Cassette Review: Tucker Theodore

Tucker Theodore

To Make the Sun Hurt cassette

available from antiquatedfuture.com

This incident might be from another lifetime. Perhaps it was sometime in the 1990’s. A man in the apartment next door is fiddling with an amplifier and an old tape recorder. You hear his howls through the wall. Maybe he’s been listening to Bonnie Prince Billie. Maybe he’s secretly Jandek. You don’t know him very well, you mumble "hi" to him at the mailbox & don’t make eye contact. At one point he starts whistling along with the thrum of his guitar. His voice sounds like it’s echoing out of a coal mine. The batteries run down in the tape recorder and he stops singing. You’re not sure what you just overheard, yet it haunts you like surrealistic dreams of clouds. 

Where You From #4

Where You From #4

News from Home

New Hampshire in the 80’s

Review: Hope has created another absorbing issue of Where You From, forty pages of histories and reminiscences of growing up in the Granite State, my place in the world. Through several chapters, Hope documents her recollections and impressions of the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the police brutality against Rodney King, an out-of-control murder of a local family man by police in Hudson, Ram Dass in New Hampshire, and more. Peppered throughout are grainy black & white images that perfectly accentuate the histories that Hope explores. Where You From #4 is a lovely and provocative zine.

Commentary: I grew up in and have lived 99% of my life within the geographic boundaries we call New Hampshire. Though I was a young adult with three children during the era that Hope describes, it is almost as if we lived in two different states and two different times. I grew up in southern New Hampshire and was acutely aware of the social injustices going on both nationally and next door. Most of my family’s friends were non-white, non-wealthy, and some were non-neurotypical. Where Hope states that “…this is why we get out, to see a bigger picture, to understand more …” I think: this is why some of us stay (in New Hampshire) or in our home towns … because the bigger picture is not outside of us, somewhere else, it is within our hearts.

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