Part one of a series of posts reflecting on almost a decade of DIY culture.
Intro:
Intro:
2017: I spent
almost a year kicking around Canada. When I came back in 2008, I started a free
zine entitled Bad Apples after a post
card I saw proclaiming that 'it only takes one bad apple to spoil the barrel.' BA was a double sided A4 sheet folded in
4 to make an A6 pocket sized mess of tiny type that came out every couple of
months. It lasted 4 issues, plus a transcript posted on a local internet forum
for issue #5. It then had an afterlife as a poorly compiled anthology that I
took to Australia with me in 2010.
I found a long section of fragments
from #5 entitled 'Some shit to think
about' on an old external hard drive and I've decided to republish it for a
third time as a series of monthly blog posts. Including this introduction there
are 18 sections. If I revisit this at the rate of two a month, that should be 9
months worth of writing.
Its cliché to proclaim that the past
is a foreign country, but my I often find it difficult to unlearn hard lessons
- and unread game changing books/unhear mind-blowing records - and put myself
in the shoes of who I was. What I find particularly interesting therefore is
that by accident, I've already started a conversation with myself by adding to
this piece when it shifted from appearing on southcoasthq and became a print
zine with the BA anthology. In these
blog posts I want to add to this article a third time, so that not only do you
get to see the changes I made two years after it originally appeared, you also
get the thoughts of the author 9 years later.
What I'm hoping to do here is explore
three things:
Firstly, what I was thinking at the
time which I don't think was that dramatically different from the punx around
me. Secondly, to show how technology and other factors superseded quickly some
of what was written. Thirdly, to provide a window into what's dropped by the
wayside since then. I'm not arguing here that anything is worse (or better) now
but more that I wonder if any of these points will strike readers as original,
controversial or coming from a radical direction that might be worth
resurrecting.
What follows is a disclaimer of sorts
from both earlier versions of this article. It seems like a good way to begin;
if I could talk to me in 2008, I'd suggest that I chilled the fuck out because
no one cares. Worryingly, this followed on from an electronic version of my
per-zine that was so self censored that it basically too scared to express an
opinion. It was mental illness creeping in around the edges and in 2011 I finally
ended up on meds. Which is another conversation for another day.
*
2010: This
article appeared in Bad Apples #5. This zine never got beyond being a
transcript posted on the internet. I don’t even have the original word file. I
did find it online though and this article was the only thing really worth
saving. I’ve kept it pretty much as I found it, with a few 2010 edits [made obvious].
To quote the intro to the zine, this
article was written in the context that it:
2008: “...is a list of ideas and thoughts that I
don’t totally agree with but are things that I’ve been thinking about over the
years. Some of them are contradictory. Some of them clearly wouldn’t work on a
large, uniform scale. Some of this people are already doing. Please read it
more as a spring board for your own thoughts rather than the gospel as written
by Phil Chokeword, something to call me out/rip me over or as a personal
criticism. It’s just a bunch of shit I thought/read about/stole and might even
think is too dumb to act on. I’m not saying your band, label, zine or show is
shit. If I was, I’d totally say that to your face instead. Some things are
about pluralism and dialogue - there’s room for more ideas than just mine or
yours. Take an idea and roll with it. Or not.”
2010: That
disclaimer stands though it seems a bit epically cautious to me now.
One:
2008: If you knew a good band was going to split up
tomorrow, you’d go to the last show if it was in your town, right? And you’d
probably dig it, knowing that this was your last chance to do so, right? So
what if you knew that band was good and was only EVER going to play one or two
shows or deliberately played only once or twice a year? Wouldn’t every show
played be like the last show? Whilst we’re thinking about good things coming in
finite packages, you can only stretch ideas so far before they reach their natural
conclusions. This is why the fifth CD you put out probably won’t have as many
gems on it as the first. So what if you only agreed to make one record with
your band. And that was it. No watered down ideas, redone on album 3 not as
well as on that first 7”. And wouldn’t you want that to be the best record you
could write, so you’d make sure there was no filler too.
2017: The Say It Right Writers Circle I
facilitated worked on this principle and was conceived as a 12 month project;
when it seemed hard to steer it over the line, the finitude of it meant that it
much easier to keep going because there was an end in sight. It psychologically
was more manageable because it wasn’t going on forever.
In a purer sense, I'm sort of haunted by this idea, even though
I've never put it into practice with a musical project. The general trajectory
is that even bands that start for the crack of it end up moving towards being
more serious as they progress. I was and am concerned about projects peaking
and keeping on going until they dissolve into shit art, acrimony and posturing
where really, all anyone wants to hear is that first 7 inch anyhow.
I wonder about projects that have too much
time/money/infrastructure/ego invested in them so that they become zombie
institutions, no longer fit for purpose but too big to fail, like some sort of
DIY RBS. What does it mean when spaces, bands, zines, collectives can’t be
fully reformed but drift on, not quite what they should be, no longer meaning
what they did but not quite falling over, taking up space and energy?
The opposite of course is equally problematic. You don’t have to
be a Buddhist to see that impermanence is the state of things; nothing lasts
forever, and new things start all the time. But what would it mean to advocate
the continual tearing down of projects as they pass their high point? What does
it mean to clear out dead wood to make space for what comes next? And what if what
comes next is dog shit?
*
Jump to fragment (links added as fragments are posted): Intro //
One // Two // Three // Four // Five // Six // Seven // Eight // Nine // Ten //Eleven // Twelve // Thirteen // Fourteen // Fifteen // Sixteen // Seventeen
