teal;deer

The dumbest thing I used to tell myself was that I had ~missed out on making a zine, like there's a brief window in your teenage years or early twenties where if you're going to do something like that you get it out of your system and then age gracefully into the next phase of your craft, whatever that means for you. Obviously that's a frame riddled with self-defeating expectations and I failed to make anything on my own terms for years, even though I spent just as much time writing alienated, rage-fueled poetry about the beauty of the world as working on my social work degree. In fact, I wrote alienated, rage-fueled poetry about the beauty of the world to cope with the cognitive dissonance involved in getting a social work degree. They were different ways of expressing both an infinite optimism of what people are capable of being, for and with each other, and the deep disgust of seeing that potential desecrated in new and imaginative ways every day- anguish born of an...

Maximum RockNRoll Magazine issue 425 “There’s never been a better time for freaks getting into heavy music.” Renovated Victorian houses in Pittsburgh don’t change much, particularly not their basements. Layers of paint build up over decades, wooden stairs get replaced, leases expire. But the basement shows you can hear from the back yard are as driving and explosive as ever, the shows are still BYOB, the grass is still littered with cigarette butts, small crowds are still sardined together to be manically catharsized by the screaming freedom of rapid-fire three-minute hardcore songs punctuating the night. But sitting down with Cecelia Martuscelli of Pittsburgh’s Het Ward Collective, all we can talk about is what’s different- what’s changed and how it’s enabled a small revolving group of post-punk and hardcore musicians to own their corner of the scene and drawing a crowd of similarly-alienated queer punks. The music is hard as hell, but at Het Ward shows men no longer own th...