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my first time
title: My First Time: A Collection of First Punk Show Stories
editor: Chris Duncan
other shit: 181 pages, plus (short) author bios. 2007, AK Press.
rating: 3.5/5 safety pins
I will admit it, guys: There is not a lot I love more in the world than stories about How Punk Rock Saved My Life, and this book has many such stories. Most of them are pretty short, only a page or two, and they’re mostly by people who Do Stuff in punk. They’re in bands (Blag Dalia, John Poddy, Blake Schwarzenbach) or they write books (Michael Azerrad, Chris Walter, George Hurchella), something like that, but some of my favorite ones are by regular joes.
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worms play pinochle on your snout
Most of my friends play some sort of card game: Magic, maybe. Munchkin was really popular for a while. Poker, of course. In some parts of the U.S., kids still grow up playing euchre. Most people can play hearts or spades, or at least the computerized version. But there is this whole class of older, complicated games like pinochle, games that take no money and only as much time as you feel like giving them — I’m not going to be so reactionary as to say they’re being lost, but if I want to play pinochle with someone who is not a member of my immediate family, there is a 100 percent chance I will have to teach them. And I’ve done it, rounded up three friends and sat down at a table with diagrams and beer and cards, and those are some of the best times I’ve had. Granted, probably that group of people could have fun watching paint dry, but I don’t ever get bored playing pinochle — frustrated, sure, and occasionally even angry — but mostly? Mostly, I laugh, and so does everyone else.
Some of the better memories from my childhood are of playing cards at my grandmother’s house, laughing uproariously at some bone-headed play or at some scathing bit of commentary from my grandmother’s acid tongue. We all play: my grandmother and my mother and my aunts and my cousins and my sisters and we’ve been teaching my nieces. (Sometimes the men of the family play; they certainly know how, but often they go to bed. My mom and my aunt and my grandma and I, on the other hand, will quite happily stay up all night playing cards and drinking coffee and laughing till we cry.) I’ve been playing pinochle since I could hold cards, and I grew up reading this ancient yellow copy of Hoyle’s Rules of Games. Sometimes we go through phases where we’re in the mood for something else, but we always end up back at pinochle.
Pinochle is a strategy game, a memory game, a game of teamwork and of social engineering. There are very strict rules about when you are allowed to play which cards, and you need to know those rules backward and forward. There is a part of the game where everyone puts a bunch of their cards on the table and adds up the points, and you have those few seconds to look at what everyone has laid down and memorize it, because you need to keep track. You have to pay very careful attention to who plays what and when. There are things you say or don’t say, things you listen for, social cues you try to send or pick up on to steer the play. It sounds hard, maybe, but it keeps you on your toes. As my grandmother approaches 90 without a hint of senility or dementia — she can’t shuffle anymore, but if you want to win, you try to get on grandma’s team — I wonder how much of that has to do with these think-really-hard card games she’s spent her whole life playing.
At any rate, the part where you put your cards on the table is called “melding.” Melding is one of two ways to get points in pinochle; certain combinations of cards have different values. A marriage — a king and queen of the same suit — is worth two points. Jacks around — one jack of each suit — is four points. The nine of trump is worth one point. One of the pieces of meld is called a pinochle; it’s a jack of diamonds and a queen of spades.
A standard pinochle deck is 48 cards, 9 through ace, two of each. It is therefore possible to meld a double pinochle, two jacks and two queens. It’s worth 30 points. In my family, we tend to play double-deck, and so you can get a triple pinochle for 90 points. A quadruple pinochle wins the game. I have seen a quadruple pinochle exactly once. I can still hear my mother’s gasp as someone — my aunt? one of my cousins? — laid it down.
So getting a pinochle is awesome, right?
Well. The problem is that pinochle is a bidding game, and you have a partner, and you and your partner have to take tricks. Between your meld and your tricks, you have to get enough points to cover your bid, or you go set and lose everything. If I take the bid — let’s say I took it for 80 — my partner gets to pass me four cards, but I can’t say what I want. All I can do is name trump. And if I name diamonds as trump: What do I want? Am I going for the pinochle? Or do I just have a fistful of diamonds? There is no way to know. No one has put down any cards yet. You have to guess what I have and what I want based on what’s in your hand and what makes the most sense, strategically. There are all sorts of crazy ways to try to figure it out, but in the end, you pass and you hold your breath and hope your partner smiles.
But let’s say it pays off, and I put together the double pinochle. That’s 30 points of meld, which ain’t half bad. But what if I don’t have anything else? Thirty points is not very close to 80 points. To make up the difference, I have to take every single trick when we start playing, and I’m sure as hell not going to do it with a double pinochle in my hand. Jacks and queens don’t take tricks. They’ve just fucked me. In the end, they’re not worth anything at all.
You just spent all this time obsessing about the pinochle, and it didn’t do you any good.
So when I mentioned oh-so-casually that I got a tattoo on a whim in Salt Lake City, that was only half true.
by tyler james densley at cathedral tattoo
Style-wise, that is a very traditional tattoo. It doesn’t remotely resemble any of my other tattoos, which are all [mostly] abstract blackwork pieces. Content-wise, it’s also traditional. All those vices, cards and booze and dice and a big ol’ cigar. Often these sorts of tattoos show aces and eights, the dead man’s hand, but that’s a double pinochle up there. The tattoo is as much a tribute to my family and to the game we love as it is a reminder that maybe everything isn’t exactly what it seems. Maybe this Vegas-looking tattoo was done in Salt Lake City. It could have been done anywhere, of course, but it wasn’t. Maybe those awesome cards aren’t worth anything at all. Maybe our obsessions shouldn’t be pursued so single-mindedly.
…or maybe I just won the game.
it feels good to say what i want
Hello, friends! Been a while, and I’m sure you’ve all been wondering what the hell I’ve been doing with myself. Answer: reading (pretty sure I’ve read 30 books in 30 days), traveling (I have been at the airport once a week for the last month), and not a whole hell of a lot else. I have a bunch of book reviews half-written that should theoretically be going up very soon, but for now, here is a concert report for the last month, some tattoo ramblings, something about traveling, and a little about cats. Warning: long.
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with the history of the world
There’s a quote from a book that I remember, but I didn’t remember remembering until I saw a tattoo of it recently on tumblr:
The quote is from “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky. It reads:
Standing on the edges of life offers a unique perspective, but there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor.
I like that quote for personal reasons; I spent a large chunk of my life waiting. I’ve always wanted to do $whatever. I’ll do it when…
When what? I don’t know that I’ve had a ton of Eureka moments in my life, but that was one of them. When what? Now I do what I want.
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who came along for the ride
On Wednesday, I will be moving the RSS feed of this blog over to feedburner. I have absolutely no idea how many people subscribe, and I have absolutely no idea if those people will be fucked if I just change the address in my settings, so I am giving you some advance notice. I think there are two of you. Min and Terry, UPDATE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS. The new address will be:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/newsprint-fray
I did some other stuff, too, since I seem to be updating this blog with something that approaches regularity. For example, I put back the buttons that allow you to share posts on spaceface, and I fixed a bug in the navigation, and I upgraded my wordpress install, which I had to do by hand because of some memory error. So that’s all shiny and great. I also killed categories and am just using tags, because I just could not handle trying to figure out what the difference was and what it should be blah blah blah. TAGS, motherfuckers, it’s the only way.
Not much else to report. Another review and soundtrack should be out pretty soon, and then I have these two irritating books on hardcore to complain about, and I just ordered another slew of books to read/review. I haven’t done reviews of biographies, but maybe I will? I may also start doing blurbs on the documentaries I watch, since I don’t watch anything else anymore. (Most recently, a terrible direct-to-youtube one called Welcome to Sammytown, in which somehow the guy who murdered his girlfriend is the most sympathetic person there. Everyone else says shit like, “Oh, yeah, Sam totally killed that girl, but he’s not a murderer! He’s got a heart! Murderers have that stone look in their eyes!” PROTIP, DOUCHEBAG: YOU BECOME A MURDERER BY MURDERING SOMEONE.) But I could put up short paragraphs of a few documentaries at a time, starting with Welcome to Sammytown and that one about Johnny Thunders that made me want to slit my wrists.
I also have a stack of new albums to listen to and review except I keep listening to the Misfits instead. No shows this week, but next week is John Doe (I can’t even think about that one too much or I will freak myself out) and then the Rural Alberta Advantage. I’m still mad at them about their video, but they put on a hell of a live show, so I’m looking forward to it.
all this science i don’t understand
I was going to write about a documentary I watched recently called The Heart Is A Drum Machine. I’m not sure what it’s about — what is music, it persists in asking — but at many points, the people interviewed discuss the physicality of music, the mystery of its origin, the rhythm of the heart. The drummers they interviewed said things like, “the heart and the drum are not two separate things.” (Milton Graves, in that case.)
i have got to leave to find my way
When I found out Bill Berry left REM, I was in my father’s living room. I don’t remember if someone called me, or if I heard it on the radio, or what. It’s even possible I read it online; it was 1997, I had a computer with dial-up and AOL. I stood there and thought about the rumor, the report, the whatever, the thing that told me that one of the band members had said that if one of them ever left the band, REM would break up. And now Bill was leaving, so that was it, right? They were over? I didn’t cry, but only because I was panicking too hard. I got online and refreshed the news obsessively. Were they going to break up? I am pretty sure I did that for three days straight.
I tell that story, such as it is, because Min asked a question on her blog, sort of, about songs and stories and bands. And last week I told her about my sister coming to visit me, and I was wearing an REM t-shirt. My sister laughed because she’d been visiting my mother before she came to Chicago, and my mother has been cleaning out her basement, and had a box of my sister’s old stuff. My sister threw out everything in that box except her REM t-shirt, the one she got in college — she went to UNC in the earlyish 80s, when REM still played the area pretty frequently.
let’s just see what the morning brings
Just over a month since I got my last tattoo, I have added another one to the collection. This one is even more difficult to get decent pictures of than that one was, because it spirals around my calf.
as long as the road lacks perspective
Many lifetimes ago, I was in an ambulance, on my way to the hospital. The sirens weren’t on. We weren’t going very fast. It was a cold March night, quite dark, raining. The guy riding with me, Jared, was 22 years old. He was wearing a snazzy red jacket, and his blond hair had been recently cut. He liked to paint pictures. I asked him how long he’d been an EMT; it was only his second week, and it was already getting to him.
“But you know, Pam, I just keep thinking about those deep-sea creatures. You and me, we’re in this ambulance, it’s raining, things are really fucked up, but right now, somewhere out there? Are deep-sea creatures.”
I’m not that person anymore, except I will always be that person, and somewhere, there will always be deep-sea creatures.
It’s a kraken, drawn for me by my friend Jason, and I walked around with the drawing folded up in my pocket for years. The tattoo itself was done by Daniel at the Pearl Harbor Gift Shop, in Toronto, and I love everything about it.
the best game i can name
From the Not A Personal Blog And Yet files, I went to the Winter Olympics earlier this year. I really only remember moments; here are a few of them.
I remember dueling national anthems on the skytrain, being worried the Richmond Olympic Oval was going to come down around me when a Canadian won gold, the crepe stand in Yaletown, the appalled look on Sam’s face whenever I said something so utterly preposterous that the only thing there was to say was “oh my GOD” (I did this often, and mostly on purpose). The dude in line at Ontario house who called a friend and said, “well, there’s an American in this line, but she’s okay.” More cowbell. The kid on his bike with a Canadian flag cape flapping behind him. Looking at my hands, realizing they were swollen and discolored and covered in sores, but twittering something about frostbite before I put on my gloves. The running commentary on the nordic combined team event, provided by American skier Todd Lodwick, standing about six inches away. Being in BC Place for a medal ceremony, thinking it was reasonably loud and awesome when they played the American anthem for Shaun White’s gold, and then standing in awestruck silence as 20,000 people sang ‘O Canada’ and proved me wrong. Wondering how more bobsled people don’t die, because it is fucking terrifying. More cowbell. Sam’s cheerful, “good hustle, team!” as the three of us (her, me, The Dart), hating the world and the mornings in particular, stumbled out of the house at 7am to make it to curling. Freezing once we got there. Feeling like my life depended on how hard I cheered for Canada in the first USA-Canada hockey game, and hoping Gabs did not get us all killed by cheering too loudly for America. Fleeing the premises when the US got that empty-net goal. More cowbell, more cowbell, more cowbell. People on the skytrain platform cheering QUATCHI QUATCHI QUATCHI as I walked by, a giant stuffed Quatchi doll strapped to my back. “Pam, we’re never going to get out of here if you stop to flirt with every Mountie between here and the door.” The sky on that last Sunday, clear blue and beautiful when Canada won that gold in hockey, and there were kids on every street corner draped in maple leaves and cheering; people on their porches waving the flag; cars honking at each other as they passed, cowbells hanging out the windows; pedestrians waving and smiling and dancing; lines of high-fives with strangers as I waded through downtown to get to the airport; the Hip on my ipod playing Fireworks (if there’s a goal that everyone remembers…); grinning at people till my face hurt; laughing, laughing, laughing.
That is all.