Something that’s inside of me
It’s something that I cannot see
Like rules and regulations
Passed down for generations
-“My Very Own Flag” from the 1995 Less Than Jake album “Pezcore”
“Less Than Jake are playing tomorrow at Brooklyn Bowl,” my girlfriend of four Valentine’s Days mentioned Wednesday night (I guess those email mailing lists DO work). “I know you like them”.
My liking them was the usual understatement, like me saying I heard she listened to Bob Marley in college. Then, upon my acknowledgement she mentioned she already had plans for Thursday night, otherwise she’d join me. That was the permission I needed to see if I could indeed get back in touch with the 14 year old in me that first fell in love with the band back in 1998 when a friend first played the album Losing Streak on my basement cd speakers back in ninth grade. The 14 year old I was before girls, chemicals, college, jobs, New York; the 14 year old I was before I even heard other music.
Having inherited absolutely no musical tastes from my parents, I had to wait to see if my friends would suggest any. It took until almost high school when I started getting suggestions beyond the Christian Rock I was hearing Sunday nights in group and the frantic scribbles I would make in my journal during theThursday night Top 25 Y100 Countdown on Philadelphia Radio.
It came in the form of the album Losing Streak (1998) by Less Than Jake, a punk band that regularly used horn accompaniment alongside their drum/lead/bass punk sound from Gainesville, Florida. My friend by the same first name treated me to “Automatic”, the first song on the album (although you could hold rewind on the return CD button and discover pre-song bonus material, which felt like a cool thing at the time). The music hit me hard and told me I had been missing out. I was.
That song led me to find their other earlier EPs. It drove me to apply and start what would be a five year on-and-off retail career at F.Y.E, where I would work at one of the three chain stores that overtook The Wall (and their blue square sticker lifetime quality guarantee that came with each CD) in the King of Prussia Mall, and collect every Less Than Jake release in their ongoing catalog.
It led me to Camden, New Jersey, to the Sony Entertainment Center (which became the Tweeter Center) parking lot where the annual Warped Tour summer punk mega concert was held. My brother and I collected a discarded LTJ branded guitar pick off the floor that we’ve kept to this day, if only to never forget how lucky we felt in the moment where this was our first live band experience and nothing could change that. I’d see LTJ that summer and subsequent summers until college.
When I was in college, I still clung to my first punk love of fast guitars, loud horns, speedy lyrics, and sweaty mosh pits where I learned to hold my arms out in front of me, cocked at the elbow, and held up to push away and protect my body as it went through the mosh cycle. I made my friends accompany me to shows at the Troc in Philly, 9:30 Club in DC, and wherever they were playing in Baltimore. They got hooked on the energy, the promise of punk, the freedom in letting loose, and wringing your shirt out at the end of the night not caring whose sweat it contained as long as it was exhumed.
Then I moved to New York. I remember my first sublet in the East Village and being excited that I could walk to the first LTJ show in my life (at Webster Hall in 2006) instead of committing a 2 hr round trip to travel; being so excited about the venue proximity that I nearly wouldn’t make it in time to the show, I was so boastful of how short a trip it would be.
And that brought a new set of friends I would drag to the shows. A new roommate from SoCal understood the scene and knew what to expect put me at ease and made me feel as though I wasn’t getting too old to jump up and down to lyrics about leaving town and finding myself., having already followed through earlier that year on those pledges. I’d see LTJ once or twice a year, now standing at the bar in the Hammerstein Ballroom pointing out how cool it was that Roger, the white dreadlocked bassist, was in the crowd drinking a beer and checking out his opening band.
And then 2012, at the Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg, when they’re playing their 20th Anniversary tour, and I break through the mosh pit to get to the front to recognize the same band, slightly more overweight and slower, playing with the same heart and energy anyone could ask for, humbled into taking $15 tickets in Brooklyn when they couldn’t sell out Madison Square Garden, no matter what they thought they were doing with their last several new releases.
The good news is that it’s the same band I fell I love with and that they’re carried me well into an adulthood where I am only too happy to put up with the two new songs they begrudgingly play in order to get back to the old school hits that drew me in in the first place. I’m happy to be at this show alone, jumping in place with a surging older crowd that also gets why I’m here too, because we’re all looking for one last wave, a shock of recognition that makes us proud to have stuck with these goofy Florida assholes all along because they paved the path and took us with them. And it’s good to be twenty years in and still comfortable with the first band that made you understand and appreciate growing up in the first place.
Less Than Jake is returning to play The Brooklyn Bowl on Tuesday, February 21st, $15
Peter Knox has been going to Less Than Jake shows since 1998 and took the G train to see them last night.
New Jobless Claims Hit Four-Year Low -- Daily Intel -
New claims for unemployment benefits dropped by 13,000 to 348,000 last week, the fourth drop in five weeks and the lowest number of claims in nearly four years, according to the Labor Department. And at the same time, hiring is up: The economy added a net 243,000 job in January, the most in nine months, bringing the average gain over three months to 201,000, dropping the unemployment rate down to 8.3 percent.
How The GOP Went Back To The 1950s In Just One Day | TPM2012 -
So there you have it: modern women being told by Republicans that they’re not qualified to talk about their own sexual health, are dressed like “whores” and probably need birth control because they’re so slutty. And this is just in one day.
It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage, they are supposed to be for purposes that are, yes, conjugal, but also [inaudible], but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen. We take any part of that out, we diminish the act. And if you can take one part out that’s not for purposes of procreation, that’s not one of the reasons, then you diminish this very special bond between men and women, so why can’t you take other parts of that out? And all of a sudden, it becomes deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure. And that’s certainly a part of it — and it’s an important part of it, don’t get me wrong — but there’s a lot of things we do for pleasure, and this is special, and it needs to be seen as special.
Ordinarily it wouldn’t even be worth my time to get upset by what Rick Santorum says, but considering that quite a few Republicans deem him fit to be the leader of the free world, I feel that it’s incumbent upon myself to help point out how batshit crazy he is.
I feel like every week the man manages to come out with something even more vile and divisive than the week before, but I think that his recent uneducated ramblings on birth control really take the cake.
For some reason older, white males in the Republican party have recently taken issue with birth control, even though the overwhelming majority of women in America (including Catholics) have used it and deemed it ok, something the Supreme Court agrees with and chose to protect.
Now Santorum is coming out and saying that sex for anything other than pro-creation is “counter to how things are supposed to be”, suggesting that sex with contraceptives is immoral and “libertine”.
Santorum’s fundamental (not to mention irresponsible) misunderstanding of science, sex and morality makes my head want to explode. We aren’t supposed to use birth control, condoms or have sex for anything other than pro-creation? Does he have any idea what century he’s living in? Does he have no conception of STD’s and how easily millions of deaths can be prevented every year? Does he have the slightest idea of how birth control even works? Does he really not know that sex is natural and in no way shameful and that it’s an important part of healthy relationships? I honestly feel bad for Santorum’s wife. By his math he’s only had sex with her 8 times in the 22 years they’ve been married.
Rick Santorum and other oblivious white, conservative males like him need to butt out of issues they don’t have the slightest idea about or right to be meddling with in the first place such as women’s healthcare and private sexual behavior. Hopefully after Rick Santorum loses this year’s election he will disappear back into the skewed, Dark Ages world he came from, leaving the rest of us to have as much safe, consensual, responsible, non-procreative and enjoyable sex as we want with whoever we want.
Letting Dean’s response stand here because I’m too angry/flabbergasted to formulate one myself.
[video]
[video]
Less Than Jake crowd at Brooklyn Bowl, Feb 16, 2012
My kind of place serves every Brooklyn Beer on draft. Love @BrooklynBowl for this reason. (I got the Blast, it’s special).
I have written two books, and you can order them now. They’re printed in Moleskine type journals and look amazing; also, handmade in Brooklyn. Very big thanks to Amanda White and everyone at 8-Bit for making this happen. Please reblog and spread the word!
With love,N
Congrats Ned!
Coming to Terms | The Point Magazine
(well, this seems to have been written with me in mind)
Congressional Birth Control Hearing Involves Exactly Zero People Who Have a Uterus
Today on Capitol Hill, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform assembled a panel to discuss the birth control mandate in President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Specifically, whether or not requiring insurers to cover birth control violates religious freedom of people who don’t believe in science. The committee, chaired by a male, consisted of eight men who felt personally persecuted by the requirement. And that’s about the least depressing aspect of the whole circus.
I wouldn’t let these guys determine my haircut, much less what’s really at stake here.
“I know nothing about basketball. I only know when Jeremy puts the ball in the basket he has done a good thing.” —
Jeremy Lin’s Grandmother Watches, Along With Taiwan - NYTimes.com
A Taiwanese treasure. This is adorable.
bacon chocolate chip cookie recipe | pete bakes!
This is my old friend (who introduced me to Less Than Jake), and his baking blog.
[video]
(via “Cherry” Photocall - 62nd Berlinale International Film Festival - Pictures - Zimbio)