RECORD REVIEWS!

I bought some records and stuff.

Total Trash - s/t 7" (self-released, 2013)
Total Trash is from Minneapolis but somehow I've never seen them. I suppose I lean towards the "history-minded Saturday-night-stay-home-and-read punker" end of things, so that isn't much of a surprise, but after getting this 7" I'm sold on them (despite having always been turned off by the ICP irony and summertime beanie vibes, and two pretty middling-to-obnoxious--and not in a good way!--tapes). The first song has some doomy Ginn-esque feedback squalls and "oooh"s echoing through the background and a funny sing-songy rhyming scheme that I found distracting. Then we get "Misanthropy." I don't even think this is THE hit (I mean, it is for me, but "Jean Genet" could be an indie radio hit, with this totally great sweeping riff, positive lyrics, and more sung vocals that would go well on a tape with Potty Mouth or even, dare I say, Crash Diagnostic-era Discount), but man, this track is so good. Jessica's vocals get in the red at the best moments. "Take It Straight" and "Heady Times" are pretty straightforward hardcore songs, but both are good. I wish this record had lyrics to go with the nice screenprinted covers because I think I like them, but who knows?! There's also a sample from Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains for added lady punx cred. (Sidenote: two people have told me recently that they saw that movie when they were 13. Admittedly I would have fallen asleep because it's a movie and I hate those (jk, kinda), but I wish I had seen that when I was 13! Oh well.) The production is pretty raw and the instruments bleed together, but I think with a cleaner sound this would be too polished. Worth your time and $6 or whatever. totaltrash.bandcamp.com

Kaos - Ayacucho Centro de Opresion 7" (Odio los Discos/Sin Temores/Discos Huayno Amargo, 2008)
Ok, so to my shame, I once owned this record and sold it to Extreme Noise. I bought it back today after hearing "No" on a podcast. It's weird that I sold it because I think I've had the title track stuck in my head since the first time I owned it. Kaos formed in Lima, Peru, in 1986 and recorded the material on this record in 1989.  The vocal style is really similar to the dude from their countrymen Ataque Frontal, and the singer really lets loose on "No," screaming his head off over a fast-slow-really fast tune. SO RIPPING! Eternal mixtape fodder! All the songs on this record are great, mostly fast tunes with nary a guitar solo in sight. "X" has a melodic, mid-tempo start before revving up and slowing down again. "Ayacucho Centro de Opresion" follows the same formula (albeit less melodic) with a savage whisper-to-scream vocal bit. Excellent hardcore.

Brilliant Colors - Introducing (Slumberland, 2009)

Their loud pop/C86 reinterpretation of "99 Luftballoons" speaks for itself, no?

 

Apocryphal butt enlargement stories

Hello internet, I just read two more books and bought approximately 100000 records of varying quality and stomped around in the snow and ice in my makeshift snow suit. I ate shit on Lake Street but survived to ride my bike around on ice like an idiot once more. Fun and exhilarating and sweaty and scary.

First of all I read In the Freud Archives (1984) by Janet Malcolm. I suspect I will read all of her books and not have much to say about them beyond relating anecdotes and being a bit wowed by her smarts. This book was also wonderful, rich with incisive and telling details and hilarious in its generational spats. Malcolm gets a lot of shit for being icy and mean, and I definitely see it and find it a bit off-putting at times, particularly when out of nowhere she slips herself into her writing. I feel totally blindsided in those moments, like "there's a real person behind this?" She's great though, and I will read more soon.

I read The Flamethrowers (2013) by Rachel Kushner too. Much has been written about her ear for dialogue and how incredible her writing is, and it is. Reno, the book's protagonist, is constantly on the receiving end of blather from her friends in the art world, long-winded men of various stripes from misogynist to neurotic (and undoubtedly the two intersect). She also suffers this fate at the hands of her boyfriend's mother, a cruel Italian plutocrat who relates the following anecdote:

A cousin who went to sub-Saharan Africa and was bitten by a tsetse fly and got elephantitis in his buttocks. He'd had to purchase special-order trousers with a gigantic seat, Sandro's mother said, and he slept with a platform extension at the side of the bed, to support his ass. (226)

This is a complete aside from the plot (though it is very much a part of what makes this book so wonderful, these details!), but it is up there in butt elephantitis stories with the one about the inaccuracy of the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware (due to thyroid issues, he had a gigantic butt and would have fallen out of the boat or sunken it entirely). Favorite historical apocrypha genre.

Anyway, Reno (we never learn her real name) comes to New York from Reno and falls in with the downtown art scene, and begins to date a wealthy son of privilege whose family owns a motorcycle and rubber empire. Reno had been a motorcycle racer and artist before, but now in New York she falls under the specter of the much older Sandro, whose connections in those worlds subsume her prior engagement with them. Kushner describes Sandro as elegant, yet all he seems to do is skirt away from his family's past and have sex with Reno in public. Reno is a great protagonist and narrator though, witty and observant and capable, and Kushner plops her down in the middle of these great times of upheaval and she completely holds her own. I found her eminently relatable and cool. A wonderful entertaining book about badass girls getting theirs.

Currently reading Wanderlust (2000) by Rebecca Solnit, more to come on that... I'm a huge fan of Solnit so I'm hoping it will become more focused as I read more, cuz right now it's a bit all over the place.

Can't stop jamming these songs below... It's funny the stuff you come around to.

 

 

 

Why do I feel gross after eating cookies and watching Trailer Park Boys all day? Ugh.

Video dump part 1 of one million

Sure why not?

 

Fat cannibal

Back in May, I read Cynthia Carr's Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (2012) while I was in California visiting my sister. I read the whole 600+ page book in like 4 days. It was so good. I picked up Wojnarowicz's own book Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991) right away, but I put it aside until a week ago. One of the blurbs on the back says, "This fierce, erotic, haunting, truthful book should be given to every teenager immediately," and I could not agree more. Being given this book as a teen would have probably made the difference between sitting in my car listening to sports radio in the school parking lot and burning down Darrell Issa's office.

Wojnarowicz's prose is often simple and incisive, and the strongest passages are the long sentences describing what would become his political funeral after his death in 1992. I saw two films about ACT UP, United in Anger and How to Survive a Plague (both 2012), with powerful footage of AIDS activism during this time period. The footage of the ashes actions at the White House will haunt me forever, I think. Both movies recommended. Complementary and worthwhile.

The best part of Close to the Knives is the last 100 pages, where Wojnarowicz weaves together diary excerpts, dreams, descriptions of attending a bullfight in Mexico, and recordings of him interviewing his friends Joe and Johnny about their dead friend Dakota (a suicide, in exile in Texas and unable to cope with his loneliness and addictions). There's an ultimate resignation to Dakota's suicide, where Joe and Johnny know that in part their sexual rejection of Dakota led to his isolation and death. There's also an almost hilariously macabre description of Dakota killing a drug dealer, and another moment where they're describing either the Ricky Kasso case or some proto-Kasso satanic murder in New York, which really struck me. Was AIDS and sexual politics ultimately responsible for politicizing that historical moment so intensely? The quotidian concerns and fears of the junkie and the urban underclass are so present in this part of the text (not that addiction and poverty aren't political, because duh), and all of Dakota's art (as described) would be like a sub-nu metal teen murder fantasy if not for the government enabled epidemic of AIDS and violence against queer people. I don't know. It's passages like that that really drive home the "give this to every teen now." Like it's the difference between Flipper and the Feederz ya know? 

On a different but most important note, I went to a hc show in 2013 and had an incredible time and felt like a part of something. Awesome right? TC punks ain't so bad, and just wait for 'kato... Part of the project of this blog is to become more outspoken about things that matter to me aesthetically and politically so I can happily project these ideas to my immediate social world instead of shitting on everyone's vanity craft cottage industry (happy to still do that, of course). I feel pretty good about this in punk world lately, but we'll see... I plan to read a few books tomorrow (for real) and write about some tunes I like in depth soon.

TOP TUNEZ
FRAU demo (bummer about that weird digital clicking noise at the end of the tape)
1st Offence - The Night the Punks Turned Ugly 7" (gimme)
The Lewd - Discography 2xlp (need American Wino please)
Hounds of Hate lp (sick, like the 1st SOIA LP but a little more punk production so you must be like "why does this exist in 2013?" but it's great and I'm glad it does. Is "Brotherhood of Night" a secret track? I'm moshing regardless)

more book bloggin'

So, I knocked out Johan Kugelberg's Brad Pitt's Dog (2012) in a day a few weeks ago. Hard to even comment on the actual ideas in this book without touching on the existential panic that it induced in me. I was simultaneously reading Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes (1968) in 20 page chunks every morning before I bundled myself off to work for either 4 or 11 hours, forever looking up Laguna Beach special features DVDs for outstate library patrons (for whom torrenting is inconceivable in theory or execution) or nodding politely to strangers asking me about my name and spelling it back to me. Seventh circle of library hell b/w grin and bear it retail reality. Life in your mid 20s. Grim.

I just finished A Fan's Notes a few days ago. That book is full of lovely long paragraphs about a real asshole. The book's Exley (I'm sure not far of a remove from the real thing, about whom I admittedly know little) is a total piece of shit, but if you (like me) think you are above the bullshit conventions of business, society, the art/literature establishment, etc. and you're finding yourself completely demolished by the notion that you're no longer special or prodigious, you'll cringe and weep and try to weasel your way out of identifying with Ex and you won't be able to. You'll be paralyzed: opt out? buy in? Ex opts out, and his refuge bears disturbing resemblance to my own, were I to choose such a path.  Mom's couch and an elderly spaniel? (Though Skye, my parents' beloved Springer, doesn't have a Roman numeral in her name because we're of the ascendant Jewish middle class, no WASP bs here!) A dangerous novel to read at 24. Scarier still to imagine reading it later in life and finding it this potent.

Many of my friends are choosing to opt out, after trying to be yuppies for a while. I'm aghast at both, but I can't figure it out for myself, so I'm just working two dead end jobs and frittering away my money and time on what? A disjointed record collection and existential panic about being the wrong kind of fan, the wrong kind of punk, a person whose life/jobs/interests are fine and noble in theory but in reality give me nothing? I remember about five years ago I started working at Extreme Noise and buying a lot of records all of a sudden, and I was talking to my friend about how to even begin to prioritize what you want. He said to me, "Get what you can find, because you won't always be able to get this stuff, and what you want is probably always out of your reach."

Five years later I have a lot more stuff, and a lot of fucking cool records, but I know all the sick rares and zine scraps and digital currency of amazing old hc pictures can't make my idea of community appear in front of me. And is it even community or a way to conquer the uncertainty of life, the gaps and skips that we try to ignore by organizing, collecting, cataloging? I don't know, and I'm not smart enough to intellectualize it any further, but what Kugelberg calls "a sentiment much too dark" (below) I want to get tattooed backwards on my fucking forehead to remind myself to chill out on this stuff sometimes.

You will...
Never know everything
Never hear everything
Never own everything
Never remember everything

Top tunes of November

I have been buying records nonstop cuz I have two jobs and nothing else to spend money on. Top hits...

1) Fracaso - s/t 7" (2012)
Raw and simple d-beat from Venezuela. On first listen I was underwhelmed, but reading the lyrics and explanation on the insert in my shitty Spanish and poring over the simple pen and ink drawings on the cover, the vitality and importance of the act of making hc like this in a place like Venezuela is so evident and powerful. "Pregunta por direccion fisica, nos estamos moviendo constantemente." Not obfuscating bluster, but the real outcome of writing a war haiku in the Global South. Not quite as good as the Atentado 7" ("No Necesita Tus Reglas" is a mixtape staple and my fave song of the 2000s, probably. Am I the only superfan of this record?), but what is?

2) Beaver - s/t 7" (1981)
"Video Disease" would be a perfect song without the reggae part. What other 82 hc songs are like this? There must be a million. I can think of so many 77 punk LPs that would be perfect without the dub. Generation X s/t comes to mind first, obv. Inflammable Material too.

3) Pyhakoulu/Abortti 13 split 7" (1984)
Pyhakoulu is up there with Indirekt "Ik Wilde Leven" for female-fronted Euro hc with bass way too funky and loud in the mix that somehow still works. This record and Kaaos "Sota on Tulossa" off the Systeemi Ei Toimi comp are my Finnish hc discoveries of the year. That Kaaos song is SO GOOD! I mean, I love Kaaos, how do you make a guitar sound like that?

4) Autoclave - Go Far 7" (1991)
"I'll Take You Down" over and over. Fuck this band for making me want to buy a 10". 

Maybe I'll write soon about the Cremalleras s/t LP cuz I fucking love it. Also digging V-3 - Negotiate Nothing, Wildhoney 7", Frau demo tape, this song...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_l_5tmqYx0

I'm gonna write about every book I read this winter.

The last three weekends I've read a book every Saturday. Three weeks ago I devoured Joe Carducci's Enter Naomi: SST, L.A., and All That... (2007) in a matter of hours. It's a memoir of Carducci's time at SST, with a specific focus on Naomi Petersen and other women who worked at SST. It has so many of my favorite things: L.A. apocalypse visions! women in male-dominated scenes who take no bullshit from anyone and build a world on their own terms! the grand SST mythology, distilled to a fine focus! What the book does well is allow Naomi Petersen's story to exist in her own words, through her photos and color scans of her detailed planners. The dark side, of course, being that in trying to show how and why Naomi is special, Carducci cuts down so many other women to caricatures of crazy lost girls, which is a bit of a pill, since as a text of the SST myth we're privy to rampant sexual violence throughout. COOOOOL! Still, inspiring and awesome to see one woman's reaction to that and how much of an era's aesthetic and images she literally created and defined.

Two weeks ago it was Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer (1990). The central argument of the book is that journalists operate on deception, that a subject's candor and access is obtained through a false sense of trust or friendship, that pathos or the illusion thereof is the catalyst for this deception. Dark thoughts about all my human relationships notwithstanding, it was an engrossing read, though the premise seemed very self-evident to me. I am too much a product of my liberal arts education/Unitarian progressive hippie upbringing to find the idea of a journalist's subjectivity and shifty motives to be shocking (illusions shattered long ago leaving me yearning for a true sincerity at times, obv), but as an outsider to journalism/its attendant debates perhaps I'm missing something. Any suggestions?

More soon...