David Starkey interviewed me for the local public access TV show Creative Community. We talk about writing, my childhood, and punk rock. I also read a couple of passages from Dead Extra. Check it out.
You can also watch the video on Vimeo by clicking this link.
I wrote this column for the Razorcake web site a few days after the presidential election. It fell from the front page of the site and into obscurity, but I like this article and I want to share it here. Hopefully, it’s the last thing I post about Trump for a while.
It’s hard to keep from freaking out right now. We live in a country where a candidate who ran a genuinely fascist campaign was elected president. None of us know how this will play out. A wall between the U.S. and Mexico, a nuclear war, and mass deportations are all unlikely. Still, the fact that these scenarios are back on the table sucks. A lot of us feel devastated by this. A lot of us don’t know what to do. The corporate media is offering suggestions, but this is the same corporate media that spent the last year treating a fascist as a legitimate candidate. Your social media feeds have suggestions. Some of them are good. Most are just links to more content generated from the corporate media. And we can’t ignore that social media exists to sell advertising, not to foster discussion.
So what do we do about all this?
Well, by “we,” I mean punk rockers. And my suggestion is that we keep doing what we’ve always done. I’m not here to offer advice. I’m here to offer encouragement.
If you’re a musician, write a song about this moment. Bring that song to band practice. Make it sound good. Record it. Release it. Send it to Razorcake. We’ll spread the word. Then tour. Go around the country and nurture this scene. And don’t doubt that it’s a worthwhile way to spend your time. I think of myself as an adolescent in Reagan’s America, living in a backwoods Florida town where the adults around me voted straight Republican tickets and the kids around me would grow up to support Trump. When those first Dead Kennedys albums made their way to me, I felt like I’d grabbed a lifeline. They got me interested. I went to the library and flipped through the card catalog to find out what a Pol Pot was. Around that time, I also got my hands on a Maximum Rocknroll compilation of hardcore bands, which taught me about the El Mozote Massacre and CIA-trained Central American death squads.
One great record (or, really, cassette dubbed from a friend) led to another. In the late eighties and early nineties, I listened to The Clash, Minor Threat, Stiff Little Fingers, Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, Hüsker Dü, X, the Minutemen, and bands like that nonstop. This music helped shape my life. It made me a better person. It put me in the world around me, helped me understand that my concerns are just a small part of this greater social animal, that I have responsibilities toward others, and that my anger is valid, but it needs to be directed in positive ways.
When Bush was elected in 2000, everything sucked but the music. This was the height of Avail, Anti-Flag, the Unseen, Strike Anywhere, Dillinger Four, and so on. I remember being on a book tour and hanging out in a punk house in Milwaukee in the second year of the W. presidency. Someone put Reinventing Axl Rose into the stereo, and by the time “Those Anarcho Punx are Mysterious…” came around, everyone was singing like their life depended on it. The album had been released two weeks earlier, and we all knew every word.
I’ll never again doubt the power of punk rock music.
Now, we’re poised for another wave. I can’t wait to hear it.
I also know that a lot of Razorcake readers aren’t musicians, but they’re just as active. I want to encourage that, as well. If you’re not in a band, make art. Make a zine. Paint. Draw a comic. Write a book. Do whatever it is you do. Now is the time to do it. History is on your side. I always go back to this idea from Harold Cruse in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Cruse argued that effective social movements need to be fought on three fronts: an economic one, a political one, and a cultural one. In response to this, a bunch of black activists in the late sixties formed the Black Arts Movement. They originally conceived of themselves as the cultural arm of the Black Panther Party. They set up community theaters and put on plays. They started book publishing companies and published poetry and prose. All of it was under the banner of black art for black people. BAM theorist Larry Neal said that protest art was masturbating for white people. Don’t protest, he said. When you protest, you legitimize a racist system. Work outside of the system. Define yourself. Control your own art.
Most readers of Razorcake aren’t ready to take on the next fascist administration on political or economic fronts. But creating culture is what we do. This is one of the reasons why I migrated to L.A. a few weeks before W. took over as president in 2001. I moved into a termite-infested sweatbox with Todd Taylor. Together, we gathered dozens of punk artists, musicians, writers, graphic designers, and computer programmers and we started Razorcake. It was never just a magazine. It was and is a community. We did what we could. We’re still doing it. And you’re a part of us.
So while we’re doing it, let’s not forget a couple of things.
First, life is better face-to-face. It’s easy to fall into social media rabbit holes where you only communicate online with a narrow group of friends who all agree with you. That can be valuable for a short time. We all need to process what just happened. These social media spaces allow us to do that. But to move on, we need to spend time physically together. We need to go to shows, to readings, to protests, to parties, to zine fairs, to whatever events allow us to really interact with each other. Nothing tests your views like having to say them to people who can look you in the eye when you talk.
Second, before we get all caught up in what will happen, let’s pay attention to what just happened. We were just given a choice between an eminently qualified woman and totally incompetent sexual predator who says incredibly racist things, but is at least a man. More than fifty-nine million Americans decided that the incompetent sexual predator is the right choice. Let’s remember that.
Let’s acknowledge that we live in a country where more than fifty-nine million people may not think it’s okay to grab a woman “by the pussy,” per se, but they have said that if you do grab a woman by the pussy, if a dozen of the women you’ve grabbed by the pussy file charges against you, well, that shouldn’t keep you from being the leader of the free world. And maybe these fifty-nine million people don’t necessarily agree that Mexicans are mostly rapists and murderers or that Muslims are mostly terrorists or that African Americans turn their communities into war zones, but they think it’s okay for the leader of the free world to think that.
There’s no reason to accept this. Instead, let’s try to reshape our culture into one where this doesn’t happen again.
I’ll be in Minneapolis this week, reading at Magers and Quinn on Friday night (June 3, 7:00). Bizarro author, Razorcake contributor, and part-time drag queen MP Johnson will read with me. I’ve never had a dull event in Minneapolis. Hopefully, this one will be as fun as readings in the past. Here’s a link to the bookstore’s events page.
Scroll below the picture to get a Replacements song in your head and read a vignette I wrote about reading in Minneapolis in 2008.
Take the Skyway, high above that busy little one way.
Minneapolis
After I finished my reading at Arise Bookstore in Minneapolis, the God Damn Doo Wop Band took the stage. And, by “stage,” I mean the empty area in front of the chairs in the backyard of Arise. It was one of those perfect Minneapolis days that apparently don’t happen all that often but seem to happen every time I’m there. It was sunny, temperatures in the low eighties, an even cooler breeze. The sun was starting to set behind the bookstore. The band sat on a low wall.
The God Damn Doo Wop Band: three women who know how to spend their money on boots and tattoos and hair dye, who, more importantly, know how to sing doo wop songs. They launched into three-part-harmonies about boy troubles. On the one hand, they seemed like an authentic throwback to the Staten Island doo wop of the fifties. On the other hand, it was something totally fresh and original.
One of the band members is named Annie. She used to be in the Soviettes. She didn’t wear boots. Her Vans were worn through just above the big toe. As she sang, her big toe popped out of the hole in her shoe. A little red toenail kept the beat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sean Carswell 