December Wolves: I Ain't Thinking Of Slowing Down

Well, the year is almost up and I was concerned that I wasn't going to be able to make it to an internet portal to make good on my 15 by the 31st promise. With just one more to go and two hours to complete a look back, I think I can do it.

The title comes from the new Defeater record called Lost Ground. It's about a young African American soldier, before during and after World War II. It comes from the first song, called the Red, White and Blues. The narrator is spending his last night in town before deployment, goes to the cemetery to say goodbye to his mother, who was recently laid to rest and spends the rest of the time in the tavern drinking whiskey. He tells the bartender to keep pouring him shots, he's not slowing down.

So, five more things below. Happy New Year.

11. Having Seventy Times Seven sung for me in GFC. It felt really good to have a song played for me, at random. Seventy Times Seven being a Brand New song I never thought I'd hear live feels even better. It felt like a reward. In a strange way, from a group of people that I realized I intersected with but didn't know I made that kind of impact on. That realization, coupled with live music just made me smile at the end of the final semester. I felt satisfied.

12. Penny Bar. Despite my fear/avoidance around alcohol, it's nice to settle into a local bar and for 2009, the Penny Bar was it. Less a place than the people and the experiences inside it, the Penny Bar was an oasis of intoxication, available at a bargain basement price. Much of the rest is noise, blurs of Yuengling and generic, well-intentioned tomfoolery. One can't curse, which sounds bad, until you realize it weeds out the bad apples. Best drawback ever.

13. The End of a Year interview. The End of a Year Self Defense Family Force Five Iron Frenzy Band (okay, it's just End of a Year and they're changing their name to Self Defense Family, but work with me here...) is a group I only recently got into. They do some pretty hilarious youtube videos that I saw got almost no hits. I liked the cut of their jib, and finally sent some questions over to the band. I was expecting it to be in text format, but it turned out the guys went ahead and did it in the YouTube format. Hilariously, I was expected to be a chick, have Daisy Dukes and be attractive. That didn't work out well.

The questions were answered with unflinching honesty, with the self-deprecation and oddly specific answers. Also, they said nice things about me. There's nothing like hearing people you respect say good things about you to make you feel like you've made a couple good decisions in your life.

14. Joining Issue Oriented, the Millionaires post. I've been a fan of Ronen Kauffman's former band Zombie Apocalypse for a long time and I've also enjoyed the podcast he runs, Issue Oriented. So, when I got the text message saying "would you be interested in doing some blogging for us" I said yes before I could stop to say no. That's pretty cool. But what's even cooler is seeing something on the internet you know is wrong, saying it's wrong and actually realizing that after you wrote it you're still right and on the moral high ground.

Punk rock has seen worse than Millionaires and it will see worse than them in short order, I promise.

15. Gen Con. And internet on the megabus to GenCon. There aren't that many times when I feel like I'm in the definitive future. One time this year, stood out and that was going to Gen Con. Gen Con itself was three days, four nights of nerdery and alcohol, so that was pretty cool, but I really felt like I was in the future when I was getting internet access on my laptop while I was on the bus, in the middle of Indiana.

I'll repeat that. I had reliable internet access on a moving bus in the middle of Indiana. That's a huge step forward. Throw that in with finding out there was a cover of Bad Religion's 21st Century Digital Boy by Groove Coverage (oddly appropriate, right?) and by the end of the trip, I had a new song on my iPod, downloaded while I was on a moving bus just felt too cool for words.

December Wolves: The Everything Else List Round 2

More lists. I don't know if this is my price for lazing about on this stuff, but ending the wolves with lists feels somewhat defeating. Never fear, though. There's at least four more posts left and there's one non-list post in the can. Fifteen was the number I said I'd make and fifteen will be the number by 31st, whether by hook or crook.

I'll push the fear out of the way.

6. The way Kristian from Crime In Stereo's eyes lit up when he talked about his new record, I Was Describing You To Someone. Every band says their new record is their best before its been released, but the way Kristian seemed stoked about it (outside of the Metro) is something it's hard to find a parallel for. They clearly want these songs to be heard, blasted and compared explicitly to their previous material. That's rare and frankly magical.

7. Hearing and believing I'm an inspiration to other people. Hearing that those people believe my writing is "inspiring, interesting and intelligent" is very, very flattering, but even more flattering is that my writing inspired other people to write. Those words still make me blush a unflattering red.

8. Auto-Tune the News. I'm of a single mind on Auto-Tune the News. It has the emotional weight of a carrot, the depth of a dog's water dish and the nutritional value of a Slurpee. Then again, it's a full pop song about the month's news, fed through a vocoder and even had T-Pain guest on a song. From that perspective, it's a neat snippet of 2009. Yes, people mistake it for saying something politically, but you shouldn't hold that against the show.

9. Beating the final mission of Starcraft: Brood War without cheat codes. I've said repeatedly that Starcraft is a defining moment in my childhood and continuing growth, so putting the entire single player campaign to rest is a real accomplishment. I probably sunk an entire day into beating this mission with all the re-starts and save states, but frankly, I just ended up outlasting the computer and using the cheats of a walkthrough and constantly saving my progress.

It went like this: Take out the nuclear Terrans (with their fucking siege tanks) as fast as humanly possible, assimilate their base. Defend my base. Build up my force. Break off pieces of Battlecruiser/Valkyrie Terrans. Defend my base. Build up my force. Break off another piece of B/V Terran territory. Assimilate base. Defend my base. Rinse, repeat.

By the time I got around to the Protoss that had unfettered access to the bottom half of the map (and attacked me throughout the mission), it had run out of resources in its own base and it hadn't expanded. It's not quite the same as beating a human player, but the payoff of destroying three forces dead set on my destruction, that started off with nuclear weapons, Battlecruisers and a half-started 'Toss tech tree is still sweet.

10. Obama being sworn in. I cried and nearly ran out of my Oral Presentation class to make sure I caught whatever was left of the swearing in. Our long national nightmare was over, I texted. Finally, the feckless, thuggish era of Bush was done. And it hasn't been sunshine, gumdrops, rainbows and Candyland since, but that day, I felt hopeful and inspired. Yes, I would rather be lead by a President that got out of college and chose to do community organizing instead of a guy who coasted around on Daddy's money and ran businesses into the ground. I would rather have my country lead by a guy who taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago for a decade than a guy who couldn't be bothered to look into the details of his decisions.

Let me hedge my bets just a little. He's continuing some of the Bush policies that I find repugnant. Then again, Al-Qai'da tried to attack us Christmas Day and should have succeeded. Oddly enough, the reason why they didn't succeed was because what they got on the plane was incendiary than explosive and the passengers (!!) put it out. But then again, Al-Qai'da attacks are usually redundant, so there should have been someone else on that plane that had a bomb, but apparently, there wasn't. Strange. Suicide terror is crazy.

The short version is this: I sleep better knowing Obama is at the desk and not Bush and that inauguration was the day when it first felt real.

December Wolves: the Everything Else List

For my other website, every year I do an end of year recap which includes a list of the CDs I enjoyed the most. In 2006 and 2007, it was a huge, sprawling, all-consuming thing that took up a couple weeks of my free time since I had to put everything down that I thought was important in there.

It ended up being 20+ pages on Word. 2008, I stepped back from that, but it was still a pretty long document and involved a week or so of prep and writing. This year, my list was done in sporadic, quixotic bursts, avoiding a numerical list while maintaining a year-end favorite (in this case, P.O.S.' Never Better) that I think is roughly 2,000 words and not nearly as many pages in a word doc. I think it communicates everything essential.

The list itself is little more than a time-capsule and a specific imprint of what I was listening to this year, warts and "terrible choices" and all. The music list hasn't gone up yet and I'm jonesing to get a year-end something out before 2010 hits. An idea struck me walking outside and suddenly another member of the pack is ready for it's close up. Here's a different time capsule for Eleven Names: The Everything Else list.

Since pastepunk is awesome and I already covered the recorded music I listened to, I had other, non-musical experiences that were great, but didn't fit the bill of the first list, the Everything Else list is a list of everything else I enjoyed, or a list of cool experiences, media and so on. It will continue through the 31st.

1. Batman and Robin. Grant Morrison doing Batman is one way I described it to the ARGO kids, but the title of the comic tells you exactly what it's about, even if it requires a little bit of deconstruction. The comic is about legacies of Batman and Robin and the people behind the cowl. The current Batman was previously a Robin. He is training a new Robin, the test-tube baby of Batman, while fighting another former Robin who

has turned into a villain.

All of this is happening while the upcoming plotline is that the new Batman is trying to revive the old Batman. It's about growing up, coming to grips with the new responsibilities with the hope that the actual Batman comes back soon. The new Robin (the test-tube baby) is precocious enough to believe that he ought to be Batman, so the current Batman (former Robin) is trying to hold it all together.

2. Graduating college. I have a nice plaque. Okay, but no seriously, it's an accomplishment that I'm proud of. At the very least, it's provided the spark of creativity for a good third of my posts here.

3. The ARGO column. I wrote a sweet column about growing out of college gracefully. It's one of the things that I go back to and sometimes think I'm a good writer or I'm at least making something universal personal and location specific. The fact that it resonated with people who weren't in the club was something that I worked very hard on and to have the audience recognize that was and is very reassuring.

4. Meeting Jordan. After three or four years of helping Jordan out with it, I managed to hop on a drive to D.C. for the sole and express purpose of meeting up with him. I've never met Adam or Aubin or Brian from punknews, so I've always felt like there was something missing from the last three, four years of our collaborations, so finally meeting him felt awesome and a capstone on an incredible academic ride.

5. End of college radio show. It's an excuse to play all my favorite songs that don't have vulgarities and giving two endings. This two endings part is incredibly important.

The first being the appropriate "things change, it's scary but we move on" song, sung by Vienna Teng, an attractive woman, playing the piano. It's a lullaby for a child being scared by the rain. Note perfect. The actual ending, a little more...ragged.

The first track was John Coulton's Still Alive, a little ARGO hoorah, which I'm sure you know and if you don't know it, learn.

The second was Thunder In the Night Forever by Planes Mistaken For Stars. It is the sonic embodiment of this picture. It is about taking the fight of your expression to the billboards and ideologies that have gouged your eyes and ruined your friends lives with velvet-lined promises of fame, purity and higher callings. The subtitle is We Ride to Fight! and it reflects its performers, a dirty, beautiful song. I think I like women like Planes songs, breathtakingly intelligent, frighteningly powerful and with a pretty edge and this song is one of Planes' defining works.

The third was Bane's Ante Up, a song with an opening drum tattoo made for the purpose of engender stage dives. It is a song about understanding that you have made mistakes and bad things have happened, but you have to get up and put yourself forward in a way that leaves you totally vulnerable and with all your chips in the balance.

Heavy-hearted hymns are my thing, and it's Bane that finds the light at the end of the tunnel without neglecting the fact that it's dark in that tunnel. What's the point of writing about overcoming if the hurdles aren't that high and you aren't stabbed during the marathon?