Corporate Officers Co-founder and head CEO Dan likes to see the Secretions as an "actualizing of theoretical potential to the highest degree." Dan is a man who takes his business as seriously as his women. At the age of 78, he shows no sign of slowing down. Kevin was brought on board as a junior executive in 1998 when the Secretions were in the midst of restructuring. Not daunted by an organization in transition, Kevin quickly proved his value as a team player as well as an innovator. Co-founder and Financial Officer Mickie Rat has been with the Secretions since the beginning, back in 1991. He prides himself on having a handle on the market as much as his back swing on the green. Download images and audio and see why the Secretions is the best solution for your enterprise! The Secretions owes much of its innovation and financial success to many others across the internet. Without these corporate entities, the Secretions wouldn't be to offer the viable commodities it does today! To know where we're going, it's important to see where we've been. Have a look at our past accomplishments and envision what growth will come in the future! So easy to use, no wonder it's number 1! Blogger offers its users the latest in personal online publishing technology. We're happy to support and be affiliated with this fantastic online service. We Haven't Sold Out -- We've Bought In The Secretions weblog is the least updated part of our site. Check here for upcoming shows, bizarre band stories from recent shows, and the day-to-day ramblings of the three band members. Wednesday, March 12, 2003 ...and now, a million years later, I actually update this frelling thing. I have good cause, because I am finally booking us a tour! Well not really finally, because I have booked us a tour before, but that was in 2000. I booked the first show today, which is going to be on June 20th at Arkaik in Reno. That is technically the last show of our tour. Here is where we are trying to go on our tour: June 6 -- LOS ANGELESJune 7 -- TUCSONJune 8 -- NOGALES, MEXICOJune 9 -- EL PASOJune 10 -- DALLASJune 11 -- AUSTINJune 12 --HOUSTONJune 13 -- NEW ORLEANSJune 14 -- FAYETTEVILLE, ARJune 15 -- OKLAHOMA CITYJune 17 -- ALBEQUERQUEJune 18 -- DENVERJune 19 -- SLC/PROVOJune 20 -- RENOIf anyone reading this happens to have connections in any of those towns, please email me. I am kinda starting from scratch in booking this tour, and I kinda suck at booking tours, so I need lots of help. I do have some connections, like in Mexico and Arizona and Reno and possibly New Orleans, so it's not all bad. I have a good feeling about this particular tour, I don't know why. Part of it might be that Kepi routed this entire tour for us. I was hanging out with him a few days ago, saying how I wanted to go to New Orleans on our tour but I couldn't figure out how to get there and back in two weeks. He admitted that he was a tour routing genius and whipped out the atlas, and in less than five minutes, he mapped out the route that I listed above. It inspired me so much that I have already started booking. If all goes well, we will be playing in New Orleans, in the French Quarter, on Decatur Street, on Friday the 13th of June! Oooh, creepy! Maybe we'll even see some extra creepy voodoo curses while we are there! This time around, I am not leaving until I see at least one cemetery! I'm excited, and I hope this goes well. If things happen the way I hope they will, and this might be a pretty big if, a week after we get back from our tour, we might be playing on the eight U.S. west coast dates of the Vans Warped Tour! Even if that doesn't happen though, I won't be mad because at least I will have been to New Orleans this year. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with going back there. Ever since I went there with my old band the Phlegmings in 1995, I have been dying to go back. I had such an interesting time there, and we were only there for two days! I love that place. I even went as far as to get a city map of the Big Easy and put it up on my wall. I'm gonna know the streets like my own hometown by the time we get there! Anyway, it's gonna be cool this summer no matter what, because I'm finally gonna get to hit the road like I always wanted to with this band. I'm gonna go to bed now, because I'm really fucking drunk. Yay tour! posted by Mickie Rat at 3:03 AM Thursday, November 28, 2002 Okay, wow, I'm finally updating this thing! I'm bored and full of Thanksgiving pie right now, so all I can do is sit here and write. I brought the Alive and kicking home to show my mom, and she immediately said "Well, that's not a picture that your mother would really be proud of." And of course I whined "But mom, it was for Halloween! We're made up like Zombies cuz it's a Halloween themed cover!" She was just kidding though, she really loved it. I also gave her a copy of the new Groovie Ghoulies/Secretions split 7 inch, "Til Death Do Us Party." We just got our copies a few days ago. The cover is so cool, it's in full color. The marbly black "tombstone vinyl" is cool too. You can order your copy here. If that wasn't enough to be excited about, we have our Boardwalk show on January 7th coming up. We get to play with Marky Ramone's new band again, but this time it is going to be at a cool all ages place instead of that creepy dive bar that I won't mention here. Marky Was so cool to us last time, he hung out with us after the show and let us take pictures with him. He also signed my leather jacket "Marky Ramone 2001." I think I'll just get him to update it this time by adding a "2002" to it! Plus, that show is going to be even cooler because we get to play with the legendary LA punk band D.I. if you want to check them out, go rent Suburbia, they are the band that plays the song "Richard Hung Himself" at the punk warehouse club. That is gonna be a really fun show, and I will be twice as hyper and excited as I normally am (which could be dangerous) and I will probably end up breaking something. Hopefully it won't be one of my own bones. Be there dammit! oh, and one more thing that's cool, our website is linked on Marky Ramone's links page! Woohoo! posted by Mickie Rat at 6:48 PM Saturday, October 05, 2002 Something weird and wonderful happened today. Secretions finally made it on the cover of a magazine. It's a local music magazine called Alive & Kicking, and it's only available in the Sacramento area and surrounding counties, but it's still pretty cool. I'm not getting a big head about it, I know that in the worldly scheme of things, or even in the national scheme of things, it doesn't really mean a whole lot, but it's still nice to be noticed. Nothing like this has ever happened to any of the bands I have been in before, and I am enjoying it. I am fully aware that there are many people who don't really care, and I am not going to try and stop them from doing so. I will admit that doing the interview was a lot of fun for me, and reading it is even more fun, and I hope that those who do care enjoy reading it as much as I did. For the aforementioned folks, you can pick up this newspaper 'zine style thingie at local Sacramento coffeeshops or music venues. The basic premise of the interview was setting the three Secretions loose in a run down drive-in movie theater with a bad movie and twenty five pounds of candy, all in the spirit of Halloween. Antics ensue. It is the October issue, so we figured to get in the spirit of things, we would dress up like zombies and take some photos to be used somewhere in the interview. Our friend Justin Pine, who is going to Tom Savini's monster makeup school, helped turn us into the zombies that now grace the cover of issue number 90 (October!) of Alive & Kicking. In addition to being a fun and crazy thing to do at the drive in, this interview celebrates the fact that we have a new 7 inch vinyl record coming out on Springman, which is a split single with our friends and mentors, the Groovie Ghoulies. They are both songs that have been released before, but we just wanted to do it for fun. Both the interview and the record are wonderful things for me that I never thought would happen, so right now I am happy. Today we got on the cover of A&K. Today was a good day. posted by Mickie Rat at 2:00 AM Wednesday, October 02, 2002 It's been two days since I got back from Hawaii, and I miss it already. The kids in Hawaii are very sweet and keep emailing us, asking when we will come back again. The Friday show was a lot of fun. It was at a coffee shop called the Coffee Factory in Honolulu. That place was cool, it was only five bucks to get in, and they had "punk rock" prices for soda, coffee, and even fifty cent Mega Jolt! About forty kids showed up. Dave apologized and said it was not a good showing of the scene, due to another punk show going on the same night at the Pink Cadillac in Waikiki, where we were playing the next night. We didn't really care, cuz hey, we're playing a show in Hawaii dammit! The first band to play was the Tanner Boyle Quartet, with our gracious host Dave Noodle on guitar. They were very energetic and fun, and their singer Lyle was like an Asian Iggy Pop, writhing around, screaming, and attacking audience members mercilessly. I came in just as they were in the middle of their set, and Lyle singled me out for a serenade while the band was raging on behind him. he looked me straight in the eye, and grabbed my crotch, gave it a good squeeze, and sauntered off. I didn't even flinch, and I would have thanked him if the music wasn't so damn loud. I wandered in and out during the break, and during the next band, Black Square, and talked to some of the locals at the show. Most of them seemed to be young college kids who have moved to Honolulu from all over. A guy named Pete told me that his parents told him he could go anywhere he wanted for college, so he picked Hawaii. Pretty clever. Nevermind that pesky Yale or Harvard, let's go to the beach! Anyway, Black Square was good, they reminded me of an East Bay band with their clever songwriting and dynamic stage presence. It was around the middle of Black Square's set that we realized how drunk Kevin was. We had been drinking at Dave's house for a few hours before the show, and we just kind of kept drinking in the parking lot during the show. It was pretty easy because all the friendly kids at the show just kept handing us beers. Those friendly Hawaiians! I had about five beers and Kevin had put away seven before we played, which is kind of a record for him! Danny made him drink a bunch of water before we played, so he was okay. I think he actually played better! I know I do when I am a bit more "relaxed." Secretions were up after Black Square, and it took us a while to get set up, because we were borrowing amps. We just brought our guitars and a snare drum for our Hawaii shows, due to weight limits on the plane. The bands at both of the shows were really super cool to lend us their stuff. That night I used a single fifteen inch cabinet with a really decent head, I can't remember what kind it was though. I couldn't really get a good fuzz sound through it like I could on my Ampeg, but it was fine because my Rickenbacker sounds good on anything, fuzzy or not. Kevin used a Marshall half stack, so he sounded great. We blasted through our set as usual without any problems. Fortunately Kevin and I were not "relaxed" to the point that we were playing bad. I actually think we did a little bit better than usual. Some of the kids watched us, and some just wandered off, probably in search of more beer. Most of them were actually inside though, which means they still liked us, even if they weren't paying full attention. One kid with spiky red hair, who I dubbed Yu-Gi-Oh! due to the similarity in hairstyle, was extra obnoxious and decided he was going to run into everyone in the room. It was cute, but it looked painful for the bystanders. The crowd seemed to like us a lot, and a few kids told us that they would come to our show the next day in Waikiki. The band that played after us was called Mindless Rebellion. They played the good old school type hardcore that we used to have a lot of here in Sacramento. Unfortunately most of the kids left after we played, so there was only a handful of people left to see them. Their drummer kicked ass, he was really good, and really fast. Danny ended up talking to him after the show for a while, and he said the whole band was thinking of moving to Portland. I think Portland would be a great place for them, they would be more appreciated there. All of the bands were really cool, they told Dave that it was cool if he gave us all the money from the door to cover our cost of flying out. It was a great night. Saturday we got up and had breakfast at the coffee shop right next to Dave's apartment building. I had my usual of a garlic bagel with peanut butter and Danny had a huge waffle with tons of fresh strawberries piled on top. Danny claims it was "a waffle so good, it would put the True Love Caf?ut of business." Good thing it's in Hawaii eh? After that, Lory Danny and I headed out to the Aloha Bowl, where they have a huge swap meet in the endlessly looping parking lot every Saturday. It's actually less of a swap meet and more of a mini-mall, but they do have a section where there is cool garage sale type of stuff. It is hotter than hell out there though, so we only lasted about two and a half hours, or was it two and a half laps around the parking lot? I got a cool weird army surplus mosquito netting jacket, and Lory got a cheap back scratcher and a five dollar sarong. Danny got a hat that said "I Got Lei'd In Hawaii!" After hours of trudging around at the hottest Swap Meet ever, we decided to go visit our friend Otto, who works at the Honolulu Academy Of Arts. He is a server in the Pavilion Caf?a really nice restaurant that sits right in the middle of all the exhibit galleries. Lory and I got a couple of ten dollar salads, and Danny got a twelve dollar sirloin burger. Everything was delicious beyond belief. Normally we would not be eating so well on tour, but Otto got us a huge discount, meaning it was free, so we managed to afford it. After our insanely satisfying meal, it was time to go home and get ready for the show at the Pink Cadillac. The Pink Cadillac is right near Waikiki beach on Oahu. It is a fairly normal looking bar above a strip mall, right next to a 7-11. It is a weird sort of situation, being that it is a bar that also does all ages shows. They have a dance floor that they rope off for the kids to hang out in, and a separate section for the over 21 crowd. We got there, and were surprised to see that all the kids who said they would go to our show the night before were there! We lugged our stuff upstairs and hung out for a while. I ran into the drummer and the guitarist from Mindless Rebellion. They asked me if I could help them polish off a really big bottle of Jim Beam that they had lying around, so we found an appropriate spot behind a dumpster in the alley behind the 7-11 and had a whole lot of Jim and Coca-Cola. I told them all about our adventures in Portland, and how it would be a cool place for them to move to. Somehow I managed to cut myself off from the Jimmy Coke just in time to not be totally obliterated for our set. At last it was time for the first band, Buckshot Shorty, to start playing. We were pretty amazed by the fact Busty toons they played, there were 200 kids at the show. We knew it was going to be a great night. I'm no rock critic, so I can't come up with any fabulous Lester Bangs-style adjectives to describe Buckshot Shorty, but they were good. They got the kids all good and excited for our set. Their bass player was kind enough to lend me his Gallien Krueger double fifteen stack for our set, so I was really happy. I think Kevin used a Peavey half stack that night, which he said sounded better than the Marshall the night before. I was having a bit of trouble getting my stuff ready because I had a minor case of the whiskey stumbles, but I managed to get ready in time to play. Up front, all the kids were getting ready to rock as well. One especially large Islander kid, who introduced himself to me as Charles, was really excited to see us play. I was thinking about how crazy the crowd was for Buckshot Shorty, and had visions of getting my teeth knocked out with the mic stand Billie Joe style. I've had several teeth chipped over the years from especially enthusiastic kids in the pit accidentally knocking the microphone into my mouth during our set. I'm not complaining, it's all part of the fun of punk rock, as everyone knows. Battle wounds can be cool, something to compare when you're trying to outpunk your friends, but after ten years of playing punk rock, I'm rapidly running out of good teeth, so I have to be careful in my old age. Suddenly, in my whisky-induced stupor, I had an idea. I tapped Charles on the shoulder and promised him a free extra large Secretions T-shirt if he kept me from getting my mouth busted open by the mic stand. As soon as we started our set, the kids went nuts. Luckily Charles was there to save my teeth. We played mostly songs from our new CD, SECRETIONS TIL DEATH, and threw in a few covers. We played a Misfits song (Bullet) and the kids loved it, but when we played Ace Of Spades by Motorhead the crowd got even crazier. It was the kind of show that we always want every show to be like, where everyone is having fun, jumping around, not fighting, and generally being really cool. Everyone seemed to really enjoy us and wanted us to come back soon. The Sticklers played after us, and they were a great and a lot of fun as usual. This was their last show before breaking up for good, and all the kids showed their support by singing along with every song as loud as they could. I jumped up to sing their cover of Joan Jett's I Love Rock & Roll with Dave, as did about five other kids! It was a sweaty mess of fun, and everyone was happy and tired afterwards, as they should be after a good punk rock show. We hung around for a while after the show, selling records and taking pictures with some of the local kids. We put our stuff away and went downstairs to say goodbye to Buckshot Shorty and figure out what to do for the rest of the night. It was decided that our activities would mostly involve beer, and some other kind of activity, possibly running around on the beaches of Waikiki. We hung out in the parking lot for a really long time, not really wanting to leave, because we knew it was our last day in Hawaii. I was hungry, so I tried some prepackaged sushi cones from the 7-11 next door. They were actually really good, which is surprising for convenience store food in general, nevermind sushi. We talked to a bunch of the local kids for a while, and then went to get more beer. We ended up not going to the beach because we were all really tired from the show, so we ended up passing out on Dave's floor while watching old 80s videos on cable. Yes, I know it's an anticlimactic end to an adventurous weekend, but that's how life goes sometimes. I think we got maybe four hours of sleep before having to get up to go to the airport to go home, but we slept plenty on the four and a half hour plane ride home. One of the coolest parts about leaving Hawaii is looking out at Waikiki as you soar away from the Honolulu Airport. I actually was able to find Dave's apartment building as we cruised away from the island! He only lives about six blocks from Waikiki, so it was pretty easy. The Hawaii trip was a total success. It was tons of fun, plus we covered our costs totally, and that almost never happens on tour for us! I can't wait until we go back. posted by Mickie Rat at 10:51 PM Wednesday, July 31, 2002 Mickie Rat here! Yeah, I'm still working on the Warped Tour adventure piece, sorry, but you all know what a procrastinator I am. I've also been busy working on the van, getting Andre 2, our beloved green 1977 Plymouth van ready for our trip up to Washington next week. Anybody know where to get new van tires for cheap? We are playing two new towns in Washington, Everett and Bellingham. Ah great, another adventure I have to write up! I'm hoping it will be awesome. I hope I will see all of you hardcore Secretions fans out at the Groovie Ghoulies show in Cesar Chavez Park this Friday, I will be there, flyering for our August 24th show with the MR. T. EXPERIENCE!!! Sorry, I know I'm yelling, but have I already said fifty times how excited I am to finally be playing a show with this band? Well, I am. It's one of those things to check off the "List Of Things To Do Before I Die." I am also excited about playing with the Manges on September 6. The Manges are coming here from Italy, they play cool Ramonesy punk rock and they even do a cover of the Goonies song! Jughead from Screeching Weasel is being a pal and playing second guitar for them while they are on tour in America. It's gonna be a fun show. So there's an update for yah! If you want more new stuff to read, go to my Secret Rocket 13 weblog and read that. See Yah!!

|| music _ Bang! BANG! - SMAP || fun fun funn! me was at padangg cuz' my dad won 6 ticketss there! whOo! shiok lah. only that the emcees were abit irritating. and i think we did a whole 15 minutes worth of kallang waves. no! wrong! it's called the SINGAPORE wave. "come on! marina south! your turnn!" "get ready, GREEN sector! get readyy!" "GO! GO! GO! GO!" all the crap lah. but nobody seemed to mind. heh` anyways, i think the best part was of the performance with the rifles. super cool! turn turn turn, and the wonderful hand routine. oHHH! and i love the GOH marching bandd! especially the clarinetss! so niceee! *dieded* oh mann! people started leaving even b4 the actual fireworks boomed into the air! tell me are they missing the fun arnott?! omgoshh. and all the aunties were pushing until i had to stand on the chair to prevent my childhood fright from happening again. (that is: being flung away to space by a flying bag) but history didn't repeat itself cuz' i was...

I was probably one of the dorkiest junior high kids you'll ever see. I was shy and awkward, hesitant and apologetic in my demeanor.

I had a handful of good friends who came with me from grade school but we were split up across classes and I only saw them once in a great while, so I felt pretty much on my own.

It was all so completely new to me. Even though it was 20 years ago there is still one moment from my first day of classes at New London Junior High that I will never forget.

It was in music class. I was sitting in the front row waiting for class to begin when she sat down next to me ... and I was lost instantly. She had the most mischievous, bewitching eyes, a smile that could disarm anyone and there she was, sitting next to me and smiling at me.

It was a great effort but eventually I was able to focus on what was going on in class. Half-way through the class the teacher who taught band came in and said that there were a few openings left for a beginning instrumental class -- was anyone interested in transferring?

My hand shot up the moment I saw Liz raise hers.

Over the years that followed, we became better and better friends. Through high school we took more courses together and the two of us did a summer theatre workshop a couple years in a row.

By senior year we were the very best of friends.

I'd go over to her parents' house for dinner (even called them Mom and Dad) -- but all the while she never knew how I really felt. I was completely head over heels in love with her but could never figure out how to tell her.

And now that we were as close as we were it seemed somehow that much harder. As senior year was coming closer and closer to an end a sense of urgency began to grow. Soon we would be packing up for college and going our separate ways.

Neither of us was involved in a relationship at the time, so one day I finally told her.

I can't remember what I said or how I said it. All I can remember about that day is the way she reacted. As if I had betrayed her.

We hardly spoke to each other for the remainder of the year. As graduation grew nearer, we started to warm up to each other again -- but by then it was too late. Pretty soon she'd be going her way and I'd be going mine and we both knew it.

I talked to her not too long ago, called her out of the blue. We laughed and talked, caught up for a while.

I don't regret having never been more than a friend to her -- it's our friendship I miss the most.

 

Burt Notes 1: Nirvana and Jorie Graham
Many of Burt's general-readership tropes in The Believer article are downright ill-advised. They remind me of a PhD thesis after an advisor has helped edit it into a university press book. Or something. The most ill-advised by far: Comparing Jorie Graham's The End of Beauty to Nirvana's Nevermind. It's introduced as somehow helpful to people who "listen to lots of rock music":

Though The End of Beauty hasn't a prayer of matching sales figures for Nevermind, people who listen to lots of rock music might do well to make an analogy between the post-Graham poetry world and post-Nirvana indie rock: in both cases a big success from the early 1990s scrambled both the commercial field (as it seemed to record labels and radio stations, to publishers and magazines) and the self-definitions of artists in what has been a discrete set of "mainstream" and "underground" styles.

(Didn't his 'rock critic friend' advise him against this? Did he not vet this idea? It makes for a doubly accountable faux pas.)

Let's play out the Burtian analogy. The Nirvana phenomenon came after 13 years of post-punk movements and underground heavy metal gelling together into Nirvana and other bands of its ilk (Melvins, Jane's Addiction), and was cast as a tonic to the desiccated big hair metal and schlock mainstream pop. Nirvana was REM with balls; it was red state-friendly, and alongside Guns 'n Roses, it flushed out a lot of bullshit music and made way for a brief Camelot period during which people would get good music on the radio and on MTV, and listen to actual good hip-hop. People started getting along. Then of course the money people took over as they always do and it all went to shit and cookie cutter grunge and Black Crowes and goatee nation and gangsta metal.

To say post-Jorie Graham = post-Nirvana, then, is to presuppose that Jorie Graham had her own hair metal bands to blow out of the water, that had larger readerships to whom they would gravitate. This didn't happen, and if anything, the inverse happened, with readers turned off by Graham's skilled albeit overrated project. Perhaps we could cast Mary Oliver as Poison (NBA winner 1991), Edward Hirsch as Milli Vanilli (Grammy 1991) and Galway Kinnell as Madonna circa Immaculate Collection. That there was a "movement" afoot of an alternative poetic is something critics and poets have put forth well, since Wordsworth or thereabouts. So he's solid there for about a century.

But to say that Graham's 1987 book was somehow a culmination of the projects of the alternative poetry movements from Donald Allen's anthology on, or on top of that Ashbery, Bishop, Language poetry, and Wallace Stevens, has always been to me merely a validation of the power of Burt's Harvard teacher-now-colleague Helen Vendler. Nothing more, nothing less.

Graham's ascendance was as if Gene Simmons (Vendler) discovering Van Halen (Jorie Graham), which really happened, but it's also if Gene went out and wrote all the glowing reviews, too. It is or was canonization, pure and simple, of a poet that embodied what Vendler, and assumedly Burt, see in what an alternative or genuinely authenticc poetic practice should do, inside and outside the poem. It is the fetishization of a poet who apes the unacademic in an academic setting. (More on that last bit in another Burt Note.)

Burt's take here on this alternative poetic, far from being a Simmons-Van Halen discovery, is, for those who listen to lots of rock music, like when John Cougar Mellencamp tried to help the career of the Slash Records artist The Blasters (oddly around the same time as Graham's book). The former artist needed the street cred of latching onto something, fairly or not, viewed as true Americana, and the latter being the more indie, less commercial version of roots rock.

++++++++

One thing is for correct in Burt's Nirvana analogy -- if Jorie Graham "scrambled" anything in the late 80s and early 90s, it scrambled the distinction between old-boy, Ivy League network vast conspiracy favoritism so rampant in literature with that of a genuine movement or poetic, proselytizing it, and forming that bugaboo term--which I hate but is applicable here--community. The Iowa workshop became hip again, with Graham on the faculty, people from Brown and Harvard could go there without any guilt that they would "sell out," they would even become a hip academic. Burt mentions health insurance as practically the only reason poets join academia, some version of argumentum ad misercordiam, is ill-advised as well; it reminds me of way former punk kids rationalize their gigs at corporations.

It seems the post-Grahamites Burt lumps together, for those of us who listen to lots of rock music, would like us to think they became those people who liked or formed small-scope bands in the post-Nirvana age, sunning on hillsides at small liberal arts colleges. Bands like Pavement and Cat Power. The post-Grahamites, if they even exist, have added value and importance to themselves beyond their true aesthetic worth; they are in short, rock bands for which the idea of the band is better than the band itself (like Cat Power, like Pavement). Since the poets and the poems they write do not worry about the "goals of the lyric" (remind me what that is again?), worrying about sense, or "telling a story" (et tu, Rebecca Wolfe?), these Dogme poets can get down to the real nitty gritty of poem-writin'. Which is what again?

This critical trope is familiar to those who have an agenda to lay out and promote, in Burt's case I suspect it's making the academic world hiply unacademic. Let's see if I get this straight: It's a reverse-fetishization of unacademic poetry.

As a postscript, that "scrambled the commercial field" is a stretch. A Stretch Armstrong stretch. Graham's The End of Beauty and Nevermind's Amazon rankings are, respectively, 216,473 and 285. Graham's The End of Beauty is not The Velvet Underground and Nico, in which 1,000 bought the album and all of them started bands, yadda yadda yadda. Graham's book, to those who listen to lots of rock music, is like that old Sunny Day Real Estate promotional cassette from when you worked for the school newspaper, scratched-up, un-iTunes-imported. Nothing more and nothing less.