Children of the sun on a rainy day

Lucinda Williams, AWP events & 504 Plan

I’ve been making the most of the last couple weeks in San Diego because guess what? Yep. I’ll be on the road again before too long.

Last week I had the chance to play tour guide with my friend from Frankfurt who was visiting SoCal with Thomas, his friend from Berlin, and show them around San Diego. We only had six hours so we hit what I consider to be the three essential spots in a San Diego tour. I don’t give a damn about the Gaslamp. You can keep SeaWorld. Fuck the zoo. Here’s where we went:

Chicano Park: The heart and soul of Barrio Logan. Started with tacos at Todo Pa’ La Cruda, record shopping at Beat Box, coffee at Por Vida, and a visit to The Bureau of Counterfactual Investigations (aka my writing studio). Then we hit the Coronado Bay Bridge for quick trip to Coronado Beach, the prettiest beach in SD IMO, so we could dip our toes in the Pacific. Then we wrapped up the afternoon at The Tower Bar the best goddam punk rock bar in San Diego, maybe SoCal, possibly all of California, and while we’re at it, the world.

Yesterday I had jury duty but I wasn’t assigned to a case and was dismissed early. I knew rain was in the forecast and I was decked out in boots, umbrella, and a raincoat Nuvia has never seen me wear. Since I had all this gear I decided to hoof it down Front Street to Harbor and went past the Convention Center and PetCo Park and through East Village to Barrio Logan where I stopped for lunch at Las Cuatro Milpas. Normally there’s a line down the block but I guess the threat of rain kept the tourists home. I hopped in my car just as the drops started falling from the sky. A very satisfying couple of days!

Chicano Park, Jan & Thomas in the sand, Ye Olde Tower Bar, looking south on a rainy day, Las Cuatro Milpas

Book Review: Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You

When I learned I would be going on the Outlaw Country Cruise I knew I needed to do a crash course on one of the headliners, Lucinda Williams, whom I knew very little about. Luckily, she released a well-regarded memoir in 2023 called Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You.

Ordinarily it would be a cliché to use the term Southern Gothic to describe Williams’s childhood but in this case the characterization doesn’t do the facts justice. Williams was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana and both of her parents were the children of preachers. Her father turned to poetry as his salvation; her mother turned inward and had trouble looking anywhere else. She had severe mental issues that compromised her ability to function as a partner and a parent.

Williams’s father, Miller Williams took any teaching job he could get until his own poetry started to receive some acclaim and the Williams family packed up and moved every year for over a decade. This brought Williams into contact with a lot of aspiring and established poets and writers, including Flannery O’Connor. Williams spent a memorable afternoon with O’Connor’s peacocks while her father conversed with the writer who practically invented Southern Gothic.

Some of these stories are so good I don’t want to spoil the surprise by mentioning them, but it’s a surprisingly literary memoir. I listened to the audio book, which Williams reads in her straightforward, I-told-you-not-to-fuck-with-me style. What shocked me the most about Williams childhood wasn’t her upbringing in cities throughout the south but the years she spent in Santiago and Mexico City, two cities that are very close to my heart.

In Santiago, people will talk your ear off about Pablo Neruda, but for my money the real genius of Chilean poetry is Nicanor Parra, with whom Williams’s father was acquainted and they continued their friendship for many years. I’m not a Lucinda Williams scholar by any stretch of the imagination but her music makes a great deal more sense when you understand the influence of folk singer Violeta Parra, who took her own life a year before the Williams arrived in Santiago.

There is some truth to the idea that the most interesting parts of an artist’s memoir are the years of struggle. If that’s the case William’s memoir is pretty damn interesting because success did not come early nor did it come with the sense that she’d “made it.” Williams worked in record shops and health food stores long into her forties and her success was often sabotaged by her many reckless romances, which she then used in her songwriting.

Of course, there are some punk rock connections, which I don’t want to put too fine a point on because Williams is righteously resistant to labels, which are just the way the music industry makes money off of artists. (Dave Alvin, FWIW, feels the same way.) For a time Williams bounced back and forth between Nashville and LA where in the late ’80s she often performed at Raji’s and the Palomino in North Hollywood, which is how she came to the attention of the label Rough Trade.

Although the book isn’t long, Williams’s laconic delivery made for entertaining company in the car. It also encouraged me to return to the bilingual edition of Parra’s Antipoems that I abandoned last year for some reason.

I Move the Meeting Be Adjourned
Ladies and gentleman
I have only one question:
Are we children of the Sun or of the Earth?
Because if we are only Earth
I see no reason
To continue shooting this picture!
I move the meeting be adjourned.

A pair of readings for Antisocial Warfare Patsies

You may have heard that AWP is coming to LA at the end of the month. Although I won’t be attending the conference (at least I don’t think I will be) I will be participating in a pair of readings on the same night: Friday March 28.

The first one is at Sick City Records from 6pm to 8pm and the second is Attack of the Book People III at Hotel Per La from 6pm to 10pm but I’ll obviously be there around 8pm.

504 Plan

I’ll leave you with a ripping new album from 504 Plan from Washington, D.C. Remember when teachers and parents used to threaten us that “this will go down in your permanent record?” Well, a 504 Plan is a document that travels with you on your academic journey, specifically with regards to your physical, psychological, and social-emotional well-being. Leave it some DC high school kids who know their hardcore history to give us a fresh take on an old complaint.

Thanks for reading! Next week I’ll have an update about a writing project. If you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel about healthcare vigilantes Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. I have more books and zines for sale here. And if you’ve read all of those, consider checking out my latest collaboration The Witch’s Door and the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights.

Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get my deepest gratitude and Orca Alert! on most Sundays (but not last Sunday, but definitely this Sunday). It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, crime, and killer whales.