Justin St.Germain

I haven’t updated in a while, although I did just make the layout prettier.  Been busy, been traveling, been having my apartment robbed, been moving/teaching/writing, and so on.  I just fetched the pictures off of my camera for the first time in months, so here’s a recap of the last six months or so in pictures (mostly).

Six months ago I was about to move out of the guest house in Tucson I'd been renting for the summer, to write/do research/see people I don't get to see enough who live in Tucson. It was hot, of course, but being back in Arizona made me want to stay. I almost did, but in the end I didn't. Long story.

On the last day I was there, we went to see San Xavier del Bac, Liger and I. Yes, I named my car, and yes, I named it Liger. Also a long story.

Shortly after I returned to California, I flew to Spearfish, South Dakota, to attend a conference on Western literature, where I had a long-awaited opportunity to stay in a "Holidome," a rare artifact of Americana found primarily in cold-weather locales in the Plains states ...

... and at which I also read on a panel with my old friend Seth (pictured here with his signature drink, an Appletini) and a couple of new friends, Jeff (not pictured), and Lucrecia, who's in the background. Incidentally, this picture was taken in Deadwood, the rival city of my hometown. Deadwood is like Tombstone with casinos and snow.

Thereafter began a long string of weddings. The first was Pat and Kori's in Chicagoland, a lavish and exceptionally fun affair (with fireworks!). Somehow I only have two pictures from that weekend, neither of which include the bride or the groom, just a bunch of drunken assholes. Note to wedding photographers: bringing costumes is a masterstroke.

Between weddings, a trip down the coast to the Madonna Inn, which boasts the most photographed urinal in America.

... and guest rooms made of rocks mined from the hillside.

From there, traveled to nearby Avila Beach ...

... which apparently has a bit of a shark problem.

Then northward up the coast to Hearst Castle ...

... which has interesting architecture ...

... and glorious pools, one outside ...

... and inside, where the pool floor is inlaid with 24-carat gold.

Thanksgiving weekend, my brother from another mother, Marques, got hitched.

And then, in December, the last of five weddings I attended in 2009, when Stacy got married.

After which I spent the Holidays back East, passing through or spending time in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsyltucky, and Pennsylvania. It was a travel nightmare but otherwise an enjoyable trip. Until I came home on New Year's Eve to find my apartment burgled and vandalized in laughably childish ways, including pouring a bottle of Nyquil on the couch ...

... and, perhaps most bizarrely, assaulting a potted orchid with a bottle of Newman's Own salad dressing from the fridge. The orchid died. I moved. And that was it for 2009.

I’ve been lucky enough to attend three excellent concerts in the last week and a half. The first was Handsome Furs playing in a strip-mall community theater in Scottsdale to an all-ages crowd of maybe a hundred and fifty (including Doyle and me filling the roles of the old guys at the show), yet still refusing to big-league a venue that was probably beneath them, and instead giving a frenetic, chatty, jubilant performance that I’m still thinking about ten days later.

The next was Wilco at Centennial. That was a strange concertgoing experience. I was with Doyle again, as well as our respective lady friends who are too good for us, and Doyle is the biggest Wilco fan I know. I’ve gotten into protracted ranting arguments with him about who’s better, Wilco or Modest Mouse, fairly often in the last few years. I prefer Modest Mouse. And really, even though Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Summerteeth are two of the best albums of the last ten years, I’ve never been a huge fan of the band. And despite a couple of solid songs, their last two albums have been boring Dad rock.

I also wasn’t knocked out about the idea of having to sit down for the show — UA’s Centennial Hall, while acoustically wonderful, is a stodgy sort of venue for a rock concert. Tweedy didn’t ingratiate himself to me any with the first few songs, during which he didn’t say a word of banter or even acknowledge the audience at all. They also started off with bland stuff from the new album. But as the set went on the frontman loosened up, and I began to appreciate how tight and professional the band was, particularly Nels Cline, the guitarist, who’s nothing short of a virtuoso. They also played a seven-song encore. So, while it lacked the adrenaline wallop of the HF show, I enjoyed it for different reasons: it was a professional band playing a show sober at the height of their ability, if a few years past their artistic peak.

Then I went to see the other Wolf Parade side project, Sunset Rubdown, at Plush last night. I wasn’t expecting too much; neither of their first two albums wowed me, and I never could get into Spencer Krug’s other stuff, either. I generally like the songs he writes for Wolf Parade less than Dan Boeckner’s. But last night I became a convert. I went met Swede and Charlie at the show. There were maybe fifty people there. (And the ticket was $10 — God bless shows in Tucson.) The band wound up playing mostly songs from their new album, Dragonslayer, which was released today. They were fantastic. I bought the album after the show and have been listening to it all day. You should really check it out. And if that doesn’t convince you, just watch this promo video:

Download the first single, “Idiot Heart,” here.

I got this link via Mike Scalise’s facebook page. A guy compiled all the .mp3s he could find of David Foster Wallace interviews, readings, eulogies, etc., and made them available for download on his website.

In the immediate wake of his death, I read a lot of supposed remembrances that bothered me in their rush to reduce him to an essence or a thumbnail, to draw a summative character conclusion or measure of DFW’s significance from a brief encounter the author once had (for they were almost uniformly written by authors who had had only brief encounters with him, and often no contact at all). I repeatedly tried and failed to write about it, what it meant to me, and what it meant for us and for our literature. But I couldn’t, because of course it doesn’t matter what it meant to me. That’s my usual problem with the act of elegy: rarely is it about the dead. It too often reeks of the self. But not this website: the act of compiling a dead man’s words seems an honorable and fitting tribute.

Speaking of honorable and fitting tributes to David Foster Wallace, a few of the more generous and culturally aware students and faculty of the Arizona creative writing program organized a tribute for him this Friday at 1 p.m. at the Poetry Center. (Link here, scroll down a ways.)

The same group of people have put together what promises to be the best Sonora Review yet, a double-issue tribute to DFW (order here) that includes an uncollected story of his, as well as pieces on DFW by an impressive list of luminaries: Eggers, Franzen, Sven Birkerts, Rick Moody, and so on. I’m very glad they did that; it warms my heart to see him recognized by a program that, when I was there, seemed to have largely and purposefully forgotten that he was (and remains) its most famous and relevant alum. (In fact, Wallace was once the fiction editor of Sonora.)

Props to both Brannon and Michael for their parts in organizing the reading and issue. If you’re in Tucson, I urge you to attend, and if you’re not, you should order the Sonora issue before it sells out.