DC Pierson

I Would Die 4 U

Tue, 07 May 2013 20:09:00 -0400

We sure do talk about time a lot.

Specifically how technology is accordion-ing our perception and experience of time, how the pace of everything seems to be accelerating maddeningly, or accelerating perfectly, if you’re a technology-is-always-the-solution gadget-blogger type.

And starting this essay by talking about how we’re all talking about something instead of just talking about that something when I don’t even really want to talk about the conversation around that thing, I just want to talk about the thing itself and how it relates to my favorite Prince song, is one of the many ways we all try and run up the flag of “Look, I get it, and I’m not one to go around NOT getting it.”

It is a way to say “I AM AWARE THAT THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THIS THING, GOD FORBID I BE JUST ANOTHER PERSON TALKING ABOUT IT, ALLOW ME TO DEMARCATE MY SAVVY, ALLOW ME TO PARTICIPATE AT JUST A SLIGHT, FIVE-FOOT-ABOVE-THE-FRAY REMOVE.” Just like so many things me and people like me do every day, it is another barrage in the arms race of proving how much we fucking get it.

How to participate in this arms race without it dampening our we experience of media, news, life, and each other, I have no idea. I don’t know how you can engage in any form of cynicism without it becoming very real dirt on the windshield through which you view the world. And I say this as somebody that pretty much can’t reach inside myself without feeling the very comforting contours of trusty weapons like The Ironic Distance, The Self-Aware Caveat, The Pre-Apology For Sentiment. I don’t know how I assembled this arsenal, exactly, but just like a lot of hardened gunslingers I find it extremely difficult to resolve my problems without these guns now. They have always been there, and unless I work to take them apart, they will always be there. And what happens if I disarm and I come across somebody that still has them and knows how to use them? I’ll get killed, right?

This is the way I say things on the Internet. This is the way I say things in real life, too. You probably do as well. A lot of, “I know this topic has been done to death.” “I know everybody’s talking about this, but…” For some reason, nothing feels more ancient than the thing everybody was talking about this morning.

Everything can feel instantaneously exhausted and exhausting. Or maybe not, depending on what your mileage with all this kinda stuff is. I expect my experience with all of it is pretty typical. I find Twitter alternately enriching and tiring. I find Facebook mostly just the latter but I think I’m getting better at using it for what it wants to be used for, which is playing mindless hyper-addictive games against people I had an improv class with six years ago. I will often use “Tumblr” as unfair shorthand for “someone with a lot of style and no substance,” but if I’m honest, just like anything else, it boils down to how you use it, and it if you want to use Tumblr to be a fountain of really interesting, beautiful things it can be that just as easily as it can be a soulless fashion carousel.

But taken in total, in a million tabs and windows I can’t help but keep open all the time, this stuff, for me, pretty often results in what I’ll go ahead and call the Long Afternoon Of The Soul, a feeling of strung-out-on-info-ness, and not even INFO per se (that makes me sound all cool and cyberpunk-y, like I’m mainlining 600 terabytes of raw data a second, but I can SEE THE PATTERN, MAAAAAN) but strung out on what would, taken by themselves, be wonderful little bleeps and bloops of human-ness (expressions of love and joy and humor and anger and hypocrisy, and yes, pictures of cats) but taken together during this Long Afternoon, leave me feeling kinda cranky and draggy and sad all the time.

“Dude,” you might say. “Just, like, get up and go for a walk.” And you would not be wrong.

And again, your mileage may vary with this stuff. Maybe you can bang around our Internet’s finest content aggregators for five hours on a random Tuesday and get up feeling fresh and alert and not loaded down with a sort of small-yippy-puppy-coming-out-of-sedation-after-a-nine-hour-flight-in-a-freezing-cargo-hold kinda feeling. And good for you. Like so many other ways other people seem to experience the world, I am endlessly jealous of you and wish you could teach me how to feel it the way you do.

But I feel alarmed by the way technology seems to impact my experience of time.

And my favorite Prince song is “I Would Die 4 U.”

And among the reasons “I Would Die 4 U” is my favorite Prince song is, “I Would Die 4 U” is the sound of time stopping.

I only vaguely remember when it was that I first heard “I Would Die 4 U”: I would’ve been in my early 20’s and it would’ve been in New York and I would’ve just put Prince’s Greatest Hits on my iPod from the UCB tech booth computer, which was and probably still is a marvelous aggregation of like nine different people’s MP3 libraries. It probably came up on shuffle. And it just sounded so ageless and beautiful and like nothing so much as frozen time.

I know so little about actual musical terminology I cannot begin to try to explain why I think “I Would Die 4 U” sounds like a perfect crystalline standstill, why it sounds so amazingly outside of time, outside of influence, outside of everything, how even though it has component parts you recognize (“There’s Prince… there’s female back-up singers… there’s the guitar… and horns, and that’s a synthesizer, right?”) it feels less like other songs you’ve heard and more like you are being suspended in between galaxies and shot through with rays of infinite knowledge.

I don’t know what it is about Prince over the synth line that pervades the song that makes him sound like a floating holographic head projected out of a crystal that you just stumbled upon in an Antarctic cave.

It doesn’t hurt that said head is declaring that he is somehow EVERYTHING, and yet unlike anything you’ve ever seen or felt or known. It seems like the vogue in rap now is not to compare yourself to something, but just say you ARE that thing, like Big Meech, or Larry Hoover, or Ellen Degeneres, or God. I like to imagine every single one of these I AM declarations as a shadow cast on the wall of Plato’s cave by this, the platonic ideal, Prince’s declaration that he IS a dove, he IS your conscious, he IS love.

And yes, I get all the Christ imagery. I’m not one of our nation’s leading Prince scholars, and for all I know he’s writing directly from Jesus’ POV, and this is just the best-ever Christian rock by leaps and bounds and even more leaps and bounds. But isn’t it more fun to read it like Prince is saying all these things about himself?

Prince is talking to YOU. It is you and Prince. You are having a conversation. It’s incredibly intimate and you feel truly alive and truly present and truly in your body. You feel very yourself and very grounded despite the fact that you and Prince are having this conversation in the eye of a temporal mega-storm at the nexus of infinite timestreams. And Prince is telling you:

He is all things, yet entirely his own thing.

He is all things, but there’s nothing like him.

And he would wink out of existence — and then be nowhere, and yet somehow everywhere, still — and he would do it just for YOU.

The whole business is pretty fucking Prince.

I am going to see Prince tonight in Anaheim. I’ve told myself for months I was going to really get familiar with his entire discography, not just the hits. It never really happened. I listened to his self-titled second album a bunch last year, but haven’t continued the education past that point. Yesterday, I bought the “Purple Rain” album. I figured I could either skim the catalog, cramming in the time remaining, or just really focus up on “Purple Rain.” It seemed very Prince to pay attention to one thing obsessively instead of trying to absorb (and inevitably under-appreciating) the whole sweep of the catalog really, really fast. Who wants to listen to a lot of Prince just a little bit? I feel quite certain that Prince would rather me listen to a little bit of Prince a lot.

And on “Purple Rain,” after “When Doves Cry” comes “I Would Die 4 U,” because fuck any artist who ever wants to feel like they’ve accomplished anything in comparison, Prince put “When Doves Cry” and “I Would Die 4 U” back to fucking back. And so I decided to telescope in even further, on to just “I Would Die 4 U,” for a few hours, while I wrote about it.

I resist playing songs over and over, or albums over and over. I tell myself I don’t want them to get “played out” for me. But I am realizing that making sure nothing is ever “played out” comes at the cost of nothing ever really being “played in”: broken in like a favorite old t-shirt, allowed to put down roots in a particular time and place in your life the way music and other media do when you have access to less of it or just the will and the love to focus in on just a little piece of it. The bummer of not really living with works of art for an extended period is, you don’t get a chance to have a second opinion about them, or a third, or a ninetieth. I am not trying to be Old Man Media here. I’m also not the first person to make these observations. But I am trying to remind myself that it’s silly to make a rule like “don’t let things get played out,” silly to resist obsessive attention instead of embracing it, flexing it like a muscle, learning (or re-learning) how to fall all the way into something, be it a book, or a movie, or a cuisine, or a project, or anything, really. It almost never matters what the subject of such focus is. Tight focus on the most mundane or frivolous thing can’t help but yield unique results. On the flip side, you could have distracted, slightly cranky, slightly checking-your-phone-to-see-if-there’s-a-better-party-going-on-across-town focus on something that’s very deep and demanding of attention, and all you’re going to yield is mediocrity.

And more importantly, practicing obsession on seemingly inconsequential things is still practice. That’s practice that will serve you well when it’s time for the big stuff, whatever the big stuff ends up being.

It’s fun to feel cranky about technology while listening to Prince because you know whatever slight Luddite inclination you have, Prince would either back you up on it or tell you you’re not going far enough. In 2010, Prince said the Internet was “over”. And I have the life I have thanks in part to the Internet, and you are reading this on the Internet, and I know the more gadget-bloggery among us probably snickered when he said that. But to me, Prince can say stuff like that without sounding like Old Man Media. Prince isn’t Old Man anything, despite being, y’know, older.

Just imagine Prince pointing at a giant barn full of servers and going “THAT… IS OVER.” Then imagine all the red blinking server lights blinking out one by one in shame. You can’t help but think we’d still be super-duper futuristic without that stupid old Internet, because you can’t help but believe the impossible while listening to “I Would Die 4 U.” You have to imagine we’d still have a sort of Internet even after Prince declared our computer-based one over, but that it would be a much cooler (truly COOLER, in the sense it would be a secret) one that functioned entirely via word of mouth and gypsy language and coded symbols and whispers and ruffles and positively gigantic hair.

A secret, Prince-inspired emotional Internet. It does not sound remotely realistic. But it does sound so much more awesome than what the Internet can come to seem like after one of those Long Afternoons Of The Soul: a running firefight of bullshit.

It’s not that I don’t want the future. I want the future. I just don’t always want the kind of future you can realistically envision spiraling outwards from the present we are in right now.

To me, the Prince of “I Would Die 4 U” is reminding us that there is something outside of everything, and you can go there any time just by choosing to. And we can make our world look like that one. All we have to do is cultivate what would be the primary hardware of that theoretical gypsy whisper-net: endless attention. Minds that can concentrate perfectly and forever, discern signal from noise, not just notice nuance but treasure it, these minds would be the Googles and Facebooks of this imaginary computerless backroom Internet.

“You have to get obsessed and stay obsessed.” I remember that, the second-to-last line from “The Hotel New Hampshire” by John Irving, and I don’t even have to look it up, because I read it when I was in my super-duper John Irving obsessive period in high school when I tried (unsuccessfully) to read all of his AND Vonnegut’s books in a year. Both of those guys were trying to teach me how not to be cynical. I already needed the help, and I still do. I still believe the journey out of cynicism is one worth taking. I am still on the road.

Meanwhile, “I Would Die 4 U” is playing for the 52nd time according to iTunes. In it, Prince is trying to teach me how to be simultaneously in the moment and outside of it, and that’s all I’ve ever really wanted to know how to do.

bigmoneyla: THIS SHOW IS FREE. THAT IS INSANE. Also, it’s...

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:39:56 -0400

bigmoneyla:

THIS SHOW IS FREE. THAT IS INSANE.

Also, it’s Eliza’s birthday.

YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY COME.

Giant Corporations Disclose REAL Top Five Regrets Of People Who Are Dying

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:31:00 -0400

You may have seen an article that’s been floating around recently about the top five regrets of people who are dying. I read it and, like you, I was touched.

As a moderately successful author alternative comedian, most of my friends and acquaintances are the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. I mentioned this article to one of these friends, who shall remain nameless but let’s just say he runs a little operation whose name rhymes with “Fie-zer,” and he shared with me a study he and his other CEO buds generously funded out of their own pockets to rebut the findings of this article people have been passing around. He wanted me to share it with you guys because, in his words, “You just put anything on that Internet and it like, goes around, right?”

Anyway, here it is.

I wish I’d had the courage to work more.

People regretted surrendering to the immense societal and familial pressure to work less. “My boss was always pressuring me to take paid maternity leave or otherwise strike a work-life balance,” one woman said. “He once threatened to fire me if I didn’t leave work on a Friday afternoon to see my daughter’s school play. I wish I’d had the guts to say, ‘fire me if you must, but I’m staying right where I am, and producing at optimum efficiency. If you let me go, I can always find another job. Actually, you know what? I’ll find another job even if I’m still at this job. I’ll find several. I deserve to earn less money at more jobs.’ I just wish I’d said that. And honestly? The school play ended up being bad.”

2. I wish I’d shunned people who didn’t spend as much money as me.

“My grammy was right when she said ‘peer groups are the most powerful decision influencers in the personal sphere,‘ and I regret not using that powerful influence on people I considered friends to motivate them to use more of their discretionary income on clothes and gadgets,” said one woman on her deathbed. “Looking back on it, it’s like, what kind of friend was I, calling people up to say ‘How’s everything going, can I help you when anything?’ when I should have been saying, ‘What phone are you talking to me on right now, and if it’s not the most recent iPhone, why am I even talking to you?”

3. I wish I’d taken the advice of TV and billboards.

“I should’ve seen that advertisements were my real friends, my real… can I say it? Family,” one man said. “They were the ones with the consistent message. Your friends and family, they want one thing from you one minute and then the next minute it’s totally different. My wife, before we got married, she was all, ‘You have a drinking problem, you need to take care of that before I can even consider a long term commitment,’ and then the next minute she was like, ‘Great, you’ve been sober for a year now, let’s get engaged.’ It’s like, make up your mind. TV and billboards were always consistent with their messaging, because teams of paid professionals were making sure they were that way. I should’ve tweeted more hashtags they put up in the lower third of TV screens during shows. I should’ve liked Bank Of America on Facebook. I should’ve seen a lot more movies whose posters had been focus-grouped to have maximum impactfulness. On opening weekend. I’ll never get those opening weekends back now. I’ll never get back those hashtag-less tweets.”

4. I wish I’d reported the ineffeciencies and underperformance of co-workers.

Whether major infractions of company policy or the sorts of tiny oversights which can add up to major lost productivity, dying people overwhelmingly reported wishing they’d spent more of their limited time on Earth telling their employer about bad things their co-workers were doing. “One time, I actually stormed into my boss’ office and I demanded a raise because… Oh God, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but… I felt I brought intangible personal skills to the job that were being undervalued. How embarrassing is that? I actually felt like I, a person, had some kind of ‘unique value.’”

Here the woman broke down into a fit of laughter, and when she recovered, continued: “Oh, it’s good to laugh. It’s the best medicine there is, besides name-brand, non-generic pharmaceuticals. Side note, I should’ve laughed more, by watching situation comedies at their original air times, without the interference of a DVR device so I could view all the commercials. But — anyway, so I went into my boss’ office. And it was the biggest mistake I ever made, not just because of what I said, but because I now realize what I should’ve said was ‘Suzanne in the cube across from me sometimes plays Candy Crush Saga on Facebook.’ Hell for me wouldn’t be the kind with fire and brimstone. Hell for me would be coming face-to-face with all those poor innocent man-hours I let be slaughtered because I didn’t have the guts to speak up for them.”

5. I wished I’d given in earlier to the notion that human life is total war of all against all.

“I was always asking the big questions,” one patient remarked. “What am I doing here? What’s life all about? What should my real priorities be? All of this to beat back the feeling I would sometimes get when I was particularly depressed or overwhelmed, this paranoid, jagged feeling, this suspicion that you couldn’t trust anybody and should only ever be out for yourself in life. What I now know that it was at those moments that I was my most wise. The world is deeply scary, any other person will cut your throat in a second if given the chance, so you should view them with the same naked contempt. If somebody’s on strike because they want to be treated fairly, you should take their job if you can. So what if we could all achieve something greater if we could just hold off on cashing in for just a moment? Some asshole would fuck it up by surrendering to greed, so I may as well be the asshole to fuck it up so I get the payoff. The real competition in life is who can put up with the most bullshit, the most headaches, be treated the worst. Life is a pageant and Miss Least Personal Dignity always wins. And after a point the only true innovation is coming up with the most audacious swindle. It’s not about coming up with something truly new, it’s about being the first person who’s willing to do something the previous generation would’ve considered ethically abhorrent. Honor is for suckers and you should only be decent when there’s a percentage in it. But now… but now I feel the life leaving me. It’s really finally going this time, so you, you gotta convey this message to my grandkids. If I could offer them one piece of advice from a man who’s lived ninety-two years in this crazy world, it’s this…”

A cataclysmic coughing fit racked the old man’s body. Then he settled back, and a glimmer of childlike wonder entered his eyes, and he spoke again.

“Like Bank Of America on Facebook.”

"I want to jump up on the table and scream, ‘Do you know how lucky we are to be doing this? Do..."

Thu, 02 May 2013 21:59:00 -0400

““I want to jump up on the table and scream, ‘Do you know how lucky we are to be doing this? Do you understand that the only way to repay that karmic debt is to make something good, is to make something ambitious, something beautiful, something memorable?’ But I didn’t do that. I just sat there, and I smiled.””

- Steven Soderbergh (AKA God), in his State Of Cinema address at the San Francisco International Film Festival, which you can and should read in its entirety here.

Tomorrow night in Norman, Oklahoma. Be there if you live in...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 01:57:42 -0400

Tomorrow night in Norman, Oklahoma. Be there if you live in Norman, Oklahoma.

My grandma wrote me an e-mail yesterday

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:31:00 -0400

And it started like this:

Hi my sweetheart,

Just wanted you to know that you and I are still alive, I think.

And then later in the e-mail:

We have two new baby chicks. They are so cute but I won’t send you pictures.

I wish there was an American Bureau of Immortality I could forward this e-mail to, lobbying them to grant her infinite spins around the sun.

Me @ LA Times Festival Of Books Tomorrow! (April 21st)

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 17:09:10 -0400

Los Angeles: are you coming to the LA Times Festival Of Books tomorrow? I’ll be in the mix! Come get a book signed, come hear me talk on a panel. The event is huge and FREE!

SIGNING!

11 AM - 11:30 @ Penguin booth

12:30 PM - 1 PM @ Mysterious Galaxy booth

PANEL!

1:30 PM - 2:30 PM - “Guffaws & Giggles” moderated by Aaron Hartzler

w/ Sean Beaudoin, Elizabeth Eulberg, Amy Spalding & ME!

More details about the LA Times Festival Of Books HERE: http://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/

Great song called “Back To Boston” by the great...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 23:18:03 -0400

Great song called “Back To Boston” by the great Jason Anderson.

“in the sweet arms of the Northeast, in the sweet arms of my friends / you can find me alive and in love with it all”

DC Pierson Squirrel Memes, Vol 2: “This Squirrel Is...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 18:38:00 -0400

DC Pierson Squirrel Memes, Vol 2: “This Squirrel Is Retired”

Vol. 1: “What’s Your Name, Skittle Squirrel”

DC Pierson makes a pep-rally mixtape for lonely pop-culture obsessives

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:44:54 -0400

DC Pierson makes a pep-rally mixtape for lonely pop-culture obsessives:

Super-duper proud of this. The great Tasha Robinson interviewed me for the AV Club’s “I Made You A Mixtape” feature. Details the struggle of being a cynical nerd and trying to de-cynicism yourself with the aide of, and sometimes in spite of, music and movies and making out. Features Kanye, Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Jason Anderson, A New Found Glory, Good Luck, Gin Blossoms, Girlfrendo, Karl Hendricks Trio, Weston, Ne-Yo, The Mountain Goats, Belle & Sebastian, and Jimmy Eat World.

Infinite Dolphin Source

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 22:32:29 -0400

When I was a kid I would stare into a sprinkler whose droplets were catching the light of the sun and pretend that each individual arcing droplet was a leaping dolphin, at that all these dolphins were emanating from some infinite dolphin source, and if certain episodes of certain science-centric public radio shows I’ve listened to are correct, somewhere in the universe this actually exists, this infinite dolphin source.

There’s a whole lot of matter and a whole lot of universe so just mathematically speaking, somewhere matter is combined in a way that produces infinite dolphins, appearing and catching the light and disappearing.

And if I have misinterpreted what I heard on public radio, it wouldn’t be the first time, but I think we can all agree it is harmless to let this particular misinterpretation stand.

(And I wrote this because someone was randomly a dick to me on Twitter and I liked the idea of this post being brought to you by that person the way Sesame Street episodes were brought to you by letters.

And I could’ve written back to that person saying UH ACTUALLY, EMPIRICALLY, I RULE but they would’ve just been getting what they wanted, and I think somewhere in the universe they did get what they want, after all, there’s a lot of matter and some of it will inevitably be formed into assholes with a lot of hate that demands easy electronic distribution and in certain cases those dudes will get what they want. All too often they will. But not tonight. Tonight: infinite dolphins.)

Andy Wood will not be joining us but the flier was simply TOO...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:56:31 -0400

Andy Wood will not be joining us but the flier was simply TOO REAL not to use. Come thru TONIGHT!

Look how many hugs I get

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 19:19:19 -0400

Look how many hugs I get

I gave a talk at Google the week my book came out. Talked about...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:36:47 -0400

I gave a talk at Google the week my book came out. Talked about foam swords, broken tattoo promises, and marketing. TED CONFERENCE CAN’T EVEN HANDLE THIS

I rapped about 50 more people who pre-ordered my book. Also, my...

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:23:04 -0400

I rapped about 50 more people who pre-ordered my book. Also, my girlfriend’s new kitten Linus has a cameo. Look, I know how the Internet works.

Crap Kingdom is available NOW in bookstores, on eReaders, on Amazon, etc. More info: http://crapkingdom.com

Also: in this video, I look like Violet Beauregard for some reason. It’s all just a glorious part of having a European-dad-on-vacation-who’s-been-in-the-sun-too-long complexion. Real rap.

This. Now.: This is a specific moment

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:16:03 -0400

This. Now.: This is a specific moment:

ferniecommaalex:

Thanks to disgusting and/or ignorant people like the Steubenville rapists, their enablers, Todd Akin, teems of moronic internet commenters, over 20 senators voting against VAWA, and a tragically tone deaf and clueless media, we are at a specific moment in this country where we’re talking about…

I think for too long myself and a lot of people like me assumed because we thought of rape the very definition of wrong, everyone thought along those same lines, only to discover now, in 2013, that for a lot of the country the subject even being brought up triggers a lot of queasy “now, boys will be boys and girls should reconsider their skirt length” sentiment that results in the perpetrators being viewed as victims and victims finding themselves Hester Prynned at the moment they most need to be listened to and supported.

I am dumb for not having realized the degree to which a lot of people in America think rape is a gray area, or a feminist fiction engineered to vilify boys who just can’t be held responsible for their silly penises do when Jezebels are in the mix. I’m sure everyone who’s ever been raped is already well aware of the echo chamber of judgement our society presents to victims.

Fernie is right: we as a country need to have this discussion now, and not let the conclusion of that discussion be “Did you know girls lie sometimes? And, like, society is very confusing for boys these days!”

Y’all go read this whole thing.

We Didn't Do It, But We Did It: Crap Kingdom and the New York Times

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:26:00 -0400

So, Crap Kingdom did not make it onto the New York Times Best Seller list this week.

I say “this week,” because: hey. Not to get all The Secret about stuff, but I earnestly believe that if I keep my head down and keep working and keep doing all the things I’m doing, someday it will be. It, or another book. My dream scenario is that my next book (or the book after it, or the book after it) is finally the effort-coalescing smash hit I have been waiting for and that propels my whole back catalog onto the list. I think this is the dream of every artist who feels under-appreciated. It is also (though the details may be different) the dream of anyone who has ever felt undervalued or looked down upon in any walk of life. “THIS ONE DANCE I DO AT THE TALENT SHOW WILL BE SO GREAT EVERYONE WILL SUDDENLY REALIZE I’M BEAUTIFUL AND THEY’LL THINK BACK ON EVERY TIME I TRIPPED IN THE HALLWAY AND REALIZE I WASN’T TRIPPING AT ALL, I WAS PERFORMING BEAUTIFUL MINI-DANCES!” And so on.

It is a cliché dream and I get that yet I am fully in its thrall.

That said, I’m sad. I do believe there’s a difference between “getting your hopes up” and “being excited by the possibility something.” I didn’t used to think that. I used to very willfully try to assume that nothing good would happen, thinking that if something good happened, it would be a neat surprise, but if nothing happened, or something bad happened, who cares? All that happened is what I expected to happen. Look how smart I am.

After a few cool things happened in my life and were greeted with very little fanfare by my insides, I realized something gamblers and businessmen know implicitly: in order to win anything, you have to wager something. If you want to be thrilled when something cool happens, you have to have hoped it was going to happen.

Basically: “Exciting” is a more marketable way of saying “full of potential heartbreak.”

So I was excited by the possibility that this could happen, and I worked really really hard to try and get it to happen. I try very hard not to be like a high school yearbook staff, where I say “we worked really hard on this” like it somehow inures me from criticism when I’ve misspelled someone’s name. I believe hard work should be a given. Hard work does not mean you deserve something. I scream this at the TV most weeks during “Shark Tank.” I have worked hard and I will continue to work hard and when it’s finally been enough work for it to happen, it will happen.

Interesting thing about getting bad news (and an interesting thing about getting good news): it happens. And then you are still alive. After the moment you get the bad news, there is a next moment. And a next moment and a next moment and a next moment.

And then you go get something to eat.

So the bad news is it’s not on this week’s Best Sellers list. The good news is, it is out there, and people seem to like it, and once it’s out, it stays out, and people can get it, and people can find it. And I still sold quite a lot of books. And every time someone tweets a picture of their copy of the book at me, I think: “This rules.”

The lofty goal has not yet been achieved. But the main thing worth celebrating is still worth tons of celebration, and in between plotting all of the next moves (there will be a bunch), I plan to.

If you run an independent bookstore on the West Coast and would be interested in hosting a reading / signing type deal in the next few months, let me know: dcpierson AT gmail.com

If you pre-ordered the book during the almost eight-month pre-order campaign, thank you so, so much. If you sent me your pre-order receipt for a custom rap and I haven’t gotten to yet, I will, I promise.

If you’ve read the book and liked it, please leave a review on the book’s Amazon page, it helps a ton:

http://www.amazon.com/Crap-Kingdom-DC-Pierson/dp/067001432X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1363217167&sr=8-1&keywords=crap+kingdom

And likewise on Goodreads, if you’re a member:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15780282-crap-kingdom

And if you haven’t gotten the book yet, please buy it! It’s available for eReaders and in bookstores and online. I think you’ll really like it.

Thanks to everyone who supported me in my book-launch efforts:

To Marc Maron, Chris Hardwick, Doug Benson, Julie Klausner, Tom Scharpling, Erin McGathy, Dan Harmon, Cameron Esposito, Kumail Nanjiani, Emily Gordon, Dave Chen, Jeff Rubin, Jensen Karp, Matt Robinson, Elizabeth Laime, Jesse Thorn, Jordan Morris and many more who had me on their podcasts in the run-up to the book’s release, and since. I think I sold more books because of podcast appearances than any other single reason. Thanks for let me yammer and plug. (If I left you off of this list, yell at me and I’ll fix it.)

The people who worked on my tapings for my stand-up half hour and DC Pierson Is Bad At Girls: Justin Donaldson and his crew and Jeremy Burke.

To Steel Tipped Dove who mixed my rap mixtape and Casey Trela who recorded it.

To the artists who contributed amazing original songs to the Crap Kingdom book soundtrack: Ted Leo, Jean Grae, Free Energy, Sean Nelson, The Ettes, The Rosebuds, Advance Base, and Matt Bennett. And to Jenn Misko who has worked and is working on the music blog and college radio campaigns for the book soundtrack.

To my editor Kendra Levin and Viking publicist Tara K. Shanahan.

To Corey Griffin who did my crapkingdom.com website.

To the awesome people who contributed blurbs for the book jacket: Donald Glover, Patton Oswalt, John Hodgman, Megan Amram, Matt Fraction, and Chris Gethard.

To SlashFilm who announced the book and The AV Club, Stereogum, and Complex who premiered songs from the book soundtrack.

To Baratunde Thurston, whose thoughts on pre-order campaigns were the backbone / inspiration / main rip-off source for all my ideas. And Eliza Skinner, who I think might be my consiglieri.

To any journalists or bloggers who interviewed me or wrote about the book, or are planning to.

And if you are a journalist and want to talk to me about this book’s DIY marketing campaign in which old-world publishing meets new technology meets alternative comedy, hit Tara on the e-mail tip: Tara.Shanahan AT us.penguingroup.com. I promise I will say a combination of smart things and funny things and the whole thing will be very entertaining.

To anybody who tweeted about the book, including Lena Dunham and Joshua Malina.

To Tom Wilson, Anthony King, Rich Sommer, and Gillian Jacobs who told great stories at my Crap Kingdom book release show, and Megan Baker who took pictures, and Jimmy who did tech.

To anyone who shared any bit of my campaign (the mixtape, the soundtrack, the half-hour, the storytelling show, the custom raps) with a friend or their followers or encouraged people to buy the book.

To my girlfriend Haley who, yeah, jeez, I didn’t know that part of happiness was having someone to be happy with and for and around, and to be made happy by, and kept sane by, and to make happy, and to keep sane. But turns out it is! And tonight I am going to tell you that thing I told you this afternoon I was going to tell you when I saw you because now the main part of what makes good news good to me is I know I get to tell it to you. I always knew when Common said “I’ll tell you the rest when I see you” in “The Light” it was crazy poignant but I didn’t understand why and now I do! Neat. Neat, neat, neat.

So yeah, Crap Kingdom is out now, and it stays out.

And I am excited, with everything that implies.

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Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:57:16 -0400

Crap Kingdom Publication Day Thoughts OR: Kanye West Vs. Nickelback

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:53:50 -0500

My book Crap Kingdom is available today, in stores, online, and on your eReader.

I am trying very hard to follow my girlfriend’s instructions, to resist my innate desire to douse what should be unadulterated pride and joy with self-doubt and self-loathing. Self-doubt and self-loathing are Nickleback on the modern-rock radio station in my mind. They are always on. But today I am trying very hard to drown them out.

I think I just realized I’ve been using the words “trying very hard” a lot lately. Usually in the context of “I’m trying very hard to get on the New York Times Best Sellers list.” Because I am.

I have been told by my very wise editor to temper my expectations regarding the Best Sellers list. They have this “secret sauce” they use to compute the list, and books that are in both paperback and hardcover have a natural advantage because there’s just more copies of them out there, and just like anything else, if you’re already on the list, you have an advantage over everything that isn’t on the list when it comes to, y’know, being on the list.

These warnings, well-reasoned and backed up by a lot of facts, and followed by assertions that the book is by no means a failure if it doesn’t make it on the list its first week, or ever, are like catnip to my self-doubt and self-loathing. Or, if we want to extend the Nickelback metaphor, they’re like, I dunno, Coors Light. (That seems like Nickelback fuel, right?) My self-doubt goes, yup! See? The game is fixed! The only people that can do it are the people who’ve already done it. And when somebody new does do it, it won’t be you, because you’re you. Other people are the total package, and you are a cobbled-together mess, and anyone who looks at you for longer than five seconds knows, with certainty, that you are not the real deal.

But I have other feelings that are almost always running through my head in parallel to Nickelback, thoughts I will go ahead and christen my internal Kanye West. At times like these, greeted either with frothing, unreasonable commenter-hate or completely reasonable well-intentioned and frankly dead-on advice to keep my expectations realistic so I don’t set myself up for unnecessary disappointment, my internal Kanye says, “But why CAN’T I do it? What if accepting even this totally reasonable tempering of expectations narrows the fuel line of my ambition even the slightest bit and THAT’S what results in me not making it across the finish line?”

Which is in many ways every bit as unhealthy as listening to my internal Nickelback all the time.

But you guys:

Kanye West is so good.

And his music has brought me so much comfort and lent me so much motivation over the years.

And you might think he’s a jerk, or a boor, or all of the above, but you can’t deny that he livens things up.

And you might think Nickelback are the greatest, and I mean nothing by dragging them into this metaphor other than to say that my self-doubt is as ubiquitous in my head as Nickelback is in America. My self-doubt Nickelback is on a constant arena tour of my psyche, playing to sold-out crowds of enraptured neurons who can’t wait to hear them play hits like “You’re Not Good Enough” and “Every Social Interaction You Have Is A Monumental Failure” and “Photograph.”

And it wasn’t realistic to rap about everyone who bought my book on pre-sale, either, but I’ve done it for 250 people and I’m going to do it for many hundreds more in the coming weeks and months, and I consider my pre-order efforts an unqualified success, no matter what happens.

And I realize making this a choice between self-doubt and naked, boundless ambition is a total false binary. It isn’t that simple. There is a saner, healthier middle ground and I am trying to live there and I am trying to keep things in perspective as much as possible.

But sometimes, I don’t want to keep things in perspective.

Sometimes I want to shine and stay glorious.

If you have already pre-ordered the book, and maybe even received it already, thank you so, so much. If I’ve already rapped about you I hope you enjoyed it and if I haven’t yet, I will, I promise, and I will e-mail you when your rap goes up.

If you haven’t bought the book yet, I would love it if you would, and I’d love it even more if you’d do it now, before you forget, over at http://crapkingdom.com, which has links to both Amazon or Powell’s Books if you’d rather go the independent route.

Or if you want to support your local bookstore, that’s great too, I highly encourage it. If they don’t have the book, I would love it if you’d ask them to order it.

If you do have the book, when you finish it, I’d love it if you would leave a review over ON AMAZON and on Goodreads http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15780282-crap-kingdom. As of this writing, there aren’t any reviews on Amazon yet and yours could be the first. I would love it even more if you liked the book and you want to write a super-positive five-star review.

If and when you tweet about the book, I’d love it if you’d use the hashtag #DC4NYT. This is my crass attempt to brand my foolhardy but one-thousand-percent committed effort to make it onto the New York Times Best Sellers List for Young Adult books. There are fifteen slots, fifteen huge books by very (and deservedly) successful authors. I am the little guy, and a place on the list would change my life and my career forever.

In a group and as a solo act, I’ve given out tons of free entertainment over the years. And I’ve done it gladly, and will continue to do it. With the exception of the occasional live show, this is pretty much the third opportunity I’ve offered to actually pay money for my work. If I can make money making things you like, I don’t have to spend as much time doing other stuff that takes me away from making things you like. If you’ve enjoyed all the things (or any of the things) that I’ve done in the past ten years, it would mean a great deal to me if you would spend a little of your hard-earned money on Crap Kingdom today.

And again, if you already have, thank you so, so much.

And my amazing editor is correct, and my girlfriend is correct. I am not a failure if I don’t make it on the list. Sometimes books start big, sometimes they climb up onto the list later, sometimes after years. Sometimes they just sell steadily and slowly, and all of those ways are equally valid. Simply getting in print is a massive victory. Consciously I know all these things, and I am trying very hard (see?) to feel them as well.

But my internal Kanye is telling me how good it would feel to touch the sky. And I think we can. In fact, I know we can.

So again: http://crapkingdom.com

Here is a soundtrack album that accompanies the book, featuring all-new original songs by The Ettes, Ted Leo, Advance Base, Jean Grae, The Rosebuds, Matt Bennett, and Sean Nelson: http://www.hulkshare.com/tgnznfwcclxc or on Soundcloud at https://soundcloud.com/dc-pierson/sets/songs-for-crap-kingdom-a-young

Here is a thirty minute stand-up special I posted after a certain amount of people pre-ordered the book (NSFW / 18+): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXsLG—lUOg

Here is my first mixtape as a rapper, which I posted after a certain amount of people pre-ordered the book (NSFW / 18+): http://dcpierson.tumblr.com/post/43690262970/i-said-if-50-more-people-pre-ordered-my-book-id

You can see all the custom raps I’ve done so far at http://youtube.com/dcpierson

And if you’re in LA, please join me tonight, March 7th, for a very special Crap Kingdom book release show at UCB featuring Tom Wilson (“Freaks And Geeks,” Biff from “Back To The Future”), Gillian Jacobs (Britta from “Community”), Rich Sommer (Harry from “Mad Men), and Anthony King (writer on BFF and one of the funniest improvisers ever). We’ll all be telling stories of high school and college drama-club humiliation. Tickets available at http://losangeles.ucbtheatre.com/performances/view/26723

That’s it. Thank you so much for pre-ordering, buying, reading, retweeting, podcasting, Facebookin’, listening, and just generally being awesome.

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Wed, 06 Mar 2013 22:03:27 -0500