A Monkey to Ride the Dog

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Race Writings 3: If You’re the Owner of the Washington Redskins, You’re No Longer a Cock

Here’s a column that I wrote for Razorcake in 2007 (issue #42). The second half of it is satire about Daniel Snyder changing the Washington football team’s nickname to the Crackers. Yesterday, thirteen years after I wrote this, he finally did agree to change the name. He hasn’t yet announced what the new name will be. I hope he doesn’t use the name I suggest in this column, but I had fun writing about it way back when. I’m glad he finally agreed to change the name. I hope the owners of the Cleveland and Atlanta professional baseball teams do the same.

sean_illo_42_by_brad_beshaw

illustration by Brad Beshaw

If You’re the Owner of the Washington Redskins, You’re No Longer a Cock

It’s been six or seven years now since I first heard the Atom and His Package song “If You Own the Washington Redskins, You’re a Cock,” and it still flows through my mind again and again when Fall rolls around and my thoughts turn to football. Echoing the first lines of the song, I, too, like sports, so there are some things I force myself to miss. The biggest of these things that I try to ignore is the nickname of my favorite team: the Seminoles. Now, when I watch pro football, I’ll get into the game. I’ll root like hell for certain teams. I have favorites who I root for year after year. I get swept away in the action. But when the game is over, all those emotions fade pretty quickly. If the team I’m rooting for loses, I just shrug my shoulders and think, what the hell? It’s just a game played by millionaires.

It’s different with the Seminoles, because they’re the team that represents the college I got my bachelor’s from: Florida State University. I have great memories of those times at FSU. Those years opened my mind to whole new ways of thinking. The stuff I learned at FSU taught me how to escape the construction sites of my youth and move on to a lifestyle that’s more in line with my personality. Plus, college is the place where you can indulge in booze, drugs, and sex with random people—all with impunity. Good times. And FSU football seemed to float around in the atmosphere of those good times. So now I watch the games and it ties me to an earlier, fun part of my life and I get swept away. When they win, I’m totally stoked. And when they lose, it ruins my day. Or, at least, a few hours of it. Either way, I love watching the games.

Still, it bugs me that they’re nicknamed “The Seminoles.”

Last year, the governing body of college sports insisted that schools drop their Native American team nicknames. Most of the universities complied. In the case of FSU, the actual Seminole tribe stepped forward and defended Florida State. The Seminoles’ (the tribe) argument being that they liked that FSU was nicknamed after them and didn’t want the name changed. One official statement from the Seminole tribe stated that the tribe should judge whether or not the nickname was offensive, and that stripping Florida State of the nickname would be one more example of white people deciding what’s best for the Native Americans.

Okay. Fair enough. I’ll be one white guy staying out of it. Mostly.

Because there is one other thing. In January, 2001, FSU played in the Orange Bowl for the national championship against the University of Oklahoma. Oklahoma whipped Florida State 13-2. It was a brutal, punishing game. Florida State couldn’t mount any offense. Oklahoma controlled the field. In the end, there was no doubt who the national champions were.

Later that month, I drove through Oklahoma, through the northern part of the state where the Seminole reservation still stands. As I rode along the interstate, I thought of the history of Oklahoma, how it was the territory that the United States gave to Native Americans during the nineteenth century. Then, president Benjamin Harrison decided that he wanted Oklahoma for white people and opened it up for US settlers. On March 2, 1889, any white American homesteader who wanted to could race into Native American lands and claim it for their own. By the time that the homesteaders raced in, though, more than half the land had already been claimed by tougher, meaner white Americans who had gone into Oklahoma early (and illegally) and claimed their land. These homesteaders who jumped the gun on taking all the Native American land and claiming it for themselves were called Sooners. Many years later, the University of Oklahoma nicknamed their football team the Sooners, after the very people who raced onto the Seminole reservation and claimed the land for themselves.

I thought of the battle between the Seminoles and Sooners again, in a new, historical context. It was a brutal, punishing affair. The Seminoles couldn’t mount any offense. The Sooners controlled the field. In the end, there was no doubt who the national champions were.

That’s kinda fucked up.

 

I notice these types of dual meanings around Native American nicknamed teams and athletic competitions all the time. This October in Major League Baseball, the Yankees and the Indians faced off in the playoffs. The Yankees have long dominated our national pastime. The Indians won this October. They didn’t end up making it to the World Series, though. So once again, the Indians won a battle but lost the war. In fact, the Indians haven’t won the championship since 1917. The Yankees have won it twenty-six times since then.

 

So I notice these things and get a little bothered when the Yankees and the Indians battle for supremacy in the national pastime, or when the Sooners wipe out the Seminoles in a ground-acquisition game and thereby are crowned national champions. I guess I’m not the only one who notices, though.

On October 28, 2007, the New England Patriots battled the Washington Redskins in professional football. Not only did the Redskins lose, but the Patriots slaughtered the Redskins. The game stirred up quite a bit of controversy in the sports media because the Patriots, once they had clearly won, decided to stay on the offensive and run up the score. They wiped the Redskins out. The Redskins hadn’t been treated this brutally, hadn’t been beaten this badly since 1961.

It was too much for the Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Redskins. The double entendres started to get to him. It was one thing to have a team nickname that is the racist term used by the aggressors in one of the largest genocides in human history. It was another thing to use that nickname in Washington, DC, the capitol city of the government that committed the genocide. But when a team named after the aggressors—the Patriots—and coming from the seat of European colonization in North America—New England—wipes out your ethnic-slur-nicknamed team, it’s too much. Snyder couldn’t take it.

I’m sure you’ve heard about what happened next. It’s been in the news for a couple of months, now. Anderson Cooper did a four-part special on it in November. For weeks, Bill O’Reilly has geared his talking points against the “PC Police” behind Snyder’s act. Apparently, Rush Limbaugh won’t shut up about it. Even President Bush got involved, but we’ll talk about that later. In case you missed all of this, though, I’ll tell you the two controversial things that Snyder did.

First, he decided to change the name of the Redskins.

This may not sound like such a big deal. The University of Hawaii changed their nickname from the Rainbows to the Warriors in the nineties. They never said why they made this change, only claiming that they’d always been “the Rainbow Warriors” and they were just focusing on the second part of the nickname more these days. It’s pretty clear, though, that they’ve shied away from the Rainbows because it was, well, too gay. The city of Washington, DC, has a history of changing their team nicknames, too. The Washington Bullets became the Wizards because a city that frequently had the highest per-capita murder rate was uncomfortable with a team nicknamed after the agent of death. Even the NFL is no stranger to name changes. In 1998, the Tennessee Oilers became the Tennessee Titans because fans wanted a new nickname. So if teams can ditch nicknames for being too gay, too violent, or just too unrepresentative of Tennessee, then surely it shouldn’t cause a stir to change a nickname for being too racist.

But it did stir a lot of controversy. Perhaps part of the reason had to do with the idea of Political Correctness. Bill O’Reilly, in his many rants, asked where the line would be drawn. Would the Vikings have to change their nickname, lest they offend the Norwegian population of Minneapolis? Would Catholics mount an offensive against the New Orleans Saints? Daniel Snyder defended his decision on Bill O’Reilly’s show. Snyder explained that the line should be drawn at a genocide. The Vikings and Saints were okay, according to Snyder, because our government didn’t try to wipe them off the face of the earth. Our government did try to do that to the “Redskins.” “So that’s where I draw the line,” Snyder said. O’Reilly called Snyder a “language nazi” and insisted that the producer turn off Snyder’s microphone.

Fans were upset about the change, too. Apparently, they were endeared to the mascot. So endeared, that before the name change, the Redskins were the second most profitable NFL franchise, second only to the Cowboys. That’s right. The Cowboys and Redskins were the two most profitable logos. The rivalry between the Cowboys and Redskins has long been one of the most bitter rivals in all of pro sports. So when Snyder announced that they would no longer be using the image of the chief (or, really, the image of a tan, Italian-looking guy with feathers on his head) as their mascot, fans were irate. “What about the long, rich tradition of Redskin football?” they asked. Snyder answered this question on the Rush Limbaugh show, saying, “Maybe we shouldn’t embrace this tradition of racism.” Limbaugh responded with a rant that he apparently is still reverting back to when he has a free moment between bashing Hillary Clinton and trying to blur the name Obama with the name Osama.

The second thing Snyder did was even more surprising: he renamed the Redskins the Washington Crackers.

You’ve probably heard about this, too. You probably heard all the jokes about the new mascot looking just like George W. Bush with a mesh-back ball cap on. You’ve probably heard about Bush embracing the new mascot because at least it turns attention away from the fiasco of a war he’s running. Maybe you’ve read the New York Times editorial where they pointed out that “cracker” was originally a derogatory term used by slaves to describe the guys cracking the whip, so it’s probably more hateful to African Americans than to whites. Maybe you’ve heard about Washington Crackers running back Clinton Portis demanding to be traded because, as he said, “I don’t want to be a cracker-ass cracker.” Surely, you’ve at least seen the T-shirts floating around with that phrase on them.

I, for one, embrace the name change. What the New York Times ignored was the fact that “cracker” is also a term used for a person born in Florida. In Florida, it’s actually possible to be African American and a cracker. I think it’s great, too, that Florida’s rich history of rigged elections, corrupt politicians, and cranky old people is now celebrated by the nation’s capitol’s football team. I think it’s great that Snyder has allocated one skybox for the nation’s truckers. I think it’s great that he’s increased RV parking at FedEx stadium, and that concession stands there are now required to sell boiled peanuts. I look forward to learning the new lyrics that have turned “Hail the Redskins” into “Hail the Crackers.” And though I’ve always been a fan of the Miami Dolphins, who knows? Maybe next season, you’ll see me rocking my mesh-back hat and rooting for the Crackers.

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Foot-Loose Rebels

Illustration from Razorcake #70 by Brad Beshaw

Illustration from Razorcake #70 by Brad Beshaw

The supervisors of San Luis Obispo County tried to attack free speech this week. I happened to be in town to witness it.

The crux of the problem, according to county supervisors, was the Occupy movement. The county’s chief administrative officer, Jim Grant, claimed that the Occupy encampment presented a hazard to public health and safety, though he didn’t clarify exactly how. He suggested an ordinance that required any group assembling on public or vacant lands to obtain a permit from the county before doing so.

As he should have expected, a shit storm followed.

I wasn’t involved in the shit storm. I just happened to be doing some work in San Luis Obispo County that day. I was in and out of my truck a lot, and my radio was tuned to the public station. I listened to meeting of county supervisors addressing the issue. This may sound like a dorky thing to do—listen to a county supervisors’ meeting on public radio—and maybe it is, but the meeting was exciting on this day. A couple dozen people came to the meeting to scold the supervisors and Jim Grant in particular. Each person had an opportunity to speak for a few minutes. The beauty of this came in numbers. As a citizen, we can all speak at public meetings like this. We’re all allowed somewhere between three and five minutes. When twenty-four people come to the meeting and use all five of their minutes, supervisors have to hear about this shit for over two hours. Suddenly, you have an effective protest on your hands.

The protestors struck me as interesting. Sure, there were a couple from the Occupy movement who spoke. They were the ones being targeted. They needed to be there. But also members of the Tea Party spoke against the ordinance. They realized, of course, that if Occupy has to get a permit, so does the Tea Party. One former Republican congresswoman from the area approached the podium to say that, sure, she knew what it was like to be protested. She wished everyone agreed with her all the time, but democracies are built on dissent. One incredibly nervous guy from a former Soviet bloc country stood up to say that, prior to immigrating to the US, he’d been imprisoned for ten years for speaking out against the government. “Free speech is the most beautiful thing in America,” he told the supervisors. His anxiety seemed to be stealing his breath, but he found enough air to add, “Don’t touch it, for God’s sake.”

Finally, after two dozen people from across the political spectrum castigated the supervisors, they voted to toss out the ordinance. Jim Grant apologized.

The whole debacle gave me the urge to write a column about one of the greatest moments in American history: the Wobblie free speech protests in Missoula, Montana.

 

In 1909, a team of organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) traveled to Missoula, Montana in an attempt to organize the workers in the lumber and logging industries there. As part of their organizing strategy, the Wobblies set up soapboxes or other makeshift stages on corners in the business district of Missoula and just started talking. Passersby would sometimes stop and listen and sometimes not. From a contemporary perspective, the Wobblies may seem a bit crazy. At least, from my perspective, when someone is standing on the corner of the street speaking to no one in particular, I assume the person has a mental illness. In the early twentieth century, this type of soapbox preaching was common. Think of it as a direct action blog. The Wobblies weren’t the only ones preaching on corners. The Salvation Army had their own soapbox in downtown Missoula, as well as a couple of other organizations.   The speaking on the corner wasn’t exactly the problem. The listening was.

According to a few accounts, the first wave of Wobblie speakers didn’t generate much interest. That changed when a woman who called herself “Gurley” came to town.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was nineteen years old and six months pregnant when she hit Missoula. She’d been agitating for workers’ causes since she was a little kid and her parents took her to socialist meetings in Brooklyn. In her autobiography, The Rebel Girl, she traces her activism back to her four great-grandfathers, who’d all taken up arms to fight the British occupation of Ireland. Her presence in Missoula was one more incident in a long heritage of actions geared toward social justice.

Even at nineteen, Gurley was famous among the workers. She did two things differently than other speakers. First, she drew a crowd. This shouldn’t be ignored. People in power will always let you say whatever you want as long as no one is listening. When others gather around to hear what you have to say, those in power lend an ear to hear if their power is being threatened. And it was. In particular, Gurley attacked the local employment agencies. These agents were in cahoots with various lumber and logging companies to hire migrant workers for a week or so, charge them a finder’s fee for the job, split the fee between the agency and the company, fire the worker after a week, and hire a new sucker. Not only did Gurley criticize this, she set up her soapbox in front of the three most prominent employment agencies and criticized them to their faces. The migrant workers, hearing how the scam worked, hesitated at the doors of the employment agencies.

The second thing Gurley did was attack the soldiers from Fort Missoula. They walked past during one of her speeches. She accused them of being hired thugs for corporate interests. They went to city leaders and threatened to “clean out the whole bunch” of Wobblies. The sheriff intervened to keep the peace.

The peace didn’t last for long.

Under pressure from employment agencies and local industry leaders, the City Council passed an ordinance restricting free speech. Three Wobblies—including Gurley’s husband, Jack Jones—were arrested. A fourth man who wasn’t a Wobblie was also arrested. A guy named Herman Tucker was working in the U.S. Forestry Department office upstairs from the soapbox when one of the Wobblies was pinched for reading the Declaration of Independence. Tucker was so incensed at the Missoula police that he came downstairs, got on the stage, picked up the copy of the Declaration that the Wobblie had dropped, and started reading where the last guy left off. Tucker went to jail with the rest of them.

At this point, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and her fellow Wobblies developed a strategy that they would employ in free speech battles throughout the western US for the next decade. They put out word for all “foot-loose rebels to come at once” and aid in the fight for free speech. Loggers, miners, migrant workers, and other activists hopped on trains from all over the country (though mostly from Butte and Spokane) to join the orators in Missoula. Gurley picked several spots throughout the town’s business district and sent speakers to all of them. The sheriff and his men chased them all down and nabbed them. When one speaker got arrested, the next one took his place. The Wobblies were careful to give their speeches before dinner time at the jail so the City would be forced to foot the bill for feeding them. The City, for their part, made sure to release the Wobblies before breakfast time.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was arrested at this time. For some reason (perhaps because she was so young, famous, and pregnant), she wasn’t housed with the other inmates. She demanded a jury trial. Charges were dropped. This triggered the next step in the rebellion. When speakers were arrested, they started demanding jury trials. This meant that the City would have to foot the bill to prosecute dozens of “disturbing the peace” cases. They’d have to populate dozens of juries. The activists added to this problem by refusing to leave jail—even when the jailors tried to kick them out—until their trials. Suddenly, the City had to foot the bill for housing and feeding these protestors.

Meanwhile, the Wobblies kept up their speeches. Before long, the Missoula jail was overcrowded. Speakers were imprisoned in the basement of a downtown building. The Wobblies, never a quiet group, spent so much time in jail singing, arguing, yelling out the window, and generally raising a ruckus that local businesses started pressuring City officials to resolve the situation. The mayor first tried diplomacy. He sent the chief of police to meet with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. He offered to stop harassing the speakers provided they just stay off a couple of downtown streets. The Wobblies refused. They had the City against the ropes. There was no reason to back off. The next day, city officials gave up. All of the charges were dropped. The orators were all released. The Wobblies were able to continue speaking and organizing.

This became the pattern for larger free-speech fights in a handful of cities from San Diego to Spokane. A whole host of anti-free-speech ordinances were defeated. Workers were able to organize to bring about social changes that built the American middle class: the eight-hour workday, the five-day work week, employer-sponsored health care, minimum wage, child labor laws, overtime compensation, Social Security, equal rights for women and minorities in the workplace, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, collective bargaining, employer-sponsored pension plans, etc.

Perhaps this is why, when we study American history in high school, we all spend so much time studying Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Wobblies, and the freedoms that unions have earned for us. Perhaps this is why, when we talk about heroes who have fought for our freedom, we talk about activists like Gurley and the twenty-four San Luis Obispans who showed up at the county supervisors’ meeting. Perhaps this is why I always see bumper stickers that say, “If you value your freedom, thank a protestor.”

Okay, maybe I’m being a little facetious with that last paragraph.

I do want to take a few seconds, though, to recognize that sometimes activism does work. Sometimes, we do affect positive change in our lives. Sometimes it only takes twenty-four people to do it. Sometimes those twenty-four people couldn’t sit down and have a conversation about politics for three minutes without wanting to strangle each other, but if they can recognize when they do agree and focus on that one specific thing, they can get something done.

It’s easy to feel jaded about contemporary politics. It’s okay to feel that way. I look at my whole list of freedoms that American workers earned during the twentieth century, and I can’t ignore that most of those things are being threatened today. It bums me out. I also recognize when cynicism becomes a dead-end street. At those moments, it’s helpful to consider the paths people have blazed out of that cul de sac.

 

Author’s note: This is the twenty-fifth and final chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #70.  For more information about the collection, read this post. If you enjoy reading my Razorcake columns, please consider subscribing to the magazine.

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Downtown Safari

Illustration from Razorcake #63 by Brad Beshaw

Illustration from Razorcake #63 by Brad Beshaw

A group of senior citizens out on safari descend on the downtown post office. They wear wide brimmed hats—the same kind Curious George’s keeper wore—and huddle together close. One member of the group is clearly the guide. I can tell because he wears a vest and speaks with authority. He points out the post office mural, which was painted in 1936 by a local artist named Gordon Grant. The ceiling of the post office is about sixteen feet high, and the mural takes up the seven feet of wall from the ceiling down. It shows workers engaged in the various industries that drove the economy of this area back in the thirties: they farm; they pack oranges; they work on oil rigs; they operate machines in factories; they load trucks. “Notice,” the tour guide says, “that all the faces of the workers are exactly the same.”

I look up at the mural. What the tour guide says is true if you discount the fact that most of the faces have different noses, different chins, and different hairlines. The hues of their skin varies, also. The faces do all seem to conform to the artist’s style. The eyes and mouths look pretty similar.

The tour guide adds, “And they’re all looking down.” Which, again, is true if you discount the fact that several of them are looking up.

Perhaps because I’ve spent so much time looking at this mural, I start to really pay attention to the tour guide. I turn my gaze from the mural and to the guide. I notice that all the faces of the senior citizens on safari are not the same. While they do wear big hats that protect them from the sun, their faces differ. Some show that loose elasticity of someone pushing or perhaps even beyond eighty. Some stare intently at the mural. Some don’t regard the mural at all, instead checking out the people in line or the homeless dude camping by the front door. The tour guide doesn’t seem to be looking at the painting. His eyes focus inwardly, on a memorized passage about a mural that he doesn’t bother to glance up and see at all. He has a thin, gray beard, slumped shoulders, arched back, and a round belly. If a cartoonist turned him into a character, the tour guide would likely morph into a tortoise.

He says, “Most of all, you’ll notice that the workers all seem unhappy. This is because the artist, Gordon Grant, was a communist. So all the workers are communists. That’s why they’re so unhappy.”

This makes me want to leave the line and ask the guide a few questions. First, if an artist is a communist, does that mean that everyone he paints becomes a communist, too? When Diego Rivera painted Mussolini, a Klansman, and the Pope in one of his murals, did Mussolini, the Klan, and the Pope all become communist? And what about being communists would make the workers unhappy? My understanding of communism—which comes from having actually read The Communist Manifesto—suggests that, under a communist regime, the workers would share equally in the wealth produced by their labor. Wouldn’t that make them happier than the real farm workers of the thirties who were divorced from the wealth of their production, who were frequently beaten or arrested or starved out for attempting to organize, who were paid wages that either barely allowed them to feed themselves or weren’t enough for them to feed themselves?

I don’t walk over to the tour guide to ask him any of these questions. I just keep listening.

“And how did the town react?” the tour guide asks himself. “Well, this was a Republican town. They were not pleased at all with this socialist painting.”

Again, I want to ask questions. What makes a town Republican? Was there some halcyon past when entire towns agreed on a political standpoint? It seems to me that most people don’t wholly endorse one party or another, but pick and choose based on specific issues and candidates and their limited choices in elections. Was that not the case in the thirties? And what did it mean to be a Republican in the thirties? Did the town stand behind Hoover, despite the fact that his policies were part of the reason the nation was flung into the Great Depression, despite the fact that he called upon McArthur to violently suppress World War I veterans who marched on the White House looking for pay that they’d been promised but never received?

And was Grant a communist or a socialist? I know that communism is a socialist platform in the same way that a square is also a rectangle, but just as not all rectangles are squares, not all socialists are communist. The terms are not interchangeable. Communism has, as one of its principle tenets, the abolition of private property. Socialism is simply a community or government project that seeks to enrich the community without turning a profit. The examples of socialism we could see on this safari, for example, are the post office that we’re standing in, the street that runs in front of it, the park across the street from it, and the city-funded tour that the tour guide is leading. So, when the community railed against socialism, did they rail against the post office itself? Did they rail against the public road that led to the post office? What was their united opposition?

The tour guide chuckles as he describes the sad descent the artist, who ended up committing suicide. When he’s done, he leads the safari out of the post office and onto further points of interest.

My poor wife has to hear me ramble about everything wrong with that tour guide’s thirty-second presentation.

 

Part of what chaps my ass about this tour guide’s presentation is his total dismissal of the painting. I love that painting. I live downtown. I run the mail order of a non-profit book publisher, so I spend a lot of time mailing books at that post office. A lot of that time is spent standing in line. Which makes sense. I live in a heavily-populated region of an overpopulated world. In a lot of cases, more than one member of the population wants to do that same thing at the same time, in the same place. So we have to wait for others sometimes. It’s no big deal. Still, I greatly appreciate Grant’s mural at the post office. It’s a respite from all the advertising clutter that surrounds me. Instead, here’s a piece of art that gives my thoughts a field to roam around in. I like that the art matches the landscape of my life. I love that it focuses on workers—both men and women—in their daily activities. I wish I lived in a society that supported more of this art. I wish that our public spaces would offer more things like Grant’s mural and fewer things like billboards.

I also love that, if you had the time to stare for hours at this mural, you’d probably come up with different ideas about it than I do. We could talk about our different interpretations. All that I ask is that, unlike the tour guide, you actually look up at the painting before generating your ideas. Art is so much better when you actually look at it.

 

The other thing that bugged me about the tour guide was how much his presentation mirrors our cultural discourse. He works exactly the way that much of our media works. In short, you have someone who knows very little about the issues he’s presenting, has almost no concern with whether the information has any bearing in fact, uses language that he does not have control over, discusses an issue devoid of the context surrounding the issue, and delivers the information in a way that is needlessly simplistic. And, like the rest of the safari, we spend too little time asking questions about the information. Instead, we tend to either accept it because it’s easier to accept the opinions of others than to do the research necessary to form our own opinions, or we get frustrated that so much of our information is delivered by dubious presenters like the tour guide, so we largely tune out. In both cases, we lose opportunities to understand our world better. It’s a shame.

 

After leaving the post office, my wife and I head into downtown. The safari is now at the corner of Chestnut and Main. The tour guide points at the old downtown theater building. He’s too far away for me to hear what he’s saying, which is lucky for my wife, because that means she won’t have to hear my rebuttal. Our former neighbor Shirley is on a collision course with the group. Shirley lived in the section eight housing that was next to the first apartment my wife and I shared here. She’s crazy. She has some sort of dissociative disorder. Some days, we could hear Shirley screaming at her empty apartment, using the voice of an angry older male. Sometimes, she would pace up and down the stairs, talking to herself in another voice. Sometimes, she sat on the steps and talked like a very young girl. We lived next to Shirley long enough for me to recognize five or six distinct voices she used. One of those voices was of sane Shirley. I’d frequently chat with sane Shirley. Nothing too specific. Just the typical neighbor chat: stuff about the weather or day-to-day activities. One time, she baked me cookies.

Shirley approaches the safari. It’s clear she’s out of it. I can tell by the way she’s charging toward the group like she might sack the tour guide. My wife and I get closer. Shirley charges past the group, then stops to wait for the traffic light. The group heads east toward the library. My wife and I cross Main. Shirley doesn’t recognize us. She doesn’t even react to me when I wave to her. Instead, she cocks her hips and waves her hand at the traffic light with the type of flourish a model uses at a car show. She talks about the traffic light. I can’t make out what she’s saying, but I recognize her teenage girl voice.

We end up following Shirley for a couple of blocks. She keeps up her routine, flourishing her hand at points of interest downtown in her own dissociative mimicry of the tour guide. She points out benches, an ATM machine, an Italian restaurant, a white lady in yoga pants who’s walking a dog. I can’t make out a word Shirley is saying. Still, I think she’s so much better at this than the tour guide.

 

Author’s note: This is the twenty-fourth chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #63.  For more information about the collection, read this post. If you enjoy reading my Razorcake columns, please consider subscribing to the magazine.

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The Myth of the Real

 

Illustration from Razorcake #61 by Brad Beshaw

Illustration from Razorcake #61 by Brad Beshaw

A few weeks ago, an old buddy of mine from my undergraduate days at Florida State University rolled through town. He told me he was coming ahead of time. We made plans to grab a burger and a beer at the local brew pub. I knew there would be some problems, largest among them the fact that people who are my age are getting old, which I cannot understand because I’m staying the same age. And this buddy, I’ll call him Dane—because that’s his name and he doesn’t read Razorcake anyway—has belly-flopped into middle age. Suburban home. SUV with a McCain/Palin sticker still on it. Christmas cards with pictures of his kids on them. Kids named Hunter and Aspen. He has a hairline that looks like the toilet seat in a public restroom and a belly that rubs the finish off the bottom of his belt buckle. He’s gonna hate me if he ever reads this. Still, when I see him, I have to squint real hard to see the guy who, when I knew him, was living with his girlfriend, started having an affair with her best friend (who, not-so-incidentally lived with them), completely fell for the best friend, and moved his stuff into her bedroom (two doors down the hall). As you may have guessed, neither girlfriend became the mother of Hunter or Aspen.

As you may not have guessed, it was good to see Dane. We shared some stories that I love to relive through the retelling. He told me about what some of our old friends are up to. I told him about old friends he’d lost touch with. The beer was good. I gave him no shit about ordering a salad and much shit about his bald noggin. He tried to come back at me with some crack about my gray hair and couldn’t figure out if I was serious or not when I told him I die it that color. We talked about politics and it didn’t matter that we were on opposite ends of the spectrum because the world’s not gonna change the way I want it to and he doesn’t act on his political beliefs, anyway. And then he pushed my buttons.

He said, “Are you still doing that magazine? What was it? Razorcookies?

“Kinda,” I said. “I still write a column for it.”

“But you’re not the guy anymore? What did you do? Sell it?”

It took a while for me to explain to him that, yes, ten years ago I moved out to California to help start the magazine and that, for four years, I did half of the work on it: editing; proofreading; working with writers, artists, photographers, bands, and labels; laying out columns and interviews; adjusting the resolution of photos so they’d look okay in newsprint; wrestling with distributors; mailing subscriptions; dropping the originals off at the printer and picking up the thousands of copies in a truck; loading and unloading them; so on and so forth. There are even a couple of early issues where, if you look real closely, you’ll see that I wrote about a third of the content. For the next few years of the zine, I gradually backed off. I did a little less and a little less until I now only write a column. Amazingly, volunteers have come along to take up all the slack I left. In fact, volunteers now do almost everything that Todd and I used to do in that ratty old Razorcake HQ of old. I told him that I was never the guy and the magazine was never mine. That Todd and I had started it together, so technically, the two of us would’ve been the guys. But we never were. Even from the first meeting, it was way bigger than me and Todd.

Dane got hung up on a few points. How could we have volunteers? Who got paid? Who made the money off it? He was particularly pissed off that I didn’t sell “my half” of the ‘zine to Todd. He kept asking me what would happen if the magazine got big. “Like Rolling Stone big” were his exact words. What kind of money would I be entitled to? He looked at me like I was retarded for never getting paid money for my labor, for not holding on to some sort of future entitlement to money. He thought the whole idea of a not-for-profit magazine sounded vaguely socialist. I’m pretty sure Dane, like most Americans, doesn’t really know what the word socialist means.

Dane is not the first person I’ve had this conversation with. I could kinda see where it was going. And, sure enough, he said, “Anyway, at least you finally joined the real world.”

This statement, this sense of the “real world,” is what gets me worse than anything. I did the only thing I knew to do. I pointed to the pub TV, which was tuned to ESPN, and said, “What do you think about ol’ Jimbo Fisher.” Because Florida State alumni will always be willing to talk about Florida State football. And this is the real reason I pay attention to football at all: so I can have something to change the subject to when I get stuck in situations like this.

 

I guess I should be vaguely pleased that a someone like Dane would acknowledge my job—teaching literature at a state university—as real. Most people of his ilk see English as a waste of time. The fact that most people of Dane’s ilk are functionally illiterate doesn’t seem to matter to them. Though, in fairness to Dane, he’s not functionally illiterate. I’m projecting characteristics of others with whom I’ve had similar conversations onto him. Either way, I know that what I teach has nothing to do with his definition of real. I know that the only thing that makes my job real to him is the fact it pays me a middle-class salary and it’s a job middle-class people can understand as being middle-class. And middle-class, to him, is the real world.

This magazine, on the other hand, is somehow unreal. I mean, obviously it’s real. You’re holding real paper in your hand as you read this. That’s real newsprint ink sticking to your real fingers. It’s as real as the crap you’re taking while you read this. And this magazine was even legitimated—not by Dane but by others with whom I’ve had this “real” conversation—by being sold in Barnes & Noble. But the situations that allow this magazine to become reality are unreal. Volunteers. Community. Not-for-profits. Twenty-first century punk rock. If I’m to understand Dane, these are not part of the real world.

When I explained the reality of Todd to Dane, things became even more unreal. How could a man in his late thirties spend all his time in his basement, running a magazine that has no aspirations to make big-time money? How is he going to retire? How can he raise a family when he’s doing that? When is he gonna join the real world?

And this is what is so difficult for me: that even now, even among my friends, I’m still being sold only one way of life. It was bad when our parents were telling us that we had to grow up, go to college, get a job, get married, buy a house, have kids, work for a company for forty years, and retire with a pension. It’s worse when you’ve already grown up and your friends, the very same people who rebelled with you in your youth, are telling you the same thing. It’s even more ridiculous when we look at a world where some of those things cease to be an option. Buying a house may have been a good idea once upon a time. It may be a good idea again sometime in the future. But right now, putting down on a mortgage that’s gonna cost twice as much as rent for the same place, just so I can own it when I get to be in my seventies is a little ridiculous. Working for a company for forty years—dull as that may have been for our grandparents’ generation—isn’t really even an option for our parents. No company keeps their employees that long. When your salary gets too high, they lay you off and hire someone who’ll work for less. And there are no pensions anymore. I mean, there are. I’m paying into one. I’m just not so naïve as to believe I’ll get any money back out of it. And the alternative, something like a 401K, seems like even more of a sucker’s deal to me. I don’t believe for a second that, if you let Wall Street handle your retirement, you’ll be able to retire. That seems the ultimate unreality to me.

So I think of Dane and his real world seems a fantasy to me. He thinks he owns a home, but he doesn’t own it. The bank does. They will until at least 2030 or so. He thinks he drives an SUV. There’s no sports. There’s not much utility. It’s just a station wagon with a high roof and an effective ad campaign. He thinks he lives in the real world, yet most of his free time is spent watching television or playing around on the internet, which are both modes of escape out of the real world. Nearly everything about Dane’s life is a fantasy he’s bought into. Even his name is a fantasy. He’s not Danish. Even his son’s name is a fantasy. Dane isn’t gonna take Hunter hunting.

And it’s not that I’m trying to make myself feel superior to Dane. My name is a fantasy, too. Sean is as Irish as they come, and I’m not Irish at all. My life is not much more rooted in reality. I spend most of my time reading fiction and teaching about fiction. Everything about my life is about making sense of the fictions that surround us. So I’m not trying to get on a high horse. I just think about where Dane and I met in the first place, which was a creative writing class. I remember Dane writing hilarious short stories. He’s embarrassed about that now. And I think of him rejecting a world of creativity and self-expression so he can hole up in some corporate marketing twat’s mundane fantasy version of a reality… Which is fine. He can make his choices. But I think of it and what makes me most upset is not that he gave up his own creative outlets to do it. It’s not even that Dane thinks Todd is somehow unreal because Todd never gave up his creative outlets.

What makes me most upset is even the possibility that I’ve somehow entered this world of reality with Dane.

 

Author’s note: This is the twenty-third chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #61.  For more information about the collection, read this post. If you enjoy reading my Razorcake columns, please consider subscribing to the magazine.

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Banner Pilot in Beverly Hills

 

Illustration from Razorcake #58 by Brad Beshaw

Illustration from Razorcake #58 by Brad Beshaw

I headed west on Sunset Boulevard, straight into the heart of Beverly Hills. The motor on my truck’s air-conditioner had just gone. I needed some music that would sound good through the rush of air and the roar of traffic, so I popped in a Banner Pilot CD. Banner Pilot—with all their songs of working shitty jobs, getting drunk, going nowhere, not really knowing where to look to go, even—in Beverly Hills. It’s an odd combination. Two weeks earlier, I’d seen Banner Pilot play, well, not exactly in Beverly Hills, but at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, and if you stand in front of the Troubadour and sneeze in a westerly direction, your spit will land in Beverly Hills. And the thought of me—with all my stories about working shitty jobs, getting drunk, going nowhere, not really knowing where to look to go, even—in Beverly Hills, twice in two weeks, it’s even more odd.

So what was I doing there this second time? I’d met up in Hollywood with Jim Ruland, talked about books, picked up a couple of novels at Book Soup, then headed west to the freeway that would take me home. A woman in a very expensive car with a very expensive haircut tailgaited me, whipped around me, offered her middle finger for my viewing pleasure, then sped off. Her bumper sticker read, “I save lives, what do you do?”

I hadn’t really done anything to incur the wrath of her middle finger besides drive through Beverly Hills in my old pickup. I didn’t care about that woman or her finger anyway. Banner Pilot’s song “Skeleton Key” came on. I turned it up and sang along.

I like this song because it tells the story of the novel that the songwriter, Nick, wants to write. It opens with a woman who’s beaten down by the weather and a man who stumbles out of a bar. It’s a beautiful scene, but it’s all he has. He doesn’t know how it’ll all play out but he knows that, in the end, she’ll save him and herself. I love that idea of a novel that’s only an opening scene and an ending, no more than a hundred words spent on it. As I drove through Beverly Hills, singing along and thinking about novels, I thought, I could write that book for Nick. I know what it’s like to stumble out of bars and ally myself with beaten-down girls in a search for redemption. The song swears that it would have to take place in Minneapolis, but if I were to write it, it would have to take place in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Because that’s where I know about being lost like that. And thinking these thoughts, it occurred to me that I wrote this novel already. I called it Train Wreck Girl. It came out a couple of years ago on Manic D Press.

I kept thinking about Banner Pilot and books, though, because there’s something kinda literary about them. At the end of side A of their album Resignation Day, they sample a Jack Kerouac reading. This mirrors the sample of Kerouac at the end of side A on Jawbreaker’s 24-Hour Revenge Therapy. I like Banner Pilot’s sample better. Jawbreaker samples passages from Kerouac’s “October in the Railroad Earth.” Lonely, self-absorbed passages that match the lonely, self-absorbed songs of Jawbreaker: “the clarity of Cal to break your heart.” Banner Pilot samples passages from The Subterraneans, from the part of the book where everything goes right before everything goes wrong: “a tableful of beers a few that is and all the gang’s cutting in and out… the booming drums, the high ceiling.” This sense of things going right before they go wrong is part of what I like about Banner Pilot’s songs. Though Nick writes the songs, they remind of the stories Banner Pilot bassist Nate used to write in his zine Pick Your Poison. Stories about working shitty jobs, getting drunk, going nowhere, not really knowing where to look to go, even. And, of course, there’s Kerouac to think about, with all of his stories about working shitty jobs, getting drunk, etc.

So there I was in Beverly Hills—a city where nothing of value is produced, a city known only for its spectacle of opulence—once again thinking about class in America, thinking about one more lost generation and where it all comes from and what it adds up to. I’ve been reading these stories and singing along to these songs for more than twenty years, for more than half of my life. I’ve been writing them for about as long. Between my two trips to Beverly Hills, I even went to Flagstaff for the book release of James Jay’s The Journeymen. It’s a book of poetry about working shitty jobs, getting drunk, etc. His reading could be nowhere else but in a bar. It was packed with people who lived the lives that James Jay put into poetry. It was one of those unique literary events where the crowd spent almost as much time laughing, hooting, and hollering as James Jay spent reading, one of those unique events where this kind of behavior is welcome. Even encouraged.

With all this in the last two weeks, I drove home among the rustle and roar of the L.A. freeways wondering what conclusions I could draw from more than twenty years of reading novels and listening to songs about working shitty jobs, getting drunk, etc. Here’s what I came up with.

The first question I asked was: what’s behind all these shitty jobs? Of course, there’s the system of neoliberal capitalism and all that, but I want to stay focused on a topic small enough for this column. One of the books I’ve read recently that can help answer this question is Iain Levison’s How to Rob an Armored Car. It tells the story of three guys—a manager at a Wal-Mart-type store, a cook in a corporate restaurant, and a dogwalker—who decide to enter into a life of crime. The emptiness and futility of the two corporate jobs are familiar to most Razorcake readers. What’s interesting about the book is the dogwalker because he has dipped his toes into the American dream. He has a bachelor’s degree, a wife, a child, a house with a mortgage, his own business, everything he’s supposed to have. It all feels empty and insufficient to him. As I read the book, it was easy for me to root for these guys. I hoped they would take the step of getting away from the TV and actually rob an armored car. Because a quick survey of their options showed that life in twenty-first-century America can be empty and meaningless and there can be reasons for throwing it all away. Not that I want to throw it all away. I don’t. I just want to understand why throwing it all away is understandable.

This is why the dogwalker was interesting to me. I recognize his relationship with money because, like him, most of my money is spent on getting by rather than on exciting purchases. I earn enough to pay my bills because I want a roof over my head and water in my pipes and electricity for the computer and record player and light at night. I don’t buy much beyond that. But most jobs are only worth the ridiculous hours and chronic humiliation if you make enough money to buy shit that makes you happy. And most shit that I could buy doesn’t make me happy. I get exhausted thinking about all the things I don’t want to buy and don’t even want in my house. Here’s a short list: a cell phone, a digital camera, a new car, a suburban house, insurance, bottled water, a diamond ring, any kind of jewelry, anything that’s advertised during a football game, a blackberry, a meal at a corporate restaurant, a soda, new shoes, furniture, window treatments, clothing with logos on it, disposable cleaning products, anything sold at any big box store, anything for sale at my local mall, or anything else, really, except for a new air-conditioning motor for my truck so I can go back to traveling the freeways of L.A. bourgy-style.

So, if you’re not someone who likes to buy the poorly-made, largely disposable goods that drive our economy, if you’re someone who has learned that the purchase of nearly every item gives you a brief jolt of happiness followed by at best empty clutter and at worst crippling debt, then your typical job is unsatisfying and you may as well work a job that covers only the bare minimum. Whether we’ve articulated it this way or not, I think a lot of us has recognized this. Hence, the second part of the familiar plot: getting drunk.

But this is a real problem. For so many of us, the punishments of society (anywhere from being broke and eating Top Ramen to being homeless or in jail or carrying a lot of debt) are real, but the rewards (a bluetooth, leather car seats) aren’t rewarding. I wouldn’t want a house in Beverly Hills even if I could afford it. My neighbors would be assholes. I prefer the junky who lives next door now. He may blast heavy metal so loudly that I have to leave my apartment until he’s done, but he’s not all bad. Sometimes he plays the Misfits.

Beyond leading us to getting drunk, this relationship with work and money also leads us to that feeling of being lost and not knowing where to go. There’s no real easy answers to this one. It’s not easy to find what you’re looking for when you’re not even sure what it is. I don’t want to offer platitudes like be true to yourself or find something you love and pursue it. Going from lost to found is difficult, and it’s different for everyone. You have to figure it out for yourself. One way to figure it out is to write stories or songs. Another way is to listen to these stories and songs and decide what works for you and what doesn’t.

For me, luckily I don’t feel so lost any more. I have a pretty good job. It may not be perfect. I may not make a huge salary, but I only work thirty-two weeks a year. When I am at work, I feel like I’m doing some good for society. When I’m not at work, I can do the things that make for a richer life: hang out with friends, spend time with family, write, surf, ride my bike or my skateboard, volunteer for causes I believe in. It’s not for everyone, but, for me, it’s not bad. It beats being a stressed out asshole flipping off people on Sunset Boulevard or robbing an armored car, anyway.

 

Author’s note: This is the twenty-second chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #58.  For more information about the collection, read this post. If you enjoy reading my Razorcake columns, please consider subscribing to the magazine.

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My Favorite Kind of Madness

Illustration from Razorcake #59 by Brad Beshaw

Illustration from Razorcake #59 by Brad Beshaw

There’s this moment: late July in the Zane Grey Ballroom. Flagstaff, Arizona. Every seat has a butt to warm it. Three of the four walls have shoulders leaning against them for support. Somewhere around seventy-five or eighty people have come out and squeezed into this room. It’s a Sunday night and most of them have to work the next morning. And what are they here to see? A poet. In 2010.

The poet is James Jay. This is the release of his book The Journeymen. He’s reading the first poem, “Time Trapped in Light.” It’s about another moment frozen in time: a picture of Jack Kerouac. He’s tuning a radio to the perfect frequency. But the poem itself is a picture of James Jay tuned into the picture of Jack Kerouac, and right now it’s me in the front row of the Zane Grey Ballroom tuned into a frequency powerful enough to hold me, James, and Jack. There’s something about this moment.

You could say it’s a moment of vindication. After all, I published The Journeymen. James sent the poems to me individually and we talked about them. He sent me the collection and I edited it and he revised—often with enough good sense to ignore my advice. I typeset the words inside and designed the cover outside. I slapped cash on the barrel to print a couple thousand copies and moved those copies into bookstores and distribution warehouses and storage spaces. I even brought several here to sell later. And I could look around the packed house of Flagstaff locals—drinking their beers and hanging on James’s every word and looking like anything but a crowd for a poetry reading—and say, “This is why I did it.” But it’s not why I did it. That’s not what this moment is about for me.

It’s something else.

 

In a weird way, poetry and punk rock have blended together in my mind. Both came to me when I was still an adolescent stuck in small town Florida, hoping like hell that there was a bigger world than what I’d seen in my life. Hoping like hell that there was some form of rebellion, some meaningful way to, if not change the world, at least change my life. So, like most of you, I stumbled across bands that expanded my world. Maybe like a few of you, maybe like none of you, I stumbled across poets who did the same thing. Specifically, a teacher loaned me an anthology of hers that had poems by Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. The poems exploded the walls that I once thought were built around me. They invited me into a world of intense experiences. They inspired me to seek out my own.

All these years later, I still spend a lot of my time (maybe most of my time) with books and music. I read poetry the same way I listen to my favorite records: focusing mostly on new stuff, always looking for the latest releases, always stoked to find a new favorite, but also going back to the ones that invited me into this new world to begin with. The Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, the Clash, the Ramones on the punk rock side; Corso, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the poetry side. Watching James Jay read in the Zane Grey Ballroom to me is tantamount to seeing the Riverboat Gamblers at Alex’s Bar. It means something.

 

But I also think about that time trapped in light, because there’s another aspect to this. Back in real time, the time when I write this column (which is a couple months before you read it), I’m still thinking about that frozen moment in Flagstaff, still trying to make sense of what’s significant about it. And I’m a little uneasy because, a couple of weeks ago, some college kids were playing around in a nearby park. They were dressed up as knights, doing battle with foam swords. Maybe you’ve seen these societies for creative anachronism reliving the middle ages at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Maybe, like me, a mean little man inside of you wants to make fun of them and the nice little man inside of you has to say, “Dude, they’re just having harmless fun. Let ‘em be.” For me, though, watching these kids play pretend made me think about the anachronisms I’m playing with. I wonder sometimes about poetry and punk rock in the twenty-first century. I wonder if they’re both part of a past that I pretend to live in even though their time has come and gone. I helped start this here punk rock magazine twenty years after punk was declared dead and two years after the smart money said that magazines were done and readers had moved electronic. Now this fucker is almost ten years old. On top of that, I just published a book of poetry in 2010 as it were 1956 and I were Lawrence Ferlinghetti trying to put the poetry renaissance into print. Then, I went to the reading in the Zane Grey Ballroom as if I were living in the Gallery Six scene of Dharma Bums. I wonder what’s next for me. Will I dress up in rusty armor and sally out onto the Spanish plains like Don Quixote, without even a trusty Sancho trailing behind on his mule? Will I get my own cloak and foam sword and join the kids in the park who at least acknowledge that they’re living in the past?

 

This issue of living in the past is a tricky one. The Japanese have a word that is sometimes translated as heart, sometimes as mind, and sometimes as soul. The word is kokoro. I don’t speak Japanese, but the nearest I can tell, kokoro doesn’t exactly mean heart, mind, or soul. It’s more like the aggregate memories and feelings about those memories that construct an individual’s identity. Think about that concept for a second. Think of how useful it would be to have a word like kokoro. In American English, we have over fifty ways of saying “shit,” over a dozen words each for various genitalia and bodily emissions, but we have no word to express the beautiful and painful memories that add up to make us who we are.

Even without the word kokoro, we still understand the concept. We understand that, when we talk about who we really are, that identity is just a sum of the things we’ve done and how we felt about them. This kokoro is stuck to us like a shadow. It determines how we’re going to act in every situation that requires us to act. It creates the context for how we’ll feel about that action. In this way, we live most of our lives trapped in memories.

 

Take this moment at James Jay’s reading. Part of the power of the moment resides in my kokoro. There’s the memory of a seventeen year-old me who was so taken by the Beats that he dreamed of one day fostering a Beat renaissance. There’s the memories me as an aspiring writer, kicking around Flagstaff, drinking beers with James Jay and talking about starting my own City-Lights-style press, or driving down to Phoenix with Todd Taylor, talking about how rad it would be to start our own ‘zine. There’s the fanatic in me who loves poetry too much to write my own, who loves punk rock too much to start my own band, but who still wants to publish it and write about it. There’s also the moment that goes with this memory when I can turn to that seventeen-year-old me and that aspiring writer me and that fanatic me—none of whom are really me anymore; all of whom still live inside of me—and say, “Look, man. Look what you’ve done, not to make this moment, but to nurture it to the point where you can now just sit back and enjoy it.”

Still, so much of the meaning of that moment in trapped in memories. And, still, I feel like there’s more to it.

 

I listen to the poem itself. That’s why everyone is really here: the poem. Sure, James Jay is a man about the town in Flagstaff. He’s well-liked. He seems to know everyone. He could probably draw a crowd for just about anything, if he really wanted. And sure he has a comfortable stage presence and stories and jokes to fill in the space between the poems. But it’s like a Dillinger Four show: sure Paddy’s antics between songs are funny. That doesn’t change the fact that you came for the music and your favorite part of the night is in hearing the actual songs. Likewise, for all the pleasing madness of this reading, the real pleasure is in the poem. And “Time Trapped in Light” captures something about this frozen moment. Because it’s the first poem in the book. It’s one of the first ones he reads. And in the poem is the sense of things to come. It’s as if James is looking at the picture of Kerouac, saying, “All right, Jack. I’m dialing in that frequency of beauty and pain and lunacy and transcendence. I’m gonna put words on a page and hope they give shape to the abstract notions that can’t be put into words. Maybe it’ll all be as meaningful to the next generation of readers as your poems were to me.” It’s this optimism, this looking forward, more than the connection to the past, that moves me.

Because, sure I live a lot in the past just like everyone else, but at the core my motivation isn’t to keep reliving the past. Instead, I want to be part of the construction of a future in which new records keep me from digging the old ones out of the stacks, in which new poems keep me from reading Howl for the fiftieth time. I want a future where punk rock and poetry are perpetually valid forms for new expressions, perpetually exploding walls and opening new worlds.

 

Author’s note: This is the twenty-first chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #59.  For more information about the collection, read this post. If you enjoy reading my Razorcake columns, please consider subscribing to the magazine.

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Grrrl Can’t Help It

Illustration from Razorcake #57 by Brad Beshaw

Illustration from Razorcake #57 by Brad Beshaw

Strangely enough, I remember buying my first Bikini Kill record. It was in Vinyl Fever in Tallahassee, Florida sometime in early ’92. My buddy Pete and I were flipping through records and Pete pulled out Bikini Kill. He said, “You’ll like this. It’s kinda like the Butthole Surfers.” I remember looking at the picture on the cover: the grrrls looking so geeky and tough, the trails of light following the bassist as she moved faster than the camera’s shutter. I checked the track listing and liked how the words looked like they’d been etched into cover with some kind of makeshift blade. So I chanced the six bucks and picked up the record.

Of course, there’s problems with this memory. First, I also remember that my record player was stolen when I was away for Christmas in ’91 and I didn’t buy a new one for a couple of years. This means I would’ve been flipping through CDs at the time, not records. Also, that Bikini Kill album came out in June of ’92 and I moved away from Tallahassee in May of ’92.

Clearly, my memory rejects the tyranny of chronological time and verifiable facts. It will reconstruct the past as it sees fit.

I also remember there being a kind of conventional wisdom around the guys in the Tallahassee music scene at the time. It went like this: wear a Bikini Kill T-shirt and punk rock girls will dig you. I never actually tested this wisdom. I rarely had enough money to buy T-shirts at shows and Bikini Kill didn’t come through Tallahassee when I lived there. I think my memory may have made up this conventional wisdom.

I bring this up because, lately, I’ve been trying to remember the riot grrrl movement firsthand. I should be able to remember it. I was alive then. I was in college. A few of my closest friends were in bands. I went out to shows at least two or three nights a week. A lot of the bands I saw had women in them. I knew some of those women. I knew most of the deejays at the university radio station. My next door neighbor was the station manager. Because we shared a porch, we spent a fair amount of time on that porch listening to new music. So I was in the know.

I also have a lot of the music, and I’ve had it for so long that I don’t remember buying it. If I didn’t buy that Bikini Kill record at Vinyl Fever in ’92, I must’ve got it somewhere in Atlanta a couple of years later. Pete lived there then, too. Maybe that conversation happened at Criminal Records in ‘94 instead. And, of course, there’s other stuff that I have around. I have a Kill Rock Stars comp that’s so old it has Courtney Love the band on it. (If you’re like just about everyone else, you probably didn’t know or forgot that before Courtney Love was the stage name of Courtney Harrison, it was a band featuring indie rockers who were not named Courtney and did not marry anyone in Nirvana.) I still have mix tapes so old they may fall apart the next time I try to play them, and they’re full of riot grrrl bands. I have CDs that are equally old and equally representative. I have more Sleater-Kinney albums than I want to admit to in the pages of Razorcake. And how many, exactly, is that? Three. I still listen to two of them regularly. Don’t judge me. At least one of the members of the band—I’m not sure if it was Sleater or Kinney—wanted to be my Joey Ramone.

So what do I remember firsthand about the riot grrrl movement? Only that I went to see L7 in the spring ’92. This I remember clearly because there’d been a girl in my Freshman English class who I’d had a crush on, but she had a boyfriend. Over the next few years, I’d see her on campus and she was fun to hang out with, but she still had that boyfriend. I ran into her again while I was walking over to see L7 and not only did she have no plans for the night, but she was up for walking over to the show with me. And did she still have that boyfriend? No, she did not.

L7 must have put on a hell of show because I remember it. I remember a packed house and everyone going nuts. I remember leaving the show sweaty and the girl I went to the show with leaving sweaty and a mist rose up from her when she stepped into the cold night air. I remember exactly the way she looked at that moment. But I don’t remember a grrrl revolution. I’m not even sure if we can lump L7 in with riot grrrl.

Regardless, I start here to make one simple point: I’m not the person to write the history of riot grrrl. Even though I was around at the time, I barely remember it, and what I do remember is highly questionable. I can’t even write about it without making lame jokes that suggest I don’t know that no one in Sleater-Kinney was named Sleater or Kinney. This doesn’t mean, of course, that the movement is insignificant. It’s not. It’s important. It opened the door for a lot of young women to create and foster an exciting and productive community. It invited more women onto the stage and into punk rock. It helped a lot of women take steps toward becoming empowered.

I’ve been thinking about it, though, because I’ve seen riot grrrl coming back. I haven’t seen it coming back in the cool way, with new grrrl bands and zines and music festivals. Instead, it’s returning in the form of retrospectives—articles written by people whose memory of the movement is even more questionable than mine. The articles all follow the same pattern: punk rock had no room for women; women started their own bands (but apparently only three of them); Olympia, Washington and Washington, DC became the epicenters of women who wrote “slut” on their arms and went to grrrl shows and traded zines; magazines like Sassy and People wrote articles about them; Kathleen Hanna declared a media blackout; the movement continued for another year, then the founders either became more sophisticated (read: less punk, more indie rock) or more legitimately famous (read: toured as Pearl Jam’s opening act).

These retrospectives bother me for a few reasons. First, because they’re all the same. And by all following the same pattern, they suggest that this is the objective history of a movement. Which it’s not. Though it seeks to be a definitive history, it ignores a lot. It ignores that a lot of punk rock women had taken the stage before riot grrrl. For a decade prior to it, women had been instrumental in creating the LA punk scene. Bands like The Bags, Alley Cats, The Brat, and X gave a real voice to women in punk long before Bratmobile did. All-female bands like The Runaways and The Go-Gos had even somewhat normalized the idea of women playing their own instruments before most grrrls had gotten out of elementary school. I don’t point this out to demean what riot grrrls did. I just want to point out that riot grrrl was an evolutionary stage for women in punk, not the completely original phenomena that these retrospectives paint it as.

Another problem with these retrospectives is the context in which they’re emerging. Of course there are problems when the mainstream media tackles anything that has to do with punk rock. That can go without saying. Instead, I want to look at a recent article in Bust Magazine. Because Bust is supposed to be an alternative to the mainstream media. They started out as a zine. Riot grrrl in no small way blazed the trail for them. And in their latest issue, they have a retrospective of riot grrrl. This comes in their music-themed issue. This particular issue has a movie star on the cover. This movie star has her own band. You’ve probably heard her music; it’s in a commercial for cotton. Beyond the movie star, Bust features four other women in music: Joan Jett, Kathleen Hanna, Jill Scott, and Wanda Jackson. Because, apparently, all the women in music either are movie stars or began their careers more than twenty years ago. Hardly a word is dedicated to women in new, current bands, though there is a fashion spread of indie rock women dressed in their favorite outfits.

This is where Bust has taken the trail that riot grrrl blazed for them.

What bugged me most about the retrospective, though, is not that they demonized white male punk rockers (because I like being demonized). It’s not that they portrayed riot grrrl as the first all-girl bands while also running interviews with Joan Jett and Cherie Currie—who were in an all-girl band fifteen years before riot grrrl—in the same issue. It’s not that they’re so clearly clueless about contemporary music. What bugs me is this: in 2005, Jennifer Whiteford came out with the novel Grrrl, which, though it’s fiction, is a more real, honest, and reliable history of the riot grrrl movement than any other that I’ve read. Part of what makes it so great is that Whiteford writes it from a personal standpoint. It shows what it was like for one particular person in one particular place at one particular time while amazing things were happening and she was a part of them. She creates no hierarchies. She does not pretend to be definitive. Instead, she writes a narrative that builds on the empowerment of riot grrrl. It’s a narrative that is empowering itself. And though it takes place in the past, it looks forward to new possibilities for women in the twenty-first century. In short, she does the opposite of what Bust and all of these other retrospectives do.

I’d be lying if I said that it doesn’t bug me that Bust did not review Grrrl, even though the publisher sent them two review copies and two personalized cover letters (I know this because I’m the publisher and I did it), even though the book is exactly the kind of thing Bust readers are looking for. But what really bugs me is how this example demonstrates the way we construct our shared pasts and the history of resistance movements. The people who have the definitive voices are largely ignorant while the real, honest voices are largely ignored.

 

Author’s note: This is the twentieth chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #57.  For more information about the collection, read this post. If you enjoy reading my Razorcake columns, please consider subscribing to the magazine.

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A Punk’s History of Howard Zinn

 

Illustration from Razorcake #55 by Brad Beshaw

Illustration from Razorcake #55 by Brad Beshaw

Celebrity deaths elicit some strange reactions. I sometimes get wrapped up in mourning the loss and forget that I didn’t know the person. I was hit pretty hard by the deaths of Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone, even though I’d never met them and had no intention of meeting them. I have to remember that the things I love about those guys still exist very much in the present. I can listen to them sing any time I want to. And, let’s face it, the grand productive days were over for those two. As decent as their final releases were, neither of them was going to produce another Give ‘Em Enough Rope or End of the Century.

Maybe the fact that three of the original Ramones are dead and all of the original Eagles are still alive is proof that, if a god does exist, he’s a bit of a dick. Nonetheless, the point remains that celebrity deaths need to be taken with a grain of salt. But I’m struggling over this most recent one.

On January 27, 2010, we lost Howard Zinn. Among other things, Zinn is the author of A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present, which is probably the most comprehensive history of Americans who fought against racism, sexism, imperialism, and classism; of Native Americans who refused to be annihilated, of African Americans who refused to be dehumanized, of women who refused to be the second sex, of citizens who fought against wars rather than in them, and of workers who fought against exploitation. I remember my first time reading A People’s History. It was about a dozen years ago. I was living in a small town in Florida, working as a construction supervisor. The eight-hundred page tome rode shotgun with me as I drove my truck from jobsite to jobsite. I read snatches of it during breaks, eating lunch, waiting for subcontractors to show up, or sitting in my thrift-store recliner in my one-bedroom apartment. It was a time in my life when I felt particularly powerless. Although most of the construction workers viewed me as a boss, I had no real authority. I made less money than most of the skilled workers (many of whom were less skilled than me), and it was becoming more and more clear to me that I was just fuel in a generator that powered the banking and insurance industries—the ones who really make the money in construction. I’d spent a decade trying to get out of these kinds of jobs. I’d gotten two college degrees (a bachelor’s and a master’s). I’d published my first novel. And I still found myself in a low rent apartment in a white trash neighborhood, living a life that most of America feels comfortable calling white trash. Amid this atmosphere, A People’s History was empowering.

Zinn, like all historians, tells history from his point of view. His values are reflected in whom he chooses as historically significant and what events he chooses to focus on. Unlike most histories that I was familiar with, though, Zinn focused on people like me. He was less concerned with presidents, generals, and leaders of business (unless he was knocking them off their pedestals). Instead, he acknowledged that real change comes from the bottom up. While Abraham Lincoln may have signed the bill that freed the slaves, he didn’t do it out of a deep-seeded belief in social justice. He did it as a response to an overwhelming resistance movement that fought against slavery, be it through the dozens of violent slave uprisings throughout the South, the Quaker network of safe houses for escaped slaves, the challenges to the Fugitive Slave Act, or the narratives of writers like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. In most cases, politicians don’t act. They react. And their reactions are often based the uprisings and resistance movements of ordinary people.

Think for a few seconds about how significant this perspective is. In the American educational system, we’re taught to look for heroes. Christopher Columbus discovers America. George Washington wins the American Revolution. Abraham Lincoln frees the slaves. General MacArthur leads the Good War and defeats fascism. Martin Luther King gives a few speeches and ends racism. This type of mythology pervades our national consciousness. It is manifested in our movies, where the action movie genre is dedicated to promoting the myth that a single man (with the right amount of firepower and a few inhuman stunts) can simplify any complex concept and solve it himself, while we get to sit idly by, eating popcorn and drinking soda. And we believe it. Sometimes, we even elect one of those action heroes as governor. Or we elect Obama president and expect him to give us jobs and money, take on the health care industry, and end two wars by himself. And when Schwarzenegger proves to be exactly the idiot he sounds like, and Obama demonstrates that the president of the United States can’t solve all our problems, we blame the men themselves without questioning the underlying myth that enabled us to place these unrealistic expectations on them.

We also ignore our personal responsibility.

So for me, reading A People’s History a dozen years ago hammered home the point that I had to take responsibility for my own actions. I couldn’t just sit around my low rent apartment and complain about the system and its injustices. Or I could. It just didn’t do anyone any good. What I needed to do, instead, was get off my ass and fight for what I believed in. And I had to do it as a lifestyle change—something I could do every day.

I looked at how Zinn fought for what he believed in and noticed that he stuck with his strengths. He worked for social justice as a historian, as a speaker, as a writer, and as a teacher. And I thought to myself, what are my strengths? Well, both of my degrees were in writing, so I needed to stick with that. And I was an excellent student and researcher. I was comfortable talking in front of a crowd, and I could articulate my ideas verbally. In short, though history isn’t my discipline, many of my strengths were similar to Zinn’s. So I could use him as a role-model.

I picked the issues that were important to me to fight for. I wanted (and still want) a free media, and I couldn’t just kill Rupert Murdoch like some action film hero would (and even if I could, I’d have to remember that his real power comes from his legions of followers, not from Murdoch himself). But I could co-found this here punk rock magazine. I could write hundreds of essays and stories for dozens of independent magazines. I could write books that dealt with American classism and get them published on indie presses. And so I did. My writing may not have the impact that Zinn’s has, but I’m doing about as well as he was doing at my age. If I stay on his schedule, I have twenty-one more years to come up with my equivalent of A People’s History. I have forty-eight more years to become the cultural force that he is today.

The second issue I chose to fight was this creation of the Superman myth that enables us to deify men like Washington, Lincoln, and Obama while ignoring our own personal responsibility. Because the second really significant thing I got out of A People’s History was that, historically speaking, people like me have mattered. I do matter. I don’t need a hero to free me or a politician to give me hope. I can take care of these things myself.

One thing traditional histories do is make people like you and me feel insignificant. In all likelihood, second graders of the future are not going to be learning about us. Punk rock probably won’t even be a footnote in texts in fifty years. But we can ask, whose traditions guide these traditional histories? How can we change them? How can we write a history that defies the myth of super humans and empowers those second graders?

So, along these lines, I’ve spent the last six years at a state university, developing my own personal pedagogy of social justice, one that explores the literature of writers who resisted the powers that were. About twenty-percent of my students will go on to be K-12 teachers here in California. Hopefully, by learning to question some of these myths that continue to be perpetuated in our public school system, my students will decide to stop perpetuating them.

 

Of course, here I am at the end of my column, one which started out seemingly eulogizing Howard Zinn, and I’ve hardly talked about the guy at all. I haven’t talked about his amazing career, his wonderful books, or so many things that made him great. I haven’t even talked about the time I spent with him—because I actually did meet him and spend time with him. He was nice enough to stay in touch with me for a little bit after that. He even blurbed one of my books for me. He was a great human being. But, first of all, I’ve already written quite a bit about Zinn in Razorcake (see, for instance, the interview Todd and I did with him in issue #6, my story about that interview in issue #31, plus the multiple reviews I did of his work in other issues). And, second of all, it would be contradictory to write a eulogy that puts Zinn on a pedestal while I compliment him for teaching me that no one belongs on a pedestal. So, instead, I just want to take this moment to thank him, a couple of months too late, for teaching me that I have the power to change my own life.

Thanks, Howard. I miss you already.

Author’s note: This is the nineteenth chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #55.  For more information about the collection, read this post. If you enjoy reading my Razorcake columns, please consider subscribing to the magazine.

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With My Little Ukulele in My Hand

Illustration from Razorcake #53 by Brad Beshaw

Illustration from Razorcake #53 by Brad Beshaw

 

On South Street in Honolulu sits an unassuming, two-story building, not much bigger than Razorcake HQ. Nothing about it really stands out except for a small sign on the front with the familiar k on top of a k. It’s easy to drive by without noticing, heading either for the beach or downtown. I almost missed it, whipping into the parking lot only at the last second. Inside, they were making a little magic in the form of a Kamaka ukulele.

Now, I can almost hear you, Razorcake reader, groaning. Perhaps it’s because I assume you poop while you read this. Groaning helps. Perhaps I’m right in guessing that you’re about to turn the page, grumbling, “Ukulele’s are not punk rock,” and “Geez, I really need to give myself a courtesy flush.” And, damn it, you’re right on both counts.

Ukuleles are not punk. I know that one of the guys from the Jennifers has an act called the Punk Rock Ukulele. I know there are hundreds of videos on YouTube of lonely girls playing uke versions of Green Day songs. And, yeah, Gugug’s uke covers of Ramones songs are pretty rad. But they’re not punk rock. I’m okay with that. I’m hoping we can relax and admit that there are some things like Stax Records, surfing, socialized medicine, and indie novels from Featherproof Books that are ideologically awesome and don’t have to be punk to be appreciated. And I’m sliding Kamaka ukuleles into that mix.

 

The ukulele is a funny instrument. I have a friend who refers to them as the pugs of the music world, because she can’t help smiling every time she sees one. It’s indelibly linked in our imagination with Tiny Tim tiptoeing through the tulips, or, if we’re luckier, Benny Hill singing “Everyone Wants My Fanny.” It’s an instrument for men who are so comfortable with their penis size that they can drive an MG convertible and skinny dip in a cold pool and listen to April March. The uke is supposed to be funny. That’s part of the point.

Another part of the point, though, is that it’s an instrument of resistance. The instrument itself was born from the cavaquinho, a small guitar brought to Hawaii by Portuguese immigrants. Through that little guitar, we can see the blessing and curse of colonialism. The cavaquinho was adapted into a ukulele by Hawaiian musicians in the late nineteenth century, and it quickly became entrenched in Hawaiian culture. Now everyone knows what a ukulele is while even I have to go back to the dictionary to make sure I’m spelling cavaquinho right. So that’s the blessing. The curse lies in the fact that the cavaquinho is the instrument of the Portuguese immigrants who came to Hawaii as overseers for the Dole plantations and the Big Five sugar plantations. Dole and the Big Five pressured President William McKinley to overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy and annex the region as a territory. The Portuguese overseers kept the plantation labor force in check through it all. They oversaw not only the horrible exploitation of immigrant labor, but actual slavery on those plantations. Dole and the Big Five used “indentured servants” until Hawaii became a state in 1959. So colonialism was a mixed bag for the Hawaiians. American corporate interests got the islands and the money and were able to reinstall the plantation system that had been outlawed on the mainland. The Hawaiians got the ukulele. It’s a pretty lousy trade for the Hawaiians, sure. But let’s not sell it too short. They did get the ukulele out of the deal. That’s a hell of a lot better than what the Iraqis are getting from Halliburton.

And I think there’s something to be said about this kind of cultural appropriation of the ukulele. Cultural appropriation in general can be a positive thing. Sometimes we forget that in the punk community. We’ve seen too many great things of ours appropriated in bad ways. It’s heartbreaking to see manufactured pop stars being marketed as “punk” or wearing shirts that say “I ♥ Punk.” It’s even more of a bummer to see the trend when, about a decade ago, not selling out to major labels became such a powerful ideal of the punk community that major labels started to just put out classic rock bands in Hot Topic clothes and bill them as punk (see: Good Charlotte). But we’ve done our own share of appropriating, too. We took the idea of fanzines from movie buffs and Star Trek geeks. We took the idea of DIY publishing from resistance groups that run the gamut from Ben Franklin to ‘60s hippies. Just about every pop punk song is an appropriation of the Ramones’ appropriation of Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, and Bobby Fuller. I love The Clash, but I cringe to think of what they would’ve been if Joe Strummer hadn’t been stealing from Lee “Scratch” Perry. And, hell, even I know how to play several dozen punk songs on the uke. Come by my place with a six-pack of beer. I’ll play them for you until you run away screaming.

The point being, appropriation in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. When people exploit independent culture so they can make money, that sucks. But when the people who are not in power appropriate things from the people in power and change those things into something unique and organic, it’s not only okay. It’s a way of challenging those who are in power.

Which is exactly what the ukulele has done. It’s said, “Fuck the cavaquinho, man. I’m gonna do something all my own.” And the uke, like Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, has done an amazing job of making bad songs sound good. Check out Iz Kamakawiwo’ole’s version of “Over the Rainbow.” Listen to the uke in that song. So fucking cool.

 

My brother-in-law Rien got me into the ukulele. It was about six years ago. I was hanging around another brother-in-law’s place in suburban Sacramento, bored out of my gourd, when Rien broke out his Kamaka and started strumming. I noticed that all the songs he played had only three chords. Hell, I thought. I can play a three-chord song. They’re the soundtrack to my life. Rien told me that, if I could play guitar, I could play uke. And I can play guitar. So I picked up my other brother-in-laws uke, Rien taught me the F, Bb, and C7 chords, and we spent the afternoon playing the thirty-seven Hawaiian songs that use no more than those three chords.

A few weeks later, I bought a cheap ukulele of my own. I practiced those chords, learned a few others, and adapted a few punk songs for the uke. They just didn’t sound as good as when I’d played on Rien’s Kamaka, though.

 

A couple of summers ago, I found myself stranded in Indiana, PA (for reasons why, see my column in the last issue). About a month after my birthday, I got a package from my mom. It was a ten-dollar, pink ukulele with flowers and the logo of a Cocoa Beach tourist shop on it. I was a little confused. As luck had it, my mom called right around the time I opened the package and started scratching my head. I said, “I got your package.”

She laughed. “Don’t you just hate it? I saw that in the store, and I just knew you’d hate it!”

Because that’s my mom. She’ll wait until a month after my birthday before sending me a present so that she’ll have extra time to find something I really hate. She’s hilarious.

She’s also a model for mothers of punk rockers everywhere. She knows that, if you want to make a punk happy, get him something he can really hate. Because here’s the worst thing about the whole episode: I tuned up the fishing line strings on the little pink flowered uke and was jamming along to the Replacements “If Only You Were Lonely” within minutes of getting off the phone with her.

The thing about the pink ukulele was that it sounded worse than my cheap one by the exact same degree that my cheap one sounded worse than Rien’s Kamaka. So I became obsessed with Kamaka. I looked into the company and found that they have been a family business for almost a hundred years (93 to be exact). That, during World War II, they hired deaf luthiers to make their ukuleles. The deaf craftsman knew they got the sound right when they could feel it. And this is a cool thing about Kamakas: when you play them, you can feel the song on your chest. It’s unlike any other uke I’ve played.

As far as I know, there’s still at least one deaf luthier making ukes at Kamaka.

I also learned that Kamakas sound so good because the front plate—where that rich sound comes from—is made from solid Koa wood from the Big Island, and that the ukes are so popular and the shop so small that you can’t buy one from their store. You have to order one and they’ll make it for you.

I went to the headquarters in Honolulu. They let me play all their ukes. I played their $1400 deluxe soprano, which is funny because it looks like so much like a toy. And what does it sound like? It sounds like fourteen hundred dollars. Fucking amazing.

I have my own Kamaka, though not the deluxe. One that I found after searching and searching, waiting for one in my price range, and finally stumbling across it in a Claremont music store. It’s from the sixties and it had to be reconditioned by the shop, but, unlike most things from the sixties (Sonics and MC5 notwithstanding), it sounds great.

The last time my wife’s side of the family got together, we broke out the ukes. I started playing a ‘20s tune, “5 foot 2,” which my grandfather used to play for me on his tenor guitar when I was little. My four-year-old nephew, like a true prodigy, told me to play it faster. I played as fast as I could. He and his three-year-old sister made their own circle pit in my living room. I love how things come around.

So now you may be thinking to yourself, all right, Sean, I took your advice on the courtesy flush but I’m still sitting here, 1800 words later, My legs are falling asleep on the toilet seat, and I’m waiting for you to get to the point. Well, maybe there isn’t one, really. Maybe I just wanted to spend a few minutes on the beautiful and absurd. Maybe that’s enough for today.

Author’s note: This is the eighteenth chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #53.  For more information about the collection, read this post. If you enjoy reading my Razorcake columns, please consider subscribing to the magazine.

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Pop Culture Pap

Illustration from Razorcake #51 by Brad Beshaw

Illustration from Razorcake #51 by Brad Beshaw

I walked across the campus at UCLA a half hour before the hullabaloo was scheduled to begin. A middle-aged woman in Birkenstocks walked toward me, accompanied by a dog that looked like a fat greyhound. A squirrel darted through the planter to my left. The dog bounded off after the squirrel. The woman hadn’t had a tight enough hold on the leash. It slipped out of her hand. The squirrel made for a tree—his only hope. The dog took three steps, swooped the squirrel up in her mouth, and bam. Two shakes of her head and the squirrel’s neck was broke. He hung there limply in the dog’s mouth. The woman screamed, “No! Macy! Put it down!” But it was too late for the squirrel. Macy knew this. She took off running down the hallways of what looked to be a Biology building. The woman ran after her dog.

It all seemed futile to me. She could give that dog all the yuppie names she wanted and scream at her all she wanted, but Macy had thousands of years of genetic memory telling her to eat that squirrel. Yuppie names and scolding in a language the dog doesn’t speak are no match for that. I wanted to tell the woman, “Relax. Let the dog have her little squirrel. It’s just the way the world works.” Instead, I minded my own business. I thought to myself, this has to be a metaphor for something.

 

A half hour later, the hullabaloo ensued. Crowds filtered in, writers performed readings, panels of other writers talked about their books, publishers hawked their wares. The LA Times Festival of Books was underway. I set up a chair adjacent to the table of Gorsky Press books and let the festival wash over me.

I was working half of the Gorsky Press/Manic D Press booth. Jennifer from Manic D had asked me if I would split a booth with her. From about ten seconds after I said I’d do it, I regretted my decision. I hate working at book festivals. I hate the retail aspect of it. I hate having to give a sales pitch for a book that I’m selling for five bucks. I mean, come on, five bucks? What else can you get for five bucks? A burrito. Someone poured his heart and soul and years of his life into this book, I spent several months working with the author, editing, typesetting, designing the cover, and creating the actual artifact. And you can get it for the cost of a burrito. Don’t ask me to give a sales pitch.

Thus, I started the day grumpy.

To make matters worse, the Gorsky/Manic D booth was right next to the LA Times Stage. This is where all the “celebrity” authors (or is it celebrity “authors,” because you know Cloris Leachman didn’t sit down at a laptop and type seventy thousand words of an autobiography) read from their works and answered questions from the audience. Whether I wanted to or not—and believe me, it was a not—I had to hear Winnie Cooper talk about math, Marsha Brady talk about her cocaine addiction (she bragged about blowing a quarter million dollars on coke, then scolded someone in the audience—probably some little girl—by braying, “Don’t you ever do drugs. Drugs are bad!”), and a few different celebrities whom I’d never heard of whine about being recognized everywhere they went. Bob Barker was there. I’m not sure what he talked about, but I couldn’t help feeling like he was trying to sell me a washing machine.

 

There’s something hauntingly painful about giving a sales pitch to a customer who’s clearly not interested in the book that you poured sweat and blood and thousands of dollars in, and giving that sales pitch not because you want to, but because he asked. And you know he only asked because he’s killing time until the Dancing with the Stars host takes over the stage. And you can hardly hear yourself grumble to yourself because Tori Spelling is squawking through the P.A. behind you.

Our booth number was 666. Before the festival, a friend asked me if that was a coincidence. I didn’t understand how it could be. I’m not satanic. After a seven-hour assault from the LA Times Stage, I knew what he meant. It was a coincidence because I was in hell.

 

Beyond the celebrities and customers, there were my fellow publishers to contend with. Not so much Jennifer from Manic D, but the publishers who stopped in to chat. The trendy fear this year is digital book readers. Publishers are convinced that everything will be going paperless within ten years. Books will be a thing of the past, surrendered in favor of the Kindle or the Sony Reader. And, as much as I like to indulge on unfounded panic, I just couldn’t commiserate with my fellow publishers.

On the one hand, I could see the benefits of these digital readers. Because everything published before 1923 in the US is part of the public domain in the US. No one holds the copyright on it. So, if I wanted to publish Moby Dick tomorrow, I could. And since the Herman Melville’s estate isn’t going to get a dime, it doesn’t make sense for Barnes & Noble or Penguin to charge as much as they do for their copies of that novel. You can get a free copy of it online at Project Gutenberg. So, if these digital readers became popular, anyone who wanted to read a pre-1923 book could download it for free. I think that would be a good thing. But you can already read most of those books for free online. And I still buy the books. Because Moby Dick is hard enough to read without having to read it off a glowing, flickering screen.

And that’s the problem with these book readers. The manufacturers swear that the screens don’t glow or flicker. But I’ve seem these readers. They glow and flicker.

Besides, if more people went to the digital book readers, I could sell a whole lot more Gorsky books without having to print, store, or mail them. And, sure, more people would be illegally downloading these books, but I could live with that. At least more people would be reading our authors.

On the other hand, I have trouble believing that these readers will take over. For one thing, I’ve never seen anyone using one of these digital readers in the world at large. I see a lot of people reading books down by the beach or on airplanes or in diners or on campuses, but I have not seen one single person reading a digital reader outside of the store that sells that reader. And I’ve been looking. For years, I’ve been looking.

When we started Gorsky Press more than a decade ago, people told me then that, within five years, everything would be paperless. Ten years later, people are telling me that, within five years, everything will be paperless. Will I hear the same thing in ten more years? I don’t know. I do remember buying an LP back in 1984 and the clerk telling me that cassettes would make LPs a thing of the past. Twenty-five years later, the LP is more popular than it’s been in a decade.

This goes to show that the future, like the present, isn’t binary. Sure, people probably will start buying more of those readers. Maybe they will get more popular. But for the rest of my lifetime, at least, people will still buy books for the same reason people still buy records. We want the artifact. We want the ceremony of lifting the record onto the turntable, hearing the crack and pop of anticipation, and listening to that warm fuzz of analog. Likewise, when we read a book, we want to be able to pause with our thoughts, gaze at the cover, flip back through the pages. We want to dog-ear pages and underline beautiful sentences. We want to smell the musty pages of a book that we’ve read twenty years ago, and reread that book and let the smell and the browning pages connect us to our earlier selves. I can’t see myself giving that up for a glowing screen. I can’t see readers like me giving that up for the next fifty or sixty years, at least.

Of course, I didn’t tell my fellow publishers this. Nothing bugs people like mixing your reason in with their panic.

 

So that was the LA Times Festival of Books. Vacuous celebrities, whiny publishers in a retail purgatory, and me grumbling. But there was this beautiful moment, too.

With only a couple of hours left in the book fest, with another celebrity chattering away on the stage behind me, I left the Gorsky/Manic D booth, made my way across campus, and watched a reading sponsored by an organization called “Dime Stories.” Aspiring-but-little-known writers read three-minute, slice-of-life stories about commuting on public transportation and thinking about their aunt and that kind of thing. I watched five or six of them. They were at times funny, clever, and thoughtful. All of these writers, though, clearly spent a lot of time crafting these little three-minute stories. They thought about every word. It was big deal for them to read at the Festival of Books.

The crowd was bigger there than it had been at the celebrity stage when I left. I was happy to see that.

Twenty minutes into Dime Stories, who should take the stage but Razorcake’s own Jim Ruland. He read a twisted story about a guy obsessed with Nietzsche and pro sports. It got a little edgy at the end. Some spectators who’d brought their young children squirmed in their seats. I felt a little swelling in my chest, proud for ol’ Jim.

Was his reading so powerful, so beautiful that it vindicated my whole experience at the Festival of Books? No. Clearly, I’m still grumpy about it all. I was just glad to see that among this vacuous display of a culture in ruins that passes itself off as a Festival of Books, at this homage to pop cultural pap where honest attempts at communication are lost in the clutter, at least organizations like Razorcake, Gorsky, and Manic D still have a foothold.

 

When the hullabaloo subsided, I packed the unsold books back into my truck and thought about the dog and her squirrel. I tried to make sense of the metaphor. Who was the dog in this scenario? Who was the squirrel? What were we genetically programmed to do? How was nature running its course?

I still don’t know. I’m sorry.

I wish I had a better answer for you.

Author’s note: This is the seventeenth chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #51.  For more information about the collection, read this post. If you enjoy reading my Razorcake columns, please consider subscribing to the magazine.