Here’s the info for the drug study that Sherri did:

Phone: 479-4GFI or 1-800-552-4GFI
Web: http://www.gfistudy.com

I made this poster for the third annual boxcar books rock n’ roll prom:

xmms-shell should totally make it easier for me to control my media player. there’s a debian package for it.

justin rhody was telling me about this story at the holy bible show last night.

aparently taiwan is creating an expanded version of what sound similar to bloomington’s system (where recycling is free, but trash pickup is charged on a per bag or per bin basis).

listen to the new story here.

Ryan suggested using a sample from this TAL show for the pretty hot recording, in regards to where in the world is diana spitzers.

in the clip starting at around 18:30, out of context, she could be talking about punk rock or the navy, and that’s eerie.

in the clip starting at around 42:20, two pilots talk about whether it’s hard to drop a bomb on afghanistan. one tries not to think about the consequences. one has “no remorse” and says it makes him feel “warm inside” to “drop bombs on the bad people.”

the demo is here

Someone who I met on the last Defiance, Ohio tour sent me an e-mail today asking some questions for a ‘zine he’s making on folk-punk. He asked me about the first time I heard the phrase and what I thought it meant. “folk-punk” is a phrase that’s been bandied about so much lately that I can’t help but think about it. I feel like what I wrote back to him does a pretty good job of summing up my thoughts:

To answer your question about folk-punk, I think that I first heard it about two years ago when my friend Kevey said something about Bloomington and Pensacola being the two “meccas” for folk-punk music. At the time, I wasn’t really sure what the phrase meant. I sort of figured that it meant punk bands that made poppy, low-fi recordings.

I feel like now, most people think of folk-punk music as bands that come from the punk scene but who play punk music on traditional instruments (acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle, etc.) or who play punk music that has elements of the style of singer-songwriters like Phil Ochs or Woodie
Guthrie, or maybe some country, old-time, or rhythm and blues influences. I think that this definition doesn’t do service to a word that has such powerful implications as “folk”.

I’m not a music historian, but to me, it seems like what put the “folk” in folk music wasn’t the asthetics. The songs were just played with whatever instruments and styles happened to be around. The recordings were oftentimes low-fi due to the available recording technology. The thing that made them folk music is that they were sincere songs that spoke about the songwriter’s lives and also reflected a certain consciousness of things going on in the world that were affecting not only the songwriter, but their families, communities, and even countries. The
songs were simple and meant to be sung-along-to and shared. By these standards, I would say any kind of DIY punk whether it’s pop-punk or hardcore is “folk” music and that’s the important part.

I don’t mind the term “folk-punk” and I think for show flyers or record reviews it can be a fairly descriptive term. However, it seems like increasingly there is the notion of a “folk-punk” scene with specific asthetics, politics, and ideas of what’s cool and isn’t cool. I hear of young kids setting out to start “folk-punk” bands, specifically. I think this is all kind of sad. I grew up in a town that was far too small to have genre-seperated punk scenes, and I always loved how a show would have a hardcore band, a ska band, a crust band, and a pop-punk band playing on the same bill. I loved that the first time I saw the members of my favorite local youth-crew hardcore band play, they were playing acoustic Indigo Girls covers. It was exciting and special to feel like people with such differing musical styles or fashion could be involved in the same
thing together.

Our world is one of drawing arbitrary divisions between people – whether it’s on the basis of nationality, or spirituality, gender, class, sexual orientation, or a ton of other things that build barriers between people. Certainly, differing styles of music within punk-rock and “scenes” associated with them aren’t going to cause wars or discrimination, but I can’t help but feel that punk’s classifications and seperation is still really arbitrary and comes from that same stupid human desire to say “I am absolutely this, you are absolutely that, this is one way, that is another”. I’d like to hope that punks have a better chance of some day walking away from all that than the rest of the world.

I started reading the first chapter of a book that my friend renee gave me called narcissus and goldmund by herman hesse. The description of the back cover reads

Narcissus and Goldmund is the story of a passionate yet uneasy friendship between two men of opposite character. narcissus, an ascetic instructor at a cloister school, has devoted himself soley to scholarly and spiritual pursuits. one of his students is the sensual, restless Goldmund, who is imediately drawn to his teacher’s fierce intellect and sense of discipline. when narcissus persuades the young student that he is not meant for a life of self-denial, Goldmund sets off in pursuit of aesthetic and physical pleasures, a path that leads him to a final, unexpected reunion with Narcissus.

The first chapter really only establishes the two principal characters, and to be honest, when I first was given the book I thought it seemed an awful lot like Sidhartha, the only book by Herman Hesse that I’ve read. I was more excited about the fact that someone had given me a book to borrow (because I really think that giving people books or music or clothes, or letting them borrow those things are some of the nicest small gestures that anyone can do) than about the actual book, but I’ve been thinking about the book and I’m more excited about it.

I’m interested in the book because I like the idea of people having a fairly established world view, or lifestyle, or personality, or personal inclinations, and having those things make people very different from each other, even conflicting with each other, but that such diversity ultimately is what makes people be able to coexist and maybe the world a bit better.

I started thinking about this while I was making a mix cd of bands that were playing in bton this month. I wanted to put a Dave Dean song on it, and all I had was the two dean crew 7″ that he made with his brother. I put the song risk on the cd because I remembered him playing it at shows. The song talks about the safety and routine that can be found even when doing interesting things like playing music and contrasts that with someone who isn’t neccessarily “productive” in terms of making records or zines, but who seems to live life more spontaneously.

I can’t really tell if the song idealizes the romantically reckless lifestyle or if Dave just goes out of his way to vividly and endearingly describe his friend because some of the way she does things are the way that he doesn’t do them and he feels like being aware of those differences is a good thing. These days I’m surrounded by people who I feel like are pretty different from me in terms of personalities, personal capacities, and temperment and who I also find to be terribly aspiring. And I feel like I’ve changed a lot since I’ve known these people, but that awareness of change also brings up the nagging idea that maybe it could be possible to adopt little bits of the things that I like so much in my friends and stuff them into parts of my personality. This is a stupid idea, but it’s also real attractive.

When you start thinking like that, it’s scary because you realize how much you are yourself. I went to ryan’s art show‘s opening and a party afterwards with ryan and a few other friends from bloomington. I kept looking at ryan’s paintings and thought about how he’s the kind of person who has enough of an idea about what he wants to make that he can make these beautiful finished paintings where I feel like a lot of the time I get excited about ideas, but they’re loose and I quickly lose the energy to make much of them. He also has this confidence in his ability to make things that he can re-make things, or set them aside to pick up later, or throw them away entirely until he’s happy with them whereas I’m so excited at making *anything* that I worry that, if left to my own devices, I’d settle a bit too much on the quality. And I think that I’m not like my friend Justin who can get a little drunk and walk around a party with a tape recorder talking to art ladys. Or he can start off a conversation saying how he learned from school how to bullshit and then we can have this nice, quasi-philosophical conversation on the drive home that seems to make some sense, but could all be just for amusement. I don’t mind that, but I worry that I put to much stock in conversations like this, in hearing my self talk, like I put too much finality in the things that I begin to figure out hearing myself talk, or arguing with a friend. And listening to Justin talk, I feel like the conversation is fun and lively, but that he’s got so much going on in his head and that’s the reality of his life, and the things he occupies himself with and not the things that he converses about.

The thing I have to remember though, is that doing the things the way that I do them has worked out pretty well for me. I’m pretty happy, which isn’t to say that I should try to define who I am and stick with it, but I think it’s also reason enough not to embark on a crazy self-improvement regimine. Is proximity to different, challenging people, that make you feel a little self-conscious enough? Do you have to try to throw yourself into their world a little bit? Or are the things that you figure out for yourself the things that count?

so i’ve recently picked up knitting and the thing that I mess up the most is dropping stitches when purling. This website gives the following instructions for picking up the stitch:

To retrieve a dropped purl stitch, insert the right needle through the loop, and under the strand.

Insert left needle from front to back, and lift stitch gently over strand.

The strand thusbecomes a stitch facing the wrong way.

Slip needle into loop and slip stitch to correct position for purling.

when ryan and i spoke at the punk town meeting at pix fest last summer, one of the arguments that i made was that the danger of George W. Bush was that he shifted the language and way of speaking and thinking about politics from one that was rational and considerate to one that was unilateral and ignorant. Right now I’m listening to some radio documentary on stabalizing the conflicts in Venezuala. The commentator spoke about how the Venezualan leader, Chavez, has a very aggressive and confrontational way of public speaking. She notes that in terms of how the media addresses contentious issues was affected by this. They would choose speakers, and even counterpoint speakers that mimicked this aggressive speaking style, so the entire political dialogue shifted a little. This is exactly what I feel has been going on in the US as well. The president and the way he talks has influenced other in his party, the media, and the response from the left and even radicals.

the radio program is here, i think