by William Cody Watson
Download - Tulips
untitled, 2009
I’m thinking of ways to dismantle my brain
and I’m thinking I might just puke on your grave.
12/28/2010
Tulips
Download - Tulips
untitled, 2009
I’m thinking of ways to dismantle my brain
and I’m thinking I might just puke on your grave.
12/21/2010
Chrisp Breatt
by Ian Paul Roger Nelson
2010
Mixed medium collage (wasa crisp bread wrapper,
scotch tape, 1990 topps baseball cards, acryllic)
8 x 8.5 inches
Mixed medium collage (wasa crisp bread wrapper,
scotch tape, 1990 topps baseball cards, acryllic)
8 x 8.5 inches
12/14/2010
First Response
by India Nicholas
My girlfriend has a copper hook inside her.
It is a tiny, T-shaped thing. Perfect to hold a writhing worm,
an inch of flesh pieced by metal. This thing would bob in Lake Oswego,
shining, glittering, ready to be nibbled by fish that sparkle with rainbow skin.
But my girlfriend does not use her copper hook to catch me
or any other scaled swimmer. Her small tool sits afloat in her belly, sends repellent,
a radar of warning. Her copper hook is a fence around the lake.
My bloated fish are not allowed to swim there.
I wonder if it rusts, her copper hook jewelry.
Will it turn that aquamarine green? I wonder, does it pollute?
Will it stain her insides? Will that color seep through her skin?
I would like to have a blue girlfriend.
12/01/2010
Notes From the B Train: Part 4
by Lucy Morris
View: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
XI.
I spend the spring working with a new gentleman, Vanya, who appears to be about fifteen but is actually my age. The fact that he has no years on me does not stop him from dispensing all kinds of advice. “Listen,” he starts one day, apropos of nothing in particular. “All I’m saying is that a person’s education is never over – and I’m not talking about school.” And with all the wisdom garnered in his twenty-two lengthy years: “Every problem in life can be solved with math except for women.” I can’t really fathom what he means by this, and math is not exactly my strong suit, but I nod in agreement. Upon finding out I am newly single, he decides to share his courtship experience with me. “I finished my rapid dating phase early,” he lectures. “By nineteen I was just ready to settle down.” Vanya spends a lot of his day acquiring and consuming beverages, among them Mighty Leaf tea, peppermint mochas and the occasional glass of microwaved plum wine; at night, he reminds me, he prefers cognac with the occasional glass of Jack Daniels. “Jack and Coke – that’s the family drink,” he tells me proudly, like this family of Ukrainian émigrés that I have come to know through his screaming phone conversations with his mother thrice daily actually invented it.
Vanya introduces music to our office, which is initially an improvement upon the hums of our servers and the habitually shrieking cashiers. Unfortunately, Vanya has a European’s taste in American music. There is a lot of techno - the booming kind that makes you feel like you’re in a cavernous club where the lights flash epileptically. For some time after that, we spend our days tuned to an Internet radio station called Chill FM. Just happy to be listening to something with words, I express my enjoyment of an Air song. “Just wait,” he says excitedly, inviting me to turn and face his monitor. While I watch over my shoulder, he logs into his Deviant Art account to show me a photograph he took inspired by the song “Playground Love.” It actually depicts a playground, the one just across the street by Restaurant Tatiana. But compositionally I am surprised to find I like it a lot.
Over the course of our months together, several things happen to Vanya. The first is that he falls in love around the same time I fall out of it. “Girl,” he tells his beloved Sasha over the phone, “You want me to bring a bottle of champagne tonight? Tell you what: I’ll bring two.” I type out an email to a friend with more force than is truly necessary: “Fuck love and everybody in it.” Then it turns warm and I fall into a relationship just as Vanya falls out of his. “All these Brighton girls,” he complains, “They just wanna get married.” I have headphones on listening to “Hold Yuh;” I am feeling positive for the first time in a while. In April, Vanya goes to Coachella and returns having discovered marijuana and Burning Man. He seriously considers the idea of growing dreadlocks. This combination of revelations puts him in touch with his long-touted but somewhat latent musical side and he starts seeking my help in writing song lyrics. “Lusya,” he inquires. “What rhymes with ‘inspiration?’” Having concluded that my marketable skill is not so much Russian as it is English, he begins consulting me as his personal spell-check. “How do you spell ‘lingerie’?” he asks. “And ‘stewardess?’ I need this for a really important Facebook post.”
XII.
There are a lot of things I find to be vaguely morally challenging about this job. Aside from translating copy for revisionist pro-Stalin histories – what would my anarchist Russian ancestors think? – I translate promotional articles stating that all girls are born wanting to be moms and wives someday, swallow hard during the racist and sexist jokes, yell at angry babushkas on the telephone and take part in a lexicon of phrases like, “I am watching you” and, “You will be held responsible for your mistakes.” (Everyone seems to have learned their English by watching The Godfather or playing World of Warcraft.) There are days when I think I should get paid twice as much for working in two languages, and other days when I appreciate that I am perhaps only truly required to be half-good at either one.
In June, when I decide it is time to move on, to leave New York and translating behind for a while, I learn that Russians have certain traits that are terribly hard to walk away from: their tradition of buying food for everyone else on one’s own birthday, occasional champagne afternoons, and heated discussions of UFOs and Greek myths. Mostly, though, it is their total laxness hiding behind a veneer of dictatorship; their genuine concern and crazy commitment - even for a girl who wears thrift store sweatshirts - concealed by the stern looks or the constant yelling and shoes so pointy they’d pierce your shins.
It takes two full months to quit my job. I start large by announcing I am moving to Asia. “What are you going to do?” my boss asks me quizzically when I inform him of this. “Learn Chinese?” As if this is actually an insane thing to do, as if he doesn’t read the news, as if learning Russian makes more sense than learning a language spoken by a sixth of the world. Soon he dismisses the idea entirely. “So you’re going to Israel,” he informs me with a bemused grin, because, to him, this is the only country that allows Jews. “And when will you come back?” I tell him I’m gone for good. He smiles merrily and gives me a look of the kind people give during the early stages of relationships, when they’re skirting genuine feeling. “We’ll see,” the look said.
One day in the beginning of July, when I give my final month’s notice, I type this on my phone on the train home: “When I lived in Russia I appreciated most my lack of responsibility for anything except, essentially, staying alive. Even failing classes seemed like it might not have the consequences it would in the States. All my relationships were far away, fourteen hours away, and while this was hard at times, it was also incredibly easy. When I go to work every day, I am distancing myself from all the things that are familiar to me. It has become its own alternate reality, my little Working Vacation on the Beach. I won’t miss the unpredictability of the office clamp-downs, or finding myself locked out of my office because some men need to catch a mouse with their bare hands – “Lusya, step back, there will be blood,” they say, totally serious. But I’ll never work somewhere like this again – at least on many days I hope I never do.”
New York is unbearable, like it is every summer, and my usually peaceful commute gets rowdy as the B train fills up with high school kids on their way to the beach. I tell myself I can’t wait to get out of here. But as the end date approaches, I find myself on a tipsy humid night telling a boy I wish someone could say “Lusya” the way the Russians do. He tries valiantly but I shake my head; it’s in that softest of spaces between the “s” and “ya.” I wake up some weekend mornings with Vanya’s favorite Pink Floyd song in my head, thinking of the way we both confidently sing along to the line, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,” as though we have any knowledge of English ways at all. I start asking with genuine interest how his artistic endeavors are going, concede that this one abstract photo does, in fact, look a little like Kandinsky if you squint your eyes just right. My boss announces abruptly one day during my second to last week that I am “the best,” and I consider that boyfriends saying it never sounds as good as when he does, his “the” sounding more like “they” and the intonation of the second word rising out of his mouth like smoke. I try to imagine a life where Misha doesn’t sit down next to me at 2 PM every day to eat a banana. If not Marya, who will sneak up from behind and scare me? Who could come up with more diminutive variations for my two-syllable name than Natasha? Probably not the Chinese.
XIII.
I have by now collectively spent days of my life waiting for the B train: in lots of rain and some shine, among beach girls in rompers and aging Russian men in gold chains. I have gotten unreasonably indignant when asked for directions in Russian – this is New York! – but answered in Russian just the same without thinking. I have tried to listen for waves from the elevated platform and seen sunsets over Soviet-style high rises taken straight out of the exurbs of Vladivostok. I have sent text messages in Cyrillic by accident. I have quaked in my Keds dreading to ask for vacation in a language I didn’t feel I understood. I have smiled when I had to concede the Russians were so much more generous than I’d anticipated, in almost every way imaginable.
The trains in Brighton Beach swing toward you around a sharp bend. The B trains are the older kind with orange seats and graffiti and out-of-date ads, and their approach reminds me of the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island, just down the boardwalk from my office. There’s the sound of rickety wood and a whoosh of air and the moment when the angle allows you to see both the conductor in the front car and the tail end of the last one simultaneously. It’s not often that you see the start and end of trains, or anything else really, all at once. I remember my first day of work, the start of the period that one day months from now, I’ll call My Slow Descent Into Fluency. I don’t remember the last day, because it turns out it never happens: Two weeks after my last day in the office -- “Will you come back to us a ninja, Lusenka? A spy?” they ask over champagne toasts -- I get a call from Misha. I am back in my hometown for a while before leaving the States. I ignore his call, as I have always done with the Russians, and wait to listen to the message. “Lusya,” he says, not as sheepishly as I would like but still somehow sweet in his resigned tone. “We were wondering. Can you work for us from home?” And I say yes, because I always have said yes to the Russians eventually, because I am not ready, it seems, to say no, to say goodbye for real.
11/17/2010
Bechamel
by Hadar Ahuvia
The Jutland Peninsula has taken her in,
my cousin—
like they sheltered Judens during the third reich reign.
She can marry there,
but not on holy terrain
because her mom’s not kosher/
She returns to celebrate Christmas on the kibbutz—not kosher,
where I pocketed rabbits— not kosher—
and ate bacon for dinner with cream— not kosher—or my aunt who fed it—
my Dane dame—not kosher— who exclaimed
“Your tush is flowering with jubilation!”
as I lay frogstyle— not kosher—
on the tile.
My cousins’ son, named Yonatan,
suckles her cheek and teat.
He puckers— an ingathering of lip pleats
a kibbutz of sorts—
the family’s scatter and flock
kibbutz round pagan lights
kibbutz for soldiers on leave
micro kibbutz on cells and skype
kibbutz on Shabbat
kibbutz parking lot
Yonatan was born off the kibbutz.
like me raised by a daughter of the/ away from the/
who’s parents live on the/
that is no longer really a/
My mom’s lips never converged on teats
but rather bottles of fresh cows milk
quickly scattering in refusal
of fatty alien goods.
I disaffect her-like
Fuck lite.
Gimme more filllin. More skin. more pepper grindin.
More chew.
More melt.
I’ll butter the skillet
loosen my belt
ladle and lip grip
taut sacrament
relinquish the bet
drop Hannukah gelt
affix ‘il’ to Lent/
and reminisce of schnitzel corn and rice—delight
Persons of every generation must view themselves as having been
individually freed from the land of Egypt
After the Pageant
the dining hall
has dissembled dismembered
every generation individuated itself, to free(ify) itself
Egypt melts in a cast iron pan/
the fingers of my hand kibbutz to gesture wait
as of late
soldiers kibbutz on Gaza.
while we—like milk and butter—
cream.
11/02/2010
Step Down
by Allyson Paty
Too many in the post office line. Each one
clutches his parcel and his woe is me.
Think, of course, of the stove, the lamp.
Go outside if the rain peters out or sleep
when the construction quiets down.
After the morning glories closed
you gripped the chicken wire just in case
the wind came to rattle you away with
the seedpods. Just maybe the stove,
your blackened kitchen. At the grocery store
the loaf goes stale before you can buy it.
A man behind you spit shines his child
when she squirms herself to tears.
Stand straight and stay still. The light
gaping out at the empty room.
10/28/2010
Notes From the B Train: Part 3
by Lucy Morris
View: Part 1, Part 2
VIII.
Winter comes to Brighton Beach, and as it turns out, winter there is barely acknowledged. The thermostat does not appear to ascend past 60 degrees and my pal Misha rubs his hands together for warmth over his keyboard. I turn so my feet are pressed against the cozy computer hard drives. We all wear hats and nurse hot beverages; I buy larger coffees. Friends in their first years of employment elsewhere across the city are thrilled by the realization that snow days exist in their professional worlds. I scoff and trek to work through snow up to my knees. “You think Russians are going to shut down because of snow?” I ask, followed by a requisite dramatic pause. “They invented snow.” This is, I suppose, what I talk about when I talk about Russians – their vodka and blizzards and great fur shapka hats - because it is easier than saying almost anything else, anything more nuanced or complete.
It’s the second half of my first year with them. With my hands on the keys and eyes on the screen, the Russians keep passing around me. They bustle and lurk, yell maddeningly and conspire in whispers, they laugh and they eat. A girl cuts her foot on glass. “Where is the vodka?” is the first question someone asks. On another day, a different girl cuts her hand. “Why isn't life easier?'” she wonders through tears with her hand under running water. “Come on,” says another Russian impatiently. “Who would want to live an easy life?” I concede that this is a fair point but I am not sure that it is.
My office is small and windowless and closed to the natural elements, but it hums and swells with philosophical questions and spiritual contemplations, with mixed-language idioms and jokes. I am drinking tea on a break and evaluating the state of my nails. “Lusya,” says a woman I am sure I've never met. “What are you thinking about so seriously?” Moved by the Russian spirit of things, I answer with seriousness, “Life.” The woman, who is somewhat brusque, flashes her gold teeth at me in approval.
Over lunch, conversations of similar import commence. Is the lychee fruit related to a leech? Is couscous the American kasha? What exactly is a bad romance, in the GaGa sense? What are the origins of the term “Limp Bizkit?” Is being married on the Sims really so different from being married in real life? Are we all just controlled by aliens? Where can you find a decent banya in this town, one where you're allowed to sip beer while you steam? In the morning, Vanya asks me how I am. “I'm fine,” I say like an American, but in Russian. “And you?” “Everything is terrible,” he says. I spit out my coffee laughing, but I should know better, that he is serious, because Russians are when it comes to these things.
IX.
As the only possessor of a United States birth certificate, I am exempted from staff meetings and USSR t-shirt uniforms, but I sense that I am a step outside the ring in almost every other respect as well. This constant need to prove yourself on behalf of your entire culture makes, it turns out, for an exhausting way to spend your days, and there are a number of occasions over the course of the year when I think I might give up the Russian racket for good, get out of the business and back into English.
Over time I realize that I am prone to forgetting that the strict militancy of the Russian environment conceals the fact that there are actually no rules at all. The law of Brighton Beach is that there isn’t one: you can do whatever you want, more or less; a hangover or a desire to go to the beach is, after the most unconvincing sigh or slightest good-natured berating, a perfectly legitimate reason not to come to work. But arriving in the office each morning as an American, raised in the great tradition of defense as the best offense, I feel compelled to offer excuses for my behavior, the good and the bad, and grandiose reasons for any absences. I find that for as many things as I do not understand about them – the constantly raised voices, the endless appetite for mayonnaise – there are a lot of things the Russians do not understand about me: my willingness to wear used clothing or scuffed shoes, how I can be a Jew without a last name like Goldsteinberg, what exactly I, as a vegetarian, eat and how I stay alive, so far from my mother’s home cooking, too. But one thing Russians are very good at understanding is chaos, the dramatics of love and family, personal crises, the kind of lack of direction or tendency toward major life upheaval that may or may not afflict you, intensely and suddenly, when you are twenty-two or twenty-three.
This all comes to a head in March, when a trip to visit family turns into one of these crises, just the post-grad kind, the end-of-a-long-relationship kind. As soon as I get back to New York I decide I have to leave again, and while I am prepared to work off-site – “Telecommuting,” I tell them like I know anything about business at all, “It’s very popular in American management” – I am also prepared for the likelihood that I could be fired. But instead of chastising, the Russians swing into action, full of advice, completely in their authoritative element. On the hunt for an apartment, I ask Misha if he has ever moved within New York before and if he might recommend a moving company. “Oh man,” he says. “You’ve got me. I still live with my parents. I tried to move out three times but my mom just wouldn’t let me.” When I announce with exaggerated optimism that I am moving in with male roommates in Crown Heights, the reception is as though I have announced I’m quitting drinking during a long winter; there are sharp exhalations, some muttered disbelief at how far I’ve fallen and intimations of, “This can’t last.” Several people suggest I move to Brighton Beach instead. I entertain the idea so far as a cursory Craigslist search and setting up an apartment visit, but at the last minute I back out and don’t show. There can be, it seems just then, distinctly too much Russian in one day.
Oddly, when I return from my second trip away from New York, my employers are moved by some sort of pity or regret or other kind of mysterious Russian logic to promote me. My boss corners me and asks me about my plan for the future. Being the kind of person who consults airline ticket prices so frequently I know which days a month are best to fly from New York to LA or from New York to Chicago, I do not like to commit to any kind of plan that might keep me in one place. I swallow and tactfully say that I enjoy working with the business and hope to continue working with it somewhat longer in whatever capacity both parties agree on. My once mainly academic and survival Russian vocabulary, full of words useful for describing the Imperial legal system or ordering Baltika beer, has taken a turn toward “amateur lawyer with a taste for idioms.” “How long will you stay with us?” my boss wants to know. I say six months with a question in my voice. He says a year. I counter two years. He suggests three. It is bargaining, the Russian way of life, the trait I find to be most frustrating and advantageous at once. By the end of the conversation, he too has offered to find me a studio apartment in Brighton Beach to spare me a commute and keep me close to the fold. He takes particular joy in imagining depriving the MTA of the $89 I pay for my monthlies. The thought of relinquishing my Metrocard seems like a fate significantly worse than unemployment. “We’ll see,” I say, which is a phrase Russians like very much and use to signify the end of many conversations, their special non-committal yet all-knowing refusal to ever concede the last word.
X.
For a while, moved by enthusiasm and perhaps some post-holiday rush boredom, my boss decides to try convincing me to work longer hours, preferably ten hours a day, six days a week. For various reasons, chief among them my embarrassingly meager pay -- although spending most of my waking hours confined to a space where people think microwaving fish is acceptable is also an unappealing prospect -- I do not find this to be a reasonable expectation. I spend a week refusing to submit a new schedule. “Ten hours is not possible,” I say. “I have classes, I have another job, I have things to do,” trying a new excuse every day in the hope that one will strike my boss as sufficiently convincing, but he doesn’t give up. “Well, what’s wrong with nine and a half hours?” he asks reluctantly, like he is sacrificing something major and not just a few hundred words about translations of Dr. Spock books. After work, I fume to a few friends. They are Jewish and sympathetic. “Didn’t our great-great-grandparents work 18 hour days for their Russian overlords so they could emigrate and we wouldn’t have to?” someone asks. I outwardly agree, as carried away by American indignation as I was before by Russian moral meditation, but I stop to consider that our ancestors’ Russian bosses presumably did not try to lure them in with afternoon sake or pirozhki.
The Russians get more comfortable with me as time passes and spring arrives. When the men ask me to name my favorite alcohol and the women start asking to borrow money, I know I am more or less part of the family. They enjoy sharing with me their vast repertoire of Jew jokes, as though they believe that as a Jew I might especially understand and relate to them. When I cannot bring myself to laugh uproariously they think I may not understand. “You see,” Misha explains with patience, “It is funny because there is a thought that the Jew people are very stupid and greedy.” After a pause and a bite of potato salad he asks breezily if “Hava Nagilah” is my favorite song. Still, they take nearly endearing pains to assure me that I am not quite as bad off as other members of my culture. “You have some Irish heritage, yes? Don’t worry, that is much more important. Your children will be great drinkers.” I am not sure what scientific grounds they might have for this conclusion, but as with much of the dubious information they present as indisputable Russian fact, I accept it tacitly and with a tight smile. It is not often that I actually disagree with them entirely, but they are not to know that; such is the nature of our bond: the old believers and the new disbeliever, the confident and the skeptical confidant, the Slavs and the American.
10/19/2010
Snail Talk
by Maia Stern
Growing up in Los Angeles, I took walks around the block and found myself stepping on a lot of empty snail shells. The sharp, crunching noise kept me coming back to this one spot, guaranteed to be overloaded with empty snail houses. I never liked the gooey ooey part of the snail, and to this day I hate worms. They are gross. They don't have that nice shell to cover up their grossness. But snails have since grown on me (idiomatically, not actually grown on my body). In fact, I kinda love them.
A couple weeks into the snail house-wrecking period of my life, I was at the car wash with my mom, waiting and being bored and 6 years old or something. There was a weird gift shop vibe at this car wash. It was as if the car wash dudes were thriving off the bored little kids who got tricked into going on errands with their parents. There was this spinning puppet rack, like the kind you'd see in a toy store. Of all the fluffy and soft animals I could stick my hand into, I chose the snail puppet.
My mom bought me Snaily, the snail puppet, and from then on out Snaily officially came with me everywhere I went. Here is a picture of Snaily and I, dinning.It is easy to imagine Snaily’s fate resembling Woody’s in Toy Story 3, just chilling on the bed, waiting to get played with. But Snaily was actually a big hit in college. Rather than just a puppet, he was kind of a comforting glove. You put Snaily on your arm and you can still pretty much do anything you would normally do, it's just a little funnier looking. You forgot that you were wearing a snail and went about your business - eat a banana, turn off the light, something. My friends' evolving intrigue in Snaily and their appreciation for my random interest in all things snails made it easy to get me birthday gifts. I started to rack up on the snail paraphernalia. I left college with a snail lamp, a snail clock, a couple snail candles, a snail necklace, an I <3 Snails magnet, a snail-print cloth from straight-up Africa, a couple snail shirts and the list goes on. Nowadays, people send me sweet images of snails or photos they've taken and think of me when anything snail-related is involved.
Anytime the moment arises where one would need to draw something on a wall, or carve their name in a tree or just generally graffiti (pretend that's a verb) something, out comes a snail. It's a nice go-to and I feel pretty lucky to have it. The other day in the subway, I saw someone had drawn a snail smoking a cigarette on a poster. I think I have a doppelganger out there. That's cool.
10/12/2010
Woven Bones Interview
by Ida Griesemer
Andy, Carolyn, and Matty are in the Austin, TX band Woven Bones. When I was there in August I was talking to Andy about where we were going to meet for the interview. He said I could come to their practice space. He said there was a giant moon rock out back. I said that sounded good. When I got there, the trio took a break from playing and led me to the moon rock. Together we orchestrated a conversation, and below are the stories that came out of it. I edited out most of my prompts and left Andy's words, because that's how my man Studs Terkel used to do it. The band will be in town next week for CMJ so feel free to check their dates and catch a show.
Andy: As far as like a, "what is the coolest thing is the world that you could do?" kinda level, always in the back of my mind I think, "being in a rock band." Giving your songs to people. Having people like your songs. It's been a fantasy of mine.
Nivana, the Cure, fuckin Sonic Youth, fuckin Weezer. I mean, Jesus and Mary Chain. Velvet Underground is one of our bigger influences but I didn't even really know the Velvet Underground until I was like a senior. In high school. I grew up in a real - I got into everything through 120 Minutes on MTV. That or whatever my skater buddies listened to. My parents liked the Beatles and the Mamas and the Papas and the Kinks. And Tommy James and the Shondells. That was their biggest contribution to my record collection. Nothing too far out or wicked cool or underground or anything.
I grew up in Jacksonville, in the city, five minutes from downtown. I grew up skateboarding and playing basketball and riding my bike. Doing all kinds of shit. Skateboarder forever. My parents moved out to the burbs, far out, when I was 13. Kinda like the country. I didn't want to at the time. Because all I did was skate. And we were an hour away from downtown. But it was cool because - they were few and far between - but the kids that I met there were all really cool. I met people, and driving an hour back to town and having older friends that could do it ended up not being a problem. I did that whenever I could. And there was actually a cool punk scene of, not house parties, but more at veterans' halls and crazy shit like that, in the area where my parents lived. It was a weird time. Veterans' halls – they would just rent out a space and throw a show for a band that was on tour. It wasn’t total hickville. It was, but it was a different day and age. It's backwoods Florida but there's a beach there. There's a beach, there's a downtown, there's an urban area around downtown. It's a legit city. It's not as far behind as some people think Florida is. I mean it is, but it's not.
There was an old place called Einstein a Go Go that was on the beach. And I mean, The Breeders and Nivana and The Pixies, and The Melvins, and Arches of Loaf - all these cool bands, like Luna, right before they got big - they would come through and play Einstein a Go Go. All of the people that were older, in their late teens to mid-twenties, a lot of them are still around in Jacksonville. They've always done nights in Jacksonville. So from when I was able to go out, there was always really good indie rock/rock and roll/punk rock dance nights. Those don't exist in Austin, or lots of places. Where they just play really fucking good indie rock, and a sea of people dance. It was different places, after Einstein a Go Go. When that place went down, everybody filtered into the urban neighborhoods around downtown. There were a few places that had that kind of thing. Thursday and Saturday nights. There were two different places. Every hip kid - that's where we were all at. And we'd just get wasted. I mean, whatever 90s indie rock to whatever's cool now. They'd play all that. And all the hits. And everybody just danced their asses off and has a good time. Old school dudes would dj. It was fun. It was what we did. Compared to Austin. I mean I like dancing. You like dancing, huh Carolyn?
Carolyn: I love dancing.
Andy: Yeah, I mean I like dancing and having fun. We all like – from shitty new pop music to - I mean they'd even play whatever crazy hip hop was rad. It was just good shit that kids like. Just the regular shit that everybody loves. It was not genred-out or anything. It was just the shit and everybody danced.
Besides really crappy punk pop bands - like Limp Bizkit is from Jacksonville, really crappy shitty stuff like that - there was never really any cool bands that played good stuff. That's kinda why I moved out. I went to college and I went through a bunch of shit, and came back home and wasn't really doing anything. Everyone was still there. Everybody goes out and parties and has good taste and are good artists, but they're all armchair critics, and I mean it in the kindest way. I love everybody from there. Everybody's an armchair critic, they talk about everything, the good and the bad, smoke shitloads of weed and get wasted, but nobody ever actually participates in creativity in a fashion that they actually try to go out, and get it out. A lot of people don't do anything. They're just lazy.
I had sort of a panic attack. Actually, it was the worst job I ever had. I was working at Guitar Center. I went through a bunch of dark times. I broke up with the girlfriend I was with for years when I was in college. And then a few months later I lost myself to drug-fueled abandon. When I got my head out of that I was living at home just to get my feet on the ground again. I worked at Guitar Center. When you first work there you work in accessories. So I just knew about guitar pedals and a bunch of stuff. I knew about the stuff because I was interested in it. A lot of people work there and don't give a fuck. They're ex-musicians who were used car salesmen and got fired from that, and now they're selling musical instruments as if they were used cars.
You work on commission. You have to fade your pay. That's what they call it. To get commission on what you sell you have to outsell your hourly wage, and then you get a percentage of what you outsell. And if you don't outsell your hourly wage, your job is at risk. So they make you make these annoying phone calls to people, which I never did. I just acted like I was doing it.
I did really good and they tried to move me to guitars, which is a more money-making side of the job. I did really good the first day and as soon as I did good all the old dudes who worked there, all the sharks – I'd be talking to a customer, trying to give them the right deal for what they needed and get them out of the store. It's like, moms shopping for their sons and daughters. The kids, either they know what they want but it's too expensive but they can get something that's just as good, or they don't know what they want at all, and you want to get something that is proper for them. And all these other guys wanna do is make as much money as they can and they don’t give a fuck. You know what I mean? So they would cuss me out or try to make me look like an idiot and get loud and then swoop in and steal my customer. And I was like, "Well, I don't give a fuck. Hey, brother, I'd just rather be king shit of my little shit-fuck mountain in accessories and work back over there." I don’t give a fuck about competing with some dude who used to play keyboards for Gloria Estefan back in '85.
I was starting to write Woven Bones songs and I had a lot of stuff going. But it was so soul-sucking and fucked up. I started having all these like – the economy was just starting to fall – and they started having all these sales meetings. And they were talking. And there was all this shit. They were crazy sharks and weird shit. I was just stoked to work around instruments. Even if it was at fuckin shitty ass guitar center, it was cool. Then I worked every day of the week. I only had one day off. I basically worked from 10 until 8 at night, and I drove an hour to work in the morning and an hour home. I didn't ever get to do the stuff that I wanted to do, that I thought would be more possible because I worked in a music store. Then shit just keep getting more and more corpo and sales-oriented and weird. I sort of had this panic attack one day. I and talked to my friend in Orlando and I was like, "Dude, I'm just getting the fuck out of Jacksonville. I don't know what I'm gonna do, but all I need to do is get out of here." It's only an hour away. It's a quick move. I moved to Orlando. I worked at a vegetarian café that was family-run. I was the only employee besides the family. And I played music with my friend Curtis. We started Woven Bones up as a two piece band. When the economy crashed, a bunch of shit went awry at the restaurant. A bunch of equipment broke, like the air conditioner broke and shit. They were all kinda like, bumming around. I was like, "I know I'm the only person who's getting a non-family paycheck. A legit paycheck. I don't wanna beat around the bush or be a burden on you guys. Let me know. Because I've got some friends in Austin that told me I should move there. And I'm sure it wouldn't take a lot to move there." They were like, "Yeah. We were gonna tell you that we might need to let you go." I was like, "Well let me work until next Friday and just pay me out in cash and don't give me a check and I'll be out and everything will be cool." So that's what happened.
I've been able to get by. I get by by the skin of my teeth a lot. There's a lot – I dunno. It just seems each easier here right now for me. And it has since I moved here. I think that I was lucky that things kind of took off for our band in whatever way they took off. It's given me, even in a miniscule way, opportunities to make money doing design work and stuff like that. Just freelance. It's cheap here. I haven't lived in the best places. I haven't been as comfortable as I have been in the past. But I've been able to get by. At least for me and Matty. Carolyn's just now stepping into the role of casting aside things to play in a band. It's enabling. To get by and keep up. The town is supportive of music. We're lucky enough to have - for whatever strange reason, right when we started people paid attention to our band.
LL: How did that happen?
Andy: I dunno, do you?
Matty: I dunno. We're good?
Andy: Maybe we're good, I dunno. I had people who wanted to do our record – like Hozac – when it was just me. They heard songs on the internet. I moved to Austin with a bag of tools that enabled us to do things. A bag of tools that a lot of people don’t have. Record labels that wanted to do records. I told them to wait, that I would find a band and we would tour. There's a lot of bands these days that never leave the bedroom. They write cool records and it's 7 inches and stuff, but they're just bedroom projects. I was like, "I really don't wanna be one of those. If you want to spread my music around to the world or the internet or whatever, I would love to be in a real band and actually support it and try to do as much for you as you can do for me." It's worked out. Everything we have right now has been a successive thing of people hearing what we put out. I've never sent off demos to anybody. There's a lot of small record labels around, and we've tried to pick the best ones to work with who wanted to do stuff for us. It ended up being, as far as we can see right now, the right decision. We signed. Now we're on a label called Hardly Art, which is part of Sub Pop. Which is cool. We're all stoked on it. We're not rich. We didn't take a bunch of money, agree to get a big advance or anything. We're happy to have a home with a really good team of people behind us who genuinely like our band a lot. We signed for two records. So if our first record that we do with them totally tanks, they can drop us. But as long as we work on it, I doubt that will happen.
9/16/2010
Innuendo
by Hadar Ahuvia
soft palate craving
not souffle
or soft spells
softballs come near
sweaters may solace
/
sweater vest
turtle neck
mothball
hardball
spit
slant pitch
/
cross county parkway
Bronx river parkway
soft smelt playway
go local trainway
faster flit
expressway
sprain brook parkway
swallow circle/drive
9/08/2010
Went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back
by Marie-Helene Bertino
Greg Huffer went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. It was Jennifer’s 5th birthday. Party hats and birthday cake on the floor. The dog was on the floor. His son Jake, 7, on the floor. Goin’ out for a pack of cigarettes, Greg said. Jake held his arm in front of his sister as if protecting her from a sharp stop. Can I come?
Anne Huffer would not let her children cry after their father went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Listen children, she said. Your mother has long legs and you have tongues in your mouths. The cake on the plate in her hand shook. Jennifer, clean the cake off the floor. Jake, run the faucet. Your mother has long legs. Your father is gone.
Jennifer Huffer began doing JC Penney ads a year after her father went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Jenny on a bike. Jenny on a horse. JC Penney catalogues slip under every door in America, in every town she couldn’t spell where grown men hide. Jennifer Huffer married a Jehovah’s Witness: a religion with no birthdays. One night they went to a meeting hosted by a man who had gone out for a pack of cigarettes and had never come back. In the kitchen, men were going out for cigarettes and never coming back. In the bedroom, in the dining room, until Jennifer ran outside, in time to catch several men gunning their trucks, on their way out for cigarettes. Where’s my brother? She choked into the exhaust. Where’s my brother?
Jake Huffer had his mother’s legs. He made it onto the football team without trying out. He got bored walking around his town so at 17 he walked to another town. Then, he walked to another town. He hung on the edges of groups. No one lonelier than a good-looking man. He tried to be funny, tried a card trick. Looked up his father who was living with a woman with money. They didn’t let Jake stay; trucked away from him fast at the bus station, the woman’s blue coat sticking out of the cab’s door. Jake doesn’t know how long his father lived with that woman, or why the memory of her coat sticking out of the door comes to him now, watching his girlfriend slice through a party in a blue dress. It’s a blue she’s proud of. It’s a blue for him. Gifts repulse him. He’ll punish her for it later. He will give it to her under the awning, over and over, until she can’t look at the dress without feeling sick. I need a cigarette, he says when she reaches him. Baby, she says. You don’t smoke.
The night before Greg Huffer went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back, the Huffer family had a party. Greg Huffer picked up a guest’s banjo. Greg Huffer who did not play the banjo played on the banjo an off kilter song and sang along in a dead way. Anne Huffer, smelling like mother perfume and dishsoap, knelt so she was the same height as her children. Look at your father, she said, her breath Christmas-quick. That funny man. The laughter on the tin strings and the jangling of guests. Look, she said, listen. Their mother kneeling behind them, Jennifer and Jake could hear but not see her as all three stared at the same man.
9/03/2010
Two Alleluias
by Allyson Paty
The thefts had been small: last milk from the carton,
a moment, a glance, the buttons from my dress.
We sat where you gutted the fish, the house dark,
and our suitcase zippers glared back at the sun.
Passengers emptied onto the street the way doctrine
charges from the apse. A bus hissed, whimpered, and
lurched away. Your watch ticks out on the nightstand
until the little black beetles overcome the flour.
The gifts were also small: a bistro matchbox, a touch,
a shiver, a clover dried and pressed in the middle of a hymnal.
The cat would not stop licking her haunch. I, too,
sweltered in my fur.
8/24/2010
Letter in Retrospect
by Emma Barrie
Dear Attractive Male Friend of My Mother's,
You were forty-three. Me? Thirteen going on thirty-five. I loved the way you loved your wife and child, but let’s face it: you and me, we were meant for each other. The way you’d sometimes wink at me from across the table at Mom’s dinner parties. That time I came back from the orthodontist, and you told me not to worry, that I really pulled off the clear braces look. You let me sit in the front seat sometimes even though I didn’t weigh enough to set off the airbags. Remember us? That’s when we were wild. When nothing mattered.
All those times we high-fived, I knew what you were really thinking: how could I be so young, and yet possess such an old soul? How could I see straight through your façade and deep into your heart? How did I understand you in a way even your closest friends never could? I couldn’t say for sure. But if I had to guess, I’d say it was because we both really loved Seinfeld.
I liked your button-down shirts. Your leather wallet. Your grown-up accoutrements. At my Bat Mitzvah, you told me I kicked ass. Way to be subtle. Thanks for the present, by the way. That Tiffany’s bracelet with that dangling silver heart. You may as well have just flat-out told me you couldn’t wait until I was legal.
I forgive you. I forgive you for bringing her to my piano recital. For putting your arm around her as you told me you loved my interpretation of Jolly Old Saint Nicholas. For ruffling my hair and robbing me of all my dignity. I forgive you.
Hey.
Remember that time we all went out for ice cream? I let you try some of my rainbow sherbet with bubble gum chunks inside. I had never shared a spoon with anyone before. I just thought you should know.
X
Emma
8/10/2010
What we had on our hands
by Marie-Helene Bertino
I said to my brother there’s a woman swimming in the saloose.
Where. He raised his hand against the bay’s light.
I pointed.
She was going in and out of the water. I lost her in the sun then she was back.
Stupid. He kept digging.
I watched for another moment then I kept digging, too.
Excuse me, a voice said. We looked up and both of us blinded.
She was naked except for unsexy underwear. She held her breasts in her hands.
My brother told me later I stepped behind him like the summer we saw a bat make epileptic circles above us. He stared. Even at 14, not a boy who looked away to save a
woman’s feelings.
They took my clothes. She used her head to point to the water. Boys, I think.
My mother and father out of the house. What is going on here?
They took my clothes.
My mother back into the house.
My father looked at a terracotta pot like he was thinking of planting.
My brother laughed. The woman said it’s not funny.
My mother came back with a sweater that had buttons shaped like barrels. The woman put it on. Her underwear was wet. Her eyes took longer than her neck to change positions.
Who can we call said my mother.
No family the woman said. My keys were in the clothes they took.
She buttoned the sweater wrong. She seemed more naked than before.
My mother said there must be someone.
The woman said there is no someone.
My mother’s hands worried the end of her shirt.
I said why were you swimming in the saloose?
She looked over the bulkhead where the water was blinking. It looked cool.
But the saloose is sewer water I said.
You have a nice family. Her breast was out.
My father stepped in front of me. Go home.
Getting dark and too far to walk.
That’s not our problem.
She was taller than him. Nice people would ask me to dinner.
My father to my mother: call the police. He held out his arms, anticipating quick
movement. Justine, in the house.
I said no.
We could hear my mother on the phone, explaining.
The woman sat on the dirt. I just wanted to swim and those assholes took my clothes. She stared at me. She was slow or injured.
My father’s fingers around my wrist pulled. I went into the house. I watched
from the window, fascinated and bored. I poured a glass of iced tea then the police were there. They pulled by her arms. She yowled. Her underwear came down when they
carried her. I heard her crying. I drank my iced tea.
The car pulled away.
My brother banged into the house. What we had on our hands was an es-cap-ee!
Escaped from where I said and he said he didn’t know.
That woman that day, she opened me.
Chicken and rice for dinner.
7/29/2010
Half About Julie, All About Me
by Michael Pollock
The longest and most frequent pause in my life, a year out of college, comes after being asked, “So, what do you do?” and right before I answer, “I wait tables.” Obviously, I do other things but the asker doesn’t mean, “How do you party?” The asker means, “What do you do to make a living? How do you financially support yourself?” The pause doesn’t come from my dislike of the job - I like it a lot - but from my inability to see beyond the title of waiter when I am forced to define myself. I pause because it takes a moment to deal.
Last week, while working a busy brunch, a girl, a cute one nonetheless, asked if this was my place. If she had not been with her hung-over boyfriend, I would have taken this for flirting. Still, I felt flattered, as if I had been mistaken for a celebrity, and not Topher Grace this time. Inarguably, being a restaurateur is far better than being a waiter. Besides the perks of more money and the ability to run shit, a restaurateur, like an artist or musician, receives a unique suffix that sets him or her apart from the rest of us laborers.
My boss, Julie, actually owns the French restaurant where I work. However special her label, it is still a label. Along with having this label pushed upon her, Julie is also forced to be the face of the restaurant. She is always there, and whenever people wave through the window, they are waving at Julie. Most restaurant owners cannot separate themselves from their restaurant. The egomania portrayed on these chef and kitchen reality shows is, unfortunately, pretty spot on. Julie lacks my pause-inducing anxiety not only because she has a more esteemed, title but also because she possesses a remarkable ability to separate herself, her identity, from her restaurant and whatever label she is forced to declare upon meeting someone new.
Even while at work, Julie doesn’t care about how her restaurant is perceived. Last Thursday, Glen, a bartender from down the block, came to eat before his shift. He asked if we had this whiskey or that rum. Could we make this cocktail or that specialty shot? He was showing off, pluming his peacock feathers, and Julie was having none of it. She only responded, “absolutely,” then poured him a glass of rose with a silent smile. The bartender’s posturing is pretty common on our block filled with bars and restaurants that, like us, have been around for about five years, some less. Because he was about to head to work, Glen was dressed like a greaser – his hair was slicked back and every article of clothing that could be cuffed, was. This is how the owner of that bar dresses and how he makes all of his employees dress. The bar is a scene straight from The Outsiders and very much imbrued with the owner’s identity.
Julie, though, she couldn’t give a fuck about what I wear.
This isn’t to say that Julie doesn’t love her restaurant, her bar or the bottles that fill it. We have a drink each night before we close and she stares at the many French liqueurs that line the shelves. I think I have caught her petting them. We taste the anis flavored Pastis. I think of how much I hate black liquorish but she thinks of her college where they would drink it without ice while “talking about Foucault and so much worse.” She cuts a slice of orange for the Lillet Blanc that I won’t be able to sell and tells me about the bull fights that happen in the south of France every August. I’m sure she could tell me similar stories about the stained wood tables or the curtains that she changes every season.
I take comfort in the fact that Julie is older than I am, and I hope that my pause will diminish with time. During slow shifts, with nothing to do, I imagine what Julie might have been like at my age. Every version is a total babe but one of them - my favorite – is like me because she also has trouble telling people who are future art dealers and politicians that she is a waiter. She has trouble, not because of their jobs and not even because of her job which she likes, but because she is afraid that this waiter that she proclaims to be, this self assigned classification, will get in her way of actually being herself which she will, in the end, become.
7/13/2010
Cozy Space Mugz
audio by Green Gerry
image by Micah Moore
Download - Cozy Space Mugz
chick-fil-angster
2009
film
408 x 567 pixels
2009
film
408 x 567 pixels
6/25/2010
Big Bridge Diary: Part 4
by Chen Si
Translated by Spencer Woodman
Chen Si spends his weekends on Big Bridge which crosses China's Yangzte River, attempting to stop people from jumping. This translation of excerpts from his blog will appear on Low Log in four parts.
Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
10-20-2008
4:50 p.m. I am patrolling the South Fort section of the Big Bridge, when I notice a woman. She looks several times over the edge of the bridge. I cross the street and come up beside her and try to get her to tell me what was wrong. She just cries. I advise and persuade many women who come to the bridge and they say not one word.
At 6:00 p.m. her cell phone rings and she answers. On the other line is the voice of a man who tells her that he wants her to stay [on earth] and live on. He arrived 15 minutes later and drove her away in his car. He told me that this situation [the attempted suicide] was all the result of a little misunderstanding.
08-17-2008
Tuesday morning: a man darted through the bridge’s traffic and — despite the pleas of onlookers - jumped into the Yangzi. Thursday morning: at the South Castle section, a young man plunged off the Big Bridge and died on the spot as he hit the concrete below. Friday morning: a young woman at the South Castle section jumped into the Yangzi, hit just by the water’s edge. She died on the spot.
06-22-2008
A middle aged man, standing right by an armed guard jumped off the bridge. His body was found in a flowerbed.
6/23/2010
Interview with Sam Herring: Part 2
by Ida Griesemer
I met Sam Herring, the front man of Future Islands, on April 4th before his show at Glasslands. We strolled around a corner and sat on a little ledge and talked for a little while. This is the second and final part of the interview.
View: Part 1
LL: Who was writing the songs?
SH: Gerrit and William worked out the songs, and then I would come in and write to them. It was never successful with me writing words first and then coming to those guys, because I don't know how to speak in music language. And that kind of goes back to my hip-hop roots of freestyle, feeling a song, feeling how it makes me feel and translating that emotion into words. And also just riffing off something. Because usually when we play songs live they aren't completely written yet. It's kind of fractured. I'll have a chorus, or a first verse and a chorus, and we'll just play it and see what comes out of my mouth. If there's melodies that work I might hold on to them.
LL: So a lot of it is improvisation?
SH: Well, definitely in the beginning process of writing songs it's a lot of improv and I don't wanna say jamming, but definitely jamming and feeling things out. I mean, Gerrit's the principal songwriter now. Because now that we don't have a drummer - for the last year and a half we haven't had a drummer – so Gerrit's had to do double duty. He's doing drum programming and keyboards. That allows him to go in and take over the structure. And then William comes in. It used to be that Eric would kick something simple and those guys would work together and figure something out, but now Gerrit's taken that over. That's been interesting because Gerrit has his own mode. But it's good because we really just need things to write with. For me, I just need some music.
LL: How did the more pop feeling come about? You said that it was a little bit sloppy at first, but did it become something that you were all very comfortable with and excited about?
SH: Well, I don't know. It was always kind of shaky. I mean it was fun, no doubt. Our first band was three keyboards and a bass guitar. And then we immediately went from having the electronic drum beat to having a live drummer behind us. And for me personally, as a performer, that propelled me in a different way. I was already very charismatic and frenetic lead singer, but having the drums was dynamite under me. It became more of a punk band at first. It was much faster and much – William's bass playing style changed a lot in the very beginning. But we slowly started writing deeper songs, with Eric. But I really feel like it was after Eric left, when we got back to the three of us, that we started writing at the pace that we wanted with the songs. Future Islands really sped up. But we'd always been a pop band. Since the beginning we were making pop. Even if we weren't trying or didn't realize it, we were making pop music. It was like, catchy choruses and keyboards and dance-y drum beats – stuff like that. It was interesting for me because it allowed me more space to go as a performer, having the drums behind me. Because when that got taken away, when we were without a drummer after two years of having one, it felt really alien to not have that behind me anymore. And then I had to fight to get back to who I was before. And then I've finally found a medium between then. That power, and also that poise, as a performer. To move like I have a drum kit behind me. To know what that was like helps me to tap into that. So that's important, to me personally. I've never really thought about that before.
LL: What brought you to Baltimore?
SH: The Wham City scene. Those are really good friends of ours. Of course Dan Deacon, who is the most instrumental member of Wham City. I think the first time we played with Dan was either late 2003 or early 2004. So it was right in the beginning of Art Lord. And you know, when we got into town there were only a couple bands that were really doing anything. Valiant Thor who is now a huge warp tour band, they were like touring with Motorhead and they've done tours with the Misfits, just like, really crazy shit. They were the dudes who had been around town for a while and they were like the band. Then there was the Kick Ass, who I was a big fan of. Instrumental. At their best, they sounded like Tortoise. Really intricate metal. It's kind of like jazz-metal. And then we came along, and the scene was kind of dead and we started something up. Just started up a house party scene again. Because there had been one in the past, but nobody was really doing anything. So we started a band because we wanted to play a party, play for our friends and bring people together. So we started a small scene, a house party scene, and became pretty quickly – thanks to the Kick Ass, they put us on our first club bill, opening for them in Greeneville – and we started to get a following. So when Dan came around, his first time a guy in town booked him and asked if we would headline the show to bring this guy in. This weird noise guy. And that's when we met Dan. It was his first tour ever. We didn't really become friends that night. We met, and he enjoyed our set. It was kind of funny, because his set was so weird to me. It was different than anything I had heard or seen, and it was just kind of like – I didn't know what to make of it. And it wasn't until another six months after that when we played with him at this noise fest in Hampton, Virginia at this place called the Rat's Ward that I got to see him perform as a performer. That’s the thing – Dan's taken back the stage now, come to present time, but until we were on that tour with him this time last year, he hadn't performed on a stage in something like four or five years. He would be out in the crowd. And you don't really get to see Dan, but he was one of my favorite performers. Extremely - he just had so much energy and movement, and was a very strange, enigmatic character, like he is. But I was really drawn to that and we became friends doing that thing. And he started coming down to Greenville a lot because he was blown away by Greenville that first time, and then the subsequent times, because we had something really interesting going. We did tours with him and we would play to nobody, but in Greenville, you know, we were kings. And Dan would come and we'd just have these crazy parties and just have a good time. So we became really good friends. And then basically he moved to Baltimore in the beginning of '05 or late '04, and shortly after that we did our last tour as Art Lord and the Self Portraits with Dan. And then we broke up. Even back then he was pushing us to move to Baltimore. That was at the very beginning of Wham City and Baltimore. It was kind of an entity before it was in Baltimore, at SUNY Purchase. So we eventually just got to Baltimore. When I moved to Baltimore, I thought that Future Islands was just gonna break up, because I was living in Ashville, North Carolina, Gerrit was in Greenville, William was in Raleigh. We weren't making any music. Eric had quit the band. Partly because I was a dickhead. It was a bad thing. I kinda fucked up. And I just thought it wasn't gonna happen, because Gerrit didn't want to move. He didn't want to move to Baltimore. And I was like, "I'm gonna move to Baltimore and I'm gonna start a new band and I'm gonna do my thing. There's musicians there, I'm gonna go do that. This is what I want with my life." And then William's like, "Oh, I'm gonna do that too!" And we're like, "Awesome! We can start a band!" So William actually beat me up there, he got there in November '07 and I got that January '08 and then shortly after that Gerrit split up with his long time girlfriend and was like, lonely as fuck in Greenville, North Carolina. And we're like, "Move to Baltimore!" and against his will power he moved to Baltimore. And things have been great for us. It really changed – well of course we're all finally in the city for the first time in almost two years. I was cleaned up, doing really good, was happy about stuff, and had my friends again. And it was interesting because I had to re-learn that friendship. My oldest friends, but it was kind of weird at first because I had been away for so long. I mean you know, you change, you grow. It's weird to think, because I'm turning 26 next month, but that was only – I was 23 when I moved to Baltimore. Because I felt so much older. I felt like an old man. But I wasn't that old. So we got up there and things were cool. We had a lot of friends. It was mainly because of the friends, and just knowing that something was going on there. But it really helped us because we didn't really fit into North Carolina. We were always just seen as this weird dance band, because we were a dance band and there aren't really a lot of dance bands in North Carolina. Or bands that don't use a guitar. Everybody would write us up and write us off as weirdo, bizarre musicians. And then when we got to Baltimore is was like, "These guys are the new serious guys in Wham City." And we were like, "Whoaaa! We're serious, man!" We were so happy. And now we go back to North Carolina and they're like, "The prodigal sons have returned! They're coming back!" So we get a lot of respect now. But it was like, us going away was us trying to get out of a comfort zone. Trying to get out of that comfort zone of our college town, or our hometown, or anything that would suck us in. And Baltimore kind of put us on edge. We were a little afraid when we moved there. We were all afraid. Not only of the city but just of the circumstances and being outside a comfort zone, and that propelled us and pushed us to do something. But also it a little bit pushed us to get out of the city and go on tour! Hahaha. But also made us stronger friends, because we had each other. I do feel that that element of fear or that element of struggle does bring people together and creates strong bonds between people. You know, when you're all in it together. I mean, just getting by in general. Then again, in New York I can only imagine it's so much harder to get by because it's so fucking expensive. Baltimore is chill as far as that goes. Prices are still pretty low. I mean it is going up, because there's a lot of gentrification going on too. A ton of gentrification. So the city's being cleaned up. And that's good and bad.
It really did work. We were trying to be more serious. We went to Baltimore and we just went on tour. In the first year and half that we were there, we were gone for a year of that on the road. And that was what we wanted to be doing. We didn't have jobs, we were out of school, our girlfriends had left. It was like, "This is your life now." So it was kinda interesting.
LL: Has Baltimore remained a city that has a lot to offer for you as a creative community?
SH: Yeah. You've got the school feeding a lot of that. You've always got fresh, young kids, art students coming in, and they start their band or grab a warehouse spot and they're always making art or going to shows, and that's important. But then again, there's a huge transplant just from the outs, and I didn't really know where that started. I mean, I still feel new to Baltimore. We've only been there two years. I definitely can't speak for Baltimore, like what the city is or what it has been, because I am still one of the newbies. It's interesting. Like my friend Denny from Double Dagger, the drummer, he's one of the only musicians in Baltimore I know that is from Baltimore. And he tells me crazy stories about going to shows when he was 13, 14, 15. Just kinda wild.
It really is a hub. You have to pass through Baltimore going between the South and New York. It's always been a hub. But there's tons of musicians, a lot of artists, interesting people. People are doing things, and that's what's cool. There's always something going on. Sometimes you have to get out. I miss North Carolina a lot. We definitely won't get out of Baltimore for a little while. But we do all miss the South. That vibe. If we moved back home now it would be a bad move. We'd fall into old spells. But it's comforting. Like, "One day I shall return."
