try harder

Sound of a New Punk Being Born (from MRR #322)

2010-11-12T12:01:00.000-08:00

I’m still dealing with the fact that my baby niece asked me to buy her records this year for Christmas.

It feels like a lot of pressure to be shouldered with, the thing every punk has at least had a tiny fantasy about, that they would get to give their baby cousin/neice nephew/whatevs their first punk record. Here it was before me, and I couldn’t think of what to get her, I mean where do you start? I feel like I have all of punk stretched out before me to choose for her, where would I have started if I could have known what there was?

I can’t even remember what started my slide into punk. How I tumbled off the cliff. The Ramones had something to do with it, and then operation ivy. But it started before them, I was primed by my brother’s old skate videos, and random tapes left around the house that had Suicidal Tendencies, Black Flag, Agent Orange sharing time with my brothers getting stoned reggae mixes. I used to fast forward through Maxi Priest, Black Uhuru, and Steel Pulse to get to the fast stuff the stuff I would jump around on the couch and shout along to.

So when my first encounter with punk in the world came, I was more than ready for it. It was like coming home, finding out that my secret love wasn’t just a thing my brothers had that I wanted. Like everything else. It was something I could go get, go find, go be. When I saw the Ramones the summer I turned 13, it hit me like an epiphany, I wanted to be punk. I went home and tried to use Clorox to bleach out parts of my hair. I took a sharpie and wrote “FUCK” on one of my dad’s old shirts that was in the rag pile, I threw bleach all over my jc penny’s stretch pants and put on some red 70’s boots of my moms. The transformation was overnight.

I took the money my mom gave me to get my now fried and orange hair fixed and went to the one record store I knew how to find and asked for punk cassettes. The extremely sweet older man helped me pick out The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and as I demanded, The Ramones. I played those taped on my walkman until they there warbley and faint.

When I was 16 I begged my dad to let me unearth one of the old turntables in the garage so I could listen to the small box of punk records I had assembled from garage sales and thrift stores. Hardly any of them would play they were so warped and scratched to hell, and the ones that did play were terrible new wave or just didn’t resonate. But I listened to them anyway, I liked their smell, and I liked watching the record spin with the needle singing along in the groove.

I didn’t start buying records in earnest until I was nineteen and finally started seeing touring bands on a weekly basis and buying their merch. I never got bit by the collecting bug. I don’t want to have every record, or delight in having exceptionally rare records, but I want to have the records I love. I want to physically own the records that mean something to me, and I’ll pick up records of bands I see and like, but the records themselves aren’t the passion.

All of this, relevant or not went into my choices for my budding punk niece.
I’ve over thought it, I know. But in the end it’s good I had a strategy. I decided to give her a smattering of the classics:

Black Flag – Everything went black. She lives in a tiny town off a big highway in the central valley. The population is about 5, 000, and less than 200 kids go to her high school. The main industry is dairy, so there is always at least a hint of cow in the air. There are five blocks to downtown. Most people would describe this as sleepy, or quaint, but to most of the young people it is one word: boring. Since rural hell can be a lot like suburban hell in it’s monotony, and frustration I thought she might connect to Black Flag’s seething.

Bikini Kill - s/t LP. She has a guitar that her Dad got her for her birthday, but she doesn’t play it. She likes having it, she wants to play it, she wants to learn, but she’s kind of convinced herself it’s too complicated or too hard for her to do now that it’s in her reach. I want her to pick her guitar and feel she has every right and capability to play it. I think Bikini Kill has said that effectively to a lot of girls.

Ramones Mania. This is my one nostalgic choice. Since my first punk show was The Ramones doing one of their farewell tours, and their music will always hold that magical crystallized moment for me when I wanted to be punk. It was ugly and wild, and that was what I wanted to be, or rather who I was, and it was suddenly not just okay, but cool.

Plus, I threw in Black Sabbath, ACDC, and B52’s to psych out her dad so he wouldn’t scrutinize her punk records too closely. I love my brother, but becoming anybody’s dad will throw the pressure on you to be a stickler and a square. And he was already a little bit of both.

I’ve also got CD-Rs ready to mail of Warsaw, Neurosis, Amebix, Earth, and Rudimentary Peni since hearing she is really into a certain Nu Metal band that shall not be named since this column is for posterity and I don’t want to grievously embarrass her if she ever reads this.

And if she does, I want to thank her for asking me for records. For letting me live the dream. And I’d want to tell her that in the end, as exciting as this all is for me, I can only try help her find the bands she’s looking for.
I can’t help too much, after all, punks make themselves.

any mail should be tied to the leg of a sleeping pigeon, that is fed bread crumbs bearing my address. What’s my address? Oh, well, um…

Gore Fetish (From MRR #321)

2010-09-20T16:55:00.000-07:00

I saw the two bloody visions dance past each other on a street just below Market in San Francisco. It was a bright cold morning and the suits shuffled and gabbed while others curled up below sleeping off last nights drunk. A little grey-haired lady laughed, that’s the only reason I looked up to see it, the absurd and magical moment that the anti-fur mobile with it’s flayed skinless little creatures plastered across it and the anti-abortion box truck with it’s big posters of bits of aborted fetus on it’s sides slowly passed each other in the mid-morning traffic.

The little old lady snorted another short little laugh, and said to herself, “Well what’s the meaning of those two put together, huh? No coats out of babies? Stop badger abortions now? Oh it’s just too much. “

When I was eight my babysitter took me to planned parenthood with her when she went to get a pregnancy test. I got to pick whatever assortment of candy I wanted in exchange for my silence. I was working on my third abba-zabba when we walked out to the parade of tiny elderly ladies outside the clinic. Shelly tried to get us out of range before they saw us, but it was too late. In moments we were beset by cotton ball headed grandma’s in decorative sweaters with binders full of confusing red photos. I was curious when I saw the first photo of the red glossy shapes they put in front of me, I didn’t understand what the globs were supposed to be, but it made me think of when I saw kittens being born, of curled up birds I’d found, and sliced cherry pie.

It was in the same moment I heard one little lady say “they’re killing babies!” that I saw the little hand. It was like a little severed doll hand in the mess of red. I threw up. I threw up and I fell down. I don’t remember Shelly carrying me to the car and driving me home. I told my mom I ate too much candy and got sick, she put me in clean clothes and into bed.

Horrifying images are nothing new in the lexicon of political propaganda, probably because they are inherently compelling, and effective at making issues tangible and real to the viewer. These kinds of images beg people to look at the “truth” of a situation, confront them with an aspect of life that they would rather not see. Such is the case with films like “Hearts and Minds.” A Vietnam war documentary which shows just about every horrifying aspect a war could manifest. It seeks to show the horrifying, the grisly, the in-humane portions of the war to combat the notion that it was an honorable war, that war could be honorable.

But you can choose to watch a film, or not. You can choose to look at reporting in newspapers. You can choose to seek out these “truths,” or you can gloss over them, ignore them like most people do, or as the news sometimes chooses to do for them. But what happens when these images are forced on us? When do we deem it appropriate, even ethically necessary that we press these images on others? And what happens when the gore simply becomes part of the aesthetic? Used simply to convey the protest-ness or political activity? Does it ever do what it’s meant to? Or is it less about advocating a cause than using it as an acceptable release of moral outrage at those do not agree with you? Psychically hitting them with the violence of your images.

If that’s the intention, to express moral outrage, to express anger, then by all means that is important too, but if the intention is to change minds, to advocate, to appeal to the part of another that you think would be as rightly outraged as you are if they understood the way you understand, then the best way to do that is to create interest, to create dialogue, and nothing will prevent that more than a tactic that is basically a confrontational visual slap.

But sometimes shit is just so crazy, so outrageous, you really do just want to slap people who don’t see the horror you do. I know that feeling, I know it intensely as a hater of war, the suffering and exploitation of animals, of rampant ecological devastation, of poverty, of a million other things that seem so obviously hate-able, that seem so clear, that it does almost make me feel wild with rage that it isn’t universally acknowledged. But I also know what it feels like to be the subject of someone else’s moral outrage. I have a thousand dreams of a little severed hand to remind me that there has to be a limit to how far you should go to make your point.

I’ve had my vengeance a few times over by throwing water balloons and garbage and condoms full of lotion at various sets of little old ladies protesting outside of clinics (If you’ve never tried it, let me tell you it is seriously helpful for working through issues).

I like to think about what the two drivers of those gore covered box trucks must have thought as they passed that morning. I imagine them slowing to check eachother out, finding themselves disgusted, but with a kind of professional sympathy and maybe even jealousy. “That’s so disgusting, and printed so well, I wonder who does his sign work…”

It really is too much.

I know, I know, there’s a lot to this. Trying not to over simplify, but I know if I do, you’ll call me on it. That’s what an angry letters section is for. I welcome a dialogue about this… niegh, I plead for one. Please send all passionate emails defending your vivisection photo poster collection to ______________ and all your napkin drawings of aborted fetuses should be made into a zine and sent in for review.

Stay Punk (from MRR #320)

2010-07-26T00:14:00.000-07:00

um, it's a banksy, obvs.

Everyday I sprawl on the lawn before class, pretending to read, but actually scanning the courtyard for punks or near-punks, somebody to relate to, to give my already re-read and well worn new issue of MRR.

I finally saw them. A couple with matching green splotches of hair in the “its cheaper to share dye, even if we’re all matchy after” kind of way, which is adorable in small doses. As they got closer I saw they were shinier and cleaner than they first seemed, with matching white creepers and Horrorpops shirts (BTW, who the fuck are they? Anybody?), I gave them the nod. Punks are punks, right? He arched a brow at my faded Dystopia shirt and rolled his eyes. It was out of a movie about high school. I know it’s never cool to be the new kid, but really?

I suddenly found myself the crotchety old punk wondering about what punk has come to. “Who are the punks these days? Seems like we can’t trust to find each other on the street anymore. Some people look punk but aren’t down; some people don’t look so punk anymore, but are.” I grumbled on this way all the way to class, disappointed.

“Lyra, are you punk?”

“I don’t know, mommy.” Lyra is slouched way down in her car seat trying to pull one of her little cowgirl boots off. Her mom, Kristina, smoothes a loose lock of her hair back into a barrette. “Yeah. I know what you mean kid, I don’t know either.”

Lyra scrunches her little face for a moment then looks at us seriously and says, “We’ll see when I’m bigger.”

Kristina is a wide seven months pregnant, with sneaky eyes and a bright smile. Last time she was pregnant she used to make me laugh by drinking water out of tall cans at parties and seeing how many dirty looks she would get. We’d laugh even harder when no one gave her shit for it. When she got pregnant the first time, she moved back in with her parents in Orange County. So she knows just how I’m feeling right about now.

My decision to become a nurse, though it has felt right, has wreaked havoc on my life. I am living in the house I grew up in with my cranky, aging father, in a town I once swore to hate for all time, away from almost everyone I know, and am daily forced to battle the boredom and bureaucracy that is community college.

“I don’t know, I just don’t feel that punk sometimes,” Kristina continued, “I was dating this kid, and he was so obsessed with being punk, he had to print designs on his jacket and fill it up with patches before he could wear it out. I don’t know, it just seemed so stupid. How are we punk? I mean, I know we are — we don’t look it so much these days, but we are right?”

Tina may not feel so punk anymore, but she’s more punk to me now than she was a few years ago as just yet another wastoid in Oakland. She’s studying to be a librarian, and is getting really into Chicano Studies, interviewing her friends and fellow activists about racist gang-injunction legislation that targets brown people. She is a mom in a time when I can’t imagine trying to hope for a future.

This is the age, the point in life I feel like most people lose touch with punk. Insecure because school, or motherhood, or a new life situation has pulled their community out from under them, they become lonely, or resentful that punk has not grown into their new more complex life with them.

I am here to say that you’re still punk, even if you don’t feel like patching up your jacket anymore, even if you don’t only cut your hair when you are black out drunk anymore, even if you don’t recognize all the names on the cover of this rag anymore. You can participate as much or as little as you want to. Just because you want something else doesn’t mean you have to stop being punk.

It is society that has branded punk a youthful rebellion, as a passing phase. It is society that has told us that punk is a kid thing, something you grow out of if you want to do “important things” or “grown up things.” Just like with every other assumed truth society at large has dictated, I call bullshit.

We need to redefine punk to encompass who we are as whole people. So you don’t need to be a punk-hyphen. Punk-mom, punk-lawyer, punk-yogi, punk-chef, punk-whatever. Punk should be big enough to include all these ways of being and to represent us at any age.

If you see your friends drifting away, feeling cut off or dissatisfied with punk, make them a mix tape, remind them it’s less about how we look and what we do individually, and more about who we are and what we care about and do as a community. When I’m feeling cut off and punkless, which is a lot lately, I just think about all of my inspiring friends and all the things they are gonna do to change the world, and to change our idea of what a punk is and can be. I think about all the punks I know, or know of, who are working toward something better. Working as teachers, community organizers, herbal healers, doulas, women’s choice clinic phlembotomists, and those going back to school to become public interest lawyers, nurses, doctors. I feel good knowing that somebody else was bitten by the same bug.

I think of Lyra becoming bigger, deciding what she’ll be. I think of all of the punks in my community I just haven’t met yet. We’ll find each other. I’ll be in the dirty Dystopia shirt (seriously, most of the time). And I think of Ivy the last time I saw her, singing at the at Clarion Alley block party sagely reminding us that “what we want is what we’ll get.”

Put paper letters in a bottle and throw them in the garbage, you’ve got a better shot of it getting to me that way than with the ocean.

Nice Tits (from MRR #319)

2010-07-01T17:27:00.000-07:00

yep, that's a Barbara Kruger.

Kristin and I have ventured to the Black Castle in Inglewood for an epic dose of metal. None of the band names are familiar, but with the wildfires, community college, and missing everybody in the bay, I’m in a dark mood, a metal mood. It’s $15, (yikes!) but the interior is perfectly familiar, a barewalled converted old warehouse space with a slapped together stage and exposed rafters. I feel blissfully at home.

The metal is technical, flashy, and the hair is whipping at a phenomenal speed. It’s not really what I was looking for, not the darkness I wanted, but it’ll do.

The first person to speak to me of the night, that is not Kristin, is a young heavy set dude, with long hessian locks, in a crisply black shirt with a pretty unremarkable and dumb band name on in like Nightskull or Zombie Death, or something like it. But I’m still pleased to maybe make a friend, being new in town can be rough.

Instead of leaning in to say hi, or something equally friendly and expected. He looks me full in the eyes and jockishly says “nice tits,” with a menacing kind of friendliness in his air. Everything in his manner says ‘If your cool you’ll say thank you and wink, if you get upset, you are an uptight bitch.’ It’s an approach that risks nothing and dares you to get upset. One I am too familiar with.

I want to punch him, or at least get a good solid slap across his face. To keep from doing so I lash back with the first snide and cutting enough response I can think of.

In tight but even tones I say, “you too” and mock wink. I haul myself to the other side of the stage before he can respond.

It feels good to have something cold and bitchy but funny to say at just the right moment, but it feels hollow too. I’m reduced to making a joke about his size to defend my self and my sex.

My small victorious high wears off entirely by the time we are leaving. I am wondering if I handled things as well as I could have, when a dude from one of the bands standing outside hollers at us wanting to know if we wanna be their groupies. As we keep walking down the street there is the faint sound of the word “bitches” on the breeze. I sigh.

Sometimes it’s so hard to know what is worth expending energy on, and what is best left unanswered; what fights are worth fighting. It’s something I’ve been thinking about and struggling with more lately.

I remember standing around Nick and Rhi’s kitchen this summer in Brighton after our show, holding a beer in each hand while heather sat on the countertop. We took turns complaining about young dudes saying and singing fucked up shit on tour.

“Ugh, I mean they are teenage dudes I keep expecting them to know better, but they don’t. “

“And they were so stereotypical too. ‘this song is about my ex-girlfriend’ then every other word in the chorus is bitch. We walked out, and were gonna tear them a new one, but it just didn’t seem worth it.”

Nick didn’t agree. He thought it was important to challenge people everytime, call them out. “it’s important” he said with a warm smile, and he was right.

I know it’s important, I do, but most of the time I am just too tired to really deal, too overwhelmed. I roll my eyes, mouth “fuck you,” but ultimately let the offending incidents go by unchecked. I make excuses for people, I invoke cultural relativity and tell myself that I didn’t understand the situation right, that it’s different here in London, or Arkansas, or San Diego, that I can’t really know or judge their cultural climate or intent. I tell myself these things so I don’t have to fight every inch of everyday. So I don’t have to cause conflict, so I don’t have to rock the boat, so I can I just get on living life.

But isn’t that what punk and radical politics is all about? Rocking the boat, challenging all the unbelievable bullshit we see and experience in the world, even in our peers, maybe particularly among our peers.

While that is true, letting things go can be necessary sometimes too. I only have finite energy to battle the forces of thousands of years of gender based bullshit, and it’s not my responsibility to take every sexist asshole I meet and read him the riot act and instruct him how to not be an asshole.

There has to be a balance, a compromise between the two.

I’ve decided to try something new. No more pretending not to hear shit, no more declaring war sporadically. I want to be the kind of person that reasons with people, that lets them know when they say and do fucked up shit, and why I think it’s fucked up.

I don’t have all the energy in the world, but I can do this. I can talk to people, I can try to stay calm, I can reason it out. I can try.

So, to the random metal head in Inglewood: Sorry about the tits thing, you had something coming to you, but making fun of your size was not it. That said, I see you again and you talk that same shit to me you are in for a real long lecture about how saying shit like that makes you an asshole, and why you shouldn’t be one. But be careful, I’m new at this, you make me too mad, I still might just knock you out.

No new PO Box yet, sorry. Save up all those letters and send ‘em at once, drown me in paper.

Omens (from MRR #318)

2010-05-16T21:04:00.000-07:00

(photo: glendale news press)

Janelle got me thinking about omens the night before I left.
We were packing boxes in my nearly cleaned out apartment when she explained her subtle art of divining. “So right before a job interview, I went to get coffee and this homeless man whipped it out”
“uh-oh”
“The interview went great! I ended up telling my potential future boss about it. I don’t know how appropriate that was, but he thought it was hilarious. Homeless penis is goodluck”
“I guess we gotta troll around people’s park anytime something crucial comes up”
“then the other day this bird shit on my hand. And I had the worst day ever.”
“that one makes sense. ”
I don’t believe on omens, or signs, or much of anything really, but it was fun to subscribe luck and portent to the random weird things that tend to happen to me and Janelle. A bird shit on my hand once too, and I totally had a terrible day too. Evidence enough for us.
That night I dreamt of crows, hundreds lined up on fences. One cocked its head looking at me and said something I couldn’t hear. They took flight all at once, and I opened my eyes.
I’ve had this unsettled feeling the whole drive down the I-5, my car packed full of belongings. The BBC tells me they there is an out of control wildfire burning in the foothills above Los Angeles. They just evacuated half of the city I’m moving to and the fire is only 5% contained. The governor has declared a state of emergency. I pick up my phone.
“Hey mom, why did no one bother to tell me La Crescenta is on fire?!”
“It’s not on fire, it’s the hills," she answers. "It’s all over the news.”
“I don’t have a tv”
“it’s on the radio too”
“yeah, I know. But why didn’t you call me?”
“it wasn’t serious. There are lots of fires right now. But I thought you knew.”
“Well, what’s going on ? Is there any news?
“aunt carol is evacuated, so is your uncle donny. The fire is coming down the mountain now. But, I think it’ll be okay. they said at the very worst the 210 will be a fire break, it won’t go past the freeway.”
“mom, we’re on the mountain side of the 210”
“well, yeah, but that’s at the worst, they’d never let the fire get this far through the city. Unless the wind picks up, then they can’t… but it won’t honey. Everything will be fine.”
“okay, I’ll just see you when I get in”
“oh, didn’t you get my message?… I’m taking your dad out of here, the smoke is too much for him. Don’t worry so much. Just make sure you get a face mask on as soon as you get here. And stay inside. And keep the phone on you in case they call to evacuate. Love you honey.”
This is bad.
My first glimpse of flames is exiting the freeway. The night sky is clouded by smoke lit orange by towering flames. I continue to drive and the flames continue with me. The familiar range of mountain transformed into seething and angry gods. The mountains like an endless row of erupting hilltops and the trailing orange glow of fire on the mountainside like lava creeping ever closer. It’s easy to feel awe and hysteria mixed in the sight of such unbelievable demonstrations of nature. The desire to go home sweeps over me. But I don’t have a home anymore, I am here to make a new one. Carrying my bags up to the house the smoke is thick, the air is hot and dry, and it’s lightly snowing ash. My nose burns with the smell campfire, and my eyes are watering.
The house is empty, but the oversize TV is blaring the news. A man stands framed against the flaming hills.
“We’ve been lucky so far, but if the winds pick up, I can’t promise the safety of the 10,000 homes now threatened” He looks tired. Face smudged with black ash, eyes red and drooped, but alight with the same anxiety in mine. I need a cup of coffee, or a beer.
The coffee shop is full of pacing nervous people and black smudged firefighters. No less anxiety here.
“Even in a worst case scenario, the fire won’t come down this far. Right?” the girl pouring coffee is smiling, sure of his answer.
He is less sure, and careful with his words, “we hope it won’t come to that miss”
No one wants to make predictions. The fire doubled in size over night, and no one feels sure of anything. I know, intellectually, the fire would be stopped before it raged so far down the hill as my father’s house. But at the moment, anything feels possible. I step outside.
The smoke has settled like fog, and my flimsy mask is not helping very much. I’m looking at the mountain, wondering what I’ve got myself into. Joan had it right when she said that “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” She was speaking of the hot dry winds that rise out of the Mojave and usually spark the autumn fires, but it feels like it can be applied to all of LA’s seasonal phenomena: mudslides, floods, earthquakes, and fires.
“you know, the native Americans used to burn off large sections of this land to make fertile soil… they did. What we’re gonna have is new and abundant growth up in those mountains. And nothing for the Santa Anas to burn this fall. So don’t look so concerned young lady. It’s a natural cycle, a clean slate for the mountain, a fertile renewal.” He is a dapper old man, cane in hand, and white hair parted and smoothed down.
“aren’t you worried about all these houses?”
“oh no, not for mine anyway. I’ve got a box of photos and books to put in the car, and insurance for the rest. I could do without all this smoke though.” I handed him a spare mask my mother had left me while he coughed into a white handkerchief.
“thank you.“
“do you believe in omens?” I said returning my gaze to the mountains.
“no, no I don’t. but if I did, I think fire would be the best kind. A promise of a new beginning, of a world purged of mediocrity.” With that he shuffled off into the smoke fog.
I went home, turned off the news and began to unpack my things.

Thoughts on death, and the perfect burrito (from MRR #314)

2010-04-04T14:59:00.000-07:00

photo by Erin Yankee

I was daydreaming about the perfect burrito when the tire blew.

It was at the precise moment I had decided that cilantro was indeed crucial to the ultimate harmony of flavor perfection that the van roared and shuddered violently beneath us.

We later concluded that the loose gravel on the road contributed heavily to why Heather lost control and we tumbled off the road down the embankment. I remember her clear and absurd calm when she said, “here we go!” as the van spun around and tipped over the edge.

That moment of terror and hysteria is a strange kind of memory. It was so loud, the rumbling crunching of the van, I know it was, but my memory of it is somehow one of still and quiet terror, frozen in the moment just before the tumbling began.

We had been deep in a cranky silence before the accident. Five and a half weeks into tour we had settled into a dysfunctional truce, fundamentally still friends, but sick of everything about each other. I don’t remember if we had been fighting really, but I remember the tension in the van. No one was speaking in the long dark stretch of Texas on the way to El Paso. We had all retreated into our respective heads for some much-needed alone time that we could not really have for a few more days.

Eating enough is a perpetual struggle for me on tour, since vegan eats are few and far between on the road I make do with every variety of fried potato. I am always thinking about our next meal, and if it will prominently feature the color green. Sometimes on tour I dream about grilled tempeh and big green salads with California avocados (those Florida imposters are fucking garbage, btw). Once I woke myself up ordering a sandwich out loud. So it’s no surprise that I was thinking about food at that crucial moment.

As the van was falling off the road, I had time to be terrified, to brace my arms in front of my face, call paul’s name and laugh as I thought, “I can’t believe my last real thoughts are going to be about food.”

I was the only one with out a seat belt on so I tumbled a bit more than the rest. When we landed on our side I was scrunched upside down and buried in the loose contents of the van: corn nuts, dirt, socks, sunscreen, a piece of the high-hat stand among other things. Sliding down the embankment with our windows open also threw tons of dirt and shredded truck tires in with us too. When we stopped sliding the dirt cloud in the car made it so I couldn’t tell which way was up, or where anyone was.

There was another moment of absolute still, of anxious terrifying stillness, before we began to call out for each other. Dan’s muffled, “herrre” was spoken into the side of my knee and I found I was sitting upside down on top of him.

We crawled out the passenger side window into the warm clear summer night. We stretched out our limbs patted ourselfs down looking for injuries. Everyone was okay. Dirty and shaken, but fine. My only injuries were a knock on the head and some rug burns on my elbows from tumbling against the car interior.

The couple in the car behind us that had called the ambulence and climbed down to see if we were alright found us hugging and verging on tears.

I touched Paul’s face and told him I loved him as the fluids from the engine seeped out the top of the car and down the hill toward us in a shining black mass.

Some of the most important people in my life were in that van with me, and knowing they were okay, that we could have very easily not been so lucky, that I could have lost any of them was a totally sobering and unrelatably scary thought.

I was shaking for at least an hour.

We caught a ride with the highway patrolman to a small motel in the closest town, and the tow truck driver promised to pick us up to survey the damage early the next morning. After settling our dirty scraped up selves in the motel, we formed a much needed beer expedition.

The gas station mini-mart refused to sell to us because while we were waiting in like with out twelve pack it had passed the legal time to purchase. We explained that we had been in line in time, that we’d flipped our car off the road, but to no avail, the heartless harpy, queen of that particular mini-mart would not budge. So we walked back to our motel. All in need of winding down, all a little trembly and high from our brush with death still.

We took long hot showers, ate candy, and sat near each other on the lumpy beds while watching bad television. We worried about how we would get home if the van was wrecked. The room buzzed with a different kind of tension now: a mix of shock, adrenaline, and a deep satisfaction in being alive.

We made some phone calls to friends to relate our scary tale, and uncertain future. The sweetest response of all was from Will, who immediately offered to come pick us, and all our gear, up if the van was indeed totaled. “Just let me know, and I’ll come get you.”

And though it turned out in the end we were able to drive home after duct taping the side mirrors back on, refilling the engine fluids, and replacing the tires and rims, it was nice to know that we had real friends, people who loved us, and that we loved each other still despite the long and tense time on the road. We drove the crumpled van home, and after it safely conveyed us there it was junked. The shop determining it would cost more than the thing was worth to fix everything we had broken, and that sooner than later it would give up altogether.

It’s so easy to get caught up in petty daily life annoyances and bullshit, It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. But I’d much rather my last thoughts be about friends and love and family, and not how annoyed and hungry I am.

Sometimes when I’m eating a burrito I get this strange overwhelming feeling that there isn’t much time left -- that I should take a step back and enjoy life, and value those around me, because I could go at any moment.

Goodbye Gilman (From MRR #313)

2010-01-20T20:14:00.000-08:00

photo by Robbie Wobbles

“I just got egged!”

“What? No way!”

Pat showed me the slimy side of his pants with a disgusted grin. Jon followed him in the door laughing into a tall can of root beer saying, “Yeah, they threw them out of their car at us. They only hit pat though.”

“People still egg people?” I said, eyebrows raised, still staring at the drippy mess of Pat’s pants.

“They egg Pat anyway.”

I scrunched my face up, looking at pat and said, “well at least nobody is trying to kiss you, I’ll take eggs over gross old dude kissings any day”

“who was kissing?”

“ugh, it doesn’t matter. I’m just grossed out and a little mad”

“that makes two of us”

I don’t know why we were smiling, but we were. Arms folded, smiling at each other. Mad, grossed out, and smiling.

This night started bad, then got weirder and worse as it went. Everybody was late, bands cancelled, it rained, only a handful of people turned up to watch the bands, and to top it off two older drunk dudes under the guise of thanking me for the show gave me too familiar hugs and planted bar floor smelling kisses grossly close to my mouth. The first one I chalked up to drunkness, and a slight case of the over friendlies, but the second dude swooping in for the same right after, that was conspired lechery. Add to this a band whose song mentioned going to TJ to catch a donkey show, and you have my idea of a bummer night.

But looking at Pat with his eggy pants and folded arms, it couldn’t be anything but funny. I started giggling hysterically, and I couldn’t stop even to explain why I was laughing.

Gilman is like that. You get shit on, and when you think you ought to be mad, you’re laughing.

1st and 3rd Saturdays: It’s meeting time.

We are sitting around in a loose circle on dirty couches and metal folding chairs. These twice-monthly meetings let us check in with one another since we don’t all come to all the shows. Here we decide everything pertaining to the club from frustratingly small quibbles, to the ideologically large. Anyone who has been to at least one meeting before can vote on any proposals brought up, and anyone can join in discussion. These meetings, though sometimes tedious, were a large part of why I wanted to get more involved with Gilman in the first place. I loved that any issue you had could be brought up to the collective, and that even if you didn’t volunteer at the club you had an equal say in it’s running, because as a punk who went there you had an equal stake in it too.

I remember soon after one of these meeting seeing “It’s your club” printed behind plexi in the entrance and finally getting it. Really getting it. It was my club. I knew suddenly that it was all of ours to take care of. The next weekend I started training to work in the Stoar — that was sometime in 2005.

My palms are sweaty. I don’t usually get nervous talking in front of big groups anymore, particularly here at Gilman. But I have an announcement to make, and one I won’t enjoy making. I have to tell them I’m leaving. That after these years spent volunteering here, I am leaving and I don’t know when I can come back.

I twist up my scarf in my hands and begin “I’m moving at the end of august. And I can’t be head coordinator anymore….” I take a steadying breath, and I tell them that I’m going to LA, and will be gone at least a year. I am trying not to look at anyone.

I know it’s not really such a big deal, that someone else will step up and take the responsibility I’m letting go of. But I can’t help but be worried. A big part of my life the last few years has been just that, worrying over and tending to things that needed to be done at the club.

For the first time it occurs to me that maybe I’m less worried about how the club will do without me than how I’ll do without the club. As much as I’ve tried to do in the last few years, I know I’ve gained more than I’ve ever given.

I used to be a pretty plucky fighter, ready to punch someone out if they deserved it, but I’ve seen again and again that almost all fights start over nothing and come to nothing. Over and over I’ve seen fights erupt over stupid misunderstandings or drunken aggression and end in blood pouring down faces and flashing red and blue lights. Now my only respect is for those who can speedily prevent fights, or break them up. I’ve also cleaned enough split lips, broken noses, split eyebrows to know that y’all need to learn to keep your heads down (or your arms up).

I’ve gone to a lot of shows I never would have gone to and am better for it. Seeing bands that I would have always thought to poppy or sweet for my taste, and liking them despite myself. Which is how I ended up with a Defiance Ohio record, and Kimya Dawson stuck in my head. I found that across scene divides everybody is just as nice, and just as punk.

I used to have to drink at least a 40 or a couple 32’s in order to comfortably enjoy a show. Yeah, social anxiety is rough. But, after so many shows spent sober, and delightfully able to remember what bands sounded like, I don’t think I’ll ever feel the need to link how much fun I’m having at a show to how wasted I am again.

I used to think every punk band was playing for the love of music, but I’ve had to see some pretty pathetically money driven displays that have opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of punk bands are just as greedy and obsessed with getting their “due” as any other genre. Instead of being disillusioned I am instead more appreciative of the bands that are generous, and really are doing it for the love of it. Bands who give money away to other bands, who don’t have or want booking agents, who don’t have tantrums over the band order, and who say thank you and mean it — they have a very special place in my heart. How your band acts in the world has equal bearing as how much you rip, so be nice.

More important than any of this I’ve learned to trust myself as capable. The other volunteers of Gilman have trusted me to be in charge of decisions and their trust has given me confidence to make those decisions, to take the lead in emergencies, and to know without a doubt what I am capable of (it’s a lot more than I thought). In turn I’ve learned to encourage others to see what that are capable of, to push them to do what they’re not sure they can, and enjoy their success as much as my own.

Gilman’s appeal, it’s amazingness, is the very simple fact that it is entrusted to us (all of us) to make of it what we will. Even if you live a thousand miles from the Berkeley, I guarantee there is something that that you can do that will mean the same to you as Gilman has meant to me. You can work unselfishly for the betterment of your (punk/whatever) community, share power and decision making with others, and respect the needs and opinions of those around you. If you resolve to build or maintain something good in your community, I promise you will get 100 times back what you give. And it will be impossibly hard to leave if you ever have to.  

The meeting is over and it’s time to get started on the night’s show. Bands are loading gear in through the side door, I’ve got to go get the worker list and a clipboard to get started on staffing the show. I notice Pat standing in the doorway still has a yellowy string of egg on his pants.

The War (from MRR #312)

2009-12-17T17:45:00.000-08:00

On her first Christmas back home from Iraq, I helped my mother roll out dough for piecrusts. She was showing me how to roll it out nice and even when my stepdad popped the cork off a champagne bottle. She froze like a small deer: tense with wide terrified eyes. She dropped the pin and put her hands to her face like an embarrassed child. I put my arms up in a panic to comfort her. So quick I didn’t have time to process it, she yanked me into the pantry and shut the door.

I pulled the dangling string and lit up the tiny food closet. Surrounded by oatmeal boxes and cooking oil, and every kind of canned vegetable imaginable, my mother stood crying.

She looked up at me meekly, her face flushed wet, as she said, "Is my make-up okay?"

I took a napkin from its bulk box container and patted away her smeared mascara.

"Good as new," I said, touching her cheek with my palm, starting to choke up a little myself.

“I could stand to feel this way as long as I didn’t have to do it in front of everybody. It’s so embarrassing.” She muttered as she leaned forward into my shoulder. I held her and stroked her hair the way she used to hold me when I was I child.

"We can stay in here as long as you need to momma.” My voice broke at the end and I looked around for something to distract myself with as I kept stoking her hair.

“I mean, look at all this food! We could camp in here for weeks if you wanted… Crap, we forgot to bring a can opener though. You think anyone would notice if I reached out and got one out of the drawer?"

She rumbled a little, chuckling into my shoulder. She leaned back and used her apron to wipe the last tears away.

“We’d better go out there before anyone notices,” she said as he smoothed her hair.

“No one expects this to be easy for you,” because no one knew what to expect at all.

My mother is a small woman, with quick eyes and delicate wrists. Only the faintest ring of her southern accent remains in her small soft voice. She likes show her military ID to people and giggle when their mouths drop open in disbelief. I wonder with them. How did this little soft spoken woman, one who never used to raise her voice or swear, how did she end up a Lt. Colonel in the Army? How did she end up a medic in the middle of a war?

She’s defensive if I ask her outright. She says, “I knew what I was getting into, I knew there was a possibility things would end up like this. I went in with my eyes open, I want you to know that.” I do, I know she made a choice, that she knew there were risks. But I still can’t piece together what combination of events and sentiments brought us both here.

Her first real love and fiancée died in Vietnam. She only speaks of it in her faraway voice as if he were a dream. “He was dark and tall. I loved him and he died.” She carried it with her, through two subsequent marriages as a waitress and a single mother of two boys. She struggled, scraped up enough to put herself through nursing school. Met married and divorced my much older father. And at the end found herself in her forties with three children, and no security --nothing to steady herself with.

She wanted to finish college, but couldn’t find a way to pay for it. She lived in a rented house she couldn’t afford, and let my brothers grow a crop of weed in the garage to help make ends meet. I was eleven, and I could tell my mother was falling to pieces inch by inch. In this moment chance and need and predisposition collided when she joined the army as a nurse, and an officer. She said she dreamed of saving the lives of other people's loved ones so that they might be spared her pain, so that they might not have their futures ripped from them.

Now, having been through war, my mother has dreams of a burning woman she can't put out. She wakes up sobbing, and buries her face in the soft sheets of her queen-sized bed in her king-sized track home in the middle of quiet California farmland. The woman she dreams of was a real woman, a patient burned in a bombing, who though full of morphine screamed for hours until she died. A woman she could not save, whose pain she could not lessen.

Sometimes she wakes up at night to her own screams. Other times she can’t sleep at all because of the burning tingling that shoots up her legs and arms from her last series of anti anthrax shots. The VA doctors think it will get a little better over time, but the neuropathy caused by the drugs will probably be with her all her life. Sometimes she’ll wake up sleep walking looking for her rifle that was by her bedside in Iraq. She says she has this sense in her dream that if she finds it she’ll feel safe again, that only then she can really sleep.

When she first came back it was hard to talk politics with her. She was quick to jump to defending the war, to insist that it would be too much if all these people were dying for nothing. When she's feeling defensive you can almost hear the war drums rise in her voice. Borrowed words, and sweeping sentiments used as armor. It was too much then to even consider that everything she had witnessed had been for nothing, had been a big sprawling mistake.

When she first came back she was also prone to hilarious angry outbursts. We were in the mall trying to find some shoes she felt comfortable wearing after a year in boots. There was a woman ahead of us in line berating the sales clerk and pitching a fit that they didn’t have the color sandals she wanted. My mother turned a bright crimson before she yelled, “What the fuck is wrong with you? Be glad they have shoes here! Fuck, some people don’t even have feet!” I gently pulled her backward out of the store as the pale shocked faces of the customers stared at us. The offending woman said, “I’ll take the red ones” in a very small voice and I burst out laughing.

She also took to saying really grumbling old man things like: “war is fucking hell. All these people don’t know how fucked up the world really is. They get to stay here and shop and pretend nobody is dying. Fucking assholes.” Sometimes I can’t believe how much more alike we are now. We can relate in ways I never thought we would. We both hate war and warmongers. We both can’t stand the self-entitled decadence that is life in the US. We both despair that we can’t see a way out, and that these wars rage on. She used to be so optimistic, so cheerful, full of hallmark sayings, and faith in the world. Now that most of that is gone, I miss who my mother was, but enjoy the closeness our mutual despair has brought us. It might be the only pinprick of light in all of this.

After a months and months of painful adjustment, she has come into a little bit of peace. She works for a VA Hospital doing outreach to homeless vets. She says it helps her as much as them to have someone to relate to.

She has come to believe that the wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan are unjustified, and the people that have died, did in fact die for nothing. But this has only strengthened her conviction that she has a duty to go and help as many people as she can make it through.

She was deployed again last week, first to a base here in the states, then, back again to Iraq or Afghanistan. Back to sewing young men and women back together again. And I’m preparing to help pull her back together again when she gets home.

Crustier than the next dude (from MRR #310)

2009-04-04T15:43:00.000-07:00

photo via macwagen on flickr

Last summer Burt got ringworm and scabies at the same time.

When he told me I just laughed at the absurd punkness of it. I’ve never had scabies, but I feel like it’s one of those supremely punk problems. Like on tour when we rolled into town and find the house we were playing emptied of furniture.

“We burned the couches last night”

“Whoa, why?”

“Scabies.”

We all nodded our heads solemnly. Unconsciously beginning to scratch our arms, or rubbing the edge of one shoe against the other leg. We hugged our friends, but carefully, remembering every time our skin met their skin, trying not to think about it… but thinking of it all the same.

Then we drank around the blackened remnants of the bonfire, and later sleep fitfully in the bare rooms with grime outlines where the couches used to be.

Every tour it was a different house, but the rituals were the same.

I’ve had and heard about my fair share of tour ailments, both illness and injury, but none so sadly out of control and preventable as Burt’s.

Burt is not the cleanliest of dudes. His once white shirts are the color of smog, and his previously black clothes have all turned a sickly olive or a rich reddened brown. But in general he takes care of himself. His is not a self-destructive neglect, but a general aversion to clothes washing or owning enough clothes to have to decide what to wear. I like to call him a house crusty, or apartment hobo.

Even being as grimy a dude as I know him to be, it still seemed crazily impossible to get both ringworm and scabies at the same time. I made him walk me through it, step by itchy step.

In his estimation the problems began before he ever left on tour.

“Getting ready to leave. I had so much to do. I wasn’t showering. I wore the same underpants for a week and a half. I’m sure that was a bit of a factor.”

He didn’t worry about the itching at first. Like I explained, he’s a generally grimy dude, so he’s used to some itching.

“Everybody itches. It didn’t seem like a big deal. But it got worse. I woke up at night and couldn’t go back to sleep. I’d just scratch and scratch”

It was two weeks of constant itching before he couldn’t take it anymore. The turning point came when it made it’s way onto his “junk.”

He’d woken up at 5am and tried showering to help ease the itching. But it didn’t work. He called around to find a free clinic, but no one could see him. So, he had the band take him to the emergency room.

“I said, ‘it itches’ and she had me drop trou. She glanced me over and said. ‘You probably just have jock itch.” (Aka. Ringworm. Aka Tinea Cruris. Aka punk itch)

‘She prescribed pills and ointment and told me to wash thoroughly twice a day. So, I had to try to shower twice a day at weird punk houses, and sadly the next string of houses we stayed at only had tubs. I spent a lot of awkward time crouched over in these tubs washing my groin. It fucking sucked, but we did get to make a lot of ‘there’s a fungus among us’ jokes.”

The additional thing Burt had to do to get rid of the itching for good? Boil his underpants. Which seemed easy enough to arrange since they were staying with good friends. But when Burt asked if he could do some panty boiling on their stove the answer was an unequivocal “No way!”

He grimed through another night in his ringworm underpants, and the next day, in the next city, he decided to go for it and boil them while his hosts were away at work.

“I only had a small pot, so I had to boil all my underpants and a couple shirts in batches. My clothes hadn’t been washed in… well, ranging from two weeks to a year. I didn’t add more water between batches so the water got all low and black. I singed some of the clothes a little bit”

No one came home from work to find Burt making dirt soup and burning his clothes on their stove. He got it done, and presumably killed the fungi living there.

Two weeks later and he had finished the anti-ringworm regimen. During that time he had gathered a vast array of anti-ringworm accessories: special soap, a loofah, tea tree oil, and some boxers. But he was still itching. Bad. Some of the redness had gone away, and it seemed to have retreated, but it was not getting less itchy. Luckily, they had a few days off in his hometown so he could see a doctor he knew and get things sorted out properly

“I went in and said ‘hello sir, I’m having a problem with my penis.’ He examines me and says ‘let’s just think about this.’ We spent a while comparing my junk to pictures and realized it looked just like scabies. We deduced I had killed the ringworm, but had let the scabies take over.

Burt was given a cream to apply over his whole body, and leave on overnight. Unlike the old days of being forced to use the harsh foul smelling Lindane, he was prescribed a mild scentless cream called premethrine. He was warned that even with the treatment done he would itch for another month, but he would no longer be contagious.

“I want to clear up some misapprehensions it seems most people have about scabies. It’s not that bad, and it’s harder to pass on than everyone seems to think. According to my doctor you have to ‘share clothes or naked hug someone’ to pass it. I spent eight weeks in a hot van with my band, and no one else got it.

“I’ve changed my habits a little. I mean, we all want to be crustier than the next dude, but I change and wash my underwear more often now. I’m also more likely to go to the doctor now; these are the kinds of things that I always struggled to take care of with a home remedy. I’m all about home remedies, but I think this is a situation where you want to have ‘the man’ give you a chemical.

For home remedies Burt says the tea tree oil helped alleviate some of the symptoms, but it didn’t come close to any kind of cure.

“Couple tips for those with scabies: hot showers are no good! It encourages them to thrive. As for killing them on your clothes, boiling works… but you should iron them too to be extra sure. And crusty dudes particularly – change your underpants dude, please.”

Both Ringworm and scabies are things the punks seem particularly prone to. We live and tour in filth, shower less frequently, wear tight pants, and tend to wait for our ailments to cross the last possible line before we seek treatment.

The kicker? Right before Burt left on tour, he told a friend about his slight itchiness. They said. “dude you probably have ringworm, take care of that shit before it gets out of hand.”

Dear the punks: Listen to your friends, change your underpants, quit putting off taking care of shit you are hoping will just go away but know won’t, and please take care of yourself so next summer I won’t show up to your empty house wondering if I should risk hugging you.

It is now perfectly safe to naked hug Burt, but for at least a few people who read this-the following will be true: he boiled his ringworm scabies underpants on your stove, in your only pot.

The Dickies - Banana Splits

2009-04-01T22:54:00.000-07:00

The "Banana Splits" single came out in 1979, and somebody thought it wise to throw some money at these crazies and let them make a video.

Rumor has these dudes all met because they had the same speed dealer. surprised? no, didn't think so.

1977 in San Fernando Valley, what else to do but get high and start a punk band right?

more factual info on the Dickies

Corrupted (from MRR #308)

2009-03-10T12:19:00.000-07:00

I’d say it happens once or twice a year. A show that reaffirms or re-inspires why punk is important and relevant, one that fills you up, carries you through the shit we call life. One you can really say makes it all worth it. Some of these moments get added to the annals of punk history, repeated and made legend. Some are only remembered tenderly by those few who were there. Some others are made into memorable moments in post production, given a glossy sparkly sheen by time, and remembered more by those who were not there, than those who were.

In search of the past

The night before, I worked a smaller show, one that deserved a bigger crowd, but it was a cold blustery night, and wintery rains will keep punks home with hot cider here in California. (To those accustomed to trudging through snow banks to get to the show, I know you think California is perpetually temperate and that we are just crybabies, but it isn’t so! It gets cold and miserable here, I swear, and not a single person I know has a decent rain jacket. But I do wish we had more of your fortitude sometimes.)

I was listening to the dark hypnotic post-punk/death rock of Swann Danger, wondering why they aren’t a cult sensation yet, when a reporter from the Daily Californian came to ask a few questions for his article about the 20th anniversary of Green Day’s first show at Gilman. I should have given a fake name, told half-truths, or refused to comment… but I never think of these things in the moment, and I can slip into an overly helpful mood while working.
He asked about my feelings about Green Day, and was clearly disappointed that I had none. I told him I was six at the time of their first show at Gilman, and didn’t know anyone that was there for it. He asked angled question after question, until he finally just asked what he’d hoped I’d say all along.

“Don’t you think they sold out?” he said with his pen poised to write in his little top bound notebook, like a kid playing reporter.
“I wasn’t here when it happened. I wasn’t even punk yet.“
“But you can still have an opinion about it…”
I’m not one to turn down having an opinion, so I told him, “You have to have stood for something to begin with to sell out. And maybe I could blame them for spawning countless horrible pop-punk bands or for mainstreamizing punk… but they weren’t alone. I hope you understand they just aren’t on my radar at all.”
“But don’t people talk about them here?” he said slowly putting his notepad down, tucking his pen in his shirt pocket.
“Only tourists and reporters.”

He shook my hand and left, saying he’d be back to try and find someone with an opinion or more insight. I was angry, mostly at myself for bothering to talk to him. Then at him, and every other reporter who shows up to get a good line to put in their article about the mega-band, trying to craft a narrative where there is none; either trying to paint the club as a bitter ex or a proud parent. It never occurs to them that we are too busy running a club to be constantly contemplating the past, and that some of us have never known a scene that included a punk Green Day. To us, it never happened.

I stayed a little mad at myself for talking to a reporter, knowing he could probably find a fraction of one of my sentences to use the way he wanted. I went home, went to sleep, and dreamt about the apocalypse.

Try not to blink, or sleep

It can be any combination of things that make a show amazing, but there is something extra, something like magic that can push it over into the realm of perfect. Everyone you want to see is there, people you haven’t seen for years came out or drove in for it, there is an air of excitement, the bands are not only playing well, but playing as if they are playing for posterity, playing how they want to be remembered. (Add to that the hundreds of vegan tamales, and something truly magic happens.)

After an amazing set by Stormcrow, and a pretty interlude by Amber Asylum, Asunder took the stage in total darkness. I don’t mean it was very dark, I mean the stage was a pitch black void, and they played so well, so tight, that it seemed impossible (without some sort of night vision or extrasensory abilities). All three bands played short sets (for them) of about half an hour or so, so that Corrupted could blow everybody’s minds and play for two hours.
Let me guess, you’re thinking, “Two fucking hours???” You’re right, I exaggerate. They actually played for only an hour and fifty-four minutes. An hour and fifty-four minutes of the heaviest, slowest, most epic drone/doom/sludge; shit that can be a mindfuck even when you aren’t beyond tired and hopped up on too much coffee.

I’ve been waiting a long time to see Corrupted. After hearing their split with Phobia, I had a friend tape me a copy of their Llenandose de Gusanos record. I was nineteen, and walked through the forests of Santa Cruz listening to that record, eating too-strong weed food, and in the process scaring the shit out myself. For a few hours I forgot I had a walkman on and just figured this must be the sound a forest at sunset makes. I was out of my head, but it was the first time I actually enjoyed living in that weird burnout, forested beach town. To see them now, sober, but older, was much the same as then, only not scary, just transformative.
To see a band carry out an epic vision, see a show transcend into event, and to know that what is happening is special the moment it happens (not years later while reminiscing), is really all that you can ask. Particularly for a band that you’ve been waiting to see, hoping you would get the chance to see.

You can talk all you want about what was. About what must have been the perfect moments in our shared punk history, you can even write trite articles in local newspapers, but don’t be so hung up on the past that you miss the moments that are now, with current bands and current faces. Don’t miss your chance to say “I was there”.

Thank you to Jay for all his hard work putting the Corrupted show together, Karen for all the glorious food, Pat for keeping shit secure, and to all of the other Gilman staff/volunteers that make a show like this possible. Thank you to Corrupted, Asunder, Stormcrow, Amber Asylum and Swann Danger for providing the soundtrack to a weekend I won’t forget.

For the newest of new columns, and the latest in the world of international punk

subscribe at: www.maximumrocknroll.com

digital hearts analog

2009-02-13T19:32:00.001-08:00

yes, you can use www.poladroid.ne t to turn your digital pictures into polaroids.

It is fun to play with and instead of $1 a pop it's cheap as free.

but it's still not as fun as shake-shakin' it.

(photos are a mix of mine, and ones via ffffound and flickr)

Pick one. (From MRR #307)

2009-02-10T22:40:00.000-08:00

I’ve been waiting for two hours to turn in my Food Stamp application and talk with this, the gatekeeper of social services. She wades through and confirms all of my information line by line: Name, address, Social Security number.

She looks like uncannily like Teresa Covarrubias from the East LA punk band The Brat. I know it isn’t her, but can’t help but think of her as some other punk turned social worker (probably the fate of more than a few punks) working for the state and serving the public. Doesn’t seem like a bad gig either. I know more than a few punk teachers who love it, and I read somewhere that Exene is a librarian.

Feeling warm toward her, as an imaginary punk, I interrupt to ask her name. I feel like it’s the polite thing, she knows who I share food with so I might as well ask her name, but she is awkwardly surprised and skeptical. She stares at me for a moment, and then says, “Just call me ‘lady’.”

I feel momentary embarrassment for crossing some kind of unspoken line, but we are right back to my application, moving forward as if I never said a word to her. She is inputting my information into her computer when we hit the stumbling block. Ethnicity.

"It will only let me check one."

“I’m pretty sure at least one of the forms said ‘check all that apply’ for that portion,” I say shifting from foot to foot on tired legs.

She is still staring at the screen, brows furrowed, not hearing me. “I just don’t know what you do in this case.”

Looking around the room at all the people, thinking of the volume of people this woman has assisted, I could not imagine I was her first mixed person. It seemed a statistical impossibility. An involuntary flush began rising in my cheeks. I’ve been waiting a long time; I’m tired and, well, hungry.

“This doesn’t affect how much I get in benefits right? Can we just check “other” or something? What do people usually check?” I ask, hoping this doesn’t take longer than it has to.

“They pick one, sometimes they say you are supposed to side with the mother. But it is self-identifying.”

“What happens if I don’t want to pick?” I ask, starting to feel like I just want to leave.

“The county will do it for you,” she says matter-of-factly, looking up at me.

So much for self identifying.

As of the 2000 census the county where I live, Alameda County, had 1,443,741 people living in it, of which 5.63% were of two or more races. Even with statistics almost a decade old Alameda county had somewhere in the neighborhood of 81,000 mixed race people, and still Social Services has no way easy way to categorize them? The “mark all that apply” option is usually the best in terms of inclusion, so why not make it so in their internal system? Why this checkbox category system to begin with?

Sure, for Social Services, the need to collect data is understandable. They are trying to answer pragmatic questions: Which communities are underrepresented and in need of more outreach? Are there languages other than the ones they are offering that they need to hire translators for? Etc., etc.

But if their forms aren’t dynamic enough to really represent people, isn’t it flawed data to begin with? If people simply have to choose one, won’t our understanding of others and ourselves stay as stagnant as the forms we must fill out?

The human impulse to categorize isn’t limited to race/ethnicity. It’s in gender, sexuality, class, and for many the fewer categories the better. For a long time the dominant paradigm saw the world as such: man/woman, straight/queer, white/not-white, rich/poor, Christian/godless, good/bad. Things have certainly gotten more complicated, but instead of understanding that the system of categorization was the problem, we have simply added more categories. As if there ever be enough categories to explain or encompass what we really are. Sometimes try to rephrase our category to be more positive, something we can own, but even that isn’t all that empowering. It also has a tendency to reinforce the idea that you are born with certain characteristics, and that they do not and cannot change over time. That your sexuality cannot vary and shift and grow with age, that your gender cannot also be ebbing and flowing more toward one end of the spectrum or another across your lifetime. We are made to choose, and when we choose, we are expected to stay. Like good dogs.

It’s usually only those who fall between or outside of these categories who see them for the human inventions they really are.

“Lady” surprises me with a personal aside, but it’s almost like she is speaking to herself. “My husband is from Ukraine, and my family is Mexican and Filipino… my children are mixed too. It seems silly that they won’t know what to check. Okay, I know what to do. I want you to check “other,” but we are going to write everything in the margin, and I will input it in the comments and show to my boss.”

She handed me a stubby little pencil and I wrote as small as I could in the margin. In alphabetical order: Apache (Junimano), Basque, Catalan, English, Scottish, Yaqui.

It felt good. Once the need to categorize was eliminated I could for the first time in my life spell them all out. One by one, each portion of “makeup.” As soon as I had, I felt how arbitrary they were. Little pieces of the past, people and places no longer remembered, collected together. I had thought the world at large was just too lazy to understand, and for my whole life, even I had labeled myself in order to make it simpler for others to understand. Now it seemed like just stories about people no longer remembered, with no real ties to my life.

I crossed out my little list and wrote “fuck you” below it.

When I handed it back to her, lady laughed, and dutifully typed “fuck you” into the comments field. Maybe she was a little bit punk after all.

It's Fucking Free (from MRR #306)

2009-02-06T12:23:00.000-08:00

photo from Sam K.

As I try to lean over most of the piss puddle to tape an "out of order" sign to the urinal's makeshift trashbag covering, there is nastiness seeping in the sides of my shoes. My right foot slips and I catch myself on the handle, saving me from a face first tumble into the urinal, but instead sending another little wave of pee water over my shoes.
It’s already been a long day, full of problem after problem: the bands are late, there are not enough volunteers, not enough small bills for change — but as of then, no injuries, no fights, no vomit… it’s not as bad as it could be, not as bad as it has been.
I start laughing at the sad little list of things I’m thankful haven’t happened yet.
I laugh harder when I realize that I’m not alone in the bathroom and that to the boys sheepishly crowded near the door I must look bizarre, awkwardly bent over the urinal laughing to myself, one hand now tangled in the duct tape I was trying to employ.
I reach a hand out and one of the boys helps me to drier ground, and they all begin to chuckle with me about my ridiculous situation.
“Shit, I hope you’re getting paid extra for taking care of this,” the tallest says, headed for the stall with a door.
“No way, you couldn’t pay me enough to do this.”
Blank perplexed stares.
In a culture that values money above all else it seems hard to explain the satisfaction of giving your time and labor freely to anyone, besides those already well acquainted with working in volunteer-run collectives.
My mother tends to portray it as altruism. She tells her friends, “Ari works with at-risk youth,” which in itself is too crazy to try and correct. Or maybe is hilariously correct, but misleadingly vague. Yes, the people I work with (my coworkers) are sometimes pretty young, and are, if it’s a good night, totally at risk of getting into some kind of mischief — but then so am I. But the kind volunteering I’m talking about isn’t based on a selfless devotion to others, its work like any other, just unpaid.
Sure, part of the time I work for money. I work in a steel fabrication shop at the end of the BART line, in an underserved and violent little city at the edge of the East Bay. I work in a steel box inside of a bigger steel box that is always hotter or colder than seems natural. I sit in a swiveling chair, stare at a screen making figures add up. I’m not particularly good at it, I don’t think anyone can be good at that kind of work, it’s automatic. It’s like breathing, but more boring. But I don’t work there for fulfillment: I work to eat, to pay rent, to have some cash on hand to buy things I want or need (records, paint, cans of mock duck, plastic cameras, etc., etc.)
The real work I do, the most valuable time I spend, I do for free, for the joy of doing. Like the work I do as a show coordinator at 924 Gilman St.
There the work itself has intrinsic value. To be given money for it would cheapen it, would break the magic spell that makes it all worthwhile.
Why? Because as soon as you begin to accept money for work you begin to calculate the value of your work in terms of hours and in terms of dollars. You begin to say what can my time buy me? (Or how much money is it worth to wade through the mini pee lake in the dank grimy bathroom to tape up the urinal?)
Whereas, unpaid work is valued by the people it helps, the art it creates, the world it inspires. Or in my case, the crisis it averts, the shows it keeps running, and the bands it supports.
And make no mistake; I’m no martyr, no lone figure fighting selflessly to keep punk’s head above water. I am just a part of a community of volunteers, and a scene of punks committed to keeping the place open, to keep it thriving. I know what I do helps in that aim, and there is the value, there is my pay. And no money is worth that feeling. It’s fucking free.
But still, you ask, why not earn a living doing what you love? Like say, playing music? As soon as you make your music a product you depend on for your life’s expenses, the shift in emphasis will swing immediately from playing to selling, from moving bodies to moving units. Soon to follow are all the hallmarks of a corporately marketed band: a press kit, a booking agent, a glossy 8 x 10, and a repulsive air of entitlement. In that moment everything good and true and punk about your band will start to die.
Even in bands who know better than to try to make a living off of it, who consider themselves as punk as can be, I’ve seen a worrying trend developing. It happened gradually, almost imperceptibly, that less and less of them freely give their money to other bands after I pay them at the club. It used to be common, every band would give most if not all their pay to the touring band, maybe keep a couple bucks for bridge toll, but that was all. There are definitely still bands that do that, but less and less of them. It also used to be bands would regularly give money back to the club, but that’s so rare that I am surprised when it does happen.
It seemed there was this code of conduct among bands that has started falling away. A general sense of camaraderie is still there, don’t get me wrong, but the generosity is what I see less of.
There are expenses to being in a band, I know (my band is currently a couple grand in debt after putting out a bunch of vinyl), but on a show with one or more touring bands you can’t convince me they don’t need the money more.
Shit, you can’t convince me that the money should matter at all to local bands.
Another place I see a rampant and gross use of price to equate value is in record collecting. In any conversation about records, particularly about older ones, it seems inevitable that someone will pipe up with a report of how much something went for on eBay, the riculous price adds a layer of mystique to the record, and whether or not anyone in the group would deem it to be good, suddenly they must concede that it is valuable.
You can almost hear the gears turning. “If it’s valuable, lots of people want it or are willing to pay exorbitant amounts for it, therefore it must have something about it, maybe something I don’t get. Better think twice about how I feel about it.”
This kind of thinking is in opposition to everything punk is about, so why are we all a little bit guilty of it? It’s because we don’t overtly think it, it’s just lurking there in the back of our minds, the product of a culture dazzled by money, and obsessed with getting their due.

Jobs that pay more (or at all) aren’t better jobs, expensive records aren’t better records, and just because your band gets paid doesn’t mean that you can’t give it away.

From the ‘this is why we can’t have nice things’ dept:

The Long Haul info shop in Berkeley was raided by a cooperating task force of University of California police, FBI agents, and Alameda County Sheriffs. News sources point to the recent surge in ALF activity at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley as the cause, at least one source suggested the raid was due to threatening emails traced to the info shop. The first outrage is, of course, at the space being broken into, that the warrant is inappropriately non specific, and that the computers that aid in publishing the Slingshot newspaper, as well as computers belonging to organizations renting office space in the Long Haul were seized, not just the Long Haul’s free access computers.
This, however, ought to be a lesson to us.
Our radical free spaces are vulnerable, and if you are going to be doing some online activism and want to remain anonymous, send your shit from the fucking library! (They’re not about to seize all the library’s computers…not yet anyway.) Or maybe a bougie internet café. Not from a valued space that is already a target. The point is to be careful, and be aware of where your actions are traceable to.
We know they’re out to get us; lets not leave a trail of breadcrumbs.
Donate to the Long Haul by PayPal (to info@thelonghaul.org) or send a check to 3124 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, CA 94705. Make checks payable to “Long Haul”. They’ll need it for a legal defense fund, new computers and to repair damages.

Oh, and please send a dry pair of shoes to:
PO Box 301, Berkeley, CA 94701 USA

to read my columns hot off the presses
buy the latest issue of MRR at www.maximumrocknroll.com