Yo Frederick – the rumors were true. It’s the end of Subversive Zine. We’re dropping the mic and leaving. But not without dropping the very last (and one of our best) Subversive issues ever. Subversive #8’s cover is done by none other than local OG, Goodloe Byron. 
There will be time for reflections and post-Subversive murmurings later but for now, check w/ Subversive instagram or fb to see where we’ve dropped #8 off around town. It’ll be a virtual easter egg hunt for ya’ll b/c there are less than our usual 300-400 printings – so do grab an analogue copy soon. There won’t be any more after that. IF you aren’t able to get one – we’ll have the digital version of issue #8 online for quite a while before we flicker into the long night.
And we’ll add more expansive pieces online to compliment #8 (we also need to add part 2 of Bernard Rollins’ interview from way back).
But let’s start with celebrating Subversive #8 (which took too fucking long to put together – my fault entirely-AnonymousFREDerick won’t disclose any more details) with a trippy satirical (possibly faux-book) Preface written by an incredibly talented musician, Frederick native Corey Thuro. He’s doing some wickedly creative stuff – enuf so that he’s playing in joints like the Rhizome in DC – same as Twin Jude’s crew w/ Quodesh records collective. Check his music here. But I digress, Corey lays out his academic book preface (of a book that may or may not exist -we’ll let you decide) regarding a # of topics – musing on the future based on the historical trends of Frederick. In Issue #8 we have a short edited version, but here’s the full on, LSD fueled piece in it’s glorious entirety:
PREFACE
If you are reading this right now it means that you have bought a copy of my e-book ‘Frederick, Maryland: What is it and How is it Going?’ Aside from thanking you for purchasing the book, let me tell you, you’re really in for it. There is no book quite like this one. Within the e-pages of this document you will find an alchemy spanning the elements of historical analysis, cultural anthropology, political propaganda, subaquatic cartography, and much MUCH more. Without giving away everything, I’d like to provide something of an idea of the topics you can expect me to get into here. The work began as a dissertation effort towards my Ph.D. in US Regional History and was inspired by my time growing up in the remote rural haven that is Buckeystown, Maryland. The intention was a sort of holistic nonfiction portrait of the city I grew up near and spent a lot of my adolescence in. Then, one night, while taking a walk under one of the bridges on Carrol Creek, a homeless man in stained Carhart overalls laying on the ground on a blanket beneath the bridge started talking me up and offered me something (vodka) to drink from a brown paper bag. Being a stranger to no one and having no plans for the next morning I gladly took him up on it. Of course, you know how it goes; one drink turns into two, two into three, three times three is nine, and gradually the night and my lucidity receded into a golden ratio spiral of intoxication. Two weeks later I woke up fifteen miles away in the woods near Gambrill State Park wearing clothes that were not mine. After the immediate horror and confusion eased up slightly, memory began to trickle back of the man’s fingers reaching out and placing two tabs of LSD under my tongue; the two of us howling hysterically into tears, and fractal images of arms reaching into a backpack and bringing out what looked like a Tibetan singing bowl filled with a greenish brown liquid which Tony —if I’m remembering his name— and I drank together. Beyond that nothing got through but a deep and pervasive headache like a helicopter landing in my skull. After I brushed the sticks and forest debris off of myself and struggled to stand, I eventually made my way to a nearby road which I located by the sound of sparsely timed cars passing in the distance. Before long I was picked up by a police officer patrolling the area who had slowed and reversed when she saw my scarred body hobbling along the tree line. She took me to an emergency center where I was given liquids and food and was in time restored to my natural health.
The experience informed intensely what this book would become. Tone, content, breadth, form, and focus, all. The work begins with an historical outline of Frederick and suggests some preliminary questions about its current cultural and artistic situation inspired by various conversations I’ve had with local musicians, artists, and passerby around town.
On page 7 of section one (chapters 1 through 7), entitled: I Call Upon Frederick, Maryland to Demolish its Identity, Fulfill Prometheus’ Prophecy That Zeus Will be Overthrown by the Proletariat, and Consider Whether or Not it Has or Needs a Music Venue!, I write:
“Frederick, MD: elevation 92 M, time zone UTC – 5, is a city with much to offer unlike, say, Terra Haute, Indiana. Terra Haute, Indiana is a strip-mall Hell which Frederick’s ‘Golden Mile’ can only dream of resembling (though as we can see, it shall not be deterred in its efforts). In Terra Haute, Indiana, the rain pours down from the smoke streamed sky with the preternatural intensity of a scriptural event. When existing in Terra Haute, Indiana one is pervaded most by the feeling that one is really only on their way to someplace else. Indeed, to walk through a grey afternoon in the sour shadow of a ‘Got Milk?’ billboard in Terra Haute, Indiana is to realize the most primal manifestation of human discomfort and fear. But I kid. Terra Haute, Indiana as I describe it here for punching-bag-use is only a too-mean caricature of a much realer, more complex, more human place whose fate is entangled in the multi-verse of corporate America’s economic self-cannibalism. You may roll your eyes but even as I write this the federal government allows Nestle Corporation to buy up most of the remaining water in Flynt, Michigan…Anyway, asides aside: what Terra Haute, Indiana can claim that Frederick, Maryland cannot, is that without question Terra Haute, Indiana has a music venue. Let’s get into this a little and see what it might mean and whether Frederick does have a music venue and whether it should. First things first, if Frederick does get a ‘real’ music venue, that is a place where the presentation of music is its primary service, it should be careful. Frederick doesn’t need an immaculate stage and sound system that draws profit booking nationally touring Dave Matthews cover bands and The Reagan Years to the neglect of local musicians. I’m tired of half listening to concerts at Baker Park. Frederick needs a venue that is actively committed to engaging creatively with its community. Artists and ‘non-artists’ all.”
From here, the book shifts focus towards a painstaking sketch of the spirt, personality, and growing ethnic diversity of Frederick. Here is an excerpt from chapter 9 entitled Frederick, Make Like a Freudian Groundhog and Acknowledge Your Shadow!:
‘‘Frederick’— as it displays itself to itself by its downtown area is a cute, spirited, creative, rootsy but rough-edged, gentrif….’nice’ place. It is also a historical one: the horrors of the civil war and slavery still energizes some of its essence. And of course, Francis Scott Key is from Frederick. The fact that both the local mall and minor league baseball team are named after Key is an illuminating example of how idols which affirm the dominant narrative are chosen as locality namesakes patriotizing the community and reaffirming a thin but real sense of national identity. On the other hand, Frederick is a strange fringe place where lives and ideas from the trailer park valleys and farm families and Amish Pennsylvania mingle with lives and ideas from Baltimore transplants and middle-class suburbanites drawn to D.C. In fact, Frederick’s ethnic and cultural makeup is only diversifying. According to an article titled ‘Racial, ethnic groups grow in city, county’ published by The Frederick News Post Oct 12. 2012:
“In regard to minority group growth, the 2010 census data show the city’s Hispanic population at 9,402, a 271 percent increase compared with 2,533 in 2000, making Hispanics/Latinos the fastest growing race group in the city and in Frederick county (267 percent increase). Frederick city had 3,800 Asian residents in 2010, a 128 percent increase from the city’s 1,664 Asian residents in 2000. The city’s black or African-American population increased 56 percent, from 7,777 in 2000 to 12,144 in 2010”
Just like all of us, Frederick has a hard time seeing itself. And just like all of us it creates things in order to see itself better. All in all, what I want to see is Frederick being more truthful to the multiplicity that is its community. We don’t want a Frederick where the differences of people’s ideas and backgrounds and upbringings are subsumed and washed away under the unifying banner of ‘Frederick: The Official Frederick of Frederick’. I like sipping a forty-five-dollar jasmine infused espresso in the transcendental hipster cowboy shade of abstract art as much as the next guy. But we want a Frederick where differences exist between people. Radical differences. And where different people can witness each other being different than themselves and can be given a place to talk and argue about it and do creative things together.”
This aim takes up the majority of what may be called the midsection of the book. That is, more or less, chapters 9 through 22.
Towards the seventy percent mark the writing begins to shift narrative style. I have long been interested in researching and contributing to the local legend of the Frederick Snallygaster. In fact, there is already a great book on the monster by Patrick Boyton. Since it seemed to me that Boyton’s book does the historical issue justice I decided to write a play. This occurs beginning on chapter 27 entitled Snally Snally Snallygast! (the name of the play). Being the renaissance man that I am I was not satisfied with merely writing a play about the feared mythical beast. The play is accompanied by ambitiously structured musical compositions with which it is to be performed. The songs vary in style from rockabilly, hip-hop, K-pop, calypso, metal, honky-tonk, indie, top 40, dancehall, folk rock, meme rap, Dub, country, go-go, jazz, folk, neo-folk, neo-indie-folk-rock, americana, contemporary classical, swing, funk, gospel, Hindustani classical, house, no wave, punk, new wave, delta blues, Memphis blues, bagpipe, hippe, sound collage, garage, kid’s song, jam, old time, EDM, classic rock, big band, parlor, synthesis, tape, Appalachia, avant-garde, romantic, sludge metal, jig, death metal, doom metal, speed metal, freak folk, hard bop, be bop, post punk, free jazz, free improvisation, rap, poetics, alt-rock, disco, jingles, math rock, Cajun, comedy, Celtic, psychedelic, singer-songwriter, Jewish scriptural, samba, Neoist mock rock, socialist work song, baroque, bossa, reel, Romanian gypsy jazz, nursery rhyme, tango, tango nuevo, minimalism, gagaku, fusion, Gregorian chant, desert blues, chanson, cha-cha, opera, maximalism, serialism, ambient, breakbeat, hardcore, lofi, zydeco, sea shanty, industrial, prog, electronic, cake walk, ancient Greek, deep listening, Partch octave, R&B, Medieval Court, soul, reggae, and reggaetón.
This section continues until the final ten chapters where I layout my climactic socio-economic manifesto for Frederick and its future. The beef of this manifesto rests upon my belief that Frederick must begin to fight for the power its innate greatness deserves. In Chapter 30, Harness the River! I lay out my plans for expansion:
“The Potomac river flows from Frederick County down into Montgomery County. If the river were dammed Frederick could harness the energy in electricity and sell it to local businesses for profit. There is one main obstacle. About twenty miles downstream, just in Montgomery County, there is a small town of about six thousand people called Poolesville, Maryland. If we dammed the river Poolesville would surely be flooded. However, if we first convinced most of the people of Poolesville to leave, perhaps even to come and live in Frederick we would have no problem at all. I propose we gather a team of armed mercenaries to block off the roads coming through and leaving Poolesville. No one needs to die. We just need to instill fear. Poolesville does not have its own police force but there are surely a lot of people with guns. To make this work, we’ll need a sizeable militia. At the same time, we begin running ads in the local papers that the living conditions in Frederick, MD are better than ever. All the while we do whatever is necessary to convince people to leave. This may mean anything from slashing tires at night, cutting off local food supplies, poisoning cattle and crop, destabilizing internet service, etc. Once we get the majority of the population out of there, we dam and flood the river. Those remaining in Poolesville will have no choice but to flee and will not be numerable enough to comprise any formidable resistance. In fact, if our propaganda works, they’ll be running into our arms! Once the river is dammed and Poolesville forgotten we extend the boundary of Frederick County into the township formerly known as Poolesville. This will receive intense backlash from local, state, and federal levels but I believe that is the time we begin to take what is ours, ask for forgiveness later, and prove our glory now…”
I’ll stop there for fear of giving away too much. I think you’re becoming sufficiently confident that you did not make a mistake in purchasing this book. Which seems a fine segway into the much-owed thanks in general:
Lisa Whateley, Ed Stone at Monocacy Valley Publication; you guys were a dream. Steve Crass for proofreading and editing, couldn’t’ve done this without you. Ellen Vandorfluke, Tim Dron, Leonard Halstead, Lois Menenez, Mic Trevor, Tony Buckel, Jamie Erndst, Shannon Maguerite, Kel Patterson, Josh Bishop, Emilia Baughman, Sandy, Ted Applebaum, Keith Morely, Jefferson Knight, Francis Cooper, and all the folks at Wymtech. Thank you all so much for your time and compassion. I hope you are as proud of this work as I am.
