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.

Adventures in Nonfiction

Mimi was in town. It had been three years. We went out for Indian food and then coffee. Her dashing girlfriend Fiona was there too, in a vintage vest and tie. I had forgotten that Mimi was left-handed and that she didn’t drink coffee. She still had asymmetrical hair but now she grew herbs, she said, with a shrug, and did bodywork to take care of her fucked-up shoulders. She and Fiona were working on their respective books. Mimi said she was tired of hers, she wanted to write a different book, a series of essays about NGO-sponsored beauty pageants in which landmine victims were awarded solid-gold prostheses, and the for-profit marketing of women’s-prison-made handicrafts to consumers, and other confusing and/or obscene intersections of fashion and oppression. I told her I wished she would hurry up and finish the first book so she could hurry up and write the second.

We talked about how to get these things done when there’s no one around to tell you to do them. No TV, no video games, we agreed. At one point Mimi said that if she were rich she would probably just stay home and play World of Warcraft. We talked about teaching: Fiona presents key points of feminist thought to her students by showing them slides of cute boys. Seeing Zach Braff or whoever floating on-screen beside important tenets of post-colonial theory made them feel less anxious about taking Women’s Studies classes, she said, especially from someone who looked so queer. We talked about binge drinking, grade inflation, and the Midwestern post-adolescent’s lack of affect.

I told Mimi and Fiona how lately I’ve been tiptoeing into a local grassroots literary circle, a place I might someday like to belong. It’s mutually supportive and DIY and otherwise similar to the punk scene in many ways, but I still feel like a kid at my first show, or writing overconsidered letters to zine editors, all awkward and fumbling around with my wings folded behind me and dragging a little on the floor in front of the stage. It’s a strange place to find myself, after having stuck around long enough in punk publishing to have my name scratched on the walls, and to be accepted by people like they accept the walls. We talked about writing zines and blogs and books. I laughed because I had left MRR to attend a top-tier journalism school and now here I was, back again. I said it felt right, I missed it, I needed a smaller feedback loop than the huge film and book projects provide. They take so long and can be so lonely. Mimi shrugged again and said she needed to keep writing too — why did I think she hung on at Punk Planet until Dan Sinker took her off the masthead without even an explanatory email? And that’s also why she does the wonderful threadbared fashion site that’s of course about so much more. I asked, but what is the compulsion to share about, anyway? Why so first-person all the time? Is it some kind of disease? One we share with everyone on Twitter? We’re not 25 years old anymore, clutching Xacto blades, but we haven’t changed. We still keep courting the dynamic terror of creative self-doubt.

Fiona and I finished our coffee. I bragged about touching the Rosetta Stone. Then we talked about what was hot in YA fiction. Mimi recommended a series called Monster Blood Tattoo.

Notes!

1. Check out San Francisco’s Doomed this week. Yes. All ages. Yes. Maximum plus Thrillhouse plus bands plus baseball. Yes.

2. Surrender is still on tour. Go see them when they come through. OK, they’re peace punk, but they’re also doing…theater. I don’t mean like high school thespians exchanging lines from “Les Miz” in the cafeteria. I mean that they don’t just play, they perform, and they don’t break character, allowing you to fall under their spell. The blindfold still bothers me, but in a good way.

3. I am interviewed by the rejectionist about my film on Ursula K. Le Guin.

Arwen Curry and Ursula K. Le Guin (photo by Andy Black)

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Hey, it’s a new column! A web exclusive from our friend and yours, Arwen Curry. And there’s more where this came from, so stay tuned to this website…

Hello Again

“I feel no pain.”
—The Guilloteens, “Call on Me” (Memphis, TN, 1965)

“I feel the pain.”
—Big Star, “Try Again” (Memphis, TN, 1972)

I know it’s been a while since you’ve heard from me, but can we just not talk about it? I’m always working on three movies and one book. I always have a new band probably. Half of my friends moved to New York or L.A., and it’s sometimes hard to focus when they don’t come around to sit on the stoop. I had my reasons, and you’ve moved on, and that’s OK. But now I have my reasons again, so I hope you’ll read along. I missed you.

So let me tell you about New York earlier this summer. One night toward the end of my stay I went to see a band that used to be from Memphis. I ran into my friends playing foosball in the basement of the club. I was glad to see them, but I didn’t want to be in the basement, although the lighting was nice. They were engaged. Everyone was engaged. I’d spent hours walking up and down Broadway in the rain looking for red shoes to wear while preceding Megan down the aisle when I got home. Congratulations, Megan and John! I was learning to make boutonnieres from tutorials on the internet.

Upstairs, nobody was dancing, even though it was that kind of band. Their sound connects directly to major nerves. It’s organ-rich. Listening to the records, you can feel the heartbeats of the people in the crowd that must be gathering outside the studio to beat time with their heads against the doors. But now the band seemed tired, either that or just not loud enough; it was hard to tell. Their faces were etched, like caricatures of musicians, and their weariness, if it was weariness, made me want to take them out for milkshakes and fries. After a while, though, it became clear that it was not weariness but steadiness. They were in it for the full ride.

The dance floor thawed. Everybody was grinning, sweaty, packed in like sardines. The guy behind me seemed to be dancing pretty close, seemed to be touching me, was definitely touching me, lightly on the hips, like we were posing for a prom picture. It was a strangely anachronistic way to be touched. Was it just creepy, or also exciting? I couldn’t tell. I turned to face the groper and found him modestly good-looking, a total stranger. What the hell is this, I asked with my eyebrows. He smiled and shrugged. Pretty, he mouthed. The band wasn’t breaking a sweat. A gorgeous punk rock girl from San Francisco reached out her hand. I took it and danced off into the crowd. People, you can’t omit both a pronoun and a verb and still expect strangers to make out with you.

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You’ll have to buy the magazine to see everyone’s top ten records of the decade, but here, free of charge, is MRR movie reviewer Steve Spinanli’s Best Movies of the Decade list from this month’s issue (#320, January 2010). You’re welcome!

One Decade of Movies
By Steve Spinali

It seems half the world is paved with “Top Ten” lists, but even in spite of this, they’re awfully hard to resist. But with MRR movies, things are a little more complicated.

The ideal, of course, would be to concentrate on punk movies. The reality is that there aren’t that many punk movies, and the ones that are left aren’t necessarily good. Occasionally, features will include the likes of the Ramones or Pistols, but it seems that punk is still underground in a lot of ways. To help make up for the dearth of ace material, documentaries can be a great help. They’re comparatively low budget, under-promoted, and (at their best) complement the issues MRR fans generally find interesting. As a last resort, there are always lots of good foreign films to choose from. In making a Best of Decade list, then, it’s not so much an issue of hauling out the very best features; there are too many of those lists already. My idea of a good Top Ten would include great films that you may not have been turned on to yet. And if you haven’t, look no further.

In the first category, comprised of punk-oriented films, two documentaries stand above the rest. Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia directed The End of the Century (2003)— unquestionably the definitive document on the history of the Ramones; it includes funny and revealing moments from their early live gigs in New York, giving you a feeling for how emotionally explosive one of their gigs could be. Joey is no longer with us, of course, but after watching this film, we begin to appreciate the painful, real-life “daytime dilemma” that tore apart his personal life. The End of the Century is by no means a definitive or complete biography of punk’s greatest band, but you can’t help but understand their personalities more intimately after you look past their public image.

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