Monthly Archives: December 2022

Acknowledging ugly truths

I’ve seen a couple of videos on TikTok that put forward the idea that punk is inherently inclusive and that if something is sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc. then it can’t be punk. While I applaud actively trying to make punk inclusive for everyone, and I may be taking to video creators too literally in their comments, I’m very uncomfortable with this sentiment.

The reality is that a lot of punk’s early history is sexist and misogynistic and homophobic and transphobic and all the rest. A quick read through oral histories like Please Kill Me and We’ve Got the Neutron Bomb makes that clear. And we’re not even getting into hardcore here. To present punk as something that was always inclusive is to just ignore the history of punk. It also makes telling the story of punk difficult.

How do you explain Kathleen Hanna’s call of “girls to the front!” or the concept of girls only shows, with out acknowledging the misogynistic environment that riot grrl pushed back against?

How do you explain the importance of zines like J.D.’s and Homocore or bands like Pansy Division and Team Dresch without acknowledging the homophobia in the scene?

And beyond the concepts, there’s the simple matter of giving people their due credit. Riot Grrl and Queercore were two of the most important movements in the history of punk. Not because they gave us great bands, but because they rebelled against the rebellion. They called out the hypocrisy and bullshit of punk and they demanded that it be what it was supposed to be. That took a lot of guts and a lot of courage and it deserves to be recognized. And that recognition can not be properly given unless we’re willing to talk about how and where punk has failed.

In the end the power of punk comes from it’s honesty. This is an art form that is at it’s best when it is being brutally honest about the best and worst things about humanity. If we’re going to move this art form forward and pay proper tribute to the people who came before us, then we need to be brutally honest with ourselves about how we got here. We need to celebrate the things we got right, but we also need to acknowledge the things we got wrong. And we need to honor the people who showed us we were wrong.

Seek You by Kristen Radtke

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The following quote is from Seek You by Kristen Radtke.

Decades before the internet’s invention, producers of early television coined the term “the coconut effect,” referring to any sound or special effect divorced from reality but whose presence was required since viewers had come to expect it.

Think here of the dried, empty coconuts that were clapped together in a sound booth to create the clicking of a horse’s hooves, even when the animal was walking on dirt or grass, or the sharp, excessive metallic sound of a tv sword being drawn from its sheath.

And, of course, the laugh track, which grew to annoy viewers; yet when it was removed, they complained that their viewing pleasure was diminished by its absence.

What mid-century television viewers might have liked, and perhaps what social media users respond to now, is exaggeration: a not-entirely representational, slightly enhanced version of the lives they recognize. This concept can be applied to animal behavior, too.

Baby seagulls ask their mothers for feed by tapping their beaks against a red stripe that runs down the center of hers. When scientists present yellow popsicle sticks to the nest, painted with a red stripe, the birds peck at it just as they would their mothers.

But when they’re offered sticks painted with three stripes, the baby birds run over each other, frantic to ge closer to the stick, pecking maniacally. They ignore the single stripe, and even their real mothers, in favor of the hyperbolic impersonation.

Outcries over the ways in which the digital age distorts relationships to reality may be warranted, but perhaps this distortion has become so possible because we animals have preferred it all along.

If we no longer feel tethered to the communities our species was molded into needing, the act of posting a selfie or a carefully edited portrait of our banal domestic lives could just be a muted form of personal rescue.

Is display a form of dilution or is the broadcast part of what makes it real?

Ian MacKaye – Creative Time Summit DC Keynote (2016)

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…sometimes when we play shows I always try to remind the audience that we are the band, they are the audience, we are collectively making a show. If the audience was not there we would be practicing. The energy that happens between a band and audience is the thing that can elevate the moment and make it into something that is… transportive I guess or whatever the word is.

[Talking about Dischord Records]: ‘…December will be 36 years. This is a label that has been around… I just want to point out a few things. Never used a single contract. I don’t have a lawyer, never had a lawyer. We pay royalties every six months still to this day. I have four employees, who have health care. I just want to say those things out loud because people say ‘It’s to idealistic’ it’s not to fucking idealistic if you just do the work that’s in front of you and most of all if you don’t look beyond the work to the profit because that is the distraction. It’s the money that always gets in the way.

I do know one thing. Artists are translators, that I’m pretty sure about. They see something; they have to explain it. And the way they explain it, if they’re visual artists they make a picture, ‘this is what I see’. And if they’re writers and they’re thinking, ‘this is what I think’. And if they’re musicians, ‘this is what I hear’. And if they’re dancers, ‘this is how we dance’. They’re translating.

Facial hair as metaphor

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I’m about a year into growing my beard out now.

The first time I tried to grow my beard was in the fall of ’94. I was 19 years old and had a bit of a problem. I felt like a weird, strange person who preferred the company of other weird and strange people, but I looked fairly normal. In my undiagnosed autistic mind, I needed some kind of social signifier that would let other weird people know that I was in fact one of them and not one of the boring normal people appearances be damned. This was the source of my discontent with life and if I could just come up with a way to let my people know who I was, I would find where I fit in and be happy.

The problem was finding that signifier. My hair is thick so any attempt to grow it out quickly becomes a haystack of annoyance. I’ve never really had the courage to pull off dying my hair, especially not back then. Nor did I have the confidence of pulling off outrageous clothes and those tended to be uncomfortable anyways so that was out. What I could do though was grow my beard.

Back in ’94 beards weren’t a thing in most of the country yet. In my experience they were limited to mountain folk, bikers, and hippies. And since I was in the process of turning into a bit of a hippie it seemed like a perfect solution to my problem.

My first beard did not look particularly good and so didn’t last particularly long. I did keep growing them over the years though and it started to come in proper and looking better. Eventually I decided that I just didn’t like the way I looked without a beard and so a couple of years ago I decided that I wasn’t going to shave it off anymore going forward. I did keep it trim and neat so it would look proper and appropriate. I admit to some jealousy when I saw someone who’d let it grow. I didn’t live in a world where I could do that though and something is better then nothing.

At the beginning of 2022 I was turning into a bit of a hermit. Sobriety had left me sorting through a lot of things and with the cold weather and the still lingering pandemic I just kind of stopped leaving my house except to get groceries. I stopped getting my hair cut and stopped trimming my beard. By April the hair needed to be cut, but I’d grown accustomed to the beard being long. It had turned into a physical representation of my unmasking journey. And when I did figure out I was autistic in the summer it just seemed even more appropriate.

At this point I let my barber clean up my sideburns when I get my hair cut, but otherwise it just grows. And while it grows, I try to figure out how to make this all work.

Queercore and Assimilation

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Queercore: How to Punk A Revolution is an oral history about the Queercore punk scene and it’s creation. Below are a series of quotes about the assimilation of the gay rights movement into the mainstream that I thought were interesting.

The goal of gay liberation was to expand what is possible for a human being, to open up the society and make all different ways of living, and all different ways of being sexual and being in a relationship and being in a community, accessible and possible for all people. Eventually this movement, as the country and the world became more reactionary, was replaced by a gay rights movement. And that’s an entirely different idea. It’s not about social transformation; it’s about gay people fitting into already-existing social concepts of what is acceptable. So what we have now is that instead of gay people, or queer people, changing the world, the world has changed us. Now we become acceptable to the degree that we resemble the dominant culture.
When Barack Obama says that we should respect gay people because we should respect love, what he’s talking about is gay marriage and gay family structure, which is what love means to him. He is not talking about sexual liberation at all, and he’s not talking about even the basics of antidiscrimination laws. He’s talking about us fitting exactly into his concept of how a citizen should behave. Herbert Marcuse called that repressive tolerance-when you’re tolerated, which keeps you in a position of subservience and inferiority at the will and whim of the dominant group. And this is being touted, hours after Obama’s speech, as this revolutionary concept that shows that gay people have arrived. But actually it shows that we’re in terrible trouble. Because on our own, in the places where we are different from dominant culture, there’s no acceptance at all.
Sarah Schulman (writer)

Tom Jennings had a giant banner up in his house at 666 Illinois in San Francisco that said No Assimilation Ever. Now… TV shows like Will & Grace and Glee are all about, Look how cute we are. We’re gay-don’t you love us? We’re so cute. If God hates fags, why are we so cute? Which is one way-and it’s a very important way-to bring visibility and awareness about queers, to be like, Look, we’re charming. We’re cute. We’re just like you. Look how adorable we are and how sexy.
But we were like, Yeah, we’re queer; you hate us, right? Yeah, we’re that. We’re that thing you hate. And people… I guess it’s the same reason you pay money to go on a rollercoaster, because it’s scary-we pay to be scared. And people wanted that. Sometimes you want Will & Grace, sometimes you want Tribe 8. Like we always say, there’s room for Melissa Etheridge and there’s room for Tribe 8, but you need both. You come at the problem from all directions, y’know; from the mellifluous sounds of Melissa Etheridge, singing about climbing through some babe’s window, to us being like, Suck my dick, motherfucker! You need both.
Lynn Breedlove (member of Tribe 8)

I always talk about the luxury of normality. The first time I experienced the luxury of normality was in the late ’90s, when I went to a Radical Faerie gathering. I was not well known to the Radical Faeries-I hadn’t starred on Broadway, hadn’t been nominated for a Tony, hadn’t played Carnegie Hall, this was before all of that. So I went to a Faerie sanctuary, it was my first night there, and I put on this gold lamé dress to go to dinner. And as I was walking through the camp, there were all these people dressed in amazing, outlandish, gorgeous ways, and nobody batted an eye when I walked past. I was used to being stared at, my whole life-either the object of misogynistic comments or homophobic comments, sometimes twice in ten minutes, by different people who perceived me in different ways. No one batted an eye, and I was so shocked, because I had never been invisible before. I burst into tears-it was such a profound thing, to understand what it’s like for most people to just walk down the street and not cause a stir.
So I understand the desire to assimilate. I understand the desire to be a man who lives with your husband and your children in a suburban neighborhood. It’s a comfortable, safe lifestyle, and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone a comfortable, safe lifestyle. I mean, I would like to have a comfortable, safe lifestyle myself; and maybe someday I will be more invisible. I think as I get older and I read more as a sort of well-off, middle-aged white woman, I am more invisible, which I like. But that doesn’t change people’s reactions to finding out my truth, and for me, my truth is the most important thing.
And that has nothing to do with assimilation or queer politics; it’s a demand that I put on myself to be honest, and to grow, and to be able to change, and to not be stuck in an idea that someone else has of me-whether it’s my parents, or a current lover, or what I think a future lover might want from me, or my public, as an artist. So I think the idea of being assimilationist is vilified unfairly. But I also don’t think that demanding a space to be yourself should be considered a threat to anybody. I call it, like, expanding the circle of normality.
Justin Vivian Bond (actor/singer)

Nothing irks me more than seeing-like, my Wikipedia page says American songwriter. I was never an American songwriter! I want to be known as the Jewish lesbian folk singer. I want to say the word Jewish; I want to say the word lesbian; I want to be known as a dyke the minute I walk out the door, every single day. Because I feel like being myself is the most political thing I can do.
Phranc (Jewish lesbian folk singer)

From a different chapter, but worth mentioning.

By its very nature, queercore is a herd of cats. People who call themselves queer tend to be aggressively individualistic, y’know? I don’t want to be male or female. Why do I have to fit in your paradigm? I want to be who I am, and that might be some of both or neither or something else at any given moment. My gender, my body, my expression is mine to define. But that’s the thing; for all the differences, there is that unifying idea, that unifying unmet need. None of us can be that or do that alone, because it leaves us too isolated, which leaves too many of us vulnerable-which leaves too many of us dead at the hands of haters. So we come together. Not just despite but because of our differences, because together we can do things that we can’t do alone.
Deke Nihilson (co-creator of Homocore zine)

Here we go again

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I honestly don’t remember how many times I’ve created a new blog with the intention of publishing some kind of writing. Twenty fiveish years ago I made some kind of name for myself and found a community writing about music, and I can’t extinguish the hope that I can replicate it again. Of course, now isn’t back then, and a single blog in the ocean of content isn’t a mailing list with a built in audience of like minded people, but that little quiet voice keeps talking and sometimes, for my own sanity, I need to give into it.

Plus, writing has always been the way I make sense of things and as I’m learning about being autistic don’t I keep seeing the advice to lean into these kind of things? So we’re doing this again, even reusing an old url this time. I guess picking up things I’d previous discarded is becoming a bit of a trend in this whole unmasking process.

Anyways, we’ll see where this experiment goes. I obviously would love to see this turn into something and for me to find some sort of new community, but past performance would indicate otherwise. So I need to try to do this for me, a mark that I make that may never be seen by anyone else, but I know it’s there and that needs to be enough. Otherwise past performance tells us this will get tossed off in frustration when no one reads and what’s the point of pushing that boulder again?