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Low Fidelity, or: How John Cusack is ruining my life

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I should not be allowed to watch High Fidelity ever again. Because it’s amazing and it always makes me feel like shit. It’s a weird juxtaposition. I’m ambivalent about my love for this movie. It’s damn near a perfect movie. And I only qualify that with “damn near,” by the way, because I really hate the song that plays over the end credits.

No, stop it. You’re not going to talk me out of this one.

It’s damn near a perfect movie. And here’s why:
- Unbeatable soundtrack. Un. Beat. Able.
- Super witty dialogue. Excellent writing overall, based on a great book.
- John Cusack gets rained on. Again.
- Jack Black singing Al Green.
- Tim Robbins with a hilarious yuppie ponytail.
- Bruce fucking Springsteen.

Yeah, that was six, but whatever. Ha! Meta jokes! Sorry.

If you haven’t seen this movie, you simply must. Especially if you’re a music lover. Really especially if you’re a music collector. Basic rundown: struggling record store owner (Rob Gordon, played by our hero, John Cusack) loses his girlfriend, thus sending him into a shame spiral of self-examination. He recounts his top five horrible breakups, trying to figure out what contributed to each of them. It’s a weird structure for a movie, the narrator speaking directly to the viewer, told in flashbacks and present-day over-analytical musings. And the record store is a great backdrop for this story, because it shows the I-just-have-to-make-it-through-today aspect of a horrible breakup, which I think is lacking in a lot of American love story-based movies. Your heart just got stepped on and fed to you? Too bad, you’ve still got to pay the bills. Sad but true.

But the thing I think I really dig about this film is the way it’s just steeped in music references. Even the costumes and set design show an obsessive love of music that speaks not only to the backstory of the characters, but also to the viewer. A sort of inside joke, if you will. It’s a great movie. I love it. And I hate it. And that’s why it’s interesting. For me. Maybe not for you.

My only goal in this life is to write. You may or may not know that my secondary goal is to open my own bookstore, mostly just to subsidize my first goal. And also to feed my junkie-level book habit. Because I have a Literature degree and don’t want to teach, these are the only two things I’m qualified to do. But my way-down-deep, extra special, super secret dream job? I’d love to own a record store. Clearly none of my dreams involve me making any money. I’m honestly and truly ok with that. I hate money. It’s not about money. It’s about the love of a thing. On top of which, like agro whipped cream, I just don’t want to work for anyone else ever again. I got burned badly by the Giant Evil Bookstore. So fuck it, I’ll open my own. That makes sense. But a record store? That’s just crazy talk.

I won’t say vinyl is dead. It’s actually making a comeback. (Thanks, hipsters.) There are only two or three places left in the U.S. that still press vinyl. Everybody else went out of business in the 90′s. (Thanks, internet.) I’m not one of those people who thinks that absolutely everything sounds better on vinyl. Nine Inch Nails? Nope. You need those sharp, clean, digital edges. Anything live? No! Crowd noise plus needle noise equals too much fucking noise. But I love vinyl. I love how it smells. I love the necessity for interaction with vinyl, because you can only listen to a handful of songs and then you have to get up and flip it over, you know? Instead of just absorbing hours and hours of iPod music, mindlessly, and without any sort of intention. And you have to be delicate with records, store them properly and protect them from sticky hands and scratchy things. It’s an act of love to be a person who collects vinyl. Finding an obscure record that I’ve been looking for in the back of the bin in a thrift store for two bucks? That’s just heavenly. There’s really nothing bad about vinyl.

So High Fidelity really fucks me up. Every time I watch it I listen to The Clash for about a week solid. And I end up having all these horribly unrealistic fantasies about owning a record store. Which makes me feel like I’m cheating on my more plausible goal of owning a bookstore. Which then makes me feel like shit because, probably, neither of these will ever happen. So then I drink heavily and listen to The Clash for another week (possibly the Violent Femmes, after the drinking starts) and end up hating myself because I’ll never amount to anything.

See the problem?

This isn’t John Cusack’s fault, I guess. I’m a huge Cusack fan. Say Anything? War, Inc? Grosse Pointe Blank? Better Off Dead? Being John Malkovich? Come on. The guy’s a genius. I could blame it on Nick Hornby, maybe, for writing the wonderful novel. But there’s something about Cusack’s performance as Rob Gordon that’s just heart wrenching. It’s not the love story thing. It’s a great story, but it’s a love story like any other. No, what gets me in the feels is that he runs a business that is, essentially, for the connoisseurs and by the connoisseurs. That’s clearly frustrating, both because there’s no money in it, and also because collectors of things are always comparing their obsessions rather than their collections. Your fixation becomes a big part of your personality, a measure of your worth. And despite living squarely on the edge of bankruptcy, he continues to do it because he can’t do anything else. It’s all he knows, all he loves, all he is. That’s admirable. Rare, even. It’s impressive as far as the screenwriting goes, too. The love story bits are couched in the language of his love of music because that’s the only way he knows how to talk. Obsession makes for interesting linguistics.

I’d like to say, at the end of my life, that I absolutely, unabashedly, did what I loved. Even if it’s financial torture and it makes everything else harder, being passionate about what you do, how you spend your energy, is worth every penny you didn’t make. I saw a Facebook meme the other day that said “The biggest risk of all is the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet that you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” That’s the bottom line. (How sad is it that my current mantra-slash-philosophy was distilled down to a Facebook meme? One that I didn’t make? Urgh.)

Anyway. Go watch High Fidelity again. It’s so fucking good. You can turn it into a drinking game, too. Every time someone mentions a band, take a drink. Every time they quote a song, take a shot. You won’t get through the whole movie but it’s fun. And a great way to kickstart your self-loathing Clash marathon. Good times.

A hundred-pound sturgeon on twenty-pound test…

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Let me explain to you the complete literary weirdness that happened to me this week. I’ll begin at the absolute beginning: in 1999 my cousin, the stagehand, snuck me in the back door of a Primus show. (And yes, I know that “snuck” is not a word.) I was a junior in high school and had been going to a ton of shows that year, spending unreal amounts of money on shitty metal bands. And I knew Primus, but I wasn’t a die-hard superfan or anything. I had Sailing the Seas of Cheese. But everyone has Sailing the Seas of Cheese (and if you don’t, you should), so that doesn’t really count. It was free (sort of) and I was on vacation so I figured what the hell. However, this particular show was in-fucking-credible. Buckethead opened for Incubus (before they started to suck) who opened for Primus and my mind was thoroughly blown. So, typical Vanessa long-story-short-but-not-short-enough, I went off the OCD deep end and bought every Primus album (on CD, whippersnappers). Huge Primus fan.

Fast forward to 2006, when I heard through the Giant Evil Bookstore grapevine that Les Claypool, the lead singer, bassist, and general heart and soul of Primus, had released a novel. I was stoked and confused and weirded out by the whole thing. Could not for the life of me, even with all my insider information, find a copy of this book. I asked every used bookstore in town to keep an eye out and call me if they saw a copy. I checked the Giant Evil Bookstore database day after day and there weren’t any available. And eventually I gave up, wrote it on my ridiculous books-to-buy-eventually spreadsheet, and forgot about it.

Then I was in the used bookstore in Arcata last week, just poking around. I usually avoid the fiction section. Too many books I want to read and I’ll spend all my money. So I stick to the scifi and fantasy sections because I have very specific things I’m looking for there. More cost-effective. See? I’m a responsible grownup. I irresponsibly wandered over to the fiction section and was reaching for a book on the very top shelf (to clarify: I am short and top shelves are usually difficult for me), when I tripped and knocked over a small stack of books that were precariously balanced on top of some other books. I was putting them back (even though they shouldn’t have been there in the first fucking place) and what do I see? South of the Pumphouse by Les Claypool. In the wrong section, of course. It was in the L’s and not the C’s. Damn it.

This is the third time that I’ve found something I was looking for in this particular bookstore by almost seriously injuring myself. I’m not sure if I should be more cautious or less cautious while in this establishment. Either might serve me well. Hypothetically. Fuck it, I’m just clumsy, and the universe seems to be rewarding me for that. By giving me books. Or something.

Anyway. It’s a pretty small book. I read it in about a day and a half. Weird. Very weird. If you’re a Primus fan, you’ll recognize a few lines from the song “Fish On.” It’s basically a story about two brothers who haven’t seen each other for years and are trying to work on being a bigger part of each others lives after the death of their father, even though now that they’re adults they have absolutely nothing in common anymore. There’s a lot of stuff about trying to go home and see things the way that you did when you were a kid. There’s a lot of fishing, which I kind of took as an extended metaphor for how one can’t force camaraderie through sharing an experience. But then, about three quarters of the way through, it takes a real hard left turn. I won’t give out any spoilers, but I have to say that was not the way I expected it to go. All in all, a good book. Not a great book, but worth the day and a half, for sure.

But I wasn’t quite sure what to think so I read a couple of reviews of it after I was done, just to see what other people had to say about it. And almost all of them (as well as the blurb on the back of my copy of the book) compare Claypool to Hunter S. Thompson. I don’t know that I agree with that comparison. There are drugs and madness involved, and some wacky shit goes down, but Thompson was a revolutionary and a complete crazy person and I wouldn’t in good conscience compare him to anyone. He’s the Pink Floyd of journalism. This novel reads a little more like Steinbeck, trying to squeeze profundity out of the mundane.

Point is, it wasn’t at all what I expected and I’m very disappointed in myself. Because I shouldn’t have hyped up the book based on my previous opinion of the author, right? Just because his music is this wonderfully weird thing doesn’t mean that his written work will be (which is not to say that writing lyrics is not, in itself, worthy of being called “writing,” but you know what I mean – long form prose versus lyrics which are essentially poetry? Apples and oranges, yes? We can all agree on that?). Why pigeonhole people because they’re really good at one thing that they’re famous for doing? Doesn’t mean that’s the only thing they’re good at. Or the only thing that they love. Frankly, I’m dismayed to learn that I even had that particular kind of bias in me. Made me sad. Mostly because when it’s the other way around (and, most often, when it’s someone else’s opinion) I rail against it. Like saying that just because Matthew Gray Gubler is an actor, that he can’t paint. Or that Henry Rollins can’t do spoken word poetry because he’s a punk singer. Or that Eddie Murphy can’t sing because he’s a comedian.

Wait, no, that one’s true.

And I’m not condemning Les Claypool’s work, or saying that he should just stick to shredding on the bass guitar (a fretless, six-string bass guitar). If he writes another book I’ll probably read it. And of course I would never discourage anyone from expanding their artistic horizons. You have a story in you? Fucking tell it or it will die. Period. But beware the preconceived notion monster. Because apparently it will eat your face without you even knowing about it. Lesson learned.

Retail Minions Unite!

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This weekend was my one year anniversary of quitting my job at the Giant Evil Bookstore. That’s weird, man. I don’t think I’ve ever been this stress-free for this long. I live in California now, where things are blissful and it’s gorgeous anywhere you look. Unexpectedly, I enjoy digging in the dirt. Being tired at the end of the day, but saying “Hey, look at this thing I accomplished.” That’s pretty great on a lot of levels. And the husband is the happiest monkey in the world out here. The other day he yells at me from across the living room, using his excited voice, “You know what we should do? We should make a wood stove that looks like R2-D2!” I sigh. He continues. “No, wait, no, we should make one that looks like Darth Vader’s helmet mask. And you put the wood in through his mouth? Nothing says ‘nerds off the grid’ like a Darth Vader wood stove.”

I’m not sure anything actually says “nerds off the grid.” But if anything could, it would, in fact, be a Darth Vader wood stove.

That’s like a Twilight Zone sentence, right? I’m not imagining the weirdness?

Anyway, I digress. I always had mixed feelings about the bookstore. It was books, and I love books. It’s like a little kid getting to wallow around in a pit full of kittens all day. Sort of. I do miss my peeps, good booknerdy folks who knew their shit and with whom I could comfortably commiserate about the horrors of minimum-wage shilldom. I liked knowing what books were coming out before anybody else. And seeing the ridiculous furor over best sellers or weird fads (thanks for that, Oprah). But the zombifying, soulsucking, spirit-crushing nature of a retail job definitely outweighs all of that.

But the best thing about working in a bookstore was definitely the customers. Also the worst thing. We had some fantastic regulars whom I adored. But most everyone else…hmm, there aren’t really words. But there are examples! (I’m the one in italics. I look great in italics.)

“You guys had a book on a table up front about six months ago? It had a blue cover.” It’s always the book with the blue cover! “Do you know where it is now? Why isn’t it still on the table?” Do you understand how marketing works? No? Ok.

“Where’s your nonfiction section?” Well, I can show you were my fiction section is, and then there’s the rest of the store, which is nonfiction. “What’s the difference?” Sigh.

“It’s a novel, but it really happened.” Novels are not nonfiction!

“I want something with wizards, but not like Harry Potter.” Urm. Good luck with that.

“Where’s your Harry Potter section?” Seriously?

“Where’s your Twilight section?” Fucking seriously?

“My kid really likes Twilight. Do you have anything that’s like that?” Everything’s like that. Can you be more specific? “Well, she’s ten.” Holy shit, lady, why did your kid read Twilight at ten? Or at all, for that matter?

“My kid’s a really good reader so it’s hard for him to find books that are challenging. He loves science fiction and fantasy.” Ok, great, let’s go over to the Science Fiction and Fantasy section. “Oh, no, I don’t want him to read adult books. He’s only a teenager.” This is why America is crumbling.

Kid with a giant stack of books she’s pulled out of the shelf and practically destroyed. Her mother: “Oh, no, honey, don’t put those away. That’s what she’s here for.” Point that finger at me again, bitch, and I will eat it.

“Why aren’t there any new Hemingway books?” Well, because disembodied dead spirits have a really hard time getting publishing contracts these days.

“I need these eighteen books as quickly as possible.” They’re out of print. “What do you mean?” I mean they don’t make them anymore. You’ll probably have to look at a used bookstore or order them online. “What do you mean?” When books stop selling they stop printing them. “What do you mean?” Are you stuck in a logic loop, Borg person?

“You can’t find it? Obviously your computer is wrong.” Obviously. Can we maybe think of more than one vague word out of the title with which to search? “Well, it should pop right up. It was ‘The’ something.” Can you think of any part of the author’s name? “Bob or Dave or John. Maybe.”

“I really like this author, but I’ve read all his books. Can you suggest something similar?” Sure, try this guy. “Oh, no, I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of him.” That was kind of the point, wasn’t it?

“I can’t find it. Can you just show me where it is?” Yes, ma’am. It’s right there on that shelf next to your eyeball.

“This place is so big. How do you find your way around?” A nauseating degree of repetition. And a basic understanding of maps and the alphabet.

“I ain’t never been in here before.” You don’t say.

Ok, ok. I’ll stop. I do tend to go on and on sometimes, don’t I? I don’t mean to sound so negative. It wasn’t all bad. Sometimes I even liked my job at the Giant Evil Bookstore. It taught me a lot about how not to run a business. Like not treating your employees like useless idiots. And refraining from most kinds of corporate scumfuck douchebaggery. What blew my mind the most about working there was how ignorant people were about books in general. I was endlessly fascinated by it, honestly. It’s like there’s a blind spot in their cultural awareness, you know? So often people would come in and say things like “I need that book that was on the news last night.” At which point I’d tell them that I don’t have a television and they’d look at me like I had three heads. And of course they didn’t remember the title or the author because they assumed that everyone at the bookstore would know exactly what they were talking about. Because it was on tv. Why wouldn’t everyone know exactly what they were talking about? It’s tv. Why have we gotten to a point where this is the norm? I’m upset and icky-feeling over it.

The other interesting thing is the way that customer service folks are looked at as subhuman. Like those types of jobs make you less, somehow, than other people. But you’ve got to pay the bills. Stupid capitalist society. For the record, we’re not in these sorts of service industry jobs because we’re too stupid or lazy to get a “real” job. Every single person I worked with either had a college degree or was in college to get one. Bookstore employees are pretty knowledgeable, if just by virtue of being forced to hang out there all the time. Don’t assume that they won’t know the answer to your question because of where they work. It’s their job to know the answers, and it’s a thankless job most of the time. Your shopping crisis may seem like the end of the world to you, but it’s only a few minutes out of their long-ass day, a day filled with all kinds of interesting shopping crises. So be nice. And be patient.

Story Time!

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Alright, kids, I hate to let life get in the way of my blogging responsibilities, but sadly it does happen from time to time. I’m in the middle of moving so I’ve got to keep this short and sweet this week. No deep insights! Very few ridiculous analogies! Plain old ordinary anecdotes! Possibly even typos. It’s so haphazard and exciting. Sorry. Next week I’ll try to be a badass. If I’ve got my shit together by then. Onward and upward. (Cue campfire ghost story voice. Ahem.)

Our story begins in a dim and dreary bookstore in the rainy depths of coastal California. This particular bookstore has pretty damn satisfactory scifi and fantasy sections (Tin Can Mailman in Arcata – I always leave happy and broke, check it out if you’re close and need a bookstore, plugplugplug). And the scifi section faces the front door so everyone who comes in has to walk right by you, right? I was standing there with (I’m not even fucking kidding) Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Piers Anthony, and Frank Herbert in my hand. In those great old 1970′s-looking mass market paperbacks? I love those. I looked like a walking cheapskate scifi 101 class, though, for real.

In walked these two gentlemen who were clearly on a mission to find a particular book. Which should’ve been right where I was standing. But wasn’t. Of course. And it’s a used bookstore and they’re usually kind of busy and they’re by nature a little disorganized so I usually look two or three times and try random leaps of logic to try to look in other places that it just might have possibly ended up through some twist of fate. But these two gentlemen were being extremely thorough, even by those standards. And they were all up in my space, you know? I suppose at some point my comfort bubble got a bit bent because myopic, fucking overly polite me, I stepped back and started squinting at the books from afar so as to give these dudes the prime scifi section real estate, goddamn it. Because clearly they felt that their used bookstore experience was of a higher priority than mine.

One guy gave me the thank you nod (manners props to Dude #1!) and the other guy. Ooh, the other guy. Homeboy looked like Comic Book Guy’s, geekier more UV avoidant cousin (can you make fun of Simpsons characters for being pale? Does that even work? Fuck, I’m brainfried, just let it go). And you know, I don’t give a shit what people look like, I really really don’t. But sometimes you can just spot them from a mile away. Those haughty kind of LARPier-than-thou sorts of guys. They fall within a bell curve. They usually resemble the bell curve, as a point of interest. So this walking fucking stereotype, this caricature of a human being, gave my books the “I’m obviously being nosy about your books but it’s ok because we’re in a bookstore” head-tilt eyeball situation. And giggled. More of a giggle/scoff, really. A gloff, if you will.

At this point I should’ve asked him “What the hell, bro?” And just intimidated the shit out of him with my meaty social prowess and skillful altercation-starting skills. But those things aren’t real, you see, so I was left in this weird state of not knowing what had just happened or how to feel about it. Which is how I feel most of the time when I deal with other humans. Also why I moved to the middle of nowhere to a county that literally has more bears than people. That’s statistics. Look it up.

Because that gloff had the stink of superiority to it. And I don’t know why. I’m bothered by this not knowing (grammar what?). Are these four really important scifi classics not good enough for Dude #2? Because that’s bullshit. Maybe he was just a fantasy geek who scoffs at scifi in general, but then why the rudeness trying to get past me to the scifi books? Or was he laughing because he assumed I hadn’t read them (three of them I had, I just didn’t own my own copies, for the record)? In which case the proper etiquette of nosy bookstoreness would be to say “Hey, those are really good books” not “You mean you’re in your thirties and you haven’t read those yet?” Or maybe (because we need at least one optimistic prospect) he was thrown off by my being a girl in the scifi section at all and couldn’t think of anything to say that was polite so he opted for the idiot gloff instead. Any of these things is possible.

Anyway. I guess it’s just a mystery. Damn, there’s really no good way to end that story. It was a frustrating nerd moment, you know? I’ve let it roll off my back. After I stopped myself from chasing him down the street screaming “Why?! Why?!” Then I let it roll off my back. I’m not particularly good with people. So, if we need to find a moral here: be nice in bookstores, ok?