I'm not Henry Rollins

Spoken word in Hollywood, poetry in Paradise Hills

Aug 23, 2023

We made it through the tropical storm here in San Diego’s South Bay. We live in the southeast corner of the city in a place called Paradise Hills, which is about five miles west of the navy base that I called home for two years in the late ’80s.

New visitors to San Diego are always surprised by the city’s many canyons and hills and, as you may have guessed from the name, Paradise Hills has a lot of them. We weren't really worried about flooding here but we did our due diligence in the garage. We were mostly worried about losing power, which didn’t happen, and we spent the day working and looking out the window and reading updates on our phones.

I was supposed to go to LA for events on Sunday and Monday, but the former was canceled (and has been rescheduled for February). I had planned on making it a two-day trip but ended up driving up to LA on Monday afternoon and coming back that night, which is never ideal.

For Monday’s Psychedelic Circus, Jessamyn Violet of the band Movie Club invited me to read a short piece of prose that would accompany one of their songs. Movie Club is a guitar and drum combo that excels in driving beats and washes of distortion. The songs are all instrumental which made it a fun project. I chose “Trap Door.”

After watching a few videos of previous collaborations, I realized I’d have to write something new that fit the contours of the song. Also, Movie Club doesn’t make ambient music. I was going to be competing with drums and a very loud guitar. I was going to have to write something intense.

When I was writing Make It Stop. I wrote out the sentence I WILL SHOW YOU INTENSITY on a series of post-it notes and stuck them over my desk. I wanted to remind myself every time I sat down to write that for the characters in my novel my words were a matter of life and death.

Unless you’re famous, when you go out on book tour, you’re always explaining yourself to a room full of strangers. This is who I am. This is what I do. This is why I’m here. You have to be your own emcee, PR person, and tour manager rolled into one.

I feel like I’ve gotten pretty good at that but it’s a practice that calls for some savoir faire. I used to do a fair amount of spoken word and I miss the days of screaming into a microphone about beef or cops or sentient tongues and leave it at that.

Flyer for the open mic I co-hosted once upon a time with Skip McCraw

I wrote a short piece called “The Demo” about the head of a record label who becomes obsessed with a demo tape. He wants to put out the record except the cassette doesn’t have a label and no one knows where the tape came from. The head of the label descends into a spiral of paranoia, thinking the band is fake or his employees are fucking with him or one of his many enemies is out to get him.

In various places around the internet, including here, I referred to the piece in tongue-in-cheek fashion as a lost chapter from Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST.

Writing the piece to the rhythm of the song was a fun and challenging exercise. During sound check on Monday night, I realized “The Demo” was too long. The length was fine, but there were too many words. It’s one thing to rehearse a pierce while listening to a song on my phone but being on stage with the drums and guitar was another matter. With the music behind me, I realized the words mattered a lot less than the feelings I conveyed, the emotions I expressed. The intensity was all that mattered.

I should have written a song but I don’t know how to write a song.

After the show, I spoke with an acquaintance who wanted to know if the piece was true. He’d taken my “lost episode” promo seriously. While it’s true I did intentionally blur the lines between fact and fiction, I’m not Henry Rollins and “The Demo” isn’t about Greg Ginn (but it’s not not about him either).

I walked down Hollywood Boulevard to where I’d parked my car across from Jumbo’s Clown Room, which somehow still exists, bought a can Red Bull at the liquor store, and drove home.

Last week I received my contributor’s copies of The Heartworm Reader Vol. 2 in the mail. They’re absolutely gorgeous and filled with beautiful words. If you’d told me 30 years ago that I would one day share space in a journal with Stephen Jesse Bernstein, Mark Lanegan, Thurston Moore, and Jeffery Lee Pierce, I would have laughed in your face. I’m not sure I even knew who all these people were 30 years ago. I for sure didn’t know about contributors D. Randall Blythe, Kristin Hersh, Geoff Rickly, or Emma Ruth Rundle because I didn’t have access to a time machine.

LA is the dream factory and I wouldn’t trade the ten plus years I lived there for anything but I love being a writer in San Diego. Every time I drive the 12 minutes from Paradise Hills to our studio in Barrio Logan I have to pass the Navy station, the hulking gray hulls of US warships are an almost daily reminder of a time in my life. when living my life as an artist or any kind of existence outside of the Navy’s hierarchy felt like a fantasy.

I was at the studio reading

HAPPY NEW TEARS by Wesley Eisold

earlier this year when Wes announced the next issue of Heartworm Reader. I’d read the first issue and, inspired by too much coffee, I responded to Wes’s newsletter: “I want to write for Heartworm Reader some day.”

Or something like that.

I put it out into the universe and the universe responded.

“Today is the day,” Wes wrote back almost immediately. “Can you get me four poems by next week?”

Or something like that.

“Of course,” I said even though every single one of you reading this knows that someone who doesn’t know how to write a song sure as shit doesn’t know how to write a poem.

I read poetry and I’m inspired by poetry. But my poems read like stories and my stories read like novels and my novels, well, they’re a fucking mess until I figure out how to make them less so.

I figured all I had to do was write with honesty and intensity. Write one true thing, I told myself. No bullshit.

I wrote about my late cousin Mark Patrick Carducci, one of the few no-bullshit zones in my life. Before he became the celebrated screenwriter of the horror movies Neon Maniacs, Buried Alive, and Pumpkinhead, my cousin wrote for movie magazines. He wrote for Fangoria and Cinefantastique and others.

I was digging through his interviews with directors and was struck by how most of them took place on set. When he spoke with Walter Hill it was during the filming of The Warriors and he was on set during the iconic “Come out to play” scene.

You know the one I’m talking about.

Mark was there. He witnessed that.

Art occurs in the present tense. In literature and film and music the artists are alive in their works. Shakespeare writes. Alan Ladd kisses Veronica Lake. Lanegan sings his guts out for all eternity.

When I press play and watch the clip I conjure my cousin. He is there, off camera, scribbling in his notebook, a ghost.

That’s what I wanted to write about.

That’s what I tried to capture.

I don’t know if a poem is the best way to cast that spell.

I suspect it will take a book, the book I’ve been writing for 20 years, on the stage, in the pages of Razorcake, and now in the Heartworm Reader, which you can order right here.

Thank you, Wes, for letting me share some of Mark’s light with the world.