2/24/22 - There's A Place Called Ocean Avenue / Theatrical Debates / A Short Open Letter for Loved Ones Getting Into NFT's
Small dispatch.
Practically timeless, the pop punk trope of hating this town. It’s a potent ingredient to have in any song that ends up being formative for your adolescent years, a juvenile contempt that buys into the grandeur of its delusions. When I die, my last played song will be “Ocean Avenue.” This was a fixation I heartily indulged back when they announced the lineup of the When We Were Young festival, the sheer euphoria of that moment a faded memory as I write this.
So for a good couple of weeks, I buried the claws of my attention deep into the thing, and tried to think about why the trope is and why it works. It was important to me that I reflected on why I continue to return to pop punk as an emotional refuge, even as I grow older, my concerns become less juvenile, and the world becomes more treacherous.
Trash Theory makes the interesting observation of connecting pop punk’s “locational disconnect” to Manifest Destiny, the imperialist impulse to take all their shit elsewhere and put it there. But this idea, plus the surprising consensus that Florida sucks, isn’t enough.
A helpful text to refer to is the essay “‘The Cassette Played Poptones’: Pop Punk’s Embrace of the City in Ruins,” written by academic Patrick Deer, and published in the anthology “Punk and Its Afterlives." (Mags lent me this book!) In it, Deer lays out the frictions produced by pop and punk rubbing against each other, and in the process, touches on the trope of locational disconnect.
Patrick Deer references both “Northern Ireland during The Troubles in the late 1970s,” and Great Britain, as sites of militarized conflict and sectarian violence that besieged the urban landscape. This is what I’m most interested in. There’s were the conditions in which punk could flourish. “Helicopter noise was deployed against demonstrators; surveillance technology listened for snipers and paramilitary plotting; white steam noise was used to break down internees,” and in this cacophony, “the anarchic growl of punk music” spoke to represent the youth who felt relentlessly policed. And even though pop punk’s more sugary sensibility could be traced back to comfy upbringing of mall teens, the roots still show. There are subtle traces of it in “All Signs Point to Lauderdale” by A Day to Remember, and “Grand Theft Autumn / Where Is Your Boy” by Fall Out Boy.
It’s like a cynicism that went so hard it circled all the way back to earnest rage. You want to get away. You want to burn all towering structures to the ground, and get away. I go through this vicious circle nearly every week, I think.
The essay goes on the expound on the contradictions between pop and punk mixing together—the way pop aims to assimilate, and the way punk aims to subvert (even those attempts at subversion often amount to just posturing and grandstanding—and Deer invites us to consider this:
“What, finally, is punk music’s relation to acting out the conventions of pop in the ruins of the city? Pop is designed to keep it going, to provide a continuously flowing sound track to our lives, through thick and thin, to guarantee the exchange of consumer time and money for pleasure, product, and diversion. One consistent objective of punk, in all its self-negating refusal of the mainstream, has been to pull evanescence and meaning out of such monotony, to pull fleeting joy out of the banal and the cliched.”
This is partly why “Ocean Avenue” is so interesting to me. In “Ocean Avenue,” the persona clearly yearns for what we can infer as his hometown, the way it is tethered to the memory of the beloved. It is a site of the sublime, the specific coordinates in which they were both 16 and it felt so right. It possible to inhabit such a place while living through incredible political crises, the kind of machinations that can escape a teenager’s worldview. We are currently experiencing history, after all (a meme sentiment), and still create pockets of joy that we illogical human beings will eventually look back upon as good days, better days.
And yet in the chorus, the persona promises his beloved that if they could only be together, they could leave this town and run forever. What was just a few breaths ago a refuge to return to becomes a disaster to escape from. Is this the reinvention? The self-negation? Is this the natural contradiction that arises from pop and punk interweaving?
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Not long ago I attended a watch party for the presidential candidate debate that took place in Okada Manila, one people were hyping up to be a kind of ultimate showdown between Marcos Jr. and dark horse candidate Ka Leody de Guzman. Ka Leody spoke like a patient man who was on the verge of losing his patience, in the best way. Professor Clarita Carlos talked way too much about her personal academic projects. What Ernesto Abella and Norberto Gonzales were doing there is anyone’s fucking guess.
And of course, fuck BBM and his whole family. I wonder if a certain contingent of Poblacion eventologists were keeping Sandro, the human equivalent of a Philippine Eagle NFT, company during the whole thing, but that’s neither here nor there.
I have mixed feelings about the way many contingents of extremely online left activists seem to think that the revolution is mostly fought on the battlefield of memes, and I tried watching another debate that was similarly hyped for is histrionic, memetic potential: the 2019 debate between Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson. I could barely get through it. Totally unlistenable. Flash in the pan. Didn’t get us anywhere. I think the Okada Manila debate got us somewhere. But because of work and various money troubles, I’ll just keep myself at arm’s length of everything and update myself with post-debate analyses of future events. Carrying out the civic responsibility of being an educated voter should not be this hard.
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Don’t. Just don’t. I care about you very much, so just don’t.
Hello! I know I’ve been updating this blog less and less. It’s been a difficult February.
Two things. First, I urge you think about what it’ll mean to vote for a Socialist President, and consider voting for that kind of candidate. Second, I’m raising funds to help my family pay for the expenses of an automobile accident, and the cost of palliatively caring for our old dog before having to put him down earlier this month. If you have a group of friends who are interesting in being playing Dungeons & Dragons as an adventuring party, I can run a Session Zero and a One-Shot for you! I have room for one party. Message me for details.
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