Harbingers of the death of rock and roll, fear not.

Traffic signals blink yellow because there is no traffic to regulate. Darkened church doorways shelter homeless men in ragged socks. Construction vehicles rust in the abandoned roadwork. The library and the Red Cross building are boarded up and vandalized. Vampires roam the streets (probably).  

Detroit is dying. Or so it would appear.

To get to The Loving Touch, you must drive south on Woodward, past the Fox Theatre and Comerica Park, past the now-defunct Magic Stick, past empty buildings and weeded lots and broken glass and graffiti, until you pass, fittingly, a large cemetery. And then you are in Ferndale, which, while not technically Detroit, is close enough.

The ghost town aura of downtown Detroit, however, has vanished. The Mediterranean restaurant we go to is positively bustling, and the bars near The Loving Touch (itself a former massage parlour) are renovated and graffiti-free. Gentrification is in full effect.    

The show is sold out, and more than half of the patrons in the bar sport black Magic-Markered Xs on the backs of their hands. (Many of them wear Hawaiian shirts like the lead singer is sometimes wont to do.) The other patrons drink tall cans of PBR, the cheapest beer they have. (I drive vodka and water, because I am a grown-up who is concerned about her caloric intake.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXTc3Choroo

Australian band Dune Rats warmed up the enthusiastic underaged crowd with their hyper garage/pop/rock and roll, including a cover of Blister in the Sun with half the lyrics omitted in favour of indiscernible mumbling.

And then the stage went dark and the lightbulb eyes lit up in the giant papier-maché-head replicas of the band members and FIDLAR came on and the place went fucking mental. I had seen the band twice before in Toronto, so I knew what to expect, but I did not expect such chaos from a bunch of kids whose illegal pre-show buzz must surely have worn off by that point. They jumped around like wild things, they shouted and sang, they surfed the crowd, they took their sweat-soaked t-shirts off and lost their cell phones in the frenzy.

There is something about attending a live rock show that no shaky iPhone video or post-show review can ever capture, which is why it's important to just GO, man. You can never truly know what you've missed: the jostling that will result in bruises the next day, the smell of furtive joint-smoking, the shared smiles when the band plays that song that you love that they never play, the feel of other people's sweat on your own bare skin (okay, I can probably do without that last one).  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DBBI-eKH7U

I have never believed in the dire predictions of the death of rock and roll. Rock and roll will never die. Its power might ebb and flow, but as long as there are teenagers, there will be angst. And as long as there is angst, there will be the need for rock and roll.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2srovkhf0w&oref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DD2srovkhf0w&has_verified=1

Last night at the FIDLAR show, the youth of America gave me hope for the future. For the future of kids raised on technology who showed me that it IS possible for them to put their phones down and live in the moment, for the future of Detroit, that dying city with the possibility of revival in its embers, and for the future of rock and roll.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaUzYISKKAI

Riot on.

Static Mind

You know that theory about it being important to interact with people with worldviews and philosophies that oppose your own because it will somehow enrich your life and open your mind to new ideas? Fuck that. From now on, I choose to only interact with people who share my core views and values, because you know what? We're goddamn RIGHT, and nothing you can say can ever convince me otherwise. So here are 9 things I will never change my mind about: 

1. White cisgendered males are not the enemy. They are human beings with thoughts and feelings and experiences, just like every other human being. No two individuals will think about and feel and experience life in the same way. 


2. The environment is more important than the economy. The economy can adapt; the environment cannot. 


3. Artists can say and do whatever they want in their art, even (especially) if some people consider it offensive. 


4. Public figures do not automatically have the responsibility of being role models. They are people, and should be allowed to fuck up. Fucking up is how we learn and grow.


5. This new trend of identifying "triggers" is more damaging than protective. Learning to deal with your own personal trauma involves actively confronting those triggers, not running away from them because they make you uncomfortable. 


6. Spelling and grammar and punctuation are important because communication is important. You don't always have to follow the rules (sometimes breaking the rules is more effective than following them), but the devolution of language into cartoon symbols is an intellectual step backward.


7. Relying on technology instead of your own brain will have devastating effects in the future. Technology should be used as a tool, not a brain substitute.


8. Laugh tracks are for people who are too stupid to decide for themselves what's funny and what isn't.


9. All spiders want to kill me. Riot on.

Portraits

You hide your insecurity behind black eyeliner and strong opinions.

You carry your mother's pain. 

You bear the burdens of slow death and suicide, somehow, impossibly, with a smile.

You find solace in the vastness of the desert sky. 

You escape into silence. 

You have stomped all over the bullies of your childhood in heavy black boots and metal and ink. 

You have never escaped the bullies of your childhood.

You send out only positive vibes.

Your art is both hindered and helped by your mental illness.

You found yourself when you left this small town behind.

You are afraid that no one will love you, but you're wrong.

  

It's all about the balance. (Ah well, and riot on.)

I think I'm a pretty self-aware individual. In order to know others, one must first know oneself, and I am infinitely interested in knowing (and understanding) others. Humanity is fascinating, in all its violence and tenderness. I know my strengths, and I know my weaknesses, and I try not to be apologetic about either.

My astrological sign is, appropriately enough, Libra. The scales: the symbol of my life philosophy and of the way I think and behave, both consciously and unconsciously. It's almost enough to make one believe in a cosmic order. But celestially-influenced or not, my life really is all about the balance:

I believe in equality.

I enjoy things, but I am not fanatical about them. I am fundamentally unable to understand the drive to covet, to hoard, to consume something in its entirety. Fanaticism tips the scales, and my scales don't like being tipped.

I am an omnivore.

I can see both sides, almost always. And if I can't, I try. (This does not mean that I can't be hurt, but I will always try to understand.)

When a relationship is more work than fun, I think nothing of divesting myself of that person. I have been accused of being cold and unfeeling for this behaviour, when in reality I am simply maintaining the emotional balance. I can be no other way, any more than my fanatical friends can stop themselves from being fanatics.

I like rectangles and symmetry and parallel lines.

I believe in accepting our differences, but I also want to change the world. I want to impose my sense of order as much as I want to let you do your own thing.

I am bitter and caustic, but also considerate and kind. My optimism and my cynicism are constantly at odds with each other.

It's a hell of a lot of work, truth be told, balancing these opposing desires. Sometimes I wish I could just stop struggling and give in, let one side slam down and the other fly up. Maybe wear a one-sleeved tunic or something. I know I never can, though, because it's all about the balance.

 


 













 

Photographs

As a child, I delighted in hauling out the old leather-bound album and seeking myself. Is this me? This is me. This is me, a naked baby in a sink full of water, laughing. This is me, standing beside a bicycle amid fallen autumn leaves, holding a boy's hand. This is me in a school photograph, with a cold sore on my lip and a purple ribbon in my hair. 

Today, that fascination has not waned. This is me, posing in front of the mirror in my leopard-print bra. This is me, drinking sangria on a patio with friends. This is me in front of a famous monument in a foreign city. I know that this is me, because I took these photographs. I never tire of looking at myself, especially at the myself I have created, deliberately, with care.

We used to take photographs for ourselves, to remind ourselves of people and of moments. We would say cheese and hope that our eyes were open. (And if they weren't, we put those photographs into albums anyway, because they were all we had to remember those moments by.)

We did not take a photograph with the knowledge that it would be shared with anyone other than the other people in the photograph, and sometimes not even with them. Photographs were private, pasted with care into albums to remind us of our own stories with the turning of a page: the birthday parties and graduations and weddings, the family vacations, the laughable fashions and dated hairstyles, the prints on the wallpaper and the patterns on the furniture. Sometimes we would frame them, the really good ones, tack them to a mirror, stick them on the front of the fridge with a magnet, to remind ourselves of those moments. 

We did not take a photograph and then immediately inspect it for flaws, discard it like an inferior fish because the angle or the expression was not quite right, take another. And another, and another, until all parties are satisfied and that ephemeral moment, which was lost immediately after we threw back that first fish, is caught.

Now we take photographs not for ourselves but to create ourselves for others. 

We take photographs to share. We take photographs and then upload them to any number of websites so that family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, can peek into our lives and express approval. Everything is beautiful and fun, or deliberately ugly. There is purpose to the things we share, purpose beyond the preservation of a moment. Today we are all artists (albeit often without training or a creative eye), and our artistic goal is to create images that reflect who we are or who we want to be or who we want others to think we are. 

We no longer take photographs to preserve memories, but to make them. The moment only exists for the photograph rather than the other way around. The albums are not tucked away on a shelf, dusty and largely overlooked, but public domain, open to approbation or censure. When we look back at our lives in photographs, will we be looking at our lives as they were, or as we made them? Is there even a difference?

They are overwhelming, all these photographs of people who are not ourselves, of moments that we were not part of. Why share the trivialities of our lives? The coffee cups, the clothing choices, the sandwich you made for lunch, the bottle of beer you drank, the record you bought, the book you read? Photographs on the internet are the equivalent of a stranger showing you the pictures of their kids that they have tucked into their wallets. Beautiful, you say, nodding. But you don't really care, because these are not your kids. This is not your life. 

We no longer want to remember so much as we want to be remembered. This is me, we say. This is the way I look and these are the people I know and the things I do. I want to feel like I have some control over a world that is increasingly out of my control. I want to feel like the things I do are valuable and valued. I want to feel like I am valuable and valued. I want you to like me. Look at me. Look at me.

Is this me? 

    

So here's the thing:

So here's the thing: People will judge you. Always. For all sorts of reasons: for your skin colour, your gender, how much money you have, who you fuck and how you fuck them, the clothes you choose to wear, your body shape, your occupation, your decision to have or not have children, etc. It's entirely up to you, as the individual, to say, yes, I accept that judgement and give you the power to make me feel less valuable, or, no, fuck you, this is me and to hell with you and your tabloid-media sense of value because I know that I am awesome. We all just need to make a concerted effort to not give a shit about other people's personal opinions of us and seek value from inside rather than outside. I used to think my grandmother was weird and embarrassing for walking around in public with two different socks. Now I salute her. To sum up: seriously, who gives a fuck? Work on making your own self the best self it can be and shut up about everyone else. As an aside, while on my bike ride today, I accidentally smushed a caterpillar because I saw him too late, but then two seconds later a bug flew up my nose and lodged itself in my nasal cavity. Riot on.

Warm Nights in Strange Cities: Costa Rica

The mist rising through the mountains and every shade of green, emerald and hunter and lime and forest and fern and kelly and jungle. Riotous eruptions of bright pink and brilliant orange and bold blue. A waving crab in the middle of the road welcomes us.

Flower-coloured paint on poured concrete walls and rusty corrugated tin roofs with swatches of brightly-coloured fabric covering barred screened windows. A dirt yard and a worn armchair out front for sitting and watching the road. Satellite dishes and the glow of television screens in the dark.

The roar of the howler monkeys from the black depths of the rainforest, the torture and anguish of a thousand helpless souls. The constant electric insect hum and the cheeps and chirps of bats and birds and monkeys. The dings and mews of tree frogs. The chirrup of the geckos that live in the Big House with us, the way they laugh at our jokes at night while we drink cheap red wine from Argentina and battle for the presidency with a deck of soggy playing cards.

Hummingbirds zip from blossom to blossom in the morning sunshine. Leaf cutter ants march down the trunks of trees and over the path to the beach. The golden orb weaver waits patiently in her web. Crabs of many colours, orange and blue and black and brown and yellow, slip out of sight when we approach.

Brush cutters and machetes and the endless attempt to tame the jungle and keep it from invading the scars made by man. Potholes and gravel and hot asphalt and the never-ending road work of brown-skinned men in yellow shirts and orange vests as a brown-and-white mutt, her belly swollen with a litter of unborn road dogs, supervises.

The road dogs themselves, all manner of size, colour, and breed, alone or in pairs, loping casually or running purposefully down the road to Manzanillo or all the way back to San Jose for all we know. For two nights in a row, a smelly road dog ambles silently up the jungle path to the Big House out of the dark. She rejects our meager offering of half a granola bar and some fresh water; she wants only to be scratched under her smelly chin and behind her smelly ears. She lies down on the mat where the door would be if the Big House had a door, sighs contentedly, and goes to sleep, where she dreams, I imagine, of roads.    

Battling Caribbean waves in the soft rain, the resistance of my muscles against the pull of the undertow, laughter tempered with that instinctual ocean fear, the taste of salt on my lips, salt stinging my eyes. Sand-coloured crabs creeping out from their holes when I sit quietly on a piece of rotting driftwood in the morning listening to the crashing of the waves as the beach comes alive with their wary sideways scuttling.

School children in bright green shirts, the colour of the rainforest, waiting at the bus stop at 6 a.m. Tourists wearing bikini tops riding rented bicycles without helmets. Ticos on scooters, heedless of oncoming trucks or tourists riding rented bicycles, darting over bridges and between the semi-trailers carrying loads of bananas.

Forests of bananas hanging in protective blue bags. The desire to steal one, to pick just one perfect ripe banana from a banana tree instead of from a bunch in a bin at the grocery store.

We coo over a sleepy two-fingered sloth hidden in a blanket nest, her tiny pig nose and tiny pink tongue as I offer her a fuchsia flower. We take photographs of orphaned baby three-fingered sloths, barely bigger than my hand, tiny smiling buddha brothers who fill me with joy. Our guide explains how he takes the young ocelot out into the jungle every day to hunt spiders and lizards and grow wild enough to spend his life in the rainforest where he belongs, how already the cat sneaks up behind him and attacks his neck; we are lucky to be here, lucky to touch this wild creature. We play with baby howler monkeys on a baby jungle gym and one of them leaps onto my head and sucks my finger. We cuddle capuchins and spider monkeys and howler monkeys and feed them from bottles and offer them pieces of broccoli. They use us as springboards to jump and swing.

We put on rubber boots and tromp through the mud of the rainforest after dark armed with weak flashlights in search of frogs and spiders and snakes and other scary things, but we make sure we are back by 9:30, when the really dangerous things, the fer-de-lance and the pit viper and the jaguar, come out to hunt.  

We enjoy steak chimichurri at La Refugio, rice and beans and Caribbean chicken at the Cool and Calm Cafe, ahi tuna at Jungle Love, pina coladas at Koki Beach, whole red snapper and lobster and rondon and chicharrones and chifrijo and fresh coconut that we smash ourselves.

A night-time visit from an opossum, who smells our bananas even through the plastic container we keep them in; his tail is immeasurably long and hairless, a giant raccoon-rat nonplussed by our presence. The death of a vibrant blue ortho butterfly. The theft of a bag of chips from unsuspecting picnickers by a cheeky white-faced capuchin on the Cahuita trail.

 A Jesus lizard says a Hail Mary and leaps from a vine in front of our canoe and skips miraculously across the water to the shore. A gust of wind shakes the tops of the trees and sends a shower of orange petals raining softly down on us. Buttercup, the wise old sage, wraps her strong sloth arm around her neck and screams.

Overflowing garbage bins and a breakfast club of vultures in Puerto Viejo at dawn. A magical glen like something out of a fairy tale, the grazing horses hiding their unicorn horns and pegasus wings from human eyes as we drive past on our way home.