More News From Nowhere

…it all just seems so sensationalized.
–Aziz Ansari

I know ppl like u think it’s “cool” to theorize about quantum fluctuations, but the heat death of the early universe isn’t something to romanticize.
–Frances Bean Cobain

…I say hey Janet
you are the one, you are the sun
and I’m your dutiful planet…
–Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds

This Guns N’ Roses weekend is over.
-Your Writer on Tour with Ironwhore, July 2005

Waking up with a hardon is the best thing to happen to me in years.  Never mind I quit smoking, drinking and the Life, that I’ve published three collections of poetry and prose and survived as a working singer songwriter for the last 5 years, or that we just wrapped 4,484 miles pulling in to Hippie Town at 9pm last night.  Waking up erect is good news from the Gods, like we’re gonna win this thing.  Know what I mean, good Reader?  As we were leaving Austin 19 days ago, it dawned on me that I probably have arthritis, if not in my left middle finger, then certiainly on my right thumb.  Anyone reading this blog on the regular knows I haven’t caught my breath in over a year-and there are other, less savory conditions and maladies that’ve fell on me in these paling years, not the least of which being a lack of libido.  I let it all slide, rather than jump through the bureaucratic hoops of health insurance that only led nowhere-but decreased interest in sex was, at the time, viewed as an improvement.  Sex seemed to always land me in trouble somehow, and, by and large the partners I had were colossal wastes and the biggest drains of my time, on my health and my career as a day worker, writer and performer.

The truth is I’ve let a lot of things go.  I’ve insulated myself from the world with this gig.  I’ve maintained at minimum, and pushed harder when I needed to, but when I look back at the last 5 years and think about the fact that I’m 42, I’m terrified and disgusted-the former boring through nights pocked and shot through with anxiety, and the latter beating the opposite sex to the punch.  I couldn’t fuck and I didn’t want to.  It’s called depression, and low self esteem, which can intermingle in a vicious cycle that the worst people will blame you for, but actual compassion for, even if welcomed, can veer too close to commiseration and in any event is a shit substitute for understanding.  The silver lining is the coffee’s done, it’s time to wake up, this gig is over in less than 2 months and, like the Buddhists say-the best time to start was last year, the next best time is right now.  Lest we forget, I taught myself how to write these last 5 years, and the dream of being a columnist has been realized, thanks in no small part to you and your wonderful Readership.  I’ve got a 2009 Monk’s Robe Orange Honda Element and a Tacoma Guild.  I live in a post-gentrified Paradise and every dumb ailment and malady I’ve mentioned can be treated by swallowing a pill-ok, I still need to look into why I can’t catch my breath, it’s true, and wish me luck as I enter their world and try to get the help I need.

This blog has always been the balloon to my wet cement blues.  I talk myself down from the noose here, and you read me and it’s perfect.  Healing myself with my own medicine bag, sitting down to type and hang it on the fucking wall, feeling supported and, most of all, seen by you is terribly important to me-a rudder in the shitswells of a dark and calmitous world, the biggest boon and best thing to happen to me in years besides waking up with a hardon this morning.  Oh yeah, that.  It seems like the weeks get away from me.  I mean, sure, I work full time, and I just spent 18 days on the road with my Boss, but time gets away from me-that is, the time to address the many peccadilloes and tragic breakdown I’ve been skirting since I turned 40.  I feel like I should address it, tacitly, get up on it like Ahab, and chronicle the savage journey I’ve undergone since deciding to stop being depressed (I am NOT saying that this decision cured my depression AT ALL).  Brother Bean has asked for it, in the past, and I feel like I’d do well to bring it back for you-hip you to the saga of a working class ex-Pat punkrocking rockabilly New journalist with a a whole lot of time on his hands, a new car and a rekindled libido.  I’ll still try, good Reader.  You bet.  But I’ve got to wrap this.  I still believe in my dreams and I feel like I’ve got something to live up to, until the next time we meet, so I should get cracking.

May your crown be a halo.  See you next Thursday motherfucker.

 

 

 

 

 

…for your young idea…

“Fuck all that shouting, nothing happened!”
–Billy Idol

The rise and fall of the post-Nirvana boom I don’t care about. I think we can all agree it didn’t represent a takeover of anything.
–J.Robbins

There’s always room for bros.
–Alex Rawls

Rock and roll was a dangerous weapon, chrome plated, it exploded like the speed of light, it reflected the times, especially the presence of the atomic bomb which had preceded it by several years. Back then people feared the end of time. The big showdown between capitalism and communism was on the horizon. Rock and roll made you oblivious to the fear, busted down the barriers that race and religion, ideologies put up.
–Bob Dylan

And after two years of trying our best to convince you that all these things were true, it turns out that we, the media, were the ones who were lying.
–Brian Joyce

I’ve been listening to nothing but live Fugazi.  They’ve got to be the greatest rock and roll band of all time.  That’s only slight hyperbole, used to convey the utmost respect and admiration I have for this band.  Throughout their career they managed to maintain form as content. Despite a complaint against the proselytizing of singer Ian MacKaye, the lyrics of Steady Diet of Nothing show a marked shift from direct moralizing into more abstract and artful tropes.  Fugazi will always represent the spirituality of salt to me.  Without drugs or alcohol, they explored deep and archetypal forms-which is a very fancy way to say they managed to let their imaginations run wild without any outside influence.  It’s very pure.  In “Latin Roots”, co-frontman Guy Piccioto’s journey of a regressing young adult laying on his parents’ bed and falling backwards through the centuries of his genealogy, happens without even the smoking a cigarette.  Perhaps this is only how I imagine it, I’ve conflated the narrator/performer/writer with his subject matter.  It only speaks of the mythology at work with this band, as there is with any great band, performer or artist.  The other thing Fugazi share with great art is that they’re in the air, or, in the water, as poet Bernard Pearce wrote.  Fugazi is the east coast, where I grew up and first saw them perform, at 15, in the gymnasium of Drexel University in their backyard of Philadelphia.  They’ll always sound like adolescence to me.

Fugazi will always be crystalized into one moment, walking down some forgotten street in Clifton Heights, as a 14-year-old skinhead, being picked up by one of the only skaters in High School at the time, him having their s/t album on cassette, rewinding it to the beginning and listening to the whole thing.  So many things are gone from the day, the most tragic being a time when I could holler out and hop in the pickup truck of someone I didn’t exactly know but trusted more than family because of how he wore his hair and the fact that he knew.  We knew.  We knew what was coming, what was happening, and it wasn’t punk rock, that was our older brother-the generation before.  This was now.  This was brand new and it was kids, like us.  They were just like us.  That feeling would last until the release of Nevermind 2 years later, when jocks and squares started dyeing their hair and it all became a silly fad-repurposed and sold.  Fugazi continued touring and putting out albums throughout it all, until the apocryphal announcement of their hiatus at the dawning of the New Century.

Fugazi will always be a winter band. There’s a resourcefulness that comes from living in winter climes, and I always think of them with their knit caps on, a chill in the air and chimney smoke mixed with the smell of wet stone just before it snows.  I’ve become a new man so many times while listening to them, on so many levels, not the least of which having shaved off my long hair and starting High School, a new man but barely one…in the Fall, which is when I received their last album from WKDU’s Stevie D., and played the whole thing front to back on a Monday evening just a short walk away from the gymnasium where I’d seen them play 13 years before-they sounded ebullient, and they always will, jaunty and fresh and political, just like youth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4/30

radio coming into
the room like it was 1999
“Pink Flag” and all that shit
still holding up
at 3am, the morning
of my 40th birthday

what a thrill
me&Big Brother night
together again
synchronous&singing
to WKDU

a tube radio will literally warm the room
f-this generation,they are doomed.

View this post on Instagram

MY FOURTH POEM OF FORTY CELEBRATING #nationalpoetrymonth. http://bit.ly/1awBVea #poetry #thirtythirty #poem #poetryofinstagram #poetryoftheday #poetrytime #poetrylove #poetryclub #wkdu #radio #philly #philadelphia

A post shared by Jim Trainer (@goingforthethroat) on Apr 4, 2015 at 8:22pm PDT

38

13 years ago in Philly I rode my bike down to Spaceboy Records for an unplugged set by Rocket From The Crypt.  They played a song called “Blue Cowboy”.  Said it was a Wipers tune.  That night I caught them at the Khyber Pass.  Back when that town had it.  There was excitement in the air and danger everywhere.  Seeing RFTC back then reaffirmed everything you knew was true, about rock&roll and the streets and our desperate hearts, desperate to love&fight&drink&rock the fuck out.  Desperate to kick back against American isolation with our young idea.  In basements and hollowed out movie theaters and on rooftops and gymnasiums.
It’s always better looking back but I’ll never question the magic I felt on Hostile City streets-dancing and sweating and yelling back down at the Gods.  A new century with a new media to call our very own and listening to WKDU 91.7fm.  Philly was always like the town that time forgot, free from current trends and doin its own stubborn thang.  Heads made it, up&out, but we forgot about them and their Coke commercials, pfft their hometown shout-outs and ignored their calls from graves marked Los Angeles.  We soldiered on, always with something to prove at junkyard art shows and punkrock barbecues.
Then the 21st century clamped DOWN and hard.  Suddenly we found ourselves in the jurisdiction of a world police.  It wouldn’t matter about Philly anymore, or scenes or true love.  Peace in our time, once scattershot and underground, was no longer possible.  It came home to roost in our town and your town, too.  There was always a dividing line but now it meant that you could be sent off to die for lies or b/c you were trying to provide shelter for your loved ones that you’d never get financed or get an education that you’d never be able to afford.

I guess this blog ain’t so  personal after all but it’s my birthday, Jack.  Go write your own blog.
The innocence of youth can never be questioned.  It’s that blood and that idea always in our hearts that can never die.  The cataracts of youth should fall away and half the house will have to come down.  We’ve got blood on our hands and there’s so much suffering in the world.  And worse, I feel a dark hand being pulled in front of our eyes and a cheaper tomorrow on the horizon.  A collective and irresistible dumbing down and a more selective isolation cleaving between us.  What’s mine&yours behind wide walls, zombies through our windows blued with confections of lies.  You’ll see-culture first, everything else soon after.  But now we do it to ourselves.  We always had to and they have trained some of us so very well.
The world needs more rock&roll.  More inclusion.  More eyes opening, looking inside.  More hearts knowing.  All I’m asking for is 38 more.  I will need more time to crank it and nail it down and make this dream real.  There’s so much more that I must do before I’m blown back to dust.  For true.
The last couple decades I been sinking down.  Recovering from the bad confusion over a love I’d found.  I thought you could never live up to it Brother but we both know it was me.  I’m going up on the high plains.  My exile from Philly was just the beginning.  I got some work to do inside.  I’ll see you on the streets motherfucker, another pilgrim gone to temple seeking refuge.

 

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.
-HST