Thursday, September 12th—I had plans, but the night went another way. A trail of cosmic dust had been laid and I followed it. And I happened to have my camera. I had gone to a meeting about a new art project I’ve been working on, a kind of visual writing. You would probably call it a film. Either way, it’s an experiment. And my collaborator was waiting for me at the Remedy Room bar in downtown Durham at 730pm.
I walked over from my car, a 3-minute jaunt from Morgan Street, through the alley by The Durham Hotel, along the sidewalk where the Speedy Q used to be, across the street to the courtyard by the Bull, down past Ninth Street Bakery, a little hop over the intersection by the now-closed Beyu Caffe, finally arriving at the bar that had once been called Criterion, and before that, Whiskey.
Along the way I bumped into everyone I have ever known in Durham. At least, that’s how a 3-minute walk felt like a 10-minute parade of nostalgia. Friends hugging me on the sidewalk, others waving from the window at Pizzeria Toro, another on a bike rounding the corner by Bullseye Bicycle Shop, and in front of Remedy sat a promoter I knew from the Moogfest days, typing on his computer. He said there’s a punk show upstairs at Rubies. If I wanted to go, I could “just go,” he said.
Surreal is a word that is overused. But it is the only word that fits tonight. Frenetic is too harsh, ethereal is too soft. Incandescent sounds nice but doesn’t carry the right meaning. The night has a flow to it, in the same way that water and electricity both have currents and if channeled effectively, you have power and light, which are really the same thing.
Water has been a theme lately and I told my collaborator that the change I feel inside me feels like water seeking a new vessel to fill. I told her I want to go from the puddle to the sea. Fitting then that I had just gone to the ocean last weekend, dipped my toes in the Atlantic, captured metaphors with my camera, and have now brought them to Remedy Room to share.
Recently there has been something in the air. My dearest friend calls it “USA!” or “Universe Strikes Again!” He died yesterday morning and the night feels surreal because of that too, or perhaps, especially because of that. The cosmic dust had been laid bare for him and he followed it to the end. I was there. I witnessed his departure. I was holding his hand when he left. And soon I will become aware of that void—his absence—and I intend to fill it with art. My collaborator and I agreed that loss is an undercurrent of the film project.
Lately I have been writing with my camera and taking pictures with my pen. Sometimes I think maybe that has always been true, but recently this personal truism has become gospel to me, something incontrovertible. I write without contestation. Expression, not content. Can you see the difference yet?
I took out my camera after I bumped into an artist I knew when I went to close out my tab. I took pictures of his hands while he and my collaborator spoke about going to high school together just across the street at Durham School of the Arts. They were the highly misbehaved class of 2006. My high school is 800 miles away and was recently torn down, but I was also class of 2006 and all of my classmates were delinquent in some way. Even me.
Though I never contributed to the statistics that earned us the badge of “most penalized class” to ever pass through those now-destroyed hallways, I did orchestrate the senior prank. “Detour 06” we called it.
I expended all of my accumulated goodwill with the teachers and staff on a single action on the last day of high school. Neither I nor any of my classmates were punished for breaking into the school at 6am and building a cement wall in one of the hallways that forced everyone to walk around the entire school to get to the other side. The principal pulled me aside later that day and said, “We know it was you.” That was when I learned they had secretly installed cameras in all of the hallways earlier that year. Nevertheless, we got away with it. All of us.
By this point in the night, my nostalgia parade had started to feel more like a mosh pit of memories. I decided to embrace the whirlwind and “just go” to the punk show upstairs at Rubies.
Didn’t even look at the show bill. I went in blind, following that current of electric dust into unknown sounds. When I got to the top of the stairs, I told the door guy that the promoter was supposed to put me on the list. He looked at me, saw the camera, and accepted that I was being truthful. Neither of us actually used the word, but “journalist” opens many doors. (Though it closes others.)
Punk shows don’t usually have doors. This one had stairs and I had ascended these particular ones many times for this very reason. Though, I hadn’t started my night thinking I was going to cover a show. What does “cover” even mean? Nothing about this story qualifies as journalistic coverage, but I think you already knew that.
The camera pulled me toward the stage. The lighting was perfect, bright and focused on the electrified two-piece punk expression delighting a small audience of fervent listeners. I didn’t even know the name of the band but the song they were playing when I walked in had a kind of surf rock feel, melodious and wavy like piña coladas on the beach. This is a punk show, right? Yes, the shredding guitar made that obvious, but punk is not a singular genre or a restrictive sound. Punk is a feeling, a form of expression that refuses to be confined or defined.
The band turned out to be Cardiel, a skate punk duo from Mexico City. Like many bands who perform at “punk shows” this one describes itself as a “rock band”. It’s a generic description indeed, intentionally vague, open to the possibility of whatever might happen on stage.
Punk embraces its contradictions, much like my internal emotional landscape on this particular evening. You can be angry and have a good time. You can be in mourning and still smile. You can find delight in talking to strangers and still miss your friends. Accepting the turbulence of contradiction is the very essence of emotional fluency and self-knowledge. Punk is one tool among many in the arsenal of creative expression to aid in this understanding, this permission to feel whatever you gotta feel. And I am one of many authors using the language of feeling to fill up spaces, abysses, and voids. I didn’t mean to go to the punk show, but I didn’t have to mean it. Intentionality is irrelevant when riding a current. You go where it leads you.
