“Maybe I would’ve gone about it less bluntly, or somehow differently. But not much, not much differently.” – Michelle Cruz Gonzalez, ‘The Spitboy Rule”
They’re calling it “my most doesn’t make sense title yet,” so: Michelle Cruz Gonzalez’s nickname was Todd. She talks about how in the late 80s-90s punk scene, your last name was your band name, so she was “Todd Spitboy” to a lot of people. Many people expect Michelle to be a guy, especially because she hits the drums so hard.
I don’t wanna get too ahead of the book in the intro, so let’s just say that gender bending is cool, and people should do it more often.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Two books I feel completely confident that 20-year-old or even 16-year-old me would have enjoyed. Not all that rare a thing, but given how different I am from age 16 or 20, somewhat remarkable. That’s right, two books. Because while I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep this pace up, I read a lot of poetry over the break. I’m talking, of course, about The Spitboy Rule by Michelle Cruz Gonzales and The Parachutist by Jose Hernandez Diaz.
The Spitboy Rule by Michelle Cruz Gonzales: what a kickass book. A crisp 129 pages, a series of disjointed tales that add up to a portrait of a band. It’s such a time capsule into the late 80s/early-mid 90s, too. Michelle talks about her ethnicity being “invisible,” and it’s a reminder of how much the 1990s really wanted to be “colorblind.” Things are different now, and as grating as identity politics can sometimes be, it seems pretty obvious to be that society needs to be more racially conscious (not in the way Nazi punks mean it, obviously). Colorblindness is stupid. Thinking sexism and queerphobia have been “solved,” as Steve Albini talked about thinking and later regretting, is stupid. Inclusivity and a celebratory multi-culturism are important pillars of a society, and we should be pro-active about those things. I don’t want to paint the book as “Michelle wanders from racist microaggression to sexist macroaggression,” though. This is a book about a truly kickass band.
I bought this from the same Haymarket tent as I got Going Underground (it’s also off PM Press). I’d never heard of Spitboy, but the fact that Los Crudos lead singer Martín Sorrondeguy was endorsing the book was a big selling point for me. Obviously, I am a guy who thinks punk is best when it wears its radical leftist heart on its sleeve. Spitboy was that. Spitboy was also DIY to the core, and they never let fears or insecurities stop them from going out and kicking ass. This isn’t a “sex, drugs, rock n roll” book, because that stuff isn’t really what tour is like. That said, Michelle isn’t straight edge or shy about sex. It’s just that Spitboy has a rule about no romantic entanglements on tour, and they don’t really have time to drink. They’re too busy screen-printing their own shirts and bonding with bands in other cities in a way that makes you really believe in the punk rock spirit.
I love that she ends with the Spitboy creation story. As soon as the band breaks up, the book goes all the way back to the beginning, and Michelle tells us how it started. Makes my shriveled punk heart sing.
The Parachutist by Jose Hernandez Diaz: this book is incredibly endearing. It’s strange, whimsical—almost like if Adventure Time was a book of mostly prose poems by a Mexican-American poet. It’s certainly in that James Tate (who gets thanked in the acknowledgments)-Zachary Schomburg-Heather Christle (who blurbed the book) lineage. Many of these poems are truly wonderful. Still, with a few of them, I found myself wishing the language surprised me as much as the images did. I’m not arguing for strange for strange’s sake. More like, more surprising adjectives or slightly shorter sentences. Still, I loved the characters that cropped up—the skeleton, the man in the Pink Floyd shirt—and found the whole world of this book so charming. If you think you don’t like poetry? Check this book out and see if your mind changes.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Look, it’s gonna be a Spitboy set. Real quick about the links tho: I collect links (a fancy way of saying I never close tabs on my phone) over time. This week, reading about Spitboy—one of the ultimate DIY bands, who screen-printed their own shirts (like, for band merch) on tees they bought from thrift stores and had to be talked into amenities like roadies—I wanted to contrast that with how awful and soulless and and anti-punk and anti-DIY and anti-human AI is. Fuck AI. Listen to Spitboy. At the Fireside Bowl, no less.
- Of course, a brief update on ICE: Whistleblower drops ‘largest ever’ ICE leak to unmask agents: ‘The last straw’ by Nicole Charky-Chami in RAWStory, Why It Matters that Renee Nicole Macklin Good Was a Poet by Alison Stine in Nonprofit Quarterly, ICE’s Violence Is “By Design” Under Trump by Isabela Dias in Mother Jones, Former Resident Of South Shore Building Raided By Feds Is Now Missing, Police Say by Maxwell Evans and More Evidence Ordered Unsealed In Excessive Force Case Against Feds As Dismissal Delayed by Melody Mercado in Block Club, Illinois and Chicago file lawsuit against Trump administration over its ‘unlawful and dangerous’ tactics during Midway Blitz by Tonia Hill and Q&A: HOW TO STOP ICE (albeit, a couple decades late) by Morgan Elise Johnson in The Triibe, Far From Free: Venezuelan Migrants in Limbo After Maduro Capture and Venezolanos en el limbo político y migratorio by Alma Campos in South Side Weekly
- Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI by Varsha Bansal in The Guardian
- The More Scientists Work With AI, the Less They Trust It by Joe Wilkins in Futurism
- He Grew Obsessed With an AI Chatbot. Then He Vanished in the Ozarks by Miles Klee in Rolling Stone
- Doctors Catch Cancer-Diagnosing AI Extracting Patients’ Race Data and Being Racist With It by Joe Wilkins in Futurism
- Who’s Responsible For Elon Musk’s Idiot Chatbot Producing On-Demand Child Sexual Abuse Material? by Albert Burneko in Defector. A pull quote, because Defector is subscription-based (but worth it!): “I think it’s important for a person to hold an imaginary sane and just society in their mind, against which to measure the actual society that exists instead. In a sane and just society … well, Grok probably doesn’t exist in the first place in a society like that. (Also, in this universe, Elon Musk found his highest personal calling as dinner for a family of hogs some 20 years ago.) But somewhere along the wide spectrum of social operability in between that sane and just place and the shambling, clattering junk heap where I wrote this blog and you’re reading it, there is a theoretical place in which OK, yes, Grok exists, but maybe not absolutely everything has yet been motherfucked all the way out of function.”
What’re you still doing here? Wanna hear Michelle read?
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Here’s a wonderful excerpt from Michelle’s book about Pete the Roadie, a professional punk roadie. This type of attitude is whack if you work at, like, Chili’s or whatever. It’s pretty admirable, borderline heroic, if this is your attitude towards art.
“Pete seemed to believe that his primary job was to serve artists, to make it easier for them to make the music that he loved and spread the ideas that he believed in. He did what he did without the glory of actually being in the band. I admired his code, being a woman whose life had, in large part, been about serving others, helping my mom take care of my brother and sister, and in my job as a preschool teacher…But when applied to me, it felt decadent. I didn’t feel comfortable being served…All that mattered to [Pete] was that my drums were set up properly and nothing moved out of place when I played them.”
Go out and make art this weekend. Or better yet, encourage your friends to make art.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris