Crossing Identity Streams with the Thorns of Life

The first couple of days of the year of the Ox have produced strange yet pleasant nostalgia about the days before the Internet, the daze before identity markers. It was a time before I knew how to wave any identity-driven flags. If I was any younger then I might freak out at the nerdiness I embodied 16 years ago. Luckily I’m able to just let all that shit go and enjoy the fact that I was a smart angst-ridden teenager that managed to have a good time on my terms while maintaining a chuntara sartorial sensibility that teetered between pleasing my immigrant parents and gliding under the gender appropriate radar.

I am 32 years old and I spent my adolescence avoiding sex and drugs to chase bands around the sprawl of Los Angeles at soon-to-be documented sites like Jabberjaw, the Anti-Club, the Alligator Lounge, Spaceland, Macondo on Melrose which was right around the corner to the Bike Kitchen in the Heliotrope haven for the post-messenger bicyclist, Saint Lucy’s which was adjacent to Fais Do Do, UCLA’s Coop, Claremont Colleges, and Cell 63, which rotated out of several public storage garages in Sun Valley, Pacoima and Northridge. I was too young for Raji’s in Hollywood and Fender’s in Long Beach but I was able to catch a lot of great and epoch-defining shows, at least for myself.

I hate sounding like a some kind of technological Archie Bunker but it was a time in which people actually used to postal system and fanzines to communicate their feelings about bands, shows, tours and the concomitant gossip to one another across zip codes, area codes, counties and states. I swear I am no Luddite but there was something kind of magical about actually using your hands on a typewriter, a steering wheel driving to Kinko’s, ripping off Kinko’s and selling the ‘zine to folks you talked to directly that I kind of miss.

But another thing I miss is the ability to compartmentalize my identity according to the band I listen to which brings me to my current site of torment: The Thorns of Life.

Thorns of Life is the new Blake Schwarzenbach musical project. Blake Schwarzenbach is my fucking Bob Dylan. More than anything I write this blog because I cannot turn the hands of time back to last Thursday. It was the day in which instead of turning in grad school applications I should have opened the goddamn LA Weekly to see that Thorns of Life were playing in some god-forsaken spot in Eagle Rock.




I am an asshole. I missed the show. Can somebody hold me?


Yet, who cares, right? Well, you obviously don’t know that I have been enamored with Schwarzenbach’s first significant band, Jawbreaker, for almost 20 years now. That is fine, I can’t expect you to know such meaningless crap about me. But Jawbreaker’s oeuvre pretty much helped me understand, and dare I say, contextualize gendered dynamics, uncomfortable truths and sexually tense circumstances, too (see the song Chesterfield King off their 24-Hour Revenge Therapy for reference). I was so butt hurt and unable to process grief that when Jawbreaker broke up and Blake moved to New York, I just could not deal let alone enjoy his next project, the magnificent Jets to Brazil.

Blake’s new band features Aaron Cometbus of Crimpshrine and the Cometbus mini-bibles all handwritten in the most perfect penmanship from the empty train cars of the Southern Pacific. The band also features Daniela Sea on bass. Yes, Daniela Sea of the (*shudder*) L Word. I feel weird about that collaboration—he on guitar, he on drums and she on bass. Sure, she played in Bay Area punk rock mainstays The Gr’Ups and Cipher in the Snow but so what? I was all about Blatz, Tribe 8 and The Tourettes and Raooul anyway, you know the stuff that actually made it down to Los Angeles. I was into The Haggard, never Bitch and Animal.

Hey man, Daniela is fine on the L Word and to each their own but I am tired of accepting the mediocrity in the name of visibility, especially considering the perfunctory writing on that show. I will also never forgive those pig-bitches for the “Papi” character perpetuating bullshit Latina stereotypes. So why does Sea have to ruin it and be in a band with my man? Now all these lesbians will be at Thorns of Life show—and all we have in common is that we have sexual relations with other female-bodied females.

Man, and to think that I was so desperately trying to avoid the L Word at all costs this year and like the freakin’ mafia, Schwarzenbach pulls me back into this bottom-feeding scene by joining forces with the likes of them. This is worse than gender policing in public restrooms. What is this discomfort that I feel? Like it’s not bad enough to be rendered invisible by white dudes, I got to go and be terribly transparent to white lesbians that could rob me of my rightful place at Thorns of Life shows, too? My psychic wounds collected through punk rock are survivor scars I show to you now but I am more lenient on punk and indie rock scenes because they are places for misanthropes and fuck-ups. The lesbian scene portends to open its doors to all women-loving-women, which is bullshit. My trauma from those circuits of sociability is still alive and thriving every day.

So don’t get me wrong—I love the mixed gender and orientation bands. I love Hazel and Bloc Party and Husker Du and Unwound because you know with those bands it has always just been about the music not any sort of toxic psychic spillage. But of course, there’s this heinous zeitgeist that the L Word has become these last few years amongst the champions of the Kunte Kinte. I ask you: have you ever been to an L Word viewing party at a lesbian bar? Never had I felt like such a sloppy Mexican until I went to the Falcon in West Hollywood. To be inundated by power suits, crazy geometric hair and butch dykes in skinny jeans and leather jackets was too much for me to ever want to return.

Indie rock and punk shows offer a respite, a place of refuge if you will, from lesbian-specific spatial and social dysfunction. I have gone to rock shows and know that I can be ignored on my own terms. But lesbians! Who really understands them? When we’re not ignoring each other then we’re neglecting the playlist and end up resentfully dancing to vapid Katy Perry-like music. I am compelled to ________ the pain away and right now it looks like an Adam Sandler dramatic vehicle (I’m looking at you, Punch Drunk Love) might do the trick.

All I want is for my lesbian life to separate from my punk life, no matter how far apart they actually are—it somehow convinces me that I am in control of an otherwise powerless existence.

Thorns of Life is a Venn diagram I am unwilling to participate in at the present moment, but know I will have to at some point if I want my special feelings to be acknowledged and taken care of in the form of some cryptic, revenge-laden power pop scorcher. I guess I will be fine as long as there aren’t any Thorns of Life parties being held in West Hollywood or see any snarky posts about stocky lesbians in Dickies attire on Craigslist.

Ugh.