A South Florida Story

I fucking hated my time in Miami.  Still can't stand the goddamn city.  I know there are people who love South Beach and its clubs, how Miami always makes some annual stupid Ten Best Places to Party (Woo-hoo!) or Hottest Spring Break Destination list.  You can have the place.  I spent three miserable years in that sweat-soaked armpit stain, with that fucking thumping reggaeton music pumping in every store you go into, surrounded by dopey girls with their augmented body parts, counting the days until I could get out.

Not that I didn't make some terrific friends along the way.  And receive a stellar graduate education (!), which was paid for (and then some).  It's just when you lose a wife and almost die in a city, your memories of that place tend to be tainted.

I don't know.  I guess it just wasn't my kind of scene.  I hadn't talked to an old buddy, Jason Carlson, for a long time.  Jay and I had known each other in San Francisco, were good friends, and then I started getting further and further out there, and we lost touch.  After I straightened out, got my undergrad degree and went to study writing at FIU in Miami, I got ahold of Jay.  When I told him where I was, he started to remininse about the time I met him and the rest of the Boys of Belvedere at Lake Havasu, wearing my pea green, thrift shore coat, fedora, and pasty white skin (http://tinyurl.com/4xgq6xj).

"I just can't picture that guy in Miami," Jay said.

And he was right.  To (mis)quote the great Raymond Chandler, I belonged in Miami "like a pearl onion belongs on a banana split."

Maybe it was all that fucking sunshine.  I have a certain morose persona I try to cultivate.  It is goddamn tough to be morose when every day is sunny and in the upper '80s, a hot tropical breeze blowing the big palm fronds, and goddamn coconuts falling on your head.  (Actually, had coconuts ever truly fallen on my head, maybe it would've aided my morose cause.  But the closest I ever came to [natural] cranial damage was the big lark nesting in a palm tree at my condo on the beach, which dive bombed your face to protect her eggs every time you walked across the parking lot.  Used to scare the shit out of me [Jimmy too, when he came to visit].)

This would've been bad enough, but making my time in Miami even worse was all that quintessential Miami poetry.

I posted last week how much I hate (most) poetry and (most) poets (http://tinyurl.com/3lv7lqq), because they read their poetry like this.

And before all my poet buddies have their heads explode with aneurysms, I know Sylvia Plath is a great poet with her place firmly etched (and rightly so) in the American pantheon (of greats).  But don't tell me you don't cringe listening to her read her own work.  She sounds like she's trying out for 3rd understudy in a Pumpkin Valley High spring production.

In Miami, I attended many poetry readings.  And there were a few reoccurring...themes.  It seems there is some unspoken mandate in Miami that 99% of all poems read within county limits have to contain at least one reference to your grandmother. Only here, with the pervasive Cuban influence, it is abuela.  Usually the abuela is cooking something that is Spanish-sounding, stinks, and also goes in italics.  Something like, "And on Sundays, mi abuela would cook boliche / its pungent aroma wafting from the kitchen..."  Or some crap like that.  And every poem also has to mention either "bouganvilla" or "monkeygrass" or "mangroves." And everyone knows Miami is a land populated by very tiny dogs.  Don't ask me. Them's the rules.

So when I was leaving Miami, I wanted to write a poem commemorating my miserable time there, incorporating these regional distinctions.  This poem was recently published by Tigertail (http://www.tigertail.org/onlinesales.html) in its latest issue, which features flash and noir, and is guest edited by my former thesis advisor, the indefatigable Lynne Barrett.  I received my free contributor's copy in the mail today.  You don't get a free contributor's copy.  You can buy a copy at the link provided above.  And you should, because for as much as I hate poetry in general, this issue contains work from my friends, with whom I studied, and who made my time there at least bearable.  And it's noir-tinged, which is always cool. 

My poem isn't online.  So I'll reprint it here for you (but you should still shell out the lousy $3 for your own copy.  Y'know, to frame or something).  It's pretty fucking short (and I'll retain my original delineation, which was altered by Lynne to better fit the issue's theme).  Hope you like it.

                                          A South Florida Story

                                          I bludgeoned your abuela 

                                          beneath the bouganvilla,

                                          then dumped her body in the mangroves

                                          and walked my tiny dog.

Screw you, Miami.

Poetry

In honor of National Poetry Month (or maybe it was in fucking April, who really knows), I thought we'd devote a week talking about the least valid, lucrative, or tangible of all writing forms: poetry.  Or maybe we'll just do it until we hit a wall. Wouldn't want another "Burning Man III" debacle (http://tinyurl.com/4xjur47).  It's tough to understand poetry, at least in terms of its functionality in a modernized world. Poetry is like that guy who once had it all in high school.  He quarterbacked the goddamn team, all the girls dug him, all the guys wanted to be him.  But then you see him at your class reunion and he's bald, working in middle management, or selling cars, and he smells like cheese, and you can't understand how this guy was ever relevant.

For me poetry is pretty much this Cracked article (http://www.cracked.com/funny-2260-poetry/), a once necessary and even vital art form whose use has long been supplanted by things people can actually use, like breasts and the Internet.  Now I must admit, some of my best friends are poets, and that furthermore I, too, used to write the stuff.  In fact, I have a couple poems being published next month.  These are not new poems. Back in aught4 (sorry, Esther), when I first was getting sober and didn't know any better, between the rock and the roll, my ear still fucked up from the years of hardcore stimulant abuse, I wasn't playing the guitar, which reminded me too much of getting high, drugs and the music so inextricably linked, and poetry seemed enough like writing lyrics (it's not), so I stared trying my hand at it, and people started liking it.  I won some award at the CT Review and was paid about $400 to tour the state that summer as a "CT Student Poet," which is apparently some time-honored, -respected tradition, with a long list of poets whose names I don't recognize.  It was cool enough.  A pretty girl once asked me for my autograph.  Always thought I was someone, turned out I was wrong...

Well, my poetry career was a short-lived one.  Once I realized the best I could hope for should I master the craft (which wasn't happening) was abject poverty, chapbooks, and non-recognition, I jumped on the fiction bandwagon (Oh, and that decision has worked out smashingly).  I forgot all about poetry, and the only verse I'm writing these days are the ones that come before the chorus (and usually after it, too, and then again after the bridge, but sometimes we skip a bridge and add last verse and go right back to the chorus--a double rock 'n' roll chorus!).  

(But I still have a few poems that haven't been published, one or two of which I still think are quite good. Occasionally I get solicited by magazines, because I know the editor or because the author and I have appeared elsewhere together, and when I do I will send them some of these.  Which is why I have a couple poems coming out next month.  Not that you give a shit.)

My poetry career died a slow, unnoticed death.  The last poetry reading I gave was in '09, when a friend asked me to read at an event he was hosting.  It was me and three other readers.  It received a single Yelp review.  Which I will re-post here.  

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5/3/2009Janis R. says:

Being unemployed and finding something to do on a Sunday night, this was a good diversion from the mononity of sitting at home and watching another re-run.

[Reader A] is awesome!  She opened with the funniest poem ever that was a great ice breaker (too bad she was last).  Her preview to her collection of [Book Title] left me wanting more... can you start a blog or something?  I appreciated [Reader B's] poems, but loved his explanations to the inspirations of each one more.  Joe Clifford's personality is hilarious, but his poems left more to be desired... with the exception of his last poem about his brother... very deep; and lastly, [Reader D]... nice spin on America but had too many re-occurring phrases they took my attention away from the individual poem and left me comparing them to her previous ones.

Overall, thankful they put this together, had the courage to share their works and surprisingly sparked an interest to document events in our lives through this expression.

So clearly the world isn't exactly clamoring for my return to hexameter.  At least Janis R. isn't.  And who are we to argue with Janis R.? 

All of which is a long-winded, roundabout way of saying (much like my poetry itself), I am probably the least qualified guy to review the shit.  I hate poetry.  If Bukowski didn't write it, I don't want to read it.  I find Shel Silverstein infinitely more enjoyable than Walt Whitman, Liz Bishop, or any of the other stuffy set.  And of all the writers I've know, by far, the dullest have been the poets (current friends withstanding, for you are a wacky and zany bunch).  

When I think of poetry, I think if Steve Kobak.  Steve and I worked on a literary magazine at CCSU called Helix.  And holy fuck did we receive a lot of shitty poems.  Most of these came from lovesick undergrad girls.  The staff used to go through these submissions together, basically four guys hanging around a classroom after school, smoking cigarettes, reading aloud and seeing just how bad bad writing could be.  After one particularly dreadfully, sappy love poem, something about "long tendrils of hair," Steve goes, "Happy Two Month Anniversary, Honey."  Still makes me laugh.

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I received an e-mail last week from Candy and Cigarettes regular reader Jenny Dreadful, asking if I'd review her poetry chapbook.  Don't ask me why the fuck she'd think my doing so would, in any way, help her "career."  But I said I would. Because 1.) her name is Jenny Dreadful.  I've never had a cool nickname, and so I admire people who do.  Gluehead.  Kelpbed.  Jimmy Dread (Tom Pitt's friend, not mine, and no relation to Jenny Dreadful, at least not that I am aware).  Best I ever had was Tweek the Wunderkid.  Which stuck about as well as you'd think it would. And I gave it to myself.

Part of the reason I haven't gone further in life, I'm convinced, is because I never had a cool nickname.  Life caters to people with cool nicknames.  Reason #2 I said I would view Jenny's chapbook is that she asked me, however misguided her assumptions.  Let's face it.  I'm a nice fucking guy. Beneath the tattoos and the muscles (and the smoldering, movie-star good looks), I'm just a sensitive boy who loves to help others.

So this will be Poetry Week on Candy and Cigarettes.  Which should really drive up the ratings.  

Do you have a story about a poem that changed your life?  If so, please keep it to yourself.

(And I'll get to that review sometime this week, Jenny.  And it won't be a hatchet job.  I've read the chapbook and it's good.  I think you and I are going to be friends. You wrote a poem about Bukowski...)

Get Set Go: Ordinary World

Continuing our series of awesome bands that haven't gotten their due (http://tinyurl.com/5tgtaen), and stealing a page from my buddies at shitforfuckheads (http://shitforfuckheads.blogspot.com/) (seriously, remind me never to piss these guys off with a shitty record.  Or, rather, don't let them hear anything I did from '91 - '99.  Check out the hatchet job they do on the Stones' Dirty Work.  Hilarious.  And totally true.), I thought we'd kick off this week with Get Set Go and one of the best records you've never heard, Ordinary World.


I am "friends" with Get Set Go on Facebook, and recently, I along with all the band's other friends, received a mass (highly apologetic) e-mail message, looking for help getting their next record off the ground.  Which to me is astounding.  I have no idea how a band this good, original and irreverent, does not have a major label throwing piles of money at them to do whatever the fuck they want to do next.


You very well may've heard of Get Set Go, especially if you watch Grey's Anatomy. I don't watch the show, but thankfully my friend in Miami, C-Love, does, or did, when he heard this gem:

I don't know if this is the original clip, because like I said, I don't watch the show.  But after C-Love turned me onto this song, I had a new favorite band, as this song played on heavy rotation.  So rarely has a song so deftly captured my innermost feelings.  OK.  Not so innermost.  Never been much of a people person.  But even those of you "every day is a gift; that's why it's called 'the present'" types have surely had at least three and a half fleeting shitty minutes where "I Hate Everyone" speaks to you.


If it were just this one song, I'd chalk it up to catching lightning in a misanthrope's bottle and go listen to the Replacements some more.  But after "I Hate Everyone," I went and downloaded the album from which it came, Ordinary World, which proved to be as complete and close to perfect a record as I've ever heard.  I've listened to the band's other songs and albums, and they don't disappoint (most notably "Fuck You [I Want To]"), but I don't have time to review their entire musical catalogue.  In fact I don't have time to even give OW the shitforfuckheads treatment and go track by track.  Because Ordinary World is over 20 songs.  Yet, I am doing all a disservice not doing so. 


One of the strengths of Ordinary World is just how well-cratfted and fucking good every song is on it.  Get Set Go is basically this guy Mike TV.  I mean, he writes it all, sings it all, not that the rest of the band doesn't bring a lot to the table (I know my brother, Josh, has a huge crush on their violin player, Emily).


Anyway, like DJ Lance, let's break it down.  Here are some of my favorite tracks.


Crying Shame


There's that scene in High Fidelity where Rob, Dick and Barry are listing the Top Five Track Ones, Side Ones.  And this would be on mine.  It captures what the record is all about through an economy of language seldom heard in pop.


'Cause I don't want to get a job / I've stolen all I can rob.
I don't know how I will get by.
Something in me thinks / I've had one too many drinks.
I've spent too much time getting high.


I wrote an entire memoir trying to express this sentiment.  It took me 60,000 words; it took Mike TV a couple dozen.  There's always the musical inclination, even an unwritten rock rule to want to kick off the record (like a mixed tape) with a killer, but here's it's just an acoustic guitar and vocal, a little harmony, and it yields more despondency and heartache than Gordon Lightfoot on benzos.  True ache without wallow.  Try pulling that shit off.


Get Thru the Day


Here's the killer.  Get Set Go's greatest asset (besides lyrical acumen) are the hooks that bore into your brain and don't leave.  I am a melody guy.  For me, pop (like commercialism) is not a dirty word.  I like big, catchy choruses.  And when you can do that with some heavy guitar chugging and driving force behind it, all the better.  This song is about every addict's dilemma: trying to find a way to get through the day (tougher than it sounds).  And you don't need narcotics to be an addict.  Addiction is about yearning, still being unsatisfied long after the dregs and lees have been lapped.  Drugs, sex, cigarettes, a goddamn milkshake.  Doesn't matter.  You want more more more. And the shelf-life for satiation ain't shit.


Ordinary World


Like I said, I am highlighting choice tracks, my best of the best.  Which means I am leaving off several terrific selections like the one that comes before this, "One Hundred Locks," which could easily be the single on a billion other records. But here it's like batting only .280 with 25 HRs and 87 RBI for the Yankees; you're batting 7th.  "Ordinary World" has the feel of "Crying Shame" without sounding anything like it.  It tells the story of Peter and Mary, two world-class fuck ups, and I know it makes my brother happy because it has a violin solo. Narratives in rock are not easy.  For every "Bobbie Jean," there are a hundred "Take the Money and Run."  But through the examination of two unrealized lives, Mike TV shines an unflattering light on the bad, greasy skin of an entire generation.


I Hate Everyone


We covered this one above.  But I'll say it again.  So rarely has a song so poetically captured how I feel most every minute of most every day.


Lift Me Up


I don't know Mike TV's life story.  But I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say we've battled similar demons.  I'm basing this simply on paying attention to the lyrics and not being a dumbass.  And whether that's drugs or mental illness, which are usually the same thing anyway, I can't say, but one of the defining characteristics of both is the wildly vacillating between extremes.  You can feel elated by a really good sandwich one minute, and crushed by a parking ticket the next.


So who's going to save me tonight?  It's usually a girl.  The Smiths figured out this winning formula a while ago: pair miserable lyrics with uplifting major open chords.  Get Set Go exploit this dynamic throughout Ordinary World, and it may be blasphemy, but I'll say it anyway: I'll put what Get Set Go does as on par with the best of Morrissey and Marr (the Gods of Emo forgive me). Although "Lift Me Up" is the rare instance where both music and words strike a similar upbeat chord: 


But it's not getting me down 'cause there's a girl /
Spins my world around and it's for sure /
That every time I'm lovin' her / The world collapses under her /
And all that's left is her and me.

Not sure I believe the speaker.  Not sure he believes himself.  But the degree to which we can attain happiness in this life is often dependent upon the degree to which we can swallow our own self-prescribed bullshit. 


Murder by Millions


I saw Daniel Tosh last Thursday.  Fucking hilarious.  Nothing is off limits with Tosh.  Domestic violence.  Osama Bin Laden.  Kids with cancer.  He has this bit where he's like, "If you are one of these people who says 'There's nothing funny about blank,' we can't be friends.  Everything can be funny if the joke is written well enough."  I live in the Bay Area.  There are lots of things we aren't supposed to find funny.  Like when I take the food scraps Justine throws in the compost out of the compost and throw it in the trash just for the hell of it. Because there's nothing funny about global warming.  What I'm trying to say is we live in a sensitive world.  I try to find the joke in everything (albeit with dark, black humor) because if you don't laugh, you'll end up running out your house, screaming down the street, and so, outside of my kid, there isn't much I hold sacred (and Holden is a redhead).  This is all a long about way of saying that some people will see the humor in this song.  And for those of you who don't, we can't be friends.  Oh, and also, BEST CHORUS EVER.  Hook, catch, reel you in.


A Little More / Won't Let Her Go


Part of any album's success is contingent upon song order.  Even in this world of single digital downloads.  Because when you find a truly great (complete) record (admittedly a growing anomaly), it tells a complete story, and here the story is wanting too much, going down hard, and reaching up for those things you love and think can save you but never can.  It's about the shared sickness of the wounded.  One of Mike TV's lyrical gifts is an ability to straddle both worlds, to be both light and heavy-handed, comical and serious.  You never feel like his words are pedantic or didactic, but there is some real fucking weight to them. "A Little More" tackles alcoholism without sounding at all like it's tackling alcoholism.  Which is good.  Because (sincere) songs about alcoholism are practically impossible to pull off (notable exception, "Here Comes a Regular" by the Replacements).  "Won't Let Her Go" is every addict's love song, with the absolutely brutal opening lines:


She doesn't close the door /
As she visits the bathroom /
The sound of flushing water /
Comes a little bit too soon.


Man, I wish I wrote that.


And it gets even better when we hit the end of the song and the lament for days that ain't ever coming back ("When we were young / oh, we were young / and we were everything.")


Ouch.


Die Motherfucker Die


Having studied creative writing in a graduate program, I had the...pleasure...of reading many accomplished poets, Liz Bishop, et al, and I know Billy Collins, Robert Hass, and Sylvia Plath are good poets.  But one of my problems with grad school is I didn't give a flying fuck about "bats o'er a win'ers morn" or whatever the fuck poets talk about.  I am not saying Ted Roethke isn't a great writer, just that I don't give a shit about his subject matter.  And if I don't care what you're writing about, I can't care what you're writing about.  When I first heard "Die Motherfucker Die," I felt like Satan at the end of this Kids in the Hall clip:

At last, a song that speaks to me!  


This is rock 'n' roll.  This is poetry.  My favorite track on the record.


And here is the tune.  Learn the words and sing along.

Like I mentioned earlier, this record was on my mind because I received a message that Get Set Go, inexplicably, doesn't have a label sufficiently backing their next effort.  I normally don't get into social causes.  But this disturbs me greatly.  I see it happening more and more.  Another one of my favorite bands and singers, Brent Best of Slobberbone, recently solicited fans to buy his next record before it's finished.  Basically asking fans to send in their $10 just so he can get the damned thing recorded.  Which I did.  And I also contributed to Get Set Go's Kickstarter project.  Gladly.  Because while god-awful American Idol retreads and tone-deaf retards like Ke$ha have no expense spared, and the same goddamn Katy Perry song gets shoved down my throat daily (slowed down or sped up, it sill sucks), the fact that bands like Slobberbone/Brent Best and Get Set Go are forced to shill for themselves smacks of grave injustice.  One more reason for the motherfuckers to die.


So Candy and Cigarettes would like to do its part.  Here is the Kickstarter site where you can buy Get Set Go's next record, Fury of Your Lonely Heart, and do your part to promote the arts and be guaranteed some brilliance in return. And if you bid enough, the band just might come to your house and get drunk with you.


http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/707987144/get-set-go-loves-you-so-much-we-might-explode