(dis)membership.

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Sound confession

Aside from the occasional local music festival and the various “WBLI Summer Jams” early on in my tenure of musical appreciation (Jones Beach and featured band 98 Degrees was, to a 12 or 13 year old Long Islander, a sad little slice of heaven) I’ve been reflecting upon the evolution of my musical tastes and auditory interests. I know they’ve certainly changed (and, with the benefit of retrospect, thankfully for the better). Piquing in college, as I’ve gotten older my interest in large venues and heavily populated shows has drastically decreased, though my love of live music has not. As embarrassing as this may be, let’s take a little trip down memory lane with a sampling of popular shows (those that I can recall) I’ve attended, shall we?* Though not necessarily all-inclusive or indicative of the entirety of my musical interests, it's certainly entertaining.

First, there was high school. I was, it seems, a hop skip and a jump away from a septum piercing and JNCO jeans. The fact that one of my biggest regrets in high school was miserably failing to see Tool when I had the chance says quite a lot. (The fact that I later – much later, at age 26 – seized the opportunity to meet Maynard James Keenan and shake his hand at a wine bottle signing at Whole Foods in Cambridge, MA also says a lot, and I don’t think that it’s really in my favor.) The list:

• Blink 182 (an outing with a couple of besties – c’mon, give me a break, they're tatted and pierced and loud and rebellious and they were super fun to see live)
• Moby + The Roots (the outlier… I think I got these tickets for free)
• Incubus (as a young teen listening to Incubus pre-huge international pop-like fame, I was obsessed with Brandon Boyd. I feel fortunate that I was at least lusting after a pseudo-rocker and not a Backstreet Boy)
• Hoobastank (“stank” is actually incorporated in the band name. Need I say more?)
• Linkin Park (But, you guyssss, I saw them before they were totes famous! Wait, what? Doesn’t matter? Yeah, you’re right. It doesn’t)
• Taproot (inexplicable)
• Deftones (le sigh)
• 40 Below Summer + Ill Nino (Jersey heavy metal phase? Um, yikes. Shows like this did, however, allow me to frequent CBGB’s before it was dismantled, so, win)
• Coheed and Cambria (this required a 3-hr trip to Poughkeepsie, which I was happy to make at the time)

Ah, college. I wholeheartedly thank my fabulous friends (what up, IMF?!) for introducing me to 95% of the below, in addition to helping shape my current musical consciousness. While I was exorbitantly intoxicated for a good number of these performances (again, what up, college?!) this hasn’t prevented me from repeatedly enjoying their records.

• Cursive (this was early on in college, and also during that weird phase when every indie chick got into knitting, often bringing it to shows and sitting off on the side to complete some monotone scarf or something. Sadly, I was not immune).
• Decemberists (Awesomesauce)
• Shins (kinda dicks. Just saying)
• Andrew WK (freaking fantastic show)
• Rilo Kiley (a college favorite. Salute Your Shorts, kids, and Troop Beverly Hills!)
• The Mountain Goats (this is the first of three times that I’ve seen them, and I remember absolutely nothing. Damn you, Bacardi Raspberry, damn you!)
• !!! (Chk Chk Chk) (This show was particularly memorable as Nic Offer not only called me to the stage in my absence – I had left early - but then took an article of mine that I had left behind and shoved it down his pants in protest)
• Minus the Bear (notable as, like the other shows, I did the artwork for their promotional poster and it ended up looking like “Minus the Bean”. I still call them this)
• Ellis Paul (le sigh)
• Ratatat (two dudes, two electric guitars, a Mac, some flashing lights, and a bottle of Jack)
• David Dondero (I recall nothing of note)
• The Unicorns (disbanded)
• Sleater Kinney (Feminist riot grrrls still rocking)
• Ted Leo (sans Pharmacists, I would later live in the same neighborhood as him in Cambridge. Apparently he’s all about Hollywood Express)
• Jennifer Gentle (bizarrely high-pitched, but catchy tunes nonetheless)
• Elf Power (oddly just saw them a second time, as they opened up for Jeff Mangum)
• Chromeo (sexy – totally sexy – le swoon. A tall, dark and handsome French professor at Barnard College? C’mon, it’s not even fair. A handshake was almost too much to bear)
• The New Pornographers (never really liked them, still don’t, and yet thanks to a friend and an ongoing music exchange throughout graduate school I have more music of theirs than I know what to do with)

Post-college has been a time of adjusting and re-adjusting to urban adult life, and has not, it seems, incorporated very many live shows. Increasingly scrupulous, a couple of repeats and some obvious favorites.

• The Avett Brothers (Paradise Rock Club was a super fun venue, although I was nearly overtaken by the suffocating aroma of body odor – plaid, beards, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise)
• The Mountain Goats (John Darnielle is phenomenal! I’ve seen him multiple times and I will see him again! Any time he comes to town! And there is a good chance I would travel to him as well!)
• Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel (fucking. amazing)
• No Age (looooOOOOOOuuuuuuddddddDDDDDD)
• Feist (beautiful, beautiful voice)
• Ellis Paul (I’ve seen him more times than I can count, at this point. One of the most wonderful singer-songwriters continually touring – all should attend at least one show of his)

*Read between the lines: mindless Monday afternoon activities that can take place at one’s desk with little to no suspicion.

Personal Musings on Public Space

While lounging late in bed late this morning and enjoying a delicious cup of coffee, I got to thinking. Not common practice for a Saturday morning, but the night before I’d had a particularly irritating discussion regarding specific public spaces and the experiences of certain individuals that pass through them, which directly related to gender. The discussion rapidly morphed into something of an unstructured argument, with neither party (myself included, sadly) accomplishing much more than a reiteration of the same points and making the others in tow feel just plain uncomfortable. My emotional reflexes and foggy head left me unable to clarify my thoughts on the spot, let alone get to the crux of exactly why I cared so deeply, and needed to dig my heels in right then and there. Thus, here I am, spending my Saturday morning musing over and possibly reconsidering this debate. And what I’ve decided is that this supposedly insignificant spat actually encompasses the far more significant fact that external perceptions and forces – resting on superficial external clues related to gender, or to race, or to age, or to whatever - almost always influence the ways in which individuals navigate public social spaces amongst one another. Ignoring this fact, in my opinion, is both ignorant and detrimental.

Ok, let’s rewind and zoom out and add a little current context…. Whether you watch the news, peruse the blogoshpere or religiously read The New Yorker (gosh, you so smahhhht), you’re well aware that some horrible shit’s been going down lately (always?) across the board. Shootings at movie theatres and bars, rape jokes heedlessly slung by douchey comedians in late night clubs paired with actual rape scandals on Air Force bases, Modern Family hogging four out of the six Emmy nominations for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy… And, yet, here we all are, still hanging and going about our business like “oh hey, that shit was sad or tragic or whatever, but I’ve still got only 30 minutes for lunch and I still can’t decide what to eat, and where are we going for happy hour tonight? I’m totally jazzed for the Block Party this weekend, TGIF guys!” and so on and so forth. Life’s life, you hear shitty shit in the news all the time, it’s screaming at you from the television, it’s assaulting you on the internet, and you just take it in, and you digest it, and you excrete it in whatever form allows you to successfully leave it behind as “that horrific thing that happened” (but not to you!), the “moral of the story”, the “lesson learned”, or as the impetus for future necessary precautions. As Walter White has said “we’re human. We move on”. And, we do. Humans do horrific things to other humans over and over again and, somehow both as a society and as individuals, we continue to move on.

Sometimes, however, as with the shooting that occurred in Colorado last week as one example, those incidents are so massively horrific they catch the eye of the entire nation – at the same time - and everyone takes pause in shock (in this case) of the sheer disregard for human life, for other human beings. At the risk of diminishing the severity, terror and sadness of this event, I’m not even going to try to further articulate it. I don’t need to, as it’s being replayed, elaborated upon, embellished and dissected on every news channel, across the Internet, in daily conversations and interactions. No matter your source or daily routine, odds are that since last Friday, you’ve had ample opportunity to be repeatedly reminded of this tragedy whether sought out or not. And common conversation, no matter what the venue, relates to “our” safety. A Google search of a sampling of news headlines read: “Do we need metal detectors at the movies?”; “Colorado Shooting Shatters our Sense of Safety”; “Dark Knight massacre could prompt massive, expensive security changes at movie theaters”. With this continued media onslaught alongside the events of last Friday, the experience of “going to the movies” - the “movies” as a public, social space - will inevitably be, and already has, changed. Whether or not you, as an individual, choose to continue going to the movies is somewhat less relevant than the thought process that runs as an undercurrent to your eventual actions of entering that public space or not, the decisions you make and considerations you take into account, the thoughts that run through your head, the sense of (dis)comfort and overall safety that you experience the next time you walk into a dimming theater and settle in to your seat.

Whether you live in California, Kansas or Connecticut, the extreme violence that occurred in Colorado provides a loud and unique breach in “daily goings ons” that forces the very valid reevaluation of public space in general and the movies in specific, in relation to both personal safety and sentiment. The apparent randomness allows for individuals regardless of social indicators to feel somewhat similarly - threatened or saddened or just plain aware - when moving through this specific public space. But, what if this indiscriminate air was absent?

Now, stay with me here; it’s an interesting, and for many a not all too foreign, thought. Let’s consider this same general heightened sense of awareness and potential for harm in public spaces in the context of that initial argument I participated in the other night: in relation to gender (“gender”, for the purposes of this informal chat, being either man or woman). Think about this. Picture being assaulted on the daily with news articles and stories that highlight rape and sexual violence perpetrated against individuals solely because they’re perceived (easily physically identified, based on dress or build or just general assumption) as women. Envision taking public transportation every day to or from work and, say, being confronted with the “See It, Say Something” campaigns in regard to groping on crowded buses and T’s, something that’s happened to you personally, more than once. Consider hearing a plethora of tales (let alone personal anecdotes) from and about your mom, your friend, your coworker, your cousin’s roommate’s sister, and how these women were “taken advantage of” or molested or even raped. Spread out over a day, a week or a year, these personalized micro-aggressions by no means make national noise comparable to that of a mass shooting. Their repetition and frequency over the course of a lifetime, in numerous facets of your life, however, creates a landscape in which awareness is not only beneficial but also necessary for survival. As a physically identifiable “woman”, I’m subtly inundated with reminders daily and come to critically comprehend that ensuring my own personal safety requires a keen awareness of my surroundings in no way unrelated to this classification.

Right. So for many (rather unfortunately, if seen as reflective of the current state of social kyriarchy), this is hardly news. Heck, maybe this is little more than a personal discursive exercise in better understanding my visceral reaction. But what it comes down to is that moving through public spaces smartly requires an understanding of how you’re perceived. This understanding is fluid, and it doesn’t need to change your actions, it doesn’t necessarily dictate what you do. Let me emphatically state that by no means do all women do all of the same things, frequent the same places, or interpret external information, habitual clues or micro-aggressions in the same ways. There is nary an individual – man or woman - that doesn’t have a host of additional factors (in addition to and way beyond gender) playing into their public perceptions and the way in which they’re publicly perceived. Across the board, however, these internal and external factors do remain present as we all live social and interactive public lives and they (whether implicitly or tangibly) need to be accounted for, whether going for a jog, walking down a darkened street, getting a drink at a bar solo, riding public transportation or getting the mail.