weekend update: the music, the gentrification, the patriarchy

The Thermals played new songs on Saturday to 250 kids in a coffee shop called The Fresh Pot. One was full and bombastic with inflated power chords and one had this Cure-like guitar solo but for the most part, they sounded like all the other songs by the Thermals: 2-minute-long spastic little pods of pop music, with Kathy and Jordan playing straight to Hutch’s boyish coquette/non-threateningly cocksure frontman steez, which by the way used to be only a kernal of what it is now (pre-Thermals, in the Hutch & Kathy “we are playing twee love songs on acoustic guitar phase. Then he went through the short-lived but infamous “Hutch gets buck-ass naked” phase, before Ben got the boot and all Hutch had to do was jump around, look cute, sing and take his clothes off.)
The Thermals, they were super. They are one band in Portland that are universally loved by indiepop kids, garage-y kids, rocker kids, people who stalk Stephen Malkmus, pdx international superstars, and some creepy jerk-nut who pushed his way in front of me even though he was like 6’5″. (Implicit context: there are so many bands per capita in Portland, the scene is rendered divisive, in that some people can and do get away with seeing only one kind of music, ever.) A whole room was gleaming. Someone yelled out, “Where have you been all my life?!” Hutch responded, “I don’t know, are you staying for the dance party afterwards?”
Thermals sum up a sound but there’s a darker faction, here, as seen at the Thurs nite Numbers/Nice Nice/The Formless show. What [sort of] used to be the {kind of} “PDX noize scene” has traversed into “lots of bands whose hands are grubby with the dinge of early Sonic Youth,” i.e. The Formless, worshipping EVOL, drummer Chelsea pounding in the mimicked wind-up/rigid style of Meg White, screaming in the Pacific Northwest liberal-arts cheerleader howl of monotone. Kim Gordon in a wind tunnel. Alternately, with bands like Nice Nice, every time, something explodes in my brain; they are improvisers who don’t draw on Cage or Zorn but for Davis and Coltrane; moreso Sean Paul, James Brown, Grateful Dead, fuckin Can or, like, Afrika Bambaataa, with the drums and guitar and pedals thing they do, riding on the strength of 1. funk 2. amorphous chemistry. This is different than what I thought about them at their last show, which is why, in three or so years, I haven’t tired of their shit: they are all about regeneration, new ideas.
I’m still basking in/fixated on the hot light of Jonathan Lethem’s “The Fortress of Solitude” so spank me if I get too precious, but at The Thermals show, I felt the stretch of gentrification. The Fresh Pot is the coffee shop in the middle of the Mississippi neighborhood–an historically black/Hispanic neighborhood in Portland since Northeast was segregated in the ’30s, redlined in the ’40s–made profitable/booming by an influx of white artists/small business owners, attracted by lower property taxes, displacing former residents but not entirely, because a few months ago, outside Mississippi Records, some black kids shot some other black kids in broad daylight, while a primarily white clientele bought dub plates and drank lattes—how clear a line was drawn that Saturday, between the two seperate Mississippi Streets, a racial line, a class line. Like each other didn’t exist, like they were operating on two seperate planes of time converged when pierced by bullets.
You probably already know this but my best friend, J-HOVA AKA Tiny Lucky Genius, is one of the most brilliant people alive today. One reason is the MUY ROMANTICO bio. Another reason is that she called me on Saturday, breathless, to read to me from the pages of bell hooks’ new book, entitled “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love,” and that she was going to fed ex it to me but that instead I should BUY IT IMMEDIATELY, and we would conference-call a book-group discussion on Monday.
I bought it, in the new-release section of the monolithic Powell’s (ILWU local 5 represent), and was in fact bawling by page xvii in the preface. At the Thermals show, attempting to proseletyze to men I love or have loved that the patriarchy keeps them down, too, that it hems their freedom to love and acclimates them to violence. It is so clear: that feminism is still seen as an effort of, for, and by women is inherently wrong, dangerous, an active tool of oppression by the patriarchy itself. PATRIARCHY HARMS EVERYONE. Essentially, the book so far is about how the patriarchal construct, violent as it is, tells men at an early age that they will be emasculated if they express love or any emotion other than anger–that their only acceptible mode of being is dominance by any means necessary, up to and including violence. This is especially relevant now, when little kids are seeing (by example of the US gov’t) that, if they aren’t getting what they want, they may wage war (be violent) to assert their dominance, even if that war (violence) is unjustified, morally reprehensible, and unpopular with its constituents (family/friends). hooks asserts that if the patriarchy is to fail, it has to be a joint loving effort between men and women, that feminism will never work without cooperation and inclusion. That’s why, right now is a perfect time to unite against the constructs of the violent patriarchal paradigm, because the Iraq invasion is a direct result of said paradigm. If we can recognize the war as a broad example of how it can distort and crumble the health of a society, perhaps we can strive for a more equal/humane mode of being.
This whole spiel went over with mixed results at the Thermals show, but I believe in it with my heart.