1. Whatever generation it is now of the St. Marks Poetry Project New York School is beyond us, we stopped counting as soon as we saw Anselm Berrigan running the joint, remembering him as a kid banging around the folding chairs at the Project really not that long ago. Time flies in real time and in poet time and the last decade of young poets around that scene has been consistently engaging, though maybe exuding a transitional character that left us waiting for some kind of sick throw down. A recent publication that kind of comes very close to this is Mum Halo by New York City poet John Coletti, published by Rust Buckle Books. Coletti’s a pal of the true hearts writing, ruminating and starving around the historical churchyard on 2nd Ave and 9th street but keeps a slow and low profile. So when Anselm handed us this book we were curious, and when ripping through its pages we were left both stoned-brained and speed-slapped. Here is writing that takes the economy of word-mythos line play and evokes it with charm, humor and street sophistication. Check this out:

Opens Slowly

Because you’re patient
helping world being
less injured in it
pull up skirt hard inside
simple folding
burnt my finger
putting you out

Killer, here’s another:

Truce

Like to complicate my life no I don’t
sleep all day full pail &
feather your hair grinding sea
for Texas decades, sure
I might be a fuck-up
awesome fuck-up

2. The recent Jack Rose release party in Philly felt pretty cathartic for a bunch of the people who attended and it also kinda highlighted the wide breadth of style-glumph that is currently heralded as volk.

There is, of course, Jack’s own new album, Luck in the Valley (Thrill Jockey), which is a magnificent precis of his career, ranging from long raga fantasias to clackety neo-rags and stomps with Harmonica Dan, D. Charles Speer and other fellow travelers. The beauty and ease of his playing is something we will hold as a treasured memory as long as we live.

Jack’s long-time riding partner Glenn Jones also has a brilliant new album called Barbecue Bob in Fishtown (Strange Attractors Audio House), which is his best blast yet. Soloing on both guitar and banjo, Glenn’s playing has a precision and formal mastery that is jaw-dropping and so wide-ranging it’s incredible. And it’s definitely worth getting the LP version, since there’s a visual tribute contained to Muddy Waters’ Electric Mud album that is sure to crack up any knowledgeable collectors out there. I just hope he gets around to recording the Stockhausen music box pieces he’s been ruminating on for last decade or two. That would be a total gas.

One of the obsessive fanboy strands we’ve shared with Glenn over the years is the immortal Michael Hurley, and he has a smoking new LP as well. Ida Con Snock (Gnomonsong) was recorded over the course of a few years and features a mic of new & old material (as has been Hurley’s wont for a good long while.) What’s different and extremely special here is that he’s backed by the young Brooklyn folk-rock band, Ida, and also the great Tara Jane O’Neil. The gang really provides Hurley with the best backing band he’s had since Have Moicy! They usually hang back, only moving forward when it’s really appropriate, and the results are solid and as satisfying as a spliff, a jug and a warm fireplace. Hurley has the capacity to sound timeless, and he’s in rare form here, doing songs as transcendent as “Wildegeeses” and as boy howdy as “Ragg Mopp.” A massive favorite for all seasons.

Which reminds me of a show we put on in 2002 or so, where Hurley was backed on some numbers by the Philly band, Espers. That was a corker, as is Espers’ new LP, III (Drag City). Someone from the band told me they felt like this album was a holding-pattern in comparison to earlier work, but we sure don’t hear it. The CD has been stuck in the car stereo a lot lately, and the blend of Anglo-style female vocals (this time more like Celia Humpries—from the Trees—and Sandy Denny) and the male ones (which remind us of nothing so much the actually great—we swear—soft-rock of Mark-Almond and Sweet Thursday) is so fine. And the whole thing is laced with shots of guitar so goddamn psych you’ll swear they’re Japanese. But they aren’t. They’re just great.

Lastly in this category (for now) comes Peter Stampfel’s long-overdue Dook of the Beatniks (Pietystreet Files and Archaic Media). Stampfel, of course, as half of the original Holy Modal Rounders has a pretty legitimate claim to being the founding father of the whole psych-volk shebang, so what does he do? Why he perversely records a rock & roll album with Mark Bingham producing. And it’s great, naturally—c’mon, nobody sings a song quite as crazily as Stampfel does—and contains everything from covers of obscure Johnny Cash b-sides to Sam Shepard’s “Take a Message to Omie” (Shepard was in the Rounders for a while too) and various other great damn tunes. It’s really nice that Stampfel allowed himself to take the lead on all the vocals here (something he never did in the Bottlecaps or the Rounders) and the results are extremely uplifting. You have to go online to read the fucking liner notes (similar to one of those Adelphi Rounders albums where you had to write the label to get ‘em), but they’re typically fine and worth the effort. This still ain’t the exact Stampfel album we’re waiting for—back in the ’80s Ira Kaplan tried to strong-arm Peter into doing a solo LP with just voice and fiddle, and that’s the one we’re still holding our breath about. But this one’s a riot. And the cover pic of young beat Pete is wild. But hey—what happened to that album where he was gonna record a song from each year of the 20th Century? That’s due, too. Shake a leg, mofo.

3. Some superior communal and loose-tongue drone by Your Drugs My Money, a collective of peeps from all over the usa and one copenhagenite. They wrapped their heads together a couple years back in Portland and ran tape and it is deep wind-charmed fluidity, both sweet and raw. The session exists on a split tape released by oms/b tapes with Les Aus, two freaks from Barcelona who’ve been making records etc. for a while. Death trip momma Lydia Lunch shows up to intone on a track and the earth cracks open and cream gushes.

4. As it so often does, the Christmas season brought an avalanche of books about the Velvet Underground. Well, maybe not an avalanche, but THREE. And that seems like a lot for band that lost its leader (Lou Reed) 40 years ago, But we don’t wanna complain. ‘Cause the best thing is that whenever a buncha new books come out, it means there’ll be some pics we’ve never seen before. And it’s hard to think of a band that looked as consistently cool as the Velvets. The three are all by scribes we know, and each has a take somewhat reflective of author’s personality.

A Walk on the Wild Side author Jim DeRogatis

The first and most general one is A Walk on the Wild Side by Jim DeRogatis (Voyageur Press). Jim’s best known for daily newspaper work and his serviceable bio of Lester Bangs. His chief function as a rock scribe seems to be restating consensual realities, and so it is here. I mean, the book’s text is a solid introduction, but this is an intro that’s been made many times before. The volume’s raison d’etre, one assumes, is the new visuals. And it’s true—the pics look great (even though the most surprising ones now show up elsewhere as well), but the text is somewhat bland and the stuff about later solo work doesn’t carry the same charge. Still, a worthwhile filer. The Velvet Underground: New York Art by Johan Kugelberg (Rizzoli) is an outgrowth of the art catalog he did that we wrote about a couple of years ago. New York Art is a gorgeously printed, obsessive’s guide to the explosive confluence of Warhol’s scene and the Velvets. If you want a coffee-table Velvets book, this is the one to own. The text pieces are solid (an interview with both Lou and Maureen; random pieces by Bangs and Meltzer; memoirs from Rob Norris, Sterling and others) and the illustrations are pretty mind-bending. Very over-the-top, but wildly cool. White Light/White Heat (Jaw Bone Press) by Richie Unterberger: this one goes beyond obsession. It’s a day-by-day tracking of everything known about the band and their fellow travelers. And it is exhaustive. Richie has even dug up some images that eluded DeRogo and Johan, but the meat of this book is information overload. It’s the kind of book that can keep your ass glued to the toilet for days at a time. So don’t keep your copy in the bathroom. Might be hazardous to your very own ass health! Amazing work.

5. Caldera Lakes is Eva Aguila and Brittany Gould, two Los Angeles women who are displacing the Ladies of The Canyon mantle of Joni Mitchell by taking that songbird’s searching heart and massaging it against an amplified key grinder. And it is seriously killer. With a clutch of releases on Blackest Rainbow, Deathbomb Arc and 905they have proven to be one of the most arresting and savage femme noise units creepy-crawling the planet. Their latest self-titled tape on Accidie is as great as anything they’ve done, if not the greatest. Essential mayhem.

6. There are pretty many great jazz reissues and retrievals every year. People stumble over some crazy ass shit and we are goddamn happy when they deign to bring it to our attention. But it’s also fun to revisit old friends who’ve lingered in the shadows of our record collections for too long. So it was a sweet feeling to get a grey-area reissue of The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing, an LP that originally appeared on John Fahey’s Takoma label in 1967. Asked about it, Fahey would only say, “That was ED Denson’s idea!” But Nothing at this time was a Berkeley fixture and was known for wild alto sax improvisations as well as the huge book of writing and art he was always working on. Well, Charlie passed away a couple of years ago, and he recorded a bunch of interesting stuff that will hopefully see wide distribution one of these days, but this album is his first and it is a masterpiece of free improv—sax and percussion, unbridled from formal constrictions, allowed to weasel around like electrified rats. People have occasionally decried this LP in the same terms they use for Beefheart’s soprano playing (”that’s not playing—that’s just breathing!”), but we say “Fuck You,” to those who would quibble over such outmoded concepts. As Duke Ellington so famously said, “If it sounds good, it is good.” You are so right, Duke. And this Charlie Nothing album sounds GREAT.

7. Kryssi Battalene is a New Haven experimental angel who channels the sound of cosmic snowbirds through the physical friction of ferrous oxide tape against smoldering tapeheads. She also plays an astoundingly wicked guitar both traditionally and out of this world. We first saw her perform as a duo with Danny Moore in the amazing Heaven People, since disbanded, and she has been currently soloing every once in a while under the name Colorguard. She’s recorded a few weird cassettes handed off at gigs but thank the long red hair mystic Heath Moerland of Fag Tapes for releasing Shared Planet, a fine premier for this most awesome of wild improv enchantress.

8. Excellent to be able to screen Shout Factory’s new, super clean DVD of the great American International teenage rock & roll spectacular, The T.A.M.I. Show. The older of us actually saw this screamfest at a movie theater when it came out in ‘64, and it was amazing. The weirdest part of it may be the soundtrack, which has a persistent teen-scream huzz which (from the look of the crowd) is something that was tacked on to provide extra energy or somesuch. But the film doesn’t need it. Between the gyrations of the go-go girls (including Teri Garr and Tosi Basil back when they were part of Wallace Berman’s circle), the wild performances of the musicians (James Brown, the Stones, the Barbarians, Chuck Berry, etc.) and goofy MCing by the superb surf duo, Jan & Dean (the first group whose records I collected seriously). It is an insane blend and a testament to the heterogeneity of the early ’60s R&R experience, when the underground and commercial scenes were virtually interchangeable (apart from the creepy singers pushed by publishers and producers). This was shot at the Santa Monica Civic, and the tickets were given away free to local high schools. What a bonus fucking day that must’ve been.

9. One of the great small press poetry publishers, O Books, out of Oakland CA, issued in 1989 the first English translation of It Then, a book of poems by the late French poet Danielle Collobert. Collobert is little known outside the rabid circle of enthusiasts for her minimalist, self erasing style, but she has an intriguing history. Born in 1940, she published her first book of poems, Chant de Guerres (Song of Wars), in 1960, then hunted down every extant copy and destroyed them.

She became a political activist involved with publishing the Revolution Africaine newsletter. She published the Raymond Queneau-championed book Muerte (Murder) in 1964, traveled extensively, wrote and performed radio plays, published Il Donc (It Then) in 1976, and committed suicide in her hotel room in Paris the night before her birthday July 24, 1978. Collobert possessed a dark and romantic visage, especially evident when one notices her jacket photo with its downward gaze and the sensual sadness of her beauty. Her work astounds, moving across the page with a sonance both velvet and machine-gun like. The translation allows us to access her meaning, but the poetry here is compromised by not hearing the sound of the writer’s language. Even so, the thought process, the artistry of the trajectory, comes clear—and it is not always pretty. In fact it can be pretty frightening, detailing emotional negotiations with the poison of inhumanity as well as the living psychology of being female, indeed being REAL.

An excerpt:

I

It – flows – it bangs itself – slammed into walls – it picks itself up – stamps feet – it doesn’t go far – four steps to the left – new wall – it extends its arms – leans – leans hard – rubs its head – again – harder – forehead – there – the forehead – hurts – rubs harder – becomes inflamed – not the forehead – from within – cries

good start for the pain – head between arms – forehead against wall – and rubbing – skin breaks open a little – not enough – ooh the pain – there it is – feet kicking the wall down low – go on – with the toes – striking hard – thrashing – nothing to be done – doesn’t subside – never will subside – the rage – the pain – cries – hits with flat hands – dull noise – a cry – here a cry – no gasp – a little above a gasp – in shrillness – here it comes – collects at the back of the throat – what’s going to come out – still below the pain – not enough

sobs shaken – saliva at lips’ edge – bitter taste – slides a little towards the corner – nose smashing – lips – the lips twisted sideways – pulled back to the gums – moistening the wall – eyes closed – stomach and chest flattened – unsticks – comes back harder – sharp impact of shoulders – unsticks – comes back again with elbows with knees – bangs fists – fists’ backs – to the bone – starts over – skin reddens – rips at last – it falls – doubled up – dragging arms stretched along the wall – kept vertical by ends of fingernails – it collapses – impact of back – head rings on wooden floor – it pushes up onto its elbow – drags along the wall – reaches hung-up coat – hangs onto – hoists itself – buries its head in the wool – grabs the arms – holds the end of the sleeves tight – overlaps them around neck – expecting softness – but no – squeezes hard – chokes – coughs into tears – chokes – lets go – hangs onto cloth – pulls hard to rip – rips with all its strength – tears pieces with its teeth – spits – chokes – arms fall back down – sinks down – slips onto the ground

a body there – practicing pain – as if it hadn’t had enough of this suffering – at each moment – in floods – in vast wave – trying pathetically to practice it

body striking – disfiguring its limbs with the too full pain – which body sudden empty – which violence against – about empty – pain congealed at last – wanting to reach it to set it once and for all – to keep it there motionless – or set it down in front of it – itself – to make it really visible – in its infinitely numerous images – unceasingly

a body there – no – that body there – the one banging its face against the wall – maybe – no

walls fictive also – unnecessary walls – no – only to see from the place of the present invisible – here – facing the stripped body – arms motionless yet sweeping around in space without meeting anything to lean on – temporary connection – just for an instant – to slow the breathing down – slow down the beating – to quiet down – this body seeking the place – the hollow in which to melt back down again – heat ruptured – and cold of the world around – its place or position unsure to inscribe against the lack – the shocks of the day

(copyright © 2002 O Books)

It Then is available again through Small Press Distribution, a fantastic source for small press lit.

10. So many boss records floating through here, really have to just randomize & roll. Talk Normal’s debut full-length, Sugarland (Rare Book Room) is a blazing extension of their earlier EPs. Their basic heft (UK ‘78 DIY/No Wave squall) remains in places, but it is swamped by a new, venomous psychedelic thrust mixed with a post-scum instrumental chiming that is ridiculously effective. And their Roxy Music cover is as perfectly imagined as anything you’ve ever heard.

Then there’s the new album by Pete Nolan’s main non-Magik Markers project, Spectre Folk. Their second LP is called Compass, Blanket, Lantern, Mojo (Arbitrary Signs), which I suppose are the four main points on Pete’s aesthetic compass. Less massed and grueling than the Markers, this band’s sound is far more ramblesome and loosely psychedelic. Largely instrumental and as low-key as it is wasted, the LP wiggles beautifully from the instant it hits yr veins.

One of last year’s most profoundly underrated LPs was definitely Bats in the Dead Trees Parts I-IV (Lost Treasure of the Underworld) by Columbus, Ohio’s Cheater Slicks. This superb band—once based in Boston—has been churning brilliantly for a couple of decades now, and has created some of the world’s most tasty garage raunch in the process. Here they take the challenge and drop structure for an album’s worth of howling free-rock improv, and it sounds so fucking perfect, I just hope a whole lot of garage dudes/dudettes decide now’s the time to put up their own dukes and just LET ONE FLY. Would make for a lotta totally ginchy listening! Thank you, Cheater Slicks.

One band that was born in the land that form forgot was Detroit’s Destroy All Monsters. And luckily for us, Cary Loren has whipped out some expanded jams first presented in edited form in the 1974-1976 3CD box, and smeared them across a glorious slab of vinyl called Double Sextet (The End Is Here/Compound Annex). Yow. Only 500 pressed of this 33-minute chunk of free-form savagery, recorded in 1975, and it’s an instant classic.

Also instantaneous is the garage-vom-darkness of the long-lost LP by Michael & the Mumbles (De Stijl), a ‘66 midwest session led by the teenaged Michael Yonkers. The band’s sound contains elements of frat-romp, folk-rock and pure-garage-fuzz, but the blend is definitely tentative and the sound quality is on a par with Justice albums of the era. Very cool, but only essential if you’re already a head. Which we are. But was this actually released at the time? We’d never even heard rumors of its existence. What the fuh?

Last brain-fugger this time out will have to be Major Stars‘ Return to Form (Drag City). We think it’s their second for the label, but our Drag City service is too spotty to be certain (hint hint). Regardless, we have loved this band’s core (Wayne, Kate and Tom) through decades and every combo mutation they’ve fronted. The Major Stars express more explosive improv gush here than they’ve done on some other LPs (they sometimes feel more like a live band than a studio one, which’s the opposite of some of their precursors), but the balance—as always—in the Major Stars rests on the balance of the instrumental frontline’s grotesque sonic overload and the massed rock-drive of the other players & singers. Sounds fucking incredible this time out (yin/yang energy up the ass), and the cover art by Bill Nace is as beautiful as a foot.

Alright. Gotta get this posted.

If you want some aktion, please send two (2) identical copies of yr object (archaic formats always appreciated) to:

Bull Tongue
PO Box 627
Northampton MA
01061
USA

Get ready for more transpersonal vision and non-locality
as Jesse Moynihan’s GWC continues!
Click to read the new GWC

We are proud to announce the launch of Arthur Comics brought to you by Floating World. Stop by our new oasis, http://www.arthurmag.com/comics, for a leisurely bath in our new interactive format, an exclusive collaboration with GreenerMags / グリーナーマガジン. Enjoy the next eight pages of GWC, followed by all our previous editions in sequence. Check back soon for the full Arthur Comics archive!

About Jesse Moynihan:
Jesse Moynihan self published 2 books in 2005, and ran a strip in the Philadelphia Weekly. He’s been featured in Meathaus and Canicola anthologies. This year, Bodega put out a larger volume of his work called Follow Me. He recently collaborated with Dash Shaw on a strip that will appear in an upcoming issue of Believer Magazine.

Meanwhile Jesse has been plugging away every Thursday on his webcomic, Forming, which is a sprawling account of human origins, transgender aliens, and ripped gods.

]]> http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/02/27/gwc-part-5-jesse-moynihan-third-eye/feed/ 5 http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/02/24/ten-out-of-5/ http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/02/24/ten-out-of-5/#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 01:31:35 +0000 Administrator http://www.arthurmag.com/?p=11679
photo: Leni Sinclair

This guide was originally published in Arthur No. 9 (March 2004) as one of a set of articles on the MC5 in that issue that ran over several pages (see two of the section’s two-page, 22×17-inch spreads above.) Copies of Arthur No. 9 are available for $25 each (our stock is almost out, that’s why the price is that high) from the Arthur Store…

TEN OUT OF 5
A comprehensive guide to the MC5’s recordings, for the curious, the enthusiast and the hopeless completist by Seth “The Seth Man” Wimpfheimer, James Parker and Ian Svenonius

KICK OUT THE JAMS
(Elektra, 1969)
Amazon

Halloween Night 1968, the Grande Ballroom, Detroit. First night of a two-night stand for locals the MC5, who are being recorded by Elektra Records for their major label debut: a live album. According to the Zenta calendar, which has been devised by religious personages close to the band, it is New Year’s. Zenta will never quite catch on, but the rap of its chief prophet and warm-up man, Brother J.C. Crawford, is ageless: “BROTHERS AND SISTERS! I WANNA SEE A SEA OF HANDS OUT THERE!” etc. The rabble is roused, and the band kicks off: “Ramblin’ Rose,” preposterously overdriven blues-rock, with Wayne Kramer’s falsetto vibrating like a steam-valve. Can you feel it? Hype, beautiful fucking Dionysian hype, is its own kind of electricity, and The Motor City Five, being electricity addicts, were hype kings. To dig the band was almost an act of faith, an investment in the idea that somewhere in this shrouded world there could exist a gang of strobe-lit blue-collar psychosexual freebooters and political daredevils who played like God, lived like pigs, and freed everyone they touched. Crazy? Oh no no no. The MC5 were it. They were IT. And if they weren’t it, you could be certain that nobody else was. They hyped themselves, they hyped each other, they were hyped by their manager John Sinclair and by and by it became the truth—rhetorically inflated and musically bombastic but yes, the truth. They were the only band reckless enough to play to the protesters outside the ‘68 Democratic Convention in Chicago (moments before the baton charge), reckless enough to harness the dynamics of roots rock in the service of a free-jazz mindblow. Nothing they did was effortless; the MC5 weren’t geniuses; they were, by an act of will, supercharged rockstars, and sweating, bellowing exertion is all over Kick Out the Jams, desperate showmanship, an enormous PROJECTION. They come on like vast comedians, trading lines, riffs, yells, leads, calling each other “brother,” yapping “thankyuh! thankyuh!” The scale of the projection unbalances the music—the rhythm section collapses under it, toppling into a general soup of voltage and scuttled drum-fills. At the core of the record is the astonishing triptych of “Come Together,” “Rocket Reducer No. 62 (Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa)” and “Borderline,” which taken in sequence describe the arc of a young man’s lust, from wanting to getting to the complexities of getting OFF. First “Come Together,” which is the volcanic arousal-chant—“build to a rising! Together, yeah, together in the darkness!” (Research undertaken for this writing has revealed that the line I always heard as “Let me sniff it!” is actually “Nipples stiffen.” Oh well.) “Rocket Reducer,” named after a favorite brand of glue, is the fucking song, sheer brainless priapic mastery—“I’m the man for ya bay-beh!” is the chorus—engorged self-belief, satin sleeves ballooning, spangles ablaze, just bashing away rama lama with the balls swinging like trophies, but “Borderline,” inhabits some sort of quivery-quavery threshold state: “Love is true but I just don’t know why/ I-I have to love you so/ You’re movin’ around, pushing me past my borderline’—confusion!—a staggering time signature—failing potency—eddies of the heart—plunging on lost-cocked into desire’s sunset. It breaks down to an uncanny electronic ululation from (I think) Rob Tyner, a long and lonesome “OOOOOOOOOOH…..,” crooned, nearly feminine, before he summons the band again with a panted “Hey!,” a crumping, battering climax ensues, wrung out to the drops, and we settle into the post-coital chug of “Motor City’s Burning.” Er, ten out of ten, motherfucker. —James Parker

BACK IN THE USA
(Atlantic, 1970)
Amazon

A perfect album, Back in the USA is also a riddle of confusion. Partisans hail it either as the group’s liberation from the clutches of White Panther Party activist-manager John Sinclair or as their betrayal/sell-out to market forces, embodied by producer Jon Landau. Really, it’s the Five in disguise as a bubblegum hop group, but still kicking out the jams like primate warrior philosophers. Fatally misunderstood at the time, we now see how vital and intrinsically subversive this album is, and how it could have set off a bloody cultural revolution had it taken its place next to The Archies’ records in America’s playpens as was intended. Sadly, the sophistication of the subterfuge was lost on the group’s hip adherents, who read it as cynicism and abandonment. After all, to Freek America, the MC5 embodied the rock group as guerrilla cadre; a cultural invasion force drawn from the alienated teenage middle-American piss-pot. Ho Chi Mihn with a stratocaster. Their music was James Brown and Blue Cheer working through the revolutionary tracts of Coltrane and Sun Ra. The two guitars traded solos like jazzmen on the stand while the rhythm section mercilessly strafed the room. Meanwhile, their singer intoned Arkestra tone poems, boogie standards and original freek anthems. Their manager released broadsides, outlining their total assault on the culture, in their underground newspaper “Rock N Roll Dope.” Their gigs were high energy orgies of confrontation between freeks, greasers and management. They performed at political riots and teen discos all over Michigan, burning flags while doing “the camel walk” But when Kick Out the Jams, boldly conceived as a live concert postcard in the spirit of James Brown’s breakthrough Live at the Apollo, failed to break on through, the 5 conceived a different approach to their musical revolt.

Employing snot-nosed music critic Jon Landau as producer, the 5 tried to present a more concise, readable version of their highly evolved, multi-faceted, crystalline-sonic ectoplasm. In contrast to the first record’s Technicolor, collaged, bloody free-Jazz /acid-rock freakout, Back in the USA is a highly taut rock ‘n’ roll concept album about, well, youth life in the USA. Landau was a businessman and formalist, concerned with marketing the band as working class saviors of rock. With Back in the USA he tried to draw a circle around the Five’s origins, their fans’ teeny bop circumstance and the promised rebellion/intrinsic paradox of rock ‘n’ roll—all the collective forces which had ultimately transformed the 5 into paragons of communal living and “Rock ‘N’ Roll, Dope, Guns and Fucking in the Streets.” As a critic, Landau was a conservative who could only understand things which had gone before, so he encouraged the group to lose their politics in favor of the raucous themes of early rock. Even so, each song is a furious anthem of rebel celebration: “Human Being Lawnmower,” “American Ruse,” “Call Me Animal,” “Tonight,” “Looking at You“…all performed with lethal economy. Both a joyful rendition of teeny rock and ironical subterfuge, the record was prescient of “punk” in its schizophrenic celebration and condemnation of middle American trash culture. With 11 songs clocking in at under 27 minutes and its post-modern subversion of bubblegum, Back in the USA is The Ramones before the Ramones.

The record begins and ends with Little Richard and Chuck Berry covers respectively, which serve as bookends to the masterwork. This “roots” concept coincided with a general trend in rock n roll at the time toward nostalgia and classicist revision, as exemplified by NRBQ, Zappa’s Ruben and the Jets, The Beatles Get Back project (Let It Be), Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed. All of these artists were forsaking the expansive psychedelia typical of their immediately previous work for the old rock, doo wop, blues and country forms which had originally energized them in their formative days. (Sha Na Na, featured at Woodstock, had already jumpstarted the ‘50s fever which would culminate in the next decade with Grease and Happy Days.)

Like Dylan’s electric conversion at Newport, Back in the USA was a two-pronged gamble. Clean and formalistic, it challenged the MC5 acolyte’s limited idea of the group while attempting a more comprehensive conquest over the unconvinced teenybop mass too freaked out by the intensity of their earlier “KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS” attack. After Back in the USA “failed” by industry standards, its producer hawked the template of the album to his next client-Bruce Springsteen, for what would be his 1975 breakthrough album, Born to Run. The formula was the same: working class savior of rock writes Brill Building-style teen anthems celebrating Americana with a post-modern/world weary edge. Even the album covers are nearly identical! Jon Landau, it seems, had one idea. Unfortunately for the Five, neither the freeks nor the greasers were ready for that idea in 1970, let alone the teeny boppers. Now, after decades of critical debate, we can see Back in the USA not as an aberration, but as one part of the MC5’s varied ouvre—a vital facet of one of the most dynamic and influential groups of any age.

Oh, and also it’s really trebly. —Ian Svenonius

HIGH TIME
(Atlantic, 1971)
Amazon

It makes sense. Out of the dialectic of the first two albums—the hyped, throbbing excess of Kick Out the Jams, the trimmed observances of Back in the USA—emerges the synthesis, High Time, in which the MC5 ditch the influences of their father-figures, Sinclair and Landau, and pledge themselves at last to the Goddess. “Sister Anne don’t give a damn about revolution!” is the opening lyrical shot, with the boys flinging aside their seditionary pamphlets and going to their knees before some sort of iron-buttocked Catholic Ur-mama who sneers at them through her wimple, a queen of loving punishment. They have failed to change the world (Back In The USA didn’t even make the top 100), the world indeed has begun to change them, so they come before her humbly. Her gift to the band is discipline—a groove that anchors all their freakishness in solid, primally familiar rock’n’roll. The playing is hot but precise, snappy. And they can’t stop blowing your mind: the twin divining rods of the Smith/Kramer guitars are trained on the old structures and magical spaces are found, little pockets of the future wherein reverbed interludes can occur, fantasias of brass and percussion, and Rob Tyner can ponder the prospect of a “vaccination against castration” while still keeping to verse/chorus/verse. The uniformity of vision means that band members can write their own songs, speak with their own voices as it were, and maintain coherence: everyone but Mike Davis has a song or two, and Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith has four. Politically too the stance has changed—no more the macho righteousness of …Jams, the phallic boom. This new anger is in the key of confusion. Now hooked (according to the rhetoric of the third phase) on “loving awareness,” as opposed to the “defensive awareness” of the old, paranoid days, the 5 open themselves to the general mood, which is a bummer-saturated mess. It’s 1971. But they can’t stop being funky. “Over and Over” is tired, pissed-off, helpless, a litany of futility with Tyner cracking his voice in a merciless high key, but Fred Smith’s quizzical solo takes it somewhere else, empowers it with a kind of lofty bemusement: the cycles of pseudo-revolution may boom and bust, but the 5, says the skewed guitar, will survive. Unfortunately of course they didn’t; the band fell apart before High Time had made a dent. In the words of Dave Marsh, “an album about the future by a band that did not have one,” adrift in time, a little storm of excellence, glimmering with holy possibility.—James Parker

MC5 ARCHIVAL RECORDINGS: An overview by Seth Wimpfheimer
So you already own Kick Out the Jams, Back In the USA and High Time and you want to explore the MC5 further through that vast and sprawling landscape of archival or bootleg releases. It’s a tough back catalogue to wade through as you ask yourself: “How does this one sound?” and “Is the performance good?” or “Do I really NEED another version of ‘Rocket Reducer No. 62’?” and wind up with only one answer: ”AAARRGGHH…”

It IS a daunting task because in the two decades since the 5’s first archival collection was released (1984‘s Babes in Arms), there’s been an inundation of archival MC5 material, now in the region of two dozen albums. Sometimes comprised of complete show live recordings or stitched together from several different sources at once (live recordings, outtakes, demos or early singles), it is hardly an organized body of work, especially with the extraordinary amount of material that overlaps between many of these albums. And as usual with such affairs, the sound quality runs the gamut from excellent to dreadful.

The three albums released while the 5 were together capture the band’s ceaseless evolutions about as much as three stills excerpted from what was their epic film/seven-year rite of passage only could. These archival releases fill in many previously unknown gaps of development, demonstrating that the 5 were a band tirelessly pushing themselves and their music as only the best rock’n’roll does: with defiance, intuition and passion.

This guide seeks to separate the wheat from the chaff by pointing to the location of the best moments that exist within this gargantuan stack of copious releases.

Live: Sturgis, “Dialogue ‘68”, Saginaw and Elsewhere
There are three primary sources of live material that have been recycled over ten (!) albums. They are:

1) Sturgis Armory, Detroit, June 27, 1968
2) The First Unitarian Church in Detroit, September 7-8, 1968 (referred to by its original banner, “Dialogue ‘68”)
3) Saginaw Civic Center, January 1, 1970

Luckily, the following two CDs preempt many lesser titles in both completeness and sound quality: Starship: Live at Sturgis Armory June 1968 and Teenage Lust (live at Saginaw Civic Center, Saginaw, MI: January 1, 1970.) Both are as essential as they are radically different in approach. Starship is an invaluable live document of the band three months prior to Kick Out The Jams that exhibits their “avant-rock” explorations alongside covers of artists ranging from Albert King, Little Richard, The Troggs to James Brown. Teenage Lust is a complete show with good sound displaying the band in good humor as they tear through a variety of material gleaned from the imminently-released Back In The USA album, with far greater energy. A breakneck medley of “Kick Out The Jams”/“Starship”/”Black To Comm” ends it all magnificently.

The “Dialogue ‘68” concert is represented by six tracks spread out over three CDs: Power Trip (“I Put A Spell On You”, “Born Under A Bad Sign”, “I Want You”), American Ruse (“I Believe To My Soul”, “Black To Comm”) and Live Detroit 68/69 (“Come Together” along with its introduction by J.C. Crawford.) Despite its amateur recording, those two nights of “Dialogue ’68” were pretty explosive: all you need to do is listen to “Back To Comm” or the koozedelic slurping/vocal mania of “I Want You” to hear Rob Tyner in one of his most apocalyptic moments of heat, ever, backed by his truly sweaty cohorts giving it all they had…and then some.

Along with the “Dialogue ‘68” tracks, Live Detroit 68/69 incorporates two tracks from Saginaw, although here they are erroneously credited as being from ‘Westfield Highschool, Detroit’ October 1, 1969. (The 5 DID play Westfield High School on that date, but the Westfield High School in question was in New Jersey, not Michigan. The only reason I know is because it’s my hometown, this gig was common knowledge among all the older music fans in the area and there was a tape of the gig in circulation with the following set list: “Ramblin’ Rose,” “High School,” “Tonight,” “Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa,” “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” “Teenage Lust,” “Shakin’ Street,” “Let Me Try,” “Looking At You,” “The Human Being Lawnmower” and “Kick Out The Jams”…Which Tyner introduces with a most resounding “Motherfuckers!”)

The companion piece Live 1969/70 is kind of a misnomer—it actually begins with an excellent performance from ‘72 of “Kick Out The Jams” from the West German TV program Musikladen. The rest of this multi-sourced collection is of varying quality. Three tracks unique to this comp, credited to a Grande Ballroom, Detroit performance from ‘69 are “Born Under A Bad Sign,” “I Want You Right Now” and “Shakin’ All Over” while the remaining seven tracks are culled from the Saginaw show.

Clocking in with a running time of over 40 minutes, the Ice Pick Slim CD is just three tracks in length, all from different performances at The Grande Ballroom in ‘68. The album opens with an excellent sound-and-performance of “Motor City Is Burning” from their recorded October 30-31 stand at the Grande (recordings of which would comprise their first album, Kick Out the Jams. Confused yet?), followed by “Ice Pick Slim” and “I’m Mad Like Eldridge Cleaver”: both are extended free-rock workouts informed by avant-garde jazz, blues and soul in very fine quality sound.

The out-of-print vinyl bootleg Live ‘72 Kick Copenhagen (Lawnmower Records) is an audience recording and the last chronological recording extant of the MC5. At this point they were more like the MC2+2 as only Kramer and Sonic were left from the original lineup, backed by Derek Hughes on bass and Ritchie Dharma on drums. Here “Empty Heart” along with rock-bottom chestnuts like “Bo Diddley”, “Let It Rock”, “Gloria” and “Louie, Louie” get the work-out, and although only the twin guitar chassis of the original MC5 vehicle remained, the firing-all-cylinders-at-once stamina that had been fueling the band for the past seven years is maintained.

Motor City Meltdown (Liquid Sky) is one of many releases that re-jig the Saginaw set (with sound quality better than average) as well as adding four tracks from “Dialogue ‘68”—“Come Together,” “I Believe To My Soul,” “I Want You Right Now” and “Black to Comm”—that are all, of course, available elsewhere. Black to Comm has versions of “Ramblin’ Rose” and “I Believe To My Soul” of unknown origin and rough quality sound (this last named is NOT the “Dialogue ‘68” version) while the rest of the album is comprised of live tracks from both the “Dialogue ‘68” and Sturgis Armory gigs. Motor City Is Burning is comprised of live tracks from the Sturgis Armory and Saginaw gigs, with a version of “I Believe To My Soul” available only here and on the Black To Comm comp mentioned above thrown in as for good measure. Receiver’s Looking At You CD is (once again) Saginaw, but the sound quality is far inferior to Teenage Lust. Like Black To Comm and Motor City Is Burning, Greatest Hits Live is a hodgepodge that features the same versions of “I Believe To My Soul” and “Ramblin’ Rose” of unknown location and date while everything else is (naturally) tracks taken from the Sturgis Armory and Saginaw shows. Extended Versions is a mid-priced release from last year that draws from (yup) the Sturgis Armory and Saginaw shows. Sonic Sounds From the Midwest is a vinyl bootleg of the Saginaw show in poor quality.

Although Phun City, Uk is the only CD where live renditions of “Sister Anne” and “Miss X” exist, frustratingly it is also probably the worst sounding recording in the entire canon of amateur MC5 recordings. Reports of this performance by those who witnessed it were and still are universally glowing, so I’m grateful that this document at least exists, because the heat is still in there under a massive scrim of muddy sound and tape hiss. For maniacs and completists only.

Studio: Singles, Outtakes and Other Rarities
Prior to their three major album releases (and their combined three 45s for Elektra and Atlantic), the 5 recorded the singles “I Can Only Give You Everything”/“One Of The Guys” on AMG (1966), “Looking At You”/”Borderline” (1968) on A-2. In ‘69 the AMG single was re-issued with a different B-side, “I Just Don’t Know.” These five tracks are often used as fill-ins on many of these collections, and are all essential listening. All five of these tracks appear together in one place only once—on the long deleted Vintage Years CD (where, incidentally, the other four cuts are live recordings by Rob Tyner, post-MC5. Likewise, the misleadingly MC5-credited, vinyl-only Do It album on Revenge is also comprised of live performances by Tyner plus backing band, and not the original MC5.) You can scoop up four out of five of the early singles sides (“One Of The Guys” is AWOL) on Jungle’s Thunder Express CD, arranged after a six-song performance from France in 1972 recorded live in a studio at Chateau D’Herouville. They churn out a rough-hewn return to roots rock’n’roll that was still nailed down tightly even at this late stage of their career, and the sound is excellent. It also includes one of their last original songs, the title track “Thunder Express.”

Leading the pack on the MC5 archival front is the Alive/Total Energy label. Besides their superior live collections, their ‘66 Breakout! release gathers all three AMG singles tracks in perfect sound alongside various rehearsals and live performances that represent what the 5 sounded like during their early garage punk phase. Alive/Total Energy have also re-released the MC5’s second single on the A-2 label, “Looking At You”/”Borderline” as a vinyl single (after years of bootlegging) and it is ESSENTIAL. If you don’t own a turntable, you need one now in order to fully experience the immense sonic boom that is their first studio release of “Looking At You”: direct from the original master with breathtaking depth (it also made it onto Rhino’s starter compilation The Big Bang: The Best of the MC5, but not so for the tempestuous, bottom heavy B-side, “Borderline”.) Also worthy of investigation on ’66 Breakout! is the inclusion of the earliest performance of “Black To Comm,” the 5’s experimental free-form freak-out centerpiece that even at this stage of the game (1966) was already a sprawlin’, searchin’ and a-groovin’ all over the place improvisation that would only grow in energy and power the more it was performed.

Power Trip was the first MC5 release on Alive/Total Energy and it is just superb: Not only are the performances excellent and sound great but also most of these tracks are unique to this disc only. The three instrumental outtakes from late October/early November ‘70—“The Pledge Song”, “Head Sounds (Part Two)” and an early version of “Skunk (Sonicly Speaking)” named “Power Trip”—are all killer 5 moments as is the extended raw, noised-out improv “I’m Mad Like Eldridge Cleaver” and the previously-mentioned tracks from “Dialogue ‘68” which are trudgeworthy, pre-Kick Out the Jams live assaults played at the same ear-splitting volume but at a fraction of the pace. Highly recommended. (Note: although not credited as such, the version of “Black to Comm” on here is from Saginaw.)

The American Ruse is comprised mainly of Back in the USA studio outtakes with and without vocals, rounded out by “I Believe To My Soul” and the totally out-there ”Black to Comm” from “Dialogue ‘68.” It may not be suitable to throw on during a party, but you can test people’s knowledge of MC5 lyrics with impromptu karaoke sessions. I’m serious: just try to sing along and you will soon have even more respect for Tyner’s vocal prowess as you realize how tightly on a dime he had those lyrics nailed—especially “Teenage Lust.”

Babes in Arms was the very first archival MC5 album, and although in the past 20 years a lot of it has been re-issued with better sound resolution, the alternate take of “Shakin’ Street” and the blaxploitational wah-wah moves of “Gold” (an outtake from the film soundtrack of the same name) have never been available else, AND they still sound great.

Okay. After all this razzmatazz, probably the best place to start is with the recent Human Being Lawnmower: The Baddest and Maddest Of MC5 CD, which collects many of the best moments off previous Total Energy releases along with the best sounding live cover version of Ray Charles’ “I Believe To My Soul” ever, a brilliant sounding “flat mix” of the A-2 version of ‘Borderline” and a poignant Sonic Smith acoustic demo of “Over And Over.“ Rounding it all off is J.C. Crawford’s “What Is Zenta?” and well, what more could you ask for? (Besides the tracks they left off Kick Out the Jams, the pre-Landau run-throughs at Elektra of “Human Being Lawnmower,” “Call Me Animal” and “Teenage Lust,” I mean…)

If you dig “What Is Zenta?”, then Music Is Revolution is a must to check out. Although there is no music, for those with an interest regarding the MC5’s White Panther Party affiliation it is very insightful–it’s 30 spoken-word tracks made in the late ‘60s/early ’70s of White Panther members and associated revolutionaries rapping and so forth. (Contact: Book Beat Gallery, 26010 Greenfield, Oak Park, MI 48237 or thebookbeat.com)

Archival Recordings Discography
* = Recommended

Albums
* ‘66 Breakout! (Total Energy NER3023-2) 1999
* Babes in Arms (ROIR RUSCD8236) 1998
Black to Comm (Receiver RRCD185) 1994
Do It (Revenge MIG5) 1987
Greatest Hits Live (Purple Pyramid CLP0429-2) 1999
* Human Being Lawnmower: The Baddest and Maddest Of MC5 (Total Energy 3032-2) 2002
* Ice Pick Slim (Alive 0008) 1997
Live 1969-70 (NKVD NKVD01) 1991
Live 72 Kick Copenhagen (Lawnmower MOW11) 1990
Live Detroit 68/69 (Revenge MIG8) 1988
Looking at You (Receiver RRCD193) 1994
Motor City Is Burning (Trojan 06076 80213-2) 2001
Motor City Meltdown (Liquid Sky KT005) 1996
Phun City, UK (Sonic SRCD000040) 1996
* Power Trip (Alive CD0005) 1994
Sonic Sounds From the Midwest (Clean Sound CS1014) 1988
* Starship: Live at Sturgis Armory June 1968 (Total Energy NER3018) 1998
* Teenage Lust (Total Energy NER3008) 1996
* The American Ruse (Total Energy NER 2001) 1995
The Big Bang! (Rhino RS79782) 2000
* Thunder Express (Jungle FREUDCD71) 1999
Vintage Years (NKVD NKVD02) 1991
Music Is Revolution (Book Beat) 2000

Singles
* “I Can Only Give You Everything”/“One Of The Guys” (AMG 1001) 1966
** “Looking At You”/“Borderline” (A2 333) 1968 **
* “I Can Only Give You Everything”/“I Just Don’t Know” (AMG 1001) 1969 (reissue with different B-side)

ABOUT OUR GUIDES
Ian Svenonius is the acting chairperson for the Rock N Roll Comintern and an auxiliary member of the group Weird War.

James Parker lives in Boston, Mass., with his wife and son. He wrote Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins and once held the position of official astrologer to the Spice Girls Fan Club.

Seth Wimpfheimer is a rock’n'roll writ(h)er. Also known as The Seth Man, he reviews lotsa Rock albums on Julian Cope’s Head Heritage site (headheritage.co.uk) as well as for Cool and Strange Music and New Gandy Dancer magazines. He has so far published two issues of FUZ magazine (copies are available for $8 apiece/$12 for both issues so send cash, or money order to in US dollars to: Seth Wimpfheimer, P.O. Box 1211, Mountainside, NJ 07092-0211.) He also owns three copies of one of the best albums ever made: Alexander Spence’s Oar.

“WE WANT THE WORLD, AND WE WANT IT NOW”

In 1968, after years of self-imposed exile in Europe, the Living Theatre triumphantly returned to America with their theatrical breakthrough “Paradise Now.”

The sensational production, involving group nudity, marijuana smoking, advocacy of a non-violent anarchist revolution, continuous interaction with the audience and something just this side of a full-on public orgy, received attention from those far outside the normal theater-going public.

From The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage by John Tytell (Grove Press, 1995):

Doors singer Jim Morrison and poet Michael McClure actively participated in performances of ‘Paradise Now’ at the [San Francisco Bay Area's] Nourse Auditorium…. McClure brought Morrison to visit at [Beat poet/City Light Books founder Lawrence] Ferlinghetti’s office. Julian [Beck, of the Living Theatre} was on and off the telephone to New York, frantically worried about the money to get the troupe back to Europe where engagements has been scheduled. Quietly, Morrison offered to assist with money.

Morrison–who had read Artaud and Ginsberg in college–saw himself as a revolutionary figure. Agreeing that repression was the chief social evil in America and the cause of a general pathology, he was typical of the sectors of support The Living Theatre had received in America. [The Doors'] long improvisational song ‘When the Music’s Over’ proclaims, as in ‘Paradise Now,’ ‘We want the world, and we want it now.’ Morrison had seen every performance in Los Angeles and followed the company up to San Francisco.

“On the day after his visit with McClure, Jim Morrison gave Julian [Beck] $2,500 for the trip home…”

Two years in the making, beautifully assembled with love by Will Swofford, Arthur Magazine’s PARADISE NOW: A Collective Creation of the Living Theatre features a DVD of rare, never-before-distributed films and revolutionary multimedia documents from the production, plus two double-sided posters and a detailed 40-page booklet. This set is worth far more than $29.95, but that’s what we’re charging. We made a single edition of 1,000 in 2008. When they’re gone, they’re gone.

Detailed information on the Paradise Now is available at the Arthur Store:
http://store.arthurmag.com/product/paradise-now

Jack Rose passed away suddenly at home in Philadelphia on December 5, 2009. He was widely regarded as the most profound exponent of acoustic guitar playing of his generation. Jack grew to be loved and admired by a great many people through his live performances, electric personality, [serious] cooking skills and a general mastery in the art of friendship. This concert is a release party for his new album Luck In The Valley and an occasion to celebrate and remember the good Dr. Ragtime. The artists performing were all dear friends of Jack’s and admired by him musically.

Saturday, February 13, 2010 – 7:00 PM
Latvian Society of Philadelphia – 531 N. 7th Street

Tickets: $18
Available now: http://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/4067

Performers:
D. Charles Speer & The Helix
Thurston Moore | Paul Flaherty | Chris Corsano
Michael Chapman
Pelt
The Black Twig Pickers
Glenn Jones
Byron Coley
Meg Baird | Chris Forsyth
Megajam Booze Band
DJ Ian Nagoski
Video clips curated by Tara Young

Newspaper articles previewing this event:

“Blues for Jack Rose: Friends and fans pay tribute to Philadelphia’s lost guitar genius” by A.D. Amorosi (Philadelphia City Paper, Feb 9, 2010)

Remembering an acoustic artist: Philly guitarist Jack Rose seemed poised to reach a new stage in his career before a fatal heart attack in December. Two concerts this weekend will pay tribute to him.” by Joel Rose (no relation) (Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb 9, 2010)

Here is a new song from Jack Rose from Luck of the Valley, out next week, courtesy Thrill Jockey Records:

Stream:

Download: Jack Rose — “Woodpiles on the Side of the Road” (mp3)

1. I guess it’s beyond the point of convincing anyone that some of the best music/sounds is happening on small cassette labels, but once in a while something gets slapped in the tape deck that just utterly, completely nails you to the underpinnings of heavens dripping maw. Such an experience is to be had by anyone lucky enough to grab hold of if only goodnight, the first cassette on the Wagtail label by Eastern Massachusetts improv/noise/strange-string shaman-femme Ashley Paul. Ms. Paul has been on the hot tongues of local noise lovers for a few years now and has gotten some recognition through her collaborations with the amazing Rel Records imprint. This cassette is really, really stirring and odd and affecting with high-frequency vox (which may or may not be ACTUAL vocals, but the mystic air conjured by reed-tongue) that call to mind early Connie Berg (Mars) interacting with bowed percussion and dislocated guitar sex. Cool as it gets. Get it.

2. Recent times appear to have been busy for Ed Sanders (above), one of the heroes of this century and the last. Amidst rumblings of a vast archival reissue series of material recorded by Ed’s band the Fugs, there is also a new Fugs album due sometime soon, and a slew of printed material already in hand. Poems for New Orleans (North Atlantic Books) came out in ’08, but only recently came to our attention. The book is full of Sanders’ beautiful verse, inspired by a trip to the city, which lead to intense reading about its history, and imaginings of chance encounters that might have been. Thus, the book’s a mix of investigative poetry (a school of thought Sanders founded), pure conjecture, and his own special lyricism. Great stuff, tying together near-ancient history with the catastrophes of Katrina and much else. Here’s a brief sample of the poem, “Echoes of Heraclitus”:

A helicopter flew me away
I wound up in Utah
where I am waiting for Jesus
or anybody
to help me home.

Also new to us is America, A History in Verse: The 20th Century Volumes 1-5 (Blake Route Press). The first three volumes of this massive, detailed ride through the American consciousness were published by Black Sparrow Books, but following the retirement of the legendary publisher, John Martin, there was no one around to actualize the words. Thus, the full set is available as pdf files on CD. And hideous as this format feels (we spend way too much time on screen already), the work is fantastic. Here’s a short piece from Volume 5:

The Oklahoma City Bombing
April 19
Timothy McVeigh
looked like someone who could have been a NASCAR driver
or a retired quarterback
Close cut hair
White eyes of blue a Gulf War vet
and bursting from a sliver of the small town ethos
that allowed grumbling gun nuts
& gummint-haters
to exist without much hassle

It would be delightful if someone would turn these last two volumes into actual books as well, but for now, this will have to do. Ed was also the main subject of a recent show hosted by an amazing gallery/printing shop in Brooklyn called The Arm. They hosted a brief show of his many glyph-based artworks from the last half a century, and while the show has ceased to exist, The Arm’s Dan Morris is working on a portfolio reprinting several of Ed’s most eye-commandeering efforts. There are also a few loose sheets of this work available. And they are guaranteed to make yr brain very hot.

Anyway, we await finding a copy of Ed’s new poetry collection from Coffee House Press, and the soon-due Fugs CD as well. ‘Til then—keep grope alive.

3. One dude who has been on the UK underground noise cassette scene as long as Ashtray Navigations’ Phil Todd is Joincey. Haven’t really heard to much from Joincey in a while but he has this new thing now called My Carapace Is Leaking and the first thing we’ve heard by “them” is a split cassette with Swiss-Swedish double bass improvisor Nina De Heney on the Rayon Records label from Lyon, France. Joincey, or My Carapace Is Leaking, also employs bass action, though unlike De Heney’s more raw, organic scrape and touch (which is ruling), it is more of a skin-melting lather. And it is completely great. A wonderful split by these two, and anyone who has followed Joincey through the years with Wagstaff, Inca Eyeball, Coits, Stuckometer, and his amazing Face Like A Smacked Arse label will desperately want this.

4. Another great set of releases has appeared from Mondo Macabro, who seem to have a truly insane grasp of international exploitation films. The third volume of their Bollywood Horror series pairs two films from the Ramsay Brothers studio, Mahakaa and Tahkana, which combine tons of bad vibes, dance numbers and surreal juxtapositions of elements – I mean, who knew Nightmare on Elm Street was lacking a gay Michael Jackson character? Not us. But now we do.

We also understand, from seeing Akio Jissoji’s Marquis De Sade’s Prosperities of Vice, that it would have been a bad idea to create a criminal theater based on the works of De Sade in Japan during the 1920s. As to whether it’d be a good idea now, we can only guess. But watching how the bad idea actually was is a great visual treat. Weird to think this same director did the Ultra Man movies!

5. Great Dividing, the Australian label that kicked in the front door of our o-brain with the posthumous 3 Toed Sloth LP (which for better and/or worse is as close as we can get to contempo Feedtime action as it features almighty Feedtime drum-jesus, Tom), has issued a cassette comp, A Range of Greatdividing, which has some primo Sloth as well as other Oz dementia like the top-notch Shoptoprockers. Primal, guitar scrawl with dirty-hair free-chug moves that proves Oz still the sexiest dirtbarge ‘neath the meridian.

6. Willie Lane, long an active participant in New England underground swamp hijinks, moved to Philadelphia a few years ago and has really kinda flourished in the land of Fishtown. He released the great Known Quantity LP last year, and has followed that up with an extremely choice single, “Sleepy Hands/Arrested for Decay” on his own Cord-Art Records. The sound is wildly slubbed electric guitar, wrung through god’s own wringer and whacked in a way that recalls the dementia of early Black Sun Ensemble. The cover art rips off Don Bikoff’s Celestial Explosion album (a classic in its own right), which seems to us just more testimony to Willie’s scholarship and good taste. Jump on it.

7. For some reason or another, recent long car drives have often been made to the accompaniment of prog rock from the South African underground of the early ’70s. This would seem like a daffy-ass thing to listen to, but what the hell? The German Shadoks Music label has been reissuing a bunch of material from the period, and the stuff has a crude charm I find totally cool. The musical models for the bands I’ve heard are fairly obvious and mostly drawn from the upper echelon bands of the UK psych/prog continuum, but the South African versions sound pretty great. And that’s no lie. Biggest of the bands (in terms of popularity) was probably Freedom’s Children (pictured above), who had three albums between ’68 and ’71. Battle Hymn of the Broken-Hearted Horde is a varied, heavy psych/prog bridge, with tunes ranging from deadly serious poetic phlug to great Traffic-style rural fluff. Astra has a Floydian feel and is probably their most fully realized and successful album. But Galactic Vibes is my fave because it’s wildly schizophrenic with a wonderful spudly blend of jack-ass prog action, rock doofery, and genuine weirdness.

Third Eye (above) were another big local band with three LPs in ’69 and ’70. Awakening is a bit of a hodge-podge with horn parts and dull “sunshine” vocals placed amidst the organ gush. Searching is much more focused with a Procol Harum tooth-flash, and a few blasts of highly acidic guitar. Brother is a hybrid of the earlier two albums, sans dreaded horns, and with a manic cover of Arthur Brown’s “Fire” that challenges the original for sheer sonic madness.

But my favorite of the selections I’ve heard is Time to Suck, the sole album by Suck, originally issued in ’71. This album is a true pinnacle of dunt-rock. The album opens with a cover of Grand Funk’s “Aimless Lady,” a song so amazingly devoid of lyrical brain weight, it feels as though it emerged from an era in which people had forgotten how to use words. What an amazing choice for a cover! And the whole album is covers—two Grank Funks, Deep Purple, King Crimson (their “21 Century Schizoid Man” shreds even the version on Earthbound) and so on. Just brilliant. And they have a sonic attack as beautifully slothed as anything Stackwaddy or Soggy ever attempted. Really a deep toke of pure splooge. Makes me recall the way Nigel Cross once described the live sound of Sweet Slag. Some of these Shadoks came out on vinyl, a few seem to be CD only, but maybe I just missed the vinyl. Not sure, but it makes me real curious to check out some other SA stuff—Otis Waygood, Abstract Truth and whatnot. Don’t fret—we’ll issue reports as we get them.

8. A sorta newish cassette label called Rotifer Cassettes out of Gainesville, FL has been issuing some very interesting new-garde forays into the sound/sky/vision axis. The one we’ve been flipping over (and over) is the c16 called Versazi Yenisei by Abolicao, a project de plume of Jeff Astin who runs the amazing Housecraft label. (There is also an Abolicao tape Flowering Judas on the righteous Cabin Floor Esoterica label which we’d LOVE to grip but is sadly sold the fuck out). Rotifer only pronounces that this is “deep gusts from inlands satiating harvest” which makes more than perfect sense. What we hear is the sonic manifestation of a Floridian breeze wafting through a rusting clothesline. It is beautiful music and the world melts away.

9. The world according to Chris D is a weird goddamn place. But that’s not to say it’s an uninteresting place. A prolific writer, musician and jack-of-all-trades (Slash editor, record producer, film director, loverboy, etc.), Chris is also a poet and lyricist of amazing power. This was first demonstrated in such legendary ‘70s anthologies as Bongo Chalice, but was made explicit as hell first on the lyric sheets to Flesh Eaters‘ records, then in Double Snake Bourbon (published by Laura Cloud’s ill-starred Illiterati imprint), and now in A Minute to Pray a Second to Die (New Texture Books). The new book is almost 500 pages of lyrics, poetry, stories, dreams journals and even lists of fave films by Mr. D, and it is a brilliant gas to read. We recently hosted a reading in celebration of the book’s publication, and it was totally wild evening. Chris’s stories about insanely violent and/or obsessive people are informed by his encyclopedic knowledge of film noir, Asian cinema, beat poetry, and friendship with Darby Crash, and his words ring with a deep and ugly truth. Chris’s head must be a crazy ass place to live. But let’s thank him for the occasional access he grants us.

10. SEXKRIME ARTS has released another trio of tapes by the cream of the harsh industrial cretins slithering in the back corners of noise basements across the wasted universe of skum. The focus is on ultimate porn darkness with savage mind trashtronics serenading the depressed hole of bitter bleakness. The new ones are III by Custodian, who the label regard as “the most important artist operating in the U.S. noise scene,” Exchange by Corporate Park (“an alien voice examines the remains of humanity”) and the one we’ve been turning the lights off to most often, a masturbation noise fantasist masterpiece by J/O which is a mail collaboration betwixt Luke Moldoff and A. Kmet. Moldoff has been recording amazing harsh gunk wave for some years and running his own Razors & Medicine label and it’s all straight up excellent. But this release really has a sinister and reality-defying quality that will have you prowling your neighbors’ backyard clothesline for soiled sniff. Amazing and sublime b+w pantie bellybutton artwork suitable for framing etc. “sticky industrial harsh noise for those who lack self-control.”

That’s all for now. Back soon.

REMEMBER: 2 COPIES ARE BEST WHEN SENDING TO:

BULL TONGUE
POB 627
NORTHAMPTON, MA 01061
USA

tues. feb 16th 7-10pm
herbal house salon
with ‘weedeater’ nance klehm
and delectable edibles by eden batki

for this evening, we will have an urbanforage by flashlight, sip herbal infusions and eat delicious homemade snacks, discuss herbal energetics, learn basic tincturing techniques and make a tincture to take home. please bring an 8 oz jar with a lid filed with two fingers of vodka, french brandy or raw vinegar.

1519 allessandro st. 90026
(large peach colored building on west side of the street. empty lot next door. up stairs to the back house)

$22

Please let me know if you can come. Thanks!

x Eden
eden@edenbatki.com

This C & D session was originally published in Arthur No. 13 (Nov. 2004)…

C & D
Two confirmed schmucks grapple with the big issues—and an unexpected female visitor.

PICK A WINNER dvd
(Load)
C: You’re not going to believe this.
D: Try me.
C: [delicately loading DVD] Like an hour’s worth of charmingly bonkers/whimsical low-tech animation to go with homemade psych-crunge by the usual Fort Thunder-plus suspects… [Reading the sleeve text] “Dual formatted, double dipped and extra-whipped. Technicolor-laced acid flakes are on the table. Dig in! 18 trips of sound & sights are poured into K-Holes of dubious dimension from tonz of Load bands and video tribes with this new DVD/CD powered pellet.” Amen to all of that.
D: [looking at screen] Whoa.
C: Lightning Bolt, Black Elf Speaks, Wolf Eyes, Neon Hunk, Pink & Brown…
D: [eyes pinwheeling] I don’t believe it. I mean, I do believe it. I am believing it very hard.
C: Party video of the year. People are gonna be getting mandala’d all winter long to this thing, man. Plus there’s a CD in here too.
D: Do you have any mushrooms?
C: No.
D: I’ll take a spray paint can and a plastic bag at this point…

TOM WAITS
Real Gone
(Anti/Epitaph)
D: He really knows his Cuban rhythm, after all these years. You have to dance like David Byrne to this music.
C: Ribot sounds so good. This is the best one since Bone Machine, and you will notice that there was no Mr. Marc Ribot on guitar on the others in between.
D: I feel too close to Tom Waits to talk much more about this.
C: Really?
D: Yes, his armpits are kind of moist. He’s about as cool as you can get for a humid individual.
C: The most important music is for making out, cleaning and cooking. This music is for—
D: Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it late at night.
C: —I want to walk at night to this music. This is quintessential Californian music – in the redwoods and towns like Bakersfield
D: And Capt. Beefheart…
C: If he wasn’t a musician, would he be this level of cool?
D: [musing] He could be a gas station attendant.
C: ….

THE CRAMPS
How to Make a Monster
(Vengeance)
D: This was recorded in the ‘60s.
C: Sort of. Except it was recorded in 1977. It’s the Cramps, my friend!
D: Hmm. 1977? Wow. Possibly better than the Sex Pistols. Tribal psychobilly, proto-blues!
C: Two solid CDs full of early Cramps for the diehard fans. Live stuff, demos, more stuff from the early ‘80s. It’s a clearing out of the Cramps garage, after all these years.
D: And that garage floor is covered in the goo goo muck! Forget Songs for Bad People, C. This is Songs for Worse People. And I am definitely a worse kind of person.

THE HIDDEN HAND
Mother Teacher Destroyer
(Southern Lord)
D: Whoa…. This is so heavy, I think I may be experiencing some pulmonary problems shortly. Ack…
C: New album from Arthur No. IX cover star Wino, legendary godfather of doom metal, stoner rock, whatever you wanna call it. He’s always been a bit beyond those niche-holes.
D: [listening to “Black Ribbon”] Black Sabbath is back AGAIN, my friend! This is music to endure a tragedy to…
C: It is a pretty amazing record. The kind of doomish, expansive rock record that… well, it elicits dripping monosyllabia from the listeners. Or at least from us, I guess.
D: We are on a doomed flight into the sun on a heroic mission to save humanity, and this is the music we will hear right before we explode!
C: The closing track is entitled “The Deprogramming of Tom Delay”!
D: Excellent! A profound title and some heavy helicopterage and sub-buzzsaw guitar for my least favorite congressman! Wino strikes ONCE AGAIN with his iron-falcon guitar of justice!

BLUES EXPLOSION
Damage
(Sanctuary)
E: [Entering with a six-pack of Optimator] Hey fellas, what’s the commotion?
D: E! You grace us with your female presence once again.
E: [ignoring] What is this?
C: [looking at sleeve] It’s the new Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, except they’ve shortened their name to deal with the shortened attention span of today’s audience.
E: Well for once, it doesn’t suck.
C: [listening to “Crunchy”] Alert the media! Jon Spencer is singing.
E: I always thought Jon Spencer took a special pleasure in subverting his own genius.
C: Look, there’s even a bridge here!
E: I don’t think irony goes well in blues, this hipster irony value. I think he does it because he’s embarrassed about going all the way like Jack White does, all-out all the time.
D: [out of nowhere] BUH-LOOZE EXPUHLOSION!
C: Er. I think he does what he has to onstage because he doesn’t know how else to be in public.
E: He is his own worst enemy. [listening to “Hot Gossip,” a duet with Chuck D] This is pure cheese.
C: I think it’s pretty good. Mista Chuck gets my vote! I wouldn’t demand my money back.
E: Orange kicked ass, they’ll never top it, and that’s the problem.

FELA KUTI MIXED BY CHIEF XCEL
The Underground Spiritual Game
(Quannum)
C: This is a whole bunch of old Fela songs mixed together in one long jam by XCel from Blackalicious.
D: [Dancing] I didn’t know what this was, but I could tell it was cool.
E: It’s hard to talk about stuff that’s so good.
C: You guys are just putdown artists. Just listen to this. It’s like a K-Tel Afrobeat record, and I mean that in the best possible way.
E: K-Tel XCel. Words are redundant when faced with something this good. It’s like Tolstoy said, all the happy families are happy in the same way, the unhappy families are all unhappy in different, interesting ways.
D: [Stops dancing for a minute to ponder] If Tolstoy had lived in Africa…
E: I’m just saying, if you want to stimulate discussion, it’s better to give us something sweaty and imperfect.
C: But we already had the Cramps.

AFRIKA BAMBAATAA
Dark Matter Moving at the Speed of Light
(Tommy Boy)
C: New album by the legendary Mr. Bambaataa, who seems to be on a Detroit trip. He’s obviously working on a computer from some kind of bank of sound samples.
E: If a kid was break-dancing to it this at some subway station, I would definitely check it out, but that’s the only context I’d listen to this.
C: This song “2137” has a distinct 227 feel.
E: [looking at sleeve] There’s a song on here actually called “Electric Salsa.” [makes negative face] Not very enticing.

TIM HECKER
Mirages
(Alien8)
C: This reminds me of the in-between songs on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.
D: It sounds like what an electric shaver would hear if it had ears.
C: Pink noise, where no one frequency is dominant. Instant cancellation.
D: It seems like the circuits are burning.
E: It’s contemplative music. Not music for airports, but music for landing strips in the desert. It’s Mogwai without the guitars…
C: He’s obviously interested in melody, it’s got that dislocated-yet-sensual warm/cool feel of certain films: The Man Who Fell to Earth, Demonlover… It’s a few degrees warmer than, say, Godspeed You Black Emperor. This is the opposite of death metal: life metal. He uses tones that the avant garde wouldn’t touch.
E: [drifting] It’s very womblike….
D: Exactly, and everyone should be able to like this, because that’s where we all come from!
C: It’s really inspiring and makes me want to buy multiple copies to give to all the young people I know. Imagine being 13 years old and getting this as a gift…

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN
New Roman Times
(Vanguard)
C: New concept album from Camper Van Beethoven. There’s always been a Zappa quality to Camper, I think they’ve achieved that here.
E: Yeah, that and, um, “Riverdance.” This is truly ridiculous, this song.
D: At my high school they would have called this Camper Gaytoven.
C: I dunno, I like it. The thing holds together. Listen to this Cubanic waltz klezmasm! And the lyrics…
E: Did he just say “Half-baked and high on Scientology”?
C: And come on, [singing] “Yeah, might makes right/Might Makes right/They say that God is on our side/and made us mighty”…
E: [disdainfully] I’m not convinced. Tesla, I think they sound like this, right? Next!

THE FUTUREHEADS
The Futureheads
(Sire)
E: Cool and refreshing, let’s dance. If I played this at the office, everyone would like me more…
C: Wonderful concise songs, totally XTC, Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers, the Jam…
D: Don’t forget Haircut 100!
C: Harmonies bring a lot to a group. Good new New Wave. Newer Wave.
E: [gets up and takes CD] See you guys later, I’ll be going door to door and replacing copies of Hot Hot Heat and the Faint records with this, in order to make the world a better place. [exits]
D: [wistfully] New ripples from old waves, making the ladies smile on the subways of London and helping people dance at the office parties. [exits]
C: They are the Hans to Ferdinand’s Franz.
D: …

THE VERVE
This Is Music: The Singles 92-98
(Capitol/EMI)
C: Here’s the career retrospective, bang on time for the holiday gift-givers. [in generic announcer voice:] “From the spaced-out rock with dark-ocean riffs through to the comedown ballads, ladies and gentlemen, we give you, direct from Wigan…the Verve.” [listening to previously unreleased song “This Could Be My Moment”] Sounds like [Verve singer] Richard Ashcroft fronting the Black Crowes.
D: We must initiate the [Black Crowes guitarist] Rich Robinson-Richard Ashcroft connection!
C: It’d be good to have a different kind of Anglo-American collaboration – something better than Bush/Blair.
D: I have to admit I never really got into these guys.
C: Having seen—experienced—them, I am forever converted. The Verve were a heartening phenomenon… an unafraid frontman inviting you from the stagelip … they were travelers from the psychedelic wilderness at the bonfire, singing their own stoned soul hymnals.

PATTY WATERS
You Thrill Me: A Musical Odyssey 1962-1979
(Water/Runt)
C: A collection of rarities from a very feted female who recorded deeply deeply soulful stuff for ESP back in the ‘60s. Foreword by Batoh from Ghost, an essay by Arthur’s own Bull Tonguer Byron Coley, and a short textpiece by Waters herself. What more can you say? It’s beautiful overcast music from a deeply soulful white woman working in that folk-soul-jazz-art idiom that’s so hard to master.
D: It’s devotional music to her man.
C: As Mr. Coley says here, “Rarely has longing-as-pain-as-art been created in such a massive way.”
D: [examining CD booklet picture of Waters completely naked, seated in a bohemian living room chair, her head tilted, gazing out a sunburst window] I do like the naked ladies.
C: I say, good for her for being naked. You can’t get any more naked than her music anyway. The Jax Beer commercial at the top must be noted.
D: [dreamily] I can almost imagine her, naked down by the water, singing, accompanying the piano playing from the other side of the lake…
C: …
D: Hey, where’d the Optimators go?

HANDSOME BOY MODELING SCHOOL
White People
(Elektra)
C: I’m going to play us only one song off this album, which is “I’ve Been Thinking,” sung by Chan Marshall of Cat Power.
D: How is the rest of the record?
C: I have no idea. I pretty much just keep coming back to this one song, which I think may possibly be the best thing she’s ever done. Easily the sexiest.
D: [listening] Reminds me of Sade or Lauryn Hill in a way that I am deeply appreciating in this moment, even without an Optimator. [clears throat] Can I see the sleeve?
C: What, are you gonna check for more boobs?
D: I am not saying that is not be true.
C: Well we don’t have the sleeve here, so you’re gonna have to keep making do with that Richard Avedon shot of her in The New Yorker. [Listening to Marshall sing “slip, slide/slippity slide”] Total babymaking music. These guys are geniuses to be able to convince her to sing like this, to finally coax the coy flirt out of her that we all knew she had. She should do her next record with them, in my humble armchair A & R opinion.
D: [speaking into tape recorder] I hereby prescribe this track once a day to every human on the planet. That, plus two Optimators. No negative side effects, I assure you. Ladies, take two and call me in the evening.

MARISSA NADLER
Ballads of Living and Dying
(Eclipse)
C: Debut album of winsome ghost-folk on the increasingly estimable Eclipse label. Music for tending a candle to.
D: Reminds me of Cowboy Junkies.
C: I think it’s a lot closer to Mazzy Star, with that kinda noir psychedelia sound. Not quite as depressive/sedate, though. Which makes her Hopeful Sandoval. [laughs]
D: …
C: I hear some Joan Baez in there too. Some of it’s incantatory, like some Spanish-Jewish-Irish hangover folk remedy. This is hangover music, for when the agave and cactus nectar don’t work.
D: I usually just grunt and throw up.
C: I bet someone in this band makes their own stained glass windows.
D: This is good music for hanging linen in the country… [face lights up] especially if you’re a naked woman!
C: [sighs] It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, D?

ENTRANCE
Wandering Stranger
(Fat Possum)
D: When I was in college there was a coffeehouse where you could hear music like this. I desperately want this to explode into something interesting.
C: But this isn’t Led Zeppelin, it’s solo lonesome blues, it’s supposed to be contemplative. Stop pounding the Optimators and have some whiskey for once, it’ll all make sense then. You gotta get in the spirit.
D: [listening to “Make Me a Pallet On Your Floor”] I gotta admit his voice is getting better. I thought he could only hit four notes.
C: And you’d be bored by R.L. Burnside if that’s your criteria. He’s doing lots *within those notes. And the guitar work is cool, subtle. The songs don’t explode, but there is some build and tension and then the guitar arches up and over and it’s just devastating. You just gotta have some patience bro. It’s not always gonna be a beer commercial. I can’t wait to see where this guy goes next.

WILLY MASON
Where the Humans Eat
(Team Love)
C: Same thing as Entrance, in a way, with some swamp country. But kinda dull.
D: I can imagine No Depression magazine people and Ryan Adams fans listening to this.
C: I keep thinking it’s gonna turn into a Richard Hawley thing, but his voice just isn’t that rich. Obviously the kid’s got talent, you can hear it in the songwriting. But the whole thing is just…studiofied. Well, it’s his first record, maybe he’ll get better later.
D: Can we watch that video again?

NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS
Abattoir Blues / Lyre of Orpheus
(Anti)
C: Meanwhile, this guy keeps getting better. He’s opened like this before, on Henry’s Dream, but this is better because it’s got the gospel women singing. This is going to be unbelievable live. “There She Goes, My Beautiful World” is almost Spiritualized with a real preacher.
D: “Woke up with a frappucino in my hand”? He’s not concerned so much with southern gothic anymore. But this is good, really good. It’s obvious on first listen.
C: You have to go with his metaphor like Julian Cope is always telling us—he’s working in this weird idiom of over-the-top, almost maniacal surrealism sometimes, then there’s all this humor. He’s heading in Dylan’s direction, I think, by way of…Flannery O’Connor or something. This is his most American-sounding record: blues, gospel, roadhouse rock n roll, lolling funk. And what a beautiful closer vocal on “Carry Me.” Damn! He should be playing the Gospel tent at JazzFest.

BROTHER JT
Off Blue
(Birdman)
D: [singing along] “Everybody was/somebody’s baby once/Little lumps of clay/waiting to be shaped into…”
C: Gentle living room sofa psych-folk lucid lullabies from Brother JT, one of underground America’s gentlest and most open-hearted souls. Wonderful stuff, as always—and album title of the year.

NAGISA NI TE
The Same as a Flower
(Jagjaguwar)
Download: http://www.scjag.com/mp3/jag/bramble.mp3 (mp3, “Bramble”)
C: Continuing down the quiet-time path…
D: The cover picture perfectly describes what you’re going to hear.
C: A Japanese man and a woman and a flower and the sky, yep. Like the more stately Japanese folk melodies that you might hear on a Ghost record. Some songs stretch it out, there’s even one where something explosive happens, D. The mellotron enters at minute eight, it’s just mind-staggering…

GROWING
The Soul of the Rainbow & the Harmony of Light
(Kranky)
D: Warm buzz… Womb music… Drones of the gods by Eno descendants…
C: These guys are doing something profound, sublime.
D: All is right in the universe…

This just in from occasional Arthur contributor Dave Tompkins:

I’ll be doing a talk for my Vocoder book How To Wreck A Nice Beach at the Goethe Institute as part of the Unsound Festival. Goethe is located at 5 E. 3rd at Broadway in the Wyoming Building. It takes place at 5pm, this Saturday, February 6, (also known, in the blizzard immediate, as tomorrow). It’s free.

I will be showing images from the book and playing vocoder audio clips from the 1930s and The Future, including the years for which we were more or less present.

“Something To That Effect” will include an ad for Silly Willy Toothpaste, “Barnacle Bill,” German soccer chants rendered from stadium noise, the last house on Mars going bananas, Cold War drones, seashells powered by unvoiced hiss energy, a song called “You’re A Peachtree Freak On Peachtree Street,” my Verizon bill, talking castle winds, talking this, talking that, Phil Collins, and, if time allows, a guy with strep throat singing “Candy Girl.” Whatever it takes. Bring a snowman, win the Super Bowl.

How To Wreck A Nice Beach will be published by Stop Smiling/Melville House at the end of March.

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling was positive in one respect: it made law out of what was already happening. While corporations earned “personhood” back in the 1860s when a (likely bribed) court clerk added this language into the margins of another court decision, they never quite had the rights of citizenship before. They already write our laws (through lobbies) elect our leaders (with money) and create public opinion (with money and PR). (If you’re interested in how and why that happened, please read my book Life Inc.) But they have always tended to do so by working around government’s efforts to limit their influence.

It was a losing game for a government by the people, of course, because almost no one gets into office without the kind of corporate assistance they need to pay back if they want to get into office again. Meanwhile, while corporations have enjoyed the benefits of personhood for over a century, they don’t suffer the main pitfalls: chiefly, death—but also despair, fatigue, and the need to feed their kids. They could outrun or at least outlast any effort to curb their influence. That’s how the railroads got to trample States’ rights to their own land, how GE got out of cleaning the Hudson River, and so on. They just wait, make a little progress, and then wait some more.

The era of Obama seemed to promise something different. Here was candidate who, at least initially, raised more cash through decentralized means than by appealing to large centralized corporations. As a candidate funded through small donations by real people, he seemed to offer an antidote to business as usual. If a few million people donating small amounts could, in aggregate, raise more money than a couple of hundred mega-corporations, then democracy stood a chance even as the PR and money driven spectacle it has become. Of course, Obama’s later donations turned out to be just as corporate as anyone else’s (if for no other reason than that they smelled a winner), and his hands almost as tied. He raised so much, he rejected the campaign finance tenets he had promised to adhere to back when he thought he’d be the underfunded candidate.

But the lasting sense was still that real people might be able to exercise at least some influence over who gets elected to office. Maybe, just maybe, the net and a new spirit of participation could play some small role in the democratic process and even make incremental progress in developing campaign finance reforms. Meanwhile, over the last thirty years, legislators on both sides of the aisle have sought to free themselves of corporate influence, and passed what legislation they could limiting corporate campaign contributions (especially by non-humans).

Luckily for corporations, the activist justices appointed by an earlier version of our corporatist government (the Bush 2 regime) have decided to reverse this process. Instead of acting as as stopgap to preserve constitutional rights, they are serving as a new legislative branch—rewriting the law by declaring it unconstitutional. It is a violation of corporations’ civil liberties to limit their influence over the political process. Even though they are artificial entities, with greater access to capital, infinite longevity, and no interest in or connection to humanity, we now guarantee them the right of free speech.

Of course, the right of free speech was created in order for human beings to have the ability to talk back to the corporation—the British East India Trading Company—that was running the colonies before the Revolutionary War. And it was upheld a century later so that laborers could organize unions or speak out against industrial abuses without fear of getting killed. It was a way for human beings to guarantee their ability speak out against largely systemic and structural repression. Now, that structural repression itself has that same guarantee.

All this does is make centralized government even less relevant to our plight as human beings. I admire folks like Larry Lessig for their faith in our ability to reclaim a government by the people, to use the net to expose and even reverse corporate influence in the political process, and for us to legislate a commons back into human affairs (even though it has been on the decline for the past 600 years).

But I’ve got more faith in our ability, as people, to rebuild our society and economy from the bottom up, without the participation or approval of a corporate-funded and corporate-driven central government. We can rebuild local economies based on the abundance of our labor and resources rather than the scarcity of centrally issued currency. We can rebuild local agriculture based on the quality of the topsoil, the features of the climate, and the nutritional needs of people rather than corn lobby laws. And we can rebuild our mechanisms for making meaning based on our shared hopes and values rather than those developed by PR firms to make us compete for false, individualistic goals.

In short, I say screw ‘em. Let’s do this ourselves.

Originally published in Arthur No. 10 (April 2004) (available from Arthur Store)

The Lyon & Healy pedal harp is not a regular presence in rock clubs. It’s expensive, it’s big, it’s complicated. It has 46 strings, which cannot be re-tuned between songs during a performance. It’s difficult to master—basic competence requires years of training and practice. Outside of Bjork’s last album and recent tours, it’s an instrument almost without history in pop music.

So, when the 22-year-old Joanna Newsom appears onstage, alone, playing this exotic device, attention is inevitably paid, not just cuz you never see it done, but because, as Joanna says, the harp is usually associated by contemporary listeners with a single cheesy sound: the glissandi, a simple, artless running of the fingers across a broad span of strings, used as a decorative cue in sitcoms, films and commercials. Which means the simple act of witnessing a harp really being played—of runs of notes plucked with one hand while the other plays a fixed pattern—is gonna be novel. It’s as if your only experience of the electric guitar was the sound of a single power chord, and then suddenly you witnessed the playing of whole riffs, whole rhythms, whole melodic lines, whole songs…

Songs. It’s Joanna Newsom’s songs, it’s her lyrics, it’s her singular voice—accurately described by Currituck Co.’s Kevin Barker as “eight and eighty, dawn and dusk”—that makes the gawkers stick around, after the initial curiosity of seeing a harp played by a pixie from a California Gold Rush town wears off. Cuz what Joanna is doing is neither experimental, avant garde stuff, nor the pretentious bloat generally associated with the use of classical instruments on the rock stage. It’s instead firmly rooted in the folk tradition: verse-chorus songs with careful attention paid to lyrics and vocal performance. When Joanna sings “This is an old song, these are old blues/This is not my tune, but it’s mine to use,” she’s stating fact and ambition. She’s making a claim. It’s one that she’s earned the right to make.

With support and advocacy over the last couple of years from friends and admirers like Will Oldham, Devendra Banhart and Cat Power, she began to record her music and perform live. After making two home-recorded CD-R EPs, she released her full-length debut on Drag City this spring with the stunning The Milk-Eyed Mender, and will be touring with Banhart in the early summer.

Two weeks after seeing her wow drunk hipsters in a Seattle rock club, and after tagging along on the photo shoot for this piece, I interviewed Joanna for an hour by mobile phone. I was struck once again by her essential singularity—it extends even into her conversation, which is learned, humble, passionate and articulate. Here is some of what we talked about.

Arthur: You’re living in San Francisco, which seems to be a hotbed of talent at the moment. What is it about the city that is attractive to you?

Joanna Newsom: I think that things that require closer listening in order to get have an audience here: things that have more layers to them and maybe aren’t quite as bold on the outside. I visited New York last year and, granted I wasn’t there long enough to get any sort of a realistic view of what the music scene is like, but my first impression was that in order to get noticed there for what you’re doing musically, it seems like the work has to be sort of…heavy-handed, I guess. Music that’s done in big broad strokes. Subtlety or strangeness or delicacy have, for the most part, not seemed to be qualities that attract a lot of people’s ears in other cities.

Arthur: You grew up in Nevada City, California, a small Gold Rush town.

Joanna Newsom: It’s a really, really strange town. Basically every building there has been there since the Gold Rush. There’s still stages around that had a lot of Gold Rush-era performers come through, people like Lola Montez and Lala Crabtree and Mark Twain. There’s miles of boarded-up mines and tunnels. And in downtown Nevada City, there’s a network of tunnels that had to do with a system of brothels that existed during the Gold Rush. I worked in a coffeehouse downtown, which was located right above this hive of little tunnels, and it was definitely haunted. Pretty much everyone who worked there would see the ghosts of Gold Rush whores. I’m convinced I saw one.

Arthur: What kind of people live there now?

Joanna Newsom: It’s a really weird combination of extremely rural farm-type folks and older retirees, but there’s also a lot of art people and hippies and composers and artists and poets. There’s seven hills ringing the town, dotting around the edges of Nevada City. That’s where a lot of the people live… Gary Snyder lives there. Terry Riley the composer lives there. Utah Philips lives there. I grew up neighbors with the singer of Supertramp, Roger Hodgson, who has a big pool shaped like an electric guitar next to my house.

Arthur: So, were you living in the woods, then, or…?

Joanna Newsom: We were surrounded by trees. From the back porch in the house that I grew up in, all you see is mountains, graduating in height, getting more and more purple as you go further back, until you see the Sierra Butes and the snowcaps. That was my view. We had your average Northern California forest wildlife: deer, birds… I saw a mountain lion a few times. And there is the river–all you do in the summertime if you’re a kid growing up in Nevada City is go to the river every single day, and it’s beautiful and it’s clear and there’s swimming holes. I loved it as a kid. I know a lot of kids got bored. But I had a good situation–I really liked my family a lot. If you didn’t get along with your family, I imagine it wouldn’t be a good place to be AT ALL. Because there would be very little way to carve out your own space and have a network of people who supported you and had things to do to distract you from it. I had a really wonderful experience but I don’t mean to paint it as this perfect utopia because it most certainly is not.

Arthur: How did you end up playing the harp?

Joanna Newsom: From about the time I was 5, I had been telling my parents I wanted to play the harp. They took me to the harp teacher in town, which does exist, an amazing harp teacher in Nevada City, and she said that she didn’t want to take a student so young and that she thought that I should probably take piano lessons first, so I took them for a number of years. When I finally started taking the harp lessons, I think I was around 10. From the very first day I took lessons I was in love with it. I think it was the first and perhaps only thing I’ve ever done where it was just a perfect fit. Nobody had to tell me to do it because it just resonated with me so much.

Arthur: Harps are expensive instruments. Did you have one in the family?

Joanna Newsom: My parents rented one for me, and then when I was a little older they bought me a Celtic harp, which is a little different from the one that I play now. It has levers that change keys instead of pedals. It has fewer strings and it’s much less expensive. Later, maybe in my freshman year of high school, I became really sure that I needed to be playing a pedal harp. I’d started writing my own music and I wanted to have the flexibility of changing keys and have the sort of range of expression that a pedal harp allows you that a Celtic harp doesn’t. A Celtic harp has a really pure, beautiful sweet sound–it’s lovely, but it’s sort of limited to that, in terms of timbre, whereas the pedal harp can be really percussive, it can be loud, it can be soft: it has the ability to express a lot more. So, my parents helped me buy a very used one, which is now very much used…. A new pedal harp, nowadays, is about 30 to 40 thousand dollars, and that is so far beyond what I can afford. It’s really unfortunate because at this point I would love to really get a beautiful new harp.

Arthur: Having long fingers is helpful if you are a guitarist. Are there any physical attributes that are helpful to have when you play harp?

Joanna Newsom: [laughs] Well, I always got compliments on my fat finger pads, because the fleshiness of the tip of your fingers makes a big difference in tone. With most other tonal things, you can just learn: you can learn the right position for your hand, and the right amount of pressure to put on the strings, and the right sort of attack, and the way, what you do with you hands right after you play a note, all these different things surrounding plucking a note that make it as good a sound as possible. But if you have a really bony fingertip, it’ll make a harsh sound. And you can’t have any fingernail AT ALL, or else it’ll make a really metallic harsh sound.

Arthur: You were writing your own music as a teenager, as opposed to spending all of your time learning a formal repertoire.

Joanna Newsom: I had a really exceptional teacher as my first harp teacher. She introduced me to improvising, which I think is something that not a lot of harpists learn, in the way that a lot of guitarists might. When I was really young, she introduced me to the idea of playing a fixed pattern with my left hand and improvising with my right hand: sort of rudimentary stuff like that. Somehow, I really loved improvising more than anything else. As I got a little older, it turned into me loving to write music. So I went to Mills, which has a really well known composition program, with the intention of being a composer. But it became obvious that I hadn’t really known what it meant to be a composer: all I knew was that I liked to write music. There is an emphasis on melody that I have that, as far as a formal discipline of composition, didn’t really have much in common with what was being focused on by everybody else there.

At a certain point, I just started singing. I had written songs for years but didn’t really sing them above a whisper. I don’t know whether this is connected, but I switched majors from composition to creative writing and I was doing a lot of writing. I have a really big interest in the sort of ideas that don’t have much weight placed on them in modern poetry programs, such as rhyming and the number of syllables per line and strange embedded rhyme patterns, as well as rhymes at the end of the lines. Silly stuff like that. I certainly didn’t make it the focus of my writing, but… Anytime that something was supposed to be a poem it ended up really resembling lyrics to a song. I don’t think that’s what made me write songs—it just sort of was a parallel. At one point I was started singing, and I don’t really know why.

Arthur: You seem to take a lot of care with your lyrics.

Joanna Newsom: Nabakov is a huge influence to me. Because he was such a perfectionist, and because he had such a strong relationship with the senses, it’s almost as though he overcompensated for English being his second language by having every single word that he wrote be so carefully thought out, and its relation to all the words around it, and the rhythm of every line, and the kind of alchemy that happens when the different words bump up against each other. There is this heightened tension and heightened impact because it wasn’t familiar to him. It was like he placed a lens on his own writing. It isn’t entirely natural, but at the same time it’s like the purest type of writing, to my mind. Whether or not it’s reflected in my own writing, his sort of relationship to words is very influential to me. [laughs] And I love Faulkner! Sound and the Fury is one of my most often read and studied books.

Arthur: You cover an Appalachian traditional song, “Three Little Babies.” Do you have many of those old mountain songs in your repertoire?

Joanna Newsom: No, I don’t. I listen to plenty of them but that one’s really significant to me. When I heard it sung by a singer named Texas Gladden at an American Music class at Mills, it somehow…allowed me to sing. I realized that her voice was conventionally not beautiful and yet it was SO worthy of being listened to, and so affecting. Before that, I knew that I wanted to make music and I knew that I had things to sing about, and I knew that I could employ my voice, to whatever degree it was polished, in my songs and do something with it that I wanted to do with it. But something about hearing her sing was a comfort. Most of the people around me were saying it was really ugly, but for me, it was sort of like time stopped. I felt like I was gonna cry in the middle of class. I was so bowled over by her voice.

Although that song is deeply connected to all the Appalachian tradition, and to the body of work of all the other recorded Appalachian artists, for me it wasn’t just that she was from where she was, and that she sang in the tradition that she sang within, it was that she was HER. HER voice, in and of itself, is magical. HER interpretation of the music is magical. And rare. And has never been replicated by anybody else.

Arthur: You’re also an admirer of Ruth Crawford Seeger, who I’m not familiar with…

Joanna Newsom: She was a really amazing composer, who in her 20s, was part of the loosely organized movement of composers spearheaded by Charles Ives and Carl Sprague Ruggles and Henry Cowell. They were all trying to formalize a specifically American sound–it involved a lot of experimentation that had never done before. She played around with a lot of exquisite dissonances: it’s really brave, confident work, and she got a lot of critical praise. Of course, a lot of it was tinged with that underlying misogyny of the era–“Miss Crawford’s work is so virile you can hardly tell she’s a woman”—that sort of thing. But it really was incredible work, and has stood the test of time.

It’s also a small body of work because, basically, she met Charles Seeger and married him, and had difficulty reconciling being a composer and also being a wife and mother. He had some kids already when they married, and they had kids together as well. She helped him to author a book on dissonant counterpoint. Most of this histories say that she was dictated to, that she basically wrote down all of his ideas, but now historians acknowledge that she probably had a lot to do with actually coming up with this methodology.

Their children grew up to be Peggy Seeger, Mike Seeger, Pete Seeger: all the famous folk revivalists in the ‘60s. I think her last compositions were around the ‘40s. Then she just slipped fully into mama mode. The interesting thing about her is that once she was doing that, she began to work with the Lomaxes. She scored and did all the arrangements for all their pieces, including a book of children’s folk songs. You can recognize her watermark on the pieces. They’re supposed to be these extremely true representations of American folk songs, and they ARE, and it’s wonderful that they did that, but they’re also totally her pieces: there are slots where she’ll just slip in these really strange dissonances. It represents this really unique and rare intersection of art music and folk music. And an equal reverence, on her part, for preserving history and moving forward.

Arthur: I can see why she would be inspiring to you…

Joanna Newsom: I know I’m doing something completely different, but her life is sort of a distillation of all the things that are important to me, except for the fact that she gave up our life’s work because she didn’t believe she could be a composer and also be a mother at the same time. Even then, it’s interesting to me that their children grew up very much focused on the work that she was pursuing, rather than the work that their father was pursuing, which continued to be formal ‘new music.’ So, she definitely had an effect on everyone around her. It was like she gave up one thing, but her involvement with folk music was NOT half-hearted. She was very passionate about it.

Arthur: When I first heard your recordings, I assumed there was some overdubbing. But when I saw you perform, I realized that you’re actually playing all the notes at once!

Joanna Newsom: Some of those songs I recorded the vocals and harp separately. But it’s very much not overdubbed. I work so hard on the harp pieces. They’re hard to play. I’m so untrained as a singer and the singing is so much more intuitive, whatever comes out comes out, but the harp, I’ll work on arranging and practicing those parts for months and months. I’m not super-prolific. I’ll often have one little figure that I’ll play with for like a year, some little harp thing that doesn’t have a home yet and then all of a sudden the right lyrics will come along and they’ll just meet and they’ll work out.

I saw a painting the other day of this gypsy lady that had a skirt covered in pockets everywhere and there were little things in all her pockets. Sometimes I feel like that: I have little objects and every once in a while I take them out of my pockets, lay them all in a row and I like the way they look next to each other, so that’s a song! [laughs] But I’ve had them in my pockets for such a long time.

I write songs with the intention of covering as much ground on the harp as possible: playing the high range, the middle range, and the low range. Just cuz that doesn’t get done very often in music. I try to make them as interesting as possible to listen to, because the harp is such an incredible instrument. I feel like a lot of people don’t understand what it’s capable of because it’s been so ill-used in a lot of popular music. You hear modern symphonic pieces or classical symphonic pieces and they all just use this horrible, gratuitous glissandi all over the places. To most people, that’s what the sound of the harp is. But I believe it’s capable of amazing, percussive, shimmering, interesting contrapuntal magic, and I work so much to come close to doing what I think it’s capable of doing. I don’t know if I’ve gotten there yet. Someday.

Above: Stephan Beyer, conscientious gringo

Singing to the Plants: Stephan Beyer drinks up
by Erik Davis

techgnosis.com – January 11, 2010

Book website: http://www.singingtotheplants.com

The spiritual superhero of the baby boomers was the guru. But where the guru once hovered with his beatific smile, the shaman now shakes his stuff: an earthier, more pragmatic icon of mystical powers more suited to our era’s green anxieties. Now a significant figure for scholarly discourses as well as popular ones, the shaman, and especially the ayahuasca-swilling Amazonian variety, has not only stepped forward as a vehicle of archaic spirituality but has become—as the gazillions of bedazzled Avatar initiates can attest—a seductive site of fantasy and projection. For many of the aya tourists now hustling down to Peru in droves, or the untold thousands dropping 300 bucks or so to drink in their own Euro-American backyard, the man with the rattle (and his less common female compatriots) has become a visionary Rorschach blot: a New Age therapist, an avatar of environmentalism, a psychedelic captain fantastic.

This is why we need Stephan Beyer’s new book, the magisterial Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. In this tome, Beyer has found the sweet spot between scholarly and popular writing, the otherworldly and the disenchanted, participation and observation; the result is the best or at least most comprehensive book I have seen on ayahuasca.

In addition to a law degree, Beyer hold doctorates in psychology and religious studies, but his discovery of ayahuasca was more than intellectual. Arriving in the Amazon to practice wilderness survival, he soon realized that learning about the jungle meant learning about the spirit of its plants. So he apprenticed himself to two mestizo teachers named Don Roberto and Dona Maria. He studied ceremony, healing plants and the inevitable sorcery tactics with them and others for many years.

While Beyer’s personal tale enlivens Singing to the Plants, he resisted the temptation to write a memoir. Instead, he allowed his experiences to round out, deepen, and authenticate what is a manifestly solid work of scholarship designed, happily, for the rest of us. Beyer’s book offers broad discussions more than new data or highly focused arguments; despite some arcane and fascinating discussions of magic stones and sex with plant spirits, I suspect that ethnobotanists and anthropologists familiar with the Amazon will find relatively few surprises. But the ant hills of detail are not the point. Singing to the Plants is designed to inform a wider audience—and gently bust some myths—by presenting this almost literally kaleidoscopic phenomenon through a number of distinct lenses: anthropology, ethnobotany, pharmacology, psychology, international law, cultural politics, and magic both crafty and occult.

I knew I was gonna love this book when, after presenting illuminating and occasionally disturbing tales about his own teachers, Beyer frames the shaman’s work through an understanding of performance. Like stage magicians (or western doctors), shamans are, on one level, performers with an audience, and aspects of their performance are deeply linked with everything from the sleight of hand of conjurers to costume. Beyer’s breakdown of shamanic performance is thorough and fascinating, with chapters on “Phlegm and Darts,” “Sucking and Blowing,” and “Harm.” I was particularly wowed with his discussion of shamanic sounds and songs, and especially the haunting, nasal whine of icaros. In addition to presenting research on how these sacred songs are passed on and improvised, he emphasizes the abstract effects produced when lyrics break down into alien tongues or pure sounds like whistles, hacks, and hums, whose “correct resonance and vibration [are] more important” than meaning.

Beyer roots shamanic performance and the ayahuasca ceremony in the body. As initiates know, the aya ritual can be an intensely physical experience—a woozy, vibrating, literally gut-wrenching dance of coughing, spitting, burping, and, of course, puking. (Beyer spends a lot of time with phlegm, for example, an aspect of shamanic performance that is not always emphasized north of the border.) This carnal and even carnivalesque dimension reminds us that ayahuasca is not a mystic or transcendentalist affair, and resists the highly internalized or even disembodied approaches that many American seekers bring to it, with their background in meditation or other more internalized psychedelics. Along these lines, Beyer makes the provocative argument—which is growing on me the more I think about it—that DMT (the most active ingredient in ayahausca) deserves to be classed as a “hallucinogen” distinct from “entheogens” like LSD and mescaline, which peel away the layers of the self to reveal the god within (the literal meaning of entheogen). In contrast, according to Beyer, DMT unveils a visionary world out there, one that is not only believable but seemingly inhabited.

While Beyer uses plenty of concepts and lingo drawn from anthropology and psychology, he does not offer these views in a spirit of reductionism. After all, Beyer has been learning the ropes for years, and has spent far too much time wrestling with wizardry to try to dissipate its dialectic of healing and harming with the word-spells of academe. Beyer’s critical discussions only help illuminate the central mystery with greater intensity. So while he offers up useful maps of the phenomenology of visionary states, when it comes to talking about the spirits themselves, Beyer just calls ‘em as he sees ‘em. Spirits—or “doctores”—are simply part of the picture; there is no need to reduce them to projections or myths—they harm and they heal, converse and confuse. As long as we remain aware of the various contexts which structure our encounters, we have every reason to acknowledge and engage the spirits as part of our world—an aspect of nature and consciousness, but also—and this is crucial—an aspect of modernity itself.

In contrast to many Euro-American aya fans, who fetishize the otherness of the Amazonian shaman, Beyer does not characterize the Amazon’s techniques of religious ecstasy as archaic residues free from any contamination from today’s globalized world. The culture of ayahuasca is both stronger and weaker than that, more expansively eclectic and also more ordinary. Beyer notes that Dona Maria’s spirit doctors regularly spoke in “computer language,” just as an earlier generation of shamans used metaphors of electro-magnetism and radio to characterize the spirit world. The UFOs found scattered through Pablo Amaringo’s paintings are icons of this visionary futurism. But they are equally signs of the syncretic, mix-and-match, opportunistic, and almost willfully contaminated aspects of mestizo culture—which must make itself up as it slips along between jungle and city, modernity and the indigenous forest. That said, Beyer is all too aware of the political, economic, and spiritual costs of the Amazon’s deepening imbrication with global flows of capital and culture—an encounter that is increasingly taking place through the medium of ayahuasca tourism, which receives a sharp if too short treatment here.

If shamans are not frozen under glass, they are not squeaky-clean avatars of sweetness and light either. Beyer is very clear: to enter the shamanic world is to enter a world shot through with sorcery, with harms as well as healings. Budding shamans either struggle with sorcerers or join the wickedness; in his fascinating discussion of psychic darts, which healers store in their bodies for a rainy day after extracting them from victims, Beyer explains why the dark side is actually an easier path to take. “Good” shamanism reveals itself to be an intensely ethical discipline, not only in relationship to the community of persons (human and otherwise), but to the darkness within. The shaman’s predicament is also grounded in social reality: a successful healer necessarily creates rivalry and envy, and when he fails at his healing task, necessarily creates paranoia and suspicion as well. This accounts for what Beyer calls the “social ambiguity of the shaman,” the fact that many of them are sneaky, unstable, and mistrustful. It’s a lonely path, anxious and ambiguous all the way down the line.

And the job has only gotten harder, even though there is more cash to be had and the global profile is at an all time high. Beyer closes the book with a pessimistic assessment of Amazonian shamanism’s future in a world where the younger generation would rather learn quick techniques from occult books than take on the ascetic rigors of the plant healing path. Beyer knows that conscientious gringos like himself will not fill the gap, especially when the general effect of the exploding Euro-North American interest in Amazonian shamanism is a spectral assault of dream darts soaked in naive assumptions and often narcissistic desires. Hopefully, Singing to the Plants will help us realize that one of the best cures for our own poisons is to learn how to hold them.

My interview with Stephan Beyer on Expanding Mind.

Aya Avatar: Drink the Jungle Juice
by Erik Davis

Originally posted: techgnosis.com

January 7, 2010

In paradoxical and altogether predictable terms, James Cameron’s ravishing Avatar sets a blue man group of mystically attuned forest dwellers against the aggressive and heartless exploitation that characterizes the military-industrial-media complex, with its virtual interfaces, biotech chimeras, and cyborg war machines. The paradox, of course, is that a version of this latter complex is responsible for delivering Cameron’s visions to us in the first place. To wit: before a recent screening of the film at the Metreon IMAX theater in San Francisco, we hapless begoggled ones were barraged with military ads, not to mention a triumphant techno-fetishist breakdown on the Imax technology that would soon transport us to the planet Pandora almost as thoroughly (and resonantly) as the handicapped jarhead Jake jacks into his computer-generated avatar body.

But those are behind the scenes ironies. With its floating Roger Deanscapes and hallucinogenic flora, the manifest world of Avatar instead spoke another truth: that the jungle pantheism that now pervades the psychoactive counterculture has gone thoroughly mainstream. Of course, noble savage narratives of ecological balance and shamanic wisdom have been haunting the Rousseau-mapped outback of the western mind for centuries. That said, Avatar represents some important twists in that basic tale. The most important of these is that the Na’vi’s nearly telepathic understanding of their environment is grounded not only in ritual, plant-lore, and that earnest seriousness that now afflicts PC Hollywood Indians, but in an organic communications network: the fibrous, animated, and vaguely repulsive pony-tail tentacles that not only allow the Na’vi to form direct control links with animals but also, through the optical filaments of the “Tree of Souls,” to commune with both ancestors and the Ewya, the biological spirit of the planet whose name resonates with Erda, our own Earth.

Call it ayahuasca lite. For while Avatar features nothing like the South American shaman lore and stupendous aya visuals that litter the otherwise very bad 2004 Western released here as Renegade, the film does suggest that the bitter jungle brew, and ideas of ecological wisdom now attached to it, is having a trickle-down effect. The banisteriopsis caapi vine that gives ayahuasca its name (though not its most hallucinogenic alkaloids) is also known as the “Vine of Souls,” which echoes the Na’vi’s Tree of Souls. And when Sigourney Weaver attempts to establish the efficacy of the Trees through a neurological discourse of electrical connection, the corporate tool Parker asks what she’s been smoking—a backhanded way of acknowledging how much Avatar’s visionary take on ecological consciousness is grounded in psychoactive consciousness.

After all, beyond a thriving and in many ways damaging ayahuasca tourist market in Brazil and Peru, clandestine aya circles manned by South American shamans and all manner of Euro-American facilitators are are now well established throughout the west. Among the professional creative classes who make up a sizable portion of West Coast seekers—for spirit and/or thrills—ayahuasca could almost be said to be mainstream. So it no longer matters whether Cameron or his animators have themselves drunk the tea; its active compounds are already swimming in the cultural water supply. Eco-futuristic dreams are now indistinguishable from the visionary potential of media technology itself. Indeed, whether you are talking form (ground-breaking 3D animation) or content (cyber-hippie wetdream decor), Cameron’s visual and technological rhetoric is impossible to disentangle from hallucinogenic experience.

OK, maybe I am the one smoking something. But if there is an aya-Avatar connection, it would explain one crucial way in which the film differs from conventional “noble savage” mysticism. Rather than ground the Na’vi’s grooviness in their folklore or spiritual purity, the film instead presents the vision of a direct and material communications link with the plant mind. Which means that Eyra does not have to be believed—she can be experienced. After the temporary fusion with the Tree of Souls that fails to prevent her death, Weaver’s chain-smoking left-brain doctor happily confirms Ewya’s existence. Like the Vine of Souls now wending its way through the developed world, the Tree of Souls becomes a kind of bio-mystical media, a visionary communications matrix that uplinks the souls of the dead and the network mind of the ecosphere itself.

Subscribe to Erik Davis’ Techgnosis by Email

Probably Not Peaches
by Nance Klehm

I wrote the following last October—I’m sharing it now because in this new year, I feel there is an urgent call for us to get grounded in our actions and intentions…

My egg economy fell out on Monday. All of my quail and all but one of my chickens were killed by a predator with dexterous digits—one that can turn a latch and pry chicken wire away from an armature. (Probably a raccoon, not as rare as you might think in urban Chicago.) Their headless, half-eaten bodies were strewn about the garden. Prolly, aka P-N-P, aka Probably Not Peaches, my one remaining hen, is in a liminal state of health. She is hovering. I am sitting in my bathroom with her. She is breathing deeply, sitting on a bed of straw in a small cage with a dish of her favorite foods nearby: scrambled eggs with crushed egg shell, raisins and chickweed. This food has remained untouched.

I live with animals and plants. It is my practice and lifestyle to grow, forage preserve food, make medicine and build soil. This practice of mine is an economy in and of itself. It sustains me and I am also able to use it to create other economies that create other relationships with people and sometimes ones that pay the bills. I use aesthetic strategies to illuminate and frame this lifestyle. Curiously, the art world casts lines to my practice and I am offered exhibits and asked to perform. I engage this economy skeptically and try to identify the cracks that allow me to expand beyond it.

From the back of her comb to her shoulder blades, Prolly has been scalped. I am surprised she is alive and holding onto this compromised state of being, but animals are like that: they continue to persist even when they’ve been knocked down a notch or four. I rub honey with finely chopped yarrow into her rawness. I hold her in my lap and loop energy through my heart, into my left arm, through her, into my other arm and then into my heart again. And I keep looping this circuit. It occurs to me that I am allowing myself to be increasingly late to my own art opening.

If Prolly could think abstractly, and who’s to say chickens don’t, what would she say about ‘economy’? The word ‘economic’ directly follows ‘ecology’ in many dictionaries. In mine, the Oxford Pocket American Dictionary of Current English reads:

ecology / economic / economical / economics / economist / economize, economy / ecosphere / ecosystem

All these ‘eco-’ words framed between the unlikely bookends of the bacteria ‘e.coli’ and the color ‘ecru’ come from the Greek oikos meaning “home.”

“Ecology” is about the quality of relationship of a community of organisms and economy is about the wealth and management of resources of a community. Ecology is a self-perpetuating economy. There is a cyclical give and take and give once again. I am a homesteader. I follow these cycles.

Prolly breathes long and heavy. I take advantage of this and drip watery eye droppers full of blended chicken soup, molasses and bee pollen into her beak. She drinks each dose and then suddenly flails herself from my lap.

So I go to my art opening late. I mill about distractedly. I am taken to a boozy dinner with the curator. I do my best not to growl. I get home at midnight and sit in the straw and drip feed my chicken until we both nod off.

***

After five days, Probably Not Peaches let go. When I returned home, I paused at the door and asked her if she was there. And she said “no.” And she wasn’t. That night I gently planted her to feed the witch hazel.

Prolly was in pain, but I didn’t kill her. I wanted to care for her after the trauma and in caring for her, I entered her time completely and our communication was clear.

I am feeling immensely hopeful that some of us are already engaged at that clear, belly-churning level, and others are reaching for it. The Earth has shifted on its axis and the light is coming back to the northern hemisphere. It’s time to drop deeper into our particular places and get busy. So I leave you with this distillation:

Situate yourself sensually.
Contribute to your inhabitation.
Embody your economies.

Can you feel it?
Ground down.

Virginia Aste, Black Rock Cafe, Pahoa, Hawaii, Mother’s Day, 2008. Photo by Susan Kay Anderson

“Freedom?”: Richard Brautigan’s first wife, VIRGINIA ASTE, speaks in a new interview

Interview by Susan Kay Anderson

Edited with Introduction by Mike Daily, with biographical information contributed by John F. Barber, Richard Brautigan scholar

Less-than-revered by his Beat peers (Ginsberg gave him the ungainly nickname “Bunthorne,” Burroughs once observed him—drunk—crawling along the floor of a hotel after a reading event, Ferlinghetti said he “was all the novelist the hippies needed” because “[i]t was a nonliterate age”), Richard Brautigan became internationally famous in the late ’60s for writing simple-yet-surreal poems, short stories and novels that made readers marvel and burst out laughing. Brautigan’s personal life, however, was no laughing matter. Severe alcoholism—drinking a bottle of brandy and two fifths of whiskey a day during binges, according to friend Don Carpenter—and depression over declining book sales led to Brautigan’s suicide in September 1984. He was 49.

Brautigan began writing Trout Fishing in America in 1961 on a camping trip he took with his first wife, maiden name Virginia Alder, and their one-year-old daughter, Ianthe. Married in 1957 and separated in 1962, they officially divorced in 1970. Before the separation, Virginia Alder had become involved with one of Brautigan’s drinking buddies, Tony Aste, with whom she later had three children (the first in 1965, the second in 1968, the third in 1969). There is no known record that she and Tony Aste ever wed, though she took his last name. Virginia Aste eventually moved to Hawaii in 1975, without Tony, who remained, living in Bodega Bay, California, and then San Francisco, where he died in 1996.

Today, 75-year-old Virginia Aste is a political activist working as a substitute teacher in one of the most violent school districts in Hawaii. Susan Kay Anderson, a fellow educator at the school, recently met Virginia Aste and interviewed her about her early life and travels with Brautigan.

“Virginia Aste is not a ‘little old lady type,’” Anderson reports. “She is almost six feet tall and wears glasses, well-fitting outfits and interesting jewelry. Her gaze never wavers. She laughs easily and speaks in a measured, self-paced, quiet tone. She is quite funny and self-effacing, able to laugh at herself.”

“Much of Brautigan’s past has remained shrouded in mystery for so long as to become mythology,” says John F. Barber, curator of the comprehensive, multi-media online resource Brautigan Bibliography and Archive. “Virginia’s comments and insights [in this new interview] are important because they help us better understand the stories behind Brautigan, his life and his writings.”

Like a Waterfall

Arthur: What were the ’60s like?

Virginia Aste: The ’60s were a lot like the ’50s, a continuation of [the '50s], except for ‘68 and ‘69. Then, everything changed. For example, I took Lamaze [childbirth classes] for Ianthe’s birth. They didn’t know what I was talking about in the hospital. They gave me some pillows and helped me lie on my side. That was that.

The change came with the music. There were concerts every day—really, really good concerts every two weeks or so. Groups from New York came. The concerts were in Golden Gate Park.

At that time there was the Cow Palace, a big stadium—George Wallace was to speak. All I remember was the atmosphere of hostility and women there. This [Cow Palace] was a place where women burned their bras; where riots happened. It was a feeling of a mob and impeding violence and we just had to leave. We had gotten Ianthe a new raincoat from her dad. Ianthe’s raincoat pocket caught on a car as we were leaving and she started to cry. It was no real riot that time, but it felt like it could’ve been. What we were witnessing was a lot of yelling and Wallace was yelling back. He was ranting. It was an awful ending to an awful day.

For a year, there were free concerts every other week. It was wild. Of course, there were precursors to this, pre-’60s. I purchased a Rudi Gernreich bra—it was see-through—and took off my shirt during a party. We saw how many people could crowd into a phone booth at a time.

In one house where we lived, there was something wrong with the plumbing so the water ran and ran. It was like a waterfall. We turned it stronger and then back again or we just got water.

We moved out of North Beach and out of Haight-Ashbury. There was a lot of alcohol and pot use. There was the Ice Cream Store where bikers and bus drivers took pills—early speed, the chicken egg-producing drug, methedrine, cheaper than heroin. It was the time of the Alphonse Mucha art style on concert posters: big bicycle wheels on bikes, elongated figures riding, and the skulls and roses of the Grateful Dead.

Richard admired the Diggers. Our whole thing was a proletarian idea that you take care of everybody. I remember baking bread in coffee cans. I did. We had everything available to us at the free store. We never had any money. I don’t remember paying for anything for a while. This was the last half of the ’60s.

Trout Fishing In America

Arthur: How did you meet Richard Brautigan?

Virginia Aste: I met Richard Brautigan at a laundromat in North Beach. I had wanted to meet him. He was very alluring and I thought he might’ve been from Germany. He didn’t say much. I had Ron Loewinsohn introduce us.

Richard was working in a lab that manufactured barium powder. People drank the powders for X-rays—there were different flavors like peach, strawberry, lemon. He came home smelling like those different flavors. They hired Richard for one dollar an hour.

I was working downtown as a secretary. I carried the typewriter home with me. It was very heavy. I typed up his poems. He began sending them out to places like The Nation. He started with fifty poems.

I was working for two dollars an hour. I was good at Dictaphone. From our tax return and claiming Ianthe as a dependent, we bought a 1951 Plymouth station wagon and took a trip across Idaho, five hundred or six hundred miles across the Snake River. This became Trout Fishing In America. Jack Spicer helped edit it. I helped edit, too, and typed it because I could read his handwriting. I used to read lots of [scrawly] doctor and lawyer handwriting.

In the Afternoon

Arthur: Did he read a lot? What was his writing routine like?

Virginia Aste: He would write in the afternoon because he watched Ianthe in the morning. That became a routine because I was working. He needed time and space, time and silence, but not totally. He did not lock himself away.

Between me and Jack Spicer and Richard reading us stuff, we would tell him to take out a lot. There wasn’t much left. That was Spicer’s thing.

He read incessantly at the Mechanics’ [Institute] Library. It was a library founded by a union in San Francisco. He’d read fiction on the second floor. He’d read the Ladies’ Home Journal. His earliest reading was the National Geographic. He’d read old issues when he was in elementary school and later read the Ladies’ Home Journal. He read Faulkner, Jack London, he read poetry.

I translated Neruda’s work for him into English. Also Mayakovsky. I took Russian then. A lot of people were killed under Stalin. People still talked a lot about the Spanish Civil War in those days.

B Vitamins

Arthur: Did you see his writing as genius writing?

Virginia Aste: Yes, Richard was a genius in his writing because of his humor. He was like Mark Twain or Saroyan because of his use of irony. He would be right on target.

He also had a sense of the tragic. He had sentimentality for his dead relatives but he was never syrupy sweet in that way.

He was very caring…cared very well for Ianthe. He paid the rent six months in advance. He had a stockpile of food in the cupboards. Probably because he cared for his sister, Barbara, while they were growing up. He had grown up very poor. I almost got him sobered up. I gave him a lot of B vitamins. After our baby, he began drinking heavily. Lots of socializing.

I read on the Internet that he had had homosexual liaisons at this time. It was when Ianthe was about four.

He had new fame. It was tremendously exciting. He began drinking heavily and became abusive. One night, he wanted to have sex and became violent—I shut him out of the bedroom. There were these thick wooden doors. The next day I left with Ianthe.

What happened was totally against what we were all about. We were so pacifistic. This was the dark side of what was going on. On the other hand, he did love guns and loved going shooting.

To Say the Least

Arthur: Did he talk the way he wrote?

Virginia Aste: Yes. Yes! He had a constant dialogue going and had constant jokes. He was interested in everything about art. Dada was one of the themes. Jack Spicer said that one should pick out the worst thing from a piece of writing and keep that and then write from that. He told Richard that and he did that.

He was experimental like William Burroughs and the same [in the sense] that he traveled around and had a huge following. Burroughs would tear a page of his writing down the middle and then match up the halves to different pages, creating interesting sentences, to say the least.

I think Richard was very sad when I left him, taking Ianthe with me. People didn’t talk about addiction—about drinking—then. Oh, I should’ve…maybe stuck with him. It was a few years later when the lawyer had me sign for a divorce. I didn’t make any claim to his work.

All of his early books, I know exactly what and where he is talking about—even though the writing is ambiguous on purpose. I can picture this or that place.

Once we lived in Big Sur, in a cave that was carved out of a hill with a little roof jutting out of it to keep the rain off. He was very interested in the history of WWI and WWII. Especially WWI and the Civil War. He was particularly interested in the campaigns of the southern generals. He talked about the Holocaust. He was fascinated with the personalities surrounding Hitler and in the atrocities dictated by the S.S.

Into the Creek

Arthur: Was he a history buff, a ghost town buff?

Virginia Aste: He was very interested in graveyards; gravestones. Interested in imagining what people’s lives were like—the food they ate, the clothes, one hundred and two hundred years ago. He was interested in the working people.

On our trip to Idaho, we read gravestones on old cemeteries.

He was always connecting different times and people and places together. He did this constantly—made connections. He had a maniacal laugh. Ianthe has the same…a real wild laugh.

In ‘57-‘58, we did crazy things. Climbed up on the Palace of Fine Arts and looked over the city—all the heads of statues toppled over. Once with Kenn Davis, who was selling paintings at the time, we went to a reading. The hood of our car flew off at one o’clock in the morning as we approached the Bay Bridge. Richard jumped out of the car, opened the trunk and threw it in. He could move really, really fast when he had to.

We were cooped up inside five days once in Big Sur, up a little creek. Water came down and we could not get up to the highway. He jumped into the creek and got me. He never could swim. He never did learn to swim.

He was capable of athletic feats nobody thought he could do.

In Big Sur, Richard was very interested in Price Dunn, who was “the Confederate General of Big Sur” [from Brautigan's book of the same name]. Price read the Greek classics, et cetera, as a child in Alabama. He took us down to Big Sur. We were two or three weeks there. We talked, fixed meals, had two cases of wine. I remember there was an invasion of frogs there. We poured wine around the porch to try to kill the frogs. They were kind of like the coquí in Hawaii.

As one of my friends said about Richard, “He was like shining too bright a light on too small a thing.” His writing was not voluminous. By the time it got pared-down, and pared-down, there weren’t a lot of words. There wasn’t a lot to work with.

He was good at listening to criticism. He worked with and listened to Ron Loewinsohn, an academic and a poet. He wasn’t like Robert Duncan who was a traditional poet, or Ken Rexroth, who was a target for poets because he was so academic.

Richard was contemptuous of literature taught in college. He got to become the flavor-of-the-month for a lot of them. He liked the Black Mountain College poets [Creeley, Dorn, Olson]. Richard knew Lawrence Ferlinghetti; some of the artists. Artist Tom Field was a really neat guy. He lived with us for awhile and was an inspiration to Richard. He taught Ianthe drawing when she was two.

A Great Fan

Arthur: What do you think he would’ve thought about current technology, the Internet?

Virginia Aste: In “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” [1967], Richard anticipated the impact of computer technology. He was happy to get an electric typewriter. It was a lot of work making corrections on copies of his work, and typing it over and over. It took a lot of time. It was a lot of work.

He would’ve been a great fan of the word processor because he couldn’t spell.

I think he ran out of things to write about, unlike Styron and Mailer—who he didn’t like. Alcohol shut down his spontaneity and depressed him and accelerated/exaggerated the parts of his personality that was pessimistic about people. I’m pretty sure he did not believe in God or an afterlife. He believed in art and the arts as the highest people could live for.

Freedom

Arthur: Was it unusual to be traveling and camping—going on a road trip—with a child in Idaho? Did you grow up there, is that why you went there on the infamous Trout Fishing In America road trip?

Virginia Aste: I grew up camping a lot. In those days, if you were a hundred miles out of L.A., in Mojave, for example, you were in the mountains. My father was a fisherman, he liked to fish. He was one of eleven children. My mother was a school teacher. It took her sixteen summers get her teaching license.

We took two trips. We had an Indian theme going with Ianthe in a little pack. We almost suffocated Ianthe.

Arthur: A cradleboard?

Virginia Aste: Some misguided Indian thing. We were gone two weeks to the Klamath River. Ianthe was too hot. When we took her out [of the cradleboard] she sort of unwrapped herself and threw a fit.

On our trip across the Snake River we could watch Ianthe because she had a pink fabric leash [harness] like a dog that we tied to a tree. We used it one time. We had to be absolutely sure about her because we were very close to the river. It had a steep cliff. A sharp drop-off to the river.

We almost didn’t make it. The first night, we drove down into an old lake bed— I think it was called Dollar Lake. Oh, was it there? Anyway, we had boxes in our 1951 Plymouth, books, boxes of clothing in the back of the station wagon in wooden crates, paper bags, baby stuff. Lots of Dostoevsky, we couldn’t go without Dostoevsky! God forbid we go without that! Ha!

That night we slept inside the back of the car. Everything was on the ground. Then, within minutes, a huge cloud burst. There was going to be a flood of mud, huge raindrops, dollar-sized, the area began filling with water. I put Ianthe somewhere. I started driving up this road and I couldn’t see.

Arthur: Richard was guiding you up?

Virginia Aste: Yes, we were in the middle of a huge cloudburst, we were stuck—Dollar Lake, or wherever that was. The road wound around and around. It was so impossible to see. That was the first or second night of the trip. That was the beginning of Trout Fishing In America. Sleeping in the back of that station wagon. That’s why it was so crazy. It was a shift car with the shift on the wheel.

Richard ate a lot of watermelon and had to pee in the night. That’s how we found out the lake bed was filling in.

Arthur: Lucky.

Virginia Aste: So, I don’t know why we did the trip. Re-visiting Idaho, I guess. We saw the Snake River in the beginning of its decline and urban development. It was Indian-based.

Arthur: Romantic.

Virginia Aste: So romantic. Very romantic idea.

Arthur: Did a lot of writers take off with their families at the time and camp?

Virginia Aste: We were ahead or behind the times. Having a child was unusual at the time. Well, some had children. David Meltzer had three kids. Ron Loewinsohn had a child later. Robert Creeley. But from what I read of Kerouac, his trips were not family-oriented.

Arthur: This seems a bit different compared with trips other writers were taking across the country. Do you think?

Virginia Aste: Yes. It was quite amazing. The clutter of the station wagon. Now, there are containers for everything. There weren’t then. [We used] wooden crates and paper bags. We had a ridiculous tent. Stakes for the tent, food. The tent had to have stakes. It was canvas. It did not pop up. If a stake was lost, you had to find a tree, cut a new one.

Arthur: It sounds like homesteading.

Virginia Aste: Re-enacting a whole bunch of stuff—it was a long trip. A canvas tent during the day is hot. Washing diapers in the streams…we weren’t conscious of the fact that it was polluting.

Arthur: You were mostly alone at the camp spots?

Virginia Aste: Yes, usually the only people except for local fishermen. We saw some sheep, sheep farmers, and had to go through the herd of sheep and then came back round again. The sheep men just smiled. They knew [we weren’t getting anywhere]. Richard wrote about this.

Arthur: You were really wild, adventuresome.

Virginia Aste: There were no maps, no guides. We went up and down the creeks until we found a good place. Taking that tent up and down…we were re-enacting some parts of our pasts.

We had traveler’s checks and finding a place to cash them was hard. There was nowhere to cash them. Like in those novels where you read about the South, very backwoods. It wasn’t convenient.

Our baby was always an icebreaker. Richard had a song he sang, “Orofino Rose.” He sang that over and over to Ianthe to get her to sleep.

Arthur: Why didn’t you just use cash? I mean, what was the point of traveler’s checks? Because you were travelers?

Virginia Aste: Yes. We had gone to Mexico, to Oaxaca and had traveler’s checks there. That might’ve been a role model for that. Richard was paranoid about losing money.

Arthur: It sounds sort of urban, but you were both raised in rural areas. Or at least, not in big cities.

Virginia Aste: I was raised in the San Fernando Valley. It doesn’t exactly inspire your imagination there. San Francisco was really inexpensive when we lived there. It was a city life, lots of poetry, but then—

Arthur: You wanted nature, adventure, taking the trip to write about it on purpose?

Virginia Aste: Richard was always writing. He sat at a card table with his Royal typewriter during the trip. I didn’t know what he was writing until later. He was always taking notes. His short paragraphs were like poems. Real different writing. Coming back [after the trip], it was very short on words, not prolific, turned into short chapters that were almost poems. They were so funny.

But everything changed. Ianthe was two when I met Tony [Aste], my later lover. Richard had become so abusive from alcohol. What boys see done to women in their youth…Richard and I weren’t about that at all, we were into Camus—not towards others, but how we viewed ourselves.

Richard was fascinated by war—by WWI and WWII. He shot up one wall of his house in Montana which had a clock on it.

Arthur: That must’ve been really loud.

Virginia Aste: Yes. It was like a war, the sound of war. I didn’t mind him going shooting, but…we had this spaghetti party, and afterwards he yanked the door open. He didn’t wake Ianthe, but he was very violent. I left soon after with Tony.

In Richard’s poem, “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace,” his writing is a predilection in a way. It has come true. There isn’t anything you can do. The ether is full of good deeds and misdeeds—it all gets recorded. I’ve never looked back. I don’t sit around and reflect on the past. I’m in the moment, in the now. I’ve lived that way my whole life.

People were living in communes and trying to be peaceful. What it came down to was falling into prior patterns. Richard just fell into that as far as I could see. He liked Katherine Anne Porter a lot and also Eudora Welty.

I think he had a special admiration for writers who were profound and humorous at the same time. He really liked the Armenian short story writer [William Saroyan] who wrote My Name is Aram. There were so many things that I didn’t ask Richard about. It was us against the world and rebellion. Like living in a bubble. What did we want?

Arthur: Freedom?

Virginia Aste: Freedom from the society that had jammed people into unhappy relationships and war. Freedom from that.

LA LADIES CHOIR
presents

TAKE MY TREASURES
all proceeds go to
Children of the Night

4-7pm Saturday December 19

Space15 twenty
1520 Cahuenga Blvd
90028

featuring
SILENT AUCTION: Donated treasures, from Flea’s bass guitar with his original drawings, Bauhaus, Tom Petty, Kevin Willis, Lauren Dukoss, Jess Holzworth, Kime Buzzelli, Alia Penner, Will Lemon III, Billy Idol, Lucky Dragons, original sketches from Where the Wild Things Are film and more to be announced

RAFFLE: Family Bookstore, Amoeba Music, Miranda July, Atherton Lin, Annakim, Dallas Clayton, Manimal Records, Elf Cafe, City Sip Wine Shop, Acupuncture by Leona Marrs, Bedford Falls, Miss KK, Warner Bros. boxsets and dresses from LA Ladies Choir

Plus Baked goods (by Mooi, Trails Cafe, Kevin and Daisy Mae) and a Polaroid Santa Booth!!!!

With DJ Will Lemon III and Ana Alderon

And the LA Ladies Choir performing Christmas Carols!

Poster by Alia Penner

Children of the Night is a private, non-profit, tax-exempt organization founded in 1979. They are dedicated to assisting children between the ages of 11 and 17 who are forced to prostitute on the streets for food to eat and a place to sleep. Since 1979 they have rescued girls and boys from prostitution and the domination of vicious pimps. And they provide all programs with the support of private donations.
More info here: childrenofthenight.org

Posters by David V. D’Andrea, available from dvdandrea.com

THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN
The acclaimed 2004 CD collection of current underground folk music, as selected by Devendra Banhart. This is more than a compilation—it’s expertly sequenced and paced, like one long, slow flow of a particularly rich vibe. Liner notes are by the artists themselves, paying tribute to each other, all handlettered by Devendra, who also provides artwork on cover, back cover, sleeve, tray and the disk itself.
“Essential.” —Mojo
“Sparkling.” —The Wire
“8.6 (out of 10): [Its] sprawling landscape presents a persuasive case for the depth of a scene that seemingly sprung up (like mushrooms) overnight.” —Pitchfork

PARADISE NOW: The Living Theatre in Amerika
Specially priced DVD with extra-sized booklet and posters featuring rare, never-before-distributed films and a bacchanal of revolutionary multimedia documents from The Living Theatre’s historic and influential ‘68-’69 American tour.

TRANSMISSIONS FROM SINAI
Fresh 2009 multi-artist CD curated and sequenced by Al Cisneros (Om, Sleep, Shrinebuilder), with cover artwork by Arik Roper.

‘A giant of American music opens the book on his wrenching professional and personal journeys, paying tribute to the vanishing Appalachian culture that gave him his voice. He was there at the beginning of bluegrass. Yet his music, forged in the remote hills and hollows of Southwest Virginia, has even deeper roots. In Man of Constant Sorrow, Dr. Ralph Stanley gives a surprisingly candid look back on his long and incredible career as the patriarch of old-time mountain music. Marked by Dr. Ralph Stanley’s banjo picking, his brother Carter’s guitar playing, and their haunting and distinctive harmonies, the Stanley Brothers began their career in 1946 and blessed the world of bluegrass with hundreds of classic songs, including “White Dove,” “Rank Stranger,” and what has become Dr. Ralph’s signature song, “Man of Constant Sorrow.” Carter died in 1966 after years of alcohol abuse, but Dr. Ralph Stanley carried on and is still at the top of his game, playing to audiences across the country today at age eighty-one. Rarely giving interviews, he now grants fans the book they have been waiting for, filled with frank recollections, from his boyhood of dire poverty in the Appalachian coalfields to his early musical success with his brother, to years of hard traveling on the road with the Clinch Mountain Boys, to the recent, jubilant revival of a sound he helped create. The story of how a musical art now popular around the world was crafted by two brothers from a dying mountain culture, Man of Constant Sorrow captures a life harmonized with equal measures of tragedy and triumph.’

“Rudolph Wurlitzer is the author of the novels The Drop Edge of Yonder, Quake, Flats, and Slow Fade, as well as the nonfiction memoir Hard Travel to Sacred Places. He wrote the screenplays for such classic films as Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Two Lane Blacktop, and Walker, among others, and co-directed the film Candy Mountain with Robert Frank.”

Read the introduction to the new edition of this “headventure” classic by Arthur columnist Erik Davis: download PDF

“In 1950s California, and especially in Los Angeles, there existed few venues for contemporary art. To a whole generation of California artists, this presented a freedom, since the absence of a context for their work meant that they could coin their own, and in uncommonly interesting ways. The careers of Ed Ruscha, Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz all begin with this absence: Ruscha turned to books as a means of dissemination, Berman pioneered mail art through his magazine Semina and in March 1957, Ed Kienholz, in collaboration with curator Walter Hopps, co-founded one of California’s greatest historical galleries, Ferus. Within months of opening, Ferus, which is Latin for “wild,” gained notoriety when the Hollywood vice squad raided Berman’s first–and, in his lifetime, last–solo exhibition, following a complaint about “lewd material.” Shows by Kienholz and Jay DeFeo followed, but 1962 was Ferus’ annus mirabilis, with solo shows by Bruce Conner and Joseph Cornell, and the first solo shows of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol on the west coast. The following year, Ferus also hosted Ed Ruscha’s first solo exhibition. After Kienholz and Hopps parted ways—Hopps went on to mount the first American Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Musuem—the reins were handed to Irving Blum, who got Ferus out of the red and ran the gallery until its closure in 1966. A Place to Begin is an illustrated oral history of this heroic enterprise. With 62 new interviews with Ferus artists and more than 300 photographs (most previously unpublished), it retrieves a lost chapter of twentieth-century American art. Edited by [longtime Arthur contributor] Kristine McKenna, noted expert and co-editor of the critically acclaimed Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle.”

2010 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints
Radical Heroes for the New Millennium
by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective

32 pages, 12 x 16 inches, saddlestitched, $9.95

Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project — a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the “New World” and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear — at the dawn of this new millennium — that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever!

Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!

Go to Autonomedia to order

“Ah, man”
An afternoon conversation with American musician Jack Rose
by Brian Rademaekers

All photos via drragtime.com (click on photo for credit/story)

This interview was conducted at Jack Rose’s house on Ontario Street in the Port Richmond neighborhood of Philadelphia on July 17, 2009, about a week before Jack was set to play a show I had helped arrange at the riverside Penn Treaty Park in Philly’s Fishtown neighborhood. When he agreed to do the show, Jack didn’t even realize it was a paying gig. That’s just the kind of guy he was. The show, set for July 29, was rained out, but Jack and The Black Twigs did a smashing, rollicking set at Kung Fu Necktie that night. Later, he played the final show of the summer at Penn Treaty Park, in his splendid solo form. It also ended up being the last show he’d ever play in Philly, as he was busy finishing his upcoming LP Luck in the Valley for Thrill Jockey and toured Europe with the Black Twigs.

Jack said it was probably the longest interview he’d done, but he enjoyed it. We just sat there for about two hours and drank loads of tea. The transcript ends a bit abruptly, but the official interview ended when Jack asked if I’d like to join him to meet his wife Laurie at the Lost Bar in Kensington. We drank beers, ate kabobs from a street stand and talked about Jack London and David Goodis. It was a day I’ll never forget.

Rose grew up in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he lived until he was senior in high school. He then moved to Richmond, where he met Mike Gangloff and Patrick Best, fellow members of Pelt, and studied English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Later he moved to Blacksburg, where he met his wife, Laurie Sutherland…

Arthur: So, about when did you start playing?

Jack Rose: I started playing in high school, started playing classic rock.

Arthur: Did you have musicians in the family?

Jack Rose: No, no. I just picked up the guitar because I wanted to play “Stairway to Heaven,” like everyone else. I discovered blues right around the same time, too, and I started doing fingerpicking at about the same time that I was taking lessons for electric guitar…I was about 13. It was pretty early on.

Arthur: Do you think that had anything do with where you grew up?

Jack Rose: No, that was pure luck. I was sitting on my porch, and there was a kid next door to me and he was sitting on his porch, he was from New Jersey, visiting his parents. I guess he was about 17, and I heard this finger-pick guitar. I had heard some fingerpicking on some Zeppelin stuff, but this was something different, so I went over and asked him what he was doing. He was playing some Mance Lipscomb song, and he had this book…it had tunes by (Mississippi) John Hurt, Gary Davis, Mance Lipscomb, and I think there was a [John] Fahey tune in there as well. So what I did was, I borrowed the book until I could get a copy myself. Then I bought the records they suggested. I’d pick the tunes I wanted to play and then get the records.

Arthur: That was pretty lucky run-in. What year was that around?

Jack Rose: Yeah, it was totally by chance. I guess it was around 1985? 84? I showed my guitar teacher what I was doing, and he said, ‘Well, can you sing?’ I said no, and he told me to just forget about it and stick with the playing. And I did.

Arthur: Electric blues?

Jack Rose: Yeah, Howlin’ Wolf, and Buddy Guy … he was trying to make me into a jazz guitar musician … but I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

Arthur: So I guess your immediate attraction was to blues guitar?

Jack Rose: Yeah, I liked guys like Buddy Guy and Otis Rush and Link Wray and Muddy Waters, and I liked Howlin’ Wolf a lot. I had this electric blues band called The Mice. I was like 15.

Arthur: That was your first band?

Jack Rose: No, I had a band called Naked Lunch. Then there was Ugly Head with Patrick, before we joined Pelt. That was my first record I put out.

Pelt sounded like post-Sonic Youth, Husker Du and stuff like that before that. I started ordering all these records from Forced Exposure, and I turned Mike onto that and we started listening to all this stuff from them. Dead C, a lot of New Zealand stuff like Dadamah, Gate, some English stuff like Wiccan Smiths, Richard Youngs, and also Sun City Girls…

Arthur: Jumping from electric blues and more traditional stuff like Howlin Wolf and Buddy Guy, what attracted you to that?

Jack Rose: Well, there was no jump really. I mean, there wasn’t a jump from that to that. When I first went to college, I got into the Stooges, I got into Television, I got into Captain Beefheart, which was the next logical step into that stuff. But I guess for my age, it should have been hardcore from the beginning, but it wasn’t. From that, I got into the weirder shit.

Arthur: What was it that attracted you to that weirder stuff, things that weren’t as constructionist?

Jack Rose: It was just like everything that was being put out at the time, produced, was like very indie rock. Some of that I still like, like Pavement and all that sort of stuff. I think that out of the indie rock stuff, the only thing that really holds up is Pavement. You had all this stuff like Teen Beat, and Dischord…we were just kind of sick of it. When we got into the Sun City Girls and The Dead C, we wanted something that wasn’t going on, and you know, friends of ours were making that sort of music. My friend Jason Bill joined the band Charalambides, and through them I got into all the stuff on Siltbreeze, like Harry Pussy, and Brother JT and Strapping Fieldhands…

Arthur: During this period, were you still interested in playing fingerpicking style?

Jack Rose: Not really. Mike [Gangloff] had started playing banjo, and I still had a few blues records — I had sold a lot of it because I was broke all the time—so I played him some of those, and he asked me if I could [fingerpick]. I said, ‘Yeah, I can do a little bit.’ I was really out of practice, and I didn’t do anything too serious. Then, when I moved to Blacksburg, I started listening to Matt Valentine of Tower Recordings, and that turned me on to all the British folk stuff. So I started listening to Incredible String Band, and messing around with the guitar a little bit, and then Mike was like, ‘Ah, we should start doing this old time stuff,’ so we started up this first old time band called the Lick Mountain Ramblers, but we never put anything out. It was me and his wife Amy, on autoharp.

But it was a real tough time for me because I had cut my finger in a cuisinart and got eight stitches, so, it was really hard to play that stuff because you’ve gotta hold those chords down for a long time. I couldn’t do that, so I started doing things in open tunings and trying to figure out how to play those songs, but in open tunings.

I mean, I started doing open tunings with Pelt because I just wanted to try to do something different and it was good to get drones going. But when I was doing old time stuff with Mike, most of those older guys who had done that stuff played in standard tuning…but after a while, I would just stop playing in the middle of gigs because my finger would kill me and I couldn’t take the pain.

Arthur: Was this at the beginning of Pelt?

Jack Rose: Pelt started in Richmond in 1995, and in 96, I moved out to Blacksburg…Mike was already out that way, about 50 miles west. So when I got into town, he was getting really into the old time thing, and he drafts me into this ad hoc band [to do some fingerpicking]. It wasn’t that good, because I just wasn’t interested in doing that, you know.

But then I started doing the open tuning stuff to be able to keep up with the banjo playing. That was going on at the same time as Pelt. Patrick was still in Richmond.

Then, I moved to Philly, in 1998.

Arthur: Were you doing anything else besides Pelt at the time?

Jack Rose: When I moved to Philly, I knew I wanted to make some solo music, but I didn’t know what I wanted to make. In about, ’96, ’97 I got into John Fahey, and it just blew my mind wide open.

Arthur: How did you first come across Fahey?

Jack Rose: Well, I guess Byron Coley wrote that article in Spin in about ’94. But I never paid any attention to him when I was learning to play, even when I had those books. I looked at a picture of him and I saw that he was a white guy, and I was like, ‘I don’t care about that. I want to learn from these old black guys. He can’t be that good,’ I thought. So I never knew anything about him.

Which I would say, at that point, when you’re that young and in your teens, your musical development is really important, and I am going to say it was probably good that I didn’t hear him then. My taste hadn’t quite been fully formed yet, and I can imagine that if I had got into Fahey then, that would have led into Leo Kottke, and that would have led to other stupid bullshit like that. I wouldn’t have had any context for it, and I would have probably ended up going full on into that Kottke stuff because it was just hot guitar playing. Thankfully, I didn’t hear that. It wasn’t until my late 20s when I heard Fahey, and I was just like, ‘Aw, man!’

Arthur: You do just about all of your stuff in open tunings. Is that something you got from Fahey, or because you hurt your finger…?

Jack Rose: No, I didn’t get it from Fahey. I got it from that book I read when I was kid that had that “Frankie and Johnny” song, and I was like, what the hell is that? I would look at it for like two weeks before I would try it, because I only knew how to do standard tuning. So I would look at that and think it was really cool, but I was really scared. As a kid I would be really paranoid that I would never get it back in tune again. But I got over that. Then in college, I would hear experimental tunings in the Sun City Girls stuff and I wanted to try it.

I got my open C tuning from this guy Christian, a chef in Fredericksburg, Va., a really great jazz guitarist that plays gospel jazz. I was sitting in Apple Music, owned by Mike Chaffin, and I was playing in the tuning that I used for most of my Pelt stuff, and he noticed that I was in open tuning, and he showed me the open C. That’s my favorite tuning. Then I heard it in Fahey and recognized it. It’s real low.

Arthur: Do you think listening to bands like Sonic Youth, and some of the more abstract bands with drone elements, helped give context to Fahey?

Jack Rose: Yep. Because, like I said, Fahey is this icon amongst so many types of people, people who are into drone music…all sorts of people, all walks of life. People who I think, you know, are horrible players and make horrible music, but they still make that connection with Fahey.

He himself wrote off all his later work, and he wanted stuff to move forward…he was definitely against all that Windham Hill, Leo Kottke bullshit.

But if I had heard Fahey when I was in my young teens, I would have moved on to the other guys, and who knows what would have happened. I may have dropped Fahey altogether, because I would have associated him with these other guys. If I had heard it when I was 15 or 14, I wouldn’t have any idea what to think of it other than it was good guitar playing. I wouldn’t have any idea of who the man was.

Instead, hearing him when I did, it all made a lot more sense to me, and it made all the difference.

Arthur: So when you heard Fahey, how did that impact what you were doing?

Jack Rose: The first record I heard by him was Fare Forward Voyagers, and that is an incredibly droney record. So, I was already doing that kind of stuff. Hearing him do that stuff, with the kind of drone background that I already had, and of course, also at that point I was already heavily influenced by the Bishop brothers, Rick and Alan, so all of that just kind of came together and just kind of made sense. And, of course, I was listening to [minimalist composer] Terry Riley, and I just made all these connections between these different types of music.

Arthur: How did you bring that into Pelt on albums like Ayahuasca?

Jack Rose: Well, we recorded that in about 1999, and we were making our first attempts at that stuff, and I also heard Robbie Basho at that time. When I first moved to Philly, after about six or seven months, I got some Basho records, and that helped too. So we were starting to incorporate that stuff, and I was incredibly frustrated with it, because what I was hearing in my head, I wasn’t getting on my fingers.

Arthur: I imagine it is pretty hard to get to that level.

Jack Rose: Yeah. I knew that if I was going to be any good at it, I couldn’t have a dayjob. And then luckily, I got unemployed, and when that happened, I was able to take advantage of that…that’s when I got really, really serious in trying to develop a way of playing. So it was about late 1999 that I started getting really serious about the guitar.

Arthur: Your music has the feeling of being played by somebody who is really dedicated to learning, and to learning not just that style, but to developing your own style. What was it that pushed you to take it to that level?

Jack Rose: When I first started getting back into that stuff, I was getting really into Fahey, but I don’t think I ever fully digested all his music. And the way I kind of heard my playing at the time was kind of like second- or third-rate Fahey. So I took more cues from Basho back then, because he had such a freer way of playing, and it was a lot more interpretive, so I would listen to him a lot. And then from there, I kind of got my stuff. If you listen to my first record (Red Horse, White Mule, 2002), you’ll notice that I’m not doing much double-thumbing in the Fahey-type style. On my first two records I was trying to make something that really can be clear cut when compared to Fahey. For somebody who is really into the music and gets into the guts of the records, they would see that it really doesn’t sound much like Fahey because I’m intentionally not doing some of that double-thumbing. On Opium Musick, I do. But on those two records, I am intentionally staying away from doing any sort of Fahey-isms. Just because there is no point in it. You have to have your own style of playing. Yeah, you have to copy people in the beginning because you have to learn from it, but at a certain point, you have to break with that and just go for your own thing.

Of course, later, now, I have no qualms about stealing from Fahey, at all, just because I think now I am a much more comfortable player, more comfortable in my own skin, than I was back then. So stealing from him, and being more, I guess, blatantly American-sounding, is fine by me.

Arthur: Do you think what you’ve developed then is a sort of homage to players of the past as well something that is your own style and moving forward?

Jack Rose: You have to look to the past — that’s what you do…you have to look at the past in order to move forward.

Arthur: When you started to bring that stuff into Pelt, things like the ragas, were they into that?

Jack Rose: Yeah they were into it, but it was really Mike that dragged me into it, I didn’t go into it willingly for the Ayahuasca sessions. I felt like I was kind of forced into it, and I am sort of thankful, in a way, that I was. If I didn’t have someone like Mike riding my ass, I probably wouldn’t have done anything. He was always getting on me about really learning how to play, and we had lots and lots and lots of fights. We got pretty angry at each other during those years.

Arthur: Because he wanted you to go in a sort of Fahey direction?

Jack Rose: Well, [towards] Fahey, or even just completely acoustic. And I wasn’t ready to do that, and Patrick wasn’t either. This was when we were making Ayahuasca, and there was a mix of electric and acoustic. But Patrick and I were not ready to make that leap yet. Because, listening to some of the tapes from live gigs, I thought that it just sounded terrible. It was really difficult to try and reconcile that drone sound with the old-time. For a while, it seemed like the old-time was pasted onto this drone aesthetic that we developed. Because we all lived in different places, we couldn’t practice six times a week and develop this old-time/drone sound, and so it took a while for it grow.

Arthur: Do think that the blend of old-time and drone hit its peak on Ayahuasca?

Jack Rose: That is my favorite Pelt record, and acoustically, my favorite is Pearls From the River (VHF, 2003). We finally incorporated all of that, and that was our first record that was entirely acoustic. When I finished Opium Musick, I went right to work on Pearls From the River.

Arthur: So you were already doing solo stuff at that point?

Jack Rose: Yeah, I was doing solo stuff and Pelt concurrently for a little while.

Arthur: What pushed you to really start focusing on the solo career?

Jack Rose: Well, I put out those first two records, and did a couple little tours around that. I was still playing to nobody and for no money, which is what you gotta do. So, Raag Manifestos (2004, VHF) came out, and then the interest from Europe started coming in. In 2004 I did couple of tours, a couple of East Coasters and a couple of West Coasters…and they actually went okay. I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I wasn’t going broke either. I was still coming home with a little cash. Mike had kids, and he couldn’t really tour, but for me, it was easy.

Arthur: Is that in part what led to the dissolution of Pelt?

Jack Rose: Kind of, yeah. The last tour Pelt did, we went over to Europe in late 2006 and…at that time I was really happy playing the Pearls From the River-type music, but those guys went in a totally different direction I just wasn’t ready to go into. And it is really odd, because early on in Pelt, Patrick and I were like the drone keepers—that was what we did. And Mike, he would play melody on top of that.

Then, when I started getting into the fingerpicking thing, I started to get into the melody as well. But then Mike went even further into drone, which I would have been into years ago, but at that point I had no interest in hitting gongs or anything like that.

So when we tried to do these songs and play raga pieces, Mike and I would be stepping all over each other and it was getting really frustrating. We weren’t communicating that well at all. And it was mainly due to distance. We were trying to do these interweaving call-and-response lines, but you can only really develop that if you’re doing that stuff everyday. So I was kind of getting frustrated with that, and the solo thing was going really well, so I began to think it would be best if I just went and did that and not really worry about Pelt.

Arthur: At want point did you go from really liking the American stuff to digging more Eastern influences and ragas?

Jack Rose: I liked the Eastern stuff in college, and I got turned onto it by the Sun City Girls. And my really good friend Jason [Bill], lived in Houston and Houston has a really huge Indian population. And I would go there in like ’92 and 94, and go to these Indian shops and buy these tapes with sitar music and listen to them.

Arthur: And I guess Fahey did some raga-type songs too.

Jack Rose: Yeah, sort of. He Americanized them, more or less. Which is cool. “Fare Forward Voyagers,” I think, was probably his most raga-esque.

Arthur: Do you think Fahey was heavily borrowing from stuff that came before him? The American Primitive style, where did it come from? How do you think it developed?

Jack Rose: Well, he was stealing from early American guitar and banjo players and that sort of stuff. And he was also stealing from classical music, Tin Pan Alley songs and just anything he liked. He put it all together into one big thing, you know.

Glenn Jones brought up something really interesting when he said that nearly every acoustic guitar fingerpicker he ever met has been an Orientophile. All of them are into this Eastern stuff, because if you listen to these ragas, there is a lot in common with American blues because of some of the rhythm cycles and the kind of notes and the scales.

Arthur: Do you share the opinion that the guitar is the ultimate American instrument?

Jack Rose: Sure, yeah. I’ll be the millionth guy to say this, but it is a limited instrument and a limitless instrument at the same time. You’ve got a limited range, and on a fretted guitar you’ve got 12 notes to work with and it is such a small range. On sitar, you can’t really tune it up at will all the time because there are a lot of strings. But when you are tuning a six-string, man… you can use a lot of different tunings and combinations, and you are playing all these neat chords and melodic patterns. You can’t do that with a piano or a wind instrument.

So, I would say that with the ability to put the guitar into so many different types of tuning, you are offered so many different possibilities for different types of structures and chords and melody. And of course, when you throw a slide into that, it’s a whole other thing…it’s a much more vocal-type sound.

Plus, rhythmically, the way the guitar is built, the way it is set up with the strings…it’s like a band in a box. Listen to Blind Blake recordings. He sounds like an orchestra.

And it’s portable. I would say that the only instrument that could top it might be the harmonica, because that’s the ultimate portable instrument.

Arthur: You ever try the harmonica?

Jack Rose: I tried it, but you know, I’m terrible at it. I’d never be as good as Harmonica Dan, so why bother trying?

Arthur: Banjo?

Jack Rose: When I was out in Virginia with the Twigs recently, I did record this one song with them on the banjo because I found this easy picking pattern … and I wasn’t able to play it on the guitar, so I tried it on the banjo to get some kind of rhythm going on it and it sounded a pretty cool. Nathan plays banjos on it, so we’ll have two banjos on it and it’s pretty good.

Arthur: At what point were you in your development when you hit “Kensington Blues”? What were you trying to do with it?

Jack Rose: It was November 2005…A lot of that record was developed from this idea I had of being able to incorporate all sorts of different elements of guitar music that I had figured out. I wanted to put it all right there — everything. A lot of those ideas were developed on Raag Manifestos, and you can hear an early version of “Now That I’m a Man Full Grown” on that triple-LP compilation that I did with Six Organs of Admittance, MV & EE, Dredd Fool, Fursaxa…I was also working on an early CD-R of Dr. Ragtime (Tequila Sunrise, 2002). So with those and Raag Manifestos, I was trying to combine all those elements.

At that time, I was starting to get more comfortable with Fahey-esque playing because I discovered that on a couple of those songs, like “Kensington Blues,” I played them a couple of times and they never sounded right to me. And that’s because I had the rhythm wrong. I had been accenting the four strings, which is the upbeat. But I noticed that on a song like “The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick,” Fahey was accenting the downbeat. I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve been playing that wrong this whole time.’

When he was accenting the downbeat, I realized that’s where the jug is in jug band music, that’s where the rhythm is. So then I started playing all that on the downbeat, and all that stuff—the Fahey stuff, the ragtime stuff, all the blues—it all came into place.

For the first three records, probably the reason I never did any of that stuff, and I certainly attempted it, was because I was playing it wrong [laughs] for like two or three years. So I had to fuckin’ relearn the way I was playing to make sure I was emphasizing the downbeat. Once that happened, it was clear.

Arthur: So you think that discovery is what showed up on Kensington Blues?

Jack Rose: Yep, and from all the records there on out. Yep, because, well, I figured out it was all in the downbeat. I was like ‘Wow, okay, now I can really play all this stuff.’

Arthur: The actual song “Kensington Blues,” was that something you wrote after the fact, or was that something you wrote to reflect where you were living?

Jack Rose: Well, I called it “Kensington Blues” because it sounded better than “Fishtown Blues.” But, that song took me about a year and a half to write. In my old house on Cedar Street, that’s where pretty much all those songs were conceived…that’s where I refined all that material, in that house. Right before I went to Europe and all that jazz, that was when we moved to Fishtown.

Arthur: Would you consider Kensington Blues to be a blues album?

Jack Rose: Nope. I would consider it to be an American album, but not a blues record. There’s not any real blues on it, I’m not playing any 12-bar blues. “Rappahannock River Rag” is about as close to blues as I get on that one.

Arthur: Sometimes it seems like you went straight from Pelt into your solo career, and now you are just working your way back into playing with a full band, but it’s not really that cut and dried, is it?

Jack Rose: No. But after that European tour in 2006, I pretty much quit the band…but I have an invitation to come back. It was pretty hard, you know, Mike [Gangloff] and I were pretty mad at each other.

Arthur: At one point, you said that Kensington Blues was a hard album to live up to, but with this latest release, Jack Rose and The Black Twig Pickers (Klang, 2009), you said this album is the closest to your heart.

Jack Rose: Oh yeah. On this, I am playing the music that I fell in love with when I was a kid, and I’m getting to play all these tunes that I’ve always liked since I was a young kid and I’ve loved for most of my life. That music is the most important music to me, and I love all of it. All those songs are old songs, except for “Kensington Blues” and “Revolt.” A number of those were picked by Mike and the Twigs, and I picked a lot of them.

Arthur: Who picked “Little Sadie”?

Jack Rose: I picked that one, but I knew that was a song that Mike has played on banjo for a long time. I was doing some weird recording gig for a friend…one of them was “Little Sadie.” I knew the tuning it was in, and I basically was trying to do the banjo part, but then I switched to different tuning and it worked out really well.

The part I came up with for “Little Sadie,” I was really proud of that, and I was like, ‘Well shit, I gotta use that again.’ So I showed those guys, and Mike has become a really amazing fiddle player over the years. I said to Mike, ‘I’ve got this down on the banjo part, you should play fiddle on it.’ And so he is playing fiddle and Nate (Bowles) is playing fiddlesticks, an old Hammons family trick.

Arthur: What brought you from really developing the solo stuff to doing albums like Dr. Ragtime & His Pals (Tequila Sunrise, 2008) and bringing in the accompaniment?

Jack Rose: Well, I always wanted to do that. I mean, starting with Opium Musick I had accompaniment with the tamboura on one track and Glenn Jones on guitar on another. I always liked that stuff, and a lot of my favorite tracks from Fahey were the ones where he had accompaniment. I like guitar duets, I like jug band music, and I like early jazz and string band stuff. I always have.

The earliest Fahey recordings were 78s on the Fonotone label, and there was this one where he is playing with this ad hoc jug band, and that is one of my favorite recordings he has ever done. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s Fahey and he’s playing in a fucking jug band!’ I think there were only like one or two tracks where he ever did stuff like that, and I guess I’ve always been obsessed with that track because you don’t hear a lot of fingerpicking on old-time string band records. You hear a lot of the guys doing the pluck-strum thing, but not a lot of the intricate fingerpicking in a group context.

Another reason [Jack Rose & The Black Twigs] is really close to me is that, we do all these old songs, but we’re not copying anyone. These are our arrangements, but they’re not stupid and shitty like a lot of those crust punk old-time dudes who can’t fuckin’ play and they’re strummin’ around and shit…there is no subtlety to the music. But all those, those are our own arrangements, man. Probably the closest to anyone else’s arrangement is when we’re doing “Sail Away Ladies,” because I got that from a Fahey record. But all the other stuff, those are our own arrangements.

Arthur: As far as a style or a genre or an ancestral heritage, is there a way that you would identify that stuff? Is it blues, bluegrass?

Jack Rose: What we’re doing? No. If you read a lot of blues biographies and stuff like that, one thing that has been brought to light is that, in the 1920s and ‘30s, there were no ‘bluesmen.’ You played what people wanted you to play, and everybody knew all different types of music. Somebody like Robert Johnson, he knew the hits of the day, he knew how to play country and western, he knew jazz and he knew how to play blues. They all did, because you know, they’re on the street playing a song and somebody would say, “Play ‘Three Coins in The Fountain.” Well, they’re not gonna say no.

The only performer that could remotely be considered a ‘bluesman’ would be Skip James. But, that’s because he is so fucked up and weird. But he still knew how to play string band music, and all those guys did, every single one of them. That’s because the notion of a ‘bluesman’ is nothing but a fuckin’ construct by white blues scholars. Even these collectors, as great as they are because they rescued so much American music from the garbage can, they’d say “Well, that’s the purer sounding blues, the stuff from Mississippi,” or whatever. And now we know that’s bullshit.

So on [Jack Rose & The Black Twigs] we had that mindset, that American music, for me, and you’ll see it if you look at my record collection, country and blues and all that shit is together, because it is American music. Like blues, old-time, bluegrass, jazz, jug band, Cajun…it’s all the same continuum. And that’s the kind of mindset that we were all in, that it is all there.

Arthur: Do you feel like that you’ve sort of swung away from the Eastern influence, and you’re more heavily into making strongly American music? Is that a groove you want to keep in?

Jack Rose: Oh yeah, definitely. The one I’m working on now is like that. There will be some more raga-esque stuff on the next record too, we’ll see where that is going to go. There are five tracks already recorded, ready to go.

Arthur: Where do you go from here? How do you feel like you can continue to develop and grow as a musician on the guitar?

Jack Rose: I don’t know. It’s really weird…I always think the last record I make is going to be the last one, but there is always something that comes along that piques my interest. Like the one I am working on right now (Luck in The Valley, due out February, 2010 via Thrill Jockey), I got back from the second session, and I was like, ‘Wow, shit I’ve got a lot of work to do.’ And I’m sort of thinking like, ‘Ah god, I gotta come up with some songs.’ But the other day I came up with this one I think is really great, and when the Twigs get up here I’m going to play it with them, and it is probably one we are going to record.

But yeah, sometimes after every record I finish… with the exception of the one I did with the Twigs, because making that record was one of the most relaxed experiences I’ve ever had.

Arthur: Where was the Jack Rose & The Black Twigs LP recorded?

Jack Rose: It was all recorded in Virginia, at Mike’s house in a shed at the back of his house. We had an 8-track and few mikes that we put in this shed that had amazing reverb, so what you’re hearing on that record is that there was barely any EQ and mixing, it’s all that room sound. There was a little tweaking here and there, but not much. We’d sit down one day, work on the tunes and play them, and then the next day, record them.

Arthur: How many takes did you normally need to get it down?

Jack Rose: It depends. Like on “Goodbye Booze,” that was about 10 takes, but that was because the shed was freezing cold. That was in the winter of 2008. But then in the summer, we did two tracks down there for my new record, and it was hot as hell, and it took about three takes and they were all really good. But I think we took the second takes for both of those tracks.

Arthur: Do you have a favorite from the Jack Rose & The Black Twigs LP?

Jack Rose: Ah man, it’s tough because I like them all. But I’d probably pick “Goodbye Booze” because that is a side of sentimentality you don’t ever see from me. That’s about as sentimental as I’ll ever get. And it is a great song to end a set with, you know. Because, when we did that song, I’d never played anything like that on slide guitar before, and that’s like the most country I’ve ever sounded with the slide. I have to pick one more, and that would probably be “Special Rider” because I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone doing a version of that on the slide guitar. I can play it in regular six-string tuning and it does all these kind of choked octaves and stuff like that. But when I was playing it like that, it just didn’t sound right to me.

But we were able to translate it into slide really well, and that is my arrangement.

You know, I took a lot from the Skip James version, obviously, of course, but that is still my arrangement. It’s mine, you know. Mine. And I’m really proud of it.

Arthur: On Luck in the Valley, are you going solo or are you going for more accompaniment?

Jack Rose: Some of both. I just recorded up at Black Dirt Studios with Nathan [Bowles], Harmonica Dan, Glenn [Jones] and Hans Chew. There was this spontaneous jam that happened between Hans, Nathan and Dan, and I was upstairs with Jason (Meagher) talking. We came down and fucking Hans was banging the shit out of the piano, and Nathan was into it too, and Dan is blowing the shit out of the harmonica and luckily Jason had the mike set up and we recorded it. It was really raw and awesome.

Arthur: What were you looking to do with I Do Play Rock and Roll (Three Lobed, 2008)?

Jack Rose: My friend Cory from Three Lobed got in touch with me to see if I wanted to do something for this series [Oscillation III], and when he called me I was really hung over and I just said yes. A couple days later I realized I agreed to something, and I was like ‘Fuck, man what am I going to do?’

So I went through my archives, and found the stuff for the first side, which I thought was really good… I found this 12-string raga (“Calais to Dover”) that was really good, “Sundog” was recorded out in Western Pennsylvania, and the six-string track (“Cathedral et Chartres”) was originally on A Raga for Peter Walker (Tompkins Square, 2006), so it was basically a live album.

On “Sundogs,” it’s played with a bar, and you rest it on the guitar and scrape it. When you’re playing with a Stevens Bar, that’s what it’s called, and it’s got all these little nicks and scrapes and you just drag it along the strings to create these harmonic frequencies. There is no picking, it’s just that, and that’s all it is. And it is only a very small fret radius. It was recorded at this place near Kutztown, and when I finished, nobody clapped, nobody. They were just looking at me. [laughs]

I think a lot of people were expecting fingerpicking, but they didn’t get any of it. That was the only piece I played.

Arthur: Who named the album?

Jack Rose: I did. It’s after (Mississippi) Fred McDowell: I Do Not Play Rock ‘N’ Roll (1969, Capitol).

Arthur: Do you think “Kensington Blues” is your most poplar song?

Jack Rose: Yeah, I guess. I mean people seem to like it, and I play it at almost every set I do. It feels like a theme song. We did a version of “Kensington” on [Jack Rose & The Black Twigs LP] and I think it turned out really nice. On that song, I’m playing it the same, and (the Twigs) just kind of jump in. But with the exception of “Revolt” and “Kensington Blues,” all those tunes we came up with together. A lot of people have mentioned, and I think it’s cool, that it doesn’t sound like Jack Rose, it sounds like a different unit. On a lot of songs, I really just lay back which is great to do because I get to play these like cool, old-time, more bluesy parts that I don’t get to do that much when I’m playing solo.

Arthur: What are you listening to now, as far as contemporary music?

Jack Rose: Well, I just got the new Sylvester Anfang II double LP (Aurora Borealis), which I think is really great…Glenn Jones’ new record, which hasn’t come out yet, I really like a lot…the new No Neck Blues Band record, and also Cian Nugent’s live record from last year I’ve been listening to a lot. He’s one of my favorite new guitar players. I think the new Why We Love single is good. Birds of Maya: I think they’re the best band in Philly right now. I saw those guys for the first time when they opened for Endless Boogie, and man those guys are just like masters of the blues, it was just fucking great. I was fuckin’ blown away.

Arthur: Have you ever thought about doing something electric, like the new Richard Bishop Freak of Araby project?

Jack Rose: I did a collaboration with D. Charles Speer last summer, and that was fun. It’s not out yet… We did four tunes. I played electric on three tracks and acoustic on one. It was fun, but I don’t feel the need to plug back in. The reason why I did play electric was because I wanted to record live, and that was the only way everyone can hear you is if you play electric.

Arthur: Are you able to completely support yourself through music these days?

Jack Rose: Yeah, it’s been tough this summer because we just bought this house, and I haven’t toured this year yet, so there hasn’t been a lot of money coming in.

Arthur: Tell me about that tiny pressing of 78s you did.

Jack Rose: Well, it was James Twig Harper and Carly Ptak from Baltimore, and they had some roof problems at their warehouse, and I played at the True Vine bookstore. And they said, ‘Hey, mind if we bootleg ya?’ And I was like, yeah sure, why the hell not. They said, ‘We’re gonna bootleg you, and press six 78s out of it. We’ll take three, and we’ll give you three’ Well, three showed up in the mail. I sold the first one when I had to go on tour. I was going out to ArthurFest on the West Coast, and I needed a plane ticket, so I sold the first one online for like $500. The second one I sold for around $200 because I had played it a couple times…

THURSDAY DEC. 10 at YOD. 7:00 doors/food, 8:00 show.
Chris D, of Flesheaters/Slash Magazine/Divine Horsemen fame will be reading from & signing copies of his new book — A Minute to Pray a Second to Die. Dredd Foole will also be playing a set. And I, Mr. Coley, will do a reading to open things up.
glass eye books/yod/new grass, 221 pine street #441, florence ma.
Directions are on our site www.yod.com

Here’s the announce for the Dec 12 event:

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
presents
Saturday, December 12, 2009
at 7pm
A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE
A book release and reading by
CHRIS D.
(w/ Thurston Moore and Byron Coley)
“…one is reminded of Lautreamont and the Victorian diabolism of J.K. Huysman’s LA BAS, Edgar Allan Poe’s American Gothic sensibility, Baudelaire’s celebration of sensory derangement and an obsessive interest in sin, guilt and religious and supernatural iconography…hallucinatory, phantasmagorical…”
-Robert Palmer, THE NEW YORK TIMES

A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die – A Collection of Writings by Chris D. has just been published by New Texture Books.
Chris D. is one of contemporary L.A.’s true rock n’ roll and literary legends, former editor of SLASH Magazine, producer of records by The GUN CLUB, The DREAM SYNDICATE and The MISFITS amongst many others. Leader and chief songwriter of The FLESHEATERS, The DIVINE HORSEMEN and STONE BY STONE, Chris’ musical output has been one of the West’s laciest bludgeons for nigh on a lifetime.

On this occasion he will read from A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die and will sign copies, available for purchase.
Joining Chris this evening will be Thurston Moore, founding member of NYC’s avant rock dystopiasts Sonic Youth and rock-writer/poet/publisher Byron Coley both reading from their own and each others spurious archives.

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
620 greenwich street
new york, new york 10014
212 627 5258

“one for jack”

jack rose was one of those guys
with whom one feels an immediate bond
he wasn’t a physical giant or anything
but he had an immense presence
something, perhaps, more spectral than tangible
which filled a room easily
enveloping you in a kind of bear hug
that could seem either threatening or comforting
depending on the look in jack’s eyes
and on the level of self-assurance
in which you held the quality of yr record collection

jack was an excellent drinking partner
even if you weren’t imbibing yrself
he would see that yr portion was duly taken care of
without so much as a peep of complaint
and he had a set of ears and hands as big as his heart
which was huge as his thirst
once he’d left pelt and started his serious acoustic journey
we’d talk sometimes about guitarists and how they did certain things
i could almost never follow him after a while
but i figured his observations were right, because almost every time i saw jack
his technique would have moved to a whole new level
beyond his models, beyond his friends, almost beyond the bounds of the possible

occasionally we’d see each other for an intense string of days
then not again for a year or so…even more, i guess
but it was always great and easy to hang out with him
we’d make fun of each other’s cooking and record collections
maybe arm wrestle a bit, or at least talk about who was stronger
damn…
jack was just one of those people you knew you were gonna know for a long time
there was an agelessness about him that gave you the sense
he was built to last, like a bull
or a china shop
although what i guess he resembled most
was a bull becoming a china shop
his transformation from drone thug to master primitive
was amazing to behold
and we are so lucky – all of us
to have known him, or at least his music
because that music will always be available
as long as people can still perceive brilliance
and let’s hope that’s forever

so long, jack
tell fahey he’s goddman fatso
i’ll never forget you, man

–byron coley
deerfield ma 12/08/09

photo by dan cohoon

Originally published in Arthur No. 2 (Jan 2003)…

Our Dead Bodies are Like Honey to the Flies
Gabe Soria meets 21-year-old Devendra Banhart

It’s a cold and gray afternoon in Brooklyn. I’m sitting in Devendra Banhart’s fourth floor walk-up apartment and we’re both slightly hungover. The furniture in the apartment is old and scrounged looking, full of ramshackle character. Devendra asks me if I want to hear a new song, something he wrote the evening before. Keep in mind that I’ve known the guy for a grand total of five minutes, and in those five minutes, we’ve already been witnesses to the aftermath of a car accident on a nearby street. It’s a good, we’re-unemployed-so-what-the-hell feeling, and there’s nothing to do but roll with it.

Of course, I say.

He begins to play me a lilting, sexy lullaby, something that sounds as if it could have been written in 1910. It’s gorgeous. Later I’ll learn it was partially inspired by a new girlfriend. But now, once he finishes playing, a little wobbly (there’s that hangover again) but unaffectedly so, Devendra announces that he “sucks” this morning. I assure him that that’s not the case, but he’s unconvinced.

A week later I will see him play for his record release party, and the song formerly known as “Sucks” will be polished to a rough sheen, so beautiful that the air at the show is almost palpable with the audience’s need to shed an appreciative tear. No one needs to be told that they’re witnessing something special. Everybody sips their drinks quietly and the room is hushed. Even the bartender looks sheepish when she has to go through a particularly noisy drink preparation. It’s not an affected pose though, this silence. It’s not the silence of pretentious jazz fans, or avant-garde indie kids who aren’t aware that their emperors of silent cool wear no clothes. This is the silence of a group of people in smiling awe of a genuinely talented and wonderfully strange kid, a young man whose charm is almost effortless, whose skill is obvious and whose soul is on his sleeve.

But that show is still a week in the future. Right now, we’re still slightly fuzzy from our respective previous evenings and are both in need of coffee. “Do you mind if I take a shower before we go? I stink real bad,” Devendra says.

Go right on ahead, I say.

He hops off to his bathroom, and I sit there in his apartment, staring at the walls. Everything I know about Devendra Banhart so far is from listening to his peculiar and beautiful debut record, Oh Me, Oh My The Way The Day Goes By The Sun is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit (on Michael Gira’s Young God Records). At first glance, he seems like a prime candidate to be dismissed as yet another in the long line of “weird white folkies” that cynical rock critics have been setting their watches by from Dylan to Oldham. He fits the racial profile: a kid with a patchy beard who’s studied his blues ‘n country licks. And there have been so many who reek of artifice and calculation. But when the real thing comes along…wow. It’s nutsy bananas. Devendra Banhart and Oh Me Oh My… are, without trying to sound like a super-happy hype machine, the real thing. His is the sound of a skeleton playing his blues on the front porch of a haunted house, banging out curiously hopeful cemetery songs with a celebratory, surreal zeal, singing out with a high, quavering voice that is at once bizarre, unearthly and old, yet completely inviting and totally ingratiating.

And he’s twenty-one, I think as I wait for him to finish getting ready. This kid’s got his entire creative career ahead of him. Jesus.

While I continue to wait, I wander around Devendra’s small room off of the apartment’s living room. He apparently likes picking up playing cards he finds on the sidewalk. A Queen of Spades, the 10 of Hearts and the 2 of Clubs share space among photographs of friends, torn pieces of artwork. The cluttered collage look seems to be a physical reflection of Devendra’s speech and attitude: It’s all a beautiful, soulful mess, full of unhidden love and fastidious, inscrutable detail.

Devendra emerges from the bathroom, scrubbed and ready to go. We hit the street, in search of food and caffeine. He begins reflecting on his as-of-yet ungentrified corner of Brooklyn.

“During the day this neighborhood is all families and kids, but at night… it’s all shadows. Walking shadows.” A group of youths pass by us, dragging baseball bats along the concrete behind themselves in an unconsciously threatening way, underscoring his point.

“The other day I found a piece of a guitar, just a fretboard, and I was carrying that around,” he says as we watch the kids recede into the distance. “I think that would be a great weapon. Just a fretboard. That’s what I’d fight with.”

After this, I just let him go on as we walk. His speech, like his music, is peppered with observational non-sequiturs. He’s one of those great free-associating story tellers that defy conventional structure and logic. Like so: “Why do bees make honey?” he asks. “Are they trying to make something else and honey is byproduct that we dig on? I don’t get it. Is it bee shit? What beautiful shit. That’s the best shit. We don’t… well, we kind of feed flies. Our dead bodies are like honey to the flies.”

Then: “One time I was in Paris, and they have this beer there, this whiskey flavored beer, and it tastes like a skunk’s ass. But I drank so much of this shit that I blacked out and I woke up and I was in an Ethiopian, a Jamaican… something. An all-black calypso bar and I’m dancing, man. This was the only time ever where I blacked-out and ended up somewhere else and I was moving. It was such a bizarre thing to wake up to. To wake up dancing in an all-black calypso bar. That was last summer.”

Or: “The first time I played in New York was like at a Puerto Rican rally, and the band before me were these Puerto Rican dudes, and they had this twelve-year old boy. ‘Here’s our grandson on the mic.’ And he’s like, ‘Mama, yo quiero…’ And I had to follow this, so when I get up, I’m like ‘¡Viva Caracas!” And everybody’s laughing, it was such a weird-ass show. There was this old Japanese dude who was rocking out. It was like a festival. It was bizarre.”

This is more of what I found out about Devendra Banhart on that walk:

Some of Devendra Banhart’s many loves:

-Corn :“Corn is magical. You ever been in a cornfield? It’s magical. I don’t know what it does to me. Sometimes I just want to disappear in a cornfield.”

-Fred Neil: “I couldn’t believe the obituary. It was just a little thing: ‘Fred Neil: Songwriter.’ That made me so sad when he died. I loved Fred Neil so much, so much.”

-Harry Smith: “He made such beautiful things. They make me want to do psychedelics in the park.”

-Churches: “I want to be a church janitor, man. Wouldn’t that be beautiful? I love churches, and just to be able to walk in when there’s no one there and polish things and just live there. I don’t know, there’s just something I like about that. But it sounds cheeseball, huh?”

-Mice: “When I first moved to Brooklyn I got this little mouse for a dollar twenty-five or a dollar seventy-five and his name was Mister Journey. I built him this big cardboard house with velvet and pictures, but he attracted all the rats. I had these huge rats stuck in my room. The walls were so cheap that they were eating through the walls. It made a hole big enough for its head, so I had to get rid of my mouse. I set him free in this forest, and the minute I set him free, ten rat heads popped up. Do rats eat mice? We don’t eat midgets. I just hope they didn’t eat my mouse. He was a quick motherfucker.”

-Dance offs: “I heard about this thing where these two girls were in the subway, and one of them was all like. “Aw, bitch, let’s fight,” and the other one was like, “No: I’m gonna dance you off,” and she starts dancing. A dance off! Wouldn’t it be cool if you could do that in real life? That’d be so cool.”

And some things that he does not love:

- Newspapers: “Anytime I want to get bummed out about my life, I just read the newspaper. It’s so fucked up. These are definitely the dark ages, man. These are definitely the dark ages.”

- Serious misuse of language: “When words like divine are used to describe ice cream, everything is fucked. Sacred words like that… I don’t know man.”

- Papayas: “I can’t stand papaya. My mom used to be the color of papaya. She ate it my whole life and she eats it everyday as much as she can, so she became papaya colored and I don’t know what that is. I love my mom but I hate papaya, man. But oh, I love mango. You can replace your girlfriend with a mango. I tell you, those things are so sexual. They’re just like sex. They’re these beautiful things. At my grandmother’s house in Caracas, if you walk outside there’s this tree and it’s just dripping with mangos, the biggest mangos. And they’re all over the floor, because mangos are everywhere. You can literally just walk out and grab a mango. It’s amazing.”

Devendra begins to explain his personal history to me as we sit down to tamales and cups of coffee in the back of a neighborhood Mexican grocery store/taqueria. He was born to a Venezuelan mother and a Texan father in Houston in 1981. In 1986, his parents split up, and he and his mother and his brother left Texas for his mother’s home country of Venezuela. “My mom moved back to Venezuela with me with I was five,” He pours a little jolt of whiskey into his cup and offers some to me. I shake my head and tell him that my New Year’s resolution for the coming year is to develop a taste for brown liquor. This amuses him, and he shakes his head. Whiskey is a treat to him – he pronounces the word “whiskey” with the same joy a child reserves for the words “candy” and “ice cream.”

“I lived [in Caracas] until I was twelve or thirteen,” he explains, “and then we moved [back to the States]. I never went anywhere, I never visited anywhere. Now I go back there as little as I can. I hate it. It’s just so fucking dangerous and corrupt. It’s like a reverse volcano, you know?”

He laughs, thinking. “I guess that’s what a valley is, huh?”

“There are mountains surrounding Caracas,” he continues, “but the mountains aren’t mountains. They’re just covered in shanties and the city’s in the middle part. No one’s really rich, but there’s no sense of pride in being working class or poor. Everybody’s just trying to fuck everybody else. It’s a really dangerous place. At eight o’clock, the streets just empty. I know people whose kids have been killed for wearing Air Jordans. They don’t even take ‘em and tell you to run. They’ll just shoot you and take it. It’s so fucked up.”

But when he hit his teens, his mother decided to leave Caracas behind and headed to California, settling in a small canyon community somewhere above Santa Monica. “It was beautiful, so beautiful. Then I went to college in San Francisco. I went to art school for interdisciplinary studies, like sculpture and film and all that, but I was like fuck, I just want to go home and play songs. I was working and studying everything except for what I love, which is music, so I dropped out. Then I just started playing in San Francisco. Then I went to L.A. I moved to New York five months ago. I came from L.A. I hate that place. It fucking sucks. I had to drive and I’d be driving drunk. You have to. It’s so flat and nothing.”

“I’m 21. I’m embarrassed. I feel like a baby, you know? I guess I’m nostalgic for eight. I feel like I remember too much already, but I don’t remember anything.” Devendra shakes his head, looks up at me… and apologizes. “I’m sorry if I fucking suck at this interview. I feel like a dork, man. I feel totally fucking stupid. This is only the second interview I’ve done.”

I assure him that he’s doing just fine, but by this time, we’ve finished our meals and we decide that that’s the end of the interview. It’s early evening now in Brooklyn, and we decide to walk to a neighborhood bar and have a few drinks. All the way there, we sing songs by the Monkees, make up fake band names and song titles and toast the fucked up beauty of the world.

“I could use some flip-flops”
What if Godzilla was one of us? A slightly testy King of Monsters reflects on his long career in this exclusive interview with Dave Tompkins

Known for his bad sense of direction, Godzilla “King of the Monsters” was recently spotted lumbering around Long Island, insisting to bewildered local officials that he was on “Monster Island” and asking where the hell was Rodan and in general making a big mess. Apparently, the Kaji Eigu legend hadn’t been notified that local mecha-faced rapper MF Doom had transferred the title of God’s former stomping ground to a New York suburb known for its tasteful lawn furniture, cracked toenail polish and a crew of rappers called “the Monster Island Czars.” Confused but flattered, Godzilla was in good spirits when Arthur correspondent Dave Tompkins found him resting comfortably in an orange floral lounger, popping beta capsules in Doom’s backyard. After an unprecedented 50 years in the monster game, Godzilla is happy to finally retire—though he’d still suit-up at a moment’s roar. Under a bruised sky, the bomb-born icon reflected on his career, quoted Public Enemy and marveled at how he nearly had his ass whooped by a moth…

ARTHUR: Godziller, wake up.

Godzilla: I dreamt I was a 400-foot tall black guy having sex with a volcano.

ARTHUR: That was the Dave Chappelle Show…

Godzilla: He was Blackzilla and the volcano was a very active Mount Fuji. My name is everywhere… from Yankees pitchers to Parliament bass players. I can’t be mad at that.

ARTHUR: Paul Hogan spoofed you too.

Godzilla: An atomic drunk Australian in flip-flops, crumpling Foster cans…

ARTHUR: Booming burps upon the people—

Godzilla: If you’re that large you don’t burp, you eructate.

ARTHUR: If you wear flip-flops, you burp.

Godzilla: I could use some flip-flops. I’ve been walking all over towns for half a century and my gods are barking.

ARTHUR: The same gods that squashed Bambi in Godzilla Vs Bambi.

Godzilla: Whambi. And just like that, I’m wearing fawn flops.

ARTHUR: But that didn’t really happen.

Godzilla: Of course not, it was animated.

ARTHUR: Have the documentaries been accurate?

Godzilla: Not really. That heap of bones at the end of the first one Inoshiro Honda did in 1954 wasn’t me. And if Dr Serizawa deoxidized the ocean, we’d be shit out of fish. At least he immolated himself so his invention couldn’t be inflicted on humans. Nice touch. Japanese version only.

ARTHUR: The US version woke you with a Hydrogen bomb instead of the A-bomb.

Godzilla: The Americans splice in Perry Mason and the Japanese splice ‘em out. Japanese version wasn’t intended to be anti-American, just anti-nuclear. What destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki merely got me out of bed. Something’s really wrong with that. I’m a constant reminder of one of history’s darkest moments. Talk about guilt. I have a military industrial god complex. It’s confusing. I could be defending Tokyo and the next thing I know they’re popping peashooters. Bullets sting like sweat bees and my feelings get hurt. Then I find it was the Americans who initiated the atomic testing. They woke me up. Like that Pharoah Monche song that says “Get the fuck up!”

ARTHUR: Right, “Simon Says,” the one that sampled your theme music.

Godzilla: Monsters would kill for a horn section like that. That’s Akira Ifukube. Dun-dun-dun-dun! How could I not tromp Tokyo?

ARTHUR: And The Roar. Sounds like two rusty frigates slow dancing.

Godzilla: Again, Ifukube. Rubbing a resin-coated leather glove against a contra-bass. It’s on the Godzilla Alarm clock.

ARTHUR: So you woke up and started swinging at Japan.

Godzilla: Japan was convenient. It was instinctive and I was groggy. Grogzilla. Can you be instinctive and groggy?

ARTHUR: A groggy man’s instinct is to not look where he’s walking.

Godzilla: See? And they woke me up.

ARTHUR: To meet your metaphor.

Godzilla: To mash my makers.

ARTHUR: They made you a star.

Godzilla: Loved, feared, merchandised. Maybe I helped Japan economically avenge itself. But they didn’t need me to crush GM. There’s a Nissan named after me now, 1000 BHP. I’ll step on it. And where do you watch me crush Tokyo? On your Sony Trinitron.

ARTHUR: Japan is very forgiving of you.

Godzilla: I’ll never be able to set foot in some towns again.

ARTHUR: Like the island of Odo?

Godzilla: (Snort) I feel bad about that. I had no idea where I was. My head was in a atomic fungus cloud. I was looking for the island from Attack Of The Mushroom People. Imagine taking a global economic power while on toadstools. That would’ve really tinkered my perspective.

ARTHUR: Now kids can be giants and stomp their Godzilla models.

Godzilla: The tables turn.

ARTHUR: Suckers burn to learn.

Godzilla: They can’t disable the power of my fable.

ARTHUR: The Godzilla legend lives on eBay and DVD.

Godzilla: Use your Godzilla Calculator to add up all the damage. Estimated 6 trillion yen just in Godzilla 1985 alone.

ARTHUR: Too bad the movie didn’t rake in—

Godzilla: Watch it!

ARTHUR: I haven’t…

Godzilla: Next question.

ARTHUR: You’ve been lionized by the very culture you destroy.

Godzilla: I’m king of the beasts. At least I’ve defended the world from Ghidra– the three headed garden hose gone wild.

ARTHUR: And Monster Zero.

Godzilla: Who’s got zilch on me.

ARTHUR: Godzilla’s got jokes for the folks.

Godzilla: You’ve got to when the United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Center is funding all this Mecha-mitsubullshit. And I get blamed for every oversized space cricket that craps in a crater. I wasn’t the one who defrosted that giant grasshopper in the arctic.

ARTHUR: That was a mantis.

Godzilla: That’s the thing—

ARTHUR: No, mantis—

Godzilla: No the thing is—

ARTHUR: Mothra!

Godzilla: The Godzilla Vs The Thing thing?

ARTHUR: That’s the Thing before the Thing.

Godzilla: Before the winged Thing.

ARTHUR: Ding!

Godzilla: James Arness was the first Thing…

ARTHUR: That’s my Thing—

Godzilla: The Thing From Another World.

ARTHUR: …thawed from a block of ice—

Godzilla: Like the giant locust. One man’s plague of bad movies is another’s childhood. Every A-Bomb boob in a monkey suit is chin-checking for me.

ARTHUR: You still talk to Kong?

Godzilla: Sometimes. We’re cool with each other. It’s kind of like professional wrestling. Minus the bad hair and fake moves. But I don’t think Kong should get back in the ring. Reminds me of when OJ played for the 49ers with his shot-up knees. Kong and I’ve had great seasons but—my knees are in a bad interarticular space right now. Low on elastoviscosity.

ARTHUR: Kong kicked your tail huh?

Godzilla: Kong grabbed my tail and threw me across Tokyo.

ARTHUR: Helicopter spin!

Godzilla: Sometimes it doesn’t pay to have a tail.

ARTHUR: Kong doesn’t have a tail.

Godzilla: Kong is paid.

ARTHUR: So it ended in a draw.

Godzilla: It ended in the ocean.

ARTHUR: And Kong won.

Godzilla: If you buy the American version.

ARTHUR: In the Japanese version, Kong surfaces in the water but we hear you roar.

Godzilla: Hear me roar!

ARTHUR: Did Kong roar?

Godzilla: Kong didn’t have the pipes.

ARTHUR: What started the beef between you and Kong anyway?

Godzilla: It started when Kong clobbered that Tyrannosaurus at Skull Island back in ‘33. That Rex was my prototype, minus the isotopes. Kong was salty that I was labeled “King of the Monsters” without being tested.

ARTHUR: But you were atomically tested.

Godzilla: Still, Kong wasn’t trying to share his crown when he thought he could whoop Leroy Brown’s junkyard dog’s ass.

ARTHUR: So it was a title thing. Tohos before bros.

Godzilla: Also, I’m Gojira—Japanese for gorilla. So I’m Gorilla, King of the Monsters. That’s funny. That really enriches my uranium. What a Donkey Kong dumbass. Actually I’m supposed to be this monkey whale combo.

ARTHUR: And you don’t see Orca bitching about that.

Godzilla: Because Orca’s dead.

ARTHUR: My bad.

Godzilla: So, you have Kong, Malay god of Skull Island, billed against Me, the Manhattan Projectile Ray Leonard. Still, Kong taught me a lot. That flying drop-kick I used on Megalon? All Kong. Nothing mamby Bambi about that. And Kong learned it from Willis O’ Brien, the great stop motion animator. In addition to being the genius who mentored Ray Harryhausen, Obie liked boxing and billed Kong as this pugilist.

ARTHUR: Who had a problem with dinosaurs.

Godzilla: Maybe it was a mammal-reptile thing. I always resented being tagged a mutant dinosaur. Dinosaurs are stigmatized as old folks, broken down bulldozers and purple pills.. It got too cute didn’t it? Gamera…the Flying Turtle. Mothra and the Peanuts Sisters.

ARTHUR: Mothra was female, good-natured and wasn’t played by a guy in a rubber suit.

Godzilla: It’s beHEmoth, not beSHEmoth.

ARTHUR: Dude, it’s not 1954 any more.

Godzilla: But fighting a moth?!?

ARTHUR: Her larva silked you up and you fell off.

Godzilla: I fell off a cliff. Talk about bad threads…. I was impressed with Mothra as a caterpillar–in a Monster That Challenged the World kind of way. But they should’ve hired the amazing Mooncalf from First Men in the Moon. Now there’s a caterpillar!

ARTHUR: Yeah Mothra never really scared me. Neither did Kong for that matter.

Godzilla: Don’t let Kong hear you say that. Monsters with good resumes are chomping for a comeback. Remember how Gorgo took London. The Ymir took Rome. Reptilicus took Stockholm.

ARTHUR: Sweden had a monster problem?

Godzilla: Reach out of the darkness, son. Who didn’t have a monster problem back than? The atom ants of Arizona? The big-ass rabbits in New Mexico?

ARTHUR: I’m surprised the gnat wasn’t supersized.

Godzilla: Gnatmare on Elm Street, Gnat of the Hunter, The Gnat That Saved Pittsburgh. Then there’s the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms! The Rhedosaurus.

ARTHUR: They say he died like an opera singer when he got electrocuted by that roller coaster.

Godzilla: Yeah, that was sad. At least he took his lonely monster blues out on Manhattan. The Muppets had an easier time taking Manhattan. Or Gork.

ARTHUR: Gork?

Godzilla: Gork Eats New York And Gets A Thank You Note From President Ford.

ARTHUR: But Fred G. Sanford fabricated that one.

Godzilla: Another example of my influence.

ARTHUR: Do you have credibility issues because you’ve always been played by a guy in a rubber suit?

Godzilla: I’ve got incrediblity, son. I never had the discipline for stop-motion animation. I got into modeling for the glue. And CGI may be fancy but the rubber “suitimation” get-up has the charm. I’m analog like Yog.

ARTHUR: You needed more than a rubber suit for Hedora, the smog monster.

Godzilla: Here comes the sludge! That guy was a mess, a real chudsucker. How do you shog a 400 foot industrial wasteoid who can turn into a Frisbee that spits acidic mud?

ARTHUR: Mule Team Borax?

Godzilla: Hedorah came from tadpoles hitching a ride on a contaminated meteor. This was ‘71.. just after the Chisso Corporation finally started compensating victims for dumping nearly 70 tons of Mercury acetaldehyde in the Minamata Bay—especially during WW2. While Chisso’s plastic production was booming, they were poisoning people and fish. Not that I’m Mr. Save The Whales. I breathe radiation for crying out loud!

ARTHUR: What are your concerns raising a son in a world that’s gone in the ecological shitter?

Godzilla: Crappy movies, SARS and the fact that a lot of warheads aren’t screwed on too tight. We all might need rubber suits soon. Thawing giant grasshoppers is one thing. But unfreezing nuclear weapons program… I guess no one listened to me.

ARTHUR: Or Bulgasari.

Godzilla: “The North Korean Godzilla.” A leftwing revolutionary DMZilla from 1985–but backed by Kim Sung-II. He gave the director (Shinn Sang-okk) suggestions on how Bulgasari should look. His name means “starfish” so dude needed help. They imported my personal image consultants from Japan and monstered him up.

ARTHUR: Bulgasari was the people’s monster with a strong anti-nuclear stance.

Godzilla: The government wanted to convert confiscated farm tools into weapons—to stomp a peasant revolution. But Bulgasari ate all the metal. And Kim Sung-II endorsed this! And now his son antes his arsenal while his people starve. Talk about irony.

ARTHUR: While you were flossing your teeth with Tokyo’s bullet train.

Godzilla: (Sigh) Talk about stupidity.

ARTHUR: Talk about Man.

Godzilla: Nukes, biohazards, genetic engineering—how does that old song go? The message is the monster. You know it’s time to hang up the contrabass when they’re using your own DNA against you.

ARTHUR: Godzilla Cells! Spliced with a rose bush haunted by a mad scientists’ dead daughter and…

Godzilla: Voila! “Bioallante!” A plant named after an enviro-friendly Cadillac.

ARTHUR: Greenhouse in effect! Your biggest opponent.

Godzilla: The greenest but not the meanest.

ARTHUR: Speaking of asexuality, there’ve been questions about gender ambiguity. Does your son sometimes feel like a motherless child?

Godzilla: Hmph.

ARTHUR: Struck a nerve?

Godzilla: More like a plothole.

ARTHUR: Your son helped slay Ghidra in Destroy All Monsters. That must be a special memory.

Godzilla: But Monster Island wasn’t too happening. It wasn’t like we were dancing around singing “I Scrumble For Ya.” You know that movie was also called Godzilla’s Electric Battle Masterpiece. Destroy All Monsters is a cultural battle cry. Take a look around. I’m the least of your worries. Like the Twilight Zone guy with the eyebrows once said: “The monsters are on Maple Syrup.”

ARTHUR: That’s Maple Street.

Godzilla: That’s splat. Flat as a Bambi pancake.

ARTHUR: Please stop.

Godzilla: Did you just call me Godziller?

Longtime Arthur music reviewers C and D, as depicted by Pete Toms

This C & D session was originally published in Arthur No. 31 (September 2008)…

C & D
Two confirmed schmucks grapple with the big issues.

C: Our work continues.
D: Or at least our drinking does. Ahahaha.
C: [frowns George Will-style] Let the record show that whatever we say from this point forward about any of these records that the Arthur staff have so carefully assembled will invariably be colored by what we’ve just been listening to: Born to Be with You by Dion, 1975, produced by Phil Spector, downloaded off the Heat Warps blog. We are basking in its rather substantial afterglow.
D: A stone gem beaut of an album…which, by the way, has never been released in America! What is wrong with you people?
C: Have some pity on a country in decline. And you full well know it’s (apparently) Mr. Spector himself that kept the record from ever being released here. But keeping to the point: the readers should know that not only did we just listen to it, we just listened to it three times in a row. We are smitten by this version of “(He’s Got) The Whole World In His Hands,” which just sorta echoes all over creation in a melancholy way…
D: [muses] It is strange to feel so instantly nostalgic for a record you’ve never heard. And yet I have been having that distinct feeling for the last hour and 25 minutes as we have been watching the sun go down over the Manhattan skyline while listening to the wonderful, stirring, heartfelt, heretofore unheard-by-these-ears work of the incomporable team of Mr. Dion and Mr. Spector. I guess it’s what they call that old deja voodoo, eh?
C: Ha, yes I suppose they do…

FELA! A New Musical
at 37 Arts in New York City
Book by Jim Lewis & Bill T. Jones
D: So you went to a musical?
C: Yes, I did.
D: How did you like it? Did you laugh? Did you CRY?
C: From the first minute when the actor playing Fela sauntered by, two rows in front of me, on the way to the stage in his pink jumpsuit, led by his dancer/singer/wives, as Antibalas played the opening to “Everybody Scatter,” I was weeping openly.
D: I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It is said that dancing by yourself in your living room to Fela Kuti music is the only known cure for depression.
C: If it is that good, imagine what it must be like if you dance with others to it in public! The collective righteous joy is unbelievable. This thing broke me out of my post-David Foster Wallace suicide negative power zone.
D: So it was a full-on simulation?
C: Well… It’s not simply a tribute/costume concert, it’s an extremely brilliant musical-fueled biography of the man himself. The piece is two hours, 40 minutes and is set inside Fela’s club in Lagos, the Shrine. It’s 1976, I think, and he is onstage performing, and preparing to leave Nigeria. He’s had it with the ongoing corruption and idiocy in Nigeria. The government has arrested him, the military has stormed his commune, beaten and raped his wives and thrown his mother out of a second story window, leading to her eventual death. So he’s in and out of songs and monologues, reviewing his life to that point, smoking his big marijuana joints, laughing and crying and leading this band and this dance troupe, putting on this two-tier Afrobeat performance of… It’s spellbinding, just awesome, and I gotta say… As somebody who’s watched every second of available Fela Kuti footage out there, I thought I’d understood, as best I was gonna be able to understand in 2008, the man and the music. Well, I was totally wrong.
D: Wouldn’t be the first time!
C: Quiet. It’s one thing to see the pictures, to see the video, but to actually BE there, with the whole force of the music and the costumes and the VIBE in your face, at full volume, done with such love and care and attention to detail, with so much thought put into it… I don’t really understand how they did it, especially the guy who plays Fela, this brilliant actor named Sahr Ngaujah. Who inhabits him, completely, scarily. It’s enough to make you weep.
D: Which you did.
C: I should report that there is one major inaccuracy: the size of Fela’s rolled joints of Igbo, here it’s like a cigar but really they were more like torches.
D: Like a baby’s arm?
C: More like a bodybuilder’s.
D: That’s something they can fix when it goes to Broadway.
C: All the shit Fela talked about, it’s still true. More true. Bankers, government officials, colonial-minded lackeys, cowards, fools. Vampire Weekend? If only. It’s been a Vampire Millennium. And I can’t think of an artist alive today with the balls, and the trickster humor, and the anger, and the appetite for pleasure, and the gift for performance, and the raw charisma, the undeniable conviction, that he had. Did you know how musicians and other artists are not allowed to express views of the world in America? And if they break the rule, it’s cause for alarm and outrage and Drudge-shaming and record-banning and harassment and slandering and worse from the well-funded right-wing authoritarians. Don’t be political at the Oscars! Now is not the time! Nor at the Emmys. Oprah shouldn’t endorse! And so on. Because apparently they sometimes confuse the message from the government and break the entertainment moment that the viewer was anticipating, and indeed had every right to expect, given their school training and subsequent mediated experiences. The timing of Fela! is impeccable. He couldn’t believe the public would fall for this shit that the people in power were pulling.
D: But we do.
C: Over and over again.

HACIENDA
Loud Is the Night
Alive/Natural Sound Bomp

D: Well, another oldie but goodie. Or oldie but moldie as they used to say.
C: Actually, this is new.
D: You say that every issue.
C: Well, it happens to be true sometimes.
D: Let me see this. [grabs cd sleeve] Aha! I should have known by these golden tones—it’s another Dan Auerbach production.
C: He of the Black Keys.
D: Yes, I know. The bearded bandana-wearing one.
C: I’m talking to them, you idiot.
D: Who?
C: The readers.
D: What readers? [laughter]
C: Yeah well… So, Hacienda are from that hot gateway to the great southwest, San Antonio, Tejas. Three brothers with a last name of Villanueva plus a cousin with the last name Schwebel.
D: [Repeating lyrics of “Useless and Tired”] “Never want to work in the day/no reason for it any way/any troubles I sleep em away.” I resemble that remark, as they used to say.
C: Who is this “they” that you keep referring to?
D: [Repeats lyric and melody] What is that? “When you’re awake you’re out of your head”?
C: Ah! Nice nod to Los Beatles.
D: [sips beer] This is very sweet, warm music, but there’s something else. Like that moment during summer when you realize autumn is around the corner.
C: Beauty tinged with mortality. But not death-haunted! It’s like when you forgot to eat your ice cream cone fast enough and now it’s melting and you make a move. The good times were right there, but time kept on slipping…
D: …into the few-chah!

GANG GANG DANCE
Saint Dymphna
The Social Registry

D: I believe this is a concept album but I am unsure what the concept is.
C: Internet says: “Saint Dymphna is traditionally held to be the daughter of a pagan Irish chief and his Christian wife in the 7th century.”
D: So she is the saint of miscegenation! Cross-fertilization! Pairing of native and invasive species!
C: But Dymphna ends up being beheaded by her would-be incest-minded widow pagan father.
D: Oh.
C: “Her feast day is May 15 and she is the patron saint of those who suffer from mental illnesses and nervous system disorders, epileptics, mental health professionals, happy families, incest victims, and runaways.” Well, there you go. The fact that St. Dymphna’s is also a the name of a bar on St. Marks Place is simply a bonus. Would that we were there, indulging in libations.
D: What I hear is a post-Animal Collective/Black Dice loop daze with zero interest in melody.
C: A rather reductionist assertion, sir. She’s singing but I can’t understand a word she’s saying. And admittedly I can’t find the rhythm either. And yet I must admit that I kind of dig it.
D: Perhaps it is your infamous fondness for weird Greek mystic chicks?
C: Silence in the lower ranks! Once I saw this Gang Gang Dance perform at the Hollywood Bowl. It was like Euripedes interpreted by New York Eye And Ear Control. Firmly in the recombinant tradition of Adrian Sherwood, Jon Hassell, Bill Laswell…
D: “Inner Pace” is like advanced Casio atomic dub, but I can’t find something to grab onto. My fingers itch. There’s no groove, no bassline to lay back in. They do everything I don’t want a group to do!
C: Perhaps we should discuss your unrealistic expectations.
D: Okay, “House Jam”—this is the jam.
C: Kate Bush’s goat-song!
D: The whole album should sound like this. The rest is just clippings and trimmings. Not that I have anything against trimmings and clippings.
D: Yet I take it you prefer more jams.

KASAI ALL-STARS
in the 7th moon, the chief turned into a swimming fish and ate the head of his enemy by magic
Crammed Discs US / Amazon

C: This is third in the “congrotronics” series of albums by various contemporary African artists who utilize..um…
D: ‘tronics.
C: It says “Kasai Allstars draw their songs from festive and ritual music played in the bush before being banned by the Europeans, who considered the highly erotic dances and the pagan trance ceremonies as “satanic.” Based in Kinshasa, DR Congo—
D: That’s like the Compton of Africa!
C: “—the Kasai Allstars collective revolves around 25 musicians originating from five different ethnic groups, each with their own language and musical tradition.”
D: And judging from the title, I believe this is a concept album.
C: Great title. It’s like a caption to a comic book panel.This sounds like the music Jack Kirby’s “Forever People” would’ve made, up in their electronic trees: gamelan thmb piano chantdown on babylontronix with classic eternal North African guitar circles. This is what I thought psy-trance would sound like from the way everybody went on and on about it. What they really meant was advertising agency music.
D: They’re on some serious ritual witchdoctor shit. Like a tribal Funkadelic.
C: Trans-ethnic, five traditions…. I wonder who’s going to protest here regarding non-native species invasion?
D: While they argue about that, the real predators circle.
C: I want to know more. they’re so elaborately done up, it’s beautiful.
D: Other bands draw their record covers. these guys draw themselves! African glam!
C: Is the stuff traditional or new fashion or—remember that book that Alia was talking about, Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa (Hans Silvester, Thames & Hudson)….? You know with some bands, the more I know about them, the less I want to know. But these guys? Gimmie.
D: “Mbua-A-Matumba” is the jam to beat.
C: You could play this right next to Panda Bear.
D: Those guys should collaborate.
C: Can you imagine AFRIKA COLLECTIVE???

NATACHA ATLAS & THE MAZEEKA ENSEMBLE
Ana Hina
World Village/Harmonia Mundi/Amazon

C: Talk about erotic. I believe you Europeans would probably outlaw this too.
D: [ignoring the jibe] At last: printed lyrics!
C: Ha, like you’re gonna sing along.
D: [ignores]
C: Just relax! You always need to know what you’re listening to, what kind of music it’s called, how it’s regarded, what you can expect to hear.
D: Yes, yes, yes… I am cursed with the need to know more.
C: Well, I feel the need to sit on a rug. Recline on the pillows. Have some red grapes.
Pass the pipe.
D: I am the pipe-passer.
C: I suspect this is a concept album.
D: [reading from sleeve] “…East and west musical collision for the Natacha Atlas acoustic project.”
C: Calling St. Dymphna!
D: They do a take on Nina Simone’s “Black is the Color,” which it says here is based on a Scottish folk song!
C: “Hayati Inta Reprise (Hayatak Ana)” sounds more like Stevie Wonder “Higher Ground.” This is Arabic gypsy cabaret music. And “El Asil” is Egyptian swing. I wish an interzone nightclub existed where I could hear this all the time…

EL GUINCHO
Alegranza
XL Recordings/Beggars

C: Is “El Guincho” Panda Bear in Spanish?
D: They say he comes from the Canary Islands.
C: I say he comes from… Chants and loops gradually getting guitars layered… Steel drums. South American soccer hooligans. M.I.A. and Diplo are the gateway for el guincho. But.. [listening to “Antillas”] Wait, is the CD stuck?
D: I don’t hear enough melody. The hooks are too simple.
C: We should mention that we are listening to this on stereo when perhaps it is best appreciated on los headphones… “Cuando Maravilla Fui” brings on the bhangra. This may be Le Jam.
D: El Jammo.
C: Thee Big Jam.
D: One jam, large please. With some dub on the side.
C: “Buenos Matrimonios Ahi Fuere” is awesome. Eternal schoolyard kid chants.
D: You can’t lose when you sample schoolkids, everybody knows that.
C: The Canary Islands, eh? I look to the South for hope these days. USA and Europe are descending into dumbness on a mass scale. They’ve completely crushed the left and the indigenous. Only in the South is there anything like successful uprising. Venezuela, Brazil, Chiapas, Bolivia…!
D: Forget the Third Way! Bring on the Fourth World.

MEGAPUSS
Surfing
Vapor/Amazon

C: This is a side project recording by Devendra Banhart and the guy from Priestbird—
D: The new Pink Floyd! But nobody realized it…
C:—who drums in his band. That guy can write songs, but I don’t know about his bands’ names. Tarantula A.D.? Priestbird? Megapuss?
D: There is a time and place, and yes name, for everything. And right now I am saying to you this album, which features at least 12 novelty hits by Dr. Demento Banhart and Sir Priestbird, is the exact reason why I for one am going to enjoy the Forthcoming Depression. Surfing is not my idea of a good time. I am not an advocate of voluntary physical endangerment. I am, however, happy to watch from the safety of my beach chair.
C: With a Jimmy Buffett tape on no doubt. I just want to say that if it’s going to be about goofballing and bad clothes, can we switch back from Jimmy Buffett and Les Claypool and the truly unctious Infected Mushroom to, oh, how ’bout Frank Zappa and the Fugs? Thank you. This is good stuff: some more of those great upbeat afrobeat/reggae/tropicalia party jams that Devendra’s been pumping out in the last few years that sound so deep in the pocket live, I think this is the first time he’s caught that on record. And some true goofery. And hey hang on, there’s some spooky stuff on here at the end.
D: A dark undertow?
C: Watch out for riptides while Surfing.
D: And jellyfish. And tar spots on your back.
C: Some serious haunted canyons vibes on this record, I’m serious. Loooook out, lovers…
D: Tell me there is not a band that is called Infected Mushroom. That can’t be true.

LITTLE JOY
(no title)
Rough Trade/Amazon

D: [listening to “The Next Time Around”] It’s the Strokes’ beach party album!
C: Ha! Actually this is a new band called Little Joy, named after Joe McGraw’s spot in Echo Park. It’s the Strokes’ drummer Fabrizio Moretti, also on guitar here, and Rodrigo Amarante, a beardo from Brazil who’s been playing with Devendra lately, on vocals and the guitar, and guitarist/composer/arranger/Devendra associate/man-of-hair Noah Georgeson, producing.
D: And introducing the mysterious Binki Shapiro, right here on the lady reggae vocals.
C: Gotta admit I didn’t see this one coming from down the coast.
D: It sailed right in when we were watching the surfers.
C: Rodrigo has such a great voice. But on a track like this one [“Keep Me In Mind”], it must be recognized that the similarity to Mr. Casablanca is uncanny, but Rodrigo has a bit more color, more tenderness. What a great pop song. I’d listen to this on a bistro on a beach. Heck I’d go to a beach to listen to this. I would apply super-SPF 300 cream to listen to this. Every song is good! And there are actual ballads.
D: Samba. Bossa nova. And what do they call it?
C: MPB! Música Popular Brasileira.
D: But the question remains, who is this “Binki Shapiro”? That’s suspicious nametaking there, that one. Reminds me of all those pseudonyms on the old Desert Sessions records…
C: [listening to “Play the Part”] Perhaps I am going overboard here, but this—and “Evaporar”—is reminding me of modern Jobim, my amigo. But I am not an expert.
D: [lost in space] And Jobim and Jim Beam are secret brothers…
C: [listening to “Don’t Watch Me Dancing”] The Doors…! Wow. 11 songs, 30 minutes. I think we can issue a joint statement, or a communique as we said in the old days, stipulating this as darkhorse album-of-the-year contender. First class work, gentlemen.
D: And that includes you, Binki Shapiro!

MERCURY REV
Snowflake Midnight
YepRoc

C: You know when you make a wrong turn and then instead of correcting it, you make another wrong turn which is even worse because this time you don’t even realize a mistake has been made and you go 90 miles in the complete wrong direction?
D: Oh come on, it’s not that awful… [reads from promotional notes] Did you know that on this record Mercury Rev experimented “with laser harps, ad hoc computer programs and random note generators?”
C: What? To mathematically determine that this was the worst possible music they were capable of? To quote Greil Marcus, What is this shit? Former members of this band have grounds for a class action suit based on dereliction of aesthetic duty. And I volunteer to be their expert witness!
D: Whew! Beware the wrath of the betrayed longtime fan!

DESOLATION WILDERNESS
White Light Strobing
K Records

C: Ah, bliss. Pure balm from these young dudes out of Olympia.
D: Is this what they called “shoegaze” in the olden times?
C: I suppose. But it’s more like that one little moment in time—’88-‘90???—when there were all these modest late-afternoon psychedelic folk-rock guitars-and-organ-and-reverbed vocals bands floating and swooshing around… the Rain Parade, the Cocteau Twins, Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3, ultra vivid scene, then Mazzy Star, Pale Saints… Ah, “college rock.” More recently, I would say BEACHWOOD SPARKS.
D: That’s right. I am getting a very benevolent salvia essence inmpression from this.
C: “Come Over In Your Silver Car” is song title of the month. “Turquoise and Gold,” “Horizon Star”…these are like Brightblack Morning Light song titles.
D: White Light Strobing, eh? [Listening to “Forget Everything”]: I feel like I’m watching Stan Brakhage, even though my eyes are closed…

GROUPER
I’m Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
Type/Amazon

C: Speaking of sleeping… Here’s the new album by the lady who calls herself Grouper, which she recorded in her sleep. She’s upstairs from Beach House, mixed by Belong into into-the-red, into-the-fog reverb absinthia. Which means it sounds like home demos for a new My Bloody Valentine album. You know what I’m saying.
D: Not really, but um… Where’s a fog machine when we need it???
C: Funny you should mention that. Ladies and gentlemen…

C: [Pushes button on remote control; fog shoots out from behind chair.] The Antari Alpha F-80Z!
D: Exxxxxxxxcellent! So, um, what year is this fog?

MATT BALDWIN
Paths of Ignition
American Dust

C: About five minutes into the lead-off track “Weissensee,” which is a Neu chestnut Rother/Dinger cover, it’s like Randy Holden crashing into an ashram where Sandy Bull was having a hip jam session.
D: That’s some serious stormbrewing guitar! Matt Baldwin! Who is this lightning bringer.
C: I think it’s the first record from the dude. He’s Bay Area and he’s over six feet tall.
D: Clearly this is a keeper. In fact [D runs to CD player]—I’m confiscating this CD for personal use.
C: It figures. Ah well. We should tell the people out that that there’s four more songs, including one entitled “Eulogy and Dark,” [in Jim Sjveda voice] which I am guessing is some sort of homage to Funkadelic’s classic “Eulogy and Light” off Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow. Talk about a song recorded at the edge of sonic legibility—a prayer over backwards tape. 38 years on and people are still responding to that album… You know why people are still responding to records from 38 tears ago? Cuz the music was so much better then. The vibe was COMPLETE. Look on the CD tray for “Free Your Mind”—they reprint the Best Selling Soul LP’s from Billboard Magazine for week ending December 12, 1970…
D: [reading chart] “1. Third Album by Jackson 5 2. Sly & the Family Stone’s Greatest Hits 3. Curtis by Curtis Mayfield 4. To Be Continued by Isaac Hayes 5. Abraxas by Santana 6. Sex Machine by James Brown 7. Temptations Greatest Hits Volume 2 8. Still Waters Run Deep by Four Tops 9. Chapter Two by Roberta Flack 10. Everything Is Everything by Diana Ross 11. Free Your Mind by Funkadelic 12. Indianola-Mississippi by BB King 13. Spirit in the Dark by Aretha Franklin 14. We Got to Live Together by Buddy Miles 15. The Last Poets 16. Pocketful of Miracles by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles 17. New Ways But Love Stays by the Supremes 18. In Session by Chairmen of the Board 19. Signed, Sealed, Delivered by Stevie Wonder 20. The Isaac Hayes Movement 21. Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time) by Delfonics 22. I Am My Brother’s Keeper by Jimmy & David Ruffin 23. Booker T & the MG’s Greatest Hits 24. Workin Together by Ike & Tina Turner 25. Burning by Esther Phillips 26. I (Who Have Nothing) by Tom Jones 29. Shirley Bassey is Really “Something” 31. Led Zeppelin III 37. Grand Funk Live 39. Cosmo’s Factory by Creedence Clearwater Revival.” Whew.
C: Well, there it is. All civilizations have high points, some so high that they reverberate for the rest of the civilization’s life, however long that may be. It’s shadow of the colossi, dude.

JONAS REINHARDT
(no title)
Kranky/Brainwashed

D: Electromental …pardon me, electonic instrumentals… [coughing]
C: Sorry about the fog.
D: It’s okay. I’ll survive. Is this the new Klaus Schulze???? Or early Tangerine Dream
C: It’s like he’s got the same drum machine and keyboard. Serious vintage gear. Recorded at “The Equinox.”
D: Probably an Antari in there somewhere!
C: Have you seen the Z-800II? Wireless! Anyways.
D: I believe this music was made without laser harps.
C: These are basically covers. Throbbing electro-orbs float by with John Carpenter at the helm.
D: “How to Adjust People” is my pick to click. And you can take that to the bank, baby!
C: In my ideal town, there would be a geodesic juke joint at the edge of town where they play this music four nights a year—on each equinox.
D: Is it possible that it was easier to program soul into analog equipment than it is into digital? That digital is not really for humans, it’s for machines. Can we reverse digitalism? That is the question.
C: Here’s to vintage solid-state equipment!
D: The old ways were the wise ways!
C: I think the fog may be getting me high.
D: Waiter, I’ll have two quarts of fog juice, see vouz play!

RAGLANI
Of Sirens Born
Kranky/Brainwashed

C: Here comes another super-quality analog guy. He’s a little bit further out there, but you can still see him. Employed on this record: “Sine/square wave generator, analog modular synth, melodica…”
D: [“Jubilee”] It’s going like flute-style Jajouka! This is some kind of new shiznits. I’m confiscating this one as well.

APSE
Spirit
ATP

C: Impending doom music for fans of Godspeed and Silver Mt. Zion, Mogwai, Radiohead, Sigur Ros… I think it’s a concept album, but…
D: “In the 7th moon, the chief turned into a swimming fish and ate the head of his enemy by magic…”
C: “It’s not dark yet / but it’s getting there…” This is very good as far as it goes, and maybe I’m being totally unfair, but it might be past time for the wordless dread. Maybe now we need something more explicit about what’s going down. Does that make me old?
D: [thoughtfully] No. But it might make you a little bit wiser…

ZACH HILL
Astrological Straits
Ipecac Recordings/Amazon

C: Moving from A to Z. Zach Hill is the powerhythmic drum half of hard art chargers Hella, who have been known to rock the show.
D: I shook hands with someone once who’d shaken hands with Zach Hill. There was a residual charge.
C: Considering his serrated cymbal work Zach must have hands like a camel’s backside!
D: But sensitive. Apparently Zach met Jimmy Page at a show once and told him, “I should play drums for you.”
C: C’mon, imagine how many drummers must say that to Pagey.
D: The thing is, Zach Hill is actually the man for the job! He’d take Pagey to a whole new power grid!!
C: Yes indeed, Zach’s got a rad attack, as proved by this here double album. This jam ["Keep Calm And Carry On"] is like Zeppelin, Zappa, and Zorn rolled into one.
D: The guy is a total thrash jazz assassin. [cranks the volume] Check this out out, it’s called “Necromancer”… a thirty-three minute epic beginning with Marnie Stern reciting an original fable in the Brothers Grimm/ Henry Darger mode, followed by Zach on drums and Marco Benevento on piano playing a deranged duet like Dave Lombardo versus Duke Ellington.
C: I’ve got blisters on my earlobes!

EAGLES OF DEATH METAL
Heart On
Downtown/Amazon

C: Moving from the gnarly to the nasty… This is the third album by Eagle of Death Metal, who are led by handlebar mustachioed Jesse “The Devil” Hughes on guitar and vocals, with Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age on drums and whatnot. Basically it’s a caped male Peaches doing “Brown Sugar” variations, and it’s a hoot.
D: Eagles of Death Metal—they have always rocked your mustache pretty hard.
C: Not many Americans know this but Eagles of Death Metal played possibly the coolest gig of all time: a women’s-only show in London at a place that’s usually a strip bar.
D: I think that’s what you call an “everybody wins” situation.
C: [Listening to “Anything ‘Cept the Truth”] Not sure about this one. There’s not supposed to be bridges on Eagles of Death Metal songs! Then again “Now I’m a Fool” is something they’ve never done before—an acoustic guitar, mid-tempo, melodic toe-tapper song-of-yearning—and it totally feels right. It’s PRETTY.
D: Old eagles can learn new tricks.

Blurred and Spacey
By Nabob Shineywater

Originally published in Arthur No. 25 (October 2006)

Sandy Bull
Still Valentine’s Day 1969: Live at the Matrix, San Francisco
(Water)

When I was living in Point Reyes, my closest friends became people in their sixties. They would share stories with me as I managed the community print shop. One day I was listening to Sandy Bull, and a visiting Vietnam vet shared a great story with me. One day back in the late ’60s he was riding his bicycle through Mill Valley when he heard very, very loud music. He was able to locate the house it was coming from, and sat on the porch and listened for about three hours. Then the music stopped and he knocked on the door to thank the artist. Two very tall African women opened the door, traditionally dressed and very gorgeous. Then Sandy appeared, and was friendly, but also severely spacey. The house was empty with white walls and carpet. My friend was already familiar with Sandy’s music, and had attended some of the shows in San Francisco that Sandy was doing. He rode away on his bicycle, surprised and happy.

Sandy lived in Berkeley, Mill Valley and Fairfax in the ’60s and his best friend was Hamza El Din, the oudist from Egypt. What a special time these men had together. Hamza had arrived in the United States after opening for the Grateful Dead at the Pyramids. He is best known for his ’70s release Escalay (translated as “The Water Wheel”), which features Sandy playing an ancient beat on an ancient drum. In Escalay, Hamza wanted to translate the feelings of the folks whose role it was to haul water to and from the well. It’s the best cinematic folk music I’ve heard—when you listen to it alone you actually arrive at his homeland. The oud is the most gut-pounding stringed instrument I’ve heard: it sends out depthful waves, resonations that have bass where you wouldn’t expect it.

Still Valentine’s Day 1969: Live at the Matrix, San Francisco is a live album from 1969, and the result of Sandy pushing the limits by using an electric oud through about four different Fender amps, all with heavy reverb and vibrato. I really enjoy the entire collection of songs, and have spent some high times with them lately. The songs feel a little more blurry and druggy than on E Pluribus Unum, the 1968 studio album where a lot of them first appeared. Which I appreciate: I am getting stoned a lot, so I am currently looking for items to reflect that, that I respect. Yet I know he was into the junkier side of drug experimentations. I feel if the tapes were mixed track-by track, that it could expose some more low-end that might be now missing. Sandy had a degree in classical bass; he was highly skilled, and his bass lines are sometimes just as interesting as his oud.

Sandy’s shows are another discussion, but briefly, he wouldn’t play with anyone. So he recorded all the instrumentation on analog tape, and then figured a way to synch up each tape machine. He would then haul this to a gig, press play on everything, then rotate between electric oud and pedal steel. Sandy bootlegs are amazing and even funny, as he was so interesting—Sandy had a great style and it is rumored that William Burroughs saw Sandy and immediately copied his fashion; the Beatles song “Come Together” is actually about Sandy; etc. Anyway, Sandy told obscure funny stories between songs. This release has a small dialogue about the live sound engineer ; the un-mastered version I have actually has a huge wallop of stage feedback due to the lack of understanding by the evening’s sound engineer of just what Sandy was attempting in relation to amplified reverb. The feedback is a painful-sounding slash across the speakers, not interesting at all, and isn’t approved of by Sandy. The same thing regularly happens today in live performance—this realm has not progressed much, and the truth of it is that it’s the fault of people’s stagnant exchange with audio psychedelia. There’s been a lack of progression or maybe a lack of respect for the trade of sound engineering folk.

If you get to know the songs you can actually feel Sandy become elated with tonality as he plays here. Some may think his jams are light, or even beatnik. I think his jams are of the heaviest order, and I believe him to be Northern California’s greatest artist ever because he wasn’t a contrived enterprise. This music is a reflection of what was the norm in NorCal back then. People were learning about the strength of folk culture around the world, and using that knowledge to justify dropping out … and to drop out in colorful, musical ways.

Hipped via The Howling Hex

text and photos by Nance Klehm

painting by Adam Grossi

Six years ago, I had my first loud and explicit communication from a plant. It was a pine tree that called to me—an 800-year-old pine in Ireland. It was encompassed in a buttery halo, rhythmically puffing pollen smoke signals from its multitude of male flowers. Its fecundity pulled me to it. I put my hand on its deeply flaked bark and it held me. I could not move my hand and didn’t want to. It poured itself into me, filling me like a river. “Oh, I see,” I told it silently. The strength of its flow made me start to cry.

Learning to listen to trees led me to hear other plants as well. And talking back to them. I found that some plants pulse, while others stream: their flows are different frequencies, strengths and textures depending on the plant’s species, its health and its age. Plants are networked batteries; trees are pneumatic tubes and portals.

Recently I asked a few people to sit with a plant that they’ve been “noticing.” The people I asked are sensitive people, but not experienced with plant communication. This is what they shared with me…

NICOLE
Nicole showed up on her bike with her plant and a sawed off shovel nestled in her bicycle basket. We met in a park on the north side of Chicago that was close to her house.

“It was amazing how much the plant shed on the bike ride here, like it was losing what it didn’t need on the move,” she said.

We spent some time looking for a sunny out-of-the-way spot to plant her plant. Eventually we came across an area between the fence for a swimming pool and a small grove of pines. Under one of the pines was a mattress and a blanket, in its branches a pair of pants hanging to dry.

“Six weeks ago I was in ceremony with a community of people brought together by Oscar Miro-Quesada,” she said. “He was doing this ceremony called ‘Sacred Space/Urban Grace’ in five cities. Five of us were asked to bring plants to this ceremony. We were to bring a tree, fruit, or native to this region. We made a pledge to plant our plants in a public park or public space. These plants of ours were in ceremony all weekend. We charged the energetic matrix of the plants to symbolize the greening of the city and the restoration of the Earth. It was a tremendous healing.

“I picked a compass plant, which is a native prairie plant that orients its leaves in the cardinal direction of North and South. I put this particular compass plant on my mesa, which is like an altar. I sat cross-legged, with the plant between my legs. I put my left hand at the base of the plant as a prayer, asking my guides to talk to the plant’s guides and that they talk amongst each other and to translate to me anything needed. I held the intention to listen to the plants.”

Nicole started digging a hole for the compass plant when the cops pulled up. She approached them smiling, slowly wiping her hands of dirt on the side of her pants. She explained to them that she was just planting a plant and no, that it wasn’t marijuana. She smiled a lot and talked slowly. The cops smiled amusedly and drove off over the lawn. She resumed her story.

“I had my eyes closed and I felt a pulse. It wasn’t mine, it was a round energy field. This field changed. Sometimes it was close, sometimes fluttery like eyelashes batting.

“I didn’t get any messages in a language I understood, but I did get another sensation of a connection being made and suddenly I was quickly enveloped. The plant held me. That seemed groovy. That seemed really nice. That was a good feeling.”

She blessed the compass plant with a rattle, summer solstice water, Florida water and tobacco, then put it in the ground with worm castings and more solstice water, placing four stones around its base. We scraped globs of sap from the pine tree to burn at a later time, and left.

LINDA
I met Linda at Cabrini Green, a notoriously doomed experiment low-income housing project in busy downtown Chicago. Linda indicated a large community of plants growing through the chain link fence as “her” plant, horseweed.

“I work near here, near a dandelion and white clover park,” she said. “I walk by here at lunch time to get out of the office and spend time with these plants. I saw it everywhere and I got curious. It smells sweet. It seemed not poisonous, so I ate it. it doesn’t taste too bad: pepper with a little mint, like candy with a grassy underneath. I associate light blues and purples with it.

“I found a patch of it and pulled one out and put it in a jar, thinking I’d get to know it more at home. One day I was absentmindedly stroking it, vibing it. It has these little 1/8-inch white flowers, and it’s kinda prickly. It’s a bushy cattail, pet-like. I realized it was sucking on me. Like it was sucking out my bone matter. It is a powerful plant. It’s probably not a good plant of you have arthritis…

“Another time I was sitting in my car with a leaf trying to get something from it and it started pressing on my Mount of Apollo, which is in the palm of the hand. It means ‘Art’ and ‘Beauty’—which I need a lot of both right now.”

We followed the chain link fence around the corner and she took me to a second fenced-off lot with a field dominated by thousands of five-foot-tall horseweed swaying in the breeze.

“Look how beautiful it is,” she said. “No one is interfering with it. I’m kind of jealous of it.’

A week later, I got this e-mail from Linda:

“This morning I went to the ‘garden of wild delights’ to check on the primrose pods and what I found was sickening. Every bit of it had been ripped away. All of the evening primrose and goldenrod—everything along the fence line—gone. The fields of amaranth and mallow mowed down. Remember how I said I loved it because it was a place nobody fucked with? At lunch I got a closer look at the damage. The sparrows were freaking out. They sounded so distressed. A bunny sidled up to me and craned his neck up at me. Bunnies need briar patches! This city needs an exorcism. Maybe that’s why I’m so angry.”

I replied:

“How ridiculous to ‘clear’ this land before the winter. Seed source is so important to birds and animals in the fall and nothing is gained by mowing them down now. Besides. the plants have already dropped a lot of their seed, which means the developers will have to mow again come springtime.”

Linda again:

“I know! They’re right there on the verge! Apparently, the property of whatever developer owns that land doesn’t extend back into ‘Feather Duster Fields,’ as I’ve dubbed it, so my plant is doing fine. I went back today and found a few evening primrose inside the fence close enough to reach in, so I gathered some seeds and scattered some.

“I guess it bugs me because the gamma-lineic acid in the seeds is being researched for possible anti-tumor and specifically, anti-breast cancer properties. I think such a beautiful, valuable plant loaded with immature seed pods should be treated with a little more respect. My mom died of breast cancer, my dad’s sister and two of my sisters are breast cancer survivors…and incidentally, I looked up the significance of the Mount of Apollo in acupressure: it corresponds to the lungs and breasts. I’m going to scatter that seed everywhere. And you can eat the whole delicious plant!”

MICHAEL
I met Michael at his home, a lofted industrial building behind a mega hardware store chain. Michael started with lighting tea lights, pouring me a glass of wine and a glass of water. He served a cheese plate with wild Armenian cucumbers, breadsticks and five kinds of cheese. He plunked his plant, a bamboo, on the top of a road atlas open to ‘Illinois’ and started talking.

“This is my plant: Fargesia rufa. It is a relatively new cultivar also called ‘Green Panda,’ which it really does look when it’s mature. It tops out at six feet. It is grown in Oregon but well here also. Cow, my cat, likes it too.

“I brought it into my bed to takes notes every morning.

“So I don’t know what you were expecting, but this is my experience: this plant says ‘hi’. It opens up upon looking at it further. There is a tremendous amount of growth. It’s a family tree—this one comes and stops, this one comes up and branches further. I stressed it by design. I pushed it to see what it would do and tell me if he could do it. He browned out. He got pissed—I had flushed him out. This bamboo has suffered a huge vitamin loss and I will need to put it on a program.

“A friend of mine sat with the plant and felt embraced. She works with kids in identifying with their bodies. to express themselves healthily. Maybe she should work with this plant with the kids…

“My personal experience: I gave attention to this bamboo and it inspired me in my absence from it. It was a facilitator—I mean, an instigator. It helped me ground myself into who I am. It told me that my experience is my responsibility.’

Cow climbed into the bamboo, climbed out and circled around it, leaning into it.

“It’s true that it shifted my thinking, but I can’t say this is the miracle plant. You can play with it.”

Michael holds a tea light under the stems to show them to me.

“I’m thinking about children and alienation from nature now. Nature will be there to deliver. It’s there. It’s welcoming. It’s opening. People should stop watching TV or playing video games. They should stop watching porno and start watching bamboo.

“I was paying attention to a plant—it’s not a modern urge. It’s a simple, profound thing that comes from nature. It’s a trickle, a dissemination… It’s not weird. It’s practical.’

===================

Nicole Garneau was born in Chicago and has lived in the city for 20 years. She works at making art, performances, and ceremonies from a politically radical point of view that somehow embodies a world in which she wants to live. She makes work in multiple communities of people both locally and nationally. She loves to cook, embroider, speak Russian, and practice healing.

Linda Moran is endlessly fascinated by neuroscience and she has elf breath.

Michael Loran Hansel is an urban landscape designer in Chicago who enjoys the particularity of plants and their environmental possibilities.

From The Center for Tactical Magic:

The CTM presents a new interrogation of power dynamics. Existing at a technological crossroads where torture, recreation, magic, and self-liberation merge together, Witches’ Cradles (2009) are an interactive public installation based on a contemporary re-envisioning of a medieval torture device.

“During the witchcraft persecutions in Europe, Inquisitors are said to have sometimes put an accused witch in a bag, which was strung up over the limb of a tree and set swinging. When witches’ learnt about this punishment they experimented with it themselves and found that the sensory deprivation or confusion of senses induced hallucinatory experiences. A similar swinging motion has long been used by shamans and dervishes and is sometimes known as ‘dervish-dangling’.”
- Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology

Devised initially for interrogation and torture, the witches’ cradle was eventually reclaimed by its potential victims for flights of fancy and inward journeys to altered states of consciousness. Since then, the past 100 years alone have shown us an array of antecedents that cast both shadows and light on the witches’ cradle, ranging from backyard tire swings to mob lynchings; from New Age sensory deprivation tanks to the haunting images from Guantanamo Bay. Even Houdini’s famed illusion, Metamorphosis (in which he freed himself from a locked and tied canvas sack), promised “self-liberation” and “change in 3 seconds.”

The Center for Tactical Magic’s re-envisioning of the witches’ cradle plays on these historical notes while suggesting a present-day desire to conjure positive transformation. Each cradle consists of a large 5-pointed star designed to simultaneously evoke its magical origins, imperial state power, and a cosmic source of light amidst darkness. After sitting in the center pentagon, the points of the star close overhead as the cradle is hoisted off the ground, allowing the participant to swing gently in the darkened center of the collapsed star. Like a black hole, a holding cell, or a metaphysical amusement ride, the Witches’ Cradles distort time and space. It is at this event horizon that the Witches’ Cradles create a place where one can begin to realize an altered state and contemplate the next course of action.

The Witches’ Cradles can be experienced at the Shift Festival of electronic arts and new media in Basel, Switzerland running from Oct 22 – 25, along with our collection of contemporary Wands. This year’s theme for Shift? “Magic. Tech-Evocations and Assumptions of Paranormal Realities”… Enough said.

For more info:
http://www.shiftfestival.ch/en/shift-2009/home-news/

Sorry about our recent absence, but travel and general shit have shoved their fingers deep into our collective schedules. Hopefully, we’ll manage to wiggle around in more timely fashions now that the nuts are off the trees.

1. Was really curious to hear some sides by The Pink Noise—Canadian noise rockers recently expanded to three pieces from two—after hearing them kill it one night at Union Pool. So, was hanging at Earwax on Bedford waiting for the line to shrink in front of the Endless Summer taco truck and eyeballed their Alpha LP (Almost Ready Records) and the “Gold Light/Prince Charlies Revenge” 7” on Sacred Bones Records. Grabbed ‘em both and was kinda stunned by how much weirder and seriously zonked they were in comparison to their live blast. Gotta see ‘em again now cuz these vinyls are really outasite no (whatever) wave primal beat drum/guitar from crazy place and the singing is odd guttural scrawl. You might wanna dig this. Or eat it. We did both and are ready for many more spoonfuls.

2. Incoherent Lullabies (Camera Obscura) is the second album by Denver-based space pop outfit, Fell. And it makes me (the older Tongue handler) recall the first time I ever heard of Pink Floyd. It was the spring of 1968. I was attending Montclair Academy. I was talking to someone about how much I liked the Doors and he said, “Oh, you should check out this new band from London, The Pink Floyd. They’re like the English Doors.” I did check them out, and didn’t really get the connection very clearly. Syd Barrett and Jim Morrison were so incredibly different it just didn’t make sonic sense. But now, hearing Fell, I am starting to appreciate some of the sonic similarities between Obscured By Clouds-era Floyd and L.A. Woman-era Doors. They really do share turf in terms of construction and looseness. Anyway, at several moments, Fell remind me of a cross between those two bands, although their vocals are more like generic post-Pepper Brit pop, verging on tongue-turf staked out by the pre-Threshold Moody Blues. Which is actually a fairly cool mix. Other parts sound real diff—with influences ranging from Suicide (copped from some Suicide-damaged band rather than the root source, I’d wager) to the Cure—but I keep thinking of 1968. Before Chicago. Before Nixon. It’s a pleasant memory.

3. Gotta say side two of the Diagram A LP, excellently titled Human Tissue Press : Vinyl Removal (Open Mouth), is one of the classiest cut-up, clipped and jagged one-man/one-mantra meditation sessions we’ve ever ommm’ed across. Really very sweet and ahead of the game. This Providence-expat dude has been on the sub-tributary scene of bizarro solo noise junk sculpture performance for like fucking ever and, along with Noise Nomads, is one of the Eastern Seaboard’s most magnificent purveyors of random brain rip.

4. Cruising the road and/or the dial and/or the web on Sunday mornings at 2:00 AM to 4:00 AM (CST), our ears are gently pressed to the dulcet warblings of Tulane Blacktop on WTUL-FM (91.5). The show, co-hosted by Lazy Dave and Mr. McSuds has proven to be a solid sniff of interesting night air. These 19 year-olds may not have brain roots as deep as redwoods, but we’ve heard more Dictators tracks played on this show than any other in recent memory, and one segue a couple of weeks ago—going from the Misfits into the Supremes—was the most bodacious transition we can recall since someone used Hendrix’s “Hey Baby” (from Rainbow Bridge) as an exit strategy out of “Anarchy in the UK” (single version) on a party mix back in ’77.

5. Ypsilanti, Michigan continues to throw up weirdo record labels without surcease, and one we’ve been sloshing through with boots of gunk lately is With Intent Records, which has been issuing some real nice graveyard drone dirt. A particularly deadening example of their aesthetic would have to be the new Exhumed Corpse LP titled Pray For Death. This minimal dark dirge morass spreads its inky stasis across both sides and when it’s over, well you won’t know it’s over, cuz you’ll be dead.

6. A couple of summers ago we had the chance to watch a mind-blowing pre-punk document from suburban L.A.’s deep underground. The object in question was video documentation of a gig by the Imperial Dogs at Cal State Long Beach, the night before Halloween, 1974. The Imperial Dogs were one of those bands about whom rumors more than facts have long tended to cohere. Led by writer/maniac Don Waller, they were part of the same aesethetic gush as Back Door Man fanzine (with whom they were tightly associated) and various other loose threads that were blowing around in those rough days. The band only had one posthumous 45 released in the ‘70s, and it didn’t seem indicative of the madness of which they were supposedly capable. That legendary quality was finally made manifest in 1989, when the Australian Dog Meat label issued the amazing Unchained Maladies LP. And this newly released dvd—Live at Long Beach! (Imperial Dogs)—is icing on all known cakes. It is an exquisite, Stooges-damaged dive into the dumpster of style—as punk as a glitter jockstrap caked with blood. It ups the ante as far as extremo-pre-punk recklessness is concerned and is one of the swellest things to watch ever.

7. Fuckin fuck fuck fantastic duo LP by trumpet mangler maestro Greg Kelley and Scottish drum freak Alex Neilson called Passport To Satori (Golden Lab Records). Just kills. First side is straight up awesome lips on brass spoot ‘n spit tone with sweet tap tap. Side two is more manic, more off the fucking wall with Kelley sending air sound through sickened pedal puh while who one of these drunk fucks starts whooshing some kind of synth hell—really great improvisation and it takes you straight to that Satori joint (or whatever that place is) where blowjobs are as good as free jazz.

8. We have been off the Corwood Records promo list for a few years now, so it was lovely to see a package with The Representative’s distinctive lettering on it in the mailbox once again. The parcel in question contained a 2CD set called Portland Thursday and it is an absolute ratification of the enduring brilliance of this eminence grise. Like Charles “Chuck” Berry, Jandek usually plays with pick-up bands as he travels around, and this quartet (Sam Coomes, Emil Amos, Liz Harris, Jessica Dennison) is very damn fine—creating drift clouds of beauty and menace to encircle the free-form composite-obsessions of The Representative. We must do some catch-up work on the Corwood catalogue. This music is far too good to not-gobble.

9. Meditations had a couple of cassette releases on the excellent Anathema Sound label a while back which exhibited a mesmerizing take on sick forest desolation and the harsh chill of deviant synth blackness. Whoever they are they got as good a grip on new nothing black grimness as anyone out there and this new Digitalis cassette of theirs called Precipice, is full-on beautiful agony of dead vocal puke tone awash in earthworm feedback. Genius.

10. Also embued with genius is Dark Horse Comics’ series of three volumes reissuing the collected adventured of Herbie–The Fat Fury. These books seem obvious as the root-source of some of the best characters invented by Dan Clowes and Chris Ware, but there’s a strangely inert quality to the drawing and writing that pushes this stuff into a real strange and unique place. Friends collected copies of these ‘60s books quite assiduously at various times, and they were never super-rare, but they were always super-weird. Great to have them in one handy place. If you got a taste of these in Dan Nadel’s great Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969 (Abrams) you may now fully slake yr thirst.

Over & Out.

We remain interested in all spew—especially vinyl, print & visual. Two (2) copies are best. Send ‘em to:

Bull Tongue
PO Box 627
Northampton MA 01061
USA

From a piece by Eric Smillie in Good Magazine:

In an undisclosed storage area in Chicago, Nance Klehm has a hidden stockpile of human excrement. When the 1,500-gallon stash finishes its two-year composting cycle next summer, it will be soil as rich as any you could buy at the store—a gardener’s black gold. If it’s discovered by the authorities before then, it’ll be deemed hazardous and removed. The hoard belongs to Humble Pile Chicago, a conspiracy of 22 people Klehm has rallied to help.

Credit her childhood on a farm in northwest Illinois: Klehm is a self-made food and soil consultant who thinks we need to close the nutrient loop when it comes to a sustainable source of fertilizer. “It’s hard to find safe soil for planting in the city,” she says. “Most of what you get is stripped from someplace else; we’re stealing it from one place and trying to enrich another with it. It’s nuts.”

She decided years ago to collect more than kitchen scraps, and built herself a dry toilet to catch her “humanure.” “My bucket is front and center in the bathroom at this point, while my flushie is just a book stand,” she says. She started Chicago’s Humble Pile to increase her yield. Participants had simple orders: Do your business in buckets, cover with sawdust, and fill large garbage cans for Klehm to cart away (while avoiding landlords).

For Nicole Garneau, 39, a performance artist and teacher, taking part was easy. “I could do it without ever leaving the comfort of my home,” she says. When her full barrel was ready for pickup, she’d boldly leave it out in front of her co-op building with a sign that read, “Nicole’s shit, do not open.” No one did.

She’s now eagerly awaiting the return of her portion of the pile, which she plans to nonchalantly fold into her co-op’s box garden. By then it will bear no evidence of her dastardly deed—it will look, in fact, like any old humble pile of soil.

To join the Chicago Humble Pile, visit http://spontaneousvegetation.net/humble-pile/

The first time I worked with a computer, way back in high school in the late ’70s, there was no such thing as software. To use the terminal, I had to write my own code and then input it into the computer. Only then would the computer be a typewriter, a calculator, a psychiatrist, or an elevator controller. A computer was an “anything” machine. Moreover, everything I wrote and saved—my “content”—was accessible and changeable by anyone else on the system—unless I specifically ordered otherwise. Media was no longer fixed, it was changeable. Not only ownership, but also the notion of finality itself had become arbitrary—even artificial.

Today, most of us think of computers—and all of our digital devices—in terms of the applications they offer: “What does it already do” instead of “what can I make it do?” Likewise, instead of teaching computer programming in school, we teach kids how to use Microsoft Windows. This difference is profound. It exemplifies the core difference between a society capable of thinking its way beyond its current limitations, and one destined to repeat the same mistakes until it drives itself to extinction.

Computers and networking technology present humanity with the greatest opportunity for renaissance since the invention of the 22-letter alphabet in about the second millennium BCE. But, just like then, we are squandering the opportunity. We are afraid of what it means to live in a world where we are responsible for how things turn out. We would prefer to live under the false assumption that the rules by which we live are given circumstances rather than realize they are creations of human beings and utterly up for discussion. Just as we understand our technologies to be limited by the software with which they are packaged, we understand our world as limited by the social and economic codes currently in operation.

The real power of media revolutions—such as the ones that occurred during the Axial Age when the alphabet was created and the Renaissance of the 1300’s when the printing press was invented—is that the new medium offers people an entirely new perspective with which to relate to their world. The alphabet led to monotheism and contractual law. The printing press led to the notion of individuality and the Enlightenment. The status quo not only comes under scrutiny; it is rewritten by those who have gained access to the tools of its creation.

We now have technology at our disposal that offers us even more profoundly meaningful access to this creation than ever before. However, we are squandering its real potential to patch up the holes in our failing economy, market culture, and social hierarchy. Instead of working together, consciously, to harness the power of new media and build an infrastructure capable of networking human society, enhancing cognition, and promoting a full-scale reconsideration of the assumptions on which our culture, politics, and economics are based, we assign this task to programmers working offshore, at the behest of companies looking to improve the short-term bottom line. This means using technology to increase human predictability, conformity, and compliance rather than their opposites. The effect of the net on us as people is, at best, an afterthought to be argued by intellectuals.

This wouldn’t be the first time a medium failed on its promise to offer human beings a new level of understanding and agency. Like the participants of failed cultural eras before our own, we have embraced the new technologies and literacies of our age without actually learning how they work and work on us. The Axial Age invention of the 22-letter alphabet did not lead to a society of literate Israelite readers, but a society of hearers, who would gather in the town square to listen to the Torah scroll read to them by a rabbi. Yes, it was better than being ignorant slaves, but it was a result far short of the medium’s real potential. Likewise, the invention of the printing press in the Renaissance led not to a society of writers, but one of readers; the presses were reserved for those with access. Broadcast radio and television were really just extensions of the printing press: expensive, one-to-many media that promote the mass distribution of the stories and ideas of a small elite at the center. We don’t make TV; we watch it.

Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. But the underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming—which almost none of us really knows how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. We teach kids how to use software to write, but not how to write software. This means they have access to the capabilities given to them by others, but not the power to determine the value-creating capabilities of the technology for themselves.

Like those failed media renaissances before this one, we remain one step behind the capability actually being offered us. Only an elite—sometimes a new elite, but an elite nonetheless—gain the ability to fully exploit the new medium on offer. The rest learn to be satisfied with gaining the ability offered by the last new medium. The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; we write, while our techno-elite program. As a result, a majority of people remain one dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind those who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.

And it breaks my heart, it really does. I knew the implementation of a people-focused media would be a struggle, but I didn’t think so many otherwise intelligent humans would surrender their agency and awareness to the always-on drone of the corporate-driven net—at least not this quickly and totally. Still, I can’t bring myself to believe it is an inevitable state of human affairs. History can be changed, particularly before it has even occurred. We can break the cycle of illiteracy, and—at the very least—develop technologies and interfaces that promote rather than repress the awareness and access implicit in digital media.

I’m going to start writing—here and elsewhere—about what our new media does and doesn’t do. How it promotes asynchronous communication, letting people get “work” done when they want, rather than at someone else’s schedule—loosening the connection between human time and the value of labor. How it gives small producers on the periphery an opportunity to sell and exchange directly with others—rather than through central authorities. How it allows people to relegate the inhuman parts of themselves to the machines, while preserving the human for the real world. How, contrary to most of our experience, it actually gives us the freedom to restore human scale in our real lives, while engaging in non-human-scaled activities exclusively through our laptops, on an as-needed basis.

It’s not too late to shift from an “always on” digital culture to an “always alive” real culture, with occasional, digitally assisted transmissions for non-local and sub-human activities.

The digital should have made all of this more probable and more possible, not less.

Douglas Rushkoff is the author, most recently, of Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back. He hosts The Media Squat on WFMU, and teaches media studies at The New School.

David Katznelson (left) with Lionel Ziprin (date unknown)

LIONEL ZIPRIN
A remembrance by David Katznelson

On the morning of Sunday March 15, 2009 Lionel Ziprin passed away. By nightfall, his coffin was riding on a plane to Israel, to be buried in Tsfad alongside his mother, grandmother and grandfather, the great Rabbi Naftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia. Tsfad was the home of the mystics, those Jewish spiritualists who dedicated their lives to the study of Kabbalah—the esoteric Jewish texts that were untouchable by most. The Abulafia family was one of the most famous families of Kabbalists.

I originally met Lionel because of his grandfather, a rabbi whose singing was recorded in the ’50s by pioneering musicologist Harry Smith (student of Alan Lomax and creator of the definitive collection of American folk music), because there were sacred melodies—bridging the gap of hundreds of years of cantorial practices—that were known best by him. I had read about Rabbi Abulafia’s recordings in an article by John Kalish, and contacted Lionel to license them for a non-profit Jewish reissue label I co-founded, The Idelsohn Society. Many before us had already tried to convince Lionel to allow the recordings to be released to the public; the recordings had become legendary for the very reason that Lionel refused all offers, other than allowing a single CD to be released, containing short bits of only a few masterpieces.

Four years ago my friend Roger Bennett and I started our trips down to Lionel’s apartment on the Lower East Side, situated in an island of olde Jewish culture that once flourished throughout the neighborhood. What started as skeptical conversations morphed into strange, deep discussions about Judaism, metaphysics, the otherworlds, and the angels that exist on this one.

Lionel was a born-again Hasidic Jew whose past was anchored in the artistic movements of the ’50s and ’60s. As a child he was plagued by epilepsy and rheumatic fever after which he had visions, seeing the bible come to life in his grandfather’s house. Later, he would translate these visions, along with his thoughts that came from them and his external worldly experiences, into his poetry. Ziprin as bohemian walked with the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Allen Ginsberg, Bruce Conner, and SF poet laureate Jack Hirschman to name a few; his apartment was a destination for the greatest underground artists of his time. He married a woman named Johanna, so famous for her beauty that her vision was immortalized by Bob Dylan in song. The couple had four children.

Lionel was a poet, an adviser, a comic book writer, a greeting card maker and an underground film actor. He had no need for fame, releasing his poetry so violently and haphazardly that even in the age of the Internet it is almost impossible to find more than two of his works without a struggle.

To sit with Lionel and talk…talk of the speaking bird that flew into his window and stayed, or the latest project he was working on with the angels that helped Adam and Eve post-Paradise Lost, or the time an unknown powerful force physically drew him—pushed him—to a closed-down temple in the Lower East Side where his grandfather worshiped long ago, only to find inside a group of learned rabbis sitting, debating text, and to his astonishment they asked him to stay…when Lionel talked, his apartment dripped with mystical vuggam that only the great Isaac B. Singer could hope to conjure. He was one of the most interesting Jewish voices I had ever listened to.

The three of us, Roger, Lionel and myself, along with Ari the out-of-work cantor and Lionel’s home-help Mr. Hi, sat one day and listened to over nine hours of his grandfather’s recordings, with Lionel providing deep commentary along the way. Lionel discussed his vision for the release—detailing the content he wanted covered in the liner notes, the look of the design, and the steps we could take to ensure that stores would think twice about selling them on the Sabbath. (San Francisco’s Aquarius Records in a letter assured him they would honor this request.) He spoke about releasing a plain packaged version for the Orthodox and an ornate version for the general public, although he did not understand who in the general public would care. He saw these recordings as beacons of light for a dark time.

Listening to these recordings energized his bony bundle of flesh; we ended our day by dancing around his apartment, clapping and singing to one of the more spirited numbers whose chorus rhythmically chanted “LAMO LAMO LAMO.” Lionel declared the day a celebration of music that sparked the spiritual core, and decided to emphasize the moment by grabbing some HAPPY BIRTHDAY hats that he had lying amid his massive collection of black fedoras, throwing one on himself and giving the rest to us to wear. A sweet, unexpected ending to a day of listening to cantorial recordings!

The dichotomy of Lionel’s religious convictions and his infusion [integration?—Ed.] of his past bohemian lifestyle gave him a unique language. I think that is what made his fantastic world so understandable and vibrant to me. He walked a line of reality and fantasy as only a true mystic would, and more often than not stayed on that line for the entire conversation. He experimented with the ideas and substances of the world, thrived on going deep into the abyss of Jewish thought, and was lighthearted enough to laugh at himself after making a particularly strange yet appealing statement.

About a half a year ago Lionel took me into his bedroom, removed a few hundred-plus-year-old bibles from his desk, and handed me what was underneath them: his grandfather’s recordings. He also gave me an amulet that would light up if brought to temple on Yom Kippur. And he gave me a homework assignment: to listen closely to the recordings and curate an hour’s worth of selections that best showed off what his grandfather represented.

A daunting task.

It took me over three months of careful listening to compile the hour’s worth of material, and with shaky hands I ventured back to New York and to Lionel’s apartment for another listening session.

As was the custom with Lionel, he began the visit skeptically, slapping his hand on his armchair, saying and uttering a few morsels of genuine concern. But as we listened to the CD, and went from the first track to the second and then into the third, his expression lit up, and he relaxed. He complimented me on my hard but successful work. He held out his hand and said that he could see that these recordings had changed me for the good: my face looked different.

That was the last time I saw Lionel.

A few months later, I got the word that he was in the hospital not breathing on his own; he always had trouble with his breath since I had met him. Being 3,000 miles away and feeling helpless, I reacted by collecting and reading all of the Lionel Ziprin-penned works I could find, which included an amazing box set of poetry, and a record that Lionel was pushed to release in the early ’90s. To have his works in one place is to understand the true artistry of Lionel Ziprin, but to listen to him speak about the same subjects is to understand his true uniqueness.

As he writes in the poem Sentential Metaphrastic, 1965-1971:

“Existence inhibits, but does not inhibit me.
I am like a flame leaping from the side of one’s head.
Nothing inside is hidden.”

With his passing I have lost more than a friend. I have lost a bridge that connected the physical world I live in with a unique metaphysical world I had just learned existed. Lionel was the translator of the Orthodox, a teacher of mystical thought and intention and a wonderful person to have a long conversation with. I will miss him.

MORE ON LIONEL ZIPRIN FROM THE ARTHUR ARCHIVES:

“He really was one of the great white magicians of the era.” (NYT obit)

Lionel Ziprin Talks Smith-Abulafia Recordings, by Ian Nagoski

Here’s the lead loper off MV & EE’s new album “Barn Nova” (pictured above), out October 13, 2009 via Ecstatic Peace Records of Massachusetts…

Stream:

Download: “Feelin Fine” – MV & EE (mp3)

Arthur welcomes

Ecstatic Peace! recording artists
MV &EE
accompanied by Willie Lane

plus

Blood Like Mine
(Geoff Bucknum & Rosali Middleman)

Thursday, September 17 8pm
Frankford Gardens/ The Compound
at 2037 Frankford Avenue (map)
(enter from Sepviva)
music promptly at 8:30
$5
all ages encouraged
this is a home, not a bar
so remember to bring your own locally brewed beverage

MV & EE: http://www.ecstaticpeace.com/mvee
Willie Lane: info, mp3

Sign-up for the weekly bulletin is quick & easy: go here to do it now.

Advertising with Arthur is smart. We operate on a sliding scale and offer a not-insubstantial discount to fellow autonomous/indie businesses. Email us to discuss what would work best for you.

“Command Performance” No. 161
The Arthur Magazine Email Bulletin
September 4, 2009

Arthur Blog: arthurmag.com
Arthur music streams/downloads
Arthur on Facebook: facebook.com/thearthurmag
Arthur on Twitter: twitter.com/arthurmagazine

Hiya,

1. HMMM….
New possibility for revived, giant-sized print version of Arthur Magazine: mail order, subscription-only. “Free” has been costing us more than we’ve been taking in, and we can’t go on like that. So. Hmm. Would you buy what you once got for free? Let us know…

2. TOTALLY THEURGIC
In mere minutes, Arthur’s Fishtown squad leaves for Baltimore to attend tonight’s “closing ceremony” for White Magic frontlady Mira Billotte’s “KOSMOS: Music of the Spheres” installation at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson featuring performances by White Magic, Daniel Higgs and Zomes. Totally theurgic. More info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/31/mira-billotte

3. LOST TERENCE MCKENNA FILM ON ALCHEMY COMPLETED, NOW AVAILABLE
“In the mid-1990’s Terence McKenna and Mystic Fire’s Sheldon Rochlin teamed up to make this rich and exciting film. Little did they know that this would be their last film. Originally titled Coincidencia Oppositorum: The Unity of Opposites and filmed in Prague with Terence portraying his usual erudite rendition of the Irish Bard, this filmed classic takes us on a journey into the alchemical renaissance of King Frederick V and his wife Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia. Playing the role of John Dee, court magician for Queen Elizabeth of England, Terence McKenna shows us how the promise of a return to the tradition of alchemy was almost instituted in Europe. He also shows us that this early attempt at the creation of an alchemical kingdom actually lead to the European Renaissance and the institution of Cartesian science and the beginnings of rationalism within the western mindset. This incredible film is not only beautifully filmed but is Terence McKenna’s finest performance and a worthy eulogy to his genius.”

More info, excerpt, dvd purchase link and, well shoot, you can just go ahead watch the whole thing online right now, here: http://bit.ly/hbFsq

4. WE HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE…ER, THE PRESENT…ER, WHAT IS THAT????
Mitch Altman made a device called Trip Glasses—sunglasses with embedded red lights that flash in preprogrammed patterns, in time with sound coming in through headphones. You close your eyes and you get hallucinatory visions. It’s like a 14-minute trailer for an actual psilocybin or LSD trip, or for what you may experience in deeper meditation. And it has its own battery. Info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/27/mitch-altmans-trip-glasses-a-demonstration

5. MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

6. OF TOMATOES AND CANNING
Dear Weedeater: Help! I went crazy this year and started a tomato garden in the backyard! I dunno what it was, the sight of Michele Obama pulling up lawn grass and planting a garden at the White House or the cutie at the nursery who helped me pick out some heirlooms and beefsteak starters, but one thing led to another, somehow my little backyard thing went crazy, I didn’t get hit by the East Coast blight thing yet (perhaps I speak too soon?), and now I’ve got way way WAY too many ripening tomatoes. I’d give them away except all my neighbors’ gardens are overflowing with tomatoes too. Somebody mentioned canning my extras, but that seems…um, hard and… I dunno, Nance. Is it worth the trouble? Signed, Newbie in New Jersey

Arthur Magazine “Weedeater” columnist Nance Klehm says:
No need to mince words on this one, the answer is totally ‘yes.’ There is no such thing as too many ‘love apples’! Unless you have loads, the gift outweighs your total energy out: $20 of canning jars plus two hours or less of your time (or even much less if you have a friend helping), plus some good music to chop and simmer to = the best sauce, tomato juice, salsa, whatever. Your tomatoes will speak to you for all the dead of winter…

Comments or questions for Nance Klehm? Go here: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/09/03/dear-weedeater-is-canning-worth-the-hassle

Oh yeah, one more thing from Nance: Forget crazily expensive vertical farm schemes. We can make all the soil we need from our own poop. Read on at an article on Nance’s “Humble Pile Chicago” project at the “In These Times” website:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4561/your_crap_our_compost/

7. ENERGY JUSTICE
One from the Arthur archives: “Siphon Your Way to Financial Freedom” by Dave Reeves – http://www.arthurmag.com/2007/02/20/dave-reeves-in-arthur-magazine-no-17

8. HOT TONES, LICKS, RIPS AND TUMBLES
Sweet new 38-minute trance flow from WHITE RAINBOW, exclusive for Arthur – mp3, stream, etc: http://bit.ly/77I6M

Music from another sphere: new AXOLOTL mp3, stream, etc: http://bit.ly/zKgFk

CHRIS CORSANO and MICK FLOWER (Vibracathedral Orchestra) will be touring the East Coast of the USA later this year as a power duo force. video: http://bit.ly/13Sjh6

New SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE “Anesthesia” video directed by Cam Archer: http://bit.ly/a97r8

9. MAP OF HUMANITY
Be sure to zoom in!: http://bit.ly/2PydvP

10. NEW ARTHUR COMIX
‘MILD HASSLECOP’ by Chris Cilla: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/25/mild-hasslecop-by-chris-cilla
‘PASSAGEWAYS’ by Matthew Lock: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/09/01/passageways-by-matthew-lock

11. TRAILER FOR NEW WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS DOC
“A Man Within” looks pretty good, unfortunate typography aside. Check out the trailer here:
http://bit.ly/iXCoO

12. THE WELL-CURATED STORE
First in an occasional series, as part of a general Arthur effort to combat the ongoing, escalating de-bookshopping of our planet by bringing attention to particular exquisite stores’ existence and reason for being: a look at HERMITAGE BEACON of Brooklyn’s mission statement. And their motto. Go here: http://bit.ly/5vGEj

13. ALWAYS REMEMBER
“Marijuana is not a medicine. It is a drug that makes people think they feel better.”—lobbyist for the Committee on Moral Concerns
(from the back cover to Paul Krassner’s Pot Stories for the Soul)

Now merging,

Arthur Magazine Theurgians
Fishtown * Little Village * Baltimore * Marfa * wherever you are

Allen Crawford (aka that guy “Lord Whimsy,” pictured below) will host a workshop on building terrarium environments for the coming cooler months. He will show you how to set up your terrarium, as well as explore the different kinds of containers and plants one can use: classic leafy houseplants, desert succulents, and local wild mosses.

Space is limited to 20 attendees. Workshop tickets are available for $10 in advance, $12 day-of-workshop, as space permits. Reserve space in advance by

* sending $10 per guest via PayPal to editor@arthurmag.com, or
* handing cold hard cash to Jay or Brooke at 2037 Frankford; arrange ahead of time via email to editor@arthurmag.com

This workshop will be held, rain or shine, at 2037 Frankford Avenue in Fishtown (Philadelphia, PA 19125).

Lord Whimsy (full name: Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy) is author of The Affected Provincial’s Companion, Vol. I, published in 2006 by Bloomsbury. More information on the book is available from lordwhimsy.com; his lordship’s blog, The Affected Provincial’s Almanack: inept smatterings of a wood-tramp, is updated with alarming regularity.

Signing up for the weekly bulletin is quick and easy: go here to do it now.

Advertising with Arthur is smart and affordable! Email us for rates — we’re reasonable and will work with you. We operate on a sliding scale and offer substantial discounts for indie/autonomous businesses.

“Command Performance” No. 160
The Arthur Magazine Email Bulletin
August 26, 2009

Good-for-you, food-for-us tax-deductible donations to Arthur Magazine: http://www.arthurmag.com/donate/
Arthurmag Blog: arthurmag.com
Arthurmag MP3 downloads
Arthurmag on Facebook is actually pretty happening: facebook.com/thearthurmag
Arthurmag on Twitter: twitter.com/arthurmagazine

We meet again.

1. AYAHUASCA IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Credit where credit is due: one of the most mainstream magazines there is—National fuckin’ Geographic—has just published the best (bar NONE) article ever on the subject of ayahuasca-as-medicine. Features a first-person account of two ayahuasca treatments by courageous reporter Kira Salak, as well as commentary/information/insights from leading, sensible Western ayahuasca researchers (Charles Grob at UCLA; Benny Shanon at Hebrew University, Jerusalem; and psychologist/author Ralph Metzner) and footage of the beginning of an ayahuasca session. No Pinchbeck 2012 newagenik nonsense. Professional journalism for the people at its finest. Key text for a lot of us: “‘Ayahuasca is perhaps a far more sophisticated and effective way to treat depression than SSRIs [antidepressant drugs],’ Grob concludes, adding that the use of SSRIs is ‘a rather crude way’ of doing it. And ayahuasca, he insists, has great potential as a long-term solution.” Read it in print, or checkit out via this link: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/21/excellent-article-on-ayahuasca-in-new-national-geographic/

2. “YEARS LATER, SHE WAS STILL CALLING HER SISTER, TRYING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT EXACTLY HAD HAPPENED….”
Arthur freaks may remember Brian Evenson from his cover feature on Sunn 0))) and Earth, published in Arthur No. 20, and his short bit on an imaginary disease in Arthur No. 7. Regardless, Brian is a brilliant writer of unsettling 21st century fiction, and he’s got a new collection out of short stuff—Fugue State, published by Coffeehouse Press—out now. The story that begins with the text of this entry’s header continues online at http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/11/younger-a-new-short-story-by-brian-evenson/ Or you can just download the story in PDF by clicking here. Thank you to Brian and Coffeehouse Press for making this possible, and as they used to say, look for more of this kind of thing in the future from you friends at Arthur Magazine on our blog and in our website’s new nattily-titled BOOKS section. Internet is nice, but books are better, and that’s the triple-truth Ruth.

3. ARTHURMAG CO-EDITOR DANIEL CHAMBERLIN’S “INTERNET ACTIVITY PAGES”
Chambo is back and he’s linking it altogether in distinctive Chambo style. Catch him regularly at the Arthurmag blog. Here’s some of his recent stuff:
• AFRO SCI-FI: Sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor is talking with all of her pals about whether or not “Africa is ready for science fiction” as a guest-blogger on the Nebula Awards website and it’s chock full of clever anecdotes about creating sci-fi that appeals to non-Western audiences. As Notre Dame professor Naunihal Singh puts it, “Bring the Terminator to West Africa, and he’d stop running in a day. He’d sit there and glitch. It’ll be hard to make people afraid of a future where computers take over the world when they can’t manage to keep the computers on their desk running.” There’s also lots of great jumping off points for exploring other African sci-fi writers and absolutely bonkers-looking Nollywood B-movies like Across The Bridge; that’s the trailer up top there, sample line: “Are you willing to suck the breast of ever-flowing milk?” [Nebula Awards via Harper's]

• ATTN NEW WELFARE QUEENS: If you spend a lot of time reading Rushkoff’s commentary here in Arthur on the current death throes of American laissez faire capitalism, you probably know that when the unemployment numbers go down it’s often ’cause people STOP looking for work, rather than b/c they got jobs. But that doesn’t matter right now, ’cause “California’s jobless rate reached a fresh post-World War II high in July, climbing to 11.9%,” as the LA Times reported last week. WELCOME TO THE AMERICAN DOLE, you deadbeats. Here’s a great blog that’ll show all you n00b unemployees how to work it: UNEMPLOYMENTALITY has all the tips, tricks and hacks you’ll need to navigate California’s EDD. E.g. If you’d like to quickly bypass the robots and talk to one of the live drones, call the Vietnamese language line. BRILLIANT. [Unemploymentalitiy]

• MORE LIGHTNING BOLT NEWS: Did you know that lighting sometimes strikes up? See images of a “gigantic jet of upside down lightning” over at the Nature blog. [The Great Beyond]

• MINIMALIST CHRONICLES OF WESTERN DECADENCE: Do you guys read Texts From Last Night? It is a website where American exhibitionists offer up short form narratives about their bad trips, pregnancy scares and a super gross thing called “sharting.” On the one hand it’s as dumb a time-waster as LOLCats, but on the other it is like Ayman Al Zawahiri’s darkest fantasies of Western Decadence rendered in minimalist text-messaging prose, the area code from whence said texts were typed being the only identifying detail. [TFLN]

(813): I think dad’s getting high again. His last google search was “awesome ping pong shit.”

(323): The idiot babysitter thought my dildo was a teething toy and gave it to our child.
(1-323): Did you put it in the freezer again?

• AWESOME PING PONG SHIT: As it happens, that “high dad” had the right idea, Googling “awesome ping pong shit.” Case in point, the John McEnroe-caliber table tennis antics seen here: http://www.youtube.com/v/0laUX453tlQ

4. MUSIC WE ARE DIGGING ON AT HEADQUARTERS EAST, CENTRAL AND WEST
a. “You’re a Target” from NO AGE of Los Angeles, California: My Bloody Valentine smear plus concise punk at a Husker Du tempo. Nice!!! Available now as stream, next month in real world from Sub Pop of Seattle, Washington on thee new “Losing Feeling” EP. MP3, stream, purchase info etc: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/26/new-no-age/

b. “Now That I’m a Man Full Grown” – a hurricane of acoustic folk-blues from JACK ROSE of Philadelphia, released this year by the good folks at VHF Records. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/26/a-hurricane-of-acoustic-folk-blues-jack-rose/

c. “Motorboke” – psych rock rumble from WOODEN SHJIPS of San Francisco, Calfiornia, off their latest album Dos brought to your ears byo ne of America’s finest record labels, Holy Mountain of Portland, Oregon. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/26/wednesday-afternoon-psych-rock-rumble-wooden-shjips/

d. “Dear One” by PISCES —recorded in 1969, finally issued this summer by the lovely gents at Numero Group of Chicago, Illinois. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/24/late-night-psychedelia-pisces-dear-one-1969/

e. “Trouble” by HOPE SANDOVAL AND THE WARM INVENTIONS—another glamorously doomed blues serenade, with a rare chord change, from their forthcoming second album, Through the Devil Softly, out in late September from the good people at Nettwerk Records. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/24/monday-evening-music-hope-sandoval-and-the-warm-inventions/

f. “Networking” by PENS—from the sassy British misses’ zero-fi party jamz debut “hey friend, what you doing?” out next month on LP and CD via De Stijl Records of Minneapolis, Minnesora. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/18/sass-on-parade-pens/

g. “Colossus” by LIGHTNING BOLT—a heavy saga-as-song from the dude-os’ long-abornin’ forthcoming album “Earthly Delights” on Load of Providence, Rhode Island. MP3, stream, beautiful floral B. Chippendale album cover, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/17/new-lightning-bolt-epic-for-ya-colossus/

h. Perfect meditation aid, but also just striking as music/sound/drone: a shimmering 10-minute excerpt from BRENDAN MURRAY’s “Commonwealth,” released last year (and still available) via 23five. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/17/monday-evening-meditation-aid-music-brendan-murray/

i. “Freeway In Mind” a sweet tune by the infamous KURT VILE off his sleeper sub-hit, “Constant Hitmaker,” released last year by Gulcher Rec ords from somewhere in Florida. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/17/a-tune-for-you-kurt-vile/

j. “Cocaine Wedding” by THEUSAISAMONSTER—refusenik prog from one of the decade’s greatest-yet-underheard bands. From last year’s “Space Programs” released thru Load Records of Providence, Rhode Island. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/16/refusenik-prog-from-theusaisamonster/

k. “Her Death” by LOREN CONNORS—spectral midnight space blues, from the bottomless “Juliet” album, released a few years ago by the good people of Family Vineyard Records of Indiana. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/15/spectral-midnight-space-blues-loren-connors/

l. ESPERS covering Blue Öyster Cult’s “Flaming Telepath” live two friday ago at Harvest Records’ Transfigurations Fest in Asheville North Carolina. Downloadie: http://bit.ly/GdXuE

5. MASS ORGANIZATION FOR SERIOUS CHANGE IS OVER, SEZ RUSHKOFF (2009)

An End to Movements
by Douglas Rushkoff – Aug 15, 2009

6. MASS ORGANIZATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE IS OVER, SEZ LEW WELCH (1967)
From an old Com/Co Broadside written by Beat poet/life actor Lew Welch and distributed on the Haight Ashbury in late March, 1967… (see copy of original here: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/21/the-diggers-papers-no-21-a-moving-target-is-hard-to-hit-by-lew-welch…

A MOVING TARGET IS HARD TO HIT
Whatever tribe I am the reincarnated member of, apparently won, or lost, or survived, as Ishi’s TRIBE, simply by fading away, dispersing, a whisp of fog no one can strike: “a moving target is hard to hit.” This can be the reverse of cowardice, it takes great courage, at times, to back off from what is rightly your place to stand.

7. PETE TOMS’ PINK TOMBS PRETTY PRETTY
“Pink Tombs,” serialized in its entirety recently on Arthur Magazine courtesy of the artist hisself and Arthur Comix Editor Jason Leivian of Floating World Comics of Portland, Oregon, is now available direct from Toms himself. Why should you own a physical copy of something you may have already read online, for free. Well internet is nice but the real world is at, books are cool, and Pete can make more comics for you when he has a full stomach. The internet hasn’t fed him yet baby! Go here for more reasons a patrons’ edition of PINK TOMBS, more info on h ow to buy the sucker, and to examine the comics story if you somehow missed it first time ’round: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/20/pink-tombs-limited-edition-print-run-available-now/

8. HOUND DOG TAYLOR HOUSEROCKS YOU FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE THANKS TO THE INTERNET
Some of the finest music you will ever hear, here, now now NOW. Turn it up til the speakers are blowing out, turn down the lights, move the furniture outside, get out the best whiskey and get down to business. The world is going to hell, let’s enjoy what’s left of its greatness while we still can, goddammit… http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/21/friday-night-boogie/

Paz and love,

Arthur Magazine Outdoor Houserockers
Fishtown * The Russian River * a swimming hole near you

Stream:

Download: “Freeway In Mind” – Kurt Vile (mp3)

Subscribe to Arthur’s iTunes Podcast and receive music automatically: click here

“Freeway in Mind” by Kurt Vile of Philadelphia is off last year’s Constant Hitmaker — LP still available on Woodsist of New York City, CD on Gulcher Records from somewhere in Florida. Kurt’s new album is forthcoming momentarily from Matador Records…

Click here to see photo essay…

Band sez:

October 13th 2009 sees the release of the new album “Earthly Delights”. gatefold packed 3 sided LP, CD(still around!) and whatever download where-ever.

destined to be leaked onto the internet by……hmmm. take a guess, maybe august 31? early september? you tell me. but i think the art of this one is good. get the LP!

songs.
1. Sound Guardians
2. Nation of Boar
3. Colossus
4. The Sublime Freak
5. Flooded Chamber
6. Funny Farm
7. Rain on Lake i’m Swimming in
8. S.O.S
9. Transmissionary

Older stuffs:

River Cottage official website

About the book: publisher’s website

More on Arthurmag.com about THE RIVER COTTAGE

The national healthcare movement was doomed from the start. TV clips of shouting matches at town halls and fear-mongering by cynical politicians may be lamentable, but we are witnessing something more profound than the collapse of civic discourse. The failure of a movement that could rightly claim over 70 percent public acceptance just a month ago, exposes the inherent failure of movements of any kind to effectively address our society’s ills.

That’s right. Mass organization may just have been a twentieth century thing: collective actions of all sorts—good and bad—were responses to the corporatization of government and industy. As such, they took the form of the entities with whom they sought to do battle. But—like the top-heavy, highly abstracted creatures they were created to counter —they are proving utterly incapable of providing an alternative to what they would replace.

They did work for a time. When a corporation had the power to hire a police force to crush labor unrest, labor created its own collective, virtual structure to fight back: the union. When disenfranchised blacks faced Jim Crow laws, the Civil Rights movement gave them a tent under which to organize, a charismatic leadership to follow, and a clearly articulated cause to promote. It was branded. Marches could be scheduled, buttons could be worn. And it worked.

Between the 1960s and today, however, the mediaspace through which these causes disseminated ideas and gained momentum has changed. The best techniques for galvanizing a movement have long been co-opted and surpassed by public relations and advertising firms. Whether a movement is real or Astroturf has become almost impossible for even discerning viewers to figure out. The question often becomes the new content of the Sunday morning news panel, taking the place of whatever real issue might have been addressed.

But the problem is not simply that we’ve lost the ability to distinguish between real movements and cynically concocted fake ones. It’s that they are functionally indistinguishable. They may as well be the same thing.

In our current position, when disconnection from the real world is itself a cause for concern, movements only serve to disconnect us further from the actionable. They give us content for websites, language for our bumper stickers, and faces to put on our ideals. But they distract us from the matter at hand, and worse, turn our attention upward toward brand mythologies instead of immediately before us to the people and problems that need our time and energy. In the place of real connections to other people, we get the highly charged but ultimately fake connection to an image.

This is why progressives are so disillusioned by President Obama. He was never anything other than a centrist Democrat. But “brand Obama” gave his supporters—a movement in the fullest sense of the word—an abstracted ideal on which to focus. At least until his election. Meanwhile, the real requirements of progressive activists to contribute to their neighborhoods, promote local business and agriculture, invigorate failing public schools, were again left to someone else. This is not the failure of a president, but the flawed functionality of movements themselves.

For while civil rights, suffrage, and many other causes were largely won through traditionally organized, long-fought, top-down movements, the scale on which these great battles were waged is one no longer appropriate to the tasks at hand. In fact, it is the scale itself on which we have been attempting to orchestrate human affairs that is suspect.

Activists would do more to fight Big Agra simply by subscribing to their local Community Supported Agriculture groups. We’d more effectively pull the rug out from under a corrupt financial sector by simply investing in one another’s businesses—our own town restaurants and drug stores—instead of outsourcing our retirement savings to Wall Street. We could more easily re-invent public schools by volunteering our time to them directly, instead of sending our kids to private schools while we sign petitions for government to re-prioritize. And even in health care, we’d end up cutting everyone’s costs by commuting less, smoking less, landscaping less, and, yes, hating less. For each of these actions triggers different responses, undermines industries, requires new legal structures, and so on. It’s tiny, but it’s almost fractal in its impact.

For as the alternative is now teaching us, one size does not fit all. Americans, in particular, have been living under the premise that there’s something to buy, vote for, or believe in that will simply change everything. And it’s certainly still possible that government could develop the single payer system that pretty much everybody knows deep down would bring the best of industrial health care to the most people.

But just as we are learning that industrially produced food is not ultimately nutritious, a top-down, passionately executed, and highly branded movement is not ultimately effective.

In fact, by creating and branding a movement, even the most well-meaning activitsts are disconnecting from terra firma, and instead entering the world of marketing, public opinion, and language selection. Potential participants, meanwhile, are distracted from whatever on-the-ground, constructive and purposeful activity they might do. They get to join an abstracted movement, and participate by belonging instead of doing, or blogging instead of acting.

Douglas Rushkoff is the author, most recently, of Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back.

Signing up for the weekly bulletin is quick and easy: go here to do it now.

“Command Performance” No. 159
The Arthur Magazine Email Bulletin
August 13, 2009

Arthur Magazine resumes publication Autumn, 2009!
Arthurmag Blog: arthurmag.com
Arthur MP3 downloads
Arthur iTunes Podcast
Arthur on Facebook is actually pretty happening: facebook.com/thearthurmag
Arthur on Twitter: twitter.com/arthurmagazine
Arthurmag Store: store.arthurmag.com/
Arthurmag Advertise: jesse@arthurmag.com
Arthurmag Support (it’s tax-deductible through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas): http://www.arthurmag.com/donate/

!!!!,

1. GRATITUDE!
Arthur pays its bills with merchandise sales, advertising revenue and donations. With merch sales and ad revenues severely depressed because of the Great Contraction, Arthur is more dependent on donations than ever before. So, let’s all give a big hearty round of gratitudinal salutes to Christopher Sousa, Jennifer Schad, Ariana Moore, Liza Berdnik and Paul Lovelace, all recent donors to Arthur Magazine via our fiscal sponsorship through the arts non-profit Fractured Atlas, which allows donations of any size to be made to Arthur to be tax deductible. Thank you all, sincerely!

2. SATURDAY AUGUST 15, 2009 ALL NITE ALL AGES DIY DISCO DANCEPARTY!!! PUBLICIST live! with guest vocalist IAN SVENONIUS!
Plus DJs Ian Svenonius, Justin Miller (DFA)
& Jacques Renault (Runaway)
Video installation by Alison Childs (Donuts!)
Free vegan spacecakes!
Market Hotel
1142 Myrtle Ave. @ Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11206
Midnite – 6am
$10

ARTHUR MAGAZINE & GALAXIE are excited to present a rare live appearance (THE ONLY U.S. DATE!) of TRANS AM drummer Sebastian Thomson’s solo electro project called PUBLICIST this coming Saturday at Market Hotel. His set features guest vocalisms by Ian Svenonius (Soft Focus, Chain & The Gang, Scene Creamers, Make-Up, etc.). You may recognize Sebastian from other acts such as Weird War. He loves making music with his friends but he also loves to make music on his own. As he once said “I love making music with my friends but I also love making music on my own.”

Ian will be DJing for the first hour or so from his collection of soul, funk, boogie & disco 45s. Galaxie residents Justin Miller & Jacques Renault will join Ian on the decks for an all-night, all-ages afterhours disco danceparty at Market Hotel in Brooklyn. We’ll also have a laser-like video installation courtesy of Galaxie resident video artist Alison Childs and free vegan spacecakes. Doors are at midnite and we’ll go til 6am!!

Flyer/links: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/10/aug-15-nyc-arthur-co-presents-publicist-with-ian-svenonius-more-all-nite-all-ages-dance-party/

3. DARK STATS!
Bob Herbert in the August 10, 2009 New York Times: “The percentage of young American men who are actually working is the lowest it has been in the 61 years of record-keeping, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

“Only 65 of every 100 men aged 20 through 24 years old were working on any given day in the first six months of this year. In the age group 25 through 34 years old, traditionally a prime age range for getting married and starting a family, just 81 of 100 men were employed.

“For male teenagers, the numbers were disastrous: only 28 of every 100 males were employed in the 16- through 19-year-old age group. For minority teenagers, forget about it. The numbers are beyond scary; they’re catastrophic.

“This should be the biggest story in the United States. When joblessness reaches these kinds of extremes, it doesn’t just damage individual families; it corrodes entire communities, fosters a sense of hopelessness and leads to disorder.

“…A truer picture of the employment crisis emerges when you combine the number of people who are officially counted as jobless with those who are working part time because they can’t find full-time work and those in the so-called labor market reserve — people who are not actively looking for work (because they have become discouraged, for example) but would take a job if one became available. The tally from those three categories is a mind-boggling 30 million Americans — 19 percent of the overall work force.”

4. MORE DARK STATS!
From August 12, 2009 New York Times:
“Although about a third of the students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2007-8 graduated with no debt, nearly the same as four years earlier, the average amount students borrow has increased, according to a policy brief released Tuesday by the College Board.

“For bachelor’s degree recipients who did borrow, the median loan debt was $19,999, up 5 percent from $18,973 four years earlier, adjusted for inflation. The data, the latest available, come from the federal Department of Education’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, which is conducted every four years.

“About 6 percent of those who completed a degree or certificate — and 10 percent of those who received a bachelor’s degree — borrowed more than $40,000, the brief said.

“But the brief does not include parents’ borrowing, credit-card debt, informal loans from relatives or friends, or loans for graduate school.

“‘We are asking people to bear more and more of the cost of higher education through borrowing, since neither state spending, need-based aid, or family incomes have kept up with the costs,’ said Lauren Asher, president of the Project on Student Debt, a nonprofit research group.

5. DAN DEACON COMMUNE TOURBUS AND PHILOSOPHY SHORT DOC!
Here’s a short doc poached off pitchfork,on DAN DEACON’s current tourbus/commune sitch. Nice! Loaded up for you on arthurmag along with recentish interview with the Dan himself by Arthur Mag’s Jay Babcock. Good music + smarts + fun + commune-ity-style living/eating/working/thinking = a good model, a great way forward through these grim/stoopid times:
http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/13/8792/

6. URBAN FORAGING WITH ARTHUR ‘WEEDEATER’ COLUMNIST NANCE KLEHM IN PHILLY RESULTS!
We walked one block in two hours. We found lambs’ quarters, amarath, yellow wood sorrel, red clover, queen anne’s lace, mugwort, evening primrose, plaintain (both lance leafed and broad leafed), sweet annie, poplar, dandelion, yellow dock, burdock, poor man’s pepper, mullein, a solanaceae Nance is working on idenitifying, poision ivy and hops. All of these plants have medicinal value, and almost all of them were edible. all were growing wild in disturbed soil, disused grassy lots, or in “crack gardens” (Nance’s term) amidst concrete and refuse. See photos of the forage, and the salad we ate from what we found, here:
http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/10/pix-from-yesterdays-urban-forage-with-nance-klehm-in-phillys-fishtown-neighborhood/

7. HUBCAP PRAYER WHEELl!
“Hubcap Prayer Wheel is a high-quality vinyl decal that depicts the most popular mantra in Buddhism, Om Mani Padme Hum. Long ago in Tibet, people began inscribing this mantra onto prayer wheels that were turned by hand, water, or wind. With every spin of the