The School of Rembrandt
or maybe the problem is that I simply don't know how to have fun, at all, ever. SXSW is like paradise to some people, and I for sure will cop to--let's call it "an issue surrounding"--self-involvement, but jesus christ, I'm not the only performer whose parents didn't love him enough or correctly who goes down to Austin every year or two. I do, however, seem to be the only one who has the worst time of his life and comes away feeling like a grain of salt in the dead sea (if not the dead c). i wish i liked people enough to just love hanging out and talking shit about musicians. i wish i enjoyed the trivialization/reduction of the pursuits I love down to their crassest most cynical elements. i wish i wish i wish.
there are two happy SXSW memories I can muster. the first is from 2003, when the Barsuk showcase became a complete love fest between the LWs, Nada Surf, and DCFC. There was some question about how the NS boys would fit into the family (if you can really call it one), and to be sure, there was a fair amount of teeth-baring and tail-fluffing among the more competitive elements of certain bands. But by the time the night was over, everyone, even JV, had played the best set I'd ever seen them play *(and I have seen all those bands way more times than any of you). The NS had been arrested the night before and spent the night in west texas jail, so we didn't know if they'd make the show, but they did, just in time to see the banner i'd had made that day at the copy shop across the street. it read: "FREE NADA SURF." Nick Harmer ended the DCFC show by swinging from the scaffolding and landing with a crash at the end of "prove my hypotheses" (i think). it was clear that night that the cab had turned the corner and would soon be riding around in solid gold limos and buying houses made out of $100 dollar bills, and now they are, and good for them for reals. i got nothing but love.
the main thing was that the show was a culmination of a two-year process that had begun on the DISASTROUS 2001 DCFC-Little Champions-This Busy Monster Tour, and the ass-out Barsuk SXSW showcase at the end of it. The intervening years had seen everyone get real about making their bands and their label world class enterprises (everyone but me, of course, but let's leave that for another blog, shall we? yes, lets); the LWs were breech-born but mutated into a suitable showcase for JR's genius (literal actual genius, I say)--"when i pretend to fall" hadn't even come out that night, but everyone there was all the way on its jock; NS was the left-field modernist rock band that no one suspected of harboring true brilliance, professionalism, and the prettiest voice in America; JV had a greatband together; et al et al et al. The place was PACKED and everyone was together and no one could deny that our little label could. The fact that I was in the full throes of suicidal despair, broke, lonely, and lost in life, couldn't even get me down that night. i felt superconnected.
but you know i couldn't last.
my second happy memory is tainted by the incredibly sad news I received late last night.
in 1997, harvey danger played its first SXSW, having no idea what we were doing, fully expecting that our mere inclusion in the fest would get us discovered or some such folly. the crucial thing was that in our quest for legitimacy, the outside world had offered scant few breadcrumbs, and this felt like a big one. we played at the ritz lounge with House of Large Sizes (yay!). No one came (boo!). Well, a couple of people. Among them were Phil West and Ken Hunt, or old Seattle cronies who had moved to Austin to make it big as... poets. or so it is said. Phil and Ken were central to the lore of HD, not least because they got us our first show, opening for their band, Self-Help Seminar (which aaron used to play bass in). Ken was even the HD drummer for a while, before evan and I were in the band. There was always a deep sadness about Ken, the kind that you could only get growing up gay, intellectual, alcoholic, and fiercely punk in Aberdeen, WA. Ken wrote songs that could break your heart, though his band played them with chainsaws and rat pedals, and he seldom had the confidence to sing them so you could hear them. We covered his "Heroine With an E" on our first demo tape after Evan and I had stayed up, stoned, all night once at Eastern House, listening to the SHS 7-inch of it again and again and again. "I can pierce a room with my gaze and my arch-backed posture..."
anyway, we played the show and nothing changed in anybody's life, so we went back to ken's house, where E&I were staying, and proceded to eat an ounce of mushrooms. (I may have skipped a day or something, but I don't remember seeing too much music that year; i'm sure I did, though. i used to love going to see bands... mainly I just remember making everybody sit through an excruciating evening of spoken word because I had the hots for a female "poet" in vinyl pants who had absolutely no time for me whatsoever. i recently googled her. she's still foxy, but i don't like her writing. that seems like a pyrrhic victory. lo, i digress.) At that time, Ken was living with a guy named Richard Loranger, and the two of them wrote and read poetry, smoked cigarettes, drank beer, and generally lived a bohemian intellectual underground life that seemed to me (and evan) like the absolute height of '90s-era ambition, right down to the self-published chapbooks. Ah, the '90s. Let us (not even) go there, you and I... As the dose was coming on (as they say in fiction), Richard was suddenly declaiming, in character, all these amazing monologues, and shorter poems, and, Evan and I looked at one another, and it was ON. we basically invited them to poetize until the sun came up, eager as we were to imbibe in all the creative energy that was surrounding us, eager above all to appreciate their work, their gesture, the whole idea that they had committed to the lives of gay slacker poets in Texas. A little bit Rimbaud and Verlaine, a little bit Laverne and Shirley. Totally amazing.
Richard (whom I've not seen since) was the more flamboyant and entertaining of the two with monologues clearly written to be performed (he probably did the lollapalooza spoken word tent or something) and, consequently, his work wore thin first--though it also provided the most uproarious highs. Ken was the real star, though. I never knew him well, but he was obviously a very smart, very sensitive, very funny, and utterly tortured soul. he had droll poems and abstruse poems and site specific slammy poems. But then he had "The School of Rembrandt," which was an epic poem, on a par, i genuinely feel, even after the drugs have long since worn off, with Robert Lowell and John Ashbery. It was the first piece of genuinely brilliant work I'd ever seen from a peer, after a lot of good-to-really-good-to-bad work from all of us. i'm pretty sure I cried, but I know i shook with reverence for both the poem and the poet. the sun was rising. we were outside, smoking. it was cold. ken was beautiful in the blue-gray light, displaced as a Northwesterner in Texas, doing the only thing he was built to do, for an audience of three, at least two of whom were blasted beyond recognition.
"last time I checked, the river still rose," it began. I'll type the rest tomorrow. ken hunt died saturday, the same night we were playing at SXSW. he was found under the El train in Chicago.
there are two happy SXSW memories I can muster. the first is from 2003, when the Barsuk showcase became a complete love fest between the LWs, Nada Surf, and DCFC. There was some question about how the NS boys would fit into the family (if you can really call it one), and to be sure, there was a fair amount of teeth-baring and tail-fluffing among the more competitive elements of certain bands. But by the time the night was over, everyone, even JV, had played the best set I'd ever seen them play *(and I have seen all those bands way more times than any of you). The NS had been arrested the night before and spent the night in west texas jail, so we didn't know if they'd make the show, but they did, just in time to see the banner i'd had made that day at the copy shop across the street. it read: "FREE NADA SURF." Nick Harmer ended the DCFC show by swinging from the scaffolding and landing with a crash at the end of "prove my hypotheses" (i think). it was clear that night that the cab had turned the corner and would soon be riding around in solid gold limos and buying houses made out of $100 dollar bills, and now they are, and good for them for reals. i got nothing but love.
the main thing was that the show was a culmination of a two-year process that had begun on the DISASTROUS 2001 DCFC-Little Champions-This Busy Monster Tour, and the ass-out Barsuk SXSW showcase at the end of it. The intervening years had seen everyone get real about making their bands and their label world class enterprises (everyone but me, of course, but let's leave that for another blog, shall we? yes, lets); the LWs were breech-born but mutated into a suitable showcase for JR's genius (literal actual genius, I say)--"when i pretend to fall" hadn't even come out that night, but everyone there was all the way on its jock; NS was the left-field modernist rock band that no one suspected of harboring true brilliance, professionalism, and the prettiest voice in America; JV had a greatband together; et al et al et al. The place was PACKED and everyone was together and no one could deny that our little label could. The fact that I was in the full throes of suicidal despair, broke, lonely, and lost in life, couldn't even get me down that night. i felt superconnected.
but you know i couldn't last.
my second happy memory is tainted by the incredibly sad news I received late last night.
in 1997, harvey danger played its first SXSW, having no idea what we were doing, fully expecting that our mere inclusion in the fest would get us discovered or some such folly. the crucial thing was that in our quest for legitimacy, the outside world had offered scant few breadcrumbs, and this felt like a big one. we played at the ritz lounge with House of Large Sizes (yay!). No one came (boo!). Well, a couple of people. Among them were Phil West and Ken Hunt, or old Seattle cronies who had moved to Austin to make it big as... poets. or so it is said. Phil and Ken were central to the lore of HD, not least because they got us our first show, opening for their band, Self-Help Seminar (which aaron used to play bass in). Ken was even the HD drummer for a while, before evan and I were in the band. There was always a deep sadness about Ken, the kind that you could only get growing up gay, intellectual, alcoholic, and fiercely punk in Aberdeen, WA. Ken wrote songs that could break your heart, though his band played them with chainsaws and rat pedals, and he seldom had the confidence to sing them so you could hear them. We covered his "Heroine With an E" on our first demo tape after Evan and I had stayed up, stoned, all night once at Eastern House, listening to the SHS 7-inch of it again and again and again. "I can pierce a room with my gaze and my arch-backed posture..."
anyway, we played the show and nothing changed in anybody's life, so we went back to ken's house, where E&I were staying, and proceded to eat an ounce of mushrooms. (I may have skipped a day or something, but I don't remember seeing too much music that year; i'm sure I did, though. i used to love going to see bands... mainly I just remember making everybody sit through an excruciating evening of spoken word because I had the hots for a female "poet" in vinyl pants who had absolutely no time for me whatsoever. i recently googled her. she's still foxy, but i don't like her writing. that seems like a pyrrhic victory. lo, i digress.) At that time, Ken was living with a guy named Richard Loranger, and the two of them wrote and read poetry, smoked cigarettes, drank beer, and generally lived a bohemian intellectual underground life that seemed to me (and evan) like the absolute height of '90s-era ambition, right down to the self-published chapbooks. Ah, the '90s. Let us (not even) go there, you and I... As the dose was coming on (as they say in fiction), Richard was suddenly declaiming, in character, all these amazing monologues, and shorter poems, and, Evan and I looked at one another, and it was ON. we basically invited them to poetize until the sun came up, eager as we were to imbibe in all the creative energy that was surrounding us, eager above all to appreciate their work, their gesture, the whole idea that they had committed to the lives of gay slacker poets in Texas. A little bit Rimbaud and Verlaine, a little bit Laverne and Shirley. Totally amazing.
Richard (whom I've not seen since) was the more flamboyant and entertaining of the two with monologues clearly written to be performed (he probably did the lollapalooza spoken word tent or something) and, consequently, his work wore thin first--though it also provided the most uproarious highs. Ken was the real star, though. I never knew him well, but he was obviously a very smart, very sensitive, very funny, and utterly tortured soul. he had droll poems and abstruse poems and site specific slammy poems. But then he had "The School of Rembrandt," which was an epic poem, on a par, i genuinely feel, even after the drugs have long since worn off, with Robert Lowell and John Ashbery. It was the first piece of genuinely brilliant work I'd ever seen from a peer, after a lot of good-to-really-good-to-bad work from all of us. i'm pretty sure I cried, but I know i shook with reverence for both the poem and the poet. the sun was rising. we were outside, smoking. it was cold. ken was beautiful in the blue-gray light, displaced as a Northwesterner in Texas, doing the only thing he was built to do, for an audience of three, at least two of whom were blasted beyond recognition.
"last time I checked, the river still rose," it began. I'll type the rest tomorrow. ken hunt died saturday, the same night we were playing at SXSW. he was found under the El train in Chicago.
posted by Sean Nelson at 10:21 AM
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