Seven for Five

Tonight the bands are seven for five bucks, mostly unremarkable, but the kids have great plumage as they sway and flirt in the courtyard out back. One of them takes a long pull off a PBR and says to her friend, “That looks like the guy who stuck his hand in the blender at my house last night.” Inside a longhair stands taking off his clothes in the corner. A tall person dancing by the stage smiles like a young John Doe, lighting up one whole side of the room. I sit for a while by myself sort of not knowing what to do with my hands, which feels the same as it always has, except that now I’m not so self-conscious about being self-conscious. Instead I spend a few minutes enjoying the awkwardness. This is the feeling people drink to suppress, but they shouldn’t bother. After all, who cares? Nobody cares. And even if they did, who cares?

I drink anyway. I’m talking to a woman with impossibly (not too strong a word) thick black braids and a complexion that may one day, if she doesn’t take precautions, be considered “ruddy” but is now a smooth toasted rose. She’s just come down from hiking the Pacific Coast Trail. I ask if she gets stuck talking to annoying creeps when she’s walking alone. She says yes, that does happen, but it’s not so bad in the context of the loneliness of the trail. I ask what goes on in your head, hour after hour of walking in silence. She says you think about music and sex a lot. She says it takes about a week for the noise and slogans and pop-culture detritus to slough away, but she doesn’t tell me what replaces it.

Rayos X (photo by Paul Curran)

As we talk I’m thinking about getting older in the scene. The things that change. How it starts to seem like a good idea to frame things instead of just taping them to the wall. How you have less time for anything that feels like you’ve heard it before. How clichés taste like turds in your mouth. How taking things slow seems nice, even exciting. How you no longer pretend you can get away with not flossing. How instead of worrying about what you’re going to do with your life, you worry about whether you’ll have to do it alone. Unless, that is, you’ve already set up house.

After seven bands’ worth of no ins-and-outs the floor is a slick rink of sweat and beer that a few wasted kids are skating across arm-in-arm. Everyone is clearing away from the edges of the pit, so they get farther and farther out, and I feel bad that no one will create that flexible human rope to enclose the space. It occurs to me that the pit is just a manifestation of the desire for boundaries from an indulgent community. We want there to be some guidelines to go apeshit inside. The kids are flinging themselves out into space to see who will push them back into the sweaty mess. Spinning so fast or charging so hard they fall, just to be reassured someone will pick them up. It’s sometimes more entertaining than the band, but not when the band is Rayos X, from Los Angeles.

Email me. Mail to PO Box 170291, SF, CA 94110.

Virtually Invisible

Last week the New York Times Magazine published photographs by Pieter Hugo of foragers in Agbogbloshie, a slum in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Here human beings hunt for sellable computer components in a smoking wasteland of toxic waste and ash. The computers they’re picking through were sent as parts of foreign aid packages, but end up being more useful to people as raw materials: they can sell the precious metals inside. I looked at the face of a fourteen-year-old human being crouching on a ruined apocalyptic surface and thought about the many hours I spend in front of my laptop working through some idea about the world. Sometimes what I’m imagining, sitting there, is some version of the apocalypse, but not this.

When I’m living my punk-capitalist life, eating and drinking and buying shoes and reading magazines, I try to take account of the real value of what I’m consuming — a value that takes account of the real labor, danger, and terror that went into making and delivering a product, as well as the pulse of my desire for it. I don’t try as hard as I should, or as hard as I used to, but I try. When I sit to write about it on my computer, on the other hand, I enter an abstract state, as if I were communicating directly to the air, not using a tool at all. The packaging of our devices, increasingly lightweight and abstract, further exaggerates this feeling that the computer (phone, etc.) is not a physical object in the same way as other objects, but somehow an extension of our own thoughts.

But on the other side of the near-magic of these intimate machines is the expression in the eyes of the fourteen-year-old on the dead land of Agbogbloshie. Technology makes waste, and the waste ends up in the laps of the poor. Same as it ever was.

•••

People are drinking Coke in San Francisco. Yelling in the streets, staggering shirtless. The fog’s burned off, which means a difference of thirty degrees. It’s not like there’s no summer here, regularly, but it’s suppressed — it’s like somebody muffled it with a wet rag. When they lift the rag it roars back and everyone wants to immediately get busy. Half the neighborhood is assembling ships on wheels and cars with sails in preparation for a big wild party in a distant desert that has a real effect on life and money in San Francisco. The rest of us are enjoying the precious warm nights smelling like clover, like trash and suntan lotion, like motorcycles, like smoke and jasmine in the future, jasmine to come.

Summer tours came through. At the house show the tenants piled all the furniture in the kitchen and ripped the doors off of parts of the house and hammered them onto other parts of the house. The arrangement reminded me of somewhere I had lived as a kid, somewhere in Hayward. Trash kept handing me caffeinated beer. Fugitive Kind put their best guts into their last song. Opt Out’s Dan Zia did many spastic half-flips and played a shocking tug-of-war with some kid’s cane. Then everyone was dancing to Chicago’s Daylight Robbery, dripping with sweat. I’d seen them a while back in New York and thought they were X-like, which now struck me as clearly not quite right. Nuclear Family from Albany rocked it, and charmed us with a cover of “Class War.” I wondered if they had a local cover for each town — nice trick. Somehow nobody was bleeding. Around the corner from the show light poured from a storefront, where boxes were piled high with free food. It was like a socialist dream state: the destruction of walls, the redistribution of bread. Everybody was eating handfuls of marionberry pie and bedsheets of lavash.

It was summer for four days. On the last of them I went to Grass Widow choir practice in a twenty-year-old warehouse space with five levels of lofts connected by spidery stairs and firemen’s poles to slide down to the ground. Someone rolled up the delivery doors for the heat and we saw the sunset and across the street the freight trains hauling aggregate to Nevada. We were standing in three groups of six or seven women and a few little girls. I started in bronze but ended up in gold, the middle group, with Ivy and Priya. The band was already doing three-part harmony. It started getting dark, and hobos gathered outside the doors to watch. During the part where the gold group sang “aaahhhh,” the train whistle went off. The strings arrived.

Write me. PO Box 170291, San Francisco, CA 94110.