September 2003 Archives

Last night I saw Arnold's "Indian Gaming" ad and when he said, "I promise you, things will change" I suddenly realized that we are in fact a phantasm in the mind of Philip K. Dick, still transfixed by a sourceless beam of pink light, turning Hollywood into reality, one politician at a time. On the right coast a treason scandal is erupting. Is Jerry Bruckheimer advising any of the candidates?

When I get around to writing a novel loosely based on this period of my life (but not legally actionable), I may want to call it South Lake. I like the name for some reason. I try to name all my novels, even the ones that are still just a glimmer in my eye. Having a name puts them on my short list of what to work on when I'm stuck on whatever I'm supposed to be working on. Currently, by the way, that's Johnny Come Lately (a working title), my memoir of growing up in New York centered roughly on 1974 - 1976.

I'm at the point where I should put the working titles in chronological order based on the period inspired or portrayed in them. I've got nothing for high school or college 'cause those still feel like really hackneyed times to me. More fun to end JCL with me preadolescent with the Studio 54-era coming on. I remember people in 5th grade repeating lines from the first season of SNL: "Ouch, my penis sure hurts when I urinate!" and stuff like that. Fairly radical for 10- and 11-year olds.

For the period of the late '80s - early '90s in San Francisco (all pre-dotcom), I've got History of Utah (a novel in the form of a bunch of Camper Van Beethoven bootlegs, some mixed tapes, and commentaries), and For You, the Stars a set of short stories, at least one per girl.

Only Way Free stalled out with about 100 pages happens in the mid-90s, eventually including email. It deals with hack writing and fidelity and is stuck on a context-shift metanovel thing that's kind of embarassing.

Wellspring is my dotcom novel, mostly a sketch, pretty theoretical, and possibly not worth doing but when I took the stock options, I promised myself I'd take notes and capture some of the best scenes, and it does have three natural acts. It's just a story that we all know too well right now. And how boring on the Internet, especially if you were here before, during, and after the bubblee. Still, again, witnessing is worth doing and maybe it will mutate to another context. Maybe I'll set it in Texas in the '80s.

A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I'll Never Read is a hyperlinked writing sandbox with pretensions of someday spilling out at least one good story, possibly the one about Rafe.

Not set in period / hard to classify: Blurt is a hypertext that currently exists only on my Palm and which consists or many very short interlinked blurbs written for specific words.

I'd also like to take the a text like the neverending sentence a make every word a link. Maybe like a wiki so that some of the links went to form pages where anyone could define the word or write about it or reweave the slub back into the woof, or maybe more authorial, more auctorial than that. Still, the Mola Project has always made me want to write (or contribute to) a densely linked and nonetheless coherent hypertext story, one where literally every word (or almost every word?) links somewhere, but that's another story.

I also wrote about two paragraphs of something called Wodeneye that might be about my dad. I'm not sure.

There, I've named them. Now I just have to finish, write, or start them and we'll be all set.

B commented on how it seems that numerous people we know have bought houses in the Brooklyn area on the south side of Lake Merritt (between Lake Shore and Park Boulevard). We live in a strangle little interstitial rhombus, bounded roughly by Oakland High on Park Blvd., Highland Hospital over on 14th. Ave., 580, the great class-divider in Oakland, between hills flats, high foothills and low foothills, the old MacArthur Boulevard route that turned Oakland into a commuter throughway, its traditional thoroughfares reduced to snaking over and underpassing the concrete, and some arbitrary point around 27th or 24th Street, in what used to known as the San Antonio area - probably a former ranch.

The patch between Park Blvd. and the Lake is more fashionable than our multiculti enclave, but they're not too far apart. If you include the lately bustling Lake Shore area on the near side of the Grand Lake Thetre and the Trestle Glen / Glenview area near Park Blvd. above 580 (sometimes known as "baja Piedmont"), you've got a nice little thing going on.

I'm calling this rough area South Lake to give it some geographical context around Lake Merritt, which is the geographical focus of Oakland for me as well as, of course, not actually being a lake.

Bringing nothing to read forced me to write.

1. Some guy I hate, goading me on.
2. A looming deadline.
3. A tempting escapade.
4. Anxiety, guilt, shame.
5. Sex.
6. Bodily functions.
7. Unsatisfactory conclusion.
8. Go to (1).

And why does it send me right-wing spam?

Note to self: get Ween tickets today.

Note to self, the second: Sit far enough from the stage to avoid the Poopship Destroyer, if they've got it on this tour.

These are the days of our lives. Today I reached the 100% submission milestone on one of the most difficult writing projects of my life. I kept getting "nearly" done and then I'd be stuck again rolling a rock up a hill. This last piece, an appendix, took me at least three or four weeks more than it should of. Some of these deadlines were originally set for March!

I still have to review galleys for a bunch of chapters, and replace some illustrations now that the software the book is about has stabilized. Plus, there are endless postponed responsibilities that will come flooding into the open space, as well as long-neglected other writing projects, email that needs answering, stuff I meant to post about in this or that weblog that has probably already expired conceptually, an IRS audit for my 2001 tax returns (I think I didn't issue all the 1099s I needed to for my subcontractors, so I'm hoping one that's resolved there will be no other problems, but still who wants to go through that?!), a few consulting projects that seem like they might be about to start, some political activism I've been meaning to do, the cleaning up of my own web properties and some half-completed personal content-management projects, and oh the list goes on and on.

But right now I get to feel good about (finally) hitting that 100% mark. Plus it means they owe me my final advance check, and I can stop walking around with that guilty look on my face.

One thing I've learned is that if it's going to be geeky technical stuff or web-related, I'd rather be consulting or training or teaching a class - there's more human interaction and frankly it pays better than your typical technical book deal. I'd like to reserve my pure writing efforts, and especially any monumental book-length ordeals, to more humane topics, matters that engage a more full range of my senses and sensibilities.

My sister, J, writes:

Looks like DC is going to get smacked by the hurricane sometime after midnight on Thursday night. They say it would be better if it goes straight over us because there is usually less damage than there is to places that are on the outer edges of the storm (some analogy to an octopus whipping around is the concept). Since I'm on the second floor and my windows are set back from the street and sheltered by two wings of the building, I figure that it'll be noisy but fine. In the city, they've placed sandbags around all of the grates above the metro to protect it from flooding and been trying to unblock any drains that are clogged. I've also seen a lot of trimming of trees today, they usually cause the most damage by falling on power lines. Anyway, that's the scoop from here. I'll be in touch and let everyone know whether or not M and I end up on a raft!

This Pirate Kills Fascists: feed: URL Scheme Specification

I was watching the Frontline documentary on how 9/11 impacted the religious faith of various people involved either directly (such as those who lost loved ones) or indirectly (the rest of us who were terrified by the diabolical spectacle) when a Conservative rabbi started singing a text with the intonations of a cantor, as if part of a liturgy. The words of his litany were taken from voicemail and answering-machine messages left from the airplanes and the burning buildings, final words of love and fear and longing, last attempts to make contact one final time and to say the unsayable at last.

I began welling up. I didn't fight it. I didn't know these people but I know what it is to be human, and "I don't think I'm going to make it" and "I love you, mommy" - I know what those things mean. I became those people. I was frightened. I thought about despair and hopelessness and imminent death and of reaching out across the emptiness that divides us and trying to touch someone one last time and the tears started leaking down my cheeks and I let them and I didn't wipe them away at first but let them dry there and thought how small this offering was, this tiny catharsis, this understanding, this sorrow, this embrace.

The rabbi said he sings these words every morning. He considers them sacred and pure. I love you, mommy.

Warren Zevon died Sunday, September 7, at the untimely age of 56.

You know one of the things I most admire about the guy is that when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer the first thing he did was hit the studio and record a new fucking album.

The man who wrote "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" took a nap and didn't wake up.

He was a musician's musician and he'll be greatly missed. It makes the Lindley performance of "Werewolves of London" from the night before all the more poignant.

We made mad love
Shadow love
Random love
And abandoned love
Accidentally like a martyr
The hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder

Or something like that. Rest in peace, Warren.

David Lindley's '80s band El Rayo-X reunited recently for some shows and I saw them play last night at the Fillmore with Michael Z. and Suki. What a great show! So many highlight, I'm not sure where to start. Perhaps the biggest crowd pleaser was "She Took Off My Romeo" during which Lindley had the audience sing the chorus a few times, and then asked us to sing it all high (in falsetto), and then low (all basso profundo). It was really fun and he was obviously getting off on it, because he kept mentioning just how "sick" it had been, how "insane." He also said that they were taping the show so we're all going to be on the CD.

What else? He played my favorite El Rayo-X number, "Quarter of a Man," along with so many others "Let the Girl Go Home," "Don't Look Back," "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" ("Mama, I'm depending on you/To tell I the truth"), "Bye-Bye Love" (first encore), "Werewolves of London" (second encore, with a long improvised riff twisting on the "Saw Lon Chaney, Jr. walking with the Queen/Doing the werewolves of London" lyric - in this case he saw George Bush walking with Margaret Thatcher, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger walking with George Schultz... naturally it turned out to be Arnold drinking a pina colada in Trader Vic's - his hair was perfect, which led into a long disquisition on Mr. Dave's hair, which is of course "very, very greasy"), "Twist and Shout," "Brother John," and so many others, most in Lindley's famous whiteguy reggae stylee.

The audience was mostly of an age to know who Lindley was (probably from his backing work on records by Linda Rondstadt, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Warren Zevon, and others), so I was among the youngest there, which is a rare experience for me at a rock shows these days. In addition to original Rayo drummer Walfredo Reyes (now with Santana), Lindley's current musical partner, Wally Ingram, also sat in on drums and weird percussion objects (like his famous tin dustpan and what looked like a WWI combat helmet). The "Dos Wallies" played a few snappy drum duets that were sinuous and at times melodic, never lapsing into the terrible clichés of drum solos and duets established by arena rock bands in the '70s.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some highlights, but that should give the flavor of the evening. Nice souvenir poster, too!

I just bolted off the couch when a very sudden sharp earthquake (rather vertical in its motion) flashed through our house. It was followed by some rapid juddering that shook the chandelier. Apparenlty it was about a 5.0 (felt like more) and centered near Piedmont (no wonder, that's just a mile or so from here). Talk about panic. I was up in a flash and my heart is still racing.