spring has broken

I went to a Good Friday service with my folks last night instead of hanging out in an old cathedral listening to requiems, and I was kind of zoned out through most of it, not all religious experience is warm and fuzzies, sometimes it doesn't feel like anything as much as you'd want it to. But I'm sure a lot of this is what's going on with the body if not the soul. I have these moments of disbelief and skepticism still, it's a good thing we're not asked of anything larger than a mustard seed, and I guess I'd make a horrible Calvinist because that line of reasoning already amplifies my doubts.

And so sleep, and dosing with nyquil and dayquil, exiting music practice early because I felt like I was going to fall over and usually that leads to inflicting those I love with irritability, which no one wants. More sleep, laying out a sleeping bag on my balcony since there's no furniture on it, just a discarded drop cloth and some discarded liquor bottles from my landlady's lousy contractors, a walk with my neighbor, currently sitting at the local coffeeshop banging out more of the giganto paper, generously illustrated with pictures of reliquaries and Northern Renaissance art. Because. 700 more words and I'll be golden, though most of the relevant sources are in German or Latin and I suck American style at languages other people know. 


I know this fatigue of all kinds is in part the product of a stuffy nose and a tired brain. It's just so beautiful outside right now I just want to be awake enough to live it.

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.

rust belt chicanery

There was a discussion in a class I took last semester where the prof took issue with the writer of our book saying that a certain group is constantly looking back to and trying to recapture a golden age that existed in one form or another. I said that everyone does this, it's a universal human trait like creating or fighting or whatever, and of course I was wrong, because that's not what he believed. 

So we look back on our golden years, when there were jobs and whatnot, and there's talk of some renaissance in the form of taking ownership of our culture, but it doesn't ring true to me which is strange because all the stuff that's celebrated is stuff I kind of like, but I don't like the way it's being done, in part because I'm a bit cynical of bandwagons as a rule. 

So, rust belt chic.

It's a construct of underdogness,  a love of regional Midwest industrial culture by the young folks, a buzzword for this "creative class" that evidently has lots of money and no children and probably has some technocratic advertising gig, so uncool it's cool, which we've been recycling since Douglas Coupland codified the Gen-X irony and concepts like McJobs and Nutritional Slumming, but instead of being a wry look at the absurdity of modern life, it's become this kind of twee thing where it's way more shiny and perky and accentuate the positive than I'm comfortable with, and I think it's the preciousness of the approach that rankles me more than anything else. The quote about jaded anorexic vampires from cool cities like New York also somewhat rings false to me, because if anything we're not much of a blip on the radar anywhere else anyway, and we've got plenty of those types here that eat their own and relish being a big fish in a small pond.

But I think this is more some kind of escapism for people my age and demographic with some degree of disposable income looking for a new and in this case, a very affordable and available trend, capitalizing on the zeitgeist of kitsch, a low-budget conspicuous consumption that's not quite as weird as being a Bronie.  

Is it a proverbial going back to the womb? An escapist reaction to the current ennui?
  I told Randal I blame Wes Anderson in part, and maybe the whole Instagram aesthetic that infuses everything with this goldenrod tinge of retro, conjuring a comforting fuzzy memory that's some amalgam of childhood experiences that may or may not even be terribly Rust Belt per se but that were common collective memories of middle-class and blue-collar existence in the inner ring suburbs. 

Things like the houses our grandmas lived in, the afghans of cataract-fueled colors we were wrapped in as babies, tchotchkes made of seashells and matchbooks piled up in Dutch butter cookie tins celebrating Chuck and Di and exhorting you to Vote For This Guy back when cigarettes were more socially acceptable. Things that reminded us of a more innocent time when we were too young to be aware of the social problems around us like segregation and race riots and the Cold War, just the pop culture detritus of classic rock and Saturday morning cartoons and Star Wars, the graphics we remember as children, a selective approach to throwback clothing... vintage-style t-shirts yes, polyester muumuus and leisure suits not so much.

And then there's the comfort food we ate in the houses of our grandparents, in this area mostly of the Eastern European extraction, fuzzy VHS camcorder memories of going to weddings where there's polka bands, Catholic schools when they still had nuns, and hanging out at bowling alleys and corner watering holes where the decor hasn't changed in 30 years, the same . Ethnic identity was more of what your last name was than any long-held grudge from the Old World or any real sense of history except for maybe the street names in the hoods your grandparents once lived in before they hightailed it for post-war bungalows in the suburbs and on the outskirts.

Also, certain selective aspects of clothing from that era that mostly involve 50/50 poly cotton t-shirts with names of old bar league softball teams and trucking companies that no longer exist and quite possibly hair metal bands that may or may not be loved ironically. It's a very specific cultural memory for people who grew up on the West Side and then may or may not have majored in English lit at a state school, that conveniently forgets about the segregation, pollution, and other inconvenient truths of that time.

Is this maybe the northern equivalent to the southern nostalgia for the antebellum days? I wouldn't be the one to know, but it's a convenient revisionism that sentimentalizes and softens the edges, and maybe it's not so much wrong as something I just hope goes away sometime soon.