Hey, y’all! Sorry this is coming in so late. I thought I had queued this up for Thursday, but somehow or other it ended up in my other Substack, which I technically began a couple years back but never actually posted anything in. Here it is this week for you, and as a reward for your patience, you’re getting three this week! How about that. What can I say, I wrote me a corker recently, and this is therefore a creatively fecund time for your fearless hero. It’s a little out of date in that I’ve since finished Rubicon Beach (see below), but editing is for cowards. Here we go.
Sometimes you gotta give your teenage self their due, because it turns out it feels a lot better to embrace honesty than deny yourself because you want to feel like an adult. Case in point, I just rediscovered how good System of a Down was recently. I loved these guys in high school, man. Me and my shithead buddies used to drive around East Redacted Heights blasting “Chop Suey!” with absolutely zero regard for what the neighbors thought of us, and we shouted their most obscene lyrics (my favorite was always “pull the tapeworm out of your ass! HEY!”) in the high school halls. As adolescence gave way to adulthood, I figured my former love of these dudes was a consequence of immaturity than anything else, but turns out it’s actually a consequence of, well, it’s a lot of fun to thrash around and listen to really loud music.
Especially if that loud music has a great sense of dynamics and group interplay. See, “Question!” got stuck in my head a few days ago, so I played it on a lark, and its slippery jazz rhythms and massive chorus dispelled any notion I had of SOAD as a gimmick band. If booze is your style, slam some cheap whiskey and mosh to “Sugar” with some buddies. If not, rock out, and cry when angels deserve to die. Everyone knows the Hypnotize/Mesmerize double bill (I even had the CD slipcases that fit together, which was so cool), so give Toxicity into Steal This Album! a try sometime. The phase of maturity that nobody tells you about: when you realize that it’s not only fine but utterly necessary to squeeze as much fun out of this thing called life as you can manage. Responsibly, of course, but regardless. I missed these guys during that post I made a couple months ago when I rounded up my favorite groups of the ‘00s, so consider this my effort at rectifying that.
And hey! Might as well commit to this listening/watching/reading bit, because my quasi-autistic brain finds it comforting. One could reasonably argue why I spent all that damn time on RYM in the first place. I’ve been off my movie bullshit lately, but I gotta get back onto it, because I rewatched Scarface with the film snob crowd and oh buddy did we have us a time. That movie oozes ‘80s cocaine grandeur and the attendant paranoia. Pacino trades some of the nuance of ‘70s roles like the Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon, but here his point-and-shout later style comes off with force, irony, and more nuance than you may remember; you can tell Tony Montana is performing at least some of the psychosis, at least until the precise moment that the slide begins. Couple that with the bleary neon aesthetic, mix in De Palma’s terrific instinct for suspense (that chainsaw scene), and top it all off with a delirious Oliver Stone screenplay, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for a wildass time. I bet you anything Pacino, Stone, and De Palma hoovered blow off knives between scenes. God bless America.
Speaking of wildass, what better time to turn to Steve Erickson? If you’re not hip, get hip, because when you make a list of the great American postmodernists, he’s a lot closer to the top than his relative obscurity would suggest. I’m about sixty pages into Rubicon Beach, his second novel, and so far it seems like he’s finding his bag: writing about weirdo loners who nevertheless must resolve themselves with the bigger world around them. The dude would eventually ride this style all the way to Zeroville, one of the best damn novels of our troubled young century, but the whole appeal of the deep dive is you get to see how your favorites became your favorites. My boy is cooking, and thus far I’m happy to let him.
Drink in the arts, teach the kids, watch some hoops, and spend as much time with your people as you can. The rest, like the fella says, is rust and stardust.