Dear Friends,
Four of the five school days I have a group of students who come to my room in the afternoon so I can help them get better at speaking, reading, and writing English. They come from the other fourth grade classrooms where their homeroom teacher is working with the kids who are proficient in English. It’s a strange group of kids.
I’m so used to my homeroom class where the worst kids are still pretty great. I mean, evil Nancy is still kind of a c-word sometimes and apparently was hitting kids while I was in Maine and had subs, but she’s still very manageable most of the time. Some of these afternoon kids, though.
Wow.
There are some really great kids who want to learn and our actively participating in the learning process. There are others who are just not down with the English just yet and haven’t quite decided if they care one way or the other, and then there are those who have figured out that they can just kind of play at school because they act like they don’t understand.
These are my least favorite kids. 9 or 10 years old and already figured out how to ‘game the system.’ One of these kids, I had her older brother two years ago, so I know she has been in our school for about two solid years now. She claims to speak zero English, yet I see and hear her speaking English to her classmates.
Now, it’s not the best English, but she understands way more than she lets on that she does. Her brother was the same type of kid, too. Lazy as fuck. It is kind of heart breaking and kind of infuriating.
I’m still trying to figure out how to reach these kids in a way that empowers them to take the control they think they have and use it for learning. Many of these kids are quite capable but just feel like they can come to class and play and talk to their neighbors but when I ask them a question, they can pretend to not understand. They will learn, though.
Fun thing, too, is that because of the law here, I can’t provide any assistance to the kids in their native language as part of my lesson. I can’t put a direction, for example, on the board in the Swahili that one of the children speaks or in Uzbek, which another one speaks. I can’t even put my learning intention in Spanish on the board, either.
Thanks, Tom Horne, you shit eating goat fucker.
*****
1995 was quite a year for me. I found out that I was a dad, moved out from living with my long-term girlfriend, and was making quite a bit of noise with Hillbilly Devilspeak. It was also the year that Fugazi put out one of my favorite records, Red Medicine.
Red Medicine certainly made a tumultuous year easier for me. As a devoted Fugazi fan, it was always exciting for a new record to come out from them, but I remember being particularly impressed with this effort. No offense to In On The Kill Taker, their previous record, but Red Medicine blew it away.
One of the things that I really like about Red Medicine is the controlled (or semblance thereof) chaos all over it. From the very beginning, it is a noisy little (not little, huge, really) thing. “Do You Like Me” starts out with a noisy a bit then just explodes into this frenetic blast of riffage.
The energy flows right into “Bed For The Scraping” that has a cool Joe Lally bass line floating through it. I love the guitar work here, too. Ian Mackaye may not be the greatest guitar player ever on a technical level, but the guy certainly knows how to get great sounds out of a guitar and amp.
“Bed For The Scraping” is probably one of my favorite Fugazi songs. Listen to it.
“Latest Disgrace” is a Guy Picciotto song (as half of the songs on this record are). It really allows the duo of Lally and Brendan Canty (drummer extraordinaire) to really shine while the guitar noise layer the song beautifully. It’s a heavy song, emotionally.
“Birthday Pony” sounds like a Birthday Party song at the outset. I’m a big fan of when the band would include different instrumentations like the clarinet in this one. It sounds like there is a piano in there, but there isn’t.
One of the great things about Fugazi is how they featured anger in their songs. They never made anger seem like an unhealthy thing. This is a really important thing for everyone to realize. Anger isn’t bad. It’s what some people do with it that is harmful.
“Forensic Scene” was probably my first favorite on this one. It’s just so damn cool sounding. The way the song builds tension is really wonderful, too. Fugazi were masters of this and by the time they got here to Red Medicine, they had it down pat. “Forensic Scene” is a master class in building tension.
“Combination Lock” is a song that I have never really given a whole lot of thought to over the years. I think the single note guitar part at the beginning is not my favorite thing, but then you have Lally and Canty doing their thing underneath the high pitch wail, and it works. Eventually, about a minute in, things expand and the requisite space that all Fugazi songs seem to have is more apparent.
Fugazi has certainly had some good instrumentals over the years.
“Fell, Destroyed” is another one that I just loved in 1995. I think because I was going through a lot of heavy stuff in my life, I identified with the idea of things falling apart. This one has a little bit of a Fall influence, too. I wonder if that is why they named it “Fell, Destroyed.” The song really blooms throughout the almost four minutes it exists.
“By You” is one of those songs I would like to hold up as exhibit A in my argument that you don’t always have to play the notes from a scale to make something beautiful Mackaye plays some notes that sound like they don’t quite belong (to the discerning ear) but they totally work. Noisy guitar is not ugly guitar. What starts out as something humble sounding grows to something heavy and powerful.
“By You” is also the only song on the record that Lally sings lead on. His vocals remind me a bit of the guy from Hater. Good stuff, Joe.
“Version” is another instrumental. It’s also super noisy and has Picciotto on clarinet again, too. It’s a good interlude.
“Target” has a great, nimble bass line. It’s also got this incredible groove to it that is probably the tastiest on the record. Picciotto knows how to sing songs like this so well.
“Back to Base” almost sounds like a Husker Du riff for part of the song. I think it is how Lally plays a riff that descends then builds back up in a similar way to how Greg Norton would play for the Minneapolis legends.
As we get closer to the end of the record, there really aren’t enough superlatives to load onto this one. “Downed City” is presented as if it is a reminder that Fugazi is one of the greatest punk rock bands of all time. Sure, people call them ‘post-hardcore,’ or whatever, but they are just a great and inventive purveyor of punk rock.
“Long Distance Runner” is one that I really liked back in the day, too. I still love it, but there wasn’t something about the herky-jerky riff that makes (and made) me smile. A perfect ending to a perfect record.
*****
See you tomorrow.
So I asked AI to come up with an album cover by a band of elks who play sitar. The name of the record is Warm Enough for Wednesday. Enjoy.
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