Best of 2011 by Erick Lyle

LIVE SHIT

1. Occupy Wall Street (SF, Oakland, Olympia, etc...)
Face it, this shit ruled! I was lucky enough to be around this in different places -- the Oakland General Strike, the inception of Oly's Occupy, the scene at Zucotti... Very cool. Finally a movement that so simply captured the public imagination that even my MOM got it! Zucotti was very special -- so organized and ambitious. The People's Library, the daily feedings, really the whole bit. I loved how people were talking to each other. It was this island of respect and tolerance in downtown NYC. It reminded me of Orwell's accounts of anarchist-controlled Barcelona. People were walking a little taller here all over town, for sure. And still are, if recent hand to hand battles with NYPD in the streets are any indication. Its not over yet!

2. Exene Cervenka/Black Rainbow/Younger Lovers/Displeasure/Alibastair Choad at Serra Bowl in Colma, CA 7/16/11
Did I ever tell you how Exene opened for my band in a bowling alley in the suburbs of SF? Just another in a long series of "Anything is possible"moments in the Bay Area! SF and Oakland punks descended on a real live bowling alley full of Filipino families bowling and teens hanging in the parking lot on a Saturday night. Gangs sized each other up outside and old men drank in the old man bar while the pins fell all around. A spirited parallel show was said to take place at the karaoke bar while this raging punk show took place in the arcade (we just had to leave $100 deposit and move the air hockey tables to make room for the bands). Displeasure are raw, noisy, chaotic, tough. Alibastair Choad were their usual compelling cult-like selves. Exene sang three songs a cappella and spoke a little between songs. She was brilliant, really spot on politically but understated and modest. "The World's a Mess Its In My Kiss" gave me chills. Brontez closed out the show with the usual hilarious jokes interrupted every so often by dancy pop punk.

3. Do You Hear We? Fest Chattanooga, TN June 2011
This is my yearly family reunion, now in its 4th year. It has been so inspiring to see The Region calmly grow through love and calm determination into an actual punk destination. In 1995, none of us could have imagined that punks FROM OTHER CITIES would ever flock to Chattanooga to hear what we were doing! This 4-day blowout really shone on the last two days with back to back full days of The Rock at the new Sluggo's North. Hidden Spots, ADDC/Twat Sauce/Shell Shag/Landlord/RVIVR/Street Legal/Dark Rides/Future Virgins/countless others ruled it for days of non stop dancing and friendship.

4. Mike Watt and The Missing Men @ Mercury Lounge New York City 4/1/11
So good to see Watt back in action with a blazing hot band. I stood pressed against the stage as close as possible and let Watt and drummer, Raul, blow me away for an hour as they played their entire new LP start to finish and a bunch of Minutemen covers for an encore. Watt is a force of nature and he just keeps going, getting better and better, on his lifelong Econo mission. So inspiring!

5. Son Skull in the pouring rain at Nuts Zine release party 10/8/11 Olympia, WA
From behind the band, the view was classic -- a soaked, wildly dancing and stage diving crowd lit up by stage lights as sheets of freezing rain poured down and Son Skull killed it. I heard a rumor it was to be their last show. I hope not!

6. Broken Water/Sewn Leather/Russian noise band/Knife in The Eye at Dumpster Values Olympia, WA 10/15/11
First show with my new band turned out to be kind of a perfect night. The thrift store was turned into a tent by sheets Kanako strung up overhead and bands played in there. The Russian noise band generously wore goofy masks that had been made out of black foamy noodle pool toys! Broken Water were heavy and hypnotic and Sewn Leather was snotty and hilarious, a crusty with a heart of gold! Bikini Bill was unofficial MC of course-- in the show and on the streets! Diverse crew of Oly oldtimers and young punks coming together for a pretty warm feeling night. Made me feel like I'd been welcomed into the family up there.

7. Hysterix punk house West Oakland, CA 7/11
This show was perfect! I arrived just as Hysterix were about to play. The living room was aleready completely packed, with lots of friends on hand, and everyone danced like hell in the tiny space. So great! Across town the Zero Boys were playing a much heralded reunion show at a big rock club and most of my friends went to that. As much as I love the Zero Boys, I know that whatever spark they once must have had was really on display in this tiny hardcore show with 50 kids jammed in this living room. This was what the "old days" were really like!

8. Interference Archive opening night Brooklyn, NY 12/16/11
The new venture from longtime activist artists Josh Macphee and Dara Greenwald is Interference Archive, a public archive of their collected library and ephemera in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The couple has filed their collection of political art and pamphlets, posters, flyers, etc. and made it available to everyone in this public office space. The opening was very sweet as lefty artists from all over the Eastern seaboard showed up to pay their respects and check it out. As a researcher, I'm excited by non-institutional archives. As a friend, I am once again reminded of how Josh and Dara really embody their collective politics and always bring people together so wonderfully.

9. Raymond Pettibon at David Zwirner NYC 1/11
Ray remains my last living art hero. The two enormous rooms at Zwirner were filled with uncompromising new work, featuring Ray's edgy and twisted humor. What other artist makes work that is still so resolutely anti-authority? Duke Riley? Certainly none operating at Pettibon's level of art world success. The last show of his I saw at Zwirner (opening on 9/11/07) had many pieces about Bush and Co. Ray took on Obama in this new show. Formally, Pettibon has comfortably moved into full color and the results are mind blowing. This show made me feel -- as did many of these other shows - proud to be a lifelong member of the underground criminal scumbag community!

10. Max Rameau at University of Miami Library Miami, FL 2/11
I was honored to be able to speak with Take Back The Land's founder at the dedication of our archives at the University of Miami Library this past winter. Rameau's work with the Umoja Village and the squatting efforts of TBTL for the last few years has pushed the conversation far enough to the left to have helped make Occupy Wall Street not just possible but inevitable.

HONORABLE MENTION: UNDER THE BIG BLACK SUN exhibition at LA MOCA Los Angeles, CA
This was one of about 60 simultaneous art exhibitions related to SoCal art history that opened this fall across LA as part of the Pacific Standard Time series. It is easy to be cynical about the PST shows and LA civic leaders' efforts to subsume all of this countercultural art into LA's new myth of itself, giving the city a new backstory of authenticity while providing the institutional interest that will make a whole lot of obscure work suddenly highly collectable. And, its true, this exhibit from curator, Paul Schimmel of Helter Skelter show fame (1992) was also somewhat uneven, overstocked, muddy. Nonetheless, it turned me onto a whole bunch of freaky, out there, LA art. Cool work from Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, Robert Heinecken, Nina Segalove, Allen Ruppersberg, Ruscha (of course) and about a thousand others...

MUSIC

1. Landlord "Beneath The Wheel" LP
flawless stony jams from Bloomington wizards! Listen to the drum tracks with head phones on, it'll close your mind!

2. Off! collection of singles on LP
Dude! Keith has still got it! Wings over Inglewood! Total rager from start to finish!

3. ADDC LP
Now in their 11th year, this is the most ambitious effort yet from this group of long time Region Rockers. Influences are all over the place here, cohering somehow into an overall sound that is the band's very own. You can hear the band members' lifelong friendship at work here. The tightness, the integrity, the love. Great great stuff. Would be #1 probably if I hadn't already heard the recording so much in 2010.

4. Grass Widow LP
Think this came out last December? Lets put it in! I listened to it a ton this year anyway.

5. The Endemics
Not sure if or how this came out. Sonia just emailed me the recording! I have like 11 songs and they all rule. Lil B's time machine East Bay Ray git licks and Mason's rock steady beats lock in step with Sarah Beth's dreamy soulful vocals over the top. Music that sounds old in the best way, like timeless.

7. Broken Water EP
Trademark hypnotic and dreamy waves of sound here with a little more snarly edge than last time. I wish I was around to hear the Grass Widow and Broken Water tour discussions!

8. Future Virgins LP
Flawless pop, Mike Pack recorded, and Ashley from Sexy all grown up here. No more pissing the couch, but plenty of great hooks and two guitar interplay laid out to total satisfaction. Region Rock advances into a stately and determined middle age! As Pack would say, "Lets get there."

8. Light Brigade demo
Holy shit! Sounds like OLD Portland in the best way. Like the Neo Boys or some band that opened for The Wipers on a rainy Tuesday in 1979 and never played again and you spend the rest of your life haunted by their songs. So good!

9. Twat Sauce demo
The Black Flag of 2012! The band poses the question, "What if Riot Grrl had been born not in Olympia in 1991 but in Ft. Oglethorpe, GA in 2021?!?" Unfuckwithable, as Lance used to say.

10. Sewn Leather LP
Crusty dance noir, includes best song about a Greyhound bus ever!




BOOKS

1. The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson
2. Believing is Seeing; Observations on the Mysteries of Photography by Errol Morris
3. Savage Messiah by Laura Oldfield Ford
4. The Gentrification of The Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination by Sarah Schulman
5. Where Art Belongs by Chris Kraus
6. Blossoms of Greenpoint by David Kennedy Cutler
7. Decoded by Jay Z
8. King King Theory by Virginie Despentes
9. Speaker Receiver by Moyra Davey
10. (tie) Retromania by Simon Reynolds/ Otherwise Known as The Human Condition by Geoff Dyer

ZINES/PERIODICALS

1. Mother's News
A monthly treat, its understated New England charm belies the paper's towering ambition: nothing less that to produce a vital and consistently readable newspaper that pays for itself every single month in an era when we are told the newspaper is dead. Jake's seemingly ad-libbed observations on the months of the year and various quotidian facets of life resonate with surprising profundity, sometimes sticking in my head all month. Always warm and hilarious, but never below the belt, Mother's News, like all great newspapers, builds community.

2. Baitlines
See above. The SF queer Utopian Free classified ad paper/art project rolls into its 4th year, still as great as ever.

3. Loitering is Good
In latest issue, Joey celebrates the lonely spaces of our moribund urban areas, waxes poetic on the passing of the working man, and details enthusiastically how his impulse to do graffiti has morphed into an addiction to planting trees in the abandoned no zones where he once obsessively tagged. Moving, sincere, lyrical, and tender but not self-consciously so, this was as from the heart as any zine I've seen in years.

4. Suspect Device
Josh Bayer and Co skewer Nancy in a zine-length display of Situationist delight. Sluggo, too!

5. WHY DON'T PEOPLE MAKE ZINES ANYMORE?!?
Flyers, too. Dark times for the scene related ephemera these days, no?

Coasting-Portland

Video animated and directed by Sarah Manuwal

polly darton

Plan B is a legal form of birth control

photo of sara and jen taken by diana arens, from wip website


In 2006 a group of people in Olympia, WA started a boycott (grrlcot) of Ralph's Thriftway, a locally-owned grocery store with a pharmacy that refuses to stock Plan B, a form of emergency contraception (EC). Five years later the boycott is still going strong and the legal case, Stormans v. Selecky, is going to the U.S. District Court.

A recent article in The Olympian by Brad Shannon reads:

Those who support the dispensing of Plan B say it is a high dose of the ingredients of a birth-control pill that greatly reduces the chance of pregnancy if ingested by a woman within 72 hours of unprotected sex. The Food and Drug Administration in 2009 ordered that it be available over the counter for teens as young as 17, but with prescriptions for those who are younger.

The FDA also says the medication does not affect existing pregnancies, unlike the RU-486 drug, but that the medication might act to prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb.

This is poorly worded and misleading. As I noted in an earlier article (written in 2006 for a class I was taking and posted online in 2009), once again, science is being framed by "pro-life" ideology in our local newspaper.

The Olympian says "those who support the dispensing of Plan B say" it works like regular birth control pills. This is not a matter of debate. This is the established medical explanation of how the drug actually works. It is a form of contraception. It is not an abortion pill. This article makes it sound like the scientific definition of medicine is subjective. Consult the World Health Organization, the FDA, the CDC and current peer-reviewed medical journals for a more objective account. If you are anti-Plan B, you logically should be anti-birth control pill, it works the same way.

The medical definition of a pregnancy is a fertilized egg that is implanted in the womb. By this definition, Plan B is birth control NOT abortion. This is true regardless of whether or not Plan B prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb. The newspaper needs to make this clear and not pander to there being "two opinions" with equal weight when there are established legal and medical definitions at work.

As I noted before, there is no conclusive medical research that proves that Plan B prevents an already fertilized egg from implanting. To focus on the possibility that it MAY work this way when this is not backed by science is confusing at best and biased in the way it reinforces the "pro-life" agenda of confusing birth control with "abortion".

Finally, Plan B will not work if you are already pregnant when you take it. Medical research does not back the claim that it will effect a fertilized egg that has been implanted. Plan B is a legal form of birth control. It is not an abortion pill.

If you believe pregnancy starts when an egg is fertilized (not when a fertilized egg is implanted in the womb) and this is a moral issue for you then, based on a scientific understanding of how emergency contraception works, your objection to the use of Plan B should probably extend to the use of regular birth control pills and *possibly* IUD's.

From the Emergency Contraception website:

To make an informed choice, women must know that ECPs—like all regular hormonal contraceptives such as the birth control pill, the implant Implanon, the vaginal ring NuvaRing, the Evra patch, and the injectable Depo-Provera,41 and even breastfeeding42,43,44,45— prevent pregnancy primarily by delaying or inhibiting ovulation and inhibiting fertilization, but may at times inhibit implantation of a fertilized egg in the endometrium. At the same time, however, all women should be informed that the best available evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that levonorgestrel and ulipristal acetate ECPs’ ability to prevent pregnancy can be fully accounted for by mechanisms that do not involve interference with post-fertilization events.

Emergency contraceptive pills will not cause an abortion. EC is not the same as the abortion pill. There is no time when the emergency contraceptive pills available in the United States would end a pregnancy once it has started. Hormonal emergency contraceptive pills don’t have any effect if you are already pregnant. If you decide to use an IUD for emergency contraception, your health care provider would test you first to confirm you are not already pregnant.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this case. It is likely to go to the Supreme Court. I have not been able to shop at my neighborhood grocery store for over five years because I support the boycott. This is something that impacts me on a daily basis.


Here is some more info I gathered in my research on Plan B back in 2006:

The right wing campaign against Plan B is anti-birth control not just
anti-abortion. They specifically see Plan B as immoral because they are
worried it will promote promiscuity and sex before marriage,
particularly among young people. These are the same people who argue
against condoms and want abstinence only education.

Studies show that Plan B has the potential to prevent 700,000
abortions a year. If lowering the number of abortions is really the
issue, Plan B should be made readily available.

A high percentage of rape victims use Plan B.

According to both sides of the issue, there is no medical reason to
require a prescription for Plan B. The FDA ruled that it is medically
safe. Lawmakers ignored the FDA advisory board in 2004 and were
persuaded by anti-abortion politicians to keep it available by
prescription only. This caused all kinds of controversies about science
v. politics/religion that have been widely documented in peer reviewed
journals.

In Washington State some pharmacies (such as those in Safeway and Fred
Meyer) will give you Plan B without a personal prescription--they have a
general prescription that can be used--you don't have to see a doctor
first. This is called a "protocol".

If Plan B is legal but hard to get it is less effective. You
need to take it within 72 hours after sex or it won't work: like regular birth control pills, it is MOST effective when taken BEFORE sex.

Only 60% of Americans know Plan B even exists as an option.

For further research:

Page, Cristina. How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America. New York: Basic, 2006.

If you need access to Plan B or another form of EC, check out this website.

Protesters demand birth control. (Photo by Krista Theiss)

whatever happened to chris bald?

dischord is reissuing subject to change by faith (I always called them 'the faith' because it sounds better) with extra tracks. here's an interview with band members but no chris bald. I often wonder whatever happened to him. he roadied for bikini kill once or twice. I heard he moved to kentucky and then I lost track. usually people show up eventually, but occasionally someone disappears. maybe "bald" is not his real name? anyone know?