Ryan Werner (Writes Stuff)

NO COAST

7/12/2017

Click that big picture and you'll go to the new album I have out! It's called NO COAST, and it was written and recorded in two short bursts: one in July of 2016 and one in June of 2017. It's the audio companion to my first chapbook, MURMURATION (2012, Passenger Side Books).

The first three tracks are from that first session, where I could only record so loud in my apartment, which I only bring up because I really like the tone I got out of my broken Peavey Rage 158 and Earthquaker Devices Palisades.

The last two tracks are from the second session, where they were written and recorded in the same day. "Everything Breaks/Everything's Broken" was not improvised, but I didn't figure out exactly how I wanted to play the song until the second or third time some of those parts came around. I think I like the narrative of that more than I'd like getting a really good take of the whole thing.

I think Micah Schreiber played some ambient bass stuff on "Purple Cars," so thanks for that, bud.

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MURMURATION is a short story chapbook that was written over the course of the year 2012 when I was a janitor at a Wal-Mart in Galena, Illinois. Here's what Mary Miller (author of Big World, The Last Days of California, Always Happy Hour) said about it:

"The five stories in Ryan Werner's Murmuration, which are dedicated to the Midwest, bring me into the heart of a world where boys drive cars off cliffs and have least favorite strippers, where dreams must be revised into "necessary shapes" by playing guitar in the street at night. Ryan writes with authority, skill, and passion, not only about the Midwest, but about youth and what it means to be young."

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If you download NO COAST from Bandcamp at a pay-whatever-the-hell-you-want price, you will receive a PDF of MURMURATION, a lossless copy of the accompanying NO COAST album, and the audio book version of MURMURATION with the dulcet tones of NO COAST weaving in and out of their respective stories.

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I'm holding out for that teenage feeling . . .

1/15/2017

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Might as well go whole hog while I'm indulging my nostalgia.

I'm joining in on this Albums of My Teenage Years thing a little late. These are some of the real formative years in terms of taste, the foundation of it if not the development of it. Consider these the baby pictures of my musical taste. Draw your own comparisons between the weird friend I totally forgot about inviting to my 5th birthday party and the 1988 live Deep Purple record Nobody's Perfect I got a copy of from my buddy's DJ dad.

We got the internet at home around the time I started high school. I would spend most of my nights on AllMusic.com looking up bands I liked and then downloading (from Napster!) a record each by the bands listed under "Influenced By" "Influenced" and "Similar Artists." So, while I definitely had heard Yeti by Amon Düül II when I was like fifteen or sixteen, it didn't really blow my mind. Listening to New Found Glory was just way better.

Excluding Sesame Street Live, I'd only ever been to three live music performances by the time I graduated high school: jazz fusion guitarist John Scofield (high school jazz band trip), Tool/Tomahawk (loved Tool, helped Tomahawk get booed off stage), and Deicide/Cattle Decapitation (this was fucking awesome). I joined a band in college and started going to shows and, flashing forward to present day, now I'm one of those people who complain about Eureka by Jim O'Rourke not being on Spotify.

In short, this list excludes the really crucial years of my musical growth and is pretty much the same shit listened to by every non-athletic/non-weedian teenage boy in Wisconsin towns with under 2000 people in them, and while being comprehensive isn't the point, it makes more sense to me to list five albums from each year of high school.

Why should I be punished because Drag City like to pretend it's important to
consume music the same way people did twenty years ago?

Freshman Year

This was right in the middle of the prime Ozzfest years, if such a thing exists. I tried to pick the worst of the worst from the pool of what I was listening to--that Kid Rock tape just barely edged out Three Dollar Bill Y'all here because Kid Rock is somehow even worse, a different letter in the Hepatitis alphabet soup--but rest assured knowing there were plenty of nu-metal CDs available for the entrance music for all the backyard wrestling that went down.

Nirvana - Nevermind
(My aunt cleaned hotel rooms and found a copy of Nevermind in there, which I stole. I stole Appetite for Destruction from my other aunt, but didn't get really into it until college.)

Denis Leary - No Cure For Cancer
(Had a dubbed VHS version I watched a hundred times. Finally got a burned CD of the audio and listened a hundred more times.)

Metallica - ReLoad
(I'm pretty sure I thought ReLoad was the first Metallica record.)

Kid Rock - Devil Without A Cause
(Can still rap this front to back. Still haven't heard a Public Enemy tape all the way through, so never trust me on anything.)

Rob Zombie - Hellbilly Deluxe
(I bought this at the mall with my mom. When we walked past Victoria's Secret I said something about Tyra Banks wanting to be my girlfriend. Mom pointed at my Sam Goody bag and said, "You think she wants to drive you around listening to that bullshit?")

Sophomore Year

The restaurant I worked at was awesome for finding new music. When I stayed overnight at one of the dishwasher's house, he had like a half dozen of the other teen dirtballs who worked there over to do shit like watch softcore porn, drink shitty beer, and break his folks giant glass coffee table. It was awesome, even if I only helped with the first and last things on that list. They stole a bunch of pointless shit from cars that were unlocked in the neighborhood after I went to sleep early. I woke up with a lifted copy of Alice In Chains Greatest Hits stuck to my head with shaving cream.

Pantera - Vulgar Display of Power
(It was cool to be tough in my room. Dimebag shreds, don't care what anyone says.)

George Carlin - You Are All Diseased
(I think I saw clips from "The Seven Words You Can't Say On Television" in some documentary or read something online, but this is the tape I ended up with somehow.)

Van Halen - VH1
(An old cook with a mustache at the restaurant told me to check this out. Before I could tell him how rad it is, he got fired for calling one of the waitresses a cunt.)

Weezer - Pinkerton
(That Pinkerton hangover has been going on for fifteen years and counting.)

The Hard + The Heavy: Volume One
(A bought it for the Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, and Rob Zombie, I stayed for Queens of the Stone Age, Fu Manchu, Neurosis, Monster Magnet, and Motorhead. This was one of the biggest game changers ever for me.)

Junior Year

I switched schools and got a car and a girlfriend and even though I can't list it again, really, most of my time was spent listening to Pinkerton. I kept telling people I was really into Dream Theater but I didn't listen to them all that much. I'd started playing guitar by now and was starting to get obsessed with shit I couldn't even begin to approach: Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, Joe Satriani. The G3 DVDs were a pretty big deal to me and a couple buddies, but mostly for the parts where Steve Vai made his cum faces and when Satch jumped over a monitor at the end like a little kid and they freeze-framed it. My buddy Scotty made me a mix with "Blowjob Betty" on it, but it didn't take. Oh, what could have been.

Tool - Lateralus
(I wish I'd gotten into this sooner so I could have been disinterested enough in it by the time I turned 18 and wouldn't pay an old biker named Spanky to give me a tattoo of the multi-colored eye on cover.)

Bill Hicks - Arizona Bay
(I'm almost positive this is 100% related to the Tool obsession. Thankfully, getting a Bill Hicks album is the best possible takeaway from being a Tool fan.)

Tom Petty - Wildflowers
(Listening back, this record feels like it's a thousand hours long. I listened to this non-stop because there was absolutely no way for me to find out about Elliott Smith yet. Tom Petty had to sing about joints and honey bees before I could discover any other music with acoustic guitars.)

Our Lady Peace - Clumsy
(I think I bought this on a lark at Moondog Music because it was like three dollars cheaper than the rest of the used CDs. Unrelated except for also being Canadian, but a guy on a wrestling messageboard I went to was obsessed with Matthew Good Band and I also got into them sometime around this point.)

Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
(My high school girlfriend got into a big fight with me at school when I first bought the Wish You Were Here album cover shirt because, unbeknownst to me, her grandma had caught fire and been hospitalized years before, proving that it was possible to be triggered before Tumblr existed.)

Senior Year

My favorite music-related memory of all of high school happened Senior Year when my buddy Chris bought a school bus. It was an older one, but he got it for $500 with a full tank of gas. He was going to rip all the seats out, add some beds and tables, and use it to go to Canada on fishing trips. He wanted it to be green, so on the day before the last day of school, he asked me if I'd come over and help him tape up some windows, maybe assist with the painting. "Should take an hour, two hours, tops." Eleven hours later, we finally finished. I still remember listening to Radiohead and Pearl Jam and all the other high school stuff we'd been into, blasting from my car with all the windows down, nobody in any of the seats.

Radiohead - The Bends
(A desert island record for me for years and years that pretty much was all I listened to the last half of Senior Year. I printed off the lyrics to the whole record on my first day of college and kept them in my master class binder until I graduated, which, now that I type it out, is possibly the most embarrassing thing on this entire list.)

Steven Wright - I Have a Pony
(The three disc changer for my after-school, play-video-games-for-a-bit sessions were very often the first two Weezer records and I Have a Pony. With all this comedy I listened to, I really should be funnier.)

Blink 182 - Take Off Your Pants and Jacket
(I definitely didn't bring this up a lot around my metalhead buddies.)

Porcupine Tree - Stupid Dream
(No idea how I heard of Porcupine Tree, but, again, their CD was in the used bin at Moondog for like $3.95, so I picked it up. I played and sang an acoustic version of the song "Pure Narcotic" at the National Honor Society dinner at school after the principal asked me to perform, which was the only way I was getting anywhere near the event.)

Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American
(I'm glad nobody told me that these would be some of the more tolerable emo vocals I'd end up hearing in my life because then there's no way I would have ever listened to Mineral.)

Seriously, though, this entire list should just be Pinkerton and its relevant b-sides.

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We Will Live 2 C the Dawn

4/22/2016

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We Will Live 2 C the Dawn

I had 31 Prince albums. It’s not unfair to compare collecting and obsessing over these records to war in that, by the time I finished, I was a completely different person when I started.

I will assume you’ve owned 31 albums by someone, that on your best days, music is this weird lifestyle or religion and, on your worst, just the thing you reflexively do for invisible reasons both molecular and societal, like turning on the television or kissing your children.

The first Prince album I bought was Dirty Mind, when I was 19. The last Prince album I bought was LOtUSFLOW3R, when I was 26. Those and the records between them didn’t necessarily help me through the four bands, two women, three jobs, and countless slices of gas station pizza I’d consumed, but they were there.

Sometimes, I think about the things I’ve had forever. My bones, the sun, the future. To consider life without them is impossible because it simply is. Prince came later, but it’s the same idea. Without him, I might as well just be a pile of skin or be in the eternal, cold darkness. I might as well be done.

* *

I got into many fights with one of my English professors in college. Most of them were about how much of a chump Pip from Great Expectations is or why I should maybe not leave in the middle of class and come back fifteen minutes later with an ice cream cone. These mostly blew over.

I’m not necessarily upset she called Prince sexist, which is something academics say sometimes when they’re deeply frustrated by an unfair system but temporarily frustrated with certain students railroading a discussion about Evelyn Waugh, but I’m still not understanding what she was saying. I think she was claiming that he used sex to control women, which sounds more like stripper-positive logic than anything else.

Prince isn’t sexist. Prince is sexy. He’s a fucking caveman about it sometimes, just laying it all out there in “Soft & Wet” and “Head” and “Gett Off” and about a hundred other songs. I can see where that would sound crass. But being crass and being sexist aren’t the same thing. Especially when he can be so tender about sex, the remorseful want of “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,” the unburdened flirting of “Kiss” or “Let’s Pretend We’re Married.”

What about in “Bambi” where he tries to convince a lesbian to have sex with him? What about the entirety of the song “Sister” just being about fucking his sister? It’s an almost discretionless obsession on sexuality that exceeds bizarre, sure. But sexist? Prince would fuck a plucked cactus if it could give consent.

Of course, I said none of this. I didn’t know anything about what little sex I’d had. Have you ever tried to have sex while listening to Prince? It’s too much of the thing it’s supposed to be, a rush hour of blood to the head.

* *

Musically, I don't know what to say about Prince. You can read about his genius anywhere or, better yet, listen to his music and hear bits of Ernie Isley, Joni Mitchell, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Jimi Hendrix, and a few dozen more godheads from funk, soul, blues, folk, and rock.

The fact that he kept doing it is one of the many the impressive parts, maybe the one that resonates the most with me. He even had time to write "Manic Monday" and "Nothing Compares 2 U" for other people. It's the musical equivalent of Stephen King publishing books as Richard Bachman or, in another dimension, Kirby Puckett deciding to hit home runs for the Brewers in his spare time.

As I dug deeper and deeper into Prince's catalogue, as it became clear that I would need to dedicate serious time and energy into listening to all of his work—to say nothing of actually digesting it. I began to think of the extended Prince discography not as a challenge or a treat or even an inspiration. It's simply a wonder, no different than standing at the foot of the Pyramid of Giza or the Lighthouse of Alexandria and seeing that, though these giant marvels are far from perfect, humanity is that much more incredible for laying claim to them.

* *

The only celebrity musician death that could be worse for me than Prince is Neil Young. In 1987, Neil filmed—but, in a vintage Neil Young move, never released—a “documentary” called Muddy Track that was a bunch of handheld camera footage of bassist Billy Talbot trying to play his idiotic parts on a keytar, Neil eating a boiled egg with psychedelic music in the background, and the general chaos that led to Neil falsely proclaiming he’d never work with his longtime backing band, Crazy Horse, again.

At one point, after a particularly excellent European show, Neil goes to the back of the bus and begins taking off the shoes and several pairs of socks he was wearing during the performance. He’s going on about how great the show was, how the horse was really clompin’ that night. His longtime archivist, Joel Bernstein, is graciously listening, being the sort of person one would have to be to follow Neil Young around for a few decades. At one point, Joel interjects by saying, “Prince is going to be here next week.”

Neil stops for a very brief moment to think about that statement. Prince had just released a double album called Sign ‘O’ the Times. It was a mix of music from his personal vault, pieces of aborted records, and conceptual songs—“the one where the vocals are sped up” or “the one written to fool a friend who only likes hits.” It was not only a massive critical and financial success, but it’s the record where Prince learned to be Prince. I think that’s what clicked for me, listening to Prince be himself to such a degree that he became undeniably special and realizing that I could maybe do that, too.

At that time, Neil Young could barely figure out what Neil Young did, let alone who Neil Young was. He said, “Well, Prince better be pretty fucking good.”

Of course, we all know what Neil knew: Prince was pretty fucking good.

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Too fucked up to love, too soft to hate . . .

1/4/2016

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"Bad Art & Weirdo Ideas" by Beach Slang, one of my favorite tapes from 2015

I made an effort to read more indie lit this year and try to get involved in the community more, which ended up being great, because I'm full of shit for about half of the things I say. So, I read a decent amount of indie lit but also deleted my Facebook because, holy fuck, you writer people sure do whine about a lot of bullshit.

According to Goodreads, I read 171 books for a total of 26,500 pages. The shortest book (19 pages) is Gwen Beatty's Kill Us On the Way Home. The longest book (592 pages) is Blankets by Craig Thompson.

Those book/page numbers sound impressive until you realize how many comic book trade paperbacks I read. Don't worry, you're still probably smarter than me. (smarter than I?) (FUCK.)

Anyway, I had a great time reading again all the way back in 2015. Just like I made it a goal to read more indie lit last year, this year I need to read more books by women. Some of my favorite books (The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison, and Nevers by Megan Martin all come to mind immediately) are strong female voices, so bring them on in 2016. (I already preordered Katie Schmid's Forget Me / Hit Me / Let Me Drink Great Quantities of Clear, Evil Liquor.)

I documented my reading journey on the aforementioned Goodreads, where you can add me as a friend at here. I tried to leave a little review of everything I read/rated. I also post cover shots, capsule reviews, and excerpts of everything I read over on my Instagram account. You can be my friend there, too.

Oh yeah! And I did a few formal book reviews at Heavy Feather Review and [PANK]. If you want me to review your book, give me that shit for free and I probably will. Otherwise, just keep being awesome and I'll get to you eventually unless I get eaten by bears or something.

And now, in alphabetical order based on whatever dumb shorthand I named the image files on my computer, my favorite books of the year.

BEST COMIC THAT IS BETTER THAN MOST LITERATURE

[3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man by Matt Kindt]

A man named Craig keeps growing, won't stop growing. Craig loves and is loved, but he becomes too big for love to work. It can't function. He's a man who you would think has, within him as he expands with every passing moment, room for everything. But what's the counterpoint to that? The world that contains him has less and less room with every passing moment. Which is exactly how love works or doesn't work: not against or in spite of effort, but independently of it.

This year I also read the first five trades of Kindt's MIND MGMT series along with four of his stand-alone comics, and this one blew me away the most. For the things we can control and the things we cannot, Kindt's 3 Story is heartbreaking and life-affirming.

BEST MEMOIR THAT USES A VIDEO GAME I'VE NEVER PLAYED AS A FRAMING DEVICE

[Baldur’s Gate II by Matt Bell]

Bell does what I do with wrestling, what most nerds do with the things they hyperfocus on, and gives it a cerebral twist. This book about Baldur’s Gate II is an apt mix of recapping the game itself and dissecting it in a way that justifies an interest that has continued beyond, through puberty and adulthood and Rush albums both good and bad.

Bell shows the humanity that lies between the lines of any RPG. The actions of our character, Gorion’s Ward, are set up as a series of choices in a system that, regardless of who the player being the character is, eventually brings us all to the same outcome. Birth, middle stuff (food, sex, etc.), death. This should sound familiar.

BEST NOVEL ABOUT BODYBUILDING

[Body by Harry Crews]

What an odd, black comedy. The ending came fast and there were some too-long sections devoted to the b-story of some bodybuilder with an amazing back falling in a deep, mutual love with the hillbilly sister of one of the main characters, but it definitely made me want to check out more Crews.

The idea of "fetishizing surface qualities is dumb" dovetails into "fetishizing anything is dumb" and then finally turns into "everything is dumb." In a way, this is a depiction of the grotesque horrorscape that the world has become, but in another way, it's just a crazy old man being really funny, mostly on purpose.

BEST SHORT STORY COLLECTION THAT MADE ME REMEMBER HOW INHERENTLY SAD ALL YOUTH IS AND BASICALLY JUST GO "OY VEY" A BUNCH

[Bones Buried In the Dirt by David Atkinson]

David Atkinson is one of the best dudes out there in terms of Friend of Writers with capital letters. This book is eerie in how it nails the unassuming (or, often, the incorrectly-assuming) narratives of childhood. The voice is too spot on, nomadic, almost, in terms of the young mind that won't stop moving because it's the only thing it knows how to do.

As the narrator made his mistakes, began to understand how social construct works, I cringed along with him, thinking of my own missteps. If there's one thing we all were, it was wrong at some point. If only we didn't need it.

BEST CHAPBOOK I FINALLY READ AFTER GETTING YEARS AGO

[Box Cutters by Sam Snoek-Brown]

It was weird reading these stories as a proper book, as many of them were passed back and forth between Sam and I for years before Box Cutters was even an idea. "How Long My Bruises Will Last" is still one of my favorite stories, one that opened my eyes to how an economy of language can work and succeed.

I can't say the one thing I learned from Sam in all the years I learned shit from him. Lots of those things are here: don't be flashy, don't say more than you have to, and listen to the damn story.

BEST COMIC SERIES THAT MADE ME WANT TO BEFRIEND A DOWN-ON-THEIR-LUCK POLICE OFFICER / DANCER / BARTENDER / BOXER / HEIRESS / ETC

[Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips]

The only noir I knew before reading these books was Veronica Mars, The Maltese Falcon, and that Joseph Gordon Levitt movie I can't remember the name of. (Brick?)

After these, I dug up some more noir to read and realized that my original reaction of "These are like super fucking good, right?" was right on. Brubaker gives us real characters that flesh out the tropes of the genre and Phillips does the same with his art, leaving shadow over only the necessary parts.

This same duo let me down a bit with Fatale, their other series I read this year, but each arc in the Criminal world checked all the boxes: action, desperation, and integrity.

BEST POETRY COLLECTION ABOUT WRESTLING

[The Dead Wrestler Elegies by Todd Kaneko]

Just like the best dead wrestlers themselves, Todd Kaneko twists up manhood and humanity, for better or worse. We pop in and out of the narrator's relationship with his father and, to a lesser extent, his mother, and if there's one thing I wished for in the book, it's a more standard progression of that narrative. Nonetheless, as those ideas weave in and out, we tangle up personal history with a public half-myth and are certainly not left off in any sort of detrimental state.

This book needs more Dino Bravo getting killed trying to do Trailer Park Boys shit, but other than that, this book is way rad.

BEST SHORT STORY COLLECTION WHERE I DIDN'T ACTUALLY LIKE ANYONE IN THE BOOK

[Death Don’t Have No Mercy by William Boyle]

I could see this book coming out on Black Sparrow Press sometime back in the 70s, but for as much as it owes to that lackadaisical, just-plainly-say-what-the-hell-happened sort of writing, there are other recognizable touch-points of minimalist/crime writing that give the book a lived-in sort of feeling.

I got a bit lost in the stories at different points. Things start to blend together, and one character's bad decisions, lustful gazes towards female bartenders, and schlepped drinks turn into those of another a little too easy. I figured I'd had my fill by the time I reached the last two stories in the collection, that had become harsh background noise at that point, but I kept going and got to read the two best stories in the whole collection. If nothing else, "In the Neighborhood" and "Here Come the Bells" are two of the best stories I read all year.

BEST NOVEL WHERE ALL THE CHARACTERS TALK JUST LIKE ME AND MY BUDDIES

[F250 by Bud Smith]

The large and easy free-floating heart of the beats and the vernacular of a bunch of dickhead guys who never went to college figuring out the best way to call each other dickheads when they can't decide how a snare drum should sound. What that ends up being is some people noot necessarily understood, but known, and wholly so.

This is working class writing that isn't dumb or an accidental parody of itself and, holy shit, it's really damn funny. To be expected from a book written by a funny dude like Bud Smith who can cut to the quick of what it means for a guy in New Jersey to be in a band called Ottermeat and crash his Ford F-250 into pretty much fucking everything.

BEST POETRY COLLECTION NOT ABOUT WRESTLING

[First Course In Turbulence by Dean Young]

About a dozen really great poems in here. The best ones make great use of Young's randomness, putting a line-of-thought through the things nobody else would have come up with. There's not a formulaic funny/funny/sad or sad/sad/funny sort of rhythmic cleverness here. Instead, Young's best work in this collection is rich like the world, everything always there.

The worst poems here are obtuse, like a bad cut-up or tolerable alt lit. Still, when Young's ideas and language meet up and come alive together, holy fuck.

Excited to read more, as I have several of his collections I'm finally jumping into after reading him here and there in anthologies.

BEST COMIC SERIES THAT WAS INCREDIBLE UNTIL RUINED BY ALIENS AND TIME TRAVEL

[Irredeemable by Mark Waid and Peter Krause]

It was so perfect, like an Alice Munro short story: the pace, the aversion to cheap tactics, the humanity. Waid took his love of classic comics and turned it inside out with shockingly apt writing. He cut the hokey bullshit from Superman and pushed the rest over a cliff.

And then aliens. And then an inescapable prison-planet. And then time travel! I'm trying to keep this list positive, but the second half of this run can get fucked. I can't recommend trades 1-5 enough and can't shake my head hard enough at trades 6-10.

BEST CHAPBOOK BY SOMEONE WHO HAS SEEN ME NAKED

[Kill Us On the Way Home by Gwen Beatty]

Some gal sees her ex-boyfriend's wife and sees that she's pregnant and so she herself pretends to be pregnant so she can bond with her new not-really-a-friend friend who has no idea who she is. Her boyfriend who doesn't like her and who she doesn't really like makes her paper-mache bellies so she can look the part.

A kid with a friend who has a phantom limb blows all his settlement money on cab fair to ride around and shoot seagulls in parking lots. These sisters go on a quiz show and try to not explode from the inside out with either rage or facts about bugs.

This all feels so accurate and true to the malaise of a certain place in the world, a certain time in life. Is "kill us on the way home" a good thing, like you're driving somewhere with someone and they don't want to die just yet, want to live to see what the world is going to deliver them when they reach their destination, or it something darker, something of a standard request from what can only be the last place to go or be?

BEST ONGOING COMIC SERIES I DON'T UNDERSTAND, NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT

[The Manhattan Projects by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra]

[Honorable Mention: Like a Velvet Glove Cast In Iron by Daniel Clowes]

This is an alternate history romp where the atomic bomb is just the start of some intergalactic, interdimensional horseplay involving a cannibalistic Oppenheimer, a Fonzie-like Einstein, and the displaced super-brain of FDR. There's also a dog in a spacesuit and lots of secret experiments and motives that I just don't understand.

I stopped reading East of West for similar reasons. I liked it a lot, but the long-haul for Hickman is a bit too long for me. The Manhattan Projects is either really great or it's so up its own ass that I just think it's great so I'll think I'm kind of smart.

BEST WORST ONGOING COMIC SERIES I WON'T STOP READING OR COMPLAINING ABOUT

[Morning Glories by Nick Spenser and Joe Eisma]

The seventh volume starts with "NINE YEARS AGO" and I don't even know that what that means. If I'm reading a book with words AND pictures, and I can't get my brain in the right spot, there's a problem. I guess I did fail math three times in college. Maybe I'm just a moron.

This series is endlessly convoluted, introducing new characters and plot threads and never delivering a conclusion--satisfactory or not--to any of it. In reading it, I wonder constantly why this is a 100 issue run when surely a tighter 60 would have done just fine. Spencer claims to have every detail of every issue planned out. NO FUCKING WAY, DUDE. SHUT IT.

Basically, this is entertaining in the micro and fun to complain about in the macro. And Casey Blevins is jailbait cosplay guilt-porn.

BEST COMIC SERIES I COULDN'T PUT DOWN

[Scalped by Jason Aaron and RM Guera]

This is a double-agent/noir story done so right that's it's way more than just a double-agent/noir story. The reservations featured across the book are populated by alcoholics and addicts and gamblers and thieves.It's beyond gritty. It's grimy, the pages almost thick with a history as sad as it is rich.

It doesn't slow down, either. There are the occasional issues that develop a single character, either through flashback or single POV, but even those move the narrative along in a certain direction. Mostly, though, it follows Dash Bad Horse and Chief Red Crow as they try in their own ways to make the world the way it should have been all along if they didn't fuck it up in the first place.

I read ten trades of this in six days, and the only reason it took me that long is because I had to wait for the library to get the last few of them back in.

BEST POETRY COLLECTION BY SOMEONE WHO LET ME SLEEP ON THEIR COUCH

[A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us by Caleb Curtiss]

My boy Caleb Curtiss let me stay at his house once. I left my book on a cabinet in his dining room and took one of his with me. Glad I did.

The title poem/essay hybrid could have easily been a gimmicky jumble-fuck, but it ended up being the only way that tale could be told, the confusion and twisting of lost siblings and lost time, some more lost than others and none of it close. Probably the best poem I read all year.

BEST COMIC SERIES THAT, ON PAPER, SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING I'D HATE BUT IS ACTUALLY SUPER RAD

[Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson]

A cyberpunk adventure following a Hunter S. Thompson stand-in as he fights against a dystopian future being buttfucked by an echo of Richard Nixon and a parody of Tony Blair.

Sounds like 100% horseshit, but at the end of the second trade, I felt a bit of a connection with the characters, or at least was entertained by the gonzo antics, and by the time the main narrative started rolling towards the end of the third trade, I realized that Warren Ellis made me like something I by all means should have hated. (Just like he did with time travel in Planetary, which I also read this year.) See what can happen when your character believes in something and has to fight to get it?

I loved Darick Robertson's art in The Boys, too, so seeing more her was goddamn delightful.

BEST ONGOING COMIC SERIES I CAUGHT UP ON AFTER FIVE YEARS OF NOT READING AND WILL PROBABLY NOW PUT DOWN FOR ANOTHER FIVE YEARS

[The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard]

I read the first eight trades of this back in like 2009 or 2010 and thought it was pretty good. A couple of months ago I saw the library had the sixteen trades that had been released since then and figured I'd pick it back up.

It was really boring for awhile! Then it got good. Then it got boring again. Then it got REALLY GOOD. Last one I read was all right. I like complaining about it slightly less than I like complaining about Morning Glories. When it's on--that is, when Kirkman's not ham-fisting some exposition or character development--it's every bit as good as lots of people say it is.

The weird thing is how good it really can be sixteen or twenty one trades in. I'd be completely tapped for ideas at this point, and the fact that this isn't the John Cena of comics kind of blows my mind.

BEST BOOK I WROTE

[Soft by Ryan Werner]

It's 256 tiny tiny chapters that make up this rock and roll morality play about music and money and caring about shit and bending yourself in the shape of a C or a V or maybe a Y trying to fit between all three. Some people really liked it! Most people didn't read it. (Don't worry, I get it.)

If you want a copy, you can buy one here. If you want to trade a book or a record or a VHS or some cookies or pretty much anything you made for a copy of this book or any other book I wrote, you can email me here.

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Questionably Terminal: The Summerbruise Book Tour Recap

8/13/2015

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If I could afford to pay financial advisors, they'd probably tell me to stop going on book tours. They would also be confused as to why "magnum ta tshirt size m" is one of the auto-searches on my eBay home page. Thankfully, nobody tells me what to do with my money except my landlord, the people who run utility companies, and Great Lakes Financial Services.

What I choose to do with the extra $40 a month I have left is up to me. So, for the past three years, I've been going on these book tours. Some people I tell this to are confused as to what this entails. It's not a complicated process, though I can understand why you'd think you'd be missing something considering the crux of the whole thing is "I drive a long time to read something for twelve minutes and then hope I can find somewhere to sleep."

Making a book tour happen--at least at the level I do it--doesn't require an agent or getting dressed in the morning. I've gone into it a bit more (as well as other related issues) in an essay I wrote for Passages North a couple years back, but here I'll boil it down to only setting up a tour.

The first thing I did was decide how long I wanted to be gone for. Some people can only decide how long they can be gone for, but because I work at a preschool and give guitar lessons, that leaves me with an entire three months where I have about four hours of shiftable responsibility a week. I don't have to worry about doing the dumb thing the smart way. While tour is a fun and a worthwhile experience for some people, I really suggest you don't wreck your life trying to get a couple weeks off from unloading a dock so you can drive to Boise and read to nobody. Writing and reading as a public exercise is unreasonable enough already.

In the past, I'd done twelve days at a time. Since those went well enough, I figured I'd try seventeen days this time. I'll talk more later about how stupid this was, but for now, that's the arbitrary number I went with.

After that, I went to Google Image search, typed in "map of us," and then looked at this picture for awhile. I wanted to get to the East Coast and back without having to kill myself on drives and also without having to email too many people who don't know me and don't give a fuck about me, as opposed to people who are one or the other and can be easily shamed or annoyed into helping me.

(I always make sure I have alternate cities listed where available, too. So, I wrote down "Peoria, IL" for a stop, but if I couldn't find anything there--which is likely because Peoria kind of blows--I knew that I could look in Normal/Bloomington, Springfield, or Champaign/Urbana as well. Decide ahead of time how far out of your way you want to go to do a show, too. My buddy Bob tours all the time and doesn't give a fuck if he has to zig zag or backtrack to play a show as long as he doesn't have to drive more than five hours to do it. I'm more likely to take a day off and save what I'm assuming is a headache and can confirm is money.)

I put all of this into a spreadsheet just to make sure I could organize it all and not email the same place twice or book two cities on the same day or do any other number of things that would make me look like a jerkoff.

I had two seven hour drives on this tour and the rest were between two and three hours, for the most part. Facebook has a feature that allows you to search your friends list by city, or at least the city they have listed, if any, on their profile page. I routed the tour (for the end of July) all the way back in March, which is when I started adding people on Facebook who lived in the cities I wanted to go to and who I also had a lot of mutual friends with. That way, when I actually needed to start booking a month or so after that, they either recognize me as The Guy Who Keeps Posting Stuff About Aerosmith Tapes or have already deleted me and I don't need to worry about it.

You may struggle with the idea of community, and I understand that, but some of these people will be very useful to you. Maybe someday you can be useful to them and maybe, even better, be useful to them because you're a buddy.

I couldn't find a human being in every place, so I had to research venues, too. This involves attaching "reading event" "poetry reading" "coffee shop" "diy" "lounge" and "hardcore" to the names of cities, depending on where you're okay with reading. I've been to all sorts of places and read with all sorts of acts, but you might not be cool with reading in someone's living room to a bunch of kids with what appear to be unfinished haircuts. That's fine if you don't, but places like that are out there if you're into it.

Once I had the names and contact information of people and venues in the cities I was potentially going to, I had to do the shittiest part of the booking process and actually start contacting them.

Setting up an event for any creative performance is the ultimate yelp into the ether. Seventeen days means dealing with at least seventeen different people. This is before you factor in dealing with places that book by committee or people who will forward you other people or multiple people at a venue all checking the booking email address and not communicating with one another. Everyone's going to want something different from you except for a few things:

1) Nobody wants to read an extended synopsis, especially in the scientifically abstract, about the work you're touring behind. This includes long blurbs, where you were at emotionally when creating it, and how it's been received so far.

2) Nobody wants to deal with a superstar. Don't want so much that you seem like a pain in the ass.

3) Nobody wants to deal with a pissant. Don't want so little that you don't seem to be worth anyone's time.

4) Everybody wants to have an easygoing, artistically fulfilling experience, including you. So present yourself, briefly, as you are--or at least the parts of yourself that aren't shitty.

Here's the template for my (not-perfect-so-don't-hold-me-to-it) booking email:

[Name of Person if Available]

This is Ryan from Passenger Side Books, a small micro-press. I live in Wisconsin and like to leave it every once in awhile, so I'm currently planning another book tour this summer. I hope to come through [City] on [Date]. Maybe we can work out an event that evening with me and some local writers or musicians?

I usually read for about twenty minutes, but can do longer or shorter as the event necessitates. I love sharing bills with acoustic folks, hardcore bands, heavy metal belly dancers (Champaign, IL! What a weird city!), or anything else creative people can think of. I'm easy to please.

[If someone sent me this person's way, I namedrop them here and also probably say something that proves I've visited their website and know a little about them. Everyone's so goddamn special.]

Below is a big generic bio with publication history and all that other stuff some people are curious about sometimes. I have posters and handbills I can send ASAP if we set something up. Let's be in touch about some good times.

Stay great,

RW

**********

Ryan Werner is the author of several short short story collections and chapbooks out on Jersey Devil Press and Passenger Side Books. His newest book, a novella called Soft, is a 250+ chapter rock and roll morality play. Of his work, Mary Miller (author of Big World and The Last Days of California) said, "Ryan writes with authority, skill, and passion, not only about the Midwest, but about youth and what it means to be young." His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in the Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Smokelong Quarterly, [PANK], BULL: Men's Fiction, Juked, and many other places of varying notoriety and popularity.

http://www.ryanwernerwritesstuff.com

"What do you mean you're a nineteen year old girl going to school for comparative literature and you've never cranked up 'Combination' or 'Last Child'?"

Not long after sending my first round of emails, I sat back and waited for the flood of emptiness and spooky radio silence to come flooding in. And flood it did. I must have heard back from zero, maybe even one person within the first couple of days. I usually wait about three business days before I send a polite follow up (Just checking in on this, as I know how easy it is for stuff to fall through the cracks. And that's it.) and then after a couple more days I try a different place or person.

When I contact a place, I change their name to purple in my spreadsheet. If they get back to me and confirm, I change it to green. If they never get back to me or can't do the show, I change it to red. If they get back to me with "lol a/s/l?" I stop trying to book tours in chat rooms.

That's pretty much it in terms of the heavy lifting. It's the easiest and hardest thing. I learned that some think I'm not even worth being told to fuck off. A prompt "NO, EAT SHIT" from a person or venue would be off-putting, but welcome. I worked for a year and a half on my newest book, spent hours researching people and venues to contact, and put even more time and money into moving things past a creative stage. Just because I worked hard doesn't mean I matter, but it also doesn't mean I should stop working hard. At least not at this point, where I can still do the majority of this work while eating ice cream and watching Robocop.

Repeat the contact process until tour is booked. On the days when you're waiting for a response, research more people and venues. There's usually some stuff that is missed after only one pass. There are Facebook pages for DIY scenes and venues. Do the homework. Don't contact a coffee shop just because they're a coffee shop. Make sure they actually do the kind of thing you want to do. Can you imagine trying to book a tour twenty years ago? Holy shit. Use the information that's out there. There's no excuse for being a dummy these days.

Yes: I received some help along the way. Really, when it comes down to it, it's all help. These people will be thanked extensively. Everyone else will be shamed. Let's look at the tour.

DAY ONE: NORMAL, IL

I got into town and went to this comic shop where, like almost every other comic shop, I didn't buy or touch anything. I love comics, but don't understand all of the quirks about the subculture. As much as I wanted to play with the Venom figure, I didn't. Next door was a record store where I picked up some cheap 45s (Alice Cooper, Neil Young, The Cult, The Bellrays) and, after my comic store wandering, felt especially hospitable to the people in there talking loudly about how they couldn't believe they found some Beatles records or some shit.

Steve Halle met me at this record shop and we went and got something to drink. He runs the Re:Verse reading series and does a ton of work putting out wild, otherwise-lots-to-the-world poetry books. We talked a bit about David Foster Wallace, how he wrote most of Infinite Jest in Normal and how I've tried to read it about nine or ten times. I think the Sparknotes for it is longer than any of my books.

I set up in a really cool looking part of campus that was great other than nobody was there. A guy with a hand-drum showed up and made it worse. Then a guy with an acoustic guitar, which bummed me out just out of instinct.

People slowly filtered in and those musician dude played and it wasn't bad at all. Nice guys, too. Good cover of "My Sweet Lord" by George Harrison. Rachel Burns read and she's way more soft spoken than I thought she'd be, a very low voice that you might hear coming from the mouth of a woman who poisons people in a detective movie from the '50s. Then I read and, other than the wind blowing my props all around, it was fine. I sold an absurd amount of stuff and stayed at Rick and Rose's place where we were up too late talking about Billy Corgan. They're the best people.

DAY TWO: CHAMPAIGN, IL

This was about an hour drive, so I had more than enough time to walk around to the world's worst pawn shops for a bit and totally not buy a solid state Crate practice amp for $130. I found a Barry Hannah book that turned out to not be that good--it turns out you can't write your redemption like you wrote your destruction--and then sat at The Blind Pig, where I'd be reading.

The reading went well. Everyone was very cute and there was no wind, two things I was grateful for.

Caleb Curtiss set the whole thing up for me (and then bailed to go to Pitchfork on Hobart duty, handing the reading off to John Dudek, who was also incredible) and let me stay at his house. I read his book The Taxonomy of the Space Between Us and it's damn good. The standouts were a multi-section poem called "Dream" and a poem/essay hybrid that has the same title of the book I don't feel like typing out again. It could have been a bad gimmick in someone else's hands, but it ends up being the only way to show the confusing, twisting loss of a sibling and how time never really quite slips away as much as it readjusts itself. And, he has really awesome shampoo in his shower.

DAY THREE: BLOOMINGTON, IN

The CSI pinball machine wasn't in the student union on campus, so I had to play a Monopoly machine with a messed up left flipper. Horseshit.

Austin Hayden made the reading happen (with a big assist from Maggie Su) because he's the best dude. We read at this gay bar called The Back Door. There were astronauts riding unicorns painted on the walls and right after the reading finished a big dance party broke out, which I'm guessing is like a sort of daily Rapture that could happen at any moment.

We were the only white people on a six-person reading and it was at a gay bar. I don't get to hear a lot of non-white voices, in non-straight atmospheres or otherwise, so this was exciting for a small-town dude like me. Turns out it's a big world with lots of different people living in it. Who knew?

We did karaoke at this place called The Office Lounge. It's a liquor store for about the first ten feet and then it turns into a bar. I killed "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It" to the point where the woman running the karaoke night bowed to me. Tulo and Austin split a gallon of gin and tonic and did "How's It Gonna Be" by Third Eye Blind. Then Austin almost got beat up by an old man for walking on a table during "Authority Song" and we left shortly after.

Our buddy Dillon put us up that night in his apartment above a 24-hour donut shop. Austin, Dillon, and our boy Tulo, who was coming along for this reading and the next one, got drunk and I got fat. I woke up in the middle of the night with a bit of puke in my mouth and my first thought wasn't Maybe I shouldn't have eaten three donuts and a pint of milk before bed, but instead was I bet one of those guys puked in my mouth a little and then left.

DAY FOUR: CINCINNATI, OH

The Midbestern Megan Martin made this one be a big deal. She resurrected her and Lisa Howe's reading series IMPORTANT PEOPLE, which we totally aren't worthy of. About forty people sat there and listened to everyone read and they even laughed at this dumb joke about Mamie Eisenhower in the section of the novella I read. Best reading of the tour, easily. It was especially great as Megan was there and her book Nevers really helped me write my novella. Because rules are dumb, as she proved over and over in that book.

After the reading, we all ended up at the greasy bar called The Rake's End. Some punk gal talked to me about performance art for just a bit too long and then Tulo talked to my girlfriend on the phone about Gossip Girl for not quite long enough, according to the two of them. I crashed out not long after getting back to Megan's place and eating some pudding.

DAY FIVE: DAY OFF IN CINCINNATI, OH

My buddy Sara Tucker (who did awesome at the reading the day before) put me up and took me to an arcade where I got fucked over by yet another Monopoly pinball machine. I don't want to talk about it.

DAY SIX: HARRISONBURG, VA

This was one of the seven-hour drives. Harrisonburg came about because I couldn't get anything in Columbus, OH or Pittsburgh, PA. Columbus falling through was just a matter of lack of communication and people not getting back to me on time. Pittsburgh was a bit odd in that I had a place booked and when I wrote back to confirm where to send fliers to, I got silence. This ate up a big chunk of time I could have used to book another show.

I contacted Joan Bauer who runs the Hemingway Summer Reading series and she told me they usually book 4-5 months in advance, that I can come and read at the open mic for three minutes if I want (and they usually focus on poetry), and then she sent me the schedule for the rest of the series even though you could literally fit the country of Germany between where I live and where the reading series takes place. She also suggested that if I do come through that week, that I shouldn't book a Tuesday, as she was expecting a big draw for the poets they have on deck already.

Emails like that and the process I'm assuming goes along with running that series make me think that it and events like it are the reason so many people think it's hard to make readings and tours happen in the first place. Best of luck to Joan and the like, but there's most certainly a better, more writer-friendly way to do things.

For example! When I got in touch with some people in Harrisonburg, they said there was one reading they do every month and it just so happened to be on the day I was looking for. So they added me to the event. I'm definitely not saying that touring acts should be bent over backwards for, because sometimes shows and scenes are saturated enough as is, but there's a difference between saturation and clueless exclusivity.

Enough complaining. What a beautiful drive through West Virginia. Wild and wonderful might be a bit of a stretch, but the reading was great and I had an excellent cheeseburger. Tip of the hat to Paul Somers for both. A kind woman whose name I can't remember let me sleep on her couch and she didn't even murder me. Some dude in a Kid Rock shirt who I think was tweaking on meth also didn't murder me, which was somewhat of a larger concern.

DAY SEVEN: BUTTFUCKED IN WASHINGTON DC

On the drive to Harrisonburg the day before, I got two flat tires and an email from Joel at The Electric Maid in Washington DC. I got the tires fixed the next morning. The reading, on the other hand, not so much.

Joel told me that, despite the reading being booked for two months, he couldn't find any local support. I was still invited to show up and read, but he said it'd probably only be him and the soundguy. Not a lot of money in that, he said. I took to Facebook, explaining my situation, how the show was cancelled and I'd take any last minute help I could get. After some comments from people, Joel said that he never cancelled the show, and I could still read if I wanted to.

So I cancelled the show, pretty much at the request of the promoter, who didn't promote shit.

I spent my day at the zoo. I don't like animals, so watching them in captivity is great. My friend Kaila took me to a Mexican restaurant where I explained how wrestling works, using the rise of Daniel Bryan as a representation for the great American story of underdog/redemption. I did some laundry and slept on her guest bed.

Parking is a nightmare there.

Essentially: fuck DC.

DAY EIGHT: PHILADELPHIA, PA

Drove straight to an arcade and played the best game of skiball of my entire life. Met up with my friend Marissa, who was kind enough to let me crash at her place, and had a cheese steak. I ate it with ketchup and was shunned.

I finally met Mike Sweeney, the guy who made my first book happen and made this novella not be a big pile of shit. I was pretty sure it was Mike until he was leaving and told me that he could have just been someone that Mike paid to say he was Mike, and because that was a weird enough thing, I entertained the possibility.

Philly sure didn't like me! I got up, read to a group of ten people who didn't make a sound, and then walked back to my merch to the sound of polite clapping. Then everyone left the room. Then I got an email that my reading in Akron was cancelled because the house got bedbugs.

Essentially: fuck Philly.

DAY NINE: BROOKLYN, NY

$35 in tolls just to drive from Philly to Brooklyn and then go insane once I get there because people won't stop honking at me when I refuse to block an intersection.

I went to a record/comic shop called Vinyl Fantasy that totally ruled. Ilana was kind enough to not only give me free comics, but she talked some dude in the store out of spending like $2000 on some ponzi scheme.

The reading was at a place called Molasses Books. I was uneasy about reading at a bookstore, because bookstores take cuts, often large ones, of books sold from the people reading. I understand taking a cut from a book you inventory, because it takes up space and you need to pay someone to do the transaction. However, if I'm walking into your bookstore, reading, and then closing my suitcase of books and walking out of the store, the store itself doesn't deserve any of they money from the books I sold. Certainly not 20-40% as is standard.

You, as a book store owner/operator, let me stand in a spot and read. This draws customers to the store, because it's an event. It's something going on that makes people go into the store when they otherwise wouldn't and possibly buy something. If a bookstore wants a cut on something they aren't going to inventory, ask them for a similar cut on books they sold independently of you while you were in the store. That's the only fair way to do things.

Anyways, Molasses Books was just a coffee shop that sold used books. They didn't give a fuck about getting a cut. I got to finally meet my friends Nicole Audrey Spector and Zachary Lipez, both super talented writers I had only previously known from the internet. Nicole is very funny and pretty and Zach is even funnier but slightly less pretty. They seemed to hit it off about being freelance writers, which is great, because then I don't need to talk about how I make mac & cheese for toddlers. I would have loved to hang out more, but I needed to get the fuck out of Brooklyn.

I drove two hours into Pennsylvania and checked into a hotel.

Essentially: fuck the east coast.

DAY TEN: NOT SHIT GOING ON IN WHITE HAVEN, PA

Home of Liz Lemon!

My dad travels for a living. The company pays for the hotels, but the membership points go to him personally. I stayed in this Comfort Inn for two nights and it cost money that was pretty much imaginary for every single person involved. I downloaded wrestling, read comics, and ate lots of Wheat Thins.

I guess I could have stayed in hotels every night, but that just seemed like the wrong way to do things and missing out on some of the real tour experience. Also, I was running out of momentum and needed a quiet place to not get dressed for awhile. Doing the tour alone only really seemed like a bad idea once it got to this extended downtime.

DAY ELEVEN: "PIZZA" IN CLEVELAND, OH

I couldn't find anything in Cleveland or Akron to get added to last minute. I drove up to Cleveland to see my friends Russell and Julie, who just happened to be on a little weekend getaway. I had a weird pizza with brats on it and then drove to a different Comfort Inn where I downloaded different wrestling and read the same comics. I bought myself a Mountain Dew and it was all about as exciting as you'd think.

DAY TWELVE: TOLEDO, OH

I found this bowling alley in Akron with 48 lanes and 22 pinball machines, so I hit that up before I left. The new KISS machine is kind of weak, but I set the loop record on the Black Knight 2000. Played this pirate game called Black Rose that was really awesome. All the instructions were in German, so I really didn't know what I was doing. Bounced around to a bunch of other ones and before I knew it, three hours, ten dollars, and my ability to talk comfortably to people were all gone.

This dude Danny was having the reading at his house. There were no bedbugs, which I was stoked about. It was the first show he'd done in awhile after doing them for years and years. He has a two year old daughter who I played with most of the time because I was really missing (some of) my Montessori friends. She had a Care Bear outfit on and she was wild until I got up and read, at which point she was lulled to sleep. If you're under five or over eighty, you can sleep at my readings and I won't be sad about it.

This seven year old girl sang her first song ever in front of people, about her cat who died. Not a dry eye in the house.

I talked to some older dude about thrash metal for what I think was a couple of hours. Once someone mentions Kreator, time disappears.

DAY THIRTEEN: ANN ARBOR, MI

I showed up to the venue super early and after telling two different people that I was there for the reading that night, a third came up to me and told me she didn't know anything about the reading. I tried getting in touch with Barry Graham, who set the whole thing up, but he wasn't getting back to me. A man named Leo showed up and told me he was running the show now, since Barry was out of town. The woman who told me she didn't know anything about a reading wasn't lying: she forgot to mark it on the events calendar and hadn't hung any of the fliers up I'd sent in.

A guy in a Ramones shirt started soundchecking an acoustic guitar. Can you see where this is headed?

He got halfway done performing to his three friends at a table in front, Leo and his girlfriend off to the side, me behind them, and two other guys behind me. Leo told me I was up next and I showed him the event page online, specifically the part where it said there were going to be four readers, a band, and three comedians. One of the readers was in the back of the room. He told me he didn't know the other one. Barry was out of town and he was supposed to read, too.

The guy playing acoustic guitar wasn't the listed musical act. Leo didn't know who one of the comedians was. A notification popped up from one of the other comedians, saying that she and her guy (the other other comedian) though the show was cancelled and now they can't make it.

The guy in the Ramones shirt finishes playing and in the time it took me to walk on stage and ask everyone if they could hear me without a microphone, he and his three friends packed up his guitar and walked directly out of the building.

I read for four minutes. Red Hot Chili Peppers were blasting on the jukebox across the bar the entire time. An old guy came up and bought my book and said, "Good effort."

The next guy to read came up with two yellow legal pads and read some poems about beer league softball.

I really wanted to go home.

DAY FOURTEEN: GRAND RAPIDS, MI

One of my best friends, Josh, and his wife, Abby, live in Grand Rapids, so this is where the tour was going to hopefully turn back into what it was on the first several days. Except between them working and having a newly fostered ten-year-old in the house and me going to a reading that lasted for almost five hours, we didn't get to see much of each other. (I did, however, get to meet the totally rad Todd Kaneko, who I'll hopefully be doing a wrestling-themed tour with someday.)

The reading was fun, but exhausting. It was the last reading this house venue was doing before the people who ran it moved away, so everyone was invited to read. Twenty people, all with notebooks, read for about ten to fifteen minutes each. By the end of the night I think even I forgot I was selling books. Lots of great people, but it was a marathon.

DAY FIFTEEN: NOT KALAMAZOO, MI

My reading in Kalamazoo fell through that morning for a story even more convoluted than all of this. It boils down to me not hitting "reply all" on an email chain.

So I went home. Gwen was happy to see me. I was happy to see her. The next morning, I got my haircut for the first time in twelve years. Thanks to the people who wanted to see me look even more irresistible and some money from my own pocket, I was then able to donate $750 to a local women's shelter. They gave me a tour of the place and, other than the circumstances that bring women there, it's better than my or your college dorm. They do the good work.

DAY SIXTEEN: RACINE, WI

This was supposed to be South Bend, IN. It was all set up through a guy named Myles, who then handed it off to two people who couldn't have given a fuck at all. By the time they really really stopped responding to my email check-ins, I was already screwed.

Thankfully, my friend Josh Hensley from AMAZING SUPER AWESOME CHECK IT THE FUCK OUT ALREADY band The Rutabega in South Bend checked in to see where I was reading, found out it was nowhere, and got me added to this show they were playing in Racine. Gwen and I drove out for it and had dinner with my buddy Jay, another one of the coolest wrestling fans I know, before heading over to the venue.

The second band played the world's longest set for a second band on a three band bill, especially for a band that was just bass and drums. No tonal variety for 55 minutes is only awesome if you're a test pattern.

I read a very, very short story because by the time I got up there it was already about midnight on a Friday. Not exactly the prime time to be telling people to be quiet and listen to flash fiction, but people mostly obliged and I was happy to be there with so many buddies and good tunes and pretty everyone except that band that played their interpretation of Led Zeppelin's live at Royal Albert Hall set.

Jeff Moody put us all up at his place because he, like so many other people mentioned here, is the best dude.

DAY SEVENTEEN: CHICAGO, IL

Gwen and I stopped into a small press festival in Griffith, IN before heading to the reading. It was pretty tiny, but for a first year, it seemed to have everyone there into it. The best part was meeting Bud Smith, who might be the silver-tongued devil people are always talking about.

We met up with Michael Lambert, who was supposed to the tour with me but bailed because he's a punk bitch (who got funding from his university to go to a retreat and blah blah blah FUCK YOU, MIKE). All three of us read at this new place called the Two-Hearted Queen, to the two owners and our friend Liz. She was glad we waited for her, but if we didn't, we wouldn't have had a third of the crowd.

The next day I deactivated my Facebook (SO SHARE THIS POST ON THERE) (AND KEEP IN TOUCH WITH ME ON INSTAGRAM), which I hopefully won't need again until I start booking next year's tour. If nothing else, I got my books into the hands of people who wouldn't have otherwise got them and saw some things I wouldn't have otherwise saw. It's like Tumblr except, you know, real.

LESSON LEARNED FROM TOUR

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The first 36 chapters of a novella called Soft

6/1/2015

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I wrote a novella called Soft. It has 258 chapters. Because I don't even know how I'd go about publishing only a section of it in a literary journal--and because I'm putting the thing out myself anyways and because I'm too impatient to wait for someone else to make me a priority and because because because--I'm putting the first 36 chapters up here as a preview. So here's what you're not buying, people of the world. At least now you can know why you're not buying it.

One person who read it was Megan Martin, author of the book Nevers out on Caketrain Press. It's a fantastic book, disjointed and shattered and told in the sort of little absurd pieces I can relate to and crib heavily from. Not to hit the inside baseball too hard, but we call this a "blurb" in the book business. It's a very weird tradition of using the often-hypothetical drawing-power of someone else's name, sometimes your friends and sometimes not, to sell more books. Following Megan's blurb--and I will call her Megan, as I've met her and she's lovely and this is one of those instances where she is a friend and I'm happy to have her name attached to this book, even if it's only tangential and even if it doesn't make anyone buy it--there are some fake blurbs from real authors that you may treat as fact if it'll make you buy my goddamn book.

High visibility, folks.

Anyways, here are some blurbs.

"With the wit and heartbreak of Amy Hempel, the satirical eye of George Saunders, and the "we're on this earth to fart around" mentality of Kurt Vonnegut, the 258 micro-chapters of Ryan Werner's Soft tell the story of a failed rock band on tour. In sharp, spare, laugh-out-loud prose, Werner's misfit characters struggle to find their purpose in a world defined by alienation, death, and soul-sucking capitalism. These characters desire more from life, but are unsure what more looks like or how to get it. While they're figuring it out, they cope by trading clever one-liners, eating a lot of gas station food, obsessing over the world's extinction, and mailing koan-like postcards sacross the country. This is a small, smart book that asks the big questions about the age we're stuck in: What is the good life? Does it exist? How can we create authentic selves and art in a world that values neither?" - Megan Martin, author of Nevers

"I shared a Facebook status Ryan Werner wrote one time. It was about the Rick Derringer song 'Rock & Roll Hoochie Koo' This book is about music and girls. Really groundbreaking stuff, I'm sure." - Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity

"I read this book outside. Have you ever been outside? It's wonderful out there. Let me tell you about Montana for awhile." - Rick Bass, author of The Watch

"I wish I wasn't dead so I could enjoy this book a little more. I hear there's a part where a man goes shopping at a grocery store. He's possibly distraught. His life hasn't caught up with him yet, or vice versa. The years haven't disappeared because the years don't take the easy way out. He picks up an orange, a plantain. 'Who picks these?' he asks a young woman who is mostly her vest but partially her frown, the frown itself partial in terms of the world. 'I don't know,' she replies. 'I just don't know.' And that's probably what this book is like. Probably." - Raymond Carver, author of Cathedral

"Decent book, terrible Jew. Three stars." - Grace Paley, author of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

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I've spent the last two seasons listening to Japanese dudes tap on their guitars

5/4/2015

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Mirror/Low-Pass Split EP

It's been like seven months since I've checked in with something that wasn't just about music or wrestling. Let's update.

1) I started and then stopped reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman books. There's only so much I can take of a surrogate fantasy character standing around overlooking a bunch of rocks and musing on dreams. That's why they have messageboards and books about spiders. Got through the first five books and tapped out.

2) I went to a Ring of Honor show and met a bunch of wrestlers who do too many moves and don't sell anything.

2b) AJ Styles, in walking from the autograph tables to the backstage area, accidentally kicked over some dude's can of Coke, locked eyes with me as I watched him do it, and then walked right past me like nothing happened.

2c) He later murdered Kyle O'Reilly with a flash tombstone piledriver.

3) I released an EP with my band Split Pricks. It's called Hang In There, Baby and it's pretty all right if you like Chavez and Polvo and fuzzy things.

4) I cut 16" off my hair. Sorry to the kid who is going to have a wig that smells like Taco Bell wrappers.

4b) I actually stopped eating Taco Bell and all other fast food back in December. Now I eat boring shit that grows in the earth.

5) I bought a van. Now all my bands can play out of town and I can get weird looks when I have to park in front of the preschool I work at.

6) I moved to a third floor apartment and I'm never moving again unless I get a Kindle and an iPod.

7) I interacted with Nick Hornby. I posted a status on Facebook that said "Let me tell you if a song is better or worse than 'Rock & Roll Hootchie Koo'" and he shared it, saying "The best service offered on the whole of the internet."

7b) There was more, but I'll spare you more nerdery. Let's let it rest at me being thrilled but also wanting to explain to him that his books didn't necessarily help me deal with my anxiety in talking to girls in college.

8) I bought a guitar shaped like a can opener.

8b) A fucking can opener!

9) My instrumental fun-house rock band Young Indian put out our second EP, Hardcore. It's a good time and a great way for us to get on DIY house shows that leave straight edge JUD JUD JUD bands very confused but somewhat pleased.

9b) For ten minutes at a time whe I feel like kicking shit over in my living room, Madball is the best band in the world.

10) I finished my novella, Soft, a 300+ chapter rock & roll morality play. I'm currently in the editing process and I hope to have it ready for the tour I'm booking.

10b) The tour I'm busy booking now, which is why this will be a short update. Check the dates below and help where you can!

Thursday, July 16th: Rock Island, IL / Bloomington/Normal, IL
Friday, July 17th: Champaign/Urbana, IL
Saturday, July 18th: Bloomington, IN
Sunday, July 19th: Cincinnati, OH
Monday, July 20th: Columbus, OH
Tuesday, July 21st: Pittsburgh, PA
Wednesday, July 22nd: Washington DC
Thursday, July 23rd: Philadelphia, PA
Friday, July 24th: Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, July 25th: Selinsgrove, PA / Allentown, PA
Sunday, July 26th: Cleveland, OH / Akron, OH
Monday, July 27th: Toldeo, OH / Bowling Green, OH
Tuesday, July 28th: Ann Arbor, MI / Lansing, MI
Wednesday, July 29th: Grand Rapids, MI
Thursday, July 30th: Kalamazoo, MI
Friday, July 31st: South Bend, IN
Saturday, August 1st: Chicago, IL

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You Can Tell a Lot About a Person By Their Username On a Pro Wrestling Game App

11/16/2014

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Ahmed Johnson, my favorite wrestler eighteen years ago, in the Playstation 1 game WWF Warzone, looking and sounding like someone shaking a pair of leggings stuffed with bratwursts.

WWE has this phone game called WWE Supercard. The rules are a bit too convoluted to explain through text, but it's basically Pokemon for people who don't want to collect anything except a post-count on a messageboard.

Every time you go to play a new round, you're presented with four options for opponents, so your electronic deck of cards with wrestlers and arbitrary numbers can virtually do battle with an automated version of someone else's electronic deck of cards with wrestlers and arbitrary numbers. Whoever has the higher number in the randomly selected attribute wins the sub-round. Best 2-out-of-3 is the winner. In reality, both of you probably smell like Mountain Dew and owe money to someone who makes custom swords, so there actually is no winner.

Over the course of 1200+times doing this, looking at the names of four different people each round, I began to remember that I actually hate the vast majority of wrestling fans. I can say they're good people in the same way that I say NASCAR fans or Steampunks are good people, in which I really mean that enthusiasm is wonderful but you can't brush your teeth with it.

These are the worst of them.

People Who Are, In General, Assholes

You still own nu-metal CDs. You still listen to CDs. You post e-cards on Facebook with the note "SO TRUE!" attached. Most of your responses to texts are "k" and "lol." You own a pair of pleated Dockers. You own parachute pants. You own own those pants with the belts and buckles looping all over them. You own a backup pair of pleated Dockers. You say racist shit and when people call you on it you say it's all right because you like Outkast.

People Who Are Bros

You catcall girls. You bought a hat you saw in a music video. You make music videos in your basement wearing said hat. You call people "faggot" when you get mad at them. You hate it when people call you "faggot" unless you're in the gym, then it pumps you up. One time, you punched a guy for talking about math. You have a 512 MB RCA MP3 player filled with nothing but ideal entrance music for when you're in "prime MMA shape."

People Who Are In Junior High

You repeat Dane Cook skits to your friends at lunch. You have a LiveJournal where you post Nine Inch Nails song lyrics about your teachers. Someone you know has the high score on three different Street Fighter II arcade machines in the area. You have a LiveJournal where you post lyrics you wrote about girls. You drink Faygo. You put too much gel in your hair. You put gel in your hair. You think Edgar Allen Poe is the best writer ever.

People Who Can't Think of Anything They Like Besides Wrestling

You own dogtags with your favorite wrestler's logo on them. You buy wrestling shirts at K-Mart. You respond with shouted catchphrases when someone talks shit to you. You've said "books are gay" at least five times in your life. Most of your meals are precooked and frozen. You saw a girl at a Smackdown taping and tried to get her Twitter handle but she wouldn't tell it to you so you called her a trash bag ho.

People Who Are Nonsense

You chew on tinfoil in the morning. You bought a French Press and never learned how to use it. You go to garage sales and offer more money than something is listed for. You made your own umbrella. You will be dead of a stroke sooner than later.

People Who Are Indie Wrestlers

You have a Young Bucks t-shirt. You don't do sit-ups. One time, you broke your wrist practicing enziguris in a gas station parking lot. You call Sami Zayn "El Generico" very forcefully. Your Twitter bio mentions the two podcasts you were on one time each. You bought a very expensive VHS bootleg of the 1995 Super J Cup Tournament. You think Diamond Dallas Page is the shits but he showed up at one of your spot shows and gave someone a Diamond Cutter and you popped huge.

People Really Into Penis/Butt Stuff

You have a year membership to Kink. You buy a special disinfectant with which to clean ball-gags. You drive a yellow Malibu convertible. The walls of your apartment are painted matte black. You shave only a portion of your balls. You're writing a cookbook where every dish is a pun on the name of a venereal disease. On your computer, Google autofinishes the phrase "where can I buy" with "lava lamps in bulk?"

People Named "Iceman"

You're a fucking dickhead.

People Who Are Straight Edge

You go to hardcore shows and stand there with your arms folded. You've screenprinted something a pair of gym shorts. You get off work early to stand on a street corner and hand out pamphlets about how to stop hate speech. You've had a conversation about whether or not ginseng is a drug. You own more than ten shirts with something written on them in Old English. You've put out a 7". You've paid money to have an extra insert in your 7" because your thank you list was too long.

People Who Would Like You To Know Their Age

The background of your computer is a girl in a swimsuit. You know a bunch of guys named Gary. You bowl in a league in the winter. You play softball in a league in the summer. You own Workaholics on DVD. You have "secret strategies" for fantasy football. Thinking about ordering something different than you normally order at Burger King makes you nervous.

People Who Are Into Superlatives and Minimalism But Don't Know What Either of Those Words Mean

You go to indoor motocross events. You own a No Fear shirt. You own a No Fear hockey jersey. Your favorite food is from Applebees. You used to dub VHS compilations of softcore porn from Cinemax and try to sell it out of your locker. You make sure everyone knows you get the really spicy kind of beef jerky. You're in third grade.

People Who Love a Certain Wrestler But Not Enough To Spell Their Name Right

You're at risk of being deported. You hit someone's car door with your car door at least once a week. You call anyone who disagrees with you a "nazi." Around election time you have lots of jokes based on the word "caucus." People tell you that you remind them of Ricky from Trailer Park Boys. You say "irregardless" when dismissing someone correcting you.

People Who Ran Out of Characters

You have a crooked piercing somewhere on your body. Every time you try to tell a joke you start laughing at the punchline halfway through the set up. You think a White Russian is milk, coffee, and Budweiser. You have a word document with all your favorite quotes from The Big Bang Theory written in it. You consult Consumer Reports when buying new appliances and then just buy whatever's on sale.

People Who Don't Understand Technology

You have six different active search bars at the top of your browser. You use Netscape Navigator. When someone sends you a text, you call them. You tell people about your friend who has their own website and when you show it to them it's a MySpace page that hasn't been updated in four years.

People Who Love John Cena

Your parents pay for your WWE Network subscription. You've been beat up in the last ten years. You own a Rockstar Energy Drink t-shirt. You're saving up to install suicide doors on your Corsica. You know all the words to "American Pie" by Don McLean. You've seen all the American Pie movies in the theater.

EXCEPTIONS: You're a terminally ill child, you're Mr. OOC from OSW Review, you're a soldier who's never seen wrestling but Tribute to the Troops is on base and what the fuck else are you going to do.

BONUS: People Who Are Actually Totally Cool

You buy everyone pizza. You own Dopesmoker on vinyl. When you enter a room, you have a really funny thing you do and it never gets old. You kick ass at foosball, air hockey, ski ball, and pinball. You loan shit out to people and actually mean it when you tell them to take their time. You beat up skinheads. When you put a suit on, people are like, "Your suit game is tight," but they're not all that surprised, overall.

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Music For Little Kids That Isn't a Bunch of Bullshit

9/11/2014

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Fang Island playing to a bunch of stoked kids.

Working at a Montessori preschool is great because I get to shape young minds and also be patient zero for a new kind of foot-and-mouth disease. I was listening to Lucinda Williams one day when one of the teachers told me that I needed to play kids' music, which isn't untrue but is kind of missing the part where she actually just kind of hates Lucinda WIlliams.

I had no intentions of listening to Raffi or limp-dick classical music or Kidz Bop. Because I love my job, I also had no intentions of putting on Return to Metalopolis or Zombi and being like, "There's no swearing and it's virtuosic! What great music for kids!" just to be an asshole. After awhile, I ended coming back to these albums again and again. I can't guarantee that it's worthwhile or sinking in, but you could say the same thing about math.

Jim O'Rourke - Bad Timing

I probably prefer Leo Kottke if I’m going to listen to some guy sit down and noodle around on an acoustic guitar, but Kottke gets to be a bit too much with the 12-string battering sometimes, like he wants to shred but he can’t find his pick and oh shit I’m high on coke and is this an acoustic, man? I’d probably be better off with John Fahey, but at 7:15 in the morning I usually feel like I want to die enough already.

This album is pretty even sounding until some majestic, closing-movie-credits horn arrangement comes out of nowhere towards the back half. I always end up running into the kitchen to shut it off around then, because it’s around 7:45 in the morning at that point, and I don’t feel like hearing Jim O’Rourke’s interpretation of what a Clint Eastwood western would be like if he flew to the sun on the back of a dinosaur at the end.

I put this album on after hours at the bar I work at and my buddy Zach asked if it was Al Di Meola, which kind of sucks.

Chet Baker - Chet Baker Sings

This is the Chet Baker I’d like to remember, where he looks like a detective diving cock first into an undercover job as a high school quarterback as opposed to the dude made of cigarette butts that we see in that documentary from the last year of his life. Flea is somehow more annoying than he’d be in the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Chet Baker glues his bones back together with heroin. Wonderful film.

Thankfully, the kids are still about fifteen years and several failed attempts at fucking a girl who looks like Death from the Sandman comics away from knowing anything about that documentary. For as much instrumental music as I play at the school, it’s nice to get something with vocals in. This isn’t nearly as desolate as Baker’s lispy cover of Elvis Costello’s “Almost Blue” years later, and not as flip as some of the ballads albums he did for drug money. I think the kids would actually dig it if they weren’t busy yelling over it because they’re stoked I built a four foot tower out of some wood blocks.

Marvin Gaye - Trouble Man

I like Let’s Get It On better, but that’s practically like sex ed class and I don’t want to be the reason a bunch of future-dudes get maced because they keep telling the wrong girl at the bar that they know she sure loves to ball.

This one is mostly instrumental with random smatterings of jive soul nonsense thrown in because it’s Marvin Gaye, so who gives a shit. It’s like sexy meth head open mic rambling. Apparently it’s the soundtrack to a Blaxploitation movie about a detective named Mr. T who is also a pool shark attempting to clean up the ghetto. I haven’t seen it and I probably don’t need to because it uses a dice game as a major plot device and life is pretty short.

Whenever I put this on, one of the parents dropping of their kid will almost always do a little head nod and be like, “Yeah, we’re really jamming now!” Iowa is the whitest place on earth. Everyone owns the soundtrack to The Big Chill and has a favorite sandwich at Subway.

Toe - The Book About My Idle Plot On A Vague Anxiety

I told a friend of mine online that I was starting an instrumental rock band. He sent me back a video of Toe playing live and then I thought I needed guitar lessons more than delay pedals.

For all the weaving and patchwork of the guitars, the drummer’s probably the best part. Usually I don’t want to listen to a band where the drummer’s the best part because they think they’re Led Zeppelin but they’ve actually just been playing the same blues riff for twenty minutes while some prick does fey wrist movements on his and-a hi-hat hits.

There’s a Toe album where some girl does weird techno-pop vocal punching—or at least that’s how I remember it—over top of the band and some more EPs that are all right, so this and Songs, Ideas We Forgot are the one I end up playing the most. This band and that heavy metal shred game show where Paul Gilbert and Marty Friedman cut heads and speak very campy Japanese are almost enough to make up for all the cartoon tentacle porn and vending machines that sell used panties.

Tristeza - Spine and Sensory

In college I went kind of far down the post-rock rabbit hole while also, perhaps somewhat relatedly, secretly dating a girl who was hanging on to the last gasps of the religion she grew up with. So, there exists in me, as I'm guessing there does with many other guys my age, an odd correlation between sexual frustration and the discography of Mogwai.

It was actually the second Tristeza record, Dream Signals In Full Circles, I had back then. Like Air’s Moon Safari or Unwed Sailor’s The Faithful Anchor, we only listened to it once or twice for whatever reason. Years later I wanted to hear some emo stuff without the vocals, because I hadn’t gotten laid in a long time but was mostly at terms with it. Remembered Tristeza and checked out the wrong record, Spine and Sensory, which I like a lot more.

TL;DR: This is a good album and I don't want kids.

The Score for David Lynch's The Straight Story

Man, it took me forever to get into David Lynch. The first thing of his I saw was Mulholland Drive, which I didn’t know going into is like the length of a Wrestlemania and is either a Mobius strip experiment or just some weird fucking movie that could probably be like an hour and a half shorter. I didn’t know anything about David Lynch at the time except that he was cool enough to put tits in his movie.

I came back years later and tried Eraserhead, and thought it was like what happens when some kid gets too much money to make his entrance tape for film school. Blue Velvet had cool cars in it and I really loved Wild At Heart because it’s got Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern listening to thrash. Twin Peaks is great for awhile until that one chick turns into a knob on a cabinet or whatever. Audrey and Cooper never banging is horseshit.

I still haven’t seen The Straight Story, but I think I would really like it. Whenever I listen to the score I always mishear the kids and end up thinking they’re talking about manic depressive states and hyper-realistic alternate realities. Either Lynch really knows how to get the most out of sonic elements or I’m more deaf than I thought from years of practicing with a dumb stoner rock band without earplugs in a 9’x9’ room.

Eluvium - An Accidental Memory In the Case of Death

I only passed my Piano Tech class in college because I insinuated to my professor that my parents beat me if I practiced at home and got a note wrong. Nothing I’m proud of, but I got a B and could barely chuff my way through a Bartok etude.

I watched a dude play entire Lizst compositions from memory before and I don’t think the Eluvium dude could hack that. Not that there isn’t a lot of middle ground, but this feels like classical music for dipshits. Which is fine, because if some kid is telling me a ten minute story about how they saw a bird at the park the other day, I don’t want a blanket of piano hitting me in the back of the head. It’s hard enough trying to guess what kind of bird they’re talking about based only on the description of “my grandpa threw his cigarette at the bird and then the bird ate it.”

Sigur Rós -Heim

Depending on what part of the album is playing, parents dropping their kids off either comment on how pretty the music is or try to ignore that high-pitched, clearly-not-English nonsense that’s mixed way too high above everything else. I’ve had similar reactions to Agnostic Front tapes.

This is the last thing by these guys I really dig. The one after this sounded like Animal Collective and the one after that was pretty middle of the road. This one sounds like what I imagine Weird Al sounds like if you run his songs through one of those programs that slows stuff down by 400%.

I keep wanting this one girl at school to hear this because I think she'd get it. She randomly says stuff like “My name’s Debbie, and there’s a party in my body,” and “Oh, the concerts! My mother will kiss me!” apropos of nothing. One time she drew a bunch of random letters on a toy chalkboard and when I asked her if it says that we’re best friends she turned around and said, “Uhhh, these aren’t words.”

Gary Burton - Who Is Gary Burton?

I have three little pieces of my life that have to do with mallet instruments.

1) The percussion/jazz professor during my two years as a music major was a dude named Joe Caploe. One time he told me about how he wanted to audition for Thin Lizzy and “really fuck them up, man.” He’s a monster behind a drumset but he absolutely kills it on the vibes. (The music ones, not the Teaches a Class On Sandal Tightenting At the Y and Doesn’t Tip When Ordering a Beer ones.) He told me that in the 70s he’d play four-mallet electric vibes with “like, forty ProCo Rat pedals hooked up to it,” which may be a bunch of bullshit, but is an awesome enough thing to think about that it doesn’t really matter.

2) Some drumline instructor I knew gave me a copy of Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians back when I was really into finding similar alternatives to doing drugs, like listening to Spine of God by Monster Magnet and falling asleep in public a lot. I don’t know if I’ve ever listened to the whole thing and I’ve been listening to it monthly for about a decade. I put it on and try to follow one of the pulses, but they all fade into each other so weird that my brain is like, “Hey, this is less like watching wrestling and more like doing math. I’m going to sleep.” Now I mostly listen to Reich’s Six Marimbas, which my girlfriend hates. She never did an album with Pat Methany, though, so I like her more than Reich by default.

3) I have no idea how I got this Gary Burton record, but I listen to it all the time, especially when the only other similar options at school are moozak versions of popular songs played from a Pandora station with ads off an iPad. Those nasty, soaring notes in “Sweet Child O’ Mine” as played on a marimba are only slightly more tolerable than listening to Axl sing them now. So, fuck it, put on Gary Burton.

Bill Evans Trio - Sunday at the Village Vanguard

I want to make fun of this for paving the way for completely ignorable, low-key lounge jazz that serious musicians play because it’s an inoffensive, far-less-exciting variation on the sort of thing they want to be doing but doesn't pay anything. My first instinct in trying to talk myself out of doing that was to argue that we shouldn’t blame Faith No More for nu metal being so terrible, but that actually makes a lot of sense.

Here’s how I explained it to a four-year-old recently. Let’s say you’re playing Kid’s First Memory Game and you get really good at it. You practice all the time and develop that part of your brain that remembers stuff. Sometimes you accidentally knock the tiles off the table, but it’s an accident. One day, your friends watch you play and are amazed. The next day, they all want to play Kid’s First Memory Game, but they’re kind of dumb and the only thing they remember you doing it knocking the tiles off the table, which is how they think the game is played. Nobody has any fun and I need to take a two hour nap when I get home. Fast forward twenty years and everyone but you has a goatee and a three word band name with the word “Fire” in it.

Morton Feldman - Rothko Chapel/Why Patterns?

I have a hard time explaining to parents that this isn’t one of those Spooky Halloween Sounds albums. It sounds more like an hour of film score during the Protagonist is Sneaking Around/Has The Mystery Of A Major Point Revealed To Them parts. Also, Morton Feldman looks like something Dan Clowes would draw.

It’s between Morrissey and Motley Crue on my iPod that I still can’t work the wheel on correctly, so most of the time I end up accidentally playing the opening to Dr. Feelgood or Bona Drag. I’d never play either one of those for kids because they both usually make sure the point in their lives where they shrug off falling asleep while crying into a dude’s crotch come far too early and far too often.

Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music For Airports

This kind of sounds like some asshole in a post-rock band hooking up all their pedals and making a “solo ambient project” YouTube video after practice got cancelled one day because one of their several band members who is a barista had to switch shifts last minute, but I still really like it. I put it on when I want the kids to go to sleep at naptime and also when I want them to realize that every molecule in the world will eventually expand to a point where everything they compose will become one all-encompassing, pulsing being.

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Things that can happen, happen to you . . .

8/2/2014

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"Unreal Is Here" by Chavez, with a great Bon Jovi video/Mentos commercial

Another several months of terribly sporadic internet promotion. Here are some things.

1) I met some wrestlers (and Randy Couture) in Waterloo, Iowa, at a little Wrestling Hall of Fame between a strip club and a gas station with a Burger King built in. Diamond Dallas Page was a super awesome dude. The Steiner Brothers were kind of standoffish and weird. Jim Ross once again made it a point to prove that he didn't really want to be there.

1b) Wrestling fans are the best. Of the two dudes I was stuck between in line, one of them reads stuff on the internet but doesn't process it into actual thought ("Brock Lesnar's going to win at Summerslam. I read it online," followed by twenty similar comments) and a guy who thought wrestling was real and posed the question of whether or not Undertaker is in the Illuminati, which is also real.

1c) DDP is obviously in the Illuminati, as his hand symbol makes a triangle.

1d) In complaining about this guy to my friend Jim, he said that most people believe in angels and nobody's ever seen one, so if someone wants to believe in wrestling, at least everyone's fucking seen Stone Cold Steve Austin.

2) I'm mostly reading graphic novels and nothing else. Writing has been slow because all I want to do is sit down with Punisher MAX and play guitar because I'm fifteen.

3) I got a library card, finally. (So I can read comics for free.) I immediately cashed in on any goodwill I may have rallied up in the ten minutes I was a member by shitting in the women's restroom, something even the homeless dudes who mostly bathe there frown upon.

4) I thought I wasn't too old and frail to be front row at a hardcore show, but I was fucking wrong. Two songs in--this equals about 45 seconds--and someone landed on my head, sending my glasses directly underneath the feet of like 150 malnourished kids in black t-shirts.

4b) I got new glasses, which I will now use to watch hardcore bands from a comfy position off to the side of the stage along with the rest of the 30-year-olds who still want to be cool.

5) My girlfriend was in Reefer Madness. I watched most of it but my buddy Scotty showed up and started playing me videos of him doing trick basketball shots like halfway through.

6) I've gotten really into eating lots of chili dogs lately.

6b) "lately"

7) If the crowd who frequent the bar I work at is any indication, lots of people either don't really read books or there's a new thing people do where they explain to strangers how books work using James Patterson and Chuck Palahniuk as examples.

8) Got another email from an agent, which is awesome except for the fact that he essentially said, "If you have a novel, great! If you have a short story collection, write a novel."

9) I'm trying to downsize things and having a hard time, which means I packed up two giant boxes of books and still have five and a half bookshelves worth of stuff that I "can't possibly part with" even though I'm never going to read my copy of Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon books that I've read the first twenty pages of take up about a foot and a half of shelf space.

Also, working with kids is awesome.

No publications since the last time that I can think of, though I just remembered that I need to send Austin Hayden of 90's Meg Ryan the audio file of me reading a story about karaoke.

I did do an interview with Jon Konrath over at Paragraph Line. Here's an excerpt:

PL: Who are your favorite three members of Krokus other than Chris Von Rohr, Fernando Von Arb, Marc Storace, Mark Kohler, and Mandy Meyer?

RW: They’re all drummers, actually. Freddy Steady, because he kind of sucked but really loved being in Krokus, which is admirable. (Sort of.) Steve Pace, because he played drums and his last name was Pace. Stefan Schwarzmann, because he’s like the foreign metal version of some asshole like Matt Sorum, who just plays in every band after their prime. He was on one of the Krokus albums in the mid-2000s, which he left Helloween to play on.

As you can tell, it's very insightful. Here's the whole thing.

Other than that I've been the least busy I've been in years. I mentioned in a previous blog post that my writing is slowing down and that I feel all right about it. I tried working my novella a bit this summer, the aforementioned Soft that is told in hundreds of shattered pieces and, so far, has had some mixed reactions from the people who have read what's done of it. I wrote an essay about a Drive-By Truckers song and never revised it. I wrote that story for Austin Hayden. I started some more stories about a guy named Marty and haven't finished them. And, like I said, I'm all right with that.

I've been playing guitar, writing songs for the three or four bands I've been ignoring while I do all this book/tour stuff. Finally getting back into comics has been great, too, especially since I've got some monthlies that have grabbed me, Saga and East of West. I've even been playing some shitty tower defense computer games just because I realized that I can.

I don't remember the last time I took a break from things--writing, working on publishing, booking a tour, doing stuff for Passenger Side, feeding my ulcer cream soda--for more than a week or two. I go back to my day job at the school in a few weeks, but until then, I've finally figured out how to relax. Talk all you want about the satisfaction of writing, but it's easy to forget that satisfaction and not the writing is the endgame.

And I've been saving lots of pictures of wrestlers wearing fanny packs to my computer. Interests are weird.

I'll be doing a couple more readings this summer before packing it in and doing weekend warrior shit during the school year. Here are the last two dates:

8/6 - Champaign, IL - Institute 4 Creativity (w/Bob Bucko Jr & heavy metal belly dancers!)
8/7 - Rock Island, IL - Rozz-Tox QC (w/Bob Bucko Jr, Mystic Dolphin, KAB)

As for the readings I did this summer, they were all pretty awesome. Plenty of shit to talk, plenty of kind strangers. I made enough money to cover gas and a shitload of pinball, I never went hungry, and I had a place to crash every night. Everything else is a cherry on top. Let's do it again soon.

I'm going to rewatch all of The Larry Sanders Show now. Party time.

RW

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