Trap Them And Queer Them

Donald Trump won the election. Serious political commentators ignored the possibility or gave it no better than a 35% chance. Then President Trump won. It wasn’t quite Dewey Defeats Truman, but it did happen and it’s where the country is now.

Since then, news about grotesque abuses of power and appointments of actual Looney Tunes to federal office dominates the papers and television.

Election night, I expected to feel rueful and happy for my friends inspired by Secretary Of State Clinton’s campaign. I’d never seen so many of those friends excited on the morning of November 8th, and I figured Secretary Clinton’s victory was inevitable. So the next evening, I marched and chanted and went home. I held up a sign saying I was queer, bloody but unbowed. It did feel like that, I did feel like whatever we’re calling culture now landed one really good punch, but shit, I was still here, and it would require more than one really good punch to knock me down.

(Image above from Monkey Defies Gravity.) Trap Them played Subterranean six days later. I’ve got a long history with Trap Them, and I count on the band for spectacular live shows, due in large measure to vocalist Ryan McKenney.  Whenever I see Trap Them, McKenney goes off, whether it’s jumping into the crowd or perching on top of the barrier like a vulture, eyes set to kill, forehead oozing blood.

McKenney broke both heels in Europe (and one ankle) and according to the show I saw on YouTube, did the following European tour in a wheelchair. It was wrong to see McKenney confined to a chair, gripping that microphone like a neck of a man who never saw McKenney coming. Trap Them performed admirably, but when the band’s most dynamic member broke both his heels, it’s unlikely to result in an engaging set.

(Image above is from Metal Injection.) I almost didn’t go to the Chicago date. My brain was wobbly and my head swam if I moved it too quick. It’d’ve been prudent to lie down and stay home. I almost did, and then saw the earplugs I’d been hunting for. Fuck it, I said to myself.

My brain evened out and my head stopped swimming by the time my commute to the venue, Subterranean, was over. Subterranean is a three story walkup. There’s yet another floor of Subterranean to get backstage. How did Ryan McKenney get up those stairs?

I waited. Like Rats was unremarkable, and Yatuja was technically proficient enough that I’ll remember their name, but anything else about them is gone. Sorry, gents. An admittedly generously poured vodka cranberry later, and Trap Them was finally sound checking.

No sign of Mr. McKenney. I figured he’d be on the first floor in a wheelchair, and then someone from the venue would carry him up the five or six steps from the audience floor onto the stage. There’s another way to get onstage and that’s down one flight of an industrial metal spiral staircase from backstage. But imagining him going down those stairs was ridiculous. How would they carry a person in a wheelchair down that spiral staircase?

They didn’t carry him. He descended alone.

I saw McKenney push himself cast-first down each step of the spiral staircase. He wore casts on his feet and kneepads. He crawled from the bottom of the staircase at far end of stage right to the microphone stand. The venue would’ve carried him. His bandmates would’ve carried him. He crawled.

He performed the 45 minute set on his knees, thrashing around, using whatever he could for support and maintained the baleful, wrathful presence he was known for. He flung his body like he hated it, and yeah, broke open his forehead mid set. I’m focusing on Mr. McKenney and not the rest of the band. They played well, if unspectacularly. I think guitarist (and songwriter) Brian Izzi added a few flourishes on the pre-Blissfucker material.

You’ve read enough of these know how this one comes together. Life landed one real good punch on Mr. McKenney, and he was stubborn enough to cancel zero shows. I began to despair and Trap Them reminded me I didn’t have to. And I needed to see Trap Them and Trap Them specifically. I needed the music (a combination of Entombed and Hot Snakes) played much too loud. I needed to see Ryan McKenney’s wild eyes and him performing through what I presume is meaningful pain.

(Above image from Flickr user Morten F.) I somehow got the idea my queerness is incompatible with my love for guitar music. I believed (at the cost of impugning one of my home cultures) that I really ought to listen to more, well, queer or allegedly queer friendly artists. During that seven day period, what I saw from queer friendly artists was variations on the phrase “my idols are dead and my enemies are in power”. I understand the fear. I understand the despair. But I came to fight, not resist. McKenney came to fight too, even when no one would blame him for a less evocative performance.

It was at most 45 minutes. I don’t recall an encore. Before I left the venue, I talked to Mr. Izzi, who said that we all needed this show. He was more right than he knew.







Youtube won't load properly, so instead, have Chris Maggio recording drums for Darker Handcraft. He's incredible.

The Common Clearinghouse

Usually, I'm more nuanced than this, but Common's appearance at the White House and subsequent Fox News pants-shitting based on the "burn a Bush" line has only two sides for me: You either understand Common's rhymes in the context it was written and then compare that to his entire discography or you don't. This is one of the few times where black OR white thinking is completely correct. There's right and there's wrong. It's clear, Fox News is on the second side.
Oh, and this is obviously manufactured outrage. No one ought to be surprised.

(Also: I use rhymes here as opposed to lyrics not because I want to devalue the message in hip-hop, but I instead don't want to use rock parlance to describe hip-hop where I don't have to.)

The song that got Fox News' knickers in a twist, "A Letter To the Law", based on its last part is, explicitly, about moving beyond that kind of violent language and rhetoric the news organization took for the song's core aim, to make a better, more safe world as a community. Period. There is no grey area on this one. I accept none. So let's use this as a test: Are you for Common or Fox News? Life hardly ever gives us these clear choices, these easy distinctions between knee-jerk crank yankerism and you know, truth, bolstered by accuracy. Take this moment and hold onto it.

Side point: Since when does anybody, for any reason, go to Fox News for any meaningful critical dissection of art? Seriously: When was the last time you or any of your friends thought "There's a new record from [Artist H] coming out. What does Fox News think of it?"

Then, Ron Grossman wrote in the Chicago Tribune an idiotic op-ed with the point that hey, Common, as a rapper, is not a poet. And his poetry isn't really that good. He's certainly no Keats, and thus Common ought not to be mistaken for a poet. To support his point, he chose the line I'm a renegade. I ain't never been afraid, I'm fresh and gettin' paid.

Now: Let's ignore the Grossman sheltering himself in his description of himself as a fuddy-duddy. I'll get to that later. What he's doing is using a particularly, say, bad line of Common's and saying it's indicative of the quality of his rhymes. It's not, of course. I don't even listen to Common and I can smoke this guy. Here. I spent an entire...3 minutes on rap genius and found this one: so many raps about rims, I'm surprised niggas ain't become tires.

The genius of rap genius is that you can click on the rhyme itself and get the explanation of it, sooooo, when I click on that, here's what comes up: [Common]’s surprised that even after rapping about rims so much, people aren’t tired of it. Also, play on the words raps/wraps. What wraps around a rim? A tire, of course.

That is some wordplay that Grossman dismisses entirely. Shit, most of rap's best lines are double, triple and quadruple-entendres that you need to be in the community to get. And pursuant to sharpening my point, I don't even listen to that much hip-hop! The two I listen to most often are Dessa and P.O.S., not exactly Hall Of Fame material. I don't even LISTEN to Common! I know he's Kanye's friend from Chicago that isn't Lupe Fiasco. I bought one of Common's CDs, Universal Mind Control, for my brother, for Christmas. That's it. That's the extent of my Common knowledge.

Now: Let's get back to the point about Grossman sheltering himself in the phrase fuddy-duddy. He's old. He doesn't understand kids these days. It's a phrase to give him wiggle room, to show that, well, he might not have everything right, but he has the gist. Fucking wrong. If he's going to call out Common for being bad with language and saying he's an old teacher, then he should at least have the temerity to back up his "Common isn't Keats because Common occassionally writes lyrics that are putrid" statement with his full authority. Plus, I'm Keats wrote subpar stuff and it doesn't get collected with his best work. Why not the same for Common?

And, finally, a recursive point, independent of Common's ability as a poet, just because he's bad doesn't make him not a poet. One can do things and be bad at them. What all of this boils down to is vivid: Common's getting a lot of flak that he simply does not deserve. That it is this simple is something that does not happen terribly often.




This song is by Common. It's called the Corner. It's about the corner and its importance in black culture. Enjoy.

That Guy Who Is Now Dead

I'm not happy with the announcement that Usama Bin Laden was killed.

Don't get me wrong, Usama Bin Laden killed a lot of people. I hate that. I don't like it, not one bit. But the President announcing it was the wrong thing to do. Yes, it gets a bunch of political points and by now you've probably seen the .jpg at right in five different places, but hey, hopefully it's still new, even if it's not fresh.

(Quick aside: It's a sign of the times that an image that hasn't been out 24 hours is already old news. Or maybe it's just me.)

I'll even go so far as to say I don't mind that he's dead. But dude, Al Qai'da sticks around even after Usama's gone and it's already adrift from being largely left out of the uprisings in the Middle East. With their symbol's death, it will almost certainly galvanize them to some kind of reprisals, and guess what, that's exactly the kind of shot in the arm a terrorist organization need to realign its priorities.

Let me say now, by the way, that I'm okay with the U.S. finding and killing Usama Bin Laden, let's call it an assassination, if we're to be honest. But announcing that he's dead and you've killed him makes him a martyr. Hopefully, this assasination, which again, few people in their right mind are going to argue against, is the above the water bit of the iceberg that is Al-Qai'da's declining importance and not the thing that gave Al-Qai'da their M.O. back.

Some Elbow Room

I'm not sure if I have much to say about the attempted (!!) assassination in Tuscon, except that I don't think it will change anything, regardless of how inspiring Obama's speech was. And it's not just a Republican thing, either. I'm not going to insult your intelligence and say that there's equal opportunity slander and misrepresentation since, frankly, it isn't. If the Republicans feel hijacked by Fox News and driven to a more radicalized strategy to retain voters, that's their fault. It leads them to start spewing more and more insulting, callous garbage, which gets the craziest people re-elected and the most reasonable out of office.

The Republicans, and Republicans admit this in public and on camera, were led by the most radical voices in their party to a defeat on the health care bill, which itself was a watered down version of its original form that lacked backbone. But: When you put this kind of material out in front of people, there are people that will amplify the message and take it to heart.

This has not been the Democratic strategy. The Democrats have been doing their best to remain as moderate and inoffensive as possible in a vain attempt to win over Republicans, which hasn't paid dividends until, the lame duck session of Congress of 2010, which ended up being the most productive of the last two years.

And yet. Maybe this will make House and Senate Republicans (Yes, I'm singling them out. Remember: They're the ones that held up the 9/11 first responders bill because they were concerned about it being too expensive. Let that one sink in.) think twice about using that kind of language since they know the person that got shot in the brain. But here's hoping that they people that didn't know the Congresswoman can't use the language until after the 2012 election and then we can get back to the good old fashioned food fight that is our political process.

2. Mike Steele is no longer the chairman of the Republican Party, a white guy is, now. Maybe he'll talk about something fresh, like traditional values.

3. The idea of a media diary is nothing really new, but the twist on it (that year-end list privilege what I've been listening to in the last five weeks) makes me want to pick it up again. Of course, then I realize how many different songs are on my iPod and I laugh hysterically. Maybe I can integrate it somehow into Mondays. (Oh, right. Monday I go back to Rome.

In that vein, I read Who Is Jake Ellis #1 (a limited comic book series from Image) and enjoyed it quite a bit. I see the art and I think of David Aja, who did Immortal Iron Fist, but the artist isn't quite that good with Aja's brilliant little pieces of attention to detail. Anyway. The hook is that there's a White Dude With A Gun, but he's got a guy in his head that can tell him what's going on around him and keep a look out for guys that are trying to kill White Dude With A Gun.

It's not clear that the guy in White Dude's head is another part of himself, subconsciously repressed or whether it's another being entirely, which makes it fun. I can just see the pitch now and I'd bet money the key phrase is Jason Bourne meets Fight Club. And you know how much I like Fight Club...

The first new song from No Trigger since 2006 and man, just listen to the opening drum tattoo. You think you know how it's gonna go and it sticks around just a little longer than you expect. Plus, at less than 90 seconds, it's lightening fast and sprightlier than quicksilver. It's called Commonwealth and if you're from Massachusetts when you read this, even better.

Two Fuses

There's a passage from the chapter I read that says it all: "There are...many efficient arrangements of the basic structure...The problem is to choose between them."

There are different philosophies (or ordering theories) for how to do it, but necessarily better ways of going about those theories. At this point, that's about as far as I can go with A Theory of Justice. I've read the chapter, but I'm struggling to find something external to relate the lessons to. There's always politics, but I'm not quite caught up with the moves yet.

If I'm going to run my mouth about that, I can talk about how Obama is being strung out by two different camps, the news media and the centrists for not being bipartisan enough and then by the left for caving too much to the Republicans that will never give him anything. In the case of the extension of the full Bush tax cuts, I'm conflicted.

The GOP said they wouldn't sign anything without a promise that the full Bush tax cuts would be extended and for a whole week, it looked like the Democrats were going to fight it. Krugman was leading the chest beating, saying if they say no, just let the tax cuts expire, all of them, even the ones for the rest of the goddamn country and make the Republicans explain what their obstructionism cost the American people.

Which, for the record, makes a lot of sense to me, because fuck 'em, that's all they've been doing over the past two years. Then, Bill Clinton shows up with Obama saying that the tax cuts have to go through, the country needs it and we can't be pulling this brinksmanship garbage. Well, shit. He's a smart guy and is in no position to have to step out with Obama on anything. Maybe I've been playing too much political football and not enough seeing the wider picture.

Well, the tax cuts will probably go through and we'll still have a huge deficit, as opposed to one that was hacked into a little if the full tax cuts weren't passed. But. If the Democrats have capitulated on this, then I hope they'll use this opportunity to force votes on repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell and acting on a number of their other bafflingly large agenda for the lame duck Congress.

Now, finally to the point: There are two narratives and only two narratives. It goes between Obama not being bipartisan. He addresses that and the next day, he's being blasted for caving too quickly. When Obama turns to address that, trying to use compromise to achieve his goals, he's blasted for caving too quickly. They're burning Obama at two fuses and frankly, I hope he can keep it together for another term.

He can choose whichever, but there's better and worse ways to go about either, qualitatively and otherwise. I just hope he can figure out what they are, because, hell, I'm a leftist liberal and I'd like things that seem moral no-brainers like 9/11 responders health care coverage and the DADT repeal not to be held up much longer.

It's things like that which make me wonder: Is there really any justice and Rawls reminds me, no, not unless we work for it.

When I'm aggravated politically, I turn to the Suicide File, who wrote one of the, if not the, definitive political song of the Bush years, Ashcroft. ("If what it boils down to/is that you're either for us or against us/well, I guess I've got a tough, tough choice to make," is how Ashcroft OPENS. Yes.) They wrote it, in 2002, before it was clear just how fucked the United States was. That guitar riff will be in your head for the rest of your life. Have fun with it.

That they broke up before they could come up with a second full length of material, in the dark, dark heart of the Bush years, when we needed it most is tragic. Well, not really tragic, but sad at least, because I can only imagine how they would have been inspired by Bush's second term. It turns out that Ashcroft was one of the sane voices in the room on some matters, which, speaks volumes about the administration and runaway cabinet. Anyway. Ashcroft live. It's fun.

The Dead Also Rise

There was a guy who wrote a letter to the editor that said some pretty crazy things about justice. I responded, this is it. Also: This is me cannibalizing my other work, because I'm in Munich for the weekend and won't have the wherewithal to update today. Thus, here's something old, but something I think that's aged well.

It is my opinion that the Guantanamo Bay prison is not as comfortable as Mr. Coyne believes.

First and foremost: He says the U.S. Congress has reviewed the facility and deemed it fair. Given that Congress reviewed the evidence for the war in Iraq and found it sufficient, their approval does not satisfy me.

Second, whatever the formal religious accommodations are, they're undercut by the guards spraying urine on the Koran and sexually assaulting the prisoners, according to an internal U.S. military review and the FBI, respectively.

Third, the Red Cross has reviewed the detention center and is far less charitable than Mr. Coyne, specifically using the phrase "tantamount to torture." But ignoring the Red Cross, most striking is what the FBI (and the Department of Defense) allege about the facility: That the prisoners were shackled for 18 hours at a time and forced to urinate and defecate on themselves.

As for the idea that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be tried in a civilian court and kept in maximum security prisons like any other criminal, I say yes. The point is not to throw suspected terrorists in a gulag that resembles limbo or a relatively high circle of hell, but to expedite justice.

Apparently, the increased security supposedly needed for the trial will cost more money. In my eyes, the money is well spent. This is about the vindication of our justice system when the entire world is watching. This is what you spend money on, guys! And yes, the United States has a gaping maw of a deficit. At this point, another couple million is comparative pocket change.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be held in the super maximum security prison in Illinois. The building was created to detain the most dangerous criminals we can apprehend. The idea that it's going to make the prison or the surrounding communities a target is a bit late. The prison created to detain the most dangerous criminals we can apprehend is already built.

Mr. Coyne ends his letter throwing his support behind the execution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I believe this to be unwise. Killing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed brings back no victims from the grave and gives our enemies another martyr and recruiting tool.

In short, I think Mr. Coyne is mistaking revenge for justice. Our criminal justice system makes tragic mistakes on a daily basis, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed doesn't have to be one of them. As much as it hurts, I believe this country ought to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a better trial than he deserves, and, if at the end of it he is found guilty, then we let the rule of law decide what to do with him.

Revenge is cheap and quick. Justice is expensive and boring.




Thursday's Division St., for obvious reasons. If you don't like it at first, wait till you get to the part about crickets in the trees. It'll make you a believer.