Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Exploded View
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 4/29/1969
WEBSITE:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_McPheeters * https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/born-againsts-born-mcpheeters-on-his-eerily-realistic-dystopian-novel-about-police-surveillance
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born April 29, 1969, in Lorain, OH.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, artist, journalist, musician. Former lead singer for punk bands Born Against, beginning 1987, Men’s Recovery Project, beginning 1993, and Wrangler Brutes, beginning 2003; Vermiform Records, founder, 1990.
WRITINGS
Also coathor, with Mark Steese, of Travelers’ Tales: Rumors and Legends of the Albany-Saratoga Region, privately published, 1981. Has written for Apology, Chicago Reader, Criterion, Vice, and Village Voice, among others.
SIDELIGHTS
Sam McPheeters was prominent in the punk rock scene from 1989 to 2004 as a lead singer for bands including Born Against, Men’s Recovery Project, and Wrangler Brutes. Since then he has put his talents to use in writing, both journalism and the novels The Loom of Ruin and Exploded View. Speaking with Michael T. Fournier in the online Noisey, McPheeters commented on his switch in careers from music to writing: “I’m not a musician. Here’s the thing about playing music: if you can’t actually play music, it’s … wretched. Bands are … business ventures with a crappy selection of consolation prizes—artistic expression, spotty camaraderie, brief moments of glory—substituted for actual business. … It’s an irrational pursuit. … The month after my last band imploded, I went to a concert and felt queasy. None of the familiar rituals made any sense to me. So I stopped going. … I’ve got other things to explore. I like writing. I’m borderline competent at it, and I can’t say that about many things.”
The Loom of Ruin
McPheeters’s debut novel, the 2012 work The Loom of Ruin, is a piece of speculative fiction featuring a very angry man, Trang Yang, a gas station franchise owner. Trang came to Los Angeles as a hopeful immigrant a decade prior to the action in the novel, but his future seemed to be cut short when a stray bullet from an LAPD officer’s gun passed through his brain. This trauma actually changed all Trang’s thoughts and emotions, turning them into a white-hot anger and need for violence. In an effort to cover up the shooting, the LAPD issued Trang total immunity, meaning that he could take his need for violence out on hapless customers, innocent passers-by, even executives of the oil company controlling his franchise. His weapon of choice is an aluminum baseball bat. Meanwhile, Trang is being watched by a bevy of personages, from private detectives to the FBI, LAPD, corporate spies from Chevron, and his ex-wife. All these people want to find out what he is up to and what dark secret he is hiding.
Reviewing The Loom of Ruin in the Washington Post Online, Chris Richards called it a “satire skewering Hollywood, late capitalism, and all the red-white-and-blue absurdity McPheeters can cram into the black hole of 21st-century Los Angeles.” Richards added that the author’s “tone is about 60 percent deadpan, 40 percent dead serious—which is approximately the ratio that makes his new novel … so funny.” Writing at the Chicago Reader Website, Philip Montoro also had praise, commenting: “What I like best about the book is its absurdity. It’s not waka-waka absurdity—it rarely calls attention to itself, and when it does, it does so tactfully. The tone is dark, clipped, and dry, with a cynical bite.” Montoro went on to observe: “In the universe of The Loom of Ruin, human society has become a malevolent machine that’s not just indifferent to our happiness but actively working to prevent it, as though it had not only become somehow sentient but also discovered that it hated us. I find that the book’s title makes a lot more sense read in this light.”
Joseph Lapin similarly noted in the online LA Weekly: “The Loom of Ruin [is] a book showcasing head-severing action, jump cuts as quick as Bruce Lee karate chops and a main character capable of only one emotion—rage. It’s packed with so much action, violence and black comedy you’ll swear you stumbled into a movie written by Kurt Vonnegut and directed by Robert Rodriguez.” Likewise, Birth. Movies. Death. Website contributor Zack Carlson noted: “This is a truly great novel about not-so-great times. Like its bloodthirsty protagonist, it seems largely fueled by the desire to target and eradicate the unacceptable blunders that most of us try to ignore. We live in an age where hard work is considered low class. Talent isn’t as enviable as foundationless fame. Literacy is generally unfashionable. In the midst of all this, a first-time novelist unveils something jarring, innovative and relentlessly entertaining.”
Exploded View
McPheeters’s second novel, Exploded View, is set in the Los Angeles of 2050 and presents readers with a futuristic police procedural. Here, LAPD detective Terri Pastuzka employs various forms of augmented reality equipment to help solve a series of murders that appear to have no motive. Meanwhile, Los Angeles is filled with refugees from a brief nuclear war between China and India and the citizens of the beleaguered city use the same high-tech equipment to keep themselves entertained. Now, as the body count rises on her case, Pastuzka wonders if she can trust this technology, for everyone can create their own version of the truth.
A Publishers Weekly contributor found little to like in this “clumsy” novel, noting that “though the mystery is solved, the solution is as empty and meaningless as the technology it’s based on.” Booklist reviewer Don Vicha, however, found more to like, noting of Exploded View: “The suspense here builds to a satisfying conclusion resonating with authentic emotion and a profound question about life.” Similarly, a Kirkus Reviews Online critic felt that the “book’s powerful themes—the relationship of police to policed, trust in governmental authority, trust in the media, immigrant tensions, and generational change—are sharply executed, and the groundwork is well-laid for a possible sequel.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 15, 2016, Don Vicha, review of Exploded View, p. 32.
Publishers Weekly, September 5, 2016, review of Exploded View, p. 59.
ONLINE
Birth. Movies. Death., http://birthmoviesdeath.com (March 21, 2012), Zack Carlson, review of The Loom of Ruin.
Chicago Reader, http://www.chicagoreader.com/ (April 11, 2012), Miles Raymer, author interview, Philip Montoro, review of The Loom of Ruin.
File, http://file-magazine.com (June 8, 2012), Jan Galligan, review of The Loom of Ruin.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com (August 1, 2016), review of Exploded View.
LA Weekly, http://www.laweekly.com/ (April 9, 2012), Joseph Lapin, review of The Loom of Ruin.
Noisey, https://noisey.vice.com/ (September 23, 2016), Michael T. Fournier, author interview.
Sam McPheeters Website, http://sam-mcpheeters.tumblr.com/ (April 24, 2017).
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (April 20, 2012), Chris Richards, review of The Loom of Ruin.
Sam McPheeters
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sam McPheeters
SamMcPheeters.jpg
Background information
Born 1969
Lorain, Ohio
Associated acts Born Against, Men's Recovery Project, Wrangler Brutes
Website sammcpheeters.com
Sam McPheeters (born 1969 Lorain, Ohio) is an American artist, journalist, novelist, and performer. Raised in Albany, New York, he became a published author at age 12, with Travelers' Tales,[1] a collection of regional folklore. In 1985, McPheeters grew active with the hardcore punk scene, producing several fanzines and organizing local concerts. After moving to New York City in 1987, he co-founded Born Against in 1989 and the Vermiform Records label in 1990. In 1993, he co-founded the Virginia-based band Men's Recovery Project, and in 2003, he co-founded the Los Angeles-based band Wrangler Brutes.[2]
Starting in 2005, McPheeters has written for a variety of national magazines, including the Chicago Reader, Huffington Post, the OC Weekly, Vice, and the Village Voice.[3][4] In 2012, his first novel, The Loom Of Ruin, was published through Los Angeles-based Mugger Books and received positive reviews.[5][6][7] He lives in Pomona, California.
In 2016, Talos Press release McPheeters' second novel, Exploded View.[8]
Contents [hide]
1 Bibliography
2 Discography
2.1 with Born Against
2.2 with Men's Recovery Project
2.3 with Wrangler Brutes
3 External links
4 References
Bibliography[edit]
(1981) Travelers Tales
(2012) The Loom Of Ruin
(2016) Exploded View
Discography[edit]
Fear of Smell (1993)
Feer of Smell (1998)
Sam McPheeters / The Catholic Church (1998)
with Born Against[edit]
Born Against (1990)
Eulogy
Nine Patriotic Hymns for Children
Battle Hymns of the Race War (1993)
Suckerpunch split
Screeching Weasel split (1993)
Universal Order of Armageddon split (1993)
Man Is The Bastard split (1994)
Compilation appearances
Murders Among Us (1990)
Forever
Bllleeeeaaauuurrrrgghhh!
Our Voice, Pro Choice
Give Me Back (1991)
The Dignity of Human Being is Vulnerable
God's Chosen People
False Object Sensor
with Men's Recovery Project[edit]
Frank Talk About Humans (1994)
Botanica Mysteria (1996)
Grappling with the Homonids (1998)
Golden Triumph of Naked Hostility (1998)
Resist The New Way (1999)
Boldies over Basra (2000)
The Very Best of Men's Recovery Project (2005)
with Wrangler Brutes[edit]
Cassette
Tour 7"
Zulu (2004)
ABOUT
- Born 1969 Lorian, Ohio
- Raised in Albany, NY
- 1981: co-authored Traveler’s Tales; Rumors and Legends of the Albany-Saratoga
Region (with Mark Steese)
- 1989-2004: sang for Born Against, Men’s Recovery Project, Wrangler Brutes
- 2009-2015: Wrote for Vice, Criterion, Chicago Reader, Village Voice
- 2012: First novel, The Loom of Ruin, published by Mugger Books
- 2016: Second novel, Exploded View, published by Talos Press
LIKES
Age of Quarrel, Allegro Non Tropo, B&E dub, Confederacy of Dunces, Goldmine font, Hamburger Eyes, ice cream, Looney Tunes, Los Angeles, HP Lovecraft, Missing Persons, Myrna Loy, Kurt Russell, San Soleil, Sick Teen fanzine, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Three Stooges, Towing Jehovah, Gahan Wilson, Zardoz
DISLIKES
Bars, cooking, drunks, Fig Newtons, Florida, guns, hippie bullshit, imprecision, kombucha, Levitated Mass, live music, Natalie Merchant’s music, mockingbirds, Nazis, overdraft fees, REM, Lou Reed, Kai Ryssdal’s voice, sports, the smell of tar, throwing up, wet Band-Aids, Wikipedia
Sam McPheeters
Sam McPheeters
Follow
Sam McPheeters was born in Ohio and raised in upstate New York. In 1981, at age 12, he co-authored Travelers Tales; Rumors and Legends of the Albany-Saratoga Region. Starting in 1989, he sang for Born Against, Men's Recovery Project, and Wrangler Brutes, touring 17 times across North America, Europe, and Japan. Since 2009, he has written for Apology, Chicago Reader, Criterion, Vice, and The Village Voice, among others.
QUOTE:
I'm not a musician. Here's the thing about playing music: if you can't actually play music, it's fucking wretched. Bands are basically business ventures with a crappy selection of consolation prizes—artistic expression, spotty camaraderie, brief moments of glory—substituted for actual business. By definition, it's an irrational pursuit. ... I went to a concert and felt queasy. None of the familiar rituals made any sense to me. So I stopped going. The world is a big place. I've got other things to explore.
I like writing. I'm borderline competent at it, and I can't say that about many things.
Born Against’s Sam McPheeters on His Eerily Realistic Dystopian Novel About Police Surveillance
MF
Michael T. Fournier
Sep 23 2016, 1:05pm
His second novel, 'Exploded View,' sets its sights on the LAPD of 2050.
Photo by Lisa Auerbach
Sam McPheeters was the singer for New York hardcore punk legends Born Against, a band that took every chance to poke an angry finger in the eye of dogma and orthodoxy. His subsequent music projects, the bizarro absurdist theater Men's Recovery Project and the caustic Wrangler Brutes, were no less confrontational. But the thing about McPheeters' music was that his anger was never kneejerk, but laden with purpose, a calling out and demand for accountability absent from the most of the genre.
McPheeters self-released his own fanzine Error and wrote columns for Punk Planet while playing in bands. After curtailing his vocalist duties, he focused on writing novels. His first, 2012's The Loom of Ruin, was an intricately plotted series of cliffhangers culminating (spoiler alert!) on the destruction of Los Angeles.
In Exploded View, to be released on October 18, McPheeters trains his critical eye on Los Angeles once again, but focuses on the Los Angeles Police Department, this time in the year 2050. His protagonist, detective Terri Pastuzka, investigates a murder that tendrils out into the city's refugee crisis—the city is overrun by illegal asylum seekers following a catastrophic war between India and China. Pastuzka uses her PanOpts (think Google Glasses, but useful) to access video recorded by citizens and surveillance cameras all over the city.
PanOpts and EyePhones, their civilian equivalent, are ubiquitous in Exploded View. Rather than simply watching television, these devices allow users to command their favorite television shows and movies to end however they wish, skewing the very notion of journalism—and of truth.
As we near the election, this notion of manipulating facts grows more ominous. This is just one of the topics McPheeters and I tackled in this interview.
Noisey: How much attention did you pay attention to the media coverage surrounding the Boston Marathon bombing?
Sam McPheeters: The bombing happened six weeks before I finished Exploded View. Meaning, I was unhealthy, unhappy, and viewing the news through the fearful lens of having current events overtake my subject matter. But although this particular event involved much of my subject matter, I was mostly frustrated at how little discussion there was over martial law unofficially descending on a large American city. I still don't get that.
The reason I ask is because on page 240 of Exploded View, Terri wonders "why didn't she live in a universe where it was okay to crowd source a murder case." In the days before the FBI released info on the Tsarnev brothers, a bunch of internet sleuths tried to figure out who committed the bombings, and in doing so identified and harassed the wrong guy—and just today Glenn Beck settled out-of-court with a guy he accused of being involved. It read like an intentional nod.
I didn't consider that you might be trying to keep the world out while writing—rather than taking it in. But it makes sense: I noticed you dialed back your internet presence after Loom of Ruin. How long/how extreme was your attempt to keep the world and news out of your novel?
No, it was just the opposite. I absorbed as much information from the outside world as possible. I was able to write this thing so quickly—ten months for the first draft—partly because I treated each writing session like a dream; anything that happened in my life got sucked in and reconfigured. If I hurt my shoulder, a character hurt his shoulder. If I read about Internet knuckleheads trying, and failing, to crowdsource a murder investigation, I had a character ponder this same concept. Although I'd completely forgotten I'd written the thing on page 240.
Were there, or are there, specific incidents from real life that were catalysts to this line of thought in your book? If not, where did the idea come from?
There wasn't any one incident; it's the story of this decade. I started writing Exploded View during the 2012 race, right around the time the phrase "post-truth politics" became a thing. The political implications are already fucked. CNN has just released a poll showing that Trump's assault on the media has worn public trust in journalism down to a nubby 30 percent. Now consider what this will be like in two decades, when anyone, anywhere, can falsify news.
It's a frightening prospect. There's ample evidence of truth becoming less and less relevant. And in the wake of police shootings, there's always public outcry for police to wear cameras—it's only a matter of time, in such a case, before footage is outright forged. Maybe this has happened already in a police context; I don't know.
Forging footage currently takes a lot of work. There was an uproar last year in Europe, when the German Jon Stewart made it look like the Greek finance minister had flipped the bird to Deutschland. The entire forgery took less than two seconds, and still required the skills of a TV studio to pull off. Also, conspiracies are porous. It would be very hard for any police department to keep falsified footage secret. But give it a decade or so. Although, by that time, any one will be able to "remix" bodycam video in real time.
You do a great job in Exploded View of coupling post-truth with surveillance. Terri reconstructs crime scenes using her PanOpts—nice pun, by the way—which merge all existing footage. All of the attention to technological detail in your book is a joy—every layer of surveillance and device is so well-thought and believable. Because the world is so rich and nuanced, I was especially surprised that it only took you ten months to write the first draft. I'm on novel number four and they never get easier to write, especially first drafts. Aside from the dreamlike state you already mentioned, what else might have been responsible for the fast output? And how does your process this time compare to when you wrote Loom Of Ruin?
The first novel I wrote took me 16 years. It's a rookie book, and largely unreadable. A large chunk of that novel takes place in 17th century Turkey. I spent years on my research—there was a period in my life where I could have schooled anyone on Ottoman inflation. It was fun—I'm never going to complete my bachelor's degree, so when else will I be able to make time to read Turkish history? But it also consumed a lot of lifespan. When I wrote The Loom of Ruin over the course of three years, I decided to skip any research that wasn't absolutely necessary. I'd devised a tight system by the time I wrote this book.
And it wasn't a fun ten months. I wrecked my health, put on a lot of weight, had to go on antidepressants and get physical therapy and an ultrasound for suspicious pains. I wouldn't recommend working the way I did.
Speaking of The Loom of Ruin, that book's short chapters had a cinematic sort of feel. Exploded View did, as well, though the cityscape was far bleaker. The near-future scenario and the technology reminded me of Blade Runner. How conscious are you of film when you're writing fiction, in terms of tone and mood?
I'm not sure. Both novels are built in three acts, script-style, only because I never learned any other way to set up outlines. I did have Blade Runner in mind when I wrote this, but not as an influence. My book jumps ahead the same span of time—38 years. Go back 38 years and you hit the mid-1970s, a period I remember well. The world doesn't look that different now. We have more gadgets and better clothes, but the essentials are the same; people have jobs, drive cars, run up debt, etc. I love science fiction that shows continuity. Meaning, I loved seeing old junkers in Blade Runner, but I thought it was silly when Harrison Ford mentions a bar in "the fourth sector." I like the idea of exploring a future LA partially through civic change. What's the future of Boyle Heights? What becomes of LAX after peak oil? What happens when the per-square-foot cost of office space inevitably plummets?
So, with all this said, why writing? This book made you bummed out and physically ill while writing it. Why writing now, and not playing music?
I'm not a musician. Here's the thing about playing music: if you can't actually play music, it's fucking wretched. Bands are basically business ventures with a crappy selection of consolation prizes—artistic expression, spotty camaraderie, brief moments of glory—substituted for actual business. By definition, it's an irrational pursuit. For a variety of reasons—some mental illness-related—I forced myself to overlook all these objections when I played shows. The month after my last band imploded, I went to a concert and felt queasy. None of the familiar rituals made any sense to me. So I stopped going. The world is a big place. I've got other things to explore.
I like writing. I'm borderline competent at it, and I can't say that about many things. I made some urgency-based mistakes in the writing of Exploded View, but I'm good at learning from my errors. Next time around, it'll be a better experience.
This is what I wanted to do when I was a kid. Ten-year-old me would be really excited that I have a science fiction novel coming out.
Are you working on your next project already? If so, what can you say about it?
One of the errors I've learned from is announcing big projects before they happen. So I keep mum on new doings. Even now, with the book release less than a month away, I'm still paranoid that a rogue tornado or something will destroy the printing plant. Fingers crossed.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 2012
BOOKS / SPRING BOOKS WEEK / MUSIC
A Q&A with Sam McPheeters
Posted By Miles Raymer on 04.11.12 at 03:35 PM
mcpheeterw.jpgLike a lot of people I first encountered Sam McPheeters through his work fronting legendary 90s hardcore band Born Against, and I continued to follow not only his musical progression, through groups like the Men's Recovery Project and Wrangler Brutes, but also his burgeoning writing career, which took him from the pages of Punk Planet to Vice (where among other things he contributed one of the greatest profiles of an insane former punk rocker ever committed to print) and eventually the Reader.
Currently McPheeters is on an extensive tour promoting his first published novel, The Loom of Ruin, which is about the angriest man in the world (Philip Montoro reviewed the book earlier today). He's also laying the groundwork for the first issue of Exploded View Quarterly, a literary magazine he's working on with former Vice editor in chief Jesse Pearson. McPheeters hits Chicago tomorrow, when he'll be reading at Columbia College's multicultural affairs multipurpose studio (618 S. Michigan, fourth floor) at 2:30 PM and giving a spoken-word performance at Permanent Records (1914 W. Chicago) at 6 PM. I talked to him by phone as he was being driven across Pennsylvania in a rental car.
How's the book tour going?
Good. There was a lot of very bad suspense over a rental car switch-over we had to do today, and there was a brief moment where we thought we'd have to set up shop at the Dollar car-rental counter in Philadelphia and perform all subsequent readings there, but that didn't happen.
I looked at your itinerary, and it's pretty insane for a book tour. It definitely looks like a really intensive hardcore band tour.
It's weird. I forget that and people keep mentioning it and I get this kind of like sharp twinge in my chest. It doesn't feel like that right now. I mean, I actually had a few friends I had a serious chat with, "Are you sure you want to do this?" And I mean, what's the worst that can happen? I'm unhappy? I mean, I'm fine with that.
Were you like a guy who liked touring when you were in a band?
No. Oh no no. Mostly for one reason. I mean, a lot of other reasons that are just dumb, and I didn't always conduct myself so well, and all the normal stuff of touring. But I also really have a lot of problems with sleep. And that really would always mess me up. And that's still been happening on this tour, but it's different when you don't have to scream and shout in front of people or load amps.
That's gotta be nice.
I really enjoy seeing the country, but after a certain point—I know other people who've encountered it, where you've just kinda seen everything. Yeah, I mean, there are a few things on this tour . . . I've never been to Graceland.
I noticed, following you in the past, there's always been an element of fiction that you've sort of played with, especially like when you started your Twitter and it was just like these little tiny micro stories, but a lot of people who are familiar with your work know you through the stuff you've written for Vice, and maybe for the Reader. I was wondering, what was it like making the transition over to being a fiction writer?
Well for me it isn't a transition now. I started writing—attempting to write—serious fiction over 20 years ago. I had another novel, a very long novel, that I started in 1990. It took me over 15 years. I really poured my heart out into it. And it didn't quite work, and I just got curb stomped by agents and publishers. So in a way, this book was sort of an internal response to that. I realized that I was so deeply bruised by rejection that it was just going to kind of end it for me and for the writing, that I'd let myself be crushed—let that continue and I would wind up in my late 60s just a bitter old man. So that was the impetus to this. And the other part of that is that I realized I was taking the wrong approach. I was writing books for me. But a lot of the art that I like now, bands and, I don't know, fine art, is coming from the opposite approach—it's art on the audience's terms. And even though I've done other band stuff that was on my terms and not audience friendly, I made a very conscious choice in the late 90s to not do that. So then I thought, why don't I attempt to do that with fiction? Why don't I write a book that I would want to read if I were someone who wasn't me who liked the writing of Sam McPheeters?
Well, it seems you have a complicated relationship with being published. I read your essay recently about accepting the book you wrote when you were really young. Could you tell me about that?
Oh yeah. Yeah, I never talked about that at all, with anyone. Any time I would talk about it with someone, their reaction was so baffled and borderline shocked that I felt validated by not telling them. I feel like everyone has something like that—multiple things like that, like when you're a kid you just forget. Like, "Oh yeah, we went on that fishing trip and you almost died. That was weird." It really does seem like everyone has something like that, just maybe slightly stranger.
You were how old when the book was published?
Twelve.
That's precocious.
Yeah. Like I said, I wrote it with Mark Steese, who was 19, and he was my best friend, and we met at a school that is its own very long book in and of itself. Later, he became my stepfather, so it's a really weird story. And when I tell the details, people's reaction made it too much of a pain in the ass, you know? Like, "Well, that one required too much context. I'm just going to hold off on it." And I think I knew I was, in a way, holding off, so I might get some impact out of it. And it just seemed like the right time to have that story out there as well. The other bookend is this new book that I have, if that makes sense.
I'm kind of curious—"The Loom of Ruin" is the name of your book and also the name of your blog—which came first?
The book was originally The Loom of Ruin, and then in 2007 I hit a wall with it. There was a structural problem I couldn't figure out, and there were a couple of characters that eventually got taken out. I had the title and didn't know what to do with it, so I started the blog and that was going to be it. Originally, the blog had a point. The blog was going to be—I don't even know what the hell it was going to be. It was going to be about weird, armageddon stuff, I don't even know—I just picked the name. And then there was a phone call, some IT person, something regarding my domain, and he's like, "Your domain sounds like a really weird science fiction novel." And I thought, "Thanks, dick. Now I can never use it." So this had a different title up until two weeks before it was published, and then my editor, Jesse Pearson, who also was the guy I worked on Exploded View magazine with and is also my editor at Vice, said, "You really need to change this. You need to change it to The Loom of Ruin. The title right now is not appropriate." And he was correct. I’m very, very glad I followed his advice. I think that's a good example of trying to be very flexible and not too married to or precious about anything. So I'm glad I was able to execute that. I'm not always able—I'm too inflexible with my ideas. I'm not that way now. Now, the goal of whatever I'm doing needs to be to just get that thing done, and not my artistic vision 100 percent, because it's not possible, usually.
I also come from a DIY background, and there's a big difference between going from writing your own zines to working with an editor. Having the ability to give up things that you're kind of in love with or whatever, being able to give those up is so essential to being a writer.
Yeah, it's crucial. It's a really hard trick to wrap your mind around. I don't feel like I'm 100 percent there. I've still done freelance pieces with new editors where bad times occur, and that's really rough because your name is attached to it. I can make corrections to my blog, but that really runs into an Alan Smithee kind of thing, like I'm really dispelling the entire piece, which is counterintuitive to me getting freelance work in the first place. But at least with a novel, it's different. There's a larger scope and it more or less says I wrote it, just with a lot of small changes.
Tell me about your relationship with Jesse. You guys have gone from—it seems like you got a lot of really great stories out through him, and now you guys are working on Exploded View. And he was on your tour, right?
Yeah, he was on the tour for like a week. It was great. It was good that we had a week to get to know each other's quirks and stuff. I've had a really, really great experience working with him as an editor. I was a little sad when he and Vice parted ways. Even though the timing of this magazine in my life is clearly incorrect—starting a magazine and doing a 40-city book tour is not the correct thing to do—this was the time for us to make this happen. We're clearly the people to make this. This is going to be an extremely bitchin' magazine and it's going to be a lot of work. So it's really good that we've had, I'd say, a little over two solid years of working together and then just continuing—I wouldn't say immediately after he left, but soon after he left—figuring all the ins and outs of how we're going to do this project.
Is there anything you can tell me about what the magazine is going to be?
It is a literary magazine with a strong emphasis on graphic design, a very strong emphasis on photography. Literary meaning long-form journalism essays, fiction, nonfiction, humor—there's like five more things it's got a strong emphasis on. I guess I'm still ironing out the elevator pitch. There's a zone that's uncovered right now between saccharine, twee literary magazines and super-serious, no-graphics, no-frills, chore literary magazines. So we want to be right in the middle of that zone. Something you get and that you're excited to get and want to read it, and it's dense and there's a lot of stuff you can turn to and there's a lot of people that you really admire who are selected in it. It sounds very ambitious, now that I'm saying it like that.
QUOTE:
The suspense here builds to a satisfying conclusion resonating with authentic emotion and a profound question about life.-
Exploded View
Don Vicha
Booklist. 113.2 (Sept. 15, 2016): p32.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Listen
Full Text:
Exploded View. By Sam McPheeters. Oct. 2016.384p. Skyhorse/Talos, paper, $15.99 (9781940456645).
McPheeters' second novel delivers on the promises of The Loom of Ruin (2012) with a futuristic police procedural that echoes themes by Philip K. Dick and Charles Stress. LAPD detective Terri Pastuzka uses augmented-reality gear (eyewear called PanOpts) to handle what turns into a series of murders connected by a single weapon and an absence of motivational connections. The Los Angeles of 2050 is haunted by a nuclear exchange between India and China that has filled its abandoned skyscrapers with unwanted refugees. The same high-tech gear that allows police to use ubiquitous camera footage to recreate murder scenes is also used by ordinary citizens to create entertainments that blend cinema, documentaries, and home movies as backgrounds to mundane lives. As the body count increases, Terri realizes that she can no longer trust her technology, because when anyone can forge their own version of the truth, knowing what is real becomes a leap of faith. The suspense here builds to a satisfying conclusion resonating with authentic emotion and a profound question about life.--Don Vicha
QUOTE:
clumsy
The suspense here builds to a satisfying conclusion resonating with authentic emotion and a profound question about life.
Exploded View
Publishers Weekly. 263.36 (Sept. 5, 2016): p59.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Full Text:
Exploded View
Sam McPheeters, Talos, $15.99 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-1-940456-64-5
In this clumsy debut, McPheeters attempts to combine science fiction with a gumshoe adventure. Terri Pastuszka is a jaded LAPD homicide detective worn down by the futility of policing a city that's struggling to recover from a thermonuclear war. She is guided by the PanOpts system, wearable technology that monitors the jurisdiction. Terri cares little for the victims in her cases, or any other human beings. When she is assigned to investigate the murder of a refugee, she is drawn into mystery that extends through unrelated lives and brutal deaths, and which may end in her own demise. McPheeters fills the first third of the novel with dragging exposition about virtual reality, too fascinated by that idea to reveal his characters or their motivations. When he finally presents the more interesting crime procedural, it is a sharp relief from the tedium that preceded it. The resolution, once again tied too tightly to PanOpts, negates the high-stakes adventure he has created for his characters. Though the mystery is solved, the solution is as empty and meaningless as the technology it's based on. Agent: Scott Gould, RLR Associates. (Oct.)
QUOTE:
book's powerful themes—the relationship of police to policed, trust in governmental authority, trust in the media, immigrant tensions, and generational change—are sharply executed, and the groundwork is well-laid for a possible sequel.
EXPLODED VIEW
by Sam McPheeters
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KIRKUS REVIEW
In the Los Angeles of 2050, a detective struggles to solve a mystery that threatens her understanding of the truth in McPheeters' (The Loom of Ruin, 2012) second solo novel.
Terri Pastuzka is in some ways your stereotypical hard-bitten detective: divorced, depressed, and alcoholic. But she's also an LAPD homicide detective in a future where cops use PanOpts—smart sunglasses hooked into a nigh-omnipresent surveillance network—and she lives and works in a Los Angeles that's been flooded by enormous numbers of refugees from a nuclear India-China war. Between the technology's pervasive impact on both detective work and the general culture and the social ramifications of a downtown LA taken over by an impoverished minority, there's fresh ground to tread here. Like all good crime thrillers, the story begins with a murder (unfortunately, more than 40 pages in). Terri investigates the death of a “nobody” Indian refugee, but when the trail leads to a different, high-profile murder, she becomes embroiled in politics, the public eye, and a rising body count. Her hunt for answers brings her into direct conflict with a “post-truth” society, where narrative trumps facts, and Terri discovers that everyone—and everything—she trusts may be lying to her and that everything she loves is threatened. It's a tense and paranoid ride to the truth...and a somewhat anticlimactic villain reveal. All the same, the book's powerful themes—the relationship of police to policed, trust in governmental authority, trust in the media, immigrant tensions, and generational change—are sharply executed, and the groundwork is well-laid for a possible sequel.
Though McPheeters takes a bit to find his stride (and belabors his technological exposition in the meantime), the story is worth the wait and might just leave you hesitating before taking the next reblogged video at face value.
Pub Date: Oct. 4th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940456-64-5
Page count: 384pp
Publisher: Talos Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1st, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15th, 2016
QUOTE:
This is a truly great novel about not-so-great times. Like its bloodthirsty protagonist, it seems largely fueled by the desire to target and eradicate the unacceptable blunders that most of us try to ignore. We live in an age where hard work is considered low class. Talent isn’t as enviable as foundationless fame. Literacy is generally unfashionable. In the midst of all this, a first-time novelist unveils something jarring, innovative and relentlessly entertaining.
Book Review: THE LOOM OF RUIN
Why Sam McPheeters’ new novel could save the world... but should destroy it.
By ZACK CARLSON Mar. 21, 2012
0 0
THE LOOM OF RUIN
by Sam McPheeters
262 pages, softcover, fiction
Mugger Books, 2012
A washed-up TV child star. The president of the United States. An unemployed Hungarian masquerading as a detective. Satan. These are only a few denizens of Sam McPheeters’ fallen world, its epicenter being the most unassuming corner of LA. A dry, glamour-free oasis of cardboard boxes and abandoned warehouses, littered with fast food wrappers and non-functioning cell phones tossed from the freeway overpasses above.
Rising from the overpopulated wasteland is Chevron franchise owner Trang Yang, elevated beyond his gray reality by a steady flow of pure, seething rage. Trang arrived in California a decade earlier, a hopeful immigrant whose future was glowing with possibilities. But after an LAPD officer’s stray bullet passed through his brain, his thoughts and emotions were reconfigured into a nigh-superhuman force of violent, unstoppable anger.
In an effort to sweep their blunder under the rug, the LAPD has granted him complete immunity. This allows Trang the freedom to assault, mangle and potentially kill any customer or passer-by who enters his hate-sphere. In an unusually restrained moment, he tells an aging Chevron representative, “You old. Go to graveyard now.” For the most part, he’s more likely to deliver sentiments like this with an aluminum bat or a bumper torn off a station wagon.
The unlikely protagonist is a surprisingly effective anchor as The Loom of Ruin unfurls. Dozens of characters are introduced, developed and/or decapitated in monumental sweeps of brutality and hilarity. Like Trang (and most educated people), McPheeters clearly harbors an understandable disdain for humanity. But unlike his main character, the author is also capable of sympathy. Most of the residents of his teetering Los Angeles are flawed and self-absorbed to the point of retardation, but those who survive Trang’s wrath beyond a few pages are still fully formed and deeply impressive creations in their own right. You may even like one or two of ‘em.
While juggling a large number of fictional people, McPheeters maintains his theme of mankind’s glaring deficiencies. The decline of our social fabric is simultaneously dissected at subtle and catastrophic levels, sometimes with rabid zeal but always right on the money. Though he veers towards the wildly comedic (and even the supernatural), he doesn’t sacrifice focus; the mounting chaos is expertly organized without stooping to smarmy cleverness.
This level of creative composure may surprise someone who’s only casually familiar with McPheeters’ early work as frontman for legendary hardcore band Born Against. But he’s spent many years excreting a skull-cracking array of projects: (non-)rock groups Mens Recovery Project and The Wrangler Brutes, the Vermiform Records label, self-published printed work like Error and Clog, etc. In recent years, he’s done articles and essays for Vice, The Village Voice, Punk Planet and many others. As someone who’s enjoyed pretty much all of his output, I’m compelled to note that The Loom of Ruin is his best work yet, in any medium.
This is a truly great novel about not-so-great times. Like its bloodthirsty protagonist, it seems largely fueled by the desire to target and eradicate the unacceptable blunders that most of us try to ignore. We live in an age where hard work is considered low class. Talent isn’t as enviable as foundationless fame. Literacy is generally unfashionable. In the midst of all this, a first-time novelist unveils something jarring, innovative and relentlessly entertaining. One just mourns the days when there was a larger reading audience with the desire to be entertained.
It’s reasons like these that make Trang Yang the single most powerful fictional creation to come along in decades. If the story’s many other characters represent the failures of the human race, Trang serves as a much-needed annihilator of those failures. I only wish there was one of him stationed on every street corner in America.
BOOK REVIEW: THE LOOM OF RUIN, A NOVEL BY SAM MCPHEETERS
Posted by Jan Galligan 8 June 2012
In the summer of 1965 I finally discovered serious fiction. Having just graduated high school, I was working nights at a local gas station mini-mart in Kenosha, WI, so my days were spent at the Lake Michigan beach. Needing something to read to pass the time, I searched my parents’ small bookcase filled mostly with Book-ofthe-Month and Reader’s Digest Condensed books. Tucked among them, one book caught my eye, An Invitation to a Beheading. “This looks interesting,” Little did I know how right I was. Written in 1935 by Vladimir Nabokov, its original Russian title is Приглашение на казнь. Nabokov translated it into English four years after his 1954 success with Lolita. Set in a nameless dystopian land in an undefined future, it tells the story of Cincinnatus C a young teacher who is imprisoned and sentenced to death for the crime of “gnostical turpitude” or failure to conform. Awaiting execution on an unknown date, he passes his time dreaming and imagining, the very acts that got him arrested. He’s also writing. As he says:
…in the end the logical thing would be to give up and I would give up if I were laboring for a reader existing today, but as
there is in the world not a single human who can speak my language; or more simply, not a single human who can speak; or, even more simply, not a single human; I must think only of myself, of that force which urges me to express myself…
Where have all the humans gone? The answer might be found in Sam McPheeter’s story, The Loom of Ruin. This is McPheeters’s first novel. Since that first encounter with Nabokov in 1965, I’ve had the pleasure of reading a number of first novels when they were first published, including Stephen King’s Carrie in 1974, James Ellroy’s Brown’s Requiem in 1981,
and Michel Houellebecq’s Whatever in 1998. Not to mention many other first novels after the fact, Nathanael West’s 1931 The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 Player Piano and JimThompson’s 1942 Now and On Earth.
I’ve often thought how interesting it would have been to know one of these writers before they got started on their writing careers. Ellroy and King are my age, Houellebecq is ten years younger than me, so we might have hung around and maybe I’d have had an inkling that they were going to be up to something, but this would have happened in the years before I first read Nabokov. Not so with McPheeters. I’ve known him since he was five, and I was going on thirty. By the time Sam (we’ll call him Sam for the moment) was a teenager it was clear that he was up to something. By the time I was forty, I’d read hundreds of novels, most serious, all interesting. Sam had already begun writing, drawing cartoons, creating characters, improvising and generally dreaming and imagining scenarios for himself and those around him, me included. In 1983 he self-published a book about the oddities and curiosities he’d discovered in and around Albany, NY where we were living at that time. Sam was a neighbor and constant companion for my son when he stayed with me every summer. Maybe Sam was influenced by William Kennedy’s O’ Albany, published about the same time as the McPheeters compendium. Sam’s book was the more interesting and might have been titled Whoa! Albany, for its mix of the bizarre and the absurd. Not only did I purchase a first-edition copy of his book, I bought a lifetime subscription to his complete works, which he has honored to this day. While we were still in Albany, Sam would regularly stop by with his latest publication. After he moved to California, whenever he self-published a new work it would dependably show up in my mailbox.
Last month, retrieving mail from my PO box here in Santa Olaya, PR, I found a package from Sam McPheeters: a pre-publication review copy of the first edition of his first novel, scheduled for release April 1, 2012. Perfect-bound paperback, 265 pages divided into 109 sections or vignettes, each averaging about two and one-half pages, and each labeled with a two or three word title starting with “THE.” For example: THE WOMEN, THE LIES, THE BONERS, THE LAKERS. All of them are plural nouns and all sound like they could be names for 1990s hardcore punk bands. McPheeters played in a few seminal hardcore bands including the band he formed in Los Angeles, THE WRANGLER BRUTES. My first thought was that this list of section titles came from a sheet of paper he’d tucked in a drawer back in 2003 when he was trying to come up with a name for his latest project. Before you read the book, flip through the pages like I did in the post office parking lot and read all the names. You’ll see what I’m getting at.
It wasn’t a complete surprise to have McPheeters’s new book in my mailbox. His tweets are texted to my cell phone and McPheeters had recently uploaded this posting:
@sammcpheeters Sam McPheeters
Sometimes I forget that I have a Twitter account,
or that I wrote one of the best American novels
of the 21st century: http://amzn.to/u9Mwn9
In 2010 McPheeters announced that he would use his Twitter account to post “one short story each day for the entire year” which means a complete story in 140 characters (including spaces and punctuation), each one rather like a short-story-haiku. That’s when I started having his tweets sent to my cell phone. It also set me thinking about the possibility of writing a novel over the course of one year and posting it to Twitter, 140 characters at a time. The problem is that Twitter postings are listed most-recent first so if you want the story to be read in logical sequence rather than from the end forward, you either have to post it in reverse order, write the logic so that it flows backward instead of forward, or find a software that will display the tweets in reverse order, all of which seemed like more trouble than it’s worth. One story per day though, that’s a good idea. Here are a few examples from the beginning of McPheeters’s 2010 production, in reverse order:
The doorbell rang. “Good morning,” the well-dressed, mentally insane psychopath said. “Hoo, I’m parched. Would you have any water?” Fri Jan 01
The bank manager, drunk and red-faced, tried to explain why Jennifer’s account was mysteriously overdrawn. “Ish the
ecomony.” Wed Jan 06
Carl faced the Rorschach test of all New England Long John Silver’s’s employees; are the fish fillets shaped like Vermont or New Hampshire? Sat Jan 09
Life can be difficult when you’re a beautiful nude woman, thought Lydia as she boarded the subway and tried to ignore the stares. Mon Jan 10
Jim walks into a tattoo shop. “What’ll it be?” says the artist. Jim pulls a gun. “Your face on my neck. Now.” The artist nods. “Ok. $300.” Tue Jan 12
She died broke. The end. Wed Jan 13
These stories arrived like clockwork as promised, one per day for the rest of the year. Curious as to how McPheeters maintained this demanding schedule, I asked him about it in an email and he replied that he’d written most of the stories months ahead of time and had written a software utility to upload them to his Twitter account, one per day at a specified time. Nice. Stories, long or short are one thing, novels are another, and first novels are in a class by themselves. There’s no question McPheeters can write. I’ve been reading him for almost thirty years and as his author blurb states: “His columns, essays, profiles, and short stories have appeared in The American Prospect, Chicago Reader, OC Weekly, Punk Planet, The Stranger, Vice, and The Village Voice.” He’s earned his street cred, but is that enough to pull him into the writers’ pantheon? The Loom of Ruin is a complex book. Composed as previously noted, of 109 vignettes, it tells the story of over 50 characters in many locations in and around present day dystopian Los Angeles, as well as Washington D.C., the Mojave desert, and the Arctic Circle. It weaves all of these people into one elaboratly orchestrated, finely tuned plot that hurtles them towards an inescapable, inevitable, preordained destiny. It’s their fate, and it’s the fate of the world, although the fate of the world is not in their hands exactly – except of course for the hands of President Obama at the White House, 2,671 miles away from the main action. We meet the president in Section 65: THE SECRETS, standing on the White House
colonnade, smoking a Lucky Strike Filters cigarette in the cool October night air and hanging out with his personal assistant, Reggie Love. Obama asks Love:
“Did you ever think about the fact that somewhere someone is saying the exact same thing as you, at the exact same moment? Even including this sentence?”
Reggie smiled: “You don’t know that, sir.”
“Seven billion people out there, Love.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Lots of people.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have to admit there’s a chance that I’m right.”
Reggie looked thoughtfully into the night sky. “I don’t believe, under the present
circumstances, that I need to admit shit, sir.”
In the preceding vignette, Section 64: THE OPTIMISTS, Titus Johnson had just asked his coworker and new girlfriend Jennifer Martinez that very same question, word for word, even including the sentence: “Even including this sentence?” There are many parts of this book, vignette after vignette, where you could say that it’s about life imitating art imitating life. McPheeters addresses the question of Art directly in Section 14: THE ARTS. Schoup Davis, band mate of main character Bo Boxer, a former child tv star and present day hourly employee at one of the novel’s ill-fated gasoline station mini-marts, thinks that “this civilization respects the arts too much. There are too many bands, too many venues, too much competition. It was getting hard to find a place to play,” and one of the novel’s intrinsic dilemmas is whether the band will be able to play in public, or not. Not wanting to write a spoiler with this review, it’s best if you read the book for yourself to find out. It’s very easy to get caught up in this story as it accelerates towards its denouement in the final segment, Section 109: THE FOLDED NOSES. The question remains as to McPheeters’s place in the literary collection. How does his book stack up against other novelists’ first outings? I will leave that judgment to you. What follows are four short excerpts from four first novels by: Kurt Vonnegut, James Ellroy, Stephen King and Sam McPheeters. The questions are: who wrote what, and how does McPheeters compare? [Answers at the end of this article.]
[Author #1]
Her bloody mouth made the smile grotesque, twisted. “As Jezebel fell from the tower, let it be with you,” she said. “And the dogs came and licked up the blood. It’s in the Bible! It’s—”
“Her feet began to slip along the floor and she looked down at them, bewildered. The wood might have turned to ice.
“Stop that!” she screamed.
[Author #2]
… the tubes increased like rabbits.”
“And dope addiction, alcoholism, and suicide went up proportionately”, said
Finnerty.
“Ed!” said Anita.
“That was the war”, said Kroner soberly. “It happens after every war.”
“And organized vice and divorce and juvenile delinquency, all parallel the growth of
the use of vacuum tubes”, said Finnerty.
“Oh, come on, Ed”, said Paul, “you can’t prove a logical connection between those
factors.”
“If there’s the slightest connection, it’s worth thinking about”, said Finnerty.
[Author #3]
He took a slow sip of his martini and thought about the entire human race. His time in the Defense Nuclear Agency in the early 1990s had opened his eyes to the wide array of threats facing his species, all the varieties of extinction that really were far more possible than the public cared to believe. His time at the DNA also gave him access to a wide range of chilling state secrets. Only one still concerned him: The Walrus.
He sat ramrod straight, jolted by a sudden, terrible hunch.
“Hector!” he yelled to his new manservant, Raul’s replacement.
“Yes, sir,” came an immediate response through one of several disguised speakers hidden throughout the huge living room.
“Get me April Jakosa!”
[Author #4]
Your cut comes to three hundred seventy-six dollars and twenty cents, payable next time I see Cal. Today we visit Leotis
McCarver at 6318 South Mariposa.”
As Irwin swung his old Buick onto the Hollywood Freeway southbound, I caught him looking at me out of the corner of his eye and I knew he was going to say something serious. I was right. “Have you been all right, Fritz?” he asked. “Can you
sleep? Are you eating properly?”
I answered, somewhat curtly, “I feel better in general, the sleep comes and goes, and I eat like a horse or not at all.”
“How long’s it been, now? Eight, nine months?”
“It’s been exactly nine months and six days, and I feel terrific. Now let’s change the subject.” I hated to cut Irwin off, but I
feel more comfortable with people who talk obliquely.
We got off the freeway around Vermont and Manchester and headed west to the Mariposa address.
Writing in the recent essay Why Write Novels at All? Garth Risk Hallberg asks the questions: Does “the sign that we’re not alone” ultimately refer back to the solitary reader, as [David Foster] Wallace often suggests? (“If a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own.”) Or does it refer to the author, as in [Jonathan] Franzen’s Why Bother? (“Simply to be recognized for what I was, simply not to be misunderstood: these had revealed themselves, suddenly, as reasons to write.”) Or does truly great literature point to some third thing altogether? Hallberg goes on to say, “Literature, to a degree unique among the arts, has the ability both to frame the question and to affect the answer. This isn’t to say that, measured in terms of cultural capital or sheer entertainment, the delights to which most contemporary “literary fiction” aims to treat us aren’t an awful lot. It’s just that, if the art is to endure, they won’t be quite enough.” Or, if the world survives, as McPheeters might ask himself. After all, in Section 64: THE OPTIMISTS, Jennifer tells Titus that all the kids at her school “are saying it’s the end of the world… It’s supposed to be an Aztec prediction or something,” she said referring to the Mayan Long Count Calendar.” Her friend and coworker Titus replies, “Only an extreme optimist would think we’re going to make it until 2012.”
__________________________________
ANSWERS TO FIRST AUTHORS QUIZ:
Author #1: Stephen King, 1974
Author #2: Kurt Vonnegut, 1952
Author #3: Sam McPheeters, 2012
Author #4: James Ellroy, 1998
___________________________________
DOES McPHEETERS STACK UP?
In this author’s opinion, definitely.
___________________________________
_Jan Galligan, Santa Olaya, PR
QUOTE:
His tone is about 60 percent deadpan, 40 percent dead serious — which is approximately the ratio that makes his new novel, “Loom of Ruin,” so funny.
It’s a satire skewering Hollywood, late capitalism, and all the red-white-and-blue absurdity McPheeters can cram into the black hole of 21st-century Los Angeles.
Sam McPheeters, from punk’s Wrangler Brutes to a new novel, “Loom of Ruin”
By Chris Richards April 20, 2012
After nearly two decades of screaming his larynx to ribbons in a series of hard-core punk bands, Sam McPheeters was prepared for his second life as a novelist.
“There are a lot of parallels there with being inoculated for rejection,” the 42-year-old says. His tone is about 60 percent deadpan, 40 percent dead serious — which is approximately the ratio that makes his new novel, “Loom of Ruin,” so funny.
It’s a satire skewering Hollywood, late capitalism, and all the red-white-and-blue absurdity McPheeters can cram into the black hole of 21st-century Los Angeles. (He’ll read from it at Joint Custody, a record store in Adams Morgan, on Sunday afternoon.)
As the frontman of one of the funniest, most ferocious and most inexplicably ignored bands of the previous decade, Wrangler Brutes, McPheeters has played to his share of sparse, cross-armed crowds. Before that, he made art-damaged punk in a group called Men’s Recovery Project. And before that, he led Born Against, a troupe that introduced radical-left politics to the mucho-macho world of New York hard-core punk in the early ’90s.
From band to band, McPheeters transformed from an angry young man into a funny middle-aged man, penning short stories for self-published fanzines and essays that appeared in the Village Voice and Vice magazine. His strangely brutal whimsy reached a peak in 2008 with “Clog,” a zine of short stories about drunk martial artists, lawsuits against Jared Leto and something called “the punishment bathroom.” McPheeters originally conceived “Loom of Ruin” as a series of serial fanzines, but ended up bundling it into novel form.
Musician/author Sam McPheeters. (John Michaels)
The book’s plot swirls around a perpetually enraged loner named Trang Yang, who also happens to be the most successful Chevron franchise owner on Earth. An ensemble cast flesh out the narrative — the former child actors who work for him, the Chevron suits who spy on him, the authorities who want to crush him — each presented in their own shade of pathetic. “There’s not one character in here that I was sad to bump off,” McPheeters says. “And a lot of people get beat up.”
McPheeters says his influences should be obvious: Kurt Vonnegut, John Kennedy Toole, Richard Brautigan and a recently resurrected television comedy. “I had been watching ‘Arrested Development’ obsessively, to the point where I could recite the dialogue,” McPheeters says. “If you watch it 20 times, it’s absurdist comedy that they disguise as something else.”
In “Loom of Ruin,” McPheeters’s brand of absurdity ranges from subtle (Barack Obama experiencing a moment of ennui in the Situation Room) to not-so-much (Las Vegas rock band the Killers dying in a freak bus wreck in Puerto Rico).
And while it’s his first published novel, it’s not the first he’s written. McPheeters has been toiling over his first book since 1990, but needed to shelf it and try something new. “I just got that wall of rejection that all writers get,” he says. “I realized that if I didn’t jump back on real quick, it was just going to be a scene cut and then I would be in my late 60s, complaining to my three friends about how I’d been screwed by the publishing industry.”
To promote the book, he’s revisiting the D.I.Y. tactics he learned in the punk scene, leaving his home in Pomona, Calif., for a self-booked, 40-city tour of independent bookstores, record shops, art galleries, coffeehouses and tattoo parlors. “I have all this preexisting goodwill and people that will give me the time of day,” he says.
When he gets home, he’ll center his attention on Exploded View Quarterly, a literary magazine of fiction, humor, journalism, photography and graphic design he’s planning to launch with Jesse Pearson, the former editor in chief of Vice.
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“We’re hoping to plug the gap between the boredom of serious, quote-unquote, lit magazines and the saccharine twee-ness of hip lit mags,” McPheeters says. “I think there’s a big gulf there.”
‘The Loom of Ruin’ by Sam McPheeters (Courtesy of Mugger Books)
He’s right. The shelf space between academia and the McSweeney’s empire seems his for the taking.
Sam McPheeters
will read from “Loom of Ruin” at Joint Custody, 2337 18th St. NW, Sunday at 2 p.m. He will also give a spoken-word performance across the street at Smash! Records, 2314 18th St. NW, Sunday at 5:30 p.m.
"His tone is about 60 percent deadpan, 40 percent dead serious -- which is approximately the ratio that makes his new novel, 'Loom of Ruin,' so funny." - The Washington Post
QUOTE:
What I like best about the book is its absurdity. It's not waka-waka absurdity—it rarely calls attention to itself, and when it does, it does so tactfully. The tone is dark, clipped, and dry, with a cynical bite
In the universe of The Loom of Ruin, human society has become a malevolent machine that's not just indifferent to our happiness but actively working to prevent it, as though it had not only become somehow sentient but also discovered that it hated us. I find that the book's title makes a lot more sense read in this light
Sam McPheeters's Loom of Ruin tour hits Chicago on Thursday
Posted By Philip Montoro on 04.11.12 at 09:38 AM
Sam McPheeters
JOHN MICHAELS
Sam McPheeters exhibits an unusual startle response
You might recognize Sam McPheeters's name from his occasional Reader byline—his piece on Articles of Faith is my favorite so far—but it's more likely you've encountered it elsewhere. For nearly two decades he was a musician, zine publisher, and label owner, most famously as cofounder and front man of Born Against. And in fact I first bugged McPheeters about writing for the Reader after seeing an amazing piece of work he'd done for Vice: a profile of former Crucifucks front man Doc Dart, who now calls himself 26, that ran to nearly 8,000 words. Earlier this month Mugger Books published McPheeters's first novel, The Loom of Ruin, and on Thursday he's in town to read from it (at Columbia College) and do some spoken word (at Permanent Records).
I've read The Loom of Ruin twice since asking McPheeters for an advance copy. It's a brisk book—actually I think "pell-mell" might be more apt—with 109 chapters in just 262 pages. The prose is sufficiently direct and unadorned to let those chapters fly by, but it's not so unflashy that it'd be fair to call it utilitarian—practically every time the voice of Satan speaks (more on that in a sec), it's described with a new metaphor. One of my favorites is "like a car engine being dragged across a cold concrete floor."
Driving the story is the impenetrable and imposing figure of Trang Yang, a slightly built, middle-aged Hmong immigrant who owns nine Chevron gas stations in Los Angeles and is "neurologically incapable of any emotion but rage"—the result of a brain injury inflicted by a stray police bullet. (We first encounter him as he matter-of-factly threatens to behead with a machete a man he believes is a corporate spy.) His stations are unaccountably successful, and his bosses' desire to replicate this profitability sets in motion the convoluted series of interlocking events that constitutes the novel's plot.
The cast of characters is dizzyingly large—it reminds me of the huge ensembles in 70s disaster movies, surely not by coincidence—and includes lawyers, cops, FBI agents, a German-American security guard who converts to Islam and hijacks a blimp, a group of struggling rock musicians, two Safeway "fronters," personal shoppers, community activists, President Barack Obama, a former child actor, Chevron employees at all levels, Yang's relatives, and a buffoonish, lovestruck Hungarian man (Nimrod Papp, aka Chad Malta) impersonating a private investigator. As you might imagine, the reader doesn't get to know anyone particularly well, and character development is not among McPheeters's highest priorities.
tlor-cover-high-res.jpgWhat I like best about the book is its absurdity. It's not waka-waka absurdity—it rarely calls attention to itself, and when it does, it does so tactfully. The tone is dark, clipped, and dry, with a cynical bite—the closest thing to a fantastical element is a plot line that to all appearances concerns Satan, who's inadvertently summoned by a harried attorney who runs her microwave empty for two minutes. Most of the craziness on display is decidedly more plausible—a high school honor student driven into a frenzy of despair by a huge RIAA downloading lawsuit, a fraudulent "green" shredding operation run by meth addicts, the CEO of Chevron's phobia of plastic bags, even the existence of McElroyville (a city the size of Baltimore, built 40 miles under the earth's surface "for the preservation of America's political and corporate elite").
This absurdity finds its ultimate expression in Rube Goldberg-style chains of causality, many of which I can't describe without spoiling the ending. Two examples will have to do.
The attorney receives instructions from Satan to infiltrate a Toyota dealership and insert a single comma into the computer code that controls its huge electronic billboard on the highway, transforming its display into a "kaleidoscopic chaos of colors and static" and triggering a behind-the-wheel grand mal seizure in a Gulf War veteran, which in turn sets off a ghastly pileup that briefly reunites four other characters—previously involved in a squabble over an Applebee's gift card—in an explosion of twisted metal and body parts. Several chapters earlier, another enormous traffic accident is caused by one of the aforementioned meth addicts, swerving in an attempt to retrieve that same attorney's discarded iPhone from the roadside—and the wreck liberates from his van a never-to-be-shredded note she'd written mentioning "Broccoli Top," which is not only a nickname for the child actor in the story (later her love interest) but also an alleged FBI code phrase for an atomic detonation. The police pass the note along to the FBI, and the bureau's resulting intervention in Trang's single-minded scheme (about which I must remain silent) is one of many factors that precipitate the novel's catastrophic climax 154 pages later.
The subtext in all this, as I read it, is the failure of agency—none of the characters, with the arguable exception of Trang Yang, actually accomplishes anything by setting out to do so. The reasons that lead to any one outcome instead of another are influenced in so many directions by so many things that it's hubris of the highest order to imagine we can control the process. In the universe of The Loom of Ruin, human society has become a malevolent machine that's not just indifferent to our happiness but actively working to prevent it, as though it had not only become somehow sentient but also discovered that it hated us. I find that the book's title makes a lot more sense read in this light.
McPheeters reads at Columbia at 2:30 PM on Thu 4/12, in the multicultural affairs multipurpose studio on the fourth floor at 618 S. Michigan. His spoken-word performance at Permanent Records (1914 W. Chicago) is at 6 PM, and (at least according to the store's PR) he'll also be signing copies of his novel there.
Both events are free and open to the public, but if you go to the one at Permanent, you probably ought to buy something from the store while you're there.
Tags: Sam McPheeters, The Loom of Ruin, novel, Vice, Doc Dart, Articles of Faith, Born Against, Permanent Records, Columbia College, reading, spoken word, Trang Yang, Variations on a Theme, Image
QUOTE:
The Loom of Ruin, a book showcasing head-severing action, jump cuts as quick as Bruce Lee karate chops and a main character capable of only one emotion -- rage. It's packed with so much action, violence and black comedy you'll swear you stumbled into a movie written by Kurt Vonnegut and directed by Robert Rodriguez.
Sam McPheeters, of the '90s Punk Band Born Against, on His Bizarre Novel About L.A.'s Angriest Chevron Owner
MONDAY, APRIL 9, 2012 AT 2:53 P.M. BY JOSEPH LAPIN
Sam McPheeters, of the '90s Punk Band Born Against, on His Bizarre Novel About L.A.'s Angriest Chevron Owner
Tara Tavi
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"I wanted it to be like a firework show," Sam McPheeters says about the crescendo of energy and tension in his debut novel, The Loom of Ruin. "It just gets more and more insane."
Co-founder of the legendary hardcore punk band Born Against, McPheeters' first novel will be released on Mugger Books -- a Los Angeles-based press run by an English and philosophy teacher at Compton High School. Between a music career, touring the world and writing a novel, McPheeters has written for the OC Weekly, The Village Voice and Vice Magazine. He lives in Pomona, and he told me about his journey to bring The Loom of Ruin to the shelf.
McPheeters first shopped a different book to editors and literary agents. "I was trying to write something too serious," he says. Plus, he found limitless amounts of red-tape publishing frustration. So he decided to switch gears and start anew. "I just wrote a book that I would want to read if I were a reader."
The result: The Loom of Ruin, a book showcasing head-severing action, jump cuts as quick as Bruce Lee karate chops and a main character capable of only one emotion -- rage. It's packed with so much action, violence and black comedy you'll swear you stumbled into a movie written by Kurt Vonnegut and directed by Robert Rodriguez.
McPheeters tells the story of Trang Yang -- L.A.'s most profitable -- and angriest -- Chevron franchise owner. Here's the thing about wild old Trang: Due to irreversible neurological damage accidentally caused by the ineptitude of the Los Angeles Police, Trang is always pissed off and lacks any ounce of control over his impulses. Plus, he's paranoid that everyone who walks into his store is trying to steal his gas. And, well, Trang has a reason to be paranoid. He's being watched by private detectives, the FBI, LAPD, his ex-wife, corporate spies from Chevron -- an endless amount of groups trying to find out what dangerous secret Yang has been concealing.
Sam McPheeters, of the '90s Punk Band Born Against, on His Bizarre Novel About L.A.'s Angriest Chevron Owner
Tara Tavi
"I'm going to feel weird giving this book to people I really respect as writers, artists and also to my family members," McPheeters says. "They're going to read it and be entertained by it, but they're also going to be scratching their heads and be, like, 'What was Sam trying to do here?'"
When talking to McPheeters, there are no pretensions. Though I asked him about the political and social impact of creating a Hmong main character (it's an Asian ethnic group from China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand) and a book centered on the Chevron corporation, he wanted to be real about his artistic motives: "What I'm trying to do here is write an interesting book. Below the surface there is just more surface."
That's somewhat hard to believe. In the book, LAPD injure civilians with stray bullets, a man commandeers a blimp that reads "Death to America" and FBI agents are out-of-touch and bumbling. One thing is for sure: Los Angeles is as much a character in this book as Bo Boxer, the washed-up child star who works as an attendant at one of Trang's gas stations.
"When I was an East Coaster, I used to come out here [L.A.] all the time ... It was this nice oasis," McPheeters says. "Despite that, me and all my bandmates, we always used to make fun of Los Angeles. That was always one thing we would say about it -- how apocalyptic it was. I would think about it later once I lived out here, and I would think, what did that even mean?"
McPheeters, who was inspired by Mike Davis' The Ecology of Fear, Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and a love for the classic film Dr. Strangelove, portrays L.A. as a powder keg. At any moment, something horrible is about to happen. And, in fact, horror ensues with a massive pileup on our legendary traffic-packed freeway, savage beatings in broad daylight and, well, an ending so devastating that I really want to reveal it ... but won't.
This month, McPheeters is on a nationwide book tour but one that's typical for a contemporary debut novelist. There's no red-carpet book tour sponsored by a major publishing house. There's no first-class seat. There's no luxury hotel. There's just one man, taking to the road like the old days when he was in Born Against, trying to reach the audience who will love his work.
"I'm going to be doing two shows a day," McPheeters says. "Going all across the country. In 2012, it is absolutely the author's job, not the publisher's, to really sell their work. So I walk into that with my eyes wide open."