Half the stuff I have ever written in my life disappears in unsaved drafts or forgotten and long obliterated emails. All the long first drafts of Brick’s Picks columns I gushed out…I’d trim them to the exact word count and turn all that excess writing back into random electrons. And I have no idea how many emails are no more, thousands and thousands of emails. I used to do my best stuff in emails. Some were saved. The ones written at work, however, they too are now electrons. They could run on for hundreds of words, for paragraphs, crazy tales of something or other and then poof…..gone. Words become crazy spinning electrons. Probably a million words have gone that way. Hundreds of stories. Thousands of vignettes. I never even think about it till suddenly I want to retrieve one like the tale of the girl I nearly squirted with pickle juice. Sounds funny now, but to a little kid from California plunked down on an island off the coast of Maine it was no laughing matter. Lobster bait. It was my very first day in Great Island Elementary School, the fifth school I’d attended in second grade….beginning in San Diego, a stop in Tacoma, a couple other places, then the wilds of Maine……and my mother packed me a brownbag lunch of a liverwurst sandwich on rye with a pickle and when I bit into that pickle it squirted…but just then the little girl sitting next to me ducked down to pick up a pencil or something and the juice arced clear over her head and landed unseen in the floor. I could see it there, a tiny little puddle. Probably the most relieved I ever felt in my entire life. That was half a century ago but I can still remember it vividly. I wrote down the whole thing in a longish email that is gone now. Just electrons. And you know how electrons are. Meaningless. Brownian. infinitesimally small. Too small to give a damn about, really, except that I just wrote that sentence in electrons.
Category Archives: Think pieces
If you call this thinking,
Here come da judge
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
Arianna Huffington
Yet another article on astronomical CEO salaries. Executive pay just seems to go up and up and payroll goes down and down. The average CEO makes 354 times as much as the average worker does now. Thirty years ago they made 42 times as much. CEO pay soars at a faster and faster rate while your pay stagnates well below the rate of inflation. Wages are so low now, benefits so slashed, even little perks cut back. The company can no longer afford free bagels on Friday.
I was surprised to learn that Arianna Huffington makes $4 million a year as head of Huffington Post. That site was only profitable for a couple years, and has lost money since becoming part of AOL, but Arianna reels in that salary still. And that’s without paying her writers, all but a chosen few, a business model that most CEO’s can only dream about. This CEO salary inflation is so pervasive that it infects even the progressive media that rails against it. Doesn’t seem to bother its readers a bit, though. No one even recognizes irony anymore. I wonder if Arianna does. I’m sure she does. A sucker, they say, is born every minute.
Voiceless alveolar bilabially trilled affricate
Good writing does have its place, I replied to the economist, but not in the press much anymore. Since journalism is driven by online readership (as opposed to print readership) the press needs people who can turn copy quickly and can write basically their entire piece in the first paragraph. Few readers get past that. Furthermore (I continued), revenue comes in the number of hits. There’s not much value in a reader staring at one page a long time, unless you can distract him with those ever changing graphic ads that lead you to another page, anyway. You’ll find good writing tucked away on obscure if beautifully written blogs that tend towards the literate and academic. As far as readers go they are in the backwaters of the web, but worth the search, if you’re so inclined. Which I am. But, like you, I also enjoy the occasional bit of academic writing myself. Not economics….Lord no, I get lost. Fascinated, but lost. But I have a weakness for linguistics. Still, I prefer my Chomsky in English so generally avoid the original and read one of his acolytes. Kind of like Joyce. One of the reasons that I was so excited about that upstart Daniel Everett was that he could write in English. Besides, if it weren’t for Daniel Everett I’d have no idea what a voiceless alveolar bilabially trilled affricate is. Though, to be honest, I still don’t know what a voiceless alveolar bilabially trilled affricate is, no matter how many times I listen to the damn MP3. Voiceless alveolar bilabially trilled affricate. In German that would be one word.
Sigh…I passed out on the couch hours ago after taking an allergy pill and now I woke up and it’s 3:30 in the morning and I just wrote voiceless alveolar bilabially trilled affricate three times. Four times.
Why do smart people write such stupid tweets? Give them 140 characters and suddenly they’re back in junior high. Must be that irony thing. It’s a shame though….it’s such an amazing technology. You learn how to reduce an essay down to a vivid sentence or two…till you have nothing but the pure essence of what it is you are thinking. A thousand or ten thousand words laid out in 140 characters, and then sent out to hundreds or thousands of people who will understand exactly what it is you are trying to say in the instant it takes them to read the thing. Wow.
But so few people seem to realize this. You’d think a writer, especially, would pick up on this. Instead they make wise ass comments and make themselves look like snide little assholes. I guess maybe the potential is beyond the current generations using it, really…they can’t get themselves to think in Twitter. Instead they use it just like they text. If you could sext on Twitter it’d be full of naked pictures, and that’s all.
Funny that something as incredibly basic and user friendly as Twitter is a technology that is beyond the evolution of the human mind..so far. Give it twenty years, though. Twitter and all the future mondo-twitters will be used to transmit the most profound ideas and visceral emotions in ways that perhaps 99% of us can’t even imagine–hell, can’t even conceive of–now.
I’m not saying Twitter will replace novels,essays or blogging. But it might become just as significant as al of those. No one would ever have believed that those little Edison shoot ’em ups would ever become as profound as anything done on the stage, that those early jazz cylinders would ever become A Love Supreme, or a few symbols scratched on a mud tablet along the Euphrates River would ever become the zillions of books available on Amazon. It takes a generation at least even begin to imagine the potential for that. Wish I could be there to see it. But being born to early, I probably am not even equipped to imagine it. Hardwired in the past, I am. Neuroplasticity has it’s limits. Sigh……….
Ray Bradbury
A couple years before Ray Bradbury died he made an appearance at a book store in Glendale called Mystery and Imagination, one of those places devoted to science fiction and fantasy and science fiction and fantasy fans. The place was packed, every nook and cranny. It was a thoroughly enjoyable event, there were things to eat and wine to drink and weirdos to talk to and cool books everywhere. Ray was his usual incorrigible self, up there in years but still Ray. My wife was thrilled. She’s seen him several times, but Ray was old now, and weak, and wheelchair bound, and you got the feeling that we wouldn’t be seeing him again.
The LA Times had sent a hip young blogger out to the thing. He dashed off a few quick sentences tearing Ray Bradbury apart, making him look like a doddering old fool, hinting at senility. He also took one of those National Inquirer style pics that somehow puts a celebrity in the worst light possible. It was not one of the finer moments of the Los Angeles Times.
Nor of Reason magazine, whose online edition featured a blogger snidely railing against Ray Bradbury, tearing him to shreds, based solely on the account written by the LA Times blogger. That was enough for me and I hit the roof and fired off an email. The guy had the decency to post it in his next blog, which surprised the hell out of me. Though if I hadn’t been writing for the LA Weekly at the time, I doubt he would have bothered.
Anyway, this is what I wrote:
I was at that Ray Bradbury event. My wife’s a fan, I tagged along. It was in a wonderful old fashioned used book store, and was a very charming party full of long winded reminiscences and toasts, and to be honest anything Ray said I have heard him say before. Nothing was new. Not a damn thing. He’s been bitching about machines for his entire career (he wrote everything on a manual typewriter). He’s always hated being called a science fiction writer. His government views have changed little. The moon stuff is not surprising…we’ve fallen decades behind schedule on that one compared to what was expected in the sixties, and he’s frustrated not to have witnessed a mars landing. Hard to blame the man on that one. And even his plural internet is perfectly valid unless one pretends that all the intranets, some of them truly vast, are not actually internets…and of course Google is working on its own internet–not intranet–as we speak. He’s hip enough to know that.
And that pic the Times used was not the beaming, laughing old gent who I watched on Sunday.
Alas, that badly written and edited blog entry in the LA Times has now become part of his legacy. The man is being trashed all over the web–like you have done–based strictly upon that little story. There’s no turning back now. He’ll be dead soon enough, and that bullshit story will long survive him, and will become him to many people. After all, they saw it on the internet, it has to be true.
Thx much….
Brick
Ray Bradbury died a year or so later and all this was forgotten. I imagine the L.A. Times blogger now brags about the time he met Ray Bradbury, and I’m sure the guy in Reason forgot all about excoriating Ray Bradbury as a “Luddite old fart”.
The problem with bloggers is they think they are important. But really, we are not. It’s just a zillion people typing a zillion zillion words onto the internet. It’s not like writing a novel. It’s not even like writing an essay. It’s barely writing at all. It’s more like the drunk guy at a cocktail party who won’t shut up.
I love this shot.
I love this shot. Phone cameras have rendered photography so artless (the way blogging has sucked the art out of writing) that when I see a well rendered shot I’m taken aback. I think the ease of the technology is the problem…it’s so quick, and so cheap, no one hesitates even a second to consider if something is worth photographing, or even to set it up right. Why bother? You can take a zillion shots and some are bound to be OK. OK…that’s the standard for photography now. It looks OK. And the technology is so piss poor, I am constantly amazed at how even the most lovely women are rendered plain by the phone camera..facial features flattened, shading lost, lighting a glare. And the most lovely scenes look like rejected stills on the cutting room floor.
As for blogs. Everybody blogs. Everybody. The first thing that pops into someone heads is poured into a blog and posted. There are no second drafts, and the concept of an editor is perfectly medieval.
Digital technology has made everything possible, alas it has made everything possible.
(After posting this essay I found out the photographer goes by the splendid name of El Imagenero. You can find much more of his work on his sites here and here, not to mention on Flikr and Instagram. Well worth a long luxuriant look or two.)
“It’s All About the Music”, photo by El Imagenero, taken at the Typhoon Restaurant this past summer (2012). He used a Nikon. That is the brilliant saxophonist Benn Clatworthy in the background with Aguabella Nuestra Era. In the foreground are charts (well, copies of the charts) from the late great Francisco Aguabella’s own book.
About Lester Bangs
(Comments posted to a New Yorker piece about Lester Bangs, 8-30-2012)
Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boils down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
That Astral Weeks review is awfully pretty, gorgeous even. Too bad it’s complete horseshit. It has nothing to do with what the album sounds like and everything to do with Lester Bangs. Not that Lester Bangs wasn’t a fascinating guy, but if you’re reviewing a record you should leave yourself at the door. I don’t care how many English classes you’ve had or if you’ve read Baudelaire or can do more acid that Philip K Dick, I just want to know what the album sounds like. So many music critics to ignore that principal. Lots of pretty words that don’t give you a clue about what the music actually sounds like. If you want to write about yourself, write your memoirs. If you’re going to review an album, let the music do the talking. And if you can’t do that in prose, you’re in the wrong business. Because when you write about music, the only thing that matters is the music. You the critic don’t matter at all.
Here’s a rule of thumb…if you’ve completed a review and it’s one of the best things you’ve ever written in your life, dump it. You probably wrote about yourself.
All you can do is watch and remember
(Comments I added to a story about how Silver Lake got to be so damn straight in the Eastsider, 2012. Amazing what you can find when you google your own name.)
I’ve lived in Silver Lake for close to thirty years. The gay scene in Silver Lake (which was Silverlake back then, incidentally) was devastated by AIDS. It never recovered. Silver Lake’s gay scene was very leather, and that scene was hit particularly hard. The survivors began moving out, selling their homes, leaving town. Too many sad memories. Straights filled the void.
Silver Lake had the most wonderful estate sales back then. You’d pick through the stuff, get great deals, and head back out to your cars feeling vaguely guilty. Weird time.
When AIDS first hit Silver Lake it was scary. The dying were everywhere, the dead not there at all. Lost a lot of friends. Soon it seemed we had no gay friends left. They’d all vanished…moved, died, or just stopped going out.
I miss those days. I miss the gay bars, the ones we could go in, the ones we couldn’t. I miss the gay hamburger joint and gay coffee shops and gay steak houses. I miss the gay newspapers. I miss the leather guys in their chaps buying crisco at the corner markets. Good times. Even for a soooo straight couple.
Btw, in the sixties Silver Lake was a hippie haven. By the punk rock 80′s when we moved in there were a few of them left. They’d go one about the old days and wonder where everybody went.
Now us old punk rockers wonder the same thing.
Cities change. All you can do is watch and remember.
(And you know, I’m still not used to it being Silver Lake. Before it was hip and famous and yuppie breeder heaven it was Silverlake. Then the city put up that damn sign on Sunset….)
A Love Supreme in a still, dark room
(Comments from 2010 on a first draft of a Bricks Picks from 2007)
I just found this. It was written in one long take. I just let the thing gush apparently. My wife Fyl had been out of the hospital about six weeks [she’d nearly died of an infection…had died for a few minutes, but pulled through tho’ with severe amnesia] and right about this time she had a heart operation to install a defibrillator because the doctors (and me) were worried the arrhythmia would drop her stone dead. I’d avoided losing my job, barely surviving a big layoff. I was learning how to handle all the finances, and all the other things I had never done in our 28 year marriage. I had decided to throw Fyl a big birthday party at the end of the month (and big it was, too, old friends by the dozens just thrilled she was still around and a pile of gifts; she smiled and laughed and said thank you and had no idea who any of them were.) And the economy had just caved in and the country was in a complete panic. Basically, all was madness. I was utterly exhausted. I even seem to remember briefly quitting the Weekly in there somewhere (my latest editor was fucking with me. He stopped). Writing is always a bitch for me, about this time it was becoming brutal. I hated it. You can see and feel that all here. That last paragraph was so typo-ridden (Propler weill be praying fr everybody in ;ll the chuched, kankers will tr to keep pour mpney from diappearring, brokers will f;lutter and pamic. Even presidential candidates sat sc=art stuff. But try this…pull out “A Love Supreme” in a still darj room. Let ijam. Siy tight, pillows hekp. Herbals too. Get all te way throight, ide it with Johgn C(ltrane. How many revolutions and wars, riys and assisinatiuons and recessuions, and disatr4rs has it withiood) that I could barely read it now and it was me that wrote the fucking thing. The final draft must have been cut by half. But reading this now it’s so evocative. What an amazing, terrible time that was.
Anyway, I cleaned it up some here, mostly for spelling:
Brick’s Picks # 46
Yeah things are rough with the market down and unemployment up and mortgages defaulting and debates boring and what can a jazz fan do? You still need to hear music—and maybe need it more now than ever—but your 401K just took all the jazz cruise money and left you sporting hoover flags and no place to go. Fear’s not the only thing scaring us, everything is anymore, and man do we all need a good night out to listen to some solid tuneage and just forget the whole bit for a couple hours. But there’s that image that jazz has picked up the last couple decades…that is it an effete entertainment, something expensive to expensive for you, the guy who had to dash in and out of the liquor store to pick up this Weekly without buying anything. It’s not that there aren’t pricey jazz joints and even pricier concerts—there are plenty—but there are even more places that charge no cover (or maybe just a little one), have no minimums, and won’t completely break you. So let’s pick a few for the weekend.
For early starters this Friday afternoon they’re kicking off the Thelonious Monk centennial (a week late and a decade early, as he was born on Oct. 10, 2017) with a whole herd of master pianists—Geri Allen, Jean Michel Pilc, Frank Kimbrough, Bill Cunliffe are some—at Ernst and Young Plaza at 7th and Figueroa downtown. It runs from noon to three, so head on down there, buy an apple off some sad broker and dig the wide ranging interpretations. Pretty unique event. Then head over to LACMA where beloved local bassist Putter Smith leads his West Coast through some straight ahead. Also free. There’s bar there, too, and eats. And that’s two events right there that won’t cost you that spare dime and it’s not even night time yet.
Now how about the genuine nightspots….real jazz junkies collect at Charlie O’s in the Valley. It’s this town’s straight ahead epicenter, and the crowd is purist, half of them players themselves, the rest jazzophiles. These people demand the real stuff, three sets worth. There’s usually no cover (except on Big Band Mondays) and there’s no minimum, what else you want? This Friday check out saxman Justo Almario, a Colombian whose impassioned sound is shot through with Trane (much like fellow South American Gato Barbieri used to, though Justo can bop with the best, too.) In fact, the great tenor work continues all weekend here….with the mighty Don Menza on Saturday, his is a big, fat powerful tone, the kind that as they said of Dexter Gordon, seems to fill the whole room. And on Sunday it’s Doug Webb, who delivers with a passionate intensity and nods to Trane and Joe Henderson and Hank Mobley and all the rest of those cats. We dig him. Real jazz in a real jazz freak’s club.
It’s a whole other vibe at the Foundry, on Melrose of all places, where Fridays and Saturdays is about kids going nuts, pushing things. It’s always bassist Matt Cory’s trio, and generally the astonishing imagination and sheer ballsiness of Zach Harmon on the traps…on Friday Gary Fukushima is at the upright and—get this—on Saturday it’s veterans Larry Goldings with the incredibly sympathetic Bob Sheppard on sax…these guys both have such advanced concepts about the things that can be done with a melody, but it never screams or scares people . The crowd is young (with women at a jazz spot!) and there’s no minimum but you cheap jazz nerds ought to buy a drink and a grilled cheese ferchrissakes. Help keep the happenings happening. And you know…talk to the jazz kids here and you’ll discover a whole scene in this town you never even knew existed….names and places new to anyone older than 30, and killer chops.
A lot of that scene seems to be popping up at Rocco’s latest spot, the Café Metropol. There is a smallish cover here, but the east are great and beers varied and the room has a kind of intimacy that makes it ideal for, like, dating…the place won’t scare anyone from the office you talked into going out with you. Sometimes the music might—Rocco likes a lot of fringier stuff, which is fine for a lot of us, but not for many of those that know us. Saturday’s a great bet, though—Nick Mancini is back, and he can charm his way through the most intense arrangements, and man what a vibes player. Another downtown spot on Fridays and Saturdays is the high ceilinged bar at the Biltmore…all that space up there takes from the volume, but bands seem to dig the room and there’s a pretty varied, friendly crowd. No cover, no minimum. No eats either. Which just lets you save more money…. Anyway, trumpeter Elliott Caine is there on Friday and he’s been on a post-bop tear lately—the Lee Morgan is still there, but Lee wasn’t all cornbread, and Caine and crew seem to head in that Search For a New Land direction too, if you can dig that. (He’s also at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach on Thursday…and such a deal that room is. A great—and historic venue, back to what, the 40’s? the 50’s?)
Then there’s good and reasonable restaurants that happen to have good jazz in there on occasion, and if you are into solid fifties hard bop and straight ahead you are in luck. Out in Sierra Madre the very family friendly Café 322 has the splendid Donavan Muradian Quintet. They have that Jazz Messengers thing down (and check out Donavan’s tom work), from Chuck Manning inventive distinctive tenor work (though his primary source, Joe Henderson, never did the obligatory stint in Blakey’s batalion) to Kye Palmer’s dulcet, gorgeous trumpet sound. Their Live at the 322 from a couple years ago was ridiculously solid (check out “Whisper Not”). Great stuff, great pasta, reasonable fare, no cover and just a quick jaunt up the 210. No city traffic at all. Now more good eats—American heavy—will accompany that other local outfit that has hard bop thing down: The CJS Quntet. Chuck Johnson’s tenor is martini dry and always on the mark, while Houston Texas’s Smitty Smith just oozes blues and Pops. Great pairing. Kirk Silsbee once compared them to the classic Max Roach-Clifford Brown Sextet (which says something about Smitty’s playing, huh?), and this makes this a great if higher calorie follow up to Friday’s dinner with the DMQ.
Of course head west out of Hollywood and things begin to empty the wallet a lot faster. Like up in Brentwood, if you haven’t got the bread you shouldn’t even think about eating at Vibrato. I mean, look at them waitresses….they don’t waste them pushing hamburgers to bums like us. Nope, they are for the power diners. But don’t let all that hot air fool you (and it’s a LOT…you don’t make it big on that end of town, apparently, by being quiet)…it dissipates into boozy, overfed murmur after a couple sets, and enough jazz fans have slipped in by then to transform the place into a serious jazz gig. The bar might be full of rich people crying into their fruity Belgian imported beer because their portfolios have blown all over Wall Street but there’s no minimum so just grab one of the strong drinks and a seat somewhere and dig Chuck Manning again—-he’s there Saturday, and he stretches more here than in the DMQ, and quite beyond the whole Buhaina thing…and if you’re lucky it’s John Campbell on the piano and man does that cat swing in the classic sense. Sometimes for a minute it’s like Bud Powell (let alone Monk) never happened. Which can be very refreshing sometimes. Go listen for yourself.
Oh yeah, we’ve received word of some Thursday night jazz craziness that’s erupted without warning at TiGeorges Chicken on Glendale Ave (just south of Temple) in Echo Park. It’s the Haitian place, but no compas on jazz night…instead we have the Tom McNalley Trio with saxist John Gross. Hot damn. So what there’s no beer. Drink enough of their coffee and you be hightailing up Glendale to leap into the Lake. It’s safer in there. Repomen are scared of geese, you can’t hear the news, and no brokers can jump that far from any of those gleaming towers just down Temple. We’ll survive this, you know. Just hang in there, and let the music purge the shit at least once a week. Go out for a late night listening to some of our exceptional jazz talent. Hang onto every last note till they turn off the lights and clear everyone out. Let those final progressions, the last traces of that the melody that fade to breath out in a pair of suspended notes, tenor chords that dissipate to air, follow you all the way home, bouncing around inside your head. Let it lullaby you to sleep. And do sleep. Hearing good jazz’ll do you more good than you know, and you can always worry about the end times in the morning. People will be praying for everybody in all the churches, bankers will to to keep your money from disappearing, brokers will flutter and panic. Even presidential candidates sit scared stiff. But try this…pull out A Love Supreme in a still, dark room. Let it jam. Sit tight, pillows help. Herbals too. Get all the way through, ride it with John Coltrane. How many revolutions and wars and riots and assassinations and recessions and disasters has it withstood?
Brick Wahl 
