In T-minus six hours, I will be boarding my first plane since 2019 to experience the sights and sounds of Chicago. “Sounds” is quite literal since Riot Fest is my main squeeze for the weekend, but I’ll be taking time to soak in what else the city has to offer in the meantime. It’s exciting to finally be seeing the world outside of my semilocal bubble again.
Windy City, here I come!
It blows my mind that there are people who don’t believe others deserve the basic right to privacy. So many people in media authority make immense profits off of the most useless and manufactured celebrity gossip. Glutting mainstream newshubs with this empty information tells the masses that world conflicts and political corruption are of no concern when baby scares and wedding fiascos exist. It commodifies the human experience to a systematic extent—how are we supposed to escape it? It’s a bafflingly cynical line of work.
While heinous acts of terror and rape deserve to be dealt with accordingly, celebrity gossip culture places all forms of human fallacy—from murder to making fun of another grown human person with a fully developed brain on the internet—under the same umbrella. The real problems hold the same magnitude as adolescent he-said-she-said. It only promotes a crippling twenty-first century hypersensitivity and, at times, viciously targets people who, in the grand scheme of things, never actually hurt anyone. Getting distracted by these meaningless items only allows the real offenders to scurry away scot-free in the meantime.
For the people receiving the feed, keeping up on such “news” can become an addiction. As human beings, we are all faced with varying levels of insecurity regarding our inherently selfish and prideful nature. Seeing a person in power who has done a supposedly “bad thing,” no matter the magnitude, tears down the curated, perfect image that stood so prominently before. The true, flawed nature of man is put on full display. It elicits almost a sense of pride in the lowly observer, who now feels superior than the persona-person for having not committed the same crime—or, in the most likely case, not getting caught doing the same thing. With enough repetition, the hypocrisy becomes commonplace and irremovable. As long as the happy buttons in the brain are being pressed in time with those on the “volume up” control, all is good from the armchair. Nothing of actual substance gets done, and the world keeps on disintegrating as usual. What the observer fails to realize is that no-one is inherently better than another, for we are all sitting here waiting for the earth to be consumed by the sun, preaching the gospel while whipping ourselves for our sins behind closed doors.
Since I could first cognitively think, September 11 has been a day of lecture. Every year on that day, my teachers would take a special few minutes at the beginning of every class period to reflect on and explain their personal 9/11 experiences to us. It was an attempt at contextualization for our young, burgeoning minds who never got to live in a world without taking your shoes off at the airport or the Department of Homeland Security.
It sometimes feels unreal that, as much as I may relate to the adult role models who surround me, they knew waters that I will never swim in and no one ever can again. The pool is remodeled, and all those changes can’t be undone, and all I can do is read the recounts, look at the old photos, and try to understand the facts.
I never intend to speak for my entire generation’s perspective, though. As much as my generation gets classified as a homogenous cluster of activists and freethinkers, I know first hand how blatantly ignorant and close minded some people my age can be. Sadly, looking at the world through the clearest lenses I have, it’s quite safe to say that most of them will retain their false pride for the rest of their lives. While some love to argue otherwise, cruelty and selfishness know no generational restriction. Just look at the response that was unleashed twenty years ago, when not blindly saluting the flag in the name of Middle Eastern slaughter was “un-American.” I wonder why Muslim hate crimes in America have yet to reach pre-9/11 levels after they skyrocketed in 2001. Humans here aren’t as nice as the propaganda makes them out to be.
With American flags waving in the wind right beside Trump 2020 signs, it seems like barely anyone has learned from the jingoism, the violence, the hatred. But was learning ever the point? The wildfire continues to rage, and people continue to suffer in cruel ways supported by deep roots. The fostering of close-mindedness and suppression of critical thought that billowed up like clouds of debris smoke resulted in a terror that was homegrown, not some tricky bogeyman from abroad. It is a terror that has culminated in the destruction of lives and the obliteration of common sense, and there’s just no going back.
You can decline the supersize Freedom Fries offer with your Happy Meal, sure. But when Big Daddy has force fed you blind submission to the powers that be your entire life, isn’t succumbing just so much easier?
I apologize for the lack of posts in the last week. My silence was due to both a small bout of writer’s block and me organizing other social media pages of mine in the hopes of getting my word out there more effectively.
The most important of these social media “upgrades” comes today, a day I should really be taking a break (Happy Labor Day!). I have launched the Transmissions From The Battlefield Tumblr blog! It will serve not as a replacement to this site but rather a companion. All posts on here will be posted over there, and they’ll hopefully be able to reach more eyes over there. Exercise the freedom of choice you have left to choose one or the other, both, or neither. It doesn’t matter!
See you in the Tumblrsphere!
NEWS FLASH: “Inside Fortnite’s Disastrous Martin Luther King Jr. Tribute.” Now that’s a headline you can’t make up.
What happens when you put a bunch of clueless, bootlicking children in front of a money hungry fake hologram of Martin Luther King? You get the trivialization of civil rights history, that’s what! No going back at this point…
Fall is truly falling, isn’t it?
While my previous logs were written from my room, I wrote the entirety of this piece over the course of a few study hall periods, as school is back in session. I must admit, I forgot how much teenager germs still make me gag, all the more a reason to wear a mask walking to and from my classes. Almost all of my peers are abstaining from wearing theirs since there is no enforced mandate. My COVID concerns still linger, so it’s still slightly unsettling, but I’ve managed to make myself comfortable. It helps that all my teachers are nice.
Yes, fall is kicking in, though the runoff of the hottest summer the Northern Hemisphere has ever experienced (thanks, climate change!) doesn’t make it feel that way. Neither does darling little Delta lingering around the corner, waiting to crash your party and leave you realizing the next morning that the previous night wasn’t as good as you thought it was. It’s a real pity. I thought this was supposed to be an ascending fall, but I guess the only positive curve is the hospitalization graph!
On my calendar, September holds large scale events that I have been anticipating since March of last year, yet the threat of Delta’s dance keeps them hanging in the balance. The first on my list, the Riot Fest gathering in Chicago, has already had two of its biggest acts—Troubled Trent! Frank! Nooo!—withdraw out of COVID concern only to be replaced by…Slipknot. Didn’t one of their members just catch COVID, and didn’t another one just straight up die a few weeks ago? My condolences, of course, but I didn’t expect overly angsty (and, it seems, painfully mortal) nu metal to be the soundtrack to the world’s reopening.
Me being me, the prophetic songs of DEVO, who are still on Riot Fest’s bill and have a show I’ll be catching at Radio City Music Hall two days later, sound like a much better choice. They also seem brazenly enthusiastic about finally getting back out on the road after years of Mark Mothersbaugh being too busy making movie score money. I assume they trust their fans with actually taking precaution and getting their shots, considering that both of the group’s frontmen have caught the virus in its early days; Marky Mark even needed a ventilator. His recovery was also apparently interrupted by the indulgent partying of the youthful TikTok stars living next door, a modern day exercise of the “live fast, die young” mentality that has latched onto so many. There’s no good future in sight, so why not submerge ourselves in fun, partying, tossing cash around, assorted acts of degeneracy that our parents’ bank accounts let us get away with while we still can? It’s saddening to see, yet it’s not an unnatural response considering the circumstances.
It seems like everyone is thinking, “what can I do that makes me happy before the world burns?” That includes myself. But typing on an energy-consuming computer with the lights on isn’t actually as damaging to the environment as carbon dioxide-pumping, uselessly polluting companies want me to think. Neither is letting yourself loose in a crowd of like minded people while your favorite (and not favorite) bands bring their songs to life.
So, DEVO and Slipknot, eh? Not all jumpsuit wearing, clown mask bearing bands are made equal. But can we expect anything to not happen at this point?
It’s 2021, and the boys are back in town—the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan boys, that is. Almost twenty years after the American military sent the Taliban’s government went into exile, they’re back in power after America’s (truly weak sauce) withdrawal. You would think that twenty years of occupation would have produced some hurdles for the Taliban to climb, but their regain of what they had lost was sickeningly swift.
It’s the miserable end of a miserable war that has been going on since before I was born, one that, looking at the plain hard facts, ultimately proved useless for the greater good. The money has been spent, the death toll is still staggering, the weapons suppliers are doing exceptionally well, and the innocent people of Afghanistan, humans like you or me, are back to being incessantly victimized by an excruciatingly oppressive and fundamentalist state. Got enough of rose-tinted late 90s-early 2000s nostalgia? Try going back 500 years, when women weren’t permitted autonomous thought and simple forms of recreation were considered a front against the man upstairs. Heaven on earth, truly.
But is that really that different from the country I reside in? You can rejoice in the streets about how a man in a blue tie is in office, but that isn’t stopping the men in red ties, the conservatives, our own Taliban, from trying to exert their own archaic control over the populous. Bills proposing the restriction of voting rights, abortion, and gender expression continue to pop up like kernels of butter-drenched popcorn at the movie theater, granted that movie theater hasn’t closed down because of a local spike in COVID-19 cases.
The COVID problem is also an important matter here, as leagues of religious fundamentalists claim that wearing a mask for the safety of others in the middle of a worldwide pandemic is some ungodly offense. Vaccines, too, are seen as satanic, as they’ll apparently rape your body with either a tracking chip or reptile DNA, depending on which science disbeliever you ask. All this when hospitalization rates of those who abide by these reckless behaviors are spiking from their selfishness. We’re going back once again, back to when leeches and snake oils were used as cure-alls. Mind, these are the same people who also want to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and other innocent people in the name of the lord, just like those Taliban boys over there.
And did we all just forget about when the so-called patriots who believe all of this tried to pull their own takeover at the Capitol building last January? I witnessed the attempt at insurrection on live television, and I can remember it like yesterday. Unsatisfied by Biden as the country’s choice of president but fully aware that his election win was genuine, I had innocently turned on the news hoping to simply observe his presidency be validated, because seeing democracy actually happen successfully is pretty satisfying in today’s perpetually corrupt hellworld. I was aware that the moment was one that would be placed in the history books after months of incessant “Stop The Steal” squabble calling for another four years of Trumpolini (like the country hadn’t been decimated enough by the first four). I also expected counterprotests at the scene by those delusional goons indoctrinated into his suicide cult of personality, because you can’t help but do so after four years of fringe conspiracy insanity becoming mainstream political discussion.
What I ended up seeing was a nation’s people mobilized against itself, their brains rotted by lies and conspiracy, exerting violence in the name of tyranny, the decimation of what remnants of democracy we still claim to cling to. The halls of the Capitol became the stomping grounds for a horde of neurotic rednecks, a deranged militia free to roam in defilement of something once considered worthy of protection. All sanity and sense of what should be was forcibly ejected out the window. The patients had taken over the asylum.
It still unsettles me to think about; I never would have expected for the world’s forces of de-evolution, those dangerous delusions, to catalyze such an attack, to go that far off the deep end. People died that day. Many others feared death or worse. It was a nail in a coffin.
But we’re America. We’re united. We believe in freedom—freedom to treat others like dirt because they’re different than you. It could never happen here, could it?
Group oneness is an essential catalyst of change on any meaningful scale; the higher the manpower, the more widespread the effect. While movements of this nature can only function by targeting an “enemy,” this does not contradict the goal of unity when the target serves an actual threat to a more fulfilling world. Work of this manner, however, becomes impossible when we are taught to fear things or groups that do not actually cause harm. We are told that nebulous forces carrying both widespread control and inherent inferiority—paradoxes—are out to destroy all that we know that brings us comfort. But is all that we know really beneficial, and is much of it really worth saving?
Irrational fears supposedly help us protect our “freedom”—our gas guzzling cars, our insecure belief systems, our dirty blue jeans—yet they only restrict us to strategies of division and conquerment. The “other” is a lurking threat, and you’d best amplify your greed as much as you can to prove that, no, you will not become one of “them.” Exiting one’s comfort zone becomes betrayal, a crime. These fears keep us from enjoying new experiences or any form of change; we are left to our inoculating bubbles, safe but inexperienced and idiotic. We are told to live in fear.
It reminds me of a narrative that has sparked my attention recently. It regarded a pale-skinned man with a wife and two children of differing sex, a dog, and one car. They lived comfortably in a suburban Colorado development just far enough away from society to put him at ease while close enough to it to assimilate him to the eyes he knew were always watching. His preferred methods of faking conformity were leaving to work at eight in the morning five days a week and hosting backyard cookouts featuring homemade lemonade and Frisbee. Repairing his car in the driveway was his second favorite hobby, though this lingered far behind tending to his obsessive thought patterns which demonized all who surrounded him. In a way, his constant state of paranoia paralleled that of men weaker than him, men who had completely rejected methods of assimilation and retreated to the seedy backwoods of America in avoidance of the truth. To them, the facade of normalcy and wholesomeness in a world gone mad was not worth it when hoarding firearms in a remote cabin was a possibility. Our subject, however, had not succumbed to the call of the wild, primarily out of fear that the effort he had put into the construction of his life would be wasted should he abandon his family and the suburbs. He shared their same fears, but he owned a shame that the others had let go of long ago: the shame of looking like a crackpot to others.
He still read the daily paper during breakfast the old school way like his own father had, and he still carried Chick tracts in his briefcase to leave in public restrooms. He took three little white pills a day, and so did his wife. Meatloaf was always dinner on Mondays, and every weeknight, before the nightly news came on, each family member would go to their bedroom, put on the custom fitted military grade combat uniforms that he had special ordered for everyone, and then gather in the darkened sitting room. They would then situate themselves on and around the couch as they faced the television set tuned to their channel of choice, watching intently and completely focused should any violence or staticky primordial material come leaking out of the screen in a direct attack on the concept of the nuclear family itself. He held his rifle during these sessions should anything happen. The television remained unplugged and covered by a floral print sheet at all other times. His children were not allowed to leave the development, and his wife rarely did.
Our hero, who lives in a perpetual time warp, seems bound to the model family as propagated by America’s post-war culture of the 1950s. His obsessions prove wrong the common assumption that rises in divorce rates, single parent households, and mixed relationships have made the nuclear family ideal extinct. As much as some would love to say that old traditions are being eradicated (for better or for worse, depending on which side you’re on), they still exist and inform our ways of living (for better or for worse). Our hero falls in the latter category—he is still trapped in his bubble, so deathly afraid of popping it that he armors himself against a world that cannot attack him (and would most likely accept him if he offered himself). Sound familiar?
Also, his mistrust of his television set appears to be an exaggerated version of the relationship most of us hold with technology. Despite suiting up in defense of it, he still makes a ritual of its consumption. We may question how much surveillance our computers have over us, but we still use them. We have to. So-called technological progress has strong-armed us into a love-hate relationship, an endless battle between tradition and progress, one that perfectly sums up our hero’s sad existence. The same patterns reverberate on, sometimes in different colors or speeds, but always fundamentally the same. There is no end; the news channel runs twenty-four hours a day.
In Ken Russell’s Altered States, protagonist Dr. Edward Jessup’s psychedelic exploration of his psyche culminates into his physical mutation into a self-sufficient, antimatteral being of the most innately alive of the organs: flesh. His appearance in this form may be warped and inhuman at a glance, but his embrace of the hairless flesh most commonly associated with homo sapiens makes his transformed state a distinctly humanoid one. Was he not conducting his experiments for a deeper understanding of human consciousness in the first place? His research ultimately draws a dark conclusion: that mankind is an innately selfish race. In his superhuman form he reaches the peak of individualism—he needs no support to exist, and no one is capable of doing so unless they, too, want to give up Earth’s realities and join him in his subconscious realm, a realm dangerously leaking into the real world. He transcends his humanity by embracing what makes him most human. Jessup would have let this physical representation of his ego take over, too, if he hadn’t kept enough self awareness to save his wife from the same forces. Empathy to the rescue.
Of course, self exploration, whether done hallucinogenicly or sober, is not inherently bad. In many situations, it can catalyze positive internal change that can be reflected onto the surrounding world. But one must be wary that one’s retreats into the self do not manifest degenerative delusion.
Sadly, it seems that our current generation is not being taught values similar to those that ultimately saved Jessup. He still kept a grip on reality even when his curious mind sucked him into the monkey man microscope screen warp speed world of his subconscious. Today’s world, on the other hand, offers no escape from the epilepsy inducing acid flashback that is pop culture. Deeply rooted traditions of primal self satisfaction—earlier in the film, Jessup regresses to an apelike state before embarking on a rampage, a friendly reminder of how we, too, are nothing more than animals—are not changed, but encouraged. From birth, we are bombarded by unregulated flashing images, exaggerated facial expressions and cartoon realities, infinite streams of worthless matter lurking behind clickbait headlines. Political pundits and their battles become increasingly caricatured, turning nightly news into WWE. Nothing really matters, except for the hyperactive manchild’s exploitation of the child’s feeble mind. As long as you think the junk food you’re guzzling tastes good (or you don’t mind the side effects), alles ist gut.
Maybe we are all still children in some respects, still trying to process information and make sense of the insanity swirling around us. Most, however, question not what they see, staying on whatever the “correct” track is as dictated by meaningless societal trends or whatever makes them feel more self righteous. And considering the bust bum brainwash world we live in, where facts are opinions and lies reap in the profit, the consequences of such complacency are too often detrimental to those with their heads in the right space.
Absurdity reigns, so what should we do about it? Embrace it. One does not silence another by cowering and covering their ears. Much like how sustainable forms of energy begrudgingly coexist with fossil fuels, not all noise is pollution. Use it to your advantage. Submit your social commentary under the covers; weave double entendres into your speeches; force the world to grab that dinged-up shovel and start digging, because there’s a lot left to uncover, and it might just be worth your time.
The Straight Facts On Riot Fest 2021
Saturday, September 25th, 2021It really is hard to make the good things last.
Last weekend went by not like the rickety but effective trains that linked me from the airport to my hotel room to Douglass Park, home of the beloved Riot Festival. In hindsight, my time in Chicago feels like it passed me with the speed of a Japanese bullet train. Finally, life felt almost like it did before COVID-19 grounded planes and ravaged the live music industry. Simultaneously I was granted a rare time to let loose and release all my adolescent urges. I had been needing to do so for a while.
The zeitgeist was in full effect as we made our way inside the festival’s grounds on Saturday. Signs pointed towards COVID testing sites. I flashed my vaccination card alongside my ID to be let in. The first band of the day, Man On Man, was formed over lockdown by Faith No More’s keyboardist and his boyfriend out of quarantine boredom; it was their second live show. FNM would have been hitting the stage later that day had their seemingly impenetrable frontman not cancelled their tour to deal with a mental health crisis.
It quickly became evident that everyone was more than happy to be back. I try to socially distance myself from GWAR as much as possible due to cleanliness concerns, but I couldn’t help but spy on their performance. I ended up getting a clear view of their assorted liquids arcing over the heads of the hooded rain poncho clad security guards and into the untamed audience. (My friend Kati walked out with green stains splattered across her starch white mask and tote bag.) Later, as Les Savy Fav played, it was impossible to socially distance from frontman Tim Harrington, who frequently retreated into the crowd for a variety of antics. He rode an audience member down the aisle like a toddler receiving a pony ride from his dad; he took and wore on his head many pairs of sunglasses before redistributing the Ray-Ban wealth to an entirely different section of the crowd; he rolled out a roll of tarp across everyone’s heads, got on top of it, bore a hole in it, and reemerged among everyone else. It was truly a sight to behold.
The next day, I stood on my feet for over five hours. The first band I witnessed during this test of leg strength was Body Count. From the safety of the VIP section, I was protected from the mosh pit happening not very far away from me. Ice-T didn’t refrain from giving his commentary on the pit, which he found unsatisfactory. It even once transformed into my eyeballs’ first wall of death at Ice’s behest. If Ice-T tells you what to do, you do it. The band was tight and talented, and the songs were topical and pretty infectious. Add a hefty dose of Ice-T being extremely Ice-T and you’ve got one unforgettable performance. “I PLAY ONE ON TV!” the Law & Order actor reminded us as the band closed their set with “Cop Killer.” You love to see it!
After Body Count left the stage, I spent the next two and a half hours standing in front of the rail waiting for my main attraction, DEVO. I had been there for their final pre-COVID performance almost two years prior, and it seemed unbelievable that the wait was finally over. Their set began with a 70s film of the band tussling with their fictionalized pushover manager, Rod Rooter. It was followed by a recently shot clip of the same guy riding an exercise bike and wearing a tiger print tracksuit. Disappointed that the band he once managed wasn’t doing stadiums “like Kid Rock,” he sardonically reintroduced the band to the audience. (They aren’t your everyday boy band.) It was a reminder that, as much as you may want them to go away, DEVO never truly will. Even with two frontmen having recovered from COVID-19, the spud boys still carry force, talent, and an electrifying presence. In fact, they incited such a frenzy that I spent a good amount of the show ducking crowd surfers who got dangerously close to crushing me. Security guards cradled them like Booji Boy babies as they passed one by one over the rails before being shooed to the back of the crowd. Later I overheard that their forceful performance of “Secret Agent Man” incited a fist fight farther back in the mass of de-evolving dregs. If a mini-militia of costume changing, whip-smart punk scientists in or nearing their seventies can still hold it, don’t listen to Rod: they still shoot straight. See DEVO while you still can.
“Freedom of Choice” completed the band’s set; the group had apparently been under threat of getting the cord pulled due to going over their time limit, which would have been blasphemy. The next thing I knew I was sprinting across the sunset lit field as the Flaming Lips’ set opener—“Race For The Prize,” of all songs—echoed across the darkening park. I was able to blend into the crowd as the happy-sad hymn to medical progress came to a close. How else would they open a post-vax concert? I spent the majority of their awe inducing performance in a haze fueled by exhaustion, awe, and second hand smoke. Slightly hypnotized by the neon psychedelic video backdrop, assimilating with the seizure inducing swirl seemed much more preferable to walking to the train station.
Eventually, the lights on the Roots stage dimmed and Wayne Coyne’s virus proof giant bubble deflated for the last time. We worked our way through the darkness to reorient ourselves and ended up catching a portion of the night’s closing performance, the Slipknot spectacle, from afar. We reunited with a friend we had chatted with earlier in the day and took the opportunity to rib on the group. We all agreed that, while they were obviously dedicated to their presentation, their musical content couldn’t live up to it. At another stage out of our range, Machine Gun Kelly, the creepy rapper turned equally creepy pop punk poser, was also playing. Another example of when immaculately crafted style outweighs substance. Interesting that the two bands immediately behind them on the billing—the Lips and the VOs—were the ones who actually hit a successful combination of the two. Life is not fair.
But the pain of Machine Gun Kelly’s existence did not ruin the weekend, as weird as it was to witness such a large crowd once more. It was a time of strange euphoria and semi-reluctant indulgence. It was relieving that the long stretch of boredom that had made up life up until that point was finally interrupted by a brief blip of in person camaraderie. There’s no wonder why stepping out of those gates for the last time and taking that final train ride felt as if something was being lost. If only the fun could last forever.
Tags:Body Count, Chicago, concerts, DEVO, Faith No More, GWAR, Les Savy Fav, Machine Gun Kelly, Man On Man, music, personal experiences, reviews, Riot Fest, Slipknot, The Flaming Lips, things I enjoy, travel
Posted in Life, Reviews & Commentaries | 3 Comments »