RULES FOR MAKING UP WORDS

<a href="http://exfriends.bandcamp.com/album/rules-for-making-up-words-2" data-mce-href="http://exfriends.bandcamp.com/album/rules-for-making-up-words-2">Rules for Making Up Words by Ex Friends</a>

As I hope you know by now, Paper+Plastick just released Rules For Making Up Words, our first proper full-length. 

Writing the songs was cool, and recording them with Vince Ratti was super intense and fun. Naming the record, however, was hard. Album titles have an almost impossible job: explaining whatever it is that binds all the songs on the record together. People usually hear an album title before they ever hear the record, and remember it even after they've stopped listening to it. If it falls too far to one side, it's dumb. If it falls too far to the other side, it's pretentious. No pressure though, little album title! Just be yourself!

In the end we settled on Rules For Making Up Words. This happened mostly because I spent the the last decade or so in grad school and teaching at colleges and trying to get academic papers published. The culture of academia messes with your head in a really unique way.

One of the intellectual privileges that academics routinely abuse is the manufacture of neologisms, i.e. new words or phrases. These usually (but not always) have a prefix like post- or meta in front of them and are usually (but not always) manufactured to subtly shore up a weak argument by making it seem like it is based on an idea or ideas that were already out there, rather invented by the author. If a normal person goes around making up words, they get put on Lamictal. If an academic does it, the made-up words eventually just become regular words. 

In 2012, the year most of these songs were written, my frustration with academia was at an all-time high. By 2013 the worst was over, but when the album was in the can and it was time to name it, I kept thinking of this book by a British philosopher of language named J.L. Austen called How To Do Things With Words. Now, this book was published in 1956, so it predated by around three decades the Wild West years of word-making-up in academia, but its preoccupations are very similar.

So, Rules For Making Up Words won out in the end. Here is a list of album titles it beat out, some of which are not made up:

1. Linear Algebra and the Apocalypse

2. Gil, You Know It's True

3. When Good Things Happen to Bad People

4. Students Against Democracy

5. The Steve Vai of Study Dates

6. Eleven Man Werewolf Band

7. Rival Ska Bands United by Ska

8. White People on the Internet

9. Against Cilantro

10. Centralia! The Musical

11. First Robot President

12. I Call This Meeting of the Bartertown Chamber of Commerce to Order

13. You Named Your Cat Yasser Arafat

14. This Zoo Sucks

15. Bring Me the Finest World Map Shower Curtain in all the Land

16. Correlation Does Not Equal Causation, Bro. 

17. Go Back to Brooklyn

18. Fishtown Surprise

19. The Exoticization of Delaware County

20. Ludes, man. 

You can have it fast and cheap, but not good. 

You can have it fast and good, but not cheap. 

You can have it cheap it and good, but not fast. 

But you can't have it fast, cheap and good. 

Hey. This is a post about writing things. If you're reading this, there's a pretty good chance you are some kind of person who does things or make things. Those things probably involve music, or maybe something else awesome like movies or paintings or restoring old helicopters or something. Whatever it is, way to go. I'm glad you make stuff. If that's the case, chances are you have trouble finishing some of those things that you try to make, because most people do. I certainly do. Last summer I had to finish something, and it was the hardest thing I ever had to do. I managed to finish it. Along the way I learned some things about how to finish things. I'm writing this post because I think maybe some of those things I learned might be useful to other people. So this is about that. 

WARNING: This is not a post about punk music, or even just music. But it could be. That's why I'm writing it. 

This past summer I had to finish something I'd been putting off for a long time. It's something that should have taken me about two years at the most, but had already taken me more than five. And what's worse, if I didn't finish it by the end of the summer, it was going to mean that I had failed - finally and irrevocably - to achieve a goal I'd set for myself 13 years ago, at age 25. This failure wasn't going to ruin my life, not exactly anyway, but it was going to mean that a lot of things I'd wanted to do in the future were going to be permanently out of reach, and a lot of things I planned to do that were already going to be difficult no matter what were now going to be REALLY difficult. And then of course there was the thought of having to tell people I care about that I had failed, and having to see the look of disappointment in their eyes.

And to make matters even worse than that, I had been almost completely stalled on this thing since 2010.  Failure seemed not only possible, but maybe even imminent. 

The thing I had to finish writing was a doctoral dissertation. If you're not totally clear on what that's about, just think of it as a book: an awkward, boring, repetitive book that barely anyone reads, with a style and structure left over from the nineteenth century, but a book nonetheless. Books are hard to write. Lots of people intend to write a book, and quite a few of them start. Not many of them finish. The reason books are hard to write is because they are long. Mine ended up being around 60,000 words, and a little over 200 pages. When the summer started I had probably written around 20,000 of those words, and around 80 pages. I had no idea how I was going to write enough in such a concentrated period of time to actually finish by August, given my previous track record. But here's what I did know:

1. I had to to try write something everyday. 

2. I had to block out a significant portion of the day for writing. (I'm lucky that I have a job where I don't have to work in the summer if I don't want. I get that this is not the case for most people.) And I had to stop going out in the evenings on weekdays. Sometimes having a fun night planned means that the writing day just turns into counting down the hours until fun time starts. 

3. I had to focus on each day as it was happening. Thinking about everything that had to happen for the whole summer, well, that way lay catatonic depression.

4. There needed to be some kind of accountability. I needed to report to someone other than just myself, or I was just going to end up making rules for myself and promptly breaking them. Some people have an inner cop that tells them to exercise or eat a kale salad or only have one beer. I do not. Or I do, but I can just totally tune that little bastard out like it's no big deal. 

5. I love screwing around on the internet and I especially love communicating with people via social media. I love sharing ideas, opinions and dumb jokes. I love seeing other people's ideas, opinions and dumb jokes. I love just throwing something out there and seeing what people do with it. And unfortunately. over the last five years, a lot of this has happened when I was supposed to be writing my stupid dissertation. 

All of the above were important realizations, but Number 5 was probably the most important, because I realized that this whole time I had been fighting the wrong battle. Instead of telling myself to stop screwing around on the internet and get back to work, I needed to make screwing around on the internet into part of the work. Furthermore, because I, like all humans, want validation, and the internet is where I typically turn for validation (look at this blog, I mean...damn), I decided to combine Number 5 and Number 4 by making social media the place where I would fight my daily battle with words, and air the results. 

On a practical level, what this meant was that at the beginning of each day, I took note of the word count and the page number I was starting on for the chapter I was working on at the time. Then, over the course of the next six to twelve hours, as I paced, stared into space, cursed, threw myself down on the bed, ate peanut butter out of the jar using a fork and, finally, when all other options were exhausted, wrote something, I had a clear sense of where I'd started. At the end of the day, when I came to what seemed like a logical stopping point, I'd look at the word count and the page number, and carefully note on an index card with a sharpie how many words I'd written that day, and what page I'd stopped on. Then I'd tape it to the wall, photograph it along with the previous days' cards, and post it to Instagram and Facebook. 

People would see it. Sometimes they'd ignore it. Sometimes they'd "like" it. Sometimes they'd post an encouraging comment. Sometimes they'd say something weird, or even unhelpful. but the point is that they saw it. 

And more than that, the point is that I let everyone into the daily struggle. And they came to expect it. And - and this is the critical part - on bad days, when 2 pm rolled around and despite having sat in front of the computer for five hours I hadn't written a word, I would think of the index cards and be like "Fuck. I don't wanna have to post that I wrote 12 words today or, worse, none at all." And in nearly every instance, that would be enough to push me back to the page. I'd start thinking about whatever idea I was stuck on in a different way, from a different angle and slowly, laboriously, the words would come. 

That ended up being the difference between last summer and previous summers. in previous summers, when I hit that point of total frustration and self-loathing, I'd just go lie down on the sofa and watch like eight episodes in a row of The Big Bang Theory. This summer, it was that sense of being answerable to other people's expectations, however fleeting and, perhaps, imaginary, that would push me to keep going. 

I set goals, and the goals, in retrospect, were ludicrous. Two thousand words a day? Crazy. I learned that 1200 was the outer limits of what I was capable of. Writing seven days a week also turned out to be a little far-fetched. But by setting the bar so high, I insured that when I failed, I would fail high. I ended up averaging about five days a week of measurable progress, which would have been science fiction in previous summers. 

The cards became fetish objects, kind of. I became obsessive about the (completely arbitrary) format and would rewrite the same card three times to get it right. I color coded by chapter, and caught myself obsessing over what color to use for what chapter. As the day was winding down I would get excited in an almost childlike way about the ritual of writing, placing, photographing and posting the card. It became a reward in itself.

I would get excited about the reactions too. In retrospect, these ended up being helpful in a very concrete way. People who had been through the process or, just as often, had a partner who had been through the process, would respond by offering advice, and the advice was often quite pragmatic and helpful. And their reassurance meant a lot, because they knew what a shitshow this all is. And, most importantly, I came to hate the idea of having to explain to them why I didn't write anything that day. That was the clincher. 

And the way the cards built up over the summer. Into this multicolored rectangle of positivity and productivity and hard-won optimism. It was beautiful. I felt like I was building a skyscraper. 

In the end, I completed a draft shortly before Labor Day. It ended up being the most productive summer of my life. I finished writing a fucking book, for fucksake. And on balance my time was managed so much better than in the past that I still had time left over to travel around the country playing loud music a little bit. It ruled. After work got busy again I still managed to do all the revisions and all the paperwork, and on November 15 I successfully defended the whole pig. And now it's done. This thing that hung like an anchor around my neck since 2007 is done. And it happened, in large part, the same way that everything else positive in my life has happened: I brought it to the community and said "Hey, everybody. What about this?"

It's a weird plan, admittedly. You can call it narcissistic, you can call it OCD, you can call it trivial and annoying. i won't disagree with you. But, if you've ever had a good or maybe even great idea and felt like you were slowly suffocating under the weight of your inability to execute it, I urge you to try it this way. Bring it to your people at the end of every day. They'll know what to do. And you won't want to disappoint them. 

Special thanks to Heidi Saman, Melody Kramer, Sarah Watkins and Josh Brown. 

On Friday, October 25th, The Switchboard Sessions closed down for good. Here's why this is a big deal:

In 2010, Dane Erbach, a a lifelong fan of punk/emo, was settling into life as a married high school English teacher in suburban Chicago. Like many of us, he felt disconnected from the music he built his identity around as a young adult. And like many of us, he contemplated ways to keep that connection to the scene without turning the rest of his life upside down. Here's what he came up with:

Dane began conducting interviews with and recording minimally arranged (often but not always acoustic) performances by members of bands he liked. Here's the catch though: All performances had to be recorded over a telephone landline, with virtually no production on either end. 

Okay, first of all, why a landline? Glad you asked! The answer is simple. The audio signal that comes out of your cell phone is far more compressed than the one coming out of the landline at your work, or your parents' house, or wherever you still have access to one. The purpose of voice audio compression on old landlines is basically just to eliminate frequencies that just carry noise, or are too low for your ear to actually hear. On cell phones, however, where the carriers have incentive to conserve as much bandwidth as possible, compression is more aggressive. For the purpose of the Switchboard Sessions, a song recorded over a person-to-person cell conversation would sound like gibberish. 

So trying to transmit and record the performances over cell phones on either end wouldn't have worked. But why a telephone at all? Why not just get an M-Box and a Shure 58 and Pro-Tools, like everyone else? To understand that you'll need to take a moment to sink in to Dane's unique way of looking at music, and art, and the world. His words:

The purpose, though, is to capture a song in its rawest, most spontaneous form. In its imperfection, I hope that you can perceive the intimacy and honesty in each offering; I also hope that you can hear, even when the quality of recording is intentionally reduced, that the quality of songwriting cuts through.

Armed with that philosophy, Dane recorded and interviewed over 50 bands/artists between 2010 and 2013, before packing it in due to exhaustion (duh), job and family responsibilities, a desire to pursue new projects, and a sense that he'd accomplished what he set out to do. One of the things that will strike you about the Switchboard Sessions roster is that it included plenty of subjects for whom a gritty acoustic performance is all in a day's work - like Murder By Death, Laura Stevenson and Restorations - and plenty who had to temporarily reinvent themselves and their songs for to pull it off, like Samiam, Small Brown Bike and The Promise Ring. 

And then there are the interviews.

If you've played in punk bands in both the 1990s and now, then you'll know what I mean when I say that interviews ain't what they used to be. They tend to be conducted via email with little or no follow-up, and thrown up on the web with minimal editing and a brief introduction full of misspelled names and factual errors. 

Dane is a very striking exception. Conducting the interviews via phone, immediately after the performance, Dane goes deep. After being interviewed by him for over an hour last January I walked away with the impression that he begins by formulating a thesis about band and the songs - like a unifying idea that connects them all, something they all have in common - and then uses the interview as a means to test the thesis. I've been writing punk songs since I was 17 years old, one or two of which seem to be kind of a big deal, at least to some people), and this was literally the first time anyone ever asked me a serious question about how songs get written. It was almost disconcerting. 

But it's not just a vanity thing. Read Dane's piece on Brendan Kelly of the Lawrence Arms and you start to get a sense of what he was trying to do. Kelly has to sing extra quietly because he has just just put his kids down for a nap. 

And - and I think this is the important part - by tethering the performer to a landline, what he is actually doing nine times out of 10, is tethering them to some physical location that, more times than not, is part of their non-musical life and non-musical persona. That, I think, is where Dane suspects the real stuff is hidden. And if you talk long enough, you end up revealing stuff you didn't necessarily mean to, or weren't necessarily aware of. Dane thinks maybe somewhere in that stuff lies the key to whatever it is he finds interesting about the songs themselves. 

The Switchboard Sessions captured a brief but not unimportant moment in the history of this kind of music. Tom Gabel did a Switchboard Session shortly before Laura Jane Grace. Tony Sly did one shortly before his death in 2012. Punk music will go on without the Switchboard Sessions, but it will go on with a small piece missing.

Hosting capabilities mean that all 50+ sessions can't just live online perpetually, but Dane has thoughtfully arranged highlights of the sessions into four volumes, all of which can be downloaded for free here. If you want something from a specific session you can always ask.

- Joel 

[aerial view of Gainesville during FEST weekend]

The world's biggest DIY punk fest takes over downtown Gainesville for a long weekend every fall, pitting great bands against each other and creating inevitable heartbreaks. Here are mine:

Thursday, October 31

Halloween night doesn't so much pit band against band as it does fun against reality. In other words, I have a job and can't get to Gainesville until Friday. This means I am missing:

Goddamnit: In 2011, Creep Records founder Arik Victor, after nearly two decades of running a label and a studio and playing music, was like, screw it, I'm starting a hardcore band. What started as a way to blow off some steam quickly turned into something very serious. In 2013 they released How To Take The Burn. In my humble opinion it is the best East Coast melodic hardcore record since Hello Bastards. Yeah, I said it. Also, they are playing at Loosey's, which is hands down the chillest Fest venue and has the best sound. And they'll need it, because Goddamnit has three guitars and hearing them live is kind of like getting in a fight with a continent. 

Also: Pity Party (ex-The Measure, total cerebral meltdown, super fun) and The New Lows (Orlando lifers, somehow simultaneously reminiscent of Archers of Loaf and Television). 

Central conflict: Real life/adult responsibilities vs. Goddamnit

Winner: Real life/adult responsibilities. Grrrr. FUK SOSIETY!

Friday, November 1

I won't be here in time for the screening of the Descendents movie. That's cool. But i will hijack a white Bronco and drive it at 120 MPH all the way from the Tampa airport to Rockey's if that's what it takes to be on time for:

Big Awesome: I don't know anything personally about these guys and I don't want to. If you try to tell me anything, I will cup my hands over my ears and emit a continuous high-pitched whine until you stop. They are from like South Carolina, or North Carolina, or something. They are a four-piece. They are "emo" in 1997 sense of the word and they released an EP last year called Birdfeeder, every song of which tripped a wire in my brain that had lain dormant since I first heard Dutchland Diesel. I am so excited for their set that I could puke. 

Unfortunately their set is at almost the exact same time as Mikey Erg's set at CMC. This is a huge bummer, not least because recently he has been covering "Two Room Apartment" by Tom Petty and it's sick. 

Also: Lauren Measure, Mixtapes, Aspiga

Central conflict: Big Awesome vs. Mikey Erg

Winner: Big Awesome. Because, let's face it, any time I walk into a public space where people are playing live music, anywhere in the industrialized world, there's at least a 50 percent chance Mikey Erg will be playing the drums...or guitar...or xylophone...

Saturday, November 2

Saturday at Fest is like Christmas day afternoon at your uncle's house. Everyone has arrived and everyone is embarrassingly drunk. I am going to be pacing myself pretty hardcore however, partly because I have to play punk rock at 3pm but mainly because:

Tenement: As with Big Awesome, I don't know anything about these guys and I don't want to. I think they are from Wisconsin. Or maybe it's Wyoming. Anyway, I don't know what the fuck is wrong with their brains that allows this to happen, but they have made a bunch of records in the past few years that combine storytelling worthy of Muswell Hillbillies-era Ray Davies with noisy irrationality that would creep out David Yow. And then just when you can't take it anymore they drop into a plaintive, resigned synthpop anthem that somehow manages to retain all of the above contradictions. I've missed them a bunch of times in Philly, a mistake that won't be repeated when they take the stage at 8 Seconds at 11:20 pm. 

Also: Broadcaster, Caseracer, Brian McGee, Lipstick Homicide

Interestingly, there's no one up against Tenement that I would consider missing Tenement for. The problem is that Lipstick Homicide and Brian McGee are on at the same time, at 1982 and The Lunchbox, respectively. 

Central conflict: Lipstick Homicide vs. Brian McGee

Winner: Lipstick Homicide. This should be an easy win for Brian McGee, seeing as we've known each other since we were 13 and spent our late teens and early 20s touring around the country in a van having formative experiences that made us into the people we are today blah blah blah blah blah...plus he's a great performer and his forthcoming solo album Ruin Creek  is amazing, but...Lipstick Homicide is one of the best live shows I've seen in a long time and one of these days they will probably just explode onstage - I mean literally explode - and I want to catch them as many times as possible before that happens. Sorry Brian!

Sunday, November 3

Ex Friends will be playing their first Fest set this afternoon at Boca, and I guess I'm pretty excited about that and stuff, but let's get down to business and talk about:

Fake Problems: I don't know why I love this band. I just do. Probably mostly because of this song. 

Unfortunately, they are playing at the exact time as a band far more deserving of my affection, Slingshot Dakota. The two members of Slingshot Dakota travel the world playing synthpop, sounding like Mates of State would sound if Mates of State was good. They also work at a diner together in their hometown of Bethlehem, PA and are nice to absolutely everyone. Hmm...

Also: Crybaby, Pale Angels, Blacklist Royals

Central Conflict: Fake Problems vs. Slingshot Dakota

Ladies and gentlemen, JP Flexner. 

This is a photograph of a section of a mural on the Spring Garden Bridge in Philadelphia. The original mural went up sometime in the 1980s. In the original, the back of the punk's jacket read LED ZEPPELIN. In the late 1990s, a concerned citizen updated it to read "PHILLY SHREDS." 

The mural was painted over in the early 2000s, and with it, the punk. Inspired yesterday by this truly insane entry on the vintage section of the Urban Outfitters website, JP updated the image for 2013 (in all of its horror). 

On October 6, Marky Ramone and Andrew WK are coming to the TLA in Philly and are going to scream Ramones songs for 90 minutes and we are going to open for them. 

It took me almost 30 minutes to write that sentence, because that's how confusing and awesome Marky Ramone's Blitzkrieg is. 

On Saturday we will share a stage with The Dead Milkmen. This is a big deal. If you are wondering why this is a big deal, you probably do not live in the greater Philadelphia area. 

If you are from around here and came up in the punk scene, it is practically impossible not to have some sort of personal relationship with this band. One of us took our first stage dive during a Dead Milkmen show at the Trocadero. (I think this song was playing.) Two of us, separately, used to write fan letters to them - fan letters, I hasten to add, that were always answered. (I later learned they were also stored and meticulously cataloged, and apparently still are to this day.) Another of us used to be roommates with one of them in a great big house by Clark Park in West Philadelphia.) And one of us used to copy edit their singer's ballistically weird music column at the Philadelphia City Paper. From the 1980s to the present, if you were/are punk and from Philly, the Dead Milkmen are part of the air you breathe. 

The Dead Milkmen were, first and foremost, contrarians: They carved their way through the early 80s hardcore scene in Philly without ever pretending to be tough. Hell, they barely used distortion. They wrote ambitious pop songs with resolutely unmusical arrangements. They sang about shit no normal person would sing about. They made a video that became wildly popular on MTV and then promptly got themselves banned for life from the station. (They refused to lip-synch during a live appearance, which singer Rodney capped off by handcuffing himself to Downtown Julie Brown. Yes, you read that correctly.) They signed to a major label and then got dropped. Around that time I remember reading a zine in which their guitarist mused about working at a coffee shop where every now and then his hit song would play on the radio. I think I learned more about the music industry from that essay than I could have from a hundred dumb books about marketing or A+R or synch licensing. 

Philadelphia is a weird city, and growing up around here it was always easy to imagine that they were some kind of Philadelphia cult, like M.O.V.E., or the Toynbee tiles. We were so used to this idea that still, to this day, when I meet someone from some other part of the country (like these guys) who is psyched on the Dead Milkmen, it's kind of disorienting. But the fact is, there are people all over the world who love these dudes. 

They understood politics a lot better than most "political" bands. They were smart but refused to take themselves seriously. They were funny and surreal and gross and then, sometimes, when you least expected it, incredibly poignant. 

But most of all, The Dead Milkmen have been a Philadelphia punk band on and off (but mostly on) for more than three decades. They've been through some shit, but they're still here. I don't believe in a whole lot, but I believe in that.

Thanks for reading. 

See you all on Saturday. All ages, etc. 

- Joel

VIDEODRONE

My family first got MTV when I was 10 years old. A few years before that there was a show on Channel 17 (Philly station) called Video Rock. The first video I ever saw was for "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurythmics. The second was for "Puttin' on the Ritz" by Taco. The Third was for "Electric Avenue" by Eddie Grant. The fact that I can still name them in order should give you some sense of the impression they made. 

I loved videos with stories and characters. I especially loved videos whose length exceeded the length of the song, leaving extra room for more story, more character, or even just for awkward or tense silences. All of this was pure magic to me. In equal measure, I hated videos that just dropped the band into some warehouse or faux-live setting and had them lipsynch the song. I could not comprehend why people with the resources at their disposal to actually make a music video would do something so completely unimaginative. 

Eventually punk bands stepped into the fray, and every now and then a band like The Dead Milkmen would make an amazing video. But for the most part, punk rock and DIY told me that MTV was bad and videos were bad and for the most part I convinced myself that this was the case. At  one point I even had a patch on an army jacket with the MTV logo in a circle with a line through it. Beneath it read "Fuck the industry. Do it yourself." 

But punk, as usual, was partially correct: By the late '90s, MTV was a total mess and the medium of the music video had, for the most part, failed spectacularly to live up to its potential. 

Since then, the internet has become where videos happen. And there have been some cool ones, like this one Fake Problems put out last year, and some AMAZING ones, like what Fucked Up did in 2011. And probably some other pretty interesting ones I haven't seen too. 

Anyway, these were thoughts going through my head as JP Flexner and I started meeting with photographer Isaac Turner earlier this summer to plan out a video for the Ex Friends song "Dirty Ben Franklin," the opening track on our album Rules For Making Up Words, due out November 19 on Paper and Plastick. A few weeks later, with a lot of found resources, a lot of donated time and a lot of talented friends, we shot a video. We tried to make it cool. It's not up to us to decide if we succeeded, but we definitely tried.