RIFF MARKET

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Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito?

Also if anybody knows what happened to my man Don Pollyanna get at me! Also if anybody knows a good dentist

FANG

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YEAR IN RIFFS: NICK SYLVESTER
Another Five Years of Life

A lot easier to write last year's. Stupid decisions, the personally/creatively catastrophic sort, have a way of aligning everything you didn't think needed alignment, plus with brute clarity you'd never get from the shrink sesh or cozy pray-on-it. Pants down and balls out and egg cracked wide open, suddenly you find out the limits of your current ideas and your abilities to translate them; the people who understood you and the people who merely said they did; down to the hundredth of a thousandth of latitudinal/longitudinal degrees, with option for street view, where exactly you stand in the world. If after all that you still happen to give a shit, you connect the dots and scour for those missing pieces to What Exactly You Were Getting At. You reacquaint yourself with yourself, spend a lot of time hitting the speedbag in the barn. Then maybe you come back to the rink and slug your own personal Racki, then maybe you jump off the ice and onto a sexually explicit videotape with some youngblood, then you watch Keanu Reeves run away with your career, and then it's Year In Riffs time: wash rinse repeat.

These days I spend a lot of time hitting the speedbag in the barn. Where I published seemed off Google's radar, what I wrote was exercise. I bought cookbooks and watched my face pock from the splashback of hot olive oil. There's a cat now, and an apartment with a couch, and a mattress on a boxspring. In two months I saw Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, 8 1/2, Blow-Up, Blue Velvet, Breathless, Days Of Heaven... you get the idea. Major catch-up. Rules of the Game. For whatever reason I had always begrudged film the uninterrupted two-hour burden it supposedly placed on me, one that music, even the most difficult stuff, supposedly never had the arrogance to do. Wash, rinse, then: twelve-grand in credit card debt--twelve grand! It took me the whole year but I beat it down to goose eggs. Lots of Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, Juan Atkins. Lots of Faulkner. Long mostly fruitless hours in front of certain hundreds of thousands of words I called in finite jest the Ten Minute Wait, and only now, a year and a half into it, am I realizing why I have to see them through. Writing has to be the most roundabout way imaginable of making friends, trying to be loved, curbing social reflux, connecting on the astral plane--especially in this city, when best friends are a half-hour subway ride away and don't make you jump through verbal hoops for said astral planitude. Except most of them write too, or hide in their studios audio and visual, and one doesn't begrudge the other (at least one hopes not) for the time and energy and aloneness their roundabout communications by nature require. Lots of emails.

(Which is to say that "All My Friends" is not "about" aging. I don't know why everybody keeps saying that, except that I know exactly why people keep saying that: Every Pop Song Ever Is About Aging. Somebody on the internet got paid money to pass off that nugget as criticism, as his own, and nobody called him on it because unlike most somebodies on the internet, he can at least write a good sentence. Anyway the song sums up last graf's sentiment better than I could. "Where are your friends tonight?" isn't just for missing them. It's also what you say to yourself when you've hit upon some brilliant riff in your black mold studio, when that clear turn of phrase comes to you on a Friday night and you decide to stay in and feel it out, when after a decade of hedonism you figure out you have a voice, and something of astral planar significance you want to say, and a good reason as to why you in particular have to say it. You hole up and work your ass off and suddenly you're touring the world to much acclaim and yeah you're tired but hey: "Where are your friends tonight?" They're watching Frasier reruns like they always do. Like they always do, tomorrow they will wake up and go to work. Or more likely they're doing exactly as you are, good because it gives slack to guilt, bad because you're not the only one stuck alone in the proverbial middle of France. So the question you ask when you're lonely as all fuck, it's the same one for when you've realized your time away has scored cosmic dividends. A really tangled emotion to deal with--let alone put to beat. See also Panda Bear's "Bros": "I'm not trying to forget you/ I just like to be my own/ Come and give me the space I need/ And you may and you may/ And you may and you may and you may/ Find that we're all right.")

Double digits of friends are out of work at the moment. If you've been reading the last few days, you've seen their names and could with minimal dogpiling find out when and where you've seen their work elsewhere. It's not so much the money-lack that's tough but the uncertainty timewise. Difficult to commit to writing something like a screenplay, say, when you don't know exactly how much time you'll have to work on it. All bets off, they've all lost their psychic exhaust pipes--no way to, as Mike Schur put it, sublimate fear. Granted nobody's in tears or anything but the funk is thick and undeniable.

A few weeks ago some of us made it out to Friday Night Fights, this amateur boxing night that happens underneath the Church of St. Paul the Apostle on 60th and Columbus. We went down the steps to what looked like a grade school cafeteria, except there was a ring lit up in the middle of the room, lunchlady types selling beer and hotdogs and popcorn out the kitchen, "Cher Chez LaGhost" loud on fat speakers, two white screens on either side the room with half-baked video art and foreign television advertisements projected onto them, elsewhere vinyl banners announcing the Fights' sponsors: Singha, Le Tigre, Wallstreet.com, Mohegan Sun, New York Post. I'd seen one fight before, by accident. But just from the way people around us talked about the fights, you got the sense they were new to this too, the bulk of our boxing and fighting knowledge cribbed from Punch-Out! and Tekken and Mortal Kombat and (to a lesser extent) Blades of Steel. Father Martinez, the church pastor, got into the ring and made the fights' introductory remarks. "People say to me, 'Isn't it too violent for a church?'" he said. Most screamed back no--not too violent. "Well, yes, it is," he said. "But like all good sports, it teaches us who we really are."

Martinez skirted the question he started with but whatever, that's not the point. In Muay Thai kickboxing, Fighter #1 often tries to land huge hits on the thigh of Fighter #2's leading leg. The kick makes this fat dad's-belt-on-the-ass kind of sound if it lands square, and from there maybe the guy next to you will start screaming stuff like "KICK HIS ASS, SEABASS!" or "RIP HIS HEAD OFF!" or "I KNOW YOU GUYS ARE AMATEURS AND ALL BUT WHY DON'T YOU THROW SOME PUNCHES!" before returning to his lady, whom he's now gripping by her backfat. Otherwise the kick is rather uneventful--no blood code, like a cheap Chun Li roundhouse sweep. I found myself drifting in and out, making Sagat jokes, drinking Singhas, then caught sight of my friend Chris's face. Another kick had just landed. He was rapt, smiling. "They're trying to give each other charley horses," he said.

97 S'FANGS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2007