...so I want to tell you something I've never told anyone before.
Sometimes people ask me "What's your Secret?"
Well, to be honest, I'm kinnnndof Billy Dee Williams.
---
I've been missing the golden age of Bo De Duyen, the best god damned vegetarian Vietnamese joint this city's ever seen. I was winging it with this recipe, I had a divine vision, and it worked out so good I took a picture and wrote all this down. Firstly, I don't measure anything, I don't like math enough to want to put it in my mouth. So listen to your heart, follow your instincts and this will surely make your yuletide extremely gay:
Hot-Pot Style Seitan in Black Pepper Sauce
Seitan is made from wheat, if you have gluten or wheat allergies don't do it. You can get seitan in most asian supermarkets or health food stores. If possible, get it in bulk (from big tub of water) but if packaged, get one that's plain and not already cooked or flavored. Get, a bunch of it. You'll also need:
Black Pepper Sauce (a vegan one with no MSG)
Black Bean Sauce (same deal)
Sweet Red Pepper (or yellow/orange)
Garlic (fresh) and Ginger (fresh)
Brown Rice
In a small pot, not a frying pan, put in a bunch of oil. Not olive, it burns easy and tastes strong. I used sunflower oil here. Cut up garlic into slices, at least 2 cloves (you see how the math creeps in?) and slice a bunch of the ginger, give it a few minutes headstart on High and then add the black pepper sauce. A lot of it. And add the black bean sauce. You shouldn't need salt because there's a lot in these. Stir it good, add more ginger if you can take it. Break up the seitan into shreds/chunks, put it in there, turn the heat halfway down and stir the seitan into all the black sauce. Cut the red pepper into slices and add them here. Stir it. Cover it and add a bit of oil if there isn't some hanging out at the bottom, and keep stirring it periodically (it shouldn't be dry enough to stick or burn with the heat turned down). Start your rice. I went with brown but you could roll with whatever kind floats your boat. Try the seitan about now and if you need it, add more of the pepper sauce to taste, then turn it down more so as to time it with the rice being ready.
...I think you can take it from there.
---
"It was my understanding that there would be no math."
I think I need to do some ballsier and less cracker-ass travelling. Maybe it's just the winter talking but I think I missed my calling by 3 decades and several continents. I should have been a Zambian circa 1970-75 instead. I wish to Christ I could find these original records. Why does this seem so much more real and unaffected than any of its possible Western counterparts? Fucking staggering:
...and I'd be willing to bet they've got some awesome coffee and no American Apparels. Seriously, how much of the world do we just forget is ever out there? 98%, you think? I used to think this simplistically when I was a kid but it's true - Somewhere right now there is a French Polynesia. Someone is waking up or coming home from a friend's dinner party in Tunisia. Looking out at the ocean towards whatever is on the other side. Drinking too much kava in Fiji. What the fuck is all that? This is why I love the Bowles' and the Kapuścińskis of the world. They're too few and too goddamn far between.
And while we're at it, some love for/from Gambia. This is the best track from THIS AMAZING LP. Tell me this doesn't stick in your head. You want to have sexual intercourse to a phonograph record? Heads up:
1. Getting my CX backed into by oblivious Starbucks motherfuckers while parked in front of the U of T gym .
2-10. Getting my CX backed into by oblivious Starbucks motherfuckers while parked in front of the U of T gym AGAIN. In the same fucking parking space. It goes without saying, Fuck You - Pay Me. It's all stuff I can fix but holy fuck - if you fail to notice a 600 pound motorcycle behind you, you need to pull your head, your Iphone and your latte out of your ass or don't drive a car.
BEST OF 2009:
All the rest.
---
This is the first morning of real-deal winter and it's almost mid-December. I think we did pretty good. I've got a stack of neglected books that look like they'll get me through it. It's been a good year. Been catching up with a lot of old friends lately, going back 10-15 years. Also (been home for over a month now so this is very belated but) the UK was amazing. If you ever wonder who the sweetest kids in the entire fucking universe are, the answer is this:
Being out with the guys in Burning Love is great. They have no second thoughts or complaints about nerding out for hours in record stores of the world, jumping into the English Channel just because you're there, or crashing out in a sleep-where-you-fall pile of Mad Max squat punks. And even when shit goes terribly wrong, it's still fun and we go home thinking of the next thing regardless.
Came home from the UK with so many fucking records. We were ditching all our things just to fit more into our carry-on luggage. And I still haven't put these piles away, guess I should make that proper OCD guy list now so that I can, huh? These are from all over the UK, a lot of it from one brotherly Welshman Chris D, and holy shit, the best record store in the UK (Minus Zero RIP), Wax Factor in Brighton:
...Wow.
UK Scores - LP/12":
Slayer - South of Heaven (UK)
Scientist - Heavyweight Dub Champion
JAMC - Sidewalking 12"
Equals - Greatest Hits
The Jam - In the City
Kinks - Lola (Hallmark)
T-Rex - Ride a White Swan (Fly)
Pink Floyd - Relics (MFP/EMI)
Fleetwood Mac - 2xLP of early years (pre-chicks)
Hawkwind - Hall of the Mountain Grill
Nightmare - Scatteraw
QOTSA - Songs for the Deaf 2xLP
Motorhead - Bomber (Bronze)
Animals - The Most Of (MFP) & S/T (Regal)
Sabbath - Technical Ecstasy & Never Say Die (Vertigo)
Dusty Springfield - Where Am I Going?
Hendrix - Cosmic Turnaround (favorite JH boot!)
Desmond Dekker - The Israelites
No Mind - Tales of Ordinary Madness
Smiths - That Joke...& What Difference...12"es
Smiths - The World Won't Listen
Joy Division - Still 2xLP
Oppressed - Oi Oi Music (Oppressed Recs)
Social Unrest - SU2000
Cowboy Killers - Press and Run Like Hell
Rot In Hell - Hallways...(ltd cover) LP
Ripcord - In Search of a Future (ltd #172/500)
Heresy - 1985-1987 LP
Motorhead - Japanese Ace of Spades (boot)
Skinhead Moonstomp - Symarip (Trojan orig)
Napalm Death - SCUM (Mosh 3 orig)
Visions of Change - My Mind's Eye
...wait a minute, this is just the LPs and not even all of them. This list is retarded. And no one needs to read it. They get the point: There was lots of awesome records. Let's wrap it up.
Duly noted. Among the 7"es, some of the more notable scores:
Heresy - Whose Generation?
Poison Idea - Just to Get Away picture disc
Poison Idea - Filthkick EP
Blitz - All Out Attack & Warriors
Adverts - Gary Gilmore's Eyes
Smiths - Panic & Ask
Napalm Death - The Curse 7" (7 Mosh 8)
Last Rights - Chunks/So Ends...(Taang, Green)
Voorhees - Violent
Discharge - ST, Fight Back & Never Again
JAMC - April Skies
Pissed Happy Children - Gravel Truck
Neon Christ - S/T 7"
Sabbath - TV Crimes & Paranoid
Thin Lizzy - Cold Sweat & Killer On The Loose
T-Rex - Get It On
Morrissey - Thats How People Grow Up
Unsane - Vandal X/Streetsweeper (Subpop)
Partisans - 17 Years of Hell
Devo - Satisfaction (got it signed at TO show)
Animals - House of the Rising Sun UK
...alright stop it STOP IT!!!
OK, a FEW more, then you have to change the subject.
OK, I'm done now. THANK you. Fuck. There is apparently more to life than records. But not much more. One good thing about working in a cult video store way past the point when you should have had loftier ambitions is access to Cool Shit. I don't know if it's winter or turning 35 this month, but please, a moment of love and nostalgia for the things that were on non-cable TV at 6am when I was a kid:
...and if you use your head, you'll always win. Jesus Christ, that was a long time ago now. How retro!
Oh hey, the Mature Situations Cracked Pelvis EP is still available, the Old Hands EP is soon to be (on Deranged), the domestic version of the Burning Love demo EP will be out in January and Don't Ever Change EP and first LP (Deranged) are coming soon. Both BL and MS have tons of shows coming up. And, me and Andrus made a two-man Disrupt-worship side project, as yet unnamed. Will post some links when we mix it. Stay sweet.
9.30.2009
1. Nazi Dust - Demo. I don't know how but I'm stoked that someone, especially Cult Ritual members, brought the singer of Lifesblood out of retirement.
2. Pissed Jeans - King of Jeans. Dissonant Freudian postmodern noise punk is a fickle fucking world. But I'm glad after 3 LPs, this band has still got 'it'. First time I heard Shallow, I thought it sounded like Crime guitars with Bad Brains slow parts and Lux Interior vocals. Now I don't even know. I don't know about art but I know what I like. Hey, the Cramps said that. Waiiiiitaminute.
3. Cult Ritual - All. Woot woot, a modern hc band that I like everything about. That's twice in 10 years! (see #4). Their records look great. They pull off an X cover that doesn't suck. Don't know their status but you can download all their shit here, and they're in a million side bands which are all good (see #1).
4. Omegas - Sonic Order EP. What? I'm not just saying this because I'm putting this shit out. Not a shameless plug, I fucking love everything about this band. Check out You Can Be Replaced.
5. Brimstone Howl - We Came In Peace. So Dave played me this on tour and it stuck in my head. Once again, Cramps vibes. There's a lot of neo-retro shit doing the rounds, but when it's good, it's good. Tracks 2 & 3, A Million Years and Child Of Perdition, can't wear them out. And I've been trying.
...that's just 5. Kind of only half a top ten, no? I've been balls deep in layouts, art for bands and getting ready for Burning Love UK tour in a few weeks. In a related story, anybody want to buy a teetotaler kidney?
1. Losing a battle with stimulus, external information that I'm less and less able to isolate, prioritize or interpret in my head. Saying and doing things I should only ever think, if even that. In a related story, deliberating an abrupt end to medications (see a few posts below) but begrudgingly knowing that this would erase what little gravity is keeping the real and the imagined in their respective corners upstairs.
2. Permanent Damage and abuse of the body asserts itself. Avoiding a throat doctor, knowing what they'll say. "Some Day" may very well have arrived. Parts of me are giving out. The ears, back and head, for starters. Which is fair, but I still feel I have a lot that I meant to do with them.
3. With bad sleep and a dark sky threatening, a lot of creative thinking and backlogged ideas are getting out (which, as always, only seem to flow this well when I'm broke, stressed and at the end of my rope. why?) A lot of new songs and some design work I'm pretty happy with have come out of it. IE:
4. Eating at One Love every time I work. I'm pretty sure these people invented PMA. Not just rastas or vegans, but these actual people. Check the place out.
4.5. Liking Prison Break a bit too much.
Doing
I have some serious piles of books to get through between now and death. Did you know that Dali wrote a novel? Some writers that I've been enjoying a lot and why:
Paul Auster - Man, I never get sick of his amnesiac characters retroactively trying to piece together the events that brought them to the present. No matter how many times he writes the same neo-noir story, I'll read them all. Swear to god.
William T. Vollman - One of the OG McSweeney's roster. The guy has a Henry Miller-like aptitude to be one with the filth and speak for it. Like a character actor, but a writer. The Rainbow Stories is where I started, a great place to jump in. And I have Poor People ready to roll.
Kapuscinski (All) - RIP. Thanks to Sanjay for introducing me to Imperium back on tour in Europe a few years ago. I love this fuckin' Polish guy, always trying to barter his way into culturally alien places as they disintegrate into civil war. Fearless. Check him out. I got his book on Haile Sellassie in The Pile. I'll give you a full review when I finish it, in fucking March 2018.
To Do
- Make Amends. Keep head in body and feet on earth.
- Give Hunter S. Thompson another chance. I read the Sonny Barger bio first, which definitely paints him as a tourist and kind of a bitch in the real-time test. But I started Hell's Angels, his first. It's the same story from the other angle, and I'm liking it a lot. Anybody read about his suicide note a few years back which was the single word "counselor" typed out on his typewriter? Now that's some cryptic shit. We'll see where this goes.
- Be a better cat owner.
- Catch up with old friends.
"...But Five (+5+5) Years Down the Line, Man..."
Hey. I should say this. My friend Keith asked me to clarify something about my parts in the Burning Fight book. I guess it doesn't take much for my train of thought to fall out of step with what I'm saying. With regards to straightedge...yes. With the exception of some medications which are anything but recreational, I am and have been one of these pricks since I was 20. I just don't like talking about it. I always hated the polarities that culture drew people to. I think it's just something you do or don't do, regardless of any subculture built up around it, because that shit changes like clockwork with every generation, and if you don't have any more personal reasons for it, you're betting your identity on a fetish. I don't drink or get high not because of any stoic heroism but because of the strength I don't have. I fucking suck at moderation, so it's always just been easier for me to categorically not do anything like that at all, ever, than to trust myself to know when to stop if I did. It's always been the way that 95% of every generation falls off, since well before my time. I'm well used to that, and try to relate to The Kids by who they are and not by what they do or don't do. But as of the last few years, I'm having to see a lot of friends fall into deep holes. Not just the young ones that turn over regularly but older ones my age that were seemingly in the clear and are now getting hopelessly lost in the shit. I don't regret a thing about being young and dumb and self-destructive except that I couldn't get away with it longer. Anyone that had a peer group around them with the brains to invest themselves more in road trips and poolhopping than what they could stuff up their nose to shut out how much they hate their job or life for another hour, had a headstart that few of them probably realize or appreciate. As they "grow up", they associate it with being young and dumb, and they party like reclaimed 15 year olds, and talk about it way too much. I went through it with my peers the first time we all went from 19 to 25. For most people, that's normal, chalk it up to the rashness of youth. The reason I hated SXE culture was that kids were setting themselves up for just this kind of fall by polarizing life to that extreme, as if the only lifestyle options you have are self-righteous martyr or total waste caste. I don't know if that's more or less confusing, but for the record, yeah. I'm basically a bitter and self hating teetotaler that loves good times and hates false good times. You know, you CAN listen to King Khan and enjoy the fine outerwear of American Apparel and NOT be a useless cokehead. But realistically, 8/10 of you will. What's up with that?
(catches self talking too much, tries to save it with Bowles quote)
"The world seethes with words. Forgive me." - Paul Bowles
Hi. Sorry, this is sorely out of date. The good news is, it's
because things have been very busy and productive in "Real Life".
Par Example:
The Mature Situations EP is out now and preorders are up.
...Burning Love is about to go out east with Vicious Cycle and planning a UK tour in the fall, and there's 2 EPs coming out:
...There's a boss show at the Music Gallery (Foundation Room) coming up July 25th, a benefit for the White Owl (a nonprofit gallery in Kensington Market) which both MS and BL are playing, along with Lullabye Arkestra and a few others. Which is to say, this will be boss, or "a good time". The Boss is not playing.
More imminently, I'm DJing this on Saturday:
And Michael Jackson died. Which for the official record, I still think is a hoax. Think about it. "Body" covered up in sheets as it left the house? Word. Only one grainy unofficial "death" photo? Yup. In debt millions of dollars? For reals. Eccentric enough to fake his own death? No doubt. Obvious access to limitless plastic surgery? Clearly. Never wanted to be seen growing old? Check. Back catalog of unreleased songs going back 3+ decades, to make money as rereleases for ever? Uh-huh. I don't know, I'll believe it when an autopsy video leaks. Even then, it'd be a pretty easy body to fake.
...wow, that sounds way funnier when anyone but me is saying it. Anyway, here's the situation: mature. That is, the Mature Situations "Cracked Pelvis" EP is now done and due out on Free Cake soon. We cranked out a sick Suicidal cover while we were down there, shaved a couple seconds off the original even. That and one of the EP songs are up here as of now. We're recording a second EP for Deranged shortly. The 'Sitch is also playing with Nitad (Sweden) +2 at Siesta Nouveaux on June 6th. Bring your own Depends. This is a picture of Carrot Top, in hell, with Hitler, Jonbenet, Gacy and the kid that loves Turtles spotting him:
Burning Love is kicking into full gear, the EP is to be out shortly on High Anxiety. The demo is up here. It's just a rough practice space recording, but you'll get the cut of our jib, no doubt. We have a bunch of Ontario and Quebec shows lined up with Vile Intent, Omegas and more, and hopefully some US action coming soon, possibly some shows with Doomriders. Look out for an interview about it in Decibel soon. Go here for BL show info, and a hectic video clip of the 751 show a few weeks back.
Past Life Regression
Deranged is putting out an LFD discography complete with the live reunion LP and DVD. (Goddamn, even the reunion is retro already, time flies when you're splitting heads!) No Idea is putting out a Swarm record containing Old Blue Eyes Is Dead and all the EP, split 7" and compilation tracks after Parasitic Skies. The Cursed BBC Session, recorded during the last tour, is going to be a real-life 7" on High Anxiety, and possibly a box set of all three Cursed LPs could happen when I find that ten thousand dollar bill I lost. Zing!
I keep forgetting, either honestly or willingly, that it ever happened. When you trip over yourself on the sidewalk, you don't stand there and think about it, you just keep on walking. Right?
The first time I remember having what I would later know was an anxiety attack, I was skipping high school, sitting with a girl at a window table in an empty, busted Chinese restaurant on the second story of a building overlooking King Street in Hamilton. All I really remember is that I was looking out the window at the street below and I started laughing helplessly. Nothing was funny. There was absolute dead ambiance in the place, and no one else there but the staff and the two of us. The girl (I say that pretty coolly, "the girl", but we went out from the time I was 16 till I was 21) didn't get it, was getting pissed. She didn't get what was happening and I couldn't explain it. As far as I remember, she actually walked out (things to never ever do to somebody having a mental breakdown - check). Somehow, it worked itself out. It passed, I paid, I left. I chalked it up to an anomaly and didn't do anything about it.
[A thought that tugs at me often: People know and like you better as a pile of stress and confusion. You keep yourself a neurotic mess. It's your penance. For what?]
Volatility. My whole childhood and adolescence was volatility and confusion. Love? There was lots, no doubt. A loving mother. The best. But it came with all the rest. The unspoken but staggering anxiety, towards inertia, being found, being found out, that's in my DNA. I have always been leaving, and seldom for any concrete reason. When I found as a teenager that I could take my self, and build into it the consistency that I never had, that I could consistently choose not to do a thing, I kind of went overboard. It was total war on vices both real and imagined. Booze, cigarettes, meat, the religion I'd grown up with, television, media, modernity, the values of my culture - evicted. Get out and stay out. All the things I could not control, the inconsistencies of the world around me, I could at least control within myself. Right?
At that precise moment of life, I happened to come upon a particular subculture whose essence (at least at the time) was the conscious restructuring of the individual, by the individual. Away from the influence of socialization and manipulation by outside forces. Being fairly young, it didn't occur to me that all these people were also very young for the kind of line they were talking. The most terrible and comic part of the whole thing is that the words they were mouthing were right. Just maybe premature. Didn't take into account how much you will change in those next few years between high school and adulthood, whether you like it or not.
I saw all my friends go towards the precise things they were out to avoid. I mean, 98 out of 100 of them. And I mean, precisely those things. It wasn't a vague misinterpretation of their politics, they had t-shirts and tattoos about it. But like I said, when you're young and wrapped up in something, you don't see the big picture, you think you can account for the rest of your life at that moment. And the more I saw that, the more I hung on to the person I'd decided on being. Which seemed right.
Well fuck me. As it turns out, rigid attention to lifestyle consistency is not just unnatural, it's straight up unhealthy. I took a lot of time thinking, deliberating, all the time, the existential consequences of everything. Every last possible dilemma. I had always had sleep and anxiety problems. This spun them into a manic cyclone of swirling half-thoughts that were ever present. I couldn't figure them out and I couldn't shut them out. But medications were also on the long list of enemies to my self-sufficiency. So there were a lot of sleepless nights, paranoid generalizations, surreal days and rash decisions made. And I think that some of the most violent and honest moments of my life came out of that angry sleepless desperation.
Skip ahead about 15 years.
2008. In the psychiatric emergency ward of a downtown Toronto hospital. With no family doctor to call, no one to explain how this person came to be sitting here in this state. Standard question. "Do you have any sharps on you?" Fair enough. They must deal with the worst of it, they want to know you're not going to stab them or yourself if they take their hands off you. As it turns out, I did. I had a really sharp sharp, in my pocket. I gave it to them, they put it in a hospital bag with a Biohazard sticker on it. "I knew you were heading towards something like this", she said. My wife. Now this, on the flipside, is a girl that gets it. I had been on a tear for a few weeks. Little cracks around the edges. It comes out in frustration, trying to forcibly impose sensibility on the outside world. Curb Your Enthusiasm times 1,000.
Definitely Not A Fan.
A few days earlier, I'd had a meltdown trying to buy a fan. It was a heatwave and we'd just moved into an old house. Just a regular fan. Sounds easy enough, right? I was trying to look up fans at Wal Mart (Seriously, go here and tell me if you can look up a basic f-a-n anywhere without blowing your fucking head off.) I ended up on the phone asking some girl if they sold any "cool air relocation devices", and what in her opinion such a device should be called, and could she please fucking spell it for me because I must be overcomplicating the matter.
At any rate, this is the typical scenario, I get wrapped up in a circular, throbbing, overly logical (yet not at all rational) thought, to the point where I'm so pissed off I can't put one foot in front of the other. The safety comes off and it builds until the whole thing cracks and the trigger is pulled at some random point. It could be minutes or weeks later, but it will happen. You have passed that irreversible point whether you know it or not, and without a doubt you will momentarily throw the breaker.
Go back two summers.
University of Toronto Athletic Centre. The day of my friend Damian's wedding. Maybe I overdid something, pushed myself too hard. I was in the change room, I went to undo my lock and realized I'd been sitting in front of this locker. I had just lost about 7 minutes of my life. Which is to say, for the first time ever, I couldn't account for the present moment. This was new. "Who are you? Why are you sitting here?" I drew a total blank on the combination, it was something I did routinely every day, hundreds of times. It was the same locker I usually used. I tried to think about my mother's name and at that second I couldn't. Someone came by as I was sitting there. "Excuse me" he said and opened the lock, which was his that day and not mine at all. So at least there was some comic relief. But it was shaky, wondering if I was going to black out while riding my bike home. Trying to remember everything I could think of in case it happened again. I went home, I explained what had happened. "Are you sure you should go to a wedding reception right now?" We went, but I felt like I was driving a car with a blindfold on. Everything really cautious. I told a friend who I seldom see but who goes back far and through a lot of close calls and near-death experiences, who understood everything. "You're precious to me", he said. One of the most touching things I've ever been told by a friend. You know who you are.
Skip ahead another year.
When it happens, you will think you are dying. At least, your body is sending this signal to your brain. Your brain is looking for data to validate it, and your body backs up the suggestion - your heart speeds, tingling down your arms, lightheadedness, everything spins, perhaps you fall down. Because it comes out of nowhere, with nothing stressful happening at that moment, you think you must be dying.
At work. In a video store. At 2:30 in the afternoon. For a minute I couldn't access my left arm. Dead weight. Panic adds to the debilitation. In all likelihood, you could very well be having a stroke. You take super-detailed stock of the situation, as if you are floating above yourself. "I am dying right here and now, at 2:30 on a Tuesday and no one is coming in. I am going to die listening to this song ("Lost in the Dark" by Entrance), wearing this shirt. In a video store." I realize that I am still in the moment, consider phoning someone, but feel ridiculous, what do I say? Somehow it passes, I think about it for a few days, then discard it as one more in a series of anomalies. There are more and more of these than I care to remember.
The long and short of it is this: Internalizing stress does not mean that you fully metabolize and dispose of your problems, only that you feed your demons, and build the house of cards higher and higher. You withdraw from voluntary social situations, or take them on more and more cautiously. You can't help but resent how many people walk through life seemingly oblivious to the things that keep you up at night, and do just fine that way. You want to think that you're more responsible, more aware, less ignorant, more conscientious, more self-controlling. But as it turns out, that's a lot of self-sacrificing bullshit. That's an angry, alienated teenager commandeering the throat of a nearly middle-aged man. Face it. These people don't fall on their faces, and the "Real World" does not come crashing down on them. It is their world, and they have great jobs, sleep at night, and live to ripe old ages there in it.
And you, little man, have little to show for all this striving and thinking but the broken machinery of reason, the weight of neurosis
Hey all. Sorry for the lag, but hey - I'm DJing next Tuesday's Downtown Art & Sound at the Rivoli, which features the work of Toronto's Louis Au. And it's free! Lots of other shit is going down. Working on some graphics for Black Ships, The Secret, Rackshot and Sights & Sounds. Mature Situations is gonna be recording a 7" for NJ's Free Cake, and playing with Coliseum at Rancho Relaxo in on March 21st. If you haven't been, definitely check out the spot before it expires at the end of March. It looks like I'll be DJing some of the next Smithsfits night there too on Feb. 27th. Also, Burning Love is getting its shit together for a Dees show in March with Young Widows. That's BOTH Pattersons in the same week! Get ready for my floor, Louisville!
...and check out all the crazy shows going down in March/April at SITC.
2009. I like it already. So many good record scores lately. Top of the list is Paul Bowles - 100 Camels in the Courtyard (read by PB) 2XLP. This was a birthday present from a righteous dude and it continues to blow my mind. In the last week, I scored The Equals - Baby Come Back (I love you, Chris Harper, like men "love" other men in the Old Testament), as well as some other gems:
Scientist Vs. Prince Jammy - Big Showdown 1980
Augustus Pablo - Rockers Meets King Tubbys In A Firehouse
Augustus Pablo - Africa Must Be Free By 1983 LP
Desmond Dekker - You Can Get It If You Really Want (Trojan)
T-Rex - S/T (1970)
Millie Small - The Best of Millie Small ($2!)
Lightnin' Hopkins - Last Night Blues LP & Lightnin! 2XLP
(and as of the mail just coming, thanks Ryan:)
Snake Apartment - Paint the Walls LP
X - Los Angeles (Slash)
Entombed - "But Life Goes On" Demo (1989) 7"
Sunn / Boris - Altar 3XLP
Moutheater - 7" & Split 7"
Crucifix - Corpus Christi LP
And over Boxing Week...man, I won't even start. Suffice it to say that 1) this house is full of tasty jams, (enough to block out this thoroughly shitty winter) and 2) that I wasn't fucking around about records, and trading them (a few posts below). If you're after stuff I might have and vice-versa (see below), drop me a line. This week in music: the Mature Situations demo - get it here (fixed). I started writing something pretty long about mental health after some recent run-ins with the laws of reality, but I'm still writing it. So until then, and until they shut this mother down, here's some more great shit I wouldn't last a winter without:
Major Highlights: Mercy Killing - a fantastic explosion/implosion far away from home, impressive and cataclysmic enough to suffice for a sudden death, and a chapter of life stretching back too many years finally gets a long overdue bullet in the head. Karma takes all and I'm not even fighting it. Good night and good luck. Next? A week in the care of some great people, Czech mountains and cold rivers puts my problems in a far greater context, makes it all alright. Yes there is good to make up for the shit in people. (Děkuji, Nemůžu se dočkat, až tě zase uvidím.) Next? Home. Graduating school. Moving homes. Taking a lot more space and time to myself and not apologizing for it.
Writing. Doing a lot of writing. A piece called No He Is Not Sleeping for Harvest Magazine's Death Issue. (from a book project called Nine Lives that will probably take me forever), Some really elaborate interviews for random zines (Buried Alive and a few more). A part in Brian Peterson's book Burning Fight about 90's hardcore (no doubt in my mind he's done an amazing job of it and that it'll do the whole era a lot of justice - check that book and the Chicago release shows out). Also started this interview in series form for Stuck In The City, on growing up in and into Hamilton Hardcore (Greg and everybody associated with SITC has been doing a lion's share of shitwork with shows in Toronto. Check them & their shows out). Music. Nothing for a few months. Then bam - the itch. Drumming, though. Who knew? I grew up on it. Haven't drummed since the CS 7" and I'm reaaaally rusty, but wanted to do it before I could find some apathetic 34 year old's reason not to do it, so I started something fresh with some like-minded people that is fun, dumb, and full of cum - exactly my speed after the events of this year:
(Mature Situations @ Siesta Nouveau 12.27.08)
Work. Did this, a lot. Having been in bands all my life and juggling the rest, I have a job I enjoy in a place with actual counterculture value, that I can actually support. But it doesn't do much for the fact that my time isn't worth much money, with or without a B.A. Been considering ways to have fun with this whole global economic collapse thing. How great would it be if all the punks became majority shareholders in major corporations by buying into it in the worst of the collapse? Or if the 30% of us who aren't trust fund kids (sorry, but it's true) got stinking fucking rich that way and could start any club, build any halfpipe or put out any record we wanted. Just a thought. Apparently I am a dreamer rather than a realist. What else? Fell back in love with the hunting and gathering of records, and oh god, how could I forget you?
Vroom Vroom - Caught up with an old labor of love in the form of a 1975 Honda CB360 Twin that I got dirt cheap last year, which was soon followed by a 1978 Yamaha 750XS Triple. Learned that I get more out of working with my hands than my head these days. A lot of days in the shed with strong coffee and King Crimson making mechanical problems worse and better, but at least learning a lot along the way. Planning a motorcycle road trip in the spring/summer that will make Easy Rider look like Brokeback Mountain. High Anxiety. Worked on the label, got Cheap Tragedies and Eating Glass records out. Burning Love EP, posthumous Cursed 7" & DVD and Lullabye Arkestra, Nightbringer, Crux of Aux and other records are all in the works. Layouts. Did some fun stuff. The EG 7", an Endless Blockade/Shank 7", the VCM CD. 1060. Got to collaborate with the best person I know on some layouts and designs, and planning more in the new year. Missing Persons. You're looking at it. Started as an exercise in writing just to get back into shape and kick out the writer's block. And I guess it worked. I skipped over cell phones (my prediction...head cancer, just you wait) and the social networking side of the internet, but I like this. It's just information, you can take it or leave it. After the Melvins in Detroit last fall, I'm working off my list of bands I need to see before I die or they die. Top of the list: The Cramps. Somehow. Finally saw Neurosis, at the Masonic Temple in Brooklyn. And Bo Diddley had a stroke just days before the Toronto show was to happen.
Favorite things about 2008:
The Decline of Western Civilization. Decades of unrealistically non-sustainable hyper-capitalism finally hits tipping point and meets some natural equilibrium in the form of recession and the West sinks in prominence - entire world freaks out and starts talking about the next apocalypse. Millenial anxiety skips 992 years: "2012"? Bullshit. Find me somebody that said the same of any millenia, or Y2K. Once it comes and goes and the sky doesn't fall, they tend to just make breakfast, lose the bumper stickers, shut up and pretend they were never that irrational. Just like the voting majority of post-Bush Americans will pretend they weren't so swept up in CNN hypnotism that they were attacking Mosques, looking sideways at anyone remotely brown and repeating pushbutton xenophobe shit like "freedom fries" and "git r done" and not joking. 2012, I don't buy it. But people love apocalypse theories. It gives them excuses to be apathetic shitheels in the meantime. Shit is bad, sure, but cataclysm doesn't run on the calendar year. The numerology of it is purely incidental. Politics. A costly, unnecessary Canadian election just months after the last one, the third in...six years? Yes I did not vote. I'll get you next month. Or talk to me when we get to vote on separating from England, like any half civilized, self-respecting monarchal outpost has done by now, and we'll go from there. You wonder why Canada has such a crisis of political vagueness. Oh yeah, and America elects a Black man the president of the worst tangled mess in history. (Have you seen this? Have you heard about this?) How liberal. Baby steps, America. Baby steps. With the history of disaster politics in the last few years, and monumentally backwards decisions being made while the whole world was forced into a state of shock, I can't help but think the script for how this plays out has already been written. But for now I cross my fingers and hope he has a good stunt double.
And speaking of the arts & entertainment...Movies: Guy Ritchie's Rock N Rolla and Let The Right One In (Sweden) blow my mind. As do Iron Age and the Young Widows' live shows. Best records of the year: Young Widows - Old Wounds, Dismember -S/T & Ken Mode - Mennonite. Currently rereading Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon and Philip K Dick's Time Out of Joint, fostering an unhealthy fixation on Bobby Gentry and trying to get all the photos from Europe/Scandinavia/UK into some kind of album I can post here, but there's 1500+ pictures so, all in good time.
Good night MMVIII. Here's to new maps of the world.
"I Want It All... I Want It All... I Want It All...
...And I Want It Now!"
I've been fully nerding out on records again. It's like a pilot light that's always on to some degree, but when I found that Miles Davis soundtrack it reminded me that any and everything is out there somewhere, obscure or not. And I'm really glad, because I worried that I was getting deadened to music, until recently.
Some Awesome Scores This Week: Freddie Scott - Are You Lonely For Me LP (Shout) Napalm Death - The Curse/Musclehead...7" (MOSH8) Desmond Dekker - You Can Get It...45 (Trojan) Poison Idea - Darby Crash Rides Again 7" Melvins/Mudhoney Split 7" Melvins - With Yo' Heart Not Yo' Hands 7" (SFTRI) Motorhead - The One To Sing the Blues 7"
Rocket From The Tombs - Ain't It Fun 7" Iron Age - The Way Is Narrow Misfits - Back With a Bang (Bootleg 7") Morrissey - Boxers 7" King Tubby Meets Scientist Volume One LP Townes Van Zandt - S/T 1969 LP The Language And Music of The Wolves LP
So, point being, there's a lot of shit I'm into, across the board, and records I'm after, from soul to thrash to roots reggae to grindcore records. I've never done this kind of shit online before and I don't know where to go or where to start, so I'll go right here: if you out there are into trading or looking for records I might have, get in touch with me. Records I'm After:
Top Five:
Collette Kelly: Long & Lonely World 45 (Stax/Volt)
Entombed - To Ride...(Gatefold LP)
Jerusalem (UK) - s/t (1972)
Allen Toussaint - From A Whisper To A Scream (1970)
Melvins - Houdini
Some Of The Rest:
Necrophobic (Sweden) - The Nocturnal Silence (1994)
X (Australia) - Aspirations LP
Fun Things - 7" (bootleg) Scientist - any 1978-1981 LPs Fuse - s/t (1969)
Howard Tate - Get It While You Can (Legendary/Verve)
Coven - Witchcraft Destroys Minds...(1969)
Bruno Nicolai - Rendez-Vouz (1975)
Anything Paul Bowles or Dark Shadows related
...the list goes on. Got it? Want It? Playas, pipe up.
(And My New Favorite Toy: The Equals. Thank you, Andy.)
Music is forensic. If you could see everything that ever happened all at once, you would get a very different picture about it than what the official record might state. In film they call it the "Crane Shot", God's own POV. But we are subjects of our time and space, and we don't have that option, so those of us bothered enough to disrupt the picture, we start pulling out the wires, we peel back the layers and we dig.
I grew up hungrily devouring music. All music. I got into punk at 15, and I thought the music I listened to was one simple, self-standing phenomenological thing - until I heard the early 80's punk and hardcore that it came from, which led me to the punk of the late 70's, not exclusive to the UK or the US but in my own backyard, which in turn eventually led me to the destructo late 60's/early 70's punk before punk, things like the Stooges. And back from there to the music that would have been on their record players at the time.
Somewhere along the way there came the jump not only from musical style but the undeniable question of "realness" and race - from white to black music. Backwards to the "race records" (aka black music for white people) of the early 20th Century. The sound of real adversity, extracted and reproduced on wax, to be dissected by the curious - generally those on the other side of that diversity but who inherently understand their place in it, aka the Guilty White Liberal - via the safety of a one-way stereophonic interaction.
The things I knew I would never have to understand - like the fury of jazz musicians - dexterity unparalleled to this day - who had to wait in damp alleys in between sets in sold-out clubs they were otherwise not welcome in as patrons, and who could only express that conflict of self-worth in music, in new languages and an untouchable new amount of notes-per-second. The "easy-listening mellow vibes" piped way over the heads of the grandchildren of that same socially dominant, privileged class in coffee houses everywhere to this day. But having dug, and read, listened and learned, it's music that I find just as beautiful, but for the opposite reason - because I can only ever hear it as the sound of sheer fury, despite the external display of decorum, and the beauty that has to redeem it. I can draw you a direct line from Reign In Blood to Max Roach and Clifford Brown's Cherokee.
Forensics. I worked my way from Black Flag backwards to the distorted sounds of Thin Lizzy, King Crimson, the Pink Fairies, the Kinks or the Stooges. Backwards from there to Bo Diddley, to Elmore James, Lonnie Johnson, T-Bone Walker, the first guitars ever plugged in to something. From the Blues backwards to the roots of the Blues: Robert Johnson, of course. But Blind Willie McTell, Skip James, Josh White, Son House. Tragic, beat down lives, but master storytellers. Getting it out the only way they could - saying what you feel and what you hate.Chasing down the mythologies of songs like the Careless Love Blues, 50 years before Elvis. The best and most haunting version, incidentally, is the earliest Lonnie Johnson one. Backwards, to the work and field songs of the late 1800s, which were stoic, but underneath that Old Time Religion they carried an angry message mouth to mouth - a fixation on the next world, and contempt for a life wasted working for other people to make money. Sound familiar?
Follow it back, whole centuries. Among the first music ever made or recorded was protest music. And what music of any worth isn't a protest - against the unfair terms and conditions of life, love, age, work, time, and ultimately death? Backwards from the fields through all the centuries, past Carmina Burana and beyond. Almost all surviving musical traditions were there to say the same things in different words. Why am I here and what the fuck am I supposed to do with this? Backwards you can chase these shadows, all the way back to the fucking Big Bang. And from there all the way forward - to right now.
DNA. Listening a little harder, for the faint but undeniable links. Between any DIY music culture that responds to it's own co-opting and mainstreaming by making itself encrypted, unmarketable, intentionally abrasive, confusing, but still a real language. A system that works because most culture is made to be fed to people like candy and to go down easy. The advent of "Noise", which had already been there. From Sunn or Man Is The Bastard back to Steve Reich, to Cecil Taylor or Sun Ra. The ones who encrypted it, took it one level deeper, made the language inconvenient to tourists. You could draw a picture of it all that would make the London subway map look easy.
I am one of those who believes in the Collective Unconscious of music. Musicians are mediums, capable of expressing something they often don't even know they're aware of. I'm not suggesting that Kerry King gives a shit about Max Roach, but I have found that that it doesn't really matter if it's James Carr, The Crucifucks, Brahms, Terrorizer, MF Doom, George Crumb, Blitz, Jerusalem, or Fela. It's all part of an amazing and otherwise undetectable whole picture. The Inconspicuous World. It's something that we could live our whole lives and never see unless we volunteer to lose some sleep over it. And when you do, it's fucking beautiful.
"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic." - Anaïs Nin
Triple booked and burning the candle at all ends, just like old times. Today I woke up already running. My normal job goes until pretty late into the night, and getting home to do a few hours catching up on other things puts me at about 3am on average. I get a call last night, at work, about a morning gig already just hours away, on top of the one I'm already booked for today (Eagles of Death Metal), and seeing Boris and Orn with the wife I apparently have somewhere in between the load in and the load out.
Concert season is funny. If you've ever worked labor or production in that field, you'll know it's total feast or famine, with no heads up. It sucks. So many commitments, money pressed tight and so I'm taking everything that comes my way, two-ended candles be damned. Woke up, it was pissing down some cold November rain. I've been off coffee, I love it too much and every few years I take a couple months off it. But holy shit, if there was ever a day not to be such a fucking teetotaler...My bike was drenched and to top it off my clutch was fucked, so I was driving and stopping half in & half out of gear, which I can't fix until tomorrow.
Driving in Mega Toronto 2008 is a fucking royal pain in the ass, it's more and more like Manhattan all the time. Everyone trying to go everywhere at the same time, resulting in nobody getting anywhere. I forget that I need an hour to get across town. Good thing about motorcycles is, you can usually get around it all. But they want to GO, which is why we get along so well. We both hate the stop and go. We want to cut through the city shit. Over, under, around, through - whatever means necessary.
But not today, and not when you're overheating from all the stop and go, and a streetcar driver turns into you on a yellow light, when they know they can't go any further than halfway through the intersection, blocking your last chance as your fourth light in a row turns red, and you drop a loud C-bomb on her because you forget you're not in a car, and she bitches you out through the window for this, while you're stuck, and late, in the pissing rain, and so you freely drop several more F and C Bombs for good measure, as your motor dies, and the light goes green, and suddenly every asshole in the city is behind you honking and you just take off your helmet and close your eyes and let your head roll back into the rain, in the middle of the traffic jam which has now pinned the blame on you. And you're not even really awake yet.
A) If you want to force your way through more of this bullshit, go to the pre-job job after all and unload a truck in the rain, turn to Page 32. Otherwise...
B) You kick it over, cut across the road, take a time out, and decide to skip the fucking job and go get the awesomest and strongest coffee possible, which is a soy Cortado at Manic. And where is this all going? Don't worry, here comes the silver lining:
Suddenly having a few hours free, I went and saw a record store friend, and was digging through his insane archive of records. We are talking about the top records we want, in the whole world, ever. For me, the 1958 soundtrack to Louis Malle's Ascenseur Pour L'echafaud, an amazing French New Wave-era noir with a smoking hot Jeanne Moreau, and a suitably gloomy, brooding score by Miles Davis and Art Blakey. Something I've hunted for literally all over the world while touring and travelling, to no avail. I found a few awesome scores, a Screamin' Jay Hawkins LP, a Honeymoon Killers 7", Johnny Winter's Saints & Sinners, a Delroy Wilson collection, Kenny Burrell's Recapitulation (no relation to Crucifix). And then, literally as we're talking about it, in between a bunch of Kiss records...BAM: Fontana 220. Elevator To The Mother Fucking Gallows.
I was like "Seriously, where's the hidden camera?" We both laughed our asses off. He didn't even know he had it there. Moral of the story : chill out. Break your own rules. Take a day off sometimes. Life is too fucking short to internalize the city gridlock. Fuck it. And while you're fucking it, kick it with this perfect rainy-day record:
'I was never interested in existentialism, because of Sartre's famous phrase 'Hell is the others'. For me, this is a crazy idea. For me, hell is one's self.' - Jeanne Moreau
Epilogue:1:13AM. Boris was fucking disgusting and beautiful as always. I gotta give Smile a second chance. And congrats to ORN, keep your eye on that band. And here's a weird little factoid: working the EODM show, I was tearing down Joey Castillo's drums and the dude has not one but TWO SPACE HEATERS on either side of him, on full. Says he uses them every night. I don't know if he did that shit in Danzig or QOTSA, but that's mental. Heaters! And speaking of drummers, and bummers:
I think Halloween is giving New Years Eve a run for its money. The best live band I saw all last year just became the best one I've seen this year, and in the same room - IRON AGE. Fucked Up tore shit up all weekend long, way tighter and more sound-conscious than before. Overpower brought the oi thugs out to 751. Mind Eraser shredded as always. Quest For Fire. Sex Vid. Eating Glass. Tons more...
...Dead babies, human crayons, Hoibak as a giant pumpkin, and the undisputed champ - the O RLY Owl who was indeed keeping it RL all over town.
Somewhere in between we got hold of the drum set for the soon to be announced project with Dan Innes that I'm gonna drum in. Missing music a lot but I'm also glad I took such a step back after Europe and the Cursed blowout. I needed it. It's made me appreciate shows and music a lot more, with less cynical eyes and ears. Seeing old friends, having good times. Not having to put on faces or play anything up or down. Everything that's ever been real, good and energizing about this music and culture. Anyway, big ups to Pesci and FU for pulling off this mammoth weekend. It was really fun. Getting up this morning in the dark and freezing fucking cold to go to work? Not so much.
PS - Darkthrone Shirt...the new Motorhead Shirt.
Current Top 10:
Dismember - Dismember (2008)
Buddy Rich & Max Roach: Rich Vs Roach (1959)
Jesus & Mary Chain: Power of Negative Thinking: B-Sides & Rarities
Omegas: Psycho Dives...Demo (Fuck! Germs % Dead Boys = This)
Wedard - Wo Die Ewigkeit Die Zeit Beruhrt (2008)
Deathside: Bet On The Possibility LP (1991)
Grave - Into The Grave (1991)
Loss - Life Without Hope...(2004)
Quest For Fire - Quest For Fire (2008)
Allen Toussaint - The Complete Warner Recordings
*Also, the links 2 posts below for those mixes I made are fixed, re-upped and should work okay, but let me know if they don't. I'm still working on the Soul Mix and Loud Mix, which should be a total bummer and a total rager, respectively.
I was working in a busy restaurant kitchen washing dishes and there was a radio in the back, I'd keep it tuned to the CBC, who's always had some really good nighttime programming. I was going a bit mental, working too many jobs, stressing out, touring and nowhere close to making ends meet. At that precise moment, a sink full of murky water was clogged. I was up to my elbows in food waste, steam burns, broken glass, bullshit and frustration. I reached in the sink to the bottom of the sludge and something large and cockroach-like crawled across my fingers, and sent my brain over the top. At that exact moment, Sandy Bull's version of Carmina Burana (for banjo) came on, and the combination blew my mind.
I'm sure Sandy Bull is old news to audiophiles but I'd never heard him before that. The rest of the record is as amazing as his reinvention of Carmina Burana, it sounds like the inside of Martin Sheen's head in Apocalypse Now as the boat gets nearer down river towards Col Kurtz, drowning his sanity underneath it. When I fiiiiiinally found this a few years into the search at Discovery in the Beaches, for $15 (along with E Pluribus Unum and Inventions) I almost wore a fucking hole through it.
If you don't know John Fahey, I won't even try to explain him in detail, I couldn't do it justice. Read about him here and here, check out his label and life's work here and here. Basically, a juggernaut. A musicologist whose forensic obsession over early rural folk and blues is largely responsible for the survival, availability and proper credit and historicity of a body of music which might otherwise have been lost to history (a prime example being the American Primitive series on his own label, Revenant). He wrote a book, How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, and it did. Between mental and physical health problems, and battles with alcoholism and diabetes, he was living between the street and seedy motels and pawning his records and guitars towards the end of his life. The liners in Red Cross have a really good account of his later days, read them in full here, it definitely brings context to the haunting and hypnotic nature of this record. As a musician, his works go back to the 50's but this is (I think) the last thing he recorded before his death in 2001.
(1939-2001)
"When I was little I used to listen to the trains going by near where we lived. In the winter, after a big snowfall, late at night I’d sometimes hear the sound of the railroad plough clearing the snow off the tracks - a metallic, grinding noise.
So, I owed a bunch of people a bunch of best-of type mix tapes, and realized I may as well just compile and upload it all and stick the links up here for anybody else that wants them. So here you go, as promised, you know who you are:
And I'd like to thank the second generation Italian immigrants I grew up in the houses of. It took me about 25 years to realize it, but yeah - I AM addicted to Brio.
I'm gonna start making more posts about good obscurities like this one. It's a real anomaly and a fucking hard record to find. It blows my mind how a bunch of dudes in Africa in 1975, with really minimal resources, no slick producers and very little scene to support it, could make music that incorporates all the best things about loud rock and roll, and come off so completely natural. And the fact that WITCH was an acronym for "We Intend To Cause Havok" kind of seals the deal. The fuzz guitar and dirty riffs of the Stooges, the swagger of the Stones ("Motherless Child") the crunching riffs of Black Sabbath ("Black Tears"), and the groove of Hendrix ("Strange Dream"), whether they meant to or not. From The Liners: "...Inspirational psych/rock group blasting out of Zambia in 1975. A soul-shouting edge combines with hard driving punk/garage guitars, tons of wah-wah, mesmeric melodic constructs, heavy African rhythms and powering blues testifying that sounds like a more militant/low-down take on South American psych." Read more about them HERE.
Johnny Ace may be best recognized for "Pledging My Love", the deceptively wholesome soundtrack to Harvey Kietel's degenerate junkie cop in Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. But the world will remember him as the young crooner that blew his head off between sets on Christmas Eve 1954 in Houston Texas.
During that 300-plus show year, he had somewhere along the line picked up a .45 handgun and a fatalistic habit for Russian Roulette:
"After touring for a year, Ace had been performing at the City Auditorium in Houston, Texas on Christmas 1954. During a break between sets, Ace allegedly decided to play a game of Russian Roulette. He aimed a .45 caliber revolver at his girlfriend, Olivia Gibbs, and pulled the trigger. He then attempted to shoot her friend, Mary Carter. Both times, the hammer fell on an empty chamber. He then swiftly turned the gun on himself and ended his life. According to Big Mama Thornton, a witness to the shooting, Ace pointed the gun at his girlfriend and another woman who were sitting nearby, but did not fire. He then pointed the gun toward himself. The gun went off, shooting him in the side of the head." His last words were "I'll show you how it works".
Just like there's 4 Charlie Riches who easily could have been our Elvis, and James Carrs that should have been our Percy Sledges, Irma Thomas' our Etta James', et cetera, there are 10 just as deserving classics that die in the shadows of obscurity for every one that goes down on the official record. Here's a few good examples, of people that I for one got to way too late, but better late than never:
First Generation of Honda Civics. They started making them in 1973, the year before I was born. My mom had a red one. We had it until 1987. It had hundreds of thousands of kilometers on it by then, and I don't remember exactly how it died. You never see them. I saw one this week for the first time since I was a kid (a dark green one) and when I looked around, couldn't find them anywhere. I'm not a car person but am debating the mental health implications of hunting for one of these. Funny how incidental things like a car or the wallpaper in a house hold so much, sometimes more than the things we TRY to invest meaning into. Animism, they call it. Constant flight/movement was a recurring theme, so the insides of cars are just the kind of thing that sticks. "Honey we're here. Wake up and put your shoes on."
1971 Dodge Duster. A father figure I once had had one of these. He was a real piece of shit. If you can read this, I still think you're a real piece of shit and still think often of how right it is that I will be still alive for some time after you are dead. You were the worst of them.
...AND OTHER INANIMATE NOSTALGIA BOMBS.
...Hidden randomly like razor blades in the dark. Not likely ever to cross my path, but possible. Physically, it's still the same world, right? And things don't break down and blink out that fast. I don't think I'm that old, but the world displaces and replaces its objects faster than ever now. So fast that these objects I'm sure I have known are now classifiable antiques.
Orange Transistor Radio, inside a tent on my front lawn, playing the Boomtown Rats' I Don't Like Mondays, technically the first punk song I ever heard. I could tell you every word of it (Silicone chip inside her head...) to this day. 1981. 16 Park Lane. The backyard had a dog house from the previous owners, I would hang out in it often. There was an old GI Joe in it, the large ones with the bristly hairs. Jenny Rooney. My friend Domenic's older sister. They were all Scottish with thick accents. Domenic Rooney had funny big Scottish ears. We played a lot of Atari at his house. Lock N Chase. Maybe that one was Coleco. They had a large backyard. One day behind a tree Jenny Rooney made me show her mine (a pitiful young thing) and she showed and made me touch hers (pale, budding and hopeful) which unlike GI Joe had no bristly hairs. The things that stick. They are in danger of being pushed off the back of the bridge. I don't think I'm that old but these are accidental leftovers, the final shadows of memory, getting displaced all the time by such trivial, undeserving details of this modern life I feel like I'm not made for, never asked for. And the assholes that make billboards and TV ads and place them carefully in my path, that try to strike on any random nerve for people of "my generation", they'll never come close to these things. It's the random things that survive, by virtue of their genuine randomness. Stuck between the hairline cracks that run the entire length of the Collective Unconscious. The smell of a musty crawlspace in a summer house spent in a Northern town where my mother's boyfriend lived. The dusty stack of Gold Key horror comics and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Digest procured from the general store in the small town we'd stop in on the way there. The closed-
down roller rink at a four-corner stop in the middle of nowhere that I broke into. It was full of banana boards and soda machines. The track in the back, weeds and grass growing high through cracks, was still able to be navigated. The sunlight. The buzzing of hydro wires and cicadas. The way sweat and heat roll over you 15 seconds after you stop and sit against a wall. The things no one could ever find because no one would ever know to go looking for. The nerves that no Think Tank or Ad Man could ever locate, let alone target. I want to crawl back into it and die there, in all the objects and places from the world I didn't yet have to answer to.
So, before everything with Cursed in Europe suddenly burst into fucking flames, I had managed to secure some awesome record scores. Much thanks to one Jamie Thompson of London England, who kidnapped me and took me across town to Minus Zero, an amazing record store in Notting Hill consisting of two older gents who had suffered a legendary falling-out and divided their store straight up the middle, with a narrow column in the middle being the only passage between two walls of equally mind-blowing records. The two somehow don't talk to each other, which if you see the place, has to be quite a feat (even by seasoned passive-aggressive record store curmudgeon standards). This isn't all from Minus Zero but if you're in London, look the place up. Seriously now.
...yeah, with the way the Cursed thing ended, I had to ditch a lot of things too. I found an old Italian map of the world in a long-abandoned but creepily intact Alfa Romeo factory next to the show space in Milan. It somehow made the cuts and made the journey home too. I'm gonna mount it, ripped up and everything. There's a lot more to say, about the tour, about the trip to Prague after it, about coming home to a lot of harsh news, about finally moving out of this neighborhood that I love but that I've perhaps been curating as a museum (and being its sole customer) for a bit too long. Safe to say, the kids aren't coming back to the nest. Thanks endlessly to Tomas, Milan, Ondra and everyone that took such good care of us in Prague. The train ride back through the Czech countryside, man...I never stared out a window so long. May we find many more (even colder) rivers, and jump in them all.
accidentally finished university. Handed in my last paper ever, some total masturbation about
existentialism and theology. I've been juggling school and this Degree in the midst of work and band life for ten years now. What better way to kick it off than tour and traveling for a bit? Europe. Shit, maybe I'll find myself, wouldn't that be sweet? If the real me was under a rock in Norway this whole time, and I tripped over it? I'd probably kill it and put it back under the rock if no one was looking, things have been too good lately. Plus I think you have to be 18 for that. High Anxiety stuff has been busy, some really cool new records coming out, Cursed is back in full speed and more independent/self-determining than ever, when it seemed on the brink of total oblivion just moments ago. So it's all borrowed time, and really good times, people and places lately. An Australian tattooist named Fingers that's coming to the European shows is gonna give us all Cursed hegoats that say "I Hate You Guys". It's funny. In a few days I'll be on a plane, see a lot more of the world in a month (friends and record stores in that order), and then go back to Italy with my girl to see our friends Cici and Luca somewhere rural and really pretty that I can't pronounce. In between, if I can pull off Morocco or somewhere ballsy and otherworldly, I'm gonna try. I never did get that design stuff up here, did I? When I'm back in the summer, Ali and I are gonna start collaborating on some proper design projects, take it back to 2001. 1060. 9-11. It's all Numerology.
The 10 Last Records I Bought:
Allen Toussaint - Southern Nights LP
Joe Tex - Different Strokes
Channel Three - S/T (new LP!)
Crime - Exalted Masters LP (new too!)
Thrones - Day Late, Dollar Short
The Sonics - Here Are the Sonics
Iron Lung - Sexless/No Sex LP
XBrainiaX - Split EPs
Napalm Death - Scum (Picture Disc)
Pretty Things - House In The Country EP
The 10 Last Movies I Watched:
No Country For Old Men
The Call of Cthulhu
Ils (Them)
Rolling Thunder (1977)
The Case of Howard Phillips Lovecraft
The Kingdom (Von Trier)
The Other (L'Autre)
30 Days of Night
Pierrot Le Fou (Godard)
Little Children
10 Books I Can Finish
Now That I'm Done Using My Brain Forever:
Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine
Dave Eggers - What Is The What
Buruma - Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of It's Enemies
John Sayles - Union Dues
Arthur - You Will Die: The Burden Of Modern Taboos
M.Ondaatje - Coming Through Slaughter
Granta 93: God's Own Countries
Lovecraft - At Mountains Of Madness
Jack London - White Fang
Thomas Homer Dixon - The Upside of Down
10 Things I'm Trying To Do
Before I Leave For Tour on Sunday:
See my wife for more than 5 minutes or while sleeping
See CPC Gangbangs & Jay Reatard at the Silver Dollar
Find a huge fucking HP Lovecraft anthology for tour
Brush Up On Some Fucking Italian
Cheat Adulthood /Anger the Gods
...and drink as many soy Cortados from Manic because I think, if I may be so bold, that it is perhaps the perfect coffee beverage, mathematically and aesthetically, somewhere 'twixt the long and the short, blurring the lines between macchiato and god knows what.
There, I said it. See you somewhere down the line, huh?
I just realized that I wrote this big'un out in the early hours of New Year's Eve and saved but never actually posted it. Better late than never:
9:30 PM: We hit Ethiopian (Sheba's at College and Bathurst - do it!) and then played the first Burning Love show (with Reprobates, Our Father and The Endless Blockade at Rancho Relaxo, Toronto). Burning Love immediately got in a cock fight with a dreadlocked young French-Canadian fireball of a sound girl over us not turning down, which was retarded because there was only one cab per guitar and the PA could have easily accommodated it, and would indeed prove itself fully functional for all bands but us. But hey, adversity gives you purpose, so bring it. We'd already been asked not to come back to the place we were practicing, and figured we must be doing something right.
It didn't help the sound war when Dave told the girl that if it was too loud, she should take her fucking devil sticks and go back to Montreal, and I've long since had a rule barring me from having any patronizing conversation involving the phrases "too loud" or "do my job" with any sound person under 45 years of age, and definitely no French Canadian ones, of any age. Sorry but it's true - with the glaring exception of Manon, aka the mouthy French CDN girl in Another State of Mind (1984), that used to do sound at L'ex in Montreal (2001). Still awesome after all these years. Sister, you can tell me to do anything.
Fine, so the vocals got fucked over, but the show was good. We played fast and surrounded by a lot of good and old friends, and had a wicked time. The Blockade, needless to say, devastated, and Reprobates fucking brought it, opening and closing with ripping versions of SSD's Boiling Point.
1 AM: In a cab, from this show to a party at a friend's house. From hanging out getting bloody and sweaty with 19 year-olds to hanging out with 42 year olds who make me not fear getting older, and being grateful that I managed a life where these numbers don't matter, and things like age don't stand in the way of interacting or cutting the shit with anybody.
2:30 AM: I had signed on about 48 hours earlier to sing a bunch of songs for a Kittens cover band. Sure, fuck, throw that one on the pile. I had to write Pony (Kittens' singer) for some of the proper lyrics because they make next to no goddamned sense but are brilliant, and I'm a stickler for details. One night only - in a huge old house where a bunch of kids had been evicted and were going out with a bang - a New Years rager in the empty house. My only stipulation was Sex Boat, and Where Eagles Dare for good measure. It was a great and senseless way to end a long year. I decided that drunk girl mosh pits, they make everything better. We were called Bloodhoser. Thanks to Dylan and all the 'Hosers for that. Here's some drunks-eye-view video, it's grainy and dark but it's the closest thing to proof:
3:45AM: Home. Wife 1 is crashed out hard. It'll be five years in 13 days. Baby we did really good for making it all up as we go along and never having a plan. I don't know how anyone thinks that "Life Plan" is anything but an oxymoron. We did good. We survived ourselves.
5:15AM: Writing This. The Sun Is Coming Up, it's 2008. I decided I would let this year make or break a lot of things for me. To New Beginnings, Mother Fuckers.
An imbalance of chemicals in the brain. This time of year is like clockwork. The winter grey sets up shop for 6 months and parades ghosts in front of your face. Past winters, past Christmases, past lives all hang in the air. The morbid shuffling from door to door. The elements that want you dead. The good news is, I have an arsenal of destraction - This:
DARK SHADOWS
(1966-1971). Sadly, there were only 1245 episodes of this, or 1225 if you're a nerd and don't count the 20 that were never broadcast. This was always on TV at 5 AM when I was a kid, on one of the 3 channels that weren't fuzz. It's slow but hypnotizing. Nerd out:
Yeah, so if you only see one creepy 60s vampire soap opera this winter...here you have it. There were also two movie versions of the original, House Of Dark Shadows (1970) and Night Of Dark Shadows (1971), if you dont have 1,225 hours to kill. Apparently they're about to remake it. No doubt the jackass that made Mouse Hunt, the Olsen Twins and some computer generated bats will make this twice as great in 2008. Why, God? Why? Actually, the word is - Johnny Depp.
If anyone reading this collects Dark Shadows shit, especially the Gold Key comics or original posters, I'll gladly trade any rare Cursed, Swarm, LFD records (or "paperweights" as I call them) or other records for DS stuff. Fat chance, but if you are that nerd, get in touch. If you are Johnny Depp, don't fuck it up.
Wow, it's a big one. I came to work today but I'm just sitting here watching a cold white cloud with occasional bits of shuffling people through a plate glass window - the city is in a dead stop. Not even the Market crackheads are braving it today. A few feet of snow and counting. No cars on the roads, public transit partially shut down. You can literally walk down the middle of a major street, the sidewalks are a lost cause. At this rate, by tomorrow it'll be a few more feet deep and a real snow day for everybody, like it or not. I love it. You can't do anything about it. And what better week than Christmas for nature's wrath to put a cold wet blanket on all the aimless, senseless hustle and bustle?
In 1998 there was a legendary storm that shut everything down for days and days. I lived in a house with my bandmates and friends. It was a week-long unisex underwear Nintendo marathon, no one could go to school or work. A pink slip from life. We were digging out neighbours' parked cars where snow drifts had crawled right over them. They'd get free, make it maybe a few feet and get stuck in the middle of the street where they remained for days. The subway stopped dead on account of the parts that go overground being unpassable. It was declared a state of emergency after a few days (when no trucks could get to the few food stores that were open and people were getting freaked) and they called the Army in with huge flamethrowers on trucks to try and melt it. It was pretty fucking cool. I for one could use a week of snow days right now.
All links link to existing links, if you want to get existential about it. Please contact me via comments if you have personal or professional issue with any content.
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James Carr - 
