Life Harvester #14: Holiday Gift Guide, Ballin', Bernie Sanders, Constant Insult, The Jackie Robinson
Life Harvester is written by Colin Hagendorf and edited by Rebecca Giordano. This is the email version of a print publication available for free throughout the United States and for low-cost individual subscription. Life Harvester subscriptions are free to prisoners. If you know an incarcerated person who would like to receive a newsletter every month, get in touch with me directly and I’ll take care of it.
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY I LOVE YOU
Hello and welcome to February 2020. February is a great month. You’ve either given up on your new year’s resolutions and accepted your fate or you’re a newer, better you. It’s still cold, but now you’re used to it. Plus February is short, and spring is just around the corner. February birthdays include Audre Lorde, Anais Nin, Alice Cooper, Cam’ron, & me, your lowly newsletter gal.
HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE
The holiday is my birthday and this is a gift guide for you to get me presents. If you wanted to keep it simple, you could subscribe to this newsletter at patreon.com/lifeharvester. There are multiple subscription options, including one that allows you to download a bunch of mixtapes I made (a new one every month), including this month’s tape where all the songs are about masturbating! For Valentine’s Day! It’s good!
If you wanted to go a little bigger, here are some options: things I really want all the time are a t-shirt of the Mukilteo Fairies Special Rites 7” cover, and a copy of the only GB Jones book. I collect Enesco sad bassett hound figurines, feminist bookstore t-shirts from the 70s & 80s, mass market editions of Sam Delany & Isaac Bashevis Singer books, as well as those little mass market volumes of Mad Magazine. I don’t collect M.U.S.C.L.E. Men action figures, but I have a friend who does and he has a lot of cool stuff that I bet he’d trade me if I ended up with some he doesn’t have. I already traded him a few for a bunch of drawings.
Donating to charities is a really good thing to do on people’s birthdays. I like specific institutions in cities where I’ve lived, but generally speaking, I’m more interested in encouraging you to engage with people where you live. Local direct action community relief leads to palpable change on a small scale. I’m a fan of bail funds, trans rights groups, abortion access funds, needle exchanges. There’s probably one of those in your town. Give them money!
Also Marky Ramone is on Cameo.
MUSTARD FT. RODDY RICCH — BALLIN’
It’s hard to listen to rap radio for more than half an hour anywhere in the US in the last decade without hearing the “Mustard on the Beat” drop that Mustard (née Dijon Isaiah McFarlane) begins all his songs with. His ubiquity is testament to his ability to craft an infectious pop song. In many ways, he’s shaped the sound of hip hop in the 2010s, hitting the mainstream and rap charts consistently with songs like Tyga’s “Rack City,” and Big Sean’s “I Don’t Fuck With You,” the latter of which I wasn’t really feeling until I was at a pretty rambunctious protest in Oakland and all the teens were blasting it off their scrapers and screaming it at the police.
In 2018 Mustard really hit his pop stride, with every single he released reaching an almost insufferable pervasiveness, starting with Ella Mae’s “Boo’d Up,” (if you don’t count Lil Dicky, which I don’t) and capping off at the end of last year with Roddy Ricch vehicle, “Ballin’,” a perfect end-of-summer jam. It opens with a pitch shifted sample of Las Vegas girl group 702’s 1997 ballad “Get It Together,” invoking thoughts of getting your whole life together instead of just your relationship. Then a beat drops that I don’t think is sampled, but really reminds me of the Trammps’ “Rubber Band” loop on fellow Compton rapper The Game’s similarly inspirational anthem “Hate It Or Love It.”
There’s a few things I love about “Ballin’” besides the fact that it sounds great. First of all, as my frequent attendance at H2O shows in the 90s attests, I’m a cornball who likes motivational music, and that’s what this song is. It’s about triumph over adversity, celebration of the people who helped along the way, and tenderly memorializing our friends who are no longer with us. Secondly, I cannot stress enough how much I love the fact that the song title has an apostrophe instead of a g, but then Ricch pronounces the g on the end of the word “balling” SO HARD, as is typical of a Compton accent. This hard g is at the end of a pronunciation of the word “balling” that sounds more like balleeng, which highlights the slight Mexican inflection in the Compton accent. That’s the third thing. Since I was a little kid I’ve always been fascinated with how vernacular evolves in parallel to diasporic communities living in close proximity in urban areas. Simply put, there’s something that makes me feel good when I see evidence of cross-cultural influence. It may have its roots in my being from New York, but the idea that people from very disparate backgrounds get mushed together in cities and then a generation or two later there’s a whole new culture that developed piecemeal from all of them (Becca tells me the word for this is “cosmopolitanism”), I dunno, it makes me feel like maybe not everything is fucked.
BERNIE SANDERS
This is an endorsement. As an aging anarchist and lifelong punk, it’s embarrassing to be excited about a presidential candidate, but I am. Last time around it didn’t seem pressing enough to get worked up, but this time the stakes are higher. And let’s be real, hedging or embarrassment aside, when in my 37 years have I had the opportunity to vote for someone who is categorically against war, wants to cancel student and medical debt, give everyone free healthcare, institute national rent control, end for-profit prisons, tax the extraordinarily wealthy, and on and on. If he even does a quarter of the things he says he wants, it will SUBSTANTIALLY improve my life and the lives of many people I love. Since I was a kid throwing a 40 through a Starbucks window I have petulantly insisted that there are other options available than the ones we’ve been given my whole life. A Sanders candidacy is a tangible step in the right direction.
CONSTANT INSULT — HISTORY IN SHORTHAND
Becca and I just listened to Constant Insult’s first, self-titled record the afternoon before they played in Pittsburgh. We were driving home from the hilltop cemetery on the North Side with a beautiful view of the city, where Becca had been feeding our dog Gus a hot dog from Frankie’s Extra Long to celebrate their Copper Anniversary (mazel tov to the beautiful couple, may there be such oneness between you that when one of you weeps, the other tastes salt). An amiable spirit permeated the car as we cautiously made our..way down Troy Hill. Becca asked, “does every band in Minneapolis sound like Frozen Teens?” To which I responded, “maybe it’s the same people!”
Guitarist/singer Wil Olson was in Frozen Teens and the first Constant Insult LP, released 5 years ago, sounds A LOT like them, a genre Becca and I had a hard time pinning down while we were talking in the car. “People might incorrectly call this pop punk,” I said. “Yeah,” Becca agreed, “It’s like Marked Men and all those Denton bands in that it sounds like rougher power pop. These could be Paul Collins Beat songs if they were recorded a little cleaner. And the drumming is right off a Nerves record.”
When I first put the needle on History In Shorthand, I was expecting more of the same, a formula I like, don’t get me wrong, but a formula nonetheless. Instead, it looks like Constant Insult’s other singer/guitarist, Katie Thornton, has taken on a little more of the songwriting in the five years since the self-titled record. Thornton’s background seems to be in a sort of folk punk that I was once completely enamored with but can’t really stomach these days. Gravel-voiced men and clear-voiced women romanticizing their inchoate alcoholism over minor key accordion and banjo arrangements. Folk punk was a travesty and everyone who participated is guilty, myself included.
But the fact is, Thornton’s Americana sensibility adds an interesting component to the Frozen Teens blueprint. Thornton and Olson trade off singing throughout the record, but no matter who’s at the forefront, their harmonies define Constant Insult’s sound. If any comparison is to be made, it’s that Constant Insult remind me of the 90s communist mods and fellow Twin Cities rockers The Strike, who’s truly excellent, mostly forgotten, 1999 record Shots Heard Round The World was released on Victory Records of all places.
History In Shorthand is solid from front to back. Opener “Best Seller” is a midtempo rocker about Paul Westerberg, which is nice because the Replacements have a midtempo rocker about Alex Chilton. Maybe in 20 years someone will write a midtempo rocker about Katie & Wil. The momentum built in “Best Seller” maintains throughout. This record moves. On my drive to New York last week, I was two and a half listens through before I became aware it was repeating. Stand out tracks are “Room For You,” a mod-inflected ripper that wouldn’t be out of place on an early Ted Leo & the Pharmacists record, “Batteries,” a classic punk anthem to yearning, and closer “The Invitation,” which could be a lost Billy Bragg song.
THE JACKIE ROBINSON PARKWAY
I’ve been back in New York for three days and I’ve already gotten to drive the Jackie Robinson Parkway two of them. A blessing! It’s my favorite highway. Proposed in 1899 and finally completed in 1935, the J. Rob runs from the Grand Central Parkway in Queens through a bunch of cemeteries, and terminates just shy of 5 miles later at Highland Blvd in Brooklyn. It was originally just called the Interboro Parkway, but was renamed in a ceremony in 1997. I was 14 years old then, and that was right around the time my grandma moved to the Forest Park Co-ops and we start taking the J Rob to the Myrtle Ave exit to get to her place. It’s windy and tight and surrounded by graves. As a kid sitting in the back of my parents’ car, driving on it felt like being in on a secret.
My first apartment when I moved out on my own was in Central Queens in Kew Gardens on 83rd Ave off Queens Blvd, right next to where the Jackie Robinson begins. I hadn’t moved next the the Jackie R on purpose, but it makes sense that I would be immediately drawn into its orbit. After a decade in the gentrification crescent of North Brooklyn, I moved back to Queens, to Ridgewood where I lived off the next exit down from Kew Gardens and was neighbors with illustrator of this month’s caption contest, Yusuke Okada. He and I would sometimes meet up at night and walk along the parkway out to East New York and then take the train back.
The 35 years between the parkway’s proposal and finished construction was largely due to the number of human corpses that had to be moved, a combination of reverence for the dead and intense corruption among cemetery trustees. Land acquisition had completed in 1929, but the delicate balance of planning a route while disturbing as few graves as possible took time to navigate. In 1930, New York State offered to pay for construction if the city would acquire an additional 40 feet of width for the whole road, a request the city denied vehemently, shell-shocked as they were from the nearly 30 years it took them to get the land in the first place.
The resulting parkway is shockingly narrow by today’s standards. The stretch from the the Grand Central to exit 6 is absolutely claustrophobic. Once you enter Forest Park things open up just a little, but before you know it, you’re gonna hit the wiggles in the Cypress Hills Cemetery. The wiggles are a slalom of tight curves, maybe half a dozen, that wind back and forth. It’s dizzying and a little jarring at first, but as my dad once said when I expressed apprehension about him passing a truck on the narrowest segment of the Williamsburg Bridge, “they make the lanes big enough to fit a car.”
I sometimes refer to driving on the JRP as “wigglin’ through the cemetery.” Right as you come around the last big wiggle (if you're going from Brooklyn to Queens, vice versa), you get my 2nd favorite cemetery view from a highway in New York City, when you look at what I call the Corpse Amphitheater, where all the graves are set up like stadium seating. My first favorite cemetery view from a highway is on the Eastbound BQE on that little stretch between the Long Island Expressway and Newton Creek that runs along Laurel Hill Blvd in Maspeth. Here, the expressway abuts Calvary Cemetery, and if you look at it from just the right angle, the gravestones segue seamlessly into the skyline of Manhattan. It’s a beautiful and cool optical illusion, with the added bonus of feeling ominously significant when I was on acid in someone’s car in my early 20s because like, those skyscrapers are capitalism and capitalism is death, maaaaan.
On a recent Saturday night, I was driving back to my friend Sal’s place from my parent’s house. It was about 9:45 and Funk Flex was doing his Saturday night “25 & Older” set on Hot 97. Right as I hit the wiggles, he was playing Isley Brothers “Between the Sheets” into Diana Ross “I’m Coming Out,” a one-two punch of the originary tracks of classic Bad Boy samples, and I noticed that I was slightly accelerating into them. I’m certainly not a cautious driver, but I don’t think of myself as a wreckless one either. On dark country roads in places I’ve never been, I drive like a grandma with my brights on. But I know the wiggles on the Jackie Robinson like I know the lyrics to “Shook Ones.” And you know what they say, when you’re wiggling through the cemetery, you gotta wiggle fast so a ghost can’t catch you.