So, I like, fo reals had a ridic rad assignment all lined up for Super Snoop Sunday, which was to infiltrate the neo-golf subculture couched within some Aussie dude’s Superbowl party in the West Village and report back to my peeps at AMR. My homegirl Ellie’s ex/not-ex boyf who she like just kicked out of her pad is now crashing with the Aussie-partydude, so it seemed all drama and whatevs, but eff it. There’s gonna be golfers there??? Weird. The only golfers I know are like my dad and my gramps, so I was all set to find out what was the color a la mode for polo shirts. Collars popped up? Have golf shoes become hip like bowling shoes, informing street shoes, informing golf shoes, informing Fashion Week? Is it still all about plaid and argyle, or are they mixin it up with metallic leggings or neon harem pants? Has Tiger Woods made golfing sexy? Are these golfers gonna be total scrotties? Back when I was a teenager, my grandpa was all about trying to get me to pimp myself out to pro golfers. We’d be watching a game on the tube, and he’d point out some sideline slutz all decked out in Ralph Lauren visors and shorts and biz, and he’d say, “You know, you should really just go hang out at these tournaments like those gals… pick up a nice young pro. There’s big money in golf!” So like, I know the whole Tiger Woods shiz is totes played out (SCOOPED!!!), but I’m just gonna throw in my op to the ed, and say that it probably wasn’t Tiger’s libido that got all caaarrraaaaaazzzzy OOC. He was just trying to make all those ladies’ grandpas happy!
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by Mighty Amy
Note: The title for Overboard in spanish speaking countries translates to “A Sea
of Trouble.”
My interest in Overboard was re-kindled during a Kurt-Russel-Movie-Knowing Contest that I was having against a co-worker in my company’s North Carolina office. I lost the contest at the point when the guy said “I should get back to work.” That is also a moment when I felt very embarrassed about who I am in society.
Speaking of society, I believe today’s would not tolerate a RomCom whose premise is really the common-law felony of false imprisonment paired with a hearty helping of Stockholm Syndrome. But I could be wrong. We are a society that tolerated the movie Old Dogs.
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Previously:
AMR Music Month (Introduction)
AMR Music Month - Track 1
This one’s a laffer for all you pre-Valentine’s day <3 birds, lyrics after the jump:
Click to hear “My love,” by Mark Fullmer
Quick Housekeeping: All you folks participating in AMR music month, send me your mp3s! I just remedied my own recording situation so will start posting Courage tracks over the weekend, but so far Mark’s leading the convoy. Or, you know, whatever.
Context:
“I hadn’t at all expected to get to my second song on the list this soon, but after I got home from this Thai cafe I found myself playing around with ye ol’ guitar of yore and, well, this is what came out. I originally wrote the lyrics as a poem, back in those highfalutin grad school days. I sent it out to the literati, the intelligentsia, the hoi AND the poloi. One friend, a girl, a grad school buddy who shall remain nameless, wrote back something like “Please don’t send me stuff like this again. Ever.” So now I find myself putting it to music. Anyway. The chorus came first (from a tidbit I was humming on the way home today) and the verses followed pretty intuitively. -M”
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The New Orleans Saints are playing in Super Bowl XLIV this Sunday and it’s officially a thing. I knew it was a thing - officially - when my sister, an ornithologist and the world’s foremost expert on the Swainson’s warbler, a small swampy bird that’s notoriously tough to spot, gave me the run down on Pierre Thomas (#23) one morning when I called to talk to my five-year-old niece. And my mom…I can’t even get into that. She raised me atheist - rational humanist for those with delicate sensibilities - and now she asks me why I’m not Catholic like her; it’s the same with football but with Drew Brees (QB) on the votive.
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Click here to listen to “Vespers” (cover), by Mark Fullmer
The first installment of AMR Music Month, an updated version of the cover song you may remember resonating so profoundly with me in a previous post. Without repeating myself, this version - this version is darker and more hopeful, which seems like an impossibility, but never underestimate escape. It’s also more of a palimpsest. There’s some Plath, I think some Hemingway (?), an unmistakable Ginsberg. Definitely, in any case, a textured yearning, an almost - appropriately - ecclesiastical meditation reverberating with best-of-Tarantino atmosphere. For completists, the spoken word bit at the end is from a poem in Mr. Feather’s Flies Again, “PhDville burnt down”.
Liner notes, care of Mark: “This was put down over three states — the guitar and main vocals in CA, the poetry additions and harmonies in AZ, the final mastering in NM (one time zone closer to Brooklyn).”
Addenda: Mark is currently making his way eastward from California en route, ultimately, to China for two years. The catalyst in the crucible of this particular cover, I think. Relatedly: Last night, before Mark sent this on, I was watching a BBC documentary on China and thinking vaguely about Mark’s future life there. Today an editor friend sent me a picture of one of our authors with Quincy Jones’ daughter - whats-her-name - and my immediate Rorschach reaction to their admittedly impressive foreheads was “the limestone mountains of Hunan” and, of course, Mark among them.
Which feels reflected here, everything all together - the tension between self-mythology and mounting history, the impossible abnegation of a primetime oversoul that recognizes itself in world wonders and facebook doppelganger shots. Sort of the opposite, really, of the solipsistic original (in the player at right as “younger”).
Also see: Mark’s take on MarkFullmer.com
Related:
Friend of a Friend Interview: Mark Fullmer
“The Right Shadow Spoke”: A Facebook App Novel Shout-out
Tweet, Tweet: A mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the American open road odyssey
I don’t even know what to say about this - I don’t really want to say anything about it, actually (he’d been dead to the world for so long that it’s like hearing a myth died) - except that my selfish half-to-whole is really hoping there’s no deadhand control keeping me from reading the stockpile of words he probably has hidden away somewhere… and I feel just a little conflicted about that too (UPDATE: from the NYT obituary, “New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home”).
Wikipedia, per usual, gauchely channels the oversoul:
So the novel is called 1337: A Videogame Novel About Videogames and it’s an honest to goodness facebook app by Friend of a Friend Mark Fullmer, drawing on your friend-base for characters and fully interactive in a post-modern but also old school text adventure sort of way. Points for Ennui and Whimsey! A refreshable Lustiness index!
I work in publishing where we’re always talking about harnessing “New Media” and a nowhere lit. e-zine just became a major player because they tweeted a short story - badly. This is pretty much the most fun thing I’ve seen in a while, and the least specious re: actually utilizing new media (not counting “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge: A Google Maps Essay”).
But unlike “Plimp’s Revenge” this is a whole novel: serialized and super-fun - launched on David Lynch’s birthday, 1337 (pronounced: “leet”, for I guess my octogenarian demo) has a sort of William Gibson down the rabbit hole meets Cory Doctorow in Little Brother feel to it. I hope you give it a chance, because I <3 this stuff. And while you're at it, check out the context, both wiki - linked - and “developer website“, which is extensive and more Hackers than Hackers. This, folks, is Mark Fullmer Overdrive.
Heads up! February is RPM Challenge month, which is basically the same concept as NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month - except for rock and roll (or, you know, whatever). The challenge: 10 songs or 35 minutes of original music by the end of February. Which isn’t that wild by AMR standards, but a few of us have decided to do a thing anyway and will be posting the results here. So watch this space!
So far, expect to hear from: Mark Fullmer, Mighty Amy, Scott Davis, me, and you, if you think you’re up to it. If so, you know where to send your mp3s! Also, hey - I think friend covers are okay.
A friend recently covered one of my older songs, “Vespers” (”Younger” in the player at right), which was something I’ve been wishing would happen since I started recording in 2004 - getting covered - and I know that seems like not long ago, but check your calendars. And it’s everything I’d hoped for, by the way, even though he’s not sure he wants me posting it here. The me that wrote the song seems to make more sense now, or at least seems more emotable, and the song makes more sense to me, too. Also: it has a bass line.
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Bat is moving back to Brooklyn and wrote a song about it (click to listen). Know anyone looking for a roommate in Williamsburg/Greenpoint starting late February/March?
That thing with all the drowned authors - I’ve been feeling seriously bad in a way I don‘t expect anyone to really get or empathize with even though you all seem like the kind of people that should, you know - if you‘re being honest with yourselves given previous stances re: humanism and global circumstances and interconnectivities - but forgetting all that, I honestly promise every last one of you ten thousand times: there wasn’t anything sinister or “political” about it. It was basically - and I know, I know how this sounds, especially after all the memorials and stuff, but it was part of an environmental initiative. Reduced flow toilets, no-flow urinals. Enforced recyclable stations, and I know a few people who asked not to be named but who can attest to that enforced thing. We were super serious about sustainability - it was our main thing, which is a step forward given a look around yourselves, even with all the progress. And it’s hard when you’re a publisher to cut down on paper but we did that too: two-sided printing on that half-brown post-consumer product the soy ink doesn’t entirely stick to; e-books.
But the thing with e-books and brown paper, and I don’t mean to get too technical or whatever, but the main thing with e-books is electricity. And I am in no way claiming to be an expert consultant or electrician slash environmentalist but just from living in the world we all know that it takes however many joules or flashes of electricity or whatever to make an e-book run and that electricity mostly comes from the equivalent of blood diamonds, just clear cut coal farming in China or however, which is why we have windmills, which everyone also knows don’t work on any kind of a scale. So e-books never seemed to be the most eco-conscious sort of thing, we all thought, even though it might have seemed that way on the surface to the layman. I’m not meaning to give the impression that I was in any sort of inner circle or meetings, by the way. We were a family though, before the drownings, so of course I knew what was going on, felt able to empower myself to make a few suggestions when it came down to it. And what happened afterward, after the suggestions, well - I feel bad for that like I said before but basically this was just an office policy sort of thing and I’d like to remind everyone that we’re all people here and there’s no reason to make this hard world harder than it already is by default.
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by Mighty Amy
The first Fast and the Furious brought us Vin Diesel as the king of an underground high jacking street-racer gang. That sounds good right? Hijacking Ferraris?! Hijacking Japanese import cars? Hijacking gold? Russian whores?!
This gang was hijacking DVD players, which were widely available in Walgreens for reasonable prices in 2001, the year the movie came out. DVD players aside, the movie was full of cars and nitrous oxide systems (NOS!). Even the most crappy, non-existant acting can’t ruin lines like: “I live my life a quarter mile at a time. Nothing else matters: not the mortgage, not the store, not my team and all their bullshit. For those ten seconds or less, I’m free.”
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It’s raining and I’m at Verb Cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn looking out onto Bedford Avenue. I just bonded with two grizzled regulars next to me over watching a mom help her kid pee in the rain (tic-tac peen between her thumb and ring finger and pointing upward for maximum arc). And afterward, in response to three thumbs up in the window - a wink and curtsy, amazing. In that spirit of camaraderie and mutual respect - and in celebration of a long weekend - I’m happy to share some online AMR books to read and likewise share. I’ve been posting these individually as I’ve archived them, but this is the definitive forever-collection:
Click here to read Mr. Feathers Flies Again (2006).
Click here to read Triangulating Happiness (2007).
Click here to read some Nick Courage poetry on Exquisite Corpse.org.
To purchase physical copies of either of these and other books - and music! - visit our merch site or our in-stock order page.
My Life as an Aerophyte (2005) probably won’t be reprinted or online, but it’s been the most popular AMR book so far so I’m sure you can find a copy floating around
Read books I wrote as a kid:
Click here to read The Monsters (1988)
Click here to read Race Car Magic (1989-90)
Click here to read A Day in the Life (1991)
This was Rachel’s idea and my ms paint execution. It’s scary that this may be what the internet remembers us for.
