The Drunk Surgeon Cuts On: Thoughts from Austria on Show Day. (Patreon)

Hello loves.

More thoughts on yesterday’s conversation…I am still reading through the last of your comments and some of them are so incredibly well-written and I am so happy to see the civility.

If you missed it:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/138769331

This was mostly written for the commenters on socials but I’m posting it here, also because it’s too long for IG so I’m sending those people over here if they wanna read more thoughts. Be nice to the newcomers. You always are.

……

I posted yesterday about Empathy not being Endoresment and it riled a lot of feelings and led to a lot of comments and discusson. So here goes all the unedited thoughts at once…just like the old days.

So many of you know me as the one who speaks my mind openly and obviously (well, perhaps not obviously to all) my thoughts and feels about many things have been curtailed for the time being. I’m semi-canceled in many quarters at the moment for irrational reasons but, in a weird way, that emboldens me because if it gets me more canceled…eh, at this point, whatever.

Because of my current life situation, there are so many thoughts and deeper feelings I do not share because it simply does not feel safe. I used to share so much. But I have talked to a lot of artists lately and I am not alone in this, and not just because of my divorce situation. It’s larger.

My band has a huge show just outside Vienna tonight.

I just shared a meal with the festival curators and the discussion took that dark turn into the political situation here. The FPÖ (the extreme Far Right / Freedom Party) has about 30% of the vote. You read that right. Three zero.

I remember touring here years ago and being terrified that they had 4%. It seems absolutely unbelievable. But it is happening.

I walked down the street to get a coffee and I tried to wrap my head around all this. I remembered living in Bavaria in 1996 and feeling this seeping discomfort around the casual racism against the local Turkish population. From punks and artists my age.

I have lived my life as a human and a writer and a whatever-I-am dedicated to a philosophy of non-violence and radical compassion. I stand by it. I will never abandon it. Ever. Cancel me.

I have been criticized early and often throughout my career for clapping back online when I see people celebrating or taking glee in anybody’s death or suffering.

There’s nuance and semantics and fine lines and we all dance around them; and there’s humor, but in earnest I just don’t think it pushes humanity in a better direction for anybody to want anybody - literally anybody - dead or for anybody to actively wish harm on any other human being.

If you disagree, that’s okay. We can still be friends. One of my besties and I got in a kitchen conversation/tussle a few months ago when they insisted that if they were in a room with (insert oligarch) and coukd get away with offing them, they would. But really? I asked. They said yes. We discussed. We still love each other and make music together. It’s okay.

In some ways, I wish I could be as flagrantly loud as I used to be. I wish I could speak more openly about things. I can always summarize and I’ll never cover it all swirlimg around but I’ll try: my divorce has been extremely difficult, and let’s just say it: tragic. I want nothing more than to to protect this next generaton and the future landscape of their mental health. I want to serve my little music community, and I can’t believe some of the things people think nowadays about me, and am so about that world. I can’t believe the number of people i see buying guns; places I never saw it coming. I think what’s going on in Gaza is horrific and inhumane. I can’t believe the number of my friends who have canceled one another over Israel/Palestine issues. I see the horror and the genocide in Gaza and also see my Jewish friends feeling horror and despair about what to do; so many of them just seem paralytic. So scared. Most of them protesting. Some of them just seem trapped and in shock.

Then Charlie Kirk happens. The man and his ideas were and are abhorrent. Fucked up and sickening, ethically revolting. And listening to the people who wrote in from Utah, the hardest thing to digest is the concentric waves of extreme suffering and the images now in my head of children vomiting from shock at seeing something so unspeakably awful and violent. The local trans community - who already have so much shit to fight and deal with - having to deal with one more battle they didn’t ask for.

I will never stop calling for empathy. Ever. For all. I really do not think you can make exceptions for any reason.

I feel the same way about Mangione and the United CEO. At the end of the day, celebrating and wheeee-ing murder is not gonna move us ahead on the logical chess board. Empathy means: you must feel the whole ecosystem. You can’t make exceptions because it is the exceptions that make the rule.

I said it yesterday to the patron post: Charlie Kirk was a horrible tumor on an ailing body, but he was lopped off by a drunk surgeon with dirty hands. The whole body he grew on (us) is sick and needs healing and care, but now it gets more badly infected and bleeds out. This is bad for everyone. The whole problem gets worse when you celebrate the drunk surgeons.

It’s so weird, being in Europe for the first time since 2019 and trying to make sense of all this happening in America. But it’s also happening here.

What have we become? Were we always this?

I can tell you this, and ask a favor.

I’m going to play an hour or so of music tonight. I’m not going to make any big long political speeches. I’ll keep it short and sweet. Our set is only 75 minutes. My politicos speeches are in the form of playing Sex Changes, and Girl Anachronism, and Black Sabbath and Brecht and Sofia Isella.

This band and our songs are inherently political. It’s a miracle we exist. We are two bizarre and unapologetically expressive artists who were raised by Nick Cave and Fugazi and who believe in love and hope and freedom and gay gay gayness and who have never, ever compromised our art to sell a product. The male drummer wears make-up and pearls. The female singer has armpit hair and screams her feelings.

It’s enough that our poster is up all over town in this place where the local nazis are literally starting to take over.

I can try my hardest. I can try my hardest to get it right. Gaza. Kirk. Music. Divorce. Life. That’s all I can do. Try, and know I’ll get it wrong, in most people’s eyes, most of the time.

Here’s the favor: ask all you want of your artists, gently, but try not to punish them for not doing and saying enough about (issue x) to the point that they decide it isn’t worth it to try to make their art.

You need us. You need our art. You need the wildly expressive feelings of the next generation of artists to carry the important story of our true humanity forward.

If you ask us to work *for* you and your immediate agenda, if you punish us online for not nailing it 100% perfectly in regards to Charlie Kirk, or Gaza, or Abortion Rights, or Taylor Swift’s airplane, or Greta, or Trump, or AOC, or Gavin, or Kamala, or Gun Control, or (fill in the endless endless blanks that will never go away), you are going to exhaust and endanger the very source of what is going to save us all.

The art has to come from somwhere. We have to be okay enough to make art. Please, be careful. Don’t punish your artists out of a fucking job.

Me? Dude. I can take it. I have been taking it for 25 years. I am a pro, an emotional internet garbage disposal. Seriously. You’ll never scare me or chase me away. But please, please, watch out for everybody else. I’ve heard from too many artists lately that they’ve left the internet because they just cannot handle the insanity.

We know how lucky we are to even be here, alive and working at this festival, playing our music for money. And unlike our friends who played the Kennedy Center a couple weeks ago, playing music for money without being quietly taken aside by the stage manager five minutes before the show and reminded not to “say anything” political.

Wish us luck tonight.

X

A

(I’m going to cross-post this to FB, and the start of it on IG. Please feel free to share discuss there but I’d love the conversation to live here. Fuck Mark Zuckerberg atop all this. But I don’t want him shot).