You Can't Get There From Here

There's an old children's game that involves holding a makeup mirror under your nose and walking around the house with it held there, facing up towards the ceiling. The mirror reflects the ceiling into your peripheral vision, and you start to subconsciously navigate around the house as if the ceiling were the floor - stepping over the tall thresholds created when door headers are reflected onto the floor, and running into furniture that goes unseen on the smooth expanses of the ceiling. This trick and others like it have always been of interest to me. I suppose I was destined to experiment with drugs as some of my earliest pastimes were spinning around until I was dizzy, holding my breath, and pushing on the outsides of my eyeballs until I saw double. But as a hard-core rationalist and someone who permanently gave up psychedelics after a single, life-changing experience at the tender age of seventeen, I've always been drawn to the types of out-of-body experiences that can be attributed to glitches in our own internal processing or other types of visual and auditory phenomena that have a simple, rational explanation.

As a kid, I had a treasured book that dealt with metaphysical phenomena such as astral projection and lucid dreaming. The astral projection bit always seemed a bit hokey to me, but I still applied the techniques and tried to imagine myself pinned against the bedroom ceiling, staring down at my own prepubescent body, comfortably wrapped in my favorite brown and orange 70's sheets with the mountain/sunset motif. I had more success with lucid dreaming, and I still have some successes finding the cracks in the veneer of a dream's believability - those cracks that are the openings allowing you to step in and take control of the dream for yourself.

This interest in the ability to exert a level of control over what is essentially a delusion takes me back to my problem with psychedelics. If you take enough acid (which I certainly did that one night), you can reach a point where you can no longer continue to tell yourself that you feel the way you feel because you ingested a foreign substance. It's the opposite of lucid dreaming. Once you lose the thread that ties you back to reality ("I did drugs, and this will pass"), your current situation becomes your reality - and your reality is theonly reality. Our only connection to "reality" is through the unreliable input from our senses and we all experience the world in our own ways. There is no objective reality.

When I awoke from my one-and-done acid trip with my seventeen-year-old body tied down to a hospital gurney, the doctors who insisted that I stay there for three days against my will did so because they were ostensibly concerned that I might have a "flashback". It didn't help my state of mind any that the reality I had woken up to was just as surreal as the drug-induced one that I had just left behind. Neither did the fact that they pumped me full of other psychoactive medications - drugs which caused me to shake violently - and then proceeded to interrogate me about why I was shaking. Laying there supine, naked, struggling against the thick leather restraints, I did my best to astral project myself right out of that hospital room, but alas, it wasn't going to happen.

I'm pretty sure my elite team of doctors got their training from watching old episodes of Dragnet, still, as the years have gone by, the dreaded flashbacks they were so valiantly shielding me from (with Haldol and stomach pumps) never came to pass in the sense that I never had the experience of unexpectedly returning to my previously-drugged state, but I did eventually experience a type of flashback, one that manifested itself as a reliving of past traumas experienced during my experience on acid - little flashes of PTSD. Just because something didn't really happen doesn't mean that it didn't happen for you. I still have nightmares about my seventeen-year-old nightmares.

Perhaps because of the memories of these past traumas, I've become interested in creating environments and experiences now that shift our perceptions as a sheer exploration of joy. I want to induce auditory and visual hallucinations that can be turned off at any point - take off the headphones or step out of the room and it's over. The ability to escape these situations does not make them any less powerful, it simply makes them safer and less likely to traumatize the participants. Still, these experiences have the potential to show us what's on the other side of the curtain, not that there is a world of magic and mysticism out there, but that the world is simply what we make of it. So maybe there is magic and mysticism after all. There is if you want it. I don't really, but anything is possible.

Reading in bed without craning your neck is possible if you have a pair of these fancy new "Lazy Reader" prismatic eyeglasses! The glasses shift your gaze 90 degrees to the south, so when you're lying in bed staring at the ceiling wishing that the Haldol would wear off and somebody would give you a blanket -instead of actually staring at the ceiling, you can stare at your feet as your ankles tug against the restraints. You could read a book if somebody would just prop it up on your chest. Or you could re-read the short inscription on that Jesus Lizard record that your brother had the band sign for you to cheer you up while you were in the hospital.

Or maybe you're not a sedentary person. Perhaps your idea of a good time is hanging off of a sheer rock face hundreds of feet in the air, belaying your partner as he picks his way through the next pitch of 5.14 cracks, running out of places to put any decent protection as a storm rolls into the valley. Don't strain your neck staring up at your partner's ass all day. Put on a pair of these prismatic "belay glasses" and look straight up while looking straight ahead. Or walk around the house looking at the ceiling as if it were the floor. Like you did when you were a kid.

It is only because of Amazon and Facebook's intimate knowledge of my interests and shopping habits that I learned of the existence of belay glasses. I had the idea to create an installation like this years ago, but the glasses part of it just seemed too fussy and complicated to bother with. I shelved the idea and thought there was no way that anyone was ever going to make a commercially available pair of glasses that looked straight up in the air, but here we are. And here I am, preparing to spend more than $1K on acrylic mirrors to cover the ceiling of a gallery so that people can walk around in goofy glasses, looking at the tops of their own heads. This may turn out to be a perfectly pedestrian experience, or it may be mind blowing. There's only one way to find out. We're going to have to do it.

And this is how my recent artistic practices have really come to excite me. I don't know what's going to happen. It might not work at all. Or it might just be kinda lame. Or it might be completely disorienting with people bumping into each other and falling down. Or it might be totally transcendent.

I spend a lot of time making mock-ups and renderings to help myself envision the way things are going to work, and those things do help, but there's really no way to tell how these environments are going to work until you experience them in person. What I have tried to focus on here is simplicity. Works such as this can have all sorts of  after-the-fact meanings attached to them, issues of surveillance, voyeurism, mysticism, etc can be layered onto a work like this in an attempt to make some sort of larger statement. I've been guilty of plenty of those things in the past. This time I would just like to keep it simple: a stage onto which other dramas can be projected.  A frame or vessel in which art can be created and enjoyed. Or we can just dance and attempt to transcend ourselves in the most primal of ways - through music, and  movement, and trance.

I had one of those moments at Tempus two years ago when Prince died and Tracy held an impromptu dance party in his honor. I'm not a dancer. Can you tell that I'm self conscious? I can't get out of my own skin. But that night I did, for just a few brief moments as we drank and danced and mourned the loss of someone that had pulled back the curtain for us so many years ago.

So let's make this a dance floor, and have a dance party. And we'll let Tempus and Tracy program the play list, and we'll hope that it's heavy on the Prince because we know that it will be. And we will literally leave our bodies behind. We'll project ourselves up and out to look down and see ourselves dancing - as others would see us - and not our own flawed conception of others as people who are critical of us because we are critical of ourselves and the others that we imagine are products of our own self-critical imagination. Actual others. Others who really don't give a shit about us, but also they don't live in our skin and they can see the beauty of our herky-jerky old man dance, or the wild mania of the twirling girl, or the joy in that guy who just keeps jumping straight up and down. We'll be both ourselves in our dancing meat bags and we'll be everything else that is not us and our meat. Or we'll just be a bunch or dorks walking around in silly glasses. Whatever. It's worth a shot."

Speculative Geography

I've recently been invited to join an old dudes book club, where a few forty-something guys read books about punk rock and get together in a bar every couple of months to talk about what they've read. It's quite possibly the least punk thing I've ever done. As an ardent anti-nostalgite, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the whole thing, but I've started to realize that now is the time that our own personal histories start to get written, and if we want them to be written well, or at least accurately, then we need to participate in the entire process - not just in the consumption of these histories, but in their critique and even their production.

To this end, I have been working on the very early stages of a personal project that I'm tentatively referring to as "Natural History". The idea goes against most of what I've explored artistically and intellectually to date. The project approaches my own personal history (my actual lived experiences combined with fantasies, false memories, imaginings and influences from music, art, film, and popular culture) as fodder for a multi-faceted, museum-style exhibition. Think less Museum of Modern Art and more Natural History Museum. Where the world has been reduced to the size of a man. The man as museum - complete with dioramas, diagrams, puppets, illustrations, photographs, and recordings. The dioramas have become especially fascinating to me as they seem to carry with them the institutional voice of authority (and a certain quaint antiquity) while still being easily subverted. The fractal nature of our experience becomes immediately apparent as models are developed at full scale in a digital environment and then scaled down to be 3d printed, laser cut, or sculpted from materials generally acquired from hobby shops. The viewer's access to information can be easily controlled through carefully constructed apertures that allow only limited views of the action. There can be, both literally and figuratively, elements included in the works to which the casual observer may never have any access. This is an idea that I have often struggled against in contemporary art. The idea of the artist's intent (which can only be discerned through examinations conducted outside of the work) giving the work its meaning and, ultimately, its value, is something I've always taken issue with. On one level, the concept of artistic intent is something that has been used as a key to the capitalist lock in contemporary art. Only a select few are given the tools needed to assess the value of a work of art. Those without the necessary background are left in the dark. It's no accident that Wall Street speaks a language that Main Street doesn't understand. It's not that the people on Main Street are incapable of learning the language, the obfuscation of certain financial instruments is as intentional as the deliberately opaque language and background information surrounding much of contemporary art. I like to think that my approach differs both in practice and intent. The idea of literally burying certain information deep within the work becomes an exercise in what I have come to call "speculative geography"  - a way to inhabit the characters of a story through real and imagined connections to place. The exercise can be viewed similarly to the actor who writes a detailed back story for their character. A back story that never ends up on screen, but serves to inform the actor's performance. In a sense, though, what I'm interested in is displaying only that back story without its accompanying narrative.

I have found myself looking for inflection points in both my own real history and in the history of important events that I've used to build my own personal cosmology. These inflection points always seem to be tied intimately to an actual place in time. Sometimes this place is purely imagined or constructed from second-hand descriptions, but I can nevertheless feel the size of each room, the quality of the light and the sound. It's often only through hindsight that one can identify the point where two disparate ideas, influences, or people rubbed up against each other and the world was forever changed - a time when the membranes became so thin that ideas and influences could move across the normal barriers that we encounter every day.  

As our first book club assignment, we are reading Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr. I'm not even close to finishing it, but I've been struck by a particular scene - the moment where all of the principal players come into contact with each other (without most of them even knowing it). The "meet-cute" as it were. Paul Westerberg is walking home from work along his normal route (in the snow, in my imagination) and he hears the distinctive sound of Bob Stinson's guitar, Bob's eleven-year-old brother Tommy on bass, and Chris Mars on drums, as their band, tentatively named Dogbreath, blazes through an instrumental cover of the Yes song "Roundabout".  Westerberg kneels at the basement window of the house at 3628 Bryant Road in Minneapolis and tries to glimpse the source of the racket. I imagine what he hears is mostly Tommy's bass through the thick basement walls. Perhaps he sees the top of the kid's head, his blonde bowl cut bouncing to the song's distinctively quick, funky, prog rock bass line. The Stinson brothers play their own version even faster than the virtuosic tempo of the original. I imagine that it's wintertime because I love the way sounds carry and die on the snowy ground. When the sound of the whole world is softened and muffled under a blanket of snow, the noise of a band like Dogbreath blasting out of a cold Minneapolis basement, on a dark and quiet street, feels all the more strange and cacophonous.

One of the great things about modern speculative geography is the information that is readily available at one's fingertips. Google Earth took me right to the house at 3628 Bryant Road and I tried to glimpse its character through a springtime thicket of trees. I had better luck with Street View where the trees were denuded of their foliage. I took a screen shot of the facade, loaded it into my 3d modeler, and began to recreate the house in my imagined world. I carefully scaled all of the dimensions based on the assumption that the front door was a standard 6'8", as most front doors are.  I placed the four doric columns on the front porch, overly ornate for a house so plain. I imagined the interior layout and tried to pull up the property on the Hennepin County property appraiser's site without any luck. I would have to come up with the floor plan on my own. I thought of the classic TV sitcom interior seen so many times, all the way from Archie Bunker to Al Bundy. The front door to camera right, the staircase on the back wall, kitchen to the left. I downloaded a four piece drum kit and a couple of human figures and began to place them around the scene. I will continue to fill out the scene, adding details, decorating the rooms, sculpting the characters faces to fit their likenesses. And I will put myself in the scene over and over feeling the impact of the surroundings and the details slowly recalled. Cigarettes smoked in the cold. The crunch of snow under foot. Westerberg's tracks through the deep lot. The dark house with a faint glow from the low windows. The vibration of absolutely everything at once.

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The house at 3628 Bryant Road where the Stinson brothers lived with their mother.

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A rendered view of my 3d model of the Stinson house. More details remain to be added, but this provides a preliminary view of the scene to be depicted in the final diorama.

Interstices

What is being mapped here are so-called "desire paths", the routes through the woods that only the kids and the hobos know. Forgotten and overlooked infrastructure. The places where there is no "there". My whole life I've felt like I was in-between. An honor student taking OJT and working nights. A 30-year-old sculptor in the Fire Academy. A southern liberal. 

And it's always back to these same houses. Single-story, low roofed, chain link fenced, concrete block. These houses that burn in minutes. Everybody's house is a mess. People are den animals who like to burrow in to their own mounds of stuff. Everyone has the same stuff. Very few people have walked into the number of strangers homes that I have. Just walked in with impunity. Looked at all the pictures on the wall. Rifled through the cabinets to find the medications. How many pressboard vanities have I seen falling apart? All of them. How many trailer floors have I fallen through? Remembering that trailer with the rookie firefighter that looked like they had rolled the carpet with a paint roller charged with feces. The negative image of the dead dog left on the floor when the animal was removed and the room cleared of the strange, thick, greasy yellow smoke.
I would give up my sense of smell in a heartbeat. The ratio of unpleasant to pleasant smells experienced is at least three to one.
And somewhere, down the hall, there's always a smoke detector chirping. Is that what it is? We've been wondering. For God's sake, yes! Me with a clipboard full of nine volts, changing out batteries while my crew addresses the patient.

Dumb Jobs For Smart People

This is what happens when you grow up as a smart kid in Lutz. In a down-at-the-heels exurban Central-Florida neighborhood with a step-father who works for the county and a mother who is a secretary at the nearby university. Four of their five kids are within two years of each other. Two are his, two are hers, and the youngest one is theirs together. Or, as she likes to say "his, mine, and ours".

I was in the middle of everything.

By the standards of our neighborhood, we were practically rich. We lived in an honest-to-god house on a street full of houses, just a block from the run-down travel trailers and old single-wides of the MGTP (the Mighty Good Trailer Park).  Ours was the cypress-clad house on the corner with a hot tub on the back porch and a stained-glass window in the gable - lit from the inside at night (my step-dad's idea). A constantly rotating fleet of well-used cars filled the front yard, nosing up to the chain-link fence. 

To our friends on the block, we had everything we could want - electric guitars, drums, a four track cassette recorder, a microwave oven, and a refrigerator stocked with Toaster Strudel and Dr. Check. I had a go-kart that I'd bought for thirty dollars from a friend.  It had a three horsepower Briggs and Stratton motor, but no brakes or gas pedal. To drive it you had to hold one hand on the wheel and the other behind you on the engine's throttle lever. The kart's braking mechanism involved wearing an old pair of shoes that could be planted on the pavement to bring yourself, ever-so-slowly, to a stop.  When eventually the go-kart was stolen from my yard, I got my big metalhead friend Eric, and we walked over to the MGTP where we - or he - physically threatened the suspected perpetrators until they produced the go-kart, somewhat the worse for wear. Eric's dad gave me my first welding lesson as we fixed the steering mechanism that the thieves had broken while racing the kart through the woods behind the Handy Mart. 

We were one of the first families in our neighborhood to have cable TV and a VCR. We didn't have any movie channels so we had to turn the cable box up onto its dial when the parents went to bed in an often-futile attempt to unscramble Cinemax's latest installment of Emmanuel or Lady Chatterly's Lover. When the image wouldn't unscramble, we would sit listening to the audio and speculating as to whether the dark spots on the screen were perhaps nipples, kneecaps, or eyeballs. The VCR was a top-loading JVC with giant, primary-colored Mondrian buttons and a "remote" whose cord you had to route under the living room rug so people wouldn't constantly trip over it.

The neighbors thought we were pretty fancy, but we didn't compare ourselves to the neighbors. What we saw as kids, and especially as teenagers, were our own shortcomings in the eyes of our classmates at an upper-middle class suburban high school - having gained admittance through the use of a fake address. There, we were the poor kids. Still, our parents had bought us each a car for our sixteenth birthday - just like all the other kids at our school - but ours were bought for $500 (an AMC Hornet, a Plymouth Reliant, a green Pinto station wagon) and were necessary for us to get to school on our own, while the cars our classmates drove were BMWs and, at the very least, newer Toyotas.

Our savior, and eventually our curse, was punk rock. Money didn't make you cool in the world of 1980's punk. In fact, it was quite the opposite, and our shift from wanting the latest fashions to shopping almost exclusively at the thrift store couldn't have made my mother any happier. She wasn't a fan of our hair, but I guess you can't have it all. Our high school friends had a harder time establishing their working-class punk cred, but they had a lot more to rebel against than we did. The anti-establishment fire may have burned a little hotter in them. They were the children of the buttoned-down yuppies that all of our new idols despised. Our parents were more of the post-hippie Laissez-faire variety. They took us to bluegrass festivals and we periodically stole bits of stale old weed from the same little baggie in their top dresser drawer. By the time I was sixteen, everyone of us, children and parents included (except my youngest brother who was only seven), smoked cigarettes in the house all the time. It was unbelievable.

I'm not quite sure where it came from, but the one thing that seemed to run strong in our family was what has typically been called "Protestant work ethic". Perhaps this was something that my parents got from their parents (most of them survivors of multiple tours of duty in multiple wars, the Great Depression, cancer, heart disease, alcoholism, and perhaps most notably, depression). Somehow this work ethic had been passed along almost completely intact, but devoid of all religious associations. We were raised, and remain largely, agnostics and atheists. Hard work was not something done to achieve salvation, but simply because it beat the alternative, and in the years before Prozac, hard work was second only to alcohol in providing many of us with a way to outrun our own creeping depression.

I've always had a bit of a split personality. The hands-on, real-world side of my brain is in a constant struggle with the more imaginative, free-association side. One thing I've never had much patience for is rules. I like to take things as they come, and having hard and fast rules in place always seems to stifle any attempt at truly thinking through a situation. Plus, nobody loves a rule book like a dumb person loves a rule book. The biggest rule followers in any organization are invariably the least creative, most unimaginative thinkers. Whether it's the Bible, or the City of Tampa Construction Code, there's nothing that makes life easier for the dullard than being given a written set of instructions on how to conduct oneself. This is why, contrary to popular belief, I think atheists are the most morally-minded of individuals. There's a lot of hard work that goes into creating your own morality without the assured guidance of rule books and sermons.

The fire department is as rule-bound an institution as any other paramilitary organization, but unlike many similar agencies, firefighting has a long tradition of creative rule bending and breaking. What saves us as firemen and frequent defiers of the rule book is the fact that the final outcome is usually easily measurable. Did the house burn down? Did the patient survive? Did anyone get hurt? This is helped by the fact that every situation is different and the rules often don't apply at all. As long as you can justify your actions to someone after the fact, and the outcome was satisfactory, you can chalk it all up to thinking on your feet and responding to a dynamic situation. You just have to hope that your actions come down on the right side of things when the history of the incident gets written. There are plenty of situations where, at least in the moment, it may be possible to see two distinctly different outcomes. Your heroic actions could just as easily get you demoted as get you Firefighter of the Year.

So this is where I found myself in the summer of 2013, a newly-promoted Driver Engineer sent to one of the furthest outlying stations in the wilds of southeastern Hillsborough County. I had come from a moderately busy suburban station that averaged 8-10 calls per shift covering an area of about 6 square miles, to a rural station that averaged 1-2 calls per shift and covered an area of 125 square miles. We didn't do much, but when we did it was usually serious and our backup was a long ways away. You could easily have a structure fire all to yourself for twenty or thirty minutes before another unit arrived on scene. And all this with no fire hydrants.

In the Florida summer, Wimauma and its surrounding agricultural lands are the frequent site of large-scale brush fires that can burn hundreds or even thousands of acres. These fires may take anywhere from several hours to several weeks to control. The apparatus assigned to our station consisted of an engine (or fire truck) manned by a crew of three firefighters, a one-man tanker truck carrying 3500 gallons of water, and an un-manned brush truck staffed by the firefighters from the engine as needed. When called for a brush fire, we usually just grabbed our gear off of the engine and jumped on the brush truck with the tanker following in our wake. On this particular afternoon, the call was dispatched as a simple grass fire at an address at least 10-12 minutes from our station. The three of us piled into the brush truck and pulled out of the station with the tanker close behind. On small outdoor fires such as this, we generally only dispatch a single engine or brush truck. In this case, due to the water supply issues, we had the tanker coming as well. As we got closer, dispatch updated us that the fire was "possibly" threatening a structure on the property. A few minutes passed and they were advising us that this was a confirmed structure fire with at least one house burning and an unknown occupant level. With each update we discussed our plan of attack, but our strategies were severely limited by our choice of apparatus and the equipment that we had available to us.

We discussed the possible scenarios across the front seats as we sped towards the rising column of thick, black smoke in the distance. We had three people, one airpack (each brush truck only had one air pack on it), two sets of structural firefighting gear (our rookie had left his on the engine, only bringing his lightweight brush gear), and no handlines suitable for fighting a structure fire. We ran down the inventory coming behind us on the slow-moving tanker - one more airpack, 3500 gallons of water, a pump, and two 2" handlines that had probably never been pulled on a structure fire and may have been completely unserviceable. The beginnings of a plan had started to come together. The Captain and I would suit up in our structural gear while the rookie pulled the brush line and fought whatever brush fire there was and we waited for the tanker. One of us would pull the second airpack off of the tanker and we'd pull both of the 2" handlines to fight the structure fire. As we discussed our options, I realized that I was grinning from ear to ear, and I voiced to my crew what I had been thinking since the start of this whole debacle. "This is gonna be awesome."

Sense Memories

Florida scrub heat.  White powder sand. Palmettos.  The clicking of insect wings in the still air.

Sand so fine it works its way through the fabric of your shoes.  Sweaty dirt between your toes.  ‘Dirt tan’ rings at the tops of your socks.

Sandspurs.

Sky.

Drinking Kool-Aid from the plastic cooler/pitcher that leaked all down your front no matter how careful you were.

Slick wet tree bark and two-by-four steps to an ageing rope swing.

Things you can jump off of into the water.

Canoe blisters.

Wet tennis shoes.

Alcohol and vinegar solution from a ketchup bottle in the ears.  The hot, pungent sensation of it as it ran down your neck.

The cool water at the bottom of the lake, the muck that your feet sank into.

The smell of lake muck.

The smell of everything when it gets hot.  Like a red Tupperware lunchbox that’s been left in the car all day.

Road heat.  Grass heat.  Car heat.  Sidewalk heat.  Baseball diamond heat.  Parking lot heat.  Boardwalk heat. 

The bench seat of a VW camper van.  Orange and brown plaid interior.

Trying to make the Star Wars laser sound by hitting telephone pole cables with wrenches.

Crowded back of a light blue Plymouth K Car.  No AC.  Sweaty and newly hairy adolescent knees sticking to each other.

Cigarettes on the beach. Cigarettes in the mall.

Hollow brass door knobs.

Sour laundry.

The cold air blast of a HARTline bus.

The sound of a bicycle chain with sand in it.

Everything fixed with tape.  Sticky, hot, tape residue on everything.

The inside of a car’s ashtray.

Dashboard foam split by heat.

Lawnmowers that don’t start.

The dampness at the back of an aluminum shed.

Chain link everything.

Dog runs along the fence.  The way the dirt piles up in the corners.

The taste of water from a sun-baked garden hose.

Palmettos.

The Great “Merchandise” Debate

Over the last week or so, there has been a vigorous online debate about the contents of an interview with the Tampa band Merchandise published by the Pitchfork writer Jenn Pelly on the website dazeddigital.com.  The interview is a virtual treasure trove of priceless quotes for those interested in the follies of youthful philosophizing and hipster literary pretentions.  Merchandise was recently signed to the British independent record label 4AD (home to indie superstars like The National, Bon Iver, and Iron and Wine – among others).  By all accounts, and based on my own limited exposure to their music, these guys are talented musicians and they are probably going to be very big.  So what’s all the fuss?

Well, in the course of his interview, vocalist Carson Cox spoke about his work and his hometown of Tampa in terms like this:   "I'm proud of the fact that we did this in a cultural wasteland, that we made something we think is intelligent in a place where they just don't want anything intelligent”.  Cue the internet outrage.

This is where I get a little squirmy with the vitriol being directed at these guys.  Don’t get me wrong, I think they’re just as naive and misguided as everyone else does, but perhaps it’s for different reasons.  Whenever somebody says something negative about Tampa (or anywhere else for that matter), there emerges almost instantaneously a group of defenders of the area that all sound like they work for the state tourism board.  When somebody accuses you of being unintelligent and culturally bereft, to point out to them that we are home to the Dali Museum and the Chihuly  collection just makes you seem ridiculous.  It’s as if people think that, with enough persuasion, we can convince anyone that Tampa is a great town.  We can’t.  And we shouldn’t try to.  Tampa is a great town for a certain type of person (self motivated, immune to insults and humidity, capable of handling failure and rejection, etc.) and it’s not a great town for other types (lazy, entitled, hipper-than-thou douchebags).  This is exactly as it should be.  Part of what we all love about Tampa is that it actively encourages those types of people to leave.  It’s a self filtering machine.  And this is where I take umbrage with Cox and others of his ilk; he seems to be exactly the type of person that usually gets propelled out of Tampa like a magnet with the wrong polarity, and yet he’s still here, and he’s still bitching about being here.  In public.

We’re from Tampa.  We don’t need self esteem.  We are not strivers.  We are not ambitious.  This doesn’t mean that we won’t work tirelessly to express ourselves or improve our communities, it just means that we know that the recognition we receive will be virtually non-existent, but we will know what we have done and those that know us will know and appreciate it too.  One of the things that I always say I love about Tampa is that when something cool happens, there’s a good chance that you either did it yourself or you know the person responsible.  I don’t have any real gripe with New York or Portland or San Francisco - there’s much to love in all of those places - but I do take offense when someone I know moves to New York and three months later they are telling me that “their city” is the greatest city on Earth.  You didn’t build that.  You paid the price of admission, and that’s fine.  Some people like to do things themselves and some people like to hire someone else.  To each his own, but if we are going to apply a “cool factor” to each individual, I will always argue that those who do it themselves are cooler.  And poor people are always cooler than rich people.  And the Yankees suck.  Sorry, but that’s just the way it works.

So I’m not surprised when somebody like Lena Dunham says that we can’t afford to have the Patti Smith of our generation moving to Tampa.  The article’s writer, Jenn Pelly, is living in Lena Dunham’s New York and deriding the horrors of Nebraska Avenue and Alpine Liquors.   These “kids” were just recently introduced to Patti Smith by reading her National Book Award winner “Just Kids”.  Smith wasn’t even on their radar until she made it to the top of the New York Times bestsellers.  And now they imagine themselves inhabiting that same New York.  That New York doesn’t exist anymore.  That New York was a collection of Nebraska Avenues and Alpine Liquors – and cool people.  Whether or not you think that Tampa has what it takes to nurture those same sorts of cool people doesn’t really matter.  What matters is that the people that live here – and choose to stay - do.  And that’s what’s so annoying about Cox’s attitude.  He doesn’t get it, and yet he’s still here.  He’s supposed to be an artist with an ability to see what lies beneath the surface, and everything that’s cool about Tampa is beneath the surface.  Cox is seeing Tampa through the eyes of a New Yorker, and still he stays.  We’ve always viewed ourselves as a sort of anti-New York that doesn’t open itself immediately to the casual observer.  It takes patience, and perseverance, and creativity.  I’ve said for years that I’m going to make some bumper stickers with a new twist on a clichéd old saying:  “Tampa:  nice place to live, wouldn’t want to visit.”

The Night They Burned The Harbor Club Down

Last night in Tampa, the old punk rock haunt The Harbor Club burned down, about ten years after most thinking people believed that it would have. Frankly, it was the only way to effectively clean up some of the messes that had been left there. GG Allin did things inside that even a raging inferno cannot completely eradicate. In the same week, the Cuban Club demolished its outdoor bandshell, site of the famous 1986 Black Flag 'riot' as well as performances by punk giants like Bad Brains, Seven Seconds, Descendents, and many memorable Tampa "Slam Fests". Now the mayor wants to destroy the Bro Bowl skate park, a famous daytime hangout for Tampa's disaffected youth since the late seventies. 
So here's the truth about all of these venues: they all sucked. That's precisely why we were allowed to have them as a bunch of violent, snot-nosed little nihilists in the mid-to-late eighties. The community, such as it was, didn't give a shit about us or any of these venues during those years, and we used that neglect to our advantage. We could do whatever we wanted in these places. It was the first lesson for a group of predominantly middle-class, predominantly white youth, about the (limited) benefits of marginalization. "Benign Neglect" would have been a good name for one of the many hardcore bands that came and went so quickly in this era.
I always feel a little conflicted about the loss of one of these 'institutions'. We can get up-in-arms that our history is being destroyed, but what is the alternative? Preserve it in its present state of decay as a museum to some bygone era? The Harbor Club was a death trap. The Cuban Club was a horrible performance venue with terrible acoustics, and the Bro Bowl is one of the lamest skate parks still in existence. But again, it was those shortcomings that made them available to us, and it was that benign (or possibly malignant) neglect that allowed us to explore methods of expression that actually came to matter to America's cultural legacy. This is the lesson that Tampa seems incapable of learning. The official response has always been to recognize the importance of underground or grassroots movements only after they have either run their course or they have become simply too big to ignore. The first official response is to shut down whatever is happening and then announce a plan to build a state-of-the-art replica of that which they've just destroyed (witness the current assault on the burgeoning craft beer industry by our state legislators for a current example of this behavior). This makes me think of the first time Kelly (Kombat) Benjamin ran for City Council. He was in a panel discussion at Tampa Theater where one of the other candidates -who had long been involved in the workings of Tampa’s government - was crowing about their plan to turn downtown Tampa into an “arts district”, Kelly laughed and said “You had an arts district in Tampa. It was called ‘Ybor City’, and you destroyed it.”
It’s easy to say negative things about politicians and their love of money and power, but there’s something else at work that is not often expressed. Politicians are dorks. They have never known what is cool, and they never will. They appeal to a large swath of their constituents in the same way that a beige wall appeals to the largest group of potential home buyers. If they were cool, they wouldn't spend so much time worrying about whether or not people like them (people don’t). So here’s an idea: what if we just lead them down the wrong path? This technique has a long history in this region. The local Indian tribes convinced the first groups of Conquistadors that the gold they sought was always just around the next bend. They passed them off to neighboring tribes and got them to walk all the way to Texas. So let’s change tactics. Let’s start talking about how much we like Family Dollar and Wal-Mart. Let’s insist that they move into our neighborhoods, and then let’s NEVER shop there. Soon enough, these places will be abandoned (ex. NAPA Auto Parts on Florida), neglected, and all-but-forgotten by the powers that be. That’s when we pounce! We can move in to their buildings, have punk rock shows, and once again beat the shit out of each other with impunity.