MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL
Bandmates require time, attention, patience, forgiveness, stimulation, trust, and a general sense of commitment, same as a partner, and I believe that band relationships are just as important as any romantic relationship. They’ll become a part of your life, good or bad, and if you’re going to stay together all these things need to be […]
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Sid Lives (Actually, He Doesn’t) Kenmore Square in Boston (forever immortalized in LAST RIGHTS’ “So Ends Our Night”) used to be a much more happening place—it was seedy, it was grimy, it could be a bit dangerous. I’ve written about this in the past. Anyway, those days passed a long time ago. It’s been (or […]
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Sound Guide 2: The Mix Welcome to the second part of my sound guide series. This month, I’m bringing a topic that was requested by a reader. It’s also a highly relevant topic that always comes up in conversations about sound. You can have a perfect grip on all technical aspects, high end mics and […]
Read full "Europe: A Beginner’s Guide" column
Where were you when you heard the news that Maximum Rocknroll was going to be ceasing publication after the next few issues? I saw the announcement in my inbox while I was walking around a grocery store in Houston, Texas, of all places—back for a really short visit to the city that I grew up […]
Read full "Futures and Pasts" column
I was dismayed and saddened to hear about the end of MRR as a zine. I will write more about this in my final column next month. Let it be known, I had zero input on this decision, I am just a contributor. My year end top ten didn’t make it into the Top Ten […]
Read full "Fin de SiÁ¨cle Angst" column
From the introduction to the first Teaching Resistance column in 2015: “Though the institutions of education are historically problematic and often oppressive, students who have experienced them as outsiders’ understand the importance of learning from teachers who have struggled with the same systems as outsiders themselves, and who have developed radical notions of what education […]
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“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” —Karl Marx The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852 “There’s no Left left.” riffing on Gertrude Stein Does history repeat? Are we living through a rerun […]
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Autobiography of a Trans Punk in 2000 Words 1985 or 1986. I learn about shame through Jem and the Holograms, a cartoon about an all-woman band led by a singer with pink hair. Ostensibly a boy, I know I’m not supposed to want to watch this, so I have vague and sporadic memories of being […]
Read full "I Don’t Think That I Need to Sit Here With You Fucking Dildos Any More" column
Farewell Maximum Rocknroll, We Hardly Knew Ye Hearing the sad news about the changes MRR would soon be going though, I had a very difficult time finding motivation to compile a column for this month. It may seem strange to some to have been affected so heavily by such news, but few things have made […]
Read full "Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel" column
Harm Reduction and Pregnancy By now we all know that there are only a few months left of physical MRR so I am going to use the last few issues to talk about some things that I’ve always wanted to address in this column but haven’t gotten around to yet. This month, it’s harm reduction […]
Read full "Overamped: Harm Reduction for the Modern World" column
“Everything is infinite, nothing is eternal” —Martha Well. I got The Email today. I couldn’t quite believe it until I spent the rest of the day lying in bed and listening to Dork Rock Cork Rod and crying. It’s kinda stupid, I guess. Or at least that’s how it would seem to most of the […]
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I refuse to accept that punk is less appealing to kids than it was in previous decades. Gigs are still just as slimy, dark, and angry as they ever were, and I truly believe that teenagers live for dirty, angry, dumb garbage. But, as I’ve gotten older, the crowd at your average show started looking […]
Read full "Generally, I Don’t Speak Ill of the Dead" column
Ruthless criticism of all that exists! Nothing is immortal and the future is the only real thing! I was not going to eulogise. I called Brace from a busted payphone in the lobby of a hostel in the Mission in 2008 to deliver him some punk post. I apologetically jammed a copy of my zine […]
Read full "No More Bad Future" column
