Tipsy cat, Maher Shalal Hash Baz

Volemosebbene

Monk

How to Start a Punk Band Workshop

Big Joanie are keen to decolonise and demystify the punk scene.

We want to do this to make it easier for everyone to join bands and start making the music they always wanted to hear.

This is why we created our How to Start a Punk Band workshop.

During this workshop we discuss how to start a band, why we started a DIY punk band, way perfection had nothing to do with creativity, how punk can be used a radical method of activism, run through various technical vocal warms ups and finally write a song using maracas, pots and pans and whatever else we find lying around!

It’s a fun and exciting way to get started if you’re looking for a platform if you want to make music but don’t know where to start.

If you want us to put on a workshop at your event email us at bigjoanieband@gmail.com.

For now here’s our playlist on how to start a punk band.

King-Cat 52 cover, 1996.  Based on a drawing by Zenchu Sato.

I’d not seen this one before. I’m going to settle down with King Cat.

me @ men

Guys, this is season ONE of the Simpsons.

I wish I could do the first week every week for the rest of my life.

The first day is the same as most other days. The second sees a a globular feeling forming in the bottom of your limbs but not much else to report. By day three, the relief is like nothing else you know. The evil twin of the relief felt coming out of that six-week flu sentence we all did last winter, it’s an old friend that begrudgingly accepts your hug, stiffly and without warmth. 

Weighty and sodden, even your clothes feel heavy on your back. It’s excruciating behind the eyes but you’ve no excuse to not go to work - you’re taking the cure they’ve given you, you’re better now. 

You need to worry about it but you can’t, it’s an effort to get up out of the chair, it’s an effort to think about getting up out of the chair, it’s an effort to think. 

Your body becomes a cat that won’t be talked down.

A series of aggressive directives sent from brain to body and you’re out of bed for day four. You lift someone else’s hand in slow-motion, you let someone else twist the tap in slow-motion, you watch as you take the longest shower a human has ever had. Maybe you are dying, maybe the pills will get no traction and this is you for the rest of your life. That wouldn’t be so bad, but without the memory fresh in your exhausted mind of the electrified ball of short-circuit nerve-endings sunk into your stomach.. how would you appreciate that this is the best you’ve ever felt? 

Day five is vegetative. You’re thinking back to the days where you’d lie on the floor having to forcibly relax every muscle in your body, sinking bones into floorboards to slow your heartbeat. Now it’s all you can do to blink. 

The sixth day, your eyes are two holes in space. One of your older colleagues is getting worried: you’re not politely smiling at his jokes. But he’s the only one, the others are making jokes about your period. You’re staring at a wall, eyes screaming to be closed, you serve customer after rude customer who stare at your leaden mouth barely controlled by anvil jaws and think you’re the stupid one.

“I think it’s really positive that you are sleeping.” She doesn’t seemed bothered that you’re racking up ~14 hours a day.

“I’ll write a letter to the counsellor.” Okay, good, but can you also help me?

Day seven and you’re coming out of the woods. It’s time to regain some composure and settle in to wait for your cold, hard life to arrive with a nine month supply and a noticeable upward change in your ability to be punctual.

~*~*~

This is the fourth time I’ve come back to this solution. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve asked them to do something else that won’t end with this solution but it always does. I’ve read and watched things and talked to people about it - people I respect a lot and also people I don’t know the tiniest thing about - and I try to emulate some of their eventual acceptance. It allows you to function while you are in a state of dysfunction but it also, eventually, saps your joy and this is the thing I can’t ignore. Muted and blunt, your once sparking, ADHD-inner-child has been sedated and sent back to school. You can’t cry, for happy or sad. No more drawing on the walls, no more throwing your toys out of the pram, no more running, no more playing, no more singing. 

The last time I was on something I wrote one song in 14 months. In the five months since then, I’ve written nine songs for an album and an e.p, which I’m putting here as a boiled-down example rather than any kind of self-defeatist benchmark. A lot of other things have changed too so it’s impossible to tell. Not that writing songs is a gift or whatever, but it’s significant to me because it’s the thing I’ve committed a large amount of time, money and effort to over recent years. Since March 2013, I’ve not been regularly taking a thing for a total of 11 months in two bouts of cold turkey cleansing. I can’t help feeling frustrated and defeated and like I’m letting myself down with the constant waxing and waning; for me, it’s a fight between accepting that what I want for myself is not necessarily the most helpful in order to function socially (which has become increasingly harder in recent months) and palpitating on in the only way I know with the hope that it gets easier with age (which, so far, doesn’t seem to be the case.)

This doesn’t really amount to anything, this is just my experience of something that I felt I needed to write about.

Rosie (Oh Peas) is one of the best humans I’ve ever had in my life. This week we played a kind of dopey show on London. She sang and played guitar. I backed her on the drums. She was incredible. Her recent songs knock me out. If I’d not been trying to be on top of making things up with the music, I’d still be a wreck over the words. There are so many perspectives on medication regarding mental health. Too many, really. This is one person’s experience and is maybe helpful, in a non-judgemental or sensational way.

I’m at a funny spot where I’ve been on helpful brain medication for about a year and a half. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s impacted me in a lot of ways. My downs aren’t so deep, but I’m slower and find it harder to dive into excitement. I’m thinking about coming off them next month. I feel like I’m in a good place for that. Anyway, not about me. Perspectives etc.

u ever wake up at 4am and start thinking about the kardashians + jesus

My Stylist On Holiday.

the fact that marsha p johnson, sylvia rivera, jennicet gutiérrez and twoc have a history of being fucking ignored and booed off stages and not given platforms to speak that the “community” won’t accept poc, trans folks, femmes, fat folks, ppl with disabilities but nick jonas speaks at fucking stonewall is such a fucking slap in the face

GENEVIÈVE ELVERUM fundraiser

www.gofundme.com/elverum

Here is a thing I wrote:

Before I met her I carried around my love in a different way than I do now.  I used to walk around with my love held out in front of me, eager to show it off, singing about the details of every powerful personal experience, blabbing about places and dates, naming names, all in service to my high ideas about true authentic expression and powerful art.   After I met her I didn’t feel that way anymore.  The love we shared felt like a whole new category of human phenomenon, possibly never experienced by anyone anywhere, ever.  The idea of displaying it for strangers felt obscene and perverse.  It was too good for that, it felt too important.  Whatever priorities I’d previously placed on “authentic art” were superseded by this way more powerful personal thing.   We gradually built a bubble around our real everyday selves and the details of our life together.  Being both semi-public semi-known artists and musicians, we were participants in the constant self promotion and personality-making that comes with those roles, and we knew that it was time to think about where to draw the line, eventually settling into a comfortable ambiguity, not touring together anymore, not putting our names on each others’ things so much, not denying anything either, just not being all loud about our love.  I mean, just on a basic local level, we didn’t exactly walk down the street kissing.  Just as people we are not the p.d.a. types and our affection took place in private.  Seeing us hug was rare.  On the outside perhaps we resembled platonic housemates, but we were passionate and deeply in love, quiet and powerful.

Now things are happening within our bubble that compel us to adjust these boundaries, to let whoever in, and ask for help.  The cocoon phase is over.  Here are the specifics:

I met Geneviève in 2003 at a time when I wasn’t particularly aiming to fall in love.  I was happy to just be a solo wandering dude doing my thing.  We met and it was instant.  Each of us felt like we’d found our person.  No question.  After some international border confusion and many trips back and forth to Vancouver Island, she moved to Anacortes and we got married.  Some of our friends were freaked out by the speed of all this, while those who’d met us both understood.  The connection was clear.  Two people found each other from across a universe.   So it’s been 12 years of all kinds of projects and adventures and love. We collaborated a lot, but mostly we existed as 2 sovereign creative maniacs, not butting in too much to each others’ projects, and mostly keeping quiet about who we were married to.   We wanted a baby the whole time, pretty much from day one, but it just didn’t happen.  There were some years of frustration and sadness but probably not to the huge existential degree that some people have it.   We always both had so much going on that it didn’t seem like the end of the world to continue devoting so much time to these art and music projects.  In early 2014 we’d both found some kind of peace and acceptance of the idea of a childless future, and maybe even positivity about the possibilities that would bring, but then she was pregnant all of a sudden.   Our daughter was born in January of 2015.  The secrecy around all this was extra intense.  No pictures on the internet, don’t tell anyone, it’s private and too special, maintain the boundaries.  Even now I don’t want to say her name.  She is the physical embodiment of our special private love for each other so of course we’d be protective of the details.   Then 4 months after having a baby Geneviève went to the doctor for a regular check up, mentioning some abdominal pain, no biggie.  There were some extra questions and an ultrasound and a CT scan, triggering some googling and some worrying at home, but she was 34 years old with a ridiculously healthy lifestyle, so the worries were minor.  Then the lighting bolt:

Advanced pancreatic cancer, stage 4, inoperable, chemotherapy ASAP, “do you want to talk to the chaplain?”, get the wills in order, etc.  

What the fuck?  No family history of cancer, never smoked or drank, mostly vegetarian, so much organic food, big water drinker, young, a profoundly good person.  It felt like conclusive proof of the absence of god.  We agonized over the logic.  How could this be true?  It is preposterous.  It’s so stupidly illogical and wrong.  How could it actually be happening, but then each morning we awoke to the same world where it was indeed happening. (To get perspective on the intensity of this particular cancer, it might be worth looking it up for a minute.  It has a vicious reputation and pretty brutal statistics.) Gradually the existential questioning faded into the grinding logistics of appointments, insurance, bottle feeding, diet questions, acupuncture, therapy, baby care, laundry, money worries, trying to keep the floor clean, trying to keep the house warm, maintaining the basics.  There is simply no time to ponder the big questions right now.  There are diapers to deal with.

We’ve already long since adjusted our bubble boundaries locally and have received so much crucial help from friends and family, as well as remote support from distant friends.  So much love has been beamed our way in the form of meditations and thoughts and prayers and mail and things and money.  All of this is so necessary and huge.  It’s strange to remember our earlier attitudes about preserving the boundaries at all costs.  Even though we are essentially the same hermit weirdos, we need the support and the priorities have massively shifted.

Now we make the broad public announcement and plea for money because we can’t take it anymore.  The savings have been depleted and financial worry creeps in as the inability to do anything resembling “work” continues indefinitely.  

Existence is officially confirmed to be surreal and totally absurd. Thank you for loving and supporting us and each other in this ridiculous whirlwind, sloppily surfing on messed up waves, all of us.  

Phil Elverum June 1st, 2016

Please read about the situation in Phil’s words.