The Paperboy Always Dies Twice

Morel.

*****

Wall-of-effects guitars, echoing keyboards, and laconically urgent vocals over rock/disco beats that range from the laid-back to the moderately uptempo: not for nothing is one of the remix tracks for Morel's recent album The Death of the Paperboy retitled "Shoegazer Disco." Something about the vocals on this album keeps reminding me of the Soup Dragons’ cover of “I’m Free,” but the instrumentation and arrangements probably owe more to The Stone Roses and others of that ilk … and that’s a compliment. A lot of what was awesome about the early 1990s’ collision of rock and dance music is on display here, suitably refurbished for 2009. It’s extremely tasty stuff.

I think what really grabs me, though, is the sense of something going on in the lyrics that is a bit more than the sum of the parts.

The title track isn’t the only one to muse obliquely on some strange intersection of adolescence, death (of children or of parents), and sexual awakening, as if Morel were in a gayer version of Springsteen’s old territory. There are a lot of “kids” on this album, sometimes in groups …

“kids from nowhere, born to run, disco drugs and lots of fun” (“Still Born”--told you about the Springsteen feel)

… sometimes just one kid, maybe the same one each time …

“put your arms around me, one more time for the kid” (“Flawed”)

… whose loss seems to be somehow transcendentally significant

“the kid of the universe dies to dig a direction” (“The Death of the Paperboy”)

Losses and the risk of loss pile up: an unjustly ignored lover, a paperboy struck by a car on the roadside, a friend’s mother. And perhaps one’s own innocence, or a past that might not have been as great as one remembers it as, but that can’t and shouldn’t be forgotten. There’s also a fair amount of unrequited emotion here:

“No makes me lonely … yes it hurts, but I’m not in love …” (No Makes Me Lonely”)

“There’s danger in here between us, but most is on my side. You walk around in stardust while I hide.” (“My Side”)

At the album’s close, we get a hint that some of this might have something to do with one of those canonical gay teen romances with a straight friend who likes us, but not that way (“that way” not, of course, having been discussed):

“If we drive forever and a minute I won’t mind, you say there’ll be lots of girls and lots of beer, and you don’t even notice as I start to unwind … your leg brushes against my skin, and you don’t even notice my grin.” (“Nova”—more gay-Springsteen feel here: the Nova is a Chevy and the song’s protagonist is driving to “the Cape” with his friend).

For me the centerpiece is “Anymore, Anymore,” a gorgeous ballad whose narrator, singing against a backdrop of gentle piano chords, slowly-accumulating distorted guitars, and the repeating sound of a single drop of water, wishes he could “be the drug that brings you down” for some friend (unnamed, though other boys in their circle are cited by name) and claims that he doesn’t mind “the falling out” though it’s also what “makes me sad” (for that “I’m okay, really I’m okay, no matter how often you ask me I’ll insist I’m okay” feeling). Ultimately, there’s a near-coming-out:

“We could go for a walk and talk about the things that let you down. Like heaven and martinis, and boys who hang around. If I told you my biggest secret, would you promise me you’d stay? It isn’t what you’re thinking; it’s simple, in a way.”

But if this is a coming out, about what is it coming—because whatever you’re thinking, it isn’t that. There’s a sense of more going on than just sexuality here, or at least a sense that sexuality involves much more than sex.

The best thing about all this heavy implication is how completely unschematic it is, how much room there is for interpretation … which is also to say, alas, how much room there is for things to remain painfully unspoken until years later. It’s more in the manner of transcripts from memories that demand their hearing now and then, or the dreams the old experiences sometimes force on us.

If you’re smart, you’ll plunk for the two-disc set, with both Disc 1 (the rockier take on all of this) and Disc-O, the remix album on which the “Death of the Paperboy” track becomes an uptempo rave with a spoken-word break about transformative moments and hopes for the mutuality of memory.

Rocking on the surface, subtly stunning underneath, and highly recommended.

Symmetry

Ever plug someone's name or user-handle for one of your social-networking sites into a searchable email system (let's say, gmail) and confirm your impression that the relationship is grossly one-sided?

Perhaps it's you who never talks to them. Maybe you aren't really that invested. Maybe they're doing all the work.

Or maybe you have become someone's social-networking pal because your mutual friends all sing their praises, but it turns out that for all that you've quipped in their blog when they were quippy, or offered a shoulder to cry on when they needed one .... and when they've even thanked you for that ... they have never once commented on anything you've written in your own blog, never once initiated contact.

Accountability

There's been a lot of discussion lately about problems with the leadership of gay communities, particularly following the No On 8 campaigns. There's a lot of talk about holding the leadership more accountable in the future. I want to take a step back from that and talk about some questions I think are critical in seeking that kind of accountability.

• How well does a community serve its majority membership?
  
• How well does a community serve its most vulnerable members?
  
• How does a community deal with internal disagreement or dissent?
  
• How does a community present a united front when it encompasses a diversity of people or opinions?
  
• How do leaders respond to critique from the rank and file?
  
• How do community organizations change tactics when portions of the communities they serve report that the current tactics are serving them poorly or harming them outright?
  

*****

My experience of gay community organizing is that we've been stuck for years mostly focusing on the first question. We take the temperature of the overall gay community and we hear what most people want and we start organizing on that basis. In the 1970s there was a high focus on encouraging people to come out and be gay, in the 1980s and early 1990s it was the response to AIDS, in the last several years it's been marriage, both in the sense of social recognition and in the sense of the legal and economic protections it affords those who have a marriageable partner. All of these have been important issues, on their own face, as well as because of the number of people in the community who care passionately about them.

But if the Proposition 8 loss has reminded us of anything, it's that the will of the majority should never be the only important factor. (Any of you who were reading along and curious, or uncomfortable, merely because I kept talking about the "gay" community, rather than some other mushy but more nuanced thing: gold star. The gay majority (however you want to define it) IS important, but the minorities within the community count too. Just as the gay minority counts within the larger heterosexual world.)

So we have these other questions we ought to consider.

How well does a community serve its most vulnerable members?

Example: gay teens, or transgender people. How do we do here? Looking around the people I know personally, what I see is general agreement that our vulnerable community members are important too, and frequent action to make that sentiment count. I would argue that, wonderful as that really is, it's not nearly as prevalent a sentiment as it could be, and often ONLY a sentiment. Actions still speak louder than words; problem is, the vulnerable parts of our community could use a LOT of action on their behalf.

How does a community deal with internal disagreement or dissent?

There are all kinds of possible answers to this question. "Deal with" does not have to mean "agree that everyone's views are equally valid." There are people with all kinds of odd ideas out there, some of which they hold passionately, but not all of those ideas are going to work for significant numbers of us. Moreover, many of these ideas don't point to anything a community should try to act on. So "dealing with" disagreement needn't mean "trying to address all points of view equally." But it probably should NOT mean routinely telling people who hold certain viewpoints that they are wrong, or that they should shut up or wait 'their turn', while insisting that the community cares about them, or shaming them that they are letting the community down if they walk away from it while it steadfastly refuses to hear them out. There should at least be mechanisms for supporting members of the community whose concerns are not being addressed as quickly as others' are, and for finding ways of reiterating the community's commitment to everyone it claims to embrace, even if some are moving ahead faster than others, and even if it's GOOD that some are moving ahead faster than others.

How does a community present a united front when it encompasses a diversity of people or opinions?

This is a legitimately tricky one; it's almost impossible to be perfect about it, and in the US we have a strong tendency to dismiss imperfect solutions as wholly worthless, an attitude that often blinds us to possibilities for partial progress.

My impression is that the gay/etcetera communities have tended to handle this by insisting that we should sweep our differences under a rug--the classic move of a victim protecting itself. I think that has sometimes proven effective in the short term, but as long-term policy it seems likely to produce larger fractures within the community. One still hears pronouncements, routinely, that "everyone" in the community needs to be "on board" with Idea X or Action Y "or else". This is handling diversity by insisting we're not diverse. Also known as preaching to the choir. I think that gets trickier all the time, the more that the "choir" is embedded in much larger crowds, in which so many of us can overhear each other all the time, via modern communications. What I notice the last several years is a great deal of free-floating frustration amongst people who are tired of being preached to as if they're members of the choir when they've already declared that they're not. And what I also notice is that MOST of us are choir members or non-members in many different ways.

How do leaders respond to critique?

How do community organizations change tactics when portions of the communities they serve report that the current tactics are serving them poorly or harming them outright?

These last two are especially important in cases where the tactics happen to satisfy a significant majority of the community while heightening the vulnerability of some other portion. It can require creative thinking to change tactics or strategies that continue to meet the needs of the majority while potentially being LESS damaging to some internal minority(s).

*****

So here's what I have to say about the community leadership in the wake of Proposition 8. Many of the problems people are noting now have been present for years. And there have been people speaking up about that for just as long.

Here's the rub: prior to the Prop 8 debacle, the people who were speaking up about the problems of the leadership tended to be members of internal minorities, and/or people who were looking at accountability on ALL of these points, not just the first one.

What's changed now is that the problems of the leadership have come to the attention of the gay majority, because the leadership's problems resulted in something that hurts the majority.

There's a prominent leader from the LA area whose name has come up several times recently in articles or discussions friends have pointed at. I worked briefly with this person several years ago. Accountability to the rank and file was important to this person, as far as I could tell, mostly in a "firefighting" sense: if the rank and file had a concern, the leader was smart enough to have a sit-down with the upset people and talk it over and try to defuse it long enough to carry on as usual.

What was lacking was real attention to the substance of internal disagreements, and substantive change on the basis of what the rank and file was saying. This was particularly true in terms of organizational tactics, when the majority was being served by the tactics, but an internal minority ... or two, or three ... was feeling hung out to dry. The leader in question clearly felt that as long as the majority was being served well enough, seeking even better solutions that would have the side effect of not hanging internal minorities out to dry was a waste of time.

Problem is: any member of the rank-and-file, any *group* within the rank-and-file, can be dismissed as a disgruntled minority. And in communities as complex as ours, that's a mindset that the leadership gets a lot of practice at. Remember: this is a community in which we have a long history of calling each other "drama queens," rather than listening seriously to each other.

As the No On 8 campaign went forward, clearly there was a lot of concern among the rank and file. But the leadership has gotten a lot of practice at ignoring bitching from the rank and file .... and I would argue that the rank and file has sometimes collaborated with that tendency, by shouting down dissent.

So now the majority is awake to what some of the community was saying all along. It's not just that we don't hold our leaders accountable enough ... it's that our entire accountability model needs rethinking.

The questions above are only part of it. Other factors include things like: checking the actual results of tactics against the original goals, and figuring out what really works, versus what we hope or believe will work. Or: ponying up either money or time in at least as much quantity as criticism.

I'll come clean with my own stake in this: there's a part of me that's rather gleeful at seeing certain people I didn't get on with get their comeuppance.

If I stop making it about me, though, I worry that I'm not hearing much in the way of holding future leaders accountable in a smarter way. Indeed, I don't think I'm hearing much "accountability," so much as a lot of expression of frustration.

Long term, I don't think the community gets it that expressing frustration is not the same as a) activism or b) holding leadership accountable.

The current mindset in the community is precisely the kind of situation I would not want to become an activist in. I hope some of these kids organizing on Facebook don't wind up getting held accountable to the same overly-simplistic, frustration-without-action standards that have often applied in the past.

Aha--There's The Black Dog

Someone I know online slightly was talking recently about how he practices optimism and how it has helped him not be prone to things like depression or guilt over past mistakes.

I volunteered a response about how I'm the same way.

But let's be honest. I wish I didn't have to practice optimism so hard, sometimes.

I'm feeling fairly unloved this morning. I've been having weird stomach distress the last few days, not sure what it's about, so that's not helping. Creatively, I feel blocked. Rehearsal on some new music is not going well, I'm VERY conscious of my low skill level compared to what's going to be needed eventually, and I'm not doing a very good job of reminding myself that practice will bring more skill in time.

It's hard not to notice that while a few of my friends will move mountains to spend time with me, or to stay involved in my life, most people only want to interact when I make it convenient for them. My recent show keeps feeling like an example of that .... Matt came all across the country to see me, one other friend took time out of his schedule (and as far as I know, he's not a big fan of rock music so that was especially meaningful, as I see it) ... and most other people just SAY they'll show up and then don't. Actions speak louder than words.

I'm even being kept waiting by someone who I made time for in my schedule today when what I really wanted to do was focus on myself.

Most of this is transient feelings that will resolve on their own, but I don't think it pays to ignore them. I have to practice optimism in the face of them.

Late Afternoon Light

I wonder if I should bring my little point and shoot camera with me to work more often. The late afternoon light is gorgeous right now as it paints the red brick of Memorial Hall in orange tones, gray/blue sky behind it. I'm seeing it partly through the purplish sheers they use as curtains in much of this building.

It's late fall light, no question about it, I don't think this shade of orange really obtains in summer with the higher angles of the sun. As much as I am given to lamenting the shortness of days at this season (as much as that really does seem to affect me), there's real beauty at this time of year.

Probably not the easiest thing to capture photographically, but then that would be part of the challenge. ;-)

EDIT: Ten minutes later. Memorial Hall is fading, but the white marble or concrete of the William James Hall tower is stunning.

The Noise Is Restful

I don't remember which of my friends I must have seen toting Alex Ross's book The Rest Is Noise a few months back, but it looked "craveable" (in the words of Whorange style maven Tula Jeng). So I picked it up on its recent softcover release and dove into it.

Ross makes 20th century "classical" or "made by composers" music accessible by re-embedding it in the historical times it was made in and the personal lives of the people who made it. And as a sometime maker of music in a popular idiom, with tangential forays into stranger stuff, I have a certain interest in how other people have done things.

Not to mention the fact that a great deal of the popular music I enjoy has either been influenced by composers, or has influenced composers. Some of what seemed striking or strange about 20th century high-art music is now so taken for granted that we're all soaking in it anyway.

At the moment I'm listening to Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians, and some of the echoes (whichever direction you think they go in) with Eno, or Talking Heads, or Sigur Ros, are easy to hear. On the subway this morning I took in Olivier Messiaen's Quartet For the End Of Time. Last night it was The Rite Of Spring, and sure, I'm aware that my catching up with the Rite marks me as someone VERY late to this party, but what the heck.

Ross is totally engaging about why any of these things might be interesting, at least in terms of intellectual or musical history ... and his enthusiasm is compelling enough to make trips to the music store worth it. Indeed, there's a substantial audio area on his web site where one can listen to clips of many of the things he talks about in the book or venture further afield to Napster or wherever. He makes playlists and recommends things to download and all kinds of good stuff.

Plus he's totally gay and now he's my fantasy musical boyfriend.

Paisley Prick

There's a certain kind of queer man, whether queer in gender traits or in sexual object choice, who finds it confusing and difficult to make sense of his queerness and retreats to one of the sterner religious dogmas in an attempt to, if not sort himself out, then hold himself down.

The gay community is chock full of people who, even if they didn't grow up in a religious family, found themselves turning to religion as a means of dealing (or not dealing, which is a form of dealing) with being gay or differently gendered.

Some of them are good friends of mine .... though usually, we became friends many years after they came out of the closet and, often as not, out of religion as well.

Since this temptation to use religion against oneself is common enough among gay-as-in-totally-gay men, how much more tempting it must be for men who might actually feel themselves drawn to women as well as to men (assuming, for the rest of this post, that their queerness is at all about object choice, rather than gender identity).

It's not uncommon to find Kinsey 1ish or 2ish men who are scared shitless of their interest in men, not JUST because they're dealing with internalized homophobia, but ALSO because they perceive (not always inaccurately, it has to be said) that nobody, particularly chicks, will believe that they really go both ways. Supposing they want the hole 9 times out of 10, their motivation for dealing with the pole issue isn't all that obvious.

You meet one of these guys who's actually checked his own head about it, rather than run from it, and you've usually met someone with a fair amount of personal ethics and courage. Not to mention, often a good lay, in the sense that chucking one's self-repressions tends to do wonders for performance in the sack.

But many of them are so afraid to open Pandora's Cock that their clinging to dogma is all the stronger for having an actual crack in the armor. Nobody who starts out with a shred of possible heterosexuality knows whether he's going to keep liking pussy once he's tried dick, and it's not necessarily even helpful to point to openly bisexual men one might know who have a devoted following of hot chicks following them around, turned on by the fact that these guys know their way around cocks and vaginas, because a) most people don't take the time to find out that there are such guys, and b) it's easy enough to disbelieve in fairies no matter how many of them you meet--particularly if they're a kind of fairy the other fairies say is just a myth.

The middle ground is an unpopular place to be, and plenty of people who genuinely fall into it torture themselves about it, with the full approval of the world at large. The self-torture gets read as "commitment" and "principle" rather than "OMG get over it, it's not so bad." It's similar to the way that some of the most strident "you have to make up your mind and commit to your gay identity, bisexuality is a cop-out" gays are Kinsey 5's who "experimented" plenty with girls and probably yen to keep doing it. Scratch a fundamentalist, religious or sexuo-political, find someone with more issues than National Geographic.

Catch someone like this out in the real world, and maybe you can point him at a support group for safely exploring sexuality or gender identity. You take his sacred-holy-text thumping for the poor clingy life-saver it is and you smile and nod and hope they do some therapy.

You don't take it seriously ... or too personally.

If you catch someone like this and he's a rich pop star, then he might be named Prince, and you might enjoy his music. You still don't take his homophobia seriously.

Or too personally.

After all, this is someone who thinks he "owns" video rights to his cover of someone's else's song.

We're not talking about psychologically well-adjusted here.