Last Night My City Let Me down

On the night of March 30th, 2014, I went to a concert to see one of my all time favorite bands nearly flawlessly perform a downright amazing set of their best material from a long and storied career. Unfortunately, something happened that drew my focus from their performance, and to a greater issue on the whole. I wish this review could have been about a great band performing a killer set. Instead, what follows is a lot of disappointment and some soul baring. Not necessarily the domain of The Cheeto Factory, but we'l return to your semi-annually scheduled buffoonery sometime in the near-ish millennium. This essay/editorial (what? I'm the editor here...) was originally posted on facebook, and is here being reposted, slightly revised, for greater visibility and posterity. [Mort]

Last night, a portion of a Portland metal audience unironically cheered when a staunchly anti-fascist, pioneering extreme-metal act made a barbed comment about Portland being the seat of caucasian racial prejudice the last time they came through town some 20 odd years ago, and it solidified everything that’s wrong with this town for me. You should be ashamed of yourself, Portland. I honestly don’t know what else to say.

Usually, when one says that their city has let them down, they mean that their sports team lost an important tournament, or one functionally identical binary political party member is elected to some ineffectual position of imaginary power in favor of the other. It’s not often that one can say they’re morally disappointed in the entire city in which they live, especially when one is something of a moral blank oneself.

Last night, a legendary British band came through town for the first time in over two decades. Over the years, Carcass have pioneered a variety of extreme metal styles, and endured hardships that would break feebler bands. Throughout all this, a major lyrical theme of the group has been the rejection of authority and systems of oppression and torture, amongst a wide variety of other topics. Rejection of authority and rebellion may very well be overblown teenage constructs that lose their potency in the stolid march toward adult responsibility, but there is a kernel of truth in youthful anarchy, and I believe it remains relevant regardless of what age you are. Nevertheless, themes of antifascism are timeless and Carcass have penned a number of very powerful songs refuting oppression and torture.

In fact, here’s an excerpt from a former Carcass website F.A.Q. regarding the matter of fascism:
“Carcass are a vehemently anti-fascist band, if you are a right-wing nazi racist - please don't bother showing up to our shows or buying our records, you are sadly missing the whole point.” [1]

And another excerpt from an interview with Bill Steer:
“[…]All of us detest sexism, racism and bigotry in general[…]” [2]

So when bassist/lead singer Jeff Walker cracked a joke last night that “The last time we came through Portland, you guys were the white power capital of the world…” and a not insignificant portion of the crowd (roughly 20-25% by my entirely non-scientific estimate) cheered, I was not only heartbroken, but confused and angered.

The metal and punk I grew up listening to, for lack of a better explanation, came from a place of moral high ground. You could listen to metal and punk and it addressed important social issues like corporatist greed, and governmental corruption. It was a call to arms to challenge the human race to deny its sad history of nationalism and persecution, and to educate people in an effort to bring about a general sense of egalitarianism. I don’t know, though… maybe I’m just some kind of idealistic prick who read that all wrong and it was only meant in a “rights for whites” kind of way. I always had friends who were people of colour who listened to metal, and it never seemed any other way to me, so the very idea that forms of extreme music are exclusionary is absurd to me.

The extreme metal music climate I grew up in had a very strong antifascist core. 90s era east coast hardcore had its share of skins, but everyone I knew was firmly on the side of antifascism, and skins were persona-non-grata at most shows. In the event they did show up, there was conflict and it was made known they weren’t welcome. Bands like Sepultura, Candira, God Forbid, Body Count, Orange 9mm, Biohazard, Rage Against The Machine (yeah, yeah, they get a lot of shit for being corporate sponsored, hyper-popular metal hypocrites, but for all the metal hipster “too popular!” chatter, I personally think they were a solid band the entire way through, and they were a great mainstream source of antifascism… also, I was 17), Corrosion of Conformity, Rollins Band, etc. all featured either strong members who were people of colour and/or an avowed message of antifascism and equality.

It was never even a question of “should I be a racist dimwit?” when I was a growing up in extreme music, I always had amazing role models who crafted strong music that fostered a spirit of equality and justice to guide me, and friends of a variety of nationalities with whom to share the experience. That, and racism is idiotic, and if you can’t see why it’s inherently, logically wrong, you have the mental comprehension of can of soda. A very stupid can of soda.

Which is why, when I discovered that a book entitled “What Are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman's Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal” [3] exists, it brought about a very profound sense of dismay in me. People of colour were always welcome in metal and punk events in the area in which I grew up (NYC, NE Pennsylvania, and northern New Jersey). Again, it wasn’t all copies of By Any Means Necessary and flowers and shit. We had a racist contingent and we dealt with them. Their pride was a shameful thing. They were unwelcome. That they continued to show up to events was morally problematic for us. It never occurred to me that elsewhere, hell, even in other metal scenes, racism and the pervasive creep of real (as opposed to projected, knee-jerk, “I toss this term around to sound socially proactive”) privilege cast the shadow of exclusion on people of colour in the context of styles of music I love dearly.

Since then, my unfortunately, circumstantially naïve brain has come to conclude that metal has a problem with racism (and homophobia and sexism as well, but that’s another subject entirely). In a bizarre twist of irony, given that its birthroots are blues and rock and roll, metal and its subgenres are almost overwhelmingly populated by white, male musicians, most of whom are perfectly nice guys with no fascist agenda whatsoever, who will happily tell the racist skins to fuck right off should they turn out to shows. Indeed, there are disturbing pockets of propaganda machines in bands like Skrewdriver, Brutal Attack, and Skullhead, but many of those bands are shunned outright by the majority of most metal fans. Still, statistically, when you look at the numbers, white musicians and fans comprise the vast majority of the experience. Which isn’t inherently a bad thing; it’s largely a cultural construct, especially here in the states. The problem is that white people simply don’t understand racism from the receiving end because they’ve never experienced it. That, in all honesty, is the true definition of “privilege”. It’s not a term meant to shame white people, it’s simply a very real concept. A concept that illustrates that a certain group of people will never experience the lifelong consequences of casual or outright exclusion, derision, belittlement and violence that comes from being a visible minority; plain as that.

So when I stand, in my city, amongst a group 300 strong (at least), enthusiastically enjoying the music of a band who is avowedly antifascist, and that group cracks a joke about our city's shameful past and NO ONE fucking boos or jeers, and, in fact, a largely audible portion of the audience applauds and cheers… I have no fucking words for you Portland. None at all. I’m horrified, in fact. You should just… know better.

Not long ago, I was talking to a good friend of mine who is black, and we got to the topic of his experiences of racial prejudice in general and eventually that of his experience in Portland. He told me a story about how his mom came to visit him from out of state, so he took her to a nice restaurant so they could have dinner together. Along the way, someone shouted “NIGGERS!” at them from across the street. My heart fucking sank. Imagine the experience of taking a loved one out, simply to enjoy a freedom that everyone in the country has a right to. Now imagine that experience being overshadowed by a group of ignorant shitheads shouting the most demeaning, irrelevant insult at you that you can think of. Now imagine that it’s not an isolated incident. In fact, this, and several shades of more and less subtle disparagement pervade your entire life. It changes the way you experience the world.

Could the above incident happen in just about any town in the US, pretty much at any point in history? Sadly, unfortunately, the answer is yes. The fact that it happens at all in what is, today, considered one of the most progressive towns in America is despicable. It is not an isolated story.

I hear anecdotes of subtle and not so subtle racism in my chosen hometown frequently enough that I can’t simply ignore it. I, myself, frequently experience other white people whom are very obviously racist, but since it’s at least somewhat of a social faux pas to be a visible racist these days, they couch their bullshit in socially digestible nice-isms, acting like they’re being responsible community people, helping to keep a healthy buffer from a “bad element”. And truthfully? I don’t know how much more of it I’m willing to tolerate. The fact that I tolerate it at all is a source of great internal struggle for me. Often, I’m presented with these issues in the workplace, and I’m forced to put my financial stability before my sense of equality and fairness.

It is not my lot in life to be an activist in the traditional sense. I’m a DJ, a musician and a music engineer. That’s my passion, and it’s very clearly my path in life. It’s a very time consuming career and goal and it leaves little in the way (currently, at least) for me to both make a living and support my dream and my burgeoning career. I support antifascist charities and events when I can, but being on the front-lines isn’t really something I have the ability to provide a consistent, sustained focus for. Creating awareness is my small attempt to overcome that, to help educate people when I can. It’s a personal struggle for me, as I hate armchair activism, but in essence, I'm little more than an armchair activist myself. I suppose we all have our issues.

Honestly, I hope that perhaps my reading of the entire situation is simply mistaken, and the crowd were just cheering blindly at the words coming out of the mouth of someone they respect. That, in and of itself, presents its own very vexing problems and parallels, however.

Portland most certainly DOES have the capacity for great things. I’ve seen and am participant to a number of amazingly artistic and beautiful cultural events here in this city. There is also, undeniably, a very real problem with a very ugly demon that rears its head far too often to be a topic that is swept under the table as much as it is. What is to be done about that problem is a question I am unable to answer. Education is the best form of combat against intolerance, but how do you educate people who refuse to see they even have a problem? I don’t know, and it very seriously calls into question my continued, long term residence in this town.

Get your shit together, Portland. Seriously. Not for me, and not because I’m some kind of moral force in the world, or even this town, but because it’s the right thing to do.

1. http://www.goddamnbastard.org/carcass/faq.html
2. http://www.goddamnbastard.org/carcass/interviews/nucleargore.html
3. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1935950053

The Room. Live.

For those not in the know, The Room is an independently produced, low budget American romantic drama film that has gained a participative midnight movie screening cult audience, not unlike The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Vanilla Sky. Except the whole “cult phenomena” thing never happened to that piece of shit second film and rightfully never will. Why it happened to The Room is beyond the comprehension of anyone, living or dead, ever, in the history of this or any other universe and is possibly the result of Satan worship, international bribery and/or telepathic brain manipulation. The frightening billboard Wiseau maintained off an LA highway might have something to do with it as well.

ALRIGHT. FUCK! I’LL GO!

Listed among wikipedia’s "List of films considered the worst" (not a long list, by the way), nearly anything that can be said about The Room has already been written, so I’ll briefly address some of its main points. At face value, The Room is the age old story of a man betrayed by his best girl and his best friend. He also kills himself at the end, so there’s that too (lolSPOILERALERT).  How anyone manages to kill themselves with an Airsoft gun, though, is incomprehensible. Admittedly, sense is not the domain of The Room. Pretty much everything about The Room raises the bar for the term “suspension of disbelief”. Subplots and characters are introduced and dumped quicker than Jennifer Anniston at a lame horse auction. The music sounds like everyone who was ever rejected from an O-Town audition smoked a bunch of shitty weed and covered an unreleased Nsync album. Dialogue is… uh… you can’t call it that. It’s not dialogue. It’s basically moonspeak. And when the not-dialogue isn’t moonspeak, it’s like someone who had only a rudimentary understanding of a non-existing gibberish language made up of mangled aphorisms and folk wisdom phrases plugged several of those phrases into Google Translate and then farted at a piece of paper to fill in the blanks. What characters The Room does decide to chronicle, it does so in such an unbelievably amateur way as to render them zero-dimensional. I know that’s hard to grasp, zero dimensions, but it’s imperative that you don’t give it much thought, lest The Room win and your mind be assimilated into whatever unearthly force is making Tommy Wiseau’s left eye lazy to the point of being indicted for unemployment fraud. What I’m saying is that The Room is a difficult film, though it isn’t challenging in any cinematic sense like, say, Begotten or Possession. The Room is more like an endurance test, like trying to play QWOP with one’s fingers stuffed up one’s own ass. I’ll take a juice break while you attempt the aforementioned feat, just make sure to wash your hands before you return to the keyboard.

Directed by Tommy Wiseau.

The creators of both QWOP and The Room clearly intended to produce something of creative value, but failed miserably, somehow inspiring car wreck decapitation levels of rubbernecking at their colossal missing of the mark. That missing of the mark is what delivers us to the midnight screening cult phenomena of The Room. Reportedly the result of a word of mouth, “OH GOD I CAN’T STOP WATCHING THIS” campaign, independent of the director’s actual advertisement campaign, the film spilled out of its LA “Friday Night Is All Anal Hardcore Night” theater confines and people were soon ridiculing the film internationally. However, Canada will watch anything and post-modern irony is still a good twenty years away from their collective conceptual understanding, so they actually think it’s a good film. I’m just playin’ witchoo Canada, we cool.

I can no longer remember how I was introduced to The Room. Wiseau has clearly taken over the part of my brain that controls why anyone would think it’s a good idea to actually watch The Room, but I think it was the aborted child of my love of shitty cinema and drunken, late night internet trolling. I acquired a copy of the film, watched it… and then watched it like three more times. All totaled, I’ve probably seen The Room about fifteen times, possibly more. When I heard The Room was playing at Cinema 21 in NW Portland, I was oddly compelled to go. The thing about The Room is that it’s much better to watch with other people. I should know. I’ve watched the film alone at least three times and I’ve wanted to commit suicide by pellet gun myself each time. When there are others present with which to commiserate your shared agony, it seems there may be hope and light in the world. But then, for some idiotic reason, you watch it by yourself again, drunk at 3 AM and it’s the filmic equivalent of consuming an entire bottle of aspirin and chasing it with a bottle of extra strength own brand Draino.

I didn’t really expect there to be as many people as there were, but there were a fuckton of people there. The line was around the block. Wiseau was late, but when he showed up he gave everyone in line a high-five, stopped to cavort and play “football” (a Room in-joke) in the middle of the street with a few attendees and got scolded by the cops for doing so. Indoors, Wiseau had set up a merch-table pretty much directly in the entrance of the theater and a small crowd gathered to collect autographs and interact. Interacting with Tommy is fucking bizarre. I get the impression that no one has any idea what that man is talking about, ever. Asked for advice about success or some such topic, Wiseau said “Always give twenty percent. Never one hundred. It goes twenty percent, forty percent, sixty percent.” I did the math in my head later and realized that’s 120 percent. What the fuck? In the Audience Q&A before the screening Tommy claimed to be from Mars, insulted the theater for lack of preparedness even though he was fifteen minutes late, and improvisationally mock-directed a skit loosely based on his film with a group of people who had come dressed up as characters from the film. He made absolutely zero sense until dropping the line “The Room is about expressing yourself.” At that moment, I realized Tommy Wiseau was actually insane.

Solely on the merit of his film being mocked and publicly ridiculed has Tommy Wiseau achieved success. He refuses to tell us about his past. Funding for the film’s six million dollar budget may or may not have come from child labour. His film is considered one of the worst of all time. And I asked for his autograph.

And I posed for a picture with him.

He refused to have buttsex with me though.