Back to My Stones
October 29, 2008
For those of you who may have wondered where I’ve been, I just returned Monday night from twelve days in England. My trip was enriching, wonderful and as I post in the weeks ahead about my writings and my progress in getting them to all of you and others, I imagine I’ll see even more how my adventures have changed me as they always seem to do.
It had been twenty-four years and change since I’d visited the place in England with the big rocks, arranged in that unique and iconic structure by the ancient Druids for reasons we once believed to be astrological and possibly mystical. Hell, it could have just been something for them to do to pass the long days watching sheep eat their full (a condition that never seems to come) across hillsides in which one with a keen eye can easily locate every shade of green known to the universe. But recent evidence marks this unique place north of Salisbury as “the domain of the dead”, or a place where prehistoric peoples cremated and buried their kin. I don’t know about you, but for me, that changes everything.
When I walked up onto the site, I felt a surge of adrenaline that I didn’t remember from my days as a restless teen. The stones are bigger than I had imagined or remembered, and they stretched further to the thick and gray sky than I had anticipated or recalled. And the way the crows flew off a set of high, craggy precipices and back onto a new set called to mind the way we foolishly jump around on hot pavement looking for a spot yet uncharged by the sun. And even in their understood composition, the stones, as still as death itself, seemed abundantly alive. They seemed to watch the weary travelers that encircled them in the same way those who built them did nearly three millennium ago. I posit that you simply cannot walk the entire circumference of these ancient and unmoving structures without feeling some sense of connection. And it’s a fearful and awesome connection.
It’s a connection to the dead.
The wise old fossils of Stonehenge seemed to be waiting for all those who captured their images into their cameras and collected them onto any number of trinkets (even I bought one to wear to my next band gig as if by some archaic duty) to join its architects under the grass from which the droves of sheep – an unappreciated force of nature, it has to be said – would derive their continuous nourishment. These giant deposits of earth’s crustier disposition seemed to scoff at our concert concerns, smothering them with handfuls of mineral and understanding as if to say that we’re all just part of a cycle of life that is far less permanent than bedrock and rainy soil. Unto all of this world we are visitors, plain and simple, not just this well-visited place. We may invent gods above or below and we may write about them for billions to read but we and they are no more significant than the dead we surround or the sheep that carry on with their chewing, ignoring us until they lose their sweaters.
As I climbed back into the car I felt a little like a boy who had been scolded. Perhaps I was just tired from driving back up from our trip into the outskirts of Cornwall, but whether it was in that moment that I shed some idealism or became aware of its shedding from a time so many years ago, I definitely felt winded with a dire need to grab more tightly onto life. I suppose this reaction is quite the same as many of us have after seeing such overwhelming sights such as Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, but you see, there is still room in those experiences to say we are significant beyond these natural wonders. We are humbled by them, yes, but we’re still seeing them as if they are our gifts to record and enjoy. To sidestep the issue of a higher power, suppose we assume that we lucked out with these magnificent planetary anomalies and that with a little careful planning many of us are afforded the gift to visit them just to say “we were there”.
Stonehenge is a little different. For over two-thousand years, generations of people dragged these stones as they dragged their dead, to a place they decided would stand the test of time as they understood it. “Here you will learn,” is the story they appear to be telling. “Here you will learn what you truly are and you will see that you are the same as we were. You will toil and effort to make sense of why you are born and why you will die as you sample from this life and in the end you will see that it was in those efforts to define it for yourself, for all and for eternity that you stopped living. We did this so that you would come to the realization that you are not to spend so much time gazing for answers from our creation but to eventually turn your eyes away to the sheep; they do not move in blind allegiance to a shepherd simply to surrender their flesh and their skins but they do so to find new places to continuously graze.”
It is to do that we are, I thought to myself, as I took one last look at the monstrous maze and began walking back to the car park. It is to occasionally (or as we please) drag out stones and arrange them for only so long as they make us understand that we are fortunate beasts of this earth and little more – which to me is more than enough. I thought this as my girlfriend and I drove away from the site with more than a hundred miles to go before we could again enjoy some food and a pint together.
And now, if you don’t mind, it’s time to get back to my stones.
Rock and Roll Literature
October 13, 2008
Fuck it. If Scare Appallin’ can burn books and get away with it, I sure as hell can. But my burning book leaves no smoke. It just smokes the dinosaur brains of those who would try and silence anyone’s power and vision.
In fact, I aspire to write a hardbound, genre-bending tale that the Puck-Dropping Pageant Also Ran would push her secessionist weirdo of a husband into a snowdrift and trip over her snowmobile to burn. In other words, I want to burn a book from the inside out, using only words and ideas to do it.
And I don’t want anyone to be able to stand back and watch the words vanish into the Northern Lights, smug in the knowledge that they’ve rid another dissenting voice from the eyes, ears and minds of the world. I don’t want anyone to be able to say they discouraged anyone from writing the most explosive, challenging, and shocking piece of literature ever written. For those who would try, I want to shake the shit out of their rudimentary and self-righteous ganglion clusters. I want them to cry, or better yet, worse; hailing from Jersey as I do, leaving no witnesses gets me off. I want to write the censoring czars to death.
I’ve been off-handedly referring to my style as Rock and Roll Literature. What makes it different from, say, a hard R-rated graphic novel or comic serial in Heavy Metal or Epic magazine? Besides not having any illustrations, I dunno. Probably not much if you take some of the most irreverent and penetrating prose from any decade and explored it in the context of its time. I’m certainly not trying to place my writing in the same category as the important works of some of the world’s greatest literary minds, but let’s just say I want to write a pop/rock/punk word record that punches a hole in your rigaramole.
But I don’t want to just come at you extreme. I want it to have humor, depth, individual style, and clear purpose. Cause that’s where the impact is so strong that the hole out the back of your head is ten times the size as the one that enters your face. I say with my Jack-O-Lantern tongue sticking out that I don’t want to hurt you unless you try and piss on my candle to keep me quiet and shut my eyes. If you’re the kind that would try, then I will effort to shock you with my free-thinking soul, believe it.
Great rock records change the way we see things. First and foremost, I want my books to be lots of fun. But I’d also like to change the way you think about yourself and the world – even if it’s only in the smallest of ways. I want to blow your attention deficient eyedrums out with a fresh hell that will wake you and strip you of what you think you know, and titillate you in ways that may also terrify you. But most of all, I want to find new avenues to explore and get those who dare to be on the same page excited to read more.
Rock and Roll Literature. Burning down the shelves.
Feel Good Satanism
October 3, 2008
Well, maybe that’s going a little overboard, but I think the concept would make a funny commercial for sWitch if it was ever made into a film. And if it were, the Drive-In would be where it belonged. I’m not much for big, posh, multiplex theaters crowded with cardboard adverts and noisy arcades. I like to hear the projector or the crackle of a dangling speaker, not some idiot on a cell phone. And with your date in a tube top and a six-pack of Michelob in the trunk, what could be better? You could even hit the diner later and unscrew the salt shakers.
I’m not that huge a retro-fan – okay, I certainly am, but I like to think that I recognize the truly special in contemporary popular culture – but there seems to be a commercial agenda to broaden the cultural perspective so that the entire family can join in on the fun with their wallets. I’m always hearing that we’re “getting what we want”, so much so that I’m starting to wonder a) how they know what we want, and b) if they’re not just telling us what we want. To be honest, I want to know what you as a filmmaker/writer/artist wants and I want you to try and convince me of your point of view. In other words, not so much “here it is!” as “check it out!”. We’re so focused on raising the bottom line that very little is a surprise anymore. In the end, I suspect, we lower the standard for our imaginations. No wonder there’s so much attention being paid to remakes and retreads. How something from 50 years ago is still relevant has less to do with new effects and cultural signifiers than where we are now in terms of the human animal.
The story of The Ducharme family was, on the surface, a twisted and sexy romp that attempted to turn modern horror paradigms on its ear. Believe me, that sounds far more pretentious than it really is. I just wanted things to “switch” in the middle, and have the hunter sort of become the hunted and mess with our ideas of who is really the bad guy and so forth. If that’s enough for you, and I’m fine if it is, you can stop right here and enjoy the picture. The likes of which you, too, can make by going here. But if you’re in the mood for the real pretentious stuff, read on.
sWitch is my comment on the culture quandary caused by a commercialized, cookie-cutter caricature of the American Dream. I had grown tired of “feel good” narratives that propped up the wholesome brand while basically pretending that our darker instincts didn’t exist. The practice is the entertainment equivalent of a local beauty pageant. And with entertainment making enormous profits by raising our children these days, I believe we as a society addicted to entertaining ourselves are fixing them with overly simplified versions of what they should expect of their values, bodies, minds and the world. While I strongly believe there is room for low nuance and high sentiment in what we might dub mainstream recreation, fucking hell, have you seen an episode of America’s Got Talent, lately? Why can’t we mix family values with bold and truly creative expression of which diversity is not a challenge of otherness but intrinsic to our strength? Where’s our Adam’s Family, Hollywood?
At this point, there appears a stagnating divide that perpetrates a culture war within our own families. In essence, we’re at war with ourselves in modern American society and therefore we’re at war with everyone outside of it. We’re covering up, painting over, and sublimating our true nature –– a nature that is open to change in a variety of forms –– and the results are social and political constructs that support conflict, division and ill mental health (much of it organized under a rotting belief system).
I’m not trying to spur a revolution with rock and roll literature, and I actually believe that real cultural growth needs a balanced view of social propriety and experimentation. In fact, what fun would it be if there were no inherent conflicts in human social nature? It’s awesome to have a Bogeyman unite us, as long as we’re all clear on where he comes from and do our due diligence to determine what exactly is “real”. With sWitch I was definitely championing what I perceived to be cultural scapegoats and pariahs to try and make people examine their own personal beliefs and see if they recognize anything profoundly full of crap. And if they do, I would love to say to them, “Hey, it’s cool. Sometimes you need to play along to get along but let’s not confuse the matter further by giving up our connection to the earth and our own, natural born strengths”. I know that might sound like some lame Chicken Soup for the Soul definition of dark paganism, but if we’re bent on adhering to some saintly marketing concept that, under scrutiny, actually opposes togetherness and growth, I think it’s not only unhealthy, but ultimately fruitless, as well.
What I’m saying is, we don’t need to be afraid of who we are as human beings. What we should be afraid of is a lack of inward examination and self-exploration. We’re created to be comfortable with the dark as well as the light, with the earth and the stars and with sexuality and pleasure. It’s not wrong to lust, nor is it wrong to release our deepest desires through all forms of expression, as long as we’re not asking anyone else to adopt them. In nature, everyone is held accountable for their actions. There is no court of high appeals and no sociological “time outs”. Are we now too comfortable with a margin for error that is so easily filled with empty doctrine and self-serving spin? We’ve lost so much trust for ourselves, we’re creating hundreds of billions of walking powder kegs who are mourning the passing of self-respect in all kinds of weird and scary ways. And not “cool” weird and scary, more like “really” weird and scary. There’s a difference, folks.
Hey, I don’t give a damn how you look, what you drive, what kind of house you have, where your kids go to school (as long as they “teach” there), what kind of music you like, how much you “give” and what silly little bullshit you might have “lost” doing it. I give a damn about your humanity and understanding enough about what that means to wake up and accept that you might have a responsibility to keep working, growing and stay out of the way of real, evolutionary progress. In short, and perhaps in toto, sWitch sets out to be a wickedly fun way to hold you responsible for your connection to yourself as a human being and hold others responsible as well. I’m not even sure I succeeded in doing what I set out to do, and if some of the ideas turned you off, then consider yourself filtered. I’m okay with that. But you still have to ask yourself if you are doing enough to discover your own strengths and recognize your own real weaknesses, or are you expecting someone else’s marketing concept of who you should aspire to be dictate what’s right and wrong, and what’s appetizing and what isn’t?
It’d be swell if we stopped being afraid of who we really are, and more importantly, who we really could be. It requires a malleability of vision and the development of courage to accept what our experiments truly yield. Expectations are okay, just as long as you don’t expect anything but the truth.
