on starting a “zine”

I was a nerd- kind of a fat nerd- never made it with the ladies. And so I figured, what was the best way to get revenge on society? It was either start a punk band or start a zine, and I chose the loser way out and started a zine. In the ’90s, the zine boom was really huge; it was really a fun, fertile time for that type of stuff.

All the zines at the time were personal zines; they were diaries of girls with issues and punk guys talking about how much they hate Ronald Reagan and how much they hate cops, and that just wasn’t what I was about, so I wanted to do a magazine that made fun of movies and pop culture and stuff. In high school, I started a pop culture magazine called Damaged that I used as a way to rebel against pop culture, which wouldn’t accept me.

At the time, I ran a pretty positive review of Roger & Me, because I grew up very poor. My dad and my mom tried to instill in me never to take money from the government– never to borrow money, never to take money– always work and get it for yourself. But at that time, when you’re a teenager, you’re trying to rebel against everything your parents teach you, so it was “Come on, it’s like the Haves and the Have Nots, man! Roger & Me teaches the truth, man!” And then, I wrote a list of the top 10 hottest women, and it was 1995, and I think #1 was Kim Deal of the Breeders. So it was truly an embarrassing time.

The first issue had nothing but immense hatred for Green Day. Every single page was just a slam on Green Day, and I didn’t realize just how truly prophetic that hatred would become.

on technology

I don’t even think I used the Internet until college, and that was ’98 or ’99, maybe. I just went to the computer lab, and I tried to use it to find movie news or wacky forwards, chain letters. I didn’t even really know what the Internet was til about the early 2000s, to be honest with you.

It’s kinda funny, cuz yeah– zines, in a lot of ways, were kinda like blogs in the pre-mass Internet days. But to do a zine, you had to have real fortitude, you know? You had to be a bit more of a go-getter to actually lay things out, write things out, type things out– get shitty clip art. You had to actually do real work to put a zine together; you had to go and get it printed. You had to pay for it. All that stuff– but now, any jerk can do a blog (and most people who do blogs are jerks).

Writing for yourself really isn’t as interesting anymore, because anybody can do it, and there’s less chance you’re gonna get noticed for what you do. The world wide web has been broken down from a world into an infinite number of tiny little cliques. No matter what you do, if you’re not doing it exactly for yourself and hope to get nothing out of it, you’re never gonna get noticed anymore these days, unless you jump on stage with “Soy Bomb” tattooed on your chest.

on running a small business

When I was 15, I got a work permit, cuz I immediately wanted to get a job. By scamming the fax machine at the public library where I worked, I was able to get the first three issues printed on Xerox paper, but eventually the demand got bigger and bigger and I started selling more issues through outlets like Factsheet 5 or outlets like those early zine directories. I eventually had to go with a real printer, so I would just mow lawns and weed gardens and collect cans and work at the library and try to do everything else to pay for the printing cost.

The last issue came out in 2001, and I was in this really long relationship that I thought was gonna be the relationship to end all relationships, and it wasn’t and I went crazy and I left Oklahoma City one night. I just move to Fort Collins, CO randomly.

I started doing the radio show and started doing other forms of media and I keep promising myself I’m gonna return back to a print version of Damaged. And I always have ideas, but I write for so many newspapers and magazines and everything now, and you just see them dying off constantly cuz print is dead– actually holding something in your hand– it’s dead, I hate to say it.

It stinks, but between the costs of having to print something now– zines could go anywhere from a dollar to five dollars. Towards the end of when I was doing it, people were selling it for five dollars, but from the first issue to the last, I always kept the cover price two dollars. Cuz my thought was, you know what? Everybody has two dollars to waste on a magazine; you know? And it was a good plan, but I don’t know if that’s cost-effective now. But then again, I could probably reach more people, cuz more people would be interested in reading a two-dollar magazine on the toilet than sitting at their desk, skimming through my blog. You have more rapt attention when you have something in print in your hands. So, getting involved with radio and other forms of media have taken the print thing away, especially when I found out I can get paid for my writing, which I know is a very dirty, capitalist thing for an artist to say.

on starting out in Fort Collins

Within one weekend of moving here, I got involved in the radio station. About a month or two later, after my show premiered, I kind of manned up and went to the local alt-weekly newspapers and said, “Hey, I’m a film critic; hire me.”

If there’s one thing I hate in film critics, it’s when they spend four paragraphs synopsyzing the movie, and then the next two paragraphs go “This movie was very good. I liked this movie. The acting was so good.” So I try to put a personality and a story into the review, something to make it different than what other people are doing. And it worked, so now I’m a professional film critic and that’s what I do for a living. It’s a shitty living, but it’s better than digging a ditch.

I moved here with little cash, and I rented a room in a hippie flophouse. Down the street was KRFC, and the hippie landlord was like, “Yeah, man, you gotta get involved in community radio.” And so I went down there the first weekend I was here, to see what was going on. I think they were giving away free wraps or something, so I was hungry, and whenever I’m starving, I’ve been known to put away all culinary judgment, and I’ll eat watercress wraps if you let me have, like, five of them. So I went down there and got some vegetarian wraps, some tempeh, and I talked to the guy who was in charge, and I said, “Oh, you probably need a degree in communications-” “No, it’s community radio, so anybody can come and get a show. You’ve gotta put in a demo and go through all these hoops and everything, but we’ll see what you’ve got and get you on.” That’s what I did; I came down and cut a demo, and they accepted it within a few days, and they’ve been sorry they did ever since.

on his political awakening

Being around the hypocrisy of my liberal friends, they lived in a very do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do manner. They just seemed like they were wasting their lives, getting drunk every night and fucking around, not having any type of goal– and the older I got, I realized that’s not something I can do. I can’t just float through life like that; I want to be something and do something and want to be able to make a living doing it. Yeah, pretty much capitalism and the will to exceed– the driving desire for exceptionalism– turned me from a lazy liberal to a hard-working conservative, and on top of that, dating a super-ultra- feminist liberal who used feminism to rationalize cheating.

Community radio is a typically extreme-left medium; just take a look at your NPRs and your Pacificas and all that stuff. I’m pretty much the lone wolf here, and that’s how they’ll describe me if anything ever goes wrong, I bet. I spent a lot of time when I was first here just constantly getting my feelings hurt. Once a person finds out you’re not a liberal or a Democrat or an anarchist, they start talking to you as if you’re not even in the room, and they do things to get you off the air or fuck up your game.

I decided, instead of letting it hurt my feelings or get to me, I was just gonna turn it all off and deflect it back on them and just turn them into the joke. Any time we do characters, any time I do leftist ranting, it’s literally based on lines and phrases that have been shouted and used at me in meetings or hate mail I’ve received. Everything is taken from real life, just amped up.

It’s kinda funny how peaceful people who are so anti-war and who want nothing but to hug your children without nuclear arms, how if you talk about wanting to shut down bicycle lanes in Fort Collins, they’ll send you a death threat about shooting you in the parking lot. One of my heroes was this Denver DJ named Alan Berg who got shot by white supremacists, and Oliver Stone made that movie Talk Radio loosely based on him. And so, you know what? That’s gonna be my big claim to fame. So any time I get a death threat, I go on air and say, “Look, I dare you– I fucking dare you to come to the parking lot and shoot me. You won’t do it, cuz like all liberals, you’re a hypocrite with no guts.” I keep trying to tempt them. I’ll be honest, I’m completely and totally afraid they will do it, but as soon as they don’t do it, I strut around like the cock of the walk, knowing I will never get my comeuppance, and it’s even more feeble.

on his show prep

I do whatever I feel, whatever I think, whatever I’m in the mood for. That’s probably why I couldn’t work for real corporate radio; I could not force someone, unless it was some sort of ironic joke, to listen to a Justin Bieber song or a Lil Wayne song. I couldn’t do that. I play what I want to play; I play what I want to hear. One of the best things about community radio has been that you play what you want. If I’m having a bad day and I wanna play the Cure, I’m gonna play the Cure. If I’m having a good day and I wanna hear the Osmonds– I let my mood dictate the music.

As far as the comedy rants go, I’ll take notes throughout the week, and whatever pisses me off the most I’ll just rant on. I allow my rants to ramp up; I start small, but then I’ll just keep working and working and working and see how far I can go. That’s either A) I get a phone call from the general manager or B) I start laughing at the ridiculousness of how far I’m going.

With the first couple of years I was doing the show, I was very careful. But, like I said, when I started deflecting the anger and rage people gave me for saying, “Maybe we should give George Bush a chance,” and I was getting, “How dare you, you monster. You’re an evil monster! No blood for oil, you son of a bitch!” I wanted to become the monster that they perceived me as to begin with. Once I started doing that, it becames this progressive ramp of “How far can I go?” I realized that with each show, I could go farther and farther and farther to the point, now, where I literally feel like an unstoppable Hellspawn, and I’m truly not afraid of going on the air and saying what I want to say now.

Of course, I try to edit the cussing and stuff like that, but if something truly ticks me off, I will totally go for the throat now. That’s what you have to do to get people’s attention. If you go on and just give some middling criticism, nobody cares. But if you go on like a jerk and say, “this is what I believe,” and then make fun of them for it, that’s gonna get their ire. My whole goal of my show has become, “How far can I go to piss off someone this week?”

But people get it; people think it’s funny. As much as people hate me, and people at this station alone want me off the air, I have listeners and people who love what I’m doing. To me, that means the whole world. I’m able to get liberals who may disagree with me to laugh at themselves. Cuz I do the same with the right, too, the real blustery-type blowhards who have no sense of humor about their beliefs. You’ve gotta take the salt with the sugar sometimes.

I’m the only music show on KRFC that has a disclaimer. The public affairs shows do; most of the public affairs shows are very left-leaning shows about recycling and bicycling and anarchy and stuff like that. The reason we started doing a disclaimer was because someone wanted to do a psychic show, and a local group of skeptics, who took issue with a psychic show on the area, wanted a disclaimer that said “KRFC does not support this as a science” or whatever. Anytime you do anything with religion or spirituality or right-wing politics, you always get that faction that wants to make it hard for you to do the show so you’ll give up and quit, you know? So I said, “I’m fine, I’ll be like 2 Live Crew. I’ll wear my Parental Advisory Sticker as a badge of honor.” So I wrote my own disclaimer– made it funny, made it self-deprecating. I play it every week proudly; I’m the only show that does that.

I’m really the only show out here that does what I do. All the other shows, they play music and they may say one or two things about the war or whatever, but nobody really does a show, where the main goal is to entertain. I feel like I try to do the complete opposite of what everybody else is doing, and that’s what I feel I’ve been doing my whole life. With the magazine, trying not to do a skater zine or something.

And you know how it is; if you have a different opinion than everybody else, you get labeled a contrarian. “You’re just doing that to get attention!” We live in a society where we proclaim to have this individuality, but any time you are an individual or have your own thoughts, you’re made to feel like shit for it, like you’re not part of the group.

The thing that does upset me a lot is the indifference from the right. A lot of times, the right is too stodgy or melodramatic and sentimental. A lot of them just seem to be so desperately stuck in the ’80s. There are a lot of new, young alternative conservatives who get it– they get pop culture and humor– and I don’t care anymore about trying to reach a 60-year-old retiree playing a golf course in Florida. I want to reach people who are smart and savvy enough to get what I’m doing.

I feel like there’s a young culture coming up; as much as there are Republican/Democrat factions warring against each other, there’s also two different sides of the conservative aisle, too. I saw this especially when I went to see Michael Steele in Fort Collins on a “Stop Pelosi” bus tour. You have the older, well-to-do people, and their grandkids, who wear pearls. And then you have the more middle-America type, middle-aged people who wear beer t-shirts and torn jeans, and they’re just regular folk, working class. And then I was there, and I’ve got long hair, and I look like fucking Charles Manson. And it’s kind of funny, because everywhere I go, I don’t see people like me– young, pop culture punk– not punks, I don’t know how to describe it. Alternative, hipster– I’ve been accused of being a hipster lately. There’s no middle ground for me to play in, so I have to do all this stuff by myself. Fort Collins is such a white bread community, I don’t have any acceptance here as much as I do via the Internet and my writings. So many of my listeners are just all over America– people like me who get it and want to be a part of it cuz they don’t have anything like this where they live.

I’d started getting emails, and whenever I would go to horror conventions, sci-fi, and people would take me aside– everybody tells me how funny it is, how much they love it, but I knew I hit something when people who are really ashamed to say they’re conservative (they’re too scared cuz they know they’ll lose friends) take me aside and say to me, “Hey man, don’t tell anybody, but I really agreed with what you said about Obama. I really think you made a good point.” They’ll take me aside and say these things privately but never admit it. That’s how I knew I was hitting something, when I realized how many people used me as a confidant to tell me how they really feel about things.

Since I came out of the closet, so to speak, about my conservatism, I’ve lost so many friends. Even though I’m still the same and still do the same jokes, because I gave myself a label like that, I’m evil now. Forget the fact that I grew up a poor Mexican, forget the fact that I work for charities and volunteer my time non-stop, forget all the good stuff in the world I do. Because I check a box a certain way on a sheet of paper, I am the fucking enemy.

You lose friends, but at the same time, you gain people who transcend friends, you gain soul mates, in a way. I know it’s a funny way to say it, but it’s people who get you. That’s the best feeling in the world, when you know there are people who get it, and you’re not just jerking off on the air for no one.

There’s one guy named Mike who does a podcast called Cadaver Lab who I’ve become good friends with. He’s a horror fan and he’s also into Slayer and metal and stuff, but he’s also a pretty hardcore Mormon and conservative, and in a lot of those circles, just the minor belief that there might be a God will earn you derision. So it’s primarily a very godless, liberal group. But like I said, I make friends, pockets of people who come up to me and, very sheepishly, say, “Hey- hey, are you a conservative by any chance?” just testing the waters. And that’s how I’ve met so many friends. The guy who plays a character on the show, the extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist Richard LoCoco, he’s a friend of mine from Denver who I met at a horror convention in Cleveland.

So yeah, you make these friends and you start forming connections, and you start realizing you’re on similar creative wavelengths, you’ve got similar things to say and what you believe and what you want to get out there, and that’s how art is created. When you meet somebody who gets what you’re doing, all that does is just inspire you to do even more, to push it up another degree.

What type of music do I absolutely hate? Do you ever read personal ads where it says “I love all kinds of music, except for country and rap”? Well then, you know what, genius? You don’t like all kinds of music. I honestly can say that I do like all kinds of music, because in every genre, there is something good. From pop to world music to rap, you’ve gotta have the balls and wherewithal to seek it out. And I’m very fortunate, because this is what I’ve been doing my whole life– being a music nerd and movie nerd and everything. I know what I like, and I know how to find it. There really isn’t a musical genre that I absolutely hate. If you give me a genre and ask me who I like in it, I’ll probably be able to find someone to play for you. I can easily listen to Toby Keither next to the Grateful Dead, no problem (which I’d like to do a mashup of).

on people who say “all music after [year] sucks”

Those people are the worst type of elitist, snobby assholes. What type of jerk just cuts himself off from experiencing other types of art? As much music knowledge that I have, I’ll go into a record store, and I ask a simple question: “Do you guys have the new White Stripes?” or whatever, and instead of giving you help, they talk down to you and make you feel stupid or shitty for asking for help. And I don’t ever want to be that guy who makes you feel shitty because you like something that I don’t like. But do I do that, though, accidentally? Probably. I just want to explore and listen to whatever I can; if I just prejudicially throw off a genre of music as garbage, I might me missing something that might change my life.

Growing up, it was all about the Beatles and the Ramones and Amy Grant. Those were my big three in middle school and high school. I loved the Beatles, I dug the Ramones, and I was totally in love with Amy Grant. Not even necessarily her Christian stuff- her pop stuff, like Heart and Emotion, I was obsessed with that album, and that just spiraled me into different directions.

And my new thing is Tex-Mex music, Tejano country and outlaw country– that’s what I’m really obsessed with, because that’s the only music I can honestly connect with on a spiritual level. Cuz the other problem with hearing everything and trying to seek everything out is there gets to be a point where you realize you have heard everything and you start to get bored. So you still like it, but you just get bored of it. It’s like a junkie, man– like heroin. You do a couple of shots every now and again, and you don’t get the same high, so you start doing it every day. That’s what music and movies are like for me. I keep needing something more to get the same feeling I had when I heard my first Beatles record. [I make a crass joke about the rumored end of David Carradine.] I’m gonna end up in my movie room hanging from my DVD shelves wearing pantyhose and a belt around my neck. If it does come down to that, wouldn’t that be a great way to be remembered?

appeal to conservatives

You know what, conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, whoever you are? You know what? These people talk shit about you. They deride you; they say you’re no good. They say you don’t get it. So every fund drive, I try to make more money than anybody else. So I want to come to the people with money– Joe Conservative– and say, “Hey, let’s prove ‘em all wrong.” Let’s have conservatives and Republicans save the show, save the station, and make more money than anybody else. That’s what I’m saying; I want the phone lit up, I want the lines to go down from the amount of people calling in to pledge. Let’s prove to them that we support conservative comedy, conservative radio, and young alternative conservatives trying to do something different and get a different voice and opinion heard.

on his place in conservative media

Maybe in body size, we’re the same, but I can’t ever be a Rush Limbaugh, cuz that’s not my goal. I’m me, you know? I can never do what everybody else is doing, so in the conservative community, do we punish that or do we reward it? Let’s have a competition; who’s more supportive, you know?

Every week I come to the station, I’ve always got to fight for my show, regardless of how much money I make or put into it. I’ve literally won awards for this show, but I constantly have to fight for it. There are literally people whose goal is to bring me down. [I make a crack about being harassed by Media Matters.] I’ve actually considered starting my own Louis Watch blog, just every week, every offensive thing I say, writing it out, Soros-style, and contradicting it and putting facts and everything down, just so I can take care of the problem for them.

on public broadcasting

NPR’s just awful. They’re just awful. And any time we have a meeting, you always get those people who show up at the meetings, saying, “We should become an NPR station! Have you heard Click and Clack? Those guys are just hilarious!” I mean, Ira Glass? He’s like sandpaper. “This American Life,” all those shows? I don’t know how people can listen to NPR– actually sit down and base their whole afternoon around Terry Gross. It’s just the most maudlin, monotonous, boring radio possible. Don’t you want something that’s exciting or really thought-provoking or will piss you off, something that makes you feel life? That’s what I try to do, take everything that’s just horrible about NPR and flip it around and have my way with it, you know?

Now, I love me a good joke or two about sexy sax music, so one of the biggest musical surprises of my month was discovering Destroyer, a laid-back but affecting (correct usage, I checked) amalgam of slower-paced ’70s disco, ’80s new wave, and ’90s adult contemporary music, featuring sexy sax/trumpet/flute, sparse electric guitar, and a backdrop of sometimes-sexy, sometimes-ethereal synths. Singer-songwriter Dan Bejar sounds a lot like the Weakerthans’ John K. Samson taken down to a plaintive whisper, drawing us into the wistful world of his innermost thoughts. He takes his time between chord changes and keeps his melodies minimalistic, allowing for plenty of breezy licks from whatever solo instrument is best for the moment. The songs can run long, up to 9 or 11 minutes, but Bejar keeps things rolling so you can either focus intently without getting bored or just get lost in the atmosphere of a song.

The clincher for me with Destroyer really is the sax. Who in the indie music world would think to indulge in a style that virtually demands hipster mockery– to indulge in it with such sincerity and emotional vulnerability? Bejar deflects any hint of detached irony and gives us pure beauty that you can tell he’s genuinely passionate about, and that’s something that should be celebrated.

Disasteradio is the work of Luke Rowell, a one-man MIDI wrecking crew from New Zealand with no shortage of enthusiasm or ideas.  I found his single “Gravy Rainbow” at a site for viral music-related videos, and through the magic of Bandcamp, I was able to stream his whole album, which should be retroactively inserted into my Top 10 albums of 2010.

Opener “You Win” had me thinking of Weird Al deep cuts; it’s an unadulterated major-key joy ride with fatty drums, octave-hopping bass, and unapologetic, unironic retro synth voices. Rowell isn’t the strongest singer (make no mistake, it takes one to know one), so tracks like “Gravy Rainbow” are actually the exception to his style– using a vocoder– which often works best with the songs, anyway. Disasteradio’s energetic, playful tone is infectious, like Andrew W.K. with a Roland X6, and its lightheartedness and brisk pacing allows for many repeat listens. In a world where even our Top 40 pop stars are trying to be “dark” and “edgy,” this kind of manic, playful energy is rare and fragile; we must cherish and support it.

Deastro is the kind of music I would make if I could translate it exactly as I imagine it in my head. It’s electronica full of bright, warm synths and 16th-beat drums pitter-pattering underneath singer Randolph Chabot’s quite capable voice. I would classify the music’s tone as emo– the good kind. Instead of mopey whining, Chabot has the kind of longing– even desperation– you heard on the first two Weezer records, or Superchunk and Sunny Day Real Estate. He’s a young (my age) liberal who wants to change the world, and you can’t help but be won over by his sincerity and empathy.  Deastro can be a bit exhausting, especially as full album listens, but in my book, it’s better to be overwhelmed by true beauty than by pretentious mimicry and mockery of beauty.

So, this month, it appears the theme of my picks is that the artists have taken “classic” concepts and sounds and embraced them without hipster irony and derision. Works for me.

Conservatives are already on board with these cuts. You will not need to pander to us with buzzwords about “Constitutional principles” or “fiscal responsibility;” we get it. The battle right now is for the heart of independents, and you must stress to them what is at stake in their personal lives if the federal government continues to spend almost 50% more than what it takes in every year.

You must do everything you can to stress the extremist, obstinate, out-of-touch refusal to accept the will of the American people that Barack Obama and Harry Reid are displaying. You must tie it back to the health care debate; virtually every poll taken about the 2,000+ page monstrous health care law showed that a decisive majority opposed it, yet the President used every dirty trick imaginable to pass it. And now while he adds waiver after waiver to his political allies so they don’t have to be burdened by it, you’re trying to give a permanent waiver to every American, and he selfishly refuses to give up his pet legislation despite the overwhelming vote against it in November and the legal decisions against it in federal court.

You must stress how, despite President Obama’s campaign promise to review every government agency and go through the budget with a scalpel, eliminating whatever does not work efficiently, he is only content with cuts amounting to $33 billion for this year alone, which is only .86% of this year’s projected spending– only 2% of this year’s projected deficit! In a country that already has a multitrillion dollar national debt, that is unacceptable by any standard. You must stress this to any reporter you speak to. You must not kowtow to their sob stories and anecdotal accusations that so-and-so will suffer because of X or Y spending cut. You must bring it back to the big picture, that even if X or Y program is kept, soon the federal government simply will not have the money to pay for it anyway.

We, your supporters, will use social networking sites and conversations with friends and coworkers to try to explain this to those who are not politically involved and may not understand why the government is shutting down, but you must do your part as well to use what exposure you have through broadcast media to get this message out, as well. This a critical point that will greatly affect the outcome of the 2012 election, and we are rightly worried about how the GOP will handle the messaging of this precarious situation. Please, Speaker Boehner, do not let us down in this. We support you fully for taking this stand, but we need you not to drop the ball where it counts the most. You must go on the offensive to get the truth to the American independent voter, because you will be facing an openly hostile press corps.

UPDATE: Thanks for folding like a cheap accordion, Johnny.

I finally got to meet all the people that have legitimate credentials for blogging about politics and media.  My editor, John Nolte of Big Hollywood, was particularly fun to be around, as well as his sweet wife, who was much more soft-spoken than his tweets make her out to be.  Larry O’Connor of Breitbart.tv and the Stage Right Show was exactly like he is on air, trying to fit in as many mentions of “ass” as he could (best line: “Kim Kardashian has an epic, epic ass”) but working hard while he was on air.  Holly Bacon of Tony Katz’s show was my guardian angel, showing up almost wherever I went and guiding me around to different events.  I met lots of great Twitter personalities, such as the effervescent Dina Fraioli, and I also met a lady who was a fan of my writing and freaked out when she recognized who I was.

I chose not to take tourist pictures at CPAC. This is a Google Images result for "Ezra CPAC."

I finally got to meet the blogfather himself, Andrew Breitbart, and though our time was brief, he thanked me “for fighting.”  It was a very appropriate comment; the Breitbart blogs are the place where blogging is also conservative activism that achieves real-world results.  Whilst hovering around the man a few times, I got to meet more of his posse:  singer Jon David, business partner Larry Solov, awesome lady Liberty Chick, et. al., and it’s really cool to feel like a bigger piece of such a tight-knit bunch (and I think I may have enlisted myself for videography work when his network of cameramen need someone near Philly).

Also, I learned that almost everyone blogs pro bono.  Sure, some of us may have ads on our sites, and some of us may actually be paid to blog, but the vast majority of people that I met up with have regular, full-time jobs and are just doing everything they can to get recognition and eventually go pro.

Unfortunately, since anybody can blog (or Tweet), there’s a huge glut in the market, and I found myself failing to say hi to people since I wasn’t familiar enough with their work or just seeming like a douche because I didn’t know who they are.  Thursday night, I was at a bar with a group hanging out with both Pamela Gellar and Robert Spencer, and though I know who they are, I haven’t read much of their recent material, so I held back from introducing myself to two veritable blogging legends.

I was surprised how suburban Washington, D.C. was. I’m from Pennsylvania, where you go from totally rural (my neighbor was a beef farmer) to urban sprawl in two minutes of driving.  I was expecting D.C. to be nothing but high-rise buildings and overwhelming traffic, but I stayed with my brother in a low-key, residential neighborhood with no tall buildings in sight, and this was a little less than two miles from the Marriott.  I couldn’t even see any large buildings until the last half-mile of the walk.

And unfortunately, this walk turned out to be the first phase of my undoing.  [Warning: graphic medical descriptions ahead.] Wearing new, fresh, slightly stiff khakis, walking two miles, then walking continuously through the hotel all day, then sitting down for four hours, you get your underwear bunched up, clinging to your tender, sedentary flesh because of your own sweat, and rubbing with every tiny adjustment you make in your posture.

By the time I started back to my brother’s apartment (the walk is mostly uphill on the way back), I had discovered a burning, stinging, crippling pain on my thigh.  When I finally made it to the apartment, I discovered I had broken the skin with all that chafing. I was sawing through my own leg with my underpants.  The next two days, I had to walk just as much, and though I did everything to minimize fabric-to-skin contact (one person asked why I was limping), I still continued the leg sawing up to the point when I left.

And, hoo boy, the point when I left was momentous as well.  Or, rather, the point when I was about 9 miles away from home (according to my GPS).  I made a point to be awake in time to see Andrew’s speech at 9 AM, which, with the shower and the walk over, required me to be up at 7:30 AM.  At night, since I stayed around for the Kruiser Kabana (which was shut down by security) and more time hanging out with the Stage Right crew, I started driving home around 1:30 AM.  On the highway, I found myself waking after dozing, swerving into the other lanes, which, fortunately, had been empty for miles.  However, once I got onto more residential streets, my fortune ran out.

I woke merely a split-second before my car smashed into a telephone pole on the side of the road.  Air bags, spinning 130 degrees, broken glass, the Danielson Famile still cranking their bouncy tunes through the CD player (Fetch the Compass Kids is the pinnacle of the work Daniel Smith has done under the “Famile” moniker), it was stereotypical and surreal.  I’m a horrible Christian, but I know that God was protecting me in that crash.  If I hadn’t hit the pole, my car would’ve careened into a ditch and I would’ve had more than just a single bruise on my knee.  If I had been on the highway, I would’ve had been going 50 or 60 rather than 35.  If I had swerved a second earlier, I wouldn’t have just hit my passenger-side front wheel.  Had any of these details been different, the total-ing would’ve included my body for sure.  This is probably the third or fourth genuine miracle I’ve observed first-hand throughout my life.  As I emerged from my car, chemical smoke still pouring out of the airbags, I noticed I had crashed right in front of a church.

So while I’ve hit a bit of a personal setback (due to my own irresponsibility), I wouldn’t trade it for CPAC.  If it happens again next year, then maybe I’ll take it as a sign I shouldn’t go anymore, but for now, I was just glad to have met you.  Yes, you.

The majesty of Deerhoof is their apparent inability to rest on laurels.  Each album, they’re working with exactly the same sonic palette:  grungy guitars, high-pitched Japanese lady singer (& indie-falsetto man singer), and hyperactive, loose, but technically perfect drumming, plus some synthesizers and glockenspiels to round out the high end.  Yet within these confines (given the possibilities for digital music production, these are actually rather severe), they are always drawing out arrangements that are new and surprising– not just shoveling a chunk of icing from one side of the cake to the other, but mixing and baking a whole new flavor of batter.

It just boggles my mind.  I was given this opportunity purely out of the goodwill of John Nolte, my editor at Big Hollywood.  He has entrusted the reputation of a million-hits-per-day website to a screwup like me.  It’s just like God has done with life itself– not just existence, but eternal life.  I get it not because I deserve it, but because of His generosity; people get it wrong when they say that suffering is unfair.  It’s life and peace and comfort that are unfair to receive, considering what we’ve earned.

Back to the point; this man is a genius:

And I can’t wait for his next one.  The vibe I’m getting from the first single “Grow Up” is more along the lines of Fetch the Compass Kids, his first masterpiece before 2006′s sprawling, magisterial Ships.  As that record had a consistent lineup of musicians and didn’t experiment too much with different instruments and sounds, the Famile had an unpredictable jam session going on with tons of earworm-y hooks packed into each song.  “Grow Up” has that same air to it– loose, bouncy, and unpredictably fun.  Daniel’s still got his signature squealing vocals, and his guitar riffs have this really deep quality– crunchy without distortion, so you feel the presence really well without them taking up too much of the mix.

So watch for my interview with Daniel Smith to hit Big Hollywood sometime in February, and in the meantime, play, share, and comment on the video for “Grow Up,” cuz if you don’t, you’re a dirty Birther Socialist yeti.

I listened to Matthew Dear real quiet-like one day at my work, and it was some pretty good, dark dance music.  I keep hearing all this hype about Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, and even though he’s on Animal Collective’s label, I really can’t get into him.  Round & Round, despite its catchier moments, is just so long and sluggish.  This is pop music; tighten it up, man!

However, I was absolutely blown away by Tobacco (pun?).  This is the exact kind of electronic music I’ve been searching for over the past, say, 10 years.

The fuzz!  Not just distortion, but a subtle filter to give it an analog feel that’s just potent enough to be noticeable but doesn’t give itself away– like catching special effects in movies where it looks too real to be CGI but seems entirely impossible to create without CGI. Plus, there’s a sense of retro playfulness that doesn’t turn into mere imitation of old ’80s music, and a healthy dash of dark undercurrent-ing that gives it even more of an edge.  Now, cue the Double Dragon remake/reboot, and get Tobacco on soundtrack duty.

Sullen.

The contrast is interesting:  Sufjan creates this big, ornate, “gotta express myself!” opus, broadcasting his innermost thoughts to his lost loves, his God, and ultimately his audience.  Avey retreats into his mind, immersing his concerns into murky mud, singing only to himself.  If you haven’t, check out this excellent interview between him and his sister Abby where he reveals some of the inspiration for the album– namely, that his wife Kria Brekken has separated from him.  That kinda taints my opinion a bit, cuz I’m going through exactly the same thing, but it really helps with understanding the album.

When the woman you love lets you know in no uncertain terms that you’re not worth being around anymore, that everything admirable about you isn’t enough to trump everything that’s wrong with you, it messes you up like nothing else.  This really gives good insight into the sound of Down There. All low end and mids, Animal Collective-style voice modulation pushed to a whole new level, stop-start rhythms that seem to just trip along aimlessly– it’s familiar enough that you can just dive right into album opener “Laughing Hieroglyphic,” but it’s far enough removed from Merriweather Post Pavilion that there’s no competition, no marking off points because it doesn’t live up to that record.

I haven’t taken a look at the lyrics yet (with AC members, you always need official lyrics), but I really like the title, Down There, despite its mile-wide target for innuendo.  In his recent Pitchfork interview, Avey likened the ubiquitous swamp imagery to hell, and it makes sense from this personal perspective.  When you’re dumped– not by a girlfriend, but a wife– you want nothing more than to be alone, and you hate nothing more than being alone.  That darkness and uncertainty resonates through the sounds on the album.

So yeah, I’m really jazzed about this one.  It’s digging its hooks into me, and I’m really looking forward to its release.  Now, Paw Tracks just needs to get a Bandcamp page, cuz I don’t get the record player in my separation.  I needs me some mp3s.