It ends with a swift kick in the ass

Circle Jerks, Ruth Madievsky & Make It Stop

Greetings from San Diego! Hopefully I’ll stay put long enough that I won’t have to update you on my whereabouts each week.

Last week I flew back from CDMX in time to catch the Circle Jerks at the North Park Observatory on Friday night. This is the fourth time I’ve seen Keith perform since the pandemic started: twice with Circle Jerks and twice with OFF! I think Friday’s performance signaled that Keith is all the way back to his old self.

The set was broken up by Keith’s banter, which I haven’t seen him engage in for a while. Keith doesn’t ramble per se, he circles around the point he’s trying to make until he finds the entry point he’s looking for. He did that several times on Friday and it always brought a smile to my face—not because I understood what the hell he was talking about—because it reminded me of those long afternoons I spent in his apartment while we were working on My Damage. I’m here to report that the Mayor of Los Feliz was in fine fettle and all is as it should be in the world of punk rock.

Keith Morris at North Park Observatory

I got up early Saturday morning and drove Annie up to the mountains in San Bernardino where she’ll be a camp counselor for two weeks. Our second road trip this summer. I promptly drove back down the mountain and headed west on the 10 through 100-degree temps to LA. I camped out at House of Pies for an hour or two and then hung out at Razorcake HQ for the rest of the evening and was asleep by 10pm.

On Sunday I was off to visit an old friend in Hollywood and do a quick shoot for a documentary. Hopefully I’ll have more to say about that before the end of the year. Then it was back to San Diego and I dragged myself through the door after listening to two hours of death metal.

I woke up Monday morning with all kinds of plans to tackle a half-dozen projects but I just didn’t have it. My brain and body said, “Enough.” I spent a long stretch of Monday evening sitting on the porch with Nuvia, watching the swallows dart in and out of the eaves of the building across the street, their sleek forms describing dizzying arcs in the twilight. I was so happy to sit and do nothing and go nowhere for a while. Highly recommended.

I really am going to try to take things slower for the rest of the summer with more regular reading, reflection, and exercise. There will be live music, of course, but I’m hoping these next few weeks unfold at a more leisurely pace.

And now some links…

All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky

Last week I neglected to post a link of a profile I wrote about Ruth Madievsky and her debut novel All-Night Pharmacy. It’s an LA novel full of sex and drugs but not in a way that reminds me of any other work of fiction.

The novel contains multitudes but I think the one thing you need to know about Madievsky is that she’s a hell of a poet. I picked up her collection Emergency Brake and its one of those books that wows you over and over again. As Madievsky might put it, the book is full of bangers:

I remember wondering whether the body / was a pool, if it could be entered that easily, / the way I enter dreams and play every character, / one version of me petting the dog / while another sets the schoolchildren on fire

I love novels written by poets because the language is like another character, and in Madievsky’s case it’s an unruly guest who will drink all your booze and sit uncomfortably close to your significant other.

Madievsky invited me over to her apartment in Santa Monica and we chatted while her new baby slept in the next room. It felt like an oasis of calm, which is the exact opposite vibe of All-Night Pharmacy. Here are a few things she said that didn’t make it into the profile that might interest you:

On influences…

I was very influenced by a lot of the books that I've been reading at the time, like Jesus Son was very big for me, as with basically every writer in their 20s. I've always been into voice-driven literary fiction, people like Rachel Kushner, Melissa Broder, Raven Leilani, Brian Washington. Those are some of the people I read.

On the intersection of fiction and poetry…

I think that with both poetry and fiction, I'm always trying to tap into something that captures how it feels to be a person in the world. For me, it's about capturing hyper-specific experiences, which is why I gravitate toward voice-driven fiction so much. What I like to read, both in poetry and fiction, is also what I like to write, and that is books where there are cough drops and softshell turtles and these highly specific things that you can encounter as a person in the real world. Sometimes when you're reading books, you don't see things with that level of specificity. It’s a tree or it’s a car. I feel like I'm always trying to find ways to make make this feel visceral, like people are actually in the scene.

On books that are about more than one thing…

I was interested in writing about generational trauma, but not in a way where that felt like the central theme. I was interested in writing about substance dependence and queer coming of age and the urban loneliness of living in Los Angeles and all of these things without any of them being what the book is about. And so I had a lot of fun working all those threads in and I think that's why my friend said the book is like an all night pharmacy with everything in it. I don't think the book is just any of those things. In some ways, it's a little hard to describe what the book is about when people ask me for the elevator pitch because there are so many different threads and none of them are the most dominant one.

Go check out the profile, and by all means check out All-Night Pharmacy and for extra credit hunt down a copy of Emergency Brake so that you won’t feel left out when Madievsky publishes her next stunning collection of poems.

The House on Dead Confederate Street

I’ve got not one, not two, but three interviews to share with you.

Last week, my short story “The House on Dead Confederate Street” was published at Short Story, Long. This week, you can read a short interview between me and Aaron Burch about it. Here’s an excerpt:

Not to throw my family under the bus, but we've all had our brushes with the law. I had one sibling go to juvie and another had to wrap Christmas presents at the mall. For my community service stint, I did volunteer hours at my on-campus job in the computer center. So the idea of a bunch of misfit kids having to do community service at a haunted house doesn't seem that far-fetched to me.

I’d like to say this is the last time I’ll bring up this story here in Message from the Underworld but I’m thinking of adapting the story into a screenplay. Who knows what the future holds? Not you. Not me.

Make It Stop

I had a great chat with Tobias Carroll at Vol. 1 Brooklyn about the origins of Make It Stop. Tobias asked me about the challenges of writing Make It Stop:

That desire to be done with the book was so strong, so powerful, and it fooled me, on more than one occasion, into thinking that it was finished when it wasn’t. I’d say the most challenging thing was accepting there was more work to be done, five, seven, nine years into the project.

Also, I was recently featured on the podcast Bookin’ with Jason Jeffries to discuss Make It Stop.

Lastly, my double nickels birthday is on Saturday. If you still haven’t picked up a copy of Make It Stop, you can get the e-book right now for $1.99. That’s cheaper than a birthday card.

Keep cool, stay safe, and see you next week when we’re going to discuss one of Keith’s favorite bands… Cypress Hill.