good to have variety. Good to not stereotype.

I did terribly. I liked how I delivered my material, and just to be clear it was an open mic and I was just trying new shit out. The crowd did not like it. I mostly got silence and bewildered stares. I was doing a lot of weird material with no buffer or softening the blow like I’d do in a feature set in a room like this. I share this because the bomb stories are relatable. I like the failure stories. Comedy isn’t all pretty. I just like getting out there and doing it, and sometimes it goes this way. I’d be suspicious of anyone who told you I was wrong about that.

Amanda went up immediately after me and did not mince any words. Pitch-black comedy, and glorious for it. No filter. I thought she was fucking brilliant. Some crowd members walked but she just leaned into it the same way I’d leaned into my awkward silence for my set. There’s all kinds of comedy and there’s room for all of it. Steve and I liked it and I hope she keeps doing it more after her hiatus. Book her if you can.

I valued the bomb. I’m not writing this to puff myself up, shit on the crowd or make fun of the mic or host. It was just me doing a set that failed to connect in any meaningful way beyond some scattered chuckles. That’s how it goes. I feel like unless you’re at some huge inflated level, the sets will vary and a lot of them will be very tough to break through. And it’s interesting to me. You learn things when the set does not go well. And you’re reminded that you’re just part of a huge world of people just doing art out there. I had fun for what it was.

When I was leaving, I had to piss but couldn’t find a gas station or anything open. I was right outside of Hickory on 321 going west. There was one gas station that was closed and another that didn’t have a bathroom. The McDonalds across the street was functionally closed except for drive-thru. Whole stretch of road with open establishments but no bathrooms. Just amazing to me really. Same thing with the earlier issue with the restaurant kitchen.

None of this was the fault of the workers – it’s just how dilapidated society is. We made a society that runs on ruthless moneymaking. A cold thing, brutal and harsh. Nothing matters but that and it’s a train running away from you if you miss it. They had to fire everyone during the pandemic and now it’s all just sort of held together with rubber bands. No space for basic needs anymore. Shame. Got to look out for your communities. It’s really quite sad how some things are these days. The individualism is suffocating and awful. It should be better. There should be some other way. I don’t know what it is.

But anyway, mostly it was about the comedy. I’m trying to book more shows. Maybe I’ll do it eventually. It was good to have another out of town adventure that didn’t go catastrophically.

Breakthrough

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I haven’t had anything published in about a year and a half or maybe two years. I’d made this site, originally, to be a vehicle to promote my stuff, but then I didn’t get anything published for a long time, which just made this whole site look like another weak vanity project. More words pretending to be important. I never like that stuff. I could’ve just kept a journal.

But I kept going here and there because I’m just too stubborn. I wanted the record in public.

Well it seems to be going good again now, the wait prevailing. My book LAZARUS & THE DESERT MURDERS will be published sometime soon through DLG. It’s a sprawling Western – a neo-Western I guess the term would be. I was heavily into BLOOD MERIDIAN at the time and this story just came pouring out. It’s also to do with my allergy Flonase drug addiction (the stuff can fuck you up and I did enough of it to land in the hospital with a killer nosebleed). I didn’t intend that – I just wanted to do a grizzled, gnarly neo-Western. But reading it back after the insane flurry of the original draft, it’s about as blunt as anything ever was. It doesn’t really make sense to describe it like that, but I think people will enjoy it. I feel like a real fucking creative again. There was a period of time there where I felt pretty out in the weeds and disconnected from it all.

My other story CAREER MAN will be coming out with them too soon. That one is from the same period as this book and I was doing some really good work then. I’ve been asked a few times now to add more words. I don’t know how much more I can add without diluting the core of this story. But then again I do find new inspiration and it’s easy to write this story. It’s a part of me now.

I’ve got some other works in progress that I don’t know where they’re going. One of them I’m trying to make a long piece, a BONNIE & CLYDE-esque crime epic. I’m not sure if it’s good yet. I just sort of keep hacking away at it. This has been a challenge and I may have bit off more than I could chew, but that’s the exciting part of doing art. Reading Hemingway and Flannery O’Connor always gets me in a mood to write, shows me how it’s really done. There’s a certain finesse to it where it becomes more than just words. I really value that.

I’ve been reading Bob Odenkirk’s COMEDY, COMEDY, COMEDY, DRAMA memoir for the past few days. Really just devouring this thing. I have good memories already of reading it at the hotel bar of this wedding I was just at. Odenkirk writes a lot about how he’s a comedy snob and something of an elitist. I don’t think those are bad qualities so long as you’re not being a dick to anybody else. He talks about how he wants comedy to be challenging and different and weird – a pure original vision. He compares his outlook for sketch to how Bill Hicks was with stand-up. I think I got the same outlook too. If I’ll get anywhere remains to be seen, but I dig the impulse to want something great out of art.

He talks about taking risks and having specific goals in mind, even niche ones, for a piece of work. Refreshing compared to the comedy “gurus” online whose advice boils down to “make sure your stuff appeals to the widest mainstream audience or else it sucks.” And there’s a genuine love for the craft in here. It’s not comedy as a hedge against some culture war. There’s a lot of discourse about “woke” comedy now that I can’t identify with. It’s a very narrow view. “Punching up, punching down, that’s too woke, you’re not woke enough.” Very narrow thing really. I just like the spirit of creation. I like how jokes can take on infinite forms. Chimera things you can’t define, but which have the possibility to be the best thing you’ve heard all week, to open up those brain chemicals that make you laugh. That’s the stuff of life! Worrying about anti-woke stuff or doing everything through a lens of angry reactionary stuff seems such a sad way to live.

But then again comedy’s always going to be dancing and parrying with the ills and foibles of the world. I guess it’s inescapable that these things happen.

I don’t have any comedy bookings right now. I hope it changes, but I did need the break. I’m coming down from a long winded run of traveling for some other stuff. There was a wedding for a friend of mine. I hadn’t done a wedding in so damn long, but there was something really contagious about the happiness of it all. If you care about somebody that much and it’s mutual, you better celebrate the shit out of it. I feel like that’s all we can do is just find ways to enjoy life. It’s a form of rebellion. Maybe I’ll write more about all of this later.

The Great American Road Trip Pt. 2

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I had one good day at the beginning of this last road trip where it seemed like everything was going to go off without a hitch. I did a show for a little crowd at this chilled out Charlotte sports pub, ate some fish, read a little. Then I was on the road again. It was going alright for a while, but pretty soon there was a sense of dread. Why had my car tires been doing this weird stop-start thing for a few seconds? It was probably nothing. I’d been stuck in a deluge of awful goddamn rain the previous day, and figured that had jammed up the car a little, that it’d wash out as I drove. Pretty soon I was too tired to drive. The first two hotels I tried were total pieces of shit, with awful cracked up parking lots and the veneer of places you would only stay for a good story. But they were sold out. On this Memorial Day weekend I couldn’t even get a room in the middle of bumfuck SC.

Finally I found an Econo Lodge – and for under a hundred bucks at that. Crazy. I slept pretty well and did a bit of writing that night.

In the morning I drove for a few more hours. Bright cloudless summer day on a holiday weekend and we were in lockstep. My tires were still being a little bit odd. I stopped finally after about two or three hours in Walterboro, where I got some snacks and a bottle of water. Sat there for 10 minutes in the parking lot to take a break. The plan was to stop again in St. Augustine. It all seemed like it would be alright. Then the car stopped in the middle of traffic as I was trying to leave and the car horns started coming. I restarted the car and managed to get it to the parking lot of a strip mall with a sushi place, a clothing store, a KFC, a Walmart and this random sports bar type of place.

For the next few hours on this holiday weekend I tried to call every auto place in the area to find somebody to help. Of course they all were gone pretty much, even at like 11 a.m. on a Friday. The blacktop was scorching and the sun was relentless. I don’t understand white supremacists at all if they’ve ever had to stand in the sun like this. It’s very clear what the truth really is – I got scorched like a fucking lobster out there.

Finally I got a tow truck guy to drive me and the defunct car, which was suffering from a transmission failure, all the way down to Savannah. I was redoing the whole plot of PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES, except with no trains. I was determined to get to Florida. I had some shows to do, and a bachelor party to get to. At a hotel in Savannah on Memorial Day weekend, I drank beers on the roof lobby and then sipped a tiny rum bottle as I was watching GOODFELLAS – Ray Liotta had just passed. Usually I’d be out with the nightlife. This night I had no energy for anything. Completely drained. I woke up and took a plane back to Orlando.

I was able to rent a car to get to Tallahassee on the 31st to do shows with my friend Erick Lutz. We stayed in a weird hotel that was something like a labyrinth, with about three distinct parts that appeared to be upstairs and downstairs areas, even though the parking lot was a continuous downward slant. It appeared to be some sort of place for people to stay long term – there were families in the pool, cooking on grills, all kinds of stuff. The room was small and the WiFi didn’t work. There wasn’t even anybody in the lobby past 11, so if we’d gotten there too late we would’ve been fucked.

And the coffee shop where we camped out before the second show, it was swelteringly hot, with seemingly no air conditioning. Erick dabbed at his head with ice cubes from his drink and I was sweating on my computer trying to work. That whole day I was also on the phone with three different people trying to get my car moved to a transmission shop. I told the AAMCO to use their towing guy, thinking the AAA guy I called had not showed up. The AAMCO guy called me, irate, at 7 pm, saying the car was gone. I rested in satisfaction knowing that the transmission was broken, so no one could’ve stolen it at all, and it must have been taken by the AAA guy after all (It had been.)

The comedy shows went off like gangbusters. The crowds were fun and we got the satisfaction of being traveling bards in a foreign land. There’s a sort of recklessness, in a good way, you get when you’re performing somewhere nobody knows you. It elevates you and the material becomes fun because you know they’ve never heard it. The stage makes you forget all the car troubles and weird tribulations of the trip. One show was at this arcade bar place and at that show there was a woman who heckled everyone. Earlier in the night she’d made a weird crack at the bar on how she couldn’t come see the show because she’s blind. Erick is blind and took this as an opportunity to riff on it all.

The second show was at a place I’d done before, Bird’s Aphrodesiac Oyster Shack. Small crowd but they were into it. It’s one of these places with a bunch of old memorabilia and posters covering every inch of the wall, so I know those places will be good for me. Now I’ve had two great shows there. I felt like it went well. Erick did great too – he did some wild stuff on stage that the crowds ate up. Just first rate comedy. It’s good to have a bit of camaraderie and teamwork in all this mess.

I did some other shows – one of them a clean show at Sleuth’s Mystery Dinner Theater. I wasn’t told it’d be clean before the show, so I had to do some mental calculations. I was pretty sure a bunch of tourists wouldn’t want to hear about allergy drug addictions or traffic crashes or animal suicide. I’m usually not into having to do this, but it did go off without a hitch and the crowd was fun, probably not even caring so much about the content as the venue did. Erick put this one on, and he really got a great crowd out of those tourists. The other show was a contest which I lost, held at one of these fancy breweries where you pour your own beer from a big wall panel of selections. I had a fun set though.

Then came the bachelor party in Miami, a sprawling three-day adventure of swanky clubs and all kinds of stuff. Lots of swimming. I drank vodka at one club and chatted with a girl who was from Asheville. Way down in Miami just two Asheville residents. That place is probably as touristy as anywhere now. But I like it. The party was for Colin and it was just a few of us, but it was a good time and we lived it up. At one point we were lounging in a rooftop pool owned by Pharrell Williams, the sun murderous, but there were so many beautiful people around and none of them seemed to care. Miami is a place where everyone there is the most perfect physically beautiful people you’ve ever seen in your life. Like you can barely even imagine them returning to work in a random car dealership or insurance office or fast food place. They’re like aliens.

I finally got the car fixed on June 17th. I took another plane out, then had a two-hour layover and numerous delays. Drove through the worst thunderstorm in at least a few weeks. I’m home now and hoping not to fly anymore for a while.

Otherwise… here’s some stuff I’ve been enjoying.

WATCHING – CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is a gloriously dark, twisty piece of film, fraught with meaning, crackling with its own dark ingenuity at every turn. Cronenberg returns in fine form. MAD GOD on Shudder, by visual artist Phil Tippett, is this trippy, violent haze of creative stop motion puppets and animation. Best looking thing of the year. I’m endlessly fucking fascinated.

LISTENING – The new Jack White album I finally got on CD and the lyrics make more sense when reading ’em. Also the band Crass. A brilliant anarchic punk act. They really live their shit, they believed every word. They were the real deal. And Nuclear Death has been intriguing me. This takes everything just so far out and the lyrics are masterworks of just utter depravity and filth. I can’t get enough. I want stuff with that artistic intent.