“Hello babies. Welcome to earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies, ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”

-Kurt Vonnegut Jr. All praises due, and thanks to Kimya Dawson

Head Start

So it’s pretty obvious at this point that I’ve been unable to keep this up on a daily or even weekly basis. We play records almost every day, but with both of us working and trying to fumble our way into competent parenthood, it’s been hard to find time consistently to reflect and to write. So I’m going to mess with the format a little bit.  I’d prefer to write more consistently and sacrifice some depth, at least for some of the entries. Time is passing by quickly, and our daughter is changing a little bit every day, and I don’t want to miss the opportunity to document experiences that will then be gone forever.

Hitchcock is a prolific singer/songwriter who first released records with the Soft Boys in the late 70’s, and followed up with a couple of solo records before teaming up with two ex-Soft Boys to form Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians. “Fegmania,” their first album, is a psychedelic alt-pop masterpiece. Aside from the fact that this record is full of truly strange and idiosyncratic pop gems, it’s worth noting that Hitchcock seems preoccupied with the primitive and age-old themes of love and death.   Of course, 90% of our record collection probably consists of various songwriters’ attempts to make sense of these universal experiences, but Hitchcock’s decision to take the psychedelic approach frees this collection of songs from the shackles of the grim or overly earnest tone of most musical musings on love and death, and transforms them into something more playful and absurd.  People who take themselves, or their music, too seriously sometimes balk at this approach, and I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself at times.  But we too easily forget that engaging our imagination and our sense of play is one of the most human things we can do, and can liberate us in so many ways. Imagination is an incredibly powerful tool, too often left to children and scoffed at by so-called “realists.” But it’s what allows us as children to build on our sense of wonder at the world and to engage in play, that most important of childhood activities.  It’s what allows us first as teenagers, and then as young adults, to consider a world better then the one in which we live, and to consider that we might play a part in bringing that world into being.  Its what can make idealists out of largely helpless, alienated, and bored suburban kids, and possibly help transform them into people that make things happen instead of passively watch them happen, people that dream of a better world and then fight for it, on a personal, local, or global scale.  I think that imagination is what helps transform us into activists, artists, musicians and advocates. I often find it odd then, that so many of the leftists/activists/punks I know are skeptical of parenthood. “How could you bring new life into such a fucked-up world,” is the typical question that’s posed to us.  But I’ve found that having a baby and experiencing secondhand her wide-eyed wonder at the world has re-awakened my tired idealism.  I can’t imagine a better way to fight for a better future than to raise a child in opposition to a world that values pursuit of capital over pursuit of joy or pursuit of justice.  So here’s to play, here’s to imagination. Raise your glass.

Hot Track: “Egyptian Cream”

This is really a band for everyone, beloved by fans of punk, new wave, dance music, indie rock, and us dinosaurs who remember ‘college rock” as a genre unto itself.  I always felt like they were a true dichotomy, equal parts minimal pop group and pre-programmed dance machine.

The opening strain of “Love Vigilantes” always brings a smile to my face, and now that she’s smiling for real (and not just because of gas), I can say that it seemed to make our little girl happy too. Not surprising, since it’s got a pretty cheerful and infectious hook, the morbid lyrical theme of ill-fated love notwithstanding.  The impact of the song is magnified by its contrast with “The Perfect Kiss,” which comes next. The transition from the organic (bass, drums, guitar and harmonica) to the mechanical (sequencers and drum machines) and back again is a tough, potentially awkward thing to pull off even in the most capable musical hands, but it seems like the most natural thing in the world when it comes from New Order.  It made me think of the paradoxes, the sharp contrasts, the experiences defined by apparent contradiction, that we’ve run into so far as parents.  In a lot of ways, parenting has presented us with a reminder that life is filled with opportunities for play, for unmitigated joy, for feeling and acting ridiculous and seeing things through innocent eyes.  Relating to this 7-week-old little girl, playing on the floor, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out what makes her smile and what makes her afraid, seeing her respond to all these new sensations, these sights, sounds, and textures, we can’t help but be enchanted by everything, as if we’re experiencing the world as something totally new through her.  I can’t tell you how many times in the past month I’ve wished for an adult-sized bunny suit to match the one she has, or made up ridiculous songs to try to entertain her (try rhyming “hippopotamus,” with “fight the misogynists”).  On the other hand, being a parent requires a degree of seriousness that is new for both my wife and I, and not yet entirely comfortable.  What seemed like a minor fever led to a New Year’s Day emergency room visit and 2 days in the hospital, and our house, which I’ve always thought of as a safe, gentle, inviting place, now seems filled with sharp corners and other potential hazards.  Until a few months ago, I would have least five unexplained bruises on my body at any given time, presumably from playing shows or accidentally smashing into things as a result of being severely uncoordinated. Now I move around our home slowly and with utmost caution, fearful of dropping my baby girl or banging her head on the arm of a chair or a protruding cabinet door.  Hours spent scanning the environment for possible choking hazards.  I’ve spent more time thinking about, and being preoccupied with, safety and potential dangers in the past month-and-a-half than in my entire life before our daughter was born.  Case in point, a dream that my wife had earlier this week:  We are living in her old house, but the living room has been turned into a swimming pool, and one of the many drunk kids jumping into and climbing out of the pool informs us that there’s both a manatee and an alligator residing in it.  “We don’t really worry about the alligator, dude,” the kid says, “he’s too old to bite anyone.”  Later, upstairs in our room, I lecture her, “Now that we’re parents, we need to think about safety. So I got this gun for me (I pull out a big black semi-automatic pistol), and I got this gun for you (I point to an English bulldog in an electric blue lucha libre mask with a hunting rifle affixed to his back).”  The dream is funny, our sudden preoccupation with safety is not.

Caution.  Prudence.

Words I always associated with the overly anxious adult, always someone older or more uptight than me, someone who thinks about consequences at the expense of living in the here and now.

Joy.  Wonder.  Awe.

Words to describe the experience of seeing something beautiful for the very first time, as if through a child’s eyes.  Experiences that sometimes seem out of reach to the jaded adult.

I go back and forth several times in the space of a single hour.  Life is good, but increasingly strange.

Hot Track: “Sunrise”

Words to Live By: “ We might be your black sheep, but you forgot us a long time ago. We might be your lost sheep, but it’s time you remembered us now.”

A lot of people responded positively to the picture of my daughter wearing the homemade Black Flag baby shirt. I want to make sure to give credit where credit is due.  My wife made it, and she also made this prehistoric Flag shirt.  She’s amazing. Next she made this rad “Out Of Step”-inspired mobile to hang over the crib. Luckiest baby in the world.

This is the real Elvis. My feelings about the American singer of the same name can be best summed up by the third verse of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” and that’s pretty much all I’ll say about him. Of the huge selection of heartbreak music in our collection, Mr. Costello (née Declan McManus) and his band are perhaps the most compelling to sing of unrequited love.

What I want to write about today is, in a roundabout way, love that is unreciprocated. And here comes the sentimental part, so brace yourselves: I fell in love with our daughter the moment I saw her, when she slid reluctantly into this world, blue, wrinkled, covered in blood & amniotic fluid. I fall a little bit more in love with her every day. I love her with a ferocity that I couldn’t have imagined just a few short months ago. I feel fiercely protective towards her, and end up staring at her for hours on end. For the first time in my entire life, I can actually sit still just holding her. And as I gaze in wonder at her sleeping face I can see hints of my wife’s features, which only adds to how much I adore her. Maybe you’d call it paternal infatuation, something I’ve heard other Dads talk about, but didn’t understand until now. The thing is, she literally doesn’t have any idea who I am. My wife breastfeeds her, and consequently they have a bond so pure that it’s unlike anything else. Their connection is direct and visceral, based on love, but also on dependency, sustenance, and comfort. She can’t really recognize people yet, so I’m basically “the other big person who doesn’t make the milk.” For a five-week-old baby, life is basically about sleeping and seeking food and comfort, which means that I have very little to offer, because feeding is her most basic comfort. It’s really self-centered and selfish of me, but I find myself jealous of the relationship that my wife and daughter share. I feel excluded in some way that can’t easily be reconciled. In some ways I’m hesitant to share this publicly, because it’s a little more revealing than I’m comfortable with, and makes me sound somewhat needy and pathetic. However, the whole purpose of keeping a record of these experiences is to create something that’s honest about fatherhood in a way that’s fundamentally different from most of what I’ve seen published on the subject. So if I look like an ass, so be it. I know that this situation is temporary, and once she understands who I am, I’ll have my own unique connection with her. But for now I’m a little bit heartbroken.

Now on to our man Elvis. His early records blended punk, soul, jazz and country in a way that was, and still is, timeless, seamless, and masterful. Listening to his records with the Attractions, you don’t realize that you’re listening to a synthesis of disparate musical styles, and if you do, it’s only perceived at the back of your mind. The most remarkable example of this is “Watching the Detectives,” which on paper is equal parts reggae and surf, but if anything creates the impression of soundtrack music for unreleased film noir, but transposed via time machine and style-machine to the height of the 70’s new wave movement. Via some magic of cadence and inflection, his staccato vocal style managed to sound aggressive on even the most laid-back tracks. The Attractions were obviously influenced by the burgeoning punk scene, yet schooled in the Stax tradition: frantic bass lines complementing the melody, tremolo-laden organ, falling-down-the-stairs drum fills, the works. Also punk-as-fuck in attitude, as you will see first-hand if you can track down the footage of their late-70’s appearance on Saturday Night Live. After having been pressured by their record label to feature their new single “Less Than Zero,” in support of their upcoming album, they started the song, but stopped a few measures into it, when Elvis started waving his hands and yelling “Wait, Wait!” They then proceeded to play “Radio, Radio,” a protest song critiquing corporate control of the airwaves that they had been warned not to play. Although this album is not my favorite of theirs (that distinction is reserved for This Year’s Model), I wanted the baby to hear “Alison.” Also, “Welcome to the Working Week,” is a near perfect album-opener. There are many other masters of the forlorn, the despondent heartbreak song, but Elvis hurls his epithets with a caustic wit that neither Robert Smith nor Morrissey can manage, even at their best.

Hot Track: “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes”

Words To Live By: “I said ‘I’m so happy I could die.’ She said, ‘Drop dead,’ and left with another guy. That’s what you get if you go chasing after vengeance. Ever since you got me punctured, this has been my sentence.”

My Rules

The most difficult part of having an infant in your house is that you can’t really leave her alone.  If it’s just her and I at home, and I need to make food or take a shower, I need to think very carefully about how and where she’ll be safe if I put her down.  Soon we’ll need to start thinking about who we will trust to care for her when we’re at work or (gasp) out doing something fun and adults-only.  The first time I left her in her swing so I could take a shower it nearly broke my heart (not to mention filling me with not a little bit of anxiety).  I put this record on.

Two separate threads come to mind: one is the question of who we trust to protect and educate this little creature that we brought into the world.  The second is why Fugazi were so seriously exhilarating.  These two threads are intertwined.

Every parent comes to understand certain basics about entrusting other people with childcare. There are limits to what you can control.  For example, regardless of what rules or boundaries you establish as parents, there will be at least one grandparent who will try to spoil your child rotten behind your back.  But having someone feeding your daughter extra dessert once every 2 months is not really a serious problem.  I’m more concerned with values.  I know that this word gets thrown around a lot by religious conservatives and other frightful people, but it’s an important word regardless.  It’s much deeper than politics, at the intersection of heart and head, the crossroads of compassion and intellect.  I mean it in the sense of a core set of beliefs about how to treat others and how to have faith in oneself in a culture that supports selfishness and superficiality.  I’ve already heard too many stories of parents discovering that one of their babysitters has been teaching their child something that they object to.  Of course the world will eventually throw plenty of disturbing ideas in her direction, and she will need to learn how to filter and make decisions for herself, but it’s another thing altogether to have someone you trust indoctrinating your child with silly bullshit.  For example, I don’t want traditional gender roles reinforced by a relative or babysitter, there’s quite enough of that outside of our doors.  Also, we’re raising our daughter vegetarian because of deeply held beliefs: opposition to cruelty and violence, perspectives about humans’ place in the world, our understanding of the economic and environmental consequences of meat production, and of course, the impact on our health.  What if we leave her with a relative or babysitter for the day who decides, as I’ve heard so many times, that “a child can’t really thrive without meat,” and feeds her some?  Not the end of the world, I know, but upsetting to me nonetheless, and a pretty serious violation of trust.  Maybe all of this is unavoidable, especially once children are in school, but I want to believe that we can take responsibility for teaching our child values that we hold dear, and to some degree protect her, for a few years at least, from some of the wretched things that are reinforced by the world we live in.  I believe that how we raise children is one of the ways we build a better world.

Now, on to the mighty Fugazi. If I were to pick one set of songwriters who I’d trust to pass knowledge on to a young child, it would be the genius tag-team of Ian MacKaye, Guy Picciotto, Brendan Canty, and Joe Lally.  Seriously, for well over a decade, any time we might be tempted to become embarrassed of punk rock, or to entertain the notion that we’d somehow outgrown it, Fugazi would release something new, and we would be reminded of the potential to create something beautiful, intelligent and challenging out of instruments and outrage.  I really believe that they defended the covenant of punk and DIY for years; not only with the music they made, but also with the way they conducted (and refused to conduct) business.  They were like our wise uncles, our radical clergy or even our cool babysitters, showing us a world of possibility.  The band was about music and ideas, not merchandise.  As a result, they didn’t make or sell t-shirts.  Shows were always all-ages and inexpensive, and there were no secrets about how money was handled.  They took responsibility for violence at their shows, calling it out and policing it, and more than a few times refunding the door price to some overly-aggressive macho drunk and escorting him out, even when they were playing large venues.  They were men singing about sexism, punks critiquing the assumptions and rituals of our subculture, D.C. residents showing us a glimpse of life in the capital. They defied the musical and behavioral conventions of the day and could’ve cared less about whether they made enemies or friends doing so.  The first time I ever played a show in Europe was opening for Fugazi in Prague in 1995.  The band walked it like they talked it onstage and off, honest, accessible and generous to the last.  They lent us cables and straps because we lost some crucial luggage, and I watched Ian deal with the promoter and the show accounting in the lobby of the venue, out in the open, setting aside a large amount of money for a community arts center they had encountered on the way. Values. The experience has informed how I’ve thought about being in a band ever since, underscoring the importance of ideas and actions as well as music.  This particular album seems to be nobody else’s favorite, but I love it.  It closes with one of my favorite anthems ever.

Hot Track: “KYEO”

Words To Live By: “Don’t you know that things have settled down but silence is a dangerous sound, we must, we must, we must keep our eyes open…the tools they will be swinging, but we will not be beaten down.”

Because sometimes you’re in the mood for beats, but not lyrics.  And sometimes sound conveys something that words can’t.  It takes most of us quite a few years before we start to grasp this possibility, that we can communicate without words.  Our intuitive response in most situations is to say too much, when just a look or a touch would suffice. Often simply acknowledging that we really don’t know what to say is really the most honest and useful choice of words.  I cringe when I think of all the things I’ll probably say to our daughter that would be better left unsaid.  The brusque or hurtful things said in moments of anger or frustration, the times I’ll inevitably rush in to try to make things better, when all I really need to do is shut up and listen.  The times I’ll interrupt, or run my mouth without listening first.  As a psychologist I realize that words can be our most powerful tools, but being able to tolerate silence is just as important.  So here’s to the artists who recognize that words can sometimes be unnecessary.

Producer/DJ/MC Madlib has been one of my favorite artists since first hearing Quasimoto on Peanut Butter Wolf’s My Vinyl Weighs A Ton. By the early 2000’s, current hip-hop’s fixation on materialism and misogyny had left a bad taste in my mouth, but once I figured out that independent labels like Stones Throw and Definitive Jux were releasing rap music that was every bit as fresh, dynamic and exciting as the material that I’d found so engaging in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I got pretty obsessed, tracking down every release I could find. Madlib was one of number of artists that was busy proving that underground hip hop artist were pushing musical boundaries in a way that was far more sophisticated than anyone in independent rock music.  Madlib is most famous for his collaborations and various alter egos, but here he appears as himself. For this release, he was given access to the Blue Note back catalog, and produced an album full of remixes of Jazz classics.  The record is nearly perfect, and I’m so grateful that he didn’t make the mistake of inviting various MC’s to rap over the tracks.  That’s the mistake RZA made on the retail version of the Ghost Dog soundtrack, and it ruined a potentially incredible album.

Hot Track: “Andrew Hill Break”

Words To Live By: ……