I’ll Quit the Bitching On My Blog and Stop Pretending Art Is Hard

I want to say a few words about the Occupy movement and about ukuleles.

This isn’t a blog about politics. I’m honestly not a very politically-minded person. I don’t like politics, honestly, because more often than not it’s a divisive topic that makes people try and beat the (usually) metaphorical shit out of each other with their beliefs.

But Occupy is more than that. Occupy is, from my perspective, a highly visible symptom of a systemic problem that’s choking the life out of this country and our culture and our everyday lives. Occupy is a reinvigoration of the heart of the nation, and I’m sorry that I just rhymed, but the point still stands.

“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

Thomas Jefferson said that in 1787, in a letter to William Stephens Smith, a member of New York’s House of Representatives. If that isn’t a pretty decent description of Occupy – at least, the ethos if not the behavior – I’m not sure what is.

But what are we protesting? Why are we taking arms against this sea of troubles?

Why am I about to publicly state that I, a student at a prominent business school, stand with the Occupy movement?

Let me talk about ukuleles, and specifically an amazing song about them which is NSFW and I think you should blast as loud as the speakers on your office computer can go anyway.

For too much of the 20th century, I think we were, as a culture, told that art is the purview of “artists” – specialized people who suffer or bleed or have some unique spark in their minds that lets them Create. We, the masses, can only watch the art be made, and then we need to pay the artists so that we can enjoy their creations. It was all about the performance, not the community.

Now, I want to say really quickly that I completely believe in compensating artists for what they do. Hell, I’m a writer and a musician, and I put a lot of work into those things and would love to sustain myself with them. I paid five bucks to download the MP3 of that Amanda Palmer song, which you can just get for free [here] or listen to through that YouTube link or do any number of hinky things to get a copy of. I didn’t need to pay for it – I did it because I appreciate Amanda as an artist and want her to have my five dollars.

My problem is the cognitive disconnect between artistry as a profession and the misconception that Only Paid Artists Can Do Art Things.

That’s bullshit, and I think the ukulele is a great metaphor for this. We can all pick one up, fuck around on it, and have a good time. Make yourself happy, make friends smile, have something to all sing along and laugh with. You don’t always have to rely on professionals to entertain you.

It’s not just with music, either. We all are becoming more and more hyperspecialized, because in this economy we’re told we need to stand out, be some unique thing that nobody else is. Well, I’m fucking confused, I thought the point of being alive was to be a unique person.

I love specialization. I love the fact that there are people out on the Web that I can get ahold of who do totally different things from me, and we can collaborate and accomplish what I’m incapable of doing. But I think that’s a terrible way to do everything in my life. Become a generalist. Go pick up that ukulele, learn how to make an omelet and write a sonnet, and then go ride a mountain bike.

We Occupy because we’re sick of this world that forces us to be specialists. When we overspecialize we become too reliant on the system, on the people we can’t control, just so that we can survive. The system – at least on our end – becomes fragile, because ordered systems are inherently unstable. Entropy is the natural order of things.

I’m not advocating anarchy, but community.

I really don’t know how to fix this fucked-up country we live in. Hell, I’m struggling to just make this blog coherent. But these are words that’ve been rattling around my head for two months, as I’ve been hearing reports from protests across the country. I’ve had friends on the front lines at Oakland and Wall Street. I’m worried for their safety, when all they’re trying to do is make their voices heard in a democracy.

I don’t know how to fix things. But I do know that as citizens of a democracy, it’s our responsibility to come together as a community and find a solution best befitting the nation.

I’m 23. I was lucky enough to have my family pay for my undergraduate degree. I don’t have to pay my own cell phone bill. I have a pretty decent car. I can waste some of my income collecting Pokémon cards. I’m getting an MBA.

I’m taking on $100,000 in loans to GET that MBA. I’m irresponsible with money. I’m lonely every night because my girlfriend is on the other side of the country desperately trying to finish her own degree before her money runs out.

I have no fucking clue what percent that puts me in. But I stand with Occupy.

And I’m going to go buy a ukulele tomorrow.

A Bit of Writing Advice

Today is one of those days where my desire to write is losing the war against my desire to drink tea and watch cartoons. I’ve been having a lot of those days lately, actually, and I’m getting pretty sick of them. So in order to motivate myself, I’m gonna post up a letter that I wrote in response to a friend that is, appropriately enough, about finding the motivation to write. Feel free to chip in with thoughts – I know my process isn’t the only one out there!

I have a lot of admiration for your writing and your style so I thought I should come to you for this matter. Lately, I’ve been thinking of picking up the pen again but… I’m quite rusty and I sort of have panic attacks when I stare at my blank notebook. I read a bunch of stuff I wrote in the past and immediately think I’ve lost it all and that I’m forever stuck in this down spiral… So, what I’m really asking is what advice can you give? Have you ever been in such situation? How do you beat “personal pressure” as a writer?

Honestly? This is something I go through every time I sit down and write. You may have noticed I haven’t updated in a few days – between real life business and just a lack of drive, I couldn’t bring myself to sit down and write.

I find that, for myself at least, the greatest problem I have with writing is that I have lofty expectations of my end product. In other words, I expect that every time I write, I will in short order bang out something brilliant and world-changing and undeniably amazing. Sadly, nobody writes like this, and one of these days I really have to stop deluding myself.

Writing is like any other activity; you need to stretch yourself. Walk before you run. Juggle two beanbags before you move on to flaming chainsaws. And, partially at least, this is the point of this blog – it’s a place for my exercises. Sit down, look at an object, and just begin to write about that object. Don’t censor yourself, don’t overanalyse what you’re actually writing about, just write. It’s how, as Ernest Hemingway would have said, you “get the juices flowing.”

Speaking of Hemingway, although I can’t stand the man’s novels, I’m increasingly attracted to his attitude about writing. In 1934, he wrote a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, saying:

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

Unless it's about a fish. PUBLISH THAT SHIT.

See? Even celebrated authors don’t have the greatest success ratio for writing quality work! Hemingway has fewer shots on goal than the Vancouver Canucks, and that’s just how it is. The solution isn’t to despair about your quality as a writer – the solution is to just write more. Always write more. Carry a notebook or a tape recorder so you can get things down. Don’t censor yourself. Don’t sit on the computer and say “I should be writing” – turn the damned computer off, go in another room entirely, get comfortable, and write. It sure as hell isn’t easy. But few things in this world beat the satisfying sound of pencil on paper or seeing the pile of filled pages next to you grow.

Anyway, Hemingway definitely knew what he was talking about. Generally speaking, I think all of us creative types suffer from having to balance practical productivity with whether or not our “muse” or whatever has spoken to us. And in a sense, that’s one of the biggest barriers that makes people with more “conventional” jobs biased against creatives – for good or for ill! Think of anyone you know who has either belittled your creative pursuits as “not real work” or, conversely, someone who has wished they could just “lie around and draw all day.” They’re operating off the fallacy that since creatives usually have an unconventional approach to workflow, they’re lazy or have it easy – and we all know that’s bullshit.

That bias is something we creatives have to struggle with internally, too, even if we don’t always realize it. Turning creative talent into a real profession does require discipline and dedication – if you Google the phrase “hone your craft,” the first five links all have to do with creative pursuits, and the #1 hit on the organic search is about writing!

Let’s think about the use of “hone.” My dashboard dictionary defines it as:

hone |hōn|

verb [ trans. ]

sharpen with a whetstone.

• (usu. be honed) make sharper or more focused or efficient : their appetites were honed by fresh air and exercise.

noun

a whetstone, esp. one used to sharpen razors.

• the stone of which whetstones are made.

ORIGIN Middle English : from Old English hān [stone,] of Germanic origin; related to Old Norse hein.

So it’s a metaphor! One that, at least in common parlance, has evolved away from knifework and towards the concept of refining artistic abilities. Let’s run with that.

Think of your artistic talent as a knife. Not an implement for destruction, but rather one of creation – a chef’s knife, not a KA-BAR. A chef’s knife must be well-forged, balanced, versatile, and requires constant attention so that the blade is always smooth and sharp. A dull, rarely used knife cannot easily transform a random pile of ingredients into a meal – and similarly, unused talent cannot transform the whirlwind of ideas and images in your head into a tangible, accessible work of art.

Most artists and chefs really have a lot in common (I could argue that chefs are artists, actually, but that’s another rant) – we work hours that “sane” people couldn’t stand, there’s a culture with a propensity for substance abuse, and we get a masochistic rush from just barely meeting a deadline. Oh, and I’ve always wanted to wear a chef’s hat, but that might just be me.

So hopefully this has been a helpful rant. The next time you feel uninspired, think of yourself as a chef! Keep your blade honed – it is your livelihood, after all – and even when you have a boring pile of ingredients, use the techniques you’ve practiced since day one to throw them all together anyway.

You might be surprised at how delicious the result is.

Eat Your Cereal, Don’t Up the Punx

So now that September has ended, I woke up today determined to talk about punk rock.

That was a joke. Well, sort of. You see, back in 2005 – and you may remember this, actually, considering the ridiculous amount of media attention it got – Green Day released the single “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” which was blasted from tweenagers’ stereos nationwide, much to the consternation of “real punks” everywhere. We  (and yeah, I include myself in that group because in 2005 I was convinced that as far as my friends went I was the punkest of all of us) felt betrayed. We knew that Green Day had been on the downslide away from punk and into the mainstream for years, and now this horribly sentimental ballad with accompanying anti-Iraq War music video seemed so totally not punk that we wouldn’t have been surprised to see Fiona Apple’s name next to Billie Joe Armstrong’s in the liner notes. My self-righteous high school self thus publicly disowned Green Day at every opportunity for being total sellouts… and then I listened to that song on repeat all the damned time.

Keep gloating, Billie Joe. I still hate your hairdo. And the rest of the album.

Yeah, I’ll admit. I liked the song. I still do. Hell, I even think that from a certain point of view it’s kinda punk.

Don't give me that look, Skywalker. It's not like I'm lying about your father's identity here.

See, punk rock is about as static of an ideology and art form as… well, hip-hop. Every year there’s a whole new crop of kids discovering just how fun it is to get really mad at their parents and the establishment and wear shabby clothes and swear and jump around like a ferret on PCP to the sound of badly tuned guitars. In a sense, the half-life of a punk is pretty short, as you’re theoretically supposed to grow out of it and be an adult once you get all that silly adolescent rebellion out of your system. That’s why we say Green Day can’t really be punk any more, or why Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros are nowhere near as relevant as the Clash ever were, or why we think it’s better the Sex Pistols split or even why people think it’s best that the 27 Club all beefed it way too soon.

Maybe I’m an immature basket case for saying this, but I think that’s bullshit. Well, except for that last bit, because the thought of Jim Morrison going the way of Marlon Brando is… depressing. Anyway, that’s why last week I did the most totally punk thing of my life: I took my middle-aged, folk- and chick rock-loving parents to see Andrew Jackson Jihad open for Frank Turner and the Sleeping Souls at a complete shithole of a dive bar in Baltimore.

It wasn't this metal, but it was close.

They fucking loved it, strangely enough. See, I was worried about that. This voice in my head told me that my parents wouldn’t exactly take a shine to Andrew Jackson Jihad’s tendency to sing cheerful songs about serial killers, or the rampant profanity usual to punk performers with access to beer tickets. And yet my parents actually wound up having a great time. From where I stood in the middle of the crowd, I actually could see them having fun. They clapped, they sang, they even danced around a bit, especially to this particularly jaunty number:

Now, if you didn’t start dancing in your seat to that I recommend you rush to the emergency room and get your pulse checked, as you are likely dead inside and I don’t want your continued undead existence to be in any way my fault. But my point is that my parents – who are fun people in their usual environment, sure – got into that while wedged into the corner of an overcrowded, overheating dive bar with walls that looked to be more made of layers of gaffer tape and old posters than actual sheet rock. And why did they get so into it?

Well, I could go on a rant about the musicology of it – and I’d love to do that, sure – but since it’s two in the morning and I want to go dance to a song about a ninja, I’ll leave the dissertation about the legacy of Bob Dylan for another day and just put it simply. They got into it because punk – real punk rock – isn’t about exclusionary teenaged angst. It’s about creating an atmosphere of camaraderie. The kid from Into It/Over It (the opening act, who I personally wasn’t all that into but will definitely give props for the performance he put on) put it pretty well during his set, and I’ll attempt to clumsily paraphrase him: “We came to punk rock because everyone else was fucking us around and we just wanted to find a place where we belonged.” In other words, don’t confuse the messengers (with their extremely heated opinions on music and questionable fashion choices) with the message. Punk doesn’t mean “fuck you for conforming to something different from me.” Punk means we’re all different, so fuck you for thinking your way is better than anyone else’s. As Frank Turner put it in his single “Try This at Home”:

The only thing that punk rock should ever really mean
Is not sitting round and waiting for the lights to go green, 
And not thinking that you’re better because you’re stood up on a stage.
If you’re oh-so-fucking-different then who cares what you have to say?
And there’s no such thing as rock stars, there’s just people who play music, 
And some of them are just like us, and some of them are dicks.

There you have it. Old people can be punks. Young straightedge kids can be punks. My Chemical Romance fans and Black Flag fans are both punks. So go ahead and hit some guy in the face in the mosh pit at the next Against Me! show – but don’t be a dick about it. Help him back on his feet afterwards, hand him a beer, and keep rocking out. Celebrate the message and don’t get lost in the details or the aesthetic.

She does have a point, though. Don't be a poser. Eat your cereal, don't up the punx.

Love, Lust, and Loss: Murder By Death and Ludwig van Beethoven

I haven’t posted anything here in about two years, because life is kind of funny sometimes. You get a girlfriend, finish up your BA, and go on to grad school, and it’s only when you sit around with the flu for a few days that you start thinking of blowing the dust off your old blog and getting back on the horse. But it’s time to get back in the habit – and what with me now officially blogging for my grad program, any extra time I spend writing is probably a good thing. Also, the alternative is just sitting alone in my apartment and temporarily going mad and talking to those things you talk to when you go mad. Kings? No, trees, that’s it. Trees. Anyway, on to today’s argument.

Some of the most fun I have as a blogger, DJ, and amateur musicologist is drawing the most random connections possible between artists. I once mentioned going from the Alexandrov Ensemble to Willie Nelson on the same mix tape, somewhat as a joke, and have since found that people regularly find their way here by Googling old Willie’s name. So if you’re here because of that, welcome. Hopefully you’ll stick around to actually read something, right?

Connecting the thematics of music along with the more obvious stylistic and technical similarities is always absolutely fascinating. Music is an ever-evolving art form, and when you trace that evolution you feel like Darwin with his finches – you see the common threads that bind everything together with such artistry where the casual observer may only see pop music. Now, if you really want to feel like some sort of Pitchfork-mainlining indie kid, you probably trace everything from the Smiths, and if that’s the case, sit on a fencepost and spin. Your masturbatory fantasies about Morrissey are unnecessary and really just a waste of time – at this point, he’s a cliché. It’s all predictable. Like Barry rants at Rob in High Fidelity, “Couldn’t you make it any more obvious than that? What about the Beatles? What about the Rolling Stones? What about the fucking… fucking… Beethoven? Track one side one of the Fifth Symphony?” (Emphasis Hornby’s. You can’t make that shit up) And you know what? Fatass old Barry has a point. What about Beethoven?

Moreover, when's the next damned Tenacious D album coming out?

The answer? Everything.

Musical tastes ebb and flow throughout the years, and that’s fine. However, as generations progress, the desire to pay attention to the music of ages past – not simply that from a few decades or even a century ago, but truly that of bygone eras – continues to wane. Even with the Internet at our disposal (obviously, since you’re reading this), the majority’s desire to become broadly versed in musical tradition is, in my opinion, pathetically lacking. I mean, sure, people may know the hook from the Fifth Symphony, or the Ninth, or maybe a little Bach or Mozart or Brahms… but who’s honestly listened to the whole Hammerklavier Sonata? I’ll admit, I only heard of it through reading a novel that used it as a minor plot device. But, with Wikipedia as my trusty guide, I hunted it down, took a listen, and fell in love.

Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, technically known as Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major, isn’t exactly the most soothing piano composition for modern ears. The performer must literally approach the keys at points with the mentality that his hands are indeed hammers, pounding their inner anguish into the piano with a poise that is simultaneously animalistic and refined. If I had to draw a comparison to a pop song, Muse’s “Space Dementia” comes to mind – it walks back and forth between the withdrawn and the overwrought, the passive and the manic, painting the sonic picture of not just the two-dimensional mental construct of your average 3:30 pop ballad, but the four-dimensional space/time construct of a broken and bleeding heart.

Now of course, broken hearts are truly the glue that holds pop music together. Yet it is specifically the sound of the Hammerklavier‘s third movement, the languid pounding of confused grief and hope, that can be found so readily in modern artists, such as the aforementioned Muse or my own personal favorite bourbon ballad band, Murder By Death. Seeing them live twice so far has really given me a greater appreciation and understanding of their work, as well as insight on just how complex this morbid bunch of indie rockers really are.

A track of theirs that interestingly parallels the Hammerklavier is “Until Morale Improves, the Beatings Will Continue.” Buried in the middle of MBD’s second album, Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left of Them? – nominally, a concept album telling the story of a devil waging war against a small Mexican/American border town – “Morale” is the kind of multilayered acoustic experience that can provide both an excellent atmospheric effect and a fantastically rich analytical environment. In other words, it hooks you with its honestly fantastic title and then proceeds to kick ass in the background or kick you in the teeth when you really sit down and listen to it. Or see it, rather – “Morale” was the first song that MBD made an official video for, which I’ll now throw your way:

Now, the video’s visual imagery certainly complements the album’s overall theme – the tattered frontier town, the funeral, the ragged inhabitants trying to just hold on. But the song itself is, thankfully, more universally applicable than that. At least, it speaks to me on a personal level, even though I’ve never walked the road from Tuscon to San Antonio, so I assume it can do the same to others. Lyrically, there’s a despondence and desperation that really can resonate with everyone. The Old West trappings of the video and the lyrics are a framework, crystallizing the stark reality of the singer’s monolithic feelings of loneliness into the kind of image that weighs down any soul that finds common ground there. We’ve all had those days when we’re wrapped up in masochism and trudge along just for the sake of trudging on.

Speaking of masochism, I’ll leave you with this question: who really counts as the Beethoven of our era?

And please, please don’t say Morrissey.

A Semi-Fictitious Interlude

His head is killing him.

He doesn’t have the balls to admit it to her, though. He gives her a hug as she gets out of his car, pulls out of the driveway slowly while watching to make sure she gets inside alright, and curses a little under his breath as, like every other time he’s done this, his car scrapes its undercarriage against the unnecessary change in slope between her driveway and the street. He sees her close the front door and, satisfied that his little sister is home safe, slams the car into forward gear and cranks the music.

Each suburban house passes by with little fanfare. It’s too late at night – the world around him is asleep. His head starts to pound rhythmically, running counterpoint to the upbeat alt.country on his stereo. Pulling to a stop at the last intersection before the freeway, he flips on the roof light and swaps the CDs, picking a Lucero album. Then, rolling the windows down, he guns the engine, peeling out and jumping to freeway speed as quickly as his little sedan’s engine can.

Fifteen miles ahead of him. He doesn’t quite put his foot to the floor, but the little car shakes beneath him as he brings it up to eighty. This is familiar to him. He has driven this stretch of road far too many times over the years, at every imaginable hour and almost every level of inebriation. Every bump in the road is an old friend, every speed trap something he knows how to avoid with a timely application of the brakes. He gives control of the car up to muscle memory and just focuses on the physical sensations – the pulse of the music through the car’s frame, the gentle caress of the heater blowing on his feet, and the abject thundering of the wind through the car’s still-open windows. Each buffet of cold air is a second’s worth of relief from the pulsing in his skull.

The miles get eaten up quicker than he realizes. He lets the car decelerate on its own, mostly, only applying the brakes at the sharp turn at the end of the offramp. The blast of the wind is replaced by a more gentle airflow, and it’s only now that the frenetic energy is replaced by that calmer tendril of night breeze that he begins to shiver from the cold. He turns the stereo down to match the quieter night around him; as he passes through, the town square seems like a ghost town. The only thing left open is the 24-hour gas station, and as tempted as he is to pull in for a quick pack of smokes, he can’t afford it. He lets the car crawl its way up a hill and gently pulls it into the driveway, just far back enough so that his brother can get out in the morning. Parking brake up, he kills the engine, and the music finally dies.

Stumbling inside, he opens the refrigerator to find a single can of club soda. He grabs it, downs half of it, and then scrounges through the kitchen drawers until he finds a bottle of painkillers. The recommended dose is two pills, but he takes four, washing them down with the rest of the soda. He shuffles into his room, shuts the door, drops his pants, and collapses face-first onto his bed. Unconsciousness takes forever to find him, and when it finally does its hold is tenuous at best.

When he wakes up in the morning, his headache will only have gotten worse.

A Personal Interlude: Coffee, Identity, and Burning Your Tongue

In the war between thrift, avoiding conspicuous consumption, and hunger, hunger won. I’m sitting in Santa Cruz Coffee Co., waiting on a cup of joe and a breakfast burrito that isn’t breakfast, and wondering why the most foreign place to the human mind is the place we used to call “home.”

I’ve been wandering the Pacific Avenue strip for over an hour, poking my nose into stores I haven’t been in for months, just to make sure they’re still there. I’m killing time. Whittling my afternoon away. Wondering why the one time I take initiative on getting a job it turns out to be one I am in no way qualified for. I mean really, Floral Expert? Thanks, Whole Foods, but my expertise with flowers boils down to “I like the smell of jasmine for sentimental reasons” and “roses poke you.”

I take a break from this confusion and cognitive crisis to eat. To my starving, neurotic mind, it’s fucking delicious. Mind you, that’s five bucks I’ve spent that I probably shouldn’t have, but at least I have the money to feel guilty about spending now, and I’ve gotten most of the requisite compulsive spending out of the way thanks to my last few paychecks. I blame car’s constant need for maintenance – well, that and my addiction to books. I’ve been spending a lot of time in bookstores in the past two weeks alone, which is abject hell on my attempts to save money, but I can’t help it. Junkies need to shoot up, and I need to freebase literature.

You have to love combining a hot burrito and hotter coffee in the middle of the afternoon. I mean, I feel an awful lot like a hipster right now – my shirt makes an ironic statement about art and video games, my backpack is sitting next to me on the counter, and I have my face buried in this notebook as I scribble furiously – but it’s refreshing all the same. Except for my scalded tongue and caffeine-addled nerves, I’m relaxed. I’m Zen.

I shouldn’t be, though. I keep checking the clock to make sure I don’t have to feed my meter, or looking to see if I’ve missed any “important” phone calls. I resisted my urge to spend money while loitering in Logos, the fantastic used bookstore here. It was hard – Anthony Bourdain’s fantastic Les Halles Cookbook, which my proto-foodie and Bourdain-worshiping brain is convinced should be in the same hallowed cannon as Julia Child and Escoffier – was only $15. Half-price for a tome of arcane culinary knowledge – and one with an attitude, at that. Paging through the first few chapters, I’m assaulted with a barrage of profanity that seems more befitting of R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket.

Between my obsession with Bourdain (watching his show, No Reservations, reading his books, listening to his memoir on tape) and what I’ve seen around Santa Cruz today, I think I’ve figured out the root of this quarter-life identity crisis I’m going through. For one, Bourdain has suddenly become this superhero in my mind. I want his job, or at least something like it. I want, if I achieve fame at all, to earn it for being someone who says what nobody else realized needed to be said. I mean, sure, the perks – traveling the world, eating and drinking and waxing poetic on a professional level – are pretty kickass. I have, in my idolization of Bourdain, found a goal for the kind of person I want to be. Yes, my role model is an ex-junkie trash-talking chain-smoking binge drinker who eats testicles and feet all over the globe. But he’s also an honest, hard-working, capable individual. There are worse people to emulate.

The problem with this is that I can’t stop comparing myself to him. By my age, he was studying at the Culinary Institute of America, close to graduating, and already working in the business. Makes me feel great about dicking around as I enter my aimless final year as an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz. I can’t stop hearing his voice in place of my own internal monologue. Next thing I know, I’ll look at my reflection in a window, and it will be like that bit in 500 Days of Summer, except instead of Harrison Ford’s grinning mug I’ll see a gray-haired, middle-aged New Yorker staring back, cigarette dangling unlit between his lips as he shrugs, as if to say “So what?”

So what, indeed, Tony. Identity derives itself, partially, from comparing yourself to other people. “I am X, he is Y, she is sexually desirable, and that is a fire hydrant” – that sort of thing. I haven’t had much of a chance to do that this summer. I’m stuck with my parents for three more weeks – three weeks of social limbo to cap off the past two mind-numbing months. Today is the first day in a very long time that I’ve had a chance to just sit around and observe people; until now, every time I’ve left the house I’ve either had an errand to run or been in the company of friends. My only goals this afternoon are to move my car some time in the next hour and to find somewhere that will let me use their bathroom without having to pay for anything. My friends aren’t picking up their phones. I (gasp!) don’t have an iPod on me. I’m stuck – and I use the term ironically, I swear – doing that horror of horrors, people-watching. I’m so okay with that.

I’m sitting here at the SCCC counter, right by the front door, watching everyone. Someone behind me is whistling along to the jukebox – currently, the guitar solo from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Suzy Q.” There’s a guy two booths over watching 70s concert footage from YouTube on his ancient PowerBook. The guy past him is playing some MMORPG, with so many peripherals and power cords coming out of his overclocked and overworked little Dell that it looks like a scene from some Japanese tentacle porno. The flow of people in and out of here, and on the street outside, makes for a kaleidoscope of frenetic human energy. Hipsters, tourists, high schoolers, old townies, a random Hindu family, a kid picking his nose – identities are everywhere. The CCR on the stereo (now changed to “Around the Bend”) wars with the buskers on the street – more high schoolers, playing mariachi of all things, some hipster with a ukulele, and of course the ubiquitous hobo playing Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” out of tune and ad nauseam.

The incongruities are what make this so alive. The stereo here, considering the way the tracks are shifting from one to the next more befits a dive bar – I can think of plenty of crowds that befit having Mick Jagger croon about wild horses. This isn’t one of them. But it seems to work somehow.

My coffee is down to the dregs now – the last inch of grounds that made it through the hand-poured drip filter. This isn’t coffee, this is roasted bean soup with the caffeine content of a whole box of NoDoze, pulverized and snorted in one giant batch so as to inflict the wrath of the hyperactive God of ADD on my blood-brain barrier. I savor every sip.

Back in Logos, I spent a good twenty minutes flipping through the records in the back. My fellow audiophiles know this game – you slowly look at each record, not actively seeking anything, secretly praying you’ll see something you didn’t know you needed as you simultaneously criticize them for having three copies of the same damned R.E.M. single. It’s an exercise in patience, one I undertake regularly and succeed at rarely. While somewhere in the middle of the alphabet of Rock, I overheard a kid and his dad bickering. The dad was trying to tell his son about the “good old days,” rattling off an anecdote about some Journey album. The kid (maybe he was fourteen, maybe seventeen – I can’t tell any more. Once you’re past a certain point of adolescent obesity, kids, you become an ageless man-baby. Put down the burger and walk it off) seemed almost embarrassed to be here with his old fossil of a dad. now, I get what it’s like to be bored by your parents in public just as much as the next twentysomething, but what struck me was the combination of apathy and nervousness in the kid. I don’t know, I’m sure there’s a long story behind it all, but overhearing just that one little snapshot made me feel strange. My audophilia put me on the side of a baby boomer! I’m turning myself, by choice, into an anachronism. Someone give me a membership to the Historical Preenactment Society. No wonder I’ve been going for older women lately.

With my cup now empty, I suppose it’s time for me to keep walking. Time to go back out into the smoke-filled streets of Santa Cruz and kill another hour or two. I know the smoke is a bad thing – wildfires, property damage, air quality, yadda yadda – but it’s making the whole town smell like a hickory-smoke barbecue. Suddenly that burrito seems like a waste of money – I’m hungry again.

Maybe that’s the solution to my identity crisis. No matter what or who gets stuck in my head, I’m just another 21-year-old with an insatiable appetite for books, records, and food. I guess that’s a foundation for something.

Confucius Say, “Bury It on Side B.”

My recent post on rap music brought a few points to light for me. One; other people have opinions that are just as valid as mine, and instead of hoping they’ll throw in with a comment or two, I should perhaps do as good reporters do and seek them out in order to utilize them as part of my entries, particularly in topics where I have little valid foundation for my own opinions, be it because of my dangly bits or my ruddy Norse-Irish complexion. Two; I was starting down a path of semi-academic writing that honestly isn’t that healthy for a blogger. Maybe it’s all the Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations that I’ve been watching lately, or maybe writing more frequently has relaxed academia’s iron grip on the squishy grey Jell-O pile that calls itself my brain. Either way, I’ve come to realize that I want this blog to be about personal expression, not just the ideas that come stumbling out of that expression. What good are ideas when you can’t hear the text in your head or feel the identity of the person expressing them? So with that all in mind, I’ll be trying from here on in to give my writing a much-needed facelift. I’m a person, the same as you. Well, except you probably aren’t as tall as me, and statistically speaking the odds are against you having a beard, but once you boil all that away we’re just people.

Speaking of boiling things down, when you boil every pop song written in, say, the past millennium down to the nitty-gritty, each one is a love song. Whether it’s love of a memory, of yourself, a physical sensation, or – my personal favorite – something as simultaneously ephemeral and concrete as the open road, the act of songwriting is in and of itself a declaration of love and passion. The emotions expressed represent every facet of love – hope, lust, apprehension, sorrow, and even good old high school angst. Over the years, as I’ve grown as a musician, an appreciator of music, and a rabid Nick Hornby fan, I have taken this fact to heart and, in the traditions of Shaolin monks and hipsters with unnecessarily large headphones, I have honed my abilities in the arcane art of making mixtapes.

“But wait,” you might say, “what’s so hard about mixtapes?” Honestly, nothing. Anyone can simply take however many tracks they like, put them on a CD or a playlist, and you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that. At all. Music snobbery aside, that makes plenty of people happy and leaves them feeling satisfied about their musical tastes. It’s like making a sandwich – place ingredients A and B between bread of choice, pop open a beer, and enjoy. But, much like sandwich-making, there’s a whole level of artistry that you can aspire to and enjoy on your own time. You can stop eating baloney and yellow mustard and learn how to combine the choicest, freshest ingredients… Alright, I’m not going any farther with this sandwich metaphor, as it’s making me hungry. But my point still stands: although anyone can make a basic mixtape, there’s artistry to be had in putting one together well. Before honing our skills – or at least giving you a peek into the craziness of my process – we should first look at some of the preconceptions of mixtapes. Rather, one in particular comes to mind – the idea that there is no such thing as a mixtape without meaning. This isn’t so much false as it is overly general. Without a meaning, a mixtape is just an arbitrary collection of songs, and if that’s what you’re after then just find a radio station that you like, or use those nifty new iTunes functions like Genius or iTunes DJ that can generate a playlist for you that’s only somewhat likely to wind up half-full of train wrecks [train wreck (n.) A DJ term for when the transition between two songs is jarring or inappropriate, such as going from Pink Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky" to Reel Big Fish's cover of "Take On Me"]. In the case of Genius, of course, I may be exaggerating – I’ve started using it lately in lieu of Pandora, actually, and it’s usually rather fluid as far as the song choices – the scary thing, of course, being that it’s adaptive software and learns from you as you use it more… I really should just get around to naming my iTunes library “Skynet.” But I digress. I’ll get back to the point after this here YouTube interlude, which I promise will be explained.

This is the result of unhoned mixtapery. Was there meaning? Hell yes there was. Was there a theme to the mix? Considering the song titles, you’d have to be blind to miss it. Would anyone say any of those songs flowed well from one to the next? Er… well, no, not really. Princeton gets an A for effort, and probably a B overall because Kate got the picture thanks to fiat and plot, but why settle for a B? I’m not claiming any mixtape is perfect, because the very issue of music for an occasion is horribly subjective, but there’s so much more a person can do to create an effective soundscape. Princeton’s tape is also one that doesn’t need to actually be listened to. Every song there is horribly well-known and – dare I use the hipster buzzword? – cliché. I mean, it could be worse, he could have found himself in this situation:

What I’m trying to say is that there are rules to a well-made mixtape, just as there are probably rules to a well-made blog post that I probably don’t follow well – and I would be remiss in my duties as a rabid scholar of pop culture if I didn’t use the words of the great Nick Hornby to point out some of the rules of mixtapes. I mean, I could try and write my own, but if I use someone else’s, then it’s just like using someone else’s song to describe how I’m feeling. Like with a mixtape. See what I’m getting at? Neither do I.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with “Got to Get You Off My Mind”, but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and…oh, there are loads of rules.

Nick, or rather in this case his narrator, Rob, is right. A good tape works because of the amount of thought put into it. Now, I’m not going to say that his rules are some Commandments that must be followed, because I’ve broken most of those and I have no regrets about it. The important thing to realize here is that he’s talking about how the mix needs to have cohesion, some ephemeral theme that runs through the tracks. Don’t be Princeton, though, and just do a bunch of songs that “remind you of someone.” Or if you’re making a mix for a road trip, for example, be wary of just throwing on every song you have with “road” in the title, unless you really, really liked The Wiz. I hated that movie, if you were wondering.

Let me throw out a little anecdote about my own mix-making idiosyncrasies. Every year, I have a ritual – the first week of fall where it rains twice, I begin working on that year’s “Rain Mix,” and usually that entails picking over the carcass of the past year’s mix. I should point out that these are rarely songs about rain; those got weeded out after the first year or two, after I was bloody well sick of John Lennon telling me that when the rain fell everyone ran to hide their head. Instead, there’s a very specific memory I have that I try and emulate with every year’s passing – I try and find new ways to say something burned into my soul. Specificity, in a mix, is a double-edged sword, however. You have to find the perfect focus, a balance of saying exactly what you mean and not getting bogged down in the details. If this were a mix for a girl who had, say, light blue eyes, and I found them haunting beautiful, would I use The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes”? Probably. I might use R.E.M.’s cover if it fit the flow better. But that’s all I would do to touch on that. How didactic would an entire hour-long CD about someone’s eyes be? Nevermind the esoteric panorama of artists I have with songs about eyes – a mix that spans the Alexandrov Ensemble (better known as the Red Army Choir) busting their Russkie chops on “Dark Eyes” to Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” would be a wonderful tribute to globalization and multiculturalism, but I would wager it would be absolute shit to listen to.

Right back at you, cowboy.

I’ll admit, I’m not Nick Hornby. I’m a college DJ and sound engineer, which means I could almost say I’m a professional at this sort of thing, but I’m not getting paid for it yet. Even if I were, I don’t know if I could really give you a step-by-step procedure for how to make a perfect mixtape. But I can give you five pieces of advice that might help you start to see how it can be done.

1. Have something specific you want to say. Yes, girls, when a guy gives you a mix, he’s trying to say something, and the odds are it’s “I like you.” Some guys break that pattern, but we’re not to be trusted, as we’ll probably find a way to say “I like you” in the mix while the mix still manages to say something completely different. But still, you can say anything with a mix, convey any emotion. Whatever it is, have it in mind when you sit down.
2. Don’t worry about how long it is. The only occasions where the actual length of a tape matter are when you want something for a road trip or when you’re making a playlist to cover up however loud you are during sex. In both cases, I speak from experience and suggest erring on the long side.
3. Play around with it. If you’re working with your average CD, you have an hour and twenty minutes, maximum. Pick an hour and a half’s worth of tracks. Futz with the order, swap them out for each other. Can’t decide between two songs by the same artist? Put them both on and keep fiddling around. It’s like Tetris – if you’re good, you can get everything to fit perfect and snug. If not, then it’s more of the Red Army Choir for you!
4. Let random chance have its say. If I’m stuck on track ideas, I put my whole library on shuffle and start flipping through songs like an epileptic changing TV channels. Eventually something will pop up, and I’ll smack myself for not having actually thought of it. And sometimes, your computer is smarter than you are. I’ve paired tracks together because iTunes just played them that way and I found myself muttering something along the lines of “That was good, that should have been mine.” If you get the Hornby reference there, you get a cookie.
5. Listen to the damned thing! When you think it’s finished, listen to it from the top. Every track. I don’t care how many times you heard them while putting it together. Find an hour somewhere, make a cup of tea, put your headphones on, and listen to your creation. If you aren’t happy with it, you aren’t done. And guys, if the mix is for a girl, you may want to do this a good half-dozen times.

So that’s that. My challenge to you, dear reader, is to just sit down this weekend and make a mixtape. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, post it here. I promise I won’t tell you that you should have gotten out of bed earlier.

Until next week, music fans.

- Z

Vinyl Comes in More Than One Color

Racism is, surprise of surprises, a problem in modern pop music – hell, in the pop music of any era. Racial stereotypes draw Sharpie-thick lines, delineating the boundaries of acceptable artistry more savagely than any musicologist and with more elitist ignorance than the most Pitchfork-obsessed hipster. What do these lines boil down to? “White music” and “black music,” stereotypes that have existed for over a century, ever since the travesties of minstrel shows managed to at least being to sow the seeds of new musical forms. We still, even with globalization and stylistic dissemination, manage to keep alive racial notions surrounding something as universal as music.

Consider the two immediate stereotypes of the “white” and “black” musical arguments – rock and rap. Both words, in and of themselves, with the genres they represent and their simple etymology, have little by way of racial implication, but the inference on an almost universal scale is that white people like rock, black people like rap, and any crossover is either a poseur/loser or Trace Adkins.

Yet I’ll admit, it’s a noble attempt, crossing over like that. Is it a good song? Not really, although I’m tempted to swing along. It’s not going to change lives or make a political statement, but it does succeed on occasion in doing something music is supposed to do – get someone up and dance. Combining country and rap here is, admittedly, at least somewhat catchy, if not meaningful or relevant. Moreover, Adkins at least manages to defy a stereotype – he’s definitely not a “wigger” by any stretch of the word. But at the same time, this isn’t exactly a shining example of crossing racial lines to any positive benefit other than record sales.

Race shouldn’t factor in to record sales, though. Nor should it influence judgments about a person’s musical taste. People of my generation deck themselves out in plenty of other indicators of personal preferences – infer information from those choices they’ve made, rather than something that is essentially circumstantial. We don’t assume someone likes opera because they have blue eyes, or that someone’s a raver because of their neon-green hair… wait, no, that could be a safe assumption, because hair color can be a choice.

Moreover, the modern music scene, as far as major labels are concerned, isn’t doing much to change peoples’ preconceptions. I can’t say any major black rock stars leap to mind, and the big-name white rapper is Eminem… who, like Trace Adkins, isn’t exactly the kind of person I want as an example for my skin color’s ability to rap. At the same time, the major-name black rappers constantly portray images of materialism and misogyny. So then where can we find counterexamples? Well, let’s start with the traditional.

Jurassic 5 are a fantastic group. Sadly, they split up a year and a half ago, but they left behind a legacy of three full-length albums  and their self-titled initial EP. One of the MCs (my personal favorite), Chali 2na, is also an early member of Ozomatli, and is performing with them again after the 5 split. Their beats are, to use some vernacular, decidedly funky, and their works are typified by both incredibly frenetic rhymes and the occasional obscure pop-culture reference that makes you realize that all of these guys are incredibly literate, incredibly well-versed in music theory, and rather happy to be doing what they’re doing. They collaborated with Nelly Furtado, Dave Matthews, Mos Def, and others, and tend to sample from sources that can only really be described as “esoteric” – Back to the Future, Bill Cosby, Ennio Morricone, and even Three Dog Night.

All in all, the 5 tried hard to work against the negative stereotype of more popular rap groups. Songs like the single “What’s Golden” and its b-side, “High Fidelity,” talk about their respect and homages to hip-hop groups from the 80s, while “One of Them” is a somewhat more… aggressive… response to the dominant paradigm.

Next up, we depart rather strikingly from the familiar, even within hip-hop’s own counterculture. We turn to the world of the Flobots.

Flobots are a truly crossover group. They combine live rock instrumentation with a lyric intensity that has a sense of percussion all its own, and defy consistency in a rather brilliant manner on their two albums and EP. Their breakout single from the latest album, Fight With Tools, “Handlebars,” is at once both endearing and terrifying, painting the picture of the danger of power and megalomania, although I have to say the music video is somewhat strange.

Fight With Tools‘ opening track, “There’s a War Going On for Your Mind,” is a minute and a half of constant syllabic assault, at once reminiscent of an actually talented slam poet and a funeral dirge, and makes for a fantastic transition into the next track, “Mayday!!!” In fact, the whole album flows fantastically, with the beats seamlessly fading from one track to the next, interspersed with the occasional hum of strings and a simple back-beat.

So all in all, stereotypes abound in the music industry still, as well as in our perceptions of how race interacts with musical forms. And of course, this problem is self-propagating, as every stereotype is, but that isn’t necessarily the problem. I’m not crying for equality in the industry, and I’m not saying that rock’n'roll needs Affirmative Action. Just know, as music lovers and as people, that the dominant paradigm isn’t the only one. There’s fantastic music out there that doesn’t conform to industry standards, but also isn’t pretentious indie drivel. We are, as Flobots say, the insurgents.

Gazing Into the Abyss: The Light and the Dark (Side)

Hobbes was right. Man’s inner nature is ignorant and cruel. We are tribal creatures by instinct, driven by survival-based urges of xenophobia and materialism. Is that a bad thing? Not by any means. The traditional developmental argument of “nature versus nurture,” is, however – in a word – bullshit. Something as inherently complex as the justification behind human behavioral structures and attributes can’t be reduced to a binary or even a spectrum. Nature and nurture, inherent characteristic and learned information, a priori and a posteriori – all of these are simply two sides of the same coin.

Where is this most apparent? Pop culture, of course, particularly in regards to adolescents. There we find the last vestiges of medieval morality plays – children’s cartoons where traditional Christian values (tolerance and compassion, that is, not dogmatic adherence to anti-Semitism) are taught alongside simple portrayals of black-and-white morality. Outlying data points arise, however, when children’s reactions to that input are observed. In my own upbringing, I always found myself caught between identifying with the noble, if naïve, hero and the bitter, grizzled antihero, and thus I find myself in my early twenties with a rather mixed and tentative grasp on moral constructs.

Consider, as I always do, whatever pop-culture role models you had as a kid. Not real people, but the fictional constructs you idolized and pretended to be on the playground. As a complete geek, I grew up on, of course, Star Wars and Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space 9 (and Babylon 5 and the X-Files and a whole host of others, but they’ll all factor in later), which when compared to each other just fuel the fires of moral ambiguity.

On the one hand we have the original Star Wars trilogy – the archetypal Hero’s Journey, with conveniently color-coded representations of Good and Evil. As a kid I found myself wanting to be both Luke Skywalker – heir to generations of noble, moral tradition – and Han Solo, gun for hire and everyone’s favorite stuck-up, scruffy-looking Nerf herder.

Sorry, Han, but it’s true. But hey, your initial mercenary portrayal gets revealed to be just a cover for that unsure, compassionate heart of gold! You’re just Luke, with a veneer of bitterness instead of naïveté, and a blaster instead of a lightsaber. Okay, and with more sarcasm instead of whining.

Sorry, Luke. As you eventually tell your son, whining is a family trait…

Star Wars makes right and wrong almost tangible through the Force and its influence on the people that can in turn influence it. The call of the Dark Side is said to be “seductive,” while walking the path of the Light takes dedication and discipline. For the Force-sensitive, there is no grey area – morality is as much a binary as the unseen power they wield. Tapping into the negative energy is an almost irrevocably corrupting influence – only a half dozen Jedi of note managed to throw off the Dark Side, and half of them were Skywalkers (specifically Anakin, Luke, and Cade). And yet this simple binary of human instinct and morality isn’t quite as clearly-cut as initial impressions and symbols might lead us to believe. After all, Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke the truth, but only from “a certain point of view.” Both he and Yoda play off Luke’s drive for glory and power, while simultaneously saying that a Jedi’s way is that of non-passion.

The black-and-white moral division is not as simplistic as it initially appears. Or perhaps it never existed in the first place – perhaps everything really does boil down to a “shades of grey” spectrum. For that, we’ll have to look somewhere else, and to do that, I’ll need another few days.

Coming up soon: Space, the final frontier… Seeing out new life and new civilizations, boldly finding moral conflict where no man has found it before. Or, to turn Picard’s line back on itself… Where must the line be drawn?

Thoughts on a Band: Murder By Death

When some people talk about bands that can span a spectrum, they’re probably talking about The Beatles or someone of equivalent mega-star status – a group whose career is so ridiculous that it’s unthinkable that they wouldn’t completely reinvent their sound every few years. Bands like Murder By Death, sadly, fly around under the radar, perfectly deserving of that description of musical flexibility and yet unlikely to ever receive the attention and praise they deserve. Well, except in this blog.

MBD is based out of Indiana, and they’ve been doing the whole almost-creepy rock’n'roll thing since 2000. I won’t bother summarizing the Wikipedia entry for you – if you want more details, click here. If you’re upset that was a LMGTFY link, click here.

So what makes MBD so unique, sound-wise? To start, they’ve basically had two styles; their initial two albums, Like the Exorcist, But More Breakdancing and Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them? have a particularly pronounced resemblance to harder post-rock groups. Tracks like Exorcist‘s “You Are the Last Dragon (You Possess the Power of the Glow)” or Survive‘s “Three Men Hanging,” aside from referencing terrible kung-fu movies or being sexily covered by Amanda Palmer (frontwoman for the Dresden Dolls and girlfriend of Neil Gaiman, for those not in the know), combine fluid instrumentals with jarring guitar tones and bare-bones lyrics that at once wrap you in a cocoon of mournful sound, and then rock your face so far off it goes “splat” on the next wall.

But those albums, amazing as they are, aren’t what make MBD stand out, or make me want to smoke half a pack of blacks on my back porch (well, “Three Men Hanging” does, but that might be a side effect of figuring it out on my banjo by ear). No, the revolutionary move this band made was with the release of In Bocca Al Lupo – an album title taken from an Italian expression for good luck which literally translates to “in the mouth of the wolf.” There’s an instrumentation change, for one – the cello becomes more prominent, while the rest of the band gravitates from the forward drive and unique time signatures of their initial releases to a more old-school beat familiar to anyone who has ever listened to good country. For two, Bocca is a concept album, portraying twelve stories of sin and redemption, from “Boy Decide”s shiftless, lazy anti-protagonist to the lonely, haunted man of “Shiola,” left alone in a house with only the ghosts of his dead family, or even the drunken louts singing the sea shanty “Dead Men and Sinners.” For three, the singer made the simple change of lowering the vocal parts for the entirety of the album, creating a more soulful, guttural feel throughout – and in the case of “The Big Sleep,” he almost convinced me that Johnny Cash had come back from the dead and recorded the saddest song ever (of course, they also reference him rather thoroughly in “Sometimes the Line Walks You”). Apologies that the video is a live version, but I can’t find anything using the album cut that isn’t an AMV, and I’m religiously against AMVs. Finally, the album’s first single, “Brother,” also marks MBD’s first video, which is automatically cool for being set in a speakeasy, nevermind how fantastic the track already is:

Their most recent album, Red of Tooth and Claw, isn’t quite as revolutionary as Bocca was. Instead of finding a third direction, they use the album to refine both their sound and their methodology, bringing more focus both to their new-Western sound (“Comin’ Home” and “Tribute (For Ennio Morricone)”) and their constant study of sin and redemption (“’52 Ford,” “Spring Break 1899,” and well, the whole damned album). I can only hope whatever they release next is just as revelatory and revolutionary. Sadly, they haven’t done a video for Red yet, so here’s some live footage from tracks from there:

So if you like what you’ve read, heard, and seen here, their next show in this area will be September 20, where they open for the Gaslight Anthem in San Francisco. They’re also headlining in SLO the night before, but I don’t have a clue if I can make it down for that.

Until later, music fans.