Some Lightening Some Not

 The first time I read James Baldwin’s A fire Next Time I read it all in one day while on break from my shit-pay-super-busy restaurant cook job. It was an extra day off because me and the sous chef had held it down while a bunch of people were out sick or something. I don’t remember. I remember that I said to myself “girl, it’s okay if you lay in bed all fucking day, you are going to just chill, read this book and listen to all of these CDs you got in the mail.” And that is exactly what I did. I listened to Isis and Oxbow while reading Baldwin, looking out over the street and the ridge line behind my apartment. Looking at how the light plays with the clouds. It was a sparkful day. In the middle I took a nap to a Merzbow album. I drifted off to the the grinding noise of machine feedback and awoke as it all coalesced and ceased into silence. 

This is all just to say that there is art which creates beautiful, distinct memories around it. Certain things jump into our personal, and collective, zeitgeist. The album before last by The Michael Character, Oh, Shoot!, took over my morning routine for a while. It gave me hope and a sense of urgency and ardency in the face of the dehumanizing forces of the profit motivated, hierarchal, economy which defines most every aspect of our existence. 

For all the people who have read The Fire Next Time a lot less have read  No Name In The Street, Baldwin’s follow up to Fire. I did not read that book in a day. It took me about a month of working my way twenty, ten , or five pages at a time. It was a more brittle book, as Baldwin was wading his way through the deaths of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Junior, and to a certain extent, the death of the civil rights movement. Coming to terms, as it were, with a failure to achieve what Malcom X identified as the dominion of human dignity, not civil rights.

As I heard that The Micheal Character were ramping up to release this album, and I was brought into the fold and given the promo link, I started thinking about the relationship between Fire and No Name as a framework for thinking about Oh Shoot! and the new album. Would Totally Totally be a less shining, more contemplative, response to the things which have occurred since the tumultuous, almost surreal experiences, of early lockdown when Oh Shoot! was released? The historic moment that was the early days of covid in America seemed to almost lift a veil on possibility. And Oh Shoot! Felt like a reminder, as Bruce once sang, “that it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive”. 

Totally Totally reminds me of No Name In The Street less because its reflecting on losses and collective tolls, and it does that some, but because of its lack of luster. Like No Name, Totally is dense. The first song “Erik Prince” is an extended reference to the privatized military politics of the global war on terror. One thing I know is that a lot of the references were flying by me like exit signs on a highway. As soon as the album started I had to google who Erik Prince is. I don’t know what making ‘Iran the new Afghanistan’ means. 

Sonically the album is lush and warm. More so that Oh Shoot!. There are woodwinds, strings, slide guitars, and pianos all over the record. On my first listen I thought there was a lack of bangers, of songs you’d want to play at high volume and dance around your room to (see ‘The Social Wage’). My repeat listens, though, are giving way to a real fondness for these songs. I don’t know if any of them feel like they stand out in the same way as on Oh Shoot!. Though I do think there is a ‘if you observe it, it will change simply by the act of observing it’ thing going on. I find that when I go into a record knowing I have to write about it, the things I say about it change as I listen more and more, making exact statements about a record hard to pin down. 

Still present on this record is the thru-line of looking at the comforts we accrue in the world, because we all want, and deserve, comfort, and how this comfort separates us from the people who are lower than us on the rungs of society. I am poor but I ain’t homeless. I was raised broke but my moms got money now. I have a degree. I read the good books and I talk right and dress right. What, really, is my relationship to oppression, stress, and trauma. Getting the answer to these questions feels essential to moving on with my damn life. But I know I’ll never have them. 

This record, in what can only remind me of listening to early career Eminem in my brother's bedroom while playing Xbox as kids, has a lot of skits. Well three. But for a ten track record that is a lot. And one of them, “Eliot Hugh” has a funny voice! A track I always skip. Because I am a humorless bitch. The accompanying piano is marvelous. 

In some ways it feels like this album is bursting with too many ideas. Lyrically, and musically. There are noisy moments of synth which are fun and exciting and perhaps add nothing. The references. Oh god so many References. The lyrics come on sometimes like a graduate paper or a leftist zine of ‘talking points’. Album closer “Song For a Project” does the best at bridging the political to the human with a singing melody and a refrain of “you better get more creative real soon”. Fantastic stuff. 

The Michael Character, after 15 albums, have a sound, defined by subtle and wild dynamic and tonal shifts. They excel at taking a kind of american songbook pastiche and wringing it out until it's something a lot more raw and a lot more punk. On this record a sudden burst of synthesizer madness creates these moments of shift, on “32” they are deployed to mirror the mental anguish the singer is contending with as they describe their excursion deeper and deeper into the fold of normative middle class hegemony. “Erik Prince” undulates between a kind of mad dash bloom of trilling strummed guitars, twinkling pianos, and beer bottle whining slide guitars and a folk rock strumming stomp. The band, after all this time, is tight. They are perhaps underrated as a great band, being that the lyrics and ideas tend to take center stage. But the music is no joke either. 31 turns up the tempo and gets the tempo up. “Where's all the land back when you need it.” The screaming at the end of that song is scary. Very scary. 

“Did I work for all the things I got?/ My high birth and my union job?” Totally Totally revels in its sing song density. The more I listen the more I see that there is luster. And perhaps if I reread No Name I would see that the complexity of the diamond carbon structure of it is not at the sacrifice of gleam. 

“I didn’t know anything about Communism, but I knew a lot about slums.” Baldwin writes about his march in a May Day parade, chanting, “East side, West side, all around the town, we want the landlords to tear the slums down.” My love of Baldwin stems, in part, in his ability to find the humanity behind a cloak of cultural diction. Here he spells out that though as a young boy he knew little of theory, he knew a lot about slums. This is an energy The Michael Character has been drilling into record after record. How to build collectively with people, in spite of their desire to man a barricade. The lyrics about the social wage, about Palestine, about moving to the suburbs are in essence an incantation of question and protection. Searching for some way to bring it all together so that everyone gets what they need. 

The Michael Character has proven that they release heartfelt and essential records. By the fifth listen through the record started to make sense, to fit together wholly. It's good that a listen through takes a bit less time than to read a book. My critiques still stand though they feel less relevant, after the picture starts to make sense. And now I have spent my Baldwin comparison-for-a-review bullet. 

Home and its destruction

A fascist jag named Ellis told me trans women were just pretending to be women. And zap, there goes my favorite comic bookstore. I turned from him, said fuck off and walked out, screaming fuck into the road. That comic store was, I thought, a port in a storm. A place for some beautiful retail therapy and comradery. A place where I could always be safe on at least a certain level. I had spent the last two years or so spending my way through to some type of certificate education in comics, buying whatever in the hell caught my eye at the overstuffed shelves of Comic Boom, consuming and regarding as a part of whatever on going pipe dream I have to write comic books. I'd walk in there more days of the week than not. 

I went home. after being confronted by this toxic, ridiculous, totalitarian way of looking at the world, after softly saying 'that is so terribly cruel.' and being told I was looking to be a victim. I went home and slumped in my chair in my sobbed. mourned violently the loss of my second home, and my naivety. Transphobia is not hard to find in the world. Go sniffing and you will get a whiff. whether you want to mince about gendered language and cisnormativity, or hunt for the destruction of gender essentialism or 'gay panic' defenses. And here I was, confronted with it all. The cool imperialist shitbirdisms that only some shlebby dude can dole out as though he was god himself (just before this interaction this dude and (I think his brother?) we declaring with marble clad certainty that Andy Warhol had made art worse, which hey fuck Andy Warhol, but what kind of person thinks art is the kind of thing which can be made worse). The tears and wracking sobs gave way to violence. I won't lie, the violence hit my brain pretty quick, pretty much as soon as I slammed the door and screamed fuck into the road. I thought about getting physical, not walking away and out. I ran in my mind a thousand different ways how it might have all gone down, how I could have controlled or handled the situation. Who I could have cracked over the head with a thick hardcover Möbius reissue. And the current of thought only got more violent from there. For days and days after. It kept me from sleeping a couple of nights. I hate conflict and I especially despise the arrogance of men and I hate even more a bastard know-it-all. A projected understanding of knowledge which is absolute and unwavering. no hemming. no hawing. no tick to to even present that one might need to consider the grand and complex tapestry of all the things we call the world. He asked me, if trans women weren't just men pretending to be women, than what are they. I whispered 'they're women'. He said that's 'just not how it works.' I left and told the room to fuck off. 

This horrible exchange just served to remind me that the marginalized, a word i use to describe myself hesitantly, are never long for our safety. the places that hold us can be burned off in an instant. When I got home I texted my friend Dylan, and I called my mom, and I called my brother after I had called my mom. They all advised me, kindly and rightly, that I shouldn't let this experience ruin a source of joy in my life. Everyone knowing just how much time and how much of my heart I put into Comic Boom. Which is why it stung so fucking bad. I had put the chips on making that place a kind of home. A territory I could claim. ain't that the irony of life-and indeed a truism, which i do so find icky- it is the importance of things which makes their breaking apart so devastating. I so want to head the advice of my friends and family, but something in that moment felt like flash paper. just snap and gone. I think that is why i screamed fuck into the wet pavement of west street. Like I didn't even feel that regret of loss like... i had fucked up and been banned or the store closed or some tragic separation. But like a choice had been made, a path had been shifted. and all there was to do now was Mourne the loss of one more safe place to be in. A trans girl out in the lurch once more because of the ignorance, and the wide birth that ignorance takes up. 

Its all very metaphysical. i'm trying to be less melodramatic in that way. which is a kind of hard thing to say after writing everything I have written, but it's true. and im trying to thread  the needle of knowing that there is a difference between the world as i ingest it in a metaphysical sense-the meaning i assign to the segmented notions of its various parts- and life as it is just lived here, through the eyes and the hands. by this i mean i can talk about the flash paper moment, the mourning of a home destroyed. or i can just walk into the shop and risk looking that fucker in the eye again. and take up the space i want to take up while being who i am. though this struggle is essentially of life, between what things mean to you and what they actually are to you. In any case, i know i'm going to save a lot of money on comics thinking it all through. 

peace love and protect trans women. 

Idealism and Materialism

 I met someone today that described themselves as a materialist. Which has hitched me, for whatever reason. Maybe because the conversation had a stilted quality to it. Like two people waiting for a surprise that the other was not going to, was not willing to deliver. In any case it got me thinking of the nature of idealism as opposed to materialism (this person said, 'I am a materialist, I do not believe in the utopian'. To which I think ‘then what the hell is any of this for’. But also maybe that’s why their standing on the corner distributing goods to people who need them and I am sitting around thinking about materialism versus idealism). I am an idealist, by way of a fairly basic understanding. It has crossed the bar into self myth at a certain point. When I reach into my memory for a reason, for an origin I plunge my hand into a murky stream and pull up the phrase: “That which is right is good and that which is good is right.” I have no idea where I heard this. I just know it is true and it is what I believe and I call it idealism. 

A quick google search reveals that materialism is a philosophy propagated by Marx which deals wholly with the material, as opposed to the ideal; the spiritual realms. This is a philosophy of form manifest in the bodily consciousness. The ideal is that which is spiritual or non-embodied, or so says the google search. My main gateway through idealism is Hegel and his dialectic on the nature of recognition: “the lord-bondsman dialectic.” A piece certainly possessed of the ideal. A dialectic which brings us the material. Marx, having drawn on Hegel, could never have conceived of the proletariat, illuminated the hierarchy of class fundamental to his materialism, without the idealism of Hegel. Without Hegel's idealist notion of work. That the lord separates the bondsman from their labor, as Marx would say the factory worker was from theirs by the factory foreman, and thus separated from themselves, as Marx would say of the factory worker, obliterated by the piecemeal nature of their singular task. The ideal provides, as it often does, the heart of the material. 

And so I think about the relationship between the material and the ideal. They are written about as being oppositional, but we see they are indeed lineal. Corroborative. The ideal, dare I say the utopian, paves its ground for the material concern. What does the material mean to me if I cannot have my spirit. What's that line: ``I don't want to join your revolution if I can’t dance”. What is dancing but ideal.