Battle Jacket:
A denim or leather jacket worn by metalheads to show their devotion to the best musical genre on earth.

The denim kind are usually sleeveless. The leather kind are usually a converted biker jacket.

It is covered with sew-on patches with the names/logos of favorite bands. There is usually also a large backpatch covering the back of the jacket, with almost all the available space left taken up by smaller patches. Studs and/or spikes are optional, but they aren’t punk jackets so don’t go overboard.

Some may smell a bit due to being worn exclusively in moshpits where it can get sweaty at times.

Metalhead 1: Your battle jacket is awesome!
Metalhead 2: Yeah I know. I dare you to smell it though!

After the jump, check out our huge gallery of battle jackets! Much thanks again to T-shirtslayer for the images!

The post Fuck Yeah Bang Your Head…
The Art of the Battle Jacket Part IV appeared first on CVLT Nation.

Negative Queen’s short life started on December 18th 2010 and ended on September 1st 2011. The band was comprised of vocalist/guitarist/noise samplist Dylan Bennedict (Cull, Anon Remora), guitarist Ayla Holland (Disemballerina, Anon Remora, Malice Discordea), bassist Myles Donovan (Disemballerina, Myles of Destruction), and drummer Ashley Spungin (Taurus, Purple Rhinestone Eagle). The name of the band originates from the above quote – a line which was delivered as an immediate response to bassist Myles Donovan’s refusal to comply with the societal cluster of expectations and stereotypes that burden individual members of smaller LGBT circles (where the ‘L’ and ‘T’ matter just as much as the ‘G’ and ‘B’). For the short span of time they were around, the members dealt with a few years’ worth of personal pressures and group-based tension.

The members found themselves during a time when everything was falling apart and the only possibility of relief made itself attainable when the music was being played. This is a definite sign of a band that had a purpose and, by virtue of this, a band that needed to exist at some point in time. One can only imagine how the constant stream of friction felt and shared throughout roughly seven months of activity justified the band’s existence when those momentary lapses of release manifested themselves on stage, or otherwise.

Here is some live footage of “Mutiny” recorded at the Black Rose in Portland:

“Violent Eyes,

Violent Heart,

Violent Mind,

Violent Hands,

Survive My Heart…”

The band started out as a three-piece with two of the members of Anon Remora and Ashley Spungin. Marla (Fainting Room) nearly made it into the band as a keyboardist but the trio opted for a bassist instead. Myles eventually joined the band as Negative Queen’s first show was nearing and the rush of all the members having to adapt to themselves in a collective environment made itself quite apparent.

The first show happened on the winter solstice of 2010 and the beginning of the performance saw a spontaneous crow chant prelude sparked by Katherine (Sei Hexe, Nasalrod) with the intention of casting a dark blessing spell. For whoever is willing to believe in the unknown – the blessing may have metamorphosed into a hex by itself in the midst of spontaneity. The chant was opined by Myles as being something that provoked “a pretty bad ouija board feeling” – which instinctively prompted him to let his bass feedback over the residual echoes of the chant, perhaps to dampen the advent of other kinds of negative auras. Those auras still managed to make their way into the existence of the band as it started to develop a prolonged streak of what he referred to as “signature bad luck negative queen style.” A bad luck which inarguably heightens the mystique and mystery encircling this unsung project.

To paraphrase something Myles said in a trenchant response to my inquiry about the band, they destroyed, and involuntarily so, a friend’s van on a South-bound tour to California. They coped and got back to Portland with the help of friends from BRANES but the return to the rose abode was far from an easy one. Morale was shattered and bearings were lost. In another instance of misluck, Dylan was hit by a car right before the band’s last performance. He took it upon himself to perform with the others afterwards, after receiving a swift fix-up, arms in bandages and high on painkillers.

The sincerity in Negative Queen’s music stems from a direct exposure to the thematic depth that is musically explored by the band as an entire entity. The words for “Murder Suicide Pact,” for example, were written about an agreement between two friends on getting clean before one of them regrettably succumbed to an overdose. The band was often considered a goth band while it was active but the edgy inflection of the themes of death, hatred, separation, loss, misery and violence happened primarily in the context of slow, swampy and perplexing arrangements. Those arrangements have more to do with what the members felt like playing at the time than with the evolution of the forebears of the current ‘g-beat’ scene in the west side of the pond.

Amber Asylum’s “Songs of Sex and Death,” The Gault’s “Even as All Before Us,” Diamanda Galás’ “Saint of the Pit,” White Hex’s “Heat,” or the gut-wrenching intensity of Swans’ “Filth”-era output all come to mind as the hazy layers of vibrations are devised between a cohesively sustained melodic personality and fragmented slabs of sound. The band conveys portrayals of beauty and ugliness, vacancy and longing, violence and fragility, reproaches and melancholies – imagery and sound both share this strange, conchoidal sense of duality. The 3-track demo offer a complete oeuvre with a well-defined sense of transitional movement existing in and out of compositions. All the songs in the demo complement each other well by striding in the same musical direction and by allowing motif variations to occur naturally. Nothing is forced. All is sullen.

The cassette liner reads: “this is qveer kvlt. fvck you.” The term implies a relative deviation, and perhaps even a departure, from the queercore punk subculture movement that sprouted in the mid-1980s and experienced more exposure later on by an expansive upheaval of DIY output and musical acts like Mukilteo Fairies and Limp Wrist. ‘qveer kvlt’ is a necessary answer to a question that was brought to my attention recently, “what do you listen to when you are gay and suicidal?” It is a radical complement to the culturally prominent exercise of raging out against repressive cultural  intolerance and bloc misconceptions about patterns of queer identity and trans-identity (and the skewed social construction of ‘gender identity’ as a whole). Both approaches appear to be exploiting the possibility of subversion roomed by what Judith Butler termed as “new gender politics,” and both merit consideration in a post-out-of-the-closet environment of fast-encapsulating undoes and goings-on. ‘qveer kvlt’, in this sense, provides a method of social reform by taking a hand in recoding a dehumanizing cissexist system of normativity and essentialism – art with a purpose. What do you do when you cannot go on but you have to anyway? You either turn inwards, or you deconstruct. Things will get ugly before they get better,  just as they should in asinine times of bigotry, “Kill the Gays” absurdity and transphobic marginalization. Although not all members of the band are gay, Negative Queen existed explicitly as a queer band to make a  poignant counter-cultural statement, one which seeks to transcend fashioned identity and invisibility, as artists like Diamanda Galás, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson have done in the past.

There is no doubt that some artists are profoundly honest when they attempt to externalize their own individual reactions to unlivable moments in their lives. Those reactions would perhaps be cruelly isolating if suffering should find itself privatized and left unwoven into personal expression. However, many do not allow themselves to be sensitive enough to the subtlety and nuance that this practice requires. Negative Queen’s music manages to capture those qualities and attune them to the droning space in which the songs grow and vanish quietly when the minutes granted to them dissolve into a silence that is increasingly tragic and meditative.

There is a generous amount of space within passages. This room to breathe is precisely what causes the listener to be enveloped in the uncomfortable, abruptly and violently. This is hardly a genteel submersion into enjoyment but it is an immersive experience of engagement. An engagement with the uneasiness of misery, the realities of dysfunction and the crises that are naturally composed beneath the harsh layers of decline, all of which bleed through dramatically. The music provides a space of confrontation – a world is being confronted, and the meaning of this face-à-face is never truly eclipsed by the captivating and intimate presentness of the musical contributions oozing from every angle. This lulling assemblage of what-breaks-a-conscious-being isn’t without a stab of douceur — patience often tends to lure it out as the listener journeys through barely surmountable landscapes of chest-beating morosity.

The pace remains steady throughout the sterling demo tracks. This creates a pensive sentiment of hypnosis which weanedly enraptures the listener in a feverish dream decorated with meandering withdrawals of reality. Dylan’s fragile and fractured delivery of hymns often finds itself enmeshed in bass-leading structures that murderously mature into a mating ground for incisively imbricated, reverb-soaked dual-guitar interplays. The lyrics are textural — they are conducive to mood creation and a brooding sense of time. At times introspective (“You were my compass. I fell into the darkest eyes.”) and at others, feral, the mood vascillates between bitterly tinged avenues of memory.

The percussion work is creatively concise and minimal as it feeds the bass structures with just enough room to thrust entire songs into overwhelming momentum changes. The drums billow like widows in a synclinal march to an unappeasable void. The impulsive and lush quality of the music are malleated in absorbing ways and it works. It works because there is a real sense of rhythmic confluence marinating within the capacities of the quartet. It absorbs and it affects, as it intends to.

“Indictment” starts with a wavering and quaint spoken word prologue punctuated by the echoes of percussive throbs and bass-line nuances which bear a slight resemblance to Lorrain Rath’s enchanting work with Worm Ouroboros. The guitar melodies twist and churn their way through in a pervasively tentacular way – sharper minor key notes latch on birthing grooves . The latter half of the song sees Dylan venting spleen and screaming “Coward” repeatedly, like a wounded and resentful animal, after bare-handedly lifting reflections on guilt and ruin from a movingly venomous stanza, which reads: “My lungs are so full of stagnant hate. I can’t find the breath to curse your name.” It is a merciless, almost Baudelairian, atmosphere that this song creates — scenic climates are unveiled to the listener through repetition, discordantly squeaking noise scrapes, and a harmonious blend of instrumental reaches.

The music isn’t flawless. It harbors the same flaws that make Nico’s “Marble Index,” Coil’s “…And the Ambulance Died in His Arms,” or Worm Ouroboros’ “Come The Thaw,” to name a few, special mood recordings in their own right. Those are formidable heart-breakers, where perfection would only hinder the searing flow of emotions that clings to the crystalline textures of sound congealed. Negative Queen falls under this aegis and squarely on the bottomless side of a contemplative and engaging musical venture. Textures are often gauzily crescendoed over long and plodding pieces. The approach to songwriting is inherently different, in so far as it veers towards the more oppressive side of the musical template, but it is, in essence, a dream-like excursion into melancholia, with a sensibly restrained but no less fiery delivery. This immeasurable quality transcended the messy demise of the band and was naturally adopted by two particularly distinct two-piece projects which seem to be evolving as polar opposites — with Negative Queen acting as a sort of vestige in between diverging sonic climates.

The band’s last show saw a proposition for a split record with fellow Portlanders Atriarch but it happened at an inopportune time when the Queen was readying herself to fall apart. The Queen’s death saw the emergence of two sublime acts. Myles and Ayla moved on to pursue the majestically heart-wrenching force that is Disemballerina, along with cellist Melissa Collins (Malice Discordea, Discharge Information System); and Ashley now embodies half of the surrealistic, unique-sounding monolith that is Taurus next to Dark Castle’s Stevie Floyd.

Disemballerina is an open ‘Trauerspiel’ exercise in capturing the visibility and presence of death and dolor through the elegiac weight of acoustic instrumentation – in a way that is not dissimilar to releases by the likes of Amber Asylum, Hala Strana, or the Nick Cave & Warren Ellis pair. Its formation precedes that of Negative Queen.

(Disemballerina; Photo Courtesy of Justine Murphy)

It also represents continued efforts by Myles and Ayla to perpetuate the nurturing of the ‘qveer kvlt’ idea that characterizes acts like Negative Queen and Gloomweaver. Taurus, on the other hand, is pure tranquility and bliss transmitted through pulsating walls of ambient feedback and drone-drenched tonal cosmoses. Taurus’ debut, aptly bearing the title “Life,” can be streamed below. Merch is still available, after a seedful Summer tour in direct support for Agalloch, and can be purchased here.

(Taurus; Photo Courtesy of Veleda Thorsson)

The Negative Queen demo was recorded live by Radio Sloan (The Need, Ce Be Barns Band, The Circuit Side, Mocket, Fact or Fiction) and was kindly uploaded by Ayla for the purpose of this article. You can download it here.

Dedicated to all the queens out there seeking liberation from unending cycles of negativity. Please bend your ears and let your heartbreak resound. Fuck the hostile world.

Physical copies of the demo are still available at Linear B.

All photos courtesy of  Jacqui Rae Meadows, unless otherwise noted.

My thanks to Myles for sharing the life of the band.

The post Negative Queen:
Qveer Kvlt in Mvsic Cvltvre
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D.I.Y. or Die: How to Survive as an Independent Artist from SkullKrusher on Vimeo.

The post D.I.Y. or Die:
How to Survive as an Independent Artist
Documentary Now Showing!
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One night a little more than a decade ago, Steve DeCaprio pulled his bike up to an abandoned house in Ghost Town, a poor neighborhood in West Oakland dotted with vacant lots. He cut through the rusty lock on the chain-link fence with bolt cutters, then pried open a plywood sheet that stood where the front door once had. Then he replaced the locks with his own. This is how DeCaprio, a longtime East Bay squatter and veteran of the punk and metal scenes, acquired his home.

He already knew that the previous owner of the house had died in the early 1980s and that no one had come forward to claim it. The turn-of-the-century bungalow had sat empty for many years. The kitchen floor was burned out, and the back of the house hung off the foundation. An acacia tree in the backyard had grown into the roof, leaving the interior open to the elements. The top floor was piled with the carcasses of dead raccoons and other small animals.

DeCaprio and a crew of friends got to work making the place habitable. “At first, it was basically just urban camping,” he remembers. It took eight months of on-and-off work to fix the roof. He got the water flowing, bought storm doors and painted the exterior, planted cacti in the front yard, and yanked out another backyard tree that had begun to menace the house next door. He named it Noodle House, and he currently shares it with three people plus the occasional touring underground band.

DeCaprio, who turns 40 in August, has tousled, graying hair and favors Carharts and black T-shirts bearing band logos. In a more mainstream context, he would be described as a “go-getter.” He plays guitar in a black-metal band named Embers, works as a member representative for the California League of Conservation Voters, and is pursuing a law degree through an independent study program (he expects to take the bar exam next year). And, of course, there’s the house. Right now, DeCaprio is working on a solar array to provide electricity. “There’s gonna be this moment when I turn on a light switch and it’ll be epic,” he says.

Perhaps most impressively, DeCaprio is no longer simply a squatter. He didn’t buy his house, but, after more than a decade of struggle, he owns it. Indeed, he has lived in his house so long that he has gained ownership of it under an obscure law called “adverse possession,” which allows ownership not through purchase or inheritance (the common paths to home ownership), but through occupation—provided no one else can prove he or she is the real owner. Adverse possession, DeCaprio says, is the “holy grail of squatting.”

With the rise of the Occupy movement, squatting has gained new visibility. Since the camps were broken up last fall, the movement has increasingly focused on housing justice—whether it’s helping homeowners fight foreclosure, staging protests against homelessness, or setting up safe havens for occupiers to pursue their activism full-time. Squatting, as a tactic or occasionally as an end in and of itself, is the key component. (As I reported this story, more than one person told me that the word for “occupy” in Spanish—ocupar— also means “to squat.”)

DeCaprio, whose status as an adverse possessor gives him legal protection, has emerged as a squatter spokesperson of sorts. Last summer, he founded Land Action, a nonprofit dedicated to creating more “occupations” (he prefers that term to the “s-word,” which he thinks has a pejorative edge) like his own. The idea, he explains, is to provide free housing that in turn allows countercultural people the financial freedom to pursue low-paying or unpaid social justice work. And when Occupy burst onto the scene, he acted as a consultant: advising occupiers on property law, real estate research, and squatting history and tactics.

For DeCaprio and other political squatters, Occupy’s appearance was both cause for excitement and a vindication. “A lot of people last fall were saying, ‘Yeah, join the movement to occupy!’” he says. “And a lot of other people were like, ‘We’ve been occupying for years.’” Unlike DeCaprio, most political squatters aren’t terribly interested in owning their homes. But in their mix of utopian ideals and ruthless pragmatism, they share the same ultimate goals for society: they want to carve out new spaces from the settled order.
“There’s all kinds of waste in our society,” says a 30-year-old squatter who spent last year squatting foreclosed homes in Sacramento and putting the money he would have spent on rent into underground art shows. “These vacant buildings are just going to waste. Why not use them?”

Today’s political squatters are heirs to a long Bay Area tradition of unconventional approaches to housing and land use. In Berkeley in 1969, a group of radicals transformed a UC Berkeley-owned lot into the communal People’s Park. A month later, Alameda County sheriff’s deputies opened fire on a protesting crowd, killing one and injuring 100 others. In San Francisco, the Good Earth commune—a tribal assortment of radicals, hippies, and ex-cons—took over shooting galleries in the drug-ravaged Upper Haight and made them habitable again, according to David Talbot’s history of progressive San Francisco, Season of the Witch.

As the 1970s bled into the ’80s, squatting became associated with punk. Both had an anti-authoritarian, do- it-yourself sensibility, and wandering young punks streamed into the Bay Area just as the flower children did one generation earlier. Some of the squats were explicitly political. For example, a shuttered South of Market laundry building called HOLC served as the headquarters for punk and anarchist protests during 1984’s Democratic Convention. On the last day of the convention, according to an essay by activist David Solnit, punks went to a Rock Against Racism/Reagan concert, then marched to the Bank of America building to protest its ties to the nuclear weapons industry and apartheid South Africa. The day ended with a police riot and some 300 arrests outside the Hall of Justice.

A new squatting strategy took root in the early 1990s, courtesy of a San Francisco homeless advocacy group named Homes Not Jails (HNJ). Noting that the city had 14,000 homeless and 6,500 empty units, the group proposed putting the homeless in some of those vacancies. The approach was two-pronged: they staged spectacular occupations of “symbolic” buildings to draw media attention and build public support for housing rights, while secretly placing homeless people in empty buildings.

The group’s first public takeover set the template. On Thanksgiving Day 1992, activists converged on a Tenderloin apartment building owned by a notoriously sketchy landlord. With the media in tow, they occupied it, barricading themselves inside and dropping banners from a window announcing their cause. It was a sensation. “The media has always loved building takeovers,” says Ted Gullicksen, founder of Homes Not Jails and executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union. Meanwhile, HNJ members were breaking into abandoned buildings and offering the homeless a place to stay.

Now, owing to the foreclosure crisis and the ferment of the Occupy movement, there might be more squats than ever. Through DeCaprio, I met an Oakland squatter who is staying at a clandestine Occupy Oakland squat. He asked that I call him “Magon,” the name of an early 20th century Mexican anarchist, rather than use his real name. He estimates that there are six Occupy-affiliated squats scattered across the city, and perhaps double that number in non-political squats. This number doesn’t include short-term places that last a day or two. He adds, “The scene is exploding.”

On a chilly day late last fall, a few weeks after police cleared Occupy Oakland’s downtown camp, DeCaprio stood in the amphitheatre of Frank Ogawa Plaza, the site of Occupy’s general assembly meetings. Microphone in hand, he ran about two-dozen occupiers through a series of mini-seminars with titles such as “Squat Law” and “Defending Squats.”

He discussed California Civil Code Section I006, which allows squatters to occupy disused buildings provided the owner doesn’t object, and the ins and outs of the criminal code, which gives authorities leeway to charge squatters with criminal trespassing (in practice, sometimes even if the owner doesn’t complain). Mostly, though, he dispensed advice. When the cops show up at your door, DeCaprio told his audience, it’s very important to behave as if you belong there—from having your own set of keys to mowing the lawn to getting your mail delivered to the house. “The phrase I love to use is, ‘Is there something I can help you with?’” he said. “It’s magical. It’s like ‘These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.’”

“Some people might say, ‘We should march on the White House,’” says DeCaprio. “I think it’d be more effective to occupy a bank-owned property in an economically distressed neighborhood. Right now the bankers are in the White House, hanging out with the president. Meanwhile, in the deepest part of Oakland, some squatter is occupying a bank-owned property and seizing a tiny bit of power away from them.”

Near the end of 1999, DeCaprio and his wife Kelly Nelson’s anarcho-punk band, Lesser of Two, embarked on a months-long European tour. It was an eye-opener for DeCaprio. Squatting is far more accepted in many European countries than in the United States. The protocol was famously easy: get a few items of furniture, put a lock on the door, and you’re in.

The band played and slept in squats from Oslo to Leipzig, Milan to Prague. A place named La Sintilla, in Modena, Italy, which had a bar, a library, residential apartments, a concert hall, and foosball tables, was typical of the more developed squats. “Some of these places blew my mind,” he says. “Anything you could imagine was being done … I wanted to build more alternative structures like that.”

When he returned to the Bay Area, though, things went south quickly. DeCaprio couldn’t get his job back, and he and Nelson were evicted from their apartment after demanding repairs from the landlord. “I had seen this other world in Europe,” DeCaprio says, “and now I was back here, living in my fucking van.” He decided to start his own squat.

DeCaprio threw himself into the task. He rode around on his bike, scouring the inner East Bay for a likely squat. He found his current home first, but at the time he didn’t have the money to fix the roof. Instead, he concentrated on a decrepit Victorian just inside the Berkeley city limits. He went to the assessor, the courthouse, and the recorder’s office, researching property records. He tried to find living relatives.
Gradually, the house’s story emerged: the owners had died in the 1980s and their son inherited the house only to die soon after. Nobody, apparently, had lived there since. It seemed perfect. DeCaprio named it Banana House.

He also read up on property law. He schooled himself in the nuances of adverse possession, the law that permits squatters to gain title to their homes. Like much of U.S. law, adverse possession is drawn from English common law, and it has been part of our legal code since the 18th century. The law, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and adverse possession is meant to encourage the productive use of property by providing a way to transfer title of an abandoned property to someone who will use it.

“It’s good for society to have a way of clearing titles when we can’t figure out who owns land,” says Tim Iglesias, an affordable housing expert and a professor of property law at the University of San Francisco School of Law. “Adverse possession says, ‘Well, this person is using the land, and he seems to be using it well.’”

The exact requirements differ by state, but in California adverse possession officially requires five years of open, continuous occupation without the permission of the owner, the absence of a challenge to that occupation, and the payment of back property taxes. Unofficially, it requires a ton of luck. “That’s the funny thing about adverse possession,” Iglesias says. “Until you’re an adverse possessor, you’re a trespasser.”

DeCaprio would discover this for himself with Banana House.

For awhile, everything was coming along nicely. He fixed the plumbing lines and got the water going. He installed a new door, and soaked the bathtub in bleach after removing piles of rusted pots and pans from it. But the local neighborhood association didn’t like the idea of squatters living in the house, even if they were making it nicer. Somebody called the cops.

Citing civil law, DeCaprio insisted that he was in the process of taking adverse possession of an abandoned home. The police, citing criminal law, said he was trespassing. After police kicked him out the first time, DeCaprio returned to reopen the house. He was cited six times in all, but he kept coming back, even after the city welded the doors shut and glued the locks. One time, DeCaprio says, the police arrived with guns drawn. There was a trial, and he was convicted on three counts of “unlawful entry into a residence” and spent his weekends for most of the next year wearing a fluorescent vest, picking up trash on the side of the road for community service. The judge, he says, called him “arrogant.”

Painful though it was, the experience was instructive. It also served as an inspiration to others. DeCaprio wasn’t a lawyer, but he had become the go-to guy for helping fellow squatters.
“I didn’t figure most of this stuff out until the shit hit the fan,” he says with a laugh. “There was no Steve DeCaprio to ask.”

A few days before Thanksgiving last year, a group of Occupy Oakland members took over an empty lot near the intersection of 18th and Linden in West Oakland. Wells Fargo was due to foreclose on the lot along with the house next door, a few weeks later. The action aimed to draw attention to the foreclosure crisis and, with luck, force Wells Fargo to work out a deal.

This new type of action was the first of its kind for Occupy Oakland, representing a turn towards housing— a potent symbol of inequality. DeCaprio wasn’t at the occupation and didn’t help plan it, but he did play a key role. He trained Chris Moreland, a 23-year-old Oaklander, and a host of other young occupiers in property research.

“Steve showed me how to do all of that stuff,” Moreland says. And the seed, once planted, continued to grow —Moreland says he’s already taught others how to research properties. “They’re all going out there doing their own occupations now,” he says. Although 18th and Linden collapsed, other occupations are succeeding. In San Francisco’s Bayview, one of the city’s poorest and most predominantly African American neighborhoods, occupiers helped a man reclaim his foreclosed house in March. The bank backed off, at least temporarily, and the occupiers transformed the home into a base for fighting other foreclosures in the neighborhood.

At the end of April, a 77-year-old Walnut Creek woman contacted members of Occupy Oakland and told them she was due to be evicted the following morning at 6:00 a.m. Occupiers showed up and convinced the sheriff’s deputies to reevaluate the eviction, which the woman’s family insists is based on fraudulent foreclosure documents. The deputies backed off, and the action bought her a two-week reprieve to keep fighting the foreclosure.

Occupiers are also taking over homes to house their members. Craig Rouskey, an Occupy San Francisco member who works with Homes Not Jails, says there are about a dozen Occupy squats in San Francisco right now — “and some of them are really nice.”

Still, DeCaprio is virtually alone in his security.

Officially, the city doesn’t recognize his ownership of Noodle, but the law of adverse possession doesn’t care what the city thinks. For now, he feels relatively safe in his home. He talks of “putting in a hot tub in the backyard and being all fancy.” But, he adds, “Those ideas are in the distant future.”

His band, Embers—which, though not explicitly political, operates by punk’s DIY rules—will be touring Europe soon, playing clubs and squats alike. His nonprofit, Land Action, is consulting with would-be occupiers all over Oakland and fighting for one group of squatters in court contesting an auction of their West Oakland house. And the rise of Occupy has shown DeCaprio that there are many more people out there who see the world as he does.

As we drive, he marvels at the trajectory of his life. “I’ve gone from sitting in Banana House in a mildewy room all by myself waiting for the cops to come,” he says. “But now I feel like, OK, even if at the time it didn’t make sense to a lot of people, now it’s borne out.”

Chris Smith is a writer and photographer, and he teaches journalism and international affairs at The Art Institute of California, San Francisco. Excerpted from California Northern (Summer/Fall 2012), a biannual publication exploring the region’s cultures, environments, histories, and identities.

The post Housing a Movement:
Adverse Possession in California
An interview with Steve DiCaprio of Embers//Lesser of Two
appeared first on CVLT Nation.

Over the past few months I have had the incredible opportunity to stay quite busy with playing and attending shows here in the bay area. I am a huge fan and supporter of the underground music and art scene, this year more than ever I’ve fulfilled many life dreams and played/attended some truly spectacular shows. Here’s a collection of sights and sounds that I’ve gathered this Summer.

Starting off, on 5/28/12, The grindcore band I play with, Your Enemy, opened for the legendary Nasum on their 20 Year Anniversary and Final Tour. Here’s a video of them performing “Inhale/Exhale”.

Brainoil played second. Generally, if Brainoil is playing second you know the show is a big deal. Here’s a video of them performing “Death Of This Dry Season & Feet Cling To The Rotting Soil”

My band opened, and usually im not into this sort of self publicity, but our friend filmed it on VHS and it looks pretty cool. For those whom are interested here’s a bit of our set.

On 6/1/12, I caught Uzala performing at The Oakland Music Complex. They are a Crushing Doom force out of Boise, featuring Nick Phit from Graves at Sea on Bass. Super Heavy and into it. Here’s a video of them performing “The Reaping”.

On 6/5/12 & 6/6/12, Your Enemy met up with our friends in Turbokrieg(P.L.F) and Needful Things(GRIDE/CZECH REPUBLIC) to support them out on tour in the bay. HumanxWaste, played with us on the first evening. This is them performing “Wave of Death”

Here is footage of Turbokrieg performing in this packed garage in San Francisco and also the following night in Oakland.

Here is footage of Needful Things(Ex-Gride) performing and the singer of the next band(Chet Wrecker) doing a front flip off of a very high locker. If you blink, you might miss it.

One of the openers of the show was Chet Wrecker, a new fast band that recently transplanted to the bay.

This same show marked the return of Crust Heavy’s, War Trash(Ex-Stormcrow/Population Reduction), who’ve been on hiatus for the past few years. They returned with a firestorm of energy.

Fast forward three days later and on 6/9/12 the legendary Massgrave was performing in a small bar in downtown Oakland. Here’s a few videos I snagged of their electrifying performance.

There’s still a couple more months of awesome shows and experiences to be had, so keep a look out for the continuation!

The post Living a Dream: Now Showing “Summer In The Bay” Pt. 1
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