Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Just go with the flow

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Though not a specialist at all, when I was working at a large entertainment consortium I spent about five years in the internet security department (full of supposedly reformed hackers) and then another eight working with the people who specialized in data mining and selling profile data. Totally ruined me. Instead of the dawn of a new era, I tend to see the ugly, scary side of the Internet all the time.

I’m not saying that’s a good thing.

But being old enough to have lived most of my life in an analog world I have piles of books and records and folding maps and videos and cassettes and boxes full of typewritten and hand scrawled writing full of white out (remember sniffing white out?) and passages scratched out but still visible. I have photo albums, a dozen photo albums, stuffed with pictures that exist nowhere else but in that photo album. I have old flyers I made cutting and pasting. Cutting with a scissors and pasting with Elmer’s glue. The glue would get all over your fingers and make a helluva mess. Glue sticks were a revelation. The slightest invention made things simpler. A glue stick then was like an app on your iPhone now, a silly assed little thing that made life easier. But now it makes the virtual easier, while, back then it made the real less sticky. I remember thinking my Mr. Coffee machine was the greatest thing ever. A Mr. Coffee machine. Imagine how much simpler existence was then if a Mr. Coffee machine was a life changer.

I found a folder full of service manuals, all of which are available online. Things were tactile then. You could feel the paper on your fingers. There was glossy and non-glossy. I look at onion paper now and can’t remember why anyone used it. Onion paper. Typing paper. Note pads. Graph paper. All kinds of paper. Construction paper in a zillion colors. Even xerox paper in various colors. Paper filled up manila folders, stuffed file cabinets, could never be found when you needed it. Paper cut down whole forests, spotted owls and all, and left ugly scars across entire mountain sides.

And things like this, what I’m writing now, remained in notebooks, real paper notebooks, never seen by anyone, and when you died they were stuffed in bins and taken to the dump and no one ever knew. Now we write them in blogs for anyone to see.  Anyone.

That’s the scary part, that anyone. Who is that anyone? I write something, think that anyone could see it, and that anyone might be someone, somebody, Somebody. So I delete it.  Were I thirty years younger that would never even occur to me. Or else I wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t know that everything I did online was part of the vast, inchoate internet, an internet that could conceivably some day reach across the entire universe, and it wouldn’t concern me a bit.  If I were thirty years younger I’d read that paragraph above about maps and photo albums and hand scrawled writing and not get it at all. An ancient clouded time, primitive, sad. Not one with the body.

But in thirty years all my age will be gone, and so will memories of black and white television and the smell of freshly mimeographed paper. Of green stamps and paying cash for everything. Of 8 tracks and writing thoughts out on lined paper. Of terrible percolator coffee and how long it took to cook things before microwave ovens. Of checkbooks. Playboy centerfolds. Reaching for a dictionary or a thesaurus. The complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica,14th Edition, Revised, that sits ignored behind me in a corner and fed my autodidactism for decades. Those memories will be all gone.

And in fifty years the people who remember us remembering these things will be gone. People will think back to lives a hundred years before and wish they lived then, back in the 1950’s and ’60’s and ’70’s, without realizing just how much better it will be by then. They will re-create virtual versions of us doing things, fun things, mostly, but doing things. Driving our own cars. Cooking our own foods. Being hippies or punks or beatniks or fighting in World War Two.  Reading books and making music and having sex in person. They’ll look at these virtual representations of you and me and sigh and wonder and wish.

But those people won’t be nagged by the memories of the days before the internet. And privacy. And things that were corporeal and real and tactile being better than things that are virtual and imaged and electrons. They won’t look at photos of themselves tagged and profiled and commented on by complete strangers and sometimes weird out. They won’t remember privacy, and long for a time when they weren’t on a zillion databases everywhere. They won’t fear the internet. In fact, they might not be paranoid at all. Maybe paranoia itself will die out, and acceptance will soothe them. Zen has long been the balm of those trapped in lives they can’t control. Don’t fight it, people will say. Just go with the flow.

Oral Surgery

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At the last of the season’s summer BBQ’s last nite the dudes sat around telling macho scary oral surgery stories. Pain, lots of pain, pain so severe that even the strongest of men could not will it away, and teeth so big cocked and gnarly that the sweating dentist could only yank them from the jaw with supreme effort. Hot dental assistants look on, excited. Then come the painkillers, huge Charlie Parker sized bottles full of opiates and whatnot, then abuse and whiskey and rock’n’roll and dénouement. 

Which leads, as these things often do, to a story I’d already written a couple years ago, in which….

My wife Fyl had some oral surgery today, replacing a previously yanked front tooth that had gone rotten from neglect during her amnesia. The surgeon screwed in a big, well, it was a screw, a nasty looking thing in the x-ray….and when I got there to drive her home  there were spatters of blood everywhere. She’s a stoic Indian, though (that stereotype is 100% true from all the ones I’ve known) and said nothing, complained about nothing. She’s a trooper, the nurse said. She’s trooper the dentist said. Later we’d been home and hour or so when the oral surgeon called to check on any bleeding or pain. None. Gave her his pager number just in case. A good doc. (Fourteen hundred dollars worth of good, though.)

His call took me back nearly 25 years. I had an incisor gone bad. A major tooth, those incisors, deeply, massively rooted, the tooth that half a million years ago we’d tear fresh raw flesh off of bones. A tooth strong enough to shear though meat and sinew. Yanking one out takes a lot of drilling, anesthesia and sheer dental muscle. I remember the amazing sound it made pulling free, a huge crunch that went right up the jaw to the eardrum. There was blood everywhere.

I went home with a bloody cotton wad where my smile used to be, and a big jar of some kind of painkillers, probably vicodin. I ate one, smoked a joint, drank some beers. I was feeling good, even missing a tooth. There was an amazing band (maybe two bands, but I only remember Universal Congress Of) playing a performance spot called Olio around the corner. Maybe 100 yards away. I told Fyl that I was gonna go down there. She didn’t look so sure but no stopping me. At least I wasn’t driving. I took another vicodin (maybe two), rolled a couple joints, bought a bottle of Bushmill’s at the neighborhood liquor store and went to the show. I got so high, utterly wasted, a mouth fall of bloody cotton, polishing off the bottle (though a few others joined in) and smoking all kinds of weed—what I’d brought, what others brought. Joint after joint went round. The band was righteous, groovy, dissonant, rocking, funky, swinging…it was an incredible show, and a great party. I knew everybody. The men, the ladies, everybody. Or thought I did anyway. Eventually I reeled home, up the hill past a couple houses and down our long driveway, stomped up the steps and stumbled inside, singing. What a blast I yelled, and began regaling my wife with details. I was still really, really high on everything, the pills, the whiskey, the weed, the music and pure adrenaline. I kept talking and talking. Then I admitted ya know, I’m kinda fucked up.  She looked at me.

Your dentist called.

Oops.

He was concerned. Said he did some serious surgery on you, there was a lot of blood, a big open wound. He was worried about pain and bleeding. Told you to take it easy.  He wanted to talk to you.

Uh oh.

I told him you were asleep.

Perfect answer. For he never would have understood that perfect a night. I  passed out and slept like a baby.

Ya know, I really loved my thirties. I was such a crazy macho motherfucker, a hard drumming, hard fucking, hard partying and hard writing mass of epileptic energy. I was, all of us were then, these glorious nuts. Oh man have I settled down. I catch myself being boring, monotonous, and wonder how the hell did this happen?

Age, I guess, experience. Just getting old. Things break or wear out or just don’t stay up as long as they used to. Friends disappear into mundane lives. So that’s all you do? That?

Sigh…..

Funny how oral surgery—and not even my own oral surgery, for christ sake—set this off. Ya never know where memories will come from. Or how accurate they are.

TV Eye

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Will you all just shut up about Breaking Bad already?

I don’t understand why you people keep getting hooked on television shows. I mean television shows? After all these years you still get sucked into that? Sometimes you all get together and waste an hour talking about television shows when you’re not even watching them. Nothing ruins a party like a bunch of people babbling about TV. It seems like a ridiculous waste of whatever time you have left on the planet. I mean there’s nothing wrong with television, I watch television, but it seems weird to base so much of your week around what shows you’re gonna watch, and caring so much about fictional characters. That seems so completely weird to me. I have absolutely no idea what I will watch tomorrow, or the day after, or ever. I don’t plan for television time. I never have. Ever. If there’s a good movie or a hockey game or a great documentary I’ll watch it, maybe. But it’s all spur of the moment. I would never set aside time to watch Dexter or Mad Men or whatever on a weekly basis.. You know you’ve been suckered by a television network when you do that. You know they’ve got you pegged. And they know you’ll be buying something you saw during the commercials. You say you won’t, but you will. It’s not like you have a choice. They figured that out too.

So here’s an idea…..if there’s a television series on, and you find yourself watching three or four episodes in a row, it’s time to stop watching it. You’ll live.

This message was not brought to you by the Advertising Council.

 

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Tongue thing

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I don’t remember writing this, but it was sometime after Miley Cyrus shook civilization to is very core.

Not defending Miley Cyrus, mind you, but she is young, and we all make mistakes. The unfortunate part is that she made her mistake in a very public way, and will have to pay for it, no doubt,for many humiliating years to come. (from Facebook)

A mistake? That wasn’t a mistake. From her POV there’s nothing to defend at all. She’s twenty years old performing for sixteen year olds, Whatever grown ups think means absolutely nothing to her or  that demographic. I think you are all completely missing the point, which from her POV, is great. The more outraged the old people are, the more her fans will love her.

And besides that, her performance was nothing. It was rated PG. The media and public reaction was more about babbitty Gen X’ers turning puritanical with age than it was about her being bad. Hell, man, twerking? Really? You ever see footage of rotten teens jitterbugging in the thirties? Or flappers in the twenties? Or naked hippies? Or punk rockers? I once heard Donna Summer do a thirty minute soundcheck outdoors in Milwaukee that pretty much covered the entire auditory range of the female orgasm. It echoed. This was thirty years ago. Civilization recovered.

We’ll all look at that stupid Miley Myrus dance in ten years and wonder what the hell everyone was so excited about. And we’ll feel kinda silly about the whole thing.

But I am looking forward to the pictures in twenty years–Grandpa doing his Gene Simmons tongue thing and Mommy doing her Miley Cyrus tongue thing and the kids being completely disgusted.

A happening, a fist fight, whatever

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An anecdote from my pal Owen Green (who probably turned me onto Sun Ra, as well as Fela Kuti and Patto) about the much-missed Palomino, which was the honkiest honky tonk this town ever had:

One of the penultimate live show ironies of my experience would be seeing The Sun Ra Arkestra at the Palomino; which included the wait staff (dressed in Daisy Dukes and the like) gawking at the stage wondering who were these crazy black people along with the equally eccentric audience watching them.

And I thought seeing the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra at an East Hollywood punk rock dive called the Anti-Club was special. Well, it was, but not Sun Ra at the Palomino special. We did get to hang out on the band bus, though, and smoke a reefer with the singer. Buddy Morrow hung with us a bit but turned down the joint, he was working. Man, this was three decades ago. Three decades before then was the tail end of the big band era. Three decades ago from today rock music was vital and crazy and still scared people. Well, not Buddy Morrow. Probably nothing scared him. He’d been around. Night Train, baby. Sun Ra had been around too. To other planets, in other lifetimes, and up on a rooftop in Philadelphia. That one there’s film of.

Do these kind of things even happen anymore? Sun Ra and cowboys, Tommy Dorsey and punk rockers? Well, not Tommy Dorsey himself, he would have punched us all out after screwing the bartendress. Herman Blount (aka Sun Ra) just floated above the audience though. I wish Waylon had been there to see it, or Jerry Lee Lewis. Or Willie Nelson…he and John Gilmore could have gotten down.

The thing about big giant cities is that everything is here, and sometimes they meet and weird, wonderful shit can happen. Or else there’s a fist fight. Whatever. It’s a happening. Space is the place, even if that place is a honky tonk.

Ya know, I tried looking for a picture of Sun Ra at the Palomino to put here. No luck. There were pictures, but they just looked like Sun Ra anywhere. I didn’t want anywhere, I wanted the honky tonk. I did find the LA Times review of the show, though. The guy wrote it up like a jazz review. Not me. I would have gone crazy. It was Sun Ra at the Palomino for crying out loud.

Now it’s time for Owen to spill about those all night Fela Kuti extravaganzas at the Olympic. I missed out on those too. You never realize how stupid you were until years later, and there’s nothing you can do about it because everybody’s gone.

The new thing with feeling

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(expanded from an online conversation today with John Altman) 

Ya know, if I’d stop writing my self-indulgent stuff and went back to writing about jazz I’d start getting invited to the pricey jazz things and fancy digs. Something to think about…..

But the last couple years I was at the LA Weekly writing Brick’s PIcks I was really hating the way I was writing. It was stuck, in a rut, doing the same thing over and over. It was so easy and I’d gotten cynical. I was feeling very dishonest as a writer and that is death.  I had to re-learn how to write so it was time to woodshed. Like breaking a badly set arm and letting it heal all over again. So I up and walked.

That gig was killing me. I absolutely hated it by the end. Hated it like you hate the worst job you ever had. It was turning me into a fake. I’d invented this ridiculous Brick’s Picks character, him with his royal we and oh so ridiculously hip, turning the emotional faucet on and off…I hated that guy. He was a joke. That’s what happens when you wind up a jazz journalist without ever wanting to be a jazz journalist. Finally I got my zillionth idiot editor and said fuck it, I’m gone. And I was.

So that’s where I went. People still ask, which amazes me. They still bitch, which irritates me. Sometimes I say nothing, sometimes (if they’re older) I mumble an apology, and sometimes (if they’re a friend and ought to know better) I tell them to just shut the fuck up. And I’m feeling better about my writing now. To quote Eric Dolphy’s post card to Oliver Lake (I wish I’d saved the picture), I’m trying to do the new thing but with feeling.

Ya know, I don’t think people realize that writing is like music and you have to practice every goddamned day. Practice till your brain hurts. Practice till everything around you is language, everything, and you need to stop and just look at things and try not to think.

Then start writing again.

Giggling

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I heard that my brother was on the radio giggling. I didn’t hear it myself–I can hear him giggle anytime, little private giggling sessions, laughing and laughing as only brothers can laugh and laugh. But tonight he was–is, actually,as I write this–on the radio, he and Alan Hambra, giggling and chuckling and thoroughly bechortling themselves. You can do that on college stations, giggle and bechortle yourself. Bechortle yourself silly even.*

But you can’t giggle on KCRW. You can’t even think about it. Not Henry Rollins, not nobody.Though there was a time before the lighter, friendlier Henry that giggling wasn’t even conceivable. He was like one of those mean, gnarly L.A. rappers that took names and kicked ass and shot people. Now he’s more like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Happy. But still giggle free. If you have wine and cheese fundraisers like KCRW then you are required to chill since no one in Santa Monica is funny. So by chill I mean rich white people chill which the rest of us would call boring but what do we know? And I never even use the word chill unless I’m making a jello salad, but when you talk KCRW-speak you gotta say chill. It’s chill or be chilled.

But on KXLU you can giggle. A little irony helps, but giggling is encouraged. Which is a good thing. Giggling on the radio is a positive life reinforcement. It’s like kayaking or volunteering at the neighborhood youth center or dancing with a mailman. It’s like petting a wiggling puppy or waving to the little towhead in the stroller. It’s like watching tight jeans walk away, slowly, with just the hint of a swish. A good thing.

Not on jazz stations, though. No giggling at all. No one has giggled in jazz since Ella Fitzgerald, unless they are way stoned or posing for album covers. And sometimes Ella doth giggle a little too much. Like maybe she wasn’t giggling inside.

OK. One time me and the legendary artist George Herms were at Charlie O’s. I can’t remember who was on but they were hip. Way hip. And Charlie O’s was hip, jazz hip. And the two hippest cats in the room–we were that night, so hip–were sitting in front of the stage a couple feet from Charles Owens or Chuck Manning or somebody which was hipper than living fuck, I mean it was so happening. Two hip cats digging the sounds. People watched us. Waited to see if we applauded first. We were that hip. You ever been that hip? I’m not that hip anymore, but George sure was, and still is, and I was, and how. Hip.

Then we started giggling. Laughing and chuckling and, thoroughly bechortled, we giggled. Couldn’t help ourselves. The very air in there was laughing gas and the music was so alive and on that we, well, giggled. Giggled and giggled, giggling and giggling.

Then it happened…..Someone hushed us. Loudly. An angry shushing. Shush!!!  And we froze, looked sheepish, and giggled.

Sometimes a man, even a hip man, just has to giggle. I suppose if you’re a Prussian you don’t giggle. You hold it in and it forces its way out in excessive boot heel clicks or the rearward song of the pumpernickel. But not a couple good ol’ American boys. No, we just did what a man has to do.

We giggled.

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* And you can make up words like bechortle if you are a writer and don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks.

Sin is sin

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Not sure what this is about, but sin is sin.

Not sure what this is about, but sin is sin.

What’s the difference between fornicating and adultery? Or is adultery just fornicating with lies? I think drunkenness goes with both. I’m not sure about the rest, though fornicating combined with witchcraft might be interesting. Mixed with idolatry might get too weird. I’d prefer not to talk about homosexuality just now.

Miley Cyrus has turned all my friends old and grumpy

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Miley Cyrus has turned all my friends old and grumpy. Kids these days, they keep saying, those rotten kids. But what about dressing up like Kiss and sticking out your tongue? What about strutting ass high and wiggling to Sir Mix A Lot? What about– They cut me off. That was different, they say. That wasn’t stupid? No, that was different.  Then someone says twerk and they reach for their AARP cards.

John Turturro

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Brick with John Turturro

 

John Turturro and I at the opening of Passione in Beverly Hills. I’m the tall one. It’s a brilliant documentary about the Naples, Italy music scene…I was hoping to do an article on it for the LA Weekly, which would have gotten the thing the attention it warranted in this town. New editor wasn’t interested. A shame, it could have put the thing over in L.A., and gotten the soundtrack attention too. One of those rare times a music journalist can have an impact on another medium. And the film, and the Neapolitan music scene it so lovingly portrayed, deserved a helluva lot better than they got from the local press.

There was a great party at the Italian Consulate afterward. Pretty heady haps for a jazz journo, I gotta say. This was on a Saturday night. I quit the Weekly that Tuesday. Told the editor I quit. He sent me a lecture on punctuation. I told him to fuck off.

But I did take the kernel of that unwritten article and made it the coda of my very last Brick’s Picks:

Just saw John Turturro’s Passione, and talk about a revelation. We barely knew anything about Neapolitan music…Dean Martin, Lou Canova, pizza parlor juke boxes … that was about it. Who knew that back in ancient, messed-up, photogenic Naples could be found the real thing. Not even the hippest radio stations played the stuff. That bothered Turturro. He loves this music. So he did one of those things that must drive Hollywood agents utterly mad: He took a film crew over there and shot 23 songs by 23 different acts in 23 different locations in 21 days and, man, you gotta see the results. There isn’t a performance that isn’t stellar, and the passion and intensity is so stirring you’d have to be a hardened cynic not to be moved. The tunes run the artistic gamut from street singers to classic love songs to art songs to operatic numbers to very Neapolitan rap, rock and even reggae. Turturro limits his screen time to a couple street interviews (and one freaky dance); mostly he just narrates, sparingly. He doesn’t edit the tunes all to hell and no storyline bogs the thing down. It’s just music and locations and people — no heavy analysis, no dreadful critics, and unlike Buena Vista Social Club, no American players sitting in and tainting everything. Nope. This is the best music flick we have seen since Calle 54, and to be honest, we liked this even more. Go see it. Buy the soundtrack. You’ll be making pasta and singing “O Sole Mio” to your dog, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Still bums me I didn’t get to write that piece. I remember telling my wife on the way home that this was gonna be the big time. It would have been, too. Only problem was I didn’t want the big time. I just wanted my life back.