Mentally Assaulted In The Suburbs Again

     Recently, I ended up at the suburban coffee place again.  Every time I'm there I start wondering how white people are still a thing and haven't gone extinct from their own stupidity yet.

     I wasn't even out of the car before some dumb ass felt like flashing their stupid in my general direction.  There was a woman on her cellphone standing in the middle of the last available parking spot when I tried to put my car in it.  I gave a polite tap on the horn which prompted her to look up at me and then go back to her conversation without moving.

     I then laid on the horn to similarly disinterested results.  Winding down the window and yelling “WHY DON'T YOU TRY STANDING ON THE SIDEWALK THAT'S RIGHT FUCKING NEXT TO YOU, YOU FUCKING IDIOT!!!” as loudly as I could finally got the desired response as she then trundled off into the night.

     For the life of me, I can't think of any reason why it should take this much effort to operate out of doors.  Why would someone even think to stand in a parking space and then look at me like I'm the asshole when I try to park in it?  Incidents like this only seem to occur to me when I head toward the more affluent areas around town.  Does having money make people forget how to not be fucking morons?  Does it provide some level of entitlement that the rest of us have to suffer through?  And it didn't get any better when I walked into the coffee place.

     Apparently, there was a PTA meeting at the nearby school that had just let out and a group of parents felt they needed to go for coffee to bitch about the goings on at the meeting at a very loud volume.  The few of us that weren't there to whine about volleyball uniforms or whatever the fuck were huddled in the front corner trying to avoid the endless verbal onslaught.  Even the employees were trying to duck these assholes.  The volume on my headphones could barely counter the sound without making my ears hurt.

     What the fuck is wrong with these people?  I was stuck in line behind all of them while they were trying to order their overly complicated drinks.  They would forget what they were ordering while attempting to continue their conversation so they would then yell the rest of their order at the barista who was already in the middle of making their drinks and had to start over.

     There was a visible sign of relief on the face of the employee at the register when I ordered a large coffee and handed over exact change plus a dollar tip.  Luckily, these assholes cleared out after about twenty minutes but the respite did not last long.

     A few minutes after the PTA fuckers left, some idiot came in and started having a conversation over Facetime at the top of his lungs.  Maybe we shouldn't slam the breaks on this whole climate change thing.  Maybe we should do our best to speed it up and end humanity as quickly as we possibly can.  People are awful.

     That's why I don't attend many school functions or hang out with other parents or other humans in general.  They are an irritating, needy and entitled bunch of dumb animals that are easily susceptible to bullshit.

     This gives me a new appreciation for the group of musicians, artists and all around weirdos that I have slowly come to befriend of late.  They also seem unwilling or unable to relate to a large portion of the world around us.  It is extremely freeing to not give a shit about more than half the nonsense that “normal” people get twisted up about.

     I constantly feel like Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451 when he's riding the subway and is being bombarded by advertisements to the point of having a breakdown.  Distractions punching me in the brain in an attempt to chase away any possibility of a moment of thought and introspection.  No wonder critical thinking skills are going to shit.  Who needs to think when the powers that be need you to know when Dancing With The Stars or some equally terrible programming is on.

     Our surroundings have been pressurized with content in an effort to have us all conform to the aspiration of being a good little consumer.  Get in line to hand over your hard earned or you will be forced to with or without your knowledge or consent.

And Now It's Time For Something Completely Redundant

     I have recently come to the conclusion that I lack the discipline needed to carry out any sort of creative endeavor.  My habits and routines fall apart very easily and without much of a push from the outside world.

     Through a combination of laziness, illness and an unquenchable desire to watch The Wire from beginning to end, my creative output fell to zero rather quickly.  No words written, no photos edited.

     Skipping several shows and not leaving the house unless it involved going to day job was also counterproductive.  When trying to write about my “adventures” at shows while taking pictures at said shows it may be helpful to the enterprise if I actually went to the shows more frequently than I do.

     Having to be at a desk at 7am for some arbitrary reason followed by eight hours of I don't even know what certainly puts a damper on the proceedings.  By the time the traffic monster coughs me up onto my driveway I've either got myself a headache or I'm just flat out exhausted.  Getting to a club to put up with the behaviors of my fellow humans is no longer something I could bring myself to give a shit about.

     I normally try to keep a few finished articles on the hard drive for those times that the schedule doesn't line up so I would still be able to meet my self-imposed deadline but those dried up rather quickly or became outdated and need to be rewritten.  Now I'm back at square one and have to rebuild.

     Luckily, I have reached that time of year where I am now sequestered for a few hours every weekend at the Carnegie Museum's cafe while my daughter is somewhere in the building learning about and creating art.  I get ripped out of my mind on caffeine and mash my face against the keyboard and see what comes out of it.

     This desire to have some sort of creative output is my way of pushing back against the oppressive mundanity of my day to day life.  Trying to build a body of work to at least say that I was here and to leave evidence that I was more than my pointless day job.  Succumbing to a no impact existence is a fate worse than death and I am trying to run away from that fate as best as I can.

     Taking pictures at shows is my way to say that these bands were here too.  Documenting their existence to prove at a later date that they were here and should not be lost to the ether of time and short attention spans.

     The reason I have built up in my head for taking stills instead of video is that if you wanted to see what took place, you could have been there as easily as I was.  In reality, it's a sound quality issue but I like to think that it's a loftier idea than that.  And besides if you really wanted to see what happened, there are enough people posting their shitty cellphone videos all over the internet before the show is even over.

     I have reached the point where I don't care if anybody reads this nonsense or if it's any good. I am grateful if people read it but I need to do it as a means of survival.  A way to use my brain in a manner that has nothing to do with how I almost pay the bills.  Drooling over my laptop in an effort to form sentences or trying to make an out of focus picture look halfway presentable is more draining to me than it should be but it's worth it to keep that part of my brain moving.

     For the life of me, I can't figure out how “normal” people are satisfied with only having an unfulfilling day job and then going home to their Ikea furniture.  I guess that's what booze and Jesus are for.  Fuck it.  It's time to put on some records and chase these blues away.

Skull Records Birthday Party At Babyland On November 8th, 2019

   Here are pictures that I took at Babyland on November 8th, 2019 for the Skull Records birthday party.  The lineup was Drug Lust, Submachine, Mud City Manglers, Killer Of Sheep and Charged DIS.

Drug Lust:

Submachine:

Mud City Manglers:

Killer Of Sheep:

Charged DIS:

By The Time I Possibly Get To Arizona

     It was recently announced that Rage Against The Machine will be reforming to play a handful of shows in March and April of 2020.  This news was met with what seemed to be an equal amount of “Holy Shit!!!” and “Who gives a shit.”

     The largest amount of backlash is coming from the arbitrary puritans that can't get over the fact that Rage will be playing Coachella.  I had the same feeling when I first heard that they were going to be playing at this soulless suck fest at a polo ground that has become more about celebrity and fashion instead of the music.  Not to mention the greedhead political leanings of those who operate Golden Voice Productions, the organizers of Coachella.

     Then it dawned on me.  All of the dehydrated, beautiful, young people that will be blitzed out of their gourds on MDMA at this festival will also have a cellphone in their pockets.  They will surely be taking shaky videos of Rage's set and beaming them out all over the internet to their social media followers.  Thus giving the band a worldwide audience to jam their message down the throat of the masses.

     This is why The Clash were always on CBS/Epic Records and opened for bands like The Who. They had a message and took it directly to the largest possible amount of people instead of only preaching to the choir.  Rage Against The Machine clearly has an agenda on this tour since they are playing mostly southwestern border towns that have been under siege by ICE and Border Patrol.

     I know Rage Against The Machine gets a bad rap for ushering in the awful trend of rap-metal bands that sprang up in the mid to late 90s but that's not really their fault.  That was the fault of the record companies trying to cash in on what they thought was the musical trend set to follow Grunge. Don't blame Rage, blame Capitalism and corporate synergy for bringing the likes of Kid Rock and Fred Durst into our lives.

     Rage Against The Machine started my political awareness as a youth.  Every time I listened to those records and poured over the liner notes I was slowly shaken out of my apathy.  That band helped to open my eyes to the fact that we are all surrounded by old guard pigfuckers that don't want society and culture to move past 1950, especially if it will inconvenience them out of a few cents.

     That band served as a gateway drug to knowledge to help fill in the many blanks to the whitewashed history that I learned in school.  Their second album, Evil Empire, had a photo of various books spread out on a table that I had made a list of and went hunting in local used book stores to try track down as many as I could.  Not only was I learning about Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal in the band's lyrics, I was now reading essays from the Black Panthers and The Autobiography Of Malcolm X in an effort to chuck off the low-level generational racism that I was raised with.

     I had missed out on seeing the band live the first time around.  I did have a ticket in hand for their joint tour with the Beastie Boys that was cancelled because one of the Beastie Boys was in an accident while riding a bike through New York City but that was the closest I ever got.

     Much like Aus-Rotten, Rage Against The Machine had been screaming a warning at the top of their lungs almost twenty years ago when they called it quits and society hasn't learned a fucking thing in that time.  Hopefully things will be different this time around when the band takes a stage to grab us by the collective shoulders and shakes us while slapping us across the face in an attempt to wake us up.  If not, there's at least the very real potential for post show rioting and turned over police cars that have been set on fire.

     Over the years, their records have gathered dust on my shelf as I have not necessarily outgrown them but more of having used them as a foundation and built too far above them to access them. After this run of shows was announced, I dragged all three studio albums off of the shelf and gave them a spin.  And then I listened to them again and again.  I'm not sure if the records still hold up under my microscope of musical snobbery or if it was a straight dopamine rush of nostalgia but goddammit if I'm not fighting the urge to book a flight to Phoenix in March.

Proposed tour dates are as follows:

March 26th—El Paso, TX

March 28th—Las Cruces, NM

March 30th—Phoenix, AZ

April 10th—Indio, CA

April 17th—Indio, CA

Caught In The Sleater-Machine

     This past week I found myself at two different and unlikely venues for me to drag my carcass to. The first was the dreaded Stage AE and the second was the Carson St. address that used to house the Lava Lounge.

     Sleater-Kinney was at Stage AE on Saturday, 10/26/2019.  As with every time I force myself to go to this overly corporatized, yuppy, shithole of a venue, the bands that play have to climb the steep hill of overcoming my negative experience of entering the building for me to enjoy the music.

     There's something telling about a venue when the crowd waiting on line to enter the venue is bonding over their shitty experiences at the place.  Everyone seemed to have had a story about the aggressive security staff and we all shared a laugh at the door length sign of items that were forbidden inside the venue.

     It didn't help matters that there was a football game earlier in the day.  There were still tailgating fans throwing up a day's worth of beer in the garbage covered parking lots when us music nerds were showing up for Sleater-Kinney.  Stay classy, Pittsburgh.

     The opening act was Joseph Keckler.  He sang a short set of opera songs about taking too many mushrooms and getting dumped, among other things.  He closed out his set with a cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' “I Put A Spell On You.”  Joseph Keckler was so delightfully weird that I was an instant fan.

     Sleater-Kinney hit the stage and quickly reminded me that they could wipe the floor with damn near any rock band that I could think of.  Over the course of their twenty-four song set, the band sounded tight and looked like they were still having fun playing in front of rooms full of people.

     Given the unwarranted backlash over the new record and the departure of drummer Janet Weiss, I'm not sure if Corrin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein still feel like they have something to prove in this new phase of the band but holy shit did they ever level the crowd.

     Even though the crowd didn't really seem to have caught up with the new songs yet, those were the ones that sounded the most impressive to me because they were able to overcome the sterile PA and fill the room.  The Stage AE PA seems to neuter guitar sounds for some reason that I can't figure out.

     I knew what to expect from the older songs since I've been burning those into my brain for the past several years but, much like every time I hear the song, “Jumpers” still got to me.  The opening lines of “I spend the afternoon in cars/I sit in traffic jams for hours/Don't push me/I am not okay” were enough to buckle my knees given the weight of my thoughts of late.

.     .     .

     On Wednesday night, 10/30/2019, I found myself at Cocktails From The Crypt.  A seasonal pop up bar that has a Halloween theme.  This was for the annual Submachine Halloween show with Venus In Furs as the opener.

     According to my t-shirt, I had not attended Submachine's Halloween show since back in 2010 when it was at the 31^st St. Pub and that may have been the last time I was at the Pub before it closed. This was also one of the rare occasions that I found myself on the South Side that didn't involve my chiropractor.

     The back room where the bands were set to play was pretty tight but I found myself a spot up front in order to get some pictures.  That is, until Venus In Furs fired up their fog machine and filled the room so I couldn't see anything that wasn't a few inches from my face.  I was able to get a few pictures of the singer and the guitar players but there was no way I got anything worthwhile of the drummer and the keyboard player.

     The fog cleared out and Submachine went off like a bomb.  The revelers that were there to experience the atmosphere of the Halloween bar were suddenly making a mass exodus while those of us that knew what we were getting into took over the back room.

     It was later reported that the band was so loud that they could be heard clear across the street.  I found an odd sense of pride in that especially since DJ Fuckhead and whatever other hollow dance music has taken over the South Side and can be heard pouring out of clubs at all hours of the night along Carson St.

     It was nice to see that there was a large turnout for the show.  Half the time people can't be bothered to show up on a Wednesday night or any other night for that matter.  I guess after almost thirty years enough people have figured out that Submachine celebrating Halloween is a show that should not be missed.  The band plays a longer than usual set and pulls out songs that they don't normally play.  They even played their version of DEVO's “Mongoloid” which taught me many years ago that there was more to DEVO than “Whip It.”

     After helping with tear down and load out, I got caught in a weird moment while standing on the sidewalk.  I was contemplating whether to head toward the car or walking back across the street to maybe experience this thing called “fun” that I have heard so much about.  Needless to say, I called it a night and eventually started walking to the car.  This elusive “fun” in social situations will have to wait until I'm not so fucking weird.

Devil's Night At Cocktails From The Crypt, 10/30/2019

Here are photos that I took at Cocktails From The Crypt on October 30, 2019 for Submachine's Halloween show.  Venus In Furs was the opening act.

Submachine:

Venus In Furs:

Submachine At The Rock Room On 10/14/2019

Here are photos of Submachine that I took at The Rock Room on October 14, 2019.