Is It the Drugs? Father John Misty, Possum Dixon and the Altered State of Creativity

I know that all drugs are not the same and that to conflate mushrooms with heroin under the heading of "dangerous drugs" is tantamount to placing "failure to signal" in the same category as "driving on the wrong side of the highway." Sure both can get you in trouble, but the latter is almost guaranteed to. Nonetheless, a couple of news items hinging on the use of these drugs have hit home with me lately and I want to take a moment to explore the reasons why.

The first item is the recent death of Celso Chavez (pictured above), guitarist for the '90s new wave pop band Possum Dixon. He died of pneumonia resulting from a staph infection. Drugs weren't the direct cause of death, but the band's members did have a history with hard drugs including crack and heroin. At the time of death, drugs were apparently still a part of Chavez's life.

"He had been doing a lot of harm to his body for a really long time," the band's lead singer Rob Zabrecky told the L.A. Times. "It finally took its unfortunate toll."

No band has influenced me as much as Possum Dixon. It was at my first club show ever that I saw Chavez, Zabrecky and their band play a chaotic, blistering set of music. At the end of the performance, Zabrecky shoved the microphone into his mouth, put a pair of pantyhose over his head and then sang Madonna's "Like a Virgin," writhing on the ground as Chavez banged on his guitar. I had never seen anything like it. Right there I realized that there were no rules.

This brings me to the second news item, the recent attention gained by former Seattleite Josh Tillman following the release of Fear Fun, the first album from his new band/identity Father John Misty. On Monday Tillman played a show at Neumos in Seattle. It, like that Possum Dixon show, was a personal revelation. I am still trying to put into words what happened that night in front of a near-packed house. I will say that Tillman pushed the boundaries of performance in the same way that Chavez and his bandmates did. As Tillman smoked a cigarette on stage, twirling to the ground, screaming incoherently into the microphone as his band buried him in deep, dark distortion, I again realized that, when it comes to creative expression, all rules are self-imposed.

I have been reading every interview with Tillman I can get my hands on. His recent creative rebirth from a sad-sack folkie with a lyrical gift into a boogie-woogie balladeer with a searing intellect is a point of fascination for me, especially as I think about how to transform myself into a more honest, lucid writer. Tillman is eloquent, thoughtful and provoking in his answers. There is so much to be gleaned from his ongoing experience. Central to that experience is drug culture.

"Altered perspectives are very useful for a writer," Tillman recently told an interviewer. "If you’re interested in excavating the human experience, the best subject you have at your disposal is yourself, because you have total access, if you’re willing. Mushrooms are very useful in that respect."

So, this is where I'm at. The artists that inspire me the most are driven, to some degree, by mind-altering substances. Logic dictates that I should follow their lead. But what if I have no interest in exploring my creative mind in an altered state? Is it possible to dig deep into my own experience, obliterate my ego and discover truth without injesting mushrooms? Can I go over the edge, and peer into the darkness without the temporary net of opiates? Is it possible to embrace the idea that there are no rules while following my own rules of self-preservation?

I can only hope so.

Mike Daisey and Doing the Right Thing

After gestating on the matter for five days, I finally put down in words my thoughts on Mike Daisey, the monologuist who, it was recently revealed, fabricated much of his recent one-man-show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Many people felt duped by the performance, in which Daisey tells of the abused and underage workers he met while visiting an Apple supplier in China and then implores his audience to spread his tale. I felt particularly angry, since Daisey made these claims, to my face, when I interviewed him for an in-depth feature story for City Arts. I tried to temper that anger, but it is still very much there.

So, that's my professional response, but my emotions are much more complex than that. Despite feeling deceived, I also feel a tremendous amount of empathy for Daisey. Like every other serious storyteller, both Mike Daisey and I have stood at a common crossroads.

The night before the news of Daisey's mass deception broke, I found myself at that crossroads again. The final deadline for submitting changes to my book about the independent record label K Records was the next day. At this point I should have been focused only on crossing any uncrossed "t"s, dotting any undotted "i"s. But there was an elephant in the room, one that had been lingering for months.

The book is not a work of muckraking journalism. It is a collection of stories told to me by trustworthy witnesses, stitched together in a smooth narrative. When I uncovered contentious issues, I tried my best to speak with both sides. In some cases I was able to suss out a truth I was confident in; other times I presented both sides of the story as equally plausible. Sometimes, in order to achieve that smooth narrative, I had to revisit my sources and dig deeper into my primary source material to find the connective tissue. Connecting the dots, I called it. That's what I was doing for the last four months of the writing process: connecting the dots.

But there was one pair of dots that were embarrassingly far apart. The connective tissue I used to bring them together was not fabricated out of thin air--it was available in various locations on the Internet, provided with no primary source. But it was tenuous and weak, more tissue paper than Teflon. It held until that final night. And then, it tore. Frantic, I finally talked to my girlfriend about it.

"Just say that it's a rumor," she said about the suspect story. "Say that it has spread on the Internet."

I resisted. "I don't do that anywhere else in the book," I said, pointing out that I manage to avoid talking about the Internet until it actually appears in the story, a full five years after the event in question. "It will destroy the narrative flow."

This, I imagine, is the same argument that Daisey told himself, and perhaps his wife, when he contemplated the fibs in his deeply flawed work. "It will destroy the narrative." So when Daisey appeared on This American Life and admited that he had fabricated much of his story--a story that the radio program, like me, had spread to its audience--one part in particular cooled my anger and replaced it with a pained empathy.

"Did you ever worry that this would be discovered?" asked the show's host, Ira Glass.

"I worried about it all the time," Daisey replied. "It made me sick."

I knew that feeling. I had felt it for the previous two months. The thought that I was presenting a possible lie as truth--even if the potential lie wasn't one I created--sat in my stomach like a rock. As time wore on, the muscle around that rock was rubbed raw and grew into a festering wound.

As much as I disliked the idea of tampering with the narrative, the thought of living with that feeling, the feeling that I imagine has become an integral part of Daisey's work, was unimaginable. After my initial resistence, I took my girlfriend's suggestion. I disrupted my narrative. How I managed it I will not say, but I did spit that rock out.

I wish Daisey would have done the same. Maybe I wouldn't have written about him, but I could respect him.

The Church, the Barnyard and the Schoolhouse

Last night I returned to Seattle after a three-day whirl-wind trip to the Midwest where I witnessed the marriage of my cousin Amy to a tall, handsome gentleman named Brandon. The bride was beautiful; the groom affable and a little goofy. They both danced, with each other, with their friends' children and then apart, one half of the new whole twisting the night away as the other graciously worked the room of two-hundred-some well-wishers.

It was a Catholic wedding and the reception was held in the banquet hall adjacent to the church. A modest crucifix hung above the dance floor. From there Jesus looked down on the celebration as he did his own sort of twist.

During the wedding itself my father was tasked with reading the two stories from the Bible that would provide the undergirding for the ceremony's authority. My father possesses a warm and comforting reading voice that I became accustomed to hearing as a child during Sunday mass. Kneeling, standing or sitting in those hard, wooden pews, I often listened to him sing with the choir, his baritone voice, slightly pinched, stretching to hit the tenor notes. Out of all the voices, his was the clearest, a clarion call. My favorite services, though, were where he would take the lectern and read, as he did for his niece on her wedding day.

First he read the part from Genesis where God puts Adam to sleep, removes his rib and makes the first woman. Later he read from Ephesians, in which the author instructed, "Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord," before imploring, "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her."

My father was the first storyteller in my life. From the lectern, he told tales of deep troubles and great hope as I listened, along with a community of friends and family. As a result of my interest in the stories my father told, I also took interest in the stories told by the priest each Sunday--the canonical gospels that recall the life of Jesus Christ--and listened with great interest as the priest bridged the gap of relevance during the homily, explaining to the parish why these ancient stories are important to us today.

My interest in these stories didn't lead to a devout life within the Church. On the contrary, I think that my interest in the stories that created the Church--or that the Church created--is what eventually lead me astray. Once you start paying attention to the fine print, it becomes more difficult to sign on the dotted line.

Still, sitting at Amy and Brandon's wedding, I was reminded of the power of that setting, the gravitas of my father's voice and the great joy I find in the contemplation that comes after a well-told story. The Church, I was reminded, didn't necessarily make me want to be a good Catholic; but it did undoubtedly make me want to be a good storyteller.

Fortunately I come from a family of great storytellers. I don't know if it was the Church, exactly, that inspired the stories that my aunts, uncles and cousins tell. The craftsmanship of them--the set-up, the arc, the pay-off--points less to an instruction in piety than to the need for entertainment that results from a childhood spent on a country farm.

My uncle Dick tells stories of an old acquaintence whom the Baumgarten boys had nicknamed "I". That nickname is a simple device that is boundless in its comedic possibilities. "Dick, tell us about the time I fell in the river." The request itself is a punchline.

The poetry of these stories, I credit to my late grandmother Marge. She was a schoolteacher and, even after she quit that job to start a family with by grandfather Lyle, she wrote poetry. She died when I was three, so I never really witnessed her brilliance in person and I have yet to uncover any of her poetry. But I do find proxies of both every time I go home for a wedding, a funeral or a holiday.

On the night of the wedding, after the garter and bouquet had been thrown and the last disco light was cast on the visage of Christ, a few of my uncles, aunts and cousins gathered in a hotel room. We sat around--no TV, no music--and told stories. On this night, for whatever reason, we were interested in mischief. My uncle Oris--husband of my father's sister Doris--told about the time he and a friend broke 300 eggs just for fun.

"You're an outlaw," said my cousin Kurt before telling his own tale of a dead racoon, a high school locker and a memorable stench.

Oris countered with a story of how he accidentally turned the electricity off for an entire neighborhood and then spent the evening evading the police.

"I think the statute of limitations has run out for that by now," he said as we all laughed.

"Now what about you, Mark?" my aunt Doris said, turning to me. "I'm sure the statute of limitation has run out for some of your stories by now, right?"

Photos: (top, from left) Lyle Baumgarten, with sons Dick, Bert, Paul, Jack and Tom, my father; (bottom) Marge Fenske at her schoolhouse.

Why Did I Watch the Grammys with the Elderly?

While sifting through articles to put together my "Past Stories of Note," I had the great horror of revisiting the weekly columns I wrote for Willamette Week while working as music editor there from 2003 to 2006.

My column was called Riff City (a play on Portland's nickname "Rip City," the origins of which I do not recall). I generally refused to write about anything outside the city limits, which could be a good thing. When a local band of note released an album or when a club dismissed its talent buyer or when the daily newspaper accidentally helped shut down a beloved pirate radio station, Riff City was teeming with original reportage and, I like to think, the most informed insight in the city. On slow news weeks, though, the column was a playground for my personal angst and self-loathing. I wrote some depressing crap that I can not imagine anyone enjoying.

Looking at it now I am sure that, as a reader, I would have hated Riff City for subjecting me to such drivel. I went to a country and western karaoke night by myself (sad!) and sang a Willie Nelson song altering one of the lines to incorporate a reference to "hipsters" (why?!). I wandered around downtown Portland in search of a song that would make me feel better after a fight with my long-distance girlfriend, only to discover that no song could solve my problems (imagine!). I went to a foam club with a bunch of 18-year-olds, and then just made fun of them (creepy!).

Then there was the time I went to an old folks home to watch the Grammy Awards with a bunch of elderly women. I wanted to watch the awards with a captive audience, one that did not care enough really to express any cynicism, something from which I was apparently trying to escape (and which I mentioned three times in the first paragraph). I remember making my intern call around to all of the elder care facilities in Portland to see if they were going to be watching the awards. If so, I wondered if I could come watch with them. One facility agreed, but, when I arrived, it was clear that everyone had been wheeled into the T.V. room to watch the Grammy's because I was there. It was humiliating and the resulting story an embarrassment, though my editor assured me otherwise.*

What was I thinking? Well, I was thinking that I had to get a column done every week. When you are in a crunch whatever idea pops out of your head first is the one that gets the space. And what was popping out of my head--just like what is popping out of most twentysomethings' heads--was really not ready to be shared with the world.

Now I'm writing another weekly column for City Arts and, to be honest, I'm a little scared of it devolving into a new version of the same old crap. I like to think I've learned a few things in the intervening years, chief amongst them the ability to use the word "I" without bleeding all over the keyboard. I'm certainly a happier person. Also, I have learned that the elderly are not for my readers' amusement. But what have I yet to learn?

*Bless you, Kelly Clarke, but subjecting these grannies to my clumsy sensibilities was a mistake.

Indie Rock Dream Journal: Calvin Johnson

Every few months I will have a dream about a subject I have interviewed or will soon be interviewing for a story, usually a musician. These are my work stress dreams and they offer absolutely no insights into these characters. But I feel compelled to make a record of them.

Last night my dream interview subject was Calvin Johnson (above), the musician and proprietor of K Records who I have interviewed numerous times throughout the last year for my book, Love Rock Revolution. These are the things that I learned. Pease note that none of this is true!

• The K Records offices are now located in the lunch room of my alma matter Tomah Senior High School in Tomah, Wisconsin.

• Calvin works out, heavily, every day and has ever since he was 4, the age at which he was given his first treadmill.

• At one point Calvin was in a band called the High Life Society and they are thinking about reuniting (judging from the VHS tape he played for me, they sound a lot like the band Papas Fritas).

• Calvin vehemently denies the rumors that Dub Narcotic Sound System* will be reuniting. In fact, when this was suggested he got on the phone, called all the band's various past members and informed them of as much.

• K Records was once in league with a motorcycle gang. This relationship lead to a hearing before the Washington State legislature, after which K was exonerated, but the motorcycle gang leader, who looked like Lemmy of Motorhead fame, was fined $500.

 

*This is a real band that Calvin was actually in until 2004.

Photo by Hilary Harris

Dismembering the Live Review

I loathe concert reviews. I can’t stand reading them. When I feel I should read one, I skim it, sometimes jumping entire paragraphs for no good reason. For the most part, I can’t stand writing them either. Unless the live performance is part of a larger story or there is some kind of actual news peg--say if a band is debuting a raft of new material or playing for the Pope--a written review of a show reads like filler. I'd rather move on to the obituaries.

Someone could point out that, just three weeks ago, I commented on a live review of an Allen Stone concert written for City Arts by the very kind and thoughtful music critic Dan Digs. I wrote, “Well said, Digs. I went Saturday night and this happened ...” and then linked to this video of Stone leading the crowd in a dancing frenzy. 

I didn’t lie, exactly. What I read of Dan’s review was solid, but I skipped a good three-quarters of it. I care about Allen Stone, but that’s why I went and why, really, I didn’t need to read the review. My compliment was just a way into the conversation so that I could post that amazing video and maybe a sideways thank you to Dan for writing the review so I didn’t have to. Thanks, Dan. And I'm sorry.

My distaste for live reviews might be due to the fact that, at almost 60 years old, the live rock ‘n’ roll experience often feels pretty played out and sclerotic, incapable of seeming newsworthy or surprising anyone in a post-GG Allin world. Or maybe I am just contemptuous of other people’s unproven opinions. I revere some of the live reviews of my rock critic forefathers, but is that just because all that literature has been sifted through, codified and stamped with “APPROVAL” from the cultural relevance police? Do I hate writing reviews because I secretly feel totally irrelevant?

Maybe the spread of the camera phone is to blame; no longer do we need to read words about performance. We can see it with our own eyes. That video of Allen Stone tells you everything you need to know about that show and does so in less than a minute.

I only bring this up because a few weeks ago a young songwriter in Seattle invited me to attend one of his performances. He promised it would be memorable. The way he was asking made it clear that he imagined a live review from me would be an ideal outcome.

I went, and I was moved, but I didn’t write a live review. Instead, I took the things that inspired me and parsed them into two different stories with very different purposes. One was an exploration of the space where the show was held with a few words on how the concert illuminated that space; the other an updated history of the artist that uses the show as a point of contemplation in a timeline that moves onward.

My method is to use the concert as a gateway. I hope it works to further the conversation. If not, at least I'm not asking you to read a set list.

Talkin' Gauguin

The February issue of City Arts is now on the streets. My most noteworthy contribution is a short feature about Seattle composer Jherek Bischoff, accompanied by a wonderful photo illustration shot by Nate Watters and sprinkled with fairy dust by art director Dan Paulus. Bischoff is a very kind young man with large features and an insatiable hunger for experimentation and collaboration that has landed him the opportunity to collaborate with David Byrne and Caetano Veloso on his latest project. Inspiring stuff.

My favorite of the pieces I contributed this month, though, is the brief essay that kicks off the opening HERE section of the magazine. Each month that space is occupied by the first-person story of a notable figure in the arts who has something going on and something to say about it. Since I edit the section, I often end up selecting the subject and conducting the interview that is then molded into the article you see before you and affixed with the "As told to Mark Baumgarten" tag.

Past favorites have included Native American photographer Matika Wilbur talking about cultural assimilation, choreographer Donald Byrd contemplating his attempt (and failure) to bridge a political gap with art and activist Kathleen Kassis sharing her thoughts on the role of art in the early days of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It's nice to have a place to allow people to contemplate topical issues that are near and dear to them. Endlessly more interesting, and often more insightful, than listening to pundits.

This month I had the great honor of interviewing the curator of Paris' Musée d’Orsay, Stéphane Guégan, about Paul Gauguin, the colonial-era artist whose work will be shown in an exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum starting next month.

My excitement was two-fold.

First, the d’Orsay is my favorite museum in the world. I have never been to the Louvre, despite visiting Paris a number of times. The reason: It is just across the Seine from the d'Orsay and every time I have been near the giant old train depot, I have been sucked in and lost hours staring at its canvases smeared and dotted with the work of the greatest impressionist and post-impressionist painters.

Second, Gauguin, while not my favorite painters, has held a special place in my life as the inspiration for W. Somerset Maugham's novel, The Moon and Sixpence. which recounts Gauguin's journey to Tahiti where he found the inspiration that transformed his art. It's been a few years since I've read the book, but I recall it being a work of great mythology that is likely far too forgiving of both the artist's and colonialism's brutality. But it is a beautiful mythology thanks to Maugham's inimitable style.

Naturally, my interests led the conversation a bit. Guégan doesn't talk about Maugham, but mythology is at the core of this piece and, though it seems inoccuous enough, plenty controversial to match the spirit of the previous oral essays that have filled the space.

Love Rock Revolution, Shelved

I couldn't help it. The publisher at Sasquatch Books sent me a PDF of the cover that will accompany the review copies of Love Rock Revolution for approval and, despite the fact that it is a full half-year before it will be available for anyone to read, I had to see what it looked like on the book shelf. So I printed the rough cover out, trimmed it, wrapped it around a copy of Our Knowledge of the External World by Bertrand Russell and shelved it where I think it belongs.

What the New York Times Taught Me Today

This week's revelations, courtesy of the New York Times Sunday Review Section, the only section of the Times I read.

Photo by Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times

1. The article about Japan's nonexistent “lost decade” ("The Myth of Japan’s Failure”) enlightened me to the fact that the American media might just invent narratives to fit in with preconceived ideas about our friends and enemies. Whodathunkit? In this version, America's national anxiety of the ‘80s--on which the plotline to the 1986 American comedic film Gung Ho so firmly hung--transformed into a tempered glee following the 1990 market crash. That, in turn, gave way to the idea that Japan never knew what it was doing in the first place. Reading between the lines, I divined that letting go of this assumption, even in the face of facts—average life expectancy rising by more than 4 years being one—would not only mean that Japan is yet again a threat to America's feeling of supremacy, but that such an acquiescence would revalidate the idea that the Japan's dominance in the ’80s really was a part of a largely successful, if somewhat rocky, economic plan. I would like to point out that this was all laid out prophetically in the final scenes of Gung Ho.

2. The article on the difficulty of keeping resolutions because the body only produces so much will-power juice (“Be It Resolved”) filled me with the hope that at some point the American media’s will to bury its head in the sand will wear off.

Quoteable! Going Where I've Never Been: The Photography of Diane Arbus

"There's a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you, and that has to do with what I've always called the gap between intention and effect. I mean, if you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really really get to it, it becomes fantastic." -Diane Arbus