Volume 7 of Postcards from Irving is out Monday 3/11.
The contents include All Towns Small but Interesting: Port Huron, MI Venue Stories: The Hawaiian Room at the Lexington Hotel, NYC The Ben Irving Songbook: “Post Office Complaint” Plus a bonus, spirited rant inspired by finally reading James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere (1994).
If you would like a copy, some copies for your distro, or would like to subscribe (The 2024 run – Volumes #7-10 for $12 shipped) please reach out via the Instagram page. You can also mail $4 of well-concealed cash to Box 1309, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48804 and receive Volume 7 in the mail with a personal note. Just don’t forget to include your mailing address.
Volume 6 of Postcards from Irving (12 pages, color + b/w) is out now, and has been for the past week or so. Sorry – the holidays and end of the semester have slowed down the printing/mailing process, but the new issue has been sent out to most of the subscribers, and new one-issue purchasers out there should be receiving it by this weekend.
If you would like one, or to subscribe (a $10 donation gets you four issues, beginning with whichever one you’d prefer), please reach out at Box 1309, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48804, via tyler at sonicgeography dot com or via the Instagram page.
I’m hoping to get around to a 2023 wrap post or two, but in case we don’t speak before then, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Happy Monday. I’ll post more about these (or, just repeat myself) as they approach individually, but I wanted to make sure to get these out into the ether before Thanksgiving.
On Tuesday, December 12, I’ll be appearing at the Hagaman Memorial Library in East Haven, CT to talk about some Ben Irving-related epiphanies. I’m looking forward to finally meeting and working with Chris Hemingway, without whose help you may recall a substantial portion of Postcards from Irving 4 would have been impossible.
On Tuesday, January 23rd, I’ll be back in Central Michigan, hosting a discussion with author Jason Klamm about his oh-so-fun book We’re Not Worthy: From In Living Color to Mr. Show, How ’90s Sketch TV Changed the Face of Comedy. Jason’s talk and Q&A will take place at 6pm at the Veteran Memorial Library Annex in downtown Mount Pleasant. Sleepy Dog Books will also be on hand to sell copies of WNW for Jason to sign!
More info about the book is available at Jason’s website here. Come on out and celebrate some of the great sketch comedy that made us who we are today.
“Ruined” is inaccurate. It’s a funny article, and the Hard Times‘ skewering of Toby Morse doesn’t begin and end with a joke about Peter Pan syndrome common among the tiny sliver of humanity who made a healthy living off of ’90s pop-punk. Considering how Morse, from all outward appearances, is far from being the most insufferable of that lot, you can’t blame him for sticking by what he loves and wishing to have Saturday every day for the rest of his life. Considering how much shittier the world outside of Pop-Punk (and plenty of the world inside it, too) has gotten since 1999, I begin to wonder if those jokes are rooted in a particular shade of jealousy.
I don’t think H2O ever made any grand claims as generational spokesmen, and I don’t know anybody for whom they were the favorite band (as much as plenty of those people existed and continue to exist). H2O came into my life via an unremarkable track on one of the Epitaph Punk-o-Rama compilations, but they eventually “got me” via a music video I saw on MTV (likely M2/MTV2) for their legacy-defining song “One Life, One Chance.”
That summer, I saw the band play the song at the Warped Tour, thereby completing the millennial pop-punk bingo card. More than two decades later, it’s still, categorically, my favorite H2O song, and considering how Morse has named his podcast (where he records and publishes bro-versations with his army of bro’s, many of whom made scattered appearances on F.T.T.W.) after the song, he has embraced it similarly. I’m frankly surprised that the official music video has toiled in late-2000’s resolution jail; that one embedded above was the best quality version I could find.
I’m not sure why I chose to revisit Follow the Three-Way, more commonly known as Faster Than the World. I’m also not sure why I was talking about H2O with my Irish colleague Steven Donnelly recently – probably because Steven booked them on an upcoming gig there – but he reminded me that most people think it stands for the opening track “Faster than the World.” Admittedly, H2O calling the album F.T.T.W. to instill that ambiguity was a pretty fun and clever choice. Anyway.
As much as my relationship with H2O fizzled out soon after this album (and their corny-ass Madonna cover that I must admit I still kind of enjoy), and I’ve found myself decreasingly enamored with many of the bands Epitaph threw at adolescents like me, there are plenty of undeniably great songs here. “EZ 2 B Anti” is a relatable sendup of their friends who got jaded and shitty as they got older, “Liberate” has an undeniable hook, and their hidden track is a cover of 7 Seconds’ “Not Just Boys Fun” with women singing gang vocals (where the original version had teenage boys singing in high registers). Secret tracks did have more pop on CD’s and cassettes since the bands are visible on records, but Morse is wearing a 7 Seconds hoodie on the insert, so it’s not like this came out of nowhere. You could probably make a full-length compilation of “show off your heroes” hidden cover tracks from this era with this, The Suicide Machines’ cover of “I Don’t Wanna Hear It,” and a long list of others.
I think I revisited it because I needed to pull it out of my record shelf to rearrange its section for some additions and deletions from my collection. I’ve decided to hold onto this one.
I’m excited to announce that Postcards from Irving will be tabling its first zine festival table this Saturday in Indianapolis at Gluestick Zine Fest. It made perfect sense, given the amount of work I’ve been doing in expanding my research on the life and landscapes of Ben Irving, the primacy of Indianapolis (especially Black Circle Brewing) as a hub of outsider creativity and community, and the timing.
If you’re anywhere near Indy, stop by anytime between Noon and 6pm. Because it’s Black Circle, they’ll have good drinks available, great music spinning, great (or at least highly entertaining) grainy visuals playing at 4:3 aspect ratios, and you’ll have time to stop into both Luna Music and Indy CD/Vinyl before or after! In case I haven’t written about it here, Black Circle Brewing also hosts the annual Dead Formats Festival, which is the greatest gathering of all things VHS, Beta, cult, horror, and sleaze in the Lower Midwest. They also hosted a 3pm deathmatch which was one of the most insane things I’ve ever witnessed in public, so who knows what the Zinefest may have in store.
We will have special back-issues of Postcards from Irving (including color runs of #1-#3) and special new subscription cards ($10/year for 4 issues), plus some back issues of Horror Macaroni and a few copies of Zisk! A Baseball Zine for People Who Hate Baseball Zines #34, hot off the presses from Cape Cod.
See you tomorrow down in Indy.
Repeat-Photo of a 1934 Ben Irving Postcard taken March 10, 2018 in Indianapolis with the worst possible sun positioning. All rights reserved, Sonic Geography.
There’s a lot happening in Ben Irving HQ to report. Well, there are two things happening, but they’re both pretty exciting.
First, Issue 5 of Postcards from Irving (Summer 2023) is out now! They’re available for $3 PPD or equitable trades. Back-issues are also available for $3 (Issue 4) or $1 apiece (Issues 1-3). You’re welcome to send cash to PO Box 1309, Mt. Pleasant, MI or email me with questions about subscriptions/PayPal. Some back-issues (along with many other good-times zines) are available from Policymaker.
Second, I’ll be lifting my (highly translucent) veil of obscurity tonight to present, live via satellite, “A Postcard Tour of Pre-War New Orleans” for the Friends of the Cabildo, a French Quarter-based history non-profit. The lecture will begin at 6pm Central Time (7pm Eastern), and costs $10 for the general public. Admission link passes are available here.
A Postcard Mailed Home to Brooklyn, February 2, 1941.
It’s impossible to gauge these things (bearing in mind how “fun” in 2013 looks and feels a lot different from 2023), but the Punk Scholars Network meeting may have been the most fun I’ve had at a conference. In 2023 terms, that fun was sharing a large classroom in Chicago with dozens of like-minded individuals with a wide diversity of research interests, all bounded together by the massive fluid big-top of punk. It was two days, three sessions plus one keynote guest per day, with nobody impulsively checking their phone/schedule to see which room they had to slip into next (or how far they had to jog with all of their notes and bags to get there). It was so small, we didn’t even have to wear nametags. How you like THEM APPLES?
I loved just about every paper presented/talk given across the two days, and I had a blast finally getting to present on my DC Punk walking tour. I shoehorned as many Simpson references as possible into introductions for the Wednesday morning session that I chaired, inspired by organizer Ellen Bernhard’s “Bort Religion” t-shirt and a conversation that immediately broke out between us and Torontonian film scholar Marco Djurdjic:
“No, my band is also named Bort Religion” “We’ve also arrested your older, balder, fatter Greg Graffin.”
Well, we thought it was funny, anyway. For the record, Marco’s favorite episode is ‘Homerpalooza’ (“Homer Simpson, smiling politely”), George C. Grinnell’s favorite episode is ‘Lisa the Vegetarian,’ and Rebekah Buchanan’s favorite characters are Patty and Selma, largely due to their love of MacGyver.
I don’t have enough time to go into details about the actual research presented at the conference, but I came back last week with a major stash of intellectual fuel to pour into a few new projects. One of which is a book chapter that will hopefully see the light of day soon, another is the fifth issue of Postcards from Irving (September), and a proposal I finished and submitted for something that will likely make you roll your eyes and say, “yeah of course you’re writing that, Tyler.”
Feast your eyes on some photo evidence:
I’m bad at choosing favorites in anything, but the Schwartzie is my favorite sandwich in the entire world. PFI4 on the shelf at Quimby’s!Paid the cost to be the BOSSBryn Mawr Red Line PlatformThe Loop, Monday MorningThe Gauler Twin Houses in Magnolia GlenHumphrey!Stephen Armstrong talks about his upcoming book on the Ramones in HollywoodGeorge C. GrinnellGreat mural by unknown artist, somewhere on the North side.The crowd to get into my talk (just kidding, it’s the crowd waiting for the Red Line train at Addison after the BOSS).Rebekah Buchanan
The longer I wait to write about this IASPM International conference, the less rigorous my memories will be, so I should do my best to at least share a few pictures and observations about what happened a few weeks ago in Minneapolis.
With the exception of a day I spent at a small conference at Alma College commemorating the 50th anniversary of the PBB Disaster, which was fantastic (the conference, not the disaster), this was my first major conference trip in person since 2019, when I went to Australia for IASPM in Canberra and the Institute of Australian Geographers meeting in Hobart.
Minneapolis was a great setting for the meeting; (ethno)musicologists from all around the globe had the chance to visit Paisley Park, see First Avenue, and realize that the Twin Cities are a better taste of the States than most “highly attractive” US conference cities (Chicago and New Orleans, contingent on time of year, notwithstanding). Unfortunately, the host institution treated IASPM with a level of disrespect that bordered on contempt, and they taught the coordinators and membership a valuable lesson about future meetings in the TC. I won’t go into much more detail here, but there were at least three easily-avoidable obstacles the conference had to transcend.
IASPM decided, for a variety of reasons, to keep the conference in a hybrid format. Given how the host institution didn’t provide any IT support (which is essential, for all conferences with an in-person component) or even provide console computers in our assigned rooms, it fell on the session chairs to set up multimodal interfaces on their own laptops. I did manage to delay one remote presentation about 15 minutes in part due to my own poor planning, but by the mid-point, conference-goers were accustomed to practicing patience.
Every now and then, a silver lining presented itself. For example, had we had PCs provided with everything cohesive in the conference rooms, we would not have had that fun communal experience of counting down to where Shawn Cullen could skip ahead of the YouTube ads on his paper about Steve Albini’s collaborations with Kim Deal. Also, thanks to that same YouTube algorithm on Kwame Harrison’s laptop, I now know that the Kool Keith show exists.
The conference did succeed in spite of the host institution’s best efforts, though, and what a set of research panels the membership came through with this year!
Shawn Cullen on Steve Albini (IASPM Meeting, June 2023)
As is an unofficial requirement of IASPM meetings, a handful of us were able to take in a touring gig at First Avenue. My partner and I made it just in time to catch Wednesday’s headlining set – a true moment of one of the hottest bands in indie rock at the height of their power. I’m still growing into their music, but the show itself was a great spectacle.
The crowd at First Avenue as Wednesday begins their set, downtown Minneapolis (June 28, 2023)
It was also cool to have an excuse to check out First Avenue, which to most of the world exists as “the Purple Rain club.” I had been to 7th Street Entry before (once, in 2011 to catch a comedy album recording), but never the big room.
Out of the fear that I’ll leave this post in the “drafts” folder (as I have for the past few weeks), I’ll add a few photos from conference highlights here, with some accompanying thoughts.
I was so glad to finally meet in person Maciej Smolka, a one-time Prince-ologist who spent some time of his doctoral study in Minneapolis. His more recent work has focused on Disco Polo, a retroactively politicized genre of dance music. He introduced many of us non-Poles to the ’90s group Boys with this video, which (in my eyes, anyway) owed a clear debt to New Kids on the Block as well as Scooter. I resisted the urge to jokingly ask how Boys got Tim Roth to sing for them (see the YouTube link).
It was also a delight to catch up with some scholars I met in Canberra who made the journey up, including Paige Klimentou (above). Paige has woven her own professional devotion to tattoo art into research about the (im)permanence of tattoos as well as tribalism in hardcore. I’m glad that she, her partner (whose band Keratin released an excellent demo tape this year), and the rest of the Melbourne crew were able to experience the US through one of our truly under-rated Midwestern cities rather than getting grifted by New York or Miami.
Speaking of scholars who made the journey from Down Under, Sam Bennett (seen at the podium, above) was perhaps under even more pressure, as the new IASPM President. I was incredibly fortunate to present my paper in the same session as Sam’s on Friday. When we were setting up, she told me she had cited Capitals of Punk recently! I was genuinely honored to hear it, and I’m looking forward to reading her work on recording rhetoric.
In the photo above, Sam was facilitating a Q&A with Alex Reed earlier in the week, who (like several presenters) couldn’t make the meeting due to a cancelled flight. However, because he was video-ing in from his home office, he could pivot his camera and show us, en vivo, the Aegis archive. Although I had barely any knowledge of goth zine history before his presentation, I’m now so grateful that the archive exists. I mean – just look at their list of titles!
Those were just a few highlights from the conference, which in retrospect, was still a major net positive, despite the stumbling blocks created by the hosting institute. It reminded me what I love and miss about meetings like this, and how grateful I am I’ve wound up involved with this corner of the Musicology world. Apologies to numerous friends/colleagues old and new who I didn’t have a chance to feature here, but their names will certainly show up on this site soon (provided I remind myself to post frequently now that the Fall semester is approaching). Tune back in soon for thoughts on my buddy Giacomo’s book on Deindustrialization and Popular Music, which I was glad to finally get my hands on.
Enjoy this photo of a confused turkey who crossed my path on campus. To be fair, I was equally confused trying to find the Armory entrance on Day 1. These big birds were wandering all over the Twin Cities. It’s cute and terrifying.
Postcards from Irving Vol. 4 is out now, and in color!
Those with subscriptions should have yours by this weekend, and if you’d like one, please drop me a line via email or mail (PO Box 1309, Mount Pleasant, MI 48804). More info is here. Here’s the masthead and index of this quarter’s issue:
THE SUPPLEMENTS
The Hialeah Park (1970s-1990s?) Club House (?), which is mentioned in Volume 4’s ‘July All Year Round’ installment. It included one photo; here is the rest of the set. All contextual information can be found in the printed version.
I will also present this with absolutely no context. I promise it will make sense if you read Postcards from Irving Vol. 4, though. Incentives!
Sonic Geography 