Facebook has ruined writing. You can write all you want on Facebook and there’s no need whatsoever to do so with any grace or talent or even basic writing chops. You’re not supposed to show any chops, actually. It was designed as a purely egalitarian medium. Nothing pretty. Very little even signficant. I know a lot of fine writers and their Facebook posts are just as dull and artless as any twelve year old’s. It is wholly functional. Two dimensional. If people talked as dull as they post you would find them so annoying you’d duck out of the way when you saw them coming. Facebook reduces everyone to the dullest person you know. It is artless, faceless, characterless and not very funny. Emotions are worn on sleeves. Facebook is like instant messaging that everyone at work can read. Safe, dull, and designed not to hurt anyone’s feelings. No juicy gossip, no hidden secrets, no sex. Continue reading
Author Archives: Brick Wahl
Maybe a couple too many tom toms
They say Big Sid Catlett could swing an entire big band with a pair of brushes and a phone book.
Fan mail
An artifact from 2007 I just found tucked away in my email…..
Brick- How’s it going? I read one of your jazz picks while taking a dump this morning….good stuff….
At least he read it before using it.
Movie star
Rough morning at work, everything going wrong, so I split for Don Cucos right around the corner for huevos rancheros and a Tecate. I took the seat at the far end of the bar. There’s three music industry guys next to me, the ones who design and make boxes and pedals and amps for guitar players. They were chatting up a storm over beers. I ate in silence, paid my bill and got up to leave. One says Hey, aren’t you a movie star? I said no. They said yes you are, you’re a movie star. I said no, I’m nobody. The guy says no, you’re that dude. I recognize you. That dude. I said no. Yeah you are. That dude. I oughta ask for your autograph. I said no, no autographs. He said well, let me shake your hand? We shook hands. As I walked off he was trying to remember just what movie I had starred in. I had just made that guy’s day.
You have no idea how many times this happens to me. Several times a year. And those are just the ones with the nerve to ask. Most just stare and wonder what movie they saw me in.
Ya know, it’s really weird when people think you are Somebody because they never belive it when you say you’re a Nobody. I tried something different today. They asked Are you a movie star? I said no, I’m just some asshole. Which meant for sure I was Somebody. No Nobody would ever call himself an asshole. So there goes that idea. Back to square one.
I get asked for autographs. If I don’t agree to an autograph they get mad. Or hurt, you can see it in their faces and just feel awful about it. Problem is since they never know who I am I have no idea what to sign. I signed Brick once. Just Brick. That made them happy. Tourists, ya know.
Once a security guard at the Hollywood Von’s caught me in the aisle and asked if I was a movie star. None of the other employees the nerve. They told him to ask me. I said I wasn’t. He said I was. I said no, really, I’m not a movie star. He said come on, man, I’ve seen you in movies! I said OK, I was. He said I knew it!
I never told him who I was, though. But he knew it. I saw him talking to the others, and they stared, trying to remember who I was. I was polite, but secretive. You know how movie stars are.
The funny thing is that I have no idea why people think I am a movie star. I have no idea what it is I do that gives people that idea. If I could figure it out, I’d stop. But this goes back nearly 30 years. Thirty years of movie stardom and what do I have to show for it?
Grammy Museum
One night I finally gave in and went to one of these events at the Grammy Museum they were always after me about. It was dull, dull, dull. There was the inevitable private reception afterward with an open bar with expensive wine. The bored waiters slipped about with trays of bite sized things I couldn’t identify, but generally tasted odd. The crowd was all music industry types and hangers on and ass kissers and aging star fuckers and their rich kid freeloaders and not my scene at all. Not one bit. I slipped away for a minute and looked at some photo display in the gallery. Big shiny photos perfectly positioned and mounted and framed and very artily significant. Most of them were of rock stars, this being the Grammy Museum. Boz Scaggs and Rod Stewart and Bonnie Raitt, some Debbie Harry and David Byrne and Sting, like that. For some ungodly reason, right there in the middle of them, was a shot of crazy, hardcore, anarchist, music business-hating Black Flag, with Henry Rollins all serious and fierce and young and not quite so buff. I recognized the beat up van they were sitting in and laughed….I remembered smoking dope in that very same van. Getting very high. That was, what, some thirty years ago? A couple party attendees came up, maybe wondering what I found so funny. I got high in that van I said, aloud. Maybe too loud. They backed off. I laughed again. Nice people did that when we laughed back then too, thirty years ago. We would laugh, they’d retreat, we’d laugh again. Funny how laughter can be dangerous. Everyone took themselves very seriously in the seventies. So we’d laugh at them. It worked. This and the rest of my life three decades ago passed before my eyes. I was dying in there, surrounded by these photographs, these people, this place.
Suddenly I wondered just how the fuck I wound up hanging around a bunch of music industry hacks at the Grammy Museum. I hate the Grammys. I hate the music industry. At that moment I knew I would never make it in this business. Me, who’d shared a bill with Black Flag in some hole of a club long ago. And me now, who only wants to sit in a small bar somewhere and listen to intense jazz improvisation. I just want the music, the pure stuff, all creativity and inspiration and intensity. Not this shit. Not this ultra hip industry crap. Not their fine suits and fine cars and arm candy. I was hating myself for even being there. I had promised I never would, but there I was. Just another jazz journalist on the make. I had to get out of there, so I gulped down my two hundred buck chuck and split. The valet brought my car around. I got in and cranked up the radio. A saxophone screamed. I pulled into the city traffic and went looking for some jazz, feeling clean.
Plumbing
So the boss comes by my desk and says you better run upstairs to the 19th floor and see what the hell is going on up there. It sounds like the ceiling over the men’s room is gonna explode. I ducked into the 18th floor john and sure enough there was an ungodly racket coming from above. Loud, vibrating, scary and potentially disgusting. I’d once had a very traumatic moment in the building when I was trapped by a volcanic toilet and came close to dying a horrible death, or at least having to buy new shoes. It just began welling up from one of the empty stalls, gurgling and splashing and trapped me in a corner behind the sink.It was a very long few seconds there, the foul tide rising and rising till I could back up no further and my mind was filled with really nasty scenarios. St. Crispin had mercy on me and interceded, the tide retreated, and I washed my hands with a violent intensity that made no sense at all. They were clean. I stood in the men’s room, remembering all this and staring at my shoes on the shiny floor. It began rumbling again upstairs. OK, let’s roll.
I took the elevator up to the 19th floor to investigate. It was a tonier floor than our humble 18th floor, with better, newer carpeting and not a hint of napwear. The furniture in the lobby looked new. The plants were so perfect they looked artificial. The elevator closed and slid away behind me and all was silence. Not a voice, not a rumble. Found the men’s room. All was peaceful inside. Flushed a toilet…the water splashed, rushed away, and all was silence. As I stepped back out into the hall suddenly there it was, an enormous roar, seismic even, you could feel the floor rumble. It filled up all that silence like the end of the world. Then it stopped, suddenly. Nothing. Since the world was still here, it had to be the plumbing. I stood in the hallway wondering when it began again, huge and loud and menacing. I’d never heard anything like it. Then the door of the ladies room opened, and I could hear it, the flush from hell. Pipes vibrated and roared, and out walked a very pretty blonde. Just lovely. She lowered her eyes as she passed, the door swung closed behind her. The noise abated.
Oh.
Transformation
(2011)
Today the wife and I were running about town doing errands and decided to stop for lunch at some Mexican place in Echo Park we’d never been to. It’s off Sunset, a bit hidden, and you descend into the place from a rear entrance. Not a window in the joint, it was probably a speakeasy in the twenties. Very cool little spot. The room was intimate, the bar ample, the service great, the food delicious and it just oozed an Echo Park hipness, not yet discovered by the outsiders. We’d picked a booth at the back with a view of the bar, and we’re being waited on hand and foot….it was obvious the elite dropped in regularly, and they treated every customer as a member, just in case. Basically a fun scene.
My phone rang. It was a dude who wants me to write some elaborate liner notes. He pitched me, we went back and forth on what ‘s needed, and when, and how much money he was offering. The food came, I nodded at the waiter and he brought another Tecate, I mouthed “con limon” and he bought a beautiful dish of freshly sliced lemons. He silently refilled my water glass as I chattered loudly into the phone, I nodded thanks while laughing into the phone, he poured my beer and dropped in two slices of lemon as I gestured broadly at the guy I was talking on the phone to, who could not see me, and went back and forth over the money. The waiter—his name was Miguel—slipped away silently. My food sizzled on the platter as the guy on the phone kissed my ass. I nodded. Finally I said OK, the food’s here and getting cold, and I could hear him grow nervous on the phone that I might bail because the temperature of my huevos had dropped a degree or two, so I said I’m aboard on the project, he said excellent, so we can work out the details later? I said sure, and he said ciao. I didn’t say ciao back, but said cool, which is basically jazz-speak for ciao. I put down my cell on the table like it might ring again any second and took a sip of my ice cold beer and realized, damn, I was just one of those assholes who talks loudly on a cellphone in a Hollywood restaurant, making a deal. It doesn’t get more show biz than that.
Scary. Since writing for the L.A. Weekly I had changed. Little by little, but still, five years before that wasn’t me. Not even a little bit.
It bugged me enough to write it all down.
[I quit the Weekly a month later.]
Elevator
Did I ever tell you about the time a lady took off her jeans, pulled on some panty hose and a skirt while I was with her in the elevator? Gorgeous blonde she was, too. Executive secretary. She said pardon me as she pulled off her jeans. I said no problem as she slipped on the panty hose. She tugged and straightened and ran her hands up from toes to up there. I looked away. There were pumps in her purse. We got to her floor. She smiled and was gone.
That was so long ago, but I still think about it sometimes. Not often, maybe once or twice a year. But I’ll think about that elevator ride and I’ll smile, knowing no one really believes that story but me.
Kitty heaven
Cat’s dying and we’re sitting here waiting for it to go. It looked bad once and revived so that you’d feel just terrible putting it down too soon. Now there’s been a turn for the worse, but not as bad as the first time. We were ready to put her down then but the vet really didn’t think it was time yet. She’s not ready, give her time. So we did and sure enough she perked up, wandered around, enjoyed herself. Spent some quality time with her sister. But now, I dunno. We’ll see tomorrow. Cats have an infuriating tendency to hit the final skids on evenings or weekends, when you have to go to the emergency vet and it’s big bucks. It’s a shame, though, she’s only ten years old. Diabetes. A severe case. She’ll be gone soon enough, she’ll shut herself down and begin that final purr. Then kitty heaven. Life returns to normal.
The new happens only once
Watching The Foreigner again on TCM Underground. Yeah I know it’s awful, but so punk, so punk. God those were the days. I see these crazy asshole punk rock kids and I think damn, I was just like that. There’s a scene where the main guy’s watching a news report on the English punk rock scene and the horrified newsman describes in his broadcast voice what a bunch of destructive worthless scary incoherent morons we all were. All we want to do is wreck everything. We’re artless and nasty and a menace to society. The Damned are playing, the music is raw, hard and fast and the electricity shot through me. again, just like it did the first time. You’ll never hear that again. Never feel that again. The new happens only once, and after that it’s all history and nostalgia. So sad. You spend the rest of your life watching people who don’t realize what they’re missing when they don’t try to change everything. Sometimes everything is so fucked and compromised all you can do is tear it down and start all over. I’m useless to society and society is useless, the lead character says. Sometimes that’s a good thing.
You can’t be a rebel at 56, but you still don’t have to collaborate. Sometimes all you can do is tell the world to fuck off and get on with your lives. I beat the hell out of an old drum kit then, but now all I can do is write. So I write for me.
I’ll post this now before I have safe, middle aged second thoughts. Ha!
Oh yeah, Deborah Harry was gorgeous. Stunning. And not like Joni Mitchell at all.
Brick Wahl 