Keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again

"People over Profits," Port of Oakland, 11.2.11

So, I’ve been not blogging and not writing and not even really listening to music for the past month or two, largely because I’ve been busy being totally obsessed with the Occupy movement. (Also I’ve been working a lot. Hire me!) From the bridges of New York to the corners of Oakland to the tiny towns in between, this 99% thing is happening, and sometimes in order to let something happen, you have to push reflection to the side for a bit and participate.

The only thing I am certain of at this point is, I’m a part of this.

When I was small enough, I climbed inside the cool orange velvet of my mother’s acoustic guitar case and sat inside it. From this textured shell I listened to roughly strummed versions of Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, and I thought that’s what protest was.

In the protest songs of my remembering, the narrative is simpler and more direct than I’ve seen it be in my adulthood. The oppressed rise up promptly upon being put down. Small acts always have historical effect. Hope is clear and so is the opponent. Change is a pinpointable effect we achieve together, unified, from the first chords to the last strains with maybe just a bridge or two of confusion thrown in for mood, most likely in the shape of E-minor/G plucked loosely on guitar strings.

What I’ve seen and experienced in the past month or two has not been so neatly proscribed. Often it’s also raw and scary and exhausting, and at this point it would make a terrible song. But what I understand the more I see is that it’s probably going to stick around for a while. Its songs have time to be composed. As my friend Kevin said of his 4-year-old daughter after the Children’s Brigade march in Oakland on November 2: “Ingrid is a member of the 99% generation!”

My parents sang protest songs. First in protest, then as lullabies. They were students in the 60s, they protested the Vietnam war, and they raised kids in the California redwoods in the 70s, so the legend of that era’s social movements was deeply embedded in my upbringing.

I was a child of the Reagan generation, and by the time the 80s came around, I viewed the movements and their songs as  historical: romantic, but ultimately dragged down by difference and economy. It was nice to be a hippie, I thought, but ultimately you have to get a job. Buy stuff. Send me to ballet class. Slap a “no nukes” sticker on the station wagon and pick me up after school. I never expected, in my lifetime, to feel the urgency people must have felt when they thought they were changing the world, for real. I never really listened to the words:

They say: We are unstoppable. Another world is possible.

So for now, until I can at least rein in my to-do list a bit, I’m going to let the protest inhabit the music and vice versa. I’ll share a couple of my favorite protest songs with you.

And yes, I’m taking requests.

Painful

Matador, 1993

It’s as though you woke up from a long time away, your body still riddled by the trauma of an injurious daunt: the bullet or the blade, muscles or words and how they almost broke you. The air cooler now; the body still little.

You are sitting in a city’s hot pavement square or you are climbing a grass hill to a garden plot. The mass of electricities passes you by; shadows of steel papered with letters to the missing and gone. Rows of grounded vines stretch out like steps that you cross and the crusty matter of summer’s off-sling is percussive beneath sneakers. Blisters swell your heels.

In the time you were out and now, when you’re lessened, some pairings had changed. Others had not.

I think some part of me, he said, will always.

But it still didn’t make sense to you, to see them kiss and his small hand like a flesh raw thing in that rust red birds nest hair.

Everyone was not hurt while you were. The harvest was over.  The city unslept.

Slanted and Enchanted

Matador, 1992

With the most precious ones, the heart-fillingest ones, the favorites, criticism fails. There is only sensation.

These songs summon a boy, who taught me to count between lightning and thunder, get dry beneath buildings, roll loudly down lawns: a western girl in her fifteenth year caught in her first eastern summer afternoons.

I remember every thing about it: the crest of your nose, the sores on your lips, your eyes smaller than they should be. Your father the brain surgeon, the curve of your left-handed script, your hair-dyed-blue hands drenched in teenage come. Sneakers.

Later, mailed mix tapes.

A Summer Babe.

Repo Man

San Andreas Records, 1984

Remember when I was talking about Joan Didion and  Tom Waits, and saying that perhaps I’d rather be from his California than from hers? I’d like to add to that by saying that this is also the California I’m from.

Repo Man is a cult film made in 1984 by Alex Cox. It’s about a guy, a car, capitalism, drugs, the possible end of the world, LA, some unseen powers, and a lot of punk rock songs. I’m sure it’s about some other stuff—it’s been forever since I saw it—but in my teenage memory, those are the things that stick. I had friends who were absolutely obsessed with this movie. I loved it, saw it many times, but I never knew all the lines like some guys did.

“Ordinary fuckin’ people. I hate ‘em.” –Bud, Repo Man

Pretty much anyone I knew in high school that was obsessed with this movie hung out across the street. You know what across the street is in high school, right?  It’s the steps of that big old wooden house with the big gate and the shading vines that provide a nice cover for lighting joints. It’s the small alley around the corner whose curbs cradle you when you’re making out or coming down or just having a break from the constant barrage of authority known as the high school experience. In some schools, it’s the parking lot, or behind the church, or under the bleachers. It exists in every teenage world: the place in high school where kids who are a little bit outside hang out.

I liked to move around in high school — I hung out across the street, and I also didn’t. But some of my favorite people were usually there. People who weren’t from perfect one-story craftsman family homes on the West Side but instead grew up in the mountains, by the beach, in ramshackle family situations, in unheated garage bedrooms, a little closer to the edge than other people liked to acknowledge.

In high school I didn’t do drugs, didn’t even smoke cigarettes, was fairly tame in my sexuality. I was from a comparatively sane family, I did theater, I worked hard, and I wore interesting clothes. But I had friends who were far more adventurous than I was. And I loved them, and I hung out with them. Across the street.

Get outta line, next neck on the block –Circle Jerks, Coup D’Etat

Once my high school principal actually tried to talk to me about hanging out across the street. I was in his office for something unrelated, and he mentioned that it seemed like I was hanging out “over there” with “the wrong element.” My parents worked at the university. I used to be friends with (actually, date) his own son. I was a bright girl with a bright future and I wouldn’t want to, well, you know… I stared at him, at first honestly not sure what he was implying. Then I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, and my friends were some of the smartest people I knew, and I walked outside. And across the street.

People who have had to fight for their identities—and especially people who have had to do this as children and teens—guard them with a mixture of unwavering pride and a sense of underlying vulnerability that never goes away, no matter how black your clothes or scratched your arms or loud your culture. If you are a teenager and someone puts you down, hits you, ignores you, or even just doesn’t really notice you – or if you feel in some other way (culturally, sexually) disenfranchised, it shows.  If you can find something that somehow, with its mix of intelligence and fuck-you-ness and bitter humor, speaks to your feelings, you memorize it. It’s punk for a lot of people, or movies like Repo Man, or theater or video games or whatever culture catches you in that moment of vulnerability and allows you in.

I’m not crazy / you’re the one who’s crazy / you’re driving me crazy –Suicidal Tendencies, Institutionalized

Listening back, this music sounds much mellower than I thought it was at the time. Punk. It is so angry and so about rebellion. But it is also just, really, rock ‘n’ roll, no? Sometimes faster, sometimes yelling-er , but always about a guitar and a kid who wants to be heard. I must have heard these songs when I first saw the film – probably in junior high, considering the fact that I had an older brother. I know that I loved Suicidal Tendencies and their dirty lack of tact or melody. I loved The Circle Jerks even though I wasn’t even really sure what their name meant. Black Flag was a presence that invoked Cool even if I never got super into them – channeling disaffected teenagers everywhere with we’ve got nothing better to do than watch tv and have a couple of brews, dude. And just today I realize that this soundtrack album contains the first version of “Pablo Picasso” I ever heard, long before I knew who the Modern Lovers or Jonathan Richman are.

I’m glad to have listened to this music young. I’m glad to have identified, even tangentially, with the cultural place this record represents. This place of rebellion and humor all at once, this cult Hollywood outsider status of whatever was happening in the 80s and 90s in California that left such an impression. And I’m glad people listened to me when I was a kid. I wish they’d listened to more of my friends.

Because this record is about them. Kids. About the way it sounded to be a teenager in this place, dreaming of access to a car or money, avoiding the crush of pressures large and small, feeling acutely aware of our impending-apocalyptic era, the hot California pavement shaking beneath our skin every day, trying to understand and accept and get the hell out of and fall in love with where we were from. Across the street, in a cul de sac, or on the open radioactive road. This is California, too.

Is This It

Rough Trade, 2001

Some records are not about the things they make you remember.

Portland, Oregon. September 12, 2001.

The fall of the sun sweeps the backyard fence. Our picnic table nestles the remains of the chips and salsa. Shaking the dregs of empty Pabst cans, looking for a place to extinguish the joint, my friend’s friend from college debates a classic flick: “It’s not misogynistic, it’s about the plight of man.”

I want to touch him, his summer-labor shoulders. I don’t care about the plights of men, or Samuel Fuller’s war movies. What I want to know is: How to tap this violently musclebound fuck god? How to cash in on the fear of this day? How could I possibly be alone when the sky is falling?

And although he’s wrong, I feel for him. And for Fuller, too.

It’s like, no matter what amazing and radical intentions he has, no matter what fuck-shit-up rebellious instinct, what strong single mother raised him up, what depths of poetry lurk beneath those abs—no matter what—in the end, a man makes a war. What can he do?

When he leaves, lengthening shadows are cooling the wooden seats on which we sit. A Volvo station wagon pulls up and he strides through the gate to get in it. Out of the window behind the steering wheel, a pixie haircut and sunglasses reflect us.

He opens the car door to the amplified sound of a clipped electric guitar, fuzzy but clean like it came from a city bigger than here. His girlfriend has been repeating it for a month in the car. We all have. Defending it. This little disc in a little sleeve painted to look like a vinyl record. The Modern Age. Shades of: Velvet Underground, The Cars, someone at the table says “is that Rick Springfield?” or something else undeniably tinged with sudden nostalgia.

The past separates itself from today. The old car drives away. In its engine’s noisy wake I hear the beat. A deeper fuzz.

A fighter-plane’s patrol loop blots out the sunset for only 2.5 seconds, but it’s enough. Dresden, Sarajevo. Baghdad.  New York.

We’re done.