So You're A Super Senior

Originally, I was going to graduate in 2014.  But sometimes life likes to throw you little curveballs.  And then there's people like me; the strange man in the Goofy hat and clogs playing baseball by himself, and in this case, throwing balls at his own face.

...Yes, I realize it's a set-up.  Go on.  Get it out of your system.  I deserve it.

Yea, at the end of my sophomore year, I tacked on an additional major (because there's like, three minors at Columbia, it's great), and along with it, an additional year.  Hopefully.  I mean, hopefully just one more year.  Now the time has come.  If what my Facebook feed says is true, every person ever is starting their senior year this week.  Aaaaaaannnnd then there's me.  Not doing that.  It's surreal.  And kinda sad.  Also really great, because I've found that I'm crazy-happy for everyone that's sailing off to Grown-Up Land come May (well, maybe), even people that I've fallen out of contact with.  I know I'll do the same eventually.  It might be with a smaller crew, and it'll kinda suck watching that first boat, the one we missed, chasing the horizon while we can still see the port - but since it's full of our friends, that makes it at least a little-

What the fuck happened to this post.  What even is this ship analogy.  I'm gonna move on while I still have a chance of being on-point.

Despite all my bellyaching purple prose that's eerily reminiscent of senior-year me,

being a super-senior-to-be (there's no way that's grammatically sound) isn't all bad.  In fact, it's hardly worse than being a regular senior.

I'm closing one of my degrees this year, so if worse really comes to worse, I can close up shop and be the last skipper to hop on board (and you thought the ship analogy was over with).  I'll have taken probably a third of my classes for nothing, but you know what?  Worse things happen to better people every day.  If I want to make games, I'll make games, formal education be damned.  Of course, being able to say "Hey, I'm kind of educated in dis shit and that guy isn't" is a nice concept.
The above is pretty tailored to my specific situation, but if there's a particular lesson to take away from it, it would be... uh... I don't really know.  You can always back out?  Or something like that?  Okay, next point.

You get to be in college for another year.  Come on - even as someone who goes to an arts school that doesn't have any of the components of your "typical college experience" (Greek system, a quad, school spirit, tests), even as a total neurotic prone to flopsweats, I can say "college is pretty freaking great".  Of course, the extra year does mean mo money (in so facto, mo problems).  But it also means mo excuses for not being totally self-reliant, mo parties (don't worry; it's not completely creepy until you're old enough to have finished medical school), mo connections, mo hanging out, mo campus food, mo electives, mo learning, mo school-sponsored events (also known as "the cheapest dates possible that don't suck"), etc.  Of course, none of these are guaranteed experiences - since you're in your fifth year, you might actually spend some of that extra school developing as a professional.  You know.  If you're into that kind of thing.

Assuming you're not a super-senior because you failed everything, it doesn't look bad on a resume.  Some argue that five years is quickly becoming "the norm"... but uh... what's a more clever way of saying "it isn't yet"?  While four years is still considered the mean, look at your extra year of backbreaking, specialized work in a more positive light: you've got that much more learning experience under your belt.  Hell, even if you are back for year five because your freshman year was a haze of Four Lokos and Left 4 Dead, every top has its spin.  Except, you know, really shitty ones.  Like ones with chips in the bottom.  Those probably don't spin more than once or twice.
...I'm saying you should embellish on your resume.

There's more time.  Again, I get it; time = money, an old adage that fits college to a tee these days.  But you can make it worth your while.  More time in school means more time for figuring out what you want to do.  Come on - don't pretend for a second that your career path is cut and dry just because you took some classes tailored to a specific field.  More time to add some cards to your rolodex (or, you know, wallet - the normal person's rolodex).  More time to look for prospects after your late graduation.  The idea of the fourth year being your senior year is kind of terrifying and back-asswards, if you think about it.  "Sup, person barely into your twenties?  Oh look, it's already your final round of required classes!  Probably the most grueling/important ones!  Have fun finding a job right the fuck afterwards!"  Not that I'm totally making excuses for myself or anything.  In a fifth year (at least I hope), you can intersperse your "time to test everything you were supposed to learn" classes with classes you otherwise wouldn't have had time for, outside-interests kinda stuff.

Well... only four entries, but I think I covered some broad strokes here.  See you next time!  Or, you know, not.  Cuz you're in another part of cyberspace.  And earth.

Interview with Joe Meno, Part 3

Welcome welcome, to the third and final portion of this fantabulous thing called an interview!
If you can't tell, I'm rather sick of introductions.  Read the damn post.


Me: So, besides the ages, what did you feel really changed about the scene in Chicago from when you started playing to when you stopped?

Joe: In the mid-90s in Chicago, there was this emphasis more on art rock or math rock or post-rock bands, like The Sea and Cake, Tortoise, Don Caballero, bands that were pretty instrument-based, almost jazz-influenced.  The idea of being "rock", like a rock band, whether that was garage rock or indie rock – for a couple years, that fell away.  So at a lot of venues, there was like - I don’t wanna say prog-rock or whatever, but these people were awesome at their instruments - there were no lyrics, mostly instrumental music, bands that had more of an abstract sound… and that was real interesting for a while.  And then in the late 90s, there was this revival or resurgence of garage rock that really took off.  There was this great explosion of bands like Baseball Furies, and Brian [Costello’s] band the Functional Blackouts, and a couple bands that I played in.  Then this real interesting scene started developing - and I think I still see them online - this magazine Horizontal Action, and there were all these different garage-rock-oriented festivals.  Suddenly, there was the return of, “Okay, it’s cool again to be in a rock band, and have songs with lyrics, and to honor the music you had grown up listening to," like The Who, or The Rolling Stones, or The Beatles.  And then in the late 90s, early 2000s, there was a kind of similar resurgence on a national level, bands like The Hives, and The Strokes, and The White Stripes, bands that were getting national attention that were returning to a more familiar rock-song structure and sound, and it echoed what was already going on here.  It was wonderful, because that’s the music I always loved, you know?  I like rock music.  Not to say I’m not a huge jazz fan – it’s just a different kind of experience.

Me: It’s more familiar.

Joe: It is, and I mean, Chicago has one of the greatest avant-garde jazz scenes in the world, and we have these great people, like Ken Vandermark, and a number of other amazing soloists and avant-garde players, but going to see a jazz show, it’s kinda this thing up here [hovers his hands around his cranium] and it feels like you listen with your head, and not with your chest and your balls – like when you see a great rock show and your whole body’s involved.

Me: I’ve always heard the word “cerebral” to describe certain bands like that.

Joe: And it is!  And it’s also clear that Vandermark grew up listening to Black Sabbath, and it feels like “Oh shit, this is as intense.”  It still has those rock elements, even though it is avant-garde jazz.

Places like the Empty Bottle and Lounge Acts hosted these different nights to promote these different kinds of sound.  And they still do!  Well, the Hideout kinda took over when Lounge Acts closed.  And then there was the “return to rock” thing.  Somewhere in there too, there was this blossoming indie rock scene, which was a little more reserved or restrained.  Bands that were echoing the Pixies, or Pavement, or the Smiths.  There were bands like the Scotland Yard Gospel Choir and…  I’m trying to think of who else fits that bill, that incorporated stuff from folk and rock, that had maybe a less direct garage-rock/punk sound, but still didn’t feel like mainstream rock.  You could go see a show, and there was this loud punk-kinda garage band, here’s this band that feels more indie rock, here’s this other band that has some weird instrumentation.  Venues like that showed the breath of all the different music that was being produced at that time.  You feel really luck to be able to go see a show that has that many different kinds of music being played.

Me: When you were first starting out, back in the early 90s, what bands that you’d seen or played with did you look up to?  Like, who made you want to play music?

Joe: There are a few bands here in Chicago, they were bands I felt were so tremendous that I didn’t associate them with Chicago, like “Oh man, I didn’t even know they were from here”, bands like the Jesus Lizard-

Me: Oh shit.

Joe: Well there you go!  I saw a couple shows at the Metro, and they were just completely electrifying…  They were bands like that, that made you think “This is why I live in Chicago, because people like that are making music.”  You almost felt this weird sense of ownership.  Bands like that, and the Mids – I think they broke up by ’95 or ’96.  That was one of the big bands.  And there were bands like Shellac, Steve Albini’s band, who’d put out these really formidable, really interesting records.  Jay Ryan’s band, Dianogah, which was another more instrumental, but really really interesting band that starting putting on shows in the mid-90s, and I think every so often they continue to play.  That was more noise rock or aggressive rock stuff.  And then there were bands like Andrew Bird, who was doing this quasi-jazz rock folk stuff that had interesting instrumentation – like instead of there being a lead guitar set up, there’d be someone playing a violin.  To this day, Andrew Bird is widely recognized, still lives in town.  Then there's like, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco.  Bands like that in the mid-90s that you felt were almost ambassadors.  And that’s not even to mention by the mid-90s/late-90s, Chicago hip-hop started to take off, performers like Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco.  Those guys suddenly put Chicago on the map in a huge way, so you felt like you’re part of this city that’s on the forefront of some really interesting music.

Me: I guess we’ll move on to the final question: the hackneyed interview question.  If you had to tell your younger musician self something, what would it be?

Joe: I don’t know if I’ve ever heard that question.  I don’t think it’s hackneyed at all!

Well, it’s like I said earlier, that playing in bands…  There’s just all these interesting implications I wouldn't have been aware of at the time, like helping you understand your relationship to an audience, your idea of promotion, and marketing, and touring.  Even when I’m writing a short story, I don’t feel like it’s done until I can read it to an audience, and that’s one of the ways I figure out if it’s working or not; you read it and you’re like “Ooh…  This part… that didn't work,” or “This part, people laughed.”

When you’re in a band, you’re constantly doing stuff.  You’re writing songs, you record a record, you have to make flyers, you have to rent a van or save up and buy one, maybe you play a bunch of shows, and you’re constantly having to convince your friends and strangers to come to your shows and promote yourself in a fairly aggressive way, right?  If you book a show at a venue and no one shows up, they’re not gonna have you back.  So this pursuit of making stuff and getting in the habit of finding a way to get it out in the world, whether it’s making a record or making a flyer, getting posters made, booking shows, that habit that I did over and over and over again in my twenties, it really helped me as a writer, cuz I still do that stuff, I still am having constantly to promote work.

I had two books come out with these big corporate presses, my first two novels, and they had a certain way of promoting their books, which meant they just kinda sent them out to reviewers and hoped people reviewed them – and I had grown up playing in all these bands, and I was like “Why not go on tour?  I could do it for cheap, I could sleep on strangers’ floors – I’ll sell books out of the car.” and they’d never had someone do that.  This was what I’d been doing.  Third book came out.  I worked with a publisher that was really interested in that idea, and the book was a huge success because I was able to get out and tour, basically adapt what I’d been doing, what I knew already worked.  If I do a reading in Portland, I need to get like, two people from Portland on the bill, cuz if I show up and I only know ten people in Portland, there’s only gonna be ten people in the bookstore.  But if I invite another writer, or some musician, then we’ll have forty people.  That was a totally foreign concept to a lot of these publicists, and they were actually afraid to do that.  Over the last ten years, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, and it’s been really successful.  And it’s actually more enjoyable for me to go to Portland, do a reading, hear someone else read, hear a band.  It’s more of a night, more of an occasion, versus me just like, showing up.  So there were all these really important things that I was learning about what it means to be an artist that I thought was just part of being in a band, and that was really helpful.

And a step removed from that – having grown up in the 70s and 80s and playing in bands – not seriously, but in a committed way – in the 90s, I learned the reliance of independence, because a lot of the bands that I admired were bands on small labels, like Dischord or Touch-and-Go, and those were basically labels run out of someone’s house.  They didn't have money, but they had this great reputation and dignity.  If Ian MacKaye came out with a record by some band, I’d go buy it, just because I trusted him as a label-owner.  That idea of DIY, not buying into this corporization of art, that had a huge impact on my writing as well, because I feel like the freedom to make books that I’m interested in reading, not so concerned with whether this is gonna be a big hit…  The books that I write are kinda influenced by that same spirit.  As an indie musician, your goal isn't to get on the radio or sell a billion copies; it’s to make a real interesting record.  That same spirit is a huge part of what I do.  A couple weeks ago, I did this reading at the Metro as part of Story Week, and I've read there a couple times before, but it was really momentous for me, because I grew up going to shows there.  I've done readings now at a lot of these music venues that I had once played at in bands, so in some ways it’s like I never really stopped.  In a lot of ways, I'm still engaged in that world.  Literature isn't just for people who go to college, or go to bookstores.  Through my experiences, I've learned that it’s bigger and there’s these interesting connections between music and literature, literature and art… things that musicians sometimes take for granted.  And I feel really grateful for that.

Interview with Joe Meno, Part 2

Last time on "Stupid and Contagious"!

Joe: Does this have anything to do with your questions?

So what do you think, dear reader?  Did this have anything to do with my questions????
Find out... TODAAYYYyYyYyYyYyyy!!!


Me: Oh, totally!  Actually, you kind of… answered half of them right there.  So you stopped playing music when, like late 90s?

Joe: It was 2003.  No, I’m sorry, 2004,  because it was literally when I turned 30.

Me: Was that a thing like “when I turn 30, I’m done with the whole band thing”?

Joe: I started playing bands when I was like, fourteen, and we played at things like battle of the bands, fests, and some actual venues, and because we were so young there were very few venues that fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds could play.  There was this place out in the suburbs, The Thirsty Whale...  I think now, it's a service station.  It was mostly a metal or hard rock venue, like if you were one of those, that was the only place you could play.  That was my first experience with performance, and I did that all throughout high school, throughout college, and even though, like you said, I never had any illusions like “Oh, I’m gonna make a living off this, I’m gonna be on MTV" [if this sounds unfamiliar, this was part of our preliminary conversation, before we got down to actual interviewy things] – when MTV played videos.  It was like if you grow up with a sport or growing up with some mode of expression or release; you do it, it’s therapeutic, and it’s social.  I really like the idea that music’s social, which is very different from fiction writing.  I really miss that element of “Ha!  I have this idea” and another person comes with their own thing, and together makes a better, more interesting idea.  I do love dramatic writing, for stage, and that has a similar vibe, where a director comes in, and you write the script, and there’s actors, and it feels familiar, but what’s different is – I just talked about this in my class last night with my grad students – playing music, for me at least, is this non-intellectual process.  It’s more with your body.  It’s a way of expressing things without necessarily having to put words to it.  Even if you have a song where there’s lyrics, it feels much more abstract, less literal, less intellectual…  It’s often out-and-out just a lot more fun, whereas when you write a book, it might be fun – sometimes it’s not-

Me: Should be fun.

Joe: Yeah!  It is fun, most of the time, but sometimes it’s really hard and frustrating, and because I have my career wrapped up in it, it’s not something you do for pure amusement, for pure joy, and I miss that.  I also miss just making noise, like the element of “we’re gonna get together, have some beers, make some actual sound that’s bigger than us”.  It being this physical, non-intellectual expression.... I really miss that.  I still go see a lot of shows as often as I can, but that act of spending a couple hours each week doing something that has no career goal or pursuit, where you’re just doing it to be around your friends and have fun, I kinda miss that.

I’m 39.  It feels like the things that I do now, even if they’re fun, all come back to either my career as a writer, or my family.  It’s rare where I go do something totally unrelated.  I mean, I exercise and things like that, but there’s something about music and the age that I started playing it, I felt like it was its own pursuit.  So I miss that.

So what happened was that I’d been in these bands, we’d toured, there was this great venue, and every so often they’ll still have shows maybe a few times a year – the Fireside Bowl, over on Fullerton.  And in the mid-90s all the way to like 2004, 2005, maybe fifteen years or so, it was kind of the best all-ages venue.  They typically had a lot of punk or post-punk or indie rock shows, and they had great touring/national acts play there.  And it’s a bowling alley, right?  There was this little tiny stage, the sound was decent, but the thing that was great about it was a lot of young people came, cuz it was mostly all-ages shows.  There was this general sense of enjoyment and acceptance and excitement.

Sometimes in shows in Chicago, there’s a feeling of distance or snobbery, where the audience just kinda sits there in this kind of Chicago rock pose.

[Here, Joe crosses his arms, tilts his chin down and glares at the theoretical stage (my forehead), imperceptibly bobbing his neck.  Yeah, that’s pretty accurate.]

Me: I usually try to avoid those kinds of shows.

Joe: Well sometimes they’re great shows but a lot of the times, people literally don’t know what to do with their bodies as they’re listening, so they cross their arms and it feels like they’re kinda disengaged.  The shows at the Fireside Bowl were pretty unique.  And there’s a bar or club like that in every big city where it’s this all-ages-show club and people go there when they’re like fifteen or sixteen and they have these seminal life-changing rock-and-roll experiences there, and that was that place for that particular time period.  I saw so many bands, and the bands I was in, we played that venue so many different times…  It felt like a clubhouse.  You know what I mean?  It felt like this great place of safety and comfort even though they’re putting on these really great bands, some avant-garde kinda music.

I’d played at those venues all throughout my twenties, and the older I got, the more I realized the people coming to shows were getting younger and younger.  For a while, I was like, “These are like babies!” but I was just getting older.

I had started playing music just for fun, and this great almost therapeutic quality for me, like I started playing when my parents were getting a divorce.  It was just some great release.  By the time I'd turned 30, I’d started writing pretty seriously, and I’d had a couple books come out, I had toured, and that pursuit of writing had kinda taken over.  I was doing all these things as a writer that I always enjoyed doing as a musician, like touring or performing.  Also, there was something about playing these all-ages shows with like fourteen-year-olds or fifteen-year-olds that felt kinda odd or almost inappropriate, like I was holding onto this thing that had been really important at one time in my life, and it was really okay to let it go.  So that’s when I’d stopped.  I’d also promised my girlfriend, who became my wife at the time, that because I was touring with the books and touring with the bands, that when I turned thirty I’d kinda back off the music, cuz it was just for fun.

The only thing that I miss, like I said, is the non-verbal expression of people being in a room and making great noise.  I have it with my kids sometimes, where they just yell and bang stuff, and that feels… familiar, but it’s not quite the same.

Me: It’s a little more destructive.

Joe: Yeah, stuff gets broken and then you’re like, “Ohhh, I gotta clean that up.”  But it’s that release…  You don’t even have to play a show to feel it, even if you’re just playing or practicing or whatever, there’s this real emotional release that happens.  I have that in other ways, but it’s not as… hm…

Me: It’s like another outlet.

Joe: It is!  An outlet where you’re not hoping to get money or fame from it, and that’s real important, I think.  So that’s when I stopped playing, and that’s also when I started doing tons of music journalism, because I’d had all these relationships with these different bands.

Me: You started doing that when you stopped playing?

Joe: Yes, because I’d established all these different relationships with bookers, and venue owners, and bands, like I knew all these bands cuz I’d played with them, so I started working as a contributing editor at Punk Planet, and I was in this great position, cuz I never ran out of bands to write about.  There were bands that I thought were great that we had played with that deserved national attention, so this was a way to take what I most loved, this music, and actually give an opportunity for someone else to hear about these bands that I was enjoying.

Once you start writing music journalism, your mailbox is never empty.  I started getting ten CDs a day, and I would just have so much music, it was great.  For seven or eight years, I just didn’t buy music, I just kept getting tons and tons of promos.  It was awesome.  I got turned on to so many great bands like that.

And going and seeing shows, it still echoes that kind of familiarity of playing in a band, it still does provide a kind of release in that way.

End of today's session!  We moved on to more great topics from there, but this post is already long enough soooooo I'll leave the next great slab of awesome for later.  'Til next time!

Interview with Joe Meno, Part 1

Yeah yeah, no punny title this time.  Get over it.

Not long ago, I interviewed an actual 90s kid (like someone who was a teenager in the 90s): longtime musician, Columbia College fiction writing teacher, author of Hairstyles of the Damned, Demons in the Spring, Office Girl and more, Joe Meno.  I got a full half hour and several pages of strong material from this interview, so, not to bog you down with too much of an awesome thing at once, I'm gonna post this in, oh, three parts.  Maybe four.  Maybe more if you're good.  I see you back there.  Little troublemaker you.

So uh... how do real music journalists do this?  Some kind of dramatic narrative introduction, right?  Well, I walked into the Fiction office at Columbia College, some stuff happened, then the interview started.

We shot the shit for a minute or so.  Joe asked about some of my own playing experience, I gave as spruced an account I could manage of my sordid experiences.  Now here's the part you actually want to read.


Meno: I think it’s funny, because when I went to grad school here mid-to-late 90s, there were a lot of fiction writers here that were also playing music.  Actually, I came into fiction writing through music.  Starting in high school, I was playing in bands – awful, awful metal bands – and that’s how I first started writing stuff, like awful HG Wells-inspired metal songs that became an entry point into writing really bad poetry, and then that became really not-so-good stories, and it was somehow… incremental?  It’s funny, what I do with fiction writing, like all my novels as I’m putting them together, I’m trying to figure out “what’s the style, what’s the sound, the tone?”

Me: So it’s almost like putting an album together?

Meno: It is, especially with novels.  I have this one, Hairstyles of the Damned, it’s about growing up in the early 90s, and there’s this kid, he’s like sixteen, who gets turned on to some early punk music and it shows the effects that it has on him.  This last novel I had, a big family novel, it was totally my interpretation of the White Album.  I wanted it to be big and expansive and have all these different voices.  When I’m trying to organize a big project like a play or a novel, I go to music.  It feels less like cheating, because it’s not another writer, it’s not another novelist.  It’s a lot more abstract.  I’d grown up in bands, played in a bunch of bands in my twenties, and then I finally stopped playing when I turned thirty.  I have kids now, but I’ll still sometimes take the guitar out and they’ll run away, cuz they don’t wanna hear it.  It’s still a huge part of what I do, still has so much to do with how I construct things.  Those songs... they're the first things that I built.

In my twenties, I was in a band and we toured a bunch…  And the idea of the tour as a way to promote your work has been huge for me as a writer because I do basically the same thing.  Instead of going to a club, I go to a bookstore; instead of playing at twelve o’clock or one o’clock, you do your thing at seven – so I use the same principles.  I would never go to a town and try to read by myself.  I always look for another writer or even some band or another to put a show together with, cuz if I bring twenty people and they bring twenty people, then you have forty people instead of just your twenty people.

Even just the idea of a performance: if I do a reading, it’s the same thing.  You get up on stage, you’ve built this thing and you put it out in front of a crowd, which is exactly what I did playing in bands.  I feel like it gave me this great training, where you learn to get past certain things.  Not to say you don’t get nervous, but this is part of what you do.  You don’t write a song or whatever and keep it to yourself; you go play it.  I feel like it’s really informed the performative aspects of what I do.

…Does this have anything to do with your questions?

To be continued!

Spoiler: It totally did.

Sorry if that's not too much this time, folks.  Next chunk's way bigger, just the right length.  By tagging this one onto that one, it'd just be whopper and...  Oh calm yo tits, I'll do what I want.  Stay tuned for more Meno.