Life Harvester #26: Milford Graves, Best Friends, The Big Bagel Question, Miss Soup Pussy
Life Harvester is written by Colin Hagendorf and edited by Rebecca Giordano. This is the email version of a print publication available for low-cost individual subscription via Paypal or on Patreon. 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.
HBD2ME
Welcome to February 2021. Fuck you. Happy birthday to me, Juanita Vail, and a sheltie named Annie. RIP Milford Graves.
MILFORD GRAVES
I’ve been reworking this whole issue, which is already late, because Milford Graves died today. His work has been so important to me for so long. Graves was a free jazz drummer, a professor, an herbalist, a martial artist, a sculptor, a doctor, and one of the truest freaks I’ve ever encountered. If you’re unfamiliar with his music, I would encourage you to start by listening to the Paul Bley Quartet Barrage EP, Sonny Sharrock’s Black Woman LP, and Albert Ayler’s s/t 7”. While you’re listening, look up the 2004 NY Times article “Finding Healing Music in the Heart,” about his experimental medical research using recorded polyrhythms to treat heart arrhythmia. Then, watch his 2018 film Full Mantis. For now, I’d just like to share my memories of seeing him perform for the first time, cribbed from a letter I wrote to Flannery a few months ago.
“The day of my first ever hangover, my dad took my friends Evan, Joaquin, and I to see the Sun Ra Arkestra in Battery Park. Woulda been 1997, probably. John Zorn and Milford Graves opened, just the two of them. The rumor was that they’d never even met before, just had a few phone conversations to plan the performance. Arguably this was my first noise show, and probably a lot of why I don’t really go in for noise nowadays is that nothing will ever compare to the antagonistic chaos of Graves and Zorn at that yuppy jazz festival. What can I say about John Zorn? The guy is a putz, but at 14, I was absolutely enthralled with his inscrutability. I thought the fact that the music he made largely sounded like shit to me meant that I just didn’t get it. I really wanted to make it work! He was, afterall, my Jewish countercultural forebear.
Graves on the other hand, left such a lasting impression. He had his drums set up on the floor in front of the stage like Lightning Bolt. While Zorn was busy tooting his little horn up there, Graves was down on the floor just fucking going for it. At one point he stopped playing, and just started pacing the floor in front of his drums, not unlike a hardcore singer. Plodding away at the concrete in the park bandshell. Zorn was making those strident high pitched squeaks he’s so well known for, just blasting the whole crowd with this atonal one man cacophony. Then Graves dropped his posture, rounded his arms, protruded his butt. He was hopping around like an ape in front of the mostly moneyed, mostly white audience, his grunts and pants barely audible where I sat a few rows back. Zorn’s squawks were reaching a fever pitch and Graves just plopped into some white yuppie’s lap in the front row, and lifted the guy up on his back. He paraded his captive around in front of the stage, then finally ascended the stairs to stand next to Zorn, who’s sax went silent. Graves set the man down, and the two musicians walked off, leaving the audience member to find his way back to his seat. Truly one of the most intense performances I’ve ever seen and no amount of punk provocation over the years has come anywhere close to impacting me like that moment.”
BEST FRIENDS
This column was originally printed in Maximum RocknRoll in April 2015, during the editorial tenure of Grace Ambrose. I’ve been thinking about it lately because I’ve been considering non-familial care networks and all that we can accomplish when we open ourselves up to love in all its forms, when we broaden the scope beyond romance and kinship as the only sites of transcendent devotion.
It was Valentine’s Day and I was out to dinner with my friend Marcia. We’ve known each other for over a decade, have often been mistaken for a couple, though we’ve never dated. So when she found out her chef husband had to work that night she asked if I wanted his end of their dinner reservation. Sitting at the restaurant we got to talking about what wild maniacs we used to be when we were young.
It was mostly fun nostalgia—recounting bar fights I’d dragged her out of, or times she carried me home when I’d eaten a handful of pills and then continued to drink as if I hadn’t. Or when she lived with my very first love who had just dumped me. One night there had been a show at the house, and my ex had invited her art school friends to play in their wack noise band. The drummer, this tall poser who wore a charged leather he shamelessly admitted to having bought on eBay, had shlepped his drums to the show in what we would have referred to in those days as a Granny Cart. Some time late in the evening Marcia and I left the house to get more beer. When we returned, the whole party had cleared out and the poser’s granny cart, with his eBay jacket hanging from a hi-hat stand, was parked at the bottom of the stairs. Clearly, my ex had chosen to sleep with a hot poser instead of me, a whiny brat.
In retrospect, it’s clear no wrong was done. Let she who hasn’t slept with a hot poser cast the first stone. But at the time? Oy gevalt. I was young, the love of my life was sleeping with some putz who left his little shopping cart at the bottom of the stairs. I couldn’t imagine a greater humiliation. I went outside to smash bottles on the construction site across the street when I heard a crash coming from inside the house. I ran back to find Marcia smashing every dish in the kitchen because she knew I would think it was funny.
At one point during dinner she mentioned that in retrospect, it’s clear she was too scared and wounded by the world back then to let anyone love her. But on some level, she must have known she needed that kind of care, because she would seek out intimate relationships with people and then push them away as soon as they got close enough that she felt vulnerable, or they tried to convince her to maybe change her wild ways. I was shaking my head in fervent agreement. I was a traumatized, dissociated mess in my 20s. All I wanted was to love and be loved but any time I came close to finding that, I’d concoct a reason to back away.
But as we talked more and more about what wrecks we had been, we shared memories one of us had either chosen to forget or couldn’t remember because we had succeeded at what we were always trying to do back then—blot out our awareness of ourselves as thinking, feeling humans. In the midst of Marcia recounting a weekend bus trip to a casino I still can’t remember a literal second of, I suddenly recalled that there was a period of about six months or a year in that era, back when we still lived around the corner from each other, where we slept in bed together almost every night. And I told her, probably for the first time, that I don’t know if I would’ve made it through that period if we hadn’t been friends.
Not that I would’ve died, although I couldn’t imagine living very far into my 30s back then. I just mean, things got pretty grim for me for a minute and I was able to walk away from it in one piece. I’m not some broken shell of a person. I’m happy and productive and more or less healthy, and I don’t think that was an inevitable outcome. I think I owe a lot of it to our friendship.
And then I started thinking about a through line that we could trace from one story to the next—a narrative about she and I looking out for each other and having each other’s backs in the exact way we both felt we had been incapable of letting anyone do back then. We took care of each other on the most basic, fundamental levels, down to eating and sleeping together. But I never told her to stop drinking so much. She never told me it was probably a bad sign that I puked every day. And we weren’t suppressing the need to communicate those things, because that wouldn’t have been healthy either, we just honestly didn’t care about shit like that.
So like, even though we didn’t care about ourselves we were able to care about each other, and it’s because we never made any rules and we never told each other what to do. I think about that Code of Ethics that Jamie wrote in the liner notes of the Bent Outta Shape / Drunken Boat 7”, which probably came out in the same year I was sleeping at Marcia’s apartment all the time. It’s a great list and if you haven’t seen it you should look it up on the internet or something. I’m specifically thinking of rule #4: “Don’t tame / be tamed (no taming).” That was so fundamental to the relationship she and I had, which was pivotal to the fact that we both made it out and into our 30s and we aren’t totally fucked basket cases.
And it seems like there was something really fitting about having that relationship, that kinship, the love between us, highlighted on Valentine’s Day, which is a time that was manufactured by late Capitalism to make all people feel like shit and enforce some false romance/loneliness dichotomy on a population of people already alienated from each other and their own bodies by technology. Laurie from my book club says that some dude told her Valentine’s Day is based on a Roman holiday where men would get butt naked, kill a wolf, and then run around slapping women with the pelt, but like, you know what I mean, right?
All I’m saying is that Marcia rules and I’m so lucky to know her. A lot of people come to punk feeling broken or alienated or out of control. Even in the chaos of addiction or deep depression, even when I feels like the whole fucking world is out to get you, there are relationships that you might not realize til a decade later are sustaining you and keeping you alive.
ASK A SHMUCK
Dear Shabby,
There are so many ways to eat a bagel, but what is The Right Way to eat a bagel? Also, I have to be vegan now, and that's honestly a drag to delicious bagel eating ways.
Seeking the Hole-y Grail in Secaucus
Dearest Seeking,
As a woman with many unnecessarily restrictive and proscriptive culinary beliefs that I cling to as if they actually matter—an epicurean trad wife, if you will—I’m as shocked as you’re about to be by the next sentence: there is not one right way to eat a bagel.
Bagels are powerful. You can do so many things with them! But before we get into how to eat a bagel, make sure you pick the right bagel to eat. You’ll need to go to a bagel store. You can’t get a good bagel at the supermarket. If you’re outside New York, it’ll be slim pickins, but you might find something decent where you least expect it. A bagel should be slick on the outside, dense, moist, and toothsome within. A good bagel is delicious both raw and toasted.
As for bagel preparations, you’ve got options. There’s the classic cream cheese shmear, the full lox spread, and a spectrum in between. The bagel is versatile. The original pizza bagel, a homemade snack invented by suburban Jewish mothers in which a bagel is topped with marinara and mozzarella, is certainly among the right ways to eat a bagel. And so before I address the second part of your question, Seeking, I’m going to take you on a brief tour of some of my favorite bagels:
Childhood–onion bagel; cream cheese & chives; red onion; lox; eaten open face. The purview of Yom Kippur breakfast, Sunday brunches (Jews invented brunch) with my friend David’s grandma who looked like Joan Rivers, special occasions when my dad would go to two different stores across town from each other because the place with the best bagels had terrible lox.
Teens–everything bagel, toasted or not depending on mood/freshness of bagels; vegetable cream cheese; closed sandwich. Introduced to me by my teen best friend Juan, and most often eaten late night and real drunk from the 24 hour bagel place on St Marks. I was skeptical of classic East Coast shmear vegetable cream cheese as a concept, because I generally only ate bread and sugar as a teen, but it is factually delicious.
Late teens–pumpernickel bagel, toasted; tuna salad; m&ms; closed sandwich. I understand how deranged this sounds but it’s actually really good. I can’t remember why I put m&ms on the first tuna sandwich, probably as a joke, but it was very good. I was doing a lot of speed and it’s hard to replicate whatever logic led to this discovery but I continued to eat it when I wasn’t spun and it was still good.
Early 20s– plain bagel, toasted; plain cream cheese; sliced tomato, cucumber, red onion; open face. My bagel shop order in my early 20s remained an everything with veg cream cheese, but this particular combination cost something like $2.25 at the diner near my house, which was open all night, and so despite the fact that this bagel was atrocious, it was a fine accompaniment for a cup of coffee, was filling, and had vegetables, which my standard diner order (two over medium, home fries, rye toast) lacked.
Late 20s– everything bagel; plain cream cheese; bacon; closed sandwich. This one still feels controversial. My sister told me this is what she ate to cure hangovers in college. “Colin, you gotta try it.” I was skeptical but I’ll tell you, Seeking, it’s really good. The warm, salty bacon with the cold shmear is heaven.
30s and beyond– I don’t really eat that many bagels lately, but when I do I change it up, cycling through an assortment of my old favorites, minus the pumpernickel-tuna-m&m. Not because I don’t like it, but primarily because I’m a grown woman, so there’s never m&ms lurking around the house anymore.
Also, there is the true classic toasted plain bagel with butter. It’s simple. It’s delicious. It’s my father’s favorite bagel preparation, and he’s a Jew from Williamsburg.
As for your veganism, I’m sorry to hear. Not because I think veganism is, in itself, unfortunate, but because you seem to be making the choice under duress and I think dietary restrictions necessitated by health concerns are tragic. I just wish everyone could eat whatever they want. But also, don’t fret! It’s 2021, and the world may be a toilet, but at least there’s a wide assortment of delicious vegan dairy products. For cream cheese, I think Kite Hill is the best store bought by miles. Bagel shops are gonna be on a trial basis. Here in Pittsburgh for instance, there is a phenomenal house-made vegan cream cheese at Pigeon Bagels, which is coincidentally the only good bagel shop in town. As for smoked fish, they make a pretty good fake lox out of smoked and cured carrot slices, but most vegans I know don’t wanna eat something that slimy.
Good luck! I hope you find everything you seek. xo, Shabby
MISS SOUP PUSSY
I had a truly terrible health teacher in tenth grade. Like, she was a bad teacher and also seemed to be a bad person. She was a white woman in her late-20s. She clearly didn’t care about teaching, though to be fair, the curriculum didn’t inspire. She was rude and dismissive to her students in ways that ranged from outright and unacceptable racism, to more benign harassment. For instance, when a photograph of me grinning maniacally, eyes red slits from being real stoned, holding up a paper plate of Corn Nuts, fell out of my backpack in her classroom, she didn’t return it to me immediately. Instead she passed it around all her classes while explaining to my peers why they shouldn’t do drugs, saving my class for last and only returning the photo after making sure everyone had seen it. This is clearly a severe abuse of power and deeply inappropriate, but luckily for me, I didn’t give a fuck about anything back then, and my classmates’ response, by and large, was to invite me to smoke weed with them.
Sometimes she would just ramble about her dumb ass life and then try to extract a meaningful lesson from whatever she was talking about. One afternoon she told the class a meandering cautionary tale about underage drinking. One night her and a friend had gone to a frat party, where they’d consumed Jell-o shots under the misapprehension that eating the Jell-o would constitute a meal. When they returned to their dorm room, wasted and hungry, they realized just how wrong they were. My teacher attempted to prepare herself a Cup O’ Noodles to eat before bed, but due to her compromised dexterity, she spilled the cup of boiling broth right down her Juicy shorts, scalding her genitals. This was why we shouldn’t drink. Because we, too, might burn our supple young crotches with instant soup.
The story spread through the school like wildfire. As far as I’m aware, no teen was warned off drinking by it, but it did have one lasting effect: everyone started calling that teacher Miss Soup Pussy. At times I felt bad for her, to be roasted so constantly by teens, but she was truly awful. Looking back with the 2020 hindsight of a full grown 38-year-old woman, I can safely say that she absolutely deserved to be called Miss Soup Pussy. It’s funny to think that I’m older than she was now, and that I’ll never get to experience the ecstatic glee of being a teen acting wild disrespectful to a grown up. Truly one of life’s great joys. Thanks for that, Miss Soup Pussy.