Trying to blog every once in a while. Just some quick thoughts of some things I listened to and read recently. Maybe will be a normal thing.
Samiam-All
I use Samiam as a way to track where I am each week. I do not know if it is a band that has really traveled past my generation. They exist in that same space of whatever people mean when they say adjacent. I can hear a million different tendrils of punk when I listen to them. I listen to “Ordinary Life” as a protective covering when I want to go to sleep at 6:30. Summer in Chicago makes me want to die every year. I undergo amnesia when each season changes, as if I have not lived here my entire life. Samiam has always mirrored that passive existence that a big city conjured out of me. Similar feelings pass with “Dull” on a later record. It is a window into understanding why people decide it is time to leave. Or as they say, “Is it to much to ask for, some kind of ordinary life.”
Boilerman-All
One of many local bands that was passed down by friends who were much older than me. There needs to be a way to say pop-punk in a nonderogatory way. It is more J Church than New Found Glory. The layout of their albums themselves owes way more to 90s Lookout Records, using collage and slapping some text and saying Oh, good enough. You should not be on the beach listening to this. You should be riding the bus in the Fall or riding your bike, hoping not to die when crossing some dangerous intersection in Chicago. It is music that soundtracks the mornings while I’m on the train, avoiding eye contact with any living soul while I clock into a morning shift.
Nelson Algren-Man With The Golden Arm, City on The Make
Trying to spend time reading more fiction. I think when I was younger, I was so single-mindedly trying to read as many punk books and zines as possible. I would go to Quimbys and find whatever back issues of Punk Planet I could. Earlier in the summer, I picked up On The Make, a longform narrative poem Nelson Algren wrote. It was interesting to read him describing the decay of Chicago some sixty years ago, written as someone who loves Chicago but needs to leave it. I live in the same neighborhood that is depicted in much of Man With The Golden Arm. The characters he portrays–bums, the people the city would like to pretend don’t exist– are a world far from my own. Damen and Division in the 1940s seem like a fantasy world. At the corner now lies a home decor store, a cash station, and a collectivo coffee.
I even think of his short story about the drunkest man in Chicago at Polonia Liquors. It still stands to this day. I have never walked inside, but I have had my version of those dive bars where locals waste away their days. Shoutout Oasis in Roger Park. I spent all of my last year of college there before getting sober. I could be boring and be like, “Oh, gentrification.” But there is something depressing about reading a news article about a new apartment complex being built and seeing the words 2,000 dollars for a one-bedroom apartment and realizing the world I even inhabited almost a decade ago is no longer feasible.
This post has less to do with Nelson Algren and more with the constantly changing terrain of Chicago. (Side note: Only realized recently the Nelson Algren line in Doublwhiskeycokenicee by Dillinger four).
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