Tag Archives: stories

The Mechanic’s Guide

In many ways, stories are more important then truth. The stories that we tell ourselves, whether they are “true” or not, shape the world we live in and control when and where we will see opportunities or obstacles. Here’s a story that I was told when I was around 18. A lot of this story ended up being true, though bits and pieces were exaggerated either by the person who told me the story or in how I’ve remembered it.

The story concerns the above two women, Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson. Jenny and Kristin had a band called Tsunami out of DC in the 90s. They also ran a record label called Simple Machines Records. One of the more famous releases on Simple Machines wasn’t music though, it was a pamphlet called the Mechanics Guide.

The story as I was told/remember was that after being in Tsunami and a couple of other bands and running Simple Machines for a little while, Jenny and Kristin got together with some of their friends and decided to put everything they had learned down on paper so they could share it with other people. How to book a show, how to book a tour, how to record your band, how to turn that recording into an actual release, how to start a label, how to promote a label, etc. And the instructions were pretty low level. Not just ‘send your record to a record pressing plant’, but ‘here’s the plant that we use and what they charge us, and here’s another plant that our friends use and their rates’.

The idea was that it was everything you needed to know to start taking part in your culture in whatever way that meant for you. If you were the kind of person to form a band, here’s what you need to know. If you were the kind of person who’d rather form a label or a zine or book shows, here’s what you need to know. It was rooted in the idea that the reason most people were passive in their culture was because they didn’t know how to be anything else. So, teach them how to be active in the culture and some of them will go and do that.

I’ve been thinking about this story a lot recently and what it means. Not just in its promotion of DIY culture, but in what it says about helping the people that came after you. At the end of the day Tsunami were a great band and Simple Machines was a great label, but neither of them was revolutionary. People had done these things before and they’d do them afterwards. The revolution came in Jenny and Kristin’s decision to help the people who came after them. To make it a little easier and to share the knowledge they’d learn. An act that I still see as the punkest thing anyone has ever done.

Like I said, when I finally got around to looking into this story I found that a good chunk of it was actually true, though may be exaggerated. If you’re curious about the official story, you can find that here on the Simple Machines website.

Epilogue

Jenny and Kristin closed up Simple Machines in the late 90s after Kristin moved to Philly and they got got burned out on the business side of running a label. As an encore though they joined forces with several friends and founded the Future Of Music Coalition which helped independent musicians make sense of the new digital landscape and lobbied governments to ensure that independent musicians had a seat at the table as the new rules were being drawn up.

Jenny currently works at the Ford Foundation.

Kristin currently works at the Media Democracy Fund.

Creating truth from nothing

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I was recently reading the book Queercore: How To Punk A Revolution, an oral history of the Queercore punk scene, and I came across an interesting story.

One of the pivotal moments in the creation of queercore was the zine JDs, created by G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce. The zine documented a thriving gay punk scene happening in Toronto at a time when punk was still fairly homophobic and many gay punks struggled to find a way to reconcile their identification as both punk and gay. JDs presented a scene where these two things were able to exist side by side with no apparent contradiction. And, most importantly, here was a place where punks could be openly gay and feel accepted.

There was one issue though, it didn’t exist. The Toronto gay punk scene was in fact a handful of friends who all hung out at the same bar and a couple of whom had formed a band that occasionally played said bar. No one outside Toronto knew this though and so everyone just took them at their word and they went off and founded their own gay punk scenes all over the US and Canada because they thought that bridge had already been crossed and it was a natural normal thing.

In the book Kathleen Hanna sites JDs as a big inspiration in how she talked about riot grrl in the early days. Back when she still talked to the press about it, she would tell them that riot grrl was a national movement with groups all over the country. In truth, it was a couple dozen folks at the time, mostly in DC and Olympia, WA. Again though, people didn’t know that and so they thought they were walking down well trodden trails when in fact they were blazing brand new ones.

When I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that this wasn’t the first time I’d come across this tactic. R.U. Sirius, the original editor in chief at the infamous cyber punk magazine Mondo 2000, admitted, years after the magazine folded, that they regularly invented stories for the magazine if they couldn’t find actual people that were living the story that they wanted to tell. Again, the expectation was that people would read the article and be inspired to do their own thing, because they thought someone else had already done it.

The whole thing gives new meaning to “be the change you want to see in the world”.

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.

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?