Someone always brings a camera to events, but that person is not me. In fact, I don’t even own a working camera these days, which is why you are spared photos of meals I’ve prepared, my cats doing funny things, and various local signage (my current favorite sign I drive by on my way to work is for Ratha’s Charm House, a hair salon, in case you were curious.

Anyway, one of the Old Lumps’ friends took photos at the Skylight Event, so here’s some documentation of that afternoon. More snaps here.

Daniel and Ben ponder the meaning of indie in late 2009. Did I mention that it was hot? We all look lightly toasted.

Justin and Courtney look very intense here. Indie is hard to figure out. Trust me: it took me two years to write a book about it and I still don’t know what it is.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember most of what we talked about on the panel, but I do know we laughed a lot.

When I look at this photo of myself, the word “sweaty” comes to mind. It was almost a hundred degrees out and people kept telling me it wasn’t that hot. Also, even though I’ve recently lost some weight, the camera appears to believe I need to add about a hundred bicep curls to my workout.

In case you were wondering, yes, this is Charlyne Yi from the movie Paper Heart. She’s in the band and is hilarious in person.

The most indie thing of all happened when Jessica’s mike stand kept collapsing and the Skylight employees rushed forward with a roll of packing tape to repair it.

Yesterday’s event at Skylight Books was tons of fun, and likely the first book event I’ve been to where the author got up and did a really terrible impromptu dance number to a cover of Beast of Burden. That was pretty fucking indie. Thanks a million to Skylight, Daniel, Justin, Ben, Courtney, The Old Lumps, and especially to Zoe for getting me to the airport on time.

I gave away a bunch of book soundtrack CDs with no track listings and told people to come here if they were curious, so here you go. And if you didn’t get one but would like one, leave a comment or drop me a line and I’ll take care of you, darling.

A Supermarket in California : Allen Ginsberg
The World Turned Upside Down (Diggers’ Theme):  Billy Bragg
This Ain’t No Picnic:  Minutemen
Forget: Mission Of Burma
The Crowd: Operation Ivy
Summertime: Crimpshrine
Rebel Girl: Bikini Kill
Indian Summer: Beat Happening
Love Buzz: Nirvana
Summer Babe (Winter Version): Pavement
Silver Jews: Random Rules
Our Singer: Pavement
That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate: Mission Of Burma

My next book is going to be about a noncontroversial topic, something everyone agrees is delightful and does not comes with any sort of pre-suppositions, purported authorial biases, or references to hipsters and their pants. It’s a topic we can all agree is an awesome one, and no matter who you are, you will want to read it and buy an extra copy to give away. This book will bring us all together in a kind of unified adoration not seen since the introduction of the peanut butter cup.

That’s right, I’m writing a book about puppies.

Okay, I’m lying. But puppies are pretty great even if I’ll always be a cat person.

Hey folks, things are kind of nuts with teaching classes, a super secret writing project in the beginning stages, and trying to keep my house reasonably clean, so just a brief update to remind everyone about this great event I’m doing in LA this Sunday. Please tell your friends who live down thataway; I’m flying in Sunday afternoon and out on Sunday night, jet setting Southwest Airlines style. Here’s the blurb from the fine folks at Skylight Books, who helped put the event together.

We’re looking forward to this panel discussion on the development of indie culture in America. Kaya Oakes, author of the new book on the topic, Slanted and Enchanted, will be joined by Ben Bush, editor of The Fanzine; Courtney Knopf of Everloving Records; and Daniel House of CZ Records. Justin Gage, founder of the fantastic music blog Aquarium Drunkard, will moderate, and the band The Old Lumps will play a short set to start things off.

Kaya Oakes is the co-founder of Kitchen Sink magazine, which won the Utne Independent Press Award for Best New Magazine in 2002, and currently is a writing instructor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Based in Los Angeles, Justin Gage is the founder of both the influential music blog Aquarium Drunkard as well as Autumn Tone Records. He also hosts, and is the program director, for the weekly Aquarium Drunkard show on Sirius/XM satellite radio. His first book, Memphis And The Delta Blues Trail, was published in May via Countrymen Press.

Yesterday was kind of insane: on top of teaching two classes, I also got interviewed by a journalism grad student from USC who was kind enough to take an interest in my book and in the magazine I used to edit, then I drove out to Orinda for the dress rehearsal of Cal Shakes’ final show, Midsummer Night’s Dream (my summer job doing pre show talks there ends this week). This may explain why I also had an “asshole day”, which is not to be confused with a “bitch day”. On a bitch day I’m just run of the mill cranky and ill tempered; on an asshole day I tend to be more aggressive than usual. I’m a pretty mellow person and loathe confrontation, so usually when I get a Google alert about a book review and it’s a negative review, I just read it, gripe to my husband and friends, and leave it be.

But because it was asshole day, I decided to start responding to some of those reviews.  I know bad reviews are bound to happen. The first review the book got was in Kirkus, which is notorious for its awful reviews. The second was in Library Journal, and that was awesome, as was the one in Publisher’s Weekly. Generally, all the big newspaper reviews have been positive. But the blog reviews have been all over the place.

Anyway, it was during the conversation with the grad student that I started to get why the blog reviews were irritating me to the point that I had to start commenting on some of them. It’s because blogs are always so freaking short, and there’s no way you can develop a thoughtful, reflective review of anything in less than 500 words. That’s a big reason I don’t do much freelance journalism anymore — it takes me at least a thousand words just to figure out what my point needs to be. The decimation of book sections in newspapers, and of book criticism in magazines, means that the combined anonymity and generally rude culture of the internet leaves room for people to blurt out whatever the hell they want, but unedited, and usually in short bursts. That’s why I was a Twitter holdout and even now kind of don’t get it. And the kind of sustained, intelligent book reviews writers used to get are pretty much a thing of the past. And no, I don’t read The Believer so I have no idea if they pull that off.

It’s frustrating, because the internet does promote a more democratic range of responses, but it also means that people who aren’t writers and don’t know much about writing are writing book reviews. I’m not an elitist (I teach writing and reading skills to at risk students at a public university for a reason), but I do miss the idea of intellectual discourse in reviews instead of BLEAT BLEAT LOOK AT ME I’M SLINGING MUD YAY. And the same goes for film, and music, and television… anybody can take the time to learn enough to write informed reviews. But time is what most of us seem to be missing.

This is the kind of day when two out of three cats barf within thirty seconds of one another, when a student asks how many sentences should be in each paragraph, when I repeatedly stumble in three inch heels on lumpy campus pathways, when my five year old neighbor drives by in a Barbie jeep blasting Chris Brown from her speakers, when the weather starts out in Autumn and ends in Summer. I used to blog about life, but lately all I blog about is indie.  I’m tired of blogging about indie, but I have to be interviewed in an hour, so I’ll save my gripes  until then.

Meanwhile, how about a giveaway? Inspired by Harvey, the awesome night clerk at Spectator Books in Oakland and friend to many local poets, who recently saw me come up to the desk with a pile of titles and asked, based on their oddity, “what are you working on?”, here’s the deal. Here are some of the titles I’m reading right now. If, based on these, you can make a guess about the subject of the project I’m thinking about working on (hint: it is not about indie, but that may be obvious), you will win a copy of the S&E soundtrack CD, which is pretty cool even if I made it and I’m not feeling cool at the moment. Includes everything from Allen Ginsberg to Bikini Kill and I’ll even walk to the post office to mail it, old school style. Okay, here you go. Titles, not authors. What, you thought this would be easy?

Shakespeare After All

Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor

The Interior Castle

The Sign of Jonas

The Cloud of Unknowing

The Long Loneliness

How Far Can You Go

The Dark Night of the Soul

The Noonday Demon

Email me if you think you’ve got it. kaya at oakestown dot org

David Berman is, in many ways, indie’s poet laureate. His book, Actual Air, is one of the few poetry books by a musician that poets respect. His albums with the ever-rotating cast of The Silver Jews have lyrics that poets respect and his smallish but very devoted group of fans adore. Just as we were going into final edits on Slanted and Enchanted, Berman announced that the band was going on a permanent hiatus, so that he could pursue a career in “screenwriting or muckraking”. Whatever he does next, it’s guaranteed to be interesting.

Berman prefers to do interviews via email, so after I contacted the nice folks at Drag City, his excellent label, he was kind enough to answer some of my questions back in March of 2008. I’ve tried to preserve the line breaks from his email here, so hopefully you can see how even his prose looks like poetry.

KO: I’m going to start out with a kind of complicated question. You’ve been an independent musician for many years, and your poetry’s been published by an independent press and in independent magazines. And now you’ve come back to Judaism. Do you feel there’s any connection between being an independent artist and spirituality? Is independence a kind of religion or at least a dogma for you?

DB: I felt so liberated when I realized that Christians were absolutely wrong about the

Past present and future. I felt liberated from the rapture narrative and the hell narrative.

I’m angry I endured relationships with people who still  avidly look forward

To events they believe with lead To my decapitation by a dragon.

KO: And now on to some simpler questions… your first book of poems came out from Open City, and I believe that was the first book they published. How did you end up hooking up with them? What was it like seeing your first book come into print?

DB: The literary journal had come out with three or four issues when I met Rob Bingham.

We became great friends.

His mother was the poetry editor at Grove.

For a couple years he tried to get me to work up a manuscript

To show his mother, which I finally did, so she passed it on to the

the guy Who really ran the show in poetry,

but it languished

in piles and stacks

and she was always in Washington..

so Rob decided to start Open City Books.

And put it out himself.

KO: You’re one of the few musicians I know of who poets respect as a poet and don’t see as a dilettante. How much does other people’s poetry matter to your own? And are there any intersections for you between poetry and music or do you prefer to keep them separated?

During the writing of this album, reading Mallarme and Emily Dickinson

Had a lot to give me. Phrases from Emerson and Whitman and Roger Miller

Are weaved in there.

The lyrics are now being held to a higher standard. Linking Sense-making images  via original language that goes somewhere worth someone else’s time

No

Up until the last year.

I ‘ve always used a different standard for judging

good lyric writing than I have for good poetry,

but the activities are cousins, like mowing and raking.

In both I’m shooting for a nice looking yard.

For me , poetry is new poetry and song lyrics are old poetry?

Poetry is like putting on a funny suit. And lyrics are like marching

Down main street in that funny suit.

KO: You’ve always seemed to be able to collaborate with a lot of different musicians. What do you get from playing with a variety of people versus being in a set band that doesn’t change?

DB: Variety:    the same thing your wardrobe gets when you fill it with crazy clothes

Instead of  four or five conservative  suits.

This band on this record is the band I toured with. All except one live here in town.

We all get along . Me Cassie and Four other guys.

KO: One thing many people who choose to be independent artists have in common is the need for a network like minded people who perform many roles, but who primarily help us to be creative. How much have networks mattered to you in your musical life?

DB: I guess Drag City could be that.  I’ve got an intern recently.

KO: You’ve lived mostly outside of the major metropolitan epicenters (though I know Nashville’s not a small town). How much does living in the south or living outside of big cities matter to your music and writing? How has Nashville in particular affected your work?

DB: It’s fun for me to try to outwrite Music Row. They’re going to know my name

Over there soon.

KO: For a lot of creative people who move outside of the mainstream surviving and being creative are antithetical to one another but have to be negotiated. Can you talk a little about day to day living and making music and writing? What’s the balance between paying the bills and making art and how do you find it?And that’s it for now. Many thanks again.

DB: Starting around 1997 I stopped having to work.

American Water helped.

Bingham gave me an advance for actual air

For the next ten years I constantly felt on the verge

Of having to do something drastic that would mean

Giving up my freedom. The idea of teaching writing

horrified me.

I fell into great amounts of debt in the early 2000’s

One day I realized I could save myself. It was out of the blue.

I could go on tour and make money and save myself.

Now it’s two years later and im back in it.

But im so confident about these songs, I have a feeling one

Might have a future in a popular country singer’s throat.

Thanks Kaya,

DCB