On Accomplishment, Pt. 1 – “My Mother Was a Failure, a Complete Failure.” (no, not my mom, it’s a quote)

A FRIEND OF MINE recently opined via a social networking website that she hoped to ‘accomplish’ more in the year 2012.

Apparently she felt that her list of achievements compiled over the months of 2011 didn’t meet a standard that she, or perhaps others, or possibly both expected of her—a sentiment that I imagine is perfectly understandable and identifiable to most of us.

In my own case, around the time I read her message about accomplishment and its lack, I’d been feeling irritated that my last Valid Neurosis post was made in February 2011, a post that promised more to come over the course of the year, a year during which no further posts were made.

In a sense, I ‘accomplished’ next to nothing in the year 2011. Most of my days were spent doing dishes, cleaning floors, and attempting (though usually failing) to keep up with the needs of a ‘passionate’ three year old daughter and her less demanding, though still omnipresent six year old sister.

Again, in a sense, I ‘accomplished’ next to nothing in this small, cloistered world that more often than not failed to extend much further than the front yard of my house, and, continuing in this sense, at times a part of me allowed itself to be consumed with depression and/or rage.

As a ‘primary caregiver’ of two small children, my days are very similar. They pass both excruciatingly slowly and debilitatingly fast. My life is largely situated around the needs of others. There is very little of ‘me’ in the world as an inflictive force, and as such I have practically nothing to show for in terms of credentials, accolades, distinctions, or ‘accomplishments.’

While most of the time this situation doesn’t faze me, there are moments when I allow myself to become stagnantly unreflective in regards to the notion of ‘accomplishment,’ in turn falling prey to the constant, systemic chatter that guides us toward an understanding of accomplishment as the measure of all things, and a very narrow definition of accomplishment as the standard by which to make this measure, and it’s in these moments that I risk indulging in the previously described feelings of depression and/or rage.

What am I doing with my life? Why haven’t I accomplished anything? I should be ‘doing’ something, and since I’m not I begin to rent my hair or lash out at my lack of ‘doing.’ But in times of greater lucidity, I ask myself, what precisely is all this to do about ‘doing,’ and it’s in the spirit of bringing lucidity to the feelings that begin creeping toward the surface at the beginning of a new year—feelings of guilt over failure to effectively accomplish, as presented publicly by my friend mentioned at the outset of this writing—that I hope to bring the elusiveness that is ‘accomplishment’ into clearer focus.

On the Validity of Neuroses in 2012

WHILE 2011 was a bust here at Valid Neurosis—my online graveyard for musings on minutia of the mundane—2012 proves to be…well, who knows, but I’m trying my hand at the written word again, so there could be more entries, shortly…or not. Stay tuned…or don’t.

And, in other VN-related new, while I originally hoped for the blog to be more of a collaborative enterprise, I’ve been unable to find anyone who’s been interested in contributing…until now.

A dear friend to us here at VN HQ, ‘Mr. Sensational’ Gino Vega, has agreed to come on board to offer his unique view on the world of ‘popular culture.’ So, while I’ll still be handling the weightier, more morose stuff, Gino will be foaming at the mouth as only he can on professional wrestling, video games, comic books, and all the other existentially bankrupt stuff we grew up on as kids that we’ve now repackaged and fetishized into having ultimate existential meaning.

Happy New Year, everybody!

– Scott Valid

On the Validity of Neuroses in 2011

I STARTED this blog sometime during 2010, and since 2011 has now begun I figure it’s as good a time as any to reflect on the motivations behind the project, its first year of existence, and where things stand for Valid Neurosis in the year to come.

Regarding the blog’s genesis, I’d experi- mented with a few other online writing projects prior to clacking away infrequently at the keyboard in service of Valid Neurosis, though in the case of those earlier projects the focus of my writing centered on subjects that were near and dear to me, subjects that, fortunately or unfortunately, tended toward the existentially baroque.

The topical terrain that resulted was then akin to the fallout created by a four corners elimination pro-wrestling match between the works of Franz Kafka, Emmanuel Levinas, Andrei Tarkovsky, and David Lynch, and, that being said, those earlier attempts most often had a readership of one—myself, reading my posts as I wrote them.

The fact that these writings generated a decided lack of interest on the part of friends, acquaintances, and, god forbid, strangers wasn’t at all surprising considering the opaque nature of the interests I was asking them to be interested in. Neither was a lack of interest on the part of others necessarily a ‘bad’ thing. The need that drives me to produce a creative output, as meager or ineffective as said output might be, isn’t fueled by the desire to appeal to nor participate with a wide audience, but rather a desire to commune with individuals disturbed in ways similar to myself.

The same goes when seeking the creative output of others. Generally, I’m not drawn to an art that attempts to be socially reassuring or that serves as a means of solidifying a sense of societal cohesion. Instead, the art that resonates with me is that art through which an individual shares his or her own idiosyncratic worldview and, in doing so, challenges and scars the worldview of its observers.

As such, I find myself suspicious of ‘professional’ artists. It’s not that there aren’t countless examples of those working in ‘the arts’ professionally whose work is of interest and inspiration to myself and others, nor do I hold some ascetic objection to individuals profiting from creative pursuits, but at the same time it seems that if a work’s appeal is broad enough to generate a significant amount of income for its creator, then the thrust of the work must be at least in part more concerned with enforcing societal norms than it is with shedding light on the peculiar.

Of course there are instances where a work, socially accepted in its own temporal context, is so deeply connected to existential truth that it can be at once both financially successful and transcendentally meaningful.

Dostoyevsky, for instance, made a considerable ‘living’ from his work during his lifetime, yet this in no way takes away from the gravity his work has for an audience even disconnected by centuries, continents, and language. By the same token, if the peculiar isn’t a shard of something larger and more familiar it becomes strangeness for strangeness’ sake, a novelty as opposed to a uniqueness, and therefore self-defeating. The ‘strangeness’ of Kafka’s writing may have contributed to its being largely ignored in his own lifetime, yet his work, even defined as it is by personal symbolism, speaks to a truth great enough to have overcome its temporal social failings. 

Rock of Ages: Keith Morris and Aging in Rock and Roll

THE GREAT punk rock vocalist Keith Morris— most musically notable for his stints with Black Flag and The Circle Jerks—is these days fronting a band called OFF!, a band I listened to for the first time recently, and expecting them to be horrid I was instead pleasantly surprised. But why would I expect a Morris project to disappoint? Both Morris’ Black Flag and The Circle Jerks were among my earliest and most influential forays into the world of punk rock music, so wouldn’t it make more sense if I expected his current endeavors to be decent at the very least?

Keith Morris was born in 1955. When I was 14 and first getting acquainted with his music, he was 35 years old. At that time, to me, a 35 year old may as well have been Methuselah: from my pubescent vantage point Black Flag and The Circle Jerks were venerable echoes from a distant past (11 and 1 years prior, respectively), and Morris himself, while legendary, was an elder, an ancient, a rock and roll demigod spirited away from the active, teenage world of the here and now and into a kind of post-30-year-old suspended animation. He was an object to be looked up to and admired, for sure, though strictly in the past tense.

But again, why? Morris recorded his most significant music (socio-historically speaking) between the years of 1976 and 1989, taking him through the entirety of his 20s and well into his 30s, and therein lies the reason. Rock and roll, as we are told by any number of advertising firms, record labels, and publishing conglomerates, is a young man’s game. Particularly in the subgenre of punk rock, a lack of creative longevity is almost a requirement. In an art form centered around snarling, youthful rebellion, aging is an embarrassing impossibility. A 50 year old Johnny Thunders is a joke. A 60 year old GG Allin is an abomination. ‘Live fast, die young,’ or so the saying goes.

And so, according to my own ingrained prejudice, a 55 year old Keith Morris fronting a new band couldn’t possibly be worth listening to. At 55, Morris is a punk rock paradox, anathema to the very idea of the punk aesthetic. Yet, as I mentioned previously, OFF! is good. In fact, from what I heard, OFF! can go toe-to-toe with anything Morris produced in his younger years, and if this is the case, as I’d argue it is, a huge hole is then torn in the dogmatic fabric of rock-and-roll-as-necessarily-youthful-terrain.

To be fair, rock and roll’s own track record has done plenty to encourage the worship of novelty and youth. For every OFF!, there are scores of Aerosmiths, Motley Crues, Rolling Stones, and Metallicas whose later career output ranges from irrelevant to ungodly. It seems that in rock and roll’s more mainstream/established quarters, the function of a ‘successful’ band is less that of charting new or varied terrain and more a matter of dilutedly reproducing that which has worked in the past. ‘The Rolling Stones LLC’ is not as concerned with releasing something creatively akin to what ‘Exile’ was in its day as it is with releasing an album that’s just Stonesy enough to fill arenas for another rendition of ‘Start Me Up.’

Further, in ‘mainstream’ quarters, rock and roll ultimately serves as an advertisement for youth-oriented consumer products, and so, whether said products are being consumed by the young or the elderly, it’s important that the aura of youth surrounds its pitchmen. Mainstream rock and roll acts are then seen as either young people appropriately making rock and roll music, or aging rockers rehashing their youth. 

He Used To Do That Gesture Where You Tap Your Index Finger To The Side Of Your Nose…

FROM THE AGES of 15-17 I attended a high school where—due to the school’s geography and related demographics—achievement and the acquisition of credentials were communicated as the highest aim of intellectual development.

Never mind the fact that most of the school’s students and their parents couldn’t have told you the difference between Socrates and Sophocles, much less Groucho and Karl Marx, there remained the amorphous notion that ‘education’ was ‘important,’ or, in other words, that it was incumbent upon the student population to excel at the memorization and regurgitation of facts and figures in order to graduate into a sufficiently prestigious institute of higher learning. Afterwards the individual student would then be rewarded with a corresponding level of social and/or financial stature, in turn establishing the student’s ego, along with the egos of his or her parents and family.

For those who took well to such a system, said system functioned neatly and efficiently, however, for those with whom the system was not a natural fit, a disservice was done. Since the high school I attended communicated to us that an individual’s choice was either the Ivy League or Skid Row, those of us choosing neither were faced with three years of wasted, directionless time.

Some poor souls were fortunate enough to have parents who steered them helpfully toward GEDs, the local Junior College, a form of trade or artisanship, or some corresponding alternative. Other folks were determined and resourceful enough to seek out these or similar directions on their own. Yours truly however, being cowardly and weak, did little more than to go half-heartedly along with the flow, scraping by with C’s and D’s while skulking through the hallways. Still, thanks to the nebulous and hard-to-pin-down subculture that is ‘punk rock,’ my high school years weren’t a complete loss in the ‘learning’ department.

Through my before, after, and eventually during-school forays into the world of loud three chord music, malt liquor, caffeine, nicotine, and naive political idealism, I received lessons—some hilarious, some crushing, some heart-warming, some painful—in everything from the practicalities of small business, to the differences between intentions and actions, to the distinction between the social and the personal, to the concepts of death and dying, and many points in between, though this can be summed up most succinctly by the fact that I learned how to sleep anywhere.

It may sound trivial, but it’s true. Due to the travels and circumstances related to my involvement in ‘punk rock’ as a high schooler, I’ve slept everywhere from comfortable beds to rocky terrain. From houses where someone’s mom took pity on a rag tag bunch of losers and even made us breakfast, to houses where we were told that if we weren’t gone by 6am, the owner would be calling the cops. There was even the crack house in Little Rock, Arkansas where I laid myself down to rest amidst a pile of feral kittens and their feces, and, while this particular setting stretched my abilities to their limits, I still managed to catch a few Z’s.

Wherever Particular People Congregate: A Look At Santa Rosa’s Atlas Coffee Company

OF ALL MY many idiosyncratic peculiarities—most of which stem from the same singular source of guilty/ obsessive/ paranoic neurosis—the fact that I don’t enjoy spending time in public places looms large among them.

While congregating in community plazas may be fine for movers and shakers, captains of industry, hustlers and bustlers, and any other manner of active, well-adjusted types, such is not the modus operandi Fate had in store for me. Still, this distaste for public gatherings isn’t as wholesale as I often make it sound. Given the right combination of persons, place, and activity, I too can don a TGIF shirt and a ‘fanny-pack,’ while ‘ooo-ing’ and ‘ahh-ing’ with the best of them. It just so happens that these combinations tend to be few and far between.

Following this line of thought, cafes typically haven’t been among the places that join forces with persons and activities to bring me scuttling from my cave. This is paradoxical in a sense, as sitting around while drinking coffee is one of my favorite pastimes, yet it’s precisely because this activity is so second nature that I usually find little reason to do it outside my own living room. I know how to make a cup of coffee I enjoy drinking, I have access to the music I want to listen to, the art I appreciate hangs on my walls (or at least more of it would if I could ever get around to interior decorating), and the people I like to converse with are usually on hand at home, either in person or only a quick phone call or email away. Why disturb a system that works?

Sure, there’s something to be said for challenging one’s routine, yet at the same time I learned long ago that seeking out novelty for novelty’s sake rarely leads to anything satisfactory. On those few occasions when I have gone seeking a cafe in which to conduct a public life, either the environments have been inhospitable, the faces have been unfriendly, or the coffee served has been uninspiring, and while I can live with any one of these three shortcomings on their own, two or more together spell a quick retreat to the comfort of home, and time and again such a retreat has been the case.

I do know, however, that it doesn’t have to be this way. As a young child living in San Francisco, my parents used to take me to their own public haunt, the Cafe Trieste in SF’s North Beach district. It was a real neighborhood joint, full of friendly and familiar faces whom my parents recognized and were glad to see.

There was Bruno, the old man with the blind-guy shades and beret, Matteo, the stately mandolin player, always with a warm smile, Yolanda, the effusive Italian woman behind the espresso bar who once gave me a toy Fiat car she brought back from Italy, and plenty of other folks whose faces swirl together in a child’s-eye haze of morning fog and cigarette smoke.

Meanwhile, in addition to the people, character oozed from the cafe’s smoke-yellowed walls as well—the ‘Clark Kent’ style phone booth in the corner, the jukebox overflowing with Italian crooners, the Colombus-discovers-America fresco on the back wall, the black and white photos of Bill Cosby hanging askance, in between pictures of customers’ babies (yours truly included), and so on.

Plummet From The Tombs: The Aphrodisiacs Story (Introduction)

AS SOME OF YOU MAY KNOW, I was/am in a punk rock band called THE INVALIDS. However, after and before I was in THE INVALIDS, I was in a long and winding project known as THE APHRODISIACS.

THE APHRODISIACS existed roughly from 1997 to 2004, going through several line-up changes and a few name switches along the way, all in a futile quest to bring moronic garage punk (and later moronic glam-metal-ish punk) to our own little part of Northern, CA.

Sonoma County, our home turf, was/is a land where rock and roll musicians often try to pass themselves off as the Second Coming of Mozart, and so back then I felt it my duty to inject a little blatant stupidity into the mix. I think my crowning achievement with the band was when a local musician approached me after a show and informed me that he, ‘understood what we were trying to do, but hated it.’ A close second was a time when, in full long-haired APHRODISIACS mode, I was stepped to at a party by a much-esteemed Sonoma County indie rock drummer. “No matter what you think you are these days,” this prick informed me, “you’ll never be anything more than this…” and he proceeded to hum an old INVALIDS ‘lead’ sarcastically while air guitaring. Love that guy!

Anyway, the sound and look of the band changed a bit over the years, but in retrospect our original lineup symbolized the intent of the APHROS at its purest and most effective. MORI PALEGIC (of ‘MORI IS A MANIAC‘ fame) on guitar, KEVIN ‘I AM A ROCK, I AM AN ISLAND‘ JAMIESON (aka DERF) on bass, MATT ‘BIG BOY‘ SILVER on drums, and yours truly (known then as SCOTTY STEELE) on vocals cut a mean swath through the pretense of Sonoma County’s indie rock obsession. Or at least we did in our own minds while practicing in MORI‘s parents’ backyard.

Earlier today I came across our old demo tracks from that era (some of which ended up on our BLOOD ON FIRE 7″ EP released by BEN SAARI‘s LAIDOFF RECORDS) and I thought it might be fun to post them here for public perusal. Then, after a little reminiscing, I thought it might be appropriate to pen a ‘complete’ history of the APHRODISIACS in all their imagined glory. Maybe I’ll get around to it one of these days. For now, consider this the introduction.

You can listen to songs in the media players below, or ‘right-click’ on the song titles to download…

THE APHRODISIACS - Original Demos (1997-ish)

Hey Man

Devilman

Without You

All I Wanna Do (is Rock and Roll)

Blood on Fire

Burnin’ Love

2000 AD

Gimme Something Neurotic

PENGUIN BOOKS published a tome not long ago titled ‘Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day,’ and, shortly before it was released, a neighbor of mine was kind enough to leave a copy on my porch.

To be honest though, I couldn’t bring myself to read it. Instead, the night he dropped it off, I sat in a chair in my living room, cringing, my hands over my ears while my wife sat across from me on our couch and tore through the thing in a couple of hours. She’s a fast reader, and she probably could have finished the book even faster if I hadn’t been bugging her to repeat each chapter out loud as soon as she was done with it.

Using this admittedly irritating method (sorry Erin!) I was able to hear most of the book—partially paraphrased, partially verbatim—which, though still difficult to bear, was considerably less painful than reading it myself (thanks Erin!), perhaps causing one to wonder: why so much angst and gnashing of teeth over a book written about a kind of music I grew up listening to, from a part of the world I’ve spent my entire life living in? Well, right there lies the problem.

For a little background, I entered 7th grade at the end of the 1980’s—‘88-’89 was my 7th grade year if I’m doing the math correctly—a student at the wretched ‘Herbert Slater Junior High School’ (now Middle School) here in Santa Rosa, CA. HSJH was an emotional, intellectual, and existential wasteland. Seriously, one of the worst places I’ve ever been in my life. True, as with most unpleasant experiences plenty of people have gone through a lot worse, but relatively speaking this place was bad.

Being an institution concerned with the hyper-socializing of the under-socializ- ed, Herbert Slater Junior High School functioned in such a way as to break down the distinguishing components of the individual person. Group participation was rewarded, while deviation from the group was punished, ‘the group’ in this case being the overarching student body and staff as a whole, toward which all activities were designed to foster group membership, followed by a top-down hierarchy of sub-groups based around age, occupation, ethnicity, personal preferences, and so forth. Since deviance within this kind of institution is punished both officially by its overarching system and unofficially through its sub-systems, it becomes difficult for an individual to survive without support from a distinctive sub-group, and it’s here where my thirteen-year-old self ran into trouble.

I came from a thoroughly average, not particularly socially-saavy family—we were neither ‘poor’ nor ‘rich’, neither dramatically dysfunctional nor purposefully driven, my parents weren’t stand-out radicals nor were they by-the-book squares, our family was ethnically ambiguous, new-ish to the area, and so forth. Taken on my own I was exceedingly average as well—skinny and awkward, but not enough so as to reach ‘freakish’ status, neither stone stupid nor particularly smart, not noticeably talented in any given area, but at the same time unable to blend completely into the background, etc.

‘Quality’ from the UK! (The Zatopeks)

BEEN A LITTLE SLOW with blog entries lately. I’m working on a new article that should be up sometime today, so Mom and Aunt Marge can rest easy. Actually there is no ‘Aunt Marge,’ and I don’t think my mom knows about this site, so I probably have even fewer readers than my self-deprecation would suggest.

Nevertheless, I want to take a moment and draw your attention to a band I found out about over the weekend. Plenty of folks are already familiar with them, I’m sure, but as I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been under a rock for the last couple of years, so this is all new to me.

The band in question is called The Zatopeks and they hail from London, though I’m not certain if that’s where they’re currently based. Their music is an exquisite mix of classic Lookout-inspired ‘pop-punk’ with a vintage rock and roll sensibility, the end result being something along the lines of Elvis Costello fronting a legit punk band, or, as the band themselves describe it, ‘Buddy Holly covering Rocket to Russia.’

By effectively evolving what can sometimes be a constraining genre, though without making it unrecognizable, The Zatopeks are a cut above the average ‘pop-punk’ band. Further, they’re strengthened by their lyrics and the vocal delivery of their frontman Will DeNiro—who doubles as the mind behind the blog Quality Footwear—proving that one can be authentically poignant and insightful while still making ‘damn fool music,’ which is what, in my opinion, rock and roll is all about (indie rockers please take note).

Do yourself a favor and check out the songs they have up on their myspace page. ‘Jumble Sale’ and ‘City Lights’ are my personal favorites, but all of them are ‘quality’ as Will would say.

First it was Dave Breedlove with his Bubbledumb bands (Nobunny, Personal and the Pizzas, and co.) as well as a few other recommendations (The Flakes, The Okmoniks, etc.), then it was The Prozacs, followed by The 20Belows, and now The Zatopeks. This is turning out to be Christmas in February for me as far as ‘new’ music goes…

- scott

Two Blogs With Which to Spend Your Time…

HERE ARE TWO blogs I’ve come across recently during procrastination shenanigans. Both are interesting reads and worthy of your time.

Music Ruined My Life posts, according to its description, ‘fine, out-of-print
three-chord obscurica (punk, pop-punk, mod, power-pop, folk, country…whatever),’ along with expert commentary by its curator, Jeff.

and…

Quality Footwear, which I only just came across tonight, features some fascinating writing by a guy named Will, tackling everything from The Ramones to Friedrich Schiller.

- scott