a what's what of bullet-blast

Check out "Black Market," the February issue and the second helping of Short, Fast, and Deadly's new monthly incarnation. Buy the print issue, it looks nice. Some great people and great stories to ponder. I've got a review in it, but no one really reads those, right?

Strokes haters need not apply

Howler

America Give Up

Rough Trade, 2012

I really want to like America Give Up, the debut LP from Minneapolis’ Howler. Really, I do. The young quintet’s full-length is chock full of super-catchy garage rock and post-punk jams, impressively tight guitar licks, and a pleasant lo-fi distortion that conjures some of Guided By Voices’ more accessible numbers, or perhaps a faster-paced Pavement. The kind of stuff that demands to be played loud and often. Not surprisingly, the band’s 2011 EP, This One’s Different, was universally lauded, and NME went as far as to name Howler the third-best new band of that year. So what’s the problem?

NPR, in a feature on the band, noted several other groups that sounded like Howler, the first being labelmates The Strokes. The comparison couldn’t be more apt. The more I replayed America Give Up, the more it felt like I was listening to an early Strokes album, and not a particularly outstanding one. Most of the songs are inundated with the same hi-hat heavy, rapid and syncopated drum rhythms, predictable chord progressions, the slightly distorted and deeply intoned vocals we’ve all heard before. Tracks like “Pythagorean Fearem” and “Free Drunk” are dead ringers for Strokes demos that would have probably been relegated to B-sides in favor of something just a little more interesting. Lead singer Jordan Gatesmith (named one of the 50 Coolest People of 2011 by NME) sports a delivery that is, at its best, vaguely powerful if not a little understated. At its worst, he sounds like an even more forced faux-British mash-up of Julian Casablancas and Brandon Flowers on Vicodin, doling out relatively uncreative musings on teenage neuroticism: “I hate the way I talk / And I hate the way I write / Sometimes it's better to stay in bed / Sometimes it's better to stay out all night.” I guess what I’m getting at is the reason I liked The Strokes’ early work is because it felt so fresh and authentic; these were truly gritty New York cats whose innovative music was the inevitable and unstoppable byproduct of the streets in which they traveled. By so greatly emulating a band that is certainly a major influence, these five fresh-faced Midwestern lads are only diminishing the talent they clearly possess.

But I’m not dismissing the album as a total cheap knock-off. The best songs – and they are gems – are the ones that diverge the most from the formula. The seductively slow-moving “Too Much Blood” one-ups many of The Flaming Lips’ coolest, more darkly ethereal moments in the 90s. “Back Of Your Neck” is a raucous, falsetto-friendly surf-rock-meets-power-pop good time who’d undoubtedly be the popular kid at any party. No, the LP isn’t bad, and most fans of the indie persuasion will find it enjoyable, if not moderately addictive. But I’m more intrigued by what Howler does next, if the band can find its own voice and build on the big-time potential that surfaces only periodically on America. It’s a start boys, now let’s get to work!

life is a bug right now

Humor is so situational like if a waiter asks a customer and his date what they want to drink and they say "two Manhattans on the rocks!" and when he (the waiter) brings the drink ticket to the bar and says "two Manhattans on the rocks" and I say "Oooh, Manhattans on the rocks, that's my favorite drink!" the waiter, the bartender, and even the barback will inevitably bust out laughing or at least chuckle knowingly because they all know that a Manhattan (rye, sweet vermouth, Angostura bitters and garnished with a maraschino cherry) is a stirred drink that is always served up, never on the rocks, so we all know that this customer and his date are probably tourists from Cincinnati or somewhere who only ordered a "Manhattan on the rocks" because woo-hoo we're in Manhattan and it must be like, a specialty here; or, even worse, they aren't tourists and simply frequent bars that deign to sell their clientele Manhattans on the rocks, which clearly translates to "MAJORLY UNCOUTH POSER BAR" and reinforces the staff's superiority in the form of a communal laugh. It's funny right?

he’s lost the ability to process most physical sensations

Out of Touch by Brandon Tietz

Otherworld Publications

Pub date: December 2010

242 pages

**I wrote this like over a year ago and submitted it to a publication that will go nameless, who said they were going to publish it like a year ago but it looks like they forgot about me and when I emailed them they responded as if my name was the author’s. Weird. Oh well, I really liked this book and it’s worth reading about. And I’m cleaning out my Word documents and want to get rid of the file.

 One of the most prevalent – and frequently maligned – tropes of what can be loosely be called the current transgressive fiction movement is a character (often young, male, and upper class) whose frustration with the prevailing cultural hegemony, or simply his deep-seeded blasé nihilism, gives him the impetus to partake in unprovoked violence, deviant and usually misogynistic sexual acts and a variety of criminal activities, all for the sake of indulgent self-knowledge. More often than not, this morally vapid jaunt into the taboo is dismissed by many readers as offering little or no intrinsic value and providing, at best, vague social commentary or disposable shock entertainment.

But what happens when a protagonist, possessed of those same taboo inclinations, unexpectedly finds himself physically unable to enjoy, or even engage in his favorite disturbing pastimes? How does he cope with, and derive new personal meaning from a new and profound numbness that is anything but comfortable? 28-year-old Kansas City native Brandon Tietz has the answer. His debut novel, Out of Touch, is a delightfully twisted and cunningly crafted über-noir literary thriller that not only pays homage to the movement’s older masters, but also signals the emergence of a brilliantly distinct, brutally funny, and culturally savvy new voice.

The book recounts a few months in the decadent, bleak, didactic and ultimately fascinating life of Aidin, a filthy-rich 24-year-old with a high school education and an insatiable proclivity for meaningless sex and pharmaceuticals. After a standard club night involving enough cocaine, roofies, and Viagra to make Charlie Sheen blush, he wakes up and discovers he’s lost the ability to process most physical sensations. He can’t feel his own skin, sex as a pleasure hobby has become strictly impossible, and the drugs and booze that fortified his manic, self-destructive nihilism and numbed the tremors of his inherent (and somewhat cliché) child-o’-wealth sadness, are utterly useless. Realizing that his heretofore gilded shitshow of a life is ostensibly finished, he enlists the professional help of Dr. Paradies, an unorthodox therapist who, in lieu of medication, provides Aidin with a detailed and seemingly arbitrary list of assignments to be completed that are meant, he thinks, to help him come to terms with his condition, to help him find a new purpose and new talents in a heretofore purposeless life, to pick some new hobbies, or…something. Because as he sets out to finish the list – items that range from mastering an Easy-Bake Oven to delivering strange packages to anonymous undercover agents – with the fervor of one of his past binges, he realizes that his is a tiny cog in a much larger, unnamed conspiracy machine that may be darker than anything he’s seen or felt, but one that might also offer him a chance at redemption for a lifetime of apathy and self-denial.

On a superficial level, and from a literary standpoint, Aidin is far from a revolutionary character. Upper class, white, the emotionally vacant That Guy drowning in a deluge of designer labels, slinging stacks of cash at the trendiest venues, whose mantra concludes that “when you really break it down, attraction is nothing more than a chemical response in your body. Lust locked in a tablet,” but who still attracts the rabid advances of every gold-digging floozy his eyes wander upon. The novel’s action presumably occurs in Kansas City, however, it’s a wealthy-suburb-slash-posh-downtown milieu that could just as easily be located in Southern California or Connecticut. Yet in spite, or perhaps because of his vapidly amorphous characteristics, Aidin is able to elicit a series of profound and tragicomic truths that transcend geography and socioeconomic status. As he begins checking off items on Dr. Paradies’ list, he not only discovers a particular set of skills – genius-level IQ, the ability to instantly learn and speak dozens of languages, the stamina to run 10 miles without feeling tired  – but also reflects with increasing clarity on the minutiae that has comprised his past. The drug-induced disconnect, the end of introspection and promises of commitment coupled with the ironically dehumanizing creep of communications technology. The deflating feeling that the newest generations coming of age have been abandoned by parents whose “me first” pursuits of youthful American immortality have left us not only environmentally and economically depleted, but also psychologically and emotionally sapped:

I’m not a product of my environment or my peers.

I’m a product of absence, and even though it kills me and the last of my young ideals to admit this…I just don’t think I believe in heroes anymore. Not in this world. In this life.

No one has powers.

Nobody is special.

Most of all, me.

Postmodernism isn’t fun anymore and it’s starting to sink in. The most unnerving moment appears in the midst of the book’s spiral into what at first seems like an outlandish terrorist thriller until Aidin casually remarks that “everyone wants to see through the tinted window, but no one ever tells you what it’s like to live behind it.” It is when we understand that nothing is too far fetched; we are all products of the panopticon, the Patriot Act, the whims of therapists and governments and pills, the sheep-herding, behind-the-scenes personality control tactics we all hear about, but about which no one seems to care. It is the moment when we realize that, unlike Aidin (and the seemingly impossible physical and intellectual development he’s experienced as a result of his resistance to the numbness) we might be the ones who are really out of touch. Tietz’s constant delving into black humor and his authoritative yet accessible pitch-perfect delivery do much to diffuse and lighten these ultimately hefty overtones.

Yes, the prose is robust, yet uncompromising and economical; Tietz likes his sentences terse and biting, the verbal contradiction to the numbness with which his protagonist is consumed. Yet as impressive as the language remains throughout the book, it was also an initial source of concern for this reader. As an avid digester of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk, I was immediately struck by Out of Touch’s similarity to the work of these transgressive rock stars, in both the book’s textual surface and thematically. The L.A.-esque club-kid nihilism, epically excessive and flippant drug use exacerbated in no small part by parental absence, and the young, hyper-sexual and physically flawless socialite-turned-terrorist, are crucial elements of Ellis’s Less Than Zero and Glamorama, respectively. Here we also find Palahniuk’s trademark coy flip-flopping from first to second person – “You’re not a numb-nutted freak; you’re ‘somatically deficient.’” – as well as an emphasis on mental instability and the steps the afflicted take – prescriptions, progressive therapists, group help sessions – to alleviate their real or imagined illnesses, à la Fight Club and Choke. There’s also the ubiquity of signal phrases (“Everyone is two people”, “…maybe I started something I shouldn’t have…”), short, often repeated sentences (frequently employed by both of the aforementioned authors in virtually all of their novels) whose meaning deepens with each jarring plot shift.

The similarities should come as no surprise. Ellis and Palahniuk are the first two names that Tietz credits in the acknowledgements that precede the text, and the author currently serves as a moderator at The Cult Writers Workshop, an online community located on Palahniuk’s Web site that caters to likeminded writers (and a forum to which he owes much of his early publishing success). That a novel is clearly so indebted to others begs a number of questions, the most obvious being, does it matter? Regardless of whether or not the reader is well-versed in the postmodern transgressive canon, is it enough to simply sift through two writers’ technique bins flea-market style, extracting the most compatible fabrics from each to sew a tapestry that, while remaining compelling and coherent, is still comprised of the already-done fragments of novels that have simply been rearranged? Fortunately the point is moot because the book is Tietz’s own, fueled by a unique and addictive voice, a fresh grasp of post-recession culture and a masterful sense of pace, of the relevatory arc. Aidin elicits an empathy that is lacking in the majority of Elllis’s characters. This isn’t to say that we should feel anything close to tear-jerking sympathy for a spoiled child of obscene wealth who often comes off as callow and misogynistic, but the desire to see him fight his disability and break out of his apathetic bubble after suffering the extremes of abandonment and manipulation at the hands of his parents is a driving force of the novel. And though the plot twists, the teasing of vital information that stokes the thrill ride, might be compared to Palahniuk, they are just as easily reminiscent of Chandler and Ellroy, with more than an inimitable touch of brimming Generation Y idiosyncrasy. Tietz’s transparency is noble, if unnecessary.

In one sense, the book’s final chapters seem a bit rushed, even though they do accurately encapsulate the constantly shifting conspiracy mindfuck that Aidin’s life has become. But this is one of only a very few minor plot-related gripes. Because the total package is a rare harrowing gem, equal parts trendy and cautionary, emotionally implosive and sensory deprived. Out of Touch is a fearless and audacious debut from a writer whose chops, poise and ear for detail make a strong opening argument for his candidacy as the next bearer of transgressive fiction’s chic, bloody torch.