the scowl

Word has come that Tim Kinsella — of many fine bands, including Joan of Arc, Owls, Cap’n Jazz, and Make Believe (pictured below) — has a novel forthcoming on the fine indie press featherproof.

I ended up writing a short blurb about this for Vol.1. What I wasn’t able to work in there was a link to this short story of mine that appeared on THE2NDHAND a couple of years ago. Called “Party Able Model,” it was written for a night of stories inspired by songs that was held in Chicago a few years ago. Given that Kinsella’s music has inspired fiction, it seems only fitting that he himself should also be working in that realm.

A number of very smart, very astute people have written elegant pieces as of late on why you should pick up Out of the Vinyl Deeps, an anthology of Ellen Willis’s rock criticism.

There isn’t much I can add to this. I will say, though, that I spent the last few days reading the anthology, and this excerpt from a piece on the Velvet Underground won’t stop rattling around my head:

For the Velvets the roots of sin are in this ingrained resistance to facing our deepest, most painful, and most sacred emotions; the essence of grace is the comprehension that our sophistication is a sham, that our deepest, most painful, most sacred desire is to rediscover a childlike innocence that we have never, in our heart of hearts, really lost.

Last month, I joined WORD’s classics book group. This month, we’re discussing the first half of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. Until now, it had fallen into the strange category of classics looming unread on my shelf — alongside Ulysses until a few months ago. Looking at the book itself, its densely written paragraphs, and its age (over a century and a half), I assumed I was in store for something…almost archaic.

I was very wrong. Consider the narrator’s tone here, somewhere between omniscient and mildly frustrated with the characters around him:

As the conversation that the wayfarers conducted with each other is of no great interest for the reader, we shall do better if we tell something about Nozdryov himself, who will perhaps have occasion to play by no means the last role in our poem.

Or this passage, from five pages in, describing a piece of, er, unconventional decor in a common room:

…the same oil paintings all over the wall — in short, the same as everywhere; with the only difference that one painting portrayed a nymph with such enormous breasts as the reader has probably never seen.

Not being a reader of the original Russian text, I’m not sure if the tone here comes more from Gogol or from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation. But either way, it was a sign from the outset that I was certainly not in the company of a museum piece, and that the narration was as alive as that of any recent novel I might encounter.

So: I reviewed Bryan Charles’s memoir for Vol.1. Long story short: I enjoyed it. There was strange feeling I got when reading it, though, and it wasn’t something I could easily bring up in the course of my review. That said, I thought I might do so here.

As someone who lived not far from Charles during the time described in his book, it’s a surreal read. The apartment Charles describes living in for much of the book is about ten blocks from where I was living (still live, in fact) at the time. He talks about a bar on 14th and B with half-price beer on Thursdays; I was at that bar on many a Thursday night. And there’s a  surreal quality to reading a book that describes certain locations during a certain time and realizing that, more than likely, you could be found in the background of those scenes, lurking on the periphery, the main character of your own as-yet-unwritten story.

And if I’m going to bring up the book in question, I should also mention the impressively comprehensive interview with Mr. Charles conducted by the esteemed Matthew Perpetua that is, I daresay, pretty essential reading.

Last Friday, I got my second tattoo.

The quote itself comes from the last issue of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, which is — I daresay — one of my favorite works in any kind of media, and one which continues to resonate with me in strange and different ways since I first encountered it in the mid-90s.

So here’s the full quote. I used the last line:

We made gods and jailers because we felt small and ashamed and alone. We let them try us and judge us and, like sheep to slaughter, we allowed ourselves to be…sentenced.

See! Now! Our sentence is up.

I’d messed around with some designs, but nothing quite seemed to fit the test. I ended up consulting my friends Alex and Scott, each of whom knows quite a bit about typography than me. Alex suggested Rockwell as a font; with that in mind, Scott came up with a pair of designs:

I then made my way to Josh at Greenpoint’s own Three Kings Tattoo, where the design was turned into what you see below (and also on my left arm). Apologies for the blurred cameraphone image — it’s still markedly better than the photos I’ve taken since then.

After this was done, I noted that it had taken me thirty-three years and four months to get my first tattoo, and ten after that to get my second. At this rate, I may not have any uninked skin by the time I’ve reached my forties…