• ON DARK SKIES AND FALLING STARS
The last time we wrote about a meteor shower here at Arthur, we lived in the middle of the sprawling, light-polluted metropolis of Los Angeles, where the only meteor-like streaks in the sky were the tracer bullets being exchanged between LAPD choppers and some of our gang-banging neighbors. Now we live in Marfa, Texas where we’ll be taking in the Leonid meteor shower — at its peak tomorrow night (that’s November 17) — as it rains across the dark skies of the Trans Pecos from the comfort of our back yard, frosty session brew in hand. Ahhh. Click here and a nerd will tell you where to look for the meteors. [Bad Astronomy/Discover]

• IT WAS HARVEST TIME AGAIN

Speaking of California, it was around this time last year that Arthur columnist Dave Reeves and I were … uh … “camping” on a nearly-destitute drug farm in Northern California. The paranoia, the backwoods misogyny, the nightly “who has the most bullets” shooting contests with the meth-head farmers over the hill … oh the memories. You can read all about it in his story — and look at my pretty, pretty pot pictures on my photo blog — from last year. But did you know that most people don’t have this type of extremely sketched out paranoid experience up on the pot farms? Redheaded Blackbelt writes about some of the less psychotic aspects of growing and trimming with “How long until you earn a million with marijuana and other things you can learn online,” a great jumping-off point for a variety of weed-head shop-talk blogs. And don’t miss the Redhead’s more recent posts, like the one about the time he accidentally sent his kid to school with a memory stick full of marijuana porn. Lotsa nice otter photos there too. [Redheaded Blackbelt]

• BEERS, STEERS AND AFGOOEY SUPER KUSH

Speaking of high quality marijuana, that’s one of the few things that the failed state of California has going for it these days, what with the quasi-decriminalization and all, and it’s definitely something it can hold over the weak produce and harsh sentences here in Texas. Though maybe not for long, as even mainstream Texas magazines are starting to get in line with long-standing Lone Star marijuanauts from Willie Nelson to Gibby Haynes, or at least that’s sure what this “Texas High Ways” (wokka wokka) article from the October Texas Monthly sounds like. [Texas Monthly]

• SPEAKING OF DARK STARS AND FALLING SKIES

We still get email about “Uncle Skullfucker’s Band,” my memoir of spending my high school years as a closet Deadhead, a lot of it looking for pointers on the noisier inheritors of their heavy improvisational legacy, or as Ethan “Howlin Rain/Comets on Fire” Miller put it in a follow-up article, you can listen to a lot of Dead and never “[mistake] it for Fushitsusha, ya know?”

As it happens, audioblog Mutant Sounds just put this thing up that is more or less the ideal entry point for noise-heads that want to “get” the Dead: It’s the Leningrad Psychedelic Blues Machine doing a 21-minute cover of the Dead’s long-form psychedelic masterpiece, “Dark Star.” The Leningrad Psychedelic Blues Machine, of course, is a Japanese noise-blitz apocalypse supergroup including members of Acid Mothers Temple, High Rise, Mainliner and Zeni Geva, and their version is expectedly rough, rugged and raw in what sounds like a tribute to the best of the crackly, fuzzed-out late ’60s audience recordings out there. [Mutant Sounds]

• WHO WANTS A BODY MASSAGE?

Sorry for the long absence. Shortly after arriving here in Texas our pal Lil’ Earl sent us this GI Joe PSAs video from way back in 2006 and it’s pretty much the only thing we look at when we turn the internet on. “Porkchop sandwiches!”

Arik Moonhawk Roper has become one of those artists whose album cover artwork is as dependable a way to select the listening material for tonight’s speaker-worship session as the band personnel listed on the back of the slipcase. Earth. Sleep. Howlin Rain. Sunn O))). Black Crowes. But the expansively naturalistic imagery he provides for these artists is only an entry point to his work: from his many editorial illustrations as a contributor to Arthur; to his most recent book, Mushroom Magick, a “visionary field guide” of botanical illustration that serves as an excellent companion piece to revolutionary mycologist Paul Stamets‘ Mycelium Running.

“The Hidden Dimension” is a survey of Roper’s recent paintings and drawings at New York’s Fuse Gallery, and an ideal next step for those looking for further vistas onto his mystical landscapes. From the press release:

“The Hidden Dimension,” drawings and paintings by Arik Roper runs October 24 through November 28, 2009, at Fuse Gallery, 93 2nd Ave (between 5th & 6th Sts, 2nd Ave stop on the F), NYC, NY. The opening reception, on Saturday October 24, from 7 to 10 pm, is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Fuse Gallery at 212.777.7988 or fusegall@fusegallerynyc.com.

A selection of images from the show can be found below, after the jump. To see more of Roper’s work, you can visit his website, www.arikroper.com as well as the Fuse Gallery website. For more about Roper’s Mushroom Magick, take a listen to his recent interview with Gnostic Media by clicking here. And if your local fungi emporium is sold-out, copies of the book are of course available from Amazon.

Like we said before, these treesitters are HEROES. We were really just kidding around about the tunes, but this video has some jams from HELLA and it’s totally great. Thanks to SPAZ at www.climategroundzero.org for the update. Don’t let the bastards get you down! Sit strong for real.

• ACCIDENTAL GUNFIRE AND UNEXPECTED NUDITY: Doug Fine is a journalist who lives on a remote solar-powered ranch somewhere outside of Silver City, New Mexico. The founding of said ranch is chronicled in his sometimes corny but ultimately pretty fascinating book, Farewell, My Subaru. In the years since, Fine has remained almost entirely off-the-grid, save for the digital connectivity by which he maintains his career as a writer, as well as his blog: Dispatches from The Funky Butte Ranch. This has led him to consider how well he would do in a real grid-crash and the ensuing collapse of mainstream civilization that might soon follow in an essay called “In The Year 2049: Would I Survive A Worst-Case Scenario?” How would he mine the perimeter of his compound? Who would make his shoes? It’s especially entertaining to compare the responses of his city-dwelling pals who are all like “you’re nuts everything’s gonna be fine” and his fellow ranchers who are like “that’s a good idea about the mines.” [Dispatches from the Funky Butte Ranch]

• DO YOU EVER PLAN ON EATING OUT IN LOS ANGELES? Pulitzer-Prize winning food critic Jonathan Gold’s “99 Essential LA Restaurants” is a delightful read even if you don’t plan on dining out in Southern California anytime soon: It’s a journey from the obscure meats of Vietnamese strip mall joints to the finest haute cuisine, and as such it’s one of the best impressionistic portraits of what makes Los Angeles such a strange, delicious town. He’s known to compare tacos and noodles to different varieties of cocaine, he follows Spanish-language media in order to keep up with Mexican-American chefs and says things like this about a Korean spot out in Torrance:

We are as jingoistic about fried chicken as the next guy, and we’ve been to dives in Louisiana where the chicken was so good it made a roomful of testosterone-crazed roustabouts weep like your mother’s bridge club that time Steel Magnolias came on TV. But Korean fried chicken really is an evolutionary leap forward — steeped in a cabinet full of spices, saturated with garlic, double-fried to a shattering, thin-skinned snap dramatic enough to wake a sleeping baby in an adjoining room.

The new edition is available this week — this is gonna be the first time we pick up a hard copy of the LA Weekly since, well, Gold’s list from last year — and you can also read it online. [LA Weekly]

• ON BECOMING ONE MORE HORSE’S ASS: After 12 weird years of living in Los Angeles, California, I’m moving to Marfa, Texas early next week. Fitting that the sky above my house in Atwater Village is dominated by a massive plume of smoke rising from a forest fire in the San Gabriel Mountains; it always feels good to commence an exodus under a rain of ash. Chambo’s Internet Activity Pages shall resume upon activation of Arthur’s Marfa Station. [Bobby Bare - "One More Horse's Ass"]

• SPEAKING OF MARFA: Yacht recorded their most recent album, See Mystery Lights, down there in West Texas. They’re giving away copies of the instrumental version over at the Free Music Archive and I am going to be playing it all weekend — along with lots and lots of Doug Sahm — while I load the moving truck. [Free Music Archive]

“Dr. Pek van Andel was a natural choice to investigate how somebody had attached a dried bull’s penis to the Oxford ox.”

• DID YOU KNOW THAT VIDEO IS A PR0N?: This is a scientist-made porno movie called “Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal.” It’s maker, Dr. Pek van Andel, seems to be a deeply pervy researcher who is able to conjure funding so that he can pay people to copulate in an MRI chamber. The narrator suggests that this video is of interest to “specialists,” as well as “laypersons who have an interest in reproductive anatomy” which is, y’know, pretty much everybody with a working pair of ovaries or testes, right? If you really are curious about such things — and not just for onanistic ends — then click here to read the New Scientist article with all the dirty details. And if you’re just watching because this is the sort of thing gets you wet, just wait ’til you check out the totally NSFW X-ray blowjob pics that have been in the top five posts over at Ballardian for the last year solid. HUBBA HUBBA! [New Scientist via The eXiled]

• READING RAINBOWS: When Stephen Beachy was 19, he took some acid and wandered into a “room full of cadavers.” “Whoah,” he said. Beachy colors his micro-reviews of “12 hallucinogenic novels and 8 inebriated memory pieces” with plenty more such anecdotes, guiding the lysergically-minded reader through canonical works from P.K. Dick and Burroughs, along with underexposed masterpieces; my personal favorite being Denis Johnson’s oft-maligned psychedelic California noir, Already Dead. [SFBG]

• TOO HIGH ON A MOUTAINTOP: Look, just to get this out of the way right off: The guys and gals that sit in trees with, like, a bowl of oatmeal and a hacky sack and manage to stop burly fuckers in bulldozers with giant bags full of explosives from BLOWING THE BRAINS OUT OF MOUNTAINS across Appalachia are H-E-R-O-E-S. Of all time. True heroes. Build a statue and we should all lay flowers down in front of it until the end of days. Click here to go read about all of their laudable activities in Grist.

But when they put their video up and it’s them sitting in a tree in West Virgina with hyper-earnest folk music about “grandaddy workin’ in da mountains/unlike the ’splosion miners of 2day” it sucks all the swagger out of the thing. I understand why these fighters can’t go up there with shotguns and just cap anybody who thinks it’s a good idea to “remove” a mountain, but at least they could score it with jams that sound a little more, I dunno, aggravated. Next time let’s make one of these videos with Lightning Bolt or something like Wolves in the Throne Room’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” or maybe “Hate Crystal” if you still want to keep some of the crusty vibrations. Otherwise you’re unnecessarily wimping it up in front of the whole group. Like Jensen says, “this is war.” [Grist]

• BOIL ME UP SOME BACON AND SOME BEANS: “I never knew baked beans could be such a triumph, such a prayer, such a song,” says Pioneer Woman in her introduction to this recipe for “Best Baked Beans Ever.” What is the secret of these tasty beans? “Start with eight slices of bacon …” and it just goes from there. [The Pioneer Woman via Serious Eats]

• FRESH HEADERS: Aren’t those new Arthur headers sweeet? [Into the Green]

• AWESOME MAPS FROM AFRICA: The dirt scientists at GlobalSoilMap.net are making maps of all the dirts of all the world, and Africa is just the beginning. The landscape architecture obsessives over at Pruned offer up some interesting analysis of a variety of soil maps of African countries, looking at the crossover between “these beautiful abstractions of geology” and the politics of agriculture that are inextricably linked to soil quality. E.g. in vintage maps of Zimbabwe nee Rhodesia, you can find the white population firmly ensconced on the finest dirt. We want to see a soil map of Tim Dundon’s Doo-Doo Manor next! [Pruned]

• TASTY FISH OR DEADLY FISH: Are you looking for new ways to police the eating habits of your pals in public? Who isn’t, is more like it! The Monterey Bay Aquarium has been producing a guide for responsible fish-eaters for awhile now — you’ll oft see them taped to refrigerators in “conscious” pseudo-vegetarian households — and they’ve now ported these guides into a mobile-phone friendly version. There’s also the requisite “iPhone app” if you’re into those exploding Macintosh pocket computers. [via The Vigorous North]

• ATTN CONQUERING LIONS: If you ever have a sudden urge to replenish your digital library with fresh reggae tunes, You & Me On A Jamboree is the website to hit up. These Brazilian bredren have posted literally hundreds of classic out-of-print JA jams, adding more rocksteady, dub and roots albums nearly every day. Our most recent favorite is this super sexy 20 Reggae Disco Hits thing, by which they don’t so much mean “disco” as “righteous pop sweatiness.” It’s a vinyl rip and we kinda love hearing the dusty crackle underneath the super chill covers of “Angel of the Morning” and original rockers from a couple people we’ve heard of (Ethiopians, Gregory Isaacs) and a bunch of dudes and ladies that are totally new to our ears. [Y&M]

• HOT TOWN, SUMMER IN THE CITY SUCKS: Anthropogenic climate change is bad for everyone, but you’re especially fucked if you’re poor or old and you live in the city. So says a new report from the National Wildlife Federation and Physicians for Social Responsibility, via Scientific American:

The report says urban areas, with their asphalt and concrete, are as much as 10 degrees hotter than more rural regions.

More than 3,400 people died in the United States from exposure to excessive heat between 1999 and 2003, the study states, adding that heat accounts for more weather-related deaths than any other single source.

All the more reason to get yourself some of that country air if you can, forest air in particular seems to be the way to go. [Scientific American]

• SPEAKING OF OLD PEOPLE: They say wise and funny shit sometimes: “The dog don’t like you planting stuff there. It’s his backyard. If you’re the only one who shits in something, you own it. Remember that.” [Shit My Dad Says via Harper's]

• GREAT BALLS OF FIRE: Did you miss the Perseid meteor shower peak-hour blowout that happened back on August 12? We went camping up on Mount Pacifico here in the Southern CA San Gabriels the weekend after and caught a couple fleeting shooting stars, but the main event was completely obscured by the impenetrable orange-grey dome that covers the Los Angeles sky each night. Luckily this “Jeff Sullivan” guy on Flickr recorded a good portion of the night with his HD camera. [via Bad Astronomy/Discover]

• PACIFIC SCI-FI: We are slowly working our way through Simon Sellars most recent contribution to Ballardian, a website “exploring tropes and motifs found in the work of J.G. Ballard.” Sellars’ essay — “Extreme Possibilities: Mapping “the sea of time and space” in J.G. Ballard’s Pacific fictions” — is an in-depth look at themes of dystopia/utopia in works such as “My Dream of Flying to Wake Island” and Rushing to Paradise, tales set on uninhabited Pacific islands. Sellars brings anarchist philosopher-poet Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) and literary critic Fredric Jameson into the discussion, along with a variety of photographs and video documenting the nuclear testing that gives much of these works their apocalyptic tint. [Ballardian]

• TO DEET OR NOT TO DEET: Last week a bunch of people picked up the story that the noxious insect repelling chemical was maybe bad for you, as in neurotoxically bad. O RLY? That shit melts plastic and “stained” the frames of my spectacles — of course it’s bad for you. But you know what else I think is bad for me? Having mosquitos and no-see-ums eating my eyeballs alive when I’m up in Tahoe, exploring high altitude bogs in the Desolation Wilderness. And also BUG GIRL says that maybe these studies aren’t that useful anyway: “The results in this paper are preliminary, need to be confirmed, and even IF confirmed, remain irrelevant to the average person who might want to use DEET.” Whatever: DEET ‘em if you got ‘em, I guess. Or better yet let’s see what NANCE has to say about hexing them skeeters … [Bug Girl's Blog]

• ON YARD EGGS AND CITY CHICKENS: The urban homesteaders at Homegrown Evolution are talking chicken at their newly launched L.A. Urban Chicken Enthusiasts online forum. And if you’ve got an extra 20 bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you can go hang out with them at Project Butterfly in downtown Los Angeles TODAY (that’s Tuesday, August 25, 2009) and they’ll teach you how to make sauerkraut and a “self-irrigating pot.” [Homegrown Evolution]

Have you ever seen Boris live? Dudes cart around a huge effing gong with ‘em, and as I recall from their Arthur Nights performance, they only bang on it like once or twice but when they do: Whoa boy! Just WHAM and it’s all shimmering through the air until it fades back into the wall of guitar buzzing. Anyway, they’ve got two new splits out right about now. The first, with one of Boyd Deveraux’s favorite bands, Miami-based sludge metallers Torche (click here to go read “Riffs on Ice,” our interview with the doom-metal-loving hockey great) is called Chapter Ahead Being Fake and it’s got one song from each band. They’re both minor works and a bit “meh” but far from stinkers. It’s out on Daymare Recordings.

The other split out now is a winning head-scratcher: It’s called Golden Dance Classics and it’s with a band we’d never heard of called 9dw. A quick-read of their MySpace reveals them to be a “hip Japanese combo” that does a kind of techno-jazz fusion thing that’s all manic high-hats and funky keyboards versus spaced-out keyboards. Makes us think of all those modern Japanese modal jazz guys that we could never really get into. But all that is beside the point: The two Boris songs here are totes amazing. The first is a long thing with a drum machine, keyboard squiggles and guitar lines keening around as the band kind of yelps and moans prettily. The second song is a wall-of-guitar fuzz builder with pleasantly melancholy vocals that build together into a total anthem. RAAAAH BORIS! You can find links to get this one with it’s trippy cover art and everything at the 9dw M’Space and the Boris M’Space.

The first time I heard Fuck Buttons I was in a house that was belching smoke from a smoke machine and there was a guy swinging from the rafters by his hands, wearing nothing but pajama bottoms. The friend who delivered me to this party — you may know his work as the author of Arthur’s “Do The Math” column — disappeared into the gloom, only to pop back through the fog moments later yelling incomprehensibly over the music and swinging a giant bong around. He was also wearing a flight helmet, while another guy behind him was fast approaching in a fencing mask. So needless to say the band’s videos for their glistening kaleidoscope noise jams have a long way to go when it comes to trumping the images I already have in my head. Luckily, this video for “Surf Solar” — the first single from Tarot Sport, their Andrew Weatherall-produced sophomore release due out in October 2009 — delivers with penguin races and pulsating symmetrical neon signs or something. The video was directed by Fuck Button Andrew Hung.

Their first album, Street Horrrsing is also just grrreat, and yielded this wonderful video for “Bright Tomorrow,” directed by Hung, and comprised entirely of camera phone photography asplosions.

• 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 below:

• MORE AWESOME TAPES (AND 7-INCHES) FROM AFRICA: Frank lived in West Africa from 2005 to 2008, and he tells us all about it at Voodoo Funk, a collection of stories, MP3s and awesome record store art. He’s also DJing a “Lagos Disco Inferno” party this weekend in Brooklyn, and you can get a preview of the heavy grooves from his crates with this kinda sloppy and totally delightful downloadable mix. [Voodoo Funk]

• MEXICAN JOURNALISM 101: Tucson-based writer Charles Bowden is by far the best guy when it comes to reading about drugs and Mexico, partly because in Mexico you are not allowed to write about drugs and Mexico. In last month’s Mother Jones he wrote this terrifying story of a reporter who wasn’t even trying to do that, but Mexican Army psychopaths decided to try and kill him anyway. He fled to the United States looking for asylum so we put him in jail and took his kid away. [Mother Jones]

• CHILEAN ELECTRONICS: Arthur pal Raspberry Jones is adding a bunch of tunes to Newly Lost Edge, including some interesting electronic music from South America. Jones is a regular go-to guy when it comes to this stuff, helpfully directing our attention to mixes such as this one from Matias Aguayo, a Chilean dude “putting on his various friends from around the world – artists from Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Cape Verde, etc. – who aren’t just doing the local thing, so much as mixing that local thing with a (for lack of a better term) minimal techno vibe.” [Newly Lost Edge]

• ENDGAME TIME AGAIN: The Guardian UK joins the Financial Times in shoring up the British mainstream press’ reputation as a hub for radical anarcho-primitivist thought, following the Jared Diamond interview we wrote about last week with this pleasantly archaic exchange of letters between two dudes, one of whom is like “The writing is on the wall for industrial society, and no amount of ethical shopping or determined protesting is going to change that now” and another guy who’s like, “you’re just horny for the apocalypse.” [The Guardian]

• NEW ANIMALS: Did you see the new animals yet? World Wide Fund for Nature has all kinds of information about the 350 different species of plants, amphibians, reptiles, fish, birds, mammals and invertebrates that humans have recently discovered hiding out in the Eastern Himalayas (so not exactly “new,” so much as “new to us”). Including this flying frog that glides around from tree-to-tree with its webbed feet. That guy is most likely on the anti-industrial society side of the debate. [WWF via Science Daily]

P.S. Happy Birthday Joe Strummer! You can read Kristine McKenna’s beautifully sprawling Q&A with the dearly departed Clash frontman and all around inspirational hero from Arthur 3 (March 2003) by clicking here. We’ve also got plenty of hard copies left in the Arthur Store. Click here to go see about that.

Hiroshima, photographer unknown, 1945, via International Center of Photography

Earlier this month The Design Observer Group commemorated the 64th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima by republishing the following essay by Adam Harrison Levy along with a new collection of photographs of the city following its obliteration by atomic bomb. The photographs are from a collection of 700 images by an unknown photographer that were literally found in the trash in the late ’90s by some guy out walking his dog in the rain. What’s particularly interesting about these images is the U.S.’ suppression of such documentation:

Thirty-one days after the blast, a team of U.S. scientists flew over the city. “There was just one enormous, flat, rust-red scar, and no green or grey” Philip Morrison told The New Yorker in 1946, “because there were no roofs or vegetation left. I was pretty sure then that nothing I was going to see later would give me as much of a jolt.”

The world has very few photographs of what gave Morrison that unforgettable jolt. This is no accident. On September 18, 1945, just over a month after Japan had surrendered, the U.S. Government imposed a strict code of censorship on the newly defeated nation. It read, in part: “nothing shall be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility.”

The U.S. government was ostensibly wary of the emotions of grief and anger that could be unleashed in Japan as a result of the circulation of images of the destroyed city; it was probably just as concerned to keep the physical effects of its new and terrible weapon a secret. But this suppression of visual evidence served a third purpose: it helped, both in Japan and back home in America, to inhibit any questioning of the decision to use the bomb in the first place.

Find the whole essay, along with a slideshow of these photos at The Design Observer Group. (via Conscientious)

One of the many challenges of using both emerging technology and pre-industrial building techniques comes when the adobe architect, solar power installer or graywater recycler runs up against city codes that are either outdated, ignorant or designed to bolster the entrenched building supply and construction industry. The point being, as with so many other things in life, is that it’s a lot more fun to stand up to the bastards with a little help from our friends. Scientific American has a new blog called “60-Second Solar” where George Musser reveals the tips ‘n’ tricks of installing solar panels, and in this installment he turns the keyboard over to a dude from Washington D.C.’s Mt. Pleasant Solar Cooperative, who tells us how they got together, and how you can do something similar in your town.

An excerpt from “The pleasant way to go solar: neighborhood cooperatives”:

“I figured we could get something going within a year. Boy, were we wrong. As we grappled with what was actually involved in making our dreams real, we spent two years climbing the solar power learning curve, and it was steep.

First of all, we hit the reality that solar power is relatively expensive, costing up to a third more than carbon-based energy sources. If we were going to do something, we had to figure out how to cut every cost possible. Second, the economies of scale that we envisioned simply don’t exist in residential solar installations; at least that’s what veteran solar installers around Washington told us. Third, the practical realities of going solar in a cost-effective way turned out to be fiendishly complex set of interrelated problems.

We learned, for example, that holding down the price of solar power depended, in part, on the implementation of solar-friendly practices such as “net metering” and “smart metering” by our local utility, the Potomac Electric Power Company, otherwise known as Pepco. But Pepco’s willingness to do right by solar customers depended on the views of the local Public Service Commission (PSC), a powerful but opaque body that moved with the speed and friendliness of a glacier. The PSC, in turn, looked for guidance from the D.C. City Council, a dozen elected officials from a majority African-American city, who were hearing complaints that a previous solar rebate program amounted to a handout to wealthy whites.

Amidst this welter of conflicting forces, our beautiful but innocent idea of neighborhood solar power was not enough. We needed expertise to give our project credibility with decision makers who could deliver real financial benefits for our members. So we scaled back our ambitions and started with smaller steps. We touted basic energy-efficiency measures to our members as the prerequisite for going solar. (Drafty windows and outdated appliances waste solar energy just as fast as they waste carbon energy!) We arranged for discounted home energy audits for our members. We bought compact fluorescent bulbs wholesale and sold them at cost to Coop members. And we started networking with City Council aides, national green groups, PSC members, and industry experts seeking advice about how to make solar power cheaper and more accessible.”

Click here to read the whole thing over at Scientific American.

White Rainbow Live @ Henry Miller Library from (((folkYEAH!))) on Vimeo.

Adam Forkner just posted this trippy footage from the “last ever White Rainbow show played from within a zome dome glow tent thing” up in Big Sur in October 2007. Get more White Rainbow stuff by dropping in every now and again at the White Rainbow “life log.”

A Journey Round My Skull, one of our favorite blogs covering “forgotten literature” and graphic design, recently turned two. Curator Will Schofield is revisiting selections from one of his archival posts about renown Japanese designer Tadanori Yokoo to mark the occasion, saying “One of the best things about viewing art online for me is the ability to stare at details for as long as I want to, and sometimes to blow up those details.” Click here and go stare as long as you like …

“… The bus dropped me off at a deserted intersection, where a weather-beaten sign warning off would-be trespassers in English, Fijian, and Hindi rattled in the tropical wind. Once I reached the plant, the bucolic quiet gave way to the hum of machinery spitting out some 50,000 square bottles (made on the spot with plastic imported from China) per hour. The production process spreads across two factory floors, blowing, filling, capping, labeling, and shrink-wrapping 24 hours a day, five days a week. The company won’t disclose its total sales; Fiji Water’s vice president of corporate communications told me the estimate of 180 million bottles sold in 2006, given in a legal declaration by his boss, was wrong, but declined to provide a more solid number.

From here, the bottles are shipped to the four corners of the globe; the company—which, unlike most of its competitors, offers detailed carbon-footprint estimates on its website—insists that they travel on ships that would be making the trip anyway, and that the Fiji payload only causes them to use 2 percent more fuel. In 2007, Fiji Water announced that it planned to go carbon negative by offsetting 120 percent of emissions via conservation and energy projects starting in 2008. It has also promised to reduce its pre-offset carbon footprint by 25 percent next year and to use 50 percent renewable energy, in part by installing a windmill at the plant.

The offsetting effort has been the centerpiece of Fiji Water’s $5 million “Fiji Green” marketing blitz, which brazenly urges consumers to drink imported water to fight climate change. The Fiji Green website claims that because of the 120-percent carbon offset, buying a big bottle of Fiji Water creates the same carbon reduction as walking five blocks instead of driving. Former Senior VP of Sustainable Growth Thomas Mooney noted in a 2007 Huffington Post blog post that “we’d be happy if anyone chose to drink nothing but Fiji Water as a means to keep the sea levels down.” (Metaphorically speaking, anyway: As the online trade journal ClimateBiz has reported, Fiji is using a “forward crediting” model under which it takes credit now for carbon reductions that will actually happen over a few decades.)

Fiji Water has also vowed to use at least 20 percent less packaging by 2010—which shouldn’t be too difficult, given its bottle’s above-average heft. (See “Territorial Waters.”) The company says the square shape makes Fiji Water more efficient in transport, and, hey, it looks great: Back in 2000, a top official told a trade magazine that “What Fiji Water’s done is go out there with a package that clearly looks like it’s worth more money, and we’ve gotten people to pay more for us.”

Selling long-distance water to green consumers may be a contradiction in terms. But that hasn’t stopped Fiji from positioning its product not just as an indulgence, but as an outright necessity for an elite that can appreciate its purity. As former Fiji Water CEO Doug Carlson once put it, “If you like Velveeta cheese, processed water is okay for you.” (”All waters are not created equal” is another long-standing Fiji Water slogan.) The company has gone aggressively after its main competitor—tap water—by calling it “not a real or viable alternative” that can contain “4,000 contaminants,” unlike Fiji’s “living water.” “You can no longer trust public or private water supplies,” co-owner Lynda Resnick wrote in her book, Rubies in the Orchard. …”

Keep reading at Mother Jones.

Head to the hills and turn your eyes skyward! The heavens will soon be alight with blazing fireballs as debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet continues to disintegrate in the Earth’s atmosphere. The Perseid meteors have been burning out across the sky since mid-July, and according to StarDate online, the bombardment peaks “early afternoon on the 12th, so the morning of the 12th (midnight to dawn) and late evening are the best times to watch from the U.S.” There’s also gonna be a pretty big moon, so that’ll reduce visibility a bit. Though here in Los Angeles the light pollution’s so bad we’ll have to plan a damn road trip to have any chance at seeing these suckers. Or maybe we’ll just sit on the porch and watch the LAPD helicopters hunting through Frogtown with their searchlights, just like any other night.

More information on just what is going on can be found at Discover, StarDate and National Geographic.

Anyone who’s been to Manhattan Beach anytime in the last 20 years or so will likely find little in common with Gordita Beach — the fictional locale of Thomas Pynchon’s universe, thought to be based on the beachfront community south of Los Angeles — but the few landmarks that remain are helpfully pointed out in these two pieces below.

Gordita Beach is the setting of Pynchon’s new stoner-noir, Inherent Vice, and also makes a brief appearance in Vineland, his 1990 novel set amidst the schizophrenics, hippies and rednecks of the Northern California redwoods. Though his whereabouts have usually been unknown over the course of his career, the famously reclusive writer lived in Manhattan Beach in 1969-70 while he was writing Gravity’s Rainbow, and in keeping with his near invisibility beyond the bookshelf, there’s little trace left of his presence, or the enclave of “paranoid dope-smokers, surfers and ’stewardii’” of Inherent Vice.

The Daily Breeze did a compare and contrast piece on modern-day Manhattan and Gordita Beaches in its August 8, 2009 edition: Surprise! Most of the good bookstores are gone, it’s all overrun with horrible lawyers, the landmarks have been plastered over with Oliver Garden-inspired facades and hardly anybody remembers that one of the most significant literary works of the late 20th Century was written there:

But around the South Bay, the response has been more muted. Over the past few years the beach cities have lost their best independent bookstores – such as Either/Or Bookstore in Hermosa Beach, where Pynchon was alleged to be a customer – and Manhattan Beach has been slow to claim Pynchon as a local author.

“Manhattan Beach has a way of shoveling under that kind of countercultural history,” said Frost, whose extensive report on Pynchon’s local ties can be found at www.tinyurl.com/macb29. “He occupied a time in history that doesn’t get recorded very well in the South Bay.”

You can read the Breeze piece by clicking here or keep scrolling down to the bottom of our post.

For a more in-depth look at Pynchon’s South Bay years, we’ll refer you to the Garrison Frost history that The Breeze is talking about, originally published in 1999 in his journal of South Bay ephemera, The Aesthetic. Several amusing tidbits:

First and foremost, though, Pynchon was a writer, according to Hall. He was known to lock himself up in his apartment for days and weeks at a time while writing “Gravity’s Rainbow,” often going so far as to block out the windows with towels.

Guy recalled that, while doing research for the book, Pynchon translated an entire book of Russian history using only an English/Russian dictionary.

Perhaps the most interesting tale that Hall has regarding Pynchon is of their last meeting. It was around 1975 and he hadn’t seen the author since the two chatted at the counter at El Tarasco a couple of years earlier. By chance, Hall found himself back in Manhattan Beach and met Pynchon on the sidewalk near the Fractured Cow.

“I was walking down the street and he was walking toward me,” Hall said. “Our paths crossed right in front of a pay phone, our eyes met and we recognized each other. I asked how he was and at that moment the telephone rang. He looked at me and looked at the phone, then turned around and ran down the street, and I never saw him again.”

Click here to keep reading “Thomas Pynchon and the South Bay” at The Aesthetic’s website. And if you haven’t gotten a copy of Inherent Vice yet, Amazon’s currently offering a free download of the first chapter as PDF.

Read “Fictionalized Manhattan Beach comes to life in Pynchon novel” from The Daily Breeze after the jump …

Fictionalized Manhattan Beach comes to life in Pynchon novel
By Gene Maddaus Staff Writer
Posted: 08/08/2009 10:10:40 PM PDT

It’s been about 40 years since author Thomas Pynchon lived in Manhattan Beach, but his latest novel is rich with his recollections of the beach enclave and other parts of the South Bay.

“Inherent Vice,” released Tuesday, is a detective novel set in fictional Gordita Beach – a stand-in for Manhattan Beach.

Pynchon, 72, is famously reclusive. He does not give interviews and little is known about his life or his whereabouts since the early 1960s.

But a decade ago, local journalist Garrison Frost gathered recollections from acquaintances who claimed to know Pynchon when he lived in Manhattan Beach in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when he was writing his best-known book, “Gravity’s Rainbow.”

The new novel – the first Pynchon has set in the South Bay – buttresses those claims, as it seems to have been written by someone familiar with the petty aggravations of local life.

For example, Pynchon describes Rosecrans Avenue as a “chuckholed obstacle course,” and includes this passage on local parking:

“The kindest thing anybody’d ever called the parking in Gordita Beach was nonlinear. The regulations changed unpredictably from one block, often one space to the next, having been devised secretly by fiendish anarchists to infuriate drivers into one day forming a mob and attacking the offices of town government.”

There are also references to local history, including a riff on Gordita Beach’s troubled past. Egged on by the Ku Klux Klan, locals are said to have burned a black family’s house to the ground and then confiscated the land for a local park.

That seems to be a clear reference to Bruce’s Beach, which was a black resort until the city of Manhattan Beach seized it in 1924 and turned it into a park. According to local historian Jan Dennis, there was an active local chapter of the KKK and black-owned homes were often torched.

Among a certain crowd, the release of a new Pynchon novel is a major event. Book Soup in West Hollywood and Skylight Books in Los Feliz each held midnight release parties Tuesday, so Pynchon fanatics could pick up the book as soon as it was available.
But around the South Bay, the response has been more muted. Over the past few years the beach cities have lost their best independent bookstores – such as Either/Or Bookstore in Hermosa Beach, where Pynchon was alleged to be a customer – and Manhattan Beach has been slow to claim Pynchon as a local author.

“Manhattan Beach has a way of shoveling under that kind of countercultural history,” said Frost, whose extensive report on Pynchon’s local ties can be found at www.tinyurl.com/macb29. “He occupied a time in history that doesn’t get recorded very well in the South Bay.”

The Gordita Beach of Pynchon’s fiction is a funkier place than modern-day Manhattan Beach. Gordita is populated by paranoid dope-smokers, surfers and “stewardii” who fly out of nearby LAX.

The novel is set at a turning point in the culture war. Charles Manson is about to go on trial, and the Los Angeles Police Department is portrayed as a paramilitary organization.

Some local landmarks referenced in the book – such as the Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach – are still around. But much else has changed.

“There’s been a gentrification here since the ’60s,” said longtime local resident Don Spencer. “It costs more to live here, and that seems to attract people who have been relatively successful. Either that or relatively lucky.”

That cultural shift may help explain why “Inherent Vice” has received little local attention. Dave Prentice, owner of Dave’s Olde Book Shop in Redondo Beach, said the local clientele now consists largely of lawyers – who for some reason prefer science fiction – and their wives.

“The wives are susceptible to buying expensive books if you tell them they can’t afford them,” Prentice said. “We also sell books by the foot to interior decorators, but they’ve got to be the right color.”

In keeping with the Grateful Dead thread that happily resurfaces every so often here on Arthur, I’m offering up one of the heaviest bootlegs in my collection: A soundboard recording of October 12, 1968 at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. It’s a show that came up in our “Listen to the Dead” story from 2005, and it’s my favorite single-disc representation of how monstrously weird this band used to be. Legendary taper Dick “Picks” Latvala is quoted on Deadlists saying that this is among his favorite performances, calling it “primal Dead.”

It’s a short show by Dead standards — just about 80 minutes — comprised entirely of CRUSHING jams. No folky “Sugar Magnolia” sing-a-long first set, not much noodly Phish bullshit and almost no sign of the gentle rainbow twirly groovin’ bear nonsense. Instead it’s near ambient passages that slowly gather speed and intensity before exploding into massive psychedelic earthquakes of rhythm that leave aftershocks of cosmic guitar lines shimmering through the air. This is the fearsome and messy STEAL YOUR FACE sound that people who compare the Dead to Royal Trux or Comets on Fire are talking about. A Dead show where you can see why Greg Ginn and the Black Flag dudes were into these guys.

Check the annotated setlist below. FYI the “>” is taper shorthand for songs joined together by “a defined jam or contiguous transition” so you get the idea how loose things get:

Set One (1) [0:23] % (2) [0:37] ; Dark Star [14:53] > Saint Stephen [4:51] > The Eleven [9:58] > Death Don’t Have No Mercy [7:#52] ; (3) [0:31]

Set Two Cryptical Envelopment [#1:28] > Drums [0:10] > The Other One [7:08] > Cryptical Envelopment [8:30] > New Potato Caboose [3:28] > Jam [3:11] > Drums (4) [1:35] > Jam (5) [7:12] > Feedback [7:15#]

A couple notes: Some Deadheads like to talk about how maybe Jimi Hendrix was hanging out in the wings during the show. As rumor has it he snubbed the band’s invite to check ‘em out the night before — there was this girl and she had some acid and yadda yadda — and so they failed to invite him on to jam or something. Who knows if it’s true, but like the shows these guys played with the Allman Bros later in the ’70s, it’s fun to imagine such a ridiculous gathering of guitar avatars in one place.

People also complain about somebody who is just cold goin’ bananas with some kinda wood-stick percussion thing on “Dark Star,” all “ritzy-rit-ritzy-rit” outta rhythm with the rest of the band from time to time. Whoever it is walks up to a mic at some point and it gets really annoying in the front of your speakers for about 25 seconds but then it fades out, so just chill about that. It’s also a show where beloved keyboard slob Pigpen is not on stage — probably off getting wasted with Janis or something. Good for him!

You can stream the show over at Archive.org, or download it by clicking below.

The Grateful Dead – Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco, CA – 1968-10-12 (320kbps)

More Dead on Arthur after the jump …

• Drone artist Greg Davis’ massive Dead mix
• Headneck Bonanza: Doug Sahm live in 1972 with Leon Russell and the Dead
• New Riders’ Marmaduke, RIP
• Listen to the Dead: An Arthur primer featuring Ethan Miller, Animal Collective’s Geologist, Erik Davis and more
• Uncle Skullfucker’s Band: Daniel Chamberlin explains the discreet charm of the Grateful Dead

An excerpt from Barbet Shroeder’s Charles Bukowski Tapes (1985), in which the crusty and hilarious old alcoholic writer (and inspiration to countless terrible would-be alcoholic writers) rides around Los Angeles — specifically, the intersection of Hollywood and Western — in a convertible and shows us where all the crazy people sit, where you can purchase lethal powders for 15¢ and who the hookers and dope dealers are. It’s a telling sign of Los Angeles’ depressingly unchecked development that one of the only buildings that’s still recognizable in 2009 is the dilapidated Le Sex Shoppe just east of Western on Hollywood. (via LA TACO)

Our celebration of recently departed hippie-country music pioneer John “Marmaduke” Dawson of the New Riders of the Purple Sage’s legacy started a conversation about the history of “headneck” music: tunes beloved in equal measure to cowboys, hippies, bikers and all varieties of stoner hicks, country heads and longhaired rednecks.

Beyond the New Riders and the Dead, the consensus seems to be that Commander Cody, Asleep at the Wheel and Doug Sahm (in his many incarnations, from dusty Texas boogie, accordion-flecked Tex-Mex and sun-dappled Mill Valley country) represent some of the pinnacles of this rowdy sound. After a bit of digging around in the Google crates, we found one of the holy grails of headneck history over at The Adios Lounge: a bootleg recording of an impromptu 1972 Doug Sahm, Leon Russell, Jerry Garcia and Friends show at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, Texas.

On Thanksgiving weekend in 1972 the Dead were in Austin, on tour of course, and they joined Sir Doug and country-time piano genius Leon Russell — you know his rollicking keys from session work with The Byrds, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, his oft-covered song “Superstar”; and you really should seek out the riches of his 1971 solo album, Leon Russell and the Shelter People, as the psych-out cover art is just the beginning — on stage for a couple hours of once-in-a-lifetime country grooves.

Genuine Texas groover Sahm with spliff and brew

At our request, Lance — the gracious proprietor of The Adios Lounge — has re-upped the whole two-and-a-half hour jam session full of songs from Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan and Hank Williams, among many others. It’s a soundboard recording (A-/A for the tapers out there) full of Garcia’s lush pedal steel, Phil Lesh’s noodly bass, and fiddle duties handled by Marty Mary Egan and Thirteenth Floor Elevator (!?) Benny Thurman. Vocals are traded between Sahm, Garcia, Russell and what sounds like a room full of rowdy Texan headnecks having the time of their lives. “Holy shit” is right.

This is music for hot afternoons, sitting shirtless in the sun, chasing shots of green dragon with econo-brews and popping off at the empties with your “blaster of choice.” Many thanks to Lance for the re-post. Click here to go download yourself a copy.

Now who’s got the hook up on some vintage Commander Cody bootlegs? And “muchas Garcias” once again to longtime Arthur compadre Michael Simmons for initiating my search for this music.

Also: BONUS HEADNECK JAM after the jump …

We highly recommend that you grab Doug Sahm’s overlooked 1976 classic Texas Rock for Country Rollers while you’re visiting the Adios Lounge. Lance has done a song-by-song annotation of the whole album that establishes its reputation as a standout in Sahm’s already overflowing back catalog. It includes such gems as “Cowboy Peyton Place” and “Texas Ranger Man,” the story of a stoned Texas gigolo pining after a “lonely-looking Pisces” in some honky-tonk, his affections kept at bay by her father, the cop of the title. Get it here.

We don’t post all that many videos from “old-folks bedtime-lullaby program” The Tonight Show, but we’ll make an exception this time for beef-necked beatnik Captain Kirk reading Alaskan poetry. (via Wonkette)

UPDATE: DANG! YouTube video appears to have been removed. Click here to watch Shatner’s reading of Palin. Apologies for the pre-roll car advertisement, and thanks to Bill S. for the update.

New Riders of the Purple Sage, live at Fillmore East, April 29, 1971. Click here for the setlist, or to download the whole thing as MP3s

Dilettantes dabbling in the genre of country music have always had a hard time, from hippies like Gram Parsons to his modern day alt-country hipster inheritors. There’s almost always an inevitable anxiety over class privileges and the fetishization of working class experience by cultural elites. That combines with the classic rural versus urban divide and adds up to an awkward night sitting in a bar in Silver Lake listening to delicate, good-looking dudes in fancy vintage Western shirts singing about CB radios and old pickup trucks. It’s airless tribute at best, unaware cowboy drag at worst.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson was the lead singer and main songwriter for The New Riders of the Purple Sage, the best of the hippie country bands that emerged from the West Coast psychedelic rock and rustic folk scenes, and one of the only bands — along with Commander Cody, Doug Sahm and Asleep At The Wheel [thanks for reminding me, Michael!] — that managed to merge roper with doper without apologies to either camp. He died on Tuesday in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he’d been teaching English as part of the city’s established community of American expatriates. He was 64, and stomach cancer was the culprit.

Travel to Mexico is the subject of one of the New Riders best-known songs, “Henry.” Marmaduke often dedicated live performances of the song to anyone in the audience who “smuggles dope for a living,” and given that most of the New Riders best shows were during the early ’70s opening for the Grateful Dead, there were no doubt plenty of audience members who appreciated such recognition.

“Henry” is about the titular drug runner on his way down to Acapulco to find out why all the marijuana has stopped flowing to the United States. After navigating a series of twisty mountain roads, he finds his supplier’s farm and proceeds to get thoroughly obliterated on freshly trimmed crops. The song is about the drive back, as told from the perspective of an unnamed passenger, who is continually beseeching the seriously faded Henry to keep the brakes on as they careen through the mountain passes.

It’s a song that, like so many New Riders tunes, conveys a distinctly hippie experience using the language of country music. The band was an outgrowth of Jerry Garcia’s pre-Dead unit, the wacky bluegrass band Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. The Dead did plenty of country-leaning material, but Garcia still wanted an outlet for his pedal steel licks, and thus the New Riders of the Purple Sage came to be.

Garcia does indeed lay down sublime steel guitar on their first two albums — as a band member on the eponymous 1971 debut, and a guest on 1972’s mellow Powerglide — and joined them onstage frequently when the two bands toured together throughout the early ’70s. It’s here that Garcia really opens up on the foot pedals, unleashing sinuous lines of guitar twang; a perfect complement to Marmaduke’s dopey, nasal voice.

Such hippie experiences aren’t just limited to running drugs: Marmaduke was also quite adept at celebrating the natural beauty of California wilderness with songs like “Rainbow,” and wrote environmentalist ballads like “Last Lonely Eagle,” which managed to be as unapologetically corny and gorgeously heartbreaking as George Jones. Later, less well-known albums like Brujo continued to convey Marmaduke’s interest in South American adventure through his songs and collaborations, my favorite being the Kim Fowley-penned “On The Amazon,” the story of a thief who flees the city to become a river bandit.

The New Riders made great country music because they came off as goofy and brokenhearted as real country musicians, not urban folkies poor-mouthing their way through ballads of small town heartbreak or long nights of hauling freight; in other words, I believe Marmaduke because he wrote really dumb, beautiful songs.

Marmaduke and his band sound just like what they were: hippies who loved country music. Even when they dabbled in Bakersfield classics or pulled out their gloopy psychedelic version of the speed-chomping anthem “Six Days on the Road,” it always sounded like stoned tribute, rather than like they were really trying to come off like actual truck drivers, roughnecks or fence-mending cowboys. That puts Marmaduke’s body of work — which also includes co-writing credit on the Dead classic “Friend of the Devil” along with guest spots on American Beauty, Aoxomoxoa and Workingman’s Dead — closer to cowboy storytellers like Robert Earl Keene, Jerry Jeff Walker or Commander Cody than either the San Francisco acid rock scene from whence he sprang, or the alt-country players rocking vintage NRPS gear procured from eBay collectors.

There’s plenty of studio work from the New Riders that’s worth tracking down, but the first two albums are the best, IMHO. What’s more the New Riders still have plenty of soundboard and audience bootlegs available for download at Archive.org — unlike the Dead, who true to their unfortunate legacy as profiteering yuppie douchebags, pulled all the soundboard recordings from the Archive site several years ago. Marmaduke continued playing with the New Riders until 1997. He supported, but neglected to join in with, the 2005 revival of the band. It sounds like he was pretty content living a low profile, low cost, low impact life down in Mexico; an idyllic existence well in line with the loveliest of New Riders ballads.

FURTHER READING:
• Uncle Skullfucker’s Band: Daniel Chamberlin explains the discreet charm of the Grateful Dead
• How to Get Into the Grateful Dead

To commemorate the alleged death of the reclusive Hoosier sex wizard Michael Jackson, the dude at Ballardian has updated one of J.G. Ballard’s 1970 “surgical fictions,” a cut-and-pasted thing called “Princess Margaret’s Facelift,” originally published in New Worlds but most readily found in the appendix of modern editions of The Atrocity Exhibition. As Ballard told Penthouse back in ‘70 (when porn mags were quite literally worth reading, from time to time):

“I feel a tremendous rapport with pop artists and in a lot of my fiction I’ve tried to produce something akin to pop art. For instance, I’ve just published a piece in New Worlds called ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’, in which I’ve taken the text of a classic description of a plastic surgery operation, a facelift, and where the original says “the patient”, I’ve inserted “Princess Margaret”. So I’ve done precisely what the pop painters did, using images from everyday life — Coca-Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe — and manipulated them. The great thing about pop painters is their honesty. They’ve turned their backs on the traditional subject matter of the fine arts — which had hardly changed since the Renaissance — and looked at their own environment and decided: yes, the shine on domestic hardware, like the refrigerator or the washing machine, the particular gleam on the mouldings of a cabinet, the moulding of doorhandles, are of importance to people, because these are the visual landscapes of people’s lives, and if we’re going to be honest we’re going to use reality material instead of fiction. I want to do the same.”

So you can see how this might work with the legendary plastic surgery hobbyist and “dancing king,” yes? What with his multi-decade transmogrification from “ebony” to “ivory” to some sort of troubled anime being. Click here to read “Michael Jackson’s Facelift” over at Ballardian — complete with more creepy plastic surgery photos and annotations from other Ballard interviews — or take a gander after the jump.

Michael Jackson’s Facelift
Author: Ballardian • Jul 2nd, 2009 •

From the files of Dr Ricardo Battista’s assistant, School of Specialization in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Melbourne, Australia.

“As Michael Jackson reached middle age, the skin of both his cheeks and neck tended to sag from failure of the supporting structures. His naso-labial folds deepened, and the soft tissues along his jaw fell forward. His jowls tended to increase. In profile the creases of his neck lengthened and the chin-neck contour lost its youthful outline and became convex.

The eminent plastic surgeon Ricardo Battista has remarked that one of the great misfortunes of the cosmetic surgeon is that he only has the technical skill, ability and understanding to correct this situation by surgical means. However, as long as people are prepared to pay fees for this treatment the necessary operation will be performed. Incisions made across the neck with the object of removing redundant tissue should be avoided. These scars tend to be unduly prominent and may prove to be the subject of litigation. In the case of Michael Jackson the incision was designed to be almost completely obscured by his hair and ears.

Surgical Procedure: an incision was made in Michael Jackson’s temple running downward and backward to the apex of his ear. From here a crease ran toward his lobule in front of the ear, and the incision followed this crease around the lower margin of the lobule to a point slightly above the level of the tragus. From there, at an obtuse angle, it was carried backward and downward within the hairy margin of the scalp.

The edges of the incision were then undermined. First with a knife and then with a pair of scissors, Jackson’s skin was lifted forward to the line of his jaw. The subcutaneous fatty tissue was scraped away with the knife. Large portions of connective tissue cling to the creases formed by frown lines, and some elements of these were retained in order to preserve the facial personality of the King of the Pop. At two places the skin was pegged down firmly. The first was to the scalp at the top of his ear, the second was behind the ear to the scalp over the mastoid process. The first step was to put a strong suture in the correct position between the cheek flap anterior to the first point, and a second strong suture to the neck flap behind the ear. The redundant tissue was then cut away and the skin overlap removed with a pair of scissors.

At this point the ear was moved forward toward the chin, and the wound was then closed with interrupted sutures. It did not matter how strong the stitches were behind the ears because that part of the King of Pop’s scarline was invisible in normal conditions.

Complications: haematoma formation is a dangerous sequela of this operation, and careful drainage with polythene tubing was carried out. In spite of these precautions blood still collected, but this blood was evacuated within 48 hours of the operation. It was not allowed to organize. In the early stages the skin around the area that had been undermined was insensitive, and it was not difficult to milk any collection of fluid backward to the point of drainage.

Scarring was hypertrophic at the points where tension was greatest: that is, in the temple and the region behind the ear, but fortunately these were covered by the King of Pop’s hair. The small fine sutures which were not responsible for tension were removed at 4 days, and the strong sutures removed at the tenth day. The patient was then allowed to have a shampoo to remove the blood from his hair. All scarlines are expected to fade, and by the end of three weeks the patient was back in social circulation.

At a subsequent operation after this successful face lift, Michael Jackson’s forehead wrinkles were removed. An incision was placed in the hairline and the skin lifted forward and upward from the temporal bone. The skin was then undermined and the excess tissue removed. The immediate result was good, but as a result of normal forehead movements relapse may occur unduly early after the operation. To remove the central frown line, the superciliary muscle was paralysed by cutting the branches of the seventh nerve passing centrally to it. A small knife-blade was inserted from the upper eyelid upward for 3 cm and then pressed down to the bone. External scars on the forehead often persist, and even in the best hands results are not always reliable. It was explained to Michael Jackson where the scars would lie, and the object of the intervention.”

Based on ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’, by J.G. Ballard.

Now that we’re at the height of the home-grillin’ season, it’s as good a time as any to revisit this Wonder Showzen classic, wherein the kids get to visit a hot dog factory! Who wants to swim in the meat pool?

So have you all seen the new issue of Orange Coast magazine yet? You know, “the magazine of Orange County”? Yeah, us neither. But thankfully LA Observed checked it out and hipped us to this decent article about Philip K. Dick’s final years of ducking the spotlight, having profound religious experiences and munching on Trader Joe’s grub down in the OC, basically living a life quite similar — minus the amphetamines he’d mostly left behind — to the goners of A Scanner Darkly. An excerpt:

Dick moved from Fullerton to downtown Santa Ana, where he rented a two-bedroom apartment that he later bought when the building went condo. As a bohemian hipster whose work depicted future people oppressed by life in their monstrously huge, regimented, soulless “conapt” complexes, Dick couldn’t escape the irony that he lived in a condo. In a 1980 Slash magazine interview, he denounced the condo association’s resident meetings as creepily intrusive.

In truth, Dick’s new residence was in some ways ideally suited to him. His building had an elaborate security system, which assuaged his latent paranoia. For the agoraphobic author, the apartment was within walking distance of the post office and a Trader Joe’s, where he could pick up roast beef sandwiches and frozen dinners.

Read the whole of “The Unending Tale of Philip K. Dick” at Orange Coast, or right here after the jump.

The Unending Tale of Philip K. Dick

By Patrick J. Kiger / Illustrations by Joseph Adolphe

Back in the summer of 1981, Catherine Cate recalls, she and the other young condo owners at 408 E. Civic Center Drive in Santa Ana had a custom of gathering after work at a table in the building’s courtyard. “We’d pour some glasses of wine, or mix a few margaritas or Singapore slushes, and just unwind a little,” she says. Occasionally, the casual conversation about their working days took an offbeat turn, when their third-floor neighbor wandered down to join the group.

Phil, as they called him, was pleasant and sociable, but older than his fellow condo residents and a refugee from the Bay Area, where they suspected he may have experimented with a few illegal substances. He had a Berkeley Bohemian dishabille—wrinkled clothes, stringy gray hair, dirty fingernails, an apparent indifference to shaving. “Grooming was not his priority,” Cate recalls. “And his color was not good. He had an overall aura of not being in the best health.” He was pleasant and convivial, albeit somewhat distracted, as if his mind were somewhere else.

Phil told them he was a writer, though Cate had never heard of him, and mentioned that one of his books was being made into a movie called “Blade Runner.” It was when Phil started to talk, though, that she recalls him morphing from just some aging, eccentric anti-yuppie into a visitor from some preternatural, alternative reality. “Flights of fantasy, almost nonsensical,” Cate explains. “Sort of ‘What if …?’ or ‘Have you ever considered this?’”

“At the time, I wasn’t a science-fiction fan, so I wasn’t familiar with Philip K. Dick,” Cate says. “Not really knowing about his writing career, our knowledge of him was really based upon what we saw of him and what we talked about. And he was a very strange person from that perspective … it was a little bewildering. You’d listen and look at him and think, ‘Is this guy on the same planet?’ And the answer was probably no.”

As Cate learned more of her neighbor’s literary notoriety, she had to wonder why one of the most important American writers of the 20th century, a genius that Rolling Stone once proclaimed “the most brilliant [science-fiction] mind on any planet,” was living in a Santa Ana starter condo. “When he finally told us a little about himself, he emphasized he was seeking privacy,” Cate recalls. “In fact, he told us that, should anybody come looking for him, we needed to protect him, to neither confirm nor deny that he lived there. He tried to stay under the radar.”

Today, even as Dick’s literary legend grows, his connection to Orange County remains obscure. Though he often is thought of as a Northern California writer, he lived his final decade in Fullerton and Santa Ana and wrote several of his most important books—“A Scanner Darkly,” “VALIS,” and “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer”—during his time here. And Orange County was the place where Dick in 1974 experienced the transcendental visions that, depending on your degree of open-mindedness, either gave him a secret glimpse of a universe with multiple realities and the nonlinear impermanence of time, or shoved him out on the crumbly precipice of sanity.

Today, nearly three decades after his death in Santa Ana at age 53, Dick has a vastly higher profile. Much of his prolific output—he published 44 novels and 121 short stories—still is in print. Critics hold him in increasingly high esteem, not just as a master of the science-fiction genre in the same league as Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury, but as a philosophical novelist who explored the shifting, ambiguous nature of reality and the question of what it means to be human. In 2005, Time magazine selected his 1969 novel “Ubik” as one of the 100 most important American novels of all time, and contemporary writers such as Jonathan Lethem cite him as a major influence.

In Hollywood, Dick has become an industry. Nine of his novels and stories have been made into films that collectively grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, including the 2002 Tom Cruise-Steven Spielberg hit “Minority Report,” which generated $132 million in the United States alone. Many others are in the works, including projects involving big names such as Paul Giamatti and Matt Damon. (See related story, Page 88.) A Web search yields an ever-growing number of sites devoted to Dick’s life and work, such as www.philipkdickfans.com and the Total Dick-Head blog (http://totaldickhead.blogspot.com).

And Dick again is in the news, thanks to a legal struggle that has developed over the profits from his literary legacy. In April, the author’s fifth wife, Tessa Busby Dick, who was with him during his time in Orange County, filed suit against an array of plaintiffs that includes Electric Shepherd Productions—the film production arm of the Dick estate founded by his daughters Isa and Laura—and his literary agent Russell Galen. She claims she is being deprived of a share of the earnings from two of Dick’s works—his 1977 novel “A Scanner Darkly,” which was made into a movie in 2006, and a screenplay version of “Ubik,” which she says the author gave her in their 1976 divorce settlement. Christopher Tricarico, an attorney for the estate, declined to comment, but said in an e-mail he will be “vigorously defending” against the claim, which may mean even more headlines in the months and years ahead.

Dickian devotion has grown to such extremes that a few years ago, a robotics researcher built a life-size android version of the author, which, according to a New York Times account, “was able to conduct rudimentary conversations about Dick’s work and ideas.” Fans lined up at conventions for a chance to meet the ersatz Dick, until the android’s head was accidentally left in an airline overhead bin, then apparently misrouted by luggage handlers.

It may seem incongruous that Dick, who for years fueled his writing efforts with amphetamines and described himself as a “religious anarchist,” would choose to live in what at the time was the nation’s most deeply conservative hotbed. “He used to joke about living in the shadow of Disneyland, and about how everything in Orange County was made of plastic,” recalls Tim Powers, an award-winning science-fiction and fantasy author who became a friend of Dick’s while a student at Cal State Fullerton. “But he seemed to find it convivial. He made some friends here.”

And to Dick, who’d become entangled in the darker side of the Northern California counterculture, then-staid Orange County may have seemed like an appealing refuge. “I think he liked the anonymity,” Powers says. “Nobody in Santa Ana knew who Philip K. Dick was. He was just this guy going to Trader Joe’s [to buy] lunch.”

As recounted in “Divine Invasions,” Lawrence Sutin’s 1989 biography, Dick was in a rough situation when he began looking to relocate in the spring of 1972. At 43, he was coming off four failed marriages, bouts of depression and paranoia, a longtime amphetamine habit, decades of financial struggle, and the respectable literary world’s indifference to his work. He hadn’t written anything in two years. After his house in San Rafael was burglarized—Dick alternately theorized it was the FBI or CIA, black militants, religious fanatics, or disaffected members of his circle of drug-using acquaintances—he fled to Vancouver, where he attempted suicide, and then checked into a rehab center to kick drugs and get a respite from the craziness.

Eventually, he turned to Willis McNelly, an English professor at Cal State Fullerton who died in 2003. McNelly was one of the first academics to look at science fiction as serious literature. “Phil wrote to Willis and said, ‘I’ve got nowhere to go,’ ” recalls Powers, who then was a Cal State Fullerton graduate student. “Several of Willis’ students wrote back to Phil, saying, ‘We just lost a roommate; you can move in with us.’ Such was Phil’s desperation that he said, ‘OK. I’ll get on a plane. Meet me at LAX.’ He didn’t really care where he was going.”

A welcoming committee included his two potential roommates plus Powers and Linda Levy Castellani, another of Mc-Nelly’s students, who drove to Los Angeles to pick him up. Castellani recalls that Dick made a striking, if bizarre, impression on her. “Here was this portly, bearded man who looked somewhat like a rabbi,” she says. “He was in a trench coat and was carrying a Bible and a box wrapped in an electrical cord. But the strangest thing was that he never took his eyes off me. The attention was so intense, it scared me to death.” The author, who had a thing for dark-haired women and a tendency to fall in love at a moment’s notice, already was enamored with her.

The middle-aged writer soon tired of sleeping on the couch and the expectation that he spring for the students’ groceries, and moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a recently divorced male roommate. Meanwhile, he continued his pursuit of Castellani, taking her to dinner in Los Angeles with sci-fi great Harlan Ellison and suddenly shocking her with a marriage proposal. “He and Harlan were having this intense conversation and I was just listening, when Phil handed me this thick envelope,” she recalls. “It was this amazing letter—a scary sort of good, page after page about how wonderful I was, and at the end, it said, ‘P.S. Will you marry me?’” Castellani ultimately rejected Dick’s romantic advances, but the two remained friends and talked on the phone regularly until his death.

But Dick wasn’t without female companionship for long. A few months later, at a party in Santa Ana, he met an 18-year-old soon-to-be college student from Anaheim who aspired to be a writer and had sold a few pieces to small magazines. “I didn’t know who he was,” says Tessa Busby Dick, who became the author’s fifth wife. “But I just knew that he was a remarkable man. And as I read more of his work, I appreciated his genius.” Dick wasn’t just attracted to Tessa’s looks—the dark-hair thing again—but also to her intelligence and empathy. On a visit to Disneyland with friend Powers, he proposed to her, though the romantic ambience was disrupted when he began arguing with Powers over a pickle that he had snatched from Dick’s plate.

Tessa recalls the years she spent  with Dick in Fullerton as “the most wonderful time of my life.” In 1970s Orange County, Fullerton was a bohemian oasis, a college town with war protesters, cappuccino, even an organic grocery. Dick and his new wife lived near the Cal State campus, where he could be around the students and intellectuals whose company he found stimulating. In July 1973, Tessa gave birth to son Christopher, Dick’s third child after his daughters from previous marriages. (Though Christopher, along with his half-sisters, owns and manages their father’s literary properties, his mother did not name him as a defendant in her recent lawsuit.)

A few months later, in September 1973, according to biographer Sutin, United Artists picked up an option on Dick’s 1968 novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” putting a much-needed $2,000 in his pocket. He even started to write again, completing the novel “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said,” which he had set aside back in Northern California. He conceived a new novel, “A Scanner Darkly,” set in a seedy dystopian version of Orange County, in which a narcotics agent pursuing the source of a new, personality-fragmenting designer drug goes so far undercover that he begins to investigate himself. As Dick admitted in a 1975 Rolling Stone interview, it was the first time he’d written a novel without the help of amphetamines.

But beneath the fragile normality, Dick was in turmoil. “His method was to think about a book for a long time, and then write the entire thing in 10 or 11 days, hardly eating or sleeping as he pounded it out at high speed on a manual typewriter,” Powers says. “That was the way he’d done it in the 1960s, when he was doing a heap of amphetamines to fuel his production. But even after he quit the drugs, that was the only way he knew how to write, in one sustained burst. … Particularly in the last 10 years that I knew him, the writing of his books began to take a real physical toll on him.”

In February 1974, after being given anesthesia for dental work, Dick returned home and began experiencing bizarre visions—a rectangle of pink light on his bedroom wall containing writing in a strange language he could not read, along with mathematical equations. He heard voices, and was visited by strange beings who “looked almost human, but they had large heads, small noses, small chins and mere slits for mouths,” as Tessa later recalled in a self-published memoir, “The Dim Reflection of Philip K. Dick.” Instead of abducting him, the alien visitors used holograms to turn Dick’s apartment into a classroom, where they taught him a secret theory of existence. Dick only explained parts of it to Tessa: The past wasn’t immutable; to the contrary, someone was in the process of changing history. And neither was it linear; somehow, Dick simultaneously existed in the present and in ancient Rome. Neither was the physical world solid and stable; even something as basic as a light switch on a wall might mysteriously vanish when you reached for it.

Dick would ponder his “2-3-74” experience, as he came to call it, for the rest of his life, and it eventually would help inspire his 1981 novel “VALIS,” a mind-bending synthesis of science fiction and the mysteries of Gnosticism and Christian theology, in which mystical revelations are beamed by laser from an orbiting satellite.

“He was his own skeptic, always ready to dismiss and deride his theories when he saw flaws in them,” Powers says. “One day he’d think it had been God talking to him. The next day, he’d say it was just acid flashbacks. The day after that, he’d decide it was psychosis, or some sort of secret Soviet telepathy experiment. But he kept coming back to the idea that it was God.” He pauses. “I’d put money on it that it was God who spoke to him, crazy as it seems. His sort of ongoing, contentious dialogue with God does have the tone of Teresa of Avila [a 16th century Catholic mystic]. Or maybe it’s just a better story that way.”

By 1975, Dick’s marriage to Tessa was falling apart, and he had become involved with another woman, Doris Elaine Sauter—a relationship that became even closer when Sauter, in her mid-20s, was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. According to biographer Sutin, Dick again attempted suicide—gulping a combination of pills, slitting his wrist, and sitting in his garage with the engine of his car running, before having second thoughts and calling for help. “When I went to see him in the hospital, he said, ‘See, I tried to kill myself. You have to move in with me now,’ ” Sauter recalls. “I read him the riot act about that.”

Dick moved from Fullerton to downtown Santa Ana, where he rented a two-bedroom apartment that he later bought when the building went condo. As a bohemian hipster whose work depicted future people oppressed by life in their monstrously huge, regimented, soulless “conapt” complexes, Dick couldn’t escape the irony that he lived in a condo. In a 1980 Slash magazine interview, he denounced the condo association’s resident meetings as creepily intrusive.

In truth, Dick’s new residence was in some ways ideally suited to him. His building had an elaborate security system, which assuaged his latent paranoia. For the agoraphobic author, the apartment was within walking distance of the post office and a Trader Joe’s, where he could pick up roast beef sandwiches and frozen dinners.

Sauter did her best to get Dick out of his Santa Ana comfort zone, but it was tough work: “It was more anticipation anxiety. Prying him out of the house was hard, though if you could get him to go, he’d be glad that he did. I could never get him to go to the Santa Ana Public Library, for example. But when Ray Bradbury would speak in O.C. and take a room at the Disneyland Hotel, I’d get Phil to go out and have a drink with him. He always liked that.”

For all his psychological maladies and quirks, though, Dick remained a focused, professional writer. “He would get up at 10, have some coffee, write until 3 in the morning, sleep for five hours, and then get up and do the same thing the next day,” Sauter recalls. “He’d switched to using an IBM Selectric typewriter, and he was a lightning-fast typist. I don’t recall him doing a lot of rewriting. The first draft was always very readable.

“After he passed away, people would always ask me, ‘How sane was Philip K. Dick?’ Anybody who could wake up at 5 a.m. like he did and play hardball on the phone with his agent in New York—I mean, how crazy could he be? There’s been a tendency to picture him as a psychological mess, because of the suicide attempts and so on. But Phil had the ability to put aside whatever he was feeling or thinking to do business.”

Over the last few years of Dick’s life in Santa Ana, Sutin reports, he finally managed to earn a high five-figure income from larger advances, royalties, resales of his early books, and payments from the producers of “Blade Runner.” But to him, relative affluence wasn’t entirely a positive development. “People always say it’s too bad that he died before he made serious money, but he would have been uncomfortable with it,” says Powers. “Remember, he grew up in Berkeley in the 1950s, when rich guys were not OK. As it was, he always was finding excuses to give it away feverishly—charities, UNICEF. One time he even had a bank teller who’d seen his account balance call him up and ask for a loan of a couple of thousand bucks. It was an unbelievably inappropriate thing for the guy to do, but Phil just said, ‘OK.’ ”

In February 1982—a few months  before the release of “Blade Runner,” the Harrison Ford movie that would introduce Dick to mainstream audiences—he suffered a major stroke at his condo, dying on March 2 at age 53. The facts of his demise have not been universally accepted—perhaps fitting for someone who believed in multiple realities. Someone once assured Powers that Dick had committed suicide, just as musician Kurt Cobain had, though Powers quickly corrected them. Six weeks after Dick died, Sauter was startled to read a claim in an article that he was still alive. She once made arrangements to see the android version of the author. “It really felt like it was going to be a big emotional shakeup, like seeing a dead family member,” she says. “Then we finally decide to do it, [but] the head disappears … Phil, who had this great droll sense of humor, would have thought that was hysterically funny.”

It’s all part of an Internet-age version of the ancient Greek mystery cult that has sprouted during the last two decades, with Dick as its deity-oracle-role model. “Phil’s work, with its hints of insights into God and the universe, lends itself to that sort of obsessive interest,” Powers says. “A lot of people respond to that. But I think Phil would have been a bit bewildered, just as he was in the ’70s when Marxist critics in Europe adopted him as a hero. He never had to deal with the kind of prominence he has now.”

If he had lived, Powers wonders if Dick might have followed the same course as Hawthorne Abendsen, the fictional writer in Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle,” who writes a novel revealing an alternative reality—and then goes into hiding to avoid the consequences of his revelation.

Patrick J. Kiger is an Orange Coast contributing writer.

Russom debuts Black Meteoric Star tracks with Assume Vivid Astro Focus at Paris’ Super Festival in April, 2008 (part 2 below)

Former Arthur cover co-star Gavin Russom has new music coming out next week on DFA. He’s recording as Black Meteoric Star, and while the tunes are still rife with droning synthesizers — a la his essential Days of Mars work with Delia Gonzalez — he’s going for more of a dance floor vibe this time. Specifically, BMS is his exploration into acid house. He expands on that a bit in this 2008 interview with the UK’s Fact magazine:

“Later I became very interested in the thematic elements of early Detroit and Chicago electronic music and the cultural environments that surrounded the Warehouse. Of particular interest was the way that a piece of music technology (specifically the Roland TB-303) generated an entire musical aesthetic because of its characteristics and its limitations. The post-apocalyptic vision of a new society, armed with electronic technology, emerging from the post industrial wasteland resonated with my own political ideals, my experiences growing up in Providence and my interest in the post-WWI European avant-garde who had similar ideas.

“Of course I always come back to the fact that it’s simply interesting and powerful psychedelic music.”

The self-titled album’s out on June 9, but you can get a preview via Tim Sweeney’s “Beats In Space” radio broadcast from back in April. Russom opens with 30 minutes of BMS material, before going into a lovely DJ set including plenty of drones plus crusty voodoo folk-rock from Exuma and Archie Shepp’s “Monkey Blues.” Download the whole 90 minute podcast over at Beats In Space.

• More info on DFA’s MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/dfarecords

• Trinie Dalton interviewed Delia & Gavin for Arthur 21/March 2006, copies of which are still available in the Arthur Store. Click here to commence browsing.

• Assume Vivid Astro Focus made a sweet video for Delia & Gavin’s “Relevee”, which we posted back in April of 2008. Check it out by clicking here.

To those not yet in the know, all the true heads check in at the Crystal Vibrations audioblog for the cream of the crop in Nuevo Age jammage. CV is Greg Davis‘ thing mostly, if we’re going on number of posts, and his thoroughness with regard to the history and cultural relevance of New Age music suggests that the man has curated a staggering collection of some of the most mundane sounds ever conceived. (Davis, if you don’t know, has been creating very pleasant albums of sorta tribal ambient electronic stuff since the early ’00s.)

Keeping that in mind, the truly hype shit when it comes to New Age tunes is outta this world, and stands out as even more of a treasure given the genre’s overarching treacly nature. A reclamation and a reappropriation of the blissfully soporific is in effect here, engineered by the aforementioned Davis, along with likeminded pals such as White Rainbow’s Adam Forkner.

So yeah: We’re STOKED that he’s back with his first post since early April. Namely, to quote Davis, “a real soother” in the form of David Parsons’ 1980 album, Sounds of the Mothership. The awesome picture up top sums it up: The best possible version of “bidi-puffing white dude hanging out by a waterfall, getting mellow on the sitar” you can imagine. Plus the requisite Tangerine Dream-style warbling synth drones and occasional cricket chirp and birdsong. So chill.

Click here to go get mellow with David Parsons at Crystal Vibrations.

Windy & Carl’s “Undercurrent” from their 2001 album, Depths.

Los Angeles hosts some of the best bands in the country this weekend (if one were to judge such things based on the soundsystem at Arthur’s Atwater office and distribution center) creating a real stumper when it comes to Friday night. If you forgot to snatch tickets for the Animal Collective/Grouper show at the Wiltern and you’re sitting out on the Brightblack show in Eagle Rock for some reason, then might we suggest you consider Windy & Carl along with White Rainbow on Friday at Synchronicity Space? Local avant-dub banana-peelers Sun Araw are also on the bill, which is good news. Here’s the details:

Who: Windy & Carl, White Rainbow, Nudge, Fantastic Sleep, and Sun Araw
Where: Synchronicity Space
4306 Melrose Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90029
When: Friday May 29, 8pm to 12am
How much: $5
More info: www.syncspacela.com

Adam “White Rainbow” Forkner explains his music to Pauly Shore.

And in case you’re going to be at either the AC or BBML happenings on Friday (or if you’re coming down from Dublab’s Tonalism up in Big Sur), you can still gorge yourself on gentle granola drones as Windy & Carl and White Rainbow will be playing on Saturday afternoon at Echo Curio.

Who: Windy & Carl, White Rainbow, Nudge
Where: Echo Curio
1519 Sunset Blvd.
Echo Park, CA 90026
When: Saturday May 30, 3pm to 6pm
How much: $5 donation
More info: www.echocurio.com

Daniel Chamberlin explains the discreet charm of the Grateful Dead. Illustrations by D.C. Berman.

Originally published in the July 2004 issue of Arthur, which is currently available for purchase in our online store. Click here to check it out.

I’M NOT ALLOWED TO WEAR TIE-DYED CLOTHING. My girlfriend and those friends of mine who truly have my best interests at heart forbid it. For most people this is an obvious and easy style rule to adhere to. But during certain times of the year I am overwhelmed by the Grateful Dead. I listen to nothing but live recordings of Dead concerts while immersing myself in books detailing the minutiae of their 30-year career. I search through David Dodd’s “Annotated Grateful Dead Lyric Archive,” reading up on the roots of “Fennario,” a made-up world of timber forests and treacherous marshland mentioned in two of my favorite songs, “Dire Wolf” and “Peggy-O.” Judging from the number of Dead recordings in my collection one can draw an easy conclusion that I am a certifiable Deadhead.

This is a problem because alongside New Age or contemporary country, “Grateful Dead” is a genre of music with acknowledged questionable merits. This has something to do with the schizophrenic quality of said music: the May 14, 1974 “Dark Star” performed in Missoula, Montana sounds like “In A Silent Way” as interpreted by Sonic Youth but nearly every performance of “Lazy Lightnin’” sounds like coke-snorting yuppies getting funky in tie-dyed Izods. The Dead toured with both Love and Waylon Jennings in the ‘70s but were collaborating with Bruce Hornsby and Joan Osborne by the ‘90s. I hear their influence on classic Meat Puppets and latter-day Boredoms albums, but their official inheritors are cornball bands like The String Cheese Incident and Phish. They count among their fans legions of Hell’s Angels as well as Tipper and Al Gore. There are a lot of ways to listen to the Grateful Dead. As legendary concert promoter and longtime Dead booster Bill Graham once put it, “They’re not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones that do what they do.”

Mostly though, the Dead’s bad reputation is due to their fans. My latent Deadheadism causes my girlfriend to worry that at a certain point of saturation, she’ll come home from work to find me reeking of patchouli oil, clad in vibrant pajama bottoms and a tank top decorated with capering bears, my dilated pupils being the only reason I haven’t yet found something to juggle. “Fukengrüven, sister!” I’ll say as she comes through the door.

My most recent Grateful Dead binge kicked off when Islamic militants decapitated Nicholas Berg on the Internet. Oh yeah. No more NPR for me. Instead, a free-falling relapse into this December 26, 1969 Dead show at Southern Methodist University. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann is late getting to the venue, so Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir lay down this sublime acoustic set of murder ballads and old Christian folk songs that they refer to as “sacred numbers.” It’s the only known recording of their version of “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet,” which is really something to be excited about for a closet Deadhead like me. The show provides a wonderful escape—the Dead always seem so detached from reality and that’s exactly what I’m looking for.

I was looking for a similar kind of escape in 1991 while en route to my first Grateful Dead show. I wanted to see if the Deadheads might offer a more organic, hedonistic alternative to the existentialist discomfort of my central Indiana high school experience.

My friend Jeremy’s ancient brown Cutlass Sierra didn’t have any air conditioning. He and I sat sweating on its stained tan upholstery as the soft fabric that lined its cabin ceiling sagged like the belly of an obese cat. There was a hole in this ceiling liner through which his passengers had squirreled little pieces of trash and souvenirs of high school pranks: cigarette butts, Taco Bell sauce packets, fully-expanded tampons.

Jeremy was my first friend with a car—he was a senior in high school, I was a sophomore—and he played chauffeur for many of the relatively mundane adventures that characterized my teenage years. Examples given: Skating clandestinely at the loading dock of a Wal-Mart. Watching obscure hardcore bands play at the Broad Ripple Community Center. Driving in circles around a Bob Evans restaurant until perplexed waitresses gathered at the windows to watch us. It was on one such trip to a hole-in-the-wall punk rock record store that Jeremy purchased the Meat Shits tape we were listening to that hot June afternoon as we sat in a sea of traffic outside the Deer Creek Amphitheater. This Meat Shits album had 666 individual songs. Their music and their photocopied album art were comprised of cut-and-pasted shards of pornographic imagery, guitar noise and obscene lyrics. Though secretly I was growing to love the Dead, I publicly declared their music to be drippy psychedelic glop. This Meat Shits album, this was where it was at.

Jeremy was a Dead fan, though I don’t know that he would’ve called himself a Deadhead. His car’s bumper was covered with punk stickers—Ramones, Misfits, anti-war slogans—but a skeleton wearing a crown of roses was plastered on the back window. He thought the Dead were a good acid rock band, no more no less. We didn’t have tickets to the show; we were just going to wander amid the freaks in the parking lot scene outside.

From what I could tell from my public high school classmates, if you liked the Grateful Dead, you were most likely a drug addict. There were probably a few Deadheads who didn’t spend their free time tracking down pot dealers or dropping acid during gym class. But the quintessential Deadhead for me was a lanky, mullet-sporting fellow with the nickname “101.” The handle came from his claim that he was well-versed in “one hundred and one homemade ways to get high.” Over lunch he would regale me with tales of huffing gasoline in his garage, emerging hours later with .22-caliber rifle in hand. He would then take up position in his backyard in order to defend it from an onslaught of talking gophers. These hallucinations were often unfortunate squirrels or neighborhood cats. Backyard safely defended, 101 would head inside, get busy with some model airplane glue and settle in for reruns of “The Jeffersons.”

“But 101,” I’d ask, “what’s so great about watching TV after sniffing glue?”

“Because when you’re high,” he would reply, “the Jeffersons come out of the TV and watch their show with you, dude.”

Sometime during my junior year 101 stopped coming to school. The rumor, circulated by his friend Matt, was that he had stolen his parents’ credit cards and their car and high-tailed it to Florida. Nobody ever heard from him again.

Matt was in my chemistry class and sat across the table from me with his lab partner, Donovan. Together they would amuse themselves during lectures by grabbing large beakers and holding them up to their mouths, inhaling make-believe bong hits. It was funny the first day or two, but by the second semester the joke seemed more like a junkie’s force-of-habit. It was Donovan who gave me my first taste of Grateful Dead music. He was a nice guy and when he wasn’t passed out on his desk he could be quite funny. He was also from Australia, and in the cultural melting pot of central Indiana his shade of vanilla qualified as exotic.

My conservative Christian upbringing translated into a sort of straight-laced teenage rebellion characterized by Morrissey’s paeans to celibacy and the militant asceticism preached by Ian MacKaye and Minor Threat. I wasn’t straight-edge, but I didn’t do drugs or have a girlfriend. I spent a lot of time listening to music about not-drinking and not-fucking instead. My horizons were starting to broaden a bit by my sophomore year though, and eventually a pot-smoking anarchist punk floated me a Throbbing Gristle tape.

In its myriad forms—sinister electronic ambience, perverted synth-pop, grating industrial noise—Throbbing Gristle’s music is characterized by deviant sexual behavior, outer limits drug use and radical challenges to notions of identity and morality. Listening to songs like “Slug Bait” and “United” on headphones was the most psychedelic experience I’d ever had. Given what I knew of the Grateful Dead—free-lovin’, acid-eatin’ hippie freaks who liked to think about weird shit—I figured I could turn Donovan on to some TG while he could turn me on to the GD. I swapped my copy of Throbbing Gristle’s Greatest Hits for his copy of the Grateful Dead’s one studio masterpiece, American Beauty, and went home for the weekend.

Maybe it was the fl uttering, disorienting monotone vocals of “Hamburger Lady,” a Throbbing Gristle song about a burn victim. Or perhaps it was head Gristle Genesis P-Orridge screaming insults over the sickly synthesizer drag of “Subhuman” that harshed Donovan’s mellow. He returned the cassette with a sad shake of his head. “No thanks dude. I don’t know how you listen to that stuff.” Donovan, a veteran of more than his fair share of Hoosier acid tests, had pegged Throbbing Gristle as the bad trip music that it is. He was not interested in trading any more tapes with me.

In contrast, I went home that weekend and fell in love with American Beauty. “Box of Rain” and “Ripple” joined Crass, the Smiths and Public Enemy on the soundtrack to my morning ride to school. I lived in the country surrounded by miles of cornfields so I was thrilled to hear country music— juicy, psychedelic country music—made by people who weren’t shit-kicking rednecks. In particular I was enamored with “Sugar Magnolia,” a song the Dead played live 576 times. It’s basically a shameless fantasy about some dude and his luscious hippie vixen girlfriend riding around an idyllic backcountry in a vintage Willys Jeep. The two stop to have “high times” and then proceed to “discover the wonders of nature / rolling in the rushes down by the riverside.” Throbbing Gristle was a great band to listen to while nursing grudges against bullying jocks, slow-witted teachers or curfew-enforcing parents. But The Grateful Dead were beyond all of that. They sounded like an escape to the way I wanted things to be.

“When I think of the Grateful Dead, I think of a flag and I think of a rose and I think of a steak and I think of a gun,” said Richard Loren, a former Dead manager, in Carol Brightman’s Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure. “I think of the West and I think of consciousness expansion. I think of irreverence and anarchy and I think of something pure.” I heard all of these things in American Beauty. But when I thought of the Grateful Dead I also thought of 16-year-old burnouts flunking chemistry class and gas-huffing drug addicts shooting cats. When punk friends made the switch to Deadhead, they sold me their Fall and Naked Raygun tapes for what I assumed was drug money, given their new logy disposition. I was heading with Jeremy to the parking lot scene at the Dead show looking to replace these associations with the ideal that Loren was talking about.

I looked everywhere for this enlightened hippie archetype: From the bedraggled column of burnouts marching alongside the traffic jam outside the amphitheater to the extensive marketplace of black-light artwork, grilled cheese sandwiches and juggling paraphernalia within the parking lot. Initially I took the offers of hits, ‘shrooms, X and weed to mean I was one of the group, that people trusted me. After an hour or two of this, Jeremy and I were thinking about returning next year and muttering “hits, hits, hits” with a hammer in hand. As the band started playing, Jeremy proclaimed loudly that he had a “pocket full of miracles”— Deadhead jargon for free tickets—and we were instantly surrounded by desititute hippies awaiting a handout. Then he dug into his pockets, and punchlined, “Whoops, I guess I left them in another pair of pants.” It was pure cruelty, and a fitting end to our day: if we weren’t going to join in with the Deadheads we could at least mask our disappointment with a laugh at their expense, and maybe incite a Deadhead riot—whatever that means.

Though OG Deadheads were forwarding similar complaints regarding the rampant drug use among newcomers to the scene, there were just as many first-generation hippies mesmerized by the massed tie-dye. The fact that they were sober didn’t make it any more acceptable. As my girlfriend remarked years later, while perusing a copy of Grateful Dead: The Illustrated Trip: “These people just don’t look very sharp.” She was looking at a photo of a group of dazed girls dressed in strange linen smocks, strung-out members of some Holly Hobby-worshipping cult. A few pages later a guy in breezy purple hemp pants juggles oranges with a slack-jawed grin. As nice as many of these folks were and as much fun as they seemed to be having, I just couldn’t ally myself with such a coalition of day-tripping frat boys, full-time acid casualties and wide-eyed naifs with rainbows painted on their faces. There seemed to be no common ground between the Deadheads and myself.

And back then, you had to have common ground with Deadheads in order to get in to the wondrous world of Grateful Dead tapes: complete historical documents of nearly every step the band took in its live evolution, some of them flawless professional jobs, others a delicate collage of audience recordings and soundboard patches. It’s a process that was started by Owsley “Bear” Stanley—also responsible for birthing the oft-reviled groovin’ Dead bear iconography as well as being the most bad-ass LSD-chemist of the ‘60s and ‘70s—the Dead’s early sound engineer.

With the exception of American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead, the Dead’s studio albums suck pale compared to the live recordings, so if you aren’t initiated into this circle of traders, you’re missing out on what the band is really about. Just talking about it makes you a Deadhead. It’s the one undeniably cool thing about the band: They openly encouraged their fans to record and trade live recordings of their shows, more than two decades before online file-sharing existed. But, since I could hardly stand the company of Deadheads, making the connection into the world of Dead tapes was difficult. The hippies I met at college were no more interested in swapping Nurse With Wound tapes than Donovan was down for further investigations into Throbbing Gristle.

This problem was solved when I found deadshow.com in 1999 and started listening to streaming concerts and eventually downloading them from sites like archive.org. Only by avoiding actual Deadheads was I able to become a Deadhead. The world of Dead shows online allows me to explore the Grateful Dead on my own terms. Most Deadheads only kill the buzz, their interpretation of the band being a far cry from the fantasy world they represent for me.

I actually tried to see the Dead once. I purchased a ticket to a show in June of 1995. Since it was in Chicago, a good four-hour drive from where I was living at the time in southern Indiana, I backed out the day before and sold the ticket. I couldn’t take that much time riding in a car full of enthusiastic Deadheads. It was the last show the Grateful Dead would ever play. Jerry Garcia died two months later on August 9, 1995.

The one tribe of Deadheads who beat the rule live in Humboldt County in far Northern California. Mostly in their 40s and 50s, they probably don’t identify themselves as Deadheads. It’s just that their rural lifestyle—whether they’re pot farmers, wood carvers, schoolteachers, retired bikers or the crackpot tinkers behind the World Championship Kinetic Sculpture Race [See Mr. Chamberlin’s detailed report on the latter, "A Slow, Strange and Grueling Thing", in Arthur’s March, 2004 issue—Ed.]—seems to be lived in accordance with the sound of the Dead. It’s a revision of Manifest Destiny, a psychedelic Americana with Walt Whitman and Neal Cassady taking the place of Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett at its core. It’s about as patriotic as I get these days, but it feels really good when it happens.

For me, the Grateful Dead were pretty much over at the end of the ‘70s. The zeitgeist had passed to a new generation. All Deadhead-phobic Dead fans have rules for listening to the band—this appreciation of certain periods versus unquestioning acceptance of all Dead material seems to be part of what distinguishes them—and mine are pretty simple. Like other avant-garde guitar fans, I love a good “Dark Star”; like other hipster country music disciples I dig the Dead’s covers of George Jones’ Don Rollins’ “The Race Is On” [author's correction, 9/13/04: Though "The Race Is On" is sometimes attributed to Jones, the song was actually written by Don Rollins. Thanks to Rollins' niece for catching my mistake.] and Johnny Cash’s “Big River” as well as psych-country originals like “Loser” and “Jack Straw.” My favorite years are 1969 and 1974. I just can’t listen much past 1977. At this point, the Dead made a crucial decision. They went funky disco and dissed punk rock. The unintentionally saccharine results aside, this can be seen as an admirable decision. They’d spent their career covering blues and R&B standards and combining rustic folk with jazz-inspired improvisation. By exploring funk and disco they seemed to want to engage with African-American musical traditions rather than treat them as a static historical base. But the music was really terrible.

By the time the ‘60s generation had grown up and moved to the suburbs, electing Reagan to two terms as president, the Dead—in all their apolitical, hedonistic splendor—seemed to embody all the failings of that lionized era. Their success made them easy points of derision for young cynics like me. To make matters worse, their most conspicuous followers in the ‘90s—Dave Matthews Band, Phish, Hootie and the Blowfish—were the adult-contemporary and/or frat-party soundtrack antithesis of everything interesting in music.

I didn’t see the Grateful Dead in concert, but when I saw fellow ‘60s survivor Neil Young touring with Sonic Youth and Social Distortion in 1991, I understood that just because you get old doesn’t mean you have to lose touch. This happens all the time: think of Bob Dylan inviting Jack White onstage in Detroit a few months ago for the Dylan band’s cover of “Ball and Biscuit.” Besides the quote from Richard Loren about how the Dead sound like guns, roses, meat and freedom, it’s Dylan’s eulogy for Garcia that reminds me what I like about being a Deadhead. That even though the Deadheads I knew in my youth had more time for drugs than obnoxious contemporary counterculture, there was something for me to identify with in a band that tried to call their 1971 live album Skullfuck. On to Dylan on Garcia: “He is the very spirit personified of whatever is muddy river country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal . . . There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter Family, Buddy Holly, and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school.”

Or in other words, “Thank You Jerry.”

Your contributing editor learned a long time ago to be suspicious of most white dreads but theusaisamonster guys get a lifetime pass because they make unstoppable songs like “Cocaine Wedding” and create things like the above eight-minute-long forest-prog fantasy animation video. Witness “Fight No More Forever (remix)” and understand why people are bummed that they’ll be playing their last-ever show, this Saturday, May 9, 2009. Go click around on their mySpace page for more about that show.

A bit more info: The film is directed by Peter Glantz and incorporates 150 fresh new drawings by the great Kevin Hooyman, who was recently featured on this site. The song originally featured on THEUSAISAMONSTER’s “Tasheyana Compost” album.

UPDATE: Director Peter Glantz wrote to let us know that you can download yer very own HD copy of the above video — suitable for iPod screenings, etc — for $1.50. Wotta deal! Just click below …

Highlights from Chhandayan’s 9th Annual All-Night Concert of Indian Classical Music

One of the many wonderful things about getting a bit deeper into Indian Classical music is learning about the way ragas work better when they’re played at specific times of the day and night. E.g. When things get hectic after lunch here on Arthur’s Atwater Campus, we’ve learned to put Nikhil Banerjee’s Afternoon Ragas – Rotterdam 1970 on blast so we can keep things in focus.

So when there’s an epic Indian Classical jam like Chhandayan’s 10th Annual All-Night Concert of Indian Classical Music going down in New York City, you know it’s gonna be awesome ’cause this is how these nocturnal ragas are meant to be experienced: All through the night and into the woozy early hours of the AM. It’ll be just like sweating through the wee hours to the oonce-oonce-oonce except instead of extended trance breakdowns and all the hands in the air there’ll just be a collective sense of silent elation as Utpal Dutta “goes for it” with a wild 4am tabla solo. Plus you’ll probably feel a lot less shit come dawn. Please note: Sleeping bags and mattresses are prohibited.

Ready to get pumped? WFMU is previewing the show this Saturday, May 2 from 6-9pm on Rob Weisberg’s Transpacific Sound Paradise. For more Indian ragas we’d also like to direct your attention to the outstanding archives of now-silent audioblog The Magic of Juju. Likewise, the Pandit Pran Nath album that Babcock hipped us to back in early March is still available for download over at Big States.

What: Chhandayan’s 10th Annual All-Night Concert of Indian Classical Music
How much: Tickets range from $25-$100
When: May 9th 7pm – May 10th 6am
Where: The New York Society for Ethical Culture
2 W 64th Street, New York, NY 10023
More info: http://www.tabla.org/

Whether you’re looking for leaks and bootlegs from across the spectrum of doom and stoner rock, or you simply want to peruse Photoshopped images of topless, winged women wielding a variety of Renaissance Faire weapons, Doomed To Be Stoned In A Sludge Swamp is the audioblog for you.

Sludge Swamp is a collaborative affair, and right now their contributors are commemorating last weekend’s Roadburn Festival — an annual Dutch gathering focused on the hard rock underground, well known among European burners as a “time and place to get high en mass [sic] and bask in the heaviness,” to quote from its MySpace profile — by uploading live sets from Roadburns past.

Right now the archive includes recordings from Witch, Sunn O))), The Melvins, Om, Wolves in the Throne Room, Brant Bjork & The Bros, Masters of Reality, Hawkwind and Earthless (along with loads of lesser knowns) for your downloading pleasure.

Check out the full list of sets available by clicking here.

Video of White Rainbow, ARP and Lichens’ improvisational accompaniment to Doug Aitken’s “Migration” Installation.

Adam Forkner, the guy behind maximum bliss-out drone project White Rainbow, has six different outlets by which enthusiasts of his inner space sounds can follow his activities. For those fans — such as your contributing editor — who were mostly oblivious to this WR media empire, Forkner has provided a digest update of his most recent activities on his old fashioned blog, or “Life Log.” Of particular interest:

• Upcoming shows with drone-happy lovebirds Windy & Carl take White Rainbow up and down the West Coast in late May 2009, with stops in Seattle, his home base of Portland, Big Sur and two shows here in Los Angeles. The Arthur Atwater office is raising its STOKED level to Red.

• Tracks for the next White Rainbow full length, New Clouds, have been delivered to the mastering dude, with a tentative September 2009 release date on Kranky.

• A WR collaborative EP with Stag Hare is due out “as soon as humanly possible” on Marriage Records.

• Stag Hare you ask? Stag Hare is a crunchy fellow from Utah, and his self-released album Black Medicine Music was the best ambient trail mix of 2008. Thanks to Forest Gospel for being the first to hip us to these nuts and berries desert ragas. Don’t sleep. Though its rustling drum pattering and Juniper-scented driftscapes may have pleasantly soporific effects.

• And new White Rainbow music is available RIGHT NOW and FOR FREE by way of audioblog Raven Sings The Blues, which posted its first compilation, RSTB Presents Vol. 1, back in mid-March. The comp also has top ranking earth psych and noisenik sounds from Wet Hair, Plastic Crimewave Sound, Sic Alps and more. Go get it here.

• Forkner is considering “qutting pizza” for his health. We feel you bro.

And that’s just the White Rainbow stuff. Click here to check out the full post with info on all of his doings.

We’ve been hungry for new White Rainbow jams for awhile now, so here’s a few other Forkner curated emanations that we discovered deep in the Gooogles …

• BONUS 1: Forkner’s 2008 compilation for Deerhunter/Atlas Sound dude Bradford Cox is still available over at Cox’s blog. Go get that — along with the new Atlas Sound tunes that seem to be appearing daily — by clicking this clicky here.

• BONUS 2: For those White Rainbow heads that want to go even deeper, Forkner is an occasional contributor to Greg Davis’ seriously tripped out New Age music audioblog. If you are jonesing for “flute noodling” and such from super-gentle space cadets, Crystal Vibrations is your new favorite website.

The Marfa aerostat, aloft in daylight

The so-called “drug blimp” is actually a tethered aerostat — a white helium balloon as big or larger than the portly tire-company-maintained dirigibles that flock to parades and sporting events — operated by the U.S. Air Force, which makes the data it collects available to NORAD and the U.S. Border Patrol. It is by far the most tangible of the lazy clouds floating through the skies of the southern region of Far West Texas, its onboard radar system keeping an eye out for drug smugglers flying or driving loads of cocaine and or marijuana over from the deserts of Northern Mexico. It’s unmanned and controlled from the ground, attached via a tether cable to some kind of rail system. Similar aerostat sites can be found in the Bahamas, Arizona, and broadcasting decadent episodes of “Nanny 911″ or whatever via TV Marti into Communist Cuba from Cudjoe Key, Florida. Or at least that’s what the Air Force has to say about it.

The Marfa aerostat, grounded at 2:45am

I came across it moored, at about 3am, in a blazing circle of orange halide security lamps on my way from Los Angeles to visit friends in Marfa and Terlingua. I stopped and started snapping away with my camera, but kept getting that “willies” feeling that goes along with standing on a windy, deserted Texas road in the middle of the night, taking pictures of a government surveillance aircraft that chases narcotraficantes around.

Pinto Canyon Road, West Texas, by moonlight

The Marfa aerostat is part of Far West Texas’ complex system of border monitoring technology that includes triggers on rural routes that insure government agents will be checking up on late night back road cruisers. Or so I was warned by two local joint-passing bros when I inquired as to where my friend Sasha and I might catch a glimpse of the Marfa Lights, or at least document the West Texas hills in the light of the full moon. They pointed us down Pinto Canyon Road, but told us to expect company. No Border Patrol 4×4s were waiting for us though (nor were the mysterious Marfa Lights); there were only a few wary horses on hand to monitor our activity.

The Marfa aerostat, sundown

It’s no secret that the aerostat is based off Highway 90 between Marfa and Van Horn, so it was easy enough to catch again on my way back to Los Angeles a week later, right around sundown, when I was a bit less creeped out.

The point being, of course, is that West Texas is a weird and wonderful place where psychedelic cowboy bands play atop pirate ships that have run aground on sandy desert shoals; Harvard-educated lawyers build lovely off-the-grid compounds based on ancient Egyptian architectural designs and the Feds watch it all from dread zeppelins floating 10,000 feet up above. Arthur columnist Dave Reeves and I spent more time there than we were expecting, and will be filing further dispatches in the weeks to come. Stand by …

The Sodfather
Californian compost wizard TIM DUNDON talks shit with Daniel Chamberlin.

Photography by Eden Batki

Originally published in Arthur No. 27 (Dec 2007). Original design by Molly Frances and Mark Frohman. Find bonus Sodfather photos by Chamberlin at Into The Green.

Alchemists are often characterized in modern times as bumbling would-be wizards at best, greedy charlatans at worst. They’re portrayed as fumbling hopelessly in cluttered laboratories, unenlightened madmen trying to turn lead into gold. The reality is more complex, of course.

Alchemists were up to plenty of things, many of them having to do with relating to the natural world—and understanding its processes of transformation and transmutation—in philosophical and spiritual dimensions that transcended traditional religious thinking, both Christian and pagan, and preceded modern scientific thought. The whole “lead into gold” thing was but the most lucrative of the alchemical —or hermetic—practices in the eyes of the monarchs and rulers. Alchemy’s material prima as Peter Lamborn Wilson writes in the recent collection Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology, “can be found ‘on any dung hill.’ Hermeticism changes shit into gold.” It’s an image memorably realized in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain wherein the thief character takes a dump in a fancy bucket, and Jodorowsky, playing an alchemist, distills those fresh turds into a hefty chunk of golden bling.

Such fantastical processes are well known to dirt-worshipping gardening sage Tim Dundon, the beneficent caretaker of California’s most famous compost pile and the kindly warden of the tropical forest that has fruited from its rich humus. It’s here that Dundon, a scientist-poet in the truest hermetic sense, finds hope and salvation in the transformation of death into life—of rotting organic matter into nutrient-rich soil—that takes place daily in the fecund jungle he maintains on his one-acre yard.

The botanical odyssey of Dundon, the self-proclaimed “guru of doo-doo” and the man whose mammoth compost pile once covered a football-field-sized lot, begins in 1967 with a marijuana shortage. Like any good gardening story, it encompasses Hollywood producers, fires, suicide, PCP injection, a nude Quaker iconoclast, standoffs with city officials and a violent pet coyote.

Dundon, a 65-year-old lifelong resident of the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena, relays the tale with the voice of a true bard: his gospel of compost is told in a pun-filled rhyming style akin to the braggadocio-laden poesy of Muhammad Ali. He’s been a fixture in the bohemian scene of Los Angeles for four decades, known among the circle of outsider intelligentsia that has gathered for Bacchanalian parties at the Altadena ranch of Turkish Armenian painter Jirayr Zorthian since the ’60s. He often marches in Pasadena’s farcical Doo-Dah Parade clad in white robes, a purple turban atop his head—the garb preferred by his guitar-playing alter-ego, Zeke The Sheik.

Dundon provides anyone within driving distance of his home with what is widely considered to be the finest compost in Southern California. He does not charge for the actual raw material, but asks for a delivery fee—$35 and up, depending on where you live—for a steaming pile that could serve a small subsistence farm. Many of the recipients of his fertile mixture of manure and lawn clippings end up hosting impromptu mulching parties, inviting their neighbors to come and fill wheelbarrows and buckets with the organic matter left spilling from their yards onto sidewalks and streets. Due to the freshness of the manure component of his compost, his deliveries initially reek of ammonia, but the smell fades within days leaving the pleasant odor of healthy vegetation in its wake.

The mother pile from whence this compost comes once filled the multi-acre lot that his neighbors—the Mountain View Cemetery—granted him use of. After multiple battles with city officials and several fires, this sprawling organic mass has been confined to the lot where he lives, and where he’s been piling compost since 1973.

Dundon resides at the intersection of Mountain View Street and Fair Oaks Avenue, the main thoroughfare connecting Altadena with Pasadena to the south. Altadena is an unincorporated community of almost 43,000 residents that falls under the jurisdiction of the city of Los Angeles. Its northern border is the Angeles National Forest and the San Gabriel Mountain range; it last made the local news in February 2006 when a resident spied a mountain lion napping in the shade of her backyard shrubbery, prompting a lockdown of local elementary schools. It’s also known for its population of human predators, with 10 homicides taking place in the vicinity over the first half of 2007. Gangs are one of the first things Dundon talks about to me when I call to set up the interview, complaining that some of his neighbors—they’re Bloods, he says—have parked a broken-down pickup truck in front of his property in order to “make whitey look bad.” This is to be distinguished from the fully functional pickup truck—complete with hydraulic lift—that he uses to haul compost far and wide.

Dundon’s place is not easy to find as I cruise down Mountain View on a sunny Saturday afternoon in late August. Young black dudes draped in red clothing pass blunts, chat with their friends in sparkling Escalades and give me quizzical looks as I circle the block peering at street numbers. The houses are one-story ranch affairs, the yards are dirt interspersed with yellowing patches of dry grass and weeds.

After driving up and down the street several times I park my car and decide to investigate on foot, soon realizing that I can’t see the compost for the trees. Dundon’s yard is literally exploding with plant life: A riot of cacti, palms, walnut trees and succulents strains against the sagging chain link fence that marks his property line.

I find Dundon at the gated entrance to this chaotic lot. He’s stooped over a fresh load: rotting plant matter and manure from a local stable falling through the tines of an ancient pitchfork. Dundon’s tall, about 6′4″ with broad shoulders and considerable biceps. An urban mountain man, his beard explodes from his face, white whiskers frizzing out from his sideburns down to the middle of his chest. His moustache is stained light brown, I’m guessing from drinking apple cider vinegar as he has a slightly sour, though not unpleasant, odor. His long hair is dark gray, pulled back into a ponytail. Blue eyes sparkle from above rosy cheeks and a weather-beaten face. Give him a conical red hat and he is an unmistakable garden gnome.

We exchange greetings and without hesitation he launches into his pro-compost spiel.

“I’m here to capture the rapture and the resurrection at the same time,” he says, pushing a wheelbarrow brimming with fresh mulch, leading me up the inclined path into his shady tropical reserve. “Isn’t life triumphing over death the resurrection? The body turns back to basics and then the basics are picked up by the next generation and the next generation makes use of it and is happy to live inside this new entity because it didn’t go to the landfill. It went to the hill with the will.”

The ground is spongy and soft, piled into rolling hills of nutrient-rich soil that rise a good four or five feet above street level. Black hose—part of a DIY irrigation system—criss-crosses a pathway lined with black plastic gardening pots filled with young ferns and prickly-pear cacti. Dense foliage spreads out on both sides of the path: Kaffir and Stargazer Lilies bloom amidst the psychedelic red, green and yellow leaves of coleus plants. Myriad other tropical species compete with jungle cacti for the shafts of sunlight that splinter down through the banana and walnut trees. Palms tower 30 feet overhead, swaying in the slight breeze of what, on the street, is a hot August afternoon. The temperature in the shade is a good ten degrees cooler. The air smells of wet dirt and blossoming flora.

“When the county came after me one time they said it was a pile of debris and trash,” he says, dumping the load of mulch; spreading and turning it between ferns and broad-leafed fan palms with his pitchfork. “The reporter from the local newspaper came, and I said, ‘Do you realize what the question is?’ I told her I’m sent to be the modern day Shakespeare/ The sincere seer engineer that’s here to commandeer the sphere/ Because your atmosphere and the pure have already started to disappear/ So you better get your rear in gear my dear because the real enemy is right here/ I’m like Paul Revere crossed with Shakespeare. And the question is: Debris or not debris.” He stops for a second.

“See?” he asks. “It really gets ‘em when you say it in rhyme.”

The Dundon family moved onto this piece of land in 1933. Tim was born in 1942, and grew up here with his two brothers and a sister. He tells me it was a flat lot full of weeds, and that an evil spirit inhabits the house itself. “My family’s been possessed big time,” he says. As we walk through this fertile microenvironment he tells me about his nephew’s habit of “gunning” PCP, his sister’s “demonic possession” and an attempted intervention cum exorcism that ended with a family fistfight and a pile of flaming Bibles. “Over and over again my life has been full of weird, weird stuff,” he says. “I don’t want to freak you out.”

Chickens, roosters, ducks and geese patrol the paths of Dundon’s forest, and their work rooting through the top layer of mulch brings his attention back to the matter underfoot. “You can see the chickens have been digging,” he says, kneeling down and plunging his hand into the warm soil.

“That’s the powder that makes you prouder and prouder,” he says, bringing up a handful of rich humus. He lets it run through his fingers and sings a verse from Creedence’s “Proud Mary:” “Big wheel keeps on turnin’/ Proud Mary keeps on burnin’.” He smiles. “See, it’s burning with the fire of life. I call it yea-palm instead of napalm. Rather than burn people to death it brings ‘em more alive. This stuff here, the raw material?” he comes up with another handful of the same fine black soil. “I call that craptonite. Craptonite does to the forces of evil what kryptonite does to Superman.

“There’s so many bacteria,” he continues, “so many worms and living creatures that when I wet this thing down at night there’s this big party that comes out. They just chew it up and turn it into the black stuff. So it’s crap tonight, soil tomorrow,” he pauses for a beat, to see if I’m following his joke. “Like when it goes to the black form there, when it’s completely done, it’s called humus.”

The process of composting is, to quote the the Rodale Book of Composting, “the biological reduction of organic waste to humus.” Which more or less means when plants or animals die and fall to the earth, they become food for other organisms. This process is both hindered and harnessed by humans: The billions of bacteria and fungi that dwell in a handful of soil are largely absent from, say, asphalt, concrete or the compacted mash of garbage in a landfill, but the process is streamlined and accelerated by traditional organic composting practices.

The first stage of decomposition in composting is chemical: microscopic organisms flock to the dead thing and start to secrete enzymes that break it down on a cellular level. As bacteria, saprophytic mushrooms and other fungi eat and digest, they give off considerable heat, causing compost piles to steam and occasionally even catch fire from the trillions of tiny post-dinner bacterial farts. Such a catastrophe took place at Dundon’s place in 1990, and nearly cost him his beloved pile. As temperatures fluctuate within the decomposing matter different communities of organisms rise and fall according to their ability to withstand the heat, which can approach 160-degrees Fahrenheit.

As the chemical decomposers make the dead organic matter a bit more malleable, the physical decomposers start to show up. Millipedes, sow bugs, springtails and snails are happy to chomp up the plants. Flies arrive bringing more bacteria to the buffet, leaving behind eggs and maggots for spiders, centipedes, mites and beetles to eat. Ants replenish the fungi, transport minerals from within and without of the pile and eat plants and insects. But the most accomplished of all the decomposers is without question the earthworm. In his blockbuster 1881 essay “The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits,” Charles Darwin writes, “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as these lowly organized creatures.” These original slimy alchemists eat dirt and shit out the organic equivalent of gold: castings, also known as vermicompost. Castings enrich the soil with nitrogen, calcium, magnesium and other minerals, in addition to increasing its ability to retain water. And they attract more earthworms, too.

If the aspiring organic gardener’s compost is comprised of the proper materials—check out a good composting book like the aforementioned Rodale guide, but no meat, cat, dog or human poop for starters—it shouldn’t smell bad or attract rodents. The primary odor that emanates from Dundon’s pile is the deep funk of healthy soil. Which is actually the smell of the spores produced by actinomycetes bacteria, a chemical decomposer that thrives in the latter stages of the composting process.

This is how the majority of humans grew their gardens for most of recorded history, taking cues from the world around them. The original practitioner of this composting process would be the forest floor itself, where a mulch of dead leaves, needles, bark and branches covers over and protects the networks of roots, mycelium, bacteria, insects and worms that take part in soil genesis activities. The first people known to have written about composting were the Akkadians, an empire that thrived in Mesopotamia between the 22nd and 24th centuries B.C. There are irregularities in this history, of course: Rodale cites a 10th century Arab agriculturalist as endorsing human blood as a potent addition to compost. Colonial-era American composting seems to be predicated on “fish to muck” ratios. In the ’50s gardeners were going bonkers over mulching with wet straw. Dundon credits his pile’s success to cemetery grass clippings and never fails to point out that there’s a lot of manure involved.

This cycle was interrupted in 1840 when German scientist Justus von Liebig discovered just what it was that plants liked about humus. Prior to Liebig’s research it was commonly accepted that plant roots were chowing down, literally eating, humus. Liebig’s research showed that plants were benefiting from the absorption of chemicals, specifically nitrogen, present in humus but also easily isolated and applied to roots directly. In short, Liebig’s discovery enabled the synthesis of fertilizer. As is often the case when industrial scientists decode a natural process, he proclaimed his methodology to be superior and actively dismissed the process of composting, forever changing agriculture.

The widespread use of synthetic fertilizer instead of humus was quite a coup in that a naturally occurring—often free—recycled substance that enriched the soil was replaced by an industrial product requiring nonrenewable resources that was often not only detrimental to long-term soil health, but also expensive for the farmer. Further refinements to the production of fertilizer—most notably the Haber-Bosch process of synthesizing ammonia to be used to boost crop production, developed in 1909—are often credited as enabling the population boom that has contributed so drastically to the environmental degradation of the planet.

So when Tim Dundon talks about how his pile is the answer to “all of mankind’s problems,” he’s not kidding around. And there’s no question that the pile has saved Tim Dundon.

Dundon spent his early 20s as a plasterer, shooting fireproofing on the structural steel of the skyscrapers going up across Los Angeles in the ’60s. When a doctor told him that the asbestos that was getting in his eyes would eventually leave him blind, he switched jobs and became an ironworker.

“I was being a tough young fella,” he says, sitting on a lawn chair in a salon-like clearing framed by the winding, sometimes horizontal trunk of a decades-old pepper tree. “I got really super powerful,” he says. “My barber was the third contender to the bantamweight championship.”

Dundon boxed too, both in and out of the ring. He and his hard-knock friends would get into bar fights and street fights, “dusting off Mexicans” and getting dusted off by Mexicans, high on acid and pills. They’d take “racks and racks” of Benzedrine, Seconal and Percodan and spend the weekend hunting in Arizona or in the rugged forests north of Altadena, “beating the hills and catching rattlesnakes.” After these strenuous and sleepless weekends he’d return to the work of building bridges and buildings. “I was breaking my back,” he says. One of his friends, the bantamweight barber, was eventually murdered when “a guy he’d worked over a few times in street fights caught him coming out of bar with a twelve gauge shotgun. Right in the face. He wasn’t quite tough enough to take that punch. That’s a good way for somebody like that to go out though.

“This is the kind of people that used to be in Pasadena,” he says. “You talk about heavy duty, these people were way above and beyond the call of duty.”

By the late ’60s Dundon was living with his second wife in Altadena, raising snakes and trying to keep his pet coyote from killing his neighbor’s dogs, or his wife. “One night me and my wife did acid,” he says, “and he wanted to kill her so bad you could see the hate vibrations coming off of him. If I’d a let him go she’d a been in pieces.”

It was around this time that he first smoked marijuana, coming up on his first batch of cannabis by way of a “mailman guy” he was hanging out with. “I took a couple hits on some really good stuff,” he says. “Then I had a big steak, and then went home and played with mama and it was like whoa!” He bugs his eyes out and smiles. “This is good.”

The following year Dundon started on the path that would eventually lead to the lush garden where he and I are now talking. “It was one of those summers when you couldn’t score any of the stuff,” he says. “I decided to plant some stuff behind the garage. Put in a couple tomato plants and some corn to camouflage. I saw the miracle of growth happen there. That was ‘67.” His expanded his garden of legal and illegal plants when he and his wife bought a house in 1970. Three years after that they split up and he returned home to take care of his aging parents: Frank, who worked in the aerospace industry, and Edna, a concert violinist.

“It was my calling,” he says. “My father is the gardener, I am the vine. This is one of the heavy Bible statements. My middle name is Francis. Francis is Frank. Remember the Catholic saint, St. Frances of Assisi? I’m St. Francis of Afece. Is that funny shit or what? It goes on and on and on.”

The genesis of the modern organic gardening and permaculture movement of which Dundon is an icon occurred in 1940, two years before his birth. Almost 100 years following von Liebig’s discovery of fertilizer, Sir Albert Howard, a British botanist and the Director of the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore, India, published An Agricultural Testament. The landmark book was a result of Howard’s years of study of the indigenous agricultural practices of India, and it lays out a vision of symbiosis between animals and plants and a scientifically validated methodology of composting that have become the core tenets of the organic farming movement. And the dude talks a lot like Tim Dundon, if Dundon were a British knight. “How long will the supremacy of the West endure?” Howard asks in the introduction to Agricultural Testament. “The answer depends on the wisdom and courage of the population in dealing with the things that matter. Can mankind regulate its affairs so that its chief possession—the fertility of the soil—is preserved? On the answer to this question the future of civilization depends.”

Howard’s work flew in the face of an agricultural fertilizer industry that was already entrenched across the planet. And he inspired a generation of organic farmers, among them American gardener J.I. Rodale. Rodale started publishing magazines and gardening guides—including the composting book quoted above—in 1942, based around his enthusiasm and belief in organic farming. Among the many authors that he published was one Ruth Stout, a rebellious woman raised as a Quaker in Girard, Kansas. Though her work is often overshadowed by that of her brother—Rex Stout, the author of a series of mysteries featuring an obese detective—Stout published her first book in 1955. How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back outlined her philosophy of permanent mulch, summed up with the maxim “no dig, no work.” Like Howard she recognized nature as a gardener that didn’t need to be improved upon, and was reputed to tend to her bountiful, chaotic roadside gardens in the nude.

After Dundon moved back to his parents’ place in 1973, he continued to garden, but it was Stout’s writing that gave him the inspiration to start his now legendary compost heap and the jungle that has sprouted from it. “I read her book about mulching,” he says, “and how it had turned her place into a virtual paradise. She had all this stuff growing, really wild, just by spreading hay and organic material on the ground. I took Ms. Stout to a new level.

“I had a vision in early ‘73—I was right over there,” he points through the trees to a spot a hundred yards or so from where we’re sitting. “All of a sudden it dawned on me that that this was something that could change the whole world. People could create their own well-being, their own good health, happiness, have peace on earth, just by using organic material, turning it into a game or a competition or whatever to get everyone excited and involved. Something that could really work.”

Dundon soon began collecting the yard waste that his neighbors at the cemetery were incinerating. His pile grew to cover over the lot on which he lived, and soon the cemetery let him expand onto the land that connected their two properties. He claims the eruption of foliage occurred naturally. “I used to get the grass cuttings with the tree seeds and the shrub seeds,” says Dundon. “Instant forest.” He’s obviously done lots of planting though, as it’s likely the banana trees didn’t come from graveyard grass clippings. Likewise the massive dioon—a member of the ancient cycad family and a native of Central America—that spreads its palm-like fronds over a dilapidated shed. Or the exotic epiphytic cacti that bloom from the trunks of host trees reaching up toward the sky. Amateur botanists who travel to Dundon’s forest with a field guide in hand will be richly rewarded.

Dundon picks up a walnut from the ground underneath our chairs. “Just throw a little mulch on top and before you know it there’s stuff everywhere,” he says.

Dundon also kept up his marijuana cultivation. After his parents died, they left the property to him and selling pot augmented his income from doing odd jobs and gardening work. By the early ’80s he claims that he was the “kingpin grower and dealer” of Altadena. “The people I was dealing with, they weren’t into cocaine and all the other stuff,” he says. “They were just into doing the herb. I had a bunch of women that were coming around and I could of said ‘Drop your drawers and I’ll give you a half pound!’ Never any of that. I knew the growers; I got the super price, to where the people felt they got the best deal on the best stuff. This is the way it should be.”

He was busted in 1985, charged with cultivation, sales to a narcotics officer and possession of magic mushrooms with intent to distribute, all felonies. He was busted again while out on bail and charged with possession of more marijuana and psilocybin. He represented himself in Pasadena Superior Court as his alter ego Zeke the Sheik, dressed in a white caftan and making his case in rhyme. “I was obviously guilty,” he says “but I was claiming that I had dominion over the plants, because I was a true Christian believer and that my father in heaven according to the Bible gave me dominion.”

He was convicted following a famously comical trial, but the judge let him off easy: 60 days for each set of felonies, but to be served concurrently at Camp Snoopy, a minimum security prison camp. He only served 18 days, and had a pretty easy time inside: “One day I was pretending like I was asleep on the ground and these black guys were talking about me, sayin’, ‘Hey man we were in Altadena and this guy was selling this weed that was so bad that we didn’t need no cocaine or none of this other stuff. That’s him right there!’ If you’re a child molester they’re gonna kill ya, but if you’re a weed dealer they’re gonna say ‘This guy’s cool, man. He’s all right.’”

Dundon’s next encounter with the authorities came in 1990, when his compost heap caught fire. “It was like hell on earth,” he says. “It was like Puff the Magic Dragon and Dante’s Inferno right in the back yard.” He was oblivious to the fire until two police officers notified him of the smoke that was rising from his pile and lying so heavily on the street that it was stopping traffic.

Dundon was in a massively depressed state at the time: His 26-year-old son had committed suicide two weeks earlier, following the death of his mother, Dundon’s second ex-wife. “He broke up with his girlfriend. He was having trouble with the man,” he says. “He was gonna have to go to jail for 10 months or something like that. He got involved in some kind of drug deal. It was just too much for him to handle so he did the big one.” Dundon points two fingers at his head and pulls an invisible trigger. “So right at that time the pile was starting to catch on fire I was so bummed out, so blown out.”

He managed to contain the fire, but it broke out again the following day. The fire department was sympathetic to Dundon, but warned him that he’d be facing massive fines if they had to intervene. With a combination of water and silt he finally contained the blaze, and with the assistance of scientist friends he was able to verify to county authorities that his pile was no longer a hazard: the compost had mostly burned up, and what remained was non-combustible humus.

But the assault on the heap was only delayed, the issue handed over to county planners who claimed that Dundon’s pile was in violation of Los Angeles County zoning regulations. In 1999 senior county planner John Gutwein told the LA Times that “Mr. Dundon is a very nice man, conducting a large-scale composting operation. Frankly, he is doing very positive things … But Mr. Dundon is going to have to move the pile somewhere else.”

It came as no surprise that Dundon was unable to transport his pile—which had grown to be at least 40-feet high, and was reportedly the length of “five school busses”—to an appropriately zoned industrial area. Shortly thereafter the owners of the land—the Mountain View Cemetery board—were threatened with jail time and a $1,000-a-day fine if the pile remained. It was soon bulldozed. After the compost was removed, the ground was sprayed with herbicide and is now a barren dirt field dotted with tufts of crispy, sun-baked weeds.

Still, this major setback, disheartening as it is, can’t detract from Dundon’s progress: Not just on his own land, but through the work of the compost disciples that swear by his humus, a congregation whose members range from prim rose hobbyists to crunchy urban farmers, bohemian permaculturalists to straight-laced landscapers. He shows me a calendar that features images from his customers’ gardens: Sprawling groves of tropical plants, flowerbeds and vegetable plots bursting with life, even a few images of gardeners who’ve followed his model and added chickens and ducks to their backyard biospheres.

Where would you be without your compost? I ask him as we wander around his house. It’s one of two on the property, though the foliage is so thick that I never manage to discern where the second structure is. (I later learn that he has another garden growing on top of one of these buildings, a green roof that serves as a refuge for a pride of feral cats.) He stops to look down on a cage with two baby rabbits inside. It’s stacked up next to more cages holding chicks, chirping in alarm at a black and white cat that has emerged from the undergrowth. He looks back at me and raises two fingers to his head and pulls the trigger. “Probably,” he says. “The ups and downs got so bad. Suicide was close many times. When the pile got destroyed and the whole thing got so weird.

“Death, and bad relationships with women and having to be alone,” he continues, noting that his last girlfriend left 20 years ago. “If I could’ve had some breaks …” Dundon has aspirations to Hollywood stardom, brushes with television producers and media attention that have fueled obsessions with becoming a celebrity through the transformative power of compost. Which makes sense considering how much it’s enriched his life. “It would be neat to go back and write a novel about what would’ve happened if I’d gotten in contact with all these people. How much different the world could’ve been if that had happened. It could be Ecotopia already.”

It’s one of the only moments in the hours that we’ve been talking that he seems to be at a loss for words. It passes though, and as we continue to walk through his garden he tells stories about his brother Pat’s singing abilities, and then freestyles humus rhymes: “That’s the royal soil wrapped in foil/ So it’ll never spoil for those who are loyal/ and put in the toil/ and create the thing that will not only end the turmoil/ but replace oil.”

Dundon’s enthusiasm for compost goes beyond the sterling scientific theses of Sir Howard, and nearly eclipses Ruth Stout’s candid mulching genius. While compost guides stress that humus springs from all organic matter—plants, kitchen waste, cardboard, et cetera—Dundon mostly focuses on the manure component. He loves the Paul McCartney album Flaming Pie and never fails to make a reference to the fact that a lot of his yard—all dirt on earth, in fact—is in part made out of poop. I could find only one other accounting of compost in all its degraded glory, and this from an inverted perspective; one of repulsion at the death, disease and decay that makes up this nourishing part of the cycle of life. Walt Whitman’s “This Compost” is a selection from his 1855 masterwork Leaves of Grass wherein the bearded poet shudders at the thought of “every continent work’d over and over with sour dead.” He closes the selection with the following lines:

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

Dundon expresses similar sentiments, only true to his style, and to the holistic tenets common to both alchemy and permaculture, he embraces the corruption as much as the sweet things that grow from it:

“There’s three parts to life, right: The father is the male. Spirit, or space. The second is the mother. The female, the matter, the material. Third is ‘it.’ Like these chairs,” he gestures to the lawn chairs we’re sitting in again. “All these inanimate things are it. So the pile is what I call she-it. So that way they can’t bleep it because it’s a bunch of shit.” He smiles. “No shit?” he asks.

I nod and reply, “No shit.”

He shakes his head. “Nope. All shit.”

Photo: Jay Babcock

Special thanks to Greg Dalton.

Baltimore’s psychedelic rock & soul saviors Celebration have two brand new songs up for free download on their website, Celebration Electric Tarot. What’s more, they’re gonna be releasing all their new music in this manner. Once they’ve got enough new songs for an album, they’ll do a proper vinyl release, but if you’re happy with 192kbps MP3s, it’s all gratis when it comes to their shimmering guitar trance workouts. From their manifesto:

We, as Celebration, have felt the continual growth of web culture’s need for barrier-free exchange. We also feel that the traditional methods of releasing music have put too much distance between us. As we see it, the current music business model is crumbling. We believe their methods waste resources and time in a “print for market world” that no longer makes sense. The birth of the MP3 has dreamt the death of the CD format, and so all across the board, CD sales have dropped. What has given way is something so magical and evolutionary, music has grown, that we have only begun to understand the cultural impact of this sharing. So, past the piles of broken CD cases and badly scratched polycarbonate rainbow discs, there lies a fantastic world of freedom –freedom to share instantly with little or no impact on the environment, in a seemingly infinite, eternal and virtually cost free universe of the world wide web. This is our emancipation. Without the need for manufacturing CDs and the danse macabre of the promotional corporate machine, we can be free to release our music when and how we want –no waiting. We know nothing of the marketing world and don’t care about the vampires any more.

For more on Celebration, we would like to direct your attention to Ian Svenonius’s Q&A with the band from Arthur 27 (December 2007). You can download the PDF or purchase a hard copy by clicking here. Visit Celebration’s website to download “I Will Not Fall” and “What’s This Magical”. Read their full manifesto after the jump. (once again via Gorilla Vs. Bear).

Greetings Dear Ones,

We, as Celebration, have felt the continual growth of web culture’s need for barrier-free exchange. We also feel that the traditional methods of releasing music have put too much distance between us. As we see it, the current music business model is crumbling. We believe their methods waste resources and time in a “print for market world” that no longer makes sense. The birth of the MP3 has dreamt the death of the CD format, and so all across the board, CD sales have dropped. What has given way is something so magical and evolutionary, music has grown, that we have only begun to understand the cultural impact of this sharing. So, past the piles of broken CD cases and badly scratched polycarbonate rainbow discs, there lies a fantastic world of freedom –freedom to share instantly with little or no impact on the environment, in a seemingly infinite, eternal and virtually cost free universe of the world wide web. This is our emancipation. Without the need for manufacturing CDs and the danse macabre of the promotional corporate machine, we can be free to release our music when and how we want –no waiting. We know nothing of the marketing world and don’t care about the vampires any more.

Our plan and experiment is to post new songs monthly, as we create and record them. Under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license. all of our new music will be free to download on our website for non-commercial use. When we have enough music for an album, we will release it on vinyl for those who want to have something to hold. As artists we can only stand for our music, our art, our creation. So here it is laid bare. Some may say we are fools. If we be fools, then let us be the Fool of the tarot. The Fool card of the tarot represents a leap of faith, a leap into the unknown, a trust in the adventure of chance. It is in this spirit that we are unvailing a multidimensional, interactive musical Tarot deck, on our new website. We are constructing an experimental place to experience and share our musical vision with you. We strongly encourage you to blog, podcast, email and share links to our music and our site with others. We will post stems in the near future for remixing. If we like your remix, we will post it on our site. This experiment is funded solely by us and those of you who choose to be a part of making the music available. We’ve added a donation box to the site in hopes that you, our audience, can help support the artist’s right to autonomy. Thank you!

So with a leap of faith and fortune, we turn the fate of our future to you. We look forward to the time and moment when we share our music with you –it is our greatest joy.
Love,
Celebration

“The web is incredibly subversive, simply for the fact that all information is there and available in a world where control of access to information has always been a game. So the way I see it is, the psychedelic people need to use the new information technologies to build art, of a type, that is more powerful, more compelling than the world has ever seen before, call it virtual reality, call it multimedia, whatever you want. It’s basically walk into, walk around art, and then the boundaries will fall.” -Terrence Mckenna

“for it is in giving that we receive”- St. Francis of Assisi

One of the guys from Gang Gang Dance just put up a “shit res” video for Panda Bear’s blissed-out “Take Pills” on his blog. It’s got weird reflective masks, broken computer graphics, backwards singing and insects eating candy. Sort of like if Paper Rad was remixing David Lynch. Though not as good as Paper Rad remixing Rihanna using old Alf parade commentary, as seen in the video below. (via Gorilla Vs. Bear)

Another awesome tape from Africa, courtesy of the blog of the same name. Karamoko Keita does mellow guitar jamming with male-female call and response vocals. “This tape is legendary in my world,” writes ATFA proprietor Brian Shimkovitz. He continues:

I bought this tape in a neighborhood in Accra, Ghana. Known for its high concentration of people from other West African countries, Nima is one of the busiest, and toughest, places in town. Several tape shops lie along the main road that bisects this enormous slum. The shop where I found this Karamoko Keita recording has tapes you can’t find anywhere else in the city, tapes from Nigeria, Mali, Ivory Coast…that shop is chill.

Head over to Awesome Tapes From Africa to access the full 41 minutes of African guitar bliss.

As you probably know, Alaska’s Mount Redoubt has been blowing up for most of today, as reported by Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal’s arch-enemies at the Alaska Volcano Observatory. But did you know that you can read about this historic eruption in oddly truncated sentence fragments on the Twitter? Click here to do that. Or head over to the AVO website for actual pitchers of the asplosions.

Our pal Jody over at When You Awake has a new mixtape up, put together by Akron/Family member Dana Janssen. It’s called Top 10 Songs To Ride A Bike Thru NYC To and it features pedal-pushing hits from Harvey Milk, Fela, Tinariwen and Lil Wayne. It’s an annotated mixtape, naturally, so you can also look for tips on what to look out for (curbs) and drink after the ride (kombucha). Check it out here.

She also reminds us that Akron/Family will be playing a three-night run at the Steve Allen Theatre here in Los Angeles on March 10, 11 and 12, no doubt previewing material from their new album, Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free, due out on May 5. The show is presented by Arthur and Aquarium Drunkard, and all you need to know is found by clicking here.

While you’re over at When You Awake you should also totally check out their double-disc set of post-Valentine’s Day jams, Music For The Morning After, featuring one disc of songs selected by bands like Vetiver, Howlin Rain and Beachwood Sparks. Disc two has another set of jams picked by writers, bloggers and DJs including Aquarium Drunkard, Little Radio, and a very special foresty nugget contributed by your humble Arthur Magazine contributing editor. Go get it here.

More on our selection, Kate Wolf’s “Early Morning Melody,” plus a bonus track after the jump.

A couple years ago your contributing editor was “getting lifted” with Nabob from Brightblack, backstage at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. We were looking at the wall covered with all of the shots of people playing at the historic Southern California club — Robbie Basho, Townes Van Zandt, Michelle Shocked and on and on — when Nabob paused at one image of a young woman folk singer. “That’s Kate Wolf, man,” he said. “That woman’s voice is the sound of Northern California wilderness.” I’d never heard of her, and considering Nabob’s last recommendation to me was Sandy Bull’s E Pluribus Unum — possibly one of the most melted psychedelic guitar raga records the West has ever produced — I went out in search of her tunes.

The song “Early Morning Melody” is from her 1979 album Safe At Anchor (and can also be found on the 2000 anthology Weaver of Visions) . It’s an incredibly melodic bit of country folk — killer steel guitar — filled with sweet images of domestic life shared by two musicians: Wolf sings about listening to her lover getting up before sunrise and picking out songs, singing to “the coffee pot and kitchen wall.”

Wolf died of leukima in 1986 at the age of 44 and though I have no personal connection to her, I always get choked up over it when I listen to this song. I’m also susceptible to bouts of sentimentality as Wolf’s tunes are perfect for sitting on the front porch, reminiscing with a brew or two. The imagery is so personal, it leads me to think about how much she must be missed by whoever she wrote it for. Yeah yeah weepy cheeseball but seriously: You gotta hear this song.

On a lighter note … There’s a festival named after her that’s held annually in Laytonville, a small town in Northern California’s Mendocino County. The 2009 festival is scheduled for June 26-28 and features Emmylou Harris, Mavis Staples, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Richard Thompson, for starters. Yow. We should totally go, actually. More info at the Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival site.

On to the bonus track: Will Oldham contributed a gorgeous version of “Early Morning Melody” to the compilation that went along with the 2002 All Tomorrow’s Parties festival curated by Shellac. Here it is for your listening pleasure: Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “Early Morning Melody”

In a technological down-shift that will warm many an aging Deadhead’s heart, cassette tapes continue to be the medium of choice deep in the American underground. This embrace of outmoded audio technology is old news to regular readers of Bull Tongue, Byron Coley and Thurston Moore’s Arthur column — new installments of which will be featured here on the Arthur site — but even old hands can find this network of brilliant and often purposefully obscure music tricky to navigate.

Among the many resources that your contributing editor consults in searching out the latest drone and psychedelic noise releases is Expressway To My Skull, an audioblog and review site maintained by Vancouver’s Mark E. Rich. Rich is on vacation at the moment, but prior to leaving he posted Expressway’s Guide To The Cassette Underground, a handy digest of “earth psych” labels, DIY distributors and cassette-only radio shows.

You can also check out his monthly cassette review columns by clicking here. Have a nice vacation, Mark.

(And P.S. thanks for the Bull Tongue shout-out.)

You know, with all the “Is Obama The New Black Lincoln?” commentaries going around, George Washington is kind of getting the short end of the stick this President’s Day. With that in mind, we give you the above historical retrospective of Washington’s lesser-known talents (e.g., he had four dicks, rode a crystal horse and “made love like an eagle falling out of the sky”). Every year your contributing editor’s favorite “DC gossip” blog Wonkette posts this thing and he watches it a dozen times before emailing it to all his friends. It’s got some NSFW cusses in it, but you’re probably gonna get laid off anyway so who cares, right?

Watch more ridiculous videos from Brad Neely at his website, Creased Comics. UPDATE: More of Neely’s amazing videos after the jump.

MIA had a baby boy last Wednesday, as she announced on Saturday with an ALL CAPS blog entry (that also features a hilarious “preggo shuffle rap” youtube).

To commemorate the occasion we would like to direct your attention to Piotr Orlov’s epic 2005 Q&A with Mathangi “MIA” Arulpragasam. Click here to read the article, originally published in Arthur 16/May 2005 and now available online in the ever-expanding Arthur Archive. You can also order yourself an actual copy of the the May 2005 issue with MIA on the cover — less than 50 left! — by visiting the Arthur Store.

Contemplators Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and Al Cisneros (Om) discuss roots, rock, rhythm and chess.

Originally published in Arthur No. 27 (Dec 2007).

Both Cisneros and Chasny have resisted the identities that could be easily assumed given their iconic and prolific output—the former a stoner metal avatar, the latter a cryptic forest folkie. Instead, as their conversation below reveals, they’ve chosen to take on the humble mantle of “friend,” both to each other, and to anyone who sits before the speakers, transfixed by their resonant, circling explorations of repetition and change. —Daniel Chamberlin

Ben Chasny: I wanted to talk about how you come up with your vocal phrasing, because some of it, especially on Pilgrimage, is heavier than a guitar. It’s like extra percussion.

Al Cisneros: Definitely. It’s in everything that we do. It’s essential, especially being in a two-piece band, not only that the vocals have a melody, but it’s much more important that they have a rhythm. Really, it’s all drums, the whole band’s drums. When I play bass it’s a drum, it’s in the fingertips, it’s a hand drum. The vocals are a drum too. The whole thing is just rhythm. The vocals are constructed in a way to keep the whole thing in interplay between the three instruments, you know?

Ben: Yeah, and it’s another rhythm in itself, a cross rhythm over it.

Al: Like when we play a riff, without even thinking about how the vocal part goes, it just happens. It’s just fine tuning it after the root’s there.

Ben: So it’s not a labor-intensive process, it’s all very natural?

Al: The labor part comes in after the root is established and takes it to an analytical place and that takes a while. But the first part takes place automatically, even if it’s the first time we play the riff, as it’s playing.

Ben: Wow, that’s crazy because your phrasing is so complex. Sometimes you will start a phrase three beats before the riff, sometimes seven and it seems so complex. It is awesome to know that it is just a natural thing. That is a totally different brain space than I am used to being in. When I make up my singing parts I am just singing what I am playing, you know?

Al: It seems like it’s similar to the way that I am hearing your records. For example, the beginning of “School of the Flower,” it’s incredibly structured in that sense, the way the vocals contrast and go in and out. I don’t know, it seems that way to me.

Ben: I think we’re similar in the way that sounds come before the words come.

Al: That’s what I mean about the second stage, the analytical stage where you fine-tune it.

Ben: The riff comes. Then the sound with the riff. And then, yeah, carving the words out of the basic sound. In that way I definitely relate for sure. You know, when we first met a few years ago one of the things I noticed is that you seem to be possessed by vibration, like you have some sort of higher vibrational ear or something. And I don’t mean in sort of hippie dippy bullshit way, but it just seems like you pull rhythms out of the air. We’ll hang out and then you hear it and mention the rhythm or riff that is there.

Al: Yeah, I won’t say it’s a sickness, it’s just a heavy thing, all the time. Rhythms all the time.

Ben: It almost seems like a curse but you have figured out something to do with it, like playing music

Al: It goes back as far as I remember, ‘cause I remember even as a little kid I would run and hear the sound of my feet in my ears and my breathing and I would start to put stuff on top of it. I didn’t even know how to play an instrument. It was there all the time constantly, and there were all these inner circles, all these textures to it. With that it’s difficult, you know?

Ben: I wasn’t sure if you were aware that you seem to be possessed by vibrations.

Al: There’s no way to not have it and that’s the thing. It’s coming to terms with it and trying to harness it better and better all the time. Also at the same time not being destroyed by it because when it is constant like that, there is no place to rest.

Ben: Right. Do you think you would go crazy if you weren’t playing music? Or do you think you would find other ways?

Al: I don’t know because when I wasn’t playing music in between the bands, I started to first really appreciate philosophies of sound, and sound in silence, and not allowing myself to be near stereos or be around anything. I made it so that whatever was inside would play up to the surface and I was going to examine it, and I realized how many layers of input we all have to deal with. That was important.

Ben: Did you find other ways to manifest that music and vibrations?

Al: At first I deliberately did not because I wanted to make sure that the music I was hearing was worth hearing, or if I should continue to not attach to it. I needed to know if it was valid. The only way to do that was to starve it out by not letting it come out and see how hard it would retaliate. If it didn’t retaliate very hard, the riff couldn’t have been very good. And so it got to a point after long enough with a couple of reoccurring riffs over two years where it was all breakdown. I couldn’t talk and I had to start recording again. But it has to get to that point I think. I don’t want to go around recording a bunch of ideas, it’s just that I let them go and if they are really good, they come back, they stick to you. I can’t expect anyone to listen to music, to have a part stick to them, if it doesn’t stick to the people in the band first.

Ben: Totally. We talked have talked about that before: suppressing the riff, starving it so only the strong riffs keep coming back because they need to be there.

Al: For sure. That happened a lot in the time after the first band. I don’t know, I needed to get away from listening to music and go to a place without sound so I could actually think and see my own mental process. If the riff keeps talking to you it eventually finds its home in a song somewhere.

Ben: Yeah, it’s the riff that survives, even if you don’t pay attention to it for years and years. And it’s one way to get it out of your brain. The third song on Shelter From the Ash is the same way. I’ve had that for ten years and I had to get it out.

Al: Exactly. On everything we’ve ever recorded there are riffs that attain that natural terminus and are permitted to blossom. Over the past few Six Organs albums I’ve heard a lot more drumming and it’s totally linear and organic, it’s just totally natural and it makes perfect sense. And it’s interesting the way that you switch off between Black Wolf, White Wolf [Ben’s electric guitars] and the acoustic and yet all of them are one and the same, the same thing comes through it and it’s nice. I’m just really happy with the new album you did.

Ben: Thanks. Yeah, it just seems like a natural thing, you know. Noel’s drumming is never too complex, just natural exclamation points or something, and repetition. That’s something I was thinking about today: repetition. Contemplation and repetition, do you know what I mean?

Al: Yeah, I think through repetition there’s an established current of frequency that at a certain point becomes self-propelling like an orbit. That takes place of course in all of art, but repetition is like a great healing tool, it’s a great practice, because be it an internal meditation or an external song process, you go into that peeling away of those external layers. You can hit seven points on the target but they are all varied. You want to hit that one point on the target over and over repeatedly until water comes out of the ground.

Ben: Exactly. It’s how I hear music so that is the way that I want to play music too. Repetition. Over and over. Yeah, exactly, because in each of the…

Al: But what I have always heard in Six Organs is that repetition…cyclic, as an underground, as an undertone, a root note, a root cadence, which is constant, throughout the duration of the work, but upon that ground there are top layers, and the top layers do switch back and forth and present various shades and various moods. But at all times there is that constant floor underneath it.

Ben: Right, because when you change that floor underneath it, you change the whole entire emotional shift of the song.

Al: It’s like somebody opening a fucking door at the movie theater and everybody is like, ‘What the fuck?’

Ben: And that’s the thing: the songs are naturally going to be long. It’s not setting out to write a huge song, it’s how it has to be when you are dealing with repetition in music, the importance of repetition.

Al: Exactly. Like even in the old band [Sleep] people would ask why did we write a 70-minute song? Originally it was a 70-minute song that got pruned down through studio editors and record fools to a 50-minute song and people were still like, ‘Why do you write songs so long?’ and for us it was ‘What are you talking about? You don’t sit down and plan it, it’s just there.’ You know when it’s done because you feel…

Ben: Because there has been a proper amount of repetitions that has been satisfying.

Al: Yeah, there is a certain place that’s tapped and sustained. And if it can’t even be tapped and sustained then it needs to be worked on. Yeah, it’s essential. It doesn’t matter what style of music, if that place doesn’t arrive in whatever form…

Ben: It’s just soothing to me. Repetition is just very soothing and when I work with repetition I feel safe to contemplate things in the music itself. I feel safe to set up a foundation to build things that are entirely structured on the foundation that I had just built.

Al: It’s like outer circles around a center, a hub. Unless there’s that hub established which is completely balanced in it’s curvature, if that is compromised at its center than everything that you circle around it is going to be, ehh, you know. And so, of course, of course, that center, that repetition-core, that ground that is tapped, that floor that is provided that sustains throughout the entire work, if it’s not there than the things that are built on top are like a bad building. It will fall.

Ben: Exactly. I was driving around thinking about that today.

Al: Like a shitty chess position. Really! Like somebody that can recite the Sicilian defense to move 19 but hangs a fucking knight as soon as they are out of book openings. You know? Not into it. Not into it. I’d rather see the person that can’t even recite an opening but is a master tactician who can handle anything that’s a surprise. A surprise isn’t a surprise to a person like that.

Ben: Uumm.

(laughter)

Al: If the position is not solid, if the center is not controlled, if the pieces aren’t developed, if the king is not castled. No matter what ideas one has about the middle game, they are illusion. The foundation has to be solid. There are certain essentials that have to be locked down in place. And once that’s there, the things, geometrically, automatically, through the laws of physical reality provide their own layers. But if that sound foundation is not there, it’s a chasing game, it’s a dog chasing its tail. Anything. Does that make sense?

Ben: Yeah! Well…I don’t play chess but I know what you are talking about.

Conversation turns to Al’s recent frustrations in interviewers’ and critics’ continued insistence on approaching music only through the genre lens: eg. ‘stoner rock,’ ‘doom metal,’ ‘post-rock,’ etc.

Al: Another thing is the fallacy of genre. It’s deep, it’s deep. There’s these people who are threatened and want to fortress themselves through their status quo ideas of their biosphere around them. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. In that, all they are doing is continuing human history. They’re making another purpose of dividing each other.

Ben: Right, more walls.

Al: And here we are again. It’s really sad actually, because, you know, within music there are all these people that judge each other because there is that phenomenon, that place, at least in American music culture at this time, everybody has their categories in their records stores and their shelves and… STOP! There is a unity behind the differences. There is a great unity, there has never not been that great unity, behind the apparent differences. But the attempted interview reminded me of how it’s not obvious, it’s not cool, and people still aren’t ok with that.

Ben: People trying to own genres and using the genres that they think they are masters of and doubling back and making it so that those genres are as important as their own name to them. You can take that same mindset and it relates directly to war. It’s the same mindset, the same part of the brain.

Al: It’s a tragedy. It’s an ultimate sad self-defeating culture that wants all these divisions up. And then where do you draw the line? Even the people that talk about the divisions are redefining the divisions. It’s very difficult. It’s like a flypaper. It’s very easy to get stuck in the problem while even talking about the problem.

Ben:Yeah, it’s weird. You get people who think you must be playing shows with this band or that band and they always want to know, “then what scene DO you belong to?” And I just think about my friends who just play diverse types of music.

Al: But it goes beyond music though. It’s not even friends who are in bands or work on recordings and write songs. The friends that you have are friends not because of what they do but because of who they are, their character, things that are in their spirit and heart and resonate with you, certainly not reserved to just music. And your point, in agreement with you—if there’s one genre, I’m cool. But if there’s 50 and everybody is mad at each other because of that, then Stop! There’s the one and that is life. We’re all here together.

Ben: When it comes down to it, there is no classification. They are just friends.

Al: Friends whether they are in person or in present life or friends within the common vibration. There are so my levels of friends. They can be in the written word, in the recorded sound…

Ben:Your best friend when you were 14 years old, sitting in front of the stereo…

Al: Geddy Lee.

Ben: Tommy Bolin.

Note: “Transmissions from Sinai,” a c2009 ompilation curated by Om’s Al Cisneros, is available now. Click here for all the details.

New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones has an excerpt from Arthur contributor Dave Tompkins’ long-awaited book about the vocoder up on his blog. Tompkins connects the dots between Cher, T-Pain, Holger Czukay, and the classic Cylons, sprinkling in ample quotes from Bell Technical Journal along the way. Go read “Unvoiced Hiss Energy” over at the New Yorker. And keep an eye out for Tompkins’ book, due out next spring on Stop Smiling Books/Melville House.

P.S. Tompkins’ infamous interview with Godzilla appeared back in Arthur #10, which is currently available in the Arthur Store.

Visionary mycologist Paul Stamets is giving one of his totally awesome mushroom workshops tomorrow (Friday, 2/6/09) at the Community Church of NY; 40 East 35th Street, Between Park and Madison Avenues. It’s $20 and — if you’ve got it — well worth it.

Full details at New York Open Center. More about Stamets after the jump.

from the Open Center website:

“A visionary emissary from the fungus kingdom to our world, and the message he’s brought back … will fill you with wonder and hope.”—Michael Pollan

Mushrooms and other fungi are the unsung heroes of the planet: their ubiquitous invisible networks underfoot clean up our messes, create soils and support the whole web of life. This evening one of the world’s foremost experts on mushrooms, the brilliant visionary Paul Stamets, will explain how the fungal realm can become our greatest ally in repairing the damage we have done to our biosphere and in helping heal our bodies from many illnesses.

Drawing from his lifetime of research, Stamets will explain how various mushroom species can replace chemical insecticides, break down some of the worst toxic wastes, and inhibit the spread of some of the most virulent diseases. He will also share his fascinating ideas about the inherent intelligence in the vast underground mycellial networks that produce mushrooms, that he sees as akin to “nature’s Internet.” Don’t miss this rare East Coast appearance by this legendary figure.

First, President Obama’s Kenyan half brother gets arrested — in Kenya — for holding, like, one joint. Then over the course of the last week the DEA busts a series of medical marijuana clinics across California. Then cops in Fontana — formerly a hub of the pig farming industry and now a dismal commuter suburb of LA — discover 1,800 pounds of weed being smuggled inside … wait for it … concrete lawn donkeys. “Drug mules,” geddit? (At least those pickup truck rampin’ Mexican cartels have a sense of humor, right?) The next thing you know, Obama’s bro is out on the streets again, all charges dropped. Coincidence, or…? Connect the dots, friend.

You know who doesn’t have a sense of humor? All the marijuana activists that were blowing up yesterday across the internet over the DEA raids on medical marijuana clinics that took place from South Lake Tahoe in Northern CA to Venice and Marina Del Rey down here in Los Angeles County. Do you know the reason why they are so itchy about these acts of Federal aggression? Because back in March and May of 2008 Obama said some evasive but still encouraging shit to two Oregon newspapers: Southern Oregon’s Mail Tribune and the The Willamette Weekly — an alt-weekly — about basing policy on science when it comes to medical marijuana. And we block-quote the Weekly:

Would you stop the DEA’s raids on Oregon medical marijuana growers?

I would because I think our federal agents have better things to do, like catching criminals and preventing terrorism. The way I want to approach the issue of medical marijuana is to base it on science, and if there is sound science that supports the use of medical marijuana and if it is controlled and prescribed in a way that other medicine is prescribed, then it’s something that I think we should consider.

Then, as if to confirm any suspicions that the casual reader might have about the Lollapalooza-types one might find staffing an Oregon alt-weekly, the interviewer asks Obama if he would get a tattoo were he placed “under duress.” That is certainly an imaginative question. But we digress …

As of January 28, Hopey’s man Eric “Lando” Holder is running the Justice Department, thus everyone from the libertarian burners at Reason to the up-against-the-wall muckrackers at Counterpunch to LA Times haberdashery columnist Patt Morrison (we kid we kid Morrison is oft very clever and funny) is like, “Lay off already!”

Get your summary of the day’s chatter after the jump.

From Jacob “Saying Yes” Sullum at Reason:

Two days after President Obama’s inauguration, the DEA raided a medical marijuana dispensary in South Lake Tahoe, California. Yesterday, on the same day Eric Holder took office as Obama’s attorney general, the DEA raided two Los Angeles dispensaries. Obama deserves a certain amount of transitional slack in delivering on his promise to respect state laws regarding the medical use of marijuana, but with drug warriors operating on auto pilot in this area he needs to step in soon and let them know the federal policy has changed.

Patt Morrison at the LA Times:

Back in 2001, barely six weeks after the attacks of 9/11, when all of the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement resources were supposedly being thrown at terrorism, the Bush Administration nonetheless found the time and manpower to raid a medical marijuana dispensary in a West Hollywood church. When the case came to a finale in court, I was there when federal judge A. Howard Matz handed down the lightest possible sentence he could to the dispensary operators — one of them a cancer patient himself — and said stingingly, “I think this entire prosecution was badly misguided.”

So here we go again. Unregulated and poorly regulated dispensaries are a real problem, as the state of California knows and has been trying to do something about. If that was the problem underlying today’s raids, at least the DEA could have let the local law know that it had a problem, and even brought the LAPD along on the raid.

But many of these dispensaries operate scrupulously, with the knowledge and blessing of city and county law enforcement officials — and now with the tacit permission of the President of the United States, who said he’ll defer to state law. And that, under Proposition 215, makes medical pot legal in California.

Now if only someone will cc all of this to the DEA.

Fred Gardener* at CounterPunch (this one has some good details about the South Lake Tahoe bust, so click it if yer curious):

Obama’s comment about using his political capital to achieve more important goals was said in a tone and accompanied by a smile that conveyed, “This is a reality that you and I both understand…” But it’s a self-fulfilling reality that involves two misleading assumptions. You and I and Barack Obama and Nelson of the Mail-Tribune know that the polls consistently show 75-80% of the American people wanting the marijuana laws to allow medical use. Relatively few voters woud be alienated if the new President directed the DEA to respect the relevant state laws –or if his Attorney General classified marijuana as something other than a Schedule-1 drug. Those steps would not be unpopular with the masses and taking them would only cost Obama “political capital” if he’s defining it as something other than “popular support.” So he must be referring to his political capital vis-à-vis the corporate elites and a Congress that does their bidding.

And why assume ending marijuana prohibition would be a less significant political achievement than reforming the healthcare system or getting US troops out of Iraq? Looking back at the changes effected in 1932, ending alcohol prohibition doesn’t seem trivial compared to the public works projects and economic reforms instituted by FDR in response to the depression.

It’s fun to make jokes about Arthur being a bunch of potheads, sure, and not to get all po-faced and NORML-y (or worse yet, trashily self-righteous and High-Timesy), but jail is no fun at all (just ask Arthur’s Do The Math columnist Dave Reeves) and yadda yadda lot of good people are getting roughed up by DEA goons and imprisoned over this bullshit. So there you go.

*Gardener is the editor of a sort of fascinating pro-marijuana medical journal — O’Shaughnessy’s: The Journal of Cannabis in Clinical Practice — that offers an inside look at medical marijuana research, including input from hippie doctors as well as the big pharma lizards.

Oxford University Press — the home of the OED, the only $1000 dictionary you’ll ever need — has united religious conservatives and environmentalists the world over by swapping out words relating to religion and nature for technological and pop culture terms in the latest edition of its Junior Dictionary for children 7 and up. This whole thing broke in the UK back in early December, and the story just now seems to be infuriating “green” parenting bloggers here in North America (tho we read about it first at Next Nature), who are all posting pictures of dandelions and quotes about the power of language.

The OUP argument, which is interesting while also being terribly depressing, basically says that their job is to reflect language as it’s used, and most kids these days live in cities and spend their time hankering for MP3 players, thus they need to get the definition of “bullet point” and “block graph” early, because MP3 players are more expensive than, say, almonds or dandelions. Don’t want the kids to be confused when it’s time to get their TPS report cover sheets in order.

Of course the religious douches came out in force, starting off saying good things but quickly getting it wrong and detouring into lame culture war throwbacks, like blaming the whole thing on political correctness and the influence of multiculturalism. It’s Britain, so of course these losers are HIGHLY concerned about the swap of “celebrity” for “monarchy” — though of course you’d never hear an American religious authority lamenting the loss of words like “elf” from a kid’s dictionary, cuz of the witchcraft. From the Rev Canon Jeremy Haselock in The Telegraph, re: his church’s new Conservapedia-sounding website:

“Thank goodness our stunning new website is unafraid to use vocabulary I have always been naïve enough to believe was basic, and thank goodness it includes an on-line glossary which I now officially designate a non-politically correct, non multicultural supplement to all future editions of OUP’s colourless and romance-free publications.”

We’ve never used the Junior Dictionary — it’s a UK-Canada thing, we guess? — but the update makes it sound like they’re turning an idyllic primer of classic Britannia into a consumer electronics catalog. And while children in the UK will have an even harder time figuring out who’s who in Wind In The Willows (they’re cutting “weasel” AND “stoat”?), perhaps the addition of nature words like “drought” and “allergic” will be more useful after all.

Find the whole list of swapped words after the jump.

Here’s a list of the words in question, via The Telegraph:

Words taken out:

Carol, cracker, holly, ivy, mistletoe

Dwarf, elf, goblin

Abbey, aisle, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, vicar

Coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire, monarch, decade

adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, porcupine, porpoise, raven, spaniel, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren.

Acorn, allotment, almond, apricot, ash, bacon, beech, beetroot, blackberry, blacksmith, bloom, bluebell, bramble, bran, bray, bridle, brook, buttercup, canary, canter, carnation, catkin, cauliflower, chestnut, clover, conker, county, cowslip, crocus, dandelion, diesel, fern, fungus, gooseberry, gorse, hazel, hazelnut, heather, holly, horse chestnut, ivy, lavender, leek, liquorice, manger, marzipan, melon, minnow, mint, nectar, nectarine, oats, pansy, parsnip, pasture, poppy, porridge, poultry, primrose, prune, radish, rhubarb, sheaf, spinach, sycamore, tulip, turnip, vine, violet, walnut, willow

Words put in:

Blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, chatroom, bullet point, cut and paste, analogue

Celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, common sense, debate, EU, drought, brainy, boisterous, cautionary tale, bilingual, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro

Apparatus, food chain, incisor, square number, trapezium, alliteration, colloquial, idiom, curriculum, classify, chronological, block graph

Not to get all protectionist-ically jingoistic, but wouldn’t it be great if there were a way that we could produce marijuana without having to deal with directly fund Mexican drug cartels?

Imagine, a pot-farming Shangri-La where most of the gunfire is some penny-ante bullshit between paranoid trigger hippies and trigger-happy meth heads popping off into the open sky, trying to figure out who has the bigger box of bullets. Or hey, maybe forget the guns altogether (except for target practice and varmint deterrence, of course) and see if some New Age-type hippies can find a way to cultivate cannabis for medical use, etc. without torturing and killing thousands of their neighbors?

Perhaps someday we’ll find a way to grow our own. Until then, we’ll have to rely on the dirt weed that psychopathic gangsters and their terrified migrant-labor minions are smuggling in through sewer pipes, raising in environmentally-devastating wilderness grows and ramping over the border in pickup trucks. Wait, what?

From the February 1, 2009 New York Times:

Tougher Border Can’t Stop Mexican Marijuana Cartels
By SOLOMON MOORE

TUCSON — Drug smugglers parked a car transport trailer against the Mexican side of the border one day in December, dropped a ramp over the security fence, and drove two pickup trucks filled with marijuana onto Arizona soil.

As Border Patrol agents gave chase, a third truck appeared on the Mexican side and gunmen sprayed machine-gun fire over the fence at the agents. Smugglers in the first vehicles torched one truck and abandoned the other, with $1 million worth of marijuana still in the truck bed. Then they vaulted back over the barrier into Mexico’s Sonora state.

Despite huge enforcement actions on both sides of the Southwest border, the Mexican marijuana trade is more robust — and brazen — than ever, law enforcement officials say. Mexican drug cartels routinely transported industrial-size loads of marijuana in 2008, excavating new tunnels and adopting tactics like ramp-assisted smuggling to get their cargoes across undetected.

But these are not the only new tactics: the cartels are also increasingly planting marijuana crops inside the United States in a major strategy shift to avoid the border altogether, officials said. Last year, drug enforcement authorities confiscated record amounts of high potency plants from Miami to San Diego, and even from vineyards leased by cartels in Washington State. Mexican drug traffickers have also moved into hydroponic marijuana production — cannabis grown indoors without soil and nourished with sunlamps — challenging Asian networks and smaller, individual growers here.

Keep reading after the jump.

A Justice Department report issued last year concluded that Mexican drug trafficking organizations now operated in 195 cities, up from about 50 cities in 2006.

The four largest cartels with affiliates in United States cities were the Federation, the Tijuana Cartel, the Juarez Cartel and the Gulf Cartel.

“There is evidence that Mexican cartels are also increasing their relationships with prison and street gangs in the United States in order to facilitate drug trafficking,” a Congressional report from February 2008 stated. Intelligence analysts were detecting increased Mexican drug cartel-related activity in Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Seattle and Yakima, Wash. — areas that used to be controlled by other ethnic networks.

Smuggling is still most conspicuous in the Southwest, which has been home to Mexican traffickers for more than two decades. From Nogales, Ariz., recently, a reporter watched as smugglers across the border, in hilltop stations, peered through binoculars at the movements of American Border Patrol agents. The agents gunned their trucks along the barrier looking for illegal crossings.

About noon, border agents saw a 60-pound bale of marijuana drop over the fence.

“That kind of thing happens every day here,” said Agent Michael A. Scioli, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection.

For the cartels, “marijuana is the king crop,” said Special Agent Rafael Reyes, the chief of the Mexico and Central America Section of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “It consistently sustains its marketability and profitability.”

Marijuana trafficking continues virtually unabated in the United States, even as intelligence reports suggest the declining availability of heroin, cocaine and other hard drugs that require extensive smuggling operations.

By combining smuggling with domestic production, the cartels have sustained the marijuana trade despite the onslaught of enforcement actions on both sides of the border. From 2000 through 2007, Mexican authorities arrested about 90,000 drug traffickers, more than 400 hit men and a dozen cartel leaders, according to a 2008 Congressional report. The United States extradited 95 Mexican nationals last year. Seizures in the first half of 2008 outpaced the average seizure rate from 2002 to 2006.

But the price has been high. Tensions have increased among the cartels, which are warring over lucrative drug routes through Mexican border towns like Juarez, Tijuana and Nogales, Sonora. More than 6,000 people, including hundreds of police officers, were killed by drug-related violence in Mexico in 2008. United States Border Patrol agents are also reporting more violent confrontations with traffickers.

As the Mexican government and American authorities have hardened the border, drug cartels are increasing production just north of it to avoid resorting to smuggling.

Many of the largest marijuana plantations are hidden on federal and state parklands, federal authorities say. Bill Sherman, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent based in San Diego, said the authorities were also finding an increasing number of farms in Imperial and San Diego Counties, an area traffickers traditionally avoided because of the presence of border guards, various police agencies and Camp Pendleton, a Marine base.

“We’re seeing a lot more grows down here now,” Mr. Sherman said. “That is a shift.”

Drug enforcement agents uprooted about 6.6 million cannabis plants grown mostly by cartels in 2007, one-third more than the plants destroyed in 2006. In California, the nation’s largest domestic marijuana producer, the authorities eradicated a record 2.9 million plants by the end of the marijuana harvest in December.

Yet enforcement officials say they see no discernible reduction in the domestic supply. Prices have remained relatively steady even as the potency of marijuana increased to record levels in 2007, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center, a Justice Department analysis agency.

Mr. Reyes also noted that Mexican traffickers in the United States were choosing hydroponic marijuana, which is more potent, profitable and easier to hide because it can be grown year round with sunlamps. (A pound of midgrade marijuana sells for about $750 in Los Angeles, compared with $2,500 to $6,000 for a pound of hydroponic marijuana.) He noted a case last year in Florida in which Cuban growers used several houses in a single Miami tract development to supply hydroponic marijuana to Mexican traffickers.

Kathyrn McCarthy, an assistant United States attorney in Detroit, said Mexican traffickers in Michigan were trading Colombian cocaine for hydroponic marijuana from British Columbia to sell in the United States. In Washington State, now the second biggest domestic producer of marijuana, Mexican cartels are growing improved varieties of outdoor marijuana to compete with BC Bud and other potent indoor plants.

Last year, narcotics officers discovered 200,000 high-quality marijuana plants growing amid leased vineyards in the Yakima Valley. The Northwest has traditionally been the province of Asian hydroponic networks.

Despite increased planting, the cartels still rely on smuggling. Near Nogales, Ariz., Mr. Scioli pointed out several cross-border tunnels, one of which extended from the backyard of a house, under the fence and into Mexico 40 yards away. Another series of cross-border tunnels made use of existing sewer lines or drainage pipes. They were among the nine smuggling tunnels drug enforcement agents have discovered there since 2003.

Despite the fact that the authorities are discovering more marijuana production inside the United States, most of the cartels’ leadership remains in Mexico and, for now, so does most of the violence. Still, recent photographs from Mexico of the decapitated heads of Mexican policemen play in the minds of law enforcement officials on this side of the border, who are vigilant for signs of spillover.

The Mexican police in Sonora “are stuck between two warring cartels,” said Anthony J. Coulson, a federal drug enforcement agent. “The cops are being killed as pawns. They’re being used to show how much power and control the cartels have.”

Mr. Reyes, the special agent, said, “The violence is happening because of the pressure we’ve exacted, but it does not fuel any increase or decrease in marijuana.”

No one sees a quick end of the violence in Nogales, Sonora.

Sheriff Tony Estrada of Santa Cruz County said there was so much violence on the other side of the border that many Mexican police officers and politicians had become virtual refugees in Nogales, Ariz.

“The violence has left a large contingent of police on this side of the border,” Sheriff Estrada said. “The killing will stop when somebody dominates. When somebody takes control.”

Your contributing editor was in the Trader Joe’s one day, grinding his coffee at one of their machines next to some other dude. The spoon that’s usually chained to the coffee grinder — it’s there so you can flip the last of the beans down to be crushed — was gone, so we were both using the plastic lids from our coffee cannisters to this end. Guy says to me something about how isn’t it great we have thumbs, can learn to use simple tools and ha ha ha.

My response: “Fuck thumbs man. Thumbs mean that we developed agriculture, built cities and spread civilization to the point where we gotta have jobs in order to buy food and stay alive.” The dude sorta laughs as I go on. It’s a Silver Lake Trader Joe’s in the middle of the afternoon — i.e. full of self-employed freelancers and other such bohemians and assorted leisure-seekers — so it’s not surprising that he’s somewhat sympathetic to my random, half-serious anti-civilization spiel.

“Take dolphins, for example. They didn’t evolve thumbs, which means they get all the benefits of intelligence minus the drags of civilization. So they swim around all day having sex and eating sushi,” and dodging tuna nets and plastic bags etc etc, “while you and me have to scrimp and save only to settle for some lame pre-packaged California rolls. Never mind my prospects as a hetero male trying to find a date in a city where the single guys outnumber the single ladies two to one.” He laughs again and we’re both on our way home to enjoy the fruits of civilization such as the aforementioned coffee and deli-fresh sushi.

I was kidding about the sushi line, but as it turns out dolphins use — or at least are starting to use — a sushi-chef like approach to preparing cuttlefish for dining. From Discover:

Australian researchers have observed a female bottlenose dolphin using her snout to prepare a meal of cuttlefish. But instead of just gobbling up the fish, the dolphin carefully extracted its bones before dining—a display of chef-like skills that is extraordinary among marine mammals.

The feast took place in South Australia’s Upper Spencer Gulf, where cuttlefish breed. The researchers had first filmed this amazing culinary-enabled dolphin off the coast of South Australia in 2003, where they saw her preparing four different cuttlefish. They were able to identify her in 2007 by her scars (apparently the circular scars on her head were unique enough to identify her four years later). They recorded her meals with a Sony HD Cam video camera, and later used the footage to analyze her foraging behavior.

Read the original study, “Preparing the Perfect Cuttlefish Meal: Complex Prey Handling by Dolphins” at PLoS ONE.

More dolphins after the jump.

This follows the first documented use of tools by dolphins back in 2008, as another team of researchers studied the way dolphins use sponges to scare up meals of tiny fish from the ocean floor. And then teach their offspring how to do the same thing — though it’s mostly the female dolphins that pick up the skill. Also from Discover:

In the study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, lead researcher Janet Mann explains that while mothers show both their male and female calves how to use sponges, female calves are almost exclusively the only ones to apply this knowledge. “The daughters seem really keen to do it,” says Mann. “They try and try, whereas the sons don’t seem to think it’s a big deal and hang out at the surface waiting for their mothers to come back up” [New Scientist]. Mann speculates that this could be because sponging is a time-intensive and solitary occupation, with more work required per meal; she thinks it’s possible that male dolphins aren’t willing to give up the socializing that could give them access to fertile females.

Read the original study, “Why Do Dolphins Carry Sponges?” also in PLoS One.

And while we’re at it, here’s a solid piece from Scientific American about dolphin researcher Diana Reiss. It’s a nice little profile about her work helping protect dolphins and her experiences with different forms of dolphin communication. Of particular interest though was her path toward this career:

Reiss’s expressive ways are no accident. She graduated from college with a degree in theater and went on to work as a set designer with the Manning Street Actors Theater in Philadelphia. In the mid-1970s the group went on a trip to Poland to visit Jerzy Grotowski, an experimental director who worked with a concept he called “theater laboratory”. One night, in an effort to break down the actors to “the basic components of acting,” Grotowski put them in the middle of a room and had them do animal calls. “It was like an epiphany,” Reiss recalls. “I just felt like I really wanted to study animal communication.”

Read the rest of “Whistles With Dolpins” over at Scientific American.

And in closing … We are late to this but the underground tape-trading kids have been getting the word out for months now: DOLPHINS INTO THE FUTURE is the top ranking Belgian when it comes to deep-sea marine-mammal synth-jams.

We’re going to go out on a limb here: Olympia, WA’s Wolves in the Throne Room are easily the pre-eminent American eco-black metal band.

For those not already in the know, there’s been a emergence in the black metal world of a sort of “shoegaze” sound — much celebrated by indie rock nerds around the globe — found on albums from old hands like Enslaved as well as relative newbies of the nascent American black metal scene (see famous Alhambra, CA shut-in Xasthur). WITTR make such dark, My Bloody Valentine-style raging guitar buzz sounds from time to time, as well as switching between cookie-monster style grunt-growling and near-operatic arias of sometimes-singer Jamie Meyers. Plus they apparently live on an off-the-grid farm in the countryside. Arthur columnist Erik Davis talked to them about this for Slate back in 2007. Check out his interview here.

Where most Scandinavian black metallers are obsessed with, say, the outcome of 10th Century battles between Vikings and German Christian colonizers, WITTR are more concerned with pagan/environmental themes, adding a decidely fresh take on subjects usually dealt with in far more pastoral sonic palette. Epic jams like “I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots” and “Hate Crystal” are rife with brutal imagery — just imagine the soundtrack to an especially grim Derrick Jensen lecture, perhaps?

Add all these things up and you’ve got a black metal band that you can actually talk to non-black metal people about, without having them suggest you take your conversation over to their younger World of Warcraft obsessed sibling.

Wolves in the Throne Room’s excellent new EP Malevolent Grain was released this weekend on vinyl, with a CD version soon to come. Check it out at the WITTR online store. New album Black Cascade due out later this spring.

More WITTR after the jump …

As it happens, the sophisticated visual aesthetic of the black metal community seems to rarely extend past arcane logos and/or makeup skills: You are thusly warned as we direct you to DOOMED TO BE STONED IN A SLUDGE SWAMP, an audioblog overflowing with erotic photoshop art featuring boobs, blood and weed. Amidst the cleavage and gore you’ll find a most excellent bootleg of Wolves in the Throne Room playing at the heavy, heavy Dutch Roadburn Festival in 2008. Check it out here.

When they were at the top of their game, the tuneful curators at the Magic of Juju were running one of the best audioblogs on the web. They’ve been quiet of late, but most of their collection of Indian ragas, Malian guitar jams and Indonesian field recordings is still available for your perusal.

They’ve also got a friend named “Jah(n)” who drops in every once in awhile to offer us these wonderful collections of classic reggae and dub, often previously unreleased and almost always ripped from the original vinyl singles. The last post from Jah(n) and the Juju crew came at the end of November, and it’s a doozy: Seven hours, give or take, of sides from seminal Jamaican producer C.S. “Coxsone” Dodd. Go check it out here.

Dodd–the founder of Kingston’s Studio One label–was born this week back in 1932, so we figured now is as good a time as any to overload our hard drives with his sweet irie jams. That, and, of course here in the Atwater office we’re looking at 80-degree temperatures this weekend and want to be ready should barbecues begin to spontaneously alight.

John Martyn’s two 1970 albums with his wife Beverley — Stormbringer! and Road to Ruin — are near perfect examples of lush, freewheeling ’70s folk music. There’s the intricate guitar picking that characterized his earlier work on albums like The Tumbler, and there are a few of the jazz affectations that defined his later, more experimental efforts like Bless The Weather and Solid Air. But mostly this is the sound of two people in love, holed up with pals like Levon Helm in the idyllic countryside of Woodstock NY — e.g. just look at the two Martyns huddled together on Stormbringer!’s awesome cover (later appropriated by Wooden Wand & The Sky High Band for their 2006 album, Second Attention). On his website, John offers these memories of the sessions:

“It was the year of the festival. We just lived there and worked with Paul Harris very quickly and very briefly and we just went into the studio and did it very one-off, very swift. Levon Helm and Harvey Brooks we met in Woodstock and used them, just because they were friends. It seemed obvious that they should be on it. Dylan lived up the road, and Hendrix lived virtually next door. He used to arrive every Thursday in a purple helicopter, stay the weekend, and leave on the Monday. He was amazing…a good lad.”

Here’s my favorite song from the album, the absolutely magnificent “John The Baptist.”

Download “John The Baptist”

On his 2006 tour Will Oldham was playing a hybridized cover version of Martyn’s “John The Baptist” and another song on the same subject by Virginia country gospel players E.C. and Ornal Ball. Here’s an acoustic version of Oldham’s medley, from his August 2006 run at Joe’s Pub in NYC. (Thanks to Aquarium Drunkard for posting the complete Joe’s Pub sets back in December).

Download Will Oldham’s “John The Baptist”

Road to Ruin–also recorded in 1970–has more of the same but with lots more jazz playing. It includes the melancholy vacation anthem “Give Us A Ring,” in which the couple ask their friend Nick Drake to bring them something cool back from his time abroad.

Download “Give Us A Ring”

Martyn went on to make weird, wonderful records that spanned folk, improv, ambient and reggae, but those two albums with his wife — they divorced in the late ’70s — will always be my favorites.

John Martyn died today of pneumonia. He was 60. Various obituaries and remembrances after the jump.

from The Guardian:

He was also a far more gentle soul than his image as a grizzled wildman suggests. Initially intimidated by the fact that he was gruff, large, bearded and extremely drunk, I found him to be someone whose acute sensitivity meant his existence was innately painful. Drink dulled that pain, and turned it into something Martyn could laugh at. His songs were an attempt to make sense of it. The music, as John Martyn said in what proved to be his final public speech, was the cool bit.

from The Telegraph:

The trappings of fame and celebrity held no interest for him, which is why one of the greatest, most exhilarating and innovative British albums of the past 50 years – 1973’s Solid Air – remains largely unrecognised by the general public.

from The Times:

His folk sound was transformed by his discovery of electronic guitar effects – first on Stormbringer, a 1970 collaboration with his then wife Beverly Martin, but more dramatically on Solid Air.

Previously in Arthur: John Martyn, 1948-2009

OMFG! We thought the mere IDEA for this thing was funny enough, but then Van Hagar’s ugly mug comes floating through the space debris. GENIUS. Forget the latest Tom Clancy nuclear holocaust first person shooter war porn: Diamond Dave’s Assteroidz is the video game of the year.

Find more wonderful Van Halen oddities over at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog.

Alison Levy is a curator, writer and a blogger at the 2012 apocalypse fan-fiction forum Reality Sandwich. She’s posted a great interview with Arthur columnist Aaron Gach, of The Center for Tactical Magic. Check it out here.

In the midst of all the New Age therapy-speak in the comments — e.g. “i was the canvas i was doing the painting on, it was a shamanic abstract x-pressionist personal human sculpture” — “sonofman” jumps in to direct the RSers over here to Arthur to check out some of the Center for Tactical Magic’s contributions. Thanks, sonofman. Here’s a quick digest of the Center’s “Applied Magic(k)” columns, for your consideration:

Vanishing Act, from Arthur 32/December 2008

An Open Invocation, from Arthur 31/October 2008

The Roots of Culture, from Arthur 29/May 2008

Will Power To The People! from Arthur 27/November 2007

Calling All Ghosts, from Arthur 25/Winter 2006

BONUS: The Center for Tactical Magic at Psychobotany at Echo Park’s Machine Project, May 2007

Read an excerpt from the interview–in which Aaron explains what he learned from private eyes, ninjas and magicians–after the jump.

Alison Levy: I want to know more about each of those types of world perceptions as the private eye, magician, and the ninja. What is something you learned from each of them?

Aaron Gach: OK, the single most valuable lesson that I got from the private eye is something he would talk about repeatedly, which was, humans are creatures of habit. His whole job was really predicated on uncovering hidden information, information that’s either intentional hidden away, or even unintentionally — sometimes just lost. The gist of what he was always attempting to do, was to find out more than what was readily available. Depending upon what sort of situation he was engaged in, sometimes it involved following people, sometimes it involved going to courthouses and digging up records, sometimes it involved just talking to the right people, networking people or convincing people to give him information that they weren’t supposed to give him. But his main operating premise in all of these situations was always “humans are creatures of habit.” That meant that if he was trying to find a missing persons he would start by looking at their routine. If there was a situation where he was trying to deal with someone who was intentionally trying to avoid him or trying to hide something, he would start by looking at the most mundane aspects of their life that they returned to, consistently. Those became points of vulnerability.

When I think of that in society at large I feel that in a lot of respects this is what TV does, this is why advertising happens on TV. It happens at that mundane part of the day when everyone is coming home from work and they are exhausted, tired, and vulnerable and they want to relax. They’re in a suggestive state. That’s just one type of example, but nonetheless we can begin to think about how that relates in everyday life.

My relationship with the magician gradually became more complex, like relationships do the more time you spend with someone. Initially, we were just dealing with the ideas of perception and the ideas of performing power; what it means to be a figurative power, or someone perceived as having great or greater abilities than other people. Oftentimes when you think of a magician, whether it’s a street or a stage magician, the initial notion is that the magician has some sort of knowledge or power that the audience does not have. That’s what allows the magician to perform.

You end up, within metaphysics and the occult, with this split, this sort of binary between those of black magic and white magic. That pops up in stage magic performance on occasion too, and it happens in reference to the type of magic performed by a magician for his audience. A magician that is truly performing for his/her audience is a magician who is trying to amaze, is trying to give some profound understanding of the complexities of reality, that reality isn’t what is seems to be, that our perceptions can be fooled, deceived, and that sometimes in that fooling, we begin to recalibrate our understandings of what actually is going on around us. On the contrary side of the magician, maybe he is performing for him or herself. The act is a very egotistical act, it’s an act about showing that he or she has greater abilities and becomes this big ego trip.

I think anyone who has seen a magician perform is always ill at ease when a volunteer is asked for because the fear in part is maybe they are going to go up on stage and be humiliated. This is the real shift between magicians where on one hand the magician may bring a volunteer on stage and have them participate in casting an illusion or creating a grand effect; but on the other hand everyone sort of knows the worst case scenario where someone generously volunteers to be on stage and ends up being turned into a fool — they become the victim.

I think dealing with those sort of power relations shows up in politics all of the time. We see it every time a White House spokesperson makes semantic arguments that don’t really speak to the events that are at hand; anytime that the government seeks to distract our attention by presenting us with some sort of false debate; anytime the news media chooses not to cover events or not to offer solutions to crises, but rather just to report the doom and the drama in the midst. Those are all instances where the relationship between the stage magician begins to reflect the sorts of illusions and the sorcery that gets cast in the halls of government and the offices of marketing agents.

My relationship with the ninja was interesting on a couple of different levels. For one thing, I think it’s important to emphasize that ninjas in pop culture are not the same thing as ninjas today. Ninjas in pop culture and movies from the 80s, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ninja Motorcycles, all of these sorts of constructions really are fictional constructions about what the world of the ninja was historically. They are usually cast simply as assassins, or sometimes underhanded secret agents. But historically if you look at the role they played, they had a very community-based practice, they didn’t necessarily abide by the norms, standards, or the codes of feudal Japan. They took matters into their own hands, and they often focused on achieving goals. It’s not a martial art that’s strictly self-defensive. Sometimes, it’s just about accomplishing the goal at hand, which may mean running from conflict altogether, it may mean hiding, or evading circumstances. It may mean preempting a certain set of circumstances that would lead to trouble or danger.

Having that sort of understanding, of just trying to accomplish goals, while trying to think tactically and strategically, I think it goes beyond many martial arts today. The way this martial art is practiced today, while it trains for tactical purposes, it focuses on principles. The difference there is that a technique can be deployed when the circumstances allow for that technique, but understanding the principle gives you the flexibility and the resourcefulness to adapt yourself or change your conditions. So in that case, ninjas tend to think of training not just an individual body, but as thinking of the body as a small group, a large assembly, and a social mass. In those instances, the principles apply, where as an individual technique it may not.

The National Film Board of Canada was founded in 1939 in part as a way to distribute World War II propaganda throughout the Great White North, but went on to become a bastion for experimental animation, “socially relevant documentaries” and other film projects “which provoke discussion and debate on subjects of interest to Canadian audiences and foreign markets.” In particular the NFB is known for producing some of the dreamiest nature documentaries of modern times — it’s where Boards of Canada got their name and a lot of their soft-focus naturalist vibes. And now the NFB has started posting their library of films online.

A lot of these docs are wordless montages of natural imagery accompanied by droning Eno/Tangerine Dream-style synthesizer soundtracks — our favorite so far is William Canning’s 26-minute short Temples of Time (1971), described by the NFB as follows:

A mountain is a living thing; it has an ecological balance, a process of evolution manifested in slow, subtle ways; but it is also subject to the ravages of human intervention. Filmed in the Canadian Rockies and in Garibaldi Park, this picture brings to the screen magnificent footage of mountain solitudes and the wildlife found there, of natural splendor in all its changing moods. The film carries the implicit warning that all this may pass away if people do not seek to preserve it.

Hook your computer up to your stereo for the full effect of Edward Kalehoff’s warbling synth drone soundtrack. Who needs to figure out the whole new digital TV upgrade chip whatever thing when we’ve got this treasure trove to explore? More to come …

Note: The NFB’s online library is brand new and still a little wonky from time to time. If the embedded Temples of Time isn’t working for you, go here to watch it on the NFB site.

The Small Science Collective makes free, totally awesome zines about earwigs, protein structure, intestinal bacteria and facial gestures. Their motivation for this DIY public science publishing project? “Overall scientific literacy in the U.S lags at the very same time that the privatizing and patenting of scientific knowledge becomes more and more common.”

Some of the zines are charmingly straight and to the point like science fair projects, others are collaborations between astrophysicists and graphic designers looking into the “gossip and hearsay about the universal nature of spiral forms.”

All the SSC zines are available as downloadable PDFs, and are distributed for free in “subways, benches, coffee shops, and any place someone might least expect them. Perhaps catching the attention of strangers who might what to learn something new about ants, spirals, food, or genetics?” Or those who want to know how to best play host to the parasitic bot fly.

Check out the full zine library here. Print one out, follow the folding instructions and pass it along. They’re looking for new contributors too. Sweet. Read their manifesto after the jump. (via Bug Girl’s Blog.)

from the SSC website:

Who’s Knowledge is Scientific Knowledge?

Many say science is one of the most democratic forms of knowledge. At the same time, the gap between scientific, medical, & engineering specialists and the public only seems to continue to increase. Overall scientific literacy in the U.S lags at the very same time that the privatizing and patenting of scientific knowledge becomes more and more common.

It is easy to feel disempowered, believing that scientific knowledge is obscure, boring and simply not for us. We might shrug-off the importance of science in our lives, assuming doctors and researchers who “know better” will do all of the thinking for us. Although sometimes enjoying the strangeness of scientific discoveries, many of us don’t seem to believe we could play any part in communicating and sharing scientific knowledge.

The intention of Small Science Collective is to get over these assumptions and get everyone thinking about & communicating science through cheap and handy one page zines. Contributions come from researchers, students, the science-curious, and hopefully you as well! These zines and pamphlets are distributed in subways, benches, coffee shops, and any place someone might least expect them. Perhaps catching the attention of strangers who might what to learn something new about ants, spirals, food, or genetics? Whatever else, it is at least something to read while you wait for the bus. Pick one up, print one out here, read it, and leave it somewhere random for some unsuspecting stranger to pick up and learn something new. The science is yours to share.

So if you’re in Southern California and you had tickets for one of the two canceled Animal Collective shows this weekend — canceled due to sickness, so no bad vibes — you are no doubt very bummed. Doubly bummed now that the AC site is encouraging ticket holders to contact the point of purchase for a refund, i.e. the shows aren’t being rescheduled.

Your contributing editor has been elevated to the point of ecstatic laughter at an Animal Collective performance on the Sung Tongs tour, and he has walked out early from a disorienting and rather grating show when they were out pushing Strawberry Jam. It appears as if this current tour was of a quality suggesting the former experience, as in true jam band fashion AC has been taking older songs from their back catalog and re-rubbing their edges to fit into the gloriously swirling forms of the transcendent Merriweather Post Pavilion.

To get a sense of what we Southern Californians missed out on, we direct you toward NYC Taper’s excellent AUD recording of their January 21, 2009 Bowery Ballroom show. Put the “My Girls” house-building anthem video on repeat, mute the audio and let the reel-to-reel roll. (Re: the video. How many granola jam-band credits do you get for rocking a headlamp on stage? Enough to counterbalance the lack of hairy chinspace?)

It was just last year that Arthur pal Zach Cowie, in his 2007 year-end list of favorite things, predicted that “homeboys are about five seconds away from having a tapers section.” Now, a year later, and this is definitely the reality. NYC Taper’s show is the best we’ve heard, but if you find something as good or better here in this Animal Collective dot org archive of live recordings, drop us a line in the comments.

And while we’re at it, Arthur contributor Trinie Dalton — who profiled AC for the cover of Arthur 19 (Nov 2005) — catches up with the band once again for LA Citybeat. Read “The Polka Dot Lives On” here.

Animal Collective will be back for shows all up and down the West Coast — including an already sold-out (DANG) stop at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur — in May.

UPDATE: Read a take on the aforementioned Bowery Ballroom show (written by one of our favorite Deadheads, natch) over at the Village Voice.

(thanks to Raspberry Jones for the AC dot org tip!)

Download..

It’s a cavalcade of long-form guitar wailing tonight — Tuesday January 20, 2009 — at The Smell in downtown Los Angeles as Fuck Yeah Fest presents the epic heaviness of dopesmoking intergalactic Viking war historians ANCESTORS alongside the equally sprawling winter beach party jams of the LBC’s MAGIC LANTERN*. You can read all about the Magic Lantern guys over at the LA Record, who of course have been down with their “uninterrupted jammage” for some time.

Headliners Crystal Antlers manage to convey their squealy-squally guitar messages in a shorter format, but they make up for brevity with a second drummer who stands up and pretty much only plays a snare. We’re not quite sure what Slang Chickens are up to, but according to their M’Space page they really like ZZ Top, which is maybe a good sign.

As is the custom at The Smell, anybody of any age is welcome, as long as they got $5. Things get going at 9pm.

*While we’re on the subject, we just wanna say that the side project from ML’s Cameron Stallones, Sun Araw, is truly on some other shit with its queasy New Age tropical dub meltdowns and y’all should not be sleeping on that 2008 Beach Head album.

Photos from your contributing editor’s show at Art Center College of Design, “Light Pollution Series One: Artifical Night Lighting and Photosynthetic Organisms“:

Urban outdoor lighting produces enough spectral pollution to turn the city’s night sky into an orange-grey dome, smudging out all but the brightest stars. Of the myriad organisms affected by humanity’s colonization of the darkness by way of electromagnetic radiation, plants are of particular interest. Plant life cycles revolve according to their light environment: Photoreceptors tell them when to extend stems or broaden leaves; when to germinate and when to die.

These images are an examination of photosynthetic organisms as painted with the palette of artificial night lighting. The viewer’s attention is drawn away from the horizon — where the natural light has disappeared — to emphasize the industrial lighting on the organic textures. Tree limbs are framed against the night sky, nebulous clouds of leaves reflecting the glare of sodium vapor security lamps; groundcover is shot from directly above, micro-landscapes rendered in the orange halide tones of residential streetlights.

All of these images were made after civil twilight — when the sun is six degrees below the horizon — using available light with exposures from 20 to 696 seconds.

See the whole series at Into The Green.

Natural selection is being run, more or less, by the gentleman hunter we have up top there with the classy antique deer rifle. He does not believe in evolution, yet he and his ilk are currently sort of in charge of it because they are the ones culling the herds of bighorn sheep, clearing the hills of ginseng and emptying the rivers of salmon. The findings of this horrific new study — “Human predators outpace other agents of trait change in the wild” — more or less clarify that traditional conservation efforts and hunting/fishing regulations encourage the killing of the largest, healthiest adults, leaving the weakest members of the community to breed. This, of course, fucks things up on an evolutionary scale. From the New York Times:

The new findings are more sweeping. Based on an analysis of earlier studies of 29 species — mostly fish, but also a few animals and plants like bighorn sheep and ginseng — researchers from several Canadian and American universities found that rates of evolutionary change were three times higher in species subject to “harvest selection” than in other species. Writing in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers say the data they analyzed suggested that size at reproductive maturity in the species under pressure had shrunk in 30 years or so by 20 percent, and that organisms were reaching reproductive age about 25 percent sooner.

In Alberta, Canada, for example, where regulations limit hunters of bighorn sheep to large animals, average horn length and body mass have dropped, said Paul Paquet, a biologist at the University of Calgary who participated in the research. And as people collect ginseng in the wild, “the robustness and size of the plant is declining,” he said.

The researchers said that reproducing at a younger age and smaller size allowed organisms to leave offspring before they were caught or killed. But some evidence suggests that they may not reproduce as well, said Chris Darimont, a postdoctoral fellow in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the work. The fish they studied that are reproducing earlier “on average have far, far, far fewer eggs than those who wait an additional year and grow a few more centimeters,” he said in an interview.

Dr. Darimont said it was unknown whether traits would change back if harvesting were reduced, or how long that might take.

The researchers also noted that the pattern of loss to human predation like hunting or harvesting is opposite to what occurs in nature or even in agriculture.

Predators typically take “the newly born or the nearly dead,” Dr. Darimont said. For predators, targeting healthy adults can be dangerous, and some predator fish cannot even open their mouths wide enough to eat adult prey. Animals raised as livestock are typically slaughtered relatively young, he said, and farmers and breeders retain the most robust and fertile adults to grow their herds or flocks.

…

“Targeting large, reproducing adults and taking so many of them in a population in a given year — that creates this ideal recipe for rapid trait change,” Dr. Darimont said.

Some fisheries scientists have said their studies of fish stock had not shown a correlation between fishing intensity and growth rates. And some wildlife conservationists question the idea that hunting can have harmful effects on species.

Dr. Paquet said that although he had confidence in the new findings, he knew there would be questions about the analytical methods he and his fellow researchers used. “That’s expected,” he said. “That’s how science proceeds.”

He said he had anticipated that the work would be “contentious” among trophy hunters. “Essentially, we are saying, ‘You should not do this because it is having effects even you might not like,’ ” he said.

(via Reeves).

Did you know that the “C” in CNBC stands for “consumer?” We always thought it was for “Canadian,” when we thought about it at all. They’ve got some probably dumb tee vee especial about “America’s marijuana industry thriving and making bazillions of dollars like never before” coming up and it’s called MARIJUANA INK so maybe it’s also about horrible pot tattoos. (Wocka wocka it’s actually Inc. like incorporated). Ask your friend who still has television reception to tape it for you, I guess.

Anyway, in the run-up to their big reefer show, Consumer NBC’s got some doof named “Danny Danko” from embarrassing pot magazine High Times giving us the current market price of 12 different cannabis strains in a lovingly photographed slideshow. If you have not looked at High Times in awhile — like a decade, say — it is a real hoot because they actually do marijuana porn now. Like pictures of naked women either rolling around in marijuana, or with pot leaves magically Photoshopped onto their skin. It is truly gross and hilarious. Anyway, enjoy the weed pitchers. (via anonymous tipster/Boing Boing)

It’s fun to drive around in Los Angeles and every time you pass by a strip mall with signs in English, Spanish, Tagalog and Thai to say “that strip mall looks like a Thomas Friedman column.” Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi (author of the infamous “52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope” piece) gets a bit more clever than that in this review of Friedman’s latest book, Hot, Flat and Crowded. For added fun David “Get Your War On” Rees has created a comics version of the review. From “Flat N All That,” available in its entirety in the New York Press:

Like The World is Flat, a book borne of Friedman’s stirring experience of seeing IBM sign in the distance while golfing in Bangalore, Hot,Flat and Crowded is a book whose great insights come when Friedman golfs (on global warming allowing him more winter golf days:“I will still take advantage of it—but I no longer think of it as something I got for free”), looks at Burger King signs (upon seeing a “nightmarish neon blur” of KFC, BK and McDonald’s signs in Texas, he realizes: “We’re on a fool’s errand”), and reads bumper stickers (the “Osama Loves your SUV” sticker he read turns into the thesis of his “Fill ‘er up with Dictators” chapter). This is Friedman’s life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee’s signs.

More after the jump …

Friedman frequently uses a rhetorical technique that goes something like this: “I was in Dubai with the general counsel of BP last year, watching 500 Balinese textile workers get on a train, when suddenly I said to myself, ‘We need better headlights for our tri-plane.’” And off he goes.You the reader end up spending so much time wondering what Dubai, BP and all those Balinese workers have to do with the rest of the story that you don’t notice that tri-planes don’t have headlights.And by the time you get all that sorted out, your well-lit tri-plane is flying from chapter to chapter delivering a million geo-green pizzas to a million Noahs on a million Arks. And you give up. There’s so much shit flying around the book’s atmosphere that you don’t notice the only action is Friedman talking to himself.

…

Three observations about this touching and seemingly remarkable development, i.e. onetime unrepentant free-market icon Thomas Friedman suddenly coming out huge for the environment and against the evils of gross consumerism:

1. The need for massive investment in green energy is an idea so obvious and inoffensive that even presidential candidates from both parties could be seen fighting over who’s for it more in nationally televised debates last fall;

2. I wish I had the balls to first spend six long years madly cheering on an Iraq war that not only reintroduced Sharia law to the streets of Baghdad, but radicalized the entire Islamic world against American influence—and then write a book blaming the spread of fundamentalist Islam on the ignorant consumers of the middle American heartland, who bought too many Hummers and spent too much time shopping for iPods in my wife’s giganto-malls.

3. To review quickly, the “Long Bomb” Iraq war plan Friedman supported as a means of transforming the Middle East blew up in his and everyone else’s face; the “Electronic Herd” of highly volatile international capital markets he once touted as an economic cure-all not only didn’t pan out, but led the world into a terrifying chasm of seemingly irreversible economic catastrophe; his beloved “Golden Straitjacket” of American-style global development (forced on the world by the “hidden fist” of American military power) turned out to be the vehicle for the very energy/ecological crisis Friedman himself warns about in his new book; and, most humorously, the “Flat World” consumer economics Friedman marveled at so voluminously turned out to be grounded in such total unreality that even his wife’s once-mighty shopping mall empire, General Growth Properties, has lost 99 percent of its value in this year alone.

So, yes, Friedman is suddenly an environmentalist of sorts.

What the fuck else is he going to be?

Read the whole thing over at the New York Press.

Growing up in pre-internet rural central Indiana, there was no cable television and the radio was awful which basically meant late-night PBS programming was totally mind-blowing for your contributing editor. Dr. Who, Monty Python and most amazing among them all for its sheer menacing weirdness, The Prisoner. Patrick McGoohan, the star of the crushingly brilliant 1967 dystopian sci-fi spy series died on January 13, 2009 at age 80.

AMC has the whole series up online and it’s just gorgeous. Watch it here.

Read McGoohan’s obituary from the Guardian after the jump.

Obituary: Patrick McGoohan
Actor best known for his roles in the 60s TV classics The Prisoner and Danger Man

* Dennis Barker
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 January 2009 19.23 GMT

The handsome and steady-eyed Patrick McGoohan, who has died aged 80, was the star, co-writer and sometimes director of one of British television’s most original and challenging series of the 1960s, The Prisoner. In it, he played Number Six, a mysterious, resigned former secret agent who is always trying to escape from the Village, an apparently congenial community which is in fact a virtual prison for people who know too much. They are allowed to be comfortable there only if they conform completely and do not try to escape.

McGoohan was at the time, 1967, the highest earning British TV star, paid £2,000 a week through appearing in a highly successful secret agent series called Danger Man, in which he was John Drake, a European security man who – on McGoohan’s own insistence – never carried a gun or seduced a woman. But he was becoming disenchanted with the series, whose American purchasers from Lew Grade’s British television company ITC were pressing for more stock banalities such as car chases, shoot-outs and sex scenes.

He was invited to lunch with one American executive, who explained that they wanted pictures of him on the screen with glamorous girls – or, as McGoohan himself put it, “the corny showbusiness formula, the publicity machine grinding away”. He declined, and the lunch lasted only six minutes.

McGoohan, who had his own production company, Everyman Films, suggested to Grade a different, seven-part series for which he and others had prepared scripts, called The Prisoner. Grade cheerfully admitted that he had not understood a word of what McGoohan proposed, but had so much confidence in him that he agreed to fund it immediately.

Grade’s chief international customer, however, wanted a longer series. There were 17 Prisoner programmes, each of them loaded with mysterious psychological nuances, and set in an ideally artificial Village – in reality Portmeirion, an experimental community with exotic buildings designed by the architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, in north Wales.

From the opening titles, the programme was no easy ride. An angry secret agent drives into London in his fashionable Lotus 7 as a storm threatens, bursts into his boss’s office, throws his resignation down on to his desk, and storms out again. At home later, he finds an undertaker at his door. Gas comes through the keyhole, and he collapses as he packs his bags to go away. He wakes up in the Village, and no one will tell him where he is or why he is there, only that he is Number Six. ” I am not a number, I am a free man!” is his answer – and battle was joined in 17 attempted escapes.

In the series McGoohan met several sinister Number Twos but could never find out who Number One was until the last episode, improvised by McGoohan and his large writing team at the last moment, when Number One’s false face was pulled off to reveal a monkey’s underneath. When that too was pulled off, it revealed the face of McGoohan’s Number Six himself.

The implication that human beings can imprison themselves was timely in the swinging 60s, while at the same time the notion of the security services as the real enemy was seeping its way into fiction that had previously existed in more black and white terms. The programme achieved cult status for both itself and McGoohan personally, who had involved himself in all aspects of the productions in a way his colleagues thought obsessive. He became a darling of the campuses, but found that The Prisoner was a difficult act to follow.

In 1974, Everyman Films went bankrupt with debts of £63,000, at least half of it owed to the Inland Revenue. By the 1980s, McGoohan had recovered, The movie Kings and Desperate Men (1981) was praised by British critics and he starred on Broadway in Hugh Whitemore’s Pack of Lies.

The cosmopolitan variety of his professional interests owed something to his background. He was born in New York to parents who were once Irish farmers. His father, though barely literate, had an ear for Shakespeare, so that when Patrick read plays to him, he would remember and recite whole passages months later.

The family returned to Ireland when he was six months old and then, when he was eight, moved to Sheffield. Patrick later won a scholarship to Ratcliffe college in Leicester, where he played Lear in a school production. Leaving school at 16, he went to work in a wire mill, rising from the factory floor to the offices and then leaving to work in a bank.

This made him feel caged, so he set up instead as a chicken farmer, until an attack of bronchial asthma put him in bed for six months. He walked around Sheffield looking for work and eventually tried the Sheffield Repertory Company, for which he became assistant stage manager. When members of the cast were off sick, he was asked to step in, and found that he was best in the lighter Shakespeare plays, gaining praise for his Petruchio.

McGoohan stayed for four years, by which time he had appeared in 200 plays, including a touring production of The Cocktail Party in a small mining town, lit by miners’ lamps when the electricity failed. He met and married the actor Joan Drummond, with whom he had three daughters.

He made his first appearance in the West End in 1955 as the lead in Serious Charge. Orson Welles saw him there and asked him to play Starbuck in his production of Moby Dick Rehearsed. At the same time he stood in for Dirk Bogarde during a screen test, and was offered a five-year contract with Rank. But the studio’s “charm school” approach irked him and the contract petered out after four films.

After this, he turned more towards television and appeared in a production of Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife, about a paranoid Hollywood producer and the protege actor who he thinks has betrayed him. It was seen by Grade, who thought McGoohan ideal for John Drake in the Danger Man scripts. From 1960, McGoohan played in 86 episodes. At around this time, he turned down the chance to play James Bond in the first Bond movie, Dr No, seeing the Bond character as a stock gunman who treated women badly.

In 1968, when The Prisoner series was ending, McGoohan left Mill Hill, north London, to live in Switzerland after the local council refused him permission to fence his house off from prying eyes. In 1973 he moved to Pacific Palisades in California. There he wrote poetry, a novel and television scripts. He appeared in, wrote or directed some of the Columbo films in which his American friend Peter Falk appeared as the deceptively ruffled detective.

This redoubtable enemy of dumbing-down remained a highly individual operator into the 1990s. In 1991 he came to London to make the TV version of Whitemore’s play The Best of Friends, in which he played with considerable plausibility and élan another Irishman not frightened to swim against the tide, George Bernard Shaw. In 1995 he was cast as Edward I in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.

In 2000, he provided the voice of Number Six for an episode of The Simpsons, and gained his last film credit in 2002 as the voice of Billy Bones in Treasure Planet. A proposed film version of The Prisoner has yet to make it to the screen, but a remake of the TV show has recently been filmed by ITV, with the US actor James Caviezel as Number Six, and is due to be transmitted later this year.

McGoohan is survived by his wife, three daughters and five grandchildren.

Patrick Joseph McGoohan, actor, writer and director, born 19 March 1928; died 13 January 2009

* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

Last time your contributing editor saw Willie Nelson it was with Arthur columnist Dave Reeves and we were at the Hollywood Bowl. Given that it was an audience full of KCRW-dads out to let their hair down, it wasn’t more than 15 minutes before the overweight yuppies were trying to buy pot from us, just based on the length of your contributing editor’s hair. They even plied us with non-medicinal brownies, but to no avail. Same yuppies were less enamored with us as we shouted and whooped along with “Beer For My Horses” and the other classics that Willie and family ran through in a pretty mechanical way.

One of the things your ed forgets about Willie’s three thousand albums or so is that very few of them are comprised of rowdy honky-tonkers: Most of the guy’s catalog is made up of very mellow and often heartbreakingly sad acoustic affairs full of songs that never make his live setlist, nevermind country radio. That’s pretty much what we’ve got here with these two overlooked gems from 1970: Both Sides Now and Laying My Burdens Down. This is pre-Outlaw Willie, though there are shades of things to come with “I Gotta Get Drunk,” an early version of “Bloody Mary Morning” and the gospel-tinged sounds that would come to full bloom in 1976 on his totally amazing Troublemaker album. Also plenty of tasteful covers; his revision of “Both Sides Now” ranks alongside Sinatra’s as among the sweeter covers of the Joni Mitchell classic.

Both come courtesy of Crooner’s Corner, a no-frills audioblog overseen by a wonderfully curmudgeonly collector of music by “male singers and musical entertainers of fame and legend.” Go check ‘em out here.

The decline of the LA Weekly is a particularly depressing thing for your contributing editor, and I imagine for a good number of us Arthur contributors. Though your contrib editor’s arrival in Los Angeles in the late ’90s post-dates its true heyday as a bastion for long-form journalism, checks from LA Weekly put plenty of food in this freelancer’s refrigerator. The editor I worked with most — regular Arthur contributor and heroic Diamanda Galas profiler John Payne — still contributes, but is long gone as a staff editor, and many fine editors, writers and fact-checkers have fallen since.

Political columnist Marc Cooper left a couple months ago, and though he’s been kinda “meh” lately, dude used to report from Central American warzones and managed to weather several years under the noxious heel of New Times management. He finally spilled all the beans on his blog just the other day. Even if you’re not from Los Angeles it’s a worthwhile read when it comes to laying out how shitty newspapers have gotten in the last decade. As Cooper points out, the Weekly used to be mentioned in the same breath as Harper’s and The New Yorker. What’s this week’s cover story? Something about porno dudes and their dumb meth-erection feud with a headline that I can’t even bother to decipher. If genius food journalist (and the author of the 1989 NWA cover story up top there) Jonathan Gold would just start his own web-log we could be done with that fishwrapper forever (via LA Observed).

Choice quotes after the jump, or go read the whole infuriating kajillion word account over at Cooper’s blog.

When the L.A. Weekly and I parted ways two month ago, I promised a more detailed report. Here it is. It’s more like an autopsy on a paper that once was.

I thought many times about spending the time to write this over the past few weeks. In the end, I wondered, who cares? And worse, this can come off as sour grapes.

I can’t really answer the first doubt. As to the second question, let me be very clear. I lost most interest in the Weekly a couple of years ago when it was taken over by the New Times chain and I made it a very small part of my professional and personal life. I wrote the income from it out of my personal budget and diverted all Weekly checks into a retirement fund.

Indeed, I was so turned off by what I saw happening that I visited my Weekly office exactly three times in the last two years, mostly to pick up accumulated checks in my mailbox. During election week in November, I was given a layoff notice with a generous settlement.

They had lost interest in me and I was too expensive. With very few exceptions, I had long lost interest in them, too. It was a miracle, in fact, that I had lasted the two years since New Times took over the Weekly. Fair enough.

…

The paper has fired, pushed out or let go its top deputy editor who managed most of its cover stories over the last five years. It fired its managing editor — and with no intention to replace her ( this is a first in newspaper history I think). It fired its dazzling News Editor — and my friend Alan Mittelstaedt– and has shrunk and twisted its news gathering operation which took more than a decade to build into a competitive and credible local watchdog. The paper’s two prize-winning investigative reporters quickly bailed to other papers. Other long-time staff writers have been fired. Others have chosen exile. The Weekly’s fact-checking department has been abolished. Its copy editing department has been decapitated. It design staff decimated. Its free-lance rates — once competitive with any other publication in town — have been chopped and the overall free-lance budget has been almost obliterated. Writers’ rates that once topped a dollar a word have been cut by half or more (for the few writers who can still squeeze out an assignment).

More to the point, the 30-year-old Weekly’s heart and soul has been scooped out by a corporate management that seems hell-bent on a suicidal tack. The Weekly once distinguished itself by being, alone with the Village Voice, the only major metro weekly in America willing to focus on national and international coverage beyond the local boho bar scene. It had a real and substantial editorial budget. The Weekly was read avidly for 30 years by an audience that relished not only its excellent cultural, film and music coverage, but primarily its bold and prominent political writing– including a rich menu of commentary and opinion. Its reporters were, not infrequently, sent across the country and sometimes around the world to write 10,000-word cover stories that could be found nowhere else. It now boggles the imagination when I remember –in a different era—reporting from South Africa, El Salvador, Cuba and from within various national presidential campaigns—for the L.A. Weekly. And these were not just second-rate self-absorbed wannabe writers who were on the road. I’m in great company when I note that those of us who wrote those stories also worked for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Vogue, and the Sunday magazines of the Los Angeles and New York Times. We wrote for the Weekly because we chose to write for the Weekly – certainly not because we had to.

…

The results of all this? Fairly catastrophic, I would say. And that’s with the full-on debacle yet to come. The L.A. Weekly press run is currently down about 30% or more from its peak of 210,000. That means they can’t even give away as many copies as in the past. The weekly number of printed pages has fallen to just above 100 when in the past it hovered at and beyond 200 (once even touching 352 pages). Even special editions, ones that carry years of tradition and loyalty, like the recent restaurant edition, are but shadows of the past. One of the most savvy of long-time New Times watchers once told me — years ago– “the guys who run these newspapers run them like they already know the shut-down date.” It seems they now might finally get their wish.

Keep reading over at Marc Cooper’s blog.

The Vigorous North, a “Field Guide to Inner-City Wilderness Areas,” has this great thing up right now about another wonderful side effect of the current economic slowdown. From The Foreclosed Backyards National [Skate] Park:

… thanks to the passage of the massive bailout package and the “troubled asset relief program,” the American public now owns a substantial portion of these over-mortgaged backyards.

America’s foreclosed backyards are a lot like a newly-created national park.

It’s a good survey of recent articles from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, focusing in particular on how drained swimming pools are such a wonderful resource for those with skateboards and a few cleaning supplies.

The skateboarders have even developed their own code of ethics, which is strikingly similar to the “leave no trace” principles that are promoted among backcountry hikers and climbers.

This is of course quite similar to the water shortages of the ’70s that drained so many Southern CA backyard pools, inadvertently helping birth the era of modern skateboarding. Yet another way to survive the coming economic depression in high style.

An Experiment in Provocation
Stealing Gaza
By BRIAN ENO

It’s a tragedy that the Israelis – a people who must understand better than almost anybody the horrors of oppression – are now acting as oppressors. As the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once remarked “Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it’s the Palestinians”. By creating a middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they’ve forgotten it. And by trying to paint an equivalence between the Palestinians – with their homemade rockets and stone-throwing teenagers – and themselves – with one of the most sophisticated military machines in the world – they sacrifice all credibility.

The Israelis are a gifted and resourceful people who fully deserve the right to live in peace, but who seem intent on squandering every chance to allow that to happen. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that this conflict serves the political and economic purposes of Israel so well that they have every interest in maintaining it. While there is fighting they can continue to build illegal settlements. While there is fighting they continue to receive huge quantities of military aid from the United States. And while there is fighting they can avoid looking candidly at themselves and the ruthlessness into which they are descending.

Gaza is now an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate them regularly…and, surprise, surprise – they turn hostile. Now why would you want to make that experiment?

Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now ‘under attack’ you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfit to govern itself, a terrorist state, a state with which you couldn’t possibly reach an accommodation.

And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing their homeland.

Three Stooges bootlegs for you to put on blast while pondering the loss Ron Asheton.

The first, My Girl Hates My Heroin, is a wonderfully rough and dirty document recorded in Detroit sometime in 1973. Get it here.

Next up are two crisp and sweaty live recordings of the Stooges’ reunion tour. The first, from 2007’s Glastonbury Festival, also features a 10 minute interview and some sorta annoying interstitial commentary from British TV host Jonathan Ross. The band sounds amazing though, and the audience is roaring its appreciation, going absolutely bonkers. “We are the fucking Stooges,” indeed.

Live at Glastonbury, 2007

And finally here they are going nuts at a Spanish rock festival thing in 2006.

Live at Spain’s Azkena Rock Festival, August 31, 2006

Aaaand if you’re interested in harshing whatever mellow you may have fostered with the Perro Tapes, we would like to direct your attention to the absolutely bananas day-glo ecstasy of Dan Deacon’s “Get Older,” from his upcoming Bromst album, due March 24, 2009 from Carpark.

Get Older – Dan Deacon

David Crosby’s first solo album, If Only I Could Remember My Name? (1971) is one of the most beautifully wasted documents from one of the most determinedly psychedelic representatives of ’60s and ’70s counterculture. For most of us, that means it’s totally awesome: Crosby is jamming on high in fluid country-folk mode with most of the Grateful Dead plus Joni Mitchell, the rest of his band (SNY) and Grace Slick. A bunch of people hated it though (Christgau suggested rechristening Crosby as Rocky Muzak, Roger Crosby or Vaughan Monroe) and it’s been in and out of print over the last 30 years.

The Wilco fetishists at LA-based roots music blog Aquarium Drunkard have posted the outtakes from those sessions — known as The Perro Tapes or P.E.R.R.O. ruffs — which are even more disorienting and hazy than the finished album, natch, which by our measure is a great thing, especially on a chilly Southern California morning such as this one. In addition to sketches of songs from If Only I Could Remember My Name?, there’s also snips from other solo CSNY projects plus a couple mellow and airy takes on “Loser,” a Dead standard from Garcia’s first solo record. Go get the tunes here. For more on the music, head over to … uh … “The Phil Zone” and you’ll find a cluster of Deadheads offering song-by-song annotations that are actually pretty fascinating.

At the Franklin Mills mall here, past the Gap Outlet and the China Buddha Express, is a $13 million video arcade that the Army hopes will become a model for recruitment in urban areas, where the armed services typically have a hard time attracting recruits.

The Army Experience Center is a fitting counterpart to the retail experience: 14,500 square feet of mostly shoot-’em-up video games and three full-scale simulators, including an AH-64 Apache Longbow helicopter, an armed Humvee and a Black Hawk copter with M4 carbine assault rifles. For those who want to take the experience deeper, the center has 22 recruiters. Or for more immediate full-contact mayhem, there are the outlet stores.

The facility, which opened in August, is the first of its kind. It replaces five smaller recruitment stations in the Philadelphia area, at about the same annual operating cost, not counting the initial expenses, said Maj. Larry Dillard, the program manager. Philadelphia has been a particularly difficult area for recruitment.

Screw that. We’re gonna go lazer taggin’ with the Black Keys guys instead.

Strange Times

VERSUS

You know how all the haters are always saying Arthur only has love for so-called New Weird American Freak Folk or whatever, despite the fact that Delia & Gavin, Spiritualized, Sunn O))) and MIA (and Sparks, Diamanda Galas and Wino while we’re on the topic – ed.)have graced our covers and we also write tons of stuff about everything from Flying Lotus to classic country to contemporary African blues nomads?

Well as a matter of weird fact your humble contributing editor was once the editor of a rap magazine, and so respected a critic of electronic music as to be quoted by the Wikipedia on the subject of minimal techno’s links to classical minimalism*. If you have even a passing fancy for minimal techno, ambient electronic music or classical minimalist composition (or if you’re curious about some of those German names that keep popping up in the liner notes of Animal Collective albums), we would like to direct your attention to two timely items of interest.

The first: Resident Advisor’s Top 30 tracks of 2008. Ignore the cheesy club flyers and interchangeable baldhead Anglo DJ headshots you’ll find a quite useful resource for contemporary electronic music, much of which is still quite hard to follow for the neophyte given that it still happens on vinyl 12-inches traded mostly between close-cropped/baldhead designers slash DJs living in either Berlin or Brooklyn. (Not unlike the aforementioned folk music, just with more tracksuits and less fringed-vests).

If you follow closely, you’ll find all sorts of hairy kosmiche shit and lysergic drum meltdowns. (Always check for anything Ricardo Villalobos is putting out, for example). Anyway, this techno blog from Greece or somewhere compiled all 30 of Resident Advisor’s year-end best techno tracks, which means this is probably the only electronic dance music download most of you will want to make for the foreseeable future.

And as for the minimalist stuff: Glowing Raw made this amazing compilation of links to their favorite minimalist recordings back in November. It’s got loads of heavy and wonderful dronings from Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Henry Flynt, et al. Do not sleep on Charlemagne Palestine’s Four Manifestations on Six Elements, btw. EPIC DRONE ECSTASY from jump.

* Your editor is also accused in this Wikipedia thingy of attributing the roots of minimal techno to classical minimalist composers at the cost of providing a musical history lesson tracing back to its Indian/African roots. It should be noted that said editor is well aware of such connections, but was not concerned about providing the full audio genealogical chart — including the requisite Detroit techno hagiography sidebar — given that the piece in question was a quite lite 500 word event preview written overnight for a cheesy Miami newspaper, and thus doesn’t really hold up well as source material for a wiki-academic encyclopedia entry. And that said editor was also using the assignment to finagle himself a promotional copy of Terry Riley’s remastered In C, which is awesome. Anyway. Meh. Point taken. The Periya Mêlam ritual music ensemble buries all comers, true.

The dude taught George Harrsion how to play slide guitar, wrote the song “Superstar”–made famous by the Carpenters (and later covered by Sonic Youth) — and created some of the warmest “Sunday mornin’ comin’ down”-music with his then-wife Bonnie Bramley and a chorus of pals that included Rita Coolidge, Gram Parsons and Duane and Greg Allman. Delaney died in Los Angeles on December 27. Here’s the New York Times obituary. And here’s a Delaney mixtape tribute from our pal Jody over at When You Awake.

The tunes aren’t half bad either, especially Horace Andy’s “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem” (?!). Light up some trees of your own to the irie sounds of Brazil’s number one reggae blog, You and Me on a Jamboree.

Just in time for the holidays*, it’s the International Institute for Species Exploration’s 2008 “Top Ten New Species” list. So how did the the Arizona State Universty-based Institute come up with this year’s list, including the understandably vexed-looking Mindoro stripe-faced fruit bat pictured above?

An international committee of experts, chaired by Dr. Janine Caira of the University of Connecticut selected the Top 10 New Species. These species were selected from the thousands of species described in calendar year 2007. Nominations were invited through the IISE Web site and generated by IISE staff and committee members themselves. The Caira Committee had complete freedom in making its choices and developing its own criteria from unique attributes of or surprising facts about the species to peculiar names.

Check the IISE’s site for full profiles of this year’s list. They’re also taking nominations for 2009, so let ‘em know if you’ve seen heretofore unseen fauna creeping in your yard or undiscovered fungi flowering in your garden. We’re only half kidding about this. Number 7 on this year’s list, a mushroom we now know as Xerocomus silwoodensis, was discovered popping up on the lawn outside a British biology classroom:

This new mushroom species was discovered on Silwood Campus, a campus of Imperial College, London, although it is also found elsewhere (two additional sites in England and one each in Spain and Italy). The discovery of a new species in one of the most intensely studied floras in the world and on the campus of a leading education center for biologists illustrates how poorly species are known.

*IISE actually announced the list back in May, but what the hey. Tis the season for top tens. (via Discover)

Check out the new December 2008 issue of Arthur (download here as a PDF) for “American Beauties,” an expanded photo essay from Eddie Dean and Leon Kagarsie’s Pure Country. Full details for tonight’s show after the jump.

From Process Media:

Mon Dec 15
7:30pm

Echo, Grand Ol Echo, Stories, Process Books & Arthur Magazine present
A Celebration of the book “PURE COUNTRY”

Featuring “The First Lady of Banjo” RONI STONEMAN of the Stoneman Family
With special honky tonk performances from
MIKE STINSON * DAVE GLEASON * DAVE SERBY
WEST OF TEXAS

and DJs “Lonesome Cowboy” Chad Brown and Cuz’n Roy

@ EChOPLEX
enter at 1154 Glendale Blvd
Echo Park, CA 90026
http://www.attheecho.com/
7:30pm / $10 / all ages

213 413 8200
Tickets available at ticketweb.com

Nabob Shineywater of Brightblack offers the above picture “taken in the truth of night, in our universe” as proof of where the wild things are.

And if you happen to live near to one of those giant splotches of light pollution, tonight is a rare chance for you to take in some planetary activity as Venus and Jupiter will be teaming up with Sister Moon to create what the poets at National Geographic are referring to as … um … a “a brief ‘unhappy face’ in the sky.”

If you live in one of the dark spots you’re probably way ahead of all of us on this and have already gathered plenty of wood for a giant bonfire feast or something. Regardless of where you are in North America, the trio should be easy to find just after sunset in the southwestern sky.

From The Globe and Mail, reporting on a story in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

Researchers find oldest-ever stash of marijuana
DEAN BEEBY
The Canadian Press
November 27, 2008 at 2:37 PM EST

Ottawa — Researchers say they have located the world’s oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.

The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly “cultivated for psychoactive purposes,” rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.

The extremely dry conditions and alkaline soil acted as preservatives, allowing a team of scientists to carefully analyze the stash, which still looked green though it had lost its distinctive odour.

“To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent,” says the newly published paper, whose lead author was American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo.

Remnants of cannabis have been found in ancient Egypt and other sites, and the substance has been referred to by authors such as the Greek historian Herodotus. But the tomb stash is the oldest so far that could be thoroughly tested for its properties.

The 18 researchers, most of them based in China, subjected the cannabis to a battery of tests, including carbon dating and genetic analysis. Scientists also tried to germinate 100 of the seeds found in the cache, without success.

The marijuana was found to have a relatively high content of THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, but the sample was too old to determine a precise percentage.

Researchers also could not determine whether the cannabis was smoked or ingested, as there were no pipes or other clues in the tomb of the shaman, who was about 45 years old.

The large cache was contained in a leather basket and in a wooden bowl, and was likely meant to be used by the shaman in the afterlife.

“This materially is unequivocally cannabis, and no material has previously had this degree of analysis possible,” Dr. Russo said in an interview from Missoula, Mont.

“It was common practice in burials to provide materials needed for the afterlife. No hemp or seeds were provided for fabric or food. Rather, cannabis as medicine or for visionary purposes was supplied.”

The tomb also contained bridles, archery equipment and a harp, confirming the man’s high social standing.

Russo is a full-time consultant with GW Pharmaceuticals, which makes Sativex, a cannabis-based medicine approved in Canada for pain linked to multiple sclerosis and cancer.

The company operates a cannabis-testing laboratory at a secret location in southern England to monitor crop quality for producing Sativex, and allowed Dr. Russo use of the facility for tests on 11 grams of the tomb cannabis.

Researchers needed about 10 months to cut red tape barring the transfer of the cannabis to England from China, Russo said.

The inter-disciplinary study was published this week by the British-based botany journal, which uses independent reviewers to ensure the accuracy and objectivity of all submitted papers.

The substance has been found in two of the 500 Gushi tombs excavated so far in northwestern China, indicating that cannabis was either restricted for use by a few individuals or was administered as a medicine to others through shamans, Russo said.

“It certainly does indicate that cannabis has been used by man for a variety of purposes for thousands of years.”

Dr. Russo, who had a neurology practice for 20 years, has previously published studies examining the history of cannabis.

“I hope we can avoid some of the political liabilities of the issue,” he said, referring to his latest paper.

The region of China where the tomb is located, Xinjiang, is considered an original source of many cannabis strains worldwide.

Hey remember that f.e.y venue “apocalyptic opposite-igloo” show in Portland, OR that we wrote about here back in October? The one with Diane Cluck and Anders Griffen? Larissa and Tiger — the founders of the traveling f.e.y venue — sent us that panoramic picture up top (click it for the widescreen version) to give us an idea of what went down. Judging from the full collection of snaps they’ve got up on their Flickr page, it looks like a high time was had by all.

And oh yeah: They’re gonna do another one! Larissa writes:

should be in march
looks like it’ll be a music/video/sculpture collaboration
inspired by haeckel’s biological drawings

Which sounds awesome. In the meantime, check out this massive online archive of plates from Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur.

The Goldbear Academy here in Los Angeles hosted a wild party last Saturday where the Entrance Band played and everybody came dressed up as their spirit animal. It should come as little surprise that Arthur’s esteemed fashion editor Alia Penner was representing with some fresh art works, including the totem piece that you see above. More of Alia’s images from the show, plus a collaboration with Miss McKenzie Kay, after the jump.

Will, the proprietor of the biblio-blog A Journey Round My Skull, describes his online venture as “unhealthy book fetishism from a reader, collector, and amateur historian of forgotten literature.” Which is pretty accurate though we’re gonna politely disagree on the unhealthy part. Last we checked, preserving and disseminating gorgeous “avant garde for the poor,” arcane children’s literature and bizarre Japanese woodblock prints (like the awesome Utagawa Kuniyoshi piece up above) didn’t lead to the diabetes or rickets or anything like that. And it actually makes us feel pretty hale and hearty. Check out more of Will’s picks after the jump, with links to his original blog posts.

from Paul Rand, Anti-War, Pro-Typographer

from Just Married – Metamorphosis

from Nothing Child

Essential reading from Diggers founder and international bohemian icon Emmett Grogan, now back in print courtesy of New York Review of Books Classics:

Ringolevio is a classic American story of self-invention by one of the more mysterious and alluring figures to emerge in the 1960s. Emmett Grogan grew up on New York City’s mean streets, getting hooked on heroin before he was in his teens, kicking the habit and winning a scholarship to a swanky Manhattan private school, pursuing a highly profitable sideline as a Park Avenue burglar, then skipping town to enjoy the dolce vita in Italy. It’s a hard-boiled, sometimes hard-to-believe, wildly entertaining tale that takes a totally unexpected turn when Grogan washes up in sixties San Francisco and becomes a leader of the anarchist group known as the Diggers. The Diggers, devoted to street theater, direct action, and distributing free food, were in the thick of the legendary Summer of Love, and soon Grogan is struggling with the naive narcissism of the hippies, the marketing of revolution as a brand, dogmatic radicals, and false prophets like tripster Timothy Leary. Above all, however, he struggles with himself.

Ringolevio is an enigmatic portrait of a man and his times to set beside Hunter S. Thompson’s stories of fear and loathing, Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, or the recent Chronicles of Bob Dylan, who dedicated his 1978 album Street Legal to the memory of Emmett Grogan.

Read Peter Coyote’s introduction to the 1990 edition here.

Montague Phantom Brain Exchange #11
Wednesday, November 26th, 9pm Five Bucks!
at the Rendezvous
78 3rd St
Turners Falls, MA 01376

Flaherty,Voigt, & Karetnick Trio
Blue Shift
lecture on Tongue Theory by Byron Coley
comedy by Shawn Smith
Alt