Short Story: The Runaway

Aaron slipped out the door while his parents were watching TV; after all, neither Nancy or Benjamin Hackett had any reason to believe their only son was going to run away. "Run away" is at least what he himself, Aaron, would refer to it as years later when he told it as a funny antidote of some silly thing he did as a young kid.

He slipped out in the afternoon, while the sun was still high and the air still thick and warm. It was around half an hour, possibly more, before his parents noticed he was gone. It started when Nancy walked into the kitchen where she thought he was playing; "I thought Aaron was in here?" she relayed to Benjamin, who agreed: "so did I". He quickly moved up stairs, hoping to be the one who would resolve this conflict, only to be the one to initiate the panic as he shouted down to his wife that their son wasn't upstairs.

Aaron, upon leaving, had quickly come to terms with the fact that his original run away plans - to run far down the country, simply sleeping out on streets and next to roads like it was no problem, and somehow finding his way into a new life simply by talking to people in shops and walking around parks until someone chose to talk back to him - were very unrealistic and would need to be revised to go with the reality Aaron now found himself faced with.

His new plan, which he put into action simultaneously as he thought of it, was to run a few streets down from his house and camp out in the small forest area which he already knew well from playing with friends and walking his dog with his parents there. It wasn't really a forest at all, actually just a collection of farmer's fields with some greenery in between them. Aaron quickly found himself bored while sitting in the shelter of high grass and spiraling branches.

Aaron sat around wondering about the panic his parents must be in, although part of him actually hoped they weren't panicked at all, that they didn't even care that he had left and were happy to let him go, because that would be the perfect justification of why he ran away - at the present there was very little reasoning behind Aaron's runaway.

Instead his parents were very panicked. Benjamin went running into the streets, running down back alleys and all around the local neighbourhood, his fear turning to desperation with each unsuccessful street; while Nancy started ringing local friends, or parents of friends of Aaron, in hope that Aaron had simply forgotten to tell his parents that he was going to see a friend, and phoning family members too, most of which didn't even live nearby, to see if they had any guidance. The fact that she didn't phone the police is a clue that her mind hadn't yet reached out to the darkest possibilities.

Aaron found himself walking around the fields near his house with no other aim than to waste time. He walked near dog walkers so he could get a look at their dogs, and maybe even walk past so that he could stroke them, but never spoke to them; he walked through the tree and forest areas, discovering new pathways - he ran into a few small isolated areas where the floor was covered in flattened beer cans and greasy wrappers; he picked up stones and sticks and threw them around and pulled grass out of the ground as if he was simply bored and waiting for a friend to arrive. He hadn't brought a watch - hadn't brought much but a few survival items that he shoved into the biggest coat he had that he had wore to keep warm at night - but even without a clue to the time he still managed to understand that time was going very slowly for himself.

By the time the sun was setting, and the sky and to some extent the world beneath it had turned into a blueish shade of grey, both Nancy and Benjamin had given up hope that either of their respective methods of finding their son, both of which seemed to wish to undermine the seriousness of the problem, were going to work, and by this point were answering questions for police while alert looking middle aged family members, a crying grandmother and some concerned neighbours stood around the room feeling that they weren't doing enough.

Two police were in the Hackett family living room asking questions like "can you think of any reason why he might have ran away?" while another two policemen were already patrolling their car around and surveying the local area. They stopped off at one point to ask a group of kids playing football if they'd seen Aaron or any kid of his description but, despite the kids seemingly doing nothing wrong while playing their game of football, they all ran away as the police car pulled up. It seemed to the police, the family, the neighbours - everyone - that Aaron hadn't simply went for a stroll or went to hang out with some friends and the explanations started to become more worrying; words like "kidnapping" were never mentioned although surely only the least cynical and jaded of the lot, like Aaron's Grandma, weren't thinking them.

At first Aaron was happy when night time came around as it meant he would finally be able to sleep and the time he had been a runaway would go over faster, not to mention his parents wouldn't be able to go to bed without noticing he was gone. Although sitting in one of the wrapper-filled forest areas he became terrified by just how dark it was. He noticed for the first time that he had never actually been out this late alone, had only been allowed awake at these times at family get togethers. The darkness was complete and all consuming, it literally prevented him from knowing exactly what was a few centimeters in front of him; it was nothing like the night time in movies where you could still see everything and his eyes did not slowly adjust so that he could see the outlines of things like they did when his mother turned off his bedroom light at night.

He began to get scared that he would never find his way out of the darkness and felt the horrible urge to wriggle free from his own body like he did when trapped in small confined spaces. It took Aaron 20 minutes of using his hands the same way a blind man who's lost his walking stick would to find his way out into one of the fields, which, incidentally, was lit up only by the full moon in the sky. Aaron had never noticed the amount of light which radiates from a full moon, and the brief moment he took to stare up at its beauty was the first comforting moment Aaron had had all night.

By this time there were cops searching for Aaron so far away that, if Aaron was a little older, he would have probably found it hilarious. He walked home, freezing despite the coat. People, both family and not, were searching through the streets for him now. His parents would have been with them but the last policeman to talk to them had told them it would be best if they stayed inside and got some rest as it would mean the police could contact them easily if anything came up. They had both sat on the living room sofa, both sweating, in the total darkness, as if to look worried was somehow integral to being worried.

Aaron approached his house, still unaware of any commotion he had caused. He worried he would have to stay in the garden until morning but the door had been left unlocked - he wondered why. The house was in total darkness and total silence, which made him feel uneasy. He took off the coat. He made his way upstairs, shaking with the fear of getting told off if he was caught and from the general adrenaline rush of running away from home and camping in the woods. He heard heavy breathing from his parent's bedroom and decided to quietly creep into his own bedroom. He changed into his pyjamas, as quietly as possible, and jumped into bed. He continued to shake with fear and excitement but slowly he began to stabilize as the act of simply lying in bed in darkness merged this night with every other night he'd ever experienced, and it was as if nothing had happened.

Xscape by Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was one of those rare artists that only thought in big ideas: it's why all of his albums are so short - he had no time for filler; even his weaker tracks feel like integral parts of his library. It's also why his "adult career", which started in 1979 with Off The Wall, and lasted 30 years until his death, produced only six studio albums. I guess it's testament to Jackson's appeal then that he became possibly the biggest artist in the world with only those six: when Lester Bangs, on the occasion of the King's death said we'd never agree on anything again like we agreed on Elvis he got it wrong by one.

Which hasn't stopped it from becoming a sort of universal joke that anytime someone mentions this "new" MJ album that we all laugh about the absurdity of MJ still bringing out material from beyond the grave and how the studios are just milking him dry, yet really not being surprised at all - probably more surprised that this is only the second posthumous MJ release -  and, for those of us who didn't think of the man as only a cultural commodity but genuinely liked his music, the prospect of a new album is exciting. And Xscape is successful in all accounts an album with material that the singer himself decided to keep unreleased could be; it's eight tracks - taken from forgotten back alleys dotted through all of Jackson's career - and if it isn't all great material it's still all as big and vibrant as Jackson's music always aimed to be.

The best track is Do You Know Where Your Children Are? which supports my belief that while Jackson was always a showcase of grandiosity, his best moments where when he found something smaller to focus on - his best produced tracks usually the most claustrophobic ones. Here Jackson spins a tale of a kid running away to Hollywood to escape an abusive step dad. When Jackson sings "she is tired of stepdaddy using her/Saying that he'll buy her things, while sexually abusing her" a line that could sound so false from most other singers but has a real authenticity, a real caring, from Jackson's voice, he manages to bypass the fact that his voice never became as deep as many of his contemporaries and finds a different type of masculinity.

Contrary to growing belief, Jackson finished all of the vocals to these tracks, and even finished the production on many too; Timbaland and Co., who were hired to do production on the album, are more here to give the album a sort of unity and not sound like a bunch of randomly selected tracks; they succeed, although it's still easy to tell where some of the tracks come from: opener Love Never Felt So Good, another highlight, could be from nowhere but the Off the Wall-Thriller era, with its sparkling enthusiasm and Jackson's vocals sounding like they're bouncing all over like a ray of light in a hall full of mirrors, and just the general care free enthusiasm of a singer making music for the joy of music and not something more personal.

There's enough good stuff here to make Xscape essential to anyone who likes Jackson - I've had A Place with No Name and Loving You on repeat; there's throwaway stuff here too, the title track for instance, but Jackson's worst moments are only when he's overdoing it, he was never boring. Xscape is further proof that Jackson is an artist worth exploring, not just experiencing.

Pain & Gain (2013)

Name me one artist, any medium, who has ever done a full 180? Woke up one day and decided it's out with the old and in with the new. You can't, can you? It's because it doesn't happen - yet everyone who saw the trailers for Pain & Gain on release secretly thought, hoped even, that this was Michael Bay being reborn as a "mature" filmmaker; a big middle finger to Transformers and fast food tie ins and all the rest.

But the guy's already got a new Transformers on the horizon, and a heavily butchered Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles too. And P&G isn't too different from the lot of them: the humor is childishly vulgar as always and Bay's camera literally never stops twirling around and cutting for the film's two hours. It's not that Bay's refined his talents, simply that he's found a story so absurd that Bay's way of doing things fits like a glove.

And you could see it then as a bit of a joke that the absurd story that P&G spins is a true story: Marky Mark Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, a fitness nut and small time personal trainer who's, as he puts it, "wearing sweat pants to work" and wants to make it in the big leagues. He recruits fellow down and outer Adrian (Anthony Mackie) and reformed god serving con Paul (Dwayne Johnson) for his plan to kidnap and hold ransom his greedy one percenter of a boss Tony Shalhoub. Things obviously go wrong and the screen explodes into a mesh of cocaine and dead bodies.

It has a lot in common with Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street, another true crime story from the 90s, and another story told in a hyperreal way: full of kinetic energy and both very self-conscious (a sign even appearing in one of P&G's more absurd moments to remind us "this is still a true story"). Most film fans wouldn't put Bay and Scorsese side by side but the comparison here is a good showcase of just how close well respected art and low brow art is: P&G is irreverent like hell - sure to turn many off - but if you buy into it it's a shot of pure fun straight to the mainline.

Wahlberg always gives off a very no-fuss quality; it's not an old fashioned movie star charm but the guy has a confidence that most of his contemporaries lack, used here with brilliant effect to play Lugo as someone who has bigger ambitions than he has restraint; while Johnson gives inarguably his best performance (I can't think of any performance of his coming close). Although it's screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely who deserve the most praise: this is the first Bay film about something. If you want it's just some violent pop corn fun, but there's a sense of tragedy to this story as well, of small timers wanting so bad to live out the American Dream they end up turning to crime because it's the only way they can make it.

The film isn't without problems: the quick cutting is here, sure to send any analytical film fan's heart plunging to the bottom of the ocean, although P&G reminded me more of a Michael Mann film than previous Bay stuff: each shot counts, has a real purpose in the scene than to just spice things up. The constant fast pace has its own problems though, like in an early scene in the gym in which Anthony Mackie speaks of his hopeless dreams - it feels like things should slow down and we should get a quick breather while this emotional moment happens, while instead the push onward continues. It's a reminder that it's the material that is such a good fit for Bay, not Bay adapting his style to the material. But it doesn't change the fact that P&G is some of the most fun I've had watching a movie in a while - an unashamedly crass jolt to the senses, and a work of film construction that deserves to be admired as much as any film from last year.

Only a Nerdy Psychology Student Would Notice this...

...but this shot from Pain & Gain is exactly like the "iceberg diagram" we're show in class: Marky Mark's head above the water, the normal size one, is the reality of things - the level headed side of the character - while the distorted view from under the water is his repressed thoughts. The mind is made of the id, ego and superego; and the id (which deals with desires and urges) is clearly going out of control in this shot (what sets the events of the film in motion, really).

Plus, intentional or not, this shot sort of goes with the old "keeping your head above water" saying. Probably the best few seconds of Michael Bay's career.

Playlist

Starting up a new feature: each week I'll go through the best songs I heard that I'd never heard before. Hopefully it'll be a good place for people to discover some new tunes:

Allure - Jay Z. I'm working my way through Jay's back catalogue (at least his pre fake-retirement stuff) and searching for the hidden gems. This is one of those songs that keeps the same tempo throughout, so you can keep putting it back to near the start and have it playing on constant repeat (heavily recommended).

Atmosphere - Joy Division. I've practically out played every JD song there is but never got into this one until a few days ago. Ian Curtis' voice sounds so weird, it sounds intrusive, like he's speaking to you directly through the speakers. The floaty backing track sounds so optimistic for JD. Fantastic video too.

L.A. Women - The Doors. The Doors were in the crapper by this point and the album this is from is downright terrible, but this one song is classic Doors: you can really hear every member of the band working together, and Jim Morrison's voice, altered by years of drug abuse, sounds scary and out of control.

I Can't Help It - Michael Jackson. I can't be the only one excited for the new album, even if it is just a few remastered demos. This one's from the first album of Jackson's "adult career". Repeating the main title line he just sounds so intense.

There's A Man In There - Birdland and Lester Bangs. I just read the Bangs biography (brilliant, by the way) the other week, and the impression I got was that his music was terrible, but this is brilliant. Bangs' voice is so powerful and it takes on extra meaning when you find out the lyrics are about the death of his father.

Let Me Go - Gary Barlow. Not my sort of thing but every time I'm at the gym this song is playing so it was only a matter of time before I started playing it at home. My mum walked past while it was on and started laughing hysterically and told me she thought it was a joke song, so I guess not everyone likes Gary. Catchy though.

The Rolling People - The Verve. I'd only ever heard their hit singles so I decided to give their album Urban Hymns (where all their hit singles are from) a whirl. Most of the shorter tracks are throwaway but they had a great talent for longer, jam session type tracks. This is the best example.

Retrograde - James Blake. The best track from his album Overgrown which I was long overdue in getting around to. I shouldn't have to explain: it's practically bleeding pure emotion.

The New Classic by Iggy Azalea

Iggy Azalea's talent actually shines through - where most modern pop stars are hidden behind production, it's fun just to hear Iggy rap. Her raps reminded me of Pusha T - maybe the comparison isn't very obvious, yet both have the ability to rap a flow that feels strong and intimidating without feeling like they're trying. They're aggressive without being strained. Listening to Iggy shoot out lines has a laid back urgency that is always fun to listen to.

That is why, for the most part, The New Classic fails. It has its highlights - the loopy New Bitch, minimalistic opener Walk the Line - although these tracks work mostly because the production doesn't get in the way. When the guest stars start to move in I was waiting for Iggy's choruses, and when the production started to fill the speakers I was waiting for the tracks to end.

The New Classic does do a good job of creating an image for Iggy, here as the aggressive, no bullshit "nineties chick". It's an image that has her spitting lines like "Fresh in some new shit/Damn, she is too thick, who is this?/Yeah I'm his new bitch" with ease, while feeling completely uneasy and artificial with lines as life affirming as "Keep on living/Keep on breathing/Even when you don't believe it/Keep on climbing/Keep on reaching".

Iggy's persona is a sort of self-knowing version of the gloating personas of rappers like Eminem and Jay Z that a nineties chick like herself would have grown up listening to. On a more focused album a track as focused and claustrophobic as Goddess would feel as aiding of Iggy's persona as an album like Yeezus was to Kanye West's, yet as I say only parts of this album is focused on the right places. Instead The New Classic is a better showcase for Iggy's talents than it is a good listen.

Joy Division: Celebrating the Irony

The first time I ever made a friend listen to Joy Division I sat them down and put Love Will Tear Us Apart on. They listened for about 20 seconds, asked "what kind of emo shit am I listening to?" and turned it off. I was a little pissed but I can't really blame them, the first time I heard JD was the song Transmission; I mistook the announcement of "Radio, live transmission" as the gastral flaw of some weird gremlin doing an impression of a clogged up throat. It was the voice of Ian Curtis.

Being a JD fan (like I eventually became) is similar to being a Nirvana fan - both left behind discographies so relatively small that you end up fetishizing every song and scrap of information you can get your hands on. Ian Curtis was only 23 years old, and had been Joy Divisioning for less than three years, when he slung himself up from the washing line in his kitchen. When you first come to the realization that JD are actually a good band (I think it was Disorder that did it for me) their library - the entire of it being only two studio albums and a couple of compilations - doesn't seem like it would be enough for you to be able to even call yourself a fan; although you'd be surprised at the mileage you can get out of a few records when there's no alternative.

Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Bernard Sumner had been playing for a while when they signed up Curtis as singer after a Sex Pistols concert. It's the great punk myth that none of them could play any of their instruments, but what separates the "punk" of Johnny Rotten and Co. and the "post-punk" of Joy Division (a broad term at best, being that it also encompasses wildly different bands like Talking Heads and The Police) is that the former was angry thrashing and the latter was a slowly building cloud of moody atmosphere. Or: the former was anger at society, the latter was anger at the self.

And Joy Division really could play: listen to the precision of guitars on Disorder, a complete contrast to the mess that a band like The Ramones would throw out at the time (a fantastic mess, before you start yelling); or the claustrophobic production in Atrocity Exhibition which slowly builds to the point of sweat and tears as guitar feedback rings through the speakers; or Peter Hook's bass (severely underrated) which had the power to cut through the air like a razor blade. And it's impressive how many sides there are to be found in a band around for such a short time: garage punk ripoffs on their earliest recordings; energetic and at times extremely heavy on Unknown Pleasures; dark and claustrophobic on Closer; and aggressive enough to turn crowds into chaos when live.

I find it interesting to think about live JD, because it's more than likely that even most JD fans in the early 80s hadn't seen them live. If you're wanting to check out live JD you haven't got much to go on: beyond their few appearances on the BBC and some piss poor quality recordings on Youtube, the only quality source of live JD is on compilation disc Still. Just listen to it: I'd argue it makes the case for JD as some of the greatest live performers ever, if only in raw talent and not prolificacy. The best live performers - say Jimi Hendrix or Nirvana, the one's who knew how to make a live set it's own thing and not just a recreation of their albums - were also the ones always closest to falling apart. Cobain and Hendrix sometimes struggled to get through a set, their talent a very active struggle for all to see, while Curtis performed under the constant fear of having an epileptic fit.

Now, I wouldn't call JD a one man show, not with the talent already described, but if all music is is just another way for humans to channel emotions from one another then the emotions of JD are surely all Curtis', with the rest of the band organically moving around him. Listen to the live version of Transmission on Still; you can hear the emotions getting channeled, a constant state of unease building to an explosion, and not just from Ian: the guitars are different from the album version, they have a sense of urgency to them. JD didn't have the eclectic live sets of Hendrix or Nirvana, they stuck mostly to stuff on their albums - but there's a feeling to their live recordings, of a real person performing, getting up on stage like you or I would and doing his best. Not a superstar, too comfortable with performing live, going over another well choreographed performance.

I'd recommend any JD fan check out Control, the biopic of Curtis' life starring Sam Riley as the man himself. On my first viewing I thought Riley, great at the dramatic stuff, was only doing a poor imitation of Curtis' singing. It wasn't until I listened to Still that I realized he had got it right, that his somber throaty delivery really was what Curtis sounded like live, and not the spectral baritone of the albums, like a ghost hanging over each song.

And it's here, in these contrasts between the reality and the fantasies that the music studio afford that you can draw up a narrative out of JD. If there is a "theme" to early JD it's high tech and futuristic. There's a cold, machine like preciseness to the guitars. The front cover of their first album is a visualization of some radio waves; a complete contrast to the "pleasures" promised within. All of their photography is in black and white. All of this could be seen as Curtis trying to create order out of the chaos of his personal life. Trying to turn the grand, lush, despairing emotions he felt into digitalized 1s and 2s. It's a depressing goal, yet there's something hopeful about how Unknown Pleasures looks to the future, about that lone radio signal in the middle of total darkness.

By the time Closer - the second and final JD album - released, this sense of hope had gone. The cover, which depicts a funeral in an Egyptian tomb, looks like a mystical photograph recovered from hundreds of years ago. It's pointing only to the past. Curtis wrote it down himself in the line that's used to open Control: "Existence. Well, what does it matter? I exist on the best terms I can. The past is now part of my future. The present is well out of hand". The whole album represents Curtis' defeat to the dark thoughts clawing at him, and JD finds the perfect music to go without.

As I said earlier: fetishizing over small details and romanticizing everything. I know the little narrative I've just carved out of the JD albums isn't really what was intended; the truth was probably far more ordinary than that. But that's the reason fans draw such a personal connection between themselves and bands like JD and Nirvana. They're making their parts to bands they wish they had more of. So fuck the skeptics, this time rock and roll really was a matter of life or death.

Bookshelf: Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace

David Foster was quite possibly the greatest writer of his generation and the writing in Both Flesh and Not, the only collection of his work released after his death, is practically sign posted as his worst. After all, why would he not include these pieces in the collections he hand picked himself?

What this really is is the leftovers. Beautiful leftovers, better than most writers ever manage, but lesser works of a master nonetheless. Wallace's two previous collections - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider The Lobster - are more substantial and surely worth checking out first, while to say that they are better isn't entirely accurate; not when each collection, despite none being "themed", shows a very different side to Wallace.

Both previous collections focus on particular periods of Wallace's career: Fun Thing on 1991 - 1996 and Lobster on 1997 - 2005. Viewed like this it would be easy to see an evolution of Wallace's writing from one to the other. Fun Thing made the case for him as a hip social commentator, the best pieces being the long wandering ones. It's an insight into a messy writer with more talent than he has places to publish it and more ideas than he has time to properly compose. Lobster makes the case for him as a "genius", or is at least one of the reasons he's been called it so much. The essays are more focused and have an end message; his language had become more dense and complex.

Different from these, BFAN spans Wallace's whole career, from 1988 to 2007. It shows that Wallace's writing didn't change all that much over time, not that it needed to: he was the same prodigiously talented, slang speaking academic show off he'd always be back in '88. In one of the earliest pieces here - titled Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young - Wallace examines the current state of the American Novel circa 1988, of which he himself was obviously part of (and which like always he tries to ignore). Wallace isn't too pleased with the state of modern fiction: it's here that Bret Easton Ellis' long feud with Wallace stems from, and Ellis isn't the only one Wallace singles out in a not so great light - which begs the question: when does a writer earn our right to listen? The essay is a fun time capsule, but undeniably flawed: Wallace starts off making the case for the writers of the past, most of which didn't need any education in writing, yet then goes on to criticize the lack of education of many writers of his own generation.

If it wasn't Wallace who had written this piece but someone who hadn't went on to such big things, and someone stumbled upon it, would they treat it as having the same authority that we give it now? No, no doubt about it. You'll read most of these pieces for their author; some transcend this and some don't.

There's a wide variety of topics here: tennis, AIDs, Terminator 2; although more than anything else Wallace writes about writing itself. This is of course risky, as any writer knows; a legion of fans always waiting for such pieces in the hope that they'll have some back stage pass to a writers talent. Yet in these pieces Wallace distances himself from his own work. In his introduction to Best American Essays 2007, Wallace writes that his selection process for choosing the best essays of the year, the ones with the most "value" as he calls it, are the ones that fight against the "total noise". That's the name he gives to the modern culture: the never ending stream of the web and the TV, or in this case the impossible-to-get-read-them-all quantity of essays released in 2007. Wallace writes that the best essays untangle some part of the Total Noise, and don't just add more to it. This is much more clear in Wallace's other collections, it's the clearest explanation for a piece like Up, Simba (in Lobster), which followed a political rally and deconstructed the whole process of following a political candidate in minute detail. Wallace was simply trying to unravel a mess of a culture; and seemingly doing it singlehandedly.

As I say, this is less apparent in BFAN. The strength of these essays is accessibility: they're surely shorter and much less dense in information or technical jargon than in Wallace's other work. The pieces are more niche, yet they offer their own "value". The most fun I had was with 24 Word Notes which is simply Wallace's guide to certain word usage and is the best case that, given the right output, Wallace could write something short and fitted into a structure and still retain all the qualities of his best writing. Hanging over it all is: would Wallace want us reading this stuff? But in the end does it matter? I imagine Wallace being the sort who obsessed over which pieces went into his previous collections and which didn't, and here is a book where he had no control at all, and surely that is important.