Adam Gnade

1. Lillian Ross’ eulogy for JD Salinger in this week’s New Yorker is loving, expansive, and well worth your time. She shows you the man and knocks down as much of the myth as possible.

2. I found a new place to live out in the country. I move in tomorrow. More about that, and the story of its last tenant, the murderer, later.

3. Complaining is one of the most unbecoming things you can do.

4. If you do anything good today, go somewhere loud, and go there alone. Sit down and close your eyes and listen. It could be the subway or a rivershore or a schoolyard or a diner. Just listen.

5. I’m about to go do an interview on the radio and I’m pretty excited about it. I’ll tell you all about that soon.

6. I love you guys. I’m sorry I never respond to emails or calls. I’m trying…

It’s snowing again here in the Big Quiet so I’ve been hard at work recording these Surrenderland tapes. I guess I should’ve known but it’s taking longer than I imagined. Each one has to be its own thing; I can’t repeat myself or get lazy. The songs need to be turned inside out, stripped down, built up. Just finished tapes 10, 11, and 12, which I’ll send off to Denmark (two copies) and Scotland Monday morning. If you want one of these, there’s still some left here.

This was one of the early ones. Not sure which one. All the tapes are numbered but I don’t paint the numbers on until after I’ve listened back to them.

While I was recording tape #8, this note was slipped under the door. If you get tape #8 (which will be sent off to Christchurch, New Zealand on Monday) listen for ghosts.

-Adam

When you release a new album, your record label asks you for a photo to use for the press run. I don’t think I’m telling you anything new here when I say that promo photos are pretty much shit. The band sitting on the curb looking down at their sneakers. The band with their hands in their pockets, all looking different directions, brooding. The wacky shots. The shots where the band wears clothes they would never wear in real life. The band—or singer, as it may be—standing in the middle of the woods or in a field of wheat, pretending to be from the country (or the ’60s.) It’s all crap. Which is why doing the press week stuff can be frustrating. For Surrenderland, I gave my label a candid photo from the night of the Great Portland Blackout, where me and Jamey lost power in the house during a big howling storm and got candle-lit drunk (which is the best kind of drunk.) It’s not very press photo-y but whatever; it’s a photo of a good night and to me a good night means a lot.

-Adam

Here’s another thing of mine published by Asthmatic Kitty. From now on there will be regular stuff of mine at their site. Check here Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

-Adam

New release means another press week. My label has me doing one.

-AG

Punch Drunk Press is proud to announce a brand-new limited-edition release by Adam Gnade, the extensively titled, Surrenderland: You Could Quit Your Jobs and Run Away Like You Used to, Back When You Did Things Just Because, and Because it Felt Good to Run Away, and Because You Didn’t Worry so Much Like You Do Now… just Because and Leave the Assholes Behind and Fuck ‘em Anyway, They Don’t Mean Shit.

Part two of the three-part cassette series that began with his Island’s Islands cassette, Surrenderland will be issued in a limited-run of 100 cassettes, each one recorded live into Adam’s 4-track machine, and each one totally different, a 20-minute analog artifact recorded directly onto the tape that you get with your order.

Theme-wise, the tapes will take songs from Adam’s debut record, Run Hide Retreat Surrender, and will offer up alternate versions of the songs.

Says Adam, “I’m recording each 20-minute album onto the tape I send you and whatever you get will be totally different than any of the other tapes. I chose to deconstruct the Run Hide Retreat Surrender songs because there’s a lot of room to fuck with those songs and I’ve been wanting to try new shit with them for years—acoustic versions, experimenting with noise revamps, more avant dissections, full band arrangements, heavier minimalism, fucking up the lyrics—whatever feels right at the time.”

The third and final installment of the tape series will be a split cassette featuring Adam on one side and Andrew Mears (Youthmovies, ex Foals) on the other. This will be out in late 2010 and will be a wide-release (not limited-edition).

Issued on clear purple and orange cassette tapes, Surrenderland, has hand-painted faces. Email duke@adamgnade.com with any questions…

GO HERE TO ORDER SURRENDERLAND WITH PAYPAL, CREDIT CARDS, OR DEBIT CARDS

You should read this story my buddy Bart (left) wrote that was published as a mini-book by the Dispatch Lit-Review. Real American writing. Stuff about how people ARE. No bullshit. Go here.

-AG

BY ADAM GNADE

It was a cruise ship alright. Tall as a building and wide and white and slow. Jeremy and I sat in the smoking lounge by the big windows drinking lime juice and gin from little glass bottles and celebrating our luck.

“That bartender, she likes me, doesn’t she?” he said.

The north sea passed below us, gray and stormy and silent through the windows.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she’s one of those girls who’re friendly to everybody and half the people they’re friendly to think they’re flirty when they’re not. I don’t care. Look at us. We’re here. We’re headed to Holland. We made it.”

“It was the gods,” said Jeremy, nodding at me and running a hand through his bushy hair. “We appealed to the gods and now we’re here.” He lit a cigarette and hunched over the small round metal table on his bar stool. Outside and 100 yards below our deck, the water passed by, dark, ruffled. “The gods.”

“It was the Catholic Church.”

“Oh, oh yeah. The Catholics. We’re Catholics now.”

Earlier, huddled against the wind and falling snow, miles away from the Harwich seaport, our train late, it looked as though we were going to miss the ferry ship to Amsterdam. We’d only London three hours before but our money was already gone. I had what was in my pockets, which was not a lot. Jeremy had next to nothing, but he had plans.

“Alright God,” said Jeremy, staring at the sky, his arms extended, palms held to heaven. “If you get us on this fucking boat James and I will be Catholics.”

“You sure?” I said, pulling my parka around me, my breath steaming out in front of my face. “Catholics? Really? Aren’t you… you’re an atheist, right?”

He ignored me. “God, just get us on that fucking boat to Holland and get us out of England. I give up. I’m fucking done. God, just get us on the fucking boat and I’ll be good forever. Get us across the water and get us to Holland and I’ll believe in you. Get us to Holland and get us out of this snow. You know what to do, God. Don’t fuck this up. We’ll be Catholics, God, and we’ll be good Catholics.”

All around us was low, flat, snow-covered English countryside. I stood near the train tracks and turned a circle, my boots squeaking in the snow. Gray over black. Ice over fields. The pine trees disappearing under a layer of white.

“Snow’s getting worse.”

“Don’t tell me that,” said Jeremy. “You know who to talk to.”

“Seriously, Jeremy. Let’s just call the trainlines. Maybe we can… maybe we should try and find someone to give us a ride to the harbor. There’s gotta be a farmhouse around here, right?”

“You know who to talk to.”

“Fuck,” I said, zipping my parka up to my neck. “This is ridiculous.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“This is bullshit.

“C’mon, James.”

Really? Really? Is this how we’re handling this now? Fuckin’ a. We never should’ve left Crouch End.”

“You know what to do.”

“Okay God,” I said begrudgingly, “just get us on that fucking boat.”

Doing some short writing about a summer I spent in Virginia and dug up these photos. Summer 2008. Muggy, lightning bugs at dusk, thunderstorms every day at four. Spent most of the time walking through the woods and swimming at the secret river beach I discovered and writing the first chapters of the book I’m editing now. The story is in this novella but here’s what it looked like… the woods, the tree over the tidal marsh, and the train yard.

Today, January 5th, is the internationally recognized holiday, Adventure Day. Started by one Jessie Duke, pictured below, the premise of Adventure Day is pretty self-explanatory. Get out there and do something. Throw yourself to the fuckin’ wind. Get in trouble. Break the law. Close the front door behind you and get in your car or on a plane or climb on your bike and live. Adventure Day is the day you tell yourself, I’m sick to death of being boring. I want to live a life that would make a good movie—a movie I would want to watch. The next step is yours.

Your friend,

-Adam Gnade

ADAM GNADE & YOUTHMOVIES “IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK IN AMERICA AND EVERYONE’S SLEEPWALKING” FROM THE HONEY SLIDES EP (TRY HARDER RECORDS)

It took me a while before I figured out how to give writing and music equal time without losing my shit. What it came down to is I had to combine them and immerse each in the other and then work on both as hard as I possibly could. Because of that I have to do two projects at once if I’m going to do anything. One writing. One music. And both connected. Which can be a strain. It can also be totally natural, like when me and Youthmovies wrote and recorded this one together in the studio in Oxfordshire. Came outta nowhere, music, lyrics, and then it was done. Right now I’m doing the edits on this new book (which won’t be out for a year or two) and writing a new record. The book has been natural, and a pleasure to write, but the record is giving me hell. I want the kind of ease I had with this song but it’s not coming.

Which is why it gives me hope when I read things like this, my friend Bart Schaneman’s bit on struggle, identity, and fear…

The world likes to see a man who is striving for something, as much or more as they want him to succeed. It’s the struggle that’s interesting, not the result. And there are some who would like to destroy a man for trying. We find ourselves in our selves. But identity is always shifting, always eluding our grasp, always inches beyond our reach. Some people find it in what they once were, yet even then they are changing, growing farther away in time from that person, and that too is a shift in identity. We seem to place value on self-awareness, self-knowledge. We like those that aren’t afraid of the world, that somehow seem to know their place in it. But I’ve never met anyone truly, thoroughly unafraid of the world.

If you’re not keeping tabs on Bart’s writing website, you’re missing out. He’s doing good things, things you can relate to and carry with you while you fight. And he’s a good dude to be around. Here’s a picture of him hanging out in front of a damn red wall…

BY ADAM GNADE

In the bar Jeremy and I sat across from each other at a table by the fireplace. Outside it had begun to rain. It was a slow, gray, listless rain, nothing more than a drizzling mist over the cobblestones and archways and rooftops.

A man rode by the window on a bicycle and looked in at us as he passed. The room was dark. Thick greased glass. Heavy maroon-black wood. Salted pork hanging in hocks above the bar. It was an old place, a strong, solid place that smelled of riding leather and coiled rope and smoked meat.

“So how much?” I said quietly.

Jeremy moved the coins across the boards of the tabletop with a finger, bringing them from one side of the table (uncounted, unsorted) to the other (counted, sorted). The fireplace flashed and made them gold and then fell low again. “Eighteen euro,” he said, frowning.

“To last… “

“To last until we leave.”

“Leave Spain or leave Europe?”

“Europe.”

The waiter, a large, balding, gorilla of a Spaniard, came in from the kitchen and set a tapas dish on the tabletop between us. He grunted something friendly in Spanish and walked away.

Eighteen euro to last a week. Goddamn it, goddamn it, goddamn it, I thought, but I kept it to myself. “Aceitunas,” I said cheerfully, “Olives.” I picked one of the green olives out of the brine and placed it in my mouth but didn’t swallow. I held it in my cheek and let its shape tell me it was a real thing, let the salt and brine and garlic core become a flavor and let the flavor become food. We hadn’t eaten much since Berlin, more than a week now. It was just an olive, but anything was something and I held onto the feeling of it for as long as I could.

“So, eighteen euro… “

“Eighteen,” I said, chewing the olive slow and then swallowing it. Now the something was nothing and it didn’t make much of a difference. “So I guess what we should do is have one more drink, which will get us another dish of… what’s next in the round?”

“The crackers we had with the first drink. Rounds of four. This will be drink five. Back to crackers.”

“Back to crackers. So, the plan is we get another drink, get another free plate of tapas, and then we pay for what we’ve had, save the rest of the money for something tomorrow and then hopefully the airline to Portugal will feed us.”

“Hopefully.” Jeremy’s face darkened. He leaned forward in his seat and pulled his green army parka around him. “I’m sorry I fucked this up so bad,” he muttered. He stared at the coins on the table but his mind was elsewhere.

“You didn’t fuck it up. It was Paris. Paris fucked it up. Anyway, the plan,” I continued, changing the subject, “we’ll have a euro a day to spend in Portugal. Hopefully Manuel will get my call and we can stay with him in Ericeira. If not, we’re kind of… we’d have to stay in Lisbon and sleep in the airport all week and get what we can for the euro a day.” Oscar was right, I told myself, but didn’t say aloud, we’ll be burning our clothes in the street to stay warm and eating Kendal Mint Cake.

“I can’t believe this,” he said, still looking down, idly scratching the tabletop with his thumbnail. “James, I don’t know, I think the gods are against us. I think… this is how my life has been these past few… I think I should become a criminal. There’s good money to be made in crime” (he was joking but there was more desperation than humor behind the joke). “I give up. I give… I don’t know what to do. There’s nothing. There’s nothing I can do,” he leaned back and put his hands up. “James, I’m throwing my cards down. What’s the point even trying? I’m an international fugitive. I’m worse than a terrorist. I might as well hijack the plane back from Portugal and crash it into something. They’re going to… as soon as I get to New York, if I get to New York, I’m done. They’ll get me. If it’s not the landlords and bill collectors it’s the cops. If it’s not the cops it’s… “

“Or,” I said, cutting him off, “or… or we could spend the rest of the money on another bottle of wine, which will give us free rounds of tapas until we’re done drinking and then… and then we worry about money tomorrow. Something will happen. We’ll figure something out.”

Jeremy’s eyes flickered to life and he leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and smiled at me. It was a child’s smile. A sweet, sad child suddenly told a good thing.

“I was going to suggest it,” he said, wagging a finger at me, “but I didn’t want to be the one who said it.”

“Well, I said it. What’s ‘One more bottle of red wine’ in Spanish? Un mas botela de vino tinto? Un mas? Or Uno mas? I can never remember.”

“The second I think. No, it’s Un. Un mas.” He was grinning big now and the sadness was gone. He pulled a cigarette out of his pack of Lucky Strikes, tapped its end on the table and put it to his lips. “Jeremy and James! The conquering American GIs!” he announced happily. “The conquering GIs have returned! Damn you, Poseidon. Damn you, Zeus. Damn you, damn you, damn you. Damn all of you. We’re the real gods. How do you say, King Kong ain’t got nothin’ on me in Spanish again? El gran mono negro … something something tienes… tiene nada… something. I don’t remember. Damn you… to all the gods. Je suis acteur célèbre et je suis perdu! Je suis Clooney. Damn you, damn you, damn you. We’re amazing. Damn you. Damn you.” He was boasting again and it felt good to hear him boast.

I got up and walked to the counter and ordered another bottle.

Nice shot by the good Megan McIsaac of a house party/noise jam at my old place in Portland. This is Mia Ferm playing organ at our Dia De Los Muertos bash. Says Megan,

“renee, my brother, and myself ventured to a friends house for dia de los muertos, which is also renee’s birthday. from noon until midnight a collective of friends and strangers spent those twelve hours making drone music on various instruments while surrounded by candles, shrines, and memorabilia. the experience we shared was morbidly beautiful and spiritual, which is how i feel the day of the dead should always be.”

Megan’s photos are, as always, the real thing. She hasn’t been in Portland long but she’s already nailed the vibe—all the pines and rain and raggedy kids on porches, the old cars and street musicians and sunlit cafes. She almost makes me miss the place. Go here to see more of her photos.

BY ADAM GNADE

On the last day of December, you go out walking by yourself and hear the snow crunch under your boots and see the fog hang over the valley and the skeletons of trees lining the creek. Now the house is quiet and you’re the only one awake. This is what you wanted, James, you tell yourself. This is the world you’ve been looking for. Try and get your head straight to write. When you got here you felt like an escaped prisoner, liberated, enthused, but now this is your life and you need to make it work. “When the measure of your work/is the measure of your worth/then you better make it work.” Man, you liked that song a lot and you believed it with conviction. (At one point Ethan thought that line was yours. How proud you were. Those are binder lines, you decided; the lines kids write on their school binders. You’ve been after that ever since.)

Now you need to move forward without distraction. Push away all extraneous thought until you see the story. Find the ticket for that world you’re making and then find the bus station and get there. But some mornings it’s slow. You tell yourself that: It’s slow. I’m slow. No, IT’S slow. It’s not me. It’s a separate thing. I’ll get there but it’s me who needs to do the pushing.

You tell yourself you’re missing out, that back home in Portland the New Year’s Eve party is busting out, delirious, alive, flush-faced, drunk on its own promise. That’s okay. I need to work more than I need parties. Parties… you forget parties by the time the next one comes around. I don’t need parties or the people who go to them. I don’t need anything. “I am a rock/I am an island,” goes that song you always hated. But sometimes you were honest and you knew it was about you and that made you nervous. You saw yourself becoming that thing that doesn’t feel, that writes and thinks and reads and is alone and cold as death and touches nothing and loves no one. Find the bus ticket. Find the station. Go…