Life Harvester 29: Remix Requests, Hate Your Friends Vs Dream Baby Dream, The Last Time I Did Acid, Writing Letters
Life Harvester is written by Colin Hagendorf. 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.
MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE
Hello and welcome to springtime. We’ve all been cooped up for so long. Many of us still are. There’s a global vaccine apartheid that will lead to suffering and death for millions to line the pockets of a few. The police have been unrelenting in their war on US citizens, executing people in the street almost every day since they sent Derek Chauvin as their sacrificial lamb to the slaughter. I begrudgingly respect the Thin Blue Line flag hanging on one of the trap houses in my neighborhood for its seeming utility to the men who do business there, but I hate having to see it when I walk the dog. Happy birthday to three Taurus Kings: Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, & New Haven, CT’s Commie Larry Flynt, Win “The Skin” Vitkowsky.
At the time that I wrote this introduction, the Jerusalem police had not yet attacked the Ramadan worshippers at Al Aqsa mosque, the IDF hadn’t ramped up their siege on Sheikh Jarrah. In this moment, it feels important to emphasize that my Jewishness has always been anti-zionist. It was only in recent years that I learned about the artist Gustav Metzger, (the namesake of Becca’s basset hound Gus, who longtime readers will recall from his frequent appearance in the dog photography that accompanies this newsletter), who was rendered stateless as a child by the holocaust. His Auto-Destructive Art is rooted in this statelessness (pun intended), and his conception of Jews as an inherently stateless people is one that I’ve always resonated strongly with. The project of Israel, the creation of a Jewish state, is fundamentally at odds with this conception.
I’ll leave you with a few words my friend Aiyana shared recently that I succinctly express everything I could hope to: “In spite of a profound appreciation for the often Zionist Jews who risked their lives to fight the Nazis, I’ve never wavered in my stance as an anti-zionist or in my firm belief that Israel does not represent the diaspora and does not represent Judaism. I believe that Zionism is a betrayal of Jewish values.... As Jews, one of our primary tasks is to learn and tell our story of oppression, just as we do for pretty much every holiday. Our story is repeated and passed down through generations not just for our own self-knowledge, survival, and preservation, but so that we can resist oppression in all its forms and for for others—not just ourselves.”
RAQUEL NAMUCHE OF RIDGEWOOD TENANTS UNION
This month on the podcast I talked to the delightful and charming Raquel Namuche who I met because she yelled at me on the street and we've been friends ever since. We talked about her childhood in Lima and Queens, getting into punk at ABC No Rio, finding other immigrant punk kids in the Migra Punk scene, becoming involved with activism as a teen at Charas/El Bohio, and how that ultimately led to her work today with Ridgewood Tenants Union. Plus we cyber bullied T*dd P, and Raquel talked a bunch of shit about some anarchists I’ve known since I was a teen and it made me palpably uncomfortable but is actually a very important conversation. LISTEN HERE.
REMIX REQUESTS
Here are some remixes I want to listen to but I don’t have the patience to make. If you can do one and you send it to me, I’ll trade you a 1 year Life Harv subscription.
Mary J Blige - Mary Jane (No Scatting Megamix). This song is so close to perfect and then Mother Mary starts scatting and doesn’t stop. Scatting is almost always bad, though like most bad things, it's palatable in moderation. This however, is completely overboard. It’s like, listen girl, you didn’t have to take the “swing” in “New Jack Swing” so literally. I just wanna bump this 90s R&B diva does Roller Rink Disco classic in my car without feeling embarrassed. This was one of the first songs I ever danced with another girl to, and I’d like to savor the memory of trying desperately not to get a boner in my elementary school gymnasium without having to hear Queen Mary scat.
Vybez Kartel & Spice - Romping Shop (Suitable For Queers This Time). Once again, a near perfect song, ruined by a single aspect. My brilliant former editor/incredibly hot Italian-American ex-wife Rebecca Giordano first played me this song during our courtship, and my mind was blown. “Romping Shop” is a truly nasty sex duet sung over Ne-Yo’s incredible “Miss Independent” beat. Kartel & Spice, two of dancehall’s biggest pervs, play off each other with such pornographic perfection listening is almost a religious experience, transcending the profane to the sacred. The moment on the hook when Vybez sings “and when you a cum, whisper something like this” and then he and Spice straight up shout “I CAN’T STOP FUCKING YOU” is sheer bliss.
AND YET, during the spoken intro, these two otherwise blemishless sex-fiends say “every man grab a gyal, and every gyal grab a man. Man to man, gyal to gyal that’s wrong. SCORN THEM.” Why’d they do us like that? How am I supposed to play this song in public? I heard a rumor from a Jamaican friend that the original lyrics said “Burn them” and that they toned it down to “scorn them,” which I guess is progress, but like, can some good samaritan just remix this song without it altogether? This is an excellent opportunity for a straight person to do allyship for me, but if you want it to count you have to donate your subscription to a trans person.
HATE YOUR FRIENDS VS. DREAM BABY DREAM
At some point in my early-20s, I was invited to a birthday party I didn’t want to be at. It was in a bar, and for some fakakta reason, I felt I had a social obligation to go and that the only viable way to not spend my night at the party would be to get thrown out of the bar. When I got inside, I grabbed an empty pint glass off a table and went into the bathroom to fill it up from the 40 in my bag. Inside the bathroom, I found that the walls had been decorated with actual audio cassettes, hot glued in vertical columns like tiles. As I was pissing I started reading some of the names on the handwritten labels of the dubbed tapes—The Melvins, Jesus & Mary Chain, Babes In Toyland—and was self-righteously appalled to see these perfectly good tapes rotting on the wall. I took my leatherman off my belt and began peeling all the tapes down, throwing them haphazardly into my giant messenger bag.
I had been inside the bathroom for enough time to drink my entire pint, but no one seemed to care. When I emerged into the bar, I pulled the 40 out of my bag and started to refill my glass standing right in front of the bartender. She looked at me with weary eyes, she’d had her fill with entitled little twinks. “Come on, get out.” She didn’t even raise her voice. I drained my pint, walked over and set it on the bar along with two dollars. “Tips for the beers,” I told her. “I drank one in the bathroom too.”
I got another 40 and walked down to the river. Back then I used to carry this little boombox with me everywhere, and I sat down on a rock and began to fish through the tapes. Most were that classic Maxell or TDK clear plastic shell, but one tape was opaque, taxi cab-yellow plastic. I popped it in without looking and heard a man’s voice singing clearly over scratchy guitar... “You got problems you can’t solve? It’s enough to make you start to hate your friends. Go to the show, they stare in your face. Don’t you know you hate your friends?”
It was like this guy was singing about me. I had to be mishearing it. I hit rewind and listened again. And again. And again. Which only confirmed that I had the lyrics right. I popped the tape out to find out what I was listening to and was shocked to discover it was the Lemonheads. Weren’t they basically grunge Donovan*, a pretty face using counterculture aesthetics to croon love songs for drug money? They couldn’t be a punk band. I put the tape back in and listened to it for like a year straight.
15 years hence, with the pervasiveness of social media and its constant self-administered, highly-curated surveillance, the song is almost more relevant than when it could only refer to an exhaustion with IRL socializing. Who hasn’t spent an evening watching instagram stories of people you care for deeply and thinking “I can’t stand these people” ??? It’s a problem! I don’t need to know what everyone’s doing all the time. It used to be if I was in a bad mood, I could isolate until I felt better. Maybe I’d read about a party I wasn’t at in someone’s zine, but that was manageable. Now, even alone in my house, it’s so easy for me to not just know what my friends are doing at nearly all times, but to see them doing it and loathe them for it.
One night a few weeks ago, going through a bad spell of watching and hating the people I love, I lay on my porch swing listening to “Dream Baby Dream” by Suicide in the hopes that it would improve my mood. Martin Rev’s metronomic drums and dreamy synth, peppered with the tinkling of a wind chime in the distance, are the perfect accompaniment to Alan Vega’s lazily moaned motivational speech. “Dream baby dream. Keep them dreams burning forever. Keep that flame burning, babe. Those dreams keep you free, baby, and you gotta make those dreams come true.” To me, it sounds like being blissed out on pills, nodding out in a hammock on a warm summer night, completely euphoric.
That particular evening, it was unseasonably cold for the Spring, and I was far from blissed out on anything. I was a bundle of nerves with no outlet, barely capable of feeding myself. All I knew was chain smoke, clutch my dog, never sleep, and cry. Every time I’d absent-mindedly looked at social media for days, I’d felt nothing but disgust.
But laying on my porch with “Dream Baby Dream” repeating on an infinite loop from the speaker on my phone, I found a warmth inside myself that I needed. When I absentmindedly opened up an app and began to scroll through the endless pictures and video, I was overwhelmed with love for my friends. Their mundane actions—cooking dinner at home, walking the dogs, hanging out on a stoop—no longer seemed like a personal affront to me. These delightful people loved me, and I loved them and everything about their precious lives! Nothing about my mood or circumstances had changed in the hour since I’d last looked at my phone and despised them all. The only difference was the song I was listening to.
Anyone who’s ever watched a movie knows how influential music can be on the mood of a moment. As “Dream Baby Dream” looped and looped, I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me to try this before. I began to feel shame but immediately forgave myself, swept up once again in a wave of love for the people I’d chosen and who had chosen me. So if you ever can’t seem to wash the taste of a Lemonhead out of your mouth, remember what Mike Muir said, “Suicide’s an alternative.”
*I now know that Donovan rocks.
THE LAST TIME I DID ACID
On the second night of Yom Kippur 2008, I was sitting in the backyard of a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with an older friend of mine, talking about the fact that he’d never done acid, when I pointed at a guy with dyed black hair, wearing a black vest, white button up, and black slacks. “You ever notice how sometimes when a nerd tries to dress like a rock’n’roller, he just looks like the maitre’d at a Greek Diner?” My friend laughed and lit a cigarette. I would’ve been 25 at the time, which would make him 35.
“Were you talking about me? I could feel you talking about me?” My friend and I looked at him dumbfounded. “Was it because you know I sell acid?”
My friend’s eyes lit up. “Yes. I’ll take four.” He paid for the acid, plopped two tabs in his mouth and handed me the other two, which I plopped in mine. We finished our drinks and went for a walk. I was carrying around a small boombox blasting Lemonheads Hate Your Friends with no regard for anyone around me like the little shithead I was. We were bopping along the street until a young hippie spanged us. He was younger than me but looked to be in his 20s. He smelled like fabric softener, and his hair was glistening and healthy. Nevertheless, we dutifully reached into our pockets, and when we didn’t find any change my friend offered him a cigarette, which the hippie declined, so we began to walk away. The hippie grew angry as he watched us leave, and he called us a homophobic slur. My friend, more of a fighter than me, began to run towards the hippie without saying anything. I began to run after my friend. The hippie began to run away from my friend, and soon we were all three of us running in a straight line West on Grand St.
When my friend and I reached the water the hippie had long since turned down a side street, but we had been having too much fun running towards the river to veer off course. We hung around down there for a while, listening to the Lemonheads tape over and over and throwing rocks at the water, then slowly made our way back to my house, where we parted on my stoop. I went upstairs to try and get some sleep before work. My friend went to lay on his back in the park and listen to Bjork on headphones, clearly the better decision.
My roommate was serendipitously out of town and I had the apartment to myself. I took a couple klonopins I had lying around, stared at my cats, looked at some cool album covers, listened to Alice Coltrane, and then got into bed and passed out from the combination of the benzos and all the booze I had drank before encountering the maitre d. This was a terrible mistake.
Instead of restful sleep, I found myself astral-projecting—floating out in space encountering a variety of physical manifestations of different aspects of my personality. (I’ve just begun seeing a therapist who practices Family Systems Therapy, a modality in which the patient’s self is individuated into “parts.” This was like a LITERAL version of that which is probably why I’m thinking about this particular night 13 years ago.) I don’t remember what most of my different traits looked like, but I’ll tell you the one I do, even though it’s deeply embarrassing: my libido is a giant cat sitting on an elaborate gilt throne. When I say giant I mean like, as big as Galactus the Devourer of Worlds. I was a little Silver Surfer floating in the stars in QUEENS tall-t, no bigger than her little nose.
The experience was mostly pretty chill, but every so often, out of nowhere this guy would pop up who looked and talked like David Cross but was wearing a green bowler hat, an all white outfit, green boots, and a green vest like some kind of droog leprechaun. Whenever he arrived, he’d quickly monopolize the conversation, talking nonsense over me when I tried to speak, his strident yammering crescendoing into a familiar refrain when I’d finally give up: “You suck! You’ve always sucked! You’re always gonna suck! Your family hates you! Your friends hate you! You hate yourself!”
Luckily my cat Growler is a Dream Warrior, and every time I’d start to feel overwhelmed she’d mash her little head into my palm, sucking me back into my body. This happened 8 or 9 times until I began to see the sun coming in through the window and I freaked out that I had finally taken the hit of acid that was gonna make me stuck like this. I started frantically calling friends and no one answered because it was like 5:30 in the morning. I finally dozed off on the couch cradling my boombox like a baby in my arms, the lilting strains of an AM frequency evangelist my lullaby.
When I went to work at the diner a few hours later I was dazed, and definitely still On Acid, but I wasn’t tripping anymore. That was when the diner never had any customers so I think it didn’t really matter that I walked in a few hours late, but you’d have to ask my friend Cory about that.
WRITING LETTERS
I’ve often joked that I hate writing, but I keep doing it because I hate the feeling of not having written so much more. My emotional economy is shame-based, but what Jew’s isn’t? When I’m not writing much, I have the tendency to compare myself to my friends and peers in ways that are unflattering to me, and then start feeling bad for myself. This often the results in my laying on the couch, completely miserable, watching my friends’ instagram stories and hating them too.
Despite having experienced this cycle countless times in my life, it feels tremendously inescapable every time. And yet, it always has the same solution: writing letters, which solves multiple problems. First, it forces active connection. I have to engage with whoever I’m writing to, or at least with my conception of them, instead of just passively and scornfully receiving their online presence.
Second, it recalibrates my tempo. The unrelenting barrage of information that the internet inundates us with is EXHAUSTING, and the lag time between putting something out into the world and receiving a response is almost non-existent. 90% of the time I post something, I receive an affirmative response within seconds. It’s an unsustainable model. Writing a letter shifts my expectations to a place where I’m more comfortable. I was a 90s zine bitch, afterall. Sometimes you don’t hear back from someone for months, sometimes not at all. Remembering to slow down like this is good for me.
Finally, and most obviously, writing a letter is writing. The problem I have getting started writing once I’ve lagged in my daily practice is almost always the same: there’s a clog. Without words pouring out regularly, the thoughts accrue and stick to each other, creating a mess that’s difficult to untangle. I turn the spout expecting it to flow like normal, it just trickles out. Writing a letter is like snaking the pipe—getting in there, pulling out the mess and untangling it all. Maybe this analogy doesn’t track, but I’m a writer, not a plumber, gimme a fuckin break. oka