Hold On

I had a couple of instances this last week where I was concerned that some latent racism long hidden by liberal, white guilt was surfacing. The first instance was when I attempted to rescue a lost pit bull. I understand the reputation that pits have and they make me just as nervous as anyone. As a matter of fact, if I wasn't half in the bag by the time I found this thing on my lawn at 4am, I probably would have let it be. However, I was so I decided to make friends with the dog. Turns out this dog was one of the nicest creatures I have ever seen. Fast forward through me bonding with the animal and making all sorts of plans to keep him and incorporate him into our family to me being woken up by the mailman who, after Herbert (the dog) escaped from our yard, he rescued from the neighbors. It turns out that they were trying to kill the dog with bats, hammers, large sticks, etc. because the animal supposedly bit someone. Then they came over to my place with the assorted weapons looking for the dog. I had to call 911 (yeah, thanks for showing up TPD...Oh wait, you didn't despite me asking for help against an agitated, drunken group of young men with weapons). Eventually Animal Control showed up and took the dog away. This was the final straw vis a vis these neighbors. They are a blight on the block (other neighbors think so as well); the house is filled with people of various ethnic backgrounds; drug dealers and gangsters come and go; they sit in the yard and drink all day, throw trash in our yard, and then stay up all night listening to bad rap or rape-rock. Ok, so I'm done. I've long refrained from vocalizing any sort of judgment about gangster/urban/street whatever culture, but now I'm going to say that it sucks. It's bad for community, it's dangerous at worst and obnoxious at best. I'm tired of kids (yes, kids) hanging out all day next door dealing and consuming drugs, drinking, and playing terrible music at unbelievable volumes. I'm tired of the scuffles, arguments, and generally antagonistic nature of the entire house. I'm tired of the poverty and ignorance. Are these my poor? I think not. My liberal White guilt is no longer enough for me to rant incoherently about the iniquities of big business and consumer culture while remaining silent about the soul-sucking ignorance of the large majority of the poor.

Ok, deep breath. So, after the incident with the dog, I'm acutely sensitive to the brothers from the barbershop hanging out in front of the bar listening to loud music, smoking weed, selling whatever, and generally accosting nearly every single woman who walks by. I've had many conversations with a friend about how she can't walk or ride through the neighborhood without brothers yelling at her. Everyday it's a new story. It usually turns out that she ignores them or says something flippant or dismissive, which then aggravates the men leading them to become confrontational and insulting. Still, my liberal White guilt dismisses these things as "cultural differences," which now that it's typed in front of me is woefully condescending. I don't hold brothers from the neighborhood to the standards that I would any other civilized human being because they are black, listen to rap music, smoke weed, and are gangsters (literally). If all of the aforementioned were true, but it was a gaggle of white guys, I would have no tolerance. Jesus Christ, is this institutionalized racism at its worst? I consider myself a self-aware, progressive individual, but I haven't thought all that much about this. It certainly warrants more consideration.

Back to my point, I was sensitive already to the culture around the barbershop, so when I was leaving the bar the other day on my bike I had a problem with my deraileur as I was changing lanes. A guy leaving the barbershop decided to try to intimidate me by slowing down, pulling into my lane (I was in the turn lane), then basically threatening me. I stopped riding, handled the situation, then rode on. This kind of thing happens all the time with motorists of all shapes and sizes, but it just so happened to be a brother driving some ghetto fabulous car with nice rims. And! As he pulled away he was driving without hands so he could count his rather large roll of cash.

This got me thinking: is something like the barbershop necessarily good for the neighborhood? Previously, my liberal White guilt didn't allow me to ask those kinds of questions. To dare question whether a black barbershop belonged in a black neighborhood was to be part of the culture of gentrification, it was to be part of the Whiteness that makes me so uncomfortable. But after the incident, I began to wonder (not without some guilt) whether a business that also serves as a social spot for gangsters and drug dealers is really the best thing. I genuinely don't have a feeling either way. I'm not sure that a cocktail lounge where privleged, fixed gear, white belt wearing hipsters congregate is necessarily any better (or worse). What this last week did was provoke some rather uncomfortable questions about race and class that I haven't found any easy answers for.

What really inspired me to sit down and rant about my week was this: (h/t to Everything is Terrible).

Watching that made me nauseous. It's the milquetoast homogeneity of White culture that I am ashamed of. It's not just them; if you took the same crowd shots of the Apollo, I would be equally repulsed (as much as I'd let myself acknowledge it). I see previews for anything involving Tyler Perry and I want to shoot my eyes out. I also hate cars, specifically new cars. I hate shiny new cars with Abercrombie polo wearing would-be jocks with white caps askew who, along with their skinny-pretty bleached-and-waxed girlfriends, treat people in the service industry like a lesser class of human. I hate the lawyers and judges, real estate agents (Oh man, do I hate real estate agents) and property owners who "flip" houses. Middle aged, bourgeois white people. People who look like they shop at REI. Anyone who thinks it's hip to be ironic. The fucking Tacoma Police Department. You know what? Fuck you you fucking pigs for everytime you harass a bicyclist for not wearing a helmet but you don't come when called. It's 911. Get your ass out here. Fuck corporate financiers who rob everyone blind. Fuck you Matador bartenders. You should be ashamed. Fuck you you tribal tattooed, gauged ear, heavy metal woman beating rapist who malingers between Hell's Kitchen and every other shitty hard drinking bar filled with Rock of Love skanks, PBR, and grape vodka drop shots. Fuck you you fat lazy fucks waddling around Safeway looking for a Kit Kat bar. That's right. Fuck fat people. Look around at our culture. Seriously. Stop and look. Being fat is a crime. The amount of shit you have to eat to get this fat is staggering. Those faceless corporate monsters who are stripping the ocean of fish and wiping out the rain forest are doing it so you can have a $2.99 Grand Slam breakfast at Denny's at anytime, anywhere. Your bloated corpse inculcates you in every crime of this irredeemable culture from the war in Iraq to rampant deforestation to the incidents of sexual assault against women. If you stopped sleepwalking through life long enough to put the Twinkie down you might realize that your being corpulent is a crime. So, get fucked you fat ass.
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Fuck you Christians. Get off my fucking lawn. Double fuck you Michael Bay. Fuck professional athletes who rape and murder without consequences. That includes you, Roethlisburger. You're not off the hook because you are the white QB. You're a fucking asshole. That motorcycle accident should have taken your career if not your life.

I'm fucking done. Over it. This world fucking sucks from the hood rats parked in the street who refuse to get out of the way to let cars pass to the smarmy fucking judge with the bluetooth headset who thinks he's the cat's meow. Get fucked. All of you.

Edit: Jesus, sorry guys. Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed. By that I mean the side w/o spell check or a dictionary...

Crash Course and required reading

I just finished watching Chris Martenson's The Crash Course (h/t to Nate.) This is the required reading Derrick Jensen's The Culture of Make Believe, James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency, and finally Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. Watch Martenson's Crash Course. Next time we meet for dinner, bocce, drinks, or to run, we are going to talk about what we need to do. Then we will keep talking about it. Now, you tell me what I should be reading.

The Coming Night

Those that know me know that I've wrestled with how I can best apply my efforts to either make the world a better place or simply benefit my community. In the end, I took the path of least resistance, stayed in the trade that I know, and the result is that I spend my hours, which stretch into days and months, running a bar. Before I continue too far down this path, I must offer the following caveat: I am proud of what I do. I work hard and have created a place in the neighborhood for people to come together, imbibe, and enjoy each others company. That is it. I work at what I know and I am good at what I do. Some friends are carpenters, some teach, and some push papers. I make cocktails. It doesn't change the world, but it does give people a bit of respite in the face of an increasingly ominous future. It is this future that concerns me this morning.

James Howard Kunstler over at Clusterfuck Nation does good work. His book The Long Emergency is a must read. Kunstler writes about how our Culture of Leisure and Happy Motoring is predicated upon easy access to cheap energy. This is going to end sooner or later (all signs point to sooner...), at which point what happens to the suburban sprawl, planned obsolescence, and the general toxins and detritus left behind from 60+ years of rampant consumerism? Look around you at everything that is plastic. “Except for a small amount that has been incinerated...every bit of plastic manufactured in the world in the last 50 years or so still remains.” (The World Without Us, Weisman) This plastic, a large portion of which ends up in the ocean, concentrates pollutants in the environment and as it degrades enters the food chain at the smallest levels. Now, just so we are clear, these are compounds that have a shelf life greater than the Pyramids of Giza and the Roman Aqueducts. These tiny pellets and everything that we make out of them has an expected life that is measured in terms of a geological scale. Say 100,000 years. To put this in perspective, 100,000 years ago we were living caves; we were far from the only bipedal hominid; and (although still contentious), we (as Homo Sapiens) began our mass exodus from Africa. Your cell phone, plastic bag from Safeway, and potentially the majority of the buried newspaper in landfills, could be around long after our art, philosophy, and science have been reduced to dust and ash. Our great legacy will be sun bleached plastic and garbage that has reduced to the size of krill food and, the elimination of biodiversity that is being called the sixth great extinction, the Holocene extinction. This anthropogenic event promises not only to be a dark legacy of our over-consumption, but also promises to make it much more difficult for us to return to a sustainable way of living. Even after we kill each other in the streets as we run out of energy, fresh water and food; even as the coastlines rise and displace or kill millions; as the era of mass production ends and we are left with a wide swath of aggrieved, unemployed peoples looking to scapegoat someone (always the Other...); even after desertification, floods, malnutrition, AIDS, obesity, and cancer wipe out large portions of a soft, artificially-supported population; there still might not be enough for those who are left. Those that live into the Long Emergency may look out upon a world that resembles more McCarthy's The Road than Mad Max. Those left will rummage through the great wastes of the 20^th century culture looking for things that will help them grow or catch food, capture or filter water. I-pods, digital cameras, laptops, 20 pairs of shoes, and $12 cocktails will be revealed for the decadence and luxury that they are. History will not look kindly upon us as we rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic whilst talking about how to resist as the world around us ended. Already we enjoy too much at too small a price to us and too high a price to everyone and everything else. Our sporting events, muscle cars, personal electronics, fast food, and Cult of Convenience come at a price. That price is the degradation of environment, the loss of biodiversity, the subjugation of peoples half a world away, and endless background noise of wars that we no longer (or ever did) understand. Our enemy is the Other (be it the Terrorist kind or the Faceless Government Bureaucrat); we wonder why they hate us or why they send poor, brown children to kill and die for us as we listen to NPR podcasts on our techno-fetishist accoutrement while riding our ridiculously expensive bicycles (because we're Green!) to political rallies protesting the cause du jour or the bar to get drunk, get laid, to be seen. In this way, the literate, angry, rational among us are worse than the fat, burger-eating, nose-picking, reality show-watching, shuffling, gray mass of humanity; we have a moral responsibility not only to affect change directly and to resist constantly, but we have a responsibility to lead our lives by example. We have no room for laziness or excuses like, “Progress, not perfection!” How many people have died in the name of progress? How many die each day as we assuage our guilt with the petty, insignificant acts that have come to define resistance? Eat vegetarian, ride a bike, go to a protest, plant a garden. These First World choices are not enough. Do more and get ready, for night is coming. Watch the unemployment rates around the country, especially in impoverished areas. Watch what happens when a country that has moved from manufacturing “things” to a “service” based economy reacts to contraction that is permanent. What is optional resistance now will be a matter of survival soon. It will start with people pissed off because they can't have the Blue-Ray deluxe edition of the new Michael Bay explosion montage and end with people pissed off that they can't cheaply procure white fish (or any other sort of fish, which should be a luxury item) that was caught in the Great Lakes and processed in China. I fully believe that our way of life is so unsustainable and will end so abruptly that I'll dispense with the rest of this rant about broken I-pods, green Chartreuse, and the regular reoccurence of these fits in my life. We all read the same books and listen to the same podcasts. You know what has gotten me particularly agitated. I'm going to go finish my book, take some valerian root, then fall asleep with the tenuous hope that tonight is not the night that my neighbors kick the door in or simply burn my house down. Tomorrow I'll think more on how resistance is no longer an act of self-congratulatory idealism, but the groundwork for survival as the lights dim.

Edit: I'll learn to like paragraphs when I learn to be coherent. First things first. Sorry.

Staircase

Since the bar opened in the last week of March, I've been trying to take mental health breaks. These are generally constituted of me being out of cell phone range from an hour to a day. It is a good exercise in patience; I fret and pace about what is going on, but I have to let go and enjoy whatever it is I am doing. With that, here are some pictures from the weekend spent at Staircase and hiking Mt. Ellinore.

The first pic is from the ascent to the summit of Ellinore. Before we reached the ridgeline, there was this staircase that went straight up into the mist.

The next pic is on the same staircase behind us. At some point we were above the trees hiking through rocks. Given that we are all pretty soft, it was intense.

The next pic is of pea climbing through rocks where the trail had disappeared. Last year we tried this hike in June and the summer path was snowed over. We made it to the chute, but probably about a third of the way up we turned around. I was committed to making the summit this time despite there obviously being no view...

The last few pictures are from what can only be called a stroll after Ellinore. They are both of the Staircase river that flows into Lake Cushman. The last one is on a giant felled tree across the river from our campsite. Serene, beautiful, exactly what I needed.

Ah, music...

O dear Siren, I haven't heard your call in quite sometime. I stopped thinking about music before I stopped playing having been burned and hollowed by years of playing. I was exhausted; I had nothing left. I started playing not to become a rockstar, to play arenas and get blowjobs from groupies, but to play small venues with a devoted group of people who were into the punk rock, DIY thing that had me driving to Canada to watch Botch and Harkonen play in a cafe in the nineties. So I did what I did between Carmenzito and The Assailant and I haven't looked back (very much) since. Until this weekend.

It started at work when a couple of old Tacoma musicians sitting at the rail were geeking out about music. It started with one of the going on about how the music on MJ's Thriller was so fantastic. He was playing air drums while singing the guitar parts with (to be honest) a puerile exuberance. His friend humored him until it was his turn to geek out about Helmet's AmRep records. Eavesdropping on their drunken euphoria sent me spinning off into a Neverland where I started playing music again in a heavy, indie, noise-type band that was some hybrid of early Helmet and Jesus Lizard. The feeling lingered until the end of the night when a young kid who'd seen the assailant came in. We ended up talking music with the conversation coming around to the old Paradox (U-District, not Tacoma...) and The Edge of Quarrel movie. I went home sad and nostalgic that night...

So, tonight, Independence Day, I ended the social part of the evening talking for an hour or two in the kitchen with Liza's new bf, a nu-metal guy who vaguely understands DIY and hardcore/punk, but has toured and knows what it means to play loud music then get old. The night ended with K putting on 20 from Colera and Liza and her bf indulging us for about 1/2 the song. Nevertheless, I teared up as I thought about how it was the last song I ever played live. So, I'll try to avoid the semi-turgid prose and give you a few snapshots:

I honestly don't remember this show. We played so many at Camp Nowhere and eventually they were all packed to the rafters and some sort of nuts. It was so hot and close, these were the types of shows that got me into this. Maybe we influenced somebody there like Botch did at the Velvet Elvis did for me. It was what I wanted shows to be like. This pic kinda sums up the goofy, crazy energy that was at every show.
I want to say the funny thing about this pic is...but really there's so much. I'm drunk on a balcony in an apartment in the center of Paris in between the Iranian and Chinese embassies explaining to Rye where the bruise and knot on my head came from (basement show in the Latin Quarter where, packed to the rafters, Nate's drumset keeps moving and I held it in place as people spilled over me the entire set. At one point Jon cracked me in the skull with his head stock.) That same night in that same spot Ryan broke down crying because he was so happy. He couldn't believe that he was on tour and had just played an amazing show in Paris. All of these cute French girls crowded around to comfort him because they couldn't understand why he was crying...

Our last tour was rough. We did mas o menos 5 weeks with Elphaba around the country. As bad as it was (it's the only tour that does not shine in the flattering glow of memory), there were still great moments. We played an awesome show in Detroit, but really we played the same whether it was 10 kids freaking out or ninety. This pic kinda sums that up for me. It was a long day and not a lot of people, but I remember it because it seemed so quintessential...

I've talked about this show a lot this weekend. I didn't want to play it as I've always stubbornly resisted bar shows. I gave in to Ryan and Casey and I'm glad I did. It was the Akimbo record release show and one of our last. It was everything that I wanted out of shows. The place was packed, everyone had fun, and frankly, it reminded me of Europe.

I sit here now with a glass of bourbon reminiscing bittersweetly about it all. About how much has changed. How I work differently now. How my friends are half a world away or they work for me. About how I balance a checkbook and plan vacations. About how I worry about the future, my health, and my relationship. The Assailant was the apex of my youth where I didn't give a shit; I would quit any job or leave anything to play music, tour, to do it. Now, I work 60 hours a week running a business. Now I try to save money not to tour, but for the simple fact that I feel like I ought to have money in the bank. I don't write, I don't make music. All of my creative energy pours into the business and its management. My mental energy is drained by managing talented but willful personalities. I bring the same monomania to business that I brought to music, but with much different results. Ultimately, I am constantly exhausted and unsatisfied.

The Victory Garden

I started gardening for the first time last year when I was out of work. Inspired by the convolute ramblings of Derrick Jensen a my own dissatisfaction with my life in general, I spent last summer working at a DIY bike shop and a community garden. Here I am a year later, still unsatisfied, by trying my best to make it work. Here is a little documentation of the work at home. This first pic is of the bed that is mas o menos devoted to tomatoes and basil (purple and gree). There are a few Walla Walla sweet onions and a potato going as well. I moved the peppers (Anaheim and another hot type that I don't know that name of) over to the bed with the corn. The soil here is fantastic as we composted in the box all winter, added a bit of top soil, then called it good. I must say that in a lot of ways I am pretty lazy about this kind of thing; I simply threw all of our organic matter in the box without worrying about turning it too much or really doing much of anything. The worms seemed to have taken care of everything for me.

In this bed we cut the sod, added a bit of organic top soil, then put the corn, sweet peas, artichoke, and greens in the ground. A bit later I moved over here volunteer potatoes and squash.

Finally, over behind the beds where the soil appears to be the worst, we have planted more volunteer squash and potatoes, strawberries, and a blueberry bush.

So, we have soil of varying degrees of apparent health in each spot. It will be interesting to see how each group does. Philosophically, I think that getting the plants in the ground is the most difficult part. After that, it simply requires watering, occasionally weeding (although I keep this to a minimum as well), then enjoying the fruits and vegetables. Of course, everything could die, at which point I will been proven wrong about the amount of work required...

Mise en cinema

There's a great post over at IO9 about why these fake films within films are great (ostensibly because their absurd nature and obvious badness would deter anyone from making films like these...) Aside from the CG being bad and it being generally hackneyed, there is something disconcerting about this clip:

George Simmons in "Re-Do" from Justin Long