Stop It

Weird music is coming through some wall, not necessarily weird in any objective sense, but weird in a sense given its context, a Bushwick apartment building and a neighbor on one side of me blasting what sounds quite a lot like Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, that or some other old-timey Western swing. I just watched Athens, GA - Inside/Out, was inspired to read it by its brief mention in Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. The movie was cute in its documentation of what seemed to be a really beautiful music scene, a small scale thing where musicianship was encouraged, where being in a band seems less a scary thing than it would in the music scenes of LA or NY, something that several of the people featured in the documentary mentioned. I saw the film's relation to the book, to the same type of scene that occurred in Olympia and DC in the early nineties. I don't aspire to be a musician but there is something useful that I take from these past scenes and their documentation in these two objects. The book is inspiring me a great deal, pouring gas on to a flame that was relit a week or so ago by getting to see Belle and Sebastian perform, this feeling of being alive and creating things and putting stuff out there and interacting with works of art. It's just a matter of doing it. Kathleen Hanna told a few people, awkward fans, that they needed to make a zine, that they had something to say. Reading about the formation of these bands is really inspiring, seeing what it takes to go from being a fan of a certain type of thing, consumer of it, to a creator of a certain type of thing, participating more in the dialogue. There is a lot I want to do and there are big bursts of inspiration that have been coming to me a lot in the last week or so. I went hiking with Jacob upstate and it was insanely beautiful and made me want to escape this city more often. There is that goal, the goal to write things, and the goal to get a new job. All doable, and all within reach. Just fucking do it.

And then there is this song, which somehow I had never heard until seeing it in this movie this evening, and which made me want to dance and scream and write and for a brief moment have a band of my own, mainly so I could thrash around a stage to this song and pretend it was mine.