2 I f*cked up bigtime! (or: on finding perfect goodness)

hail mary digital!

2 I f*cked up bigtime!

(or: on finding perfect goodness)

by Brian Buchanan

— — —

Hi.

Before we get started with the show, I just wanted to mention two things real quick. First: this is a long show and you don’t got to be be a hero! There are natural break points so, you know, stop when you need to stop, drink some water, and pick it back up when you’re ready. Second: hail mary digital! is an independently produced podcast. Right, like, I’m not on a ~fancy podcast network~ and this show isn’t ~ad supported~ or anything like that. Now, I’m not looking for support BUT if you do enjoy the program, I’d ask that you consider leaving a donation with the Sandy Ground Historical Society. Sandy Ground — which is located right here, on the south shore of Staten Island — is the oldest continuously inhabited free Black settlement in the United States and was a station along the Underground Railroad. The Historical Society offer workshops to students across the New York City and they even maintain a museum here in the community. Every dollar helps them continue the work of telling their story. If you’re interested, there’s information in the show notes and on my website.

ANYWAY here we go!

— — —

Every single day, I get to play an un-fun game. There’s no name to this game and it can pop up at just about any moment. The real kicker about this game is that I can’t even win — by virtue of simply playing the game means I’ve already lost. An un-fun game I can’t win is not a game I want to play, but my brain seems to have a mind of its own (go figure). And so I must. I play, I lose, rinse and repeat, day in and day out.

What is this game? Well, picture yourself. You’ve just walked into a door and stubbed your toe. Or scrolling too far deep into someone’s instagram history and accidentally like a post. Or maybe you’re running on a cruise ship, you slip, and you stab your eye with a pen. Some thing has happened so come on down! The game has begun! Because — I don’t know about you — but whenever some stupidass thing like that happens, I immediately review the chronology of events that led me to this moment. I don’t have a choice in the matter — I’m off! And the game wouldn’t be the game if I just identify whatever it was that just proceeded the fuck up. I mean, if only, right?

For some reason — a virus in my millennial blood, perhaps — it’s easier to believe a global conspiracy decades in the making than just admit that I screwed up. Why? I don’t know.

ANYWAY — here we are. Episode two. Let’s talk about a time I fucked up bigtime.

On Pink, hit it. You’re listening to Hail Mary Digital. Am I going to have to bleep out every time I say the word f*ck? F******ck. Episode 2: I F*cked Up Bigtime. Or: on finding perfect goodness…

All right. OK. We gotta play the game, but that means we gotta start at the end. And our story ends about a decade ago: on December 18th, 2010. That’s when; what about the where? We’re at The Cup on Staten Island. I don’t know if it was The Cup at the time because The Cup has had many names over the years. Like, for a time it was just that: The Cup. But it’s also been The Muddy Cup, The Full Cup, and most recently… The Hashtag Bar.

ANYWAY we’re at The Cup. The Cup, for my money, had the best sound system of any venue on the island. For local shows, having the best sound system meant that the PA was — for once — louder than the bands themselves; you’re not just hit with a wall of mush. I mean, yes, you’re still hit with a wall of mush BUT at least you can hear the vocals and make out the kick drum, too. Better sound — to me — meant it was going to be a better show than normal… and I get that that seems like an obvious point to make now that I’m writing it down. But there are two direct consequences to this.

The first one. Consider the date of this show: December, 18th. The show took place on a Saturday night, a week before Christmas. Local shows were usually themed if there was some appropriate special occasion coming, like a holiday — a few weeks before, we probably had our annual Skanksgiving show with all the ska bands. But for this show, that meant everything — the instruments, the musicians, the halls of the venue — they were all decked out with boughs of holly and other assorted holiday paraphernalia (I believe one of the drummers had a, um, baby Jesus taped to his kick drum (and I mean, really, would it have been a Christmas show without a makeshift, punk nativity??? It’s doubtful)).

The Cup looked great and the vibe could only be described as, you know, merry.

Part of that also had to do with where most of us were at with our lives. 2010 was the year I graduated high school and while I spent my first semester in college in Manhattan, it felt like being a world away from home (more on that later). Beyond that, I was also a year or two younger than most of the crew in this scene and many of them went to school much further away than I did, states away sometimes. Meaning: for a lot of us, this was one of the few, precious breaks where we were all home; some of these bands hadn’t played a local show in months. And in an absence of shows, that meant not seeing your “show” friends in ages.

What are “show” friends? I’m glad I assumed you asked! Show friends are friends that you only ever saw at shows because no one has time to see anyone at any other time. But you make sure to make a whole thing out of it. Like, going to shows wasn’t just about going to THE show, right? You all got food afterwards at Mike’s Place or something. My best friend Zim and I would get Palmers at the Food Mart and sit on my porch talking local band politics after a good show. That kind of stuff. Anyway, I just love just watching people reunite: that first glimpse of realization, the cheer, the hug; the sizing each other up during small talk; the: “I’ll be right back, I just saw someone else I gotta say hello to…” But, whatever, there’s going to be a ton of people here and yeah, the place ended up being packed.

see? lots of people. you can’t technically see me in this photo, but more on that in a minute. Photo by Nikki Bacas.

Couple all that with the fact that we’re playing a venue that had the only decent sound system on the Island and this show was looking like it had the potential to be an all-timer.

The second direct consequence of having a good PA was that my recording was going to come out sounding super crisp. For a few years at that point, I’d been running a Tumblr blog called the Staten Island Local Show Closet. This was a little hobby I had: whenever I went to a local show, I’d take my bulky Sony D50 digital recorder to quote-unquote “tape” the whole thing. Maybe a day or so later, I’d splice up all the tracks and upload them to the blog for people to download.

me doing the thing. Photo by Erin Janosik.

Real quick: you want to talk about a fuck up? Back in the day, there were two main file sharing sites you could use before the likes of Dropbox and Google got in the game: Mediafire and Megaupload. Remember that scene at the end of Last Crusade when Donovan drinks from the chalice that Elsa picks out for him and and then he crumbles and then the Knight is all like, “He chose… poorly,” ??? Between Mediafire and fucking Megaupload, guess which one I used to host all my recordings. Yeah.

My point is: if the sound system was good, the bands would sound better, which meant my recordings would sound better, which meant I’d get more reblogs on my little Tumblr profile and, subsequently, more downloads. And because I’m just as screwy as everyone else is, all those fake internet points, meager as they may be, validated a small part of my self worth. OK? I admit it.

I mean, I’m kidding (slightly). But by the end of 2010, bands liked the Show Closet because they’d be able to approximate how they sounded live and people liked hearing sets from shows they might’ve missed. I felt like I was keeping up the legacy started by Zeppelin bootleggers, just on a much, much smaller scale. I was happy to document those times at those places; nobody else was and it felt like someone ought to do it; why not me?

Running the Show Closet felt like a responsibility — and the further we get from that time, the happier I am to’ve done it — but also, like, I didn’t want to just go to shows and have to worry about the levels on my dear Song D50 the whole time. I’d have to stand in the back of the venue, by myself and I didn’t get to enjoy the bands or be in the thick of it all with my friends. And there’s my problem…

So, ready for the fuck up? Here it is: Christmas show. At the Cup. We’re a few bands in and yeah, this show is living up to all the potential. Everyone’s going rosy. It’s awesome. And I’m in the back, taping an old school pop punk band called Story.

jaybird on guitar and Scionti on bass in Story. Photo by Nikki Bacas.

Story’s got a pretty storied history — soon after this show they’d change their name to Wester and become just an emo band, and a little while after that they’d change their name The Messenger Flood and be a post-rock band. Before they were Story, they were a punk band called The Antics, and after that — just before they became Story —they were a punk/ska band called Sink You Fool!. You got all that? No? That’s OK. The point is, and this is subtle, but Story had already written and were playing the songs that would be on their Freight In Limbo EP — which they’d release under the Wester moniker. Put another way: this pop punk band was playing emo songs.

They’re what? The third or fourth band of the night? I’ve been hanging out just underneath The Cup’s little mixing booth recording everyone. But the guys in Story are my friends and their set is winding down. I want to be with them, I want to be in the crowd! So I call over my buddy — my best friend Brian — just before Story are about to play their last song. And Brian knows the drill, he’ll hold my recorder for a sec and I push my way up through the crowd a little bit. Perfect. Story start playing a song called Shattered Island (which is… interesting (but more on that later, too)). But they play it, it’s great, we’re all jolly.

santa seemed quite illuminating that night. Photo by Nikki Bacas.

This is when it happens; my fuck up was this: I should’ve known better, known what was about to happen next. Like I just said, Story went through about a million band names and sounds but right before they were Story, they were Sink You Fool, the punk/ska band. They released one and only one EP as Sink You Fool BUT the third song on it was this cute little number called Caps, Gauges, Shorts, And Kicks (which everyone just called it Caps). Caps was a bit of a calling card for the band, you know a novelty. A fun little song to top off any set because it was so out of left field. This wasn’t a pop punk song or a ska song or even an emo song… this was (what else?) a hardcore song.

don’t think I’ll ever forget those first few SNARE HITS THANKS CHRIS. Photo by Nikki Bacas.

And I knew this, this shouldn’t’ve been a surprise. But it was. I mean, really, they always, always ended their sets with Caps. Thanks to Brian, I have the audio, I might as well roll it. “So do you want us to play it or not? All right!”

Mosh pits are like an inverse hurricane: the center — you know, ground zero where I was standing, of course — is where it’s violent. At least in my experience. Which was this. This was the one and only time I ever got caught in a mosh pit. So yeah, Story busts into Caps and after the first few rapid snare hits, I’m hit immediately. Wham! Was I whacked from behind or from the front? Doesn’t matter! In any case, I wasn’t expecting this, I was caught off guard so it didn’t take much to send me to the floor. I landed on my elbow.

In case you’re wondering, just because someone’s body has hit the floor does not mean a mosh pit stops. So, I still heard all the ruffling going on around me and the pounding amplifiers. All the Christmas lights that’d been set up around The Cup didn’t matter down here; it was dim. There was just… legs. And feet. People stepping on me. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that I got hit in the head. Someone’s knee or foot. And then it happened again. And again.

I swear to God I was having lucid enough thoughts while all this was happening to recall something from the news from a few weeks prior. My senior year of high school I thought it’d be so very worldly and astute of me to start reading Al Jazeera English as one of my main news sources. Al Jazeera didn’t hold back — not like the American news websites did — so their coverage of the Phnom Penh stampede was particularly graphic. People were stuck on a bridge, the third day of the Khmer Water Festival and began pushing from both sides. A panic broke out, leading to the stampede which claimed three hundred and forty seven lives.

I didn’t remember all that distinctly. What was distinct was what I was feeling. And this wasn’t claustrophobia or pain, it was fear. I was getting anxious because knowing what I knew — and what was happening to me — this is how people die.

I tried moving, putting my hands out to try and get up but that was pointless; they just kept getting kicked out from under me. I should be clear, too, nobody was trying to hurt me — I mean, at least, I don’t think — it’s just, the point of scuffling like this is, well, the scuffle. Most times you get knocked around and you bounce back up, no big deal. Usually, people around you are helping you up and I’d seen exactly that a hundred times. But it wasn’t happening for me. I remember being down there and asking myself, “Why is it taking so long?” That was the other notorious facet of Caps: on record, it was only fifty seconds long and Story always played it way faster than that. For a moment, I thought it’d finally come… but no, it was just a small reprieve in the song where they change tempos. This was taking an eternity… “You fucking bitch!” “Hey! Andrew Vacante on vocals…”

Eventually, eternity ended. As happens, someone — I don’t know who — but someone grabbed me by an arm and pulled me up, finally. Actually, they pulled me up with so much force that — coupled with the dizziness that was setting in — I nearly toppled over again. I was stumbling about, not able to balance, seeing spots of… nothing, just fuzz. With what few bearings I had, I attempted to make my way to the back of The Cup, to Brian and my Sony D50.

And it was here — at that moment — that the game set in. What was it that caused what just happened to me to happen to me? If only I’d gotten a better spot in the crowd? No. If only I’d remembered that Story ends their sets with Caps? No. Maybe if Brian wasn’t there, or at least wasn’t near (enough) me at the exact right moment when I could’ve asked to hold my recorder? No. Each of those were their own unique mistake, to be sure, but my answer to the game was this: my head never would’ve been pounding like it was if I’d never ever joined the music scene. That was my fuck up, the real cause of it all. And boy, had I fucked up bigtime. Next stop, the start.

Six hundred and fifty-eight days before the Christmas show at The Cup was a Battle of the Bands at L’Amour’s. I know that band battles seem like a sort of movie cliché and, you know, not a thing that really happens in real life, but I don’t know what to tell you. We had ‘em. There were quite a few battles of the band back in the day, actually, each with their own varying degree of legit-ness. Like, what does it even mean to be crowned the best band on Staten Island? Who decides that? Who can? That said, the bands that came in first often got some decent plunder, be it recording time at a local studio or some big cash prize. But always, the real, undefeated winners were the venue owners. I mean, what did we know? We were kids. But I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that whatever multivariable calculus was used to determine the top tier band, the number of tickets they sold always seemed to play an… exceeding role.

So it’s a bit ironic that I didn’t actually pay for my ticket to get into L’Amour’s that night. In fact, I don’t think I had a ticket. I am suspicious of if he had the authority to — and it’s pretty clear to me now that he didn’t — but I was snuck in by my friend from high school, Andrew Paladino. We all knew him (and still know him) as dNo.

dNo and I went to St. Joseph by-the-Sea High School. Private, Catholic, exactly what you’re imagining. And we were in the school band together (though, nobody called it the band; you weren’t in the band, you were in Band. With a capital B). And being in Band at Sea was a trip. For one thing, it was a class, but also… not exactly? We got grades, but not unlike the formulas used to determine the winners of the battles of the bands, how our Band grades factored into our total GPA remained this mysterious enigma my whole tenure there. The other great thing about Band was that you had to love it. I mean, you had to! Like, they scheduled it before homeroom. Downbeat was at 7:30 AM sharp, Monday to Friday.

And while on the broader topic of ranking bands, Sea’s Band was never anything to write home about. Not our concert band, definitely not our marching band. Not even the pit band we pulled together for the musicals and kept together with gum and shoelaces. Perhaps — perhaps! — our jazz band could hang with some of the others on the island. But so yeah, we weren’t very good.

That said, we wouldn’t’ve traded it for anything else in the world. Sea was all about trying to produce the island’s next top academics and leaders and athletes. Not the top artists, though. Not the top musicians. If we wanted that, we should’ve gone a few blocks down Hylan Boulevard to Tottenville High School. But despite all that, I maintain that Band was still one of the school’s principle accomplishments, albeit one that was a bit more understated.

SEAN10RS!!! (and Mr. Delman). — **SEA**N10RS!!! (and Mr. Delman).

Consider this: a freshman walking into Band got a snapshot of all that Sea had to offer: every club or sport had a member that was also in Band. Band was this microcosm of the whole student population. I mean, hell, we even all had homeroom together right there in the Band room. Imagine that: all eighty of us packed together in one place, all four grades (from the baby frosh to jaded seniors, all in one habitat). The class vaguely counted and we got up entirely too early each morning but we still showed up because once you were in it, you were important to this melting pot. You were needed. So yeah, maybe we were never one of Sea’s crown jewels, but the friends you formed in Band… graduations would come and go but one thing stayed the same: you could always count on your fellow Band geeks.

don’t you forget about us (like I forgot about wearing my band shoes… 🤦‍♂️)

ANYWAY dNo was a year older, a sophomore when I was a freshman. Many students were in Band because we’d just been in whatever orchestra we were in when we were in middle school, so why not continue that and have something to paste onto your transcript later? But dNo was one of the few, rare talents that could, you know, actually play. And I mean play. For the big, full orchestra stuff, he was a percussionist, but his home was the jazz band. His weapon of choice? An axe. dNo’s father is a professional saxophone player, so he’d had that musical gene in him. Whenever solos came up he’d bust out his guitar and just smoke everyone, leave the rest of us in his dust.

I was so evidently intimidated by someone older and much more talented but we still managed to forge a friendship, somehow. Again, that’s just what happened when you were in Band, starting your mornings with the same gang, day in and day out. When we really got close was in the spring of freshman year, when the school musical rolled around. The bassists and the guitarists were seated near each other, towards the back with the drums. That year we did Babes in Arms and the sheer rascality of all we got up to in and out of the pit remains — to this day! — the Stuff of Legends. And after the shows, we’d all get rides up to the Applebees in New Dorp for a glorious, victorious post show feast. For whatever reason, the upperclassmen all took this shy kid under their wing, let him sit with them and eat and hang out.

viking players for fiddler on the roof (we might’ve, uh, accidentally put a hole in that side wall there and definitely NOT where TYLER is covering/standing 👀).

I can’t say for sure when I learned about them, but by then I had to’ve been aware of dNo’s band. They were a trio called Curious Volume and they’d been together since middle school. That was an impressive feat (that band I mentioned last episode, that covered American Idiot when we played IS34’s talent show was long over). I’d been bopping around between bands since then, but none of them ever really had any traction. And there’s a lot of reasons why but chief among them is just that writing songs is super fucking difficult. Or rather, writing good songs is the hard part. All the bands I was in were ripping off The Beatles or Avenged Sevenfold or Guns ’N’ Roses if not just covering them outright.

Trotta looks like a hoodlum, right? Photo by James Yarusinsky.

But Curious Volume? There was something off about them and their songs from the get-go. They had this zany energy, this penchant for abruptly flipping the script in some new, orthogonal direction in each verse and chorus and bridge. And they were catchy. And they spoke to the concerns of young, teenage boys going to Catholic school on Staten Island. Like, how many songs are there out there where the chorus talks about hoping you catch the train… and then it’s followed up with a scat solo? Nobody — or at least none of the bands I was in — were doing anything like this.

The first time I heard them was online. They pressed CDs but I didn’t get my hands on them until later, and this was also before file sharing sites or streaming became, like, a thing. But in the absence of all that, we did have one coveted resource: Myspace.

The internet of today is so segmented. Like, the social media sites like Instagram and Twitter are the social media sites. If you’re in a band you can get your stuff up on Spotify or Apple Music but for the most direct connection to your fans, you want to use Bandcamp (or Soundcloud if that’s more your crowd). But back in ye olden times, Myspace was the one stop shop for everything.

On Myspace, you had your own profile. And you could customize that profile however you wanted. Didn’t like the default page layout? Not a problem, you could change it. You could also host your best friends on your profile, right, your Top 8. And let me tell you: many friendships were ended over the incorrect listing of besties or a glaring omission in this reverent space. You could upload photos in which you would leave a pic comment in exchange for a pic comment with someone else. And who could forget the bulletin board? The place where anyone could post just about anything, really.

You didn’t just have to have a profile for yourself on Myspace; you could also have one for your band. And this was gold. Bands could set up pages and — perhaps most crucially — post some songs where they’d be hosted for free. This was far and away the easiest way to distribute your music if you weren’t loaded. Band profiles and personal profiles were basically indistinguishable, so why not put it somewhere in your Top 8 and give it more exposure? You could also set any song that was uploaded to Myspace — which, I’m sure turned out to be a copyright nightmare — to be the song that played when people visited your profile, so set it to be one of your band’s singles.

This is what I’m getting at: The music landscape was turning more and more to the internet and for local bands that didn’t have the resources to build and host a website, Myspace was THE THING. You had to have your music up, you had to maintain your page so that looked nice, and you had to have a lot of friends because you wanted a lot of interaction any time you posted about, say, an upcoming battle of the bands. Curious Volume did all these things and they were meticulous about it; their page was legit. And it helped, like I said, that they had some good songs. There was one in particular that all the girls pretended dNo wrote about them called I Need You — at its peak, it had tens of thousands of plays on their page.

And it wasn’t just that the songs were good in and of themselves as far as the songwriting was concerned. They won one of those battle of the bands and they’d had the cash and actually got some decent recordings made (all while the rest of us were still early adapting prosumer audio hardware and tracking into the sketchiest digital audio workstations ever designed).

They had the music, they had the crisp profile. So what was next? After all, any edge you could get could be the thing that helped get you discovered, helped “break” you (so to speak). I mean, not really, but that’s what it felt like, so that’s how we all behaved. So what was something that could put you over the edge? Having live videos of your band.

no baby Jesus present. Photo by James Yarusinsky.

That’s the idea — and in theory, it’s great — but you gotta remember what we were dealing with back then. This was early 2009. The first iPhone wasn’t even two years old at that point. Hell, you couldn’t even record videos on iPhones until the 3GS! And I’m referring to iPhones because they’re the crème de la crème now; nobody had them back then except for the snootiest of the snootiest Catholic school students. We were all stuck with crappy phones with crappy, overloaded microphones shooting the crappiest, potato quality videos possibly ever. I mean, seriously, the Lumière brothers could’ve gotten better footage of your band than any of us in the crowd.

And so this is where I stepped to the plate. Did I volunteer myself or was I propositioned? I can’t recall, but who knows? Maybe it was common knowledge that I liked to screw around with my parents' camcorder (‘cause my first love, before I ever dreamed of being Paul McCartney, was of becoming George Lucas). And not that the sound on this thing was great or even good, but it would’ve beat everyone’s phones for sure and not look too bad to boot. And so, that was it. At some point dNo and I arranged a little quid pro quo: if I could video tape his band at their upcoming show at L’Amour’s, he’d get me in for free. That’s why I didn’t have a ticket. That’s why he snuck me in. In all likelihood, I probably would’ve gone to the show anyway, but hell, if I didn’t have to pay the what? Five bucks? to get in, why not? Sure! And so we had ourselves a deal. I didn’t know it yet, but just like that the Staten Island Local Show Closet was born…

This show at L’amour’s had been hyped up by dNo in homeroom and on Myspace, but I don’t think anyone was prepared for the turnout. L’Amour’s was packed. Packed. Like fucking sardines, all right? There were a few familiar faces from school, but so many more were strangers, kids that went to other schools. And you could forget the small talking; you ever go somewhere and it’s so loud it’s hard to even think? That’s what it was like. And, of course I made the rookie mistake of not having any ear plugs.

I was here for a job, and I wanted to do my duty well, and so I waded through the masses until I made it to what felt like a good spot in the center of the room. And then I waited. We all waited. There was growing recognition that this was going to be an Event. Mounting anticipation ran through each of us, jumping from person to person like the Power of God when they open the Ark at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And just like the Raiders, we weren’t expecting what was about to happen next: to get our fucking faces melted off.

OK, it was slightly less dramatic than this. but not by much.

They cut the lights, then they cut the house music. The band didn’t take the stage, though, just dNo at first. He started with a song he’d only posted to Myspace weeks before, the solo acoustic number called Thoughts from the Eltingville Train Station. Everyone already knew all the words and sang along and in the comedown near the end dNo’s bandmates finally joined him: the bowl-cut Cole Rice and John Trotta — or just Trotta — on bass. I remember being particularly wary or I guess intimidated by Trotta. I was a bass player, but here was dNo’s bass player. He wore his hat kinda goofy and I knew he went to Farrell — which is Sea’s crosstown rival, an all boys Catholic school — and all those dudes that went there were all shady. All trouble.

Regardless, Thoughts from the Eltingville Train Station was winding down as Cole took his seat behind the kit. dNo kicked on his distortion and you might as well’ve lit a firework off in the room. There was this eruption. The first few notes of (what else? but) I Need You and it was like all the energy in the room released. All hell broke loose: there was pushing, jumping, flailing, singing, clapping, diving.

I found it hard to believe that so much sound was coming out of a trio. Cole was like John Bonham incarnate or perhaps Thor, thunderously punishing his kit without mercy. And Trotta just sounded low and huge. dNo was somehow playing three guitar parts at once. Like, imagine an alternate reality where Jimmy Page joined Metallica instead of Zeppelin. Song to song they continued just to be catchy as fuck and, simultaneous, very strange.

And the more and more I think about that specifically, the less it feels like an accident.

There is one universally loved music group on Staten Island. Plenty of people liked The Beatles, sure, I mean, who doesn’t? And at any show the over/under of how many Zeppelin shirts you’d see was always — generally speaking — four and a half. But they didn’t unite us in the way that The Wu-Tang Clan united us. Maybe that sounds strange, maybe not, but every rock band, every punk kid, every hardcore mosher on Staten Island knew that we owed everything — and I mean everything — to Method Man, GZA, Inspectah Deck, U-God, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, Masta Killa, ODB, Cappadonna, and the RZA. I wonder if they know that; I hope to God they do.

Still, talk to anyone anywhere and they won’t have a nice word to say about Staten Island except that, hey, at least there’s The Wu-Tang Clan. Their debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) is a sacred text here and beyond. The album is hailed as being this oddball mishmash that came out of left field and was just better than everything else. And everyone accepts it for what it is, a landmark in rap’s history. But here’s the thing, too: every casual, dismissive comment about Staten Island also betrays the foundation of what makes The Wu-Tang Clan The Wu-Tang Clan.

To the point: Staten Island — like all islands, really — exists in isolation. There are four bridges to get on and one ferry service. I suppose you can do as the deer do and swim to and from Jersey, but I don’t recommend it. Especially not while three of those bridges connect us to the Garden State. Which means — that’s right! — we only have one bridge connecting us to the city we’re a part of: The Verrazzano, to Brooklyn. When I said earlier that going to college in the city (and, by the way, Staten Islanders call anything not Staten Island the city, but when I said going to college in the city) meant it felt like I was a world away from home, I wasn’t being overdramatic. Often, a trip home would clock in at over an hour, usually closer to two. Staten Islanders that travel to the city every day for work routinely come in first place for longest average commute time in the world. Put another way: it’s difficult for people to get here, and it’s hard for us to leave.

You might think that isolation is a hindrance, a grand knock against us because that suggests we lack exposure. But don’t tell that to The Wu-Tang Clan. Just listen to what the RZA had to say in his epic tome The TAO of WU:

“I spent my formative years on an island — Staten Island — which is a blessing I’ve taken with me through life. Many cultures consider an island to be the ideal home. First, because you’re surrounded by water, which is life. Second, because you’re isolated from the masses, which allows you to find yourself, to develop inner strengths you couldn’t find anywhere else. An island shows you the true nature of life itself.

In Staten Island, [The Wu-Tang Clan] were set apart from all the influences and fads that were happening in the other four boroughs. I believe that while everything else in hip-hop culture was in constant flux, this island was nurturing something ancient. When you watch a movie like Godzilla, you see them go out to one of these tiny remote islands and find Mothra. It was the same way with us. A nine-man hip-hop crew based on Mathematics, chess, comics, and kung-fu flicks wasn’t springing up in the middle of a Manhattan art scene. Only on a remote island can something like King Kong grow to his full capacity.”

The Wu-Tang Clan own Staten Island, wear it like a badge. If you’re me, if you’re from here, how do you not love that? How do you not try and follow that, try to honor that?

I once speculated over whether or not The Wu-Tang Clan would’ve become what they became if they didn’t get their start for another fifteen years or so, if they were part of the Myspace generation. You know, just fucking post up Bring Da Ruckus as soon as it was finished and let it fly. The mental gymnastics here actually go a step deeper than that. Like, think about it: the modern internet made us all connected, right? There’s no sea borders between profile pages. And that would appear to stand opposed to, or resolve, isolation. But for all the quote-unquote “connectivity” of the internet, it’s still a remote connection. The Wu-Tang Clan were alone together. Those of us here are — to this day — spatially, and therefore also temporally, separate from the rest of the city and the rest of the world.

That’s a fun thing to think about, but ultimately one of those unanswerable questions. But I bring it up now because I believe that same brand of potency through isolation — the kind that let’s King Kong grow to his full potential — existed for our local bands, too. Like Curious Volume. At least, in our own way with our own flair. But it isn’t like whatever was afoot with a band like Curious Volume wasn’t tangibly evident to us. If they had to be distilled down to a genre, we could’ve called them ska/punk, but that didn’t feel right to me, not back then and not now. I mean, yes, upstrokes and complicated bass lines, sure. But they also took their cues from a massive musical library, rejecting nothing and implementing everything (like adding a disco breakdown in Song for 3 Scholars). They exploited a thorough vocabulary that meant their bombast was still consumable. And there was no better example of this than their song Bigtime…

Curious Volume’s set at L’Amour’s was drawing near its end. We were all gross and sweaty and my arm was crying with fatigue from holding up the camcorder for however the hell long their set was. But it didn’t matter because they were just cranking out song after song and it was like nothing I’d ever heard before. And it was all right in front of my eyes and being pounded into my ears. I’m sure they had the numbers for this battle of the bands — at least enough to carry over to whatever the next round was — but they also had to’ve scored whatever points in whatever system was being used just based on the fervor they induced; it was rapturous, euphoric insanity. The only thing left to do was to end it.

This is partly the story of how I joined the scene, but that wasn’t something that just happened because I simply showed up. The set had been thrilling and exhilarating and I wanted to be a part of this again. But it was this last song, the finale — Bigtime — was the invitation to take ownership in this enterprise. Put another way: if they don’t play this song — if they don’t end with it — I’m not convinced I’m getting my skull knocked around six hundred and fifty eight days later. Is that a ridiculous claim? Yes! But hear me out: Let’s begin with the song itself.

Cole leads us in with a jazzy tom fill, something that has that Sing, Sing, Sing swing. The boys count us in and we’re off. Trotta is walking the walk on bass and dNo’s playing… not dissonant chords, but F down to a D7 is a little unusual.

Woo! There’s nothing I need more now

Than a punch right to my face

An elbow to my waist

To be put in my place

Yeah, I’m a rude, rude boy…

Anyway, he starts singing and the lyrics are fairly straightforward: he’s committed an offense and his retribution is coming and he deserves it and he knows it.

Enough is enough

‘cause I fucked up

And I deserve no mercy…

But when the chorus hits, they take a sharp, abrupt turn. The tempo recedes as they contort the song into a mighty anthem. And here they make a bold proclamation:

I fucked up bigtime

Yeah, I know

I fucked up bigtime

Yeah, I know, here we go…!

That’s it. That’s all they say. Simple. I get that that might not seem like much. Even on the recording dNo’s guitars are merely overdriven; they don’t smack the way you’d think an opus like this ought to, they don’t shake bricks off walls or make you nauseous. So, how is it possible this song be the crux of everything? Well, what’s important and what you got to remember is that I saw them play this live and when Curious Volume played Bigtime to a hometown crowd, something incredible would happen.

See, when they got to the chorus and the big slow down, dNo and Trotta would step away from their microphones. They wouldn’t sing the chorus because, in their place, the crowd would rush the stage and they’d be the ones shouting their confession to the world, arm in arm. And don’t get the wrong idea, people were singing along to all their songs the whole show, but only now were they being summoned to L’Amour’s elevated stage to relieve dNo and Trotta. This is the instant I joined the scene because in that moment, even though I wasn’t personally hoping on stage, there wasn’t any separation between the band and the crowd. We — everyone — were on equal footing. Like stepping into Band at Sea.

There’s power and status and esteem in playing in a rock band but in the biggest moment, they relinquished all that to us, their friends and fans. And in doing so they fostered and cultivated community. I mean, I’m sure it was fun for everyone to get up there, too, but gosh… what an extraordinary act. This happened here and it could’ve only’ve happened here, a local band on an isolated island writing as they only knew how, this off-beat and bizarre song.

There seems to be something, too, in the potency of this song due to its opportunity for and offering of penance. Apologizing often feels like a very personal, very private act, usually between two people. But, communal atonement has been a part of various traditions for… well, forever. I asked our resident expert Casper about this…

Casper

The first thing I want to say is that — when you tell that story — I hear is confession, right? Like, I hear a practice in which people are saying something that they, you know, “I screwed up. Like, I know I fucked up.” And the music is giving people a language to say the thing that they know is real in a way that might be really hard to do just if you’re sitting on your own, talking to someone.

Brian

Yeah.

Casper

And I think that’s one of the beautiful things of music is that it literally gives us words or it gives us access to an emotion, right, whether it’s a melody or a chorus or something or lyrics that help us reconnect with something that we feel that maybe we’ve pushed away or maybe we’re scared of feeling. So music is a very, very powerful way of doing it and what’s so powerful about music especially, when it’s shared in a context like this concert —

Brian

Right.

Casper

— is that it’s not individualized. And so I think with confession it’s so powerful to realize, like, everyone has fucked up, right?

Brian

Yeah.

Casper

And singing that together — and this is one of beautiful things of congregational singing — whether it’s in, you know —

Brian

Right!

Casper

— like a punk, kind of rock concert or in, or in congregational singing, it’s a collective language —

Brian

Yeah.

Casper

— for the things that we have experienced individually. And so, you know, so many practices today when we think about spirituality are focused on individual practices whether it’s, you know, meditation or whether it’s sometimes even yoga (that sense of, you know, get your own house in order). But what I love about this example that you’re sharing is that its a collective confession which feels very faithful and traditional — especially, maybe especially Catholic tradition.

Brian

Yeah, yeah.

Casper

That sense of, like, we know we have, we’ve all scored up.

Brian

Yeah.

Casper

And I love that the lyric is, “I fucked up, yeah, I know.”

Brian

Yeah!

Casper

Right, like, it’s not just a realization of, like, “Oh, no, this just happened!” It’s, like, no I — and I, and what’s unsaid I think in that lyric maybe is, like, “I’m going — and I know I’m going to screw up again.”

Brian

Yeah.

Casper

That that’s part of what it means to be human. I’m very interested — I mean, this is so much of what the book is about — is thinking about where spirituality shows up outside of traditionally religious spaces. And, I mean, music concerts are such an obvious one and there are artists who really lean into that.

Brian

Right.

Casper

And who play towards it, that sense of building tension and release, a sense of introspection and outer connection.

Brian

Yeah.

Casper

All of that is really going on I think for artists who are thinking about it that way. I mean one of the things that’s really important to think about with confession — that I learned from my friend Nadia Bolz-Weber — is: we should never set people up to confess without giving absolution.

Brian

Yeah.

Casper

And so you need that response of confession and absolution. And so one of the things that is, maybe, less common I think in a, in a music context is maybe an explicit sense of that, you know, whether it’s forgiveness, whether it’s renewal, a chance to start again. That’s part of what makes confession so cathartic and so important is because we feel, like, yeah, we can give another go, you know?

Brian

Yeah, yeah.

Casper

And, and that might be implicit within a music concert, right? You get that kind of, “Whew! Right, like, I sweat, I danced, I feel good. I feel renewed and energized.” But that’s maybe one of the beautiful things about religious traditions that we can lean more into is that explicit sense of: you fucked up, you’re sorry, you’re going to find a way to do better. You’re going to start again. And really receive a blessing in that moment to start again.

I’m always a bit apprehensive to indulge in nostalgia. Normally that’s due to remembering events as not just better than they were, per se but… better than they deserve, right? Like, making a thing seem more encompassing than it ever really was. This was the opposite of that, though. This ended up being a genuinely momentous event. And the scary part is weighing how much of it came down to just my buddy from Band asked — and perhaps on a whim! — if I’d video his band at a show, and I said, yeah, OK. I just… how do you adequately frame a moment like that? What if I said no? What if I didn’t go and everything didn’t change for me that night? And not for nothing but this wasn’t big just for me, either — this was the first show for a LOT of people, including my current Dungeon Master Joe Cosentino. Cos put it like this once:

Cos

It’s amazing that this single event has become such a massive turning point in so many people's lives. I honestly have no idea who I would be today if I did not attend this show. My entire frame of reference, every major experience and almost everything I hold important to me and define myself by, hinges on this one evening. And I doubt I'm the only person that feels this way. When I walked in that door, I knew the two people I came with; now, I can name almost everybody in that room. When they assemble the compendium of local music history I hope they’ll mark this as the beginning of the Pax Romana.

The Pax Romana. Photo by James Yarusinsky.

I can’t watch the footage I took that night without a sense of awe. I see people that I didn’t know at the time, but that would eventually become my best friends. I see others that are “show” friends, even to this day. There are pals I already knew from school, some that I keep in contact with and some I don’t. There are characters — villains and heroes from the scene — that are conspicuously absent from this event and I’m left to wonder: where were they that night? There are people in this room that I will fall in love with… and fall out of love with. Just the law of large numbers means that I’m sure there are some people in this video that are no longer with us. There are people within these frames I will yet still come to know very well, one day. And others I once knew well but they’ve since become strangers again. And yet, even more beyond that that will remain perfect strangers, forever. They're all here. All of them. Mixed in the red, blue, greens of my MiniDv tape.

The worst aspect of the game might seem like it rejects the immediate boneheaded-ness of whatever I just did. But I’m a prisoner to the game in a way that feels worse. And it’s that obviously nothing happens in a vacuum. Nothing happens independently. Like, I can draw a line, prudent or not prudent, from getting injured in a mosh pit to a band playing some song at a show the year before, but… why stop there? What caused the song? I mean we probably inspected that enough. But so then, what caused the show? You know, besides the potential shadiness of the venue owners.

There’s so much about that Saturday night in February that shouldn’t’ve worked, so much that was… just weird. This was unquestionably going to be a big show for Curious Volume, but for them, it was in large part just another highlight in a series of ascending highlights; another peak in a mountain range. And even the venue itself — L’Amour’s — that’s not the venue on Staten Island, not now and not even then. The venue isn’t even The Cup; it’s this grimy, seedy place called Dock Street.

Dock Street has a few levels but everyone cuts their teeth and earns their stripes and other idioms in the basement bar, which is now called Amendment 18. Picture The Beatles’ Cavern Club, only your descending into a personal lounge designed for Satan.

The only other variable that made that show what it was — that made the fraternal aspect of Bigtime truly pop — is the sheer volume of people that attended. In all my years going to shows, I’ve never been to one that’s been as, well, crowded. Is it dumb to point this out, that all the cheers were louder and the collective harmony of the masses was all the more euphonious because we just had the numbers? I’m so drawn to this though, because continuing to play the game at this juncture is where everything starts to get a little twitchy and uncomfortable.

The only question left to ask is why were so many people at this show specifically and the only answer I have — the only “good” answer I have — is that, in addition to being isolated, Staten Island is a segregated island.

Segregation is a sort of isolation unto itself, isn’t it? What I mean is: there are pockets of isolation on our island that are hard to navigate to and from and the effect of that — the BigPicture™ — is that we’re segregated. You don’t even need to just take my word for it, you can see it. I’m about to do again what I did last episode, which is commit the cardinal sin of podcasting: describing a visual. And what’s worse is I’m not a visual person; I really don’t deserve my eyes (I mean, you heard what I did to one of them on The Parallax Collapse, right? It was very nearly a pirate’s life for me after that). I’m going to be talking about the most dazzling sight one can conceive, too: highway systems. Seriously, I strongly urge you to pull up a map of Staten Island, or at least, for the love of God, look it up later.

ANYWAY look at Staten Island.

the biggest pizza slice in all New York.

We’re a top-heavy island, and we got ourselves a tilt, more than 45º or so, give or take, running northeast to southwest. Now look at the highways: we’ve got three. When you’re coming off the Outerbridge Crossing you can hop on either the Korean War Vets Parkway — which will run you up the center of the island and specifically to The Mall — or the 440, which is known as the West Shore Expressway. The Korean War Vets Parkway eventually fizzles out Mid-Island, but the West Shore Expressway keeps going until it connects with the runoff of anything coming over the Goethal’s Bridge (in our northwestern corner). Together, they form the creatively named Staten Island Expressway. The Staten Island Expressway runs West to East from there. There’s a minor, offshoot highway, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Expressway, which will take you North to the Bayonne Bridge and, subsequently, to Bayonne, New Jersey. But like, I don’t know, 90% of the people on the Staten Island Expressway have got their eyes set on one thing and one thing only: the Verrazzano. After that, it’s Brooklyn and beyond.

Looking at the West Shore Expressway, there’s really isn’t much to the west of it once you get to Rossville; you’re basically just driving up the Island’s coast. You can’t say the same thing about the Staten Island Expressway and the northern coast, though. From the Goethal’s Bridge to the Verrazano there’s a whole chunk of our island. This is the North Shore. And the expressway is, quite literally, the dividing line.

I suppose the game could continue to be played here — was our island designed this way with intent? — but… I believe there is more virtue in examining the effects of all this, at least for right now. Staten Island as a whole is 60% white, about 19% hispanic or Latinx, 12% Black, 11% Asian, and I’m already over 100% because I’m giving you rough estimates but of course beyond that there are smaller groups still of Pacific Islanders, American Indians, and people of two or more races. The reason I bring this up is because we are not all of us — all half a million of us — evenly distributed across the island.

In broad strokes, Staten Island’s Black population lives above the Staten Island Expressway, in the North Shore. Staten Island’s white population lives below it, dispersed between the Mid-Island and the South Shore. With a total population this large there are bound to be exceptions, naturally, such as Sandy Ground. Sandy Ground, a village within Rossville on the South Shore, is — believe it or not — the oldest continuously settled free Black community in the United States and an officially recognized spot on The Underground Railroad. The first settlers were farmers and I learned recently that they were the ones to bring strawberries to Staten Island; they didn’t grow here naturally, not until these farmers brought them here from the south. And though Rossville has been thoroughly condominium-ized since, some descendants of those original settlers still reside there today. I really could — and should — do a whole episode just on Sandy Ground — the history is amazing, and I didn’t know much about it until this year. Anyway, I would’ve been remiss if I didn’t at least mention Sandy Ground but unfortunately, it is an exception to the general picture.

This is one of those topics where it becomes hard to talk about in the sense that I have to rely on anecdotes and not research. But there have been substantial externalities to our island’s being made up in this way. Like, The Staten Island Expressway is referred to as The Mason-Dixon Line. As I mentioned earlier, it’s hard for the different shores to interact with each other. Sinister intent or not — and just for the sake of it, let’s assume there was no ill will at play here at all — the difficulty of getting from one side of the island to the other is nothing short of criminal because by now it’s a recognized issue that’s long gone unresolved. The highways on Staten Island are not lanes that bring us together, they are speedways for which we can easily slip by one other. Other than those, we have our — count ‘em! — one train line. The major road on Staten Island that runs top to bottom on the east side — Hylan Boulevard — takes close to an hour to traverse… and that’s on a good day with light traffic in perfect weather. What I’m trying to say is: at best, it’s inconvenient. And honestly, you really don’t need much more than that to get people not to interact with each other, spend time in shared spaces.

Our island has been like this for decades (probably longer). And so what’s developed, what we’ve grown to be is (like the song by Story) a shattered island.

It’s hard enough, shattered and broken

It’s hard enough, shattered and broken…

On one hand you’ve got a densely packed, socio-economically challenged area where The Wu-Tang Clan would come to fruition and on the other, the mid-to-upper middle class suburban South. The differences mount as the years pass and we’ve got neighborhoods that are suspicious of each other. This fear grows and self-perpetuates, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it becomes a problem.

And it means that eventually, when a battle of the bands is hosted at a venue on the South Shore, a flood of kids are able to go, not just because the transportation is easier, you know, more convenient, but because their parents don’t have to sit with the quote-unquote “anxiety” of their child being on that side of the island, the other side. With the other people.

The L’Amour’s show was a banger. Is that only because of factors that played into our home being (explicitly or implicitly) racially divided? Of course not. There’s this scene in the second episode of The West Wing where President Bartlet quizzes his staff on the meaning of post hoc ergo propter hoc…

PRESIDENT BARTLET: CJ, on your tombstone it’s gonna read, “post hoc ergo propter hoc.”

CJ CREGG: OK… but none of my visitors are going to be able to understand my tombstone.

PRESIDENT BARTLET: Twenty-seven lawyers in the room — anybody know, ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc?” Josh?

JOSH LYMAN: Uh, um. Post — after. After hoc. Ergo — therefore. After hoc, therefore something else hoc.

PRESIDENT BARTLET: Thank you, next.

LEO McGARRY: “After it, therefore because of it."

PRESIDENT BARTLET: “After it, therefore because of it.” It means: one thing follows the other, therefore it was caused by the other. But it’s not always true. In fact it’s hardly ever true…

It’s hardly ever true… That’s the reason why the game I so often find myself playing, spiraling away and away and away, is ultimately futile. These things can’t be pinned down, and certainly not to any one cause. In these situations… there’s a million tiny fucking levers all pulling the world along one way or the other and it’s rare when we can locate THE ONE at the root. Sometimes we can, but not always and not often. We have to just sit with the knowledge that we’ll never know the weight of any decision and its influence on the whole, that which will make the stars align, someday. But in the meantime, all I have left is this vague dread.

My final year of college I was offered a scholarship — the Robert Noyce Scholarship. I was nominated and I got it because I met all the right qualifications and I agreed to all the stipulations and commitments. Everything was golden, except — of course — for one persistently pesky criterion (‘cause, you know, there’s always fucking something with these things). And in my case I needed to be a full-time student. The way my time at university shaped up that last year just meant I’d taken almost all the classes I needed, which was (honestly) good news for someone about to embark on their most treacherous academic odyssey yet: a pair of classes called Physical Chemistry I & II (game over!).

So I was more than happy to have a little extra free time to take care of the incoming calamity I was about to endure, plus their corresponding labs, when this scholarship came up. But what, was I going to not take free money? Are you kidding me? I’d suck it up and take another class or two, who cares? It was senior year, I know how to do college. I’d already taken a bunch of math classes and chemistry classes; maybe I could load up and have enough for a minor or something by the end. Simple, right?

Maybe it would’ve been easy if the new semester wasn’t a week out. None of the math classes I could’ve taken were being offered and all the chemistry classes were not unlike L’Amour’s: packed full. And so it was with great trepidation I found myself in as foreign a land as they come for a physics major — the English department. Dr. Rotenberg-Schwartz listened patiently as I explained my whole situation. I think I might’ve over sold it, actually, saying that, hey, I could’ve chosen anything and I came to him! Luckily, he didn’t chuck me out of his office right then and there. Instead, for whatever reason, he saw this as an opportunity to hear from a different voice. How would a stranger fair in a strange land? He offered me a spot in one of his classes that semester and I agreed — a decision that turned out to be one of the best of my entire college experience.

ANYWAY I end up taking that class. I think it was American Colonial Literature, which on the surface would’ve been as much of a barn burner as it sounds if Dr. Rotenberg-Schwartz didn’t bring this signature passion and intellect to the material. I swear the guy is jacked into the Matrix making all these connections nobody would’ve recognized on their own (which, as far as I’m concerned, is exactly what you want in a college professor, so you can see how to start making those connections for yourself).

I ended up learning a lot not just about how to read early American lit, but on how to be open to a text, to reflect on what I’ve read, to exercise my empathy. I had to go through the whole full-time student charade again for my last semester and so, like, why wouldn’t I have seen what Dr. Rotenberg-Schwartz was offering that time around, too?

There was a new class coming, one that he put together that he was really… I don’t know, I don’t want to say excited or enthusiastic to teach. Intent, perhaps. Simply captivated. He was also a bit of an expert, so this was his forte. The class was The Literature of Genocide. I’m pretty sure I said sure without thinking twice about it. This was also my last semester and I’d come down with a pretty severe case of senior-itis. And if he was teaching it, hell, it could’ve been a class on reading all the nutrition labels in the snack machine, I would’ve taken whatever he told me to.

Two weeks into the course, it became abundantly clear to my family and friends that on Wednesdays, I was off limits. That’s the day I got to campus early, caught up on all the reading and homework, and the class was in the evening. And as you can imagine with a subject this important and heavy, this class turned out to be one that demanded my full attention and my best effort. In Colonial Lit, I admit I might’ve at times only skimmed over the journal entry from, you know, the week’s third settler account, but there was no way to authentically engage with what we read in this class without giving myself over fully to the experience of the authors and poets and filmmakers. And there’s no putting some good, happy spin on genocide; there is no silver lining. So yeah, after those classes, I didn’t want anyone talking to me; I had to somehow try and process it all. More times than not, that wasn’t even possible.

We were weeks into the course when Dr. Rotenberg-Schwartz assigned a chapter from Dr. Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive. This was just one of several sources we had to catch up on before class but… I don’t know. In a few short pages, Dr. Klüger’s account — her words — imprinted on to me, altered my DNA, changed the way I see, well… myself, the world, and everything. I don’t know, has this ever happened to you? You read or hear something and it just becomes a part of you, you carry it around with you? You filter everything through it? Or perhaps it’s more like the opposite, like a veil you never knew was present before you finally lifts.

If this all sounds too wondrous, Dr. Klüger would say you’ve seen too many action flicks. But, here’s what happened. Dr. Klüger — Ruth — was born in Vienna. She grew up there, she was shaped by the city’s culture. When she was twelve, she found herself at the end of the world: the Auschwitz concentration camp. Her mother was there with her, though they had a strained and complicated relationship. In her chapter on the death camp, Dr. Klüger offers a snapshot of her day to day experiences — the heat, the constant thirst, and, “the stench from the death factory.”

I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but I know for me — and likely many others — when we think about genocide in a broad sense our first thoughts go to The Holocaust. And not that it should or it shouldn’t but what, if anything, does that mean that we have a default? What does that tell us, when there have been other genocides before and since? Dr. Klüger and her mother arrived in Auschwitz like many others — by train. And again, that feels like a familiar narrative. And what does that say, that something like that has been codified to a familiar, prevailing experience? An experience that we too often define the individuals around, what Dr. Klüger calls, “a gruesome accident.” Auschwitz was a place, an event; the measure of a life, though, is so much more than the worst that happens in it. I say that just so we remember it.

Dr. Klüger also captures the absurdity of a genocide with acuity. “It is dangerous nonsense to believe that anyone contributed much to her own survival,” she writes, because, “In Auschwitz, love couldn’t save you, and neither could reason. Madness, perhaps.” That is the hardest part for me to process, because I’m still processing a lot from this class daily, all these years later. And I think it has to do with that genocide is just The End. The End of society, The End of culture — everything. Just, The End. For “civilizations” in which genocide is possible, it is the last stop in the line. And I mean, how could anything come after it? When you’re dealing with The End, that’s all there is: Human Life systemically extinguishing Human Life. That’s it.

In that way, those that survived survived because… they survived. They weren’t smarter or luckier or more shrewd or cunning or anything else. You survived because you survived. Actually, as Dr. Klüger puts it, the only advantage one might have in an irrational situation are those that suffered paranoia: “[they] had a better chance to pick their way out of mass destruction,” she writes, “because in Auschwitz, they were finally in a place where the social order (or social chaos) had caught up with their delusions.”

Like I said, though, Kluger’s words were more than just beneficial in the broader context they supply for understanding genocides; without any embellishment, her words — for me — became transcendent. And it has to do with an act she recalls that resulted in her leaving Auschwitz for another labor camp. Many others in the camp balked at the idea of leaving for somewhere else; there was an apprehensive attitude for the unknown. But Dr. Klüger and her mother viewed this as an opportunity: so long as they were living, what could be worse than what they’d already experienced here in Auschwitz?

Regardless, all the women entered one of two lines. At the end of each were SS officers that were casually deciding who would move on to the labor camp and who would be sent to the gas chambers. They were only accepting women between fifteen and forty-five, so Dr. Klüger’s mother was an sure applicant. Dr. Klüger — Ruth — was only twelve. “I was the smallest, and obviously the youngest, female around,” she says, “undeveloped, under-nourished, and nowhere near puberty.” Her mother pleaded with her to simply lie and say that she was fifteen but for a pre-teen such a lie seemed impossibly preposterous: “The difference between twelve and fifteen is enormous for a twelve-year-old. I was to add a quarter of my entire life.”

They settled on a compromise. Ruth would tell the SS officer that she was thirteen, not twelve. That wasn’t enough, however, and the number that had been tattooed on her was not recorded down for the labor camp. Now what? Her mother insisted that if her daughter wasn’t going to the new camp, she wouldn’t be going, either. For as multilayered as their relationship was, she was not going to be separated from her daughter. But Ruth wasn’t convinced that would play out as they intended. Short of that, then, their only option was to try again, to sneak on the other line which Ruth managed to accomplish.

The plan remained the same — she’d give thirteen another go with this new SS officer. “What happened next is loosely suspended from memory,” she writes, “It was an act of the kind that is always unique, no matter how often it occurs: an incomprehensible act of grace.” The SS officer at the end of this line was in a better mood than the first and being clerked by another prisoner, a young woman. Here’s Dr. Klüger again:

“His clerk was perhaps nineteen or twenty. When she saw me, she left her post, and almost within the hearing of her boss, she asked me quickly and quietly and with an unforgettable smile of her irregular teeth: “How old are you?” “Thirteen,” I said, as planned. Fixing me intently, she whispered, “Tell him you are fifteen.” … When asked for my age I gave the decisive answer, which I had scorned when my mother suggested it but accepted from the stranger: “I am fifteen.”

“She seems small,” the master over life and death remarked. He sounded almost friendly, as if he was evaluating cows and calves.

“But she is strong,” the woman said, “look at the muscles in her legs. She can work.”

She didn’t know me, so why did she do it? He agreed — why not? She made a note of my number, and I had won an extension on life.”

The first time I read this scene it was hard to understand what exactly made this the incomprehensible act of grade that Dr. Klüger described it as. But she lays it out, explaining how in a world gone mad, this woman, in deciding to help her, broke what she calls, “the chain of knowable causes.”

She writes: “Don’t just look at the scene. Focus on it. Zero in on it, and consider what happened.” There is a lot going on here, a lot at play. This SS officer seemingly held all the power in this situation, a power that was not limited to life and death. And when he looked upon twelve-year-old Ruth, underdeveloped and small, it’s not like she was going to be the linchpin to Nazi success or failure, right? Like, he chose to pass her along because in that moment, as Dr. Klüger says, it suited him to listen to his clerk; he agreed, essentially, on a whim.

Then there’s the totality of the act of the clerk. And this is Dr. Klüger again: “She was an inmate, and she risked a lot when she prompted me to lie and then openly championed a girl who was too young and small for forced labor and completely unknown to her. She saw me stand in line, a kid sentenced to death, she approached me, she defended me, and she got me through.

What more do you need for an example of perfect goodness?”

What more do you need for an example of perfect goodness? That is what has stuck with me, that one question. That one phrase: perfect goodness. This person, this woman that had nothing to gain and everything to lose put everything all on the line so that one young stranger might live. Contemplate the systems in place required for such an act, structures that only genocide itself — at its fullest capacity — can facilitate. Dr. Klüger puts it like this: “I think it makes sense that the closest approach to freedom takes place in the most desolate imprisonment under the thread of violent death, where the chance to make decisions has been reduced to almost zero. … In a rat hole, where charity is the least likely virtue, where humans bare their teeth, and where all signs point in the direction of self-preservation, and there is yet a tiny gap — that is where freedom may appear like the uninvited angel. … One might argue that in the perverse environment of Auschwitz absolute goodness was a possibility, like a leap of faith, beyond the humdrum chain of cause and effect. I don’t know how often it was consummated. Surely not often. Surely not only in my case. But it existed. I am a witness.” This is not a message of hope, I don’t think. Just a recognition of what was. What is…

Since that class, I’ve been hyper charged, on the lookout for signs and evidence of genocide at home and abroad. I often can’t tell if it’s just the times that we live in or if by looking through this lens at all I’m of course going to see what looks like paths to The End. I suppose it doesn’t really matter if I can’t help it. GenocideWatch has put together a list — the Ten Stages of Genocide — though, they’re clear to remind us that each stage is a process in and of itself and they don’t necessarily have to play out in a linear order. But my understanding of what they mean by that is: there are no unexpected genocides. There are always clear warning signs along the way.

That’s why my concern about Staten Island’s division has been by design and not adequately addressed; it’s a problem to be sure and we will reckon with those decisions one day if they were made deliberately. Some might say we’ve already been reckoning with them. But for the time being the repercussions feel like the more immediate issue. I am unqualified in assessing how close the United States is to carrying out a genocide, but we are unquestionably capable and that’s the point. And having that reflected in our infrastructure, as innocuous as that might seem is, nonetheless, a step in the wrong direction. A step within a larger process in a grand machine. We need a fix, and we need a fix fast.

I remember I told myself to just keep moving, to keep walking. To not stop. We’re back at The Cup, by the way, at the Christmas show in 2010. I don’t know how sound this logic is but, for whatever reason, I thought that if I kept moving I’d be less lightly to fall over. The question was: where to go?

Anyplace would’ve been fine, really. More than anything else, I think, I just wanted to get away from the crowd and out of The Cup. Just cut my ties… not unlike when Indiana Jones cut the ties of that bridge in half in Temple of Doom to get away from those Thuggee cult members. I realize that I’ve now referenced all three movies in the Indiana Jones trilogy in this episode and this isn’t an accident. I rewatched them all recently — the first time in a while — so they’re on my mind. What a strange trilogy. Seriously, it’s really the only franchise in the WORLD that can say their least problematic film is the one in which the main hero gets Hitler’s autograph…

“where do your films belong, dr. Jones???”

ANYWAY people noticed that something was up. I was getting bombarded with questions: “Are you OK? “What happened?” “Did you pass out?” I told the press pool that I got knocked down and I thought my head got bumped. I wasn’t able to talk smoothly but, again, I also just had one thing on my mind: I was on a mission to get the fuck out. The one and only slammin’ Sam Revello, a day #1 real one, led me past The Cup’s bookcase bathtub and to Van Duzer Street outside. There’s really nothing like being cooped up in a hot, sweaty local show and stepping outside to the cold December air. You don’t need your jacket and it feels utterly… butyraceous. Outside The Cup were these abandoned, concrete plant holders, large enough that people casually lounged around on them when they needed a smoke break from whatever business was going on inside. I found a vacant one and took a squat.

I’ve always been spoiled in the sense that I have both a high quantity of friends that — by some miracle — are also of the highest quality. So, soon after I found my little spot, word must’ve gotten out because again I was, within minutes, crowded around by an even larger concerned mob. The questions continued flying — somebody wanted to get me ice, then got me ice, then insisted I put it on my head — and as much as I appreciate everyone’s apprehension in retrospect, obviously, that was the last thing I needed or frankly wanted in the moment. Which they all collectively seemed to get, thankfully. They all gave me some space.

The torrent was I don’t know, seven, ten minutes behind me. The worst of it was over. If I were to’ve watched a video of what happened… look, I didn’t feel great but it probably would’ve looked worse than it felt. I overheard one friend that had seen it happen say to another that I got “trampled” but that feels… a little excessive. At this point, I just had a little bit of a headache, a tiny, tiny bump, a sore elbow. More than anything else, I had a huge case of nerves. Nothing like this had ever happened to me at a show before, and like I said at the top of this episode, I was legit worried. I got roughed up a little, but spooked the hell out. And it sucked!

Whatever the case was, I knew I was done for the night; I wanted to go home. I got out and now this was my new destination. The next band was all set to play and about to start and seeing as I wasn’t dying, most people shuffled back into The Cup. But you know who stayed with me? Cole wanted to make sure I was all right, and dNo swapped similar war stories with me, when he’d been in mad music melees of his own. They calmed me down, made me feel relaxed. I must’ve told them that I’d wanted to go home, and I’d better catch the train home before it was too late — if I didn’t get going I could be waiting around for an hour or more.

They started pleading with me. “Didn’t you drive here?” Well, no, my mom drove me here and I was going to get a ride home from someone but they want to stay and I don’t want to bother then and have to make them leave. “OK, well, why don’t you just call your parents up again?” No no no — I can’t tell them what happened; you think they’re going to be OK with me going to shows if they know what I just got caught in? Plus, who wants to schlep all the way out to The Cup at this hour? This is fine, I’ll just take the train, all right? And that’s when Trotta stepped up:

“No, you’re not. Are you crazy?” he asked, “We’re in Stapleton, at night, you're only wearing a hoodie. What if you got a concussion and you pass out and get robbed? No. I’m driving you home.”

Now was my turn to plead with him, but it was no use; he wouldn’t hear it, he wouldn’t budge. No matter how many times I was sorry or that this wasn’t necessary and that I would be fine, this kid that I once thought was just another Farrell scoundrel — that I was jealous of because he played my instrument — was going to make sure I made it home safe. And you know I always recognized this, even then, as a fairly ordinary act of friendship but not until recently have I realized that it was a fairly stunning act of rebellion. In league with Ruth Kluger’s “perfect goodness.”

And that comparison might seem ridiculous mostly because, you know, I was not facing near certain death in a concentration camp. In my defence, however, Dr. Klüger also asked, “Isn’t all reflection about the human condition (or conditions) a process of deducing from ourselves to others? What’s left if we don’t compare?”

And I mean this seriously: think about this from Trotta’s position: he had basically nothing to gain here and so much to lose. Was the comfort of knowing that I made it home worth more than missing the subsequent bands and the headliners? Seeing and hanging with all his “show” friends that he hadn’t seen in a while? The gas it would take to get me all the way home AND then drive all the way back to The Cup?

That’s really it, that right there. I lived in Tottenville, the southernmost town in New York City. Or put another way: the very Very VERY bottom of Staten Island. And The Cup wasn’t like L’Amour’s; The Cup is located on the North Shore. In order to get me home, Trotta had to overcome the might of the very systems that shatter our island. Do you see what I’m saying, the totality of this action? Rewind the tape and play the game all the way through to the end:

If Staten Island isn’t cut up the way it is, then we don’t get The Wu-Tang Clan and a weird sense of musical heritage that plays a part — no matter how big or small — in a band like Curious Volume forming and writing a song like Bigtime. I don’t hear that song unless I’m asked to video record their set at a show that’s both easy to get to and “safe” in the minds of the crowd’s parents, so a lot of kids show up and make it a night I’ll never forget.

If I don’t record that set, I don’t get into audio and create the Staten Island Local Show Closet and want to go into sound as a career, which is exactly what I study for a year before deciding I like the physics of it all better and transfer to another school. Meaning: by the time I get to my final year my credits and schedule are just screwy enough that when I’m offered a scholarship, I end up having to take a class on genocide where I’ll read an account that will change my life, all because one woman told a girl to lie and say she was fifteen when really, she was twelve.

If I don’t stick with audio as a hobby I might not be making a podcast that’s being listened to this very second about the time I was in over my head at a show and a friend decided to go completely out of his way, which is only possible due to the inconvenience caused by our island’s infrastructure. Put another way: this act was made incredible because of the burden of the system in which we live. All that was good in there — all the friends I made through the scene, all the music I enjoyed and all the memories I cherish — wouldn’t’ve been possible if it wasn’t built on the shaky foundation of isolation and segregation.

I saw… maybe not perfect goodness that night, but a goodness all the same. Trotta got me home. Given the circumstances, that might be one of the nicest gestures I’ve ever been on the receiving end.

Again, I’m not sure what there is to gain, if anything, from trying to get to the real root of anything. And especially if, after laying all this out, the morale of this feels ironic: I want to live in a world where perfect goodness is impossible to display. Where altruism is a myth. There’s a sadness to that to be sure but how could it be any other way? A world in which perfect goodness is possible would require us to live in a collective nightmare, permanently. For too many, though, that collective nightmare isn’t a nightmare at all, that is their reality. My hypotheticals can take a seat.

The last question to ask is where I stand. Where I want to stand, and what I want to stand for. The game is futile and the game is irrational but it’s also cruel in the fact that I don’t know and will never know what it was — the one act or the many — that made me who I am, the one typing these words into my computer box and not someone offering armed resistance if those goddamn protestors take so much as one step onto my property… There is too much in common between them and me. Far too much.

In the absence of any real or “true” answers, I don’t see why I can’t at least have a say in the matter. What would I choose? If everything led me here than really I could pick anything, couldn’t I? So fuck it, there could be something new every day! My parents, my education… but I think today, it’ll be this:

That, even though I went to local shows for the music, the reason I stayed was because of the people. And those people are the best of their kind. Whatever is good in me, I’ve copied from them, down to their last dancing molecule. I’m an imitation. And should our shattered island ever sink into the sea, they’re the ones I want to go down with; we’ll be singing those songs at the top of our lungs. And because Staten Island so richly serves its spot beneath the waves, perhaps in those left few moments, with our last gasps of air, we could all admit to our mistakes. That we fucked up, that we fucked up bigtime.

And, if nothing else, at least we know.

we were like public school kids on a Bloomberg snow day. Photo by James Yarusinsky.

— — —

hail mary digital!

by Brian Buchanan

Mixed by Nick Pitman and mastered by Ian Pritchard.

Special thanks to Erin Janosik, Steve Zimmer, Jason Roschbach, Alex Cadwell, Brian McCann, Angelica Bamundo, Cole Rice, Steven Bacas, and Kayla Elder.

Shout out to Sarah Andersen and Casper ter Kuile.

Intro and outro music by On Pink.

Additional music provided by Sthlm Blush, Collector//Emitter, Chronofile, Shaun Gold, Lincoln Mayorga, Mike Maldarelli, Joe Ippolito, Ross Fish, and Curious Volume. Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov was performed by David Nolan, Enrique Batiz & the Philharmonia Orchestra, was provided courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc. “Up She Rises” and “Classic Battle” by Sam Spence were provided courtesy of APM Music.

Promotional material provided by Marisa Sotto. Additional material provided by James Yarusinsky and Marquis Pickering.

For more information, please check out our website at: www.brianbuchanan57.com. That’s Brian with an I, Buchanan, like the president, and 57 like… the ketchup bottle.

Hail Mary Digital is a co-production between Phat Jewelle & Star Command Audio Solutions.

Later stranger!

— ♭rian♭uchanan57