Tag Archives: fugazi

A Sample

My roommate had an odd look on his face. It was an unsettling mixture of trepidation and something close to embarrassment. I thought either someone was dead or I’d won a lottery I didn’t know I’d entered.

“You have a voice mail,” he told me, “from Kathleen Hanna.”

Kathleen Hanna had called me because I’d emailed her about doing an interview for the zine I had just started. I named it Jes Grew, after a “disease” in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, a novel about race and the influence and spread of black culture into the mainstream. Said novel was one of my many obsessions and a driving influence behind Record Ignite!, the band I’d formed a while ago. But that band was no more, and so this zine was where I thought I should channel my creative energy.

I’d emailed Kathleen at a generic info-type address on her website, so I didn’t have a huge expectation I’d actually hear from her. It felt like asking for a million dollars–this probably won’t work, but it’d be awesome if it did. When I’d formed my now defunct band, there were a select few groups in my pantheon of what I wanted it to be, and Bikini Kill was one of them. I admired their commitment to doing something that was genuinely dangerous, and was also sympathetic to their brand of feminism, though I realize now my understanding of exactly what feminism entailed was rudimentary at best. (Now that I have a daughter, I feel like I understand feminism better than I ever did before, but that’s another post entirely.)

In other words, getting a call from Kathleen Hanna was an enormous deal in my universe. My roommate left the room so I could listen to the voice mail, sensing that this was something he should allow me to enjoy by myself. Hearing a recording of her voice address me was enthralling and terrifying all at once. She sounds just like she did on that Mike Watt album!

I eventually reached her on the phone in person, which was even more terrifying, and we arranged to meet at a coffee shop in Soho for the interview. The day we met was a gorgeous late fall afternoon, just the faintest chill in the air, summer stubbornly hanging on. At this point in my life, my only interviewing experience came as part of a group affair when Jello Biafra came to speak at NYU. Me and another editor at the school’s humor magazine lobbed questions at him along with 20 other “reporters,” one of whom took a good 10 minutes to ask Jello if he would lend his time to something called the Million Marijuana March.

I did plenty of advance work to prepare for this interview, and yet was still frightened beyond comprehension before it began, afraid that I’d say or do something unspeakably wrong. That feeling faded quickly once I actually met Kathleen, because she was unbelievably warm and engaging, completely putting me at ease about talking to someone I considered a hero. (I imagine she had extensive experience doing this.)

We talked for 2 hours, in large part about her new artistic direction, since her first solo album Julie Ruin had just come out and was quite a musical departure from Bikini Kill. But we also covered the gamut of politics and feminism and music, and I somehow managed to sound coherent on these subjects while cognizant of the fact that I was discussing them with Kathleen Fucking Hanna.

Before we parted, I gave Kathleen a bunch of 7 inches from the label my friends upstate had started, including my old band’s sole release (seen to your left). I can’t say why I did this. Perhaps because I felt I should offer some kind of token of appreciation for taking the time to talk to me, and I had nothing else to offer. I think my rationale was, We all love you, so here’s something you, in essence, helped make. She demonstrated far more thankfulness than she needed to, and left. I hadn’t the slightest idea, really, of what I’d just done.

Continue reading A Sample

Capital

Last week, I took a trip to Washington DC for the first time in over a decade. The last time I went there, it was to see Fugazi play a show on the National Mall as part of a Washington cultural festival; the opening act was a go-go band, go-go being an ultra-regional soul/funk genre practiced in DC and virtually nowhere else. That’s about as close as I ever got to any of DC’s major attractions, because each previous time I’d visited, it was to see Fugazi, see another band, or to play in a band myself. The vast majority of those trips landed me at places like the Wilson Center, Fort Reno, Adams Morgan–in other words, far away from what the vast majority of folks go to see when they’re in Our Nation’s Capital.

What I saw of DC back then, I liked a lot; they seemed vibrant and genuine in a way that’s being systematically leeched out of New York a little bit more each year. But my few encounters with the more traveled areas of the city felt foreign to me. It didn’t remind me of an American city at all. The first time I approached anything close to downtown DC, it reminded me of Buenos Aires, as weird as that may sound. Wide plazas flanked by arches and statues of generals on rearing horses struck me as very South American. But I also didn’t get close enough to any of them to make a real judgment.

Having now visited the stuff everyone visits in DC, I can say that those initial impressions were only reinforced. The monuments and museums of Washington are imposing and majestic in a very non-American way. America definitely does bravado well, but in a ham-fisted, dumb kinda way, like wearing star-spangled boxer shorts or selling hand-painted silver dollars with bald eagles on them or blowing your hand off with a roman candle on the Fourth of July. Or invading Iraq.

Placed against this standard, DC’s Big Parts seem positively European. It’s all extremely impressive and regal and stentorian, but none of that represents America very well. This is perhaps because when the city was designed and laid out, and even when the Really Big Monuments were being constructed, we still didn’t quite know what America was. All we had to go on was a European model to aspire to, so we copied a bunch of French and Greek stuff and dropped it in a swamp on the Potomac. It was like the ancient ancestor of Las Vegas’s New York New York.

I was really struck by this when we went past the Lincoln Memorial. I never realized how huge the thing was, and the fact that it looks out on a tidal pool adds a further sense of awe and glory. But if you know anything about Lincoln The Man, this seems a powerfully wrong tribute to him. He wasn’t quite the log cabin man mythology makes him out to be, but he was closer to that than he was to the towering ersatz Parthenon built to honor him. You have to think that, given another 100 years, we might have been able to build something a bit more American in his honor.

Then again, even the more modern stuff has a decidedly foreign feel to it. Many of the big federal buildings constructed 30-40 years ago were done in the Brutalist style, the kind of architecture most associated with the Soviet Union; it reminded me of the bizarre Yugoslavian war monuments, only not quite so artistic. The same went for the Metro system, which I found quite efficient and comfortable, particularly in comparison to the NYC subways. But every station looked exactly the same, which made it look eerily like Pyongyang to me.

For all this, I didn’t get to see as nearly as much as I’d like; I could have spent a whole week exploring the Smithsonian. And yet, it feels odd to visit your own capital and feel not just like a tourist, but like a foreigner.