Fucking Olive Garden

The Olive Garden, Live in Concert

/ Benjamin N. Schachtman / Leave a comment

Author’s note: This story is fiction. It is a made-up story about a fictional version of a real fake version of a real band. Any similarities between this fiction and reality, or any of the iterations of fakeness, replication or simulacra in between fiction and reality, are purely coincidental. Olive Garden, on the other hand, is both real and fake, so good luck sorting that out.

“Christ on fire it’s hot,” Fake Bon Jovi says, more or less to himself.

The sun hangs low in the sky, the air over the parking lot blacktop waves like cartoon squiggles.

Fake Bon Jovi hangs back, leaving his band to soundcheck, adjusting spiny frosted-tip spears of hair around his balding crown. He removes his sunglasses, quickly and cautiously, and checks his make-up. His cheeks are sallow, bags hanging in overlapping folds beneath his bloodshot eyes.

Slippery When Wet – the ‘premier’ Bon Jovi cover band – has just wrapped up a fortnight at sea, a residency on Royal Caribbean Pearl of the Seas. Fake Bon Jovi is barely holding it together: it’s a thick, still, sopping wet hot outside, and he’s recovering from the bowel-rending ravages of some nautical disaster: Noro or E. Coli, the ultimate result of cramming that many people together on a floating shopping mall.

Now he’s trying to get his land-legs back (the platform heels and skin-tight pleather are not helping), and on top of that Jason – yes, that’s the real name of Fake John Francis Bongiovi – has already had too many luke-warm Landsharks from the Igloo cooler behind the stage.

Huddled around the cooler, a local band attacks the free beer with the gusto of people unaccustomed to free booze. They’re scraggly, harried, showing up with girlfriends and wives who help them carry their own gear. Fake Richie Sambora is taking nips from a bottle of rotgut bourbon with the local band’s guitarist, who looks like the kind of guy who would perpetually have a bottle of cheap liquor within reach. Fake Richie Sambora holds up his guitar, presents it for inspection like some fearsome Scottish Claymore. The local guy laughs, shakes his head, picks up the guitar, smiles.

Fake Bon Jovi doesn’t approve, wishes the Slippery When Wet guys would stay in character. Take their drummer, Fake Tico Torres; his soul patch is a sloppy rhombus of hair, not like Real Tico’s flawless Clovis Point. And Fake Tico put on like fifteen pounds on the cruise. Who gets fat eating sushi? Fake Fucking Tico.

Fake Bon Jovi spits out a mouthful of warm beer. And hamming it up with the local guys, Jesus. These dirtbags barely have one set of gear between them, cabinets all torn up, showing up in work clothes. Jesus. Fake Sambora is busting out the talk box. The local guys are howling. Worse than mockery, they’re actually into it. Fake Sambora is trying to show him up; he’s trying to pull a Real Sambora. But Bon Jovi isn’t a rock’n’roll band, it’s the Jon Bon Jovi show. Any Sambora knows that. Jesus.

Now the local band’s singer comes over to Fake Bon Jovi, smiling nervously.

“Thanks, man, for – uh – having us, I guess. We’re really excited to play. So, thanks.”

Fake Bon Jovi keeps his hands tucked in his armpits, sweat already soaking through his denim jacket. Why does Fake Sambora get to play in a sleeveless T? Mindy, their costume designer. That’s why. Frigid bitch. Fake Bon Jovi lets it drop. He looks past the local singer, sighing, and says:

“Yeah. Well, this was an unplanned stop. Kind of shit venue.”

The local singer glances at the stage, the rows of monitors, the heavy PA speakers, and looks back at Fake Bon Jovi.

“It’s a nice set-up, good sound,” the local guy says.

“Our drummer’s from here,” Fake Bon Jovi says, “so he wanted to play here. Stupid. We’re playing in Germany next.”

“That’s fucking cool,” says the local singer.

“Yeah,” Fake Bon Jovi rolls his eyes. “Cool. We’re a big deal in Germany.”

The local singer nods, takes his cue, and walks away. Fake Bon Jovi looks at his watch. Ten minutes to vocal check. Then he can finally get out of this fucking Apocalypse Now swelter and back to the hotel, maybe get a blowjob from the escort girl. Maybe not. She’ll probably want some of his coke, but Fake Bon Jovi has already torn through the eightball he scored at Myrtle Beach. Fake Tico was supposed to score some from one of his idiot hometown buddies. Fat chance. Real Tico would have had Real Bon Jovi hip-deep in blow, stat, no questions asked.

The sound guy shouts to Fake Bon Jovi and nods; Fake Bon Jovi pushes quickly through the crowd in the VIP area and jumps up on stage.

“Just fucking use the levels from last time, it’s the same — ” Fake Bon Jovi gets cut off, the sound guy winces and holds up an Apple tablet, shrugging. Fake Tico’s playing the whole kit behind him, like he’s fucking Fake Neil Peart. Oh, and now Fake Sambora’s got his goddamned talk-box going. Woaow-woaow! Whoa-whoa-whoa! The fucking noise eats up the whole bandwidth, it’s all you can hear. Fake Sambora has to blow the vowel-sounds into a tube next to his backing-vocal mic, and then it feeds into one of his little guitar pedals. He’s way too into it, Fake Bon Jovi thinks, it’s gross. Like he’s almost sucking on it. God. Can’t he just use a wah-wah pedal?

Finally, full band check with vocals. Fake Bon Jovi clears his throat and belts it out, looking out across the empty parking lot and up at the restaurants and bars, the patios and porches of apartment buildings down the block. He swings for the fences. From three blocks away you can hear people sing along, cheering, screaming. The band stops, already a crowd starts to gather.

“We’ll see you in a few hours folks,” Fake Bon Jovi says, speaking up over the small crowd that’s gathered. The crowd stays, curious. It’s a free show, and it’s too early to start drinking full on.

The sound guy nods to the local band and they start lugging their equipment on stage, laughing and joking. Amateurs.

“Sounded good,” the local singer says as he passes Fake Bon Jovi.

“Yeah,” Fake Bon Jovi says, nodding at the crowd, “they’re here for us.”

As Fake Bon Jovi heads for the enveloping cool of the hotel lobby bar, he hears the local band start to play. Some song no one’s ever heard before, one most won’t ever hear again. It’s not what people want, Fake Bon Jovi thinks. They want what they know, a chorus they can sing along to. This band, too herky-jerky. Some weird key, too much noodling, feedback. Amateurish or experimental, it doesn’t matter.

People don’t want that shit. They want Olive Garden, nothing weird, nothing unexpected.

But then he hears it. Fake Bon Jovi stops, turns slightly.

There’s actually a small crowd, gathered in front of the stage. They’re singing along. All the Whos down in Whoville, they’re actually fucking singing.

Something tugs at Fake Bon Jovi. He was young, once, a kid named Jason from a small town with a girlfriend he’d known since high school. He’d been in a band, played local bars — played his heart out for a dozen people. Loved every second of it.

But it didn’t matter; it didn’t pay.

Fake Bon Jovi remembers he tucked a bump away in the toe of his other pair of boots. He glances one more time at the locals, soaked in sweat, dancing to strange songs.

“Fuck this town,” Fake Bon Jovi says.

 

 

The Anarchist’s Song

/ Benjamin N. Schachtman / Leave a comment

August and September burnt fast, hard days and short nights. If nothing else, I put a decent dent in the world’s whiskey supply. It’s been a rough few weeks, but not without something to show for it. So, without delay, some news:

EML V2.0

 Exploding Math Lab is back, after a very brief hiatus, with new bass player Shaun Paul. As a four piece, we’ve been recording new songs (some of which you can check out at our Bandcamp site: https://explodingmathlab.bandcamp.com/releases). They’re like the old songs, but 33.333…% better. (Can’t argue with that; it’s just science.) We’re currently working on a proper LP release, and we’ve been getting some nice support from the Wilmington music scene to that end. Hopefully, a really-existing, hot-in-your-hand album is in the fairly near future. Christmas is coming, kids, whether you like it or not. It’s thoroughly rewarding and insanely frustrating to write and play original music in a world that doesn’t seem to much care for it, so we’re grateful for every single person we can reach. Spread the word, and – if you live in the Southeast area – we hope to be coming to a city near you soon. Hit us up on Facebook. We’ll play your local bar, your high school, or your fucking backyard.

WIP

I should say – that is, I should have said this earlier – that it’s far easier to talk about myself as a musician than a writer. I would never introduce myself as either – my personal rule is that, if you can’t put a roof over your head by plying a trade, that’s not your fucking trade (I’m looking at you, poet-baristas of the world) – but, of the two, guitarist sounds less wretchedly self-aggrandizing than novelist. For one thing, you can’t go into a brick-and-mortar bookstore and find any of my written work (except maybe one place in Brooklyn, but I digress), but you can come down to a bar in Wilmington and hear my band play. For another, playing music is a group activity, and it’s almost intrinsically less autistic and narcissistic than writing. Even if nobody shows up to a show (it’s happened, and it’s mighty grim looking), I’m still playing with three other people. It’s not completely masturbatory. It’s definitely better than eating at Olive Garden.

Okay. That said: I have some new short fiction out – check out the ‘Short Work’ page for details – but, of late, I’ve been plugging way at the WIP (Work in Progress, or Wrangling It Painfully). This is, in large part, the reason for relative scarcity of activity on this site this summer. When I have time to write – which is like saying, when I can manage to tread water long enough to breathe – the WIP is what I’m working on. The goddamn thing is nearly cooked through, and – unlike previous and more narcissistic manuscripts – this one’s been beta-tested a couple-few times. Hopefully there will be no news about it for a while, and then really good news about it. I’ll keep you posted.

CHAOS A.D.

Finally, and this is not the total non-sequitor it appears to be, I’ve been thinking about anarchy a lot lately. Not in the navel-gazing undergraduate sense, or the snot-nosed punk sense. In fact, I’ve always found myself disenchanted with the punk-anarchist pose. Sample interview with a punk: Q. How is putting a safety pin through my nose supposed to disrupt an established order so engrained that two world wars couldn’t budge it? A. Fuck you! Yes. It’s not a very satisfying philosophy.

And, intellectually, I know anarchy is a bad idea, for a number of concrete reasons. But, mostly, I know it’s a bad idea for me. Selfishly. I know a lot of people that I care for would perish, pretty quickly, in the event of a complete breakdown of social order. The young, the old, the sick – all fucked. What if my wife, the person I love most of all in this world, got sick? I feel nauseous even thinking about it.

Not to mention that pretty much everything I’m striving for in my life would become overwhelming irrelevant. In an anarchistic world there are no publishing houses, no editors, no printers, no book stores, no magazines and newspapers to review books. No universities or colleges, no classroom and no students. There are no concert halls and venues, no record labels, no Spotify or Pandora. There are no restaurants, no food magazines, no seafood delivery companies. As a writer, or a guitarist, or a teacher, or a cook, I’d be pretty much out of luck.

I’d be hunched over a fire, cooking squirrel.

But the heart wants what the heart wants. A tautology that’s usually deployed to explain unrequited love, or the foolish dreams of the young. In my case, the heart wants anarchy, wants the big wave, Roland Emmerich style, the Zombie apocalypse, the rise of the machines. Whatever. I don’t want to want it. I don’t think it’s a good idea. But, deep down, when I close my eyes, I know it’s what I dream about: the end of everything. Running mad, naked and screaming, through the burning streets of the world.

So, if I can make something out of my life, whether I’m teaching or cooking, playing guitar or writing books, I’ll be happy. I’ll be blessed. But if you run into me, ten years from now, and I’m doing well and the world is still standing, and you notice there’s still something just a little melancholy about me, you’ll know what it is.

Please, please, please, let me not get what I want.

Cheer Up, You Weirdo 

Alright, well, that got dark quick. But don’t worry, it was all just a dream. Next time: good Pod vs. bad Pod, adventures in self-sabotage, in defense of Hemlock Grove, and short-short fiction vs. long-short fiction vs. long-long fiction vs. Godzilla.

 

 

The War

/ Benjamin N. Schachtman / Leave a comment

…I have a dream. I’m watching a titanic battle between my brother and the monsters of the underworld, and my brother is killing one after another with a huge shotgun. The monsters are cartoonish and murderous and it doesn’t matter how many he kills because there’s an endless supply of them.

Eventually he just runs out of ammo, I realize. Eventually the monsters will win.

Sebastian Junger, War

 

Where did July go? Evaporated in the triple digit slow cooker heat? I don’t know, but it seems likely. I’ve been head down, in the mud, working, trying to push the boulder up the hill – fuck that Sisyphus slacker – I’ve been pushing a half dozen boulders up a half dozen hills. Something’s gotta give, my wife says. I love her, need that optimism, something to cut the bitter, overproof whiskey doubt in my heart. But nothing has to give. Nothing gives until you break it. So, in lieu of a status report, let me just say things are cooking. Slow cooking, but cooking. (Less obliquely: in the fall, there’ll be new fiction – including a piece in Sixfold’s Summer 2015 release – and new rock and roll – Exploding Math Lab’s EP2 is going to be a thunderous monster. New stuff, even better than the old stuff. Guaranteed.)

In the meantime, it’s war.

Not the war abroad. No, though I mean no disrespect; we’ve all got friends and family over there, somewhere. Whatever the (shitty) politics that got them there. I’m talking about a different war, an older war. The war at home.

The war inside.

Turn on the TV, and you see the casualties. The ruined cities, monuments to the victors: apathy, complacency, sloth, and fear. ­Makes you wish the real horsemen would show up. But instead we get EL James, Guy Fieri, Jeb Bush, and Stan Lee. Yes, Stan Lee – you aren’t off the goddamn hook, no sir. Stan Lee phoned in a lot of his creations, and they’ll be clogging the bowels of Hollywood for decades to come.

I turn on the radio – ill-advisedly, I know – and you can actually hear the sound of people surrendering. It sounds like 4/4 timing, mid-tempo ‘rock’ that sounds just like mid-tempo ‘pop’ and mid-tempo ‘country.’ White flags flying over every radio station.

Okay, so it’s the mediocrity in the arts rant? Not so original. And not so bad, either, if that was the end of it. Because, honestly, if you’re going to write, or make music, or cook food, then maybe it’s not so bad to have nothing but mediocre hacks as your competition. Just lined up – dumb faces upturned – for you to trounce. And maybe, then, you could startle people out of their stupors. I remember the first time I ate real cheese. (Wait. What? Hold on, stay with me.) Unpasteurized, unhomogenized, unfuckedaroundwith. I thought: this is how the gods eat. That’s how you could make people feel.

But the war isn’t about artists versus imitators, or the stagnation of American creativity (by a school system and a broader culture that enforces safeness and timidity, no less). Those are symptoms, cropping up here and there.

The war is everywhere.

The war is at work, for example.

Last week, I fired a long time employee. There were lots of reasons. First and foremost, she made terrible food. She only knew about four or five recipes, and – even after she’d been warned, ordered, begged, not to make these things – as soon as you turned your back on her, she’d scurry around, making one of these awful creations. Cinnamon-sugar sweet potatoes, in July. Roasted vegetables, deflated and unseasoned, some raw and some cooked to shit. Broccoli salad that was 90% mayonnaise by weight (and also, for no apparent culinary reason, contained wildly expensive amounts of raw pine nuts).

When she washed dishes, she’d cram four or five times too many things into the machine, leaving you with racks of food-flecked dishes after she left. She’d go on break during the busiest hour of lunch, sitting at the computer in a room adjoining the kitchen, smiling dumbly, the way a child does when they shit their pants without even realizing it.

At one point, a few months back, she asked, ‘when you fire me, can you please give me two weeks’ notice first?’ Not if. When. She knew, in the dimmest possible sense, that she was bad at her job. She didn’t know why and she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to learn, or improve, or change in any way. She wanted to punch her time and then leave. When you told her, the way you cut vegetables is so wildly ineffective and insanely dangerous that it is difficult to watch for longer than a split second, she’d just say, ‘oh, I’ve been doing it this way for a long time.’

And there it was, the battle cry of the enemy: it’s always been this way.

Every day at work, our pay gets docked a half-hour. Why? Because, a while back, when the kitchen was run by a brigade of crackheads and slackers, employees abused the paid breaks to the point where they’d wander off, for hours at a time. Hours. So management’s solution, with their signature mix of underhandedness and cowardice, was to automatically dock all employees a half-hour. And now, that the kitchen is being run by actual cooks, who do not take breaks (because, quite simply, there is too much goddamn work to be done, at all times), why does the deduction still exist? Management scratches their head, as if this is some kind of eternal mystery. Well, it’s always been this way. It’s a felony – wage theft is a fucking felony, let’s be clear – and an insult. Management rubs their belly, eyes drifting to the buffet, conversation already stillborn and cold, I dunno, it’s just always been that way…

There’s no devil, no demon, in any myth or nightmare, as vicious and vile as that sense of complacency.

Well, you know, summer blockbusters, they’re always kind of dumb…the radio always sucks though…well, some people like unlimited breadsticks…we’ve it’s always been a man’s job…it’s always been illegal to buy beer before noon on Sunday…but marriage has always been about a man and a woman (or seven hundred women)… the shit was actually already on the floor, it was here when I got here so…well…but…you know … it’s…always….been…this….way.

We fight it. Try to educate, recruit, at least hold the line. One battle at time, dispelling one stupid myth after another, cutting down one stubborn, mule-headed motherfucker after another, on our hands and knees, shoulder deep down a clogged drain, scrubbing until our hands bleed, working harder and longer than the summer sun. I don’t think the war will ever be over. It doesn’t matter, how many fires we put out, how many rocks we shoulder up the hill, how many monsters we put down. The enemy has the sheering force of brute stupidity. He’s got the high ground, he has numbers, he’s got time.

But that’s why the gods allow evil, to give us something to fight. To prove ourselves, if only to ourselves. (Running joke: shouting ‘prove it to yourself,’ to guys who clearly have something to prove, rag-top German coupes, diamonds on their watch, running shirtless through downtown. Still, beneath the joke, a little truth: who else would you want to prove anything to?)

But that’s the story: you’re born, you fight like hell, then you die. Better than nothing, better than boredom. Better than eating at Olive Garden. So, if you’re out there, and you give a goddamn – about something, about anything – and you know what I mean, then may the gods give you their blessing, or at least stay the fuck out of your way.

Ever Newer Waters

/ Benjamin N. Schachtman / Leave a comment

I quit my job last week. And then they fired me.

Back up.

First there was Frank. No, wait, back up some more. First there was a parade of increasingly untalented chefs, each who bullshitted their way into the gig, and behind this parade was cast a stretching shadow of gloom and disappointment. With each chef, another cook would stand up and say, ‘this is unacceptable’ (except, they’d say it like a cook: ‘this is fucking bullshit’) and then they’d be fired. Good friends of mine, some of the best cooks I’d ever met, fired for refusing to cook bad food on purpose. Frank was only the latest in a line of hacks. And, finally, it was my turn, so I told him, ‘this is unacceptable.’

Except I said it like a cook.

So, that was probably the end for me. But I played nice, and gave my two weeks’ notice. I offered to help train the new crop of ex-felons and crank addicts and whatever poor sobs they can find to reheat food for minimum-ish wage. I worked hard, even though my heart was broken. I tried very hard to be professional, which – how can I say this? – is not always the way I play things.

On Wednesday, Frank called to fire me. It was hurtful and unprofessional and my goddamn day off, and it’ll leave me with a week and change of not being employed until I start my new gig in April. But, I’ll make good use of the time – WIP abound, plus I’ve been promising my wife I was gonna put those guitar racks on the wall since February – and, more importantly, when Frank called, he gave me the opportunity to say something I’ve always wanted to say.

‘You can’t fire me because I quit.’

You really should say that, once in your life, I promise, unlike those foot-massagers in the Sky Mall magazine, this feels as good as you think it will. I mean, technically, I think it’s a touch ambiguous, and for clarity’s sake a more articulate phrase would be: “You cannot fire me, logically speaking, because I’ve already quit.” But, screw it, I like the Cobain way.

Now I’m at home on a Friday night, while every kitchen in town gets hammered. I’m sitting here with a narrow finger of bourbon, having worked diligently all day, but something feels wrong. My hands are dry and clean, no burns or scratches. My shirt is clean. It’s the first Friday in quite a while I don’t smell like shit and spaghetti. My stomach is not a knot from a diet of coffee and bread-crusts. I ate sitting down this afternoon. At a table. With a fork.

I’m back from the war, not entirely sure what happened to the rest of the platoon.

And the part I hate most: we lost.

We won a moral victory, one by one, we were fired for our principles, we quit for our principles. But if you know anything, you know that moral victories are the fucking O’Doul’s of victories. The bad guys won: they choked us out, cut our hours, stripped us of any creative outlet, made our lives an assembly line. A painful lesson – painful because you can learn it so many times, and it feels fresh, and stunning, and wretched, each time – is that sometimes you cannot win. The restaurant will have lousy food and a lousy environment and a profitable year, because capitalism. Because America.

But that I can live with; I’ve lived with America for quite a while. What I miss, are the men and women I worked with. One thing I especially hated about Frank* was that he constantly called us ‘boys and girls.’ He hadn’t earned the familiarity, and he failed to recognize how amazing these people were. I loved them, as brothers and sisters. I could not, if I wanted to, exaggerate. Some of them I’ll be working with again, soon. Some of them have been scattered out. I doubt we’ll ever all be in the same place, at the same time, again.

I miss them. I wish I could go back, appreciate it more. I wish arson was legal. I wish this post was funnier.

My father told me, ‘you’ll never step in that river again.’

Because my father understands, in his weird way, and also has a tendency to quote cryptic Greek philosophers in casual conversation. You have to love a father like that. But he was right. Frost was right. Heraclitus was right. Nothing gold can stay. Nothing at all can stay. Panta rhei.

But the old Ephesian also said that nothing is ever destroyed, only exchanged, like gold for goods, and goods for gold, like fire into air, and air into earth. So there’s that.

He also spent a lot of time wandering the mountains of Asia Minor, chewing on herbs like a goat, and he died covered in cow-shit, eaten by a starving dog. So there’s that, too

But enough maudlin navel-gazing. As Doug E. Doug said in Cool Runnings, ‘you know what my grandfather said? Get back to work!’

The upshot: a lot of new stuff coming out. New songs, new stories. Less bitching about work. A fresh spike of piss and vinegar in my veins. That ‘true story’ I promised? I’ll tell it. More rock and roll? We’ll play it.

Back to work.

*And Frank? Oh, don’t worry about Frank. As Heraclitus says, ‘strife is justice, motherfucker.’

12 Ways to Massacre Your Enemies on Valentine’s Day

/ Benjamin N. Schachtman / Leave a comment

Last month I promised several things, and – unlike the pizza guy in a mild dusting of Carolina snow – I am here to deliver, goddammit.

*

First, Short Work. ‘Mystery’ went live earlier this month at the Eckleburg Review (and, if you dig that, the Eckleburg folks had me back to talk about the writing of the piece, here). Also, I’ve added links to two stories you aren’t likely to find in your local bookstore: the novelette ‘Dear Penthouse’ – about a model struggling with mental illness, from the Conium Review – and ‘The House of the Dogs’ – about fine dining and war crimes, from Confingo, across the pond. Yes, I said ‘novelette,’ and yes, that is a thing. A good thing.

Stay tuned for two more shorts, coming in early March: ‘A Prayer for War’ delayed but most certainly coming, from Bloodstone, and ‘Horizon’ from PIF Magazine. (‘Horizon,’ is by far the most NSFW thing I’ve had published, so if you’re never been to HR for the ‘uses and practices’ lecture, make sure to read that one at work).

*

Next, Rock’n’Roll. Exploding Math Lab has an EP, and you can listen to it. Like Radiohead, we’ll let you pay whatever you want for it (including nothing). Unlike Radiohead, we won’t be mopey, pretentious pricks about it. Check it out: https://explodingmathlab.bandcamp.com/releases – I don’t write our lyrics, but I did write our track notes. Thought I’d put the English degree to good use.

And, of course, we’re playing all over this tiny Carolina town, so if you’re passing through, show up, and we’ll buy you a beer and break your eardrums. Lovingly, of course.

*

New Project(s). It’s happening, but it’s top fucking secret (that’s one step above top secret).

*

Finally: Twelve Ways to Massacre Your Enemies of Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day is the Normandy Invasion for an Italian restaurant in a town without too many fine dining options. Unfortunately for me, in this metaphor, the cooks are the hapless Wehrmacht regulars, given the impossible task of holding off the relentless Americans and their corn-fed optimism, while our cowardly Nazi superiors scamper off at the crucial moment to avoid death or capture.  Our latest chef, Oberstarzt Brian, quit a week before Valentine’s Day, after thinning our ranks with his incompetence and inexperience.  Our management seemed almost disinterested in the massive horde of hungry Americans gathering on the horizon. And, despite having no leadership, we were told we were in no position to make decisions for ourselves.  Outnumbered and underappreciated, we were hung out to dry.

Still, when the onslaught came, we gave it hell.

Why?

I can tell you this: it was not for the customers. We’re happy they had a good time, ate some good food, had a nice evening. But that has very little to do with it. We did it because no one was going to do a better job than us. Good food deserves to be made, regardless of who eats it. Once it leaves the window, we’re on to the next thing.

Now, cooking is not like playing music which is not like writing. But they share a few things. You don’t do it for the money, or the fame, or the glory. And you don’t do it for the audience. That sounds crude, and pretentious, and solipsistic, but it’s true. Ninety percent of the people who come into the restaurant want fettuccini alfredo or lasagna, not because it’s authentic or made with care, but because it’s a relatively inexpensive, because it’s two pounds of rich, fatty, carby, comfort. Ninety percent of people who like what’s on the radio, they like Nickleback’s new single, and Two and a Half Men, and 50 Shades of Grey because they think these things are edgy. It’s just helping after helping of alfredo, unlimited breadsticks, ranch dressing poured over everything.*

But this isn’t a rant about American unexceptionalism.  This isn’t what Kanye, in his stunningly inarticulate way, tried to say about Beck, or what Jonathan Franzen, in his dickishly eloquent way, tried to say about Jennifer Weiner.

Because the writers whose work I’m reading, the bands whose music I’m listening to, the chefs whose food I’m eating, they don’t give a shit what you call them. And they don’t care what other artists are doing wrong and whether the people are eating it up. They care about writing, and music, and food. They’re working their asses off, they’ve got blinders on, because they need that focus. But they aren’t doing it for me, for anyone else. We aren’t entitled to it. In all likelihood, we do not deserve it.

What I’m saying is, if I sit in traffic, listening to an awful song, that is on me. If I go to a crappy taco place – when there’s a legit Mexican joint across the street – that’s on me too. If I only pick up a book because it’s become a movie, and it bores me to tears, if I go to the movies and see some half-thought-out piece of Bruckheimer garbage, if I keep paying for cable ‘reality’ TV, all of that, that great big plate of alfredo and the slow, boring death that comes with it, that is all on me.

As an audience member, someone who loves good food, rock’n’roll, books and movies, it’s easy to blame the artists, to see them as the enemy, to see their greed and indifference as the driving force behind your own boredom. Why do we have this plastic culture? Because that’s the only one offered to us. It’s easy to wish a plague on the houses of Hollywood and Manhattan.

And, as an artist – as a cook, or a writer, or a musician – it’s easy to see the audience as the enemy, to wish them up against the wall. It’s tempting to see their laziness and complacency, their entitlement and ignorance, as the scapegoat for your shortcomings. Why have we not struck it rich? Because the audience is too stupid to understand what we’re doing.

But there are no enemies to massacre, except the ones in our heads. Laziness and greed, boredom and fear, and – the worst of the bunch – entitlement.

No one is owed anything. Not artists, not audiences.

We can go out and find the good shit, or we can make it ourselves, or we can take what they give us. We can go to our local bars and listen to live music, go to a new restaurant, go online and read something weird. Or we can go to fucking Olive Garden.

It’s on us.

 

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Next time: ‘From the Vault’ – a true story I can’t stop telling even though I don’t remember it at all anymore.

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*Yes, I know I more or less stole this from Gaffigan’s “Mr Universe” special, but – in my defense – Jim Gaffigan is unlikely to read this blog, and if you the reader recognized the theft, then at least I know you’ve got good taste in comedy.