What in the hell …

Artist and audience, I mean. Got a new CD today, new CD by a band from Chicago. People right about my age. People in this band played the first punk rock show I went to at 16, in other bands. I went to see them in different iterations. I booked shows for some of their bands in the late 90s when I put on shows for a while. I’ve got all their albums. I have a tattoo related to them.

These folk have been an important part of my growing up. As I was going through different changes and dealing with different issues, they were writing songs about them at the same time. Those songs were part of the way I figured things out, the world, life, relationships, depression, anger, etc. And their a small enough band that we’d chat a bit before and after shows, my partner and I’d buy them drinks, exchange hugs and smalltalk if we met on the street in Chicago. They’re super fucking important to me. Emotions run high listening to their records and even more so at shows (I choked a kid at one of their shows, the only thing really resembling a fight I’ve been in since the 7th grade, in part because I was cranked up really high. And this wasn’t in high school or college. It was in the past two years.)

At the same time… while I have a lot of affection for these people, we’re not really friends. We’re friendly, but that’s not the same. I don’t know these people. I know their work. It’s a strange thing. There are other artist I have the same relationship with - musical in particular, also literary and to a lesser degree philosophical, visual, dramatic. Music’s the big one for me, and literature’s second. I’m a bit uneasy with the artist-audience relationship in some ways, at least whenever I meet artist who mean a lot to me, mainly because I’m shy and awkward.

But with this band, it’s like there’s some overlap of the artist-audience relationship and other relationships. I have similar ones with other people I know - many of the people whose blogs I read are distressingly (depressingly!) smart and well-written, and more importantly are people whose ideas are super important to me. But I’ve got relationships with many of them, it feels a little more like a collaborative venture and the lines make more sense. Like being in a band with someone who is a super talented musician. Being impressed by and respecting and being moved by artistic creations and also having affection for and a friendship with the person, that makes sense more in those settings.

This case with this band is a little more confused for me, because the relationship is so close in time and space, I think. That’s also part of the power there. Same ages, similar in terms of background and geography. And all the face to face contact, the economy of scale. They’re a great band, and the other bands were great too, and other bands are. But this band are a great band made up people like me (ish), and I can see that because I’ve had enough conversation with them.

That was what made punk rock so powerful, aside from being an outlet for and minimal self-awareness in terms of anger, it was exciting because it was like “we could do this too!” and that became a provocation, “why don’t we do this too?” That’s why I started playing music, a lot of why I started trying to write, did zines for all that time. I’m not in those circles anymore, those clothes don’t really fit in many ways, but it was huge in terms of starting to become consciously self-active. And this band touches on all that and I’ve got really strong feelings and am a bit confused about it. It’s an odd relationship: “In a way, I love you. You helped make me what I am, helped me make me what I am, helped me start to make me me, and as far as I can tell we have at least some things that are important to us both very much in common. But you don’t know me, really at all, and really I don’t know you.” How strange.

It’s also complicated in that … well, this band, what they play now, it speaks to me. What they used to play, it used to speak to me. And they still play some of the old stuff. Their old bands used to speak to me. They recall those associations for me. And that’s ambivalent. My wife said to me last night, “you’ve aged more chronologically than I have.” I turned the record down and said “what?” She explained, along the lines of: “You’re not who you were, that’s a big deal to you. So the old bands make you feel differently than they make me feel. I am who still I was. I’m not just that person, but that’s still part of me. And sometimes I go back or want to go back. You don’t like to go back.”

That’s true. I don’t like to go back. Her life is an accumulation, mine is a progression. I have affection for some of the past, but ultimately I relate it to me now. If I like where I am now then the past is good insofar as it helped me move here. If I don’t like where I am now, then the past is bad insofar as it helped me move here. And there are certainly regrets about some of the dead ends and more circuitous routes taken along the way. Hence some of the ambivalence, because those dead ends and routes are part oft the ensemble bound up with even the best moments in the present when those moments involve old records or new records by old bands.

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I also got some great bilingual prayer-style candles tonight at this little store next to record store #2 on the hunt for this CD (found it at store 3). They are a Pancho Villa candle, a Death To My Enemies candle, and a Shut Up candle. They’ll be placed on my desk next to my prized Jinx Removing candle as soon as I unpack it and get my desk set up.