Dispatches from the Land of the Dead

Of having no other place to go-ho (I wanna be cremated)

This week’s Message from the Underworld really is a message from the underworld.

On Sunday I drove up to LA for the LitFest in the Dena, which was held at the Mountain View Mausoleum in Aaltadena. It’s like Pasadena only higher up the mountain. It’s a beautiful space full of marble and stained glass and, well, dead people.

The mausoleum has the austere beauty of the Huntington Library, of old California wealth and prosperity, but it was a little strange to be sitting on a panel with Keith Morris, Iris Berry, and Patrick O’Neil talking punk rock in a building full of bones. (Incredibly, no one made a PUNK’S NOT DEAD joke.) I blame the moderator who filled in for Todd Taylor, Razorcake co-founder Sean Carswell (Hi, Sean!).

As strange as it seemed at first, it surprised me how quickly I was able to put the venue completely out of my mind. I listened to the panelists, doodled a picture of Keith, and answered questions from the audience—just like any other literary event. I said hello to some old friends (Hi Scott!) and met some new ones (Hi Facundo! Hi Devon!) and even signed a couple of copies of My Damage with Keith, which is always a treat. It wasn’t until I looked at the photos the next day and thought, Geez that’s strange.

Even stranger was to get the news yesterday that OFF! is breaking up and playing a very short farewell tour in conjunction with the premiere of the film Free LSD. Dates were announced for Chicago, New York and LA and that’s it for OFF! I sat two feet away from Keith for an hour and we talked about all kinds of things—on and off the mic—but the end of OFF! was not one of them.

And then this morning, literally as I was writing this, I got the news that Steve Albini died suddenly from a heart attack. Albini’s band Shellac was supposed to play with OFF! in Chicago. He wrote one of the greatest songs about what it feels like to grow up in a small town, produced Nirvana’s In Utero, and was a World Series of Poker champion. He was 61. He was also born in Pasadena. How weird is that?

My sojourn into the underworld continued last night when we drove up to Riverside for a memorial service for one of Nuvia’s cousins. Nuvia has a very large family so these gatherings are like mini family reunions with little hits of joy mixed in with the sadness. It was especially eerie because the deceased’s stepsister passed away last year and the service was held at the same facility. Talk about déjà vu.

What made it even more eerie for me is that the funeral home is located in Norco, a town of 25,000 people that refers to itself as Horsetown, USA. As you drive in there’s a feed store, an equine hospital, a boot barn, and—for some reason—a tropical fish supply shop. There are signs that urge drivers to share the road with horses. It’s such a distinct and unusual place that I used Norco as a setting in my novel-in-progress.

When the main character learns that a woman he worked with and secretly loved thirty years ago has died from a drug overdose, he drives to Riverside to attend the service. I’d never been to Norco before and didn’t expect to again and certainly not for another memorial service. So driving into Norco and sitting in that chapel again was like slipping into my novel in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced before.

I’m going to read from that novel next week here in San Diego at The Book Catapult on Saturday March 18 at 7pm. I’m stoked to be part of Small Press Nite’s one-year anniversary. I went to the last one and it was packed so if you’re planning on coming arrive early, grab a seat, and buy some books in one of the best-curated indie bookstores in all of Southern California.

I promised some book and music recommendations last week. I’ve got one. I’ll do better next week.

Selected Poems by Kenneth Patchen

I’ve been reading Patchen since I was exposed to his anti-novels in college—Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Sleepers Awake—and he’s one of those authors that I read and reread. Now that he’s worked his way into my novel-in-progress I only expect that to intensify. Selected Poems is only 145 pages but draws from ten books published between 1936 and 1957 so it’s all over the place in terms of tone and style. My favorite period is during the mid-40s when he’s at his angriest and most prolific. For my money, Patchen is the closest thing to William Blake the twentieth century has produced (sorry Ginsburg). He’s got a poem that opens in all caps and grabs you by the throat.

I DON’T MEANT TO STARTLE YOU but
they are going to kill most of us.

Patchen is the great dismantler of decorum, of precedent, of the way things are done. He was a huge influence on the Beats and to my mind is very punk. Check out this excerpt from a poem called “Credit to Paradise”:

The fun of being God would be
In being nothing;
To really live, we should be dead too.
Isn’t all dread a dread of being
Just here? of being only this?
Of having no other thing to become?
Of having nowhere to go really
But where we are?

Thanks for taking us to the edge of the void and fucking leaving us there, Ken. Selected Poems has one of my favorite visual poems, “The Murder of Two Men by a Kid Wearing Lemon-colored Gloves.”

Patchen was also a visual artist—of course he was—who filled his books with drawings, illustrations, and paintings full of strange figures. His art is indifferent to beauty. His lines are confident but crude, like they were drawn for an audience of one, which was the case. He dedicated countless poems to his wife Miriam.

Patchen has the voice of a pulp existentialist and the intensity of a street preacher. There’s a messianic fervor to his poetry that is full of questions, not platitudes. He is always stridently, vehemently anti war, but he comes on like a drifter trying to con the bartender out a free beer.

“It’s dark out, Jack, the stations out there don’t identify themselves…” is a line that has been rattling around my head since a former colleague used it in a student film 30 years ago.

It is dark out there, Jack.

It feels like it’s never been darker.

Thanks for reading and a special thank you to those who have recently upgraded to paid or renewed your subscription. I really appreciate it.

If you’re new-ish here and you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel 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. Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get Orca Alert! every Sunday. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, and killer whales.