What Means the World to You?
In this newsletter:
Meditations on fire.
Nate Lippens’ Ripcord.
The power of not inserting yourself into the story in Sarah Gerard’s Carrie Carolyn Coco.
A forgotten ’90s post-grunge band loved by me and Keanu Reeves and maybe no one else.
Shameless self-promotion.
“Leo asked how I could believe in nothing. How could I not? Nothingness is enormous and impossible. All that endless silence, much bigger than god.”
-Nate Lippens, Ripcord
THE ART OF DISAPPEARING
When it was my full-time job to write magazine profiles, I meticulously cut myself out of every part of the story.
Story subjects did not tell me anything, they just said things into the air. Scenes happened, observed by an omniscient narrator who was both me and not me. I took myself out of every story because it was what you were supposed to do. Profiles of celebrities are profiles of celebrities, not profiles of celebrities and writers…unless they suddenly become both when something really interesting happens. This is a “rule” of magazine writing, but we all share the tacit understanding that sometimes, maybe eventually, it’s time to break that rule. My problem was I never knew when that time was, so I kept writing first drafts that had me in it, and then removing all evidence I was ever there.
BLACK SMOKE AGAINST A BLUE SKY
When I woke up last Wednesday—after a sleepless night in a house in Los Angeles with no power, my son in my bed next to me so I could shield his body from a shattered window if the winds really got that strong—I opened the front door. What I saw was apocalypse. It looked wrong. It was morning, but the sky was still black, not night time black or dawn blue-black, but a greasy, unsettled black that wasn’t supposed to be there.
I sloppily packed an evacuation bag and went out to put it in the car. A wide, steadily expanding triangle of toxic smoke was drifting lazily from a single horizon point in the distance. I couldn’t tell if it was from the Eaton fire or the Palisades fire or both or some other new fire I was unaware of. I saw a man strolling down the street in a gas mask.
My son and I got in the car and drove North.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the emotional cost of trauma—how easy it is to say “we evacuated once, so we can just do it again,” how that faces head-on the facts of the situation, while eliding the feeling of it entirely. How do I push aside the memory of the thought of telling my son to put on his sneakers instead of his Crocs because I was imagining what would happen if we got stuck in fire traffic so bad that we had to abandon the car and go on foot? How do I push aside how silly that memory feels now?
THE ART OF DISAPPEARING II
In the book Carrie Carolyn Coco the writer Sarah Gerard writes with precision about the murder of her friend. For the first 50 pages or so, she goes to great lengths to take herself out of the story, despite being a person who very much has agency to be in it. Her absence in the narrative, even as she is constructing it, is striking. Each line has extra weight when you remember that the emotional processing she must have been doing was purposefully forced off the page, and when she does bring herself into it, it’s with a jolt. A reminder that the story is hers too.
THE FUTURE WON’T BE LONG
The first time I remember feeling nostalgia was in elementary school. My mom handed me a CD by a now-forgotten band called Lifter—passed on to me through her by who knows who.
Lifter were an LA-band who can barely be classified as one hit wonders, yet they had the kind of ’90s music industry boom career that you rarely see anymore. Founded by Mike Coulter and Jeffrey Sebelia (if Sebelia’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was the winner of Project Runway s3), the band kicked around Silverlake before it was Silverlake, hanging with Dave Navarro, writing post-grunge breakup anthems that turned Keanu Reeves into a fan. They shot a number of songs out into the music industry ether in the hopes of getting a hit—the videos for “Headshot” and “The Rich, Dark, Sultry Red of Hate” were directed by Wes Craven’s son, but didn’t really do much for them. It was “402,” a song not meant to be a single, that caught my attention when I was around nine years old.
“402” was on the radio in Seattle pretty often. I had no idea at the time that the local alt-rock station KNDD The End (you may remember it from The Real World Seattle, because the cast “worked” there), had gone rogue and just decided to play it even though they weren’t authorized by the band’s label, Interscope, to do so.
“402” is about how when you’re a teenager/new adult playing at being an adult you sometimes get into situations that remove some part of your innocence before it’s ready to go, which is scary and weird and tends to make you long for childhood because it’s a reminder that you’re no longer a child. The chorus goes like this: “I want to go back home and mow the lawn for my dad / I want to walk to school and get high with my friends / Where is my honey-dipped life and my pretty wife? / Why can’t I leave this town and tell my mama I tried?”
Hearing that sparked something in my kid brain—some projection into a future scenario where I’d be somewhere I didn’t want to be. Never mind the fact that when I first heard the song I regularly, begrudgingly, mowed the lawn for my dad, often walked to and from school, had never smoked weed, was too young for a wife, and had no interest in leaving the town I very much loved. I couldn’t have known at the time that what I was feeling wasn’t actually nostalgia, it was anxiety about an uncertain future. I could never have predicted the feeling of looking out at a world I didn’t recognize and having to make a decision because there was no one else around to make it for me.
There’s another line from Ripcord that keeps coming back to me:
“When did I stop saying goodbyes? Probably five years ago when I realized it made no difference. Goodbyes slowed the exit.”
SELF PROMOTION CORNER
Thanks for reading this far! Here’s your reward: some self-promotion.
Recently, for the print edition of the Southwest Review, I wrote an essay in fragments about monoculture, the art of obscurity, Kurt Cobain suicide bricks, Final Fantasy VII, and more. It went up online the other day.
I just completed the 27th installment of New Environments, my monthly radio show on Dublab. My goal with the show is to create mixes that really hold together as long pieces, sustaining a mood or feeling or environment. Predictably, the most recent episode is uneasy and restless and very informed by having fire on the brain and in my reality.