Don’t Even Worry About Crime Anymore

I keep thinking of Russia and Dinosaur Jr and Nina Simone’s Gum

When I was in the Navy, I was standing watch on the bridge when our vessel had an encounter with a Russian warship.

I can’t remember which watch station it was—helmsman, lee helmsman, messenger of the watch—nor do I remember where we were—somewhere in the Pacific Ocean—but those details aren’t important. Our ship, the USS Meyerkord, a converted destroyer escort serving as a diesel-powered submarine hunter, was cruising around the Western Pacific when we received word from the ship’s Combat Information Center that a Russian warship’s fire control systems had locked on to us.

In other words, we were now a target.

The mood on the bridge got very tense.

Prior to getting underway, I was very cavalier about my role as a member of a warfighting unit. To be honest, I didn’t take any of it seriously. The rah-rah bullshit was for people who didn’t know better. This was the navy, not the marines. I was a deck ape: an unskilled, uneducated laborer. In the pecking order of the military-industrial complex I was little more than a janitor. My tool was a paint scraper and I wanted to keep it that way.

I was so out of touch I tried to paint a peace sign on the inside of my ball cap with a stencil pen and drew the logo for Mercedes Benz instead.

Then, as we were steaming toward Hawaii, our first stop on our way to the Persian Gulf, an Iraqi jet fighter fired a pair of Exocet missiles into the USS Stark, killing 37 sailors and everything changed. The commanding officer announced we were in wartime cruising and urged us to stay “battle ready.” That meant General Quarters wasn’t just a drill anymore. I spent many hours at my station in the forward magazine where the ship’s heavy artillery was stored.

The year was 1987—years away from the collapse of the USSR. The Cold War was very much in effect. I grew up on the films WarGames, The Day After, and Red Dawn. During our encounter with the Russian warship, I knew all it would take was an ill-considered decision, a panicked officer, or someone with an itchy trigger figure to initiate the sequence that would end in mutually assured mass destruction, nuclear winter, men and women huddled in hovels roasting cats and dogs over tire fires.

As our ship responded to the threat by training its weapons on the Russian warship, I wondered if I was being given a front row seat to the end of the world. Was this how it would go down, two vessels engaged in a stupid game of cold war chicken?

All the Russian warship had to do was alter its course to sound the alarm and send the entire ship’s crew into battle stations.

The Russian warship didn’t change its course. It went on its way and we went on ours. It’s possible that some of the sailors on board never knew about the encounter. I just happened to be on the bridge. Later, I’d find out that this kind of thing happened all the time. The Russians liked to fuck with American warships by training their weapons on them and sending hostile messages.

If anything, this made me feel worse about the situation. In my mind, this made an accident much more likely, increasing the odds that one day a naval officer in a really bad mood—Russian or American, it didn’t matter—was going to take things to the next level and there would be no going back.

So when I heard the news about the Ukrainians on Snake Island who responded to threats from Russia’s navy with “Fuck off, Russian warship,” I cheered. For me, it was personal.

That said, I never hated the Russian heads of state the way I hate Putin. We’re talking about a man routinely murders journalists. How many has he killed? So many that it has its own Wikipedia entry.

Putin doesn’t just stop at killing journalists. He routinely goes after his enemies at home and abroad and has ordered scores of extra-judicial killings. In 2006, he made it legal to assassinate extremists on foreign soil. He essentially gave himself a license to kill and has used it repeatedly, including as recently as 2018 when he attempted to murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter with nerve agents in London. His thugs carelessly disposed of the weapon where it was discovered and resulted in more deaths. Can you imagine if that happened in Los Angeles, New York, or Washington, D.C.?

I think about it all the time, but what matters today is what’s happening in Ukraine. I am heartened by the resolve of the Ukrainian people. I am enthused by the way the EU is rallying around the beleaguered nation. MI am relieved that after four years of Trump doing everything in his power to weaken NATO the alliance is stronger than ever.

Between five years of MAGA nonsense and two years of anti-vaccination madness, it feels strange to see the world responding in a unified way to Putin’s madness. There is still plenty of disinformation, misinformation, and bad poetry being circulated, but it’s a welcome change as the free world rallies around Ukraine and sends it support.

The nation will need it. As I type this Putin is ramping up his shelling of soft targets, a euphemism for murdering civilians, because that’s what Putin does.

So yes, always and forever, Fuck off, Russian warship.

Fuck off, Vladimir Putin.

And fuck off to the right-wing politicians and pundits who have been toadying up to Putin and his murderous totalitarian regime in plain sight. With the eyes of the world on Ukraine, we see you for what you are.

PssSST! (Dinosaur Jr Edition)

I went to see Dinosaur Jr for the first time last week. I went with a friend (Hi Josh!) to the North Park Observatory and ran into another reader of Message from the Underworld (Hi Gary!).

The experience was much more subdued than when I was there for the Circle Jerks the week before, nor were there as many people in the room. It was easy to move down closer to the action and I could have gone all the way to the stage if I so desired but to be honest there wasn’t all that much action to get close to.

Dinosaur Jr sounded great and despite everything I’ve heard about J Mascis’s love of loud music, it didn’t seem too terribly loud. The sound at the North Park Observatory is consistently good and is one of my favorite places to see a show in San Diego. The band played a mix of songs from all eras of its history, including material from the new record Sweep It into Space, which I like quite a bit. Dinosaur Jr also dedicated the song “Gargoyle” from its debut album to Mark Lanegan. In the mid-80s, before it added “Jr” to its moniker, the band played with Screaming Trees and Lanegan told me it was so loud he had to leave the room.

Dinosaur Jr followed up “Gargoyle” with “Freak Scene,” which was the highlight of the night for me. It was much more raucous and epic-sounding and a clear highlight in what was otherwise a fairly mellow night—a bit too mellow for my taste. After every song Mascis tuned his instrument, which was odd because he was constantly switching out his guitars. One reason guitarists do this is so that the guitar tech backstage can tune the guitar that’s not being played. What’s the point of even having a guitar tech if you’re going to tune your guitar on stage after every song?

Mascis’s attention to detail is well documented, and his desire to achieve the best possible sound is laudable, but stopping the show after every song sucked the energy out of the room. Cheering at the end of a song only to recognize the opening notes of the next one, making you cheer even louder, is one of the reasons why experiencing live music feels so good.

A recent acquaintance sent me a one-minute clip from the Turnstile show in LA last weekend and there was more energy in that 60-second video than in the entire Dinosaur Jr performance. That’s not a fair comparison. Turnstile plays faster songs and has youth on its side. Dinosaur Jr is older and doesn’t move around very much (although it must be said that Lou Barlow’s hair is magnificent). If Mascis and Barlow wanted to play hardcore, they would still be in Deep Wound.

I don’t have any SST-issued Dinosaur Jr records in my collection, but since the band is one of the few that have won the rights to its music back, I do have a couple of reissues, namely Bug (SST 216) by Jagjaguwar and the singles box set Visitors put out by the Numero Group that includes “Little Fury Things” (SST 152), “Freak Scene” (SST 220), and “Just Like Heaven” (SST 244).

Dinosaur Jr ended its set without saying good night or thank you or anything at all. Everyone in the room knew there would be an encore and the band went through the motions of leaving the stage so it could come back a few minutes later without comment.

The encore consisted of two songs, concluding with “Just Like Heaven,” which seemed strange. Each band has a different relationship to cover songs, but when those cover songs become more popular than the band’s original material, it can create problems for the band and its fans. Do you keep playing those songs to appease the fans or do you let them go?

I can see why the Circle Jerks played its covers of “Wild in the Streets” and “I Will Destroy You.” The band’s lineup has changed and is no longer generating new material. But Dinosaur Jr is different and for a band playing with its original lineup and writing new songs, it seemed like a strange choice.

Dinosaur Jr at North Park Observatory

Incidentally, readers of Message from the Underworld came through with responses to my question from last week: What SST bands are still playing with the lineup from its SST days?

Chandan Narayan responded that Buffalo Tom has the same lineup its always had and Liam Coper pointed out that the Descendents, whose lineup has changed quite a bit over its long history, is playing with the same crew that released its SST debut All (SST 112).  

This seems like a good place to mention that the new March Xness tournament is underway and this year it’s dedicated to pitting cover songs against one another. (Incidentally, Hüsker Dü’s cover of “Eight Miles High,” is getting destroyed by Joan Jett’s “Crimson and Clover.”) I don’t have an essay in this year’s tournament but in my bracket I have the Lemonheads’ “Mrs. Robinson” going deep into the tournament and Sinead O’Connor going all the way.

Nina Simone’s Gum

On July 1, 1999, Warren Ellis (the musician, not the comic book writer) attended Nina Simone’s last performance in London. He was so moved by the experience that after the show he went up on stage and took the piece of chewing gum that Simone had removed from her mouth and left on the towel on top of the piano before she started playing. Ellis held on to that gum and came to view it as a kind of holy relic.

Through the force of his obsession, Ellis has turned an amusing anecdote into a thoroughly engaging story about art and art-making. Although he occasionally turns his attention to his lifelong fascination with found objects and his own curious relationship to them, the focus of the book is on his relationship to the gum. I found this to be utterly fascinating, one of those books that’s meticulously specific about the nature of Ellis’s peculiar obsession but has something universal to say about our relationship to art.

It's also delightfully weird. The parts where Ellis describes his out-of-body experiences while performing Beethoven are sublime. If you have a complicated relationship with objects or have ever suspected that you love art more than it loves you, Nina Simone’s Gum might be for you.

Corporate Rock Sucks

Somehow the calendar tells me it is March, which means Corporate Rock Sucks comes out next month. I did my first interviews for the book on Tuesday and have another one scheduled tomorrow. I’ll have lots of official announcement in the weeks to come but I want to give readers of Message from the Underworld a head’s up: the official launch of Corporate Rock Sucks will take place in San Diego at The Book Catapult on April 12 and the following night, April 13, I’ll have an event in LA at Book Soup. Stand by for a deluge of announcements in the coming weeks, but you can safely mark your calendars for these two events.

This weekend I’m heading to New York and will be roaming around Brooklyn and Manhattan next week. If you have a recommendation for me, especially if there’s a show I should see, a reading I should attend, or some cool shit I shouldn’t miss, put it in the comments or drop me a line.

Stay safe and see you next week.