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.

For example, I love the one by Anna Kanaan, who was 43 when she went to her first punk show. She was there because her kid was playing the show and she got suckered into doing security. She was a little freaked out by the prospect, but learned that — surprise, surprise! — punk rockers are people, too. They were nice to her, and now she smiles at them on the street and says hi. It’s pretty adorable.

I suspected I would enjoy this book, and I was right. If you have similar suspicions about your own enjoyment, they will probably be right. I do suggest the library, though. This is a pretty fast read, nothing too deep or life-changing, nothing that you need to keep forever and ever on your shelves.

It did make me think, though: What would I come up with if someone asked me to write an essay or story about my first punk show? I don’t know that I could. I might be able to write something about my first show back after years of no shows at all, but that show was not a punk show. It was followed by an affair with CanRock (still ongoing, although these days it’s my bit on the side), and then a first punk show after the first non-punk show after no shows after many shows after the first show. That first punk show, maybe I could write about.

But my first punk show ever? I have no idea. And I don’t know what that means. Does it mean that it sucked? That it didn’t change my life the way it was meant to? Was I Doing Punk Rock Wrong? Or just that it was so long ago that I’ve lost it?

G: What’s the first thing you remember?
R: The first thing that comes into my head, you mean?
G: No, the first thing you remember.
R: No, it’s no good. It’s gone. It was a long time ago.

I started going to shows in 1990. It was not a great time for punk rock. So — maybe there wasn’t a first punk show. Maybe it was Pearl Jam. I see a lot of kids these days in Nirvana shirts at punk shows. Last week a kid had on his back: The Exploited (back patch), GG Allin (regular patch), Nirvana (sharpie). So maybe early Pearl Jam counts.

It was definitely not Marilyn Manson. I went to a hockey game last week, and they played the opening of “Beautiful People” as the Blackhawks skated onto the ice (despite the absence of Patrick Sharp from the lineup — rimshot!), and I was appalled on several levels. It wasn’t Nine Inch Nails, either, although let me tell you about early 90s pits at industrial shows as a 14-year-old girl. That thing you’re imagining right now? The face you made? You’re not wrong.

Was it Social Distortion? Could be. That would make sense. It might at least explain my deep affection for Mike Ness, which is otherwise unfathomable.

Or was it some local Flint band, a few kids my age who played four gigs ever at the Local, their names and songs since lost? Or — one of the guys I dated in high school, he had a band. Maybe it was them. I would not have called them punk rock at the time, and I probably wouldn’t do it now, but maybe it was them.

G: You don’t get my meaning. What’s the first thing you remember after all the things you’ve forgotten?
R: Oh, I see. …I’ve forgotten the question.

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.

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.

I went to see OFF!, Keith Morris’ latest band (you may know him from Black Flag or the Circle Jerks), when they came through in July; they played Reggie’s as some kind of Lollapalooza afterparty thing. I don’t do outdoor fests, so I didn’t see them there, but I’m sure it was great. I basically blame OFF! for sucking me back into hardcore; when I went to see them at the Bottom Lounge in April, I hadn’t been to a hardcore show in years. Now I go to a lot of hardcore shows. Just when you think you’re out, you know?

There were some opening bands. The first one, local hardcore group the Vicelords, started off all right but deteriorated pretty quickly and I ended up not liking them much. (The bassist from the Brokedowns is in that band, and I like the Brokedowns, so I was disappointed in the Vicelords. They just didn’t have their shit together.) The second band, All Eyes West, starring guitarist Jeff Dean, played a really energetic and dynamic set of fairly classic early-90s post-hardcore. Think, I don’t know, Jawbox + that Chicago sound, whatever that is. (You know it when you hear it, right? Right.) They should have been third on the bill, because they made the next band seem sort of boring. That said, while I will fully admit that they were a good band and they should play out more, I can only listen to roughly 20 minutes of early-90s post-hardcore before I get bored of the miasma of manpain and want to move on. I appreciate it just fine, and sometimes I’m even in the mood to listen to it, but I don’t connect with it, and All Eyes West wasn’t any different. Sorry, emo kids. (That’s the best part of this post, by the way. All the arguments I’m going to get into at work over my dismissal of an entire beloved genre of music as a “miasma of manpain.”)

The third band, Ratasucia, I admit it, I remember nothing about them except that I spent the whole time trying to get pictures of the bassist’s Black Flag tattoo. Here it is:

ratasucia @ reggie’s, 2011-07-17

Here’s a picture of mine, taken when it was shiny and new:

It is not quite Cat Flag, but it’s probably as close as I’m going to get to tattooing a band logo on myself. It’s pretty close, though. On the other hand, I’ve been very wrong about my tattoos before, so who knows. Maybe I’ll get the real thing. Maybe I’ll start getting cat tattoos with the same frequency with which I get cats. As for this particular tattoo, its name is Henry. Raise your hand if you are shocked. I should not see any hands. It was inked by Kit Hall, who works out of Deluxe and is awesome, even though my tattoos are not her style (she is more illustrative, but I like her, dammit). Anyway. The bars double as legs for the cat, I guess, or the legs double as the bars. Not that that makes much sense, but ask me how much I care.

Speaking of Black Flag, during one of my trips, I read Spray Paint the Walls: The Story of Black Flag, and I thought it was a pretty good band bio, especially considering the author spoke to neither Greg Ginn nor Henry Rollins. HOWEVER. While I do not expect everyone to be able to date photos of Rollins by counting how many Misfits tattoos he has this time (or by consulting this handy chart), I would submit that someone writing a biography of Black Flag should be able to do it. I also submit that someone with any common sense whatsoever should not date a no-tattoos photo of ANYONE as 1984 after dating a many-tattoos photo of the same person as 1981. Wrong, wrong, wrong. (Also, it’s Huntington Beach. Not Huntingdon. Come on, fact checkers.) Other than those minor quibbles, I liked it. I might even do a real review at some point!

Back to the OFF! show. Keith Morris, at 55, has approximately 37 times the energy that I do, and the band’s very short songs are packed full of piss and vinegar. As I, too, am full of piss and vinegar, it’s a pretty good fit. I think they played every single one of their songs at least once in about an hour. The pit broke out immediately, but I barely noticed because it was behind me. Often I notice anyway, but there’s no stagediving at Reggie’s, which makes it a slightly subpar venue for a hardcore show. Mostly I remember enjoying myself, and that Morris was mysteriously nice to me, in that he apparently decided I needed some water about halfway through the set, so he went and got me some. I was genuinely appreciative but confused, and I thanked him, and next time I’m going to try to talk him into doing “Nervous Breakdown.” He always says OFF! songs only when he is asking for requests (I should learn the damn names of the songs, I guess; I know the words, because they are things like FUCK PEOPLE, which, now that I think about it, is probably also the name of the song, so never mind) but he used to play that one with the Circle Jerks, so maybe there is hope. But I digress. I didn’t take many pictures of OFF! this time around, but here are the photos from last time. Morris was in a Germs shirt this time, but otherwise my photos would have looked pretty much the same. I also thought Morris was in a better mood, but it’s hard to tell.

At any rate, that concert was back in July, and by the time August rolled around and I found myself in Salt Lake City for a work conference, it had been nearly a month since I’d been to a show. Way, way too long. So the first thing I did was pick up a copy of the indie weekly to see if there were any shows worth going to, and yes! My adventures first took me to the diviest dive bar I’ve been to in ages. They had some mixed-drink specials written on a chalkboard, but they were out of all the required ingredients by 7pm. All they had left was whiskey and vodka. So I was like, well, okay, do you have beer? The bartender said yes, and then walked away. I was expecting her to tell me what kind of beer they had, but that step was unnecessary because they had only one kind: PBR. Two dollars, 12-oz cans. Done and done.

First up was some local open who played terrible, terrible covers, forcing me — forcing me — to drink a lot of PBR in response. Seriously, ‘Mother’ followed by ‘When Doves Cry.’ It wasn’t pretty. Next up was an all-chick band called ESX, and they were more new-wavey than my usual fare, but I liked them well enough, and they had cool tattoos, and they were lovely people who seemed like the sort of people I’d be friends with if circumstances were different. The headliner was Girl in a Coma, a San Antonino three-piece (again, all women) I saw open for the Detroit Cobras earlier this year. I enjoyed their set a lot, and so I got really excited when I saw they were playing their own show in Salt Lake. I genuinely think they are Going Places, you guys, and their current tour is almost over and is mostly west coast, but if you get the chance to see them, you should check them out. They play punk-tinged rock that kicks all sorts of ass, and they are nice people to boot. I had a really good time that night, and it was exactly what I needed.

The next night’s adventure took me to this bizarre venue called, I believe, The Complex. It was like a venue mall, one big building with four separate rooms to serve as venues, with an honest-to-god food court in the middle. Seriously, there were nachos for sale. The room this show was in looked like this:

It was just a big room with risers at both ends; one end was the stage, and the other was the bar. Most people were jammed into the bar for most of the show, because you couldn’t leave that area with your drink. That photo was taken at the set break, if that tells you anything. Normally people start drifting to the front, but not here! It was strange. There were barricades in front of the stage, although I cannot for the life of me figure out why, because they were just bike racks. They were unstable and unsteady, easy to tip over, and by the time the headliner came on, the racks had been pushed to within a foot of the stage. Why bother?

There were only two bands, Pagan Dead, a local psychobilly/black metal band that was not my thing at all (I know for a fact that other people in the audience enjoyed them a great deal, but I found it excruciating), and the Nekromantix, one of the older psychobilly bands. I tend to prefer my psychobilly with more of a punk rock slant than the Nekromantix give it, but they are one of the Big Names of the genre, and Kim Nekroman, well–

He has hilarious hair and great tattoos and plays a coffin-shaped bass. He also makes fantastic faces, but my camera and my photography skills are not good enough to have captured them. Still, some of my photos are okay, and I had a good time. The Brains (Canadians!) were supposed to play second but didn’t show up for some reason; I’m a little bummed out about that, but I should get to see them when the Nekromatix come through Chicago a little later this year. They’re bringing the Brains as support, and although I don’t have any sort of pressing need to see the Nekromantix again, I’d like to see the Brains, and psychobilly nights at Reggie’s are always fun.

By the time this post goes up, I will have been to a few more shows in Chicago and the tattoo I got on a whim in Salt Lake City should be farther down the road to healed, and probably I will have read 17 more books about heroin addicts and found them all to be completely boring. Read all about it! Next, on Newsprint Fray.

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.

There is, however, some judgment implied by that quote that I don’t agree with (I have little use for judgment, frankly). One person’s “standing on the edges of life” is another person’s “enjoying the hell out of the show,” and the way I participate in and enjoy my own life holds zero appeal for most of the people I know. But I don’t care about that, and neither do they, and together we muddle through.

To put it another way, there is this writer/photographer in town who I’ve mentioned before, MXV. We end up at many of the same shows, and he takes photos and writes concert reports and talks about vinyl over on punkvinyl.com. He was at the last show I went to — Eske, I Attack, Verbal Abuse, Dayglo Abortions; this post started out as my concert report — and I glanced at him sort of awkwardly and should have said hello, but didn’t, because I am a socially awkward individual. And then it got to the point where we were standing there by ourselves long enough that I felt like saying something would have been awkward because why didn’t I say something before, and basically, I might need Captain Awkward to advise me on dealing with this issue the next time I run into him.

Anyway. He’s more on top of things than I am, and he put up his concert report and a bunch of pictures. There are even more pictures over here.

Here is one of them, from the latter batch:

If the watermark did not tip you off, this is NOT MY PHOTOGRAPH. Credit: MXV.

This photo is unusual because I’m in it. Usually I’m only in photos because I know I’m in them — I’m standing right there, but you rarely see me because I’m so small — but I’m visible in this one, with my leather jacket and my stupid hair. The guy to my right in the black t-shirt is Nicki Sicki, the frontman for Verbal Abuse. He came down to the floor to sing a few songs, and I didn’t know this one, so I stepped back a bit.

But that photo isn’t how I remember that moment at all. Was there that much room? That much light? I guess there must have been. And yet:

this one is mine. verbal abuse @ cobra lounge, 2011-06-04

I’m pretty sure that’s the same moment, and it blows my mind sometimes. I miss so much, you know? We all miss so much. And my point is not that my way is better or superior or true; my point is that my way is narrow. So is yours. And maybe the path gets a little wider when we’re on it together, but mostly, “truth” is such impossible bullshit.

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.

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.)

Then I was going to talk about 4/4 time, which is the most common time signature in western music. It is a heartbeat, as far as I’m concerned. Rock & roll, country, the blues — the vast, vast majority of it is in 4/4 time.

[A brief time signature primer. The top number is beats per measure; the bottom is, uh, the value of 1. So if the denominator is a 4, the quarter note gets one beat. If it's an 8, an eighth note gets one beat. Etc.]

So anyway. 4/4 time, four beats per measure. Four quarters. Building blocks of life, really, to hell with DNA. Or maybe the building blocks of the soul.

This is a quarter note:

Sometimes, though, I need to just–. Stop. Just for a second. This is a quarter rest, the piece of musical notation that means to do just that:

I don’t have anything particularly deep or meaningful to say about the fermata, another piece of musical notation that means “hold.” It goes over a note (I am simplifying drastically; musicians, forgive me). Usually you hold the note until the conductor signals that it’s time to move on, but if you’re on your own, the length of the hold is left up to you. I’ve never seen the sheet music for “Goldfinger,” but I bet you anything there’s a fermata at the end, and Shirley Bassey held it so long when they were recording it that she collapsed when she finally stopped singing.

Mostly I just like the idea of holding on. And anyway, it goes with the kraken.

Both inked at The Code of Conduct, and I would like to say that you really do not realize how often your inner wrist scrapes against stuff until you’ve got a new tattoo there.

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.

My sister’s in her 40s now, married with two kids, and she doesn’t have time for music anymore. She barely has time for thinking. But while she and I were talking about REM, her oldest daughter asked us about them, and my sister got this wistful smile on her face and said, “I’ll try to find it for you when we get home.” Her husband’s in the Air Force and they move constantly, shedding their music and possessions as they go, but I’m sure she never got rid of any of her REM. I hope her daughter asked when they got home. I hope she loves them like her mother loves them.

The name of this site, newsprint-fray, comes from an REM lyric in the song ‘Daysleeper.’ That’s because, in 2007, I was crazy, and Sam was planning her wedding, and we’re not all that sane and stable even when we’re sane and stable, but in the early months of that year, we were not well at all. Somehow, we decided that ‘Daysleeper’ would be a fantastic wedding waltz, and we listened to it on repeat for months on end. Now Daysleeper is a state of mind, it’s being exhausted and run-down and beaten and just absolutely fucking done, slowly shuffling through that wrecked gray haze that is the life of an insomniac, trying to get to the next knife-sharp edge so you can see again, so you can sleep again, and being sure it’s never going to happen. It’s not depression — I’ve been there, too, and I know that dance — because no matter how many times I hear the song, that soaring chorus kicks in and it lifts your heart with it and you think, oh, hey, yeah, I actually do have a heart, and it’s capable of hurting, just like this, this one wrenching tug, and at least it’s better than the nerve-dead numbness that permeates the rest of your life.

Some days are still Daysleeper Days, days after days upon days without sleep, days one of us is just plain fucked-up, and it’s comforting to be able to have this conversation and be understood:

one of us: How are you?
the other: I’m listening to Daysleeper on repeat.
the first: oh god.

i’m the screen, the blinding light / i’m the screen, i work at night / i see today with a newsprint fray / my night is colored headache gray / don’t wake me with so much / daysleeper

In her post, Min says she fell in love to the sounds of ‘Nightswimming’ and ‘Find the River,’ from Automatic for the People. So did I. I think. It’s hard to say. I’d had a boyfriend, and we covered ourselves in paint and made out to the Cure (mostly Disintegration, with a side of The Head on the Door) and we went to see shows in Detroit and we danced to the Dead Kennedys and we put on makeup and hung out at a rest stop on I-75 after a Nine Inch Nails show I think I had to sneak into. We were mostly music, and I don’t think we much cared what music it was. He was in a band. I think he broke up with me by writing a song about how much I sucked and singing it straight at me one night as I sat on the floor at the gig and stared at him. [Okay, okay, that was not our breakup-breakup, but that was when I knew it was over. I think the breakup-breakup maybe involved a note in my locker and a cookie? I don't know, it was high school, I don't remember. But we're Facebook friends now, it's all good. (I mean that. He's a really good guy.)]

Either way, I was not too broken up about it because I was in love with a different boy (I had terrible judgment; I’ll admit it), and we fake-tangoed to Tom Lehrer and sang along with They Might Be Giants. He and I were not about music. We weren’t about much of anything.

After that, I had this friend, except we were more than just friends. It took us a long time to figure that out, though; we were just kids. But her mother figured it out, and forbade all contact between us. That worked exactly as well as it has worked in the entire history of teenage romance, i.e., not at all. She lived out in the country, and we would sit outside by the fire and listen to Automatic for the People and we wouldn’t make out because we weren’t making out, but we might as well have been. She was a classical musician, and in college, I’d sleep on the floor of the practice room while she worked through a new piece (she was a percussionist, and I think she loved me a little for that ability alone, sleeping through a few hours of snare drum practice), and then we’d find a stereo and I’d play her whatever new music I’d come up with since last time. I was the rock and roll one, she was the classical one, and we held hands and smoked cigarettes and took turns going to the symphony and going to the bar, and I gave her REM (she gave me Karel Husa, whose ‘Music for Prague 1968′ I once cried through in a concert hall, long before I knew anything about what happened in Prague in 1968). I think REM is still her favorite band. And I think this is how we broke up (click to embiggen):

She sent it to me at some point in college, back when all communication was done poorly and through the use of song lyrics. (It’s ‘Nightswimming,’ for those of you who don’t have the lyrics etched into your bones.)

My senior year of high school, when I thought I really loved REM, my school hired a new science teacher. He was fresh out of college and therefore only a few years older than I was (younger than my siblings, about the same age as many of my friends), and he was the first person I’d met who was an actual collector of music, you know, someone who went to the trouble of tracking down all 15 versions of a single because the b-side had a slightly different mix of some song on it or the vinyl was a different color or there was a misprint on the label. And he mostly loved REM, so he would bring it in to school for me, rare shit I never even knew existed, and I would make tapes of it and play them in my BFF’s shitty brown van until the tapes disintegrated, and then I would make him bring them back in. That is when and why I started collecting, too. Now I can tell you about different album art if you want me to. (You don’t.)

The last day of high school, we had New Adventures of Hi-Fi and a stereo in 7th period, and we timed it so that ‘Electrolite’ was ending just as the final bell rang on that seemingly momentous day.

your eyes are burning holes through me / i’m not scared / i’m outta here

I’ve seen them a few times (three?) but I don’t remember much about the shows. I don’t remember where they were — one was outside, surely — or when they were or who was there with me. I remember ‘End of the World’ went so fast I couldn’t do anything but throw back my head and laugh.

I lost track of them, a little, once I got to college, but REM has always been one of my bands. Reckoning is my favorite most of the time, but not all of the time. I probably have a hundred REM stories, and a hundred stories about a hundred other bands I love that are the soundtrack to my life. I’ve spent years with that adage in my head, “Writing is easy. Just open up a vein and bleed.” And while there have been times that writing has been both technically and emotionally difficult, nothing has ever felt as much like opening up a vein as telling these stories about music. That kept me from doing it for a long time, and I’m not sure why I’m doing it now, but telling stories about REM seemed as good a place to start as any.

As for REM, they have a new album coming out on 8 March, Collapse Into Now. They have made one track, ‘Discoverer,’ available for download on their site.

ETA 2011-09-21: And now they’ve broken up, and I don’t know how to feel about that.

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.

Here is the full image, in pre-tattoo form (click to embiggen):

As for what it is, it’s the audio wave form of a loon call. Loons are very pretty, and awfully Canadian (they are on the one-dollar coin), and they are water birds and I have this sort of water theme going with my tattoos.

This is a loon:

This is a loonie:

Also there’s something I could say about language, about the way “loon” is slang for the mentally ill, and whether that applies. I’m not really sure what that something would be, though, so I’m moving on.

This particular loon call is the one that opens ‘Wheat Kings,’ by The Tragically Hip; it’s the first 17 seconds or so of the song. I don’t know if ‘Wheat Kings’ is my favorite song of theirs, but it’s up there. And I don’t know if it’s a happy song — not particularly; it’s about someone wrongly convicted of a crime (no one’s interested in something you didn’t do) — but I love to listen to it. And you know the feeling you get when you hear the opening of a song you love? Now I have the opening of a song I love with me always.

Wheat Kings (also, appropriately enough, a hockey team):

Inked by Johnny, at Code of Conduct.

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.

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.