Bad Apples: Twelve

Part seven of a series of posts reflecting on almost a decade of DIY culture - focusing this time on swapping. For an introduction to this series, click here.

Twelve:

2008: Swap things. I’ve got a book or shirt I don’t want. So do you. Maybe we could get together and trade. Maybe we could get a few people together and trade? Also, I like the idea of people contributing or sharing things to cover the costs of an event. An example of this is a potluck, where everyone brings a meal so that one person doesn’t have to cover the cost. Or the scavenger hunt I planned years ago where the entrance fee was something we could give out as a prize.

2017: This post is an edited group discussion inspired by fragment #12. Ben plays bass in Latchstring and books DIY shows as part of the A Public Disservice Announcement collective. Geraldine as involved in booking punk shows as part of the STE collective (and its afterlife). Jordan co-runs Circle House Records, books shows as part of DIY Exeter and plays as Phaedra’s’ Love. Kristianne is a spoken word artist who also runs the bi-annual event DIY Southampton at Planet Sounds. Enjoy.

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Geraldine: I’m all behind the theory of swapping, I just got a problem where Rich likes to keep everything he’s got! [Laughs] There are some things I like to keep because I really want them, but if I’ve bought and read a book from a charity shop, I’m quite happy to give that away or take it back to the charity shop. But Rich will even keep those books! [Laughs] In ten years time I don’t know what our house is gunna look like!

Jordan: Possessions are kind of a weird thing and people in these scenes have really different views. Some people can read a book and say “someone else can have it” but a lot of people – and I kind of find myself in this boat, it’s not about finances, I like to have something with me. If it’s say, a record I love but I’m not even using it much, I love the fact it’s sitting there on the side of my bedstand.

G: It’s not a financial value. Rich will listen to records and even though he’s had them years, he’ll have that cover and he’ll be looking at the artwork and the words and it’s the whole package. So we’d never be able to rip that collection and get rid of the physical copies because to him, it’s not just the music that he really enjoys.

J: I like when you play in bands you swap a cassette for a cassette or a t shirt for a t shirt. In a world where everything’s about money and value, its nice to just strip that back and actually just relax about it a little bit more. It gives more value to the things you own - it gives sentimental value. 

Ben: People ascribe different value to different things, like I would ascribe a personal level of value to my record collection and I can’t see me any time soon getting rid of that. I don’t feel the same way about books and DVDs. DVDs I go “I’ll watch that a couple of times, I can probably find that online” and I’m quite happy just like, Googling a ripped copy of the film online, whereas I don’t feel exactly the same about a record. I like having a record, even though I’ll have the digital version to carry around with me.

Kristianne: For years I never thought I would get rid of a book. Books were sacred like vinyl, really special. And then I just realised that things were piling up everywhere and actually, my head couldn’t cope with it all anymore. And I kinda went, “you know what, I have to do something about this” because actually, I need to be well and I can’t be well with all these amazing books around me. I started pulling out books I thought I could give to people I thought they might like, then I realised that was going to absolutely wipe me out. So I just went, “no, I’ll do it and see what happens. I’m not gunna die.” And I kind of did it and actually, it was quite freeing and it lifted quite a lot of weight off of me.

B: I’ve got a very few books where there’s a story about how I came across that book that’s extraneous to the contents of the book. So like my copy of ‘The Mountain inn’ by Guy De Maupassant, I was reading a book where the main character of that book was reading the ‘Mountain Inn’, it was woven into the narrative. When I finished that book, there was at Boscombe bus stop a 50p book table. The top book was ‘The Mountain Inn’ by Guy De Maupassant, so I’m never getting rid of that. But I’ve got way more stories like that about records and I think that’s why I probably ascribe more value to my records and I’m probably less likely to turn up with a carrier bag full of them and say “help yourself”.

K: There are some things that I’ve kept. I’ve got books that are signed by the author with little messages inside them, there are some sequences of books that I have read over and over again that I know I will read again and again and again, fiction that I love reading and can lose myself in. And I won’t get rid of those because I know I’d only have to buy them again. And I have a lot of very valuable kind of art books that I think “oh, I could sell all these and make loads of money”. And then I’m like “I really like it so they go back on the shelf!”

G: I could go through our books and cull them, I’d be quite happy to do that… But the records would only go in an emergency situation, if we were desperate for the money. We’ll get our records out, and there’s tickets in them, there’s letters from people when you had to be writing to people and reading zines to know what was going on. And you’d buy something and you’d get the record and it’d come with a little note and I would always keep that note in with the vinyl – I’ve got little notes from Dick Lucas – and yeah, and then all that are in there so it’s like you say, it’s the whole, it’s the whole story of how you came by it. And it’s not just going into HMV and buying it or downloading it, it’s so much more assessable music now then there ever used to be. If you weren’t involved you didn’t know what there was to buy. You had to be involved and engaging to know what was going on, to know what was out there and what was happening. And when you drop out of that it’s hard to get back into it again. You have to put the effort in don’t you? So having a lot of the records and stuff is tied up in the effort you put into engaging in the scene. Which is why they’re so important. Because they’re like the history of a lifetime.

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J: I’m a promoter but I feel myself very like graphically impaired in the sense I just can not create like a poster that’s good. If I have a friend who’s really good at design, they can make a poster and that’s their way of contributing to that show, and if I got a really great graphic designer in that’d be very expensive for me so they get free entry.

G: The STE worked a bit like that didn’t it – Ad always used to do the posters mainly and Rich would do most of the organising and then everybody flyering and what have you.

B: But with swapping to say get entry to a show, I can’t see that would happen beyond people who are able to do something to make the show work. You wouldn’t charge those to get into the show would you because they’re part and parcel of organising that event. I don’t see how it can be any broader than that.

G: If you need to pay the bands, swapping’s not going to work is it? Because you’re not going to find something of value to them that’s gunna help them.

J: Circle House records has quite an expansive distro of records put out by different labels. And we never buy those tapes from different labels to stock them in the store, we give them four of our tapes, they give us four of their tapes and so all the people that are interested in our label are able to find out about those bands and records etc. And I think things like that in swapping can actually really help to support bands bit more.

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K: I like swapping and away things I don’t need… I do it a lot. I also like that idea of if I’ve got a skill and I swap it with you then somewhere down the line you might help me out. I don’t think there’s enough of that going on, I don’t think there are enough people participating in that kind of pool of swaps and gives. Some people are doing a lot of it though like Libby with clothes swap and Curb with the food and that’s a bit what I try and do with DIY Southampton, give something away because I can pull all those people together. And Tim at Planet Sounds gives me that space so between us we are giving away quite a lot. 

B: It’s a way of explaining the concept of mutual aid to someone. You have someone doing an event and you’re not expected to bring and drop something off but you can still take something. Everyone can get together and to participate when they might not have the means to. It breaks down barriers to access so that people can still have a good time even if they’re unable to put in like everyone else. There’s a meme doing the rounds where it’s loads of animals all cooking dinner for each other. All the different animals are saying “I’ve got a carrot”, “I have stock”, “I have like, cutlery”. And then one animal goes “I don’t have anything” and they go “But here’s a spare bowl, here’s a spoon, there’s enough for everyone”. And it’s like it’s cute and it’s overly simplifying something but at the end of the day, that’s what it is.

K: When I take stuff to swap, I’m not looking for something in return. If you’ve got stuff and you don’t want it and somebody else does, I’m cool with that. I go to every clothes swap and I always take stuff. But I never take anything away because I don’t want to take something that I don’t need for the sake of taking it. I’ve got what I need, not everybody’s in that situation, which is why I like it and I support it. It’s the same with Curb, I’ve always donate and have something to eat with them but I’m not going to take away loads of stuff just because it’s there necessarily. If we were sat around the table now and I brought a big pile of books to swap, I wouldn’t care if I went home with nothing. I’d be really happy seeing those things go somewhere else.

B: I think within a community, it relies on people to self regulate. There’s a big difference between one day not having anything to bring, but you see something and you go “I really want those,” that’s fine. But if this happens regularly and you’re always a person who always takes and never gives, it’s down to that community of people to say “how do we resolve this situation because this has become something that isn’t quite fair.”

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Jump to fragment (links added as fragments are posted): Intro // One // Two // Three // Four // Five // Six // Seven // Eight // Nine // Ten // Eleven // Twelve // Thirteen // Fourteen // Fifteen // Sixteen // Seventeen 

Bad Apples: Ten // Eleven

Part six of a series of posts reflecting on almost a decade of DIY culture - focusing this time on putting on an “event”, writing letters and some thoughts on electronic communication. For an introduction to this series, click here.

Ten:

2008: I’m into the idea of an event. By this I mean something that’s a big one off. Let’s make some effort to make the night something to remember! Why don’t you get everyone to dress up in smart clothes for that local band show and do a punk prom, complete with prom king and queen… Or maybe you could bootleg the show, take peoples contact emails and then send them a copy as an mp3/sendspace link… Or get a piñata. Drunk punks with baseball bats would be interesting…Or I once read an old Crimethinc pamphlet [2017: note that referencing Crimethinc in 2017 does not imply endorsement...] about this kinda thing. In amongst the usual purple prose there was a rad idea which basically boiled down to seeing how many bands could play in a finite amount of time (eg: an hour)… Or a local punk house sometimes builds a fuckin slide on their stairs out of wood. That’s something to see and remember though I doubt it’d pass a risk assessment… So yeah. The ideas are pretty endless really once you think about it. (And kinda dumb too).

2017: This fragment partly inspired a previous post entitled The Best Things Happen in Secret. I won’t add to it, except to underline that the ‘payment’ I get from playing in a band isn’t financial. It’s getting to see other cool bands I didn’t know existed, meeting good people – and crucially, having a story to tell. I want to go into work on Monday with the wildest anecdote about my weekend, even more so now I’m sober and I can see that there’s sometimes a laziness about using drinking as permission to do something ‘crazy’. The most memorable punk shows are often the ones that are most removed from your parents’ idea of what a gig should look like. Putting on fancy dress to get drunk doesn’t count either (fuck right off).

Eleven:

2008: Write a letter. Yeah it’s slow. Yes it costs money. Yes it takes effort. But all that shows you care. It takes no effort at all to write a comment on my Myspace page, and that’s totally cool. I know were all busy and you might not have much to say to me beyond “are you going to that CIRCUS ACT show?” And I think that any way to communicate and keep people together is a good thing. But it’s much better to get a letter someone had to sit down and write, and then put in an envelope with beer mats, post cards, mix tapes, and other free shit they collected. You get something permanent you can look at when you find it in a shoe box in 2030 and it showed that someone cared enough about you to do something the hard way for once all those years before.

2010: I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. It bums me out that instead of a pile of old letters, I’ve just got a bunch of saved emails and texts.

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2017: I can’t remember the last time I sent a letter that wasn’t just a note in with a zine or mix CD-R.

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It seems like a lot of digital communication is throw away. By this I mean that despite permanently sitting on a server somewhere, it’s somehow lost to us much quicker than analogue forms. Of course verbal communication is and always has been instantly lost whether its face to face or over a phone, but it seems to be that there’s not really a digital equivalent of keeping a shoe box full of letters that you might rediscover one maudlin afternoon and retread moments you decided were important.

I suppose that you might have an old email account with a saved messages folder but as we move from platform to platform, what happens to all these old interactions? I recently shut down that Myspace page without a second thought. Most of the messages I lost were banal of course but what about the ones that weren’t? SMS is even worse. Who keeps a stash of old Sim cards and working handsets to flick through on a rainy Sunday?

It’s not just personal history that’s hard to access. What will social historians look at? How will our grand children construct family histories? What will be the 21^st century equivalent of finding a stash of letters in a house clearance? It seems a paradox that as more and more data is harvested forever – intrusively and against our wishes - our meaningful access to it long term is less and less. 

Although capital inserted itself into our communication before – after all, you had to buy a stamp and some stationary – it seems a markedly different relationship now. If I send you a letter, its then yours. You have it, theoretically until it rots away. But that old Myspace message is something else in that it remains mediated by the platform – you have to log in to access it. It’s a bit like having to go to the post office and show ID every time you want to reread a letter.

You can probably find a way to save it in another format, maybe there’s a way to archive your text messages in another device or platform, you can definitely print out a hard copy of an email if you like. But you probably aren’t going to, meaning that instead of a one off exchange, a corporation has a permanent mediating role in you accessing it. That’s something that’s become normalised, but really – it’s pretty odd. 

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Just so you know. That banner image on the Facebook event you used as the only form of promotion won’t be adorning anyone’s wall, flyer collection or retrospective scene photo book either.

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I don’t believe in ghosts, though sometimes I need to remind myself of that, just as I don’t believe in other superstitions but I’ll still rub the foot of Ted Bates statue on the way to a match and refuse to say anything positive in case it jinxes my team. But I’ve often thought that if I’m wrong and I end up coming back to haunt you motherfuckers, I’d probably end up haunting a hand set.

Are haunted phones a thing? It probably should be if spirits haunt the places where emotionally intense things happened. If ghosts are remnants of strong emotions that haven’t quite dissipated, then I’ve certainly got a pile of broken mobiles kicking around that I’ve poured love and bile into.

If you think about it, the kinds of wonderful, painful, ecstatic, regret-soaked conversations that our for-bearers had to have face to face in their stone hovels we can have on the go. That lingering energy would be a kind of decentralised haunting, not tied to any particular location now that we can break and fix our own hearts on buses, walking through parks, in train carriages, supermarkets, cars, lunch rooms... The other person isn’t even there. The location is inter-changeable as long as there’s signal. The tool that makes it possible though is constant. We’re pouring all this intensity into a little box of plastic and wires. All this epic psychic energy captured and chucked out into space - there must be something left over.

These obsolete, rundown phones are “dead.” Language hints at the possibility of a haunting already.

Boo.  

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(I should write you).

Some of the observations in this piece were inspired by the excellent book 'Filling the Void' by Marcus Gillroy-Ware. 

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Jump to fragment (links added as fragments are posted): Intro // One // Two // Three // Four // Five // Six // Seven // Eight // Nine // Ten // Eleven // Twelve // Thirteen // Fourteen // Fifteen //Sixteen // Seventeen 

Bad Apples: Eight // Nine

Part five of a series of posts reflecting on almost a decade of DIY culture - focusing this time on compilation tapes and recycled releases. For an introduction to this series, click here.

Eight:

2008: Whilst we’re talking about being wary of technology – I made a comp CD for myself today. What a shitty experience that was, shuffling around MP3s on the PC so that I could burn them to CD so that I could play it on my stereo upstairs. Yeah, the end was the same, but the process was sterile and dull. Not like making a mix tape, where you get to listen to the songs as you record them so that you know everything’s in the right order and just generally kick back for two hours, drink tea and listen to music you dig with no interruptions. Sometimes having fun with the means is as important as getting the right thing in the end. Do things the hard way once in a while.

2017: I still entirely agree with this post, but my own commitment to making tapes has fully waned. Part of this is due to practicalities. Realistically, how portable is an audio tape? I don’t have a Walkman anymore and what car can play a sweet mix tape on your 2017 summer road trip? Worse, if you make a tape for someone as a surprise present, what’s to say they can even play it? It’s the biggest elephant in the room that although tapes are cool, they’re also a weird retro flyer that comes when you buy a MP3 download code. Worse still, I found myself with so many bangers only available as MP3’s that I ended up burning play lists to CD-R then taping from the CD-R, which is just peak-nonsense.

But... I’m of a generation for whom a lot of the albums that got me into punk and hardcore came to my attention via tapes made by older mates and I can remember desperately taking a Gorilla Biscuits / CIV / Better Than A Thousand tape apart with a tiny screw driver to save the mangled mess inside. I’ve also a genuine appreciation for the format that goes beyond nostalgia. The limitations of an audio tape are also its strengths; how many times did a song that sucked on first listen worm its way into your brain because fasting forward through it was a pain in the arse? And even the warping, the stretched tape, the sound of decay is kind of nice if you think about it. That’s not poor quality; at its best, that’s the sound of how much you’ve enjoyed listening to it, of how much that music means to you.  

I’m not sure there’s a meaningful way to replicate that fragility. It must be possible to create files that decay, MP3’s where each play triggers a further process of descending into some sort of pre-programmed warping or white-noise. But what’s the point? Am I really arguing that a format that doesn’t corrode with each play should fabricate this out of some sort of romantic notion that the things I really like should turn to shit? I suspect I’d just keep master files anyhow and continually make new versions each time the ones on my player started to sound like arse.

I do sometimes find myself making 45 minute MP3s though, cutting and pasting songs from a play list in Audacity to make files that replicate C90’s. On my cheap player, fast forwarding within a file is about as much fun as it was on the Walkman I took on family holidays, so putting everything together in a MP3 that replicates the side of a mix tape also recreates that enforced listening experience. But it’s an unsatisfying way to ensure a new song sandwiched between two bangers ends up a firm favourite.  

Nine:

2008: Whilst we’re talking about tapes I’ve noticed that since people other than me still care about them, wouldn’t it be cool to do a limited run of tapes to go with your CD release? I’ve not tried them but a few kids on Collective Zine have mentioned Tapeline as a good place to get custom audio tapes. I read in a zine as well about people reusing old VHS tapes and dubbing live band footage or art projects on them. If you go charity shopping, getting a stash should be dirt cheap. Tape over the pushed out tabs and you’re set.

2010: We did this with the LIKE GRENADES EP (2017: Note - ripping off our friends in WHOLE IN THE HEAD) – it was pretty boring dubbing them all but it was quite cool to see a pile of 60 recycled tapes, all with download codes and all unique because I’d left the original recording on the other side- there was a ANT & DEC split tape, for example.

2017: I’ve already written about the tape labels as a life line for broke punks elsewhere on this blog. Around the same time as I was thinking about that earlier post though, the band I play in discussed releasing our own tape.

Following on from the success of In On A Secret - where live recordings of the bands that played the show were released as an online album - and ripping off an earlier 7 inch called ‘Same Shit Different Day’, the plan was pretty simple: record a small number of bands in the same studio on the same day and release the outcome as a compilation tape.

Alan from Hackjob put together the original compilation and explains the idea we were planning to brazenly steal:

For me punk is all about involvement. Right from the very beginning, gathering like-minded folks together has been a massive part of what gives punk its power and its longevity – see The Roxy, Dial House, The 121 Club etc for shining examples.

I wanted to do something similar on a small scale with ‘Same Shit, Different Day’. I thought it would be fun to create a snapshot of South Coast (roughly) bands at an instant in time, and recording everyone in the same place, on the same day, seemed like the best way of achieving it. The 6 bands on the 7” are very different musically so it was also a great way of demonstrating a cohesive scene – no egos, no fathing around, just get in there and blast it out. I was really pleased with the result...

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The plan was pretty simple. But like pretty simple plans conceived by punks the world over, our tape compilation never got off the ground.

Of course, it’s impossible to say if the reality of putting out a tape would have been as easy we thought. But we’d gotten as far as costing the release with help from our friends who run Cult Culture and Circle House Records, and got the hypothetical tape down to about £1.10 a unit. This was 99 pre-dubbed compilations, each with a card sleeve, an A5 insert, a label maker strip for the cover, tape stickers stamped with a star to show side A and 19 minutes of the best music that never even got properly discussed...  

Component	Cost per unit (99 units)
Card slipcase	15p
C19 cassette – pre dubbed (up to 99)	70p
A5 tape insert (b/w copying at the library like a proper punk rocker, 2 to an A4 sheet)	5p (10p an A4 b/w copy)
Cassette label stickers – pack of 120	2p (£1.50 a pack)
Self Inking Star Stamp (one off cost)	7p (£6.31)
Old School Label Maker (one off cost)	10p

(You can have this one for free).

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Incidentally, there was a predictable ending to recording over pre-dubbed tapes. I eventually accumulated a shoe box full of cassette singles that I’d periodically picked up whilst charity shopping. This treasure trove of ancient, shitty music sat quietly rotting in the background through a couple of abortive bands until eventually the moment came to tape over them. I passed them to our bassist to do the dubbing duties and it turned out that every one was warped to fuck. Every last tape. And that was that.   

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Jump to fragment (links added as fragments are posted): Intro // One // Two // Three // Four // Five // Six // Seven // Eight // Nine // Ten // Eleven // Twelve // Thirteen // Fourteen // Fifteen // Sixteen // Seventeen 

Bad Apples: Six // Seven

Part four of a series of posts reflecting on almost a decade of DIY culture - focusing this time on doing things for free. For an introduction to this series, click here.

Six:

2008: Most things cost money. It’s shit if you haven’t got much. Now, there’s two schools of thought about this. The first is that if you do something for free, then people assume it’s not worth looking at, since nothing that doesn’t cost anything can be worth anything. I prefer the second idea, namely that it’s vaguely subversive not to charge for this zine. I get to give it to people without worrying if I make my costs back because I’m not trying to. It doesn’t reduce my writing and interactions to simple buyer/seller based financial transactions (“Hi buy my shit, yes?”). And hopefully people get entertained for free. And yes I lose money. But less than if I spent all the time writing it doing something else. Plus money isn’t the only way to measure value. Other currencies include enjoyment, satisfaction, creativity and community.

Seven:

2008: I’m pretty much some kind of semi-Luddite. I’ve a natural suspicion of being sold gadgets that do something I can already do, no matter how convenient they are, and I’m about 5 years behind everyone else with the internet, that great big shopping catalogue that lives in my PC. The internet is, however, great because, if you are really broke and want to contribute to the death of print media, the post service and the music industry, you can publish things for free (blogs), make and download radio shows (podcasts), upload your bands demo for all to hear (Myspace etc) and stalk your ex on Facebook. Then you can make fliers or spam people about your shit and it costs less than actually making physical things! I think download only releases are pretty horrible because I like to actually have something physical to hold. I also like to have the lyrics and artwork to look at and I think this is an important part of the release too. But at the same time, it costs very little to upload mp3 files so that broke punx can download them for free. You can always do both like we did with LIKE GRENADES.

2010: Also check out killyourown.co.uk and ifyoumakeit.com  [2017: both sites seem to be dead, though IYMI is still online and worth a look] for a creative way to combine pay-what-you-can-afford downloads with physical releases. Most records on both sites are available physically but you can download them for free or a donation which goes to the bands.

2017: I’ve been thinking about this post perhaps more than I should, because it seems to me there’s a lot to unpack here and lot of it remains controversial in some way. Myspace is long dead – I got around to shutting mine down recently and it was a time capsule from a decade earlier with an overly confusing interface – and all the people who want physical releases buy them and those who don’t, don’t. But the idea that a DIY project can be free is still polarising and much too long to address comprehensively. These are just some thoughts on fragments six and seven.

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It seems pathetic to me that you shouldn’t do something for free because if someone doesn’t pay for art, it doesn’t have any value to them. That’s a bleak assumption that the value we as individuals put on something is dictated by how hard it hits our pockets. Are we really arguing that if you give someone a zine rather than sell them it for a quid they’re going to enjoy it less? And if we are going to argue this, is this a good thing? Shouldn’t we be doing more stuff that challenges this logic?

The act of doing something free can feel like throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. Just as when you flyer for an event and a bunch end up on the floor, when I did Bad Apples there were always a few copies discarded. But would those people have bought a zine in the first place (or bought it and drunkenly left it on the bar) and how many people got a copy of Bad Apples and read it who never would have paid for the zine? Rebounding shit vs shit smeared on the brickwork I guess. 

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“...If I shoplift an album from my local record store, no one else can buy it. But when I download a song, no one loses it and another person gets it....” – Aaron Swartz

However you feel about downloading, there is in this quote a valuable point: if you download (or share electronically) material, it doesn’t disappear, it duplicates. That process costs nothing. If you’re trying to make money, this causes a problem because it’s in your interest to make sure you have a finite resource, either to control the price through supply and demand or to simply make sure you shift all your hard copies to get your money back. But if you don’t care about that then the problem becomes a solution because you don’t have to stump up a ton of money making physical copies that you lose money on. All this is seems so obvious now that it almost becomes invisible again and worth reiterating.

 The issue than becomes in an over-saturated internet, how do you let people know your project exists?    

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The notion of non-financial rewards resonates even clearer a decade on. Perhaps this is sober logic but it remains clear to me that if you measure everything in terms of capital, you focus on the end exchange. Instead, I often think that whilst I may lose money on a project, how much money would I be spending to have the same degree of enjoyment consuming rather than creating? Of course I focus on money spent on alcohol here because I’m trapped to a certain degree in that logic but there are plenty of ways to spend outside of the pub. 

There are other forms of exchange outside the financial and Mauss’ The Gift is an interesting starting point. The simplest explanation of what Mauss is exploring is the potlatch (or potluck) where each guest has the obligation to bring a dish to the communal table. If we think of the free DIY project as a potlatch, if the artist brings free art of whatever kind to the table, what does the audience share with the artist and what obligation does this put on the audience? Perhaps an obligation to accept the gift – i.e. actually look/listen/engage - and provide community in return might be one way to understand this trade.

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I recently wound up B/W&Red Small Press because my interest in it ended exactly at the point where shifting what I’d helped bring into the world ended. Helping to write, edit or manage a project to completion is something that I loved and take pride in. Selling the fuckers doesn’t interest me at all.

Some of that is to do with the interactions involved. A sizable number of people I sold to were friends and whilst I’m not above spamming my work, it did feel uncomfortable to shift from buddy to sales person face to face. For someone who’d happily buy you a coffee on the basis of what goes around comes around, interjecting some sort of (diluted) market logic into a space that is outside of it wasn’t something that I found pleasant. I just wanted to go “keep your money, I just hope you enjoy reading it”.    

I know I wasn’t the only one. One Contested Ground contributor found the response to selling the zine to friends from a wider social circle particularly abrasive for the same reason; one of the contributors to the Say It Right anthology left copies for people to find in public rather than sell the ones received as ‘payment.’ Trying to cover your costs brings new dynamics to social interactions that it’s fair to say aren’t always positive.

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Although not technically ‘free’, Pay-As-You-Feel (PAYF) adds another dimension to this dynamic and one that I personally don’t have too much experience of. I can remember doing the door though at punk shows when having a waged/unwaged sliding scale was common place and the confusion that this sometimes created when you ask people how they classify a fair price or to self select - on trust - what they should pay.

Libby from Curb: The Real Junk Food Project explains something similar. Curb redistribute food that would otherwise end up in a landfill and sometimes cater at house shows and other low key DIY events in Southampton.

Often people can seem reluctant to accept PAYF events and ask how much they should pay. When you step back and say “I don’t know how much you should give, it’s up to you”, sometimes it baffles people. When society says “I’ll leave the food for someone poor or homeless”, the distinction between ‘poor’ and ‘not poor’ becomes a divide that is between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Pay As You Feel sets that aside because there's no set criteria to meet to access the food we provide... I think things are changing. At least in my community the practice of trading, lending and PAYF is becoming more commonplace, I think this changes how people value objects and interact with each other.

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Bad Apples: Four // Five

Part three of a series of posts reflecting on almost a decade of DIY culture - focusing this time on crafting and projects with a local focus. For an introduction to this series, click here.

Four:

2008: We live in an age of mass production. Millions of identical consumer items roll out of millions of factories. This means that I can get a cheap TV but it also means that there’s a weird flawless uniformity to things since they’re all made to the same blue-print. That’s probably OK if you’re making cars but wouldn’t it be cool if each one of those records you’re making was slightly different? That’d show that a bit of thought and love had gone into them. I’d also probably treasure your shitty demo more if it was a unique one of a kind thing that no one else had exactly the same.

2017: Revisiting this, one of the things that jumps out at me is the proliferation of shit that’s marketed as artisan or bespoke which I’m pretty sure wasn’t on my radar, and certainly wasn’t the in-joke it is now, when I wrote the fragment. It’s interesting but sort of obvious that the drive for something “authentic” as opposed to generic and mass produced can be so easily be part of a marketing campaign. The DIY version of this is the collectible commodity that ends up flipped on Discogs or held in some airless collector stasis...  

I wasn’t exactly thinking of craftisvism – but I was thinking of a less alienated process of making something, or at least a closer relationship to the item produced than something that rolled off the factory line. It’s easy enough to make things unique after all when your producing dozens rather than hundreds of items, so why not hand decorate whatever it is you’re making so that the imperfections or deliberate quirks make each one different?

This to me seems something of statement of intent; something that says the person who made this actually touched and hand finished what your holding as opposed to it being made in a factory far away from the label or publisher or writer or whatever, who never even knew it existed bar as a number in a spread sheet or in a financial return. In that way, if you really stop and think about it, buying a hand numbered zine makes it much more personal than the majority of books on your book shelf. Its clear that someone touched what your holding and it meant enough to them to hand alter it, rather than the easy myth that it suddenly appeared in the world without any labour.

There’s of course limits to this; you aren’t going to use a tooth brush to flick paint on 50,000 tapes but you might 50. So it also says that whoever made this is small. Small might not always be small forever and small doesn’t mean “not shitty people”, but generally speaking, in a world where we celebrate endless growth as the ultimate goal, it’s good to stand up for the little guy - particularly if it’s through refusing to compromise that they stay little.      

All this seems to be going against the grain of things. When you can leave a chain store in one city, fly half way around the planet and have the same experience in the same chain, to empathize difference and craft-person-ship, even if it’s on an insignificant level, is probably worthwhile still.

Five:

2008: The internet is great and so is the postman. We can talk to the world from our homes and more importantly I can hawk my useless crap globally. I send this shitty zine to Canada and Australia! WTF. But wouldn’t it would be cool if sometimes we deliberately just wrote for our local scenes and didn’t try to get any bigger than that? You could write songs about your mates or how your town is a hell hole and everyone would totally get it. Another good thing about keeping things small is communication – if people know you’re writing directly to them, they might be more likely to communicate back and create dialogue. A good example of this kinda logic is the STE Bulletin – this primarily exists as a listing for Southampton people so they know what’s going on locally. And handy it is too.

2017: Rich STE on the STE Bulletin:

“Think Globally, Act Locally!” was the cliché that we took to heart in the S.T.E. but all clichés are at least grounded in reality. Sometimes this internationalism was literal – I remember after one gig our house being full of Americans, Germans & Norwegians along with us reserved Englishmen. At all times though, we took a localised slant on ideas, words, music and actions from all over the world. Sometimes these influences took a while to disseminate to Southampton and these days global communication is much more instant but the principle remains the same.

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Here’s a thought experiment for you. For arguments sake, let’s say that a scene is a community of people with an active interest in something. Community is a rightly contested word, but in this case it is a bit of a zero sum concept – you are either part of it or you aren’t, it something that has a border and you sit on one side of it or another, no matter how permeable that might be. These sides don’t have to be in competition, they can be fluid and there doesn't have to be a value judgement about which side is best. But for our purposes, you’re either in or out.

How do we describe that boarder? If we approach it as dividing off a physical space, it’s probably most familiar. It’s a geographical area, a building, a neighborhood, a space, a city. But it’s also possible to describe community in terms of time – a bunch of people coming together from/in no fixed geographical location for a period, perhaps to achieve a certain task. The boarder of the community here is temporal – it didn’t exist before a certain point and doesn’t exist after a certain time. Another concept of community is unity through a shared interest or activity. Here the boarder is between those who have the required interest in (for example) pop punk and those who don’t. Some communities combine all of these boarders. That’s OK for our purposes.

The experiment is this: having this very simple definition of a community, what happens if you take your creative project and either erect, move or tear down one of those boarders? What happens if you make those walls invisible or insurmountable, distant or close? For example, what would it mean to be in a band that was bound to a physical community that was defined by a particular city? What would it mean if that same band wasn’t tied to a particular community based on interest?

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It strikes me that part of why some of the outcomes of this experiment seem ridiculous is because we’re conditioned to think that growth is a good thing. Putting barriers and limitations on what we do doesn’t make much sense in that context; if we’re looking to maximise some sort of audience, to open up new “markets”, then choosing not to do something you could do, choosing not to grow as big as you can, obviously runs counter to that. If we measure success in numbers, in size, in units then this fragment is even sillier. 

But should we always be doing that? What do we miss when we think this way? What relationships do we undermine and water down? What opportunities and practices do we overlook that could reflect a fulfilling way forward for our projects?

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