Happy Birthday, Stephen King

In celebration of Stephen King's 65th birthday, I wanted to share one of my favorite Stephen King short stories. This is also my student's most favorite thing we read all semester. Anything else I give them will usually receive mixed reviews. But this one always gets unanimous praise. I tell my students before I distribute the story that this is not a horror story. King writes more than just horror. Few people believe that, and, honestly, I don't believe it much myself. All of King's stories find somebody caught in a moment that no one would want to face. Like in this story, for instance. Still, what we have here is not overt supernatural or violent horror as much as relational, emotional, psychological horror, and I think that's what my students love so much about it: the tearing apart of siblings, the sonic pounding of regret, the desparation to change just one single moment, to go back in time and to have written that one letter that may have changed everything. If there's one literary triumph King delivers repeatedly, even if he can't close a novel worth a good golly-dern, it's this: he can capture the human heart at its best and its worst, and he can show it to us in ways that feel uncomfortably familiar until we realize it's us, the Constant Reader, that he has exposed. I've tried to make it a celebratory tradition each year on this day to share a Stephen King story with my friends. I hope at least one of you will enjoy this one.

Click on the story title to open the story link: "The Last Rung On The Ladder"

Palahniuk's STRANGER THAN FICTION

         

          In his essay “Monkey See, Monkey Do”, Chuck Palahniuk confesses (as he does in many essays) the source of his anti-establishment inspiration for his first novel, Fight Club. Waiter friends pissing or blowing their noses into customers’ food. Projectionist friends splicing pornography into feature films. Literary fans fighting temptation to open emergency doors on in-flight airplanes. Pyromaniacs in Portland filling tennis balls with matchheads, binding them in tape, and leaving them on the street or sidewalks for unsuspecting pedestrians to stumble upon. “So far, a man’s lost a foot; a dog, its head.” Palahniuk, whose fiction appears sympathetic to such antics, follows his listing of extremist behaviors with a challenge to readers: “All of this reaction, as if we can protect ourselves against everything.” Waiters raging against wealth and luxury. Projectionists revolting against family dynamics. Passengers ravaged by the thought of killing them all. Assholes in Portland simply bent on destruction. Palahniuk calls them out, calls us all out, and asks us what we’re so afraid of. “What’s coming is a million new reasons not to live your life. You can deny your possibility to succeed and blame it on something else. You can fight against everything . . . you pretend keeps you down.” It’s an unexpected sentiment from the man who blew up Portland’s skyline in the end.

          This was an unexpected sentiment to encounter until I read more of Palahniuk. And what I’ve learned about Palahniuk is that he writes to abate two primary fears: the first being a fear of death. Half the essays in Stranger In Fiction amplify Palahniuk’s carpe diembattle-cry. Pieces like “Brinkmanship”, another listing style story of family illness and personal tragedy, carries an apology: “I’m sorry if this seems a little rushed and desperate. It is.” In “You Are Here”, the most poignant piece in the collection, Palahniuk speaks to would-be writers, challenging them to live lives worth writing about: “Instead of modeling our lives after brave, smart fictional characters – maybe we’ll lead brave, smart lives to base our own fictional characters on.” In his interview with Marilyn Manson, “Reading Yourself”, Manson attempts to read his own Tarot cards, beginning with a possible lack of wisdom and ending with, what Manson hopes, is happiness and great achievement. Palaniuk writes transparently, infusing even his oddest stories - such as “My Life As A Dog”, which tells of Palahniuk and a friend skirting a crowded Portland shopping center in dog costumes – with a sense of urgency, as if the bottom is about to drop out at any minute, our lives instantly swallowed by time, capturing us in our most honest, telling behaviors.  

          Palahniuk’s second fear is named immediately in the introduction: “all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.” His essays are no exception. Whether Palahniuk is reporting combine racing in Washington (“Demolition”), submarine life (“The People Can”), Olympic wrestling tryouts (“Where Meat Comes From”), castle building (“Confessions in Stone”), or the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival (“Testy Festy”), Palahniuk assures readers, “Every story in this book is about being with other people. Me being with people. Or people being together.” Palahniuk writes extensively about his attempts to combat the solitude of writing with community game nights, writers’ workshops, and volunteer work. He speaks passionately about close friends, and his tones drop regretfully when recalling past relationships. In a personal interview (“In Her Own Words”), Juliette Lewis walks Palahniuk through a list of questions she wrote to learn more about a friend, only to admit “[t]hese questions are more telling about me than anything I could write in a diary.” The same can be said of Palahniuk’s story telling: readers learn more about the writer than the subject if they read closely enough.

         And it’s in this close reading that one might notice, possibly, Palahniuk’s greatest fear. The final essays of Stranger Than Fiction explore, recall, and re-retell the circumstances surrounding his father’s death as well as Palahniuk’s fear of not winning his father’s approval. Palahniuk’s tone while confessing his excessive steroid use (“Frontiers”) is gravely apologetic to his father. In a story about haunted houses (“The Lady”), Palahniuk strikes out at his dead father for visiting the entire family in dreams the night he died, everybody except Chuck. In the closing essay, an uneven piece about the success of Fight Club the film (“Consolation Prizes”), Palahniuk fondly remembers his final conversations with his father and walks readers through pivotal moments in his father’s life. It’s a bitterly sad piece, but Palahniuk declares, half way through his final essay, that “[e]verything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.”         

          If Palahniuk’s laughing at anything in his fiction, even his nonfiction, he’s laughing at fear. Charging forward with new titles and new ideas, he’s laughing at death. Openly cherishing (in words at least) friendships and professional connections, he laughs at loneliness. And it appears that in his own odd way he’s laughing at himself. The consummate orphan. The fatherless son clawing the walls for one last message of “good job, kid.” This is the one thing Palahniuk can’t have, the one thing he can’t change, so he writes it over and over and over, keeping those wounds fresh as blistered reminders to tend to life and love while you still can. “It’s hard to call any of my novels fiction,” he says in the introduction. With a writer as transparent as Palahniuk, the reading of his novels blurs our own boundaries between fictions and nonfictions. And that might be a sign of a writer worth reading: one who calls us into and out of silences with hunger for more of each.

Katy Perry: Part of Me

            Before engaging this review, you should know that the wife and I did not walk into Katy Perry’s Part of Me (in 2D) under any ironic pretenses. We walked in as hardcore, diehard, for better or worse, Katy Kat fanatics. (Me probably moreso than the wife.) I fell in love with Katy Perry the first time I saw her “Hot n Cold” video, back in spring ’07, and realized this chick was doing pop music right: she was having a helluva good time. I’ve been a committed Katy Perry fan ever since, following every single, every music video, every televised live performance, every SNL song and skit, and as little of the Perry-Brand debacle as possible – all of this following and following and following much to the chagrin* of my uber-cool (male) friends** who relish the likes of uber-cool (male) music. It was this long-forged Katy Perry fan-fare, formed perfect through the fire of social chastisement, that carried me and my wife into the theater to experience Part of Me, just as it carried us into an Austin auditorium last summer to witness Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream Tour first hand. Surely, we’ve been the subject of more than one prayer circle.

            Part of Me is exactly what you would expect in many ways, sprinkled with a smathering of surprises and even heart-breaking scenarios. Of course, there are the legions of pint-sized fans, pearly grinned and caffeinated on giddiness. Most of these young fans are either in costume, full-music video themed make-up, or they’re sporting tacky homemade t-shirts and dresses professing all manner of adoration and praise for Katy Perry, if not for a specific Katy Perry song. The film features lengthy sets of concert footage, offering bothPerry and her fans equal screen time. As fans ourselves, we loved the electric energy of the live-sets – the  dancing, the costume changes, the props, the Vaudevillian absurdity of Perry’s stage-play that rises above the cotton candy simplicity of princess pop music. This right here – all this gratuity and fun – is the stuff we love about Katy Perry. This right here is why we paid admission to the film and the concert.

            However, the best moments in Part of Me are the intimate moments between Katy and her family, Katy and her friends, Katy and the camera. In these moments, mocked in the media as sanctimoniously staged, we see Katy Perry as a girl that is not only well loved but who also loves well. It’s impressive to witness Katy’s commitment to family and friends, even hiring her sister and close friends to act as managers, wardrobe coordinators, make-up artists, and backstage hands – many of whom had zero experience within the field of their tour positions. Katy Perry has become known for meeting people, deciding she likes them, and then giving them some kind of Katy Perryflavored job. In such ridiculous business-mindedness, Katy assures that the people she loves are employed and also that they are near her.

            Whether these moments are, as the media would have us believe, sanctimoniously staged or not, seems of little consequence when we see the moments shared between Katy Perry and her entourage, even her fans. In Part of Me’s most climatic scene, we have access to a moment that feels far too personal for cameras as Perry emotionally, even physically, breaks-down from the strain and stress of her divorce. (Notice: the film finds a way of acknowledging Perry's divorce from Brand, without ever speaking ill of Brand in the process. I appreciated this neutrality, even as I wondered how tempting it was to show bias.) As Katy Perry writhes, almost dry-heaving with sobs in her make-up chair, her largest crowd yet awaits her outside in Brazil. Gently, her friend and manager approaches Perry's side and says, “Katy, you have two choices right now: you can either cancel the show or you can give it your best. But you have to make a choice.” Perry chooses to go on stage, requiring assistance to even approach the stage where she collapses one last time before standing, gathering herself, and assuming character as the peppermint and lollipops do-gooder in a poodle-skirt swirl of scant innocence. It’s a powerful scene – Perry assuming character through the gravity of her life – and it makes one mindful of that age-old entertainment missive “the show must go on.”

            However, it also makes me think of the fairy tale world Katy Perry portrays. She’s a California Gurl. She’s a Friday night party animal. She’s an alien lover. She's a girl-kisser, a pearl, a face on a milk carton, a Vegas bride, a peacock plumer. Baby, she’s a firework. She’s anything her imagination can imagine, a princess in a tower of whipped cream guarded by an army of gummi bears, but she’s also unmistakably human. The fairy tale heroine has her pumpkin and her poison apple and her neverending sleep, just as she has her deferred hopes and lost loves. I’m not sure what this speaks to Perry’s young audience, but I know I was moved, and my wife was moved, by Perry’s exuberance and tenacity and passion. I love writing, but I often love beer more. I love teaching, but I sometimes have debilitating malaise. Could I love something as much as Katy Perry loves music and performance and pizzazz? Could I love something to the detriment of my own sanity and skin? Could I love something more than my own need for emotional security? I’m not sure I could, unless that something were my wife or my pug or another pint of super fine hoppy ale.

            I’ve said to several people that I walked out of Katy Perry’s Part of Me feeling like I could punch a hurricane. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie. And she’s that kind of performer. I saw Katy Perry live last summer after a week on extreme pain pills from an abdominal abnormality. I was not pregnant, but something had set up shop in my gut that would later blow the walls out of my colon and cause me to miss Kelly Clarkson in concert (the only female pop star I love more than Robyn, who is the only pop star I love more than KatyPerry). We considered skipping the concert, due to my health, but I knew that Katy Perry was the elixir I needed. How often do you get to see a show like the Teenage Dream Tour? How often do you get sprayed with whipped cream from a canon? Or have a thorny little diva serenade your balcony with an acoustic guitar on a pink cloud? Not to mention, Robyn was the opening act. I was NOT missing that show. And while Katy Perry did not heal my gut like the hemorrhaging lady touching Christ’s cloak in the crowd, she gave me two hours of constant, honest, fever-pitched joy. A friend of mine said once, “Yeah, Katy Perry’s fine and all, but no one’s going to be listening to her in twenty years.” I said to him, “Screw twenty years. She’s now. She’s huge and she’s here now.” It wasn’t the most profound of retorts on my part, but it’s the truth. Katy Perry seems to know the ways of pop culture – here today, forgotten tomorrow – so she’s blowing it up while she can. Carpe diem and all that she-bang. And for those of us listening, she’s making a solid case to do the same.

* One common confrontation I’ve received concerning my love for Katy Perry is “You only like Katy Perry because she has big boobs.” To which I’m forced to reply, “Sure, but I listen to Katy Perry’s records on my home and car stereo where I can’t see her boobs.” What the confronter does not realize is that this is more of a judgment on me than on Katy Perry. Even moreso, only women have said this to me, which is more a judgment on themselves than Katy Perry. Beauty begets beauty in some, while it triggers the fear of ugliness in others. Go figure.

** My most favorite Katy Perry confrontation came from my dear friend Amber Haines, a glorious poet and biscuit maker, who once leaned across a café table in Fayetteville, Arkansas, took my hand, and said in her sausage-gravy thick Alabama drawl, “Kevin, what’s with all this Katy Perry bullshe-it?” I hear Amber in my head damn near everytime I listen to Katy Perry.

Social Distortion

My buddy Colby introduced me to the band Social Distortion in 2004. At first, I didn’t like Social Distortion. All they’re music sounded the same to me. The same drum beats. The same guitars. I couldn’t distinguish between the end of one track and the beginning of the next. And then Social Distortion came to Kansas City. My buddy Colby was going through a rough stretch. He’d just had his second kid and was in between jobs. He needed a night of beers and loud music, a rough crowd and maybe a black eye. So I bought Colby a ticket for his birthday and one for myself. We hit up McCoys before the show for burgers and stouts. Colby bought us each a Jager bomb and we met several haggard concert goers slithering around the bar. I don’t want to say that I had a religious experience at the show (might just be the beers talking), but something shifted between me and Social Distortion that night. Looking back, I think it was the chemistry between the lead singer and the crowd: the way Mike Ness knew these people, and the way these people – an eclectic bunch of white-collar suits and blue-collar Dickies, kids and old men, cowboy hats and mohawks – loved Mike Ness. He was their evangelical poet of dirtbag redemption, and we were his surly congregation. That night I finally heard the difference between songs, the cut between tracks, and instantly I was hooked. A week or so later I sold a bunch of old records to a used record shop in KC and bought several Social Distortion titles. I began by listening chronologically, moving from the beginning of their career to their most recent release, and in doing so I heard Mike Ness tell his story of drugs, the death of friends, his struggles with cleaning up, then finding God and, finally, realizing sobriety. Ness’s whole story is right there in the music. His memoir, as they say in literary circles. His testimony, as they say in the church. From drugs to sobriety, from angst to celebration, Ness wrote and sang and recorded it all behind the wail of blues infused guitars, country simple drums, and punk-rock attitude. Mike Ness even taught me something about myself: more than anything else on a record or in a book or on a screen, I need to encounter someone telling the truth, no matter what that truth might be. Honesty begets honesty, and Mike Ness’s confessions drew out my confessions. Two days ago I checked Social Distortion’s website and saw that they’ll be playing Austin in May. It’ll be the first time I’ve seen them in five years, and I’m feeling long overdue for a religious experience.