Cashless and Cheap, We Killed the Radio Star

~ Chris Cocca ~ 6 Comments

Sometimes I mourn the loss of acts like John (I Still Call You Cougar) Mellencamp and Tom (a hell of a lot more so) Petty on Top 40 radio.  This post, from June 2009, is about missing acts like Black Lab and The Flys.  Remember them?  They came out in the summer of 1998 along with bands like Semisonic and Harvey Danger and Days of the New.  I worked in the music section of BestBuy that summer, so I remember these things…

…a week or two after I loaded  my new dorm-room-employee-discounted-fridge onto my best friend’s Tempo and secured it with 300-odd feet of rope, I was in college discovering mp3s and file sharing.  Even if you didn’t use Napster, you probably used your campus network to copy songs from your friends’ computers.  It can’t be a coincidence that so many of the bands that came out right before the industry shift this practice created haven’t stayed in the Top 40, which is to say we have only ourselves to blame for forfeiting popular radio and the lost art of music video to the market defined by our allowance-spending, dial-up connecting kid sisters.  Hello, Brittney Spears, Backsteet Boys, NSync, et al.  Hello and you’re welcome.  To all the good bands we killed in the process, I’ll apologize on behalf of all of us.  We didn’t do it on purpose. We were just cashless and cheap.

It’s hard to think of a major pop or rock band to emerge circa 1998 that’s still super popular now.  You might come up with a few, but they don’t spring to mind like bona fide stars of the mainstream.  Go back to 1996 or 97.  Where are the Wallflowers? Why didn’t Primitive Radio Gods become the new Peter Gabriel? Come on, Better Than Ezra! Maybe it’s all very zeitgeisty. Remember that “Take a Picture” song by Filter from 1999?  That song killed.  I know, I know, Coldplay.  But they’re so post-2000.

Everyone knows the saccharine pop side of what happened next. There was also the continued hip-hop move to the mainstream that started with The Chronic and Snoop’s early records, continued through Tupac, Biggie, Puff Daddy and Missy Elliot.  Streets Is Watching came out when I was at BestBuy and then Eminem came in the fall.  Oh, how we laughed at Slim Shady.  “Who is this clown? What’s Dr. Dre thinking?”  Well, we know better now. But hip-hop and rap records, huge as they were, didn’t kill alternative radio.  That was never an either-or kind of thing.  Then came the post-grunge, which started okay but became something else.

Somewhere in all of this, people stopped purchasing alternative pop into the Top 40.  And I’m not talking about all the high-brow indie stuff.  I’m talking about accessible, quirky, well-crafted music with some hooks and a few jangles.  I could tie this in to the recent posts about irony, about how our tastes shifted as a way of escaping sincerity blah blah blah.  I always liked that “Old Apartment” song by Barenaked Ladies.  But “One Week”?  Come on.

“So long ago, remember baby….”  I would hear this at BestBuy and sort of know I was in the process of losing something.  How about that look at 00:28?  Video here.

“I think you’re smart, you sweet thing…”  This is one of my all-time favorite videos.  Do I miss circa 1998 Katie Holmes the way I miss circa 1998 myself?  I think so.  Or maybe I just hate the 2000s.

“Phonebooth” is one of the smarter songs of the decade, circa 1996.

How about Tonic? (The “You Wanted More” video from 1999 is here).  Lemon Parade came out in 1996:

Karma Police

~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments

is probably my favorite Radiohead song.  I remember the first time I saw/heard it on MTV back in the day.  It sounded right.

So I was working in the yard the other day and thinking about it.  There’s this Christian concept of Grace, right, very Pauline, very Lutheran, which Bono says is the opposite of Karma.  Karma is about the balance sheets and Grace is supposed to be about ripping them up.  But I think a lot of people who say they believe in Grace really just use it to reset their Karma.  There’s no freedom in it for them.  Grace cleans them up for the moment and then they inevitably fuck up and there’s all that guilt.  All that having to make things right…not because you owe it to people you hurt (sure, you do), but because you’re thinking somewhere about the kickback.  I think it’s tough to know if your piety is piety out of reverence for God or piety for the sake of keeping your karmic shit together.  I wonder if you can know.

If Grace is real, it makes Karma unintelligible, doesn’t it?  Yet I’m willing to bet that most people who say they believe in Grace live like they’re bound by Karma. Can one be bound by Grace?  I’m not sure that makes sense.

What The Future Used To Look Like

~ Chris Cocca ~ 5 Comments

spacePaleofuture.com is one of my all-time favorite blogs.  I’ll say more about that in a coming edition of Blog Love, but I spent some time today looking at pictures like this from EPCOT books and other places.

I was going to write an essay about toroidal space colonies and what makes a thing authentic and I’d probably get into terraforming as human duty.  I started doing that and what’s below came out instead.  So rather than edit and refine it and make it palatable to everyone or into something finally constructive, I thought I’d share it as a writing experiment/free association with the picture as a prompt.

 

I was a kid in the 80’s and got to go to EPCOT.  I used to read Popular Mechanics and try to make crap out of batteries and magnets and draw fighter jets and space stations and curvy future cars and build paper ammo wristbows from rubber bands and hangers.  I did The Jason Project.

I remember when the Challenger blew up because the lady teacher had a kid  my age and my family had an Aerostar the first summer they came out.  After it happened Ford pulled the commercials that showed how the nose of their new mini-van looked just like the Shuttle.  I broke the sliding door with my first GI Joe and burned my arm on an interior light and it scabbed and cracked and leaked all summer and I’d touch the the puss with the fat tips of my fingers to see if it would hurt.

My grandmother made me watch INF when I was 7 so I could say that I’d seen history.  She didn’t say it but in 1987 you had no way of being sure you’d see more big human moments.  Imagine living like that for 4o, 50 years, thinking about the button, building schools with fallout bunkers, doing drills. I remember the first time I saw a plane, it was Wednesday, 9/19.  I went to college near a  power plant with two cement torch chimneys so these things made me nervous.  I imagine living like this for 40, 50 years, collecting history for my son just in case it stops.  Waiting for the break, the thaw, the Islamofascist perestroika. The Western glasnost Gorbachev and the Dubai-Vegas-Beijing Red Dawn white trash show.  Waiting for the INF bombs to come in off the market.  There is no end of history, Francis Fukuyama. There is history or nothing.

Obama will close Gitmo but will hold enemy combatants indefinitely without trial on the mainland.  Semantics must be justice. There are pictures of Pelosi toasting Cheney and Shepard Fairey laughing, obey, obey, obey, obey the giants and their posses.  I was a kid in the 80’s.

I thought we’d have more now:  sustainable communities instead of social networks.  Colonies in space.  Personal computers and their market like I didn’t get when I was 10, personal accessories and spirit trips but  lazy outward pushing.  If Richard Branson brings the heavens we should fill them.#

 

The Good Thief and Foundling Review

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

A few days ago I got an email from one of the editors of a fledgling online literary site asking if they could reprint my story “The Good Thief.”  I was more than happy to say yes.

Foundling Review‘s inaugural edition went live this morning.  From the About page:

Foundling Review is an online
literary magazine that wants to
give you an opportunity to
publish your best work. What makes us different?
Nothing much.
We hold PhD and Masters degrees in
areas that are totally unrelated to fine arts.
But we love reading, writing, and
have an overwhelming passion for the
well-crafted word.

As the editor put it to me: “with so many well-written works not finding any takers they languish in dead space, like abandoned children – hence foundling.”

Very cool idea and a nice-looking site.  I’m honored to be part of the first issue with “The Good Thief.”  Check out Foundling Review and submit your best work. They publish 2 stories and 2 poems a week and respond within 3-4 weeks.

Confessions

~ Chris Cocca ~ 11 Comments

A note to subscribers and other readers:  This is a post from April 8, 2009 that’s since gone offline.   I’m reactivating it in online archive today, January 24, 2011.  I do this from time to time, depending on what I’m working on or what I sort of just find in the archive.  If you’re a subscriber to this blog, you’ll probably get a notification that I’ve posted something new, but I’m really posting something old.  I’m not sure that I’d agree with everything I said in this post now.  One big difference is that my gut is with short stories and novels alike.  And memoir.  So, in addition to commenting on the original questions on this post, feel free to comment on the whole phenomenon of learning as you go.  best, Chris.  ps – It’s good to read good things?  Brilliant comment, Christopher.  But still true.

When I was young and so was Brevity (or “In 2006”), Dinty W. Moore was the first web editor to accept my work for publication. I’d been published in print before but the web journals were new to me.  Cooper Renner of elimae published what became my first web story (“Evensong”) in January of 2007 and the following month “Last Stand in the Closing Country” was featured in Brevity 23.  Around that time, I began blogging here sporadically about these and other early triumphs.

In the last two years, Brevity has grown in reputation and exposure.  The excellently maintained Brevity blog is one reason for this.  There’s an interesting post there today adapted from a presentation by John Bresland about memoir as confession and the need for confession to be shared and received in spoken rather than written/read form.

This past Friday, I read Darcey Steinke’s memoir Easter Everywhere in one sitting.  The last time I read an entire book without stopping was 1990 and the book was Superfudge.  I found Steinke’s recounting of her childhood and the tense nuances in her familiar relationships tender, anxious, and compelling, and my experience as a reader following her comings of age was cathartic, empathetic…good.  I really like this book and am recommending it widely.

I don’t know that all memoirists (or writers of personal, creative nonfiction) understand the craft in confessional terms.  Maybe so.  I don’t know that confession is the germ of Steinke’s project the way it is for Bresland’s, but it could be that confession lies at the heart of everything any of us write: confessions that there’s one undertaking, at least, that hasn’t lost all meaning, that there are human reasons to share these parts of ourselves, to tell our stories, the true ones and the ones we make true in our prose and by our choices.  Confessions that we hope for something (because why else would we share?) and that we can understand something about each other against so much noise.

I confess that I’m grateful to Dinty and Coop and Robin from Boston Literary Magazine and Will at Geez for running my first pieces, to Darcey Steinke for Easter Everywhere, to each of you for reading this blog and the pieces I run here and elsewhere.  I confess that one of the problems I’m having in my longer fiction is this mannish, moody distance I insist on putting between the narrators and the reader.  I think reading more memoirs will help my fictive voice and tone.  These people should sound real even if they’re not.  And, of course, they are.  Not like in a memoir exactly, but still like the way our memories work.  My fictive pocket universe with its confessors and confessing and the lot they have to learn from the flesh and blood types they’d love to be.

I don’t meant to say these characters are flat or unbelievable.  They’re not.  But they’re fighting for incarnation and I suppose that’s what I’m resisting on one side of the equation.  Attachments.  Confession.  Narration is so much easier.  Telling doesn’t hurt but it’s hardly ever honest.  On the other side is the overwrought bullshit that looks like me at 2 AM when everything is beautiful.  That’s not honest, either.

Short writing doesn’t have the same existential needs.  Its characters are born fully grown and armored and for very specific missions.  Joe from Bookish Us and I were talking last week about the ways long and short forms might appeal to men for different reasons.  Short stories for their barbarous terseness, their long-shadow effect, the damage they can do or the presumptions they can upend in brief attacks.  Their left hook jab hook combo.  Novels, as Joe pointed out, for their space, for all the places we have in them to run and hide from definition.  For our meanderings.  For the growth (or not) you’re supposed to enter into.  Short story characters make lousy novel heroes.  They’re too all-growed up.

The novel is balancing act for me.  My gut is with brevity.  My gut is with detachment and people that don’t change and the idea that the feeling you get when you’re done with the raid is precisely the point of reading or writing.  My gut is not with learning or teaching but with observing and reacting.  My gut is with the combo.

A.O. Scott has an interesting recent piece at the New York Times about some of this that I came across today.  He proposes, for reasons not unfamiliar to readers of Brevity or Six Sentences:

The new, post-print literary media are certainly amenable to brevity. The blog post and the tweet may be ephemeral rather than lapidary, but the culture in which they thrive is fed by a craving for more narrative and a demand for pith. And just as the iPod has killed the album, so the Kindle might, in time, spur a revival of the short story. If you can buy a single song for a dollar, why wouldn’t you spend that much on a handy, compact package of character, incident and linguistic invention? Why wouldn’t you collect dozens, or hundreds, into a personal anthology, a playlist of humor, pathos, mystery and surprise?

I don’t quote this to denigrate the longer forms of our craft.  I’m convinced that Scott and others who take the death of the novel for granted are wrong.  Great novels and memoirs are still being written and they matter, and no short story, no matter how great, renders them superflous.  (Another confession: I also don’t believe the album is dead or that video killed the radio star.  Maybe SoundScan did.) That said, there’s something about all of this brevity that seems very natural.  I hope he’s right that our culture is ripe for the rebirth of short fiction, not because it’s better, but because it’s good and important and (confession) rather particularly American.  Not like the Statue of Liberty.  More like Graceland.  (Confession:  I stole that, in a way, from Easter Everywhere).  There’s something mysterious about the short story, not quite poem, not quite long-form prose.  There’s something subversive about its purpose, something audacious about its claims.  Something kind of haunting.  Ballsy.

What do you think?  Is all memoir confession?  Is all writing?

Are short stories poised for a return to prominence as Scott suggests?

How do you intepreret the differences between short and long form writing?  As a reader and a writer, do you have a preference?

Sufjan At The Nursing Home

~ Chris Cocca ~ 4 Comments

A few days ago I told you about hearing “Chicago” at Friendly’s and being lost in a moment.   Today I was visiting a nursing home and the same thing happened.  A nursing home.  Bizarre.  I was gone for a minute.

My grandfather passed away last year.  He lived for a few years before that in a nursing home.  I found out before my visit to the home today that my dad, my sister, and I all dreamt about him (my grandfather) last night.

The Beloved and the Knowing

~ Chris Cocca ~ 3 Comments
I’ve been thinking about Plato’s idea of the Beloved, and about how every decent pop song ever written exhibits the yearning for wholeness and completion that Plato locates in the Beloved.  This is, perhaps not coincidentally, also why so many pop songs can be rendered as peans to what we usually mean when we say “God.” (Brian Wilson knew this when he talked about “Smile” 40 years ago).   That’s really all I have to say about it; just that pop songs are almost invariably Platonic. Our relationship with the Beloved teaches us about ourselves, cultivates joy, and lifts us for observations of the divine.  (Brian Wilson knew this when when he wrote “God Only Knows” and knew it again the first time Carl finished singing the first line).
The spiritual tension isn’t always expressed as sexual/romantic.  Often it’s rendered in terms of what people usually mean when they say “platonic” in the first place.  How right they are, as it turns out.  All the Pink Floyd songs about Syd Barrett are about the platonic (in the popular and classical senses) friendship of Roger Waters and Barrett and then its loss, or rather Waters’ and the world’s loss of Barrett spiraling out from Barrett’s own loss of self.  God, those songs are good.
I suppose you need this yearning if you’re going to make art.  I suppose you need this sense of incompleteness…I suppose this is why art has become so personal and why didactic art or message art is usually bad.  I suppose it’s also why you can hear and see yearning in art at all, that is, why you can receive it as such, why you can feel like you own it, why you can sing a stranger’s words and somehow still feel known and like you know.  And so then art is in the intuitive, emotional knowing that we are not finished. That we lack.  What it is we lack is something else.  God or human other, lover, loving, love?  But at least there is the knowing.