The Fest, day 3

November 11th, 2009 by Geoffrey Hing | No Comments

The Fest, day 3

All day I heard different accounts of the “riot” that happened at the house show the night before. From different accounts I heard that people tried to tip over cars. I heard that some people tried to rough up a cop, that someone got tazed by a cop, that the cops got surrounded [...]


Fest 8 Day 2: Kickball and Costumes

November 1st, 2009 by Geoffrey Hing | No Comments

Fest 8 Day 2: Kickball and Costumes

I started my second day at the fest playing kickball. I know that plenty of people have traumatic experiences with sports from their youth and that, even with punks, its easy for things to turn ugly, but I do love the feeling of big groups of people being involved in something together. As [...]


November 1st, 2009 by Geoffrey Hing | No Comments

I get to the hotel where we’re staying for the fest and start paging through the dense, brightly covered booklet that describes the bands playing and other events over the course of the weekend. Bz tells me, “just read the first sentence of the description,” and I do. It says, “Welcome one and [...]


awesome punk rock shows, kids, and change

September 10th, 2008 by Geoffrey Hing | No Comments

awesome punk rock shows, kids, and change

For more than a decade, I’ve identified with and invested myself in punk music and subculture.  As I get older, I struggle with feeling like punk as I know it can be a little too much like Project Runway, “one day you’re in, the next day you’re out”.  Perhaps that’s overly cynical, but I do [...]


folk music and liberalism

March 27th, 2008 by Geoffrey Hing | No Comments

folk music and liberalism

I just got an e-mail asking of Defiance, Ohio wanted to do an interview for a zine called Even If Your Voice Shakes which is put out by some folks involved with the Riot Folk collective.  It made me think about some of the discomfort that I have with folk music and that moniker being [...]


gaming reviews vs. criticism

February 24th, 2008 by Geoffrey Hing | No Comments

gaming reviews vs. criticism

I’m not a gamer, but I found this article, linked to from BoingBoing relevent not just to gaming but other types of media:
Similarly, there would be no point today in writing a review of Ultima IV, since it is long out of print. A useful work of criticism, however, is entirely conceivable: discussing, perhaps, its [...]


punk as social force?

February 21st, 2008 by Geoffrey Hing | No Comments

punk as social force?

I feel like I’ve gained and reiterated a more critical perspective of perspective on punk in reading and responding to Daniel Traber’s L.A.’s “White Minority”: Punk and The Contradictions of Self-Marginalization.  Michael Eric Dyson spoke at IU this week and talked a lot about hip-hop as an amplification of culture at large (i.e. critics of [...]


White Minority

February 16th, 2008 by Geoffrey Hing | No Comments

White Minority

Rawny had said that he wanted to play a classic hardcore cover with Disaster, but I don’t want to just play one because people will get rowdy and sing along. So, the idea of playing a cover kind of got put on the back burner. Randomly, I thought about the song White Minority, [...]


interview responses about Defiance, Ohio

December 3rd, 2007 by Geoffrey Hing | No Comments

interview responses about Defiance, Ohio

These are some responses I wrote to a person who wanted to interview me about Defiance, Ohio for a university thesis.  I decided to post them on my blog because I feel like I don’t always get to say the things I want to say or have time to think ideas through in traditional interviews [...]


trainwreck riders, sass dragons, prizzy prizzy please, pretty hot @ ducks in a stack.

March 27th, 2007 by Geoffrey Hing | No Comments

trainwreck riders, sass dragons, prizzy prizzy please, pretty hot @ ducks in a stack.

Info on bands:

Trainwreck Riders
Pretty Hot
Sass Dragons

I think most of them have records available at Sweet Hickory.