Fugazi’s Ian Mackaye. Props to Jody Morris.

Last week Fugazi started releasing recordings from a collection of more than 800 live shows online. The band, which recorded and performed between 1987 and 2002, is one of the most influential groups of the early ‘90s post-punk movement even if they aren’t among the best known.

The band declined to sign with a major record label, choosing instead to essentially self-release records through Dischord Records, the indie imprint owned by Fugazi front man Ian Mackaye. They also refused to work with ticketing services such as Ticketmaster, required concert promoters to keep ticket prices low, and would stop playing when fights broke out in the audience or if things got too rowdy up front. I was fortunate to see them live twice; once at the old City Lights theater at 38th and Shadeland in the early ‘90s and once at the Northside Knights of Columbus in the late ‘90s.

But this post isn’t about Fugazi. It’s about how one simple act of generosity exposed me to their music and changed the trajectory of my life.

I started going to see bands when I was 12 or 13. I had a USC Trojans baseball cap with the names of bands, both well known and obscure, written on the bill. The hat is long gone but I still remember a lot of the names: Kokopelli, Sacred Reich, Birdmen of Alcatraz, Pantera, En Dive, Jackhammer, Neenah Foundry, Wheelchair Bitch, Phallics (then Phalanx), Blatherskite, Planet Earth, Beastie Boys, Split Lip, Rollins Band, Proper Burial, Endpoint.

I came, I saw, I ‘moshed’ in school cafeterias, back yards, theaters, fairground halls, coffee shops, and community centers. There wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy about this in the beginning because in 1991-92, everything smelled like teen spirit and everyone was going to shows. Then one night I went to an Amnesty International benefit show at my school – they all seemed to be Amnesty benefits back then – only to find out that the show was for high schoolers only.

We shot the shit for a few hours on campus and at the very end of the night, after Planet Earth was done playing, someone let us in the door. We told the band that we had come to see them but got stonewalled so they offered to play a song for us. The song they played was “Waiting Room” by Fugazi.

I went to a record store in Broad Ripple the next day (housed in the building that was most recently leased by Cardinal Fitness) and bought two Fugazi tapes, “13 Songs” and “Repeater.” While Fugazi was well on their way to selling millions of records and many of my peers didn’t distinguish between them and say, Pearl Jam, I quickly learned that there was something substantively different about the band and where they came from.

Fugazi cracked the door to an interconnected global underworld of people who, like me, felt different and weird and angry and without a place, and gave themselves purpose through art and activism and entrepreneurship. The DIY punk scene consumed my life for the next decade-plus and since I had little use for our culture’s rites of passage, it helped me find my way from boy to man.

Even though I bowed out of that world several years ago, twenty years on the lessons I learned playing and releasing music, booking, promoting and running shows, publishing ‘zines, traveling and touring are very much a part of what I do on a daily basis. For better or worse (and I think better), my understanding of myself, the people around me, and the world at large are a product of that experience.

There’s no telling if I would have come to the same destination by another avenue, and it’s possible that in retrospect I am placing too much importance on a single span of five minutes. But I know that if I had spent that five minutes waiting outside for my dad to pick me up, my path would have been altered. It’s probably why I have a hard time turning down opportunities to help people or contribute to cool projects, because I know that sometimes five minutes is all it takes to change the course of someone’s life.

At the risk of beating a dead horse I’ve decided to post my final thoughts on the manufactured controversy around the Indianapolis Convention & Visitors Association’s Super Bowl Shuffle parody video that was released several days ago. Links to the video and negative commentary about it started populating my Facebook feed and Twitter timeline on Tuesday night and by Wednesday afternoon, the self-fulfilling prophecy came to pass and the video made “national news” when Deadspin posted a story about it.

I spent too much time on Wednesday debating various points relating to the video with people I like and respect on Facebook and Twitter and went to bed thinking that everyone who had wound themselves up unnecessarily were coming back down and that the story would go away. This feeling was reinforced by the fact that the ICVA removed the video from YouTube.

Then I picked up the morning paper and saw that my former colleague Erika Smith – another person I like and respect – was continuing the flogging on the front page of the Indianapolis Star. Having already moved from confusion to annoyance to rage in my interaction with the anti-video contingent, I set the newspaper down with a sigh and decided that I would would not read, listen to, watch, anything about the situation for the rest of the day (or ever?) nor would I speak about it with anyone.

That embargo lasted a few hours until it came up in conversation with a friend and I started raging all over again. Now that we have some distance from the initial flare up and I’ve had a chance to talk with the wonderful people at the ICVA about this and many other things I decided to sit down and organize my thoughts on the matter for posterity (and for people who don’t have the time or patience for social media flamewars).

Mistakes were made. But making the Super Bowl Shuffle video wasn’t one of them.

Many of the people who saw the video thought it was hokey, unfunny, or worse yet, offensive. I’m not going to sit here and say that the video was the best or funniest thing I’ve ever seen. But I seem to be one of the few people who understood one crucial point; my opinion of the video is irrelevant, immaterial because I am not the target audience.

The target audience, the people the video was made for, are meeting planners and convention industry professionals who are meeting in Chicago, hence the Super Bowl Shuffle schtick. The video was not made by the ICVA to promote Indianapolis to the general public. It was made to be a business-to-business marketing piece, one step removed from an internal communications video for sales or training. Which brings us to the first mistake; making the video viewable to the public.

I wasn’t in the room when the decision was made. If I were, I would have suggested that the video be set to private to ensure that only the target audience would see it. Not because the video is anything to be embarrassed about, but because of the potential for people who aren’t part of the target audience to get ahold of it, take it out of context, blow it out of proportion, and force you to respond to baseless complaints, which is precisely what happened.

Which brings us to mistake number two, and this one is on you. The video found its way to your virtual doorstep, you watched it, you didn’t get it (because it wasn’t made for you) and rather than ask what its for or why it was made (which was actually explained in the initial news release that was read on WFYI), you posted it to Facebook, and Twitter. “OMG this video is so bad WTF they’re setting the city back 100 years!!11!!!11!!!” Then you throw your hands up exasperatedly when the video ends up being mocked on a national blog a few hours later. Do you know WHY the video became a trending topic, a meme, a brief national punchline? Because you and all of your friends and all of your friends’ friends shared the video talked about it all day.

If you thought the video represented Indianapolis so poorly, why would you want the whole world to see it? Virality is enabled by sharing. When ideas, stories, links aren’t shared, they don’t spread. The ICVA made a video for meeting planners. You made it a meme.

I suspect that it has more than a little to do with Hoosiers’ deep seated feelings of inferiority. People want to distance themselves from things they don’t like about Indiana history and culture so they point fingers, sneer, and build straw men to let everyone know how smart, stylish, and sophisticated they are. But the cities these people want Indianapolis to be compared to don’t collectively wring their hands and fret about what we think of them, why should we lose sleep worrying about what they think of us?

Geography does not impart value on a population. Someone who lives in Brooklyn is not more important than someone who lives in Indianapolis simply because of their zip code. Someone who lives in Austin is not more important than someone who lives in Indianapolis simply because the live music scene is really strong there. Someone who lives in Portland is not more important than someone who lives in Indianapolis simply because they have light rail and finely cultivated facial hair.

Indiana is a diverse mix of intellectuals and corn pone hillbillies, farmers and engineers, creatives and laborers, progressives and conservatives. We are rural, suburban and urban. Claiming that any one of these archetypes can be held up as an example of everything that is right or wrong with Indiana is as silly as attempting to do the same with a random sampling of Manhattanites. All of us spend most of our lives eating, sleeping, working, going to the bathroom, doing laundry and checking Facebook. That experience is mostly the same no matter where you live. Yes, there are lots of cool, unique, interesting aspects of living in the places I mentioned above. There are also lots of cool, unique, interesting aspects of living here. But until we really own our history, our culture, and our geography, we’re going to be on the defensive.

Which brings us to mistake number three. If the ICVA made a mistake in pushing the video out to the world at large it followed it up with a bigger mistake and that is the decision to temporarily remove the video from YouTube. Taking the video down is an admission of sorts, an acquiescence to the will of the mob. In this instance – as in most instances – the mob was wrong. I would rather have seen the ICVA stand its ground, explain its position, and refuse to apologize for doing something that wasn’t wrong. This was a fantastic opportunity for the organization to educate the city on what it does and I don’t think that they capitalized on it. Is it the end of the world? No.

Because no part of this situation will have a real and lasting impact on the future of this city or the way the rest of the world perceives us. Not the video, not the exaggerated provincial response, not the start/stop decision to publish video, none of it. What would have an impact on the future of this city or the way the rest of the world perceives us is if all of the people who care so passionately about this city and how it’s perceived sat down at the table with the ICVA and learned about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it. If the critics of this particular video have something constructive to offer, and I think that some of them do, then the ICVA can do an even better job of attracting visitors to Indianapolis and we all win. Whadd’ya say?

Several weeks ago the New York Times published an opinion piece by William Deresiewicz titled, “Generation Sell.” The premise, as I understand it, is that contemporary youth culture “contains no element of rebellion, rejection or dissent.” 


According to Deresiewicz these hipsters – his word, not mine – differ from previous youth cultures like beatniks, hippies, punks and slackers because those generations “could be characterized by two related things: the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned.”

Deresiewicz goes on to describe those emotions and social forms as ecstasy and individual transcendence, love and communal action, rage and nihilistic anarchy, and apathy and “a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony,” respectively. “Today’s ideal social form,” he writes, “is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.”

This is not surprising. What is surprising is that Deresiewicz found fault with it.

The surge of entrepreneurship, in Deresiewicz’s view, is accompanied by an contrived affability. “Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality,” he writes. “It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.”

At the risk of sounding un-neighborly, this is total horseshit. There are greasy Dale Carnegies in every generation and where Deresiewicz sees the absence of the vital energy of past youth movements, I see a rejection of them. Why? Because they all came and went without much upsetting the order of things and failed to change our world in any meaningful way.

You can write all the poetry you want, organize as many trippy festivals as you want, rage against the machine all you want, or talk about how nothing really matters all you want, but at the end of the day, unless you are actively effecting economic or political change, the kind of change that is exhausting and unglamorous and forces you to apply pie in the sky principles to real world problems, your youth culture will be reduced to a fucking t-shirt and sold in a mall by the very people you hate.

A lot of new entrepreneurship is framed in counter cultural terms: slow foods, artisanal products, social entrepreneurship. Selling $6 bowls of organic gazpacho from a bike trailer is not going to overturn the social order and neither is having a pleasant demeanor. But that kind of business deconstructs everything that we have come to understand about capitalism and mass production and offers a new model, one that just might be environmentally sustainable and allow people to do something they love while paying the rent. It’s a creative response to disenchantment and disenfranchisement.

The fact that I strive to treat people with dignity and respect and courtesy does not point to a lack of passion or investment, love or rage. The fact that I express my values through commerce doesn’t ding my counter culture street cred. Because affability and entrepreneurship are my forms of opposition.

I’m not affable because, as Derewiecz writes, I find myself “to be living in a fundamentally agreeable society.” I am affable because my generation is staring at a clusterfuck of imminent environmental, political and economic collapse and facing the world with a smile and a plan is preferable to a life of existential crisis and hopelessness.

I am an entrepreneur because I reject the idea of the starving artist. Making ends meet without abandoning your ideals is hard. In some ways it’s harder than living with the cognitive dissonance of earning money in ways that contradict your personal values. I can’t reshape the world myself, but if enough of us stop being content with being cogs in machines that don’t share our values, then maybe we can build a “fundamentally agreeable society.”

Have a great day!

I’ve disabled commenting on this post. If you’d like to talk to me, you know where to find me. Fist bump to Matt Gonzales for the post title.

All right folks, you’ve heard this pitch before so I am going to make this short and sweet. Nate Heck is an amazing teacher in a rural-burban area east of Indianapolis. He teaches art in a district that – like too many others – is deeply cutting funding for arts among other essential ‘elective’ programs like music and phys ed. Rather than bemoan this fact, Nate got creative and has spent the last couple of years developing a video series called Artrageous with Nate!

Nate is in the running for a Pepsi Refresh grant and you can help him win by voting here every day and texting 109868 to 73774 every day to vote via SMS. You can connect with Nate on Facebook and Twitter, as well.

Between the Greenwood Band, Homespun, Big Car, and Indy PAL MMA, metro Indianapolis has pulled in a lot of grant money through this project – let’s help Nate keep the spigot open.

The 65th Historic Irvington Halloween Festival is underway and will culminate with a street fair on Sat., Oct. 29. Not only will there be dozens of vendors and community groups lined up between Ritter and Audubon on Washington St. but The Wife has put together a large tent full of INDIEana Handicraft Exchange artists and area businesses like Jockamo Upper Crust Pizza, The Legend, George Thomas, Black Sheep, Roscoe’s Taco’s, Bookmamas, Lazy Daze, Homespun and Papa Roux will be rockin’ and rollin’. Sun King Brewing Co. is hosting a beer garden in the Snips parking lot and all proceeds will go to support the festival. It’s a really awesome day on the east side and it gets better every year. Hope to see you there!

Great interviewer or greatest interviewer?

Seth Godin’s blog is one of the few that I subscribe to – the others include this one, this one, this one, oh, and this one – and some of his posts hang around in my inbox longer than others. One post that stuck around longer than any other so far is “How To Be Interviewed.”

I keep returning to this post because I came to marketing (or whatever it is that I do) from journalism. So the preface of his tip list – “The explosion of media channels and public events means that more people are being interviewed about more topics than ever before. It might even happen to you… and soon.” – made me want to turn the post on its head and offer tips for conducting interviews. Because the explosion of media channels and public events means that more people are conducting interviews about more topics than ever before. It might even happen to be you doing the interviewing… and soon. I humbly offer the following tips for aspiring journos, bloggers, or people who simply want to have better conversations.

1. Be curious. There are a lot of people creating content who don’t seem genuinely curious about anything, more concerned about being able to say they are a blogger/writer/show host. Don’t be one of these people. There’s so much to learn and none of us have enough time.

2. Do your research. There’s nothing worse than reading, listening to, or watching an interview in which the interviewer is unfamiliar with the subject, her work, etc. Actually, participating in an interview in which the interviewer is unfamiliar with the subject or his work is worse. Trust me, I’ve been on both sides of that one. Between Google searches, Lexis/Nexis, and state/museum libraries, you can learn more about people than they want you to know. Consume all of your research, digest it, look for holes in other interviews, angles that haven’t been explored, and craft your questions accordingly.

3. The interviewee is not your friend. You might think that your subject is the bee’s knees. You may be in awe of him or her. Please, for Valhalla’s sake, do not fawn over your subject or act like the interview process somehow makes you a party to the glory. Hero worship is gross and will likely prevent you from asking the only questions worth hearing the answers to.

4. Do it a lot. I’m not a man of faith but I am a big believer in the 10,000 Hour Rule. Interview your parents, your friends, the lady next to you on the bus. You’ll learn a lot. You’ll learn how to handle awkward situations. You’ll become a better conversationalist, and in turn, a better interviewer. And you might just learn what I did, which is that the best way to get people interested in you is to ask them questions.

I’ve turned off commenting and pingbacks for all blog posts. If you want to talk with me about anything I’ve written, I’ve made it easy to find me.

There’s only so much to say about jingoistic right wing politics, so it makes sense that the news media would seize upon the progressive Occupy Wall St. protests, chattering on and on about whether or not the demonstrations would spread and coalesce into something larger. Earlier today the Indianapolis Star’s Erika Smith asked her Twitter followers, “What do ya’ll think about the Occupy Wall Street movement?” For whatever reason, all of the disparate thoughts I’d had since the protests started – that 1960’s style protest movements make for good highlight reels and little else, that many of us who fall under that broad “progressive” banner are too busy working and taking care of our families to take to the streets, that despite the fact that I fall under that banner I didn’t quite understand the motivations and aims of the protesters – crystallized.

What I think about the Occupy Wall Street movement is that all of that energy would be better directed elsewhere. Yeah, I’ve been angry about the behavior of financial institutions before the Minor Depression started and ever since. But the universe doesn’t care about my feelings. Sure, if you can get enough people to hold enough signs for enough time, maybe you’ll get a Congressional hearing where Barney Frank will wag his finger at executives and toss out some zingers to be replayed on The Daily Show.

But what could be done with all of those man-hours? Instead of venting your rage at “the system” and crying about how the economy is broken, why not pick a spot and start repairing it? Instead of calling for the Obama administration to create jobs, why not get out there and create your own. If you don’t have a skill or trade to build into a job or business, start learning. Libraries are still free (for now) and there are relatively inexpensive technical schools and educational resources in every state, county, city in this country. People still need goods and services and if you can provide a friendly, proficient, and local alternative to one of the monolithic multinationals that everyone is so mad at you stand a good chance of carving out a niche.

You might fail. In fact you probably will on your first, second, or third attempt. You might spend hours, days, weeks, months, years building a career and end up broke and frustrated. Which is likely what you already are if you’re marching up and down a street holding a sign. There’s no safety, no security, no promise that things aren’t going to get worse, so there’s no real risk of failure or loss. If you do nothing, you’ll lose. If you do something, at least you’re giving yourself a shot. It’s fitting that Steve Jobs joined the iCloud today, since he offered this gem on risk: “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

So put the sign down and start doing the real – and much harder – work of changing the world. #OccupyYourLife

*This goes for the Tea Party movement, too. Stop crying about taxes and regulations and socialist conspiracies to take the Bible out of public schools and start positively contributing to the future America. Not only is the old one not coming back, it wasn’t that great for a lot of us the first time around.

My son turned one today. I don’t talk or write publicly about him or the experience of fatherhood very often. Facebook.com/nealtaflinger and @nealtaflinger are constructed public performances. They reflect the parts of me that I want to share but other members of my family don’t live in public and Zeke isn’t old enough to consent to the virtual sharing of his life, so I try not to do it. In fact, I don’t say much at all about my personal life if it’s not relevant to my nebulous socially-progressive, fiscally conservative, private-enterprise-for-the-public-good agenda. But we’ve been going through a rough patch personally even as we’ve experienced our greatest professional triumphs. No, that’s not accurate; we’ve experienced our greatest professional triumphs because we’ve sacrificed nearly everything else. And now, in order to keep our family, my career, and our business on track, we’re giving up most of what’s left. The house, the pets, probably one of our vehicles. It doesn’t feel good to see parts of my life disappear into boxes and bags and other people’s cars, but it’s just stuff.

I’ve been talking to my own father about all of this, trying not to feel like I’ve let my wife and son down by not being able to keep every ball in the air all the time, and he told me that he went six weeks without a paycheck when he owned a Marathon station in the early 1980s. Six weeks without a paycheck in a one-income, two-child house. That’s not a Dustbowl sob story, I know, but the weight that a small business owner carries – the debt, the responsibilities to employees, vendors, customers – can be crushing even when you’re making money.

Of course I don’t remember any of that – I was, like, three. I just remember that it was fun to visit him there and that even as a toddler I thought it was cool that my dad owned a business. He worked what seemed like a hundred jobs during my childhood – mechanic, handyman, car salesman, teacher – many of them simultaneously. I didn’t inherit any of his mechanical savvy but I did inherit his willingness to work himself into a living death. It may not have been the best thing for our relationship but it definitely allowed me to grow up completely oblivious to whatever financial difficulties my family may have faced.

That’s what I think as our possessions and companion animals disappear one by one. That 20 years from now Zeke won’t remember any of this. He won’t remember the first house he lived in or why we sold it. He won’t remember what it was like when mom worked at the store full-time but didn’t take a paycheck. And I won’t have to come up with metaphors to illustrate how much mom and dad love him and what we would do for him. I’ll just show him. Here’s looking at you, kid.

Are we singularly focused, obsessed, or gluttons for punishment? You decide!

The Wife and I are taking one more run at glory – tonight our final (I hope) Pepsi Refresh proposal went live. Same project as before, only this time we’re up for $25,000. There are more winners in that bracket and the organizations are a little smaller, which we think makes this our best (last?) chance to grab the brass ring.

If you’re feeling generous, please vote for our proposal. If you like-ah-the-Pepsi, please use the Power Votes on our behalf. And if you have great text-derity in your thumbs, you can SMS 108002 to Pepsi (73774) to vote from your mobilephonic device. (Just like American Idol, standard text messaging rates apply.)

This year Indy has already hauled in $50,000 in Pepsi money for Indy Pal MMA and $25,000 for Big Car. Why not make it an even hunnert grand?*

*I forgot about the $50,000 for the Greenwood Marching Band. ‘Sup, Woodmen.

Chances are that I don’t know you. We might be friends on Facebook or Yelp, you might follow me on Twitter, and/or we might be connected on LinkedIn, but as my social network grows larger my connection to each of you becomes more tenuous. And while those sites are great for making introductions, maintaining existing relationships, broadcasting information and engaging in limited conversation, it’s difficult to make deep connections in the shallow social “stream.”

There are a lot of you who are doing cool things in this city and I’d like to get to know you better. That’s why I am taking my social network offline. Over the next few months you might get a cold call, e-mail, Facebook message or @reply asking you to have lunch or get coffee. Hopefully you’ll be able to tear yourself away from your computer for an hour when I do.