Late Spring Cleaning/Break(down?) Mix

So I know that I said I was doing all of this blog-related research and development in my last post (like, months ago -- where does time go?).  And I was, until I got sidetracked by some unfortunate but very necessary cleaning.  I know that spring cleaning is supposed to be like, a thing, but I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever really done it.

And this probably won't shock anyone who really knows me, but dudes, I am doing it hardcore.  Not just because I'm slightly compulsive and very much a virgo, but because this is not just a matter of simple 'cleaning'.  No, it is instead a matter of cleaning out an entire house.  That's right: while everyone else (in the US, anyway_) is partying or barbecueing for memorial day weekend, I will be sorting through and discarding the possessions of my deceased loved ones.  Awesome!

As much as this sucks, I am a firm believer that even the most miserable of situations can be alleviated by a good soundtrack.  So for anyone else who might be out there cleaning, either in the figurative or literal sense, enjoy these thirteen tracks about the emotional rollercoaster that is purging your life of things you don't want, don't need, or simply can't keep.  It's painful, yes, but it's necessary to get rid of stuff to make room for new things.  New things, of course, meaning 'new records'.  (Or at least that's what it means for me.)

Late Spring Cleaning/Break(down?) from rockandthesinglegirl on 8tracks.

Slingshot Dakota -- "Ohio"

Shoppers -- I

Babes in Toyland -- "Pain in My Heart"

Lost Weekend -- "Worn Out"

The Distillers -- "I am a Revenant"

Forward Russia -- "Fifteen pt 1"

Lemuria -- "Length Away"

RVIVR -- "Edge of Living"

At the Drive-in -- "Rascuache"

Bad Banana -- "Oregon Trail"

Aye Nako -- "Let It In"

Taking Back Sunday -- "Carpathia"

Little Lungs -- "The Big Six"

Do you remember when we couldn't put it away?

I would have posted this yesterday, but I spent most of the day preparing for and then partying down at the (almost) last P.S. Eliot show, WHOOPS!

Back in October I headed over to Brooklyn Fireproof to support my friends and fellow volunteers in Aye Nako. Perhaps out of what could be described as professional habit, I got there early to check out the other bands. (Short report: Mitten dropped off last minute; Troubled Sleep and Once A Pawn? Both worth googling. I'm just saying.) But I really wasn't there in any kind of professional capacity. I was there for friendhangs, not for blog fodder.

[Image: A brown, wide-eyed stuffed monkey sits on a table.]Flier for Brooklyn Fireproof show. And again, those bands are worth looking up!

So naturally, something reminded me of this internet space that I've been neglecting lately. I was at the merch table to say my good nights to the band when drummer Angie asked me, "So what did you think?"

When a person asks for your opinion like that -- or I guess when I ask someone for their thoughts on something I've done -- it's a request for some kind of reassurance, for support. It translates to, "I'm not feeling great about this, remind why I do this?" The idea of Angie, as in, "Angie Boylan (ex-Cheeky, ex-Very Okay, ex-Little Lungs, Each Others Mothers)", asking me for reassurance seemed bizarre. Trying to recover from my shock, I asked, "What did I think? Uh…why?"

"Well, I care about your opinion," she shrugged. Cue more shock. "You're probably the only one," I said, trying to play it cool. "I doubt that that's true," she smiled skeptically.

Standing at the merch table I considered those words. "Your opinion". There was no explicit mention of this blog, or of my pseudo-career as a music journalist, but those words made me think, Oh, right -- you used to have opinions on everything you listened to, you used to share them via this blog, and at one point it seemed like people actually wanted to know what you thought about stuff.

That time feels like a different life. Back then, I had the time and energy to go to multiple shows every week, to acquire and listen to countless demos and new releases every month, to record my reactions, and to update this blog every single week, sometimes three times in a five day span! I remember being able to do all of that, but only just barely. I certainly can't imagine being able to do that ever again.

But I do remember that I loved doing it. And after what has been a long and strange year, I'm finally starting to genuinely want to contribute to and participate in my community again. I'm slowly starting to remember what and how much all of this meant to me.

So I've quietly begun writing again, for other publications; writing your own blog is a pretty solitary pursuit and what I've needed lately is to work with other people. I wrote a piece for the recent issue of Hoax Zine. I've contributed two reviews to Tom Tom Magazine. Last month I read at Meet Me at the Race Riot: People of Color in Zines from 1990 to Today, and later wrote an as-yet unpublished account of my experience at the event for co-organizer and moderator Daniela Capistrano.

To be blunt about it: I've been really lucky. I'm fortunate enough to be able to do all of this, and to know cool people who are doing cool things, and who are willing to print my work. I'm lucky that after a year of being unable to write, I've started to recover my abilities, and that at least some friends are still interested in reading and hearing what I have to say.

But for as grateful as I am for all of the aforementioned opportunities, and as much as I love writing, I think what I've really wanted and what I've really struggled with is needing a very specific kind of validation from my friends. What I've really wanted is for someone to say to me, "You're going to be okay." I wanted someone to insist that regardless of what I do, whether I blog or not, whether I write I or not, that I'm going to figure things out and that everything will be fine, or some version of it.

No one has told me anything like this. I haven't really asked, because even though I think it's important to ask for what you need, especially emotionally, sometimes it feels weird to request that sort of validation.

What I have been told, more than once, is that I "shouldn't" need that sort of validation, that I "shouldn't depend on people" for it, and that I should be more self-sufficient. And yes, self-confidence and self-reliance are both really important But what I've learned in the last year is that support, especially when you live and operate alone, is pretty fucking important too. If you are fortunate enough to have family, friends, roommates, and co-workers that you see daily, if you haven't had the experience of really being on your own, you wouldn't know this. But I have been on my own, so I do know it.

But what I also know, passive aggressive-soap box-venting aside, is that you can get so wrapped up in what you need that you don't see what you have. I still want someone to tell me that I'm going to eventually be fine, and I consider that to be perfectly reasonable. But that doesn't negate the less direct support and validation I've received.

Friend, co-organizer, and community pillar Kate Wadkins asked me to read at Meet Me at the Race Riot, with the likes of Osa Atoe and Mimi Thi Nguyen, Kate believed that I belonged at that reading, even if I don't really. Friends in other bands have asked about my work, and about writing about their bands, surely out of need for publicity, but also because they must like something about what I do. My bff Cary bugs me about writing in particular on the regular. (Direct quote: "Update your blog, you daft wanker!")

I could write all of this off as empty talk. But, at this point, I choose not to. I choose, instead, to (at least attempt to) be gracious about it, and accept it as a compliment. It only took Angie Boylan randomly asking me for my opinion to get me to realize it.

To answer her question, Aye Nako's set that night was tight, if casual. The band seems to be writing new songs at the moment, and is gradually debuting new material at their local shows. There's a plenty that I could and would really like to say about what I've heard so far, but I think that that's a different post for a different day.

The vicious cycle and the single girl.

Last week I spent days -- yes, days -- writing a new post for this blog. It was a post about a discussion that happened in class at rock camp in August, and I completely threw myself into it.

And then…I decided to not post it. I read it back, and decided that even after days of writing it, I just didn't like how it had turned out.

I wish that I could say that this was an isolated incident, or even a routine occurrence of the "they can't call be winners" phenomenon that every artist is (or should be) familiar with. But it's bigger than that. Things have quiet around here for over a month because lately, I don't like anything that I write. Lately, everything I write seems stale and boring, and I can't bring myself to think that anyone might want to read it. And I get that even at what I consider my best, readers, perhaps even most people, will still find my work uninteresting. But at least I used to like what I was writing.

It's not just the finished product, either. Lately, I've found it difficult to enjoy the writing process. I used to feel that I had gotten the hang or, and was maybe even getting pretty good at blogging. I was comfortable with each step of the process, the scribbling down of a few ideas for a post, the shaping of those ideas into an outline, the filling out of the outline, and then the editing and publishing. I used to be able to do it in a few hours spread out over two or three days. But right now I can't even think about that process without feeling overwhelmed, and can't imagine how I used to do it regularly.

So, here is where I find myself: I feel like I can't write a decent blog post about something pertinent to this blog. So I don't. And then not writing reinforces my feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. Which leads to leads to more not writing (or doing anything else productive, for that matter). Which leads to more bad feelings, and so on, and so on, and so on….


Credit: Laura Siragher. Orginally found at her tumblr

As illustrated by this handy diagram, this is a cycle. It has no beginning and it has no end, so how do you stop it? How do you interrupt the cycle of unhappiness and unhappily doing nothing about it?

Trying to answer this question has unexpectedly brought me back to one of the central concerns of this blog: access. This blog has always looked at the way gender affects a person's participation in music, and I've tried to consider how gender intersects with gender presentation, sexuality, nationality, race, and class. Now, I find myself wondering how access and one's ability to participate is affected by one's emotional health or well-being.

I know from experience that emotional difficulties can be a real problem, but a lot of people don't seem to take 'emotions' or emotional health very seriously. Every time that I've tried to talk about how I feel and why I haven't been able to do meaningful work, almost every time that I've tried to talk about feeling anxious, or scared, or alone, or just plain unhappy, I've been told to simply not

To be told to simply not have a certain feeling is pretty much the least helpful advice you'll ever receive. But people still do this, I think because we as a society don't take emotions or emotional health seriously, and we don't know how to deal with it when we have these problems ourselves, and we definitely don't know how to handle it when someone right in front of us is struggling. We don't know how to respond when our friends tell us that they are in pain. So we say stupid, unhelpful things. Or, we try to crack clever cultural references, or we steal them from movies like Reality Bites. "Man," we say to each other, "you are like in the bell jar." Because we don't know what else to do or say.


Girl, you don't even know. Image: a light-skinned, dark-haired woman in a yellow paisley shirt accurately summarizes an unseen character's emotional condition.

I wonder on a regular basis how much of an impact this social resistance to dealing with emotions has on girls and young women (and also, young men). It's easier for me to think structurally, and to worry about other would-be female artists of all types and their inability to get work done, than it is for me to think about my own problems. It's easier to ask myself, "What advice would I give to a friend, or to a student, who's struggling?" than it is to ask myself what I should do.

How do you break a cycle? Whether you're talking about the cycle of anxiousness and low productivity, or the larger cycle of ignoring feelings and not knowing how to deal with them? I don't have a real, solid answer for this question. But if a friend or a student or a camper asked me, I would tell her that I believe that this, as in this sort of post, is the start of an answer. Maybe, rather than jumping back into your work, and expecting yourself to ignore your negative feelings, you need to acknowledge and openly discuss those feelings. Even when it feels like no one else wants to hear (or read) about your feelings, and especially when you feel like you can't talk to anyone about them.

I would write this blog as I normally do if I could. I miss being able to focus on shows and bands and the people I know who are making music, zines, and other DIY media. But I think that first I have to learn to write about how it feels to not be able to write about the things that matter to me. You can't circumvent your own feelings, and there's no getting 'over' them, either. The only way out, it seems, is through.

Hump Day Treat, To Spain with Love Edition

Let me divulge one of my compulsions: whenever one of my friends posts lyrics on facebook, I absolutely have to answer with the following verse.

And this was how I got thinking about Rilo Kiley. One of my friends posted part of their first single from their last album, Under the Blacklight. I kind of lost track of the band after that record, because I wasn't entirely into the seedy '70s Los Angeles concept. I was pretty enamored of their first two records though, especially during my undergraduate days, and I saw them live at least four times during that period.

Rilo Kiley is not, and has never been what you'd describe as 'punk', and I don't really think that anyone would describe their band as feminist either. But I'll give them this -- they're fronted by Jenny Lewis. And she might not be punk or feminist either, but I admire and appreciate her songwriting. In her songs, Lewis refuses to represent herself or others as simple, one dimensional figures, and she fearlessly documents and tackles fear, anxiety, unhappiness, ambivalence, and lots of other messy, sometimes shameful emotions that most of us would probably rather not discuss, much less sing about. And so we invite you to enjoy Lewis's suffering on this snowy hump day.

Rilo Kiley: Live at the Ford Amphtheater from John Welch on Vimeo.