springbroken

The Kids are reprieved from their studies this week, Randal is a-darkthroning through Parmastan, and yours truly is continuing on the daily grind with the usual inherent after-work straungeness and such. I'm finding this whole daylight savings time a bit of an adjustment, though I like that extra hour for my wanderings, and it's never made me as ragey as others.

Still, the caffeine consumption has continued to rise, there's snow blowing outside, I'm digging through piles of 1980's local newspapers full of strange ads and figures from a different time... Rick James, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Tawana Brawley, World B. Free, a Cavs team with Mark Price and Brad Daugherty, vaguely remembered names and faces from my toddlerhood, now-disgraced Clevelandia politicians.

But last night, my neighbor and another college radio DJ was in the mood for a mini roadtrip and some live tuneage and so we ended up driving out to Oberlin to see Cult of Youth, pondering punk rock and politics on the drive there and finding it supremely ironic that a neofolk band was booked by the college to play in their student union within a week of certain, well, incidents. 


Oberlin's got a fascinating history and aesthetically it's a beautiful little college town. One of my friends from high school got married underneath the arch commemorating martyrs from the Boxer Rebellion, the village green is beautiful, the architecture lovely, the free art museum is quality. On the other hand, it sometimes feels a bit like a Portlandia episode in its overcompensating earnestness and general rich hippieness that reminds me of the targets of Camper Van Beethoven songs.

I learned from my previous roommate and her brother that black residents on the outskirts refer to the college itself as "the plantation," and the school itself has a secret list of people who aren't welcome, which makes me wonder if things aren't quite so kum-bay-yah to begin with. So while I think racism and other -isms are as bad as the next person who has any empathy, I find things like this a bit over-the-top, given the overanalyticalness and the presence of uber-helicopter parents. Most of us can point to something in our background that marginalizes us but sometimes this seems like firstworldposturing more than anything else. Those of us who live in craptastic neighborhoods and don't have rich parents and aren't hermetically sealed deal with these issues way more.

Part of this maybe has to do with working at a very racially and economically diverse place where we  have to peel off National Alliance stickers from the black history books and deal with all sorts of clownery, and some people did get shot here a few years back by some neo-nazi freako who wanted to start a race war.

Still, most of these clowns want attention and making a big stink only gives them what they want and while I appreciate the ideals of The Kids, it's hard for me not to roll my eyes at the usual tropes of 1960s protest with the bongo drums and whatnot. Perhaps we Clevelandians are tougher? Or just not as enlightened? Who knows?


Anyways... neofolk. We've had the new record up at the station, and I've played a few cuts that I liked and didn't find any red-flag moments in the liner notes, and they don't seem to play that up as much as certain other parties, but my compadre told me that there were a lot of shaved heads at their last jaunt through our city and the songs translated to a live setting were definitely more punky, or shoegazing with dubby basslines and some stomp to it that I enjoyed. The girls in front of me seemed a little freaked out, it seemed like more people were there to be there than anything else but what do I know except I was feeling pretty damn old and like I'd walked into an H&M commercial. Still, sometimes it's nice to get out and be somewhere else.

femina feminae

One of my friends linked to some article lamenting the lack of feminine presence in the current music industry, bemoaning the preponderance of The Kids to prefer Lady Gaga to Patti Smith, and how there aren't as many prominent "rock chicks" as there were back in those halcyon days known as the 90's.

The aesthetic of the time was different, the slick marketing of acceptable grungeness, heroin chic, and edginess, and former dance-pop divas like Alanis Morissette were rebranded as Angry Chicks, in an image just as manufactured as any other. And most of the girls in bands were either the bombshell lead singer or the hot bassist. They weren't the main creative force or the songwriters or the guitarists, more often the eye candy and the objects of ogling by the male fans and the image of what we girls wanted to be, which maybe wasn't the same sexualization as, say Britney Spears, but it still was just as dysfunctional.

And hell, most music is "mewling" about love and stuff. It's just that some people make it more awesome than others. So yeah, non-story, but people like Liz Phair need to eat and still feel relevant, so it gets trotted out everyone once in awhile so everyone can feel superior about the good old days that in this case really weren't. Besides, as I've said before, there's more than enough good stuff out there due in part to the fair sex as it is. And while I don't believe that the double standard will ever magically evaporate, I do think the next generation of girls will have it easier than I did.

the shitlist: Charles Bukowski

Yours truly likes to use this corner of the internets to highlight stuff she digs in hopes that you might like it too. On the other hand, there are other things that are considered sacred cows by some who'd consider themselves more enlightened that are anything but. The Shitlist, in homage to a quartet of ladies with loud guitars playing mostly middling tunes for tomboyish riot grrrls more interested in getting wasted than fighting the power, highlights some of these. 

I majored in English lit after realizing I'd be in school ten years taking terrible education classes and would face unemployment as an art teacher, and besides, I suck at prepared public speaking or keeping kids in line. The majority of the people studying this kind of thing were other ladies so most of the reading selections would generate male-bashing discussions that probably made the token dudes feel awkward for having the indignity of growing up cracker and sometimes hetero.

There was a guy I met who lived in my dorm that was kind of a smart brainy type too, with whom I'd argue about God and trade music and books with and in whose dark dorm room I watched SLC Punk and Clerks for the first time. He described himself as a feminist and really into women's rights, all while telling me that while I was smart, I'd be a lot more hot if I dyed my hair black and got my lips pierced and maybe some tattoos and how hot this other girl was.

As this was in the time of old jeans and ill-fitting band shirts, mutilated hair and gauged ears before I got a Real Job and started actually caring about how I looked, it kind of made me feel like crap until I realized that he was the one being stupid and hypocritical. After going to see some punk rock bands where he ditched me and my roommate for his cooler friends, that was pretty much the end of that.

Ironically enough, he was a fan of manly-man hipster lit, mostly along the lines of Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski. I'd only heard of the latter and pulled some of his books from the shelf while working in the stacks of that even more towering slab and while some of the poetry could be occasionally decent, and it seems he had a sucky life that was exacerbated by being a constant lecherous drunk, the stories sucked, and I finished enough of them to not be convinced. I don't think I read a single thing of his that wasn't somewhat repulsive, and even the occasional stylistic rawness of the more sensitive poems was not enough to be redeeming.

“Baby," I said, "I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me.” 

I like my everyman lit as much as the next person, but not if it's the literary equivalent of the  creepy dude on your street who watches you mow the lawn in cutoffs like my old neighbor and can't think about a woman's body without wanting to rape it, who throws around racial epithets for the hell of it. I guess one could read it for insight into the thoughts of the drunk in a dive bar, but to hold this man up as some kind of saint for keeping it real doesn't work for me.

And again and again I'd be at social gatherings with lots of sensitive-dude Pavement-loving English majors who said my last name was cool because it sounded like his, which would make me come close to snarling and would just keep telling me he was "misunderstood" and "really didn't mean what he said" but the consistency of degradation of other people is kind of hard to ignore.

Maybe I'm just biased as a sensitive chick, or that I associate him with other souls who perceived themselves as sensitive and progressive because they liked Sleater-Kinney but who were anything but. I don't buy the whole "he was a product of his time" thing because other people writing in the 1950s were misanthropic without being so universally hateful.

Hence, the shitlist.

If dudes need an alter ego of manly dudeness, at least Henry Rollins has the testosterone but something resembling a curious mind and a beating heart too, just sayin'.