The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
On Black Lives Matter protests in my small Midwestern hometown
My head has been full of noise the last two weeks. I’m sure that’s been the case for most of you, as well. I think it’s probably impossible to see evidence of one man cruelly ending another’s life on camera, boldly assured he was going to get away with it, and then witnessing the hurt and action that ensues from that moment with anything resembling a calm heart and mind. I’ve spent over a week now experimenting with a variety of ways to make myself useful to this larger movement while attempting to maintain focus on the routine demands of my existence and the material reality that I’m directly responsible for. With every action I’ve taken, it’s been met with hours or days of second-guessing and self-doubt. One thing I keep seeing is that it’s important to find ways to use your unique skills or platform to aid in the cause, but as someone who has always seen my primary skillset as a writer (or more vaguely, a “creator”), this doesn’t seem like the time to be constantly pushing my own thoughts.
The further we get into this situation, the less of a problem the noise becomes and the more clearly I can select, follow, and explore a train of thought. One plot line I’ve found myself drawn to is really considering what my personal relationship to the broad idea of racism in American. What is it that causes these feelings of anxiety, confusion, and helplessness that have invaded my psyche? As I trace my own education on the topic, it’s with no surprise that I share, along with most white people and most Americans in general, a basically “highlight reel” understanding of black history in this country. I didn’t even learn about Malcom X in school. There’s a simple lesson that comes at the end of this, that racism is bad. And that’s about the extent of it. The immoral actors - in history, on TV, and especially in real life - are always so outrageous, brazen, and cruel with their hatred and beliefs that it always felt so easy to be on the “good” side of this situation. Racism was presented as so ugly and unappealing that being racist was an easy thing to avoid. I’ve grown and experienced a lot since then, and now it’s easier to understand that the continued existence of those ideas in any form - even when it feels siloed or cartoonish or desperate or sometimes sad - is a true affront to the cause of humanity at large. It’s a rot at the root of a dying empire.
As I got increasingly radical during college (the height of my politically performative phase), I remember feeling an increasing pressure to find a way to commit to my newfound beliefs in a concrete way. In hindsight, I think that was what moving to Chicago was supposed to be. I know now that it’s easy to be dismissive or cynical about transplants (rightfully so, at times), but really I see it now as pledging to myself and to the world that I trusted in the inherent goodness of diversity, opportunity, and community investment on a large scale. I was naive, yes, and learned over the years of the myriad ways this city is itself deeply racist. But with that naivety came the courage to move myself out of my comfort zone and to reject what I acknowledged to be the narrow and misguided ideas about life that I’d been sold for so long. In so many ways, life in the city has affirmed these feelings and been a great catalyst for growth.
I’m far from the first person to say this, but that liberation from your myopic view of the world can and should be incredibly uncomfortable. Putting yourself in a place to learn more is hard, but actually opening yourself up to those truths is harder. And that is where we are as a culture right now. Waking up to an alarm that’s been sounding for 400 years. It’s time to stop hitting the snooze button. To actively accept (rather than passively learn) about the absolute horrors of oppression in our country and its history, and specifically on the unjust burden that black people have carried for our society in the form of unrelentingly dehumanization and violence. It hurts deeply to know you’re a part of this. And it should. I feel it physically in my chest as I sit here and write this. But strength of character requires dealing with this hurt, not ignoring it or projecting it onto others.
I’m very inspired by a group of (mostly young) people who are organizing and doing the work to bring this message to my hometown and start this uncomfortable and necessary conversation. I’m proud of my sister for coming down from the city to attend. I’m disheartened that the response of so many people has been an incredibly inappropriate reaction generated by fear and manifested as attempts at intimidation and threats of violence. I think so fondly of my youth and where I grew up and the love that I know exists there. Members of that community basically saved our family’s lives with care and support when we lost our home. This same goodness should be mined and extended to this protest and this larger cultural conversation. If there’s one thing that too many people need to hear right now, it’s that you should listen and believe it when others say that want peace and non-violence. That what you’re afraid of and reacting to is an internal pain and discomfort about the fact that this story is not as simple as what most of us have been lead to believe. That it’s yet another instance of being failed by the institutions you’ve been told to trust your whole life. What we’re working for is on the other side of that anxiety and discomfort. Harassing people, acting out violently, or even just being a dick, all this is going to do is affirm the negative and ugly ideas that many people have about small, rural, mostly white communities. Take some pride in yourself and your community use this opportunity to show the world that you are not what other people believe you to be. That you’re open to cooperation and conversation. When it comes down to it, that’s what this movement is all about.
One week out from this show! If you have or haven’t seen @noramarksmusic yet, this is going to be a very different set from anything we’ve done before. I’m also excited to play with these great bands and honestly just make noise with an electric guitar in public again. Definitely not a show you want to miss! #noramarks #tonicroom #chicagodiy (at Tonic Room)
https://www.instagram.com/p/BwUWyPTHobC/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1ib6exp2jndpl
Colleges are outrageous. They’re basically incredibly expensive resorts that we send teenagers to with minimal, mostly peer-enforced, supervision to experiment with drugs and sex and radical ideas and concepts. Because it’s a time of life where you’re basically building your last foundation of nostalgic memories before adulthood, people form deep attachments to the places where they partied or had affective encounters or just spent a lot of time staring at the same seals with Latin words in them and pictures of old people.
At the same time, these college cultures encourage or enforce these behaviors (I’m not weighing in on whether this stuff is good or bad; I don’t think it’s really applicable and definitely not nuanced enough to be meaningful) because the stronger someone’s neural pathways associate this brand of education and culture with positive memories of serotonin bursts, the more likely they are to continue to support this company after graduation, maybe with donations, but more likely with football ticket purchases or merchandise. The most meaningful repayments are, of course, repping (i.e., advertising and staking your reputation on) the brand for free with like bumper stickers or just verbal support and eventually sending your child there. A Legacy family. When, per current trends, the cost of doing business has probably increased incrementally, while the cost of the service itself has inflated astronomically.
I have to wonder, in a world full of Brett Kavanaughs and Aunt Beckys, if there isn’t some correlation between the people who where the most excessive and hedonistic in college aren’t, as adults, the ones most willing to tie their sense of self to the location and culture that provided those moments and memories. Like their fucking brains just exploded with pleasure and they associate that with the best versions of themselves. And so they sort of have a stake in maintaining this cultural idea of the superiority or overall value of the college experience.
The beauty of the college model is that they sell a bit of everything, or at least enough to satisfy a large number of people. The number of people they graduate is indicative of how many people they’re able to keep comfortable and invested over the course of four years. Education is just a component of that, designed to attract people interested in being educated. Sports is the other big ones, designed to attract athletes, as well as people who want to be associated with those athletes. Partying and the overall social scene for some. Art, music, and culture for others. Surely every college accountant knows what kind of attrition rate the school can withstand from an incoming freshman class and still profit.
And it’s played out to a point now where the dominant professional or adult culture is more of this mindset, meaning that the most efficient way to survive in our economy is to accept and take part in this fictitious foundational concept that attending college = making or having money. Money is just about the amount of resources you’ve accumulated and have, not about what kind of experiences you have. That’s why job hunting is so weird and alienating. You reduce yourself to the sum total of specifically pre-selected and curated experiences that you’ve had. We’re just trading on faith that we can all be expected to adhere to this one version of reality with its own hierarchy and set of obligations. But you don’t own anything or trade anything but a sort of promise of your ability.
“Friction (But You Still Did)” is one of those songs that showed up more or less fully formed, the big idea incubating beneath the surface long enough that when I finally grasped it walking down the hallway at my old job, all I had to do was let it unfold and make sure to write it down.
Shouldn’t be a big surprise, since the narrative here is based upon the (at the time) crumbling long-term marriage of a close friend. It was a story I was living through day-by-day with new scenarios or situations or ultimatums or decisions building upon each other and playing out in real time. I was pretty fresh into my marriage at the time, just starting to get this band going and starting to take careers and relationships more seriously. To Be More Mature and Adult. A kid was a real possibility in some sort of undetermined future.
What I was seeing happen in the context of this adjacent and flailing relationship was something that I felt like I understood, both intellectually and deep in my bones. Male hubris and poor decision making and the fear of disappearing into the void of fatherhood and someone else’s story. It was precisely what I was trying to push back or skip around with this band, my last ditch effort at making music and art a defining priority in my life. I couldn’t help by find sympathy for the person at fault, because I saw how easily I could be that person when faced with the overwhelming existential terror of becoming someone who gets sucked into the vacuum of routine adulthood and losing any ties to the things that you feel make you special.
That fear is what this song is really about, more than any specific relationship or situation. Fear of seeing yourself for who you’ve become; fear of never being sure of who you were. In a lot of ways, I see it as the prequel to the character in “Drinking for One,” off of our first EP (which came out 7 months before this single). “Friction” was actually written around the time of the rest of that record and was already played live by the band at least once before we went in and recorded it. Mostly, we ran out of time during the recording of We Don’t Have to Do This, and this was the song we were least confident in at the time. Funny, because it’s since become a band favorite and staple in our live shows.
The writing process was interesting in how chunked it was. The basic foundation of this song — the version of it that is performed when I play it at solo acoustic shows — was established in a day. As mentioned, the first verse and chorus(es) showed up while I was at work, and I used a keyboard app on my phone to figure out the chords and write everything out. I went for a run when I got home and used that time to come up with the ideas for the second first; the first half came easily and is a natural extension of what’s happening in the first verse. The latter part of the second verse is a little more abstract, but comes from and circles around this theme of anxiety induced by a drastically changing society, where a lot of our down time, when we should be relaxing, is spent plugged in and paying attention to what everyone else is doing and the ways in which they’re “out there” having fun or being productive. It’s how we’re kind of constantly passive-aggressively exaggerating the quality and worth of our activities in a way that makes the people watching question the value of how they’re spending their time. In essence, we’re doing the work of inducing FOMO or shame or anxiety in others for the people who want to keep us constantly working and spending money (which go hand-in-hand, of course).
Robbie used to think the line about “moving out and leaving us the couch,” was about how Amanda and I continued to use the couch in the apartment that we all once lived in together after Robbie moved out, but that wasn’t the idea (maybe in my subconscious). The house and couch are more metaphors for generations of people who have been ambling toward ideas of “growth” and “better” lives without stopping to question what those ideas actually entail and what the ramifications of their desires might be. Glued to the TV (or smartphone) and watching and wanting. Three generations of staying inside the house, losing or forgetting the importance of actual human connection in favor of collecting stuff that they can stow away in their living space. Then they’re gone, and we’re left with this huge, bulky piece of furniture that we’re responsible for. If anything, this was pulled from my family’s experience of cleaning out the home of my great-grandparents after they’d passed away and seeing just how much stuff they’d collected and kept all over their property throughout the years and thinking, “to what end?”
To scale this down to the narrative of the song, it’s like you want things and want attention and you want experiences and strive for these things in the name of blind ambition and one day, whether you’ve attained your goals or not, you stop and assess what you do and don’t have and come to find you’re a different person than the one who had those grandiose ideas. And you don’t really know what it was that was driving you that whole time.
After the run, I put the song away thinking I’d revisit and finish later and went to the backyard to play with my dogs. In the midst of this activity (I was maybe stoned), I thought about what we were doing and the movements and patterns we were creating with our activity and I thought down, down, down to the subatomic level and the fact of no two pieces of matter are ever actually touching or connected. What a bleak metaphor for human relationships. And how literally every single thing we do, every breath and every minuscule movement, is a case of parting and moving matter. It all causes some kind of friction in the universe. We simply HAVE to. And that friction scales up and up and up into actual human relationships and then past that into group dynamics and then group relationships and then societies and cultures. And it’s all a case of friction. Friction of ideas and beliefs and actions. To be, you must do. (“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal) But no one knows what they’re doing, so we just do what seems right. It feels right or you think it’s right. And eventually the path of your right is going to intersect with the path of someone else’s right and we all know two things can’t be in the same place in the space-time continuum, so action must come to pass. The friction’s the issue, no matter the issue.
At some point in playing this song, Robbie started riffing on the lyrics and creating this Taking Back Sunday-style call-and-response narrative. I can’t speak for him on his meaning or intention, but I’ve always loved the way his words intertwine with what I’m saying but in a more aggressive, less purple way. I like to think of it as my character working to rationalize his decision making, while Robbie’s character is coming from a place of emotion based on the actions of the other person. Having to face the direct consequence of your actions while you stand there and try to explain yourself in increasingly abstract and indirect ways. I do know that the guitar lines he wrote for that song are two of his earliest forms of brilliant lead guitar playing and harmony within the arrangement. From the first time he played that part at the end of the chorus, I haven’t been able to hear or play the song without imagining those notes in there. I also love the bouncing bass line and the improvised bass slides that Matt came up with in the studio for this song. They add a nice fun character and help anchor the more country/folksy elements that could’ve easily been lost in the punk band instrumentation. Zach is, of course, a great drummer, and the rolling toms in the bridge were a totally unexpected and enjoyable touch.
Gateway Hug Signage / Gateway Hug Performance / The Just Luckies / Rock N Roll Moment / Secret Rats / Remember That Venue with the Toilet Paper? / Danny Cozzi is Everywhere / Morgan Talks / The Just Luckies (Reprise) / Swing, Swang, Swung (at Burlington Bar)
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt6hYLVgZAE/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=19xf9uzyojiw7
Hoo boy 500 people follow my Instagram account to celebrate here is the greatest video ever recorded.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BuZWp8KnRLF/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=155xoejo26t8v
Love listening to @commandermanderz talk about her love for @nifmuhammad and magic realism, as well as her…less favorable opinion on hard fantasy. You should check out her podcast!
https://www.instagram.com/p/BvMmfqRHe1V/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=15jutqghvomwv
“It’s the part of you that no one can see, but you know it’s there and I do, too. That’s the part of you that no one can take away, ‘cause that’s the part that’s really you. You see, the stuff I like about you isn’t the stuff on the outside. What I like about you is the other stuff, the inside stuff.”
prguitarman
ellievsbear
vaporwave
pixelskylines
