CITIES IN DUST

If you have been observing any of my content via TART for any amount of time you may have noticed I do not stay on “topic” meaning my business account holds snippets of my personal life along with tangents. Welcome to my brain.

During my childhood in the 80’s I would wake up to the news on the radio with some necessary info about traffic and the weather. Maybe you had a home with a TV that was on all morning with either a local news station or a national broadcast show. Either way you left for your day and didn’t have access to minute by minute news intermittent with recap filler news of said news.

I was driving upstate this weekend to work in the factory and had a few hours where my 12 year old son was forced to be in dialogue with me. After some witty conversation about this and that I used the moment to inquire if he had picked up on the term “Epstein Files” and if kids at school were discussing as kids at school do. He said yes in a way that I knew he was hoping the conversation would end there. Typically we do have an rule that if he asks me something “delicate” and I answer there is a moment where he can say “enough” and I just stop. This was mostly applied during 4th - 6th grade and sex ed was being taught. I had told him stories of how no one really clarified some things for me as a child and it was incredibly confusing/embarrassing so I wanted him to feel ok asking me things with no judgement, knowing it would end when he got the “gist”.

You don’t know my son but his response was kinda alarming. He just said flat out he didn’t want to discuss it all, he had no questions and would really like me to not give him any specifics. I get it, I am not a person who has dabbled in the details of looking at the actual files, mainly because I am well aware they are worse than I could ever imagine. I took a few minutes and asked if I could discuss something important with him that is related but not specific to this situation but I think important for him to understand. He nodded.

I told him that a lot of people are now becoming aware that the most powerful people in our world that run most of society are pure evil. They make the rules and they have the money which gives them a lot of this power. I went with a simple explanation: people become powerful in any setting because not enough people stop them. The “yes” people. How this applies to my 12 year son is doing my best to explain how to use his power in the right way.

Even though he does not have a smart phone I am aware that every classmate and peer he is spending time with does. So trying to control what he sees is a lost cause but explaining to him that when someone shows you something that you know to be wrong be it an explicit photo of another classmate or private conversation or a graphic video not suitable for really anyone it is his responsibility to speak up, I was clear this was not about tattling but about calling out the behavior in real time. I was a bit more specific and applied this to being protective of young ladies and any group of people needing to be defended. The truth is avoiding conflict in these situations will make you an accomplice and there is no way around it. I rely on metaphors often so since my son is a young athlete I went with this as well. Muscles are hard and painful to build but the more work you do the easier it is to lift heavy things. Basically it becomes hard NOT to say something if you are lucky. I say luck because once you have a solid core belief system and you know yourself no one can fuck with that. There is no hesitation, someone does something “evil” and you respond with your heart without hesitation.

Ok now I will try to loop this back to vinegar.

When I started my business I remember someone suggesting to me I should think of another business to use as a “role model”. That didn’t work for me but I did use Siouxsie and The Banshees as my northern star. If you are aware of this band and you know me then that will make a lot of sense. I don’t know her personally but from what I do understand she is someone who made music for her own pleasure. An example is how she pivoted from punk at a time when punk was just getting legs and shifted to a completely new sound, “New Wave”. I actually had to go back and do some research to remind myself what drew me to her specifically besides her music making me happy and there was a quote I remember vividly.

“I grew up having no faith in adults as responsible people. - I had no one to confide in. So I invented my own world, my own reality. It was my own way of defending myself - protecting myself from the outside world. The only way I could deal with how to survive was to get some strong armour.”

The idea that “you get to invent your own life” is seen in my captions over and over throughout TART. It stuck with me. Do I really need to explain why?

Next tangent.

This morning I decided to revisit an old podcast that I was obsessed with when it was released a few years ago by Jad Abumrad called “Everything. Together. Radio.” You have not heard of it I promise. It was 6 episodes (I think) and a friend who knows Jad once told him that they knew someone who would put this series on a loop and he said “they might’ve the only listener”. That was me and I did, in the early days of bottling for hours alone. Maybe it reminds me of making mixed tapes as a kid cut in with some really deep dives info music and cultural references of the moment but the combination creates an emotional response inside me. It feels like Jad made this for his own pleasure.

However for reasons that are not important to this “note” I will say I was inspired to listen to episode 2 this morning, about Siouxie and the Banshees. It’s not about her specifically but it does share the audio of a news clip not widely known of her when she was in the Sex Pistols (also not widely known) before they were famous and way before she was a Banshee. If you have the time to listen I will link at the end if you can’t I will do my best to explain by paraphrasing a Jon Bennet article written about this specific clip in 2025.

1976

“Picture this… Queen is booked to appear on Bill Grundy’s Today show, but Freddie develops a toothache, it was so bad that Freddie who notoriously wasn’t keen on dentist, decided he had to make his first visit in 15 years, so Queen canceled the appearance. EMI offered up new group The Sex Pistols as a last minute replacement. What happened next changed everything.“

To “sum it up” the “incident” isn’t about Bills mocking tone and questioning if the band is worthy of the amount of money received from their record label, or even asking them if they are “serious”. They laugh all that off. It was Bill making a casual sexually implicit comment to Siouxie, while she somewhat shys away and nervously plays with her hair, the male bandmates begin ripping Bill apart instantly for the iannapropratiness calling him a dirty old man. Bill challenges them by saying “go on you got another 5 seconds” so another male band member clearly says “you dirty old bastard”. Then it ends. The video is only 2 minutes and 32 seconds long. 

However this controversy resulted in the Sex Pistols being trailed by newspaper reporters for the rest of the bands 18 month existence. Those 2 and half minutes launched The Sex Pistols into stardom along with punk. This. I want this. I know a lot of people are reckoning with a world they believed to be one way and are now coming to understand it is not that way. I do not feel bad for you. I feel bad for the people who always knew it was evil and no one believed them or yelled at dirty old men.

Link to Bill Grundy Clip

Episode of Everthing. Together. Radio

Article by Jon Bennet