stupid attempts, no conclusions

posters i've done

2009-10-17T06:15:00.003+02:00

2009-10-17T00:06:00.000+02:00

Not to get all post-moderny on you guys anyways, but what is real anyway? That's all I can think of while on a two-day layover in Toronto going back home to Newfoundland from Vancouver. I get to catch a show in the big city, and it's IRON AGE, and smoke is billowing from a PA speaker on a stand, stage right, and the singer, between every song is saying "More vocals in the monitor, please." But isn't the burning plastic smell noticeable and indicative of why his vocals seem quietish? They are the opposite of blown-out and with a shitload of reverb. Is this how they always are?
My friend, a fellow but native Newf, is like "They were right wicked" and I say "But the vocals... " She's like "I dunno, I just figured something was broken."
I guess she liked it anyway. Me, I'm I defensively try not to like anything. Cool, well, being a snob is okay.
Prior to trip to which this layover belongs, I was having a quarter-life crisis. It was such a shock, I didn't know what it was and took it really to heart. I'd managed to avoid most of the usual growing-up milestones and invented my own. An older, wiser columnist (Al Quint, I think), once said, (I'm totally paraphrashing) "Shut about being 30. If I wanted to be bored listening to people talk about what they should be doing at their age, I'd go listen to my sister's boring friends talk about their biological clocks ticking." I totally agree. That shit ain't punk. Still, though, when I was given a printer by a 32-year-old friend who was giving up all his projects and moving to the mainland, and I surveyed the ways I could get ink into this printer, making it usable to me, and even the refill kiosk at the mall was beyond my current financial means. Then the name and logo rang a bell and I realized that this franchise, which had crawled its way, 5000 km, across this big stupid country, was started by this guy whose website I used to write show reviews for in 2000. It's like, one minue we're both high school kids fiddling around ancient versions of photoshop and reading CSS tutorials to make wicked websites while listening to FUGAZI or whatever, and the next minute, I'm 25 and unable to afford the "environmentally friendly" discount inkjet refills dude is becoming a millionaire from selling.
My reaction aims for self-righteousness but stinks a little of shame. On one hand, I'm a success snob, remember? I already don't like IRON AGE. I don't want a profitable business, fuck. Think about it: douche bag investors, boring meetings with charts and stuff. But I'm keeping it real, right? Right? There's nothing wrong with asking my boyfriend to borrow money for my antibiotics because I have impetigo again, right? Right?
So, then, just to throw a huge fucking wrench in my financial furies, I borrow too much money from various friends so I can impulsively fly cross-continent to Vancouver. It all started when my mom called me, crying, about her mom's health. Actually, I should clarify that: I called her and she was crying, because I stubbornly don't let her have my phone number even if this means she files a missing person's report on me whenever I ignore her facebook friend request. It's totally awkward, like it means a cop comes to my door looking at me with disgust whenever I drag myself to the door after a graveyard shit to prove to him that I'm not dead. This weird new routine has also maybe fueled the quarter-life crisis; at my age, you'd think I could maintain a relationship with my mother unlike that of a teenage runaway.
You'd also think the cop-calling would indicate to me a certain level of untrustworthy hysteria, but I panicked and flew in. I mean, it's my gran. She was the one related adult in my life who took all my teenage head-shaving with a total grain of salt and didn't constantly make me feel like a piece of shit for trying not to care about the small-town, high school bullshit standards of attractiveness and whatever. And she's 86, so you know. You know. I can't say it, but you know.
My aunt that she lives with and is her primary caretaker was totally annoyed. "You know," she said when I arrived, "it's not the first time she's been in the hospital. God, your mom called everyone. Even Great aunt fucking Helga's calling in from Mannheim."
But then she looked at me and realized I was like, older than 15, and possibly responsible enough for Gran-Gran to be left alone with me (meaning, my stick 'n poke pizza slice tattoo was strategically covered up with a cardigan), so she made up the guest room for me and went on a well-deserved three-day weed and wine binge. My gran and I had a lot of scrabble to play.
To my grandma, my life peaked when I was 11 and wrote a short story about a hamster that wrote detective stories that won me a $20 gift certificate to Coles bookstore, so she wants to know if I'm still writing.
"Yeah, Gran, I write a column for this, um, music magazine in San Francisco."
She stops the process of finding a tea bag to look at me, super wide-eyed. "Oh my gosh, wow, really, San Francisco. What do you write about?"
I shift my weight from foot to foot. "Oh, um, music, sort of. Feminism? Touring. My life, I guess."
"That's great."
"Yeah, I'm kind of late this month."
"Well, I know, I know a great story you could tell." She's stirring honey into her tea.
"What's that, Gran?"
"You could write about a girl.. a girl who lives in Newfoundland and her mom tells her that her grandma is dying so she flies allll the way there and her grandmother is just fine. I think that would be a very funny story and you could make people laugh."

Punks whose grandmas help them write their punky content, get it touch. Also welcome are offers to mail me the MENANCE - G.L.C. record. julsgeneric@hotmail.com

2009-07-14T01:13:00.000+02:00

Being a normal human trying to have realistic expectations of myself, I originally opted out doing my column this month. You see, the deadline is the 5th and around then, I had just finished two consecutive three-week tours and I was in the middle of getting my gigantic, gas-devouring van (Nine-seater, motherfucker!) from New York City back home to Newfoundland. I was driving an average of like, I dunno, 500 miles a day, my computer wouldn't turn on, and when I was using someone else's, I was trying really, really hard to convince flaky craigslist losers to join us for the drive as to thin out the insane amount of gas required for such a van. It didn't really work out, my boyfriend and I went most of the trip alone. I guess all the potential ride-sharers could sense the stank of nine punks and a lack of windows during a June east coast and backed out. Squares.
Anyways, I'm not a machine! I'm a broke-ass kid lacking the proper technology to keep up with all this shit. One day, when I get a real adult salaried job and don't live in a region with a monopolized
phone service run by corrupt super-corporations taking advantage of our geographical isolation from the rest of the world, I'll do my columns via text message, like those novels in Japan that are ruining the traditional structure of Kanji. Mobile phone novels. You know what I'm talking about. But for now, I'm sharing a 30-buck land line with my two roommates and buying a yearly shitty $200 used laptop after I do something stupid with the last one, like drop it when I'm all shaky during 7 am. security check-in a JFK airport because I chose shitty Brooklyn drugs over sleep.
Blah blah blah, so I got home on the 10th, check up on my square-mail (that's "e-mail" for you squares), and find lambasting from coordinator-in-femi-fascist, Layla Gibbons, for dropping the ball on the cause this month. I guess the boy columnist to girl columnist ratio is way out of whack and when one of us precious few opt out, the scale tilts just that little more towards the Maximum Gender'nEquity. That was two puns in one paragraph. I'm sorry. I'm really grasping at last-minute content here.
Anyways, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I will re-burden myself with the struggle of a consistent
wimmin voice in punk and thank you to the new columns editor (They exist and put up with our shit and do a lot of work and probably representative of the vast and invisible behind-the-scenes work punk ladies do that keep all this shit going), Judy Bawls, for allowing me to submit another gripping segment of My Bands Played Places Yours Probably Didn't an entire week late.

Peterborough, Ontario: I'm not a fan of the "Why live in this place when you can live in that supercity
over there?" ideology but I kind of think it when I go to Peterborough. It's like a sleepy suburb half an hour out of Toronto, a bustling metropolis the scene is young and enthusiastic and the cheap food is delicious and plentiful. But then, shelter is expensive, you can't park fucking anywhere, and it's kind of a suffocating, busy city. And Stu lives in Peterborough, Stu who does FREE SOCIETY zine, which is long-lived, and interesting, and smart. And Stu does DIY shows. He prefers all-ages even though he's, like, old, like 28, but sometimes he'll have to do a show at a tiny bar, where the owner will stand outside and yell FUCK YOU at the upstairs neighbor who calls the cops to complain about noise (although that first band doing a brutally poor mash-up of NO MEANS NO meets the MINUTE MEN did play for over an hour [nobody is allowed to play for over an hour except NAS and FLEETWOOD MAC] and I almost called the cops too), and the bar is next door to a delicious pizzeria that donates pizzas to touring bands, and the 20 people who come will go fucking nuts when you play. So whatever, Peterborough is pretty okay. Recommended.

Orono, Maine: I took these Irish bands on tour, drove them around. I'm tour bossy, it's pretty annoying. But do you need to drink in our van outside the community center that is being surveillanced by cops looking for any excuse to put the kibosh on all-ages hardcore shows? Is it me? Do I drive you to drink? But anyways, it didn't matter, because when my Irish tourmates got busted by cops, they charmed and distracted them with their passports (22-year-old smalltown police: "What?! You're from Ireland?! No way, that's wicked!! Want to try out my night vision goggles?") My friends got to see the world a in new, neater, brighter night-visiony light, the show still happened, everyone got to play, the kids responded to every band with an outrageous two-step circle pit, we got to all sleep in a giant punk farmhouse owned by an extremely young married couple who chainsmoke, run a record label, and hold up the infrastructure of their small scene on their shoulders, and all was well with the world. Highly recommended!

Coming home: My upstairs neighbor is freaking out, he's this borderline-juggalo cab driver that got beat up really badly 18 months ago after kicking two dudes out of his cab 'cause they called him a fag. The situation was a wake-up call for tolerance awareness in the community but now dude walks with a limp and is prone to crazy rages, yelling so loudly the house shakes. That shit is fucking heavy, huh? My bike has a flat, the hole is right on the valve so it can't be patched, so I need a new tube and I'm pretty broke but too dejected to try take my old stressful job back, a kid threw a boulder at me right before I left for tour. Well, a big rock. Anyway, I'm sick of driving, I vowed never to drive again but I've got a half-tank of leftover gas and no other transportation. I predict too-hot summer in-town traffic jams on my way to shitty cross-town food banks and job interviews. So far, I've lined up a paid smoker's survey that I will have to re-learn to smoke for and an interview at the medical university where, if hired, I will have to pretend I have various disorders while medical students touch me a lot. Not recommended.

stay stoked,
juls generic

2009-06-05T17:37:00.000+02:00

My band played in places yours probably didn't (small, weird places on tour feature series)
Marystown, Newfoundland.

In the middle-south of Newfoundland, there's a little leg of land jutting out into the sea with a burgeoning hardcore scene. Burgeoning means we had to watch something slow and metallic and with keyboards. But it's the Burin Pensinsula, isolation stacked on top of isolation crammed in a corner behind some more isolation. That shit happens. Anyway, who cares? We were stoked. These kids obtained permission for our crappy bands to play in the gazebo outside of town hall. Ambulances and firetrucks, on duty but with not much going on, pulled over to see what was happening. Teenagers moshed from the rafters. There were pile-ups. Dog piles. Overheard: “That was the most fun I've ever had sober.” What more could we ask for? A place to stay? Whatever.
An unfortunate but wacky-fun aspect of playing in Marystown is that although the local townspeople seem to want to encourage these alcohol-free youth events, the general public (as in, the parents everyone lives with) is completely terrified and/or disgusted by the scumbags who make the trip to play these shows and are uncomfortable with having them in their homes or establishments. Before the show, we followed the kid putting on the show in his car and he took us to an unpaved cul-de-sac on a hill overlooking the town WalMart and ate some apples and watermelon he had for us in the trunk of his car. After the show, we had the most respectable-looking members of band/road crew book a motel room for six of us to sneak into because the hotel has a “no-band” policy. (“No skinny jeans, no bandannas, no tattoos, no lip rings.”)
Of course, yes, staying in a motel on tour is not punk, but snowing at the end of May is also not punk, so we had to make some compromises. C'mon, judgers, lay off. It was mitten weather and we slept three to a bed.
After the motel was secured, we were taken to see the town, which was mostly a mall gutted of the normal shops and replaced with the business ventures of now: A call centre that employed a giant chunk of the local young and a bar across the hall with a doorway of vertical blinds. We checked out the bar. Some local men guffawed at me on my way in. The bar tender gestured at me with a poolstick, saying to one of the kids, a regular, I walked in beside, “I needs to see some ID from the little missus.”
He's 18. I'm 25.
I said, “I'm 25!”
“Soes am I.”
“Well.”
“Wells, I looks older than you.”
I stand there, wondering if I'm really being asked to leave a bar for being underage.
She says, “What was on da go there at the gazebo with all youse emos after?”
What do you say to that? I left and went back to the motel to watch C.S.I. with our roadies.

2009-05-06T16:42:00.000+02:00

I wish I'd timed this better. I'm going to talk about my brother Dan because I've been thinking about family because Mother's Day is the center of everyone's next weekend. My mom is a million kilometers away, both in the cross-continental sense and by way of years of disappointment, on both our parts. Like the kind of shit that leads to a sort of strained relational-apathy that hasn't led to a complete estrangement in order to avoid sudden moves. So we still exchange e-mails; I say, Hi, I bought an old junky van, I got a raise, it's still snowing, how are you? She says, It's raining, my back's out again, your dad was layed off. I say, Oh, Happy Mother's Day.

My conflict is that by the time you read this, mother's day was last month and you're over it, I bet. Not me. I'm awkward. I want to go to the Sunday flea market to buy stolen car stereos but my friends are doing brunch and/or lunch and/or tea. Lame.

I wish I researched this better because I wanted to start this column by talking about outsider punk bands as a source of camaraderie that I feel like I need at this time in my life. A sisterhood with other isolated devotees living in a region of “Who gives a shit?” and “What are you listening to?” I mean, I could point out that, paradoxically, I feel it's impossible to write about outsider punk as an outsider because if you were an outsider punk you would not know about other outsider punk bands. But this is the 00s and there's the internet and a new issue of MRR gets sent to my remote home every month so I have no fucking excuse. The truth is that I'm still confused because I don't have punk handed to me on a silver platter anymore, like I'm not all overstimulated from having the chance to see all the bands from the top ten list of this magazine playing up the street or in my back yard or, if the band was too lazy or criminally-recorded to cross the border, it was just a two-hour drive to Seattle or Olympia anyway. What's two hours from here? Come By Chance, Newfoundland, an oil-refinery town with population of 265. No joke.

Anyway, so I'm recovering from being a spoiled scene punk who is still in shock of the idea of having to research things for my column or having to seek out bands for myself, which I haven't had to do for myself since I was like 16 and doing Lookout! Records mail orders with my brother. Because of involvement with “actual punks,” dedicated research has given way to grandious generalizations based on personal anecdote that are presented as fact. Like this: One of my favorite parts of outsider punk is the prevalence of siblings within bands. You know, like how weirdo punk bands from small towns, from faraway places, always have siblings in them. Seriously, have you been to Ireland? Every single band there has a set of brothers in it. Every single one. It's a fact.

I used to find that annoying, things like twins playing music together. It seemed too convenient. Shouldn't we challenging the status quo of who we are stuck with and rejecting nuclear family and whatever? But now I'm in the thought-camp of punk being about getting shit done with what's around. Like not giving a shit about who's the coolest and who you know that writes the most blazing riffs, but instead, just starting a project with whomever you end up spending the most time with and writing blazing riffs together. Siblings. Your best friend from grade four that you made because her dad moved in next door to you. Your roommates. Your partners (does that make me a total nerd? Come on, guys, DEAD MOON?!).

I wish I was in a band with my brother, but I don't think it'll happen, although he recently face-booked me to tell me he created a simulation of me in his RockBand band. I hated RockBand with a hardline punx stance until I worked with an eight-year-old who I could only be sure wouldn't try to stab me when he was concentrating on playing the fake drums along to the YEAH YEAH YEAHS. His name was coincdentally also Daniel, but my brother never would've tried to stab me, no sir. Vice versa? Sure. Maybe. I had an extreme seein' red phase. Call it puberty, call it the realization that every thing was fucked and nothing would ever be fair. Whichever.

Despite my violent pubescent rage period, my brother and I started to get along the summer after I ended junior high. I wonder how opportunistic that was on my part, since that was also the time when my he got his driver's license and we were given reign over our parents' old mini-van and its cassette player. It was also right after he had shaved his head into a mohawk to spite his ex-girlfriend and was consequentially given some dubbed tapes by these socially anxious punk nerds eager to find new recruits. I was especially into this one tape mistakenly dubbed MUSTARD PLUG. It was actually OPERATION IVY, which I didn't figure out until years later. Man, I think I even listed MUSTARD PLUG as one of my top favorite bands on my ICQ profile. Boy, is my face red now.

So we spent like a year driving to all-ages shows in the city and listening to tapes. If there were boy and girl parts, we'd do them respectively, like BLATZ and SUBMISSION HOLD. It was great. It was a good year. He had my back. We lived together. And then summer after he graduated, he went to basic training so that he could promote pacifism within the Canadian military and then went to college the next year to try to be an engineering major but just drank too much instead and failed out and moved back home. But by the time that happened I had gotten kicked out of there after my mom and I got in a fight and I was too stubborn to ever move back in with her again so instead I went to live with my internet boyfriend's parents. And my brother and I have never lived in the same city since. Now I have bands and he has RockBand. Oh well.

Stay punk, start a band with your little sister.

julsgeneric@hotmail.com

2009-04-06T16:13:00.001+02:00

Dear international punk and hardcore community,

Well, here I am, still in Newfoundland and becoming obsessed with ice pans, an obsession that started after I heard this awesome and pleading “Please Talk to your Kids about Ice Pans” public service announcement. I guess each year when these broken-off bits of ice bergs drift past the coast of Newfoundland, local youth jump on them for kicks, leading to a few annual helicopter rescues or deaths by cold, cold drownings.

I tried to go see the ice pans last week, despite the fact that I was so tired I'd get head rushes from turning my head. Strings of graveyard shifts. I cannot pull that shit off. On evening three, after a day of failed napping, standing over a stove and preparing a pot of espresso seemed too much, so I hopped on my bike and coasted downhill towards the harbor and just paid for some smiley 20-year-old in all black in one of those extremely lame nouveau rich-fancy fair trade establishments to make one for me instead. Sure, I am in theory for the move towards all-organic food industry, but in a place wherein the the term “organic” has no regulation at all, it's just an aesthetic, some cheesy St. John-ers with ebay-bought Prada and fake mainland accents buying twenty dollar appetizer sampler plates. I ordered that double espresso to go. Yes. Let's burn this fucker down one non-sustainable cup at a time.

Anyway, the coffee did nothing but turn some stomach some more and I went around by the harbor and I couldn't see nothing around the fishing boats, so I forced myself up the stairs of a parking garage, six floors up, about half the height of the tallest building in town. I tried to see out, but it was getting too dark, maybe, or they'd passed through the harbor and were gone by now, but anyway, I couldn't see much. Nothing I could possibly jump on, at least.

Not like the ice pans I saw on the news that night, watching TV at work. Ice pans were so thick in some parts, ferries were marooned. Featured was the Bell Island ferry and a group of people trying to get back into St. John's― they'd flown in for a funeral from all the usual ex-expatriate spots: the Alberta oil fields, Qatar, Nunavut. The denseness of the ice pans were so thick, the ferry delayed its trip to wait for an icebreaker. But when the icebreaker didn't arrive and flight times loomed closer, the ferry decided to go it alone and trudge through the ice, constantly backing up and rerouting, a 20-minute trip dragging into well over an hour.

It just defies conventional seasonal logic, you know? Like, I see an ocean full of ice that thick and I'm like, fuck. That is fucking cold, man. But here, it's just a usual occurrence, symptomatic of warmer weather, see, because the ice bergs a little north are breaking off and drifting southbound. Ice pans and glacier-thick water means summer is a-comin'.

“Are you upset about the delay?” the funeral goers were asked.

“Oh, heck, no, Newfoundland, ice comes with the territory.” with a calm casualness, a genuine indifference to armageddon-like conditions.

Just like my landlord says when I hand him my rent late because I'd been stuck at my home care job for an extra day― yes, in my new life, blizzards lead me to sometimes work for a straight twenty-four hours. Anyway, he responds, in pure small-talk demeanor, “Well, no one said it would be easy, b'y”

Which is a funny thing to say to someone when taking their money for rent. Oh well. In international standards, this apartment is underpriced. Go upstairs and listen to this floor stereo unit with a broken record player that I got for free out of the Buy & Sell magazine. I listen to cassettes on it by connecting my Walkmen to it with a Y-cord via the aux inputs on the back. My old best friend/roommate circa early-2000s just sent me a mixtape. I always forget she's not 17 anymore until she sends me a mix tape that's all “Burn out” by GREEN DAY and that Bruce Springsteen song waxing nostalgia about teenage sex.

Anyway, last week, my new band played someone's twentieth birthday party in their mom's basement. Awkward occasion. If someone quotes that Greg Ginn via Henry Rollins quote about playing the fuck out of a show despite only five people in attendance maybe never played a show to said amount of people while an equal amount of college girls stood in the adjoining kitchen, smiling politely and drinking Big-8 brand lemon-lime sodas, waiting for this to all to be over. I'm wishing I was still in the study watching youtube videos of juggalos. Everyone says every year prior, the 17th birthday, 18th and 19th, this party was bumping. Something else I missed. I'm hoping the raging punk heyday of this place isn't over. I don't want to move somewhere cliche-punk because I want to be 25 and enjoy a sweaty and insane house show with my peers. I'm looking for something to jump on here.

Hopefully, next month, my column will be punker.

xo juls generic

What Makes a Nine-Year-Old Start Fires?

2009-03-06T17:06:00.001+01:00

“You can sing any song you want / but you're still the same / I can't think of anything that makes me more upset / People talk all this rhetoric” (Hüsker Dü, “The Real World”)

I'm at work. I'm always at work this winter. I work with foster kids with no foster parents. Like, when they are taken away from their parents but have nowhere to go, social services here in Newfoundland will rent them out a house and hire a staff.

I'm in the last hour of a graveyard shift. It's 7:45 in the morning. A nine-year-old is sitting on the couch, glaring at a TV. His hands are around his neck, choking himself. He is turning purple. I'm pretending I don't notice.

“So do you want your eggs boiled hard or runny?”

He stops choking himself and rubs his throat.

“I said I'm not eating anything.”

“Dude, you gotta eat something before school.”

“I'm not going to fucking school.”

“Sure you are.”

“No, I am fucking not!”

The amount of sleep I caught amounted to a two-hour nap on this kid's couch last night. I'm trying to be all level and shit, like be nice and just try to get him fed and not escalate the situation, because I know from reading the report of his last night's behavior that he started one of the recliners on fire with a lamp bulb. Smart kid. He's pissed, but not really at us, I don't think. Angry, nine-year-old destructive pissed.

I put his eggs out on the table.

“They're boiled hard.” I tell him. 'Just how you like 'em.”
“I'M NOT GOING TO FUCKING SCHOOL.”

I'm getting fucked annoyed but I feel shitty about it. I'm worried that I'm annoyed because it's my duty as the graveyard worker to get him ready for school and I think I'm afraid that the day worker will come in and think I am bad at my job, as if a nine-year-old too fucking fed up with his life to go to school would be seen as a fault on either of our parts. Mine or his, I mean. But maybe I'm annoyed because I slept next to nothing and my teeth are started to grind together. It comes out before I catch it. I tell him, “Well, dude, you don't have a choice, do you?”

It's 7:45 in the morning. This is my job. I'm telling a semi-suicidal 9-year-old he doesn't have any choices.

Right now, it's the end of February. A year ago, I was rowing a pretty similar-feeling boat. I was spending a half-week holed up in a secret fancy hotel in Vancouver, wrapping up a stint of jury duty with three days of sequesterment. That was weird. I got my summons right when I was in the middle of looking for a job that didn't involve riding a bike. It was for a month-long trial, paid $70/day, and started immediately after this little tour I was doing. Perfect, except, you know, it was jury duty. Well, whatever, I'd try out.

How did they get your name? Everyone wondered. I turned red, cringed, was embarrassed. Voter registry, I admitted. I swear, it was just once. A referendum about the Olympics. I voted no, my side lost, I was disappointed, I did nothing later except I think that MASS GRAVE show I attended at that infoshop that one time was No Olympics on Stolen Land fundraiser.

Despite doubts that I would even get picked, I did, based entirely on my appearance. No questions asked. First juror. Fuck. What was embarked as a weird, funny job I thought would be hilarious to try to get turned out to be simultaneously incredibly boring and morally overwhelming employment I couldn't stop showing up to one day, like all those other crappy jobs. I couldn't quit because a sheriff would show up at my house and a warrant would go out for my arrest. But maybe if I stuck it out, I could expose police corruption and racial profiling and blow the whole bullshit justice fucking system open, you know? Yeah?! Fuck yeah!

But as it turned out, the rest of my jury was also concerned about these things and we talked about them a bunch and tried to pick out the biases and bullshit in this big clusterfuck trial, a go-between between the racist-slanted prosecution and the classist/fucked-up-about-mental-health defense. I sat beside this Irish man, him and I wanted to rip down the arrogant police chief, this smug, condescending monstrous lady. We were going to tear her from her self-righteous throne of assholism. We were going to expose the utter incompetency of the whole fucking police state. We would find her prime suspect not guilty, we'd embarrass her, we, the people, would have her tarred and feathered. But in the end, we didn't have a lot of choices, we just got to say “guilty” or “not guilty,” and in the end, we sent a man to jail for 17 years because we were convinced, he was guilty, he did the crime, a crime I couldn't even call bullshit. I couldn't say the crime was a tool of the man, meant to protect the rich. Because he was cutting open the throats of homeless people, see? And if there's anyone I think should be removed from society, it's assholes who prey on the helpless and disabled and vulnerable, cold, hungry. But there were a lot of assholes out there preying on the helpless: the fucking city of Vancouver and its cops and the real estate developers. And how does this one dude going to jail help this situation again?

7:45 in the morning, telling a nine-year-old he has to go to school. On one hand, there are some perks about school: a break from a kid's home life, and elementary schools these days seem like a day camp with rotating fun activities. And he's genuinely reading/writing smart and does well when he's not punching his friends. But overall, school fucking sucks. I hated it, you hated it. And here I am, in charge and making a some poor kid go. I'm making him go to school because that's my job. I'm making him go to school because there's no alternative. I believe in a child's capacity for self-teaching but not this kid. Sorry. I've seen him stay home and it only involves Disney's Family Channel. Yeah, sure, I believe the school system should be torn down and kids should be allowed to learn in a casual, open-minded environment outside of a classroom setting wherein their individual talents and passions should be nurtured and explored, but that isn't available. This kid is parented in 8-hour rotating shifts by me and some college girls and some retired nurses, and his mom's parenting- privileges were just rolled back a notch on account of a missing $37 she lost or whatever out of her kids' clothing fund that I signed off to her during one of her visits. We had report it as unaccounted for 'cus otherwise one of us would get fired for stealing.

When I got this job, I was like, yeah, sign me up. Subconsciously, I probably thought I would open some minds on account of my progressive and alternative world view. I'd open some minds. Turns out, everyone is concerned that school sucks, that a nine-year-old wakes up so angry he wants to choke himself. But nobody can provide an alternative. My hands are tied. All I can do is make him eggs and juice for breakfast because I know he likes them and vitamins and protein are good for everyone. But his life is the same and I'm some asshole telling him to go to school.

Quit? I can't, the evening worker is going to quit next week anyway, the recliners on fire were the last straw for her and that'll already freak him out. Plus I know some days he will be happy and we'll go to the mall and he'll point out all the sharks for me at the pet store and be shocked when he overhears someone in the food-court using the eff-word.

“Dude,” I say, “you use that word all the time when you're angry.”

“Yeah, but not in a mall.”

But I'm glad, I'm fucking stoked he's not throwing around fuck while we're here, while I'm buying him at hot dog from some crappy mall food stand. But it's shitty that I'm stoked, I'm worried it's because the girl in the New York Fries kiosk thinks I'm his mom. I'm saying to him, “Do you want anything else, sweetie?” and the girl is trying to make sense of my YOUTH OF TODAY shirt and looking at my dumb hand tattoos and I don't want him to swear around her, around anyone, because I don't want her to think I'm a bad mom. As if that matters. As if a nine-year-old too fucking fed up with his life to watch his language should be seen as a fault on either of our parts.

julsgeneric@hotmail.com

2009-02-06T23:19:00.001+01:00

Hey, so I recently moved to the most Easternly tip of North America―St. John's, the capital of Newfoundland, a province of Canada. Around the world, my impending move was met with “Uh, where?,” or “There's a new Finland?,” or, “Are there cities there? Punks?”, or “What's that?” A few months into this residency, I'm still not sure myself. I asked local punk archivist and cassette enthusiast, Steve Dejected, who has just co-released the tape compilation “Hell Comes to Fogtown #1” if he could shed some light on my new living situation.

juls generic: Steve, what is Newfoundland?
steve dejected: Newfoundland is about the size of Pennysylvania with a twentieth of the population. It's an island surrounded by the North Atlantic off the east coast of Canada. Before its confederation into Canada in 1949, it was part of Britain, which I guess means people aged 60 and older that were born here are considered Canadians, but were born British. We have our own time zone and local gold-rich eccentric Geoff Stirling believes and promotes through his television station, NTV, that Newfoundland is the tip of the lost city of Atlantis. The capital city of Newfoundland is St. John's, which has a population of a couple hundred thousand people, apparently it’s one of the oldest cities in north America. I understand some people refer to San Fransisco as fogtown too. Whatever, 'Frisco.

JG:Are there any bands from here that outsiders may have heard of?
SD: That’s hard for me to answer. DA SLYME were pretty feared in their day. SCHIZOID, DOG MEAT BBQ. Those are all older bands, DA SLYME going back to ’76 or ‘77, they were the first punk band in newfoundland. There’s a story about the singer ending up in hospital after their first show and having to be cut out of his bloody jeans and the panty hose he was wearing over them after a confused crowd began pelting the band with beer bottles. Some collectors might know about this band and their sought-after double LP which goes for an exorbitant sum on ebay. When it came out, the band bought a bunch of dime-a-dozen albums, tossed the records, kept the sleeves, stencilled “da slyme” on the covers and that was that. There are occasional myths of someone finding one at value village or somewhere like that. There’s also a story about Damian from FUCKED UP agreeing to bring the band here if someone gives him a copy.

JG: I heard a rumor that no band from Newfoundland has ever toured in America. Is that true?
SD: No, In 2001, THE KILLING played Boston, Albany, and maybe a couple other places in the US. I’m not sure where else they went on that tour, I just remember their homecoming show. It was at a hockey arena, there was no ice and they were set up around where one of the nets would have been. One of the bands they played with covered “Eggraid on Mojo” (BEASTIE BOYS), a moment of triumph for my budding adolescent punk self.
The fact that it’s an 8-hour drive and an overnight ferry ride to Nova Scotia (the next province over) makes it a little more of a challenge for local bands that wanna tour, but people still do it, and luckily it doesn’t completely scare out of town bands away from playing shows here either. We have at least a handful of out-of-town bands every year, which people are always excited about. It’s kind of a treat when a band makes the harrowing voyage to play here and I think they’re usually well received, you’ll do well with merch if you come here. Most recently we’ve had bands like CAREER SUICIDE, GENETIC ANGRY, CRITICAL CONVICTIONS, REGULATIONS, HARD CHARGER, BRUTAL KNIGHTS, DEFECT DEFECT, and BURIED INSIDE.

JG: Are there any characteristics of the punk scene here that makes it different from punk scenes in other places? One thing I am thinking of here is those Spanish sailors who were docked in St John's and showed up at the all-locals bar show the other weekend.
SD: Yeah that was pretty funny, they were stoked. Imagine discovering punk by accident in your 40s and maybe not remembering the next morning. He kept doing off-beat straight-armed hand claps above his head with his back to the band, as if he was trying to get everyone else to join in, his friend dancing next to him like David Byrne in the “Once in a Lifetime” video. I’m not sure if I’d consider it a local phenomenon or anything because I’m sure random people wander into punk shows all the time, but I have seen this happen a few times at shows here. You’ll see this drunk man wearing a fleece vest and khakis lurking around outside the all-ages show, then halfway through someone’s set, there he is, standing on the edge of the pit in disbelief. He’ll offer encouragement to the the band between each song, saying things like, “Play that funky punk rock bass drum! Play that punk rock song so loud!”
One thing that’s been happening here in the past while is there will be outdoor shows, which are always pretty fun. Once on the day of a pretty anticipated show, we were told we couldn’t use the venue anymore, it was a church hall and someone tagged the side of the building which had just undergone an expensive facelift. Everyone was hanging out on the lawn bummed out, kids were calling for rides when I heard someone shout, “Here’s the deal, everyone meet in Bannermant Park in one hour, the show’s happening there.” Someone posted a note on the door of the venue and everyone headed for the park. The whole thing was powered using extension chords running from a light pole to a small gazebo that acted as a stage. I remember kids busting open the metal box on the pole with skateboards to expose the outlet. All the bands got to play full sets and the cops didn’t show up until everything was over and the gear was being dismantled. SHIT LEGION played that park in November once, it was so cold that the bass drum skin ripped like a piece of paper. JUDGE DREAD played their last show in that same gazebo in July with the aid of a generator. These kinds of shows definitely offer us that aforementioned glimpse at the surprised reaction of the unsuspecting passer by. I look forward to the warmer weather so this can happen more regularly.

JG: I have this theory that since the invention of the internet, kids who live in super remote places often become part of this overarching monocounter-culture. Like kids who, if they lived in other places, would be too preoccupied with the amount of local punk activity to care what happens anywhere else, but instead spend a bunch of time on the bridge9 messageboard or something. What do you think? Does this apply at all to Newfoundland? If so, does St John's support or refute this theory?
SD: Well, I think there are definitely similarities in punks from place to place but I don't think it's completely as a result of the internet. Look at all the punk imagery we're bombarded with just as a result of having record collections, all the artwork we're exposed to, all the live photos, all the ideas in the zines we read. That milk crate of fanzines next to the toilet could give someone a pretty good push if they really wanted to make some contrived attempt at a punk identity. I feel like there have always been posers, only maybe the internet makes it easier to be “insta-punk” or whatever.

JG: Tell me about the “Hell Comes to Fogtown” compilation.
SD: It’s a 90-minute indictment against the belief in CD releases and a celebration of local punk/hc, focused on the past five years or so. Kyle and I got together one night with a binder of show posters and did a list of every local band we could think of within said bracket. There were like fifty-odd bands on the list and initially we were going to have one song for each band but we said “Let’s just do as many volumes as it takes to do this shit justice” and we ended up with 22 bands, each with two or three songs. A lot was taken from demos that have dwindled in availability even locally, along with some unreleased stuff. We tried to mix it up in a way that didn’t betray the overall quality of the tape, since some of the material was of a pretty questionable quality, and I think we did a good job. Some songs might be a little quieter than others but overall it’s received a pretty good response. It’s nice to see all this stuff in one place, for people who might have missed some of the bands and as a result missed the opportunity to buy the demo that sold out in one show or whatever.

JG: What are the unlisted ditties that play at the beginning and end of each side of the tape?
SD: The song at the beginning of Side A is “I’s Da B’y” as performed by local favourite of years past, HARRY HIBBS, and at the end of Side A, it’s “Black Velvet Band.” The song at the end of Side B is called “Brendan’s Favourite” and, if my memory serves me correctly, is also by HARRY HIBBS.
We put it on there because that’s the type of music people expect to hear coming from Newfoundland, fishing ballads backed by accordion. Kyle and I are both pretty into HARRY HIBBS, actually, and we both play accordion, but that’s okay because we also rage.

JG: Why should anyone order this tape?
SD: Twenty-two bands, most of which you probably haven’t heard yet. The odds suggest that you might like at least one or two songs on here and if not, you have a 90-minute tape that, with a little masking tape, is ready for some songs you actually like.

JG: How can people order it?
SD: If you want a copy your best bet is to send me an e-mail (towerofswine@hotmail.com) and we’ll work it out. Toss in a couple bucks or something neat, you like tapes? So do we, let’s trade.
Thanks a lot, stay stoked.

health issue column

2009-01-05T22:41:00.004+01:00

The Fall of my Discontent
or: The Weirdest and Most Embarrassing Disease I Ever Had
or: Doctors are Fucking Hacks but Who Can Blame Them?

It had to have been November of '07 when all this shit went down. Probably. I remember because it was pretty soon after Halloween, or rather, pretty soon after a Halloween show at my house at which some sweet bands were covered, all lady-fronted: CCR, Minor Threat, and the Ramones. The Ramones one headlined despite their extreme sketchiness. They didn't think they were going to play and then ended up trying to play spontaneously, despite the singer being on shitty E and the bassist being falling-over drunk and the fact that they hadn't actually practiced, together, all four of them. The guitarist left in the middle of the set and no one really noticed. There were a lot of awkward lulls in which the band tried to figure out what they were doing; the audience compensated with a steady stream of crowd-surfing during the silences. I kept shoving my face into the mic and starting songs I knew they hadn't learned because they were going for an artistically obscure set.

So it must have been November when it happened, within the next few weeks after Halloween. It began as a crater on the side of my mouth accompanied by some bumps on my jawline. The night this eruption before I'd accidentally eaten some tomato (my bane, my allergy that is snuck carelessly into everything ever). Half a year earlier, I had eaten some tomatoes and became allergic to the sun for about a week. Like if my forearms were exposed to bright sunlight, the result were these boils, this this gnarly Ham On Rye, Bukowski-type shit. Was this related? I didn't know.

Every day, it spread. It felt weird. Tingly. I showed it around the house.

“That's not acne?”

It wasn't acne. It was too quick to scab for that.

I ran into this kid I had rolled hard with around the end of high school. We were both at the local cheap breakfast hipster diner. He wouldn't look at my face. I was disgusting. I immediately went to the closest walk-in clinic.

It's Vancouver and if you didn't grow up here, you don't have a doctor. No one accepts new patients. Despite what you might have heard from some Micheal Moore documentaries about Canada being a utopia of socialized health care, things here are a little fucked too. I think what happens is that doctors are offered a higher salary in America, and therefore, Canadian doctors are enticed to emigrate. I can't blame them, though, because, although university tuition is significantly lower here than it is down there, it's still pretty high and “financial aid” means you use the Canada Student Loans program, which is actually run by some asshole bank corporation that is hella stoked on the increasing amount of interest you have to pay each month. The amount of debt looming over your head after eight or more years of medical study must be fucking nuts.

So, as I was saying, I didn't have a doctor because there is a shortage of doctors in Vancouver. I had three clinics I would frequent. I usually went to the youth clinic, which I'm eligible to use until my 26th birthday. It was 15 blocks up the boulevard. They are nice as a policy, but I was figuring out that they may be a little condescending. Also, they have weird hours.

Sometimes I would go to a drop-in clinic open pretty often that is right underneath the youth clinic, but that one's iffy. It's okay if, say, you know exactly what is wrong with you and what will cure it. Like if you had a UTI but now it's really bad and your lower back hurts, so you know it's a kidney infection and can just ask for the appropriate antibiotics. Or, say, if you were bitten by a baby rat at the donut dumpster and need a tetanus shot. The big problem with that one, though, the Care Point clinic, is that you'll always get the liver-spotted old doctor who resents having to do STD tests. The man who once, when I was in getting some "I got hurt at work" forms signed, thought I was a dude, I think because I don't shave my legs.

So. On this day, the day my face disease was spread around a significant portion of the left side of my face, I went to the clinic right by my house, the Care Heart Clinic or something. The receptionist is a total dick. She will treat you like you are complete garbage, which is not what you want when you are sickly and need sympathy. But I use this one if I'm trying to avoid the outside world as much as I can because I don't have to walk far. My doctor was young and hip and attractive. He looked like Rivers Cuomo in business casual. I looked disgusting.

I pointed at my face.

“Impetigo,” he said.

“Really?” I said.

“Oh, for sure.”

He was starting to write me up a prescription.

“Um.”

“What else would it be?” he asked.

What I didn't want to say was: Dude, I've had impetigo. Twice. I'm a punk house-living, travelly punk scumbag. This is different. The whole vibe is different. I don't want to insult your long university training and expertise, but can you not do some swab tests?

I said, “Okay,” kind of sarcastically. I took the prescription and left.

In the next few days, it got worse, as I was popping the antibiotics. I kept showing it around the house.

“Well, it looks less angry but it's definitely spreading.”

“Dude, it's getting really close to your eye.”

I went back to the other clinic, the youth drop-in one. Okay, they were nice. But, as I said, I was getting increasingly weary of that one too. A few months back, I had come back from a five-week North American tour seriously really sick. The sickness started before I left and got bad pretty early in the tour; I'd get my period like crazy, oh, every three days or something but I thought it was just from traveling with lots of ladies or something. I ended every set with a throbbing pain in my abdomen I would ignore. When I got home, I went to this clinic and was told that I had pelvic inflammatory disease, that it was really bad and at risk of spreading into my whole abdomen, and that I needed to take pills to kill off all possible causes of my affliction, including the ones for chlamydia and gonorrhea.

Okay, listen. I don't want to be a dick and act like having those STIs would be deplorable and there's no way I would have them, like, ew, gross. Because the reality is that if you are fucking outside of a completely monogamous partnership (and we all know that monogamy is for squares, duh), you could contract those infections. But, guys, it's the 90s or whatever, and I get tested on the regular and so do my partners and I practice safer sex, and with the math and figuring out who I had did it with lately and when they were tested and when I was tested, I was positive I did not have those afflictions. And I the antibiotics for STIs are fucking harsh—they are important when you have these STIs, obviously, but aren't the best for your body in general. They tend to wipe out any bacteria in your body altogether, even the good ones, therefore wreaking havoc on your digestive and immune system. However, I wasn't a doctor and she was, and did I want to die? I was weak. I was sick. I took them.

So when my test results came back and it turned out that I didn't have those things, I wanted to punch her in the face. Except it was a different smiley-authority youth doctor. Fuck that clinic. But when my face-melting was clearly misdiagnosed by the Care Heart and I was too unsure to try the Care Point, I didn't know where else to go.

By this time, I had been into the youth clinic at least twice a month that fall. I mean, they were clearly idiots, but at least they knew I was girl and didn't really lecture me. They were starting to get annoyed with me, though. Like I was being a hypochondriac because I had both a serious uterine infection and a series of painful red scabs all over my face in one season. Oh, and I had gotten hit by a car right around the beginning of October and had needed a doctor's referral to get physiotherapy because it wasn't enough for me to say “I fell on my right side and now can't use my right hand” to warrant some sort of medical care for this. I needed a doctor to write that down for me.

“What is it this time?”

“Look at my face.”

“Oh, that's new?”

By then, my whole face was covered. It was bubbling.

“Yeah, this is a recent development.”

“Hmmm...”

“Can you test my face for herpes?”

“That's not herpes.”

I recounted for her the Halloween show episode. How I kept shoving my mouth into a microphone being used by my friend that had a cold sore she was trying to cover up with lipstick. How the last dude I had kissed was claiming to never had a mouth herpes outbreak in his life, but clearly had this thing on his lip.

“Well, what's that?” I had asked him, pointing.

“A fever blister!” he answered, indignantly.

(Fever blister: synonymous with cold sore; what people say when they don't want to associate their mouth thing with the crotchy sexually transmitted disease.)

I explained these things to her. I patiently told her that I would like to be tested for either strain of herpes, because this things was taking over my face and I would like to have the appropriate tests and then the appropriate treatments.

She said, “We don't really have a test for herpes.”

“Bullshit!” That was what Billy said. I ran into him outside the clinic. “Go to the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control.” That was his clinic of choice. They meant business there. All testing on premises. No going to a lab for blood work or nothing.

But going there entailed a bus ride. Brutal. A good test for figuring out how much you actually care what the general public thinks of you, like how much you've embraced the “fuck it, who cares, I'm punk” philosophy is to try being the scabby mess of a face on public transportation.

The BC Centre for Disease Control is a drop-in establishment although it is “recommended you make an appointment.” I got there was told I couldn't be seen, that it was booked up. In case this happens to you, I recommend bursting into tears, saying “There's something really wrong with my face.” They might agree to try to squeeze you in.

After a few hours of some Reader's Digest, maybe some People magazine, I was in a room with a light shining in my face and three doctors squinting at my face, humming and hawing. I mentioned the herpes thing. One of the lady doctors had the classic light bulb reaction—a lighting up of eyes. I think she even pointed into the air, said, “Ah-ha!”, and ran to the library to find a text book.

“Eczema herpeticum!” She was excited. So was I. She showed me a picture of striking similarity to my face, a dark brownish red spotting on someone's cheek, and asked if I had a problem with eczema. I listed off my allergies which will cause my skin to break out into rash: tomatoes, walnuts, chamomile, Herbal Essences shampoo, making out with people who use anti-dandruff shampoo, any kind of incense, cologne, perfume, too much dairy. I guess if you have a herpes simplex outbreak (and especially if it's your first outbreak, which tends to be the craziest because your immune system doesn't know what the fuck is going on) concurrently with an excema outbreak, these two afflictions can join forces and take over the surface of your skin. It's rare, but it happens, and it can be fatal because of the amount of area of your body that can become an open wound! Cool.

Some swab tests and a giant paper sack of Valtrex, I was on my way to health. Two days later, my face was clearing up. My faith in modern medicine was restored! Herpes Simplex 1! No big deal! All I had to deal with now was my shoulder that had, muscularly, ripped off the rest of my body. I waltzed to my local physio office.

“I have an appointment with Carrie.”

“Um, Carrie isn't in today. But Daniel will fill in.”

“... Okay...”

I looked around the office. It was empty save for some suits milling around, taking notes. No physiotherapists, no other patients.

He's just have a meeting right now,” the receptionist said, gesturing towards a curtained-off area from which there were some raised voices.

“You can't lie to me! We have the proof! How can you have billed these appointments when you were in Alaska!”

I looked at the receptionist. She shrugged. Fuck. Trust no one. Eat more garlic. Get in touch.
julsgeneric@hotmail.com

2008-12-05T04:52:00.011+01:00

I told myself that I would find a place to live for a little while this past November as a gift to myself for turning 25. I chose Barcelona, which seems glamorous AND punk. I’d been there before, I flew there for ten days in early 2007, when I was spending few months in Dublin. Ireland was good, it was okay, kids were real nice and we had this stupid band going that was asked to play a 17-year-old’s Saved by the Bell party, that was cool, but everything was small, damp, dank, and expensive. Barcelona, in comparison, was so warm and dry and so free. I was put up in an old squatted linen factory, beer was a cold 60 euro cents for a bottle at the bodega across the road, and I was staying with Americans who’d make me stovetop espresso after stovetop espresso while sounding off on me their ideas for a Unabomber-themed hip-hop project they were recording. I think it was called THE POWER PROCESS. I’m pretty sure they were calling their album “Surrogate Activities.”

For those unfamiliar with the Unabomber Manifesto, basically, the power process refers to what Ted Kaczynski believed was the basic human drive to have goals, to have these goals require a certain amount of effort, and for these goals to be reasonably attainable. Important for some is to have this process be reasonably autonomous. The lack of these things, imputed to modern industrial society, results in demoralization or whatever, you know, middle class vacuity. This leads to us pursuing a surrogate activity, or, an “artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward.” (paragraph 39)

I had timed this ‘07 Barcelona visit around a FUCKED UP show, right around the Hidden World LP hype-era. It was fairly glorious. “We love you, Barcelona,” they said as a massive enthusiastic crowd climbed all over each other. “Me, too,” I thought.

“Maybe I’ll move here,” I said the next day, on the rooftop terrace of the linen factory squat, a beautiful 4-storey oblong building no one paid money to live in. I was looking over a palm-treed, green mountained skyline, 21 degrees in January. (Americans: sorry, 70 degrees)

I heard that in Pittsburg, these punks encourage other punks to move there by offering them a bike and setting them up on two blind dates. When I tried to move to Barcelona, it felt that the punk house you’re told is way cool to stay at, but you when stop by, it’s totally the wrong time. Like they won’t make you sleep outside or anything, but they are kind of bummed, they’ve been having a lot of house guests lately, a bunch of shitty ones, it’s been a strain on the house, there’s some tension. When I showed up there, all my friends were gone, all the squats were overpacked and stressed out, and for reasons too complicated for anyone to ever translate into English for me, every show coming up during my short stay was cancelled. Plus I didn’t know what I’d do there. I needed some goals. Squat eviction was a big problem, but I am bad at fighting cops. Maybe I’d learn Spanish and be able to finally read LOS CRUDOS lyrics. I really wanted to research Spanish punk, but when I tried to move into the empty room in the apartment of the dude rumoured to have the biggest record collection in Barcelona, the vacancy was usurped by an Italian industrial design student. Then I accidentally moved in with some racists in the suburbs. I avoided their shitty comments by staying in my new bedroom with the window opening into a tiny courtyard that every kitchen in the building opened up into, every day waking up to the grumpy morning routines of five other families, pushing me towards my decision to skip out on rent and to go to Paris and learn to play the keyboard in order to join an old roommate’s band, this pop indie unit, a 9-person group-singing weird instruments combo that needed some lead melody reinforcement due to both an accordian player and a keyboardist having mental breakdowns and quitting the tour.

I think someone from that punks-playing-old-timey band PINE HILL HAINTS once likened being on tour to being in heaven, in that you never grow old and you always see your friends.

I once said in my previous column that touring is a easy way to absolve yourself of the depressing responsibility of finding meaningful ways to occupy your time. So I caught a rideshare to Paris and sussed out my new situation. I was now spending my days and nights (the tour had some down-time due to a cancelled UK portion of tour, the usual immigration problems) in what the band was calling The Eggshell Apartment, a small flat with a big living room where we’d sleep in an adorable summer camp-esque row. The two bedrooms off the living room belonged, respectively, to one of the drop-out band members and her roommate that liked personal space and hated houseguests. Outside was snowing and overpriced. Oh well. I sat in a corner, sharpied the notes onto the keys of a casio, plugged in some headphones, and practiced the parts I needed to play onstage, thereby qualifying me for transport and feeding on the band bill. I tried to seem quiet, non-intrusive, and invisible when the previous keyboard player made the trip from her room to the kitchen. Maybe it was a little like Barcelona, but at least I had activities, and eventually I’d move back into a van that I knew would never leave without me.

When the indie pop tour brought me to Lyon, France, I went to go visit my friend Alex, whose band PIZZA O.D. my other band, the Canadian punk one, had toured with just a month earlier. I didn’t invite him to the show because I knew he would hate it but I wanted to see him, so I stopped by. He told me that he was asked to book another comprehensive European tour, like the one we had just done, this time for some New Zealanders, but that he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it. Why?

“It was just so much work, months and months of stress and booking.. And touring is such an easy, non-challenging way to travel. Plus,” he said, referring to the tour we’d just done, “if I had written what I thought would happen at each show before it happened, it would’ve been completely accurate.”

I wasn’t offended. Okay, maybe I was a little offended, but I tried not to be. But I disagreed too. I guess for the Canadian contingent, having no frame of reference for what the actual, run-of-the-mill basement squat scene in most of Europe is like, everything was pretty new for us. We couldn’t have predicated how even the usual played-out cities like Paris would go, much less, say, Slovenia. Plus Alex and I, who had become penpals via his fanzine RATCHARGE, had decided to do that tour before ever meeting each other, like we met up at an anarchist radio station in Paris, interviewed each other on air, introduced our bands, and went to 11 different countries in 30 days, and it going swimmingly is one of the reasons that I’m—and please excuse my boring cliché rehashments of punk enchantment— still stoked on punk. Or, after touring with a completely not-punk band, I should say, rather than punk (although varieties within this genre are still my usual jams of choice), the underground realm of DIY organizing and networking.

But, sure, I can see where he is coming from. I probably I could do the same predictions with a Canadian tour, maybe even American. But still, even retracing a small portion of Western Europe again, the same cities, it was was pretty fucking different from when I had just done it a six weeks earlier. Guys, indie pop tour world is weird. It's a chaotic experience of always free alcohol, but not always the guaranteed food and lodging I had thought was characteristic of touring Europe, one of not having a hired driver and only the drunkest member of us being able to drive, one of mandatory, hour-long sound checks, one of weird French clubs in Berlin that we can't play drums in with furniture nailed to the ceiling. True story. Safe travelling, sure, but still weird. As in, I played the a casio in front of a hipster audience. As in, I guess I had a goal and I guess I attained it and I had to exercise my own power to do so. As in, I've staved off demoralization for another month. I think.

Stay punk.
julsgeneric@hotmail.com

column, january?

2008-10-19T22:04:00.005+02:00

I'm in Amsterdam, right? It's pretty embarrassing. I am on tour but it's a day off, we're not playing here or anything, so that's extra embarrassing. But I swear I didn't choose this; our itinerary was arranged by our non-stoner french tourmates. I guess it's just a small beautiful city everyone wanted to hang out in. It is kind of beautiful, I mean, there's a lot of canals and ducks and shit. I like weed and all and appreciate the convenience of this whole "coffee shop" thing, but at the same time, I'm not that into being in a place populated mainly by 18-year-olds who are getting silently all high as humanely possible while watching MTV. I lived in a place like that once. It was called high school.

I guess this is a tour diary, which is conflicting. On one hand, I want to write about it, because touring is what I do more than anything right now --I'm at that punk age, you know? Like when enough small groups of people in other cities will dish out some change in exchange for the fifteen-minute set by your somewhat okay-liked band to make these annual month-long things justifiable. Add that to knowing enough other people doing the same thing who have yet to grow sick of you and your habits and will therefore allow you tag along on their tours, making touring constantly available to you. Add that to being really impressed with the idea of touring as a kid, like it seemed like the coolest-fucking-thing-ever, so every tour you go on is ticking off this "childhood life goal" checklist in your heart. Negate any ambition to have a relationship, job, or meaningful long-term personal project, and there you are, early 20s, give-or-take, always on the road. What else am I going to write about? On the other hand, with tour diaries, it is fucking hard not to meander into "Touring is the best and I love being punk and it is so inspiring to do what I want all the time" territory (trite) or the Get in the Van-esque "Sometimes I don't know why they're here. Sometimes I don't know why I'm here" realm (annoying, and insulting to anyone involved in the tour, be it bandmates, bookers, or audience), or the usual "Here's some wacky anecdotes tacked onto a dry list of every city conquered" (boring, unless the reader is scanning for a call-out).

The band we are on tour with has a song called "Amsterdam." It goes "Ohhh, ohhh, Amsterdaaaam," and it's about being depressed in Amsterdam. They also have a song called "Toxic Touriste," which, in the non-french countries, is explained on-stage in english. It's about people who travel to do drugs. Like, you know, American kids coming to Amsterdam to get high and safely relying on the fact that everyone speaks English, which, you know, they do. Despite this english-prominence thing, though, I'm having a lot of trouble trying to figure out what the fuck is going on most of the time.

Like I'm in this "coffee house," right? I'm already stoned, I'm just there to get an actual coffee but I don't think I want to stick around, especially since there's a mid-30s man in a full track suit close enough to me that our elbows are touching. He can speak english, he's gesturing over his own mouth, he's saying, "I like your piercings." I'm like, "Great, thanks." He says, "They are very nice... I bet you could do very…nice things with them." I'm like, frown.

"Hey," I address the man making my coffee, "Can I get this to go?" which is an embarrassing term to use, because I'm pretty sure it was invented by McDonalds.

He looks confused.

I point towards a paper cup on top of the till, one that's used being for tips.

He says something in dutch. I look confused. The track suit man says, "He wants to know if you want sugar."

"Yeah, two, but…"

The coffee-making man drops two cubes into the shot, dumps in the milk, and pours the whole thing into a normal, nondisposable cup, I get worried and repeat myself, saying all extra clearly and loudly, "Can I have that in a paper cup?"

"Yes, yes, una memento, senorita," he answers, totally snarky, and I feel dumb, like another dumb customer making twangy English repeated demands. Like all, Please understand me. If I talk louder, will you understand me?

He grabs the paper cup I've been pointing at, finds another receptacle for the coins inside, gives that shit a quick rinse, and pours my coffee in. I say "Merci," mistakenly (wrong country), and leave.

A few days later, I'm in the van. We're circling around Berlin, trying to leave it, right? The night before had been my first of a few when I tried to mingle with the locals while my tourmates choose sleeping, so I can avoid looking like an idiot in front of my friends. So after our Berlin show (squat basement bar), the sort-of squat where we're staying is having a metal night (sort-of squat basement bar) and the guitarist from the grindcore band we played with is translating a joke about Helmut Kohl (German president) visiting a zoo. The punchline involves something about a mispronunciation of the word "dangerous," and when he finishes, I am at a complete fucking loss for words. The language barrier gapes awkwardly between us. It is like a fucking black hole of communication wherein every word spoken will be sucked in, never to be intepreted in a way at all near to the speaker's intentions. So I go sit with the promoter, this french kid who now lives in Berlin. Things aren't much better with him, every sentence we exchange is like, "What? Sorry? Huh?" At one point, it is a literal five minutes to determine that he is talking about the band KYLESA, just because of the way he pronounced it; and then when this is established, all I can be like is "Oh. KYLESA. Two drummers, yeah, cool." The only time dude uses enunciation I can comprehend is when he's singing along to NOFX, which happens around 7 a.m., immediately after which I nod out in his chair. We have to get up at 10, so this extremely strained social interaction seems like a weird choice in retrospect and it's not even until the next morning, in the van, being lost, that I realize that every time I thought he was saying "Providence," he was actually saying "Powerviolence." He was trying to figure out which of the five-thousand CHUCK NORRIS bands I was touting with the patch on my hood and I was like, "No, I don't think there's a CHUCK NORRIS in New Hampshire; I like the one from Vancouver." and he was saying, "No, powerviolence, powerviolence." and I was saying, "No, no. Canada." And I really want to be like, "Isn't it weird how at least four bands with the same name were formed with a pretty small time frame? And how the one from Canada and the one from Brazil released their first 7 inches within a month of each other and had a few really funny similarities common within the fastcore genre?" Like I want to talk about international trends in punk without the presence of one singular monopolized information source, but maybe I don't really have to say it; we're both 24 and know every single word to "Lori Myers."

And then Poland, fucking Poland. The surreality of it was obviously contributed to by this disorienting hangover I had. I don't usually get wasted, like once a year, maybe, so when it happens, I feel pretty crazy and unfamiliar the next morning. But there was a band-gets-open-bar policy in Leipzig, they were serving vegan white russians, and there was an American who picked up on every subtle circa-93 north american television allusion I made, so I was like "Oh my god, let's hang." He tells me, "I love it here but no one understands me. They all think I'm a fucking nutjob," and the night ends with me passing out in a hallway outside the bathrooms. The next day we cross an invisible border and I'm told I have to exchange my money into a currency of a worth I can no longer roughly convert back into Canadian dollars in my head. Our guitarist tries to enter a toilet room and gets yelled at by a small, round woman wearing a kercheif, pointing at a sign with new letters we can't pronounce. We have to drive 13 hours on tiny winding roads, passing 90-year-old couples on horse-pulled buggies to get to our show somewhere really, really north, to a place called Olsztyn, which, when it comes out of my anglo mouth, sounds similar to "Austin," which makes everyone laugh. Olsztyn, Texas.

Four days later, still in Poland, it's not any better. I'm in Krakow, going to see our friends GHOST MICE with our roadie on a day off. We are outside the show and some people of skinhead appearance approach and everyone's like, "Oh, fuck, here it comes," because you always hear stories of Poland being where Nazis will probably come to your show and start shit, and I hope GHOST MICE won't be offended by my saying that they are on the wimpier end of the punk spectrum, like, you know, they have that German member who plays children's toys in lieu of real instruments. But it turns out the skinhead presence is the opening solo act and his friends. I watch him. The show is in a bar that is probably actually just a cave around which they built a building. The skinhead opening act is playing an acoustic guitar with a thick chain rather than a strap and his songs, which I obviously can't understand, are so riling the crowd is circle-pitting. I am in Poland, watching people circle-pit to an acoustic guitar. One especially enthusiastic kid crowd-surfs the bag of concrete powder being used to keep the microphone stand upright. It falls, splits open. I think, "Why does it smell like a pool in here?" and then start choking and have to leave.

The next day, the van again, headed to the Czech Republic. I'm reading this Steve Martin autobiography about his stand-up career, a book someone else shop-lifted from an airport giftshop. I'm at this part in the early days of his career, where, after learning in a college psychology class that conventional comedy is based around a raised tension that is released with a punchline, therein creating the laugh response, he decides to explore creating comedy devoid of traditional punchlines. He wanted to see what would happen if he raised tension and never broke it, built it up to a climax and only deliver an anticlimax. His theory was that the tension would have to be released via laughter sometime, but the audience would have to choose when to laugh rather than rely on cues, even if the choice is made out of desperation. The van is pulling over and I'm stoked because I think we're stopping for gas, which means a gas station store, and I've been really into Polish potato chips. They have delicious unconventional flavors there, usually vegetarian (I think), like there were these Kebab & Onion chips when I first arrived, and I had these delightful Chicken, Rosemary & Blueberry chips in Warsaw, and I've been meaning to try this Wild Mushroom & Cream variety I've seen kicking around and maybe they'll have it at this store we're stopping at. I look up from my book and we're actually at Auschwitz.

I know that sometimes it feels overwhelming to have to translate things into languages everyone can understand, but forgetting to tell your tourmates about the death camp detour is a little much. But okay, we're at Auschwitz. Auschwitz. What am I going to do? Not go in? Fuck. It's cold and windy and so big. I walk to one end of the camp because I want to see everything at once, to try to look at all of it and feel its weight, but when I get there and look back, I can only see a few outside walls of barracks, blocking the rest of the camp. I walk back to the middle entrance and the cold everyone else has been getting is hitting me, my head is filling up with snot and disorientation. Everyone else is headed towards the gas chambers, shrinking in the distance. I find some sort-of grass outside the barbwire fence and fall asleep, waking up to an emptied bus of German teenagers surrounding me. All I can understand is some of them reading the patches on my pulled-up hood, "CHUCK NORRIS" coming clearly through the otherwise indecipherable sentences.