with a light vinaigrette
Two signs the recession is still with us. WFMU, the left-most button on my car radio of the mind, held a second annual fund-raiser the other day, A 24 hr marathon jr. Generally they try to get by with just one per year, but the marathon in March fell short at the time, and come November the coal bucket only had a couple lumps left, not enough to keep it firmly on the ground. The other sign was an email from our new Dean at the library where I work. Regarding the recession she indicated that state university budgets being supported by tax revenue lag behind the times. She stated that the worst is yet to come, directed our attention to an email by another state official announcing we were being asked to return another 25 million to the state. Overall she did what she could to dissuade us from using the words "my" and "job" together too often in our thoughts. Then again, because at the moment my TV is dying I was browsing through the newspaper advertising supplements for a new one. Many retailers were willing to sell me flat screens, measured apparently only by the yard, and at quite astounding price points. No one seemed willing to sell me anything that simply replaced my old 14" cathode-ray tv. Someone must have have money I thought, or someone must think we have money. Perhaps it's just that they think we will pay for what we value and believe they know all about what that is.
For WFMU's fall schedule a new show was introduced. A broadcasted podcast (a baudcast?) by someone named Nardwuar who lives in Vancouver. Normally this show airs at a time when I am on a bicycle and don't have access to the Internet. When it came up that the Nardwuar hour was going to air an interview with Ian MacKaye (Teen Idles, Minor Threat, Fugazi, Evens) I took the time to listen to the archived show later in the evening October 21, 2009: Nardwuar vs. Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins. A good interview overall. Ian seemed bemused at times by Nardwuar's ability to compress a quarter century into a series of events that lay only in some apparent recent past. "'94 is recent to you?" counter-queried Mr. MacKaye at one point. This was one of the moments during the interview where I thought to myself: Nardwuar, does he know the Minor Threat song 'Salad Days'? I liked Ian's mention of his times in the Wilson High school theater group. My niece Nicole, a senior at Woodrow Wilson, is with the Wilson Players currently.
One of the other stories he related I know something about independently. Ian talked about the time that Fugazi's Joe Lally was arrested in a bizarre raid on a house in College Park by the P.G. County police. A housemate of mine at the time - the late 1980's, also named Paul, was detained in that same incident, because he used to hang out at that house. He was shook up and a little bitter about it all, but took it in stride. The PG police descended on the house in full-force swat mode and kept everyone they rounded up in jail overnight, before attempting to sort things out. The reason was because the dark 'n arty kids of that house had been gathering cat carcasses from a dumpster behind a biology lab and hanging them from a tree in the back yard to "weather" for the purpose of glueing the skeletons to a canvas. A little Spahn-Ranch of them I suppose, but those were the times. From those people I remember a goth girl, who was an art major, and a guy and his dog. I never saw him without the dog, a big dog, whether at the food co-op or doing fill-ins at WMUC, the Univ. of Maryland's 10 watt radio station. My housemate, Paul RW Clark, had his own band, Asbestos Rockpyle, the name was in part an entirely un-ironic nod to the Nick Lowe, Dave Edmonds, Billy Bremmer band "Rockpile. I still have their 7" single.
Around the same time as Nardwuars broadcast a few weeks ago now, I went to an book talk and author signing event at Politics & Prose bookstore in DC. It was for a new edition of Mark Anderson and Mark Jenkins' book on the DC punk rock scene
Dance of days : two decades of punk in the nation's capital. This book is a separate creation from Sharon Cheslow's
Banned in DC book or Aye Jay's
The punk rock fun time activity book.
The author talk settled into a discussion, soon put into a sharp and past-tense relief by a question from a lady whose son had been in the band Soulside: "what did punk do?" A valid enough question to put to those flogging a 4th ed. of a book published nine years ago on events that took place a decade before that. Mark Anderson admitted a certain coming to terms was needed, with the fact that the Wilson High class of 79 from which Dischord records sprang graduated 30 years ago. Few if any who were part of the initial DC punk scene, in any genuine fashion, are younger than 35. Although oddly half the people there that day were younger than that. Anderson was forced to question whether the rebellious attitude of youth has any application to their adult lives. Whether any set of youthful idealism can mean much to an adult life. And whether his book catures that dimension. As the Jam sang (letting Woking Englands Paul Weller answer for DC) in their song Burning Sky: "...ideals are fine when you are young and I must admit we had a laugh, but that's all it ever was and ever could be..." Perhaps a better question might have been: What what was it about? I had a friend in those days, Steve Kiviat, who had a quote he would use - attributed to Skip Groff I think: "No Future (a Sex Pistols song I should add) for some yob in England meant exactly that: no job, no career, no upward mobility, no future. For some punk kid in Bethesda 'no future' was about not having a date on Friday night." For DC's scene to mean much it had to get away from empty borrowed sloganeering and develop an identity and awareness of its own. So then was it just about the scene? And at that should we consider the scene as this scene, or the general idea of an independent music scene. Was it just about the DC scene's success in establishing no smoking venues, all ages shows and generally making the world safe for straight edge teenage bands. Was it about the DIY ethos (Do it Yourself). The don't wait for validation from established institutions, don't wait for someone else to give you a space or an audience. Gather a peer group and give a show. About an independent music scene separate and self-formed, away from the consumer product music that would inform most peoples lives and form their memories of the times. Already, before the MP3, the stifling hold on popular music culture by the major label recording industry was being pried open. In part because of the alternative music culture like the record labels Dischord, Slumberland, Teenbeat, or Fountain of Youth, in DC alone, that insisted on remaining apart from it. This sees further expression today as yesterday in organizations like Jenny Toomey's
Future of Music Coalition. Beyond music culture narrowly; Positive Punk, Positive Force, the activist advocacy bent in the DC Punk Scene is widely recogonized. DC bands were a refreshing anodyne to the casual nihilism of much 1980's alternative music. The DIY philosophy proved a valid approach across a wide range of endeavors. There was healthy skepticism towards institutions formal or informal. Particularly towards ones that feel they no longer have to justify their claims on authority. Expressed in the simple slogan Question Authority , or the irregular and ironic command to "obey giant." skepticism leveled equally between a blowhard on a microphone soapbox, and or all others struck by a doubled sense of entitlement. One of the things that seemed to needle Mark Anderson the most are the attempts by marketers to create and co-opt a punk iconography, and attempts by counter-culture establishment figures to elevate it, and put it safely behind glass. Always one of my favorite lines in a rock song, Fugazi from Blueprint: "Never mind what they're selling, it's what your buying." If nothing else the punk rock kids always a sort of lost-tribe coalition came out of other end of those years with a good enough bullshit detector.
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