Someone Else's Sick Fantasy

Insurrections, mistaken identity, and some sad news about Golondrina

Yesterday I watched the video shown during the opening arguments to Trump’s second impeachment. Every time I watch footage of the insurrection, I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. A visceral feeling that is also the memory of a feeling, the feeling of being caught up in a mob, a feeling that anything might happen, a feeling that’s akin to dread, the kind the mind refuses to believe. 

When I lived in Arizona it was an annual tradition among our group of friends to go to Las Vegas for New Year’s Eve. One year things got a little out of control on the Las Vegas Strip. That year silly string was really big. It seemed like hundreds of people were selling cans of silly string on the street and revelers were spraying each other with it. Harmless, right? 

Some drunk guy shimmied up a pole to a traffic light. It didn’t seem like he was going to pull it off, but the crowd cheered him on and he somehow made it. When he reached the top he lit a cigarette and acted all nonchalant, as if he wasn’t precariously perched three stories up in the air.

He’s going to fall, I thought to myself and then someone fired an empty can of silly string at him. It missed, but now others were chucking cans at him. More and more people got in on the act. A few minutes before, they were cheering this guy on, and now they were trying to knock him down? What was wrong with these people? What were they trying to accomplish?

I started to get a sour feeling in my stomach. The faces of the people trying to hit the drunk guy with the cans were nauseating, real Day of the Locust-type lunacy. 

After the first volley, some people in the mob rushed forward to collect the cans that had fallen short or bounced off the traffic pole. Standing much closer now, they started firing them at the guy, who was now trying to make his way back down. Cans were bouncing off his neck, shoulders, and back. Some went sailing past his head and into the marquee for O’Shea’s, the schlock Irish themed casino. When glass from shattered light bulbs started raining down on me, I realized I needed to get out of there, but there was nowhere to go. There were people on all sides pushing in as I was pushing out. It felt as though reality was breaking down and taking on the shape of a nightmare. 

And then it was over. The drunk fellow made it back down to the ground, and the second his feet hit the asphalt the crowd cheered and high-fived and screamed “Happy New Year.” He was one of them again, but I left the scene shaken and disturbed.

What happened at the capitol was very different. This was a planned, well-funded maneuver with a stated purpose of stopping the certification process. Everyone who went to the capitol had their own motive for being there. Their own misguided dream. Watching it unfold, I wondered how many of them were being carried along on someone else’s sick fantasy. Some moron with a megaphone: GATHER UP THE CANS! ON MY SIGNAL, HIT THEM WITH THE SILLY STRING! 

(Silly string, I have learned, has been used by soldiers to detect tripwires.)

I don’t mean to make light of what happened on January 6. Everyone committed crimes that day should be prosecuted. What the Capitol Police went through that day is agonizing to think about. In the video footage, you can see the irreality washing over their faces. This is the Capitol. This can’t be happening… 

But it did happen.

And it’s still happening and you better believe these extremists aren’t arming themselves with cans of silly string.

PsssSST…

Thanks for all the kind words about my new book project: Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records. As promised, each week I’ll write about some aspect of the book that has captivated my attention. You can thank Beau, a longtime friend and loyal reader of Message from the Underworld (Hi Beau!), for the title of this section. Have a better one? Send it in! Or, if you have any questions at all, go right ahead and ask. 

What does an average work week look like for me? I work on the book every day, and by work I mean actual writing. (This year, for example, I’ve taken exactly one day off from writing.) I started out writing a page a day and bumped it up to two pages after I found my voice. Then I took it back down to one. One thing about daily writing quotas is there’s always a danger of writing to get the words down. I find this can be an issue when I’m writing at night and I’m tired and just want to be done with it. I mostly write in the morning and give myself as much time as it takes. Sometimes I’m done by 10 or 11 but usually I wrap up my writing between 12 and 1pm. Of course, writing is the tip of the iceberg. 

If I have an interview, I try to schedule it for the middle of the day. I’ve been averaging between one and three interviews a week. I’ll talk a bit more about my interview process down the road because I’ve been doing something new that really cuts back on transcribing time. The interviews are the most enjoyable part of the process and I’ve spoken with some fascinating people, but preparing for them can be anxiety-inducing. This week I’m speaking with Lisa Fancher of Frontier Records.

I’m also doing a ton of reading and research. Sometimes I’ll read a book all the way through (like the book about “Louie Louie”) but most of the time I just take what I need and move on. It’s especially gratifying when I find something that’s already on my shelf (like right now I’m rereading Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital for the extensive Bad Brains coverage) but I love combing through a new addition to my ever-expanding punk rock (and punk-adjacent) library.

I finished a really good book last week called Taking Punk to the Masses: From Nowhere to Nevermind. The book was put together by Jacob McMurray who is the Director of Curatorial, Collections & Exhibits at the Museum of Pop Culture. When I visited the museum several years ago, it was called EMP, but is still located in a trippy-looking museum complex designed by Frank Gehry on the grounds of the Space Needle at the Seattle Center. The book was conceived as a catalog for an exhibit about Nirvana “within a larger context of the development of Punk from the mid-1970s onward.” (Click to see images of the actual exhibit.)

The book has a really cool format, which shouldn’t be surprising considering McMurray’s curatorial vision (he’s also a graphic designer). A typical spread leads with a full-bleed photo (or photo of an illustration) followed by a brief description of the content and what it represents, which is then sewn up with two or three quotes. The book succeeds because of its narrow scope: a look at the punk rock bands that inspired Kurt Cobain, Nirvana, and other musicians that created the perfect storm of the Seattle scene. 

Ze Whiz Kidz circa 1970

One of the most surprising things I learned was that before Tomata du Plenty started with the Screamers with Tommy Gear in L.A., he was part of a Seattle drag performance troupe called Ze Whiz Kidz that mixed avant-garde theater with sexed-up glam. He moved to New York, caught the punk rock virus, came back to Seattle, started the Tupperwares, and because there was virtually nowhere to play moved to L.A. 

What does this have to do with SST? Absolutely nothing. Actually, that’s not true. Tomata’s bandmate, K.K. Barrett, had an office at the Silverlake Conservatory of Music that he let Keith Morris and I use when we were working on My Damage. So there’s your SST connection. Anyway, I thought it was fascinating. (Someone should write a book about the Screamers.) 

When I’m not reading, writing, conducting interviews (or transcribing those interviews), I’m watching documentaries and listening to podcasts, namely You Don’t Know Mojack, which is tackling every record in the SST catalog in order. It’s an awesome endeavor and the hosts, Ryan and Brant, are incredibly knowledgeable about many genres of music. They start each episode with a spiel about a book, documentary, or record that is connected in some way to SST. It was Ryan’s spiel about Taking Punk to the Masses that not only alerted me to the book but convinced me I had to have it. 

I’m Not Greg Graffin

One of the stranger things that happened to me while working on Do What You Want with Bad Religion was being mistaken for Greg Graffin on a regular basis. Not once or twice but many, many times. The first time it happened was in Las Vegas when I was working on a piece about punk rock parents at Punk Rock Bowling. I was interviewing a young woman and her daughter and although she’d agreed to the interview she was acting kind of weird. A few minutes into the interview she came back to herself and said, “You’re not Greg Graffin.” 

But then it kept happening. I won’t go into all the details as it will spoil the fun of the zine I have planned about traveling with Bad Religion in 2018 but it became a thing. 

Fast forward to last weekend when I received a notification on Instagram. I’d been tagged in a post about the best punk rock singers of all time. It was early Sunday morning and I hadn’t had my coffee yet and I was confused as to what this had to do with me. I scrolled through images of Joey Ramone and Joe Strummer and eventually landed on this. 

Not Greg Graffin

Now Greg Graffin truly is one of the best punk rock singers of all time. But this isn’t Greg Graffin. It’s me. 

Although we are about the same height, have similar builds, wear glasses, and *ahem* similar hair styles, there is one feature that sets us apart: my arms are covered in tattoos; Graffins’ are not. 

But it still happens. Even El Jefe thought we were related though that’s a story for another day. 

First of all, the website in question is from Indonesia, where Bad Religion is extremely popular, so I’m guessing there were some language obstacles. Graffin has written several books so perhaps the editors assumed he had written Do What You Want and grabbed the author photo, except they didn’t grab the author photo. They grabbed a different photo snapped by Clair McAllister, who does amazing work. It’s all rather bizarre.

And Now for Some Sad News

As of February 1, 2021, Golondrina is officially out of business. For the last four-and-a-half years, I’ve been proud to be part of a San Diego arts collective that runs a small shop in Barrio Logan. Well, last weekend we officially emptied it out and turned in the keys. 

The shop was a side hustle for six artists, including Nuvia and myself, a gathering place, a way to support each other and the Barrio Logan community. We had guest artists from all over the city, state, and even other parts of the country. We had book signings with Keith Morris and Lol Tolhurst. Most importantly, we made art and supported each other. But we’ve been paying rent on a store that hasn’t opened since last March and after the funds ran out from a small grant we received to help keep our doors open in December and January, we decided to pull the plug. 

For me, it was a place to support my friends work. Sure, occasionally I’d sell a book or a zine and talk about my writing with people who came through the door. It was mostly a labor of love and I was happy if I made enough to cover my rent. Friends from out of town visited with their families. Many of you stopped by just to say hello and I can’t tell you how much I miss that right now. 

The shop also inspired me to make linocut prints, enamel pins, and the occasional t-shirt. The good news is Nuvia and I have a studio down the street from where the shop was located and we’ll continue making art and supporting other artists and businesses in the community. I’ve set up a mail station in the studio so I can package things up quickly and easily and I’m there a couple times a week. Right now I’m ready to ship books, zines, and pins at my Etsy store. And soon, today in fact, I’ll be looking for ways to make some prints available as early as this weekend. 

Thanks to everyone who made Golondrina such a special part of our lives. As they say in Scooby Doo, as one door closes, another trapdoor opens underneath you...