this margin walker wants a clear view

Guy Picciotto is 47 today, and therefore it gave me a good excuse to do a Fugazi/Rites of Spring/One Last Wish set of two hours of swank. Some people called in for "Smallpox Champion" and "Waiting Room" and another friend of mine tried to prank me but didn't realize we have caller ID, but it was a fun show.

I'm surprised at how many longtime Fugazi fans didn't know the previous projects existed, and maybe it was just having a friend in high school who was obsessive and my own need to be encyclopedic, but I'm glad at least I got to let people know this exists so they can track it down themselves. 

words, words and expressions, all these confessions of where we stand....

Words are as strong and powerful as bombs, as napalm. How much the government counts on those words, pays for those words to exalt our own way of life, to build up fear of the enemy. Deliver us, Lord, from the fear of the enemy. That is one of the lines in the psalms, and we are not asking God to deliver us from enemies but from the fear of them. Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them. 

There is plenty to do, for each one of us, working on our own hearts, changing our own attitudes, in our own neighborhoods. If the just man falls seven times daily, we each one of us fall more than that in thought, word and deed. Prayer and fasting, taking up our own cross daily and following Him, doing penance, these are the hard words of the Gospel. - Dorothy Day

 I find I read the Psalms and Dorothy Day more and more, seeking a measured response to what I see around me, the fear of the Other abroad, the fear of the Other at home.


There were two instances of gay-bashing that happened at a bar around the corner from me. It's in a sketchy neighborhood, and the men there aren't the most tough so I'm not terribly surprised, but it still grieves me. A group of young black kids were the ones who perpetrated this, so I see the outrage in comments sections and the neighborhood association's facebook page and it makes me cringe. These folks who said they'd never shoot Trayvon Martin and what a crazy cracker that Zimmerman guy was are the same ones threatening to go vigilante on those "thugs" in their neighborhood and have developed the same suspicion that they abhor in those down south. Is it wrong of me to observe that those marginalized by their sexuality are the ones who have the most bile towards those of a different skin color?

When your neighbors start freaking out because a young black man walks a pit bull down their street because he might be casing the neighborhood we have a problem. When your neighbors are freaking about the guy who rides a motorcycle, we have a problem. When you wonder if your best guy friend who is black is going to have trouble with the neighbors if he moves in upstairs, we have a problem.When your neighbors are disturbed that black teenagers are hanging out at the playground and have the potty mouths we all have, we have a problem.

Also, I should note here, that I live in Cleveland proper. Not the suburbs, not the exurbs. Cleveland. Statistically, you're more likely to have neighbors of African American descent than other places so I don't understand what's so shocking about this though I get the feeling sometimes that the new urbanists want things to be just as crackerific as the milquetoast neighborhoods they left behind, just with less Applebees and more brewpubs. Dudes who are creepy in general bother me, but that cuts across all demographics and is a different thing entirely.

When 9/11 happened, I was a senior in high school living in a suburb with a relatively high population of Arab immigrants. A guy crashed his car into the local mosque. The kids at my high school with last names like Hasan and Abdallah got a lot of grief, even though most of them were Christian and went to the Coptic church nearby or the Maronite church downtown. My dad delivered to the corner stores owned by their parents. It really disconcerts me to see the way that they're now profiled and viewed with suspicion, to the point where certain friends of mine disliked using their last names for fear of the social repercussions despite having no religious affiliations whatsoever.

I feel like it's the same toxic fortress mentality that pervades all of these interactions and I hate it so much. I can't even express how much I hate it that we the people are so ugly and find it so hard to even be decent to our neighbors let alone love them.

“We do not know, we do not know. We shall live from day to day, and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine fierce dog when the fine fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night, and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forego. We shall forego the coming home drunken through the midnight streets, and the evening walk over the star-lit veld. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives, and knock that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. 

And our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown. And the conscience shall be thrust down; the light of life shall not be extinguished, but be put under a bushel, to be preserved for a generation that will live by it again, in some day not yet come; and how it will come, and when it will come, we shall not think about at all.”

things I never thought would happen

As mentioned in the previous post, there were two awesome shows going on in Fair Clevelandia on Wednesday night. As such, I went over to the gallery in Chinatown because my friend putting on the Evens show said he might need some help getting everything ready. So it doesn't seem so weird and awkward when I'm shaking hands with one of my early-adulthood heroes, because we're moving a wrought-iron canopy thing to the side, figuring out the logistics of the stage, and loading equipment and merch up a freight elevator.

I felt a little embarrassed when it was disclosed that I might be seeing someone else play that night but I ended up sticking around, sent his sister down the street to my favorite source of pad thai, watched the soundcheck, drinking cans of coconut water instead of eating dinner, working the door, taking money and distributing wristbands and then watching the show.

The fans were almost all my age or older, a few straightedge kids, a couple of families, people wearing t-shirts of 80's punk and hardcore and metal bands. I got to watch the show, sang along with the songs I knew, songs that were tightly wound on record and full of intensity live and relevant to the troubled times that we find ourselves in, of increased paranoia and surveillance and instability.

We were encouraged to sing along though I think a lot of us are way more familiar with the old bands, but everyone knew better than to say so. And he went on a digression about how awful drones are and how awful our powers that be are for continuing to use them to traumatize Pakistanis so mad props for that. He gave shoutouts to Charles and me and I'm glad no one knows who I am, because I'm pretty sure I blushed because this is something I never imagined would happen, ever.

Afterwards, I ended up running into a fellow congregant from church, of all people, the guy who is 75 and a former southern baptist minister from Alabama whose son is friends with a bunch of Dischordians and who invited him to the show. I always wondered why he liked my Billy Bragg take on the trad hymns and it makes way more sense now. The smallness of the world is kind of mind-blowing.

We marvel at this, and trade stories of DC and Cleveland with Ian's sister while I watched a line of kids take pictures and get their albums signed. I picked up the records too, but felt too shy there but got a parting shot in the parking lot because I want to remember this. We helped them load up at the end of the night, exchanged goodbyes, and hugs and I drove home too euphoric to sleep, so I hung Christmas lights on my balcony and talked on the phone because it was so beautiful out.

And then I wake up, clean the apartment, hang out with the family, and head over to the neighbors across the border to watch the fireworks, which I missed because my beater was turned away at their nice apartment building, so I missed most of the pyrotechnics but got to watch 'The Warriors' and talk tuneage so all was good. Eight hours of sleep in the past two days. It's a good thing it's dead at work today, though I think I'm still running off of afterglow and caffeine. 

I'm on a mission to never agree

someone on the Internet let me know that it's Ian Mackaye's birthday today so I decided to unleash my inner Dischord Records fangirl and play his bands' music for an hour an a half on my show this morning. I've done previous birthday tributes for Kristin Hersh and Bono, but I got some frustrated callers who begged me to play something besides U2, so I did. This time, I let the good people of Clevelandia and the Internet know, and that they could request non-Ian stuff but one caller assured me that he'd be more than happy to hear a whole bunch of Minor Threat and Fugazi so I felt validated enough to carry through.

Back in my straightedge days, I had mad respect for Ian and dreamed of doing some kind of regional label as awesome as Dischord. That came to nothing, I enjoy the occasional glass of wine or beer now and then, but the music's held up wonderfully. I got a copy of Minor Threat's complete discography in the mail from a friend who gave up his earthly possessions and it immediately conjured up memories of riding shotgun in my high school homie's beat-up Honda cruising aimlessly around Parmastan. I put Fugazi on every punk rock mixtape I ever made but no one shared my enthusiasm nearly so much, and I guess the vocals can be an acquired taste.

I find I still listen to 13 Songs, The Argument, and Repeater the most, but some of my most favorites on Red Medicine and End Hits. Red Medicine used to be on the jukebox in the bar below the student center at Kent and I'd inflict that noise-punk that gave me such pleasure on the ears of bros and watch them clear the room to that and Surfer Rosa. Times have changed, but the songs almost seem more powerful than ever now.

congenitally fractured anyway...

There are times the patience grows thin, and the lack of words is preferable to the usual kvetching. It must be the hormones, or the frustration with our perpetual brokenness and the baggage accumulated upon ten years of adulthood and the first tastes of heartbreak and things not working out the way we thought they would.

Some jumped in too fast, and now have the consequentials, and others of us crawled out from the wreckage, or saw enough of the damage surrounding to steer clear, but still there's that sense of longing, instilled by quasi-platonic ideals instilled all to young of missing halves, of fairy tales and platitudes, and destiny or whatever. It's always what we don't have, or what doesn't seem to be ours to possess isn't it? So as we get older, you'd think we'd grow up a bit, but this adult thing seems to elude us as a whole.

So my biggest pet peeve is to hear this laundry list of what the perfect girl is knowing damn well that such a person probably doesn't exist, because we all have our bad days and our not so bright moments and the times when we get PMS and aren't much fun, and c'mon dudes, you have bad days too, who are we kidding?.

And I hear the bemoaning of the lack of smart women or women who like good music and it's hard for me to take this seriously, because dude I'm standing here right in front of you and I'm waxing rhapsodic about galaxies and literature and history and bands that even you who reads the blogs on the Internets haven't heard of and not using it as social capital but just a wanting to share the sweetness that I've found. Oh yeah, and I can cook pretty well, and I can understand and enjoy sports even if I'm clueless about videogames, and I'm not going to make a fool of myself in public. But if you don't get it, than it's not worth my time, it says more about you than me.

And I've got friends who are like this too, but even if we're cute, because we don't look like that centerfold you drool over or That Hot Chick In That Band that got profiled in Revolver, or that girl who posts pictures of the doves tattooed on her hipbones on facebook, somehow we don't count, because we're not just getting our hair done and retouching our makeup, we're rocking out next to you, and therefore we're either one of the dudes more or less or there's the unspoken assumption that we probably swing the other way, and let's be real, those girls wouldn't hang out with you anyway, or it'd get old fast. You say you want a chick who likes the power chords? Especially in Clevelandia, raised on classic rock and grunge, we're out there, we just don't look like Angela Gossow or Cristina Scabbia or Zooey Deschanel, justsayin'... but who does?

And maybe we girls are guilty of this too, but I think it's easier for us to eventually get smitten by a good personality and a sense of humor and a general sense of decency or something, we're willing to take the chance that the attraction might come later, but perhaps we're expecting a bit too much to think that you'd be the same.

long distance runner

There have been a handful of people in my life who've put tunes in my hands that have altered the route of my musical trajectory drastically, and one of those was a friend at my lunch table with who loaned me Repeater at the beginning of senior year that set off a long period of Ian Mackaye fangirlness that's only been tempered by their lack of output in the ten years since I graduated. I guess it's better to go out on top, and The Argument and the Furniture EP were fitting codas that made me realize that it was possible to be yourself and age gracefully and ragefully in your art, refining sound without losing the fire.

still one of my all-time favorites.

Unsurprisingly, no one shared my same enthusiasm for these sounds, finding the tone too preachy, the vocals too abrasive, but the tightness, the coiled energy, of squalling Gibson SG, the vocal interplay, sinuous basslines, and pitch-perfect skittering drums appealed to my inner prog dork but the lack of fussiness and self-indulgence was a revelation. Red Medicine somehow never got removed from the jukebox at Kent State, and my roommate and I used to find amusement in the way that certain songs would clear the room.

 Minor Threat was a much more accessible common denominator, especially for those of us who loved noisy music and didn't do drugs and therefore felt out of step with the world, and was perfect for summer nights of driving aimlessly around Parmastan talking about things that seem both meaningful and ridiculous when you're 18 and you're realizing that your messed up country is about to get way more messed up.

The arcanity of the lyrics, free of the datedness of many of the contemporaries, let the universals of dealing with bureaucracy, sucky people, and general frustration be cathartic for whatever situation I fell into. "Public Witness" and "Great Cop" for the busybodies and bullies, "Long Division" for the breakups and disintegrations, here comes the argument, I'm still on a mission to never agree and keep my eyes open because the farther I go, the less I know.