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Tuesday, February 06, 2007
FAMILY REUNION
The O'Jays
Family Reunion
Philadelphia Int'l : 1975
[Buy It]
HE'S MY SON (JUST THE SAME)
O.V. Wright
Memphis Unlimited
Back Beat : 1973
Available on: The Soul of O.V. Wright
MCA : 1992
[Buy It]
FAMILY AFFAIR
Sly and the Family Stone
There's a Riot Goin' On
Epic : 1971
[Buy It]
"Traditions and rituals can be the glue that holds a family together....Traditions give security to young people, providing a sense of continuity, predictability and identity. Traditions are the way families hand down information, beliefs and customs from one generation to the next. They give participants an opportunity to share important family values together."
-"Encourage Good Health Through Family Traditions," Amy Griswold and Rachel Schwarzendruber
"We asked parents about the family rituals they love best. Here are some of their time-tested favorites:
'Before I had kids, my husband and I planted a tree in our front yard and had our photo taken in front of it. Every year since, we've had a family photo taken in front of the same tree. It's so neat to look at the series of photos and see how much the tree - and our family (we now have a daughter, two dogs, and a bird) - has grown over the years!""
-Babycenter.com
Christmas 2004
It was time for one of those Matthews family photos. My mom wasn't enthused. "I'm not going. What the hell am I going to go for? Who's going to be in the picture anyway? Your father's not in the picture. I'll bet you half the people don't even show up."
We had one brother missing, disappeared five years ago. We had one sister dead from cancer, a brother living in California. But I was in town for the holidays, which boosted our totals. The picture would be dad's Christmas present.
We met at one of those franchise photo places, out at Prince George's Plaza. Prince George's County was named for Prince George of Denmark. It's where Len Bias's brother Jay and George Wallace got shot. However, there were few Danes at PG Plaza, locally known as Black Flint Mall. (This is White Flint Mall. This is Black Flint Mall.)
Things were disorganized as usual. Siblings spread out with cell phones to meet other siblings at other entrances. A group of us huddled in the discouraging line at the Picture People, filled with members of other families waiting to make memories. My younger sis and I were rolling our eyes and gossiping with our sister-in-law. Our feet started to get tired. It was noisy and hot. I started feeling hostile toward the people in front of us. My daughter was hungry and crabby, so I took her to the food court. A woman from the group in front of us had a young daughter and the same thought; we exchanged wry smiles at the Taco Bell.
Back in line, the woman approached me. "Are you Megan?" I was. "Do you know that man over there?" A guy waved at me. He seemed familiar. "Megan, it's Kevin." Kevin is my half-sister's mother's son. Or my father's first wife's son, not by my dad. The people in front of us were his family, his wife and their five kids. I hadn't seen him in years. We started introducing ourselves and making small talk. Then another woman came over. "Are you here for the Matthews family photo?" She was my brother Adrin's baby momma, there with his daughter Adriana. "Nice to meet you," I said.
I have the picture. I've forgotten the names of Kevin's kids. Three sisters that could have come didn't; only two of five brothers made it. There are twenty-five people in the photo.
August 2006
We'd lost another sister. Like my sister Renee, she'd died in her 40s from some sort of cancer. My younger sis emailed me about it and neither of us was sure how to spell her name. My sis remembered meeting her; I could only remember a photo. It had sat in a built-in hutch in the hallway of my childhood home, perched in its oval frame on a pile of National Geographics we bought at the AmVets, next to a copy of Mao's Little Red Book.
We'd lost another sister and dad's dementia was getting worse. It was time to take another picture.
My younger sis didn't come. "I'm sick of these family photos." The whole thing was scheduled around my being in town; I didn't feel I had the option to refuse. Plus there was a party and my dad was going to be there.
We met at my sister Marilyn's house, the house where my dad's mother had lived when she first came to the city. That part of DC, Shaw, had been the first stop for black migrants from southern Maryland; it was destroyed and left for dead in the '68 riots. Today, it's all Whole Foods and condos and martini bars. We were posing on the front steps for the photo, with my brother Greg yelling at curious passers-by, "Look! It's a black family, with white people in it" and "That's right, we own this property. We've been here 60 years, how bout you?"
A guy came up to me. He looked about my age. He said, "Hi Aunty. You remember me?" What could I say? "Of course I do." I gave him an especially warm hug, my mind racing. Aunty? Whose kid was he? I figured he had to be my dead sister's son. He was definitely one of us; he looked just like my oldest brother Michael. He introduced me to his 12-year-old son, who was being chased flirtatiously by my 9-year-old daughter. "You know, I felt weird about coming today, having been away so long. But then I told myself, that's your family, man. Even if they don't know you, they love you, because that's what family is all about."
I smiled idiotically. He said, "I had a lot of time to think about what's important in life while I was away." I suddenly understood that he'd been in prison. "I missed a lot of my son's life. I've got to set that right." And then, "My mother talked a lot about you. She was always proud of you. I have her memory book, where she wrote her thoughts while she was dying, and she wrote a lot about you. You really meant a lot to her."
As soon as we were done talking, I asked one of my brothers to tell me his name. He smiled. "It took me a while to figure it out. That's Anthony, Demetrice's son. Doesn't he look just like Michael?" He and his baby momma and his son are in the photo, right next to my dad.Labels: megan, memoir
posted by Megan
LINK |
Friday, January 26, 2007
CRY
Godley & Creme
Episode #34, Definitely Miami, 1986
[Buy it]
TAKE ME HOME
Phil Collins
Episode #23, Prodigal Son, 1985
[Buy it]
INTO THE NIGHT
Ace Frehley
cover of Russ Ballard's In The Night from:
Episode #4 , Calderone's Return: Part 1, 1984
[Buy it]
ANGRY YOUNG MAN
Ted Nugent
Episode #34, Definitely Miami, 1986
[Buy it]
VICE
Grandmaster Melle Mel
Miami Vice: Original TV Soundtrack
MCA : 1985
[Buy it]
I was a fan of Miami Vice from the beginning. Before it was cool. Way before I was cool. Before its glorious superficiality was ruined by the gloriously superficial mainstream. In fact, I was a fan from before the beginning. I recall, early in my sophomore year in High School, running manically into my math class and chalking in huge letters on the board:
MIAMI VICE SEASON PREMIERE, NEXT SUNDAY 8PM!!!!!!!!
I must have caught a TV promo the night before. I can't remember anything specific, but it's a safe bet it featured speedboats, convertibles, palm trees, piles of cocaine, snakeskin boots, Cuban-american guys in fake moustaches. And guns. Lots of guns. None of the other stuff, exotic as it was, caught my fancy. But I loved guns. I hadn't really discovered girls yet, but at that stage in my adolescence, guns triggered the same brand of chaotic physiological elation that sex-ed teachers awkwardly assured me I should be feeling about girls. I was specifically in love with submachine guns. The Uzi, of course, and various Heckler & Kochs. But my favorite was hands down the stumpy MAC-10. There was something utilitarian yet thrillingly impractical about its design.
I wasn't actually in love with guns themselves. It wasn't a fetish. I wasn't a creepy pre-Columbine kid, or one of those hetero-homo types, who fancied the fussy, feminine, razor-ad machismo of Llorenzo Llamas and limited edition replica bomber jackets. What really left me flush was gun play. The mad dance of exit wounds, muzzle flash, spent casings pinging off the warehouse bitumen. No one choreographs this dance in the editor's suite quite like Michael Mann. For Mann, the bullet in flight is an Objet d'Art.
Mann loved the MAC-10 too. With its short barrel and protracted magazine, the MAC-10 could introduce bullets into a scene faster and more inaccurately than any other weapon. And with Mann, the mastery was in the bullets that missed as much the ones that found the mark.
For 2 years, my brother and I, and a younger kid from the neighborhood, played "Vice" on our front porch. The rules were simple. One guy was Crockett. The other two were coke dealers. We had a prop briefcase of cash. Maybe it was a lunchbox. Then we would make the following exchange, using these exact same words every time:
"You got the stuff?"
"You got the money?"
Then there would be a pause, and then someone would panic and pull out a gun and then we would all kill each other.
That was it. TWO years. Sometimes I wore a blazer.
At some point I was in JC Penny or Sears with my mom, and convinced her to buy me a pair of mint blue canvas pants. The pants were pleated with a cuffed hem, a clean crease and a thick braided cord belt. The brand was "PCH", embroidered in an exciting broad sans serif type face, like Bank Gothic, and they were only $10. I felt pretty good in the carpool the next morning, with my PCH pants and a white sweatshirt and some sockless loafers.
My classmates soundly punished me for the getup. Someone got a look of the "PCH" logo and from that point on I was known as "Punk Crockett Homeboy." What was I thinking? These people clearly were not ready for my South Beach Marina Prep styles. I quickly and quietly returned to the dominant school fashions, of, well, New England Marina Prep: double up-turned pastel polo tees, docksiders, pleated Ocean Pacific pants, Vuarnet sunglasses.
My favorite episode of Miami Vice, hands down, was Episode 34, Season 2, "Definitely Miami."
Ted Nugent guest stars as Charlie Basset, a crooked drug dealer who lures clients out to the dunes where he shoots them, steals their cash, and buries them in their sports cars under the sand. In tracking Basset, Crockett, working deep cover as Burnett, begins a stormy relationship with Basset's stunning wife Callie. Callie appears willing to turn over and give Basset up to the cops. But Tubbs doesn't buy it. He warns Sonny that Callie's just playing him, that she will betray him. Sonny just refuses to believe it. He has to find out the hard way.
posted by James
LINK |
Monday, November 27, 2006
MI YIDDISHE MAMA
Andre Toussaint
Bahamian Ballads
c. 1955
Naxos World : 2002
[Buy It]
I called my parents on Thanksgiving. They had had a quiet holiday dinner at home.
"Yeah, your father's watching TV and I'm here on the couch resting." My mom is nearly 70. She works two jobs: deli cashier and department store clerk. She's on her feet 18 hours a day, 6 days a week.
"Ma, you didn't go anywhere today?"
"I haven't heard from any of these people. Well, that's okay. I don't need anybody to entertain me on the holidays. Hell, I'm just glad to have the day off."
"These people" were my father's other children, all 8-10 of them. (My mom disputes the paternity of certain siblings.) Technically, I was one of "these people"; my mom is actually my stepmother. Usually, though, I bat for my mom's team.
My mom continued. "I know Johnny was having something cause he asked your sister what her plans were. Well, I didn't want to go. I'm tired. I could have gone to Marilyn's, she called here, but I wasn't doing that. I cooked a turkey. It'll probably get dried up cause who's going to eat it?"
Mom says "your sister" meaning her daughter, the only sibling younger than me and the only other one who's half-white. In unkinder times, we were called "the mongrel children" by the older kids. (Johnny and Marilyn are "these people.")
"Ma, did anybody come by?"
"I invited Carolyn over. She brought macaroni and cheese for like 20 people. I mean, it's good macaroni and cheese, but who can eat all this food?"
Carolyn is my oldest sister. She raised a lot of the kids when my dad was between alliances -- I'd say wives, but we don't really do marriage. Every few months Carolyn and my mom stop speaking to each other. Apparently, they have negotiated a holiday detente.
I hear the doorbell ring on my mom's end of the phone.
"Hold on. Who is this ringing the bell this time of night?"
My dad opens the door. It's some guy asking for money. He says his car is broken down at the end of the block and he's got two kids to get home.
My dad has dementia. He's 82. I'm 600 miles away from my parents, listening on the other end of the phone.
Then the guy is gone. My dad gave him the money.
My mom says, "John, how can you open the door for some guy you don't know, late at night like this?"
"I've been knowing that guy 40 years."
"You don't know that guy. That guy is a bum, a scam artist."
"Everyone's a bum to you. That's that white supremacy in you."
"You know him? So what's his name then? And why is the car parked down the street? You walk down the street and see if there's a car."
"Why don't you walk down the street with me?"
"I'm not walking cause there's no goddam car and no kids neither."
The door slams.
"Look at this! He's gone out and locked me in here. Now if this bum comes sneaking in through the back door my ass is trapped in here."
"Well, Ma, if that happens, go upstairs and lock yourself in the bedroom and call the cops."
"I'm not doing that. I'll take the key out of my coat pocket and get the hell out of here."
Mom is a problem-solver, in her way.
"You see this? What kind of shit is this? If this was a stickup guy, he could push his way in here and I could get killed in the process. It just takes a guy to reach in his pocket, pull out a gun, shoot you in the stomach, and force his way in the house. He could be here waiting for me to come home from work, with the house ransacked, and then the two of us dead up in here. Right?"
Who could deny it? Then my mom surprised me. "I know who that guy is! That's the guy from the roof."
I'm all ears.
"This is about 4 months ago, in the summer. I must not have worked that night. I'm coming home myself, your father's out walking the streets. All of a sudden, here's this guy putting a ladder up to the roof. I'm thinking, what the fuck is this? I say to him, Excuse me? What are you doing? He says, There's an old man who lives here. I saw him walking down the street this morning and he told me he needs his gutters cleaned. I said, These gutters don't need to be cleaned. You get down off that roof. I mean, what am I going to do if this bum falls off the roof? And it's on my property?"
"He came to the house with a ladder? Did he have a truck?"
"No, he didn't have a truck. He told me that day he walked 20 blocks with the ladder."
I'm relieved. The guy doesn't seem very organized.
"He's what you call street slime. He doesn't think I recognize him. These type of people, that do this kind of shit, they think they're smarter than you are. But I'm facially very good with recognizing people."
I tell my mom to go make a police report and call me back. She does. My dad has come home and he's pissed.
"That man is no goddamn stranger to me. I used to do business with him."
My dad was a bookie for decades. He was a badass in his day. He's used to people asking him for money, especially his kids.
"You don't know that guy! Your father thinks he knows everybody. He walks up to people in the grocery store and starts talking to them. They don't know who he is."
"You don't know what the fuck you're talking about, you damn fool."
My mom talks over him, laughing. "He's telling me I can move out tonight. Hey, who's gonna pay the mortgage? I'm not moving out of my house. It's a lot of nerve here, a person tells me to move out of my own house."
The door slams. My dad's locked himself in the bedroom.
"Your sister doesn't even tolerate him any more, except just to be nice. I don't blame her. She says, I don't know why you stayed with him. She's probably mad at me about it. She probably has a klupp about it."
My mom is the queen of made-up Yiddish. I haven't heard this one before.
"Ma, what's a klupp?"
"It's a, it's just a thing. It's like something that's bothering you."
I ask her for the police report number. The desk sergeant didn't give her one. She promises she'll call the precinct and ask for the beat cop tomorrow, make sure the report's been taken.
I tell her goodnight. For the rest of the night, there's a klupp in my throat.Labels: megan, memoir
posted by Megan
LINK |
Thursday, October 12, 2006
IT TAKES TWO
Rob Base and DJ EZ-Rock
Profile : 1988
[Buy It from iTunes]
EVERY DAY IS HALLOWEEN
Ministry
Wax Trax : 1985
[Buy It from iTunes]
DON'T GO
Yaz
Upstairs at Eric's
Mute : 1982
[Buy It]
YOU MAKE ME FEEL (MIGHTY REAL)
Sylvester
Fantasy : 1978
[Buy It from iTunes]
Pure nostalgia today, folks.
My friend, my best friend, was just explaining to me how every guy I've ever dated was secretly gay and it reminded me of my first years in Chicago, back when I was a lonely virgin. I had an unerring eye for sensitive boys from French class, all of whom wound up coming out to me over romantic candlelight dinners. But they liked to dance and so did I, and we spent many wasted weekends shivering on the el platform on our way to Medusa's, this juice bar near Clark & Belmont that played lots of goth industrial, stuff like Sisters of Mercy and Front 242 and, of course, Ministry, the local godhead. Oddly, the place was filled with sailors most weekends, which was to none of our tastes. But after midnight, they'd start jamming the house music. By that time, the fuzzy navels we'd drunk in the dorm room had started to wear off, but we were loose and in the groove. And they'd always kick off the house set with Rob Base. So if you were flagging upstairs, trying to muster some enthusiasm for the 10,000th spin of "Bizarre Love Triangle," when you heard that yelp (yeah! whoo!), which I didn't know then was a James Brown sample, you'd bust it downstairs to jack your body with the Navy boys and the Wisconsin girls who'd driven in for a big-city weekend.
And these guys could MOVE: my friend Chris could snake it down to the floor like he didn't have any bones in his body. At 17, I was incredibly self-conscious. I'd always been large and sort of clumsy (a charming childhood nickname was "megaton") and I thought of my body as something potentially dangerous to innocent bystanders, myself included. But I'm also competitive, and I wasn't going to be outdone by a bunch of skinny boys. I learned to feign total confidence and take the floor like I meant it and they'd be egging me on: Work it, girl!
At some point, we discovered that gay bars could be extraordinarily lax in carding cute young boys. We started hanging out at this place, Windy City, which was like the gay bar for the rest of us. Not everyone had a sixpack; not everyone had rhythm. There'd be lots of guys in jeans and white sneakers, incredibly average-looking, waving their hands in the air like they just didn't care. I was usually the only natural-born woman in the whole damn place, which was fantastically liberating. No one was checking me out. No one cared what I did. And we could drink. So that's when I learned all my ultra-nasty moves. My friend Bill would be spanking my ass, I'd be humping his leg, and it was all just playing around. Try pulling that off with one of the sailors.
One night we took a road trip to St. Louis and went to a gay bar down there. We were upstairs checking out the drag show and all these men kept coming up to me, telling me how beautiful I was. I was drunk with compliments. But as we were coming downstairs, this truly gnarly queen poked me in the chest, yelling nasally, "Omigod! He's pretty!" My friends thought this was hilarious and I was reliving that moment for the next two years of college. They even gave me a drag name, Cafe au Lait, which I spelled Cafe Ole for added flair. That moment became the metonym for all of my ambivalence about being a woman. I always felt kind of like a drag queen when I dressed up in girl clothes. Girl clothes were for 120-pound nymphets and I was Megaton, Godzilla's annoying Jewish aunt.
Eventually, I realized that hanging out at gay bars was not going to get me laid. I started hanging out with the indie-rock crowd, which was much less, uh, colorful and often downright phobic. My friends were disappointed in me. They wanted me to cuten myself up, get out of the combat boots. I got political and they were bored by my manifestoes. And so, we just drifted apart. I haven't seen those guys in years. It's funny to think that I learned everything I know about vamping and tramping from a bunch of gay guys. Maybe it explains some things.Labels: megan, memoir
posted by Megan
LINK |
Thursday, June 22, 2006
MONA KI NGI XICA
MUIMBO UA SABALU
Bonga
Angola 72
Reissued on: Tinder Records : 1997
[Buy It]
Sometimes I get lonely and I feel sorry for myself. But then I remember Barbra Streisand's nose. My mom would use this nose to make a point: "You see how Streisand never got that nose fixed? She's not crazy. She's not going to take a chance and get her voice screwed up. So she's stuck with that nose. What are you gonna do?"
Point taken, mom. And so, with this in mind, I accept a certain degree of loneliness as an essential condition of my life. Lonely is my engine, the secret behind everything I do. Lonely makes me dress up to go to the library, but it lets me find an Ideal Friend inside a hardback cover. Lonely makes me talk to random people on the street, but it's why I know so many people, so many stories. Lonely makes me a magpie for wonderful, irrelevant things, and that makes me a person I like to be.
The trick is to make the lonely work for you. Lonely is a rupture with the world you're in, but if you use it well, it's also a door to other places, other lives.
I first heard Bonga in 1996. I was living alone for the first time since I'd left home and loving it. I had a sunny studio apartment near the lake that I couldn't really afford - not so fancy, I just couldn't afford much. I started work at 3, so I spent my mornings reading and writing, surrounded by the glow of hardwood floors. I couldn't afford CDs either, so I'd tape stuff off of college radio, diligently recording playlists for future reference. WNUR had this world music show, Continental Drift, that was so good I actually called in with a pledge during the inevitable fund-raising drive. I don't remember what I was doing when they played "Mona Ki Ngi Xica," or "The Child I Am Leaving Behind," but I remember I stopped and sat and listened. I put that song on the first mix tape I made in bulk, one of those crappy tape-to-tape-to-tape jobs I sent out to a handful of friends. At least one of those tapes is still kicking around; my college roommate stumbled across it when packing for a recent move. He'll tell you, it's a weird tape: Thinking Fellers and Funkadelic and Marian Anderson. And Bonga.
Bonga Kwenda recorded Angola 72 in Rotterdam; he'd been exiled for his affiliation with the anti-colonial insurgency, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. The album was banned in his homeland, offensive to Portuguese sensibilities on two counts: its lyrics described the desperate poverty of Angolans under colonial rule and its music contained coded shout-outs to Angolan national pride. Bonga's band back home was called Kisseuia, or "poor people's suffering." He wrote songs based on the traditional semba style, the ancestor or close cousin of Brazilian samba (depending on your read of the circular genealogy of Afro-Latin music). He included Angolan instruments like the dizanka, a bamboo-scraper-type beat-keeper that reminds me of the fish. Wait, is that what it's called, the fish? You can hear it in this song:
RIGHT ON
Marvin Gaye
What's Going On
Motown : 1971
[Buy It]
I don't know the lyrics to "Mona Ki Ngi Xica" - it's sung in Kimbundu - but the emotion needs no translation: the plaintive guitars, the throaty hum, Bonga's husky cries, all speak anguished accusation. In 1974, a coup in Portugal brought down the colonial government; in 1975, a newly independent Angola imploded into a 27-year civil war that left the country in ruins. For many Africans, especially Bonga's fellow exiles in Europe, Angola 72 and the follow-up, Angola 74, became landmarks in time, music made in an explosive moment and instantly imbued with history (see Marvin Gaye, op cit).
I didn't have access to that history or those memories when I first heard the song, but it haunted me. Little by little, I learned new stories - about the song, about Bonga, about Angola.
Maybe eight years after that first hearing, another friend who got the tape I made picked up a copy of Angola 72 on a trip to San Francisco. Hearing Bonga then called up a lost moment in my own history: a rough, disheveled time when it was easy and necessary to imagine a radically different life-to-come. I grew to love another song on the album, "Muimbo Ua Sabalu," about which I can say nothing except, listen.
Hearing Bonga changed my life. It wasn't a conversion experience; I just learned something. And because I had some time on my hands, and because I bothered, the Bonga spread. I even got a little of the Bonga back. Nice, huh?
But thinking about Angola 72 makes me revise my lonely thesis. Maybe lonely isn't quite right. Loneliness is too diffuse. Maybe what I'm really talking about is longing - for home, for a time long past, for a better tomorrow - whatever endlessly deferred dream traps you, arms outstretched, in the infinite present. It's longing that opens the door. It's the door left open, waiting for someone to come home. Lower the arms, shut the door, miss the chance? No, I'm stuck with the longing, I guess. What are you gonna do?
-by Megan MatthewsLabels: african, afro-latin, megan, memoir, world
posted by James
LINK |
Monday, June 05, 2006
CACTUS TREE
Joni Mitchell
Song to a Seagull
Reprise : 1968
[Buy It]
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO NOUNS
The Minutemen
Double Nickels on the Dime
SST : 1984
[Buy It]
CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION
T. Rex, c. 1972
Available on: 20th Century Boy
Hip-O : 2002
[Buy It]
The decades since the sixties have done a remarkable job of completing the sexual revolution. This is a generation of astonishing fellators. There's been nothing like them ever before among their class of young women.
- Philip Roth, The Dying Animal Another blind date, another dark night of the soul. I'm lying awake wondering why sexual liberation didn't really work for women and then I remember the time I went to this crazy commie party.
SUBBACULTCHA
The Pixies
Trompe le Monde
Elektra : 1991
[Buy It]
So right. It was college and I was idealistic; then it was grad school and I was serious. I was ready to be part of something new, better and true. What a relief to find a community dedicated to the liberation of the human spirit! Freedom - I've always had a weakness for it.
The left is a small, small universe. There are lots of people who quietly do useful work and there are some highly visible crackpots who exist mainly to promote a proprietary ideology. I put all the old-school commies in the latter camp: the Leninists, the Trotsky-loving Sparts, the Maoists hawking The Revolutionary Worker (Mao? MAO?) - I'm sorry, I couldn't take any of them seriously. I filed them under "world's most frustrating conversation" and left them alone.
But the left is a small, small universe, and friends of friends were doing labor organizing, which means working with some cadre of these old commies, who still have a foothold in the city of big shoulders and folding factories. So here I am, partying with the commies in the spirit of solidarity. And there's this guy. He's wearing a shirt covered with ruffles, his Russian peasant shirt. He's wearing coppery leather boots, fresh from Chiapas. He's the spirit of the revolution, armed and dangerous next to the punch bowl.
He must have pissed me off. Maybe he started monologuing on the labor theory of value; I hate when guys do that. I had something to prove and I got myself trapped in one of those interminable arguments about the crisis tendencies of capitalism and the revolutionary potential of the black worker. Eventually my competitive instinct gave way to fatigue and I had to flash my friends the Rescue Me signal. After I slipped away, Captain Revolution started probing for my particulars. The quote relayed to me was, "Man, I could spend the whole evening with her strapped to my lap." AS IF. Him with his Lenin and his vanguards and his ridiculous puffy shirt. What am I, some politically correct concubine? I'm throwing down on the Second International and all he can think is pop that coochie?
SPILLAGE
The Minutemen
Double Nickels on the Dime
SST : 1984
[Buy It]
It's not like lefty guys have a monopoly on being assholes. But that was the moment when I was truly fed up. No more smelly boys in Che shirts, trying to smash the state with their lack of grooming. No more condescending boys patting me on the head like a talking dog when I said something smart. No more ineffectual boys opposed to hateful bourgeois concepts like responsibility and reliability and the ability to get someplace on time. No more with these idiotic, quivering, fantasy-role-playing boys.
And I thought it was women who needed liberating. So what happened to the men anyway, where did they go? Are they locked in towers, longing for rescue, with a changeling race of elven child-men left in their stead? Who told these boys it was ok not to try? Most of them don't even try to try. And if women did get liberated, we're stuck in the Norma Desmond twilight world where we're big and all the men are so, so small. Like that Schoolhouse Rock where the girl grows giant and the boy shrinks and then she steps on him? That's basically my whole love life right now. Meanwhile, the boys are standing there like, I'm ready for my blowjob.
But really, I just meant to tell you about the commie party. I'm way too busy being free to get into all this.
Hasta la victoria siempre,
-MeganLabels: megan, memoir
posted by Alex
LINK |
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
HOLIDAY IN CAMBODIA
Dead Kennedys
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
Alternative Tentacles : 1980
Reissued: Manifesto Records : 2005
[Buy It]
I KNOW IT'S TRUE BUT I'M SORRY TO SAY
Violent Femmes
Hallowed Ground
Slash : 1984
[Buy It]
DISNEY'S DREAM DEBASED
The Fall
The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall
Beggars Banquet : 1984
[Buy It]
TOO MUCH TOO YOUNG
The Specials
The Specials
Capitol : 1979
[Buy It]
THE BABY SCREAMS
The Cure
The Head on the Door
Elektra : 1985
[Buy It]
Nostalgia is a regressive emotion, it's true. It's not the team I usually play for. But on a Saturday afternoon of a certain laziness, driving with your friend in her gas-guzzling SUV, cruising through the suburbs on your way to the mall so you can dress for success at less-than-department-store-prices - in that moment, allowances must be made. Because I wasn't going to be this way. I wasn't going to have this life. I was cool, dammit, cool smoothed out on the intellectual tip with a punk rock feel to it. I played bass. I read Marx. I had scary hairy armpits and a severe expression.
It was the 80s and rebellion meant something. Which is why, in 1985, when I was going on 15 and had finally figured out the vital importance of being cool, I took $50 of my hard-earned violin teaching money and bought 5 cassettes by bands I'd never heard. Oh, I'd done my research. I'd watched all the hot girls with weird eye makeup for clues. What was doodled on their notebooks? What stickers were posted in their lockers? I packed up the embarrassing residue of the past: Diana Ross, Teena Marie, The Commodores. I took the bus to the Mazza Gallerie and selected the emblematic goods of the new me.
So there we are, my friend and I, blasting DK as loud as we can stand it, shouting along with "Holiday in Cambodia" as we venture west to discount shopping. Youth. Enjoy it while you can. The clock's ticking on your juvenile ass.
- by Megan MatthewsLabels: megan, memoir
posted by Alex
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Thursday, August 04, 2005
VEGETABLE MAN
Pink Floyd
Unreleased Single : 1969
PORPOISE SONG
The Monkees
Head Soundtrack
Columbia : 1968
[Buy It]
DARK GLOBE
Syd Barrett
The Madcap Laughs
Harvest : 1970
[Buy It]
The first time I heard Pink Floyd, or at least the first time I knew it was them, I was at the Ground Round with my family. It was back when they played old movies while you ate, talkies mostly, and they brought baskets of peanuts and popcorn to the table. The best part was that you could throw the peanut shells on the floor. Not "could." You HAD to. It was part of the whole thing. A peanut shell mandate. This took me some getting used to. I was a dirty kid, wore my red turtleneck with stains on it four days a week. But I didn't throw stuff around. I was learning the difference between dirt and disarray. These peanuts were both things all at once, and it was disorienting and exciting.
And then this one night amid the forced mess, there were these kids singing. I had never heard children in stereo, unless you count Sesame Street. But this wasn't that, this wasn't church. This was dark and terrifying and bad. Kids weren't supposed to say this stuff. "They just got some kids to sing on the record," my older brother Jeff said, when I asked who they were. "It's from that Pink Floyd movie." I nodded. I was nine, he was twelve. It was cool to talk to Jeff about music. I didn't want to screw it up with more questions.
It may have been a week or a month or even a year later that I watched The Wall. "Who's Pink Floyd?" I asked my brother later. "He's that guy in the movie," he said, "It's about him." That was all he said, but what it meant to me was that The Wall was a documentary about a musician Pink Floyd. A dead rat and some other hard things in childhood forced him down a very dark road. I had never seen madness before. I squinted and squirmed and rewound, watched him shave off his eyebrows over and over again. Set up the toy airplanes. I watched the family room door, knowing my mother wouldn't like this, though I wasn't sure why. I loved this boy, this man, wanted to hug him even when he became a Nazi. He was having a hard time.
Imagine my surprise when Bob Geldof showed up on MTV a couple years later hosting Live Aid. "I thought that guy was Pink Floyd," I said to my brother, who howled and howled, stopping long enough to sputter something about "I Don't Like Mondays."
And then it completely unraveled. Of course it wasn't real. How could I have been so stupid? A lot of things began to fall apart and make sense and fall apart again. I had already learned the truth about Sergeant Pepper's and Tommy and the Monkees, but this was different. This was the beginning of the part of my childhood where doubt and reason and hope would have to fight it out. Not only was there no one named Pink, not only was The Wall not a documentary, but this Geldof guy wasn't even in the band.
This trauma erased Pink Floyd from my consciousness for a while. In high school I heard REM cover "Dark Globe" on a flexidisc insert in Sassy magazine. I promptly sought out The Madcap Laughs. This wasn't easy back then. There was definitely no asking Jeff, and I'd be laughed out of town if I asked the guy at Newbury Comics about something from Sassy.
But I found it. My long-awaited reunion with my first lunatic. All I had were the cover art and the record. I'm sure there were books and articles, but I didn't read them back then. I just wasn't that concerned with anything but the songs and who I believed Syd to be. A sweet soul too fragile for this world, who lived on a mushroom with some elves. I loved him. I had no interest in elves, didn't believe in them at all, but I knew that Syd did. So I loved them, too, for keeping him company.
In the late nineties I tried to track down some of his writing or artwork for the literary magazine I edit. In one of my first extensive internet searches ever, probably using Hotbot with Netscape, I found out what we all know: he went crazy, probably from the acid. Lived with his mother until her death, at which time he burned all of his art books and journals, along with a tree and a fence. He had rabbits and cats but forgot to feed them. He was beautiful and young and full of everything and then he went away to be fat and away, maybe crazy, maybe just over it.
My private love affair with Syd, blown wide open by the fucking internet. It used to be that you found stuff out because you looked hard or asked around and people told you things. It's still people telling you things, but now it's written down and you have to deal with the fact that things you like are also liked by a ton of people with freaky fan sites. In this case mostly people who also love Pink Floyd, which isn't something I can support.Labels: classic, joanna, memoir
posted by Joanna
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