Punk By The Book

I’ve written about all the amazing things punk rock has done for me as a writer, and I’ve invited others to use my space to do the same. When I first started writing, I tried over and over again to capture the chaotic, frenetic energy of a mosh pit. I tried to get to the heart of what it felt like to have the bass line replace your heart beat in a crowded, dirty room.

I’ve never been able to do it.

It’s one of those inexplicable, full body, total mind experiences that defies any meaningful explanation. That’s okay, I think most of the beautiful stuff is the same way. I can describe falling in love, but you’re never going to feel the way I felt when I fell for my husband. I can describe the moment I held my daughter for the first time, or the day I graduated boot camp and officially became a US Marine. If I do it right, you feel something, but you’ll never feel what I felt.

Is punk rock as amazing and beautiful as those three examples?

Well. Yes and no. There’s opportunity after opportunity to listen to the music, to gather in this crowded rooms, to hear an amazing song by one of your favorite bands for the first time. But I only got to fall for my husband and my kid ONCE. So those experiences were way more powerful. Way more knock you on your ass if you’re not sitting down. But punk’s been there long before and will be there long after.

My heart swells when I catch the kid singing along to Bikini Kill and Anti-Flag. I love getting to enjoy that music with her (and yes, we listen to Tay Tay, too),but the idea of taking her into one of those crowded rooms is a little too intense at her age. Even if she pouts.

But, as she developed a stronger and stronger love for Anti-Flag, and their new album was really hitting her deep - they announced a listening party with an acoustic set near-ish to us. No risk of hearing damage, no mosh pits. And, as we discovered upon arrival - free donuts!

So, you got me. This post isn’t about crime fiction or even writing. Tonight was a really special night and I wanted to share it. If my mind goes with old age, I hope the memory of singing Brandenburg Gate with my sweet little 7 year old and one of my favorite bands is the last memory to go.

My First True Crime Obsession

Someone mentioned Cadillac Ranch and just like that, I had a picture in my head. I've never been there, but I could see it.

That's Brian Deneke (with the mohawk) and a man named Stanley Marsh, at the Cadillac Ranch. In my memory, Brian is alone in the photo, but I have no way of knowing if there's another one taken around the same time.

I've written a lot about true crime without writing about the first true crime story that really grabbed me. Back in the late nineties, the internet was a small place. A teenager using a search engine (I can't even remember what we used before Google anymore) could type "punk" and get the same couple hundred results. Yahoo groups, a couple message boards. This was before Amazon, or at least before they did anything but used books, and now I'm starting to feel a hell of a lot older than I should...

 I have puzzled over how so many people can sit and watch live trials on television, and scramble for any news on Casey Anthony, but I must have read the same handful of articles about Brian Deneke's murder a hundred times. I participated in Yahoo groups that discussed the case, and I waited and hoped for more news.

I'm not going to get into the story. It would sound a little too familiar in light of the number of murders we've seen go unpunished, particularly when the defendant is a great athlete with a "bright future." Repeating it all would get tiresome, because I wouldn't be able to keep myself from drawing parallels to all the cases that have followed, that have ended with a dearth of justice. But this one got to me. This was post- O.J. Simpson, but I was a little too young to be invested in that case. I was invested in the injustice of Brian's murder. I was shocked at the details, though I read them again and again.

The reasons are clear to me now, and they were relatively clear then. Brian Deneke looked like me and my friends. His murderer looked like the guys that made our lives hell. It felt very personal to me and in a way, it still does. In the time since I obsessively read every article and internet post about Brian, the story of his life and murder has apparently been featured on several TV shows and a movie has been made. I managed to miss it. The internet is a lot bigger now. There's a Facebook group for Brian, but the last posts were made over five years ago. 

I ask a lot of questions about what purpose true crime serves and what draws us to it, but when I remember my obsession with this murder and the case that followed, it didn't feel like the passing fancy of a true crime junkie. Maybe that's because it was a lot harder to be a true crime junkie then, or because so few of the stories seemed to involve people I could relate to. But Brian Deneke's death had a profound effect on me. I've written about my experiences living in an area where "big story" true crime was simply "life," but all of that seemed to follow my first taste of true crime obsession.

Crime & Punk: It's OK To Push Back - Ian Truman

Ian Truman is taking over my Friday spot to talk a little bit about the connection between punk rock and the drive to create.

Ian Truman is the winner of the 2013 Expozine "Best Book", Ian Truman is a Montreal born writer of poetry and fiction. His latest novel, GRAND TRUNK AND SHEARER, is available from Down and Out books.

It's OK To Push Back

I never really went to the big arena concerts, places like the Bell Centre and such, and I kinda feel lucky about that now. I feel lucky I was introduced to “legitimate” punk pretty early.

See, I was bullied a lot back in high school and in many ways I was your typical 90’s geek: too tall, too skinny, no muscle on the bones, anime club a decade before anime was “normal.” I was the kid that was hiding in the library as much as I could and I have zero problem admitting it was because I liked it as much as because I needed a place to hide. 

Now I think it was maybe in my fifth year of high school and I was hanging out with this weird fucking metalhead, one of the few other loners we had at school, and when I mean weird, I mean that he used to listen to metal sure, but in reality, he was trying to make music with a grinder over a vacuum cleaner and some white noise in the background and some bass drum filled with cans and trash or something. THAT guy, you know?

In many ways he was probably the punkest guy I have ever met. He really, absolutely and truthfully did not give a fuck about what anyone would ever think of him. He didn’t care about tags of labels or punk, metal, grind of the very concept of music. He just did whatever came to his mind. He was also probably the smartest guy around and didn’t have one once of malice in him. I would swear to that. 

 So this kid, who by then had been kicked out of the school radio club for playing his music there, told me he was going to bring me to this place they called “L’X” one day.

“You’re gonna love it,” he said. 

I said, “OK,” simply. Because what the fuck did I know about anything? That was about to change.

So one day we pack ourselves in his tiny car. That thing was a fucking Pinto, if you remember those, the rest of you can google them. That thing was a goddamn pinto. He later sold it to some monster truck show that defined the tiny box or a car as “absolutely perfect.” Anyways. So we packed ourselves in that car and we lived about an hour away from Downtown. He brings us there and it’s in the heart of Quartier Latin and, I mean, it looked like a fucking wasteland. 

This wasn’t the “Quartier des Spectacles” of luxurious condos, SAT gallery and designer gyms. This was the fucking red light in all its glory. I think it was 98 maybe.  It was the Montreal of insanely high unemployment, mental-hospital deinstitutionalization, spiking homelessness, post-referendum-traumatic-stress and population flight. 

Half the buildings were abandoned, there were vacant lots everywhere, some village made out of planks and cardboard, FOUFS was across the street and a gathering of maybe 60 bikers in a parking lot in front of an downright corporate ice cream parlour (yes, I’m serious) You stopped counting the needles and just found a path around them. I remembered some guy on the second window of an 18^th-century row house selling contraband cigarettes up and down a bucked he pulled with yellow string. 

And L’X was right in there, about a hundred inside the red light district. It was some room in this fucking historic building, abandoned or it seemed abandoned, it definitely looked abandoned. But there was definitely something happening there. And the place, I mean, it was this magnificent stone building, six or seven stories high with all the tall windows and the metal sculptures over the main entrance. “La Patrie” had been sculpted in the stone. The kind of shit you’d put in a movie or the kind of shit you say in movies that took place in New-York. You know “the” building I’m talking about.

In many ways, you could say L’X was Montreal’s CBGB’S.

So, there it was, next door over with a simple stroke of paint over a metallic door: “L’X” and that was it. The reason I’m bringing this up is because I respect a lot of artists who keep talking about those “matinées” at CBGC and how it shaped their lives and L’X was that place for me. It was the place where I had that one pure moment of revelation you really fucking need to make is as an artist. 

You see, I feel lucky about not going through the typical “Arena” concert because my friend had taken me straight to the heart of the fucking beast. That place was full of hope and desolation and fear and pain but the trash and sweat and anger mixed with this brand-new fucking notion of freedom. That tiny, fucking weird fucking metalhead had taken me right to the heart of punk rock. 

For such a legendary venue, I’m still amazed it hasn’t flooded the world of Montreal culture and writing. I don’t know if I was the first one to really write about it or it or not but it should definitely take its righteous place in the city’s cultural history.  

I mean, you had to go down some concrete stairs and then you reached the main door just inside and the room opened up in front of you. You walked down another set of stairs to the dance floor and there were metal railings all around everything and the obvious graffiti on the walls. The toilets were downright gnarly, that went without saying.

There seemed to be people sleeping down the corridor to some other part of the building, I swear, I saw some of them, there were fucking catacombs under there, it was like there was a system of tunnels below the venue that was below the fucking building that lead all over the city and the electricity was still working down there and you couldn’t figure out why. There was this one light bulb that was still dangling from the ceiling that looked like it had been there for decades and the wires running nowhere into a wall. 

You’d want to make that shit up and you couldn’t do it.

In the main room there was a third set of stairs leading up with a fucking mezzanine going all around the stage. And the stage was small and shitty and most bands would barely fit there. You’d fit fifty people in the room and it looked full but I’ve seen shows where they crammed probably a hundred and fifty.

The first show I went there had about 30 kids, maybe. It was far from full but it was absolutely mind blowing to me and I didn’t’ know what to expect.

The 30 kids in there were pushing against the stage like their life depended on it. The band started playing and I can’t remember who it was and it doesn’t matter. What mattered is I was this skinny, geeky kid getting shit on all week at school, hiding in the library or the anime club and I was smart, sure, but the grades weren’t there and I didn’t fucking know what to do with anything, with myself or my fucking life. 

 I had been writing on my own probably since third grade but I never dared to show it to anyone. I was creating in silence with no desire (or in fact, guts) to get it out in the world. No matter what you’d think about it, it takes guts to be a writer. It takes guts to say, “here, I wrote 300 pages and it’s worth your limited reading time.”

Punk gave me that guts and it happened in one second. 

The sound was fucking loud and it was horrible and heavy and noisy and shitty in every way you could imagine. You kinda just focused on the stomping of the drums. People started slamming into each other, punching and pushing each other and for the first time in my life it was OK to push back. In fact, it was expected of me. I was fucking invited to. A bunch of losers, loners and other misfit kids free to be “someone” in the second sub-basement of an abandoned building in the middle of “no-future” and a fucking recession but it was OK to push back. That meant a fucking lot.

And maybe I’m mature enough now to say that “being allowed to push back” is probably the most basic, common, most important emotion at the heart of punk. Before all the politics and the aesthetics and the noise and social critique, before all the branches and the Krishna-cores or straight edge vegans and the grind-core-pop-punk-concept-bands or post-emo-neo-crust bullshit there was this : “It’s OK to push back.” 

On paper it sounds like absolute garbage, right? It sounds so fucking basic it’s got to be a joke, right? In real life it was absolutely everything to me. 

Without that there would be no Ian Truman, no art of mine, no music, no politics, no drive, no anger, no desire or novels or poetry or books. Nothing. I wouldn’t have seen New-Orleans because of it or any other city because of it. I wouldn’t be writing this blog post or any other post at all. In fact I have little doubt I’d be dead. 

I spent about half my life in Quartier Latin, now. I’ve studied there. I work there. The building is still standing and I think about it every time I walk in front of it. You can’t forget something like that. I’m sure the aging punks in NYC still have that pinch when they walk in front of CBGB’s. I get the same feeling with L’X.

The building’s still abandoned. There’s asbestos or some shit in there. I know for a fact the room is still down there, probably untouched. I could bust the door and walk down and find the water damaged stage and the posters on the walls of bands as soft as the fucking Weakerthans, or as heavy as Snapcase and Shutdown. 

My point, I guess, is that kids need places like that in the world. It creates passion, it creates artists. They need that place to be absolutely, marvellously fucking horrible at whatever they’re trying to do. No one’s that good right off the bat. Absolutely no one.  You need to fail a lot and you need a place where you get to fail a lot.  L’X was that place for me. 

And so, sixteen years later, fucking seventeen years later, the building remains unused, wounded with asbestos, too expensive to fix or sell or too expensive to do anything with. As about a dozen glimmering condo towers have risen right next to it, it stands as a testament of what was and how much you can do with very little.

If you dare to write about it every once in a while.

Playlist: Crime Fiction Through Music (2)

Last fall I did a mini-playlist of songs that tell crime stories (here) and I thought it would be fun to do again. If you like a good crime story there's no reason you won't like it in the form of a movie, a book, or a song, right?

1. Bobby Fuller Four - I Fought The Law

I went with Bobby over The Clash because I'm a cheater and am including The Clash after this. This song's got it all - it's a love story, a prison story, a heist story, and a western (because what modern bank robbers use "a six gun"?). I've never met a person who didn't know this song, which means it's probably no revelation. But hey! I found you the 1966 version with video!

2. The Clash - Guns of Brixton

Bankrobber would have been a better choice. A deeper track, more direct in it's references to crime, I know. I linked it back there so you can watch the video if you're into the idea. But I've had Guns of Brixton on heavy rotation lately. It almost sounds like a protest song, and a lot of the lyrics seem relevant to American issues at the moment - but a closer look at the lyrics make it clear this is about organized crime. Doors are kicked down, people are shot in the street, the threat of death row hangs over head - this song has got it all. 

3. Brody Dalle - Don't Mess With Me

It's a badass punk chick singing about standing up to a bunch of guys with guns pointed at her, do you need more? I've been jamming to this one a lot since the theme of being surrounded by people with guns pointed at you, and feeling like you're going to be okay because someone else is with you is a big one in my work-in-progress. And because Brody Dalle will never not be ice cold cool.

4. Big D and the Kid's Table - My Girlfriend's on Drugs

Look, I know - you're not here for ska. Too bad. The Boston ska scene doesn't get enough credit and a whole hell of a lot of it is about drugs and crime. The title of the song is "My Girlfriend's On Drugs" so I feel like you know what it's about. This is more silly than anything, but that's one thing 90s ska really handled well - serious subject matter presented in a highly danceable, super kinetic, candy coated package. Not everything has to be so fucking heavy all the time. 

5. The Taxpayers - Some Kind of Disaster Relief

I know, two ska songs on one list. You guys are going to send me hatemail, aren't you? The point of these lists is to appreciate crime fiction where you don't expect to find it, and this Taxpayer's song answers that. It's a hell of a lot heavier than the Big D song above, tackling drug addiction, skipping town, kids with guns, and extreme poverty. There's a series of crime novels hiding between the drum beats. 

On Punk and Writing.

You ever have a moment that makes you feel like a teenager again? I don't mean like you're recently divorced and having your first super charismatic first kiss on the front porch again (though I've had that moment, too). I mean a reigniting of all the energy and optimism, all the big emotions you didn't have words for then, and maybe still don't. I mean like - the first time you heard a song that filled you up and made you want to scream with the joy of being understood and cry at the same time, or the first time you wrote something you were proud of. The way you felt when graduation was only thirteen days away and it was so goddamn exciting that you didn't have time to be fucking terrified of whatever came next.

I had a moment like that last weekend, and the next day I spent the whole day recovering from it just to suit up and head out to do a little book promo at San Diego Comic Fest. The weekend was a whirlwind capped off by finding a big Rubbermaid tub full of shit I kept from high school. It was all there - the good, the bad, the "fuck you, you are never going to see this shit, I don't care who you are." I'm talking about poetry. Poetry written between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. A box full of half formed story ideas, song lyrics, poems, a file I kept on my favorite filmmakers, a few embarrassing photos (I looked really stoned  through a lot of high school even though I was so straight edge I didn't even drink caffeine).

I went through that box and still felt good about myself, which is saying something.

The point is, I feel reignited. On Sunday, our panel was asked when we decided to "get serious" about writing which is always a funny question for me. I've always been dead serious about writing. I spent more time with my headphones in writing longhand than I spent doing literally anything else. I carried my works-in-progress with me all day at school waiting for a free moment to work. At college, with time management firmly in my own hands, I barely pulled a 2.0 the first semester because all I wanted to do was read and write - just not the stuff I was supposed to be reading and writing.

I don't count that as being serious in the context of a career, because I was still writing with that intense need. Scribbling with any pen I could find, no concept of the business side of things, no concept of what was good or bad - just filling pages and feeling good. Of course, being a writer was easier then. Lonelier, too. It was pure energy and everything else was secondary. It was writing song lyrics without knowing how to write music, and writing novels without knowing (or caring) how to outline. It was the feeling that it was important to do it, and everything else would work out eventually.

In a way, that idea worked. I had some pretty low lows, where writing was the last thing on my mind because I spent a fair amount of my early adulthood making decisions on the fly and hoping for the best, only to learn the hard way (over and over again) that there were some upsides to having a plan. The way "everything else worked out" was that I got older, less dumb, and more focused. I learned about the business side, I learned about the craft, I met other writers and started building something more than a Rubbermaid tub full of loose-leaf notebook pages. I'd be lying if I said that all that learning the hard way didn't snuff out a few sparks.
Maybe you read that and you feel a little sad, but remember how this blog post started. I've been riding the high of finding that excited, passionate, crazy ass kid I used to be - blasting my favorite punk rock and getting excited about art and writing, getting excited about possibility for nearly a week now. What's curious about it, but in the context of my life, fairly unsurprising, is I found that spark in the same place teenage me always found it. Riding the barricade at a punk show screaming my lungs out.

I've avoided shows like that for awhile because I've got a bad leg, a bad back, and a kid that requires babysitting. I was thinking I couldn't hang or I didn't belong. I was listening to other great music and only dipping toes into punk music when I felt like I really needed it. But riding that barricade again was like coming home, going to church, and finding a time machine. I've wanted to write about the odd connection aging punks have with crime fiction for awhile, before that I spent hours trying to find the right words to communicate exactly what it feels like to be in a sweaty dark club listening, screaming, mashing bodies to bodies. I haven't managed either - but I think we'll get there. Remembering what was so fucking special about it is a good start.

Oh, and I got a new shirt...

This post is redolent of...

By Russel D McLean

If you missed it, last week I was interviewed (albeit briefly) by a fantastically smart chap calling himself Blimpy. It was a short,sharp interview with questions from readers of his blog and they were great questions (especially the Ernest Hemmingway: Fuck or Fight question which started me corpsing quite badly).

But one question tripped me up:

“My book is redolent of…”

Listen to the interview, you hear me stumble, unable to recalled what “redolent” means. Mock me if you like, but, yes, I had a genuine moment of verbal confusion where I was unable to recall the word. Because its not one I’d really use.

But it got me thinking about writers and vocabulary. People expect authors to have an almost limitless capacity for wordage. We should be awesome scrabble players. In spelling bees, we’d kick those kid’s arses with out knowledge of how to spell.

But the truth is, we are like any other human being, and we have gaps in our vocabulary.

Shocking?

I don’t think so. Because being an author isn’t about knowing the meaning of every word in the language, but knowing how to manipulate the words we do know in order to communicate. Now, I’m not saying that a writer shouldn’t be fascinated by language and constantly on the lookout for new words, but I am saying that the real focus of crafting a novel or short story or whatever is using whatever words are at your disposal in the best possible fashion.

I was thinking about punk bands the other day, how so many of them knew only a small amount of chords (the clichéd amount is of course three) and yet they were able to create a vast amount of songs from just those three chords. Because they used what they had. I’m not saying any writer could get away with only knowing three words, but the principle’s the same: you use what you have to hand and you use it well.

Writing isn’t about verbosity. Sure, it helps to know words and what they do, but its more important to be able to say what you have to say clearly and concisely. It helps to know how to get your sense across. And sometimes, when you want to achieve that, less is more.

I just started reading a book for possible review (Yes, I’m trying to get back to that) which required use to the Dictionary to understand a six word sentence. I had no sense of voice or rhythm from the book. All I knew about it was that the author had a larger vocabulary than me and wanted to flaunt it. Maybe he was influenced by Joyce (who at least had control over his words and a sense of literary rhythm) or maybe he just thought that all writers should show off their vocabulary at the expense of their reader’s concise understanding.

A lot of the time, people hear me talk about Elmore Leaonrd as one of the most perfect writers. This is because he gets his sense across cleanly, clearly and concisely. He writes (approximately) how people talk. And while I’m sure his vocabulary is extensive, the need to show it off isn’t there. Unless its necessary from a character perspective.

A writer may actually be the worst person to talk to about specific words. Our job isn’t to know language intimately, but rather to know how to manipulate it to our own ends.

At least that’s my excuse, and man, I’m sticking to it.