July 17 Friday roundup

In the latest podcast episode, I talk about the U.S. government putting out a call for private contractors who will help them build a global detention network, which it’s important to push back against now. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post. I highly encourage you to read or listen to this one, because the country is at a critical moment for interrupting the broad expansion of concentration camps in the world, and I offer some advice on ways to block them.

My Tuesday posts are always high-stakes ones. But even with all the nastiness underway, I try to make Friday posts about something less harrowing as often as I can. Today will be one of those “and now for something completely different” days.

When I ran a record store decades ago in DC, there were several other stores in the neighborhood. Around the corner and a few blocks down was Smash Records, which catered to the city’s punks. To get there, you had to pass Penguin Feather, where Fluffy worked, and Orpheus Records, which had tons of used vinyl and an owner who went barefoot year round. Across the street from our store was Olsson’s, which had books and was the most reliable place to get imports from labels like 4AD for U.K. artists without a record deal in the U.S. And on the same side of the street as Olsson’s and a few blocks north sat one of the flagships of the DC chain The Wiz, which focused on a broader audience, but advertised mostly hip-hop and R&B listeners.

What did we carry? Some of everything. We had clerks who had been in locals bands, we had hip- hop fans working there, as well as people who loved country, or reggae, or the blues. We carried the latest go-go cassettes, which was the only medium on which you could buy music for most of the bands in the local scene. But with a lot of universities nearby, college students looking for indie rock made up a good chunk of our customer base.

My sophomore year was half over when I took a job at the store, and by then, I’d already become something of a music snob. I was predominantly interested in B-sides, rare cuts, and bootlegs. I thought I knew more than anyone else.

It will likely not surprise you to learn that I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did. Working at the store taught me so much about the latest production styles, house music, and whole worlds of jazz and classical music. Before punching my time card (literally) for my first shift there, I’d known next to nothing about rap beyond a handful of singles that had crossed over on radio when I was a kid. My time in retail turned out to be perhaps the golden age of hip hop. I was entranced.

My coworkers and I made mix tapes for one another, a process of continuing education that never grew old. We knew more than most customers, but sometimes they could school us, too. More often, dealing with them, I flinched when they said or did something that reminded me of my own arrogance.

All this is just to say that it was in the setting of a late 1980s record store that I first had the thought that I needed to be careful who or what I made fun of, because I might one day become that person or love that thing.

The thought made an impression, but apparently not a strong enough one to keep me from occasionally being a jerk anyway. Years later, when my then-boyfriend and future husband started reading the Patrick O’Brian series that recounts the adventures of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin in the 19th century, I saw my own tastes as more sophisticated than reading book after book of some Horatio Hornblower epic. I referred to them as the “Mister Captain Seaship” books and would intermittently ask him if the characters were having lots of adventures.

On vacation soon afterward, I finished everything I’d brought with me to read, and picked up one of the Captain Seaship books. It quickly snared me, and I finished the rest of the series in the weeks that followed. The last few volumes aren’t as good, in my opinion, but most of the prior books are fantastic.

Though my teasing had been friendly enough, I’d nevertheless not only been wrong, but also ignorant and an ass for making assumptions. Over the last decade, I’d like to think I’ve gotten a little more disciplined about not taking shots at other people’s cultural ideas and tastes. “Be careful what you make fun of” has become a catchphrase in my house, applied almost superstitiously.

(And to be clear, I’m not talking here about ethical failings, or trying to both-sides everything. There’s not much value in listening to morally bankrupt folks or rehashing tired and discredited ideas that minimize the rights or value of other human beings.)

Outside of core values, everyone has their own taste and preferences. You’re going to like what you like, but that’s often shaped by what you were exposed to as a kid or grew up seeing admired. Sometimes the things you think you don’t like may be more about what you don’t yet know.

And the cautionary tone in “be careful” represents not so much a “don’t do this thing, or the same horrible fate will befall you,” but something deeper. The goal for me is not to avoid tempting fate, which might make it so that I become one of those benighted people who do X or like Y. The idea is more to watch out, so that I don’t miss the opportunity to learn something, to be someone who’s still curious, who wants to understand and experience a larger world.

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