For the past year, I have found it difficult to really crack the whip when it comes to my kids and things they should or should not be doing. I think they would say I am still a pretty strict parent and that I have high expectations. On the outside that is probably true. On the inside, however, I feel like there is so much we used to take for granted that is now in jeopardy and what good is it doing my kids to be told they can’t go here or do that? How important are good grades when financial aid budgets will be wiped out if the tax bill gets through?
I got really annoyed recently at something my daughter had done. I went to pick her up and she wasn’t where I expected her to be. Since teenagers now have their cellphones with them at all times it wasn’t like I was panicked because I couldn’t get a hold of her or that I was worried, really. She was with friends and they were nearby, but she had deviated from our agreed upon plan. And I had had to wait for her longer than I had wanted. I tried not to overreact, at least in front of her friends, because doing so usually doesn’t have the desired outcome. When it was just the two of us in the car I let her know I was annoyed and that I thought they had not been smart, but I restrained myself.
When I thought about it later that evening I realized that when I was her age, I did things that were pretty similar. Honestly, the things I was doing at her age were way riskier, much less smart, and I felt like they were perfectly fine. Of course parents are there to tell you why those things are dumb or dangerous, and kids are going to be clueless. The world was ever thus.
What’s different for me now is that I feel like there’s no way to predict what things will be like in another year or two. Everything feels tenuous at best and we’re all still holding on to this notion that what we are living through today is hopefully a blip. A really nasty speedbump on our way forward. The paranoid freaker in me is back there though, saying, live it up while you have the chance. Let the kids go to the football game on a school night without enough warm clothes on. Trump could insult Kim Jong-un on Twitter tomorrow and trigger a nuclear war. Life is crazy and stressful. Maybe partying will help.
Once again I am too tired to write anything. I really hate falling asleep sitting on the sofa so here’s a quick video of a band I only just came across.
I have this one friend on Facebook who reposts things from his memories all the time. If you’re not on FB, it’s this feature that shows you what you posted on that day in years past. Reading these things now from a year, two years, or even longer ago is especially grim in our current circumstances. Yesterday he reposted a Tweet written by Andy Borowitz of The New Yorker which was incredibly prescient. Posted on Nov. 13, 2011, it said, “Be on the lookout for a mentally challenged pathological liar and sexual pervert. He could be the next GOP frontrunner.”
Stops you in your tracks. Some of us have been sounding the alarm for a long time and yet, here we are. I shudder to think where we might be a year from now. I read a couple of really depressing articles this week that just knock the wind out of you. Of course we keep fighting, keep resisting, but what about the gullible millions who are so angry and deluded that they steadfastly stand behind Der Orangeführer, no matter what? They’ve been brainwashed by Fox News and simply reject facts, truth, or expertise of any kind. You can not reason with them or explain anything to them that doesn’t fit into the narrow view they allow themselves to operate in. I know we outnumber them but they are not going anywhere any time soon and the Kochs and Mercers of this world will continue to feed the beast with their billions.
Johnny Marr is coming out with a third album. I’m not sure when or anything about it really, but I am here for it. I really liked The Messenger and Playland, his previous two, so I have hope that it will be great and he’ll hit the road again.
It’s been just about three years since I saw him live and I would go again in a heartbeat. I don’t think I ever wrote about that show here but I did write it down at the time so I wouldn’t forget the details. Maybe I’ll resurrect that and make a post. I have a bunch of ideas for posts but then it gets to be night time and I’m tired and not focused enough to write what I want to write.
Just got home from seeing Slowdive and I’m too tired to write anything, really. I had to be up at 5:30 this morning to drive my daughter to her school for a trip and the chill vibe plus bright lights in my face, along with the lack of sleep, made me want to just close my eyes.
Soccer Mommy opened the show. They felt like a cross between Colleen Green and Real Estate.
2017. When men will go on record to say sexually molesting a 14 year old girl isn’t a problem because Joseph and Mary were Jesus’s parents. The number of levels of wrong in some of these defenses of Roy Moore is mind-blowing.
Guess what? The Vagenda of Manocide is happening, even without Hillary as president, and the dudes are bringing it all on their own. I can’t even keep track anymore.
Thirty-one years ago tonight I went to my first R.E.M. concert. It wasn’t my first concert but it was the beginning of what became a way of life. I hadn’t known a live show could be so completely captivating. I hadn’t known that a concert could change your whole way of seeing the world. I didn’t know that I would need to see it again.
We bought t-shirts, a poster, and a tour program, all of which I still have. The t-shirt is in tatters. The poster is rolled up in a tube, a little worn at the edges from years of hanging and rehanging. The program is in pristine condition, having been carefully stored in a plastic record sleeve and preserved in a plastic tote lo these 31 years. And the stub. In the past I hadn’t paid much attention to what became of my ticket stubs after the show. But this stub was pinned up on my wall for the rest of my college years and stayed with me through all of my moves.
After getting back to our college campus, my best friend and I pored over the tour program. Where were they going to be the next night and was it anywhere near us? Could we get the train to DC in a couple of days and go to the show there? Was it sold out? Where could we sleep? Who would be able to sleep after a show anyway? By morning we realized we couldn’t really pull it off but we never made that mistake again. One show was never going to be enough.
This video is from the Work Tour the following year. There are very few videos out there from the Pageantry Tour.
Yesterday’s election results were so gratifying. I was never invested in the local races like this before. All across the country, the stories of diverse first-time candidates coming out and just crushing it in races big, and especially small. A wave is coming and it’s called payback.
“If you don’t give us the ballot, expect the bayonet.” 2018, here we come!
This past July, the new album by Public Service Broadcasting, Every Valley, was released. It’s an album filled with songs about coal mining in the valleys of South Wales in the UK; from the days of literally fueling the nation’s industry, through the progress of mechanization, the strikes in the 80s, the pit closures, and the loss of jobs and devastation of communities that followed. You might think it would be an odd subject to write an album’s worth of songs about but in the aftermath of Brexit and Trump, it’s actually incredibly timely.
I went to graduate school in Wales 20 years ago. Mid-west Wales not the southern coal fields, but still, Wales with its rolling hills dotted with sheep. People spoke Welsh there, in addition to heavily-accented English, and it’s also where my husband and I met. So I knew nostalgia was going to be pulling hard and that I was going to like this album for those sampled Welsh accents no matter what.
However, I didn’t necessarily expect to love this album for the stories it tells. It deserves to be listened to in its entirety, start to finish, as the songs follow the sequence of events as they played out in the valleys. If you’re not familiar with the history of the rise and fall of these Welsh coal mining towns, you can imagine it being coal towns in West Virginia, or the car factories in Flint, or steel mills in Pennsylvania. [I also strongly recommend you watch the movie Pride. Even if I can’t convince you to listen to the whole PSB album, watch that movie.] It’s what happens when an industry dominates a town or region, and how the working-class people who built it up are “chucked on the scrap heap” when those industries leave.
This song, “They Gave Me a Lamp” is about the women’s movement during the strikes in 1984-85 when Margaret Thatcher was determined to break the miners. I saw PSB in Boston back in September and when they played this song there were video clips of women on the picket lines and putting together food packages for striking families. It could just as easily be video clips from the Women’s March back in January. I’ve seen a video from their recent show in London and J. Willgoose, Esq., introduced this song by talking about the samples in it as “telling the story that we wanted to tell, what I think is quite a powerful story of feminism, of political awakening, of political emancipation in a way, the power of protest really, which seems it’s worth to write songs about, no?”
After the inauguration, I felt like the Women’s March was such an empowering moment and I wanted it to be the start of something, not just a one-off. There were a lot of resistance groups sprouting up and a lot of them were lead by women. I went to protests against the travel ban, the March for Truth, but I also joined my local Democratic party. I’d always voted but I felt like there had to be more we could all do. I’d read about how entrenched the Republican party had become in local politics, which in turn leads to Republican-controlled statehouses, which is what gets you those horrible politicians who want to return to the 1950s, if not earlier. They often run unopposed and consequently win in places that vote blue on the national level. If we are going to succeed at preventing this country from becoming a fascist state and hopefully moving it forward from where it was at the end of Obama’s two terms, we need all hands on deck.
So when I hear the woman in the interview at the beginning of this song saying, “if you could get a woman involved in one thing, they could see there was this other life … like myself, politics was just something that shouldn’t affect me, but politics is life and everything to do with it affects you, directly or indirectly”, I raise my fist in solidarity. By the time the second sample plays the woman saying, “I think a lot of women found their feet” I see the huge crowds at the marches, I see the women who, like me, got involved in local politics, I see the new faces of the younger people who took the leap to run for office. And when those Brassy Gents™ come in and the song really takes off, I can’t help but get goosebumps and tears start rolling down my cheeks.
Today was election day. Democrats won the governors races in Virginia and New Jersey. A transgender woman beat the GOP incumbent in the VA state legislature who sponsored the “bathroom bill.” A Sikh man won as the mayor of Hoboken, NJ. Maine, with their horribly racist and just generally idiotic governor, who was Trump’s prototype, just voted to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. And here in my town, we swept our local races. Swept. Them. The resistance is just getting warmed up.
A lot of women found their feet, and now we’re ready to run.
Noisy Cats 