Category: writing

How To Not Be Sad About The 90s

~ Chris Cocca ~ 7 Comments

February, 2011: Some updated liner notes.  I mention below that I couldn’t wait for my 30s.  Let me tell you, but the time December of 2009 came  I was really, really ready.  Ready to be done with my 20s, to be done with the 2000s and all the identity drama.  Years and years ago when our grandparents were the Justice League, using your twenties for education and cynicism wasn’t something people did.  They got jobs, had families, beat Nazis.  They made things.

Somehow between their youth and ours, we got the idea that youth is better by default than maturity.  And let’s face it, turning 20 in 2000 wasn’t perfect timing,  with the dotcom bubble bursting, a war on terror looming, a subsequent recession that wiped away most of what the 80s and 90s taught us to believe we’d earned by getting into college.  When the workforce could not absorb us, we went to grad school, law school, div school.  Maybe joined the service.  Certainly, many of us planned to pursue these things anyway, but the fact that being a professional student until one’s mid-20s or later is still so feasible for so many people is something recent nonetheless.

I don’t get sad about the 90s anymore.  I’m in touch with long-lost friends (thank you, 10 year reunion and Facebook) and I’m over that whole quarter-life crisis garbage that I thought my first book had to be about.  Certainly, there are other, better, adult crises now to conquer.  So bring those on. And let them fear my beard.

I do still, however, dig on string theory and multiple universe hypotheses.

The original post:

The other day I tweeted (we’re really going with that?) a question about why so many people were recently finding my blog by searching “sad songs of the 90’s.” Some of the responses made me realize I need to be more explicit.  I get why people come to this  blog via that search, and I get why people search that phrase, (I heart the 90’s), but why the sudden swell in that particular search?  My favorite from the past view days has been a variation of this:  “how to not be sad about the 90’s.”

I’m sad about the 90’s all the time.  And happy.  All that good music.  All those good times.  All that bad music.  All those bad times.  I don’t know if it’s possible to not be sad, in general, about something you miss, especially a formative era that gets boxed up in your minds as having been a certain thing way, a long-gone context from some once-tangible point in the past. If you’re not sad about how awesome the 90’s were, you’re too young or too old to get why “sad songs of the 90’s” is even a search phrase to begin with.

Is plaintive, smart, adult contemporary music our blues?  What’s your favorite sad 90’s song?  I’d say more about why we’re all so wrapped up in these things but I’ve done that post somewhere.

Man, now I’m all sad, too.  I feel better when I realize that time is fluid and so are we and that the best of anything is always a moving goal.  I’m expecting my 30s to kick ass, so maybe the 2010’s will be awesome.  There are some things I’m resigned to miss, ala Bob Seeger, and that’s okay even if it’s frustrating.  We’re not used to elusiveness.  I can watch any sad bastard song I want right now on YouTube.  I can’t crash in the basement of the house I grew up in and find it on MTV.  Maybe we don’t get contexts back.  But they’re as fluid as anything.  They’re as decision-dependent, moment to moment, as everything else. Believe in string theory and infinite universes and know that somewhere you’re living through all of those things again, going one way or the other, and somewhere in the fullness of time you become you.  That all of this is your context, that all of it is formative, that you never stop moving or being or becoming.  Rejoice and be glad.

Proxy Christs and Purple Spaghetti

~ Chris Cocca ~ 4 Comments

Three items tonight:

1) If Christ lives, why is it that so many Christians treat the Bible as his proxy?  If we have access to the Divine, why this divination?

2) My friend Nathan Key told me a joke long ago called “Purple Spaghetti.”  There are some versions on line, but none of them capture Nate’s sick 6th grade raconteur style.  If you know this joke, I want to see your best attempt at it.  The longer and more drawn-out, the better.

3) Dzanc has a new on-line journal up.  Check out The Collagist. Gordon Lish is in the house.

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.