Episode 512: Penn Jillette, Ling Ma, SST Records

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• Master magician Penn Jillette is on a hot streak with his latest novel, 'Random'

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  Chances are that you think of Penn Jillette as one half of the Magicians Extraordinaire, Penn & Teller.

  Their innovative illusions have captivated audiences around the world and their live show has been running in Las Vegas since 2001, making it the longest-running headlining show in town. But there’s much more to Jillette than the bullet catch illusion, the disappearing American flag trick and the one-minute egg trick.

  Jillette is also a writer. He’s published several books including the New York Times’ bestseller, “God, No!: Signs You Already May Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales.“

  
  Photo courtesy of Akashic Books

  Jillette’s latest book is a novel called “Random.” It’s a funny, suspenseful story about Las Vegas native Bobby Ingersoll.

  A few weeks before his 21st birthday, Bobby learns that he has inherited a large gambling debt from his father. He’s able to pay off the debt and take a whole new approach to life.

  Bobby chooses to let the rolls of his “lucky” dice make all of his life decisions for him.

  Jillette tells WPR’s “BETA” how he came up with the idea for “Random.”

  There was a woman he was working with while doing a television program in England who one day called Jillette into a room alone to ask if he’d read the book, “The Dice Man.” He hadn’t.

  The woman asked Jillette to read it, which he did.

  “It’s essentially a satire of angst written in the ’70s with a guy who comes up with this self-help theory of rolling dice for your decisions,” he said. He told her that he didn’t really like the book. He didn’t enjoy the comedic style of it, and he hardly ever likes satire.

  “I like things sincere, but boy, that dice thing is pretty compelling. I said, ‘I wonder if people live like that because I read a few things that said that they had.’”

  The woman proceeded to open a briefcase and remove a beautiful pair of golden, bejeweled dice.

  Jillette made an inference. Like “The Dice Man,” she must make decisions based on rolls of the dice.

  “I said to her, ‘You took this job because of the dice.’ And she said, ‘Oh, yes.’ And I said, ‘Any decisions that you’re making on our TV show, are you using the dice?’ She said, ‘Only when I’m not sure.‘”

  As the architect of the story in “Random,” Jillette wasn’t so dependent on dice rolls to determine the fate of his protagonist Bobby and other characters. But dice did play some role.

  “I rolled the dice so that all the rolls that you see in the story are rolls that I actually made, and then I engineered the decisions and so on to fit the arc of the story I wanted to do,” he said.

  Although living a “Random” lifestyle may not be in the cards for Jillette, he said he has thought about it.

  “This whole book is me considering that and thinking about it,” he said.

  Jillette always wanted to be a writer; in fact, it was his first goal in life.

  He didn’t want to be a performer. And, early on, he didn’t like magic. In fact, he said if he hadn’t met Teller and started the most interesting conversation in his life, the chances of him becoming a magician were zero.

  “I think I can say that almost that globally everyone else in magic got obsessed with the magic side of magic at the age of like 11 or 12. I hated that. I did not like magic. I did not like the make- believe of magic. I did not like the lying of magic.”

  It was only when Teller told him that magic was essentially intellectual more than other art forms that he became interested.

  “Music hits your body. Poetry hits your body. Comedy hits your body. But magic really hits your mind,” he said. Those other things do as well. But magic leads with that. Magic leads with: it only exists if you know what’s impossible.”

  He also realized that the lie that underpins a good magic trick isn’t too dissimilar from the lies told in fiction.

  In magic, there’s an ability to tell the truth while lying: “That is not the subtext, that’s the text,” Jillette explained.

  Novels are lies, too, in their own ways — series of events that didn’t happen.

  “And yet, you are drilling down deeper … to what the truth is as you see it, and in that way, the telling a lie to get to the truth,” he said.

• 100 ex-boyfriend roommates. Yetis making love. A drug called G.

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  If you’re looking for hallucinatory, haunting tales, you don’t need to look any further than Ling Ma‘s debut short story collection, “Bliss Montage.”

  Ma’s book features spellbinding stories about a woman who lives with 100 of her ex-boyfriends and a professor who has a portal in the closet of his office. There’s also a story about a drug called “G” that makes you invisible, but has some dangerous side effects.

  Ma has also proven her prognostication prowess with her award-winning debut novel, “Severance,” which was published in 2018. The book’s storyline about the “Shen Fever” pandemic sweeping across the world seemed to predict the coronavirus pandemic.

  Ma talked to Wisconsin Public Radio’s “BETA” about going deeper into her subconscious to write these surreal short stories.

  “Many of the stories were written mostly within the first year of the pandemic, when we were undergoing lockdown. And so it was a very solitary time. And I guess what came back to me were all relationships. I suppose if there’s any unifying theme through the stories, often it’s the relationships between family members and friends and ex-boyfriends,” she said.

  Ma has described her subconscious as being a million times smarter than her.

  “I think this is true for pretty much any artist or doing any creative work,” Ma explained. “You’re usually trying to get out of your own way. I often go into a story not necessarily knowing where it would lead. We might begin with an impossible premise or a premise that just feels almost impossible to resolve. I guess I kind of let the story lead the way. The characters tell me what’s happening, and I feel that’s the case for most things that I write. But definitely for the stories in ‘Bliss Montage,’ I entered each story pretty blindly.”

  

  The opening story in “Bliss Montage” is called “Los Angeles.” It’s about a woman who lives in a mansion with 100 of her ex-boyfriends. Ma said this story derived from one of her dreams.

  “In the dream, I was married to a very wealthy man. And so I thought, great, now I can get all my boyfriends to come. And they were all artists or do all sort of creative types,” she said. “And I thought they can just come live at the mansion and this is like the greatest artist residency ever. And I think it was something about guys I had dated and how nobody was ever really able to make things work in terms of just holding down a job and being able to pursue their creative projects fully.”

  Ma said the story ended up a bit different than her original dream — there are themes of domestic abuse and whether wealth can protect people from their own pasts.

  Quite a few of the stories in “Bliss Montage” were inspired by dreams, Ma said.

  “Usually if a dream sticks with me, there’s some kind of anxiety source that is still pretty potent to me. So we kind of try and…unravel or figure out what the anxiety is. I mean, anxiety is a great inspiration source for writing fiction,” she said.

  From 2009 to 2012, Ma worked as a fact-checker for Playboy Magazine. While she was working at Playboy, she wrote the story, “Yeti Lovemaking.”

  “Playboy projected this sort of archetype of masculinity, and I remember looking at these fashion spreads. If you want to look like Steve McQueen, you buy this pair of Persol sunglasses. Or if you want to emulate Cary Grant, you should buy this pair of wingtips,” Ma said.

  “And I was thinking about these archetypes of masculinity, but I thought, what if you push that even further to the extreme? What does hysterical masculinity look like? And so I started thinking about yetis and Sasquatch. And I just think the ultimate form of masculinity is a self-enclosed, completely autonomous being who doesn’t need anyone, who’s very capable and strong and needs absolutely nothing from anyone,” she continued.

  “Office Hours” is a story about a professor of film studies and his protege, Marie. After the professor retires, Marie takes over his office. She discovers that there’s a portal in the office closet.

  

  Ma’s debut novel, “Severance,” is about the “Shen Fever” pandemic sweeping across the world. It was published two years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

  So what was going through Ma’s mind when COVID-19 struck after she had covered that kind of moment two years ago in her own fictional book?

  “Well, at first, I think I was a little bit skeptical, like, oh, of course, we all want to find answers in fiction. But as we went into lockdown and we started buying masks and people started tweeting about still having to go to work, I realized that (‘Severance’) resonated,” Ma said.

  “(It resonated) I think in our collective frustrations about work and in this kind of shock that maybe capitalism still keeps going despite this global sort of catastrophe and that sense of the surreal,” she added.

• SST Records was the 'coolest, most respected' indie label in America. Until it wasn't.

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  In 1966, Greg Ginn started a small electronics mail-order business specializing in modified World War II surplus radio equipment. Greg was twelve years old. He called the company Solid State Tuners.

  Eventually, Greg turned his attention to music, and because record labels weren’t interested in his band, Black Flag, he decided to start his own record label. He created SST Records and, in early 1979, released Nervous Breakdown, the first Black Flag EP.

  

  The history of SST is documented in Jim Ruland‘s book, “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records.”

  In a conversation with Wisconsin Public Radio’s “BETA,” Ruland sums up the essence of his book this way: “It’s the story of how Greg Ginn and his associates started up the label out of basically nothing. And grew into this unstoppable force of indie music — it became the coolest, most sought-after, most respected indie label in America. But as time went on, its practices became increasingly corporate.”

  The timing for the creation of SST Records couldn’t have been better. Thanks to college radio, punk, alternative, and independent music were finding an audience across the country.

  Ruland said SST played an essential role in promoting the growth of indie music.

  “SST’s role in establishing the touring circuit and the foundation that so many other bands followed cannot be overstated. Black Flag went to places in the United States and Canada that other alternative bands had never been,” he said. “And they were relentless about it. Their touring operation got bigger and bigger and longer. They had built up this network of like-minded people who were renting out VFW halls or doing things in restaurants that didn’t normally have live music nights.

  “It was very much a grassroots thing. From there, it expanded, and many people followed. Black Flag took other bands on the label with them, and from there, it just grew.”

  SST became known as the independent music label with a diverse roster that included bands like Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Tar Babies, and Black Flag. The label produced nearly 400 LPs, EPs, CDs and cassettes until 2014.

  Many different people helped make SST the success that it became. One of those people is Greg Ginn’s brother, Raymond Pettibon.

  “Raymond Pettibon is an incredible artist and today a highly regarded and much sought-after fine artist,” Ruland said. “But back then, he was known as the Black Flag artist because his work was used on many fliers and album covers.

  “There’s something about Pettibon’s vision,” Ruland said, explaining that his drawings featured ‘Mansonoid” countercultural figures from the last 1960s and early 1970s. Imagery included knives, semi-naked figures and some disturbing scenes.

  “All just shy of being grotesque,” Ruland said. “Whether it was on a flier, poster, or album it was arresting and caught your attention. Black Flag was the perfect soundtrack for those disturbing visions.”

  Ruland said Pettibon didn’t make covers for specific albums.

  “Rather, he was extremely prolific, and the people at SST would come to him and comb through his drawings and say, OK, we’ll use this for a flier, or we’ll use this for an album cover. The visions that he created were independent of the music.”

  As SST’s reputation as an indie giant grew, it became a stepping stone to getting a major label contract. Bands like Soundgarden, Negativland and the Meat Puppets benefited from their time with SST, at least in becoming known and moving forward as bands.

  But eventually legal battles delayed release dates, and neglect hampered the label’s relationship with many bands to the point that SST began to decline in the early 1990s.

  “Some of the things that contributed to SST not releasing as much music was distributors going under and taking a lot of cash flow out of the loop,” Ruland said. “Then there were the lawsuits involving artists who maintained SST had not paid them royalties.”

  “The result was very public fights that eroded the cachet that SST had built up all through the ’80s so that when the ’90s came along, you would think SST would be poised to take that next big step along with so many other labels,” Ruland said. “But, instead, Nirvana happened, and we all know that story.”

  Ultimately, SST will be remembered as a dynamic powerhouse in exposing people across the country to a wide variety of alternative music. But that legacy will also have a downside.

  “Unfortunately,” Ruland said, “that legacy is going to be tarnished by the label’s business practices and the fact that so many of its artists left the label or sued to get the rights to its music back.”