For obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking lately about the more headline-grabbing political violence expressed by solo actors, rather than the steady, deadly wall of daily violence enacted by our domestic and foreign policy. As I write this, it looks like the cops have someone in custody for allegedly killing a health insurance CEO in the open streets of Manhattan in early daylight last week. If this is the guy, his political stances seem all over the map, vaguely right wing with no central coherence, which would put him in common company with the kid who took a shot at Trump, or the other fella who showed up armed to a Trump golf course (I was under the impression that it’s illegal to go golfing in Florida without a gun), and many other Americans involved in private vendettas of extreme rebellion through either focused or stochastic violence.
There’s something about a society where relationships are increasingly atomized and crushed by capital, and where class is a taboo subject for any major political project, that produces people as baffling as the niche voter, the scattershot reactionary, and the public shooter. The average armed American crank — usually a male — who has any passion for oppositional thinking, is often in possession of a brain that’s a snakepit of various bespoke and contradictory grievances. He has more in common with a clumsy version of the Joker or Michael Douglas’ character from the 1993 “man on fire” film Falling Down than he does with Che Guevara, V.I. Lenin, or Joe Hill. Despite what the corporate news, cops and bad-faith political heads are screaming at you, these aren’t “radical antifa lefties” organizing assassination missions and going for blood in a class war. Odd politics and malignant personal gripes have been the mark of the gun-toting U.S. bloodletter for ages, and this has only accelerated in the age of the internet. Credit a mix of a completely earned distrust of our government, propaganda and social manipulation from youth, and the general pressures from all sides by a system that only knows how to tighten and punish, and never release and rehabilitate.
I’m certainly not advocating for the “victim” here, either, or trying to downplay the disgusting inhumanity of our for-profit healthcare system. An excerpt from the lyrics of the song that provided this column’s title, from the debut record of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, peels back the facade a little bit to show a prescient — at the time of its release in 1997 — understanding of what is happening just beyond the 1,000 screens of our distractions:
“The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows
The government is corrupt
And we’re on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn
We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death.”
Replace the word “radio” with any of our many preferred, aforementioned distracting screens, and you begin to understand how and why people are behaving as wildly as they are.
May you, dear reader, avoid that void and turn to each other instead for comfort. Organize and do not comply with the death drive.
Thursday
It might not be Monday, but it’s still a metal night over at Savage Henry Comedy Club, where at 9 p.m., you can enjoy a line-up of bands from both here and abroad. The road dogs are represented by blackened thrash band Oxygen Destroyer from a scattering of cities further north in the Pacific Northwest, along with New Jersey’s Kontusion. Local psychos Bloodspire and Image Pit round out the bill nicely ($5).
Friday the 13th
Here’s an unusually and fittingly outré gig for the final Friday the 13th of 2024. Visiting from Spain, the enigmatic, masked (and possibly haunted doll) LA NEUTRA is presenting a DJ-curated, mixtape trip called “March of the Trolls, Dance Exorcism.” Expect a wide range of globe-spanning music, including remixes of Indian and Arabic music, as well as reggae, dub, dubstep, and deep and heavy meditation dance trax. This one-of-a-kind sonic carnival will be going down at the Ocean Grove Lounge, providing an extra edge of deep woods, remote highway eeriness to the wham-a-lam. Music kicks off at 10 p.m. until late and it’s a mere $5 to get inside. Viva.
Saturday
The Miniplex is putting on the kind of gig it does best, with cosmic folk musician Julie Beth Napolin, who will be joined by local heroes Ethan Miller of Howlin’ Rain and Comets on Fire fame, and Anthony Taibi, a sound maker, breaker and recorder who has been in too many amazing psyche projects to name. The fabulous Meg Baird from Winter Band opens with a solo set. Music at 8 p.m., and a mere $10 gets you past the Unicorn Door and into the palace of goodies.
Sunday – The Cold Moon
Rising star Bay Area comedian Paul Conyers brings his stand-up chops to the Basement tonight for two sets, at 6 p.m. and 8 p.m., so you have options if you are more or less of a Sunday nighthawk. The $20 admission is not a bad deal for a headlining comedian who fills larger venues in the more populated parts of the country.
Monday
Low brow, low budget, painfully bad films are an itch to tickle for some of you out there. If you are in that number, you can’t get any closer to the rancid wet shit of terrible, sub-cult films than Feeders 2: Slay Bells. It’s the 1998 sequel to the original Feeders, a Blockbuster Video Chain VHS release that is every bit as cheap and awful as this Christmas-themed sequel. I will admit to not having it in me to make it through the first act. However, for those into laughing at the tragically bad, Savage Henry Comedy Club is the place to find this stinker being exhumed, where for $10 or $12.51 online, you can settle in at 6 p.m. for the spectacle.
Tuesday
Speaking of Savage Henry Comedy Club, tonight at 9 p.m. you can enjoy True Kult, a show created and hosted by comedian Patrick Redmond, where comedians explore all things paranormal, from little gray men to cryptids to xenomorphs. Just $5 gets you a spot inside, with an online fee that once again produces an odd price, this time $7.18. Spooky.
Wednesday
Nothing much happening tonight, so I’ll just make note of another cultural milestone in the Christmas canon. On this day 132 years ago, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker ballet premiered in Moscow and was considered a failure, perhaps even a proper stinker. It took more than 60 years to really catch on in the public imagination, this time across the Atlantic and due to the choreographic reworking by George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet. So even though its creator never got to see it become a beloved tradition in the west, one should still think “never say die” when it comes to timeless art.
Collin Yeo (he/him) tries to replace condemnation with understanding, in the hope of planning for a better world. He’s probably delusional. He lives in Arcata.
This article appears in Sculpting Community.