Bring the Noise

Exhibit A:

The HideAway
Wherein a studio executive, overwhelmed by a budget billowing out of control, his hope of ever making the money back in ticket sales extinguished, stands up, draws the shades in his office, turns off his headset, walks back to his desk and opens the bottom drawer. He pulls out a square of beige fabric, unfolds and unzips it. He crawls inside, bringing his briefcase with him. He pulls the cover over his head and down to his feet, kneeling to the ground and zippering the cover in two disjointed motions.

Outside of the cover, he is a beige burial mound, its contents long since dead. Or he is a machine gun pillbox, its contents camouflaged for greater impact.

Inside of the cover, he is not in an office, corner or otherwise. He is not on set, on the lot, or in a building. He is also not in the middle of the Palm Springs desert, nor on the top of a mountain in Griffith Park. He is nowhere near Los Angeles; he is simply under a cover.

Outside, he is cowering in fear.

Inside, he is safe; he is warm; he is hiding.

This is a real product.

Exhibit B:

The 101, The 10, The 110, The 405
Whereupon many studio executives, not to mention gardeners and failed musicians and production assistants, sit every day.

This is a mischaracterization—they don't go there to sit. They go there, maybe a little late, but not by much, to drive at maybe, maybe 65 ("Can we please do at least 50? How about 45? Any takers? Please?"). They end up barely cresting double digits. They end up yelling and swearing and burning gas, then burning the brake, then burning gas. Or they sink into their car seats, admitting defeat, and rely on NPR droning to tranquilize them.

What they all do is blame it on the city: "Well, that's just L - A," with Los Angeles getting a prefix of varying vulgarity (crazy, fucking, [racial slur], etc. etc.). Any cache the city builds before breakfast with its blue skies and palm trees is blown before work on the freeways. Angelenos park and lock their cars, walk 30 healthy paces to their desks, late, miserable, and wanting only escape.

Whereupon the studio executives will go into their offices, walk over to their desks, and take out squares of beige fabric…

Exhibit C: 

The F-Yeah Fest
Wherein 40-odd bands got together at the (violent) last throes of August to do something very honest—to make noise.

If mothers and grouchy neighbors and middle school music teachers are to be believed, noise is the antithesis of music. It also can be the antithesis of organization and structure, so it was no small irony that the festival was so well-organized, with noise bands playing next door to comedy acts and DJs and boyfriend–girlfriend two–pieces all on a block of Sunset far removed from the more famous (and now more corporate and tourist-y and boring) rock clubs in Hollywood.

But this section of Sunset was to make its own fame. Noise, understandably, has had trouble establishing itself as a viable music genre. Certainly there was an element of the college radio subset that saved their pennies for the Merzbox, but it wasn't until the F-Yeah Fest that the popular youth culture showed their support for Noise music.

They were wrapped around the corner of the Echoplex and down the block, hipsters waiting in line for Japanther and for Fucked Up and for No Age.

Los Angeles wanted to hear Noise.

___________

I remember a thought I had upon first visiting L.A. with my friend Alex. We hit the midday rush on Santa Monica Blvd. but, as tourists, the traffic didn't bother the two of us. It must have been a Bentley Continental GT convertible that passed us going Eastbound (but who cares about specifics, right?) that made me think, "L.A. must be the best place in the world to live if you're rich and the worst place if you aren't."

Somehow, it wasn't until last week, after almost a year spent struggling in Los Angeles, that I remembered having this thought. Maybe I couldn't have known how right I was until I found out for myself: It isn't much fun to be young and poor in Los Angeles.

It's the internships that pay less than unemployment, the $12 hamburgers, the Bluetooth headsets we all now have to buy to talk on the phone in our cars and the $200 fines if we don't and, oh yeah, the shockwave traffic jams to greet us when we just want to go home and drink enough cheap beer to get us through the night.

And we wake to waves of financial uncertainty. And we try to keep from looking off into the valley to avoid a glimpse of humanity that resembles aTron-era computer print-off rather than a sea; 256k colors of urban sprawl and overcrowding. The competition stretches for miles.

There are, of course, glimpses of success, of standing out in a city 45 miles wide. There are Sunday afternoons spent on the roof, watching sunsets and palm trees. We are, after all, living in paradise.

And we all are, when we ignore the competition, on the same team. In a way, the rabid social networking that makes L.A. so infamous, the let's-be-friends-so-I-can-take-advantage-of-you-later kind, is what ties the city together. Angelenos are united in the goal of one day, beating L.A. Of being famous or wealthy or content enough not to care about the price tags or the freeways. The goal, in other words, is survival—together.

The only way to survive is to come to terms with reality. With those that are skinnier and wealthier and happier. With the smog and the earthquakes and the fires and the traffic. To stand and be swallowed by the wave.

To turn the volume up and make the Noise even louder.

And so the young and poor of Los Angeles crowded the F-Yeah Fest not necessarily to illuminate the inequities of life or to rally against them, as with previous movements. No, they stood in line to accept them. To react to the overwhelming exterior with something truly honest and paralyzing: Noise. And it was loud—as loud as the kids of L.A. were brave to listen to it.

After all, the alternative would have been to escape. To face the realities of the city and respond with a beige cover, pulled from a desk, with room for a briefcase.


Originally in SpliceToday at: http://www.splicetoday.com/pop-culture/bring-the-noise

Going On A Holiday - Deb Olin Unferth

I cannot tell you how many people I know who detest Dave Eggers for his self-indulgent meta-prose and presumed self-righteousness. And I cannot tell you how many more hate him for showing up early to the publishing party and ruining it for everyone else. The jig is up; now any author who sways too far towards the parenthetical is accused of being the next Eggers.

And if this were not annoying enough for the young and the bitter to boycott Eggers' website or magazine or publishing company or national chain of tutoring centers, there remains the fact that Eggers has made enough money from his writing to support a mini-empire that comprises a website, three magazines, and a publishing house.

The latest author in the “McSweeney’s Rectangulars” line of original fiction is Deb Olin Unferth, a creative writing professor at the University of Kansas.Vacation is her first novel. It begins with an opening salvo of despair and depression so thick that escape appears unlikely, no matter how many reasonable pages lay ahead. You will find characters who don't know why they do what they do, characters who have muddled motivations not for lack of writing skill or story construction from Unferth, but because you just can'texplain neuroses or obsessions. The only thing you can do is fog your prose with loneliness, and Unferth wields a mighty fog machine.

It is loneliness (and despair, and confusion) that holds the wife of Vacation's main character, Meyers, on the trail of a man she doesn't know, tracing his steps through the city for long hours. And it is confusion (and anger, of course) that drives Meyers to follow this same man down to the coast of Nicaragua in a vacation that is as much about vengeance as it is about understanding. Sure, the book is about greater things: The tedium of obligatory love in a marriage, the paradoxical necessity of that same love, the joy of travel, the comfort of plans (even illogical ones), dolphins, secrets and natural disasters. But the real star is the prose.

An example (Meyers has just arrived in Nicaragua and is sending his estranged wife an email):

My dearest wife, he began again, with a slight shake in his hand.
        It is beautiful here, somewhat like Florida but shaped differently, more squat than long. Splotchlike. Imagine ink spill. Water spot. Broke yolk. I did have fine eggs for breakfast.
        Having a good. Thinking of. Sending you. Farewell from. Warm wish. Weather.
        Deleted.

Or this passage (explaining why the man Meyers' wife follows moved from the city back to his family, leaving her somehow more alone than before):

Why did he do that?
    In order to stand by and take advantage of the rights bequeathed to him by the court: ninety-six hours divided in two and renewed monthly to visit with the product of his strife, a very small child, whom he first bundled in a blanket and carried home in the car, later picked up from the floor where she sat sucking her arm, and later led out by the hand.

Vacation does not feel conversational, as if it flowed to the page in one feverous night. It feels like the product of endless refinement, of nights instead spent watching the cursor retrace its steps to begin again, sharper and more focused this time. Unferth has created a book of sentences just substantial enough to stick to one's ribs while still sufficiently sharp and poignant to stab between them repeatedly.

It is in this style that Unferth has found something special, something unique, of a cast sharing nothing (not even narrative perspective) in common save for their emptiness. Meyers, then, is the perfect hero for the book. A man with a plan; a man who knows of a path out of the hopelessness.

And, in that sense, Unferth is a hero as well. She tactfully and selflessly avoids the criticisms commonly levelled at Eggers while still pulling off the same trick: She has shown up early to the party with a book's worth of undeniably unique prose. All there is left to do is to sit back and wait for the imitators.

Originally in SpliceToday at: http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/going-on-a-holiday