New Plastic Ideas

Houston Built Environment 1

2010-09-20T23:26:00.000-07:00

"The production of scale demarcates the sites of social contest"

"Spatial scales are the outcome of social struggles."

Cocalero

2009-06-10T10:24:00.000-07:00

A documentary about Bolivian president Evo Morales

Industrial Alabama

2009-06-07T07:59:00.001-07:00

US Pipe--Bessemer

US Steel in Fairfield

Birmingham

2009-06-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

Steel, medicine and finance

Sloss furnaces

The Highlands area at dawn

Grocery Fatigue

2009-06-02T18:48:00.000-07:00

There are two stages in job fatigue. The first is simple dread of leaving one's self-directed existence to go to work. Suddenly, slogging through the most tedious pages of a philosophy text seem equivalent to the most pleasurable drug-induced relaxation. For awhile this feeling is kept at bay by the work itself, by novelty, strain, challenge or comaraderie. But eventually it subsides, and that pervasive longing to be doing something, anything, else creeps in. I didn't reach this point until my third week on the night crew, which is probably a good sign. As I mentioned before, the work isn't that tough, and listening to music helps immensely. Last night I had some interesting conversations with co-workers and a personal Woody Guthrie/Bob Dylan marathon.

Still, I simply can't imagine doing this job for years on end. One couldn't anyway--it barely pays enough to keep a single person alive, much less a family. A second job would be necessary. Life would eventually become 'work release' from work. Last night a co-worker and I were talking about actual prisons and their oppressive monotony. I commented that, "I'm sure it makes you appreciate the boredom here at work," but I'm not so sure this is true. Never having been incarcerated for any significant length of time, I'm not qualified to say. I know prisons are horrible places. But at least in prison one can read and devote significant amounts of time to one's intellectual development. This hasn't been possible at most of the jobs I've had, including this one. I try to make intellectual games out of the items I stock, asking myself "what likely went in to the production of this product?" and "what kind of advertising would it take to create demand for this brand of organic couscous?" I find these questions don't keep me occupied for very long. Reading on break has also been difficult. When I delve into "Hard Times" at lunch, I struggle to get through a few pages. I'm not sure if it's the environment, the pressure of knowing I have a very limited window to read, or that I'm simply too tired.

At any rate, working a job like this again has strengthened my belief that intellectuals should be required to do manual labor every so often, especially those professors who engage in relatively unalienated pursuits, then complain about their 50 or 60k salaries. Sure, being in academia can be incredibly stressful, but it's positively decadent compared to many, many other career paths.

This also speaks to the value of organizing, not just for benefits and wages, but for greater workplace control. A job like this *could* be rewarding, if one was able to obtain a living wage, participate in management decisions, build comaraderie with fellow employees through struggles and decision-making processes, etcetera.

Nickel and Diming again

2009-05-29T15:36:00.000-07:00

Last summer, during my annual hiatus from the university world, I attempted to work at Wal-Mart. I made it about a week. The job wasn't so much difficult as it was absolutely mind-numbing. Anyone who's worked any kind of retail job understands what a Sisyphean task it would be to 'front' an entire aisle of fishing tackle packaged in tiny plastic bags. There was also the creepy corporate atmosphere, the wal-mart cheer, the paperwork-laden process of selling guns, and the demanding clientele. I figured out I could skate by selling things on ebay, amazon, rationing the rest of my financial aid money, and if need be, credit cards. I'd like to think it wasn't due to laziness or privilege, though several years of grad school produce both of these things.

This summer, I have no such luxury. I resolved not to apply for summer aid, and it's too late anyway. My rent is paid through June, but after that, I'd be sunk without work. And the job market is terrible. Job-seekers in central Alabama face fierce competition for all but the worst entry-level jobs (and there may be competition for those too--but I'm holding out on working food service ever again). Many people I know are still looking for summer employment and the more fortunate have given up, opting for loans and unpaid internships to skate by on savings.
Luckily, I did find a job, though in a different city. A friend of mine called me a couple of weeks ago and told me that the grocery store she works at was hiring for the night crew. Normally I'd balk at night shift work more than an hour's commute away, but I thought at the very least it might open up other opportunities for low-wage work. I've found that it's difficult to get a job at, say, a deli when one's work history for the past 5 years consists mainly of tutoring and teaching at the university level.

As far as low-wage manual work goes, this job is tolerable. Most of the time. $7.50 an hour isn't great, especially since the minimum wage goes up to $7.25 in July. Despite the low pay and nonexistence of benefits for 'part-time' employees who routinely work 40 hours a week, it would be really difficult to organize the place. It's a small grocery chain with a reputation for being a 'good' place to work, and as far as I can tell, the management isn't all that repressive either. But with the recent bankruptcy of Bruno's--the only organized grocery chain in the area--serious talk about unions might be thwarted very quickly. And when the full crew is present there are still only 6 workers on my shift, including myself and two supervisors.

Adjusting to a nocturnal schedule took about a week, but now it almost seems natural to be up during the dead hours of the morning, 2,3,4 am. And unlike the last overnight stocking position I had, where the hours were indeterminate, I'm guaranteed to leave by 6 each morning. By then I'm sore and ready for bed.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we receive pallets full of freight (various dry grocery items) we take to the aisles for stocking. This is somewhat difficult at first, requiring memorization and quick thinking. The pallets are often full of dissimilar items, so when putting items on one's 'float' to take out to the floor, the trick is to choose as many items as one can from as few aisles as possible, without holding up the process or appearing to pick lightweight items. This rarely works to perfection, and usually at the end of a 'float' one has a number of miscellaneous items to put out for consumption.

After this, each person goes to his or her (though right now we're all male) aisle to stock it, which generally takes from 2.5-5 hours, depending on the night. This is fairly monotonous and frustrating at times, especially when the items to be stocked won't all fit on the shelves in their assigned spaces. In many cases one can fit them in eventually but pushing, fidgeting, rearranging, rigging up cardboard shelves or hiding items behind others. If none of that works, the items go into the backstock, an assigned space in the back of the store. In my case, the items are often half-full boxes or trays of gatorade or juice, which are not fun to have to lift again and again.

When the goods are stocked and the backstock is dealt with for the night, the aisle needs to be 'fronted'. This involves pulling items flush with the edge of the shelf and making sure they face forward. At our store we 'front two-deep,' which sounds very tough, but only means that two of each item has to be pulled up. 'Fronting,' the aisles, much like the other type of 'fronting' makes the aisle look fuller than it actually is and more well-stocked. Supposedly there is more emphasis on this at our store, because we serve a wealthier community (more on that later). Rich people are apparently more susceptible to illusions of plenty.

During all this we're allowed to listen to ipods or other personal music devices as long as it doesn't interfere with our performance. For me, headphones are a necessity. Otherwise, the monotony of the work, the repetitive music selection and the Tom Selleck voice ad that comes on every 10 minutes--'Did you know that one 8 ounce glass of Florida Orange has 8 essential vitamins and minerals...'--would give me nervous tics.

In the next installment, I'll discuss working in the eighth wealthiest city in the U.S., my co-workers and the absurdity of variety.

Tropicalia

2009-04-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

The low cost of desperate labor

2008-06-09T23:12:00.000-07:00

Like many young, white, angry males with completely ineffective left politics, I hated Wal-Mart rabidly. It was the worst of US corporations--wasteful, environmentally disastrous, treated its employees poorly, used sweatshop labor, was 'family friendly,' and it was ubiquitous, emblematic of a wasteful, conservative suburban conformity. And those wretched smiley faces. If left unchecked, it would make the nation a homogeneous swath of parking lots and one-story box buildings. I refused to shop there, derided those who did, and for a time my friends and I thought it amusing to get ourselves kicked out of the various 'supercenters' in the vicinity. We'd walk in smoking cigars, act suspiciously so that the plain-clothes security 'shoppers' would follow us around, and make crude announcements on the store-wide intercoms to drive away customers.

Obviously I was an asshole. And naïve, with a very poor, inconsistent awareness of class. I had to work some pretty deplorable service jobs in the food industry myself, and realized the conditions were exploitative. I would often chide family members for not leaving better tips at restaurants. Why I couldn't understand the workers at Wal-Mart were similarly oppressed, I don't know. Perhaps I really believed the myth that people were really free to sell their labor to whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted, with few repercussions for changing jobs. Under this logic, Wal-Mart employees chose to work there because of some religious or political defect.

Now I work at Wal-Mart. Or, as they said in the 19th century, I've 'got a place' there--at least temporarily.
Not that my views of the corporation itself have changed much. I still think its stores and distribution centers should be confiscated and turned into community co-ops, its upper management forced to break rocks and its top-level execs deported to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Fortunately, I'm less the politically backwards, insolent shit I was in my late teens and early twenties, and don't get pleasure from harassing fellow low-wage workers.
As an English grad student whose employment history over the last 4 years consists of teaching and tutoring, I feel like I'm pulling something of a Barbara Ehrenreich. I know I'll only work there as long as I can stand it, and I'm very privileged to have that option. If I get fired, I won't starve. But I need the money to make it through the summer without selling everything I own on ebay, and Tuscaloosa has otherwise been stingy about yielding up jobs.
And I have to admit, I was grotesquely fascinated by the prospect of working for one of the world's most rapacious corporations, notorious for its unique internal “culture.” The ideological saturation job the company does on its employees was evident from the day I went in to interview.
Jeff, an older white man, probably in his mid-50s, complained about the performance of his former employees, telling me, “I've been here for 15 years and I've never fired anyone... People fire themselves.” Apparently even the lowest levels of management aren't responsible for the consequences of their own actions. Not that this is atypical of corporate lackeys with small amounts of power. He also expressed his devotion to the company, telling me some variation of “if you work hard, Wal-Mart will treat you right.
The loyalty of Wal-Mart's management to the company is a subset of patriotism. Separate, but not always indistinguishable from devotion to 'America'.
Later, at the end of my interview, I mentioned offhand to the personnel manager Joy that I needed to do some shopping. “You're going to shop here, right?” she asked, suddenly awakened from her rehearsed spiel and infused with concern. “Don't you shop at Wal-Mart?” I told her I usually shopped at the Tuscaloosa location, as it was closer to my apartment, even though I've been there, maybe six or seven times in the four years I've lived in Alabama.

After nearly two weeks I finally got called in for orientation. I arrived at eight in the morning, expecting an immediate barrage of ancient videos. Instead, we played board games. Our trainer, Donna, stressed the benefits of Wal-Mart's new training program. It was so much more efficient than the old one, she extolled. My fellow trainees and I (Jerry, a middle-aged man who also drove a truck, and Brad, at Stillman college) were made to play Sam Walton's version of 'Life.' The purpose of the game was to amass 'customer satisfaction' points. We'd roll the dice and land on squares that would either lower or raise our satisfaction level. Sometimes we'd have to read out of either the 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' flipbook, describing positive and negative customer experiences. These were things like 'employee shows you where a clearance item is, +3 points' or 'merchandise scans at the wrong price, -8 points.' Completely inane and a bit humiliating.

For the next 'module,' Donna spread a large map out on the table, which resembled both one of those cartoonish tourist maps you can find in almost any city's visitor's center and a 'Where's Waldo' book. By reading more flip books (aloud, to each other), we learned about Wal-Mart's illustrious history and other various factoids. We learned how immensely charitable the company is, and how it's now at the vanguard of the environmental movement through its 'sustainability' and 'Acres for America' programs. Wal-Mart is desperately trying to revamp its image by pushing fluorescent lightbulbs, recycling all its plastic trash bags and putting up solar panels. Oh and it's 'preserving' random patches of woodlands all over the country. This is supposed to compensate for all the waste it generates by hawking billions of dollars of cheap consumer goods and building enormous stores with even larger parking lots that increase traffic and thus carbon emissions. I could feel the vomit dangling from my uvula. But I kept quiet, even as Donna beamed: “I bet you didn't know that about Wal-Mart, did you?”

Donna, a 13 year veteran, was even more ecstatic about the company than anyone I'd met thus far. Her husband had died recently, she told us, and the insurance that Wal-Mart provided paid for her husband's heart surgery, and much of his cancer treatment before he passed away. I was certainly sympathetic, but found it slightly grotesque that she was using a personal tragedy to sell us on the magnanimity of the company, especially since her situation wasn't exactly congruous with ours. Donna was lucky to be a salaried employee, as most of her fellow employees don't get such coverage.
As a 'part-time' (33 hrs per week) employee, I'd have to wait a full twelve months to receive insurance. My fellow trainees, who would be full-time overnight maintenance workers (not an easy job) would have to wait six months for health benefits. If I was unlucky enough to have to stay at Wal-Mart for that amount of time, if I needed any serious medical treatment on my $13,000/yr salary, I'd be fucked. Sure, plenty of other employers offer little or no medical care. But how many of them have annual revenues of 374 billion dollars?

Next: I finally encounter the anti-union propaganda, the infamous cheer, selling guns

Comsat Angels - Independence Day

2008-06-01T18:35:00.001-07:00

Ellen Allien - 'Stadtkind'

2008-06-01T18:15:00.000-07:00

The wasted urban core is the new frontier, ca. 2001.

Google Earth ca. 1908

2008-05-25T22:07:00.000-07:00

Actually, it's more like 'Extraterrestrial Polaroid from 1908,' but whatever. From Alexander Bogdanov's 'Red Star,' which I'm enjoying very much so far:

"'We are about 2,000 kilometers away right now,' he said. 'Do you recognize what you see before you?'
I immediately recognized the harbor of a Scandinavian capital I had passed through a number of times on party business. The ships anchored in the roads presented a fascinating sight. With a single twist of a knob on the side of the telescope, Menni replaced the eyepiece with a camera. A few seconds later he removed it and inserted the entire device in an apparatus to one side which proved to be a microscope.
'We develop and print the image right here in the microscope without touching it with our hands,' he explained.'
After a few simple operations, which took some 30 seconds, he turned the eyepiece of the microscope over to me....A sailor setting a large box on the deck was frozen in his pose, as was a passenger showing him something with his hand. And to think that all of this was 2,000 kilometers away!"

This passage reminds me that innovations like Google Earth are tame when viewed in the context the history of human desire to control the earth by visualizing it as a totality. The release of the first actual photographs from space must have been thrilling, not least because they were immediate empirical verifications of maps. Proof that all the calculations and piecemeal observations used in cartography were accurate.

Anti-Travel

2008-05-25T20:50:00.000-07:00

This
interests me very much. It's not a new idea by any means, but I like that it's framed as an antidote to the ahistorical, limited forms of knowledge most tourism engenders. One could say it's a less indulgent, materialist take on the Situationist idea of 'drift', and a more scholarly version of urban exploration. Here's an excerpt:

"I know I’m going to sound like a geek, but I want to suggest that a little good old fashioned scholarship can trump acid in the inspiration stakes. The third part of the anti-travel writing process should involve research, a word which doesn’t have to have dusty, academic connotations. You could do your research talking to someone in a pub, or painstakingly tanscribing the graffiti on a toilet wall, or randomly opening a massive local history which nobody outside the district you’re studying has bothered to read. You don’t necessarily need a synoptic, God’s eye view of the place you’re studying – a view through a keyhole can be just as good, as long as you look hard enough. What is important is that you find some new angle on your subject, some sort of working hypothesis for your investigation."

When I lived at my last apartment, half of a shotgun-style house 16th Ave in Tuscaloosa, I'd considered something similar to this, researching the appearance, demographics and other contents of my neighborhood, which was deemed a 'historic' district. That this info was cached in the non-circulating, special collections library was a deterrent. I was already spending 8 hours a day working at a library, and didn't want to spend many more anchored to research. I plan to be more intrepid this summer. Writing about films is great, but as the article linked to above shows, they can reinforce, or even create ideas that drive the most pernicious forms of tourism.

Pandora's Box

2008-05-21T16:37:00.000-07:00

Since I don't have a job at the moment, and I'm able to coast on my savings for at least another couple of weeks before I'm forced into seasonal service industry work, my appetite for films has reached truly gluttonous proportions. I only have the super-basic cable that goes up to CSPAN, and the 4-at-a-time netflix plan isn't satisfying my need for moving pictures. Providentially, I was able to adopt the item depicted above: the ridiculously elaborate and expensive Janus 50 Film Box Set. I'd just intended to check out Rules of The Game, Loves of A Blonde, and maybe the documentary about Paul Robeson. But no, the University of Alabama library lets one lucky patron check out the entire thing for two weeks at a time. Why they didn't partition it out is beyond me, but it's consistent with the hyper-competitive "first come, first served" mentality that pervades all other University operations. I feel less guilty because it's interim term and I'm probably not preventing some budding aesthete from checking out this mammoth collection, nearly half of which I've seen anyway.

Men of style

2008-05-17T20:13:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts on Melville's Le Samourai:

In one sense Le Samourai is about the impossibility of maintaining a masculine style, a cohesive, trans-historical masculinity that transcends any distinction between subject and object. Alain Delon plays Jef, a steely-eyed assassin without a past. He abides by feudal rules of honor and is perpetually dressed in the iconic manner of the noir detective--a suit, felt hat and trench coat. To belabor the samurai analogy, one could say he wears it like armor. Jef's fashion, his style is inseparable from his duty.

Besides the fact that the outfit would need to be starched and dry-cleaned hourly (a matter the film doesn't address, definitely adding to the sense of hyperreality that surrounds Jef) it also embodies the contradiction that eventually leads to Jef's demise. His clothing is quotidian in its form--such a look is common. But his particular iteration of that generic look is exceptional, and striking in its particularity. Like his gaze, Jef's clothes are always pressed, pristine, exceptionally, impossibly crisp. This tension between anonymity and singularity is borne out in the narrative. Jef appears, from a distance, enough the everyman that those who witness him at the scene of a hit have difficulty identifying him at the police station. Yet when the police, acting on a hunch rather than evidence, begin to track him, he's all too recognizable and can no longer blend in. One could say that Jef's style is the inverse of subcultural fashions, like early punk, that eventually get deployed as common tropes. Yet unlike the walking cliche, Jef remains 'cool.' Part of this is because he's actually an agent of death, which immediately makes him more legitimate and not just a man walking around in a costume or someone engaging in camp appropriation.
But there's a special perversity in Jef's over-identification with a masculine style. Rather than intentionally exposing the contradictions of the Law in a Dionysian way, it marks a fidelity to another law, the Bushido code. It's an anachronism, but clearly Melville recognized its persistent presence in 20th century masculinity and symbolically put it to death. Although this is only done with a grave reluctance--Jef attempts to resolve the contradiction between his personal and public fidelities until the instant he's killed.
But this style extends to the rest of the film as well. It doesn't just accompany Jef's body, it bleeds into the sets, the way Paris is colored and the methodical, efficiently brusque cuts. Most scenes scenes are shot in very sharp but cool colors, primarily grey, blue and beige. It's the closest a film shot in color came to the mood of noir. When this pattern is broken, with the intrusion of red or a brightly lit room we feel anxiety. The same thing happens when Jef is asked by the police to exchange his clothing with another man--the persistence of the image has been denied us. These aesthetic disjunctions reveal the potential power film has to create an intelligible narrative that presents an internally consistent world and internally consistent moral laws. A number of other films from the period lift the curtain on both film and masculinity, or the existence of both as 'metanarratives'--The Blow-Up, Chinatown, etc--but do so in ways that are easily interpreted as symbolic rather than both symbolic and reflexive.
The film also leaves me to wonder--why a mode of masculinity that wants to eschew all visible traces of desire? I have a feeling there's a neat Lacanian answer for this.

Power comes from the barrel of...metal palms?

2008-05-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

Could the Machiavellian idea of the 21st century be a combination of Nikolai Tesla, Pat Tillman and that smug fucker who owns Virgin Airlines?
I'm not really familiar with its comic book history, but it seems appropo that the Iron Man franchise has taken the leap to film. Iron Man (still?) presents us with the ultimate white liberal male fantasy: one man spends the first half of his life as a genius/playboy, inheriting a weapons manufacturing company, having lots of sex with high-profile models, frivolously spending wads of cash on modernist he knows nothing about, building the most advanced explosive devices in the world and frequently making high-profile public appearances. Close friends include both Hugh Hefner and high-ranking officers in the Pentagon. Then he has the luxury of a near-death experience (from which he escapes heroically), quickly followed by an epiphany: the most pernicious aspects of his lifestyle are ethically problematic. This allows him to take international realpolitik into his own hands (with a little help from his female and African-American sidekicks). He uses his formidable technological prowess to simultaneously battle corporate corruption in the US and lay to waste a band of rogue Arabs in Afghanistan.
The marriage of humanitarianism and excess also has a particularly American, puritanical component. The playboy realizes the one woman he hasn't slept with, his fairly servile personal assistant, may just be the soulmate he's always been missing. She's also Gwyneth Paltrow. So both the man and the nation are redeemed in both virility and moral rectitude, though it's the ability of individual genius that prevails, and with style.
I can't say I didn't enjoy the movie. Visually it's impressive, and lacks far-fetched fantasy elements and tepid, predictable romantic subplots of most superhero films. It also risks addressing real political issues more bluntly. Though I wish I could say the point of the whole spectacle was to show us that such an unlikely character would be necessary to restore the US to some kind of moral respectability. Alas, we only learn that even a budget of hundreds of millions can't buy Robert Downey Jr. a better looking liquid moustache.

Border Incident

2008-04-21T21:57:00.000-07:00

I'm always amazed by the generic flexibility of 'noir' films, especially during their immediate postwar heyday. Before the early 50s, these crime films had developed a series of recognizable tropes, but didn't adapt these so reflexively as to constitute parody or conspicuous appropriation. Released as part of Warner Brothers' film noir box set #3, Border Incident (1949) was directed by Anthony Mann, who also directed the excellent Side Street (1950) as well as a slew of films with Jimmy Stewart I've not seen. It certainly lives up to the noir classification, adopting the dramatic (gun violence, hard-boiled language, double-crosses, chase scenes, the tension between criminal and legal organization) and the technical (shadows, night shots, location shooting, frequent silhouettes) tropes of the genre. But it's also a modern western. Largely set in the desert of the southwest, its climactic sequence features a classic shoot-out scene in a canyon. Bullets ricochet off the canyon walls, a man is shot and clutches his stomach all-too convincingly and falls off a hill, and antagonists stalk each other around large rocks until one of them forgets to watch his back.
It's also a docu-drama. The film opens with an aerial shot of large, irrigated farms in California with a voice-over informing us that these bountiful agricultural areas are the result of not only American ingenuity (of course), but the labor of "a vast army of farm workers who must be available when needed." This army "comes from our neighbor to the south, from Mexico." The narrator then tells us that most of these workers, the braceros, obey the law, but some enter illegally. Unfortunately, the narrator tells us, the braceros are preyed upon by bandits who roam both sides of the border. We're told that this information is courtesy of the INS. The film then cuts to a scene where three men are viciously stabbed to death and thrown into a pit of quicksand by said bandits.
As such it also functions as a piece of propaganda for the bracero program, a guest worker system implemented by the US and Mexican governments in 1942. Millions of experienced Mexican workers were given temporary permits to work in the U.S. in the fields, and for a time, building railroads. As one might expect, workers were paid low wages, discriminated against and abused . Though it did provide cheap labor for US agricultural markets, the program didn't reduce illegal immigration as was expected. Demand for labor far exceeded the legal labor quotas, so the program was abandoned in 1964.
The Mexican and American officials who go undercover to stop the human trafficking are portrayed as unmitigated saviors, and ostensibly the film sets up the organized criminals as the only agents of exploitation. The undercover Mexican official tells a bracero that his white counterpart is "a police agent--he's a friend of yours, and of all braceros." This ranks as one of the most ridiculous lines ever uttered on film. To my delight that particular 'friend' of the braceros is run over by a large plowing machine.
One could argue that the film's didactic, patriotic frame is, as David Boxwell argues, "subverted and challenged," by the violence and "disquieting" camera techniques. It seems that these formal elements might just as easily be interpreted as condemnation of the underworld in which most of the film takes place.
More convincing evidence of the film's subversive potential is that the cops seem all too comfortable in their roles as criminals, especially the character of Jack Bearnes who quickly transforms into a hard-boiled tough guy. Of course the ambiguous ethical intentions of the law's agents is a common noir trope, but it's put into greater relief here.
Though the film does fail to locate the real sources of bracero oppression in the state-sponsored market system (not surprising for a film made during the heyday of HUAC), it doesn't present the migrant workers themselves as the problem. It's notable that there's a complete absence of the anti-immigrant paranoia that saturates the media today. How xenophobic our current moment is.

Seaweed

2008-04-14T17:11:00.000-07:00

Seaweed is/are one of several bands from my junior high days I can not only still listen to without cringing, but enjoy more for pleasure than nostalgia. As if pleasure is often completely divorced from nostalgia. They seem to represent the recklessness of my suburban youth, where some degree of anti-social behavior seemed necessary to deal with the life-sucking regularity and inanity of the surrounding environs. Their music also marks for me, the last period where planning social activities and cultural knowledge were not yet regulated by the internet.
I don't know exactly how we communicated with each other before 1996, but I suppose we used the telephone, or hung out in the driveway until someone rode by and said, "let's go ride bikes in the desert," "let's shoot bb guns at X's house," or "dude, I found some m-80s in my dad's garage, want to blow something up?"

I first learned of Seaweed through the Sub Pop catalog (print--made of paper!), which I'd sent away for after finding an advert for it in the cd tray of Nirvana's "Bleach" album. One of Seaweed's albums was described simply as "Fugaziosbourne," which is still the best description I've ever heard of a band in terms of accuracy, terseness and silliness.
There was a stubborn regionalism based around that label and others (K, KRS, C/Z, Up, to some extent Sub Pop, etc.) that seems impossible or almost impossible now. Sonically, Seaweed have little to do with the rest of the region's musical output at that time, opting for melodic, almost apocalyptic earnestness instead of the neo-psychedelia, gritty pessimism and/or hedonism usually associated with that scene. This might have something to do with the fact that the band recorded some of their best albums before they were 21. Or that they were really just more clever and prescient than a lot of those other bands. Seaweed had more in common with bands like Samiam and Quicksand (whose drummer played on their Merge album 'Actions and Indications'), but outmatched them in energy and intelligence. They took the blueprint of melodic hardcore bands like Dag Nasty and 7 Seconds, stripped it of the 'shout-alongs' and other accoutrements of false subcultural unity, and added (tasteful) elements of the soft-loud dynamics that pervaded most rock music of the period. And oh the incredible hooks.
Even though it's not readily apparent, I think Seaweed were involved in the construction of an alternate regionalism, a realist one, rather than the myriad forms of escapism and psychological insularity that marked the big 'grunge' bands and sonic outliers like Sunny Day Real Estate. They named their home studio 'TacWa,' named their only major-label album 'Spanaway' after a lower-income suburb of Tacoma. There were also the infamous 'Visualize Tacoma' t-shirts. I had one once, until it went missing in high school. Their lyrics often referenced environmental degradation and collapse. And while this isn't exclusively a hallmark of Northwestern regionalism, ecological concern is certainly more rampant up there than in many parts of the US.

I saw the video for Kid Candy from the "Four" LP on television exactly once, at the very end of an episode of 120 minutes, and I still find it remarkable in a number of ways. Not least because it's so easy for me to identify with its portrayal of lower-middle class suburban kids taking full advantage of massive amounts of empty space. Before the housing boom that hit Boise in the mid-to-late 90s, there were empty lots everywhere, not to mention endless swaths of public land to build ramps on and fuck around in. And if we were lucky enough to have money, there were video game arcades--more social spaces that have now disappeared due to the individualization of technology.

And there's the fact that the video is a hilarious and debilitating parody of Soul Asylum's obnoxious "Runaway Train" video. But it's not just a case of the young, snotty upstarts making a knee-jerk indictment of a corporate band peddling their bleeding-heart pet cause. The parody is in service of positive content--both a coming to terms with and a lament for urban encroachment. The industrious adolescent thieves, make a private rebellion out of their fairly bleak environment, and simultaneously leave a lot of waste in doing so. And then there are the lyrics: " Shovel dug into ground/the soil forms in mounds/then the roots thrown into the fire...burnt down/...this land's played out/not a spot's the same...respect is key/it's all that matters." In tandem with the video those last two lines signify a sardonic attitude toward the band being parodied and genuine environmental respect--a theme that seems to reoccur frequently in Aaron Stauffer's lyrics. Not surprising that he moved to Northern California to become a kayak guide.

Other reasons to love Seaweed:

--A critique of ideology crops up in these lyrics from the song 'Squint'--"Reject your will, you'll find it's not your own"
--The lyrics "let's face the shelves awhile, let's face the shelves"--evidence of having worked shitty retail jobs
--Covered both Joy Division's "Warsaw" and Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way." The latter may have set a standard for improbable covers by a Seattle-area band until Botch came around and covered 'O Fortuna' and the B-52s 'Rock Lobster.'