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MXR Distortion+

How do you pair a distortion pedal with a novel set in Florence, Italy? Here’s how:

One night our hero Kevin misses the last bus home after being out at the bars. So he pops Zen Arcade into his walkman and walks back home through the cobblestone streets.

Bob Mould was known for plugging his MXR Distortion+ straight into the mixing board, a trick he likely used while recording Zen Arcade back in 1983.

From Wikipedia: As their EP Metal Circus was being released, Hüsker Dü entered the Total Access Studio in Redondo Beach, California to record their next album with SST producer Spot. The band recorded 25 tracks, with all but two songs (“Something I Learned Today” and “Newest Industry”) being first takes, in 40 hours. The entire album was then mixed in one 40-hour session; the entire album took 85 hours to record and produce and cost $3,200.

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Boss DS-1

Mountain View is set during the summer of 1988. That same year I walked into The Starving Musician in Santa Clara and bought a Fender Mustang and this Boss DS-1 to use in the garage/punk band I was playing in.

A year later Kurt Cobain would make that same combo famous on Bleach. I managed to see Nirvana in SF at the Kennel Club in 1990 when they came through with Tad and Dickless. Full set here:

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Ibanez Tube Screamer

The Ibanez Tube Screamer is mentioned on page 10 of Kato:

The room was literally crammed wall to wall with band equipment. … There were two giant Marshall stacks, numerous sticker-covered guitars and basses, a few duct-taped mic stands, a PA and a battered-looking four-track. The floor was covered with cables and cords and various distortion pedals (on my first trip downstairs, I’d practically twisted my ankle on a bright green Ibanez Tube Screamer pedal).

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New Deal Danny Sargent 

In Firenze my narrator arrives in Florence Italy in the late 80s “armed only with a skateboard and a poor grasp of the Italian language. What follows is a deadpan comedy about culture shock, family baggage, and growing up by accident in a foreign country.”

Pictured is the Firenze paperback with an early/mid 90s New Deal Danny Sargent (discarded by my brother’s friend) paired with my old Indy trucks and OJIIs. I did most of my skating in the 80s and had wanted to try this whole new double-kick tail thing out.

I recently found some of my old 80s Schmitt Stix decks in my parents’ shed so maybe I’ll post those later.

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Paddle to the Sea: The 1966 Short Film Every Gen X Kid Remembers

Toward the end of Mountain View there is a section describing a short movie I saw in elementary school called Paddle To The Sea.

I’ve been surprised by how many people have commented about the Paddle To The Sea section. Mostly Gen X folks. So maybe the movie was more widespread than I thought. The movie was originally made in 1966 and I probably saw it in second grade in the mid-70s.

Have you seen it? Did it make a big impression on you? I really captured my imagination at the time and I still think it’s pretty great.

The movie is on YouTube:

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I wrote Firenze on a Dell Axim X3

I wrote Firenze on a Dell Axim X3 with the Think Outside Stowaway folding keyboard. I wrote most of the novel on my lunch break in the Columbia Tower atrium in Seattle around 2003/2004. The Axim had a “Windows Mobile” operating system and I’d connect it to my big old PC each night at home and download what I’d written that day. 

Those were not the easiest times for me. I was a new father and sleep deprived. The dot com bubble had burst after 9/11 and I’d traded my cool remote dot com jobs for a soul crushing corporate job. I was having some doubts about giving up California for rainy Washington State.

I’d written Mountain View with extreme optimism. A desire to get that awkward period between adolescence and adulthood down on paper before I forgot what it felt like. I probably sent it to 100 agents. Got a lot of requests, a lot of very nice letters back from some big names in publishing. I wrote Kato shortly after moving to Seattle from San Francisco in a kind of furious/fuck it, I’ll just write something jokey and fun. But then I was told by people close to me it didn’t have a chance in the publishing world at that time. So I sat on it.

Then life happened. I had this idea about not being able to appreciate things in the moment. I had some other ideas I was still turning over in my mind from both Mountain View and Kato. But Firenze was a struggle–I had so little time to work on it. On this funny little device and folding keyboard in this big bustling atrium. Wearing corporate casual–khakis and a blue button up. Getting texts on my Nokia 3310. 

I was definitely listening to a lot of Radiohead back then. Hearing Amnesiac takes me right back to that time and place. 

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Mattel Football: The 1970s Handheld Game Every Gen X Kid Owned

I was really into Mattel Football (first released in 1977) when I was a kid, and featured it pretty heavily on page 36 of Mountain View. And I still have it today!

Funny thing is, reading it now I realize I was talking about Football II (the green one, released in 1978) which also had reverse. My buddy had that one.

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