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Write what you know, you know? And what I know is what I do and what I am and what I like. Which often times leads to a string of references that sure as hell can be construed as scenester bullshit, me namedropping.
Which might very well be true.
And then there's the added question of the validity of said drops, whether the context that I use references in is the one that the people I'm quoting or dropping intended. The whole question of theory comes into play, and hot on its heels is the quandry of interpretation vs. intent. Whether certain characteristics that I assign to such things are valid and therefore right on because of the simple fact that I have assigned such values. Whether the assignment in and of itself lends itself to validity.
Word soup.
Let me explain:
I have been getting a lot of reviews, way more than Adhesive X, the old zine, ever got. It's because I'm more motivated and don't have to split duties up because I've got all of them firmly on my shoulders and it's a weight that makes me pretty happy.
These reviews have pretty much uniformly hitting the broad categorization of ``personal zine,'' which isn't as cut-and-dry as it sounds. Much like the word ``emo'' is an umbrella both for:
1) sensitive bands who play with the loud vs. soft dichotomy into the ground, and
2) the spastic screamy bands with hand-screened 7' covers who just drop a ton of feedback on yr. lame ass straight up and don't stop, all the bands that look at San Diego like it's Mecca for kids who look like Romulans.
I'm doing it again. But bear with me.
``Emo'' is a catch-all phrase used by lazy reviewers who don't know shit about shit, mostly. Who don't have a musical background that spans back as little as three years. Comparing some band to a band that's actually derivative of another band is derivative in and of itself, you know what I'm saying? And that says nothing about the genre as a whole.
So, personal zines are personal, right? Well, yeah. But the whole spilling thing that I'm doing here is a hell of a lot different than writing about personal politics or stories of a band on tour or something. So I wonder; my thoughts branch out and I think about other zines and what the deal is.
Influence? Well, yeah. It's there sometimes. Little things that I think are rad creep into my writing based on stuff that I have picked up from one of the gajillion zines I usually read during the course of any given week. It's not so blatant that you'd notice, but it's there. And I'm not going to name names, because that'd be just for the sake of it.
The wonder comes in when I look to certain touchstones that don't claim to be true or false. There's just all of this writing, which might very well be a big stream of bullshit, for all I (or you) know. Tales of living in houses with guns going off all the damn time, hopping trains all over the country and getting wasted on Schlitz in the ghetto. Stuff that friends and I have reading disbelief. No one can live like that and have that much cool/funny/damaged/fucked/interesting stuff happen to them, can they? Stuff like that. The wonder pulls me under, though, into the underbelly where the real storytelling takes place, and it's the craft and delivery more than the fact of the matter that does it. And then it doesn't matter.
The one year anniversary of my job came and went pretty much without much notice. I mentioned it, compulsive as I am about most dates, and realized that from now `til when I leave Boston, most of the time that I wonder what I was doing a year ago I'm going to be put right back to where I am. I was in that fucking store.
Still, though. It was different enough so that it was a little bit fun, out of the ordinary. That morning, I walked the ten or so blocks from Jan's house to the Central T stop where I bumped into Binky. We rode the train in together and met up with Dave at the door. We were all on time, right on time.
The rest of the day passed, just like it always does. Register for me, ringing again. Year one.
Right after work on Thursday I took the train over to South Station to catch a bus to Concord. From there I was going to take my mom's car the next day and head over to Dover to check out a potential apartment for when (if) school starts again.
The bus ride was cool. I had a few tapes of records I've bought recently to listen to, a stash of good 25 cent comics that had come into the store a few hours before I left. Lots to read. Plenty of space, too. No one was sitting next to me.
I stared out the window with Jawbreaker playing in my headphones and thought about all of the times I had taken the bus to Boston from either Concord or Durham, intent on doing some record shopping and just walking around in a place that wasn't New Hampshire for a change. I tried not to look at my reflection in the glass because I didn't want to see what my expression was as the behemoth with me on it bolted for the border and right back to the beginning.
This weather makes me think of the past. Specifically, a few exes of mine. Always does, though this time, autumn, doesn't directly relate to any of them. Wasn't dating in autumn any of the times....something about the slow change to grey that just evokes in me memories of things that have passed on, I guess.
I'm just coming to terms. The need to vilify is not in my body right now. Usually there's something somewhere and I don't usually think even my best friends see it. It's buried and it comes out in small bits spread out over long, flat expanses, but it's there. Usually. For some reason, now, that vessel in me is empty, for which I am very grateful, though I have no idea where it went or whether it will come back.
Puts things into focus more than anything. Little gems of conversations with these women who, initially, at least, I had a very good time with comes into my head a little more often now than any other time of the year. Said gems have the dark tar of masochism wiped clean so that I can see the value of some of the things that were said clearly.
One such stone, in particular, came to light last spring, over the phone from the old house in Allston. Thoroughly frantic and full of forceful feelings of weight pushing on the top of my skull, I called this one woman, one ex, and asked her, skipping right over the initial smalltalk that comes up in most phone conversations with anyone, if my expectations were too high. If I was expecting too much out of people. My friends.
She told me that expectations are never too high. It's a matter of whether the people are in a place where they can provide well for you.
Whatever is necessary for me to leave this place (again) has to come from me, I guess. Maybe I can ask for help if I need it. But I haven't asked, thus far. So it's all the same right now.
So I am pretty much at the point right now where I will buy any fanzine at the record store. I love to read, to write. It helps to read other people's stuff.
Way less stuff excited me now than even a few years ago. It's not due to any one thing... ...part of it is that I've read so many zines by this point that I'm a little bit desensitized. Another is that a lot of the magazines are as fucking homogenous as a box of vanilla wafers. Same bands, same typefaces, same fifty records reviewed. Same ads.
I get excited when graffiti magazines come into the store. Trying to decipher the letters that are so intricately represented makes graffiti an interactive (and rewarding) process for me. My newness to the whole thing makes everything fresh.
The coolest thing is seeing photos of all of the amazingly detailed pieces and thinking how the writers covertly threw everything up under cover of darkness and managed to elude any kind of detection from the authorities... trainyard attendants, cops, whoever.
My folks told me over the phone that Thanksgiving wasn't going to be at my grandmother's house. Shocked? Yeah. As long as I have been alive, both Thanksgiving and Christmas have been there. They told me more about it when I came home as we all sat around Sunday morning, reading the paper and drinking coffee at the kitchen table.
``Grampa came down last Sunday to have coffee,'' my mom said, ``and I asked him about Thanksgiving.'' She paused and smiled and I understood what was going on right away. The same way that every year there has been the same question, so that Grampa could talk a little bit about Grammy getting things ready for the lot of us to go over to the house. She got ready slowly for weeks to compensate for her age slowing her down.
``He told us that he'd pay for everyone to go to the Cat and the Fiddle [this restaurant in Concord that my grandparents and a lot of Concord's senior citizens dig, for some reason]. I told him no.'' My mom shook her head. ``No no no no.''
``Why can't Grammy do it?''
``She's slowing down.''
I nodded and took a sip of coffee. Wasn't much to say about that. She had still done Thanksgiving last year even after breaking her hip when she fell in the bathtub. I guess she was slowing down.
``So it's going to be here.''
``Yes it is. It certainly wasn't going to be at Aunt Kathy's house.'' I laughed. Aunt Kathy doesn't cook at all. Uncle Jerry wears those pants. He digs it.
``Cool. So Uncle Jerry's going to help out, right?'' Visions of Uncle Jerry puttering around Grammy's pantry and checking on the turkey popped into my head.
``No. This is my house; I'll cook.''
``Wow. I....I guess I just assumed, that since he helped out up there.......''
``I don't need the help.''
Grammy did, I realized. And even though Jerry digs it, well...Grammy is probably the stubbornest person I know. I never thought about how Jerry helping out had started.
Grammy's slowing down. Has been much more than I realized before.
I don't see Abby enough. We're both busy with our respective trips.
Maybe once every two or three months, tops, aside from seeing her at a few shows a month. And shows don't count. It's nice to see people and say hello and chat, smalltalk, but there's no real conversation or connection that can go on when some band is playing loud enough to drown thought, let alone speech.
The last time me and Abby really hung out, we went first to Chinatown to get food at this rad truckstop, then we wandered through the Common and the public garden until we got to Kenmore Square. I hopped the train and she grabbed a bus.
This time around, after a week of planning, we met up at Curious Liquids. I hadn't been there for a while, I realized as I sat at a table in the window, reading the new issue of Your Flesh. I thought back to when the last time was and found all of my memories tainted with the most important time: the day I got hired at the record store, post-interview and snowstorm, sitting downstairs watching Pee Wee Herman videos on the huge TV, savoring my last few days of freedom. About a year ago, I thought, shuddering a bit. Yikes.
Abby and I went walking around looking at all of the statues in the Common. She knew a lot of the people depicted because of a few classes that she took. Religion, in particular, seemed to weigh heavily in the placement of the statues. We walked towards the ice rink, already open for the winter, and we started talking about the absurdity of Christian Scientology starting when Mary Baker Eddy ate shit ice skating and cracked her head on the ice.
Our conversation rolled and flowed as we walked form one end of this city to the other. Strange, I thought. A lot of my free time, days off seem to consist almost solely of walking around. This place is far bigger than any other town I've ever lived in, which is part of it. The other part seems to be who I'm walking with.
The whole purpose of my trip to New Hampshire was to check out this one apartment that my friend Chris and some of the dudes from the New Jersey Fairplan live in. They have an extra room there and are all nice guys... probably the only thing even remotely resembling a punk rock house in Dover. I wanted to see what the scoop was.
I pulled up onto New York Street and parked my mom's car. Two doors down from where I had lived before, I thought... funny about things like that coming back to me.
There was a note on the door from Chris, explaining that everyone was at class or was asleep, that I should come back around one. I stuck a RZA sticker on the door to let him know I had been there and then walked over to Cafe on the Corner to get a cup of coffee and kill some time. A half-hour isn't too bad, I thought.
I walked in and got in line. The same guy that had been working there when I moved last year was behind the counter.
``What's up, Mike? Still in Boston?''
``Yeah. I'm coming back to finish up.''
``You're not done?''
``No, man. I signed a lease and then found out I was two classes short. So I'm going to finish them up. I'm here to look at apartments.''
``Do you have any leads?''
``Yeah. New York Street.''
``Cool. Hey, what can I get you?''
I got my coffee and sat down and leafed through a copy of Yankee magazine just to pass the time before I could check the place out. Gone for so long, yet nothing, it seemed, had moved an inch. I wondered about my movement. My inertia.
Three days off in a row, again, found me walking the same streets just to get out of the house. I had stared at a blank screen for long enough so that the screen saver came on. Time to go walk around, look for magazines or something to help pass the time.
There's hardly ever anything new, though, because I walk the line so fucking often that accumulation isn't possible. But still, headphones on, trying to absorb something new, waiting for some heavy-handed syncronicity, wishing that someone was around to talk to. But, at the same time, digging the repetition and the time that I have to myself.
I usually bring something to read on the bus to work. A lot of mornings, though, I don't have the concentration it requires to absorb anything even slightly substantial. I'm just too sleepy.
So I've been looking out the window a lot.
This one morning I didn't bring my walkman or a damn thing to read, intent on watching everything pass by out the window of the bus, I wanted to see every little detail and be able to absorb it in as unhindered a manner as I could muster.
I climbed on the 501 and sat down, checking out all of the cool old wood houses around Oak Square, then the graffiti that started as a trickle but grew in volume and size as the bus drove down the Mass Pike.
I got quick glances of a bunch of really cool, elaborate pieces out the window as we got closer to the trainyard. I wondered if the kids doing the tags did trains, too, or just went to the `yard because of the high visibility factor that comes with being near a major highway.
Right near the Sports Depot I noticed a piece that was completely out of place among the big, gnarly multi-colored pieces. It was a scrawl, really: a dude with mohawk and a crowbar, smiling and drunk. I knew what it read before I read:
Scam Punks. Miami, FL.
At some point, Iggy Scam had hopped a train and wound up in the big trainyard less than a hundred yards from the old house on Wadsworth. He had thrown up his tag to let people know he had been there. I have no idea how many people are actually going to see that mohawked guy and realize what it denotes. I haven't met anyone besides myself who has even read Scam.
All the stories of trainhopping and guns and punk rock that had occasionally seemed more than a little bit suspect suddenly gelled in my head. The graffiti made everything true. Valid. All of the writing on the wall had been put there, suddenly, as a means of documentation.
The fact of the matter is that that piece of graffiti put more light in my day than almost anything that has happened to me recently. I gleefully dropped the name for the rest of the day and everyone at work was, of course, clueless, but that didn't stop me. I just wandered around the same CD bins I have been friends with for a year, mentioning the name of the guy and his zine. And even though no one knew what I was talking about, I think they saw how happy I was. They gave as much as the place allowed.
Place/Time
