8th Grade Hippie Chic

Comprised of sixteen prose blocks, Marisa Crawford’s 8th Grade Hippie Chic captures the jumble of early-to-mid-90s, suburban adolescence––from daisy-covered dresses, to Grateful Dead tees and dreadlocks, to fuzzy chain wallets and hair dye. From first-person perspective, the speaker of the poem reflects back on this period of her life. In her speaker, Crawford masterfully portrays a sort of earnestness that seems funny to older ears, the kind of earnestness that only comes from the self-seriousness of youth, such as when the speaker proclaims, “I am inspired by the hippie movement. The women at Haight and Ashbury with flowers in their hair and psychedelic swirls in their eyes and in their hearts. I am inspired by them.” And later, “When I think about them, I want to wear enormous feather earrings, but only if the feathers were found lying in the dirt like a gift from the animal kingdom and from the earth and from the spinning, dizzying heaven.”

The prose is spare and delivered in straight-forward language, and the brief descriptions are sharp and insightful, as Crawford is able to capture relationships in brief details, such as when the speaker plays The Nixons’ “Sister” on repeat and her mother thinks it’s because she’s sad that her sister is going away to college, but the speaker deadpans, “[T]hat had never really occurred to me.”

Though this poem will speak to many who came of age in the nineties, 8th Grade Hippie Chic should appeal to a broader range of people because of its humor and intelligence, and ultimately it captures something most people can relate to––that search for an identity and independence. It’s a story of friendship and the time in one’s life where he or she is still trying figure things out––trying to find an identity that is separate from his or her family and establishing his or herself as an individual in those ways that are not unique––smoking pot, dyeing hair––but that feel like it at the time, how small acts of rebellion seem like more than they are. Crawford writes, “Could have sworn I knew revolution. We smoked cigarettes on the swingset in your backyard.”

This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me by Jared White, Bloof Books

The thirty-four prose sections of Jared White’s This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me each begin with the title phrase, but only the first instance uses it as a complete sentence: “This is what it is like to be loved by me.” In all the other pieces, the opening phrase leads into something else, such as, “This is what it is like to be loved by me if my breath went down into my stomach and my food went down into my lungs,” or “This is what it is like to be loved by me in a dark forest midway through my life,” or “This is what it is like to be loved by me but I’m not me! I’m some wolf!” The cumulative effect of the repeated phrase is somehow both dazzling and grounding.

The sections are imaginative in their twists, and there is a lyric sensibility to the sentences that makes this poem a pleasure to read in its entirety out loud. For example, White writes:

    I chased you for an hour then I sat I like a reader reading a book but not an actual reader

an actual book. My poem my novel is one sentence long

I hope I hope

and I am surrounded by evidence

and I am an evidence maker

I could read the words in my mouth because the words have words written on them each word inscribed with the the word it is and each mouth tattooed mouth color with the word mouth in the language the mouth speaks, not mouth as it might be celestial and expensive but affordable mouth, adequate and obvious and constantly available. Happy character, mouthing ablutions of words read and knowing how unlonely it is to be the same in Philadelphia as in New York.

Further, it is a far-reaching, tender, and thoughtful poem that employs humor and also can be enigmatic at times, which ultimately comes across as a deeply human poem. With its casual tone, quiet intelligence, and sincerity, it is reminiscent of New York School poetry, especially that of Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan. Fluctuating between subtlety and exuberance, This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me is a poem that will stay with the reader long past its end and would be well-worth revisiting.

Wonder Girl in Monster Land by Brenda Sieczkowski, dancing girl press

Brenda Sieczkowski’s Wonder Girl in Monster Land is a series of poems centered around a girl named Yomi, whose name is Japanese for “land of the dead.” The character-driven series fits in well alongside other recent character-driven works, such as CA Conrad’s The Book of Frank and Danielle Pafunda’s “Mommy V” from her book Manhater. And like Conrad’s and Pafunda’s works, Sieczkowski’s has a dark edge, and there is also playfulness and humor too.

Yomi has a taste for the grotesque, but only if it is endearingly so. When she babysits for the neighbor kids, Remeron and Cymbalta (named after vintage anti-depressants), they watch the Friday night Creature Feature featuring Matango (Attack of the Mushroom People). She plants rock gardens, recreates diseases from the website “America’s Most Famous Diseases,” makes mixtapes featuring songs like “My Baby’s All Opposable Thumbs or (Please Hammer Don’t Hurt Him)” and “Ooh Baby, I Want You (To Scratch My Phantom Limb),” and hangs out with a bear that loves potato chips: “He crunches through the dark and sucks salt from his paws and then, most nights, begins licking restlessly at the raw stump where he chewed his left leg from the trap.”

Many of the poems are in prose, but they’re broken up by a number of “little songs,” which are each rhymed pieces consisting of two sestets. This adds to the collection’s playfulness, creating a children’s book-like quality. There are also visual pieces–concrete poems, one poem whose second stanza is shaped like a mushroom, and another poem that takes the shape of a hot air balloon. There are also illustrations depicting moments from the poems, and the book closes with “10 Amendments (An Erratum),” which advises, “Where text says song, read ghost. * Where text reads ghost, see further.” While there is certainly something sinister belying Wonder Girl in Monster Land, reading it is wicked good fun.

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^{8th Grade Hippie Chic is available from Immaculate Disciples Press. This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me is available from Bloof Books. Wonder Girl in Monster Land is available from dancing girl press.}

*

By the time I stand up and look out of the window of the rented apartment that I’ve been house sitting for a friend for the last few weeks, it’s 10pm, the sun is already gone and the streets of Manhattan are busy with people on the way home from work, people gathering in restaurants, people just being. I can’t remember much of last night and I start to run the water for a bath so that I can recuperate before heading out.

While my eyes gently rest upon the steam from the water, I relax; my back stretches as the heat of the water combines with my nakedness. I stare upwards and let my gaze rest for no particular reason on this damp trail of what used to be a spiders web. My guts feel wrong and I’m almost freaked by the fact that I’m no longer speeding. It takes an hour before it feels like the water is getting cold.

By the time I’m ready––a drink, an hour of watching an action hero actor (who I know for a fact is gay because of my friend’s story about seeing what he got up to in a darkroom in Los Angeles last year) promote his new film, a super-slick college radio band perform a single from their new LP, and a comedian who makes jokes about the government that I don’t care enough about to try and understand, a couple of meager lines of the stuff left from last night––it’s just past eleven and I’ve already missed Skip’s art opening. I know he’ll be mad, but I know he’ll be madder if he doesn’t see me at all.

I walk about 11 blocks, veering left until I get to the bar where Skip is having his after show. The first person I see is Marnie, which bums me out because the fact that she’s there, and was probably also one of the first people at the exhibition earlier on, reaffirms something that I can’t face thinking about while I’m still relatively sober. She kisses me on both cheeks and says something that’s supposed to sound funny and then moves on without ever looking me in the eye. I already feel like I should leave because things seem too complicated to move.

When I see Skip he hugs me and then gives me this look that feels lost somewhere in between concern and skepticism.

“Look––I’m sorry I missed the opening. I’m gonna check out the show tomorrow.”
“That’s ok. I mean, I would have liked you to have been there, but you know, it’s ok …”
There’s a pause that feels like another apology would fit perfectly into, but from Skip’s face, I think we both know that it’s pointless.
“So, how’s it going? You sold anything yet?” I try to make that sound kind of jokey but I’m struggling to look at Skip so badly that anything I say sounds weighted and heavy.
“I think so, yeah.” Another pause. “In fact, I should probably get back over to that guy over there. But grab yourself a drink and come over.”

He turns and walks over to a guy that I recognize––super queeny, immaculately dressed, who welcomes Skip back with an arm over his shoulder even though he’s barely been gone a minute. She gestures over to me and smiles even though he’s looking straight through me.

I spend the next hour struggling to keep up with the conversation. Skip’s friends Ray and Lucy share their drugs with me, which are really strong. I have these intense rushes and Lucy hugs me every now and then and tells me that she knows how hard all of this must be, and I’m paranoid because I don’t know what she’s talking about one hundred per cent but I’ve kind of guessed over the last few weeks and so I suppose deep down I do know it’s just a matter of saying things out loud because until I do things still won’t have to be real and besides I’m still trying to get over hearing that Jet had died and it fucks me up even more when I realize that that was two years ago and I feel like I’m almost gonna fall headlong into a panic attack before I find myself smoking outside the bar with Ray looking right into my eyes.

“I mean, Skip is one of my best friends, but I’m still gonna be friends with you, you know?”
I don’t answer, just try and focus. Ray’s got a picture of Lou Reed on his t shirt but I can’t work out which album its from.
“You know you can always talk to me if you need to ok?”
“Umm, yeah, I guess.”
“I mean just because I’m friends with Skip it doesn’t mean that I’ll take his side or make judgments or whatever, you know?”
“Yeah.”
Ray starts kissing me and even though I feel really spaced out I still get crazily horny, albeit in this out of body experience kind of way.

2am and we’re downtown waiting for Ray’s friend’s band to start playing. The floor of the club is sticky and a punk rocker who just threw up over his boyfriend is being pulled out the room by a security guard who reminds me of the dealer who used to show up at the squat where Skip first started showing his sculptures. His boyfriend is screaming and bleeding from the mouth.

We both start to trip out before the band get on the stage, so that by the time they do start playing they do so in a way that subtly works them into this bent narrative that keeps chopping between what’s happening during the show––how I’m asking someone if those are track marks on the bassist’s arms to––to what’s happening after the gig––when we’re in the back room of a gay bar and I’m watching Ray get fucked while someone holds a palm of white powder up against his nose––back to the gig where the singer is telling the audience that the future is ours to ruin and that he doesn’t care about himself anymore––to the last song when Ray goes nuts because it’s his favorite––to  afterwards when Ray can barely stand and I’ve half forgotten about him anyway because there’s a nervous looking guy who reminds me of Skip and he’s looking at me and trying to get me to follow him into one of the cubicles––to a little while after that when I see the art dealer who was with Skip at his party earlier but who now doesn’t recognize me, and who has now got about three young hustlers queued around him at the bar while they let him bounce his boring but impressive NYC disco war stories against their heads while they try to out flirt each other into his wallet and pants for the night––it’s trippy because I start to feel like friendship, real friendship is the only thing that matters and I realize that’s the most optimistic thought I’ve had in maybe five years and it feels like even though it’s the drugs that have put me in this state of mind it’s my mind and my soul that are really facilitating the experience and knowing that I have everything that I need already here feels bigger than me right now and I start to cry which freaks out the Latino man who has been playing with my dick and he asks if he’s hurt me or if he was doing it too hard and when I fall back against the wall he pulls up his jeans and runs away in case I die and his wife finds out what he’s been doing and I think about Skip in leather jacket and I try to work out which Lou Reed album was on the front of Ray’s t shirt and I think about friendship and I think about the punk who was sick and his boyfriend who was bleeding from the mouth and I’m back at the gig with the fuzz of the guitars lighting the night in a way that my heart never imagined.

__________

^{Monomania is available through 4AD.}

Gina Myers writes real poetry, poetry about life and disappointment, poetry about heartbreak and the insistence on continuing, in a style that sometimes (and only sometimes) reminds me of Ted Berrigan’s more down-to-earth poems. Hold It Down is her second collection, a book (like her first) published by Coconut Books. She’s inclusive in her work, and she writes about the real world in a sense that lets us (as readers) know that it is heartbreaking and difficult. These poems take place in different cities––sometimes Atlanta, sometimes Saginaw, Michigan, sometimes New York City. She’s not a tenuous writer, and her style is clear, but she allows room for “not-knowing” what will happen, all the while being sure of what she is choosing to say. In “Something Maybe,” Myers writes:

Beer can crushed & tossed across
the street. We’re not going to make it.
For an entire summer my life’s
solution was to not leave
my bed.

She uses the simple details of life in various places to weave together narrative and emotional sentences that are conservative in tone, but open and heartfelt too. She writes that “we were never / going to make it. The darkness creeps / over, smears in the rain.” She writes about cities and drinking, Morrissey and Nick Drake, all a soundtrack that lets her live a life of deep feeling. Part of this book wants what’s permanent, wants to make memory from sorrow. Yet part of this book knows that the world is about moving on from the past. In “Twenty-Seven: An Inventory,” she writes about the events of her life, and counts them, too. One of the most telling lines, “3 months of stoicism lost / in a single night’s collapse” is part of this poem.

Myers makes use of borrowed language, too. The language of advertising, cities, theory, and music plays into this book. There is a little bit of irony in some of this appropriation, and it works well with the book’s overall tone. There is even a list of fears in the form of a poem here, including “fear of voids or empty spaces,” “fear of machines or of robots,” and “fear of nihilism.” She makes use of daily news as part of the book, too, taking on the life––however tragic––of where she resides. Her fears continue in a later poem of the book: “fear of picnics,” “fear of taking tests,” “fear of symmetry.”

Four of the book’s poems are called, after the title, “Hold It Down.” In the second one, she says, wisely: “each year I get / / older / / things become less / certain / / this isn’t how / I imagined / / it would be.” There’s also collected here a set of poems called “False Spring,” from her chapbook of the same name, the poems being set in Saginaw, Michigan. In these poems, Myers writes about the happenstances of daily life in Saginaw, melancholy changes, and the little things that make up her life there, and also the life of the world around her. She writes: “The smell / of false spring fools everyone / into thinking things are going to be okay.”

The last two poems titled “Hold It Down” are found at the end of the book, and in the first, Myers writes: “All over the country / people are moving into the streets / & we’re here in Atlanta starting a new life.” She writes about a new place, being there with someone, and getting used to the dailiness of her new life. And in the last poem, “Hold It Down” also, for N & K, Myers ends her book on a note of loveliness and beauty: “Blessed / is this day.” The book ends with words of wisdom: “Not every day / can be a good day / but this is one / of them, one / of the best days.” The reader leaves with the sense that there are moments of love and happiness within even the saddest of times, and that is a good thought with which to end.

__________

^{Hold It Down is available through Coconut Books.}

Sometimes I get so grossed out in American Girl by Tom Petty when he says, take it easy baby/make it last all night, & I think he might be talking about sex. I get scared when I’m listening to Sugar Magnolia, how Bob Weir says, saw my baby down by the river/knew she’d have to come up soon for air. Like he was trying to drown his girlfriend or something. He compares her to a flower, & he lets her pay his speeding tickets & she waits backstage & then he kills her. And I wouldn’t put it past him really. Like how Maynard James Keenan called Hartford the dry cunt capital of the world, or how Ozzy yelled let me see your tits, babes at Ozzfest. And we didn’t know what to do except to pretend we didn’t hear it.

The way Jerry Garcia says first one says she’s got my child but it don’t look like me/ We were smoking pot on a porch with three hot brothers with ponytails. One of them made a dumb blonde joke but I was too stoned to understand. On Hey Joe, how Jimi Hendrix is singing about a guy who kills his girlfriend. And you can tell from the way the music keeps going at the end that nothing bad happens to him. I put on Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds & laid on my bed, imagining Jay trying to kiss me. I put on White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane & imagined myself falling down a rabbit hole.

My Stairway to Heaven poster glows in the black light & so does my nail polish. On Wild World, how Cat Stevens says, don’t be a bad girl. Jay wants us to get married & live together forever in his green Volkswagen bus. He kept moving my hands on his jeans in the basement. At the end of Jealous Guy the way John Lennon says, watch out & then look out babe. I wrote all the words to Going to California on my notebook for dramatic effect. I smoked all the all-natural cigarettes. They say she plays guitar and cries and sings. Maybe someday I went.

*   *   *

Kozmic Blues

“Nothing’s gonna change my world” – Sylvia Plath
“I was feeling nearly as faded as my jeans.” – Janis Joplin

I would call the jeans Kozmic Blue.
I would call the jeans Janis Blue. Black Pearl.
I’d push at your wish a little harder.
The image of a woman in a wedding gown,
running straight toward the water.

To dress like Janis Joplin or to dress in a Janis Joplin shirt.
An Extra Large.
To keep drinking the Southern Comfort or to put it down.
How 90s girls’ clothes could never get big enough.
To stay in the black light. Watch the colors change.

She said my figure was swimming in the t-shirt.
He said my eyes were like a swimming pool. & he fell in.
Just kidding. He pushed me in.
It was summer. The dead of summer.

Laid on the beach like a corpse in the sunset.
All of my rings arranged in a ring catch.
The 33 brought me right to Haight & Ashbury
just like a magic carpet.

I had my mom’s shirt from the 70s that looked like Drew Barrymore’s in Mad Love.
I had the Janis Joplin shirt with the big daisy on it & a picture of Janis that was the same size as the daisy.
Carrie looked just like Janis when she put the dandelion behind her hair.
And the crazy pearls around her neck.
Violet crushed-velvet skirt like I was following a trail somewhere.

Janis Joplin had the kind of laugh
you could hear reverberating throughout the office.
The kind of laugh that set a room on fire.
That could never get big enough.
I would not say, “boyfriend style.”
I would not say, “wifebeater.”
My ball & chain.
The rhinestones. The rain.
I was swimming in it.

*   *   *

Kurt + Courtney

It was 1994 and I started having this feeling.

Like I was being electrocuted.

Like underneath my hair it was a bald person’s head.

And underneath my head was a skeleton.

I got a motherfucking hole in my embroidered hippie backpack.

I sewed a Grateful Dead skull patch over it with my own two hands.

There are a lot of things that fell into that hole.

So many things that I lost there.

My Hello Kitty mood ring.

My other mood ring.

The Kiss t-shirt that Courtney Love shoplifted in high school.

The baby-blue baby-doll shirt I stole from the mall.

All our favorite songs & their best lines.

My spine. A three-pronged peace sign.

The pen you had that looked like lipstick.

The pen you had that looked like a syringe.

I have a skeleton underneath my skin, I am serious.

My veins are a really pretty shade of blue.

I was just daydreaming.

I was stargazing, headbanging.

I dove into the pool with all my jewelry on.

Like I was a puzzle in all my facets.

Like something famous was happening inside my body

I curled my fingers to make a heart.

I wrote you a love letter.

In denim blue ink.

In denim blue.

Torn-up jeans with holes in the knees.

* * *

The Brunette with Glasses

This is a project that me and my 8th-grade best friend worked on together where we went through all our favorite albums and made mix tapes of our favorite songs and pulled out all the words that were insulting to women. Then threw them at each other. Jay’s mom called us “Pretty Girl,” and “Dirty Hair Girl.” The emotionally and artistically complex brunette. The sandy-haired hippie chick with Meg Ryan’s eyes.

XY, you’re not like me. You don’t sit up all night afraid that you’re getting old. I was stopped dead in my tracks on my walk to work by a raven or a crow that landed on the sidewalk in front of me, skidded to a weird bird halt. I have had three dreams about owls and three times in the past week when I ordered vegetarian they brought me red meat and my feet carry me.

“Takes the wheel when I’m seeing double. Pays my ticket when I speed.” XY and I were at this boring party in California getting beer from the refrigerator to sit on the deck like how he always loved to sit outside ‘cause it reminded him of nature, and he was a smoker. And he told a joke that went, “She grew up in an Indiana town” and I thought, yes, this is love, this is love, XY, this has to be love.

It was words from “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” by Tom Petty, like when my mom tried to change the station when he sang, “She’s standing in her underwear,” and I stopped her saying, “No, it’s okay because she’s dead.” In the video she was dead. Pretty Girl told me that Mary Jane meant weed, and that death is a symbol.

The beautiful dumb blonde, all words. The smart, sweltering brunette, all ideas. We’d go to shows and to parties and tell people, “We’re the same person.” And everyone thought we were twins cause we were so alike in our minds it made us look alike. Called us “the Bobbsey Twins.” And I swear I felt her stomach ache.

Everyone on the deck was from New England, which means that somewhere inside we still feel the leaves and the summer steam spurts out of our tear ducts and the winter chills our blood stream. XY, I was the only one who got your joke and I got it like a geyser I got it so deeply, and when I got it, it really affected me.

*

^{Marisa‘s new chapbook, 8th Grade Hippie Chic, is available through Immaculate Disciples Press.}

What’s left to say about Ian Svenonius? He keeps writing music and is now on his second book so it looks like there’ll be plenty more to talk about for the foreseeable future. Ian’s been a fixture of the punk and underground music scene for two decades, most famously in Nation of Ulysses, The Make-Up, and Chain and the Gang, among other shorter-lived projects. His brand new Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘N’ Roll Group, out now from Brooklyn’s Akashic Books, aims to demystify the process of starting a rock ‘n’ roll band via a series of detours into mysticism and geopolitical history. Totally makes sense, right? Well, while his first book, The Psychic Soviet, was a collection of unrelated though fantastic essays, the new one is a sustained meditation that aims to decode the cultural contradictions of life in late capitalism through the prism of rock ‘n’ roll––something he’s uniquely suited for. At this point, our best hope may indeed lie in holding séances with beatified bluesmen. Personally, I did not know I had so much to learn from Chuck Berry on questions of Manifest Destiny and the Cold War, but the mysteries of the hereafter are inscrutable. One might even say sassy.  Regardless of whether you think you’re in the choir he’s preaching to, or if you just want some pointers on starting a band but can’t be bothered to summon the spirit of Buddy Holly for religious reasons, read this guide for the perplexed and you will not be disappointed. We talked a few weeks ago about everything from Margaret Thatcher’s death to his thoughts on Saccharine Trust to the gender politics of male falsettos to unpaid content creators as the groupies of the modern world.

FANZINE: You just got back from Coachella, what was that like?

IAN SVENONIUS: Yeah, I did some readings and we got some concert offers down in L.A. We played well. It was a lot of fun.

FZN:  You played with your old band, The Make-Up, not your new one, Chain and the Gang. What’s going on there, are Chain and the Gang through? More Make-Up shows?

IS: Nah, we just got back together for a couple of concerts but we don’t actually exist.

FZN: In every band you’ve ever been in you play with seriousness. The Nation Of Ulysses had revolutionary manifestoes next to (great) songs about hickeys next to conspiracy theories…

IS: Oh, I think all the points are made directly and are pretty up front. Maybe the style is playful.

FZN: Fair enough.  You’ve written a new book, Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group. You say the purpose behind it is to “demystify” how to go about forming a group, but you use “mystical” strategies like séances with the dead…

IS:  The people in the best position to demystify the process are those who have no stake in the system anymore, people who have already profited from demystification. Now they have an otherworldly perspective, they can look at rock ‘n’ roll in geopolitical terms which is really unlike the view of their living peers who are all worried about either their job security or their royalties… Their place in history… dead stars can think about what rock ‘n’ roll is, what its uses have been politically and socially. They can discuss all of the more cynical and nefarious uses of the form in a really open way.

FZN: In the book you talk about the idea of rock ‘n’ roll as a “Death Cult…”

IS: Yeah, the spirits discuss this. It’s all part of Capitalism, planned obsolescence, and so on. One aspect of rock ‘n’ roll not commonly understood is the relationship between sex and planned obsolescence.

FZN:  You actually mention a sexual/gender dynamic to this rock ‘n’ roll “death cult” as it relates to record collecting. You say, “Male rock ‘n’ roll fans have long been overlooked when adoring their male idols, who prefer to talk to girls. Resentment at second tier status among living stars catapulted the dead star into primacy…”

IS: Yes.  If rock ‘n’ roll is repressed sex then it becomes a safe outlet for heterosexual culture to worship carnal beings in a way that doesn’t undermine heterosexual culture. The dead star is central and has been since the 50’s… There are all of those songs about Buddy Holly and Eddy Cochrane, written immediately after they died.  It’s not really a later addition, it’s been central to rock ‘n’ roll’s mythmaking from the start.

FZN: Let’s talk about some “dead” rock groups. I was watching an interview on your Vice show Soft-Focus, and you brought up an interesting point. You were talking about an old SoCal punk band, Saccharine Trust, and their song “We Don’t Need Freedom.” Rock ‘n’ roll is about breaking rules, but you seem to think there might be some benefit to having them…

IS: I was always fascinated by that song and think it’s great… “we don’t need freedom”… [sighs longingly]… I’m in a group now called Chain and the Gang, and we have a record called Down With Liberty, Up With Chains! which is inspired by this slogan of the Spanish partisans who fought against Napoleon. They said “down with liberty” because Napoleon was trying to forcibly export it to the rest of Europe, reminiscent of the American obsession with exporting freedom. So for Saccharine Trust to say “We Don’t Need Freedom” is a really radical statement for America which has turned the idea of personal freedom into a kind of religion or ideology to export by force. What is that freedom? In many ways “freedom” has a lot of rules in itself and ends up being a repressive model.

FZN: It’s funny you say that because last week Margaret Thatcher died, who was famous, among other things, for popularizing “freedom” as laissez-faire capitalism, free markets. People on the left tend to think about freedom as something they own but there’s a lot more gray area…

IS: Right. What about the freedom to be healthy? It’s a weird concept. We’ve seen it recently with arguments about the Internet and the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) conflict. You have a group of people fighting against old copyright laws so people can have the freedom to download HBO shows. That’s really interesting to me because we’re not “free” to take the computer which costs $2k and enables us the “freedom” to take other things for “free.” There’s this idea that content providers––writers, photographers, musicians––they’re the ones who lose out in this new equation of freedom while hardware manufactures don’t. Freedom is one of those terms we use every day but whose meaning is actually totally nebulous. As for Margaret Thatcher, she was very cool…

FZN: It seemed like she was responsible for a lot of good music…

IS: Yeah, in that she was no different than Ronald Reagan or any other of those horrible people.

FZN: You talk about getting paid nothing to produce content in the chapter of your book on Sex, saying, “Groupie-ism was a preview of the dismantling of prostitution and other independent means of earning a wage under advanced capitalism. Just as the groupies gave it away for free, so would the punk bands of the next generation insist on playing for nothing. Punk groups and their enthusiasts created a model of free labor––based on enthusiasm for a cause––that has become much copied by corporations in the modern age. These businesses convince interns and web types to pitch in labor unpaid for the “community” (e.g., Huffington Post) while their venal bosses rake in millions.”

IS: Exactly, the groupie gives it away for free, and this leads to the punk model of giving it away for a cause which was eagerly adopted by the modern corporation. You work for some sort of brand-ideal, say, The Huffington Post, a vaguely liberal brand with which people affiliate themselves, and then you give it away for free… this is the kind of freedom the computer has given us. It’s sort of like Christianity.

FZN: You have a lot to say about gender and rock ‘n’ roll. I remember a striking line in your book, “There’s a celebrated tradition of men singing falsetto, but not of females singing baritone. This in itself is exemplary.”

IS: There’ve always been lots and lots of women involved in rock ‘n’ roll, but at a certain point when rock ‘n’ roll became very corporate with the Beatles invasion, there was a male putsch and for 10 or 15 years women were largely shut out from being in groups. Part of this was due to rock ‘n’ roll becoming an export whose goal was to explain western imperialism and so its profile had to be masculine and white. At the same time, there were a lot of men mimicking women precisely because they’d been shut out, like Shakespearean theatre.

FZN: Yeah, you had an article in BB Gun years ago that called out punk rock as “gaysploitation.”

IS: Ah, that was a great magazine.

FZN: The book is about creating “the group.” What makes that the most important part of rock ‘n’ roll?

IS: It’s not about music. A group is a different concern that’s not just about music. There’s nothing in the book about learning chords or arranging a song, it’s all about the mystique of the group identity. This is central to rock because rock’s roots are in the ideological orbit of gangland.

FZN: We talked about sex already, so let’s talk about drugs. In the past you say that drugs were about destroying your ego and expanding your consciousness, but that modern drugs are about regulating the personality. You say, “[Modern Drugs] are correctives, designed to help the user conform to normative social behavior and work modes by ironing out hard-to-take behavior. Accordingly, modern groups are loath to have personality, being formalistically obsessed with copying the Jesus & Mary Chain, the Ramones, the Stooges, or some other group.”

IS: That’s an outgrowth of the modern idea of the person as a machine, a machine that can be corrected with pharmaceutical drugs that fix specific flaws within it. In music, people that see themselves as machines begin to replicate the music of other machines. It’s a bit different than in the 1960’s when both music and drugs were seen as an avenue to a new consciousness.

FZN: Finally you seem to be really into the idea of rock and roll as a collection of fetish objects, t-shirts, records, pictures, and so on…

IS: We’re being encouraged to think that objects are bad and that everything you have should be on your iPad… That people should live in a 2001-style space apartment. I think that this is a conspiracy to rehabilitate everybody’s poverty. I think that objects are things that give us a link to things that actually happened. I don’t think that objects should be vilified. We have these shows like Hoarders that teach people that if you have “things,” you’re grotesque, but having things that exist in space and time… that’s a vestige of something that actually occurred. It’s only by going through your old things that you can have a direct link to the past. It also makes it harder to revise history. Like, looking at a love letter, reminding yourself “oh, I actually did feel this way.” That’s what a record is like.

FZN: It’s funny you say that because I saw you walking down the street in Brooklyn and was going to say hello but realized I was wearing a fake Nation of Ulysses shirt I’d bought off of eBay that had never “actually” existed.

IS: Haha, that’s foolish! I once walked through a museum with Mick Jagger but didn’t talk to him because we were wearing the same coat, so I can relate.

__________

^{Supernatural Strategies For Making A Rock ‘n’ Roll Group is available through Akashic Books.}

My Dead

The arrival of Amy Lawless’s second full-length collection of poetry, My Dead, represents the arrival of a certain type of adulthood, perhaps, as she writes in “The Skull Behind My Face,” “The arrival of fear is the arrival of one adulthood.” Throughout this collection, she explores the fear that one encounters when dealing with death, whether it be mourning the loss of loved ones, mourning the loss of a relationship, or considering one’s own mortality. Bookended by long meditations on death and mourning, the book carries throughout it a solemnity as it explores themes of loss, love, loneliness, and anxiety. However, a book so overtly about death also has a lot to say about living.

Divided into four sections, the book opens with a series titled “Elephants in Mourning,” which is arguably the strongest section of the collection. Employing the refrain, “When an elephant dies,” the poems act as a lyric exploration of dealing with loss as seen through the mourning rituals of elephants alongside the mourning rituals of humans:

When an elephant dies the lover takes the body and rolls it over and over.
When an elephant is dead it lies in a way that living elephants can not.
When an elephant dies he takes the body and rolls it over.
He scrolls his trunk and pulls his head back.
Some call that honor but it looks like someone who wants religion for a minute.
He does not x out the window.
He is someone who wants to be told that there is something else.
There is nothing else.

A number of the sections use broad, general descriptions: “And the DNA cousins and friends and children walked away whether it was raining or not and regretted what they never got to tell him. Like it would matter now if he had known just one more thing as an alive person.” However, there are also some more personal pieces. Along with a poignant section that discusses the death of an uncle, wherein the speaker does not understand why her cousins would place possessions in the coffin with the body (“This bothered me because the living needed these items”), the speaker also addresses her response to September 11th:

Mourning a grandmother is one thing.
Mourning three thousand someone’s child is too much,
But we do it anyway by
Watching some DVD until it’s over
And then letting it sit on the coffee table for a week
Until you can get out of bed and look at it
Not recognizing that this cultural artifact will always be the thing I did
Instead of watch news that day in September.

Mourning is complicated and there is certainly no set of guidelines for humans. In the final section of the book, “The Skull Behind My Face,” the focus on death turns from mourning the loss of others to a more personal struggle with the speaker’s own mortality. Written in direct, straight-forward prose, the section opens: “This week I have been struck by an intense and agonizing fear of death.” What follows could just as easily be considered lyric essay as it can be poetry, especially when considering the definition of essay that means to attempt or try as the speaker attempts to come to grips with this new and sudden fear. The speaker eventually arrives at the realization that the fear of death comes from her desire to live and to live fully. Lawless writes:

Fear of death is why women wear make up, why men wear toupees, why the young
dance, and why we, the fertile, pitch woo and do things with bodies to other bodies that
involve sweat and shame and a degree of mental castration. This is something in all of
us: to preserve something leaving, but dependent on time and space.

Further, the speaker discovers that tasks that she had previously viewed as insignificant are actually meaningful. This sort of basic desire to live and to find meaning in life is evident in other sections in the book too.

Lawless credits Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets From the Portuguese for inspiration for the second section of book, “One Way To Write a Sonnet Is To Number the Lines,” and like Sonnets From the Portuguese they take love on as their subject matter, but Lawless’ sonnets also fall into the New York School tradition a la Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer. Not as big-pictured oriented as the two end pieces, this section focuses more closely on the day-to-day, the acceptance that routine is what living is: “Proceed. Walk. Climb. Drive. This is called living,” while also wrestling with the desire for and the failure of love. Tonally this section is different too, allowing more humor and cynicism into the pieces. The second poem in the sequence opens, “Non-assholes deserve love. Assholes and / shitheads also deserve love. You deserve love,” which is a cause for the reader to pause in order to consider which category he or she falls in. In another sonnet, the speaker meets someone called Jesus Christ on the L train and muses, “His crucifixion alone would be a logistical nightmare.”

The longest section of the book, “Shadow Self,” is, unlike the other sections, comprised of individual, non-linked poems. The section deals largely with loneliness as demonstrated by poems like “Body Science,” which lists the various types of fluid secreted from the body and ends with the lines “I don’t know what to call this feeling but I know you are mostly water too / and that you’re gone from me,” and one of the title poems (there are two), where “my dead” refers to past lovers and the speaker cites the importance of being able to feel bad because ultimately that means you’re alive: “It’s important to feel like shit sometimes. / If you don’t, you may be totally wrong and dead and I don’t know what would happen then.” In “Cannibal Wedding,” we learn that cannibals fall in love and experience relationships much in the same way we do. The prose poem ends with a list of those crying at the wedding, and we realize that “cannibalism” is acting more metaphoric as it represents the way humans can (not literally) consume one another:

Those who had loved and lost cried. And those who had never loved but wanted to love
cried. And she, who had looked inside herself and knew that it’s just fucking wrong to
expect another person to fill one’s vessel, cried too because she was the loneliest. She
was the one whose heart needed to be eaten most of all.

The duality of life and death is also demonstrated in this section. In “What Nourishes Me Destroys Me,” Lawless writes, “Yes, we die alone but that’s no reason / to cancel the party.” “Sunt Pueri Pueri, Pueri Puerulia Tractant” (Latin for “children are children, [therefore] children do childish things), offers an ars poetica of sorts: “I listen to the Kinks. Then I come up with words / that mean hunger and loneliness, a deer used for physical purposes.” And the collection is populated by a variety of animals––elephants, deer, wolves, crows, and buffaloes. And the hunger is pervasive through the desire to live more and do more and also through the emptiness expressed in poems like “Pain Minus Love Equals Pain,” where the speaker cannot be sated: “I eat the lush forest with my eyes / and crouch down and bite mossy growth / with my mouth / spitting up my previous dinner.” Another strong poem in this section is “They Still Make Mohammad Ali Pose With Clenched Fists,” whose poignant title captures the sadness of this act. This section also includes more enigmatic poems, such as “Robert Frost,” which includes a man named Robert Frost who eats children, and “Purification Test,” which is a sci-fi poem of criminal confessions.

Despite its dark themes, My Dead is not a melancholic collection. It offers a series of poems in which the author addresses serious subjects in a serious way. The writing throughout is steady, clear, well-crafted, and lyric, and the voice that emerges is one that is still figuring things out but one that is happy to still be figuring things out. My Dead captures the worries and fears of a young woman coming to terms with herself and ultimately acts as a document of the arrival of one adulthood, as well as a document of promise, of other adulthoods, other meditations, to come.

__________

^{My Dead is available from Octopus Books.}

Kept Women

We shuffle inside and gawk, murmuring. This mammoth monarch’s master suite, our guide tells us, contains carved walnut / paneling and dark red Valette rugs on hard wood floors. The floor is / filled with stacks of magazines and papers. There is a California King / size bed with a row of mirrors above it. On the shelf below the mirrors / are a stuffed Mickey Mouse and a Darth Vader figurine as well as many / other toys. On a shelf across the room are over one hundred Hallmark / greeting cards from former girlfriends.

Into whose master bedroom have we intruded?

Hugh Hefner’s master bedroom, of course. And our tour guide is a roving eyeball with a vaguely British accent.

But we’re not actually inside the Playboy Mansion. We’re in a visitor’s guide, or a real estate catalogue. We’re in an archaeological excavation minus the dig. We’re in Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, or an ethnographic study. We’re in conceptual, or postconceptual poetry.

At its most basic, Kept Women is a series of prose poems that describes the rooms of the Playboy Mansion as seen on the reality show The Girls Next Door. Yet its twelve pages draw on all of the above discourses––tourism, advertising, archaeology, reality TV, anthropology––to reveal, and flaunt, what they share: a voyeuristic sensibility and a fascination with and desire to absorb, or reject, otherness.

With Kept Women, Kate Durbin continues the exploration of popular texts that has formed the throughline of much of her recent work. The chapbook follows her 2011 chapbook E!, which draws its material from The Hills and Dynasty, among other sources; both chapbooks will be collected in her forthcoming book E! Entertainment. Durbin has exploited popular texts in her performance work, too: her Bad Princess Poetry Walk involved a number of women poets dressing up as good Disney princesses gone bad––a kind of avant-pop slutwalk. Her ouevre does not adopt a third-wave feminist perspective so much as Feminism 3.5, or 3.7: it gives serious consideration to what it might mean for women and girls to understand, accept, and collaborate in their own objectification, a question investigated most directly in her Tumblr project Women as Objects.

The Girls Next Door, a 2005-2010 reality show that records the cohabitation of Hefner’s live-in girlfriends Kendra, Bridget, and Holly (later, Kristina and Karissa, the twins), may as well have been chanting her name, and Kept Women is quintessential Durbin: strange, beguiling, and funny in a nervous, beyond-ironic way. In these poems, the mansion’s residents have vacated the premises; what we know of them arrives through their rooms and the objects within them. Perhaps the central concern of the chapbook is to represent these rooms formally, particularly their visual texture. Brand names are used freely, their clunky capitalizations visually disrupting the smooth surface of the writing. In “Pink Playpen” we see: “a large Hello Kitty pillow,” “a plastic baggie of bite size Mounds bars and two bottles of / Tantalizer Body Bronzing Luminizer,” the “Control Clutter / Closet,” a poster of “Honey Rider from James Bond custom made / Beach Bunny bikini.” This overuse of proper nouns is playfully garish, as is the brazen use of alliteration (see also the “mammoth monarch’s master suite” above).

In this and other ways, the poems replicate the juxtaposition of chintz and decadence, bad taste and excess, that characterizes these spaces, and the TV show itself: the crudeness of a Darth Vader figurine amidst such rigorous luxury. Our roving eyeball adopts an equal opportunity reportage style, the master bathroom’s “seven half empty / bottles of Victoria’s Secret Pure Seduction body wash” receiving the same attentiveness as its “glittering marble floors.”

Whereas the show seems to subtly, at times overtly, mock its characters––the camera resting winkingly on Kendra’s dirty laundry as the soundtrack informs us we’re in on a joke––Kept Women resists commentary, relishing in the details but providing the reader with no clear interpretive framework. This is a strategy Durbin has used previously, particularly in “The Hills,” which transcribes in deliriously tedious detail one episode of The Hills. In its thick descriptions of setting and character, “The Hills” provides little if any editorializing, representing its source text almost as an object of anthropological fascination.

The same kind of fetishistic voyeurism is present in Kept Women––but here it gets combined with the breezy tone of the tour guide, and, frequently, the real estate agent. “The estate profits from a waterfall, streams, koi pond, and in-ground pool, all organically linked,” we are told in “Stone Sanctuary.” Hef’s room possesses an “opulent grandeur mixed with a casual, all-American clutter [that] proffers it a best-of-all-worlds ascendancy.” Each poem hangs on this kind of sales pitch; the mixture of anthropological voyeurism with the ooze of the sell makes for an unstable and unsettling poetry, one that destabilizes its source text in turn.

In so doing, the poems take an attitude toward the show that is vexingly, wonderfully ambivalent. Reality TV is at once a project of othering and a project of identification, and Kept Women performs similarly, both defamiliarizing and embracing its subjects––which, of course, are always objects, of a gaze. These poems are fascinated with fascination. If reality TV is the new anthropology, they suggest, it, too, must be an object of study.

__________

^{Kept Women is available through Insert Blanc Press.}

With the last piece of pork shoulder chopped and the beer and Coca Cola on ice, a bell announced the stand open for business. Nobody paid mind to the constant barking of dogs, except for the men who remained behind. None of them were interested in barbecue or beer.

Across the yard, George Turner swept dust out of the pit his uncle Slade had constructed from fencing a decade ago, before the assassination in Dallas and Hurricane Betsy, preparing to draw the scratch line through the middle. While known to be a competent carpenter and honest businessman, Slade Turner had spent most of the past twenty years trying to be a good husband, loving father and a respected dogman.

“That fence out there is just like Hammerhead was, it’s got deep game. Never quits.” he said to his nephew whom he had raised as one of his own. That was two years ago, before leukemia began creeping through his wife’s bones and Hammerhead Junior’s loss to the legendary Wino, owned by Brazoria County’s District Attorney Fred Tudor, the progeny of a five-generation dog family and the richest in the county.

As his cousin Maurice was set to inherit the family business, George hoped for a job at the carbon black plant in Sweeny once a position opened. In the meantime he worked in the garage alongside his cousin, a morose man often mistaken for mute, and spent weekends working for his uncle, feeding and training the dogs and taking bets when they hosted conferences every other month, a cut of which went to the house and was split between the two. In the interim, Maude, Slade’s wife, took to poor health and the president had been shot through the back of the head in a convertible.

The weekend’s conference would mark a full year from her passing during the storm. She was still with him in his mind’s eye at every step, even as George took her place in bandaging the dogs’ wounds in the den after matches. During these quiet, sad moments he knew they had done right in raising him as their own, watching the young man speak softly to the injured pup as he sewed stitches much like his wife used to.

Slade had been absent during her death, waiting for the storm to pass while he holed up in a motel on the way back from a visit with Floyd Beaudroux in Louisiana, unaware that his wife had taken a turn for the worse in bed. Though honored to have met a man he admittedly looked up to in the bloodsport, he regretted the trip. His wife’s insistence on going beforehand failed to alleviate his guilt.

He still trained Colby dogs, all bred from the same lineage of Hammerhead, but in the time that followed he began to lose more matches than win to fast-lane dogs with hard mouths, dogs who fought high in the shoulder, instead of for stamina. Luckily none of his contenders ever failed to scratch at their opponents and none were considered curs.

Maurice and his sweetheart Lynn both operated the family service station Slade opened upon returning from the Second Great War and marrying Maude soon after. Lynn made and served barbecue in the store on weekdays while Maurice ran the business from sunrise to 9pm, six days a week. On Saturdays, Lynn joined George as he walked Lobo, the latest offspring in the lineage of Hammerhead that was said to have deep game. The dog had been sold to another breeder only to be repurchased at twice the original cost months before in a desperate bid to match Wino. Most of the other dogs had also been sold. Several litters killed each other.

The number of kennels in the yard dipped as Slade began selling them. Even in the decline, with his wife gone, he now spoke of hardly anything else.

“Now Lobo over there’s an Ace ear dog. Don’t bring him back til after sundown. You hand-walk that dog from now til the moon’s rising and he’ll have no problem standing on his feet during a long contest. Not only will that dog be game, but dang if you’ll have plenty of money after the next match to go to Surfside Beach and drive all the women crazy,” said Slade on the previous Saturday.

George had no problem with this. He already drove Lynn crazy every Saturday. Hours after his uncle’s words, the two lay intertwined in each other in the tall grass behind the Bethlehem Church off State Highway 3.

“I wish you were the only one, George. I want you to be,” she whispered.

“I know. Don’t say anything honey, I don’t want to lose it,” came his reply. Once a week they uttered these words, solidifying the pact between themselves, the earth and Lobo.

That night as the men sat down to their usual supper, Slade talked up the conference before flying off about Lobo. George interrupted.

“Lobo’s been acting funny lately. I saw a coupla spots in his left eye and the other day he walked right into the corner of the barn. You think maybe he’s going blind?”

“Aww, Lobo’s eyes always been a little weak. I tell you, this dog is Ace, he’s the only one out there that can take Wino. Fred’s got breeding, but he’s got something to learn- he didn’t fight the Germans like I did and sorry to say he never had a wife like Maude.”

A week later, George now stood at a safe distance from Lynn, watching Fred show off Wino to the other breeders through slanted eyes.

The first three matches of the evening were quick. Speckles of fresh blood covered the pit as George counted cash and wrote figures in his notepad. Lynn brought him over a beer.

“Good luck.”

He grunted, trying hard not to make eye contact. Fred, across the way, showed no such worry, laughing at his own jokes. Slade, face running with sweat, brought Lobo out to pit. As it was his property, he was to referee, as George gathered bets, 20-1 odds against Lobo.

At Slade’s call, the dogs were pitted, Wino charging at Lobo, biting high up as the crowd cried out in almost perfect unison. George roared,

“No more bets!”

Fred yelled out, “That’s it Wino! Faster than a quarter horse taken after a stray!”

To his surprise though, Lobo was up for the challenge, sinking his teeth into Wino, and then breaking his jaw, on his feet for the entirety. He would miss his mark, only to try again until fangs met skin.

“That’s it boy! Do it!” screamed Slade.

As the spectators watched Lobo and his failing eyes in awe, Fred jumped and yelled in glee as Lobo took his turn scratching at his opponent. The dog was halfway when he unexpectedly turned to look at George and walked into the pit wall.

Slade looked around him and took a deep breath.

“Call the fight, Pop. He can’t see,” said George, putting his hand on his shoulder.

Slade had no choice but to do so. The dog had never quit.

“I hate to do this but I have to declare Wino the winner,” he said, shaking Fred’s hand. He excused himself and walked off to the house, sitting on the steps of the back porch, face in his palms. George spoke to Fred for a moment and then announced a fifteen minute break before sprinting to the house.

When Slade lifted his head, tears ran down his face.

“Go on now. You shouldn’t see me like this,” he said in embarrassment.

“Come on, Pa. That’s no way to get along,” said George, putting his arm around his shoulder.

“I know it aint.”

“He fought a good fight. Fred says he’s willing to call a draw.”

“I know he fought a good fight and I’m proud. Tell Fred I don’t want a draw, I bet the remaining pups and equipment and he can have it, I’m done here.”

The two men stared at the Union Pacific Railroad cars moving past in the distance, now shadows in the dying light.

“You okay, then?”

“Yeah I aint crying over Lobo, I wanna keep him. I don’t know what happened, I aint cried since I broke my ankle as a kid.”

George understood and patted him on the back again, hard. He stood up and saw Lynn waving to return.

“When you’re ready, come and get him, I’ll stitch him up. Lynn’ll take the bets.”

The next match would soon begin.

*

It’s become impossible over the last few years to stroll more than a few blocks in the well-heeled, taste-making districts of the nation’s cities without noticing one of these places. Unimposing signage, wood paneling and low light are the giveaways from the street. Though they aren’t all going for a speakeasy vibe, it’s a classier variation on a general theme and, as often as not, the bar staff are wearing suspenders harkening back to the good old days of Prohibition. The other most commonplace form is the ambiguously rustic––though improbably urban––old timey establishment. These can be identified by the prevalence of apparently useless objects strewn haphazardly about with no unifying theme or apparent purpose, save underlining the aura of “OLDE.” Think yellowing pictures from the time before smiling was culturally acceptable in photography (whose subjects are of no noticeable relation to the owners), taxidermy, broken pieces of wrought iron farm implements in nooks and crannies, anchors, ropes, and other nondescript nautical equipment, mason jars and wood wood wood––the more uneven, grainy and natural in appearance the better. Call it the pre-stressed work boot look as interior design. Likewise, food and drink at such spots varies, usually according to décor: aperitifs difficult to say but easy to swallow for some, $15 plates of biscuits and gravy for others.

The aesthetic of studied unpretentiousness they aim for can, if you pay too much attention, be bewildering in spite of itself. Maybe that’s the point. Depending on who you ask, the move towards this look began sometime in the early years of the 21st century, probably in Williamsburg. But that really doesn’t matter. What does is that the food and beverage market is saturated with these places, the trend shows no sign of abating, and it’s probably not just for the traditional reasons people seem to enjoy being wined and dined in mood lighting. Whenever a trend becomes the norm, the ground beneath our feet has shifted, we’re living in a new cultural moment, and this is reason enough to take a closer look.

So, what is going on? Where does this fascination that is playing itself out in bars and restaurants come from and what, if anything, does it say about us? Playing with nostalgia and kitsch is, so to speak, nothing new. The Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai was fond of getting drunk and shocking polite society by wearing outfits that went out of style 700 years before. If you know where to look, history is one long rogue’s gallery of dandies––if not as often restaurateurs––adopting anachronisms and aping the styles of the lower classes as marks of distinction. But distinction from whom? Most often the answer has been a snarky aristocratic gesture aimed at distancing itself from the stifling, dreary, respectable, middle-brow and middle class conformity who is its natural enemy. The French were probably ahead of the curve here. Baudelaire, Flaubert and Rimbaud (absinthe!), along with the rest of the big guns of the 19th century’s version of the creative class, adopted “épater le bourgeois! (shock the middle classes!)” as both rallying cry and standard by which to judge the merit of all things. Less impish, though maybe more far reaching was Jean Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the “Noble Savage.” Briefly, if society was artificial, corrupt and corrupting, then, well obviously, the authentic and virtuous life must reside in naturalness and simplicity. You can see the enduring power of this in the flesh by looking at hippies and the folk revival scene of the 1960s. The “folk” whose music and culture inspired the interest of a generation of college students were those marginal Americans who, for one reason or another, had resisted the deluge of inauhthenticity that enveloped the American mainstream––salt of the earth types with whom, say, Dustin Hoffman’s chronically alienated young man in “The Graduate” might identify with as an alternative to a world consisting entirely of Radiohead’s fake plastic trees. The problem, according to Historian Grace Hale, was that the clothes didn’t make the man:

“…folk revivalists did not become ‘the folk.’ Moving to the mountains or the Delta, learning to play a banjo or guitar, wearing beards, working men’s clothes, long hair, coarse skirts, and sandals––none of these acts stripped young educated Americans of their class psychology, of their sense that they mattered in the world. Folk Fans accepted few limits on their own self-invention. They believed transcendence––escape from the limits of history––was possible and confused illusion with reality. Playing the top and bottom against the middle class, revivalists positioned themselves as a cultural, if not material, elite. They built their coalition on the new definition of authenticity––emotions, raw, real, and shared. The folk music revival of the 60′s rehabilitated American Individualism by reimagining class status as a cultural choice”

The key to understanding the motif at work here is, as Hale says, self-invention as a cultural choice, specifically, choosing to be something (anything?) other than a boring average American. An aristocracy of taste and, maybe, morality, brought about through an aesthetic alliance with the bottom and all-out war against the tedium of the middle.

The journalist Tom Wolfe stumbled upon something similar in a 1970 article entitled “Radical Chic.” There, the subject was an improbable party hosted by New York’s literary and artistic luminaries whose guests of honor were members of the Black Panther Party. The comedy of errors ensuing between cultural elite and political revolutionary was everything you’d expect making for a lot of laughs and remains among the funniest pieces of the era. Wolfe, however, was interested in why the socialites from the Upper West Side were so captivated with the socialists from the South Bronx in the first place. His answer was that the black revolutionaries, like the “folk” for the folk revivalists, were proxies for everything that the wonder bread jet-set felt they lacked––real, raw, unadulterated authenticity––and that their fascination took the form of romanticizing souls they couldn’t help but see as “primitive”––but in a good way! They were, he said, yearning for the mud:

“Nostalgie de la boue is a 19th-century French term that means, literally, “nostalgia for the mud.” Nostalgie de la boue tends to be a favorite motif whenever a great many new faces and a lot of new money enter Society. New arrivals have always had two ways of certifying their superiority over the hated “middle class.” They can take on the trappings of aristocracy, such as grand architecture, servants, parterre boxes and high protocol; and they can indulge in the gauche thrill of taking on certain styles of the lower orders. The two are by no means mutually exclusive; in fact, they are always used in combination. In England during the Regency period, a period much like our own––even to the point of the nation’s disastrous involvement in colonial wars during a period of mounting affluence––nostalgie de la boue was very much the rage. London socialites during the Regency adopted the flamboyant capes and wild driving styles of the coach drivers, the “bruiser” fashions and hair styles of the bare-knuckle prize fighters, the see-through, jutting-nipple fashions of the tavern girls, as well as a reckless new dance, the waltz.”

Sound familiar yet? Think of the great migration of the latest aristocracy of talent to New York over the last 15 years or so. From far and wide, Young Financiers, Social Media Starter-Uppers, Graphic Designers, New Media Producers––in short, the new creative classes––have all made New York, Chicago, San Francisco and the rest of the usual suspects their homes. Besides lots of new money, they bring that chip on the shoulder that has always given away a provincial-cum-cosmopolitan––making it in the big city, all the while defining themselves by the cultural distance between themselves and the middle-brow landscape of strip-malls and Olive Gardens they managed to escape. Like both the literary bohemians of the 19th century and the beads and beards set of the 20th, they want little to do with average American culture and their lifestyles and consumption habits––the same thing really––express it. While my neighbors aren’t dressing up like the cast of Les Misérables (yet? time will tell), they are going, every weekend, by the droves, to what now must be places that number in the hundreds, all of which look like a throw-back Jean Valjean might have felt comfortable having a beer in while plotting the overthrow of King Louis-Philippe with his buddies. It can be pretty dehumanizing working in front of a computer 40 or more hours a week so it’s not surprising that we’d want to get our rustic on when we can. Never mind that a world lit by Edison Bulbs is grossly energy inefficient and ideologically at odds with what we’d like to say about our locally sourced selves: We’re interested above all in the real thing––or at least the realer thing than our day jobs––and nothing seems to say this with as much force as tasteful wood paneling.

The great irony for the would-be urban rustic eatery and/or saloon so favored by the modern jeunesse dorée is that it has already been done, and by the enemy. Since 1969, the full force of American industry has been deployed erecting the faux folksy aesthetic as an economy of scale. With all the calculation of Standard Oil, Cracker Barrel––”the old country store”––slouches like a great, greasy beast across large sections of the USA, having long ago mastered the art of artless imprecision whose charms the city folk are discovering. Most notable in recent years for a spat of race-related offenses and its sub-Paula Deen fried fare, in the olden days, Cracker Barrel was a sort of Potemkin Village by the interstate where you took your family after church for lunch and showed them how it all used to be, right down to the mason jars, yellowing photographs, wrought iron farm tools and wood wood wood. Though the Urban and Strip-Mall varieties of the rustic experience may be similar, one man’s craft is usually another’s Kraft. The clienteles of these two universes not only don’t mix socially (at least not until those dreaded holiday trips), they vigorously grumble at one another from across an immense cultural divide in the now ritualistic spectacle of mutual accusation that makes up so much of American political life. If only they knew how much they actually had in common.

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Jordan Somers is a Freelance Copywriter and Adjunct Professor of History in New York City. In spite of himself, he enjoys happy hour oyster and drink specials in the establishments he’s described herein.

Sam Pink has released 9 books (all of which you can find on Amazon) & 3 chapbooks. His habitat on the web is here. In addition to making music & writing some of the most engaging contemporary work I’ve read, he illustrates all his book covers (& the cover for King Cobra). The man is prolific.

Kelly Schirmann is no slacker either. In addition to making music, she writes poetry & makes beautiful collages––often blending the two. She has recently exhibited her new collage series NEW MINE at People’s Yoga Northeast. Find her work online here.

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FANZINE: Hey guys, can you tell me how you two first connected with each other?

SAM PINK: I was searching Craigslist for a Bowflex and saw a ‘rant’ posted by ‘big_sherm69’ about how McDonalds is killing and processing citizens from her neighborhood and how no one will believe her blah blah something something. So I contacted her and said how I was a businessman from London and how I needed someone in the US to run errands for me while I was in town and how I’d need her social security number, her birthday, and her bank account number.

KELLY SCHIRMANN: I urge everyone reading this article to write a letter to your congressman, district representative, dentist, judge, ex-camp counselor, person you slept with once while drunk at a party & now feel low levels of embarrassment around, literally ANYONE you’ve ever interacted with via Craigslist, and/or other meaningful authority figures about this McDonalds issue. It has gone on far too long to ignore. We will not be silenced any longer!

FZN: How do you compare/contrast the experience of making music to that of writing?

SP: For writing, if I read/edit a line then mime yelling into a microphone and then airdrum a ‘blast beat’ drumbeat, then it’s good. For music, if I’m listening to it and it makes me do this one dance I do where it looks like I’m writing on a wall with both hands, then it’s good.

KS: Making music to me is much more of a physical experience. It feels really, really good to me to sing. Writing poems requires much more of my mind, although I think for either one I care much more about generating feelings in the reader/listener than making narrative sense. Both have a writing element to them, but I feel like in both cases the words are just a means of representing what’s happening behind them: for songs it’s Sam’s music, for poems it’s my mood.

FZN: What was your musical background before Young Family?

SP: I could never find a good bandmate.

KS: I have played in a few bands besides Young Family that didn’t last long, & mostly I recorded by myself under the name ‘headband.’ I don’t have any training in music so they are pretty simple, lo-fi sad bedroom folk songs, but I like them. You can find them on my bandcamp or soundcloud.

FZN: Are there any artists who particularly impact the way you make music?

SP: I can’t think of any. I feel inspired by things I don’t like anymore I think. For King Cobra though I had the radio on a lot, on 98.7 the Chicago classical station, and I think it made me feel interested in making more complex melodies.

KS: Chan Marshall & Phil Elverum come to mind, just because especially in their early albums they didn’t seem to be crafting their music for anyone in particular, but just capturing some kind of natural interior runoff.

FZN: Tell us a little about King Cobra.

SP: We decided to name it King Cobra because we were talking about what 40 ozs we like, and King Cobra 40 ozs are my favorite. Fun fact: King Cobra is also the street name of the guy who started the Chicago street gang Spanish Cobras.

KS: Yeah, I feel like we kind of ‘upped the ante’ on this one. You Ruined It was a total experiment & the first things we tried to collaborate on, so I feel like we were able to take the things we liked from that album & augment them. Most of our correspondence for King Cobra has to do with pepperoni, pickles, special sauces, ‘levels of spicy’ etc, which leads me to believe it will be even tastier.

FZN: What is the first & last album you remember buying?

KS: TLC’s Crazy Sexy Cool was my first. The last thing I bought was Ex Tropical by Lost Animal.

SP: I think the first tape I bought was the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” single, with “Even in His Youth” on the b-side. I can’t remember the last album I bought, maybe Mr. Impossible by Black Dice.

FZN: The blend between Sam’s dark bassy electronic playfulness & Kelly’s dreamy vocals strikes a very strange & original balance. Were you ever nervous about whether the two would have trouble ‘meshing’?

SP: I knew I wanted to ask Kelly to sing, because I was already a fan of her music/singing and knew that it would sound good over what I was doing, because you don’t hear anybody with a voice like hers singing over poppy/sad electronic music. Whenever I hear singing over electronic music, it always sounds like the person is trying to be ‘sexy’ but with Kelly, it just is sexy (to me) because her voice is so strong. She has that ‘white trash blues’ type of tone. I also knew that I prefer music that doesn’t sound too slickly produced, which most electronic music does to me, so I knew the style I’d be using would fit with her voice well. I feel like I was interested in doing this because it’s basically two people with no background in this type of music trying it out, which seems like it would make something interesting.

KS: I don’t think there was ever a period of worrying if it would mesh because it was such an accidental thing. Sam emailed me asking if I would sing over some of his songs & I was excited to do it. He sent me the four tracks that are now $, $$, $$$, & $$$$. When I put vocals on them & we listened to them I think we both just felt like, damn. I remember Sam’s response after I sent them back just said ‘This shit quieted me.’ That’s the first time I think we decided to put it out, because we were so excited by what it was.

FZN: When you hear music, do you ever ‘see colors’ or ‘see scenes’?

KS: Yes.

SP: No but like, I don’t know how to explain this, but sometimes I have thoughts that aren’t words while listening to music I like.

FZN: On your Bandcamp release, you tag things like ‘electronic dub-step literary nightmare’ & ‘sad dance-pop apocalypse.’ Are there any other tags you could give us?

SP: Kelly called them ‘crunk hymns’ in an email once and I like that. Feel like I could see a music reviewer using ‘electro-lullaby’ too. Can also see someone saying, ‘big sherm’s soothing spectral croons make for excellent sauce over the halt-step doom bass melodies of DJ CARL WINSLOW.’

KS: crunk-hymn, doom lullaby, tear-soaked 30 caliber bass hug, abusive friendship bracelet, emotional emotion, slow motion hurt fantasy, etc.