My DIY Life

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | Posted by: Henry Baum

In my quest to figure out why I’ve become a self-publishing zealot supporter, I’ve come to realize that all points in my life have been pointing in this direction. My novels themselves have an outside-looking-in quality. My first novel, The Golden Calf, is about a celebrity stalker – a man who comes to hate the movie star Tim Griffith (Tom Cruise) for all his superficiality and phoniness, but at core he’s jealous about all that he can’t have. My second novel, North of Sunset, which was self-published, turns that premise on its head, where a celebrity becomes a serial killer, becoming addicted to the power of murdering someone as the evolution in his addiction to the power of fame. Both are an indictment of Hollywood, but both are also an indictment of “the beautiful people” by someone who’s not quite perfect. This was noticed by a reviewer at Laura Hird’s website:

At worst these bits read like the bile-filled whining of a man immersed in the decadence of Hollywood but not a part of it. Of someone camped outside the gates of the kingdom, nose pressed up against the wrought iron, mad for a taste, but forever denied admittance…

He has nice things to say as well, but I have to admit some of that is accurate. The books are indictments not just of what’s dumb in America, but also are borne of jealousy. What’s this have to do with the DIY ethic? It’s more about how I’ve perennially felt like I’ve never gotten the big break, always had to create my own success.

The genesis of both novels came out of my time in high school, surrounded by the children of Hollywood: Cher’s kid, Jack Nicholson’s kid, O.J. Simpson’s kid, etc. Normal adolescent alienation magnified by being surrounded by the richest and most beautiful people on earth. Meanwhile, I was playing in a punk rock band called Caustic, and this is where my DIY life begins.

The band Caustic put out two demo tapes and one 7-inch record. I (for the most part) designed the covers myself, along with ads for Maximum Rock n Roll, stickers, traded tapes with other bands, and the like. The 7-inch looked like this:

…and sounded like this:

I’m the drummer moving my arms faster than I can now move them. My first year of college, I put together a fanzine called, “Organeziezed.” I was completely and totally obsessed with the movie “Taxi Driver” (which explains The Golden Calf), and the zine was devoted to the movie – based on the line Travis Bickle riffs on, “One of these days I’m gonna get Organizized.” I laid out the fanzine myself - cut and paste -  wrote the articles, traded with other zinesters, got it reviewed, and was part of the zine community for a moment. Looking back, it was my first experience self-publishing.

I wrote my first novel soon afterwards and put my energy into writing and submitting fiction, along with playing in different rock bands as a drummer or bassist. Again, with the band Montag, which I wrote about earlier, we made demo tapes and had shows at some of the divier places in NYC. Never got our break, though we shoulda. Again, outside looking in, but proud and confident in what we were doing. Same with other bands I’ve been in – recorded in studios here/there, but never got the full treatment. Toured with Neutral Milk Hotel once (with the band Odes), which was cool.

One thing that I have to throw in here is the blog I wrote called God’s Wife. If I had known about self-publishing at the time, I probably wouldn’t have done this, but I did. The blog is Part One of a novel – a first person novel about a female porn star. I posted the blog as if it was a real porn star telling her life. This was before James Frey and the rest. I won’t get into the defense for this, because those days are long past, but I just thought it was an interesting experiment using a new medium. The site had 300,000 hits in a year and countless comments on every post. The mistake I made was accepting inclusion in a non-fiction anthology of sex writing. I was this desperate to get published.

OK, so my DIY life isn’t that rich: a punk rock band, a fanzine, demo tapes, and a blog. But still it feels perfectly natural that I’ve taken the leap to self-publishing. I’ve been close to breaking through and I’ve had some good luck, but never the elusive Big Book Deal or Big Record Deal. Most of all, I’ve always sided with the freaks, the outcasts: the characters I write about, and even the people I’m attached to in life, are people who don’t have such an easy time of it. The music I’m attracted to – independent and punk rock – also gives the finger to the status quo.

Self-publishing seems built for that kind of mindset, so self-publishing’s critics really seem dusty and conservative. Self-publishing’s got such great implications: if self-publishing can become a way for a writer to reach an audience without having to answer to anyone but his or her own artistic vision, this is something artists of all stripes have always been trying to achieve. It’s certainly something I’ve been trying to achieve throughout my life, and now I might not even have to worry about being on the outside looking in. I can enter “in” myself.