1. Venedikt Erofeev writes eighty pages to cheer his friends up, and 10 pages to make them forget all cheerfulness.
What a wonderful balance. What a gift!
2. "Sad eyes" at the party at 5:04
3. Throat buzzer as ultimate comedic prop (though it stings me to type this)
4. Here: I am nice. I will type out a bit of Moskva-Petushki, known also as Moscow to the End of the Line.
The narrator is in a restaurant. He has been denied service. He just wants a little sherry. It is early in the morning.
"Why are they all so crude? Eh? And so blatantly crude at the very moment when one oughtn't be crude, when a person has all his nerves dangling out, when he is chicken-hearted and placid? Why is it always like that? Oh, if only the whole world, if everyone were like I am now, placid and timorous and never sure about anything, not sure of himself nor of the seriousness of his position under the heavens--oh, how good it could be. No enthusiasts, no feats of valor, nothing obsessive! Just universal chicken-heartedness. I'd agree to live on the earth for an eternity if they'd show me first a corner where there's not always room for valor. "Universal chicken-heartedness." Indeed this is the panacea, this is the predicate to sublime perfection. And as for nature's activist inclinations...
"Who's getting sherry here?"
Looming above me were two women and a man, all three in white. I looked up at them and, oh, how much ugliness and vagary there must have been in my eyes then. I knew that just by looking at them, because my ugliness and vagary were reflected in their eyes. I felt myself sinking somehow and losing a hold on my soul.
"Yes, well, I'm...almost not joking. Well, so, there isn't any sherry, I'll wait, I'll just..."
"Whadaya mean 'just'? What do you think you're going to 'wait' for?
I threw the phone down in disgust. Why would I want to do that? I have pride--a certain sense of principles.
-No fucking way. As if I'd be in your music video. I am an artist, not a fancy dazzler. Fuck you.
-Oh, sorry; I forgot to mention we'll pay you one thousand dollars.
I threw the phone down in shock. I trembled. I crawled over to the shrine of Zeus, a supplicant at his stony knees. I emailed Delphi and asked how I might best handle this.
-Ummm, hello. Yeah: just looking at my calendar. Hmmm; actually, as it happens, I do have a fewwww days off.
-Oh, really? That's awesome!
-What kind of a video is it? Not that it matters. And who is the star? Not that it matters.
-You are the star. And it's a surf video, to be filmed in the West Coast town of Tofino.
I winked at the glowing, encouraging eyes of Zeus--time to push this into overdrive.
-I demand to be paid in cash, in American currency, and I demand to be flown in and out of location by float plane.
-That sounds reasonable.
-Goodbye.
And I laughed, and put it out of my mind, and thanked blessed Zeus, and for the next two months I did not think about it once, until the night before I was to board my float-plane.
I realized, rather late, that I had not received a ticket. Do float planes run on reservations? Am I on a list?
I made the appropriate queries.
-Oh, ummm. Yeah. The float plane. It will be two thousand dollars--
-And? Yes? I am sure you have access to that kind of money.
-Ummm? Are you serious? I can't tell if you are serious.
-Why would I not be serious? How would I benefit from un-seriousness?
-Hey: listen. We are sending by two old friends to pick you up. Haydn and Mike Rak.
Zeus' eyes were glowing red at this insult and blasphemy. I hung up.
We drove up to Tofino. The whole time I sat in the back and spread strife and discordance.
-Yes, hmmm, I wonder what I will spend my ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS on. Yes, it is nice to be a star. Hmmm, I wonder what the rest of the crew is being paid. Oh, it is none on my business, really. I should just be happy to be paid one thousand dollars, and be happy, I suppose.
I could see a few crumpled and dirty 5 dollar bills hanging out of their pockets. Their cheeks were hollow. I bit into my artisan hoagie. I tasted caramelized onions and fine salami. I instructed Mike Rak to drive more in the center of the road, so as to not get any gravel dust in my beautiful, luscious hair.
When we got to the film shoot, Mike Rak and Haydn marched over to the director. There was some kind of angry exchange. I yawned and fanned myself.
At the beach there was a commotion. The director had rented the same camera that had captured, in stunning slo-mo, the sharks in Planet Earth. It cost close to one million dollars, but only thousands of dollars to rent. It gleamed in the sunny haze.
The "locals" walked by. Their wet-suits hung from their sinewy bodies. Their stringy hair spoke to days in the rip-tube, in the swell-curl. They saw a million-dollar camera, on a ten-thousand dollar tripod, and many kinds of professional lights strung around the camera.
They began to assess the facts. Grizzled men in wet-suits, huddled around a million-dollar camera. Surely this was some kind of professional filming event, and these were professional surfers, for if not, then why the expensive camera?
Mike Rak pointed to me.
-Yeah, this guy is the star. He's a bit of a Malibu legend. You've probably heard of him: His name is--
--Zane. Zane McDermott.
I heard a telephone wire of Zanes rocket around the beach. Zane McDermott; a legend. A surf hero, so true to the wave that they had not even heard of Zane. Amazing, awesome, incommensurable, that Zane should be dipping his toes into the rip-swirl.
I looked into the sun. I looked into the quilt of clouds. I gazed as Zane might gaze.
After about an hour of dry-shots, the tension was unfathomable. People were crowded around the shoot, chanting Zane's name in time to the crashing of the waves.
No one stopped to think, 'Why does this chubby little beaver not look like a professional surfer? Doesn't his belly get in the way? What is his secret?'
I gazed some more. Pure 100 percent Zane McDermott.
It was finally time. I twirled my board up over my head with just my little finger. I trotted with assured confidence into the foam. I was Zane. I became Zane as my ankles disappeared beneath the foam. But I fell down. I tripped. I spat water. I blubbered. I sat in the foam for twenty minutes and tried to velcro my leash on. When I looked up, in faint hope, I saw that my career as a professional surfer had ended. Even the crew had disbanded, for a short time perhaps believing their own lies.
I looked to my right and saw the sea hurl Mike Rak onto the rocks. It was like an Egyptian myth-painting. I laughed. Hubris.
That night there was another commotion. They hadn't brought enough wood to make a brilliant fire. We needed a camp-fire, for a very important shot where my character, aka the star of the video, falls asleep by the campfire. And then sea creatures come out of the sea and rip my guts out.
So Todd had an idea. Since he is a pyrotechnics wizard, he suggested that I lie on one side of the fire, and he would go on the other side, just out of the vision of the kino-eye, and then dump gasoline on the fire, just as the sea-creatures came into vision.
I objected to the plan. I have a wife who loves me as I am. But I do not want to test the bounds of that love by coming home with gas burns all over my face.
There ensued a righteous chorus of tut-tut-tutting, and assurances. Todd even filled up a trash-can of water so I might quickly douse myself, should the unthinkable occur. I ignored my suspicion that gas burns hotter than the cooling properties of water, and consented. It was 4 in the morning.
It worked!
The last scene was to have me dragged into the actual sea; the moon was to illuminate the gentle, celestial-lit foam. But it was raining. The tide was out. The tide was so far out, that after being dragged for two hundred feet through the murk and mud and seaweed, we were no closer to the lip of the sea.
-Cursed ocean! Where are you! Show thyself!
The electrical cord had reached its limit. They had only brought two hundred feet of cable. I had been dragged through two hundred feet of muck.
Someone pointed to a creek, a tiny tributary.
-Drag the star through that. It might look okay.
So they did. They dragged me over a small ledge into a creek, and dragged my flailing body for another one hundred yards.
I ran away.
In the morning the director drove me to the bus. He had got some good shots. He paid me that which I demand and deserve. We hugged.
I burned one twenty-dollar bill and the thigh of a bull for sweet Zeus when I got home.
1. One time I was playing guitar in Fargo, or actually Moorhead, Minnesota, and I was pulling on the whammy bar and stomping on my rat pedal or whatever, and when I looked up I saw a giant wisp of a man looming over Melanie. She was trying to play her drums and trying to ignore this skinny shadow that had fallen on her.
I thought, 'This is a new addition to our band. How unheralded!'
He had a white plastic jacket on. He was eight feet tall. He had the well-trimmed brown beard of an insane man. He looked a bit like Michael Gross. His ears were covered in orange fuzzy-foam headphones. He was like some giant Tallahassee swamp plant, all stalk and no trunk, and he was looming over Mel. He had a proprietary look on his face.
We, being professionals, finished the song. I played with my back to the audience though: I was keeping an eye on this intruder.
He was a close kin to the strange anthropomorphic tube creatures that car dealers rope to their lots, thinking that this fluttering mascot will attract potential customers. He moved and swayed as if only the wind of creation filled him. He had his own beauty.
When the song ended (this was a Destroyer concert), the room was filled with a general silence (as there often is between songs at a Destroyer concert, unless Dan is wasted enough to try and crack a joke about polar bears caged in Stanley Park, or...actually that is the only joke, or semblance of olive branch, that I have ever seen extended).
Anyways: the silence. It was broken. The raving insane man was pointing at Mel. He was babbling. He was screaming at her: "You were in my pack! I know you...I do know you!"
He was rocking on his feet, and cradling his headphones to his head, as if in the middle of a transmission.
"You danced under my whip!"
At this point I considered interceding. But Mel is strong and I don't play the part of protective husband very well. And this last statement seized my pre-adolescent, pre-sexual imagination: a whip: one could whip all kinds of enemies with a whip.
And I could see through his plastic jacket, and I saw no concealed whip.
"You were part of my pack! My dog pack! You were a husky, and I made you mush!"
"In your past life! You were a dog, in my pack of dogs! Now Mush! Mush! Mush!"
He seemed quite sure about this.
Peter, our large roadie, jumped up and was like "Hey you freak! Get away from her!"
I guess I should have done something like this, something similar.
But then a really wonderful thing happened, wonderful for everyone but Peter and, perhaps, Mel. The whole audience came down on Peter.
"Hey, don't speak to crazy Herman like that!'
"That guy fought in Vietnam, dude!"
"He does that at all the shows!"
"Sit the fuck down!"
"Who yells at a crazy person? These people need compassion, not accusations!"
"Yeah Peter!"
This last comment was from me.
Peter looked around in confusion, as if he had just gone to his girlfriend's family's house for dinner, and he had yelled at Grandpa for peeing on the toilet-seat. He slunk back to his post.
2. This was at a place called Ralph's, across the river from Fargo. Ralph's was great, because it was free. So, "crazy Herman" and "wasted Pedro" (the most drunken individual I have ever witnessed) could waltz in and out of the jamz. And so could the music lovers. And so could the frat boys, who might eventually, after repeated exposures, become music lovers themselves.
Pedro might lie, like a starfish, on the floor, drumming on his chest or moaning along to the band, a full three beats behind (it took more than a few seconds for any sound to penetrate his cloud of unknowing) without the fear of "cover charge".
Crazy Herman can strut in and out, depending on whether or not he recognized any of his old mush squad now re-incarnated in human form, without fear of "cover charge".
So, in a society of niche, and codes, and fractured but (alas) ultimately homogenous gathering spaces, it was wonderful to be in a real free space.
But people need to charge money for things, and Ralph's closed down.
This essay is about two things: A. The experience of returning to a place, and how sad it is when places that we love close down. B. More importantly: Fargo as the ultimate model for a scene.
3. I took a page out of Pedro's book that night, and I drank and drank and drank. I got so lost in my stupor, and I forgot that my "job" was to play guitar (a job that, night after night, I performed with little skill or ability, but with an endless cache of gusto). I forgot about Dan's songs, and I looked at wasted Pedro with love and respect. I could "see" him.
I thought 'What would Pedro really want me to do right now?'
So I walked up to Dan, who was in mid-acapella "figure-skating sluts", and I elbowed him in the neck, thus incapacitating him and ruining both his Chicago and Minneapolis shows due to a bruised windpipe. I grabbed the microphone, and started skanking around the stage, singing, in my best hobo-thrash voice, my own acapella rendition of "Holiday in Cambodia".
Surely this was that Pedro wanted from me!
Pedro was actually taking a time-out to the right of the stage. He was slumped over a table that had three fresh pitchers of beer on it. He had his mouth and face in one frothy pitcher, and he was gurgling and kind of half-drinking, half-spitting, breathing and blowing. His hair was creating scuzzy oil pools in the beer. Since he was slumped over, he also had to put his hands somewhere, so he put them in the other two pitchers on the table. So Pedro, who had been cut off at the bar, had now laid a sovereign claim to all three pitchers of beer.
Pedro was the filthiest human I have ever seen: a roofer that works 8 days without washing, falls in a ditch, and rolls around in some dumpster juice before coming to the show. He had tar caked underneath his fingernails. His bare arms had so many dirt splotches they looked like camouflage.
The owners of the beer were just coming back to the table after a nice urination, or a quick dance, or a rousing game of pull-tabs. They emitted that nervous and unbearable air of "first date", but with one female tag-along friend to make sure that Brad didn't, you know, get any naughty ideas on Debbie. They did not share my immediate love for this man. They sadly surrendered both their beer and their table to Pedro.
After about five seconds of my hoarse acapella singing, Pedro's head snapped up, spraying frothy Coors Light all over this trinity of bummed out Fargo-ites. He started flopping around like a scarecrow drenched in coors light. He clearly approved! I'd gotten through to him! I knew I could...
...good for me...
...but this is the end of the night for me...I'm falling...into darkness...
4. In the morning, when I woke up, I had some predictable apologizing to do:
"I'm so sorry that I let that crazy man just bark at you, and let him say that you used to be one of his dogs in a mushing sleigh team. I shouldn't have just stood there laughing, giving him a thumbs up".
"I'm so sorry that I elbowed you in the neck. No, don't speak, it only makes it worse. I'm sure your voice will be better by Minneapolis or Chicago, I'm absolutely sure of it."
"I should never have tried to be like Pedro, or communicate with him in anyway whatsoever!"
And various other apologies...
One immediate mystery was: "Where are we?"
We were in Dilworth, Minnesota. We were staying at the Dilworth Inn, across from a culinary establishment called "Illegal Burrito".
I found out that we had driven just a touch out of Fargo, just a few minutes, and found a very cheap but clean motel. This combination of cheap and clean is a treasured rarity (for a counter-point, see: "the Quarry Inn" just outside of Washington, D.C.: beast urine, crack pipes, semen stains everywhere...but 5 dollars cheaper than the motel 6).
The premise of the establishment was that the burritoes were so big, they were practically illegal. But in America, a country that prides itself on its great freedoms and the individual's right to choose what ever seems appealing to him or her, this seemed like a contradiction. It should read "Illegal...everywhere BUT in freedom-loving U.S.A.".
I am still a hungry child, so the idea of "so big it's illegal" gets me excited. Poor Dan: he could barely squeak out his order for one super illegal burrito. It was fun, and good, or at least okay, and then we left Fargo/Dilworth full of mirth. That was, in many ways, the most positive show on that tour. We should have cherished that mirth.
5. So, a few years later, Frog Eyes pulled into a show in Fargo, returning to find Ralph's demolished. We searched for some semblance of "that which had been". All of our favourite haunts had suffered greatly since our virgin voyage.
Pizza Commando was but a toothless yawn in the mouth of a strip mall. Ralph's was a pit with the wrecking ball of Damacles swaying over it.
But what about Dilworth? What was happening out there? The locals feigned no knowledge of Dilworth, so they were not much help. And I kept badgering them about it, as I thought it was odd. I thought it was odd how their Norwegian faces twitched when I mentioned Dilworth, and their cheeks burned with shame.
They also were a bit puzzled by all of this talk of "Pedro" and "Illegal Burritoes". No one knew where Pedro was, or even who he was. We did hook up with Herman, but he seemed kind of distant, kind of distracted by something on the horizon.
Who's that guy: Herodotus? Yes, Herodotus. Herodotus watches a random worker roll some boulder down a dusty path and describes this with great feeling and detail. The worker knows nothing of Herodotus, of his aims and hopes for his "history". But Herodotus writes and immortalizes this one worker. Isn't that cool?
But what do we mean by immortalizing? Do the worker's descendants rooster around their workplaces, reading out p. 345 of the Histories, and claim loudly that "this was my ancestor!" Who even reads the Histories? Who reads the Histories and stops and really ponders the lived life of the worker? What did he eat? Who did he love? Where and when did his dreams die?
6. We played our second show in Fargo and it was fun, not so revelatory, but still quite fun. A rowdy woman became convinced/converted by our music, if only for a short time, and she bought us a tray of shots. This is always a nice move, especially if there are no social strings attached.
Of course, the large shot glasses were full of strawberry blush wine.
There is a temporal purity to these conversions: though we are her favourite band for 45 minutes, we will never see her again, and upon waking in the morning she will have no recollection of anything remotely musical. She will look at the unopened CD with detached puzzlement, and throw it into the garbage. She will put her signed T-shirt into the donation bin at the Sally Ann. And then they will put it on the racks, and someone with vague familiarity of the band will scoff and shake their head and wonder why we don't just give it all up. Cruelty abounds.
But for that single hour there is no questioning her fealty to the music.
7. Anyways, after the show we drove out to Dilworth. We drove out with high hopes for the comfort and cleanliness of a certain Inn, and a certain breaking of the fast with a certain illegal cone of spice and shredded pork. Mirth was palatable. Strawberry wine was in our bellies!
Predictably, and tragically: The Illegal Burrito was not only closed, but no restaurant had taken its place, so it was a preserved but decaying mausoleum of what had once been.
The Dilworth Inn was in the process of being converted from an Inn into a jail. It was in the in-between stage of construction, its gaping holes illuminated by our headlights. It was not quite Inn and not quite jail. We sobbed. We pulled our hair and thrashed our breasts. Not quite Inn and not quite jail. Somehow this all felt very familiar.
We went across the street. It looked quarry-ish. I went in to the tiny lobby with one-hundred dirty crumpled one dollar bills in my hand. I don't need to describe the lobby.
When I play music, I sweat. I cannot help it. Sometimes after a show I have the appearance of a man who has just stepped out a lake, but fully-clothed. So, from the motel owner's perspective, a dirty and crazed man holding a green egg of money had just walked into his office, drenched to the bone. Mysteries abound.
I really had to urinate. I try to drink a lot of water after our shows so I can re-hydrate. All of this water was now demanding freedom from my near-bursting bladder. The old man behind the counter saw me wincing, and squeezing my legs, and doing the "touchdown dance", and hopping from one foot to the next, while he, as slow as possible, so as to get a good read on what kind of moral character I possessed, checked the room availability. His eyebrows arched thoughtfully as he painstakingly went through his register.
There was not one car parked in the motel parking lot. Every single key to all 25 rooms hung from their pegs. I was trembling in pain. I had to pee so bad. This was it. I had to go. His pencil went slowly down the columns of his checked-in book. I had to act.
"Sir, please excuse me for but one second, I have one important but neglected piece of urgent business I must simply attend to!" And I bolted out the door and around the back of his little lodge, sprinting and hopping and yelping. I was illuminated for one quick second by the headlights of our van. I ran around the corner and found only complete darkness. I was in a field. This was the last structure before the farms began. I let it all out.
After this brief interlude, I waltzed back into his little den. I whistled. I was calm. Nothing weird had just occurred. And, of course, no explanation was given to anyone waiting in the van who just witnessed me bolt out of the motel lobby in a panicked sprint.
"Hi there...I was just in here a minute ago? About a room? Yep, that was me?"
Some silence between words.
He wets the side of his lips. He looks at me with not-quite disdain, but with the forefront of disgust.
'How many people?"
"Four, good sir!' Four weary travelers!" I said, wringing out my sweat covered shirt onto his floor.
"Four? How many rooms?" This was more curt and automatic.
"Well...hmmm...One or two? Two or three? I think...I think..."
"Hmmm...What would we favor on this blessed night?"
"...I think tonight we'll just go with one room. Yes, one room for the four of us."
And with my intention laid bare, he launched into a well-worn statement. His eyes narrowed, and the spittle at the side of his mouth seemed to foam and bubble:
"Well, you can take your money and march out that door, 'sir'! I will no longer play host to any college sex parties!"
I felt my soul whimper.
"I know what the four of you will be doing all night, carousing in ________, and _________ while the one watches, and dual _______ and _________ while the three sleep! No! Never! Go back to..." And at this point he made a spitting sound. He did not actually spit on his own floor, but he did make a spitting sound.
"..Go back to Fargo!"
Quickly suppressing my shock, I put my palms down on his register, as if to send back to the fiery depths all of his insinuations and presumptions.
He continued:
" Go back to Fargo! And spread the news! No more college-style sex parties in Dilworth!"
I stopped my ensuing retort and thought about this. Getting a bullhorn. Spreading the news. Driving slowly down sleeping residential streets. Spreading the news: "To repeat! That's right: breaking news! No more College sex parties in Dilworth! Plan accordingly! Do not attempt a college sex party in Dilworth! Under no circumstances should you attempt this! Whereas in the past it was tolerated, even perhaps encouraged, it is now officially forbidden" and so on.
I was tired. I didn't want to pay for two rooms--this act would decimate my green dollar egg.
I looked into his eyes. I made my own trademark "kind eyes" at the man.
I said, "Sir. Kind sir. Please understand me. And please know that I understand you. For we have just been in Fargo. And it is nothing if not a pit of sin and gluttony and sexual corruption."
"That, sir," And I raised my arms to vaunt the lobby, to celebrate this space as the last bastion of purity, in a world gone horny, "that is why we ventured out to Dilworth, so as to sleep a restful sleep and escape the wild hootering and hollering of Fargo."
"Sir, I assure you, we are not even in College. It is just I, and my wife, a nurse [for some reason I always bring this truth up, in times where I need to prove my moral sanctity], and her two male cousins. We are Canadians, sir. Just a few Canadians, two legally married, and two traveling cousins, trying to find a bit of peace and safety in this wicked world."
And then I peeled 40 one dollar bills off of my egg.
"Now, sir. Given that we understand each other, I'd like to offer you 40 dollars for one of your fine rooms, given that it's 3 in the morning and we will just be sleeping, and that is a discount from the advertised price of 55.00$, but, still sir, I think the fact that we understand each other should account for some kind of discount."
And then I gave him some more nice eyes. He turned around. He had his back to me. He took one key off of the key rack. He handed it to me. His actions were smooth, like a reassured cat.
I put the money on his guest register.
The money was so sweaty from being in my pocket that it was making the blue ink on his guest register squiggle and distort.
8. The thing that I wanted to accomplish in this essay, which I have not even grazed, is how much Fargo means to me.
In my house we have beautiful silkscreened posters from Fargo, printed on thick card, beautiful Sigmar Polke-style layering and juxtapositions, beautiful advertisements for our shows.
They are always working on their sound system--this is important for both the audience and the performers. The kick drum has an authority and a solemn weight in Fargo. The sound person is kind, always helping with the set-up.
The promoter comes to the show, and watches the bands, and claps and dances and drinks strawberry blush wine and claps some more. This is enormously important.
I cannot properly accomplish what I set out to do in this essay, so I think I will stop writing. Otherwise, my essay will turn into syrupy gushing about independent-music scenes, and collectives, and kids making spaces that conform to their idea of how art and artists should be both consumed and treated. I could gush about that stuff. But all writing needs conflict and tension, and I have nothing more to add in this regard.
It's not a cool war. We do not need to vie for strategic rights. He has done his thing, and I have tried to do mine.
But, even though it's not a cool war, I still insist that I was into Mcrorie WAY before BECK.
Check out his website: Mcrorie.net
Follow his twitter (things sure have changed from 1992, when the only way to keep track of MCRORIE was to tape his annual performance on Timmy's Telethon): http://explore.twitter.com/mcrorie
Or, for the Plunkett, Saskatchewan readers, please attend the following dates:
One of the great and ill traditions of my life has been the May 24. It's pronounced 2,4, not the 24th. It's a camping trip.
The 2 4 is a reference to the flat of WILDCAT or DUDE or MOLSON XXX that one purchases. Then one goes into a forest and furiously, psychotically drinks these beers. There might be other people around. There might be fires. But mostly there's the sound of you cracking your toxic can and guzzing, guzzling, chugging, swilling, pouring that stuff inside of you. Then there's a few mutterings, and grumbled asides, and the occasional cackle. It's great fun. The rain pours down the cedars and down your neck.
The idea, I think, is to create a little post-apocalyptic version/vision of hell. Let's call it Hadesburg. Hadesburg has about 25 people in it. Someone is always puking. There's a chant, a chant that I actually wrote. Every five minutes, when the inane, drunken babble dies down, and the crushing despair starts settling in, one person only needs to hum the faint melody of this chant, and all the motley camp jumps up, moshing around the fire in Rabelasian abandon, all yelling the Thoroughgood-esque mantra:
Over and over again, all chanting and drinking and fucking and puking. It's camping.
I am poor. I will always be poor. By this I mean that the stench of poverty oozes off of me. I can never be rid of it, so in order to feel not suicidal, I've embraced it. I'm "poor guy", but poor guy who can tell a joke or whatever. At least that's what I tell myself when I show up to a camping trip with a rice cracker and one can of Mike's Hard lemonade. Like: I better be fucking funny this weekend or I won't even be able to secretly cop a buzz.
One of the 2 4 traditions is to immediately set up a command station, a central nervous system called "The General's Table". This is a great feat: a gigantic old-growth stump is dragged out of the brush. Its crown is painstakingly leveled. All of the company's many twixxers (26 ounce bottles of hard booze) are ceremoniously placed upon this stump. They gleam with the pomp and shine of a round table of historical generals, the amber haze suggesting golden epaulettes, and the many golden bottle-caps all hinting at the grand splendour of Caesar himself. Great bottles the size of small dogs dogs are dragged up to the General's table.
One year a texas mickey of Canadian Club was brought to the table. A texas mickey is so large that it needs a pump.
Canadian Club is a drink made for and sold to razor-slashing psychotics from the flatlands, people who smell like carburetors and despise their teeth. It's a rusty and corrosive drink. I initiated a ritualistic throwing of the cap-of-the-bottle into the bush, thus insuring that the texas mickey would be consumed immediately or not at all. So brazen, I was.
Anyways: this one year of frugality and restraint, everyone started looking at me, to see what I would place on the stump. I could hear that harsh, many-tongued robe of rumour scurrying about the camp. I heard so many damning and judgmental comments winging about the scene: "Only one CAN..." and "He only brought..." and "I bet he won't even offer me a sip from his can" and so on.
I said something like "I'm going for a walk to the creek". I had to get out of that pressure cooker, or my mooching secret would surely be laid bare.
So after a refreshing head-cool in the icy rush of a spring stream, I nonchalantly whistled my way back into camp, heading with great feigned purpose to the General's Table, my intention being to take a dip in one of the bottles that I had surely and evidently brought, this fact evinced by my cocky and confidant stroll to the table.
And as I whistled my way up to the table I saw a damning, scarring piece of evidence: my one can of Mike's Hard, emptied, violated, shot-gunned to death.
This was as much an indictment as a tarring and feathering: "we know what you brought and we know what you are up to and we are NOT going to let you get away with it."
My heart raced, and my hand quivered over the bottle of Vodka I was reaching for. I was deprived of my mojo. My top lip was icy. I was hundreds of miles away from the nearest liquor store, and I was outed, and I would surely have to spend the whole weekend sober, nodding half-heartedly along to the umpteen performances of my chant, whilst the stars overhead mocked my fate.
And then came the flood of righteous anger: "Who drank my can?" "I was going to enjoy that, I was going to nurse that all weekend." "Just because I only brought one can doesn't mean anything." "Those classist bastards."
Bereft of witness, or clue, I gazed into the many-eyed ring of spectators and accusers. My crowd roared in laughter, my thoughts painted scarlet across my face. This could not have gone better for them. My essential nature was laid bare, both in passion to steal their booze, and passion to bring to justice that thief who had stolen mine.
A kind-eyed friend named Lief stepped forward and grabbed a bottle from the General's table. He grabbed one icy bottle of vodka, which I think I am known to enjoy. He patted me on the back. It all had the air of drama to it--the transgressor, the kind but stern interlocutor, and the ring of audience/accusers/jury.
Leif looked kindly into my eyes and unscrewed the cap. This was still clearly part of the play, some kind of twisted medieval Passion Play that I, due to my eternal thirst, would gladly play the villain in.
People started chanting "Shots!" "Shots!" "Shots!"
I got excited, which was odd and idiotic because I knew of course that this would not end well. Lief kept flashing me his kind eyes, like the cat in The Master and the Margarita. He poured a double-shot, and people started chanting a very classic line of "Pretend it's juice! Pretend it's juice!"
I drank and drank, and I felt my soul drown in the ugly twilight of a foul spring day, and I was dead before the darkness even arrived.
I woke up in sand. I was nude, but for my skivvies. Three people were sitting on me. I groaned, like "Where the fuck am I?"
I should have asked: 'What am I?'
The answer, had I asked, was a human log.
I rolled around like a possessed swine, a pig of Gadarene, throwing my captors into the ring of heat that emanated from the fire. I snorted and cursed and found my pants and crawled into the brush like the foul boar that I am.
In the morning, when the company woke up, there was a similar-smelling deposit of vomit in each and every person's tent. It smelled vaguely like Mike's Hard Lemonade.
Even though I had clearly not gotten even a drop of my chosen elixir, I was still blamed and cursed out.
"Well if you hadn't bought that Mike's Hard Lemonade then no one would have gotten so drunk anyways!"
"Awww, I feel Sick. It must have been from that fuckin' prick who brought that one can of hard lemonade."
"And where did you even go after you crawled off anyways? Probably to puke in our tents, you fucking bastard!"
"It'd be just like a guy that brings one can of Mike's Hard Lemonade to go and puke in everyone's tent!"
Of course, I wasn't able to answer any of these charges. I could only meekly reply, from the depths of my own hangover, "But I never even got to drink my Mike's Hard Lemonade."
Years later, _________ admitted to both the shotgunning and the vomiting.
After a few more days of incrimination and obliteration the camping trip came to a close and it was time to get in someone's car and drive home. Coincidentally enough, I hopped into Krug's van. We didn't really know each other then; in fact, I was probably known to him as, you know, that guy who brought that one can, and so on and so forth. He had a VW van that his grandpa had given him.
It was quite nice--I was in the back, lying in the bed. I was lying with one of the dogs that had come; this dog is called "Casey", and it has some bad habits like trying to bite children's faces off and eating shit. I am not a child, so my face was safe, and I was happy to share the bed with Casey.
Anyways, Krug and his girlfriend Jayna were in the front seat, yakking away, as he drove down the dirt logging roads that transport an entire company to Hadesburg. The spring heat beat down on the dusty road and all of that. I had my walkman on. I was escaping into sleep.
Every once in awhile I smelt the most violent reek, and shuddered and judged Krug, for what seemed like some serious gastro-intestinal disorder.
The reeks began to increase: the air was now brown, it was so thick one could grow a potato in it. I noticed that the van had stopped moving. I stopped my walkman and took off my headphones and turned around to view my chauffeurs. I had been looking out the back window.
"Umm...Carey? What's up, man? Is everything, umm, okay?"
"Yep. Okay. Just fine."
We looked at each other for a full minute without saying anything. There was a real weirdness. And wow: did it ever stink in there.
"Well, we just wanted to make sure that..."
And he looked so pained.
"That you never had an accident."
I had no idea, and then I had an idea, and I was ashamed that they'd think that about me and then I was doubly ashamed because I was thinking the same thing about him. I looked at the dog, because a dog can be a comfort.
And I saw the dog eating something that had clear and unmistakable stink lines coming off of it.
The dog had eaten bear shit, and then puked the bear shit up, and then it was licking the puked up bear shit.
I started wailing and crying. And that was the moment I decided to go to University.
Swan Lake is a musical project that I am a part of. It’s not quite a “band”—we have no drummer, no bass player, no help. There are only songwriters. There are three songwriters: me and my good friends Spencer Krug and Dan Bejar.
One day we were in the studio, and we were sitting in what studios call “the lobby”, which is a front-window-secretary-space with couches and a coffee maker and usually a Nintendo machine. We were sitting on these leather couches when the most tortured, un-listenable sounds started floating out of the mixing room. This was the sound of our first record: I think Dan or Spencer said “it sounds like a boar dying in a tar pit.”
I am an excellent synthesizer: I have very little creativity, very little spark, and I only possess a knack at fusing things together and making causal connections. Immediately the image of a wild and frenzied boar in a tar-pit passed through my mind: it was gasping, bleating, gnashing, and death-moaning in the tar-pit, the ugliest sound on earth and in earth. I said “Let’s call our record Beast Moans”. We were laughing a lot—it was nice. I miss those guys even now.
Beast Moans was recorded through a DIGI 001, a piece of shit that looks like a dolphin. I remember a week before we started our project, waking up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, thinking ‘Oh my God all we have is a DIGI 001 and it looks like a fucking dolphin.’ I was really scared.
We had a bit of money and I thought about buying an APOGEE ENSEMBLE, until I turned one on. Every light starts blinking at once, and all the lights are barney-coloured and cotton-candy coloured, and any hope of conjuring up some “Morrison-like plunge into the darkness with mebaby mojo fest” is eliminated by this gaudy and pukey light show.
I am speaking about analog to digital converters here: The microphone captures the sound, the pre-amp gives the sound its shape and its tone, but this sound or signal is still in an analog format. After the pre-amp, the sound can go to either an additional shaping device, like EQ or Compression, or straight to the recorder. If the recorder is digital, like a computer, the analog signal needs to be transmogrified into a digital code, represented as “zeroes and ones”. Some boxes do this really well. Other boxes are shitty—the DIGI 001 is famously shitty.
So the record ended up sounding pretty shitty!
There are some pretty interesting ideas on Beast Moans though, and at least shitty is a sound.
2.
I've had an idea, a concept, for my music for some time. This idea is best represented as a gigantic bowl of vibrant, pulsating, intersecting wet spaghetti noodles that wrap themselves around two or three monolithic meatballs. So in a song like “City Calls”, the umpteen snaking vocal lines and mimetic organ and guitar lines wrap around the only slightly-saucy meatball of a floor tom, or a meatball of a Dan Bejar singing “and the ill-milk in your bones…”, and this song might be thought of as flying towards you in space, and as it grows closer you realize that it gets bigger and fills more of your vision, that is to say that the negative space is being continually blocked out, continually being eaten up by this spherical mass. At the same time you realize that the plate is getting bigger, you also realize that your vision does not become more acute, you do not notice any new detail about the surface of the meatballs or about the make-up or consistency of the vibrant noodles—the image eats up more space, but you don’t ever get any more information about what is eating up more space. So in the end you feel angry and like puking, but you also can’t really look away. I hope.
Except that I do not feel that I have ever represented this idea in my music successfully.
3.
We laid down our bare-bones parts in a small barn on top of a mountain range. We used RCA 77dx mics, and great river pre-amps, and a blackface 1176 compressor, thanks for asking. The bare-bones tracks sounded pretty cool. We should have just left it at that, but I wanted spaghetti and meatballs. So I fucked it all up or whatever. It’s no big deal: I fuck a lot of things up.
I can’t remember if this essay had a point. I started it a month ago and remembered to try and finish it today.
4.
One of the funny things about Enemy Mine was that, for all this talk about collaboration, there wasn’t too many times that we were all in front of a microphone or a monitor together.
Allow me to digress, and through digression I will come to a point.
Melanie and I: we live a soft, domestic life. We go to the same video store everyday. We have a relationship with the woman at the beer store. We know the cashiers at the grocery store.
The recording of Enemy Mine, due to everyone’s schedules, was kind of weird and intense and I did not get to see Melanie as much as I usually like, which is of course every waking second. In fact, I hardly saw her at all.
And I never saw Spencer for the first two weeks because he was tangled up in his life in Montreal.
So for the first stretch of Enemy Mine recording in February 2008, I spent every waking second with someone whose soul I am slightly less mystically connected to: Dan Bejar.
The clerks and cashiers who, for years, have seen Melanie and I cuddling in line to buy our carrots or arguing over Terms of Endearment (my choice) or Krull (her choice) or canoodling while we wait for our Africanos, now saw me with a new constant companion: Daniel, with his trimmed beard, and his scarf, and his tan jacket, and his city-guy loafers, and his eccentric hair and his distant, superior, European sensibility.
Every day at the video store, and the beer store (buying Strongbows no less), we would giggle over something, and he would buy his Spanish wine and me my Strongbows.
Important: all of the “Recording” money was in Dan’s account, so he was always paying for everything. This act occurred many times, and the act procured more than a six-pack: he bought Toilet-paper and coffee. The kind I always get. And a toothbrush.
I think these are things couples buy.
I started to sense this palpable anguish from the younger members of our cashier-community.This anguish was not strictly homophobic, but more a question of TRUE LOVE: where was Mel? We seemed so in love!
And who is this bearded guy who is buying everything? What are you two giggling about? What are you doing, man! You’re throwing your life away! This guy: what’s his story! And shouldn’t I have waited a respectable month before I introduced this new companion to my community?
Lines were drawn, and though Melanie and I did not know it, the community sided with Mel. It’s funny to think: she was just working away at her nursing job, totally oblivious to the immense community outpouring of sympathy that was being psychically channeled against me (and this decrepit urban usurper), and in favor of her.
We had no idea.
This went on for two weeks: by the end of our time together, I fully expected some life counseling: a cashier intervention.
And then one day Spencer showed up, and the very next day Dan left. And the whole sordid, or seemingly sordid, ritual of video-renting and Strongbow-purchasing and toothpaste/toiletries buying started up again, but now with my new friend. This ritualistic living began anew, but now with my new young-looking handsome cherubic friend. And still: no sign of Melanie.
As if I had ditched Melanie, burned through Dan, and had now settled on this latest untarnished prize.
Succubus with a blonde beard.
So now they were like “Well, we were just starting to get used to that old dude, that guy with the beard, and now you’re bringing this new little guy in? With his soft voice and his canvas shoes and his gentle mannerisms? What’s next? Who the fuck is next? Where’s Melanie? Where’s old guy? Who’s this young guy?” and so on and so on, a vicious and dizzying cycle of serial mono-ga-tude and homophobia-lite chorusing out of their judgmental gaze.
And then, as if the torrid clouds of my new “experimental lifestyle” had passed over our island and headed out to the open ocean, Melanie returned to my side.
The first part of the tracking of Enemy Mine was done!
We had our gentle life back. I made all kinds of triumphant appearances at our local haunts, my arm wrapped proudly around Mel: Even the nihilistic stock-boy who doesn’t believe in love and who makes puking sounds when we smooch by the canned peas, even he was openly sobbing tears of relief. The universe had righted itself. Old poet and young page/squire were phantoms of mist. Melanie and I laughed and joked in the aisles.
The old guy at the video store who loves his rye and cokes looked me in the eye again.
5.
We did a second round of singing and plinking in Vancouver, at JC/DC studio, in April 2008.
I felt comfortable there. I had one great experience at JC/DC.
Let me write it down if I can.
Dan was off reading Paul Reiser’s Fatherhood, or grabbing a pizza, and Spencer was in the singing room. JC and DC were out of town. So, on this day, I was without qualification the master of the control room.
I was rolling around the floor, rolling in freedom, rolling because the control chair has wheels. I had my feet up on the computer like Spider-man’s boss. I was in charge.
We were working on one of Dan’s songs—I think it’s called “Ballad of a Swan Lake”. The last two minutes of the song is chiefly Spencer and I wailing “I sat down / and took a number / at the table where / death resides”
What a beautiful line. It’s courageous, and noir, and of course very funny. I walked around for months softly singing this song, this one line: it puts a lilt in my step. I felt lucky.
As I’ve said, for the last half of this song, there’s one track of me wailing this line, over and over again. And then Spencer said “let me try wailing!”
And of course he did his wailing. And then he said, into the microphone, “Let me try doing another track of wailing!”
And I was like “Fucking A”!
So I panned his first wail to his left headphone. This means you only hear it in your left headphone or speaker. This is the difference between “Stereo” and “Mono”: the ability to assign or weight specific tracks to one speaker. It supposedly creates more space.
I kept my wail “in the middle”, meaning it went to both headphones equally in volume. And I put his soon to be recorded second wail on the right side.
Think: Three horsemen galloping down a narrow and short stone canyon, two of them identical twins, all three riders screeching a litany about death. Each horse has an identical human face, a classic mix of Spaniard and Sephardic Jew. The face of the horse bears a well-manicured beard.
I had a kind of platonic vision of music when he was recording his second wail. I saw beams and streams of yellow light emanating from the tweeters, and I saw condensed tendrils of purple oozing from the woofers. I spun around and around on my control chair. I lost my mind in the righteousness of it all. I flew into the birth milk of the cosmos and I smelt a star, I fell onto the top of Mt. Olympus and I picked a yellow flower out of Zeus’ sandal. I did, I did: all of this, I swear. But this is personal, and I am not sure if anyone else will have a similar reaction if anyone else ever comes to hear the song.
And then Spencer asked “How was that?”
And I pushed the speak button and said “Pretty good, bud.”
It's one of those holes: as soon as you step into it, you never get out. It sucks, but once mired in the muck, one cannot seem to break clean. I've been thinking about it all day--I woke up with a fever about it last night.
Why didn't the eagles just fly Frodo into Mordor?
Think of the ultimate flying Eagle-Diamond: Gandalf at the point of this eagle-spear, full of white light/white heat and Enya song. Legolas is to his right, quivering bow in hand, ready to pierce Nazgul-throat. Aragorn is to his left, re-forged sword in hand, ready to strike! and Frodo and Sam huddle on the King of The Eagles' back in the middle of this deadliest strike force. And Gimli and maybe Radagast the Brown in the back, just rounding things out, whizzing on Cirith Ungol from the heavens.
It just seems easier to me than all that climbing and soot and orc-breath.
This is the first post in a recurring series where I assign a
photography mission to my good friend and excellent
photographer Chelsea Lowe.
By "photography mission" I mean this:
I send Chelsea into a place of business that distresses or interests me, and I get her to take pictures. I then re-create the menu or merchandise based on my impressions of her photos.
The first place Chelsea has agreed to go is a magic-themed coffee shop in Langford, BC.
The coffee shop is called "Illusions Cafe: the Magic of a Fresh Cup".
I haven't been this perplexed since I first heard about Long Island's "Yogourt 'N Such".
2. PRESTO-PESTO BAR:Occult-oats. Presto-Pesto.Tastier than you’d think. Not starving? Ask us to "saw it in half!" 8.95$ "sawed in half": 8.25$ (plus .70 cent "sawing" surtax)
3. HOUDINI-CANO: Our magical twist on the Americano—the Houdini-cano will help YOU escape from the boredom box…with Pizazz! 3.25$
1. I like the lights of Christmas. I remember being ten years old. We lived in a log house in the real north. We cut our own tree like real bushwhackers. Our log-house had a really high ceiling, so the tree that we chose was probably twenty-feet high. We lived in a sea of timber, so it didn't feel so wrong then to grab and kill a tree just so your presents can have a sylvan reflection. In fact, across from our house was a mass of rotting logs. I think my dad fell in it once, and scraped up his sides from the many broken and sharp limbs that protruded from the logs. So wood was neither holy nor precious.
We spent days stringing popcorn and lights around the tree. These days of stringing and tree-decorating were really nice times, time spent with my parents and my brothers.
Why were they so nice? Because we lived in the country and my only friend was a Neo-Nazi. I never told my parents this at the time, because I didn't know what it all really meant, but looking back, my only friend definitely was a Neo-Nazi. At least his parents were. They were Germans. They had Swastikas.
I was old enough to know that this was a really bad symbol, but not so old that I was ready to cut ties with my only friend. And I was only at their house once. They fed me butter fried hot-dogs, and I puked. I still can't eat fried hot-dogs, because they remind me of fried hot-dogs. And they remind me of Nazis.
He showed me his brother's room. His brother had guns in his room. Hand-guns. And racks and racks of cassette tapes with toxic names like "stormtrooperz 4 death" and "Blitzkreig 2: the gathering" and other names that now in retrospect sound like Highlander movies. And when he came home from whatever he filled his days with he gave me a look that was like a robotic scan for racial purity. He had a shaved head, he was lean, and he was full of toxic anger. My skin shrieked and shrank under this gaze.
Years later I learned that a real skinhead group was discovered on the edge of our Northern town. They were operating some kind of race war bullshit training ground, with automatic weapons, in this town that we lived in. I thought of my friend with real fucking sadness. What a piece-of-shit way to start your life, in a mobile trailer on the edge of an ugly Northern town in a Nazi house, surrounded by Nazi parents and a robotic shit-kicker of a brother. My friend was an amazing artist, even then, and it sometimes occurs to me that art for him, even though it was expressed in highly detailed drawings of m-16s and bazookas, was as valid an escape as anything I've ever put together in my adult life. I remember later, after our friendship had organically dissolved, seeing the swastika on a t.v. show and telling my parents that his parents hung that shit all over their house. My parents were really really upset.
Anyways: a twenty-foot high tree is fun to string. And if you are young, and the house lights are out, you can sit under it and let the coloured lights cascade into your sub-consciousness, and rock yourself into a feeling that is not dissimilar to tremolo. As if your body is one big metal sheet, slowly flapping and bending. This was my first and best psychedelic experience.
2. One year for Christmas my parents bought me Harvard Moccasins. I think that's what they were called. They were shoes made from suede, and to keep them from spoiling in the winter slush, I'd tie plastic bags around my feet. And then I'd be terrorized by the bangers when I slushed through the smoke pit. I was at a weird stage, where I hadn't yet realized that a certain tact and grace was required in order to make it through the world un-charlie-horsed or whatever. My parents were really poor, and even though everyone made fun of my slush-proof get-up (and by "made fun" I do mean punching me and throwing lit cigarettes at my plastic bag shoes), I was proud of my shoes, and I was proud of the fact that my parents would go out of their way to help me look like a prep. So my love for my parents got displaced into a love for my moccasins.
-Anyways, that X-mas day we all went out for breakfast. It was the first Christmas where my brother and I asked for clothes instead of Electronic Battleship or cross-country skies, so I think we just wanted to strut our duds out in a public situation. So we drove into town. All the restaurants were closed, except Bino's. Bino's, for those who don't know, was like Denny's. But, because of our society's latent anti-immigration bias, a chain called Bino's fell by the wayside in the grease-rush to capture that quintessential familiarity that seems to be so important in choosing a breakfast restaurant. I don't actually know if it was the quiet racism that killed Bino's, or if there were other factors.
Actually, Melanie just pointed out the aural connection between Bino's and Bean-o, an anti-fart pill.
-The actual meal was kind of depressing. We were the only family there. The gravy brown booths were occupied by solitary drunks and travelers. We were rubbing it in. And, in our new aqua-velva cable-knits and suede boat-shoes, we were brutally over-dressed. I used the pay-phone to call my friend Reg and tell him about my shoes.
He asked, "where the fuck are you?" I said, "Oh. At Bino's." He was probably stretched out in front of his fire-place, his golden retriever lapping cracked chestnut jewels out of his palm, a steaming eggnog on the rug and a plate of homemade blueberry griddlecakes coming his way. Stretched out in front of a crackler in a new cashmere house-coat. I was at Bino's.
So every year my dad asks us if we remember Bino's, as a way of honouring Zeus, who mixes our lives from the jars of happiness and sadness that sits at his feet.
In 1990, when I was fifteen, my family moved into the Gordon Head Townhouses.A man named Bob lived there.He was not quite our neighbour, but he was close enough to suck my dad into his world.This story is about Bob, and my dad, and a horse.
The townhouses were laid out in a square, and all of the back patios of the housing units surrounded this malformed, lumpy square of grass.On a summer day every patio wafted out cigarette smoke and grass smoke into the courtyard.The harshest sounds emanated from Bob’s patio: sadistic cackles, homophobic curses, a river of profanity, “fucking cocksucker” every thirty seconds, roadhouse modern blues.Bob was elevated amongst the rough-and-tumbles for sending a revealing picture of his girlfriend to an outlaw motorcycle magazine.It was published.
I never went to his patio, but my dad did.He is much friendlier and less judgmental than I am.I have a sensitive nature.My brother, who was thirteen, was summoned to the patio.He had to run to the store for packs of cigarettes and pornographic magazines and mojo-fries.This exposure, brief as it was, ruined his education.He is only now, fifteen years later, recovering from the corruption.
My dad began spending every minute with Bob.My dad was, at this time, the maintenance man for the townhouses. The maintenance of the units was thrown into abeyance.
In the winter they moved their days indoors and Bob bought a Sega Genesis.They played Sega golf and kept a diary of their wins and losses, an artifact that represents every victory and every indignity that they shoveled onto each other.The record-keeping was immaculate.A page might look like this:
May 17, 2001:
Bob wins.Fuck You Randy.Fucking Cocksucker.No fuck you Bob, I won.No You didn’t Randy go fuck yourself.Get a fucking grip Bob you lost.Eat shit randy I won
This goes on and on.When my brother and I found this diary, immaculately preserved and kept in my dad’s safe, we were flabbergasted. Why?To what end do these two men keep these scores?Will there be an eventual winner?How can a winner ever be decided upon when each and every proclamation is vehemently contested by each participant?And the language: Bob was unable to write one sentence without repeated threats to my dad.A kind of mantra emerges after a close and repeated reading of the text: “I’ll slit your throat and throw you in the drink.”
I think “the drink” is a lake where Bob throws his victims.
2007: Bob no longer dates outlaw motorcycle women.He doesn’t live in the townhouses.He lives in a motel.His neighbour is not my dad.His neighbour is a man named “Bearkat”.One night Bearkat lit his own leg on fire with gasoline.
Bearkat didn’t want to go to the hospital.He just wanted to keep partying around the motel campfire, while his leg smoked and blistered and reeked of charred flesh.He was furious when the ambulance came.
Bob somehow met a young woman named Celeste.She was oddly not repulsed by his neighbor Bearkat, and she was not repulsed by Bob’s years of hard-partying, or his cackle or his homophobia, or the decades between them.She moved in with him.
Celeste was wanted by Crime-stoppers.
Bob was so in love!No more outlaw motorcycle magazines for him!
He wanted to shower her with gifts—but what gifts?
-Steak every night, even a steak occasionally for Bearkat, because the universe is good and celestial.
He went to the bank.They held their nose, because Bearkat came with him and his leg still reeked of charred flesh.They said “But you live in a motel with Bearkat as your neighbor.”
So he asked my dad.
My dad said “Well, Bob, I’d love to lend you two thousand dollars to shower gifts and steaks and horses on Celeste, but actually I’m not even allowed to talk to you until Celeste is out of the picture, by edict of my wife Cheryl.Wait Bob: I’ve got a great fucking idea man!Turn Celeste into Crime-Stoppers and then you’ll have the two thousand dollars.Then me, you, and Bearkat can just…you know…spend that money on stuff…”
Bob threw Bearkat’s cell-phone out of the motel window.Bearkat spent the night with his wildcats taped to his belt scurrying around the bushes, like a beetle, looking for his cell-phone.
Bob went to Trans-Canada credit.He needed the money.Trans-Canada Credit gave Bob the money, but every week the loan went up 25 percent.Bob didn’t give a shit.
Bob bought some steaks and beers and they had a wonderful week of indulgence.He waited a week to buy the horse because he didn’t know how to buy a horse, and, more importantly, he wanted to stretch out this time of gift-giving.Just when Celeste’s mind was truly scrambled from a week of steaks and beers, he’d call Big Mikey, who has a car, and they could drive out to a farm or a stable or something that holds a horse, and he’ll show her the horse, and then he’ll propose to Celeste and then she’ll be his, and she can change her last name and then maybe Crime-Stoppers can fuck off.
So Bob called Big Mikey:
“Yeah sure, Bob!We can do that.In fact, Bob, I think you can buy a horse on the internet.They have local classifieds where people sell their horses.”
Bob had heard of “classifieds” but not the internet.
Mikey explained the internet to Bob, and Bob said it sounded like a bunch of “fucking cocksuckers”.Mikey protested: he is not a “fucking cocksucker”, and he goes on the internet sometimes.
Bob said that, in fact, he was a “fucking cocksucker”, and that the fact that Mikey was on this internet was proof positive that this internet is only for fucking cocksuckers.
Bob settled down and stopped calling Mikey what he was calling him and he let Mikey boot up the internet.Mikey had a portable phone—not a cell-phone—and he could easily talk to Bob and scroll through the classifieds for used horses.
“Here’s a good one—it says ‘good horse, good spirit. Lots of fire in his belly.’Kind of like Celeste eh?”
Big Mikey was smiling.He didn’t really like Celeste but he did like that Bob seemed a bit happier recently.
“I’d be happy to come pick you up and drive you out there Bob.”
Bob agreed that Big Mikey should do exactly that.
They bought the horse.They reeked of ancient beer.They borrowed a trailer and everyone coaxed the horse into the trailer.The horse looked upset—Mikey got the impression that the horse didn’t like Bob.Like it was depressed that Bob was its owner.Every time Bob called Mikey a fucking Cocksucker or threatened to slit Mikey’s throat and throw him into the drink, the horse seemed to shudder: like it was really depressed that Bob was its new owner.
They drove through the country: two friends.Even Bob admitted that the greens and the setting sun and the fields of grass and eggs and chickens were quite beautiful.Bob looked into his rear-view mirror.He looked at the trailer.He marveled at what he had done: borrowed a trailer: bought a horse: used the internet.It was awesome.He looked at the brown trailer in his rear-view mirror and he felt an enormous pride in his own capability, and a brotherly Platonic love for Mikey, who had been far more useful in the procurement of the horse than Bearkat could ever have been.
Just then the horse stuck its head out the window.It too wanted a taste of this new country air.It looked at the fields and it seemed happy.Bob was happy for it.
Then it saw Bob.It stared into the rear-view mirror.Its eyes narrowed.
It puked a bunch of carrots out into the ditch.It bared its teeth at Bob.Carrot hunks were wedged into its chompers.It shook its head viciously at Bob, letting its puke-covered tongue whip about in the wind.It was apocalyptic.Bob rolled up the window and looked straight ahead.He tried to think about Celeste.When he looked back again the horse was in its trailer.
The next day dawned, and Bob and Celeste had steak and eggs for breakfast, and they each drank three Budweisers waiting for Big Mikey to come and pick them up and drive them to the stables.They sat in lawn chairs outside, on the grassy strip where Bob and Rand and Mikey and Bearkat had their fires.Bearkat came out and joined them—he ate cereal and drank a Wildcat.Bearkat was really excited: he snorted like a horse and giggled, and Bob gave him a look like “you are one step away from going in the drink with your throat fucking slit Bearkat”, and Bearkat stopped his snorting.
Mikey pulled up.Celeste ran to the car and yelled “shotgun!”
Bearkat took that pronouncement literally and pulled a nail from underneath his lawn-chair and shot-gunned a beer.
Bob got in the back.Bearkat got in the other door.Bob was pissed but he couldn’t not invite Bearkat.The smell of Bearkat’s leg invaded the car immediately.
They screeched out of there—Mikey was trying to get some air moving through the windows.Celeste clapped her hands and yelled “Drive fast—speed turns me on!”
Bob had no idea what she was singing.
Bearkat’s phone rang.Bob grabbed the phone—it was always for him.It was probably my dad, wondering how it was going.
“Hey Randy you fucking cocksucker.”
“Oh, pardon?Um…Is this someone named Bob?Umm…did you just call me—“
“This is Bob.I thought you were something fucking else—I mean someone fucking else. Who the fuck is this?”
“Oh—sorry—it’s…”
There was a huge pause.
“I’m….from the stables.The stables where your horse is--was—the stables—oh, I am from the stables and there’s—something’s happened.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?We’re coming to the fucking stab—”Bob caught himself before he said stables.
“What the fuck is going on?”
Bob’s horse had…Bob’s horse had…I can barely even type it…
Bob’s horse had gone mad in the middle of the night and jumped its stall.It had jumped into another horse’s stall and chomped another horse to death with its murderous teeth.The other horse was murdered by Bob’s horse.This was a Macbeth-style-Universe-is-inverted kind of tragedy.Murder: By a horse: To a horse.This had never happened before.This was a first for the stables.
The stable was demanding that Bob pay for the other horse.He also had to pay for the damaged stable. He still hadn't really paid for the first horse. The murdering horse.
He chucked the cell-phone into a ditch, the same ditch on the same stretch of road where Bob’s murdering horse had puked its last meal.The cell-phone exploded.Celeste was still singing her rap song.Big Mikey was silent; he’d had a feeling that something really fucking weird and dark was going to occur.
Bearkat was silent.He had his eyes closed.He had made up his mind to go to the doctor finally.He’d finally smelt himself.
Enemy Mine: I think that it is the first time a band has ever used a "court painting" as a record cover.
I bought this painting in Penticton, BC, where my wife Melanie grew up. It's hot in the summer: you go to the lake, or you go to town and walk around the air-conditioned antique shops. There are lots of old people in Penticton. It has been an old person mecca for years, so the antique stores are a treasure trove of cool stuff.
The above painting was hanging on a wall beside a portrait of Prince Charles. I only had twenty-five dollars. Both paintings were priced at fourty-five dollars. I love Prince Charles--he's so regal and handsome. But I also love stories, and mysteries, and this painting has a lot of mystery.
I talked the proprietor down to twenty-five dollars. I am still waiting on compensation from the rest of the band and the label for my expense, despite several stern emails and legal warnings.
I love the way that no one is looking at each other.
Post-Script: The back cover is a photograph of a court-room in Prague by Vancouver photographer Chris Frey. It's quite beautiful and nebulous.
The art of the apology letter has departed from this world, because, of course, people don’t actually apologize to each other anymore for fear of being sued. I wish to revive the apology letter, as I frequently have to apologize for my poor behavior.
The form is as follows: firstly, lay out in broad, abstract terms exactly why you are apologizing. Then get into the specific instances of bad behavior. Include any and every injured party. Then get into the actual apology. Be very complimentary. Lastly, end with how you wish everything could be different. Include a specific example of something you wish you could do, and a reminder to the injured parties that they are known as forgiving people.
Here’s an example of an apology letter from a poker night that I disrupted:
Dearest Ladies of the Table,
I hazily recall that my behavior last night was gauche, crude, inappropriate, and lacking in the niceties that constitute proper and civil conversation. The specifics of my shameful conduct escape me, but through eye-witness testimony I am aware of the following: -That I repeatedly mouthed the catch phrase "You're so lame, Chelsea" - That I scorned the etiquette of the cards game -That I plied myself with most unholy libations of many make and variety -That I spilled a very special tonic (concocted by the lady of the house!) onto the lap of the poor gentleman whose unlucky fate situated him next to such a piggish oaf (me) -That my language was exceptionally cruel and foul -That I set a bad example for the other gentleman at the table (who no doubt look to me as a kind of role model due to the fact that my LEGAL marriage has lasted the longest) by using licorice as a whipping tool to annoy my wife, who I accused of “not letting me win at cards even though I lent her five bucks.”
Ladies, I am usually an honest, peaceful man, not given to fits of denigrating language or behavior. I can only conclude that at some point in the night I was drugged with a kind of aggravating steroid (I have certain but unfortunately un-provable suspicions about this incident). Chelsea, you are not lame, you are in truth strong and wonderful. Amanda, I regret accusing you of operating a racketeering ring out of your kitchen, for in truth you are exceedingly honest and forthright. The money I lost was due to my own poor decisions at cards, not from a pre-meditated scheme of collusion between you and your partner Glen. I regret so much in my life, but this most of all: that at the end of the night I was not able to order you Sarpino's pizza with the winnings of the pot. I hope this message of apology finds you both in forgiving spirits.
1. After our show in Moscow, we racked up an 800 euro vodka bill.So we felt pretty nice, you might say.After our show we drank and drank and reveled and we racked up this monumental tab. Delicious ice-cold vodka was brought to our table: whole crystal vases of precious sloshing vodka, sloshed into our joyous mouths, and plates of whole baked Rus fish with onions, and rinds of lemon, and the silver skin of the fish drizzled with olive oil, and perogies with dill.
In Russia the word Vodka is a slight diminutive of Voda, or water, and the drinking all felt very pure--as if the vodka had melted from a glacier and into some purified crystal decanter.I thought of water, and what water means to people, and I thought of water’s little brother, and what that means to people.
I wanted to go to a Georgian restaurant after this racking-up of Euros and drink yellow weirdness and eat li'l lamb off an ancient skewer.Our cosmopolitan Muscovite hosts disagreed.They surely did not want to go to a Georgian hole-in-the-wall and drink yellow liquid that slows your limbs and makes you fly around in a psychic-amber-dawn golden light.They turned their handsome Muscovite noses up at such a proposition--Muscovites, as a general over-simplification (meaning: cultural observation), have a kind of "U.S.S.R.-is-still-in-effect" snobbery towards the old satellites, and I think they possess a particular fear of the representatives of those post-glasnost countries that bolt for the West.I do have two incidences that corroborate this small claim, and I will get to them in due time.
Our hosts wanted to go to a western-style nightclub and drink tequila.I could see this desire expressed in their aura.
We bought dried fish in little yellow bags, and wine and beer and vodka, and we went back to our hotel rooms.We convinced our German booking agent to have a party in his room, but actually we convinced his girlfriend to host the party.He looked pretty sad about the whole affair.Astrid, his girlfriend, is a Bavarian and a Russian translator.She lives in Berlin but she used to live in Moscow.
Astrid is the only Bavarian I know, but I have been told that Bavarians often have this Manichean love of seriousness, made Manichean by a Bakhtin-Carnival style love of guzzing.Or guzzling. She was dressed in black, and smoked every second, and she blew the smoke out of her mouth like the smoke was an impudent child that she loved and owned. She also lovedKharms' Incidences and the lesser Bulgakov works and Bely's Petersburg, and knew lots of places in Moscow and she pissed off the brides of Mayakovsky but she didn’t care (I was of course mortified, but still so giddy to meet a bride of Mayakovsky).
Our hotel was large.It was opulent, and we were breathless virgins to that word and world of opulence.Each floor of the hotel had its own massive central gathering space, protected by sound-proof glass, with beautiful carpets and fireplaces and marble and red and gold and Hockney shit all over.I have no reference or analogy, so I can only think of these spaces like lobbies, but without a portal to the outside world.I thought: ‘We will just have a party in there’.
I love being in an elevator because it’s the only time I get to mosh.I have a personal pledge, to myself, to skank the shit out of all elevators, mostly because of this idea: the cables break from the moshing, and the post-tragedy examiners soberly pop in the security tape, and they expect to see a bunch of chicken-shit business men panicking, flailing in fear at the camera, but the footage only shows some stone-cold moshers skanking the shit out of that elevator.That security tape is, to me, the very logos of punk.
The elevator doors opened, and I stopped moshing into everyone, and I stopped singing "Holiday in Cambodia", and we looked into our pre-ordained party space.We saw that another party was already occurring.We saw a muscular man wearing jet black leather pants, smiling and singing dramatically and drinking juice out of a carton.When he drank, we saw his torso muscles ripple.He only had bald-dreads, every other hair was burned off his body. His dreads streamed in coils down his back, cascading dreadlocks that fell from the crest of his head.He wore a ketchup and mustard hot dog cable-knit undershirt, and it hung loosely off of his raw, rare bulging muscles. This shirt, coupled with the tight leather pants, produced an effect that was not unlike an exploding hydro plant falling into a panic-void.He looked like Conan on the catwalk.These were clearly theater people.We are still children, and these kinds of signifiers scare us off.
2. So we skipped the party place and moved to the room, kind of sad because everyone has partied in hotel rooms before and it usually ends poorly.
But luckily, on our way to Astrid's room, happy just to smoke cigs on the bed, and clog the sink with prawns, and chicken bones, and puke, we saw a beautiful sight--Latvian Helen Mirren, weaving towards us, slamming into the walls, swearing, laughing at her own comedies.Latvian Helen Mirren, drunk off her own beauty, her essence, drunk off her performance that night as Star Opera Singer at Moscow’s Biggest Opera House, drunk and weaving and laughing and singing Opera in the hallway, and with every swagger she was utterly bewitching us.
Mike Rak, our Bass player, dropped his beer and ran up to her, and he immediately and wisely adopted her sway and swagger.He was like "Allll Righhhhhtttt!Where are you going?That's right, I know where you are at!Come party with us, 'cuz that's where the party is really at!"
I thought, 'Wow, what a brazen move!'
Later, after touring with another Bass Player, I will recognize that all bass players are secretly sex-crazed, as a result of playing the bass. And when they have their liquor, this brazen-ness burns a forge of fire in their bellies and takes control of their actions, and they are able to speak sexily, they are able to verbalize the sexy language of the bass.
She might have slapped Mike, or scratched his eyes out, because she was shockingly beautiful. Her hair was like this field of wheat that a noble soldier sees after two months of traveling on a train, a field of wheat that he had once tilled when he was a boy, and now the sight of the wheat drains him of all of the horrors of the trench, a field of wheat swaying under a spring’s breath, a field of wheat that has grown even more handsome since his departure.
I looked into her sloshed eyes and I mouthed "Star".She truly was a star.She was 55 years old, and her laugh, if you can permit this metaphor, was a Bosendorfer twinkle. She held a beer in her noble hand, and she appraised Mike.
She “considered” Mike, though with her beauty she might have smote him a blow with her clarion voice, she might have smote him with only her eyes and struck him down as insignificant.
Her beauty was such that she could have drawn into her bed-chamber any one of Moscow's many chestnut-haired or coal-haired princes with only a glance or a lilt.There might be moats of anonymous Audis circling her hotel room, a whirling dervish of Putins crying out her name, crying for her love.
She laughed and shook her head and mouthed “no” with happy eyes, and she deaked around Mike, like Ariel on her way to a spirit party, and the sorcery of the sea poured into the hallway and we felt like we should have put wax in our ears but someone had their eyes closed or something and managed to drag us fireman style into the hotel room and away from the option of following the star immediately to her party.
The hotel room was pretty wild.Ryan was drinking lots of stuff, like beers from cans and raw warm vodka from a bottle with Prince Myshkin on the label.People were just guzzling wildly and talking about the brides of Mayakovsky and having other conversations.No one noticed Mike disappear.We noticed him come back though.He’d gone to the party.He’d followed the star.
Astrid was pissed—it could have been dangerous!But Mike swore that they were theater people, but were singing, or, in other words: “opera people.”Astrid was a bit protective, and our other host Inna, a true Muscovite, was begging us not to go to the party.She feared something nameless.But we had seen the star.
3. When we walked into the party space the excited chatter of the Latvian National Opera troupe hung up, and all eyes went right to the star.After a minute of squinting, she remembered Mike from the hallway--that is, she remembered meeting him twenty minutes prior to this show down, and she greeted us and hugged Mike and squeezed him.We sat down on some leather couches, all huddled together of course, but Mike was led into the Star’s inner circle.This circle of power was quite discernable—and those on the outside of the circle snarled and stink-eyed us, and this group of emigrants and exiles from the circle were definitely led by the 2nd Star, a young woman who was dressed like Snoop Doggy Dogg.
She really was dressed exactly like how I see Snoop whenever I close my eyes and think of Snoop: those long, skinny cornrows, a big loose blue jersey, some tear-away pants and brilliant white sneakers, cool cat slouched shoulders and the knowing of one’s own infinite coolness.She sullenly smoked and eyed us with utter contempt.Utter contempt.
Her troops assembled around her—I thought of just after World War 2, when the Russians and the Americans were viewing each other with a suspicious hatred, and then some hapless British officer shows up with a gin gimlet thinking that it’s time the allies just get along.Hapless fools, we were, and we had stepped into the darkness outside of the circle, where the 2nd star’s burning hatred for the 1st star choked the air.She just smoked, and scowled, but in her eyes smoked all of the fury of a 2nd star.
Inside the circle, everything was light and happiness: I saw the Star, holding court and laughing and drinking fine champagne, I saw the man with the leather pants and the cable-knit sweater, and a rosy-cheeked stage manager who smelled like Mel’s mom, and by that I mean she smelled nice, and there was, in this circle, another half-dozen hangers on and bit players.
Our host Inna was the most disturbed—the Latvians sensed immediately that one of the hated Muscovites had crashed their party, and though they had just played three wildly acclaimed sold-out shows at the Moscow Opera-house, the old rivalries and hatreds of Moscow were such that not even an infinite string of adored performances in their Rome could have softened this hatred.They were all burning a wicked hatred towards her.
4. I hate strife, unless I am trying to create that strife.I hate other people’s strife, and I always want to mitigate this strife.If I have to, I will create a situation that unites all of the warring parties for a short time, by acting in such a way to unite these parties.
So I stood up, and I explained to both circles of the Latvian National Opera that we too are musicians, and that it is a kind of holy coincidence that in all of Moscow two visiting troupes should happen upon each other, and what greatness lies in this coincidence, and so on and so forth.And then I planned to give a tribute.But I had forgotten, while I was planning this diversion, to decide who to tribute: Turgenev and Farley Mowat? Should I make a toast to Glenn Gould and Rachmaninoff?I just couldn’t think of anyone who we would all know and respect.
I was saying things like “It’s truly a blessing that two artistic troupes [I actually used that word] are here, unified by that most invisible art”, every fucking terrible word damning me more in their eyes, uniting them in outright disdain for this overweight, red-faced Scottish British guy with shark eyes holding his vodka glass in the air, as if he was delivering his acceptance speech for the Scotiabank poetry award (this is how crappy Canada is—it lets Scotiabank give out awards for poetry), as if I was speaking to a crowd of friendly but bored Torontonians and not hostile Opera singers who hated me and hated Inna and hated Moscow and hated each other.
I sensed that my plan was working!Star was looking at me like I was a pile of puke, and so was corn-rowed 2nd star!I became emboldened to sow these two disparate forces together:
“I’d like to make a toast, a tribute to the great musicians of our traditions!So here’s to Metallica and Shostakovich!” and to seal the deal of unified hatred, I guzzed my entire drink like a frat-house pig, great rivers of Vodka pouring down my ruddy dimples and down my neck.No one toasted with me, but I think one of the stage-hands started air-guitaring “Master of Puppets.”
After that the world started growing dim and fractured and contentious.Star looked up at Mike and asked what nationality he was.He proudly proclaimed that he was 100 percent Ukrainian, and for the xenophobic Star his hands, hands that were brazenly rubbing her shoulders and slowly moving down her chest, morphed into rotten fishes.She looked positively disgusted that this Ukrainian was giving her a sensual massage in front of her whole company.She seemed on the verge of slapping him, but then Mike really poured his magic into his bass fingers, and she floated back into the whirlpool of goodness and she started singing.This was nice, very nice, incredibly nice, shockingly beautiful, she was singing about The Volga, that steaming, boiling, rolling Volga that Paustovsky wrote about, that white frothing Volga of my dreams, she was singing and I was dancing and she was up on the table singing to her Ukrainian liege and I was spilling my new drink and dancing and then the last thing I remember was being back in the hotel room, and Astrid was talking about Faust, and I was trying to remember one thing about Faust, the book, and the one thing I could remember at the time was a cottage’s light and the word “peace”.
Then our booking agent said something about Faust, and Astrid turned to him and snarled the following words at him:
“Christian, you have only read the first six hundred pages of Faust. Until you finish Faust, I not only order you not only to never ever speak again about Faust, but you are not even allowed to ever speak again about other books, and furthermore, you are not allowed to speak again for the rest of the night, so pull the covers over your head, and go to fucking sleep!”
Then I crawled down the hallway and into bed.Mel was moaning, poisoned from Vodka, and she was muttering in her haze “She smelled like my mom…”
When I closed my eyes I saw the peace of a cottage’s light.
It's not Snakes on a Plane 2, because Val Kilmer is not into Jar-Jar Binks and Tarantino--he's into Oliver Stone, which is a way of saying that Val's involvement precludes the possibility of The Steam Experiment becoming another exercise in Irony.
Val's passion and commitment to Art and Politics destroys Irony.
My good friend Tony took a History class at University--he didn't know why he didn't like the professor, until he went to his office, and he saw a lovingly placed photo of Margaret Thatcher framed and hung over the professor's typewriter. Under the photograph read a caption, a quote from Margaret.
It read: "I will destroy Socialism."
Val's caption might read "I will destroy Irony--even if I destroy myself in the process."
By the way: December 2008 is Val Kilmer month:
1. He's running for Governor in New Mexico (thanks to Bejar for this tip) 2. He's starring in a remake of Bad Lieutenant, directed by Herzog, who has never seen the original. 3. The Steam Experiment 4. Val starred in a film entitled The Doors, directed by Oliver Stone. The Doors is Kilmer's seminal performance. Wall Street is Stone's seminal film. Stone is making a sequel to Wall Street, entitled Money Never Sleeps. 5. I basically look like him.
"Val Kilmer stars as a former professor who concocts a brutal experiment in order to get the word out on the effects of global warming. By trapping six people in an urban Turkish bathhouse, he vows to overheat his hostages unless his global-warming hypothesis is published on the front page of his local paper."
Friday, November 28, 2008
Two years has passed since I submitted this article at the request of a popular cyber-magazine, and I am coming to recognize that the article has fallen through the cyber-cracks. I am sorry about the lack of mp3, but I don't know how to do that yet.
Daddy's Hands-
http://popsheep.com/2006/11/daddys-hands.html (read the words and listen to at least one of the songs from each period) http://www.myspace.com/daddy39shands
Dave Wenger was the voice and brain of this band. He was hit by a car in November of 2006. He was hyper-intelligent and in his various bands he made amazing music. Daddy's Hands was his best band. He was at times maybe misanthropic, and at times maybe a beast, but his lover and band-mate Emily told me once that "misanthropes are like that" because they are "actually idealistic and the world repeatedly betrays them."
She was talking about Bill Murray.
When Emily died, the band dissolved for a time, or at least stopped being a cohesive unit, and though I was nowhere near Dave, I think it is fair to say that things went really bad for him.
The band recovered and made a new record.
I didn't like their new record at first, but maybe I had been used to living in a world where Wenger was a ghost, and a memory, or some such vain shit. Now I think that the record declared some great ummm "return to form". By this I mean that I always feared the shadow.
When I think of Dave I sometimes think of this archetypal and doomed officer from a World War II novel. A sensitive alcoholic, a "lost soul": Fitzgerald in an elegant gin trench. Of Time and the River covered in cigarette butts. Larry Darrell, Maugham's protagonist in The Razor's Edge. A role that Bill Murray starred in. Dave could be funny, even Stripes or Ghostbusters funny, but mostly he had this focused and searching melancholy that cannot in our age be dispelled by a trip to India. That door is sealed shut.
I am being romantic. The saddest part about Hamlet is not that everyone dies. It's that everyone dies and Horatio keeps sailing on. Great drums. Great great great towering songs. I love them.
Elyse Weinberg- Houses/If Death Don't Overtake Me
It is that immutably and ever-pressing point of "sailing on" that warms me to Elyse's record. I hear her tromping around in a mytho-poetic lotus-hazed Los Angeles. Her band sounds warm, and nice, but also "laced" or "dosed" by an undefined peril--this peril is of course acid. And there is humour in her rasp, an almost Falstaffian guffaw at the mutability of things.
She lives in Ashland, Oregon. I think they have a big Shakespeare festival there. I wonder what she thinks when Ophelia walks on the stage.
The universe would be too tipped in my favour to imagine her playing Ophelia in that tender and yet tough shit-kicked rasp.
Fela Kuti and Ginger Baker-Let's Start
Intermission from the bummer times, and hear the "Riders on the Storm" Rhodes break. Zeus is always mixing those jars. I think this was recorded live. The precision and dexterity of the playing demands a military-like ranking system for the term "Musician": (Karen Dalton: Admiral. Fela Kuti: General. Mercer: Soup Cook).
Exuma- Dambala
I have tried for hours to write about this song. I have tried to write about Dante and the architectonics of our spiritual universe. I have tried the Caliban angle and what Shakespeare might have thought if he heard this. And the jingles and the coral-shanties of Ariel. And crazy Prospero. And slavers and slaves. And even his friend Ritchie Havens. I have tried to write about a historical character named Plato the Wizard, a Jamaican practitioner of Obeah (hear also "Obeah Woman", and remember that Nina Simone covered both of these tunes).
I have tried to write about the impossibility of putting things into paragraphs. Even that cop-out of mine crumpled and withered. It is a beautiful song. One true story though, as read on the internet: When Plato the Wizard was caught and executed (due to his one weakness: Rum), a horrendous Hurricane and Earthquake ravaged the West Indies in a fashion that reminds me of Tolkien's destruction of the island state of Numenor. The sea, from all accounts, literally swallowed up the town where Plato was executed...
Bill Fay- I Hear You Calling
Bill Fay sings about Jesus. A person thinks, upon looking at the cover of Time of the Last Persecution, that Bill himself has a full-blown case of something that psychologists and non-psychologists call a "Jesus complex".
I think he has a "Hamlet-if-Hamlet-had-lived" complex, which is to say that you cannot pretend to be crazy or broken, and not end up at least partially crazy or broken at the end of the act. Which is to suggest that, in these songs, I hear an actor acting out the true and unfolding tragedy of his own life.
-For those who love paint: kandelakiv.com -This portal represents the visual art of Vladimir Kandelaki, the great Georgian painter. His painting enriches the cover of Skin of Evil. -He collects ancient swords. I know his daughter. Her name is Marika. -I think people might confuse the woman in this image with the woman at the centre of the songs on Skin of Evil. I think this is wrong, as the woman in the painting is actually a portrait of Marika's mother, and she is a real person who has nothing to do with anything that I have ever sung about. - I tend to be friends with the children of artists: Marika is rare as a child of an artist, because she does not hate art. In fact, she is a great painter herself. -Artists are like fucking Kronos with their children.
-I think my albums always get mis-represented. Skin of Evil is not so much about 'Donna', as it is about my own attempt to just stick to something, and not veer off into the nebulous domains of 'fractured social commentary.' I think that in this sense Skin of Evil is a moderate success.
-I used to love paintings. I loved painting, the verb, and I loved to look at paintings. Or, at least, I loved acting in a play where a man loves to see paintings. I loved to think that I was spending some time enriching myself. Working on myself. Making my spirit better. -Then I willed myself to stop loving it. I asked: what's so deep about a bunch of lines and colors? That stuff doesn't even move. -I fell out of love with painting. It was easy. I just tried to convince myself that painting is boring. Tried that on, as one tries on a weird pair of pants.
-I met a few people with ferocious and sympathetic minds. During a small synchronetic* period they all admitted it: -'I've never ever been moved by a painting!' -What courage, to admit such a thing! -These confessions made me wonder if I was really moved by a bunch of paint, by moving a bunch of paint, or if I was just playing at being moved. And, I asked, what is so central about being moved? -Is it a virtue? Does it allow me to see the hues of the world more clearly? Sleep sounder? -Dispense Justice? -'Not empirically answerable,' I responded. Empiricism is the enemy you hate until it departs this Earth. And that which killed it? You hate that thing one thousand times more...
-And some of these artists: Snakes! Vipers! They'd smother a baby for a handjob!
-And: the act of pondering other people's confessions has been stupidly problematic since I think Elsinore, 1324. -So just as a test, I willed this love of paint out of myself. Flushed that shit for good. -oooohhhhhhh, it worked, fuck...
-I can't recall ever being moved while actually painting. I can only recall a wonderful absence, a silence, a hollowing out.
-I said, 'I know what's clever. And what is important in that world of Art. And what people like to talk about. But a ziggy cartoon is 'clever' (?) (?) (?) (I actually remember thinking this)' -It's a bit scary, and a bit liberating, this experience. If I can will myself to pull down the blinds against one form, then why not all forms? Can I will myself into stone? -Could I shave my eyebrows and drop out of this world?
-Then can I also let that love of the WORD, and the words, drip out of me? -Yes! Of course! -It's always falling out of me, and I am always blindly crawling around, stumbling in its shards and its rolling it the crumbs, re-devouring what comes back into my mouth.
-I'm practiced at sucking that shit back up into me... -Noo-noo, that sucking thing... -Precious flickering flame to be cupped and held in the most interior zone of hand...
-And if the line, and the smudge, and the fucking WORD can drain out of me, then why not music? -What is so holy and pure about music? Stupid sputters and rattles. The sound of a dirty laundry cart with a whobbly wheel squeaking on a waxed hospital floor. Pissy cocks. Soft minds. Forks in cellos, shiny scarfs, hockey card-collectors, and boredom. So pathetic: so far from serious and so begging to be taken serious! -Begging! And so in love with money! -We mustn't judge though: Bolano says even poets are always dazzled by money.
-Who judges the meek?
-Lastly: The inverse of this act is liberating. Because if I can will myself into the discarding of one thing, then I can will myself into embracing one thing, and the fact that it can be lost, can so easily be lost, makes me cling. Or nurture. Hold tight to it, brother Self!
-I think I should love painting again. I am virtually ignorant of the thing. This is one benefit of being so 'short term' about everything; every few years your shit becomes tabula rasa.
-I should love painting again as I love music--for its frivolity, its play, its funniness, and its sorcerous power!
-I thank Vladimir for his paintings, though I have never met him, and I very much doubt he will ever read this, as he is off painting one thousand tiny Lenins into lightbulbs, or collecting ancient swords, and not slobbering over his own google alerts. -I thank him, because the paintings move me, even though I don't know if I am playing at being moved or actually being moved. So please, if you love painting, go to the website.
