Wood Theft
and going up and down the west coast all the time
Happy winter solstice, happy long darkness. Is it time soon to crack an eye open and squint toward a clarifying next year? I’d like to keep sleeping, but the days keep coming. 2024 will bring a few more Mount Eerie shows for me to tell you about along the historically hippie dippy west coast. Tickets are all on sale now by clicking on the venue name:
Friday, March 1st, 2024 - Ojai, Cal. - Deer Lodge
Saturday, March 2nd, 2024 - Los Angeles, Cal. - Walt Disney Concert Hall/Los Angeles Philharmonic, Mount Eerie playing as support for the US premier of Dirty Projectors and Los Angeles Philharmonic perform David Longstreth’s Song Of The Earth
Sunday, March 3rd, 2024 - San Francisco, Cal. - Grace Cathedral
Tuesday, March 5th, 2024 - Arcata, Cal. - The Miniplex
Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 - Eugene, Ore. - WOW Hall
You are invited. Please come!
It seems like only 5 minutes ago that I unloaded the car from the last little tour, the exhilarating short blast of shows with Black Belt Eagle Scout. Here are some pictures from Orcas, Anacortes, Seattle, Vancouver, & Portland:
We had so much fun playing these smaller DIY all ages shows. Two per night in most places. That meant 4 sets per night for KP and Camas, playing in both bands. It was exhausting and transcendent.
An undertone of every day, both at the shows and just in the world, was a feeling of pushing back against colonization. Black Belt Eagle Scout sings of being Swinomish in the deepest way, connected through blood and across time to these lands and waters. I feel my own kind of connection with a much shallower history as a non-indigenous person from this same place. To get to travel together and sing together about these things was a powerful experience for me personally. And each night we sang a new song of mine, “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization”, as well as other statements in the songs about fuck the police and Land Back and other recognitions of these deep and ongoing injustices. In each place people hooted in supportive agreement. In Portland a few people tried to get a “Free Palestine” chant going. The room always felt right on the edge of the big spill of feeling and conversation about these things, but also we were there to express ourselves through this loud music and the specific chosen poem lyrics of these songs, so we kept playing. The statements remained lyrical and non-chanted (mostly).
I’m home now for a second and feeling compelled to quickly, crudely, affirm in public what I think about this stuff. Instead of waiting for a someday where I’ll get my eloquence together and deliver a masterpiece of an essay that contributes meaningfully to the big discourse out there, for now I just want to say some of what I believe:
We live in a huge unprocessed wound. The genocide of the indigenous people of this continent, North America, and the theft of the land itself is a gigantic trauma that we all live in the unacknowledged shocking aftermath of. Not even aftermath… it’s fresh, current even. It hurts to look at so most of us just don’t do it. Plus we live in a giant exploitative system that relies on maintaining this huge blindspot for its own survival. The complex ongoing horrifying genocide in Palestine right now is another example of the ways that these unprocessed traumas can layer and compound and explode in ever-expanding violence that rings out for generations, centuries. A historically victimized people projects their fears onto their powerless neighbors and inflicts the same unhealed acts of violence, over and over, planting seeds of suffering deep and wide. People with immense power murder people with none, out of a runaway maniacal fear that they are the true vulnerable victims no matter what. Fear and violence blinds us all. I don’t know solutions really, but I know that looking honestly at the hard truth of how each of us is complicit in this stuff in various ways is a first step.
Also I think private property is a fucked up thing and I’m curious how we got so deep in this mania about it, but I’ll maybe have more to say about that later. It’s related.
That’s enough for now. A scattered newsletter for today.
Have a good end of year everyone. I love you.
Phil
currently reading:
The Dispossessed: Karl Marx's Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor by Daniel Bensaïd
Nine-Tenths of the Law: Property and Resistance in the United States by Hannah Dobbz
Appreciate the book reccs, and for you speaking directly. These things--genocide, dispossession, material and cultural erasure--network together like a tumor, connected by the threads of an economic and political system that not only allow them but seem to produce and require them. And yet, so often, they're treated (if they are treated at all) as distinct symptoms, things to be addressed with technological fixes or limited policy solutions. So, I appreciate you laying it out this way, with all that entails.
Looking forward to the next time you make it to the east coast. Caught you and Julie Doiron in Brooklyn just a couple of months before Covid hit--a small blessing to carry that show's energy into what followed.
Happy holidays Phil. Wish you the best. Thank you for your words. Hope to catch you live one day.