ARTHUR MAGAZINE ARCHIVE

For the final episode of Arthur Radio we bring you a live set by Baltimore’s Lower Dens, filmed and recorded in glorious hi-fi at Swan 7 Studios in Bushwick, Brooklyn, co-presented by Newtown Radio | Swan 7 Studio Sessions, and cushioned by an excerpt from a 5 hour DJ set recorded one joyous night in the depths of winter by Hairy Painter, Ivy Meadows and friends, re-broadcasted and cycled through a tunnel of radio feedback last week in the Newtown Radio studio.

We would like to say THANK YOU to the many guests who have graced the show with their talents (in backwards chronological order): Lower Dens, Salvia Plath, Gustav Ernst, Bryce Hackford, Laurel Halo, Saadi, Evie Elman, Mountainhood, kA, Mia Theodoratus, Spectre Group, A R P, Alice Cohen, Sonny Smith, Messages, Ami Dang, Ramble Tamble, James Ferraro, Up Died Sound, Prince Rama, Thomas (Ted) Rees, Nonhorse, The Beets, DJ Ron Like Hell, Gabe Soria, Bow Ribbons, Love Like Deloreans, Blondes, Overture Brown, Bobby Bouzouki, Excepter, The Holy Experiment, Visitation Rites, Chocolate Bobka and Tyler McWilliams. All episodes can be found in the Arthur Radio archive.

Ivy Meadows will continue to record radio shows with Arthur’s universal mutant Will S. Cameron, to be released in a similar format over at Perfect Wave Magazine.

+~+++~ One Love !+~+++

STREAMING:

DOWNLOAD: Arthur Radio Transmission #40 w/ LOWER DENS

Timeline below…

Hairy Painter + Ivy Meadows DJ @ 00:00

Lower Dens live set @ 54:44

interlude: glory girls (of lower dens) – tour cd-r, track 4

Hairy + Ivy continue @ 1:11:25

I WONDER WHAT HE’S DOING NOW?

Floating World — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 01:09:45 +0000

It wouldn’t have happened without THE CATERER.

Arthur ran a two page sample of Steve Aylett’s bizarro masterpiece in one of their back issues and I thought it was hilarious. Years later after opening my own comic shop I contacted Steve to see about reprinting THE CATERER in vintage comic form. I also emailed Jay and mentioned the project to him. A lightbulb must’ve gone on in Jay’s head. He put together that I was the publisher of Diamond Comics, a free comics newspaper anthology and he emailed me a few weeks later asking if I’d like to be comics editor for Arthur Magazine.

In the years since we’ve published work by dozens of incredible artists, interviewed folks, shared trippy animation and hopefully given a sense of what’s good and interesting in the international art comics scene. Will started collaborating with me later and introduced the full screen Greenermags format which I really dig.

We’re going to transfer all the Arthur Comics to my store’s website and I plan on curating more “Arthur Comics” there in the future.

I wasn’t able to get the link set up by the March 15th deadline, but you will be able to find us soon at – http://floatingworldcomics.com/comics

I’m also excited to announce that I’ll be publishing a chap book with Arthur contributor, Anthony Alvarado, of his DIY MAGIC articles in May or June.

Thanks again, Jay, for helping us find the others.

Thanks for all the poetry.

Travis Catsull — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:40:44 +0000

I want to thank all the wonderful poets who allowed us to post their poetry on Arthur while I was the Poetics Editor. I had a wonderful time reading the work and comments and helping bring a poetic flavor to the content posted here. Many people asked me how I was chosen for this position and I tell them it was my resume. When asked to provide more color I refer them to my resume which I’ve posted here.

Thanks to everyone for a great ride into the world of Arthur poetry.

Travis Catsull

My Resume

Objective

To use my skills for an aware and growing company and inspire my co-workers with strong work ethic and friendly attitude.

Experience

Lawn Service: Just like every kid I went around to different houses asking if I could mow their lawn for a few bucks.

Auction Ring: I’d deliver food and drinks to cowboys for tips while they worked cattle in the hot pens all day. Once I was on the catwalk and tossed a can of soda to one of the men, but I didn’t throw it far enough and it bounced off a steel bar and hit the man in the face. Blood gushed from his eye and it started swelling. He insisted it was okay, but didn’t tip me.

Door to Door Salesman: Sold greeting cards and cans of cookies from a catalogue in my neighborhood, but forgot to write down who’d ordered what and my grandmother had to go to every house with me and explain what happened.

Lone Star BBQ: While my boss was teaching me the correct way to cut brisket he told me he shot his father to death.

David’s Grocery: My friend, Jordan, used to get blow-jobs from the check-out girls behind pallets of soda while I restocked shelves.

Lakeside Advertising: Sold ad space to various businesses, but forgot to turn in the checks one day, lost them and never went back to work.

Construction: Wired houses with this old man until he started hitting on my mom.

Champions Putt-putt and Batting Cages: Was fired because I was the only one on duty and was in the batting cages when a bunch of my friends broke into the office and stole $80 in video tokens. My boss showed up, drunk, as this was happening and fired me on the spot.

Firewood Supplier: Cut down trees with a chainsaw, split wood and went with the boss to different BBQ joints in Houston to sell the wood, unload it and stack it in the back.

Movie theatre: After 4 months they changed management and I didn’t like the new people and was tired of working at a movie theatre, so I stole a 5 gallon bucket of movie trailers and left.

Lifeguard: My friend’s mother managed a country club and even though I had no idea about CPR or how to save anyone I worked two days a week until they replaced me with a trained person.

China Buffet: Was a waiter at this buffet place until Sung, the owner, cheated me out of $50. It was a great joke that every week on the work schedule he spelled Wednesday “Weeday”.

Merrill Lynch: Was PBX operator and was responsible for every incoming call going to 400 employees. I lasted a week.

Farm Hand: With a hand hook I’d toss square bales of hay onto the back of a moving truck in the sun for 10 hours a day at .10 cents a bail.

Subway Sandwiches: Was a “sandwich artist” until the boss found out after I’d close up me and a bunch of friends would play hockey in the parking lot, make outrageous sandwiches, drink beer and fill “free sandwich” cards with those yellow stamps.

M.A.R.C: Was an award winning telemarketer and donated plasma for extra cash after my shift since the blood bank was next door.

Flying Tomato: Was fired after cutting through the customer’s lawn on the way to their home to deliver a stuffed pizza. I was also on acid.

Data One: Listened to headphones while entering thousands and thousands of warranty documents from Honda. I lasted a month.

Drug Dealer: Sold acid for college book money after I spent my Pell grant on an electric guitar and a new stereo. Most of my customers were on the football team.

Mechanic’s Assistant: Changed oil in cars, swept the garage, sorted nuts and bolts and put away tools while the mechanics stood around and drank Keystone.

AMC Theatre: My manager was a lesbian nazi woman who when I didn’t hang the marquee letters just right she yelled at me so I quit.

Dr Pepper/7Up Corp.: Was administrative assistant to the Sr. VP of Marketing and did nothing except read and write stories about how shitty corporations were.

Farm Hand: Planted potatoes, cut trees for fence posts and repainted a tractor all in the name of Krishna and the chance to study a different religion.

Blue Cross/ Blue Shield: Transcribed medical charts on patients with every disease or injury known to man. Mostly colonoscopies.

Snow shovel technician: Cleared sidewalks and dug out people’s cars or mopeds until I got the flu and started drinking heavily.

American Pawn: After the boss showed me where all the “defense pistols” were hidden and seeing so many shitty and broken down people, I quit.

Machine Shop: Dipped 10 lb. metal blocks headed to the pentagon in large tubs of terrible acid. Almost killed a co-worker with a 6 inch drill bit.

Speedway Copy: Worked a copy shop where I had to wear a tie. We dubbed our boss “The Nigerian Nightmare” because he treated us so poorly and berated us every day. All of us felt like white slaves to this horrible Nigerian man.

Marriott Hotel: Got hired for the night shift at this hotel because my girlfriend worked there, but when I showed up the boss said I wasn’t dressed properly and I should go home and change into something more professional. I left and never went back.

Icicle Inc.: Cut the heads off salmon as they came down a conveyor belt while tejano music blared. My boss would stand behind me with a stopwatch to see how many heads I’d cut in a minute. Sometimes I’d get to saw the fins off 110 lb. halibut.

Creative Writing Teacher: At a teen center in the Northwest I sat around in the park writing poetry and stories with a bunch of neglected teens. They were imaginative despite their problems.

Construction: Picked up trash, bricks, wood, nails and anything else at a construction site that had finished the job. I found a good coffee thermos one day.

Driver: At a car auction I would drive cars through the auction ring so dealers could bid on them and then I’d park them again.

AAA House Painting: Was the bookkeeper for this mom and pop business until the clueless owner started asking me for business advice. I told him all this stuff, about how they needed more professional shirts and he should hire another team so they could do more houses and that I needed my own office. Mostly I would show up late and listen to my girlfriend’s radio show and eventually he fired me. He gave me a professional looking shirt as a parting gift and asked me if I wanted to buy his motorcycle for $15,000.

Seasonal Worker: Sold Christmas trees, carried them to people’s cars and tied their tree on the roof or crammed it in trunk.

Comerica Bank: Was the assistant to a wheelchair ridden investment broker. I got his files, opened his mail and drove us to lunch in his special van. Usually to Souper Salad. I was really just company in an otherwise boring office.

House Sitter: I lived in this rich Canadian’s house in Costa Rica until we got in an argument one day and he demanded I leave immediately and pay him $20 dollars for the 2 months I’d been there. He was so furious he threatened to sick his dog on me and my girlfriend, but we’d already become friends with the dog.

Bookstore worker: Stood around and sold books until I was moved to the receiving department. I hated receiving so much I simply walked out one day.

Farm Hand: Built and painted fence on a ranch in Wyoming and gutted a 1978 Cadillac to get it ready for a destruction derby contest.

Nissan: Was the production assistant for 4 execs until one of my co-workers kept messing with me, saying I’d be working there for the rest of my life and to show him up I walked out and never returned. A year later, to the day, I called him up to say hello. I knew he’d still be there and he was.

Party Promoter: Threw raves and rock shows in an old Masonic temple until I realized it wasn’t worth the money since the cops and fire inspectors were coming down on me pretty hard. My best security guy getting thrown back in prison had something to do with it too.

Nut Picker: Me and a bunch of people went to a macadamia nut farm because we heard they’d give you $2.50 for every sack of nuts you’d pick, but when we got there all the nuts had been picked and most of us didn’t even get a bag full. We made around $10 between the 5 of us and bought a 12 pack.

Tilt Video Arcade: After I beat every character 3 times in a row on Virtual Fighter 2 there was really no point in my working at this place any longer.

Old Navy: I thought it’d be a great idea to drive 20 miles to work in a clothing store. After 3 days of being late they let me go. It wasn’t “the Old Navy way”.

Guitar Promotions: I stood in Cost Co. and played guitar in front of a pallet of guitars. I was told to convince customers they should buy a great guitar at a wholesale price. Mostly, I watched a Cuba Gooding, Jr. movie about dog sledding about 100 times on the television nearby.

Maintenance Man: Worked on the softball field at Texas Women’s University until I fell asleep in the backroom while it rained and the boss caught me.

Waiter: At a small Italian restaurant I waited on rich people with expensive taste in wine until I saw the chef drooling, from lack of sleep, into the croutons. The best thing was that we’d drink nice wines in the cellar the whole time we worked.

Magazine Peddler: Tried to peddle 3 different underground poetry magazines at the weekly farmer’s market in LA and made absolutely no money.

Hatchet Resort: Was a housekeeper and did ground maintenance at this mountain resort until 3 girls came through and asked me if I wanted to go the Rainbow Gathering in Idaho so I took the $40 dollars I had and never looked back.

Short Order Cook: By the time I could handle all the incoming orders it became impossible to stand the way the owner verbally abused his wife, so I quit.

Coffee Shop: Made espresso, Italian sodas, etc. and worked the cash register until the place went out of business.

Dolly Madison Driver: At 4:30 in the morning some guy was showing me how to drive the delivery truck and happened to slip and say they require you to work 60-70 hours a week. I told him I needed some coffee and got in my car and left.

Security Guard at a Concert: Was fired after someone saw me letting people in for money after the concert had sold out.

Quality Windows and Siding: Convinced people walking through Sam’s Club they should consider windows and aluminum siding because the shit was space-age and never needed painting. I eventually became manager, hired my friends and worked 2 hours a week, but told the boss I was working 25. This lasted a few months until he started catching on and I quit.

Counter top and sink wholesaler: I told this place I was an accountant so they hired me as one. I was okay at it, but they were doing lots of illegal stuff that made it difficult. One day the boss called me to his office and told me I smelled bad so I quit.

*References upon request.

This is from Travis Catsull’s latest book, “Death of An Image and Other Poems” that can be purchase here.

The poetry continues @ Haggard and Halloo Publications.

What a Long Strange Trip It Actually Was – R.I.P. Augustus “Bear’” Owsley Stanley III

steve k — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:58:10 +0000

Probably the first private individual to manufacture LSD, Augustus “Bear’” Owsley Stanley III produced more than1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967. Stanley was the grandson of one-time Kentucky governor and senator Augustus Owsley Stanley. He served in the U.S. Air Force for 18 months, studied ballet in Los Angeles and then enrolled at UC Berkeley. In addition to producing and advocating LSD, he adhered to an all-meat diet. His pioneering role made the name “Owsley,” a popular slang term for the drug. Also an accomplished sound engineer, Bear was the longtime sound man and financier for psychedelic rock band the Grateful Dead. Stanley designed some of the first high-fidelity sound systems for rock music, culminating in the massive “Wall of Sound” electrical amplification system used by the Grateful Dead in their live shows, at the time a highly innovative feat of engineering. Hendrix’s song “Purple Haze” was reputedly inspired by a batch of Stanley’s product, though the guitarist denied any drug link. The ear-splitting psychedelic-blues combo Blue Cheer took its named from another batch. He was involved with the founding of high-end musical instrument maker Alembic Inc and concert sound equipment manufacturer Meyer Sound.

Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, he designed the Lightning Bolt Skull Logo, often referred to by fans as “Steal Your Face”. The 13-point lightning bolt was derived from a stencil Stanley created to spray-paint on the Grateful Dead’s equipment boxes.

A naturalized Australian citizen since 1996, Stanley and his wife Sheilah lived in the bush of Far Northern Tropical Queensland where he worked to create sculpture, much of it wearable art. Bear moved to Australia in the 1980s after growing convinced that the northern hemisphere would be subsumed by another ice age and sold enamel sculptures on the Internet. He was killed when the car he was driving swerved off a highway Saturday during a storm and down an embankment into a tree. His wife, who was with him in the car, suffered minor injuries. He is survived by two sons and two daughters by four different women; Peter (1957), Nina (1962), Starfinder and Redbird (1970).

GREAT DARKNESS NATIONAL PARK by Maria Sputnik & Van Choojitarom

Floating World — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:54:25 +0000

“Just because it is totally dark does not mean there is nothing to see.”

Maria Sputnik does the pictures. She’s been living in New York studying science writing and thinking about chromosomes and the moon. She misses Oregon. Van Choojitarom collaborated on the writing. He’s in Bangkok preparing to join a monastery.

“FOR LEONORA CARRINGTON” BY PETER LAMBORN WILSON (Arthur No. 31, Oct. 2008)

Administrator — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 04:57:14 +0000

This poem by Peter Lamborn Wilson was published as a letter to the editor in the final issue of Arthur, No. 31 (Oct 2008). It was in response to the piece by Alejandro Jodorowsky in the previous issue, an excerpt from his newly translated memoirs, The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, detailing his informal apprenticeship to Leonora Carrington in Mexico City in the late ’50s…

FOR LEONORA CARRINGTON

# 1
Mexico City is absolutely.
Or was.
With a claridad that would’ve seemed
glossy as bone except for the fecality
of its plutonian fruit. Especially
Leonora Carrington – the secret hardness
of colonial baroque – its refusal to be
reasonable – its crown of owls

#2
Chocolate is Mexico’s great
contribution to Surrealism.
With unbroken incantations in the
voice of a lion prepare (on wild rocks)
a soup made of half a pink onion, a bit of
perfumed wood, some grains of myrrh, a
large branch of green mint, 3 belladonna pills
covered with white swiss chocolate, a
huge compass rose (plunge in soup for one minute)
Just before serving add Chines “cloud” mushroom
which has snail-like antennae &
grown on owl dung

#3
As modern Hermeticist she ranks with Fulcanelli
a Madame Paracelsa who tells yr
fortune in the sense of buried treasure.
It seems you yourself have psychic gifts
which are only exacerbated by her soups.
Molé as Dalí realized surrealizes all
dishes via its resemblance to excrement
e. g. over boiled lobsters (serve
with pink champagne). Shit you can sculpt.

#4
Like gunpowder which was invented solely
to exorcize demons – a secret passed
along the Silk Road to Roger Bacon
who unfortunately leaked the recipe
to the uninitiated – Carrington
embodies both the siesta & the
anti-siesta. A Madam Adam
with a handcranked gramophone with a horn
lacquered black with gold pinstriping that
plays only beeswax cylinders of Erik Satie
or Gesualdo. Here alone exile
attains an elegance & impassibility known
only to stoned Rosicrucians.

#5
To live absolutely. A tricky trajectory between
clinical dementia & the sloppy lace
curtain Irish kitchen gemütlichkeit that
usually passes (present company excepted
of course) for life outside literature &
even for true love. Or else it’s
the altitude — mushrooms & chocolate — under the
asphalt the bloodsoaked landfill —
cactus cowskulls &
drunken fusillades of flowers.

(NOTE: Soup recipe by L. Carrington; see The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky.)

Peter Lamborn Wilson
New Paltz, New York

“HIGH FIVE: Detroit’s visionary MC5 receive a film tribute that aims to rewrite rock history” by Steffie Nelson (Arthur No. 9/March 2004)

Administrator — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 03:56:30 +0000

Originally published in Arthur Magazine No. 9 (March 2004) (available from The Arthur Store. This film has been held up for commercial release since 2004. There is a Kickstarter campaign to get it cleared for release here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/orchide-detroit/mc5-a-true-testimonial

HIGH FIVE
Detroit’s visionary MC5 receive a film tribute that aims to rewrite rock history
By Steffie Nelson

On New Year’s Eve, 1972, the MC5 took the stage at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, a vast psychedelic venue where they’d held court as the “house band” between 1966 and 1969. Their live shows had been so incendiary, the five band members so arrogant, that even a huge star like Janis Joplin, no slouch in the live department, once refused to go on after them. This gig, their swan song as it were, was sloppy and dispassionate; the ghosts of past glories even more unforgiving than the sparse, cynical crowd. Guitarist Wayne Kramer took off mid-performance to go cop dope, and the MC5 never played again. Kramer and guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith were 22; singer Rob Tyner and drummer Dennis Thompson were 24; bassist Michael Davis was 26. In the end they’d effectively been “pulled apart by the killer forces of capitalism and competition,” which their manager John Sinclair had railed against, perhaps presciently, in the liner notes to their now-legendary debut album Kick Out The Jams.

The MC5 hold a curious place in rock history. Their ascendance represented a moment in America when art and commerce converged, when all that was vital and visceral was also the pinnacle of hip. As the flamboyant and badass musical mouthpiece of the White Panther Party, the MC5 did embody the soul of the late ‘60s counterculture: one foot in the optimistic past and the other in the disillusioned, deadly future; one hand holding a guitar, the other a shotgun. It’s an irresistible image, one which was unappetizingly co-opted by Levis last spring for a series of T-shirts. A promotional performance in London by the three surviving Five (Rob Tyner suffered a fatal heart attack in 1991; Fred Smith died of heart failure in 1994) was seen by detractors as a final, sad sellout.

The question of whether or not the MC5 failed at the end of the day is much debated in the riveting feature-length documentary MC5: A True Testimonial, directed by David Thomas and produced by Laurel Legler. All parties agree, however, that for a fleeting, incandescent moment the MC5 were “at the center of the yin-yang,” as Michael Davis philosophizes in the film, “and it was our job to keep it going in a positive direction.”

But the proverbial yin-yang was already spinning into darkness, and it took the MC5 with it. Like fireworks on the fourth of July, they rose with a bright, beautiful bang and, as far as mainstream America was concerned, disappeared with a puff of smoke into the night. They were, ultimately, sacrificial – the artistic entity that was the MC5 didn’t survive more than seven years—but their legacy has continually inspired legions of punks, rockers, artists and freaks, who got turned on to their music through word-of-mouth, or more than likely though the persistent echo of a call to arms that rings with timeless resonance: “kick out the jams, motherfucker.”

As David Thomas says, “The people who know, know. The other people don’t get it.” The Chicago-based Thomas and his wife Laurel Legler began working on MC5: A True Testimonial in 1995, spurred on through financial troubles and licensing hassles by sheer love and respect and the determination to do justice to these American legends. As Legler points out, few bands have received this sort of filmic treatment, and if they have their way MC5: A True Testimonial will revise rock history. On the eve of a limited theatrical release and the worldwide release of a nearly four-hour DVD edition of the film (including deleted scenes, complete live performances, interview outtakes and fan testimonials), David Thomas and Laurel Legler are ready to testify.

ARTHUR: What was your initial personal attraction to the story?
LAUREL: The impetus for my even looking into this was a close friend of mine who was a rock ‘n’ roll journalist had made some MC5 compilation tapes for me, and he said, ‘Someday before I die, man, I’d like to see a movie about those guys.’ And I thought, I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. And I started looking into it, and it’s like, there’s nothing written about these guys, I got nothin’ here, what’s the deal? And of course that was what piqued my interest—what happened? These guys looked fabulous! They’re fabulous and scary and incredible and their music was astonishing. So it started out with a sense of mystery…And the first thing we had to do was contact some of these folks to find out if they were even interested in having a film made. We didn’t presume anything. We didn’t step into this and say, ‘We’re going to make this movie and here we are, deal with us.’ It was quite the opposite. And everybody said yes. So once everyone was on board it gave us both the permission to pursue the dream and also the responsibility.
DAVID: We really worked with everybody on this. We couldn’t have done it without their cooperation. It was really a labor of love, not just from us, but from all the people involved. It actually became something of a healing process because obviously there was a lot of bad blood and a lot of broken dreams.

How do you hope that will impact on the audience? What do you think the film’s ‘message’ is?
DAVID: My feeling about this film is that yes, it’s the story of a particular group, a particular time and place in American history, but ultimately it’s the story of individuals who are chasing their dream. And they make some mistakes, and they do some good things and some not so good things. In some ways it’s almost like the MC5 story is the archetypal story of artists, creative people who band against the establishment or whatever you want to call it, and the beauty that wells up from their art in spite of all that resistance. It’s a little bit about that real human drama that happens to everybody in their own lives. Which was why we worked so closely with all the people, to try to get some sense of their personal loss and their personal accomplishment because those are the things that we all strive for. These guys are, on some level, just like you and I.

Considering the state of our nation, is the MC5 story more relevant than ever, or is it more like some quaint vestige of a bygone era called ‘the sixties’?
DAVID: I think it is more relevant than ever. We couldn’t have foreseen what’s happening in Iraq when we started the project in 1995, but I think that not unlike what’s said in our film: it’s all a circle. History is cyclical, and here we are again: embroiled in a war that has divided people in terms of their opinion about it, which could largely be seen as an unpopular war.
LAUREL: Has the country been this polarized since Vietnam? I can’t really remember a time that it was, over issues as important as this. The country really was divided, it says in our film there was a war not only in Vietnam but in the streets here. Unfortunately we don’t have a war in the streets here, I wish we did. I talk to people all the time, ‘Why aren’t we in the streets marching?’ ‘I don’t know, can’t get a permit.’ It’s just ridiculous! …When we started the film we really thought there would be some elements of it that would be kind of unbelievable to younger people—you know, National Guard troops on the streets in their town—and then suddenly 9/11 happened and we were seeing that for ourselves.
DAVID: Who would have thought, a year ago, that the Dixie Chicks were gonna be ostracized for their political views by the very media that brought them to that popularity? I mean it’s not as if the Dixie Chicks are saying ‘kick out the jams motherfuckers,’ but y’know…

Can there ever be a legitimately revolutionary band again? Can there ever be another youth revolution? In a way it’s almost like it’s been set up by the media and the culture so that it can’t ever happen.
DAVID: I think that’s very true, in fact, and that’s one of the things that’s really interesting about the MC5 story. The story happens at a point when the record companies and the media are all trying to get their arms around this thing which is still kicking pretty wildly. There’s no containing it yet, and the MC5 phenomenon occurs before people are aware of the ramifications. I mean, who thought that the Vietnam War would result in Napalm falling out of the sky on villagers, soldiers disabled by chemicals; these are almost futuristic, science fiction kind of ideas. Whereas now, as a culture we’ve had those kinds of experiences, and there’s this continued effort to keep the voice of dissent stifled. The powers of the media and marketing and pop mass culture conglomerations are not the least bit interested in a message that rocks the boat, that bites the hand that feeds it.

What happened with Elektra Records? Danny Fields signs the MC5 and The Stooges at this big ‘signing party,’ and then they were dropped six months later. What do you think the label expected from them when they signed them?
DAVID: When Elektra Records signed the band in the fall of 1968 we were just beginning to hear the first rumblings of what came to be called ‘the revolution.’ And Danny Fields has told us that Jac Holzman and Elektra Records really saw this revolution as a money-making thing. Here was this group that was the ‘band of the revolution’ and for a brief period all the record companies were really jumping on that bandwagon. I remember there was a Columbia Records print ad at the time that had a picture of a protester inside a jail cell and the caption to it was: ‘But the Man can’t take away our music.’ And it was really this whole idea of packaging the revolution. What happened, though, as John Sinclair tells us in the film, ‘We were being the people that we said we were.’ They meant it. The total assault on the culture: rock ‘n’ roll, dope, and fucking in the streets—they meant it. And I think that was a little too hot for Elektra to handle.
LAUREL: They weren’t good little soldiers for the record company, and as we all know, if you’re going to be successful with your record company the record company has to like you. And they would show up at the offices and they would smoke pot and they would be loud and all these things were happening. They were just getting signed and the CIA office in Ann Arbor is bombed [an act that was widely attributed to the Trans Love House]…
DAVID: …And they’re playing the ’68 Democratic Convention [Abbie Hoffman’s Festival of Life protest in Chicago], and the FBI is all over them. Even before the record is released, this is a band that has FBI files. People really did see them as a dangerous entity, because on a cultural level they do represent the nexus, the coming together of a white, long-haired, counterculture, anti-war movement and an increasingly militant, revolutionary, armed, black power movement. Obviously, if there had been a true coalition of say, SDS and Black Panther, there really could have been revolution in America at that time.
LAUREL: We would be completely remiss as the people who made the documentary about the MC5 if we were to attempt to say to people that the MC5’s revolution was strictly a political revolution. It wasn’t. It was a revolution of the mind. Rob Tyner was interested in the mind, he was interested in how culture can change, how individuals can change, and how that collective mind can change the world around you, what energy can do when it’s combined with other energy. So in that sense a revolution is always possible but it seems like it really has to start at home, with the individual making a decision to turn the television off, to stop buying the motherfucking SUVs and to discover something new, take a stand, go to a political meeting, something. But if I were to go to downtown Chicago right now with a megaphone and call for revolution, my ass is going to jail. Like Michael says, ‘We didn’t wanna have a shoot-out with the FBI.’ But he did want to get up on stage and bend minds, he wanted to go out as far as he possibly could with his music and the images and the whole package, the sound, the lights, the music, and change the way people think.
DAVID: Ultimately that’s the responsibility of the artist, isn’t it? To make people think, to make people question their world. Isn’t that the goal of art?
LAUREL: Was it David Cronenberg, who when asked if the artist has any social responsibility, said that’s where the paradox is: that it’s really an artist’s responsibility to be irresponsible. His exact line was something like, when you talk about social or political responsibility then you’re amputating the best limbs an artist has, you’re plugging into the system already.
DAVID: You know, it’s not as if these artists don’t exist and that there aren’t artists who are taking some kind of a stand.
LAUREL: It’s a two-edged sword: you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. You go out on this tour and you decide to do press conferences and discuss the situation and then people call you a sanctimonious asshole and tell you to shut up and just play music.
DAVID: It’s not unlike what John Sinclair said in our film: On the one hand they tell you it’s a hype, on the other they throw you in jail.

Let’s talk about the White Panthers. I feel like their history is full of contradictions. Some people say, ‘Oh, it was just a joke, it was the MC5 fan club,’ yet Wayne Kramer denies this. Even the name of the organization – is it true that there was a guy named Panther White?
LAUREL: Yes, there was. He was sort of a con man. ‘Panther White wasn’t the chairman of a chair!’, as John Sinclair would tell us.
DAVID: In a certain sense it’s a con, but there’s a sincerity to it as well – an idealism, a revolutionary spirit. It’s like a carnival barker: ‘Step right this way, you’ve got five seconds of decision. Step right up, brothers and sisters.’ It’s a jive, it’s a come-on, but it’s not what the media perceived as a hype, because on a certain level they do mean it.
LAUREL: Wayne still carries with him the political importance of what the band was trying to do. I think he felt that the White Panther party was important because it was in solidarity with the Black Panthers, that for all their pot smoking, acid-taking and cracked ideas, they did mean it. He says in our film, ‘We were ready,’ and then you see some of the other members of the band and they say, ‘What do I care if they vote for Republicans or live in a commune? I don’t give a shit.’ There was even that sort of division at the time within the band.
DAVID: And even that is a reflection of the culture as a whole. You had people like Martin Luther King saying that peaceful resistance was the way to go, but you also had people like the Weather Underground that were blowing shit up.
LAUREL: John Sinclair will say things like ‘We were fearless, we were righteous, we were connected to the universe.’ In the sense of a revolution of the mind, a cultural revolution, I think it did have an impact and it meant something. But they were nuts. [laughs] They would stay up all night and chew drugs and get up in the morning and try and act out the ideas they thought of the night before.
DAVID: But John was quite serious about the formation of the White Panther Party. [Maybe some of it] was fueled by his legal troubles, because he was looking at going to jail before the White Panther Party was formed–you know, his reaction to the establishment coming down was to become increasingly radicalized and increasingly militant.

Do you think that they needed John Sinclair to survive?
DAVID: What John brought to the band I think was really important. If John hadn’t become their manager, would the MC5 just have remained another American garage band? Perhaps. I don’t know for sure. But I think that he brought something very special to the group; he gave them a purpose, a direction, a program, for whatever it’s worth. But at the same time, the thing that he brought to the equation is the same thing that sowed the seeds of their destruction.
LAUREL: At the point when John Sinclair and the MC5 part ways, they no longer needed John Sinclair. It clearly wasn’t working, from a professional or personal standpoint.
DAVID: At the same time they had changed record labels, this guy Jon Landau had come in, and Sinclair had already been convicted, he just hadn’t been sentenced yet. He was waiting to go to jail. As Michael says in the film, ‘Here’s our manager. How’s he gonna manage our business if he’s in jail?’ It was pretty ludicrous. And there were people from Atlantic records that were saying, ‘This whole Trans Love Energy thing, this White Panther thing, this shit ain’t working. Fellas, half your money is going to support all these hippies that are living in this commune. You gotta split from this.’ And that Back In The USA record is a reflection of that change in their aesthetic. John Sinclair’s assessment of that record is that it’s complete crap. But he made the arrangement that brought in Jon Landau in the first place. He sows the seeds of what the band would continue to be at that point. It’s interesting, it’s full of contradictions. That ultimately is why we could spend seven years on this film, because the deeper we got into it, the more interesting it became.
LAUREL: I think that we continue to be intrigued and surprised by the complexity of these people, individually and collectively. There was something truly magical that happened when these five guys came together, it’s undeniable. I think they tapped into energies, I think they did tap into the universe. I think that had the equation been different it never would have been the same. I just continue to fall in love with their complexity and their intelligence and their mystical side and their magical side, and they’re all still like that today.

You named your film production company Future/Now Films, which is the name of an MC5 song. What do you think they were plugged into 30 years ago that we weren’t ready for?
DAVID: ‘Future/Now’ is a Rob Tyner-composed song and those are Rob’s lyrics, and specifically, the line from the song that we had in mind when we named the company was, ‘The future’s yours right now, if you rule your own destiny.’ And that was the idea we were coming from with this thing, even before we could get funding, that we had to do this. I don’t think this was a case where we just said, ‘Hey, let’s do this groovy movie about the MC5!’ It didn’t really work like that. There was a whole series of synchronistic events, the witnessing of occurrences, everything in our lives had led us to this weird crossroads where we could take five seconds of decision and decide either that we were gonna make this MC5 movie or we were not…My favorite part is the very last line of the song, and Rob Tyner goes, ‘the key to the mystery…’ [thinking the phone has been disconnected] Hello? Yeah, that’s it. Ya get it? Fill in the blank, it’s up to you. It’s all here for ya, I’m givin’ it to you. I think he’s really amazing. I think that he was a shaman, and I think that he was a magically inspired person. On the liner notes of the first album, Rob Tyner is quoted as calling the MC5 ‘a working model of the paleocybernetic culture in action.’ Right? 1968. What the fuck does that mean? Except that now we are, arguably, paleocybernetic.

What do you think he meant by that?
DAVID: I think that he saw the MC5 and the process that the MC5 was going through as a model for the types of processes that we might actually be going through in the future. For instance an artist could work with other musicians in a tribal and/or communal setting, cut off from the influences of mainstream culture, and develop their individual ideas—compose, record, and actually get their music out to the masses, separate from the corporate power structure.

Do you think that there’s something about what happened in Detroit and with Trans Love Energies before they recorded Kick Out The Jams—like it was this self-contained universe or laboratory where all this stuff could happen, and then once they took it outside of that environment it lost…
DAVID: …the energy is dissipated? Perhaps. I mean, I think that there are a lot of really deep and interesting ideas that percolate throughout this whole MC5 thing. There are ideas of music and art as shamanistic and/or magical processes, by which one opens the gates, so to speak, by which one perhaps communicates with other levels of consciousness or being, other energy forms. There are interviews with Rob Tyner from as early as 1967 where he’s talking about music and sound’s ability to alter the molecular structure of the human body, and in fact we know that to be true now. These theories are confirmed, that if you play tones at the proper level, you can get people to perspire or feel anxious or feel calm. You can in fact affect their consciousness and their physicality. Rob used to refer to it, ‘They have to get the music in their meat.’

That’s very William Burroughs.
DAVID: Exactly. And he was a great fan and reader of Burroughs. It’s like that Parliament/Funkadelic thing, ‘Free your ass and your mind will follow.’ These ideas are all in there. There were ideas within the MC5 performance—not always conscious—which were drawing upon whole realms of ritual performance, like that whole JC Crawford ‘Brothers and Sisters’ speech at the beginning. That was all part and parcel of the shamanistic thing they were trying to do; they were trying to create this orgiastic, ecstatic union with the audience, whereby they could transcend their earthbound consciousness.

What else might have inspired this? I know they considered Sun Ra a mentor…
DAVID: You know what? Can I tell you something? Sun Ra laid his hands on me, about twenty years ago. It was in the early 1980s, I had just come back from England and my girlfriend at the time and I went to see Sun Ra. It was the first time I’d ever seen him and he was playing at the Jazz Showcase here in Chicago at the old Bismarck Hotel. I happened to be sitting on a corner chair on the two aisles, and at some point he did the processional around the room, and as he passed, twice, he laid his hands on my shoulders. And I looked up into his eyes and they were doing ‘Space Is The Place,’ and I will never forget the feel of the touch of his hands on my shoulders. It was not as if he pressed down on my body, but when he laid his hands upon my shoulders it was like they weighed a million tons. It was the heaviest physical touch, and it was the most profound physical touch that I have ever felt.

Wow.
DAVID: Yeah. And a couple years ago I was relaying that story to Michael Davis when we were in Arizona with him. We were talking about Sun Ra and I said, ‘Michael, you know Sun Ra laid hands on me.’ And after I told him the story Michael looked at me with a very sort of piercing look and he said, ‘You know, maybe that’s when this all started.’

“The abyss is something to be looked into, but not the only thing”: Artist FRANK HAINES, in conversation with Eliza Swann

Administrator — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 18:58:07 +0000

On the Winter Solstice, Eliza Swann met with Frank Haines (above) in his studio to discuss his work for the show “Under the Shadow of the Wing of the Thing,” up now through March 27 at Lisa Cooley Gallery. Their conversations revolved around the subjects of art, philosophy, form and concept as seen through the lens of darkness…

Eliza Swann [E.S.]: Since we’ve been talking about the properties of darkness, let’s begin at the beginning. Darkness represents the Absolute Unmanifest. In mythology this is often represented by primordial waters and the formlessness that precedes form. How does the concept of the Unmanifest figure into your art practice? What catalyzes your urge to make forms? How do you reconcile form and formlessness in your practice?

Frank Haines [F.H.]: BLACK! Darkness, before the big bang, all that was before. All potential. A contemporary metal band, Watain, named their recent album Lawless Darkness. The way they explained it, light is an impulse of restriction and definition. Darkness represents an absence of such restrictions. The dark is the primordial wellspring. While I definitely do not feel aligned with the path the Watain brain is on (satanism), I appreciate and relate with the sophistication of this articulation of the black. Of the absence of light. Of the unmanifest, it is the color of all potential. Light exists inside of the all that is darkness. It is the all pervasive background from which to return to. Look how good any color looks next to black. The black that surrounds the stage of a theater. Maybe there was/is a first cause. But what of the black that preceded it. Is the brain even able of thinking on such things?

E. S.: Restriction and definition are necessary for the act of creation to occur out of primordial ooze. Your work with grids hints at a Platonic geometric conceptualization of matter—a way to use limitation and restriction to understand the living world.

F.H.: Much of the sculptural work I have done has referenced the main Egyptian creation myth: “In the beginning all was only the swirling watery chaos that was called Nu. Out of this rose the primordial mound, of Atum.” This mound of earth rising out of the primordial waters. Something rising out of a bigger something. Such fertility and expansion is a major reason why I have used the color teal for so long.

A grid is a modern invention, a symbol in which to map out and contemplate the manifest. I can’t get away from the grid. It is a short step from a grid to the spider’s web, and then to consider what sits in the middle of that web. Like the super massive black hole, Sagittarius A which sits at the center of our swirling Milky Way galaxy. From manifest back to unmanifest.

I titled my last solo show “Form is the Graveyard of Consciousness.” This was a direct quote from Manly P Hall in his book Lectures on the Ancient Philosophy: ‘Throughout the inferior creation consciousness lies buried in form. Form is the confusing, resisting, limiting, inhibiting, and imprisoning part of existence. Nothing in whose nature even a trace of form remains is capable of absolute consciousness. Form is the graveyard of consciousness.”

Hall’s talk immediately reminds me of the genius of Yves Klein and “La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide” (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void), where he exhibited an empty gallery. I’m not sure if it is for this specific show, but Linda Montano told me Klein once energized an empty room by doing a lot of Judo in it, then allowing people to come in.

E. S.: Looking around your studio there is an abundance of demonic imagery which immediately makes me think of the Greek origin of the word demon—daimon. Originally this word referred to a guide which was somewhere between human and god, and carried neither negative or positive connotations. Socrates credits much of his work to his daimon or guide. Christianity gave an unsavory character to demons to ensure that no one would find guidance outside of the church. How do demons figure into your work and your inspiration?

F.H.: 2010 was a really intense year for me. Year of the tiger. I did find it to be ferocious and at times devastating. Elements that were joined together were suddenly and painfully ripped apart. I did not welcome this energy. It was the type of thing best represented in the Tarot card of the Tower. Sudden dramatic upheaval. Like a tiger stalking it’d prey in the grass.

I bring this up because it goes to the root of the idea of demons or the devil. The word devil comes from the greek word Diabolos which literally means to tear apart. This diabolic is the antonym of “symbolic” which comes from the root sym-bollein which means to throw together, or to unite.

Such bringing together and tearing apart seem like the polar energies of this universe as we know it. Matter is eternal, the compounds of matter fleeting. I can resist it and hate it as much as I want, or I can ride this universe wave and see where it takes me. Such a response is best articulated for me in the Tarot card of the Hanging Man. The paradox of an individual enlightened through powerlessness.

E. S.: I wouldn’t say “powerlessness” as much as “surrender” in the case of The Hanged Man. There is a great deal of power in surrender – the trust in the “bringing together” even when you are in the “tearing apart” space. Jesus, one of our more famous Hanged Men, at the end of the crucifixion scene said “Into thy hands I commend my spirit”, words of surrender.

F.H.: I agree with you, but sometimes your hand gets forced. And you find yourself in this place of having to be the yielding branch. While the Jesus man did say those words, prior to saying them he asked his dad why he had forsaken him.

I was bullied into Christianity as a youth. I say bullied because I had no choice and there weren’t any other options. I also say bullied because it is a belief system largely guided by the unsustainable and unproductive tenets of fear, suppression and guilt. In such a system was planted seeds of fear about those things outside the church which were labeled demonic. Life forces such as sexual desires are labeled as evil and shameful as opposed to being sublimated.

While I definitely like to ponder that which is the demonic (as one of many books on the shelf), I don’t fuck with it. Whether that energy is something that a high magician can conjure into a triangle from the protection of his magic circle, or whether it is something deep rooted in one’s subconscious, I’d rather leave that potential energy alone. I state this out of respect, not fear. Josephine McCarthy, a contemporary consecrator and exorcist, is a real forward thinking author on this subject.

E. S.: Exorcism! Absolutely! I had always approached that subject in a Jungian, metaphorical, psychological (disbelieving) way until I began working with intense energy healers who did a lot of very literal exorcisms. I just watched a beautiful documentary by Margaret Mead from the 1930s called “Trance and Dance in Bali”. The dancers enact the struggle between “fear of death” and “the living” and become possessed by spirits during their frenzy – they begin to plunge daggers into their chests without leaving a scratch.

E. S.: In Jung’s opinion the first step toward individuation, or self-realization, is confronting the shadow aspect of the self. In his opinion the key to surviving the descent into darkness, repressed areas of the psyche, and unconsciousness is to remain aware of the shadow without identifying with it. He also saw the shadow self as the seat of creativity. In what way does your shadow self figure into your practice at this moment?

F.H.: I feel like most, if not all, occult or metaphysical practices are best done in tandem with some kind of psychological therapy. They really compliment one another. In this way I think one can best maintain sanity and see that which is above as that which is below.

The abyss is something to be looked into, but not the only thing. Some of the most bitter people do yoga every day (as do some of the happiest). Facing, accepting and shaking hands with one’s darkness is a major step to evolving as a human. Because that darkness is there, always has been, always will be. Whether it is recognized or forces its way out in a terribly awkward way, there it is. Hello. You can do tons of drugs or any other type of medicating but it will still be there until it is faced. I go to therapy. I had to deal with this. The only way out is through.

The multitude of stories in all mythologies are guiding lights, roadmaps to such experiences. They also serve as reminders to how universal that life template is. Facing that dark night of the soul. Thinking you will find an abomination only to find a god.

David Foster Wallace did such a good long form analysis of personal darkness (and so many other things in Infinite Jest). Two passages stand out:

“Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing, too big to see, rising” (pg 651)

and

“As the two vibrations [exhaust fan and violin] combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not had the slightest inkling was there.” (pg 649)

E. S.:I completely agree with you about the occult/psychology nexus . People often ask me how to learn the Tarot – I usually direct them to M. Scott Peck’s “The Road Less Travelled” and Annie Besant’s “Man and His Bodies” – basically two psychology textbooks. In any “occult” study the “key” or “philosopher’s stone” appears from within – not from an external study of symbology. Meditation is also a phenomenal tool for understanding – in every aspect.

E.S.: In some of your recent performances and photographs, there is an abundance of liquid, pouring, and paint ooze baptisms happening. Water is often associated with darkness and unconsciousness and floods figure heavily in mythologies surrounding cleansing and purging – as in the great flood which destroys the face of the earth and the recedes, leaving one pure human being. What is being transformed during these pigment baptisms?

F.H.: Those color baptisms are a direct homage to the Vienna actionists and most specifically to Otto Meuhl, my favorite of that pack. They were a volcano that keeps giving. I wish more eruptions like those of the actionists would happen today. I have also considered a Tom Marioni piece from 1969, one second sculpture, where he threw a coil of metal tape into the air. Those actions have existed for a very short period of time, becoming these grotesque action painting sculptures that sometimes live on in photographs.

While I think a lot about water, those works seems more like some fucked up mess. They feel closer to blood sacrifice than a baptism. Baptism is a water grave that one is re-birthed from. It must have looked amazing on those mayan pyramids when they were cutting all those hearts out of people and the blood ran down the steps. Tragic, of course, but then we get led into territory of the terror of the sublime. In a recent Wire interview William Bennett of Whitehouse mentioned that his intent was “taking people to places that are completely unfamiliar to them. Basically dragging people into the woods.” He put it so succinctly, as being dragged into the woods sounds at once so sinister yet also transcendent. While the performance work has a long list of identifiable influences, I’ve always wanted it to have a ritualistic framework yet at the same time be short and entertaining! The word entertaining has always been a important criteria, because so much, dare I say most, work that defines itself as performance work in murderously boring and usually embarrassing.

E. S.: I am so glad you mentioned the “terror/sublime” dance – I love the quote by Edmund Burke “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.” While I definitely thought of you upon seeing Hermann Nitsch’s “60. Painting Action//60. Malaktion,” your drips and pouring also remind me of my Kundalini studies in India. I was warned before beginning that the work could lead to madness if not handled properly – in a sense being “dragged into the woods.” After a day of intense and difficult meditation a common symptom was the sensation of nectar dripping down the top of the head into the spinal cord. In your performance at P.S. 1 when you dropped to your knees to have paint poured over the crown of your head I thought “A- HA.” The sublime.

F.H.: We live in an age where we have so much to inherit. That is a thing to celebrate. We have generations of experiments in music and the visual arts to work from. There are many things in the past that do not need to be repeated, but inevitably are. Why not quote Kandinsky’s opening remarks in The Spiritual in Art:

“Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born. It is impossible for us to live and feel as did the ancient Greeks. In the same way those who strive to follow the Greek method of sculpture achieve only a similarity of form, the work remaining soulless for all time. Such imitation is mere aping. Externally the monkey completely resembles a human being; he will sit holding a book in front of his nose, and turn over the pages with a thoughtful aspect, but his actions have for him no real meaning.”

E. S.: Since we are largely talking about the properties of darkness tell me about “Noiry” from your performance duo “Blanko and Noiry.” I am also curious about the addition of “gray.” The dynamic seemed to shift from Father and Son to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

F.H.: There needed to be three. If you have two things there is always the relationship between them, in essence the third. That needed to exist on the stage, the visual triangle, the Osiris. It is such an instinctive template. It really felt that simple.

E. S.: Tell me about your musical selections for Blanko and Noiry and how you came to work with Chris Kachulis.

F.H.: Chris was good friends with Bruce Haack and did a majority of the vocals for the Haack’s Electric Lucifer. Electric Lucifer became an instant favorite of mine. It has all these forward thinking ideas about light immersed in warm electronic tones. I loved that they were claiming Lucifer in a tone that wasn’t entirely dark or sinister.

I saw Philip Anagnos’ documentary on Haacke (which I want to say for the record really falls short of being a complete film on such a visionary). On it, Chris sang a few numbers from a still unreleased record he and Haack did together (Electric Lucifer 3). Chris seemed like such a weird old tripper, I wanted to know more about him. I contacted the website and they put me in touch with him. I went to meet him at his old job of 40 years, ABC TV near Lincoln Square. I had just started performing by myself a few times. It just sort of evolved from reworkings of midi files I had been messing around with in Garageband. From those templates, we started doing really damaged versions of numbers from the American Songbook. Chris’ brain is an immense database of popular music. Chris has a grasp on most music that was produced in the 20th century and often an anecdote to go with it.

As I said, I had performed before, but they were always super-ceremonial, and based on an equinox or solstice. People were asking me to perform, but I felt like what I was doing was too sensitive to timing and place. It felt like Blanko and Noiry could be the secular outlet for performing. But slowly, the ritualistic elements creeped in and now it exists as a merger of the two. This was further accelerated by the addition of the transitional third entity, the grey one, Reuben Lorch Miller.

Chris is a really special man and we plan to record really soon. I also have some videos planned with him as the star. I really want to commit his performed database to media and not just memory.

E. S.: How does your performance art relate to ritual magic, and what other popular modes of performance do you draw from?

F.H.: HMMM. All the pictures and descriptions of operations of the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn are huge inspirations. I feel like their aesthetics and ideas still have yet to be tapped by anyone in a public way.

But there is such a huge amount of influence, a Nurse with Wound list array and magnitude of life influences. From Jodorowsky to Al Jolson to the Roxy Music pic of Brian Eno to old pictures of the Victoria de Los Angeles to Robert Blake in Lost Highway to Process Church to the long shadow cast by the genius of Genesis P Orridge to Linda Montano to all those actionist trippers in Vienna to Whitehouse to Kevin Drumm to Camus and Absurdism to Beckett trips to Bruce Haack to Sissel Kardel to Flipper to Manson music to Church times to Father Yod to Neil Hamburger to the white man married to the black woman who was a neighbor to the Jeffersons to Waylon Jennings to all the different incarnations of Faust to Kardinal to fucked up energies in Vienna to the Banana Splits to The Theosophy Library on 53rd and 3rd to mineral worship to GG Allin to Marlene Dietrich to Chris Johansen to that weird millisecond after you burn yourself to warm and cold showers to Biff Rose to Israel Regardie to Tarot times to BOTA times to Mason aesthetics to being stoned and alone with the sun out to night walks to Christopher Garrett to lessons from and in Love.

The main point is to make it yours. To quote Linda Montano “Now it’s your turn”.

E. S.: St. John of the Cross wrote “The Dark Night of the Soul” describing the despair that occurs at many stages along the spiritual path – does this figure in to your investigations right now?

F.H.: Most definitely. When does that part end?

E. S.: That’s a good unanswerable question! The poem “Dark Night of the Soul” ends with the lines:

I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.

It seems to end in an ego death into mystical love for St. John.

Death is shrouded in darkness because it is a step in to the unknown. There is that amazing scene in the 7th Seal when Antonius asks Death what he knows and he says “I AM UNKNOWING”. What aspects of death both physical and metaphorical figure in to your work right now?

F.H.: It just keeps happening. I feel that work that starts and ends with the intention of being didactic usually ends up being terribly boring and failing in it’s intent. I believe in what can happen through relational expansion.

There is so much to be gained in a misread. Reading meaning into a work that the artist did not consciously intend, that action creates new roads to new destinations. This is one reason why I hardly ever title pieces. I wouldn’t want to guide people in that fashion.

E. S.: One of the primary functions of a shaman is the passage through underworlds and shadow realms to obtain knowledge and healing for people. One could argue that heavy metal bands perform this same function. Can the artist also heal in this way?

F.H.: For the first part of that I’d like to refer to an interview my friend Pat Delaney did with the SF band Saviours. I will let this interview speak to that:

“How do you define Saviours’ brand of Satanism?

I just write about shit going on in my mind and the references to Satanic shit is about my approach to life. Most of our songs are just about our journey; partying, fucking, and having a killer time. No fucking rules. If it feels good, do it – raw animal lust.

Do the members of the group participate in the “”Satanic Alchemy” mentioned in the lyrics? If so in what way?

Yes. Being stoked, doing whatever the fuck you want, and living outside the world.”

I don’t know if I believe an artist can heal, at least through artwork itself. Our mutual friend the artist Linda Montano is most definitely a healer. But she has always worked towards making a merger of her life and her art, to a degree that is largely unprecedented with artists. So she is an exception to that. I don’t want to discourage anyone from trying. I think art can work as one of the best therapeutic and meditative exercises. But whether that exercise needs to be shared with a public is another thing. I am really willing to learn more and more from life and experience about this very thing.

E. S.: The philosopher Gurdijieff breaks art into subjective and objective. Subjective art is compared to vomiting – the artist feels better after relieving himself of nausea, and the audience is left to look at the vomit. Objective art illuminates “the peak and the valley both”, and encompasses the breadth of human experience objectively. I think artists can certainly be curative for the collective psyche. The ideas of Yves Klein, Linda Mary Montano, Jack Smith, and on and on and on have certainly changed my approach to living for the better. Genesis Breyer P. Orridge’s Pandrogyny work is moving culture to a broader place of understanding. As for objects themselves having healing power—I guess that depends on how you view physical matter and the space in between. Having seen a great Sphinx rising out of the sand in Giza I am lead to believe that they can.

F.H.: That’s one reason why I am glad we are friends, Eliza.

* * *

Frank Haines lives and works in New York. He has shown extensively in the US and internationally, most recently he has been featured in group exhibitions at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York, Krinzinger Galerie in Vienna, and B Gallery in Tokyo. In addition, Haines stages intense, mystical performances that are frequently timed to co-inside with celestial events, most recently at MoMA/PS1 and Performa09. He also performs music with Chris Kachulis as the duo Blanko and Noiry.

Eliza Swann is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York who has shown her work in the US and internationally – most recently at Guest Projects in the UK. She is currently the co-director of the Heliopolis Project, a storefront in Brooklyn dedicated to experimental art and literature, and a tarot counselor.

EDDIE DEAN: Recently Discovered Musical and Sundry Delights (Arthur No. 30/July 2008)

Administrator — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 18:10:32 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 30

Recently Discovered Musical and Sundry Delights
By Eddie Dean

Chango Spasiuk, free concert at the Millennium Stage, Kennedy Center
“I refuse to look like an old woman knitting,” said tango great Astor Piazolla, who broke tradition by always playing his bandoneon while standing. And here’s Chango Spasiuk, another Argentinian bandoneon master, sitting in a chair onstage with his instrument slinking over his knees draped with—a QUILT. But the wild-eyed, long-haired son of Ukrainian immigrants by way of Misiones province looks more like Rasputin than a knitter, like he’s ready to ambush the black-tie Bushcovites gathering down the red-carpeted Hall of Nations at another gala benefit for the masters of war. This isn’t the city music of Piazzolla. This is chamame, a down-home country music like the kind you’d hear at a backwoods wedding in northern Argentina when everybody’s had too much vino tinto and a summer storm’s brewing and the bride and groom have fled the scene. Spasiuk’s chamame has his own touches, a Marc Chagall-fiddler and “cajon peruano” percussionist. His bandoneon is a magic box that breathes, stirring the stilted, conditioned air inside the Kennedy Center, as the chandeliers weep and even the ushers prick up their ears, while outside the Potomac River turns into the coffee-hued, snaking Rio Parana. After the show, Spasiuk talks about his influences: “My father was a carpenter and musician who played at local dances and parties, and my uncle was a singer. I grew up listening to the music from the region of the rivers, the folk music, the polkas and the shotis, and chamame is the strongest color of this mestizo music. I didn’t become a musician after I saw or heard music being played on TV or in a movie or on a stage. Music was everywhere, in every social situation. My music is an utterly happy music but at the same time melancholic and sad.” His favorite musician, he says, is Beethoven.

Magnificent Fiend, Howlin Rain (Birdman/American, 2008)
The Black Crowes have been trying to make a record this good for 20 years, and these young bucks nail it right out of the shoot. Horns of plenty, and heaping helpings from the bottomless well of deep groove. As Greg Allman sang, “The road goes on forever.”

Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost by Tony Russell (Oxford Press, 2007)
You’ve already heard about Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, now meet their kinfolk, the thousand-and-one tongues of pre-Nash Trash hillbilly music: Seven Foot Dill and his Dill Pickles, South Georgia Highballers, Bascam Lamar Lunsford, Red Fox Chasers, Dr. Smith’s Champion Hoss Hair Pullers. They’re all here looking alive as you and me. Old-time music fiend Tony Russell came from England to travel the dusty backroads and knock on many a screen door to find the stories behind the mysterious names emblazoned on the old 78s. The meaty bios are salted with rare photos and period illustrations, such as a Depression-Era newspaper ad for a $3.85 Disston Hand Saw (“Mirror polish, striped back, beautifully etched, Applewood handle, fully carved”) of the sort played by Highballer Albert Eldridge, whose expert bowing “produced a sweet otherworldly humming that anticipates the oscillating electronic sounds of the Theremin.” Seems like it’s always Brits like Russell and Dickens and D.H. Lawrence with the keenest insights into the old, weird America.

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (Vintage, 1990)
Before Sam Peckinpah and Cormac McCarthy, the Spanish-American Southwest had Willa Cather to make an epic of its bleak and beautiful landscape. Instead of horse rustlers and outlaws, the male-bonding celebrated in this novel is the friendship between a pair of French Catholic priests out to save souls in mid-19th-century New Mexico. They’re not just packing Bibles and rosary beads, though, they’re packing heat: “‘You dare go into my stable, you [blank] priest.’ The Bishop drew his pistol: ‘No profanity, Senor. We want nothing from you but to get away from your uncivil tongue.’” Gimme that old-time religion, it’s good enough for me.

The U.S. Navy Band Brass Quartet show at Rockville Town Center
Good to hear the tuba out in the open. A century ago, it was the original Miami Bass, and it can still get to the bottom like nothing else. Except Bootsy.

Maryland Redbud Tree
A few years ago, at a local Arbor Day celebration cut short due to a thunderstorm, I received a redbud sapling in a soggy plastic bag from a volunteer. “Keep it wet and give it some love,” she said, handing out samples in the downpour. It looked like a dead twig with a defeated tail and I planted it knowing it would never have a chance. It has survived but not exactly thrived, a source of annual disappointment: some plain-jane leaves and an antler of spindly twin branches barely taller than my kids. And what about the vaunted red buds? Then, this spring, as if to spite my lack of faith, the little redbud tree burst forth in a fierce torrent of burning scarlet. Its proud, haughty redness rages on.

Cruising Paradise by Sam Shepard (Vintage, 1995)
Lost my wine-stained copy of Shepard’s Motel Chronicles a few years back, but I can still remember entire passages. Even better is this later collection of road pieces from the man who gives Americana a good name. His specialty is digging into mundane situations when nothing seems to be happening and everything is revealed. The sharpest story, “Colorado is Not a Coward,” has a film crew on location in a remote Mexican backwater, where “Not one child in the whole village is crying.” An old peasant rides his mule right into a scene and stalls a shoot, until he’s finally shooed away like a bothersome fly. Then Shepard finds his moment: “The director suddenly changes his mind and wants the charro back. He thinks it might add something authentic to the background, but it’s too late. The old man has disappeared into a mango grove, and the [assistant director]s can’t find him. He’s completely vanished.”

Popkrazy blog
Some people read The Onion, but it don’t make me laugh, and smirking gets old quick. I like my satire savage and unfiltered, not hammered out by committee. This blog site is the real McCoy, a shrine to pop-culture apocrypha past present and future, torn from pages of tattered issues Mad and Creem and beyond. www.popkrazy.com/pop

Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound by Paul Drummond (Process, 2007)
“Tommy Hall, wasn’t he guy who played the jug?” It’s the sort of flip comment from a rock snob that sets you off, like when some boob says Ringo was a crappy drummer or Dylan can’t sing. It’s time to set the record straight. The Elevators had another visionary besides Roky Erickson, and the proof’s in this astounding tome of garage-rock archeology. Lyricist, conceptualist, and yes, a damn fine jug player, Tommy Hall may have paid an even greater price than Roky did for his excursions into extreme non-recreational psychedelia. On the Halloween ‘66 broadcast of American Bandstand, he sounded the battle cry for the counter-culture when Dick Clark asked, “Who is the head of this group, gentlemen?” and Tommy made his immortal reply, “Well, we’re all heads.” A prophet is without honor in his own country, especially Texas in the mid-‘60s, when mind expansion was low on the list of “things to do.”

A Huey P. Newton Story (2001)
I caught this late night at on a motel TV, and didn’t move until the final credits. It seared my mind. Spike Lee directed this version of the one-man play by Roger Guenveur Smith and he wisely lets Smith steal back his own show with a performance that is breath-taking and heart-breaking. If this isn’t already in classrooms, it should be.

“Rag and Bones” White Stripes (2007)
Not since the classic ‘70s duets of Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn has male-female repartee sounded so sweet on record as Jack and Meg do here, milling through a yard sale, trying to score a deal on busted trumpets and toilet seats: “Awwwww, Meg, don’t be rude.”

“Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse,” by George W.S. Trow (1978)
My old buddy Calhoun told me this portrait of Atlantic Records’ demiurge Ahmet Ertegun is the greatest musical profile ever written. As usual, he’s right. When someone who at 15 saw Captain Beefheart perform with Ry Cooder makes such a pronouncement, you best pay attention. So I did, and I discovered 30 years late a tour de force of Boswellian reportage and pure style. Trow circles his subject, a hypnotic figure of leonine grace and bearing, with the utmost patience and care, seducing the reader the same way Ertegun seduced everyone around him, from record-biz royalty and hipster sycophants to Ray Charles and the Rolling Stones. With all its nuance and digression and episodic jolts, the piece conveys a very simple point: Once upon a time, in the very heart of the dark dominion of the pop music industry, there was a record mogul who not only loved music but loved and honored the musicians who made the music. The money and power ultimately meant little next to the feeling Ertegun had witnessing Duke Ellington’s band at the Palladium in 1933: “They were such great stars. They were such powerful men. There was this thing, you know?”

Conversations With Eudora Welty (Washington Square Press, 1985)
The second-greatest music profile remains “Powerhouse,” a short story Welty wrote in a white-hot draft after seeing Fats Waller and his band perform at a dance in Jackson, Mississippi in the late 1930s. It’s the closest this supreme Southern writer ever got to stream-of-consciousness, a testament to the incredible force and presence of Waller. In one of the interviews collected here, Welty recalls how high-minded magazine editors took the hatchet to the ending, a predicament every scribe can commiserate with: “They censored my selection of a song that ended the story. It was ‘Hold Tight, I Want Some Seafood, Mama,’ a wonderful record. They wrote me that The Atlantic Monthly cannot publish those lyrics. I had to substitute ‘Somebody Loves You, I Wonder Who,’ which is okay but ‘Hold Tight’ was marvelous. You know the lyrics with Fats singing, ‘fooly racky sacky want some seafood, Mama!’” Hearing Eudora give the low-down, a couple things come to mind: First, you can’t keep a good writer down. Two, I gotta find that record.

Julio Cortazar on yerba mate, from Hopscotch (Random House, 1966)
“He studied the strange behavior of the mate, how the herb would breathe fragrantly as it came up on top of the water, and how it would dive as he sucked, and would cling to itself…its steaming crater, its own little petulant volcano.” And all these years here I’ve been slurping my mate and spouting nonsense and flying blind in the face of an indifferent universe, while Cortazar sees an entire world in a gourd of frothing green muck. By God, I want whatever he was smoking.

Olympic Hi-Fi Stereo Console
My neighbor Ruben dragged over this vintage record-player cabinet he found when he was renovating an old row house last summer. I stored it in the garage barn out back and forgot all about it. When the weather broke this spring, I ran an extension cord from the house and found the Olympic standing patiently on its spindly legs just where I’d left it. I plugged it in and damn if the 16-33-45-78 turntable didn’t fire right up, so I threw on a JJ Johnson album (In Person) that was gathering dust nearby. Both the stereo and the record were made in the late ‘50s, an era when a high-fidelity console was also a fine piece of furniture, and both sound great a half-century later. Especially Nat Adderly’s cornet.

Some books to check out: Ledyard: In Search of the First American Explorer by Bill Gifford (Harcourt 2007); The Boys from Delores: Fidel Castro’s Classmates from Revolution to Exile by Patrick Symmes (Patheon 2007); Gringos by Charles Portis, (Overlook TP, 2000)

C & D: Two guys who will remain pseudonymous reason together about new records, plus Stephen Malkmus talks golf courses, McCain (Arthur No. 28/Mar. 2008)

Administrator — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 05:26:24 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 28 (March 2008)

C & D: Two guys who will remain pseudonymous reason together about new records

C: [While rummaging through the teeming mail bin.] Hey, look at this. It must be from that new guy who’s always lurking around. What’s his dealio anyway? He’s what my gran would call a nosey nelly.

D: I think he’s here to like, streamline shit. [Reading aloud] To Whom It May Concern: “In my private meetings with Arthur staff and contributors, we have received many disturbing reports regarding the personal, professional and spiritual-energetic conduct of C & D, or as they fancy themselves, ‘The Arthur Music Potentate.’

“There is widespread unease amonst Arthur staff about C & D’s taste in mucic, which has been described to us as ‘bewildering,’ ‘psychedelic parochial,’ ‘arguably harmful,’ ‘contrary to the public’s interest,’ ‘more narrow than their trousers’ and ‘frankly vampiric.’ I don’t quite know what all that means but it’s interesting.

“Moving forward, I have been unable to confirm that C & D are receiving payola from 86 record companies and nineteen out of our fair nation’s top twenty coolmaking marketing firms, but verification of such nefarious activity is only a matter of time.

“I am also unable to confirm their membership in the ‘Brownie-Meinhaus gang.’

“However, in my own cross-examination sessions with C & D, in which, I am preparted to testify, we did not waterboard at all , I was able to determine that they have indeed ‘lost the keys’—their words—for two of Arthur humor/motorcycle advisor Peter Alberts’ Royal Enfield motorcycles; they have indeed borrowed Arthur contributor Paul Cullum’s all-region DVD player for an ‘increasingly indefinite period’; they confess to doing two cut-and-runs at Sugar Hair Salon in Silver Lake; plainly abused Mandy Kahn’s standing offer to drive them to and from various watering holes of ill repute; and, as you may have surmised, it was indeed they — or them? I can never remember ;-( — who affixed ‘Ex Libris C &/or D’ label-plates to all the reference books in the staff library.

“Furthermore, C & D have charged 38 parking tickets to the Arthur expense account since last June. Woe betide their decision to start chillaxing out in Malibu.
“C & D have presumptuously intercepted others’ mail, especially advance vinyls from the Holy Mountain label. They play the Carbonas self-titled LP at bicuspid-crushing volume everyday before lunch. They crack each other up at staff meetings by prefacing every statement with ‘You must learn, we are the Gods of this magazine!’ They are always ordering curry. Plus they’ve used up all the paperclips, and not, I am saddened to report, in a fashion that paperclips were designed to be used.

“The Editor-in-chief, art directors and even the printer have complained that C & D are always late with their copy, which in turns holds up production of the magazine and inhibits crucial cashflow, all for something that, quoting the Editor, ‘nobody really reads or cares about anyway.’

“In my many years of optimal-sizing firms, I have been forced to make many difficult and even gut-wrenching decisions. This however is not one of them! - C & D should be shown the door, and the sooner the better. We will call it a suspension of enduring duration. Now would really be the time to pull the trigger on this. I know people who can do it.

“JUST SAY THE WORD.”

D: [gulps] Doh!
C: I always told you we would are the men who knew too much. [puzzles] But how did they find out about the brownies? I told you to watch out for those new surveillance cams.
D: I thought they were fake. And chicken tikka is not a curry.
C: Ha! And neither is lamb biryani. Wait a second… Fake surveillance cams? That’s a GREAT idea.
D: I know a guy! Just say the word!
C: [cackling] Okay but first let’s get one more column in, shall we? “They” never read this so we can say whatever we like and they won’t know til it’s at the printer, hahaha! The funny thing is we REALLY ARE the potentate around here. But if our services are no longer required here, we’d like to say one thing:
D: SAYONARA BITCHES!!!
C: Because we are in control of the horizontal. We’re the last people that see this bad boy before it’s sent to the printer…
D: Oh yeah! Heh heh.
C: …which means whatever we type here gets printed.
D: Which means…

The Carbonas
The Carbonas
(Goner)
C: They come from Memphis, they sound like Wire and the Buzzcocks, nine songs in 22 minutes. You know what you have to do.
D: Wire and the Buzzcocks? More like attach a wire to your bollocks! [helpfully] And they have a song called “Assvogel.”
C: That’s not a song, it’s a movement. And I think you know what kinda movement I mean…
D: Ahem. It is on the Goner record label. Which is what we are now. Goners.
C: Memphis is the one place I’d be interested in moving to. Start the car, I’ll get my duffel. Here’s to life in exile after abdication!
D: [brightens] I’ve been a goner since the beginning.
C: Being a goner is a serious thing. Who do you think is the original goner?
D: Robert Mitchum, no question. Yeah, that’s it, the Carbonas are the Robert Mitchum of rock!

Dead Meadow
Old Growth
(Matador)
C: I’ve been into these guys since before everyone else!
D: Except for me. I invented these guys. I put a bunch of purple pills in a blender along with a soiled Led Zep patch from my older sister’s jean jacket. Shazam!
C: ‘Old Growth’ is on the shortlist for greatest album title ever, and it’s a pretty good description of the music.
D: Here’s a better one: take a grandfather clock made of diamond-cut crystal, fill it with molasses and drop in on your head!
C: I can’t believe they’re firing you, D. You just keep getting better. Woah, this song is some serious blues shufflage. It’s like a beer commercial for really stinky homebrew.
D: There’s something about this guy’s voice that hits me like a arctic wind. Pass me my mittens. And the b-o-n-g. It’s been a bong time since I rock ‘n’ rolled!

Graveyard
Graveyard
(Tee Pee)
D: Graveyard, eh. Must be a Goth band.
C: Actually they’re not Goth. They’re not even American!
D: [listening to first track, ‘Evil ways’] Right away you know that no matter what happens, you’re gonna at least hear good tone guitar. This is far too good to be American.
C: You are correct sir. They are in fact Swedish.
D: The world’s greatest mimcs. The arch-inhabitors.
C: He pitches his vocal a bit Danzig, a little bit Bobby from Pentgaram. A little bit Jim Morrison. A little bit of the mighty John Garcia.
D: And it must be admitted, a little Cornell.
C: A little bit’ll do ya. This is Ween-quality mimicry here! Reminds me of that band Witchcraft in that they’re going further out. [listening to “Lost In Confusion”] That’s basically the Doors, right there.
D: It is like Witchcraft, but this singer has more hair on his chest.
C: … So, what do you think of that drumming?
D: Kinda…jazzy.
C: Well you know, all those old rock drummers used to play jazz drums too: Ginger, Graham…
D: Keith, Charlie…
C: I listened to this album several times without realizing it. Just kept coming back. I keep coming back to the Graveyard, D.
D: That’s where you’re gonna end up. Might as well get there early and check it out.

Harmonia
Live 1974
(Water)
C: Vintage live recording from krautrock greats Harmonia, never-before-released!
D: How is this possible? Harmonia are some of the original electronic goners.
C: If you turn it up loud enough you can hear people talking—
D: I can’t hear anything except analog electronic perfection.
C: Frankly I am perplexed by the liners which talk that like this Harmonia are barely known, even to konfirmed krautrock fans. Says here, these guys exist somewhere out beyond the “how to buy Krautrock section in your local record shop.” Is this guy insane???
D: There is no local record shop!
C: No, I mean I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Krautrock section at a record store that DIDN’T include Harmonia. And there is a local record shop, actually. It’s not final for vinyl just yet, my friend.

Cloudland Canyon
Lie in Light
(kranky)
D: Oh ho-ho, here we go. Straight from Harmonia into their young disciples.
C: Steady pulsing kosmiche jam. two-man band from Memphis. Or Brooklyn. Or Germany.
D: It’s roadtrip music for a midnight drive on the Autobahn. I’d like to see these guys in a steel cage match versus Fujiya & Miyagi. Then we’ll see who’s the real king of next-gen krautrock!
C: Cloudland Canyon scores early by using “Krautwerk” as a song title. They’re certainly inhabiting a role.
D: I prefer inhabiting a roll, if you dig my way. Anyway, I dig their seriously skulled-out drone vocal dual harmony trip too. And, as a bonus, they appear to have put photos of their seriously babetastic girlfriends on the inner sleeve.
C: Don’t give up hope, D. Those may be their sisters.

Monade
Monstre Cosmic
(Too Pure)
C: It’s Laetitia from Sterolab’s band.
D: [definitively] Stereolab arranged by David Axelrod.
C: Axelrod would say he could make this 5000% better. And he’d be right!
D: I still think it’s pretty good.
C: Stereolab is one of those bands for me like where one day you realize you own 11 albums and you can’t remember how that happened. Like Tom Petty or something. They’re just there, they sound good all the time, never totally essential but always dependable.
D: Musical comfort food.
C: Not the deepest stuff but something pitched a bit differently—more steady, life isn’t so bad while we’re playing this rhythm.
D: It’d be a finer world if people hackysacked and threw their frisbees to this rather than to Umphrey’s McGee.
C: But would it really?
D [thinks]: Maybe it IS the hackysacking itself that’s the problem.

Clark
Turning Dragon
(warp)
D: I say heck no to techno.
C: I say turn it up! I love to rave as long as I don’t have to leave the house. Ooh, nevermind chocolate and peanut butter, I wanna know who got the crystal meth grit in my tub of Vick’s Vap-O-Rub! [leaps off couch and begins swinging arms like a baboon in heat] Does the Aphex Twin know that Clark is running away with his fanbase?
D: It’s like the saying goes: Last night a DJ stole my wife.
C: This album is immense, mind-melting, and has big digi-balls under it’s crushed microchip-covered bib. Phwwwaaaargh!!

Earth
The Bees Made Honey in the Skull of the Lion
(Southern Lord)
C: …And then turned my bones into gelatinous masses.
D: E – A – R – T – H: beautifully decaying, slow gothic western-toned dark time music.
C: I nominate this as the soundtrack to the books-on-tape version of that book The Pesthouse.
D: Great idea!
C: Let’s make it happen.
D: I know a guy!

Dirtbombs
(In the Red)
D: New Dirtbombs.
C: Sounds like old Dirtbombs.
D: Dirt don’t change.
C: Can you imagine ol dirty dirtbombs?
D: I can, actually.
C: A band that sprang fully formed, tupla-like from the brain of journalist and tchoupitoulian bear farmer Gabe Soria.
D: I believe Gabe Soria also is the original creator of the Felice Brothers.
C: But Staggerin’ Stan Lee always takes all the credit.

Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
Real Emotional Trash
(Matador)
C: A blastmaster from the past, back again! Just when you thought the Malk had done already his best work, he returns with a masterwork.
D: He’s kinda like Roger Clemens in that sense.
C: Wellll…..I doubt Clean Steve is shooting HGH into his jugular. He did something way better and got Janet from Sleater-Kinney to play drums in his band. Now that’s playing with power.
D: If there was a Cy Young Award for drummers, Janet would have won it more than once.
C: [listening to the breezy fretwork of "Cold Sun"] Dude, where’s my hackysack!
D: [eyes pop out as the next track's choogle-blooz-boogie revs up] This is the best guitar playing, since, since, I, uh…
C: You are actually dribbling down your chin in disbelief!
D: Once the Malk was a preppy wiseacre, now he’s a sage-like poetaster. His music is heavier than it’s ever been, and I daresay he’s grown into his trousers. “Can’t be what you wanna be/ gotta be what you oughtta be.”
C: That’s pretty good, but how about this lyric: “He was dancing like a pit bull minus the meat.” The song’s called “Hopscotch Willie”—it’s like a dimestore crime novel with a dimebag inside.
D: Yeah a dimebag of high-grade Quicksilver riff pummelage! Listen man, this is just too good. We should call the Malk.
C: You sure he wants to talk to you? What about you hijacking his golf cart at the Dinah Shore open back in ’99?
D: The cart-jacking? That’s bongwater under the bridge, my friend. Here, I’ll call him… [dials on his cell phone while C looks on incredulous] Hey, Steve.
Steve Malkmus: Yo.
D: Um, Steve, first things first, I hope there’s no hard feelings about the golf…mishap…of some years ago.
SM: We’re cool.
D: But, I mean, what is it about you and golf courses?
SM: Well, golf courses and country clubs — which is what I wrote my thesis about — use all this iconography from old England. It’s an English game, in England it signified money, so you’re belonging to something older, like the Mayflower or something. Golf courses themselves… in America they’re kind of a perfect fit with Manifest Destiny, and with the idea of the West being this wide-open nature, this big American image in people’s minds, and a golf course is like a perfectly… it’s like nature, it’s wild, but it’s been refined by man a bit. You’ve conquered nature but you’ve just mowed it so it’s just right, so you’re sort of in the wild but it’s an American wild. Our golf courses are much different than English golf courses. How it started was the courses were just next to the beach. They didn’t refine them really. They were just flat hills, rolling hills that you played on. But we’ve made these ones that are just perfectly manicured. You can put a Hawaiian-style golf course in Minnesota.
D: Are there golf courses in Portland?
SM: Oh yeah. There’s a lot of water here. It’s not like Palm Springs. I went to Palm Springs there with my dad. They have these little tiny watering things, little black strips, for every little plant. There might as well be CIA bugs at every corner. You don’t even know, it’s so manicured and manufactured. But here, it rains a lot. All you need is a lawnmower, I guess, and good drainage. I’ve been with these sort of wild guys, they’re like contractors, almost Jackass-inspired, you know, they get a 12-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon and drive around and gamble on every hole and be sort of like hooligans. They’re not really taking it back so much as getting a little rowdy within the system. But that happens on $27 public courses, so it’s not like they’re not sharing a locker with the oncologist or something.
D: “Sharing a locker with the oncologist”? Steve, you are a great man, and we thank you.
SM: No problem. I mean, you’re welcome.
C: Wait, before you go Steve, any endorsements?
SM: Amplifone guitars.
C: Political endorsements?
SM: Well, we’ve been told, and it seems it’s gonna happen, that John McCain… I’m not saying I like John McCain or anything but my dad’s friend is running for the Senate seat of that guy that got caught in the bathroom of Minnesota, and it seems like McCain is their guy, he’s not only gonna win the Republican thing, he’s gonna win the whole election and it’s already decided, you know? Like that’s how the Republicans think: four steps ahead. Even if it’s not true, they just believe the hypnotism. They really understand hypnotism. “It is because I say it is. Until it isn’t.” I don’t know. Giuliani tanked. McCain’s like the guy that’s at the golf course with guys like my dad. The white males relate to him. At least he thinks for himself, he’s slightly in that tradition of Goldwater, where being Republican almost blurs into liberal in terms of individual rights and stuff like that. We’re pulling for Obama here. My wife’s from Chicago. He’ll be our candidate til he loses. We’ll vote for Hillary if she beats him. I can’t imagine a president being named Huckabee but then again: “President Obama”? I’d probably be surprised by that too.
C: Thank for the real talk, Steve.
D: And for rocking our day!
SM: Bye guys.

Beach House
Devotion
(Carpark)
C: Great record for rainy days with your sweetie, if you have one. And if you don’t, you should!
D: [singing] “Because she’s a BEACH…house!”
C: And with that, we are out of here.
D: SEE YOU BEACHES!!!

BLACK HOLE WHITE MAGIC by Chris Ziegler (Arthur No. 25/Winter 2006)

Administrator — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 04:17:03 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 25 (Winter 2006)

White Magic: Meanwhile, outside the city gates…

Black Hole White Magic
By Chris Ziegler

Reviewed:
Sunn O))) & Boris
Altar
(Southern Lord)

White Magic
Dat Rosa Mel Apibus
(Drag City)

I had Altar complete in my head before I ever heard it: Sunn O))) and Boris together to make the heaviest thing ever, an album that would burst cochlear membranes and the confines of three-dimensional spacetime. Modern music’s two most immovable objects: what would happen when they met? Maybe nothing—in fact, hopefully nothing, and Altar would be pure void, a subatomic drone that would go beyond Sunn O))) and Earth and Flood to the low slow B-flat hum NASA heard coming from a black hole around the same time Sunn O)))’s White 1 came out. “A million billion times lower than the lowest sound audible to the human ear!” NASA said, complete with exclamation point. That was the true sound of the universe, and if any humans could play along, well, here they were: two bands with discographies so colossal that you couldn’t deploy anything less than three syllables per adjective without feeling cheap and weak. (Cyclopean? Titanic? Hephaestean?) NASA called this new science “black hole acoustics” and that was the best explanation yet—better than the New York Times’ cutesy ‘heady metal,’ anyway.

But Altar is the un-heaviest. Six or seven minutes into opener “Etna” (played in the spirit of the volcano that will devour Sicily) presents the riff-vs.-drone grappling match the collaboration demanded, and it is satisfactorily hephaestean. Last year’s Black One and Pink anticipate these moments—Pink’s intro “Parting” especially, though Boris drummer Atsuo rarely pushes a straight 4/4 rock beat, instead mating drums to drone with a rush/recede dynamic that must have cheered the Coltrane students in Sunn O))). Black hole acoustics is science for space and gravity and not amplifier athleticism, though, so credit to Boris and Sunn O))) for Altar’s sidewise moves. Sunn O))) provokes orgasm and Boris melts minds—we know that and so do they, so let’s improv something else.

“Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)” is probably the songiest thing to ever bear a Sunn O))) stamp; Internet drones are straight-facedly calling it “folk pop” and while that’s a bit broad, it’s … understandable. Earth’s Hex had passages of twilight-zone quiet and “Sinking Belle” collects them together: reverbed piano that blooms and dissolves like ink into water with Jesse Sykes (singer from Seattle’s Sweet Hereafter) sounding like Nico at her frowniest, or actually sounding a lot like Sybille Baier, another dissipated ‘60s teuton-chanteuse. After that is “Akuma No Kuma,” an all-synth-no-guitar track (with Joe Preston growling through a vocoder) that fits the fire-and-fog Blade Runner opening, and after that the desolate “Fried Eagle Mind,” a wave of tube tone washing over Boris guitarist Wata’s ghost vocals. “Blood Swamp” has to float back home: rumble finally turns to roar as Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil gets a guitar to sound like something that breathes mud—or blood?—to stay alive. A hephaestean finale, sure, but not the truncated concussion both bands favor. There is clear-to-cloudy precedent for everything on Altar in the million billion minutes of discography belonging to Boris and Sunn O))), but it’s softness as much as the UNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNworgworgUNNNNNNNNNN we’ve known and absorbed. Three songs into Altar, the album start to float. Heavy is light.

* * *

I would hate to just bluntly ask White Magic if they actually believe in magic—too obvious, too impolite. But even a lump like me can tell that Mira Billotte’s songs about trees and wine and sun and sea refer to more than just a holiday fit for Fairport Convention. White Magic sings one thing and secretly means another, or several secret other things aligned in symbolic harmony. The band put a labyrinth on the back cover where they could have put a map. So I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

Billotte and a new set of supporters—including partner Douglas Shaw, Jim White from Dirty Three, Tim DeWit from Gang Gang Dance and noted New York percussionist Tim Barnes—built White Magic’s first full-length Dat Rosa Mel Apibus around her famously agile voice and the cascading piano melodies she plays to match Bert Jansch’s precision fingerpicking. Rosa is gentle on solemn guitar-and-voice songs like “Katie Cruel” (also covered by probable White Magic inspiration Karen Dalton) and “What I See,” but spins into psychedelic experiment like the sitar raga on “All The World Went” and the dub/reggae arrangement (and production!) for finale “Song of Solomon,” which is almost an Althea and Donna song until the accordion starts pumping toward climax. That’s a dizzy finish to a record that begins with a single piano note, and a happy release for the ideas half-hatched on 2004’s Through The Sun Door EP.

Billotte’s voice is (as always) a bird in flight, and she writes lyrics in careful camouflage, packing love songs and lonely songs with loaded notions of sleep and night and sun and light. It’s potent imagery that just begs projection from the listener. One verse of “Hold Your Hand In The Dark” and I was convinced we’d read the same Philip K. Dick essay: he said, “Sleepers awake!” and she sings, “You’ve been sleeping well, my friends/sleeping well/but if you wake, it may be too late.” Her tense mention of hands in chains and waiting in secret are from a particular idea Dick had about … well, too much of this might put this review to sleep. Different listeners discover different things.

Maybe that means Billotte is just writing easy absolutes—like everyone else, she loves love and dislikes… chains? But of course not. That seven-petaled rose on the cover is too close a copy of a Rosicrucian engraving; the translated title “the rose gives the bees honey” was a line used by alchemists to distinguish the search for spiritual truth from the search for worldly gain, and on Rosa’s second song Billotte sings, “Gone was our need for the things of this world/all we had was love.” Rosa feels full of these century-to-century connections. Hidden in this post-Pentangle piano-psych record is something ferociously righteous. White Magic believes in good research.

C & D: Two guys reason together about some new records (Arthur No. 24/Oct. 2006)

Administrator — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 04:00:08 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 24 (October 2006)

C & D: Two guys reason together about some new records

AKRON/FAMILY
Meek Warrior
(Young God)
C: [Looking at publicity photo of band] I’m surprised these guys haven’t featured in Arthur magazine yet. They appear to meet many if not all of this magazine’s apparent requirements for coverage.
D: What, they have beards?
C: Yes. I think the magazine is pretty clearly a beards-only policy. It’s pretty clearly where the underground beard was re-born. Or should I say, re-grown. Remember Alan Moore on the cover of Arthur No. 4?
D: That was a beard to be reckoned with. No razors and shaving cream in the Moore household!
C: Total ‘Lord of the Beards.’ On the other hand, Alan’s finger armor stylings haven’t caught on yet.
D: I will keep an eye out for the beard as we check out these records today. I assume there will be ladies, too?
C: Yes, of course.
D: Who presumably are not of the bearded variety.
C: One never knows, does one? [arches eyebrow meaningfully] Anyways, Akron/Family not only have some beardage, they have four-part harmonies, great cascading drumflows, sprawling late Trane skronk, and that’s all on the first track! I saw these guys once in L.A., they were like a devotional Animal Collective…
D: [smiling upon hearing the refrain "Gone, gone, gone/gone completely beyond."] Ah yes. Beyond. One of my favorite places.
C: [ignoring, continuing] … in Oshkosh overalls, without the echo delays. Like Lubavitchers gone Sun Ra or Ya Ho Wha—
D: Say wha?
C: [snobbishly] Those who know, know. [continuing] They were awesome, in complete uni-mind synch. The audience made backward-and-forward ocean ripples and sounds at their command: ‘Shhh, shhh.’ It was beautiful.

BEACH HOUSE
Beach House
(Carpark)
C: Lovely—possibly perfect?—debut album from this girl-and-boy lovebird combo who sound like they’re living down by the sea on some magic moonlit beach that stretches from France to Baja to Bali.
D: [looks at biographical notes and photo] Actually they live in Baltimore. And there is no beard.
C: Waiter, get this man a beard, se vous plais.
D: [ignoring] But Victoria Legrand—
C: Is that a real name???
D: —is definitely a lady. A lady who knows how to wear an aqua dress.
C: [looking at the photo] And a big gold amulet as well.
D: I would say this is late summer music, recorded at the beach house after everybody else has gone back to the city.
C: It’s kind of minimal naturalismo—organ, drum machine, gorgeous female voice: Stereolab, minus le krautrock propulsion. Midway between Brightblack slow-to-stillness, Beach Boys “Pet Sounds” melancholism and Air and another Carpark artist, Casino vs. Japan. Also, what the heck, I’ll throw in that first Bjorn Olson record on Omplatten [Instrumentalmusik: Instrumental Music...to Submerge in...and Disappear Through, 1999]. Nordic beaches. As you can see, D, it’s a very particular, yet universal, mood. I see soundtracks in their near-future. [picks up phone] “Hello, Beach House? This is Sofia…”
D: Her voice reminds me a bit of Sigur Ros. Hey, whatever happened to those guys? It’s like they evaporated.
C: She can really SING, when it’s called for, which is in creamy middle of the album on the song “Auburn and Ivory.”
D: Is Auburn the new Ebony?
C: All the songs have some sophisto pop songwriting going on: bridges, key changes, et cetera. And the sounds… when the organ comes in on “House on the Hill,” it’s like Captain Nemo down in the Nautilus playing pipe organ for the octopi. Whew! Can you imagine these guys with a big budget…?
D: Ahoy! Captain Nemo: ANOTHER famous bearded musician.

MICK BARR & ZACH HILL
Earthship
(5RC)
C: New summit album by underground instrumental speed kings: guitarist Mick Barr of Ocrilim, and drummer Zach Hill of Hella. It’ll tighten yer wig!
D: Well, I won’t need coffee for the next five months.
C: They’re going in for the kill like two old ladies speed-crocheting. Mind the wheedlework.
D: They are the speed criminals who no doubt are under surveillance by the authorities of rock. There’s a NEW MOTHER IN THE TEMPLE if you know what I mean!
C: It does have that High Rise/Mainliner/Musica Transonic thing going a bit. Ah, Japan. Some people may also be put in mind of the Peter Brotzman Octet classic assault album, Machine Gun.
D: That’s a ripping title, “Earthship.” [considers] If you lived there, you’d be home by now.
C: Sometimes they’re against each other, sometimes they unify.
D: I must ask: is there a beard?
C: [looks at publicity photo] Have beard, will rock.These guys are the opposite of Sunn o))): they do as many notes and beats as possible per hour. It’s anti-void music, filling everything with sound.
D: Without the benefit of riffage.
C: There ARE riffs—you just need to adjust your attention to catch them. It’s condensed free rock. Like the instruments are too hot to handle. Except for this one song I keep coming back to… [plays "Closed Coffins and Curtains."]
D: Whoa! What…is…THAT???
C: It’s like some super-processed symphonic tri-guitar. Like what that weird Godley & Creme instrument was supposed to sound like, remember that? The Gizmo. They made a whole triple-album with it, and Peter Cook too. Bonkers stuff.
D: [playing the 30-second track again] I am totally spooked. [musing] Perhaps if Mr. Ocrilim slowed down and contemplated like this occasionally, he’d get to somewhere really rewarding.
C: Rewarding to you.
D: [laughs] Of course, me! Who else matters?

THE HORRORS
The Horrors ep
(Stolen Transmission)
D: [Reading song titles] They have a song called “Sheena Was a Parasite”? I worship them already.
C: Frantic organ and guitar-driven psychobilly freakbeat rock’n'roll by five sharply dressed’n'coiffed Dickensian Brits from the belfry.
D: They look like they live in chimneys and spend all day drinking red wine and listening to The Cramps, Tav Falco & Panther Burns…probably the Hives too, and the Birthday Party and Screaming Jay Hawkins (who they cover here) and Screaming Lord Sutch and of course the right honorable Arthur Brown. I think they like bourbon and some pretty nasty stuff.
C: [listening to “Excellent Choice”] They’ve got a good look and a good sound and they seem up for a good party. They’ll come to your town and help you burn it down. And then dance in the ashes.

PRIMAL SCREAM
Riot City Blues
(Capitol)
C: They’re been around approximately forever. And this is their once-a-decade “rock n roll is dumb fun” concept record, apparently.
[C & D cringe for 15 minutes]
C: Talk about the horrors.
D: Where’s the pooper scooper?
C: Rock n roll should be fun, it can be stoopid, but it should never, ever be tedious. One hates to witness someone failing at slumming. It’s embarrassing to all involved. Does [Primal Scream singer] Bobby Gillespie seriously think this band can boogie? Ha ha ha. Poor Mani…
D: [thoughtful] Every once in a while an object is mysteriously withdrawn from stores by its manufacturer shortly after its introduction. That kind of decisive action may be appropriate here.

THEUSAISAMONSTER
Sunset at the End of the Industrial Age
(Load)
C: You will recall that both members of THEUSAISAMONSTER are members of Black Elf Speaks, which is one of the great band names ever.
D: What did Black Elf have to say?
C: I don’t know, it was this kind of gibberish? But it seemed important. [sadly, as if narration] ‘And Black Elf spoke, but no one could understand what he said.’
D: [helpfully] Maybe he had something in his mouth.
C: ….
D: Or, he might have a speech impediment.
C: …
D: [looking at album cover] Naturally I am wondering, what kind of monster?
C: Probably some kind of troll. On PCP.
D: That’s pretty negative. … Um…. Idiocracy got you down again?
C: Yeah… Between seeing that and re-reading Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning last week, I guess I’m feeling more bleh about human life than ever. The idiots don’t know when to stop. And there’s more and more of them. They want war and fast food and spectacle. They’re bad at learning. We’re outnumbered, and it’s only getting worse because the herd never gets culled, since we lack exterior predators.
D: [considers] No more trolls.
C: What are we gonna do? I don’t see a way out. Ah, hell. Maybe that’s why the industrial age is going to end, as it says here on the album cover. [reading from the press sheet] “Of course The USA Is A Monster wants to turn the tide and prepare us for the time after the lights go dim on Western Civilization’s exhaust pipe party.” Sounds good to me! Let’s engage. [starts “The Greatest Mystery”]
D: YEARGH!!! THUNDERAMA!
C: Whoa. [45 minutes later…]Whoa.
D: A shining path indeed! Was that all one song?
C: Unbelievable, just ridiculous. The Who, Bruford-era Kid Crimson, Oneida, minutemen, Lightning Bolt, Liars, Rush. Homeopathic progrock with a lot of heavy spiritual-political truths and theories (“We are only holograms”) and jokes and accusations (“You’re a liar! And a CROOK!”) and digs (“My favorite subject is…me!”). That last song, the three-section “The Spirit of Revenge”…
D: What a giant marching groover that one is! These guys must be super-fit. I’m guessing it’s a lentil and walnut-heavy diet.

WOLF EYES
Human Animal
(Sub Pop)
D: [listening to “A Million Years”] This makes me insanely happy but I can’t put my finger on why exactly.
C: I feel like it’s 4am at the docks and we’re hearing the soundtrack to some new-millennium industrial-environmental horror show. To update Funkadelic: Mother Earth is REALLY screaming now. [listening to “Lake of Roaches”] Especially now that these noise dudes have a horn. Yikes.
D: I see scrapheap monsters vomiting spare parts and microchips.
C: Urgh, this is uncomfortable in a really good way, like a good ol’ Khanate death-slog through the bog. It’s the feel-nothing hit of the fading summer.
D: “Rusted Mange” sounds like somebody getting run over.
C: “Leper War” is more queasy listening. I’m thinking of torture gardens and animal abuse science labs. All the atrocities going on behind the curtain. Machines playing with their prey. Angry dogs chomping on kids’ talking playtoys. Trains full of prisoners.
D: [thoughtfully] This is music to blow up Monsanto to.
C: Wolf Eyes: for when you want to detonate your day.

THE THERMALS
The Body, The Blood, The Machine
(Sub Pop)
C: Melodic meat-and-potatoes punk rock trio from the Pacific Northwest. Two women and a beardless man. This is a concept album about being on the run from a Christian authoritarian USA of the future.
D: [in Chuck D. voice] Fear of a Christian Planet. Fear, baby.
C: In other words, it serves as science fiction adventure, prophecy and soundtrack for real life in half of this country. It’s okay—I like the sentiment and the ambition—but I’m bored.
D: None of the hooks go in deep enough. It’s probably good to drive to, though.
C: The guy’s voice reminds me of Lee Ranaldo’s, which makes me think I’d rather be listening to Daydream Nation. Ha!
D: That should be the new Arthur bumper sticker: “I’d rather be listening to Daydream Nation.”

Good God!: A Gospel Funk Hymnal
(Numero Group)
C: Here’s another shining path: Christian funk-soul music from the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, which, let’s face it, that period was insane in every genre, every medium.
D: The first two minutes of this album provide everything I need from music.
C: This makes me love Jesus a lot more than when they come to my door and yell at me. Another Grade AAAA reclamation project from Numero Group, America’s most consistently great record label. No one runs a dig like they do.
D: They live in the crates.
C: They were BORN in the crates.
D: [boogieing] I’m happy as a Christian on the pipe and there’s nothing Bobby Gillespie and the Thermals can do about it! [thinking] If Christian soul is so good why is Christian rock so bad?
C: Well, you know what they say: the The Lord records in mysterious ways. And nu gospel metal is one of the most mysterious.
D: Christian rock has more preservatives and additives and pesticides and weird chemicals in it, which gives it big hair and a nasty sheen. This, on the other hand, is organic soul. Black granola Jesus.

THE BYRDS
There Is A Season boxset
(Sony Legacy)
C: Four CDs and a DVD for you, the gracious few. Their sound really sounds good right now. It must be those harmonies. In the book McGuinn talks about how none of the three of them had a distinctive enough voice for pure lead—but together the three made one beautiful voice. Then you’ve got those great jazz drums, that guy’s got interesting stuff going on all the time, and is willing to stop it all when it’s called for. And the guitar solos are completely nuts. People always think about the Byrds and the chiming 12-strings, band there is that, but the guitar solos are these wonderful jagged raga/jazz stop-start-scatter runs, if that makes any sense. I guess I just never had ears to hear it before. Music for golden hours in the forest, by the river. Pretty good for cleanly shaven gents. They were always tasteful ‘til they got shaggy in the ‘70s—played folk songs, played contemporary stuff (Dylan covers), some beautiful originals.
D: [sings along to “5D (Fifth Dimension”] “I opened my whole heart to the whole universe and I found it was loving/and I saw the great blunder my teachers had made/Scientific delirium madness…” Still one of the best descriptions of the spiritual side of an LSD trip I have ever encountered
C: David Crosby’s extremely gentle three-way plea “Why Can’t We Be Three” is pretty astonishing in its brazenness. You want to know how it will be/me and you/or her and me?’ Etc. And their version of “Wild Mountain Thyme”—“we’ll go gathering mountain thyme across the wild purple heather”—with harmonies and orchestra is as goosebumpraising as that Ravi Shankar at the Kremlin album.
D: Live cuts on disk 4? Not so happening.

TRAINWRECK RIDERS
Lonely Road Revival
(Alive)
C: Really good cosmic country-tinged Bonnaroo-ready indie rock from San Francisco by dudes who can write hooks. Shit, I bet they can jam it out too.
D: I don’t know why I’m filing it under “guilty pleasure,” but I am.
C: No need to feel guilty. But yeah I can already hear the hacky sacks being hacked, or kicked, or whatever it is they do. Still, you can’t judge a band by who you think their fans will be…

THE BLACK KEYS
Magic Potion
(Nonesuch)
C: I guess their fan Robert Plant didn’t end up joining the band on bass after all. Maybe he forgot to file for his post-beard exemption.
D: Excellent! The Black Keys. They take this stuff so seriously. There’s axle grease on their denims at all times.
C: So, after their tremendous levee-busting EP of Junior Kimbrough covers, here’s their major label debut. Are diminishing returns setting in?
D: It’s already a cult classic with me! And that’s the only one who matters.
C: You know, I hate to say it, but this is really underwhelming material from an incredibly talented band. I’m not hearing a single one of those choogling grooves that they used to mine so effortlessly. Sometimes low fidelity does not equal authenticity, it just means it sounds like crap.
D: Well it’s good enough for me to want to fire up the grill and have a cookout.
C: I’m hungry for something more.

Ed Rosenthal’s Big Buds Calendar
(Quick American Archives)
D: The best month is the Dutch still life with the other herbs and stuff:
C: It’s called “after the harvest” of course. [laughs] They totally have this calendar hanging by the desk at all the farms up in Humboldt. [Reading] Ha, “Slacker Thanksgiving” on Nov. 23, that’s a funny one. “As the bud ripens.” Heh.
D: To paraphrase AC/DC: Ed Rosenthal has the biggest buds of them all.

BUFFALO KILLERS
Buffalo Killers
(Alive)
C: Trio from Cincinnati—stomping ground of Bootsy Collins and Afghan Whigs—with two lumbering looking beard brothers who make a sweet racket that recalls the Black Crowes, Mountain, Hendrix. Definitely some Beatles on the first two songs.
D: From the same label that first signed the Black Keys. They must have scouts all over Ohio.
D: My main concern is why don’t they call themselves The Buffalo Lovers. [suspiciously] Were any buffalos harmed in the making of this album?
C: I love an album that builds and starts hitting its stride by the halfway point. All “River Water” needs, if it needs anything more, is P.P. Arnold singing backup. Then they destroy you with the next tune…
D: [listening to “With Love”] Now THAT is a ballad.

BLIND FAITH
London Hyde Park 1969 dvd
(Sanctuary)
C: Well this is pretty cool. They’ve issued the DVD of this great film of this short-lived supergroup playing for free to 100,000 at London’s Hyde Park back in 1969.
D: It was so weird living through the decade called the ’80s and witnessing Steve Winwood wearing a leather trenchcoat and making sterile radio pop. And now to see Winwood here, looking so young. [The band kicks into "Sea of Joy"] He really was a great soul singer. Whoa check it out, they pan the crowd and there’s is Kenneth Anger himself in epaulets and sideburns and black lips waving his wand of joy.
C: Did you ever notice that every object or action is suddenly improved if you add “of joy” to the end of it?
D: Let’s see…I think I’ll grow a beard of joy. Shitbonger, you’re right!
C: Nice to see that bearded Ginger Baker brought along his handpainted drums on this occasion. Ginger in the ’60s was the equivalent of Gary Young from Pavement in the ’90s: a wild older dude who’s really good, but may not mix well with the others.

GRAHAM COXON
Love Travels At Illegal Speeds
(Parlophone/EMI)
C: Here comes the resolute ex-guitarist from Blur with just a corking great solo album, his best one so far.
D: Blur? I did not appreciate that bloodless dress-up party called Britpop.
C: Well between this and that Dirty Pretty Things single I’m ready to get out my Fred Perry shirts again.
D: Yet if you hadn’t told me about the Blur connection, I would simply be feasting on this short spiky guitar nugs. He sounds like a long lost friend of Wreckless Eric, which makes him a friend of mine.
C: Listen, Graham’s even written the essential tune addressing the new beard conundrum. Dig this song, where he’s watching a guy and girl get off together, it’s kind of an thematic update of Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” [puts on "What's He Got?" and turns up the lyric "He's got a lot of hair on his face and on his head/ So why I get my hair cut so short instead?"]
D: Apparently in cleancut Graham Coxon’s world, the beard gets the girl.

“SEASONED GREETINGS: Deck the blahs with boughs of holly” by Molly Frances (Arthur No. 25/Winter 2006)

Administrator — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 03:32:35 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 25 (Winter 2006)

THE NEW HERBALIST
By Molly Frances

The holiday commonly called Christmas brings with it general feelings of dread and depression, as well as the intrusion of traffic, crowds, family, chocolate-covered everythings, large rectangular boxes, turtlenecks, and relatives with weird hair giving even weirder gifts. Well friends, I’m here to tell you: It has nothing to do with that!

Whichever winter holiday you choose to celebrate, from the Winter Solstice on down to Kwanzaa, I think we can do it better. We can make new rituals and traditions to define what these holidays are really supposed to reflect: faith, love, and rebirth.

The recently published Pagan Christmas: The Plants, Spirits, and Rituals of Yuletide by Christian Rätsch and Claudia Müller-Ebeling (Inner Traditions Press) is a fascinating resource to explore the origins and varieties of our holiday traditions. If you thought Christmas was a time to lay low the libido and close your heart for the season, this book begs you to reconsider. Resist the mood-killing family gatherings and neutering woolen sweaters and breathe in the seductive aroma of the ages. The very spices, plants, and incense that make us cringe when encountered in uncomfortable holiday environments have been used for hundreds of years to invoke fertility, love, and magic during the winter “feast of love.” Nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, anise, saffron, ginger and vanilla were used in ancient Roman kitchens in baking and beverages, and many of these spices were considered to be aphrodisiacs. The authors instruct that “in medieval times festive meals were sprinkled to the thickness of a finger with spice powder, most often pepper, nutmeg, and cloves.” So gather the freshest ingredients you can find and get to work on those gingerbread houses, cookies, and spiced ciders to rekindle ye olde ancient holiday magic.

The greatest burden of the holiday season is of course the madness surrounding the selection of gifts, but it needn’t be this way. Why not offer your friends a bowl of steamed kale greens garnished with olive oil, lemon juice and a festive toss of dried cranberries? Tell them you offer this bowl of nutrient-rich greens to open their heart chakras. They will be so overcome by your gesture of goodwill and caring that that marshmallow santa will be thrown to the ground in favor of real nourishment. Give your beloved a pomegranate, the symbol of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. This deeply romantic gift will sweep away all previous longing for that iPod or riding lawnmower they were expecting. Traditional and modest gifts of candles, plants, and incense are often the most potent and symbolically rich. Frankincense is described in the book as stimulating feelings of intense sensual joy and, due to its THC content, can create “pharmacological effects.”

When we decorate and give gifts of green plants and flowers we are maintaining an ancient connection to faith and the hopeful message that winter will pass into spring. This is a time to celebrate the cycles of life, the light that we know will follow the dark winter days. Pagan Christmas reminds us that the Christmas tradition contains many holdovers of pagan rituals that were adopted by Christianity due to their undying presence in the popular mind. The disconnected presence of the living room tree can bounce back to a joyous significance when you consider that “pines are a symbol of immortality and resurrection. The idea that lucky children could find treasure hidden under them may come from the tree’s long history as an object of pagan worship. Like fir and spruce, the perfume of the pine needles and pine resin was considered forest incense.” The beauty of nature can thrive even in the dead of winter—or the suburban horror of Uncle Frank’s den.

Let’s not allow the manufactured and cynical distractions of the winter season to bully the magic from our thoughts. Creativity and passion can inspire us to cultivate new ideas about sharing time and and gifts with the people we love most. The authors of Pagan Christmas point out that even normally bummed-out Nietzsche would perk up in anticipation of Christmas approaching. Instead of dredging your defeated soul to the mall, pay a visit to your local farmers market and browse the bounty of the fall harvest. Spread nature’s sweetest gifts of tangerines or bags of pecans. Plant a tree in someone’s name (http://www.americanforests.org/planttrees) to celebrate the proliferation of nature. Break out of your Jello mold and create a spicy new holiday dish. And If you find yourself alone this winter, as all of us do one time or another, why not adopt a cat or dog? They will keep you warm, and if you feed them they will love you forever. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

“Wise Walnut” by Molly Frances (Arthur No. 23/Sept. 2006)

Administrator — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 03:23:26 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 24 (September 2006)

THE NEW HERBALIST
By Molly Frances

“Wise Walnut”

Fall is here. Embrace the wisdom of the squirrel and gather up your nuts. We need them more than they do.

One of the most ancient of foods, walnut fossils have been found dating from the Neolithic period over 8,000 years ago. Rumors of the walnut groves in the hanging gardens of Babylon have been circulating for some time, and King Solomon is said to have often strolled among his walnut trees “into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley” (Song of Solomon 6:11).

In the Middle Ages, the “Persian” walnut became known as the “English” walnut as colonial-minded English sailors carted off loads of the nutty bounty and spread them about Europe, and eventually the “new world.”

Jupiter’s royal acorns, as the ancient Romans liked to call them, bear a suspicious resemblance to the human brain. That makes walnuts brain food in every sense of the word. They’re loaded with Omega 3 essential fatty acids, vitamin E, and minerals necessary for mental and heart health. It’s no coincidence that as our intake of omega 3s have decreased drastically, depression and heart disease have risen. Get this, slim jim: Your brain is 60% fat, and cell membranes will build themselves out of whatever fats are available. Omega 3s are the optimum choice, but most people fill up on omega 6s, found in polyunsaturated vegetable oils and animal products. An imbalance skewed towards Omega 6 fats are associated with inflamation, degenerative diseases, and mental disorders of all kinds, including increased violent activity. Sound like anyone you know?

Dr. Andrew Weil believes that the lack of Omega-3s in our diet is “the most serious nutritional deficiency we have in this country.” This deficiency is believed to be responsible for a wide range of diseases such as alzheimer’s, arthritis, ADD, diabetes, heart disease, PMS, and severe and manic depression. Omega 3 oils are found in oily fish, walnuts, flaxseeds, hemp seeds, and sea greens such as hijiki and kombu. They are essential for retinal function and vision, immunity, promoting good cholesterol, and cancer prevention.

Got the blues? Skip the sundae and go right to the nuts. Omega 3s stabilize moods and increase energy levels. They are also beauty oils, keeping skin youthful and glowing and hair soft and shiny. Get healthy and happy by replacing some of those 6s with 3s. How about a handful of walnuts as a snack or on a salad? How about some ground-up flax seeds? Why not? Let’s all learn how to cook up some delicious sea greens like Hijiki; it’s fun to say and more fun to eat.

Make certain to store shelled walnuts in the refrigerator (up to six months) to keep the oils from going rancid, as they can become carcinogenic. Chopped and ground nuts go bad more quickly than whole raw nuts. You can tell a bad bag of nuts by the smell – if they have the aroma of oil paint throw them away.

Enjoy a bag of organic raw walnuts or whole fresh walnuts from your local farmer’s market. Nothing says “I have arrived” like a big bowl of walnuts on your table and a nutcracker placed just so. You’ll have a potential moneymaker on your hands as well, playing the shell game with your friends. The increased walnut-fueled brain power is sure to benefit your sleight of hand.

“A Better Way to Cool Off” by Molly Frances (Arthur No. 23/July 2006)

Administrator — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 03:17:36 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 23 (July 2006)

The New Herbalist
By Molly Frances

“A Better Way to Cool Off”

As spring fever’s eager blossoming inevitably withers into the summertime blues, we seek quick relief among the abundance of icy blended concoctions that our advanced civilization offers us. Unfortunately, though that iced coffee provides a momentary respite on a balmy day, it will also quickly return you to a state of dehydration and turn up the heat of your internal thermostat.
The ingredient for the most soothing and refreshing of summer drinks is probably already growing in your garden. For a deeply cooling drink, brew up a tasty pot of mint tea.

A handful of the fresh herb plucked from your garden and tossed into a carafe of hot water will have you living the good life in no time at all. Be sure to include the stems of the plant. This tea may be served cold as well, but resist the temptation of pulling out your blender. Frozen drinks and ice cream will hold heat in your body and freeze digestion. To really keep extra cool this summer, avoid your freezer and enjoy your summer beverages without ice.

For a truly sublime experience, serve your friends a pot of Atay bi Na’na’. Made from boiling water, fresh mint, a small amount of green tea and honey to taste, Morocco’s most popular drink is consumed all day long. Usually served in ornate silver pots and small decorated glasses, it is customary for three servings to be offered by the host, who pours the tea from a distance of up to several feet above to aerate the brew and show off his skills. Practice this before the guests arrive.

In addition to its cooling properties, Mint tea settles the stomach and digestive disorders, eases migraines, and helps draw out infection upon first signs of a sore throat. The powerful antiviral properties of peppermint are due to its main active ingredient, menthol oil, which opens and heals sinuses, bronchial tubes, and vocal chords. It is also said to create a mentally stimulating and relaxing vibration that reduces stress and anxiety.

So what have we done to deserve this magical leaf? As the legend goes, Hades, god of the underworld, was busted by his wife Persephone in mid-frolic with a hot young wood nymph named Mintha. Persephone, who had been somewhat rudely snatched down to the underworld by Hades in the first place, was in no mood to overlook this infidelity and stomped the little nymph underfoot, transforming her into the plant we know today as Mint. In a gesture of atonement to Mintha, Hades would endow the plant with its sweet and unmistakable aroma.

Persephone may have extinguished Mintha in the flesh, but her spirit has lived on in this most promiscuous of plants. There are few lands that the wildly propagating mint has not traveled to, and few cultures that she has not seduced. As 16th century herbalist John Gerard declared, “The smelle rejoiceth the heart of man.” From Egyptian temples to Roman baths, Mint has been used for all varieties of healing and pleasure. The Pharisees even paid their taxes with it, as revealed by this scolding from Jesus: “Woe to you, Pharisees! You tithe mint and rue and every edible herb but disregard justice and the love of God.” Ouch!

While perhaps more prized for its pleasure-inducing than medicinal properties, the mint julep has been the preferred drink of the Southern Aristocracy. Accept nothing less than fresh mint, water, sugar, and Kentucky bourbon. As one of its key proponents, S.B. Buckner, Jr. warned in 1937: “A mint julep…is a ceremony… a rite that must not be entrusted to a novice, a statistician, nor a Yankee.” He instructs, “Go to a spring where cool, crystal-clear water bubbles from under a bank of dew-washed ferns. In a consecrated vessel, dip up a little water at the source. Follow the stream through its banks of green moss and wildflowers until it broadens and trickles through beds of mint growing in aromatic profusion and waving softly in the summer breezes. Gather the sweetest and tenderest shoots and gently carry them home.”

As Mintha clearly gets around, she has crossbred into hundreds of varieties including chocolate mint, basil mint, ginger mint, Persian mint, Corsican mint and Pineapple mint. All this intermingling frustrated one ninth-century monk, who declared, ” I would rather count the sparks in Vulcan’s furnace than count the varieties of mint.” The most popular forms are spearmint and peppermint, the former most often used in cooking but the latter more medicinally potent.

As Buckner proclaimed, “bury your nose in the mint, inhale a deep breath of its fragrance and sip the nectar of the gods.”

BAD GUYS: JOHN PATTERSON on “The Road to Guantanamo” (Arthur No. 23/July 2006)

Administrator — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 02:40:41 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 23 (July 2006)

Bad Guys
The Road to Guantanamo is a thoroughgoing demolition of the lies and unlimited incompetence of Powell, Bush and Rumsfeld says John Patterson

“We are Americans. We don’t abuse people who are in our care.” Thus spake Gen. Colin Powell in reference to the United States’ grotesque and immoral confinement of “unlawful combatants” at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Those remarks would have been news to the prisoners who committed suicide there recently, but also to the three kidnapped and incarcerated young Britons of Pakistani descent known as the Tipton Three—if they’d had access to news of any sort at Gitmo. It turns out that, having also been deprived of access to lawyers, the Red Cross or even their own families, the Tipton Three knew as little of the outside world for two-and-a-half years as the outside world knew of the goings-on inside Guantanamo’s gruesome Camp Delta.

Not any more. Thanks to co-directors Michael Winterbottom (24-Hour Party People, In This World) and Mat Whitecross, the Guantanamo genie is forever out of its bottle. Using interviews with the three men, who were finally released from Gitmo in March 2004, interspliced with harrowingly persuasive recreations of their journey to Guantanamo via Pakistan and Afghanistan, and of their terrifying experiences in US military custody, The Road To Guantanamo constitutes the first corroborated witness account of America’s Gulag to stand a chance of being widely seen in the United States, whose populace has hitherto seemed disturbingly content to snore its way through the progressive dismantling of its Constitution.

The shattering experiences of Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rusal – which included being abducted by Afghanistan˙s Northern Alliance and sold to US Forces as Taliban members (for a cool $10,000-per-head bounty—this is where our money is going?), solitary confinement, torture, 5-on-1 beatings, hoods, shackles, blinders, sensory deprivation and being witness to extrajudicial murders—make for a thoroughgoing demolition of the lies of Powell, Bush and Rumsfeld. American viewers, long accustomed to our child president˙s characterization of Gitmo inmates as “bad guys,” may find themselves asking how their own military could be so fascistic, so cruel and, most dispiriting of all, so fucking stupid.

Named for the West Midlands town where they grew up, the three young men flew to Pakistan, the home of their parents, to attend the wedding of one of their number, but also to enjoy a holiday in their land of origin, in the aftermath of 9/11. Foolishly, they took a side-trip into Afghanistan, where they were caught up in the US bombing of Taliban bases and cities, and then captured in the confused retreat from Kunduz.

Accused of consorting with Bin Laden and the Taliban, the Three in fact had watertight, easily verified alibis. Two of them were—and how hard is it to check this out?—on police probation in Tipton for petty criminal acts, the other had a full-time job. That wasn’t enough for their captors, gut-wrenching proof that American military xenophobia extends not merely to hated enemies, but also to valued allies. Unlawful combatants: meet unlimited incompetence.

The imagery confronting us in The Road to Guantanamo suggests that the United States has abandoned its sanctimoniously proclaimed fealty to such secular gods as Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton, only to replace them with Orwell, Kafka and Koestler. Two years of nonstop torture, interrogation and physical abuse—stress-holds, strobelights, earsplitting death-metal, enforced silence, isolation cells —strongly recall Gestapo or KGB information-gathering techniques, Room 101, Darkness at Noon. All that is lacking are electrodes, waterboards and clocks striking 13. And Big Brother? He’s already here. Learn to love Him.

AT HOME, AT WORK, AT PLAY: A listener’s guide to Sparks’ first 20 albums by Ned Raggett (Arthur No. 29/May 2008)

Administrator — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 01:37:29 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 29 (May 2008) (which also featured a lengthy interview with the Maels), available from the Arthur Store…

At Home, At Work, At Play
A listener’s guide to Sparks’ first 20 albums by Ned Raggett

There aren’t many recording artists in their fourth decade of recorded work whose new albums consistently merit not only attention but, more often than not, a round of applause. But Sparks were an unusual band from the start, so perhaps, perversely, their virtually unprecedented no-fade career arc is to be expected. The full story of the musical partnership of brothers Ron and Russell Mael is worthy of a thick book or two (or at least a really good documentary), but the basic body of their musical work—20 studio albums preceding their newest, the forthcoming Exotic Creatures of the Deep—can at least be talked about here. Not all are front-to-back classics, some may not even be keepers, but the standard of excellence is so high, the continuous artistic risk-taking so audacious, and the number and range of artists they’ve inspired in the last 35 years so vast—from Queen to Morrissey to Pet Shop Boys to Faith No More to Bjork to Franz Ferdinand—that even the rare misstep deserves examination. Onward, then…

SPARKS (1972)
Though L.A. performances and a number of demos helped get the initial word out about their distinctly unusual take on pop and rock—the demos still for the most part unreleased, though noted Sparks freak Morrissey has showcased a couple here and there over the years via compilations and show intro tapes—it was the self-titled debut album that first brought the Maels and company into the public eye.
Getting Todd Rundgren as producer was key. Probably no one else in America had both the relatively high profile to get the recording ball rolling and the artistic appreciation for the curious yet compellingly catchy pop the Maels and their band were creating. Balanced between a whimsical fragility and a dramatic rock punch that stacks up to any proto-metal group of the era, it’s not merely the tension between the sides that makes Sparks’ first album so memorable, it’s the fact that it’s so instantly enjoyable.
If, as the story goes, opening track “Wonder Girl” was a hit in Montgomery Alabama and nowhere else, it wasn’t because it couldn’t be hummed. It can. The band’s whole approach can be heard in this single song: the intentional use of a cliché in the title, Russell’s sweet-with-a-twist-of-sour singing (then and now, one of the most uniquely beautiful vocals in modern pop), Ron’s sprightly keyboards and lyrics which are sunny only if you’re not listening closely. But it’s also a tour de force of production—listen to the crisp hits of Harvey Feinstein’s cymbals and the almost electronic smack of the beats. On the rest of Sparks, songs change tempo on a dime, harmonies swirl in and out of nowhere, strutting rock snarling melts into boulevardier swing, with the monstrous album closer “(No More) Mr. Nice Guys” rocking just as hard as the similarly-titled song by Alice Cooper that it predates. The sense of theatricality so integral to Sparks is already present, but this is as far away from the inanities of such ‘rock’ Broadway efforts as Rent as you can get—and thank heavens for it. The whole shebang really is art rock without apology.
Note: This album was released under the original band name of Halfnelson, with the brothers then switching to Sparks after the prompting of their then-manager/label head Albert Grossman, who was convinced this was the key to success. There have been stranger solutions.

A WOOFER IN TWEETER’S CLOTHING (1973)
In some ways A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing is the first album redux. Unchanged lineup, same number of songs, and the first song on the album is, again, about a girl. But this time the stakes were a little higher:

Oh, no! Bring her home and the folks look ill
My word, they can’t forget, they never will
They can hear the stormtroops on our lawn
When I show her in…

Imagine that being sung by Russell with an almost sweetly diffident air over a chugging rhythm, with a chorus that soars down to the backing pseudo-Col. Bogey whistles and you’ve got “Girl From Germany,” one of the wickedest songs ever. From there Woofer’s could do whatever it damn well pleased, and did. Beergarden polka singalongs crossed with minimal drones that transmute into a rapid roll of drums, frenetic high-speed instrumentation and a mock Mickey Mouse-style letter-by-letter cheerleader/gangshout for the titular character, “Beaver O’Lindy.” A tune called “The Louvre” sung, but of course, in French, sounding—at least initially—like a random 1968 Beach Boys number drop-kicked across the Atlantic, trailing sparkling keyboards in its wake. A concluding song, “Whippings and Apologies,” begins like Stereolab warming up for a 20-minute freakout and then keeps stop-starting—including a great fake ending —so Russell can discuss the situations a tender-hearted sadist must face. “Do-Re-Mi”—yes, THAT “Do-Re-Mi,” from The Sound of Music, not one of the lyrics changed, turns into a high-speed gallop halfway through the second repetition of the words and gets even more over the top after that point. Nearly the whole album is so insanely fractured, and once again, so astonishingly catchy, that it’s hard to know what to highlight.
At the heart of the album lies “Moon Over Kentucky,” the only song bassist Jim Mankey wrote for the band (with Ron sharing the credit), and arguably the landmark of the first incarnation of Sparks. It’s all five members at their most dramatic, with the opening piano and wordless vocals given a steady, darker counterpoint with Mankey’s bass. This gets contrasted with verses shot through with a nervous keyboard rhythm, Feinstein’s rolling drums and a snarling riff that sounds like a Tony Iommi line delivered in two seconds. Russell yodels like a lost ghost somewhere in the woods and the end result feels like what Nelson Eddy and Jeanette Macdonald would have done if James Whale had directed one of their films, down to the horror-movie organ final flourish.

KIMONO MY HOUSE (1974)
What to say about an album that endless amounts of musicians openly refer to as a touchstone? The one that was Bjork’s first record she bought with her own money (“My mum and my stepdad didn’t like it and I did, so that was my statement.”), the album that turned Morrissey into the massive fan he is (“Ron Mael’s lyrical take on sex cries out like prison cell carvings. It is only the laughing that stops the crying. Russell sings his words in what appear to be French italics, and has less facial hair than Josephine Baker.”), the album with the cabaret-rock-opera sound that Queen, who were opening for Sparks at the time, would appropriate immediately? Where to begin? Easy—the beginning.
It starts, not like a thunderclap, but like a gentle shimmer of spring rain, a keyboard figure easing up in volume step by step. Then a voice zooms in, almost but never once tripping over itself at high speed, building up to the briefest pause, and then: “This town ain’t big enough for both of us!” A massive pistol shot rockets across the speaker range. “AND IT AIN’T ME WHO’S GONNA LEAVE!” The full band kicks in and it is all OVER. And it’s only just begun.
Kimono My House shouldn’t have been; had Ron and Russell decided not to take the chance they did in moving to London and signing to Island Records after initial UK appearances before the release of Woofer turned out splendidly, it wouldn’t have been. They did, and “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both of Us” crashed into the UK Top Five in early 1974 and what had been a low-key pleasure for some turned into pop star mania. Tales of suicides happily singing down to girlfriends in the still-living world, celebrations of the most exclusive genealogical background ever (concluding with “Gonna hang myself from my family tree”) and specifically uncelebratory non-holiday carols were suddenly all the rage. The lunatics hadn’t taken over the asylum, but their observers were genii at portraying their foibles in entertaining form.
The new backing band—guitarist Adrian Fisher, bassist Martin Gordon and drummer Dinky Diamond—weren’t necessarily as outré as the first, but as a crackerjack combo, perfectly in tune with the over-the-top glam hysteria of the day, they were essential. “This Town” is just one example of many songs displaying Ron’s ever-increasing compositional talents—consider other smash U.K. singles like “Amateur Hour,” with its quick, ascending main guitar line completely working against the typical descending rock melodies of the time and place, or “Talent Is an Asset,” a music-box riff accompanied by hand-clapping and foot-stomping rhythms celebrating the young life of one Albert Einstein. If Ron’s keyboards often times seemed drowned in the mix of the songs that he himself wrote, they weren’t absent—the organ adding further beef to the mix of “Here in Heaven,” the combination barrelhouse R&B swing and cabaret glow on the concluding “Equator.” Perhaps the album’s most emblematic song was “Hasta Manana, Monsieur,” with its lovely piano melody at the start and Russell’s bravura extended vocal break towards the end … oh, and the words too:

Leaving my syntax back at school
I was thrown for a loss over gender and simple rules
You mentioned Kant and I was shocked
You know, where I come from, none of the girls have such foul tongues.

And that was just one verse.

PROPAGANDA (1974)
Propaganda—featuring the band’s first outright classic album cover, showing the Maels as bound and gagged kidnap victims—was a logical follow-on from Kimono, much as Woofer’s had continued onward from the debut. The producer remained the same. The backing band jiggled a bit, with Ian Hampton replacing Martin Gordon on bass and Trevor White starting to handle the guitar. (Queen’s Brian May alleges the Maels tried to persuade him to join them by proclaiming his band were “washed up”—which makes that group’s Sparks-like breakthrough hit “Killer Queen” all the more eyebrow-raising.) Otherwise Sparks kept up the same glam-rampage approach. But here, everything was more in sync then ever.
The album begins with something new—an a cappela performance from Russell, his overdubbed singing providing wordless melody and rhythm as well as words, packing wartime slogans, militaristic imagery and that thing called love into about 20 seconds. Then a stentorian delivery from the full band heralds “At Home At Work At Play,” whose combination of volume, giddiness, hyperspeed melodies and Sparks-trademarked tempo shifts and pauses is clear evidence that by this time Sparks had come pretty close to being sui generis. Even songs like “BC,” which on this album feels just a touch like a “typical” Sparks number, would be utterly atypical for practically anyone else.
There’s a winsome jauntiness on Propaganda at points, musically if not necessarily lyrically, almost as if Ron and Russell were creating World War II vaudeville singalongs for their temporarily adopted home country. “Reinforcements,” playing around again with ideas of love and/as war, almost begs a high-kicking chorus line to back Russell on stage. In a different vein entirely is a power ballad of the most arch sort, “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth,” which has it all: strings, heroic guitar solo, a lot of background echo (check out the drums at the end!), Ron on what must be harpsichord, and a beautifully alien mid-song break where Russell sings in fragile tones over heavily flanged violins. On the lyrical front, Ron’s eye for the knowing cliché in the title again reigned supreme—besides “At Home At Work At Play,” we get “Thanks But No Thanks,” “Something For the Girl With Everything” and the concluding “Bon Voyage.” And then there’s “Achoo,” probably the only song in existence with a sneeze as its title. And even if it isn’t, it’s definitely the only one that starts, “Who knows what the wind’s gonna bring when the invalids sing.”

INDISCREET (1975)
Indiscreet ended up being the conclusion of Ron and Russell’s first run of hit UK albums, as well as their English residency. If nothing else, they wrapped it up in style, working with an emblematic producer of the era—fellow US expatriate Tony Visconti, whose collaborations with T. Rex and David Bowie helped define the times as much as anything. It turned out to be an inspired combination as Visconti’s ear for orchestral arrangements, familiar from T. Rex’s many singles, was in top form. The result is a rich sounding album, a big-budget effort that doesn’t sound overblown.
The band personnel remains essentially the same from Propaganda, though songs like the opening “Hospitality on Parade”—part neo-Gilbert and Sullivan triumph, part hypnotic proto-Suicide drone—suggest that the Maels were starting to feel that their band was holding them back creatively as much as they were crucial to their success. That tension shoots through the entire album, with more conventional rock-band compositions contrasting sharply to such songs as the merry 1930s kick of “Without Using Hands” or the wonderfully energetic big-band recreation of “Looks, Looks, Looks.” “Under the Table With Her” is that tendency in excelsis, with string and flute accompaniment as the sole musical element to match one of Russell’s most elfin vocals.
That said, the Sparks instinct for pop smashes in their own particular vein remains strong. There’s the careening blast of “Happy Hunting Ground”—the mid-song dropout to just drums and vocals is sheer pleasure and opening single “Get In the Swing” is an everything-and-the-kitchen sink affair with a marching band strut, band majorette whistles, a message from God to his creations and the memorable line “Well I ain’t no Freud, I’m from LA.”
The sleeper hit, though, has to be “Tits”—a thematic sequel of sorts to the previous album’s “Who Don’t Like Kids,” but which, in its slow unfolding musical drama, resembles the epochal “Moon Over Kentucky,” shot full of sequins. For all the celebrations of the female bosom in pop music before and since, this is probably the only one narrated by a married man complaining over an increasing number of “drinks that are something warm and watered down” about how the presence of a kid alters a certain dynamic in their household:

For months, for years
Tits were once a source of fun and games at home
And now she says, tits are only there to feed our little Joe
So that he’ll grow.

THE BIG BEAT (1976)
The final album the Maels did for Island has a straight-up brilliant cover, created by famed portrait photographer Richard Avedon. Russell is bare-chested but vulnerable behind folded arms and tousled hair; Ron looks to the side, his face in shadow. If only the music on the album were as striking as that image.
The Maels had returned to Los Angeles just as their star began to fade in the UK, where the punk and New Wave soon-to-be stars they’d inspired were only beginning to gear up. In L.A., Ron and Russell recruited drummer Hilly Boy Michaels, bassist Sal Maida and guitarist Jeffrey Salen from local bands and made a punk/power-pop album, featuring sharp Rupert Holmes production, tight arrangements, generally quick running times and a neo-’50s bite (“Fill ‘Er Up).” It was a new approach, but opening song “Big Boy” captures the problem of The Big Beat in general —it’s strident and forced where earlier rock-out efforts had felt nearly effortless, the emphasis placed on Salen’s competent but fairly earthbound riff instead of Ron’s piano. There’s still much to recommend The Big Beat: “I Bought The Mississippi,” “White Women” and “Everybody’s Stupid” show that the Maels’ just-off-center view of the universe remained intact, and “Nothing To Do,” certainly The Big Beat’s highlight in its catchy portrayal of random boredom, is so good that Joey Ramone later claimed that he wanted his group cover it. Still, there’s a sense of compromised horizons, of narrowing scope and less ambition, especially in the wake of the Technicolor widescreen impact of Indiscreet. Thus, it’s no surprise that “I Like Girls,” the album’s grandiose cover, actually dates from the first incarnation of the group.

INTRODUCING SPARKS (1977)
After six albums of often avant garde pop, the bizarrely titled, hilariously packaged Introducing Sparks kept the band’s wit but removed the musical edge. The whole thing was recorded with very capable L.A. session musicians (Lee Ritenhour and Mike Porcaro among them) but their airbrushed professionalism is deflating and pointless; flashes like the merry Russian Cossack kick of “Goofing Off” aside, this is an album of occasionally inspired songs struggling to break through—and failing. The opening “A Big Surprise” features smoothed-out, tame pseudo-Spectorisms and the slightly revolting presence of generic backing singers cloyingly adding their unwelcome voices to Russell’s. These backing singers would stick around for the whole album. And so it goes. With Ron’s piano pounding and Russell’s unique vocals, you’re never gonna get a bland-sounding, anonymous Sparks album. But Introducing comes close.
Introducing Sparks does have its defenders, and perhaps the live performance of its songs as part of the upcoming London residency/retrospective will help bring it more positive qualities to the fore. Yet in the end Introducing can be summed up by this simple fact: until the band finally re-released it themselves in 2007, it was the only Sparks studio album for years and years that had never officially appeared on CD. But they say it’s darkest before the dawn, and the follow-up to Introducing would be one of the most amazing albums ever made.

NO. 1 IN HEAVEN (1978)
There’s a story that David Bowie tells that goes like this: During the recording of one of his late ’70s Berlin albums with Brian Eno, he was in the studio when Eno burst in with a copy of a new single, excited as all hell. “This is it, this is the future of music for the next 15 years,” Eno allegedly said. The record, “I Feel Love,” would indeed become an epochal, era-defining smash for Donna Summer, part of her continuing collaboration with producer Giorgio Moroder and drummer Keith Forsey.
Ron and Russell heard it as well. Rather than imitate Moroder and Forsey’s sound, they decided to work with them directly.
Just hearing the start of No. 1 in Heaven is like a message from the future still, but hearing it in 1978? It must have caused jaws to collectively drop around the world. “Tryouts for the Human Race” was unlike anything that Sparks had done before—no keyboards, no guitar, just gentle space tones and a bit of synth glimmer, a hint of motorik starting to speed up and up and up until a trademark Moroder synth-bass line comes in, Forsey’s beat suddenly moving into a massive propulsive push (his fills and breaks later are pure drama in the space of seconds), topped off by Russell’s voice materializing:

We’re just gleams in lovers’ eyes
Steam on sweaty bodies in the night
One of us might make it through
All the rest will disappear like dew.

The four-way collaboration at work throughout No. 1 is just perfect—the frenetic melodies from Ron, with Russell’s beautiful voice, suddenly seeming so much more freer than before, set against the relentless electronic hyperactivity Moroder conjures up along with Forsey’s just plain monstrous drums. Even the non-singles on the album—out of six songs, three were hits—have all the pieces in place, but man, those singles. Besides “Tryouts,” there was “Beat the Clock,” another bona fide classic, Russell semi-whispering the title like a mantra and breaking into glorious falsetto on the chorus, Ron’s melodies riding on top of a rhythm so clean and strong you could run transit systems off of it—dig Forsey’s breakdown on the mid-song break—and lyrics saying, among other things, “Entered school when I was two/PhD’d that afternoon.”
And then there’s the close, “The No. 1 Song in Heaven,” all seven and a half minutes of it. In a career of perfect songs, this might be the most perfect song Sparks ever did—and it’s one of Moroder’s best as well—a moment of pure sonic celebration and exaltation, its vocal overdub intro sounding like (but of course) angels singing down from on high, a stately first half transforming into an explosive concluding section: dance fueled by atomic energy.

In cars it becomes a hit
In your homes it becomes advertisements
And in the streets it becomes the children singing

No. 1 In Heaven marked the beginning of Sparks’ ongoing association with dance and electronic music scenes, it’s the album that showed that Sparks were keeping their ears open to what was around them, and it holds up (and then some) today. In short, it is one of the greatest records ever made.

TERMINAL JIVE (1979)
The artistic and commercial success of No. 1 in Heaven bode well for the follow-up next year, Terminal Jive. The Maels had demonstrated that their combination of pop ears and lyrical invention could appealed to a mass audience in more than one musical setting. Working again with Moroder (assisted this time by Harold Faltermeyer), Sparks seemed to be primed for a run of records capturing a time and place like the Island/glam-era releases did, perhaps with similar amounts of fame and fortune.
That didn’t turn out to be the case, though. Going back to guitar heavily on a number of too-strident songs—the title “Rock’n’Roll People in a Disco World” says it all—just didn’t work much of the time. Terminal Jive really is the proverbial album that would make a good EP. There’s one big highlight, though: “When I’m With You,” a beautiful love song with a gorgeous chorus, just a bit of guitar snarl to add to the beats, and another example, like “The Number One Song in Heaven,” where a bit of self-conscious referencing proves a perfect touch: “It’s the break on the song/When I should say something special.” “When I’m With You” was literally, as they say, big in France, and further added to Sparks’ reputation as genre innovators; here they helped kick-start the entire ’80s synth-pop era without intending to. The fact, however, that the band had to fill out the album’s length with an alternate instrumental version of said hit gives an idea as to how inspiration was sadly running a bit low again.
(Note: Some fans give a bit of love to “Young Girls,” though to be perfectly honest it’s actually just a touch creepy—and given some of the songs Sparks had written up until then, that’s saying something!)

WHOMP THAT SUCKER (1980)
Sparks’ first album of the 1980s found them back with a three-piece LA-based rock band as collaborators—essentially the same set-up they had at the beginning of their career. This time around, the Maels recruited most of an entire group, Bates Motel, namely guitarist Bob Haag, bassist Leslie Bohem and drummer David Kendrick (the latter two also continued to record separately as Gleaming Spires). With Ron now playing his complex melodic runs on a bank of early digital synthesizers, and Giorgio Moroder partner Mack handling production, the crisp Whomp That Sucker placed Sparks firmly in the New Wave movement that they had no small part in inspiring.
This ’80s rock and roll version of Sparks was a much simpler and direct one than those of earlier years—instead of frenetic performances and instant stop-start changes, the feeling here is steady riffing and straightforward rhythms, immediate but less astonishingly unique (though if anything, songs like “The Willys” indicated how Sparks were listening to bands that had followed in their wake, like Devo and XTC). Even compared to the Big Beat-era band, everything here is pretty easy to get one’s head around—not a criticism in this case, since the arrangements can often be fun, but the feeling is still quite basic. In ways, this is the sound of a new group still finding its feet, and the end result is a bit uneven. Still, plenty of songs have the sensibility of Sparks at its most theatrical, such as “Where’s My Girl” and “That’s Not Natassia,” while Russell’s voice is as vividly dramatic as ever, especially in the choral overdubs.
But it’s the in-your-face numbers that score the most here, such as the hyperactive smack of “Upstairs,” the absolutely hilarious “Tips for Teens” (“Don’t eat that burger/Has it got mayonnaise/GIVE IT TO ME!”) and especially “Funny Face,” with a gorgeous “When I’m With You”-style chorus anchoring the tale of a man so perfect in appearance he despairs of never being left alone by admirers. He tries and fails to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge and lives a happy life from there, after his appearance is permanently marred. This was one of the album’s singles, by the way.

ANGST IN MY PANTS (1982)
Angst in My Pants consolidated the strengths of Sparks’ early ’80s incarnation into a smash commercial success—at least within a certain context. While they’d long had a strong cult following in the area since they started, at this point Sparks were near-gods in their hometown of Los Angeles at long last, establishing themselves as favorites on local radio powerhouse KROQ. But this didn’t translate into national success—a pity, since in many ways Angst is one of the group’s most playfully daring releases, hinted at by one of their best album covers, featuring Russell dressed as a groom in a spangled suit and Ron the blushing bride.
With keyboardist James Goodwin added to the group and Mack following up on his Whomp production duties, Angst starts out with one of the Maels’ all-time winners, the title track. Russell sounds downright sad and desperate in the opening words of each verse as well as the chorus, and the bite of the lyrics (“You can be smart as hell, know how to add/Know how to figure things on yellow pads”), as well as the pun of the title, doesn’t hide the sheer frustration he slyly captures, the sharp, stripped-down arrangement shot through with low synth moans. It’s a striking starting point and the rest of the album lives up to it, ranging from the proto-industrial stomp of “I Predict”—deep electronic bass lines set against psychic parody lines like “Somebody’s going to die/But I can’t reveal who”—to the John Barry/Ennio Morricone tribute of “Nicotina,” which makes the simple act of smoking a cigarette seem like apocalypse. (Why longtime Sparks nut Mike Patton hasn’t covered this yet is a mystery.)
The giddy, almost epic “let’s go out and hit the town” spirit of “Sextown USA” and the explosive (and deeply hilarious) “Moustache” are also among the winners, while the murky melodies and rolling drums of “Sherlock Holmes” and “Tarzan and Jane” demonstrate that the stage-show musical heart of the Maels was still strong, if somewhat de-emphasized. If there’s an established Sparks fan favorite beyond the singles, though, it might well be “Mickey Mouse,” the Maels’ long-running Disney fascination made manifest. It’s a bit surprising that the Disney monolith didn’t try and sue the song out of existence for copyright violations, but such is the weird nature of multinationals.

IN OUTER SPACE (1983)
Sparks finally got their first—and so far, their only—American Top 40 success with the lead song on this album, “Cool Places,” a duet between Russell and Jane Wiedlin, then riding the peak of her own fame as one of the Go-Gos. Wiedlin was herself a Sparks fan since the ’70s—she also appears later on the album with “Lucky Me Lucky You”—and the resultant single, although one of the Maels’ most straightforward compositions (especially lyrically), is a fun kick. It’s also one of the most straight-up synth-pop style numbers the band had ever recorded—drummer David Kendrick sounds more like a drum machine than Keith Forsey had done back on the late ’70s albums—and reflects In Outer Space as a whole, with a number of songs being practically guitarless, though the core backing quartet remained unchanged from Angst. (Note that Bob Haag is credited with playing guitar synthesizers as well as his chosen instrument.) Perhaps the Maels, producing themselves for the first time since the debut album, wanted to experiment a bit more with other electronic approaches, rather than replicating their successful work with Moroder. Whatever the motivation, a new slew of Sparks highlights are the result: “Popularity,” a dryly hilarious portrayal of hip young things out on the town, and its brilliant lyrical flipside “I Wish I Looked a Little Better” are both winningly sung and performed electronic pop at its best, an enjoyable tip of the hat to groups like Depeche Mode and Bronski Beat, among others, who had worn out their copies of No. 1 in Heaven long before.
That said, In Outer Space can be a bit too stiff for its own good—a song like “Prayin’ for a Party” tries to replicate the monster stomp of “I Predict” without much success. Add in some more uninspired lyrics and arrangements at points—“Please, Baby, Please,” despite a few good lines, sounds scarily MOR towards the end—and this isn’t a start-to-finish winner like Angst. But it’s still one of the band’s finer efforts, and any album with songs (and titles) like “All You Ever Think About Is Sex” (“All right with me!”) and “A Fun Bunch of Guys From Outer Space” has its snarky heart in the right place.

PULLING RABBITS OUT OF A HAT (1984)
Though In Outer Space had its moments and even a top 40 hit single, the Maels clearly felt a little change was needed for their next album. They switched back to using an outside producer, in this case Ian Little, while concert keyboardist James Goodwin departed to be replaced by John Thomas, who would eventually become the Maels’ studio mixer and engineer, and the group’s longest regular collaborator. Also, they reversed their recent tendency toward lyrical simplicity, amping up their continuing amused critique of the human species out in the field instead of relying on the performance to imply it, admittedly “Cool Places” had admittedly done so well.
The resultant Pulling Rabbits Out of a Hat—featuring another classic Sparks cover, this time a none-more-’80s style painting showing a typically stone-faced Ron operating Russell as a hand puppet—made less of a commercial mark but feels much more cohesive all around. It also includes that relatively rarest of Sparks efforts: a straightforward love song. “The gentle, warm chorus and sprightly arrangement of “With All My Might” recalls “When I’m With You” in its winningly romantic spirit, this time minus any self-conscious verse. That latter sentiment, however, appears in full on another one of the album’s high points, “A Song That Sings Itself.” Even if it doesn’t capture the outrageous heights of “The Number One Song in Heaven,” Ron’s sparkling keyboard loop, the great full-band performance, and Russell’s calm but still almost heroic vocals, make the song a fan favorite that has endured.
If Pulling Rabbits is Sparks starting to sound less like its own distinct take on New Wave and synth-pop and a touch more like what the ’80s mainstream did with it—check the already-starting-to-be-overused orchestral synth-hits on the otherwise great title track, opening the album with an energetic bang —it’s still more varied than In Outer Space and more intent on showing that the clever brain lurking deep inside Sparks is still operational. Squelchy keyboard break aside, “Pretending to Be Drunk,” with the narrator arguing that his plan was to try and impress an unnamed love with his behavior, is an absolute highwater mark on this album, while “Everybody Move,” the most basic song on the face of it, has this great take on exercise/aerobics culture: “Unwanted pounds will disappear/You’ll have a itty bitty rear/Better lay off of the beer.”

MUSIC YOU CAN DANCE TO (1986)
It may be pushing the parallels a bit, but Music You Can Dance To is most nearly equivalent to The Big Beat in terms of Sparks’ ’80s versus ’70s career—namely, the point where returns on a recording strategy are definitely diminishing. The core band remained on board and inspired moments aren’t absent by any means, but compared to the ’80s incarnation’s previous albums, this, its fifth and final one as a fully operating band, feels more like a collection of songs that filled out an album, with low points outstripping the best efforts.
Those high points are enjoyable enough. “Change” is a huge-sounding, epically lovelorn yet ultimately positive ballad. It’s the first recorded instance of Russell speaking verses rather than singing them, something he’s done on almost every album since. And “Modesty Plays,” originally conceived as a theme song for a proposed Modesty Blaise TV series and re-recorded here from its first 1982 single version, is fun too. But generally the band is starting to sound a little stranded. What had previously been energetic and modern sound has become shopworn and clichéd. Missteps abound. The execution of “The Scene” is flawed, but in its multipart structure there’s at least some ambition, especially compared to the cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips,” which sounds far too much like the dull horrors of so many other washed-out Motown remakes from any number of ’60s burnouts during the Reagan years. Sparks were starting to show their age—a state of mind that they weren’t yet going to escape for a little while, though calling the most trudging song on the album “Let’s Get Funky” demonstrated their sense of humor was still present.
As a weird final note, the album was later re-released on CD as The Best of Sparks, a thoroughly inaccurate take on the contents and as appropriate a name as Introducing Sparks was a decade earlier. Caveat emptor, and then some.

INTERIOR DESIGN (1988)
If Music You Can Dance To was the decline, Interior Design is the fall, equaling Introducing Sparks as a well-meaning but ultimately troubled career low. In retrospect, it’s clear that this is an album that’s not important for what it is but for how it was made—that is, this it’s the first effort fully created by Ron and Russell in the comfort of their newly completed studio, built in Russell’s Hollywood Hills house. Initially nicknamed the Pentagon, this is where all their subsequent albums have been recorded.
The fact that this is the most notable thing about Interior Design, though, tends to indicate the quality of the album as a whole. No longer working with their ’80s backing band of Bob Haag, Leslie Bohem and David Kendrick—keyboardist John Thomas had begun the transition to being the group’s regular engineer, while guitarist Spencer Secombe completed the ad-hoc line-up—the Maels have a few flashes of their trademark wit and melodic gift at play, but it’s just not enough here. At best Interior Design should be seen as a home demo record that didn’t deserve release —it’s there, but for most listeners it’s not needed.

GRATUITOUS SAX AND SENSELESS VIOLINS (1994)
After Interior Design Sparks seemed to hibernate for six years, quietly but steadily working on other still-unreleased projects and a one-off single or two. When the Maels focused their attention back on a straight-up album, presumably they hoped at the least just to reestablish themselves a bit in a musical environment that had radically changed in their absence. But Gratuitous Sax and Senseless Violins did more than just that: it kicked off their third great period of extended commercial success, this time starting in Germany. Far from being out of it, Sparks ended up back in the thick of things, in Europe at least, seemingly without effort.
The key to success lay in Ron and Russell keeping their ears open to what was going on around them, much more than they had done in the late ’80s. In the same way that hearing “I Feel Love” led them to work with Moroder, they realized that electronic Europop offered a set of musical approaches that, as Ron remarked in one interview, hadn’t yet become clichés. Sparks took to techno like ducks to water—it didn’t hurt at all, certainly, that the music’s fast temp perfectly suited Ron and Russell’s predilection for swift-as-heck melodies. Another clear inspiration was the splashy, theatrical disco that the Pet Shop Boys had cooked up on Very. The Pets’ had borrowed much from Sparks’ overall approach in the Moroder years, down to Chris Lowe’s near-perfect impersonation of Ron’s unemotive appearances at the keyboards. The song titles on Gratuitous Sax— “I Thought I Told You To Wait in the Car,” “Now That I Own the BBC”— have the air of barbed homage.
This isn’t a perfect album but there’s so much to enjoy, from the surging conclusion in “Let’s Go Surfing” to “Tsui Hark,” one of the all-time oddest Sparks numbers, featuring the legendary Hong Kong director talking briefly about his body of work. And that’s about it. Other highlights are “When I Kiss You (I Hear Charlie Parker Playing),” which features Russell doing his best version of rapping—not too surprising given his own abilities with rapid-fire tongue-twisting vocals—and the gorgeous “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’?”, the tale of someone waiting for his chance, whatever it might be, which ends up referencing both Sinatra and Sid Vicious. Sleek and winning, Gratuitous was just the recharge that Sparks needed – and it wouldn’t be the last.

PLAGIARISM (1997)
The Sparks’ 17th release was their most unusual yet. The initial idea was for Ron and Russell to curate a tribute album of other artists covering Sparks songs. But, at some point, they decided to pay tribute to themselves instead, revisiting their now massive back catalog and rerecording the selections in new or different styles. The perfect extra ingredient for this was their old collaborator Tony Visconti, who had done such a stunning job with his production on 1975’s Indiscreet.
With Visconti handling full orchestral arrangements throughout the album, plus an eight-person choir to boot, Plagiarism showcases a variety of approaches: some featured Sparks’ more recent techno-influenced style, while others, like the dramatic opening take on “Pulling Rabbits Out of a Hat,” see the Maels adding relatively little to the string-swept settings Visconti was creating— a strategy that foreshadows where they’d be going in the near future. A further example of the depth of Plagiarism’s inspiration lies in its choice of songs: relative obscurities like “Big Brass Ring,” from the misbegotten Interior Design period, and In Outer Space’s “Popularity,” receive wonderful makeovers, the latter turned into a lovely high-speed gallop, while recent hit “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’?” becomes a Visconti-scored epic, toning down but not removing the strong beat of the original. Hearing Russell ably tackling the challenging “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both of Us,” 23 years on, is a further treat.
The original plan for a tribute album wasn’t forgotten, however, and a variety of tracks also appear that turn out to be full-on collaborations, including an absolutely mindblowing dance/rock take on “Angst In My Pants” by Eskimos and Egypt. Faith No More, whose fractured, spazzed-out art-metal is clearly in retrospect derived from Sparks’ own maniacal exercises in the early ’70s, prove to be perfect partners on “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” and “Something For the Girl With Everything.” Mike Patton’s yelping bark is a particularly fine contrast to Russell’s sweetness. Erasure takes a bow on “Amateur Hour,” while one of the few singers to sound even more angelic than Russell, Jimmy Somerville, knocks the ball out of the park with his stately take on “The No. 1 Song in Heaven.” The end result is unique—a tribute album that’s actually worth listening to more than once.

BALLS (2000)
In the same way that Gratuitous Sax and the more electronic reworkings on Plagiarism drew on fluid techno pulses, Balls incorporates ideas from harsher hip-hop and dance influences. The brawling, drum-heavy attack of the title track, which opens the album on a fierce note, is more than a little touched by the Prodigy’s “Firestarter,” though Russell’s gleeful singing is hardly Keith Flint’s rasp—and a good thing too, since that idea is pretty hard to imagine —while the core melody remains a pleasant affair, in spite of all the air-raid siren noises. “Aeroflot” and “It’s Educational” also ride the electro-riffs hard. Russell’s voice is as supple as ever and memorable melodies abound, along with Ron’s usual dry wit. The Mael gift for cliché-reworking song titles is in full effect—the horn/string-tinged and very Gratuitous-like “The Calm Before the Storm,” “More Than a Sex Machine”—while “How to Get Your Ass Kicked” is, naturally, one of the gentlest songs on the album. Meanwhile, the concluding “The Angels” makes for a sweet, lush end not merely to the album but to a lifecycle of the group—and not only that, it gets away with lines like “I saw the angels cry/They feel ashamed/Because you look so fucking good.”
In retrospect Balls can be seen as the farewell to an era, with the Maels seeing out their dance-influenced ’90s on their own terms rather than clinging to an exhausted approach as they had done at similar points earlier in their career. Like Gratuitous Sax, Balls falls short, but it’s a stronger album than others in the band’s extensive history.

LI’L BEETHOVEN (2002)
Each new decade seems to find Sparks introducing a new set of musical ideas or tones that they will then work for the duration of the decade. Li’l Beethoven continued the pattern. Indiscreet’s “Under the Table With Her” showed what a combination of Russell’s vocals and Tony Visconti’s strings (and nothing else) would sound like, but Li’l Beethoven pushed the idea to the limit. Working again with Tammy Glover on drums (she’d joined the band ahead of Balls) while completely jettisoning their previous dance-beat approach, Sparks created a series of lush, orchestrated numbers that, in a way, finally brought the theatrical aspect of their work completely to the fore.
All this would be conceit if the songs didn’t live up to the inspiration, but the band was on a total creative roll. “The Rhythm Thief” is a statement of purpose for the whole thing (“Say goodbye to the beat”), while the hilarious trashing of the nü-metal hangover with “What Are All These Bands So Angry About?” and the equally funny “I Married Myself” (“I’m very happy together”) are high up there too. “My Baby’s Taking Me Home,” though lyrically one of the simplest songs the band had ever done—the words are the title, and one spoken word break from Russell aside, that’s about it—is a masterpiece, as close to a Steve Reich tribute as can be imagined in a pop format, topped off with some slamming drums from Glover.
But it’s the final two songs that are the best. “Suburban Homeboy,” a witty-as-hell rip on upper-class fake gangbangers that allows them to once again indulge a fondness for the show tune style, is flawless. And “Ugly Guys With Beautiful Girls,” with muscular guitar riffs suddenly exploding into the mix as Russell ponders the mystery in the song title, is even more notable, forming as it does a bridge back to a crucial element of early Sparks: loud electric guitar. There was more to come.

HELLO YOUNG LOVERS (2006)
After Li’l Beethoven’s, the band not only recruited a new full-time guitarist in that album’s guest player—Dean Menta, from the Maels’ Plagiarism partners Faith No More—but played the entirety of Kimono My House back-to-back with Li’l Beethoven at a memorable 2004 date in London as part of a Morrissey-curated festival. It’d be easy enough to say that Hello Young Lovers is a combination of Kimono and Beethoven, but it would also be inaccurate. Rather, as Sparks weaved more rock instrumentation into still predominantly classical orchestrations, they also returned a bit to the world of dance music, making Hello Young Lovers not only one of Sparks’ greatest albums but perhaps also their most truly wide-ranging.
The opening “Dick Around,” introduced with multiple Russells singing “All I do now is dick around,” moves from sweeping flourishes to loud-as-hell guitar/bass/drum rampages, Russell tackling everything from soft crooning to insanely quick and precise deliveries matched by equally high-speed performing from Ron, all the while singing lines like:

Through with you, through with you, through with you, through with you
Yes I think I got the point and bam there goes my motivation
What to do, what to do, what to do, what to do
All that I could think of is that I’m tendering my resignation.

If Queen had ever swiped anything from Sparks—and they did—then not only had the Maels taken it back, they had completely upped the ante.
And that’s just the start. Touching on everything from more straight-up orchestral numbers (“Rock, Rock, Rock”) to sly, finger-snapping grooves (“Perfume,” the lead single and yet another example of the Maels’ knack for pop at its best and most immediate) to a multipart concluding epic, “When I Sit Down to Play the Organ at the Notre Dame Cathedral,” at once a Parisian song of romance and a paranoid tale of work jitters. Highlights come fast and furious, but two of their most outrageous numbers ever will serve as examples—“Baby Baby (Can I Invade Your Country?),” which takes the words to the US national anthem and goes from there into uncharted but appropriately martial waters, is one of the few post-9/11 songs worth a damn, while “Waterproof,” like “Dick Around” a perfect fusion of classical strings and rock epic moves, details the story of a lover’s heart crushed by a heartless bastard—told from the point of view of the bastard, naturally.
While not a perfect song-for-song album, Hello Young Lovers comes so very close. Astonishing.

A NOTE ON VARIOUS SPARKS COMPILATIONS, RARITIES AND VIDEOS
The number of compilations released over Sparks’ career has been extensive, ranging from repackagings of the first two albums as a full set to any number of “greatest hits” sources on a variety of labels—the perhaps inevitable end result of the Maels’ label-hopping over the years. Rhino’s 1992 two-disc Profile compilation remains the best starting point but even that is incomplete, stopping as it does with “So Important.” Meantime, rarities, b-sides and remixes abound, some collected on re-releases (the four Island albums got a much improved series of CD remasters last year, augmenting some previous bonus cuts with even more extras), many others still floating free. (Track down 1993’s “National Crime Awareness Week” if you can.) To top that off, the amount of wonderful TV one-offs and appearances over the years, not to mention a stream of underappreciated videos, deserves a serious study of its own—for now, search for their original Top of the Pops appearances for “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For the Both of Us” and “Looks Looks Looks,” as well as their Saturday Night Live performances of “I Predict” and “Mickey Mouse.”
Until the day of the ultimate Sparks box set—or if that day ever even arrives, given technological and music business trends both—have fun out on the happy (musical) hunting ground.

Sunday, Public Fiction, 8pm, L.A.: TRINIE DALTON, RON REGÉ, JR. and CATHERINE TAFT

Jay Babcock — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 01:19:25 +0000

PRESS RELEASE TEXTAGE

RAINBOWS, CAPRICORNS, VIRGOS & ALCHEMY…
This Sunday March 13th please join us for a series of events at THE FREE CHURCH:

Beginning promptly at 8pm:
A lecture about rainbows by TRINIE DALTON:
Trinie will give a slide-talk about rainbows what they are, how they’re formed, and their roles in the history of art, spiritualism, mythology, and color theory.

at 8:45pm
A video screening curated by CATHERINE TAFT:
Catherine Taft presents a Capricorn/Virgo-inspired selection of videos by Dale Hoyt, Lauren Lavitt and Andrew Steinmetz

and at 9:30pm
RON REGÉ, JR. will read (and project!) comics from The Cartoon Utopia concerning the basic tenants of Alchemy and Hermetic Philosophy in Fairy Tale.”

This event will be situated in LUX, an installation by Maureen Keaveny

come!

Public Fiction in Highland Park
749 Avenue 50, 90042
http://www.publicfiction.org/

SERIOUS FUN: Sparks, interviewed by Chris Ziegler and Kevin Ferguson (Arthur No. 29/May 2008)

Administrator — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 01:08:04 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 29 (May 2008) (which also featured a massive Sparksography by Ned Raggett), available from the Arthur Store…

SERIOUS FUN
Chris Ziegler and Kevin Ferguson visit veteran sui generis pop duo SPARKS in L.A. as they prepare to perform their 240-song oeuvre in a single month-long London engagement in May. “We’re actually better than we thought,” say the brothers Mael…

Sparks have about 60 days to finish learning the five million notes necessary to reproduce live their entire 38-year discography—20 old albums, select b-sides, one new album, and a special song for anyone willing to buy tickets for the entire month-long event in London—but brothers Russell and Ron Mael remain relaxed and ready in Russell’s home studio, where a portrait of Elvis watches over rehearsals so intense that Russell can’t stop singing his songs even in his dreams. Brand-new album Exotic Creatures Of The Deep will debut live this summer in London after prior nights each dedicated to an existing Sparks album—a marathon physically and psychologically and an occasion to revisit a band almost totally untangled from the industry music mess just miles away from Russell’s Los Angeles home…

Arthur: Ron said that you’ll be playing 4,825,623 notes during the complete 21-show run. That works out to about 230,000 notes per album and maybe 34 notes per second. Does that seem accurate?
Russell: On some of the early albums it’s probably true—the Island albums are probably 64 notes per second. Those were really hyper.

Did doing that kind of statistical analysis on your lifetime of work reveal any greater truths?
Ron: It’s actually a leveling. A lot of the ones we had maybe less love for are kind of good in retrospect. It would have been sad to go back and realize they weren’t very good.
Russell: Fortunately that wasn’t the case.
Ron: But we are prejudiced.
Russell: We’re actually better than we thought.

So you’re not nervous.
Ron: We’re still nervous. It’s awesome.

Awesome in the sense that building a pyramid is awesome?
Ron: On all kinds of levels. It’s like going back to school. We haven’t even heard most of the songs for 20 or 30 years, and most of them we never played live anyway, so part of the process was figuring out how to do that. We couldn’t cut any corners—we’re doing everything, including a lot of b-sides as well. We’re figuring out how to be true to the original records and doing it live. It’s a good concert experience.

Are you offering any kind of Sparks Value Pack for the entire run?
Russell: The golden ticket! For that you also get—we’re gonna record one song and give a CD of this one song to the people that choose to dedicate an entire month of their lives to Sparks. That warrants receiving a song that no one else will get.
Ron: And there’s gonna be at least one book or maybe two about the whole experience afterward, and we’re thinking if we can get up the energy, we’ll try to keep a journal.

Why no hometown show in Los Angeles?
Ron: We have a larger following in London. It’s so expensive to put this on that the only viable way was to do it in London.

Will you be including any Sparks alumni in the live bands?
Russell: Each of the bands had a certain character to them—someone even suggested it’d be great if we had each of those bands. In a conceptual way, that’s good. In a practical way, I don’t know if it would work. It’s a real test to find people—the fans who are going to spend a month of their lives with us, and then for the band, musicians who want to stick it out for three-and-a-half months of preparation, which is unheard of. When you prepare for tour, you have maybe 20 songs, and this is 240. And you might say, ‘Oh, that’s not so hard,’ but when you think of songs on the albums that fade out and you have to have an ending for that song now. To figure things like that out times 240 is so time-consuming. Just the sheer volume you have to digest.

Are you dreaming Sparks songs yet?
Russell: I’m singing songs when I wake up—I swear. And it’s not a happy dream. It’s like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t even shut them off!’

Can you think of an equivalent to the total creative energy invested in the Sparks discography? Half a cathedral or the Pennsylvania tablet from the Epic of Gilgamesh?
Ron: It could never be done by a visual artist, really—we don’t feel like we’re doing imitation, and we don’t see them as finished, necessarily. When we play live, we’re kind of inventing them again. You hear of classical musicians that do a composer’s complete piano works—that kind of thing. But this is kind of trickier. I don’t know for a fact because I’ve never done that, but it seems like more things are involved.
Russell: We’d be allowed to read music, but we don’t read music.

Will you be correcting anything when you play the albums live?
Ron: There are things we’d like to do that for—a couple lyrics here and there—but that would be kind of cheating the process. The things we’d like to change the most would ruin the whole affair.
Russell: Because somebody might like that album!
Ron: There are maybe a couple of tunes that don’t feel as relevant to the current psyche as they did at the time. But in general, I’m kind of surprised—it’s lucky because it could have been more depressing than it is now.

It’s depressing now?
Ron: Daunting, not depressing! But we’re not fazed by it. You just have to sort of plow ahead and those shows will be there and we’ll be doing it! There isn’t even real fear about it—that implies we could back out, and we can’t.

After four decades, what have you learned about the nature of timelessness in pop music?
Russell: Sparks was timeless even when we did it originally. It wasn’t of an era—it wasn’t some trend happening then. Even songs like ‘This Town,’ which is probably our most known song in Europe—that’s not a typical pop song. It didn’t fit in at the time, but it’s really striking—powerful lyrically with structure not typical of a pop song and kind of this faux-classical feel to it. You can kind of say that in a general way, maybe that made stuff timeless. We wanted to fit in as much as the next guy because when you’re in a band, you like as many people to see you or hear you as possible, but part of the reason it’s sort of timeless is it hasn’t really ever fit in, even though it’s connected with the public in the world at various times. I think the people that really like Sparks the most feel they’re part of a little club that’s sort of outsiders. They understand what we’re up to and they don’t want it to fit in with the rest of the pop world. They want it to be their own secret band they don’t have to share.
Ron: There’s two kinds of timeless. There’s timeless like Bruce Springsteen, where the songs sound like a part of history in a way—like a form that’s always been there. And our kind of timeless is just that we’ve been able to do it for a long time, and the sensibility is almost part of the longevity of what we do, and that’s continued despite stylistic changes. And also the sensibility is not something we applied to it—it was sort of there since the beginning without even thinking about it, and that’s one part of the process.

Do you think of yourselves as outsiders?
Ron: We’ve always straddled the commercial side and the outsider—for want of a better word—artistic side! We were always a little bit of those things—sometimes they negate one another. We had a problem in the ‘70s in England. We were taken as one thing once, and when the screaming started, we were taken as something else. Obviously, when you’re working you don’t think of this stuff. But when you look back, you do feel more comfortable in periods of commercial success—but you know there’s something more to what you’re doing than typical pop music.

What about the European model where musicians can get government grants? Or how visual artists can work the same way in America? What do you think about musicians in America having to make it totally on their own?
Ron: Obviously it makes it more difficult. But having to think a little how you’ll be accepted—maybe that’s helpful to what you’re doing. It makes it more difficult knowing you’ve got to fit in some way that’s commercial, but to have that a little in the back of your mind is a good thing. If you were given a grant and you could do anything you wanted working any kind of way, maybe there’d be so many possibilities—you would kind of have no guidelines about what to do. I’d love to have that situation—it’s kind of tragic, especially in the U.S., that there’s so little of that—but I think it kind of weeds out the people that don’t have the stamina to play within those rules. We’ve been lucky. We would never have 21 albums if we weren’t fortunate to have some things work really well commercially, so we have the luxury of being able to do what we’re doing. But I’m not so sure that not having any concern for commercial aspects is completely positive.

When was the last time you felt like giving up?
Ron: Yesterday? At times you’re so frustrated at the lack of commercial success at something you thought was good—both in a creative way and a commercial way—but then a week later, something happens or you move on to the next thing or kind of forget about it. There aren’t other things we can do. It kind of helps with there are no other possibilities. It makes you more accepting of bad situations you do go through.

How many people have you met in the music industry that were musicians themselves?
Russell: The whole thing about A&R people—it’s a nebulous job description! You don’t know where those people come from. It seems to us that the people that have some musical side to them are the ones we always got along with. Tony Visconti we worked with a lot—he’s both got the sensibility and is totally into pop music, but he’s a musician, too, and a really talented engineer. He’s got all the facets covered. It’s the people who see it as a business—kind of—but are kind of musical that we seem to get along with better.

How long until Sparks separates from the industry and becomes completely self-sufficient?
Russell: The new album is something akin to that. I’m not sure what the situation in the states is gonna be, but we’ll have distribution by Universal in England, and then having the label and all that is our own thing. In England especially you can compete against the big guys because the system is smaller and there’s BBC radio. Other stations, too, but you have the same access on the BBC as anybody else. In any case, we were offered a situation with the best of both worlds—you can guide your own destiny, but have distribution by a good distributor so you know it’ll be out and about. And we have an English manager.

It seems Sparks becomes more self-contained with every album.
Russell: The last few albums are exactly that. We are really self-contained—it’s the two of us working in a room. The new album took a year. We worked exactly one year in this room without any sort of outside stimuli. Our mindset has been that we want to make what we’re doing to be as extreme as possible—still being accessible, but to make it not conform. You know the pop music world just seems sort of bland—it feeds off itself. There isn’t enough kind of adventuresomeness with people, and with the last three albums, we wanted to make them as uncompromising as we can. But we always feel in the back of our heads that we’re a pop band. And the more albums you have, you want to not repeat yourselves as much as possible. If not, it’s a real slog. We just find new ways to impress ourselves. Ninety percent of pop songs, in the first couple seconds you can kind of tell where it’s coming from and where it’s gonna be, and for us that’s really sad. What you really like about pop music—it’s kind of about shocking you. Not in a spitting-on-the-ground way, but jolting people in some kind of way. And when pop music becomes really safe, then it’s not what it originally set out to be achieving—something that would jolt other people. Now there are few things that do that.

What do you think of the idea that the TV commercial is the new hit single?
Ron: Obviously the way a band can sustain itself had to be opened up to other possibilities. It was a stigma before to be in an ad, and now all that’s kind of gone. I hear some cherished songs—sacrosanct—used for baby’s diapers and all. Kind of necessary in a way, if you’re not going to have any other means of promoting your song. It’s just a fact of life. One thing we’re both a little conservative about is the idea that a song can be cherry-picked from an album. An album can be an amazing thing—bigger than the sum of its parts. Now with iTunes and iPods, people can kind of go through what you’ve done, and that sort of democracy is not something I’m liking too much. When we do record, we see it all as one thing, though we love singles as much as the next guy. But when someone can take track five out, the whole structure collapses.
Russell: Even now artwork isn’t really relevant, too. That’s troublesome. It’s the whole package! It’s part of the fun—opening up the package—and now more and more no one cares. Even the thing of CDs—that shrunken-down image is the first step in the image getting smaller and smaller, and now you buy it online and download lyrics or something. It’s part of the tactile thing. It’s like a book—you like to touch it and stuff, too. Something more than just the music.

You’ve talked before about modern pop being conservative music for conservative times.
Ron: It seems pop music is so out of the basic psyche of things. In our minds, politics is almost more of an adrenaline rush than pop music, to be honest. It’s hard to put them together—when ‘Johnny B. Goode’ was played when McCain won, it’s like, ‘Wow, that’s… something.’ I’m really not sure how the back-and-forth political aspects work or what the effect is on pop music with the crossing of the two. It seems like sometimes the biggest pop stars are the politicians, and they look better than the pop stars!

That’s a little generous.
Russell: Well, at least Barack Obama.
Ron: I was being selective!

After four decades, what broad changes can you spot in popular music?
Ron: Sometimes it’s hard to know how much is you. You’ve heard so many records and experienced so much, maybe you’re dulled to the initial excitement of a record. But looking back—which always makes me kind of sad to say that!—when you heard a record and it just kind of made your hair stand on end—it kind of was such an important thing at that time! You couldn’t believe it! Both of us—our musical education, if there is such a thing, is from records.

How did that affect the way the band works?
Ron: We don’t feel like we’re slumming by doing pop music. It’s not like classical musicians who moved into that area. It sounds kind of banal but we’re genuine about what we’re doing.

Are you accused of not being genuine?
Russell: Sometimes if you have humor at all in music, if one doesn’t investigate what it is fully or get into the lyrics, you can think it’s kind of lighter weight. Not as meaty if it has humor to it! Where if it’s something about relationships only on one level where you know exactly what it is and it’s done seriously—‘Oh, that person has a lot of integrity!’ But if you have humor—it can’t possibly have depth to it because it has humor! You think sometimes people may like what we’re doing, but it’s ‘Oh, they’re FUN!’ To be honest, we hate when people just think it’s FUN. There are maybe some fun aspects to some of this stuff, but we see it as more to it. If you look at all the lyrics—even the lyrics that are fun—the fun-ness is coming in a way that is… I don’t know how to say it.

Serious fun?
Russell: Serious fun! There’s a lot of thought in it.
Ron: And reconciling the thing of having this be our 21st album but still doing pop music—you can’t even analyze the ridiculousness of that! You just have to do it! We’re not really into doing soul-searching kind of music in that way. We think our music is revealing of our personalities but maybe not in a way other people have done albums—we’re not interested in that kind of exploration of our backgrounds. It’s really really difficult to do music in the general area we’re working—to be able to do it at this stage and not in a nostalgic kind of way. Particularly in England—we have a certain audience still there from the ’70s and we get offered package tours.

Cruise ships?
Ron: Shows of ’70s bands, and maybe we’re delusional but we never considered us a ‘70s band. Or an ’80s band—in L.A. we get offered ’80s things! We’re playing music for people that are maybe born in a different decade, but we feel there’s something about what we do that appeals to some of those people. The live shows—so many new people are coming to see what we’re doing now! That’s what’s really exciting, and that’s the reason we’re doing these twenty shows before the 21st—in an utterly pragmatic way, it’s a way for us to call attention to what we’re doing now. Not our audience so much but people like press and radio who are so blasé about what we do—‘Another Sparks album…’—so this is kind of an attention-getting device.

Was there a need to announce it?
Russell: We’re really proud of the new album and we think it’s really good, and we didn’t wanna run the risk of it trickling out and only a couple people hearing it. We really want people to hear what we’re doing now. And this was the best idea we came up with.

What was the second best?
Ron: Killing ourselves! Maybe looking back—‘They actually were underrated!’ And this is only slightly more of a pleasant experience.

C & D: Two guys reason together about some new records (Arthur No. 23/July 2006)

Administrator — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:35:26 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 23 (July 2006)

Ethan Miller of Comets on Fire onstage at ArthurFest, 2005 (photo by Jeremiah Garcia/IceCreamMan.com)

C and D: Two fellas reason together about some new records

C: We resume not far from where we left off last issue. Only without D, our lovable excitable German, who has vacated the rumble seat to return to Der Fatherland to observe the World Cup. In his place, quaffing D’s beers for this issue only, ladies and gentlemen of the court, may I present to you: F.
F: Happy to be here, C. Those are big shoes to fill.
C: Relax. After three beers and the proper auditory stimulation, your feet will swell to fit.

Comets on Fire
Avatar
(Sub Pop)
F: After five seconds of this record, I can confidently say: Comets on Fire, you made an excitable German out of me. Pummely stuff.
C: This blasts off from where their last record left off: frequent flyer acid rock mentality, virtuous verses and choruses, oodles of audible poem lyrics, spry jams, and serious assblasting. A couple songs are slow burners…
F: …that put the power back in balladry.
C: The album-opening epic “Dogwood Rust” slithers into a Hawkwind-Ash Ra Tempel-Stereolab-Oneida locked groove around the six minute mark, then ignite into dueling guitar spirals, then some Von Harmonson echotronix. Plus the kind of casual avant garde move that’s so natural you almost don’t notice it: the electric birdsong at end of “Jaybird,” a nice fresh-air breather.
F: A muscle-relaxer for the brain.
C: For me, this album plugs back into what their labelmates Sleater-Kinney did on their most recent album: laying sweet waste to the center of Ted Nugent’s mind by power tripping from the top of the randiest redwoods. This is the Comets’ answer record, at least in my personal universe.
F: I grok that. Fight fire with Fire! Those dark noontide chimes at the beginning of “The Swallow’s Eye,” and the chorus guitars on “Lucifer’s Memory”…it’s crystal clear: Cosmic soul rock kills pain dead.
C: And it arrives just two months after the Howlin’ Rain album. Howlin’ Rain, of course, is the new band spotlighting Comets on Fire singer-guitarist Ethan Miller’s songwriterly aspect, which leans to the Allmans/Dead/Faces side of the highway. And just a few months after Comets guitarist Ben Chasny’s latest Six Organs of Admittance pan-cultural acid-folk stunner, The Sun Awakens.
F: Not to mention Comets pianist/drummer Utrillo’s nuevo Elton John/Bill Fay song project, The Colossal Yes.
C: That one 11-minute song on the Colossal Yes album? Wow… [listening to “Holy Teeth”] But back to the album at hand. This is total High Rise/Acid Mothers Temple/Kiss destruction boogie.
F: A strange thing about “boogie” is it’s been Not Cool for a period about ten times longer than it was Cool. [standing up from the couch] But it never left my behind!
C: [averting eyes, mumbling] Christ, F. Boogie if you must but please do it where I don’t have to see it. This one [“Sour Smoke”] is like keyboard-driven Fela Kuti meets Television. Can a band be this good?
F: Felavision: I wish they had that on the Dish.
C: Call your cosmic cable company…
F: To paraphrase Foster’s: Comets on Fire—it’s American for rock.

Vetiver
To Find Me Gone
(diCristina)
F: The second album from San Francisco’s haziest, gentlest canyon-folk drifters, Vetiver.
C: There’s a bucolic feel to this I love.
F: True, but what’s up with the word “bucolic”? The sound of words should correlate to their meaning, and there’s something about “bucolic” that always makes me think of a baby with a wet, hacking cough.
C: Whereas this music would more likely cure a baby of such a cough.
F: Readers with babies might let us know how it works…
C: Vetiver’s music evokes all those little phases or episodes along a dayhike in the country: the initial entry into the wilderness…the part where you’re making serious headway, alone with your thoughts…the moment when the senses are overwhelmed by the nature stimuli, the dew and the sap, the sun’s heat and the insects’ hum…when you finally you stop for water by a brook, and take a nap in the shade. When Andy Cabic sings, “I climbed so high/the sky dropped down to teach me,” he’s tapping into the naturalist in all of us.
F: I heard somebody say you could call this kind of music ‘naturalismo.’
C: I also heard somebody say that the real reason music originating from the West Coast underground—all the aforementioned bands, Brightblack Morning Light, etc etc etc—is so beautifully gone right now is because of the high potency of the marijuana out here.
C: While I am not stoned at this time, I swear I just looked out the window and saw a burrito fly past.
F: Yeah, that’s Vetiver, working the California tradition: Flying Burrito Brothers, Neil Young, the Mac of course, the original Charlatans from San Francisco…
C: And of course the late under-lamented Beachwood Sparks, whose final EP had some of this same swooshy nature euphoria and next-afternoon melancholia. Not that this is mimicry. Cabic’s songwriting here goes beyond recidivist texture gesture. It’s a very subtle, tricky thing Vetiver does, mellowing the harsh but resisting the corn. They use violins instead of fiddles.
F: Whoa, this song ["Red Lantern Girls"] is amazing! It’s like a horse just trotting along, and then alluvasudden, this squalling and sustained one-note electric guitar solo [courtesy of guest Brad Laner (Medicine/Electric Company guitarist-composer)] kicks in and the band breaks into a gallop.
C: Vetiver: cures coughs, cleanses palates. Use hourly.

Awesome Color
Awesome Color
(Ecstatic Peace/Universal)
C: Whoa!
F: Yowza!
C: These guys get on that train and ride it back to Cincinnati 1969! Total Stooges in Iggy’s-Got-the-Peanut-Butter-Again mode…
F: Yeah, but even more than that— Sound of Confusion-era Spacemen 3, especially on this track “Dinosaur”: that’s the sound of a band refusing to learn more chords or grooves because they already found the best ones.
C: Concentrating on tone and psychotic drive, like all the greats, like our national treasures The Cramps and Tav Falco and of course the 13th Floor Elevators…Awesome Color are…uh…awesome.
C: I’ve got to admit that my inner adolescent thinks this is the coolest shit possible.
F: I hope they’re all under 18, and there better be some brothers in this band.
C: This song [“It’s Your Time”] features some actual choogle.
C: Which brings us to the question that has haunted many a rock fan: what, exactly, is the difference between the boogie and the choogle?
F: Would that be choogie or boogle?

Zizek! dvd
(Zeitgeist)
C: Dude, I’m trying to play this DVD, but you totally messed up my system while reconnecting the TV to the stereo so you could watch the World Cup in surround-sound.
F: I think that D, absent as he is, would’ve approved. Anyways, it was worth it to hear the Mexican TV commentators hollering so sonorously.
C: Okay, here we go… This is a documentary about Slavoj Zizek, the Solvenian philosopher who’s known as “a one-person culture-muncher” and “the Elvis of critical theory.”
F: He looks more like Klaus Kinski. Or Yakoff Smirnoff.
C: Blame it on the beard. Zizek’s basically this super erudite dude who is also a willfully contrary polemicist commentating on everything under the sun as he goes. As he says, “The duty of philosophy is to redefine problems, not to solve them.” Here he is on a tour of colleges…he sees a girl carrying some Evian and remarks, “Water in a bottle —it reminds me of socialism.”
F: This guy’s great! Reminds me of the biting, death-obsessed comedy of the late great Brother Theodore. I believe Zizek speaks as a friend although he expounds with fiendish fervor.
C: Fiendish fervor is right. Zizek is a pre-postmodern man. He was raised in Communist Yugoslavia, but when that all went to bloody hell, he became a Christian atheist.
F: I knew I dug this guy. He’s got some zingers, like when he talks about being “up to your shit in ideology.”
C: Zizek cuts through the tripe. Here he is watching an old televised broadcast of Lacan giving a lecture. Lacan is one of Zizek’s primary influences, but he is not in awe of Lacan: “I find his emphasis and gestures ridiculous…. I’m a total enlightenment person, I believe in clear statements.”
F: Like Zizek says: “I always tell the truth. Not the whole truth, because one can’t.”
C: My favorite part about this film is where Zizek proudly shows us that he keeps his clean laundry in the kitchen cupboard.
F: You’ve got that much in common…

Beavis and Butthead: The Mike Judge Collection, Volume 2 DVD
(Paramount)
C: Meanwhile, at the other end of the philosophical spectrum…
F: Beer me!
C: Y’know, there’s so much product that comes out these days, so many records, DVDs and CDs, but I still feel like there’s a void Beavis & Butthead left that remains unfulfilled.
F: Hey, Zizek’s doing his best.
C: Hard to imagine Zizek calling Lacan a “dillhole” though. It would be so cool if they made a new Beavis & Butthead movie, like, checking in with them ten years later…
F: In the meantime, creator Mike Judge is putting out these super-packed DVDs, and it’s amazing to watch the classic cartoons uninterrupted by erase-your-blemish commercials.
C: The titles alone are remarkable: “Wet Behind The Rears” — “Premature Evacuation”—”Here Comes The Bride’s Butt.”
F: “Bang The Drum Slowly, Dumbass.”
C: I love when the screen goes dark, right before the show starts, and you can only hear their immortal “hunh-huh-unh” laughter. Ohmigod, I love this one, where they go in to the plastic surgeon to get their “thingies” made bigger, but [uncontrollable laughter] instead the doctor gives them boobs! [falls off the couch]
F: Settle down, C. How many brownies did you eat?
C: I dunno. Is the baggie half full or half-empty, buttmunch?

Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan dvd
Directed by Robert Millis
(Sublime Frequencies)
F: Feature-length film about a weird three-day street festival in Thailand, sometimes referred to as “Mardi Gras from Hell.” Whoa. Talk about awesome colors.
C: You see, this is what America should have learned from pre-Katrina New Orleans. All this industrial technology and computer whatsits and the Intervoid is so much unnecessary fuzz. To coin a paraphrase, what the world needs now is less competitive work-laboring and more communal partying.
F: Preferably in blazing demon masks made from cocount husks.
C: Yes, decadence on the cheap. Whiskey drinking at dawn and total second-line parades featuring guitar-and-flute ragas on flatbed trucks, amps powered by car batteries, people waving hand-painted papier mache phalluses with strange tips. When the grid crashes, this is how I hope we’ll party. Of course we’ll probably have to wait til then. You’d never be able to get a permit for something like this in public in America, home of the so-called free.
F: I like the Sublime Frequencies approach. They stand in awe of this planet’s inhabitants’ strange beauty: they bear witness. They just say LOOK, they don’t even try to explain—well, not much—what’s going on. Their approach is, This shit is so deep you don’t even have to know anything about what it is you’re seeing to receive some its power. It’s that rich. They’re busy grokking. They’re feeling fascination.
F: They are the real human league.

A Visit to Ali Farka Toure dvd
dir. Marc Huraux
(Digital Classics)
C: I stand in awe of Malinese guitarist Ali Farka Toure. His death earlier this year was a tremendous loss: his playing was part John Lee Hooker, part original African dance blues, all sensationally blazing and lyrical and celebratory, as well as appropriately contemplative and entrancing, and he was notoriously…well, as they say, touched. I never got to see him play live, because I was very foolish in my younger years. And of course now that he’s gone, I finally get to see him…on DVD.
F: This is a feature-length documentary film made by a French film crew in 1999, apparently, around the time that Toure cut back on his international touring in order to work his farm, not far from Timbuktu. “My main concern here is to grow enough food to be self-sufficient,” he says. “Whatever you do in life, you need a full stomach. When you’re hungry, you can’t think about anything.”
C: The whole story is just so perfect you keep laughing in disbelief at each new revelation or claim—it’s your choice. He talks about being the tenth son (the other nine died), the word “farka” meaning “resistance,” living in a town called “Niafunke” (say it aloud), enduring a childhood of near-slavery (“I had to push a 200lb barrel of water all by myself”), speaking and singing in three languages but reading none, having a grandmother who could communicate with nature spirits, and his year-long stay with witchdoctors at age 11. Or when he says, “There are millions of things that can be explained but some things can never even be mentioned.” And there’s the performances, like the one where Toure says, “I have to tell you that tonight is different from other nights. It’s true. I’m with the devils tonight.” He’s totally sexy, abandoned, rocking, almost disturbingly unguarded.
F: One thing’s for sure: the guy had huge hands and beautiful clothes.
C: And he knew how to bend desert air.

Tony Allen
Lagos No Shaking
(Honest Jon’s/Astralwerks)
C: [listening to track 1] Okay, that’s it. I hereby rescind the dance ban. [gets up from couch] I gotta close these blinds.
F: Mr. Tony Allen is, of course, the brilliant drummer and co-creator with Fela Kuti of the Afrobeat sound. They say he played like four drummers, but that was a long time ago. I think now he’s up to six.
C: [air drumming wildly] If only all the songs on here were this good. Unfortunately half of them feature vocals that are just inappropriately slick singing with banal lyrics that borrow from Fela’s righteousness but not his wit, bite or joy in metaphor. But when Rolling Dollar sings, it’s a vintage Afrobeat clinic session that’ll make your feet weep.

Eccentric Soul: The Big Mack Label
(The Numero Group)
F: Talk all you want about digging in the crates, but first someone’s gotta dig up the crates.
C: And the Numero Group’s Eccentric Soul reissue series—of which this is the latest—is excavation par excellence.
F: I’d never heard of the Big Mack label, but apparently even if you lived in Detroit in the late ’60s and early ’70s you probably didn’t hear of it either.
C: [Listening to Mae Young's “The Man Put Sugar In My Soul”] Is this CD on the wrong speed?
F: Only if you can’t dance that fast. What incredible energy. I nominate it as One of the Best Songs Ever.
C: Big Mack—more than a burger.

James Hunter
People Gonna Talk
(Rounder)
F: For a moment here I thought this was a missing disc from my Charlie Rich box set, and this was 1962. But in fact this is new. It’s just got that sweet soul something, yet it’s got a rock’n'roll backbeat, but really he’s singing exquisite torch songs. I gotta say, James Hunter, a pompadour-sporting white British guy, reminds me of chiefly of Sam Cooke.
C: The fact that he recorded it at London’s noted bastion of analog purity Toe Rag Studios makes sense. Almost nobody does this kind of music in this style. Hunter’s craft is so fine, his commitment so total. Listen to “People Gonna Talk”—his guitar lick’s so tasty, the roll’s so sweet, it captures that swinging moment when ska evolved into rock steady but still bore the clear influence of American soul records.
F: I would say Hunter is brown bread to Edwyn Collins wry.
C: One more quip like that and you’re going straight into the pun-ality box.
F: I’ve been yellow-carded for wordplay.

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott
I Stand Alone
(Anti)
F: Original folksinger Jack Elliott is 75 and from the sound of things, he’s knocking on heaven’s door.
C: What a beautiful, perfect album. The songs here sound happy but the words—about favorite dogs, old trains, the suckiness of arthritis—are by turns sad and ruminative. He’s know what’s been lost, and he knows the ramble is probably nearing its end. But he’s not entirely sad about it, which gives the songs—and banter—a mischievous tone.
F: Jack’s just doing the ding-dong-ditch on ol’ Death, I betcha.

Loren Connors
Night Through: Singles and Collected Works 1976-2004 3-cd box
(Family Vineyard)
C: Slow chilling weird blues arcs carved by a graveyard guitar instrumental master. No ghosts, though—just a man before the Big Empty.
F: Dark, dark, DARK.
C: Definite dark night of the soul stuff.
F: It’s gorgeous, but I’m terrified.

Charalambides
A Vintage Burden
(Kranky)
C: Almost unbearably beautiful new album from this long-running co-ed guitar duo, now apparently based in Texas. [listening to the perfectly titled 20-minute instrumental “Black Bed Blues”] A warm breeze on a summer night, the windows’ curtain flutters. Outside the tall Texan grass sways. You’re sleeping with your girl in somebody else’s bed. The sunrise is cloudy, gentle…
F: Two people underneath the Unnameable Vastness, instead of one. Pure mutual longing.
C: My recommendation? Give this to someone you love.

The Golding Institute Presents Final Relaxation
(Ipecac)
C: Informed Arthur readers know that the Golding Institute is associated with with notable non-comedian Neil Hamburger.
F: [reading sleeve] “Your ticket to Death through Hypnotic suggestion.” This should go over well with the Doom crowd. Zizek will dig it, and maybe Ramblin’ Jack Elliot too!!! [puts CD in player]
C: Oh dear. I think if you slipped this into amongst every commuters’ positive reinforcement self-help tapes, you could really change some lives.
F: By “change” I think you mean “end.”
C: Give this to someone you don’t love.

“Rage, Rage Against the Stuffing of the Couch” by Peter Relic (Arthur No. 22/May 2006)

Administrator — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:12:57 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 22 (May 2006)

PETER RELIC’S BOOK CORNER

Rage, Rage Against the Stuffing of the Couch
Two poets delve deep into worlds of work and non-work

Reviewed:

Alex Mitchell
Life Is A Phantom K-Mart Horse Starting Up In The Middle Of The Night
(Yahara Design Press, Madison, WI)

John Tottenham
The Inertia Variations
(Kerosene Bomb Publishing, Los Angeles)

If their styles couldn’t be more contrary, they do have one thing in common: poets Alex Mitchell (neckburned nailgun grindhouse tripper) and John Tottenham (couch-crowned prince of lethargy) have both created, by force of will or resigned declension, their own poetic form.

Mitchell is a rock’n'roll addicted sweetly emotional fellow traveler. His poems are as much about himself as the characters they co-star: a mushroom-juicing buddy from back in Pompano Beach with a suicidal brother; a friendly transvestite crackwhore outside a Hollywood 7-11. He is as much of the barroom as he is anti-boardroom, his impulsive tales [impulsions] leading us through corners of associative memory emotional and imagistic. There is a lot of power in his poems—they inspire you to write, my highest praise. In a poem called “if penguins could talk” Mitchell is a bruiser with a bruised heart (“once a speedfreak, always a speedfreak,” he writes) trying to quit Starbuck’s. After going without coffee for two weeks (“although I was feeling better physically I was jonesing for a blast”) he caves: “I greedily slammed down some of / evil black poison.” And then he’s off on a tale that goes for five pages.

Tottenham’s eight line withdrawals from ambition barely give the reader time to get out of bed, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. A resigned indentation is what he wishes to leave (if he aspires to anything at all). In poems like “Time Moves, But Not I” and “I’m Not Tired,” he discharges himself of will, while subtly sublimating his own state of stagnation. He declares he lacks the energy required to laugh, and one chuckles. The brief nature of his poems allow him to maintain the guise that he isn’t doing shit—but when you read them together, you feel the import of the block he pushes up against the eternal pyramid of poetic ambition, and one realizes: all progress is incremental…to the point of imperceptibility..despite any onanistic self-recrimination.

NEWS FROM THE UPPER NINE: Henry Griffin goes back to New Orleans (Arthur No. 20/Jan. 2006)

Administrator — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 18:24:17 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 20 (January 2006)

Illustration by Arik Roper; click to enlarge

News From the Upper Nine
Henry Griffin goes back to New Orleans

“You are entering the city at your own risk. Police and fire services are limited. There is no 911 service. Traffic lights are out throughout the city. Observe a citywide speed limit of 35 mph, and proceed with extreme caution, especially around downed power lines. You are not permitted to go beyond your designated ZIP code area. Do not drink, bathe in or wash your hands in tap water. Standing water and soil may be seriously contaminated. Limit your exposure to airborne mold and use gloves, masks and other protective materials. Apply mosquito repellent and sunscreen. Bring sufficient food, water, gas and any medical supplies required to sustain you and your family, keeping in mind the curfew and store inventories may limit access to supplies. Gas stations are not fully operational. Fuel is limited.” —from a list of “tips” from the New Orleans Mayor’s office for dealing with the “urban hazards” of life in the 9th Ward in September, 2005

I’ve long used the introduction “I live in New Orleans” to break the ice at parties. This usually cheers people up, often sparking memories of a particularly debauched vacation. “How can you people live down there?” someone would inevitably ask, meaning “How do you keep from becoming an alcoholic?” Now the same question connotes differently, more of a “How could you live in that city knowing that you were doomed by its very design?” Of all the tragedies of Katrina, this hurts the most: our carefree lifestyle, our legendary tolerance, for alcohol, for iniquity and corruption, is now less a punchline than a cautionary tale.

You’d think from the apocalyptic prognostications of the national media that there wouldn’t be much of a city left to return to. Not so. Some areas are straight-up ravaged, that’s for sure. But your “average block” can be quite a mix, and even in the so-called “spared” neighborhoods, a hundred year oak may be splintered across some power lines.

My house is still there, a raised Creole cottage at the eastern-most tip of the upper Ninth ward, three blocks north of the river. I describe it this way, as that’s how I first re-located it, via a satellite photo posted on the web, after the cataclysm. I found my neighborhood from space, then my block and then my house. It was easy to pick out: there is an 80-foot pecan tree leaning against the roof. The good news is that it hasn’t fallen through and bisected the building. The bad news is that the tree has been there since July 5, a symptom of long forgotten Tropical Storm Cindy. In classic New Orleans fashion, it hadn’t been seen to by the proper authorities by the time Katrina hit eight weeks later.

Three weeks after Katrina, I returned to find my basement apartment had taken three feet or so of water. It had dried out by then but waterlines and a veneer of detritus told the story: my life had been coated with waste, human and otherwise. To keep the effect from being entirely humorless, the Almighty had thrown in a few frogs, who were now living in my office.

My urban salvage operation actually lightened my mood. Like most folks, I’d imagined losing everything I’d left behind. To get back even half of my stuff seemed almost unfair. I couldn’t breathe the spore-clogged air or touch anything with my bare skin, but rescuing keepsakes from the rising mold was as thrilling as the prize choosing finale of Wheel of Fortune. Things I’d owned and lost were now won back from oblivion. I was in such a good mood that first night that I almost brushed my teeth in tap water, mistaking this for any other major American city. Spill bottled water on the brush, I reminded myself. Like you’re in Haiti.

Some people suffered their share without losing a shingle. My friends Dave and Jennifer had to watch the whole storm from a vacation in Thailand (being late August, lots of folks were out of town). They returned to find their recent home purchase in fine condition. Then they noticed the stench out back. An unpleasant excavation followed, and a more unpleasant discovery: a visiting country’s National Guard, after having barracked in a nearby Catholic school, had used these civilians’ yard as a dump for their rotting garbage.

Things could have been far worse. They could have had a pile of trash dumped on their lawn by the enterprising earth mover, who was leaving his business card for the follow-up call to remove said pile (in order to dump it on his next intended customer). They could have been arrested for a curfew violation by the Wyoming National Guard or the NYPD, who’ve been patrolling New Orleans due to our cop shortage, and been put behind bars at the bus station, which is Orleans Parish’s prison since the real one was flooded. They could have been blindsided by a hit and run driver who speeds off, uninterested in trading insurance information without the rule of law (I witnessed such an incident). They could have had their house gutted by looters. They could have absentmindedly opened their refrigerator.

Those early weeks after Katrina, people were very well-behaved. Streets were empty and quite peaceful, passersby waved hopefully. The de-electrified environment and low population lulled us into a sense of temporary historical atavism. By which I mean, the neighborliness was positively Amish.

Imagine that all the things you loved about your home were taken away. Instead of food you get 24 varieties of MRE (avoid the Thai Chicken); drinking water comes in cans supplied by Anheuser Busch. Where your favorite vegetable truck used to park, now there’s an upside down Volkswagen that had caught fire. Long tree-lined avenues like St. Charles and Esplanade have been given arboreal crewcuts by the storms, leaving the shade compromised. Friends and neighbors aren’t around too much, but you do get daily visits from assorted rescue workers, most double-checking that each house’s spray-painted sigil is still accurate.

And, after a while, civilization returns, one service at a time. Electrical power! Gas! Cable! DSL! Sanitation! Could the mail, once the invincible standard of civil service, be far behind?

* * *

The anarchic spirit of a functional ghost town couldn’t last forever. As the population rose in September and October, the town got crankier. Four-way stops, once an opportunity to wave at a kindly stranger, now began to prompt the waving of just a single special finger. The long-awaited return of recognizable first world civilization tested the patience of many thousands.

And yet…Each restaurant or bar that reopened became an opportunity to rejoice. By Halloween, the city’s Dionysian personality was returning in force, and celebration was beginning to become a goal in and of itself, which seemed familiar. What festivities there were spilled into the streets, as they used to do. For Halloween, the most popular costume was a refrigerator wrapped in duct tape, spray-painted with the address of George W. Bush or Tom Benson, the reviled Saints owner who intends to move our hopeless but beloved football team to San Antonio.

There were a lot of smiles, a lot of back slapping and story trading, even among people who had just traded introductions. We all knew this one new thing about each other. That we would, and did, come back. Even redefined, this tainted city, one that wasn’t exactly in mint condition when we got it, would be ours again if we want it.

* * *

If everybody doesn’t return (and how could they all?), will New Orleans lose its most essential asset, its culture? It’s hard to say. But maybe it isn’t so tragic. Maybe it’s the case that every person who doesn’t get back is somehow happier somewhere else, where they have air conditioned schools, and a lower murder rate, and better jobs—jobs that aren’t in the tourist, service and gambling industries. Who can blame them? Who in their right mind would come back, to a city of corrupt politics, looting cops and dwindling protection from the elements?

The answer, of course, is those who can’t imagine living anywhere else.

Henry Griffin, a fifth generation New Orleanian, is a writer and director whose films include Mutiny and Tortured by Joy. He organizes his books by color, trading organization for the pleasing effect of his shelves viewed from a distance. Since the storm, he is fresh out of blue books.

“Weird Shit’s Still Going Down: Notes From Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 2006″ by Gabe Soria (Arthur No. 22, May 2006)

Administrator — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 17:48:06 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 22 (May 2006)

Our tipsy author, right, with fellow revelers at the Rex Parade, Mardi Gras morning.

Weird Shit’s Still Going Down: Notes From Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 2006
By Gabe Soria

I’ve been in love with New Orleans since the day in May, 1993 when I first set foot on its soil. Since then, I’ve been a resident of the city three times and have gone back over and over when I wasn’t. Mardi Gras, for all its faults and gross public image, is important to New Orleans residents and expatriates alike, so when the chance came to visit my city for the first time after Katrina during Carnival, I jumped at it, but not without some second-guessing trepidation. What follows are rough impressions of my experience being back in town from Saturday, February 25 through Mardi Gras to March 1, Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the season of Lent…

Touching Down
Disembarking from the plane and already the Twilight Zone schisms from reality are apparent. This scene happens in the first couple minutes of the episode, the part right before the credits when the Rod Serling voice-over comes in and lets the viewing audience know that some crazy shit is about to go down. What’s Louis Armstrong International without its perpetually open souvenier stands and ersatz French Quarter bars? Too much like the Salt Lake City airport, that’s what. Outgoing passengers ain’t got nowhere to buy their last minute cans of Tony Chachere’s seasoning, authentic cookbooks or Hurricane mix. Incoming passengers don’t have anything, except for the baggage claim, and that is hardly a picnic. Everybody seems a bit hunted, a bit guilty.

Nothing makes you realize how much you’ve given up until someone’s taken away the lights, and the “Arriving Flights” underpass of Louis Armstrong International is a third world kick in the nuts: the absence of ambient light is palpable, and the illumination provided by taxis, shuttles and pick-up cars feels like interrogation by headlight. At the same time, though, it’s kinda eerily beautiful, as though everything is powered by steam and gaslight. We hear later that they’re still working to restore normal power. The airport of a major American city still doesn’t have full power six months after a disaster? What the fuck is going on here, I ask myself, resigning myself to joining the chorus of people asking that same question.

T-Shirt Slogans
The town is aswarm with bootleg political shirts, jockeying for space in Decatur Street tourists shops with your typical novelty T-shirts about states of tequila intoxication. Most of these shirts feature embattled mayor Ray Nagin in Photoshopped Willy Wonka drag, making some sort of sport about his now infamous Martin Luther King Day “Chocolate City” speech, possibly the biggest effect a George Clinton song’s ever had on the political scene. React how you want to the speech—reading a transcript in retrospect, it’s obvious to this writer at least that Mr. Nagin’s frustration with his black contemporaries left him feeling a bit loose at the mouth, but I ain’t mad at him—you can’t help but realize that there’s a little bit of smug racism at the core of the these shirt’s makers, that they finally feel justified at putting the screws to a black mayor who, admittedly, said some dumb-ass shit. But then I realize an important fact: I don’t think I’d ever really want to hang out with someone who wears their politics, left or right or straight up centrist, on their literal shirt-sleeve. I mean, I’m all for band t-shirt propaganda, but this? Nah. One T-shirt maker has gone the extra satire mile, though: for sale at the Circle Bar are “Ernie K-Doe for Mayor” tees, featuring the smiling face of the late and lamented Emperor of the Universe. Bumper stickers can be had, too. One drunken night, I find myself fervently wishing that K-Doe wins in a write in. In the storied history of corrupt Louisiana politics, the election of a deceased and much loved R&B singer has got to be an improvement.

Chased on a Bike
Weird shit’s still going down, though. On a perfectly fine afternoon, the wife and I mount bikes to ride down to a parade to meet a friend. Normally, yours truly is a bit more savvy about the safe routes to travel, but the hurricane-depleted lack of population has thrown me for a loop. Why not take a jaunt down a clear street a block closer to the river? The answer becomes clear when we make a left on Josephine Street towards St. Charles. A group of kids—12 to 14, black—are hanging out in front of a corner grocery/liquor store and begin shouting out warnings about how “Y’all don’t know where you ridin’”, etc., etc., and one kid’s bold enough to do a little mock run after the wife, who’s trailing behind on a too-small borrowed bike. The kid’s pursuit is half-assed, and he stops almost as soon as he starts, but it’s a neon-lights reminder that New Orleans is still a fucked-up place, race-wise.

In fact, this little incident is an anomaly. While statistics may not prove me right, the general impression one gets during Mardi Gras is of détente, peace. Sure, fratboys might get beaten down by cops along Bourbon Street after one Huge-Ass beer too many, but for the rank and file of the city, a “we’re all in this together and ain’t it fine” feeling pervades, usually. If you say “Happy Mardi Gras,” to anybody, they respond in kind, and mean it. But this little incident… well, they’re kids, so it doesn’t really mean much. It means that they’re acting like they think they’re supposed to act; it means that they actually think that their corner store is something to be protected; it means that they’ve learned that being young and black and aggressive can freak the fuck out of people going about their own business. Still, it’s days before I can stop picturing kicking the kid’s head in if he tried to touch the wife, and my subsequent murder at the hands of his numerous cronies. Yikes.

The 9th Ward Marching Band
Not that it needed saving by anybody, but the wife’s and my Mardi Gras is definitely given a soul-rousing boost by seeing the Mr. Qunitron-led 9th Ward Marching Band parade with the Krewe of Proteus on Lundi Gras night. For the uninitiated, Quintron and his wife Ms. Pussycat were and remain the owners and operators of the Spellcaster Lodge, a house/venue located on St. Claude Avenue in the 9th Ward. They’re both musicians, as well as puppeteers. Long time fixtures of the weird underground of New Orleans, they’re more like good spirit elementals rather than impeccably dressed scenesters, which they are as well. The 9th Ward Marching Band started as a loose-knit, almost renegade marching assemblage, but over the years they’ve gotten their weird act together, and while sharp and somewhat professional, they still make the squares nervous. While watching them march in their smart red and white outfits, playing “Rock me Like a Hurricane,” I notice that the crowd lining the parade route is going BANANAS for them. Everybody can feel that this ain’t no sarcastic, ironic hipster bulllshit—it’s true American weirdness and beauty at its finest. But you can also tell that they make some folks delightfully nervous. This can probably be best attributed to the bands in-between, resting music. When there’s a lull in their routine and things calm down, the 9WMB’s glockenspiel players start tapping out the theme from the slasher film “Halloween,” with the tubas coming in every now and then to deliver an ominous “bruuummmmmm.” It’s the film score equivalent of the fabled brown sound—you can tell by the looks on people’s faces that they recognize the minor key tune, and they like it, but don’t like it at the same time. It’s a brilliant moment, and I want to buy whoever thought of it a beer or ten.

The Dead Zone
The night of Lundi Gras finds the wife and I and our friends Judson and Courtney taking a shortcut on a drive downtown to hit a Quintron/Peaches show. The shortcut takes us through the area of town known and Mid-City, where Courtney lived previous to Katrina. Her new home features a handful of possessions salvaged from her house and cleaned of mold, but she’s basically begun anew. But driving through her old neighborhood… yikes. Once you get a few blocks off St. Charles, heading away from the river, a frightening change takes over the streets. They’re empty. They’re dark. Everything looks haunted and miserable. A few FEMA trailers are parked here and there, and on occasion someone seems to have managed to get a porch light working, but on the whole, it feels as if we’ve driven directly in a George Romero zombie flick. Any moment now I expect to see a shambling corpse slouch into the street, attempting to suck the brains out of our car’s passengers. No such thing happens, of course, but I am glad when we eventually make a right turn onto relatively populated, lighted Esplanade. The fact that a few moments earlier I was half-joking about wishing I was armed with a shotgun kinda makes me want to cry. I’ve NEVER wanted a gun in New Orleans, not even in my worse moments.

Mardi Gras Day (and on into the night)
Mardi Gras morning rolls around and all seems to be aback to normal in the city, at least for a few hours. Working on a few hours of sleep, the wife and I roll out of bed and into our costumes (I’m going as a jerk dressed in a jumpsuit and furry cap; the wife’s going the classy route by masquerading as a magical French schoolgirl). Walking over to St. Charles, we begin to see a parade of friends walk by; everybody seems to be well on their way to drunk before noon, but nobody’s got a mean buzz on. It’s all hugs, everywhere. Families lining the filthy parade route in their chairs and ladders look bleary-eyed and happy. When Rex starts to roll, you see people catching beads… and handing them to little old ladies and kids next to them. Everybody’s saying, “Hey, darlin’,” and “Excuse me,” and you’d be hard-pressed to spot your usual line of sweaty guys being led plastic-cuffed into a paddywagon (though I’m sure it’s happening somewhere—you can’t buck tradition in one year). The hours melt away—at one point, the wife and I are eating hamburgers with friends, the next, we’re at our home base eating red beans and rice cooked with a nice hamhock, the next, we’re being dropped off downtown. But by the time the Morning 40 Federation hits the stage at Checkpoint Charlie’s for their annual Mardi Gras night show, as the festival comes to its natural inevitable end, the feeling in the air is undeniably powerful, completely ecstatic. You can feel the desperate urge in the club to let loose, to raise one’s arms high above and scream. And as the Federation lurches into their first amplified ode to boozing and 9th Ward living, everybody in the room does exactly that. I’m grinning from ear to ear—it’s the feedback and the beer, most definitely—but it’s also the hope and love I’m seeing right now, that I’ve seen all weekend. Sure, folks are cynical and tired, but they still believe, much more so than I think anybody else in any city would or could, for they know that’s there’s an ineffable something to New Orleans, something that just can’t and won’t quit, ever.

C and D: Two fellas reason together about some new records (Arthur No. 22/May 2006)

Administrator — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 17:22:27 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 22 (May 2006)

C and D: Two fellas reason together about some new records

D: We have some severe time and space restrictions today because there’s 25 records to examine and I only brought four beers.
C: [disbelieving] I told you all week.
D: Yes, well. We’ll have to be efficient and precise, like the German defense.
C: Always with the soccer metaphors when he’s supposed to bring the beer.
D: [looks at stack of CDs] Hmm, I like this pitch. [smiles broadly, uncaps a Foster’s] Come on man! It’s time for kickoff.

MARVIN GAYE
The Real Thing: In Performance, 1964-1981 DVD
(Hip-O/Motown/etc)
D: Marvin Gaye, the sweetpeacelovevibetenormaster of all time.
C: Sometimes things really are essential, and this nine-dollar DVD is one of those times. Or things. Anyways, the reason I’ve been watching this all week long is pretty obvious. There’s nobody like Marvin, no one even close; it’s a blessing just to watch him lip synch.
D: [grabs DVD case] Give me that. Especially when it’s Marvin duetting with Tammi Terrell at something called “Swinging Sounds of Expo 67,” singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in a futuristic phone booth under a plastic dome with a people mover going by in the background.
C: Look at those Dentyne smiles. It’s like a commerical for some future utopia where they are the fertility king and queen.
D: [thoughtfully] A world where you’re not afraid to have a baby
C: Hey, you’ll like this: the a capella option lets you hear Marvin singing in the shower.
D: No it doesn’t.
C: Okay it’s actually just isolated studio tracks. Beautiful. He really can make you swoon with just a voice and a snapped finger. That’s all he needed.
D: Very efficient.
C: “War is not the answer/for only love can conquer hate… we’ve go to find a way/to get some understanding here today”—man, if you sing that today, you’re called a master of the obvious, and yet maybe it’s only a lovesinger who can bring the super-commentary that lasts. He reminds us there’s better things to do with our time.
D: [musing] Lovers and poets make the best peace advocates.
C: This is footage from the film Save the Children—
D: —which should be released on DVD immediately—
C: —which includes live renditions of “What’s Going On/What’s Happening Brother” from a 1972 concert where they did the whole album, and you get Marvin at the piano and the legendary James Jamerson on bass guitar.
D: [sipping beer] Unbelievable. Total butterland.
C: Total ethnographic film of Black America in the early ‘70s: broken windowed skylines and gang grafitti, soul food joints and black pride bookstores, men in dashikis, women in flares and kids in corduroys with spaghetti on their faces, street basketball and barbecue, balloons and checker pants and sweaters.
D: Excellent fashion!
C: He sings like his voice is a horn—and his voice actually has the grain of one. So amazing. Plus there’s multiple appearances on the Dinah Shore show—[notices puzzled D]—that was an afternoon TV show for bored housewives back in the ‘70s.
D: That was the time before they started making all the women work all the time too, in addition to the men. What happened?
C: [ignoring] He talks about What’s Goin On: “I don’t recall much about making it. I feel it was very personal, very divine. I don’t hardly remember writing the songs, it was like I was in some sort of other dimension when we did it, so I know it was a very spiritual.” We could spend weeks talking about everything on here: the polyester jumpsuit future-Chic-soul-P-funk—
D: Somewhere The Juan Maclean is crying.
C: —about getting down on the moon with floor fog that is the promotional video for “A Funky Space Reincarnation”— “COME ON BABY, let’s go peace loving and check out this new smoke/Naw this thing I got, it ain’t classified as dope/Smoke I got from Venus/Have had it all week, it’s getting old/come on and try this new thing with me baby….”
D: This song is my new national anthem.
C: And your new wardrobe, if the world is lucky.

GNARLS BARKLEY
St. Elsewhere
(Downtown)
C: This is a collab concept duo album by two geniuses-in-progress: Dangermouse, the guy who did the Beatles/Jay-Z album-length bootleg mashup, and Cee-Lo, the short guy from Goodie Mob with the voice and the lyrics and the concepts. Goodie Mob, those guys were part of that Georgia crew in the ‘90s, all of them interesting—Goodie and the Dungeon Family and Organized Noize and Outkast and Witchdoctor and Cool Breeze—
D: Who had a dream, he was in a place called Butter.
C: Here’s something bonehad obvious: this song “Crazy” is the song of the year—very apropos for these times, in so many ways that [looking at D opening his second Foster’s] we have no time to count. Three seconds and you’re hooked, three minutes and you’re done and ready to begin again. [looking at promotional photo] These guys are total half-bus refugees.
D: The revenge of the nerds is neverending. [listening to the song’s music] Somewhere, The Juan Maclean are crying another tear, alongside N.E.R.D. [repeating lyrics] “I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind/There was something so pleasant about that place/Even your emotions had an echo, and so much space/And when you’re out there ,without care, yeah I was out of touch/but it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough/I just knew too much/Does that make me crazy?” Whew. I’ve been to that place—I think I lost my mind there too once.
C: [laughs] Once?
D: [glares] SILENCE in the lower ranks!

RUFUS HARLEY
Sustain
(Discograph)
C: Philadelphian bagpipe-playing long-ago jazz dude with new studio record. Coltrane indebted. Whoa that’s a nice double-deep in the pocket beat underneath the drone on the second track. It’s weird how the bagpipe drone works, immediately.
D: It’s dronetime once again.
C: Sometimes I’m not sure he’s playing the same song as his band—
D: [singing that Gnarls Barkley song] Mayyyybe he’s crazy?
C: —which, according to these liner notes, includes his son Messiah, one of 17 kids?!? Is that right?
D: Could it be a misprint?
C: What, he had 1.7 kids? That’d be hard to do, then again it might not be hard for a guy that plays bagpipes in 7/4.

THE BLACK KEYS
Chulahoma
(Fat Possum)
D: I am very happy sitting in front of this speaker.
C: This is the Black Keys doing six Junior Kimbrough songs.
D: One thing’s for sure: Junior had a lot of riffs.
C: One other thing’s for sure: Junior had a lot of kids. 36, to be exact.
D: [The Black Keys’ singer-guitarist] Dan Auerbach is not one of them.
C: Not that we know of. But yeah, it is uncanny how his guitar tone, style and voice can all echo Junior’s so much—on “Have Mercy On Me” at first I thought it was Junior. Who knows why what pops up where. As they say in Africa, the wind blows the seeds. Nice to hear the Keys branching out on the track, by the way, with the organ and tabla—it’s a good sound for them. And that knotty riff.
D: Wasn’t Robert Plant gonna join these guys on bass?
C: He didn’t make the cut. Re: Zeppelin, it should be said: the guitar does have that tone and bottomlinenastiness that Jimmy Page could get sometimes. So good. Great, varied drums from P. Carney, his best work yet. And here comes another long snaking moan riff.
D: Junior’s music wasn’t done evolving, even if he’s gone.

THE RACONTEURS
Broken Boy Soldiers
(V2)
D: Yes meets the Eagles?
C: That’s a bit harsh. I know you’re a stict Megitarian, but come on: you’ve always liked both Jack White and Brendan Benson. There’s some good cuts on here, especially the Deep Purplish stutter funk on this one [“Store Bought Bones”].
D: [sagely] Sometimes when you split the difference, the difference gets split.
C: …

EAGLES OF DEATH METAL
Death by Sexy
(Downtown)
C: Another supergroup, featuring Jesse Hughes and his boomerang of love, plus Josh Homme.
D: Unlike the Raconteurs, this group knows what it’s doing.
C: And what it is doing is very simple: retarded Rolling Stones riffs that you can go-go to.
D: This music encourages sexual tendencies and is proud of it.

THE CUTS
The Cuts
(Birdman)
C: Quality high-fiber retro guitar-and-organ pop and ballads from Bay Area sweethearts.
D: That the Raconteurs would, uh… raconteur for.
C: Dude, you gotta stop ranking on the Raconteurs. You need another beer. [hands fresh Fosters to D with ridiculously gay(e) smile] As Marvin would say, ‘Here, my dear.’

FUTURE PIGEON
Future Pigeon
(RecordCollection)
C: Very nicely done modern retro-dub from the Arthur office favorites, with guestwork from Ranking Joe, Mikey Dread, Ras Congo, the Scientist. You can’t argue with a band that uses a six-foot-long papier mache electric doobie—with smoke machine and lights—as its onstage prop.

THE AGGROLITES
The Aggrolites
(Hellcat/Epitaph)
C: Very nicely done retro rocksteady, with just the right amount of grit and spit, from members of bands I don’t usually care about.
D: A pleasant shockah.

THE FIERY FURNACES
Bitter Tea
(Fat Possum)
C: Our favorite geniuses. Some may say this is the record they’ll be remembered by, but I say this is just them scraping the gravy off the ground. The endless Disneyland Electrical Parade keyboard squigglery and backmasked vocals and whatnot sure sounds to me this is a band trying to stay ahead in the weirdness sweepstakes.
D: [smugly] It’s not nearly as weird as Gnarls Barkley, and not nearly as good. And I bet you they know it.
C: Don’t they know competition is so 20th century? The key is to listen to the album in reverse order, last track first. That way you’ll listen to all of it, and you’ll be sure to hear the best song, “Whistle Rhapsody?”, which is also one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard.

ESPERS
II
(Drag City)
C: Okay, this is sadder.
D: I like these Espers. I sense naked hippies dancing around the maypole. After dark. Drinking the stuff from the milk of the frogs… [closes eyes]
C: It does have a certain Sandy Denny/Pentangle quality. I bet they get tagged with the New Wave of Ren Faire thing, but I bet they wouldn’t be caught dead at that party—they’re gloomy gusses and sad-lifed maidens who’d rather be in the woods than the castle, anyway. I’m speaking metaphorically of course.
D: [continuing, rhapsodic] Or they they may be playing in that town called ‘Machine’ in Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Which featues Robert Mitchum in his last performance. [opens eyes, smiles] One of this nation’s finest weedsmokers.

JOSEPHINE FOSTER
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
(Locust Music)
C: Okay, this is even sadder.
D: An American woman singing all 18th or 19th century German folk songs for children, in German, is the personification of melancholy. It might not be the right music to listen to when you’re deciding whether to live or die, deep at night in those grey hours.
C: As Marvin would say, That’s not livin’! But it sure is singing. Absolutely beautiful.

SCOTT WALKER
The Drift
(4AD/Beggars)
D: Excellent art-rock that doesn’t rock from a living legend, but I’m afraid this music encourages morbid tendencies. This is immense, this record. But what is it? The mood somehow implies a seriousness that might not have to do with worldly events. It is religious? spiritual? There is an urgency! Dreadstorms coming. I think of Japanese ghost music…
C: We’re running out of time, D. I think this is one we’ll have to come back to next time.
D: At least we let the people know that the mighty Scott Walker has returned.

FRED NEIL
Fred Neil
(Water)
D: The great freckled Greenwich Village folk soul who wrote “Everybody’s Talkin’,” which Nilsson had a top ten hit with in 1969 off the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack.
C: [puts on "That's The Bag I'm In"] Check out the morning he’s having: “toast was cold and the orange juice was hot.” There’s so much soul in his singing, this is an album for the dinosaurs.
D: Not the dinosaurs man, the dolphins!
C: It’s true, these are songs for the dolphins. Seriously.

BELONG
October Language
(CarPark)
C: I’ve been let down by NASA, what with the militarization of space and all, but this gives me some insight as to what it feels like to be launched into space. Beautifully fluttered and static-drenched, like those between-song passages of Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine.
D: [blissed out]
C: [blissed out]

BORIS
Pink
(Southern Lord)
C: Okay. One more beer, we’ll split it. This is the new Boris, the co-ed heavy guitar sludge march trio from Japan who in the last year have dropped the overt Melvins moves and become a band of varied powers—
D: [Stands on couch with bepuzzled-in-happy-way face] Majestic dry ice fog riffage that can’t be turned any louder!
C: A landmark record, a virtual catalog of extreme rock guitar strategy—Godflesh/Jesu ethereal rings and reversed dread, overdriven High Rise-style rhythms, post-Sonic Youth squall, Kim Thayil-style tone, Grand Funk/Montrose laying-it-out-there vocals—all on the first two songs. I don’t know if any of that makes sense but I’m trying to give people a general idea.
D: Unbelievable, neighborhood-destroying pummel drumming here [on title track].
C: [listening to ‘Woman on the Screen”] Wow. Reminds me of really, really good Nirvana-style punk/grunge, only somehow much huger.
D: [listening to “Blackout”] A mighty behemoth from the Far East is throwing mountains!
C: I think we are all in agreeance. Rock album of the year so far, easy.
D: [Dancing to “Electric”] You can lose fingers to this album.

HOWLIN RAIN
Howlin Rain
(Birdman)
C: One last supergroup: Howlin Rain, which is Moloney from Sunburned Hand of the Man on drums and Ethan Miller from Comets on Fire on vocals and guitar, working out their common interest in that seemingly lost-forever continent of great 1968-1973 American rock ‘n’ roll, when the hippies went back to the land and kept on rocking until the Man pulled all but a few back into his lame grip. Allmann Brothers, Creedence, Grateful Dead, Neil Young…
D: I sense benificent Jerry Garcia vibes coming from smiling visage of Ethan.
C: He is singing at the edge of his capability like Jerry —it’s a high, roasted voice. But, curcially, not shrieking. He sings like he’s losing his throat. One of those guys whose vocals get quieter the louder he sings. He’s got the goner’s high moan.
D: Like that guy in Canned Heat. [listening to “Calling Lightning With a Scythe”] Or Faces-time Rod Stewart. [laughs] I call this album Another Side of Ethan Miller, Workingman Rock Star.

C and D: Two guys bro down over some new records (Arthur No. 21/Mar 2006)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 21:57:11 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 21 (March 2006)

C and D: Two guys bro down over some new records

D: I’m looking at the stack of stuff we’re going to talk about and I am noticing an absence this time round of certain records, or styles, that I am particularly fond of. I am worried about the lack of brash super-volume riff-monster guitar and backbeat.
C: Well D, the way I look at it is: We certainly can’t review everything that we come across—who has the energy for that? And we can’t even cover everything that’s obviously worthy—there’s just not enough space. So it’s a bit down to what most interests us at the moment. As Allen Ginsberg pointed out, “Mark Van Doren used to write book reviews for the Herald Tribune and almost every one of the reviews was intelligent and sympathetic; he was always talking about something absolutely marvelous. I said, ‘What do you do with a book you don’t like?’ and he said, ‘Why should I waste my time writing about something I’m not interested in?’” And anyways, don’t worry. There’s some riffs on the way.

Mountains
Sewn
(Apestaartje)
D: [Listening to “Sewn One”] Hmm… Could it be the mighty Growing?
C: Close, but no cigar. This is Mountains, a duo from New York who I only recently became aware of because Mr. Plastic Crimewave selected them to play at his 2 Million Tongues festival. Their second album. A nice electrical nature hum. I’ve also been hanging out recently in the mountains, so I feel a special affection for them automatically.
D: An orchestral shower with the warm drone reminiscent of Herr Klaus Schulze on the synthesizer.
C: And then, little acoustic guitar lines and horn tones, foregrounded, or deeply backgrounded. It’s pretty great isn’t it? Total mama nature kids in a low-wattage electronic garden. Reminds me of what Ginsberg’s “great peaceful lovebrain” would sound like, slowly comfortably spinning drifting slowly in eternal wombspace. An alternate soundtrack to Silent Running‘s opening sequence, or a lost instrumental Talk Talk aria…
D: You’ve been on quite a Ginsberg kick lately.
C: [smiles beatifically] Why bother to paraphrase already perfectly put words of wisdom? I say quotate away til we have something new to say… I like to listen to this at Arthur HQ with the windows and front door open, hoping birds will fly by or neighborhood animals will walk in, and we can all be at peace together, for once… Of course, it’s also useful to drown out the car alarms and sirens and lawnmowers and leafblowers and helicopters. It’s not sentimental flashy hot leftbrain human, not cold technical rightbrain robot: strictly ahuman, objective in a naturalist’s sense.

Citay
Citay
(Important)
C: Continuing in the rural mode…
D: Psychedelic canyon and meadow music such was made in ye olde ’70s! [starts air guitaring to closing ascending twin electric guitar line of "Seasons Don't Fear the Year"]
C: They’re really nailing that rich acoustic-electric rolling tabla honey harmony sound that all those heavy bands—Sabbath and Zeppelin, especially—used to do, back when all the best musicians were inspired by what the Incredible String Band were doing, and were still able (or willing) to express a feminine side to go with their preening barbarian or depressive wail aspects…
D: [reminisces] When the maidens were fair and wore flowers in their hair instead of covering themselves in tattoos and piercings. I am awaiting Sandy Denny’s entrance at any moment.
C: Total “Battle of Evermore” vibe, especially on “Nice Cuffs.”
D: Nice title. I also like this one: “What Never Was and What Should Have Been.”
C: More like “What Always Is and Will Ever Be.” This is an album without a sell-by date, with a song for every season.
D: [listening to "Shalom of Safed"] Monumental. Like the best parts of Deep Purple and the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd.
C: Making music for horse-drawn sledrides thru the driving snow to the lodge in the distance, where pale ale and a fireplace and friends are…
D: [10 minutes later] Was that all one song?

The Duke Spirit
Cuts Across the Land
(Startime)
D: [listening to “Stubborn Stitches”] Could it be Heartless Bastards?
C: Yeah, a little eh? It’s actually the first album from an English band, three blokes with a woman in front who does have a voice not too far from Ms. Bastards, or Ms. The Kills, or Ms. Polly Harvey, or here, on “Darling You’re Mean” …
D: Great title!
C: …which opens like an old Spacemen 3 or Spiritualized tune, she’s got that Hope Sandoval reverbian thing going on, but she doesn’t just mope-pout, she howls too. Pretty standard tunes but a great voice and an interest in building to liftoff, repeatedly. The band reminds me a little of their contemporaries and fellow Englishpeople the 22-20s here and there, which of course takes us back to The Gun Club and X. And I also hear, especially on “You Were Born Inside My heart”…
D: ANOTHER great title!
C: …the sound of Come, of the great Thalia Zedek, an underappreciated true believer voice of blues trauma/”I’m having an episode” rock & roll darkside… This music says: jeans and threads, fringes and belt buckles, whiskey and sunglasses, late nights and tough mornings.
D: They strike me as… promising.
C: What do they promise?
D: Dirty glares, at first. But later? [smiles] Sex with slapping.
C: ….

Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan
Ballad of the Broken Seas
(V2)
D: [listening to "The False Husband"] Well the obvious recent comparison would be that Nick Cave & Kylie Minogue song on Murder Ballads. Also Serge Gainsbourg and Ms. Bardot, or Lee Hazelwood songs, or Jimmy Webb, or Johnny Cash…
C: It has a classic vintage feel. There’s a real string section (which more artists should do instead of cheaping it out with the synthesizer), and a darkness and a ’60s country and western duet swirl to it, with an almost inappropriately sexkittenish breathy femme voice—
D: Julee Cruise. Or, Marilyn Monroe singing to the president—
C: She’s a better singer than that, but you get the feeling listening to this—
D: [smiling broadly, with raised eyebrows] I get many feelings listening to this—
C: I have no doubt that you do, but anyways you get the feeling that she’s holding back singing, doesn’t trust her voice so much as she should. But her reticence doesn’t hurt her here because the songs are so accomplished, and she’s got Mr. Mark Lanegan, probably our nation’s greatest wounded survivor voice, to harmonize and duet with.
D: And they’re all HER songs! Interesting…
C: Except for “Revolver,” a really spooky nighttime shortness-of-breath anxiety thing written by Lanegan, and a clever reworking of Mr. Cash’s “Ramblin’ Man.” Yeah, how often do you see women writing for men anymore? It’s great. Lullabies and laments, offers and pleas, thoughtfully arranged with appropriate decor: a fiddle here, reverbed tabla there, an instrumental intermission at just the right point.
D: Which could have been a track on the Citay album!
C: And the pop tune here — “Honey Child What Can I Do?” is pure singalong AM radio gold.The album closer—”The Circus Is Leaving Town”—is an all-timer for closing time.
D: This is the kind of heartsong Tom Waits used to write.
C: What a song, what lyrics, what a melody, what a feel. I wish we could run all the lyrics for this: “The party’s over now/stop howling at the moon/you need a different beat/you need a different tune/Remember that old song/we had when we were young/Life was an empty page/the world would write upon/Do you recall the meadow grass, we’d sit and watch the hours pass/ You were such a good girl then/Oh Ruby dry your eyes/The circus is leaving town/Oh Ruby, roll your stockings down…” When Lanegan sings, “You could make me think/the sun sets in the east” and then hums at the end? Whew!
D: That’s when you know a singer knows how good a song is. When he still wants to sing it even when there’s no more words to sing.
C: Obviously, hopefully, this is just the beginning of a beautiful, enduring partnership.

Beth Orton
Comfort of Strangers
(astralwerks)
D: Wow. Total laugh-cry masterpiece triumph to the 32nd degree. And I was never a huge fan. What happened?
C: Maybe a weekend at Esalen helped? Who knows. It’s a huge creative breakthrough, for sure, on every level. There’s more good words in the first minute of the album than most songwriters come up with in their entire career. And the music is tremendous, really dry and warm and thought-out.
D: It’s called craft at service to a group of great songs.
C: Maybe it’s down to the guys she’s working with—Tim Barnes on drums, Jim O’Rourke on other instruments and production—but it seems like they totally gelled creatively in a way where it doesn’t really matter how it happened. I mean, O’Rourke was involved with those Judee Sill records finally seeing the light of day last year, and I can hear echoes of her work here—that melancholy, that minor joy, those major choruses in spite of everything, that lovely canyon feel, etc. So it makes sense. Still… Man, every song is a hit. Listen to the breakdown on the chorus of “Rectify.” Amazing. Only a live band can do that. Same thing on “Shopping Trolley,” which is practically anthemic, with zero cheese content, and “Heart of Soul,” which she just BELTS. Amazing. Bare music, bare soul. I’m crying here!
D: Coffeehouse denizens of America rejoice, we have a new masterpiece to sip our lattes to.

Belle & Sebastian
The Life Pursuit
(Matador)
D: [singing along to "Act of the Apostle Part 1] “What would I do in Germany?” I find myself wondering that sometimes.
C: [smugly] I have no doubt that you do.
D: Enough with the sarcasm, you, or there may be damages! [listening to "Another Sunny Day"] Who is this?
C: Belle & Sebastian, from Scotland. Your friend Isobel Campbell used to be in this group.
D: I don’t recall them being this fun.
C: Yeah, it’s total record store pop, isn’t it? Almost like Ween in its variety and craft, when you think about it. Just a ton of styles they didn’t have mastered before: 12-string Byrds country-soul, Gary Glitter glam beat with Sweet-style melodies and harmonies, upbeat melodic Creedence chug rock & roll, a stylish Jam dance number, a Stevie Wonder Synclavier summer sunpop hit, all sung in choirboy stylee. Lotsa great music hall stuff, but it’s all perfect for a stylish afternoon-into-evening garden party.
D: Rufus Wainwright, eat your heart out.
C: Clever observational storytelling lyrics too, which they’ve always done well. “Sukie in the Graveyard” is Sly & the Family Stone-style organ riff funk with Kinks kharacter lyrics and long-line melody. “Funny Little Frog” takes me back to Pulp, who I dearly miss.
D: “For the Price of a Cup of Tea” is an undeniable number one hit in the harmony pop heaven of my inner music-lover mind.
C: …

Sparks
Hello Young Lovers
(In the Red)
C: [listening, slackjawed] …
D: [listening, eyes bulging] …
C: Talk about genius.
D: Talk about masterpiece.
C: How do you even start to talk about this?
D: I’ve never heard anything like it.
C: The best I can say is if you ever liked Sparks—any of their many, many startling inventive endlessly idiosyncratic innovator phases during the last 30 (!) years—this will destroy you. And if you never liked Sparks, ever, you need this, just to know that pop music, pop lyrics, pop personae could be so much…MORE.
D: They should be on the cover of Arthur.
C: Stop the presses!
D: I gotta say I didn’t see this one coming.
C: A surprise knockout in the 20th round! Or, in Sparks’ case, the 20th album.
D: [opens window, yells outside to passers-by] C and D are down for the count! [pause] Again!

Reviews by C and D (Arthur No. 20/Jan. 2006)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 16:13:24 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 20 (Jan. 2006)

C AND D: Two guys bicker about new records.

TV on the Radio
“Dry Drunk Emperor”
(Touch and Go)
D: I’ve listened to this probably a hundred times by now, and I still find it overwhelming. It’s a devastator.
C: For those out there who haven’t heard it yet, this is the song TV on the Radio released in the wake of Katrina, free to everyone via the Touch and Go website [go here]. This is what they said at the time: “we were back in the studio thinking and feeling again and made this song for all our everybody… in the absence of a true leader we must not forget that we are still together…. hearts are sick … minds must change … it is our hope that this song inspires, comforts, fosters courage,and reminds us… this darkness cannot last if we work together. let us help each other… heal each other …. look after one another … the human heart is our new capitol…. this song is for you…. us…..we….them… it is free. pass it on. TO THOSE AFFECTED BY HURRICANE KATRINA: NEW YORK CITY’S HEART IS WITH YOU… STAY STRONG! WE LOVE YOU.”

We don’t usually do this sort of thing, but this is a special case. Here are the song’s lyrics:

DRY DRUNK EMPEROR
baby boy
dying under hot desert sun,
watch your colors run.

did you believe the lie they told you,
that christ would lead the way
and in a matter of days
hand us victory?

did you buy the bull they sold you,
that the bullets and the bombs
and all the strong arms
would bring home security?

all eyes upon
dry drunk emperor
gold cross jock skull and bones
mocking smile,
he’s been
standing naked for a while!
get him gone, get him gone, get him gone!!
and bring all the thieves to trial.

end their promise
end their dream
watch it turn to steam
rising to the nose of some cross legged god
gog of magog
end times sort of thing.
oh unmentionable disgrace
shield the children’s faces
as all the monied apes
display unimaginably poor taste
in a scramble for mastery.

atta’ boy get em with your gun
till mr. megaton
tells us when we’ve won
or
what we’re gonna leave undone.

all eyes upon
dry drunk emperor
gold cross jock skull and bones
mocking smile,
he’s been standing
naked for a while.
get him gone, get him gone, get him gone!!!
and bring all his thieves to trial.

what if all the fathers and the sons
went marching with their guns
drawn on Washington?
that would seal the deal,
show if it was real,
this supposed freedom.

what if all the bleeding hearts
took it on themselves
to make a brand new start.
organs pumpin’ on their sleeves,
paint murals on the white house
feed the leaders LSD
grab your fife and drum,
grab your gold baton
and let’s meet on the lawn,
shut down this hypocrisy.

C: The harmonies they get on this are just shattering. And the chorus…
D: This is soul, with zero retroism. That’s not supposed to be possible anymore and yet here it is. Pure righteousness.
C: I find this song overwhelming too. Not just for the song itself, but for the spirit in which was recorded and offered to the public, and the immediacy and selflessness involved. That’s what being an artist is about, in times like these. They get to something really tragic about the current situation: all those poor idiots who have been buying the Bush balderdash since 9/11… because they did that, now we are all paying for their mistakes, and will do for decades. And I’m broke, man. My pockets are empty. And I’ve got it easy. Think of all the unnamed, uncounted dead civilians in Iraq, all the dead and mistreated in New Orleans, all those detained in the secret torture prisons in Poland…
D: This song is so good I can’t believe somebody made it. The build and release, the chorus, the singing, the lyrics, the fife and drum…
C: It’s a call to imaginative action, for less talk and more walk. This is prime Fela Kuti-level stuff, seriously: talking truth directly to power, giving comfort and uplift to the powerless. I’ve never heard this song on the radio, yet it’s exactly the kind of song radio was made for.

Cast King
Saw Hill Man
(Locust Music)
C: Debut album from 79-year-old white fella. Recorded in a shack in Alabama.
D: Seniors rock. Look at this guy. I think our friend T-Model Ford might have some new competition!
C: He recorded eight songs for Sun Records in the ‘50s. He he had a touring country and bluegrass band, Cast King and the Country Drifters, but it didn’t work out and he never released an album.
D: Sweet baby Jesus, what is wrong with this country?
C: I find myself wondering that often these days…
D: The first line of this song is “I don’t care if your tears fall in my whiskey.” What more do you need?
C: The guy’s voice is so rich, it’s a pleasure just to hear his singing. The sadder the lyrics, the brighter the music. The songs are clever, catchy, simple. How could nobody care for three decades? This nation is so cruel to its artists.
D: There’s some Johnny Cash here for sure.
C: To our modern ears, of course. But I’m starting to wonder. Who came first? Not that it matters as much as, well, just how many other guys are out there still who are this good, who we’ve never heard? Maybe it’s a lot more than we think. People who got skipped over by accident of history or circumstance. That’s the lesson of the reissue culture that’s so strong right now—the Numero Group label’s releases, the stuff they talk about in Wax Poetics, all the rediscoveries of people like Vashti Bunyan and Gary Higgins and Simon Finn—all of this teaches us that actually the cream doesn’t always rise to the top. It often sinks to the very bottom.

Nina Simone
The Soul of Nina Simone dual disc
(Legacy/RCA/Sony BMG)
C: You’re not going to believe this, either. A new dual disc release: one side is a greatest hits run, the other side is vintage live footage. Deep vintage.
D: [looking at track listing] Whoa! None deeper vintage. Pure black power, 1960s. Look at this!!! [Reading aloud scrolling text on screen] “By the end of the ‘60s, the civil rights movement was in a shambles; its key leaders were dead, and race riots had erupted in several U.S. cities. ‘It felt like the shutters were coming down on anyone who dared to suggest there was something seriously wrong with the state of our country,’ said an angry Nina Simone. A ray of community hope appeared in the sammer of ’69, when the Harlem Festival—called ‘a black Woodstock’ by its producer, Hal Tulchin—came to Central Park. Crowds of up to 100,000 flocked to six free concerts. The stars included Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, Gladys Knight and the Pips and Simone. These excerpts from Simone’s performance have never before been shown in America.”
C: I’ve never even heard of this festival.
D: Me neither.
C: How is that possible? I thought we knew our shit. My god. Are they saying this footage has just been sitting there since 1969? Listen to her go. Listen to this band. Look at that set, look at this audience. Look at the songs she’s playing—“Revolution,” “Four Women,” “Ain’t Got No—I Got Life” and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” Look at the setting. Look at the situation is which this was performed.
D: This is right before she went into self-imposed exile.
C: She looks absolutely purposeful. There is a resolve in her voice, in her comments to the band and the audience, in that gorgeous face of hers as she sings that is just absolutely… She looks like a woman about to leave, because she’s been wronged. You know she’s gonna slam that door.
D: No whining. “My life has been much too rough,” she sings. [Listening to “Ain’t Got No—I Got Life”] Listen to the band swing! Unbelievable.
C: She’s holding back tears for the entire performance… She finally breaks—just a bit—on “To Be Young Gifted and Black.”
D: I think this is the greatest single live performance I have ever seen.
C: Especially when you consider the context. This is just extraordinary. Le Tigre and other no-skill apologists who say technique is irrelevant would do well to watch this. The reason people are listening to what she has to say is because she had skills beyond even her conviction.
D: It’s an absolute travesty that the American public hasn’t seen this footage until now.
C: Can you imagine what the rest of this festival must have been like? Look at that lineup. Sheesh. We’ve got to ask again: WHY HAVEN’T WE HEARD OF THIS UNTIL NOW? Where are our cultural historians? Why do we know about Jimi liberating the national anthem and not taking the brown acid and all that other Woodstock jive but not about this? It’s criminal.

Niger: Magic & Ecstasy in the Sahel dvd
by Hisham Mayet
(Sublime Frequencies)
C: And now for somebody who knows how to document and distribute important stuff immediately, rather than waiting for 36 years…
D: [spills beer in joy] YES! The mighty Sublime Frequencies strike AGAIN!
C: 70 minutes of footage of hot blast from the streets of Niger, one of the quote poorest unquote nations in the world. Oil can drum duos, one-stringed instrument maestros, harmonizing ululators, invocation dances. Divination ceremonies and informal nighttime initiation rituals, Taureg trance funk at the end.
D: Absolutely riveting.

OOOIOO
[Untitled]
(Thrill Jockey)
C: New album from project featuring Yoshimi who is in Boredoms. Don’t really understand the provenance of this album—recorded in 2000 but only released this year? Weird vocal calisthenics, big tribal drum thrusters, chimes and flutes and birds and trumpets, synthesizers, tablas, loopage and harmony chants, Sean Lennon and Yuka Honda amongst the guests, the best album booklet I’ve seen in 2005—it seems to illustrate a place directly midway mushroom wonderland of the Allmans’ Eat A Peach album centerfold and the post-toxic landscapes of Lightning Bolt—and check it out, here on Track 7: straight-up female Tuareg ululations!
D: Sometimes I think Bjork gets all the attention for trying to do what Yoshimi is already doing.

Pearls and Brass
The Indian Tower
(Drag City)
C: We really shouldn’t be reviewing this til next issue cuz it’s not out til January 24. But excuse me, I think I need to turn this up.
D: Cream covered by Kyuss?
C: Yeah, kind of, huh? It’s actually three dudes from Pennsylvania.
D: These are some pretty knotty riffs. Quite a brush. A hedgerow.
C: Thorny stuff, but they still give you a riff. Here, have one.
D: Why thank you.
C: Total air guitar and drum practice CD. “The Face of God” is the face they make when they play, I bet. And there’s the vocal harmonies, and the fingerpicked acoustic blues.
D: This is bigrig truck driving music.
C: Forty-wheeler stuff—for the poor dudes trying to forget about the price of gas as they drive the nation’s clogged freeways. If it’s time for a Convoy remake, then this is the soundtrack.

The Fall
Fall Heads Roll
(Narnack)
D: The Fall is now at its best since the ‘80s, and I can say that with some authority.
C: This is the kind of spare, rocking Fall we all want. I like the words—Mr. Smith’s is still a totally idioscyncratic lyrical approach—but sometime I think just hearing his caffeinated bark against a good beat is enough. It’s a very rhythmic thing—the words are almost secondary to the song’s breath. There’s something about that “ah” that he still does at the end of each line that just feels good when you imitate it. I know that sounds weird but try it-ah.

Tarantula A.D.
Book of Sand
(Kemado)
D: Classic early King Crimson sound. Excites one’s nerves, doesn’t it?
C: If Marc Ribot likes them, that’s all I need to know. But yes, this does get the blood racing down the alleyways, I must say. “The Century Trilogy II: Empire” is power metal Crimson, cello beautiful acoustic guitar, hugely romantic pastoral, hugely alarming screech and crunch. I don’t usually like something that has such a self-consciously stark, exaggerated dynamic. But both parts are pretty tremendously great in and of themselves, on their own terms. Maybe it’s those kinds of times now, eh, where the loveliness, the absolute beauty and love can exists side by side total horror. As the Irish philospher Mark Patrick Hederman said, “Singing is a way of proclaiming a better world, a refusal to give in to the grimness of the past.” [listening to "The Century Trilogy III: The Fall"] Whoa… like Jeff Buckley in his full, abandoned gypsy mode and his secret sisters fronting Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
D: They are equipped with maximal music range.

Mi and L’au
Mi and L’au
(Young God)
C: Taking it down a notch… Like old weird Tom Waits fairground songs sung by a Finnish waif in the key of air and a humble-voiced post-Nick Drake haunted gentleman from France. It’s closely recorded , delicate songs—that is there’s tape hiss and falling rain and throat-clearing—written to each other, based on a lived natural intimacy.
D: Reminds me of Mojave 3, when Rachel sang…
C: Mi and L’au apparently lead quite the reclusive, romantic life together in the Finnish woods. Life beyond electricity. This seems to be happening a lot lately: younger musicians and artists retreating, or withdrawing, to rural settings, refusing to engage modern civilization except when necessary. Little Wings and Brightblack Morning Light definitely. But nature is already providing the setting for more promotional films and photographs: see Cat Power’s live DVD, or Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods, or Growing’s work, or Six Organs of Admittance and Devendra and Feathers’ album covers, and stuff from the New Energy movement people, or those photos of Pearls and Brass…
D: I think she’s whispering along with her singing. A secret recording technique that few know about. I think Jim Morrison did it sometimes. Or I like to imagine he did.

Bjorn Olsson
[untitled album with lobster on the cover]
(Parasol)
C: We’re almost out of time so we gotta make this quick. New album of vaguely Morricone guitar an et cetera instrumentals from Union Carbide Productions/Soundtrack of Our Lives co-founder. That first album on Omplatten was a keeper. Frosted goodness, magically delicious.
D: I think he has long ago retired from this world.
C: If this was the soundtrack to your life, what would your life be like?
D: More candles. More seaside town time. More fish. Probably more wine. More chopped parsley, more diced onion. More time riding horses and picking buttercups. Less inner rage…

Biff Rose
The Thorn in Mrs. Rose’s Side/Children of Light
(Runt)
C: Nicely done reissue of 1968 and ’69 albums by long-forgotten bright eyed groom of the psychedelic morning dew piano roll: Biff Rose, a white fella from New Orleans best known as the guy who wrote “Fill Your Heart,” covered by Bowie on Hunky Dory. He’s a Randy Newman, incapable of cynicism; a Beefheart for kindly eared folks, a goofball master punster writing advice songs about human and animal and god follies and foibles. A whimsical male Mary Poppins, singing at an anti-war saloon or a soup kitchen. Free to Be You and Me for adults.

Lavender Diamond
The Cavalry of Light four-song EP
(lavenderdiamond.com)
C: Lessons in harmony (of all kinds) from the love and peace actionists who stole the show at ArthurFest: four songs in the key of love, reviving the lost tradition of the uplifting psychedelic pop. All sung by one of the most charismatic women I have ever witnessed.
D: Supremely gorgeous music. I might not be at DefCon 5 all the time if I listened to this regularly…

LIFE AGAINST DEMENTIA by Joe Carducci (Arthur No. 1/Oct. 2002)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 15:49:29 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 1 (Oct. 2002)

LIFE AGAINST DEMENTIA
by Joe Carducci

Anyone familiar with the roiling currents and tidal motion of American popular culture knows that the film and music industries are delivering less interesting work than ever. Melodies, rhythms, songs, voices, characters, stories and genres seem colder, more processed and, in general, received rather than inspired. There’s nothing wrong with referencing or even stealing plots or melodies as long as the stealing’s done by an artist or madman who revives them too, in some new personal way. But with the explosion of University film departments and rock and roll courses in the last two decades the American arts are filling up with professional careerists who better belong in business college, or law school.

The action film fell of its own overblown weight; you’d hardly know that it grew from such lean, tightly-scripted productions as Dirty Harry (1971), Death Wish (1974), Rocky (1976), First Blood (1982), and Terminator (1984). And whereas Jaws (1975) remade film marketing, Titanic (1997) threatened to remake the action film itself: fusing the male action film with the woman’s film takes another hundred million dollars and an additional hour in running time. The resulting summer behemoths trod the marketplace with such strong-arming confidence that the studios practically demand they be made without costly stars so as to pack in more explosives and effects and advertising.

The music industry’s dilemma was clear at this year’s Grammies. In a normal year Michael Greene, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (NARAS), would have slammed Republicans on non-Industry social policy grounds, but Bush got off easy this year as the country ain’t in the mood and Greene’s house was not in order. Big recording stars are lobbying in Sacramento to void the record industry’s exemption from the seven-year personal contract limit, and they want to own their own master recordings. And over all the bogus proceedings on Grammy night loomed the specter of the computer-software-hardware-internet juggernaut’s paramount killer app—free music. (NARAS is no longer Greene’s playpen due to sexual harassment lawsuit—a real Clinton Democrat, apparently.)

So the questions become:

- Have the media, which now dominate content, so divided programming into blindered marketing niches that’s they’ve cut the cords to our rich musical and film traditions?

- Has the evolution of Pop—its computer generated virtual musics and films—superseded any organic folk motion within our music and film traditions?

- Has the Organization Man of International Entertainment corporate culture proved incapable of recognizing and delivering music and film of the level that sundry Sammy Glicks and juke-box mobsters did for decades in their sleep?

- Has the music underground rejected all tradition but either the line of nihilism diagrammed by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces, or a backstop of kitsch (such vicarious ex-pat pursuits as French chanson, Exotica, Canto-Pop, J-pop)?

Sorry I asked…

We can’t be sure whether the current thin gruel might not be the only possible art deduced from the slim pickings of the last nearly thirty years. The teenagers just starting their bands and the twenty-somethings still prepping their first film will be the artists shaping what American pop culture will become. But they have experienced pop culture of little depth or personality their entire lives. What humanity persists in the art tends to be negative, reactionary traits: cynicism, indifference, contempt….

Radio was formatted in the early seventies and so ambitious recording artists quickly began to format themselves. An entire generation of willful rock bands—Ramones through Flipper—refused to format themselves. These were the last bands to have grown up listening to the cultural mix of pre-1973 radio and TV variety shows (not to mention walked through the high grade “amateur” musical environment Americans of all ages once experienced at County Fairs, Corn-boils, church socials, and school dances). But unformatted, these Punk bands were then, not programmed. Those that attempted to format themselves for hits (Talking Heads, Devo, X, Replacements…) ensured they would not be the bands that carried the torch forward; perversely, it would be the unprogrammed misses (Ramones, Avengers, Black Flag, Minutemen, Descendents…) that would launch a million bands.

Since the music left the South in the late fifties the natural grace of that early rock and roll has gradually dimmed, leaving a more studied rock music in its place. The British bands of the decade between 1963 and 1973 had studied the music, though you couldn’t say they were grounded in it. The American punk bands that formed before 1980 were the last to be grounded in this folk tradition aspect of rock and roll (though they were warped as well by that new Brit influence). Thereafter, even the most important bands (Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Tool, Kyuss/Queens of the Stone Age, White Stripes…) are necessarily more conceptual in approach. It may be that our distance from the South of that day, and the input from today’s constricted media-driven musical environment might ultimately dry up the musicality of even bands that do not depend on the programmers of radio and MTV.

Hollywood today, courtesy of marketing science and Sammy Glick IV, offers CGI (computer-generated imaging) Potemkin villages and villagers for pulverizing in CGI thermidor for the boys, tearjerking emo-porn for girls, and nihilistic puzzle pictures for the sophistos. Generations of filmmakers have been destroyed by the Star Wars saga with nary a wobble in the force detected. (In my unrequited meetings with film producers in L.A. and N.Y. the life-size star-trooper models in the office corners never relax their guard.) More noxious influences on film narratives are tramping in from TV, music videos, advertising, videogames, pornography, and all the film deconstruction bonuses included on the typical DVD release.

Recently passing on through the obit pages have been American cultural figures such as Peggy Lee, Budd Boetticher, Joey and Dee Dee Ramone, Dave Van Ronk, Pop Staples, Katy Jurado, Ray Brown, Anthony Quinn, Waylon Jennings, Dorothy MacGuire, Harlan Howard, John Lee Hooker, Richard Farnsworth, Bernard Klatzko, Carl Perkins, Ed Roth, Hilous Butrum, Rod Steiger, Otis Blackwell, and John Fahey. Never mind the heftlessness of the obits in decades to come, Britney Spears may never die! The biotech nerds (not known for their ability to hear music) are forging new frontiers in unintended consequences.

Our meta-sentient pop culture has foreshadowed this immortality. The explosion of cultural choices via cable and satellite has reached critical mass via the web—it’s now become something different, a constant ambient hemorrhagic din. Kids watch Ozzie and Harriet and The Osbournes; the Randolph Scott rides again; Buster Keaton falls down and springs up again; and even the sword-and-sandal genre returns! We are either jacked by contemporary offerings (Survivor, Cops, Robot Wars, Dismissed…) or calmed by our immortal ghost culture (Lawrence Welk, Audie Murphy, Cheyenne, Father Knows Best…).

While it is true that a musical/societal syncretism such as Elvis Presley can never be repeated, it is also true that there are no longer coherent pop and social cultures from which a given Elvis might be launched from and against. The Fifties pop consensus was bisected first by generation (Frank v. Elvis), then by gender (Eastwood v. Redford/Welch v. Streisand), and then chopped into smaller and smaller fractiles (Russ Meyer, Roger Corman, R. Crumb, splatter films, death metal, lesbian romances, the Olsen twins, post-rock, abasement comedies, Daniel Johnston, Dolomite…). Instead of backwater geniuses being shuttled into the media spotlight for the benefit of a sincerely interested audience, the media turns its spotlight onto itself, in effect, for the amusement of a fallen, cynical audience. There was one Elvis; there are millions of Kim Fowleys. People lived vicariously through Elvis in that small part of their grounded lives they reserved for dreams. Today, American work-lives generally require no physical labor and this has loosed us to live in a veritable dreamland. And one can only laugh at a Kim Fowley as he chases his weightless dream.

The advertising industry runs on applied schizophrenia; its hacks work not to express themselves or even their clients, but to anticipate and produce what their potential customers might wish to hear, all the while serving their clients’ interests. It’s this wheedling Madison Avenue energy, not just its money, which fuels the media and increasingly the art itself. If there are great garage-styled bands now attempting to get heard on radio and cable, why is it we’ve been hearing garage-style in major ad campaigns for the Gap (Troggs), Powerade (Monks), Pepsi (Sam the Sham) and others for a year or more? Clearly there are sharper and more desperate minds in advertising than in programming. Still, you’d think that advertisers would be the most concerned about tune-out factor as listeners are already predisposed to bail to another station when the ads kick in; this is a measure of just how retarded programmers have become.

An energy with a similarly desperate kick shoots prospective talismans of the zeitgeist, such as The Osbournes and mullet haircuts, through an increasingly dim popular culture and before the even dumber cultures of media, politics and the academy whose leading cement-heads can always be counted on to belabor the slightest of pop culture throwaways. We first saw this kind of mass impulse after Elvis’ death when his name and image became punchlines. The late-Elvis talisman continues to ward off the fear of being caught uncool, and naïve–it’s a default setting for the subhip. This double-dealing desperation to trump the hip has leaked into pop culture from advertising.

Still, the gravitational pull of the marketplace and individual artistic consciousness tugs at notions from all these cultural shards and remakes of them something akin to the old A-film or hit record that once offered something for men and women, girls and boys, hipsters and squares (Then, full-throated: John Ford, the Beatles, George Stevens, Led Zeppelin; Now, sotto voce: Steven Spielberg, No Doubt, Steven Soderbergh, Weezer).

Refusal to grow up was very nearly the defining characteristic of the boomers so it’s no surprise they might refuse to die. Their pop culture likewise appears immutable. Kids and young adults–those born in the seventies and eighties–have been keeping inherited styles like Hippie, Radical, Soul, Folkie, Beat and Bop alive. Alternatives such as Punk, Metal, Garage, and Rap date back to very nearly the same period. But that these styles survive does not make them vital. They each now exhibit the dementia of a played-out mind, no matter the condition of the body. And in youth-culture terms, when a style will not die, then the hollow posturing of the neo-neophytes within it tends to foreclose the use of that style’s original statements by any ambitious musician seeking to create something new informed by the best of the past–this past the only possible source of ammunition to fight a sterile present. So, while the emptied forms of these styles thrive (think reggae, punk, metal, blues, jazz, you name it), vital young musicians are discouraged from rooting themselves in these traditions because their high school nemeses are camped out within them. Again, this matters because these young players’ music will soon be what we all have to listen to. Garage might have been predicted as the most viable option to revive because, though it’s been bubbling under in collector/retro-pop circles forever, it’s been absent in the high school social universe.

The slow organic rise of neo-country since the eighties (Blasters, Panther Burns, Gun Club, Jason and the Scorchers, Souled American…) to the point that it has become a sturdy parallel economy augurs better for a musically rooted revolution today. Commercial C&W radio is as utterly irrelevant to this underground as commercial rock radio was to the Ramones twenty-five years ago; this can be a good thing if you’re patient enough to wait for Nirvana. The garage underground is probably more reactionary than the country underground. It’s an old scene that often cleaves to bad formless junk because it betrays no trace of pop, metal, punk or whatever gets their goat and so can’t sell-out to anybody and embarrass them. Luckily it has a great fanzine voice in Ugly Things, and the scene’s arbiters appear to be losing control of bands that deserve a wide audience, in the same way that the Gilman Street commandants lost control of Green Day. The Fat Possum label roiled today’s well-oiled blues industry simply by trolling the delta for seventy and eighty year old bluesmen–the last of their genus sadly. The city sophisticates of the blues didn’t immediately cotton to these rural eccentrics (R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, T-Model Ford…); that’s how far from musical truth even music obsessives can drift when a subculture’s weakness inspires defensiveness.

Hollywood’s dilemma is different. Filmmaking is capital-intensive and it is art-by-committee of nominal adults. The old studio system was crippled by the Supreme Court’s 1948 Paramount decision that forced the divestiture of the studios’ theater chains. Then it was destroyed by the growth of television, and its history rewritten via the Auteur theory, which re-evaluated throwaway B-films at the expense of fussed-over A-films. It took until the end of the sixties for new production and aesthetic equilibriums to be reached. The unexpected successes of Sergio Leone’s westerns (released in U.S., 1967-8), and Easy Rider (1969) woke Hollywood up. But too soon after that, the pulpy seventies small film (The Hired Hand, Two-Lane Blacktop, Badlands, Night Moves, Rancho Deluxe…) had morphed into a comicy template hammered out by Rocky, Jaws and Star Wars (1977). The human scale satisfactions offered by time-honored Hollywood B genres were soon inflated with A budgets and A stars to the point at which 2nd unit directors, stunt coordinators and CGI-designers have become crypto-auteurs (Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Pearl Harbor, Minority Report…), when in fact there need be no actual auteur of any script. Here too, it may be that the films offered for two decades now have corroded filmmakers’ ability to deliver, and audiences’ ability to demand better work.

The Auteur theory seduced the independent film world from the start. Here, where the screenwriter’s contribution might’ve carried more weight, young directors succumb to a false imperative to direct and write their films, a la Bergman. But without a true writer’s sense of tragedy or comedy, these writer-directors (Tarantino, Smith, Jonze) are left with little but their own fandom impulses to display personal cult bonafides. Others simply puzzle up their narratives (Mulholland Drive, Memento, Exotica!…), using alleged formal innovation to disguise lack of content. Hollywood is a long, long way from Henry Hathaway, Henry King, Jacques Tourneur, Joseph H. Lewis, Don Siegel, Anthony Mann, ad infinitum it once seemed….

What is there left in this culture that can be built upon? Who is there to build it? I’m glad you asked.

Today a kid is drafted into extracurricular activities by boomer parents who can’t stand the idea of letting him or her roam around in this world that they made. After WWII when the sexes got back together and everyone was having kids, American culture was kid-friendly. You rode your bike anywhere you wanted so long as you got home by dinner. Other adults, parents themselves, would look out for you if you got near trouble. Now with parent or parents working, a kid’s time is booked up to keep him occupied and supervised until evening. Individual sports are becoming more common than team sports for boys, while girls are now pushed into team sports courtesy the Title IX diktat (volleyball scholarships crowd out formerly abiding wrestling program budgets).

The web, television, videogames and cell-phones are ubiquitous, and the post-scarcity fastfood obesity apocalypse is accommodated by the skate/hip hop fashion world of XXXXL sizes and the faux-biker pseud-culture of tattooed tubboes with fu manchus. In early 90s NBA-style, the older players hid balding pates by shaving their heads and bluffed the rookies into shaving off their own full heads of hair. The NBA young eventually turned the tables. There are always style options for a new youth culture, though even I hesitate to observe that hotpants and afros are the most obvious one for the NBA (sure enough, Madison Avenue’s there already). Today MTV’s music videos are larded with the fantasies of fat rappers, while its reality shows are stocked with the ripped abs and bared midriffs of model American youth. (These docs never show you the three hundred stomach crunches a day these poor desperate bastards perform–that might be too real, like a Warhol film.)

Boys skate, game or surf the web for porn; girls play soccer or politic amongst themselves. There’s plenty of fan interest in music and film but it has been failing to develop beyond simple consumer response or artless careerism. The sex-roles that rise from skate culture, hip hop, videogames, girl-world, Maxim, Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and MTV are the mook and the model, or the player and the whore. Girls may get something out of these roles, but at base they float the male fantasy that the dude-as-slob can get the hot chick in heels. This is culture, not life of course, but where might a youth-style go from here? The rainbow tribe bubbleheads occupy the more naturally androgynous hippie option, the snobs are still wearing black, and even cheerleaders have tattoos.

There will be some new equilibrium that settles around these challenges to the classic cultural venues from the web, videogames, and corporate oversell but it can’t be seen yet. But one can see already that the mass markets, the passive ubiquity of the web, and the aggressive ubiquity of the cell-phone has prompted a localist reaction that champions artisanship, literature, homemade culture, and lost media like 78 Victrolas, PXL-2000 cameras and 8-track cartridges.

Females are still evolving under new pressures and opportunities. When sex, the orb around which the female psyche’s one abiding question revolves, is decoupled from reproduction as it has been since the pill was introduced in 1960, then new things begin to happen:

1) That existential question shatters into dozens of leading questionlets about mere sucking and fucking, fueled now with venal status-seeking consumer agitation,

2) Girls’ behavior to each other gets more contentious, and this anxiety might be expected to prove better for art than the traditional female code, or more recent willed solidarities,

3) And fashion, once mere social coloration, becomes instead an index of this new hysteria. When such hysterical energy is ideologized, as most everything is in this world of college grads, female artists are wont to overshoot their mark yielding work that loudly postures politically but won’t declare its art. (Art is not a hammer; a hammer is a hammer.)

Male culture seems to be either in denial about its nature (Emo, Pagan, Rave) or wallowing in it (the rest of ‘em). New options for females tend to allow males to sink into their worst impulses (see ghetto social breakdown or Maxim for this in extremis). Only the male board-sport culture seems to be creative within this confusion. After the U.S. team swept the Olympic Halfpipe event, silver medallist Danny Kass was breathlessly prompted by NBC to describe what he expected from his moment on the podium and he responded with pitch-perfect new-male bravado, “I guess I’ll try to cry.”

Women’s tennis might be the most interesting female subculture at the moment. Beginning with Martina Hingis it’s burst into a new upgrade. The Williams sisters are plenty girlish, even as they unload a wild new power onto the game. Those following are less flamboyant and all business for this new game having been secured. (The soft-focus Kournikova game never arrived.) Women’s figure skating is too trapped inside its aestheticized erotic fantasy world to break out into anything new (back-flips, etc., are illegal). Reigning billiards champ Jeanette Lee is literally the Frida Kahlo of the pool table and therefore unfortunately probably too like a forbidding Pain Goddess to become a standard for young girls. The young black women lately raging through MTV’s reality programming (Real World, Road Rules) may mean more than Richter scale abuse, or maybe it’s just racist misogyny at MTV.

But the young must work in and around a male dementia of beer ads, “Jackass,” Emo, Metal, Anime, WWF, games, gangsta-rap, Hefner, Guccione, and Flynt, and a female dementia of Alanis Morissette, Mariah, Melissa Etheridge, Enya, Eve Ensler, Louise Erdrich, Lifetime, Le Tigre, and Sex in the City. And so many of the young attend college now that urban bohemias no longer collect idiosyncratic rule-breaking drop-outs so much as they endure annual graduating classes of operators who have already interned halfway up the bowels of the Man. Recent American low-rent drop-out bohemias in Williamsburg, the lower eastside, Wicker Park, Silver Lake, and the Mission were set upon and consumed by dot.com yuppies, design students, starter execs and trust-fund babies as if by swarms of locusts.

We can cheer ourselves by supposing that the worse it all gets the greater the opportunity for some 21st Century Elvis. But can these rookies hit the efus pitch?

When Norman O. Brown wrote Life Against Death in the fifties he was trying to redeem the narrow protocols of Marx and Philosophy by insisting they contend with Freud. This he did under the pressure of an American culture unnaturally coherent due to the collective effects of the Depression and the War. But with the sudden de-mobilization that followed WWII we got a real revolution, though it did not come wearing the clothes that frustrated intellectuals expected. The GI Bill (1944) began the destruction of in loco parentis discipline at colleges via the horde of smoking-fucking-killing jarheads come to learn, and the boom in suburban life began to let the air out of the old urban tribal patterns.

Brown’s book remains important, but today his subtext of sexual frustration is of course dated. His End of Repression that frees Life to become as Play, became co-ed Hillary’s search for more ecstatic modes of living and Charles Manson’s free-love/creepy crawl a long time ago. Today we stand in the ruins of real existing Liberation, where, as Camille Paglia has noted, regression rather than repression seems the greater threat. Post-war Academic rebels took one look at Stalin and turned inward. They sought to rationalize and neuter sex so as to have a lot of it. So now an ideologized school nurse pushes safe sex to sixth graders. A century after Gauguin, radicals still dreamt of an escape from Judeo-Christian strictures. Instead they merely laid groundwork for the thorough commercialization of now de-contextualized sex in popular culture. Because, of course, to the trusty teenage mind (the male one anyway) this all translates as porn and blow-jobs all around! And there was nothing, NOTHING!, Madison Avenue more desired than the cultural license to jack directly into the factory-wired Pavlovian sex drive of its subjects.

The young remain victims of a dementia locked into our culture by the continuing demographic power of the baby boom. Brown was not entirely wrong, but his subtle turn was bested in the real world of the sixties boomers by scoundrels like Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey. These two have recently been unmasked as having in the main, simply projected their own sexual self-loathing out onto the naturally occurring social equilibrium of the less pretentious–those de-mobed out of war into adulthood who raised the many children of this baby boom out of a kind of inspired relief that the killing was over. Mead and Kinsey, et al., would catch the zeitgeist of these children—a new class, one insulated from the imperatives of war and privation, but lost in an accelerating virtual world of pop culture and pop philosophy, and looking for a new criteria in which to best their parents (today all but officially referred to as “The Greatest Generation”).

Much was wrecked, but the radicals still lost because American culture is a moving target; it is alive, reparative and evolving. In a richer musical culture teenagers in their garages cooked up amazing music. Today it’s more likely to take twenty-somethings to have a shot at that. But that was the case twenty-five years ago with punk rock too, despite all its romantic talk of The Kids. For film, the low overhead of digital home computer post-production and the proliferation of cable and satellite outlets plus internet dispersion bodes well for a renaissance. And DV has already opened up the film festival snobs to video productions they’d have rejected out of hand just five years ago.

Radio and the major record labels ignored punk when the Ramones began in the mid-seventies and throughout the eighties. Nirvana’s breakthrough in 1991 was in no small part due to the arrival in Hollywood of Sony, BMG, and Matsushita—foreign capital and personnel from smaller national markets that had long made popular successes of American as well as British punk music. Today, after decades of corporate consolidation the market seems to be saying we’re due for a period of divestment if not actual trust-busting. (AOL bought Time-Warner just a year and a half ago and now separated out, AOL’s market value is less than zero.) If the markets and/or feds turn on these culture cartels (AOL/Time-Warner, Vivendi Universal, Disney-ABC, Viacom-CBS, News Corp-Fox, Sony, and Bertelsmann) it won’t be pretty; it’ll be beautiful. The radio/concert promotions behemoth Clear Channel SFX is the likely first target of any government action. They have more clout and fewer friends. (AOL/Time-Warner, Vivendi Universal, Bertelsmann, and Clear Channel SFX have each ousted a COO, CEO, or Chairman recently.)

The market is squeezing waste from the bloated entertainment sector, and man, ain’t there a lot of it! This squeeze is from all directions: from Shareholders to pirates, from the Web to the War, from Artists demands to Audience rejection. The revenue effects of format revolutions (CD, Video, DVD, cable, satellites) and a mini-baby boom which juiced the teen pop and teen film markets led to outsized profit expectations which amplify the present despair. There is probably one more format change left for both film and music before its all delivered by wire or satellite. From that point the economics will be more easily rationalized: rewards paid out on merit after the fact rather than in upfront advances, which lead to trying to make killings on new talent to pay for the bath they take on veteran talent (Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen…).
In the end these corporations will have to radically restructure themselves to cut the costs of developing, producing and delivering music and film. The large corporations that bought into Hollywood over the last twenty years have made half-hearted attempts before, but that was about debt service after the purchase. Now it’s about survival: whether Wall Street judges the entertainment industry as something worth holding. And money moves faster than ever. Wall Street’s (and Bakunin’s) “creative destruction” never sounded more rockin’! Any resulting opening of the culture structures will beg for new musicians and filmmakers with better to offer. We’ll then know if we still have it in us.

DIVERS DOWN: Animal Collective’s Geologist and Deacon share the scuba experience with Morgan V. Lebus (Arthur No. 19/Nov. 2005)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 15:39:53 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 19 (Nov. 2005), as a sidebar to Trinie Dalton’s cover feature profile

Photo collage of (and by) Geologist and Deacon

DIVERS DOWN
Animal Collective’s Geologist and Deacon share the scuba experience with Morgan V. Lebus

Arthur: When and where were these photos taken?
Deacon: We went diving off the east side of Marathon Key in Herman’s Hole. The visibility underwater was crystal. Herman is a very large moray eel who no longer lives in his hole–he’s relocated to an aquarium in Miami.

Isn’t scuba diving expensive?
Deacon: The toughest part is getting certified, which costs about $500. I was lucky enough to have a dive master friend who certified me for free. The most expensive part of scuba diving is the travel. You can dive almost anywhere, but unless you’re pretty gung ho about it, diving in the local quarry is less than choice. You want to go somewhere that has a a tropical vibe, with lots of reef life and clear waters. Once you’re there, a full day of diving with boat and and gear rental will run less than $100.
Geologist: While this is true, if you are into cold water diving, there are some good lake spots in New England. I’ve never done any cold water dives because you need to buy a dry-suit.

Your most fascinating underwater find?
Deacon: It’s all fascinating: scuba diving is the best drug ever. My first open water dive (off a boat, away from the shore) was in South Carolina. The visibility was low and we didn’t see much more than a few barrucada and some flounder (a flat bottom feeder fish with both eyes on one side of its head). On the way up the surface I couldn’t see the bottom or the surface but off in front of me about fifteen feet away was a jellyfish. A very simple translucent specimen, but I could’ve watched sway it for hours.
Geologist: In the Gulf of California I went diving off the coast of an island that was home to a sea lion colony. The pups had just been born and they were extremely curious. I also saw a seahorse there—they’re pretty rare. My big dream though, is to see whale sharks, mantas, leafy sea dragons, and a school of hammerhead.

If you could dive anywhere on earth, where would it be?
Geologist: The arctic or antarctic. The way the light filters through the ice is supposed to be amazing. I´d also like to dive in the Andamen sea off the coast of Thailand, but further north, closer to Burma.
Deacon: I think for me it is more a matter of when. Coral is being damaged at an intense rate and a lot of marine life is gone. I imagine that diving 100 years ago would have been a dramatically different experience, regardless of where you did it.

Your deepest dive, ever?
Deacon: South Carolina at about 68 feet down.
Geologist: Deep dives are not necessarily the best because your bottom time is extremely limited. With a normal tank rig you get about 15 minutes of dive time at 90 feet before you have to to a shallower depth and decompress. However, a 30-foot dive can have amazing stuff as well and your dive can be an hour long. My deepest was just above 100. The limit was 90 feet but it was a wall dive—the sea floor was about 65 feet and it stretches out from the island and then you reach the edge and the wall drops 6,000 feet! We swam over the edge and dropped to 90 feet and viewed the wall along our side. It’s an amazing feeling to look down and see nothing but darkness and try to comprehend the bottom being 6,000 feet below you.

Reviews by C and D (Arthur No. 19/Nov. 2005)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 03:50:29 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 19 (Nov. 2005)

REVIEWS BY C and D

C: I feel dutybound to advise you that we shall be reviewing many records today that have shall we say significantly progressive overtones.
D: It should be no problem. I came prepared. [smiles mischievously] With beer.

Jana Hunter
Blank Unstaring Heirs of Doom
(Gnomonsong)
D: This is Cat Power covering Patsy Cline. After a plate of lasagna.
C: Are you sure?
D: I cannot be sure, but I feel it to be true. I am trusting my intuition. My blink-of-an-eye insight.
C: Looks like you got something in your eye. This is Jana Hunter, from Houston, Texas.
D: The home of Mike Jones?
C: The same.
D: I see. What would you call this?
C: I dunno. Downbeat lo-fi folk music with a touch of glum? But it’s more lonesome than depressing, and she tries a lot of different approaches in arrangement, texture and just general aesthetic.
D: There is definitely a deep longing at work here.
C: The album title hints at a sense of bleak but playful humor—you know the way it mimics doom metal phrasing, half believing it, getting off on how suited to these times this exaggerated language is becoming, what with all the war, pestilence and natural disaster. But sonically this is obviously not High on Fire, so you get a little wink there. Her guitar lines can descend towards doomland like Sabbath.
D: Sometimes I see where she gets the title from…

Vashti Bunyan
Lookaftering
(DiCristina)
D: Spectacularly beautiful.
C: Quiet English folk artist who made a single, slightly psychedelic album in 1970 with various Incredible String Band personnel and so on, and was then lost to the world. Championed by Devendra Banhart, Animal Collective and Four Tet, who’ve all collaborated with her during the internet era. I think some of them are on this but you just spilled your beer on the notes from the record publicist.
D: Sorry!
C: Anyways, her first album was re-released last year and here’s the follow-up. Next album is scheduled for 2037.
D: She sounds the same as last time. There’s an almost Burt Bacharach-like feel to this.
C: Yeah the orchestral hook is sweet.
D: They’re very shy, mellowcholic songs.
C: There’s more piano than one might expect. Very pretty, very modest. Quite a comeback, eh?
D: She saved a little…

M.O.T.O.
Raw Power
(Criminal IQ)
D: [instantly] I like this band. Make it louder!
C: [turning it up] Andrew W.K. meets Guided by Voices: power-pop played with Marshalls.
D: A melodic Fear. Big influence. [increasingly ecstatic] Perfect music for smart hooligans! You can quote me.
C: I am.
D: “Let’s Nail it to the Moon” is like Blondie’s first record. And “Spend the Night On Me” is full-on Lazy Cowgirls.
C: [quizzical look]
D: Aha, you don’t like them, but they have mighty hooks! “Teenage Frankenstein” is righteous rock, I’m telling you.
C: Who on earth would call their record Raw Power? At first you think they don’t know what they’re doing, then you think they’re just stupidly audacious, then you find out they’ve been around since like 1988 and so it’s just a great reverse inverse record-geek joke.
D: I never heard of M.O.T.O. But they have heard of themselves. They are their biggest fans. They’re like, ‘This is our Raw Power.’ And they’re right: it’s two giant balls on fire!
C: [looking at sleeve photo of mixing board] Notice that everything’s recorded at level Infinity. [calculating] The singer must be like 40 years old. Perhaps he is a schoolteacher too…
D: “Flipping You Off With Every Finger That I Have” is song title of the decade.
C: A good ol’ American fistfight. Those don’t happen too much anymore. What if fighting was in? I don’t mean Fight Club. But you know, hipsters going to other areas of town to get drunk and fight in public.
D: [repeating lyrics] “The moon in the sky/Kicks the ass/of the stars/they all fade.” This is true. Every song has a certain drunk-at-midnight, howling-at-the-moon-in-the-bar-parking-lot anthemic quality.
C: Their label has the best name in recent memory: Criminal IQ.
D: [confiding] It is said that there is a certain IQ where anyone who has it will eventually commit a crime. It’s like 116 or 115 or something.
C: Interesting. [listening to “Girl Inhale”] Anyway, this is an homage to the Beatles tune “Girl” that is so obvious it’s great. And is so great because it’s so obvious. It’s the folk tradition: this is how songs used to change over generations. The keyboard solo is a rip of “In My Life.” I wonder if every song is like that and we only are catching the most obvious ones.
D: I am saluting the mighty M.O.T.O. with every finger of my hand.

Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up
(Numero Group)
C: Another start-to-finish classic from one of America’s very finest record labels, the Numero Group out of Chicago.
D: They are number one!
C: This one is a collection of singles recorded between 1960 and 1980 in Belize. Amazing stuff, lots of covers of American soul hits, some reggae stuff too, all infused with this special feel. There’s a warmth—an ease—that’s absolutely seductive. You can just get glimpses of their accent.
D: [repeating lyric] “You can’t go half way, you got to go all the way/to have all my love.” Song of the third date.
C: Numero Group specialize in upending every notion you have that there is, or has ever been, a meritocracy in pop. They prove that human achievement on this planet is continuous and happens wherever people have time on their hands. It does not take place in the easily circumscribed times and places and sequences that VH1 or self-appointed music experts like ourselves—
D: [Snorts, beer comes out of nose]
C: —like to place it in. The energy is always-there-everywhere, it’s just a matter of whether you’ve found out about it yet. Remember M.O.T.O.? They’ve been going since 1988, they’re in our own country, and we only just found out about them. Think what’s been going on in other countries for decades! We don’t know anything! Admitting ignorance is the first step towards enlightenment.
D: [definitively] Numero Group are international cargo crate diggers of the first order. They should be awarded United Nations medals of honors for service to mankind.
C: Okay, time for a snack. [Offering a jar of tiny pickles from Gelson’s] Tiny pickle?
D: That’s what she said. Wait a second! That’s not what I meant.

Choubi Choubi! Folk & Pop Sounds From Iraq
(Sublime Frequencies)
C: Songs from our musically oriented friends in Iraq, much of it recorded in the Sadaam Hussein era.
D: I like this! You know, maybe we wouldn’t bomb them if we listened to their music.
C: Sublime Frequencies, who were spotlighted last issue in Arthur, also deserve special recognition and financial reward for service to humanity.
D: [looking at sleeve] It says here that this song, “They Taught Me,” is in the style of “1970’s Socialist Folk-Rock.”
C: Very helpful, D. Now, please pass the shisha.
D: [listening] This one sounds groovy… I am at a loss for words—
C: But not at a loss for beer—
D: [glares] Silence in the lower ranks!
C: It turns out that my favorite is the “Choubi” style, which sounds very Indian movie soundtrack to my untrained ears: odd rhythm, acoustic string instruments, orchestral strings, a woman ululating with a choir.
[listening to track 5] Is this one called “bee attack”?
C: No. Although there is an instrument being used called, which is Arabic for “wasp.” By the way, it says here on the sleeve that music was regarded as very important by Sadaam Hussein: he apparently called musicians the “seventh division” of his forces. But musicians themselves are not really highly regarded in Iraq. They aren’t really stars. Professional musicians are usually outsiders and outcasts, who play weddings and parties and illicit nightclubs, a recording is made to keep the artist going between gigs… gigs as income, recordings as low priority… songs are immediately public domained and any popular, locally pressed recordings are pirated… Is the music better or worse for existing in this way? I dunno. If you were to judge American music solely on the basis of each year’s 20 best selling albums, you wouldn’t say our system is outputting much to speak of. Could it be that music is worse in a corporation-ruled market system than in a dictatorship with zero intellectual property laws? If you were a musician and you’re being pirated and you’re not getting songwriting royalties and nobody is getting rich off your labor—stall merchants were just getting by, selling tapes, and in the process getting your name out there—would you care about piracy? You might be pissed off a little, but then again, chances are you built on what was there before you too. And anyways, you’re doing fine.
D: I would like to drink to this and swivel my hips. Generally just do that thing.
C: I don’t think you could get in a bar fight to this.
D: Or a war.

Radio Pyonggyang: Commie Funk and Agit Pop from the Hermit Kingdom
(Sublime Frequencies)
C: Paging Mike Patton, please come to the Lost & Found. We have your Mr. Bungle demo. But seriously: this is a whole record of North Korean stuff: “field recordings, television/radio intercepts and live performances” from 1995-1998. Album two in Sublime Frequencies’ Axis of Evil collection. I guess Iran will be next.
D: There is something special here but I think it takes a certain mind to appreciate it. [smiling] Which I have.
C: I dunno, this is a bit too schmaltzy for me. Where’s the funk? Sounds like that shitty Thai pop you hear sometimes. In the interest of peace between nations, I want to get to this but I can’t.
D: [musing] How can we hate them when they’re so awesome?

Residual Echoes
Phoenician Flu and Ancient Ocean
(Holy Mountain)
D: [explodes] Whoa! WHOA!!!! What have you let into this place?
C: This band almost caused a riot at Arthurfest when they played the first day downstairs in the theater. Socks were blown off. Heads were on their cel phones telling people to get over here NOW.
D: I can hear why. WHOA. Fuck me, this is some full-on majestic streetwalking cheetah thruster guitar rock in Satty-like collage. Man!
C: Year they’re like cousins to the Comets on Fire bros, spiritually speaking.
D: Another strike force from Santa Cruz!?!
C: It’s a question that needs an answer: What exactly is going on up there in the banana slug republic to generate this kind of Hawkwind power gazer goner stuff? I can hear some Dead Meadow blisswork bursts in there too—and Crazy Horse search-soling as well. And Acid Mothers Temple yawning-sound journeying, heavy Bonzo drumming. Amazing.

Lightning Bolt
Hyper Magic Mountain
(Load)
C: New riff-blat super-attack from the Providence, Rhode Island artcore guitar-drums power duo.
D: The cover art matches at least the first eight seconds.
C: [reading sleeve] “Humans chill out! There is no back-up planet!”
D: Cathartic art attack. They must be a ball to see live.
C: They have some definite hits here., like track 2, “Captain Caveman.” Reminds me of Unsane, Big Black, Helmet, Killdozer, Slayer: everything on that label Amphetamine Reptile used to sound like this. I guess that sound went pretty mainstream with more ink and noserings but there was always some infant-mind tantrum rapping on top of it. But this is more like the original stuff to me, more imaginative and nature-loving, and, as they say, “mastered for metal loudness.” You gotta dig the lyrics: “Health is all the wealth I need/birds and squirrels and bees and trees/all the things that ride the breeze/money makes the world go round/drags it down and burns it out/I am the caveman/I am the timebomb…”
D: Time for another beer. I’ll be in the fistfight in the other room.

We Are Wolves
Non-Stop Je Te Plie En Deux
(Fat Possum)
C: Another band with a wolf-related name. From Canada. They are Canadian wolves: hear them howl.
D: [Returning with two newly opened beers in hand, enthusiastic] I like this! It sounds like what doing really good coke feels like.
C: Um. I was gonna say these guys sound like it what I had hoped ARE Weapons or that second Faint album would sound like but that’s damning with pretty faint praise.
D: It’s almost like the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” Or Devo, even.
C: An agitated, slightly angry Devo. Or Fat Possum’s own gonzoid Bob Log III: churning stuff, guitar and vocals set to high-distort.
D: Canadians freaking out with a drum machine.

Boards of Canada
the campfire headphase
(Warp)
C: We are surely not the first people to say this but: bored of Canada. Dull down-tempo, melody-free, quasi-postrock beats for snoreheads. I’m sure they’re perfectly serious about what they’re doing but it all says soulless doom to me.
D: They need to move to Santa Cruz as soon as possible.

Danger Doom: The Mouse & the Mask
MF Doom & Dangermouse
(Epitaph)
C: MF Doom all over this doing funny, smart stuff. [singing along] “His name is Doom, they wonder just who is he…” And Ghostface is on here still rhyming like he’s got a number one album out.
D: The beats are knee-deep Dre-Tang. And the story-sketches are ticklish. [imitating] “East-sigh-hide.” Hip-hop album of the year, no question.

Fiery Furnaces
Rehearsing My Choir
(Rough Trade)
C: Fiery Furnaces one-upping Danger Doom, doing an album-length story thing. And no, that’s not Larry Bud Melman, that’s Eleanor and Matt Friedberger’s grandmother Olga Sarantas.
D: If that’s really her name.
C: It’s a family art project. You see, the Furnaces have the family values everyone else has abandoned. The family that records together stays together, D.
D: It’s a Friedberger Family Affair. It’s also obviously beautiful but I can’t tell you too much about it. I can tell you about some other things.
C: We all know that without a steady beat you are lost in the wilderness.
D: It’s true, I have to admit.
C: So you’ll like the disco hit here. And
D: Best dance song this year not made by the Juan Maclean!
C: My favorite other part of the album is when Eleanor sings, “Once upon a time there were two Kevins,” and Olga harrumphs, “You mean two jerks!” Perfect. Everyone loves feisty old women who take a stand. It’s a cool album—a record you actually have to sit and pay attention to, and you actually enjoy doing that for once because the music is unpredictable but never trying, there’s interplay between distinctive voices, the lyrics are fantastically evocative and funny, and of course there’s Eleanor.
D: Obviously a work of advanced idiosyncratic genii. Their fourth in a row. Unbelievable!

Van der Graaf Generator
Pawn Hearts
H to He Who am the Only One
The least we can do is wave to each other
(EMI)
C: Speaking of idiosyncratic genius: here’s three reissues of prime Van der Graaf Generator from 1970-1.
D: You warned me of the coming of the progressive rock, but…! [smiling] I can tell you one thing: we’re not in M.O.T.O. anymore, Kansas.
C: Totally visionary, harsh and beautiful stuff that never gets insulting or hairy dippy. They went for it.
D: They were always like the single prog band you were allowed like if you were punk, because Johnny Rotten mentioned them in interviews. Which meant it was approved with a capital A with a circle round it.
C: How great and defiantly, proudly varied Johnny’s taste was: he was talking Beefheart, VDGG, Can, dub reggae while constructing the snide glam that we call punk rock. It shows. Pete Hammill’s voice here goes all the way out to a sneer or cry in the same way that Johnny would eeenunnnnceeeaate. [thoughtfully] You could argue that punk was exciting to the degree that its makers allowed in something musically beyond the Ramones… That’s why of all the so-called punk rock to follow in the wake of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, almost the only good stuff came through SST, where the bands were extremely open-valved. Black Flag listened to King Crimson and the Grateful Dead, fer crissakes.

Unknown Instructors
The Way Things Work
(Smog Veil)
C: Speaking of SST: Zappa-essque California collab improv between vets George Hurley, Mike Watt and Joe Baiza and Dan McGuire. Baiza works out some knots on the guitar, given jamspace by minutemen/fIRESHOSErs Hurley & Watt with McGuire on the mircophone spouting the observational storytelling. “Metaphors unfurling… justice contaminated by sentiment!/shutting the drapes/I imbibe on quintessence from the skulls of old masters.”
D: It’s not SST 1986 but it’s close. And that means it’s very good.

Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom
The Days of Mars
(DFA/astralwerks)
D: [leaning back] And now, we journey deep into the heart of the Moog analog synthesizer and its universe of possibilities. Could this be Cluster? Tangerine Dream?
C: It’s actually a male-female duo—two visual artists who make music together too. They are two Americans alive in Berlin. [thinking] You know, I would like to be an American living in Berlin right now…Whoa: we are three minutes into the first track and it keeps getting louder.
D: Yes. It’s beautiful and hypnotic and changes slowly but when it does… Wow… [eyes closed, smiling]

Reviews by C and D (Arthur No. 18/Sept. 2005)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 03:20:07 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 18 (Sept. 2005)

REVIEWS BY C and D

Ween
Shinola Volume 1
(Chocodog/ween.com)
C: Ween, the house band of Arthur.
D: Not that they’d ever come to our house.
C: Coming through with an album of outtakes. But it doesn’t—
D: [singing along to opening track “Good on the Bun”] “Tastes! Tastes! Tastes good on the bun! Tastes! Good on the bun! Tastesssss…”
C: Another great Ween album. I mean, this is just a guide vocal, and a Miami bass drum pattern and the Deaner wanking away.
D: And we wouldn’t want it any other way.
C: Once I was talking to the singer of a band who shall remain nameless who went on tour opening for Ween. All the people couldn’t wait til Ween came on, and when they played a 20-minute version of “Push the Little Daisies,” people were in tears, just losing it. That’s when he realized his band was never going to make it.
D: Which is a terrible thing to realize.
C: [listening to “Boys’ Club”] “You can talk of the future/you can talk of the past/you can go find yourself a nice piece of ass”: What is this, a jingle for the Catholic Church? Amazing. And “Israel” is a Jersey Jew, perfunctorily giving a benediction, backed by the greasiest Sopranos saxophone possible…
D: It’s a one-man bar band at a bar mitzvah—
C: He just pressed the “pan flute” button on the Korg.
D: The cheese is frying on this one, that’s for sure.
C: I heard someone say these guys are one step removed from Weird Al—
D: Totally ridiculous.
C: Weird Al changes the words to popular songs. Ween write the best songs all of your favorite bands should’ve written. That’s a big difference, bro. “Gabrielle” is total Thin Lizzy action—
D: [spilling beer, exclaiming] Thinner Lizzy!
C: Please, D, contain yourself.
D: Like you’ve never spilled a beer! [muttering] So arrogant!
C: [continuing] And “The Rift,” which I think is “Roses Are Free” slowed down—is like the worst slash greatest Styx song possible. “I am the commander of time/in my vessel of god/I go through the rift/to the palace of ice … we may not come back from the palace of ice/because the rift is a door”—it’s prog written by the guy who got held back in eighth grade. I know I’m not saying anything new here but they’re the closest thing we have to Zappa, sending up everything they love, without mercy. These guys are a national treasure. And like Zappa, just as scatologically obsessive.
D: Pass the Shinola, bro!

Shel Silverstein
The Best of Shel Silverstein
(Columbia/Legacy)
C: Speaking of national treasures, here’s a compilation of stuff by Shel Silverstein.
D: I must confess, I do not know him.
C: Sure you do. He wrote Where the Sidewalk Ends and Light in the Attic, which is like required reading for the young and intelligent. Funny poetry for kids, he does these hyperdramatic readings of them here—
D: Sounds like Joe Cocker’s creepy uncle—without his pants on.
C: Plus, he wrote story-songs like “Cover of the Rolling Stone” and “A Boy Called Sue”—
D: I know that one, of course—
C: —and then there’s tracks like this “I Got Stoned and Missed It” and this one by Dr. Hook, the orgy ode “Freakin’ at the Freakers’ Ball.” [reciting lyrics] “Everybody’s kissing each other/brother with sister, son with mother/smear my body up with butter/take me to the freakers’ ball/pass that roach please/and pour that wine/I’ll kiss yours and you’ll kiss mine…”
D: Sounds like a pretty good time at the freakers’ ball.
C: “Well all the fags and the dykes/they are boogieing together/the leather freaks are dressed in all kinds of leather/The greatest of the sadists/and the masochists too/are screaming, ‘please hit me/and I’ll hit you’”… A funny guy into music, drugs, storytelling and kink—who drew gag cartoons for Playboy? He must’ve been the most popular dude alive in the ‘70s…
D: And looking at these pictures of him, I bet—
C: I know. Total human bonobo.

Devendra Banhart
Crippled Crow
(Beggars Banquet)
C: Devendra has a lot more hair on his head than Shel, but I think there’s a certain similarity in sensibility. Good times, weird times, you know he’s had his share.
D: He knows where the sidewalk ends.
C: So this is Devendra stretching it out in studio splendor, playing solo, playing with a band, playing a ton of acoustic guitar and piano songs. In English, in Spanish, in jest, in all seriousness, in duet…
D: [listening to “Now That I Know”] In the style of St. Nick Drake.
C: Such a range on the album as a whole, you can hear it in just the first five songs [out of the album’s 22]: whispers, tropicalia, a gentle piano protest lullaby, dreamytime-in-the-hash-den psychedelic-folk…
D: These songs… [listening to “Mama Wolf”] Every syllable is soothing, which is not something you hear done that often anymore. [seriously] Listen to me: Something magical is going on here.
C: Check out the singing, probably the best he’s ever done: that’s a guy who’s going for it in a heavy, trembling way—without losing it. He didn’t used to be able to sing like that. Incredible. And the lyrics, “Yeah when they come over the mountains/we’ll run yeah we’ll run right round them/we don’t have no guns/no we don’t have any weapons/just our cornmeal, and our children…”
D: I’m joining Devendra’s unarmed forces.

Silver Jews
Tanglewood Numbers
(Drag City)
D: [grimacing after a few seconds of the first song] I think I’m going to need three more beers. Immediately.
C: Don’t worry, I’ve got this one covered. [pulls out sheet of paper, clears voice] And to think this man formerly claimed he was nearly “hospitalized for approaching perfection”! Whatever D.C. Berman’s been smoking, his voice is shot. He once had a stentorian authority on par with Kristofferson and Robert Frost, now it’s lost. This might be a mere symptom of his decline —
D: Or the need for throat-coat tea and a personal trainer.
C: —or at least to mix the vocals up front—
D: Maybe he’s been freaking a bit too much at the freakers’ ball?
C: —but it dovetails with another problem, which is that since he is not a performing artist, he has never learned how to improve his craft by translating it live to an audience.
D: Which doesn’t help when it comes to making a record.
C: He now sounds as if he’s reading from a script rather than singing songs. His lyrics are great though, maybe as good as ever, like this choice couplet from “Sleeping Is the Only Love”: “I had this friend named Marc with a c / his sister was like the heat coming off the back of an old TV” altho’ his never ending quest for the ultimate bohunk cliche—”I’m getting back into getting back into you”—can be a little trying. There are a couple nice guitar moments, probably attributable to the Malk—
D: Who?
C: Steve Malkmus from Pavement, who’s on this album. [continuing] Otherwise the music is a detour-round-this junction of indie and bar band. Oh waitaminute, the seven-minute “The Farmer’s Hotel” is a sprawling gothic masterpiece: Breece D’J Pancake meets Stephen King meets Rick Brautigan in, apparently, a pernicious country inn where “there was no air of slumber/ there doors they had no numbers”…call it an analogue to being a Silver Jews fan: you can check in but you can never check out.

Sinead O’Connor
Throw Down Your Arms
(Sanctuary)
C: Sinead does an album of extremely faithful reggae covers, recorded in Kingston with Sly & Robbie. It had to happen.
D: [stroking chin, deep in thought] I believe Sinead was the first celebrity I’d ever heard of who checked herself into a rehab center for addiction to that demon weed. Sometime in the mid-‘90s, it was.
C: And didn’t she retire from the music industry a couple of years ago? So this is an interesting turn of events.
D: The main question is whether she has grown the dreads or not. The answer, thank Jah, would appear to be no.
C: I gotta say combining the stridency of the Irish with the righteousness of the Jamaican reggae artist doesn’t seem like the best strategy, and most of this album is the dull hybrid I feared it would be: too serious, too austere. Missing is the sense of playfulness.
D: She is just doing the songs she wants to do, without regard for what anyone else thinks.
C: Respect to her for that. It is weird to hear a woman with her range do songs that offer her so little room to exercise her pipes. You get the feeling that these are songs that she’s sung along to a thousand times…the versions are so faithful, at this point, she’s more of a mimic than an interpreter.
D: I think as usual you are being too hard. If you were sitting there and a girl across from you started playing “Downpressor Man” on acoustic guitar and singing, it’d be all over.
C: Her take on Lee Perry’s seduction ballad “Curly Locks” is certainly seductive.
D: And “Untold Stories.” And “Vampire.” Come on, man!
C: I’m just saying, when Sinead does an album of Ween covers, then we’ll really be getting somewhere.

Buckwheat Zydeco ils sont partis band
100% Fortified Zydeco
(Shout! Factory)
D: I am not what you would call an expert exactly, but I do not detect too much zydeco here.
C: It is pretty generic—I keep seeing John Belushi doing backflips down the center aisle. An authentic practitioner shouldn’t be caught delivering this stuff. Then again if I had an alligator po’ boy and a cup of Dixie Beer in my hand, I might have a different opinion.

Terry Reid
Superlungs
(Astralwerks)
C: The legendary Terry Reid gets a long-overdue compilation. A soul singer more than a rock singer, he came up in the ‘60s at the same time as Steve Marriott, Rod Stewart and all those guys. He’s best known as the guy Jimmy Page asked to front Zeppelin, who had to turn it down cuz of contractual obligations.
D: Doh!
C: They said Plant sang like a woman, and Terry Reid does too. Guess Page knew what he wanted. To paraphrase My Fair Lady,…
D: [singing] Why can’t a man sing more like a woman?
C: In that case, it’s a man singing like a woman singing like a man. In the tradition of Tina Turner and Mavis Staples or Inga Rumpf from German blues rockers Frumpy
D: This guy is a super-rocker. A mod-era master. He fucked it up, though.
C: Not as bad as Dave Mustaine. Better to have Led Zeppelin yelled at you on the street by the local smartcakes than Metallica.
D: [listening to “Stay With Me Baby”] Ian Gillan of Deep Purple totally took from his voice.
C: “Speak Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace” is unbelievable—the propulsive, tuneful, template for Slade, and by extension Oasis.
D: But Liam’s not a soul singer.
C: It’s very Faces. “Tinker Taylor” is the same thing. Word to the Djs out there: this is the only album you need to keep the dance party going…

The 88
Over and Over
(Mootron/EMK)
C: Second album from The 88 from around Silver Lake…
D: Ha! That’s L.A. guys doing late-‘60s U.K. vision of California a la the Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies. I like it. This is MUCH more potent that that Paisley Underground revival stuff that was going down in ’84. Silver Lake, eh?
C: But it’s not just Kinks stuff. That’s a big Elton John roadhouse ballad on here, which they can do cuz that guy can really sing.
D: If you’re going to do this, you better be able to take on El Dorado.
C: [Listening to “You Belong to Me”] Such a good singer, great voice. Too bad about the completely unrepresentative album cover, which doesn’t do them any favors.
D: Surprisingly sophisticated, this shit. It’s like known puzzle pieces being put into a new revised order… Man, if this comes from Silver Lake, this isn’t such a bad area! Maybe I should come by every now and then on a Saturday afternoon to hang out with these guys? Because they’re basically hip-hugging mod-haired Sixties guys, on a mission to pull through the gates of rock. That’s what I am too.
C: …
D: Although I am a bit older.

Flamin’ Groovies
Shake Some Action
(DBK Works/Runt)
C: Weren’t they the band that made rock dangerous again?
D: Yes. This came out in ’73, can it be? They wore white shirts and black tailored suits — they were the best dressed band besides the Band. During the glam period. The good ol teenage rock band but played by some slightly older guys. Critics’ favorites who never had a hit. I think Shake Some Action was their only popular song, though they had plenty more worthy ones that got ignored.
C: [Reading liner notes] “Dave Edmonds, formerly of Love Sculpture, produced.” For garage rock, it’s pretty reedy and thin.
D: But it’s not garage, it’s…well, it was retro even back then. They were going for the high school hop sound. They were the conservatives of rock n roll. Which is not a very conservative thing to be.
C: While you are busy speaking paradoxically, I am reminded of the time I went to a Johnny Rockets with my father and he said “This is exactly what diners were like in the ’50s!”
D: Ah, so you see, retro can be a happy place to be.

Plastic Crimewave
Galactic Zoo Dossier No. 5
(Drag City)
C: New ish of Mr. Crimewave’s completely hand-drawn and hand-lettered magazine, great features as always on everything underground and psychedelic from all eras and levels of obscurity, plus tons of Acid Mothers Temple photos…
D: And best of all, these two CDs of Crimewave picks. This is some primordial freakbeat stuff! The Four O’Clock Balloon, whoever that is, covering Don’t You Need Somebody to Love.
C: It sounds like a live recording from a psychedelic cantina in Baja. I wish someone had the courage to record something like this now, with this trashed up fidelity…
D: [reading from magazine ] This song is from a battle of the bands in Ohio in 1967.
C: You don’t hear about too many battles of the bands these days.
D: This song is called “Pippi Longstocking.” It’s like in Spinal Tap, when the guy says “That’s pretty, what’s it called? ““Lick My Love Pump.” Only this is really ugly and primitive but has a pretty name.

The Time Flys
“Fly”
(Birdman)
C: 90-second Ramones party songs. Four-second solos. One of the dude from The Cuts.
D: Sounds like really early, VERY tuneful punk. Pre-Stooges DMZ without the amps. And like Wire on the drums. Tss-tss-tss.
C: [listening to “Jailbait”] Not just punk—bubblegum, too. 1974. Sweet and their kind. Or closer: Kim Fowley.
D: The mighty Runaways.
C: There should be a track on here called “Paging Rodney Bingenheimer.”
D: [looking at sleeve] Whoa, do you look at the protrusion in the pouch of this punk’s jeans? How do you like his cucumber?
C: More importantly, how does Jimmy???
D: You know what they say: Put your best something forward.

Big Star
In Space
(Rykodisc)
C: Well last issue we had the first Teenage Fanclub album in four years. And so, poetically, here is the first album in 30 years from the band that inspired them…
D: I am almost hesitant to put this on. Big Star were so special, they were Memphis digging London. To me they were always incredibly melancholy, to the degree that you couldn’t bear to listen to the words, it was too much pain. And there were these beautiful melodies and harmonies and then also this deeply layered Memphis beat soul music. That song “Holocaust” on Third/Sister Lovers cannot be listened to. That’s what Chilton must’ve felt after his mother died in the fire. The original drummer and the bass player died like a lot of them did in the ’70s, from heroin. They and Alex Chilton’s old band the Box Tops were criminally ignored just because they were from Memphis, and not from L.A. or New York. Or so they say.
C: Chilton and Jody Stephens, the band’s drummer and other surviving member, have been doing gigs with these two Posies guys form some time, off an on, under the name “Big Star.” But over the last 30 years he never seemed to into doing Big Star records again.
D: [Puts disk in] Well, here goes something.
C: [listens quietly for some time] This is the real deal. If you love Big Star then, you will want this now.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Howl
(Virgin)
C: [after listening to “Ain’t No Easy Way] You’ll never guess who this is.
D: Full-on Led Zeppelin. with the harmonica, slide guitar and the fucking Bonham stomp in the house. [looks at sleeve] Whoa. A double gold star surprise. Before they bored me to death with their one-two chord guitar bullshit, which is good for one song on the first record. But now they come back as the guys who stole the spear of destiny, a full-fledged rock ‘n’ roll monster.
C: It’s a pretty amazing transformation. I guess Spiritualized’s path is what they’re following, headed into gospel and blues stomps.
D: [starts waving hands around enthusiastically] Tav Falco says the blues was a howl before it became a song. People were hollering about their pain, in the kind of land where you hope a train will come through and take you far away. Music…music can be about the EQ, not the IQ. The emotional quotient is what’s important here. Here they display the will to break through the final door, which you have to do to be a good band. What the hell happened? I am floored again, in a good way.

Chris Cunningham
Rubber Johnny short film DVD and image book
(Warp Films)
C: We should let the people know that it’s a four-minute Aphex Twin music video—and a very good one, I’ll admit—with a minute padded to each end to make it a “short film.” For 12 bucks. And the revolting photos on the DVD cover and inside the books are not images from the film. So…
D: It’s Joel Peter Witkin meets Floria Sigismondi, but this stuff is ten times better. All this creepiness comes from this guy Gottfried Helmvein (shouting people with bandages on). It’s just the sort of thing that comes from being a lanky weird kid being permanently confronted by non-lanky weird-in-the-other-way kids. And probably suffering beatings from them.
C: Basically it’s The Elephant Man in a wheelchair shooting lasers out of his hands in time with the music, between snorting lines off a camel’s scrofulous rump. Unbelievable editing. But…yikes.
D: This is the alternate ending of Eraserhead. [thinking] Which it’s kind of like, in another way. They asked Lynch questions, and he always changed the subject. “What about the baby?” “What was that?” “Is it real, or is it not real?” “Did you kill it?” This guy Cunningham likes to leave things open like Lynch did. What are those photos of?
C: [looking at screen] Well, that’s definitely a chihuahua.
D: I think I just dropped my chalupa.

Bjork
the music from Drawing Restraint 9
(One Little Indian)
C: New one from Bjork, the soundtrack to the new film by her bugaboo Matthew Barney, who is at the art museum edge of the New Grower Cinema—
D: I don’t give an ant’s fart about Bjork—
C: Well I adore her, but I gotta say this one might be for collectors only…
D: Always the same thing: Starts low, goes high. Whoa-ohhohhohh-ah! Same trick she’s been doing since the Sugarcubes.
C: She’s barely singing on this one though. Just a lot of very musically simple interludes, a weird curiosity tune with Will Oldham that’s interesting the first time you hear it—
D: Excuse me while I yawn.
C: —and then a lot of grunting and what I guess is a holy man’s tuneless mewling and—
D: To quote Beavis: This sucks!
C: To quote the dad of Lars Ulrich: I would say, delete that.

Saturday Morning With Sid & Marty Krofft DVD
(Rhino)
C: The pilot episodes of seven Sid & Marty Krofft series. Original stoner television—not especially clever but deeply weird. Essential to understanding certain kinds of people. Some of these are pretty lame and kind of unrepresentative of what the series would be like later. But Lidsville and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters are wonderfully bananas and make you wonder how this stuff got on the air. And what were they smoking?
D: Whatever fell out of Sinead’s dreadlocks.

Birds
In the World
(Important)
C: Some 3-D Monsterism going on on the cover here. Good ol’ Peter Fowler.
D: Let me look at that. The Super Furry Animals designer guy scores again!
C: It’s Cotton Casino from Japanese cosmic freakout collective Acid Mothers Temple, with another dude from Iceland. Recorded in Osaka and Oslo.
D: What a package vacation that would be….
C: Yeah, lots of people booking that one. This reminds me a bit of the Boredoms’ latest record, in that it opens with a woman doing a lengthy a capella piece before going into something totally different.
D: Although this isn’t a drum circle in a hurricane.
C: Naturalist psychedelia without special effects: just nature and her voice. Like they recorded it in the nude.
D: I dig this song but it might be one of those over-the-edge things. It’s music that you play after a catastrophe with stuff that’s lying around. The lost souls are still flying around trying to find out what happened to them.
C: Yep, I know that feeling.

August Born
August Born
(Drag City)
C: Another duo collaboration between people at long distances from each other. This is West Coast guitarist-singer Ben Chasny from Six Organs of Admittance and Comets On Fire, in quiet, experimental mode, working with the Japanese guy named L, who was in Ghost at one point and has been involved in other cool stuff through the years.
D: Difficult music.
C: There’s a song here where there’s three melodic lines going along and they shouldn’t work together— they sound so separated—and yet it all works.
D: It’s like tuning your ear to accept unusual signals from the old psychedelic music man up on the mountain, hanging out above the fog clouds with Popul Vuh.

Coco Rosie
Noah’s Ark
(Touch and Go)
C: Pretty much same as the first Coco Rosie record: two gifted American sisters making music box speakeasy music that’s part Billie Holiday homage, part experimental ageless whatsit. Sublime to some, unbearably mannered and pretentious to others. I go back and forth, honestly.
D: I do not enjoy this style of music, but “Beautiful Boys” with Antony is a sad knockout.

Modey Lemon
The Curious City
(Birdman)
D: A facemelting beast machinery soundtrack. Like Suicide, the band.
C: Oneida’s march-thrust crossed with Fiery Furnaces’ unapologetic quirk factor five.
D: With some of the driest singing not by a band called Om.

The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons
(Shout! Factory)
D: Sly & the Family Stone live on television in 1970? A full hour of performance and interview with an extremely nervous David Bowie in 1974? Stevie Wonder in 1970?!? A full disk of Janis Joplin… Joni Mitchell, George Harrison, Paul Simon, Jefferson Airplane?
C: Whoa, look at Grace Slick! Her spray-on tan seems to eerily predict Jessica Simpson as Daisy Duke. But I would buy this whole thing just for the Sly Stone segment, where, after showing up late—of course—he and his band put on the funkiest bar none live television performance I have ever seen. They make it look effortless. The greatest band of all time, even when Sly has a cold. And when he tells Cavett he writes music in the mirror, well… I won’t ruin it, except to say this DVD is a good argument in favor of television.

Sonny Sharrock
Black Woman
(Water/Runt)
C: Reissue of vintage Sonny Sharrock, a mighty out-there jazz guitarist in the ‘60s. He wanted to play jazz like Coltrane but he couldn’t play a horn cuz of asthma. So he got a guitar. Here he’s with his wife Linda, who’s just singing her soul out. He’s playing these weird drone chord progressions that cloud out into clusters-clots…
D: I couldn’t even begin to find words to try to describe this. When everything is so constricting, you need a place to be where you’re allowed to expand into these sorts of orgasmic explorations. She uses her voice like a hawk. Does anyone dare to sing like this today?
C: Do you know any couple that dares to get this gone in public, today? With this naked go-for-itness? Just mindblowing. Coley says “they were ready to collapse the universe” here in the liner notes.
D: Sounds accurate to me.

Earthless
Sonic Prayer
(Gravity)
D: This is the Kyuss shiznit.
C: Two songs, fortysomething minutes, totally instrumental like a more straightahead Ash Ra Tempel. One song is called “Flower Travlin’ Man,” a homegrower’s nod to the Japanese Sabbath-Zeppelin chopper-riding groop the Flower Travelin’ Band.
D: They’re holding the torch again. New blossoms in the desert…
C: They’re actually from San Diego but I know what you’re saying. They’re jamming it out and they keep going, he just keeps riding that groove—
D: Yeaaaaah. you can run but you can’t hide from the wall of thunder! [thoughtful] I’d like to review this record every month.
C: Who knows? We just might…

Reviews by C and D (Arthur No. 16/July 2005)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 03:04:42 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 16 (July 2005)

REVIEWS BY C and D

Sleater-Kinney
The Woods
(Sub Pop)
D: Before we begin, I would like to say that today I am in the mood to rock.
C: Well, my friend, you have come to the right place.
D: [first song starts, D leaps out of chair immediately] Is this one of those Japanese bands? With a girl?!? Who is this singing?
C: That woman is not a girl—she could show you a thing or two. [dramatic pause] It’s Sleater-Kinney, produced by Dave Fridmann.
D: [Jaw hits floor] Really?!? SLEATER-KINNEY?????!!!!???? Fuck, man! [shakes head] This is a MAJOR statement of psychedelic riot woman super-rock power! Rock ‘n roll album of the year! God DAMN!!!!
D: I know. Maybe the decade. Superfuzz-heavy in the Northwest tradition of Blue Cheer-Nirvana-Mudhoney, expansive like Neil Young with Crazy Hors…Hendrix… Built to Spill? There’s stuff on here that is out as Comets on Fire, possible even further. Who’s going to top this? Absolutely gigantic sounds…amps out of the red and into the black… a 14-minute song at the end that goes as far out as Comets On Fire, even into Les Rallizes Denudes and Ash Ra Tempel territory…
D: I have to admit I would never have thought these three women would make a record that’s this relentlessly face-melting.
C: I don’t know if they’d thought it possible either. There’s some precedent in Babes of Toyland, or early Hole, maybe, but this is just so much further… Well, I’m not sure that they’d call it psychedelic but it’s definitely psychoactive in an urgent kind of way.
D: [musing] There’s a bit of Jefferson Airplane in here, that’s for sure.
C: There’s a structure to everything but there are these void spaces, too. And then there are straight songs too, which rock in this tight, urgent way and then blow into something else via a drum charge or a panned guitar solo or I don’t know what. I know I’m going Beavis here but I don’t know how to [clears throat] …ahem… properly articulate the sensations I am feeling as I listen to this album. For a long time I didn’t like Corin Tucker’s voice, but here? It’s like this is the setting it’s always been looking for.
D: And that’s some hotshit drumming for sure.
C: [dancing] I can’t believe it, but seriously, one must acknowledge what is happening here. This is higher than High on Fire. They are Queens of a more stoned Age!
D: An unheard of power monster, that singlehandedly, forever eradicates the notion that women have no balls.
C: [Gives puzzled look at D, then continues] I cannot account for what I am hearing. Cannot assimilate. How did this happen? Seriously. It’s a lidflipper, a real wig-frier. Can you name another band that seven albums into their career, supernovaed into this kind of territory? This is so rare. It reminds me of something that Michael Moorcock was saying the other day: “In the ‘60s, Dylan, Beatles, Beefheart et al. were all thinking on their feet, if they were thinking at all. While Dylan remained a Guthrie sound-a-like he had no real credibility (although he did bring Guthrie a wider audience, I’d guess). As Dylan dumped the Guthrie cloak, especially when he went electric, he gained authenticity. The less like Buddy Holly the Beatles sounded, the better they got. Eventually, you went into a studio not knowing what you’d come out with.” I think that may be what’s happened here with Sleater-Kinney. Maybe this record just happened. Maybe we are witnessing the joy of unplanned, no-thinking, no-rules spontaneous creativity, of these three amazing women following and trusting their muse, confident in their abilities and each other to give it a trust that most other artists cower from giving these days? In any event, it’s an extraordinary creative breakthrough record made at precisely the right time by artists working at the peak of their collective rock power. That they are women in a stupid, male-centric culture doing this makes the whole thing even more important and inspirational. I want to go door-to-door like an evangelist for this record: “Hey sisters and brothers, have you heard the Good News?” But the old doors don’t exist after this album. They’ve all been blown open.
D: Word to your moms, Sleater-Kinney drop bombs.

Oneida
The Wedding
(Jagjaguwar)
C: New one from New York underground trance/art-rockers Oneida: a favorite around the Arthur offices for years now.
D: [Listening to “The Eiger”] They’re using strings?!?
C: Yes! This sounds amazing. The songs are catchier, there’s more dynamics in the structure, the arrangements are more varied. And the production is just nuts. This is another huge artistic breakthrough. Damn…
D: Something is in the air… Something good. A new scent.
C: Shit! Listen to how the keys get sucked out of the soundfield [on “Lavender”]… Listen to the almost-Espers psych-folk that is “Run Through My Hair.” “High Life” is an optimistic vocal over a total Kraftwerk/Cluster/La Dusseldorf electronic bed that changes into something more organic… “Did I Die” is like Wolf Eyes without the noise, [chuckles] whatever that means. Wow. I can’t believe this album…
D: It’s true, it’s beautiful.
C: Listen to how massive the drums are on “Spirits” and “Heavenly Choir,” and how majestic the guitar is. These are their “Kashmir”’s, their “When the Levee Breaks,” and this album is their Physical Graffiti…
D: We are in the presence of genius, manifesting itself.

Angels of Light
The Angels of Light Sing “Other People”
(Young God)
D: Who is this? It sounds like Johnny Cash with the Up With People choir or the Beach Boys singing backup.
C: It’s the new album by Angels of Light. You know, Michael Gira from Swans’ new band. Well, if you can be on “new” when you’re on your fourth album.
D: The most brutal, dealing-with-ultimate-things band ever?
C: None other. He moved away from that a while ago, but this one is sort of the moment when it all comes together for him. [listening to “Destroyer”] Listen to how amazing this: is that a mellotron, or strings? [Skipping through the record] And glockenspiels? Shit! This whole record is soaked in the most resplendent bittersweet textures, never getting sappy or fruity or corny in any way. Not an easy thing to do, for anyone. And for it to come from the man who wrote “Raping a Slave”? Fuck…
D: [smiling beatifically] I am shocked, once again, in a pleasantly happy way. He’s aging well, into something elegant and striking in his own way. Kinda like Nick Cave.
C: It is really beautiful, and represents the third risky, radical creative breakthrough THAT SUCCEEDS we’ve heard this session. So exciting to be in the presence of artists when they’re going for it like this.

Boredoms
Seadrum/House of Sun
(Vice)
C: And now…would you believe…? NEW BOREDOMS! Yoshimi sings a capella…and then this…[wave of drums crashes in]
D: [musing] We appear to be living in magical times.
C: 45 minutes, two tracks, completely different from each other. It says one thing: “Fuck off (in a good way). We are Boredoms. And we cannot be denied. We will now share this with you.”
D: Please place this on infinite repeat while I unclog every stuck nerve ending in my elderly body. Music…music…music…Boredoms… Boredoms… is…life.

Brain Donor
Brain Donor
(MisterE/Revolver)
D: I don’t whether to pump my fist in the air or punch myself in the face.
C: Who would have guessed that Julian Cope would be making this sort of rubber-burning rock’n'roll what, 25 years down the line?
D: His head is out on the highway. And he’s stuck in sixth gear.
C: Julian calls them a stupor group. Doggen, the guitarist, plays in Spiritualized, as does drummer Kevlar. They wear neon facepaint and have empty thought balloons over their heads. They’re like the Rutles version of the Stooges: songs that are just as good, with better lyrics. Dig the song titles: “My Pagan Ass,” “Shaman U.F.O.”
D: [shimmying] My pagan ass! My pagan ass!
C: This is a compilation CD, selections from the Brain Donor’s two previous discs that were only released in the UK. Now America can welcome Brain Donor with open heads.
D: If these gentlemen are really donating their brains, I need to go to the brain bank and get one.

Turbonegro
The ResErection DVD
(MVD)
D: Aha, Turbonegro! “IT’S DEATH TIME!” They ARE rock ‘n roll! In the gay sailor style of Norway!
C: I will explain D’s outburst of Turbonegroist passion to the gentle readers of Arthur.
D: [muttering] So arrogant!
C: I heard that, D. And I will remember. Oh yes. I will remember.
D: [muttering] So smug!
C: Shut up and let me do the thing that needs to be done. [to tape recorder] This is Turbonegro’s Some Kind of Monster, the story of “how the bandmobile went off the road in 1998,” it says here, and what happened next. Could Hank von Helvete recover from heroin addiction and other assorted mental problems and don the black cape and Alice Cooper makeup again? Could the Absolut-guzzling band of self-professed “death punk” godfathers successfully re-buddy after four years apart? Would anyone care? Would—
D: OF COURSE PEOPLE CARE! This is Turbonegro! [singing] “Whoa-oh-oh/I’ve got ERECTION!”
C: The other difference between Turbonegro and Metallica is that Turbonegro seem quite comfortable being gay. I do not know if they are actually gay, but they play a gay band onstage and on camera with a great deal of affection and commitment and sense of humor. Fear of a Gay Planet is the general concept.
D: [Watching Hank show off a vat of cod liver oil outside the local maritime museum where he worked for a couple of summers.] Look at this! This is better than A Mighty Wind!
C: We visit Hank’s seaside sanctuary, where he lived for four years, rebuilding his life. “The only thing that kept me alive were my grandparents and my belief in God,” he says, then compares himself to Napoleon in exile: “I was supposed to be emperor of Europe, but I’m kept prisoner of reality.” We do not know if he is joking, which is how the entire film is, it’s as outrageously straight-faced as comic atrocities like Alan Partridge or The Office or League of Gentlemen or—I’m feeling generous—Neil Hamburger in his most sublimely awful, banal moments. That kind of rare, supergenius thing. I don’t know if I’m doing it justice…? [looking on screen] But Hank is now showing us around his hometown: “Let’s stroll in the realm of dry fish…”
D: I still think they based their entire sound on the Dictators!
C: Ha! You’re right! Hank’s real stage name should be Gruesome Dick Manitoba.
D: They are like the Hives’ evil reverse twins.
C: The Hives give 1000% every time, but as Happy Tom says here, Turbonegro give 50, maybe 60 percent. The interviewer asks if they may get 80% this time? “I don’t think that’s ever happened,” says Tom.
D: It’s a cracker! A classic! [Thinks hard.] It’s This Is Spinal Tap—by Chris Morris!!!

BBQ
Tie Your Noose
(Bomp!)
C: Now here’s a one-man garage band, do it and doing it well. Makes the two-piece garage band seem passé.
D: Does that mean he practices in a one-car garage?
C: Fire up the grill, this is a fatback slab of that raunchy, rib-rocking goodness. It’s like Bob Log III and Doo Rag in one.
D: Yes, in one big barbecue pit! Which he probably dug out behind his garage.
C: “Don’t Hold Out On Me” is the hit.
D: I think it sounds like someone singing the Hives in the shower. Really, it’s that good.
C: Nice to see such a fine release on the Bomp! imprint, furthering the cause of Bomp! honcho Greg Shaw, may he rock in peace.

Radar Bros.
The Fallen Leaf Pages
(Merge)
C: One of Los Angeles’ subtle treasures, and group that explains the pastoral side to LA that only residents really know about. This music has a calming, benign presence.
D: It gives me the feeling I get from “Dear Prudence.” Or my very favorite song, “Something In The Air” by Thunderclap Newman.
C: The Radars absolutely own this gentle shuffle tempo. But I think they’d loan it out to anyone who wanted it. Although sometimes the lyrics are darker than you’d expect…
D: I believe he just sang, “I am the stable in which the ass has laid his manure.”
C: Walk, don’t run to pick this up. Or better yet, lope.
D: Yes, amble on.
C: There is something about this that puts me in the mindset of lightning bugs in a jar. And the most wistful of Muppets songs. You can always count on Jim Putnam to take one great whistling solo per album, and he comes through here again.
D: This truly Floyd-ian, I mean Mettle-era Floyd. The dreaminess of it, it’s positively molassesfying.
C: David Gilmour is on the phone, says the Floyd is playing the Pyramids again, and will the Radars kindly open? Could happen.
D: Should happen.

Lee Perry
I Am the Upsetter four-cd boxset
(Trojan/Sanctuary)
D: “Satan is public enemy number one.” You know, this may be my favorite music have to do with organized religion.
C: Sweet soul singing by Max Romeo. The production on these… it’s like all these sounds aren’t allowed to exist anymore, I can’t imagine a contemporary producer getting anywhere near this. Anyways, since Lee Perry was rediscovered about ten years ago, there’ve been a lot of re-releases and vaultpilations…including the Arkology three-disk set which was a big hit with a lot of people. But this is really special—it’s digestible, it’s got all the great shit on it, it covers everything from the obvious Bob Marley and the Wailers stuff to cuts even dedicated Scratch diggers may never have heard before—like “All Over” by Eccols & Neville, which is actually Clancy Eccols and Bunny Wailer. Spans 1968 to 1978, so much went by, the world changed so much. So many artists went from next-level to the pits, but Lee Perry maintained this wonderful, playful energy…
D: I am a great admirer of the well-played unison horn line.
C: [listening to "Black Panta"] I mean what’s going on here? There is a spatial distance in dub music, a relationship between the listener and the music that’s just completely, profoundly different from any other kind of music.
D: It’s like growing a third ear from the center of your forehead.
C: Seeing a stretch of the color spectrum that you’d never been shown before. I love that there are all these skank songs on here. [Looking sternly at D.] Ahem. The ORIGINAL meaning of skank, which just means Lee is gonna scratch a certain rhythm that’s gonna make you dance the Jamaican version of the funky chicken…
D: [with eyes closed] The echo makes the music sound like it’s talking to itself. For someone who uses so much delay, he certainly was on time.
C: I always thought Lee Perry’s physique, short and lean, so much finely toned power in his arms, was represented in his music. I always think of him as the producer, working the board, making compact energetic music. Totally dynamic. Full presence, just infusing everything. All sides of him are there: the playful side, the mischievous side, the judgmental side, the father side where he puts his child in there, crying. Wailing. Pleading. And mixing that in to a song that says “for god’s sake give more justice to the people”? Amazing.

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti
Worn Copy
(Paw Tracks)
C: [listening to opening instrumental] This sounds like one of those cheap John Carpenter scores, recorded underwater. In the wrong kind of water.
D: Cheese is not a virtue, except in certain hands.
C: These are not the right hands. [listening to “Jules Lost His Jewels”] Although…you know, some of this is actually pretty catchy. If only Mr. low-budget Wings here weren’t so stuck on recording underwater with such tragically awful sounding instruments.
D: So judgmental, you are. I think this might be a grower not a shower. [grabbing the CD out of the player] I will examine it more at home and report back next issue!

Animal Collective and Vashti Bunyan
Prospect Hummer EP
(Fat Cat)
C: Playful, rules-less, suffused with love…. Vashti and the AC boys harmonizing on these quiet little melodies… Whistles and phased waves of glowing acoustic guitars and… Is that a steel drum? Whoa. These guys are on such a hot streak right now. So wonderful to hear Vashti’s voice again, last year’s duet with Devendra wasn’t enough. This is a wower. You could play it for anyone: children, grandparents, sullen teenagers even…
D: [listening to title track] I think the oompa-loomas are coming.
C: Unbelievable dub-like production—there’s a real unique sense of space and place here too. Where do these people live? Somewhere in Sweden, Lee Perry awakens from his slumber…
D: [blissed out] It’s womblike. Feels like coming home from the greatest picnic ever.

Colleen
The Golden Morning Breaks
(The Leaf Label)
C: …And this is what it feels like when you’re in REM sleep, later. Music in miniature.
D: Mini-minimalism. Beatless.
C: So still. Satieists. A phased, handcranked music box. If a Joesph Cornell box had a sound… Wind chimes, plucked guitar figures.
D: Very cinematic. Makes me think of Bjork, Kubrick, City of Lost Children, Jeunet/Caro.
C: Colleen are (is?) Aphex Twin’s ambient grandchildren. Like Eno was for a while, Aphex Twin is no longer a man, he’s an adjective.
D: This is what I always hoped ambient music would sound like. Don’t throw the baby out with analog bubblebathwater!
C: … [pauses] Can I have some of whatever it is that you are on?

The Geto Boys
The Foundation
(Rap-A-Lot)
D: Who is this?
C: You know who this is.
D: The Geto Boys! Scarface, Willie D, and Bushwick Bill, together forever. Unless my mind is playing tricks on me, which is has been known to do.
C: You were right the first time, D. You may now take off the blindfold.
D: After all these years, they certainly are keeping it gangsta.
C: And yet it’s soul music. From the soul, of the soul, and the slower songs on here are actually sweet soul music.
D: You know, when I’m feeling homicidal, this music calms me down.
C: I appreciate that. More than you know.
D: Well if I didn’t know, now I know!

Neil Hamburger
Great Moments at Di Presa’s Pizza House
(Drag City)
C: On the other hand, when I’m feeling suicidal…I think of Neil Hamburger, self-proclaimed “TV comic” and “American funnyman.” [Listens to CD for a few minutes.] Well, this is a new low. Which is what you catch yourself thinking every time there’s a new Neil Hamburger album, but by now it’s clear that there is no bottom.
D: What is this? [to stereo] Tell some jokes already!
C: Heckling a CD is not the same as heckling a performer, unfortunately. One thing you can say about Neil Hamburger is he’s remarkably consistent. No matter where he plays—an expat nightclub in Malaysia, a greyhound racing park in Tempe, Arizona, a pipe organ-equipped pizza parlor in Northern California—he’s always just terrible, just desperately unfunny. You know what you’re getting with Neil Hamburger. The only surprise is how much worse he’s managed to get since the last time you heard him.

Yellow Pills: Refill
(Numero Group)
C: 33 power-pop 45s by super-obscure one-shot artists, compiled with mindblowing meticulousness and liner note cleverness by an obvious labor-of-lover: this guy Jordan Oaks, who used to do a zine called Yellow Pills. I gotta cop to it, I never heard of the zine, never heard any of these songs.
D: Man! A lot of these really should have been hits. Especially the Toms? As Dr. John and the Meters would say, They were in the wrong place.
C: This drawing of Jon Brion is incredible, when he was like 14 and a member of a band called The Bats.
D: I don’t know about this one…
C: If you don’t like one song, another will be along in two minutes. You’ll be able to find a seat on one of them. [pauses] You know D, we’ve received a lot of letters asking why we are called C & D…
D: We choose to remain anonymous.
C: I bet these bands didn’t want to be anonymous.
D: Well… life’s like that, sometimes.

The Ponys
Celebration Castle
(In the Red)
D: Must be The Ponys. Cuz it sounds like Voidoids and Television.
C: Yep. Less Hellish than before, though, I think.
D: [listening to the chorus of “Glass Conversation”] Now they are rocking!
C: And check out this guitar sound. It doesn’t matter what they play on their solos—although what he’s playing is cool—the sounds they are getting are enough for me. Yes! The solo on “Discoteca” is really simple but it SOUNDS wonderful. That’s like their second signature, after the dude’s voice. [listening to “Today”] Wow this goes into a blues thing in the middle, very cool. No wonder they were on that Junior Kimbrough tribute record, it’s all making sense now.
D: [philosophical] This is more like the first album than the first one was… [listening to “We Shot This World,” shaking head like a tumbler.] The difficult second album is not so difficult for the Ponys!
C: Our little Ponys have all grown up.

Spoon
Gimme Fiction
(Merge)
D: Sounds like the Kinks in a troubled mood.
C: But look they pull out a chorus—a melody like what the Walkmen wish they could do, and I don’t mean to damn with faint praise there.
D: Great album opener.
C: It’s like they’re gonna confront the Kinks Klone critique head-on and then go from there… This is their best shit ever, and their shit has always been fresh. The songs are better put together… listen to the counter-melodies and harmonies… even strings… Like the Left Banke, except not so fussy, or even SF Sorrow-era Pretty Things… Tight psychedelic-tinged upbeat soul rock. This song [“I Turn My Camera On”] is total disco! When he does falsetto, he sounds like what Beck tries to do. If they has strings swoop in we’d have Chic…
D: Maybe they’re saving that for the next album, which I am already eagerly awaiting.
D: [listening to “My Mathematical Mind”] Another cinematic record. There is a hint of John Barry in the air. I picture Oliver Reed in 1965 on the prowl, on the way to a party, or the scene of a crime, whichever he reaches first. Americans are making great English music again!

Weird War
Illuminated by the Light
(Drag City)
C: In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Weird Warlord Ian Svenonius is an Arthur contributor.
D: That guitar tone sounds straight from a robot’s butt. Is he playing one of those keyboard guitar things?
C: It’s called a keytar.
D: I don’t know if I can take anyone playing a keytar seriously. I believe this is supposed to be funky but it does not swing.
C: Svenonius output always divides the crowd. I dig some of this album, but the real undeniable gemwork here is the album art, which is like a Neapolitan version of what Pedro Bell used to draw for Funkadelic LPs.
D: Yes, keep the great artwork, but maybe they should head in a different direction musically.
C: I’ve heard they’re going to do a Grateful Dead tribute called Weir War.
D: …
C: Sorry.

Death in Vegas
Satan’s Circus
(Drone)
D: New Death in Vegas? Excellent! That song with Hope Sandoval and the Indian violinist on the last album was a high point global civilization.
C: No guest vocalist this time.
D: It’s very krautrockian. And Human League. And Gary Numan, the guy that we all hated, because he had bad teeth… always trying to combine the robotic and emotive. He had that pretentious super-serious look mixed with looking like a yuppie. It was bound to fail. Now he’s a cult hero. Just goes to show that every shit you throw against the wall might come down as gold. Write that down!
C: [Writing it down] Very Cluster. And the second track here…listen to this…
D: THEY ARE COVERING KRAFTWERK’S ‘TRANS EUROPE EXPRESS’!?! Unbelievable! That’s balls!
C: These guys have got to be total stoners. They are just fucking around, having fun. You can hear how much they’re digging this.
D: Roedelius, Harmonia, all those guys… I can hear this being played in a German countryside on a nice Sunday afternoon. Very evocative, simplistic—I love it. There’s a track called “Heil Xanax”? Another one called “Sons of Rother”? I give up. They are the victors.
C: The record is so committed to the style.
D: To me, this could be played in a stadium. “Reigen” is a German word for the old-world, Middle Ages a come-together, a joyous come together where you dance around the maypole, so there’s a Wicker Man aspect to it. This shows insane respect and love for a very specific genre. They are saying, Excuse us while we pay tribute to our love.

Josephine Foster
Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You
(Locust Music)
C: Speaking of Wicker Man.
D: Speaking of Jefferson Airplane.
C: Speaking of genius.
D: Speaking of…speechless.
C: She’s been in Arthur before, but… Damn. This is my favorite work yet by one of my favorite voices in the world. Her most conventional songwriting, really, with fantastic arrangements and playing. All by Josephine herself. It’s not harsh like Born Heller could be, not as histrionic as last year’s Supposed album was… I think people will now find out what the big deal is…
D: So many big deals right now, most of them female!
C: I know. Feels like a new dawning, a new birthing, a new burst of feminine energy is going on, doesn’t it?
D: Yes.
C: I can’t wait to hear what happens next…

Reviews by C and D (and E…) (Arthur No. 12/Sept. 2004)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 02:47:57 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 12 (Sepember 2004)

REVIEWS BY C and D (and E…)

THE GRIS GRIS
The Gris Gris
(Birdman)
C: Okay D, we’re gonna start this one off with something I know you will dig—the debut album from San Francisco psych-rock three-piece Gris Gris, who are led by that kid Greg Ashley, whose solo record we dug last year.
D: Yes I remember Mr. Ashley well! He is the new Syd Barrett and [listening to keyboard run] he is advising us to join him on an interstellar overdrive magic carpet ride.
C: The carpet’s in the garage, and it’s kind of greasy. It’s not used, it’s vintage.
D: Rock bands were doing this in garage basements in the Bay Area of ‘60s, after they got their first Yardbirds records. And all across Milwaukee in 1987. Mister Ashley is singing his ASH off! I also like the simplicity of the drumming.
C: …Milwaukee?

THE BLACK KEYS
Rubber Factory
(Fat Possum)
C: Third album from Akron’s finest, once again produced by themselves.
D: [listening] I am not sure if they needed to make another album on their own. There’s not enough progression here.
C: It’s more mellow than the last one. But I like it. Listen to the solo here on “Desperate Man.” And this one on “Stack Shot Bully.”
D: Hmm, definite burning there. This is a 7.5 moving up to 9.3…
C: And this Kinks cover, “Act Nice and Gentle” is great, really blissed out, reminds me of going down to the river in the summertime. I didn’t think I ever wanted to hear another take on “Summertime Blues,” but…
D: That’s a rocker with extra thrusters, baby! It still is summertime and yes I still have those blues! Even though it says “do not duplicate,” can I duplicate it?

THE FAINT
Wet From Birth
(Saddle Creek)
C and D: [blank stares]
C: Um… Pretty belabored electro dance new wave blah blah.
D: I am in Berlin getting down with the transvestites.
C: I see 16-year-old girls dancing poorly.
D: Who are they? I wish he woulda left the transformer effect at home.
C: They come from Omaha. This is their second album.
D: Really??? [listening more closely] They’ve finally written a song good enough for Victoria’s Secret commercial. Congratulations!
C: Maybe we just don’t have an ear for this stuff, but, sheesh, this is painfully shitty. Crap new wave is a joke that didn’t need to be told, ever again.

MOUSE ON MARS
Radical Connector
(Thrill Jockey)
D: This is so bad in such an obvious way. They don’t even number their tracks! So inconsiderate.
C: What, you’ve never heard of glitch in Milwaukee or Berlin?
D: Yes yes, but this… Mouse on Mars have lost it. This trying-to-be-funky-and-clever thing is not working in their favor.
C: You are not happy with the Mouse’s progress.
D: They are progressing to a place where nobody wants to dance. And I am a dancing kind of fellow!

TWILIGHT SINGERS
She Loves You
(One Little Indian)
C: An album of covers by Greg Dulli’s Twilight Singers project. He used to lead the Afghan Whigs, about four decades or so ago.
D: Never heard of ‘em. I am not a fan of the ‘90s.
D: Really? [listening to cover of “Hyperballad”] This sounds like U2. Agh, can’t stand it. Even the guitar is ringing! Can we please listen to something I might like?
C: Dulli does sound like Bono when he tries to hit those trailing Bjorknotes.
D: Is that her voice in the background? [sarcastic] Are they holding hands? This is ghastly! [listening to cover of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”] Now he sounds like Marianne Faithful. I’m getting a drink. Okay, maybe three drinks. [heads for kitchen]
C: I only like the songs where Mark Lanegan sings, really. This version of the blues “Hard Killing Floor” where Lanegan sings lead is all nice and charcoal and moonshine… But basically, I like this album more in concept than in execution. The world doesn’t need an easy listening MOR version of “A Love Supreme,” in my humble opinion.

THALIA ZEDEK
Trust Not Those In Whom Without Some Touch of Madness
(Thrill Jockey)
C: [to tape recorder] D’s in a bad mood, again! Sheesh. Okay, guess I’ll keep going here. This is the new album by the sublegendary Thalia Zedek, who lead the great lost rock ‘n roll band Come for many years. Unforgettable voice, jointly sponsored by Jameson’s and some devilry, I think. Like later Marianne Faithful, actually. Anyway, this is pretty straightahead sad-eyed twilight rock ‘n roll, with some violin on it, which of course sends me back to another lost-‘90s-rock-n-roll-band-with-a-great-female-singer: the Geraldine Fibbers. They also had a violin. Yep.

MIKE WATT
The Second Man’s Middle Stand
(Columbia)
C: Mike Watt from the minutemen and fIREHOSE and current Stooges bassist doing his first album in six years, a total concept piece about his near-terminal illness, plus Dante and one thousand and one other layers of meaning, played by a storming organ-drums-bass three-piece. 9 songs, with eight of them over 5:30, which means this earns Prog certification. Like a particularly smart Deep Purple, subbing out the ponderousness for some art-punk new-beat spastics, splatter and stutter. Do you need a lyric sheet to make sense of it? Yes you do.

PAUL WESTERBERG
Folker
(Vagrant)
C: One of the worst album titles in recent times, but let’s not hold that too much against it. Continuing in the ‘90s-semistar series here, the new solo album from the former singer of the Replacements, who were also doing traditional American rock ‘n roll when that wasn’t exactly called for by the times. Never really dug his solo work, but this is ridiculously good at what it’s doing: really melodic mid-tempo rock ‘n roll that you listen to at the gaspump and then hum the rest of the way home: kinda Oasis, actually, and kinda Tom Petty. And “Looking Up In Heaven” is gorgeous perfection. Yep.

RICH ROBINSON
Paper
(Keyhole Records)
D: [walks back into the room holding big coffee mug, mumbling to himself] People can’t tell you’re an alcoholic if you drink it out of a coffee cup…
C: [oblivious] Solo album from the guitarist for the Black Crowes, who are on some kind of trial separation. Very in-the-pocket, and lovely harmonies, just solid rock ‘n roll songs for longhairs washing their VW bus on a Sunday afternoon.

THE WHIRLWIND HEAT
Flamingo Honey EP
(Dim Mak)
C: This is the new EP from the Detroit band Jack White called the closest we’re gonna get to a Devo in this generation.
D: Hmph. I will be the judge of that!
C: 10 songs, 10 minutes, each song almost exactly one minute.
D: [listening to “The Meat Packers”] Sounds like when the White Stripes covered all those Beefheart songs on that Sub Pop 7-inch.
C: You’re totally right! Good call
D: These guys sound a little too smug to me. They’re just good enough that they’re getting laid.
C: I like conceptual limits, generally. Sometimes it gets you out of a creative jam, makes you go into a new space you wouldn’t’ve otherwise thought of. It necessitates invention and problem solving, keep you from getting too set in your ways. Standard John Cage theory, right? Brian Eno…
D: These guys should work with Eno!
C: He did produce Devo’s first album, didn’t he? Hmm. Perhaps it can be arranged.

COLONEL CLAYPOOL’S BUCKET OF BERNIE BRAINS
The Big Eyeball in the Sky
(Prawn Song Records)
C: Okay, I think I’ve had enough Primus for one lifetime but this looked interesting. It’s Claypool on bass, Bernie Worrell from P-Funk on keyboards, Buckethead on guitar and Brain on drums. Like one of those old Axiom jams that Bill Laswell used to put together back in the early ‘90s with Bootsy and all them.
D: I used to listen to Primus. They had one good album, I don’t remember what it was called but it certainly wasn’t Pork Soda. That was the worst.
C: [cracking himself up] The wurst, you mean, ha ah ha!
D: …
E: [entering room] Hey guys, what’s going on? This sounds great!
C: Whoa. The notorious E dares to enter Arthur’s inner sanctum.
D: We have not seen a woman here in sometime.
C: But your presence here has been foretold.
E: You guys might have more company if you guys didn’t lock the door all the time!
C: Sorry… So, you really like this, E?
E: I love Les Claypool’s voice. I admire his integrity. And can you say “Pork Soda” without laughing? I think not.
C: Er… I believe no one should imitate Zappa. Well not like this, at least.
D: I do like things that are circus-y. It’s like a Fellini movie, you’re waiting for the transvestite to pop out of the tent…
C: I think I’d like it more if I was 16 and playing Nintendo.
E: This is great. What’s your problem, C? If it said “Ween” on the box, you would totally dig it. They’re clearly incredibly smart and having fun.
C: Hmm. Okay, maybe if I was 14.
D: This is totally late Residents and is making me want to get very high right now. I could get a lot of cleaning done to this.

ANTIBALAS
Who Is This America?
(Ropeadope)
E: Fela? Tony Allen? This is cool, of course.
D: Is this from Nigeria? If I had to DJ a wedding, I would definitely play this. You can do any kind of dance to it, there’s so much going on. You can meringue to it.
C: But it’s not Fela Kuti, it’s Antibalas, that group from New York trying to bring back that original Afrobeat. They’re so good now, I can’t tell the difference, really.
D: Don’t they have like 86 people in their band or something?
E: [dancing] More like 20! It’s between them and the Polyphonic Spree for largest band in the Arthur world…
C: I have to say that as good as they are, their lyrics still aren’t there. Fela’s was always really biting and clever. Most of this is too straightforward, there’s none of that really cutting, mordant wit.
D: [dancing with eyes closed] Who cares, this is phenomenal! It makes me want to put my ass into it!
C: [to tape recorder] He said he was a dancing fellow, and now he is proving it.
E: Hey, did you guys hear that Rick James died today?
C: A lot of people owe him big time.
D: Especially those guys who had girlfriends who became superfreaks!!!

MELVINS/LUSTMORD
Pigs of the Roman Empire
(Ipecac)
E: Now for something completely different.
D: Fudgetunnel?
C: Is it Godflesh?
E: It’s actually the Melvins with Lustmord.
C: Awesome dark sludge from some creepy condemned industry at the edge of town.
E: [listening to “The Bloated Pope”] I think this music is really erotic! Much more than easy listening or slow jam, because it’s dark and there’s an element of mystery.
C: And the fifth song is called “Pink Bat,” which is almost as good a title as “Pork Soda,” eh, E?
E: [smiling] Yes, exactly.
D: It’s not my favorite kind of music, but I could scrub the walls to it.
E: Hey D, what are you drinking in that coffee cup? It doesn’t smell like coffee…

LUCIFER RISING
Original soundtrack by Bobby Beausoleil
(Arcanum Entertainment)
C: Speaking of dark and mysterious, here is the original soundtrack for Kenneth Anger’s legendary Lucifer Rising. The original composer was supposed to be Jimmy Page, but Anger ended up using this score by Bobby Beausoleil, an old Manson associate who recorded it in the ‘70s while in prison…
D: UNBELIEVABLY black! Black turned to 100, with lizard eyes. But subtle and beautiful, somehow. This is a high point of human culture.

WOLF EYES
Burned Mind
(Sub Pop)
D: Throbbing Gristle!!!
C: Yeah kind of, right? It’s actually Wolf Eyes, who we reviewed last ish.
E: [reading song titles] “Black Vomit.” “Urine Burn.” And of course, “Stabbed in the Face.” I think they need to get some grooves going. That’s their problem.
D: I used to go see a lot of bands like this. Then I stopped.
C: You have to see it in a small space where the sound of just overwhelming and crushing and inescapable and you are just being confronted with it. I can’t really picture listening to it at home—
E: Me either.
C: —but maybe that’s my problem?

HOPE OF THE STATES
The Lost Riots
(Sony)
D: [disgusted] Is this the new Billy Corgan album?
E: Ouch.
C: It’s Hope of the States, young band, they’re being hyped as the greatest thing since buttered bread and bangers by the British press. One of the guitarists hanged himself in the studio before they finished the album.
D: [listening to “Don’t Go to Pieces”] I have a theory about the suicide. Maybe he did it because he heard the singing on this song!
E: [groans] Double-ouch. No need to be so callous, D. You might want to lay off the vodka a bit… But yes, this singing is really awful.
C: I thought I’d like this because they’re supposed to be dark and political and grand but it just sounds like the dreary precious bits of Radiohead. No thank you.
E: Hype of the States!

SIGNER
The New Face of Smiling
(Carpark)
E: My Bloody Valentine plus post-rock.
C: One of those doesn’t belong. And My Bloody Valentine always had good melodies.
E: I’d give it some more spins, but yes, this is one for the connoisseurs of shoegazism or whatever it’s called.

THE DELGADOS
Universal Audio
(Chemikal Underground/Transdreamer)
E: Reminds me of Belly. Or Suzanne Vega. “Oh woe is me, I’ve got a spot on my blouse”-type stuff. [in teenage girl voice] “Tori Amos was the one person who could understand my heartbreak.”
C: I think it’s sort of pretty, but yeah it is another record from these Scots who never change their mood from guarded pessimism.
E: This gives women a bad name. Let’s listen to that RTX album so I can feel better about women in rock.

THEE SHAMS
(Fat Possum)
C: [digging around in CD pile] I can’t find the RTX. That figures. It’s already been stolen from the Arthur offices.
D: Hey man, don’t look at me.
C: So anyway here’s thee Shams. Young band on Fat Possum label.
E: Sounds like the Standells, recorded with modern equipment.
D: Finally something I can dig here, I’ve been going NUTS!!! New garage rock to smash your beercans too!
E: They’re not doing anything new, but they’re doing it very well.
C: [thoughtfully] Seems like that’s what we’ve been saying about everything lately.

CRIME
San Francisco’s Still Damned
(Swami)
E: Vintage punk rock from ‘70s San Francisco.
D: “Baby you’re so repulsive!” If you don’t have it, buy it, this is awesome American history. It’s not that stupid staccato punk of the last 20 years, it’s closer to original rock ‘n’ roll. [spills drink] Coffee cups aren’t made to drink ice cubes out of.
C: Would you like a bib?
D: Only if I can have some lobster too!
E: This is really good shit, man. Why can’t people sound like this anymore? Oh, when punk was young.
D: You know why? Cuz now if someone gets punched in the face during a show, they have to quit! For a month! [everyone nods, sadly]
E: Okay, I’m outta here, guys. No more nostalgia for me! Tra la la.

THE LIBERTINES
The Libertines
(Rough Trade)
C: New one from the Libertines, England’s most troubled band. Somehow they made another record.
D: It’s pretty good for 1981. I just hope the next song is about his happy knickers.
C: Sassy! But seriously, this is good stuff, English beyond belief of course. Poetic skiffle mod punk rock n roll rockabilly with good riffs and close harmonies by young guys living the bohemian dream in the Old Smoke. [dreamily] It’s all very romantic…

MUSHROOM
Glazed Popems
(Black Beauty)
D: I can’t put my head around this. The cover makes it look like it’s a compilation of ‘60s Italian psychedelic softcore porn soundtracks.
C: It’s actually this band out of the Bay Area… Somewhere around Miles’ more out-there stuff in the ‘70s, when he was playing a keyboard.
D: Nervy. There’s a fine line between experimental and self-congratulation.
C: I dig it. There’s a lot of fine contemplative electric piano stuff on here too. More music for Sunday afternoons, drifting off into siesta after a couple of mint juleps…

FESTIVAL IN THE DESERT DVD
(World Village/Harmonia Mundi)
C: A full-length documentary about what may be the music festival in the world—out in the Sub-Saharan dunes in Africa, in Mali, near Timbuktu. Besides the nomads who live in the area, the only people there are people who’ve made a real effort to be there.
D: Look at those robes! The greens and blues really pop. [definitively] This is what people are supposed to do – sit around fires and talk and make music.

Reviews by C and D (Arthur No. 11/July 2004)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 02:36:42 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)

REVIEWS BY C and D

Fiery Furnaces
Blueberry Boat
(Rough Trade)
D: [extremely puzzled] Is this the Residents?!?
C: It’s Fiery Furnaces. Second album in one year. Usually when you say “difficult second album,” you mean it was hard for the artist. But this is actually hard on the audience!
D: [grimacing] I am not sure if I like this much.
C: It’s… it’s… it’s completely nuts. But: interesting nuts.
D: I remember them now! They were interviewed in Arthur. Brother and sister. But I thought they were blues-rocking New York people? What is all this synthesizer-ragtime stuff?!?
C: It’s like low-key prog. [looking at CD player] We’re in the ninth minute of the first song here… 13 songs, 75 minutes… The whole thing is a wigged-out concept album, man. I dig it.
D: [irritated] I do not have time for concepts! I am a ramblin’ man, that’s what I am.
C: Don’t spill your Dr. Pepper, Popeye. There’s a lot of good stuff on here, it’s just sorta tucked away in pockets within pockets in a large spangled coat of many prog colors.
D: This is too wacky and too wordy. [Brightens, listening to riff midway through second song] I like that, though. I think these guys may be too smart for their own good.
C: A singles-only edit of this album would be nice for the Short Attention Spanners out there…

Comets On Fire
Blue Cathedral
(Sub Pop)
C: The new one from Comets On Fire, full-on super-rock five-piece from the Bay Area. They keep the demons at bay.
D: Yes! Big super-blaster balls-nailed-to-the-wall heavy power rock from a space cannon!
C: Amazing, visionary wizardstuff. And they give you a break in the middle of songs—there’s these lighter sections, they’re even choogling here and there, mellowing the crunchy harsh.
D: [listening to keyboard-heavy “Pussy Footin’ the Duke.”] There is a taste of the prog here, too! But I don’t mind because the riffs are deep canyons and the singer is a yowler and the drums are mighty!
C: It’s like the best of Japanese power-rock plus Quicksilver Messenger Serivce or Meddle-era Pink Floyd plus Kiss. Album-of-the-year contender.
D: I am going to make a pilgrimage to this Blue Cathedral.
C: Which is right next door to the Acid Mothers Temple, no doubt.

The Reigning Sound
Too Much Guitar!
(In the Red)
D: The Reigning Sound! Mister Greg Cartwright! Long may he reign. I doff my beer in his general direction. Heartfelt thrashing songs with a zest for life!
C: [nodding head] The is one of those records that gives garage rock a good name. Which is pretty hard, considering there’s like 45,000 bands out there who are trying to do the same thing over the last three decades.
D: I am getting old. But I will get out my leather jacket for these guys. And stitch their name on it, as is my duty.
C: They’ve got actual songs, it’s not just the two-chord mono-grind smear. And listen to this ballad [“Funny Thing”]. If you’re not a connoiseur of this sort of stuff, it sound like something between the Stones and the Hives. And the Hives are taking them on the tour, so there you go.
D: Giving them that big Swedish stamp of approval!

The Concretes
The Concretes
(Astralwerks)
C: Speaking of the Swedes. A girl band…
D: They have the big Spector beat. A little Mazzy Star, don’t you think? [the chorus comes in on “Say Something New”] The Ronnettes! It cannot be! I am 9 years old again…
C: Yeah. A little Cardigans, perhaps: she doesn’t have the most unique voice, she’s not the greatest singer. But it’s pretty. A lot of this is pleasant music for cleaning house or driving with no traffic and the windows open on warm summer nights… And by coincidence “Warm Night” is my favorite song. It has a waltz rhythm and all these harmonies…
D: [listening] It has a sea chanty quality. Beautiful and SUPER-romantic. Ah, what goes on in the Swedish woods…
C: If there had been an ecstasy scene in the The Muppets Movie this is what it would have sounded like, and I mean that with all respect and seriousness.

Martina Topley-Bird
Anything
(Palm)
C: This reminds me of Morcheeba, and I know that isn’t fair, cuz Martina was with Tricky and they were first, but… Lady can sing okay, a hint of blues pain, acoustic guitars, brushed drums, ‘70s keyboard, lush strings. Yep, this is ad agency music.
C: Totally! I see the car commercial now. Volkswagen?
D: BMW, maybe.
C: Okay, let’s skip to the track with Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age and Mark Lanegan.
D: [listening] Eh. It’s Okay.
C: Well, at least this song has more energy…
D: [thinking deeply] I must say, I always preferred Portishead.
C: The texture of trip-hop stuff is just…worn out. Do we need another record of this stuff? Even Beth Gibbons has moved on.
D: That album she did last year was the most…
C: Yes! Out of Season, Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man, on Sanctuary. Arthur readers, just buy that instead. I weep openly when I listen to that record. But here…
D: I yawn openly.

The Obsessed
Incarnate
(Southern Lord)
D: [Looking at High Volume track listing] Stoner rock, but no Kyuss…? Hmm…
D: Gas Giant are gaseous. Hello, Monster Magnet?
C: They’re not on here either. But Clutch and Orange Goblin and Nebula are, and a ton of other longhaired stoner rock lifers.
D: [looking at the sleeve] Hidden Hand and High On Fire are on here!!! Let’s skip to those. High On Fire march on like warrior kings of peace!
C: Some of it’s like speedmetal but then there’s these weird chord sequences and that six-limbed drumming the dude does. Everything they do smokes. [smugly] And where there’s smoke, there’s High On Fire, ha ha.
D: You make yourself laugh. Now for Hidden Hand, “Falcon Stone.”
C: Your basic Hidden Handiwork. Solid riffage, a firm construction.
D: Wino’s new band, bringing the master pummeller once again! [opening record sleeve, with picture of girl with clothes falling off] Hmm, I like this centerfold, I mean record sleeve.
C: There’s some cool stuff on here, like the Suplecs track, but…
listen: Stoner rock lyrics are like the male versions of girls’ bad high school poetry. It would be cool if they’d trade lyric sheets. Then we’d get stoner rock with lyrics by Jewel. And adult contemporary with lyrics by Bad Wizard.
D: [distracted, gazing longingly at record sleeve] I really like this centerfold. I’ll be right back, I’ve got to to take care of something. [leaves room, taking sleeve with him]
C: Oh geez. I don’t believe this. Anyways… If Arthur readers want some classic heavy rock, the kind of stuff that begot this High Times comp, check out Incarnate, the new Obsessed archive job that compiles a gobload of ‘90s Wino & Company stuff that went lost or mal-released. Music for driving a bulldozer down Main Street to. Heavy is as heavy does…

Wolf Eyes
“Stabbed in the Face/Rat Floods” 12-inch
(Sub Pop)
C: [to tape recorder] Well, we’ve lost D to…um… Let’s just say… Um… Pornography claims another victim. Erotic imagery. [yelling] Tits ‘n’ Buds, bro! Whatever. Fortunately I am prepared to solider on alone. Arthur readers will recognize Wolf Eyes as a Bull Tongue perennial—well, they’ve somehow made it on to Sub Pop despite being pretty brutal and weird and just generally artfuck. For some reason I am reminded of Killdozer. Anyways “Stabbed in the Face” is angry vampire rock on a disco tape loop. Forget the Dead, this is the real skullfuckery. Beware! There’s blood in the grooves of this 45rpm record, which is why on Side 2 the thing locks into a repeater groove, sending the listener down the Wolfhole into a negatory dimension where one is bed-fed codeine by the leering nurse-corpse of Ronald Reagan.

The Fall
The Real New Fall LP…Formerly Country on the Click
(Narnack)
C: There’s little to be said here besides: the Fall are on a full-forward-rock mission again and your surrender is imminent. The guitars are propulsing, broken hip priest Mark E. Smith sounds wonderfully surly and declamatory, almost drifting into dreamtalk sometimes, the other cats in the band are singing some refrains and choruses and this is very important: you can dance to almost every song. It’s full of WFMU-world hits! You people know what I mean. If this were a young band, rather than one that’s been around since 1848, this would be the now-shit of rockcrit and fashion magazines and art schools across the planet. This is as much a return-to-form as Wire or Mission of Burma have done in the last few years: these original post-punk artniks are back on the trail, it can’t be rationally explained. [listening to “Sparta 2”] Shit’s positively magestic! [sighing] We are Fallstruck, once again.

Black Dice
Creature Comforts
(DFA Records)
C: Never really dug these guys and their electro-spazz-randomonica-epic trip before for some reason, although it sounded good in theory. This, though, I dig. I am a digger. I mean, “Cloud Pleaser” is a great title. People who dig early Tangerine Dream, and I mean very early, will dig this. Also some of the more out-there Popul Vuh stuff. It’s a strange mix of electronic stuff and abstracted organic noises with forward motion, enough rhythm for you to keep it on while you’re doing dishes, but enough weird noises and soundfloods and collagework for you to pay attention to it. Kinda meditative, actually… [To D, who has re-appeared] So, everything work out okay?
D: Yes, yes. [irritated, listening to “Treetops”] Do people get paid to do this?

M83
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts
(Mute)
C: Mostly instrumental compositions with occasional sighs. Big and grand and emotional and beautiful. Sounds like it was fabricated by Tokyo-made cyborgs with tearducts, on vacation in France.
D: Like a darker Air… Dark Air should be their name!
C: Reminds me a bit of Casino Versus Japan, and Spiritualized too. Really lovely, hugely evocative, cinematic stuff.
D: Somebody alert Sofia Coppola!

Legendary Pink Dots
The Whispering Wall
(ROIR)
D: Hmm. Creepy creepy! Music for creepy crawling in dismal English towns.
C: Sort of a psychedelic haunted disco thing, yeah. Very stylish, but melodic too. They’ve been around forever but somehow I’ve never cottoned to them until now.
D: [listening to “A Distant Summer”] I like this. Such a strange, dislocated feel.
C: It’s ominous, sinister pop. Again, something that very much has its own feel. Crushed velvet, light rain, spooky carnivals…
D: A new record for all the pale people.

SUNN O)))
White2
(Southern Lord)
C: [reading the sleeve] It says here, “Maximum volume yields maximum results.” We better turn it up.
D: [smiling] Ahh. You can always count on SUNN 0)) for that maximum slow throb ambient guitar doom. They are the legendary black dots.
C: The first track is 14 minutes long! No drums, no vocals… Sonic qualudes. It’s so slow it isn’t even there. Totally enveloping.
D: It’s doom-bliss for your needy skull!

Eccentric Soul: The Capsoul Label
(Numero Group)
C: 19 tracks from an an obscure Columbus, Ohio soul record label who put out a dozen 45s, one album and had a few regional hits during the early ‘70s. Normally I wouldn’t care, there’s got to be a zillion compilations like this out there, right? But…
D: [listening to Bill Moss’s “Sock It To ‘Em Soul Brother”] This is really something. This is as good as the JB’s!
C: When you hear stuff like this, it makes you realize how much luck plays a role in what songs make it into general public’s consciousnsess. Some of this stuff, you can tell why it didn’t go beyond being a regional hit—the voice isn’t unique enough, or the lyrics are prosaic, or whatever. But there’s no reason that most of these songs weren’t big hits, other than that they were recorded and released in Ohio rather than Detroit or New York or L.A. It’s tragic that this is all we’ll ever hear from these folks, because of an accident of geography and timing. Just listen to this: Ronnie Taylor’s “Without Love” is a stone cold church-organ classic from the opening second. What a riff, what a voice.
D: [listening to “Hot Grits!!!” by Elijah & the Ebonites] Incredible! Instant dance floor groove sensation! [very seriously] Listen to me when I tell you this: This is the best soul compilation I’ve heard in 20 years.
C: [dancing] I know what you mean. Damn!

Reviews by C and D (Arthur No. 10/May 2004)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 02:27:51 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 10 (May 2004)

REVIEWS BY C and D

Eagles of Death Metal
Peace Love Death Metal
(Rekords Rekords/AntAcidAudio)
C: [singing along to “Kiss the Devil”]: “Who’ll love the devil?/Who’ll love his song?/I will love the devil and his song!”
D: Ha! This is party-starting rock n roll music! They should’ve called it, “There’s Beer in the Fridge.
C: No doubt. Doubtless. No doubt about it. Doubt-free. [sings along:] “I will kiss the devil on his tongue!”
D: He is the male Peaches!
C: The singer-guitar player Jesse ‘the Devil’ Hughes has the best moustache going in rock, and he knows it. I can hear him now: “C & D, you’ve been rocked by The Moustache.” Have you seen his cape?
D: This cannot be. What year is this? It’s like Mick wearing the Omega at Altamont. Totally Rolling Stones.
C: Jesse is Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Josh Homme—he’s the guy from Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age—is just here to do Beat Number Three on every song and help shift some units. They say it’s “Canned Heat vocals with stripper beats” and you can’t beat that description so let’s not even gonna try. It’s a pretty raw recording, sounds like a rehearsal tape with all the talking.
D: We will have to subtract points for that.
C: Yeah, all that between-song tech talk is the rock equivalent of skits on hip-hop albums. Funny the first time, maybe, but after that?
D: Eagles of Death Metal, you were rocking the party, and then you’re talking amongst yourselves about when to come in on the beat?!? Thanks for fucking it up!
C: “Speaking in Tongues” is the coolest song. Can you hear that sound?
D: Is that a car honking?
C: It’s the CD! They mixed it in! Totally brilliant! [singing along] “Toot scoot! Boots! Scoot scoot!” I have no idea what he’s saying but I like it, I like it. I said, I like it.

Pink Grease
This Is for Real
(Mute)
C: Okay, let’s get this party started again…
D: It is the Cramps. Wait, it can’t be the Cramps. Is this that “Fire in the disco” band?
C: Not it’s not Electric Six, it’s Pink Grease. Which sounds like a nightmare lubricant. Really good name for this band…
D: [hearing the riff kick in o “Fever”:] Whoa! They’re the house band for a creepy kind of party.
C: This is music for the wasters, and their married friends who are tying one on again, just this once.
D: In the right circumstances, this could finish somebody off. This is music for that kind of party where you do something you regret for weeks. [musing] Possibly even for the rest of your life…
C: They’ve got a cool thing going on—garage rockin’, good drums, new touches when you don’t see it coming: saxophone, a good chorus, some slide guitar, an out-there keyboard solo. [dreamily] They should tour with the Dirtbombs and Eagles of Death Metal and Peaches and Ween…
D: Could someone tell me why there are so many good-rockin’ dance bands right now?

John Wilkes Booze
Five Pillars of Soul
(Kill Rock Stars)
C: Then again, there’s this.
D: “John Wilkes Booze”? Terrible name.
C: I know. I gave it some time on the hi-fi cuz of the booklet. I mean, how bad can a band that salutes, in text, at length, Albert Ayler, Marc Bolan, Yoko Ono and Citizen Tania be?
D: Very, very bad, from the sound of it!
C: Is this a Make-Up and Jon Spencer parody band? Talk about putting the high back in high-conceptualism.
D: ‘Five pillars of soul”?!? Fake soul is the worst!!!
C: I’m embarrassed for these people—they have some cool inspirations and ideas about what they want to do but they don’t have the chops or the instincts to pull it off yet. Maybe they’ll get better…
D: They’re from Indiana? HA HA HA HA HA !
C: I’d like to see them try this in New Orleans.

The Thermals
Fuckin’ A
(Sub Pop)
D: [Definitively:] Guided by Voices. But harder, with more of that old piledriver beat.
C: It’s actually a whole different band, a trio called the Thermals. I like ‘em. It’s urgent. Reminds me of Lee Renaldo from Sonic Youth, bashing away in his garage with the neighborhood teenagers cutting school. Oops, dude just knocked over the ten-speed.
D: [shaking head furiously] I just spilled my beer!
C: This guy’s got one of those voices where you don’t care if he doesn’t really sing. 12 songs, 28 minutes. No solos, but it’s not hardcore or screaming emoters. Just cool. He’s determined, he’s holding on.
D: These are high-energy super-tight anthems! Where’s the towel?
C: [singing along] “Anything you break, you can probably mend/Anything you can feel, you can feel again/Hold tight, remember today.” Shit, those are words to live by.
D: Wisdom from a man called Hutch Harris. Thank you, Thermals! Yo don’t have a moustache but you have rocked C & D!

Mission of Burma
ONoffON
(Matador)
C & D: [stunned silence]
C: How can it… How did they…
D: How can it be this good?
C: They haven’t made a record in 22 years… Some of the people in this issue of Arthur were born and grew into adults in the time between Mission of Burma albums.
D: They sound hungry and creative. [singing along] “Now I live inside the circle!”
C: Inside the circle, but still outside the box. How to describe the pleasures of Burma for the people…hmmm.. well, it IS guitar rock, it has melodies and punch and strange flair, and again, like that Thermals record, there’s a sense of no wasted breath, no gloss, no glamour, just direct intention-into-thought.
D: It’s like a greatest-hits record from the last 22 years, except not only were these songs not hits, they weren’t even released!

The Icarus Line
Penance Soiree
(V2)
C: I saw these guys last year. Their singer reminded me of Richard Ashcroft in the vintage Verve days, when they were at their most cosmic and loose and desolate and swaggering… 1995… Skinny dude with cheekbones, just GONE, going for it—
D: [hears guitar break in on “Up Against the Wall”] YES!
C: —amidst the maelstrom. This one is called “Spit On It.“ Okay, this is what you call RIGHTEOUS SQUALL. Mixed by Alan Moulder, who did stuff with My Bloody Valentine, so there you go…
D: [laughing] Alan Moulder spat on it! That’s holy spit. The old Moulder grease…
C: [listening to “Spike Island”] See, and just when you think it’s all shaped noise, here comes a song with a solid, almost disco rhythm and a guitar refrain—something to pull you, something to grasp onto.
D: They’re an L.A. band. There’s a little Jane’s Addiction in them, isn’t there? Especially in the vocals!
C: That’s true. But Perry always had something interesting to say, I don’t know about these guys, I can’t understand a single word he’s singing.
D: He’s hiding behind the Wall of Squall.
C: Then again… [listening to the beginning of the 9:07-long “Getting Bright at Night”] Well, here we go.
D: They bring it down to earth so they can go back into space!
C: I just want to tell the people that at 6:15 in this song, this simple thing happens that makes you love rock n roll turned up to overwhelming. I know we were talking about finishing people off earlier, but maybe this is the real Finisher right here.
D: Right now, my ears love me.
C: Searched, destroyed. Now let’s see if they can write a song on an acoustic guitar.

The Secret Machines
Now Here Is Nowhere
(Reprise)
C: Well, they’ve got a good drum sound, that’s certain. But…um… Is he going to do that same tempo for 9 minutes?
D: Sounds like it. I think I’ll be needing to smoke some more of those special cocktails for this one. [Leaves room, returns happier.] Ah, now it’s changing. This is good. They’re originally from Texas, this really takes me there, out to the nudist lakes, drinking some Shiners, laying back in the sun with your girl, nobody around, music coming up over the sand from the box, lookin’ up and just tripping out to the great big… big I don’t know..
D: The big Big.
C: Yep…
C: [repeating lyrics to “Road Leads Where It’s Led” ] “We communicate by semaphore/No language/We’ve got flags of our own.” I like that.
D: They’re so laidback, they’re almost out of the pocket. A big cinematic sound with lots of air between the different sounds…
C: They’ve been watching Zabriskie Point, I‘m guessing.
D: They’ve definitely been visiting the dark side of the moon. Especially on this song [“Pharaoh's Daughter”].
C: You know it. “Breathe, breathe in the air.” [listening to the concluding/title track] There’s the Neu/Can/Kraftwerk motorik rhythm, done right–this is like Flaming Lips used to sound sometimes, back when they’d let it out a little more when Ronald was in the band… [listening to the song explode around 7:00] Yes!
D: Big but not pompous, psychedelic but not goofy. Yes! I nominate these guys to do a co-headline tour with The Icarus Line.
C: Good stuff from secret machines and special humans. Thank you again, Texas.

The Veils
The Runaway Found
(Rough Trade)
D: Echo & the Bunnymen?
C: Ha! He DOES have a bit of the Ian McCulloch in him. This is a 20-year-old fella from Australia. There’s some real beauts on here, D… [clicks ahead to “The Leavers Dance”]
D: Radiohead. Starsailor.
C: Yeah, I guess… But listen to those strings come in… it’s so gorgeous. I think sometimes people like us get too caught up in “spot the influence.” It’s one thing when you’re hearing straight, passionless, contrived mimicry—plagiarism—but it’s another when folks’ voices are just…similar. What are they supposed to do? Not sing at all cuz that voice is taken already?
D: [thoughtful, agreeing] To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: “A good song is a good song is a good song.”
C: Anyways, I think it’s beautiful stuff. There’s some vintage Britpop rave-ups, there’s ringing guitars. There’s some middling tempo numbers, which are hard to do, when you think about it… And there’s these autumnal, oceanside ballads. [listening to “Vicious Traditions”:] You can see how it could get all histrionic and spittle-flying, but he reins it in just right.
D: [quietly] So young, and so anguished already…

White Magic
Through the Sun Door EP
(Drag City)
D: At last, a female voice!
C: [listening to opening track “One-Note“] This is one of favorite songs of the spring.
D: Charging piano!
C: It’s serious, but not Tori Amos melodrama. “Some-thing is a-bide-ing!” Hmm…
D: “White Magic.”
C: Best name since Comets On Fire. Lotsa witchy stuff going on right now, eh? [Listening to “The Gypsies Came Marching After”] Wow here’s another stormer. This is probably referencing Fairport Convention or Incredible String Band or Pentangle but I just don’t know that stuff well enough… I guess you’d call it folk-rock—it does swing, you can move to it—and they use traditional acoustic and electric instruments and so on.
D: I like her voice. Strong, feminine, with hints of tenderness and loss.
C: This song [“Apocalypse,” the EP’s final track] is a sorta blues groove—it’s like Heart, if they were amazing.
D [musing]: PJ Harvey, with flowers and beads in her hair.

Espers
Espers
(Locust Music)
C: More really lovely, absolutely spellbinding boots-over-pants modern two girls-one boy psychedelic chamber folk-rock for you…
D: [eyes closed, rapt] My, my, my.
C: Reminds me of Damon & Naomi and Ghost. Very, very pretty, and not at all dippy or precious, which is the way these things can so easily go. [listening to “Meadow”] See, cuz they can write actual songs, they’re not just inhabiting a texture or a form…
D: It cannot be possible. What woods are all these people coming from?
C: They come from the Shire, sire. Actually they come from Philadelphia.
D: [listening to “Voices”] There’s no drums, there’s no backbeat, but, [quietly, seriously] I can dig it anyway. Listen to me when I say this: This is music that lifts the veil.

Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O.
Mantra of Love
(Alien8)
C: Speaking of lifting the veil: here’s the new Acid Mothers Temple studio album, two very long tracks. The first is a traditional vocal, with Miss Cotton Casino singing, that goes…
D: [6:25 in] There it goes now, off into the universe… Happy trails everywhere.
C: For those out there who don’t know, the Acid Mothers are a Japanese psych outfit known to the acid cognoscenti for volume, trance and hair frizz. They’re on a serious far-out trip and they’re gonna do it, sometimes on the turn of the dime, whether or not anyone else is interested. I’ve seen them play a 100-person room like they were playing for the galaxy…
D: This is the best-recorded AMT album I’ve ever heard!
C: You can actually hear the bass beneath all the Hawkwind psych-bleeptronics and Acid Mothers “super guru” Kawabata Makoto’s super-guru-guitar guru-ifying all over the place. A proper mix, finally. [listening] Aaaaand then back down to the central melody. This is humanity at its finest: dignified—cooperative—transcendent.
D: So good! I must nominate the Acid Mothers as this planet’s ambassadors to the Galactic Council!

Merzbow
Last of Analog Sessions 3-CD box set
(Important Records)
D: Ack! What the???? Something’s wrong with the needle!
C: Oh, D. So easily confused. This is Japanese noise artist Merzbow, that’s what the stuff sounds like…at first. Then you get into it. You have to listen closely.
D: I will NEVER get into this!
C: Well, that’s your problem. For the non-philistines out there in Arthurworld, I want to say that his packages three Merzbow albums—Catapillar, Medamaya and Springharp—recorded from ‘97-99 by Masami Akita, in his final analog tantrums before he went digital. As it says on the back of this beautiful silver-on-black package, “Akita plays Self-built junk—”
D: Yeah this is junk alright—
C: “—with contact mics, various filters and ring modulators, various effects pedals, EMS Synthi A synthesizer, EMS VCS3 Synthesizer, Moog Synthesizer, GR-500 Guitar Synthesizer, Tapes, EXD, Drum Machine and Oscillators.” It’s good stuff, although a little of this goes a long way and I couldn’t tell you what my favorite track is. You’ve got to be in a very certain and very open mindset to listen to this stuff, but it’s worth it. Shit is meditational, bro!
D: Listen, I get this when the DVD isn’t connected right to the stereo, and that’s free of charge.

Loren Connors
The Departing of a Dream Vol. III: Juliet
(Family Vineyard)
D: Much better. Lonesome guitars sounding occasional hopeful notes in the desert.
C: It occupies its own unique space. Not quite ominous, but not settled either. Restless, haunting. Just one man doing “guitars, tapes, sounds.”
D: This is what that Daniel Lanois guy wishes he could sound like.
C: It’s only 30 minutes, but I swear it feels like six hours. This will slow you right down, just like yoga or a good bath or chopping vegetables… Wow.
D: [asleep]

Thee Silver Mountain Reveries
Pretty Little Lighting Paw
(Constellation)
C: Four tracks, thirty minutes. “More Action! Less Tears!” is a great title: it’s like Godspeed You! Black Emperor gone early Spiritualized, with a sense of humor. [Listening to “Microphones in the Trees”]: Now we’re getting down to the REAL anguish of the evening. Guitarist-vocalist Efrim is Wayne Coyne realizing all hope IS lost, actually and death is no comfort. But there’s this ease at the end of the song, a moment of brightness. Epiphany? Or maybe it’s just the street lights buzzing on, like in Antonioni’s L’Eclipse…
D: [stirring deep into the 10-minute “Pretty Little Lightning Paw”]: What is this…? A choir from the dark stars…

Craig Taborn
Junk Magic
(Thirsty Ear)
C: Future jazz from nowtime. Reminds me a bit of Carl Craig’s Innerzone project from a few years ago. Whatever happened with that, anyhow? Jazz and digital electronics: a treacherous and therefore unexploited frontier? Tonight at 10!
D [drifting]: …Cinematic Orchestra….
C: This is heavier, swings a bit more, and goes further out, leaving the drums behind altogether. A little more intense. These are compositions, not jams, you have to follow it along. It’s cool in a tough situation.

Vetiver
Vetiver
(DiCristina)
C: This is my other new favorite record. Really lovely folk stuff from some San Francisco cats, led by Andy Cabic on vocals, guitar and banjo.
D: He sings so nakedly. There’s some Nick Drake here…
C: It reminds me of that third Velvet Underground album. Or any Velvets when they’re quieter: that sort of foggy country-folk that Lou would do then. Kind of hushed and candlelit, away from the streets and the squall and the squalor, in a bohemian garret in the city or a tent in the woods. It’s a balm, like that last Six Organs of Admittance record.
D: There is a gauzy, dreamy feel to this.
C: The songs are really well structured and arranged–there’s cello and violin all over the album. [looking at the CD booklet:] And gaze upon this centerfold, it looks like a vintage Satty image! That’s Joanna Newsom playing harp on “Amerlilie,” and of course that’s the ubiquitous Mr. Banhart sings and plays guitar on a couple songs that are almost hoedowns. Colm O’Ciosoig, from My Bloody Valentine and Hope Sandoval’s band, plays drums on a couple of tracks… and then there’s Hope herself, singing backup on “Angels’ Share.” Goosebumps…
D: There is a real Mazzy Star thing going on here! It is Mazzy Star with a sensitive boy singer.
C: They both go back to the Velvets, don’t they. Oh, the Velvets! I’d give this to the people in the coffeehouses of America digging Cat Power and Beth Orton. Such beautiful songs.
D: These are modern songs, but these are not modern world people.

Blanche
If We Can’t Trust the Doctors…
(Cass Records)
C: Another stylish country-folk softie, with a distressed cover, and banjo and quietish voices by people less than happy with the present day and their present circumstances.
D: A little bit Lyle Lovett, a little bit Buck Owens…
C: They’re from Detroit. This first song has Brendan Benson singing backup, and there’s a perfect little Jack White guitar part…
D: This is nuts. How can there be so many good bands coming out of one city at one time?
C: It does boggle the mind. It’s not just the music, though, which bypasses the alt-country tedium you might be fearing and heads for that stately old country bluegrass thing, it’s good lyrics too: “Who’s to say that I’m obsessed with everything you do/just because it seems my schedule seems to shadow you/who’s to say that tired cliche, there’s more fish in the sea/I don’t mind treading water, you’re the one for me.”
D: And male-female duets — always good, rarely done, rarer still done well.
C: [reading lyrics] “Life once again is carefree/where we tiptoed, now we waltz/past the black cats and the mirrors we cracked/without our fingers crossed…”
D: They are admirers of the old ways, but they are not worshippers.

Los Lobos
The Ride
(Hollywood)
C: What can you say? It’s the new Los Lobos. Fucking buy it already.
D: One of America’s greatest living bands.
C: They’re the house band for America. They can do everything, and they do everything with taste, and they’re not afraid to venture out. Always. Year after year! I mean, what do you call them, how do you categorize them? A jam band? Okay but they’ve got SONGS! A rock n roll band? Sure, but they’ve got so much soul, they can do traditional Mexican folk stuff, and they can flip into so many musical spaces and styles, for all the occasions of life: carnivals, barbecues, funerals, weddings, lonely drives. They’re the ascended masters, they’re our nation’s poet laureates. They should be on the radio all the time, on Leno and Letterman ever week. The true music fans know this, the true musicians know this. This album is like a testimonial to Los Lobos—it’s the band with a ton of guest stars doing new songs, some covers, all over the map stylistically. I’ll just list em: Cafe Tacuba, Willie G, Dave Alvin from the Blasters, Bobby Womack, Tom Waits & Martha Gonzalez, Ruben Blades, Richard Thompson, Elvis Costello, Mavis Staples…
D: Wow. Somebody call NPR!
C: That’s some heavy hitters, but I’d be buying this anyway, bro. I found an amazing quote from Mickey from Ween the other day on Los Lobos. He said, “I love Los Lobos, that’s a band that’s out there that really does it for me that I’ll go see. I don’t know why people aren’t really hip, because Los Lobos, to me… Like people say that Phish filled in a void for the Dead when they were gone, for a variety of reasons. You know, they played long sets, they jam a lot, they changed their set list every night. [But] Los Lobos play a very long set, they change their set lists all the time, it’s as much good, quality guitar that you could want. They’ve been doing it forever and they give off the vibe on stage that they have. They have that telepathy going.”
D: So true, so true.
C: When I hear David Hidalgo’s voice, I tear up, just automatically.
D: Like War said, the world is a ghetto. But the world is a barrio too, and I want to be there.

Toots & the Maytalls
True Love
(V2)
C: Let’s wrap this up with another celebrity testimonial album… Toots Hibbert—
D: Toots & the Maytalls!
C: —joined by a bunch of folks doing some of his old songs, and some new stuff, with a constellation of stars. There’s some total sheened-up clunkers on here, but damn, any time there’s a chance to hear Willie Nelson singing reggae, I’m there.

Reviews by C and D (Arthur No. 9/March 2004)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 02:16:57 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 9 (March 2004)

REVIEWS BY C and D

Guitar Wolf
Red Idol DVD
(Narnack)
D: Hey, I can’t make this DVD work.

The Von Bondies
Pawn Shoppe Heart
(Sire)
D: This is the Detroit garage guy who had his face bashed up by Jack White.
C: Right. Jason Von Bondie is apparently the town asshole, or so I’ve been told. But, do you know that song, “Pablo Picasso”?
D: Of course! Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers! They were the best! [singing:] “He could walk down your street/And girls could not resist his stare/Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.” But this doesn’t sound like Jonathan Richman…?
C: [sighs] Okay D, I’ll spell it out for you: Pablo Picasso was an asshole. But he also made some great paintings.

Franz Ferdinand
Franz Ferdinand
(Domino)
D: This is what the Strokes and the Rapture should have done on their last records. But they were incapable.
C: Every song is a sure-hit on the dancefloor. Plus the guy can sing. And check out what they do on this track (#3), 55 seconds in…
D: Whoa….
C: The tempo slows down… And listen to that guitar playing! Then here comes that descending disco bassline again.
D: This is ridiculous. Can I use your phone? I’ve got to call my financial advisor. I’ve got to buy stock in this band! They are the new kings!!!
C: I know, eh. It’s like all the those other bands, including those Interpol guys, were all just warm-ups for the Ferds. Amazing stuff. Album of the year so far, easy.

The Walkmen
Bows and Arrows
(Record Collection)
D: Ah, I see what you’re doing…
C: Yes, I am Clever Man.
D: These guys, they’re good, they’re kind of like the Ferdinand and the Strokes and…
C: Dude’s got a bit of the crooner in him. And he’s a more interesting lyricist than Julian Casablancas. Then again, just about everyone is.
D: Watch it.
C: Oh right, sorry, I forgot about your inner 14-year-old girl self.
D: …
C: Um… Okay, sorry, that was uncalled for.
D: You can be so ARROGANT sometimes… [listening] The sounds they get are so cool.
C: Organs, guitars, tacked pianos. But check out this next track, you’re gonna lose it.
D: [listening to “The Rat”] It’s the Strokes with their pants on fire! That guy’s mad!!!!
C: Madder than Jack White. He’s fucking going for it, damn, and you know, when a crooner spits blood, you better look out. Anger always means more when it’s coming from a guy who usually .
D: This shit is banging. “You’ve got a nerve to be asking a favor/You’ve got a nerve to be calling my number/I’m sure, we’ve been through this before/Can’t you hear me, I’m beating on the wall.”
C: I’d pay $15 for this song alone. And you know what? There’s ten more songs on the album!!!
D: And they’re good too. Shit. This is gonna be some year.

Oneida
Secret Wars
(Jagjaguwar)
C: You wouldn’t know this–
D: Again with the arrogance!
C: Well, you wouldn’t–
D: Wouldn’t what?
C: Wouldn’t know what the title is based on.
D: Well…
C: ‘80 Marvel Comics. Which I read. And I bet you didn’t.
D: …
C: So fuck off! [laughter] Big battles between superheroes and the main guy who summoned them to the “secret wars” : The Beyonder.
D: [wistful] Ah, the ‘80s…
C: Or it’s based on something else! Anyways. I dig this.
D: [Listening to “$50 Tea”] It’s frantic. Hypnotic. Like strobe lights for your ears.
C: But it stretches out too, and there’s melodies. It’s a lot like that last Primal Scream record, Evil Heat. Difference is that Oneida won’t let the machines do any work.
D: The Beyonders is the name of my new band.

Weird War
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Bite ‘Em
(Drag City)
C: From Secret Wars to Weird War, get it?
D: You are so clever. Almost too clever to bear. I cower before your cleverness.
C: [laughs] As you ought. Now check this shit out…
D: [listening to “Grand Fraud”]: Is it supposed to sound like that? Listen to all that hiss.
C: Yes, it’s nice and raw and funky and kinda fucked up. They used some old mixing board that Sly Stone and later the P-Funk guys used. Um. I guess it’s possible…
D: [2:45 into “Grand Fraud”]:WHOA!!!!!
C: That’s the shit right there. That’s IT.
D: Who is the singer?
C: Ian Svenonius, Arthur astrologer, on vocals. He’s been around forever. Nation of Ulysses, Cupid Car Club, Make Up, Scene Creamers… The Make Up split up just when they were getting good! Now I think he’s got it going on again, especially with this new guitar player, that guy has some tasty chops, as they used to say back in the day. Do you remember, back in the ‘90s, when it was a point of pride to be less than competent?
D: Stupid indie rockers, I never liked that stuff. Weird War is a weird name.
C: You’re right. Like, what do you call the people in the band?… Weird War-ers?.
D: Weird Warriors! [Ears pop up as female voice rapping begins on title track breakdown] Is that Peaches????
C: It’s Jennifer from Royal Trux.
D: Whoa. I think she can quit her dayjob! And Peaches should call her lawyers.
C: Always with the lawyers, this guy.

TV On the Radio
Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
(Touch and Go)
C: Another band with a difficult name.
D: “TV on the Radio”? What does that mean? What are they thinking? This is crazy talk.
C: Just listen to the music. You can’t judge a band by its name! The Beatles is the stupidest name ever, right?
D: Yes, okay. [listening] What do you call this kind of music?
C: I have no idea, but I like listening to it.
D: It’s dance music, but it’s got all this…
C: All these weird elements, used in weird ways. Horns. Backing vocals. Dance grooves.
D: He’s got a voice like Peter Gabriel. There’s something kind of scary about this stuff.
C: It seems like they’re holding it together in the face of something. [Quoting song lyrics:] “You were my favorite moment/of a dead century.”
D: This is really good. It’s genuinely new—I can’t say that I’ve heard something like this before. And I want to hear it again.

The Paper Chase
What Big Teeth You Have EP
(Southern)
C: Speaking of scary.
D: Super-tension crisis music!
C: Drills. Angst. Space. Rolling bass. Piano stabs. Guitars at angles.
D: It’s like a soundtrack to a murder.
C: Reminds me of Jesus Lizard. Drive Like Jehu… But there’s an almost… symphonic, I guess…component to it. They’re from Texas, they thing big.
D: Violins too. Genuine horror movie stuff! But not in a cheesy way. No organ grinder.
C: You should see the video that‘s on here: it’s like low-budge Lynch meets Cunningham. Okay, onto the next track, which is a Brel cover…
D: Of course. “My Death.” Scott Walker did this!
C: The drums are so big on this record. I think it’s a Texas thing. Those guys love the big Bonham drum thing down there. Lift to Experience, Secret Machines, these guys… Maybe it’s from all those years of Flaming Lips coming down to Austin from Oklahoma, that dude is an epic drummer. So is this guy.
D: The guitar is now being strangulated. It’s almost too much. Psychodramatic, just at the edge of being too much.
C: Yes. This last song is a Roger Waters cover from The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. It’s massive.
D: Whoo-ee. We need to keep an ear on these guys!
C: Their next album is gonna be on Kill Rock Stars… A label with a violent name for a band with a violent streak as wide as a Texas mile.
D: They are the new Texas chainsaw murderers, only they use guitars. Murdered by music.

Casual Dots
Casual Dots
(Kill Rock Stars)
C: Speaking of Kill Rock Stars, here’s a record on the label by a new band.
D: More angularity.
C: Angularity is the new strumming.
D: A female voice, finally! Why do we always listen to men records?
C: That is a very good question to which I don’t have a very good answer. Anyway, in case you were wondering, this sounds to me like Stereolab meeting Deerhoof with, oh, Poison Ivy from the Cramps on guitar. It’s indie rock vets from bands like Autoclave and Bikini Kill, but they can play their instruments.
D: Progress has been made. Miracles, they never cease.
C: This song, “I’ll Dry My Tears” is a cover, right?
D: It must be. Very nice, so different from the rest. We can ask the Internet about it.
C: Poison Ivy is so underrated… This whole record sounds like a tribute to her guitar playing.
D: Cool stuff on record, now I wanna see ‘em live. Women rock!
C: …

Hella
The Devil Isn’t Red
(5 Rue Christine)
C: Instrumental mathcore by men.
D: Excuse me while I yawn.
C: I’m sure it’s all very difficult and very intense, but why should people listen to this when they could listen to, oh, King Crimson or Magma?
D: This is so difficult. Oh so very difficult. The nerds of rock, shredding away. Maybe it is fun for them.
C: The drumming on this bugs the shit out of me, it’s busy beyond belief. For what? I don’t get it.
D: Off it goes. Bye bye!

Deerhoof
Milkman
(Kill Rock Stars)
C: Speaking of Deerhoof, here’s their new one on…Kill Rock Stars.
D: Which rock stars do they want to kill exactly, that’s what I always wondered.
C: Of all the people to advocate killing, why rock stars? Why not…um…first-world capitalist greedheads? If you’re going to go down that route, I mean… Not that I’m advocating anything.
D: We are peace people.
C: But rock stars? John Lennon was killed. Are these John Hinkley sympathizers, then? That’s pretty fucking stupid.
D: Disgusting!
C: Hey anyway, guess what? This sounds like the other Deerhoof records! Cute dreamy vocals in the same key by Japan-born singer Satomi Matsuzaki, I don’t know what she’s saying but it good, and lotsa riffs glued on, stomping and stopping and starting.
D: They’re supposed to be amazing live.
C: Yeah, I can see that. But they still don’t quite do it for me on record.
D: Well, that’s your problem. I am digging it. Next!

OOIOO
Kila Kila Kila
(Thrill Jockey)
C: Continuing on from our “kill” theme, and also on the Japanese theme, here’s the new record by the band that Yoshimi from the Boredoms leads…
D: This is boring twiddling thumbs music. Where are the drums? I need some drums.
C: You may get your drums. Just sit still and listen for a second, will ya? Patience is a virtue.
D: Hey what about that Guitar Wolf DVD? He’s Japanese.
C: Oh yeah. Lemme see if I can make it work. [tries to make it work] Nope.
D: This is getting better, but it’s taking too long. I am a busy man.
C: Okay, okay. I just want the Arthur readers to know that this is an interesting, minimalist art-trance-experimental record that rewards multiple listens by the genuinely curious. I mean, shit D, this song is 10 minutes and 40 seconds, you gotta let it develop. It’s like the opposite of Deerhoof. Deerhoof is for people who need it NOW and OOIOO is for people who can wait.
D: I am definitely a cannot-waiter. I apologize to Yoshimi, but that is how I am!

Ghost
Hypnotic Underworld
(Drag City)
C: I have prepared a statement regarding this album, that I wrote while in what we shall call ‘alternative consciousness,’ which I will now read. [clears throat] “Pure, total towering all-encompassing humble acoustic-electric-Mellotronic psychedelic-pastoral-rock-art-prog-outre accomplishment, the summation of a career, a flowing highlight reel that takes every angle that Batoh’s Ghost band (who come from Japan) have ever explored during the last decade and a half and multiplied the richest parts by a factor of 48. (It’s like The Love Below, in a way, right?) The band is sympathetic, tremendous, stunning: the electric guitarist Michio Kurihara deserves particular recognition for his restraint, his launches, his trails. Lower the lights, turn on the fog machine, put a candle in the wine bottle, turn the stereo up loud and gaze lovingly at the gatefold. I want to tell you something: my friends, whoever you are and whatever language you speak, This album is why Music exists.”
D: Yeah, it’s pretty good.

The Coral
Magic and Medicine
(Deltasonic/Columbia)
C: New album from the Coral.
D: Liverpool young guys that sound old!
C: Yeah. This is a solid record, pleasant. More lightly psychedelic folk-country-rock-I dunno.Melodic. But…
D: There’s nothing urgent about it.
C: Exactly. It’s kind of timeless, but not in a cosmic-eternity Ghost way, it’s more just timeless in an England way. You get the feeling these songs might’ve been written at any time in the last few hundred years, but whenever they were written, they never meant much to anyone.
D: They don’t draw blood—they suck it!
C: [laughs] Well…there’s just this distance to them. They have such a warm, welcoming sound, but…well the singer’s kinda flat, it‘s like he never breaks this character he’s playing. Safe but harmless. He’s no Shane Macgowan.
D: The Pogues!
C: Shane had bite, even when he was gumming it. You wanna be a poet, you can’t just sit by your fireplace all the time. You gotta get out there and take some blows for the home team, soak something up, whether it’s your own experiences or what you witness. I always get the feeling these guys sit around playing records and watching flicks. That don’t do it.
D: You could be wrong, though.
C: Well… As T-Model says, that’s true now!

Greg Ashley
Medicine Fuck Dream
(Birdman)
D: Is this new? It sounds like early Pink Floyd or…
C: It’s new. It’s Greg Ashley, he’s from Texas, used to be in a band called Mirrors down there (not the Mirrors of Cleveland), and he’s got a band in the Bay Area called Gris-Gris, who are supposed to be really good. Reminds me of Flaming Lips’ Hit to Death in the Future Head…Sparklehorse, too… Brother JT…Same sources, I guess!
D: Lonely desperate guy singing after hours in an reverbish spooky carnival funhouse about adult fears. I listen to this and I see in my mind’s eye scenes from Fellini’s La Strada. It’s beautiful…
C: There’s sadness here, but it’s not full of dread or angst—the guy’s just trying to get through something by singing, he’s not holding his situation against anyone. [Listening to “Deep Deep Down”:] The songs have this really solid folk-blues-country foundation, very simple, very hard to do. And there’s optimism here too. The dude’s got a flair.
D: [musing, eyes closed] …Gelsomina would listen to it every night as she took off her clown makeup. Maybe she’d dance a little, in the shadows, with the leopard man…

Mr. David Viner
Mr. David Viner
(Dim Mak)
D: Basically it’s all traditionals. He does a version of “Corrina, Corrina,” which make me want to own this immediately. Just saying those two words aloud makes me warm.
C: It’s a romantic record: a romantic idea of music, of folk-blues music, done without flash or glamour or tongue. He’s a nice singer: he sings just enough, it’s like he’s not even there sometimes. It’s perfect. Reminds me a little of that John Lurie Marvin Pontiac record, or Robert Plant’s last record [2002’s Dreamland], only it’s more straightforward, of course.
D: I miss John Lurie!
C: I know. You can see why the Soledad Brothers are basically the backing band here. This is their shit, too, so it makes sense.
D: When you’re playing songs this old, songs this good, they can take you over, even if you’re English!
C: Let’s see if he can push it forward, now.

The Black Keys
The Moan EP
(Alive)
D: New Black Keys!?!
C: Not really… This is on their old label. Looks like odds and ends.
D: It’s true, I’ve heard all of these songs before, I think.
C: According to my calculations, this is what you get here. A version of the the lead track “The Moan” was on last year’s Fat Possum “Have Love Will Travel“ 3-track EP, taken from a John Peel session; another live version of the song was released on a spilt EP with The Six Parts Seven put out by Suicide Squeeze Records. The Peel version is the best. “Heavy Soul” here is an alternate take of a song from the first album The Big Come Up, on Alive, which was released on vinyl but not CD. The third track is the Stooges cover “No Fun,” which also was available on the vinyl of The Big Come Up, but not the CD. The last track is a cover of “Have Love Will Travel,” a later version of which appeared in a different, superior form on their Fat Possum album, thickfreakness.
D: …
C: My head hurts.
D: Here, have a glass of water.
C: I feel like The Seth Man. Record labels can do cruel things to fans.
D: That is your problem, AGAIN! I think it rocks in the low-down bluesy throaty way that they always do, and it collects a bunch of stuff in one place for the freaks in the audience who need everything. And I am one of those freaks who lives in the Secret Vaults of Rock!

Rocket From the Tombs
Rocket Redux
(Smog Veil)
C: Speaking of vault-digging in Ohio. Or crypt theft. Here’s another band from Ohio.
D: I know this! “FRUUUUUSTRATION!!!!!” Rocket From the Tombs!!!! But what is this CD?
C: That part on the second song “So Cold’ is a straight rip off Alice Cooper’s “Sixteen”…
D: What is this CD?!?
C: It’s a new studio recording of the original RFTT repertoire by the surviving members.
D: Because they never made an album.
C: Yeah, I don’t remember the whole story but yeah the band split in two, into the Dead Boys and Pere Ubu… Who each released versions of most of the songs on here, blah blah. And one of the major guys, Peter Laughner, died.
D: These are STILL amazing angry poetic thrust-rockers from the TENSE heart of CLEVELAND, OHIO IN AMERICA IN THE MID-‘70S!!!! “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” “Sonic Reducer,” “Final Solution”!!!! This is the super-shiznit!
C: It DOES sound awesome. You got David Thomas on vocals of course, plus there’s Cheetah Chrome on guitar, and then there’s Richard Lloyd from Television also on guitar, filling in for Laughner… [Listening to “What Love Is”:] They’re doing the same rhythm-riff thing as “Communication Breakdown” but then it goes OFF.
D: So, this was just recorded recently?
C: Yeah. Timeless shit, again, but here it seems like it actually meant something to people at the time. There’s a real passion and intellect at operation here, at the same time. Plus air pollution and dead-end jobs and random sex and amphetamines and desperation and all the other necessary stuff.
D: Those timeless twentysomething kicks.

DMZ
DMZ
(Sepia Tone)
D: Unbelievable! DMZ!!!!!! How can all of this be coming out now, in 2004?
C: We live in a golden era, my friend. All praise Sepia Tone. Speaking of old punks, we were supposed to talk about the new Mekons record [Punk Rock, Touch and Go], too, but I can’t find it… [leaves room]
D: [close up to tape recorder:] Mighty super-power…aggressive garage… freakbeat rock that pummels your balls!!!
C: [Returns to the room, empty handed.] 11 songs, 28 minutes, produced by Flo & Eddie of the Turtles, originally released by Sire in 1978. Their only studio album.
D: It puts everyone to shame!!!! Everyone else can fuck off and die hard! Goodbye!
C: I think only the Hives might come close to the tight dynamo fury of this stuff right now, and they had to practice really, really hard for years to get there. But these guys…
D: The breakdown on “Don’t Jump Me Mother” when it comes back?!?
C: Unfuckingbelievable, the song just keeps getting more intense.
D: 28 minutes of genius. Incredible production! Sharp and bold and tough! Play it next to the first Ramones records and you will have a revelation-revolution of the brain and heart.

Metal Urbain
Anarchy In Paris!
(Acute Records)
C: Here’s another archive release from the late ‘70s. Punk rock in French with a drum machine. 24 songs, 71 minutes, really good liner notes.
D: It’s cool, aggressive, chantalong stuff that you can wash dishes to, or put on at a party, or turn up real loud and put your head through the wall. The machine stuff doesn’t sound so good, but whatever. That was always going to be a problem.
C: It’s a little like… You know what? This is what that Wire record that came out last year, this is what that Wire record sounds like, only 24 years earlier and in French.
D: In my opinion French should only be sung on record by young women, with certain exceptions.
C: Every time I hear these guys use the word “bourgeoisie” or “fasciste!” or whatever… I think of the guys in powdered wigs and aristocrat costumes who do those AC/DC-type songs, what‘s their name?
D: [quoting a song from memory:] “Boudoir!”
C: Yes! Upper Crust! The best band without a deal in America? Maybe!

Probot
Probot
(Southern Lord)
C: Oh sweet dark god of brutality. Lemmy, Wino, King Diamond from Mercyful Fate, Tom Warrior from Celtic Frost, Eric Wagner from Trouble plus Cronos!… Dave Grohl did all the music. He calls it metal fantasy camp. And the camp counselors were…ritually sacrificed on the first night, from the sounds of it.
D: Unbelievable! Unrelenting, joyous, full-on METAL UP YOUR ASS, as we used to say in the olden days.
D: Beavis and Butthead will rise from their MTV graves, bow down slowly and then stand on the couch and hurt their necks for an hour listening to this.
C: Dave Grohl did it. He didn’t have to, but he did. Somewhere, Kurt Cobain is cackling with glee.
D: [singing along with Sepultura’s Max Cavalera:] “Red war will follow my enemies!!!!! YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!
C: There’s a song called “Dictatosaurus”? I rest my case: we are in the presence of the metal gods.
D: [still singing along:] “Red waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar! Red waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!”
C: This could be the soundtrack to the Republican convention in August…

XBXRX
“We Hate the President” single
(Narnack)
D: …or this could.
C: Four tracks, one-sided clear red vinyl. Hardcore with a guy doing a high-demonic screech vocal. The cover images shows a very young girl child kneelingon the sidewalk…on the ground are the words “Fuck it or fight it… It does not matter. While kids die of hunger, you get fat.”
D: Yes! Fat fucking Americans need big SUVs to drive around in cuz they can’t fit in normal-sized cars cuz of their fast food lardasses! Then they need more oil for their precious Hummers…so they go to war to steal it from people! Fuckfaces!
C: I don’t usually like this kind of stuff but: well, nice one, fellas.
D: I hate the president too!!! RAAAARRGH!
C: Dear Narnack and XBXRX, please release this in a format so that everyone can play it all the time on their big mobile stereo speakers in August in New York for the Republican war pigs. I am sure they will appreciate it. Folk music’s not gonna cut it, people. We need extreme music for extreme occasions. And yes, the music SHOULD be one-sided!

All Night Radio
Spirit Stereo Frequency
(Sub Pop)
C: And now for something completely different, because you can’t be angry and aggressive all the time, you have to let the sunshine into your heart and allow for just pure aesthetic beauty in some part of your life. Otherwise, why go on?
D: This is a preview of springtime. Of Utopia.
C: And you don’t mean the band.
D: Ha! [smiling] Maybe I do.
C: It’s a side project from the Beachwood Sparks guy. Or guys? I’m not sure. Lookit up on the internerd. Super-melodic layered orchestral gauze-pop with harmonies and melodies and solid riffs and soaring George Harrison gentle-ness. Musicboxes, echoes, forgotten vintage sounds. This is what all those Elephant 6 bands wanted to sound like but didn’t have the talent for, in the end. A Magical Mystery Tour for 2004? Possibly. Kind of like Mercury Rev’s first three albums too, especially See You On the Other Side.
D: So beautiful. I will be listening to this radio station all night long. What is the word for this? Oh yes: Sublime.

Reviews by C and D (Arthur No. 8/Jan. 2004)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 02:02:56 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 8 (Jan. 2004)

REVIEWS BY C and D

Unicorns
Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?
(Alien8)
C: Who?
D: Who what?
C: Who, Sir D, will cut the Unicorns’ hair when they’re gone?
D: Ah, yes.
C: You don’t really care, do you?
D: Can’t say that I do, no, not really. These guys are wacky.
C: Sub-Ween wacky pop.
D: Helium-sucking stoners.
C: Queasy synthesizers.
D: A Rephlex artist gone Dr. Demento.
C: [puzzled]
D: This is like hearing someone you’re not interested in taking drugs. Boring drugs.
C: Maybe too much Flaming Lips for them…? There’s some talent here… “Child Star” sounds like a Radiohead parody…. You know, it’s not easy providing comic relief.
D: This whatever-it-is is not one of my cups of tea.
C: And you have a lot of china.
D: Indeed I do.

Eugene McDaniels
Outlaw
(Water/Runt)
D: [reading] “Eugene McDaniels – the soul anarchist.” Then it says here, “Under conditions of national emergency , like now, there are only two kinds of people — those who work for freedom and those who do not… the good guys vs. the bad guys. — mc d.”
C: [singing along to opening track “Outlaw”:]“She’s an outlaw, she don’t wear a bra.” Um, yeah…I don’t know if it’s me, but this doesn’t seem to have aged well.
D: This came out in the early ‘70s.
C: The guy has cred, supposedly he gets sampled a lot. And you can hear why… there’s a nice feel to these songs. Ron Carter on bass, from Miles’ group…
D: But the lyrics are terrible! And his singing is totally affected. “La la la smoke a joint” blah blah.
C: Yeah I don’t get what the big deal is either. None of these songs stand out…in a good way, at least. [laughter]
D: The cover looks amazing, though.
C: Talk about badass, there it is in front of ya.

The Starvations
Get Well Soon
(GSL)
C: We haven’t got off to a real positive start here…
D: Who chose these CDs, anyway???
C: The editor.
D: Hmm… Hey, I like this one. Very Gun Club! Do you remember “cowpunk”?
C: Yeah. [shudders] Actually I think this is better than, say, the Bo Deans or something.
D: The Bo Deans! Now there is a name from the distant past.
C: These guys are from L.A… Kinda makes sense. Countryish rock, some punk aggression… slide guitars…walking bass…throaty singer…
D: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
C: Yeah, that’s true. There’s some Birthday Party in there too. [looking at the lyric sheet] I can’t really understand what he’s saying…
D: He should practice his enunciation.
C: He sings in a tough key a lot of the time but he hits it. [reading from the lyric sheet] Yep…lyrics about graveyards, ghosts, voodoo, burgundy wine, rebel angels…and a guy called Rat Boy. Folks, we have ourselves a bona fide Romantic.
D: A bohemian.
C: But anyways, you can totally hear the L.A. heritage: not just the Gun Club but also the Blasters and the Geraldine Fibbers…
D: Nice to hear an accordion too. This is good!

22-20s
05-03
(Astralwerks)
D: Whoa! Who is this?!?
C: They’re like 20 years old, from England. It’s like the Starvations, yeah?
D: But more banging. Blues-rock with punk balls!
C: Yeah the hooks are bigger, the playing is better. Hard to believe they’re not Americans. They’ve got the Gun Club in there too…
D: That solo is like that stuff the white guy who plays with R. L.Burnside does!
C: Kenny Brown. Yeah you’re right, I hadn’t noticed that. He totally does slide solos like Kenny.
D: You can dance to this stuff.
C: Yeah that’s the R.L. influence maybe, I dunno. This track [“Messed Up”] is a march but it’s also real soulful… That’s hard to pull off. The dude’s voice reminds me of a non-fucked up Shaun Ryder, a little.
D: “King Bee,” that’s an old one.
C: Big Chicago blues stomper. This is something. Pretty good for a debut EP–there’s not a weak track. I see why there’s such a fuss about these guys. Too bad we missed em when they opened for Jet and Kings of Leon last month. Oh well.

Sun Kil Moon
Ghosts of the Great Highway
(Jetset)
D: What’s going on here? Are we reviewing for Some Depression now?
C: No Depression, you mean.
D: Whatever… all of this so far is roots-ish.
C: [looking through CD pile] Yeah, and there’s more on the way. Must be the season or something.
D: So, who is this?
C: Mark Kozalek’s new band. He used to do a band called Red House Painters. Pretty popular with the NPR crowd.
D: Never heard of ‘em.
C: Yeah, well… What a voice, eh?
D: It is a pretty voice… This kind of music reminds me of seaside towns. Long sad afternoons in the winter.
C: Yeah, it’s sad but it’s beautiful, it’s not depressing. Long, droney folk songs… ooo, lookit that, here come the drums 3:45 in to the first song. Always a nice touch.
D: I would say there’s a bit of Neil Young to him.
C: Yeah, fer shure. This song “Salvador Sanchez”…fantastic electric guitar. Listen to that simple riff and then the endless solo… People should turn in their copy of Greenville and get this instead.
D: Greendale.
C: Whatever. When he puts the strings behind his falsetto, whoa. This is almost too intense to listen to in sequence. You know what? This is what Jay Farrar from Son Volt wishes he could do…
D: It is bittersweet music.
C: Stunning, really. On first listen, I gotta say I’m stunned. That doesn’t happen too often.

Jolie Holland
Catalpa
(Anti/Epitaph)
C: She sounds a little like Karen Dalton.
D: Is this new?
C: Yeah. She was in this group the Be Good Tanyas for a little while, I guess. It’s good, huh. Acoustic guitar, ukulele, and what a voice.
D: Sleighbells!
C: Yeah. Country-blues-folk… Very pretty, kinda spooky. She’s got that white-girl Billie Holiday thing going for her, just like Karen Dalton did. [listening] Did you hear that? She sang “3 a.m.” like “three-eye-am.”
D: She must be American…
C: She is.
D: There’s a song on here credited to “Holland/Parton/Syd Barrett”…?
C: Ha! How appropriate for this ish of Arthur… [reading the sleeve] “The Littlest Birds.” I hafta admit, I don’t know exactly what she’s doing here…I guess this is a medley?
D: It must be. [repeating a lyric:] “The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs…” That’s true, you know.

Mark Lanegan Band
Here Comes That Weird Chill (Methamphetamine Blues, Extras and Oddities) EP
(Beggars Banquet)
C: Here’s another distinctive voice. Brought to you by Marlboro…
D: Mark Lanegan! He’s in Queens of the Stone Age. That guy who comes out in the middle of the show and hangs on to the microphone for dear life!
C: Right, right. Used to be in Screaming Trees, did a bunch of solo records on Sub Pop, blah blah. Amazing artist that not enough people check on, for some reason.
D: This is pretty rough stuff.
C: Yeah it’s kinda grimy. Machine rock, at least this first track.
D: Nightmarish drone…
C: I gotta say I prefer to hear his voice unfiltered… [checking credits] Oh right, okay so this is the session they did with Chris Goss, Dean Ween and Josh and Nick from the Queens and so on. With that lineup you could probably call it Desert Session 8.5 or something. Only in happened in the Valley, not the desert.
D: [listening to “On the Steps of the Cathedral’]: What is this…?
C: Pretty, eh? Like a rondolet… And the next song is a Beefheart cover, “Clear Spot.” It sounds like they’re using a drum machine, really tinny and flat. This stuff has a Tricky feel to it. Very disorienting.
D: Reminds me of that song at the beginning of The Sopranos… [singing] “Born under a bad sign…”
C: Yeah, I can hear that. Listen to that solo…it’s all high up, like one of those solos Jack White does on Elephant. Only this was recorded before that came out… This track “Message to Mine” sounds like a demo for a really good Screaming Queens song… can you hear that organ? Nice. And a little bit of the bubblegum pop on the chorus, which is appropriate since Lanegan’s album coming out next year is called Bubblegum…
D: I like it…
C: Spoken-word here… tacked piano… “Skeletal History,” wow listen to that… he’s crooning with a swagger.
D: The bass is covered in fuzz!
C: Yeah. Good stuff. Sounds like Laney gone beatnik… [repeating words] “Girls stare in dead-eyed wonder”… Yikes.
D: And this last one is a dub?
C: Yeah. It’s like a country dub, right? 6am comedown music… This is a strong EP.
D: 8 songs, 26 minutes.
C: Thanks for the stats, D.

Califone
Heron King Blues
(Thrill Jockey)
C: Uncategorizable …dark country…banjo…electronics… a lot of the ol’ kling-klang.
D: I like his voice but I can’t hear what he’s saying.
C: Yeah it’s always like that with these guys, you just catch weird phrases here and there… I like this, this might be my favorite Califone yet…
D: There’s a bit of a Tom Waits Bone Machine feel here. The Lanegan record had that, too!
C: Mmm, you‘re right. Kind of rustic, kind of futuristic. Vintage futurist. It reminds me some of that Medicine album that came out this year too… Apparently this is something of a concept record.
D: What is that on the cover?
C: That would be the heron king, I guess. Kinda got that witchy Lord of the Rings-Mercury Rev-Guy Maddin-Svankmajer vibe, doesn’t it? And then, check this out… I was gonna say Califone is like Radiohead and Wilco stripped of the pretension and pop sense, but then there’s this track… [skips ahead to “2 Sisters Drunk On Each Other”] It’s actually funky. They’re bringing in that Sly Stone stuff.
D: There’s a Riot Goin’ On…
C: Exactly. This is a proper jam band. Sounds like some of this stuff was improvised, but it really works. I’ve seen ‘em do it live. Totally underrated.
D: They played at All Tomorrow’s Parties at UCLA! We saw them–
C: That’s right…
D: Incredible.

Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult
edited by Richard Metzger
(Disinfo)
D: So we’re reviewing books now, too?
C: Yeah, and DVDs, if we have time.
D: Which ones?
C: We’ve go the Guitar Wolf DVD here from Narnack, if we have time.
D: Nice.
C: So, this certainly keeps us on the witchy path, don’t it?
D: Yes. [looking at the list of contributors on the cover] But for a book about witches and magick…why are there no women here?
C: [taking the book away] Give me that. Lemme look. Hey, you’re right…. [reading further] Oh geez. From the editor’s introduction: “For some reason, I have always considered myself to be a warlock. Even when I was very young, I don’t know why, really but it is true … [W]hen I was a little kid I really loved Bewitched.” I mean, is this guy serious? “It works on a lot of levels, metaphorically speaking, for me to consider myself a magical businessman, if you see what I am saying.”
D: Oh god.
C: Yeah. Richard Metzger, he’s that guy who’s on all the Disinfo book covers, smirking. [still reading] Then he ends it with some talk about an emerging mutant race and asks “Which side are you on?” I mean, come on, these are Grant Morrison ideas here…
D: …who is in the book.
C: Yeah, well… Gotta admit there is a lot of good stuff here, although I have no idea how useful it is… Lots of excerpts from books by Robert Anton Wilson, Daniel Pinchbeck, Gary Lachman, Terence McKenna, Julius Evola and so on… Tons of stuff about Gysin and Burroughs and Crowley and Genesis P-Orridge and so on. The usual subjects, in other words.
D: This could be a good introduction, then.
C: Yeah, I suppose, if you want to be introduced to this stuff via a book that‘s title ‘Book of Lies‘ and published by someone called ‘Disinformation.’ I mean, those aren‘t exactly names that inspire confidence on the reader’s part in the authors’ accuracy, you know? Hey, wait! I just found a woman author: Tracy Twyman is in here writing about “Hitler and the Occult.”
D: Oh.
C: Yep. Remember she’s the one who’s in with Boyd Rice on all that Cocteau-conspiracy crap. Losers. Anyways there are some women as subjects in here—Cameron, Ida Craddock and Rosaleen Norton—so it’s not completely Magic Boys’ Club. But it’s close.
D: How many women musicians have we reviewed so far today?
C: Ulp.

Bobby Conn and the Glass Gypsies
The Homeland
(Thrill Jockey)
C: Speaking of conspiracies…
D: Speaking of terrible is more like it. What is this shit?
C: “Franchised Jesus Christ/Organized paradise/Clear Channel, bargain priced/We’re not very nice/We’re taking over the world”… Yeah… Dude means well, but…
D: Turn it off now.
C: Oh, come on, we have to listen to more than four songs.
D: I am exercising my veto power!
C: [turning the CD off] Okay, well what do you think of the cover.
D: Nice pyramid and the eye, okay, I get it, I get it. Masons blah blah. Off! [Throws CD out window.]
C: Hey bro, you need to get another beer and settle down.
D: I will get another beer but I will not settle down! [exits]
C: [to tape recorder] Man, he’s totally losing it! He’s been useless today, useless… D’s falling off…

U.S. Maple
Purple on Time
(Drag City)
C: Okay, I’m just gonna do this myself then. [puts CD in, looks st jacket] US Maple? I hate these guys. People say there’s some Beefheart in there, and maybe there is, but all I hear is a lot of dry wank and no humor or beauty or whimsy, which the Cap always had. [listening] Hm, this is alright. Like AC/DC, simmering. Blasted. Not exploding, just…simmering, yeah. The vocals are low. A Dylan cover too? [pockets CD] I’m taking this home, don’t tell D…

Skullflower
Exquisite Fucking Boredom
(Tumult)
C: The mighty Skullflower! One album, one riff. Talk about jamming econo! It’s a good riff, fortunately. Somewhere around Sabbath’s “Supernaut.” No vocals, just riff and maybe a drum machine and now there’s loads of texture and stuff coming in and out…. Gets kinda crazy with the electronics towards the end and the riff is buried. But the riff doth remain. Well, it’s a mind-narrower! Definitely could be used as a meditation aid, what with the propulsive rhythm and the repetition of the guitar riff. If you’re into that sort of thing.Better than one of those fucking Enya/Mickey Hart catastrophes. Anyways. “Exquisite“? Yeah. “Boring“? No way!

Pelt
Pearls From the River
(VHF)
C: Gotta say I never listened to these guys before. Hearing this, I have some definite catching up to do…[reading from the sleeve notes by Coley] “Join Pelt in celebrating the ecstatic joy that results from refusing to accept the alleged primacy of shit-culture. It does not exist if we do not believe in it. And we must refused it on all levels always. The proof of its surrender is at hand. Yr hand. Right now, motherfucker!” Well amen to that.
D: [muffled sound from kitchen]
C: Now he’s talking to himself. Great. Okay, so it’s YET ANOTHER instrumental record we’ve got here.. three longish acoustic pieces… Like Godspeed, I guess, but with some Indian raga flair to it, and there‘s no percussion. Three guys, including Jack Rose on guitar… Really beautiful, haunting, kinda dramatic, out-there woodstuff… Some slight menace on this second track. Music to hold hands too, late at night… Actual playing here, this isn’t abstract experimentation for the artists’ sake a la some of those No Neck Blues Band records I got which totally blew. This last track is gorgeous, reminds me of McLaughlin’s Shakti a bit, only not so fast. I’d love to hear these guys with a decent tabla player… Yeah, so… Man, where’s D? [yelling] Dude, you should check this out! [mumbling] I dunno, we might need to get E in here soon, at this rate…

Audra Kubat
Million Year Old Sand
(Times Beach Records)
D: I was ordering Indian food.
C: Oh, right on. Perfect.
D: What were you playing?
C: Skullflower, that shit is awesome.
D: Well, put it back on, you scum-suck!
C: “Scum-suck”…? Dude, chill out. Listen to this record here…
D: This is nice, who is she?
C: Audra Kubat. I think this is her first record.
D: Kind of like Beth Orton.
C: Yeah. And Joni, and Nick Drake. And Miss Cat Power. This could be very big in the college-town coffeehouses of America. For sure. She’s a good singer but she doesn’t over-do it like those Lilith Faire buskers. So nice to hear music like this coming up now…

Polmo Polpo
Like Hearts Swelling
(Constellation)
D: We are not listening to too much rock music this time around, are we?
C: 22-20s and The Starvations were pretty rockin’.
D: [drinking beer] Yeah, you’re right!!! But this is not rocking, although it is something very good. What do you call this kind of music???
C: Well it’s from the Godspeed You! Black Emperor camp, or at least from the label that they do. I’ve lost track of who’s in whose band doing which project. It’s like Parliament-Funkadelic up there now, and Polmo Polpo is Parlet or something. But who is the George Clinton of the Montreal disastercore scene? That is the question…
D: [thoughtful] This is very scary music, very cinematic. It’s like something terrible is just about to happen, something I don’t want to know about…
C: And then the next track skips to after the event, doesn’t it? It’s like build-up and aftermath, but no actual event. They circle it, skirt its edges… [dreamily] This stuff makes me want to drink wine and light some candles. Or go down to the train yard and look at the stars and maybe hop a train out of town…
D: …And there’s some slide guitar! This is the best! Man… [doorbell rings] And there is our food!

Double Leopards
Halve Maen
(Eclipse)
D: This is not eating music.
C: You’re right… Why don’t you go in the other room and I’ll finish this. [D exits.] He is useless, totally useless. We have a job to do here! For the Arthur readership! Okay… Ambient haunted house stuff, no real instruments or tunes. Scratch that: more like a whole haunted city. Reminds me of Coil, a bit. Amazing cover and sleeve. Like that “Aumgn” song on Can’s Tago Mago—if you dig that, which we all have at one time or another, right?, then here’s two records’ worth. Hums. Buzzes. Very cool stuff for the headphones I bet, and good music to end a party with. This is some seriously dark mystery shit. Whoa…

Reviews by C and D (Arthur No. 7/Nov. 2003)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 01:18:42 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 7 (Nov. 2003)

REVIEWS BY C and D

The Hidden Hand
Divine Propaganda
(Meteor City)
C: This is Wino’s new band…
D: From St. Vitus! And the mighty Spirit Caravan!
C: This is prime Wino. Very focused. Full-on Sabbath power trio. Political eco-stoner stuff. “I feel the sky cracking/I feel the ice melting/I feel the world dying.”
D: Track 8 is an unstoppable beast!
C: “The Hidden Hand [theme].” Yeah, this is solid shit. Kinda conspiracy-minded. I mean, just look at the name of the band—
D: As we said in the days of old, these guys can carpet a good chair!
C: He put a suggested reading list in the CD tray, you don‘t see that too often with metalish bands. Edmund O. Wilson, The Future of Life… Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy… Wait a sec. David Icke?!?
D: Who is this guy?
C: That’s the British dude who sez that the world’s political and economic leaders are not humans, they’re actually reptiles from outer space working in a conspiracy together. Very V. I think he’s saying that 9/11 and its consequences were predicted in the pages of Alice in Wonderland. Obviously he’s onto something.
D: ?
C: I’m joking. But I wonder if Wino is in on the Icke joke. Seems like he’s taking it seriously…?
D: Wino is the best. But he looks totally different with a beard. I don’t know if I approve.

The Raveonettes
Chain Gang of Love
(Columbia)
D: Is this the new Jesus and Mary Chain album?
C: No, it’s this Swedish band called the Raveonettes.
D: Why don’t they just call themselves the Raveisionists?
C: Who do you think you would win in a rumble between these guys and the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club?
D: Agh! I hate those Black Rebel guys! So boring live.
C: Their second album is terrible. I think it could be the end of the road for them. But who cares. The Raveonettes have a six-foot chick singer, I think she could take them out.
D: Swedish precision! There’s a Spector back beat jangle here.
C: Melodies and distortion, it always sounds good. You gotta cop to it, there’s some good stuff on here.
D: Yes, this song [“That Great Love Sound”] is good. But it’s nothing that will make you spill your ice cream on the floor.
C: …?

Ween
Quebec
(Sanctuary)
D: Incredible. Who is this?
C: Ween.
D: Each song? No, it can’t be. They are all so different
C: Yes. That’s what they do! I’ve been trying to get you to listen to them for years—
D: Every song is a population of musical influences of the last 20 years. It all sounds familiar but beautifully deranged. You don’t know where the sound comes from, it’s written down in the backpages of your brain and heart but you can’t locate it.
C: This song “Zoloft” is fantastic.
D: Zoloft—that’s some good stuff there. The doctor’s medicine is working. I’m seeing different colors in a different way. Yellow even is starting to look good.
C: Listen to this one [“Transdermal Celebration”]: it’s like an Oasis song except it’s really good.
D: None of those Anglo-Saxons can rock like Americans! [Listening to “So Many People In the Nieghborhood”] These guys are like the Residents, some of this stuff. But it’s also very melancholic. This song [“Among His Tribe”] cuts straight to the bone.
C: This one “Captain” is my favorite. Very Pink Floyd. Listen to those drums. He’s stuck on a spaceship and they WON’T GO BACK!
D: “Tried and True”—this is middle American melancholy. Another weightless psychedelic Byrds song. Record store clerks rejoice. They’re the best. They’re too good for me. It’s like Ian Curtis said, I looked behind the doors of time, there was nothing there to see.
C: ???
D: [still listening to “Tried and True”] …Is that a sitar?!? No.
C: Yes it is.
D: It cannot be.
C: They’re putting the India in Indiana.
D: Ween are a jukebox. One way not to disappear up your own ass is to disappear up others’.
C: Right… I guess that’s one way of looking at it.

Terry Hall & Mushtaq
The Hour of Two Lights
(Astralwerks)
C: This should be the soundtrack for that hookah place on Sunset’s sound system.
D: Yes! Exactly!
C: It’s the Specials guy. They sound like melancholy gypsies.
D: Dignified, beautiful.
C: Class, yeah? Two cultures, maybe three.
D: I like it! Let me look at the box.
C: It’s like a new kind of traditional music.
D: Yes… [thoughtful] Can we order some Indian food now?

Brant Bjork
Keep Your Cool
(Duna Records)
C: Brant Bjork from Kyuss and Fu Manchu and Mondo Generator’s new record.
D: Is that him singing?
C: [Nods 'Yes.'] He’s playing all of the instruments too.
D: [Thumbs up.] Vintage ‘70s rock! And Thin Lizzy too! Wow. The reggae bass on “Searchin’”… scary. Reminds me of David Bowie. Or Blondie.
C: This is kinda Foghat, yeah? Plus the Cars… Here he is in falsetto… “Sister’s got the inside infoooooh!” He should do that more. Michael Jackson, almost. Very cool. This is really good, such a good feel, laidback. Compare this to that new Nebula album, ech. This is the good shit here.
D: I always liked him, Brant Bjork! Thanks for the Red Sun, Mr. Bjork.
C: Check this out: dude is putting the album out only on 12-inch vinyl. No CDs!

PFFR
United We Doth
(Birdman)
C: Bad Ween.
D: Sick.
C: I dunno, dude.
D: I love it. How did they get Snoop Dogg for this?
C: I think one of the PFFR guys is a South Park guy or something, that’s the word on the street. I don’t what street that is, but whatever, there you go. This sound like bad acid trip music. Very bad acid trip.
D: I love it.

The Rapture
Echoes
(Universal)
D: I know this. This is the Moving Units.
C: No, this is the Rapture.
D: They do the same thing.
C: Yeah, well… The Rapture have been going for a while longer, but yep it’s the same influences… Gotta say this is kinda disappointing. That one single on here from two years ago [“House of Jealous Lovers”] is cool but after a while…
D: It’s good but COMPLETELY unoriginal. Birthday Party. Pop Group. Gang of Four. They love that music.

Erase Errata
At Crystal Palace
(Troubleman Unlimited)
D: Same thing! I’m already sick of this. All of these people love the Pop Group. They love this music to DEATH.
C: It does seem pretty little limited on record. But you gotta admit it’s well done. This reminds me a whole lot of that amazing band Lilliput, you remember them? From Switzerland. Some of this stuff seems almost directly ripped. Well maybe they’ll get more interesting on the next record…
D: Lilliput, call your Swiss lawyers!!!

Pretty Girls Make Graves
The New Romance
(Matador)
D: (sighs) More of this stuff? Everybody likes the Pop Group. They like them too much.
C: I dunno, I think this is pretty good. I’d be curious to hear the next record, to see where they go.
D: Whatever. Can we listen to the new Kraftwerk again?

High Llamas
Beet, Maize & Corn
(Drag City)
C: [singing] “Orange crate art/is where it starts.” Oh wait, wrong album. This is pretty shameless Brian Wilson/Van Dyke Parks, sheesh.
D: Take it off the CD player now.
C: All arrangement, no hooks… Beach Boys without harmonies or melodies–what’s the point? Nice wallpaper stuff, though. I think he could do good soundtrack music. Maybe with Alison Anders, this is her type of shit.
D: This guy should move to Nashville or go back in time to the Brill Building. ENOUGH! Turn it off NOW or I’m leaving.

Festival in the Desert
(World Village/Triban Union/Harmonia Mundi)
C: This is my favorite album out of the whole bunch.
D: This is Malian stuff, right?
C: Yes. This whole CD was recorded live at this festival in the desert, as you might’ve gathered from the title. Pretty amazing stuff.
D: [Listening to “Buri Baalal” by Afel Bocoum] So beautiful. Listen to how the women sing!
C: Yeah, see? This music has everything: melodies, chants…incredible rhythms… all those stringed instruments, I don’t even know what they are. Guitars, I guess.
D: Beautiful.
C: They’re doing a DVD of this, that should be amazing. Sand and candles and this music: what a setting. Tinariwen are on here, they’re amazing.
D: Those are the guys who sound like Junior Kimbrough right?
C: Exactly—the electric guitars are just like his, but I bet they never heard each other’s music. Makes you wonder how far back Junior’s music really goes… Ali Farke Toure’s on here too. And this Native American rock group Blackfire, they have this old guy singing all through it. The Robert Plant song is great.
D: [Listening to Tartit’s “Tihar Bayatin”] So hypnotic… This is the deep stuff, man. The deepest stuff. I’m serious.

House of Low Culture
Edward’s Lament
(Neurot)
D: Dark night music.
C: Yeah, this is really good stuff. Desolate. Subtitled “An Account of Salvation and Redemption in 9 Movements.” So there you go.
D: No moon!
C: Just an electric hum.
D: And vampires!
C: It is pretty spooky. This first track reminds me a lot of Thomas Koner, in a bat sanctuary. The second reminds me of Begotten…
D: So good, so good.
C: This third, with the guitar? Very Gira. Also reminds me of that one vampire film, actually. The Addiction? The Abel Ferrara one. This whole album is soooo evocative. Dark, trippy, but not silly—there’s no stupid trance beats.
D: You better get the candles ready!
C: File next to Coil. I’m definitely gonna be spending some late winter nights listening to this…
D: Do you know that artist Ernst Ffolks? His sense of apocalypse I identified with totally. I have incredible books at my house.

The Dirtbombs
Dangerous Magical Noise
(In the Red)
D: Yes! This is the BOMBER! Who is this?
C: Dirtbombs. From Detroit.
D: Weren’t they more R & B?
C: Yeah, they were I think, and they still are. There’s some of that stuff on here but mostly it’s like this. Aggressive, MC5ish. But there’s good slower songs too, like this one [“Sun Is Shining“]. That guy is such a great singer. It’s hard to do this stuff well these days but here you go.
D: Rock ‘n’ roll from the True Garage!
C: [laughs]
D: [listening to solo on “Don’t Break My Heart”] Scorching. This must be burned IMMEDIATELY! Thank you Dirtbombs!

Dufus
1:3:1
(ROIR)
C: I don’t know about this one.
D: Chattery.
C: They’re kinda wacky, usually not a good sign. Low-rent Beefheart?
D: Listen to me: this is annoying.
C: Sez here on the sticker that they are “direct from NYC’s anti-folk scene! Adored by the Strokes, the Moldy Peaches & Jeffrey Lewis.”
D: I hate the Moldy Peaches!
C: I’ve got to listen to this some more… This is one of those albums where there’s probably some great stuff lurking somewhere… There’s a communal vibe going on here, which I dig…
D: I HATE all of these funny voices.
C: Hey man, you like the Strokes, and they dig this stuff…
D: Yes! I like the Strokes! Okay! But this is stroke-off stuff! I do not want to hear someone’s masturbation. Total self-indulgence. They are in their own world and they should stay there!

James Blood Ulmer
No Escape From the Blues: The Electric Lady Sessions
(Hyena)
C: Blood is a total jazz-fusion guitar legend. This is pretty straightahead for him.
D: He has a great voice. Reminds me of that Fat Possum guy, the one with polio…
C: Yeah, Cedell Davis. I hear that too. This is a real showcase for Blood’s vocals, which are just perfect: weary but determined. Vernon Reid produced this, he’s all over it. I like him like this, when he’s not doing that Living Colour crap.
D: They were the WORST.
C: Yeah. Two generations of black avant garde guitar giants working through some blues. Listen to the guitar work here [on the cover of Earl King’s “Come On (Let the Good Times Roll)”? Awesome, listen to that!
D: Solid.
C: Hendrix fans should be all over this like gnats on a fat cat. This is what they should be playing on those classic rock stations instead of that Clapton and B. B. King stuff for the 8,000th time. People would dig it if they only got the chance to hear it...

Robert Wyatt
Cuckooland
(Rykodisc)
C: Another legend from a more adventurous era..
D: I liked the Soft Machine, the early stuff. Then they got all jazz-fusiony stuff.
C: You need a melody or a backbeat.
D: It’s true, I do.
C: Well this is another kettle of fish.
D: Very atmospheric. Ghosty.
C: Only Robert Wyatt would dedicate a song to Richard Dawkins, the evolution theory guy.
D: [looking at booklet] Brian Eno is on here, singing!
C: Great song, listen to how it swings. Yeah, they’re old pals. David Gimour too… Paul Weller, Phil Manzanera from Roxy Music… Great drumming. This is an album to spend some time with, like all of his records. No one like him.
D: Such a unique voice.
C: He has more soul in his voice than anyone else in England, I think.

PERFECT SOUND FOREVER: Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, interviewed by Hua Hsu (Arthur No. 7/Nov. 2003)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 01:01:54 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 7 (Nov. 2003)

Perfect Sound Forever
My Bloody Valentine’s fluff-on-the-needle sound changed rock music forever. Then they disappeared. Ten years later, MBV’s Kevin Shields explains almost everything.
by Hua Hsu

The story is not uncommon: someone—too old to have done so accidentally, too young to have known any better—creates something truly great but panics at the burden of what that greatness means. As singer, guitarist and producer for My Bloody Valentine, Kevin Shields was instrumental in defining the sound of a generation. Breathy vocal washes clashed with brittle walls of noise on the band’s two classic albums, Isn’t Anything (1988) and Loveless (1991), and though MBV’s dense, otherworldly sound was described as “dreampop” or “shoegazer,” it was always meant to conjure up much more imaginative spaces. “When you hear something and you don’t know where it’s beginning or ending, suddenly your imagination is fifty percent of what’s happening,” Shields explains. “The person listening is playing a huge role in what they’re perceiving, cause they’re allowing that part of their mind to be open.”

Saddled with the enormous expectations that Loveless brought, the shy, nerdish Shields seemed to dissolve into thin air. Was he apprehended by his own legendary perfectionism, sitting alone behind a console of knobs and sounds, striving for something unimaginably pure and beautiful? Had he soured from music altogether, or were the rumors about his drum-n-bass obsession true? Or, had he lost himself in the logical end of his hyper-inward music and found retreat in his own mind? The rare moments he would appear as an onstage guest or as a remixer only added to his disheveled legend.

In 1997, Shields joined bratty Scottish rockers Primal Scream and though he still remained reclusive, he at least seemed alive and well. This year, Shields contributed several new tracks to the soundtrack of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and he’s in the midst of remastering and re-releasing two discs of My Bloody Valentine rarities. Disarmingly charming, Shields sat down with Arthur and a plate of fries to talk about all of it.

Arthur: Can you describe your childhood?
Kevin Shields: I was born in New York, in Queens. I grew up in Long Island (until I was ten) in this place called Commack, your typical suburb-y kind of whatever, and I went to this horrible school called Christ the King—an absolute nightmare, I’m still suffering the scars from that! Then we moved to Ireland—my parents were from there originally. They had immigrated when they were young, they were teenagers (and) they just wanted to come to America. Then they wound up with five kids in the early ’70s and they decided to go back to Ireland.

Were your folks pretty Americanized at that point?
My dad became an American citizen, he was quite Americanized because he’d spent thirteen years or something here. He spent his whole young adult life in America. I lived here ‘til I was ten, so I had the same upbringing as any American. You see the same TV shows and Godzilla movies and read Eerie and Creepy and worry about evil kids with B.B. guns.

Was there culture shock when you got to Ireland?
Mmm, yeah. That was in 1973 and America was truly about 20 years ahead of the rest of the world. In some ways, Europe had things that were more…like they had the glam rock movement. I remember that summer here (in America) it was Three Dog Night—they were the big popular bands with the kids…at school it was that or people were into Led Zeppelin or whatever. Then we got to England and it was Wizard and Slade and Sweet and all these guys in makeup. That was quite radical, that was a huge inspiration to me. In the first few weeks of being in the country, I was already obsessed with pop music. I was always into music—even in America we had our own little fake band, playing cushions and miming.

What inspired you about glam? The theatrics?
There was a whole style of producing that music that was really quite otherworldly at the time. They all used the double-tracking vocal effect and big slap-back on the drums and everything was slightly mutated-sounding. It was all very John Lennon-ized, nearly all the glam records had that double-tracked effect. Suzi Quatro had this song called “Cat on the Can” or something and there were bits where she was screaming with the double-tracked vocals and I remember as a kid believing that she was really doing that with her voice and just thinking, “These people are amazing!” and my brother going, “No it’s all studio trickery” and I was just going, “No it’s not, it’s all real they’re really doing it!”

And so you started playing music around this time?
I started playing guitar when I was 16. I was asked specifically to play guitar to be in this punk band. I hadn’t really thought about guitar so much; I was thinking of bass the summer before. I was basically told, “If you get a guitar you can join the band.” So I got a guitar for Christmas and joined the band. We did our first gig six months later doing Sex Pistols, Ramones, Motorhead…those kinds of songs. That band broke up by the end of that year and we were in this classic post-punky Joy Division-kind-of…actually quite like The Rapture. Weirdly enough, our ‘81 band was insanely similar [giggles] ‘cause that was the thing that was going on then, everyone playing sorta-funky bass, play the guitar with an echo unit—but use the echo unit in a percussive way—and you’ve got this singer who does this thing over the top… that was what was going on then. I spent all of that ‘81-‘82 period being in that world somewhere between Joy Division and…not Gang of Four, I wasn’t really that into them myself. And then from there we just went to doing this Birthday Party/Cramps thing in 1983. Einsturzende Neubauten were a big influence. I got a (Tascam) Portastudio and the first My Bloody Valentine was based around the Portastudio, making tapes at home and then playing them and then jamming over the top of them live.

So you would jam over your own rhythm tracks?
Not drums….we would just have drone-y sounds, weird sounds. Colm [O’Ciosoig, who is still in the band] would drum and I’d play guitar and Dave [Conway, who is not] would sing.

In The Story of Creation, the video about Creation Records [see Endnote 1] that came about ten years ago, Alan McGee jokes about seeing My Bloody Valentine for the first time in the mid-1980s and describing you as a “crap anorak band”—is this the period he was referencing?
Oh, that came a bit later. That came in ‘86. We moved from the Cramps to…I discovered the Byrds and a lot of the British bands that were into that light sort of thing. But all of them, whenever they would play live, it was always quite tough. It wasn’t quite that Talulah Gosh…what do you call it?

“C-86″? [2]
Yes, it was like a real twee thing came out. But around ‘85 and early-‘86 in London…I went to see Primal Scream and they were in their very Byrds-y kind of…but really loud and very aggressive version of it. Not noisy, but hard. Not angry, but a fuck-you attitude. That was kind of cool. Then we went through our shit anorak/indie phase. All our lyrics and live gigs at the time were always quite intense. We had a concept—we used to pick very harsh frequencies on the guitar and make them really loud and people would be like “Oooh,” but we had these haircuts and sparkly tops. It was too conceptual, basically, which is why it was kinda not very good. It wasn’t until Dave left that we relaxed a bit and stopped being so conceptual. We were still crap for another six months but then we suddenly got good. We just dropped the concepts and did music in a more generalized way.

Do you remember the moment when you finally thought you were good? Did you suddenly just think, “Wow, we’re good!”
Yeah. Literally yeah! [Smiles] It was literally one moment to the next. We were touring and Alan McGee had seen us the year before and didn’t really like us and then he saw us again and was really surprised at how we’d changed. He was like, “Would you guys be interested in making a record?” He gave us four or five days studio time, we recorded five tracks, mixed them and just went “Shit. This is good, actually, for a change!” We realized something. It was good because we were letting ourselves be more Sonic Youth-y, more of our influences in a way. And somehow out of that came an original quality. And I think it was just the relaxing quality of it.

Which five songs were these?
You Made Me Realise (originally issued in 1988 on Creation). That was the EP we made after doing the gig with Biff Bang Pow! [3]

You once said “Johnny Ramone’s playing on ‘Leave Home’ is somewhere between stupid and genius. Johnny Ramone was the first guitarist who blew me away—he showed me that maybe I could do something with the guitar…After getting into the Ramones, my attitude became one of using that guitar as simply a noise generator. I didn’t have any ambition to learn the guitar; I just wanted to generate noise like he did.”
Oh that “stupid/genius” thing! I’m so embarrassed by that… But yeah, the Ramones for me were THE revelation. I was into punk but in Britain punk wasn’t such a huge leap…even though it was invented in New York it couldn’t be absorbed culturally in the ‘70s in America. Whereas in Britain—since we’d had all the glam rock bands, which in a way was kind of punky—the punk bands were immediately on TV. The Buzzcocks were always on TV, every band you would read about you would see on TV every week. Punk rock was a mainstream event from the very beginning. It wasn’t an underground thing, even though if you were a punk rock kid you would risk being beaten up, but as a musical thing it was quite mainstream…So I was into all that but then I saw a video for two Ramones songs. And suddenly I understood. This was in 1978. Suddenly I realized he wasn’t playing guitar—he was generating the sound. He was doing what he had to do to make that, but there was no “playing guitar” involved. My ultimate hated image was the ‘70s rock guy just whittling away [strikes pose of consternated guitarist tapping fingerboard] with his too-tight trousers.

So the noise generator—did it influence how you practiced?
I actually consciously didn’t want to learn how to play anything other than the two basic bar chords, so I just learned the two positions Johnny Ramone used and that was it. I absolutely didn’t want to become a guitarist in the traditional sense. In ‘81 this bass player came on the scene and he was basically playing funky, strange bass-lines…melodically it was impossible to play a chord with it. So suddenly I couldn’t play. So I would find a note and then another note and I played a very fractured style. And then I did these percussive things and I suppose that’s when I left that attitude of generating a noise, and I only really came back to it around the time of the Isn’t Anything period because the way I played the tremolo arm…it only sounds good if you have quite a clear track. If you have a lot of overdubs it actually doesn’t sound good, so you can only do it with one main, good sound, and it has to be really loud to hear properly. So I came back to that stage of cranking sound like this. [Pretends to strum while gripping the tremolo arm]. As opposed to playing guitar I was just cranking the sound. And that’s what happened—that’s the Ramones connection. What I did that was any good in the end came from the mentality that Johnny wasn’t playing guitar. Even though now I’ve learned that he was playing a lot more than I thought.

You also said something in that video where you describe My Bloody Valentine as having this “fluff on the needle” sound where things are a bit dulled rather than bright. You described it as music you had to look into, as opposed to coming out at you. [4]
Well yeah. In the ‘80s the production values got to the point where every record was basically: really loud snare drum with a lot of reverb on it, the guitars were clear and separated. It was kind of…it was…your imagination didn’t play a big role in what you were hearing. When you hear something and you don’t know where it’s beginning or ending, suddenly your imagination is 50 percent of what’s happening. So the person listening is playing a huge role in what they’re perceiving, cause they’re allowing that part of their mind to be open. But if you give something to somebody in a way that says this is where it begins and this is where it ends, people go, “Okay, now what?” Whereas, if you don’t say anything people start to think…it’s like if you were to see the brain in a brain scan, it’s moving differently. So by blurring the edges—or not trying to make them clear, cause people go through an awful lot of effort to make that really clear sound—basically it just made the person listening to the music half the experience. I think what the ‘80s were about was killing that. What we were doing was reintroducing it. I think that mentality was very popular in the ‘60s—Phil Spector’s approach, a lot of the Stones’ records were quite grungy, a lot of the Beatles stuff…all the best popular music of that era, there was a lot of depth to it. It just disappeared into this horrible flat…bass exists here, snare drum is here, bass drum is very clicky there. It was, I suppose, a really right-wing way of making music in a way. It was very, this is right and that is wrong.

Do you keep tabs on My Bloody Valentine’s legacy?
I think the main thing is, in Britain and Europe because of dance music, a lot of things we did got discovered by themselves. People in the dance world discovered the pitch wheel and learned how to use it. There’s millions of dance records that, if they came out in ‘92 or ‘93, people would say they just ripped us off. And now people know they’re not ripping us off, it’s just that people have discovered the pitch wheel and they’re experimenting with it. There’s this great hit by Royksopp and it’s all “byuuuu” [makes high-pitched drop sound], it’s all twisted and melted. But it’s not from us, you know? It’s just because it had to get discovered—that’s human nature to go, “What does this do?” and then do it to every possible thing.

As influential as My Bloody Valentine has been, it seems like people tend to overlook what it is you’re describing. When Loveless came out there was so much talk about you guys coming up with “dream pop” but those who followed were usually were just noisy guitars with a girl singing on top…
Yes, singing softly!

And it’s so different from what you’re describing. There’s no imagination to it…it’s as though people picked up on the “pop” part of My Bloody Valentine but not the “dream” or imagination of it. How does imagination or openness play into your remix work? Your Mogwai (“Fear Satan”) and Primal Scream (MBV Arkestra mix of “If They Move, Kill ‘Em”) remixes are incredibly dense and they certainly leave a lot to the listener.
I don’t know. At the moment I’m producing this band called the Beatings [not the U.S. band of the same name] and we’re going for these particular…they’re really…a bit like the White Stripes guy’s guitar sound where it’s kinda got a really serrated and raw and in-your-face sort of sound. It’s something you just can’t EQ, you can’t get a plug-in to make this happen. It’s very much about the sound from the amp and the way it’s played. I’ve just been experimenting with that sort of thing. I can’t explain it…[they’re] guitar sounds that feel like if you were to rub them across your face, it would really hurt. You can really see the rough terrain. The opposite of Nu-Metal. Nu-Metal is like taking something, putting it in a blender and it’s softened out. Even though I like some Nu-Metal bands—I like the Deftones.

Is your approach different when you remix someone?
The only thing I have is, I don’t add any new sounds. I just take what’s off the tape and process it and mess with it but I don’t’ add new drums or samples…it’s always fun for the band because they hear all the parts. For most remixes, most of the band aren’t in it, it’s just the singer and one main hook and there is other stuff—for the band it’s just vaguely interested. But when I was doing one mix you could seem them all like, “Hey that’s me, it’s just backwards and sideways!” They all enjoy that, so my relationship with all the bands—except for one, that was Placebo—is always closer after doing a remix. Whereas a lot of people do a mix of the band and it separates them from the band. But I’m not really into it [remixing] anymore.

Speaking of recent work, what’s with the rumor about the box set?
It’s basically not true. I’ve been remastering the old stuff—all the EPs and rare tracks—and we got four unreleased tracks. Two of them are from Isn’t Anything and two of them are from the ‘89 period just before we started Loveless.

You’re remastering all of it? Even the scarcer, mid-1980s stuff like Geek and “Strawberry Wine?”
No, all that stuff is…that’s another story. Just the good stuff on Creation. Like all the Geek and “Strawberry Wine”…we kinda like it but it’s still not far enough away. When we did that stuff on Creation I liked it when I did it and I’ve always liked it since. The other stuff we kinda liked it when we did it and we really didn’t like it at all afterwards. And then a few years later, ten years later, you go, “That’s okay actually.” But not really, d’yer know? I don’t have an association with that music in the same way I do with the stuff on Creation, which I still feel very close to.

Do you still keep in touch with all the other members of the band?
Basically, yes.

Are the old songs demos?
They were finished and mixed, we just didn’t release them because I didn’t like the way I sang, that was it.

The Lost in Translation stuff sounds great. What’s the story with “City Girl,” is it an older song?
No, I still write like that basically. [laughs] Can’t help it!

It’s very stripped-down. It resembles a full-on My Bloody Valentine song but it’s so bare…
I know, I know. The only good thing about that is if you listen to it and go, “Alright if you take that sound and then use a tremolo arm, would it sound more like it?” It takes people further away from the idea it was all effects and studio trickery. I think people can easily see the line.

Do you usually write songs on the acoustic guitar?
Yeah.

So it’s possible to have an acoustic My Bloody Valentine song?
All of them were, yeah. Except for Made Me Realise—that EP wasn’t because it was all done in the studio on the guitars we had. The vast majority of Loveless was done on acoustic first.

Wow, I can’t possibly imagine what “To Here Knows When” sounds like on an acoustic…
That sounds alright. [laughs] Funnily enough, that was my main bone of contention—everyone at Creation would always say that song was the one with a lot of noise but on the acoustic version it’s these really complicated chords.

[Primal Scream frontman] Bobby Gillespie seems like this would-be rock god, which is pretty different from how people perceive you. Many people find it funny that you’re in Primal Scream now…
I find it funny. It’s hard to explain. That group of people, I’ve known Bobby since ‘84 and we’ve kind of changed and developed musically and we wound up on the same label. They kinda know where I’m coming from, in a weird way, but on another level, as a group, half of them never even heard Loveless or any of those records and they don’t care about it. It’s kind of a good gang of people to hang out with, especially their friends. Their friends are more in the dance world and I rarely bump into anyone who gave a shit about anything I’ve ever done and that was kinda nice just to be some bloke. D’you know what I mean? Who’s that weird guy playing guitar? What is he doing? IS he doing anything? It was good. It was as opposite as you could get from the world I was in ten years before. It wasn’t even that long ago—more like ‘92-‘98, a six-year gap of playing gigs.

Another thing you brought up in that Creation video was how house and rap production were really shaking up how people understood the structure of music. You were saying this in 1990, right around when Primal Scream’s Screamadelica and Loveless were coming out, and they seemed radical departures for guitar-based music. How deeply did you get into house or hip-hop, either personally or as an influence to your stuff?
Just as fans. I would buy all the Public Enemy stuff when it came out, I was into whatever I could get from say ’88 to ‘89. By 1990 rap had started becoming huge. It wasn’t as big as people would imagine. Even though Run-DMC were really mainstream, you’d go into a record shop and you’d have a small choice of records. There would be no difference between an EPMD record and a Salt-N-Pepa record, it would be exactly the same level of respect. It just seemed so radical. It just seemed kinda absurd for people to be going jangle-jangle-jangle-ha-ha-dee-dee-dee doing these little pop-punk songs. You had the Beastie Boys selling millions of records and there was an imbalance between so-called underground music and the mainstream, which was truly crazy. It was more like being totally shamed, d’yer know what I mean, and thinking there’s no point in making music unless you can really fuck with it, you know?

In Britain there was a big drum-n-bass movement and that was the last thing I got really into. I got really really into it at one point…we were programming all this drum-n-bass music. We did our heads in. That’s what killed it all. To do that music properly you have to use the right kind of samples…a lot of the people who do drum-n-bass records will take two weeks to make a good track. You have to only approach it while you’re quite fresh because it really fucks with your head. It just got too intellectualized—the process—and we kinda lost the only spontaneity we had left.

By “we” do you mean the band or the larger drum-n-bass scene?
No, the stuff we were doing. The drum-n-bass community was constantly making these bizarre turns and then immediately go back to [beatboxes a stiff, generic rhythm]. You would go to a club and have this really experimental set and people would just watch…and then you’d have someone like Grooverider play the most straight stuff and everyone would just go nuts. It just homogenized into this very basic type of music that’s very similar. But around ’93-‘94, it was constantly going off in bizarre directions. You’d hear tracks on pirate radio and would just be mad. But then rock music went Britpop in England and grunge in America and the mainstream became really awful.

Was it hard to keep your bearings as band during this time?
From ’93 to ‘95 we just really immersed ourselves in this drum-n-bass-y type world. From there the band just fell apart, so that’s where we were at. Just watching mainstream music get really right-wing again. Around 1990 it seemed like music could just do anything and then it seemed to close down dramatically again.

Did any figures stand out to you during this period?
In the drum-n-bass world, when it was really at its most spontaneous and exiting, it was pirate radio stations. At clubs you’d get maybe fifty people and it was very volatile. It was sort of a crack scene with these people who were like explorers going through the scene—it was very weird. Grooverider, Fabio—I quite liked them. But you’d hear mad, mad stuff on the radio and nobody would tell you what it was, where it came from. I’ve still got tons of it. We used to record it, make cassettes. That was the really radical stuff.

You’ve spoken before about Hypnogogia by Mavromatis. How influential was that book on you and your work?
It was influential in the sense that he was the only guy who made attempts…there are no books about that subject in English other than that one…not only did he write a book about hypnogogia, he literally made all the connections to all other states of mind that are very similar…the theater brainwave state. The reason it was very interesting to me was because I spontaneously became…basically that’s what happened between ‘93 and ‘97, until I joined Primal Scream. Every night I would spend hours and hours in that state, tripping out basically—that was my main concern [during that time].

Was this when you came across the book?
I came across the book after a couple years of actually wondering, am I purely insane, or what’s happening here? For some reason I can close my eyes and have three-dimensional experiences.

Do you know how you got it?
No. But it became so all-pervasive that the inner world and outer world were so equally three-dimensional that I realized I was bordering on mental illness, so I had to get out of it.

Do you still have it now?
Not unless I want to.

Have you ever used a dream machine?
No but I would go into that state every night anyway. I didn’t need it. That’s another story! It was a four-year trip, basically.

Okay, last question—when’s the next My Bloody Valentine album due?
(Smiles. Silence)

ENDNOTES
1. Creation Records was the storied British indie label started in 1983 by charismatic, if unintelligible, Glaswegian Alan McGee. Along with “discovering,” or issuing early records from, Primal Scream, Ride, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Felt, Teenage Fanclub and Oasis, McGee issued much of the MBV stuff of note, though his relationship with Shields is often described as that of the “girlfriend/boyfriend” variety.

2. C-86 was the catchall term for a mid-1980s micro-genre of UK pop known for being shy, introspective and jangly. Talulah Gosh, the Pastels (who Kevin has worked with), McCarthy (Tim Gane from Stereolab’s much more Socialist first band) and the Field Mice are all C-86 icons. The name comes from a series of compilation tapes issued by the New Musical Express.

3. Besides being a great-sounding string of words, “Biff Bang Pow” was a song by 1960s feedback-happy pop stars the Creation, whose name McGee would nick for his label. McGee, always a big talker, was in a string of terrible, Television Personalities-obsessed bands in the mid-1980s and Biff Bang Pow! was one of them.

4. Shields, on the MBV sound: “The sort of sound of things being a bit muffled—the fluff on the needle sound—where things are a bit dull(ed)—it mainly stems from the fact that people have gotten used to really bright, bright music because that’s the kind of music that initially comes across best on radio and TV. When we make records, we don’t take any of that into consideration—we haven’t yet. You wind up with sounds on records—the overall picture of the music…it fits in itself. You have to look into it as opposed to it comes out to you. Most music is made, constructed to come out, to attack you.”

“Charles Bronson, Dark Buddha” by Joe Carducci (Arthur No. 7/Nov. 2003)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:40:15 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 7 (November 2005). Adapted from the forthcoming book, Stone Male – Requiem for a Style.

Charles Bronson, Dark Buddha
1921-2003
by Joe Carducci

Charles Buchinsky was following his brothers and father down the coalmine when WWII drafted him out from under the company town of Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania. After the war he drifted and found pickup work to avoid getting locked down into the life of his family, and to protect and pursue his interest in painting. A job painting sets for a theater led to acting and marriage to actress Harriet Tendler. By 1949 he’d done bit parts on New York stages, and they moved to L.A. where he trained at the Pasadena Playhouse, which led to his first bit part in a Gary Cooper film, You’re in the Navy Now (1951).

Buchinsky (often Buchinski), with his stocky ‘30s action-style body and toughguy face, was first just another uglyman character actor—not as mean as Neville Brand, not as nice as Ernest Borgnine. American film audiences after the war were no longer obsessed with pretty boy leads, but it was older actors who took advantage of this new appetite for realism—Robert Taylor, James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda—many of whom in fact had been those slim, unmarked romantic leads of twenty years earlier. Others who got the interesting B film leads were actors like Aldo Ray, Rod Steiger, Broderick Crawford; Buchinsky coveted these roles. He changed his name to Bronson in 1954 to sound less suspicious during the Hollywood red scare—his parents were both Lithuanian.

He was in the Hollywood system though not as a contract player with a studio. Still, he was soon getting third or fourth billed roles in westerns such as Apache (1954), Drum Beat (1954), Jubal (1956), and Run of the Arrow (1957). But he was ambitious and remained frustrated. He took lead roles in three great 1958 B-films, Showdown at Boot Hill, Machine Gun Kelly and Gang War, did dozens of television one-off roles from 1953 to 1967, and starred in a cheapjack series, Man with a Camera (1958-60). 1960s A-films for Bronson meant playing in the action ensembles of Never So Few (1959), The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), and The Dirty Dozen (1967). It was progress, a career, but he’d expected more. Bronson was the eleventh of 15 children of immigrants; his father was dead of black lung disease by the time Charles was 12. Several of his siblings died young. Once out of Ehrenfeld he’d been taken for an immigrant himself and he worked hard to leave his accent and naiveté behind. (Bronson used this accent for the character Velinski in The Great Escape.)

He bounced from agent to agent, divorced his wife, fell in love with his best friend’s wife and found himself ready for lightning to strike. Bronson turned down a script from Italy called “The Magnificent Stranger.” Richard Harrison, an American actor who had found work and fame in Europe, was busy and told Sergio Leone about Clint Eastwood. The idea was to have an American star in a German financed, Italian directed western based on a Japanese film (Yojimbo) inspired by a Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott western (Buchanan Rides Alone); it would be shot in Spain. Eastwood was younger, and had less to lose; he was looking forward to the end of the TV series Rawhide wherein he’d played a character he’s referred to as ‘trail flunky.’ Eastwood simply threw out his character’s and most of the others’ dialogue and as luck had it Leone had an eye for the rest; the film became A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Bronson then rejected For a Few Dollars More (1965) and that part went to Lee Van Cleef, a marginal heavy in lots of westerns through the ‘50s. Van Cleef became an overseas star too; he looked great but never threw out enough of his dialogue. Bronson would have done The Good, the Bad and the Ugly because by then he’d seen Fistful, but he was committed to The Dirty Dozen (1967).

Meanwhile, Bronson was getting his own international action. He had married the English actress Jill Ireland after she’d divorced actor David McCallum. (It was apparently all very civilized and will someday make a nice little TV movie.) McCallum, who was quite a pop star due to his role in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., had turned his agent Paul Kohner onto Bronson, and Ireland pushed him to France to do Adieu L’Ami (a.k.a., Farewell Friend, or Honor Among Thieves, 1968) and Rider on the Rain (1970). These arty messes were huge hits throughout Europe and Asia but are most interesting for being the first to really frame and linger on Bronson’s potential for violence in its cool, calm potential phase. Following such stillness with his natural aptitude with guns and fists became his formula. Bronson made ten films in five years for European production companies. And Leone finally got Bronson for Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) where he played opposite Henry Fonda.

After five years dominating the overseas box office, Bronson returned to Hollywood, though by now the studios were mere distributors of the productions of smaller, hipper companies—companies who knew the value of Charles Bronson. Dino De Laurentiis Productions signed him for three pictures at a million dollars each. The third of these was Death Wish, a film that became the zeitgeist’s skyrocket in the summer of 1974. And so, as the ‘60s youth culture crested and curdled in 1974, a deeply scarred 52-year-old immigrant’s son found himself the number one box office attraction in America, and the world.

Producer-director Michael Winner who worked with Bronson in this period said, “He had a chance when he could have broken through, and I know the pictures he didn’t do and it’s a pity.” But when the personal and professional pressures finally let up on Bronson, film had become to him merely a professional means to personal ends. He always knew his lines and hit his marks on the set. More often in Hollywood, actors were contemptuous of their craft and so drank or whored or subverted characterizations as written with a kind of performance striptease often hinting at closeted homosexuality. Bronson instead respected the work, but from hereon he considered himself a family man first, a painter second, and only then an actor. Bronson, the Dark Buddha, had reached his personal-professional goal or dharma and it earned him the following or sangha that further freed him.

He loved Jill Ireland; they were a Beauty and the Beast couple. She loved children as he did; more so perhaps for enduring repeated miscarriages to have them. His and her children from both previous marriages as well as their daughter were often together in the rural Vermont Bronson household and after Death Wish’s success Bronson and Ireland made films together. He gladly forced her on producers, and snubbed Hollywood by working primarily with Brit directors (Michael Winner, J. Lee Thompson, Peter Hunt). The best of these films are Chato’s Land (1971), Stone Killer (1973), Death Wish (1974), Death Hunt (1981) and maybe even Murphy’s Law (1986).

Three fortunate exceptions to this Brit preference are among the best films of Bronson in his prime: Mr. Majestyk (1974) directed by Hollywood veteran Richard Fleischer from a script by Elmore Leonard, Breakout (1975) directed by Tom Gries, and Hard Times (1975), Walter Hill’s directorial debut. Telefon (1977), though directed by Don Siegel and written by Stirling Silliphant, is less than it ought to be (see Siegel’s chapter on the film in his autobiography for details).

Late Bronson deteriorates but remains interesting. The Death Wish series (five in all; the last direct-to-video), 10 to Midnight (1983), The Evil That Men Do (1984), and Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (1989) are lurid collisions of an aging puritan-avenger Bronson with some of the sleaziest settings any box office champ ever got near. Here the sexual neuroses and Fleet Street cynicism of the Brits and Bronson’s professional detachment yielded strikingly perverse films. Bronson’s Beauty was dying of cancer through these years and when she succumbed in 1990 his career changed as well. He did one last great support role (fifth billed and without hairpiece) in Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner (1991) and then moved to network television where he did some good wholesome work that was likely closer to his true taste: Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus (1991), The Sea Wolf (1993), Donato and Daughter (1993), and the three Family of Cops films (1995, 1997, 1999).

Today, Bronson’s catalog has drifted off of the shelves of videostores with the phasing out of videotape, and interest hasn’t yet demanded restocking in the DVD format. A failed career then, one might say, but surely a successful life—a complete kalpa. In Hollywood the reverse is more often true, though it’s generally work from failed careers that endures. A Buchinsky autobiography is to be published.

Margin quotes:

“The star, to me, is not an actor. He doesn’t do a scene. An actor in that kind of role just wanders through the action. He doesn’t impose himself on the action.” —Bronson to Curtis Lee Hanson, Cinema, Vol. 3, No. 1, December 1965

“The most frustrating element is to try to protect the performance you know you gave, to get it up on the screen. This is the most difficult thing when you are a supporting actor, because the leading credits get all of the consideration…. You’ve got to work, you’ve got to live. I’m in a supporting category right now. The only solution is to get the hell out of this category, and prove that you can draw the box office as well as anybody else.” —Bronson to Curtis Lee Hanson, Cinema, Vol. 3, No. 1, December 1965

“Brando’s walking around dressed like a bum and telling how tough life is. How does he know? It was never tough for him. And it wasn’t tough for most of those ‘angry’ guys. What have any of them got to be ‘angry’ about?” —Bronson!, W.A. Harbinson, Pinnacle Books, New York

“It was the biggest ‘plug’ show in the history of television. The sponsor was a manufacturer of cameras and photography products. I was the hero, a news cameraman, but the director had to keep stopping the action to make sure the label on the equipment was visible. By the tenth week I realized I was playing second banana to a flashbulb. In the twentieth week, our flashbulb became obsolete when another company marketed one that could be used over and over again. So we got canceled after the twenty-sixth week.”—Bronson!, W.A. Harbinson, Pinnacle Books, New York

“There Ain’t No Sanity Clause” by Peter Relic (Arthur No. 17/July 2005)

Administrator — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:12:13 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 17 (July 2005)

PETER RELIC’S BOOK CORNER

“There Ain’t No Sanity Clause”

Reviewed:

Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail
by Christopher Dawes
(Thunder’s Mouth Press)

And so, with Monty Python having set the appropriately demented historical precedent, Damned drummer Rat Scabies and his over-the-road mate Dawes set off in search of that most infamous, perhaps mythical tin cup. The premise is tidy: punk legend Scabies is now a boundlessly enthusiastic treasure hunter, Dawes a rapidly aging music journalist (followers of the now-defunct Melody Maker will have read him under his nom de plume Push) of no fixed ambition. The resulting picaresque travelogue, taking the pair from the planning stages at Scabies’ kitchen table to Paris brothels, a rain-lashed Scottish countryside, the mystical French village Rennes-le-Chateau and a Knights Templars induction ceremony is a pretty fine “edutainment” yarn—right down to the reproduction of Scabies’ hand-drawn map of “Grail Country.” With Dawes playing the straight man and Scabies getting off endless one-liners (describing Christian Crusader Godefroi de Bouillon as “one of ZZ Top with a halo” and the hidden message in Sauniere’s parchments as “like a medieval FCUK”), the classic buddy scenario develops into a slightly sentimental (unpunk alert) attachment between neighbors. Initially the passages of historical exposition drag compared to those detailing wine-and-weed fueled hi-jinks, but all is eventually integrated, until a description of deceased opera singer Emma Calve’s bee obsession seems relevant to Ratty’s midnight graveyard raids. And if it all sounds as dodgy as the emasculating height at which Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown wears his slacks (ever checked out the man’s dustjacket photo?), well, Scabies does carry a copy of that airport bestseller around for most of this book. Not to read though—only to tear off bits of the cover to make filters for his spliffs.

http://www.peterjrelic.com/

Arthur Radio Transmission #39 w/ SALVIA PLATH

ARTHUR RADIO — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 14:00:16 +0000

In this second-to-last episode of Arthur Radio, Gustav Ernst (host of experimental documentary radio show Tesla Effect on Newtown Radio) joins Ivy Meadows for an extended Buddhist prayer remix, after which Salvia Plath, host of Rats Live On No Evil Star, historical figure and documentarian, spins songs from Tibet via internet, treads the waters of Brazil, and shares field recordings from Brooklyn and Baltimore, keeping all vinyl running at a steady 33rpm while staying true to the phase shifts in her synesthetic life. She invites musician and sculptor Cammisa Forrest to share the studio. Forrest’s transitions between Salvia’s tracks create an immersive audio reality of wordless harmonic overtures.

“Our language is classical, and we do our best to apply it to quantum mechanics.” Neils Bohr

Cammisa Forrest is working on multiple creative projects. She is currently constructing a frequency sensitive color mixer as part of the ExiTrip project.
She also has a forthcoming documentary about the performance space ParlsLondonNewYorkWestNile. You can see the trailer below.

Photo by Will Crofoot

STREAMING:

DOWNLOAD: Arthur Radio #39 w/ SALVIA PLATH 2-20-2011

Timeline below…

Ivy Meadows + Gustav Ernst DJ intro @ 00:00

Javanese court gamelan / Margaret Dygas / Eliane Radigue / T.J. Lawrence (Hubble edit)

SALVIA PLATH live set + DJ @ 20 mins

Ivy Meadows DJs @ 1 hour 29 mins

Corridors / Eklin / Zonotope™ / Katie Deacon / Laurie Anderson

“The Art Of Asking Your Boss For A Raise” by Georges Perec now available

steve k — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 21:33:07 +0000

The Art Of Asking Your Boss For A Raise, a previously untranslated novel by OuLiPo author Georges Perec, is just released from Verso, and with it comes an online game to help you hone this art.

“Darkly funny, never before published account of the office worker’s mindset by celebrated novelist.”

A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the coming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface: What’s the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office? And should you ask that tricky question about his daughter’s illness?

You can try to navigate these difficult decisions for yourself atwww.theartofaskingyourbossforaraise.com …

An acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968. As Harry Mathews said, “For Perec, writing was a kind of salvation. It was justification by works.”

C & D bicker about new records (Arthur No. 17/July 2005)

Administrator — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 06:29:24 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 17/July 2005

Debashish Bhattacharya

C: We meet again.
D: Indeed. [goes to fridge, returns with chilled brownie]
C: Okay? We are ready to begin. D, I wish you clarity.
D: Yes. Focus pocus.

Kool Keith
Global Enlightenment Part 1 DVD
(MVD)
C: I thought this was gonna be Keith being oh-so-weird but actually it’s him being clever… He’s talking philosophy.
D: He’s talking seltzer water.
C: He’s talking about theft, it’s a favorite subject of his. And this is about how he dealt with that: by doing something that is unstealable. Listen to what he’s saying…
Kool Keith on screen, talking about what he keeps in his refrigerator: “I learnt that people like to steal your sodas. Seltzer water, people don’t like it. You could send a big jug of seltzer water around, and nobody would touch it… But people taking my Hawaiian Punches, people drinking all my Tropicana. That happened for weeks, and months. I really learned that seltzer water keeps people away. It’s like a twist: I really don’t like it myself, but I like it because people don’t like it. You have to do it that way. But you have to learn how to like it, like it’s so good to you: it’s SO GOOD to have a glass of seltzer water.”
C: That’s the way I’ve felt about Keith’s last, uh, five records. They’re hard to like! But now I gotta listen to them again, because they were hard to like on purpose!
D [musing]: Hmm. I have to admit I did not even hear those records.
C: Keith is brilliant even when he’s talking about being weird as a conceptual survival strategy. This is funny: watching Keith on Tour. It’s a sustained critique of status-obsessed modern hip-hop. So, he’s supposed to be showing how large he’s living, that’s what hip-hop stars do on their DVDs. But here he’s living in a hotel, he’s eating at Popeye’s. He’s got no hot women on his wing so he follows one around buys her some shorts. He hangs out with music stars friends, that is, the streetbusking guitarist. He has trouble finding liquor. The whole thing is done straight….
D: Even straighter than the Turbonegro film.
C: Which is saying a lot, when you think about it.
Kool Keith on screen, walking through Manhattan’s streets: “I’m always touring, even when I’m walking…. Am I above the streets? I am above the streets at my mentality level. Everybody now raps behind the microphone and a couple of bodyguards and they say they’re the streets. You see a lot of rappers, they walk around with a lot of people with ‘em, with headsets? Their reality is not even reality. It’s a fantasy. I don’t sit in an SUV, doing my documentary, ride around and talk about ‘I was in the streets, I live the street, I am the streets.’ You mean you ride through the streets. Ha. You know what I’m saying?”
C: He’s goofing like Sun Ra. Everything has at least two and a half meanings.
D: Thirty-five minutes of new stoner comedy-philosophy.

Little Freddie King
You Don’t Know What I Know
(Fat Possum)
D: [looking at cover, reading the album title] “You don’t know what I know?” I have a feeling he knows the same thing Kool Keith knows. Which it is I do not but I am trying to know.
C: It’s obviously a Fat Possum production.
D: Which means it’s thick enough to eat with a fork.
C: Raw John Lee Hooker feel, without sheen or Clapton cameos.
D: John Lee Hooker would never have a song called “Crack Head Joe.”
C: It’s about time someone paid tribute to a crackhead.

Blowfly
Fahrenheit 69
(Alternative Tentacles)
C: Blowfly is an old R & B songwriter dude who’s been running the crude parody game for 75 years. Wears a cape and mask to protect his secret identity. Totally classic if you’re in a certain mood.
D: We have to give him some major credit to the cover picture, which is a takeoff on the Bad Brains’ first album cover, only Blowfly is doing a urine lighting strike on the Capitol building.
C: Blowfly has to be experienced live, he’s a comedian provocateur goofball. (You can see why he’s on Jello Biafra’s label now.) I saw him opening for the Pixies and Soul Asylum once at a half-empty Universal Amphitheatre, and I know this is damning by faint praise Blowfly blewflied them off the stage. And get this: his ENTIRE band was wearing GIANT…RAINBOW….AFROS!!!!
D: [looks at sleeve picture of Blowfly with his middle fingers extended] I like his fingernails more than his new record.
C: To update George Clinton: Smell my fingernail.

A Band of Bees
Free the Bees
(Astralwerks)
C: There are songs on here that are as good as the originals they’re styled after– whether it’s the Zombies, or the ballads, the Afrobeat stuff. The writing is great, the spirit is there, the production is definitely there, but… Could it be that they are the men who know too much? With the internet and Mojo every phase of Western pop music is now available to kids, and it’s all presented with this sexy, dramatic gosh-wow. What does that mean for young smart musicians? Are they perhaps over-educated in music history?
D: Maybe you are an over-educated listener!
C: Could be true. I’m sure if I was 12, I’d listen to this one record all summer. But back then, you did listen to only one record all summer because that’s the most that you could get your hands on. You had just enough money saved up to buy a new record. Do kids even do that anymore, listen to one record for a whole summer? This one record, with all its styles and the sheer rich quality of the writing and playing, would keep me going. But now…
D: Now you are becoming an old man. Which is sad for you, because for me this is wonderful stuff. It’s not just vintage décor, the innards are top-notch too. And as my good friend Gertrude Stein said, A good song is a good song is a good song.

HAL
Hal
(Rough Trade)
C: Another high-quality retro band from across the Pond. A fruity harmony pop mix of everything from 1974: Elton John, The Raspberries, Supertramp…a splash of BTO. All that’s missing are Flo & Eddie. You wouldn’t say they scorch.
D: I would definitely deny scorching here.
C: If they could just rock a bit—is that too much to ask?—they could be the new Pooh Sticks. Cuz even I have to admit it’s good stuff. But pianos and high male harmonies? I can only take so much before I reach for my revolver. I need some gee-tar, D, come on.
D: You are becoming impatient and whiny in your old age, with each passing minute. May I suggest that you have one of these chilled brownies?

Teenage Fanclub
Man-Made
(Merge)
D: I heart this record from the first second.
C: You know how some people say ‘I’ve liked that band since the beginning’? Well, with Teenage Fanclub, I HAVE liked them since the beginning! And this is great. Critics have for years said all they were doing was the Byrds and Big Star, from the hair and the style of songwriting and so forth. Now they’re like the Byrds in another way: they just keep on putting out records, long after they have a chance at having a hit. This is their sixth album, they’ve now got an undeniable body of work. And they have someone named Frances playing drums, who I at first thought was Frances from fellow Scotpop stars the Vaselines, but I am now discovering that this is an altogether different Frances.
D: They march to the beat of a different Frances.
C: Yes. Anyways at this point you listen to a Fannies album and since each member gets to write a few songs, you get to see how they’re each getting along in life: who’s married, who’s divorced, who’s been single too long. Each album is an update on their domestic life. Which is cool, when you’ve grown up with them.
D: You’ve grown up with them, singing along with them from a distance.

Orange Juice
The Glasgow School
(Domino)
C: The Scottish band from whence it all issued: Orange Juice.
D: Is there something wrong with the singer? It sounds like a weak Morrissey.
C: But this is before the Smiths! And not nearly as solipsistic. I think when you’re Scots and you like Otis Redding, this is what your singing ends up sounding like. This is a great band, totally innovative. Check the song “I’ll Never Be Man Enough For You.” They crated that fey indie rock boy thing, which was basically scandalous after punk made stuff hard and aggressive.
D: What about New Wave?
C: But this is guitar based, not keyboards. They loved the Byrds, not glam. It’s even here in the lyrics: “I wear my fringe like Robert McGuinn.” It does sound thin; it’s more of a treble sound. But that’s the aesthetic.
D: I can hear their significance, even if I’m not donning a turtleneck and scarf to listen to it.
C: This is the real source of Franz Ferdinand, not Gang of Four. Along with Josef K and Fire Engines and other records store clerk specials. This is a great collection, all the singles. [pauses] I’d also like to say here: Best wishes for a speedy and complete recovery to former Orange Juice mainman Edwyn Collins, who’s been struck down by a brain aneurysm. Get well, Edwyn.

Vetiver
Between EP
(DiCristina)
C: Speaking of fey, the new EP from Vetiver: a coupla new songs, a Fleetwood Mac cover, a live version from the album last year. “Been So Long” is another humble Cabic classic.
D: I like Vetiver, and I like this, and I’m not even into the new folk thing!
C: You always talk about ‘the new folk thing’ like there’s a private club and the members all speak in code and have badges on their bongos.
D: [getting up to go to the kitchen] Anyone who I can imagine having a flower or curl in their hair, I call them “new folk.”
C: New folk? New fey.

Gary Higgins
Red Hash
(Drag City)
C: Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance has been covering Higgins’ “Thicker Than A Smokey.”
D: This is music to burn one to.
C: To burn out to. It’s a reissue of a record that is an underground collectors’ favorite. Some of it’s in that vein of folkdream—check the Vetiver-like acoustic guitar-and-cello-and-sensitive-male-voice thing here. But this record came out in 1973. It’s some heavy country-folk soul-rock with an acid edge…that got buried in its birthyear, I guess by sensitive singer-songwriters laying a lot thicker stuff on the same surfaces. The dude articulates that really pretty subtle mood, when you’re just generally down, feeling vaguely doomed, when destiny becomes clear for a second, and paths seem to have narrowed, and the one that’s opened isn’t the one you wanted…
D: He sounds like he might not make it to the studio tomorrow…
C: Yeah. Or, he did make it to the studio, but everyone else had already gone home, and he was just there, alone.

Judee Sill
Dreams Come True/Hi I Love You Right Heartily Here
(Water)
D: Judee Sill! I have her first two albums. California crystal stream radiance of the first order.
C: This is the Jim O’Rourke-supervised presentation of the‘lost’ final album and other recordings made by another underground collector’s ‘70s soft-rock-folk-pop hero, the strange and beautiful and sadly late Judee Sill, a beloved-by-some woman-artist-cosmic freak of the universe who wandered to the edge and didn’t make it back. The biography as told in the booklet here is amazing; one husband says Sill “was convinced she was a genderless angel with a message and cross to bear and she called us ‘donors’ because she said that I had the same karma or similar karmas.” But… Well, I can see my mom putting this on between Carpenters sides. There’s just so much joy but sometimes it’s just too AOR for me: tasteful, honey crystal Cheerios for the soul type stuff
D: I love it. It’s almost too wholesome to bear.
C: I can’t associate any of the music here with what usually comes out of a heroin addicts. [pauses] Then again, Jerry Stahl wrote Alf.

Diana Cluck
Oh Vanille
(Important)
C: Finally this record is being made available to the general public, not just those lucky enough to encounter Ms. Cluck at a show when she had some handmade copies on her. It’s good stuff, more of this sort of soulful folk thing that’s out there right now: a sadness that is more on a spiritual than personal level? Musically it’s pretty bare.
D: Somewhat Cat Power, a bit.
C: A banjo. A guitar. Cluck’s beautiful voice. Brooklyn. “Did you receive my love across the telepathic desert? A million signals sent…”

Marissa Nadler
The Saga of Mayflower May
(Eclipse)
C: Dark folk-country concept album edging Nick Cave-ward, but of course much more mannered. Which may be where she still comes up shy for me: it’s all so beautiful and chorale-like, and from that way Enya and a thousand New Age Witch extras beckon.
D: Blixa is not slashing his guitar around on a Marissa Nadler record.
C: So we get lots of Espers-ish acoustic guitar and flutes and very pretty, haunted wintry singing. If only she spread her wings a bit more, and tried for different vistas once in a while, instead of the fog and forest and sea.
D: She could look to India…

Debashish Bhattacharya
Calcutta Slide-Guitar
(Riverboat/World Music Network)
C: He plays traditional Indian ragas on steel guitar. Of course it’s amazing. Joyous and contemplative, barely there and totally intense.
D: [looking at the sleeve] He’s got four instruments and he’s hugging them all.
C: [Quoting] “A thousand-year tradition of music.” And we were complaining about the effects of 40 years…
D: Might need to do a re-think on that one.

Gang Gang Dance
God’s Money
(Social Registry)
C: New album from New York’s Gang Gang Dance. Sounds like Yoko Ono collaborating with Sun City Girls, all music sourced from the 4ad catalog with a few Savage Republic guitars thrown in. And I mean that in a very positive way.
D: This sounds like really early Residents. I could have totally gotten laid to this in ‘84. I would be really embarrassed if my friends caught me listening to it. Unless there were naked girls and ecstasy involved. Then everything is acceptable.
C: It’s such a weird mix, the songs feel like they, or the album as a whole, could go anywhere at any moment, into a chorus, off to another continent, into another time. I think they’re only limited by their budget.

Boris
Akuma no Uta
(Southern Lord)
C: Now for something completely different.
D: WHOA…. This is like ice age man thawing music… He thaws out, walks to his guitar, plugs in his amp and this is what he plays.
C: It’s a death affirmer, alright. An apocalypse summoner.
D: Who is this?
C: Boris, a trio from Japan, been going for a while. Holy shit. I was all set to sit through an entire album of the introduction drone and was happy about it. I didn’t expect this…
D: ROCK ONSLAUGHT!
C: I needed some guitar and this is the free-flow I.V. Okay, I hereby call this meeting of Facemelters Anonymous to order.

The Psychic Paramount
Gamelan Into the Mink Supernatural
(No Quarter)
C: I think we are required by our Arthur oath to like this, but I just want to say that were I not bound by those rules, I would still stand up and be counted for these guys. It’s amazing isn’t it? The first track is like where My Bloody Valentine would’ve gone if they’d continued after Loveless…
D: What an explosion of sound.
C: And it’s not just another needless projection of power. This second track is like Led Zeppelin doing chase music, in a Michael Mann cop film, circa 2009. Instrumental trio from back East.
D: I don’t know what to say except excuse me while I scrape my brain off the wall with a spatula.

Residual Echoes
Residual Echoes
(Holy Mountain)
C: This is Residual Echoes, from Santa Cruz. Feedback warriors who like to wig out into grooves and then back out into the old hyperspace. Bless ‘em.
D: This is the good stuff!
C: Can meets Chrome, and things gets rough.
D: Another double-banger. So many new bands blowing it into interstellar overdrive right now…

Growing/M. Evan Burden
Firmament/“10/24/02”
(Zum)
C: [listening to Growing’s 20-minute track] Reminds me of early Tangerine Dream or Fripp & Eno. Clean, kind of cold, a million miles deep.
D: Sounds from the slowly rotating electric chrysalis.
C: That guy stuck in the ice? This is what he heard for those 70,000 years he was frozen…

Jane
Berserker
(Car Park)
D: There is nothing berserk about this one.
C: An excellent Animal Collective-related project that continues their good works, humming along through some electric fairieland. They’re on a roll right now, creatively.
D: It’s very visual music. Spherical chorales… celestial Cologne… minimalist landscapes…
C: … and now there’s swarms of birdnotes—birdwords—like Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus. But also like a lot of recent albums, it seems…
D: The birds are singing more these days, haven’t you noticed?
C: …

The Juan Maclean
Less Than Human
(DFA/Astralwerks)
C: I’m going to dance to this, the finest straight-up dance album I’ve heard in years. I’m not sure how a guy from Six Finger Satellite ends up making an on-the-one pulsing joyride of New York electro-funk that this is…
D: [calling a rhythm] Talking Heads!
C: Yes. And sped-up Aphex Twin. And I don’t know. There’s something really wonderful about this. I can’t put my finger on it because it’s too busy moving. This guy has an extra finger, maybe he can make music that other people can’t…. In any event, looks like I will be dancing for the rest of the summer in private and in public. You have been warned.
D: As long as you don’t do the Crackhead Joe, everything should be fine.
C: Two fingers up.

Horoscope by JACKIE BEAT (Arthur No. 17/July 2005)

Administrator — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 06:09:06 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 17 (July 2005)

Horoscope
By Jackie Beat

Jackie Beat is the gorgeous lead singer of the electro-trash band Dirty Sanchez. She has contributed to US Magazine, Movieline, LAWeekly, Total Movie & Entertainment, In Los Angeles, Planet Homo, NEXT, HX and has made rent by selling secrets about her famous friends to Star Magazine more often than she would like to admit.

Aquarius
(January 21-February 19)
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself, “Why do people hate me?” It’s because they’re jealous, right? Wrong! It’s because you’re ugly. Seriously. And I’m not talking “ugly on the inside” here, honey—you are full-on physically hideous. But smile, ‘cause at least God loves you! Not really. He hates you, too. After all, you are a constant reminder that even he has major fuck-ups occasionally.

Pisces
(February 20 – March 20)
Does your car have an airbag? Other than your fat girlfriend, I mean. Look, I don’t want to scare you, but please buckle up and if you don’t have an airbag in your vehicle, duct tape a bag of Kraft marshmallows to your forehead for awhile. Make sure they’re Kraft. Don’t buy some no-name brand, you cheap bastard. This is no time to cut corners. After all, we’re talking about your brain here, dum-dum.

Aries
(March 21-April 21)
Pushing the limits of cutting-edge fashion is one thing, but making everyone around you constantly stifle laughs is just plain exhausting. Did you know that if you took all the beverages that have shot out of people’s noses when you walked into a restaurant wearing one of your ridiculous outfits it would fill an Olympic-sized pool? Or Kirstie Alley’s cereal bowl. Get it? She’s fat. The bowl is real big. Aw, forget it.

Taurus
(April 21 – May 21)
If we had all the answers then every computer keyboard would have one less key. Why? Because then we would have no use for that pesky ol’ question mark, silly! Embrace life’s mysteries. Enjoy the fact that so much of this nutty world in which we live is vague, strange and unexplained. Remember, “no sense makes sense.” And if all of this seems like so much cryptic mumbo-jumbo please realize that legally this horoscope column has to be a certain length so… blah, blah, blah.

Gemini
(May 22 – June 21)
You are a delight! Oh how I wish I could reach out from these printed words and just give you the warmest hug right now! Then I would wander into your kitchen and make you a cup of hot cocoa or a glass of ice cold fresh-squeezed lemonade (depending on the weather outside!). Next up would be a decadent, luxurious hour-long foot massage followed by a soothing avocado facial. Then I’d kill you with my bare hands, smear my naked body with your blood and disappear back into this magazine. And no one would ever know who did it. Scary, huh?

Cancer
(June 22 – July 22)
Uh-oh. Someone’s been feeling downright crabby lately, no pun intended, Cancer the Crab. And that oh-so crabby someone is you, sourpuss! If you can’t turn that frown upside down, then turn your whole self upside-down by literally standing on your head, gloomy gus. The blood will quickly rush to your skull and in just a few short minutes you will feel high as a kite. And let’s be honest, being high equals being happy. If for some reason you cannot stand on your head then just take some drugs or huff some toxic household cleaning products.

Leo
(July 23 – August 22)
Sorry, no funny fake horoscope for you. You annoy me.

Virgo
(August 23 – September 23)
Anger is just good old-fashioned Hurt with the volume turned way up. And you have huge speakers and surround sound, baby. Stop being angry. Let it go. Perhaps meditation and/or yoga would help. How about a much-needed get-away or at the very least a serene walk outdoors, gratefully savoring Mother Nature’s majestic natural beauty? And if none if this works, lock yourself in the bathroom and slowly cut into your flesh to remind yourself that you are indeed very much alive.

Libra
(September 24 – October 23)
The phone is going to ring in the next few hours. No matter who is on the other end of this call—your ex, your best friend, a telemarketer, the recorded voice of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger or your mom—have sex with this person. This will set in motion a prophetic series of events that will eventually open a portal destined to lead you towards great wealth and happiness. But, if the caller is not yet 18 years old, this portal will resemble the radio-controlled bars of a damp, cold prison cell.

Scorpio
(October 24 – November 22)
There are tribes of savages who believe that photographs steal a part of a person’s soul. They are right. But what no one knows is that the same is true for drawings, portraits, sketches and even simple doodles and cartoons. You are beautiful and as such you have unknowingly been the model for more than your share of artists’ renderings over the years. Yes, it’s all coming back to you now: The art student in the park with the charcoal and the sketch pad, the unkempt guy at the Applebee’s bar with the crayon and the cocktail napkin. This finally explains why you have almost no personality to speak of. But hey, at least you’re beautiful.

Sagittarius
(November 23 – December 21)
You’re in a rut. Your life has become predictable, repetitive and boring. Time to shake things up! Now I know how much you fear change, but relax. I’m not talking about moving to New Orleans or buying one of those adorable Mini Coopers, just a few little things that can instantly make life more exciting. For instance, the next time you’re whipping up a batch of chicken or tuna salad may I suggest you add a handful of slivered almonds and some golden raisins? Yum! And should you find yourself lying out in the sun, take the lemon wedge from your drink and spritz it into your hair. A few hours later—voila!—chunky, funky highlights!

Capricorn
(December 22 – January 20)
I’m tired. Please refer to Leo for your forecast. Thanks.

“Be Your Own Guru” by Douglas Rushkoff (Arthur No. 17/July 2005)

Administrator — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 05:53:54 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 17 (July 2005)

Be Your Own Guru
by Douglas Rushkoff

My good friend Jody Radzik—the guy who first introduced me to raves, actually—started up a blog this year. Jody is about the most loving and optimistic person I’ve ever known. That’s why I was surprised that instead of touting a new spiritual or cultural phenomenon, Radzik had decided to bash one.

Guruphiliac.com is dedicated to exposing the profoundly manipulative legions of grifters preying on the spiritually hopeful, as well as those teachers who simply go around letting people think they’re God, one guru at a time. It’s is an entertaining website, to be sure (for those of us who enjoy watching false messiahs unmasked) but it’s also important ongoing work. And the more I think about it, the more guru-bashing is starting to look like a form of optimism, in itself.

We all have gurus of some sort, whether we realize it or not. Even just for brief moments during the day. Haven’t you felt yourself regress to a childlike state, say, when talking to the auto mechanic about your car, the doctor about your test results, or your bartender about which Scotch to drink? In those moments—for an instant—the person becomes something of trusted authority in whose hands you trustingly place yourself. He will take care of me; he has my best interests at heart.

And in most cases, there’s of no great negative consequence to relinquish that authority. It’s just a drink, after all. And while we may want to self-educate a bit before undergoing surgery, we don’t need to learn how to remove an appendix in order to have one taken out. Unless we’re chronically ill, the doctor doesn’t remain our guru.

Even in situations where we’re learning to do something—say, hang-gliding or building a campfire—it can be helpful to surrender authority to the teacher. Certainly in their area of expertise, and for the duration of the lesson, the teacher is the master.

Where it gets tricky is when we assume that our protector’s expertise in one area makes him or her, somehow, better than us in all in all things. The Outward Bound leader knows how to build a fire and eat nettles—so in the context of the wilderness, he’s certainly got a leg up on you. But does this mean the little life lessons and platitudes he drops on you during difficult moments on the trail are universally valid teachings? They sure seem so in the moment, and they may occasionally be applicable to some other situation. But they’re just the musings of some guy.

Yes, it’s terrific to be able to surrender to the unassailable mastery of your cello teacher. She has stories to tell, techniques to share, and a holistic understanding of her instrument and music that you’d be well to emulate. And focusing on her brilliance, holding her phrases in your head like a mantra while you’re running your scales can make those interminable hours of practice more bearable and even productive.

But nowhere does there exist a genuine Bagger Vance or Horse Whisperer. There are no shrinks like Judd Nelson in Ordinary People or Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. Sure, there are great golf pros, horse trainers, and therapists. But they’re just people. The successful therapeutic ending is not surrendering to the loving embrace of a psychologist, however much we may feel the need for a parental substitute or emotional surrender. In the trade, they call this transference, and at best it’s a means, not an ends.

It’s also a terrific technique for engendering loyalty. Back in the ’90s, I did some studies on coercive tactics. From the CIA Interrogation Manual to one of Toyota’s sales handbooks, I found the same basic strategy: confuse or disorient the subject until they regress to a childlike state, then step in as a parent figure and offer relief by accepting a confession or sale.

The guru operates the same way. At the end of the post-modern era, those brave souls courageous enough to see through the religions they may have grown up with emerge frightened and confused. An ex-orthodox Jew or a “recovering” Catholic is also a disoriented, vulnerable person. Although the latest cool bumper sticker says “Eastern religions suck, too,” it’s hard to go through the world suddenly without a ready system and someone to administer it. So, like people who end up in the same bad relationship time after time only with partners with different color hair, people who liberate too quickly or angrily from one system often end up adopting the next one that comes along.

The path of devotion offered by gurus is also a natural fit for those of us who are fed up with the relativistic haze of a world where there are no discernible rules, yet equally disillusioned by institutional religions that appear to have sold out to American consumerism. The guru offers absolutism. Certainty. A point of focus.

As one slick guru, chronicled on Guruphiliac explains on his website: “When you meet a master, you have two choices. Transform or walk away. You cannot be in his presence and remain the same.” Uh, yeah. In other words, conform to his reality or scram.

The guru is the starting place from which all other decisions are to be made. You start with the guru as the one perfect point in the universe, and from there everything else can fall into place. If the guru has instructed you to eat a certain food or do a certain practice, then—according to the logic of gurudom—everything else you have to do for this to happen is part of the perfection. Slowly but surely, surrender to the guru requires you to reject pretty much everything that doesn’t fit whatever model of the world he’s offering you.

But, honestly, that’s what the devotee was after in the first place. An excuse to do or not do all that other confusing stuff in life like encounter people with different ideas, wrestle with the questions of existence, and accept that nobody really knows what happens when we die.

Most of us who have had gurus eventually see something awful—like sexual exploitation, financial abuse, or faked magic—that turns us off. (If we see the guru as perfect, then those blowjobs and false claims get justified: perhaps the guru is testing us, or breaking our hang-ups, At least for a while.) Or we decide that this guy is just too much of an asshole to really be enlightened. Or we simply tire of the idea that “enlightenment” is around the corner, and decide that life is just fine without enlightenment. And getting to that point is a beautiful thing in itself. If an experience with a guru really teaches one the futility of aspirational spiritual quests, then it can even be worth the time, money, and humiliation.

The biggest spiritual victim in the equation is the guru, himself. He’s just a person, after all, who probably had a profound spiritual or psychedelic experience and began to speak or write about it romantically. Charismatically. And this invites admirers and would-be devotees. The guru-in-waiting may not even mean to attract this sort of attention – at least not at the beginning. It’s just the kind of positive reinforcement that naturally comes to a person who speaks passionately about something. I’ve felt shades of it myself, especially when I’m doing a book tour or a lecture about a transcendental topic. Wide-eyed audiences, especially those in areas where don’t get many weird authors, gobble up every word. College students want to hang out late into the night, talking over drinks (or better) about alternate realities, magick sigils or the nature of time. How hard it is not to speak about magick in a magickal way?

And it feels good to give people answers—something to chew on for a while, even if, like a Zen koan, it eventually turns out to be little more than a puzzle to keep them occupied and less afraid of death or existence for a while. To accept this path of the guru, though, however tempting, is certain doom for the artist, writer, or philosopher. It turns his existence from a question into an answer, from flux to certainty—from a life into a death.

Most of the generation of weird sages above my peers and me has died. So now we’re the ones invited to run workshops at places like Esalen and Omega, to speak to groups of young spiritual people or counterculturalists, and to share our insights on the occult, psychic realms, and religious practices.

Lucky for me, I’ve been on the receiving end of the guru dynamic, so I know how and why to avoid doing it, myself. Avoidance usually entails deconstructing an event before it begins, decrying the self-help bias of America’s spiritual community, and then teaching in the most straightforward manner possible, even at the expense of mystery. (I’m married with a daughter, now, so the temptation to succumb to the consequence-free fringe benefits of retreat weekends has diminished, anyway.)

But as I look around me, I see other members of my generation claiming to see the weirdest things, to be enlightened, or to be able to offer access to energies from alternate realms. And it makes me sad and just a bit angry. The insights, such as they are, get lost in fiction. Even if a few of us do happen to be carrying some fragment of real wisdom, the object of the game is to get out the way so the wisdom can be shared. I mean, if I really thought I was channeling something or someone, I’d do it over the radio, anonymously.

The answer, of course, is for all of us to get over our need for gurus. Remove the demand and the supply should dwindle, too. I mean, most of us have already endured one set of parents. Why go through that again? The stuff they didn’t do right simply cannot be corrected. Mourn what you missed and move on. (Meanwhile, if it’s magic you’re after, go to Vegas and see a show. No one can teach you how to walk on water or be in two places at once. And if you do get awakened someday, whatever that means, you’ll realize this very need to talk to God or see the light is what’s been getting in the way of your clarity the whole time. Besides, is it really magical abilities and transcendent experiences you’re after, or merely escape from the pain of everyday experience?)

The truth about the great spiritual quest of our species is that it just can’t work with followers and leaders. There’s way too much duality built-in to such a scheme. Hierarchies are fun, but they’re a construction. I’ve been around the spiritual block more times than I care to mention, and have read the work of the very best teachers and philosophers I can get a hold of. And as I’ve come to see it, there is no such thing as awakening. It’s a ruse. Think about it: the whole concept of reaching enlightenment is so steeped in dualism, expectation, and obsession with self. The word “enlightenment” may sell books and earn devotees, but it doesn’t refer to anything real. It doesn’t exist. The true spiritual path may just be a matter getting over that fact, and in the process, learning to express and enact as much compassion as you can. That’s why I see guruphiliac.com as an optimistic effort; it assumes we’re ready to let all this go.

If you’ve got to start with some perfect point in the universe, start with yourself. There’s no path to take, no one else to follow. And you don’t need anyone to tell you this for it to be true. All the places you might get to are equally valid, because everyone is just as lost as you are. The sooner we all admit this, the sooner we can begin to orient to one another as siblings and partners in the great adventure.

“Closest to the Edge: Life in a squatters’ village on the wild side of Maui” by Paul Smart (Arthur No. 17/July 2005)

Administrator — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 05:34:09 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 17 (July 2005)

Small parks are set up along the Upcountry road that leads to Kanaio, commemorating the Chinese workers who settled on these higher slopes as the lower lands got bought up by Westerners. Many of the similarly pushed-to-the-edge Hawaiian communities took up the Chinese iconography, feeling a kinship to its mix of the hard and beautiful.

Closest to the Edge: Life in a squatters’ village on the wild side of Maui
By Paul Smart
Photography by Fawn Potash

Maui, the state of Hawaii’s second largest island, is shaped like a small-headed figure eight laid on its side, a lopsided infinity symbol. Giant volcanoes, both dormant, center each half of its configuration; the middle is a verdant swath of massive pineapple farms and suburb-like housing tracts, malls and a busy airport. On the left, West Maui is ringed with increasingly expensive and exclusive resorts catering to someone’s golf and condo dreams. At center is a verdant ring of cloud-draped mountains. On the right, the massive volcanic national park of Haleakala splits the terrain between bone dry and rain forest wetness. A small sliver of the northern coast is home to the world’s leading surfing waves, while the southern coast is said to be Hawaii’s sunniest spot.

“Upcountry” is what Maui natives, and guide books, refer to the long western slope of Haleakala, once a center for the island’s great beef cattle industry. Today it’s a land of Northern California-like communities nestled under imported eucalyptus trees and intensive flower farms shipping their goods world wide. Less touristed than the rest of Maui, Upcountry gets its own tourist brochures, touting the area’s long vistas and cowboy heritage, its cooler temperatures and more mellowed lifestyle. There aren’t many attractions up here besides a few restaurants and b&b-like lodgings. People tend to come for day trips to the National Park, or en route to the Eastern, rainforest side of Maui where Hana lies, a three-hour drive from the airport. Otherwise, it’s a land of upscale bedroom communities, like the Bay Area’s Mill Valley, the Berkeley Hills, the Peninsula.

The views are magnificent, and give a sense of what it must feel like to live on Maui year-round. There’s little traffic. It feels laidback.

Yet all the maps of Maui, tourist-oriented or not, mark a quiet Upcountry border, including little boxes past the site of the Tedeschi Winery warning that rental cars are not allowed past a certain point. And the long, 50-mile Southern Coast of the island gets no references in guide books, or even in Maui’s various newspapers.

That’s Kanaio. That’s where this story takes place.

We will come into Kanaio at its darkest. Late December and the firmament alive with a hundred constellations mirroring the tourist constellations created by the mega-resorts of Kihei and Wailea far below by the ocean’s edge. I’m in a rented jeep climbing higher than anything I’m used to, feeling the altitude muddy my attitude, sweeping up the jet lag and flight fatigue into a maelstrom of mental mist, a long way from home. My wife’s in the truck up ahead with her brother Brad. We spin out from the airport to Home Depot, then upcountry on back roads that channel through endless cane fields. There are fewer American flags flying in this part of the nation than we’ve grown accustomed to in recent years.

The humid smell of fertilizer rises up. I feel my pores soaking it all in, as if I’ve stepped from autumn crispness into a greenhouse. After a Y turn, I sense pineapples in the fields, even though all I can see are the jury-rigged tail lights on Brad’s Ford pickup and red earth berms on either of the narrow roadway. We pass through a suburban tract of ranch-style homes festooned with giant swanlike shrubbery. Christmas lights on palm trees. A vinyl picket fence.

Brad turns onto a higher-grade two lane roadway and I follow him several miles until he signals left. We climb a steep incline past a siren tower and more houses, less ritzy now. We pass a strange, octagonal wood church that’s all steeple and pull into an open-door concrete market for snacks. No one needs to watch the bags this far out of the tourist areas. Everyone knows each other up here, greeting each other with thumb/pinkie shaka waves, low and super-cool.

A native steps up: “Brother dude, how goes it?”

“Meet my sister, my brother-in-law, man,” Brad says.

“You new to Upcountry, good people?”

“New to Maui,” Brad tells him. “Coming from the airport.”

“Heavy. Take’em to Kanaio, my man. They learn what it is now.”

Brad buys New Zealand ale and Beck’s, throws in a few packs of generic ciggies. We get some homemade macadamia nut cookie drops and basic supplies: pasta and tuna, canned corned beef, Spam. Back in convoy, we drive through a landscape of long vistas broken by gnarled trees, their purple blossoms littering the asphalt. Cows stare out from behind barbed wire fences, munching nonchalantly. We stop and down brews at Sun Yat Sen Park, eyeing the even-bigger vista at 3800 feet. A plane moves slowly across the horizon at eye level. There’s nothing it can hit, no fears of it falling from the sky. Only an hour to go to Kanaio, Brad says, swigging on a Beck’s.

Rock walls give everything the look of a lopsided Ireland. I’m filled with memories of Brittany and the Amalfi coast, of Quebec’s Charlevoix district high above the St. Lawrence. But this is warmer. Softer, it seems.

I’m getting used to the firmament’s subtle lighting. There’s a hypnotic allure to the distant shimmer of resorts against an endless sea. I’m downing a beer now, too, although I know about Kanaio’s reputation as an outlaw haven where drinking’s no different than breathing.

We’re here because my wife hasn’t seen Brad in over a decade. He was a troubled boy, taken to drinking and fighting, going in and out of reform schools, even the Army, until he up and flew to Honolulu when he was barely 20. Since then he’s been in touch only intermittently.

One time he’d gone home to the Midwest with his dog, who then got hit by a police car. Brad got into a scuffle with the cop. The dog died. Brad tried to give it a Kanaio-style burial, complete with bonfire. Only it was the Midwest. The cops came again. Now he isn’t allowed back on the mainland.

Up more winding roads and we pass through a cluster of ranch buildings nestled into a copse of eucalyptus. A cinderblock church, St. John the Less, is surrounded by sweet-smelling honeysuckle and wild tobacco in a half-state of construction. I follow the battered truck off the paved road and up a long incline. We seem to pass through jungle. When the views return, they’re darker. No more vistas of tourist hotels and convenience store lights. Instead kudzu shapes loom stretched out supine on the starlit sea.

After several miles we stop. Brad comes back to make sure the Jeep I’ve rented is in four-wheel drive. He’s shirtless, dirty jeans slung around narrow hips. Flip-flops on dirt-encrusted feet. A disheveled mop of hair over an equally disheveled beard. He moves with the loping gait of a contractor, his main means of employment. He carries a beer in his thick hand.

Back in our vehicles we chug ever-so-slowly and carefully through increasing numbers of junk cars and tortured lava rock walls and cliffs. A cow looms in the road, lit red in Brad’s sole running light.

We turn into what seems to be a gully. Plywood shacks brightly lit for the holidays come into view. We slow to a crawl, taking what feels like every possible wrong turn.

At a wall of weather-beaten plywood boards, a grizzled Hawaiian emerges and talks to Brad. He comes back and gives me a shaka sign, says I’m welcome here. A bit further on we pass a group of kids standing amidst fencing and kudzu. One’s got a small dog in his arms. They stare at me and my rent-a-Jeep. No one waves.

Through piles of spent, windowless Nissans and Toyotas, Harvesters and Broncos, an A frame shines higher up. Above that, the stars. We’re off the map. This is the side of Maui tourist agencies and car rental companies denote with a broken line. They don’t want you to know about this side of it all, where what’s left of the native Hawaiians have been given special squatters’ rights… but no water or electrical service. No roads. Where the cheap labor that builds endless resorts and cleans them hunkers down with a view of their old holy island, Kahoolawe, now emptied after serving for years as a U.S. military bombing practice site.

We pull into trees and junk, a motor here, wires and old doors there. A dog barks. Brad gets out of the truck and asks me to keep the lights on as he fires the generator. Welcome to Kanaio, he announces with rough exuberance. We hear are the hum of generators, the rustle of strong wind, the distant love cries of drunken couples or their progeny, multiracial and tough as nails. We’re on the far side of Paradise, the deep recess of America, the mirror image of all things consumer.

Brad pulls power anyway he can. He’s got orange extension cords running through trees festooned with laundry. At one end is a generator. At the other, a solar cell on his shack’s corrugated metal roof. Plugs run into jumper cables that hook to Brad’s pickup, which he’s used to running for hours at a time. Everything feeds into a converter, an inverter and more masses of cords and wires, all running pell-mell in this heap he calls home. To fill in the gaps, he’s got stashes of candles, kerosene lamps, flashlights and lighters strewn all over.

Power lines run across roads all over Kanaio. When one house plugs in Christmas twinklers, four homes get their systems blown. People really scamper when a fuse blows. Now, during the holidays, everyone’s being extra careful as they plug in. The men scoff at the luxury of lights, but it keeps their women around.

Only one or two places up here are hooked into Maui’s water system, a PVC pipe that circumnavigates the island from the rain forest Hana side to this, the lava desert. People pay good money for the privilege. But the water’s been shut down for years as the county struggles with the threat of new homesteaders setting up shop past this outlaw outpost and around the southern coast of 1790 lava flows. Costs per household are running upwards of $5,000 a spigot.

Kanaio, in its present form, is only a little over a dozen years old. A few Hawaiian families were allowed back on these lands after the rest of Maui started filling up and the giant ranches on this side of the island–Ulupulakua and Kaupo–were forced to share a bit. Each Hawaiian brought in family and friends. They built as they could and as the land dictated, dragging up old plywood, two-by-fours, corrugated metal, lots of tarps. Everything’s been in flux ever since. People add onto stilted shacks, moving barbed wire fence boundaries to suit their whims, until collapse nears, either physical, mental or marital. Then they start over.

Exes hang on here like bad dreams, expanding family compounds and holiday events like cesspools covered with building scraps. Children count relations everywhere they look. Even newcomers like my wife and I are aunt and uncle to the Kanaio kids.

Dogs with names like Honeybear and John Wayne, Killer Dude and Argonne, Surf-Baby and King K break into fights over table scraps and too-close sniffings. Everyone has stories about what happens when a good bowzer goes bad. They get their head chopped off. It’s a lesson, brother.

Stories also abound about a series of county busts several years back. Police wore camouflage and came down the side of the volcano from far above, where they’d been dropped by helicopter. Said they wanted to break up a thriving crystal meth business. Snooped into everything. Got threatened, hit, slightly mauled when the arrests came down. Which caused more arrests.

But the cops haven’t been back. Too hard to get up here, people maintain. That’s why the roads stay 4 by 4 only. That’s why everyone keeps an eye out. People want it that way, much like the West during rancher days. Or the way they remember Maui from the early 1960s and 1970s, when cattle were still the big business up here, before the hippies came.

People here drink a bit too much for their own good. Wives take to hiding guns when binge time comes around. Men walk around bruised and unkempt. Brad tells us about Kanaio-style emergency care: duct tape and super glue. Over the course of a few days we see it in effect, or after the fact, on several men. Big, mean-looking sutures. It’s funny, and slightly menacing.

Funny thing, too: everyone’s named Paul in the hood—Hawaiian guys with stringy hair and half beards, Southern crackers who’ve pulled their teeth out with pliers. We meet three kids, all named Paul. Everyone laughs when hearing I’m also a Paul. Means I must be okay. Do the shaka sign, someone says… like this, a Paul tells me, waving his hand low to the ground like a surfer hanging ten. He smiles a big grin, so I shaka back.

Every once in a while every homestead is suddenly eating loads of beef. That means someone’s poached a cow from a neighboring ranch. People up here don’t like going much further than Upcountry for shopping.

Upcountry is the area of flower and weed farms we came through the first night, scattered roadside communities near the Sun Park, the Morihari Market and Chinese stores where everyone runs up accounts for their beer and ciggies. There’s a hardware store down in Kula. Brad keeps saying it’d make sense to do a second one up here for all the local men, the Pauls who all do a bit of contracting when they’re not patching their own homes. Even though they’ll easily travel two or more hours for a contracting job, they don’t like leaving Kanaio much. They’re sick of employers who get mad about men having a few sustaining beers while on the job. And hours. Like, who keeps time? Wasn’t this Paradise?

My wife and I take to exploring the local flora. It’s amazing what can grow through lava, catching what it can from the sun and rain for nourishment. Kipukai, a mesquite-like tree, has subtle blossoms. There’s something like heather that nestles in low rocks. Cactus and spindly-limbed shrubs. There are names for everything but most of the people in Kanaio can’t remember them. They just know what smells good, and what’s collectable for native leis.

Brad heads out one day and clambers over needle-sharp lava rocks to get some rare flowers that ride high in the gnarliest of local trees. His friend, Meadow, is a fan of the sweet-smelling Plumeria. My wife loves the honeysuckle allure of wild tobacco. Everywhere you look there’s something new. The place is fecund, overflowing, hard to tame.

When Brad starts a frustrated flurry of work trying to finish the shack he’s been talking about for years, we pick up tools and clothes, lighting implements and wires, and create some form of order. We cut back the junk trees in a small arroyo next to the shack and move in a giant picnic table, build up a firepit. We string Christmas lights (which will later break Brad’s power grid). His 12-year old daughter Jesse, my wife’s niece who she’s not seen since a toddler, is coming for the holidays. We want to capture a sense of spirit out of the disarray.

All that’s in Brad’s home is a giant television and a bed. After a few days there’s a kitchen nook, a table, some pictures up on the walls. We invite the neighborhood: Uncle Dennis, whose property this is and who’s let Brad squat the far end of the property; Meadow, the Californian goat herder with a heart of gold and a penchant for marrying the wrong men; Dennis’ son Little Dennis, always on the verge of boiling anger; Quentin, who’s just recently married a German lady with a host of blonde kids. When not drunk and bitter, Quentin goes net fishing off the lava coast down-country. He’s supposedly a genius at pulling in prize fish, none of which he or the others in this community like to eat.

Kanaio is one of the stranger edges of America. It’s a circus side show where folks can’t be called geeks. It’s like Quasimodo’s beloved Sanctuary. The Hawaiians know the specialness of the place. It’s somehow apart from the concrete block houses that make up Hawaiian ghettos on the Big Island or in the vast expanses of bustling, dying Honolulu. The sea’s omnipresent, the other islands popping in and out of view. There are no trees brought in from other parts of the world. And back when the French explorer Jean de Francois La Perouse first landed on Maui in 1786, this is where the population was based. Here, where the weather is always cooler.

The tourists that swarm the rest of Maui just don’t make it up here. Maybe to the winery, a half hour away. Maybe on the road to Kaupo and its cute store, and then the Hana side of the island. But people turn around at the cattle guards that separate the 40 or so miles of empty road, surrounded by lava fields and the looming rise of the volcano, from what they were expecting in the South Seas.

Which may be why everyone says the place is utter shaka.

Christmas in Kanaio starts early with a wild boar hunt from ATVs, the hunters egging their dogs on. Everyone started drinking a few days beforehand—it’s the holiday spirit, they say. Time’s spent with guys looking into engines, hands firmly planted in back pockets. Womenfolk hold babies, hosting cousins and half-sisters and stepbrothers and uncles and aunts from all over the state, with great Peyton Place caches of woeful gossip and sordid tales. Everyone’s got good weed to pass around in joints and bongs and brownies. Yet they keep it out of kids’ view. Call it local discretion.

Some of the ladies, married into the Hawaiian community but originally from Indiana or Kentucky, a bit bloated and skin-scorched by Maui’s constant sun and wind, decide to put up lights. The effort takes all day. At nightfall, they sit around drinking pineapple wine, waiting for their men to return.

It takes only a year or two for those seeking refuge up here to gain that singsong dialect that’s pure Hawaiian. And with the dialect comes a shrinkage in language. People will read the daily Maui News, they’ll listen to the all-Hawaiian music radio station and its homebred broadcasts from the Big Island, and they’ll catch what’s happening in the wider world via giant television satellite hookups. But they won’t look at books much, or read magazines, or talk culture.

Christmas Eve, the guys come back with nothing but several small deer, eventually traded for a giant domestic pig which gets butchered, cleaned and carried up a back mountain 4-wheel drive path to a plywood sheep herder’s cottage. Meadow’s house. Many of the men know it well. She’s central to a wide world of exes, and matron to a number of women going through troubles.
It’s time for the Kanaio community’s Christmas luau feast.

After dressing the heralded kalua pig, the ATV dudes dig a four-foot hole, line it with lava rocks and banana leaves, then heat the whole thing with a bonfire fueled by mesquite wood, shack leftovers, several cases of beer and an endless stream of Maui Wowie bowls. The next day, Christmas, everyone lays the dressed pig onto a bed of chicken wire and moist banana leaves. This is placed over the coals. More leaves cover the whole thing, which is then covered in blue and brown tarps and two feet of black lava soil. This whole contraption is called an imu. It draws a crowd like a swami in India.

The resulting spoon-soft kalua pig gets served with white bread, white rice, macaroni salad and more beer. Kids play with BB guns. Long-haired bare-chested bronze men drink in full-body swigs while discussing generators and quick ways of stealing water and cows. Womenfolk blow fuses with short-lived displays of Christmas lights. A radio plays an endless mix of Christmas tunes done Hawaii style. A shy hippie dude from higher up the mountain plays ukulele.

Morgan has just earned a PhD in studies of the South American ayahuasca vine, a powerful hallucinogen. He goes on and on about how he’s planning to take over where Big Island grower/philosopher Terrence McKenna left off when he died. Morgan, with his Wyatt Earp mustache, seems to survive on capture-and-release diatribes. He keeps talking until someone finally smacks him so hard he’s knocked silent.

Stuart is a braided white-beard sadhu from Colorado. He drives an expensive Toyota Land Cruiser and yaps on and on about a Finnish family who have discovered a pre-Ice Age Hall of Records.

Henry Silva is a leather-faced older guy who walks like John Wayne and is famous for making saddles and being, well, famous.

Gabriel’s wearing an ankle bracelet, trying to break a crack addiction that led him to hold up a Bank of Hawaii without a gun. His dad turned him in after he spent all the bucks on generators, Steinlager and drugs. He says, quietly, that he loves nothing better than kalua pig. And beer. And drugs. And women…

Kenny talks for hours about his blackout problems while boar hunting. Paul’s living with his ex-wife so he can provide shelter for a crack-addicted daughter and her five under-four year old kids. Bobby’s a former prison guard who spent four years as a prisoner after his fishing partner disappeared following a major Methadone Clinic bust. He’s now born-again. Tommy’s pulled three of his front teeth out with pliers. His family’s from North Carolina, though he claims rebirth the moment he hit Oahu twenty years earlier.

The women tend to cluster around kids and each other. They prepare the side dishes and talk about problems. Who’s been drinking again. Who’s cheating on who.

A beautiful teenager speaks about going to college in the coming year. She’s been practicing hula since a girl, part of the ethnic craze for the almost lost art that’s grown as big as the martial arts in recent years. Fawn asks the girl to show us what she can do but she begs off. She doesn’t have her outfit. The air’s too chilly up here. There’s no music.

Her mother, who’s been downing beers and spewing a litany of get-rich schemes she’s been hatching for years, tells her little girl not to worry, mom will sing for her hula dance. But only after supper.

The men have pulled the pig from its pit and placed it in a cleaned bathtub. The bones have been picked out and everything placed in large-sized aluminum temp-containers. One dude’s been very carefully cooking up teriyaki beef. The boys have all been helping out the men, and are now sitting down with pig meat and root beers, exhausted.

Before everyone’s gathered, all have eaten. There’s no toast, no formal sit down. It’s like the food has just come and gone.

My wife gathers the hula girl and her mom in the tent. Some of the men stumble in and take chairs. The kids sit on the floor. The women teeter in the background. It’s chilly and quiet when the hula girl appears, barefoot in jeans and tank top, a flower hastily placed in her long luscious hair. She nods to her mom.

The mother sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in extra slow time, her voice quavering somewhere between Judy Garland and a drunken slur. But the girl takes to the sound and interprets the words with a lilting pumping of her strong supple blue-jeaned thighs. Her arms beckon, pull away. Her eyes look far off, past the back of the temporary garage tent to that idea of Paradise that’s brought us all here. It’s a stunning performance, heartfelt and raw. Every last one of the men, women and children in this place get tears in their eyes. The dance has entered our souls.

A half hour later, when the men start fighting, women pack the food into ziplock bags and put it in ice-filled coolers. They double check the generators, switching electrical current from solar to running truck engines. They sit my wife and me down and explain that although the men drink and fight so much, they’re basically harmless.

Just before the imu got opened, as Richard the shy hippie played Bob Marley tunes on his ukulele, Uncle Dennis stumbled up to me with sunglasses on, even though it was already an hour past sunset and the only light around were hurricane lamps.

“Hey, brother, I call you New York Man,” he said in his sing song pidgin Hawaiian accent.

I steadied my footing, awaiting a two-by-four upside the head.

But then he turned and swept a hand over the distant view of ocean and miles-away hotel lights, twinkling 3,000 feet below.

“Paradise’s far, but at least we can still see it,” he said to the wind before turning back in my direction.

He raised a close-fisted hand then extended thumb and pinky in the shaka.

“Take back the good word, brother,” he said, pig smoke rising behind him. “It ain’t all good. It ain’t all bad. Doesn’t need to be.”

“If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea…” reads the inscription on Charles August Lindbergh’s grave on the far side of Maui. It’s part of a larger quote from Psalm 139 that continues with, “even there thy hand shall lead me.”

The gravesite is lush, 25 miles and over an hour’s drive around the lava flows from Kanaio. It’s behind the fourth church headed east, not counting St. John The Less. That’s including a French-looking place with weeds and ruins, the low-lying place that’s always open by what some call Seal Beach, and the first of the lot, just down from Brad’s place, that’s no longer open.

We stop by there one afternoon and ask to look around. The woman looking after the place stands around the entire time we’re there, following out our every move. She talks to her kids in Hawaiian. No shaka signs for her, no cool.

We learn later that the Kanaio Church should be open but this woman looking after it has got it in her head that the church is better kept vacant until the community gets its act together. We hear this in various versions throughout our time on Maui, usually a prelude to long harangues about the rights of Hawaiians, the way everyone’s getting on each other’s turf and the sad decline of things in general.

The churches on the southern edge of Maui, open as sanctuaries and weathered but alive, are about the only thing left of the pre-settlement years, when this side of the island was its most populated. Back before Mt. Haleakala’s last eruption. Back before the things people wanted for themselves and their families began changing.

Lindbergh first saw this coast when he was in his final years. He was visiting a friend who’s now buried near him at Kipaluhu, along with his friend’s goats all lined up under headstones. Lindy had reached his strange, lone eagle years, when he rarely slept in the same place for more than a week. And this was the place that gave him peace at the same time that it reflected what was deepest at his troubled core.

It’s hard not to think of Lindbergh while in Kanaio. There’s the way Lucky Lindy pushed himself into fame via what was basically a massive gamble. A failed Congressman’s son, Charles hadn’t known what to do with his life. He’d liked flying, but it wasn’t what his background had prepared him for. Then in one fell swoop he changed himself—and the world—by flying nonstop from Long Island to Paris in a single-winged plane from which he couldn’t see ahead. Took two sandwiches, a small supply of water. Hallucinated. Landed to a crowd of several hundred thousand Frenchmen ready to ride him into their capital on their shoulders. Became the first great celebrity of the modern age, despite his incredible shyness. Found a wife in the hubbub, a fellow government official’s child. Together, they hid from the spotlight, but also taunted fame by hiding. He taught her to fly. They had a baby. The child was kidnapped from a dream house before they could call it home. The trials and tribulations dragged on for years. The Lindberghs, moved overseas to try and quiet the storm of celebrity, blamed the media.

After the trial of his son’s alleged kidnapper and murderer, Lindbergh had a successful career helping major airlines get up and running as an industry by doing tours of European countries to assess their air forces. Along the way, he grew impressed with Germany’s Third Reich. He didn’t see them as tyrants, found himself impressed with their underlying snobbism, which he’d fallen into himself after years of hounding from the press. A prickly situation ensued. Lucky Lindy refused to call Hitler evil. When the War started, he campaigned against U.S. involvement in it. He was wrong, it turned out. Very publicly wrong.

The way I started seeing it, Lindbergh’s great mistake was to have a bad opinion and stand by it until forced to apologize. He still wasn’t allowed to fly for his nation when he changed his mind about the War. So he flew surreptitiously, under pseudonyms. He knew the maps and the terrain, having flown much of the Pacific over the years. He even shot down Japs, bailed planes, did all the heroic stuff all over again, albeit in T.E. Lawrence-style understated fashion.

After the War, he wrote books. His wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, also wrote. The two topped the bestseller lists, won Pulitzers, kept at their lives. Bought a home in Connecticut. He dabbled in the sciences, inventing an artificial heart. Kept traveling as if to escape whatever it was that had made him wrong in the war years. He became an avatar of the World Wildlife Federation, his travels taking him into wild areas of the world where he became a true friend to indigenous peoples. He came to Maui in the late 1960s, and bought a patch of land as far from everyone else as he could. He settled in Kipaluhu, a long dirt road away from the wet side of Hana, then still remote. Kanaio wasn’t available yet. But it was the same as what he bought.

Even when lush, the southern side of Maui is otherworldly. The rocks seem to have been placed in strange messages as yet undeciphered. Patterns show themselves: ripples in the giant puddles that wrap trees after heavy rains, the juxtaposition of cows and leafless trees in a lush green lava field, the crazy passion of local gravesites, built up and heavily festooned with photos and pop iconography lamenting those passed away at the early ages of 40 or 50.

The men who built Lindbergh’s pine coffin are minor celebrities now. So are those few who attended his final service, held in Hawaiian so no one could complain.

Kanaio is a rough and tumble land. There’s a drama to its contrasting edges: green fields bounded by razor sharp lava rock, deep blue ocean harboring hungry sharks, soft beaches lapped by treacherous riptides. Occasionally, one can find remains of past lives: a foundation here, old car parts there. Like the arroyos that can fill with flash floods at any moment. Like the bottled emotions of those who have come to call this coastline home, ready to spill over at any moment. It’s just the guns that make it hard, the alcohol, the things one uses to anesthetize oneself to the terrible beauty that is life here in paradise.

The people who live here have chosen to inhabit an edge that has dangers we’ll never know. To open that world up for closer scrutiny would force all of us to look closer at what it is that defines us, as well as our problems. That, in turn, would force us to look even more deeply than we have into the make-up of our own human family than any of us would want to. It’s enough that we endure divorce and alcoholism, violence and the threat of rape, addiction and rampaging egotism.

Brad told us after one particularly confrontational, drunken evening that if he could, he’d go farther away from the center, closer to the edge. But he didn’t know where to go from where he was. His property was already bounded up against a border fence that he was contemplating moving. Beyond was nothing but deeper wilderness, more fierceness, greater self-consciousness.

“Why did they even think of inviting me to their son’s birthday party?” he kept hollering, wounded like an animal, after he and a neighbor had fought. “Don’t they know I can’t be trusted? Why do you think I’m here?”

All of the people we met in Kanaio had similar stories to tell. They’d tried living in the anonymity of cities, or the comfort of family compounds on Kauai or the Big Island. Some had spent time in the wilds of Alaska, or the bayous of Louisiana, looking for places where they could be as they were without causing too much trouble. To Fawn and I, this community seemed to be perperually poised over a powder keg, yet this was where these refugees felt safest.

Many of the people we meet talk about healing themselves with new herbs and vines. They speak of South Americans who have means of spiraling through death to the lessons on the other side. So they overuse the means as medicine to cleanse their alcoholism, their anger. But it just becomes a cycle. One drinks to sickness. One takes the medicine to get well again. And on and on.

This is a beautiful, strange life these men and women live, poised between the everyday and the fantastic, between the heaven of their hopes and the hells of their addictions. There’s an innate poignancy embedded in their guilt over tarnished pasts, their grand hopes for idyllic futures.

Brad wants to build a two-storey addition onto his shack, a home for his daughter and her mother, his ex-wife Suzie. He draws up plans, scours the sides of roads for the pieces he can eventually put together in the form of a palace-like home. And yet he’ll never be able to match the two ladies’ ideal: one of those manufactured homes from the other side of the island that looks just like what they’ve seen on television, from the mainland, from Xanadu.

This landscape is built for nurturing, and is flourishing now, but feels destined to fail.

Some have said that when one dies one enters the flow of history. But that doesn’t take into account the wildness of a place like this, where the present swallows all that came before it. Here in lovely, harsh, compassion-testing Kanaio, death simply places one into the spectrum of life. Which is as endless as the horizon, as the cycle of rain and drought, as the strangeness of life on a volcano.

I asked Brad about death once. He said there is a place on the other side where it’s all okay. He tells me that he’s defined his death already via the sharp edges he’s used to define his life. He said he knows this from his medicine, from his pain, from his experience of Kanaio.

I tell him too few people can even see the beauty of a Kanaio any more. They need the quieter, more picturesque beauties to match what they’ve been given as a definition of life.

But dude, Brad tells me. That’s not how it is. There is a greater beauty and a spirit in life and it can sometimes only be seen at the edges, in the darkness, in the spiral of blood and anger.

I tell him how I can’t get over my brother’s death-bloated face in the polaroid the cops gave me to i.d. him. So Brad says get over it. One of his first memories was of finding a dead body on his front porch and running. And how, now, he wished he’d not run.

But he had, I said. Yes, he said, he had.

Which in a way is how he, and his sister and I, have come to discover Kanaio. And the compassion and edges of life itself.

“No More Oil, No More Bullshit” by Daniel Pinchbeck (Arthur No. 17/July 2005)

Administrator — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:08:26 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 17 (July, 2005)

Illustration by Arik Roper

“Here and Now” column by Daniel Pinchbeck

“No More Oil, No More Bullshit”

The recent appearance of a sizable excerpt from James Kunstler’s new book in the glossy pages of Rolling Stone may well represent the beginning of a cultural sea change. It is not that the argument presented in The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century is particularly new—in fact, the bulk of it was offered by Thom Hartmann’s The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight (1999), as well as World Watch editor Ed Ayre’s God’s Last Offer (1999), among others. The significance is that the mainstream finally finds itself compelled to pay attention to it. What these authors have been telling us is stark and simple: Our current form of mass post-industrial civilization based on fossil fuel consumption and over-use of natural resources is about to end. There is no way to prevent a collapse that may be more or less sudden, and more or less cataclysmic. All we can do is decide what to do in the time that remains to prepare for it.

The reason for this radical and imminent shift is the exhaustion of cheap fuel, causing a continual and irreversible rise in energy prices. In Hubbert’s Peak, Kenneth Duffeyes, a former geologist for the oil corporations, made a convincing argument that we are passing the point of “peak oil,” and the oil that remains underground is exponentially more difficult and expensive to extract. As Kunstler—and Hartmann, and others—report, there is no real replacement for fossil fuels in running our current sprawling, suburbs-based, energy-wasting civilization. The end of cheap oil (accompanied by the almost more worrisome depletion of clean water reserves the world over, as well as the various side effects of accelerated global warming) will cause extraordinarily far-reaching changes in the way life will be lived by all of us, in the near future.

In The Long Emergency, Kunstler takes a hard-nosed look at the consequences of our profligate ways in the last decades. “Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.” He offers a cogent regional analysis of what America may become in an energy-scarce future, in which social inequity increases, paramilitary activity escalates, and desperate urban ghettos riot at a level exceeding all previous phases of unrest. As sea levels rise by several feet in this century, low-lying cities such as New Orleans may disappear underwater. At the same time, water-scarce regions like the Southwest—and cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas—should become essentially uninhabitable. Along with forced mass-migrations out of unsupportable areas, Kunstler foresees the “end of industrial growth, falling standards of living, economic desperation, declining food production, and domestic political strife,” as well as a probable increase in terrorism.

And yet, as severe as Kunstler’s diagnosis is, his prognosis is not all bad. The massive changes caused by our energy emergency will force community building, re-localization of industry and an ethical revaluing of life, as well as a careful attention to all living processes. The passive consumer-trance of our current age will no longer be possible, as people who want to survive in this new world will have to be fully participatory as well as fluidly adjustable to continual changes in social structure and environment. In the end, Kunstler’s perspective is similar to Hartmann’s, who foresees, in the collapse of the steroid-pumped values of the current dominator culture, a return to the consilient and collaborative life-patterns of indigenous tribal societies. Prolonged, long-distance war such as the current Iraq conflict will, also, soon be a thing of the past: “A point will be reached when the great powers no longer have the means to project their power at a distance,” Kunstler notes. All of our institutions—from schools to government—will have to be reconfigured, downscaled and re-localized to mesh with our new realities. “Social responsibility to the community will be hard to evade,” he writes. “The pervasive and corrosive idea of just being another wage-earning ‘unit’ in a consumer society will be dead.”

Although Kunstler considers this approaching crisis to be a “long emergency,” reaching full-blown form by the middle of the 21st century, there is another possibility. According to this vision, the long emergency may actually turn out to be a short emergency of a year or two, followed by a movement into a vastly different—and far superior—way of thought and action for humanity as a whole. By this alternative perspective, humanity is currently going through an accelerated evolution in consciousness that will culminate in the creation of new social systems and new spiritual possibilities. My own thinking on this subject led me to the study of the outsider hypothesis that considers the Mayan Calendar to be a model of the evolution of consciousness, culminating in the establishment of a harmonic and compassion-based global civilization before the end-date of the Mayan Calendar on December 21, 2012. An excellent video presentation of this point of view, by the artist Ian Lungold, is available at www.mayanmajix.com; Carl Johan Calleman’s book The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness is another useful tool for exploring this radical vision. According to their meticulous study of the fractal model of time apparently presented by the Classical Mayans, Lungold and Calleman propose the year 2008 as the point of collapse for the current socioeconomic paradigm, to be superseded by a new form of consciousness and a unified planetary culture in the following years.

A “new form of consciousness” may sound like a specious concept, but it is one that many philosophers and visionaries have proposed, and tried to define, from Ken Wilber to Sri Aurobindo, Carl Jung to Jean Gebser. My perspective is that, as part of this 2012 transition, we are witnessing an integration of the modern rational mindset with the archaic shamanic or esoteric worldview—many people I know seem to be paying closer and closer attention to synchronicities and psychic events that appear in their lives, not in a naive or fuzzily “New Age” way but in a very sophisticated and careful manner. Such a shift is almost impossible to quantify—though the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton University is giving it a good shot, placing random number generators in cities around the Earth and noting significant statistical deviation from normal patterns of randomness after—and even hours before—major world events such as 9/11 or the massive tsunami.

The subjective, psychic, or shamanic aspect of being is only barely alluded to in Kunstler’s analysis of a potentially spooky, Road Warrior-like future (he does propose religion will become more essential to many people, with the melting-down of our current support systems), but it is one that needs to be considered. Dean Radin, Director of the Consciousness Research Laboratory at the University of Nevada, has compiled and analyzed the statistical evidence for “psi” phenomena, presenting the data in his book, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (1997). According to his meticulous study, thousands of experiments in telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance have fulfilled the scientific requirements of verifiability and repeatability, indicating that these phenomena do, in fact, exist, and can be measured. In our current understanding of psychic phenomena, we may be in a similar place as the West was in the 1750s in regards to electricity—the scientists of that time had noticed lightning and static shocks, but had no conception of how to convert this energy into a transformative force for their world. It may be that the transfer to a harmonic world will be accompanied by global psychic experiments focused on planetary healing.

Rather than thinking of a retraction or destruction of human possibilities in an approaching economic collapse, it might be that such an episode would be bracing as well as clarifying, leading to a sudden switch-over of the elites who run our crudely globalized and inequitable world-system. It is worth considering previous epochs of revolutionary change, such as the French Revolution. Before the French Revolution, the Enlightenment philosophers, pamphleteers, and cafe intellectuals of the ancien regime had little clue that they might end up the vanguard of a new social order. Revolutionary moments are mythological and archetypal situations—and we may be closer to such an episode than most of us currently dare to imagine. After all, before 1989, how many people managed to predict or even imagine the sudden and astonishingly peaceful fall of the Berlin Wall? Would the collapse of Wall Street—symbolizing a system of abstract monetary value that is a bit like a parasitical artificial life form feeding on the natural capital of the planet—be any more surprising?

If this alternative hypothesis is correct, the time between now and the approaching change-over represents our singular opportunity to develop alternative paradigms and basic support systems—of food production, alternative energy, new currencies, and so on —that could be applied on increasingly large scales as the mainstream socioeconomic system continues its inevitable entropic decline. The macroscopic utopianism of someone like Buckminster Fuller—who believed humans were fated to succeed on the Earth, designing societies of abundance rather than scarcity—may deserve more of our current attention than the dystopian visions that have become so prevalent, and so popular. At the same time, the pursuit of spirituality may come to seem increasingly less fuzzy and more pragmatically necessary and straightforward. When Yogi Bhaijan —the master of kundalini yoga who died last year—was asked by his disciples to define the true meaning of the long-awaited “Age of Aquarius,” he replied bluntly: “No more bullshit.” His answer may be a mantra for our time.

“Never Too Much, Always A Little Less”: Erik Davis on Alan Watts’ recordings (Arthur No. 16/May 2005)

Administrator — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:35:22 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 16 (May 2005)

Never Too Much, Always A Little Less
Erik Davis on the recently reissued recordings of Alan Watts’ Zen talks, haiku poetry and other moments of intense perception

Recently the good folks at Locust Music have seen fit to release three unusual Alan Watts recordings. Watts was a very social guy, and he hobnobbed with many Bay Area mavericks after moving to the region in the early 1950s. One of these characters was Henry Jacobs, a pioneering musician, sound collagist and radio prankster whose oddball 1955 Folkways debut Radio Programme no. 1: Henry Jacobs’ Music & Folklore was also reissued on Locust. That disc was culled, in spirit if not in fact, from the “Music & Folklore” show that Jacobs hosted on Berkeley’s insanely forward-looking free-form radio station KPFA. Jacobs was a Pacific Rim kind of fellow—he played tons of international recordings on his show, and was married to a Japanese woman named Sumire Hasegawa. In the late 1950s, Jacobs formed Musical Engineering Association, a record label in Sausalito devoted to the sort of east-west fusions that characterized much of the budding California consciousness movement. MEA issued three albums from Watts, along with some recordings of S.I. “general semantics” Hayakawa; they also recorded commercials for Japan Airlines.

The first Watts record, Haiku, begins with a side-long lecture by the former Anglican priest about the relationship between Zen and haiku, the highly formalized Japanese poetic form of seventeen syllables. In his classy, comforting, tweed-jacket voice, Watts describes the “profoundly startling simplicity” that lies at the heart of both practices. The talk is a fine example of the sort of shimmering and crystalline lectures that Watts could seemingly produce at the drop of a hat, often live on KPFA, and that still blow through the mind like a cleansing breeze. On the second side, Watts reads selected haiku, grouped according to the four seasons:

Outside the window, evening rain is heard
It is the banana leaf that speaks of it first

Following each selection, some Caucasian cats with Japanese instruments, including Jacobs, set off little improvised bursts of Japonica, not unlike the dramatic punctuations of a Takemitsu samurai soundtrack. Then Sumire Jacobs chants the poems in the original tongue. The contrast between Watts’ calm, storytime tones and Sumire’s witchy and Noh-esque singsong is marvelous, although best listened to with full attention and a receptive state of mind. As Watts explains on the first side, the sparkle of haiku partly depends on the open mind of the listener. In contrast to the over-saturation of our contemporary mediascape, the message of haiku is, as Jacobs explained elsewhere, “mystery: never too much, always a little less.”

Haiku sold decently. The intelligentsia were then fascinated with Zen, and the New York Times gave it a positive review. So MEA put out Zen & Senryu, a less successful but still worthwhile collection of Zen poems and satirical Senryu verse, drawn from Blyth’s Haiku book and Zen texts by D.T. Suzuki, Nyogen Senzaki and Watts. The poems are delivered in the same format as the readings on Haiku. The collection includes some classics—almost Zen cliches at this point—but some real gems as well:

Even in the mind of the mindless one
Arises grief
When the snipe wings up in the autumn evening
Over the marsh

The second side of the disc represents a more wry and modern side of Japanese poetics. In the senryu poems, the attention to the thusness of ordinary life refocuses on the absurdity of ordinary life:

The husband’s toenail jumps into the sewing box

Overtaking and passing her
I saw that she was not much

In the right space, these two Watts recordings go down like a cup of oolong tea in the late afternoon. This is IT, on the other hand, goes down like a bubbling vat of Haitian jungle juice cut with a fresh batch of Sandoz crystal. The origin of the recording, often pegged as the first aural document of psychedelia, seems to be a late-night free-association fest dedicated to nothing more than the pursuit and expression of The Ineffable ITness. Watts and Jacobs are joined by Roger Somers, who drums and chants, as well as other hipsters, including percussionist William Loughborough, hitting and plucking congas, bass marimbas, and a lujon. On the surface level, the recording resembles an improvised bongo jam between beatniks with exotica leanings, with moaning mantras, shaman rattles, faux gagaku, and dribbling Afro-Carribean beats. But just when you think things are just going groovy, some little nonsense ditty or stoner chant suddenly bristles into something ancient and enormous. The vocals of Watts and Somers are particularly intense, as words devolve into werewolf barks and demon coughs and windigo roars that are truly hair-raising. The contrast between Watts’ guttural incantations and the erudite diction on the earlier MEA discs could not be stronger, but both modes are equally inspired, and equally expressive of the same quest for authentic spontaneity.

This is IT was recorded in 1962, at the peak of Watts’ interest in LSD. The back cover copy quotes from The Joyous Cosmology, which was written the same year and features a thinly disguised account of tripping with Somers and Gidlow at Druid Heights. Given the historical context of the recording, and the surreal and incandescent mind-meld it captures, it is impossible not to regard This is IT as a documentary recording of an LSD session at a time when the meanings and routines of psychedelic experience were barely articulated. For this reason alone it is an exceptional recording. This is what freedom sounded like in Marin County, 1962, and it became the fountainhead and prophecy of so much freakiness, sonic and otherwise, to come. But the condition of their neurons doesn’t really matter—on “Fingernail Poem,” Alan Watts may simply be drunk. What matters is the blast these mavericks send our way from the far fields that fringe our more mundane realities. In this way, This is IT achieves the goal of haiku: a moment of intense perception, the lightning strike we profane by thinking only that life is fleeting.

Locust Music: locustmusic.com

C & D bicker about new records (Arthur No. 15/March 2005)

Administrator — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 03:13:41 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 15/March 2005

Nina Simone
Baltimore
(CTI/Legacy/Epic/Sony)
D: [to tape recorder] Hello. We are back!
C: [very formally] It is time to exchange views once again, after our brief vacation from these pages. A vacation, I might add, that was not entirely voluntary—
D: But we will speak of that some other time.
C: Everything was going well until they caught you putting the potato in that Hummer’s exhaust pipe in front of the military recruitment center.
D: I told them I was removing the potato that I had just witnessed some crazy anarchist put there. I was actually de-vandalizing their truck—
C: But, strangely, they were not convinced. Especially after they found the grater in your jacket.
D: Yes, well…
C: [Yawns.] Please remind me to forget to call you next time something is going down, because I can’t afford any more of these “vacations.”
D: Soooo, Nina Simone’s 1974 album Baltimore has been reissued.
C: Apparently she didn’t want to make this record. She didn’t like making the record. She didn’t like the finished record. And it’s such a good record!
D: The title track is the greatest Randy Newman cover of all time. I mean, Randy Newman done in a loping funk mode? If you’ve ridden the Amtrak through Baltimore, the route it takes gives you an unobstructed view of a horribly blighted ghetto, and her voice here really captures that sadness.
C: I’m guessing she thought the more pop-orientated /songs were beneath her, that it was somehow undignified for her to sing Hall & Oates’ “Rich Girl,” and maybe she was right on that count. But this is really a unique Nina Simone album, and frequently magnificent.

Antony and the Johnsons
I Am a Bird Now
(Secretly Canadian)
D: Give me that. [looks at sleeve] I was happier when I didn’t know what he looks like.
C: Hey man, everyone looks like something.
D: It’s like if you heard Pavarotti singing and then turned out he looks like Pee-Wee Herman!
C: Well, how hard is it to just listen to the music? My goodness.
D: I’m just saying.
C: This guy’s voice is known to have moved Lou Reed to tears. I might be wrong, but I don’t think Lou Reed cries very often. The tracks of Lou’s tears…
D: …could not extinguish torch songs this strong. So very beautiful. [towards end of album] Yet here we have instance number eighty-seven-thousand-four-hundred-and-two of a greaseball, cheeseball Saturday Night Live style saxophone solo ruining another otherwise faultless song.
C: Clarence Clemmons, so much to answer for.

The Kills
No Wow
(Rough Trade)
D: They still don’t have a drummer? Another incomplete band…
C: That means that each get an entire half of the proverbial pie! Great opening salvo, it’s the drum beat equivalent of a strobe light in the face. They have a song about asking if you got the real good cigarettes from the store like I asked.
D: A frequently posed question around my house.
C: There’s that chugalug thing they do so well, on the chorus of “I Hate the Way You Love.” You can ride that into the sunset. By taking instruments away, rock’n’roll has reminded us that at it’s core it’s dance music. Fewer instruments means the sound has room to breathe. And breath plus beat equals boogie. Even if the beat is that of a machine. See? Drum machines do have soul.
D: I am more enamored with their human qualities. Speaking of which, I’d like to give a hearty salute to VV for being that rarest of regional species: the untanned Floridian.
D: [end of “Rodeo Town”] That is so Velvets! She is fearsome yet vulnerable, a potent combination.
C: The fella in the group goes by the nom de rock Hotel. I think Motel would be more appropriate. Someplace where rooms can be rented by the hour.
D: [Listening to the three note piano riff on “Ticket Man”] They should use piano on more songs. And they should use more of the piano, period. I think there’s 85 more keys to be precise. It’s like the music has been shaved to an inch of its life.
C: I’ve always said there’s two types of people: the shaves and the shave-nots.
D: Not as catchy as the first album, but The Kills aren’t dead yet.

M. Ward
Transistor Radio
(Merge)
D: [listening to “One Life Away”] He actually says, “I’m visiting my fraulein”! An inspired approach to breaking into the hofbrau circuit. How sweet is this…you could whistle or hum along to this entire album without feeling stupid once.
C: This guy seems unassuming. I’d like to hang out with him in an Airsteam trailer crossing the country. Easygoing, but clever. He’s making lyrical origami out of the sad history of rock on “Fuel For Fire”: “I’ve dug beneath the wall of sound/the song is always the same/I’ve got lonesome fuel for fire/And so my heart is always on the line.” This album is genius. For fans of Dylan, Red House Painters/Sun Kill Moon, even Chris Isaak aficianados feeling frisky.
D: I have seen M. Ward. He has curly hair. And if the hair is curly outside your head, it means there is something curly going on inside too.
C: This song “Big Boat” is the dis track of the year! All about how this guy who says he’s got a big boat really only has a tiny dinghy! HAHA!
D: “I’ll Be Yr Bird” – a bird reference, just like Antony. The whole lot are ornithology-crazed.
C: What do you think the M in M. Ward stands for?
D: Megamensch. Obviously.

Fiery Furnaces
EP
(Rough Trade)
D: Ween covering Kraftwerk?
C: It’s like they’re playing the zaniest parts possible. Zappa plus Sandy Shaw plus Miami bass plus Peter Frampton talkbox plus “Da Funk”-era Daft Punk. [as song builds] You can hear why this band has such a good live rep. And there’s the Disneyland Electrical Parade. Geniuses, pushing it forward: a band mashing itself up. And dig those fistfulls of piano notes!
D: Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger, I salute you. Or I would, except I am sitting on my hands in an effort to behave.
C: Somewhere, Neil Hagerty doesn’t feel so lonesome anymore.
D: Todd Rundgren looks up, with interest.
C: Friedberger & Frampton has a certain ring to it. The law firm that rocks!
D: That’s very similar to an Echo & Bunnymen song, “Killing Moon.” [tries singing along]
C: You can’t sing along with this record. How you going to do “fireman Frank friendly fed fee-free/daznk dusty doughnuts den da dribble drank”? Can you imagine Fiery Furnaces karaoke?
D: Only after multiple pitchers of margaritas.
C: Pace yourself, please.
D: You may call me Margarita Friedbergerhead from now on.
C: I may not.

Louis XIV
Illegal Tender EP
(Pineapple/Atlantic)
C: More complex melodic pop, lotsa cool elements. One song goes into a violin and horn shuffle! Uptempo, Fall-Stones swagger.
D: “Are you ready Steve?”
C: Especially the garage-glam stomp here. I love the theatricality of these guys. Brian May type clipped, melodic, strutting guitar. What a tone.
D: You know, it cannot be coincidence that Brian May and Louis XIV, I mean the historical figure Louis XIV, have the exact same hairdo.
C: There may be something to your curly hair theory after all.

Kings of Leon
Aha Shake Heartbreak
(Atlantic)
D: I can’t understand a word he’s saying but I like the way he’s saying it.
C: Hawaiian washboard, dub reggae bass, tropical storm strumming… Prince Valiant takes a holiday in Waikiki. Then it goes into a Strokes/Beefheart/Talking Heads thing, taut’n’funky.
D: These guys appear to be cooking up something in the shack in back. Remember that time we were driving through Llano, Texas in search of Cooper’s Pit BBQ, and suddenly there was so much smoke in the road we had to pull of?
C: And we pulled right into Cooper’s parking lot!
D: Yes, well, Kings of Leon have a compellingly smoky sound that make me think of that. Big britches and brisket.
C: This band is like, all brothers or cousins or both. And Fiery Furnaces are brother and sister. How come my siblings were never that cool?
D: I’m sure they feel just as highly about you.

Wolfmother
Wolfmother EP
(Modular)
D: This rocks! Straight outta the penal colony commonly called Australia. “Purple haze is in the sky/See the angels wink on high!” I can understand and appreciate every word.
C: For fans of Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath. Of which we are two.
D: When I was last in Australia, I drank beer made from Tazmanian water. It gave me special insight into the psyche of the Tazmanian devil. And, I believe, into the dark hearts of Wolfmother.
C: Dude, they have a song called “The White Unicorn”!
D: See, if they were from Brooklyn, that would be irony. But Australians rock unrepentantly and irony-free. This is the way for me.
C: Break out the two-hitter.
D: It’s a no-brainer.

Parchman Farm
Parchman Farm EP
(Jackpine Social Club)
D: [listening to Mirror Spirit] “Heyyyyy something’s burning/Again.” I know that feeling.
C: Cool screecher gnome there, doin’ the bluesy shouter vocals. But he’s got that yowl that echoes.
D: Some of the Grand Funk/Cactus/ZZ Top boogie woogie oogie.
C: Harmonica. Roadhouse! Makes me wanna pour some Jameson’s in my latte. I’m still waiting for some piano or the proverbial blazing lead guitar. Like Dickey Betts, she takes a while to get into it but then—
D: She?
C: Yes, she. Guitar mixed too low. They really foreground the vocals and hi-hats.. [listening to “Too Many People” still] When she soloes…she has a real good solo flow going, it’s non-rushed, just thoughtful melodic lines. Hardly anyone plays like that anymore, it’s a lost virtue, being able to jam it out without going all melismatic on the fretboard. I am digging it, I just wish they’d turn it up more.
D: [listening to chant that starts midway “Chosen Child”] This is for the people who want to mellow their harsh.
C: Another Bay Area band. Shit! This and Comets On Fire and High On Fire, all from the same bioregion. Unbelievable.
D: The West Coast is in the roadhouse again! [looking at sleeve] Another EP??? First incomplete bands, now incomplete records…
C: I like how their songs can switch direction hard in the middle, or in the final third. There’s a loosening of the song structure rules. They need a deeply psychedelic ballad with all the trimmings—Mellotron, phased vocals—and so on here somewhere.
D: That’s the flaw in the flow.

Heartless Bastards
Stairs and Elevators
(Fat Possum)
C: Another chick guitarist playing rock n roll. Cool voice, she can really siren-ate when she wants to, nice Nirvana chords, catchy vocal turns, not the best lyrics especially “New Resolution.”
D: I resolve to skip this song.
C: Her name is Erika Wennerstrom.
D: Kind of a country voice.
C: I picture her hand on her hip on “Runnin’”—awful song titles by the way—scarf on her head, in a heat-fogged kitchen at the stove, kids running around, telling off her husband, at the end of her rope… “I hope there’s a higher ground/Cuz I’m going steadily down.”
D: Sounds like there’s a piano under there, I’d love to hear her without a rock band, away from the plodding bass, although I kinda like the plod on “The Will Song.” It does have a nice tug to it, that groove she’s riding.
C: When it starts stomping on “Swamp Song”….look out. That’s her tempo.

Sunday Nights: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough
(Fat Possum)
C: Featuring Heartless Bastards doing their righteous shitkicker stomping on “Done Got Old” – weirdly defiant given its sad lyrics, so maybe that doesn’t work on the conceptual level – why would you be so proud that you can’t do what you used to? – but it sounds awesome. In a way it’s the Led Zeppelin treatment.
D: I’d buy this just for the Spiritualized track. That’s a brainstormtrooper.
C: The Stooges, doing two versions of the same song, one of Junior’s cruelest.
D: Hey it’s the Black Keys rocking. Hey it’s our friends the Fiery Furnaces, man listen to that fleet fingerwork. That’s like hillbilly Mahavishnu Orchestra stuff right there.
D: Birds of Fiery Furnaces!
C: Thee Shams’ track is a stomper too. Stomp is the tempo of the year! Queens of the Stone Age, Kings of Leon, Louis XIV…
D: I gotta get some new boots.
C: More Stooges here at the end with Watt. Iggy is saying frankly unsayable things. And the band is getting down into the meat of the monster. Lock up your daughters. And your sons too.

Love’s a Real Thing: The Funky Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa (World Psychedelic Classics 3)(Luaka Bop/V2)
D: Not sure what’s specifically psychedelic about this.
C: …Other than it might expand some people’s consciousness to listen to electric music from Africa. We always forget that there are kids who haven’t yet lucked into hearing King Sunny Ade or Fela Kuti or Ali Farka Toure or Tinariwen, yet…
D: These guys shoulda been on the Junior Kimbrough tribute album instead of Mr. BUH-LOOOZE Explosion, who is, after all, the worst kind of novelty artist: a failed humorist.
C: Mmm that’s true, now!
D: “Better Change Your Mind” by William Onyeabor is the coolest homegrown soul-funk I’ve heard in some time. Like a home demo of a bitter-but-still-sweet-singing Curtis Mayfield giving a word of advice.
C: There’s a Fela cover on here—I think, I could be wrong—“Ifa,” by Tunji Oyelana & the Benders, what a monster groove that is.
Hey that’s the beginning of theme song for The World on NPR!
D: “I’m Lisa Mullens.”
C: “And I’m Korva Coleman!”
D: “Let’s do the numbers!”

The Chemical Brothers
Push the Button
(Astralwerks)
D: Push the “off” button.
C: Drugs help with this kind of music, but not as much as they used to… So much machine repetition, like a child’s TV program. If I’m going to live in a loop, I want it to be organically played, not by robots.
D: If I am not mistaken, and I seldom am, Keyboard Money Mark already had an album called Push the Button. Mark’s button was better.
C: They always are lifting off other people. Remember when they started out, they were calling themselves the Dust Brothers? Bizarre. You can’t sample someone else’s name for your own name!
D: Unless you have good lawyers.
C: Let’s at least salute them for “Left Right,” an antiwar electro-stomp song featuring American rapper Anwar Superstar. “What’s the difference between Bush and Saddam?…If it’s so important for us to fight for mankind/Why don’t I see any of they kinfolk out on the front line?” Sounds like your standard-issue late-’90 know-nothing No Limit rapper, except he’s pissed off and he’s aware.
D: Maybe I’m a misty-eyed optimist but this could be an anthem. Somewhere, poor Soulja Slim is still crying.

Ian Brown
Solarized
(Sanctuary)
C: Speaking of aware. I think Mr. Ex-Stone Roses singer here has been reading his Galeano. This little chant at the end of “Upside Down” (which is the tile of Galeano’s book of fury): “Seven percent own 84 percent/Of all the wealth on earth/Oil is the spice to make a man/Forget man’s worth.” That’s some pretty heavy stuff. I always get the feeling that the music Ian Brown is most into is really rasta reggae, because that’s what his political perspective and lyrical approach resemble, even if the music doesn’t always.
D: [Listening to “Time Is My Everything”] Ladies and germs, you are witnessing the cheesiest horn recorded in the last four decades.
C: That really is outrageously bad. That’s the kind of thing that people usually get disciplined for. Lose their jobs, no severance, future wages garnished by court order…
D: [listening to “Destiny and Circumstance”] I like his voice but this music is just embarassing. That guitar work is just [haughty voice] dreadfully dull. I can’t be bothered to listen to it. You bore me, Ian Brown musicians. [listening to the title track] It’s better when it’s more tripped out like this.
C: Yes, but…
D: [“The Sweet Fantastic “ starts] There’s that horn again!?!
C: All this electronic stuff is the wrong approach for him. He’s so close to the earth, he should use as few electrical appliances as possble. Just natural human energy playing drums and guitars, and for goddsake real horns. Street musicians in Morocco, or Cambodia, or Brazil. Anything but this.

Kasabian
Kasabian
(RCA)
C: British band, hot over there. Live in a barn.
D: Let’s do the numbers. Obvious inspirations: Happy Mondays, Regular Fries, late-period Primal Scream.
C: Lads on LSD, into raves and comedown music, but enamored by rock n roll’s inherent mystique and power.
D: Plus Air.
C: [belches lightly] Pretty decent for a first record.
D: Yep.
C: They could write an anthem or they could become something embarassing. We shall see.

Coyote
Inside EP
(Birdman)
D: Based on the evidence before the court, the piano is really making a comeback in music…
C: This reminds me of the guy who shows up at your party and you have to figure out a non-confrontational way to make him leave. Sounds like Drive Like Jehu or the Rapture or Entrance at a full-moon piano recital at an iceskate rink. They’ve already got the organ there for these guys.
D: Reminds me of the circus scenes in Wings of Desire.
C: Always back to the German filmmakers with you. Well, I’d rather hear some Vincent Price narration than this guy’s Crime and the City Solution impression. But the music’s pretty good.
D: This last song [“Sharing Your Soul With the Group”] has a nice gothic flourish to it. And a decent chord change.

Mirrors
Another Nail in the Remodeled Coffin
(ROIR)
D: Cleveland band. The legendary Mirrors!
C: [listening to “If I Swear”] Very angelic voice, like if Peter Cetera was fronting the Feelies. I have a theory that all music that comes out of Cleveland reflects that state of its sports teams at the time. I bet this was from the era when World B. Free was playing for the Cavaliers. And Super Joe Charboneau was having his one and only big season hitting home runs.
D: Wasn’t he Snoopy’s favorite player? I think Snoopy wrote letters to Super Joe that went unanswered.
C: No, I think it’s Charlie Brown that wrote letters to Super Joe. Anyways I bet this was created the year the Indians had 10-cent beer night and there ended up being a riot. It was music made on the cheap for everyone to have a good time to, but things got a bit out of control and everything went up in flames in the end.
D: I think this stuff is just as important as Television, but of course Mirrors were not from New York City so nobody talked about them then, or now. Except for themselves. As frontman Jamie Klimek writes in the sleeve notes: “Dedicated to all the people I’ve worked with whose names I can never remember. You know who you are. I sure as hell don’t.”
C: One gets the sense that the feeling was mutual.

Jennifer Gentle
Valende
(Sub Pop)
D: Michael Yonkers?
C: No, it’s some varying-fidelity weirdbeard Italian psych band. At first this sounds like Animal Collective, without the dizzyness, alittle more twee. But you know, I’m not into sped-up voices.
D: Smells like Demento. “Fish heads, fish heads…”
C: But this [“Circles of Sorrow”] is gorgeous. Intimate, slow-dawning rural psychedelia.
D: Whispering is underrated, under-used. Morrison used to do it all the time, there was a reason for that. I once heard Bjork whispering some Anais Nin erotica on the radio and I almost fainted. When your instrument is your voice, you gotta use every thing it can do. The ears will respond.
C: And beautiful birdsong here at the end of this song, beginning of the next one, entitled “The Garden Pt. 1.”
D: Now they are birds. Please, gentle Arthur readers, stick with this album, its riches lie near its center, like a luscious basil-mint blow pop.

Bird Show
Green Inferno
(Kranky)
D: Everyone’s gone bird-crazy. Ornithologists all.
C: Birds, flute drones, gamelan, bells: meditative. Reminds me of Kraig Grady’s false ethnographies. And Jon Hassell’s fourth world records too, of course. And Holger Czukay. And late-period Talk Talk. Anything David Toop wrote about in Ocean of Sound, you know?
D: And like that other drone-unit on Kranky that we adore: Growing. Wonderful, brilliant lifebuzzing stuff. Birds taught humans to sing, but since then humans drowned them out with their own voice and instruments. That was our loss. Perhaps it’s time for us to start listening to their song again.

WHERE WILL IT END?: J.G BALLARD, interviewed by V. Vale, introduced by Michael Moorcock (Arthur No. 15/March 2005)

Administrator — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 02:32:06 +0000

V. Vale, with J.G. Ballard

This feature was originally published in Arthur No. 15 (March, 2005).

Where Will It End?
From his home in an English suburb, controversial novelist J. G. Ballard wonders if there is something fundamentally flawed about the American take on reality. Interview by V. Vale, with an introduction by Michael Moorcock.

Born in 1930, J.G.Ballard spent his formative years in a Shanghai civilian prison camp, experiences which form the basis of his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, filmed by Steven Spielberg. In England he abandoned his medicine degree at Cambridge to become a technical journalist. His first stories in New Worlds, Science Fantasy and Science Fictions Adventure from 1956 including “The Voices of Time,” “Vermilion Sands” and “Chronopolis” are in The Complete Short Stories of J.G.Ballard (2002). Three novels, The Drowned World (predicting climate change), The Crystal World and The Drought increasingly reflected his interest in surrealist painting. The Terminal Beach in Science Fantasy (1964) marked a new phase, dispensing altogether with the conventions of science fiction.

Appearing in New Worlds, which by then I was editing, “The Assassination Weapon” (1966) was the first of Ballard’s “condensed novels” where iconographic personalities and events became the basis of narrative. Other stories included “The Atrocity Exhibition Weapon,” “You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe” and “Plan For The Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy” in New Worlds and, increasingly, in literary magazines such as Ambit and Transatlantic Review. His work encountered considerable hostility in the United States, where its irony went largely undetected. Doubleday, the publisher of The Atrocity Exhibition, ordered all copies pulped after it was printed. It eventually appeared from Grove Press in 1970. Meanwhile, “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” became the basis of a UK court case, while his “Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race,” “lost” by his U. S. agent, eventually appeared in New Worlds and Evergreen Review.

He remains a seminally controversial writer hugely admired by the likes of Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Fay Weldon, Angela Carter, Iain Sinclair and most of the best science fiction writers. Described as pornographic and psychotic when first reviewed, Crash (1973) was filmed by David Cronenberg starring James Spader in 1996. Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise (1975) continued similar themes of our psychological and sexual relationship with contemporary phenomena and iconography. The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) and Hello America (1981) are enjoyable satires; his autobiographical The Kindness of Women (1991) was a sequel to Empire of the Sun. Recent novels like Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000) and Millennium People (2003) continue to develop techniques describing his unique experience and his notion that contemporary bourgeousie have become the new slave class. Today he lives in the same London suburb where he settled some 45 years ago and, as a widower, raised three children, eschewing electronics and still working at his typewriter. Combining the creative insight and originality of a modern William Blake, Ballard is our greatest living visionary writer. —Michael Moocock

The following is an excerpt from an interview conducted by V. Vale by telephone following the Nov. 2, 2004 United States elections. The interview appeared in J. G. Ballard Interviews, available from http://www.researchpubs.com. J. G. Ballard Quotations is also available from the same excellent publisher.

V. Vale: I wanted to get your “take” on the neo-cons and Bush, and your perspective on what happened with this election in November, 2004.
J. G. Ballard: I’m sure you and your readers have had an absolute Niagara of comment on the subject, so I don’t want to give anything but one European’s perspective on it. But there’s no doubt that most people over here on this side of the Atlantic were hoping for a Kerry victory. There’s something very frightening about Bush and the neo-con group. Donald Rumsfeld is quite a scary figure—putting it mildly.

One feels that Bush and his closest advisers are entirely driven by emotions. They’re no longer driven by a reasoned analysis of where the world is going, and what the U.S. response should be. They’re driven by this visceral need to express their anger—you know, their anger and, really, rage at the world. One feels, listening to people like Rumsfeld, Bush himself, and one or two of the others like Richard Perle, that the world is seen as an extremely hostile place. And moreover, they want it to be a hostile place.
They need enemies who can be challenged and then destroyed. This is a kind of psychology that people in Europe are very familiar with, going back to the psychology of people like Hitler and his henchman, and then to Stalin and the whole paranoid stance that both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes had towards their enemies. If they didn’t have enemies, they would soon invent enemies. Because they’re absolutely hung up—and I suspect Bush and the neo-cons, to a surprising extent, in a great democracy like the U.S., are hung up on this need to hate and this need to destroy. And of course it’s frightening, because where will it end? Today Iraq, tomorrow Iran, and the day after, hmmm… maybe France, you know, because given their mindset, there will be no shortage of enemies.

I think there’s nothing particularly extreme about saying this. I think it’s what people over here perceive of as part of the dangers of this situation. Nobody thinks there is a connection between the 9/11 attack and Saddam Hussein. There’s no connection at all—it’s quite the opposite. Hussein was running a secular regime. Bush and Rumsfeld have created a kind of unstable regime dominated by religious fanatics in Iraq, of the Khadafi kind they thought they were getting rid of!

So it is unnerving. It leads us to question many other areas of the American world view. Is there something fundamentally flawed about the American take on reality? I say that as a lifelong admirer of the U.S., by the way. But it does seem to me that a lot of the formulas that govern American life—in particular its entertainment culture—have leaked out of, say, the Hollywood films and into political reality. That’s frightening.

I’ve got a feeling that Americans, who have always been admired and always been liked for the most part, don’t take kindly to being disliked. Unlike, say, the British and French, who have been disliked since the year “dot.” The Americans don’t like being disliked; the reverberations of 9/11 are not going to go away. I’m sure there will be other attacks of a similar kind and they will keep the pot boiling.

Yes. And these days, the Bush Team seems to basically dictate press announcements to the press as “news,” and then the news media just gladly print them without any critical stance or analysis. Recently in the news there was the declaration: “Well, we think Iran has weapons of mass destruction.” Obviously Team Bush is gearing up for an attack on Iran—
Well, it does look like that. What’s worrying is that that will be an automatic response: “So, it’s going to be Iran next.” I can’t imagine American ground forces are going to roll across the border, but I can see strategic bombing attacks designed to destabilize the present regime and knock out their nuclear research installations. But, the consequences would be disastrous for the world economy if the huge oil supplies locked up in the Middle East were interrupted. God knows what will happen.

We saw a preview of that in Mad Max, didn’t we?
Yes, absolutely. It’s a worrying time because Bush seems to delight in the sort of mythological version of himself which he’s created: the swaggering Texan who is supremely confident of his ability to stare down any mean guys who get in his way. Rumsfeld seems to come out of the same corner of the fairground. Some of the others, like Perle whom we see a lot of on British television, and Wolfowitz whom we also see, are much more intellectual and they provide a smooth rationale.

Something worries me. This goes back to the period of 40 years ago when strategic planners in the Pentagon were heavily influenced by game theory, John Von Neumann and others. They seriously believed there was a window of opportunity that the U.S. should take while it still enjoyed nuclear supremacy. This was the time to strike, before the Soviet missile deployment would match the U.S.’s. From what one reads, serious thought was given to picking a fight with the Russians and then obliterating them! One sees something of the same mind-set at work today, and it’s a little bit scary—

[laughs] To say the least. Wow. I’m very cautious of conspiracy theories because you can drive yourself crazy—you will never really know who killed JFK, for example. But at the same time I’m very interested in the underlying thinking that doesn’t get publicized, like the game theory of John Von Neumann. You don’t hear much about that anymore, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t go away—
I think it’s come to the surface again, hasn’t it? It’s something I’ve argued for a long while. In my last novel, Millennium People, I was putting forth the proposition that nothing disconcerts people more than an apparently meaningless act. If a hostile act in particular has some sort of obvious point … if you’re an anti-globalization protester and you picket the offices of some multinational company, or even if you blow up their showroom windows, everybody understands—they may disapprove, but they understand. But on the other hand, a meaningless act really unsettles people for obvious reasons, because we look for logic. To some extent, the tragic events of 9/11 constitute a kind of meaningless act.

What do you mean?
I haven’t seen any convincing explanation of what Mohammed Atta and his fellow hijackers were trying to achieve. I mean, this is a spectacular blow against what we’re told is—was—an American symbol: the twin World Trade Center towers—

The WTC was a spectacular symbol of American economic dominance over the world, I think—
I don’t think they were seen as such by the rest of the world. They were seen as two very tall buildings. I’ve never heard anyone refer to them. Now, the Empire State Building, and to some extent the Chrysler Building, had enormous symbolic value, which I remember back in the 1930s, soon after the Empire State Building opened for business. That stood for New York, and it stood for America. But I’ve never heard of the World Trade Center thought of in those terms. I’ve never heard anyone in any television program, documentary, article or book refer to the World Trade Center towers in the way, for example, that people always refer to the Pentagon as a threatening presence.

I think the WTC towers were elevated into this position of representing American capitalism after the event.
Well, whether they were or not, the point is: the attack on them was really meaningless—it didn’t achieve anything, apart from killing a huge number of people. It was almost a meaningless act; the logic was difficult to follow. If you hated the U.S. so much, there were other and better targets, in a way: the Capitol in Washington, the White House, the Pentagon itself—one plane obviously wasn’t going to do enough damage; all four planes could have gone into the Pentagon. The symbolic value of an attack, say, on the White House or the Capitol would have been far, far greater. By comparison, the attack on the World Trade Center in New York was really … it almost comes into the category of a meaningless act … and it’s this that people find so unsettling.

I think that when you’re faced with a meaningless act of that kind, the brain rushes around trying to find some sort of conceivable reason at work in the perpetrators’ mind. Although no one is prepared to come out and sort of back Samuel Huntington’s notion of “The Clash of Civilizations”—you know, the Christian West vs. Islam—people act as if the war against the Muslim world were already declared.

In fact, Bush constantly talks about war, doesn’t he? He refers to himself as the “War President.”
Whereas in terms of the huge enormous unlimited power of the U.S. military, I would regard the invasion of Iraq as a police action. I mean, it degenerated into a kind of huge police action now—it’s a “law and order” problem.

The reactive mechanism in Bush’s mind, and in the minds of the neo-cons around him, has been touched off. And also of course, the other thing that sort of worries us in Europe, is the way in which religious belief has begun to merge seamlessly into this sort of war mentality. That is something that is very scary, because it justifies anything. If “God” is on your side and you’re absolutely convinced of that, then you can do anything—

—And justify anything you did.
Absolutely. Going back to the Crusades and religious pogroms in Europe, the Dark Ages, the Inquisition in the 14th-15th century (or whenever), the religious wars … one doesn’t want to get too carried away, but there are unsettling echoes—put it like that.

I think back to earlier American Presidents when I was younger—say, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower … one can’t imagine them ever having gotten into this war in Iraq. Or into this peculiar mind-set, this sort of “Religious Warrior” mind-set. They weren’t riding an emotional horse …

The puzzling thing is: Why has this happened? Is there something within the American view of the world, the way that Americans think, that is responsible? In other words, has the genie escaped from the Hollywood bottle … and got out into the ordinary air we breathe? One can’t help wondering that. The logic that underpins Independence Day and Con-Air and all these films seems to be directing America today. I’m probably wrong, but that’s the impression that people have over here.

Definitely. Those popular films perpetrate a mythology, or inflict a mythology upon Americans … there are all these assumptions underlying those films—
Yes, it underpins those films, and it underpins the American comics that I read in the 1940s. I remember reading Superman comics in 1937, 1938 in Shanghai, and the hero could transform himself—which Bush thinks he can do: he goes into the War Room in the Pentagon and he comes out a cross between Richard the Lion-Heart and god knows who else.

There is the idea that if what you’re doing is “right,” and “God” tells you so, you have unlimited power. That’s a very powerful combination, actually, if you happen to be President of the U.S., but it’s frightening for the rest of the world. I mean, I can imagine a world where everyone is so frightened of the U.S. that we all convince ourselves that we admire it absolutely, and will agree with everything America demands of us, but that will not satisfy the man in the White House at the time. What he needs—or it may be a she, although I would think that Hillary’s hopes are rather slender at the moment—I mean for eight years’ time, whenever. But there seems to be a need … maybe it’s something as simple as the need for revenge—it’s hard to say. But I think it’s more than that; I think it’s the need to turn the rest of the world into a free-fire zone where anybody who puts his head up out of the nearest ditch is going to get it shot off. That way they’re safe.

But, it may be a passing phase …

NOT A KOOK: Trinie Dalton interviews HENRY DARGER doc filmmaker Jessica Yu (Arthur No. 15/March 2005)

Administrator — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 01:44:02 +0000

Not a Kook
Filmmaker Jessica Yu explores the life and work of mysterious artist Henry Darger in an innovative new documentary.
By Trinie Dalton

Originally published in Arthur No. 15 (March 2005)

In the Realms of the Unreal opens with shots of artist Henry Darger’s dusty homemade books and scrappy art supplies, with actress Dakota Fanning relating how Darger sought solace in art after a childhood as an abused orphan. This bit of biography prepares audiences for Darger’s own summary, narrated by actor Larry Pine, of his life work—a cryptic 15,000-page epic novel detailing a war waged over child slavery—at first illustrated onscreen by stills of Darger’s startling art. But it’s when one of his drawings comes to life—a girl flaps her butterfly wings and flies away—that you realize director Jessica Yu has taken biographical documentary to a new level.

Using animation constructed from Darger’s artwork, Yu opens a door into Darger’s hermetic world of evil, adult Glandelinians and their captive Vivian Girls—cute, Shirley Temple-ish girls who sometimes sport horns, wings, tails and penises. Lightning flashes in stormy skies, soldiers fire guns, and monsters called Blengins circle through the clouds. These nightmarish scenes, it turns out, harken directly back to Darger’s own past: nuns, mean teachers, and childhood enemies from his early life reappear as Confederate army members, often slaughtered on the page as a way to recoup his mental losses. (One especially cruel bully morphs into General John Manley, head of the opposing regime.)

Henry Darger grew up in asylums for feeble-minded children, and spent his adult years as a recluse. A self-taught artist who made a living as a janitor, he lived in a small apartment in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago, secretly recording the war between the Glandelinians and Vivian Girls, down to the last casualties and debts accrued. Incredibly, no one knew of his prodigious artistic talents until his landlords discovered Darger’s work upon his death in 1973 and began to share it with the public. Countless articles and several books have since been published on Darger, but never has his art been actively portrayed as it is here, embellished by a storytelling voice that sounds the way Darger’s voice may have sounded: gentle but curt, impassioned but matter-of-fact. Add in several interviews with neighbors, including one with Kiyoko Lerner, and you get a fascinating—if necessarily speculative—picture of Darger inhabiting his strange fantasies.

Animating someone else’s art is a controversial proposition, doubly so with Darger. His sincere, exacting artistic approach required that he dedicate every second of free time to perfecting his techniques. The boxes of pencil nubs, tall stacks of visual reference and piles of used watercolors that Yu’s camera scans across demonstrate that Darger was his own harshest teacher and critic. Fortunately, Yu’s animators kept the special effects to a minimum, going more for an old-fashioned, paper-doll like style rather than the gaudy Pixar look. The animation is charming and loyal to the work.

Yu’s last two films—the Academy Award-winning Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of John O’Brien and The Living Museum—also documented artists who overcame physical and mental challenges. She’s friendly and open, making it obvious that she’s doing what she loves. I interviewed her at her home in Los Angeles, as she was preparing to travel to Chicago, Darger’s hometown, for the film’s opening festivities.

In the Realms of the Unreal is screening in select theatres across North America through April.

Arthur: How did this film come to be?
Jessica Yu: I was giving a talk about my last film, The Living Museum, about a group of artists in a psychiatric center in New York. A reporter in the audience knew the Lerners [Darger’s landlords], and he asked me if I’d heard of Darger. The next day he took me to Kiyoko Lerner’s house. Kiyoko showed me some paintings, then she let me go up to his room by myself. Before this, Darger had been an abstraction to me. But I felt such a strong sense of his presence in his room. Everything in there said something about him. I wanted to tie together the feeling of that room with some comprehensible look at the work, so that we might get a sense of who this person was.

There’s so much great footage of his room in the film. Did you shoot that footage on your first visit?
No, I went back to ask Kiyoko about making a documentary. She was open, but cautious. She doesn’t want people to exploit Darger’s work. I wanted the room to substitute for Darger himself. To do this, I tried to get movement in all the shots, and we shot a lot from where he sat at the desk. I imagined how he might have looked at the room. He had his central point, gazing up at the stained glass window of the dove, sitting at the table surrounded by his work. It gives you a sense of how he lived.

Was your fascination rooted in a love for Darger’s artwork or with his tragic story? Or both?
It was combined. Some art can stand on its own, but Henry Darger lived through his art, so you can’t separate his life and work. We only have Darger’s mountain of work, a few supporting materials, and then his actual presence in the outside world. There’s so little evidence of his life. I was tantalized by the fact that you can’t really know him. I embraced the idea of the mystery. Nathan [Lerner] used to say, “Just because there are questions doesn’t mean there are answers.” Nathan took questions as a statement. This beautiful philosophy applied to Darger. In a film, you don’t want mystery just for mystery’s sake—that can be frustrating—but if you can say something about a person’s life and impact, you can satisfy in another way.

The speculative aspect of the way the interviews were spliced together, with everyone guessing about Darger, was satisfying.
When we watch something, our brains naturally seek answers. I had to set the film up early on not to be that way. It’s more an emotional or imaginative experience.

Did you feel like you got to know him?
I don’t think we could now sit down and share a beer, but I do think I have a better appreciation for where the work came from and how it served him. I have a context for it. The problem with exhibitions of Darger’s work is that they don’t give people enough context for the work. People come away thinking, “This work is amazing, but what a kook.” It’s easy to dismiss him as a man who couldn’t control his imagination. But actually, he was extremely methodical and he had a strong sense of purpose. His world was bizarre, but you can see that he was shaping everything. The fact that he was creating it for his own eyes really shows how singular the work is.

You’ve said that you became Darger-like while researching. Did you get depressed? You clearly decided to imbue the film with as much hope as possible, rather than dwelling on the negative.
I only felt depressed while learning about his early life. There were so many orphans at the turn of the century. But since most of my research was about his work, and because his work operated as a wondrous substitute for the world, it was with a state of wonder that I faced this. Museums tend to focus on his most violent images, so people get the impression that he was this angry person barely capable of controlling his rage. But only a fraction of his pieces depict girls being crucified, raped, and torn apart. He used this other world as a place to release emotions, of course, but it was also the place where he enjoyed himself. I thought this was going to be a tragic story in lots of ways, and he certainly didn’t get to live his early life the way he would have chosen, but I realized that while he appeared to be this timid, shuffling old man later in life, what he was doing was very audacious. To decide at an early age that you don’t need the outside world, that you can live inside your imagination, that you can create meaningful relationships in your mind…? He was really bold.

He faced one of our greatest human fears, being alone.
While we imagine the horrors of living on a deserted island, he was grappling with the question, Can a man be an island?

Did you relate to his obsessions, in terms of being a director?
Definitely. Creative flow was so easy for Darger. He generated this excitement, this momentum, when he got home from work every day. That’s part of what makes the novel difficult to read, however. But I admired this about him.

How do you feel about Darger being labeled an outsider artist? Part of that comes from the belief that he was probably schizophrenic.
It’s ironic because he’s the ultimate insider. He wasn’t trying to be a part of the outside world. My friend says that Outsider Art is any thing outside of Manhattan, and that’s the commerce side. But on the other side, people label him because they need to. So it’s not terribly harmful if it helps people understand the work. In terms of mental illness, it’s not always useful to have a diagnosis. Darger just doesn’t fit any diagnosis. After every single screening, people come up to me and say, “I know what was wrong with him,” and the answers vary: Aspberger’s, autism, schizophrenia. The problem with that in art is that you tend to then see the creative output as some symptom of a disorder. That’s such a reductive way of looking at it. It undermines the notion of willfulness, the idea that an artist creates work for a reason. The discipline. Darger would sketch clouds, then study different ways to color them. I saw some of these. There was an envelope full of brown clouds labeled THESE ARE GOOD, and an envelope full of blue clouds that said THESE ARE NO GOOD. He wasn’t just obsessed with making the pen move. I wanted to show how meticulous he was. He held down a job, he paid his rent, lived by himself. How, then, does he fit the definition of a person with a serious mental disorder?

His neighbors were so generous to watch over him rather than to hospitalize him at the end of his life.
I know. Most people don’t want to deal with it. He finally got his break towards the end of his life. It’s hard to imagine now—especially in Lincoln Park since it’s so completely gentrified—that he was allowed to keep his fire-trap of a room full of junk, that he was allowed to just work.

Darger seemed so nostalgic, sentimental, really longing for his past. When did you decide to use multiple narrators as a way to complement this idea? There’s the Vivian girl [Dakota Fanning] alternating with Darger’s voice [Larry Pine]. Pine has this great William Burroughs-y voice. Did you want the film to feel nostalgic?
I wanted it to have the quality of a radio play. They narration is nostalgic, but not overly-emotional. I didn’t want an actor to do a Rainman-version of Darger, or to inject emotion that Darger might not have brought to it. With Dakota’s voice, I wanted to do something different. Usually in documentary, there’s this voice of authority that we cling to and depend on to tell us what’s going on, and instead, I felt like a little girl’s voice could be more of a draw into Darger’s world. What’s interesting about Darger’s yearning is that it acknowledges that art is merely a substitute. He realized he was an old man dreaming of the past. People think of him as being stuck in the past, but really he was longing for it.

Were any other documentaries inspirational to you?
No, I tried to look at only primary sources. I was so absorbed in the research that it was hard to figure out how to work it. But when choices are limited, you’re forced to be more creative. So it was fun, too. I had to really script it out. I like to do the writing and editing myself.

How did the animation style happen?
I came up with the 2-D concept. I wanted to animate the action already suggested in the paintings. I kept thinking of Hogarth, how he’d tell a whole story in one panel. And I wanted to use only elements already in Darger’s artwork. The animators took this idea of preserving the texture of the painting and ran with it. For example, we left the paper seams in to acknowledge that we were dealing with physical materials. Finally, we wanted to invite people into his world. In the beginning, there’s only a little animation, but once you better understand the themes in his work, you can follow along more easily with his story.

What about the Civil War parts? Was the war was more about sexual issues than religiosity?
His conflict with God was foremost in what was going on in the war. He couldn’t bring himself to talk back to the nuns. He had an image of God as being Santa Claus. That if he was good, went to church, behaved, that God should come through, and he never did. Even though Darger lashed out at God, renouncing his faith would’ve meant he was completely alone. His last journal entry was, “What will it be?” Did he mean heaven? And then he had two endings in his fiction. He knew he couldn’t control what was beyond him. I wanted the film to suggest that although his life was sad, he had a richness. He had a fulfilled creative life. Tragedies became adventures rather than disasters. You know the lady with the tall hair?

The one who said, “If you’re poor they call you crazy, if you’re rich they call you eccentric. So we called him crazy.”
She said he’d constantly walk the streets, reading the paper, and that he wouldn’t even look up when he crossed a street. He finally got hit, though, and that’s when his health started to decline. But I love the idea that he was so vulnerable, yet he had more important things to do.

What part of the film are you the most proud of?
When people have an emotional reaction—not if they burst into tears—but if they can emotionally respond to Darger. We’ll never know who he really was, but we can appreciate him and have a deeper understanding of his artwork as being a fully-realized world rather than a scattered, random selection of alien images.

“Post-Election Funnies: How do we make art in this political climate?” edited by Tom Devlin (Arthur No. 15/March 2005)

Administrator — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 01:26:49 +0000

Post-Election Funnies

It’s George Bush’s world, they just draw comics in it. A special feature on making art in troubled times, featuring work by Chris Wright, Brian Ralph, Dan Zettwoch, Megan Kelso, Ben Jones, Paul Lyons, David Lasky, Tom Hart, Vanessa Davis, Greg Cook, Marc Bell, Amy Lockhart and John Hankiewicz. Edited by Tom Devlin.

Originally published in Arthur No. 15 (March 2005). Click each image (page) to really enlarge. It’s still not gonna be completely legible—for that, you’ll have to see the actual magazine (available at the Arthur Store for cheep)—but it’s pretty good.

“My Conversation With the Secret Service” by IAN SVENONIUS (Arthur No. 15/March 2005)

Administrator — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:59:56 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 15 (March 2005)

A Conversation With the Secret Service
Was I being investigated as a threat to the president—or as a potential hire for a sinister job?

By Ian Svenonius

I have a suspicion that the current president might be assassinated. How do I know? I was interviewed for it.

About a year and a half ago, I took a call from people who identified themselves as the Secret Service. They expressed an urgent desire to see me, which in their highly considered psycho-babble, was made to sound like a choiceless inevitability.

On the demand for an explanation, the agent, a woman, told me that they had intercepted an email which seemed to implicate me in a plot to harm the POTUS: that is, the President Of The United States.

I immediately surmised that her concern was related to a mass mailing I’d written in beat-prose to attract attendees to a night of record playing at a local club, called “Spilt Milk.” Thinking that my audience would enjoy the same amusements as myself, I had perhaps contained some reference to a dispatched leader of the free world.

The Secret Service’s responsibility was to check out every instance of a threat, no matter how far-fetched.

“We need you to come down to the office. It’s extremely important,” the woman insisted.

To get the initial sale, through, they used a female agent, knowing via a psychological assessment based on telephone and computer surveillance, that this would seem less threatening to me. Like a talented telemarketer, she was gentle but firmly coercive. In fact, the two professions are related, as the FBI and CIA’s inquisition techniques are lifted straight from Nelson Rockefeller’s bible for salesmen, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and feature the exact same mind control tricks. Of course, telemarketers don’t have the weight of state security at their disposal.

“I can’t come down, I’m really busy,” I told her, though my inbred instinct was to obey.

“We’ll come to your house, then,” she insisted, another offer I evaded.

After much back and forth, I agreed to meet “them,” the Secret Service agents, at a French bistro not far from my house. It seemed less likely that they’d kill or abduct me in a public setting.
Before I left my home, I alerted a few people as to the nature of my rendezvous and they agreed to witness the interrogation from afar, unannounced.

When I arrived, the officers were sitting in the outside cafe section under a sun umbrella which said “CHIMAY.” One was the woman I had spoken with on the telephone and she was accompanied by a man in a lowslung baseball cap with some rugged facial growth.

They looked drab and angry, respectively.

As the woman agent clasped the evidence and sat businesslike, her partner assumed the “bad cop” persona, searching me like a berserker and then scowling fiercely through the duration of the meeting. The implication was clear; if he were let off his chain, he would make quick work of me for god and country.

The purpose of this choreographed psycho-ballet is of course to draw the detainee into the maternal arms of the good cop so as to escape the paternal bad cop figure’s wrath. This psy-op cliche was immediately transparent, but it still worked; psychological reflex is at least as dependable as the blood-and-guts kind.

Meanwhile, my own spy witnesses had taken their anonymous positions, taking snapshots innocuously in case I were later dangled from a helicopter by these freak thugs.

When the waiter came by, I ordered a latte.

The mama character drew the offending email from a folder dramatically, like it was a bad report card. She read it aloud, slowly and haltingly as if translating from hieroglyphs.

“Dear Spilt Milk…”

The email flyer was written like a Dear Abby column, with the advice giver having the name of the nightclub. I explained this to the concerned agents who didn’t seem satisfied.

The mama kept reading:

“My partner and I recently had sex change operations to better understand the respective gender’s perspective. It was a very enlightening experience. To better understand the plight of the aged, I’ve been attending sessions at a tanning salon and to better empathize with endangered wildlife, I’ve been listening to a Richard and Mimi Farina LP.”

The agents pretended to be utterly literal and scanned me for signs of bursting hormones and imported genitalia.

I explained that I actually hadn’t had a sex change but that this was meant as a fantastical scenario in the life of a mythical do-gooder.

Again, the berserker daddy looked like he was herniating.

The reading continued.

“Now I’d like to experience psychological derangement; to stand in the virtual shoes of a person who is a would be gunmen, bent on murdering the president. Any suggestions? Signed, Empathy Tourist”

They looked at me, bewildered and shocked, in a sublime pantomime of a 17th-century Puritan couple. As if the culture weren’t littered with so much obscenity and simulated bloodshed; as if these presidential fondlers weren’t de facto collaboraters with some of the greatest mass murderers in history.

Still, the act was perfect; their collective civic virginity had been punctured by these rapacious words.They were awestruck by my audacity.

She continued, though the strain was evident:

“Dear Empathy Tourist,
My dear do gooder, you need look no further than Spilt Milk: each and every dancing lothario there is an aspiring revolutionary whose singular desire is to slaughter the president!”

The address followed but she didn’t read it.

Who was the Empathy Tourist?
Who is Spilt Milk?
Was this nightclub a gathering of would be assassins?
Would I like to kill the president?

A thousand “are you a lone nut” questions followed from a prepared questionaire, which followed the cultural conceit that there is no ideology, only insane people, that to desire the assassination of the president (a person so fine and benign) one would have to simply be a crazoid mentalist.
Responding to their assumed persona of lobotomized dunderhead, I played the part of apolitic entrepeneur, a man whose sole desire was to see asses in seats.

Before this absurd charade was concluded, I declared officially that I didn’t mean to incite club goers to kill the POTUS.

Of course, like the various running dog lackeys who were tapping my phone and reading my mail, they already knew this. The interview was bogus but it wasn’t merely bean counting. In fact, it was maybe something far more sinister.

The whole experience was demeaning like a job interview for some corporation like Urban Outfitters.

And perhaps it was a job interview; there is a good chance that I was being screened as a possible patsy in the RITUAL BLOOD SACRIFICE OF THE FIRSTBORN GEORGE W. BUSH BY HIS FATHER, GEORGE H. W. BUSH, the arch-satanist who has controlled the country for thirty years. Just as Kennedy was ritualistically murdered in Dallas by his inner circle in a magick invocation of a new age, maybe W. will be killed as an offering to moloch or whatever hungry diety demands satisfaction.

Think about it. He has been bred for this role.

The pathos of George W. is evident when one sees him speak. After the initial disgust one feels at his stupidity, arrogance and mass murdering, one is seized with pity at his plight. It’s a simple matter to see that he is merely a husk of a man, a mind controlled puppet; the sad, lame, brain-gone pawn of the various blood sucking high priests of the inner order.

His sobriety and “born again” conversion were really just a cover for an MK-ULTRA mind control program to which W, as a wayward lout, prone to suggestion, was the perfect “candidate”.
Just as Hinckley was H. W. ‘s robot slave, a “friend” of the Bush family, designed to kill Reagan and therefore annoint the elder for the top spot, George W. is another mental muppet, a bizarre construct who must be cast into the flames to realize the elder’s pledge to his illuminated brethren to usher in the final stage of Novus Ordo Seclorum, “the New World Order.” While mass murder of Iraqis, Afghanis and Colombians is an appreciable offering, the firstborn is traditionally the “whopper” of sacrifice.

I was certainly just one of several patsies interviewed for the hapless job of taking the fall. After my encounter, the agents hurried down to the club in question and harassed management there in an attempt to gauge public perception of me. They have very specific requirements, after all.

Not anyone will do.

Like Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan and Hinkley, this new “Lone Nut” will be found with journals of scribbled free verse as evidence of his lunacy…

HOROSCOPE by Becky Stark (Arthur No. 15/March 2005)

Administrator — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 17:07:56 +0000

Horoscope by Becky Stark

Originally published in Arthur No. 15 (March 2005)

Aquarius
(January 21 – February 19)
Many of your judgments have accumulated to create a fortune, a palace and a miracle. You choose again, and you choose the miracle. In your vast explorations of horizons rising and falling, the delight you bring and the fascinations you lead are the priceless seeds of revolution, thought up on a ferris wheel ride!

Pisces
(February 20 – March 20)
In dreams the water comes most. This mystery of you is everlasting, and rest comes from the sands. We take the sand as our character and our part. To feel the whole, we wash these small pieces through our hands. Return to the sand—walk on it, too!

Aries
(March 21-April 21)
Always beginning: the paradox of sublime sorcery. There is none more beautiful than the infant! Beautiful, perfect, divine, child. You are weeping new tears that we can drink. Thank you for the new dance steps, too.

Taurus
(April 21 – May 21)
Dear sweet power of thought: I now devote myself to your relation. The miracle of thinking and how magical this ability is to make reality—these thoughts guide my new world. I accept my leadership within this heaven of earth that is of my mind.

Gemini
(May 22 – June 21)
O my best friend, best friend of all life—the saddest and most funny—in your nature, human life rests its paradoxes. You are greatly loved as the keeper of the key as we enter the theater of utopia. Thank you for having carried this key with you all along!

Cancer
(June 22 – July 22)
You know everything! With this knowledge you also possess everything. The question is: how can you begin to not know things? Your perfect creative mind is manifested when you have the ability to choose what you see, what you hear, what you know, who you are. You already have this ability.

Leo
(July 23 – August 22)
Forgive the sugar. Forgive the salt. Forgive the beginning, forgive the end. Forgive what you’ve taken, forgive what you stole. Forgive when you waken, forgive when you’re old. Love is the beginning, love is the end. Teach me how to waken, teach me how to mend.

Virgo
(August 23 – September 23)
Do you remember when you witnessed the animals coming to drink at the pool below your rock? You sat for hours as they came, some smiling at you. You tell this story to a stranger and the two of you weep with its tenderness. Remember your tenderness: it is the revelation of music.

Libra
(September 24 – October 23)
If a stranger offers you candy, you should take it. If taking it makes you fear for your life then you should take two pieces. Then also you should start giving candy out to strangers, or maybe something more wholesome than candy.

Scorpio
(October 24 – November 22)
Hello children of desire! Be sure your passions are breaking upon the opening chances for life. Remember: choose ecstasy if it is new. When faced with the prison of before, choose the new ecstasy right now. You may experience this as the opposite of your previous or present body. Now prepare for your own power of god.

Sagittarius
(November 23 – December 21)
O sweet love of the perfect aim! I know that your arrows can go anywhere so you don’t like those targets anymore? Go beyond the target and make your arrows return. This is your new practice. Now we all fly on the wings of your arrows! See how we fly! Your cooperative nature is the sexy side effect of such skillful flight.

Capricorn
(December 22 – January 20)
If clowning was like flying, you are a kite! In this way, you catch electricity from the sky! Lightning travels to your paper and pen and we trust your words. This love is so strong around you that soon your comedies will manifest. Keep the comedies in your heart like you keep the money in your chest! If you are wondering, Hmm. Does it matter if my soul lives or dies? The answer is yes—it matters !! P.S. Your soul never dies.

PEACE COMICS by Becky Stark & Ron Rege Jr. (Arthur Nos. 15 and 16, May and July 2005)

Administrator — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:51:48 +0000

Becky Stark: facebook page?

Ron Rege, Jr: http://ronrege.blogspot.com

Arthur Store: Arthur No. 15 (May 2005), Arthur No. 16 (July 2005)

“Trauma Valley, Spring 2005″ by JASON T. “SLIM” MILES (Arthur No. 16/May 2005)

Administrator — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:09:41 +0000

Click image to really enlarge. It’s still not gonna be completely legible—for that, you’ll have to see the actual magazine (available at the Arthur Store for cheep)—but it’s pretty good.

Jason T. Miles: http://jasontmiles.blogspot.com/

Arthur’s superb Comics Editor in this era was Tom Devlin.

“Diary of a Bread Delivery Guy” by DAVID LASKY (Arthur No. 16/May 2005)

Administrator — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 15:57:23 +0000

Click image to really enlarge. It’s still not gonna be completely legible—for that, you’ll have to see the actual magazine (available at the Arthur Store for cheep)—but it’s pretty good.

David Lasky: http://dlasky.livejournal.com/

Arthur’s superb Comics Editor in this era was Tom Devlin.

Wait, you thought something like this would last forever?

Jay Babcock — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 03:41:22 +0000

illustration by Arik Roper

Arthur, such as it is, is set to close March 15, 2011.

The Arthur online archive and Store will remain operational for as long as makes sense.

Thank you kindly, and love to all.

DREAMWEAPON – The Art and Life of Angus MacLise opens May 10, 2011 in New York

W. SWOFFORD CAMERON — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 15:58:38 +0000

Photo of Angus MacLise in Kathmandu by Ira Cohen

Via Boo-Hooray:

DREAMWEAPON / The Art and Life of Angus MacLise is the upcoming exhibit at pop-up / parasite gallery Boo-Hooray presenting the work of the American artist, poet, percussionist, and composer active in New York, San Francisco, Paris, London and Kathmandu in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The exhibition series is open every day May 10th – May 29th and will include an overview of poetry, artwork, and publications in Chelsea, a sound installation featuring the complete MacLise tapes archive in Chinatown, and a night of film at Anthology Film Archives screening never-before seen outtakes from Ira Cohen’s The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda. DREAMWEAPON is curated
by Johan Kugelberg and Will Cameron.

[Sunday Lecture] “Watershed Work in a Changing World: Lessons Not Yet Learned” by Freeman House

Administrator — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 15:53:04 +0000

Watershed Work in a Changing World:
Lessons Not Yet Learned

by Freeman House

Plenary presentation for the California Salmon Restoration Federation’s 25th Annual Conference, Santa Rosa, CA, 9 March 2007

Watershed restorationists tend to develop a peculiar set of mind. Community-based watershed groups, the heart of anything we might call a popular movement toward restoring the Earth, are particularly prone to these psychological symptoms. The accepted protocols encourage us to envision something called “reference ecosystems,” some ideal state of dynamic equilibrium that we are then encouraged to imagine existed once and toward which we should be devoting our efforts. We develop strong attachments to certain elements of the living places in which we work, different elements for different practitioners. Some people love fish and some love trees. Many of us love the whole mysterious web of interrelationships. In all, we act as if the distribution of species and communities and weather patterns—either in the present or in our idealized reference ecosystem — is the once and always way that nature has manifested itself.

Sooner or later, we discover the weaknesses in such an idea. If only by paying attention long enough, we discover that nature over the long term is as fluid and fickle as running water. Recently, researching the prehistory of my region, I discovered something that changed the way I thought of the systems in which I’d been working for more than 20 years. I found that only five to six thousand years ago, the entire bioregion had been a few degrees warmer than it has been since and those few degrees determined a very different distribution of species than those we have been striving to maintain for so long. Most relevant for me was the discovery that in that warmer time that followed the last period of glaciation, there had been few if any salmon using the waters of California. (I found this discovery to be slightly embarrassing, having made public statements which confused the history of salmon speciation with the time that salmon had been using my home river. I would tell people salmon had been using my river for 60,000 years rather than the more accurate 6,000.)

More fascinating, though, is the archaeological evidence of Karuk and Tsnungwe ancestral peoples in the mountains above the Trinity River more than eight thousand years ago. Peoples living today in the Klamath River systems are direct descendants of people who lived through climate changes similar in magnitude to the ones we anticipate now. While those ancient peoples had centuries to adapt to a more gradual change than we anticipate, the degree to which that culture changed its life ways remains instructive. In simple terms, the Karuk people changed the way they lived. They changed from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers living in the mountains and following the food to substantial village cultures with an elaborate ceremonial life organized around newly available acorn and salmon resources. The point here is that a people completely changed their way of life in response to changes in the environment and they did it successfully and sustainably. The scope of change we face is quite different; it’s getting warmer rather than cooler and the rate of change is likely to be much quicker. We may be able to draw no more instruction from the Karuk model than that we adopt similar goals—to change our ways of life in the direction of sustainability and survival. Even James Lovelock, that most gloomy of prognosticators, ends a recent interview that predicts the human species pushed back into the Artic zones with the cheery observation that we are all survivors of humans who have endured half a dozen climate changes of equal magnitude within human time.

Now, you might ask, what does all this philosophizing have to do with how community-based watershed restorationists carry on their work? Climate change models currently available are projected on a global scale with an infinitude of possible local variations. Watershed restoration is by definition a local effort. How can community-based watershed groups include the unknown variables that face us as we make our strategic plans?

There is a hierarchy in the natural world—or rather a number of hierarchies—that have little to do with nation states or the interests of global corporations. One of those hierarchies—the one in which we choose to engage—runs from watershed to bioregion to biosphere and back again.

Response to climate change at the watershed level might be broken into three categories: amelioration of effects, preparation for anticipated changes, and finally, cultural adaptation. These are categories that overlap each other at nearly every stage of their application, so bear with me if what I have to say occasionally seems redundant.

The impetus for this talk came from the realization that in all the strategic planning meetings of which I’ve been a part over the last 25 years, climate change has rarely come up as a criterion for our considerations. Conservation and restoration issues in the face of contemporary extractive rapaciousness tended to capture our minds and efforts in spite of news of global warming occurring with increasing frequency during the same time period. Even as I and my co-workers marveled at the effectiveness with which a few bought scientists were able to maintain a climate of doubt about climate change, we failed to notice that we were in part practicing the same denials, if only by avoiding the words. We were concerning ourselves with the cumulative effects of individual logging plans while the biosphere was dealing with the cumulative effects of the Industrial Revolution.

Nevertheless, in retrospect, we were doing many of the right things in terms of amelioration of the anticipated effects of climate change. We had discovered that the way to pursue our goals most effectively was to build on the resiliency of natural systems to heal themselves. If sedimentation was the factor that was fouling our rivers, then systemically work to reduce potential sediment sources so that the waters could, over time, flush their beds clean. Good roads meant clear creeks. If reduced water flows in the fall are threatening salmon survival—which in the case of my watershed resulted from population pressure rather than from global warming OR extractive activities—then foster an effective community response to water conservation. Such models will be useful everywhere in the face of future instability of stream flow.

And I was evidently not the only one who thought of catastrophic wildfire every time I heard the words climate change, because the Mattole Restoration Council has mounted a monster fuel load reduction program which offers cost-sharing to landowners who wish to pursue it. So far, more than a hundred landowners have signed up, including myself.

I said that we had learned to direct our efforts in ways that augmented nature’s ability to heal itself. The next step in our learning processes is to find the points at which nature’s resiliency can be augmented—in our own watersheds—as whole biomes adjust to disturbances so large that they have only occurred six or seven times within the whole of human history. There’s not time here to deal with the science that attempts to describe the current crisis, but if you’re looking for one readable book that summarizes what we knew as of a year ago, I’d recommend The Weathermakers by the Australian paleontologist Tim Flannery. I’ll content myself for the moment by quoting just a few sentences from page 79 of that book.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, a global warming of 1.13° F. has occurred on our planet, and its principle cause is an increase of CO2 from around three parts per 10,000 to just under four. Most of the increase in the burning of fossil fuels has occurred over the last few decades.

In fact, Flannery points out, we have consumed in the last two decades of the 20th century more than half of the energy consumed in the previous 180 years. You can argue that the environmental restoration movement is a reaction to the industrial revolution, but it’s an alarmingly delayed reaction in the face of such considerations.

Which brings us to the second of my categories: preparation for anticipated changes. We can be grateful that the dam of denial concerning climate change in this country seems to be breaking. The recent conservative UN report on global warning took the last brick out of that dam, most of which had already been removed by a swarm of books and movies, most notably the work of Al Gore. But if one depended on the popular media for direction, one might get the impression that by adopting a bunch of technological fixes in the near future, we can reverse global warming. Not so. Even if we as a species suddenly learned to live within our daily solar budget—and that’s in contrast to our current consumption of over 400 years of fossilized sunlight in the form of oil and coal per year—the planet would still take centuries to adjust to the increases in carbon dioxide levels already present. The fixes we know about from the media all seem aimed at maintaining the illusion that somehow, we our going to be able to pursue our ever-increasing levels of consumption. Again, not true, in fact mathematically impossible. Humans surpassed the carrying capacity of the Earth in either 1980 or 1986, depending on which expert you trust. All we can do is to take action—individually, and as watershed organizations, that will reduce the severity of the impacts we can expect, which is what I mean by the amelioration of future effects.

We are going to experience climate change, and with it changes in the distribution of species, the quality of soils, and on and on. “Animals are on the move,” writes Jim Hansen, director of the Goddard Space Institute. Using data developed in Kansas, he claims that the habitats of faunal species are moving poleward at the rate of thirty miles per decade. We must assume that these rates of movement will increase in the near future and we can take instruction about what that means for us by looking at the current conditions of Inuit peoples around the globe who are dealing right now with the disappearance of a way of life pursued for tens of thousands of years. My own assumption is that those Kansas animals are following the movement of plant habitats, which are moving even faster. We have had the dubious luxury of thinking about ecology as an elegant interpretation of the non-human world. We are about to learn something that the ancestral Karuks never unlearned: that we are ecology.

As restorationists, this inevitable scenario requires that we reconsider the orthodoxy of reference ecosystems. We need now to be dealing with unpredictable future ecosystems; we need to become as canny and flexible and adaptive as our fellow species. The science of ecological restoration must embrace some place- and time-based heterodoxy. I can illustrate this with just one of our orthodoxies, our attitudes toward invasive species. The time is coming when we will need to distinguish between species that are invasive and thus unwanted, and new plants showing up in our watersheds that are expressions of biospheric adaptation. Climate migrants, my poetic neighbor David Simpson calls them.

As before, community-based restoration groups will be among the vanguard in these changes, need to be in the vanguard. Where else will the information we need to act locally come from?

I don’t mean to suggest that it’s not important that every effort be made, both personally and politically, to reduce carbon emissions in an attempt to limit the consequences of global warming. Priuses and solar panels, green building and so on, as well as demonstrations and letters to Congress will remain part of good biospheric citizenship. But these activities and acquisitions will not be enough by themselves to lead us in the direction we need to go which is toward a human culture guided by the restraints and opportunities of their local ecosystems.

Lessons not yet learned

The figures I mentioned a little earlier—that humans had been operating within a deficit in their solar budget for a couple of decades already—create an interesting equation. On one side of the equation is the need to restore natural capital—the resiliency and adaptability of our native landscapes—wherever possible. On the other side is the specter of scarcity of basic human needs. Watershed workers need to be active on both sides of that equation. Rarely mentioned in popular discussions of the effects of climate change is the breakdown of some aspects of the global economy, in particular, transportation. It is going to become simply too expensive to keep our markets stocked with the year-round supply of foods and clothing from all parts of the globe that we are used to. The only response to this situation that I can imagine is a vigorous localism, by which I mean learning to supply ourselves with what we need from within our own bioregions to every degree possible.

Northwest California is a hotbed of such activities. Food security activists are working hard to educate themselves and their neighbors about our potential to feed ourselves and to become gourmets of local food. Public transportation activists are working at every level to break our addiction to our cars. Economic development activists are working to decentralize and localize the production of our real needs. Sustainable forest harvest activists work furiously to invent ways to work in Northwest California’s productive forests in such a way that enhances ecological services and maintains jobs near home at the same time. All these visionaries are working in parallel directions, but too seldom are they working in tandem. What would happen if watershed restorationists began to seek alliances with these other groups to explore ways to build on each other? It’s an exciting prospect. The ambition to become a force for positive adaptive change is at the heart of the restoration movement.

Watershed workers are no strangers to collaboration. This organization, the Salmon Restoration Federation, is a prime example. Even within small watersheds like our own, less progress would have been made without actively seeking cooperative alliances with like-minded restoration and conservation groups and landowners. Now is the time to be seeking alliances with the user side of the natural capital equation with the clearly stated goal of creating truly sustainable local economies.

The other day I talked to a friend of mine who had just finished working on the annual watershed tree-planting project. He’d made good money, a result of the state requiring prevailing wages for state-supported contracts, and he’d worked with large crews generated by the same largesse. This single planter told me he’d traveled over 80 miles round trip each day to and from the job in a remote part of the watershed. One has to wonder just how much those little trees will have to grow in order to sequester the carbon that the workers had released into the air. Hoedads used to travel in crew crummies to their jobs and camp on site. We might need to think of similar arrangements. I will have traveled over 300 miles to give this little talk. I could have taken a bus, but I didn’t. These are considerations that will force themselves on us very soon. Has anyone converted an excavator to run on used French fry oil yet? (This is a question I know the answer for. Matt Smith, a lead restoration heavy equipment operator, who has done a good deal of work in the Mattole, has converted all his machines to run on biodiesel made from used deep-fry oil.)

That same treeplanter, though, spent far more time waxing rhapsodic about the opportunity he’d had to become intimate with a remote section of the river, giving testimony to the right livelihood aspect of his work. Already the restoration and conservation efforts in the Mattole have, collectively, become the single largest employer in the watershed, and there are few workers that won’t tell you they feel good about what they do, even if they aren’t getting prevailing wage. (Prevailing wage where? this resident of a poor county has to ask). Every poll shows that a majority of American workers are not content with their jobs. What if the majority of us were working collectively with others to improve our common situation?

The last question I have to ask for which I have no answer is this: how should our monitoring activities be expanded? Monitoring has always played an important part in our work—salmon counts, sediment samples, project effectiveness and innumerable other factors have been developed into data bases to make our work more effective. At what point should we begin monitoring the movement of species and habitats? And how would we do it in a manner that doesn’t eat up every year’s annual budget? I don’t have the training to answer these questions, but someone in Kansas does. And I’d bet that among the membership of the California Salmon Restoration Federation, there is enough expertise to mount an ongoing forum for discussion of this and other issues. We need to take care not to underestimate the self-healing powers of nature, at whose service we put ourselves. If we can imagine the planet having a preference, it would certainly be to achieve some new level of homeostasis rather than falling back a few million years and starting over again.

To end, I’d like to ask a final question to which I do feel I have an answer. In a situation of rapid biospheric and biological change, what in the world might we watershed workers be restoring? I’d have to answer that it is nothing less than the human capacity to live with and within nature. Let’s go forward with that goal in mind.

“Freeman House is a former commercial salmon fisher who has been involved with a community-based watershed restoration effort in northern California for more than 25 years. He is a co-founder of the Mattole Salmon Group and the Mattole Restoration Council. His book, Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species received the best nonfiction award from the San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for quality of prose. He lives with his family in northern California.”

That’s the biographical note for Freeman House on the Lannan Foundation website. We would add that earlier in his life, Freeman edited Innerspace, a mid-1960s independent press magazine for the nascent psychedelic community; presided over the marriage of Abbie and Anita Hoffman at Central Park on June 10, 1967; and was a member of both New York City’s Group Image and the San Francisco Diggers.

This is the tenth lecture in this series. Previous lectures are available here: http://www.arthurmag.com/contributors/sunday-lecture/.

“Modern Ritual” Part 1 by VANESSA DAVIS (Arthur No. 16/May 2005)

Administrator — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 04:29:39 +0000

Click image to really enlarge. It’s still not gonna be completely legible—for that, you’ll have to see the actual magazine (available at the Arthur Store for cheep)—but it’s pretty good.

Vanessa Davis: http://www.spanielrage.com

Arthur’s superb Comics Editor in this era was Tom Devlin.

“A Future Worth Having” by Daniel Pinchbeck (Arthur No. 16/May 2005)

Administrator — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 03:58:24 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 16 (May, 2005)

Illustration by Arik Roper

“Here and Now” column by Daniel Pinchbeck

“A Future Worth Having”

I first encountered the idea that we are quickly approaching a “Technological Singularity” in the works of Terence McKenna. In McKenna’s great essay, “New Maps of Hyperspace,” published in The Archaic Revival, he wrote, “We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.” He saw the archetypal apparition of the UFO or Flying Saucer as a foreshadowing of this tool awaiting us at the end of history. For him, this ultimate tool would exteriorize the human soul and interiorize the body, releasing the psyche into the infinite realm of the Imagination—”a kind of Islamic paradise in which one is free to experience all the pleasures of the flesh provided one realizes that one is a projection of a holographic solid-state matrix.”

McKenna was writing in the first flush of technological euphoria that accompanied the “dot-com” boom, and his perspective reflects a certain amount of that decades-long bedazzlement with the new forces unleashed by the extraordinary evolution of the Internet. Ultimately, however, his perspective was Gnostic, as well as Apocalyptic, informed by his psychedelic journeys into psilocybin and DMT-space. McKenna was a brilliant man. However, his euphoric focus on the self-organization of this technological event—which he often correlated with the 2012 end-date of the Mayan Calendar—left in its wake a certain passivity. The hipster counterculture that has beamed into this meme is too quick to celebrate the upcoming Eschaton, without doing the hard work required to bring it into being. From my perspective, what we need to consider now is not technology, but technique.

Before elaborating on that idea, let’s take a brief look at the “Technological Singularity” meme as it is currently propounded on the Internet by John Smart, of Singularity Watch, and Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines and operator of the KurzweilAI.net website. Kurzweil and Smart are “transhumanists,” who promote the prospect of an imminent super-technological future in which humans have merged with machines in order to transcend our biological limits. In his essay “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Kurzweil looks at the exponential evolution of technology, and argues that this mathematical growth-curve eventually reaches a point where it accelerates to a level that is close to infinite. He believes that this will most likely occur sometime in this century: “Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity—technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.”

Smart shares Kurzweil’s euphoria: “Technology is the next organic extension of ourselves, growing with a speed, efficiency, and resiliency that must eventually make our DNA-based technology obsolete, even as it preserves and extends all that we value most in ourselves,” he noted in a 2003 interview. Unlike Kurzweil, who sees humans evolving technologies that expand out to fill up the universe, Smart sees the eventual destiny of the species in what he calls “transcension,” essentially escaping this universe in the other direction, by creating simulations or virtual realities that will be like new universes—or, in fact, new universes, as we draw all local information into the black hole of our information-processing and technology-generating engines.

The transhumanists begin with the idea that our biological limitations should be overcome through mechanical augmentation. We are too slow, too cumbersome in our inherited meatsuits, and therefore trapped in what John Smart calls “slowspace.” Through immersion in virtual realities or direct fusion with cerebrally accelerating artificial intelligence agents—or some other technological genie—we will leap beyond our current imprisonment in the organic realm, and attain a higher, faster, snazzier state of being. Kurzweil notes: “Biological thinking is stuck at 1026 calculations per second (for all biological human brains), and that figure will not appreciably change, even with bioengineering changes to our genome. Nonbiological intelligence, on the other hand, is growing at a double exponential rate and will vastly exceed biological intelligence well before the middle of this century.” By inserting “nanobots” into our brains or ultimately perhaps downloading our psyches into immortal silicon-based supercomputers, humans will be able to contribute our pitiful little brain-wattage and antiquated personalities to the evolution of A.I.’s higher, faster levels of functioning.

We can, in fact, according to Smart, even feel some compassion for the next level of machine consciousness we are currently gestating to succeed us. He writes, “Consider that once we arrive at the singularity it seems highly likely that the A.I.s will be just as much on a spiritual quest, just as concerned with living good lives and figuring out the unknown, just as angst-ridden as we are today.” Even if, during some hyper-insectile phase of Terminator-style behavior, the A.I,’s accidentally destroy the human species, Smart reassures us, they would no doubt want to recreate us eventually – just as we build museums to understand the history of our planet and how we arose out of earlier life-forms, as well as documenting indigenous cultures that we too have accidentally destroyed.

It is instructive to consider—and to dismiss—the transhumanist perspective, as it reflects our cultural fantasies about technology and about transcendence, as well as our deep anxiety and deeper misconceptions about the essence of time, space, consciousness, and being. It may be the case—I would propose—that our future lies in an entirely different direction. To begin to conceptualize that direction—to draw in an imprint of what a truly human future might look like—we first have to give some thought to the essential nature of technology.

In his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” the philosopher Martin Heidegger noted that the essence of technology cannot be found in any machine or in anything technological; the essence of technology is the entire “enframing” of reality that is our modern or post-modern worldview. “The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology,” Heidegger writes. “The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence.” Technology, as Heidegger notes—and Smart and Kurzweil would no doubt agree—is no mere human doing. It is based on an ordering of reality that turns everything—including human beings—into a “standing reserve,” a resource to be utilized for rationalized ends. The barren architecture of the vast housing projects on the edge of our cities, prison-boxes where masses of humanity are warehoused as “surplus labor” to serve the desires of the elite, illustrates this worldview perfectly.

The concept that more speed, more information, or any form of quantity-based extension or technological transcendence of our current human reality is somehow valuable, in and of itself, is one that needs to be interrogated. An alternative perspective is offered by the Hindu guru Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj in the book I Am That: “Get hold of the main thing: That the world and the self are one and perfect. Only your attitude is faulty and needs readjustment.” A faulty attitude creates a faulty world – a world of insufficiency, in which human beings are reduced to the status of things. It is a world of endless distractions, and “distractions from distraction,” where entertainment or infotainment or pure noise are employed to fill the void of the individual self, the empty signifier. It is a world in which the present moment is devalued, and our eschatological dreams are projected on an empty future.

Heidegger notes that the origin of the word “technology” comes from the Greek word techne, and this word was applied not only to technology, but to art, and artistic technique, as well. “Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was also called techne,” he writes. “Once that revealing which brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearance was also called techne.” He found this to be a numinous correspondence, and considered that, in art, the “saving power” capable of confronting the abyss of the technological enframing might be found.

If art provides a “saving power,” it is not in the atomized artworks produced by individuated subjects, but in a more profound revisioning of the world as a work of art—one that is already, from a nondualistic perspective, perfect. It may be that, instead of envisioning an ultimately boring “technological singularity,” we would be better served by orienting ourselves towards an evolution of technique, of skillful means, aimed at this world, as it is right now, to raise up and redeem all of the people in it. Technology might find its proper place in our lives if we first made such a shift in perspective—in a society oriented around technique, we might find that we desired a lot less technological gadgetry. If we truly lived in love and wonder and synchronicity, embracing the perfection of the world and one another, we might find our IPods and laptops to be annoying encumbrances. We might start to prefer slowness to speed, subtlety and complexity to products aimed at standardized mind. Rather than projecting the spiritual quest and the search for the good life onto futuristic A.I.s, we could actually fulfill those goals, here and now, in the present company of our friends and lovers.

Instead of a “technological singularity,” I propose reorienting thinking towards the “multiplicity of technique.” Technique is erotic in essence; it is what Glenn Gould or Thelonius Monk express through the piano—the interplay between learned skill and quantum improvisation that is the stuff of genius. Technique embraces the “nowness” of our living world; technology throws us into endless insatiation.

The essence of art lies in the unlimited realm of the imagination, which is, as William Blake noted, not a state, but the human existence in itself. McKenna proposed that the imagination was akin to a lense that could be focused on different layers and levels of the morphogentic field of the psyche. The effort to attain a deeper or intensified level of consciousness brings one to the threshold of the imaginal realms that unfurl in dreams and hypnagogic and psychedelic states, where one picks up the hidden vibrations of the dreamtime realms known to the Australian Aboriginals. By reattuning ourselves to those subtle frequencies, we will first discover, and then create, a future worth having.

“Re-Psychedelica Britannica” by Mark Pilkington (Arthur No. 14/Jan. 2005)

Administrator — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 03:04:10 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 14 (Jan. 2005)

Re-Psychedelica Britannica
The fungal kingdom is making a bold incursion into British streets markets where, through a curious legal twist, magic mushrooms are openly available for sale. MARK PILKINGTON reports back from a trip to the shops.
Photos by Mark Pilkington
Drawings by Matthew Greene

On the morning of October 3, 1799 a man known only as JS was found wandering in a state of delirium around London’s Green Park, not far from what would soon be Piccadilly Circus. He complained of waves of giddiness, odd flashes of color across his eyes and a cramped stomach. His family suffered the same effects and feared that they were dying. All that is, except their eight-year-old son, Edward, who seemed to find their situation hysterically funny.

A passing doctor, Everard Brande, was summoned to the scene, where JS told him that the symptoms had begun not long after the family had picked and eaten their usual breakfast of wild mushrooms. Intrigued by this puzzling scenario, Brande would write in The Medical and Physical Journal that the family’s condition was caused by the “deleterious effects of a very common species of agaric (i.e. mushroom), not hitherto suspected to be poisonous.”

Family S hold a unique position in history, as the United Kingdom’s first recorded shroomers.

England’s most common indigenous psychoactive mushroom is the Psilocybe semilanceata, known to its friends as the Liberty Cap. Four to eight centimetres tall, nipple-headed and a rich cream colour, following the Autumn rains of September and October they dot our green and pleasant land in their millions. Individually they won’t do anything for you—though veteran shroomers may eat one or two as they pick in a fresh field, claiming that it helps them to spot other mushrooms—but in doses of 20 or more, eaten as is, or brewed in boiling water, the effects can be potent. In fact, they’re more or less indistinguishable from the effects of the 120 or so other psilocybian mushrooms found the world over—including the cubensis and mexicana, which are no doubt familiar to many Arthur readers.

The sight of plastic bag-carrying longhairs bent double, scrutinizing our autumnal pastures for a taste of freedom has been a common one for the past three decades or so. But recently the fungal landscape has taken a dramatic and surprising turn.

About two miles north from where Family JS took their historic trip into the fungal kingdom is Camden Town, a legendary pilgrimage site for punks and Goths the world over. Here the once-thriving Counterculture of independent book and record shops has been firmly superceded by the ever-familiar counter culture of Gap and co. Shifty-eyed, muttering passers-by offer you all manner of illegal substances, but we’ll ignore them and head for one of the many stalls offering an altogether more rewarding—and currently legal—psychoactive experience: magic mushrooms.

Conspicuously moist in unmarked plastic tubs are a range of mycological exotica that would, as little as three years ago, have seemed inaccessible to all but the most adventurous ethnobotanist. Psilocybe cubensis strains from Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Ecuador and Thailand sit alongside the connoisseur’s choice, Hawaiian Copelandia cyanescens, and what’s known as Philosopher’s Stone: “truffles” or sclerotica—underground growths—of the Psilocybe tampanensis or mexicana. Prices are typically £10 ($18) for 10g, depending on what and where you buy. Some stalls now also sell mescaline-containing cacti like San Pedro and Peyote, though these are slower to grow and so more expensive.

The mushrooms’ packaging tends to contain little or no information: the more organized suppliers will include a label identifying the country of origin, alongside a variety of legal warnings, but you won’t find any dosage or storage recommendations and no tripping tips. Only qualified herbalists can legally distribute such information, though most stallholders will answer specific questions and the better stalls display generalized notes about each strain of shroom. However, depending on the psychedelic scruples of a particular stall’s owner, the person selling you your magic kingdom pass may or may not know anything about what it is they are selling.

As well as key locations in London—Camden High St, Portobello Road & Covent Garden being your best bets—the mushrooms’ glittering domain now stretches to an estimated 300 vendors in towns and cities all around the country. Enterprising sorts are also offering online and telephone deliveries to your front door. But for how long?

The legal situation regarding magic mushroom sales is a precarious one. According to the UK’s 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, the active ingredients of the mushrooms, psilocybin and psilocin, are classified Class A. This places them alongside heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD and speed (if it’s prepared for injection). The maximum sentence for possession is seven years in prison or, for intent to supply, life. This strikingly neo-gnostic approach to drug law is shared by the United States and much of Europe: it’s the mushroom’s soul that concerns the authorities, not its body.
But, because they grow more or less anywhere that sheep and cows shit, including on land owned by the military and the royal family, liberty caps and the other psychoactive mushrooms that grow here—such as the Amanita muscaria, or Fly Agaric—are only considered illegal if they have been prepared. And it’s this word that has proved to be the semantic loophole through which the fungi have taken to the streets.

In its recent paper “The Magic Roundabout: How to deal with magic mushrooms,” the UK’s Transform Drug Policy Foundation (TDPF) points out that what constitutes “preparation” remains about as clear as a cup of mushroom soup. Whether freezing, refrigerating, drying or packaging psilocybin containing mushrooms will earn you a jail sentence seems to be entirely arbitrary, largely dependent on the police force and judiciary who arrest you and consider your case. Past defendants have escaped prosecution—and even had their mushrooms returned by the police—by proving that they had dried naturally in sunlight. Others who kept shrooms in their freezers went to jail.

A 2003 governmental edict did little to clarify the situation: “it is not illegal to sell or give away a freshly picked mushroom provided that it has not been prepared in any way.” To confuse matters further, in July 2004 Customs and Excise confirmed that magic mushrooms were taxable on the grounds that they were a drug (which gets hit with 17.5% VAT) rather than a food (which is not taxable). The result is a psychedelic grey area that allows street sales of psychedelic substances, but makes promoting them as such, or even providing information about them, a potential prison offense. Most suppliers, such as Psyche Deli, based in NE London, and the Shroomshop growers’ collective, provide them for “ornamental” and “research purposes” only. But, without proper information, it’s very difficult for “researchers,” especially first time experimenters, to explore them effectively. And, because the fungi can only be sold when still full of water, even seasoned trippers can have problems getting their dosage right.

An altogether better situation would be a step beyond that which exists in Holland, where many of the mushrooms sold over here are grown. Known locally as “paddos,” they can be farmed and sold legally, and are monitored by the Dutch food inspection agency, which treats them as they would any other edible produce. But once again, the law remains fuzzy, as paddos cannot be sold with the knowledge that they will be ingested. To twist things further, the Dutch Ministry of Health has produced a special information leaflet on the effects of psilocybin that is included with every mushroom purchase. (Presumably this is in case the buyer should happen to trip over and accidentally swallow some of their purchase before putting it onto the mantelpiece to display to their friends.) It’s also worth quoting part of the Dutch Health Ministry’s official report into the effects of psilocybin: “the risks of psilocybin mushrooms are low. Acute reactions are no more severe than having a scary experience. No chronic toxicity was found. And no signs of physical or mental addiction was found.”

Here in the UK it seems that the government would rather not have to confront the shroom issue head on, and is waiting either for the tabloid angry brigade, or the courts, to force a decision upon them. Unfortunately, this head-in-the-dung-heap approach is likely to result in change only when someone gets hurt or goes to jail. They seem keen not to have to force the issue: one or two shroom shops have been closed by regional councils but, despite grumblings from the Conservative party and some of the more reactionary media outlets, the current government seems extremely reluctant to get involved. Test cases in the city of Birmingham, and in Scotland, have recently been dropped by their respective courts.

The bottom line is that proper regulation and licensing of magic mushroom sellers would benefit suppliers, consumers and the authorities. Dosage and experiential information ought to be included as part of the product packaging, along with a Best Before date, so that buyers can know whether the mushrooms are in a fit state for consumption in the first place. Trippers would then know (as well as any psychedelic experience can be anticipated) what they were getting themselves into, making the experience safer and more rewarding for everybody involved. Until this happens, ignorance is unlikely to be bliss.

Meanwhile, the fungal invasion of human consciousness continues apace. It’s difficult to gage what kind of impact the availability of mushrooms on the high street [“high street” is, loosely speaking, the British equivalent for America’s “Main Street”—Ed.] is having in the wider world. Veteran psychedelic voyagers have always tended to pick Liberty Caps in copious amounts each season, often providing themselves with supplies for a whole year; so the idea of spending ten or twenty pounds on a trip seems excessive to many. How people feel about the commodification of what is, for many, akin to a sacrament, is another issue that will be worth examining if the current situation persists. Then again, some of the shrooms for sale are enticingly exotic, and you never know when you might get caught short…

Whether we’re going to see a full-on rebirth of psychedelic culture of the like not seen since the UK’s “Aceeeiiiid!” and Ozric Tentacles (dog forbid!) daze of the late 1980s is too early to say. The rise of ecstasy and ketamine as club drugs of choice since the 1990s has meant that synthetic psychedelics like LSD and 2CB are now frustratingly difficult to come by, so, although expensive, mushrooms might just bound in to fill that kaleidoscopic void.

Recent generations of teens have grown up with E’d-up love, ketamine mong and doped-up bong as their inner-escape routes. Perhaps the uncompromising blandness of recent “alternative” teen-orientated music and culture may drive a few of the more adventurous souls to look for some new kind of kick. Or it may have already begun: at 2004’s Glastonbury festival, the music weekly NME promoted the use of mushrooms by its predominantly teenaged readers, declaring “a new summer of love”. Their readers’ survey suggested that 13,500 festival goers—out of about 150,000—actually chowed down, a not unencouraging estimate.

Whether today’s teens will take up the charge into the psychedelic rabbit hole with as much enthusiasm as their forebears remains to be seen. But, while the windows of organic opportunity are still open, they may not have to look much further than their local high street.

LINKS:
Transform Drug Policy foundation: www.tdpf.org.uk
Erowid Psychedelic Information: www.erowid.org
The Psyche-Deli: www.thepsychedeli.co.uk

“The Fifth World and the Hopi Apocalypse” by Daniel Pinchbeck (Arthur No. 14/Jan. 2005)

Administrator — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 02:46:46 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 14 (Jan. 2005)

Illustration by Arik Roper

“Here and Now” column by Daniel Pinchbeck

“The Fifth World and the Hopi Apocalypse”

Last summer, I visited the Hopi on their tribal lands in Arizona. The Hopi are thought to be the original inhabitants of the North American continent–this is what their own legends tell us, and archaeologists agree. My initial interest in the Hopi came from reading about their oral prophecies and their “Emergence Myth.” According to the Hopi, we are currently living in the Fourth World, on the verge of transitioning, or emerging, into the Fifth World. In each of the three previous worlds, humanity eventually went berserk, tearing apart the fabric of the world through destructive practices, wars, and ruinous technologies. As the end of one world approaches a small tunnel or inter-dimensional passage —the sipapu—appears, leading the Hopi and other decent people into the next phase, or incarnation, of the Earth.

Of course, most modern people would consider this story to be an interesting folktale or fantasy with no particular relevance to our current lives. Even five years ago, I probably would have agreed with them. However, my personal experiences with indigenous cultures and shamanism convinced me, in the interim, that there is more to traditional wisdom than our modern mindset can easily accept. The Hopi themselves say that almost all of the signs have been fulfilled that precede our transition to the Fifth World. These include a “gourd of ashes falling from the sky,” destroying a city, enacted in the atomic blasts obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a spider web across the Earth, which they associate with our power grid and telephone lines. According to Frank Waters, who compiled accounts from 30 Hopi elders in his Book of the Hopi (1963), the current Fourth World will end in a war that will be “a spiritual conflict” fought with material means, leading to the destruction of the United States through radiation. Those who survive this conflict will institute a new united world without racial or ideological divisions “under one power, that of the Creator.”

The 12,000 Hopi live in a dry and dramatic landscape strewn with enormous boulders, resembling the surface of an alien planet. Their towns are clustered on three mesas—high, flat cliffs overlooking vast swathes of desert. Traditionally, the Hopi are subsistence farmers; they work with ancient strains of corn and beans that are, almost miraculously, able to grow in that arid environment. For obvious reasons, water is sacred to their culture—many of their rituals are aimed at bringing rain. Each spring, each well, is precious to the Hopi. While I was visiting Hopiland I attended a raindance in the town of Walpi, on First Mesa. Perhaps 50 men of the town—wearing masks and costumes and feathered headdresses —participated in the dance, which was held in the town’s center. The dancers are dressed as katsinas, the spiritual beings that are thought to control elemental forces. The ceremony is a form of possession trance—the goal is to summon the katsinas to temporarily inhabit the bodies of the dancers. The Hopi believe that their culture can only prosper if they maintain direct contact with the supernatural powers that manifest directly through the natural world.

In his book Rethinking Hopi Anthropology, the Cambridge anthropologist Peter Whitely recalls, with an almost embarrassed reluctance, that during his time with the Hopi in the 1980s, he witnessed repeated demonstrations of their precognitive abilities and their ability to influence natural forces through ritual. He was transfixed by his first visit to a Snake Dance in 1980: “This was no commodified spectacle of the exotic … its profound religiosity was tangible, sensible. Within half an hour of the dance (which lasts about 45 minutes), a soft rain began to fall from a sky that had been burningly cloudless throughout the day.” When he went to see one of his informants, Harry Kewanimptewa, a septuagenarian member of the Spider clan, he would often find that the elder would answer the questions he had intended to ask before he could vocalize them: “I have no desire to fetishize or exoticize here, but this was something about him and some other, particularly older, Hopis that I have experienced repeatedly and am unable to explain rationally.”

I can sympathize with Whiteley’s plight. Since I started exploring shamanism almost a decade ago, I have found myself living in two worlds simultaneously—the world of Western rationalist discourse with its empirical and materialist emphasis, and the shamanic realm of magical correspondences, supernatural forces, dream messages, and synchronicities. The shamanic realm is one in which human consciousness is not an epiphenomenon or dualistic byproduct of a purely physical evolution, but an inseparable aspect of the world, intertwined with reality at every level. It seems that quantum physics has attained a perspective that is similar to the shamanic view, acknowledging a direct relation between the observer and observed.

I went to the Hopi as part of my research for the book I am writing on prophecies, studying the Mayan and Toltec obsession with the year 2012, the Apocalypse described in the Biblical Book of Revelation, the Hopi foretellings, and various modern Western philosophers and visionaries whose ideas offer a context or system for understanding these predictions. Before I visited the Hopi or even read much about them, I had a few powerful dream experiences that seemed to indicate, to me, the importance of my imminent encounter with this ancient tribe. After seeing the film Naqoyqatsi (“Life as War”)—the last in the trilogy of films beginning with Koyaanisqatsi (“Life out of Balance”), by Godfrey Reggio, appropriating Hopi concepts with no input from the tribe—I had a dream of fiery demons at computer workstations, and awoke with the sense of a visceral supernatural presence flying through my house. The night before I left for the Southwest, I had an even more specific and frightening nightmare. In this dream, I was killed and dismembered by a disgusting-looking demon—who was simultaneously, in typical dream dislogic, the famous conceptual artist Bruce Naumann. In the dream, I returned to Naumann’s studio or the demon’s home and said, “Great—now that you have killed me, I control you.” I went to a bookcase and picked up a huge leather-bound volume titled “Grimoire” (a Medieval catalogue of imaginary beasts and supernatural creatures) and melted it down over a fire. As I did this, I heard incredibly loud Native American chanting and maniacal laughter. I awoke, once again, with the sense of a powerful presence, a kind of unhinged or wild diabolical force, looming overhead and then soaring away.

While traveling to Hopiland I scanned several books of Hopi anthropology and folktales and found that the being who had haunted my dreams closely matched descriptions of Maasaw, the complex creator-deity of the Hopi. According to Hopi legend, when the Hopi first emerged from the Third World to the Fourth, they met Maasaw, who gave them the rules of conduct for life on this new land and introduced them to the rudiments of their agricultural system. Maasaw brought the sun into the Fourth World; but once he had accomplished this, he left the daylight world forever to haunt the realm of night and darkness. The name Maasaw literally means “corpse demon” or “death spirit” in the Hopi language, and he is considered to be the ruler of the land of the dead. Maasaw resembles the ambiguous deities found in Hinduism and Tibetan Tantra, who have wrathful and benevolent manifestations. Since his disappearance from the earth, Maasaw often appears to the Hopi in dreams as a terrifying presence, wearing a ghoulish mask. According to some accounts, Maasaw’s deviation began long ago in the Third World, where he became arrogant and defiant. His assignment to rule over the underworld was a kind of demotion. I wondered why—as seemed to be the case—this spirit had introduced himself to me, in my dreams, even before I arrived in Hopiland.

I thought that I needed to learn more about the Hopi prophecies—and indeed, I did manage to visit an elder in that extraordinary desert landscape. Martin Gasheseoma took time off from working on his field of corn and beans, to tell me that the “purification,” as foretold, would soon come to pass, that there was no way to prevent it. “It goes like a movie now,” he said. However, even before I had found my way to this meeting, my perspective had shifted. I had realized that the essence of the prophecy—the solution to the riddle—was not in some transcendent or otherworldly event, but in the very immanent and real world around us.

The Hopi way of life is threatened with imminent extinction. In the 1960s, the Peabody Coal Company was given a concession to mine coal on their land. They were also awarded the right to use water from the aquifer under Black Mesa to slurry the coal down a pipeline, built by the Enron Corporation. This operation wastes 1.3 billion gallons of pure drinking water annually. Of course, there are other ways to transport coal, but this is the cheapest for Peabody, and the company has continually fought against and effectively delayed all efforts to change their destructive practices.

In the 1980s, it was discovered that the lawyer who negotiated the original deal for the Hopi was, at the same time, on the payroll of the Peabody Corporation—and the Hopi have received a tiny fraction of the revenue they deserve, while forfeiting control of their own destiny. According to US Government Geological Surveys, by the year 2011, the aquifer will be finished—already the Hopi are finding that the local springs on which they rely are drying up.

In the middle-class New Age culture and “New Edge” festivals such as Burning Man, much lip service is paid to Native American traditions. Perhaps millions of white people hang dreamcatchers over their beds and put kachina dolls on their shelves. Despite this sentimental interest in indigenous culture and spirituality, precious little, or nothing, is done by us—those of us with the leisure for yoga and raw food and sweat lodges, who often sanctimoniously consider ourselves to be especially “conscious” or “spiritual” beings—to help the Native Americans on this continent. The indigenous people are resettled next to toxic waste dumps, abandoned to the least arable lands, ignored when the fish in their rivers are poisoned, when their resources are robbed from them. In every way, they continue to be treated with condescension and contempt.

This is also what I intuited from Maasaw’s mocking laughter and deviant presence in my dreams: Some deep schism of the soul remains to be recognized; the wound can only be healed if we work to forge a real relationship with the indigenous world, to expiate our dominator culture’s guilt and denial through pragmatic action in this reality, as it is now. If this is the case, then the Hopi situation represents the perfect place to begin the reversal: They are probably the oldest and perhaps most well-known indigenous group in the US, zealously studied by ethnographers for over a century, while repeatedly and blatantly betrayed by the US government and private corporations.

As climate change accelerates along with the global depletion of resources, we are being forced to recognize that our current system is unsustainable, even in the short term. The Hopi situation provides a microcosm of the global crisis—a cruelly ironic situation considering the essential meaning of their culture. As Whiteley notes, “The phrase ‘Hopi environmentalism’ is practically a redundancy. So much of Hopi culture and thought, both religious and secular, revolves around an attention to balance and harmony in the forces of nature that environmental ethics are in many ways critical to the very meaning of the word ‘Hopi.’” Visiting the Hopi, it occurred to me that indigenous prophecy, in itself, arises out of a deep level of attunement to the natural world, rather than anything “spiritual” or immaterial.

According to Vernon Masayesva, of the Black Mesa Trust (www.blackmesatrust.org): “It is our water ethic that has allowed us to survive and thrive in one of the most arid areas on planet Earth. It is the knowledge and teachings of our elders that have sustained us. This water ethic that has been handed down to us by our ancestors we are eager to share with everyone who will be facing water shortages—and according to some studies, water wars—in the next few decades. When the water is gone from Black Mesa, so will be the traditional cultures that could have taught the world so much about living successfully with less.” The Hopi prophecies also tell of the return of Pahana, the elder white brother, in a real exchange of knowledge and a true communion, as the Fourth World comes to an end.

Like so many manifestations of our neurotic and alienated culture, the Koyaanasqatsi films create a mood of inescapable doom and approaching cataclysm. Personally, I reject this attitude. We still have time to save the Hopi and other indigenous groups — perhaps, by extension, ourselves—if we are willing to learn from them and fight for them, rather then appropriating their spirituality while ignoring the destruction we keep inflicting upon their world.

“Towards the New Edge” by Daniel Pinchbeck (Arthur No. 13/Nov. 2004)

Administrator — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 02:30:46 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 13 (Nov. 2004)

Illustration by Arik Roper

“Here and Now” column by Daniel Pinchbeck

“Towards the New Edge”

A few weeks ago, I attended the annual Burning Man festival, in the Black Rock desert of Nevada, for the fifth year in a row. Burning Man has been called the world’s biggest party, but I don’t even know if I have “fun” at Burning Man in any ordinary sense—being there is incredibly intense, a kind of psychophysical endurance test. Despite the difficulties, I will continue to return as long as it is possible to do so. The gathering acts as an enormous shamanic transformer, constellating new insights and clearing away old junk.

I chose to go to Burning Man instead of staying in New York for the protests surrounding the Republican Convention. My increasing suspicion is that traditional forms of protest, at this point, are only playing into the hands of the security apparatus. The police and military get the opportunity to test out their latest tactics and shiniest gadgets, while the corporate media finds the most incendiary images to broadcast across the US, amping up the anxiety. The catharsis that protesters get from yelling slogans across barbed wire barriers and out of “free speech pens” might be energy that could be more creatively invested in other ways.

As the corporate and governmental superstructure continue a lockstep march towards their own self-destruction, their attempts to pulverize the collective psyche into submission becomes more transparent and overt. Electrical currents of spite and anxiety ripple across our public discourse and private lives. The individual’s refusal to fall into these traps or accept this negative conditioning can be a great liberation. At Burning Man, I kept thinking that the most meaningful political act, right now, is to continue cultivating fearlessness in pursuit of joy. To be fearless, calm, and joyful is to jam a wrench into the “Brave New 1984” technodystopic machinery that is seeking to impose itself on our world.

I consider the current sociopolitical abyss to be a kind of evolutionary tool. The control apparatus of modern society may be functioning as a training ground for a new level of consciousness. Many different thinkers of the 20th century, as well as the prophecies of archaic and indigenous spiritual traditions, have proposed that a major change in human consciousness is imminent. This has been articulated in various ways. Before his death in 1961, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw that the “reality of the psyche,” repressed by the modern mentality, would soon become unavoidable. Mankind was being forced to climb “to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness,” to handle “the superhuman powers which the fallen angels” had dropped into our hands.

The Austrian visionary Rudolf Steiner (founder of Anthroposophy and Waldorf education) claimed that the mission of his life on Earth was to return the knowledge of reincarnation to the West. According to Steiner, individual human beings reincarnate again and again, and the Earth itself passes through successive incarnations. He considered this phase to be the fourth incarnation of the Earth. Steiner thought we are approaching a fifth incarnation, the “Jupiter state,” where humanity would evolve new capacities and reach a new level of wisdom. Actually, it’s not just humanity: according to Steiner, the plant and mineral kingdom would reach a higher level of consciousness during this next incarnation, while humanity would split into several different “human kingdoms,” undergoing different forms of evolution.

The Indian philosopher Sri Auribindo also felt that we were moving towards a new level or intensity of consciousness. In one of his last essays, “The Mind of Light,” he defined this as the “supramental” state. Just as life had self-organized out of matter, and mind had self-organized out of life, consciousness would evolve beyond the obscurations and ignorance of our current condition to attain a level of truth-consciousness, and spiritual awareness, that could not be manipulated or fooled. Aurobindo speculated that our evolution would accelerate exponentially from that point. Once we had reached this supramental state, this truth-consciousness, we would be able to transform our physical reality and our bodies. “Man,” Aurobindo wrote, “is a transitional being.” The powers unleashed by technology might be reintegrated into the psyche, at a higher level of development.

As counterintuitive as it may seem at first, I propose that our current environment, saturated with noise and chaos and fear-mongering, is the necessary background for attaining this supramental condition, for accepting and mastering the reality of the psyche. The new mindset stems from a fearless curiosity and hunger for truth, and a rejection of the cynicism and negative programming foisted upon it by the corporate-controlled media and current power structure. The new intensity of consciousness accepts the reality of psychic and occult levels of reality, denied by modern materialism, but integrates this understanding with a scientific, pragmatic, and empirical approach to existence. As a speaker at Burning Man pointed out, it is not “New Age,” but “New Edge.”

My hypothesis is that at least a portion of humanity attains this level of “supramental” mind – including, as Aurobindo proposes, an accelerated evolution —as we approach the year 2012, prophesied by the Mayans as the end of the 5,125-year “Great Cycle” of human history. Despite current appearances, we are on the verge of a transition into a new intensity of human consciousness that will institute an harmonic and utopian situation on the Earth. This thesis is not mine alone—it is carefully elaborated by Carl Johann Calleman, among others, in his new book, The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness (Bear & Co.). This book supports the basic ideas of the writers Jose Arguelles and John Major Jenkins—a new outsider paradigm is crystallizing.

Calleman, a biologist who has worked with the World Health Organization, considers the development of human consciousness to be an organic process akin to fetal development. Chemical signals are transmitted to the fetus in an incredibly complex and perfectly orchestrated sequence. The proposal made by Arguelles, Calleman, and others, is that the evolution of human consciousness on Earth follows a similar process on a planetary scale, and we are currently approaching the birth of the higher mind, or noosphere, of the Earth. After many years of research, Calleman as well as Arguelles understand the Mayan Calendar to be a synchronically-attuned device that indicates the year-by-year changes, in this final period, leading to the inevitable phase-transition of human consciousness.

The run-up to the 2012 transition appears, necessarily, as universal capitulation and collapse—just as birth is a messy process that would appear horrific to the uninformed observer. According to Calleman’s study of the Mayan Calendar, the global economy—and with it, the materialist paradigm currently holding the collective psyche at a certain level of development—will collapse around 2007-8. Right now, we are being forced to witness the shadow of the psyche projected into material form through systemic misuse of technology, biospheric destruction, as well as our current political farce. During the transition, things seem to be getting simultaneously—paradoxically—much better and much worse. Time itself seems to be changing form, accelerating, as events follow each other at breakneck pace.

Obviously, it is a difficult leap for most people to accept the possibility that the Maya had a deeper understanding of time—as a synchronic order, rather than a simple linear extension—than we currently possess. However, it seems to me that any impartial study of the current world situation makes it obvious that the current social and political paradigm is unsustainable, even in the short term. We are depleting and burning out our global resources at an ever-accelerating rate. A cynical or nihilistic perspective on the imminent fate of our species is, of course, plausible, but unproductive. An alternate perspective sees the destruction of the biosphere—and the development of technology—as byproducts of the psychospiritual evolution of humanity, bringing us to a new form or phase-state of consciousness.

* * *

One of the most beautiful aspects of Burning Man is the wide-open expanse of the desert itself, which seems to represent the infinite potential available to the liberated human imagination. While I was bicycling across the playa one night, enjoying the laser lights and carnival displays of the festival from a distance, I thought that the shift to a new planetary culture, and a new form of nonhierarchical social organization matching our new level of mind, does not have to be a cataclysmic or destructive one. The transition could occur in a manner similar to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Empire—a sudden piffle, and a shocking surrender. However, for this to happen, the new paradigm must already be in place, at least as an undercurrent. Lacking a model or an imprint, the collapse of the current system will result in a world resembling that of the Road Warrior films, without the occasional flickers of irony.

If we can make the transition to a truly rational planetary culture based on compassion, generosity, and dharmic principles, this will inspire a change in our basic conception of science. Rather than seeking to resolve dualisms and institute some final “Theory of Everything,” the science of post-history will embrace and explore paradox, going deeper into conundrums, relinquishing delusory attempts to achieve closure. Superstring physics describes a universe of nine, ten, or eleven dimensions. If reality is, as Buddhism proposes, actually maya, a projection of subtler levels of the psyche, then we may come to accept that the extradimensional object or hypercube described by physics is the psyche itself, in its full multidimensions.

I suggest that the planes or surfaces of this object can be incorporated into awareness as the various vectors or intervals or vibrational field-effects experienced in non-ordinary states – induced by psychoactive substances, meditations, dreams, shamanic trances and so on. Different psychedelics open “lines of flight” or ingressions across the extra-dimensional object that is the psyche itself. When we have matured to the point that we can accept the “reality of the psyche,” investigating these areas will be recognized as natural and even essential to expanding the parameters of human understanding. The science and art of post-history will be dedicated to exploring the numinous paradoxes of psychic reality. Instead of seeking closure, we will open new possibilities and explore infinite new realms.

AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCHS: James Parker on Richard Meltzer and Mike Watt (Arthur 14/Jan. 2005)

Administrator — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 02:19:40 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 14/January 2005

Autumn of the Patriarchs
By James Parker

Reviewed:

RICHARD MELTZER
Autumn Rhythm
(Da Capo/Perseus)

MIKE WATT
the secondman’s middle stand
(Columbia/RedEye)

It’s Autumn, by God, and I couldn’t be happier. If you’re a writer, it’s the only season: the peak, the prime. Summer flattens you, Winter cramps you, Spring is a mere sizzling of the sex-urge, but Autumn flings open the furnace door to real transformation. On a high November afternoon, with the leaves in a life-and-death whirl and that tossing, brassy light all around, the writer creeps from his/her carapace and partakes in the vortex of Possibility. Out come the old, allergen-loaded sweaters. Yes! On goes the woolly hat, that incubator of thought. Upward fly the—well, I could go on, but the point here is to address our latest bard of the Autumn, the great Richard Meltzer, whose Autumn Rhythm (now out in glorious paperback!), is not so much about crisp weather and fiery trees as it is about Mortality (or mortali-T, as the Meltz, in his demented flippancy, might put it)—age, defeat—the Autumn of our days—“the ‘topic’ at hand: your time… my time… all our times running low, running out, or in any case running.”

Meltzer, in case you’re not sure, is a father of what he calls ‘rockwriting’—Sixties, Seventies, he did it, he lived and typed it, was legendary, boozed with Bangs, tyro’d with Tosches etc etc. He figured in LA punk rock, a great stimulus to the minutemen, had his own terrible band. It’s all in his previous tome, A Whore Just Like the Rest. And now, finding himself “on the cusp of fucking dotage” (his late fifties), Meltzer is taking the long view and using the essay form. He considers his life, and the possible cessation thereof. Is there any more good art to be had from the fact that we’re all, sooner or later, going to be combusted or ploughed under? Certainly there is. Take this: “A couple years ago I started quantifying what a day actually felt like, what its duration as lived existentially was, and the unit day, I surmised, was only four hours long. It now feels about three and a half…. What can you get done in three and a half hours? (Better not piss—that’ll cut it to three.)” Or this, from a piece about Meltzer’s father, touchingly entitled “The Old Fuckeroo”: ‘Of course he LOVED me (and I loved him) and all such nonsense—but that part was maybe the worst of it. A sentimental slob, a ‘40s romantic in desperate need of a compliant LOVE OBJECT, he inflicted his ardor on me in direct proportion to what he wasn’t getting from his wife, assuring me (as often as not) that I was the the most important being in his life. A sensitive little prick, I grieved for the guy in his loneliness…” This is top-notch, ranking with the most exalted literature of fathers and sons. “(And I loved him)”—oh, the brackets say everything.

Like a number of greying punk rock dudes one knows, Meltzer is a cat person. It’s almost a type: the hoary radical, the ex-crazy, childless (Meltzer has declined to Impose “the full slimy wrath of [his] being” on any progeny), spurning most human allegiance but twistedly into his cat or cats, relishing and respecting the fuck-you-ness and complication of the feline. Meltzer writes, at any rate, with unguarded passion about his own aging—dying, in fact—pet-friend. The prose totters pretty close to the sentimental here—“It tears my guts out that I can’t tell him anything he’ll understand ‘bout how come he can’t go outside no more”—but it’s the real man speaking, no question, the same crank who elsewhere demands that we “unplug from the cyber lifeline… it’s a fucking deathline,” and that “Any bar, meantime, where the TV is never off should be NAPALMED.” (hear! hear!)

Meltzer can be an extraordinary comic writer, a real Joycean nutjob, but Autumn Rhythm is—as a rule— sombre, shaded, down. For a freelancer or “writeperson,” reading him in this mode is like having a skull on your desk—the hack’s death’s head, with failure caverned in its eyeholes. Unrich, unredeemed, still pissed at all the mags he ever wrote for, the Meltz will be your memento mori. “May this heap-o-pulp likewise serve as the ur-expression of YOUR vanity. A foretaste of your own aftertaste, of your own extinction.” No laughing matter. Only once does the author uncage the humorist, the Joycean nutter within, in a blinding series of anagrams (with explanations) for “Twentieth Century”: “W.C.T.E: ‘NUTHER ENTITY? (is the Women’s Christian Temperance Enfederation really diff’rent from their Union?)… WET TEN-INCH RYE TUT (medium-size Egyptian novelty bread, after the rain).” Personally, I can’t get enough of this stuff—“NEUTER THE WITTY N.C. (Noel Coward should be desexed, humorless critics contend)”—but I suppose I should stop quoting it. Besides, it’s not all gold dust between these covers. There are “poems”—or at least vertical strands of collapsed prose—in here, mere beermat jottings really. “His life was like a fart…” “if the flies want me/ let the flies have me,” “does my dick have scales?”—yeah, well, okay. Dead-end complacency. Keep typin’em up, Mr. M, if it helps you stay loose… Alright, just one more: “TUNNEY ET IT W/ ‘H’ CERT (Gene followed lobster with a heroin-flavor breath mint).” Ha!

MTV, the “wundaful world-o-videos,” is another of Meltzer’s apocalypses, like the TV bars and the Internet. “When the frigging MINUTEMEN did a vid,” he declares, “you knew it was completely over.” So speaking of the minutemen, and speaking of being completely over, let’s move on to the new Mike Watt CD, which details—really details—a more urgent autumnal event, a most drastic run-in with mortality. the secondman’s middle stand is about serious physical illness (and recovery), and like Watt’s previous contemplatin’ the engine room it takes the form of a punk rock opera, thematically unified, moving in suites. No guitar this time, no Nels Cline or flaming Joe Baiza—on top of the bass and drums is the B3 organ of Pete Mazich, summoning celestial overtones or carousel queasiness as required.

The sickness unto death, for Watt, began in the perineum, that dark notch between balls and asshole. A place of terror: less a place than a space—an eerie, sensate, biologically brooding nothing. Anyway, in 2000 Watt got some sort of explosive abscess right there on his perineum, on the black fulcrum of his being as it were, a boil or saddlesore that blossomed vilely upward and inward and swelled its canker until he quite literally burst, gushing infection through emergency blowholes. Imagine it if you dare, it was an authentic crisis—flashing lights, gurneys, surgery, “38 days of fever,” the mercury climbing in horror and indignation, Watt hovering in half-states, deeply drugged. He almost died. His health and strength were demolished. His recovery was inch-by-inch. “Many geisha boy steps to make the couple of blocks from my pad.” Geisha boy steps—that’s very good.

Fortunately, blessedly, Watt’s philosophy seems to have been a match for this. A proper materialist from his minuteman days, always wrestling with the actual, he was not dismayed to find himself splayed, helpless, reduced, a creature of “pissbags and tubing.” His interest in the conditions, his taste for the basics, prevailed. Adrift for a time in the the unlit precincts of his own body, CURIOSITY got him home. “Dicktube yanked out too/How I laughed when that golf ball bead came thru…” If you’ve ever encountered Watt in person you know that there’s a poetic totality to the man, a density of imagination in which everything—the mumble, the rumble, the word-hoard, the face-bristle, the bong-gurgle, the rumour and squelch of his bass—corresponds. It’s the whole Watt thing, and it feeds the art tremendously: in some respects it is the art. All experience is grist to Watt the mythifier and this here, this bodily drama, is his own “dark wood of error,” his existential pratfall. Can you dig a punk rock opera about a man whose ass exploded? I know you can. Three movements—Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso—hell-hot fever, convalescent limbo, the heaven of the healed return. Dante Alighieri hovers palely by, upper lip lengthened in slight disapproval: Watt has customised the Divine Comedy.

“Boilin’ Blazes” gets us rolling, as Watt does some big vomiting—“threw up mah guts”—and succumbs to fever. It’s the beginning of the “hellride,” a derangement of vile organ-blare and bombastic drumming. “Puked to High Heaven”—more vomiting, and the freakout becomes ontological: “In my head, a tightly packed flame…The moment has me seized!” “Burstedman” is the killer track: “Virgil! Beatrice!” cries the patient, as ungodly fluids splatter his “bulkhead.” “A life in the moment, is that what you’ve always wanted, Watt?” he taunts himself, his bass snicker-snacking. “Well here it is!” (Watt’s playing in general on secondman… is, if possible, more bulbous and ruminative than ever.)

Into hospital we go, and Watt gives us—joyously—the wadded dressings, the catheters, the incidental bladder infections, the nitty gritty: “yankin’ it out… and shovin’ it in!” The mood of “Tied a Reed Round My Waist” is… wonder, oddly enough, Pete Mazich’s B3 doing soft throbs of awe as Watt goes swooning under the knife of top surgeon “Doc Hopkins.” “Beltsandedman”—again with the blue-collar metaphors!—is a beautiful evocation of post-traumatic smoothness, clarity of perception, with fuzzed bass-notes lingering and Petra Haden’s harmonies leavening the Watt-growl. See Watt on the back of the CD, pounds lighter, purged and streamlined: the eyes are heavy-lidded but clear, afire, and there’s a sort of rinsed brilliance to the complexion. It all appears to have been quite good for him.

“Woodworkin’” Parts 1 and 2 by SAM ZETTWOCH (Arthur No. 14/Jan. 2005)

Administrator — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 02:06:34 +0000

Click images to really enlarge. It’s still not gonna be completely ideal—for that, you’ll have to see the actual magazine (available at the Arthur Store for cheep)—but it’s pretty good.

Sam Zettwoch: http://zettwoch.blogspot.com

Arthur’s superb Comics Editor in this era was Tom Devlin.

“Dick Captured by KGB” by VOINA

C. L. Hornbeam — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:31:07 +0000

“…The most notorious Voina action was last June, when several members of the group painted a penis on the Liteiny Bridge in St Petersburg. Evading and fighting off security, the 65-meter high image was completed just before the bridge opened, as it does each evening to let ships pass through. The penis ‘erected,’ directly facing the St Petersburg headquarters of the FSB, the KGB’s successor. The group called the artwork Dick Captured by KGB.”

More: The artists who crossed the line: An art group that stages orgies, throws cats at cashiers and has Banksy as a fan has enraged the Russian authorities (The Independent)

“Some of my FAQs” by DAVID LASKY (Arthur No. 14/Jan. 2005)

Administrator — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 03:45:43 +0000

Click image to really enlarge. It’s still not gonna be completely ideal—for that, you’ll have to see the actual magazine (available at the Arthur Store for cheep)—but it’s pretty good.

David Lasky: http://dlasky.livejournal.com/

Arthur’s superb Comics Editor in this era was Tom Devlin.

“Why?” by DAVID LASKY (Arthur No. 13/Nov. 2004)

Administrator — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 03:36:49 +0000

Click image to really enlarge. It’s still not gonna be completely ideal—for that, you’ll have to see the actual magazine (available at the Arthur Store for cheep)—but it’s pretty good.

David Lasky: http://dlasky.livejournal.com/

Arthur’s Comics Editor in this era was Tom Devlin.

“Epic Tale” by TOM GAULD (Arthur No. 13/Nov. 2004)

Administrator — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 03:28:39 +0000

Click image to really enlarge. It’s still not gonna be completely legible—for that, you’ll have to see the actual magazine (available at the Arthur Store for cheep)—but it’s pretty good.

Tom Gauld: http://www.tomgauld.com/

Arthur’s Comics Editor in this era was Tom Devlin.

“Flipping Out” by VANESSA DAVIS (Arthur No. 13/Nov 2004)

Administrator — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 03:17:50 +0000

Click image to really enlarge. It’s still not gonna be completely legible—for that, you’ll have to see the actual magazine (available at the Arthur Store for cheep)—but it’s pretty good.

Vanessa Davis: http://www.spanielrage.com

Arthur’s Comics Editor in this era was Tom Devlin.

“I remember high school…” by LEIF GOLDBERG (Arthur No. 9/Mar 2004)

Administrator — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 02:57:25 +0000

Click image to really enlarge. It’s still not gonna be completely legible—for that, you’ll have to see the actual magazine (available at the Arthur Store for cheep)—but it’s pretty good.

Leif Goldberg: http://www.pictureboxinc.com/artists-authors/leif-goldberg

Arthur’s Comics Editor in this era was Tom Devlin.

“Split Rock, Montana” by MEGAN KELSO (Arthur No. 6/Sept. 2003)

Administrator — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 02:42:11 +0000

Click image to really enlarge. It’s still not gonna be completely legible—for that, you’ll have to see the actual magazine (available at the Arthur Store for cheep)—but it’s pretty good.

Megan Kelso: girlhero.com

Arthur’s Comics Editors in this era were Jordan Crane & Sammy Harkham.

Comics by SOUTHER SALAZAR (Arthur No. 6/Sept. 2003)

Administrator — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 02:35:02 +0000

Click image to really enlarge. It’s still not gonna be completely legible—for that, you’ll have to see the actual magazine (available at the Arthur Store for cheep)—but it’s pretty good.

Souther Salazar: southersalazar.net

Arthur’s Comics Editors in this era were Jordan Crane & Sammy Harkham.

COSMIC HARMONIES & WHISTLING: LIVING SISTERS’ BOWIE “STARMAN” COVER

Administrator — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 17:09:01 +0000

Arthur Radio Transmission #38 w/ LAUREL HALO + BRYCE HACKFORD DJs

ARTHUR RADIO — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:14:26 +0000

Staring into the open end of a computer circuit, we suddenly find ourselves evaporating into a sparkling stream of 0′s and 1′s. In a swirl of stars and blue lights, we feel ourselves becoming weightless; like a magnetic force, the circuit sucks us into it with a single breath and we enter a mirror world where technology reigns, and to our delight we realize that we have once again left our physical bodies behind us. There we meet our very special guests, who one by one guide us through what we can only hope is life after the singularity.

Our first host Bryce Hackford (of Behavior) begins our journey by leading us into a shiny field of electrified plasma, where the local time is set to no higher than 33rpm. We dance in slow-motion leaps and bounds, taking our time to spin and roll in the air, spreading and condensing as the music changes.

After around 45 minutes, we encounter our second host, known on Earth as electronic solo songstress LAUREL HALO, who appears in a flash as a flickering face above a bank of silver clouds. The image mouths to us to follow her into a stream of white lasers, which is pointed directly upwards, disappearing into the unknown. All sense of memory–past, present, and future–is wiped.

STREAM:

DOWNLOAD: Arthur Radio #38 w/ Laurel Halo + Bryce Hackford DJ sets 1-09-2011

Back in the human realm, you can catch Bryce’s transcendence-inducing DJ night STEPS with Kyle Garner on the last Monday of every month at Home Sweet Home in NYC.

You can follow Laurel’s tour schedule and happenings here, and if you are in New York in April you can see her perform alongside Harald Grosskopf, as well as past Arthur Radio guests Arp and Blondes, at the monumental debut of Grosskopf’s 1979 Synthesist reissue on RVNG Intl (more info here). Look out for her upcoming 12″ Hour Logic, to be released in May of 2011.

Timeline + Bonus Laurel Halo DJ set below…

[ Bryce Hackford DJs @ 00:00 ]

[ LAUREL HALO DJs @ 45 mins ]

And @ 2:00:12 …..

BONUS LAUREL HALO DJ set:

DOWNLOAD: LAUREL HALO Bonus DJ Set

A Poem from Dan Raphael

Travis Catsull — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:35:50 +0000

Drunk on Bacon
by Dan Raphael

sitting in a claustrophobic, slat-sided shed for several days
in a world of clotted smoke
where meat falls like rain
no one dies    no one inhales     no one churns
to love is to have whenever the appetite

pigs are born small
trees are smaller than grass but singularly thicker
from sun to fire
        fire retards time
when the sun goes out our clocks will surrender to gravity
my wrist is a video portal
since i am so many places its always breakfast somewhere,
always the first drink of the day

when i smell myself approaching, swallowing lit matches, stealing firewood
my flame will never stop
every night a new tree falls, three more sprout
when stars turn green they’re moving sideways

[Sunday Lecture] “Citizens and Denizens” by Freeman House

Administrator — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 04:04:15 +0000

Citizens and Denizens

by Freeman House

Keynote talk for the first Carmel Watershed festival, 2004

I’ve been asked to talk on the subject of watershed citizenship. That made me want to know more about that word citizen, so I dug around a little. It’s been a useful exercise. The word originated as “denizen,” meaning ‘of a place.’ As urban life became more dominant, denizen evolved into “citizen” meaning city person. As nations rose, the word came to define who belonged inside the boundaries and who didn’t. The ancient Greeks reserved the rights and privileges of citizenship to wealthy men, and for most of Roman times, they were dispensed at the pleasure of the emperor. It wasn’t until the American and French revolutions that the notion of popular and participatory decision-making came to be associated with the word. So we can trace the concept from ancient tribal and ethnic definitions of who does and who doesn’t belong to “our” society, forward in time as it evolves toward more inclusiveness. But always there is the notion of boundaries….. In the natural world, boundaries are rarely so clear as humans have been able to make them. (What grizzly or salamander would have invented the rectangular grid? The boundaries of, say, Idaho represent the range of what?)

As the word is used today, “citizen” is the creature of the invented world, rather than a participant in unfolding creation, which is what a denizen might be.

The truly marvelous concept of participatory democracy was partially conceived in the American Revolution, and conceptually pushed a little further in the first months of the French Revolution. We need to remember that these new ideas were an invention of men in the thrall of the so-called Enlightenment. Philosophers like Bacon and Descartes, who were thrilled to think that men could control nature for their own purpose, drove the thinking of the Enlightenment. Another philosopher of the period, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was the much more popular and widely read author. It was his ideas about the basic goodness and mutuality of the natural world that combined with the Enlightenment philosophers’ thinking to produce the bastard child, democracy.

So at the same time that we were moving in the direction of egalitarian society, we were also gradually removing ourselves away from thinking of ourselves as a functional part of nature. We have come to think of ourselves, rather, as being in control of nature—no matter how many earthquakes, tornadoes or floods we may have endured. In the end, citizenship is about who makes the decisions: about land use and zoning, how we care for and protect each other—a definition of we—inside some set of predetermined boundaries. There is generally an unspoken assumption that it is we humans who are making decisions for the natural world. Denizens, on the other hand, know without thinking that their own well-being depends on the health of the landscape surrounding, that those boundaries are rarely legally defined, and that each place presents is own range of opportunities and limitations. We will become informed watershed citizens only after we have become watershed denizens. How do we become denizens? How did we lose the knack? Where are the models?

I like to do a riff in the voice of a 10,000-year-old person talking for humans in the temperate rain forests of North America. We’ve been here for a long time—many thousands of years. And if you were listening to some generic person thinking like a species, outside of time and part of place, say this place, it might sound something like this:

When the last round of glaciers was melting, we were moving around in those hide-covered boats and with those tumpline burden-baskets. Damn. It was cold! Same time, the salmon were moving south as new rivers were shaped and exposed. Every time we saw the flash and wiggle of those fish going upstream, we’d say, “hah, this place could be someone’s home.”

We moved about, and then we settled, in groups separated by ridgelines, and shared most everything with our group. It wasn’t that we were any kinder than we are now; we weren’t. Generosity just seemed like the best strategy for survival. We’d been watching the other animals and there’s no question about it: they are generous as long as they’re treated with respect. As long as we behaved ourselves, the animals returned to feed us every year. It just made sense to treat each other that way, imitate the rest of the world. Over the years we learned that it made sense to extend those courtesies to other groups of humans nearby—then we wouldn’t be fighting each other all the time. And since we tended to settle near salmon rivers, we learned to take fish to eat in a way that guaranteed plenty would get upstream to spawn, and so that our neighbors upstream would have enough to eat also. There were a great many fish and only a few of us.

Before we’d go out to catch the salmon, we’d have big times; everyone was there. For days and days, we’d get reminded of how to behave and how we fit into the world. We’d come away knowing that if we didn’t act right the world wasn’t going to work right, and we’d come away with a belly full of salmon to prove it. We’d also learned how this year was different from the other years. The basket-makers would tell how the grasses were doing, and if the fires the women had set last year had done what they were supposed to do. The hunters would talk about the animal populations; we’d all remember out loud how much salmon we were able to dry and save last year. People would talk about the acorn crop that year. If there’d been a flood or an earthquake, that’d get added to the long narrative about us and about the places where we lived. In that way, all of us could remember years of feast or famine, the things that’d happened long before we were born. Given a few thousand years of that kind of repetition, a lot of people had a lot of intimate knowledge of their home river basins. Every year we expanded what we knew about the long term in our life places. Every year we came to feel more and more a necessary part of the place. We learned how to take care of places and keep things in balance. We settled in and stayed 10,000 years or so. Over time, we learned where and when to burn and prune, how to fish and hunt without robbing our children.

The great gatherings were a good place to meet lovers, too. But we were careful not to let our populations get larger than the place would support.

But in other parts of the world, populations were getting larger than their places would support and more of us began to pour into salmon country. We newcomers looked a little different but that wasn’t the important thing. We had different ideas about ourselves and about the world. After there were enough of us, we tended to cluster in groups, too, but we acted as if we were free agents, individuals who didn’t have to take care of each other or anything else. This attitude was supported by the tradition we’d brought of turning life into an invention called money and it was by money that we measured everything. There was so much stuff here that could be turned into money that it made us newcomers a little crazy. Besides the gold and silver, there were all those trees. And there were the salmon and all the other creatures in the water. We newcomers began to turn all that stuff into money as fast as we could.

Those of us who had arrived recently thought that the rest of us were something less than human and it got pretty nasty. Most of us who’d been here forever got killed or died off. All those thousands of years of information about how to live here was lost and the rest of us were stranded. We didn’t really understand where we were any more.

But that didn’t seem to matter so much for a while. We had efficiency on our side. We studied efficiency because that was the quality that turned stuff into money fastest. We put nets in the rivers that took all the fish. Those fish wheels were really something to watch when they spit those big chinooks into cannery barges. We cut trees right down to the riverbanks and then built cities there that used the rivers to flush their wastes away, very efficient.

Pretty soon, really soon when you think how long those systems of generosity had been working, the salmon weren’t coming back in the numbers they had been and the trees were being cut faster than they could grow. And we didn’t even have gas engines yet.

Right along with that big feeding frenzy, we set up a couple of other programs we’d brought with us. Science was one and centralized government was another. Science is efficient because it allows us to break the natural world into bite-sized pieces that can be studied separately and measured. That results in a lot of information pretty quickly. Unfortunately, it also allows us to think we know more than we really do—just because we’ve translated something into numbers. It took science a hundred years, for instance, to understand that salmon make their reproductive homes in specific rivers. Meanwhile, scientists were building hatcheries based on the idea that you could just move fish from one place to another and everything will be fine. In truth, those hatcheries did keep the fishing boats working for a generation or so longer than they would have without them. But not before they had done a lot of damage to the salmon’s natural intelligence. The runs kept on decreasing.

Once it was apparent to everyone that stuff was being turned into money too fast, we started to be call nature a resource base. Once nature became natural resources, it had to be managed, of course, and managers need to be experts. The land had been cut up by this time into huge areas called states and straight lines running right across a map separated the states. This created management units that were essentially unmanageable since they cut through life zones and watersheds that required different approaches. The experts have been trying to catch up ever since. Maybe their new computer models will help them. Aside from the fact that the money people have had a disproportionate voice in how the states conduct themselves, this helps explain why regulation to protect salmon and other natural wonders has always been about a generation too late.

Even now there are folks who think they can make it alone with the right combinations of property, power, and control. But there are also coming to be a large group of people who think that maybe wild abundance is worth nurturing and that the way to pursue that is through service, respect and mutual aid. And that’s where we come in.

Now it’s me and not that generic human talking. He or she is waiting to see how things go…

• • •

As I drove here from my home nearly 400 miles north, I thought about the watersheds I was driving through—how fragile they are, and for the most part how damaged. The waters of the Eel appropriated by the Sonoma Water District, the Russian polluted by vineyard toxins, each of their dwindling salmon populations denatured by the continuous introduction of hatchery spawn taken from faraway rivers. None but two of the creeks in Marin County free-running. And then the Bay Area, the Bay itself still poisoned with the mercury runoff of placer mining more than a century ago; the Delta starved for water by the insatiable needs of corporate farms, which through over-irrigation, are salinizing the very soil that is “feeding the world.” San Jose, with its tiny steelhead population holding on in the little creek that runs right through the city. Between San Jose and here I wasn’t always so sure which watershed I was driving through, but I was pretty sure that some of the same conditions were present.

But all that sadness was balanced by my amazement at what had happened with the inhabitants of those valleys over the last generation. In every drainage with which I was familiar, I knew of two or more restoration or conservation organizations that were working hard and effectively at reversing some of the conditions I just described. In the SF Bay Area alone, dozens of organizations and schools involve literally tens of thousands of people in the Sisyphean task of ecological restoration of the Bay and delta.

And I knew that I was headed for one of the fountainheads of the watershed restoration movement, Monterey Bay, where commercial and recreational fishermen had banded together more than twenty years ago to consider ways to improve freshwater habitat and adequate flows for their beloved salmon and steelhead. And look at us now! I have a list of twenty-five organizations represented here today, all focusing on some aspect of watershed health in a drainage smaller than 300 square miles, There are probably more than are on my list, just as I was sure that for each restoration group I knew about further north, there were probably two or three I hadn’t heard about yet.

• • •

WHY WATERSHED?
Why this relatively rapid development? In those same 20 years, global environmental concerns have become an uninterrupted disaster siren. Our anxiety increases each day about our apparent powerlessness to do much about things like global climate change, ozone depletion, the health of the oceans, and on and on.

A whole lot of people seem to have come to a similar conclusion at the same time: if global problems seem too large for most people to grapple with (and how comforting by itself can an annual contribution to the Sierra Club be?) it is within our reach to assume some responsibility for our home places. Clean water is a good organizing principle, and so are native salmon and steelhead. A watershed of a certain size offers a reasonable scale of endeavor that’s a good fit for human visceral and mental capabilities—on both the levels of the individual and the community.
The watershed is a simple construct. Since water runs downhill, every drop that falls runs down one side of a ridge or another, and gathers into creeks and sub-drainages that eventually combine into a river system that gives the watershed its name. Most every person, urban or rural, consciously or unconsciously, has some visceral experience of their watershed each day—through glimpses of waterways or ridgelines that surround and infuse their local places. Further, watersheds organize themselves into a hierarchy of scales: spring to swale and tributary to river. The individual can approach the construct at any scale that suits their particular imagination or skill. The community can transform these individual relationships into a scale appropriate to its size and level of organization.

WHY WATERSHED ORGANIZATION?
Two pairs of eyes are better than one. In fact two pairs of eyes are better than two, because in the complexity of any part of the natural world, any pair of eyes is going to pick up different patterns, different details. Combine those two sets of perceptions and already you have a new ferment that has a life of its own.

Watersheds are hydrological rather than biotic units, so there is still a lot of cause-and-effect happening out there. Water runs down hill and carries a lot of stuff with it. You don’t want to invest a lot of energy in shoring up a stream bank when half a mile upstream a massive landslide is poised to wipe out your work.

Therefore, watersheds require systematic attention and there is really no one better placed to do it than the people who live on or near the creek. And of course, once you begin such an engagement—once you have the experience under your belt of having built some stream bank armoring structures, or cabled in some large woody debris, or woven willow wattles, or planted some alders along trashed channels—your learning curve both individually and collectively is going to take a very steep turn upward. You’ll know more than the bureaucrats do in an amazingly short time.

Once you get to monitoring the biotic characteristics of the waterway, it’s an endless task and pleasure, and there is literally no one else that can take note of the changes from season to season and from year to year but the people who live here.

Do this with a group of comrades and neighbors for a few years, and an interesting thing begins to happen. Without thinking much about it, you’ll have become related through the landscape that runs through your lives. You’ll begin to take on some of the aspects of a single entity with many pairs of eyes.

I’d like to sum up by making a few claims on which I hope we can agree:

1) Watershed restoration is essential to our emerging identity as watershed denizens and citizens. There’s a point of no return in the destruction of natural processes and other creatures beyond which we’ll be living somewhere else, in a world entirely of our own construct. At that point any talk of watershed citizenship will be a moot point.

2) Watershed restoration is perhaps the most effective ways to learn the things we need to know to live in place.

3) Modern industrial humans have only been in these western coast watersheds for a little over 150 years. It may take that long or longer to restore any meaningful amount of what has been lost. Therefore, we must look to the arts and to the schools to provide the generational continuity that is necessary to our effort. Congratulations to all of you here today who are already working in that direction.

4) As citizens becoming denizens, it is an indication of the primitive nature of our progress that so many of our efforts are on behalf of a negative position. What not to put in the water, how not to treat the soil, particular things that must not be put in the air, or in the landfill. Necessary resistance, yes, but we need to shift more of our focus toward positive futures. What are the businesses and industries that might be called restorative businesses and industries—activities that put food on the table at the same time as they improve the health of the watershed? A model for this is the way in which organic farming improves the soil even as it produces our food. Our need to take food and shelter from the places we live is not going to disappear. It may be, in fact, that our most effective resistance to the negative aspects of globalization will be to increase our local self-reliance.

5) Sometimes we’re going to be working beside people, our neighbors, whose worldview and philosophy is different from our own. I’m sometimes asked what is the best thing I’ve learned from working at watershed restoration and I usually answer that I’ve learned how to listen. I’ve learned more from people that don’t agree with me than from people who do. The consensual process is not so much a political tool as it is a tool for community building.

It may be that the consensus process is to community building as public hearings are to democracy as prayer is to spiritual practice. The practice is demanding, the outcome is uncertain, but this is the work we must endure.

The faith that keeps me going is the belief that such a large part of our human social prehistory has been organized around a worldview that makes human satisfaction inseparable from the health and abundance of the immediate landscape. California aboriginal peoples in particular—among the most culturally diverse populations the world knew at the time of contact—tended to organize their tribal identities within watersheds. So much of our time on the planet has been organized around similar world-views that the cultural aberrations of the last 500 to 5,000 years of civilization are but a blink of evolutionary time. So much of our time on the planet was spent in communion with the local landscape that I believe we all walk around with the genetic imperative to recover that intimacy. That no true fullness of being is available to us until we recover that intimacy.

We’re here today to celebrate that understanding. Celebration is an essential part of our work. In my home watershed there are not only several annual celebrations of the place, but each year the schools conduct an annual watershed week, during which all the curricula is organized around local phenomena. Then all the schools come together for a watershed day, a celebration. Each year, that day resembles more and more a gathering of watershed citizens on their way to becoming watershed denizens.

That’s the biographical note for Freeman House on the Lannan Foundation website. We would add that earlier in his life, Freeman edited Innerspace, a mid-1960s independent press magazine for the nascent psychedelic community; presided over the marriage of Abbie and Anita Hoffman at Central Park on June 10, 1967; and was a member of both New York City’s Group Image and the San Francisco Diggers.

This is the ninth lecture in this series. Previous lectures are available here: http://www.arthurmag.com/contributors/sunday-lecture/.

BACK IN THE DAZE

C. L. Hornbeam — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 01:16:19 +0000

PRESENCE: Lift to Experience’s Josh T. Pearson talks about the Passion [Arthur No. 1/Oct 2002]

Administrator — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 23:59:58 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 1 (October 2002)…

One Texan Band, Under God
Lift to Experience, the greatest art-rock band since Sigur Ros, talk about the Passion with Jay Babcock

Josh Pearson, the 28-year-old singer-guitarist-songwriter for the extraordinary Denton, Texas-based art-rock band Lift to Experience, works in a world positively drenched in Judeo-Christian allusion and metaphor. So of course he’s conducting a mid-tour interview on a cel phone from a Manhattan pub called The Slaughtered Lamb.

“Yeah, it’s perfect,” he says, with a chuckle. “It’s like, ‘Where do we go? Oh, there’s a spot.’”

Lift to Experience are in New York City on their first-ever extended tour of America. It’s a tour that’s been a long time coming, in support of a debut album—the audacious, double-CD concept record The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads—that itself was a long time in gestation. The songs that made it onto the album were originally composed in 1998, after Pearson had moved out to a ranch to work as a farmhand.

“It wasn’t a career move,” he says. “I just needed a place to be alone and not have to talk to anyone, to have enough time where the good ideas could become great ideas. I was alone and isolated and living in this little barn. It wasn’t glamorous, it was just mindless work: shoveling up the shit and taking the horses out to pasture and feeding them hay. It’s real therapeutic working with horses…”

Soon, the songs came. And with them, the concept for the album. No brief summary of The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads can do it justice, Texas-style or otherwise. The album’s opening, spoken announcement is: “This is the story of three Texas boys busy minding their own business when the Angel of the Lord appeared unto them saying, ‘When the Winston Churchills start firin’ their Winston rifles into the sky form the Lone Star State, drinkin’ their Lone Star beer and smokin’ their Winston cigarettes, know the time is drawin’ nigh when the son shall be lifted on high.’”

Pearson says Texas-Jerusalem is “a concept album about the end of the world, where Texas is the Promised Land—the final battleground in the war between good and evil.” But it’s about more than that. The double-album’s lyrics are full to bustling with freight trains and incoming storms, strange prophets and fallen feathered angels, blood and fool‘s gold. Its protagonists are an ambitious Texas rock band desperate for a smash hit, ready, metaphorically at least, to deal their souls to the devil at Robert Johnson’s crossroads in exchange for material success. But Satan doesn’t show. Instead it’s the Angel of the Lord, announcing “just as was told/Justice will unfold.”

“Don‘t you boys know nothin’?” the angel asks the band, puzzled by the news of imminent holy conflict on Texas soil. “The USA is the center of JerUSAlem.”

Then, the music volcanoes. The rhythm is muscular, spacious, dynamic; the guitar is meditative, gossamer drone parted by noise mass and riff shapes; and the vocals are uniquely full and rich—triumphant yet resigned—sung in a beautiful voice of steady comfort. The lyrics—the metaphors, the literary and contemporary allusions—are relentless and poetic: the simple word ’star’ means, at once, the Lone Star state, the Jewish Star of David, the Christian Star of Bethlehem and, of course, Rock Star. A lot of work was put into this album, obviously. Taking it all in is a dizzying, overwhelming experience.

“It worked out real well with what I wanted to do with the metaphors,” says Pearson. “Texas being the place of last stands, from the Alamo. And Texas being an individual nation in its own, with freedoms that it celebrates that the other states don’t have—it can secede at any time, the only flag allowed to fly the same height as the American flag, that sort of thing, cuz it was a nation before it merged with the States.

“I started writing songs and they were all pointing to a place and then one night, I realized where it was headed. It made itself known. It’s one of those things where your body is just sorta following intuitively. I wouldn’t say you’re channeling it, but you’re trusting in your intuition that it’s headed in the right direction. Sometimes you never know why you’re headed that way, but it works out. All the pieces fall into place.”

* * *

Incredibly, Lift to Experience does the album one better in a live setting.

The first time I saw them was at 7:15 on a Saturday night in a small bar on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake. A stained and horned bullskull sat at stage-center; a Texas flag draped over a bass amp. Behind and above them was the bar’s neon-lit sign that read (of course) “Salvation.” As the sun dipped into the smog horizon outside, Lift to Experience began playing to an audience of no more than 100, most of whom were unfamiliar with the band‘s music.

They began suddenly, with almost notice. And they began with a no-vocal, power trio cover of—I shit you not—“Kashmir.” It was intense, immediate, absolutely massive. There was Josh (The Bear) Browning—a bass throbber of burly frame, serious beardage and eyes-closed close concentration; there was Andy Young, a drummer with the build of the sturdiest steakhouse either side of the Rio Grande, leaning forward off the stool Keith Moon-like, switching between mallets, drumsticks and handclaps, his cymbals in perpetual perpendicularity; and there was Josh T. Pearson, a gangly lanky framed, scraggly-haired guitar-vocalist in biker Nudiewear and bracelets, his beaten cowboy hat ringed by thorns.

They seamed straight from “Kashmir” into an instrumental version of their own majestic “Just As Was Told,” without breaking. It was that rare kind of performance that dapples your skin with goosebumps. All the stuff on the album was there: the long builds and graceful a cappella interludes, the churning muscularity and psychedelic overload. We’re talking presence.

“We were influenced by all the early ‘90s shoegazer stuff,” says Pearson. “Ride, Pale Saints, Swervedriver, Medicine, My Bloody Valentine. I think Loveless is the best record of the ‘90s. What I wanted to do in the band was be a combination of My Bloody Valentine and Jimi Hendrix—Hendrix in the sense that it was more personality in each instrument, it wasn’t noise for noise’s sake, everything’s there for a purpose.

“I play in an open tuning called DADGAD. There’s three Ds there so I can do a lot of finger picking on top and just keep that low, solid note going throughout the song. One of the things I wanted to incorporate was the one note sustains, where one note is throughout the entire song, because I think it’s not just Eastern music but a lot of the Western music too, when that’s resolved, in classical stuff too, that’s my favorite thing is when there’s one solid note that’s just held and held and held. A droning. But it’s not a droning to lull you to sleep, it’s to take you to a higher place.”

It’s not all earnestness and bombast. Pearson’s vision integrates the solemnity of a believer (he counts himself a Christian) and the necessary humor of one who’s being overwhelmed and knows it. The album’s purposefully cheesy cover is an attempt at undercutting any hint of self-importance.

“From the record cover on, you know, we knew we needed an element of humor. We wanted it to look like a rap record, something so narcissistic… but at the same time be self-deprecating, you know? So we took out a pre-emptive strike against whatever people might have against the album [due to its content]. There’s lines in there that were intended to be funny. ‘Best band in the whole damn land.‘ That’s just funny. It needs humor in it to pull it off.”

With the album finished, Pearson went looking for a label. He found no takers.

“There was a year there where no one wanted to touch it. this record. I sent it out to indie rock labels, no one responded, not even a ‘don’t quit your day job.’ I knew that I could do a lot less and get a lot more. I could’ve dumbed it down quite a bit and just made some stupid-ass indie-rock record that might’ve been good for the times but no one’s would listen to in a decade. And I was like, Fuck it. This is the only thing I’m going to do with my life. Doing less would never satisfy me. I’m going to go for the higher good, try to create this piece of art that maybe no one will get, and shoot for much higher and probably get much, much less. But I’m glad I did, because that’s the only thing that would satisfy. I didn’t think that anybody would get it. I’m still surprised that somebody put the damn thing out.”

Pearson’s stubbornness and commitment seems to come from his family. He’s spoken angrily in interviews about his father, a man who went so deeply Christian that he stopped working and eventually abandoned his family.

“He didn’t leave,” Pearson corrects me. “We left him. He had gotten involved in this faith movement that sort of swept through after the Jesus movement in the late ‘70s. There was a lot of talk about the power of the Word, faith, speaking things into existence—basically believing you can get anything you want from God. It got to the point where he wasn’t working at all, just trusting in the Lord to provide for all his needs. After a coupla years, my mother had to leave because we were hungry. So she moved to Washington state. I lived with my grandparents for a while, and eventually came back to Texas. My father never paid his child support, and I couldn’t wrap my head around that. So the last conversation we had, it was just…basically I told him if he wanted my respect, he would have to earn it, and pay back that back child support. My mother just busted her ass, working three jobs at a time just to provide food for my sister and I, and he’s got a fucking master’s degree, and continues to be a preacher man. It’s completely justified in his mind. And that’s the frustrating thing, cuz he really believes he’s in the right, that he’s living righteously.

“I still have issues with him.”

* * *

In 2001, Texas-Jerusalem was finally released—by Bella Union—to critical acclaim and modest commercial success…in England. The band’s relative success there and in other parts of Europe, while remaining an almost unknown quantity in their homeland, is a point of frustration for Pearson.

“You read an American review and it makes them angry, cuz they can’t pigeonhole it and don’t know what to do with it, and whenever they have a problem with it, it’s always because of the religious references. They’re saying, This is not good art because I don’t agree with their worldview. It’s ludicrous. But we’ll get great press in the UK and France. I think it’s because over there, they’re surrounded by majestic art full of religious symbolism, by cathedrals and museums full of Judeo-Christian art, they can appreciate the beauty of something without being pissed off because they don’t agree with it. They can see Michelangelo’s angels and not have to believe in the existence of angels and still be moved by ‘em, because it’s a thing of beauty. Whereas, over here in the States, religion is shoved down people’s throats. They don’t wanna hear it. So if anything approaches that, it pisses them off. It’s ludicrous. If it’s good, it’s good. Good art exists in and of itself.

“At the same time, you know, fuck it, I don’t care. I’ve got full confidence in what we’re doing and our ability to write a song and the future of it. If it takes America 15 or 20 years, I could give a fuck. We’ll keep putting shit out, and our sound will bury ‘em. I’ve got about ten tapes filled with ideas in a general direction of where it’s gonna go, it’s called The Post-Apocalyptical Blues Volumes 1 and 2. Sort of like Use Your Illusion. That’s a joke. Well, it is kinda like it—releasing it might cause us to disappear as quick as that record did them…”

The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads is available in North America through Bella Union/NAIL.

A Poem from Smokey Farris

Travis Catsull — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 10:52:56 +0000

Another 2-d Christmas
by Smokey Farris

Fiesta frisbee legs running a gun.
Raspberry look a little giggle and a little tongue pulling in the sweet
fruit.
Jungle gym girl, jungle jim standing up on the bars, jungle gym chasing
Rocko’s gang,
hey baby you remember this one.

It was a spiral of metal mathematical bars,
must have been our kid attraction,
the dome
pentagon top,
triangle sides,
reaching off the great earth and the huge playground,
with sparse attractions.
Most of the space was vacant and earth.
Jumping high above the scotch 79 soccer field
with up turned mesh chest shirts behind the head.
Blake Edwards.
Blake red and white windbreaker,
Dreamed of christmas UFO nights with blue parades of blue snowmen
glowing
and nearly two-d christmas lights
and the magic was fading from the evil yard.
It was disney land alight but it was alien,
it was prismatic.

It was on my street,
and before on the white and yellow pink day on the driveway crest
I saw a gold governing movement,
a great glittering gold tray or sleigh craft, a flat disk,
with an unforeseeable army,
There he was, the burger king,
with his scepter and crown,
blank fiberglass stare,
and all the spirit of a cartoon god.

John Adamian on COLLEEN (Arthur No. 20, Jan 2006)

Administrator — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 03:08:58 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 20 (Jan. 2006)

UNDER A BLANKET
Amidst the culled samples and loops of antique instruments, where in Colleen‘s music is Cécile Schott?
By John Adamian

Lockstep rhythms, heartstring-tugging melodies and overpowering volume can bring the masses together. People talk a lot about the communal and social nature of music. The language we use reinforces the connection: “groups” and “bands” play in front of “crowds.” But some music—like that of the contemporary French musician/composer Cécile Schott, who records under the name Colleen—is intensely solitary, almost private. Not in the candid, pulled-from-the-diary, confessional sense, but in the I’m-alone-inside-my-head sense, holed up in a zone between headphones. In Colleen’s music there are no words, and computers and effects create its blanketing layered feel. It’s the music not of crowds, but of solitude.

My wife and I just had our first baby, Bernadette, a few months ago. Ever since we brought her home from the hospital we’ve had a lot of music in rotation in the CD changer. We’ve tried Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the Rolling Stones, Nina Simone, Raymond Scott, some old Brill Building pop, Vashti Bunyan, the Louvin Brothers, Art Blakey, Gary Higgins, new ones by the Clientele and Broken Social Scene, and lots more. A few records seem to go over well with the baby—a field recording of the Bayaka, forest people from the Congo, a couple of Glenn Gould playing J. S. Bach, William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, two Elizabethan composers, and two discs by Colleen. The mix is pretty seamless and it creates a sufficiently womblike atmosphere for all of us, but Bernadette clearly prefers the Colleen discs.

Colleen’s first record, 2003′s haunting Everyone Alive Wants Answers, is made up entirely of looped and layered samples, snippets culled from her record collection; the music creates a cocoon from thrums and furious zithers. It might seem simply soothing at first, until it casts its menacing shadow. For her followup, this year’s equally captivating The Golden Morning Breaks, Colleen (who had previously played only guitar) decided to abandon her method of using reprocessed bits from preexisting recordings and play all of the instruments (cello, music box, gamelan, melodica, etc.) herself. She then, in effect, sampled herself.

If Colleen’s music feels hermetic, of its own world, it’s not entirely coincidental. Schott, 29, works and performs almost exclusively by herself. She shuns collaboration. She doesn’t see herself as fitting in with a group of like-minded musicians. And maybe she’s right. Working for months at a stretch on her recordings, Schott prefers not to let anyone hear her work until she’s entirely through with it. She doesn’t exactly reveal herself through the music of Colleen as much as she loses herself in it. She avoids traditional touring because of the frantic travel from one city to the next without time to soak anything up.

I spoke with Schott twice by phone about her work, once from her apartment in Paris and once just after a soundcheck for a show at a London museum. As a part-time English teacher at a high school in the suburbs outside Paris, Schott isn’t a recluse, but she cultivates a kind of scholastic quietude that seems almost monastic, especially today. It was only relatively recently that Schott’s pupils and colleagues found out about her other career as a musician, and she didn’t necessarily want them to. “Somehow I felt that this wasn’t something that I wanted my pupils to know about,” she says. Schott appears inclined to maintain a distance between herself and the world. Even her stage name seems to be another buffering layer, but she says it’s more elaborate than that.

“Basically I have a problem with words in music. I think it’s hard to have good lyrics and sing them meaningfully. I have the same problem with song titles and even band names. I’ve always found it embarrassing to have to find a name, and I wouldn’t want to use my own name because I think it’s quite boring, and so I wanted something simple. I had this phonetics dictionary—I knew the name Colleen, so I’m not actually referring to the names of people, but the noun, the Irish word meaning ‘young girl,’ like the Scottish word ‘lass.’ I like the look of the word and the sound. The name itself is full of curves with the C and the O, and there’s also repetition with the double L and the E, so I thought it kind of looked like my music. Also if you say it in French, colline is the word for hill. Again that sounded really nice, this image of natural curves.”

Natural curves sounds about right. Colleen’s music has a kind of organic undulating quality to it. It’s music that maps out a certain slow welling up, an ebb and flow, a liquid flux that requires time and patience to take in. Plucked on strings or tapped on chimes, gracefully simple patterns course, separate and reconnect. The elegance is in the unfolding.
With its music-box plinkings, plangent strings and percolating drones, Colleen’s work is often labeled as ambient, but she resists the tag. “I don’t really like the word ambient. Somehow it seems pejorative. Like you put it in the background, and it’s like a nice wash of sounds, and I don’t think my music is.” When asked how she imagines her ideal fans listening to her music, Schott replies: “In bed under a blanket. Hopefully they wouldn’t fall asleep before the end of the record.”

On her website Schott writes enthusiastically about the five years she spent reading Marcel Proust’s A la Rechere du Temps Perdu, the enormous cookies-and-memories work commonly known in English as A Remembrance of Things Past. Proust, who famously holed up in his bedroom to finish his novel, was pretty fond of his personal time, too. The book starts with an extended meditation about lying awake in bed. It’s something Schott can relate to.

“Being alone in your room, listening to music in your bed, you have to have time for that. I have a feeling at the moment that time is the most precious commodity, and that everyone is running around, myself included. I think to listen to my music, you definitely need lots of time, and the bedroom thing, listening on your own, is kind of a symbol of having to find time in your own life to do this sort of thing.”

Schott relishes free time not for indolence or leisure, but because she’s trying to accomplish so much. Now, as she begins work on her third record, Schott has set a few humble goals for herself. She’s teaching herself piano, studying a bit of music theory, taking up the clarinet and planning to begin lessons on the viola de gamba, a 17th century ancestor of the cello.

We have the eclecticism of the lending libraries of Paris to thank for Colleen’s hypnotic music. Born and raised in Montargis, a small town south of Paris, Schott came to music relatively late. “I had no musical background whatsoever. My parents weren’t really into music.” In high school she played guitar in what she describes as a noise-pop band. She then studied English at the university in Dijon, before going off to England for two years, where she worked odd jobs in Winchester, Manchester and Liverpool. In 1999 Schott came to Paris to get her teaching certificate, and there she started exploring the vast musical holdings at the city’s libraries. There she discovered the music of Elizabethan composer John Dowland (“I just liked the idea of guys playing the lute,” she says), the tumbling glassy phrasing of the West African kora, the clangor of Indonesian gamelan, the freedom of jazz and other music whose spirit infuses her work (though she shied away from using the material as a musical source because she felt she couldn’t improve on it). The transition from guitar player to sample cobbler and back to performer on exotic and rare instruments was a roundabout one.

“It was a long development,” she says. “After I stopped playing in this noisy pop band, I got a four-track tape recorder and tried to make stuff on my own, but I had nothing other than a guitar. I would bang on things. I would definitely try to make ‘experimental music’ with just the guitar and not even one single pedal, so it was really hard, and I got really discouraged.”
Then a friend gave her a computer with some music-editing software, and Schott had a revelation listening to the extensive stacks of music she’d borrowed from the libraries. “I thought, that’s what I need to create my music from other people’s music, but it’s going to be mine, and I’m going to be independent, and I won’t have any problems with gear, and it’s going to be easy. All I need is CDs, and all I need to do is look for the sounds and assemble them.’”

Sounds easy enough. And it’s a familiar line of thought for just about anyone with a musical idea in their head, a CD collection and a computer. But Schott did it.

On Everyone Alive Wants Answers, insect sounds flutter in the background while what sounds like the superhuman hammering of a dulcimer floats by. An arterial pulse churns behind the sound of a child’s voice further buried under a wisp of bowed strings. “Babies” sounds like the inside of a giant wind chime. Airy skeletal samples are gathered into cycling patterns on “Your Heart on Your Sleeve.” A marching, Sun-Ra-worthy boinging Moog sound peoples “Long Live Mice in the Metro.” Sounds emerge and recede.

“I’m okay with things sounding a bit—’Oh where is this coming from?’ Maybe it gives you the feeling of some natural thing rising,” says Schott. There’s no singing, no drums. But the songs, many of which clock in at under four minutes, have a subtle rhythm and hummable melody.

The success of her computer-pastiche music created a new challenge for Schott: how to make her music for a live audience. Initially, Colleen embraced the switch from sampling records to generating her own sounds using acoustic instruments (the technique she used on The Golden Morning Breaks) because she didn’t want to be a laptop auteur. Not on stage at least.

“I’ve actually never been able to perform the older material,” she admits. “I decided to go back to playing instruments because I wanted to do live shows, but I didn’t want to bring a laptop. Originally the main impulse was because I thought there’s no way I’m going on stage with a computer and pretending to do something when I’m not. To me it’s more a question of whether the person is really doing something live, because that’s what it’s supposed to be. I’m not saying that all people who perform with laptops donít do anything, but from what I know, a lot of them are just going to press play and do a couple of things. But I wouldn’t call that a live show, and I’d be bored on stage if I had to do it.”

Despite the drastic change in approach between her first and second recordings, the results are surprisingly similar, and they demonstrate a single-minded vision working its way through both efforts. With Colleen playing all of the instruments herself, on The Golden Morning Breaks (which takes its name from a Dowland piece) the music gained a warm glow. In addition to cello and guitar, Colleen’s instrumental arsenal grew to include toy gamelan and a rare instrument called a glass harmonican. “It’s not mine, unfortunately,” says Schott. “It belongs to a friend of mine who used to sell antiques. He used to sell mechanical instruments mostly. This isn’t mechanical. It’s kind of like a glockenspiel, but it has glass blades and some small beaters made of tortoise shell and cork at the end. It’s from the early 19th century, just amazing.”

Now, if she wants to do a gig, she just has to figure out how to lug her gear. “I do everything on my own, so mostly I need a cello and a guitar, and now I have a clarinet, and I have a melodica. I have music boxes. If I play and someone can help me carry stuff, then I try to bring some more stuff. I have guitar pedals. Mainly sampling pedals, and I sample myself live, that’s basically how it works.”

Schott stresses that she’s not a specialist in any of the subjects that fascinate her, whether it’s baroque musical practice, composer Pauline Oliveros’s idea of Deep Listening, music theory, or the non-Western traditions that inspire her. Intuition characterizes Schott’s mode of composition. Sometimes spending months on a single track, Colleen works and composes in a kind of isolation, but solitude allows for practice and study as well.

“It’s not that I want to be a solo performer for the sake of being a solo performer, but I love learning things, and I would rather learn something and at first make pathetic sounds rather than leave it to someone who can do it better than me, because then it’s them and it’s not me; I’m the one who enjoys the pleasure of learning,” she says. “Also I do find it very hard to work with other people. Often in the world of music, people seem to expect it to be very natural and easy to collaborate, but I think that in any human interaction there’s going to be—not necessarily trouble, but compromise and adjusting to each other.”

For me, Colleen’s story brings on a nod of recognition and the spark of inspiration. Having played for years in a noisy-pop band, spent more than a decade trying to teach myself piano, gone back to school to study and perform non-Western music, wanting nothing more than vast stretches of days in which to read and practice, Schott’s attempt to carve out enough time to fuse all these threads sounds familiar. By making deep music from an eclectic record collection, tinkering with recorded loops of oneself, and insisting on the importance of solitude and study, Schott strikes me as being both a quiet revolutionary and entirely of the times. Maybe that’s why her music seems right at home in my life.

[update] Q: WHEN IS THE NEXT ISSUE OF ARTHUR MAGAZINE COMING OUT?

Jay Babcock — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 21:29:31 +0000

Q: WHEN IS THE NEXT ISSUE OF ARTHUR MAGAZINE COMING OUT?

A: Arthur has been on hiatus from print publication since December, 2008, when for the first time in Arthur’s six-year history, we were unable to go to press, due to repercussions from that year’s financial catastrophe, fatigue, mounting debts, etc etc.

It’s February, 2011. Although I’ve been able to clean up almost all of Arthur’s debt (magic works!), I still do not have the logistical means to resume print publication. Arthur needs a West Coast-based someone to handle its business affairs—that is, a publisher/co-owner—cuz I sure can’t do everything myself. It’s a challenging gig, fer shure, but… Know anyone? Please be in touch.

Jay Babcock
editor-owner, Arthur Magazine

Arthur Radio Transmission #37 w/ SAADI

ARTHUR RADIO — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 19:10:55 +0000

Recorded on a whim days before Hairy Painter left for Thailand, this episode of Arthur Radio is a celebration of all possible futures; roads that we choose to take, for whatever reason, that ultimately lead us to another, and yet another. Whether life is a choose-your-own-adventure or a fated journey is unknown to us, but it is empowering to believe that we mold our own destinies.

The positive energy created by special guests SAADI (Boshra AlSaadi of Janka Nabay & the Bubu Gang with Tim Wagner)’s performance was tangible in the Newtown Radio studio, where we stayed after hours to dance with christmas lights in the dark. White-saged into the present, we returned to the streets with a sense of newness in every passing moment.

Photo: Alberto Milazzo

STREAMING:

DOWNLOAD: Arthur Radio w/ SAADI 12-05-2010

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C & D reason together about some new records [Arthur No. 26/Sept 2007]

Administrator — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:13:56 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 26/September 2007

C & D: Two guys “reason” together about some new records.

D: Christ on a crutch, it’s hot in here.
C: [winces] Uh yeah, I guess I forgot to mention the “air conditioner, lack of” situation we’ve got going over here.
D: It is going to be difficult for me to do my work in these conditions.
C: [guffaws] You call listening to records “working”? Ha! That ain’t workin’! You get your money for nothin’ and your chicks for free.
D: Where have I heard this before. What money? And I don’t see any chicks around here.
C: I regret that my hosting skills are not what they once were.
D: Yes your place is not only a sweat lodge—it’s sexist. I cannot work in these circumstances.
C: You can do it if you put a beer into it.
D: Okay. Beer me.
C: Of course! [Heads to the kitchen, ceremonially] Come! Let us drink beer and reason together.

ALAN VEGA
Station
(Blast First/Mute)
C [returns from kitchen with a sixer of St. Pauli's, starts CD at medium blast]: So for some reason I thought it was a good idea to kick things off with the darkest, most negative thing possible. Alan Vega from New York City electro-rock-minimalist legends Suicide, talking about the condition of this nation. Analysis: dark. Prognosis: bleak to terminal.
D: [listening to "Freedom's Smashed"] Turn it up! This is the ’80s back with a vengeance! [listening to lyrics: "Smashing down freedom / Smashing our freedoms / Wah! / Smashing our freedom / Freedom's running scared/ Freedom's running out of time/Freedom's gone!"] Shit! I’m flipping out here. I could live inside this sound.
C: The rhythm is really amazing, it’s like John Henry hitting a punching bag—and Alan Vega is the ringside coach talking to himself about how they’re gonna lose, the fix is in.
D: Yeah baby! Freedom’s going down. It’s terminal idiocy, nobody’s paying attention. But Suicide always knew what was going down in the negative times.
C: The vocals really are astonishing in their range, very actorly. Repeated phrases in different intonations, suggesting different moods, different meanings—shock, resignation, despair, hope; and then there are all those Goblin-esque shrieks and gurgles in the background.
D: This is America at its most violent, self-flagellating. [Repeating lines from "Station Station"] “There was a TIME/ When you could dream /Now—NOW / It has become a crime/ to dream! / It has become a CRIME/ to dream.” Talking about the dream losers. Doing a deeper analysis of American society. Sometimes there’s something at work in the culture that normal journalism can’t decipher. And right now is not normalcy, my friend. One thing’s for sure: this won’t be giving comfort to the neighbors.
C: Hey, Springsteen has been doing [Suicide song] “Dream Baby Dream” live lately.
D: [pause] Little Steven was pretty good, but I always thought Alan Vega and Martin Rev should have had characters on The Sopranos.
C: Especially with those world’s biggest sunglasses that Alan Vega always wears.
D: It’s his signature. They belong in Cleveland in that Rock N Roll museum.
C: Yes, right next to all the other sunglasses of rock ‘n’ roll: Stevie Wonder, Bootsy Collins, Ray Charles, Velvet Underground, Elton John, Sly Stone, Yoko Ono, Roy Orbison. Only, Alan Vega’s would be behind cracked glass with bars in front and you’d hear someone yelling at the television in back.
D: [in Alan Vega voice] “Freedom’s smashed!”

MAGIK MARKERS
Boss
(Ecstatic Peace/Universal)
D: More ominosity.
C [handing D another beer]: This is the new Magik Markers album, and it’s much more straightahead than you’d expect from their reputation as improv poet noise-stars. These are recognizable drums-guitar-vocal duo songs with relatively melodic chant-singing by Elisa Ambrogio and surprisingly in-the-pocket drumming by brother Pete Nolan. There’s even a pretty good stab ["Empty Bottles"] at a piano ballad.
D: “Body Rot” and “Taste” remind me of the lest-we-forget great dark mystical ’80s Californian band Opal—
C: Respect to Kendra Smith.
D: —and that band the Kills who made one really good album and then….
C: Yeah there’s a similarity—in a driving, on-the-edge-of-something-intense, and she has a similar voice to the Kills singer V.V., but this seems more committed to um, murder, or something. “Last of the Lemach Line” has that good ol’ grimy looming-catastrophe-in-a-dying-factory-city sound… like Godspeed!, or Kim’s Sonic Youth jams. Patti Smith in her freer, less barroom moments. This is not beer music. [looks at band photograph on CD] But you could drink bottles of whiskey to it on a hot Saturday afternoon, which is apparently what they did when they were made it!
D: [in own world] Hmm… What did happen to the Kills?
C: Being confused with The Killers would probably be enough to cause any band to do themselves in. But my best guess is they were killed by a drum machine WITH NO SOUL.
D: That never would’ve happened if they’d used Suicide’s drum machine. Early ’70s SoHo soul, baby! [looks at empty beer bottle, bellows in Jim Morrison voice:] Beer me madly/Beer me one more time today!
C: Life: enjoy it while it lasts!

BLUES CONTROL
Blues Control
(Holy Mountain/Revolver)
D: [looking at CD spine] “Blues Control”?
C: I know, sounds like a pimple commercial. “Son, we know you’ve been having a hard time lately. Maybe you should think about using…BLUES CONTROL (TM)? It wipes away those hard-to-kill blues in a matter of minutes. “Control your blues today with Blues Control.”
D: I think my current blues control is a beer with a German girl on it. [pauses, thinks] They are hard at work on something, but I’m not sure who’s at the controls.
C: It’s a di-sexual instro duo on guitars and keys, with a drum machine. Lea Cho and Russ Waterhouse. Seems like they have two major modes: brute force monstrosity trudge in the cloudsmashing style of the mighty Blue Cheer…
D: And impressionist, introspective space and electronic plant music on that subtle plane visited by Eric Satie and Popul Vuh, with the subaquatic melodica of Sir Augustus Pablo…
C: [chuckles] That’s a team-up to be reckoned with.
D: These other songs are some pretty heavy duty stuff! It’s music you hear when you dig a hole deep enough to listen to what’s going on inside the earth. Troglobite rock, baby. And I am a troglophile!
C: [carrying on] If they put this out on vinyl, and I think that they did, it should be on coated 540 gram for the needle’s sake.
D: It should be on shellac. [finishing another beer] Analog all over your face! Ya heard?
C: Maybe I should put something else on before things get any more out of control…

CELEBRATION
The Modern Tribe
(4AD/Beggars Group)
C: …
D: Well, here’s our first obvious album-of-the-year contender.
C [listening to “Pressure” and “Pony”] The singer’s totally going for it. It’s like Johnette Napolitano … fronting a shit-hot psychedelic-funk-dance band on an electro-church run to the dub castles of Jamaica. And yes, I just made that up.
D: The singer is not holding back. Fuck me…two times!
C: [ignoring C’s outburst] Like a more passionate, more organic and more, dare I say ‘soulful’ LCD Soundsystem, fronted by a belter of a singer, who is a woman. [rhetorically:] How badly do we need this?
D: Women are DEFINITELY where it’s at right now.
C: [quizzical] And maybe always…? But yeah, so awesome. Produced by Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio, and those guys sing on it too but you can tell that. Reminds me of Moonshake, or Laika, only more muscular, funkier.
D: There is a certain Eurythmics-soul quality apparent here. [pauses] But she may actually be undermixed. Underrepresented. I want to hear the words.
C [listening to “Hands Off My Gold”]: You were right at the top, this is the album to beat, there’s hit after hit here.
D: [self-righteously] But of course, music is not a competition!
C: [smug] Oh yeah, of course not.
D: …
C: …
D: So, interested in a friendly wager?

FAUST
Faust IV
(Caroline/Virgin/Capitol)
D [listening to the opening track “Krautrock”]: Well, this is pretty clearly the source of Spacemen 3’s “Revolution,” even down to where the drums come in And there’s that Can-Hawkwind motorik rhythm. It must be… FAUST! What is this, 1973?
C: Yes and yes and yes again—sir, you are the sweepstakes winner!
D: Thank you veddy much, ladies and gentlemen. [pauses] Whoops, I mean no ladies and one gentleman.
C: Yeah well, if there were ladies here, I’m sure you’d be to busy checking your blackberry instead of actually talking to a live female human being.
D: [snorts] Silence in the lower ranks!
C: …
D: Ahem.
C: …
D: So, I never listened to Faust, they were always a big question mark for me.
C: Me too.
D: They might have been one of the most radical, political bands in Germany. Then again it was a very political time in Germany. And it’s not anymore. There’s no nail bombs anymore, just police teargas…
C: The bass sound on “Jennifer” is amazing is insane, timeless. It’s Syd Barrett inside deeply abstract bass sound, that’s essentially, basically electronic. The mix is so daring. What else sounded like this, ever?
D: This [“Just a Second (Starts Like That”)] is what we’re talking about. That certain pulse that only the Germans and Hawkwind could do.
C: Yeah, and, um, remember this band called Creedence Clearwater Revival? “Suzie Q”…
D: —is pretty much the template for everything. Highest praise to John Fogerty, one of the last surviving Great Americans of the Golden Age. You better recognize! [four minutes into “Giggy Smile”]: But—did Creedence ever dare to get this far out…into giddiness? And electronics?
C: The La Dusseldorf guys were pretty goofy. But, yeah this kind of multi-genre hopping —folk, motorik, drone, psychedelic pop—in such good spirits, so fearlessly, so without a care. Zappa? Mutantes? Amazing that there was some kind of audience for this, enough for them all to make careers. What a time that was… [drifts off]
D: By the way, I have an addendum to make. No one had cooler sunglasses than Om Khalthoum. Egyptian Moderne will always be the number one fashion look.
C: ???
D [mysteriously]: Those who know, know…

WHITE RAINBOW
Prism of Eternal Now
(Marriage vinyl/Kranky cd)
D [jaw agape]: I feel like I’m listening to the soundtrack to the truly great cosmic film Ralph Bakshi was never allowed to make.
C: [also gone] Wow…with super guitars and tablas and some seriously Steve Reich maneuvers on the vocals…
D: [at end of seven-minute first track] This is what Strawberry Jam wishes it could sound like.
C: And it’s all one guy. Remember? He did that “vibrational healing chamber” at ArthurBall a year and a half ago.
D: [one minute into third track] Serious pedal-oriented vibrations on this one. This will take a long time to investigate properly.
C: It’s like half Fripp/Eno “Swastika Girls,” half Terry Riley “Poppy Nogood.” Multi-tracked guitars riff away over a bed of raw synthesizer grooves. Incredible!
D: Massive!
C: I think we may have just left the beer portion of the evening.
D: Which can mean only one thing: Bring on the papalolo!

DEVENDRA BANHART
Old Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
(XL/Beggars Banquet)
D: Ah, not this guy again. Every single record of his, we have to review. Why?
C: Well, those at the controls of this operation like to keep tabs. See how things grow. See how the organism evolves.
D: [takes a tug on the pipe] This is Devendra’s White Album. Or the truest Tropicalia tribute album.
C: He took a longer time to make this record, really took the opportunity to stretch out and go for it with his band. The whole thing is a sprawling beauty, but there’s two kinds of songs, basically: some party goofs – reggae, doo-wop, Doorsish epics, Crazy Horse workouts—and gorgeous quiet slow-goers. A band, a talent, in full-bloom.
D: Plus Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs on here? It can’t be true!
C: And yet it is. Another album-of-the-year-contender.
[E barges in through door out of nowhere]: Agh! This slow breakup shit is killing me! [grabs beer, sits down on couch]. You know you’re in trouble when you’ve been staring at a pulsing Apple logo for three days straight! Agh! It’s slow torture, everything I’m doing right now. [chills out] Hey, what is this?
C: The new Devendra.
E: The do-what now?
D: The new Devendra!
E: [listening to “Seahorse”] This is actually pretty good. I thought I didn’t like this dude, Mr. Defreaky McWeirdbeard, but…
C: It’s those canyon vibes. Chill out…

DANIEL A.I.U. HIGGS
Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot hardcover book with cd
(Thrill Jockey)
C: New album of extended instrumentals by Daniel Higgs, housed in a hardcover book of paintings and large type text.
D: [Reads from book] ”Our actions are God’s food.” Whoa. “Devils Establish Absolute Truth Here.” “Grief Obscures Delight.” I don’t understand any of this but it is clearly a major artistic statement.
C: The first letters from each word in those phrases forms another word. So—
E: Give me that. [Reads from book] These paintings are beautiful, like Miro on a serious hermetic trip. “TERROR: Tirelessly Extending Rays Reaching Our Reality.”
C: Maybe I’ve been unadventurous, but Daniel Higgs the spookiest performer I’ve ever seen who’s not named Diamanda Galas. With black candles and a fog machine, this could send you into that void for sure.
D: He is clearly on his own path into the big infinity void, telling it like it is.

The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Source Family book with cd
by Isis Aquarius with Electricity Aquarius, foreword by Erik Davis
(Process Media)
C: This is the long-awaited group autobiography/history of the Source Family, an early-’70s cult in Los Angeles led by super-charismatic older dude who called himself Father Yod, or as he was known later, Ya Ho Wa. He had 100-plus followers, including 14 wives.
D [piping in]: And Sky Saxon from The Seeds!
C: [puts book’s accompanying CD on] They had a rock band that recorded studio albums and played daytime shows at schools. They had a big mansion, VW buses and Rolls-Royces, lived in Los Feliz. The whole thing was funded by the super-organic restaurant they ran on Sunset Boulevard that all the celebrities ate at.
E: Yeah, right. Give me that. [grabs book, reads caption of photo of Father in a pool surrounded by naked women] “Teaching water aerobics?” This guy… This is some weird fucking white pimp shit is what this is. What the heck is this, man? I guess in California, if you look like God, you are God.
C: He was a practicing Sikh and they don’t cut their hair. And he says on the CD that it’s hair that gives your body vitamin D, so the more of it you have…
E: Hey there’s some great breastfeeding shots in here.
C: It’s one of the cults that ended well.
E: What, they were the one cult that didn’t kill people or themselves?
C: He died after a serious hang gliding crash in Hawaii, he refused hospital treatment.
E: [reading] “His pain was so intense that YaHoWha wanted anything to relieve it, and he took what we had on hand to help him through it: Darvon, aspirin, champagne, Sacred Herb, Sacred Snow, and nitrous oxide.”
D: Well, that would do it.
C: And not long after that, they split up.
E: “Sacred Snow”?!? With capital S’s?!? [cackles] “The word of God cannot be copyrighted.” This is the most classic shit ever. I’ll take it. [Runs out the door, cackling] Hahahaha!

ANGELS OF LIGHT
We Are Him
(Young God/Revolver)
D: I know that voice. Swans!
C: Yeah, it’s Michael Gira’s new album. It’s got quite a sound—the Akron/Family dudes are all on here, but so are the old Gira hands like Bill Rieflin and Christoph Hahn. Layers of stuff, perfectly arranged: guitars, banjo, piano, flute, strings, accordion, melodica, hammer dulcimer.
D: [listening to “Promise of Water”] Still menacing and grand after all these years.
C: It’s…ceremonial, melodic, yearning. [“The Man We Left Behind”] is like a slow Johnny Cash waltz, just beautiful.
D: [Listening to “My Brother’s Man”] And he can still punish at will.
C: “Not Here/Not Now” throbs with life; and this (“Joseph’s Song”) has the most unexpected Gira move ever: it goes uptempo into a trombone-led jamboree.
D: A Giramboree!
C: [laughs] Like the Devendra album, this his opens up so much new territory. Unbelievable, wonderful to hear, especially coming from a veteran artist. Another album of the year contender that demands further examination…

WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM
Two Hunters
(Southern Lord)
D: [looks admiringly at black album cover with a single wolf’s skull on it in gold.] This is the best cover tonight! This is what awaits. [maniacally] As Brother Theodore, said: “Friends flee. Lovers leave. Worms wait.”
C: I might be headed back into the metal direction again. It makes the most sense when you loathe what’s around you and want to block it all out. And this is huge, majestic. Like Mogwai with a power drummer—
D [interrupting]: I think the drummer may have had some interaction with Sacred Snow.
C: —and a black metal wraith on vocals. This song is now in its ninth minute.
D: This is the one! This is heavy work in the dark metal machine. When he sings, no human entity can be identified.
C: This could be the end of the wolf bands.
D: They’ve killed them all and are roasting them on the barbecue. Where are they from? Sweden?
C: What does it say on the sleeve?
D: I can’t make out a single word. [Third track, with angelic female vocalist, starts] This has the stamp of truly obsessed.
C [reading “Artist Statement” from band’s website] “Our project is based in the forests of Olympia, Washington—
D: The land of the mighty Thrones!
C: “Our music is a reflection of the land in which we dwell; it draws its power from the long, dark winters, the perpetual mist… Our philosophies are anti-modern, romantic and anti-human, a musical expression of an emerging eco-black metal consciousness that has taken root here in the Pacific Northwest.”
D [dazzled]: “Eco black-metal”?
C: “We are unique in that we express a deeply underground ideology on a larger stage. Our Black Metal is highly local and personal—not beholden to the expectations and demands of any scene. Our music is rooted in the traditions of Black Metal, but we subvert the aesthetic and ideology to remain true to our personal manifestation. To us, Black Metal might be understood as the Death card in the Tarot or the number 13, which represents not an end to life, but the shedding of an old and outmoded way of being: death and rebirth, transformation and enlightenment. Our music is perhaps what happens after the initial, necessary, hateful burst; after the psychic explosion that is Black Metal wipes away that which came before: the sick and twisted “truths” of our modern condition. For in Black Metal, we see great truth, transcendence and power. Black Metal is the cleansing fire that frees us from the bondage of rationality, science, morality, religion, leaving us free to choose our own path.”
E: Well, there you go.
C: [musing] Does Daniel Higgs know these guys?
D: This band should curate the next Wagner Ring Cycle. They need it, the young edge, some new blood. And they have extreme people doing extreme Rings all the time, like Schlingzief is going to do the new one. He’s the biggest cultural star of Germany. He made Freakstar 3000.
C: Is he the Matthew Barney of Germany?
D: In a way, maybe. He’s a total anarchist.
C: “Thank you Cremaster, may I have another?”
D: You know that’s where all the old Nazis come out of hiding, at the annual Ring Cycle. It’s the biggest cultural event in Germany on this old-scale, old-school level. That’s where you see all of them together. [shivers] Everybody knows about it but it’s not talked about.
C: What can I say but: Send in the Wolves!

MARIEE SIOUX
Faces in the Rocks
(Grassroots)
D: What can I say? A beautiful voice of nature, singing about nature, in nature. Contentment and beauty. Forest-folk.
C: [listening to “Friendboats”] Gorgeous. She’s another one of these amazing folks from the Nevada City area in California. Terry Riley, Gary Snyder, Joanna Newsom, Noah Georgeson, Alela Diane, Dream Magazine… Something is going on up there.
D: Maybe it’s the same thing as what’s going on in the woods outside Olympia, only…
C: No two forests are alike. I am picturing her singing next to the Yuba River on a summer afternoon, everyone’s high on old-growth oxygen and riverside blueberries…
D: [Listening to “Flowers and Blood,” closes eyes] Ah. Please do not interrupt my serenity.

SUN CITY GIRLS: GOD, HOW THEY SUCKED by Byron Coley (Arthur No. 26/Sept 2007)

Administrator — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:32:30 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 26 (September 2007)

Sun City Girls: God, How They Sucked, 1981-2007
by Byron Coley

The Sun City Girls were one of the great bands of my lifetime. Now they’re gone and the world is both meaner for their passing and richer for their having been here. Their official end occurred on February 19, 2007. That was the day Charlie Gocher, the band’s drummer, succumbed to forces greater than his own—a concept almost unfathomable, but true nonetheless.

For 25 years, the Sun City Girls were a trio of exquisitely hermetic design. Charlie Gocher, Alan Bishop and Rick Bishop created a wildly bizarre universe in which almost anything seemed possible. It was always difficult with these guys to understand where truth ended and fiction began, but it didn’t seem to really matter. Like the LSD street-talkers of my youth, conversations with the band (in whole or in part) tended to obliterate many of the culturally-drawn distinctions that usually seem important. They were able to bend time and space to their own evil intent, which, luckily for all of us, was really not evil at all.

The Girls dropped many delightful and smelly bucketfuls of recordings over the years. Singles, videos, CDs, cassettes and LPs. These ranged from the virtually unlistenable—arch sets of covers played with enough irony to give you a soft-on for a year—to albums like Torch of the Mystics, which floated into the spaces between your atoms, instantly bonding with every available surface.

Never the touringest of bands, the Girls nonetheless remain most burned into my memory for their live shows. The earliest ones were mysto-shroud post-core jamborees of the most frenzied nature imaginable. Later ones blended shtick and strangeness and playing so brilliantly precise it was devastating. There was Charlie, assaulting his drums like a myth-gorilla trapped inside a VW bug. There was Alan, moving between jazzbo-centric bass pops and the corrosive performance art characters with which he amused himself. There was Rick, just kind of taking it all in and regurgitating splanges of guitar noise as delicate or vicious as you could imagine. Together they seemed unstoppable.

One of the last times I saw them was a two-night stand they did at the 2004 Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival. My friend Benoit had never seen them before, but he knew he was in for a treat. I explained we should be prepared to heckle the Girls with all the means at our disposal, since they thrived on intense audience interaction, no matter how negative. He was leery, but game. The first night we screamed our heads off, drawing incredible barbs from Alan’s Uncle Jim doppelganger and getting more than a few rises out of Rick when we began insulting him for being a rare book dealer. So successful was this approach, Benoit was invited onto the stage the next night to give Alan a tutorial in Quebecker cussing. It was an exquisite evening, although Charlie was clearly not feeling well before the show. He explained it as being some variation of a flu, combined with his “advanced age,” but I guess it was a little more complicated than that. Still, he played with a ferocious lop-sided intensity that belied any physical diminishment.

Live shows went back to being a rarity. They played but a single festival set in each of the last three years. There started to be sniping in some quarters regarding the band’s purported heisting of ethnic music traditions, but when I saw them the last time (at ATP in December, 2006), we had a good laugh about the idea of them as cultural imperialists. Their travels around the world had always been journeys of wide-eyed discovery. The souvenirs they bore home from these trips (whether internal or external) were things they were driven to share. Like maniacs. Which they were. To say they didn’t enrich our knowledge of different cultural traditions (particularly those of Southeast Asia), misses more than a few available boats. They were nothing if not the American underground’s cultural ambassadors to the world.

It hasn’t been long since Charlie died. Alan and Rick must still have a lot to figure out. Their varietal solo works will undoubtedly continue in all their glory, and one assumes there are oceans of unreleased material to be pumped into the cosmos. But I will miss knowing the Sun City Girls co-exist with me on this planet. They were a funny and generous group of individuals, committed to a lot of truly worthwhile things, not the least of which was a cruel and cutting humor, beautifully suited to the times in which we live.

But Charlie is no more. And the Sun City Girls are no more. And that’s just something we’ll have to live with.

So long, motherfuckers. You suck.

HOW TO MAKE A FLYING WEDGE OF MIND ENERGY

Jay Babcock — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:16:09 +0000

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #13
by Diane di Prima

now let me tell you
what is a Brahmasastra
Brahmasastra, hindu weapon of war
near as I can make out
a flying wedge of mind energy
hurled at the foe by god or hero
or many heroes
hurled at a problem or enemy
cracking it

Brahmasastra can be made
by any or all
can be made by all of us
straight or tripping, thinking together
like : all of us stop the war
at nine o’clock tomorrow, each take one soldier
see him clearly, love him, take the gun
out of his hand, lead him to a quiet spot
sit him down, sit with him as he takes a joint
of viet cong grass from his pocket . . .

Brahmasastra can be made
by all of us, tripping together
winter solstice
at home, or in park, or wandering
sitting with friends
blinds closed, or on porch, no be-in
no need
to gather publicity
just gather spirit, see the forest growing
put back the big trees
put back the buffalo
the grasslands of the midwest with their herds
of elk and deer

put fish in clean Great Lakes
desire that all surface water on the planet
be clean again. Kneel down and drink
from whatever brook or lake you conjure up.

BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 25 1/2

Administrator — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:14:04 +0000

Note: The following was intended for publication in Arthur No. 26′s original print date of February 2007. Arthur No. 26 was eventually published in September 2007, with a completely different, fresh column.

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

Bull Tongue 80 for 06

1. GOTHENBURG BLOOD CULT – New tape label out of Sweden bartering in ultra hell noise. Check out the compilation Fuck Money, Fuck Life with grinding hardcore spew from Maniac Cop, Ochu and Treriksroset. Sweden’s such a beatific place, it’s hard to figure the gore mania the noise scene there is so preoccupied with.

2. SAME BAND – Boxed Set 10 CD box (Disques Dual) Amazing documentation of a Portland, ME combo who existed in an oddball universe akin to some of the best just-pre-punk weirdos. They came along later than bands like MX-80 Sound, but manifest a similar vibe, which makes sense because their roots stretch back to the Granite Farm Band, a combo formed in ’68. Part free-form, part Zappa, part punk, this is rural-experimental fuckeroo of the highest order. Includes some DVD video footage, interviews, a great booklet of fliers and pics, and is contained inside a most lovely wooden box. During their lifetime they cut only one LP and one 45, but this set (recorded between ’77 and ’80) captures a brilliant, beautiful strangeness.

3. SIC ALPS – Pleasures and Treasures LP (Animal Disguise) It’s time for Sic Alps to fully bust out. An incredible raw psychedelia is being played here and after a couple of down-low tapes on Folding and Animal Disguise we’re steamy mouthed listening to their first LP (which is basically an early version of the band with the awesome Bianca Sparta of Erase Errata.)

4. DESPERATE MAN BLUES DVD – director: Edward Gillan (Dust to Digital) Nice to have a DVD of this great documentary on Joe Bussard, plus another featurette, King of the Record Collectors, and other bonus stuff. Bussard is a stone gas, grooving around his basement amidst one of the finest collections of pre-war 78s ever assembled. A few nice archival shots of Fahey, too. And the stories are hilarious.

5. RAYMOND DIJKSTRA – Der Triumph LP (Le Souffleur) What sounds like a man scraping broken glass on metal with brain-burnt organ accompaniment makes for one killer LP. Dijkstra has been honing his skin-splitting aurality for years and presents us this masterpiece in a hardback linen box sleeve.

6. LOU DUBOSE & JAKE BERNSTEIN – Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency (Random House) There’s nothing in here you didn’t suspect, but Dubose & Bernstein lay out the whole ugly quilt for the entire world’s inspection. Research and writing are both excellent. You’ll puke. Again.

7. NON-HORSE – Rigor More cassette (Not Not Fun) Vanishing Voice member Gabriel Lucas Crane’s spirit-sonic masterpiece told in 77 chapters of beautiful mystic tones.

8. VALERIE WEBBER – Thin Little Arms Build Castles (Big Baby Press) Webber has hit a new mark with this book of poems. They glower with a savage steaminess that recalls (in part) some of Lydia Lunch’s best work. But she does not have Lydia’s vicious nihilism. Valerie’s possesses a strangely juicy optimism as often as it does darkness, and there is a humor poking through many of the pieces, letting in illuminative shards of light. Favorite poem: “I Am Bitch Almighty.”

9. JAMIE FENNELLY – Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down cassette (Deep Fried Tapes) Out of nowhere, well Philadelphia actually, tape label with regional creative-squall action. Fennelly’s excursion here looks like it would be old-timey hoedown but it’s a great dark, droning improvisation that strokes the inner gore nicely.

10. HI GOD PEOPLE / DEAD C – split LP (Nervous Jerk) Debut release by the great Australian label formerly known as Art School Dropout. Dead C’s side was live at the 2002 ATP Festival and is a brilliant evocation of elemental, abstract forces, culminating in a destroyed exorcism of “L.A. Blues.” The flip, by Melbourne’s finest, is their own, very special sorta rumble through a variety of style-dodges. Wonderful destruction of pre-dawn tongues.

11. SWORD HEAVEN – Ohio duo that blamm-oed through the USA this summer really just killing live. Super intense drums/etc music-action with a blasted dose of off-the-stage and in-yr-face performance wildness.

12. P SHAW – Strings (Pshaw!) P Shaw has long been one of Boston’s great creators. His homemade comics are jammed with crazy details and storylines that will make you spit cereal out yr nose. Anyway, Strings is something like the story of Death Rattle Cat, plus related sketchbook material. And if it doesn’t melt yr eyes, well, that’s just too bad.

13. BLUES CONTROL – Riverboat Styx cassette (fuckittapes) Sweet rolling psyche minimalism from Brooklyn. Members of the way more abstracted Watersports.

14. KA-NIVES!! – Get Duped LP (Lance Rock) Crude, stupid, intimately sloppy garage punk from Houston. Drunkenly related to the great Sugar Shack, this one will make every cup in yr house quiver like a tin rattle.

15. NEUNTOTER DER PLAGE – The Spectre Sows His Seed cassette (Truculent) Howling dark ambient spook core. Perfect long winter night blood ritual groan fest. One of the better labels out of Providence, RI.

16. KAREN CONSTANCE & LAUREN NAYLOR – Chapters PORTFOLIO (Someone Else) 20 gorgeous two-sided prints by these brain-felching UK artists—one side b&w, one side color—all images drawn from deep wells of the impossible. Corrosive dreamscapes at their absolute finest. Beautiful!

17. RUNDOWNSUN – Of all the tape labels that spray paint their cassettes it’s this Canadian label that does it most exquisitely. Gorgeous, dot-dash Pollock abstraction with lovely topographic sensuality.

18. STUMPS – Split Fleet Dodge LP (Palindrone) Cool New Zealand trio antics from Antony Milton and pals. From winsome electro-dribble through into full-blown avant-rock splooie, this LP includes some splashy guest organ work by Campbell Kneale and great wobble-vibes galore.

19. FEMINIST ACTION BRIGADE – Formerly known as Feminists Against Bush, an open-forum collective of women expressing through music, art, ideas, opinions the state of power-imbalance in regards to gender and politics. Their FAB site has the story. Co-organizer Marissa also has a wicked cool experimental sound-jam cassette on Tobi Vail’s Bumpidee tape label called Marissa Magic! Also a good place to hook up with awesome liberation-punk trio, The Punks.

20. OGX – 2LP (Old Gold) Not sure if this has been out for years already or something, but it just landed in the box. Anyway, it’s a tenth anniversary comp for the great Old Gold label, and it includes all kindsa sick shit–from the high-end improv of Charlie Parker (the band) to live duo work from Eugene Chadbourne & Davey Williams. Solid and handmade—just like crack!

21. RAIONBASHI – Chloral Works I & II LP (Entr’acte) Not sure if chloral is a misspelling or intentional. But as insanely heavy as this body-part sound/yodel manipulation one-sided LP goes who cares? Raionbashi is a German dude, part of Schimpfluch Aktionist scene, and this is a weirdo tongue and ass slap piece of amplification that is full on hot n’ nasty.

22. MONDO MACABRO – Still the coolest exploito DVD reissue company going. Highlights from this year include Snake Dancer (the highpoint of South African stripper cinema) & The Bollywood Horror Collection Vol. 1—a two-disc set with a pair of amazing satan-o/vampire flicks and great documentaries.

23. KENT TAYLOR AND ALAN HORVATH – looking for d.a. levy (Random Sightings) – THE d.a. levy BIBLIOGRAPHY Volume 1 [1963 – 1966] (Kirpan Press) Premier volume rundown of every publication d.a. levy involved himself with. With full-page reproductions of many of the titles. Essential resource for anyone into the work of one of America’s greatest voices of inspired dissent and bloodymindedness.

24. DAN NADEL – Art Out of Time (Abrams) Dan Nadel of Picture Box edited this superb anthology, subtitled Unknown Comic Visionaries 1900-1969. Some of the text is a little hard to read, but it’s worth the eyestrain to see this stuff—it’s unbelievably choice and weird!

25. THE BRATS – Criminal Guitar LP (Rave Up) Oh my God, The Brats were the perennial house band at Great Gildersleeves down the street from CBGB in the ’70s. With punk in full-on birth pang The Brats were still stuck in New York Dolls/Sweet mode with shag hairdos and platforms, starry-eyed that Kiss made it big and street-wise enough to acknowledge that the New York Dolls just plain OD’d. Thirty years down the road listening to this assembly of demos, practices, live shit and their one and only 7” its cool to hear how these guys were kinda great in a genuine NYC street trash “raunchy rock” way. Where’s our Quaalude Queen now?

26. BRUCE CAEN – Sub-Hollywood (Yes Press) Crazy, sloppy, excellent L.A. punk novel by the guy who did the west coast No Mag with Michael Gira (and others). The scenes with the L.A.P.D. are so true you’ll be able to smell the jiz on their breath.

27. THOMAS ANKERSMIT / JIM O’ROURKE – Weerzin / Oscillators and Guitars LP (Tochnit Aleph) Excellent split LP by two guys who you know’d smoke the joint heavily if face to face. Ankersmit’s piece unfolds quietly with sophisto-tension ending in a long blaaang-tone. Pretty boss. Jim O’s is from ’92 and is a full on music mix of heavenly electric bliss.

28. CLAYTON NOONE & STEFAN NEVILLE – MIMI: City of Tales (City of Tales) I think this is the correct name for the homemade comic by these two New Zealand maniacs. Neville also records as Pumice, Noonan is part of CJA, Armpit and many others. Their comics are as crude as their music, and as lovely.

29. SUPERFLUX – editors: Susan Briante, Chris Murray, Hoa Nguyen Awesome new 81/2×11 staple poetry book anthology from the po-hot bed of Austin, TX. Killer kuts from Alice Notley, Anne Waldman and a stunning all-female cast.

30. FUN FROM NONE 2DVD – dir. Chris Habib (No Fun/Load) There are some slight inaccuracies in the credits (where’s Nautical Almanac?), but otherwise this is a crackerjack display of two years of noise highlights from the No Fun Fest, filmed by the great Haboob.

31. TRONIKS – L.A. has risen up like an aural dynamite phoenix with the efforts of the Troniks label. Besides the grandeur of the California ten-LP box set earlier this year, proprietor Phil Blankenship sends us off to 2007 with five LPs of high grade resonance: Oscillating Innards Bleak, Circuit Wound Density & Assimilation, Obstacle Corpse C’est La Vie, Romance / Black Sand Desert / The Cherry Point split LP, The Cherry Point & Privy Seals Casual Sex, and The Cherry Point & Howard Stelzer Untitled. These plus the various CDs, CDRs and the new Deep Jew War 7” all make for a whole new California stun. Cowabunga, motherfucker.

32. LEE ROCKEY – Lee Rockey Music LP (De Stijl) Jaw-splitting solo LP from a Portland-based musician who worked with Herbie Mann in the ’50s and Smegma in the ’70s. This archival material (from the late ‘60s or so) is much closer to the latter—strings, voices, clutter and gums.

33. ANN STEPHENSON – Wirework (Tent Editions) Nice collection of this (presumably New York) poet who has had excellent lines in Larry Fagin’s Sal Mimeo poetry journal. Taut, thoughtful ruminations on the smell of friends and evaporating streets.

34. LORD FYRE – Destruction at 2013 LP (Emperor Jones) A founding partner of the John Wilkes Booze collective lets one fly (more or less solo) in Bloomington. The instrumentation is squiggly as hell, incorporating a lot of space without sacrificing a certain claustrophobic luster.

35. DON CAUBLE – This Passing World (AuthorHouse) Along with d.a. levy, Tom Kryss, William Wantling and Kent Taylor (to just name a few), Don Cauble delivered some of the heaviest ’60s underground poetry this country has produced (and ultimately oppressed beneath cobwebs of supermarket goop). Cauble was a mystery and unheard from for a long time but it seems he’s alive and well in Portland and has written this strange novel of a young man from 1972 thrown in a Greek prison for a pot bust. And the interior spirit drive he cruises out on.

36. GROUP DOUEH Guitar Music from the Western Sahara LP (Sublime Frequencies) A very berserk album of electric music from the desert. Doueh combines Hendrix with traditional forms, creating an extremely distorted raunch vocabulary for guitar, not exactly like anything else you’ve ever heard. Yikes.

37. JESSE SELDESS – Who Opens (Kenning Editions) Each poem here moves forward with banal yet life-force-infused lines which all seemingly relate to each other, then space out into meditations of repetition and some kind of language-prayer. Odd and affecting and issued by one of the more interesting small poetry presses currently (barely) active.

38. FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS – Fantagraphics continues to overwhelm all competition with oceanic spumes of wonderful graphics work. Some recent ones that are particularly amazing are Frank Stack’s The New Adventures of Jesus: The Second Coming (which collects all of his hilarious & brilliant Jesus strips), Shadowland by Kim Deitch (all his incredible sideshow yarns in one place, finally!) and Terrible Thompson by Gene Deitch (Kim’s father, who was an animator for UPA – and a great cartoonist in his own right.) Get a damn catalogue, NOW!

39. TALIBAN / PARANOID TIME – Air Lice split 10” (Tapeworm / SNSE) Two Midwestern bands head to head in junk star lawnmower fight. Premier vinyl outing from gut slicing Tapeworm label. All systems dead, proceed to kill city.

40. WWW.GARYPANTER.COM Totally smoking site where you can read Garloo’s seriously whacked-out blog, and purchase everything from original drawings to little hand molded rubber men. Ewwww…

41. SÉANCE – editors: Christine Wertheim and Matias Viegener (Make Now Press) A collection of writers involved with the contemporary concern of language and how it conducts itself through us sexually and spiritually. It also is the cream of the crop of the hot and bothered linguistic academia which alone makes it kind of an ink-on-paper wet dream. Eileen Myles, Dennis Cooper, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Ben Marcus, Jaap Blonk, Tracie Morris and others ruminate with experimental essays and examples.

42. ANTIPAN – LP (Pulled Out) It took us a few minutes to comprehend that this one-sided LP by this Sydney quartet was cut backwards, but once we deduced that, everything was ducky. Antipan are mostly instrumental, and thrash away amidst collapsing old buildings, using “standard” rock instruments to create small blizzards of feedbacked howl.

43. ALICE NOTLEY – Grave of Light (Wesleyan) This is it. One of the most critical and fascinating poets of the latter day New York School scene, originally from Chicago, intimately associated with Ted Berrigan, a master of thought-life experiential poetry, Alice Notley is one of America’s greatest contemporary poets. An expatriate for years, residing in Paris, she has one of the most distinctly American-eyed voices to be heard. Grave of Light collects a wealth of her writing from 1970 to 2005 into a massive 364-page work of art. Essential.

44. JEREMI MOURAND – We know of two CDs thus far by this Montreal unit, and they are both woozy combinations of Beefheart blues licks, grotesque French readymades and absolute tongue-babble. The first one, FOR, might be more fucked up, but Vacher is pretty well splattered too. Great silk-screened covers as well, which appear to be the work of the great Simon Bosse.

45. MOHAMMAD ALI NIAZMAND – Wizard Poisonings (Insurance Editions) Not sure who this cat is, and Insurance Editions Press is also a mystery, though we know they’re nestled in Brooklyn somewhere. Regardless, Wizard Poisonings is a boss and fast read with sharp, evocative nailings of daily life, kids, lovers and all other weirdness. Recommended.

46. THE DRAMA – ed. Joel Speasmaker Every issue of this magazine gets better. It’s a hard-to-tag mix of words and pictures about art & music & culture, all viewed from a particularly interesting angle. Very sleek, but not slick.

47. PSYCHEDELIC HORSESHIT – who let the dogs out 7” (Columbus Discount Records) Super-great fucking messed-up music from Ohio. Self-proclaimed inspirations are “pussy, acid, hatred.” You know they rule.

48. HOMOSTUPIDS – The Brutal Birthday 7” E.P. (Richie Records) Completely wrecked noisecore splunge from Cleveland—the only real rock ‘n’ roll city in the world. These guys are as excellent as it gets, everything else eats ass in comparison.

49. KENDRA STEINER EDITIONS – Bill Shute keeps pumping out great little poetry booklets. Newest batch has two by Tarpis Tula’s David Keenan, a Lew Welch tribute by Stuart Crutchfield, and some bracing horseracing poetry by Shute himself and Brad Kohler. Outstanding stuff.

50. UKE OF SPACES CORNERS COUNTY – So Far on the Way LP (Trd W/d / Friends and Relatives / Hello Asshole + 5 others) Dan B of the great Impractical Cockpit appears here to present his take on the folk muse. And the results have a spectacular lo-fi burn that keeps reminding me of Rounder-era Hurley at his shakiest.

51. PASALYMANY – Just when you think Montreal will be crushed under the weight of new around-the-bend experimental spelunk, here comes this wicked hot label offering extra-damaged sluice from Thames (which is primarily Blake Hargreaves of the great Dreamcatcher and Waxathon) and Wapstan (Martin Sasserville of brise cul records / Foutredieu!!!). Forthcoming goodness from the already legendarily messed up Altar of Flies. God help us.

52. RURAL ROCK & ROLL DVD – director: Jensen Rufe (Jensen Rufe) This documentary about the local scene in Humboldt, CA is actually pretty interesting. I’m not sure about some of the music, but the musicians here are great examples of exurban lifers, dedicated (more or less) to just kickin’ it out. Could be the story of a lotta little smallish college towns with a couple hundred pan-generic weirdos hanging on for dear life (or something like it).

53. CARLOS GIFFONI / SMEGMA / METALUX – LP (LAFMS / No Fun) Dream collaboration, if your dreams are in a noise freak brain. Excellent and nicely reserved unfoldings of liquid dada broil.

54. JO ROBERTSON – Very ruling Brit painter-cum-singer who has been recording with David Cunningham and sounds like a totally cool update of the great Sybille Baier. Or something.

55. CADAVER IN DRAG – Septic Tomb LP (Elephant Graveyard) One-sided silkscreened monster down-in-the-dumps Midwest pummeler. On Chondritic Sound side label. Beastly bong-snort bowel scrape and fucking good.

56. HAN BENNINK & PETER BROTZMANN – Their duo gigs this past year have been mindblowing, and their two archival CD sets, Total Music Meeting 1977 Berlin (BRO), and Schwarzwaldfahrt (Atavistic/Unheard Music), are fully with it.

57. FISH & SHEEP – Double Banana LP (Ruby Red) Amazing offshoot of Portugal outsider freaks Loosers. Scrabbling guitars and drums making waste of any concept of presentable fidelity. A sweet sick and captivating motion not too unlike Lambsbread minus the holy smoke.

58. KENDRA – Extremely interesting duo from Keene, NH, comprised of Danny Kemps and Kate Hanlon. Guitar and drums combined in all new ways—imagine! Check them out live or seek their CDR, They in Heaven.

59. R.O.T. – L’Ecurie LP (Kraak) Long awaited LP by a group who issued some intriguing drone, scrape and death-tone cassettes the last few years. This baby shows R.O.T at the peak of their game which is a slow-burn ambience of raw sound psychosis and spooked noise periphery.

60. LIGHTBULB – Live: First Show CDR (Heresee) Admittedly, there is some residual parental pride getting worked here, but the chaos Lightbulb emit is pretty special, no matter whose kids they are. Can’t wait to hear the Heresee studio sessions, although the fact that they’d turned 12 by the time that session happened may add a layer of slickness we’re not ready to digest.

61. SIXES – Cursed Beast – LP (Enterruption / Solipsist) Old schoolers who came up through the ranks of Crash Worship and the lesser known but just as skull collapsing Azog. This LP is either an inspiration from or to contemporary Wolf Eyes moves. We imagine it has to be both as Sixes have been in the trenches and were making guttersnipe noise brawl when most noise kids were sucking on mamma’s electric teat.

62. LOREN CONNORS – Night Through 3CD (Family Vineyard) A brilliant collection of tracks from singles and unreleased sessions by this great NY guitarist. Gorgeous artistry throughout, and a wonderful document by any standard.

63. PAINTING PETALS ON PLANET GHOST – Oounabara LP/DVD (Opax) Gorgeous lathe cut with original copper-gold ink drawing on one side of the disc by PPOPG’s Ramona Ponzini. From Italy, Ramona is a collaborator with the incredible My Cat Is An Alien who have been issuing varying series of small press vinyl LPs that run from amazing to astounding. Like the previous PPOPG LP on Time-Lag this one goes for the spirit sky of light and energy. Ethereal vocals and droning amp action make this a sweet ride. Other member Roberto Opalio offers a DVD of silent films to be watched while listening if one is so inclined.

64. POCAHAUNTED – Moccasinging cassette (Not Not Fun) The Skaters and their howling tongue-amp majestix are one of the more far-reaching inspirations of the noise/whatsis underground these last five years. Whether Pocahaunted, a member of L.A.’s awesome Quintana Roo, has any debt to them may be worth noting; but since we’re all brothers in the flow of noise inspiration anyway, who cares? And anyone that can conceive of this kinda Indian War-Whoop take on a great long flowing tone and tom-tom raindance drone with a tape packaged in an Indian pouch with feathers attached is totally welcome here. Does Pocahaunted perform live in full native American dress? One can only hope.

65. BROADFIELD MARCHERS – When the Lifted Connive LP (St. Ives) Totally addictive lo-fi power pop trio from Louisville with lotsa moves lifted from the Wilson brothers and Sell Out-era Who, but assembled with the ham-fisted “precision” that made Salvation Army SO MUCH BETTER than the Three O’Clock. Often such bands “mature” into something a bit too evolved for our own tastes, so sample early. Edition of 300.

66. DO IT BIG – Coke Dick cassette (milk tart records) From what we can tell the members of this elusive outfit are heralded as “murder,” “kuss,” “blood,” “creampuff” and “brookie g.” They are supremely addled. This, presumably their debut recording, sounds like an LSD playground riot which runs through a good trip/bad trip journey unlike anything we’ve encountered in a while. Regardless it’s outstanding in its wastedness.

67. 40 BANDS 80 MINUTES DVD – director: Sean Carnage (Sounds Are Active) Pretty interesting concept—40 L.A. bands playing two-minute (max) sets at some place in Hollywood. The music’s all over the map and most of it’s pretty good, but even the lousy stuff is over fast, so what the heck? So underground that the “big name” bands are on the order of Abe Vigoda and Fireworks. Anyway, what’s the deal on this trio, The Amazements? Their tune came off like a cross between Demo Moe & the Cheater Slicks. Nice.

68. PALMER IS BEAUTIFUL: THE OLD STORE & THE SHED VIDEO COLLECTION DVD (The Old Store) Similar but different to the above, this documents 70-plus shows that took place at a few cooperative venues in Palmer, Mass, between 1998 & 2005. There are some names (XBXRX, Friends Forever, Partyline, etc.) but most is homegrown, lo-tech thud. And it makes for an interesting three hours of viewing (although the very end part was screwed up on our copy).

69. 6majik9 – The Majik House cassette (Cauliflower Dreams) Another outstanding find by this Belgian label. 6majik9 are considered an output of the newest strain of Australian psychedelia but they are way more outside the margins than that. Real homefire mood blankouts that drag down into bursts of sunshine lung goop.

70. GETTING RID OF THE GLUE – LP (Pendu Sound) Good, non-standard BKLN comp album with a few “known” names (Excepter, Daniel Carter) and a very nice handle on how to sniff between the cracks. This packs a variety of “free rock” approaches into 12 inches of space that are tasty and surprisingly coherent.

71. SLITHER – Cut Scales cassette (Fag Tapes) If a recording of two improvising horns in fug-mind gut interplay is not jazz then the form is dead. We say it is more alive than anyone in moldy fig land will ever know at this point. Slither is excellent reed street waste. Today’s jazz for today’s playboys. Heath Moerland still kills.

72. L’OIE DE CRAVAN – Benoit Chaput’s wonderful Montreal-based press had another great year, finishing off with a beautiful art book by Richard Deschenes, and a wild CD3 of sound-poems by Julie Doucet and Anne-Francoise Jacques.

73. O’NANCY IN FRENCH – cassette (AQM) Weird lost artifact from the mid-’80s. Two Japanese guys who perform by creating feedback with amplified oil barrels, then controlling it by gently touching the barrels at various points. First heard on John Duncan’s radio show back in the day. Now available and it’s boss.

74. DON’T NEED YOU – dir. Kerri Koch (Urban Cowgirl) Very good documentary on the history of the American Riot Grrrl scene, warts and all. Live footage and interviews, assembled with a very graceful touch.

75. ORPHAN FAIRYTALE – Anything by Eva, the most awesome living creature of Antwerp, is essential. Her Mother Mummy cassette on Bill Nace’s Open Mouth label, the Let’s Glow in the Dark cassette on Imvated and, most recently, the Big Bear cassette on Jelle Crama’s Puik label were astounding as was her duo LP Let It Be A Nightingale Then / Whose Words Are My Words- Meditation Vol. One with the mysterious Providence freako Mudboy on Cauliflower Dreams. Keep yr antennae tuned for more future wax and wonder. Otherworldly improvisatory sound dream at it’s newest and nicest.

76. DEATH CHANTS – As above, just about anything findable from Death Chants is worth yr while if into new underground American drone realizations from places Earthbound and skyward. The self-released cassette duology called Ether Works is a good place to start. Yr best bet is to query Time-Lag records as Nemo has pretty much anything extant on this horde ready to rip into yr space-brain.

77. NIGHT WOUNDS – Allergic to Heat LP (Woodsist) Nice, L.A.-based noise-spasmo trio, recorded live at the practice space and doing a cover of VOM’s “Electrocute Your Cock” in everything but name! Semi-harsh guitar-stun dynamics and some no-waved based simple ass rhythm charts.

78. ETHAN RILLY – The Nervous Party (Ethan Rilly) Great little comic by Rilly, perhaps best known for the fliers he has done for Montreal’s Casa del Popolo & Sala Rossa clubs. This is a simple, beautifully rendered tale of medium slackness & drunken whatsis that’ll no doubt resonate with many readers.

39. IRENE MOON & CHRISTOPHER CPREK – History of Darker Florida Volume 2 cassette (arrosa zuria sarea) A collaborative effort from two people heavily involved with the long running Kalamazooo artist/theatre underground. At least we know Irene is. Cprek we don’t know too much about except his last name is kinda like Ptak in a way which is interesting. Regardless, the varying disciplines and groupings of individuals from this scene have been releasing and performing consistently great actions for years and this under the radar release is, like most of their work, a cool as hell listen.

80. ATP NIGHTMARE BEFORE XMAS – The heaviest trailer park crack party of the decade. Thus far, anyway.

If you have treats you would like to licked by the Bull Tongue, send two copies (archaic formats—print, vinyl, vid—preferred) to Bull Tongue, P.O. Box 627, Northampton MA 01061.

CONTACTS
Abrams: www.hnabooks.com
Animal Disguise: www.animaldisguise.com
Atavistic: www.atavistic.com
AuthorHouse: www.authorhouse.com
Big Baby Press: bigbabybooks@videotron.ca
Bro: www.eremite.com
City of Tales: www.myspace.com/cityoftales
Columbus Discount Records: www.columbusdiscountrecords.com
Deep Fried Tapes: www.deepfriedtapes.org
Disques Dual: www.disquesdual.com
The Drama: www.thedrama.org
Dust to Digital: www.dust-digital.com
Elephant Graveyard: www.elephantgraveyard.net
Emperor Jones: www.emperorjones.com
Entr’acte: www.entracte.co.uk
Family Vineyard: www.family-vineyard.com
Fantagraphics Books: www.fantagraphics.com
Feminist Action Brigade: www.feministsagainstbush.com
Friends and Relatives: www.friendsandrelativesrecords.com
Fuckittapes: www.fuckittapes.com
Hello Asshole: www.helloasshole.com
Heresee: www.heresee.com
Insurance Editions: 35-48 80th Street #52, Jackson Heights, NY 11372
Jeremi Mourand: jeremimourand.com
Kendra: via Eric – music@ptoad.com
Kendra Steiner Editions: steinergurl@lycos.com
Kennind Editions: www.durationpress.com/kenning/
Kirpan Press: Box 2943, Vancouver, WA 98668
Kraak: www.kraak.net
Le Souffleur: www.le-souffleur.nl
Load: www.loadrecords.com
L’Oie de Cravan: www.oiedecravan.com
Make Now Press: 8152 Coldwater Canyon, N. Hollywood CA 91605
Mondo Macabro: www.mondomacabrodvd.com
Nervous Jerk: www.nervousjerk.com
No Fun: www.nofunproductions.com
Not Not Fun: www.notnotfun.com
Old Gold: www.oldgold.org
The Old Store: www.theoldstore.org
Palindrone: www.myspace.com/palindrone
Pasalymany: www.geocities.com/pasalymanytapes/
Picture Box: www.pictureboxinc.com
Pulled Out: pulledout.org
Rave Up: www.raveupreords.com
Richie Records: www.richierecords.com
Ethan Rilly: erilly@gmail.com
Jo Roberston: www.myspace.com/jorobertsonblood39n39feathers
Ruby Red: www.myspace.com/rubyreditora
Jensen Rufe: www.jensenrufe.com
Rundownsun: www.rundownsun.com
PShaw: www.pshaw.net
SNSE: www.snse.net
Someone Else: someone_else_stuff@yahoo.co.uk
Sounds Are Active: www.soundsareactive.com
Sublime Frequencies: wwwsublimefrequencies.com
Superflux: 2925 Higgins St. Austin, TX 78722
Sword Heaven: www.myspace.com/swordheaven
Tapeworm: www.tapewormtapes.com
Tent Editions: www.myspace.com/annbeatrice
Tochnit Aleph: www.tochnit-aleph.com
Trd W/d: POB 52096, Now Orleans, LA 70152
Troniks: www.iheartnoise.com
Truculent: www.truculentrecordings.net
Wesleyan Press: http://www.upne.com
Urban Cowgirl: www.urbancowgirlproductions.com
Woodsist: www.fuckittapes.com/woodsist.htm
Yes Press: dustyjacks@yahoo.com

BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 24 (Sept. 2006)

Administrator — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:03:35 +0000

first published in Arthur No. 24 (September, 2006)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

First of all, a few people have been griping lately that they continue to send us stuff to review and they aren’t getting any word aktion in return. To this, we say—sorry. We get a numbing amount of material to review, and the vast bulk of it is actually pretty interesting. We do the best we can, although there has been talk about supplementing the print column with something additional that’d run on the Arthurmag.com website. In the meantime, don’t lose the faith. If you are doing good, idiosyncratic work, we’ll do what we can to pass the word one way or another. Keep it coming.

Upset The Rhythm has been one of the coolest collectives tooling around London since their inception in 2003. They put on shows by the most radical of radical post riot punk action core noise freakers who happen to blow through town as well as put a few records out. They’ve really scored hard with a split release LP by howling UK psyche-tribe femme jamsters Leopard Leg and San Francisco all-girl metal/howl 4tet T.I.T.S.. Both these bands are super wild with Leopard Leg being a 10+ outfit of London and Brighton women stirring up a drumming, whooping cry to the Goddess light of sound, vision and pre-rock soulfire. T.I.T.S. have weirdo metal moves informed by the legacy of S.F. underground experimental noise and good times rock chaos catharsis from whence they came. The total witch jazz guitar juice and pummel bass/drum bash here put us on high alert. This split LP Throughout the Ages is a gorgeous gatefold affair and one anyone’d be a sap to pass on.

Tony Rettman, long time major domo of 200 Pound Underground, has been expanding his empire lately. He’s doing all kindsa crap on his new WFOT imprint, and one of the neatest is a book of art by Marcia Bassett and Matthew Bower. Not sure if it has a title, but it’s great stuff – avant garde van art at its finest. Good thing to look at the next time you spin that Hototogisu 3LP set. Fusetron and Volcanic Tongue handle it. Michael Bowman’s Nova Feedback is also easy on the eyes. The first five issues collect a hot bouquet of drawings and collages that range from extremely casual to speed-freak-detailed. Some of them have a very ‘50s animation feel to them (although the subject matter has a tendency to be bit perverse) and it would be mighty interesting to meet a woman who was covered with his designs as tats. There’s also another great booklet from L.A.’s Hello Trudi folks. Bro, Maybe the Good Times Are Over is a beautiful menagerie of smuts both crude and cruder. Garry Davis has also come through with something different: a booklet of collages called You’re On Glue. Done over the course of 17 years, it’s a wonderful collection of image-chops, very few of which fall into any of the standard style-holes one might expect.

Help yourself to an exquisitely duppy split LP, shared by Dinosaurs, Baseball & Hopscotch (a sorta Indiana spazz-prov all star orchestra) and France’s Glen or Glenda (Friends and Relatives). DBH lock onto a riff the way a horny poodle locks onto your pantleg, burrowing snoots deep into your, uh, snoot receptor. It’s reminiscent of a more jazzbo-oriented Fuzzhead or something. Glen or Glenda are a trio who go from grunting metal-themed instrumentals into a very bruising jazz/noise hybrid at the drop of a chapeau. I have no real idea what the fuck they’re up to, but what’s not to like? Check their website and see if you can get an accurate fathom reading.

Most interesting rock read this time might well be the interview with Portland, Maine’s the Same Band in Kapital Ink. Although I’d never heard of the combo—and still haven’t heard a note they played—the story they tell ranges from Marion Brown’s tenure at Bowdoin College through the punk era, and it’s highly reet. Also up there in any terms you’d care to name is Dumb Angel #4. Largely penned by surf/Beach Boys scholar, Dominic Priore, this issue is a wild dive into Southern California beach culture of the early/mid ’60s. Includes a piece by Harvey Kubernick about Phil Spector, a great survey of the early work of artist John van Hammersveld, stuff on Les Baxter, and wads of words and pics regarding the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, Dick Dale, et al. It’s been a long time since the last one, but the wait was definitely worth it. As is issue #6 of George Parsons’ always-delirious Dream magazine. Noted in some circles as the most heroic looking interviewee in that Jandek documentary, Parsons has assembled a great set of pieces regarding psych, folk and general undergroundery (My Cat is An Alien, Bridget St. John, Vibracatherdal Orchestra, Windy & Carl, etc.) and packed it all up with a dandy CD featuring all of the aforementioned and more.

Swinging Michigan aktion comes in the form of the Tender Swarm LP by Genders (Ypsilanti). It has a disntinctly post-punk Brit sound with shards of PiL, the Pop Group and even Furious Pig rooting around the garbage-strewn lanes of the upper midwest. How careerist! There is also a post-punque classique feel to some of the moves on first, before and never again (Mt. St. Mtn.), the debut LP by San Francsico’s the Mall. But they intersprese their bass lobbery with geographically appropriate references—a little Residents on the vocals, some Tuxedo Moon on the keys, even a touch of Sleepers in the guitar. Mix that with murky original stutterage and you get pretty cool results. Nice looking album, too.

It was with tremulous hand that we snatched up Tim Mitchell’s book, Sonic Transmission: Television, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell. With the classic 1974 photo of Verlaine, Hell, Ficca and Lloyd holding a TV set with leather jackets and chopped hair this looked like a sure thing. Unfortunately it hardly half delivers. Mitchell has done some decent research, primarily compiled from previously written documents and interviews and Television fan sites. It’s awesome to read the early accounts of these dudes, how they came to NYC as itinerant lads at loose ends with reality and their subsequent involvement with the poetry scene as well as the New York Dolls heyday. The author divines some fairly interesting analysis from the early poem texts and tackles some pretty obscure reference and context thus. But it would’ve been amazing to have retrospective dialogue with the subjects as well as more select photos than what’s here. And there’s some sorely lacking flashpoints such as any detail on the release of the first Television 7” “Little Johnny Jewel” on Ork: an incredible historical gap. But if Verlaine and Hell had any significance in your life as poet/musicians then you kinda gotta get this.

Mad Monk is the new label Wooden Wand has started after discontinuing the long running Polyamory enterprise. Polyamory was a united effort betwixt Wooden Wand and the Vanish Voice’s James Jackson Toth and Tovah O’Rourke. Purportedly since Tovah was whisked off by the jamming guns of Wolf Eyes’ John Olson and betrothed in an Ypsilanti, Michigan love nest James thought to create a new phase label and Mad Monk is off and slamming. First up is a very hip and unctious LP by the legendarily obscurant New England kosmiche syrup improv trio Astral Blessing. Anyone lucky enough to have ever caught one of AB’s gigs will have sweat dripping down their calves knowing that this baby now exists. Paul LeBreque (Sunburned Hand of The Man, Trees Chants & Hollers, Aeth’r Myth’d, The Other Method, Soil Sing Through Me) was truly under the influence of grade A channeling when performing with these cats and it’s high time we have the privilege of strapping this lady on any time we need that special rip.

Nordic Visions LP by Vanishing Voice (Gypsy Sphinx) is a rattly, diffuse set of folk-based brick-rattle improvs. Even though Pete Nolan is present at the sessions, there is no rapping (or even much in the way of non-rap vocalizing, either). The results might be a little generic in terms of non-focus string-thrust, but hey – it’s a great genre. Label can be had through Fuestron or Volcanic Tongue. About a thousand miles more trad in its folk stylings is the Life Without Outlaw LP (Grotto) by Oklahoma’s Outlaw Con Bandana. Led by Brendan Hagberg, this quartet combines first gen revo-folk (ala the Knitters) with a spiny combination of loner motion and deep rural vibrations. A few parts are so accessible you’ll almost want to ignore them, but the overall brunt is excellent, in the style of albums on the old Raccoon label.

The most interesting surprise poetry this time is Twin Vapor by Eric Amling. His writing is great. Long-lined poems are filled with gorgeous surrealist imagery, bleeding heart galore and plenty of yucks. This would include perhaps the best penis nickname I’ve yet had the pleasure to encounter—the Episcopal Hammer. Seek it for pleasure. Less of a surprise, but equally excellent is the new batch from Bill Shute. Bill has been writing for a long time and was a huge influence on my generation of fanzine clowns for his breadth of vision and sheer chops. More recently, he has been churning out booklets of great worth. The latest pile of them includes: Extension, Sonnets for Bill Doggett, So Long, and three new editions of the Sound Library Series (Spirit, Balance and Envy). Apart from the rather more formal sonnets, Bill’s work writhes across the pages, owing certain debts to the Language Poets, but not getting caught in the stink of their dead fish. This stuff is fully alive, fast and beautifully observational. Published by Kendra Steiner Editions.

Most excellent new noise label of the month goes to Trash Ritual out of Maryland. Kinda came outta nowhere with six cassette releases early in the year by a litany of completely confusing yet astoundingly deadly harsh hitters such as Blood ov thee Christ, Slow Burning and the extreme waste stasis sonics of The Rita who we gabbed about last column. A recent slew of seven tapes has us nailed to the floor with sicko nerve damage and narco psychosis. Some real heavy bladder piercing via the entrail fucking efforts of infamous Japanese earbleeder Government Alpha as well as the intriguing Genius Females and contemporary favorite Circuit Wound. A robust menagerie of mung-noise scum.

Emily Maguire from Sydney, Australia has been writing commentary for the Sydney Morning Herald with sharp and personal observances on race, religion, abortion, teenage life and all things worth opining on for a few years now. She’s a young voice coming out of seemingly nowhere with significant ideas and a completely arresting linguistic savvy. She recently blew minds with her first novel Taming the Beast (Brandl & Schlesinger, Australia) which involves itself with the brutal seduction of a 14-year-old schoolgirl by her English Lit teacher. The sex scenes in this book are graphic and constant yet never gratuitious or purposefully titillating. But they are shocking and the trajectory of the girl’s life, particularly after being abandoned by the teacher, who we find out is a repressed sadist, constitutes an intense page-turner. The book rips like a contempo crime noir thriller. It’s underlying vibe is one concerned with psycho obsession brought on by animal physics as exacted by intellectuals who you’d think could save themselves by their own wisdom. But, alas, fuck that, these people are dooooomed. A crazy read that has been zonking OZ and translated into German, Italian, Polish and Russian and ready to be published Stateside right about now by Harper Perennial. A wicked ride.

To Be Treated (Load) by New Orleans’ Impractical Cockpit is their first post-disaster LP, but it is no more filled with dread than prior efforts. This always-mutational combo has a way of adding a certain dab of power-raunch to their free-form freak rock, which gives it an edge over its more pointy-headed peers. Without veering into sheer noise, they manage to totter pretty damn close and pretty damn well. Load has also blessed us with an LP by Massachusetts’ Fat Worm of Error. Pregnant Babies Pregnant with Pregnant Babies is a lot like the good parts of Chris Cooper’s old band, Caroliner. There’s a combination of chittering insect nonsense and a centerless, gravity-defying surge of rock-based music that flows over everything the way butter flows across waffles. It’s a delicious sproing of anarcho-gush mechanics.

In person, I always find Ian Svenonius to be something of a (small p) pixie. That said, his new book, The Psychic Soviet (Drag City) is pixie-ish only in its size. The font is goddamn hard for an old guy to see all the time, but when the words swim into focus they’re hep. Basically a collection of essays pondering stupid connections in quasi-rigorous academic doublespeak, The Psychic Soviet is one of those books that is most satisfying when opened randomly (perhaps whilst on the commode) and nibbled in small bits. Also of note is the latest book by Chris Kraus called Torpor (semiotext(e), USA). The writing exhibits, in full force, the talent first perceived in her scandalous 1997 debut “I Love Dick” (about the author’s brief period of investigative obsession of renowned media theorist Dick Hebdige). For incisive, and intimate, observations of the social miasma of the art world and, indeed, the sexual politics inherent in this world, Chris is caustic, romantic, self-involved and seductive. Torpor concerns itself with a feminist filmmaker consumed and confounded by the intellect and desire of a rapacious philosopher lover. The writing is personalized and smart and by its very nature of open thought and independent energy succeeds in being the great work you hope the book’s character to exact. A very cool surprise.

It’s been a while since we got a package from Sympathy for the Record Industry, but one’s here and it’s a goodie. Two new sets from protean NYC bands, originally active in the dead days of pre-punk blandocracy. Suicide’s Attempted 2LP set was recorded at Max’s Kansas City in January ’80. It’s a great recording and captures the duo at a particularly sophisticated juncture, floating free from their ultra-aggressive roots, actively creating a kinda viral machine psychobilly. Brilliant shit. Then there’s the New York Dolls’ From Paris with Love (L.U.V.), another 2LP set. It doesn’t necssarily add a whole lot to the band’s discography (it’s been out in a couple of different versions before), but it sounds boss, and demonstrates these guys were on their game right up ‘til the end (which this show was). Ah well.

Nice crude little art magalet arrived from Mark Nichols. Patter #1 collects a bunch of crude single page illustrations, many of which remind me of the work of Napoleon Dynamite. Which is a kinda good memory. Whitewalls produces books at the opposite end of the production spectrum: high quality paper, design and content. They’ve had a bunch of good stuff lately, and the two that are in front of me right now are no exception. Peter’s ABC Book by Robert Amft is a 60th anniversary reprint of a strange kids alphabet book by a Chicago-based illustrator. Both straightly sentimental and possessed by an untaggably odd aesthetic, it’s quite pleasing. As is Red Empty (Chicago 2003) by Swedish artist C.M. von Hasswolff. This book is a collection of red monochrome prints of empty buildings, transformed by their color bath into structures more hypnotic and mysterious than their reality would ever dare hint. Nice.

Some records yield their mysteries immediately. Play them once and you know them. Other take a certain mood or a certain time and place to connect. One of the latter is the LP by Aritoma Nishihara, which we’ve been trying to decode for several months. Overdubbed layers of vocals, acoustic guitars, bamboo flute and other things make the music here seem so ephemeral at first that it’s almost hard to ineract with. But the more you play it, the deeper it digs under your skin. There’s a wide-eyed intensity to the explorations here that eventually allows you to go past the simplicty and brightness of the surface and make you realize that the inner workings of the music are dark, confused and very strange. The vocals are in Japanese, but they still carry a mood of confusion and yearning that is palpable beyond the barriers of mere language. It’s a beautiful, deeply personal effort, with touches of Takoma, early Mazzacane, and comteporary loners. It’s also very worth your time.

Alright, we finished up with a couple solid days of DVD viewing. Yow, there’s a lot of stuff to see. The Galaxie 500 Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste 2DVD set (Plexifilm) is a straight up collection of what must be just about all the live footage they could unearth, from an afternoon at the Middle East through UK television stuff. And these guys were not always the most exciting band to watch, but it sure sounds good to us. The booklet interview by James McNew is funny, too. Related to this is Damon & Naomi’s Shibuya Nest Tokyo Japan June 24 3005 DVD (Damon & Naomi), which is a simple document of an amazing live show. The pair is abetted by Kurihara and Batoh from Ghost, as well as Bhob Rainey (of nperigm). Legendary Japanese free-folk guy, Kan Mikami, even comes out for a guest spot, and the results are very hep. Trash viewing highlights were two from Mondo Macabro. We’d known Terry Riley’s great, writhing soundtrack to Lifespan for years, but had never had a chance to see the movie. Now it’s available and it’s a strange ’74 European thriller about weird science with Klaus Kinski. Hard to follow at times, but still slippery fun, and the Riley stuff works great. Also splendid is The Devil’s Sword—a berserk Indonesian movie about cyclops and umbrellas and people with bad skin. Excellent. A new company, Other Cinema, also sent three cool ones. Russ Forster and Dan Sutherland’s So Wrong They’re Right, which is kinda the grandaddy of all the underground documentaries that’ve been done of late. It follows the arc of the 8-track fan world and has funny interviews with such heavies as Phil Milstein, Michael Hurley, David Greenberger and lots more. Craig Baldwin’s Sonic Outlaws is about musical appropriation and copyright shit. Largely grounded in Negativland’s troubles with U2 and SST, it also features stuff on the Tape Beatles, John Oswald and even a bit of historical context. Some of the collages are choppy to watch, but it’s interesting as hell to acfually see Negativland at work and play. Animal Charm’s Golden Digest is a collection of videos made from “found” footage, ranging from the hideous to the sublime. Some of the pieces are totally great and very strange, others are not so compelling. But hey—we sat through them all, so could you. Finally, there’s an insane thing called Trash Talking by Paper Rad. It is like watching some sorta psychedelic Atari 64 game while you’re zipping around the house on too many ‘shrooms. Yikes. Check it out.

Okay. We’re outta breath, space and time. Bye.

Eric Amling: hoveringcapitol@hotmail.com
Michael Bowman: www.gallerymjb.com
Brandl & Schlesinger: www.brandl.com.au
Damon & Naomi: www.damonandnaomi.com
Garry Davis: yrrag26@hotmail.com
Drag City: www.dragcity.com
Dream: www.dreamgeo.com
Dumb Angel: www.dumbangelmagazine.com
Friends and Relatives: www.friendsandrelativesrecords.com
Fusetron: www.fusetronsound.com
Glen or Glenda: galerie.pache.free.fr
Hello Trudi: www.hellotrudi.com
Kapital Ink: kapitalink@maine.rr.com
Kendra Steiner Editions: django5722@yahoo.com
Load: www.loadrecordings.com
Mad Monk: www.woodenwand.net/madmonk
Emily Maguire: emilymaguire.typepad.com
Mondo Macabro: www.mondomacabrodvd.com
Mt. St. Mtn.: www.mtstmtn.com
Mark Nichols: 320 N. 2nd Street #2, DeKalb IL60115
Aritomo Nishihara: aritomomo@hotmail.com
Other Cinema: www.othercinemadvd.com
Paper Rad: www.paperrad.org
Plexifilm: www.plexifilm.com
Sympathy for the Record Industry: sympathyrecords.com
Semiotext(e): www.semiotexte.com/books/torpor.html
Sonic Transmission : www.lastgasp.com/d/28984
Trash Ritual: www.trashritual.cjb.net
Upset The Rhythm: www.upsettherhythm.co.uk
Volcanic Tongue: www.volcanictongue.com
Ypsilanti: westsideaudio@hotmail.com

BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 25 (Nov. 2006)

Administrator — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 15:59:37 +0000

first published in Arthur No. 25 (November/Winter, 2006)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Bar are a married couple from Flensburg, Germany. Hjular is an artist into collecting art-music and outsider weirdo records. He met Mama when she was 17 and the two of them live out in some mysterious house of cosmic wonder, where they record all kinds of bizarre jams and release them on their own Schöne-Hjuler-Memorial-Fond label in editions of 5 to 50. If you look on their site you can see their discography which is massive and, for the most part, sold out. We were finally able to grip a copy of their 100th release, fortuitously in an edition of 100. Wiederaufnahmeverfahren II/06 (SHMF) is a split LP by the two and if it’s any indicator of the Fluxus pleasure found on the previous 99 releases, then someone please start eBaying those discs cuz we need to hear more. Mama’s side starts with a series of similar sounding high pitched noise junk jolts, then develops into a Rita Ackermann-esque investigation of nursery rhyme sensuality, becoming alluringly repetitive and ultimately crazed as Mama’s lovely sing-song voice is transformed into deep-pit screams of anguish. Wicked. Kommissar’s side is more typically dada, running some very damaged no-fidelity frequencies against Germanic babble. The record comes in three different editions. One has a box with the LP, art, plus other sundries, and it’s cool to see the pair’s ephemeral clutter, particularly the art they make—hers, abstract paint; his, twisted eros collage. But the recordings are what’s key here for sure. A fucked earfull.

Ah, Belgium…perhaps not a comment we utter as often as we might, but it has a nice feel as it flutters over the tongue. And that’s just what it does when Satanische Vrede, the debut LP by Belgium’s Silvester Anfang (K-RAA-K) is playing. So rural, psych and folky they almost sound Finnish, Silvester Anfang is a Maldegem-based outfit whose membership changes with weather and circumstance. They use a barrage of standard rock instruments, but also lotsa odd-sounding string and percussion bits, to create a loopily chiming instrumental sound, more explicitly “out’ (in improvisational terms) than most similarly styled units. There’s nothing precious about this, and it teeters very close to the vibe produced by ostensible post-jazzbos, such as the Sea & Sun Ensemble. Which means there’s good gobbling for the whole trough. R.O.T.’s L’ecurie LP (K-RAA-K) is another explorational Belgian dive into some kinda forest primeval, but their journey is more about electro-acoustic tents propped up by crackling electronic fires in the middle of dark glens. Improvised in a kitchen, this is the sort of music horses hear right before they go to sleep. For good.

Most mind-felching graphics comp to come along lately is definitely the sixth edition of Sammy Harham’s Kramers Ergot (Buenaventura Press). This large paperback is a headrush from beginning to end. It checks in on most of the interesting styles of art currently residing in the graphics underground, from semi-realist to primitive to ratty to psychedelic to computer-generated. It’s one of those books you’ll look at ‘til your eyes get tired, then return to as soon as they’re well rested. Contributors include Gary Panter, Paper Rad, Jeff LaDouceur, Suiho Tagawa and more; the visuals range from single panel gags to long, complex sagas. Amazing. Buenavista has a couple more solid new titles out also. There’s Private Stash, a sleeved, accordion-style portfolio of glamor and nude drawings by Crumb, Clowes, Bagge, Burns, Panter, the Hernandez Bros. and others. There’s also issue 8 of Comic Art, which is a more serious journal devoted to the history of comics. This issue has a great piece on S. Clay Wilson’s newly discovered juvenilia (more on him later), a long Drew Friedman profile, stuff on the pulp art of Edd Cartier, and much more to tickle the brain of the form’s devotees. John Yee’s Arf Museum (Fantagraphics) has a second issue out as well, also taking a somewhat scholarly in-depth approach. Yee’s passion, however, is the juncture between “high art” and comics, so this issue explores that crease. Our fave things this issue are a great Mort Walker piece about meeting Roy Lichtensetin and a survey of gorilla ‘n girl art, but you’ll undoubtedly have your own picks.

The young and dapper Alex Neilson of Glasgow, Scotland is a polite and altogether engaging fellow. He is also one of the most exciting free-spirit percussionists shaking shit up in these halcyon days. His fusion of traditional and avant-garde folk inspirations with free jazz exploration is young and tender and, like a fine clotted cream, superbly succulent. He records with Taupis Tula, a trio consisting also of David Keenan and Heather Leigh Murray (propietors of the Glaswegian record store, Volcanic Tongue) and was a live collaborator on Jandek’s initial sightings. What we have here is his latest solo splooge, An Old Soul At The Helm (Chocolate Monk), recorded under the Directing Hand monniker. Drawing from the percussive history/mind of such stalwart beat babes as Milford Graves, Chris Corsano and Tsuchitori Toshiyuki, then snuggling it with a heartfelt hug for Scottish countryside balladeering is a right-on move to our ears. This CDR, featuring through-the-haze vocal accompaniment by Christina Carter on one track, is the goddamn cheese. Get it and track down his previous sides on Secret Sound, Memoirs Of An Aesthete and—definitely—the new LP, Belsayer Time (Time-Lag) by the trio of Neilson, Alastair Galbraith and Richard Youngs. This is music for the ages and a fantastic visit from New Zealand’s Galbraith. Side one is all wheatgrass and psilocybin while side two is electric jagged crystal strikes. A total must. Power trio of the year.

Oren Ambarchi has long been one of the more interesting figurines on the Australian event horizon. His work with the Menstruation Sisters and Sunn O))) is perhaps his best-known stuff, but he released a deadly series of LPs in the late ‘90s exploring explicit experimental techniques for electric guitar. He has now returned to this concept with the Stacte Motors LP (Western Vinyl) and it’s something worth uncorking immediately. Like the legendary Remko Scha, Ambarchi employs machines to play his guitar strings here. Rotating motors with strings attached slap the guitar in a hypnotically rhythmic fashion while the hum of electricity and various overlays raise the shimmer-potential to extreme heights. Comprised of two long pieces, the album is trance inducing in the best possible way. Ambarchi also works with Australian sound artist, Scott Horscroft, on a split LP shared with the late Japanese experimentalist, Takahito Nakazato (Textile). More guitars are machined on his side, although the results emphasize clutter over calm. Recording as Hado Ho, Takahito’s offering is a suprisingly laidback series of sounds produced by amp noise, mircrophones and bad connections. For all that, it has enough open space inside it for the listener to breath, which isn’t always the case when Japanese noise is on the box.

S.F. guitar improvisor Henry Kaiser has released Domo Arigato Derek-sensei! (Balance Point Acoustics), a wonderful tribute CD to his mentor the late, great Derek Bailey. It delivers a fantastic display of Kaiser’s brain-finger-string-amp process/result with a choice selection of collaborators including Charles K. Noyes, Henry Kuntz, Toshinori Kondo, Andrea Centazzo, Davey Williams, Mototeru Takagi, John Oswald, Derek himself and more. The whole thing runs with spontaneous spoken word memorials interspersed throughout by Kaiser. It’s a sweet and funny fireside chat of a concert, very attuned to Derek’s perpetual spirit. All profits from the CD sales go to Incus Records, Derek (and his partner, Karen Brookman)’s long running chronicle of the improvised music world. And all material is live and free. Natch.

Norwegian Kjetil Brandsdal, used to be an experimental guitarist as well, but he dropped that hat in the gutter. The split LP by two of his current bands, Noxagt and Ultralyd (Textile) features two very raucous sides of proletarian urk. The Noxagt material comes from early rehearsals (or radio shows or something) and consists of short slabbed chunks of goofy noise, including a cover of Toni Basil’s “Mickey.” Ultralyd’s stuff is more feedback-scrambled in its orientation, but still pleasant as getting very soft fur stuck in your eye. Same could be said of Noxagt’s eponymous third LP (Load), which is a brilliant, lunk-headed lurch through instrumental forests of progressive criminality.

Most brilliant, sickest art book to power down the drain in ages is The Art of S. Clay Wilson (Ten Speed Press). Wilson is the Nebraska-born artist who freed Robert Crumb to follow the siren call of his id, and this collection is a horribly thorough dive into his ouevre. From early sketches through comic pages, book covers and more recent color bloodfests, this book is stunner. Wilson’s characters—bikes, pirates, cowboys, beatniks, demons, et al.—wage sense-war on the masses with an obscene strength that is unmatched in documented history. Approach with extreme caution and all your holes open.

Crown Now produce exactly what To Live And Shave in L.A.’s croon king, Tom Smith, must have sounded like as a kid in the backwoods with his Boones Farm-addled pals. With pimple-powered early Suckdog energy, this duo of delirious nerdniks howl along with broken records and messed up tapes, using their shitty microphones’ on/off switches to great effect. Love it! Ain’t nothing like the future, baby. This is one of four debut releases on Jessica Rylan’s new cassette label, Friendship Bracelet. The others are Bone Rattle, two freaks who also perform as Dreamhouse (whose Shake cassette is bunghole sludge dynamism) (which equals: awesome!). Then there’s Cough It Up by the Halflings, another teen combo taking on power electronic goodness. If Jessica is gonna be the den mom of noise, then the kids are definitely alright.

UK shit-noise label Turgid Animal have been releasing all kindsa brit-slime mostly revolving around the Mutant Ape/Filthy Turd axis (which we touched on last column). A particularly interesting split cassette by M.O.A.C. and Coco & Fiend Friend Mononoke (ta043) nearly had us driving the Volvo off into Route 9’s guard rails. M.O.A.C. (Mystic Occult Aid Ceremony) is a Japanese woman now living in Boston who really delivers classic Japanoise aktion (lately overshadowed by the new bleat of the West). Not only is it exciting and refreshing to hear someone really re-investigate this sound-world once again, but she gives it an enticing contempo edge. If you’re an old fan of Vanilla cassette wildness, this momma is yours. Coco And Fiend Friend is two mates really digging chaos, spliced depravity and all the farting mantraz thereof. Extra cruddy. But what is here is ass buhlasting.

Another coupla new installments of the great Hello Trudi have arrived. First is Busyness for the Self, which seems more overtly smutty than some previous issues (although maybe it’s just our mood). The second is You Want to Hear a Simple Story of a Swimsuit Model, another un-linear grapple with words and drawings created in the post-Pettibonian universe, containing one of the best Crass references seen inside the art world in many a moon. New issue of The Chuckwagon is Midnight by Dave Newman. It’s one of the best in the series thus far, a funny, black verse novelette about what it’s like to mop floors in the company of drug-philospher. The latest Shuffleboil has a fine topless Cecil Taylor photo on the cover and Clark Coolidge’s ruminations on that 10-CD Taylor box Codanza put out. There’s plenty of other stuff, too. The standard, brilliant collage of poetry and prose about improvised music and jazz we’ve come to expect from editors, David Meltzer and Stve Dickinson. Ong Ong #3 arrived in a glassine enevlope packed with various random goodies, all of which were nice to examine. As was the mag’s actual contents, which featured interviews with the Grey Daturas, Slim Moon (now outdated, since he’s moving to NYC) a portfolio of show fliers, a CD with Ghost Family (among others) and plenty more.

Among all the sensational exploits of mind cremation at No Fun Festival 2006, the one that had all in attendance either laughing or crying or both, was the hyper-vicious goofbomb noise circus of Macronympha. Along with the group’s stalwarts, two sexually weirded females (one a frozen ice queen friend, the other a saucy asskicker) were loose among the stage melee of oil drums, drunken groping meat claws and an upended card table (which subsequently chopped an audience member’s dick off). Pretty fucking cool gig and one that still has noise bloggers discussing its merits and ramifications. We’re not here to defend or analyze Macronympha’s aesthetics of pain and pleasure. We really just wanna lean back and exclaim “holy shit” after experiencing their Mugwump Reformer Mixes CD (Audio Dissection). Recorded in their sicko hometown of Pittsburgh in 1995 (as the rare and legendary Pittsburgh, PA LP on Praxis Dr. Bearmann) and remixed earlier this year, this CD may technically be the best sounding American necro-sexual harsh noise release to date. (Or at least since the ear world profundity of To Live And Shave In L.A.’s 2004 opus, The Wigmaker in Eighteenth Century Williamsburg.) Massive dynamic range is heard and felt and the stereo field of regret and rot is remarkably insane. The folded insert is a proto-typical Macronympha image-bust w/ horrific disease and terror alongside explicit porn punks and pansies. A must have.

Speaking of No Fun, the label office of this enterprise has been squeezing out some nice and sleazy little runs of primo US noise LPs. The recent one by C. Spencer Yeh, Three Sisters Who Share An Eye (No Fun Rotten LP #5), has this cochlea-splitting Ohioan stepping outside and around his Burning Star Core monniker and recording a disk that just fucking blows doors on everything around it. We’ve raved on about Yeh’s meat salad science in the past, but the mug keeps getting more and more wrecked. Essential listening from top to bottom. Another is Oscillators ‘87 Guitar ’88 by Jim O’Rourke (No Fun Rotten LP #4) which is also just 300 copies and completely nuts—easily one of the most testes-tingling O’Rourke discs EVER. Both sides move along with a zen blood focus. The music is like power cables swaying to the earth’s heavy action with 60 zillion watts of juice silently streaming inside. Damn, dude!

Speaking of explicit porn punks, no one’s more noise-coitus graphic right now than Boston’s mighty Two Dead Sluts One Good Fuck, a fantastic duo (sometimes trio) who go way out of their way to ensure everyone’s having a fuck of a time. Their P.T. Barnum’s Gallery Of Masturbatorial Disenchantment CD on Kitty Play (a label which the group “dropped” for various reasons, all notated on their MySpace blog) is a masterpiece of messed up boy skum energy, where lead screamers grow ferocious red beards and pound their skinny white chests with cum drunk revelry. Nice. And very nasty, the sleeve is a wraparound of dripping schlongs and girl-on-girl oral communication. Top shelf! And sexcellent “driving” music, to boot.

Sheesh. Long time since we (or anyone) opened a new Helios Creed LP. But here is Deep Blue Love Vacuum (Noiseville), which fills not one, but two LPs. Anyone who ever loved his earlier solo slop, or his time in the classic period of Chrome, should have their drool nozzles well tweaked by this. Veering between thick cosmic haze-gestures and thug-metal raunch, the sound is a beautiful distorted mess. With guest vocals by Fabienne Shine (esp. notable on the Velvets cover) and a pimp-solid bottom, this is one of the best drug warps to spew past us in a while. A real surprise LP has sailed over from France by a trio called Outtakes (Abstract/Concrete Recordings). Their weird yet down-the-middle improvisational gestures evince evocative compositional goodness. A sincere avant-instrumental vibe of pop/noise psychedelix runs through the grooves and we certainly hope there’s more brewing. Word has it that they are preparing a musical tribute to the Beats. Something else to find if you can is the Djinn Funnel LP by the Sub City Girls (Nashazphone). Label is either French or Algerian or some damn thing, and the music (recorded live between ’99 and ’01) is a largely instrumental affair, displaying the band at their surreal psych utmost.

If, like us, you’re an unabashed fanatic for bowed metal and dry ice combos then dude we got the record for you. It’s 5015 AD (Ehse), the new 12” by Baltimore’s finest drone-cum-tongue-tie outfit, Trockeneis. With silkscreened jackets by Twig Harper and Carly Ptak, this is the sound of what Ian Nagoski claims is the best city for experimental music, bar none: Baltimore. So, yeh, no doubt, no argument. Trockeneis delivers classic yet singular salutations of fine flutter and squall. Further proof of Baltimore bad-assness can be found no further than an amazing LP by Harrius (Ehse). Harrius is a duo of Metalux’ Jenny Graf and the we-need-to-hear-more-from Chiara Giovando. Anyone who spun the cassette wheels off that CarlyPtak/Chiara Giovando Heresee tape from a couple years back should start the party NOW, as Chiara astounds here with a fine balance of slow, unfolding sound-dadaistix and palpable energy-microphone-allure. Jenny Graf is an excellent partner in this work which has marks of Metalux motion-magic strangeness but with a sparser spatial vibe. Dig it. Besides Ehse and Heresee another heavy Baltimore label is Hoss and they’ve just released one of thee heaviest discs of 06: the debut LP (CD is on the Hit Dat label) by WZT Hearts, Heat Chief. If you love quilted blankets as much as we do you will absolutely trip out sinking into the cover art which is a collaged bevy of fine bizarre weaves. And even if you don’t, you’ll still get sucked into the head-splut of WZT (pronounce “wet”) Hearts’ deep sound forage. A killer side.
Put This Way (Feudal Gesture) is the first volume of verse by long-time rock writer, Michael Layne Heath. Mike has been around since the earliest days of the DC scene, but is now based in SF. The poems sound like they’re being shouted through a bottle, and Mike has a nice romantic take on the deprivations of a life lived without excuses. Good stuff. On a related shelf we find dear friends, lovers suckers by Wesley Eisold and Charles Rowland (Heartworm Press). Both members of Some Girls, the book combines some the better (more reflective and funny) tour diary entries we’ve seen in a while with some excellently mean-spirited poetry by Eisold. Commendable work from a couple of guys who sound like they’re real pricks when they’re fucked up. More sober (in a way) is Carol Lewis’s Magenta’s Adventures Underground with drawings by Regine Polenz (Words Like Kudzu Press). Originally serialized in New York Nights, this short novel is a lovely, surreal version of Alice, set in the subways of Manhattan with sex, veterans and ghosts of war tossed into the mix. Regine’s art reminds me a bit of Emily Hubley’s early work. Which means it’s good, too.

Got some heavy treats from Hook or Crook, a new bizarro-garage label from Oakland. The Panther Howl LP by Haunted George is a strange one-man grovel in graveyard dirt by Steve Pallow (ex-Necessary Evils). It totally delivers on the failed promise of an album I once had by a guy calling himself “The Singing Mortician.” It’s kinda like the Zacherle/Bryan Gregory duo album you always dreamed of. Next is Demon’s Claws’ Live in Spring Branch Texas mini-LP. This Montreal outfit has the same sorta drug-swamp aura as Au Go Go-era Scientists, and their seven songs are screamed into a deep well of drunken goodness.

Another one of the chioicer garage records of late is eponymous debut LP by The Golden Boys (Perpetrator). It’s not clear why this Texas band had to go to New Zealand to find a label for the LP (I think the CD might be on Hook or Crook), but what the heck? They have a very cracked and shaky take on raunch-hootnenanny-ism recalling members of the In The Red stable, as well as some of Memphis’ more lop-sided degenerates. There are parts of this disk that cohere into something identifiably musical, but not enough to bother us. Anyone who remembers the New Zealand bands Constant Pain and 3Ds can find solace in knowing that some of these creeps are now bombing around Scotland and the UK, coming together when touched by the black thumb of Beelzebub in order to blow out overly skuzzed metal puke rock under the aegis of Evil. Evil’s first document is a 10”, A True Untimely Atrocity (Wishbone Records) and it’s pretty damn hellacious. Good to hear Liz Matthews smashing her kit and awesome to once again see artwork by 3Ds’ David Mitchell. These tots may have sold their buns to the devil but if that’s what it takes, then screw God. Hell is our destiny.

Sweden has some of the most bonker-zone record labels on the planet, such as Cold Meat Industry and Freak Animal. Those are both industrial noise-mung arbiters, but the label that’s got us trying to rip the ears off our heads in fits of dementia is UFO Mongo, a sub-label of Borft Records, seemingly bent on exposing us to the distorted vocals and blumpie-gushing synth puke of label zeros Enema Syringe. ES’s Visa Mig Vägen Till Mellringe LP and Screaming Fish 7” really had us in a herniated hucklebuck, so we were cautious in our approach to the Angst Vor Alles LP by Commando Laarz, one of the ES loonies and a pal. Not so different than the ES sound which is okay: we weren’t actually looking forward to variations on this specific fuckery. But Sweden man, whatever happened to the tender vision of Tesco Vee’s love-pump fantasy, Agnetha Fältskog?

One dude from Sweden we dig in ways that border on scary is saxophone gnasher Mats Gustafsson. Mats has got rock and roll and deep avant jazz outré-ness raging through his Scando blood. Proof positive is the torch of inspiration passed on to his teenage daughter Alva Melin. Along with girl teen partner Gabbi Evren, these two have created the stunning Drap En Hund (English translation: Slay a Dog) which is primarily bass guitar, drums and vocals. Taking cues from the wonderfulness of ESG (as well as the entire history of DIY spuzz) DEH have fearlessly cut the killer CD, Be Yourself (Slottet SLMI), with such tunes as “God Damned Destroyed,” “Don’t Drink” and “Hate You.” Why be something that you’re not? A lovely thing.

Finally laid hands on Ports Bishop’s first photography collection, Future Friends (Little Cakes), and it’s a brilliant evocation of past, present and post-present all balled into one. The photos were taken at two recent rural music festivals and the images are brilliantly evocative of the sense of time-collapsing so inherent to today’s underground. Some of the pics could be diddley-ass out-takes from an old hippie tome, others are so obviously current you can almost hear the SQUEE of noise-amps in the background. Viewed together, the result is a swank protrait of group of people self-consciously losing themselves in the aether at T-3 speed. It’s very strong work.
Treasure Chest (Galleria Paolo Bonzano) is the second LP by New York’s Hurray, an ensemble devoted to various terminal branches of sonic architecture. We’ve seen this new one referred to as “noisy folk music,” but that doesn’t really tell the tale. What it actually sounds like is a few guys up in a treehouse, throwing sticks and stones at some guys with guitars who are trying to climb up “their special ladder.” The new Timo van Luyk and Kris Vanderstraeten LP, High Noon (La Scie Dorée), is another journey through the Buddhist mind of free percussion via van Luyk’s long running collaborator Vanderstraeten. Like the Af Ursin sides van Luyk recorded (and just about anything on his label La Scie Doree) it’s all high grade spirit-spuh with enough klang to ring any tuff kid’s gong.

Received the first two issues of Sarah Becan’s comic, Shuteye (Short Pants Press). Each issue has one story unrelated to the other by anything except mood. The first issue is called “Vea,” and has a vaguely Poe-like vibe, telling a story about a deserter drifting into different realities amidst an ever-changing word of grass. The second, “Liar,” is about loss of identity and Scotch hallucinations. Both are simple, but very-well told, and the art (as well as the silkscreened covers) is quite bonus.

An amazing split LP is to be had from Jerusalem and the Starbaskets and Skarekraouradio (Apop). J.A.T.S.B’s side is some kind of unholy union betwixt an early lost Pavement session and maybe if the Velvets did jam with the Modern Lovers. It’s almost that cool, but it stands alone. A boss meander that works wonders. Skarkou Radio is a messed up amalgamation of free zap noise guitar and girls on LSD with nowhere to go except into the dungeon of your burning brain. Sweet stuff. Missouri and Illinois is where these nutrockers come from so dig it: this is some new killer American mung. Fugkin recommended. As is the split shared by two Cali bands, Child Pornography and Quem Quaeritis (Not Not Fun), both of whom mix sideways-moving improv spass-aktion with distinctive house-party formalism. What you get is a mix of disturbed urk and subliminal booty-rassling. Which might well split your butt right down the middle!

The Olde English Spelling Bee has gone beyond the call of duty by reissuing Copper/Silver the momentous collaborative meeting between Portland, OR’s Yellow Swans and Australia’s molten-drone-core kings, Grey Daturas. Initially released as a tiny edition CDR on Yellow Swans’ JYRK label what we have here is a real boss sea-swell of heavy wave deep-mind sound tonic. A double LP, again limited, and a possessed session spotlighting what is truly great within the world of contemporary underground music. No site for Olde English Spelling Bee but most small distributors seem to carry it. Yellow Swans, excellent in their own right, are heard in another collaborative state, this time with Charalambides’ Tom Carter as a unit entitled Mudsuckers. Their self-titled debut CD on Important has more open free-sparkle action than the collab with Grey Daturas, but still maintains the underlying sonic river of charmed-tone tongue that makes their shit a wicked listen. Mudsuckers is a collective with other musicians involved, particularly Henry Kuntz, a man with a long history of avant-garde saxophone work. Cool to see him here for sure. Important Records is also to be commended for issuing a balls-out mutha of a session by Paul Flaherty, Chris Corsano and C. Spencer Yeh. A Rock In The Snow has all the high action trademarks of a swingin’ Flaherty/Corsano affair. Blasting concept percussion techniques and white beard reed/bell energy lines all in a package made more remarkable and entertaining with the inclusion of kick-ass liner notes by Wolf Eyes’ John “Coorz” Olson.

Apop: www.apoprecords.com
Audio Dissection: c/o Emanuele Bonini, via Marchetti 8, 38023 cles (tn), Italia / audiodissection@yahoo.it
Balance Point Acoustics: www.balancepointacoustics.com
Borft: www.borft.com
Skarekrouradio: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=36612543
Buena Ventura Press: www.buenaventurapress.com
Chocolate Monk: www.pinktoes.net/chocolate_monk.htm
The Chuckwagon: casey.st@comcast.net
Coco and Fiend Friend: www.coco-friend.cjb.net
Directing Hand: www.secreteye.org/se/directinghand.html
Drap En Hund: www.drapenhund.com
Ehse Records: www.ehserecords.com
Evil: www.myspace.com/theunholytrinity
Fantagraphics: www. fantagrpahics.com
Feudal Gesture: mlayne@hotmail.com
Friendship Bracelet: www.irfp.net/index.html
Galleria Paolo Bonzano: www.arte3.com/
Grey Daturas: www.greydaturas.com
Heartworm Press: www.theheartworm..com
Hello Trudi: www.hellotrudi.com
Hit Dat Records: www.hitdatrecords.com
Hook or Crook: www.hookorcrook.com
Hoss Records: hossrecords.com
Important: www.importantrecords.com
Jerusalem and the Starbaskets: http//profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=20394169
Henry Kaiser: www.henrykaiser.net
Kitty Play: www.kittyplayrecords.com
Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Bar : www.asylum-lunaticum.de
K-RAA-K: www.kraak.net
Little Cakes: www.littlecakes.org
Load: www.loadrecords.com
Macronympha: www.myspace.com/macronympha
M.O.A.C.: www.myspace.com/moacmoac
Noiseville: www.noiseville.com
Not Not Fun: www.notnotfun.com
Ong Ong: www.ongongpress.com
Outtakes: http://death666records.chez-alice.fr
Short Pants: www.shortpantspress.com
Shuffle Boil: shuffleboil@hotmail.com
Slottet Records: www.slottet.eu
Sun City Girls: www.suncitygirls.com
Textile: www.textilerecords.com
Time-Lag: www.time-lagrecords.com
Trockeneis: www.trockeneismusic.com
Turgid Animal: www.mutant-ape.co.uk
Two Dead Sluts One Good Fuck: www.myspace.com/tdsogf
UFO Mongo: www.borft.com/label.php?labelID=12
Western Vinyl: www.westernvinyl.com
Wishbone Records: wishbonerecords@gmail.com
WZT Hearts: www.myspace.com/wztheartssss
Yellow Swans: www.jyrk.com/yellowswans

BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 23 (July 2006)

Administrator — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 15:47:34 +0000

first published in Arthur No. 23 (July, 2006)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

It’s nice to report that Sickness has the most goddamned great locked groove we’ve heard in years. As good as any of the 500 locked grooves on RRR’s classic 500 Locked Grooves omnibus a few years back. It’s on the Sought for Slaying LP freshly minted by Hospital Productions (not to be confused with the Graveyards cassette on American Tapes with the same title which is only available in the Hospital store on 3rd Street NYC). Sickness has a sewer full of grey life noise releases and is linked to the most ferocious and panting of compadres in that scene. One dude killing it with gore stench tabletop and loving it.

Speaking of Hospital Records, Prurient master and store proprietor, Dominick Furnow, has finally opened the amazing Hospital store in NYC. Brian from Mouthus has been keeping us up to date with every nail he pounded into the bins of this basement bordello. It lies below a reggae record joint called Jammyland and not only does it serve up a sweet load of blackness, but it is very very neat. It is also the best art gallery in a city which prides itself in such things. Unbeknownst to the art scene in NYC, this space has the most absurd and arcane objets de fetishisme we’ve ever encountered. Beautiful box frames containing such brain zapping items as Hair Police Mike Connelly’s torn shirt guitar, Dominick’s first broken-to-screaming-shit microphones, Emil Beaulieau’s button down sweater! We picked up the Ash Pool first taste of slaughter cassette on Public Altar, which is Dom’s black metal duo with Kris Lapke (dude who plays drums on Purient’s Black Vase CD). Dom explains Ash Pool as a “black metal sound with more of a ritualized abusive/obsessive sexual theme of demise vs. the usual satanic garbage.” We would have to agree definitely—pure hell vibe straight to the core with no time for comic books.

Only other metal we’ve let pass through the Bull Tongue gate is the weirded-out lung slime of Bone Awl. Two fucking insane bastards from Novato, California who go by the names of He Who Gnashes Teeth (vocals, guitars, bass) and He Who Crushes Teeth (drums). We haven’t heard their Bog Bodies/Magnetism of War LP on Goatowa Rex but if it’s anything like the miserable mung heap of their Up to Something tape or the split tape they did with The Rita (Canadian noise freaks who we wrote about last issue), then we’ll fly to Novota and prostrate ourselves, tongues lagging on hot suburban cement, to get just a taste. Shit is downright brutal with its amplified pain.

Also intriguing, in a blackened corpse kind of way, is that which is Montreal, Quebec’s Akitsa. These dark dream mugs issued a cassette years back called Soleil Noir on a Montreal label (Tour De Garde), which made many a noir metal enthusiast’s butthole pucker. It’s just been reissued as a pic disc on German rotting carcass label, Raging Bloodlust. As far as this shit goes, Akitsa has an endearing capacity to fall into hypno-stasis repeato-relentlessness with dead simple crunge n’ blunt trauma riffing. The cult of Akitsa is strong enough where Raging Bloodlust has issued Aube de la Misanthropie, a double LP of demos, comp tracks and way limited CDR heaviness, which really gives you a primer into what seems to be Akitsa’s nefarious perception of Quebecois nationalism. Go figure, but go get it for true underground hell-sludge goodness.

Chuck Dukowski is a goddamn legendary figure in terms of American undergroundism. His work with Black Flag, SST Records, Wurm and whatnot have earned him a permanent place at some kinda special table. Anyway, that’s our take. Chuck’s take is that he has this new band, CD6 (aka the Chuck Dukowski Sextet) and they’ve now released an actual CD after a couple of CDRs. Eat My Life (Nice and Friendly) has a cool, strange feel. Dukowski buckled when we called it hippie music, but it’s got a real free flow, and the graphics (by vocalist, Lora Norton—check her site for examples) look like Japanese hippie space manga to us. The first half of the album is pretty great—loose, weird rock moves with almost-‘mersh female vocals and aggression hidden in the smoke. The jazz bits that pepper it make me think of an updated version of the ‘60s band, Womb, or something. The latter half of the album is more jazzbo-specific, meaning that it’s a lot less reliant on riff primacy. And when you’ve got somebody who plays bass like Dukowski, we’re not sure that’s the ultimate best choice. But hey—it’s his band. It’s just nutty to hear “My War” played without that insane bass barrage. Anyway, it beats the shorts offa SWA, and Lora’s images have a real bizarre way of sucking you in.

A most exciting music book is The Sound of Squirrel Meals: The Work of Lol Coxhill (St. Pauli Druckerei) by Barbara Schwarz. Coxhill’s fantastic arc as a genius of the soprano saxophone (and other brain/mouth/finger hybrids) is dealt with here in loving detail. There are reprints of interviews, articles, fliers, photographs, record covers. There’s an exhaustive annotated discography, a chronology, a list of film/TV appearances, and just a whole pantload of information and wonder. Miss this one at yr own peril. Another fascinating research document is the William S. Burroughs Literary Archive catalogue from the rare book dealer, Ken Lopez. This is a detailed look, with historical context, about a very important cache of Burroughs’ letters, manuscripts, recordings and paintings that was recently sold. Not everyone’s cup of jiz, but a great thing for fanatics. Lovers of frozen oink should also check out Verksted #4/Sonic North (Office for Contemporary Art Norway). This issue of the journal is a compendium of facts and opinions about the state of the noise scene in Norway. There’s a good overview and discography, plenty on Rune Grammofon, Lasse Marhaug, Fe-Mail and more.

Mouthus have been simply RAMPAGING from burg to burg, releasing Mouthus and related jams (such as Canada’s Cousins of Reggae) on their own Our Mouth CDR imprint. And Important Records released their The Long Salt CD, which absolutely kills from start to finish. We began investigating the actuality and whereabouts of Mouthus way back when our first lead came from Michael Bernstein, who said his groovy group stroke Double Leopards shared a rehearsal space or some such thing with ‘em. As it turns out, the Brooklyn community of Double Leps and Mouthus has continued to expand particularly to the UK and particularly to Double Leps’ Marcia Bassett rockin n rollin with Matthew Bower of Sunroof! under the aegis of Hototogisu. Follow? Anyway what we’re getting at is there’s a new 2LP, Crippled Rosebud Binding with one side each from Double Leopards, Mouthus, Sunroof! and the 4th side a collab between ‘em all. Sounds like it could be a lotta pudding to digest but this monster goes down juicy. Sunroof!, augmented by Bassett and Vibracathedral Orchestra’s Mick Flower, absolutely stuns with a raw dimensional take on some tune called Cortez the Killa. The record is on Music Fellowship and is the fifth installment in their triptych series where they pair three distinctive mofos to mess your dick around. Don’t sleep, this baby is already out of print and getting hard to track down.

One more lovely, oversized, English language literary/art magazine has emerged from Eastern Europe. Blatt, based in Prague, has a bit more sexual energy than some of its confreres and is all the better for it. We are none too conversant with much of the material presented, but the prose and poetry and photography and art are all top flight. The format is goddamn elegant as well. And Michael Jackson’s head looks so cute on a deer’s body you might well rethink his whole, uh, “situation.” Also, sexy as always is the latest issue of Lauren Naylor’s Pretend I Am Someone Else. Dreams, fantasies, poetry and collages, all collide in the shadow of Leeds’ largest orgone generator. Contributors include the immortal Val Webber, and Lauren introduces a series of Titcat postcards this time as well. So write her today. One of the sharpest U.S. ‘zines to come along lately is O Sirhan O Sirhan. The debut issue has a sorta lo-fi look, but the contents are “boobs” as hell. There’s an excellent piece on Henry Flynt’s anti-racist protests of ’64, a photo essay of Deerhoof relaxing, a Devendra Banhart sketchbook, a long interview (and accompanying CD) by sound artist Jorge Boehringer, and even more. Excellent peeks!

The fabulous Memoirs of an Aesthete label out of England has released a fabulous cassette by the fabulous Melanie Delaney who is part of the fabulous Ashtray Navigations. We always thought that these days AN might be pared down to just founding member Phil Todd, but it seems that Melanie is indeed a primary ingredient of that outfit’s contempo primo bliss hiss. Add to that, the fact that this cassette has Melanie partnered with the ultra-fabulous Bridget Hayden of Vibracathedral Orchestra and sweet jesus, you know the unfolding will envelop and save your rotten tongue. We can assure you. The cassette is entitled Ground Zero Celebration Pessary, it is lovingly spraypainted and it moves forward with frozen sun guitar/amp melt-zone with an incendiary ALIVENESS. Nice shit m’lady.

Brother JT is best known for his musical madness, but he has long been a writer of immense talent as well, although his work is usually available only in fits and starts. His latest booklet, The Jesus Guitar, may actually get reprinted by Bastet at some point. Which would be cool, ‘cause this is one of JT’s best. It’s basically an extended essay on his idea of transcendent guitar playing and drugs and records and a lotta other good stuff. Definitely worth some squinting. JT has another volume out as well. Nine (Whatisit? Press) is a lovely collection of poems about music, Greg Shaw, D.A. Levy and T.L. Kryss. JT has a beautiful way of connecting interior dots, and observing his journey is a real pleasure.

Tom (T.L.) Kryss himself is well-served by The Search for the Reason Why (Bottom Dog Press). This is not exactly the “Collected Works of Kryss” we all deserve, but it is a great sampling of new and old work, both poetry and prose, with a smattering of Tom’s rabbit drawings thrown in. It’s a lovely collection—Kryss’ writing can be as “street” and real and anyone’s, but he also possesses a clarity of spirit that allows him to write about simple beauty without resorting to cliché or tired imagery. The smell and weight and feel of Cleveland (and environs) permeate the text, but we don’t think you’d wanna have it any other way. Anyone serious about reading poetry should be reading Kryss. Now.

Because of problems with Chuck Cleaver as a record dealer, I never bothered to listen to the Ass Ponys when they were around, even though they recorded for my second or third favorite Northern Ohio record label of the time. Supposedly, they eventually did some major label stuff and almost got popular, but that does not concern us. What we’re playing now is a 2CD compilation, The Okra Years (Shake It), which compiles a selection of their material from their days with that esteemed label. As with almost all Okra acts, there is s slight rural vibe that pops up amidst the daisies at times, but the overall essence here is like a somewhat straighter version of the Strapping Fieldhands. They have distinct aural connections to the New Zealand bands of the early ‘90s, but they’re not that far from Great Plains either.

Bradley Lastname has been boiling around in the punk lit underground for a good long while, and various booklets of his are hidden around here. His two newest books are pretty slick looking, however, even if their content is still quite scabbly. The Squeaky Fromme Gets the Grease and What I Learned About Ancient History from Marilyn Murray O’Hare’s Rare Coin Collection (both, Press of the Third Mind) are entertainingly toxic blends of poetry, prose, cut-ups and word games. At times, Lastname comes off as drunken blend of Brion Gysin and Buddy Bradley, but what’s wrong with that? Nothing.

Meanwhile, Buddy Bradley’s home team (Fantagraphics) has been publishing some particularly great stuff recently. One of the most beautiful is Jimbo’s Inferno by Gary Panter. This is something of a prequel to Jimbo in Purgatory and is an equally luscious piece of deluxe hardcover candy. The work itself is not a text-reliant as that other book. Actually, it’s a sustained Jimbo story, more inspired by Dante than writ by him. But man, it is a pleasure jumbo! We can never get our fill of this immortal cave-punk’s peregrinations. Another sheer stunner is Victor Moscoso’s Sex, Rock and Optical Illusions. Moscoso was both an SF Ballroom poster artist and one the select group of cartoonists who contributed to Zap Comics. This hardcover collects a huge batch of its – posters, Color Comix, that legendary bus wraparound, etc. If you like the feel of eyeballs melting, you’ll be stuck to this for hours.

As we go to press, a fucking Ashtray Navigations LP called Dirt Mummies And Bloody Amps (Freenoise UK) has just dropped out of God’s ass onto our decks and sweet jehovah if it ain’t the tits of summer. Phil Todd goes deep inside the tea-room pysche of cold and rain-dead Leeds and really channels the Flevo mama. Churning narcolicious swirls of harmonic highness rip off the static needle cling of your sweet-head stylus in a please-don’t-stop-now-or-never mode. Tasty mung. Recommended cut: “Greased Whistle.” 200 copies numbered. Go!

The latest installment of Sean Casey’s ongoing book-a-month project is Cindi’s Fur Coat (The Chuckwagon), which has some excellent poetry about the workplace. Maybe not yr workplace, but you’ll recognize it nonetheless. You should also recognize it’s a great day when the newest comic/zine/whatsis rolls in from Hello Trudi. The new one is called Winter Bender and features E*Rock, Jonathan Thomas and Chase Chivers. We woulda thought there was some Chambers stuff in here, too, but what do we know? All we can say is that these ‘zines are like a nutty cross between Pettibon, Gonzales, Childish and we dunno what else. Great xeroxed art of the most insanely wonderful type. And they just keep coming. If you like that sorta thing, we would also commend Drawings (Friends and Relatives). The first issue collects art by over 20 young bastards, and some of it is cruder than Rory Hayes crossed with Dennis Tyffuss. Honest!

New USA label, IDES, has come outta the gate with a full steam of face shredding love. Two cassettes: Nursery by Crib Death and Sexuality Is A Curse by Climax Denial. Crib Death is an ongoing project of Spite Records label master and Humectant Interruption wizard, Joel St. Germain, and bud, Anthony Miller. The extraction on display here is a gurgled mouth of cum and beer and if you close your eyes you will dig it and know those things which make reality such a stone gas.

Climax Denial from Milwaukee has been strafing death waves for years and is an entity we never became too acquainted with. Our bad, as this release is easily a contender for #1 noise jam of the ’06. Usually the sound of a distorted voice from the dry humped anus of a rotten crone would be naught but quaint and hopelessly naïve, but somehow Climax Denial renew whatever value this tradition may have warranted and proceed to rip headlong into a furnace of fucking great noisewaste.

Brian Chippendale (of Lightning Bolt) was kind enough to send along a copy of a recent comicbook called Battlestack Galacti-crap, which is a lovely exploration of Gang Gloom’s attempt to sell well-priced and healthful cupcakes to their neighbors (among other things). He also included the first two CDs by Black Pus—Black Pus and Black Pus 2 (Diarearama). Ostensibly a solo project, featuring Brian’s drums and sax playing, the Black pus disks make me think of an exploding cigar version of that old No Neck side project, Safire. Parts of Black Pus 2 might even get close to a scum-metal version of Ornette’s recordings in Jajouka. Yum! They’re both just squinky, chapped-out as hell, and feature wonderful silkscreened covers. Nate Denver from Total Shutdown has a swank volume out as well. Wait, you’re not a centaur. It’s a lovely load of stories that run 50 words or less, accompanied by very stylish illos. Our favorite one is probably about Bolt Thrower meeting Jesus, but you go ahead and pick your own. This should be out pretty soon from La Mano 21.

Don’t get too many photo books here, but just got a doozy of a collaboration called The Wheels Project (Hoover Flag Press), with the work of Ken Richardson, Jasen Strickler and Andrew M.K. Warren. The subject of all the pics is wheeled transport—from slot cars to monster bikes to old Cadillacs and onward. The prints look great, and the organization is good, too. Some of the b&w images are so totally out-of-time they look like they might’ve showed up in a Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand book from the early ‘60s. But even the ones that look like they were shot tomorrow have a great vibe—Americans and their wheels. Damn, but they look tickled.

Been spinning Shawn David McMillen’s Catfish LP a lot lately. McMillen is an elusive cog in the Texas kosmiche psyche improv scene of Charalambides and Ash Castles on the Ghost Coast (of which he was a member with Charalambides/Scorces/Taurpis Tula’s Heather Leigh Murray). His participation in the nascent activities of that scene is fairly revered, but hard to track (‘though there have been sightings with such outfits as Iron Kite, Rubble and most noticeably with Charalambides’ Tom Carter and Brian Smith in The Friday Group, who released a cool LP on Beta-Lactam Ring). Emperor Jones has righteously stepped up to the plate by curveballing out this McMillan LP, and it’s an excellent marker in the diaspora of roving Texas outsider music. Side one is a collection of varying lassitudes-of-song as ethereal gesture, while all of side two is a magnificent heat-drenched spirit improv of strings, bells and humidity. A worthwhile sniff of avant-longhorn dream-guh.

Not entirely dissimilar is the Since We Have Fallen LP by Hush Arbors. A solo venture by Keith Wood, who you may have seen playing sweet ripping guitar on stage with Wooden Wand, Sunburned Hand of the Man, and Zodiacs (under nom-de-plume Ezekiel Blackouts III). Hush Arbors is a must for anyone into super contempo sub-strata American folk-psyche modernity. This LP is a numbered edition of 500 and is packaged in a gorgeous letterpress window-cut sleeve designed by the Blue Barnhouse gang in Asheville, NC, and released by Harvest Recordings also from Asheville. The recordings existed earlier as limited CDR from Foxglove but those disappeared fast. Now’s the time to jump cuz this baby is the perennial poobah.

Mondo Macabro continues to churn out a truly screwball selection of exploitation DVDs from unexpected sources. Their latest coup is a double feature of Turkish films Deathless Devil/Tarkan vs. the Vikings. Deathless features the imortal superhero, Copperhead (actually the son of the original Copperhead, but you get the idea). It’s a classic of inexplicable topless spy adventurism and an excellent opportunity to watch Dr. Satan get his ass kicked in weird style. But Tarkan is the real mindblower here. Huns versus Vikings, two dogs (who are supposed to be wolves) named Kurt, topless hijinks up the wazoo, berserk battle scenes, the best moustache EVER, and an octopus that looks like a rubber omelet. This disk is a real charmer. In a similar vein is Sweet & Savage by Mark Goodall (Headpress). Subtitled The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens, this is a pretty thorough overview of the genre of films spawned by Gualitiero Jiacopetti’s Mondo Cane. It feels a little academic at times, but we guess that’s probably more a function of how dumb much exploito reviewing has seemed since the passing of mags like Shock Express and Pandemonium. Regardless, it’s a great read with synopses and critical writing about most of the important pics. J.G. Ballard on the influence of mondo-style cinema on his own work, and pics, too. How can you miss?

Donna Parker has finally released Debutante (Twisted Village), her debut LP and it is superb. Feedback oscillations, jammed signals, sick battery effects pedal malfunction all through the hands, ears and heart of Donna Parker, who has been one of the consistent musical highlights of the Eastern Seaboard out noise scene. Produced by Jessica Rylan (who has a duo with Donna Parker called Secret Diary—LP forthcoming on Ecstatic Peace) this is the record of the summer, with enough beach blanket noise action to sunburn yr brain from beginning to end. It’s that good. New Greek freako label Phase! has issued Black Black Heart, a 3” CDR of Donna Parker that has some gnarly zap-switching pieces plus an actual vocal track titled …This Is Why I Don’t Sing. Phase! Records seems to be gearing up for a sweet onslaught of beyondo sound solicitation. They’ve released a ton of cool stuff already from Kylie Minoise, Reverse Mouth, Post Blue etc. and have to date made three Phase! fanzines which have wicked graphix from Smack Music 7/Blood Stereo’s Karen Constance and a bitchin’ interview with Charlie Ward of Stomach Ache/RRR (!). Athens is officially insane. Welcome.

Great insanity in LP form is provided by Australian Sean Bailey, who records as Lakes. The eponymous Lakes album (Chapter Music) is a gorgeously crusty slab of mystery meat. Hard to tell at times if Sean is playing a tipple (ala Ed Askew) or hammering apart a piano or dancing around in front of primitive sequences or what-the-hell? The music has a great, non-generic no-wavey punk take on homemade electronics and vocals pushed to great limits of grit. Incredibly, it includes a cover of the Art Bears’ “Song of Investment Capital Overseas.” And it’s a tufted winner!

The out of nowhere resurgence of bone snapping harsh noise maestros Mlehst has given a lot of us heads a new reason to kill ourselves. Mlehst were probably the most intensely skin shredding noise cut up sounds-from-satans-dick outfit of the ‘90s. We’d relegated them to the miasma of past putrefaction, but the Belief Recordings label has recently issued two LPs of Mlehst kill-tunage and they’re both phenomenal. The Mlehst home label pre-Belief was called Bandaged Hand Produce, which issued a collection of signpost harshness back in the day from Telepherique, Runzelstirn & Gurglestock, Brume a.o. The Mlehst dude destroyed all the masters in 2001 (why not?) so we thought maybe this was pretty much a final sayonara but this ain’t the case. Along with these two hellacious LPs, Mlehst has an 8” lathe coming from Tasmania’s stench label Cipher Productions, a 7” and LP split with Prurient due from Hospital, an LP on Nihilist, and a cassette on Spite. Dude is back! Totally tits.

Everyone loves obscure little Japanese comic books, do they not? Certainly! And this little Ranshi by Tetsunori Tawaraya is a very crazy stew of images. Scatological, smutty, violent, mystical, ratty and arcane, all at the same time, the story seems to be about a quest of some sort. Or maybe it’s just about getting out of a rabbit costume. Either way, it’s possessed of a vibe that will make yr teeth fill with indescribable flavors. Check out his site—it is filled with wild lines and scents.

Man what is up with Filthy Turd? This UK phenomenon has released a toiletbowl full of tapes the last year or so and they are fascinatingly mundane in their gunk appeal. Our favorites have been the absolutely hideous split releases he has done with Mutant Ape, particularly the Mutant Turd Disco Anale CDR on Turddude’s own Voltage Stress*r label. Monsieur Turd has this to say about himself: “I am Filthy Turd I am the whore of mystery. I like making noise.   If you want me to make some noise for you  you know where I am. Noise isn’t the only thing in my life. I spend a lot of time picking up signals from foxes, crows and dogs. This month I’ve been thinking about big girls a lot . The universe is pointing me in the direction of big girls.”

You can read full on live reportage of Filthy Turd (who creates a hideous mud bath mess on stage), Prurient, Jessica Rylan, Emil Beaulieau a.o. in the latest issue of UK noise skum zine Idwal Fisher. It comes out of Yorkshire, where all the children born and raised in the last 20 years or so are seemingly deranged, and infecting the UK landscape with a whole new bungload of power electronics (always the providence of Blighty) and God bless them all. We can’t recommend this shit highly enough.

Swankest punk tease this time is probably The Intelligence’s Flight of the Donkeys 12” (In the Red). Four skronky gut kicks by these Seattle-based zone-bandits. They sorta sound like they’re whining as the earth collapses around their extremely classic sorta West Coast punk-scrubble. And hey, who wouldn’t? On the exact opposite end of the spectrum is the debut LP by NYC’s Apothecary Hymns. Trowel & Era (Locust Media) takes up the new-volk promise of their great 7”, adds some distinctly Brit-psych tongue-interlocutions, and comes up smelling like very sweet hay. They really approach all this stuff pretty straight-on, but the rockist touches (sporadic guitar loudness, wide-ass bells, momentary pseudo-epic surging) give things a feel somewhat akin to what later period Pearls Before Swine LPs might have felt like with Bill Harkleroad guesting. Very cool.

Hospital Records head hellkeeper, Prurient wunderkind and all around nice boy, Domenick Furnow, lists his

TOP TEN UNDERGROUND BLACK METAL skorcherz:
AKITSA – GOETIE – LP
CLANDESTINE BLAZE – FIST OF THE NORTHERN DESTROYER – LP
BONE AWL – NOT FOR OUR FEET – CS
ILDJARN/NIDHOG – COLLAB – LP
MGLA – PRESENCE – MCD
NITBERG – NITSANGER – MCD
BLOODHAMMER – ABBEDISSAN SAATANALLISET HOUREET – LP
BILISKINIR – HYPERBOREA – LP
SATANIC WARMASTER/GESTAPO 666 – SPLIT CD
COVEN OF THE WORM – 92-96
WOODS OF INFINITY – HEDJA – CS

Akitsa: www.akitsa.cjb.net
Ash Pool: www.hospitalproductions.com
Blatt: www.anagram.cz
Blue Barnouse: www.bluebarnhouse.org
Bone Awl: www.metal-archives.com/band.php?id=14143
Bottom Dog Press: http://members. aol.com/Lsmithdog/bottomdog
Brother JT: www.brotherjt.com
Chapter Music: www.chaptermusic.com.au
Brian Chippendale: PO Box 1361, Providence RI 02901
The Chuckwagon: casey.st@comcast.net
Cipher: iheartnoise.com/cipherproductions
Climax Denial: www.angelfire.com/creep2/climaxdenial
Double Leopards: www.doubleleopards.org
Emperor Jones: www.emperorjones.com
Fantagraphics: www.fantagraphics.com
Filthy Turd/Voltage Stress*r: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/voltagestressr
Freenoise: www.freenoise.co.uk
Friends and Relatives: www.friendsandrelativesrecords.com
Goatowa Rex: http://slingshot.to/goatowarex
Harvest Records: www.harvest-records.com
Headpress: www.headpress.com
Hello Trudi: www.hellotrudi.com
Hoover Flag Press: www.fortpointarts.org
Hush Arbors: www.husharbors.com
Hospital: www.hospitalproductions.com
Ides: www.idesrecordings.com
Idwal Fisher: idwalfisher@dsl.pipex.com
Important Records: importantrecords.com
In the Red: www.intheredrecords.com
La Mano 21: www.lamano21.com
Ken Lopez Books: 51 Huntington Rd., Hadley MA 01035
Locust Media: www.locustmusic.com
Memoirs of an aesthete:
www.hypnagogia.org.uk/memoirs%20of%20an%20aesthete.html
Mlehst: www.freewebs.com/mlehst
Mondo Macabro: www.mondomacabrodvd.com
Music Fellowship: www.musicfellowship.com
Nice and Friendly: www.thechuckdukowskisextet.com
Lora Norton: loranorton.com
O Sirhan O Sirhan: 7 Garden Ave., Stonybrook NY 11790
Office for Contemporary Art Norway: www.oca.no
Donna Parker: www.myspace.com/msdonnaparker
Phase!: www.geocities.com/phasemag/
Press of the Third Mind: bradleylastname@hotmail.com
Pretend I Am Someone Else: wakeuptomakeup@yahoo.co.uk
Public Altar: www.hospitalproductions.com
Raging Bloodlust: www.ragingbloodlust.de
St. Pauli Druckerei: Grosse Freiheit 70, D-22767, Hamburg Germany
Sickness: www.sickness999.com
Tetsunori Tawaraya: www.freewebs.com/tetsunori
Tour de Garde: www.t-d-g.net
Twisted Village: www.twistedvillage.com
Whatisit? Press: 130 Buttonwood, Bowling Green OH 43402

BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 22 (May 2006)

Administrator — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 10:45:21 +0000

first published in Arthur No. 22 (May, 2006)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

Richard Youngs opened the new year with a sweet drop on the Jagjaguwar label, The Naïve Shaman. It’s hard to tell where Youngs is going to go with each release. The dude travails in more numerous far-out tundras than mere mortals can only hope to experientially glimpse in a single lifetime. And lucky for us, he docu-records these tripped excursions. This is one of his more excellent forays—with percolating electronic bass guitar and frazzed guitar spuzz creating beds for lyrics of gentle fire thought.

And Jagjaguwar has other new goodnesses in LP form. Pink Mountaintops’ Axis of Evol is another nice Funhouse/Barrett blend from Canada with a dollop of Bob Dylan blues overlays. Parts & Labor’s Stay Afraid only has its CD version on Jagjaguwar, the LP is actually on Cardboard Records. But we’re sure it sounds best on vinyl, so hear its beautifully spazzed prog-pummel in that format and you’ll be happiest. It has been said that these Chicagoites sound best when they’re instrumental, but the yammer here is really quite pleasing. Lastly, there’s an Oneida/Plastic Crimewave split pairing Brooklyn muzz-harmonics with the metallic kraut shimmy of Chicago to surprisingly wonderful effect. On a related note, Oneida’s Kid Millions guests on the new LP by Ex Models. Dunno if that’s the reason that Chrome Panthers (Troubleman Unlimited) is such a lovely chalice of prog-raunch aggression, but it’s a possibility. Still, Troubleman’s best recent Brooklyn-related release must remain Mouthus’ Slow Globes LP. Spaced as they sound on this platter, the duo always stuns.

From a kozmik holler betwixt Massachusetts and Vermont comes the second release by The Bummer Road, Suncatcher Mountain (Child of Microtones). It’s in all ways a patient (‘though not without underlying stovetop rage) unfolding wind of charm-soul music. Each of these CDs is handmade with paper finger love in an edition of 99. Gorgeous. Paper finger love is just what brims from the new issue of Sleep Tight, as well. The content is mostly single page illustrations this time, and the visuals have really jumped up a notch on the intensity scale. They’re much more disturbed and quite bodacious—just the kind of thing to read when you’re deep inside your personal holler.

It’s been too long since we’ve scratched our heads to an Idea Fire Company record and out of nowhere lands this hot rock—Stranded (Swill Radio). We were sick excited, thinking maestro Scott Foust was treating us to a new-mind rendition of Roxy Music’s uber-classic. And this time surrounding hisself not only with his lovely betrothed Karla Borecky, but the twin dyna-beautyism of Feathers’ Meara O’Reilly and The Believers’ Jessi Leigh Swenson. Indeed it is obvious that Roxy Music circa ’71 is a primo informant for Foust aesthetically, but what IFC toss off here is from a whole other inner glam strata. Boss minimalism and true star experimentalism (O’Reilly plays pencil on one track, yeah!) make this one of the coolest blasts from Swill Radio’s “The Anti Naturals” community ever.

Taurpis Tula is David Keenan (guitar) and Heather Leigh Murray (vocals, pedal steel)—proprietors of UK distribution wonderland Volcanic Tongue—abetted by drummer Alex Nielson (who’s played with Jandek, Directing Hand). They’ve released a couple of fine dark drift noise docs, most notably the LP Sparrows (Eclipse) from a year or two back. Since Nielsen joined them on skins they’ve really let their brain-muse glowingly expand and it’s all there in a fine smoosh of Scottish spotted dick and Texas BBQ on the newly minted I Can’t be Satisfied / Kingdoms Come to Birth CDR (American Tapes). Angel vision vox celebrate rising noise cloud guitar/amp and free fire drumming action to blast forth a wholly glorious spontaneity. Ruling, and the CDR is one of two, the other being label boss John Olson’s ongoing zap journey sound world endubbed Spykes. Can’t miss.

There’s a good, funny interview with Olson (by Since 1972 label honcho, Drew Demeter) in the debut issue of a great new ‘zine called Ong Ong. It also features a CD of Yann Novak field recordings, and words on Jennifer Gentle, Sublime Frequencies, a useful (if small) guide to European beers and a lovely silkscreened cover. Very eye worthy. It’s available from dragon’s eye.

A couple of nice spurts from two distinctive Carsons. First Carson being Carson Cistulli who has published a staple-bound book called Assorted Fictions (The Chuckwagon), which is an amusing collection of paragraphs steeped in sardonic philosophies—gentle, absurd and always with a slight bite. To wit: “On May 3rd 1993, Pierre Boulez asked the question, ‘Does the Zeitgeist even exist?’ You’d call it poetic justice, I guess, if the Zeitgeist said the same about Pierre Boulez. Unfortunately, this won’t ever happen: the Zeitgeist is an abstract concept and possesses no faculty of speech.”

The other Carson is Carson Arnold out of Vermont with his musical foray, Starbird, releasing a debut CDR on his boss-looking Frost label. Starbird is Carson and his wife Becky and they’ve recorded a beautiful personalized soundtrack to the 1922 Robert Flaherty film Nanook of the North. Great, yet modest, swooshes of thought-tone composition. A second Frost release called chorals has just landed and it’s Carson doing “all voice,” though you’d be hard-pressed sometimes guessing some of these tracks are voice as source as they are waaaaay out there in the processed sound world. But it has an organic maple-like blend keeping it close and real to the earth.

Believe it or not, New Jersey is spearheading some new excitement on the noise band scene, particularly with the dark and dogjaw blasting skuzzicity of acts like 2673 and Ladderwoe. We’re just guessing Ladderwoe is part of this scene as they seem to be connected via Larry Hernandez of Scientific Explanation Of Despair and Dave Sutton of Current Amnesia, both of whom we think are Jersey freaks. Whatever. Who cares where they’re from? They’re all seemingly pals and have a certain united aesthetic towards grey noise felch which’s pretty damn jake in its wretch. Ladderwoe, in particular, have knocked our asses to the ice with their latest killer, Rowboat Virgins on the Water (Bone Tooth Horn). What sounds like overgrown kittens mewling through rusted vocorders in a bag of Don Dietrich’s chomped-to-shit reeds develops into tight and tense improvisations that really have that freaked edge so often missing from newcomer noise mung. Exciting shit on a label that seems bent on exposing more along these lines. They already have a handful of cool jammers from Asps, Human Adult Band, Penis In Vagina, Gerritt, the aforementioned 2673 and a sizzler from L.A.’s busy busy busy The Cherry Point. Totally recommended.

Bennifer Editions is a label outta Canada run by the fine fuck-noise gang who roam the Canuck basement world as Gastric Female Reflex. Some nice CDR puh has been squirted by such legendary groovesters as id m theftable, Brian Ruryk and Witcyst, but the label’s sweaty hands-down mama-mia disk is the beautifully OUT THERE jammer by Tovah Olson. This is Tovah making moves both classic Dead Machines style and altogether beyond what we’ve come to expect—sheer heart grenade and supremely killer. Another sweet meat Bennifer Edition expulsion is the 7” by Pan Dolphinic Dawn which is pretty much just James Ferraro, he being of groove n’ ‘grease spatial harmony heavies, Skaters. Rich, textured and lo fidelity lovely. Gastric Female Reflex themselves have unleashed their first vinyl LP, Lovers in the Midst of Eating Fries (Bennifer Editions/Absurd/Gold Soundz/Humbug), and it’s a beeyootiful earful of sput n’ blonk not too unlike Prick Decay’s Very Good LP from moons back. A-side starts with a pencil point jabbed in your vestibular cochlear nerve and the B-side ends with a gorgeous femme hum with magnetic tape wave wash.

Third issue of new oversized art rag called ANP Quarterly is out and it’s pretty badass. It’s a freebie, edited by skate/zonk artist Ed Templeton, super Dogg and Pony visionary Brendon Fowler and Aaron Rose who runs the rogue Alleged Gallery. Alleged was the place, no matter where it was, that we first encountered such art babes as Mark Gonzales and Chris Johanson. Johanson and his wife, fellow artist Jo Jackson, grace this issue’s cover with their dog Raisin. Inside is full-on interviews with them by Rose, a piece on collecting by Templeton, a review of book stores that rule, and an interview with ex-Scissor Girl Azita, which alone should make you hunt this sucker down. It’s filled with nice layouts of new art and photo miasma. The previous issue with Raymond Pettibon on the cover was as choice. In the same vein are a couple more great homemade books by Matt Chambers, combining text, squibbly line drawings (often based on photos) and beautifully surrealist weevil to massive effect. These ones are called I Taught Myself to Survive and Warm Pessamisum (Hello Trudi), but there are certainly more by now. And they surely RULE!

Another journal of a slightly different stripe is the first issue of L.A.-based The Colonial. Beneath its Richard Prince photo cover are thinking man rock n roll pieces by Alan Licht, Ian Svenonius, Oliver Hall and a killer LAFMS memoir by founder Rick Potts. Plus Ira Cohen, Greg Turkington and other lunatic punkx. Distributed by Forced Exposure. Meanwhile, Everett Rand’s great ‘zine, Minshaft, continues to evolve from its lit roots into something that encompasses more and more of the underground comix tradition. The newest issue has stuff by Crumb, Frank Stack (aka Foolbert Sturgeon), Justin Green Bill Griffith, Kim Deitch, Bruce Duncan and more. And it’s still full of great writing as well (Codrescu, Winans, Lifshin, etc.), so don’t delay.

We squibbled voraciously about that LP by Michigan femme no wave threat Little Claw in our 2005 end-of-year top 80. It’s on this label outta Ypsilanti called Ypsilanti Records. The label’s run by this dude in some band called Saturday Looks Good To Me and said dude is on the fuggin’ ball. We’re spinning the latest Ypsi LP Tender Swarm by Genders and it is a real squito bite skratcher. All kindsa zonked noise moves and tiny trash rock explosions make this one a gotta get.

Ass-blast garage pus of this go-round’s the third LP by Atlanta’s Black Lips. Let It Bloom (In the Red) is a fully realized slide between glottal garage punk maximalism (sucking root juice from three entire decades of munge) and cracked post-core corrosion. Pretty amazing stuff, even incorporating the kinda proto-beat action we haven’t heard often since the demise of Hangman Recs.

Craziest record from New Hampshire award goes to the Nauscopy label for their Zaat Hilary Gets the Martian Brainfreeze/Mystical Footprints of Asia split LP. Zaat is a Canadian band whose sound goes from oofus dunder-core into ‘70s Fall-type skreeking and onward—very messed-up power slub of a type not easily pigeonholed. And the flip is a sampler of classique Asian 78 tracks, in a sorta lo-fi Sublime Frequencies style. Anyone’s guess what was in the bong when this idea was hashed out. But it must’ve been killer, even if the Neos reference in the title seems a little gratuitous. More easily comprehended as a concept is the split LP shared by Whysp and The Story, The Dawn Is Crowned (Good Village). Whysp’s Santa Cruz sitar-dipped hippie-volk traditionalism is as great as ever. These guys absolutely nail the smoke, if you know what we mean. The Story are a UK duo led by the legendary Martin Welham (ex-Forest) and their coo is almost as drool-worthy as Whysp’s. Third fetching split LP is divided between Skarerkauradio and Jerusalem & the Starbaskets (Apop). Of the two we prefer the messed-up scum-rock-as-bumblebee sound of Skak to the screechier racket of Jerusalem, but there are many moments inside the Jerusalem universe that also fetch hard. So what does that make us?

First time we saw Noise Nomads we thought it was gonna be some skull-sucking pit viper outfit. We was wrong, it was just one dude with amps tied to his body and a microphone plugged into it all with him chasing people around and yowling from the hefty sonic overload. Fucking cool. You can bet we’re jizzed (totally) to find this new Noise Nomads 7” on Bonescraper Recordings supposedly recorded next to a chicken coop last summer. No doubt, chickens rule.

Every once in a while a new journal of ripping writing, be it poetry, prose and/or all manners thereof drops into the box and sure shit has dropped with the brando newo first edition of The Nightjar Review. John Fell Ryan, current Excepter soundlord, ex-No Neck has some extra-strange ALL CAPS word-absurd play going on in here. Also a grippable reprint of Angus Maclise’s “Year” piece which, y’know, never really dates. Nightjar contributor Shannon Ketch, meanwhile, has a great new booklet of poetry, City Sonnets. They aren’t all sonnets, but they’re mostly pretty city, so that’s cool. Lovely surrealist grit images drifting past your brainstem like so much falling ash. Nightjar editor Jeremy Rendina, has his first solo poem collection out, too. It’s called Lower Waters (c/o Nightjar) and pieces are very lovely spatial recreations of time-sliced memories. A very fine production.

Another ripe rip is issue #18 of Carousel, a lit mag that comes out of the University of Guelph in Ontario. It looks slick as hell and the format—one page of writing/one page of art (more or less) is really easy to consume. The quality of effort is extremely high throughout and it includes such writers as Bill Bissett, plus such artsos as Devendra Banhart. Extremely check-worthy. The craziest music ‘zine we’ve perused in a while has to be the debut issue of Quantum Noise. Editor J. Fortunato Perez comes up with the damnedest theories about music, and he’s happy to share them with all. Combine that with berserk naïf graphics, excellent sput on the contempo cassette underground, plus a full telling of his EMP presentation on Gnostic music whatsis (heavily focused on No Neck, Sunburned, etc.) and you are having cake and eating it as well.

Lambsbread have broken out running with a stinking stew of CDRs and cassettes all of which kumpletely kick butt. Sort of a more roughed up Mouthus but with less regard for smothering sonik dynamism. Lambsbread are into action, free and furiously gnarled. The drums keep these guys from being just another skronk and spew brigade, another similar trait re: Mouthus. Though that’s not to disparage anyone else involved as all players are on the frikkin’ money letting total blowout aesthetics merge with compositional design moves. Their label is called Maim & Disfigure and they’ve release a buttload of death-puh in the space of two months that has us all slamming teeth first into whatever blurry reality that happens to be in our way. We recommend the Purple Wings CDR, Horizontal Gash (3 for Shep) CDR and Reaching for the Hammer CDR. No site but you can check in with Volcanic Tongue in the UK or try Eclipse or Fusetron in the USA. Motherfuckers are go.

Having been familiar with neither Carlos Batts’ erotic photo books, nor with his film, American Gothic, we were not fully prepared for what a synapse-burner his book, American Gothic (Scapegoat Publishing), is. It contains drawings, collages and other stuff in a style that is creepy, sexy and unambiguously violent. Visually some of it is similar to Romare Bearden, but that’s only the iceberg’s tip. There’s also a vibe very much in common with the Davids (Lynch and Cronenberg) at their most fetishistic, and that’s a fine vibe indeed. Equally tooth-chipping is Me a Mound by Trenton Doyle Hancock, published by the always-exciting Picturebox Inc. people. Hancock’s book tells the story of a Darger-like conflict between cultures, in a style that combines a vast array of post-ratty-art influences. Some of the pages are huge and bold and colorful, others look like they were etched onto dead skin with feather quills. But it all holds together like a pocketful of magnets and is really a wonderfully insane project.

Back in the early days of hardcore, it was Washington D.C. and Michigan that reigned supreme in the form; but there was an even more intense concurrent hardcore scene happening in Finland. Seeing as how the new day noise scene of Michigan is the holy shit, it is all of a sudden fascinating to see new Finnish power electronic harsh noise groups springing up. And, like their hardcore predecessors, they up the ante on horror and basic blasting concepts. S.M.S.R. are one such example and on their recent cassette release, Just Like Me (Black Arts Productions), they leave your mind in scorched to sonorific dirt. Pure mid to high-whoosh frequency skinslicers that leave quite a taste sensation with titles like “Creation Through Depression” and “Take Your Drugs” with a front cover pic of a bondage practitioner either ready to be tied or just untied. We smell trouble.

And while we’re so far up north, we might as well skip over to Russia and dig the harshness being splooed up there. Lotsa typical mortuary and death camp skum imagery in this hell-dark noise scene. Some of it’s great and disturbing such as Tchernoblyad with their cassette, or CDR—your choice—release on the Soviet skuzz label Operator Produkzion. It’s called Love. Along with fellow Russki rotten sound sickos Narrowmind and Sudanstrain (who have a split tape on Res Adversae), this is a welcome new community of insane and creeped out core.

Finland and Russia are emitting bowel crushing stench and we certainly do appreciate it, but right now, for our money, it’s the Swedish mung that’s really loosing our load. And most of it is from the newly minted Segerhuva label with nasty nuggets of pervertoid pleasure by the likes of Blod (particularly their Romantic and Deranged 7”). A more vintage industrial violence can be sniffed on the Blue Light & Blue Eyes 7” by Sharon’s Last Part, which we can totally recommend from the grave no prob. This label is ruling, no doubt; they have eveb released one of the most kill crazy Finnish records ever. By Mnem, it’s called Golyma—maniacal metal crunching, tape head incineration. They’ve also done an LP by something called Edwige, entitled The Inconsolable Widow Thanks All Those Who Consoled Her. This one is a noise-eros collaboration by Mania (from Texas), The Rita (from Canada) and Sewer Election (from Sweden) in tribute to Euro thrill/porn queen Edwige Fenech. Heavy breath redblood rumble and screech will have you shaving your vagina in salutation.
The Rita have been really ramping up their activity this last year with surprisingly hurtful CDRs and cassettes. They’re all worth your time if you enjoy blood dripping from your dick. But once you settle into The Rita’s howling horror you may find yourself falling in love all over again. Maybe it’s the uglier side of our maleness that draws us. The Rita’s new split box set with Mania is on the Dada Drumming label. It’s called Stockings From the Rear and you get a 7” and a cassette emblazoned with the words “True Ass Worship.” Inside the box are b+w photos of female buttcheeks being sniffed and licked by female tongue. It’s a pretty gritty all-anal manifesto to the ultra-crush bunghole action created by these two ass-obsessed maestros.

Ashtray Navigations is the musical nom de plume of UK’r Phil Todd, who ran an amazing tape label called Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers all through the ‘90s. Along with EF Tapes out of Minneapolis and Union Pole tapes out of Portland, BWCD was an aesthetic precedent to the contemporary cassette scene. Ashtray Navigations released consistently groovy expulsions but then the Betley Welcomes…empire ceased. It seemed Phil was taking a vacation, but in fact he’s been throwing out juicy jammers left and right with various cohorts and on various labels. What’s been killing us are these recent cassette releases on a label that has no name. So far it seems they’re only availble from UK distro Volcanic Tongue. There’ve been three so far, Deader Pedal Jugend Reflecting North, Deader Neptune Thunder Creating East and Deader Reptile Machine Crashlanding South. Each one is a better than the last and they’re all completely wonderful. Great swirling psyched drone moves and gorgeously blissed zonk-fidelity freak folk. He issues each one in a paltry edition of 30, but some still seem available. This shit is heavy and massively recommended.

The Tapeworm label out of Kalamazoo, MI zapped out a couple of tapes last year by something called Evenings and the one we heard was a mother. High wire harshoid electric snap core and damn fine, so it’s with nervous fingers that we clutch two new releases on this label—Lowlife by Septic Sores and Feasts by Bottom Dweller. Both of these are hair in the mud Midwest skrape n sludge. Ugly beautiful shit. Worth a sniff.

On the absolute flipside is the reward one gets from spending time with Paul Metzger’s Four Improvisations on Modified Banjo and Guitar 2LP set (Metzger). Like the earlier work of this Twin City instrumentalist, the music here is brilliant long-form acoustic exploration of the cosmos’ outer tears, free from cliché and dullness. Without falling into any very specific “known camp” (although some of the banjo work does recall Billy Faier’s Raga LP on Takoma), Metzger really ranges all over the aether, producing one of the most satisfying string whomp of this or any season.

Providence, RI has some heavy history with Load Records, Prurient and Hospital Productions, Paper Radio, Lightning Bolt, Fort Thunder et al. Some new blood is drizzling through the streets by the name of Twonicorn, a label with a spartan design aesthetic and a greasy ear for excellent drone perversion. Like Load, this label doesn’t deal with blatant localism as they got the hot links with the midwest and beyond. “Basement New Age Crawl” is their motto and it is manifest certainly through the work of Tombi whose Cavern Tapes Vol.s 1 + 2 cassettes are stretched and torn drone-flowers. Also represented is the Untitled cassette by the great Glass Organ which is some sinister project of Minneapolis’ most destroyed son Justin Meyers. Hot cream.

Hot cream. Hot cream for all.

If you have treats you would like to be licked by the Bull Tongue (archaic formats: print, vinyl, vid preferred), send two (2) copies to: PO Box 627, Northampton MA 01061.

Absurd: http://anet.gr/absurd/
American Tapes: www.geocities.com/americantapes
ANP Quarterly: www.rvcaanp.com
Apop Records: apoprecoprds.com
Bennifer Editions: www.geocities.com/gastric_influence/beniffer
Black Arts Productions: black_arts_productions@hotmail.com
Bone Tooth Horn: www.geocities.com/bonetoothhorn
Bonescraper: www.breakingworldrecords.com/bonescraper.html
Cardboard: www.cardboardrecords.com
Carousel: www.carouselmagazine.ca
Child of Microtones / Bummer Road: www.yod.com/mvee.html
The Chuckwagon: 146 College Hwy #18, Southampton, MA 01073 USA
Dada Drumming: www.dadadrumming.org
Dragon’s Eye: www.dragonseyerecordings.com
Eclipse: www.eclipse-records.com
Forced Exposure: www.forcedexposure.com
Frost: www.longhousepoetry.com
Fusetron: www.fusetronsound.com
Gold Soundz: www.tibprod.com/goldsoundz.htm
Good Village: www.whysp.com
Hello Trudi: www.hellotrudi.com
Humbug: www.tibprod.com/humbug.htm
In The Red: www.intheredrecords.com
Jagjaguwar: www.jagjaguwar.com
Shannon Ketch: shunckle@gmail.com
Paul Metzger: www.paulmetzger.net
Mineshaft: www.mieshaftmagazine.com
Nauscopy: www.nauscopy.com
Nightjar Review: POB 538/NYC/10002-9998
Operator Produkzion: www.operatorprod.narod.ru
Picturebox Inc.: www.pictureboxinc.com
Quantum Noise: heavy-music2000@yahoo.com
Res Adversae: www.resadversae.cjb.net
Scapegoat Publishing: www.scapegoatpublishing.com
Segerhuva: www.segerhuva.se
Sleep Tight: easysubculture.8m.com
Swill Radio: www.anti-naturals.org/swill
Tapeworm: www.tapewormtapes.com
Troubleman Unlimited: troublemanunlimited.com
Twonicorn: www.twonicorn.com
Volcanic Tongue: www.volcanictongue.com
Ypsilanti Records: www.myspace.com/ypsilantirecords

BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 21 (Mar. 2006)

Administrator — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 03:36:06 +0000

first published in Arthur No. 21 (March, 2006)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

BULLTONGUE TOP 80 (+ 1) of 2005

1. VIDEO MADNESS 1 VHS tape (Aryan Asshole): Astounding lo-tek, plexiglass disturbance of TV transmission video psyche-mung. On Wolf Eyes’ Nate Young’s “label.”

2. GREG KELLEY I Don’t Want to Live Forever (Gameboy/Little Enjoyer): A fantastic conceptualist known for his Salt Peanuts from Hell trumpetizing with Nmperign, Kelley creates here a supremely sonik slipper of a disk. Remarkable. And his ice hockey skills are legendarily brutal as will be seen when he singlehandedly desecrates Aaron Dilloway’s pathetic Michigan “team.”

3. EYE Black Ice CD (United Fairy Moons): No, not Eye from Voordoms but a trio of Peter Stapleton, Peter Porteous and Ryan Cockburn from New Zealand ripping forth mesmerizing rockadrone swoop core.

4. ARCHAEOLOGY IMPULSE book, Eldon Garnet, ed. (Univ. Toronto Press): Incredible compendium of Impulse magazine materials, Toronto’s edge slicing lit/art mag of yesteryear (1975-90) with Kathy Acker, Chris Burden, Devo, Jenny Holzer and a myriad more.

5. HER NOISE exhibition and catalogue as presented by Electra (Anne Hilde Neset and Lina Dzuverovic), featuring Jutta Koether and Kim G.’s karaoke tent, Christina Kubitsh wonderment and other femme sound noise installations. Wish we were there.

6. SIBYLLE BAIER Colour Green CD (Orange Twin): Total, heart/mind-melt acoustic bedroom action, recorded in the early ‘70s by a German woman, whose only known recording was as part of the soundtrack from Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities. Lost until now, but recovered through a weird chain of events. Couldn’t be better.

7. DEAD MACHINES / DOUBLE LEOPARDS Fuck Victoriaville one-sided LP (American Tapes): Say no more. killer kuts from krazy kids kreeped by kanada.

8. REBECCA GODFREY Under The Bridge book (Simon & Schuster): Detailed account of the before, during and after killing of 14-year-old Reena Virk by other teenagers in View Royal, Canada in 1998, penned by the author of the amazing The Torn Skirt from a few years back. Excellent perspective of teenage foster home psychosis.

9. MARY GAITSKILL Veronica book (Pantheon): Rich, deep language reveals the heart and soul of an aging supermodel. Uncorny and heavy thought trip.

10. MUGSHOTS cassette series (Fargone): Ass-crackling noise cassette design series with new and classic jammers from The Cherry Point, Roxanne Jean Polise, Monster Dudes and other remarkable destructos.

11. CAN’T New Secret LP (RRR ): This was Jessica’s year all the way. Along with this wicked pic disc was a slew of hot cassette releases like Private Time, Long Slow Changes and her mother of a 7-inch on Ultra Eczema. All exhibit Rylan as an altogether distinctive force/voice in noise newness.

12. PRURIENT / AARON DILLOWAY Disappearance of the Maya 4Xcs (Hospital): Dominick Fernow has always been there with the most scarring and borderline insane vocal chord insane asylum dance. Here he connex wwith Aaron Dilloway fresh from sick head trip days in distant lands where snakes dance for men with rotting eye sockets.

13. SICK LLAMA unholy ghost 3Xcs (Fag Tapes): Heath Moerland continues his spread of infectious assault with a stunning release blitzkrieg from his Fag Tapes empire. Sick Llama is his skum drool of sound project and it’s been consistently mindwiping.

14. TARPIS TULA Steel Rods Bruise Butterflies CDR (Chocolate Monk): Love buzz stoned humz from the heart-to-heart village core of David Keenan and Heather Leigh Murray. Mmmm.

15. X.0.4 All Alien part one CDR (Wabana): This is a reissue of a monster ear load from X.0.4’s Bill Nace’s openmouth cassette label. Wabana has been releasing skull + crossbones CDRs of critical swoop for a bit now and this one is most welcome as X.0.4 are criminally underdocumented and have blown out many psyches live. This shall be rectified. But this ain’t to discount openmouth, they just released a gushing wealth of material we’re still trying to interpolate. More next time!

16. LESLIE KEFFER Devastates CDR (no label): Keffer is Ohio’s most intriguing raw sound annihilator since the Pere Ubu/Devo shows of 1972. Devastates takes off where her earlier Pollutes only hinted at. Keffer is set to profoundly detonate in ’06.

17. CHARALAMBIDES Live/Dead CDR (Wholly Other): This was sold on the Charalambides’ Euro tour of ‘05 and was recorded at the earlier West Coast run of ‘04. Stark and deep and completely soul-scraping.

18. AUGUST KLEINZAHLER Cutty, One Rock – Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained book (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): Grizzly, leave-me-alone scribe gets woozy in memoiristic flash pen. A great American writer akin to the primary Beat canon of which he is concurrent to but way too boss to dick around with.

19. FONOTONE RECORDS CD box (Dust to Digital): It’s not that the appearance of this makes us stop salivating about the idea of Revenant’s forthcoming set of Fahey’s complete Fonotone recordings, but hey—this is probably the most extraordinary documents of late-period roots archaeology that will ever exist. And the booklet and tha bottle opener both work great.

20. SUNBURNED HAND OF THE MAN Puppet Heaven cs/zine (Manhand): Thank God for Boston’s most favorite sons since Aerosmith.

21. ULTRA ECZEMA: Belgian dude Dennis Tyfuss’ label, which is an astounding palette for his own art mania. Along with Double Leopards’ Maya Miller, Tyfuss has infused the New Weird Earth with a living, screaming rush of horror confusion graphix.

22. NO NECK BLUES BAND Qvaris 2LP/CD (5 rue Christine): The other night we were at some hunting lodge for the traditional yule game feast and we kept hearing this heavy fucking music coming out of the kitchen. Finally we asked what it was and the kitchen guys told us it was this new NNCK. Which they actually own on vinyl. Lucky fuckers. Sweet No Neck have grown with their devotion and this killer double is as listenable and genuine as any of their previous output. In fact it’s an exciting signpost for them as they head into the March 06 No Fun Fest as headlining close-out act.

23. JOHN COLTRANE QUARTET One Down, One Up: Live At The Half Note 2CD (Impulse): Still the father. An amazing document of a complete connector to the star world of mythos.

24. DIRTBOMBS If You Don’t Already Have a Look 2CD (In the Red): In a world of scum perfection, Mick Collins would get carried around in a very special chair. Thankfully, that is not the case, so we get to carry around this collection of singles and outtakes and whatnot, by his band instead. What a very flat garage.

25. THE DRUMMERS: Coming out of the legion that was Adris Hoyo, Tom Surgal, Susie Ibarra, Willie Winant, et al. we have the new bloodz Chris Corsano, Nate Nelson, Trevor Tremaine, and Pete Nolan super-destroying time and space with Kong-like energy and thought.

26. MOUTHUS Told by the Water CDR (Our Mouth): Brian Sullivan and Nate Nelson blew out a few different Mouthus releases this year delighting our nether-ears with an interstellar blowout of skree.

27. LAYNE GARRETT Space Superiority Is Not Our Birthright But It Is Our Destiny (Question the Truth): A sprawling and creepingly engaging disk. Long, patient cosmo-dronez w/ ear juice acoustic guitar improvisations and just fine clackery. Dude also is righteously activist w/ direct action blog.

28. LAU NAU Kuutarha (POK/Locust Music): Laura Naukkarinen of Finland drove across the USA this year with pregnant body singing and enchanting the land with beautiful Finnish new folk magic. Startling.

29. FAMILY UNDERGROUND Slingshot Feud Vol. 2 (Sloow Tapes): From Denmark. Family Underground have been releasing awesome high-core rock eruption for a coupla years now. And it is all good.

30. JACK ROSE 78 lathe (Heresee): ‘strue that the titles are unknown and the tracking on the turntable has to get dicked with quite a bit for this to play, but what the heck. As beautiful as Jack’s recent LPs have been, there is something very right about hearing his guitar tones emerge at 78.

31. WOODEN WAND & THE VANISHING VOICE Buck Dharma CD/2LP (5RC/Time-Lag): Well, who could actually pick just one from the vast batch of roach-acid-bath-glossalia this crew has spewed this last year? All you can really say is that Buck Dharma has the heaviest outer-raunch atmospherics, at least as perceived right now. But gee, just got their new CD3, How the Winds Are Born by You (Dark Holler), and there’s no denying its tribal ring elegance.

32. AMERICAN PRIMITIVES VOL. II 2CD (Revenant); GOOD FOR WHAT AILS YOU 2CD (Old Hat): Impossible to deny that the first Am Prim set opened some very specific reissue floodgates, but don’t gripe! These two new sets actually go beyond the beyond, pulling things from the air of the past that you never dared imagine.

33. FURSAXA at the Montague Bookmill early this past year was one of the best examples of ghost-voice burn ever attempted. Tara Burke has perfected a thing for which many can only woof.

34. FRED ANDERSON/HAMID DRAKE/WILLIAM PARKER Blue Winter 2CD (Eremite) : Although it has always been easy to dig Anderson’s tenor, since he started recording again, there was never a set that really captured the genius of his incredible technique until this one. Two disks that flow over your head like lava.

35 ALAN BISHOP had a heckuva year for releases. Besides the endless brilliance of the Sun City Girls and Sublime Frequencies material (all of which you should own, if your pockets are deep enough), he rallied with some great solo stuff, specifically Uncle Jim’s Superstars of Greenwich Meantine LP (Black Velvet Fuckere), which is the funniest comedy record anyone has heard in a long damn time, and Alvarius B’s Blood Operatives of the Barium Sunset LP (Abduction), which transmutes the horror he sees into a kind of beauty.

36. LITTLE CLAW s/t LP (Ypsilanti): Like a stun-doughnut set to explode in your mouth, the debut LP by this Michigan trio is a primitive cave-full of no-noise-raunch that rocks with about forty ties more thuggishness than anything else in the neighborhood. Upful!

37. SWINGSET: This magazine, edited by Steve Lowenthal, is always a good toilet read. Especially notable in this last issue (to us, anyway) was the Magik Markers illustration, which made a truly great tat template.

38. ARTHURFEST: This was one of the funnest such events we’ve seen in a while. The setting was shockingly nice and the programming could’ve only been better if they’d asked our advice.

39. ANDY CLAUSEN: One of the world’s great poets, way too infrequently seen/published/etc., gave a sweetheart of a reading at the Apollo Grill in Easthampton. MA. I dunno if you were there or not, but you shoulda been.

40. GOOD LABELS: There are a lotta labels that have really evolved to the point where it’s ALWAYS a pleasure to open their packages: Eclipse, In the Red, Time-Lag, Revenant, Load, Troubleman Unlimited, De Stijl, Narnack, Not Not Fun, Locust Music, Social Registry, Strange Attractors, etc… They really make going to the post office less of a chore than it might be.

41. NEGATIVE APPROACH Ready To Fight 2LP (Reptilian Records): The ur-point of gristle-core. NA remain the blueprint for Michigan psychosis rock n roll from punk to garage to rap to noise. John Brannon rules, what can you do?

42. CHRISTINE CARTER/GOWN Christmas CDR (no label): Although we do not go along with those chuckleheads who insist that Gown is a proposition best served instrumental, there is a beautiful wonk-gravity to the two-acoustic-guitar approach here. Vocals do emerge, but they’re always tongue-in-tongue, so even craven detractors should gets some kicks here.

43. MV/EE & THE BUMMER ROAD We Offer You Guru CDR (Child Of Microtones): This expanding/contracting band of New England huffers herewith offers one of the most insane takes on space blues since Mel Lyman’s America.

44. DOUBLE LEOPARDS A Hole Is True LP (Troubleman): Potentially the most enthusiastically clenched wrestle-with-noise terra this quartet released this year. And that says plenty.

45. JANINE POMMY VEGA The Green Piano book (Black Sparrow): First new collection in a few years by this explosively liberated poet of the prisons and mountains. Has a lot of great new work, and the section of road-world stuff is especially superb.

46. WE JAM ECONO documentary film: Not sure yet on the details about the DVD release of this tear-evoking paean to the late, great Minutemen, but it stands up to repeated viewings, even if it is a little Pollyanna-ish about the way the band was generally received during their lifetime.

47. ANNA KLEIN: Her solo set at Northampton MA’s TK Gallery made many heads wag and actually start to anticipate the Believers’ album in ways that were not previously suspected.

48. LIGHTNING BOLT Hypermagic Mountain 2LP (Load): More rock than snock, these two arty bastards still understand the mechanics of disassembling the universe brick by sweaty brick.

49. MIKE KELLEY Day is Done CD (Compound Annex) and art show (Gagosian Gallery NYC): Man oh man oh man Kelley has waaaay outdone himself with this show at Gagosian which allows him lotsa room with a whole new head of weird art steam and he went for it. Best show of of the year, no contest, with great pieces (like the Shy Satanist) which are all part of a video-charged musical of folk, folly, religion, hazing, american wildscape. The CD is integral to it and acts as a “catalogue” of sorts but if this motherfucker comes near youm GO.

50. DAMION ROMERO Birth Twin cs (Heavy Tapes): Damion has been promoting and presenting the heaviest and furthest extremes of noise generation for years now. And is just getting started with new kill action with a constant slew of his P-tape labels 3” CDR series (Astro, Dead Machines, Rick Potts, etc.) as well as upcoming collaborations with Wolf Eyes folkage. Motherfucker’s ready to rumble.

51. THE WATTS PROPHETS Things Gonna Get Greater CD (Water): This reissue of tracks recorded in the early ‘70s by a Black Power poetry collective is one of the best spoken word gowks since Rounder’s Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me.

52. 16 Bitch Pile Up Just Another Point In The Pentagram CDR (No Label): Ohio’s 16 Bitch tightened up in crucial fashion this past year and swept thru the states kicking all and any ass with ultro-zonk drone huzzah. And we mean HUZZAH! Mouths were hanging deep in drool puddled guh when we caught these killers destroying in Brooklyn a few months back.

53. MATT KREFTING (sound slipper; The Believers, Duck; beautician): Whiskey in one hand, shears in the other. A bang up job whether field of straw (thurston) or silky stream (erika elder).

54. MAGIK MARKERS: Elisa Ambrogio (gtr/vx): The only real cool thing to come out of New England hardcore is the juiced mind, the wet mix eyes and the eye-popping death of kicking legs and screaming fists. Leah Quimby (gtr/vx) : howling heartbeats and pluck-delay omniscience. Peter Nolan (drms,electrnx,vx) stare into the void. Loosen up hair wire and smoke on for the tribal rhythm love affair. Markers killed in ’05 with their legendary jaunt with Sunburned Hand of The Man culminating in crushed testicles at Arthurfest. Vote Quimby.

55. TED BERRIGAN Collected Poems (University Of California Press) and KENNETH KOCH Collected Poems (Knopf) two juggernaut compendiums by the late, great masters of New York School poetry, most notably situated in and around the St. Mark’s Poetry Project scene of the 1960s/70s. They brought the music of the word back to the people, the freaks, the geeks, the hippies and the tweeks all with a firm and thoughtful hold on the wondrous history of the form.

56. JANDEK: the 4tet of Jandek, Chris Corsano, Matt Heyner and Loren Mazzacane Connors at Anthology Film Archives in NYC was supremely surreal and cosmic. Loren’s lines of blues-death smoke intermixing with Jandek’s lyrics of doubt, suicide, loss and pain pain pain was a distinct and murky brew of way-outside-the-planet genius.

57. DYLAN NYOUKIS & KAREN CONSTANCE (Chocolate Monk label, Blood Stereo, Decaer Pinga, Smack Music 7, Polly Shang Kuan Band): New parents of beautiful bouncing future child. Will the pups of noise parents rise up to liberate the planet from M.A.N.? (see next)

58. M.A.N. Mothers Against Noise: They mean it, they want to stop you the noisician from sending your signals of distress and prurience to the sponge-minds of civilized youth. It’s the same goddamn game that Jimmy Carter tried when he came out against punk rock back in ’77. Do we stop these turd-turtles or just throw ‘em to the legion of M.I.L.F. hunters? Arf arf.

59. DEREK BAILEY: leaves the planet early Christmas morning. A touch of class not lost on this beautiful gent. His wit, down-to-earth wisdom and legacy of living music is a treasure we have had the good fortune to co-exist with. Thank you Derek, you will always be the best.

60. KOJI TANO: noise soul moved off earth sphere early summer . Koji, who recorded under the ‘nym MSBR, was a king amongst Japanese noise kings. Kept a modest profile, residing in Tokyo selling harsh tronik glory from his home/office and helped set loose a new wave of late 20th centrury Nipponoise excellence from Government Alpha to Magmax and beyond. A great dude, who we’ll miss.

61. FUSETRON and VOLCANIC TONGUE: Fusetron is Chris Freeman’s label and distribution house here in USA. Volcanic Tongue is David Keenan and Heather Murray’s in the UK. They are both the lists to subscribe to in order to be first in line to consume heavy weird music shit. no shit.

62. SKATERS s/t CDR (American Tapes) Skaters ruled extra hard this year skooting cross country and back again with butts poked high and noses down to the grinding pick-ups and amp waves forming like colored clouds of psycho-fume.

63. CONTEMPORARY JAZZ QUARTET Actions 1966-67 (Atavistic/Unheard Music) Absolutely insane issue of archival material by this Danish group (best remembered for their work with Sonny Murray), kicking out the jams with a guest saw player. One of the true fever spots on the hide of free jazz.

64. CHARLES BURNS Black Hole book (Pantheon): Burns finally finished the graphic story of diseased Seattle plague teens of the ‘70s. All 12 issues wrapped up in one sweet spot.

65. PATTY WATERS: Following ‘04’s great archival release of pre-ESP material (You Thrill Me), Patty has released a new live set, Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe (DBK Works) that shows her to be as eloquent as ever. Cool.

66. MARK TUCKER Batstew LP (De Stijl): Reissue of an astounding outsider Illinois release from ’75. Tucker decided to record a tribute to a Cadillac called The Bat by taping its “sounds,” then interspersed weird paeons of heartbreak into it and pressed it up in two editions of 100 each. Everyone backed off but now NOW this babe is a golden fleece of exquisite love n’ madness. Thanks to Clint at De Stijl for this one.

67. ISALAJA Palaa Aurinkoon CD (Fonal): Second solo CD from Finland’s wondrous Merja Kokkonen who plays with Avarus and Kemialliset Ystavat (and on the recent US sojourn a duo with her boyfriend which had us melting into the floorboards of the Montague Book Mill). Her voice and tiny instrument prowess are from some mesmer Goddess’ breath.

68. FAUX PRESS: Poetry press outta Cambridge, MA that issued a handful of boss titles a coupla years back (Tony Towle, Eileen Myles a.o.). Back in action with two newies from Brandon Downing and David Larsen both exhibiting strong word/thought laced with cut-out imagery and, in Brandon’s tome, some weird hook on cinema studies. Crazy.

69. RICHARD HELL: Richie’s been howling new wind as of late and we’re more than happy to take a snout full particularly when it’s writing as weird, personal and funny/not-funny as his novel Godlike (Little House on the Bowery /Akashic), his collaborative poetry with obscure ’60s NY School poet David Shapiro Rabbit Duck (Milwaukee: REPAIR) and his “From The Mouth of Hell” column in the Toilet Paper magazine.

70. Neil Campbell Teasel / Thistle cs (Heavy Tapes): For years now UK’er Neil has been serving up mind-jabbing sonorifik slices, each one a taste sensation. This cassette is awesome particularly as it’s part of the ever fetching Heavy Tapes series.

71. Graveyards Monument Centers cs (American Tapes) It’s strictly reeds for Wolf Eyes’ John Olson when he hits the bandstand with his acoustic bass/drums free jazz-from -Jesus’-anus trio. Amazing hybrid of Michigan noise ethos with ESP devouring devotionalz. Best jazz group regardless of genre 2005 hands down.

72. EYES AND ARMS OF SMOKE Moonburn cs (Ramparts) A Religion of Broken Bones (Cenotaph Audio) and In 3 Houses CDR (Rampart/Mountaain) are but just three killer tone comp toots from these midwest lads n’ lassies. Members of Hair Police in a whoooole other bag, dad: sweet guitar picking, vocal flower chanting and jamolodik breakdownz.

73. METALUX Victim of Space CD/LP (5RC), Metalux/Evil Moisture split LP (Veglia): Two distinct documents from the ultra-falling off the edge of the planet femme duo Metalux. When they first strted out it was just a question mark hovering over the onlookers’ heads. Now that question mark shoots beams of righteous boo glory. Head scratching as a good thing.

74. MACRONYMPHA Melting Softly Into Time LP (Self Abuse/Hospital): Who woulda thought Pensylvania anal torture core noise progenitors Macronympha would return to reap the 2005 legends-of-harsh-noise lifetime achievement award? Whitehouse for the farmboy set in all its leather sack-slapping gooniness. Yes please, more thank you.

75. BURNING STAR CORE Mes Soldats Stupides 96- 04 2XCD (Cenotaph Audio): Essential document of C. Spencer Yeh’s Burning Star Core music solo violin excursions through noise/sound/auristix. From early bird tweet damage to later period cassette/CDR sexplosions.

76. HIVE MIND Death Tone (Hanson): Michigan’s golden boy Greh is on a goddamned rampage with Hive Mind recording some of the new century’s most spirit-slicing and mind-snapping sessions to date. This baby on Dilloway’s Hanson imprint is unforgiving and brilliant.

77. DEVILLOCK These Graves CD (PACrec/SNSE): Justin Meyers (who runs the Tone Filth label) has been developing harsh drudge noise explorations with his nom de plume Devillock and here he comes to some kind of new-sick pinnacle.

78. HOTOTOGISU Ghosts From The Sun CDR (Heavy Blossom) Matthew Bower and Marcia Bassett and everything they conspire with—Skullflower, Sunroof, Total, Double Leopards, GHQ, Shackamaxon, Zaimph—make beautiful sun-kiss-moon music with shards of beauty and drops of danger. Believe.

79. BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL with LEE RANALDO 30th December 2004 (Celebrate Psi Penomenon): We had heard this duo set between New Zealander Campbell Kneale and Lee is Free was the ultimate tits but we weren’t prepared for this momma. whoa.

80. Various Artists gold leaf branches 3CD (Foxy Digitalis) and Invisible Pyramid: Elegy 6CD Box (Last Visible Dog) These were the two hand-in-hand compilations of all compilations for the year covering a sweet field of new and timeless music/action from such minstrel punkers as Six Organs of Admittance, Charalambides, Wooden Wand, Keijo, Nick Castro, Lau Nau, Brothers Of The Occult Sisterhood, Hush Arbors, Hala Strana, James Blackshaw, Marissa Nadler, Mike Tamburo, The Juniper Meadows, Maniacs Dream, Black Forest/Black Sea, Birchville Cat Motel, Wolfmangler, Loren Chasse, Bardo Pond, s, Andrea Belfi & Stefano Pilia, Sunken, Kulkija, Tomu Tonttu, UP-TIGHT, Flies Inside the Sun, Uton, mudboy, Steven R. Smith, Keijo, Doktor Kettu, My Cat is an alien, One Inch of Shadow, Fursaxa, Ashtray Navigations, Peter Wright, Geoff Mullen, Urdog, Miminokoto, rea C, Ben Reynolds, Seht, Avarus, Renato Rinaldi, Matt De Gennaro and a few others (it’s hard to keep em all logged in our heads).

Contacts:
Abduction: http://www.suncitygirls.com/abduction/
American Tapes: www.geocities.com/americantapes
Aryan Asshole: www.geocities.com/azivich@sbcglobal.net/index.html
Atavistic: www.atavistic.com
Black Sparrow: www.blacksparrowpress.com
Black Velvet Fuckere: POBox 17317, Louisville, KY 40217
Burning Star Core: www.dronedisco.com/bxc
Can’t: http://www.irfp.net/
Celebrate Psi Phenomenon: www.cpsip.co.nz
Cenotaph Audio: www.cenotaph.org
Child of Microtones: http://www.yod.com/mvee.html
Chocolate Monk: http://www.pinktoes.net/chocolate_monk.htm
DBK Works: POB 2947, San Francisco CA 94126
Dark Holler: www.somedarkholler.com
Dust to Digital: www.dust-digital.com
Eremite: www.eremite.com
Far Gone: fargonerecords.com
Faux Press: www.fauxpress.com
5 Rue Christine: www.5rc.com
Foxy Digitalis: www.digitalisindustries.com/foxyd/index.php
Fusteron: www.fusetronsound.com
Gameboy: http://www.gmby.net/
Rebecca Godfrey: www.harpercollins.ca/godfrey/index.htm
Hanson Records: www.hansonrecords.net
Heavy Tapes: http://doubleleopards.org/heavytapes/
Richard Hell: www.richardhell.com
Heresee: www.herese.com
Her Noise: electra-productions.com (catalog:www.forma.org.uk)
Hive mind: www.hivemind.sinkhole.net
Hospital: www.hospitalproductions.com/
In the Red: www.inthered.com
Islaja: www.islaja.com
Mike Kelley/Gagosian Gallery: www.gagosian.com/artists/mikekelley
Knopf: www.knopf.com
Last Visible Dog: www.lastvisibledog.com
Leslie Keffer: www.lesliekeffer.com
Load: www.loadrecords.com
Locust Music: www.locustmusic.com
M.A.N.: www.mothersagainstnoise.org/
Manhand: www.sunburnedhand.com/main.html
Metalux: www.metalux.org
Old Hat: www.oldhatrecords.com
Orange Twin: www.orangetwin.com
Our Mouth: www.volcanictongue.com/outmouth.html
PacRec: www.iheartnoise.com
Pantheon Books: www.randomhouse.com/pantheon
Question the Truth: www.questionthetruth.com
RRR: www.rrrecords.com
Ramparts: www.geocities.com/ramparttapes
Lee Ranaldo: www.leeranaldo.net
Reptilian: www.reptilianrecords.com
Revenant: www.revanantrecords.com
Self Abuse: www.selfabuserecords.net
Simon & Schuster: www.simonsays.com
Sloow Tapes: http://sloowtapes.blogspot.com/
Sublime Frequencies: www.sublimefrequencies.com
Swill Radio: http://www.anti-naturals.org/swill/
Swingset: www.swingsetmagazine.com
Toilet Paper: www.toiletpaperonline.com
Tone Filth: www.tonefilth.org
Troubleman Unlimited: www.troublemanunlimited.com
United Fairy Moons: http://unitedfairymoons.blogspot.com/
Ultra Eczema: www.ultraeczema.com
University of California Press: www.ucpress.edu
University of Toronto Press: www.utpress.utoronto.ca
Veglia: www.vegliarecords.com
Volcanic Tongue: www.volcanictongue.com
Wabana: www.surefiredistribution.com/wabana/
We Jam Econo: www.theminutemen.com
Wholly Other: www.wholly-other.com/
Ypsilanti: http://myspace.com/ypsilantirecords

BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 20 (Jan. 2006)

Administrator — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 03:28:27 +0000

first published in Arthur No. 20 (January, 2006)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

August Born is Hiroyuki Usui and Ben Chasny. Hiroyuki you may know as the Japanese chap who has recorded under the name L. There was an L record on VHF a few years back that was astounding. Beautiful, home baked organic spirit folk-sonik drone breeze. The self titled August Born (Drag City) is the first in a purported series of “music by mail” sessions Hiroyuki has been involved in. Not email but snail mail, a slow process, which shows in the careful and gorgeous strains which this recording delivers. Simple and haunting vocal lines with classic Chasny guitar moves, expressive of his work with both Six Organs of Admittance and Comets on Fire. There’s an August Born track on the Bread, Beard and Bear’s Prayers CD that Comets’ Ethan Miller compiled for this mag’s Bastet imprint. A perfect winter sound.

More Ben Chasny finger-scorch news is the junk burn collaboration he’s done with squelch lord and fellow Comets creep Noel von Harmonson called NVH/CHASNY PLAYS THE BOOK OF REVELATIONS on the Folding label. It truly howls and is just one of the amazing new releases on this long-standing cassette label. Folding comes out of the Northwest and has always delivered some of the more confused and beyond-the-unknown explorations of the lost universe. Along with the NVH/Chas tape is an awesome foray into sound deviltry by someone/something called Telepathe. Their tape “I” which features Mick Barr is one of the swingenest kosmo-jungle reverb from God’s ass recordings we’ve been priveleged to hear this year no doubt. One more killer Folding jammer is the Child Abuse cassette which may be a goddamned lame name but is saved by the nutso retardo sleeve which has some little dude hand tethered to a stick looking very pissed off. It’s horrible yes but so ridiculous that you can see MAYBE where these mofos are coming from (answer: we don’t know). Child Abuse is a drum/organ twisted nut of a sesion and pretty damn fucked and really doesn’t audibly portray the sad violence of their moniker. Which is OK and adds new depth to their motive. What the fuhk.

A couple other great tape labels are Jyrk and Sloow Tapes. Jyrk is from the Bay Area and is infamous for unleashing the force that is D Yellow Swans who have been on a tear lately. The “D” standing for something “D”ifferent on each release (Dead, Destroyed, Disabled, Deaf etc.). They are consistently happening in their electroacoustic amps and wires noise/hum concertos and anything they release is gonna be worth your while. A young woman named Inca Ore, an associate of D Yellow Swans has a Jyrk tape called Milky Petals of the Solar Meadows and by that title you can bet she’s got something to say. And she does but in some strange other-planet tongue. What seems like a sensual loop of vocal matter gets entwined with live barbed wire ululations and comes at you like a repetitive salivation machine. Heavy move and we want more. Sloow Tapes out of Belgium has been releasing small numbers of fine rips by the likes of My Cat Is An Alien and others. One of the latest is certainly one of their greatest, the Slingshot Feud Vol. 2 cassette by Family Underground. Real sex-surround sound and dusk to dawn huzz. All yours.

Four hot new(ish) poetry journals of the sort that burn with modern energy and multi-levered thought/rock, roll/sexx prayerz-on-fire sensation have hit our desks recently and we feel the need to share the word. Mirage #4/Period(ical) is on its staggering-to-believe 120th issue which we guess is not so staggering-to-believe as it’s a single stapled one-sided xerox read which is really its minimalist charm. It’s edited by Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy out of San Francisco. Killian is an interesting playwright, poet, critic, novelist who supposedly has a book being published all about Kylie Minogue, whether in verse perspective or in perverse invective remains to be read. Dodie has written some of the most astounding beyond feminist lit of the last decade. She created a helluva stir when she wrote and published an amazing fem take-off on the Burroughsian cut-up technique called Cunt Ups, which is must for any progressive library shelf. Their po journal has new and ongoing work by young writers who catch the editor’s eye as well as a few surprises such as this issue’s print of a great 1959 poem by the deceased homo-beat legend John Wieners. Next up is the irrepressible Industrial Sabotage out of Toronto, Canada. Edited by the non-stop archivist, poet and all around good guy J W Curry, this is the foremost publication of the ongoing history of Canada’s amazing concrete/language/etc lit scene, primarily jumping off and around the wonderment that is bpNichol, an artist/poet who died in 1988 and left behind a living trove of experimental and loving word-work. Curry has been involved with archiving thousands of items of A list to ephemera of bpNichol’s output for well on 30 years now and has yet to exhaust his endeavor. If you think record collecting is deep dirt digging, then try to get into avant garde post war poetry. His mag is awesome, multi-hued and a great glimpse into what is one of North America’s strongest literary scenes since forever. Speaking of which it’s exciting to see the folks at St Marks Poetry Center in NYC making a fresh move with the first issue of The Recluse. Whether this mag is taking the place of the long running Poetry Center journal The World or will co-exist alongside it is anyone’s guess. Regardless, it has the cool passion aesthetic of young, serious, touch-the-sky poetry that the downtown New Yok scene has always exuded: a dynamic of voices multi-psyched, daring and thoughtful. Last, for now, is another mag outta the SF scene, a new one called jouissance. First ish has not only rad poemz by the abovementioned Kevin Killian, but also some from the ass-slapping mind of Dennis Cooper (one called THE JPEGS is about a Ray Romano/Bernie Mac sex-mail exchange). The mag has good interviews with Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu and novelist Scott Heim (whose book Mysterious Skin is being made into a film by Greg Araki), as well as writing by Dodie Bellamy. Cool shit.

While he has laid hand and/or hip on more record-projects than almost anyone, Calvin Johnson has not previously released a solo album. Dunno why this is exactly, but Before the Dream Faded (K) is really a good one. Calvin’s dark voice is probably known to some of you from Beat Happening or Dub Narcotic Sound System or somewhere, but it’s really a rumbling rose here, because it’s the album’s one constant. The instrumentation and arrangement techniques wiggle around like a hot can opener on god’s ass, but there is a foghorn in the night. Hooray! Songs go into all the hoped-for hoops and come out smelling great. As a note, when heard on CD, from the next room, one local thought this record sounded BOGUS. However, heard close up and on vinyl, she agreed it rocked like a berry. On a Calvin-related note, have been digging the curves of the new Old Time Relijun LP, 2012 (K). Must be the sixth or seventh by these Olympia mutants, but the Spotlight Kid vibe is so strong this time, I feel like we better pull out all their old records and give them a thorough sequential listen. Another record ripe with not-entirely-expected Beefheart sprong is the eponymous, posthumous MLP by Selten-Ubel (ABC Group). This Knoxville, TN group existed for only a couple of shows and broke up in ’01. But the five songs here have a very swank post-core blump into the shadows of a Magic Band.

Was going through a pile of books and realized we somehow forgot to plug the two latest books from Montreal’s l’Oie de Cravan. First of is Schmo, the second volume of drawings by Jeff Ladouceur that they’ve issued. Like his last book, Ebola, Ladouceur’s black & white drawings look like they’ve been drawn from models who were inflated with mashed potatos or something—they’re lumpy but smooth, hollow but full, all that stuff. It’s lovely. As is Nadia Moss’s Mr. Non Pigeon. Ms. Moss has done some illustration work for Godspeed and related groups, but this is her first book, and it’s a very nice combination of scratchy, obsessive sketches and more full-blown assemblage/illos. A very nice piece of work and highly commended (as is ALL Cravan material, natch.) In other friendship club news, there’s a brand spanking HOT volume of Pretend I Am Someone Else. Editor Lauren Naylor has more of her own stuff in this ish than usual, and it all reads/scans as sweet as hot buttered rum—the theme seems to be dreams this time, and it’s clear SHE’S HAD PLENTY OF THEM.

Awesome spook noise party jamz from, wouldn’t you know it, Nate Young, central monster of Wolf Eyes. His first solo LP is called Hatred and, appropriately, is the premier release on Carlos Giffoni’s No Fun label. Nice burbling scuzz and hardcore stain. Get it. Super weird left field garage shapes made by Japan stylerz King Brothers on their Blues CD (In The Red). Nipponese garage core can definitely have a bit more of an experimental edge and the King Brothers deliver it nonstop. In The Red continues to plumb the ultimate bowels of rock n roll earth for the best, most far out ho dang. Soothing hell soundz erupt in felching drizzle sput from Michigan madman Roach and his boys. They’re called Dirty Dynamite Gang and you can hear them squirm n’ growl on the “Roach = Animal” one-sided LP (American Tapes). Edition of 100 with twisted nightmare collage cover art by John Olson. Boss. Speaking of Olson, is he the monstermind behind Guam River? Y’know, probably, and if it ain’t then whoever it is has laid out a long super-spooked groan noise psycho-journey of a one-sided LP on the always intoxicatingly beautiful Ultra Eczema label. It’s called The New Maps Of Hell and label boss Dennis Tyfuss delivers a hairy beast silkscreen on one side which, when played, sounds like a sick cousin to the groove side. This label is hands down amazing with its art/noise hybrid and you better get yr ass movin’. Also ass-movin’ is the return of Tom Lax’s legendary Siltbreeze label. The Dig Yourself LP by Columbus OH’s Times New Viking is a beauteous slop bucket of DIY raunch of the sort one finds on In the Red—flappy gal/guy vocals traded like Swell Maps trading cards, unctuous guitar riffs, instrumental melt-downs of all sorts, etc. This is art punk, motherfucker. Grab yr ankles!

A new Double Leopards LP is always reason enough to buy a new hat, and Out of One, through One and to One (Eclipse) is no exception. The different layers of drones these Brooklyn goblins are now able to assemble, improvise into, and then blow away like smoke, is ever more impressive. The tracks here (two or three of them depending on how spaced you are) include some new tinkling intrusions, not like anything they’ve quite done before. But it’s the quality we’re talking about, and this has that. Spanked! Hats all around! And this is as good a time to admit as any that we somehow missed the boat on a record released at the beginning of this year, that features Mike and Maya from the Leopards, plus the twin geniuses of Mouthus. The group is called White Rock, the LP is called Tarpit (Troubleman Unlimited) and it is an eerie aesthetic configuration that captures both the tone-length of the Leopards and the cluster-fuck-freedom of Mouthus without sounding like either. It’s a strong and mysterious record, with distant tongues licking equally at finger and nip. Another grass-snake on Troubleman is the eponymous split LP by Jana Hunter and Devendra Banhart. This is old school DB, stripped of the Hairy Fairy and comported in his best bedroom Bolan manner, with other proto-glam tricks hatching out every sleeve. The Jana side is very similar vibrationally, and one assumes they had their paws all over each other’s tracks. So there! And they liked it! And so do we.

On the New England freak scene front, there’s the full length self-titled debut LP by Shackamaxon (HP Cycle). A collective involving various (although more or less un-named) members of Son of Earth, Double Leopards and Magik Markers, the drone here is intersputted with all kindsa small pieces of gristle. There is nothing very pure about the rainbows they create, but they still sound pretty bitchen—quivery, wet and radiant. Another eponymous Valley release is the Feathers LP (Feathers Family), which documents this octet’s expansive acoustic horizons. Easy to hear bits of ’68 ISB and their ilk in the mix, but the overall brunt is not actually very English. Dunno exactly how they pull that off, but they do. And it’s what you’d have to call a sweet trick. LP also comes with a poster that almost makes me not not-think of the one that came with Galactic Zoo Dossier (the record, not the ‘zine). And that’s a damned nice near-thought.

Also one more poetry note, we can not recommend enough the latest Kent Johnson book from Effing Press titled Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz. One of the strongest, and by far the strangest, anti-USA imperialistic swashbucklery tomes we’ve come across. Mind jabbing and king idiot stabbing, Kent brings in the lit world to create scenarios of hilarious debate re: war pig Bush and fat fuck friends.

If you have treats you would like to be licked by the Bull Tongue (archaic formats: print, vinyl, vid preferred), send two (2) copies to: PO Box 627, Northampton MA 01061.

Contacts
American Tapes: www.geocities.com/americantapes
Bastet: www.arthurmag.com/store/bastet_cds.php
Child Abuse: www.soundsofchildabuse.com
Drag City: www.dragcity.com
Eclipse: www.eclipse-records.com/
Effing Press: www.effingpress.com
Folding cassettes: foldingcassettes@gmail.com
In The Red: www.intheredrecords.com
Industrial Sabotage: c/o jw curry/#302 – 880 Somerset Street West/Ottawa, Canada KlR 6R7
jouissance: jouissancezine@yahoo.com
Jyrk: www.jyrk.com
K: www.krecs.com
L / Hiroyuki Usui: www.lsounds.net/main_e.html
L’Oie de Cravan: www.cam.org~cravan
Mirage #4/Period(ical): 1020 Minna Street/San Francisco, CA 94103
No Fun: www.nofunfest.com/nofunprod.html
Pretend I Am Someone Else: wakeuptomakeup@yahoo.co.uk
The Recluse: www.poetryproject.com
Sloow Tapes: sloowtapes.blogspot.com
Troubleman Unlimited:
Ultra Eczema: www.ultraeczema.com/
VHF: www.vhfrecords.com/

“A Slow, Strange and Grueling Thing”: Daniel Chamberlin on the Great Arcata-to-Ferndale Kinetic Sculpture Race (Arthur No. 9/March 2004)

Administrator — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 22:41:11 +0000

Originally published in Arthur No. 9 (March, 2004)

A Slow, Strange and Grueling Thing
Writer-photographer Daniel Chamberlin ventures behind California’s Redwood Curtain to experience the three-day triathlon of the arts that is the Great Arcata-to-Ferndale Kinetic Sculpture Race

In the late 1930s frustrated residents of Northern California declared their intention to wage “patriotic rebellion” against California and Oregon. Tired of dealing with state governments that seemed more concerned with distant population centers—and not with repairing the decrepit bridges and mud-choked roads leading to their sparsely populated mining, fishing and timber communities—the people of Northern California and Southern Oregon took steps to secede from their respective states. The new state would be called Jefferson—a name arrived at by way of a newspaper contest—in honor of Thomas Jefferson, third president of the U.S. and patron saint of Libertarians and states’ rights crusaders. On December 4, 1941, Jefferson State’s residents set up barricades on the highway and elected Judge John L. Childs governor. At his inauguration he was photographed with a bear on a chain that appears to have a severed human hand in its jaws. Three days after Childs’ inauguration Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor and the Jefferson State movement was swept aside as the United States entered World War II. Though small in number, benign Jefferson State secessionists still hold meetings, run a Web site and paint slogans on their barn roofs. Recently, they tried to use the California’s gubernatorial recall fiasco to drum up support for their cause.

The Jefferson State movement points to a spirit of individualism that thrives in Northern California, especially in Humboldt County. People who live up in northernmost California like being away from it all: there’s time to develop interesting ideas, and enough of a community for those ideas to take root. Hobart Brown, a tiny, impish, 69-year-old man who lives in Humboldt, at the southern end of what could’ve been Jefferson State, is one of those people. He’s an aircraft mechanic, astrologer and wild pig hunter. He’s also the self-styled “Glorious Founder” of an event called The Great Arcata-to-Ferndale Kinetic Sculpture Race (KSR), an event has run every year since 1969.

The KSR is a vigorous all-terrain art parade held over the course of Memorial Day Weekend. Participants take three days to travel 38 miles in vehicles known as kinetic sculptures—usually recumbent bicycles frames mounted with some sort of sculptural art that’s often conspicuously wacky: poop-filled toilet, braying donkey, KISS Army Camaro, etc. For the 2003 race, the least noteworthy of the entries appearing on the starting line in Arcata is a gray-haired, bearded guy wearing a suit and riding a bicycle. The most imposing sculpture-vehicle is the 2,000-pound “Surf & Turf,” a dramatically psychedelic Day-Glo lobster. A bull’s head that bears a close resemblance to the distressed animal in Picasso’s “Guernica” is grafted on to the back of its abdomen. Six pilots sit inside dressed as chefs, complete with poofy white hats.

In order to complete the full race course in accordance with all of the rules—to “Ace” the course, in KSR terminology—the machines must maneuver over city streets and sand dunes, navigate across a mile of open water in Humboldt Bay and slog through the murky depths of a backwoods bog. They do all of this at an average speed somewhere around 2-3 mph, meaning the race never gets much faster than the wheelchair-bound vets in the Memorial Day Parade that precedes them at the finish line in Ferndale. The KSR combines the tedious pace and muddy wallowing of a tractor pull with the budget-minded engineering of a demolition derby and the physical punishment of an Iron Man triathlon. Dozens of participants return every year. Some have two decades of consecutive races behind them. The race means many things to many people, but as far as Hobart is concerned its primary purpose is to serve as a weapon against suicide.

* * *

You have to be seeking Humboldt County in order to get there. Garberville, the largest town in southern Humboldt, is 200 miles from San Francisco. The two largest towns in Humboldt—Eureka and Arcata—are over 70 miles further north. Though Jefferson State is now mostly history, it is a given with locals that Northern California, particularly Humboldt, is separate from the rest of California. This is attributed to a phenomena known as “the Redwood Curtain.” Thousands of people do make the trip to Humboldt though; tourism is one of the area’s trademark industries along with timber, fishing, folk art and marijuana cultivation. For his part, Hobart Brown subscribes to the theory that, along with Hawaii, Humboldt is one of the last outposts of Mu, a mythical lost civilization akin to Atlantis.

The best road to Humboldt from the rest of California is U.S. 101, though what is an eight-lane river of traffic down in Los Angeles is a two-lane trickle 500 miles up the coast in Hopland. The same freeway serves as a 25 mph main street further north in Willits and Laytonville. The towns stay charming, but as you move north there are fewer high-priced bistros and more stores selling generators, solar panels and livestock supplies. Outside towns, the road is flanked on either side by acres of farmland and deep forests. Country lanes open up throughout Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, lined by roadside invitations to join the landed gentry in their wine tasting rooms from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Once you’re in Humboldt, the grape arbors are mostly gone, replaced by what local drug folklore suggests is the scent of local marijuana crops wafting over the highway. The Eel River rides alongside the 101, and in the summer it’s not uncommon to see people pulled off to the side of the road and going for a dip. “Bigfoot Country” coin purses and redwood burl carvings are readily available, and there are several opportunities to drive your car through hollowed-out redwood trees. Local highway cleanup projects are sponsored by the Harley Riders Association, the Humboldt Area Pagan Network and a store called The Blessed Thistle. Logging trucks hauling gargantuan pieces of timber, farmers driving tractors between their fields and rusted VW buses filled with vintage hippies discourage speedy drivers. The archetypal Humboldt vehicle is a mud-spattered 4WD pickup truck with a Grateful Dead sticker and a National Rifle Association decal sharing the same bumper.

In Denis Johnson’s metaphysical California noir, Already Dead, the suicidal philosopher Carl Van Ness wanders this stretch of highway and describes these remote towns as “like little naps you might never wake up from—you might throw a tire and hike to a gas station and stumble unexpectedly onto the rest of your life, the people who would finally mean something to you, a woman, an immortal friend, a saving fellowship in the religion of some obscure church.” I didn’t begin to understand the Kinetic Sculpture Race until I was drunk, stoned and stumbling with a party of veteran racers spewing history and KSR gospel in equal measure as they camped on an isolated, driftwood-strewn beach. You don’t call yourself a local up here until you’ve been dug in for at least a generation, but there’s no better description of the appeal of Humboldt life to an outsider—or a more dead-on assessment of the cult that has risen up around the race that Hobart Brown started in 1969—than that of Johnson’s troubled pilgrim.

* * *

Hobart Brown claims the title of Glorious Founder of the Kinetic Sculpture Race, but race director Bill Croft runs the thing. Croft is a sewing machine repairman who moved to Humboldt County with his wife when he retired from the Coast Guard ten years ago. Although the racers are following an arcane set of rules that Hobart and others have developed over the last three decades, it’s up to Croft to make sure the race follows the rules in terms of city permits, traffic safety, insurance and crowd control. In a phone interview a week before the race he tells me that he knows a lot about Porta-Potties, that Hobart is “the worst businessman ever,” and that without his organizational assistance it was only a matter of time before the race was going be shut down.

Croft works with an organization called the Humboldt Kinetic Association (HKA), an alliance of local non-profit groups that purchased the KSR from Hobart last year with the intention of turning a somewhat anarchic event into a smoothly functioning, money-making venture. Croft says they’re talking about bringing in a “major corporate sponsor,” selling media rights and maybe charging some kind of admission. He would like this to be a more family-friendly event, and for everyone in the family to have a place to go to the bathroom.

A handful of participants don’t like Croft or the HKA because Croft comes from the world of non-profits—he was formerly the executive director of Tour of the Unknown Coast, a successful Humboldt County bicycle ride—and not from the ranks of KSR racers. Some participants seem indignant that they guy handling all the bureaucratic shit-work has never raced the course. To Croft’s credit, I can’t figure out why he’d want the job, seeing as it pays no money and mostly consists of covering the asses of people who seem to resent him.

“Whooo!” says Croft when I ask him what the veteran racers think of him and the HKA. “We’re seen as usurpers, like, ‘What have you people got buying our race?’” Ironically, given Croft’s investor-friendly intentions, the race was flat broke until about a week ago. “This year we took it in the shorts and we lost all our sponsorship,” he says, “but we asked everybody in the county to give us a dollar. About eight or nine thousand people did that.”

I let Croft off the phone so that he and his wife can finish programming mobile phones for race volunteers with relevant contact numbers. The next time I see him he’s in Hobart’s living room welding Ace Awards, the tiny brass medals handed out to participants who complete the course without breaking any race rules.

* * *

Like a lot of places in Humboldt, the town of Ferndale offers creepy and quaint in one fog-shrouded package. There are cute fudge shoppes with sweet little old ladies tending the counter and a second-hand bookstore with shelves of sale books sitting on the sidewalk 24 hours a day. Men with radical beards drive pickup trucks up and down the street. A young woman with a fire-engine red ponytail shoves some sort of package into the back seat of a ’70s Impala and a teenage punk clothed in tattered black saunters past the bookstore. A sprawling cemetery overlooks the town, its century-old crypts and crumbling headstones spread up the side of a hill like a macabre amphitheater until they fade into a fog-filled forest.

Ferndale bills itself as a charming Victorian village, though when juxtaposed with the gray skies that are a given most of the year in Humboldt, these structures’ endless eaves and tiny windows offer many places for the hungry eyes of a mad aunt to peek out from behind attic curtains. The Jim Carrey vehicle The Majestic was filmed here, as were parts of the Ebola thriller Outbreak and TV movie adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.

Hobart Brown Galleries sits at the intersection of Main and Brown in a two-story red Victorian. Opening the front door sets off a series of bells, but there’s nobody answering their clunky chimes. The floor is carpeted and the walls are graying redwood. It feels like the inside of a barn. Hobart’s gallery hosts paintings by several local artists, but he’s the main draw. His towering works of sculpted brass run down the center of the cavernous bottom story.

Hobart is surrounded by decades of stories, some glowing, others damning. I traveled up here to watch last year’s KSR, but I didn’t get a chance to speak with him then. He seemed to keep a removed presence during the event, emceeing at the starting line and then following along intermittently in a white stretch limousine. When asked about Hobart, people seemed to either be overcome with a vague sense of awe and gratitude or they just sort of snuffled a bit and muttered under their breath. One guy gave me an open letter to Hobart that begins with the line “You are a lying son of a bitch.” Another race participant read a tearful dedication to Hobart thanking him for giving “us this grand stage we call ‘The Kinetic.’ A stage on which we, the artists, play out our dreams and passions.”

* * *

If the downstairs of Hobart Brown Galleries is an art-filled barn, the upstairs is straight hillbilly Addams Family. The walls are hard to make out, as they’re covered almost entirely with artifacts of Hobart’s life. There is a petrified pork chop, discolored with freezer burn. A picture of a middle-aged woman in ’40s-era clothing reads “Mom’s Dad” and underneath, in marker, “Not?” In a huge ’70s-era picture above Hobart’s television set he poses with his pig-hunting spear, a diminutive version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant. A Vampirella poster is plastered on the ceiling 14 feet above. KSR paraphernalia is everywhere: stickers, posters, ribbons, press clippings, trophies. Three hunting arrows protrude from the wall. A pot-bellied stove sits in the middle of the room.

Hobart welds his sculptures in his living room. Tanks of flammable gas stand behind a furry white sectional couch. Bill Croft and Hobart are sitting and talking when I arrive, and in the middle of our interview, Croft—who radiates his Coast Guard past with a warm vest and a dense beard—fires up a blowtorch and starts melting brass.

The century-old building, Hobart tells me, used to be a brothel. Hobart’s living room, kitchen, workshop and dining room are all one space divided into quarters by half walls and support beams. The rest of the upstairs consists of tiny, windowless bunkrooms often inhabited by his many guests. Hobart also mentions that he used to be a prostitute.

Hobart Brown (in hat)

We set up for an interview on a coffee table covered in all sorts of paper. Many household items—the TV, the books—are labeled with Hobart’s name and a date. One book in the bathroom accuses anyone of having the book in his or her home of being a thief, as the book was taken from Hobart’s toilet. Hobart’s bathroom holds a magazine rack, three toilet paper dispensers and a bookshelf filled with books on astrology, est, world records and Erich Fromm’s school of psychology. Copies of Popular Mechanics abound here, as well as in the living room. A sign that reads “Farting Room” hangs on the wall. The toilet seat is labeled and dated. There is a guest book in the bathroom as well as in the living room and another downstairs in the gallery.

Hobart is a funny little man. Bill Croft calls him a goof. He wears overalls with blue and white stripes. Some sort of KSR medallion rests on his chest, held there by a blue ribbon. His moustache is uneven, the right strands hanging down longer than the left. His right eye is slightly more squinty than his left and his hair is disheveled. His hands are twisted into arthritic gnarls, and he refers to himself as a “cripple.” Hobart has been married twice and has three grown kids—two sons live in Humboldt, a daughter in Pennsylvania. He’s currently single, and most of the men who spend time with him seem to be either divorced or widowed.

Hobart has done hundreds of interviews in the 34 years since he started the race. He keeps a list of all the media outlets that have covered him, his folk art gallery or the KSR and gives me a photocopied index. They range from The Christian Science Monitor, CBS Evening News and Smithsonian to California Highway Patrolman, Senior World and something called “Simon’s Hip Morning Dude Radio Show.” My conversation with him is interrupted several times by reporters calling from the Eureka Times-Standard. Tomorrow he’ll be interviewed for a newsletter in Baltimore. Hobart loves attention.

* * *

The genesis of the KSR is a concise, well-rehearsed tale. In 1969 Hobart the folk art gallery proprietor decided to make some adjustments to his son’s tricycle. The result was “The Pentacycle,” a seven-foot tall, five-wheeled vehicle with two seats. Hobart loved this thing, says he thought he had done his own Sistine Chapel. A friend, Jack Mays, saw the sculpture and decided to make his own. A couple more local tinkers decided they’d like to get in on the fun too. Supposedly it was Mays who came up with the idea to race the sculptures down Main Street in Ferndale—an obscure historical detail that has threatened Kinetic Schism on more than one occasion. On race day Hobart claims 10,000 people showed up, a boast that everyone shares when I ask about the first race. Randall Frost, who curates the Kinetic Sculpture Museum, shows me photos of the event and the figure seems almost believable. Massive crowds lined the streets of Ferndale; spectators crowded on rooftops and there’s at least one film crew on the scene. “People don’t have much to do up here,” says Frost. “And word spreads fast when there’s something going on.”

In a history that is less easily narrated, the race expanded to the current three-day triathlon of the arts. The sculptures became rugged orgies of bicycle engineering and folk art rather than the more delicate originals upon which they were modeled, graceful machines that were powered by rocking chairs hooked to drive trains, vehicles that made their way down the street propelled by the downward velocity of running water.

The thing that helps make Hobart such a big deal up here—his Humboldt County celebrity status springs from a history of events including Halloween bacchanals, wild pig hunting expeditions and confrontations with the chamber of commerce—is his willingness to embellish stories from his objectively festive life to anyone who will listen. His claim that he used to be a prostitute, for example, stems from a particularly promiscuous period in his life when he would ask his partners—women friends from around the way, mostly—to give him a dollar each time he had sex with them. He punctuates all of his stories with the sort of mischievous smile that on a younger man might result in just such a bevy of willing partners. And with the kind of laugh—a soft “coo-hoo-hoo”—appropriate to the sexagenarian manifestation of this persona.

Unexpectedly, Hobart isn’t that good at telling stories about the KSR. Nobody’s that good at telling stories about the race for that matter. It’s like asking Deadheads about Grateful Dead shows and ending up with a chronicle of minutiae that misses the overwhelmingly surreal nature of the event as a whole. Hobart is extremely good at preaching the ideals of the race though, revealing the philosophical implications of its arcane rules and guidelines. He turns every little twist of KSR history into an aphorism making the case that the world will be a better place the more people participate in kinetic sculpture racing. It turns race participants into devotees who schedule their lives around the event. I get the feeling he does this with everyone he talks to since within 30 minutes he’s already telling me how the KSR holds the keys to humanity’s salvation.

“I know what makes an artist,” he tells me. “They like to be noticed. I’ll prove my point. Name one unknown artist that made it. You can’t. So I rest my case.” It’s not clear where he’s going with this, but it’s an introduction to his idea of “the artist” as an archetypal hero figure in the Kinetic Philosophy.

“Here’s the secret: Artists are the reason that we’re gonna save the world,” he says. “They’re gonna give people purpose, improve quality of life. Get people so they don’t want to commit suicide. The way you do that is you give them a sense of purpose. We’re adults having fun so kids will want to get older. It works, doesn’t it.” It’s hard to say if it works, actually. Correlating suicide rates and indexes of depression in rural northern California with the frequency of participation in kinetic sculpture racing is not a project anyone has undertaken just yet. But regardless of the lack of research on the subject, talking to Hobart makes me want to believe that it works.

As evidence of the KSR’s efficacy, Hobart produces a letter nominating him for the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize written by Richard A. Langford, Ph.D., a professor in Humboldt State University’s Department of Psychology. “Such an event as Mr. Brown’s Kinetic Sculpture Race,” writes Langford, “can be an important social support link in the delivery of services to children and young persons struggling with issues of depression, suicidal behavior, and substance abuse. I applaud his efforts.”

* * *

Hobart thinks his mother tried to commit suicide when he was growing up in Hess, Oklahoma. One afternoon she told him they were going to take a nap, and that he should lie down and go to sleep. He got thirsty though, and when he went to the kitchen for some water, he found the gas running. He doesn’t say much more about the incident or his childhood. He was raised as a Baptist, and he’s named after the town in Oklahoma where his parents are from. Over the course of the ’40s and ’50s he received training in aircraft mechanics and worked on cars at a drag strip.

His family moved to Los Angeles in the ’50s. He took some classes at UCLA and attended a lecture by celebrated sculptor Alexander Calder that had a substantial impact on his life. Like Hobart, Calder pursued technical training over art school, and spent the early 1920s putting his engineering degree to work. Calder may be best known for his “stabiles,” massive chunks of angular metal or wood, but he also popularized the idea of kinetic sculpture with what Marcel Duchamp christened “mobiles,” a series of kinetic sculptures—non-vehicular—that were propelled by gears and cranks, or by the movement of air currents. In the agrarian climate of Oklahoma, Hobart felt there was no place for him except as a farmer, fieldworker or mechanic. After relocating to California and hearing Calder speak, he began to consider making art the focus of his life.

He moved to Humboldt in 1961, opening what he claims was the area’s first art gallery in the town of Eureka. He relocated the gallery to Ferndale, into the building where he now lives, in 1962. Most of Hobart’s non-kinetic sculptures on display in his gallery belie his eccentricity. “Bear Necessity” is a diorama of a cowboy staring at a bear that stands between him and his rifle. “The Horse” is a nearly life-size bucking bronco with an $18,500 price tag. “Duck for Dinner” is a small waterfowl ducking beneath copper rings—signifying ripples—for a morsel.

The centerpiece of Hobart’s sculptural catalog is a chunk of copper at least a dozen feet tall called “The Caves of Mercury.” It comes with its own allegorical description, handily photocopied and available at a nearby table. “The Caves” depicts a series of mountains inhabited by winged creatures known as Tranzoids. A rickety network of tiny scaffolding and ladders winds around the copper mass, stopping off at ledges and caves that depict various life stages and their accompanying challenges: Descend the ladder past the cave of early death, cross the dangerous bridge of adolescence and you arrive at the cave of rejection. Make it through there and you find early rewards. Resist those and there are more ladders and caves to endure until you end up naked in the cave of self-realization and finally cross the gateway of eternal wisdom. Hobart spends a lot of time thinking about what makes a good life, and how making it through difficult times and solving problems results in an immense sense of fulfillment.

* * *

The biggest problem in Hobart’s life right now is Bill Neill, a plumber from Oakland. Like a lot of the men involved in the race, he’s a slightly plump middle-aged-looking guy with a goatee and a ponytail. He’s been involved with the KSR for over 20 years. And he knows that Hobart hates him. So it’s kind of a surprise when he walks into Hobart’s living room in the middle of the interview. Hobart and Neill haven’t seen each other in two years; they each accuse the other being a lying thief and it seems their last communication happened through Neill’s lawyer. Hobart turns off the charm and becomes cold and distant. Neill is visibly nervous—his voice wavers and he’s jumpy. He tells Hobart he’s here to make peace. Hobart replies with a curt “No way.”

“I really do want to come up here and bury the hatchet. Not just because of the race but because…” Neill takes a deep breath, “I’ve settled down. It’s been a long time. My dad passing away and all that stuff was not, not good for me.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you, but you wrote your own script. I’m sorry Bill.”

“Okay. All right. I just wanted to come up here and do it personally. I was going to do it on the phone, way before the race, but…”

Hobart cuts him off again. “Why don’t you put that money in the race? All that money you got. You’re the only one to ever make money on this race.”

“That’s what I didn’t want to get into.”

Hobart sits on the edge of the couch staring off into space while Neill talks to his back. I have no idea what’s going on, but Hobart has changed completely. Neill tells Hobart he’s going to be emceeing the race with someone named the Burlyman, and Hobart tells him he won’t come to any event where Neill is scheduled to make an appearance. Neill offers to step off the stage whenever Hobart wants to speak, but Hobart still refuses.

“You’ve never seen me get this angry before,” says Hobart, “but I got hurt worse than I’ve ever been hurt before. I included and shared my life with you completely.”

Neill offers to talk to Hobart later of if he wants, and then leaves.

“He got more money out of the race than anybody,” Hobart tells me as Neill retreats down the stairs. “He made me close the [KSR] museum and he waited until I got to Australia before he did it. He got something like $90,000 out of something we owned together. And he didn’t hurt me, because I’m okay. But he claimed that I was a thief. He claimed all kinds of things. So he would love to come back and have everything go back to normal so he can be a hero again. But I’m not giving him that option.”

* * *

The Kinetic Sculpture Race is fraught with petty resentments, philosophical schisms and clan warfare that most participants don’t talk about right away. Monkey is this big dopey-looking guy with sandy hair, thick glasses and a really weird looking truck. When I came up here in 2002 for my first KSR he opened the whole thing up.

On the second night of the KSR, it’s a tradition for the participants to camp at a remote beach north of Ferndale known as Crab Park. They gather together for bonfires, fireworks and inebriated revelry. This is where the real shit goes down when it comes to the KSR, as good a reason to return each year as sweating inside some ridiculous costume while pedaling a thousand pounds of metal, plastic and papier-maiche over sand dunes. The beach is gray and covered with old pieces of driftwood that people drag over to a growing stack of pallets and logs. Small groups on the outskirts set up tents around particularly large pieces of wood that they’ve set alight where they lay half-buried in the sand. This place is officially closed to everyone but KSR participants, but given that it’s a bunch of hippies and folk artists, it was safe to assume when I came up here last year that the crowd would not be real heavy-handed about following the rules.

Monkey didn’t think anybody at Crab Park knew his real name, and he wasn’t about to tell me. He did tell me that what I mistook for some kind of decrepit, low-slung pickup truck was actually a 1964 Oldsmobile sedan with 350,000 miles on it. He and a friend tore the back half off and made the back seat and trunk area into a truck bed. The most important thing in the bed was an ice chest stocked with beverages. After that, the generator, something called a wire feed welder, a compressor and a stolen stop sign. In the front seat a CB radio crackled with squelchy chatter.

Monkey serves as the head of the pit crew for Area 51, who I will soon learn are basically the Hell’s Angels of the race. He had equipment for their rig—the “Devil Fish,” a raggedy, fire-red barracuda of a kinetic sculpture piloted by two heavy-set women—in the bed as well. Monkey helps everybody out with their machines, and on that night there was a constant flow of people cruising by to borrow tools. Monkey is one of those guys who know how to make things work using stuff that you find in the very back of a junkyard: the sort of person who could probably win custom car contests if he gave a shit about things like that. Instead, he follows the West Coast KSR circuit, which includes lesser events in Ventura, California; Corvallis, Oregon; and Port Townsend, Washington.

He’s also the guy who wrote the open letter to Hobart that begins with: “You are a lying son of a bitch.” I received my own copy of his letter after I talked to Monkey about the old days of the race, back when it was a “drunken, adults-only” kind of thing, the kind of event where bonfires get out of control and the whole beach ends up on fire. Not the most responsible, eco-friendly happening, but a whole lot of fun.

The circumstances surrounding Monkey’s letter were sort of unclear, but he basically accused Hobart of being Hobart, of nosing around in all aspects of the race and playing his role as “Glorious Founder” to the hilt. A key component of race fun comes from the bribes all the teams carry with them. These are stickers, trading cards and little wacky notes that people who have broken a rule—pushing their rig in a no-push zone, not having all the requisite equipment on board, deviating from the race course—can slip to judges in an effort to avoid penalties. Follow the rules to the letter and you get an Ace Award. In his letter Monkey attacked Hobart for letting the bribes get out of hand, of diluting what he called the “elite corps” of those who truthfully Aced the course. Monkey admitted that the race is pretty much what he does year round, and that he’s not a very diplomatic person. He takes his anarchic all-terrain art races seriously, and he’s not alone.

Al Krauss, an acquaintance of Monkey’s, split off from the race several years ago with a separate set of complaints—though the idea that “it’s just become a parade” is a recurring gripe—to start his own Extreme Kinetic. The participants travel what Krauss refers to as the “historic” race course, a reference to geographic landmarks all but lost on those who don’t have several decades of races under their belt. It’s still 38 miles long, but more rigorous in that it’s a one-day event. Krauss’s project is in part a response to more of the KSR’s eccentric rules. The winner of the Extreme Kinetic is the vehicle that crosses the finish line first, with a Grand Champion Award given to the vehicle with the best combination of speed, engineering and art. In years past, Krauss has persuaded as many as three people to compete in his event. He’s also ridden the course alone just to make his point. This year he’s a consultant to a team of Eureka high school students competing in their first KSR with a machine called “Revenge of the Spotted Owls.”

The scoring criteria for the Extreme Kinetic are remarkably conservative when compared to the complex matrix of awards associated with the KSR. Rather than have a participant award, all non-winning teams receive a Loser Award, in the form of an orange ribbon. The first vehicle to break down in the race wins the Golden Dinosaur Award, which is a gilded plastic Tyrannosaurus Rex. There are trophies for top speed, best design and best engineering, as well as worst maritime disaster, but the biggest prize is the Mediocre Award. “The participant is more important than the winner,” says Hobart. “The winner is one of the extremes. But the mediocre—which is the middle of the pack—that’s the best example of what you’re doing. It always is, always will be. The best part of a watermelon is in the middle. I rest my case.”

The winner of last year’s Mediocre Award was team Area 51. They received a trophy and a night at the Angelina Inn, a hotel and restaurant in Ferndale. Hobart sincerely winces when he recalls their bar tab.

KSR quarrels spring up even when Hobart’s not involved. Monkey’s assessment of the 2002 field of entries was dismissive at best: A team of engineering students from the University of California at Santa Barbara were good designers, but “didn’t know how to work with their hands.” Nevertheless, they were the only team to win any kudos from the dour pit commander. In particular he was out to counter the awe I expressed at “Tide Fools”—an incarnation of the psychedelic lobster that would reappear in 2003 as “Surf & Turf”—and “Runaway Rhino,” an equally large black rhinoceros sponsored by Yakima, the renown bicycle component manufacturer. These machines—as well as a flying pink elephant—were designed and piloted by the unequivocal darlings of the kinetic sculpture racing world and the proprietors of a facility known as Kinetic Labs: Duane Flatmo, Ken Beidleman and June Moxon. Hobart may be the Glorious Founder, but these three are behind the glorious designs that keep spectators coming back year after year. They’ve gone on to appear on television programs such as TLC’s “Junkyard Wars,” and generated a fair amount of media coverage when Moxon and her partner Beidleman decided to pilot one of their vehicles across the continental U.S.

Tide Fools, on the road.

Duane Flatmo’s “Tide Fools” is a breathtaking piece of all-terrain art. The lobster’s claws move up and down, clenching at the air. When spectators are near someone cries “Animation!” and each pilot grasps pulleys or levers that make the crustacean’s skin come to life—the creature from the Black Lagoon pops up from a hiding place, antennae bristle, and a rotating octopus twirls around while its eyes bug out.

Beidleman and his “Runaway Rhino” team pilot a bicycle engineer’s wet dream of crisp, clean gears and drive trains clustered around a skeleton of chromoly tubing, all of it hidden underneath the black plates of the rhinoceros. Their team is outfitted in comically oversized safari gear complete with huge foam rifles, bush helmets and artificial hillbilly teeth. Moxon’s fluffy pink elephant is not quite as striking as the other two machines, but remarkable if only for the acreage of plush material that covers its hide.

The trick, Monkey tells me, is that they re-enter the same machines each year but with slight alterations. Which is somewhat understandable. NASCAR racers don’t rebuild their stock cars before each Daytona 500, and while float designers might do some retrofitting before the Rose Parade, they don’t have to take their untested vehicle through the sand dunes leading up to spectator-favorite obstacle Dead Man’s Drop. Monkey’s contempt represented a deeper resentment quietly echoed by a few other racers: The Kinetic Labs folks are relatively well-funded professional artists and bicycle engineers. Monkey and Area 51 work as seasonally-employed security guards, farmers or live off of government assistance. Kinetic Labs dominates the KSR by loaning out their dynasty of award-winning machines and offering consultation to newcomers. The fantastic entries that spring forth from their warehouse complex in Arcata also help bring in sponsorship dollars. Moxon’s entry in the 2003 race—a 17-foot-long flying horse called “Bridal Trail”—is a fully animated, 216-gear contraption that was originally constructed in January of 2000 with a $53,000 grant from Mumm Cuve Champagne. Monkey built his most recent entry from scratch by scraping together $500 and a borrowed drive train. DIY machines have their merits, but 2,000-pound psychedelic lobsters do tend to please a crowd.

* * *

The sign above the Kinetic Labs warehouse in Arcata is festooned with hot-rod flames. Dragons, wart hogs, dogs and dinosaurs hang from the ceiling. On the shop floor grease-covered men with stubble and women in work smocks with sawdust in their hair labor on kinetic sculptures. Saws buzz, blowtorches glow green and spectators cluster around several of the surreal machines that have been moved into the parking lot. A lot of people are just wandering around gawking; mostly middle-aged dudes with facial hair, tie-dye shirts and handfuls of Pabst Blue Ribbon or Miller Genuine Draft. True to Humboldt stereotypes, a lungful of pot smoke drifts through the milling bystanders. An unkempt group of young men are taking turns tooling around on a spazzy little tricycle that one of the tie-dyed moustache-guys tells me is called a “Trilobike.” The rider sits low to the ground between two large wheels and grips handles that control a swiveling smaller wheel behind the seat. This allows one to drive around in very fast, very small circles. Combine with beer and/or pot and you’ve easily got an afternoon’s worth of horribly dizzy fun. One hairy youth enthuses about the quality of drugs people must be taking here in order to construct such a delightful array of vehicles, while two others carry on in an unidentified language. Other passersby are drafted into painting “Runaway Rhino”‘s black armor white. This year the machine has been re-christened as “Al, the Albino Rhino.”

June Moxon’s team—”Bridal Trail”—takes its name from the party of bridesmaids that serve as her pit crew. Moxon pilots the machine along with a woman named Acacia, who will be married on the second night of the race by Hobart Brown to Scott, one of “Surf & Turf”‘s six pilots. The team of bridesmaids will pass the course in wedding dresses as well as towering blue Marge Simpson wigs. They’ve choreographed a tap-dance routine to the ’50s girl-group hit “Chapel of Love.” At the wedding, an oversized gag-ring will be delivered by someone dressed in a small bear suit. The “ring bear,” naturally.

It’s a lot to take, but Moxon is a gas to talk with, smiling constantly and managing to sneak wry asides and jokes into even the most serious of conversations. As for Monkey’s words from last year about the success of the Kinetic Labs machines, she giggles as she does at everything. “It’s no fun to be the one sitting at home cranky at everybody else,” she says. “The only time you really lose is when you don’t do the race, and you just whine about it.”

She’s been friends with both Hobart and Bill Neill for years—joining them for Halloween parties, pig-hunts, canoe trips, even living with Hobart for awhile—and offers a similarly pragmatic take on their falling-out: “It’s just sad, they had been friends for so long. Bill took care of Hobart for a really long time. He made things easier for Hobart. Bill has been an amazing asset to the race. We love him dearly. This is one big family and families have fights. And they have disagreements and financial problems. It’s sad though because Hobart’s in bad health. Pain changes people,” she says. “The person I used to laugh with all the time is not all there now. I don’t mean it in a bad way. You just can’t be.”

Neill is also here at the Kinetic Labs, painting the image of a Kinetic Chicken on this year’s Mediocre Award: an orange, 1979 Ford Pinto with plaid upholstery. He won’t tell me how much he paid for it, only that he bought it for the race. Neill has been master of ceremonies for the KSR for the past 15 years and he is dressed appropriately. The red band on his straw hat matches his red velvet vest. A necklace of heavy metal beads hangs from his neck and he sports a huge piece of turquoise in place of a watch. He is decidedly more confident here, among friends, than during the awkward confrontation in Ferndale the day before. He pulls a photo album from the back seat of the Pinto and shows me pictures of him posing with topless women at biker rallies and nude women at Burning Man. Neill seems like he’s basically a civilian biker with a way with tools. He’s a plumber by trade, and he’s also got pictures of motorcycles he’s built along with “hatchet-and-torch jobs” where he’s turned old Mustangs into convertibles. “I always manage to go where the naked women are,” he says paging through snapshots of Playboy Bunnies at wet T-shirt contests. These are interrupted by pictures of Neill hanging out with Hobart and company in his Ferndale home, of Neill and Hobart with former California governor Pete Wilson at the KSR, Neill and Hobart posing next to earthquake damage in Ferndale circa 1982.

Twenty-five years of friendship between the two men have been lost to poor bookkeeping and miscommunication. Hobart gets people excited about the KSR gospel, and Neill was no exception when they first met in 1977. Unlike the majority of the participants though, Neill’s enthusiasm translated into a financial investment in the race itself. That’s where things get kind of confusing.

In 1988, Neill and Hobart purchased a building together to house a museum of KSR paraphernalia. Neill also invested in the KSR by purchasing stock in the “Kinetic Corporation,” an entity that defies easy explanation. Trouble began brewing as Neill gradually became unhappy with the real estate portion of his investment. The property wasn’t making any money—admission to the museum consists of a voluntary donation—and he wanted to sell the building. Around the same time Hobart decided to sell the rights to the KSR to Bill Croft and the Humboldt Kinetic Association for $80,000, to be paid in $1000 monthly installments. Croft tells me the HKA basically asked Hobart what he owed in KSR-related debt and settled on that amount as the price. Hobart was happy, but mostly due to reassurances that the sale was based on promises to stay true to his version of Kinetic Philosophy: three-day race, wacky awards, accolades to the mediocre, crusade against suicide, adults having fun so kids will want to get older.

Neill was not so happy with this arrangement. Hobart allegedly neglected to inform Neill—the biggest stockholder in the Kinetic Corporation—that the deal was going down. Hobart felt justified collecting the money from the sale of the rights due to the considerable debts he had amassed over years of basically operating the race with his own credit cards. Neill claims that when he bought into Kinetic Corp. there was no obligation to take over Hobart’s debts since those expenses were not channeled through the corporation in the first place. Therefore when the sale of the building went through, Neill kept funds sufficient to cover the loss he took when Hobart sold the rights. Neill says Hobart ripped him off by selling the rights to the race. Hobart maintains that Neill ripped him off when he kept the bulk of the money from the sale of the KSR museum building. Neill now wants to bury the hatchet and has returned to the KSR as an emcee, while Hobart remains unwilling to “validate Bill’s way of life,” essentially boycotting his own race.

All of this—the amount of money changing hands under the guise of a corporation and the up-front eccentricity of the principals involved—prompts an obvious question: Did it occur to anybody to hire an accountant? Neill tells me that Hobart hired Arthur Anderson, laughs and then becomes exasperated.

“No,” says Neill. “You know what he used? A cardboard box and he put receipts in it sometimes. I love that.”

It’s a fiscal fiasco that seems to stem directly from Hobart’s charisma. The wonder of his power is compounded with the knowledge that this has all happened before with different individuals and non-profit groups who have been involved with the administrative side of the race. An article in the May 20, 1999 edition of the Arcata-based newspaper North Coast Journal details another confounding financial conflict between Hobart and the Kinetic Arts Foundation, an organization similar to the HKA that attempted to bring organization and structure to the race.

Within 15 minutes of meeting Hobart he told me what an awful businessperson he is, using quotes that pop up verbatim in other KSR profiles that have been written over the last 30 years. “I bought my building for $10,000,” he tells me of his gallery in Ferndale, “and I only owe $45,000 on it now. I think that’s pretty good.” And yet people are willing to embark on vague but expensive business ventures with Hobart, knowing full-well—because he tells them!—that he lives on financial assistance, files his multi-thousand-dollar credit card receipts in a cardboard box and proudly mis-manages his real estate investments. It’s baffling. It’s more like faith than enthusiasm, and further evidence that the ranks of the KSR are filled with those who—to paraphrase Denis Johnson’s words from Already Dead—arrive here in Humboldt in search of the saving fellowship of just such an obscure church.

In recent years Hobart has been spending winters in Australia. He first traveled there in 1979 as an artist-in-residence at Scotch College in Melbourne, but he’s returned since to start a kinetic sculpture race at the invitation of the Perth Rotary Club. He’s helped start other races across the U.S. and also in Poland. But it seems that Australia and New Zealand have some of the highest suicide rates in the world, and he is convinced that he can do something about that.

* * *

The Area 51 crew’s garage is an actual garage behind a house in a quiet Eureka neighborhood. A small army of large dogs goes berserk in the backyard when I ring the door bell, and a gruff-looking character in a “Veterans For Peace” mesh baseball cap steps down from a rusty pickup truck and asks if he can help me with anything. The dogs calm down as Beth Dunlap walks to the gate and invites me and Rainbow—the guy from the truck—to join her amid the roiling sea of canines. Tennis balls are everywhere, there’s some kind of vintage car up on blocks in a back corner of the yard and an oxygen tank gone crusty with rust hangs from a solitary tree as a sort of lawn decoration.

I spent a fair amount of time with the Area 51 team at last year’s race—they took me into their camp at Crab Park and generously shared homebrewed liquor and joints with me, along with all sorts of KSR stories about malfunctioning drive trains, slow-motion wrecks and acid-fried camp-outs. The team has been competing in the race for over a decade and they’ve earned a reputation as a hard-partying confederation of outlaws and misfits in a field full of outlaws and misfits. Dunlap has been piloting the machine for the last three years and also serves as Area 51′s unofficial spokesperson. Monkey—the pit crew boss who offered me that first glimpse of KSR schism at last year’s race—is inside the house laid up with bronchitis. People here are bustling around since James Taylor—one of several Area 51 patriarchs and the ringleader of last year’s beachfront debauchery—is on the way home from the Veterans Administration hospital. It’s his first visit home since having one of his legs amputated due to “poor circulation.” The team is undaunted and excited about the return of the man they now call “Zippy,” and promise me that while he won’t be joining the festivities at Crab Park he will be at the starting line tomorrow morning.

The women of Area 51 are large and tie-dyed and lovely, all smiling and cussing and laughing as they put the finishing touches on their entry in the 2003 race, “The Cosmic Wiener.” Dunlap introduces herself as Deth Bunlap, Beth’s evil twin sister and launches into their machine’s half-rehearsed back-story, something about a Wiener In Space Program (WISP). Sewing machines are running as the foam head of a dachshund is wrapped with star-studded fabric. The machine’s body is simple but effective—two recumbent bicycles frames welded together so effectively that they’ve made it through 15 races—and its decorations are sloppy and fun. The wiener dog has a lolling tongue that flaps in the breeze, ringed planets embroidered on its ears and a tiny alien peeking out of its anus. Everything is paid for from the sales of homemade Area 51 tie-dyes and with the assistance of sponsors including Louise & The Rock & Roll Doctor, Rabid Aqua-Bat, Al’s Diner and Sister Mary Vicodin.

“This is people with way too much time on their hands,” says Dunlap. “Either that or they’re shirking the stuff they’re supposed to be doing. It takes us all year long to catch up with our real lives. Everybody’s really pissed at us by the time race time really happens and they don’t want to hear about it anymore.” The extended Area 51 family encompasses 15-20 people, many of whom work together doing security for concerts and festivals. They get together on Sundays throughout the year, working on the machine intensely for months before the race.

Family metaphors abound when talking about the KSR, but Dunlap uses the more apt comparison of a company of harlequins. “It’s wonderful to see theater go out into the real world,” she says. “It lets everybody step outside of their comfort zone, their normal reality into . . .well . . . we can make anything possible! It’s just really cool.” Allusions to Christopher Guest’s Waiting For Guffman would be easy enough, though the earnest passion that defines so much of the KSR drama easily eclipses the improvisational histrionics of Guest’s cast. I duck out before James arrives home but can’t help but wonder how much the scene at Crab Park this year might suffer for his absence.

* * *

The irony of Kinetic Sculpture Racing—with its mythological origin story, bitter schisms, financial intrigue and meticulously engineered marvels of mobile folk art—is that the race itself is incredibly tedious.

The race starts in Arcata, home of Humboldt State University and the birthplace of radical environmentalist organization Earth First!. The town of 16,000 people is a Mecca for hippies and hobos: there are always a few scruffy travelers on the Arcata Plaza, a grassy square in the center of downtown. On 2003’s race day—an uncharacteristically sunny Saturday morning—there are literally thousands of people milling around. Hippie parents with feral children and environmentalist yuppies with fancy backpacks and Subaru Outbacks join standard Humboldt-variety cranks to ogle at the lysergic gathering of jalopies. One woman with an especially remarkable amount of fabric and beads in her distressed hair sits tossing flowers back and forth with her topless boyfriend, a smiling, ruddy-faced woodsman-type with spastic dreadlocks. Another woman in a bikini does the splits on the shoulders of two friends. Nearly half of the gathered crowd is either juggling or hacky-sacking. A marching band bearing battered, bent and dented brass plays Beatles songs. They’re clad in tie-dyed dresses, blue camouflage and one member is wearing a cape. They compete with an all-woman kazoo marching band that is dressed entirely in red.

Neill stands on stage with the Burlyman, both reveling in their role as showmen. The machines go through brake tests administered by men in clown suits, French military uniforms and judicial robes. Hobart is nowhere to be seen. At one point the “Albino Rhino” almost runs down a race official, an incident that prompts Neill and Burlyman to shout “pan-DUH-monium!” Jokes about the “divots” left in the ground where this official’s ass impacted are never-ending. The Dastardly Razooly, the official race villain, joins Neill and Burlyman on the stage. Considering so many of the KSR figures stay in character year round, it comes as little surprise that the black-masked Razooly plays hell-raiser offstage too. He owns the Tip-Top Club, a strip club south of Eureka. He had a difficult time obtaining permits for the establishment initially, so he opened it as an RV dealership where half-nude female sales associates peddled Matchbox-car-sized Winnebagos. He also serves as a perpetual Eureka mayoral candidate, running on a Libertarian Party platform. Anywhere else in the country and he’d be just another crackpot—note: his legal name is T. Great Razooly—but considering that this is Jefferson State country, the “Mayor’s Office” sign he hangs on the door of his office at his club may come in handy some day.

The entire field of entrants—some 30 or 40 machines—circle the square in anticipation of the air raid siren that signifies the start of the race. It sounds around noon and they head for the Manila Dunes. The town of Manila, pop. 1,000, is located on Route 255 just outside of Arcata where it seems like everyone lives in a sand-blown clapboard house. Salt-corroded automobiles are parked next to screened-in porches crowded with bicycles, plants and other detritus. The Manila Dunes are a protected area of coastline with strange grasses crawling over their surface. Signs dot the landscape identifying certain types of flora, beseeching visitors to stay on the trail so as not to damage the delicate habitat.

On arrival in Manila, racers gather in the parking lot of the Manila Community Center, a low-lying complex of buildings that host pre-school classes during the day and avant-garde noise bands by night. Teams enhance their road wheels with large, flat treads to increase the surface area and help with traction in the deep sand.

Each team leaves the parking lot alone to face the dunes, at which point they begin moving even more slowly. Wheels spin and kick sand, digging deeper into the dune system while the racers sit and sweat. Their slow pace is made painfully evident by the families, loaded down with picnic and beach gear, who stride rapidly past the struggling vehicles. One woman is hollering at her children and aggressively pushing yarrow—an herb found growing throughout the area—to both racers and spectators: “Here. Put this in your mouth. It will keep your saliva glands working and keep you hydrated. Put it in your mouth.” Once I’m on the beach there’s not much to do but plop down in the sand and watch the slow parade as I fall asleep.

After waking up sunburned, I walk back through the dunes to my car and drive up the 255 to Dead Man’s Drop. All of the KSR is characterized by gleeful hyperbole, but the Drop is actually kind of exciting. A sand dune declines at something like a 70-degree angle to a tree-shaded dirt road. One sculpture—the “Albino Rhino”—navigates the hill without assistance, shooting straight down and into the trees. It’s quite a rush to watch. But crew members hold on to the sides of most of the sculptures, slowing their descent. It’s safe, yes, but hardly exciting: a good crash or two would really liven things up, especially given the mock-fear teams indulge in when speaking of the race’s perils. Still, there are several hundred people gathered here to watch, along with heavily tattooed EMTs—Kinetic Medics—on standby. There are also many mosquitoes and shrieking children who take turns burying each other in the sand. I watch for a good hour or so, and then walk back to my car, passing as I go each sculpture I had just witnessed negotiating the Drop. Pit teams await the machines back out on the paved road, bringing the first day of the race to a close.

* * *

Most of the second day is closed to the public as the machines make their way south on the shoulder of the 101 freeway. The mundanity of the day’s course is offset by the promise of partying at Crab Park. Tonight there will be a lovingly absurd wedding ceremony, and afterwards a reception replete with cake and wine, fire dancers and fireworks. The safari hunters of the “Albino Rhino” will blast bottle rockets out over the ocean from the barrels of their comedy-sized foam rifles. After the wedding dies down though, most teams will retreat in small groups for quiet conversation. Area 51 isn’t here—they’re camping at their garage in Eureka to be with their recently hospitalized patriarch—and the scene is far more subdued for their absence.

I’d discovered the Kinetic Sculpture Race several years back while on a Humboldt County camping trip. After visiting the parks in the northern part of the county, my girlfriend and I stopped off in Ferndale, ending up at the KSR museum. A year later I dragged an old friend from Berkeley back for the race. After watching two days of the event, we crashed the racers’ party at Crab Park, looking to confirm rumors of debauchery. The rumors were confirmed.

Crab Park sits on the edge of Seven Mile Slough, a stretch of muddy beach found by exiting the 101 in the tiny dairy-farming town of Loleta and traveling between decrepit barns and melancholy fields on Cannibal Island Road. The racers set up camp around their machines. Pit crews make repairs; cooks break out Tupperware, hot dogs and organic salads. We set up our tent somewhat tentatively on the edge of the campsite, but our neighbors—an extended family of Kinko’s employees racing in a snail-shaped machine called “S Car Go”—insisted that we join them for supper. Soon, I was off to find some of the people that pitmaster Monkey thought would have some interesting things to say.

After passing around a pipe full of pot and an old water bottle full of a homemade blend of pink-hued alcohol called “corpuscle,” Rob Dog and Jim quickly identified themselves as just the sort of KSR people I wanted to talk to. Rob hails from a tiny town in the mountains of California’s northwest corner, Del Norte County. He grew up listening to the race on the radio—local bluegrass station KHUM broadcasts full coverage every year, their reporters embellishing the smallest of events into breathless improvisational theater—and made it down to Humboldt to participate in 1987. He and Jim have raced vehicles, worked as race officials and negotiated with gun-toting farmers in order to gain access to the beloved Slippery Slimy Slope, a backwoods bog that must be navigated by racers on the final day of competition. Their favorite stories involved race officials showing up at this particular farmer’s house without the requisite bribe—a case of Budweiser and a jug of cheap wine— and being met with drawn firearms.

They led me back to the Area 51 camp and introduced me to James Taylor, the Area 51 patriarch. Taylor was a gray-haired, mustachioed bear wearing a leather vest adorned with Grateful Dead and biker pins and a top hat decorated with hot-rod flames. He greeted me with a headlock and noogies, and held me in that position while he relayed his family history. He eventually released me and passed the bottle of “fine Jamaican sipping rum” from which he’d already had a tipple or two.

Taylor told me he was born in to circus life in 1949. His mother was the Headless Woman and his godmother was the Snake Lady. He’s wasn’t the only Vietnam veteran in the small circle of friends that had gathered at the tailgate of his Dodge pickup truck, so there were knowing nods when he discussed his frustration with being in a warzone during the Fourth of July on top of some very serious explosives and being unable to use them to celebratory effect. Area 51 helped contribute to the impressive fireworks that were exploding in the sky above an absolutely raging bonfire. The entire camp erupted in a chorus of howling, and a tiny poodle—its fur dyed with pink and fluorescent green polka dots—came scurrying out of the darkness and jumped into James’ lap. Due in no small part to the kif-dusted joints that were making their way through the group, everyone erupted in hysterical laughter.

Strains of conversation floated across the path I stumbled down on the way back to my tent later that night—people talked politics, bemoaned overly toasted marshmallows and played folk songs on guitars. Participants knew each other from years past or from the day’s course, and they came calling on far-flung encampments bearing inebriants or team-themed bribes. A couple of guys from Oregon representing team “#2″—a giant toilet whose pilot wore a hat fashioned to resemble a fly-covered turd—handed out small buttons made of poop-colored foam. Under the glare of work lights others toiled until long past midnight, the faint smell of acetylene torches mixing with the briny tang of the nearby ocean. The race is a slow, strange and grueling thing, but I was beginning to understand why people kept coming back.

* * *

The third and final day of the 2003 race is relatively short, but difficult. First, the machines must paddle their way across a mile of open water—slightly dangerous, but well-supervised by the Coast Guard. Following the water crossing, racers make their way overland to Ferndale. The Slippery Slimy Slope is not included this year, though I’m not sure why. The whole thing looked miserable last year. Miles out into the woods, racers harnessed their entire teams to their machines like mules. They hauled the heavy contraptions through a mosquito-plagued mud bog, their legs sunk up to the knee in a noxious mixture of water, dirt and—given the land’s everyday use as pasture—cattle manure. This year, due to a vague map, flooded areas and my own ignorance of the gravel roads linking dairy farms north of Ferndale, I miss the backwoods section and the Captain Morgan’s Slew obstacle that replaces Slippery Slimy Slope.

It mustn’t have been too difficult though, as machines begin rolling across the finish line in Ferndale around lunchtime. Neill and Burlyman both hold forth on a stage set up in front of Hobart Galleries, and I think I spy the Glorious Founder peeking from his upstairs windows. They re-hash the jokes of the starting line—the race official that was knocked down by the “Albino Rhino” remains a favorite and the divots his ass left in the pavement come up often—and Burlyman growls “pan-DUH-monium” every time another sculpture crawls over the finish line. The theatrical elements of the race are in full effect when, for the benefit of the camera crew recording the race for a television program called Weird Wheels, the racers re-enact the finish line as a mad dash for the trophy, rather than the leisurely downhill coast that it is. The “Mullet Bullet”—a gold Camaro whose pilots wear long mullet wigs and blast KISS tunes from a hidden boom box—goes over very well with the crowd. The “Two Ton Trike” recalls past races: it’s a vintage tricycle that stands close to 15-feet tall. A huge quad-cycle named “Wet Paint”—huge meaning wheels with spokes that brush the eaves of second-story windows—rolls by with a bagpiper blaring victory hymns from its upper platform. “Pan-DUH-monium!”

* * *

The KSR awards dinner is held at the Humboldt County Fairgrounds in Ferndale. A KSR merchandise table with T-shirts, key chains and tiny wooden Kinetic Chickens is set up in the entryway. Three or four hundred people are gathered here to eat spaghetti and celebrate: race teams, their friends and families as well as the dozens of volunteers who work with Bill Croft and the Humboldt Kinetic Association. In a race filled with puns (as-yet-unmentioned examples include the “Axles of Evil” and “Turtle Recall” teams and a Spectator Award that is a potato covered in specks) the final authority on all KSR award issues is a character named Judge Mental Case.

This hybrid of double-entendre and pun makes me dizzy. I sit alone at the back of the white-walled, fluorescent-lit hall waiting for everything to wind down until Rob Dog spies me on my own and insists that I join him and the rest of the Area 51 up near the stage. Team patriarch Taylor is here and I say hello briefly, but the rowdy biker vet of last year is faded on the meds blunting the pain of his recent leg amputation. Area 51 is just as raucous and excited though. They were the first team to break down in the race and will be taking home the coveted Golden Dinosaur Award.

The race has four categories of winners—speed, engineering, art and miscellaneous awards—and a grand champion. Kinetic Lab master mechanic Ken Beidleman and his “Albino Rhino” team take home the Grand Champion Award. They also receive accolades from most of the other winning teams, half of whom seems to have used machines either borrowed from Kinetic Labs or engineered there with Beidleman’s assistance. Appropriately, I hadn’t yet seen the overall winner in the speed category, a one-man machine known as “Rocket Boy.” The pilots of “Mullet Bullet”—looking like roadies for Judas Priest—whoop it up when their first place Art Award is announced, tossing devil horns in the air and eliciting a standing ovation from the crowd. “We just wanted to give something back to the fans,” they say. The Engineering Award goes to a guy named Melvin, by all accounts the racer with the most KSRs under his belt. The bridesmaids from Moxon’s “Bridal Trail” win Best Pit Crew, and in lieu of an acceptance speech launch into their tap-music routine while singing “Chapel of Love.” The Mediocre Award—the orange Pinto Neill purchased for the race—goes to “Rolli Polli,” a beetle-shaped vehicle piloted, ironically, by non-licensed students from Sunny Brae Middle School.

The festivities wind down like a family reunion. “This is the one time of the year I get to see all these people,” one racer tells me in a parking lot full of sweaty, exhausted people exchanging tearful goodbyes. Hobart never shows, which seems sad and uncharacteristically spiteful given the vaunted status he holds with all racers, even those whom he’s fallen out with. Kind words are said of him on the microphone, punctuated by Neill pulling open his shirt to reveal a T-shirt proclaiming his membership in the club of KSR pariahs. Extreme Kinetic founder Al Krauss has one, and apparently so does Monkey. It reads “Hobart Hates Me!” and wins hearty guffaws from those friends of Hobart and Neill’s who are privy to the inside world of KSR politics.

* * *

There’s already one book about Hobart’s life and the KSR, but it’s currently out of print. The day after the awards dinner Hobart asks me to write the next one, his first official biography. He’s already got a title picked out—Recipe For An Artist—and is supposedly chummy with an Australian publisher for whom he may or may not be working on a comic book about a wheelchair-bound superhero tentatively entitled Wheeled Angels. The book that Hobart published in 1990 is just called Kinetic Sculpture Racing. The first 200 pages are a guide to starting your own KSR and they read like an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Manual complete with scoring sidebars, special notes to judges and detailed illustrations of the hardware racers will need in a wide variety of environmental conditions. The second half is an oral history of Hobart’s life: His biographer gave him questions, a cassette recorder and transcribed the answers into the large-format paperback that sits on my lap.

I’ve heard Hobart happily outline his lack of financial skills. I spent the last week talking to people about how difficult Hobart is when you go into business with him. I witnessed the painful real-time breakdown of his friendship with Neill. Prior to this morning’s visit with Hobart, I called Bill Croft for a follow-up interview, only to find out from a member of the HKA board of directors that he’s resigned as race director, and that he’s so fed up with running the KSR that he’s left town. Yet I still consider Hobart’s offer of business partnership, which includes room and board. He goes on to tell me about the fallout he had with the author of Kinetic Sculpture Race, the book’s distributors and local booksellers, and I still spend the next few days throwing together a preliminary book proposal. Hobart’s not pushy at any point in our conversation—he gives me plenty of opportunities to back out—but it’s not until a month of deliberating and transcribing interviews with his long list of previous business partners that I call him and respectfully decline. Hobart doesn’t miss a beat and tells me he’s already got somebody else lined up for the job.

* * *

Jefferson State secessionists no longer set up barricades and hand out copies of their declaration of independence to passing motorists. They now rally under the slogan “Jefferson State of mind” and write vaguely Libertarian Web logs. The demand for Northern California resources during World War II meant that the muddy roads and decrepit bridges they were so pissed off about were mostly repaired long ago. Reliably rainy Arcata even got an airport, constructed by the U.S. Air Force in order to train pilots to fly in inhospitable weather. The Kinetic state of mind is far more alive in this part of the country, despite the civil wars that have plagued the KSR over its first 34 years. The race is far too entrenched in a collective spirit of gleeful anarchy to fall prey to bureaucratic bungling, spiteful grudges or financial mismanagement.

* * *

I spend my last day in Humboldt at Paradise Flat Farms, the home of Area 51 pilot Beth Dunlap. She’s a 41-year-old hippie who moved to Humboldt from the San Francisco Bay Area in 1982. She came into a chunk of money through an insurance settlement and invested it into a fertile six-acre plot of land in the central Humboldt town of Shively. This tiny settlement of timber workers and farmers sits in an impossibly scenic valley at the end of 15 slow, winding miles of timber roads; there are at least two deer for every passing pickup truck and suspender-clad lumberjacks assess my suspiciously non-4WD sedan with wary eyes. Dunlap lives on the far side of the town in an old calf barn that she and friends have retrofitted into a comfortable, if not entirely up-to-code, living space. The walls are clear plastic—keeping the rain out but letting the gray light in—and there are cats and dogs to keep the rats at bay.

She missed the Arcata Farmer’s Market on Saturday in order to pilot “The Cosmic Wiener,” and she’s making up time today plowing the fields with her magnificent John Deere tractor. She has a plastic greenhouse full of organic crops—tomatoes, garlic, basil, squash and a variety of pepper seedlings—that need to be in the ground but she takes an hour or so to show me around the property. We end up eating freshly picked raspberries at a picnic table in her back yard next to a huge parrot living in an equally huge cage.

Hobart is the Glorious Founder and for now the altruistic bureaucrats of the HKA make the rules, but the KSR is perpetuated by people like this: homesteaders like Dunlap, ne’er-do-wells like T. Great Razooly, dour savant mechanics like Monkey and giggling artists like June Moxon. The sort of people who consider pedaling art-covered jalopies across muddy bogs and sand dunes to be not just an extension of their chosen lifestyle, but proof of the privileged nature of that lifestyle.

“We get to go out and be awesome and lead extraordinary lives,” says Dunlap. “It’s fun as hell. Not many people get to ride around in a cosmic wiener.”

Daniel Chamberlin: http://www.danielchamberlin.com

BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 19 (Nov. 2005)

Administrator — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:25:33 +0000

first published in Arthur No. 19 (November, 2005)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

Boston’s Sunburned Hand of the Man have been devilishly busy this time out, blessing our ears and asses with a shelf-filling pile of audio goodness. The Complexion LP (Records) highlights their percussion-and-swoop angle more than some of their others. It’s a nice thing to listen to on a rooftop, while ambulances skedaddle around the corners. Bursts of internal static and much less jam-cuss-aktion than some might dig, but we are not they. The Wedlock 2LP (Eclipse) is a document of a trek the band made to Alaska three or so years back to play a wedding. Some of it is Wedding Album audio collaging of the haps, but there are also huge patches of the band in a weirdly Hendrixy mode with heavy jam flashes and rhythm underpine. Great looking package, too. And there are at least a couple of new CDRs. Live in Shit (Manhand) is an utterly spaced-out live show from some damn time and place, one of our favorites of theirs overall. And Knifelife (Manhand) is like eating an electric waffle and grunting about its pleasures or something. There’re plenty of analog crosshatches and rich hints of both butter and maple, but that’s only part of it, naturally. Bite it hard to discover more.

Seems like Jessica Rylan can’t do wrong (get it?). Yeah, anyway, she has out a boss new booklet of drawings called something you entered into or headed towards (WFOT). We guess the format is color Xerox, and they look totally great. Some are like Adolph Wolffi doing his versions of Patchen’s poem-paintings, others are just disturbed (or calm) and beautiful. Rylan mixes word and image with a really bodaciously intellectual primitivism. Worth many peeks, both fast and slow. And, as Can’t, Jessica has released a super stark-o clipclopped-note-beat-disaster 7” through the supremely jake Ultra Eczema label outta Belgium. The label is run by an illustrator named Dennis Tyfus and his sluice-and-gangrene color creations are HOT and WEIRD. His illo of Can’t on the oversized sleeve is insanely lovely. All the releases, mostly CDRs by the such outfits as Guam River (a John Olson zap-zone), are wild on the iris and his site is a fuuking trip to knock around.

The MVEE Medicine Show rolls yet again with a stunning new LP, Moon Jook (Records), which is the most devilishly musical-qua-musical move they’ve made in a bit. Matt Valentine’s guitar playing is really exceptional here, and Erika Elder’s grasp of all “little instrument” dynamics is a breath of pure meditative smoke. It’s true the pair (and their extended family) have recorded a daunting pantload of stuff over the past few years, but this one’s particularly CHOICE. Matt’s old bandmate (from Tower Recordings), PG Six, has a great new LP too, The Well of Memory (Perhaps Transparent; CD on Amish). Pat has been playing especially superb shows this past year and this album collects a few live favorites, all of which bristle with his mastery of many strings—guitar, harp, banjo, piano and on and on. There is a sweet melancholia that seeps through every note here. It will ebb and flow through synapses like burning honey. And the word is that his next album may be harp improvs, which would be hipper than shit.

Anyone who has wanted to sample the work of the great American poet, Charles Potts, but has been mind-dicked by either the abundance or lack-of-abundance of available titles, has just had a lucky day. The Portable Potts (West End Press) is a goddamn glorious paperback compendium of his work throughout a vast array of decades, styles, foci and haircuts. And this book may lack the visual oomph of seeing Charles get blown across the stage at the Arthurfest by Sunn 0))), but it’s a book that will satisfy in many other ways. It represents a real slice of Potts’ work from the wild ‘60s poems to the insane prose to the cowboy stuff to the Chinese stuff, to the sociology and all points in between. Be a sport and stuff it in someone’s stocking this Christmas, it would be a vital gesture in support of true culture.

Our knowledge of the Portugese underground is not what it should be, we admit it. But it just got a little better, with the arrival of two records by the Loosers. Not that there’s much findable info at hand, but the sounds themselves are sweet. A trio, the Loosers do a surprising number of things at once. Their basic focus is art-damaged power-pus, but they do it in a variety of ways, recalling everyone from Sonic Youth to Jackie O Motherfucker at various times. Their first LP is For All the Round Suns (Ruby Red) and it is a pretty wonderful blend of several generations of underground nonsense —from the Birthday Party to NNCK to My Cat Is An Alien—and could easily be the best new CDR from Brooklyn this week, if you know what we mean. But it’s a dandy looking LP and that ain’t hay. Nor is their second LP, Slugs (Ruby Red), although it is not quite as overloaded with sheer idea-wattage, taking more the form of debased prog-grope excursions onto the ramp of the ringed percussive o-mind. It’s a nice trip, with flutes and toots up the old wazoot. Why they only pressed 100 is anyone’s guess.

Best tape label so far this year has been Fag Tapes out of Ypsilanti, Michigan. The proprietor dude is Heath Moerland who either works or owns the record store that Mike “Hair Police/Wolf Eyes/The Haunting” Connelly works at. Which means, just by that association alone, this label is el sickosonik. He’s released awesome noise death jammers by the nefarious doom-improv unit Death Kcomm as well as straight-up bloodfeasts from both Hair Police and Dead Machines. Sad to say Fag Tapes only issues these animals in editions of 50 or so. But you can, at least by today’s date, still grab the best dealio from the label. That be the Street Freaks 2 and Super Street 3 “diamonds in th’ ruff” compilations with skrewed out trax by Pengo, Sick Llama, The Haunting, Tape Deck, Wolf Eyes, Sightings, Aaron Dilloway, Connelly and Death Komm. Again, these babies are in hand numbered editions of 50 and 75 respectively so you may wanna act FAST. (Update alert: since this writing Fag Tapes has released vols. 3 and 4 of the Super Street series so stop sleepin’). The two distributors who have this shit-fry are Volcanic Tongue in the UK and Fusetron in USA.

Some people have always loved a kinda strange kinda sappy ’71 folk album from Texas called Illusions of the Maintenance Man by Virgin Insanity (no label). And some people have loved it enough to reissue it in all its whacky glory. There are a few tracks that are way too “real people” hippie lounge ass whatsis to make me shiver, but there are also a few very stoned tracks—the golden hippie loss of “Once,” the odd tremor of “Livin’ Lives” and others. These make the record’s rep somewhat understandable. But the reissue is a far better value than the original. In the same package was Music from South India LP (no label), which is a great compilation of contemporary recordings of Indian classical music. This must be the first new LP of this sorta material in many a moon. As such, salute it.

Another nice set of “grey market” (or at least one assumes so) LPs is a new pair by Magik Markers and Sun City Girls. The Markers’ NxCxHxCx VOL. 1 (no label), which we imagine means North Connecticut HardCore as opposed to anything else, seems like tracks from their CDRs and is a ferocious blap into the mouth of the whale they so ably represent. They are a band that never fails to stun either on stage or on the box, and this album’s no exception. It is one heck of a bonus pants-down listening experience. The SCGs’ Montreal Pop (no label) is a recording from last year in Quebec and is a totally awe-inspiring glimpse at the power these guys have developed. It’s a thoroughly majestic prowl through every side of the band—from shockingly sweet ballad remodels, through to the blasted mid-east improv insanity that is their hallmark. What pleasant souvenirs.

Saw a lotta good hoedowns this summer; a lot of the old dudes kicking some of thee most radical ass were Dinosaur Jr, Gang of Four and Yoko Ono. Some great super newies also came in blazing. Particularly the welcome charm and mindblow magic bus of Finnish musicians: Kemialliset Ystävät, Lau Nau, Puukuu, Ijslar and other tripped terrestials. And flat out wonderful were Eyes and Arms of Smoke choogling straight outta Lexington, Kentucky where two of the dudes, Trevor Tremaine and Robert Beatty, kick out the jugular with Wolf Eyes. Eyes and Arms of Smoke jam from all angles. Most surprisingly with a deft touch on some weird hybrid of French/UK prog and open-ended improviclatter. The 4tet is enjoined by the vocals and small intrument playing of Sara O’Keefe and Ellen Molle. They have a few happening sides out right now. We say go for em all. Start with the In 3 Houses CDR and Moon Burn cassette on Trevor’s Rampart label, then the LP A Religion Of Broken Bones on Cenotaph Audio.

Speaking of Hair Police, though Connelly is graverobbing across America and Tremaine and Beatty are throwing down the above mentioned kosmiche goodness, you can get a weird and welcome inject of HP from their Beyond Leech Pit cassette on Fuck It Tapes who we wrote about a couple columns back. Your are archiving these, right?

Never heard of Oakland’s The Time Flys, but their debut LP, Fly (Birdman), is pretty much as its press kit says—classic, just pre-punk style punk. They’re right to namecheck people like Unnatural Axe and the Suicide Commandos, but there are hints of even more protean stuff from Luger to Thundertrain to UA-era Flamin’ Groovies. We mean, obviously they’re coming from a “place” where pop doesn’t suck, but the rawness of their approach to “the sissy science” is pretty damn bracing.

New York’s Sean Meehan is best known for his insane percussion work. Stuff in that area with Tim Barnes and others has always been a mind-warp. He also does cool visual art, and was last noted for the production of a very wily wooden box that could function as an instrument or a “mere” object equally formidably. His newest piece is Sectors (for Constant) (SOS Editions) which is a kinda white-on-white assemblage work that masquerades as paper CDs of solo cymbal work, mounted (more or less inside) some artist paper. I’ve been looking at it quite a bit today and it has a really nice feel to it. ‘What the hell else has Sean been up to?” is what we wanna know.

The Tone Filth label out of Minneapolis has released a great huzzing, over-drenched electromeditation tape by Glass Organ. It’s the aural equivalent of two dudes heads-down buried in the daylight skuzz of bent time. Nice. While you’re at it you may wanna pick up two other nasty noise burners from Tone Filth, the always killer and brooding jam stasis of Sewer Election (tape is called TRERIKSROSET whatever the fuckoo that means) and Romantic Fever by Impregnable, which is a great band name no matter what kind of emission you choose to exhort.

Just when you thought it was safe to eat croissants, France’s legendary free-rock band Mahogany Brain returns in not just name, but also in fucked-up function. Their first LP in 30 years (or so) is called Some Cocktail Suggestions (Fractal) and it has much superior weirdness to recommend it. Indeed, it is actually better than their last LP, Smooth Sick Lights, which is kinda hard to believe. There’s a buncha cracked-open amp-splonge guitar, electronic lip-puckers, backwards masking, treated vocals, Burroughs samples and all kindsa other, very fetching stuff going on here. Whether it’s a studio creation or the work of an actual band is immaterial. It’s a nice form-stretcher regardless.

Chris Trouchon is not just a distinguished musician in such bands as XBXRX and Hawny Troof. Nor is he just a fabulous dancer and dresser. Not by a long shot. He is also a vegan chef of great repute and his first little cookbooklet has just landed in our midst. The Hungry Truth: Recipes from the Cooler (NFJM Press) has a nice silkscreened cover too. Dunno if it’s kitchen safe, however, so be sure to buy two. And if you have a striped toque, put it on now.

Indiana’s John Wilkes Booze have piled up another strangely impressive slab of avant garage noise. Telescopic Eyes Glance the Future Sick (Kill Rock Stars) is like their earlier work, in that is combines motor city power sludge with highlights ripped off the twinkling costumes in the halls of punk rock, freak soul and space jazz. The combination at times reminds us a little of some of Fuzzhead’s—lotsa long almost groove-oid pustules popping in the night air, fires burning in the distance and somewhere, the sound of a demolition derby. Nice work, for fucking drunks.

We’ve blathered on about Finland’s Maniacs Dream previously but now we’re completely beside ourselves in dripping ecstasy whilst spinning the latest tape from MD member Fricara Pacchu. Titled Waydom it’s credited as being recorded in Turkey, which rings true as there’s amazing Turku rhythms and horns and drone/chant vibes running through all these trax. It’s all instrumental and one of the coolest recordings to come through since…shit, the last Maniac’s Dream deal. On Lal Lal Lal of course. Go.

Highly recommended for persons with eyes is Re-Visiting “Father” and the Source Family (Swordfish). It’s a DVD documentary by a young film-maker about the history and mystery of the Source commune and their formidable leader, Tom “Father Yod” Baker. The story is told by a buncha the original members of the Source, most of whom seem a lot more together than we would’ve imagined. The story itself is so nuts (or so ordinary—your choice) that it doesn’t really need much embelishment. The talking heads get across the whole tale with a minimum of fluff, even though it takes more than two hours to do it. We wish there woulda been more archival footage available (maybe some’ll turn up), but it’s still a great watch. The filmmaker’s tendency to insert himself into the action is a little annoying at times, but he’s just a kid, so cut him slack.

Almost indescribably beautiful is the new LP from Jack Rose. Kensington Blues (Tequila Sunrise; CD on VHF) is an amazing solo guitar record by any standard you can imagine. Rose’s technique has been formidable for a long time (check any prior solo record for beaucoups evidence), but this one really moves into a new realm. The originals have the same blend of blue tones, volk melodicism and two hand strength that have marked all the classic albums by the prior masters. And the cover of Fahey’s “Sunflower River Blues” is so deep that it’s a goddamn ocean unto itself. But our favorite piece is probably Jack’s own “Now That I’m a Man Full Grown II” which is one of the most mean and elegant guitar pieces I’ve ever heard. Jack Rose, man. Jack Rose…

Wow, the new deluxe and handsome volume by the Paper Rad Collective and Brad Jones, Paper Rad, BJ and da Dogs (Picture Box Inc.) is a fairly substantial chunk of hardball eye candy. It’s very crazy mix of post-ratty-art impulses and extreme sophistication in terms of color and composition, incorporating graphic novels, cartoonland installations, and an extremely crude surrealism. Comparable in ways to both the graphic work of Eye Yamatsuka, and also that of the crew from France’s le Dernier Cri, it is really something to see. These guys have sometimes driven us crazy with the overload of their videos, but their print work allows you to approach it at your own pace, and seen like that is pretty mesmeric.

Leslie Keffer is the person responsible for serenading the night skies of Akron, Ohio with beautiful bloodstream noise waves. She can be seen hunkered over her set up of mangled wire-feed and plastic-tronik, hair and eye-gaze falling into the circuitry creating sincerely scary and skin-piercing squall-tone. It would be difficult to recommend any one of her cdrs or cassettes but for our money we’d opt to crank on her recent split tape with Providence, Rhode Island’s HEART2Heart called Lover’s Quarrel. And then move backwards into her juice jams on Ramparts and Gameboy.

A nice guy from a band called The Assemble Head gave me a copy of their debut LP, Sunburst Sound (Sunburst Sound) and it’s a real nice slab of contempo psych. As guitar soaked as you’d imagine, but with sorta Floydian star-clusters in some sections, and others that are more like the vibe Crystalized Movements used to hit in their shorter, rockier songs. Not much info on the guys, but the record is cool. As is the new LP by L.A.’s 400 Blows, Angel Trumpets & Devil Trombones (Narnack). There’s no discernable trumpet or trombone we can make out, but what the hex? The sound is very stubby punk-based avant-thug stuff with some heavy-ass bass riffs that almost sound like feedtime trying to play the Wire songbook or something equally ass-staticy. D(yad) Yellow Swans have been noising it up for a while, but these expatriated San Franciscans have not cut much in the way of 12” vinyl. Lotsa other stuff, sure, but the format was often a little, uh, nasty. Here, it’s the sounds that unsoothe. Because Against Sleep and Nightmare (Weird Forest) is an actual LP, and one that you will enjoy, if you like the sound of monster dogs eating dinner inside a big iron shed. Typically, their recordings are not as drool-invoking as their living power-blat, but the dinginess of their electro-vision here seems more lovely than usual. Could it be the format? We say, yes.

Just in is the fully chipper 2LP version of Buck Dharma by Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice (Time Lag; CD on 5RC). Been hearing the CD a lot on drives, and the bonus tracks here add to the conviction that this is the Wand’s most solid smokestack yet.

Our summer reading commitments became quite challenged by general chaos and his infantry of freak scenes but we did get to sneak in Easter Everywhere (Prism Books) an excellent photo history of Austin, TX’s psychobeauty sons the 13th Floor Elevators. Along with the groovy pix it’s got some sweet insight writing and interviews with Roky and the boys.

St. Marks Poetry Project in NYC, so long the bastion of street world poetry, has out of nowhere issued a new po zine called The Recluse available from them. An austere and thoughtful selection of new and been-around names: Renee Gladman, Ted Greenwald, Marcella Durand et al. Hope to see more.

UK scribe Clinton Heylin, who wrote the must read From The Velvets To The Voidoids has edited a compendium of critical writings on The Velvet Underground, All Yesterdays’ Parties The Velvet Underground in Print 1966-1971 (Da Capo) This is no academic hooey, mostly brain popping published reviews, interviews and rock n roll essays from such hippie hipster rock mags like Crawdaddy, Fusion, Planet, Oz, etc. Awesome Lester Bangs and Patti Smith pieces, along with flyers and ad copy repros, make this a sweet kiss for all Velvet freaks.

If you have kept putting off reading Ed Sanders’ memoir of Lower East Side 60s radical hippy art, poetry, music, dope, sex, slurp, snort, felch universe then now’s the time to dig in, dig? A new and revised edition of Tales of Beatnik Glory (Thunder’s Mouth Press) has hit the streets and it’s a juicy giant of a joint. The current tome is doubly expanded with more memory lights being turned on by Sanders into the inside world of USA Hippie. Sanders was there, he was more than there, he was…there. Like his mentor Allen Ginsberg he was a supreme do-er with a grasp of the goof mind necessary not to have to prove how with it you are. Whoa.

Here’s a top 10 from To Live and Shave In L.A.’s Tom Smith:

TOP TEN FILMS BY BULGARIAN DIRECTORS
(source: Russian bootleg DVDs, purchased on site or given to TS by E. Solodkaja)
01. The Peach Thief (1964, dir. Vado Radev)
02. Running Dogs (1988, dir. Ljudmil Todorov)
03. Partisans (Life Flows Quietly By) (1958, dir. Binka Zeljazkova and Hristo Ganev)
04. Birds and Greyhounds (1969, dir. Georgi Stojanov)
05. Under the Yoke (1952, dir. Dako Dakovski)
06. The Prosecutor (1968, dir. Ljubomir Sarlandjiev)
07. There’s Nothing Finer Than Bad Weather (1971, dir. Metodi Andonov)
08. Time of Violence (1988, dir. Ljudmil Staikov)
09. The Unknown Soldier’s Patent Leather Shoes (1979, dir. Rangel Valcanov)
10. Iconostasis (1969, dir. Hristo Hristov and Todor Dinov)

Superb, the lot, although my Russki yzek’s not quite good enough for me to parse pertinent narrative details from Bulgarian. Depending on which side of the fence you slouch on, probably all better than K-PAX.

Over and out, motherfucker.

5RC: www.5rc.com
Amish: www.amishrecords.com
Birdman: www.birdmanrecords.com
Cenotaph Audio / Eyes And Arms Of Smoke: www.cenotaph.org/eyesandarms
Da Capo: www.perseusbooksgroup.com/dacapo
Eclipse: www.eclipse-records.com
Fractal: www.fractal-records.com
Fusetron: www.fusetronsound.com
Leslie Keffer: www.lesliekeffer.com/
Kill Rock Stars: www.killrockstars.com
Lal Lal Lal: www.haamu.com/lallallal
Manhand: www.sunburnedhandoftheman.com
NFJM Press: www.nfjm.org
Narnack: www.narnackrecords.com
Perhaps Transparent: www.perhapstransparent.com
Picture Box Inc.: www.pictureboxinc.com
Rampart: www.geocities.com/ramparttapes
Records: POB 381869, Cambridge MA 02238
Ruby Red: www.freewebs.com/rubyredlabel
Jessica Rylan / Can’t: www.irfp.net/index.html
SOS Editions: 242 Broome ST. #2, New York NY 10013
St. Mark’s Poetry Project: www.poetryproject.com
Sunburst Sound: www.sounburstsound.com
Swordfish: swordfishrecords@btconnect.com
Tequila Sunrise: www.deletedesign.com
Thunder’s Mouth Press: www.thundersmouth.com
Timelag: www.time-lagecords.com
Tone Filth: tonefilth.org
Ultra Eczema: www.ultraeczema.com
VHF: www.vhfrecords.com
Volcanic Tongue: www.volcanictongue.com
WFOT: 412 Classon. Apt. 2, Brooklyn NY 11238
Weird Forest: www.weirdforest.com
West End Press: PO Box 27334, Albuquerque NM 87125
Lal Lal Lal: www.haamu.com/lallallal
Tone Filth: tonefilth.org
Volcanic Tongue: www.volcanictongue.com

Opening Feb 27, NYC: FRANK HAINES “Under the Shadow of the Wing of the Thing” at Lisa Cooley

C. L. Hornbeam — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:24:33 +0000