Everything is just the same. We’re all part of society. Think we’ve got what we want. Think we’ve got variety. We like to watch television, listen to the radio. We like to read the Sunday paper. We believe what we’re shown.

There are those who disagree. They don’t like what they see. Different faces, different cases. Fighting all the apathy.

I call it revolution.

It’s not the usual jaunty number I find myself singing as I step out of the shower but somehow I seemed to be channeling what was going on hundreds of miles away. My old friend Lance Hahn died today.

I knew him before I ever knew him, y’know? When I was just getting started with music one of the first 7″ I bought was by an old band called Cringer, who had broken up before I was even aware of anything other than my sister’s tapes and MTV. The memory is pretty clear– Zen Flesh Zen Bones used at Neurotic Records for about two bucks. It wasn’t their best but the name was all over thanks lists from my favorite bands of the time, Green Day and The Mr T Experience and Crimpshrine, so I picked up the far superior Perversion is Their Destiny for a similar cost from Epicenter Zone and I had the bug. A collection of sharp, impassioned, literate (enough) but immediate and raw political and personal songs. The lines were blurry– it wasn’t exactly hardcore but it wasn’t too poppy. The lyrics were directly political and yet distinctly personal. The character of the band bled through the wax and the cover, dripped in your hands. These were people you could find yourself talking to on the street, at a show or at a party. There was no detachment from life, no separation brought on by the stage. These were people.

If I had your pen I’d write this song again, and let someone else write the next lyric. Every single day we have something to say, or at least have some appearance. I can’t be right all the time. I plagiarized the next line. I can’t say that I feel shame. If everyone did the same there’d be nothing left to blame.

It’s hard to believe– in anything– til everyone– does everything.

And so Cringer became and has persisted over the years as one of my favorite bands. Not because they never released a bad record or wrote a bad song but because the spirit of their existence and the heart and soul of their songs came to exist within me. More than probably any other band Cringer single-handedly is responsible for my drawing lines between my personal existence and the political implications of my life on the world around me. Lance wrote love songs that sounded like political treatises and political songs that were a conversation between two lovers unconscious in their struggle for control. Kit and fucking kaboodle…

When I started working at Epicenter we came to know one another and it was a little incongruous, the man and the records that had taken part in the shaping of the younger me. I never told him just what exactly his songs had meant to me and continued to mean– frankly it was embarrassing and he was a little more dorky then I had expected. Not that I was star-struck, possibly because from the connection of me and that band there had been that underlying understanding that we were on equal terms. Maybe it’s because he was so dorky. It just kinda happened, us knowing one another as people. I would sit behind the counter drinking a 40oz and smoking, spitting on the ground and irritating customers (both of them) by playing country records and he would walk in in his AK Press sweatshirt and maybe some fried tortellini from Mr. Pizza Man. It seemed like neither of us had anywhere else to go so we sat there, sometimes for hours, sometimes with others. We started staying well past closing, Lance and Kate and I most often, watching movies and talking massive amounts of shit. Non-stop shit talking. A never-ending torrent of shit was talked.

I’m watching for signals, they turn every night. It’s making me restless but nothing ignites. Oh, you know that I wanted this to be so much more, but I know we both know I should head for the door.

After a couple years Epicenter became financially and, honestly, culturally un-viable. I was pretending to live in Minneapolis while the collective dissolved itself, but at the same time Lance was seeing doctors and learning that he had a congestive-heart issue that was crushing his lungs against his rib cage. While I crawled the streets along the Mississippi at three in the morning he was getting blood work twice a week and working desperately to save his life. By the time I returned to help lay Epicenter down he was out of the worst but now had a permanent condition which would require constant monitoring and medication. You would never have known by talking with him unless you knew. Because he was so full of life and something like a potentially fatal disease was not going to keep him from hanging out and talking shit all night.

Epicenter was what brought us into orbit and when it was gone things changed dramatically. Kate’s house wasn’t as conducive to hanging out and now Lance and Liberty had started going out so we didn’t see too much of either of them. Eventually Libby decided to go back to school for linguistics and got into a program at the University of Texas in Austin. Lance continued to play in his post-Cringer band, J-Church, and continued to run his record label, Honeybear Records, through two house-fires which not only left them homeless but also destroyed his entire collection of records and priceless artifacts of his personal and punk rock history. We didn’t keep in touch, never having been the closest of friends and no longer having the common bonds we once shared. The last time we spoke was several years ago when J Church was on tour and played Bottom of the Hill. I skipped the show, not yet having attempted to listen to the band (a common feature of knowing Lance shared by everyone seems to be not being able to like whatever band he’s in when you know him– oh shit, except once I saw them play when I loaned them my PA to do an in-store at Howling Bull but I was busy kicking the amp trying to squeeze volume for the mics out of it so I didn’t really notice much except Lance had the guitar slung around his ankles and was bending chords by kneeing the neck), but we hung out afterwards before the van moved on for Portland. I was working a dead end job at a dying video store, the same as when he moved away. “I’m doing the same thing” he said. “Neither of us has changed since I moved” Well, I’m living at home tho, that’s shit. “Fuck, I’d live with your parents if I could. Your parents are cool.”

Okay, once he did spend the night at my parents’ house but they were out of town at the time.

Some months ago I heard through the grapevine that he had begun to experience kidney failure and had been placed on dialysis. There was talk of a waiting list for a transplant. It was bad news but something made me shrug it off, just as I shrugged off countless benefit shows and eventually a benefit compilation CD. I mean, this is Lance we’re talking about. He’ll be fine. He’ll be up and running in no time. J Church will go back on tour (maybe this time he can play Japan and wouldn’t it be funny to actually roadie this one now that I have money and he’s not having to go to the hospital every day) and he’ll release more records on Honeybear, write another newsletter and another historical essay on a long forgotten Peace-Punk band for MRR. He’ll be back and talking shit somewhere in the wee hours eating fried tortellini or telling a story from some Polish tour way back when.

But he went in for dialysis on Friday and collapsed. He slipped into a coma and on Sunday, October 21st, he slipped out of this world. I came home to two messages on my machine telling me and I spent some time on the phone talking about it and other things. Two people who I haven’t been very good about keeping up with but two people who are friends in the truest sense of the word and who deserve a little more effort on my part. And Lance did too, of course, even if it wouldn’t have mattered to him. Once again I have someone who I had stored away in the memory file assuming that we’d meet again and, when the time came, I could just reach back and grab that information, open the folder and begin where we left off. Not so, he’s gone. And despite the distance and the time in between the last time we spoke and now I will miss him.

Trapped in the back of my mind, is the thought too little too late. So when I try to define, I tend to over-complicate. When I’m told, again and again, ‘that’s just the way things go’. It leaves a bitter taste with me, because I think that we should know.

But at this time, I would have guessed
that we could rise above the rest.
But at this time, I guess I know
there are things we still can’t show.

Trapped in the back of our minds is a single ideology. Yet we bicker and we battle about what it means to be free. We never seem to have the courage to live the life we choose. So we lost what we should have won, because our numbers are diffused.

But at this time, I would have guessed
that we could rise above the rest.
But at this time, I guess I know
there are things we still can’t show.

Trapped in the back of my mind, trapped in the back of our minds. Trapped in the back of my mind, trapped in the back of our minds.

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In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernise, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. Since they don’t have experience of the west, they even believe that western shit is pie.–Emir Kusturica

Despite my predilection for hiding in my room events overran me recently, out into the Richmond and in front of what used to be the jock-lite Last Day Saloon and has now become the yuppie-lite Rockit Room. True there was a birthday to celebrate and true two people had invited me but I was a little shocked at how readily I had consented to being taken away from my room. Maybe the mood was just there, perhaps the moon was in a special phase– I dunno. It may have been because two Serbian/Rom style bands were playing.

Years ago I dwelled in a dank little hovel called Leather Tongue which was so similar to the dank little hovels I hid away in on purpose that I kept going. It didn’t pay well and it didn’t help any minor mental issues I might have had but it did introduce me to plenty of movies I would never have chosen to hunt down and rent on my own. After renting it out to hip Mission scum a thousand times I checked out “Black Cat White Cat” by Emir Kusturica which drilled into my mind and deposited some of the most flamboyant images ever captured on film as well as some of the most scintillating music ever, er, captured on film. If Fellini had been into carnies more than circus freaks and was thrilled by saturated colors (and been Serbian) it would have been his movie. I travelled back in time a couple of years and caught his earlier festival success, “Underground“.

Last year at a different job I was hawking shit on eBay when I pulled the soundtrack to “Underground” from a bin of CDs. My hands were shaking and I played it on the office stereo. Then I played it again and again until I was quite certain that everyone was going to kill me so I had my boss price it out. Not in the store’s computer– Argentinian release so it’s $1.99… Awesome! To this day I think this is the only CD that I have danced to with another person. Waiting for my ride to The Rockit Room I played a couple choice cuts and bobbed around while finishing my roommate’s beer.

The first band of the evening took their identity-crisis cues from Hector Babenco’s depression-era drama “Ironweed“, glorifying the hobo/drifter lifestyle by not bathing and playing guitar, a washboard and a bass made from a washtub, broom handle and a single tightly wound length of twine. The kids, friends of the birthday girl, ate this up and had skipped their showers special for the event. I tried not to be bothered by this and watched them play but wondering what to expect from the next two groups in the bill.

Zoyres was a quartet: full kit, tuba, clarinet/sax and trombone. Fascinating shit, ultimately danceable and exactly what I was hoping for. It’s weird how the tuba took over where the bass would be and the trombone player kicked ass playing with a brash style reminiscent (tho probably because I can only name two others: my dad and Labamba from the Conan O’Brien show) of Don Drummond. The Brass Menazeri was even more bombastic with nine members, three tuba type instruments, accordian, clarinet, saxaphones and trumpets along with two drummers (a hand bass and a couple rack snares) and vocals. Both are local and I would recommend you check out either if your local is the Bay Area.

So the evening went quite well even tho the drinks were horribly over-priced, most of the attendees living as caricatures running around like sugar-addled, snot-nosed brats and my getting home past my bedtime. I should just stop here…

But it makes you think, don’t it? So far as I could tell everyone in these bands were American born and bred but both bands played distinctly Eastern European (with some Klezmer mixed in) gypsy music with no obvious Americanization taking place. It’s as authentic as The Dropkick Murphys but somehow entirely less offensive. Hell, the opening band, The Inkwell Rhythm Makers, co-opted not only their music but their dress and shtick from impression of a time long gone. Does America, appropriate outside culture so readily and so completely that there’s no bothering with integrating it with our own? Or do we just not really have any cultural identity not relating to commerce so we borrow heavily from places that have more than a couple centuries under their belts?

Ysabella Dolfin wrote in her blog:

Watching local access Asian TV
In Japanese. A cooking show. I have no idea what any of the ingredients are… but I recognize ground beef and some type of musrhoom. I am getting the feeling they are cooking “American” food. But they are serving it over rice with sliced fresh spinach. The theme song is some kind of Japanese rap music.

Now that’s a proper culutral mish-mash– anything the Japanese have done since 1945 has basically been one form of cocktail or another. Pop music, art, fashion, day to day living, advertising, food… it seems that every aspect of Japan has been touched by America and has incorporated, in the most fucked up way possible, the source material by taking what they think they understand and dumping tradition on top. Hell, the Japanese advertising industry has essentially become the hallmark of the Japanese approach to international relations. Why are we so fascinating to them? Cowboys? The independence of owning your own car? Where the hell is our culture out in the world that’s not a McDonald’s?

PS- my efforts to make these pictures integrate into this post have failed but I’m sick of the second one disappearing so I’m gonne give up. Deal with it.

[2] Comments

Last Summer, UK’s Channel Four ran a documentary about Tony Blair’s failed attempts at rock stardom whilst at University. The band were named Ugly Rumours and tallied an impressive six gigs before implosion. Unfortunately, that streak of destruction never left our smiling leader, and decades later he waged an illegal war in Iraq.

Stop the War Coalition organised the march of close to two million people in London just before the invasion of Iraq. You may recall a post on the charismatic and egotistical George Galloway. As head of the Respect Party, he is a key player in the Stop the War Coalition. George Galloway makes a cameo appearance as the arresting officer at the end of the video.

Stop the War Coalition has formed a band under the same moniker, Ugly Rumours, and fronted it with a Tony Blair lookalike. (The physical similarities are pretty poor). The single, released in January only as a download version is now tipped to top the UK charts this Sunday.

View the punchy, low budget version of Edwin Starr’s classic song War.

This proves to me one thing - Despite the ongoing denial in mainstream media about the heinous crimes and lies of Blair, Bush and their governments, the opposition still has humour, invention and truth on their side. They also have a voice … and some great lip sinking to boot!

Blair’s Dream of rock stardom has arrived, and I am sure Tony appreciates the the cooing street-level pedestrians, ala Beatles.

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Thanks to Tim for this great clip. It’s 18 min. but well worth it. Techno music all sounds the same for a reason!

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Well, Rummy is gone. But what’s really interesting is who broke the news. Comedy Central.

“Yep, it’s true. Defense Secretary Donald Rumseld is packing it in. This won’t come as a shock to those of you who keep in touch with the muckraking journal which broke the story late last evening, the Wall Street Jour– er, the New York T– er, the National Enq– huh? Oh, right, the Comedy Central blog. Nice work, media! You got scooped by the folks who write web promos for Mind of Mencia!

Related:

A Mind of Mencia web exclusive!!

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