Ships Ships Ahoy

People been up in the crow’s nests peerin out to the horizon looking for the next Hold Steady joint (due October), because during these bleak times they’re the only ones who indicate there’s even a drop of sweetness to be squeezed out of the lattices of today’s empty and cynical pop from the dance floor; people are panicking at the disco and everything’s gotten so sad that my friends are starting to write personal essays again.

Pitchfork has the dibs on the latest MP3 from the Hold, but the track shouldn’t be new to the devoted few. They definitely played it at their landmark show at the Warsaw this past July, and we were definitely more excited about it then than we are now.

But seeing the Hold Steady live is a religious/rebirth thing, and not just because of their overt Catholicism-dropping or the community displayed amongst the 30-somethings who hired a babysitter so they could go to the show, and it’s safe to guess that from now on the album tracks are always going to pale in comparison to the heat of the live performances.

Here’s why.

Almost Killed Me and Separation Sunday laid the groundwork for what the Hold Steady have been searching for the whole time; enjoyable pop music in the vein not of their obvious musical influences (Thin Lizzy, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and every other musical influence critics were clever enough to see name-dropped in the lyrics), but rather in the vein of the two of rock’s greats: the Ramones and the Beatles.

Finn and co. were smart enough to realize that “And Your Bird Can Sing” couldn’t exist properly without the context of the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” wouldn’t have made sense without “Gimme Danger.” It’s the contrast between the squeals of joy and the wails of sorrow that give rock its get-you-high vibe. The contrast is what rock used to be about. No band knew that better than Nirvana, whose dynamic changes forced nearly every song to live in the tantalizing space between the dregs and the cream.

Rock has two tonal poles that have been nearly completely neglected in this era of stylistic mimicry and cute postmodern allusion. We have well-worn grooves to get into now that rock is creeping towards being a hundred years old (if you count my way), but the tension between pure joy and pure agony is what separated the classic behemoths of the genre (the aforementioned Beatles, Ramones, Stooges, Stones) from the mere sonic vehicles bands ride nowadays in an effort at getting there (Queen, Led Zeppelin, pretty much everyone else).

No band in recent memory has so deliberately and carefully built towards the sweet side. Witness “Chips Ahoy.” Lurching in this direction has been their goal all along. Forget the 80’s and its dances. We’re going for a drive. Pretend this matters.

(Credibly) couching hard drug references in a song with whoa’s should be every rocker’s dream. Listen to them yell “Ahoyahoyaho.” Then hear Craig Finn singing now, not shouting, but doing his damndest to make that shitshow of a voice squeak out a couple notes, sometimes even hit them.

“How am I supposed to know if you’re high if you won’t let me touch you?” Finn’s not setting a scene; a guy cares about a girl, they’ve been through hell together, and now it’s all coming an ambiguous end, but an end all the same.

Tilting toward a belief in anything external is the ultimate goal for the children of the aughties. For all the sadness and confusion of our times all we’ve gotten so far is Indecision by Ben Kunkel and a bunch of decent R&B tracks. And Indecision was only good when it was sad, and the R&B hasn’t been anywhere besides inside the comfortable confines of sexiness and groping on the dance floor, big butts etc.

But that’s where “Chips Ahoy” wins the race. The music had been hard rock, now it’s pop. We’ve gotten through the E, the gutter, the bars, the taxis, all the youthful American stuff our parents laid down so firmly for us to tread upon, and now the two of us are laying down together, one grey and cold, on a bad trip, the other just trying to reach for it. The “Whoas” are the only way to get there, and it’s in the franticness of this simple and anti-intellectual space where rock and roll has always thrived.

There’s still a little hope.

October awaits.

_____ ______.

burnz

Ed. Note: Ideelz fact checkers have been all on my case about the Hosoi post because the VA Beach Skatepark MT Trashmore has burned to the ground (via Art of Skateboarding).

We stand by our story because of a "rising from the ashes" lead-in angle that will make next week's made-up coverage/liveblog of the event easier to write.

For All My Friends Who Used to Exclaim "JESUS CHRIST ON A BIKE!"



In spite of the onerous responsibilities of blogging/living life, I would nevertheless be remiss in my duties as a commentator of ideelz if I neglected to mention the [c]upcoming tour/documentary [video preview sort of] about meth-dealing, Bible-slinging Christian “Holmes/Christ” Hosoi narrated by Dennis Hopper of E-Z Rider fame and featuring commentaries from all the expected skateboarding legends.

The path of Hosoi’s career starts, for ideelz, back in 1988, when my parents bought me Skateboard Superstars (Holy Goddamn this Google Video provides nearly all of life's necessities), a video featuring mainly Rodney Mullen and Christian Hosoi, but also some New York groms who skated downtown and did handstands on Broadway because it was the 80s and no one really knew how to ollie yet. Despite the lack of Gelfland-inflected skate style, the video marked my first foray into pro-skater admiration/envy and helped to cement skate aesthetics as a primus motor for most of my adolescent and even adult actions/activities/critiques.

In the video, a narrator explains that Hosoi is the biggest thing ever to happen to skating, and that he’s a role model admired by many. Although my critical faculties were pretty good at age 5, I didn’t know that at that time Hosoi was also busting chops à la present-day-or-late-90s artiste-heroes/degenerates like Dustin Dollin, Ali Boulala, or Jim Greco (who is now supposedly and awkwardly clean). The video wisely airbrushed the druggy haze that was also part of Hosoi’s life for the benefit of its young audience, parents still bought kids boards, and everything went along pretty well.

By 1997, when I got back into skateboarding due to an exit from frustrated middle-school nerddom/not sure what girls were/weren’t, Hosoi had already plummeted out of the picture, due to the ollie revolution, Koston, Daewon, tech, baggy pants, 540 flips, and picnic benches. I’d forgotten about him anyway, because I’d picked up a Transworld and saw people skating handrails.

During this time, Hosoi was presumably crawling along the dark underbelly of lapsed fame and drug-addled torment. By 2000, he was arrested in Hawaii for bringing to the airport enough meth to erupt a volcano. In jail, he underwent a Malcolm X-style conversion, except he found Christianity instead of Elijah Muhammad and, thanks to his preaching to other jailbirds, was released early for extraordinarily good behavior, thanks in part to a letter-writing campaign. (Eventually there will be a blink piece about born-again skaters, a powerful and unlikely segment of the legendary lineup, which includes most prominently Hosoi and, of course, Jamie Thomas, but isn’t limited to them [I think Austin Stephens is also Christian].)



This ties in nicely with the whole 5vs1, lapsed Catholic, Hold-Steady, fame as depression and vice versa, get saved, fast revulsion and redemption theme, of course.

Anyway now Hosoi's out and he skates again, and like such other vets as Alva, Caballero, and definitely Dwayne Peters (who probably will garner his own post eventually, whether or not there is a time peg to render it “meaningful”), he’s got a world-weary edge to his skating and just oozes “respect this life I’ve chosen.”

This documentary promises to bring legit footage, and to promote it, Quicksilver is also sponsoring a tour with free screenings and demos by such incredible pros as Arto Saari and I believe Holmes himself. If you’re near a town that is carrying this tour, I highly recommend a visit. Cover it for your local alt-weekly etc.

Tour Sched (cribbed from Skateboardermag article):

8/17: Huntington Beach, CA
8/19: Wilson Skatepark, Chicago, IL
8/20: River East Arts Center, Chicago, IL
8/22: Mt. Trashmore, VA Beach, VA [!!!! If you live in DC and have a car and read this please email me or comment so we can road trip out to DO THE THING!!!]
8/23: Fairman’s, West Chester, PA
8/23: Chester County Historic Society, West Chester, PA
8/27: Knitting Factory, NYC, NY
8/29: 3rd Lair, Minneapolis, MN
8/31: Bluebird, Denver, CO
9/1: Denver Skate Park, Denver, CO
9/3: Pacifica Skate Spark, SF, CAli
9/3: The Log Shop, SF, CAlicious

Keep in Touch BABY!

IDEELLLZZZZ out.

Streets Is Watchin'




Can't Ban the Tool Man (1.2.1)

...

Positive Jam

This couldn't be more of a positive jam if it was a jelly jar with a firm belief.

Note the g-turn about 3 mins in.

For the uninitiated: Do not feel threatened.

<3

Skate=Takes=Slates

Ed. Note: At anewyorkthing.com, you can see t-shirts that say such quotes as "Crack is Back...Again!" and feature pics of arms with legs. I would've posted these illustrations but they use flash to show off their designs, probably mostly so bloggers won't copypaste and make fun of them.

On to the story...

Where I went to high school, there was a kid named Dave. Dave had played soccer since he was five, he was handsome, and he had a sharp tongue that betrayed—through the veil of his horrendous academic performance—genuine, well-greased gears churning constantly and rapidly inside what should have been a drug-addled and useless head. Not entirely incidentally, Dave could skateboard.

Dave got laid by the waifs, anorexic hippie girls who smoked pot and came to the homecoming dance high as hell. He himself was into acid, mushrooms, and, of course, marijuana, which he and the wannabe rastas at my school would smoke during the lunch hour in an alcove between two of the buildings.

Dave liked me ok, and we even skated together a couple times. But I was too sensitive, angry, and into math to ever really hit it off with the guy. When I couldn’t land my kickflips, he’d say “Don’t turn your body,” then nail a perfect one down the seven steps leading to the pool building. He’d roll off silent and clean, walk back up the stairs, and light a cigarette. He’d give me a look that seemed to say, “You’ll never do what I just did now.”

During those years, my face and body fell short of the pretty portrait Dave cut, and I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think I ever believed I could get laid by the waifs or crack a knowing joke just because I could pop an ollie over a 20 oz. Coke bottle. I knew that, for some reason, skating was cool, and of course it wasn’t bad that I could at least say “Hey” to guys like Dave in the hallways, but I also knew that I had motivations for skating beyond the elusive and probably hopeless possibility of losing my virginity or garnering the respect of awesome athletes before I graduated from high school.

The simple explanation is that skateboarding is intensely physical. Each session yields extreme results: personal injury, the pure mental symmetry of landing a kickflip in the driveway, or board-smashing frustration at landing primo. For the college-bound, high school is essentially a half-decade of preparation, and, in the context of constant slogs through Charlotte Bronte or asymptotes, skateboarding offered immediacy: pleasure or pain.

Skating offered Dave another way to exert his dominance over the angry nerds, and it offered me one of my only ways to break up the monotony of the M-F test-prep-kit disaster that was my high-school existence.

This Times Magazine piece from Sunday posits a different set of motivations for the current hip set.

Apparently, getting pretty rich and somewhat famous has supplanted the effortlessness of the knowing look or the life-affirming agony of the broken toe. Having an anti-commercial lifestyle is now commercially viable. What’s more, anyone can cash in on any counterculture. All they need is a Comcast subscription and little start-up capital. And skateboarding figures big into their marketing strategy.

All this makes sense; possessed of blogs, pitchfork, thefader, New York City, hipsters, ripsters, our very rich society, packed to the gills with savvy, overeducated minorities of every possible description, is currently mass-producing countercultures that are just as hip and alluring as all the ones of the past, only now, everyone gets a piece of the action. Don’t like the Canadian indie bands? Fine, you can like the guy who sings about states. Don’t skate? Fine, get a funny haircut and design a t-shirt. With so many different products available for purchase, countercultural images have never been more accessible. And it’s never been easier to be a maven. And, possibly for that very reason, the whole catchall pop-indie hip-hop outdo-your-neighbors hip NYC-is-everywhere scene seems to be getting more hollow by the second.

Several things separate the high-school kids at the skatepark in Shaw by my house who wreck themselves trying to hit a pivot on the 8-foot quarterpipe from the Hundreds jokers who flunked the bar but still make cash by creating exclusive and somehow skateboard-like designs.

First, there is no cash in cool for the Shaw kids, who wear white tees and smoke Marlboros and spend the money they scrape together on tattoos and weed.

They will not be taking the bar exam; they don’t have opportunities to squander. So they’re doing their own thing, spending their time after school smoothing out their flicks, hoping to catch the perfect trey. They are bereft of the sense that there is anything else for them. Like all rebels from Bob Dylan the Hell’s Angels to the Zephyr team to Rocky to the Ramones to the 90s Zero team, they carry an aura of desperation. For musicians and skateboarders, each note and every trick is an ideel to be treasured and sought after more than money or fame. At least, that’s how the story goes.

Beyond that, though, there lies an even simpler distinction. Skaters actually skate, and skaters are skaters because of what they do, not because of what they buy or sell. They aren’t upset by the idea that their aesthetic sense might never lead to rock-star parties or pseudo-fame. They don’t feel entitled to those things because they don’t even want them in the first place; at least they don’t want them any more than they want to skate.

Meanwhile, one wonders if the would-be lawyers who sought meaning in designing t-shirts ever thought that, given the lifestyle horrors of corporate law, they might have been better suited doing something with actual meaning, instead of creating luxury goods for the upper and upper-middle classes. Given a chance to crack into the top echelons of a culture they view as mildly corrupt and grossly superficial, these kids take the easy way out and churn out some pictures to put on some stretches of cotton for the very conformist classes they despise for being fake and clueless.

Where is the allure of authenticity in something so completely devoid of meaning as t-shirts that do nothing other than signify upper-class taste? Why the preoccupation with the tangential elements?

Because the tangential elements are easier to imitate and sell. Maybe in the future, no one will even have to skate or play music. We'll just get rich making t-shirts that allude to legitimate activities as historical phenomena.

For the moment, at least, the joke’s still on these mauvaise-foi t-shirt weinerhogs. Because who buys their expensive, counterculture cache goods?

Corporate lawyers. Corporate lawyers who read Slate.

I promise to start the next one off with a positive jam.

Until then.