Hardtimes, my great laborer,
Hardtimes, have a seat,
Relax,
Relax for a bit, you and me
Relax.
You can find me, you can feel me out, you can try me,
I am your ruin

My great theater, my haven, my hearth,
My golden cellar,
My future, my real mother, my horizon.
In your light, in your expanse, in your horror,
I let myself go.
-Henri Michaux
(translation by Pepe LePew)

You are the entity.

This world is full of folks (like me) who are too scared to be dumb or gross or fun, no matter how smart they are. On the other hand, blessings on the head of Blaster Al Ackerman, a writer, painter and correspondence artist who has produced a massive body of work, much of it untrackable due to his pervasive use of pseudonyms (and, for that matter, anonyms) one of which you, Arthur reader, will find in your own home in the form of the song “Hamburger Lady,” the best song by the rock band Throbbing Gristle. I’ll save the long story of Mail Art that brought about this happenstance for another day, though.

What’s important to know for now is that Ackerman has been producing a lot of text and image huzz for the private consumption of a handful of huzz-hufferers, and its taken form of a handful of side-splitting books (The Blaster Omnibus, Let Me Eat Massive Pieces of Clay, I Taught my Dog to Shoot a Gun and, most recently, Corn and Smoke among them), earning him a place in some circles as the contemporary equivalent of Poe. If you have not previously encountered his writing or drawings, we highly recommend that in advance of the short interview that follows you familiarize yourself with his work, at the least, with his recent text at the Lamination Colony site, “Eel Leonard’s Class Prophecy” and/or the free downloads of his spoken-word LP masterpiece I Am Drunk.

Also, in advance of the exchange that follows, it is worth knowing that as a young person in Texas the 50s, Ackerman became absorbed by the world of pulp fiction and attempted to become a writer, although during the pulps’ waning years he only got published in romance magazines. He did, however, strike up a correspondence with science fiction writer Frederic Brown. In the 60s, he worked as a children’s TV show writer and in a carnival before going to Vietnam as a Medivac and then working in burn wards in U.S. hospitals. In the early 70s, he got heavily involved with Mail Art, ultimately centering around David Zack and Istvan Kantor with whom he co-generated the Neoist banner of 80s pranks, plagiarism, art and multiple identity. Through the 80s and 90s, he published frequently in magazines like The Lost and Found Times (edited by frequent collaborator John M. Bennett) and the Shattered Wig Review (edited by Rupert Wondolowski)

Q: I know you were a fan of the rhythm and blues singers of the 50s as a young person in Texas. Could you tell us a little about those concerts and how they might have shaped you?
Ackerman: The first R&B concert I ever attended was probably the greatest. It took place at the Municipal Auditorium in downtown San Antonio, Texas. This was in the very early 50s and admission was only $4 or $5! A true bargain, especially when you consider who all was on the bill. An unbelievable line-up consisting of Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Frankie Lyman, Little Richard and “Mr. Please Please Please Himself” James Brown. Big Joe Turner (the Boss of the Blues) was the headliner, which seem strange today, especially considering the talent on hand but back in the early 50s Joe Turner was the most prominent name.
San Antonio was a heavy pachuco town so audience participation ran high with many seat cushions slashed; there was also wholesale bopping and vicious horseplay on the railing of the balcony upstairs and frequent injuries from falls.
Through it all, I might add, speculation ran rife over the burning question: “Is Frankie Lymon a hermaphrodite?!” (In rock circles in the early 50s this was one of two questions which engaged the brains of all true R&B fans; the other being “Is Brenda Lee a midget?”)
Anyway, I would have to say that in my experience the only other R&B shows that ever came close happened a few years later at the “Dars” Miller in Austin, Texas, when Bo Diddley and Bobby Blue Bland appeared, the crowd became so worked up that they locked the security guards in a closet, took their guns away and fired them off into the air while Bo stayed on stage and got down with “I’m a Man.” Too much.

Q: What’s the best job in the carnival, job-gratification-wise?
Ackerman: Running the Duck Pond Ride and sleeping down by the river in your duck mask, if you go in for that sort of thing.

Q: Once a person finds his way into an artform, he or she begins, over time, to recognize the mistakes or foolishness of those who preceeded him or her in that form. I wonder, once you’d gotten into mail art, in which ways did you think that Ray Johnson had slipped, a little or a lot?
Ackerman: This is a hard one, especially when you realize how I idolized Ray. And so while it’s true that Ray fell victim on occassion to a certain loquaciousness, especially in the later years, I prefer to remember when he was right on target such as the time when Art Forum was asking for an important statement and Ray came out with, “Every time I walk down the street, the little birdies go tweet-tweet-tweet.”
Really, though, in Mail Art, the real “slappage” comes when you’re on tour and you stop by somebody’s keen little house in Tulsa or Louisville and you’ve been slugging the vodka in the backseat for 3 or 400 miles so that you find upon getting into their guest room that you’re overflowing the bowl and ruining an expensive carpet and priceless antiques. What then?

Q: In Frederick Brown’s story “Come and Go Mad,” there’s long repetition of the colors, “the red and the black,” and it’s left open to interpretation, to say the least. Any thoughts on that passage?
Ackerman: I would guess that Fred was figuring that the name Stehndhal would pop into your mind, comme pour troutes les simmiennes?

Q: What’s your favorite L. Ron Hubbard story about?
Ackerman: Just about anything–uh, just about anything L. Ron wrote before WWII is worth your attention. My own big favorite is “Fear,” a classic from a classic 1940 issue of Street & Smith’s Unknown magazine. “Fear” is available in paperback today so I would greatly urge every literate person to check it out and if you happen to be illiterate, why get a friend to read it to you. You’ll be glad you did.

Q: (Bonus Question) Fill in the blanks: Answering these questions gives me a feeling of both ____ and _____.
Ackerman: To paraphrase John Berndt when he was shimmying across the plains of India, “Answering these questions gives me a feeling of both Spanish Fly and Salt Peter.”

Iraqi Jawza player Salih Shemayyil at the First Cairo Congress of Arab Music (1932)

But just in the past few week and seemingly out of the clear, blue sky comes the staggering Iraqi Maqam blog and its accompanying YouTube channel which focus exclusively on the uniquely Iraqi take on maqam, the umbrella of elevated Arab classical musics. Drawing mainly from exceedingly scarce recordings of the 1920s-30s, already Iraqi Maqam has provided a dizzying wealth of musicological, biographical and anecdotal information in both Arabic and English to hours and hours worth of virtuosic and deeply moving recordings (including truly precious translations of the poems sung), profusely illustrated with period photographs. That such a monumental, thoroughly-researched and thoughtfully-presented body of work even exists, not to mention that it is appearantly a free gift to mankind, is fortifying and exciting stuff in a hard, old world.

It’s well worth mentioning in this context that Pell is also the CEO of Specific Records, a vinyl-only label which has thus far produced exactly three utterly gorgeous object-documents of brainy musical underbelly-popcraft in editions of between 99 and 500 copies only that come highly recommended.

In Brooklyn on Saturday night, there’s the Launch Party for WFMU’s FreeMusicArchive.org , a site that will soon be eating many of your evenings in solitude by providing you with tons of free and totally legal downloads by great musicians who you really want to listen to. Before that happens, you can get out and among other people one last time and hear live music by Sightings, Pink Skull, John Dwyer’s new band, Excepter and DJ Brian Turner. Here are deets.

We will expect to see smiling, drunken photos of you at one of these events on Flickr Monday morning.

These are from Harry, which to quote Joe Vaccarino’s Baltimore Sounds: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Baltimore Area Pop Musicians, Bands & Recordings 1950-1980, “was founded in 1969 by Michael Carliner… After a rocky start, when the original staff revolted and walked out on the eve of the first issue’s press run, Harry became the choice alternative free [sic] paper of the Baltimore political and musical communities. Early contributors included Art Levine, P.J. O’Rourke, Tom D’Antoni, Alan Rose and Jack Heyrman. Harry survived many raids, takeovers and other traumatic events to provide alternative and community news at the height of the Vietnam, hippie, yippie era.”

John Waters in a leopard-print dress, ca. Pink Flamingos premier.

detail from a stoned full-page collage of in-jokes, including a young Edith Massey and a goof on the idea that Jim Morrison is not dead but in hiding as an ice-skater in Maryland...

Howdy Duty were lead by Fahey/Denson/Basho associate Max Ochs who has recently been noticed by some younger heads...

Yemeni oudist and singer Ahmed Fathi is playing the Millennium Stage of the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. for FREE at 6PM this Friday Mach 13 as part of the Center’s Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World series, running for another week.

If this improvisation in someone’s living room is anything to go by, the concert should be a hot one.

All of this, in fact, is prologue to this short and beautiful clip from an Egyptian film of the 40s – I don’t know its name – depicting the magic of listening to records, the projection of wishes into the sound, the drawing of the listener’s inner life into communion with the sound through memories – the ever-changing memories of the listener and the fixed memory on the disc. In the 40s, it was depicted through the film medium which undermined the record. And now you’ll see it on your computer screen as it similarly undermines film. Even so, the human need for that moment of communion is completely transparent. Some say that half of the world’s languages will go extinct in the next hundred years and with them, countless concepts and modes of thought. No one has tried to quantify the impending changes in music, but in a hundred years, someone will dream into sound. What dreams?

Twenty-two stunning recordings made in Constantinople and Cairo ca. 1906-07 are available for download here:
Archeophone.org Collection of Turkish and Arabic Zonophone Discs
And twenty-one cylinder recordings made ca. 1900 (!) of Turkish and Arabic music are available here:
University of California, Santa Barbara Collection of Middle-Eastern Cyliders

To top it all off, there is plenty of the great master Cemil Bey to be had on the internet, but this flabbergasting fiddle performance from the 10s on YouTube is absolutely not to be missed. (I have no explaination for the groaning, atonal, gestural passages which bear stunning resemblance to “radical” developments in mid- and late-20th century jazz and Western classical music, although I’d be grateful for any information on this piece that anyone can offer.)
Tanburi Cemil Bey – Janik Nini

The result was published in 2007 by the student-run Apprentice Press (also in Baltimore) as Prayer for the Moring Headlines: On the Sanctity of Life and Death. It’s an extraordinary collection melding the most deeply personal, immediate, overwhelming and little-talked-about feelings of grief with a broad view of which acknowledges the value of all of that seemingly chaotic intensity in justifying and reordering the world – in art, politics, social change and the day-to-day interpersonal action. Howard Zinn describes the subject of it in his introduction to the book as, “life and death, the prayer that comes with commitment, the hope that comes with resistance, the visions of a world where peace and justice prevail.” Inspirational and core stuff to find in a graveyard.

Berrigan’s “You Finish It: I Can’t”

The world is somewhere visibly round,
perfectly lighted, firm, free in space,

but why we die like kings or
sick animals, why tears stand
in living faces, why one forgets

the color of the eyes of the dead–

Fifty Thousand Atomic Rials (= about $4.60)

In his writings you’ll “meet” strongmen, magicians, the Iranian Frank Zappa, globo-talking blowhard Swiss academics and leftist philosophers as well as tender, juicy and very chewable lessons on the ins and outs of global economics, the problem of fat babies and the inside dirt on whether or not Freddy Mercury can truly be thought of as part of the Axis of Baddies.

Click on the five spot for the site (hosted by hot Chicago rockers No Doctors).

Happy Valentine’s Day.
Enjoooooy.

Drughes RAWK by Anne Everton

His most recent posts have artfully combined lustfully sought-after images with utterly maniacal texts, so that the image here is given with with a longer section of this text called “The Process of Slow Digestion” by Mileton Barba.

“Dr. Spasmodeus Smugglington shrank back, his skin shriveled and every hair on his body bristled, his nerves contracted, his guts drew taut, when he saw the little red eyes, brilliant as rubies, and the shiny, bifurcated tongue, its movements accelerated by excitement, darting, zig-zagging wildly in a bold, vertiginous arc”

Dig through the archives and be jealous, amazed, confused and sickened in turns or simultaneously by Schofield’s research. But watch for whatever he does next.

Until it’s more widely released, there is this trailer: 

And last month, Baltimore’s Ehse Records released the entirety of the soundtrack as an LP in an edition of 300 copies.

It’s a beautiful thing, made from a private, internal symbolic system and some amazing tweaking of the idea of the Western film and, by extension, America itself.

(Disclosure: although this writer made small contributions to the film and soundtrack, my hand is neither in the till nor on the tiller.)