Month: January 2019

My favorite part about getting older is how all your friends live in other towns, and you all have jobs that ruin any chance of spending quality time together, and how people with money can buy their way out of these problems and don’t even realize how everyone else everyone else is suffering because of this, and more to the point, those with money have no sympathy for those who don’t.

But we’re all expected to accept it because why aren’t you playing the game like everyone else? Shut up and enjoy those memes and that terrible TV show and ignore all of the hard realities that money allow you to forget. I bet if you wish really hard you can follow creative dreams on nights and weekends. Let’s hope your job doesn’t exhaust you first, or that you are willing to compromise on your desires, because one will be a drain on the other, eventually.

There will always be people around you who are in a position they can’t change, where no amount of positive vibes or faking it til you make it will resolve those distances between them and those they care about. All I’m allowed to do in this world is get a job and not think about those friends and hope that making someone else some money will, somehow, make me happy in the end.

I’m sure you can guess at how that’s making me feel now.

Why Troll someone? Or anyone? The more I consider this, the more I wonder why this is a thing. Isn’t it just gaslighting? Aren’t you just pushing someone’s buttons just to be a dick? What am I missing here?

I’m totally willing to admit that there is some value to trolling someone that I don’t see. But it feels so humorless and mean, and doesn’t seem funny to me unless the person is rich, white, and is among the ruling class. And some part of me thinks there’s a better way to reveal that the emperor has no clothes than to rely on gaslighting someone.

I think there’s a difference between speaking truth to power and trolling someone, that there’s a difference between satire and meanness, and I think that as time goes on, there is a very sad part of the world that believes trolling someone is just a part of our culture. But why do we accept it? Why don’t we call these people the assholes that they’re being?

One defense I hear is that of humor. “It’s funny to troll someone.” To who? It’s a joke? Really? Because it’s not very funny, most of the time. Why that kind of joke over and over again? Can’t you diversify? I think you hear the times when someone makes a satiric comment that lands, and you see a blueprint for how to be funny. But all you see are the other parts of the joke that aren’t the punch line.

Why not be funny first, and if you happen to be able to troll a figure with power while you do it, hey, you got lucky! Two for one! Well done. Most jokes aren’t that good, so why do you think yours is? No joke is so precious that it deserves to be more mean than funny.

Mock our leaders, belittle their every stupidity, and continue to find good ways to be funny. But keep in mind that our leader is trolling us, the right wing is trolling and gaslighting us constantly… other countries are trolling us. These tactics are not funny, and they are the tools of hacks and novices. In the moral high ground of navigating the future, isn’t the ultimate goal to be honest and funny, rather than insincere and unfunny?

Honestly, what am I getting wrong here?

I’ve had a wild weekend with so many great happenings, and I’m still trying to process it all, as it was all too much fun. Seeing both Matt & John perform is always a treat. They are among my favorite experimental performers in the area, and I always find myself incredibly introspective after seeing them play. Then, I got to do radio with Sierra, who is certainly my best friend (outside of Marla), which also included a full weekend of shopping and food and bad movies. (You are the best Hu-Man I know, Sierra.)

I also got to perform music and make radio with Robert, who is always a treat to spend time with. I wish I could have spent more time with Don who drove from Eugene to see us, but I’m sure there will be more time to do that someday.

Weekends like this are sometimes challenging, because there’s so much to take in, and so many great experiences, I’m sometimes at a loss for a useful way to make sense of it. I scored a great Vangelis record and some other fun things, (again, thanks Marla), and so many cool things happened, it only makes sense that I’m now feeling low, not because I’m sad, but because what could compete with that much fun? Balance is so hard, and as I chow down on leftovers and clean the kitchen, I can’t but wonder what, exactly, balance would mean.

Maybe it’s not for me?

Here’s what you need to know about this two hour broadcast:

1.) There IS a Carol Channing tribute.
2.) There’s 75% more new wave tunes from all over the world in this show than your average two hour broadcast.
3.) Four, Count ‘em, FOUR songs by the incomparable Half Man Half Biscuit… AND three excellent tracks by The Cleaners From Venus!
4.) In this show you will hear my best friend join me for two hours on the radio. He is the person who has shaped and formed my musical taste in a huge way, and has always helped me become a better person. Just listening makes you that much cooler.
5.) Oh, we’re now sponsored by the Bendix Corporation, I guess?
https://midvalleymutations.com/2019/01/25/the-return-of-the-ramen-city-kid-133/

In the late ’90s I found myself a smoker, and decided to quit using the brute-force method. (One day I was a smoker, and I just completely stopped the next day.) I assembled this zine in 1999 from my journals and other writings about the experience. This one-off zine was out of print for a long time, and it feels good to have it available here. $2

wtbc.bandcamp.com/merch

Let’s not talk about politics. Let’s talk about the people around you instead. What is more important: making sure YOUR family is happy, healthy and safe? Or: making sure your COMMUNITY is happy, healthy and safe?

To put it more pointedly: when would you consider your community as important to you as your family, and if not, why not? What have they done that makes them not worth your concern? At what point is it worth it to spite the rest of the world because your family is the only thing that matters?

This isn’t about nazis or criminals or people that want to actively ruin the world. Cut out all toxicity; you don’t have to give them another thought, and I believe they’re a smaller percentage of the world at large. But: everyone else. There’s a whole lot of them. Do they deserve happiness? Do they deserve safety, too? Do they deserve the positive outcomes that you so demand your family deserves?

This isn’t about politics; the parties don’t neatly map over the dichotomy painted about. This isn’t about politics; this is about you. Do you want happiness for yourself and your family… or, for everyone?

Okay, so this IS about politics, I have to confess. But… only because how we feel about families and communities is suspiciously absent from so many of the political commentaries I read online. I hear a lot of people make extremely ham-fisted statements that seem to betray a love of both family and country, and it begs to wonder who, if anyone, means anything to these people. Political discourse has become devoid of humanity, with abstract arguments about ideas and positions only vaguely understood by a Troll who seems to want to sew chaos more than community. I have a hard time positioning anyone on a continuum where I can tell who, or what, they may actually care about, outside of caring about making everyone hate more and more.

So I don’t want to know about your politics. I only care about what you think is important. Do you care about your family, or your community? Or neither, perhaps? Maybe you do hate yourself and you wanna see the world go down with you? Those are the things I wanna know about.

I don’t want to talk about politics. Instead, tell me how you feel about your family and your community in detail. That tells me more about you than anything else you could possibly say about politics right now.

Under the guise of putting on something for the three year old to watch, I’ve been enjoying the new Rocky & Bullwinkle Show that’s out. While I’m sure purists will find something to be angry about, and it is certainly a show made for children, I find it incredibly fun, evoking the spirit of the original while using the vocabulary and style of a modern show for kids that are growing up in 2019, instead of 1959, like the original.

While none of the other segments of the show appear (Sherman and Peabody have four seasons of their own show, and I’m sure the other properties will soon roll out, too), the show does manage to do a tremendous amount with essentially five main characters. Fearless Leader seems to get more screen time now than in the old show (as far as I remember), but the central premise is reinterpreted repeatedly without ever getting tired. There’s almost a Krazy Kat quality to it; the idea is so simple that it can be recast in a million settings and still seem fresh because of the dialog and fun the story is having.

Part of the fun I’m having is certainly from the fact that the 3 year old seems to like it too. But my memory of the old one is pushing me towards this, certainly. I remember it fondly but saw it rarely, and the infrequency seemed to only make me want it more. But by the time I was growing up, and certainly where I grew up, it wasn’t in syndication. I only saw it under exceptional circumstances, and I’m sure that also colors my memory, and my fondness.

There haven’t been good reboots of this property for a while, so doing something as close as possible to the original was (and is) the right move. They get excellent guests voices (Weird Al, Mark Hamil & Gordon Ramsey), and the jokes are fantastic, layered, appropriate, and very funny. Puns are used heavily, but there’s a sensibility that understands social media and video games too, music and film, and uses how kids talk to each other to further the stories. The kids laugh at stuff that I don’t think is a reference but they seem to get, and the more I see the more I believe that someone in that writer’s room has my sense of humor too, because a lot of jokes hit me in ways that feel like they know me all too well.

This show is aware of itself, something that TV has trouble doing well. They talk about the audience, the actors, the show itself, and sometimes they refer to earlier or later in the same episode. Jokes depend on knowing that the show is on Amazon, or that it’s a reboot, and the show has only the loosest sense of reality, as it breaks all rules to make a good joke. This sensibility is something I crave in all art, and is so rare to find without it being corny. It’s done so well here I just have to wonder how it got in the show, but it is so effective and fun that it is a consistent element, right down to the credits and theme songs.

And maybe that’s why I like it so much? The people who make this draw on as much shared experience as possible, hitting us in exactly the right place.

End of buzz marketing. Go back to arguing online about… I don’t know, stoats? Is that what people are mad about today?

Me: If you leave these out, someone will play with these.

Him: You can’t let her play with my toys.

Me: You should take them to your room.

Him: That sounds like work I don’t want to do.

(He leaves for school.)

Me: Hey little girl? Guess who just gave us permission to play with his toys?

According to the prevailing ideas of social science, the notion of dividing people up by Generation became very important in the post-WWII reality of the 1950’s. It was a more socially acceptable way of communicating which war you were most likely affected by, and was significant in that the sudden influx of children following the war illustrated a significant increase in the population, making The Boomers the first Generation to have a decided “beginning” that you could measure from.

The Baby Boomer Generation, unlike subsequent generations, was specific to years, rather than an abstract unit of measurement. Social science marks this period from roughly 1940 to 1964.

After that, Generational measurements become muddy. The earliest books published on the subject of post-boomer generations were in print when I worked in a corporate chain of stores, and I read all of them. Douglas Copeland’s fiction novel that included non-fictional elements wasn’t the first, or the last, but his book is more geared toward young Boomers more than old Xers. But before and after Copeland, the idea of publishing a book about the emergence of this new Generation X was so incredibly common that a parody of the genre was illustrated by Evan Dorkin, the most Gen X thing to happen in the ’90s.

Generation X was originally defined as the kids born during the Vietnam era. (1965 to 1975) Most books published in the ’90’s held to this definition, and culturally a line was drawn very quickly, to separate the kids who would graduate from High School in or around the year 2000 as Millennials, which almost nicely added up when you did the math, except it excluded those born after and before Milennials. No solution was offered for this until recently, when micro Generations were named to shorten the periods of Generations, and to better categorize people.

But a curious thing has happened: Gen X, a generation that was the obsession of all culture from the mid-’80’s until the year 2000, was completely forgotten about once a younger, more problematic generation arose. The power shift never moved from Boomer to X. Instead, Xers who moved into power stopped identifying with their generation, began to “Yes And” the boomers, and the remaining Xers were so distracted by childcare and The Internet that they didn’t look for their cultural inheritance until it was on the classic rock station and “Friends” was in syndication.

As Gen X continues to loose any cultural power as the youngest are now over 40, I wonder what value labeling Generations like this really serves. In ancient eras, a generation was family specific, and as the micro-Generations continue to get divided, I think we’re slowly realizing that identifying with large groups was the problem. Maybe returning to an abstract meaning will help us stop looking for where, exactly, our Generation got lost.

New to the Merchanbox: Mid-Valley Mutations Vol. 1 Compilation… on cassette! This has been out on CD and digitally, but tapes have proved incredibly popular lately, and every tape I’ve made has sold instantly. So here’s another one! Sixty minutes of live MVM performances, all for your enjoyment. Take the show with you… now on cassette.

Old Punks seem to fall into two categories as time goes on:

1.) “Well, I’ve got a family now, and I work with kids, so I’m trying to be a lot more woke than I used to be. I’m much more interested in community organizations and resources. I just want to see the World improve so we no longer feel like nihilism is a necessary way of life.”

or

2.) “I think trolling the Libs is about as punk as fuck right now. Johnny Ramone was the only good Ramone. Whatever happened to the good old days? How come ya’ll wanna take away certain words from me? C’mon. The Mentors and Skrewdriver are funny, right?”

3-Year Old: I don’t like waffles.
Me: What?
3-Year Old: I want yogurt.
Me: You eat waffles every day.
3-Year Old: No I don’t.
Me: I’ve made waffles for you every time I’m here.
3-Year Old: But I don’t like syrup.
Me: You don’t like syrup?
3-Year Old: I don’t!
Me: What do you like?
3-Year Old: …uhm… pickles.
Me: Of course.
3-Year Old: And Frozen!

I’ve noticed a few people showing off their Germs Burns since Lorna has passed. I started thinking about how many people must have these, which begs the question: how many of you have one?

I do not. In the days I would have got one unflinchingly, I didn’t know anyone who could give one. And now, I’m much less likely to go through with it.

Still, I’m curious: who has one?

As I keep sorting through all my crap, and this room becomes more of a place where I can work in a nearly distractionless environment, the idea of an Office capital O, or a Studio capital S, as a concept, looms very large.

For me, it must be a state of mind. I have a single room with a table that I can use to do my stuff, so it becomes a place where I have to reset the space regularly. So it’s not exactly a space that is permanent, but really a workstation that is multi-purpose. Which is great; a lot of people don’t even have that. I’m very lucky in so many ways, and it is 100% privilege. The fact that this room is George’s old room seems important.

When I think about the idea of an office, and what I wanted as a kid, I always imagined something off-site. I would have to go to it, and use keys to get in. I imagine landlords and sound-reinforcement. A phone and bills. Etc. But the possibility of a place like that is just impossible. How could I afford it?

And, now, as this room feels like a separate place, an office / studio of its own, I wonder where that old vision came from. This is certainly more in line with what became the future, and home studios are only gonna get better as time goes on.

I didn’t get the place I imagined going to. But I wound up living next to the place that works for me.

I once read in a zine that, in addition to writing basslines for all their other songs, Lorna Doom brought this tune to the group. The story goes that it’s the only song where she wrote the bassline, brought it to them, and they wrote the song around that. Not sure if it’s true, but you know how stories in zines are.

RIP Lorna Doom. We’ll miss you.