We See Through You #19

October 1, 2013

Hey Maximum. Listen, about a hundred people sent me emails suggesting that I go fucking die for talking shit on Agnostic Front, which I don’t really care about, but then Alison sat me down and was like “if you don’t think Vinny and Roger were keeping each other warm on long tours in a small van and ‘Showing Henry and Ian the ropes’ in the early 80s…” and I was like, OHHHHHHHHHHH. So okay, got it. Sorry I talked shit on Agnostic Front everybody. I didn’t find out about punk til I was 40.

I know a lot about Faith No More though.

Anyway can we talk about the internet? Because look, I have been talking hell of shit in this column lately, and I want to take a break from talking shit to talk about some stuff that rules. Specifically, I think that the way that a lot of people are using the internet is fucking rad and I want you to know about it so that if it seems like the kind of rad that you like, you can bask in that radness too.

See, the internet isn’t punk. I know that. I was there for the Great Debate Of Oh Eight* about whether punkers could have myspace pages and still count as punkers. I remember being kind of bewildered at the time because like, I had never paid any money to any bands through myspace, and I was like, myspace isn’t making any money off me. I mean I guess they showed ads or whatever. But I got to listen to hell of bands for free there! And listening to bands rules. Plus my bands got to post music there, which you could just listen to for free if you wanted to. (You didn’t want to listen to my bands from then, though. Trust me.) And like, I don’t know what your life story is but I can’t afford to just buy every record in Maximum that sounds cool.

Nerds are uploading that shit to the internet though!

I don’t know how I would’ve gotten a copy of the first Shoppers tape if it wasn’t for nerds turning that shit into mp3s and then putting them online. And I mean the stuff Shoppers put out on vinyl is good but song three on that first demo (titled “IV” on the LP; which is it) is, like, a perfect song. I want to listen to that version of the song! Luckily, I have an old computer where Safari crashes every time I try to watch a youtube video. But it can play mp3s! And there are people who are stoked to turn tapes into mp3s and put those mp3s up on their blogs. They are probably nerds but so are YOU. (Actually for what it’s worth that demo is on Shoppers’ bandcamp page, too, but I can’t figure out how to download it from there.)

You can just, like, borrow an iphone, record some songs, and put that shit up on bandcamp in a day if you want. Or make friends with somebody who has some microphones and stuff, read your old Basement Screams columns in MRR, have your friend Brendan record your band in a barn and then put it up on bandcamp for free! I’ve talked before about how I’m unclear how you alleged punkers afford these giant amps and stuff**, and finding a thousand dollars or whatever it costs to print a record is just, like, inconceivable to me. But it seems like it is punk as heck to make a shitty recording and put it up on the internet for free. And also easy!

I mean not everybody can afford an ipod or whatever and that is a legitimate thing to talk about, except like… can everybody afford a record player? Does everybody have a cool, dark place out of direct sunlight to keep their records? I feel like we have this hierarchy of formats where vinyl is the best and tapes are cool and CDs suck and CD-Rs are kind of weirdly cool, especially if you can get spraypaint onto them, but mp3s are pretty much bullshit, like they don’t even count. But that hierarchy is pretty much bullshit! We’re all anarchists here, Maximum. None of us likes a hierarchy. And a lot of us have computers! It’s 2013 (I think) and a lot of us have computers and use the internet and stuff. I don’t know. I just listened to eight Peeple Watchin’ songs I downloaded from bandcamp and it ruled, and now I’m listening to the Dogjaw/Agatha split that I think I downloaded for free from bandcamp too? You can get all the Correspondences stuff there for free, too. The Groke album is free on bandcamp, so are the Ragana albums, so is the Primary Stress demo. It just seems kind of rad that, like, a lot of us have computers already, like for other stuff, and that a weird byproduct of computers being everywhere now is that it can sort of lessen the role of capitalism that, until recently, has necessarily been part of liking bands.

I’m trying not to make grand pronouncements like “everybody’s got a damn computer now so let’s al make records” because I don’t want to make any assumptions about who has a computer and what’s cheaper than what for anybody who isn’t me; capitalism is totally weird and it ruins everything. And of course having a physical record rules, and when you buy a patch or a tape at a show your dollars go directly into the gas tank and belly of a band that’s on tour. Obviously I don’t think that every band should be forced to record their records into a computer microphone in a basement and put it on the internet for free. I just think it totally rules that some of us get to. You know? It fucking rules that I can just give you my record for free. Like al the way for free.

We live in the future and it is weird and cool! I’ve been living in rural New Hampshire for a couple months without a band so I’ve been demoing new stuff on my own for when I have a band again and it has been really easy and kind of fun. Macintoshes come with this program garageband where you have to fuck around with it for a couple days before you really get it down, and then you sort of have to learn to program drums if you don’t know how to play drums or if you don’t have any drums and especially if you both don’t have drums and don’t know how to play them. But it turns out it’s pretty easy to program drums and I mean everything I’ve recorded into this computer microphone has sounded like shit, but: good. I can’t wait to put it online in case you want it. Actually my Mysterious Guy Hardcore band Tall Girl’s song “Rat Princess” from that demo is gonna be on the Stick Shift Records comp my friend Kelly in Burlington might already have out by the time you read this. They’re at stickshiftrecords.tumblr.com if you like trans positive feminist punk record labels or whatever.

It just feels awesome that we get to live in the weird future where if we want to we can make up songs and record them and then just give them to each other without even having to buy tapes or live near each other or visit or anything!

…Actually that sounds kind of alienated and depressing.

But so is everything else in the world I guess? I don’t know just listen if you are cool please make a record and put it online because I can’t afford to buy it but I want to listen to it.

And I think it’s funny that there’s still this idea that the internet has killed music or whatever. This is obvious but it’s worth saying: if this stuff kills the music industry, it won’t kill music and it sure won’t kill punk. This shit is rad for punk and it’s rad for music. Somebody recently was talking shit about bands that record their shit on protools or whatever and then can’t back it up in real life at the show and I’m kind of like… I think that’s cool? The whole point of all this punk shit is that you get to suck. I think the idea that you should only make music if you have the skillz to pay the billz live is some dude rock bullshit; who cares if a band sucks live. Actually I care, I think it rules when a band sucks live. Especially if they suck awesomely!

Also, I think all the bands I listed in this column so far are bands with women and/or queers in them, which might just be because that’s mostly the kind of bands that I like, but it might also not be a coincidence. I mean this computer recording mp3 internet stuff especially rules for queers, weirdos and people with no friends! I know I am leaving the Maximum Nebula and approaching Punk Planet territory when I talk about programming drums ’cause you don’t have any friends- and feel free to tell me what is and isn’t punk, either via maximum or at imogen@keepyourbridgesburning.com- but it just seems like all this technology we all spent so much time resisting and dismissing as not punk has become cheap and available to a lot of us who might not otherwise be able to, like, get in a van. Or solve the eldritch mysteries of “distribution.”

Like, imagine that you are fifteen and you live someplace where you can’t come out and you hate everybody else in your high school too much to even find out if anybody even has a drumset: not only can you listen to queers who hate everything you hate from across the world now while you’re on the bus to school, but you can fucking sit down at your computer and put together an LP about how bad your high school sucks- maybe working in the genre eloquently described by an MRR reviewer like a year ago as “mysterious faggot hardcore?”- put that thing on bandcamp, step back and get through the school day with concrete proof that you are better than all these idiots. And then make it through high school! And then when you’re a senior or dropout with a bunch of face piercings some freshman at some other school might find your album on bandcamp it listen to it every day to survive high school too! How boss is that. I want to listen to that record.

Anyway.

If you’re like me, you cannot fucking wait for Girls Rock Vermont 2013. I’m teaching bass again. I’ll tell you all about it in next month’s column- if I don’t overdose on stoked first. Also I wrote a book. You can google it.

*I know it wasn’t just 2008 but that is a good rhyme right?

**Thanks Ryan from SWAATH for letting me use yours when we toured with you though. I don’t mean you or your band when I say “alleged.”

***I think maybe I talked shit about the latest Bouncing Souls album in a previous column, and I want to retract that. Back then I was listening to it in Eugene, Oregon, in a cold rainy January. Now it is summer. It is Souls season. The newest Bouncing Souls album rules.

****Also hey Colin Atrophy sorry I was pretending your name was Colin Entropy for a long time. Thanks for all the issues of Slice Harvester, they were awesome!

September 2013

Tagged as: maximum

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We See Through You #18

September 1, 2013

Hey livejournal. I’m having some feelings this morning so I want to tell you about them. 

Maybe you knew this about me and maybe you didn’t, and maybe this is true for you too or maybe it isn’t? But I don’t feel like I’ve ever had a community. I’ve had friends and lovers and family and stuff but when people talk about, like, finding themselves in a town they’ve never been to, spotting some punkers or queers, and ending up with a place to crash or some folks to go to the pizza spot with? I’ve never had that. 

Part of it is the way I grew up: not trusting friends enough to let them get close to me because I didn’t trust myself enough to get close to me. I was like, intently oblivious about my own queer and gender stuff until I was out of high school because exploring that shit at that point would have been heartbreaking and dangerous. I didn’t even learn to trust myself enough to know what I was feeling until, like- well I’m 34 now and I’m still working on it. It’s hard for me to trust anybody. 

Another part of it is the fact that I’m a woman. Look, I know that I’m painting a target on my forehead saying this in MRR, but it’s hard for me to trust dudes. A lot of women feel this way. We live in a patriarchal culture that doesn’t give men a lot of tools to, like, not be dicks- and in fact gives them, like, every incentive to feel entitled to women’s time and energy without feeling obligated to give back in the same way. All dudes aren’t jerks, obviously, and a lot of guys realize this and do a good job with it- but like cops, there’s no way for me to know if a dude is One Of The Good Ones when I see him walking toward me or wherever.

With queers it’s kind of a different thing because there’s a lot of talk about not being jerks, and about being accountable, and about support and diversity or inclusion or whatever, but it’s been my experience that that stuff is often a lot more theory than praxis. See I’m trans, right, and in queer communities, there’s this narrative that being trans is about Liberation From The Gender Binary- but in practice, because my queer community grew out of the Lesbian/Women’s Communities of yore, what this often means is “liberation from having to be a woman.” Which like, that is great for people, I’m glad you’re feeling liberated from that. Being a woman sucks in a lot of ways! But like, I’m trans and I AM a woman. Being trans is not about that kind of liberation for me at all.

This is why I don’t trust queers I don’t know. I’ve had so many experiences where some cool queer punker who Knew About Gender wanted to explain to me about how cool it was that I seemed cool because trans women are usually awful for this reason, that reason and that reason- and then couldn’t understand why that made me feel fucked up; or just couldn’t get their head around my not wanting every rando on the street to know I was trans (I don’t want to blow your mind but it’s because people treat trans women poorly); or every time a white trans guy or female-assigned genderqueer person made a thing explaining about how dangerous it is to be trans because of all these statistics when, actually, it is mostly dangerous to be a working-class Black or Latina trans woman, not a college-educated white trans* person; or every time I’ve entered a space full of queer folks and had to prove that I was cool or okay or whatever, just because they read me as a trans woman and then had no idea how to talk to me like a human being. 

I lived in the bay for four years and felt all fucked up pretty much the whole time. I was like, I keep going to these house shows and performance nights and readings and there keep being trans people talking about being trans, people keep trying to be nice to me but I keep feeling all alienated and invisible, what is going on? Every collective house in the east bay had at least one trans guy and no trans women. It wasn’t until I moved away and started to parse out the way that, like, everything about being trans that I was seeing was about how masculinity is cool, and talking about how packing a cock in your UnderArmour boxer briefs was like brave and empowering. Or endless performances by cis femmes who viewed femme as a kind of trans identity, who wanted to talk about how hot they were for masculinity in their partners. This wasn’t being cool about trans stuff, this was being cool about trans stuff in female-assigned trans people, and then assuming that that coolness was relevant to male-assigned trans people too. If you do the math thing where there’s a four on each side of the equals sign so you can erase both of them, then look: this is expecting patriarchy to affect men in the same way that it affects women.

(Meanwhile, the guys behind the counter at the E-Z Stop on Shattuck were laughing at me to my face while I was buying a sandwich and then calling me a tranny when I left. Those were pretty much the sides of the leaving the house coin when I was in the bay.)

Eventually I had to start framing The Queer Community and myself as broken up, just in order to be able to get through a day. I was like, the queer community is my ex, we see each other at shows and stuff but I’m still mad, she hurt me pretty bad and I don’t trust her to change. 

And obviously we don’t need to talk about attitudes about trans women outside queer communities, right? I’ve already told you in this column about how shitty it felt to read Kim Gordon chuckling with Chloe Sevigny about what “freaks” they both think trans women are. We don’t get to have heroes and all that but still it’s just like… okay, world, I get it, I don’t get to have a community, I get it, you can stop telegraphing that shit at me. I promise: I heard.

And look, I named this column We See Through You With Imogen Binnie instead of Being Trans Is Hell Of Alienating With Imogen Binnie (or God Shut The Fuck Up About Trans Women Already, Imogen Binnie, We Get It) because I don’t fucking care, I’m used to it, I’ve made my peace with the fact that people do a shitty job with trans women. This is old news and it’s boring and like, last night demoed a new song for this mysterious new band I’m starting. I just scored a copy of the Daïtro / Sed Non Satiata split, which is apparently kinda rare? I don’t know, I don’t know shit about collecting records, but can we just talk about French screamo that sounds like it came from the Emo Before Guyliner era? 

Nope. ‘Cause Maximum ran an interview with Kathleen Hanna a couple issues ago and I need to PROCESS.

Before we go further: I’m not going to tell you not to listen to your old Bikini Kill records, or that you’re an asshole for ever liking anything she’s ever done, or literally, that you need to do anything. The Julie Ruin record was my favorite for a while too, and it rules that Maximum ran an interview with Kathleen Hanna by a sixteen year old. I just want you to know that Kathleen Hanna is a major reason that I feel like I can’t trust queers and I can’t trust punks, and therefore a major reason that I feel like I don’t get to have a community- but you can do what you want with that. 

Look, there’s no reason for anybody reading this magazine to care about the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, because that shit is not punk. Basically MWMF is this week-long women-only music festival that has been happening every summer since the seventies, except the only women who are allowed are cis women. (Well, and trans men.) But definitely not trans women. For like a decade and a half there was a protest that happened nearby called Camp Trans, where I organized for a few years. It was rad but it didn’t work, Michfest still doesn’t want trans women to attend.

Who cares, right? Some stupid festival. Except this thing happens where I meet somebody who seems like a cool queer, talk to them for a while, find out eventually that they go to Michfest, and end up realizing: I cannot trust anyone. Nobody has to be accountable to trans women about this shit anywhere, ever. It is this insidious thing that sneaks up on you every time you go to a party or a reading or something: one of these queers to whom I’ve just been introduced goes to Michfest. I mean, I think it is clear how that would make a trans woman feel fucked up, right? “Oh yeah I am good friends with someone who spends hundreds of dollars every summer to support a group that defines ‘woman’ as ‘not you.’”

Kathleen Hanna’s band Le Tigre played at Michfest in 2001 and 2005.

Now, whatever. I could write off this tacit endorsement of the idea that trans women are not women and get on with my life, if EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD didn’t love Kathleen Hanna so much. Over and over this reinforces my mistrust of queer people: if I come over to your house and you’ve got a framed Bikini Kill 12″ on the wall, I’m like, that’s cool, I’m stoked that band spoke to you that way- they spoke to me for a minute, years ago, too!- but what you are communicating to me is that you don’t care enough about trans women to, like, have at least a sort of complicated relationship to Bikini Kill. You know? I understand that Kathleen Hanna has done a lot of cool work and is really smart in a lot of ways, but what you need to understand, with your Bikini Kill record on your wall, is what your apparently uncomplicated relationship to this artist’s work says about your newly complicated relationship to me. Or maybe more specifically: my new mistrust of you. 

Just so you know, this is the background noise of my life and the lives of a lot of my friends.

Take my life, please!

ENDNOTES

1. My blog is called keep your bridges burning and my email is imogen at that blog, if you wanna talk about it.

2. Confidential to Kathleen Hanna: You’ve said that you think trans women are women, but your actions have clearly shown otherwise. If you’re reading this, would you please just fucking apologize for playing at Michfest? Apologizing’s easy and until you do you’re a hypocrite. 

3. You can still buy this book I wrote called Nevada at topsidepress.com/nevada.

4. My band Correspondences might play some shows again even though we all moved away! There are free mp3s at correspondences.bandcamp.com. 

5. Next month’s column won’t have anything about gender. It’s straightup just gonna be two thousand words of Robocop fan fiction, I promise.

August 2013

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We See Through You #17

August 1, 2013

Hey Maximum! What’s up dude, I just got back from two months of tour. I was touring on this book I wrote called Nevada, which like… I mean, everybody knows that reading isn’t cool. Or punk. But whatever, sometimes we just write and publish a novel and go on a two month tour for it anyway. And it was really good, dude. My publisher fucking paid for gas! I stayed with friends and friends of friends everywhere… this girl gave me a joint in Houston and this guy gave me a bunch of mushrooms in Asheville. Pretty much, like, it turns out that touring in bands is the fucking worst compared to touring on a book. Which actually brings me to my first point in this month’s column, which is about

What I Learned On My Book Tour

1. Punk Rock Fucking Sucks

Halfway through tour I ended up spending a week in the Montpelier, Vermont area. Some circumstances happened and I ended up having to drive down to Brattleboro and back in the middle of the night one night- only I didn’t have my own car at the time, so I borrowed my friend Katy’s car. It was a very fancy rental car, like one of those big square cars they advertise at suburban boys with money who think they might grow up to be rappers one day?

I was totally stoked to borrow it because some circumstances had transpired in Phoenix that led to me having a very fancy pen in which you can unscrew the top part and it turns out there’s a two gig USB drive tucked away in there. I did what anybody would do when confronted with a two gig USB drive, which was to fill it up with Fugazi and Godspeed You Black Emperor mp3s. So I was like, coooooool, Katy’s car is new and it’s going to have a USB port thing and I’ll be able to listen to all my cool mp3s!

I was wrong, though: the USB port didn’t work. Like I plugged in my cool thing and the stereo would, like, acknowledge that I had put in a thing that said Fugazi on it, but not play any of the mp3s? It was dumb BUT it turned out that the car also had a fancy satellite radio thing in it! Turns out satellite radio kind of sucks too, but- I am getting to the point- on one of the satellite radio stations- the punk station- a very old and crotchety still alive member of the Ramones was doing a punk music show! For like four hours or something!

Well. Turns out either my understanding of what constitutes “punk rock” is really skewed, or else the drummer from the Ramones is wrong about it. And I get how canon works, I know my dumb understanding is wrong. I mean, the punk stuff I like is all either pop punk I liked when I was fifteen, scrEaMOcore I liked when I was twenty, or made by women and the occasional non-woman queer. But Marky Ramone played a four hour barrage of songs by angry teenage dudes singing about angry teenage dude bullshit, punctuated by like one Plasmatics song! Or else angry men singing about teenage dude bullshit.

Who cares!

I mean, I know I’m a big queerdo who plays in a doom metal band with a cello sometimes or whatever but I just forget, most of the time, that this is what punk rock mostly is. And I mean I know that I’m a humorless feminist lesbian anticapitalist witch who doesn’t think anything is funny except this joke Francesca told me:

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Fugazi.
Fugazi who?
Ice cream eating motherfucker

But I just forget that when people talk about punk rock they’re usually talking about like… Agnostic Front, or something. I dunno maybe Agnostic Front rules and I just wasn’t paying attention right when Marky Ramone played them but when I think punk rock I think the Maple Rabbit song “Fuck Macho Bullshit Forever” way before I think, like, “Bro Hymn.” I just completely forget that punk rock is full of dudes being tough and singing about their boring problems or the boring things they are angry about, like heterosexual sex or “politics.” Like, when a bunch of white twenty year olds get interviewed in Maximum and say dumb stuff about the way they don’t believe themselves to be implicated in the gentrification of their cities? Turns out punk rock is mostly closer to that than it is to fucking +HIRS+. I just forget!

2. Everywhere Rules.

Everywhere I went was awesome! I’d get to Tucson and TC Tolbert would show me the top secret Melrose Place pool in the back part of Casa Libre, and then the next day I’d walk around downtown and find multiple biographies of Yukio Mishima in multiple used bookstores and be like, oh my fucking god, Tucson rules, I had no idea!

Or I’d go to the middle of fucking Tennessee and a million queers qould show up at Austin’s house and an older lesbian with short grey hair would listen to my synopsis of Nevada and be like, that sounds borning, I wrote a story recently about a Jewish lesbian who ends up in heaven and is like, what the fuck, but then she finds out that heaven is actually just a farm where aliens keep souls until they eat them. And I’d be like, fuck man, I could live in the middle of Tennessee!

Or I’d go to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where I’d hang out with Alice and AJ and smoke all their weed and then Alice would sneak a bunch of fancy makeup (which is a thing she knows a lot about; one time she was like, can I do your eyebrows, and I was like, okay sure, and then she was like, can I do your makeup, and I was like, sure, and then it was basically the scene in The Breakfast Club where Molly Ringwold gives Ally Sheedy a makeover to look less like a fucking gross mess) into my bag without telling me and I wouldn’t find it until a week later, when I was staying at the Arlington Hotel in Maynooth, Ontario, which my friend and a couple of her friends bought last year, where they have like open mics and music and book reading and all the things, out in a town where the main other things you can do is go to the general store or go to a diner that closes after lunch. And then I’d be like, fuck, Maynooth, Ontario rules!

I got to hang out with Morgan Page and Trish Salah and Zoe Whittall and all these other amazing people in Toronto, which made it almost okay that the border guard rifled through everything in my car on the way up. Although, admittedly, my story sounded totally bullshit: uh, I am… a student, I guess?I rented this car with New York plates in Vermont, I don’t really live anywhere… okay yeah I’ll pull into a numbered space. Luckily though, check out this border crossing tip: keep hormones in your trunk! The border patrol people might be so interested in your hormones that they overlook whatever contraband you’re smuggling over the border.

Not that I was smuggling anything. Except love! Love for places. Turns out if you stay with cool queers everywhere then you will fall in love with everywhere. Kinda makes sense when you put it that way I guess.

3. Nothing Else.

I try not to learn stuff.

You can still get that book at topsidepress.com/nevada. If you want to explain to me what’s so cool about Agnostic Front, email imogen@keepyourbridgesburning.com

(July 2013)

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We See Through You #16

July 1, 2013

Hey whatup from The Road, Maximum. I am on tour! I’ve been on tour for a fucking month and I feel like I’ve been tired for that whole month and it’s kind of hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t, and like which way is north or whatever, but if you know anything about the Road you know it’s one of the best kinds of exhausted and disoriented. Right now I’m on this posh as hell Amtrak train headed from Philly up to Vermont, where I’m gonna get to sleep in the same bed for a week. It’s gonna be so rad. I can’t wait. I’m gonna eat hella kale and do yoga and align my chakras and wash my hair and fuckin I don’t even know, just like take a break before I do three more weeks of readings every night down the east coast, like to Texas, then back up to Canada.

I think other writers might not treat book tours like band tours?

This book I wrote called Nevada came out at the beginning of March, even though the release party was in the beginning of April, two days ago. But I toured for a month before the actual release party. My publisher Topside Press was like, “we will give you money for gas and food to go on tour for two months,” and since my experience with touring is the week and a half tour my band Correspondences did with Swaath, where we felt like we were the greatest geniuses in the history of dumb loud rock because we sold enough tapes and shirts not to lose money paying for gas, I kind of figured this would be the same kind of tour. Which means, like, camping, and staying on friends’ couches, and sleeping in the car, and never showering or getting any exercise. Turns out if you get some money from your publisher to do a tour you can stretch it really far if you panickingly believe, all the time, from the get-go that you are about to run out of money.

But it’s been unreal. Seriously, write a book and get Topside to publish it, I recommend this shit very strongly. Actually I also recommend dating my girlfriend Alex, too. With Tom at Topside and Alex collaborating on Excel spreadsheets or whatever the fuck, all I’ve had to do is read sentences out loud, eat food, and buy shoes. Like in Seattle I got a pair of britpop Pumas that make me feel like I am in Elastica and then, a couple weeks later, in Hollywood I got a pair of black cowboy boots that I’m preeeeetty sure used to belong to Slash.
I just have a feeling.

Anyway. Tour stories.

I think the raddest tour story is that when I was setting up the show in Olympia, Kelsey, the librarian at the Timberland Library, was like, Oh really, you can only be here on a Friday? Hmm nobody ever comes to readings on Fridays, do you want to have a band play? I didn’t know what to say and Alex was like Dude, RVIVR is from Olympia, so I was like Oh yeah! How bout RVIVR! and Kelsey was like, Sure, they love the library.

So I got to do a reading with RVIVR at the Timberland Library in Olympia for the second show of tour. It was rad, the poet Sarah Pinder read with me for the first few nights, and she read first, then I read, then we talked for a minute and then RVIVR played, like, the first half of their new record The Beauty Between (which has been the soundtrack of this tour- although also can I tell you that Swaath from Maine, some of the best boys that I know, finally set up a bandcamp page so you can download their side of the split they did with Correspondences there? I’m so stoked, I’m listening to it right now, it’s killer sludgy doomy very loud metal stuff from the frozen basements of Portland, Maine. When I move back to the bay at the end of the summer I’m totally gonna bite their vocal distortion thing, it’s so fuckin good. They’re at swaathmaine.bandcamp.com) and then… what happened was, Erica from RVIVR was like, Hey since this is your thing do you have any requests? I panicked and started listing all the RVIVR songs I like, I was like, Will you do Tiny Murders and Paper Thin and Seethin’, and Erica was like ok we will do Paper Thin and Seethin’ but not Tiny Murders. It ruled. They just did the first half of the new record straight through, which was awesome, and then Seethin’ and then the Hunger Suite from the end of the new record.

Man RVIVR is so good- we traded books for records and Mattie talked about the politics of growing a beard as a genderqueer person between songs and they were like “If it’s weird to be at the library when loud punk music is playing, imagine how weird it is to be in the library playing loud punk music.” Then after they played they went directly to Europe.

Oh also a rad thing happened where Erica was wearing a Ragana backpatch on her vest and I had one on the back of my hoodie and I said something about it into the microphone, like I don’t know, like “Ragana rules” or something, and then fuckin after I read and was selling books and stuff Maria from Ragana was like, hey thanks for reppin my band into a microphone. Haha. I didn’t know she was there! I think Olympia is kind of magic. The next morning I took the obligatory picture of a sign that said Sleater-Kinney on it, fucked around at a Starbucks for a couple hours and then went directly to Canada.
What happened was, Alex worked out a hundred tons of logistics- pretty much every possible thing except checking whether her passport had expired last June. So while me and Sarah smuggled books into Canada to do a reading that our friend Kay Lamothe- who’s in the bands Screaming Queens (myspace.com/eastvanscreamingqueens) and Velvet Fist (velvetfist.bandcamp.com)- set up, Alex camped an hour south of the Canadian border with our dog Pants and a laptop full of audiobook mp3s. She told me that she ate a whole box of fruit snacks and half a bottle of wine, threw up, and then had the best night of sleep she’d had in a while.

Meanwhile in Vancouver Sarah and I read with Amber Dawn, another amazing writer, and then I ended up having a really amazing conversation after reading about trans women’s space in queer and punk communities, and the overwhelming frequency with which trans women self-select out of those communities in disgust, frustration, or hurt. And we talked about inclusion theater, patriarchy, sex, whether the trans movement is forty years behind the women’s movement (the answer is that it is not, for a lot of reasons, including the fact that forty years ago nobody got to read bell hooks), and honestly? One of the best things about that reading is that Natalie Reed was there, which meant if I got tangled up in trying to talk about some very intricate thing I could just be like, I don’t fuckin’ know, Natalie, will you explain this thing? And she would. Do you know Natalie? I don’t know what she’s going to be up to by the time this is printed but right now while I’m writing it she’s just finishing up over a year of blogging at freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed, which you might check out if you want to read thousands of words laying shit out for you about trans women and oppression and everything.

Kay and Sarah and I got sushi with her afterward. It was awesome.

Man there’s a lot of other stuff that happened, I got to read at the Denver Zine Library with Kelly Shortandqueer, where he talked about tailoring his pants ’cause he’s short and I talked about tailoring my shirts ’cause I’m tall, and I got to read at One N Ten in Phoenix, and Casa Libre in Tucson, I don’t know. Modern Times in San Francisco, Pegasus in Berkeley- that one is actually up on youtube somewhere if you want to see video of me wearing a filthy Girls Rock Philly 2011 t-shirt and cussing. Colin Entropy came to the book release party in Manhattan and gave me all the issues of Slice Harvester! Annie Danger did tattoos at the book release party, I got a pink line most of the way around my wrist and my friend Dave got the logo of his band Sex on his ankle. Somebody else got Eve pawprints on her chest and I forget what everybody else got but it ruled that we did tattoos at the book release party in the Queers For Economic Justice office in Manhattan (thanks QEJ). Probably lots of other stuff. One cool thing is that the book is called Nevada and the west coast half of the tour pretty much circumscribed a donut around the state of Nevada without entering it. That was unintentional and weird.

Like always, if you want to talk about it email me at imogen@keepyourbridgesburning.com. I’ve been posting short tour diaries at topsidepress.com if you want to read them. Whatever. Did you know that last summer on the Swaath Correspondences tour we stayed at Colin Entropy’s apartment? He wasn’t there, which was a bummer, but we listened to all his records anyway. One thing that rules is listening to the second self-titled Rancid album with a bunch of other punker dorks. Okay this is Rancid signing off for now! Until next time we’ll see you guys later! Fuck yes.

(June 2013)

(ALSO, JUST SO YOU KNOW, Colin Atrophy’s name is Colin Atrophy, not Colin Entropy!)

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We See Through You #15

June 1, 2013

Hey whatup Maximum. I’ve bleached my roots, buzzed my sides, and after I finish this column I’m gonna do my nails, because I leave tomorrow on a two-month tour shilling this bright orange novel I wrote. I’ve cleaned out the car and I’m cooking all the food in the fridge, it’s pretty exciting.

Also last month’s column was some April Fools stuff. In reality if you’re sixteen and you suck at playing the songs you’ve written about how it sucks to be sixteen, I’d rather listen to you than pretty much anything else.

I wrote a column for this month while I was in Portland, Oregon a couple weeks ago that was all like “hipster this” and “it’s weird to see bands you’ve heard of in Maximum on the upcoming shows flyers in the windows of every bar here that” and “the riding a bike at night by myself after going to the queer punk show under trees when it’s kind of cold and beautiful and none of that other stuff matters other thing,” but when I reread it it was boring. Luckily I had a text document open on my computer that was just the words AGATHA, RVIVR, RAGANA, GROKE. Which sounds like an invocation when you string them together that way? Like I bet if you recite their names in that order thirteen times while looking into a darkened mirror at midnight they all show up in your basement and play so loud your house tumbles down. Give it a shot, let me know how it goes.

Hey speaking of invocations I think I mentioned RAGAN a couple months ago but didn’t really get into it- they’re two lady-type people (I think; I actually haven’t asked how anybody in this column identifies, so apologies in advance if I fuck it up, please let me know and I’ll try to fix it) from Olympia (I think) playing punk metal or whatever. They rule, they put out two EPs that are both up on their bandcamp, rararagana.bandcamp.com, which I’ve been playing kind of all the time. I put their backpatch on my hoodie. I know everybody hates witch stuff right now because somehow it became kind of cool for a minute and now we’re all over it but they play straightup witch metal. Their second EP Unbecoming came out in January and it’s even more intense than their first one, All’s Lost, which came out in June. They sing invocations and about growing and rotting and their song “666″ goes one, two, three, four, five, six, six, six, which is just like… that is how you write a metal chorus. Anyway both band members sing and I think they trade off between really loud and distorted baritone guitar and drums? That’s what it looks like in their youtube videos, I didn’t actually get to see them when they toured down from Olympia. Also they’re on hiatus because one of their members had to leave town to go to herb school, which is the most witch metal reason possible to put your band on hiatus. I’m not going to get into, like, Starhawk and chaos magic and candles here- Francesca is already gonna make fun of me for writing this sentence- but witch metal rules and RAGANA rules.

Oh I just looked at their tumblr- it’s called growsrots- and it looks like All’s Lost got reviewed in the March issue. Who knows where I was when that came out but I missed it, bummer. Anyway if any of this sounds interesting I think you can download both tapes for free from their bandcamp page.

I also want you to know that crusty queer Providence, Rhode Island dreamboats GROKE put out a tape in January! My band CORRESPONDENCES got to play with them a couple times when we were still all living in the same place and touring, they rule. Groke is noisy bass and drums and they play atmospheric drony crust. They also wrote the best song about being trans ever, titled “Dysphoria,” the lyrics of which are “You look more like me / Than I’ll ever look.”

Whoa weird, I’m looking at their bandcamp page now too- groke.bandcamp.com- and it looks like their demo came out last June and the Well Of Loneliness tape came out in January too. These are exactly the same months the RAGANA tapes came out. Spooky!

I’m also totally stoked on AGATHA right now. I feel like I’d been hearing about them for a minute but when I was in Portland my friend Kat’s thrash metal band (I can tell they are thrash metal because Kat plays drums like “what if Lars from Metallica was good”) (have I done my Lars impression here before? It goes like this: “hey guys I think I’m gonna alternate between the kick and the snare for the verse of this one”) LABRYSE put on a show titled Queer Aggression that was PAINTED DEBRIS, LABRYSE and AGATHA. PAINTED DEBRIS was this wingnut lady playing unreal and overwhelming eight-finger tapping guitar hero weirdness with a bunch of distortion and delay pedals and stuff; LABRYSE’s singer wasn’t there so they were instrumental lesbian thrash metal (I’m assuminag it’s okay to use the descriptor “lesbian” because their name is LABRYSE); and AGATHA were just, like, unreal.

I think they’re from Seattle? Their record is on Rumbletowne, I think you can download the whole thing for free on there- the URL’s got a bunch of slashes hyphens and stuff, just google it. I don’t know how folks in this band identify but it seemed clear that they weren’t just a bunch of dudes; I didn’t even want to buy a record because my debit card had already started getting declined and I needed the cash in my pocket to last through a trip to Philadelphia and back, but I ended up paying ten dollars for a record after they played a set of the like hardcore punk or whatever that they play. I think they play hardcore punk? None of the members of AGATHA seems to play much like any members of Metallica so I don’t really have a reference point. Lots of yelling and making me want to push someone, I think that’s hardcore punk right?

Anyway after they played I went up and I was like “Hey what was the second to last song you played, I want the record with that on it.” The singer was like “That one’s called Sissy Dang, it’s on the twelve inch,” so I bought the 12″. And it rules, I’ve been driving around town trying to get my shit together before I leave and banging my head at traffic lights to it; even better, they were like “Oh yeah, that one’s about the way the femininity is devalued in queer communities and how that’s bullshit” and I was like: that is exactly what I care about! Like, for real. So thanks AGATHA for being awesome, I’m totally stoked on your record.

Also on Rumbletowne is RVIVR! Who you probably don’t need me to tell you about right, RVIVR fuckin rules and I think everybody knows it. Their new record The Beauty Between is up on rvivr.bandcamp.com and it’s awesome too. Like in the last couple days I’ve been listening to PUNCH, AGATHA and RVIVR, depending on how intense I’m feeling. Like if my life were a Nintendo game with a little intensity gauge in the corner and if it was all red and SUPER AGGRO then PUNCH would play while I jumped on turtles, and if I was a little less aggro it would be AGATHA, and if I were a little less aggro than that and maybe kinda stoked then it would be RVIVR while I rode around on Yoshi or something.

One cool thing about the new RVIVR record is that they re-recorded the song “Paper Heart,” which was on a 7″ from a couple years ago. It is about feelings, it rules.

Another cool thing about RVIVR is that I’m doing a fucking reading with them! While we were putting together a reading in Olympia for this tour I talked to my friend Jess who talked to her friend Kelsey who is a librarian in Olympia. She was like, “okay the only day we have is a Friday but nobody shows up to Friday readings, do you know any Oly bands you’d want to play at your reading?” I panicked and blanked but Alex was like “RVIVR, duh,” so I was like, Oh yeah! RVIVR! Kelsey was like, “Okay great, they’re friends with the library, I’ll see what I can do.”

What.

Turns out RVIVR was into it and Mattie from RVIVR was like “oh yr column is cool” and I was like “oh thanks yr BAND is cool” and now I’m turning this column in a day late on March 6th and reading with fuckin RVIVR in Olympia on March 8th.

I’m feeling pretty lucky right now. Pretty stoked. Music right now rules and I have a book out and I get to go on tour with my girlfriend and our dog for the next month. If I get hit by a train or some shit on this tour I’m gonna be so fucking bummed. Anyway tour dates are up at topsidepress.com and you can buy the book there too… actually though by the time you’re reading this the ebook will probably be done and we’re going to put it up on the pirate bay so if your computer can read a pdf or whatever, you should be able to just go download it.

I guess I love the internet?

(May 2013)

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