A press release from The Unit Breed’s Joseph Demaree that we thought merited posting:

I paint things – www.josephdemaree.com
I make music – www.theunitbreed.com
I myspace – www.myspace.com/theunitbreed
I like to share – /www.idiomism.com

Top 3 dreams this month
1. Swimming with my dad while he explains how he will be island-hopping by holding onto a rope tied to a cruse ship. While he starts his journey I float off in my sleeping bag across the water to a suburban island. A friend of mine joins me and breaks into a house where two little kids live. Their father comes out and thinks I’m there to purchase porn. The real porn buyer shows up behind me and I back away and join the blacks down by the docks where we dance and drink while a live band plays the blues.

2. While walking along the sidewalk of a large city, possibly New York, I am with three beautiful women. A carnival is passing by. The carnival consists mostly of rocker kids in punk get-ups on top of burned-out cars playing trashy music and showing off their peacock feathers. One of the cars makes a harsh turn and the band on the roof falls to the street but continue to play.

3. There is a head that is inside of another head and we all walk outside of a pair of eyes that is the backdrop to a theater’s stage. The audience are in penguin suits. Everything empties out and I am standing alone in what once was an active beautiful theater but now looks as if it has burned down in the 1920s.

Top 3 brain foods
1. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! – 2008
2. Terry Gilliam – Brazil – 1985
3. Carlos Castaneda – The Art of Dreaming – 1993

Top 3 life-changing experiences
1. Smoking DMT
2. The death of my father
3. Losing the hearing in my right ear

Top 3 recent visions
1. There is a man who is following me. He is not part of this world. I’ve most recently seen him in my basement, at a close friend’s house in Portland, and the most pronounced appearance was at 4 am at the Gingerbread House in San Jose CA the day after Halloween where he walked up to me and vanished.

2. There is a doorway inside of my basement. I’ve only seen it once. It opened in the center of my room and someone’s shadow closed it.

3. The week following my DMT experience a white-haired goat creature began peeking into my window. He has not been seen since I spoke about him.

Top 3 stupid tricks imagination drugs lights shadows and mirrors can play on you
1. Dimensional non-understanding
2. The beginning and end of all things
3. Perfection’s simple wonder

Image courtesy http://meat-wallet.blogspot.com/

What Steve Berra is talking about applies to other essential cultural sites/practices as well. Bookshops. Record shops. Coffeehouses. Magazine publishers. Book publishers. Record labels. And so on…

Excerpts:

“I receive emails almost every single day telling me about another skate shop or skatepark that’s going, or has gone, out of business. I get asked if there’s anything I can do to keep them from closing their doors or if maybe I can build a Berrics to take its place. With the U.S. unemployment the worst it’s been in 26 years, I get job inquiries from all over the country.

“And I want to give them a job. I want to build skateparks for you; I want to help skateshops open. I want skateboarding to survive the way baseball, and football, and basketball do here in America—but without it having to turn into them. Without it losing its autonomy to a board of directors inside big corporations who think the letter X was a label any of us liked because they didn’t understand the principles it was founded upon: principles that drew me to it, and have been carried forth through the years by skateshops and skateparks that existed long before television and mass retailers saw an upside to it.

“There’s a war being waged on small businesses. They’re being taxed on both the state and federal levels. They’re over-regulated, outspent and out-advertised by mall stores with deep pockets and empty history. And in the current economic climate, they don’t stand a chance without your support. Without the foundation of these kinds of skate shops, or skateparks, the skateboarding culture slowly dies in your area, and with it, so does skateboarding…

“A system can always estimate how close it is to being revolted against by counting how many smart and willing people it is excluding from participation. And [right now] there are quite a few smart and willing people being excluded from participation. So the Berrics Unified can be considered a revolt, of sorts…”

MORE INFO
Berrics Unified: http://www.berricsunified.com/
Steve Berra: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Berra

hipped to this by Jesse Locks

I thought of this guy I knew whose gratitude practice was centered on appreciating every object from the day it comes into his possession until the dystopic collapse of society. Vacations (soon nobody’s going to be going anywhere, man), new cars (what the hell, we’ll all be walking before long), guitars (how else are we going to have music without electricity)—the guy was Zen master. And now I walked in the golden autumnal light thinking he was more right than not…

Download:
ZAZEN, Chapter 16 — “Breath of Soldiers”

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Walmart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

“Zazen” Keywords: geology, veganism, the apocalypse, urban planning, yoga, sex parties, bombs, anarchism, aging new-left revolutionaries, strip malls, paleontology, dark hippies, transcendentalism, lavender hair dye.

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 17 of ZAZEN will be posted Monday, November 23. There are 30 chapters in all.

Previous chapters available for download after the jump…
Read the rest of this entry »

We went to a bar with a TV and stared for an hour. Devadatta met us there. Bomb squads and cameras were trained on the New Land Trust Building like it was a birthday cake with a stripper inside. Then they cut back to Brass Ring with its missing face.

I couldn’t stop. I saw the buildings burn in live time. People were crying. They were scared. High school girls huddled together waiting for their parents to come get them. A little Vietnamese boy wailed in his mother’s arms. Oh god, I thought, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god…and I ran my shaking hands through my hair. With short sharp fingernails I scratched at my chest until it was red with crosshatches…

Download:
ZAZEN, Chapter 15 — “Head of John the Baptist” (pdf, 75k)

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Walmart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

“Zazen” Keywords: geology, veganism, the apocalypse, urban planning, yoga, sex parties, bombs, anarchism, aging new-left revolutionaries, strip malls, paleontology, dark hippies, transcendentalism, lavender hair dye.

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 16 of ZAZEN will be posted Thursday, November 19. There are 30 chapters in all.

Previous chapters available for download:
Read the rest of this entry »

On the way home I found myself wondering how many chances we get.

I’m learning how to call in bomb threats and bury rats in the back of a restaurant without tipping off the health department. Do I have to come back?

Download:
ZAZEN, Chapter 14 — “Two Rivers” (pdf, 84k)

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Walmart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

“Zazen” Keywords: geology, veganism, the apocalypse, urban planning, yoga, sex parties, bombs, anarchism, aging new-left revolutionaries, strip malls, paleontology, dark hippies, transcendentalism, lavender hair dye.

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 15 of ZAZEN will be posted Wednesday, November 18. There are 30 chapters in all.

Downloads of previous chapters available after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Above: Folk musicians touring the European countryside by bicycle. Photograph Roger-Viollet /Rex Features

The following was originally published in the LAWeekly on June 2, 2005…

Man-Machines of Loving Grace
by Jay Babcock

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

—from “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” by Richard Brautigan

Next Tuesday, German electronic-music pioneers Kraftwerk will perform in Los Angeles for the first time since their now-legendary show at the Hollywood Palladium in 1996. That concert drew an appreciative, astoundingly diverse cross-genre audience: indie-rock nerds and art-school casualties, computer-programming geeks and hip-hop heads, synth freaks and industrial goths, every laptop musician west of the Colorado and — oh yes! — breakdancers. Machines, it seems, had succeeded in uniting humans.

It’s impossible to overstate Kraftwerk’s influence on pop music and culture over the last 30 years, from new wave to hip-hop, electronica to (yawn) Coldplay (who use the riff from “Computer Love” on their new song, “Talk”). We all know Kraftwerk songs — odes to transportation like “Autobahn” and “Trans-Europe Express,” future/now manifestoes like “Man/Machine” and “The Robots” — but it’s in the live context, where the songs are joined to specially designed graphics, that Kraftwerk achieves a purity of all-encompassing vision that secular music rarely touches. It’s all about rapture, and an interaction with — or longing for — a relationship with something other than human.

On the telephone, Ralf Hutter — co-founder of Kraftwerk with Florian Schneider, and now approaching 60 years of age — is helpful and deliberate, like a professor pleased to have a visitor who’s interested in his research on an obscure subject.

Q: There’s a bumper sticker that says “Drum machines have no soul.” Do you think that is true?

Read the rest of this entry »

I had never met anyone in any political organization that I liked. “Eat with your hands like the African people,” that’s what this one girl I knew used to say. Someone told me she called a fork fascist. They were all like that—macrobiotic Belgian trust-fund junkies, park bench anarchists, mean white lesbians in canvas clothing and dreadlocks—each ready to denounce you as a cop at the slightest sign of dissent. But beyond that, I had dirty little secret. I only liked militants at a distance. Up close I couldn’t stand them. Their targets were always the same, a cow path from the cell to the Great Reactionary Dawn. I wanted something more creative than dead clerks…

Download:
ZAZEN, Chapter 13 — “Manifestation” (pdf)

ZAZEN, Chapter 12 — “Colony of the Elect” (pdf, 58k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 11 — “Church of Enlightened Capital” (pdf, 65k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 10 — “Venus Rodere” (pdf, 64k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 9 — “The Rat Queen” (pdf, 87k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 8 — “Lagerstätte” (pdf, 61k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 7 — “Cherry Blossoms” (pdf, 75k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 6 — “Aerial Map of Carnage” (pdf, 76k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 5 — “1 800 buy COAL” (pdf, 88k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 4 — “Asian Market” (pdf, 56k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 3 — “New Haiku” (pdf, 64k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 2 — “Pregnant Rats” (pdf, 81k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 1 — “Burning Ants” (pdf, 79k)

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Walmart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

“Zazen” Keywords: geology, veganism, the apocalypse, urban planning, yoga, sex parties, bombs, anarchism, aging new-left revolutionaries, strip malls, paleontology, dark hippies, transcendentalism, lavender hair dye.

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 14 of ZAZEN will be posted Tuesday, November 17. There are 30 chapters in all.

From the Nov. 9, 2009 Chicago Sun-Times:

Artist behind Parliament Funkadelic art struggles to get by
Chicago’s Pedro Bell was the artist behind some of music’s most iconic album covers. Now his life is anything but a pretty picture.

November 9, 2009

BY KARA SPAK Staff Reporter/kspak@suntimes.com

Thick dust covers the gold lame shirt and silver leather coat in Pedro Bell’s closet.

The clothes are remnants from a brighter time when Bell, a rainbow Afro wig on his head and platform shoes on his feet, strutted through Chicago as a charter member of the ’70s funk revolution whose sound is heavily sampled in rap songs today.

“It was psychedelic from a black perspective,” Bell said.

Bell, 59, designed the cover art for more than two dozen George Clinton and the Parliament Funkadelic albums. Under the name Sir Lleb (Bell backward), he wrote the albums’ liner notes, peppering them with cartoonish drawings, clever puns and names like “Thumpasaurus” and “Funkapus” that remain synonymous with Clinton’s music.

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Above: The Juan MacLean, featuring Jerry Fuchs on drums, at Arthurfest in Los Angeles, September 2005. Directed by Lance Bangs.

Statement from Juan Maclean: http://www.thejuanmaclean.com/blog/juan-maclean-drummer-jerry-fuchs-has-tragically-died

New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/nyregion/09elevator.html

Jerry Fuchs memorial website: http://www.jerryfuchs.net/

Announcement from The Juan MacLean’s publicist:

Juan MacLean will DJ a benefit show in memory and in tribute to friend, band mate and legendary drummer Jerry Fuchs, who passed away in an unfortunate accident in the early hours of November 8. The show will take place November 20 at San Francisco’s Mezzanine (444 Jessie Street). The show will also feature a DJ set with Parallels. A donation will be made to the Fuchs Family.

Jerry was a celebrated drummer, having recorded and toured with The Juan MacLean, Holy Ghost!, Maserati, !!! and Turing Machine. Born December 30, 1974 in Marietta, Georgia, he attended the University of Georgia and moved to New York in 1995, quickly becoming a beloved fixture on the city’s music scene. When not touring, Jerry worked as a graphic designer for publications like Chunklet and Entertainment Weekly. Juan MacLean describes Jerry as “the absolute best at what he did” and a “supportive and loyal friend.”

The Juan MacLean has released a video [posted below] of the extended version of “Happy House,” featuring some of Jerry’s best work. Shot at the Double Door in Chicago on June 16 of this year, the song is a crowd and critic favorite, having been named one of Pitchfork’s 100 Best Tracks of 2008. At nearly 20 minutes long, the performance is a testament to Jerry’s talent and dedication to his craft.