Feeling good about feeling bad

On September 11, 2002, the Canvas Cafe & Gallery in San Francisco (at 9th Ave. & Lincoln) will be hosting an event to memorialize the events of September 11, 2001. The event will feature artistic, poetic and musical works inspired by September 11. It is being sponsored by KFOG and Discmakers, and will benefit two New York-based charities. The organizers of the event are now seeking music submissions for performance that evening, and for a commemorative CD that will be distributed to the media to promote the event and sold to raise money for charity. More information and submission forms can be found at www.thecanvasgallery.com. THE DEADLINE FOR MUSIC SUBMISSIONS IS JULY 15.

Anonymous posting on the sf indie Yahoo! group, 06/24/02

I GREW UP near the Great America theme park in Silicon Valley. Even at an early age the jingoistic tone of the park's name struck me as being off – I went through a melodramatic phase of calling it "Heil America." What did Warner Brothers characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck have to do with patriotism? They acted like anarchists. I wasn't aware my cartoon idols always had ties to Uncle Sam – in college I discovered Bugs fought "the Japs" in World War II cartoons (did he start dressing in drag before or after?). Standing outside the Great American Music Hall three nights last month, I wondered when the names stopped bothering me. My youthful anti-everything stance had softened.

I didn't realize how complacent I'd gotten until comedian David Cross reminded me of how things used to be. After the mediocre opening bands, a rapt (drunk) audience sat through Cross's two-hour stand-up performance. He riffed on his Southern upbringing, the fallacies of religion, and living in Los Angeles, before he launched into lengthy tirades against Bush and Ashcroft. His stance is familiar, if the shtick is updated – when Cross was writing for the Ben Stiller Show, the elder Bush was still in office and culture wars were all the rage. We seem to have gone full circle: anger is making a comeback. Not the incoherent angst of rage rock or hate crimes but the focused beams of ridicule that come streaming through the moral murk. When talking about his experience of Sept. 11, Cross brought the dialogue to the level one would expect from a Lenny Bruce or Abby Hoffman: pissy, articulate, foulmouthed, and mostly right on. Some bits lagged, but it felt correct when Cross went off on the hypocrisy of politicians and priests; class clowns always have problems with authority figures. It sounded like he was covering familiar material, but it may just be history's odometer spinning backward to pre-cold war days. It is fun, and easy, to ridicule Bush, but I recognize the problem and appeal of falling into this trap – throwing people into black-and-white relief, where there are only "evildoers" and "heroes." It's a worldview one might call fundamentalist, but I was ready to sign on by the night's end.

I'd been at the Great American Music Hall the night before Cross to see !!!, a Sacramento band that had moved to New York around the time I'd left. They'd written some great new songs, best of all, one called "Me and Giuliani down by the Schoolyard." It flowed into choppy breakdowns and clap-alongs, incorporating the rhythmic colossus of simple beats, fluid bass lines, and a layer of percussion. By the end of the song Nic Offer's vocals became a stop-start-stutter, while the band stifled a minimal thud in a way that sent prickly chills up my back. The dance floor felt it too. I don't understand the cultural significance of white indie kids shaking their asses (as much as flexibility will allow), but I was curious about regional influences and the song's titular nod to Giuliani. Was it a dis on America's Mayor or a loving tribute? Probably the former – Offer's previous band the YahMos pleaded with kids to "Off Your Parents" years before the trench coat Mafia.

Between songs Offer presented his take on "Summer of Love 2002," promising that he and his crew would single-handedly make it happen in Brooklyn. It was a nice thought, but the cynic in me wondered how much celebratory spark was lingering there. A recent news report on the baby boom nine months after Sept. 11 made for a grim statistic – were these really love children or results of apocalyptic desperation? When Offer said, "San Francisco started the Summer of Love ... fuck it, have another one!," there was a shudder of enthusiasm before the dancing took hold again, and planning a new counterculture gave way to momentary bliss.

El-P's "Accidents Don't Happen" (Fantastic Damage, Def Jux) is the grimmest, angriest song I've heard lately. When he played it at the Great American last month, it opened a gap that we had all filled in one way or another for nine months. He prefaced it with the declaration "It's a bummer when 3,000 people in your city die. [Long pause.] Let's party!" Laughs were uncomfortably muffled. (The rip on willful amnesia makes me think of Andrew WK's theme song, now converted into a Coors commercial where the protagonist's punch line reinforces the amnesia/denial theme – after his lady friend asks him what he did the night before, he admits nothing of his drunken exploits.) The a cappella delivery of "Accidents" that followed had my brain contorted with lines like "City life is practice / A casket truancy." The idea has been expressed before, but words became real in that instant, divorced from the album's sinister production. El-P is an intense dude. Vengeance weighs heavy on his mind, as he proclaims, "The man who rapes my sister won't sleep right tonight." In the context of the song and the zeitgeist, the statement is justified, but it hits a nerve when he recites it. Should we, the audience, be encouraging violence? Is identifying with this song an endorsement of it, and what is the alternative?

You think there is finally a new taboo that cannot be broken, but someone always finds a way. Who would have thought that one day the Titanic would spawn a sappy love story? Mass media seems only to understand sentimentality as a stand-in for empathy. Californians seem to waver between wanting to feel good and feeling guilty for having it good. This might only exist in the bubble of isolation that is the Bay Area. We forget that it's not the same here as in the rest of America.

There's a kind of privilege here that allows all the freaky politics and lifestyles to flower. We have Rep. Barbara Lee, we have Berkeley talking about divesting from Israel. We do not speak for America but insist on having an opinion, and a loud one at that. This is what is expected of us by now. For my generation, riddled with Ritalin brain fritz, organized protest requires too much discipline and, uh, organization. I am chastened by the fact that my entertainment has to educate me about current events. Even Cross's dated jokes about flags and "getting back to normal" tapped deep responses from the audience. The laughter was too long in coming, the collective withholding of "bad" thoughts flooding clamped gates. Someone handed Cross a bumper sticker that read "Barbara Lee Represents Me," and he took it. In that moment it seemed absurd to let bumper stickers, buttons, songs, politicians, or comedians represent you and your opinion. Afterward, it seemed like a relief. (George Chen)