greyperegrine

[greyperegrine]

first song of the spring 2015 playlist, hopefully an omen?

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When a song explains your life, part 1.

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it's that time of year again...

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Here’s the deal. I want it all.

I want those juicy Luke’s Diner burgers piled high with cheddar and slathered in ketchup. I want the culinary masterpieces of Chef Sookie St. James. I want her literally death defying risotto, her towering cakes, her ill advised but delectable jalapeno spiked…

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Finally got some old film developed, it is half my trip to Big Sur with Tori Manferdelli and half the stop Joanna Bassi and I made at the Petrified Forest in Arizona on our way from San Francisco to Houston. This seems like a good opening image to the next batch coming on here, mostly from the road trip.

[greyperegrine]

We've Been Had

This isn’t the first time they’ve done this to us. We had to deal with this for four long months in 2013. We were put out on the streets, without any place to go, every friday night. It was winter, too cold to make the bike ride or walk between the bars enjoyable in a romantic, glowing-in-the-street-light, so-tired-I-can-barely-move, but-I-really-want-a-good-dance-party kind of way.

We were out wandering because there wasn’t a good friday night dance party left. Nope, they had shut it down, bid it farewell. It was the dance party that integrated me into DC nightlife, that reminded me why I liked being out so late at night, that led me to new music, that brought me to new friends. We had no idea when we would next hear “All My Friends” at 2:30 am on a beer-slick dance floor deliriously happy to be surrounded by all the people we knew from the bar who just wanted to dance and sing, or commit to dancing to the full five minutes of “House of Jealous Lovers.”* Indie rock dance parties were dead.** No one wanted to dance to songs with words anymore. EDM rules, man.

Thankfully, this bar brought back the indie rock dance party a few months later, ostensibly under a different format (but it wasn’t, it was exactly the same), and we all managed to forget those four horrible months in which we had no where to go and prayed for Black Cat to host something, anything, that we would like since our heretofore unmentioned bar, DC9, was failing us so severely.

But last Friday, we heard the terrible news. It would be happening again. September 20th would be our last day. We’ll be, once more, put out from the bar we call home each Friday in search of something new, although no one wants anything new, we just want to hear music from the golden age of dance punk, Indie pop, Alt-80s, garage rock, please. Someone, anyone, help us out. 

*Dancing to indie rock music can be really hard work.

**In New York, we were laughed at by a tragically hip bar tender, a bleached blonde covered in tattoos, for asking where such a dance party existed on a Saturday night.

[greyperegrine]

It seems as though these are the books I've read so far this year

The Winding: An Inner History of the New America, George Packer

Dream City, Tom Sherwood & Harry Jaffe

S Street Rising, Ruben Castaneda

The White Album, Joan Didion

Friday Night Lights, H. G. Bissinger

First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Class Black Public High School, Alison Stewart

Both Flesh and Not, David Foster Wallace

On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, Alice Goffman

The System: The Glory and Scandal of Bigtime College Football, Jeff Benedict & Armen Keteyian

Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss

The Vacationers, Emma Straub

Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Kenneth Jackson

This Town, Mark Leibovich

Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stones Interview, Jonathan Colt

Man Repeller: Seeking Love, Finding Overalls, Leandra Medine

Drinking with Men: A Memoir, Rosie Schapp

My First New York: Early Adventures in the Big City (collected essays)

The Vacationers, Emma Staub

It appears as though my theme so far is "DC"

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When Nina and I visited Jane in college, we saved our money to drink underage at her favorite bar, manned by her favorite salty bartender who responded to tips with “Not enough, children,” demanding an extra dollar before he poured another illegal drink. Hungry and broke, we pawed through her...

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Feminism? Throw it out.

Thanks to Beyonce, we've heard a lot about feminism in the past few weeks. 

The main gist of everything I've heard can be boiled down to one, whiny question (when reading, please apply a nasal voice sound): "but what does it meaaaaaannnn."

There are so many asinine conversations happening about who/what is a feminist. Is Beyonce a feminist? Is Taylor Swift? Why do so many people refute the term? Blah blah blah.

But, you ask, what about modern feminism, with its belief that women should be paid equally to men, that women should be privileged to the same, positive adjectives as much rather than terms that degrade their authority (see: "bossy," "bitch," etc), that women should be seen as valuable intellectually, and not physically objectified? 

I feel like most people are on board with all of these stipulations. Believing in the quality of women, in the year 2014, does not set you apart, does not make you a "feminist," in the same way that believing in the equality and value of Blacks/Latinos/Asians/etc does not bestow you with a specific signifier (akin to "non-racist"? I don't even know). On the whole the discrimination that women feel is, generally, a structural problem and, therefore, so much harder to fend off than personal discrimination, though - fear not - I do acknowledge it still exists. 

Here's the thing. We need a new word. The reason why we keep having these circuitous and utterly meaningless conversations is that the term feminist has all but lost its meaning. It's too inextricably linked to the idea of man-hating, bra burning, non-arm pit shaving hippies. Try and refute me but it's true. That's the first image that pops into everyone's mind. We don't need a new generation of pop culture, superstar feminists. We don't even need to feel comfortable personally accepting the label feminists. What we should do is reject the term altogether as an anachronism and start over with a word, or an identity, that embraces the current status of women. 

But that's a totally different story, since the current status of women is subject to interpretation based on your economic/racial identity.

See what I'm trying to get at there?

[greyperegrine]

T-Rex Trying to make snow angels…

#TRexTrying

#snowday

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Song Notes

This week, everything is terrible and I hate all music.

I particularly hate Spoon’s new album. So boring. So, so boring. The fact that Pitchfork can continue to canonize spectacularly unspectacular albums (see: Pitchfork’s review of Arcade Fire’s Reflektor) only confirms, to me, that they’ve lost any lingering indie credentials they once had and are now shamelessly marketing their content to middle-of-the-road music consumers.

EXCEPT, thanks to Spotify radio, I’ve pulled LCD Soundsystem’s This Is Happening out of musical hibernation (that dark corner of the mind where all life-altering albums go to rest, in anticipation of being worn out and rendered “unspecial”) and listened to “I Can Change” about a hundred times.

The album particularly suits that special time in every girl’s life where she must clear out her entire kitchen to prepare for professional roach spraying.

Spotify radio has also brought the Pixies’ “Debaser” to me, releasing it from the other corner of my mind known as “songs you hear in bars and always really like but can never manage figure out what they’re called.”

Which reminds me, dear scientists, please devise a Shazam-type chip that can be implanted in the brain. I would kickstarter that business.

-n

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Among Those For Whom Grunge Lives On

My cousin is a brooding, tortured 13-year old Swiss child with a taste for grunge music, doc martens, and deep purple lipstick. She wears her thick, wavy hair draped half way over her face, stays ensconced in her room all day, and stays up way too late, just because she can. Her Facebook page is littered with reposts from Francis Bean Cobain and photographs of early 90s Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain in mid-performance rapture. She, along with her family, are visiting my parents this July. Her summer vacation this year - hanging out with friends, going to the movies, traipsing between stores - has been replaced by social isolation in the woods of northern Baltimore County, with a month of near constant exposure to her younger sister, parents, and my parents. I can imagine that this must be teenage hell.

It’s a personal challenge to fend off the feeling that my cousin is utterly ridiculous. But I remember that when I was 13, my bedroom walls were covered in pictures of Stone Temple Pilots and No Doubt, I wore baggy black pants (this being the pre-skinny jeans and leggings era, still shaking off the remnants of grunge), and collected make up samples various relatives received from department store perfume purchases. Like my cousin, I was new to consumerism, devouring music and fashion magazines, and just as interested in the products being advertised as I was with the content being featured.

But unlike my cousin, I was the eldest cousin. I had no older relative to guide me into pop culture or taste. I introduced her this weekend to Spotify, and promptly sent her my seasonal playlists. In the car, I played Parquet Courts for her to learn about punk, circa 2014; All she knows of punk is the Sex Pistols. She asked me if I listened to AC/DC or Janis Joplin. I told her no, I prefered The Doors and, above all, the Velvet Underground. So I sent her Foxygen to learn about art rock. She knew nothing of New Wave, or synthpop, so we listened to the Talking Heads and Future Islands. She may have a handle on the 1960s and 1970s, but I want to teach her about the immense pleasure that “derivative” music, that most dismissive of labels applied to almost everything that follows, can provide.

I hope she gorges on this music, I hope her desire to know more, listen to more, leads her on a black hole chase through Spotify for more music that she never knew she liked.

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Dream City, and My Encounter with the Mayor for Life

I saw Marion Barry the other day, at the only full-service restaurant in Ward 8, the Uniontown Bar and Grill on Martin Luther King Jr. Ave, SE. I was there with colleagues for lunch. We’d scrapped our original plans for our go-to department lunch, Ted’s Bulletin on Barrack’s Row, in favor of patronizing some local businesses. I suggested it, after feeling rather hypocritical about the fact that I write grant proposals all day that encourage development in Ward 8, while ignoring the food options just down the street solely because they were in Ward 8. Our food had just arrived - and we were starving - when the Mayor-For-Life strolled in to Uniontown, eager to introduce himself to all those inside. He sat down with his entourage, a mixed-race bunch of balding, slightly overweight men in ill-fitting suits. He took the head of the table, the natural position as the leader of a crowd, no matter its size or composition.

Seeing Marion Barry stroll to my lunch table precipitated a strange real-life-meets-esoteric-reading-interests moment for me. In the past month, my reading list has been almost exclusively focused on recent D.C. history - Dream City, S Street Rising, Crabgrass Frontier - a sizable portion of which relates to Marion Barry’s former (and current) governing years. Seeing the man whose supposedly insatiable sexual appetite, lust for drugs, and limitless capacity for manipulation I had been reading about for the past three weeks was surreal. Especially when he approached my boss and began trying to sweet talk her.  

Whereas S Street Rising focuses on the personal narrative of a Washington Post crime reporter-cum-crack addict, and Crabgrass Frontier offers an academic undertaking outlining the slumification of American cities, Dream City specifically weaves the decline of D.C. with the decline of Marion Barry through intimate interviews and observations made by local politics reporters. I think Dream City tries hard to outline the causes and effects of D.C.’s fractured racial politics. But that wasn’t my largest take-away from the book. I was struck by the far reaching impact of capitalism in instigating corrupt behavior in so many of the people, black and white, rich and poor, depicted in the book. So much of Dream City is devoted not only to Marion Barry’s exploits and addictions, but also to the mutually beneficial relationships he cultivated with business interests, friends, and colleagues. Everyone benefited financially from one another at the expense of the already marginalized. I imagine the levels of corruption in D.C. far exceeded that in other municipalities, but I can’t fathom a world in which government can be completely immune from it either. It wasn’t just Marion Barry who was corrupt. It was everyone. It was his aides, the (white) real estate attorneys, the (white) real estate developers, the (white) political advisors. Half of them were participants or complicit in his drug use too. His corruption would not have been so malignant, so extensive, had there not been complicity on so many levels.

The city described in Dream City is so shockingly distant from the one I live in today, save for the relationship between city government and personal financial gain. I don’t know how much I’ve learned about D.C. from the book. I felt like a voyeur, a passive observer who has largely benefited from the real estate boom and gentrification spurred, in part, by the corrupt developers and their enablers, the politicians. I look back at D.C. in the 1980s and 1990s with bemused interest. I’ll never understand what it’s like to live in a city plagued by crack cocaine, recording over 450 murders a year. I'm worried about having my iphone snatched while walking home, not the threat of a stray bullet seeking, presumably, a teenage boy from a rival gang. A D.C. crime map shows 10 homicides within one block of my house over the past 12 years, but only one since I moved here, in 2009.

I also don’t know what it’s like to live in a segregated urban community, though this is a statement I may need to revise if I stay in D.C. for another 10, 15 years. Time will tell if the public housing complex a block away will survive the rapid gentrification of Columbia Heights, or for how long the elderly African-Americans will hold onto their Victorian row homes, faced with large sums of money from developers. There are a lot of fingers to point when it comes to gentrification but, as Dream City shows, everyone is to blame. White (and black) developers wouldn't have had access to prime plots for large scale construction had they not been permitted to win the contracts, buy the land, raze the existing structures, and determine the nature (all too often, "luxury"), of the building to be erected. No one could have done it with out their friends - neither the nearly all black politicians, nor the nearly all white developers. 

Yes, it's different now. Where I live, it's safer. There's more to eat, see, and do. But seldom do two weeks pass that we don’t hear about charter school contracts or building developers skimming funds from lucrative city contracts. This, I’m sure, is a painfully obvious statement, but Dream City affirmed its veracity to me. Democracy can never be pure as long as people maintain personal relationships with others who have business interests, which is to say, democracy can never be pure so long as capitalism exerts pressure on those in government, which it always does.

 -n

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But I look with enormous fondness on those days, on those of us who tried our honest best to get dressed up and act cooler than we were. We’d missed Britpop. It had happened when we were in high school, and maybe we’d seen the Verve or Oasis at a shed somewhere, but it had passed us over. So we took it and made something else out of it. And even if what we made was just a faint echo, it was still plenty.

http://www.stereogum.com/1676995/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-britpop-dance-night/franchises/20-years-of-britpop/2/

[greyperegrine]

Dear Friends

Friends,

I am sorry. For a lot of things.

I am sorry for presuming that you, like me, tie your self-worth to the favors you do for others. Those of you with a healthy self-esteem do not need to be over extending themselves to please. I am sorry for assuming that all the things I am comfortable offering to you, you would be comfortable offering to me.

I am sorry that I can lie to you so easily. I am sorry that I create situations that force me to lie to you. I am sorry that I lack the self-confidence to embrace the decisions I make without feeling the need to lie about them.

I am sorry that I belittle your own self-esteem related problems. I know we all have them. And I’m just trying to give you perspective, and to tell you that I think you are beautiful and funny and intelligent and that we all know this but you fail to understand on your own. I’m sorry that I’m not brave enough to tackle my own self-esteem shortcomings and discuss them with you in an open and honest way. I’m sorry that I’m unwilling to accept the compliments or advice that you give me.

I am sorry that I am unable to extract myself from relationships that upset me. I am sorry that you have to hear about the same people who hurt me over and over and over. I know you have my best interests in mind. I’m sorry for thinking that my relationships are exceptional and defy rules and logic. They’re not.

I am sorry if it ever seems that I need you in a way that is incommensurate with our history.

I am lucky to have you. All of you.

-n

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ideas for a zesty summer evening:

take your doctor’s advice and stop doing stuff or your viral-cold-exhaustion will never go away and music will never be loud enough again and you’ll always be in a fog state, half-watching Scrubs and spending money on questionable headbands

but buy those...