Where You Are (Infinite Monkeys)

Where You Are

Where we are is never where we are, which is obvious when you think about all the different ways we are moving.

The Conglomeration (Horror)

PSST! Don't have time to read this all right now?
Click this link to get a download on Scribd, or page down for a pop-up window with a .pdf to read/print for free!



Ridalfo is worried, now, that it will get out.

How secure can his basement be? After all?

Less Successful Sequels To Classic Toys (Infinite Monkeys)

October, by Liam Konemann (Short Stories)

OCTOBER

 By Liam Konemann

When October creeps up, it brings summer with it. It gets too hot to sleep and we strip ourselves naked, kick the covers all the way down to the end of the bed as late night crosses over into early morning. Our bodies glisten with sweat and it plasters us to the fitted sheet’s blue cotton, leaving damp stains wherever we lay a palm or ankle. The air-conditioner is broken and even the coldest setting gives us nothing but hot air churning above our heads and that low, mechanical death rattle. We spend hours caught adrift in that place between wakefulness and sleep, until finally in the heat-sodden delirium she reaches out to me and whispers, “take me to the river”.

                We’re driving down the highway with the windows down, because she said she wants to be able to smell it when the air changes.  Lyza flicks through radio stations, skipping over Top 40 and Indie Rock and Country music until she lands on a song she remembers from her childhood. She turns the radio up and tilts her head back as she finds her place, eyes closed tight underneath those huge sunglasses. She sings along loudly, not quite word-perfect but close enough to convince me that she once knew all the lyrics. Her hand floats out the window as we hit Ballina, palm surfing the currents of salt-soaked air. There are kids riding their bikes on the dirt shoulder of the highway, and Lyza wonders aloud where their parents are. I shrug, flick on my indicator to change lanes and say, “Anywhere. Home, probably. The RSL.”

“But they should be watching them,” she says.

She turns around in her seat to watch as the kids veer off and slip down a track beside the river.

When they disappear amongst the trees, she looks back at me.

“Shouldn’t they?” She asks.

Lyza was raised upper-middle-class in an inner-city suburb with one neat, ballerina sister, the both of them private-school educated, both A-standard students. A life full of hyphens. Her childhood was neat hedges, smooth footpaths and bright Jacaranda trees that showered you with purple flowers in the Spring. She can’t fathom an upbringing like mine, didn’t have days when her skin was fifty percent mud and grazes, and she never dug for bloodworms with bare hands peppered by mosquito bites. To her, my childhood is as foreign and idyllic as an Enid Blyton story.

She’s looking at me with raised eyebrows and open mouth, her mind conjuring images of abductions or gruesome bicycle accidents.

I tell her, “Things are safer here.”

The late afternoon sun hits us as we cross the last bridge, gold rays melting into the Clarence River like toffee on a hot day. Lyza sleeps, the wind scattering her fringe across her forehead. I follow the curve of the river past houses and cane fields, a memory on each corner and in the branches of every tree. There, the edge of that field, that’s where I kissed that girl. The first girl. And there by the upturned tinny is where I smoked my first and last cigarette, pilfered from my mate’s old man and gravel-rough on fifteen year-old lungs. The road is old and uneven, and Lyza jolts awake as one of the car’s wheels dips briefly into a pothole.

“Are we there?” She asks, mouth stretching around a yawn.

I dip my head to one side, the bastard offspring of a nod and a shrug.

“Just about.”

She hums, stretches and settles back into her seat. The air filtering through her window is cane-sweet and mud-heavy, and it cycles through the air-conditioning over and over like my favourite song playing on repeat.

We pass the tiny general store and the ANZAC monument, and Lyza cranes her neck to see over the coffee trees as we pull up in front of the house. I turn the car off, grip the steering wheel a moment too long.

“This is it?” She asks.

I nod. “This is it.”

She tilts her head back to take in the slanted tin roof, its sharp edges jutting towards us. If I look over her shoulder I can see flaking white paint and the corner of my mother’s bedroom window peeking through the trees. She glances back at me and raises her eyebrows.

“So are we going in?”

I push the car door open and lead her around to the side of the house, up the stairs to the back door. The door creaks open under my palm, the ancient fly screen sagging in the middle. Mum never did lock the bloody door. We duck into the gloomy house, almost colliding with the dining table. It’s always closer than I remember it being.

“Stay here,” I tell Lyza.

She stands in the sunlight cast by the open door as I cross the dark room, sidestepping around aging, mismatched furniture to reach the window. I tug open the curtains and let the daylight flood in, the dust particles caught floating in its pool. Lyza wanders into the centre of the room, shoes scuffing on the worn floorboards. She turns in a tight circle, eyes roving over the faded couch and once-white walls as she breathes in the smell of dirt and damp.

“So this is where you grew up,” she says.

I almost tell her that I’m still growing up, not quite thirty and not quite mature yet, but instead I shrug, nod and say, “My childhood home in all its glory.”

She ducks out of the room and down the hallway and I follow her, watching as she lingers in the doorway of each room. When she reaches the end of the hall she turns and walks halfway back to me. She stops and leans against a doorjamb, fingers running over the dulled paint. Lyza tilts her head towards the room.

“This one?” she asks.

I nod. She pushes off the door frame and steps into my old bedroom, running a palm over one warped wall. Lyza sits on the bed pressed up against one corner, the dust-heavy covers wrinkling and dipping beneath her. I hover in the hall, unwilling to enter quite that far into my own past. She takes her shoes and socks off and curls her knees up to her chest, feet resting on the edge of the bed. I go to say something about the state of the house, to tell her that dirty shoeprints won’t make all that much of a difference, but I change my mind at the last moment and swallow my words instead. She pats the space beside her and waves for me to come in.

“Scared of a little dirt?” she teases.

“Scared that bed’s going to collapse, more like,” I say.

She smiles, tilts her head and waits. I shake my head and laugh even though it isn’t funny.

Crossing over the threshold and into the room doesn’t feel the way I thought it would. The floor in here creaks just the same as it does in the hall, and the air is just as stale. It doesn’t seem like a profound homecoming, like the return of the prodigal son. I just feel like an overly tall child, standing in a forgotten room in an abandoned house. For a moment, I see myself from a different angle and I wonder how it is that I could have run for so long and moved so little. I sit on the bed and lean into my girlfriend, and she rubs a hand over my back as I stare blankly out the window. It’s closed. When I left it was open behind me, too far above the ground for me to pull it shut after I had tumbled out into the long grass. I pushed my bag out first and then clambered after it, the night air cool on my skin. In the other bedrooms, my mother and my brothers and sister slept on. I always assumed that if and when I came home, they’d still be there fast asleep, not missing me at all. Never even noticing I’d been gone weeks or months or years. Life, of course, moves on whether you pay attention to it or not. My siblings grew up and scattered to the wind and in the gap between their visits my mother died suddenly, a stroke, with no one to find her crumpled and vacant on the bathroom floor. And the house was closed for business.

Lyza strokes the back of my neck, her fingers playing with the ends of my hair. She presses her lips to my temple and whispers something that sounds both pointless and meaningful, even though I can’t make out the words. I’m not crying, I don’t think, but something tickles my cheek and when I reach up to swipe at it the tips of my fingers come away damp. Lyza turns my head towards her and kisses my lips, breathes the life back into me. When she pulls back she puts her hand in mine and murmurs, “The river. Show me the river.”

It always seems to call out to me, from across state borders and highways and chicken-wire fences. I hear it, and I feel it pulling me back like some kind of Siren, like I’m writing a new Odyssey. Creeks and estuaries flow into creeks and estuaries and I follow them, always making my home somewhere in sight of the water as if I belong to it. As if it belongs to me. It’s the smell that hits first, then the taste of the air. Somehow rotting, fresh and salty all at the same time, like the doorway of a fishmonger’s. I need it. I use it to clear the dust and petrol fumes out of my head. I lead Lyza to the banks, both of us barefoot as we stand ankle deep in the dark mud. It’s dusk, and mosquitos buzz around our elbows and knees, tapping into our veins before flying off fatter than before. The water laps up over our feet and Lyza lets go of my hand, bends forward to inspect the guppies swimming back and forth in silver clouds. She stands up, tucks her hair behind her ears and smiles at me.

“I like it here,” she says.

I breathe out, dig my toes further into the mud and laugh even though this isn’t funny either.

“I feel safer here,” I say.

*************************************

Liam Konemann is a young Australian writer who wandered off one day and found himself in the most expensive city in the world. He currently lives in East London, and can be found online at @Liam_Konemann.

Want to get paid for writing? Click the "We Pay For Stories" tab up top there for details!

What Else You GOD? (Infinite Monkeys)

What Else You God?

We have an opening in music.

 Doing what?

Making sure a cool song starts as someone sit down in their car.

Doesn't sound important. I was thinking finance.

Hmm.  It’s a recession, you know. Not much out there.  Let me check.

…

 You could be see a penny pick it up--

Ech. Nothing higher up?

Best I could do would be, uh, let me see, well, there's finding money in coat pockets.

Seriously? What about, like, dragons, piles of gold and silver and a lair?

If you are thinking about nonhuman the best I could do would be a leprechaun.

Pot of gold?

Cereal mascot.

I didn’t even think they were real.

They’re not. That’s the point.

…

You’re not, either.

Well, not yet, and not if this is the best you’ve got.

We’re under the gun here, you know. I don’t think you can afford to be picky.  How long is it since someone has worshipped you? Or even believed in you?

Too long. I know. I know. I was just… hoping…

For what? For thunder and lightning? For healing the sick? For inspiring works of art? Do you know how quickly those posts get snapped up, if they even open up?

Look, it’s not my fault I’m unemployed.

As I recall, you free-lanced it—

I have heard this quite enough…

… by trying to convince people to make things other than diamonds, gold, and silver valuable, and you being the god of new precious stones and metals.

Look…

What was it again? Aluminum?

Tin, actually. Just tin.

I could get you in with broken mirrors.

Switch teams?

It’s been done before.

I… don’t… I mean, I need the work, yeah, but it seems a little outside my… uh…

Starts today.

Does it offer benefits?

 _____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Like to write? Like to get paid? What if you combined those two?  LIFE WOULD BE AWESOME!

That's why lit, a place for stories, will PAY YOU FOR YOUR WRITING: essays, short stories, long stories, stories of medium length, poetry, novel excerpts, works-in-progress, knock-knock jokes: If you wrote it, send to to me and I'll (probably?)(I almost certainly will) publish it and pay you.  Click here for details.  

Also: the pirate really has nothing to do with this promo.  But he is fierce.

This woman is in her underwear, and high heels, and sitting on a dresser! That is unusual!

_________________________________________________________________________

Speaking of people who won't always  be happy: Meet Bumpy, who was there the night his sister's fiance drowned, but he was too drunk to remember what happened. Now she blames him, and blames everyone, and so while his sister tries desperately to prove that the death wasn't an accident, Bumpy moves on to Las Vegas where he stumbles into happiness... if he can recognize it.

That's Up So Down, a dramatic, heart-wrenching look at a family falling apart.  You can buy it on Amazon for just $0.99 by clicking here! 

This is a post in which a dialogue between two characters is set to the side of a woman holding a gun and showing a significant amount of her boobs, but not so much as to make it NSFW.

Temporary Anne: If ever a woman was misnamed, it is this one: The woman who first saw the gates of hell opening for her years ago, and avoided them by killing the man who tried to save her and casting him down in her stead.  Now, she roams the earth, stealing souls at the bidding of Mephistopheles, avoiding her own fate... for now.

Temporary Anne is a gothic horror classic that will haunt your nightmares.  

Click here to buy it on Amazon for just $0.99!

This post features a french maid dusting a mummy, plus a quote from Dostoevsky, plus an explanation of the quote.

The translation of the phrase is "There's something of Piron inside of him," and as near as I can figure out Piron is "Alexis Piron," who is known as an "epigrammatist and dramatist." Piron rose to fame when me made an acclaimed one man show about Deucalion after the Deluge. He was "intimate" with two women, one of whom he married 20 years into their relationship.

The person who Dostoevsky says has a bit of Piron inside of him is Alexey's monk boss (?) who Alexey's dad is making fun of at the dinner when he (the dad) is drunk on brandy.  So now you know.

This is a post in which a sexy, barely-dressed woman looks out of some blinds and also there is a quote from the book "The Evil That Men Do."

You can buy "The Evil That Men Do" on Amazon for just $0.99 by clicking here.

****************************************************************************

Claudius wanted to be the first man to reach the stars, but did it take murder to get there? Read the mind-bending, chilling story of an astronaut adrift in space and in his own mind in Eclipse:

"This book is brilliant," says sci-fi author Michael Offutt.  Click here to buy it on Amazon for $0.99! 

This is a post about a story on another blog.

Today on lit, a place for stories:

"Sippy Cups, Earbuds, and Something That Surely Isn't Wine," a debut short story from Tina Downey about strange things happening during a rest stop in a small town:

Lisa gulps chardonnay and texts Keith again. The boys seem oblivious to the changes now, so she's not as worried about them. But what if something weird is happening to Keith?

Suddenly Tim is crying and Jace is trying to console him. 

Read it by clicking here, and remember: lit pays for your stories, poems, essays, etcs.!  If you want to get paid for writing click this link!

This is a post with a sexy almost naked woman sleeping and a quote from Dostoevsky.

"We here are all of little faith, only from carelessness, because 
we haven't time; things are too much for us, and, in the second place, the Lord God has given us so little time, only twenty-four hours in the day, so that one hasn't even time to get sleep enough, much less to repent of one's sins."

-- The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

If Kim Kardashian gets a mohawk, I totally get credit for this.

I saw an article this morning that talked about how celebrities have to do all this crazy stuff to their hair to get noticed and keep looking hip and trendy: they dye it blonde or cut it short or spike it or some other dramatic (and probably damaging to hair) and long-lasting thing.

When what they could be doing is going to the http://finefeatherheads.com site and finding dramatic and interesting new looks without having to go to all that work.

I saw the featherheads site a while back and pointed it out to our own girls, who (I noticed this as an observant father) have hair.  The site offers various feather-based hair extensions and hair chalk: They can be woven into hair or used as accents and colorings that don't last for a million years or wreck your hair but still can look amazing.  If you are a girl, or know one, I'd check them out.  And if you're one of the stylists employed by those celebrities, I'd do that soon before you have to give Kim Kardashian a mohawk or something.

I think that I shall never see/something requiring as much work as ALL THESE STUPID TREES.

Did you get all your yardwork done before snow fell? Or are you one of those lucky people on whom snow never really falls? I hope you latter folk know how lucky you are. For the rest of us, snow is here, winter is serious now, and while that means that yardwork is pretty much done for a few months (other than shoveling out from deeper and deeper blizzards), it's not a bad idea to give some thought to the stuff you'll have to do once the snow clears and spring is here. (63 days and counting down as I write this!).

 Once spring gets here, you're going to have dead branches to prune off, probably some trees that didn't make it through the ice storms and snowfalls of the winter, and other work to do to keep your yard looking great and keep it from becoming hazardous.

Take it from a guy who knows, about that last part: a few years back we had a dead tree branch fall and knock out the power to our house, resulting in a dangerous situation AND my having to spend $150 for a hotel room at a place that didn't even offer continental breakfast!

So I keep a bookmark on the Sherrill Tree website. They've got arborist supplies for everyone, from pros to amateurs like me. Chainsaws to cut up fallen logs, eye protection and other safety gear, ropes and riggings for the guys who really do the technical stuff, if it'll help you take care of tree work, they've got it.

It's an Xmas Miracle!

And I bet you didn't even know that Xmas had been imprisoned!

Starting today, and for the next three days, you can free Xmas... I mean, you can get Xmas free, I mean.

Let me start over. 

The Greatest Xmas Story EVER TOLD 

is now 

FREE!

"Santa, Godzilla, and Jesus Walk Into A Bar," a/k/a The Greatest Xmas Story Ever Told (By Me).

Nick, a nearly-failed UFO maker, finds a tiny brass trumpet lying in a gutter – moments before a dead body drops from the sky and he’s chased down the street and into a major adventure by Sexy Cop. Before he knows it, Nick is doing battle with Wenceslas’ Xmas Machine, helped by Angels, the Secret Army Under The Bed, and a man in a robe, as attempts at world domination mix in with Nick’s attempts to convince Sexy Cop that they are soulmates. 



"if you've ever wondered what Douglas Adams might have produced if he'd been locked in a room for weeks at a time with only Twinkies and Jolt cola, you should read "Santa, Godzilla... it has that same frenetic energy that Adams has only weirder."
-- Andrew Leon, speculative fiction author.

CLICK HERE TO GET IT FREE On your ereader from Amazon!  

Get some help the "write" way.

At our firm, we employ a lot of students, and this time of year is tough for them, because not only are we busy (which means they have a lot of work to do) but they have final exams and term papers due, so they are extra busy outside of work.

Which is why I think they might want to look into one of those my essay writer type of services.

Essay writing services, like Powered Essay, can help busy students (especially nontraditional ones like older students going back to school) by providing valuable research and drafts of papers.  The point of school is to learn not just the subject you're taking, but how to learn, and in the real world, research assistants exist to help people who are busy pare down the busywork associated with projects.

I use research and draft writers for articles I write, seminar materials, even drafts of briefs.  So I don't see a problem with getting some help in writing big papers for school or work or whatever it is you're working on.

Patrick Byrne: A CEO from a different mold.

It's common these days to paint with a broad brush when talking about groups of people -- like corporate CEO's, who tend to have a bad rap in this era of #occupy protests.

But lumping all CEOs in to the same bad group ignores the good ones, like Patrick Byrne.

Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com is anything but a prototypical 1%er CEO.  He's been running Overstock.com since 1997, became its CEO in 1999 -- but rather than act the way we might expect, Byrne began using his influence for good.

An example? He started, in 2005, a campaign to end 'naked short selling,' a campaign which saw him accuse one trader of being a "Sith Lord" (AWESOME Star Wars Reference) and sabotaging his shareholders' prices.

Byrne now serves on the board of "First Class Education," a lobbying group trying to make sure 65% of all school funding is spent for the classrooms; as a longtime opponent of inflated pay for administrators, I wholeheartedly back that. Byrne's commitment to education is impressive: he spent nearly $4,000,000 of his own money pushing school reform in Utah.

Get paid for your writing!

ANNOUNCING two ways to get paid for your writing!

lit, a place for stories, is now paying for your stories! That's right -- or should I say that's write ha ha!-- this website is now a paying publisher, in two different ways.

First, you can submit any short story you want for publication. If it's accepted, I will offer to pay you between $1-$10 to publish the story on this site and in any collections of stories on this site.  Make sure you read the rules about what rights you are giving up and what rights you are giving up.  They're on the "We Pay For Stories" tab/page.  Submission rules are there, too.

Second, you can submit to

The "My Story Can Beat Up Your Story" Contest.

This is a weekly contest between two stories, which might get YOU, the author, PAID! Here's how it works:

You submit your story: any word count, any topic, any style.  It doesn't even have to be a story; it can even be a poem or essay or whatever -- basically, if you've written it, you can submit it -- to me here at "lit."

Once we have at least two stories, they will go head to head for 7 days, with readers voting by comment on which story they liked better.  After 7 days, the story with the most votes wins, and moves on to a new challenger the next week, where the process is repeated.

This gets you paid this way: When your story has its first win, you get $1.  If you win a second week, your story gets $2, and that continues to climb until it reaches $5. If your story wins 6 or more weeks in a row, each consecutive win is worth $5.  But that's PER WEEK, so if you story continues to win, you'll be making $5 a week off your writing.

And if you lose? You can submit a new story to take on the new challenger, and start trying to get paid again.

AND, your work might appear in an annual compliation of the WINNINGEST STORIES!

Again, read the official rules on the "We Pay For Stories" tab/page.

But long story short: you can get paid for your stories.  The contest could make you more money -- but the traditional way gets you guaranteed dough, so you choose!

"This news is overwhelming!"

People who read this far will be rewarded with some inside info:

What I'm really looking for is anything -- story, essay, blog post, poem, random assortment of syllables -- that either demonstrates a mastery of a traditional kind of story, a story we've read before but this is too good to pass up -- or a story that is so new, unique, or entertaining that it makes me see writing in a whole new way.

So get creative: use pictures. Embedded videos. Drawings. Play around with structure. Make up words (but not too many).

Stories about time travel will generally move to the head of the pack.

CLICK here to go to lit and learn more!

Get paid for your writing!

ANNOUNCING two ways to get paid for your writing!

lit, a place for stories, is now paying for your stories! That's right -- or should I say that's write ha ha!-- this website is now a paying publisher, in two different ways.

First, you can submit any short story you want for publication. If it's accepted, I will offer to pay you between $1-$10 to publish the story on this site and in any collections of stories on this site.  Make sure you read the rules about what rights you are giving up and what rights you are giving up.  They're on the "We Pay For Stories" tab/page.  Submission rules are there, too.

Second, you can submit to

The "My Story Can Beat Up Your Story" Contest.

This is a weekly contest between two stories, which might get YOU, the author, PAID! Here's how it works:

You submit your story: any word count, any topic, any style.  It doesn't even have to be a story; it can even be a poem or essay or whatever -- basically, if you've written it, you can submit it -- to me here at "lit."

Once we have at least two stories, they will go head to head for 7 days, with readers voting by comment on which story they liked better.  After 7 days, the story with the most votes wins, and moves on to a new challenger the next week, where the process is repeated.

This gets you paid this way: When your story has its first win, you get $1.  If you win a second week, your story gets $2, and that continues to climb until it reaches $5. If your story wins 6 or more weeks in a row, each consecutive win is worth $5.  But that's PER WEEK, so if you story continues to win, you'll be making $5 a week off your writing.

And if you lose? You can submit a new story to take on the new challenger, and start trying to get paid again.

AND, your work might appear in an annual compliation of the WINNINGEST STORIES!

Again, read the official rules on the "We Pay For Stories" tab/page.

But long story short: you can get paid for your stories.  The contest could make you more money -- but the traditional way gets you guaranteed dough, so you choose!

"This news is overwhelming!"

People who read this far will be rewarded with some inside info:

What I'm really looking for is anything -- story, essay, blog post, poem, random assortment of syllables -- that either demonstrates a mastery of a traditional kind of story, a story we've read before but this is too good to pass up -- or a story that is so new, unique, or entertaining that it makes me see writing in a whole new way.

So get creative: use pictures. Embedded videos. Drawings. Play around with structure. Make up words (but not too many).

Stories about time travel will generally move to the head of the pack.

CLICK here to go to lit and learn more!

Hair's a little tip for you. (See what I did there?)

As a guy, and particularly as a guy with thinning, weak hair that is rapidly graying, I do not normally spend a lot of time thinking about hair styling and hair accessories.

But as a guy who is married to a woman, and who has raised to daughters, I have probably had to spend more than my fair share of time thinking about just that kind of thing, since women place an emphasis on their hair. Or at least the women in my household do.

Which is why I can share with you my find:http://finefeatherheads.com/ , which is sort of the newest hottest thing around for hair style, or so I am told, since I also am not the kind of person who knows when things are new, hot, or in style. (Or so I am told.)

Anyway, what this site mostly has is "feather hair extensions," which is a modernist and/or naturalist take on the traditional hair extensions, incorporating feathers into the look, and while the look may not be for everyone, it is striking and I could see people really liking it.  The site also has something called "hair chalk," which is almost exactly what it sounds like -- a coloring product that apparently lets girls get that dramatic hair they sometimes want as teens (think pinks and purples) without the change being as permanent as dye, so they could get their rebellion in and still not ruin the family photo at Christmas time.

So it's definitely a site worth checking out if you have hair and want to show it off.

The Best Rock Band

It's time I took America, and the rest of the world which looks up to us like little brothers look up to big brothers (i.e., with a mixture of grudging respect and secret loathing, always ready to tell Mom and Dad what we're up to but still hoping that they'll get invited along), under my wing and explained what rock music really is.

This is necessary, unfortunately, because people are throwing around the term "rock" rather loosely and diluting it. I first noticed this trend when U2's album "All That You Can't Leave Behind" was released. Here's what one reviewer on Amazon had to say about the first single from that album:

"Beautiful Day" signaled the return of U2 to their classic rock mold.

That was okay, as far as it went since "Beautiful Day" was sort of a rock- ish song, but the rest of the album was similarly lauded for U2 returning to "Rock and roll" when in fact, they had not. Critics were all agog over how U2 had given up on the techno of the Zooropa era and returned to "classic rock," but almost nothing on "All That You Can't Leave Behind" was "rock." It was mellow, adult-contemporary, easy-listening pop music that probably had guitars in it but they were unobtrusively hidden behind the plaintive lyrics about regretting your past.

That's not rock.

The trend of calling things "rock" that were not "rock" continued until it reached a head with the release of not one, but two Coldplay albums that were identified as "rock." First, X&Y came out and people called it a great "rock" record, mostly (I think) because Coldplay had a rare-for-them uptempo song with guitars and a video that was as far as I could see entirely ripped off from The Killers.

I know you baby boomers and music critics missed it, so I'll prove that last point:

Coldplay's Speed Of Sound:





The Killers' Somebody Told Me.



Do you think Coldplay had to wait until The Killers left to sneak onto the set and film their own video? Were they trying to save money.

The rest of X&Y was otherwise typical Coldplay: moody, slow, thoughtful... and not rock.

Then, Coldplay got set to release another album soon and people referred to the first single off that one as "rock," too.

No, it's not. Sorry. Just because somebody appears in Rolling Stone and/or uses a guitar in their music and/or you want to feel young and hip does not make something "rock" music. You can't simply take every song that has a guitar solo and call it "rock," but that's what's happening; people call everything "rock" or "rock and roll" and that's just wrong. There are categories of music just like there are categories of books and movies and tv shows and people. But only in music do people take the thing they like and try to cram it into the category they want to be in.

Would it be correct to say that every book is a "thriller" because that sounds exciting? No.

Would it be correct to say that every movie is an "action-adventure" because doing that promises that it will get the adrenaline flowing? No.

Would it be correct to say that every tv show is a "drama," every person is a "hunk" or "hottie," or every meal is "spaghetti" just because those are things you want? No, no, and no!

So why, then, does everyone refer to the music they like as "rock," no matter how non-rock-and-roll it is? And is there anything less rock-and-roll than Chris Martin promoting soccer? I don't think so.

Frankly, I blame the baby boomers; they're pretty much responsible for everything that's wrong with the world right now, anyway, and they are definitely responsible for attempting to blatantly recategorize "easy listening" as "rock and roll," because baby boomers are getting older and don't want to hear real "rock" anymore; they want to hear easy listening rock that doesn't cause heartburn, doesn't have lyrics that embarrass them in front of their kids, can be played over their iHome in their office without unnerving the staff, and would blend in very well as background music on either Grey's Anatomy or CSI: New York, those being what pass for "edgy" shows on TV nowadays.

But, baby boomers do not want to admit that they're getting older and mellower. They want to still be the people who claimed to have been at Altamont the people who pretended to like Hendrix even though he was a little over the top, the people who sang along with Roger Daltrey about wanting to die before they got old (but they didn't do the stutter part because they thought that sounded lame.) They want, in short, to still be the kind of people they used to pretend they were.

I get it. It's not easy admitting you're getting older. It's not easy admitting that your tastes have changed and nowadays you have less sympathy for the devil and more sympathy for your tired feet. It's not easy admitting that you have become a real-life version of Chevy Chase in "National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation," tapping your hands out of rhythm and getting the words wrong.

I couldn't find that clip, but I did find this, which makes the point almost as well:



It's not easy, that is, unless you're me and you were always like that and always knew it. I'm not a baby boomer; I'm a member of the real Generation X, which is the one the media never discovered because they were too busy calling kids who turned 16 the year "Smells Like Teen Spirit"came out "generation X," no matter how wrong that was, too.

As a member of real Generation X, I had no "rock and roll" fantasy to cling to. We didn't think we invented rock and roll; we didn't invent anything, musically speaking, unless it was the use of those video game sounds in "Rock The Casbah" by The Clash. That was Gen X's great contribution to music history-- mixing in random bits of sound here or there.

So I had that going for me, and also I had the fact that I was never considered cool. Never in my life. Kids who look forward to their weekly trip to the library, who have a shirt with iron-on letters that spell out "The Great Brain", who play D&D and have glasses and an eye patch, who never know what's going on, do not grow up to be rock-and-rollers. They grow up to be bloggers and lawyers who leave work early on Friday so they can go pick up three new CDs: Kraftwerk's Autobahn, a collection of Barbershop Quartet songs, and classic bagpipe music.

It's that distance, that lack of anything to cling to, that makes me understand far better than anyone else what "rock" really is. And it's that distance that makes me so upset when people refer to everything they like as "rock."

So with that incredibly long intro, I'm going to teach the US and the world what "rock" is by defining it the only way it can be: through giving you the groups that are essential rock bands and highlighting some of their more rocking songs.

Note: Not every song by a great rock band is "rock." It's possible for rockers to make a non-rock song; after all, Elvis recorded some gospel songs and they sounded great. So the fact that a band is called a "rock band" doesn't mean that everything they ever did is "rock." I just put that out there so that I don't get a bunch of snide emails saying "Yesterday isn't a rock song, jerk-face." Save your typing fingers. I know it's not a rock song. It's a non-rock song recorded by The Best Rock Band, The Beatles.

Sometimes, The Best in a category is just obvious, isn't it? I don't think there can really be any argument that there was ever a better rock band than The Beatles. I've been listening to their music the whole time I've been writing this and each time I listen to anything they played, I get astonished all over again at the passion they played with, the breadth of their musical ability, the music they created and influenced, and the span of their reach over music.

The Beatles didn't just take over America with their peppy natures, crazy movies, and catchy tunes about being in love. They tore into America with songs that aren't as well known as the poppier "Eight Days a Week" and the like but which had an undeniable rock and roll snarl to them. Songs like the first Beatles' song I ever heard, I'm Down:



If that song doesn't get your feet moving and head bobbing and make you want to get up and dance and do the splits, then you're just a weirdo. From Paul's a capella intro to the jamming synthesizers to the bold, striking guitar chords to the screams, I'm Down is the Indy Car of early Beatles' rock songs: all exposed parts and raw speed and danger. Nowadays, we hear about the early Beatles and it's all "moptops this" and "fainting girls" that, but I'm Down presented a rock and roll that was dangerous and moody and rebellious and dark -- while driving forward full-speed.

Now, that's rock.

They didn't stop there. The Beatles stripped rock down early on and then began rebuilding it. Listen to "Baby You Can Drive My Car":



It's got the same instruments and feel to it as I'm Down -- raw guitar, tambourines, piano, but it's different. It's more layered, more developed. It's rock-and-roll with all the edges sanded down so that they're not as sharp -- but they take curves better.

Oh, and they threw in the "beep beep beep beep yeah," a bit of nonsense that as I sit here more or less set the tone for, nearly 20 years later, The Clash to throw in their little video-game sounds. That's one of the many things that makes The Beatles The Best Rock Band: they were an influence, acknowledged or not, on every single band that came after them. They invented most areas of music.

Don't doubt me. Don't ever doubt me. Heavy metal? Wouldn't exist without The Beatles' Why Don't We Do It In The Road -- which had the same bass, the rolling undertones, the heavy guitars, that would come to mark the more moody parts of Led Zeppelin's work.

Oh, Darling was the same way:



Psychedelic stoner rock? Sorry, Pink Floyd, you just ripped off The Beatles' third stage, the one that came after Rubber Soul. Long before there was a Mother to say Goodbye Blue Sky, The Beatles had "Mother Nature's Son" and "Glass Onion." And even then, they could rock:



And that little ending song on The Wall, the quiet little meditation on life that follows the overwhelming grandure of the album? Done before, on Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, when after the wall of rock and roll that was "Golden Slumbers/The End," The Beatles' gave us this runout groove:



Overall, for years and years and years, The Beatles proved that not only could they craft ear-pleasing pop songs, tender love songs, and humorous little throwaways, but they could rock, with a ferocity that could not be matched, and a new-ness and creativity that would serve to set the tone for all rockers that followed them. They didn't take old R&B and build on it, like Elvis and the other early rockers had; they took the essence of music, ripped it apart, and put it back together for us in a new way, a way that grabs each corpuscle of your blood, each nerve ending, and each hair on your body, and electrifies them, making them appreciate the power of the sound and making you want to get up and move.


That's rock and roll. Rock and roll is powerful and fast and new and creative... and it makes you move. Like The Best Rock Band, The Beatles did, making rock and roll so good and so new and so excellent that everyone thereafter just copied something the four guys from Liverpool had already done in the course of making great rock, great rock like this: