We're Eleven Names. We Can Do Whatever the Fuck We Want.

Hi everyone. Tonight is the last night in a while for Eleven Names updates, because:

Blogger isn't supporting our native method of uploading new content to the site, which I understand to be some crazy homebrew shit involving FTP. So. It is up to Zach to migrate the content, because only he has the root access. Suffice to say that right now, Zach has other things on his mind and will probably get the time to do it starting in about a month.

Which means, there will be no new content on Eleven Names after tonight for the next couple months. We briefly talked about killing Eleven Names and just having tonight be the goodbye post. It makes sense. Zach doesn't have the time to devote to it, Tom hasn't posted in years and I, in theory, should be finding more ways to write for blogs that have a larger audience.

And if reading that, you honestly thought we'd shut Eleven Names down, you have less patience for unprofitable fun and you will go very far in life and we're proud of you for it. This is Eleven Names. Of course we're coming back. We're too disorganized to stay dead, anyway.

Hell: I'm running a thirteen part series about an oft-ignored melodic punk record in which I compare the songs to lessons in my life. The title is not just wishful thinking, it's the truth: We can do whatever the fuck we want.

Yes, I will be getting my own blog as a result of this, because my words need some kind of outlet that's not subject to the whims of anyone else, whether it's my wonderful friends and comrades at Pastepunk or Issue Oriented. There's something that goes unexpressed in that statement and it's this: Eleven Names is bigger than me. Eleven Names is bigger than Zach. Eleven Names is bigger than Tom.

Here's what Zach tells me about the ETA of the new site: "[I]t won't be all that long until it's running again. Promise. (I liked the Valve Time description, though.) " Odds are, "[the new site will be] Nothing too extravagant. Just maybe migrating content to Wordpress."

So. You have now heard what I've heard. It may be that I run out of time to update Eleven Names later on, or I say everything I wanted to say in the Eleven Names venue in the future, but rest assured: I have at least 8 posts, minimum, if I leave Eleven Names.

We're still not dead. Social media links to capture our spasms follow. Thanks everybody.

You can follow our YouTube channel at: elevennames.

You can follow Zach on Twitter at: iconoclastzach.

You can follow me on Twitter at: elevenjames.

The Fear The Fear The Fear

It's been an entire twelve days since the last post. Two weeks have happened, basically. In that time, I've been listening to the Steal non-stop. They're a raucous hardcore band that sounds like the first time you went downhill on your bike as fast as you could.

Go download all their records on their official website. The title is also the title of a Defiance, Ohio record, who are nowhere near as good as the Steal, but the title's stuck with me for years. Marathon #5 before the end of this month. And now, for a drastic change in tone.

Al-Qai'da's attack on Christmas doesn't register much with me. One, I didn't know it happened until a couple days later. There's been a lot of talk about how he evaded American security apparatus, but let's be honest: he got on a plane in Europe and came into America that way. Would New York airport security have caught him, I don't know. There's a lot of fear going around that something "could have" happened and that Al-Qai'da still has a lot of pull.

Let's examine what happened. Al-Qai'da attacks usually are redundant. By that I mean, if one plan goes down, there's still another one in place. 9/11 is an example. One plane failed. Three didn't. In this case, there was one (and only one) person, using the same method the shoe bomber did, which also failed.

The suicide bomber didn't even commit suicide. What he did manage to get past non-American airport security was incendiary, not explosive. (It burned as opposed to blow up.) I'm inclined to believe that's a victory. Al-Qai'da is also known for having camps devoted to these kind of activities, so they had to know that this device was improvised and "hoping for the best".

Fareed Zakaria puts it better: On Christmas a Qaeda affiliate launched an operation using one person, with no special target, and a failed technique tried eight years ago by "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. The plot seems to have been an opportunity that the group seized rather than the result of a well-considered strategic plan.

That's worrisome, but not terrifying. America is not some kind of fortress and even if it was, it wouldn't be America. America was not founded on the idea to keep foreigners and "dangerous types" out. It is meant to be a place with open arms. Those that would trade liberty for security deserve neither, Franklin said. It's worth repeating.

A young Al-Qai'da affiliate (think of the terror organization like a franchise) literally threw something together that didn't work the first time around, failed on putting an explosive on an airplane and they still managed to freak out the American public.

The fear currently going isn't logical. The evidence doesn't bear it out. There's a terrorist incident, speaking roughly, every 16.5 million departures, Nate Silver tells us. It is significantly more dangerous to take a car to wherever you're going. Those who practice suicide terror want us to be very afraid. Killing tons of people is a bonus, but the point is to strike fear a mass audience. And, like a charm, we're all very, very afraid. That's why Al Qai'da celebrated it.

And that's why I'm not at all hopeful about the war on terror.

2010

Well, it's just past five in the morning and I'm awake and relatively clear-headed for some awful reason, so I might as well.

This, then, is 2010, the year when everything changes. (I've just made that up. Or, more likely, someone else made that up and I've just made it up again.) From the perspective of about an hour and a half of consciousness: it's not bad. The eggs are quite good, and going back to sleep will be lovely. I feel hopeful for the rest of the year.

And it's not hard to being feeling a bit of hope right now, not least because 2009 is, to slip into the parlance of the times, finally fucking dead in the ground, and we can get on with it. The 'it' is, I believe, living and growing and loving and pushing ourselves to do more and better.

2009! It wasn't the best year for me, but it certainly wasn't the worst. I've had major accomplishments and fuck-ups, but a lot of my friends have had it really bad. Things haven't gone right, and people and institutions were, and still are in some cases, collapsing all around us. There is fear and unease in the air, and the change promised us seems less real every day.

Winter showed up late this year, or maybe never left at all: if you think of centuries as having seasons, of hundred year cycles of growth, abundance, harvest and decay, or perhaps sleep, then we''re somewhere in February of the new century, marching on through the slush and ice.

On this scale, I've been in winter for my entire adult life. The whole world has. We've just come through the coldest, hardest part of winter: January into February, when trees explode and every living thing barely clings to life, when your breath freezes in your lungs and your face goes numb the second you step outside.

We're tired, but we aren't exhausted. And ahead--past the groaning ice--is the coming Spring. It's not quite here yet, and we're going to have to work hard to make it through, but on this day especially, you can feel that it might be true, that we are perched at the beginning of a new century, waiting to rise up out of the snow.

There is, of course, no reason to think about centuries having seasons. I've just been playing the oldest trick in the book on you, and myself: telling you a pretty story about how the sun is going to come back and there will be deer and blackberries and warm summer light again, here, in the dark and the cold and the ice. It's the oldest holiday tradition. Singing to keep the dark at bay.

But the sun does come back, and the world can get better. Spring is the sweetest season. Let's bring it.

Issue Re-Oriented: I've Got a Chronic Defect In My Head.

This is a new feature for a new year. I wrote a couple things for a fantastic website called Issue Oriented and I don't think it would hurt to reprint them here. This, the first of three, so far, is about identity politics, but in layman's terms: being a dude in the crowd and looking down the shirt of a female performer.

I may think too much. Or maybe not, but I don't know if that's for me to decide.




There's no dignified way to say this: I was looking down Sandra Malak's corset.

A bit of background, you say? Here we go. I was watching the World/Inferno Friendship Society (Check episode 20) perform in the Pittsburgh area earlier in 2009. Jack Terricloth and Co. were very clearly having a lot of fun, as the venue (Mr. Smalls) afforded them a rather sizable stage. About a third of the way through, I noticed, that the bassist (Mrs? Ms? Etc? Malak) of the nattily dressed band (guitarist Lucky Strano, excepted, who is contractually obligated to have a Disfear shirt on) was wearing a corset.

This is the World/Inferno Friendship Society, a raucously anachronistic band. Not a surprise, given that the men were wearing suits and ties. (And I mean real suits and ties, not a "punked out" skinny black tie.) I noticed it when she leaning down to yell the words back at the audience and my eyes slipped.

I looked down her corset.

My first reaction, aside from the neurological wiring, was "hey, that's a rather nice view".

My second reaction was "I shouldn't be doing this".

Here, now is the issue of identity politics.

(If now, you're thinking, James, this is a World/Inferno show, you're probably thinking too hard about this. Additionally, if you're thinking too hard at an Inferno show, you're dangerously close to missing the point. And you're probably right. But, on off chance I'm not thinking too hard, I continue.)

Of course, I wasn't thinking in those terms at the time. I was thinking about it in words a little more down to earth, like respect.

The voices in my head went like this:



My first question was: Am I respecting her as a member of World/Inferno and as a performer? She's playing, right now, music I like, in a band I'm pretty fond of. Choosing and I use that word carefully, since I had control of my body and my mind, does the performer a disservice. My gut check was swift and decisive. Really? A disservice? This is a grown-ass woman in a band who'se major themes tend to revolve around debauchery, alcoholism, drug abuse, dancing and chasing girls. I mean, the band is not Escape The Fate, by any means, but let's be honest: Ambiguity, allure and intrigue are three of the cards World/Inferno has been playing for a long time.

Okay, okay, but what the hell does drug use and alcoholism have to do with the possible objectification you may have engaged yourself in, I thought. Also, what about the themes of solidarity, status quo subversion and dissent generally? Those don't fit as easily into your casting of World/Inferno as a quote unquote crazy rock band.

The counter argument came pretty naturally. Point taken. That said, objectification? You peeked down her corset maybe five times over the course of an hour and a half, which she wore onstage, in a public place, where she knew she was going to be viewed. (This is distinct from the "she was asking for it" argument.) She's older than you, so odds are pretty good this is something she's thought about before, so saying she wouldn't know theoretically insults her intelligence. Also, you tended to avoid looking at her as soon as you realized what was up. Saying that you objectified her is hard to sustain on that basis. More to the point, do "serious" performers have to be without attractive hooks? Must performers be viewed without sexual appeal? That's a pretty white/protestant view of musicians and performers, isn't it?

Touche. Jack was making a big show out of the slit that broke his pants, terribly close to his crotch. And I acknowledge that viewing a performer as a person outside of gender or sexuality contributes to the current status quo. But, consider your epistemic position. You're a young white person watching a female onstage for pleasure. You, of all people, need to pay attention to those boundaries.

How was I looking at her, I thought? I was looking at her as the bass player in World/Inferno Friendship Society (a band who'se four studio full lengths I own, 3 on CD, 1 on vinyl) who made a choice in her wardrobe which possibly affords audience members a view of her cleavage, which may be more or less important to particular people in the crowd. Male gaze aside, this is a band that pays very close attention to how they look. It's reasonable for me to look, they want that attention and that's how they choose, gig in and gig out, to get it. It's likely part of an exaggerated, but calculated onstage persona, which, odds are, loosely match their offstage personalities. How they look is a huge part of their presentation. She's also a woman in a rock band, who wants have fun making music and make money. I'm a male fan. Do the math. That entire band plays up how they dress as part of their act, which, *gasp*, can be usefully monetized.

That said, I'm not sure I can prove any of that.

If you mean find a quote on the internet where she or someone from the band says, yeah we dress up because it's fun for us, it's a neat little shtick and it makes money, I haven't looked, so let's say no. But, I don't think the point can be usefully avoided. I'm at a concert, situated as a white male, watching a group of performers who are like me and it's reasonable to ask, I think, to what extent physical attractiveness plays a role in that performance. Dan Yemin takes off his shirt at Paint it Black shows, Trent Reznor has a fondness for tight black tshirts and (much love and respect for both bands) while I'm not quite the target audience, if I don't mind it there, why should I mind it here?

That said, I'm not sure those are equivocal. There's a power imbalance that you're not taking into account.

Bullshit and yeah, there's a power imbalance, it's not just that she appears to be female and I appear to be male, but that I'm a fan and she's a part of the band. Not everything can be reduced simply to white male dominance and a gaze from the relative safety of the crowd. It goes with the territory. It's more complicated and more nuanced than that, I think. Are we being used?

No, we're not being used, in that she's probably not thinking or vocalizing, "you know, I want the fans to pay attention to my breasts so they'll buy more tshirts." That doesn't make it okay and really, dude, you're impugning her integrity.

Okay. But more than that, am I over thinking this? Could I just be looking at an attractive woman onstage, that being the end of it and making the preceding pages an exercise in pretense and intellectual masturbation, like the guy in Propaghandi's Ladies Nite In Loserville?

Look over there! There's a cute girl 20 feet to our left. They're playing Brother Of the Mayor Of Bridgewater. We ought to dance with her.

Yes, we should.




And really, I got to feel uncomfortable around a different girl and that settled that argument for that night. But looking back on it, that doesn't end this questioning in my head. I don't have any answers, but maybe a couple provisional suggestions. (I find it kind of silly to be attempting to offer answers to the question it took me a couple pages to even get to and is still consuming me.)

1) Don't gawk.
2) Don't be a dick.
3) Really. That's all I've got.


Don't gawk is pretty obvious. That part really is about respect. Don't be a dick is a related point, which is don't take advantage of the exposure during the concert. My thoughts really come down to respect and being contrite. If I’m right, or at least looking in the right direction, then the “answer” is thinking of other people and looking beyond yourself, which is one of the big important lessons I should have internalized from punk years ago.

I guess there’s still more learning to do.

WHOA WHOA WHOA HOLD UP

Gentle readers, observe as our corpse spasms grotesquely, another gurgling breath drawn into the wet and sinewy pile of smoking gristle that once served as our lungs. Be not aghast at our undead respiration, instead, we beg only that you watch onward with the clinical detachment of a Victorian corpse-thief, or perhaps some kind of modern insurance adjuster.

What a world! Gas is cheap, and there are some decent bands around now. Also, did we miss a chance to gush over Obama? We did! Hooray for Obama!

One cannot help but make lists (lists!) of the life-altering events that happen in one's life. First and foremost, the fall of Communism. Secondly, 9/11. Thirdly, Obama is elected. The common thread through these isn't hard to piece together - people coming together. The Berlin Wall brought a sense of completeness, of an end to the fractious and childish nature of the Cold war. September Eleventh brought people together in the most dire way possible, made us huddle together for warmth in the face of not just an uncaring universe, but one that is actually subtly menacing. And Obama is, in many ways, the coda to 9/11, the antidote to almost a decade of Bush-era big-brother tactics, a man promising to unite an entire country, instead of a neo-con babbler, taking perverse glee in alienating themselves further and further from anything resembling a conscientious citizen.

My great burden is that I am trained to see things in a literary sense - my eyes strain to trace the arc of rising action of the bildungsroman of Obama, of the tragic presidency of George W. Bush, the Prospero of our Tempest, begging us to free him from the island of history with our applause.

Whoa, how's that for a shitty metaphor?

Anyway. The difficulty with this biz-ness is that reality doesn't serve as a cohesive arc, or rather, that it's too cohesive. We are all the main characters of our own lives, so that makes it hard to achieve any kind of clinical separation needed in order to analyze a given work. Maybe if we could achieve it, we'd unlock our chakras and turn into buddhas - isn't that what enlightenment is, after all? Rising above the cycle of constant rebirth and involvement, and just sorta chillin' out?

This is all a silly and meandering thing. Suffice it to say, there will be more silly and meandering posts later. Hopefully, less self-indulgent. But probably not! Elevennames hooray!

Inspiration Only Lasts a Few Rounds.

I'm nothing without my influences


The title is a wise piece of advice that Brandi Filumena gave me regarding a girl. I took it, eventually, and used it, even if I had to spit it out over the phone late at night. Anyway. On with the update!

For our non-American readers and for most of our readers from this country as well, one of the most prolific and deepest reaching chroniclers of our time, Studs Terkel, died yesterday. He wrote about the lives of ordinary people in a way that made you feel their lives. He won a Pulitzer for his oral history of the Second World War, if (as they should) such things matter to you.

If you want to know about ordinary Americans (that phrase has more and more of a cachet to it these days) from a person that wrote about them for most of his life, then pick up one of his books and you'll get the real story, without enough pandering to provoke nausea.

I saw Bane last night. I'm still glowing. To give you an idea of how much I enjoy seeing them live, my friends (we being college students) often tease me about it, asking would I rather watch Bane or have sex, and I tell them that the two aren't good to directly compare, which is true. The experiences are quite different and I enjoy both for very different reasons, though I will say that I feel less self-conscious at a Bane performance than during intercourse. Then again, I am terribly self-conscious at any given moment.


I'm nothing without my friends


I've called Eleven Names dead before, but now, at least as I type this, I don't find it to be true. As long as it is linked to one of our credit cards, it can't ever die, it will persist, but I think more importantly, I've acknowledged that it is not near the top of my priority list anymore. Like the Hope Conspiracy, who'se new full length, Death Knows Your Name, I have grown to love, this site appears to be something a little more casual and less rigid in having updates, and going from a "okay, we're going to put something out every week" to "we'll write when we write" is a hell of a shift in gears.

The RZA once said "How can hip-hop be dead if Wu-Tang is forever?" I guess, in one of the only ways Eleven Names is like the Wu-Tang Clan, as long as we continue to write something, every so often, this won't die. Happy Halloween.

In short: We're back.



I can't help but love this life again. -Crime In Stereo