Deep Shame in the Infinite Abyss
A short story about embarrassing myself in a documentary and more.
Hello and welcome to ZERO CRED, the only newsletter about music ever to exist. The IRS sent me a letter in the mail this week that said ah damn we just realized we fucked up and didn’t penalize you enough. You actually have to send us more money than you already did. I guess they can just tell you to send as much money as they want whenever they want because whattya gonna do about it. So I am reminding you that if you upgrade to a paid subscription I will send you a personalized membership card. Many of you have already received them and have been tagging me in photos to which I say: Hell yeah. Love to start a cult in my free time.
INFINITY FOOL
I got interviewed for a documentary about an emo band this week. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say which band yet but it’s one of The Good Ones. The glasses-wearing kind, not the flat-iron kind if you catch my drift.
This has never been my dream, to sit in front of a camera and pretend like I know crap about junk, but it comes with the territory. If you wanna be a professional music writer, every once in a while you gotta put on a clean shirt and sit in front of your record shelves and pretend to be an expert. This is called Rollinsing. You sit there and say ah yeah this band revolutionized the way we think about whatever the fuck or this album kicked open the door for a new wave of blah blah blah. Usually I just black out and rapid-fire every possible opinion and hope they can cull even one useful sentence from my word vomit. I’ve taken all sides of many issues. I have said grunge was good. I have said grunge was bad. Whatever I have to say to get it over with.
So I drive to this filmmaker’s house to get interviewed in his living room. It’s just him and a cameraman. Nice guys. The filmmaker used to be in a screamo band I liked. I figure I should use the bathroom beforehand because I have to pee non-stop throughout my coffee hours (9 a.m. to 4 p.m. PST). The bathroom is right off the living room, just a few feet away. It’s one of those sliding door situations. I slide the door closed and realize I’m standing in an infinity room. Every surface of the bathroom, including the ceiling, is mirrored. Look to the left and there you are infinity times. Look to the right, same thing. Look up, you get the idea.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had to do your business in a bathroom covered in mirrors but it’s not the fun sexy time it may seem. There’s nowhere to look where you won’t see yourself thousands upon thousands of times. Worse than just seeing yourself, you’re seeing yourself as your body does one of its top five most unflattering actions. (Top seven if you’re a man.) If you have any sort of body issues or dysmorphia, this is a problem because what are you gonna do, piss with your eyes closed? I don’t piss with my eyes closed but I decide to do the next best thing. Rather than look in any direction and see my dick ad infinitum, I choose to look straight down and stare directly at my dick. My rationale is: One my dick is better than infinity my dicks.
Then as I’m peeing I hear a voice from a few feet behind me. “Oh whoops, sorry.” That’s when I look over my right shoulder and realize there’s a second door to the bathroom which I’ve left wide open and everyone could just see what I’ve been doing this whole time. At this point I should clarify: I’m not a stupid fucking idiot, I know you’re supposed to close the door to the bathroom. But the room was small and the mirrors made it really fucking disorienting like a carnival fun house. There’s a reason why they set so many final scenes of action movies in halls of mirrors. You think you shot the bad guy but then aw fuck the glass shatters and he was actually right behind you.
“Ah shit, that’s embarrassing,” I blurt to the filmmaker as I scurry to close the door. “All good. We’re all guys here!” he says from the other side. This makes me 100 percent certain he saw my dick. “We’re all guys here” is a nice way of saying “I saw your dick but I’ve seen my own dick as well so it’s fine.” I guess I wouldn’t have minded so much but the infinity part of him seeing my dick is throwing me. He didn’t just see my dick once, he saw my dick hundreds of times. In just a matter of seconds it’s like this man saw my dick every day for the last four years. Probably more than any person has ever seen my dick.
So I finish up and go sit down on his couch and I guess we’re just not gonna talk about it. He asks me questions about major labels and the late 90s indie rock scene and I’m just supposed to answer them like that whole thing didn’t just happen. I’m not even sure why he’s still talking to me. Why record the opinions of a man so dumb he doesn’t even know how to close a simple door?
But the more time and questions that go by, the more uncomfortable I feel that he is actually not mentioning my dick. I wish he would just address it so we could move on. Nothing major, just something simple. “By the way, really nice dick, man.” Or “Forgot to mention, but sweet hog, dude.” But he never does. For another hour I ramble my way through questions about god knows what. Record labels and album covers and such. Thinking about that damn door the entire time.
Maybe in a year or two you will be watching this documentary. I’ll appear on screen and the chyron beneath me will read Dan Ozzi: Music Journalist/Open-Door Pisser. Or maybe after they show my face the screen will freeze and turn black and white dramatically. The music will grow ominous as they do a grainy zoom in on my face Robert Durst style. A title card will read During the interview, Ozzi exposed himself to the entire crew. They’ll play the audio from my mic that was running in the bathroom. “There it is, Dan. You’re caught. You did it, of course.”
An hour after the interview I am back home. Alone in my apartment, taking a leak in my own bathroom which has a single mirror in it. I peer over my shoulder just to make sure.
The door is locked.
IS JACK WHITE DOING A BIT?
Does Jack White have a sense of humor? He was pretty funny as Elvis in Walk Hard for whatever that’s worth. But I’ve never met him so I can’t confirm. One time I wrote an article about him that I guess he didn’t find very flattering and he emailed me asking for my phone number. “I would like to speak with you.” I gave it to him, figuring he was gonna call and beat me up over the phone or something but he never did. I was at a music festival at the time though so maybe I just got bad service and missed him. Come back, Jack.
But anyway I don’t know if Jack White has a sense of humor so I haven’t been able to tell if he’s been doing an elaborate bit on Instagram lately. A couple weeks ago, he went on a rant about all the rocks left over from the carving of Mount Rushmore which just as a reminder happened in the 1930s.
“So nobody is going to clean this up?” he captioned a photo of a bunch of rocks which he circled. “We as a people are just going to let this lay here forever? Was this already there or is this the largest monument to littering the world has ever seen?”
Yeah I dunno man I guess so? Don’t get me wrong, I am firmly an anti-litter guy. But a bunch of carved rocks that got moved to a nearby space with slightly differently shaped rocks 100 years ago is very literally not the hill I wanna die on. Weird place to focus your anger but ok man whatever. Celebrities often lose all sense of perspective once they get famous. Chalk it up to that.
But then the other day Jack went on another Instagram tirade about… the colors of the medals at the Olympics? Not even sure I get the angle on this one.
“I'm starting a petition soon to permanently change the names of the medals at the Olympic Games from here on out. The ridiculous need to describe the medals by their metallic colors or their elemental names rather than their relation to the second place trophy has got to finally stop.”
So again I ask: Is this a bit? Because just to point out the obvious, on the long list of real problems facing the world—entire countries getting drone bombed off the map, rising fascism, increasingly unaffordable living costs, and oh yeah the planet itself becoming rapidly uninhabitable—chunks of President rocks and award medals rank somewhere around the millionth place. I know we’re kinda running out of problems to complain about but we still haven’t solved the most pressing ones.
Again, maybe this is Jack’s whole bit? Like wouldn’t it be funny to get all worked up about the dumbest possible issues as the world burns? Again, I don’t know! So I say: Good one, Jack White. Or shut up, Jack White. Whichever it is.
I’ll put a poll here. Let me know if you think this is a bit he’s doing or what.
ONE BOOK, ONE ALBUM, ONE SONG
Hey how about some Sunday recommendations. Here’s a book, an album, and a song I’ve been into this week.
A Creature Wanting Form by Luke O’Neil
I brought my copy of my old pal Luke O’Neil’s A Creature Wanting Form on tour last week to give it a re-read. I actually gave it away when I was done because that’s a good thing to do with books you like, just pass them along to someone who might enjoy them.
Luke is maybe the only writer who can accurately capture The Way Things Feel Now. This is a collection of short stories and none of them explicitly beat you over the head with social commentary the way so much media does these days. They’re just authentic snapshots of trying to live a normal life in this world where we all carry devices in our pockets that give us uncut access to the most horrific shit imaginable. I suppose everyone has artists whose work they connect with because it closely resonates with how they feel about the current moment they’re in. I read Luke’s work and think: Yeah this is pretty close to what it feels like in my brain. Like this passage, which I really loved:
I think the idea of all of this living is to accumulate enough loving and having been loved experience points that you can cash them in in one fell swoop at the end for an ameliorating effect on the descent but the prospect of that never brings me any comfort because it's all erased on the other side of it anyway. A new ledger in which your balance isn't zero it's nothing. I guess there isn't even a ledger anymore actually.
People say you can't take your money with you when you die but you can't take your love with you either.
They could wheel your deathbed out to the middle of a football stadium with the tubes and machines and nurses and everything on the 50-yard line and the stands could be full with everyone cheering and crying and you would still be down there thinking well I suppose it could be worse but what good is all this going to do me a couple hours from now?
You can buy a copy of A Creature Wanting Form right here. I’m also remembering that I interviewed Luke as one of my very first posts in this newsletter, about his 2019 book Welcome to Hell World. Just in case you wanna read a likely outdated conversation between two misanthropic guys who secretly care about the fate of the world.
Cloud Nothings - Final Summer
A couple weeks ago I interviewed Dylan Baldi from Cloud Nothings about how he stays so prolific and the band’s new album Final Summer. The album is finally out and maybe you’re as addicted to it as I am so I figured it was a good time to bump the post.
Alex Winston - “Special Feeling”
Speaking of interviews, one of these days I gotta interview my friend Alex Winston here. If, like me, you are fascinated by major-label horror stories oh buddy she’s got her share. She’s been slowly but steadily putting an album together on her own over the past year and it’s some of her best work. This week she released my favorite song from it. It’s just bombastic weirdo pop and I love it.
SEE YOU IN SAN DIEGO
If you live in San Diego and like my whole “thing,” come to Book Catapult on May 18. I will be there with some other cool writers reading a short story I wrote. Not the one above about urinating into the infinite abyss but a brand new one about something else entirely.
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I’m rereading the bathroom section for about the fifth time, laughing secretly to myself (I’m in public, and I wish someone would ask what’s so funny). That’s some low humor done 100% right. Well done, sir!!
Fun fact (that I learned in a very unfun way): you can sometimes just send the IRS a letter saying "Hey wait if I just give you $50 and we call it even?" You can even give a little excuse or context. Worst case scenario, it'll give you another two years before a random bored bureaucrat finds your letter and writes back "No deal."