I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers – very few readers – to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors hare something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number or men. I asked him the origin of this memorable observation and he answered that it was reproduced in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar. The house (which we had rented furnished) had a set of this work. On the last pages of Volume XLVI we found an article on Upsala; on the first pages of Volume XLVII, one on Ural-Altaic Languages, but not a word about Uqbar. Bioy, a bit taken aback, consulted the volumes of the index. In vain he exhausted all of the imaginable spellings: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr . . . . Before leaving, he told me that it was a region of Iraq of or Asia Minor. I must confess that I agreed with some discomfort. I conjectured that this undocumented country and its anonymous heresiarch were a fiction devised by Bioy’s modesty in order to justify a statement. The fruitless examination of one of Justus Perthes’ atlases fortified my doubt.

The following day, Bioy called me from Buenos Aries. He told me he had before him the article on Uqbar, in volume XLVI of the encyclopedia. The heresiarch’s name was not forthcoming, but there was a note on his doctrine, formulated in words almost identical to those he had repeated, though perhaps literally inferior. He had recalled: Copulation and mirrors are abominable. The text of the encyclopedia said: For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe. I told him, in all truthfulness, that I should like to see that article. A few days later he brought it. This surprised me, since the scrupulous cartographical indices of Ritter’s Erdkunde were plentifully ignorant of the name Uqbar.

The tome Bioy brought was, in fact, Volume XLVI of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. On the half-title page and the spine, the alphabetical marking (Tor-Ups) was that of our copy but, instead of 917, it contained 921 pages. These four additional pages made up the article on Uqbar, which (as the reader will have noticed) was not indicated by the alphabetical marking. We later determined that there was no other difference between the volumes. Both of them (as I believe I have indicated) are reprints of the tenth Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bioy had acquired his copy at some sale or other.

We read the article with some care. The passage recalled by Bioy was perhaps the only surprising one. The rest of it seemed very plausible, quite in keeping with the general tone of the work and (as is natural) a bit boring. Reading it over again, we discovered beneath its rigorous prose a fundamental vagueness. Of the fourteen names which figured in the geographical part, we only recognized three—Khorasan, Armenia, Erzerum—interpolated in the text in an ambiguous way. Of the historical names, only one: the impostor magician Smerdis, invoked more as a metaphor. The note seemed to fix the boundaries of Uqbar, but its nebulous reference points were rivers and craters and mountain ranges of that same region. We read, for example, that the lowlands of Tsai Khaldun and the Axa Delta marked the southern frontier and that on the islands of the delta wild horses procreate. All this, on the first part of page 918. In the historical section (page 920) we learned that as a result of the religious persecutions of the thirteenth century, the orthodox believers sought refuge on these islands, where to this day their obelisks remain and where it is not uncommon to unearth their stone mirrors. The section on Language and Literature was brief. Only one trait is worthy of recollection: it noted that the literature of Uqbar was one of fantasy and that its epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön . . . . The bibliography enumerated four volumes which we have not yet found, though the third—Silas Haslam: History of the Land Called Uqbar, 1874—figures in the catalogs of Bernard Quartich’s book shop^[1]. The first, Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen uber das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien, dates from 1641 and is the work of Johannes Valentinus Andrea. This fact is significant; a few years later, I came upon that name in the unsuspected pages of De Quincey (Writings, Volume XIII) and learned that it belonged to a German theologian who, in the early seventeenth century, described the imaginary community of Rosae Crucis—a community that others founded later, in imitation of what he had prefigured.

That night we visited the National Library. In vain we exhausted atlases, catalogs, annuals of geographical societies, travelers’ and historians’ memoirs: no one had ever been in Uqbar. Neither did the general index of Bioy’s encyclopedia register that name. The following day, Carlos Mastronardi (to whom I had related the matter) noticed the black and gold covers of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia in a bookshop on Corrientes and Talcahuano… He entered and examined Volume XLVI. Of course, he did not find the slightest indication of Uqbar.

II

Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer of the southern railways, persists in the hotel at Adrogue, amongst the effusive honeysuckles and in the illusory depths of the mirrors. In his lifetime, he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen; once dead, he is not even the ghost he was then. He was tall and listless and his tired rectangular beard had once been red. I understand he was a widower, without children. Every few years he would go to England, to visit (I judge from some photographs he showed us) a sundial and a few oaks. He and my father had entered into one of those close (the adjective is excessive) English friendships that begin by excluding confidences and very soon dispense with dialog. They used to carry out an exchange of books and newspapers and engage in taciturn chess games… I remember him in the hotel corridor, with a mathematics book in his hand, sometimes looking at the irrecoverable colors of the sky. One afternoon, we spoke of the duodecimal system of numbering (in which twelve is written as 10). Ashe said that he was converting some kind of tables from the duodecimal to the sexagesimal system (in which sixty is written as 10). He added that the task had been entrusted to him by a Norwegian, in Rio Grande du Sul. We had known him for eight years and he had never mentioned in sojourn in that region… We talked of country life, of the capangas, of the Brazilian etymology of the word gaucho (which some old Uruguayans still pronounce gaucho) and nothing more was said – may God forgive me – of duodecimal functions. In September of 1937 (we were not at the hotel), Herbert Ashe died of a ruptured aneurysm. A few days before, he had received a sealed and certified package from Brazil. It was a book in large octavo. Ashe left it at the bar, where – months later – I found it. I began to leaf through it and experienced an astonished and airy feeling of vertigo which I shall not describe, for this is not the story of my emotions but of Uqbar and Tlön and Orbis Tertius. On one of the nights of Islam called the Night of Nights, the secret doors of heaven open wide and the water in the jars becomes sweeter; if those doors opened, I would not feel what I felt that afternoon. The book was written in English and contained 1001 pages. On the yellow leather back I read these curious words which were repeated on the title page: A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr. There was no indication of date or place. On the first page and on a leaf of silk paper that covered on of the color plates there was stamped a blue oval with this inscription: Orbis Tertius. Two years before I had discovered, in a volume of a certain pirated encyclopedia, a superficial description of a nonexistent country; now chance afforded me something more precious and arduous. Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody.

In the “Eleventh Volume” which I have mentioned, there are allusions to preceding and succeeding volumes. In an article in the N. R. F. which is now classic, Nestor Ibarra has denied the existence of those companion volumes; Ezequiel Martinez Estrada and Drieu La Rochelle have refuted that doubt, perhaps victoriously. The fact is that up to now the most diligent inquiries have been fruitless. In vain we have upended the libraries of the two Americas and of Europe. Alfonso Reyes, tired of these subordinate sleuthing procedures, proposes that we should all undertake the task of reconstructing the many and weighty tomes that are lacking: ex ungue leonem. He calculates, half in earnest and half jokingly, that a generation of tlonistas should be sufficient. This venturesome computation brings us back to the fundamental problem: Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor – an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly – has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers… directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan. This plan is so vast that each writer’s contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, and irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally. Let it suffice for me to recall that the apparent contradictions of the Eleventh Volume are the fundamental basis for the proof that the other volumes exist, so lucid and exact is the order observed in it. The popular magazines, with pardonable excess, have spread news of the zoology and topography of Tlön; I think its transparent tiger and towers of blood perhaps do not merit the continued attention of all men. I shall venture to request a few minutes to expound its concept of the universe.

Hume noted for all time that Berkeley’s arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language – religion, letters, metaphysics – all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlön’s conjectural Ursprache, from which the “present” languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word “moon,”, but there is a verb which in English would be “to moon” or “to moonate.” “The moon rose above the river” is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned.”

The preceding applies to the languages of the southern hemisphere. In those of the northern hemisphere (on whose Ursprache there is very little data in the Eleventh Volume) the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say “moon,” but rather “round airy-light on dark” or “pale-orange-of-the-sky” or any other such combination. In the example selected the mass of adjectives refers to a real object, but this is purely fortuitous. The literature of this hemisphere (like Meinong’s subsistent world) abounds in ideal objects, which are convoked and dissolved in a moment, according to poetic needs. At times they are determined by mere simultaneity. There are objects composed of two terms, one of visual and another of auditory character: the color of the rising sun and the faraway cry of a bird. There are objects of many terms: the sun and the water on a swimmer’s chest, the vague tremulous rose color we see with our eyes closed, the sensation of being carried along by a river and also by sleep. These second-degree objects can be combined with others; through the use of certain abbreviations, the process is practically infinite. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word. This word forms a poetic object created by the author. The fact that no one believes in the reality of nouns paradoxically causes their number to be unending. The languages of Tlön’s northern hemisphere contain all the nouns of the Indo-European languages – and many others as well.

It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time. Spinoza ascribes to his inexhaustible divinity the attributes of extension and thought; no one in Tlön would understand the juxtaposition of the first (which is typical only of certain states) and the second – which is a perfect synonym of the cosmos. In other words, they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas.

This monism or complete idealism invalidates all science. If we explain (or judge) a fact, we connect it with another; such linking, in Tlön, is a later state of the subject which cannot affect or illuminate the previous state. Every mental state is irreducible: there mere fact of naming it – i.e., of classifying it – implies a falsification. From which it can be deduced that there are no sciences on Tlön, not even reasoning. The paradoxical truth is that they do exist, and in almost uncountable number. The same thing happens with philosophies as happens with nouns in the northern hemisphere. The fact that every philosophy is by definition a dialectical game, a Philosophie des Als Ob, has caused them to multiply. There is an abundance of incredible systems of pleasing design or sensational type. The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one such aspect. Even the phrase “all aspects” is rejectable, for it supposes the impossible addition of the present and of all past moments. Neither is it licit to use the plural “past moments,” since it supposes another operation… One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present memory^[2]. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe – and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives – is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.

Amongst the doctrines of Tlön, none has merited the scandalous reception accorded to materialism. Some thinkers have formulated it with less clarity than fervor, as one might put forth a paradox. In order to facilitate the comprehension of this inconceivable thesis, a heresiarch of the eleventh century^[3] devised the sophism of the nine copper coins, whose scandalous renown is in Tlön equivalent to that of the Eleatic paradoxes. There are many versions of this “specious reasoning,” which vary the number of coins and the number of discoveries; the following is the most common:

On Tuesday, X crosses a deserted road and loses nine copper coins. On Thursday, Y finds in the road four coins, somewhat rusted by Wednesday’s rain. On Friday, Z discovers three coins in the road. On Friday morning, X finds two coins in the corridor of his house. The heresiarch would deduce from this story the reality – i.e., the continuity – of the nine coins which were recovered. It is absurd (he affirmed) to imagine that four of the coins have not existed between Tuesday and Thursday, three between Tuesday and Friday afternoon, two between Tuesday and Friday morning. It is logical to think that they have existed – at least in some secret way, hidden from the comprehension of men – at every moment of those three periods.

The language of Tlön resists the formulation of this paradox; most people did not even understand it. The defenders of common sense at first did no more than negate the veracity of the anecdote. They repeated that it was a verbal fallacy, based on the rash application of two neologisms not authorized by usage and alien to all rigorous thought: the verbs “find” and “lose,” which beg the question, because they presuppose the identity of the first and of the last nine coins. They recalled that all nouns (man, coin, Thursday, Wednesday, rain) have only a metaphorical value. They denounced the treacherous circumstance “somewhat rusted by Wednesday’s rain,” which presupposes what is trying to be demonstrated: the persistence of the four coins from Tuesday to Thursday. They explained that equality is one thing and identity another, and formulated a kind of reductio ad absurdum: the hypothetical case of nine men who on nine nights suffer a severe pain. Would it not be ridiculous – they questioned – to pretend that this pain is one and the same? They said that the heresiarch was prompted only by the blasphemous intention of attributing the divine category of being to some simple coins and that at times he negated plurality and at other times did not. They argued: if equality implies identity, one would also have to admit that the nine coins are one.

Unbelievably, these refutations were not definitive. A hundred years after the problem was stated, a thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch but of orthodox tradition formulated a very daring hypothesis. This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one subject, that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and that these beings are the organs and masks of the divinity. X is Y and is Z. Z discovers three coins because he remembers that X lost them; X finds two in the corridor because he remembers that the others have been found… The Eleventh Volume suggests that three prime reasons determined the complete victory of this idealist pantheism. The first, its repudiation of solipsism; the second, the possibility of preserving the psychological basis of the sciences; the third, the possibility of preserving the cult of the gods. Schopenhauer (the passionate and lucid Schopenhauer) formulates a very similar doctrine in the first volume of Parerga und Paralipomena.

The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first. The basis of visual geometry is the surface, not the point. This geometry disregards parallel lines and declares that man in his movement modifies the forms which surround him. The basis of its arithmetic is the notion of indefinite numbers. They emphasize the importance of the concepts of greater and lesser, which our mathematicians symbolize as > and <. They maintain that the operation of counting modifies the quantities and converts them from indefinite into definite sums. The fact that several individuals who count the same quantity would obtain the same result is, for the psychologists, an example of association of ideas or of a good exercise of memory. We already know that in Tlön the subject of knowledge is on and eternal.

In literary practices the idea of a single subject is also all-powerful. It is uncommon for books to be signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. The critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres...

Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete.

Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent. Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to his expectations. These secondary objects are called hronir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer. Until recently, the Hronir were the accidental products of distraction and forgetfulness. It seems unbelievable that their methodical production dates back scarcely a hundred years, but this is what the Eleventh Volume tells us. The first efforts were unsuccessful. However, the modus operandi merits description. The director of one of the state prisons told his inmates that there were certain tombs in an ancient river bed and promised freedom to whoever might make an important discovery. During the months preceding the excavation the inmates were shown photographs of what they were to find. This first effort proved that expectation and anxiety can be inhibitory; a week's work with pick and shovel did not mange to unearth anything in the way of a hron except a rusty wheel of a period posterior to the experiment. But this was kept in secret and the process was repeated later in four schools. In three of them failure was almost complete; in a fourth (whose director died accidentally during the first excavations) the students unearthed - or produced - a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or three clay urns and the moldy and mutilated torso of a king whose chest bore an inscription which it has not yet been possible to decipher. Thus was discovered the unreliability of witnesses who knew of the experimental nature of the search... Mass investigations produce contradictory objects; now individual and almost improvised jobs are preferred. The methodical fabrication of hronir (says the Eleventh Volume) has performed prodigious services for archaeologists. It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future. Curiously, the hronir of second and third degree - the hronir derived from another hron, those derived from the hron of a hron - exaggerate the aberrations of the initial one; those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second; in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original. The process is cyclical: the hron of the twelfth degree begins to fall off in quality. Stranger and more pure than any hron is, at times, the ur: the object produced through suggestion, educed by hope. The great golden mask I have mentioned is an illustrious example.

Things became duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.

Postscript (1947)

I reproduce the preceding article just as it appeared in the Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1940), with no omission other than that of a few metaphors and a kind of sarcastic summary which now seems frivolous. So many things have happened since then… I shall do no more than recall them here.

In March of 1941 a letter written by Gunnary Erfjord was discovered in a book by Hinton which had belonged to Herbert Ashe. The envelope bore a cancellation from Ouro Preto; the letter completely elucidated the mystery of Tlön. Its text corroborated the hypotheses of Martinez Estrada. One night in Lucerne or in London, in the early seventeenth century, the splendid history has its beginning. A secret and benevolent society (amongst whose members were Dalgarno and later George Berkeley) arose to invent a country. Its vague initial program included “hermetic studies,” philanthropy and the cabala. From this first period dates the curious book by Andrea. After a few years of secret conclaves and premature syntheses it was understood that one generation was not sufficient to give articulate form to a country. They resolved that each of the masters should elect a disciple who would continue his work. This hereditary arrangement prevailed; after an interval of two centuries the persecuted fraternity sprang up again in America. In 1824, in Memphis (Tennessee), one of its affiliates conferred with the ascetic millionaire Ezra Buckley. The latter, somewhat disdainfully, let him speak – and laughed at the plan’s modest scope. He told the agent that in America it was absurd to invent a country and proposed the invention of a planet. To this gigantic idea he added another, a product of his nihilism^[4]: that of keeping the enormous enterprise a secret. At that time the twenty volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were circulating in the United States; Buckleyy suggested that a methodical encyclopedia of the imaginary planet be written. He was to leave them his mountains of gold, his navigable rivers, his pasture lands roamed by cattle and buffalo, his Negroes, his brothels and his dollars, on one condition: “The work will make no pact with the impostor Jesus Christ.” Buckley did not believe in God, but he wanted to demonstrate to this nonexistent God that mortal man was capable of conceiving a world. Buckley was poisoned in Baton Rouge in 1828; in 1914 the society delivered to its collaborators, some three hundred in number, the last volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. The edition was a secret one; its fourty volumes (the vastest undertaking ever carried out by man) would be the basis for another more detailed edition, written not in English but in one of the languages of Tlön. This revision of an illusory world, was called, provisionally, Orbis Tertius and one of its modest demiurgi was Herbert Ashe, whether as an agent of Gunnar Erfjord or as an affiliate, I do not know. His having received a copy of the Eleventh Volume would seem to favor the latter assumption. But what about the others?

In 1942 events became more intense. I recall one of the first of these with particular clarity and it seems that I perceived then something of its premonitory character. It happened in an apartment on Laprida Street, facing a high and light balcony which looked out toward the sunset. Princess Faucigny Lucinge had received her silverware from Pointiers. From the vast depths of a box embellished with foreign stamps, delicate immobile objects emerged: silver from Utrecht and Paris covered with hard heraldic fauna, and a samovar. Amongst them – with the perceptible and tenuous tremor of a sleeping bird – a compass vibrated mysteriously. The princess did not recognize it. Its blue needle longed from magnetic north; its metal case was concave in shape; the letters around its edge corresponded to one of the alphabets of Tlön. Such was the first intrusion of this fantastic world into the world of reality.

I am still troubled by the stroke of chance which made me witness of the second intrusion as well. It happened some months later, at a country store owned by a Brazilian in Cuchilla Negra. Amorim and I were returning from Sant’ Anna. The River Tacuarembo had flooded and we were obliged to sample (and endure) the proprietor’s rudimentary hospitality. He provided us with some creaking cots in a large room cluttered with barrels and hides. We went to bed, but were kept from sleeping until dawn by the drunken ravings of an unseen neighbor, who intermingled inextricable insults with snatches of milongas – or rather with snatches of the same milonga. As might be supposed, we attributed this insistent uproar to the store owner’s fiery cane liquor. By daybreak, the man was dead in the hallway. The roughness of his voice had deceived us: he was only a youth. In his delirium a few coins had fallen from his belt, along with a cone of bright metal, the size of a die. In vain a boy tried to pick up this cone. A man was scarcely able to raise it from the ground. It held in my hand for a few minutes; I remember that its weight was intolerable and that after it was removed, the feeling of oppressiveness remained. I also remember the exact circle it pressed into my palm. The sensation of a very small and at the same time extremely heavy object produced a disagreeable impression of repugnance and fear. One of the local men suggested we throw it into the swollen river; Amorim acquired it for a few pesos. No one knew anything about the dead man, except that “he came from the border.” These small, very heavy cones (made from a metal which is not of this world) are images of the divinity in certain regions of Tlön.

Here I bring the personal part of my narrative to a close. The rest is in the memory (if not in the hopes or fears) of all my readers. Let it suffice for me to recall or mention the following facts, with a mere brevity of words which the reflective recollection of all will enrich or amplify. Around 1944, a person doing research fro the newspaper The American (of Nashville, Tennessee) brought to light in a Memphis library the forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Even today there is a controversy over whether this discovery was accidental or whether it was permitted by the directors of the still nebulous Orbis Tertius. The latter is most likely. Some of the incredible aspects of the Eleventh Volume (for example, the multiplication of the hronir) have been eliminated or attenuated in the Memphis copies; it is reasonable to imagine that these omissions follow the plan of exhibiting a world which is not too incompatible with the real world. The dissemination of objects from Tlön over different countries would complement this plan . . .^[5] The fact is that the international press infinitely proclaimed the “find.” Manuals, anthologies, summaries, literal versions, authorized re-editions and pirated editions of the Greatest Work of Man flooded and still flood the earth. Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a resemblance of order – dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism – was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly plant? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws – I translate: inhuman laws – which we never quite grasp. Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) “primitive language” of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty – not even a that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars… A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.

Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne’s Urn Burial.

Notes:

1. Haslam has also published A General History of Labyrinths. ↩

2. Russell (The Analysis of Mind, 1921, page 159) supposes that the planet has been created a few minutes ago, furnished with a humanity that “remembers” an illusory past. ↩

3. A century, according to the duodecimal system, signifies a period of a hundred and forty-four years. ↩

4. Today, one of the churches of Tlön Platonically maintains that a certain pain, a certain greenish tint of yellow, a certain temperature, a certain sound, are the only reality. All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare. ↩

5. There remains, of course, the problem of the material of some objects. ↩

“Guten Abend,” the skinhead said, with a crooked smile, “I’m Kyle, this is Jake.”

Kiki and I introduced ourselves.

“We’re on our way to a block party,” he continued, “you gotta come along.”

Kiki and I had spent the entire day at the beach, drugging with the Locals, and were completely played out.

“Sounds like a blast,” Kiki yawned, “but we’ve been partying all day, we’re gonna have to pass.”

Clearly not what they wanted to hear. Jake was now practically sitting in my lap, cooing honeyed words into my ears. “You’re me” was his line. How crudely romantic. It reminded me of Tarzan. And isn’t that what Ann Dvorak said to Paul Muni in the original Scarface, right before they took on the coppers?

“I’m flattered,” I said sarcastically, scooting away from him, “but frazzled.”

“Yeah, we’re done,” Kiki added, placing a cigarette in her mouth, “maybe some other time.”

“That’s too bad,” Kyle said, lighting her cigarette, “’cause we got a shitload of blow.”

“Damn!” she laughed, throwing her arm over his shoulder. “You just had to say the magic word, didn’t you!”

While walking to their van, Kiki called shotgun, forcing me to ride in back with Jake, who was becoming increasingly more charming. There was no denying it, the man exuded sex appeal, but my heart belonged to the object of my obsession, who’d busted my precious cherry, ripped out my ticker and entrails, and tossed them all into a multi-bladed Cuisinart. I couldn’t even think about another man. Or so I believed.

En route we stopped at the beach to limber up with some Jack and Coke – Daniels and Caine, that is. It wasn’t long before Kyle and Kiki were all over each other. While I ignored them, Jake stared and laughed out loud, as though he were watching a pornographic sitcom.

“Fuck off, dick!” Kyle yelled, flinging a lighter at him. “It’s too crowded in here,” he said to Kiki, “let’s go for a walk.”

And off they went. As expected, Jake wasted no time in launching a full-scale assault with his meat hooks. After trying in vain to rebuff the lecherous fusillade, I took refuge in the suicide seat. He followed and planted his repellently magnetic self in the driver’s seat.

“Keep those fucking paws to yourself,” I threatened, with my back pressed against the window, like a defensive cat, “or you’ll be sorry.”

“Why?” he laughed. “What are you gonna do?”

“Touch me and find out.”

Realizing that he was getting nowhere fast, he yielded for a spell. We began to chat in a “mature” manner, and I immediately learned that he wasn’t as one-dimensional as I’d thought. It turned out that he was a musician, which was what I’d pegged him as. We discussed music, film, literature, drugs, and politics, among other subjects, and much to my amazement, jibed all the way. At first, I thought he was bullshitting to win me over, but his knowledge was far too extensive, and his opinions, far too explicit. And when he began reciting lines from Hard Times – the film, that is – I was sold.

“Did you make it all the way through Cut the Crap?” he asked, placing his hand on my thigh.

“Once,” I replied, removing the hand.

“And?”

“It was like eating a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup without the peanut butter.”

“That’s the right answer, but I’ve never heard anyone put it like that before. You’re wacky.”

I stuck my tongue out at him.

“It’s weird that you used a food analogy though, ’cause I do that all the time.”

“I figured you for a sex analogy guy,” I replied smartly.

“It’s just another sign that you and I are destined to be together, baby,” he sighed, ignoring my remark, and placing his hand on my thigh again.

“The only reason I used a food analogy is because I’m famished,” I said, removing the hand again. “I haven’t had a solid bite since breakfast. My stomach feels like it’s eating itself from the inside out. Is there anything to munch on in this piece of shit?”

He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a three-pack of assorted fruit flavored Tums.

“Thanks,” I said, grabbing them from his hand.

“You’re not really gonna eat those, are you? It was meant to be a joke.”

I tore open one of the packages, and began popping them into my mouth like Sweet Tarts.

He started to roar. “You’re a fuckin’ freak! I can’t believe you’re actually eating those!”

“Why not?” I said, chewing on a chalky mouthful. “I’m on the verge of a hypoglycemic fit, and these fuckers are loaded with sucrose.”

“I don’t know if you should eat that many,” he said, taking the remaining roll from my hand.  “It might not be safe.”

“I just spent the entire day poisoning my body with a shitload of narcotics and stimulants, and you’re worried about a couple dozen antacids?” I laughed. “Fuck off already.”

He opened the window, and flung the Tums out into the parking lot.

“You suck!” I yelled.

“I’m sorry, baby,” he said, caressing my cheek. “Do you want me to go get them?”

I pushed his hand away and flipped him off. I wasn’t angry about the Tums, but rather annoyed that I was becoming increasingly more attracted to him, despite my best efforts to resist. “Do you want to know how old I am?” I asked coolly, glaring at him.

“I couldn’t care less,” he replied, gazing into my eyes, “I’m already in love with you.”

“You are so full of shit it’s oozing out of your pores,” I scoffed, gazing back.

“I mean it, baby,” he argued, caressing my cheek again, “you’re the one. Don’t you believe in love at first sight?”

“All I believe is that you’re a horny motherfucker who’s full of shit,” I countered, pushing his hand away again. “And by the way, I’m only fifteen.”

“Doesn’t matter to me,” he said, grinning cockily. “I wouldn’t care if you were only thirteen.”

“You’re a dirty old man. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Hey, is it a crime to prefer veal over beef?”

“When you’re beef it is.”

“Fuck, you turn me on,” he growled, pulling me toward him.

“That’s your problem, Trog,” I countered, fending him off. “If you touch me again, I’ll break all ten of your fingers, one at a time.”

Suddenly, the door flew open.

“You’re still dressed, huh?” Kyle asked, grinning at me. “You must be losin’ it, Jake.”

“I haven’t lost shit, man. This one’s a defiant little vixen. I’ve never seen anything like it. She’s Kate the Shrew incarnate.”

I flipped him off again and moved to the back seat. He followed.

“You guys ready to roll?” Kyle said, reclaiming the helm.

“Yeah,” Jake replied, glancing over at me, “let’s get this show on the road.”

* * * * *

Upon arriving, we entered the backyard of one of the houses, where we were greeted by a coke dealer named Gary, who was as slimy as can be. “Well, well, well,” he said, opening the screen door, “look who’s here. Come on in.”

Jake, Kyle, Kiki, and I sat down on the couch, while Gary positioned himself in the love seat opposite. After undressing Kiki and me with his eyes, he reached over the coffee table and handed me a sawed-off McDonald’s straw. “Help yourself, sweetheart,” he said, pointing toward a batch of freshly chopped lines that were resting on a mirror in front of me.

I snorted a tetrad – two for each nostril – then passed the straw to Kiki.

“Sssssoooo,” he hissed through a slick smile, “where did you two come from?”

“We found them at a Carl’s Jr.,” Kyle said, petting Kiki’s hair. “Unbelievable, huh?”

“You don’t say!” Gary exclaimed sarcastically. “Which one do I get?”

Kiki and I glared at him. To indicate that I was already spoken for, Jake pulled me onto his lap – which I didn’t mind, under the circumstances.

“Aren’t you going to let me play with your toy, Jake?” Gary said, waving his forefinger at me.

I returned the finger – the middle one, straight-up.

“She’s no toy, man,” Jake replied, wrapping his arms around me, “she’s the one. I asked for a soul mate and God sent her.”

“God, huh? And when did you become religious?”

“About an hour ago.”

“How old are you, little girl,” Gary hissed.

Before I had a chance to answer, Jake cut in. “Doesn’t matter, man.”

“You know Jake’s an incurable womanizer, right?” Gary said, taking the straw from Kyle. “He’s left a trail of broken hearts from here to New York City.”

“Don’t listen to him, baby,” Jake whispered loudly, resting his chin on my shoulder. “He’s a mean old son-of-a-bitch who hasn’t been fucked or blown in a year. He’s only saying that shit ‘cause he’s sexually frustrated.”

Gary grinned archly, then slapped his forehead and said, “Crap, I almost forgot! Candy did show up, and she’s blitzed. She’s been knocking on my door all damn night, looking for you.”

“Who’s Candy?” Kiki asked.

“My ex,” Jake sighed.

Gary and Kyle started to laugh quietly, as though they were privy to an inside joke.

“What’s so fucking funny?” I asked.

“Candy’s gonna smoke her, man!” Kyle said to Jake. “The second she sees her!”

“What the hell are you talkin’ about?” Kiki asked.

“Well, she’d be pissed anyway that Jake’s got someone else, but even worse, she fuckin’ hates blondes,” Kyle replied. “She’s beaten the shit outta a hundred since I’ve known her.”

I flipped around and glared at Jake, who was smiling sheepishly. I had a sneaking suspicion I’d been handpicked and brought along for a reason. “What the fuck, asshole?”

“Don’t worry, baby,” he said, stroking my back. “I won’t let her harm one hair on your pretty little head.”

“How punningly clever,” Gary snickered.

“She hates blondes?” Kiki exclaimed, looking at Jake. “What a fuckin’ bigot! That’s like hating someone because they’re black! Why the fuck would you wanna be with a cunt like that?”

“I know tons of chicks who hate blondes,” Kyle said, “and when I ask ‘em why, they can’t give a justifiable answer.”

“That’s because they don’t have one,” Gary said, passing the straw to Jake. “They’re pissed off that most men are partial to blondes, including Alfred Hitchcock, and me.”

“Amen to that, brother,” Kyle said, lighting a cigarette. “The world can never have too many blondes.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Kiki said, taking the cigarette from his mouth and placing it in hers. ”Most guys are impartial perverts. They don’t give a shit what color a chick’s hair is.”

“She’s right,” I agreed.

“And how would you know?” Gary asked. “You’re chicks.”

“And blonde,” Kyle added, lighting another cigarette.

“Because I’ve had every hair color known to mankind,” Kiki said, exhaling, “and some that aren’t.”

“And your point is?” Gary said.

“The pigs gawked and wolf-whistled with the same amount of gusto no matter what fuckin’ color it was.”

“That’s ‘cause you’re a babe,” Kyle said, smiling at her adoringly.

“No,” she retorted matter-of-factly, “it’s because I’ve had huge tits since I was ten.”

The rest of us burst out laughing.

“It’s true!” she exclaimed. “Ninety-nine percent of the guys that check me out never make it past my tits! They have no fuckin’ clue what color my hair is, and I bet they care even less.”

“Blonde, brunette, redhead, bald, makes no difference to me,” Jake said, smiling dreamily. “As long as she’s fine, I’m into it.”

“You’re hopeless, man!” Kyle laughed. “No wonder Candy wants to stuff your dick down your throat!”

“And speaking of the Amazon woman from the depths of hell,” Gary said, flashing a sinister grin, “you’d better hide your little friend here. If Candy sees her, she’ll tear her limb from limb.”

“You guys don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jake said, as I took the straw from his hand. “Candy’s a mature adult. As soon as I explain the situation, she’ll walk away peacefully, and I’ll finally be able to get on with my life.”

“And what exactly is the situation?” Gary asked mockingly.

“That I’m madly in love with someone else,” Jake replied, kissing my cheek.

“Oh, yeah!” Kyle laughed. “That’ll go over real well, man!”

“Come on, baby,” Jake whispered, ignoring their remarks, “let’s go outside and find her.”

“Why,” I asked, diving into the mirror again, “so I can die?”

I was no coward, but knew my limitations.

“I promise I’m not gonna let her touch you.”

“Bullshit,” I replied, standing up and handing the straw to Kiki, “but I’m suddenly feeling masochistic. Let’s go, before I change my mind.”

Right as we stepped out into the backyard, there was Candy – all six feet, 170 pounds of her – coming through the gate. “WHO THE FUCK IS THAT?!” she yelled, storming over.

“The love of my life,” Jake replied, parking his hands on my derriere.

“GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY MAN, YOU FUCKIN’ SKANK!” she screamed, getting right up into my face. “OR I’LL SMASH YOUR FUCKIN’ FACE INTO THE CONCRETE!”

I had a minor problem with her attitude, she had malodorous breath that was singeing my eyebrows with every respiration, and I’ve never been fond of being threatened – my temper simply couldn’t and shouldn’t abide, ever. I pushed her as hard as I could. After losing her footing for a moment, she rebounded and pounced with all her might.

When predicting the winner in a catfight, above all, one must consider the tale of the tape. More often than not, the larger girl is going to get the upper hand, unless the smaller girl possesses the fighting skills of Fedor Emelianenko, which most men don’t, much less women. I was going to be dead within a matter of seconds, but thankfully, Jake was able to contain her rather quickly. As he dragged her into the house, Kyle and Kiki came outside.

“Shit, are you okay?” Kiki asked, helping me to my feet.

I was livid, and determined to get revenge on the twat. “What the fuck did I get myself into?” I said, straightening out my disheveled clothes. “And who the fuck does she think she is?”

“Do you want me to kick her ass?” Kiki asked, cracking her knuckles.

What a loyal friend she was.

“Thanks,” I said, scheming, “but I have a better idea.”

When the loving couple emerged a few minutes later, Candy appeared to be calm and content, which I found tremendously annoying.

“Watch this,” I said to Kiki.

“What are you gonna do?” she asked, laughing.

“Just watch,” I replied, walking straight into the hornet’s nest.

After giving Candy the evil eye, I wrapped my arms around Jake and began kissing him passionately. Before the bloodthirsty bitch could retaliate, Kyle got a hold of her, and dragged her to the other side of the yard, where she launched into a murderous verbal assault.

“YOU FUCKIN’ SKANK! YOU FUCKIN’ SKANK! I’LL FUCKIN’ KILL YOU, YOU FUCKIN’ SKANK! I’LL RIP YOUR FUCKIN’ HAIR OUT BY THE ROOTS! I’LL BREAK YOUR FUCKIN’ ARMS IN TWO!”

Blah blah blah. Her outburst only fueled my retributive objective, and as luck would have it, Jake was an eager accomplice. And so this man, who I’d been fighting tooth and nail, was victorious after all. I jumped up and wrapped my legs around his waist. He cupped my rump in his hands and began thrusting his crotch into mine. I surfaced for a moment and glared at Candy, who was fuming, and desperately attempting to break free from Kyle’s hold. I smiled, flipped her off, and went back under. It was poetic. Even if she’d gotten loose, ripped out every strand of my hair, and broken all four of my limbs, it wouldn’t have mattered – I’d already won.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here!” Kyle shouted across the yard. “You two go ahead, we’ll be there in a few!”

Jake slung my body over his shoulder and strode back to the van. Before my feet had touched the ground, he pinned me against the door, and started tearing at my clothes. After stumbling onto the back seat, we steamed up the windows for what felt like an eternity, but turned out to be less than ten minutes.

“You guys ready to roll?” Kyle said, tearing open the door. “There’s another party on the other side of town.”

I wriggled out of Jake’s clutches, sat up, and tried to fasten my safety belt, but he wouldn’t let go. He kept sucking me into his erogenous vortex, and though it was an elysian place to bathe, I had no interest in flying through the windshield if there happened to be an accident.

“Let me put on my seat belt,” I said, pushing him away.

He growled, and pulled me down onto the seat again.

“Fuck off, you beast!” I laughed, smacking him across the face.

Without meaning to, I’d unleashed a salacious animal that was impossible to tame. He was a man on a mission, and that mission was clear – he wanted to screw right there on the back seat, and didn’t seem to care if there was an audience. I hadn’t the slightest intention of having intercourse with him, and now that I’d achieved my retaliatory goal, I really had no use for him. Yes, he was sinfully scrumptious, but I was only two shtups removed from virginity, and as I mentioned, I belonged to another. The fact that I was deluding myself about the latter bit was irrelevant. Besides, Jake was obviously a slut – who knows where he’d dipped his stick. Contracting herpes or, worse yet, HIV was not on my list of goals. I needed to extinguish his flame immediately before he exploded into a five alarm inferno.

“I’m going to hurl,” I announced vociferously.

It doesn’t matter if a man’s as horny as a three-balled tomcat, he won’t want to dine on regurgitated intestinal matter – unless he’s an Emetophiliac. It stopped Jake dead in his tracks, but he continued to scheme en route.

By the time we arrived at our destination, my little white lie had become a nauseating reality. Undoubtedly a combination of the massive drug consumption and lack of food, my head was spinning out of control, and it was all I could do to keep from tossing my Tums. The last thing I wanted to do was go into a box filled with rowdy drunks and deafening punk rock. “I need to go home,” I moaned, “NOW.”

“I’ll take her home,” Jake said to Kyle. “You guys go on inside, I’ll be back in a few.” Of course, he had no intention of taking me home. “I just wanna make sure you’re okay first,” he lied. “Here, lay your head in my lap, and close your eyes. I’m gonna take care of you.”

Like an idiot, I obeyed. He began running his fingers through my hair while spewing another dose of honeyed words. Like a bigger idiot, I made the error of looking up at those entrancing baby blues, which he mistook as an invitation to deliver a kiss.

“I’m warning you,” I slurred, dodging his lips, “if I don’t get to sleep soon, I’m going to puke all over you.”

“So sleep right here, baby,” he said, gazing through disingenuous doe eyes, “I promise I won’t violate you.”

“Do you ever quit?” I snapped in an irritated tone. “I’m not going to fuck you, asshole! You’d better just let it go, and take me home! I want my fucking bed!”

“I want your bed too,” he replied, smiling lasciviously, “with you in it.”

“You’re a horny fucking pervert.”

“I know,” he said proudly, “does it turn you on?”

“No, it doesn’t turn me on,” I replied mockingly. “It’s annoying as shit.”

He started to laugh.

“If you weren’t so fucking beautiful you would have been dead a couple hours ago,” I continued, closing my eyes for a moment. “Now take me home, before I kill you.”

His laughter progressed into cachinnation.

I looked up at him with both desire and desperation. He was irresistibly alluring, but my nausea had now reached a dangerous level. Many changes can occur within the human body when one’s nourishment consists primarily of drugs, coffee, and diet soft drinks. In my case, I was blessed with an esophageal ulcer, which made vomiting unbearably painful. And when I was suffering from an acute case of drug-induced vertigo, the only way to avoid barfing was to get to sleep immediately.

“Will you please take me home?” I begged, grabbing a hold of his hand. “I’m not kidding, I really feel like shit!”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, baby,” he said, placing his free hand on my face.

“Why the hell not?”

“’Cause I may never see you again. Looks like I’m gonna have to kidnap you, and chain you to my furnace.”

“You’re too fucking much. Are you always so persistent?”

“When I want something, I am… and you, I want.”

“FUUUUUUUCK!” I whined. “What the hell do I have to do to get you to take me home?”

He slipped his hand up my shirt.

“Guess that was a stupid question,” I said, abruptly removing it.

The negotiations continued for several minutes. I finally offered my telephone number in exchange for my release, and promised I’d go out with him the following weekend. After considering the deal for a moment, he agreed.

When we entered my neighborhood, I directed him to a house down the street a bit, so he wouldn’t know where I lived. He stopped the car, turned off the engine, and made his final move.

“I’m yours, baby,” he cooed, gazing at me with those dreamy eyes, “mind, body, and soul.”

I giggled like an eleven year old, despite myself.

“I mean it, you’ve stolen my heart. I wanna spend the rest of my life with you.”

Aaaaaaahhhhhhh, ain’t that sweet? A bit schmaltzy, but sweet nonetheless. Too bad he was full of shit. And if by some rare chance he was speaking from the heart, NO WAY! It was fun for one night, but I’d had my fill. Besides, I liked being alive, and as long as I was with him, there would be a price on my head, courtesy of the wrathful Candy.

After giving him a fake number and a goodbye smooch, we parted ways forever.

A discussion with activist cartoonist and BEER MYSTIC host, Ken Avidor [here posed as Greek God of Mini-Golf, Nkolfus, in Asbury Park, c. 1984].

 I knew Ken [aka Weiner] for many years in NYC, during its – or was it just our – heyday, the 1980s. This mad cartoonist worked a day job as art director of Screw where my first wife, Valerie, worked as assistant art director. Milky Way Prod. was a weirdly grungy no man’s land that still managed to forge a relation between sex, politics, liberation and humor – and profit, a kind of Mad Magazine with genitalia. But it was also an open place that offered those hanging on the margins of culture – writers, artists and illustrators who’d honed their skills on black humor and nothing’s-sacred iconoclasm – a paid gig for their artwork as long as the drawings exuberantly exhibited gruesomely disproportionate sexual apparatuses, took the piss out of its self-flagellating readership, at every turn of the page, and, not to forget, display a healthy disdain for the high and mighty. 

I felt our link was based on a deep-seated, dark-twisted sense of humor that, like so many of us at the time, penetrated the daily hypocrisies of official culture and straight society, and found some succor in the fact that we acknowledged the misery of our misguided times. 

I particularly envied him and a gaggle of other talented pencil geeks: JD King, Jonathon Rosen, Kaz, David Sandlin, Ned Sonntag, the by-then retired Yossarian [among many others]… And, since I was neither musician nor illustrator-artist, I sometimes tried to replicate their effect via my writing – always a treacherous affair. 

I remember Ken documenting the frustrations, social awkwardness, and anger of living as a misfit [in the best sense] in the 1980s, during Reagan’s reign, when people – even unions and poor people – went nuts for Reagan. This, for us, was a sign of the imminent decline of all dollar-spending mankind. That people were SO hoodwinked was difficult to comprehend and it was through art-music-writing that we found expression of our depthless levels of exasperation. 

That we were right all along is its own measly reward and has been so often manifested and proven by news and history that it is almost routine: recent manifestations include Ronald Reagan being voted SECOND most popular president of ALL time by Americans. That the crisis of 2008-201? was yet more proof of the pillaging of the poor by the rich seemed to escape the average American who consider history a boring distraction from the business of making maximum profits at all costs – until Occupy Wall Street! That Reagan set in motion many of the forces that led to the 2008 crash and the rise of OWS [finally!] seems to be conveniently ignored by far too many until it could no longer be ignored.

I distinctly remember one of Ken’s tenement parties in Lower Manhattan, always a robust affair of opinions, attitudes, anti-attitude attitudes, anti-elitist elitism and purposeful gonzo idiocy as a response to the times. There was a bathtub filled with ice cubes and cans of reasonable beer [maybe even some rabidly anti-chic working class beer like Keystone or something] and Ken standing near the entrance handing out plastic cups upon which he scrawled your name so that if you abandoned your cup you could always find it again. Was it me or someone else who would mischievously move the cups or alter the name just enough to confuse the partygoers? 

Ken [and JD King, BTW] appear in a roman a clef moment in BEER MYSTIC. After a deliriously, heated discussion, punctuated by beer spillages down shirt fronts while plotting the downfall of the hypocrite reps of the Moral Majority [reptilian ancestors of today’s Tea Party Texas Horned Lizards], the chapter ends with a scene inspired by one of Ken’s own strips:

When it was time to leave, none of us wanted to make that move to say good night [from inside our drab smoke-brew-reek clothes, which allowed us to survive our surroundings through sartorial imitation of those gloomy surroundings] because each and every one of us was afraid what the rest would say about him or her after the front door was shut and we could be heard stumbling down the cruel spiral staircase. But I made a daring move because beer had sufficiently bludgeoned me with the regret of squandered idealism. I’d had eight or maybe 12 beers and suddenly had no home. Or rather, EVERYwhere could now be considered home. I could hear Luc Sante talking to Runkle Köln about living in NY: “All of us are still in that stage of youth when your star hasn’t yet risen, but your moment’s the only one on the clock.”

“Clock! Holy shit, reminds me, I gotta get down to the Lost Manuscripts Show. They got open bar from 11 to 12. They got Belgian Palm in bottles.”

“Smooth to tipple, not heavy, full of flavor, opulent aroma.”

“Precisely!”

“But it’s five of two.”

“I’ll make it. These openings stretch out to sunrise. Got to. Duke & Jill are playin’ live and Furman’s ex is doin’ a limbo strip to reprocessed Les Baxter tapes. Illuminated backdrops by Lady Pink and Lady Bug. Life is short but my dick is long. I gotta run.” And he was gone. And true to form, the cartoonists, true to their stylish and practiced misanthropy spared no all-in-good-fun invective.

“R.K. what a fuckin’ wanker!”

“Can’t write his way out of a shopping bag.”

“And one sloppy fuckin’ drunk! The drool, the drivel!”

I somehow lost Nice and she lost me. This would not be good for my bearings. And from the death of the party [Weiner had a Saturday deadline] I bade Jude a last fruitless good night, licked her arm up into her armpits [“Ewh!”] and around and around, spiraling in ever closer to her nipples. A squeal concealed inside a groan for fear that anyone this side of cool should ever show signs of coming undone by passion. Messy passion was out, period: lush = asshole. I gave L-Dopa my last crumpled fiver toward cab fare and watched him stare down Brat Packer and then watched as Jude’s eyes became black fish doing the dead man’s float across my dreams. I could hear the cruel muffled guffaws from behind the closed door as I headed down the pitiless spiral staircase. The joke being it wasn’t even a spiral staircase.

bp: Ken has been active on the political-environmental front for some years in his adopted Minnesota. I focused on comic books as effective/legitimate tools of political critique… Did you resent having to put so much energy into preventing Michelle Bachman from leading a spiritual putsch, almost hijacking the American soul for purposes that border on insane cult? Or have you made your peace with your sense of commitment since the appearance of your dump Bachmann Book, The Madness of Michelle Bachmann.

KA: A decade ago I began a project to visualize the Twin Cities area after the collapse of the industrial era. That project is called “Bicyclopolis.” I wrote several illustrated stories that came out of that project, most recently in a compilation titled Cifiscape vol. 1 published by Onyx Neon. I began work on a graphic novel titled Bicyclopolis when I volunteered to help activists opposed to highway expansion in South Minneapolis. It became very clear that I had no first-hand knowledge of how the cult of industrialism continues to thrive, as industrialism itself is in decline. Contrary to what I had thought, the evidence of industrial collapse leads to a greater need to pretend it isn’t happening – denial.

bp: That seems totally believable. People are in total denial about their carbon foot/head/body/habit print and still have this almost devout view of progress – witness the cult of the automobile or the long lines of fanatics camping out in front of megastores for the release of the latest game or i-product.

KA: It’s like the cargo cults of the South Pacific that sprung up among indigenous tribes after being suddenly exposed to the industrial way of life in the form of island-hopping military airbases. The reaction of many people to the confusion to being wrenched from living in one paradigm to living in another is to cling to the past with the aid of  set of beliefs that attempt to explain everything. The Cargo Cults of the South Pacific had an explanation for the airplanes landing and departing their islands – the airplanes were big birds sent from their ancestors with gifts. But, the crafty white men waylaid the birds and took all the gifts (cargo). Many of these tribes built replicas of landing strips in hopes the big birds would deliver the cargo to the rightful owners.

bp: I did a lecture on cargo cults at the avant garde club, De Player, located in a former brothel in the old sailors district of Rotterdam. The ability of the human mind to manufacture the chemicals to suspend disbelief…

KA: We are starting to see that happening in reverse with the collapse of the industrial paradigm. The declining supply of cheap, easily exploited mineral resources, chiefly petroleum will hasten the end of the mobile consumer culture. The reaction among the cargo cults of suburban America has been to cling even tighter to a myth that there are magic bullets; technological, religious or governmental that can save the shopping malls and sprawling acres of “McMansion” developments.

bp: It makes all those everyone-can-become-a-millionaire pundit-motivational-speaker-barkers seem totally absurd and yet people pay good money to see bad entertainment: these foot soldiers of blameless capital progress never explain that millionaires depend on an exploitable [developing world or desperate first world unemployed blue-collar] underclass.

KA: My introduction to then-State-Senator Michele Bachmann was when I read a 2004 news report that she wrote legislation for and promoted a techno-magic bullet concept called Personal Rapid Transit, (PRT) a wacky pod-on-a-monorail concept, which, back in 2004 was seriously being proposed by Bachmann as a better solution to the chronic transportation woes in the Twin Cities [as an alternative to] light rail. Eva Young, the founder of Dump Bachmann asked me to contribute to the blog in 2005.

PRT is just one of the bizarre concepts and people that Bachmann has ascribed to over the years. Bachmann is also connected to the $3.8 billion Ponzi scam run by Tom Petters – I covered his trial for the local weekly City Pages.

When Bachmann announced she was running for President, we were suddenly experts on all the crazy stuff Bachmann has said and done. Now, we have a book called The Madness of Michele Bachmann (Wiley) coming out in December. Hopefully, our book will help bring an end to Bachmann’s political career. The experience has left me feeling sadder and wiser like the wedding guest in “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”. I think the research I’ve done will make Bicyclopolis a much better book.

bp: How have things changed for you now that Bachmann has dropped out of the presidential race? She was apparently just not insane enough for the Far Right middle-of-the-road fringe or she just couldn’t keep the story straight and simplistic enough…

KA: I’m not blogging/writing/researching as much about Bachmann. She is still a US Congresswoman. We will still keep the blog going until she is out of office. I am also paying less attention to politics in general. I am returning to long-postponed art projects.

bp: How can graphic storytelling [comics] reach a different or wider audience than say more ordinary stories? I know that in poorer countries activists often funnel their activist message of engaging  the locals through popular comic book personages.

KA: I don’t know about the audience… I don’t have an easy time writing. I have an easier time describing stuff in words and pictures – that’s what I do with comics, illustrations and journaling. What I most enjoy doing now is sketching in my journals and in courtrooms. It’s a real challenge.

bp: Tell me more about how your the nascent attitudes that germinated in your 1980s zine ROADKILL have found new expression. I remember I wrote something for your highly opinionated ROADKILL called “Bad Radio”. I think it already harbored some contentious relationship between you and the automobile/progress and I could relate to that then and can still relate to that now [I don’t own a car but we do have 3 bikes + public transport].

KA: Roadkill was a bridge between the sort of work I did for Punk and Screw and the weekly environmental comic I did called Roadkill Bill. The stuff I did in Roadkill was not my best work.

bp: Ah, it was wonderfully grumpy. Besides, my favorite tee shirt design of all time is your Serious Beer Drinker design and when the tee shirt wore out I framed the artwork and it now hangs in our kitchen. How has your vision adjusted since our “heyday” in the mid-1980s? Have you found creative or practical applications for your opinions and comics and drawing talent?

KA: The Internet has changed everything for better or worse. More people can see my work. I write more now. I sketch a lot and keep journals. Much of the stuff I do now is serious. Being serious makes me uncomfortable. I am not an expert or a journalist, but I’ve become both at times on a few obscure subjects. I look forward to just doing comics, sketching and painting again.

bp: I often thought of you as a supremely funny grump. most of my favorite comedians and illustrators are grumps or misanthropes but like angry punk I think that on some level that people who are grumpy about mankind still harbor some hope of changing things through constructive grumpiness. I think this is how i would have described you back then in the later 80s.

KA: Yup, that’s me – grump, curmudgeon, misanthrope. There are rare moments when I am happy.

bp: How did you find constructive purpose for this highly critical standpoint which you had back in the 80s but seemed not yet formulated to the point of being enlisted to actually realize change. How and when did this evolve that you thought you could have an effect of some sort with your voice/art?

KA: For me, it’s a matter of what you do when you are seeing things differently than other people or noticing things that other people don’t see. You can be a crank that just irritates people or you can do something creative; visual or in words or both. I was always crabby about the world around me, but I didn’t exactly know why. After I moved to Minnesota, I began to research why I was a curmudgeon. Part of that process of discovery was sketching the world around me. I learned that simply sketching something that people see all the time, but choose not to notice can be very disturbing – I found that out when somebody called the cops on me when I was sketching a billboard [see Counterpunch].

What people call reality, may not exactly be “real”. The human eye is not like a camera lens – it scans what it sees and assembles a picture in the mind. How that picture is assembled is influenced by what that  person thinks about what they see. This is why there are often conflicting eyewitness accounts of disasters and crimes. There  is also a moral aspect to art – how does the artist feel about what they see? Sometimes the interior reality is as important or more important than the “objective”, photographic reality – for example, Picasso’s painting of Guernica seems more “real” to me than photographs of the aftermath of the bombing of Guernica.

Sketching for me is often about figuring out how I feel about a subject. It helps to research the subject first to know what to look for. Research gives me the confidence to make a sketch that has the “ring of truth”.

I’ve learned a lot from watching prosecutors argue cases in court. I think art and law have a great deal in common. Art puts reality on trial, the viewer is the jury.

bp: You and wife-partner Roberta go out sketching as the Urban Sketchers, redrawing the psychogeography one neglected site at a time.

When I sketch, it’s like I’m recording a statement about what I see. I don’t hide my point of view, but I try to be accurate and explain as much as possible. I often add text to my sketches to further explain what I am seeing. My journals are a continuous, ongoing process of discovery.

I don’t like to work from photos. I want the sketches in my journals to be an unedited account of how I saw a person, landscape or event. I read a quote in a book yesterday by John Ruskin – “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, — all in one.”

bp: When did you move out of New York? I moved to Paris for good in 1988, although I returned in 1991 against my will with my partner at the time and then left again for good in 1996.  I return annually with family in tow to visit my Paloma’s 2 grandmas in PA and Upstate NY. When I return I can see it through tourist eyes but also marvel at how the city is dominated by commerce or rather movement: transport, by cars and trucks and ALL else must abide the grid that accommodates motor vehicles – you stand still for the second, you upset this flow. 

KA: I rarely go back to New York. When I do, It’s a very different place. It’s fun to be a tourist In Manhattan, but I could not afford to live there.

bp: Agreed. The BEER MYSTIC’s Furman Pivo experiences a spiritual disconnect between  his hopes, dreams and self. He feels the best slowly being squeezed out of him. This “good” can be repurchased at a price from the very forces that have leached it out of him – the magical formula of commerce I guess… How do you see all of this in the context of then [when we knew each other in NY] and now?

I was always a troublemaker. I’m still a troublemaker. I was utterly clueless [back then] about the environment or anything else that I write or draw about now. I enjoyed drinking beer – good beer and there wasn’t much of that in NYC at that time.

bp: How has life changed since leaving NY? 

It’s colder.

bp: What Minnesota beers should I look out for? 

There are a lot of good breweries here in Minnesota. Minnesota is Beer Heaven. My favorite beers: Surly Furious, Summit Pale Ale and Harriet Brewery’s West Side IPA.

• Sensitive Skin’s Beer Mystic excerpt 44 features an illo by Ken Avidor
• Ken Avidor hosts BEER MYSTIC 

Meaning of the Dance

It gnaws
like a wound
in my flesh.

Spite erupts like thorns
from my forehead. I’m learning
a compassion which kills. An anger
to soothe my brother’s agony.
All the lines on his face
leading me back
to Galgotha.

It wasn’t soon after writing that poem, though, that the other security guards got together and rearranged my hours, giving me days instead of the graveyard shifts. I complained. Yet, of course, what was done was done. Majority rules. Knowing my then spouse as I did, I quit then and there. My rules. My dance. I didn’t work a “normal job” for another year.

after school,
Neil Brown and I
would tear over to Friendly’s or
Burger King
in his mom’s Camaro
and then,
hopped up on burgers and milkshakes
we’d fly
a brakeless Schwinn
down the hill in his driveway
over a jump made from an old plank and a few cinder blocks
and we’d hover over
the green downward slope of his back yard,
mid-air,
spinning the handlebars as many times as we could,
posing on the bike,
pre-Superman,
making
deliciously uncertain landings,

we had other classes together
during the day
but
throughout C-period
science class
we sat next to each other
as lab partners
and, when the room got quiet for a moment,
one of us would stab the other guy
as hard as we could
and, if you kept quiet when you got jabbed in the leg,
you got to stab the other guy,

we went for the thigh
since the muscles there
seemed invincible
and there was never much blood,

it hurt but,
strangely, it was a matter of suppressing laughter
at this stupid secret game
more than holding back shouts of pain,

we started with pencils
but we got a little scared
after chunks of lead
broke off in our thighs
so we switched over
to metal compasses,
using the stainless steel points instead –

we figured the punctures would be cleaner –

we never ratted each other out
and, maybe because he was smaller than us
or maybe because we did the work,
Mr. Stern seemed
unaware
of the stabbing game.

In ophthalmology, “eye floaters” is a collective term for vitreous opacities which are attributed to different causes. In most cases, however, the phenomenon is considered a non-pathological (idiopathic) age-related clouding of the vitreous. In this article, my statements on floaters refer to this idiopathic type. According to ophthalmologists, this wide-spread symptom occurs due to the liquefaction (synchysis) and collapse of the collagen-hyaluronic structure of the vitreous (syneresis), which at some stage causes the detachment of the vitreous from the retina (posterior vitreous detachment) (Sendrowski 2010). In daylight, degenerated vitreous structures which are clumped together cast shadows on the retina and become visible in the field of vision. Supposedly, this is what we see when we are looking at our mobile, scattered and transparent dots and strings.

Floaters as vitreous opacities. Source: flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewcoulterenright/4106224/

This ophthalmological description is the latest offshoot in a tradition recorded since the time of Hippocrates. Over the centuries, the terms muscae volitantes (Latin, “flying flies”) or myodesopsia (Greek, “seeing fly-like corpuscles”) were used in Greek, Arab and Western European ophthalmology to describe subjective visual phenomena that look similar to flying flies. From the beginning, a number of eye diseases and disorders were associated with flying flies, e.g. scotoma, cataract or retinal detachment. This reflects the endeavor to localize and explain eye floaters which, in turn, depends on the dominant philosophy: the ancient natural philosophers and scholars stressed that floaters must be in the liquids near the eye’s lens, which was taken as the main element of seeing. Later, the materialistic-mechanical philosophy, on which early modern ophthalmology is based, promoted the notion of floaters as physical objects that move in the liquid of the vitreous near the retina, depending on the movement of the eyes, consistency of the medium, gravity as well as laws of hydrodynamics. 19th century Czech physiologist Jan Evangelista Purkinje explained the spheres and strings as fibrillae, vessels or dead materials near the retina whose shadows were projected on the retina when light enters the eyes. Most present-day eye doctors basically refer to Purkinje’s description (Hirschberg 1889-1912; Plange 1990).

In my view, this historically grown equating of spheres and strings and fly-like visual disorders or cloudings is the result of a one-sided objective approach and of disciplinary narrowness. To balance this, I’m going to provide some challenging observations on floaters that I have collected in my many years of holistic research (Tausin 2009a, 2010b). Since individual observation is my starting point and base for my conclusions, I do not claim general validity, but I do encourage the inclined reader to spend some time in close observation of his or her own floaters – as a way to make my findings comprehensible.

Inconvenient questions to ophthalmology

Where does the morphological regularity of floaters come from?

Floaters are dots and strings. The strings are filled with rows of dots or spheres that are more or less clearly visible. The dots are circular and concentric; they contain a core and a surround, viz. they are polar. The polarity is joined by a dualism, for there are two types of dots: those with bright surround and dark core, and those with dark surround and bright core. So we can speak of a dualistic-polar principle in eye floaters. It’s hard to imagine that randomly clumped vitreous fibrillae produce dots with such clear and repeated morphological characteristics.

The two contrasting types of polar floater spheres. Source: author.

Why are there different states of floaters?

On closer observation, floater spheres and strings show different states over time: one and the same sphere can appear as big and rather hazy or as small and clearly outlined. The transition from one state to another is fluid and proceeds in different time duration. For the sake of simplicity, I distinguish an initial or relaxed state and a final or concentrated state. In general, it seems that most floaters are initially relaxed, viz. bigger, closer and more transparent; with increasing time of observation, they change into the concentrated state. After completion of the concentration – a quick glance to somewhere else may suffice –, the spheres and strings change back into the initial relaxed state.

The two kinds of floater spheres in transition from a relaxed (left) to a concentrated (right) state. Source: author.

Why do floaters start to light up after some time of concentrated observation?

It is interesting to realize that, in the concentrated state, the spheres and strings increase in brilliance. Considering an energetic explanation for this, we could say that the amount of light or energy contained in a sphere or string does not change in the process of concentration; rather, the energy gets compressed due to the reduction of space resulting in more brilliance (Tausin 2009a, 2010b). This effect may be influenced by “external” factors: it is encouraged by bright lighting conditions and the distance of the focal point – the closer the focal point, the brighter the floaters. Also, observing the spheres and strings through the eyelashes or a pinhole in a sheet of paper lets the floaters appear concentrated. It is important to experience, though, that the concentration state is also reached without these aids, solely by focusing on floaters for a while; it is quickly brought to an end by visual distraction. Thus, floaters seem to reflect both outer and inner conditions of light and nearness, or concentration and presence, respectively.

Ophthalmology does not provide an explanation for the different states and the lighting up. Eye doctors, when asked, tend to ignore the question. Some try to explain the change in size as a result of floaters getting closer to the retina while looking up to the sky – gravity pulls the floaters back to the retina. The argument is unconvincing since the same effect can be observed irrespective of whether the eyes look up to the sky or down to the ground. Others trace the brilliance effect back to the scattering and reflectance of light. This is supposed to happen when light strikes the floaters inside the vitreous (Tausin 2005a). The lens effect explanation implies the above-mentioned moving of floaters inside the vitreous. It is problematic insofar as it does not take into consideration the evident regularity of the altering of floater states (the nearer the focal point, the brighter the floaters; the longer the observation, the brighter the floaters). Moreover, the notion of moving dots and strings inside the vitreous raises further questions.

Why do floaters move so quickly if the vitreous is a jelly-like fluid?

Floaters can be set in motion by eye movements. Doing so, they often seem to glide very easily and with high speed across the visual field. This is all the more surprising if we consider that the vitreous is thicker than water and described as a gel (Ruby 2007). How can there be any particles moving so quickly and effortlessly in a jelly-like mass? The classic answer is that the vitreous liquefies over time and floaters become very mobile. This leads straight to the next question.

If floaters are particles floating in liquefied parts of the vitreous, why do we keep seeing the same spheres and strings?

Anyone who closely watches his or her floaters will soon become acquainted with them. For these spheres and strings remain the same for years. Through vigorous eye movements we may change the relative positions of the spheres and strings to one another, but only temporarily – the floaters take their starting position soon again. This observation contradicts the notion of free floating particles in the liquefied parts of the vitreous – these would be whirled around with every eye movement and take up new constellations. The medical argument goes that some floaters do not move freely in the vitreous but are attached to the still existing vitreous structure. From the individual observer’s perspective, there is no evidence: while some of the strands whose ends go beyond my visual field might be attached, other strings and all of the spheres do not seem to be attached anywhere – but still appear in their characteristic constellations.

Why do floaters tend to sink?

Through eye movements, we can move floaters in all directions. But as soon as we keep our eyes still, we realize that they sink down in our visual field – the nearer and bigger ones faster, the others more slowly. Gravity effects seem to be a plausible explanation for this sinking of physical particles in the vitreous. The case is more complicated, though: As we know, our eyes project an upside-down image of what we are looking at on the retina.

Source: http://www.danielng.com.au/fiwee/?p=279 (15.6.11)

If floaters were particles close to the retina that are pulled down by gravity and cast shadows on the retina, then I would have to see floaters rise in my visual field. Since I do not see floaters rising but sinking, the conclusion would be that the corresponding particles in the vitreous do not sink but rise. If that is true, there would be other forces than gravity influencing the upward movement of floaters.

I have asked dozens of eye doctors about this with no convincing results. Most ignore the fact of the inverted retinal image, or consider floaters or the retinal image isolated from one another. Some admit that floaters have to rise in the vitreous if we see them sinking in our visual field. This leads them to speculate about thermodynamics (heat as lifting force) or density (floaters are lighter than the vitreous liquid) as responsible mechanisms for that observation (Tausin 2010a).

Further inconsistencies in ophthalmology

Why can’t eye doctors see floaters in the eyes?

If the so-called “idiopathic eye floaters” are really clouding particles in the vitreous, then one would think that eye doctors see them when looking in the patients’ eyes. In reality, there is often a discrepancy between the patient’s observation of eye floaters and the doctor’s findings in the eye. In many cases, doctors can’t see anything while patients very clearly perceive, describe and draw their eye floaters (cf. Weber-Varszegi et al. 2008; Tausin 2008). Then the diagnosis goes somewhat like “age-related harmless eye floaters”, together with the advice to just ignore them. Explanations for this discrepancy are easily found: the opacities are too small to be relevant; the technology used is not accurate enough; the doctors do a poor examining job; the patient is exaggerating or has a mental problem. While there might be some truth in all these points, we also should keep in mind the possibility that floaters are not what today’s ophthalmology claims.

It is no surprise that explanatory innovation comes from laser surgeons. In order to treat floaters with the Nd-YAG laser, surgeons have to localize and recognize the different floater types very carefully. The eye doctors James Johnson and Scott Geller explain on their websites that some floaters, especially those in young people, cannot be seen and treated with laser. The description of these “ill-defined” floaters fits the idiopathic ones at issue. The surgeons hold the opinion that this type is not located in the vitreous, but must be between vitreous and retina, a space called “bursa premacularis” (Geller, n/a; Johnson n/a; cf. Tausin 2009b). This space is potential insofar as it exists only if fluids separate vitreous from retina. In these fluids, rests of cells or fibrillae could remain that become visible as floaters. While the theory is not acknowledged among eye doctors – as laser surgery of floaters is itself treated with reservation by many –, it does not contradict the main strategy to remove floaters: vitrectomy.

Source: http://vitreousfloatersolutions.com/floatersyoung.html (11.6.11)

Does vitrectomy prove the vitreous opacity theory of floaters?

The most powerful argument for the notion of floaters as vitreous opacities are the different forms of vitrectomy, a surgery to remove and replace the whole or parts of the vitreous. Laser surgeons assume that even bursa floaters might be removed by vitrectomy if the vitreous is previously detached from the retina (cf. Tausin 2009b). In literature, there are cases of successful floaters-only vitrectomies (FOV), or “floaterectomies”, in patients with “idiopathic” or “persistent” floaters which had no or little objective correspondence (Roth et al. 2005; cf. Tausin 2005b). In clinical studies that evaluate the outcome of vitrectomies for floaters performed to relieve the patient’s subjective strain, patients’ satisfaction is strikingly high – around 90% (Schulz-Key et al. 2011; Weber-Varszegi et al. 2008). This figure must not be taken as a proof for the harmless floaters being vitreous opacities, though, for several reasons: in these studies, it is never entirely clear what kind of floaters these patients really saw; even if they are called “idiopathic”, patients might not have seen the floater type at issue. Moreover, the patients’ satisfaction is influenced by a number of factors such as visual improvement due to removing cataract and even subjective expectancy – the latter, together with the incomprehensible patients’ strain as a motivation to get rid of floaters, tends to turn floaterectomy into a kind of psychotherapy (Tan et al. 2011; Tausin 2008). Also, there are many reports of patients that have experienced floaters after vitrectomy (Schulz-Key 2011; Degenerative Vitreous Community n/a). They are explained as remaining vitreous fibrillae or newly developed floaters. Finally, if idiopathic floaters are no longer seen after FOV, there still might be other explanations for this. It is conceivable that the light is channeled through the eye in a different (unstructured) way and, therefore, stimulates the retinal neurons differently, resulting in a vision with less or no floaters. Therefore, I suggest that the origin of floating spheres and strings should be looked for in the activity of visual neurology (Tausin 2009c, translation forthcoming).

Conclusion

Present-day ophthalmology provides a frame to understand and describe the subjective visual spheres and strings known as harmless or idiopathic eye floaters. It is a historically grown melting pot in which floaters got associated with a number of eye disorders. A close observation of floaters reveals properties for which the disorder theory fails to provide a convincing explanation. Moreover, inconsistencies within this explanatory frame itself tell us to remain critical.

The spheres and strings are a subjective phenomenon. To study them means to be aware of that fact and to start from individual observation. We also have to keep in mind that perception is shaped not only by sensory data but also by our consciousness state, mental dispositions, motivations, cultural and social environments, etc. For example, it is my experience that size, luminosity and movement of floater spheres and strings alter according to different consciousness states. I think that the understanding of experiences like this are crucial in the search of a more reasonable understanding of floaters (Tausin 2009a). The subjective approach does not replace but complement and inform physiological research. For example, the observations presented in this article suggest to consider the role of the visual nervous system in the process of seeing floaters.

References:

The pictures are taken from image hosting websites, from scientific publications (online and print) and/or from my own collection (FT). Either they are licensed under a Creative Commons license, or their copyright is expired, or they are used according to the copyright law doctrine of ‘Zitatrecht’, ‘fair dealing’ or ‘fair use’.

n/a (n/a): Floaters only vitrectomy. In: Degenerative Vitreous Community. http://floatertalk.yuku.com/forums/2/Floaters-Only-Vitrectomy#.Tfh-e0djmy4 (15.6.11)

Hirschberg, Julius (1899-1918): Geschichte der Augenheilkunde. In: Handbuch der gesamten Augenheilkunde, ed. by E. Graefe and Th. Saemisch, Vol. 12-15. Leipzig/Berlin: Springer

Plange, Hubertus: Muscae volitantes – von frühen Beobachtungen zu Purkinjes Erklärung, in: Gesnerus 47, 1990, S. 31-44

Sendrowski, David P.; Bronstein, Mark A. (2010): Current treatment for vitreous floaters. In: Optometry 81: 157-161

Tan, H. Stevie et al. (2011): Safety of vitrectomy for floaters. In: American Journal of Ophthalmology. 151, no. 6: 995-98.

Tausin, Floco (2010b). Eye Floaters. Floating spheres and strings in a seer’s view. In: Holistic Vision 2. http://www.eye-floaters.info/news/news-june2010.htm (15.12.10)

Tausin, Floco (2009b): Aus der Wissenschaft: Mouches volantes nicht im Glaskörper? In: Ganzheitlich Sehen 4 (Dezember). http://www.mouches-volantes.com/news/newsdezember2009.htm (11.6.11)

Tausin, Floco (2008): Neues aus der Wissenschaft: “Floaterektomie” als Psychotherapie? In: Ganzheitlich Sehen 3 (Oktober). http://www.mouches-volantes.com/news/newsoktober2008.htm (15.6.11)

Tausin, Floco (2005b). Neues aus der Augenheilkunde: Klinische Studie über die Pars-plana-Vitrektomie bei Glaskörpertrübungen. In: Ganzheitlich Sehen. http://www.mouches-volantes.com/news/newsnovember2005.htm (15.6.11)

The name Floco Tausin is a pseudonym. The author is a graduate of the Faculty of the Humanities at the University of Bern, Switzerland. In theory and practice he is engaged in the research of subjective visual phenomena in connection with altered states of consciousness and the development of consciousness. In 2009, he published the mystical story “Mouches Volantes” about the spiritual dimension of eye floaters.

Contact:
floco.tausin@eye-floaters.info
www.eye-floaters.info

The book:

Mouches Volantes. Eye Floaters as Shining Structure of Consciousness‘.
(Spiritual Fiction. ISBN: 978-3033003378. Paperback, 15.2 x 22.9 cm / 6 x 9 inches, 368 pages).

Floco Tausin tells the story about his time of learning with spiritual teacher and seer Nestor, taking place in the hilly region of Emmental, Switzerland. The mystic teachings focus on the widely known but underestimated dots and strands floating in our field of vision, known as eye floaters or mouches volantes. Whereas in ophthalmology, floaters are considered a harmless vitreous opacity, the author gradually learns to see them and reveals the first emergence of the shining structure formed by our consciousness.

»Mouches Volantes« explores the topic of eye floaters in a much wider sense than the usual medical explanations. It merges scientific research, esoteric philosophy and practical consciousness development, and observes the spiritual meaning and everyday life implications of these dots and strands.

»Mouches Volantes« – a mystical story about the closest thing in the world.

An interview with Karen Lillis

When I was just beginning high school I was one scared, miffed, gawky, pimply kid, unlike the rest of the kids somehow. But what kid of 13 didn’t feel that way? (photo: Karen in the Minneapolis Public Library)

The older, wannabe bullies who needed to prove their cruelty credentials had a 6th sense for any style deviation, tic, or idiosyncrasy [my fake leather, grey penny loafers] and would home in on home in on that and tease, spit, punch, trip, roughhouse, taunt, muss-up my homemade haircut, or  play keep-away with your eyeglasses. I did not fully comprehend the ecstatic necessity of cruelty and did not know how to deal with it other than be confused and withdraw even further. And, man, you start balling, sniffling, runny nose, red eyes, the works, as a result of their well-honed efforts and you were like naked, bloody carrion to a pack of hyenas. 

That the school bus was also hell was only mitigated by one cool chick – a “slinky bird” one would have called her in 60s Swingin’ London – who looked unlike anyone else in our school, with her op-patterned Yves St. Laurent knock-offs, and mod blond bob. Later, after seeing Blow-Up for the first time, I thought I understood her. She stood up to these guys, having nothing to lose because they’d already pegged her for a whore, and in a convincing way stared them down and with a series of intimidating and somehow convincing arguments managed to get these guys to leave me alone.

Of course, once off the school bus I, a pathetic dreaming bookworm, had to fend for myself. This went on for an eternity or, at least, until I proved myself to be a new long-distance running talent. [But that chapter will be filed away somewhere else under growing pains and glories or loneliness of this long-distance runner or something like that].

During free periods I was escorted to the school library by one nice teacher-bodyguard who told me I’d be safe here. I mean, thinking back, it was like my sensitivity was seen in the same light as statutory rape or something. It was like, given the chance, these guys would have lynched me in the boysroom. Or thrown one of my fake penny loafers up on the school roof…

bp: What came first: reading, bookselling or writing?

KL: Writing is always first. I’ve been a compulsive creator since I was very young. First drawing, then photography, and then writing became primary. Reading was also an early passion, I remember fighting with my dad when I was 10 or 11 because I wanted to read my book through the basketball game I was being taken to as a spectator. Now reading and writing are totally intertwined for me. When the writing is hitting a good momentum it’s often because I’m feeding off books and authors I love. Being a bookseller didn’t feel like a job, it felt like an extension of reading. Which is partly to say, I wasn’t really conscious of what it was to be a bookseller until I wasn’t one anymore. And of course, spending 30-40 hours a week in a bookstore was a welcome surrounding for a budding writer. St. Mark’s Bookshop kept me in the company of (inspired by) excellent and engaged authors, whether it was the books or the customers.

bp: One of my best jobs ever was working for the University of Michigan library in Flint under a benevolent maternal boss who, as long as I did some work, would let me drift through the stacks to read books at random. What a dream that was.

KL: We were not allowed to read on the job, and mostly it was too busy anyway. But even selling the books was always a kind of conversation, either literally or metaphorically, with the New York reading public.

bp: What led to your activism, concern for the decline of small bookstores, or the attack on intelligence/books in general? I remember in the 1980s when book-burning fever was high, books were once again being burned by idiots. Teachers and librarians were – and remain – on the front lines of freedom of expression. They were a lot hipper than they get credit for.

KL: The struggle of indie bookstores … is certainly a concern that motivates me to write about bookstores. Independent bookstores are one of the places in American culture that serve as a public forum, at least on a small scale – a place where the curious and the engaged exchange information, where humane individuals feel free to say what they think and feel. People go off and have intense private relationships with books, and then they return to the bookstore and, among other book people, manage to share some of that interior life with strangers who can speak easily from a similar place. It’s not something we can take for granted in this society. It struck me recently – when I was distributing fliers for the October 15th Occupy Pittsburgh march, bookstores (and some cafés) were the only storefronts who gave an enthusiastic YES when I asked if I could hang a protest flier. The other store managers all hesitated or said no – they all seemed to worry first about what their customers would think, rather than what they themselves thought. … It reminded me that the air is more free in independent bookstores than in other places in America. “Bookstore America” is like a whole different country.

bp: They’re outposts, which doesn’t say much for what’s out there since those who NEVER go to a bookstore and always opt for paintball or 6 Flags or casinos outnumbers “us” 100 to 1. Not that readers/writers don’t do “normal” things. I sympathize somewhat with smallstore owners altho they can be pretty conservative chamber of Commerce types. If I hear a store owner mistreating a customer for no reason or I hear a racist comment I DO think twice about going back. I stopped going to one NY bar after the bartender was a dickhead to customers…”

KL: Maybe it’s less useful to think of it as “us vs them” than to think of it as “asleep vs awake.” A condition rather than a solidified type of person. Anyone can wake up at any time and join the ranks of the indie bookstore seekers.  Small businesses are just individuals, with all the varieties under the sun. When I was on book tour, I remember being really surprised by these California post-hippie store owners in Santa Cruz. They were now the bourgeoisie and stuck on defending their corner of “alternative” California to the death. A few of the middle-aged store owners selling alternative lifestyles were really nasty to me. I was asking them incredibly politely if it was ok to hang a flier for my reading in their window, and they treated me with a surprising level of disdain and condescension.

Back to your earlier question, I hadn’t thought about my interest in standing up for bookstores as colored by the American antagonism towards intellectuals, but maybe I should. I grew up in a pro-sports, anti-intellectual suburb. I was pretty viciously bullied for being conspicuously tall and smart, and my instincts to advocate against injustice surely came out of that period – several years of enduring this aggression from my peers on a daily basis. Lucky for me I lived in a well-read household that explicitly encouraged education. We frequented the library and the bookstore. I was never tempted to stop appearing smart or to stop reading. Reading engaged me in interests that the opinions of others couldn’t take away. My bullied years were a period of my life that passed. If I hadn’t lived in such a household, that peer pressure might have shaped me into the person the others wanted me to be. Long live small bookstores and public libraries and the readers they encourage to become themselves when no one else wants to permit it.

bp: I read your “The Revolution Will Be Catalogued” and agree almost totally; although the solidarity is there in flesh and blood I do see that many from all classes and backgrounds have been blindly supporting the very people who robbed them blind. Reagan is the second most popular president of ALL time and won landslide election victories with his policies to strip the very people who voted for him of their rights and their livelihoods. Blair and Clinton learned their lessons from Thatcher and Reagan… Back to the future, forward into the past…

KL: This sort of misguided populism is something that motivates me to write fiction. I think of Reagan as a gentle-voiced manipulator who offered the people what they thought they wanted. Most things in American pop culture are things people are told to want. But the challenge of writing fiction is to write to the level of unmistakable human need that still exists underneath the false level that will accept consolation prizes. Some needs exist BECAUSE we keep accepting the consolation prizes. I believe, for example, that people are hungry for real stories that help us make sense of our lives, but if Hollywood hokum advertises itself 25 times a day, the people will settle for Hollywood. When I write fiction, I always hope to hit a nerve that the reader can’t deny. …

bp: A prime example is – you can even watch it on Dutch TV – is Extreme Home Makeover, which is all about sentiment and compassion for a model needy family. The media dilemma in a nutshell: Makeover distracts us from many essential American [although it happens almost everywhere] truths: the substandard housing that so many people live in; the poverty so many people are experiencing; and the lack of community / local / federal support UNTIL these people are SO desperate they have to beg a major TV network [owned by the very perps who caused the crisis] to bail them out and save them from destitution.

KL: I always think of television as this invention that was dumbed down enough to create one huge country (America) out of many disparate regions. If I think of America as a nation of television viewers, I think of it as a pathetic excuse for a culture. But I also believe that you can unite people by different aspects of themselves and have them appear as a whole different group of people.

bp: True!

KL: The rabid right-wingers can unite people in their fear of immigrants, or Walmart can unite them in their desire for deep discounts, or reality TV can unite people in their most knee-jerk emotions, or a humane leader (or writer) can unite people in their hope or tenderness. Here in Western Pennsylvania, we watched a really interesting turn-around in the 2008 election. A number of working class whites, many of them union members, went from eyeing Obama cautiously or suspiciously as a black “Muslim,” to volunteering for his campaign, calling registered voters to talk him up.

bp: But Obama is a strawman who allowed people to feel good about their profiles as non-racists. And now he’s holding up a lit match to his/our own future… But I see your point. He offered hope and so they desperately leaped into a void to clutch it. But if they’d read the fine print they’d have come to the conclusions that are now only [too late?] emerging about his complicity in all this. He is the proverbial wolf dressed in sheep’s [or hero’s?] clothing.

KL: I don’t know a progressive person who isn’t disappointed with many of Obama’s moves. But I’m also frustrated for him that the Republicans in Congress seem to have made it their main agenda to thwart and obstruct him. This is an unprecedented situation, even in our dysfunctional government.

bp: This entire crisis phenomenon did not happen without the complicit aid of the victims themselves. Bush 2 enjoyed an approval rating of 90+ after 9/11 and any of the grumpy/cynical leftist seers who saw the writing on the wall were considered traitors – or worse! I remember my disillusionment when unions [not so much the leadership as membership!] went wholeheartedly for Reagan, Clinton, and Bush 1&2. This is somehow related to bully’s never going to libraries to learn history. People began blaming unions, totally buying the Republican argument, for what ails the US and sat on their hands as the rich dismantled and demonized unions. Many normal people continue to blame unions, watching their own social safety net disappear. Many of them [like my father who was a very ethical and non-investing man] invested royally in the booming junk stocks that eventually bottomed out and with each successive year, stockholders demanded ever more insane profit margins – this collective greed was rewarded with so many election victories that many Democrats, in reaction, are now positioned to the right of Rockefeller and Nixon.

KL: I remember in 2004, eating lunch at Veselka and overhearing the cook talk about his SYSCO stock to another cook. And I despaired for the election because I thought, “Everyone owns stock now. People are going to disappear into the booth and vote their wallet, vote their stock portfolio.” Up until then I was holding high hopes for the fight against Bush, but at that moment I knew that too many people were seriously short-sighted. Large numbers seemed to have moved to the right on a very selfish level.

bp: I think that is important! People were no longer just duped consumers; they were investors in the duping company. So the shift has been significant toward the perceived owners/stockholders and away from consumers/voters. 

KL: Lately I’ve been listening to speeches and interviews with the journalist Chris Hedges, who is offering some very intelligent commentary and insight on the Occupy movement and its precedents.

bp: I repost his Truthdig articles. He speaks clearly, rationally and engagingly. it’s what I used to like about Alexander Cockburn in the Voice in the 1980s. 

KL: Hedges points out in the Charlie Rose interview that American workers are being asked to compete with workers across the global marketplace, but today that means competing with Chinese workers who work in conditions so punitive that they are committing suicide. It means competing with Chinese prison labor. It’s one thing to point out that unions have been subject to corruption, it’s another to abandon all the promises of improved conditions unions once stood for, or to scorn the concept of unions as something that makes American labor “uncompetitive.” What Hedges is talking about is less an open competition and more of a threat (”you will accept these minimum wage jobs because you’re lucky we haven’t off-shored them yet”) or just a done deal.

bp: The Clean Clothes Campaign addresses issues concerning working conditions for garment workers worldwide. Yes, the Right declares that we must destroy the unions to punish corruption. If corruption is the barometer, then we may as well dissolve state, local, fed, international governments and law firms, insurance companies, munitions contractors, prison contractors, media… 

KL: …university football programs, the Catholic Church, municipal public transit authorities – state governments for sure. Lately I feel like I’m living in the 19th century in Pennsylvania with the “natural gas rush” going on here and the Republican governor willing to sell off land to the highest bidder. He allowed state parks to be used for drilling, and wants to keep the gas companies’ profits tax-free for the first several years – he’s willing to give away our clean environment to gas corporations for ZERO state tax revenue in return. Meanwhile, the paper just reported that the drilling companies in Southwest Pennsylvania are using psy-ops to deal with anti-fracking protesters…

bp: Maybe it ultimately went too bold and blatant and the message could no longer be avoided because it was now creeping into everyone’s homes.

KL: The US is considered a moral nation, a nation of law, and yet we haven’t tried George W. Bush or Cheney for war crimes. This is unbelievable to me. Nixon can get caught out, but not Dick Cheney. I recently read more about Halliburton’s shockingly substandard care of our troops in Iraq, while they overcharged taxpayers for these services. Every time I think I understand HOW immoral or amoral these creeps are, they raise that bar even higher.

bp: The problem is that this US as moral nation perception has been invalid since who knows… The hypocrisies have caught up with it and that is why the US is surprised when many people no longer readily accept the Hollywood/MTV/Disney indoctrination. There are so many great Americans who are not adequately represented by government, but also not by hollywood, glossy mags, television, contemporary music or talk shows …

KL: One of the most urgent things that the left must do is reclaim the rhetoric, the ability to call a spade a spade. The right wing has been so savvy in taking command of the rhetoric. They manage to take ideas that will benefit the people and paint them as something the people should hate instead. “Death panels” and “socialism” as the reasons you shouldn’t want universal healthcare, “big government” as the reason you shouldn’t want regulations or social services. Progressives have got to turn this around at all levels, and the Occupy movement is right now starting to change the terms of the national discourse. The brief but intelligent slogans on the Occupy protest signs are creating a powerful shorthand of the important progressive issues, the neglected issues, the people-centered issues. Maybe the left spent too much time on editorials and not enough time coming up with short, to-the-point phrases that will stick in people’s minds.

bp: Despite the attempts of straight media to manipulate OWS it is the strength of social media, internet, blogs and street signage to reveal what is actually happening that has made it easier to disprove the straight media’s wanton ignoring of this movement and its blatant distortions.

KL: If I want to know what’s going on with Occupy Portland, Occupy Cleveland, Occupy Oakland, or Occupy Erie, I go straight to Twitter. If I want to see what the latest misconception of the Occupy movement has morphed into, I check the New York Times headlines.

bp: I hope that the upside of this will mean a serious attempt to unleash a truly progressive party or a party of conscientious absentia, that the Fugs’ Tuli Kupferberg advocated. Consumers would riot if their only choice in cereals was Cheerios and Wheaties, but when it comes to candidates for higher office they don’t seem to mind.

KL: You make a good point about consumers and their all-important choices. Options, even self-destructive (or other-destructive) ones, are considered the hallmark of American freedom (the flung-around retort “Nanny State” comes to mind), yet the idea of having a viable third party consistently strikes out.

bp: It’s disturbing to see so many people accuse Obama of being a socialist. This shows a great misunderstanding of the term and certainly of his pro-business policies. It means there is very little common understanding to base a conversation on with those on the rabid right.

KL: People who call Obama a socialist are so out of their minds; I don’t think a conversation with them is possible. The Dems have moved so far right in my lifetime – it’s maddening when they still get tarred with out-of-date leftist slurs they’re not even living up to. And yet I haven’t gone as far as imagining a party restructuring yet – I’m still hoping for many more of the 99% to step out into the streets and make a show of standing up against the corporate oligarchy. I’m hearing people talk about Occupy in terms of Hakim Bey and Immediatism – we’ve got to get together as warm bodies face to face, breath to breath, before the next level of action can be decided.

bp: I just got a letter from Hakim. He received a letter saying that the first book in the OWS library was T.A.Z. 

KL: We’ve been divided by our cubicles, isolated on our laptops for too long…. I am really focusing on what citizens are doing – are they recognizing and reclaiming their power? There’s a power structure that has been making decisions that affect our lives for the worse, for a long time. That includes politicians, lobbyists, too-large corporations, huge financial institutions. We have to figure out how to dismantle the societal structures that uphold … their power. Right now that’s happening in terms of exposing the naked force of the police state, which is no longer protecting democracy but carrying out [the] regressive and paranoid orders of mayors and university chancellors.

bp: Let’s not forget they probably cracked down upon the advice received from some of Obama’s closest advisors at Homeland Security. The UN is ready to denounce the repressive measures involving free speech. The encroaching surveillance state in the name of anti-terror is a real danger.  

KL: Is Homeland Security the new COINTELPRO? … The people must keep gathering in numbers and consciously reclaiming our power. Eventually we could run a people’s candidate or influence some of the last uncorrupt politicians (and hopefully that’s happening as we speak), but I think the most important thing is to get to the tipping point of numbers and support in the Occupy movement. The 99% needs to become a force too united and committed to ignore. I think there’s a lot of people watching from the sidelines, wondering which way things will go. But there’s also a lot of people who are less-visible supporters of the Occupy movement. They’re donating money, food, sleeping bags, but they’re not always able to be out in the streets or camping. We’re just seeing the beginning of this movement, not the end.

bp: What is the role of the writer in the US? I notice that here in the Netherlands and in France [and elsewhere] writers/novelists are often as much a part of ‘serious’ discussions on talk shows as the official wonks or standard talking heads… Do social media offer Chomsky, grumpy old men like Vonnegut, acerbic critics like Hedges or Amy Goodman, more ops?

KL: Good question. I think that there is an audience for thoughtful writers in the US, but writers are still in a mostly separate ghetto from “the general public.” America is divided into those who seek intellectual food and those who don’t. Being inside the writer’s ghetto, I am certainly influenced by writers, poets, and novelists on social media (I first heard about Occupy Wall Street from poet Amy King’s posts on Facebook), but I’m not sure how far and wide these writers’ words are distributed. I think that social media still creates a habitrail – customizable networks rather than one wide public forum. When literary types write about OWS, it seems to be digested largely by other literary types, whether it’s someone’s post on social media or an essay in an online lit journal. I don’t see a lot of novelists writing editorials for broader news sources, or poets being asked for their opinion in the mainstream media. In America, there’s a long tradition of the arts being relegated to “harmless” realms like academia or entertainment.

I may have a skewed perspective: I worked in an intellectual bookstore in an intellectual neighborhood at a time when physical books were still king (1997-2005). NO LOGO by Naomi Klein and anything by Noam Chomsky flew off the shelves. I had the feeling that many people were passing these books around to their friends. By contrast I’m not seeing many articles by either of them passed around on Facebook. Who knows why, maybe I’m not in the right network or habitrail, or maybe their peak has passed, or maybe their peak has passed among my particular colleagues who discovered them years ago. I’m certainly seeing Chris Hedges’ essays and speeches all the time on the internet; he’s in a unique position to speak well about/for the Occupy movement because he has witnessed and written about so many of the world’s revolutions in the past few decades. He can speak about the conditions that come before the tipping point of a society about to revolt, and he’s superb at articulating and almost translating what’s happening for Americans, who have no clue what a revolution would actually look like….

With Pittsburgh's Jay Dantry of Jay’s Bookstall that lasted 55 years until it closed in 2008

bp: Do you think DIY/indie efforts at publishing/proliferation circumvent a publishing world compromised by the fact that they are all owned by major conglomerates, many of which have huge business investments in armaments?

KL: The great thing about the small press is that an editor might take a look at your manuscript even if you are not the ghost writer of a celebrity bio, a sitcom star, or an expert on sudoku. Not being associated with armaments is just an added bonus. The small press is one of the great bastions of free expression due to its lack of concern with mass market preferences. Editors publish what they like, to a large extent. Readers benefit from a flourishing small press, driven by the sheer grit and passion of dedicated editors and publishers who exist on modest (or meager) budgets. … Because of the market-driven publishing houses (remember “AOL Time Warner Book Group”?), many writers of literary fiction who used to publish with larger presses (aka “midlist fiction”) are being driven out by those celebrity bios. So those authors [are] looking to the small presses for publication when they never thought they’d have to go there. Downsizing and layoffs are not just for office workers.

bp: In a strangely related way, the problem with real estate in NY is that capital is seen as the natural state of homo economis and that demands or desires to engage in barter or social constraints put on the free exchange of capital is seen as an infringement upon the natural order of things. This is a very entrenched American/Western value. Maybe this is why in a supposedly liberal city like NYC, Giuliani was popular and, NY has NEVER had a progressive mayor. The idea that capital should behave in a sociable way went out with FDR and was strangled by Reagan and Clinton et al.

KL: Yes, I’m trying to remember how Jim Jarmusch put it in the recent documentary, Blank City. He said something to the effect that “New York’s always been a port city full of merchants and hustlers. Now the merchandise is real estate.” Cooper Union has a long history in real estate, starting with Peter Cooper himself. But to have power in real estate means, to Cooper Union, to choose to maximize the profits from those land holdings. They’re turning the East Village into another Midtown, taking advantage of sky-high real estate prices AND helping drive those real estate prices up so that the rich can play there, but the poor and middle class won’t be able to live there.

Imagine what real estate holdings means to a bookstore. Book Court (in Brooklyn) and The Strand are lucky enough to own their buildings, but they’re not rushing to exploit their own land and screw their neighbors. They just want to stay in business and remain an active part of their respective neighborhoods. They want to keep serving their customers who consider them an asset of their area. These bookstores, then, raise the actual quality of life for their neighborhoods, not just the rent prices. Can Cooper Union say the same?

bp: the flagship Barn & Ignoble Disney type stores not only use it for hi-profile branding but also to divide and conquer, drive indie stores out of business… I remember hipsters consistently saying ‘let’s meet in the B&N cafe’ when meeting people after work. So I blame hipster book-loving patrons, the chains but some blame should also go to indie booksellers who refused to change. When my yodel book out Itried to engineer a tour of alternative bookstores. Very few reacted despite follow-ups and appeals to the potential ‘hipness’ of my book, many others rejected my offer to do a reading. Meanwhile B&N was all too happy to accommodate. Sometimes these indie bookstores lose vision, flexibility – they certainly deserve to exist but they do bear some of the blame…

KL: There are less obvious stories about what’s been going on for bookstores, such as the rise in new-book prices as driven by Barnes & Noble [see REBEL BOOKSELLER by Andrew Laties]. The cover price for new books went higher and higher because B&N coerced publishers into deep and exclusive discounts. So, the profit margins and the sales opportunities got slimmer and slimmer for retail indie bookstores in particular. I think it threw many indie bookstores into realms of competition that they didn’t necessarily expect to be in. I don’t think, for example, that hosting readings is the strong point for every mom and pop bookstore – the thing about small businesses is that they are each their own quirky fiefdoms, for better and for worse. Perhaps there’s a good side to the homogeny of a Barnes & Noble if they establish some industry standards that are beneficial – lately I’ve been noticing more small bookstores establishing an “events coordinator” position. That’s not necessarily a direct effect of Barnes & Noble, but perhaps it is a sign of the times, a sign of the creativity and outreach that is necessary to survive in today’s bookstore/publishing climate.

bp: Where for you is the edge of conscience/activism and aesthetic pleasure in your writing?

KL: I’ve gone back and forth between activism and aesthetics for a long time. (From street protests to guerilla postering to underground newspapers to advocacy to the experimental prose ghetto, etc.) Many times I’ve combined the two, which early on did not always have the desired effect. Other times I have gone off to focus on one or the other: art or activism. I think finding the edge between the two is an ongoing experiment that gets better results over time, as I get more adept at the craft of writing, and as I respond to the world with more experience and insight. I think one thing I’m getting better at is deciding what is the correct response for the situation. Is it time to march in the streets, write an editorial, write a blog post, hone my poetics, or speak through a character in fiction? Recently, I was sure I was supposed to be writing an article about smaller-city American Occupy camps, but what I had to say ended up working much better as poems. Ten years ago, I might have set out to write such a poem precisely to write a hard-hitting political poem, but this time it was because the point I was trying to make came out more clearly in that form. On the other hand, I’d still like to write an article to reach a different audience.

bp: How is the bookstore memoir going?

KL: I really like how the chapters are coming out, but writing memoir is a new kind of challenge for me. I’ve spent a lot of my writing years cultivating a deeply subjective point of view – using poetics, marginalized characters, and stylized voice to reach a prose that describes realities under the surface. But with this memoir, I’m going for describing a place that other people will recognize – I’m allowing a collective reality or collective point of view to come into the making of the book. I consider St. Mark’s Bookshop, the entity, to be made up of owners, employees, authors, and customers – I’m willing to imagine beyond just my own experience there. So, while readers might find a “standard” narrative non-fiction when they read the memoir, for me it’s a crazy, difficult (but worthwhile) experiment to achieve this sort of naturalistic nonfiction. I’m also learning that there’s more definitions of memoir than I realized.  I really like what New York Times editor Neil Genzlinger wrote, “ If you … must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it.” In my bookstore memoir, I make myself an organizing principle or jumping-off point, more than a developing character.

bp: What do you think got revealed in the St Mark’s Bookshop rent crisis?

KL: One thing that got revealed is the way “non-profits” like Cooper Union are really acting more like corporations, and “small businesses” like indie bookstores are just really a few human beings trying to keep putting food on the table. Meanwhile, the language and structure in our current culture suggests the opposite – the non-profits still get tax breaks even as they usher in new hotels and condos for the 1%, and the small businesses keep getting the squeeze from every angle, AND get all the flak of the old “free market” mantra. “If they can’t sell enough books to pay the rent, then they shouldn’t be in business,” etc.  When really this is just another instance of who gets subsidized (the more powerful entity, Cooper Union) and who is actually thrown to the sharks of the market (the small business, which may as well be a family farm). St. Mark’s provided full-time employees with health insurance, and were surely punished for it by the rise of insurance premiums.

bp: Exactly – and it’s the most vehement opponents of subsidies / tax breaks who often receive the biggest bundles of money.

KL: I’ve loved seeing the enormous amount of support that customers have shown the during St Mark’s Bookshop during the rent controversy. I was so happy to see how quickly the petition grew, and how many people articulated why they were signing.

bp: Personally, I was pretty amazed at how low the total was for an urban area covering some 15-20 million people and it’s hi traffic location and its longevity…

KL: Artists and intellectuals from all across the country and overseas spared no superlative in praising this bookstore where they shop whenever they come to New York, or have shopped continuously, or shopped when they lived in New York 15 years ago.

bp: I think it deserves MORE support – the $2500 rent reduction seems more like a pubic relations victory for CU than a fiscal victory for SM. The fundamental issue of institutional greed, avarice, speculation, slumlords etc. seems to barely come up.

KL: I wondered recently if we’re in the mess we’re in because The Businessman (I mean the Wall Street version, not the small biz/mercantile version) has become an untouchable figure in our culture. There is nothing we won’t do to pave the path to new heights of capitalist ambition and success. The Businessman is above the law (bends or creates laws); anyone who gets in his way is a “dirty hippie” or a “socialist.” The concept of an academic institution imitating the corporate structure or raking in money from un-real real estate prices (or an overhyped athletics program) is hardly questioned in our capitalist country. It’s merely considered smart, savvy, necessary. Why is it necessary? Why can’t colleges survive in a way that doesn’t seem to undermine what most of the professors teach? The good news for St. Mark’s is an East Village of the mind still exists, even as the actual neighborhood gets overrun with frat bars and glass-and-steel skyscraper condos. And for many people, St. Mark’s Bookshop is still the ground zero of that East Village. It still aggregates and disseminates so much art, culture, and thought – the store’s book buyers are not only top notch but are highly attuned to a particular progressive view on politics, culture, and aesthetics.

bp: I like “East Village of the mind”! Like a take on the old Ferlinghetti title… St. Mark’s was the only NYC bookstore to ask me to come in and autograph copies of my books YODEL-AY-EE-OOOO and WIGGLING WISHBONE and were positive about any developments in the publication of Beer Mystic. [photo: Books & beer in NYC's Mars Bar with Danny Shot]

~~~

• Cooper Union development articles

• Karen Lillis’ Eyescorpion blog

• I Picked Pittsburgh: Karen Lillis’ Escape from New York

• Beer Mystic excerpt hosted by Karen The Small Press Librarian 

• Follow the entire Beer Mystic global pub crawl

“Muktananda, Shirdi Sai Baba and Hari Das Baba would never take LSD.”

A certain pattern had evolved wherein Maharajji frequently called upon myself and a couple of other foreign men whenever he required some enforcers. Sometimes it was to deliver bad news such as a Jao, other times just to get the group herded together for some purpose. It was not an enviable role, such as that enjoyed by a favorite singer or the one with the honored and coveted job of waving the towel to move the flies along. But any way in which one was called to serve was a blessing, and we all wanted his attention.

One morning in Kainchi we were sitting around Baba-ji on the verandah singing and laughing at his play. At some point every morning he would get up from the tucket and walk across to his office. This morning as he descended the three steps to the courtyard, with the whole group of us standing to accompany him, one young western man wrapped in a red shawl stumbled down the stairs and sprawled on the ground. He may have brushed against Baba, who turned around, saw him and continued to his office. Of course by now we could all see that the man was wearing nothing from the waist down. Apparently he had consumed a good dose of LSD earlier on and had lost his lower clothes. No-one had noticed earlier as he sat there wrapped in red.

Once in his office Maharajji started to roar. Already he had frequently used the expression regarding the foreigners, “Goli khaya, nanga nachata hain!” (“They’ve taken LSD and are dancing naked!”)

He shouted for me and another devotee. We approached the screened window, “he’s taken goli (acid)! Get him out of here.” We said “Yes, Baba, right away.” He said for us to take him out of the ashram and to stop the first bus and put him on it. Then he said for us to stop the bus for Almora, put him on it and send him to Dinapura (This was my old stomping grounds, but by now it had become synonymous with hippies and drugs). By now the guy was wrapped in his red shawl and had been taken out of sight of Baba’s window. We realized that in his present state, he could hardly speak or walk, but had a grin from ear to ear. There was no way he was going anywhere soon. We hustled him out of the ashram and someone volunteered to take him to their house, not too far from the gates.

When we got back to Baba, he was in a jovial mood, and kept repeating “He took acid and was dancing naked by the river.” We wondered after that incident whether the guy could ever come back. A day or two later he did leave Kainchi and stayed out for a week. When he returned Baba-ji welcomed him back as if nothing had happened.

My landlords in Kainchi lived across the road from the main gate and were potato farmers. Some days, in the late afternoons, after we had been sent home, I would enjoy a visit from my landlord, Bhairav, a wonderful man about four years older than I. He and his whole family were great devotees of Maharajji and had seen their lives transformed when he moved into their valley and created the ashram. From my back porch we could watch Maharajji when he came to the roof where he often sat in the evenings until dark. Bhairav was a smoking man and sometimes we would enjoy a smoke of hash together. At these times he would insist that we sit on the opposite verandah. He said that although Maharajji knew everything and could see everything, he was our father and out of respect we should not smoke in front of him.

The dilemma with writing anything edgy or transgressive in Canada, isn’t that it is all too often written from the margins, or by choice or circumstance — it comes down to the harsh reality that edgy, transgressive writing is an unwelcome commodity at Canadian magazines, journals, and ultimately, publishers. The number of Canadian magazines and publishers that publish relatively edgy and transgressive writings by Canadian authors can be numbered on one hand. Given that edgy, transgressive writing is at best a niche genre in Canada, the skewed writer to publisher ratio almost assures that edgy, transgressive writing never sees print. It also does not help that Canada has no celebrated transgressive history of its own.

~Fresh Raw Cuts

The first of three online magazines presently pushing back against the literary status quo in Canada is ditch, an online literary periodical edited by the Canadian writer John C. Goodman. Launched in August 2007, ditch is designed to promote Canadian experimental poetry by celebrating the innovative, the non-conforming, the radical, the alternative, the surreal, the avant-garde, the non-linear, the abstract, and the experimental. Much as other new online magazines do, ditch pushes the definition of what an online periodical can be by not arranging the magazine into individual issues. Instead, as new work is added to the main page, older posts are moved to the archive. In four short years, ditch has published the front ranks of Canada’s most experimental and abstract poets.

Next is The Danforth Review, an online short story magazine, founded in 1999 by Michael Bryson. It includes interviews, archived back issues, and reviews. Since its inception in 1999, TDR has been a welcome hub of new fiction and interviews not otherwise found in their paper-based counterparts. After a brief hiatus, Bryson has brought back TDR in a more abbreviated format, access is still available to its wonderous backlist of issues, stories, interviews, and reviews. TDR is a site for those (writers mostly) interested in the direction that contemporary fiction and literary criticism is taking. In depth interviews take a view into contemporary literature and fiction that one simply does not find in the paper-based journals.

Last on my list is The Puritan, a paper-based literary magazine founded in late fall 2006 in Ottawa, Canada, and from February 2007 to November 2008, released seven print issues before moving to Toronto and online. Now an online, quarterly publication based in Toronto, Ontario, it’s committed to publishing the best in new fiction, poetry, interviews, and reviews. Works featured “push toward the symbolic frontier, challenging limitations and forging into previously unexplored aesthetic territory.”

Spend an evening, perhaps a weekend, exploring how each of these online magazines push boundaries, challenge limitations, and how the writers they publish forge new aesthetics. I guarantee you will be both surprised and satisfied.

Friday, December 9th, and Saturday, December 10th

OFF highlights the best of the 1990′s Bay Area creative music scene with a power packed line-up featuring: the Rova Saxophone Quartet playing a Tribute to Bay Area tenor saxophone great Glenn Spearman, local legend Ralph Carney, Pluto, Pamela Z, Gino Robair’s Improvcore Orchestra 3000, Dan Plonsey’s New Monsters, and a re-union of the avant jazz group The Manufacturing of Humidifiers, all in two action-packed nights.

Curated by Sensitive Skin music editor Steve Horowitz (“Super Size Me” and so much more) & part of the Berkeley Arts Festival, the OFF takes place on Friday, December 9th, and Saturday, December 10th, 8pm both nights. Admission is sliding scale, suggested donation $10-20. The Berkeley Arts Festival space is located at 2133 University Avenue, just off the corner of Shattuck, in beautiful Downtown Berkeley.

Friday December 9th, 8pm Ralph Carney & Randy Odell Duo Ralph Carney, perhaps the most hard to describe multi-genre, multi-talented, wacked out pop and jazz hornplayer/singer/composer since Rahsaan Roland Kirk, has recorded and/or performed with the likes of Tom Waits, Jonathan Richman, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, B-52’s, Marc Ribot, Bill Laswell, Elvis Costello, Galaxie 500, Daevid Allen and The Black Keys. For this very special festival opening set he will be joined by drummer Randy Odell whose bands include The Impalers, The GG Amos Band, The Ralph Carney Serious Jass Project, The Cottontails and Diggsville. Pluto (the Lost Planet) Featuring Marc Weinstein, Steve Clarke, Len Paterson and Dave Slusser Nearly 30 years after their first freely improvised session, these longtime collaborators have strategies and structures developed purely from listening to each other – truly spontaneous composition, cross-idiomatic aural architecture built right-on-the-spot. Rumor has it that Ralph Carney will be joining in with the band, that used to be a common occurrence, but has not happened in a very long time! Gino Robair’s Improvcore Orchestra 3000 Featuring: Steve Kirk, Phillip Greenleaf, Mantra, John Shiurba, Rent Romus, Ben Goldberg, Jules Ryan and more… Composer and percussionist Gino Robair, a founding member of The Splatter Trio, has recorded with Tom Waits, Anthony Braxton, Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, John Butcher, Derek Bailey, Peter Kowald, Otomo Yoshihide, the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and Eugene Chadbourne, among many others. To end off the first night, Gino will lead a mass conduction of an ensemble of some of the Bay Areas finest improvisers. Saturday December 10th, 8pm Pamela Z San Francisco-based composer/performer and media artist Pamela Z works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampling technology and video. One of the pioneers of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers in her solo works that combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. Dan Plonsey’s New Monsters meet the Manufacturing of Humidifiers featuring Randy Porter and Ward Spangler New Monsters, the latest brainchild of Dan Plonsey and Steve Horowitz, also features Steve Adams, Scott Looney and Jim Bove, all long-time vets of the Bay Area Music Scene. Steve & Dan released two albums together under the name The Manufacturing of Humidifiers. At this show they will be joined on stage by Randy Porter and Ward Spangler for the first time since the early 1990′s. ROVA Saxophone Quartet Extrapolation of the Inevitable – ROVA plays for Glenn Spearman The Rova Saxophone Quartet explores the synthesis of composition and collective improvisation, creating exciting, genre-bending music that challenges and inspires. Rova is one of the longest-standing groups in the music movement that has its roots in post-bop, free jazz, avant-rock, and 20th century new music, and draws inspiration from the visual arts and from the traditional and popular music styles of Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States. To end the festival, Rova will be performing a set dedicated to the late Glen Spearman, another guiding light of the music scene at that time.

The OFF features a wide array of musicians and bands from the heyday of the Bay Area creative music scene of the 1990′s. For those of you who were not there or are just way too old to remember, the 1990′s were an amazingly active decade for all sorts of cross currents in what became to be known as the Improvcore music scene in the bay area. Some high and some not so high profile shows were centered at a club called Olive Oil’s on the piers in San Francisco (before there was a ballpark there, now called Jellys) and Beanbender’s, in the Berkeley Store Gallery, in downtown Berkeley.

The steady stream of talent was simply awesome, from bands like Pluto, the Molecules, ROVA, The Humidifiers, Eskimo, and the Splatter Trio, to individual performers like Ben Goldberg , Ralph Carney and Glenn Spearman. . . the list goes on. The late Stephen Lucky Mosko, long time conductor for the SF contemporary music players was even featured. Many of the musicians in these groups are still making vital music and have been performing locally and internationally for years. The OFF festival may just be a once in a lifetime chance to see many (not all, no way to do that) of the progenitors of the bay area creative music scene together again for the first time in a long time. Regardless of style or genre, the OFF festival is fundamentally a gigantic celebration of the talent, depth and musical diversity of the Bay Area.

This year’s festival is curated by composer/bassist, Steve Horowitz who moved away from the bay in 1996, to live in the Netherlands for four years, and then Manhattan for ten. Steve finally returned to the city for good, and being back is what sparked the idea for this mass conflagration. “The number of fantastic players and bands in SF is overwhelming, and I think a festival like this will go a long way to remind people of that fact,” said Steve. “I can remember so many fantastic shows and bands, I just wanted to see us all together again”

Rick Rees, one of the original promoters of Olive Oils and the Improvcore scene, now living in Pacifica remembers, “Those were heady musical days, there was a real sense of community and shared purpose among the groups. The Improvcore orchestra got started at Olive’s, different bands that played each other’s music in a large ensemble format. Best of all was the Battle of the Improv Bands: Splatter vs Scatter, conducted by Willy Winant. I am sure I still have the official zebra jersey he wore and the “trophy” made by Tom Nunn buried in the garage somewhere.” Composer/Saxophonist Dan Plonsey ran a creative music series called Beanbender’s in downtown Berkeley for many years. Everyone played there, Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, and even the Sun Ra Arkestra. “Beanbender’s often seemed to book itself,” says Dan. “We’d get calls and e-mails from some of our favorite musicians from all over the world, and they’d come and play in this abandoned bank which was in legal limbo. Once or twice we had no electricity, so we had to run an extension cord to the pizza place next door. Or the guys running seminars upstairs would complain about our noise, or they’d book a party, and we’d run up to complain about their noise. But people would always come to the shows — somehow we almost never lost money.” “I would expect nothing less than some new major musical moments from these players and this festival,” says Steve. “We will get to see a re-union of Pluto (now called Lost Planet, get it!) playing with Ralph Carney and a very special ROVA tribute to the late great Bay Area, Saxophonist Glenn Spearman titled, ‘Extrapolation of the Inevitable — Rova Channels Glenn Spearman.’” Steve Adams explains, “Rova will perform in honor of the late Glenn Spearman, the great tenor saxophonist who was also a dynamic force in the Bay Area music scene. ROVA had the chance to make music with Glenn on many memorable occasions, including the sax octet Figure 8 and the thirtieth anniversary concert of Coltrane’s Ascension. His playing and spirit were an inspiration to many in these parts and we will be making music dedicated to his lasting influence.”

Horowitz concludes, “In many ways, this is a dream come true, to be able to come back to town and work with these folks again. Completely inspiring, I really think this festival is going to rock!”

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners

• Albert Camus

You gotta chortle in your beerhead at the maxim “Beer Is Cheaper Than Therapy,” a tongue-in-cheek saying fraught [froth?] with this better-you-than-me ambiguity, pride unraveling by the last syllable as you realize the joke’s on you…

The film Beer Is Cheaper Than Therapy  hinges on a cynical version of this saying that’s been wafting about US military bases for some time. It implies a cavalier attitude by staff toward the social, economic and [mental] health issues of its personnel – i.e., fucked-up soldiers with attitude [after they learn they’ve been had by the patriotism sham]. The brass suggests these young soldiers should go drink beer to kill whatever “imaginary” devils, pains and nightmares they may have. The cast-off discharges eventually managed to transform Beer Is Cheaper Than Therapy into their own bonding call in bars where they ironically revel in their shared despair, with one small consolation being that he or she is seldom the worst off among them.

The fact that over 100 soldiers have committed suicide at Fort Hood and in the surrounding Killeen, Texas area since 2004 reveals that, however great beer may be, it is no panacea for ailments that immobilize these young people, infecting their souls with disaffection, disillusionment and worse. The suicides reveal a tragic disconnect between the glory of the recruitment adverts and the destitute reality upon one’s return, often not as heroes but more as annoying casualties measured in terms of health care costs to society. I think of how many walking wounded – people who can’t negotiate basic social situations but can still recite the Pledge of Allegiance by heart – the US prison system and military produce each year.

The fact that this immense military base reportedly only has one social worker to handle some 4000+ military personnel tells you something about the military’s attitude toward its soldiers; they’re no better than cannon fodder. Several of the soldiers interviewed in the film are able to voice this newfound awareness with penetrating clarity: they’re meat, human shields, pawns, proud but betrayed and disillusioned, having served their nation and believing the promises made to them: training, job ops, education, and psychiatric help, they could otherwise never afford. Brecht summed it up in a few lines of “The Cannon Song”:

John is a write-off and Jimmy is dead
And Georgie was shot for looting
And young men’s blood goes on being red
While the Army just goes on ahead recruiting.

I didn’t get to this years great International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam in November [record turnout] although I did have some very lively discussions with docu-maven, Jennifer Merin, About.com’s  expert critic and our houseguest for 6 days, about money, politics and the emerging issue of branding in documentaries and how that will undermine the critical independence of docs. Or more accurately, corporate sponsors offer crumbs in exchange for immeasurable prestige by association for a steal. Well, the military is a major brander too; it offers promises of adventure and education and the soldiers pay for this with life, limb and lots of blood and trauma.

To which Merin responded: “Yes, it surely does!  Really important point! Two more that are similar in theme: WHERE DO SOLDIERS COME FROM and TO HELL AND BACK … not about suicides, but both about US soldiers’  mental and physical traumas as result of being deployed. And all are still suffering the effects of army marketing!!!!”

I did manage, however, to see the Dutch documentary Beer Is Cheaper Than Therapy,  on Dutch TV. Simone de Vries’s film takes a serious look at the many problems these [mostly poor] soldiers face at Fort Hood. “There is no place for doubt, sadness and fear in the American army,” say the film’s makers. “ Still, many soldiers struggle with these feelings. The film portrays what goes on behind the facade of heroism and the ‘John Wayne mentality’.”

De Vries’s style is relaxing, encouraging/empowering the soldiers & mates to gradually unravel their countless tales of woe, some of whom have committed acts of violence in Iraq they now regret and others who’ve gone AWOL, bonkers and more since returning. We meet some of those closest to soldiers who have committed suicide or soldiers who have urges to commit violence they know not what to do with:

I’m 22 years old and I must have killed 30 people. The same thing that you were given badges for, over in Iraq, you would be considered a serial killer over here. That’s a very weird thought to have running around in your head when it’s dark, going to sleep or late at night.

Many of the mostly young, under-educated interviewees are portrayed as pent-up, discarded and discredited, facing official recriminations as losers for being unable to deal with their problems in a dignified manner; they are jettisoned into a mundane, impoverished and hostile environment, where beauty is measured in the effectiveness of the painkillers, the numbers of beers chugged or the extremes of the porn. The landscape echoes their emptiness/loneliness that besets them upon realizing they’ve been sold a pack of lies.

They call it a volunteer army, but almost everyone uses “volunteer” sarcastically: the joke’s on you if you believe the insanely cynical promises that lure desperate, no-future youths to “voluntarily” sign up as their last-ditch attempt to dredge up some semblance of dignity out of the little self they been have left with – yea, right, “volunteer” as in the no-hope-no-prospects-at-home category, culled from a burgeoning underclass, which is best left under-educated to better “prepare” them for future dodgy wars. It’s like patriotism is stuck on the end of a bayonet like in the olden days when the bloody beheaded noggin of a criminal was stuck on the end of a pike to spook the citizenry into submission.

One ex-soldier describes how his mom was committed to a mental institution and when he was totally lost in this lost world at 16, he decided to enlist to escape this awful world – imagine opting for a war zone over your hometown – and they dragged his mom [not legally sane enough to serve as guardian] down to the recruitment offices and got her to sign her son’s life away.

What becomes clear is something that parallels the insights of the OWS movement, that, despite billions of dollars spent on myth-building, PR and sexy recruitment tactics [the banks and the military – remember that quaint old term, “military-industrial complex”?], many of which are so low that you think your dealing with carny barkers selling elixirs and magical nostrums or something, one of the most significant American resistance movements has managed to emerge to voice the many gripes these young experience-enlightened ex-soldiers have with the military establishment in their efforts to gain sympathy, benefits and understanding for their lot. Operation Recovery Campaign, run largely by ex-soldiers, tries to help soldiers cast adrift or those suffering from PTSD, etc. It also agitates to hold the Military top brass responsible for the their abandonment of returning soldiers.

In the transition shots we see the soldiers guzzling bottle after bottle of beer, dancing away the misgivings with pained smiles, dancing away the heartache [that cleave between what one feels and what one is forced to accept]. Many fail at preventing the capsizing of their fragile, wobbly psyches. Beer and amazingly elaborate cocktail mixes of pills leaves them in a chemo-haze, delusional, standing with automatic rifles in shopping plaza parking lots or firing off hundred of rounds in an alleyway because it is only the sound of gunfire that can sooth them – explosive metal mantra, bullet Buddhism  – a brilliant metaphor had it been JG Ballard’s.

I did take seriously the statement by some who say it’s easy: You join the Army and they do the rest, they make all the decisions for you just like mom used to make. They’re right, sometimes it’s braver to go against this basic extended paternal/maternal grain. Yes, soldiers are brave but they are also chicken, afraid to say “hell no, I won’t go.”

In 1972, I remember having to pick up my draft card at the post office. I remember standing on the post office steps on a golden autumn day in Richland Center, Wisconsin, staring at it, feeling alien, woozy, a betrayer of mankind and suddenly just tearing it up, throwing it in the garbage can, wanting to be rid of any association with this vilest kind of indentured servitude. I retraced the route to Canada friend Steve and I imagined taking if we were called up – we vowed to take not the main routes but head off into the woods and cross over into Canada under cover of nature. I thought by severing my hand from the paper I would effectively sever all ties between me and the draft board, between me and evil.

I remember my friend, a nice guy, Dan, signing up with the Air Force several weeks prior to last conscription lottery when the US still had a draft in 1972, just prior to the introduction of the all-volunteer army, because he was sure he was going to pull a low number in this lottery and be drafted and sent to perdition in the muddy trenches in Nam. He wanted to avoid this fate at all costs. So he signed up for 4 years and hated it, although eventually his letters seemed to imply he had learned to live with it.

I remember watching this last lottery with Dan and other dorm mates, gathered anxiously, silently around the TV’s weird glow. Each birthdate was assigned a random number and then picked “out of a hat.” His number ended up being even higher – meaning even less likely to be drafted – than mine and mine was something in the mid-200s and I seem to remember they were drafting people whose birthdays came up to 125 or maybe 150. It was like a game show – AND THE WINNER IS – but felt like a rite of passage where even the winners come out losers. We entered the dorm room as boys and left as the anxiety-burdened men we were meant to be.

We all drank beer afterwards. You know, in that quiet way, when you have too much on your mind and as you drink you stare at your hand holding the bottle, afraid to look beyond your hand. We noticed that a few of our dorm mates weren’t there; later we heard they had slithered out during the lottery, made phone calls to their families, disappearing without a word, never to see be seen again in the cafeteria at breakfast, lunch or dinner …

• War Resisters League 
• American Veterans Against The War In Iraq [IVAW]
• US Soldier – The Real Terrorist Was Me
• John Michael Turner Throws Away and Quits
• Soldier Refuses To Return To Iraq For Immoral Duty
• Free Bradley Manning

Follow the entire BEER MYSTIC Pub Crawl, the renegade spirit

His military medals unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
• Albert Einstein

The Cooler was . . . well, a cooler. It was located in a former giant walk-in refrigerator in the heart of the Meat Packing District on 14th Street. Before the area was full of the highfalutin restaurants, shops and boutiques of the Bloomberg era, it was infamous for sex clubs like the Vault, the Mineshaft and the Hellfire Club. Half-naked trans-sexual hookers roamed the streets, subsisting on crack and Izzy’s Bagels, terrorizing Johns and innocent passersby alike, as seen in the 1990 documentary Frankenhooker. To enter the “safety” of the literally underground club, you had to carefully climb down a long, steep flight of stairs, as if one was descending to hell, which is more or less what it felt like down there – the ventilation in the former meat locker was terrible, so the Cooler was always hot, stuffy and humid. The sound was lousy too, bouncing off the metal walls of what the NY Press called a “stainless-steel dungeon.” But Jedi brought in great acts – everyone from Cecil Taylor and Thurston Moore (on the same bill!) to Atari Teenage Riot to Suicide – so it was worth putting up with the lack of creature comforts.

This night’s version of The Spitters included two avante-garde dancers, Brian Moran (who also acted in various Richard Kern films) and DD Dorvillier, who “sang” backup for Mark. Liza and a beautiful blonde fashion model played synthesizers (everybody in the band, as well as me, had a crush on her, but I can’t remember her name; as you may notice, I probably spent more time pointing the camera at her than I should have). I’m not sure, but this may very well be the last live Spitters performance. It’s not nearly as good musically, IMHO, as their earlier incarnations – is this even music? or just noise? – but as far as punk rock performance art dance goes, it doesn’t get much better. Mark was in fine form, taunting the audience, spinning and falling into the crowd, starting fights, punching his fans, poking holes in the ceiling with his mike (a skilled carpenter, he’d pop over the day after shows to fix the damage). Classic Ashwill.

Anyway, if you were at this show, or any Spitters show, this should tickle some dormant neurons. If not, this tape might explain what all the fuss was about. Spitters shows were by turns exhilarating, exciting, terrifying, sensual and sadistic, and always really, really loud – so you’ll either want to turn the volume all the way up, or off altogether – the visuals alone are worth the price of admission. Which is free. Enjoy!

UPDATE: For those of you who prefer the OG Spitters, I just found this on youtube – the official videos for Sun to Sun and 20 Minutes Into Cancer, directed by Ivan Lerner for PCP Productions.

- Sir Andre Bemler

Often overshadowed by the Beat triumvurate of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac, Herbert Huncke and Gregory Corso were nonetheless integral to the Beat family and, on a personal level at least, often the most interesting. Both had been in jail (the same jail though not at the same time), both, in contrast to the Big Three who were all Columbia Grads, were self taught.

I never read a lot of Corso because he mostly wrote poetry and I don’t read a lot of poetry. I still have my copy of Huncke’s ‘The Evening Sun Turned Crimson‘, which, despite a relative lack of artlessness, is direct, honest, even charming. Huncke details his early life hustling, plumbing the depths of drug addiction (I still recall, even years after I read the book, Huncke describing walking into Alphabet City with open sores on his face after scratching his skin raw shooting speed). This kind of thing has been done to death (literally), but Huncke was the firstest, even amongst the Beats, and his stories about the people he met along the way – drag queens, hustlers, junkies, and general people around the city – often have warmth, even tenderness, even when he described the most desperate characters.

Corso I remember most from ‘The Beat Hotel’, a dive hotel in Paris where Corso lived and shared a bed with Ginsberg and Ginsberg’s love Peter Orlovsky. Not that Corso got into any kinky three way thing. Corso knew from his days in jail that he was into chicks, and chicks only – they shared a bed because they had no heat.

In contrast to the gaunt, priestlike (or creepy, depending on your point of view) Burroughs, who lived in his own room on an upper floor, the three younger men (and Corso was the youngest of all) run wild like especially Rabelesian college kids on a spree. Invited to meet the French surrealists, they arrive ecstatically drunk, crawl around on all fours barking like dogs in what they thought was an appropriately Surrealist action. Corso, I think it was, jumped on Breton’s lap and chewed on his tie. Breton and most of the other guests, good Parisian bourgeoisie despite their pretensions, were not amused by this behaviour. Duchamp, the exception, was charmed by their very American irreverence and energy.

These guys were still around when I first got to New York. I had a friend who knew Huncke through Robert Frank. Huncke used to come by his place on East 3rd, bum cigarettes and talk. He was a great talker apparently. I missed meeting him one afternoon by a few minutes apparently. I missed meeting Ginsberg as well, which I regret less, having been oggled by the Great Man in the East Village a couple of times. I don’t say this out of any vanity – if you were under 30 and male and in the East Village before 1995, you were likely oggled by Allen Ginsberg.

In this charming half-hour short by film-maker Francois Bernadi, which was shot in 1996 shortly before Herbert Huncke’s death, Corso and Huncke read at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and are interviewed separately. Corso is irascible, brittle; Huncke is more amenable, sitting at a desk in his room in the Chelsea Hotel. We see the lobby of the Chelsea, and the 42nd that Huncke first discovered in the ’50s. Of this discovery, Huncke says:

“I liked the lights, I liked the way people moved. It was fresh . . . people seemed a lot freer in their actions than people did elsewhere.”

Corso, who also hustled on 42nd for a time, getting older men to take him out to dinner then running off, remembers the Deuce in less romantic terms:

“The most deplorable area to hang around – only the lowest of the low hang around there, if you’ve got nothing to offer society or even themselves . . . there was no class there.”

When I first moved to New York, the Beat tradition lived on, in places like the Tribes gallery, Nuyorican Cafe, in countless places now long gone, and amongst the Unbearables, Sensitive Skin Magazine, Red Tape. By the mid-’90s, the Beats were becoming a brand, more famous for their lives than their books, endlessly imitated in form if not in spirit. Some of these groups, or former members of these groups survive in rent-controlled apartments, in places they were lucky enough to buy when the real estate was still cheap. But no one would call the East Village bohemian now.

With thanks to Dangerous Minds where I found this video

We’re [Jordan Zinovich, Judy Nylon, Jill Rapaport, me and Nina, I think] headed northeast out of NYC toward Cambridge, shoulder-to-shoulder in a Japanese compact, dodging potholes the size of kiddy pools. It’s the mid-90s and spoken word is out-hyping cigars, Hush Puppies, melodic noise bands with hair, and retro bad-is-good re-appropriations as the thing for the idle to wrap their egos around. A Gap ad by early Unbearable Max Blagg, a major article in Time, one in The Face, national TV coverage, a full-page profile of the Unbearables in the Daily News had upped the anty and lowered my threshold of tolerance for stand-up poetry. You suddenly overheard people who had never suffered a day in their lives [which is probably a kind of suffering after all] in bars declaring that they were now “doing spoken word. I’ll be reading at Sinead and No Bar …” Like a makeover or diet or health club regimen or pedicure… The differences between these endeavors was slight and could barely be measured using a skin conductance biosensor to gauge galvanic skin response [i.e., sweat levels].

A few weeks earlier they were still bragging about their NA attendance or enslavement to a certain brand of frozen yogurt or a speed-knitting circle or Korean sushi-making workshops … You crack a side window and the stale smell of flatulence soon departs. That is a law of nature.

As soon as you’re above the Bronx you feel the rubber bands holding your puppet anatomy together begin to slacken. Your initial urban fears of what if you go too slack like Turkish Taffy left out in the sun soon give way to a breath of fresh air that feels like breathing room for your thoughts. Really. I’m not crazy. I think Jordan was driving. He had read way too much – or was it just enough? – Neal Cassady and liked dodging debris, potholes and pedestrians in a daze.

We had, over time and many readings, converted our word addictions into something high and mighty, moral and right – the word will smite all mendacity and idiocy… And each word will be worth $.10. I mean that’s what we were good at, making words alter our reality if ever so slightly for a few seconds even if payment was usually a feeble discount on the venue’s overpriced beers.

We were riffing on the value and utility of books and readings, defining our mission as wordy rapping hood evangelicals. Although, if pressed, we, the Unbearables©® or self-styled “literary interventionists” [Jim Feast], couldn’t really say what it was we were trying to tell people: Words are naughty fun? Will annoy, provoke or set you free? Buy our books?

Enlightenment can materialize in very unlikely venues. Halfway to Cambridge we spotted the sign FOOD and BOOKS. We took a quick ramp off the eastbound I-84 at exit 74, pulled into the Traveler Restaurant lot in Union, Connecticut [pop. 700], an obscure roadside corner of eccentricity, it turns out, in the middle of a grand homogenized nowhere [not like some of the nowheres with their pretensions of being somewhere significant].

The signs in the restaurant say: THESE BOOKS ARE NOT JUST FOR DECORATION THEY’RE HERE FOR YOU TO TAKE HOME!!!! RIGHT NOW EVERYONE IS WELCOME TO TAKE HOME 3 BOOKS… FREE… HAPPY HUNTING…

So while you wait for your meal you wander through this informal, family restaurant full of clutter, crazy wall paneling lined with makeshift shelves of pawed-over books falling, leaning and stacked in no known order, mayhem and chatter, framed photos of famous authors like Dr. Seuss, looking for your 3 free [left behind] books that are included in the price of every LARGE plate of diner food: fish sticks, tomato soup made with low-fat milk, open-faced meat sandwiches, clam chowder, pumpkin or blueberry pie a la mode, the kind of roadside food Kerouac used to rhapsodize about.

Most of the books on the shelves were of the fat tree-in-every-copy, 600-page variety with their embossed covers with scimitars, cherubs, renderings of Fabio-like men bare-chested on a white steed, with their raised lettering, promising rueful romances set in Atlantis, El Dorado, Camelot, Avalon or Elmira, read by women who’ve opted for weird mid-life hair dye colors that declare utter, desperate availability. We did manage to find some oddities: a 1940s medical book full of debunked theories about electroshock therapy, another on tapping maple trees, a novel told from the viewpoint of a shoe, recipes made with corn flakes, touring fish hatcheries around the world, and a romance novel where the women faint, wearing corsets made of a magical fabric that turns them into their dreams but is actually set in LA, circa 1982.

Two hours later we’re back on the road, driving through the rampant sprawl where you sense there were once great forests of tall trees that had been confiscated in dubious manners from the natives but now all is scarred, bald land as a price we pay for progress. We’re [you’re] in the backseat not even really wondering [are you?] and only vaguely acting like you’re interested in whether you are going anywhere. Our “astute” book choices highlighting our character better than the handwriting on the wall. We begin reading passages from our finds with gusto: “Primitive races assumed that the soul actually departed via the lips” [How Did It Begin?]. But eventually we all fall silent with our 3 books on our laps, staring out of our own windows, not caring [that’s precisely its effect] that the landscape is a scar of careless ennui. Free as these books had been, some among us may have realized how easily they can turn on us, declaring in their own way that, from one day to the next, we could become as obsolete, remaindered, and discarded as they already were – like that…

Enlightenment strikes twice: In our case, the legendary Cambridge, Mass. rock club with the unfortunate name TT the Bear’s Place [a kind of CBGB’s]. Paramour Magazine‘s Amelia Copeland had arranged this gig and we were honored. But how would we hit it off performing with trans-whatever post-Dolls meets crunchy garage lounge bands like Lars Vegas, Seks Bomba, and white trash rappers Double Dong? We held our own although who was listening?

I think we drank whatever T.T.’s served us whenever we said “Beer please.” Or was it Sam Adams? Our enthusiasm for the task of obliterating the terror of thinking that all these words during readings, no matter how perfectly ordered and precisely arranged like Pythagoras’s harmony of the spheres, may actually betray us or be even more easily ignored by bystanders, forgotten or not even listened to, not even attaining the distinction of being worth forgetting. You spend most readings getting psyched, gearing up to forget, drinking to steel your nerves, wrapping your soul in a kind of liquid oblivion in preparation for hecklers or hurled projectiles. Strange, however, that we voluntarily chose to participate in these discomfiting rituals and stranger yet: these events sometimes actually had some pleasant side effects, but this usually required attaining an intermediate limbo state somewhere between stone cold sober and embalmed lush.

I remember a gal dressed for Rocky Horror who’d had a few, twirling like a Sufi interspersed with conniption hiphop moves as I read [did my prose really have some hiphop goin’ on?] with the sound man every few minutes announcing precisely how much time I had left, while others politely applauded like they do at golf tournaments or after Rotary Club speeches. Were we even listening to each other? Did we really want to recognize how good each one of us was as a writer? Also reading that night were the estimable Joe Maynard, Michael Carter, David Polonoff, Michael Kasper, Jill Rapaport, Jordan Zinovich,  and Judy Nylon.

Afterwards, we all gathered around the Autonomedia books and zines table womaned by Nina. The table was doing briskly heartening business. Better than we were, although, a local stripper-poetess [self-described but I could imagine], hugging her copy of Wiggling Wishbone, did softly breathe into my ear: “Thanks for having an edge.” Her breath piqued with the scent of radish and rutabaga like some Old World soul. The fantastically handy nature of naiveté coupled with vanity allows my mind for the rest of the night to feed off of this one offhand compliment as casual as a sliver of fingernail bitten off and spit into the urinal.

This then was the survival strategy of beer and books: readings for audience and reader alike has always implied a ready supply of the plying stuff to wash down those dry, brittle words without a squeak. A reading without a beer was like leaping out of the trenches without a bayonet or engaging in coitus without a French Tickler.

On my long torturous journey that is truly not worth recalling in placing the Beer Mystic in a series of host sites that would wrap around the world to create a literary pub crawl I often thought of this Beer and Books idea, this complementary fusion of essential life elements. And in the fine tradition of famed &-appellations like Sonny & Cher, Smith & Wesson, ying & yang, bacon & eggs, black & tan, rock & roll, Bert & Ernie, S & M, Food & Books, there’s also Brews & Books, a site dedicated to the marriage of the 2, which seems a natural although you seldom see people reading in a bar.

Josh Christie: Is a young Maine bookseller, avid blog-geek, book fanatic, amateur brewer who hosts beer tastings, is a Maine Beer Writers’ Guild member, photographer, writes the Hop Press blog and manages Brews And Books.

bp: What made you create the Brews & Books site with the motto:  Read Great Books / Drink Great Beer?

JC: A couple things. Mainly, I just wanted a creative outlet to talk about beer and books. I’d been using Twitter and commenting on other folks’ blogs for a few months before I started my blog, and wanted a place to write in one place without a limit on the number of characters I could use. Otherwise, I wanted to improve my ability to talk about beer and books in a critical and intelligent way. I hadn’t done any real writing since college, and it seemed like a good way to learn and improve rather than let those writing muscles atrophy.

bp: What’s the relation between beer and books for you?

JC: As I write in the intro to my site, Brews and Books  is written for everyone that loves a good book in one hand and a good beer in the other. I’m not sure what the connection is, but I know it’s there. There’s plenty of people in the beer world that are literature nuts or otherwise obsessed with books. Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, for example, was an English major, and the owners of Cisco Brewing on Nantucket also own the island’s bookstore. As I’m sure you’re aware as the Beer Mystic, there’s examples of libation-obsessed authors all over the book world. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, even Thompson. Maybe the link is that, at the end of the day, good authors and good brewers put a certain amount of artistry into their products, and we appreciate that in the same way as consumers.

bp: Bukowski used to get lucid with a bathtub of beer on stage. Chandler [‘"Alcohol is like love.”], Dorothy Parker, Berryman, Dylan Thomas … How do books and beer relate for you? Did it happen in college or elsewhere? to me the 2 create a kind of alternative universe… when you have books, it’s pretty straight and straight forward, when you have brew, you have all of the craft beer nerd / junkies vying to become consumer pundits. but when you have books plus beer you get something entirely new and different – you get something many aren’t bargaining for like inspiration, like moving beyond the page, beyond the glass into some new convivial hanging out phase that means ideas, dreams, plots get discussed…

JC: Well, while you mention that books are pretty straight and straightforward, I think the truth is a little blurrier than that. Just as you’ve got the Cantillon-loving, Budweiser-despising beer geek crowd, there’s plenty of book geeks that will go nuts for Murakami and turn their noses up at Nicholas Sparks. For me – and, trust me, I’m aware that this will sound cheesy – books and beer relate to me because they are amazing, transporting, and potentially life-changing things. The right beer will remind me of a different time in my life, a girlfriend, a place I lived. Similarly, a really good beer can help cement memories in my head. A book can subvert your view of the world, and memories will be evocative of those “a-ha” moments in the same way. Though the love for (good) beer definitely started in college, the love for books goes back to reading under the covers with a flashlight when I was a tyke.

bp: Great beers may have a narrative of flavor all their own but I still prefer subtle libation – beers that don’t announce themselves overbearingly – you know, like the annoying loud drunk who wants to butt into your conversation with his witty repartee. I don’t want to be unduly distracted from the main event which is conversation. Sure, let’s talk about the beer’s qualities and its character but let us not be diverted from our human interaction. So great beers are those that are not filled with a lot of overkill, presumption and fanfare. Do you think reading and drinking go well together?

JC: Good beer and good books are two of my favorite things, so I certainly love the idea of combining the two. And, as you said, alcohol can lubricate creativity and facilitate conversation, and beer is a very communal, conversational drink. I think the inverse is a bit trickier, though I’m certain I’ve been more receptive and obsessive of some books I’ve read while having a pint or two. There’s a handful of bookstores and libraries around the world with beer bars (rather than coffee bars), and I think they’d be the first to tell you that, yes, reading and drinking definitely go together!

bp: Can you name a few? I seem to remember the Globe Bookstore in Prague having books and beer in the early 1990s… There’s the Library Bistro in Seattle…

JC: See my Book Bars! Beery Bookstores!

bp:  You’re in Maine. Are there any good beers up there?

JC: Heck yes! Maine has over 20 craft breweries, and they brew styles from British (Shipyard, Geary’s, Gritty’s) to Belgian (Allagash, Oxbow) to the traditional and extreme threads of American brewing (Baxter, Marshall Wharf, Sebago). We’d have enough variety with just Maine beer for the rest of our lives, but Maine also has great distributors who bring in beer from around the US and the world.

bp: We hope to go up there next summer to visit friends who own the renovated Birchwood Motel in Camden. Might be a good occasion to try some of these.  Is there an underground that sees what you are getting at with brews and books?

JC: Certainly. As I mentioned, there is some serious crossover between the worlds of beer and books. I get loads of comments from beer lovers who stumble onto the site about what a great combo it is because they love reading, too. Same from book lovers. It’s probably even how we got in touch with each other!

bp: I know somewhere in here there is an audience for BEER MYSTIC. I’ve for years been talking with the editor of Smoke Signals about printing out laminated copies of the novel to be attached to the bar of special handpicked bars like Rudy’s in NYC so that imbibers can read parts while they’re drinking. Still thinking about some updated version of this idea [iPad / kindle or some app or some link left at bars so people can read it on their smart phones].  I notice there are thousands of people profiling themselves on blogs, facebook and twitter as beer experts. mostly come from either the totally gonzo end or from the consumer/expert/critic end – they provide a service… how do you fit into this?

JC: Ugh, “expert” is a very tricky term. In the most recent issue of All About Beer magazine, Fred Exkhardt writes that an expert “learns more and more about less and less until finally he knows everything about nothing.” I prefer the term he settled on for himself – enthusiast. That goes for both books and beer. I don’t have a cicerone certification or an English degree. I just know what I like, I enjoy enthusing about it, and I want to turn others on to my favorite reads and drinks.

bp: Great Exkhardt quote. So true what you say. I notice that bars with interesting beers but not too self-consciously obscure are often a lot friendlier – there is some conviviality that is probably based on the surprise of great new beers recommended by patrons or bartenders and the general atmosphere is one of casual interaction based on the intriguing nature of the beer selection. This is a far cry from years ago when bars could be deathly with them serving up swill with no attachment or sentiment or enthusiasm… A beer should only be as good as the drinker. If too overwhelming it greedily draws too much attention to itself.

Read Beer Mystic excerpt hosted @ Brews & Books.

]]> http://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/beer-mystic-burp-14-beer-food-books-2/feed/ 1 http://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/jerry-rios-urban-eye-times-square/ http://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/jerry-rios-urban-eye-times-square/#comments Sun, 06 Nov 2011 14:23:57 +0000 City of Strangers http://blog.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/?p=2409 Click here to view the embedded video.

Over the holidays, reader Jerry Rio sent me this charming doc about changing mid-90′s New York: The Urban Eye. This ‘video time-capsule’ was made in 1995, when market forces, and Rudy Guiliani, were shifting the city into its present phase. Jerry Rio interviews people on the street and a mock-serious narrator charts the ‘unofficial landmarks . . . which are disappearing from the New York landscape, one after the other”. From the site description:

“Join your host Jerry Rio as he takes you on a nostalgic tour as he explores the disappearing icons of this metropolis and find out what New Yorkers think about unchecked development and the corporate homogenization that has altered and destroyed much of the uniqueness of the New York City landscape”

The first video swings between shots of signs and cityscapes of  ’a city that was once a great manufacturing center’. From the first interview, with a self-described ‘student of painted signs’, in front of what had been the Wannamaker Department Store:

“I call (what’s happening now) Facadomy – when they take something traditional and change it completely.”
“They have a lot of these retro-theme parks now”
“That’s appalling – if you’re going to change something, they should do it radically. Otherwise it just becomes some kitschy thing. ”

And
“New Yorkers tend to look down, I think it would be better if they looked up . . . “

From another interview with a man who sums up what is to come:

“I hope the whole city will turn into a giant Wal-Mart. I want no help for struggling companies . . .”

The segment concludes with amazing footage of shop windows, which the narrator refers to as ‘incidental art . . . the never ending combinations of graphics, products and objects, result in the combination that is the true Dadaist collage.’ Look for it at 11:10.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 2 focuses on midtown signage and shop window views which have largely disappeared from today’s New York, including the much lamented Howard Johnsons, and Times Square: “the veritable epicenter of the urban universe . . .the Deuce!” which, at the time of filming had been “frozen in transitional limbo for many years.” From there they focus on a lunchonette, and a look back at the Hawaii Kai and other lost kitsch (the abandoned storefront of Hawaii Kai lived on underneath the omnipresent billboard for ‘Cats!’). Jerry then goes on to interview the owner of Papaya King, Peter Poulous, underneath the original art-deco Papaya King sign, before the end credits pan out over amazing footage of signs and storefronts, many of which are long gone.

Most interesting to me was the portrait of a New York already in transition. Even by the mid-90′s, gentrification, mallification, were already changing the city’s character, starting in Times Square and radiating outward, We can see the roots of it here in this fascinating mini-portrait of an already vanishing city.

To see more of Jerry Rio’s amusing man on the street interviews go to The World of Jerry Rio

Around eight
Saturday morning
the chilly wet October fog
makes it feel earlier than it is,
the bus depot
under the train tracks
transmogrifies
into the Brooklyn moors,

ascending the metal stairway
that leads to the subway station
I raised my eyes
and saw the haunches
of this inconceivable ass
shifting ahead of me,

all in grey:
a sweater-dress,
the skirt short,
the legs
wrapped
in grey leather knee boots
and the rest of the way up
matching cable knit tights –
impeccable cat-black hair
rolled off her shoulders,

drawn by a tractor beam
of primitive initiatives
and the sudden adventure to do,
I took the last flight
two a step,

my heart pounded,
through the turnstile
I got
close enough to smell her,

a craven intimacy
walking on the path of
caution-yellow rubber
that runs the edge of the tracks,
I waited
fifteen or twenty
paces
before I turned around:

one October Saturday morning
thirty seven years ago
I was on the white shag rug
in my grandmother’s living room
watching a movie on Creature Features
from the early 60s
on channel five
about the boy from the village
who fell in love
with the mad doctor’s beautiful assistant,

she was seated on an operating table
in the laboratory
talking to the boy
and just as he went to kiss her
she moved the long dark hair out of her face
revealing horrible radiation burns
and,
as the music in the movie went
BAH-BAH-BAH-BAH
I pushed my face into one of the
yellow throw-pillows
from the couch,

but I looked anyway,
I thought she was still pretty
and that I would be lucky
if I could find a girl that nice,

now,
this Saturday,
the girl in grey
had no makeup on:
her mouth gave
nothing away –
static peace
beneath
a lidless eye
open
round and wide
on the right
and the endless hang
of burned and melted flesh
drooping a hood
over her left eye.

The name of this poem is Dong of the Dead.
It is my attempt to cash in quickly
on the literary zombie craze by
writing the first literary zombie
porn novel in verse. I am writing it
while sitting in the  back of a pickup
truck.

The poem is a pornographic labor
of love and it begins like this: “There’s no
going back—once you’ve been fucked by a dead
guy.” It continues with a zombie wind
blowing over wet living human flesh,
so electric with the scent of death it
doesn’t know how not to move, how not to
stay dead, how not to be hot, how not to
be carnal, how not to spend all the long
dirty nights of dead souls.

I’d been walking
on the side of the highway for nearly
an hour, strange words in my head, when these guys
in a truck stopped. The guy riding shotgun
turned his head toward the back of the truck and
I hopped in.

A brief description: it’s long.
It has to be. After all, this is porn.
The plot: not much—you don’t come here for the
story, which doesn’t mean allegory
is out of the picture. For example,
the zombies represent the oligarchs,
the landed gentry, the greedy wealthy,
the robber barons who through all the
centuries have held our faces down, have
told us to keep sucking, have told us we
were beautiful so keep sucking, have told
us we were the best generation so
keep sucking. But above all, they’re dead
beings with big dicks.

The truck has turned off
the highway. Now I can hear the sound of
the radio coming from inside the
pickup truck. It’s tuned to a spot between
two stations: static, lines of news stories,
gulps of old pop songs.

And now for the zombies,
a musical interlude: Bach, not black
metal, not neo-Goth, nor cuddle-core
for the purpose of being painfully,
obviously ironic, because this
is literary and is not meant to
be edgy, trendy, underground, transgressive,
because I am here to make money, and
the zombies fuck the women as Bach’s Lute
Suite in G minor plays. So, as you read
imagine this: Bach, the elegant, sometimes
mournful lute; and death-gray-colored huge zombie
dicks plunging into the amorous,
enraptured, voluptuous, insatiable
orifices of the living.

It’s hard
to write, keep pen on paper, as we ride
these rough back roads, as we go where I don’t
know. When I knocked on the rear windshield no
one looked back. When I shout a question the
static is all I get back.

Treatise, premise:
I am writing this poem because porn is
disappearing from our lives, because all
around us are fake breasts, fake styles of
living, fake sex, fake people, we may as
well be dead, we may as well be zombies and

The name of this poem is Dong of the Dead.
The name of this dong is Dead of the Poem.
The name of this dong is Poem of the Dead.
The name of the dead is Poem of the Dong.

And the truck stops by a rotting tree stump,
and the men step out as easily as
tree frogs predicting stormy weather. So
dong you, dong your mother, dong the singers

of cheap songs, dong your warm hats in winter,
dong those long sentimental walks along
the shore when your beaver is hanging out
and your dong is covered with ocean foam,

dong all the emperors of frozen treats,
dong the wrong way signs there is no wrong way,
dong these leaves, dong this grass, these knives, these long
loose motions because in the end, this is

how we live, spending these dark days alone,
sipping tea, reading the great works of zom-
bie literature, knowing that one day
everything will be dead, everything will

be war and envy and the waving of
flags and film of the newly dead. So stay
dead, my friends—this is my take, this is my
spin, on these moans, this breathing, this pace of

things knowing that one day this will all be
wet, sweaty, and oozing. Ah yes, my friends,
that’s what it will be, in the end, all still,
all static. And oozing, oozing, oozing.

-Jose Padua

Photo by Jose Padua. Jose Padua is co-author of the blog Shenandoah Breakdown.

Here is a link to a recording of the piece, available for digital download from Amazon.com

What always interested me about NY when I first came here in the late 80′s was how, like London, it was essentially a working class city. The working classes lived in the heart of the city, and constituted a great deal of its personality. Sure, the economic, media, and fashion elites, the beautiful people – they were all here. But at bottom, NY was fed, consumed, given its vitality by the great mass of its working people: black, white; Manhattan and outer buroughs. All these classes, often in conflict, also fed off each other, gave Manhattan, the whole city, its great dynamism. NY still contains many working people of course, but with the loss of the industrial base and rampant gentrification, a great many less of them are in the central part of the city.

During that period of great decline, which started in the 60′s, and continued through the 70′s and into the 80′s, many poorer neighborhoods were made unliveable. Abandoned buildings became haves for drugs, crime, the lost. In some neighborhoods, usually central, they became have for artists, bohemians, outcasts of all kinds.

What fascinates me was the mix of decay and glamor, how the two existed side by side. In Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’, you’d never know the Bronx, or the LES existed yet his New York was no less real than, say, Taxi Driver. The decay of the LES was only a short walk from the power of Wall Street, with the Twin Towers in view throughout the lower part of the island. Even those without power could see it all around them. This could work both ways of course, but it was very different from being stuck in an outpost of, say, Detroit. This is why I don’t think Detroit, or any city like it, will ever become the ‘new’ New York.

It wasn’t all crime and misery, it’s important to remember that.

A lot of people in my neighborhood, Bed-Stuy, talk about my neighborhood being a pretty good place in the 1970′s. Crime was relatively low, shops were still around, and the community was strong. It wasn’t until the crack epidemic of the 80′s, and the gang culture that came with it, that life got really hard, and continued so until very recently.

So let’s look back, in video . . .

Police on the street, 1970′s: “Being a cop has got to be the toughest way I know, to make a living!”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bus trip traveling east on 14th street, 1973:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Montage of NYC in the 70′s to the Stones’ ‘Shattered’:

Click here to view the embedded video.

To read more, see City of Strangers blog

The secret: get a ride across the border with some reputable type, preferably a businesswoman who didn’t mind the adventure of lying to them – claiming I was her son or brother or something. Incredible how energizing telling a white lie to border cops can be for these types. Sometimes so grateful that you’d forced their hands into this type of emboldenment they might even buy you lunch somewhere or hand you a fiver as you part ways on the off-ramp.

Entering the US out of Windsor in the 1970s with the wrong hair [long and unkempt] meant the border cops – their mendacity directly related to ill-fitting uniforms – could apply the things they’d learned in Border Cop 101: intimidation, toy with your prey, use language beyond your ability to pronounce it, stare down detainees with a glare that betrays their god-given right to embrace the “Little Hitler” syndrome…

My ride had panicked, coughing up the truth under pressure. He’d picked me up along Highway 401 somewhere out of Duttona Beach[!]. The guards loomed and hovered in closer, giving me the whatever degree but came off like prison camp guard extras in a failed WWII comedy.

I had to “disembark the auto” and turn out my pockets, showed them everything, stood there with what looked like 2 rabbit ears on my hips, biting my tongue as they snicker, comment on my looks and, no, I didn’t do drugs – I’m a bad liar so luckily this was true, unless, of course, rapid consumption of beer counts as a working-class approximation of opium.

Amongst the lint and fuzzy peppermints, I was carrying $19.24 or something like that. My ride was sent along his way with a stern warning… And there I stood on the on-ramp to the Chrysler Freeway. Along came a souped-up SS-396, metallic red, mag wheels, spoiler, the deal. The 3 slackers stopped, apologized; they had to make 1 stop before they’d take me up I-75 part way to Flint up to Troy. We emerged from the Beer Depot drive-through as an Unstable Molecule, like it was missing an oxygen or IQ atom or something.

The Slacker must go through life avoiding hard labor and seek out any and all consciousness-obliterating mischief on this here earth. hey with their yellow teeth, dirty sleeveless Budweiser: Breakfast of Champions tee-shirts, leather headbands, singing – screaming! – along to Bob Seger as we laid a patch of rubber that obscured our vehicle in blue smoke, Marvel Comics style. We tore up I-375 to hook up to I-75, tailgating unassuming motorists obeying the speed limit as they chucked empties grenade-style out the side windows, mooning cars, flipping drivers the double-barrel bird, passing them like they were standing still.

They were “drinking” – actually shotgunning – cans of Carling Black Label [the rise of Heavy Metal, I propose, meant any beer with “Black” in the title sold well to these guys]. Plus it was cheap.

I sat in the backseat suspended somewhere between mortification and exhilaration like some Ralph Steadman illustration for a Hunter S. Thompson story, ripped to shreds and then glued to the fake leather backseat by the weaselly tag-along using his spittle in an entirely haphazard way and then begins grinning like a petty criminal as we’re topping 100 mph, with the 2 slackers in the frontseat hollering as if they’re communing, harmonizing with the insane metallic howl of the engine.

The driver, tore open his tee-shirt, poured a can of beer over his chest, threw one back to me and insisted I drink it. No thanks. DRINK IT! If I didn’t he was threatening to stop the car dead – Boom! – in the middle lane and just let me out there. I drank their beer. Two of them to ensure my survival.

The weaselly one with the awkward grin said “LOOK,” took an empty, pressed it against his forehead and then crushed it into his forehead with a wacked WHOOO-HOOO.

That I ever managed to overcome the associative trauma of beer to this furious ride is evidence that beer is special. It was in fact my conversations with Edmonton, Canada author and editor of Urban Graffiti’s  Mark McCawley that stirred up this dusty tale of inglorious times in the Midwest.

McCawley is a literary outlaw in a land that assures it citizenry with the argument that at least their not Americans. His book of short tales Big Empty is unapologetically realistic, undermining all of the little lies we’re taught about life and writing about it.

bp: The gloomy “Scream Your Head Off” about finding the drugs you need to mitigate the pain caused by “the industrial accident, anhydrous ammonia burning away my sinus membranes” is definitely based on a lot of reality.

MM: All my fictions are based on some reality. Unlike Canada’s creative writing programs, which still cling dogmatically to the concept that “fiction is a lie which tells a truth,” the NY urban post-realists [see Sensitive Skin] I discovered in the 80s liberated my thinking regarding what fiction is capable of, and the subjective possibilities of one’s own personal narrative.

bp: Inspiring Canadians: There’s Leonard Cohen [loved Beautiful Losers]. K.D. Lang, Neil Young. Michael Ondaatje can be good. There’s William Gibson! Wyndham Lewis…

MM: Interesting writers. They’re indeed outlaws. Cohen had to leave Canada to be recognized as a songwriter… He is also the only writer ever to refuse the Governor General’s award for literature in Canada for his 1969 Selected Poems. Lewis is also a great outlaw, though a more intellectual one. His novels, poetry, and especially his criticism make him one of the most astute thinkers of his or any age.

My own entry for Sensitive Skin [with] the working title “Where the Exiles Are” ponders the idea not that Canada has no outlaw writers – it does – rather that Canada – as a literary culture – does not nurture it’s outlaw (read outsider) writers, poets and critics [like] other countries do. Look and you will find Canadian exiles everywhere. The writers you mentioned are also rugged individualists, which is why they thrived as they did in exile. Canada has always been far too insular as a culture, leaning towards group identity as opposed to the individual. Which is how one can feel like an exile within one’s own borders.

bp: You’re from Edmonton. Canada, at least up until its somewhat recent lunge to the right, was considered the reasonable or affable northern neighbor. I think you will seriously dispute that. Why?

MM: Because it is based on an image that Canada has long projected of itself: the friendly, peacekeeping, reasonable, and affable nation that has solved all its problems and is in a position to assist others with their own. The truth is Canada revises its own history, blotting out that which does not fit into the “reasonable or affable” view of itself, often actively refusing funding and airtime to artists and documentaries that illuminate these truths.

bp: Is Canada just as prudish as the US or as paranoid? Actually does the very nature of a national government mean that it is magnetically pulled toward maintaining itself at all costs?

MM: I suggest that Canada is just as paranoid as the US in its need to maintain itself, the status quo, at all costs. From spying on its own citizens, to special, secret deals with other levels of government and business. Check Secrets From The Past and Democracy Now!

bp: I notice I knew very little about Edmonton. Until our discussion of some months back I pictured a quaint post-cowboy mid-sized city, relaxed, oriented toward the great outdoors, hosting things like rodeos and country music festivals. Colorful, robust, rugged and individualistic.

MM: Some of that is true. Edmonton does host rodeos, though in all my 47 years I’ve never been to one myself. While rural Alberta can easily be described as “Big Sky Country” that harkens back to the days of cowboy on the range, that cowboy has gone through major changes. He’s still colorful, robust, and ruggedly individualistic. But his numbers are dwindling as small family farms are replaced by industrial ones. Those who are left battle with the encroachment of more and more oil derricks on their farms (Canadian farmers do not own mineral rights, etc.) and the environmental effects of byproducts they release such as the flaring/fracking of sour gas/hydrogen sulphide (linked to miscarriages in livestock and women).

bp: Your stories have a touch of Hubert Selby in them – set in Edmonton. It gives a thorough peek into underbelly life there. Who were your influences?

MM: Yes, Hubert Selby was one of my early influences. One cannot help but see oneself, one’s community in the pages of Selby’s novels and stories. They were so far ahead of their time in terms of his explorations of North America’s increasing social barbarism. Not just a peek into the underbelly of life, but where and how it breaks through so called civilized society. Mordecai Richler, Malcolm Lowry, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs were also early influences. I’d have to say that Jean Genet was a profound influence on my writing and the direction it took in terms of levels and degrees of individual transgression; Genet and David Wojnarowicz. Wojnarowicz influenced the way I viewed narrative and memory, or as he referred to it as “vision and memory”. Other influences included John Rechy, Bob Flanagan and Dennis Cooper. In terms of Canadian influences, yes, Leonard Cohen was a very early influence. Both Cohen’s writings and the writings of Jim Carroll got me through that difficult youth in the late 70s and early 80s. As did my discovery of the Canadian micro-press movement (of which I am still an active part). Each helped, I’m sure, clarify for me how the world was put together in their own way by bringing my own particular world view into fuller focus. It was a cynical view. A view without the pretense of the voodoo of hope. It was beautiful, it was ugly, it was passionate, it was real. It was not easy to look at. Nor should it ever be.

bp: I discovered Edmonton suffers from all the same ailments as any city – ugly architecture, poor urban planning, blight, social problems, crime and refinery pollution. Through your writings of aimless deprivation it looks something like Northern England’s post-industrial cities…

MM: Edmonton has it’s flaws – it’s dusty as hell, never rains enough to get rid of all the particulate matter floating in the air (a result of the petroleum industry), which gives anyone living here long enough chronic sinusitis.

bp: When I think Canada I think Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, this image of a progressive, healthy populace …

MM: Indeed, some areas of Edmonton are quite beautiful. For instance, at 7,400 hectares, Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River valley is the largest stretch of urban parkland in North America. Others, though, are sheer industrial with no concept of beauty whatsoever.

Edmonton is both a university and government city, as well as an industrial city. It is the most northern city in North America, located on the 53rd latitude (about equivalent with Scandinavia), and like most other prairie cities, is separated by empty prairie. Every city has a homeless problem, Edmonton is not immune. For a downtown core, Edmonton’s is quite vibrant and growing. It certainly is no downtown Toronto or Vancouver, yet has it’s own unique flavor.

bp: How did Canada mold you as a creative person? How would it have been different growing up in the US do you think?

MM: That is a very difficult question to answer. I suppose Canada, generally, molds it’s creative artist’s through subtle and not-so subtle modes of conformity – artistic communities, associations, guilds, etc; through the jury system of awarding grants to individuals, magazines, publishers; as well as the “great culture machine” of which creative writing and the arts are a very large part. I don’t imagine this would be very different had I grown up in the US. Having become increasingly anti-academic, though, I suspect I might have had an easier time of it, and faced far less opposition culturally. As an underground writer and literary outsider within the Canadian cultural context, one is snubbed, sneered at, ridiculed, or simply ignored altogether. Indeed, an early review described me as a “literary transvestite” right down to the ruby lipstick, fishnet stockings, and stiletto heels. Little did the reviewer know about my transgressive literary tendencies. That said, though, I’m sure my heredity of coming from multiple generations of Irish alcoholics – and indeed my own recovered alcoholism – played as much a part in my development as a creative person as anything else, particularly growing up and living through continuous cycles of economic boom and bust, and how that skews whatever sense of values you happen to have or bring with you.

bp: How is it being a cultural resisting, contrarian?

MM:  For as long as I can recall I have been a cultural resister and a contrarian. It certainly is not easy, especially within such a conformist culture as Canada. Indeed, the pressure for a writer or artist to conform to particular cultural and literary attitudes and values is overwhelming throughout the Canadian educational system right up through post-secondary studies. To take an alternate path of self-education – which for me was an absolute necessity since my interests in urban post-realism, transgression, and deviant culture within a Canadian context were unheard-of – was in and of itself an incredibly slow process. From the start, my views, my fictions, and especially my critical writings were in direct opposition to much of popular opinion… I’d say it takes fortitude to stand by one’s views and philosophy in the face of such overwhelming cultural opposition, and a steadfastness in one’s aims and goals since the rewards are so few. A steadfast belief in the works which you publish, the writers you support and promote — and trusting the brilliance that you see in them and their work that countless other publishers and editors have overlooked. It says something that over two decades of writing and publishing that I trust my own instincts more than any other Canadian publisher or editor. True, I am still without a book deal. Yet, I always did suspect there would be a high price to my cultural resistance, my contrarianism.

bp: Didn’t you go through a health bureaucracy fiasco with your foot? How did that come about and how is that symbolic of today’s health care and whatever else you want to add?

MM: Very symbolic. It’s interesting you ask, since I am about to reach my one year internment in my downtown flat since I was wheeled into Emergency in November, 2010 with an infected left foot. The May before I had stubbed my toe, and then went to see my doctor who then referred me to see an infectious diseases specialist. But for the next 5 months they kept sending the referral to the wrong fax number, and the specialist never received the referral until I showed up nearly septic in Emergency. Of course, this is an extension of an ongoing chronic pain condition resulting from a work injury in 1991 in which my sinus membranes were burned away.

bp: That’s documented in your factory realist story “Just Another Asshole”  where the character works the dri-print machine called “widowmaker.” I quote:

The ammonia fumes the machine spewed out sunk into the cuts, burning like acid. With each breath I took, I felt the ammonia burning inside my nostrils, down my throat, and inside of my lungs. It’s only a matter of time and exposure, I thought, before we all become casualties. At first sign of trouble, I’ll quit, I assured myself. But by then it might already be too late.

MM: My entire experience with the healthcare system is based on whether it’s the public system or the private. The private system is atrocious. People are barely trained, and no wonder, they are right off the street.

bp: About beer: what drinks or beers did you turn to?

MM: I was a big stout enthusiast back in the day when it had to be imported by the keg and tapped – Guinness, Russian, Irish, Oatmeal, etc. But once the great European breweries began licensing out these stouts to North American brewers and bottlers they lost their magic. I mean, imagine a carbonated Guinness stout? Fuckin’ sacrilege! My spirit of choice, though, has been, and will always be, rot-gut Dark Navy Rum. Even now, 23 years clean and sober, I drool at the thought of a wee drop of the dog that bit me… even though it would kill me to do so… what a way to go…

bp: About beer and escape from mundane realities. An issue NEVER addressed in drug/alcohol [ab]use discussions is the issue that the architects of life – the politicians and business gurus – have created an unadventurous life and so escape from the tortures of ennui begins early by purchasing one’s way out via extreme sports, behavior, television – extreme escape in general. If life in this system is so good then why are so many people trying to escape from it? I believe beer [among others] is escape but also access to another plane of being. It’s a tricky trip – not enough means boredom and too much means veering off into the distractive minutiae of inebriation. Ride that fine line and you arrive at altered states…

MM: Indeed, bart, that is so very true. For the longest time, in my teens and twenties, I used beer and spirits, and whatever mind-altering drug I could get my hands on, to escape a culture I could not stand, whose artificiality was so obvious it was painful. Nothing was real anymore, or authentic, just endless cycles of superficiality. It might be cynical, yes, but damn, it was liberating.

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Urban Grafitti hosts the Beer Mystic

For the last thirty years he has served on the faculty of the Herb Albert School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts where he teaches Composition, Orchestration and Analysis.

He has composed concertos for soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, violin and cello, as well as incidental music for two plays by W.B. Yeats and three by Wajdi Mouawad.

He recently composed the score for Tareq Daoud’s short dramatic film La salle des maîtres, an Official Selection of the Film Festival Locarno. He is currently composing a chamber concerto for the world-renowned avant-garde cellist Frances Marie Uitti (who plays with two bows at the same time). His “Prelude to Alone” for clarinets, trombones and electric guitar will appear on the soon to be released “Cold Blue Two” Anthology (Cold Blue Records).

M.J.F. has been a composer/improviser with experimental and new music groups that have included the Negative Band, Musica Veneris Nocturnus, Stillife and Ghost Duo; and currently plays electric guitar with Pickaxe (Noise), Gods of Rain (Experimental Metal), the Feedback Wave Riders (Free Improv) and Trio Through the Looking-Glass (Jazz-inflected).

His music appears on the Cold Blue, Contagion, C.R.I., Trance Port, Raptoria Caam and Wire Tapper labels.

1) “Tar” a solo electric guitar improv.

2) ” Two Bottles” another solo electric guitar improv.

3) “White Painting” for 14 Strings (1975) – CalArts Strings, Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, conductor

4) ” What the Eagles Heard” a spontaneous improv from the unreleased CD “The Joyous Gods” (2006)- Marcelo Aguirre, drums ; M.J.F., electric guitar

5) ” Desert Shore #2″ from the play “Temps” – Scott Fraser, Antony DiGenarro and M.J.F. , electric guitars

6) “Guitar/Synth. Drone” from the play “Seuls” – M.J.F., electric guitar and synth.

If our world is composed of overlapping stimuli which create constant sensory overload, then why should visual art limit itself to any one discipline such as painting, sculpture, print, video or computerized digital images? Is it not true that imagery is inseparable from sound and evolution in time? And if that is the case, shouldn’t art be a mirror that accurately reflects our environment, society and culture?

With the assistance of a graduate student physicist I built my first computerized dimming system in 1968. It was programmed for an infinite number of lighting combinations which created a multi-sensory environment where two-dimensional images became indistinguishable from the 3D objects and sculpturally painted elements in my work. There was an overlay of evolving colored lights and projections in conjunction with a looped sound system which distorted the viewer’s perception of his/her surrounding physical space, thereby successfully integrating all artistic media into one indistinguishable statement or genre which I call fusion art.

As an artist I want to bridge the existing barriers between all disciplines such as painting, sculpture, light, sound, performance theatre, video and digital art. I want to make these individual genres indecipherable from one another. I love figurative painting and I am firmly committed to it. My belief is that by breaking away from the canvas I can bring the classical approach into the contemporary arena, especially when I am incorporating computer generated art, artificial illumination and video projections. In this way, I am creating a bridge between the past and the present, where classical tradition fuses with our continuing cultural and technological evolution.

—Shalom Neuman

This island is inhabited by turtles,
Flowering shrubs linger past the drift stalks
Seashells flock the debris
This is the island where I forgot my sweater
That summer my breasts began to grow
The beach evenings were cool
I wore shorts and my legs were bare

Island No 2

Black sand frills purple hills
Island plum trees
At night, insects dine on fallen fruits
Intoxicated by sugar
Sated by dreaming
The Island where I lit a fire
Inspiration heavy eyes
I slept on the beach, warmed by flames

detail of a painting by Jim C (click to enlarge)

Island No 3

The honeycomb land of caves!
Thread throughout, a Chinese puzzle
Each flower framed
White like ivory
Blue insect husks flutter
The island where I journey inward

Island No 4

The island is bird-swarmed
Scream from treetops
Trees sheaved in aqua leaves
Smacking parrot beaks kiss together
Seed shells shimmer in the clearings
Discarded by dissident birds gangs of
Yellow Island in a black sea disappears at night
Last boat won’t linger

Island No 5

Fruit-fed hogs run delinquent squealing
Break bushes, graze bark with bristles
Hog hair paints skyline
Swamps, feeding flies
Line truffle-raped hillsides
This is the island that calls for fire but has none

Island No 6

A flat island given to floods
Home to small interior lakes
Tsetse flies swarm and no man of heart ventures inland
The flies mists too dense
Block stars
Three dogs roll to stop the bites
Drive them mad
The transvestite’s canoe brings scraps
The weather turns dry
This is the island where I left my notes on Aristides

Island No 7

This is the island where terrible things happened to the young Florimund sisters
A memory, Thank god
Hut stands empty
Snakes in roof and the pots are full of mold
The sky gold at night
And the jasmine flowers smell sickly
The island smells of babies

detail of a painting by Jim C (click to enlarge)

Island No 8

This is the island where the grandmothers hid
From poets new, (me)
Drinking Portuguese wine and smoking Cuban cigars
Smoke on hills
The train station is shuttered
Holy Oaks whisperings floated sea
The women stay indoors

Island No 9

The place of the holy springs
Lily-white sins turn black
Guilt rides big horse, looks from under big brim
My sisters walked into the sea to marry mermen
Or drown on sanctity
Cell phone stops working
Sand got into it
Rinsing made it blacker
Island of dark Iris.

Island No 10

Empty boats fill quays and on the hill a man watches them
Ancient fellow scowls at the skips
Ripple-bob beads on a string
Dawn tide daily murmur
Bear a bream of unaccounted names
The dame of the sea, the salty girl, my sisters

This is the island where I bought a telescope, I walked coast spray mist
Monkeys hang out in deserted cabanas
Mock humans, my sisters, my friends, my monkeys, my island

Island No 11

Graves on the hillside are littered by plums
Orchard hangs over a terraced garden run amok
Go where you would see
The graves are tidy, tended well,
Beach stones shine brightly and catch the sun
Mirrors flashing across the sea
Morse messages from the dead
White path cuts up
A few goats zigzag nanny, nanny, “Sappho was here”
They were poets who overreached
Where I cried for my family

Island No 12

Cat’s tails wave together Chinese plate jugglers
Thin and gaunt, eyes demand knowledge
Lovers hunt
Threadbare smiling kitties
Till dark to roust mice from the ivy
They piss and shit
Giant flies bejewel their turds
The sun beats the patchy lawns

Island No 13

This is the island where names are changed
(Ariel cries for Prospero)
The Scottish play
Harry is Harriet and Sally is Jack
This is the island where the deaf blind woman teach the secret language
These islands disconnected from logic, defined by lack of connection,
The animals and ships ferry stories to and fro.

Island No 14

is the face of Christ when viewed from the west.
From the east a small Buddha sits in the water.
Happy on one side, sad on the other.

Island No 15

This island empty baby baskets hang in bamboos
I left my child there
The one that was not born
The one I dreamed of at night
The one to be a brother
The one to argue with his brother about Proust
And the stars
Who lied about all the books he read till questioned closely
And then laughed with corny yellow hair and cornflower eyes
Lips like poppies in the summer

Island No 16

This is the island of empty crosses
The crucifix’s mark missed chances
Wrack the pain of unwritten tales
Bleached away poems of stretched skin nailed on them
As if they never were because they never were
The mottos written in the language no one knows
Escaped words of woman with no memory who sits at foot of the hill
Sings each line once
In lines freed again
You can wait a lifetime to hear it.

Island No 17

Hair hangs from trees
It is my sisters’ lost hair
My lost hair
Women’s hair given unwillingly away.
Hair torn by poets frustrated
It is the hair given to common sense and nice workable bobs
For jobs we did not want nor care for
For reasons that were alien to our hearts
These hairs were cut when I pretended to be a man a boy to gain a foothold
These tresses came out in sickness
Turned grey and sat in the horror hand in clumps
Ringed the bathtub caught in the scum of fear
They are thick on the island
Stretching as far as eyes can see

This island waits for you to come.

Island No 18

This is the island of toothless mares,
They hobble bone-bare up stony paths to the hills
The meadows are sweeter on high
The grasses softer, gentler on the gums
Their drooped heads find the grass easily
Good because the climb is hard
At dusk descend to flinty sheds
Leeward from the wind

Island No 19

These mares are strong and have ripped the tits from milking mothers
Pass by
Rage like this is not easily shaken
Stop, anger
Dream for those who have earned their nightmares
Flare their nostrils from the stench
Trample the strongest psyches
Harridan horses leap into volcano pit
And come out their teeth filled with bloody screams and fire
Hooves pounding like drums in the ears
Flanks flashing like knives
This is the island of too much fire

Island No 20

This is the island of x where things break
Plates and pencils, nibs that never write for snapping and
Porcelain statues and teacups and mothers and me—everything breaks
Dogs’ legs, flower stalks and membranes
And watch straps, oaths and you and eggs
Models with lolly sticks or matches, and codes,
And my fucking heart—computers, syntax and the middle C key on the piano
Jammed.

Island No 21

This is the island of stupid girls who think it’s all right, everything is good and it isn’t
It isn’t a bit
The island where stupid girls deny reality
The island where stupid girls think it’s okay to pretend the world is fucking nice for women that it’s all over and it never was a big deal
This is the island where stupid girls choke on their own pompous words and are so dumb they don’t notice they are being buggered and fucked from both sides because the are not moving because they cannot turn
They cannot look, they dare not breathe, because they know they are fuckadentally flawed.
This is the island where those who complain are ridiculed by the stupid women
It is a drag to be on this island and anyway it’s barely real and walking into it is like walking into a big empty cunt.

To me this island feels overcrowded.

Island No 22

Is where the girls dance for themselves
Don’t know what it looks like because me too I just dance there
No eyes to care
But it does feel good I’ll tell you that
We dance there till our mouths water with the taste of bread
Saliva fills our mouths and we breathe blossoms wafts
Colors in the head fly round down the spine
I love my skin yes I do
I love to move
My feet
Oh my sisters I cry for you who never danced for yourself

Island No 23

Has a velvet rope and doesn’t let people in unless they are cool or on the list
Drinks with fruit in them, champagne
From the air it is shaped like Dante’s rings
Difficult to get into the interior circle
You have to be really special
Beatrice avoids the place says it’s as crowded as hell and
She tends to be right

Island No twenty-four

Is as tiny as a rosebud and its sands are pink-tinged
And the sea around it is filled with carmine kelp
Its seashells are baby fingers curled in sleep
Three virgins cry milk instead of tears
Trees sway soft visitors look backward through telescopes
It’s a good place to have a jolly good cry when you are tuckered out.

And then we could talk about the reef but that’s for another day.
Maybe Sunday.

Well, yes, they fucked like bunnies, and yes, they fucked as if it was their last night on earth (when in fact it was early afternoon), but more than that, they fucked like so many, different other things completely.

They fucked like dogs and cats. They fucked as if they were fucking in the rain. they fucked as if were raining cats and dogs.

They fucked as if there was a war going on, a war between the states, a war between states of mind, a war that leaves hundreds of millions dead, some in horrible, hideous ways, some with half their bodies blown away, some strung up from trees, some with holes in their heads, leaking brains and blood and bits of bone, some with bodies contorted inhumanly, some with eyes open, staring up into the empty sky.

Young and Free – Australian Street Art (click to enlarge)

They fucked as if the feeling of emptiness that flooded their being for much of the day were somehow mitigatable through the sometimes rhythmic sometimes arrhythmic pounding of their fucking, like a metronome set sometimes to adagio, sometimes to presto, sometimes to anarcho.

They fucked as if Reagan had never been president. They fucked as if Reagan had never been born.

They fucked like cats and dogs from other planets, like a planet where a cat could be a land mammal and a dog could be a sea anenome, or a planet where a cat could be an insect and a dog could be still a dog

They fucked as if they were cyanobacteria, poisoning the planet through photosynthesis, breathing out oxygen that destroys most of the life on the planet but makes way for the oxygen breathers that might one day evolve in to human beings that could then start fucking like cyanobacteria.

They fucked like two planets, maybe Venus and Mars, or maybe more like a Paul McCartney album: Ram, or Band on the Run, or McCartney II or Venus and Mars, and when they fucked, it made music, the kind of music that no sentient being could comprehend.
When they fucked, it was if nothing else mattered, as if nothing else existed, because it didn’t.

They fucked as if their fucking could change everything, when in fact, it only changed certain things, most of which were of no consequence.

They fucked with pride and shame and honor. They fucked without fear of the aches and pains and sores and yeast infections that would no doubt ensue.

They fucked liked donuts, floating in a vat of fat,

They fucked like jackasses on that show Jackass, as if they were tied to a skateboard tied to a rocket flying over snake river canyon, without parachutes.

They fucked like records on a giant turntable while a needle scratched through their grooves.

They fucked and fucked and fucked so masterfully, that if they had been in a porno movie that you were jacking off to, you would have to stop and marvel at the wonder of it, because it was like a ballet, and you never could jack off to a ballet, could you, no matter how hot the dancers are, because it’s so beautiful and masterful. Ditto the fucking.

They fucked as if their fucking could unravel ancient riddles, as if they could explain to every kabbalistic expert the meaning of the sepheroth Da’ath, knowledge, why it is where it is on the Tree of Life, what it’s function is, why it’s not as fully formed as the others, what it meant for knowledge to be inchoate.

They fucked like the first mammals to crawl out of the sea. They fucked like mountains and rocks and trees.

They fucked liked nobody’s business, but I’m making it my business because I feel that it is my responsibility, as possessor of first hand knowledge of the way in which they fucked, to provide a first hand account of it, a detailed and metaphorical account of it, so that we might all learn from their example, not just how to fuck, but how to live and die and be reborn again.

They fucked like they would die a final death that would break the cycle of endless rebirth.

They fucked as if their fucking would somehow, one day, help a marriage equality bill pass through the Republican-controlled state legislature of the state of new york.

They fucked, then took a break then fucked again. Then fucked again.

I never mentioned did I—were they members of the opposite sex? Were they members of the same species? Were there only two of them? Were they human? Maybe they fucked like cats and dogs because one of them was a cat and one of them was a dog. Maybe one of them was a woman with a dildo, and the other was a man with a strap on vagina or a lubed up ass. I never said, did I? Do you feel bad that at some point, when you visualised them fucking, you had the image conform to your own narrow minded conception—two beautiful human beings, one male, one female, both of them in shape, attractive, neither of them old, or fat or incontinent, neither of them wearing a colostomy bag, both of them with all of their teeth, neither of them with unpleasant odors or bad breath, both of them beautiful, one with a dick and the other with a pussy, because like our traditional conception of marriage between a man and woman, when I tell you they fucked, you picture a man and a woman because that’s what fucking means to you. If you were gay, would you picture something different? Wait-are you gay? If you’re gay and you pictured two people of your own sex, aren’t you kind of guilty of the same thing I was just talking to the straight people about?

They fucked like a a totally different story. They fucked like something your small unevolved mind can’t imagine, like—you know how they say that the human mind cannot comprehend god or infinity, or that a flower cannot comprehend a flower? Well, you can’t comprehend their fucking. To ask questions of gender or species or number is to trivialize and to degrade their fucking. Their fucking was made to stand the test of time, to be written about in Wikipedia, under “Fucking,” to serve as a model for all that come after them pun intended fuck you, yeah, pun intended, or more accurately, pun not intended initially, but then immediately after it was written it was noted and the decision was made not only to let it stay but to draw attention to it.

Recordings of their fucking were made and put into time capsules, one of which wound up in the Voyager rocket, to be discovered by life on other planets, who will think about our species and say to each other, fuck me, those motherfuckers sure knew how to fuck.

They fucked and fucked, oblivious to my commentary about their fucking.

They fucked as if they existed in a realm beyond time and space, greater than the universe, smaller than the subatomic.

If it seems boring to think about how they fucked, you are free to stop considering it and go jack off or fuck or eat a sandwich or something. don’t let me keep you.

They fucked as if they were starving for sex, as if they hadn’t had it for centuries, when in fact, for one of them it had been relatively recently.
Man, you should have seen them going at it. Everybody should have. They should have sold tickets. They should have fucked in a grand arena. They should have made a movie of their fucking, it was fucking amazing. did you get that yet? The way they fucked was amazing. My words do not, will not, can not, do their fucking justice. It’s a Sisyphean task to try to convey to you the majesty, the artistry, the pornographic beauty of their fucking.
The other day as I walked down first street, I saw a pigeon fucking another pigeon. That was nothing like this fucking of which I speak.

I’d like you to close your eyes and picture the most awesome fucking fucking you ever had.

That fucking was fucking bullshit compared to this fucking of which I now speak.

Well, okay, I guess I better wrap this up.

I’d like somehow to wrap this up with a pretty little bow that would somehow justify the couple thousand or so words I’ve used to describe this sex act.

While I’m thinking about that, it occurs to me that I didn’t really describe it. I made no mention of the sweat, the heavy breathing, the particular positions or devices used, the moment of penetration, or even whether there was penetration (there was) or even what penetrated what, and how often and for how long.

Well, maybe that’s a little personal. Maybe that’s more intimate and graphic than I chose to be just now.

Although I’ve been accused otherwise, I do have some sense of decorum.

I’m beginning, however, to be embarrassed about the way I’ve gone on and on and on about it.

I hope, if they ever come to realize that I was talking about them, that they would find it in their hearts to forgive me, and to accept it in the generous kindhearted way that Joe Schrank accepted my poem of last year about him.

Because god, I love the way they fucked, and I would never want them to resent me or even worse, to become self conscious about the beautiful way they fuck and as a consequence, stop fucking. For that would be fucked, if they were to stop fucking on my account. because of my account.

Especially considering I’ve used their fucking to serve my agendas.

I used it to serve my political agenda by mentioning marriage equality and Reagan and I had meant to mention something about how the investment banks and the politicians who do their bidding have led to the near collapse of our economic system, by saying something like “They fucked as if their fucking was a call for all oppressed people to take to the streets and vilify the CEOs and investment bankers and politicians who have stolen our parents’ pensions and our children’s future” but I forgot to put that part in.

I used it to serve a social agenda, in that much of what I write is designed to encourage people to come up to me and talk to me about it, although this seldom actually works.

I used their fucking as a way to talk about fucking because I like to talk about fucking
in a sense, you could say that they fucked to serve my agenda, although that was not their intention.

At any rate, be that as it may, when all is said and done at the end of the day, I’d like to thank them for the excellent job they did fucking, and I’d like to ask you all to join me in giving them, as a show of our collective appreciation, a hearty round of applause. thank you,.

II

The next day they began again. And because of their relief that last time wasn’t their last time fucking after all all, and partly because it was a new day, they fucked in an entirely new way.

The fucking was more violent this time. There was a persistent sense of stabbing repeatedly into the same place, over and over, and of a wound gushing out like a fountain. They both saw it in the eyes of each other’s minds, and in the minds of each other’s eyes.

They fucked as if their immortal souls depended on it, even though they didn’t believe in mortality or souls.

They fucked as if they knew they were fucking for posterity, for the redemption of humanity, to help alleviate the suffering of all sentient beings.

It was good of them to fuck in such a selfless way, and to do so with such gusto and commitment.

I’m so glad they had that time together.

It was really quite considerate of them to fuck the way they did.

III

The next time I fuck, I will try to keep my mind focused in part at least on the way they fucked, because it should serve as a template for us all.

We cannot compose like Bartok, we cannot play like Yo-Yo Ma or Stradivarius or Hendrix, we cannot write like Shakespeare or sculpt like Rodin, or fight Godzilla like Rodan, or fuck like they did, but all these masters can inspire us all, so the next time I fuck, I will think of them all: the fuckers, Bartok, Ma, Stradivarius, Hendrix, Shakespeare, Rodin and Rodan.

And I will fuck with gratitude that I was born in at a time filled with so many inspiring figures.

Juan Colon on the other hand was a mac daddy. And this girl Clemente had it bad for him. She was trying to get Juan’s attention somehow and she met O’Donnelly.

That day after the protest we all met at the pool hall. Not O’Donnelly’s wife of course, she was home with the kids, but the other three and the men got into it.

The sister was playing with the cop and she bent over the table and Juan Colon whistled. It wasn’t just any whistle either. It was like I’ve had that shit and I can get it again any time I want.

photo by Ted Barron (click to enlarge)

Jimmy O’Donnelly didn’t like that. He didn’t like where he was. He didn’t like the fact that he was here cheating on his wife while she was home with the three bawling children.

Juan Colon was the kind of man to pick up on something like that. Juan had that easy confidence and that really strong sense of himself in his own skin.

Jimmy O’Donnelly was the exact opposite. He was that white boy shutdown angry energy, all uptight and not in touch with his physicality at all. They say that white boys can’t dance. Juan Colon could dance. He moved like a woman, and he fought like a wild cat.

O’Donnelly got in over his head, and he had to back off. He had gone in there alone with the Clemente girl. Something in him did not feel too comfortable with what he was doing and who he was. He never had a choice in love. He and his wife knew each other from way back, from dads in short sleeves off work from the job at cookouts cracking open beers in the backyard, little girl, little boy chasing each other around, all cute and cuddly from the beginning of time as they knew it.

He had to be a cop. Yet he was a natural; he was good at it and if he had ever the chance to grow into that role he would have been very good at it, but he never got that chance. Not after Juan Colon.

In the poolhall O’Donnelly was surrounded and humiliated. He popped Colon real good a couple of times, but there were no other cops and a lot of Juan Colons.

Miss Clemente was tall and curvy and pistol smart. Her father took her out of school and put her to work in that clothing store on the Hub. She and Jimmy O had in common that they were under the great big thumb of their fathers. Officer Jimmy O’Donnelly went back to his wife and his family. What else was he going to do? He told himself it was forever with Lucy Clemente every time they were together, but it was only forever in the moment. She fell into the discos. She was well known in the Bronx and even in Manhattan.

When next she was seen, it was in one of those heroin and crack sweatshops with one Manny Colon. She was not one of the naked girls who handle the product, she was the one with the whip, the overseer of the slaves. While Manny ran the streets, she oversaw the operation on the home front.

She got into it a little herself at the time, a little too much blow, the pretty girl’s cold, back and forth with dope to balance each other out, then she dropped out suddenly. Even Manny could not find her. She had met a man on the train; they had gone on a few dates. She had one of those irresistible faces and like Juan, a graceful leonine athleticism. After five or six dates they became serious and this man proposed to her.

She lives in Greenwich now and has a horse and a stable and three beautiful children. He does not ask her about her past and she does not tell him.

That afternoon Jimmy O’Donnelly took her by the hand and out of the pool hall, but in a matter of seconds by the way she looked back, it was clear even to him, blinded by rage and pride as he was, that she would never be able to leave behind Juan Colon.

Jimmy O’Donnelly released her and she ran back inside, and for the most part, out of his life. They saw each other a few more times, but that moment had made itself clear.

Juan had yelled out to O’Donnelly, something tough and cocky like,

Don’t ever let me see you again.

O’Donnelly said at most two words of his own, something like,

Bring it.

So next they met on Melrose Avenue in the middle of the night, on the occasion already described by two different witnesses. Clearly through no fault of their own they experienced mere fragmentary aspects of our complete story. Let me humbly add to the confusion.

First and foremost Juan Colon did not die on Melrose Avenue that night. He certainly must have appeared as good as dead to the adjunct professor. And maybe he was confused about the timing of it all. Which is understandable under the circumstances. One of Juan Colon’s back ribs was ruptured and sticking through his skin, puncturing his lung. His face was a bloody mess, his skull cracked.

O’Donnelly did not run him down with the car as wantonly as the adjunct professor describes.

Juan saw the car and tried to jump out of the way.

O’Donnelly swerved and at the last instant in a jump of balletic grace Colon leaped atop the car as it screeched to a stop, then bounded against the windshield, since the Dodge was not going that fast, even if he had gunned it as described it was up hill and he was barely moving as they pulled away from the curb after making the pickup of the bag of money from one, Frank Ellis, itinerant piano jazz genius, paramour and escort of blue blooded young ladies by evening, little league coach by weekend, capable of paying off teenagers to induce them to commit casual arson and at the same time convince an heiress to trust and marry: Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name.

In fact old Frankie did a Latin jazz Willie Bobo accompanied Stones medley of that song with “Gimme Shelter” and “Midnight Rambler” that was funny, freaky and chilling all at the same time, my brother.

Follow this: Frank Ellis witnessed the beating Jimmy O’Donnelly administered to Juan Colon on the Melrose Avenue sidewalk. I got this from the lucky devil himself.

The thing was that O’Donnelly got it just as bad.

A cop is taught to shoot for center force. A cop is not supposed to be marksman; this does him no good. He is not taught to shoot to kill. A marksman is someone who can bring down a target with one shot. This is well and good for a sniper, but we are not talking about a sniper situation. We are talking about a squad of vice cops going into a known narcotics operations spot with their weapons drawn and flushing out between fifteen and twenty perpetrators. The facts are known that O’Donnlelly shot Colon in the chest twice and if the first shot, which pierced an already damaged lung, was not enough to kill him, the second, which essentially exploded his heart, was.

Colon was dead in a few moments and O’Donnelly and the bust went on. Colon was holding a hammer and clutched it in his death convulsions. Whether the circumstances of this decision or instinctual shot haunted O’Donnelly is a good question, he never talked about it. He never talked about much besides his family, the Yankees and the job.

What’s interesting to think about for any student or inquirer into the nature of manhood is whether or not their prior relationship had anything to do with the way that either man reacted to the moment of the situation. They saw each other. They shouted in recognition. They were barely inches away, in a darkened hallway that both had stepped into in a virtually simultaneous instant of movement. Colon raised the hammer and O’Donnelly pulled the trigger.

Another sidebar worth mentioning is the amphetamine habit that O’Donnelly had at the time. It was going around. It was the age of greenies for baseball players and a lot of heads, even college students were into pink hearts, white crosses and the like. It was the peak year for No-Doz nationwide in terms of sales, which is interesting to note. Whether this all got replaced by cocaine when it got easier and cheaper to get is, while pretty much obvious to any dopefiend, not something that anyone has the means to prove.

At this point, O’Donnelly, like the crowd he ran with in the department, was popping pills to get up in the morning, pills for the job, pills for sex and pills to drink more and then drinking more to be able to pass out and then having to pop another pill or two in the morning to make up for that. He was always a speed freak. His brother talks of him going into crazy Evel Knieval-type tricks, even as a kid with his bicycle, jumping over trash cans, a gushing fire hydrant, even once the family dogs: a collie and a lab.

That three of the other dealers involved were shot in this raid had some bearing on how the whole thing played out. There were witnesses among the underground who saw what happened between Juan Colon and Jimmy O’Donnelly and one of them was a brother by the name of Manny Colon a/k/a “The Mule.”

He witnessed his brother’s death from less than twenty paces. He saw the fatal confrontation from a stairway. He stopped dead right there and was taken under arrest by one of O’Donnelly’s partners.

He was walked by the body of his heaving, dying brother.

O’Donnelly had caught a glimpse of Manny without of course knowing who he was. O’Donnelly saw him being subdued in the next frame of instant and moved on. They had a house to clear, an operation to eliminate, a job to do and the fact that he had just shot a man did not allow him even an instant to pause for that might get him shot.

They ended up in the backyard with 12 men and boys including Manny Colon on their faces in the scraggly dirt in grass of a late afternoon. The paddywagon arrived, the prisoners were marched single file around to the front and taken to the 3rd Avenue courthouse and jail for eventual arraignment. The arresting officers went to the bar.

Since Manny Colon was only seventeen, he was released to his father hours after the Walton Ave stash house bust. Two days later they held poor Juan’s funeral. From which Juan Colon, a popular kid, became a Tremont legend. The wake filled the three blocks surrounding the funeral parlor up by Poe’s Park, with fire hydrants open in Juan’s honor, and 4 two-man squads of police on patrol.

For the Mule, it became the thing in his life, at first a motivator and later quite something else. He never got the look of the guy who shot his brother out of his head, point-blank range, twice in the chest and so when he saw him again he knew what to do.

It was like a picture that was already painted. It was just a matter of filling in the colors.

Two things were set into the inextricable destiny of the world in that dusty hallway on Walton Ave by the college: that Manny Colon would become a kingpin and that one day he would avenge the killing of his brother at the hands of one Jimmy O’Donnelly.

He finished his schoolboy football career all state topping the league in tackles and concussions. He had a way of leading with his head. He became the Mule. What once had hurt him, he started to enjoy, to relish, to explore. He shook his head a couple times and got back in the game.

He went through money like it was water. He treated women with respect and grace, but cheated on them at will and whim. He had a place on the upstairs porch of one of the stash houses on Bush Ave where he sat and took time for himself. Otherwise he never stopped in his single mission. He fought, killed, and fathered. He was a man of his word. Who didn’t know his name paid for it.

Somehow when he sat on the porch, he got that it was already written somewhere and it was his job to take it as painless as possible, to turn water into wine, to fill others lives with grace, no matter the circumstances and that was what everyone would say about Manny that he was a man nonetheless. You might shake your head, but you would respect him. He never even cheated the low-level corporal or dealer.

He always treated the police with respect. He spoke reverently of his childhood dream to be a pilot as if he had somehow achieved it, as if it were a real thing. He was a true psychopath in the strictest sense of the term. He had the ability, the innate talent, to perform whatever task he had before him while having his mind exist in a wholly other realm. He told his recruits tales of King Arthur and got them to believe. He believed his own bullshit.

Until that day on Anthony Ave when shots rang out and everyone on the street ran up the hill, just a block and a half from the droning din of the Cross Bronx Expressway. A crowd of hundreds gathered in moments.

The Cassidy Mansion was the first house in the Bronx.

If you’d ever had the opportunity to be invited there to a birthday party back in the day, you still spoke of it. Everyone was welcome. Even Frank Ellis, when he was the prince of the place for his short reign, invited some into the yard during the neighborhood block parties.

Because that’s what they were, the Royal family of Tremont, and the way that subjects identify with the kings and queens was the way that we felt about our Cassidy Mansion, so on that day when the shots rang out and Townes Walker lay on the driveway, we all went up there to see what happened.

Maggie’s mother was bleeding and someone had given her a handkerchief. The police and ambulances were there.

The fallen man was put in the rescue squad truck and the crowd parted. The Mule was watching with everyone else until the instant when he saw O’Donnelly. Then it was like one of those parts in the movie when a laser point comes on the screen and zeroes in one face like a sniper sight on a high powered rifle.

He recognized O’Donnelly though it was almost four years since the killing of his brother Juan on Walton Ave. Manny Colon had become the youngest kingpin in our knowledge of the world; he was a legend. He had been checking his crew of four or five dealers in the area, four who manned the corners opposite the points of the circle where Tremont meets Webster and one that roamed, getting customers wherever he could.

There was a constant stream of traffic and business in those days. It is hard to describe except to note that a dealer, from the moment he showed up on the street with product, was busy until he left. Guys were accosted until they became weary of the sight of their brood, until they became hooked to the power they held over their own minions.

They kept their stashes in their pockets and a larger one in a paper bag they would discard nearby, in a trash can by a curb or whatever, and if anyone touched it, or even looked at it, there would be a very big problem.

This was Manny’s biggest rule. It is not a matter of shit, it’s a matter of pride. If someone takes you off they don’t respect you and this must be taken care of. There is no other way.

O’Donnelly had put on a little weight. He wore a military regulations mustache out to the corners of his mouth. He had a crew cut because it was dead summer. He had taken his hat off to scratch his brow. The Mule saw a certain look in his eye and said something like,

Uh, can I get you something?

O’Donnelly wasn’t stupid. He saw who and what Manny was. He was a man who could get him as much crack as he wanted for as long as he wanted, for a nice two- or three-day run until he discarded him because you know he was a cop. He was vice squad, and Manny Colon, he didn’t recognize him in the front part of his awareness of the situation though he knew who he was as a local dealer.

Drugs are like that; they allow the taker to layer the things in his mind so that there are different levels of reality. He knew who Manny was, point-blank, but if anyone asked him he needed to have a level of plausible deniability, why, don’t ask that kind of question. It is enough to say that it had come up in passing a couple times in precinct business that this wannabe kingpin kid was the little brother of the man he had killed with his service revolver. Most cops, contrary to television and popular conceptions, never kill anyone in the line of duty. Most seldom even fire their guns, so if you do, you remember.

There was another emotional dimension that had to be respected.

He could not admit at first that he still dreamed of Juan Colon and that hallway. He dreamed of what could have happened had it gone down differently at either stage, at the pool hall, on Melrose Ave or in the hallway.

He and Juan matched up perfectly as opponents, and just as a man, if he is lucky enough, gets to meet his or her perfect lover, or certainly the closest thing that will come to it in their lifetime before death, and always dreams of this person as a fallback sort of thing, whenever unhappy, if he ends up with someone else or not, even if he may dream of the younger more agreeable version of his own wife, as Jimmy O’Donnelly also did; but Manny Colon and O’Donnelly didn’t bullshit each other, they were too smart for that, and for the next four days they danced, each teasing himself with the delicious idea of killing the other at the right moment, like a delicious tango that neither one of them could deny, like the couple who see each other across a crowded dance floor and simply must end up having a drink at the bar.

Then it’s your place or mine.

This is what happened that moment with Jimmy O’Donnelly and Manny Colon. But let’s forget, if we can forget all that three- and four-dimensional crap and get to the bare bones of the what took place in the next ninety-six hours.

O’Donnelly had made detective.

He wore his shield on his shirt now. He looked good, he looked like Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity, with white shirt and chinos, in the sun, but if you looked closer you realized he was much more like Monty Clift because there was something haunted about his handsome face. He was looking for his own death and, just as something clicked in Manny in that moment, something also clicked in Detective Jimmy O’Donnelly because he had found his destiny.

You got something for me, you say.

They played it out like it was a tip. This was plausible enough. Dealers, especially ones as high up as the Mule, often talked to the cops, to tease them, to get them drugs or women if they were so inclined or to lay a seed for later if they were not. They reinitiated contact and proceeded to have a conversation at a pizza place that had a window where they served slices and sodas to the people of the sidewalk.

This was back down Tremont Avenue. Even here they were still on the fringe of the crowd that had gathered around the scene of the murder. There would be people soaking up the remnants of dispersed energy and madness there for the rest of the day because murder scenes are like that. This is what the ghetto gets off on, the street dramas that everyone is so addicted to it’s like sports.

They stood talking even though anyone watching would not have been able to tell Manny gave him the small paper bag of crack and heroin he just happened to have as a drop off to one of his lieutenants. As in look what I found officer you better take care of this.

Jimmy went on a legendary run, and went on to suffer the worst death of any of the rogue crack cops of his era. He was found in a room on Webster Ave with his head stove in and the carpenter’s hammer that had done the deed still stuck in his skull four days later.

Manny kept an eye on him whether it was his or not until O’Donnelly was depleted and delirious and then he took his life, as O’Donnelly had taken his brother’s.

Manny was able to stay on the street for some time and then he himself was arrested and there was no one to testify to the murder and no evidence that could be pinned to him. What Manny had done was put Jimmy O’Donnelly in the able hands of his lieutenants both male and female, so he knew where he was and what he was doing the whole time. He checked on him once or twice. He knew he cried to a whore, that he bragged to a barroom full of Yankee fans that he went home to tearfully kiss each of his children as if he knew what train he had gotten on and where it would crash.

It is said that O’Donnelly spent the last hours of his life looking out a corner window of the Tremont Plaza Hotel south and east toward the Tremont Oval, where in those days at night the gatherers there at the head of the drug bazaar the circle had become wandered to and fro like the penitent congregants of some long forsaken and outlandish pagan pageantry, where its denizens sat on the benches jabbering in unintelligible tongues, lighting up in full view of passersby or passed out on the same grass in various states of ecstasy and ruin. In his mind at the end it was a source of both envy and disdain for the born cop that he could not join them, that his own bloody transcendence awaited him, and would be met in the dark hovel, his final refuge.

Officer Bobby O’Donnelly was found in the Webster Hotel with the carpenter’s hammer embedded in the frontal bone of his skull, it was only a matter of time for Manny Colon. Granted it would take a little while. These things always do. The police force was in shambles, overworked, underpaid and undernourished in terms of appreciation from the public. The shine had worn off the badge. Also he was only one asshole and there were a lot of them out there, but if he was not public enemy #1, for what he had done to O’Donnelly, he was running a close second, rogue cop or not.

Note one: the frontal bone is the one at protects the brain and as such is the strongest bone in the body. The officer’s skull had been penetrated not once but not less than four times. The bone was effectively broken in half and the point of the back-end of the hammer damaged the officer’s inner ear.

Even the most seasoned officers upon entering the room and looking around for a moment soon rushed out when it dawned on them what had happened here and were sick in the hallway bathroom, a few only made it as far as the trashcan by the cot.

Officer O’Donnelly was given a full honor guard funeral. For those of you who don’t know, Tremont Ave goes all the way east to the end of the great North American continent in the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx. A few blocks south of our avenue, on Lafayette, there’s a graveyard, St. Raymond’s, and that’s where Bobby ended up, next to his grandfather, on their graves was carved the very same shield number. The wails of the widow reached such a pitch that they were imitated by a flock of birds that alighted in the upper branches of nearby trees, achieving at one point a relatively perfect pitch of high C.

After he left the room in the Webster Hotel, Manny Colon took a shower down the hall, shaved, shit, changed his clothes, applied cologne and went on a hot date with a freaking fly sister by the name of Delilah Gomez. It had taken him six months of preparation for this. She was an undergraduate nursing student at Hostos. She was 19. That was by day. By night she graced the club sport spots of our neighborhood with her long legs, leonine grace and bubble packed booty.

If the bus stop and the bump were not invented to show off her God-given gifts, after a few minutes watching this fine young thing in their employment any witness would agree it was academic anyway. Nothing mattered after seeing her shake that thing and more babies were born just because of what watching her did to the boyfriends and husbands of those girls present in Delilah’s sphere of influence. For all that it was her teeth, her smile and the well… intelligence with which she danced, that she brought to the dance floor that distinguished her. Manny was with her when they saw the police report on the O’Donnelly cop killing. Jimmy came on and spoke briefly about his brother and it was in that instant that Manny realized he had killed the wrong one.

He dropped a water glass and it shattered on the tile floor. He put on his pants and walked out the door.the young lady yelled after him, to no avail. This was the first year of the Serrano Scholars program at Hostos, and she would be one of the first students chosen to continue her education begun at Hostos, at Columbia University. After graduation she next landed in Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia before decamping to a 3-bedroom condo in Bethesda where she worked in the state department. At each stop of the way, accommodations had to be made for the son she had conceived with Manny Colon the very night of the morning that began with Officer Bobby O’Donnelly’s head stove in.

Manny the Mule lasted on the streets for exactly 337 days and nights, which put him exactly that many steps behind his mentor Frank Ellis on the staircase down to hell that officials call the New York State Penal system. Manny Colon had enough uncut cocaine to keep him up all but maybe three hours a night. He only slept well after sex and when he awoke like a bolt he did a little of the white horse to ease himself into the next thing that happened. The one or two nights that he slept through were spent in the wreckage of the train station where our grandfather still stood sentinel. The transit company had installed automated ticket machines and the building was condemned so only our grandfather went inside and for his old ward Manny Colon it was the perfect place to hide and the only time he knew any rest.

There was an All Points Bulletin put out in all five boroughs for the arrest of Manuel Colon thirty two minutes after Officer O’Donnelly’s body was discovered, which happened not incidentally a full 83 hours after he expired. It was on a tip from a desk clerk who became disgusted upon discovering that some local rounders were bringing gawkers by for looks; and the smell, which was awful, even with the window open. Manny Colon’s wandering sojourn often ended for some minutes respite on the park bench at the end of Mt Eden Ave where he liked the view of the passing cars especially at night on Webster Ave. Other times it ended on one of the benches of Echo Park across Tremont Ave from our church.

I saw him myself after he had been on the run for the better part of a year. Sure he had lost a little weight, but I can swear in the words of the bard that he did look great. In the Cassidy mansion in the drawing room was a Steinway piano. I was walking by the big empty house one night and decided to pay a visit. I was playing for hours before Manny came down the stairs, wiping sleep out of his eyes.

What are you doing here?

We both laughed at the same time. He was arrested a few weeks later, it was the last time I saw him for a long time.

In my work, the theme of skin and its impermanence has always been a constant — starting from the use of wax in painting, to create a textural body, which then emerged from the canvas to the elastic skin of a model I collaborated with and photographed for 7 years until his death. I am now continuing with these themes of impermanence while relating them to women’s issues regarding aging, “ideal beauty”, sexuality, eternal youth, and cosmetic surgery. I am also inspired by African sculpture, ritual objects and painting references.

For many years I was working with latex and vinyl in the form of sheet latex or fragments of Halloween masks — very tactile and sensuous mediums in which to convey impressions of skin and flesh. With these materials I was able to reference aging, deformities, discolorations, decay and exaggerated features as they are used to create the “horrific”.

I took a series of photos of boiling objects. The work was inspired by my finding a set of dentures on 25th street. I was boiling them to clean them and became fascinated with the bubbles, their movement, breath and how the objects got obscured by the energy of the bubbles. This gave them life while at the same time abstracting them.

— Janice Sloane

It’s 1977 and four upstate-New York high school students who have formed their town’s first punk rock band are in NYC together for the best night of their lives. They’ve been brought to NYC this particular Friday night by NICK, a somewhat older Brit manager who’s looking for a new band to Svengali.

They’ve just played a freak gig at CBGB, a smashing debut for the upstate band, and their (upstate) hit single, “Toys”.

Now they’re enjoying the after-party, an unimaginable experience for NEIL. The self-styled loser has an opportunity to run into his own icons, as peers.

He’s watching as DAN-EL works the crowd of sophisticates like the primal sophisticate he is.

INT. EAST VILLAGE LOFT – NIGHT

CROSSFADE from “Toys” to David Bowie’s “Heroes”. Jammed party in an unfinished space. JOHNNY THUNDERS trolls through the Crowd behind another aging ROCKER fronting for him.

ROCKER

Anybody have any coke? Any downs?

NEIL taps STEVE on the shoulder.

NEIL

Is that Johnny Thunders? New York Dolls Johnny Thunders?

They look over at JOHNNY, hitting on a deathmask punky chick with all of his street legal proto-punk glamour, hard to tell whether he’s trying to cadge drugs or sex.

NEIL sees Patricia laugh it up with a handsome poser with long black hair who looks like he’s in a band, who whispers something in her ear as two geeky fans gawk at her.

She’s not too far from Doreen, chaperoning Phil taking long hits from a joint being circulated between the lead singer of the Bent Ones and the guy he tussled with in the club.

Behind NEIL, DAN is with a few intense guys and NICK, Zipper Khan with his Walkman out and recording just like in the opening, and WHITEY, shockingly bleached like his name.

WHITEY

Once a band signs with a major label, it’s over, it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s just part of the machine, why waste time listening to anything that serves the corporate body, which is what happens when they cash that very first check.

DAN-EL

Back in LA, the Screamers, with their insane genius lead singer Tomato du Plenty, they refuse to even make records. They just perform live and on these weird sick videotapes they make of their songs.

NICK

Great, and then who gets to hear the music? The chosen few?

DAN-EL

Indubitably, dear chap.

WHITEY

Be here now. That’s cool. That’s real.

NEIL sees the poser lead Patricia out and considers following, when STEVE approaches JOHNNY THUNDERS.

STEVE

Hey, Johnny. We’re friends of Deg.

JOHNNY gives the smallest acknowledgement imaginable.

NEIL

(clearing throat)

I’m a big fan of your guitar, you know, style.

Even less acknowledgement, if possible.

NEIL

I, uh, have some pot. If you want to maybe we, um, could go smoke.

JOHNNY THUNDERS

(cutting off the girl cold)

Follow me.

INT. LOFT BEDROOM – NIGHT

“Subway Train” by the New York Dolls KICKS IN as JOHNNY leads NEIL and STEVE in, the room spacious and empty save for futons on floor and a little party around the Bent Ones guitarist, still strapped to his guitar.

JOHNNY THUNDERS

Where?

NEIL pulls out a film canister half full with shake, begins to fill his pipe when JOHNNY stops him.

JOHNNY THUNDERS

You’re wasting it.

JOHNNY usurps the canister, pastes together three rolling papers from his pocket, breaks open a Marlboro, and empties the tobacco and all of Neil’s pot onto the papers.

NEIL watches numbly as JOHNNY rolls the spliff, sparks it up and starts toking. He motions to the Bent guitarist and takes his instrument, starts noodling a few steely chords as he walks off enjoying the spliff all by himself.

STEVE

At least you can say you got Johnny Thunders high.

(The Earth’s Dream)

I started these thoughts
from the simplicity of where it was shot
and suddenly realized that the landscape
is the star of the movie.
The ‘location’ is the story
The land itself & also the land as metaphor.
I didn’t write a story and then ‘scout locations’;
the ‘locations’ had burned themselves into me
begging for a story.

Now it makes sense and it’s easy to write
(because the location is the ‘story’—
the land itself & also the land as metaphor)

And the further realization that over this long stretch of time living here
I’ve become attuned to this landscape
& stoned on its stony beauty—
and its evocative-ness? -ity?
ummmmm
the numinous rockscapes of northern New Mexico

Snow Advisory was shot in ’99
at Plaza Blanca in Abiquiu
and at Tsankawi Caves right near Bandelier National Monument
near the Jemez Mountains and the infamous Los Alamos New Mexico.
These 2 ‘locations’ are really the principal players in this story.
Plaza Blanca—with the towering lingam where we see the 3 women running
with the golden egg while being pursued by unknown forces
in a helicopter
—a place that Georgia O’Keefe was fond of
—overwhelming at all times of the day.

I shot there at dusk with Sabine and her pet wolf
at near dusk
using a blue filter

The dream cave, the womb of all imaginings
was an off limits cave
that we had to shoot in surreptitiously.
These caves were inhabited by long ago native tribes.
On the walls are some petroglyphs—
we see the hand petroglyph which in the context
looks possibly menacing.
There are also caves within caves . . . & dark.
I went there alone before sunrise to shoot the empty cave with the sunlight
and the red feathers.
And I also went to Plaza Blanca before dawn to shoot the sunrise
in the shot where the golden egg
zooms towards us
and breaking apart
disintegrates.

The landscape itself is the earth dreaming.

(so, “it’s all about location”)

In other words
the ground is the ground. Snow Advisory
(The Earth’s Dream)

I met Dupont at the Bar X, a totally anonymous-looking place with tinted windows wedged in-between a McDonald’s and a pizzeria. I might never have noticed it had it not been for the neon Bud sign in the window and the sandwich board on the sidewalk advertising a happy hour: two beers for a dollar. I went in without any expectations. From the street, the bar had a kind of transience, like the façade in the corner of a train station or an airport, the sort of place where, for a few moments, at least, you can feel poised between one part of your life and another. I wanted to have a couple of beers, contemplate my very near future over a cigarette or two, then go somewhere in the East Village and see if I couldn’t meet some people and make something happen. I never imagined that the Bar X would become my hangout. Or that I’d be hanging out with someone like Dupont.

I had a lot to think about: I’d been in New York for a month and my money was running low. If I didn’t figure out something quick, I’d have to leave. I’d been off booze and drugs more or less since I arrived and, up until that afternoon, I’d been happy. I had a little room in the Hotel 17, off Stuyvesant Square. A friend from back home had stayed there ten years before in the early ’80s. He’d told me that the other guests, an odd collection of old men, drag queens, punk rock musicians, and out of town thrill-seekers like my friend, did blow in the rooms and held wild, all-night parties on the roof, while junkies fixed openly in Stuyvesant Square, and half the storefronts along 3rd Ave were abandoned. I checked it out because, whatever its history, it was listed as good value in the Lonely Planet I scanned in a bookstore, and because I had nowhere else to go. Almost despite myself, I was relieved to find 3rd Ave fully re-occupied, the hotel lobby clean and quiet. Clearly, the party had moved on.

The room was just wide enough for a bed, a dresser and a table, but whatever I experienced walking around in the city was enough to charge the graying bed sheets, the stains and burns on the carpet, the loaf of bread and package of cured ham stored on the window-ledge, with dignity. Poverty can be tolerable, even desirable, if one finds meaning in it.

photo by City of Strangers

Part of my happiness came from the feeling that I’d escaped. I’d picked up a mild habit over the winter; as I became healthier, clearer in my mind, I became aware of just how awful it had been, and how much more awful it would have become had I not quit. At first, dope had been fun, something to kill the day. Montreal, where I’d spent the fall and winter, wasn’t a bad place to have a habit. The dealers would deliver right to your door. One guy even brought along purloined groceries, which you could buy at discount prices. The rents were cheap. I lived off unemployment, and the remains of a rapidly diminishing stash I’d accumulated working out West the year before. If things got tight, I could always pick up a day or two of crappy work on the side.

Of course, it got out of control. All I did was get high. Even if I was pretty far from a full-blown oil-burner habit, I’d wake up sick and get sicker if I didn’t go and score. I knew if I stayed, it would only get worse. Much worse. When I got to New York, away from the influence, I decided to straighten up. Withdrawal wasn’t so bad. A couple of days not sleeping, a couple more of panic attacks. Even when I’d tried to kick in Montreal, the withdrawal itself hadn’t been so bad. The hard part had been how it dragged on. Mornings waking up with shaky limbs, then a cold through the day that never left. Depression like a man-sized stone on your chest. Fleeting, yet acutely painful memories twisting in and out of my consciousness with diamond sharp clarity. Missing old girlfriends, old hangouts, missing what had been . . . unbearable. When these longings kicked in; I’d be dialing the dealer’s beeper number within an hour.

In New York, I walked. Walking kept the depression off, kept me distracted. I had nothing else to do, no one to see. I couldn’t focus enough to go to a movie or a museum, and I hated TV. Usually, my day followed the same path, walking through the West Village into Soho and Chinatown, back up through the Lower East Side. Sometimes I’d go right to midtown and on to Central Park. Exhausted, I’d return to my room and pass out for twenty or thirty minutes. When I came to, half-dazed, I’d lie on the bed letting the sensations of the day wash over me before getting up and trying to describe people I’d seen and the places I’d experienced that day in my notebook.

Within days, I’d turned inward, ceased desiring anyone’s company but my own. The first weeks alone in a great city, where no sight or sound is familiar, is a taste of real solitude, the kind Christian hermits must have known in the desert. New York’s late winter gloom suited my mood. The first Gulf War was just wrapping up, yet despite the profusion of flags, the yellow ribbons tied around every lamp-post and fire hydrant, the city felt curiously somber, even a little depressed. Every second day, great fogs washed in, obscuring the graceful skyscrapers, the iron bridges leading off the island, making them seem like extravagant props on a movie set. Yet the city popped out of the fog like a tableau, and you never knew what you’d see walking around.

Despite the skyscrapers, the sense of being at the centre of Empire, the city felt like it was not quite of the West. Even in midtown, trash overflowed in the bins and blew about the pavement. Like London, where I’d lived for a couple of years before I went back to Montreal, New York seemed a very working-class city, full of working man bars, where conversations on the street were shouted rather than spoken. But unlike London, it seemed an overwhelmingly black city: all the jobs that kept the city running, from driving the busses to manning the post office to digging up the roads, seemed to be done by black people. Homeless people, nearly all black, were camped out in every second doorway and, in the East Village, a homeless camp had taken over a whole section of Tompkins Square Park. In the Lower East Side, Spanish was the dominant language, spoken at a rapid clip by tough-looking Puerto Ricans, a people about whom I knew almost nothing. Standing on Canal Street in Chinatown, the street stalls and crush of people, the insane traffic barreling off the bridge at one end of the street, made me feel like I was back in Asia. Everywhere I went, the city unfolded like a flower coming into slow bloom; changing neighborhoods was like changing worlds.

I came down with no other plan other than to get out of Montreal. Vaguely, I thought about going back to London, but I didn’t have the money and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back. London had been fun, my first experience of a true metropolis, the city I’d wanted to live in since my teens when I started hanging around the punk rock scene in Vancouver, long before I moved east to Montreal. I’d claimed my British passport, my birthright, through my British parents, even picked up an English inflected accent. I’d gone over with my girlfriend Molly, a dual national like me, and she had introduced me to a whole squatting scene which allowed us to live all over the city, supported by a ready-made network of out-of-city and expat refugees, punks, anarchists, and artists. We hung out in what was left of the hardcore scene and travelled: Europe, North Africa, Asia. A couple of months a year I went back to Western Canada and made enough money working in the bush to travel when I got back to London.

It was a good life until it wasn’t. By the end of the ’80s, it was becoming harder and harder to find work; harder still to make money. All our friends were using dope, and eventually I started using and so did Molly. I knew that if I went back, I’d get right back into all that, just like I would if I went back to Montreal.

I didn’t want to give up what I had, tenuous as it was. Even after a week, I could see that New York offered the same kind of freedom that London had those first couple of years, if I could figure out how to get below its fabric. But America was an unknown. I’d never crossed the border before, not even for a day. The people I hung out with, whether in Canada or Britain, had often despised the US and everything it stood for, especially under Ronald Reagan, and for the most part I’d gone along with their opinion. But after the Yanks pounded Iraq, wiping out Saddam Hussein’s million-man army, I got curious. America reigned supreme, even more than Britain had at the height of her Empire, and I had to check it out for myself.

I was surprised to find out I liked it, even felt at home in it. I didn’t think I would at first. I caught the night train, traveling fourteen hours down the eastern seaboard. At the border, I was grilled by huge men with names like Bud and Tex, who kept their hands on their guns while they interrogated me, and just when I thought they were going to throw me off the train, they disappeared and I was free to go to the bar car and calm my nerves. A can of Bud cost a buck, a mini-bottle of Jack Daniels a buck-fifty. After the first stop in Vermont, the bar was packed and stayed packed right down the coast. Working people mostly, all knocking back the beer and the Jack. The staff put out Styrofoam bowls of cheesy fish, and a big black dude with an Afro came out and played Jimi Hendrix melodies on a Farfisa organ. I met a girl, a willowy college student with long brown hair, kind eyes that offset her slightly stern Midwestern face. She told me I reminded her of Holden Caulfield, and we spent most of the night necking in an alcove in the very back of the train, American cities passing by like cities lit up in the night, until she had to get off somewhere in Massachusetts. I woke up with two hours sleep just as we were pulling into New York, that miraculous Manhattan skyline spilling across the rose purple dawn, as startlingly familiar as the features of my own face in the mirror. It was perfect.

Even with the withdrawal, New York seemed a minor miracle. The people were considerably more outgoing than people in London, or anywhere in the West, so you never knew when you’d start talking to someone. This openness, as fleeting as it often was, made it easy to be alone and just stepping out on the street allowed me to forget whatever had been bothering me that day. And while it was new, it was also familiar. Like every other kid in the West, I’d been raised on a diet of images from New York, and everything from the skyline to the graffiti, to the way black kids talked on the street felt like it had been pulled from a movie or a TV show.

Still, I needed money if I was going to stay. Even at 150 a week for a room, and fifteen dollars a day for expenses, I didn’t have long left. I’d need a job. I had no idea how to find work off the books. I could hardly go through the want ads, or go to a job centre. I’d have to meet some people, preferably expats of some kind, who could advise me, and the only place I knew where to meet people was in bars.

Bars meant booze and I was scared booze would lead back to drugs. I wanted to hold off as long as I could, hope that by some miracle a job would appear, at the hotel, at the diner where I had breakfast every morning. I wrote my ex, leaving the hotel as a return address, hoping against hope that she’d write back saying she’d got away from our old friends, got away from drugs, that we should try again. I needed a sign that would tell me whether I was meant to stay or go. I lived by signs in those days, as if my future could be dictated to me from the outside, if only I could read it all properly. New York, more than any other city I’d been in, seemed a city where one was meant to live by hunches, and it baffled me a little when no clear sign emerged.

Uncertainty began to eat at me, disturbing my equilibrium and finally my resolve fell apart when I was in Times Square. It was early evening, the time when the light goes into full retreat, the time when I most felt like a drink. I’d been up since four am, my limbs stiff with exhaustion, yet I was so keyed up I knew that I would be unable to sleep if I went back to the hotel. A drizzle had set in, making walking impossible, yet I didn’t want to go anywhere near Times Square. For the first time since I’d crossed the border, New York’s tremendous energy felt inaccessible, something I witnessed but did not feel. Traffic filled the street bumper to bumper, horns honking pointlessly. Hordes of people rushed the subway exits, faces distorted by drizzle. Marquee theaters down 42nd advertised porn and more porn. Beneath this dizzying motion, the square felt not just anonymous, but empty, like the lights, the city’s energy, hid a void that was truly frightening if you looked into it. As I stood under a construction awning, the cold crept in, turning my thoughts, bringing on a longing for something I couldn’t place. I lit a cigarette, but smoking only made me anxious. I looked over the ragged men and women camped out in sections of cardboard over the subway grates. I’d expected to find scores of homeless in Reagan’s America, though I hadn’t expected to find them camped out in every second doorway at night, a shadow army living in a parallel existence to the city’s relentless motion. I’d give them change, even stop to talk to them if they weren’t aggressive or angry, but I’d always felt protected from their fate by my nationality, my inherent optimism about the future that buoyed me those first few weeks. Now, I wasn’t so sure. I was 25, I had no skills, no one to turn to when things got tight. It wouldn’t take much for me to be forgotten and suddenly it seemed that all my forward motion was an attempt to keep this possibility at a distance. If I did run out of money, I’d have to leave the hotel room, and New York would become a much less benevolent city. When I did make it back to Montreal, the most I could hope for was to wait out the rest of the winter in a rooming house room, most certainly using heroin again, living off my UI claim until the cheques stopped coming, as they would in a couple of months. Even if I’d never have to brave the New York streets, I knew that if I entered this parallel existence, I’d find it hard to come back.

One of the dealers who’d appeared around the square with the evening eyed me, then moved in, hissing something I couldn’t make out. I tried to ignore him, but he was on to me. I saw drug dealers all over the city, hissing from doorways and street corners, sometimes coming right up to you on the pavement. Scoring on the street was an unknown, a possibly dangerous unknown, and I’d never felt tempted, not even on the shakiest of days. The drug world in New York was in itself an unknown, driven not just by heroin, a crack I’d never tried and never wanted to try. I had become adept at keeping the dealers out of my personal space, either by ignoring them or waving them off, but I couldn’t keep this guy away. He was a short black guy, not physically threatening, but he’d sensed enough of my need and my vulnerability to become bold. “What you lookin’ for, man?” he said, almost turning it into a joke as he pressed closer and I knew I’d never get rid of him if I stood there. I started walking, ignoring the drizzle against my face and in my hair.

Walking made me feel better again, but the wetness only made me more tired. More than anything, I was weary of being alone. That momentary loss of faith under the awning had drained me, left me scared of what would happen if it happened again. I wanted to be surrounded by people, to feel connected again like I did when I was traveling. I wanted to feel like I had some control of my situation.

Inside, the Bar X was a curious mix of styles. It felt curiously dated, though in the moment I couldn’t figure out why. Though not even six, it was already crowded. A basketball game careened across six big-screen TVs mapped out around what looked like a typical sports bar with silver stools and a big American flag over the bottles behind the bar. Above the twin pool tables in the back, a disco ball glittered, its light obscured by a miasma of cigarette smoke. The wall opposite the bar had been painted a flat black, with jagged red lines cutting at odd angles across the surface, and even more jagged iron stools lined up along the counter, so that part of the bar could have been out of a mid-’80s new wave disco. The Doobie Brothers ‘What a Fool Believes’ blared from somewhere in the back.

I took a seat near the end of the bar and ordered a Rolling Rock, the only brand they had besides Bud and Corona. The beer was watery, but not as bland as the Budweiser I’d had on the train on the way down, and I downed half the first bottle in one go, and by the time I’d finished the first beer, the cold had gone away and I could focus on the people in the bar.

It was mostly an after-work crowd. Office workers, ties undone, or in casual suits. A couple of Spanish-looking couples, a trio of Filipino-looking nurses still in their uniforms. A couple dozen construction guys occupying the space around the bar, dressed in construction boots, jeans and wool shirts. Whatever their background, their faces looked pretty much like the ones I’d been seeing on the street for the last month, though considerably less guarded now that they were in a bar. I smoked one cigarette, downed two beers in less than twenty minutes, then ordered a couple more. With the beer, the cigarette smoothed my nerves, and I felt comfortable in the bar, a drink in easy reach, the cold safely outside. A part of me didn’t want to go out at all. I loved the Village in the daytime. The trash blowing across the pavement seemed exotic, one of those iconic New York images that made it seem like you were walking through a movie. The iron fire escapes running up the fronts of the buildings, the old synagogues and cathedrals, the graveyard off 2nd Avenue, all made you feel like you’d gone to another country, some corner of Europe maybe. Some streets, dotted with little stores and narrow diners, where people hung out on their steps when it was sunny, felt like a small town. A network of small towns in the heart of a very big city. Even the homeless camp at the bottom of Tompkins Square Park was strange, beyond understanding. A couple hundred people, camped out under blue tarps or in rickety shacks made of scrap wood, the smoke from their fires trailing through the tree branches into the street. I’d walked around the camp once or twice, surprised to find signs of community in the way people brought each other food from the mobile soup kitchen in the corner, or gathered around a fire in an empty barrel, like the further edges of the squatter communities I’d been a part of in London.

The night was another matter. I’d been living in, hanging out in, neighborhoods like the Village since I’d been 16. Bohemian neighborhoods, where internal refugees like myself came to find themselves. After awhile, these neighborhoods had a sameness, no matter what city or even continent. Walking through the East Village, I felt the same weariness below the surface that I had, too many times, in other cities. Junkie punk rockers, long past their expiration date, lurched past with that windblown look, like they’d just stepped out of a wind tunnel. Late ’80s hardcore, blaring out of the same dark, graffiti-scarred bars it had blared out of in Montreal or London, Vancouver or Berlin. Now that I’d been away from my tribe for a few weeks, I wasn’t sure I wanted to find them again. I liked being in this bizarre little sports bar; looking at people who had regular jobs and went home to parts of the city I knew nothing about.

I gazed at the American flag hanging over the bar. I’d been looking at that flag my whole life without really seeing it. Before I’d crossed the border, I’d mostly resented it, but in the context of New York, I found it oddly comforting, the way I’d once found Union Jack comforting, and for similar reasons: it was a symbol of something I wanted to be. I wasn’t sure what that was exactly, but somehow in crossing the border I felt I’d become someone different and I didn’t want to go back to whoever I’d been before I left. Stepping out of the train station into the brilliant sunlight along the Avenue of the Americas, I’d been taken by the emblems of all the American nations on the lampposts, Venezuela right down to Argentina, with Canada just before Costa Rica and Columbia. I’d walked the whole length of the street, carrying my one bag, fascinated by the thought that I was an American. That had never occurred to me, not in Europe, nor even in Canada, where, for most of my life, I’d largely assumed I was basically British, if born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Now I knew that I’d miss that flag if I had to leave, regret not following whatever promise it held out.

The bartender was pouring out a round of shots, spreading the glasses along the counter. Big glasses, with at least three ounces of what looked like cough syrup. To my surprise, he slapped one of the glasses in front of me.

“Don’t worry. The guy next to you is paying for it.”

He pointed at a guy standing a couple of places down the bar with a pool cue in one hand and a Corona in the other. The guy put down his Corona and picked up the shot, pointing it in my direction.

“Jagermeister,” he drawled in an accent that sounded not quite New York, “German or somethin’. Gets you fucked up, whatever it is.”

He and what seemed like half the construction-boot-wearing men along the bar knocked their shots back in one go. I followed suit. Jagermeister had just started being promoted in North America, and I’d never tried it before. It not only looked like cough syrup but tasted like it as well. My new friend caught my grimace and laughed.

“Don’t worry. Gets easier after awhile. Maybe too easy.”

A black guy sitting behind him grinned, like this was an old joke between them. I wondered why this guy had bought me a drink. He definitely didn’t look gay. He wore his feathered light brown hair parted in the middle, and a silver rope was just visible beneath the open V of his white sports shirt. Unlike the men around him, he was wearing white runners, but he seemed affiliated with them in some way. In his sallow eyes, there was just a hint of East European melancholy, but his casual way of holding himself, one foot on the railing below the bar, leaning forward with one elbow on the counter while his other hand fiddled restlessly with the pool cue, made him wholly American. He even seemed a little out of place in the city, as if his natural setting was at the wheel of a pick-up, six-pack open on the seat beside him, shotgun rack mounted in the back window. A good old boy in a plaid shirt taking pulls of chewing tobacco while jawing with the neighbors about last year’s crop.

Before I’d even had the chance to thank him, he ordered another round. “You don’t look like you’re doing anything important,” he said to me. Then: “My name’s Dupont. This here is James.”

He pointed to the black guy sitting behind him. James had close-cropped hair and wide-framed tinted eyeglasses. Though he wore the same outfit as Dupont, his shirt and jeans fit him better, as if he’d taken more care in their selection. He kept one toothpick between his teeth and another threaded in his hair. He had a kind face, yet seemed a little guarded as well, separate from the other men along the bar. He nodded and said something, but in some kind of patois so I couldn’t understand him.

Dupont ordered another round of beers, including me again. I was becoming a little embarrassed by his generosity, but curious about him as well. He seemed popular: every second person that came in the door stopped to shake his hand, yet he didn’t seem like he owned the place. What he reminded me of most acutely, was a guy I’d known in high school who’d been a very successful weed dealer. He greeted everyone he met with the same mix of familiarity and casual appraisal. Yet no money, no substance ever changed hands. He just seemed like a guy everyone wanted to know.

“You livin’ here in the city?” He said in a pause between greeting people. He said it while watching the basketball game on TV, not even looking at me, as if it was a question he asked a dozen times a night. As best I could, I shoehorned my situation into a single sentence. He glanced over, and for the first time since he’d included me in his rounds, he seemed to actually see me.

“Montreal? Buddy of mine went up a few years back, said it was a real good time. Lots of bars, lots of nice women.” Here, he puffed himself up a bit. “Might have to visit myself sometime. Go up with the shirt on my back and twenty bucks and see what happens. Hell, I can make a party anywhere.”

For a moment I thought I’d placed him. I’d met a lot of Americans like Dupont in Europe, hanging around the tourist bars. Outgoing, almost aggressively generous, basically uninterested in any world outside their own. But here he was on his own turf, a big man of sorts and, despite an initial skepticism, I liked him. I’d have liked him even if he hadn’t bought me three drinks: he had an openness, a naïveté even, that offset the qualities I’d seen in him from a distance. Up close, he looked less like someone in charge than a guy who’d won the lottery and couldn’t believe his luck.

“You from New York?” I asked him. I didn’t think so. It wasn’t just his accent: the faces I’d seen on the street for the last three weeks had many appealing qualities but naïveté wasn’t one of them.

“Hell no! Lived in Columbus before I lived here, but from Cleveland originally. Not much in Cleveland now, but Columbus is all right. Lots of partying, lots of young girls. Nothing like New York, though—don’t know why I didn’t move here years ago.” Then: “You visiting friends or something?”

“No. Just came down to see how it was.”

“Oh yeah?” He told me later he’d been impressed that someone from a different country would come alone to the city for the hell of it. “How long you planning on staying, anyway?”

“Long as I can.”

He peered at me again, pupils expanding ever so slightly.

“Ever work construction?”

“Oh yeah.”

He laughed again. He seemed to laugh at everything and yet I had the sense that, despite his joviality, he’d been assessing me as I’d been assessing him.

“We’re working a big job around the corner. Need someone to take care of odd stuff around the place. A little carpentry, a little painting. Almost done now, but it’ll keep you going for a couple weeks at least.”

Even if this was exactly the opportunity I’d been looking for, doubts crowded my mind. Maybe this guy was just some big talker. Maybe he’d rip me off. He hadn’t asked about that and I wondered if he thought Canadians could work in the US. And even if he was legit, now that I had the chance I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get up early and go to some job site. I’d had enough of job site routines in Montreal, long days in warehouses or dusty building sites, listening to small-change rednecks call each other ‘fag’ and ‘cocksucker’ for hours. Compared to that, collecting that bi-weekly cheque was a dream.

Dupont laughed again, catching my hesitation. “Don’t worry about tools or experience. I’m the GC and James here is the foreman and a year ago neither one of us had set foot on a job site.” Guffawing. “Hell, we can show you whatever you need to know. And the owner pays cash, every Friday.”

When James grinned as well, I decided to take the chance. Even if I still had doubts about Dupont, something about James made me trust him. I liked how James seemed bemused by whatever Dupont said, grinning at me while Dupont was talking as if to let me in on the joke, and I figured if the foreman was a West Indian who hung around with the GC doing shots after work, this wouldn’t be like any job site in Montreal. When I said sure, Dupont beamed, like I’d paid him a compliment. Now that I’d decided, I felt confident again, like the city was protecting me. I was drunk, but I didn’t feel out of control like I’d feared; I felt like I was looking down at myself from a distance, the same feeling I used to get when I first started doing dope, a feeling of disembodied confidence.

People swayed in and out of the bar. The music had gone up a notch: Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling’ blared down from the ceiling. Dupont signaled to the bartender for another round. He seemed to have a thing about it, like he was proving something to himself. Eventually, I don’t know what time, I stumbled, quite hammered, back into the midtown blur, clutching a bar coaster with a nearby address scrawled across the front, and instructions to appear at 8:30 the next morning.

I came of age in a time when the term “Bad Girl” connoted rebellion and iconoclasm, independent thinking and free-spiritedness. Bad Girls were badass, and that gave us our power. Not that the term “Bad Girl” hasn’t always had a patronizing, pejorative twang. It’s always been one part “You go, Girl!” and two parts, “You’re a slut.” But nevertheless, Bad Girls and Party Girls have gotten all shuffled together into the same deck of pornographic playing cards. Bad Girls were the ones who blew off the party to smoke a joint outside. We did all kinds of stuff with guys, and not just it. We were accomplices, we were troublemakers, we were always dressed inappropriately for whatever occasion, and likely to cause a scene. Okay sure, we were also on the easy side, but sex was conducted in the spirit of “fuck you”—not “fuck me.”

Erika, 1980

I feel I should at this point offer my Bad Girl bonafides, so you can be sure you’re in the hands of a seasoned pro.

In my 47 checkered years on earth, I have engaged in just about every kind of Bad Girlery you can imagine:

Premarital and adulterous sex, of course. Smoking, drinking, drugging, cursing, necking, heavy petting, hooky, hickey, almost-turned-a-tricky, eye-rolling, bird-flipping, shit-flipping, cow-tipping, tripping, mashing, flashing, reputation-trashing, trespassing, shoplifting, re-gifting, mooning, booing, lying, spying, fake-crying, hair-dying, fake-ID-buying, tagging, bagging, sarcasm, orgasm, party-crashing, dine-and-dashing, dirtbikes/roadbikes/grassbikes, drink spikes, one-nights, cheating, speeding, pussy-eating, two-timing, one-lining, line-snorting, sheet-shorting, and aborting.

Oh, and taxi dancing.

Like all Bad Girls, I started out as a Good Girl. What happened? I was torn from the breast young, I was spanked. I was humped by a Spaniel and groped by a camp counselor. But more than anything, I think it’s because my parents had an epic, toxic divorce when I was twelve. I learned that love was a shuck just as I hit willowy, blonde puberty in Manhattan in the late 1970’s. It was the summer of Taxi Driver and I was a dead ringer for Jodie Foster. I was jailbait and unsupervised and the world came on to me fast.

New York in 1976 was Ground Zero for sex. Women were freshly liberated and on the pill, the Stonewall Riots brought out the gays, no-fault divorce was sweeping the nation and people were getting it on. Nobody was worried about genital herpes or G-spots. Hang-ups were hung up, swingers swung, and platonic relationships were in retreat at Plato’s Retreat. AYDS was a diet candy. Everybody was doing it, even my parents—just not with each other.

My dad cheated on my mom in London with a chippie who worked for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Mom called him a cab. They both wrote thinly veiled novels about it all and made me and my younger sister choose opposite sides of the split.

Pop was more inconvenienced by the divorce than he was heart-broken. He adjusted his aviator frames, combed out his mustache and went out and swung. My father was Mr. Goodbar, mowing down liberated ladies like a John Deere in deep wheat. “I once had sex with three different women in one day,” he bragged to me not long ago.

While my father notched conquests on his water bedpost, my mother took up with Daniel, my friend Gemma’s dad. In today’s terminology, Gemma was my tweenage bestie, and our two families were not just close, our brownstones shared a front stoop. Gemma and I lived at each other’s houses practicing our Bad Girl moves together at the age of 11. We stole and smoked our first cigarettes and made prank calls and reenacted scenes from The Three Musketeers (but dirty) in my bedroom on sleepovers. We stole a condom out of my father’s drawer and stuffed it full of newspaper in an attempt to understand the mystery of the penis. The day Mom and Daniel told us they were moving in together was the last time I saw Gemma. She never spoke to me again.

Alone and frightened in my broken, atheist, culturally enriched home, I had nowhere to turn for answers but to literature. That is how I came across a copy of “Fear of Flying” while prowling my mother’s bookshelves. The cover showed a woman’s breasts exploding from a tight shirt as her zipper was being slowly run southward by a male hand. I felt a spasm of prurient curiosity. I hid the book under my purple sweatshirt and, alone in my room, discovered the “Zipless Fuck” in breathless surprise. It embodied all the sophistication, mystery and emotional remove that I dreamed of at twelve.

It wasn’t long before I was peeling my Gloria Vanderbilts off in front of Neighbor Boy, who was a year ahead of me at school. His mom caught us, scandal ensued, and thus it was that “Erika is a HOAR” was scratched on a stall door in the girls’ bathroom at school. I read the epithet sitting on the pot, praying that I would get my period—not because I was worried I was pregnant (that would come later), but because I hadn’t yet reached puberty and I needed my body to catch up to my reputation.

The classic bad girl is the catholic school Girl gone wrong. While you really can’t beat repression-meets-rebellion-in-a-pleated-mini-skirt for sheer iconic appeal, I would argue that the Atheist Bad Girl, in her ripped jeans and shit-kickers, is a far more compelling creature. Catholic Bad Girls have a lot of obvious stuff to rebel against, whereas the Godless must draw their angst from a more mutable source. We confront the existential question, “if no one is watching, then what is the point of being good?” Like Algebra, virtue seemed to me to lack practical applications.

Alone in a world that offers no identifiable moral superstructure, “badness” can root tenaciously in the grout of a girls’ soul and briskly come to flower. As an Atheist Bad Girl, I didn’t just need to break rules, I found I wanted to make my own.

Badness for me was a means to a lofty end. my mandate was to live a life of romance and adventure, then turn the raw stuff of unfettered experience into an epic love story in which the very mysteries of the universe would be revealed. By 14, I could see that my virginity was holding up the works. So I tossed it off to a cute, available boy poetically named Adam, then got to work looking for a man big enough to keep me company on the vast, lonely wash of my soul. Little did I know it would take thirty years to find that man.

But you’ve got to start somewhere, and the cigarettes I smoked with Gemma were the gateway to everything else. Next came pot, then some light shoplifting, then truancy and sex. Some indiscreet diary-keeping led to my mother’s discovery of my wicked ways, which ultimately led, as it so often does for the over-privileged Bad Girl, to banishment in boarding school.

The school I wound up in wasn’t your typical ivied, repressive, knee-socks-and-blazers prep school. Buxton was an alternative, co-educational hippie school housed on an old summer estate in the Berkshires. At Buxton girls chewed tobacco and guys wore skirts. There were no “rules” at Buxton, only “customs” which I got right to work breaking my freshman year. I wiretapped faculty meetings, embraced Anarchist politics, fucked boys in the tall grass and wandered alone in the woods, my head stuffed full of Anne Sexton and D.H. Lawrence, imagining myself the mysterious heroine of a Peter Weir film.

Bad Girling is a cinematic calling, it’s a destiny best suited to those with a sense of destiny. I was raised to believe I would have a starring role on life’s stage. As the daughter of a film critic and a novelist, both with epic senses of themselves, I felt genetically called to narrative. A high-drama lifestyle was crucial if I was going to cull material and shape it into my own Homeric saga later on. I may not have had God or family, but I had something even better­—the Audience. I never wrote in my journal without the thought that some day it would be published and read. I never was alone without imagining a camera somewhere capturing my every haunted expression. It was my duty to make my story a good one, and so I gorged myself on experience. I was high-minded and full of shit and suffered from grandiosity and low self-esteem in equal measure.

In the spring of my senior year of high school I pulled the ultimate Bad Girl move—I had an affair with a married teacher and got kicked out of boarding school. I was an A student with nearly four months to fill before I matriculated at Sarah Lawrence College in September. My father was so angry he couldn’t talk to me without spitting on me, so I flew to my mother who was living on Cape Cod with Daniel. There I discovered I was but a casting from my mother’s own Bad Girl mold­—she confessed she herself once had a passionate affair with her own married teacher while at Sarah Lawrence. My mother knew firsthand the stormy cliff on which I stood. She didn’t have a spare bedroom for me though, so I joined my teacher in Vermont.

That summer was bliss. I lived in sin, I was the object both of desire and gossip, and I was a social outcast. I had reached the exalted Bad Girl status of being “the other woman” and I got my man. Moreover, I loved that man ferociously and I lived that summer high on his cologne. I wanted little more than to watch him shave every morning. After six weeks the teacher called my father from a pay phone and asked him to come and get me. I never saw or spoke to the teacher again.

Bad Girls don’t exist in a vacuum. We all start out as good girls. But for some reason, we realize the Good Girl is unlovable, so we get all bad n’ shit so nobody will think we care. But of course, inside, we want love with a fury that would immolate most men. Molten with heartbreak, I realized I had to get rid of the Bad Girl if I wanted to survive myself.

I locked that Bad Girl up in the dungeon of my heart, and I moved to Los Angeles to reinvent myself as a Good Girl. I achieved this transformation via the sanctity of marriage and motherhood. I found a kind, respectable man who I didn’t love so much so that it hurt, and I married him. We had two lovely daughters and made a comfortable home for them together. I lived a double life.

Twenty years of attachment parenting, school volunteering, water-wise gardening and free-range chicken roasting had my inner Bad Girl circling the drain. I tried to ignore her desperate cries for help as I knitted dishrags and chaperoned Girl Scouts. Sometimes I would sneak away to visit her in the basement, and try to perk her up with lap dances or sedate her with OG Kush, but it wasn’t enough. She was dying from neglect and I was moving through my life like a woman doomed. I realized that in trying to be good, I had sacrificed my soul. I was living somebody else’s life, and at 46 years old, I suddenly understood that life was not an open-ended proposition. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to live or die.

Among the slouched, paunchy mid-listers glomming free food in the book festival green room, the Bad Man stood out like a 6’3” golem in a seersucker suit. I knew who he was immediately, of course, not that I had read any of his books. But I knew his famous rap: self-confessed peeper, pervert, truant, miscreant, ex-drug addict, sober alcoholic and twice-divorced serial monogamist. He was part genius, part dipshit and 100% bad, bad, bad.

When he stood up to shake my hand I was surprised by his propriety. He was nervous and seemed oddly vulnerable. His Adam’s apple bobbed over his bowtie. He was a Lutheran Choirboy dressed for church with starched manners and a gaze that could warp steel. My Bad Girl sat up in her cell. She peered out at him through the bars and knew instantly that he was the man she had been looking for all along. He was the one who was going to set her free.

It took two more years before the Bad Girl managed to get a message out to the Bad Man, and when she finally did he immediately busted her out. I tried to stop the whole thing, I swear. I told her she was being selfish and irrational, and she just flipped me off. I told him that I was married, that I had children to protect, that I was middle-aged, miserable, peri-menopausal and unworthy. He said, “Those aren’t soul qualifications.” It turned out he loved both the Bad Girl and the Good Girl in equal measure and he wanted to help me put the two halves of my fractured self back together.

So I left the Good Man for the Bad Man, and simultaneously destroyed the whole Wacky Pack house of cards I had built on a lie about myself I’d made up in a moment of despair twenty years earlier. Friends turned away from me in disapproval and embarrassment.

Bad Girls, it seems, come with an expiration date. A young, single Bad Girl is sparkly and sexy, but past 40 she is camel toe and a smoker’s growl. She’s the cougar, leaning over the bar revealing a crêpey décolletage and dating herself by saying things like “let’s book” as she picks up the check and a sozzled frat boy. A Bad Woman is unseemly.

Only a bad woman would leave a perfectly good man and destroy her family for someone who refers to himself in the third person as “The Demon Dog.” I was not only condemnable by my tawdry actions and dubious choice, but by the era I lived in. A divorcee in 1976 was seen as liberated, but a divorcee in 2009 is just selfish, and an adulteress with children is that most unforgivable of creatures—a bad mother. I became, for the second time in my life, an outcast.

I felt shame, not because of the man I had chosen, but because I had gone and done the one thing I had spent two decades trying to avoid—I had recreated the exact circumstances of my own downfall, for my eldest daughter. At 13 years old, my firstborn was as full of passion and poetry as I was at that age. Her eyeliner started coming on thick, and I smelled cigarette smoke in her hair. I found a pot pipe in her room. I realized my sweet, tenderhearted daughter was going Bad Girl on me.

My daughter doesn’t have to contend with Manhattan in the swinging ’70s as she negotiates the turbulent waters of adolescence—instead she’s got “The Bad Girls Club” culture to contend with, which is worse.

Sex is no longer the bold, brave, independent adventure it was when I first started having it. The party that started in the ’70s has gone on too long and gotten too big. Bad Girls are a dime a dozen, “owning your sexuality” pretty much means giving it away to a culture that insists on sexual conformity from women. The challenge today is to raise a girl so fierce and sure of herself that she can blow off that party to do something better, like live authentically, pursue her interests, speak her mind. As mothers, we’ve got to put the “ass” back into Bad Girls, and raise Badass Girls who so are comfortable with themselves they can ignore all that tired Bad Girl shit.

This is why Bad Girls make such good mothers. We hate the status quo and can inoculate our children against its lamer forces. We have seen and done it all and there’s not one trick in the Bad Girl playbook that I can’t spot at sixty paces. There’s no lying to us or hiding from us. I am very good at busting my little Bad Girl.

When she slips into risky behavior, instead of pushing her away, I have tried to pull her in closer. She has managed to redirect her energy into art, politics, and being herself. We have had tough times together, but the worst, we hope, is over. She has emerged fierce, authentic, happy and healthy.

My daughter is also about to leave for boarding school, and the reflecting plotline of her story gives me the bends sometimes. But I am not sending her away, I am sending her forth, and that makes all the difference. She wanted to go to drama school, and I wanted it for her. I hope she finds her audience, and I hope she finds a different kind of drama than I did. I hope she never feels so unsupervised that she feels completely alone. God may or may not be watching her, but her mother always will be.

I’d ended up healing down in Long Beach with my girlfriend Amber who worked as a dominatrix out of a house in LA and kept us in money while I was all but worthless, sleeping all day on her couch, taking over half her drugs, which consisted mostly of the Percodans and Xanax she kept us in steadily enough for neither of us to get dopesick more than a few times in those months.

photo by Chris Bava (click to enlarge)

Amber had gotten kind of famous, a big fish in the small pond of fetish models and the BDSM scene. She taught extreme-sex education classes and got offered a high-paying job with her ex-girlfriend in San Francisco and said she had to take it, which left me without her. No way could I follow her dragging a foot and not able to work, and I couldn’t pay the rent in Long Beach. And without an apartment it was time to make some choices. I wanted to go with her, but I knew the answer would be no. Along with the issue of my physical and drug problems, she would be living with her ex-but-sort-of-still-current-girlfriend up there. And I was still in love with my wife Olivia, who’d left me when I relapsed, but didn’t divorce me so I’d still have her insurance if I came to my senses and went back to rehab. And Amber knew I loved Olivia. There wasn’t a future with us. So I saved myself the embarrassment of having her tell me there was no place for me in her life in San Francisco.

I had to leave the apartment she was leaving. And I knew I couldn’t keep living the way I’d been living so I entered a thirty-day residential rehab program.

I made it fifteen days before I called Johnny Mo to get me the hell out of there.

Things weren’t good. I’d turned 43. Since I was 18, I’d spent most of that time fucked up. That last stint in rehab worked and I thought I’d left my past in the past. I’d stayed clean for seven years. Rebuilt my life. Got married and got back playing music and started a recording studio that was making good money and good records for a few years. And then when I was on tour two years ago, I broke a finger. Re-broke it, actually, as it’s one that’s been broken a lot over the years of abuse and neglect. Even before this break, I had trouble closing a fist on my right hand. For two shows, I played with the finger duct-taped to another finger so I could hold a pick. The pain became too much. I went to an emergency room and got some Vicodin, thinking I’d grown up and could take them responsibly. The doctor gave me a hundred and twenty pills. The pills lasted five days, and I was off and running.

And here I was, a couple years later, broke, separated from Olivia, unemployed, with a shattered ankle that had escalated my opiate addiction and a new ex-girlfriend.

Before my latest relapse, Olivia had never seen me using. We’d met and been married while I was sober. While I had worked hard to be ethical and good and honest. She was a beautiful person and I hated myself for it, but I’d chosen drugs over our life together. She kicked me out of the house we’d bought and the life we’d made together.

Her last words to me were, “I love you too much to sit around and watch while you kill yourself.”

I hooked up with Amber, who was great, but who considered monogamy an archaic notion. She taught her sex classes all over the country, classes teaching women how to be a “gusher” when they climaxed. How to maintain a polymorphous relationship. How to properly hog-tie your partner without putting them at risk. How to use piercing needles for sexual play. How to use urethral sounds for pleasure and about a hundred other topics and who was already growing weary of me being too fucked up to fuck most of the time.

Before the rehab I’d just left, I wasn’t even really getting high anymore. I was, on a good day, getting just enough drugs to not feel sick. I hated myself with the intensity of a hurricane. It’s one thing to be young and stupid and think you’re only hurting yourself and whose business is what you do with your life anyway? It’s another thing when you’ve gotten clean, faced up to your actions and their repercussions on other people, made amends and become a good person and then started becoming the beast you used to be. I wondered how much longer I could live like this. How many more people who loved me could I keep letting down?

It was no way to plan for a long life. My next overdose could be my last and I wasn’t sure I was too scared by that anymore.

The day Johnny Mo picked me up when I walked out of rehab was pouring rain.

He wore a leather jacket against the wet and cold, or what passes for cold in a Southern California winter. He had Plasticsoul’s new CD Peacock Swagger on, which sounded like a great marriage between the Beatles and Badfinger and it lightened my mood right off.

“So what’s the plan?” he said.

“I just left rehab. I was hoping to get high.” I said it, not even sure if it was totally true. I mean, of course, I wanted to get high. But the price was becoming enormous and devastating. I was just over a week removed from the end of full-blown dope sickness. The first three days of cleaning out are a pain and suffering you can’t believe are happening. And the suffering gets wrapped in awareness that you did this to yourself. That you’d been doing it to yourself for years. Every cramp, every sandpaper hot rusty pained blink of your aching eyes, every stream and eruption of puke and piss and shit you can’t control escaping from your clenched, hurt body, every nerve ending going off like a trillion simultaneous electric shocks, every second of begging for sleep and not getting it. Through all of that, you sit there, rolling on the floor, despising yourself and swearing you’re never, never, never going through this again, no matter what.

And here I was, just over ten days removed from getting the poison out of my body, feeling not really terrible at all at that point, save some massive cravings to feel good again, and thinking, damn I’d love to get high. Love to feel good. Love to shut off the never-ending waves of anxiety and dread and fear and voices that flooded through my brain. I felt like a failure, too, so why not just accept that I was a fuckup? But I knew, too, always, where it ended up. It ended up with me lost, desperate, pleading to whatever force in the universe could possibly listen to please let this agony end.

“I’ve got about five 80-milligram Oxys left,” Johnny Mo said.

I laughed to myself when he said “about five.” A pill junkie might not know what day it is. What month or even year it is. They don’t know who’s the number-one pop singer or the newest famous reality TV star or their senator or whatever else passes for important news and information to most people. But they know, to the grain and spec, how many pills they have left once the number starts to get low. If you have six, you know it. If you have a hundred and eighty, you might not know how many you have left, but get under twenty and you know. The dumbest junkie I’ve ever met could do the quickest math imaginable about how much they had left and how long it could and would last. We can shift metric to standard in our heads and we can tally up the number of pills in our pockets faster than a room full of MIT grads with calculators.

“About five?” I said.

He smiled. “I have eight. You can have one, if you want. But just one. I don’t know where the next are coming from.” He lit a cigarette. “If we can make some money in the desert, I know a guy with some morphine. Then we’re set.”

And this, a single pill, while generous, was the sharpest of double-edged swords. One 80-milligram would have me floating pretty well for about four to six hours, maybe a little more if there was any Xanax or Valium to stretch the high. And then what?

It’s always better to say no to a limited supply. But, then, eventually everything is a limited supply.

“I’ll take it,” I said. “And thanks.”

“You sure?” Johnny Mo said and I couldn’t tell if he was worried for me or if he just didn’t want to put a dent in his dwindling number of pills.

I looked at him and he gave me the little round blue pill with the “80” marked on it. I could chew it, but that would take about ten minutes to get in my system, plus it dulled the high a little bit. I reached in the backseat where Johnny Mo had a bunch of empty pill bottles. I dropped the pill into the bottom of one and started grinding it with the end of a Bic pen to get it down to a powder. Once the powder was fine enough, I took the top end off the pen, licked it and tasted the beautiful residue of the OxyContin, and poked the ink tube out so the tube of the pen could act as a straw. I thought briefly about only snorting half of the pill. Forty milligrams would probably get me going just fine to start, with my body clean. It wouldn’t be the worst idea to save some for later. I snorted all eighty, though, hoping for a better high.

“New sober date,” Johnny Mo said, smiling.

I didn’t smile back and said, “Yup.”

We didn’t say anything for a while and I started picking at this infected abscess on my left forearm with one of the 22-gauge piercing needles Amber kept around the house for needle play. They took all of the ones I had at rehab intake, but this one was left from a coat Johnny Mo had brought me. This lump had been around for about a month, stubborn as poverty, and it had turned hard as a marble under the skin. Still, some days, I could poke around enough with a fresh needle to get some pus out, which meant that it might not have to be lanced. Soon, though, I was going to have to hit a hardware store and grab an X-Acto knife and slice the damn thing open if it wouldn’t cooperate.

I was, I noticed in a warm sudden rush, feeling pretty good. The opiates had kicked in and were busy ironing out every kinked nerve in my body. It was like every good thing in the world at once: the feeling of a warm robe out of the dryer, a cotton candy pink sunset over the ocean, a blow job, cold water after exercise, Al Kooper’s organ in “Like a Rolling Stone,” a peaceful solitude that made you feel like you fit in to every fractured crevice of a fragmented hateful planet. A first kiss. Something like love, flowering inside of you.

Johnny Mo said, “So, you up for some money?”

I was broke. “Sure. Where in the desert are we headed?”

“Twentynine Palms,” he said. “Actually Wonder Valley. To see my dad.”

“You have a dad?”

“Everyone has a dad.”

“You’ve never mentioned him,” I said.

“I don’t remember you mentioning yours.”

I thought about my dad for a moment. Feeling good from the pills, I felt a world away from his influence. “My father killed at least one man,” I said. I didn’t talk about that dead man much, but he still floated to the surface of my consciousness whenever I didn’t expect it. I’d gotten resigned that he always would. There’d be strings of months where I’d only get two hours of sleep before I woke up, seeing him dead on a woodpile. I’d be able to forget the scene for a while, and then the cycle of nightmares would start again. Sometimes they were of the man he killed. The worse ones were of my mother’s suicide.

Johnny Mo looked over. “You shitting me?”

“He killed this guy in front of me when I was 13,” I said, and told him about the man who came to buy the used car. The man my father killed with the axe. I didn’t tell him my father’s side of the story, because I don’t think I believed it. The side of the story where my dad said he killed the guy because the guy had made my dad from his days when he did undercover work. That he killed the guy to protect me and my mother. It could be true—anything was possible. But I doubted it and I didn’t mention it to Johnny Mo. “He was a state trooper. He got away with it.”

“And I thought Mike’s dad was bad,” Johnny Mo said, talking about the guy who’d shot my ankle with the .22 in Vegas.

“I would say Mike’s dad was pretty awful.”

We drove a while before Johnny Mo said, “How’s the ankle?”

It felt, always, like your foot feels after it’s been asleep and starts to jangle with needles of pain. At its best, with some painkillers in me like now, it had a relentless throb of hurt. When I wasn’t medicated, I could barely walk on the thing. Johnny Mo felt responsible, to a degree, that my ankle had been fucked up on that deal that he set up. It wasn’t his fault, but I wasn’t above making him feel a trickle of guilt about it if it could get me more OxyContin.

“It hurts like hell,” I said. “But, what can you do?”

“I am sorry about that,” he said.

I didn’t want to talk about it if he wasn’t going to offer me more pills. “So, why are we seeing your dad? He have money?”

“I was hoping to borrow his truck.”

“You don’t know anyone in LA with a truck?” I said.

“Not a big truck. Before he couldn’t work, he had a water-delivery business out in Twentynine Palms. Lot of people on tank water there. So, he’s got this big truck with a water tank off the back of it. But I only want the flatbed part. I got a deal on some scrap metal.”

I wondered how Johnny Mo had any idea of what scrap metal was worth. He worked, when he worked, at Amoeba Records. Or he sold drugs. “What constitutes a deal on scrap metal? How would you even know?”

“There’s this abandoned construction site from a casino they were going to build before the recession. I know a security guard who’ll let me in and take some of the scrap. Scrap metal’s worth a fortune.”

“That’s not a deal. That’s stealing,” I said.

“It’s a very good deal. Don’t get all semantic on me.”

“Stealing copper wire is jail time,” I said. “They take that shit very seriously.”

“So, we won’t steal copper wire.”

“Copper’s worth the most,” I said. “Plus, all of it’s stealing. The same crime whether you take steel or aluminum or whatever.”

“So we will take the copper,” Johnny Mo said.

I changed the CD to Centro-matic’s Redo the Stacks. One of the great things about an opiate high is that good music sounds so incredible. Like it’s seeping into your cells on some level it doesn’t normally. An invisible goodness, the way radiation is an invisible bad one.

“This is your way to get money?” I say. “Stealing scrap metal?”

“You got any better ideas?”

The rain picked up as we headed out toward the desert, past the sad towns of the Inland Empire, past the former steel town of Fontana, which all the movie people called “Fontucky” when they had to shoot there, where almost a century ago Henry Kaiser had been an early golden god of the shining West Coast, past Riverside with its restored and at times beautiful downtown and then into the hills where junk towns like Beaumont and Banning sat without much seeming purpose. Billboards announced swap meets and chain restaurants off the 10 freeway. Signs most people took that these were towns made to pass through, not towns to settle in.

I thought about stealing scrap metal and if I had any better ideas. There was surely a lot of money to be had in the world, but I didn’t have any thoughts on how to get my hands on it. Sober, I could get paid for playing guitar or sitting at a poker table. Using, I wasn’t worth much. The band I’d formed had fired me twice. Once in the old days and again when I relapsed on a reunion tour three years ago. I said, “Amber’s making a thousand dollars this weekend doing some sex demo.”

“What does she do? Fuck someone for that money?”

“No,” I said. “Well, sort of.”

“Make up your mind,” he said.

“It’s a workshop teaching women how to ejaculate.”

“Like those gushers in porn?”

I nodded. “Amber has this theory that all women can do it. So, she teaches workshops in it.”

“So who does she fuck?”

“Her girlfriend up in San Francisco,” I said.

“That doesn’t bother you, dude?”

“They don’t really fuck. Amber gets fisted in front of all these people.”

“Yeah, that’s not like fucking at all,” Johnny Mo said, laughing.

“The front row at these things, they practically have to wear ponchos. It’s like a porno Gallagher show.”

“And that shit doesn’t bother you?”

“Wouldn’t matter if it did,” I said. And I thought again about what I offered Amber at this point in our lives and I didn’t think I could mount much of an argument for being her first choice in love right now. I cared about her. When she was gone, there was an ache of loneliness I couldn’t even find a name for. But I knew what real love was with Olivia, and me and Amber were just friends who loved each other who fucked. She didn’t ache for me when she was gone. I was lucky enough she kept me around as much as she did. It was amazing to me that anyone was able to make love work in this world, the way our greasy, damaged souls clatter together.

“I don’t think I could handle my girlfriend sleeping with chicks,” he said. “Unless, you know, I was there.”

“She does that, too,” I said.

“Well, that’s something,” Johnny Mo said.

“That it is.”

We got off the 10 and started the climb into Morongo Valley on Highway 62. I poked holes around the abscess on my arm and blotted the blood with the tail of my shirt, which had started to look like a gory Rorschach test.

“Your dad live alone?” I said.

Johnny Mo said, “The thing is, my dad doesn’t much leave his place. He’s gotten fat.”

“Too fat to go out?” I said. “That kind of fat?”

“Actually, yes,” he said. “He’s pretty sick. And over five hundred pounds, I’d say.”

“Jesus,” I said. “And he’s alone.” I wondered about his life. Alone, unable to go out. How could anyone spend day after day like that? I thought about a guy in my friend Brad’s building in Chicago. He was dead a month before anyone knew it. Finally, the smell gave it away. A month of mail piled up at the door and him dead in a recliner and no one in the world missed him enough to even know. I thought, too, of the guy whose apartment Wendell and I cleaned out that one time for the cleaning company he worked for. He’d been dead for weeks. No one to take the body. His possessions auctioned off at public storage. The possessions Wendell and I didn’t take, anyway.

“My mom’s up in Humboldt,” he said. He lit another cigarette and offered me one that I took. “What about yours? She stay with that killer father of yours?”

“My mom died,” I tell him, trying not to let the details and memories slug me. I cracked the window and watched the smoke swirl out. I tried to think about something else. “Has your dad always been fat?”

“Fat, but not obese. This is new. The last few years, he’s let himself go.”

Johnny Mo’s dad lived in a double-wide in a half-deserted blight of a trailer park outside of Twentynine Palms. I don’t know what I was expecting when I heard he’s let himself go, but I wasn’t ready for what we walked into. The two trailers on either side of his were abandoned, both of them littered with graffiti and empty liquor bottles and beer cans.

Johnny Mo shook his head. Less than ten feet from the steps, there was a mattress, soggy from the rain that had turned to snow. In the center was a giant burn hole that went all the way down to the springs and through to the sand beneath it. A lizard zipped from under it, stopped, did its little push-ups for a few seconds and darted back out of sight.

“What’s that about?” I asked.

“Pop smokes in bed. He falls asleep a lot.”

There was a rusted green dumpster, overflowing with garbage. Next to it was, I guessed, the truck we were supposed to borrow. It didn’t looked like it had been moved in a while and it sagged in an ugly unfit way on a flat rear tire. It sank into the sand and the fractured asphalt.

Johnny Mo walked up the creaky stairs and pounded on the screen door. “Pop!” he yelled.

No answer. He pounded again, waited, and then again even louder.

The door swung open and an enormous man stood there. He was too large to get out of the door and he stood in a pair of shorts and nothing more, his gut hanging like a puckered waterfall of flesh, hanging so far down so that all you could see was the bottom tips of his shorts at the tops of his knees.

“Hey kid,” he said.

The minute I saw him, I don’t know why, I got a terrible feeling and my first thought was that I should go back to rehab. This life simply didn’t work anymore. I felt a familiar dread of self-loathing and wondered why I’d let myself get into this again. Here I was, with Johnny Mo, about to do something stupid for money. And if I was lucky, the best-case scenario was that I’d make a few bucks, be able to get high for a day or two, and then be flattened and wrecked by despair for who knows how long. I felt uneasy, like something was about to go horribly wrong, and all I was doing was sitting around and watching. But, then I told myself, I’d had these feelings before, these vague worries that everything was about to go terribly off, and then nothing had happened. Or, rather, the same life just happened over and over. Heavy wet snowflakes fell over us, but didn’t stick to the ground.

The fat man said, “Who the fuck is this?” pointing to me with a cigarette jutting out from between his ring and middle finger.

Johnny Mo introduced me as “A buddy of mine.” When the fat man didn’t respond, Johnny Mo said, “We were hoping to borrow the truck for some work.” Johnny Mo lit a cigarette.

“Some work? That what you’re calling it now?”

“Pop, it’s freezing out here.”

The fat man pushed the door open and let us in. To the right was a living room. The fat man took up the whole hallway, so turning left wasn’t an option and we went into the living room, while Johnny Mo’s dad followed us, forced to walk sideways like a hermit crab in his own hallway.

We sat on a ratty couch in a living room crowded with boxes in piles against every wall in the place. A love seat with a footstool made of a milk crate covered in a pillow faced the television. The walls were covered with pictures of ’50s film and TV stars.

“Big fan?” I said

Jack said, “I used to be a big shot in TV.”

“An actor?”

Johnny Mo said, “Pop, can we borrow your truck?”

Jack looked at him and smiled. “You can have the fucking truck for all the good it’ll do you. Fucking two-ton paperweight.” He lit a cigarette with the end of his previous one and dropped the old one on the floor, still lit. He said, “Not an actor. Cameraman. Jackie Gleason’s personal cameraman. Jackie wouldn’t shoot a home fucking movie without me behind the camera.” He laughed. “I shot all his private porn, too.”

“Jackie Gleason porn?” I said and tried to keep the image at bay.

“That man got more pussy than Elvis and Frank Sinatra combined.”

“Really?” I said.

“Danny Thomas, too,” he said. “Wouldn’t work without me.”

I looked around. The walls, sure enough, had what looked to be framed, signed pictures of Gleason, Thomas, Danny Kaye, Sophia Loren and a bunch of other faded and mostly forgotten stars of the ’50s.

I said, “Danny Thomas did porn, too?”

Jack laughed. “No. Danny did his kinky shit behind closed doors. No cameras.”

“What kinky shit?”

“I’m going to tell you something disgusting, kid,” Jack said.

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just tried to look attentive. “Okay.”

“You know what Danny Thomas was into?”

Johnny Mo said, “Don’t tell this story.”

Jack ignored him. “Danny Thomas used to hire two whores to come over to his house and have one tie him up under a glass table and take a dump over his head while the other whore jerked him off.”

“Really?” I said.

Johnny Mo said, “I don’t believe that shit for a second.” He took a drag. “Plus, they’re called prostitutes, Pop. ‘Whore’ is an ugly word.”

Jack laughed and his laugh turned to a painful-sounding phlegmy cough. When he got his breath back, he said, “Believe what you want to believe, but for years after that, every Hollywood whore I knew called shitting on a table or shitting on a guy’s chest a ‘Danny Thomas.’” He laughed again. “Had to come from somewhere. And I knew a lot of whores. A lot of crazy fucks are into that. And every whore called it a Danny Thomas.”

I wasn’t in the business of judging people’s fetishes, not living with Amber. Some things were my thing and some weren’t, but so long as people didn’t fuck kids or animals, who was I to judge much of anything on this planet?

I looked down at the cigarette he’d thrown down, still burning on the floor.

Johnny Mo said, “The truck’s not working?” He sounded crushed. His plan, slim and fragile as it was, floating away like a marine layer under the noon sun.

Jack saw me staring at the lit cigarette. “Don’t sweat it, kid. The floor’s asbestos. You couldn’t burn this shithole down with a flamethrower, welcome as that might be.”

Johnny Mo went to the phone booth of a kitchen, a kitchen so small I wondered how Jack could possibly get in and out of it. He came out with two beers and handed me one.

Jack said, “Get me one while you’re being so generous with my liquor.”

“You’re not supposed to be drinking, Pop.”

“Not supposed to be smoking, either, but if I quit smoking, I’d be dead.”

I wondered how that logic might work and Jack started to tell me right away.

He pointed to his enormous chest. “If I sleep for more than twenty minutes at a time, I go into congestive heart failure.”

I took a long drink of beer and lit a cigarette, happy to be somewhere I didn’t have to be banished to a porch to smoke, especially with the snow outside. “How do you not sleep for over twenty minutes?”

Jack stuck out his hand. Between his ring and middle fingers was an open sore, cracked and bleeding. It looked like a cauliflower of scab and pus and pain. “Just stick a filterless Pall Mall there, take a puff and sleep until it burns my finger.”

I felt myself making a face. “Jesus.”

He flopped down in his love seat and took a drink of his beer. “Yeah. Nice, huh? It’s a hell of a life.” He sounded more tired than any man I’d ever heard. Every breath was a wheeze.

“The truck’s no good?” Johnny Mo said again.

Jack looked at him with a distant expression, like he was thinking about something else. “You know I’ve loved you, right son?”

“What are you talking about, Pop?”

Jack looked at me. “We’ve had our problems, but he was a hell of a good son sometimes.”

I didn’t know what to say. But it didn’t matter. Jack took a hit of his cigarette and fell asleep.

Johnny Mo said, “I can’t believe that fucking truck’s dead.”

“What’s the plan now?”

Johnny Mo shrugged. We sat drinking Jack’s beer and watching him jolt awake every ten minutes or so. He’d jump from his seat, make some hideous snort and drop the cigarette on the asbestos rug. He’d light a fresh cigarette and fall back asleep.

Around 2 am, I was drunk and trying to figure out a way to get another of Johnny Mo’s Oxys. An ad came on the late-night TV advertising money for gold.

“That’s it,” Johnny Mo said.

“You have gold you’ve been holding out on?”

“No, but I know where to get some.” He took a drink of his beer. “Dude, this could be a little ugly, but we’d get some gold. We could pawn it for the morphine.”

“How ugly?”

“You read about those guys last year that tried to rob Lincoln’s grave?”

I hadn’t heard of much of anything in the last year. I could barely name the president, as much as I kept up with the world outside my life. “You want to rob Lincoln’s grave?”

“No, dude. Fuck Lincoln. My grandmother was buried with a shitload of jewelry on. A couple of miles from here.”

“Buried? Are you fucking crazy?”

“She’s my family,” he said. “If it doesn’t bother me, why should it bother you?”

I lowered my voice, not wanting Jack to hear me. “You want to rob a grave?”

“My grandmother’s grave. Not some stranger.”

“Listen to yourself,” I said.

“Dude, she’s been dead since I was a kid. She’s probably a skeleton by now.”

“They have all sorts of chemicals that stop a body from decomposing naturally,” I said.

“So, we’ll buy some K-Y or something to slide the rings off, if she’s still like a person.” He paused. “With fingers and skin and shit.”

I looked over at Jack, who was a snoring wheeze next to us. I didn’t know what to say to this.

Johnny Mo said, “She’s in this little plot out in the desert. No one would see us. We could be in and out with gold to pawn. I really don’t see the problem.”

“You don’t?” I said. “You don’t see the problem?”

He shook his head, looking a little tired. “I hear you. It’s an extreme move. But it’s money and I don’t know how the hell else we’re going to get it.”

I looked at him hard and thought about it. She was dead. Who would we be hurting, exactly? “Give me two of your OxyContin and I’ll go with you.”

“Dude, I only have a few left. We get this money, we’ll have plenty for both of us.”

“So, give me two now.”

“You’re just out of rehab. You don’t need much.”

“A hundred and sixty milligrams isn’t much,” I said. “You want me to go with you, that’s the price.”

“You have to do more than go with me, you have to help.”

“I’ll dig,” I said. “In the casket, you’re on your own.”

“Well, then you’re digging a lot,” he said and handed me two blue pills. “Maybe all the fucking digging.”

I pocketed one of the OxyContin and, in a hurry, chewed the other one. I took several deep breaths, trying to will the drug to seep more quickly into my system, but I knew it would be ten minutes or more until I felt better.

It had, at least, stopped raining, stopped snowing. I hoped the ground wouldn’t be too hard to dig. I’d done some work in Wonder Valley once, digging a new hole for a thousand-gallon water tank and it hadn’t been so bad. But, then, it was dry and it was summer. The heat was too much, but the ground came up easily in barely resistant shovelfuls of decomposed granite, which was what most of the desert soil was made of. Now, though, with all this rain, and then snow, I had no idea what the ground might be like.

The graveyard looked like something from a period piece movie. It didn’t look like anybody had been buried here in a while—the kind of place you might visit in an old town. Like going to see Lizzy Borden’s grave or something. The clouds had parted and the light from the moon made the desert look luminous. There was light, but little color, like a black-and-white movie. The fence around the graveyard was old and broken in several places.

Johnny Mo carried a spade shovel and a flashlight that was dimmed by low batteries. I had the other shovel. We’d gotten both from his father’s garage. Mine was a square-edged one and we followed his weak beam of light and I listened to his and my boots softly crunch in the dirt. We’d grabbed work gloves and I put mine on, getting ready to dig when we found what we were looking for. He stopped.

“This is easier in the day.”

“We’re not robbing a grave in daylight,” I said.

“I didn’t say we were doing it in the day. I just said it’s easier to find in the day.”

“You better get the right one,” I said.

“Don’t worry. They’re marked. We won’t disturb any stranger’s graves.”

I didn’t say to him that I didn’t really care about that. His grandmother, after all, was as much a stranger to me as anyone else buried here. I just wanted to make sure the person we dug up was the one he was sure had gold on her when they put her down there.

The sand and snow shined in the moonlight. Wind rustled through sagebrush and smoke trees on the perimeter of the graveyard. I followed Johnny Mo and his jerky faint light as he paused and looked at the beaten grave markers. Some were chipped, a couple cracked from age and low-grade earthquakes that had peppered the desert over the years. We looked for what seemed like a long time, but probably wasn’t. I was only scared of being caught, so seconds lingered longer than they normally would have in a fear-stretched sense of time.

He stopped again, looking down.

I said, “This is it?”

“This is it.”

The pill was starting to work on me and I already dreaded the fact that they wouldn’t be working like this in a few days. Stay clean for a couple weeks and you might get three or four days of good highs. After that, life was back to just trying not to be sick every day. For now, though, I had the calm electricity of not giving a shit about anything or anyone. My head was gracefully quiet and I started digging a few feet to the left of the gravestone. Johnny Mo started on the right. The ground wasn’t too bad. Not nearly as hard as I feared it might be.

“How much morphine are we getting?” I said.

He shoveled. Shrugged. “Depends on how much gold. What price we can get. A lot of variables.”

I dug deeper. My muscles ached with the labor, but it was labor with a payoff and I felt the sweat on my body grow cold in the night air. Every once in a while, I paused to see if I could hear anything other than us disturbing the world at this hour. I looked at my watch. 5 am. We had less than an hour until the sun started swelling from behind the mountains out towards Amboy. People in the desert got up early.

“We need to get this done,” I said.

“Really?” Johnny Mo said. “I thought we could linger. Take our time robbing a grave.” He stood straight, looked up at me. “Stop stating the obvious. You think I’m stupid?”

I laughed. “You’re not stupid. You’re a lot of things, but not stupid.”

“What the fuck does that mean? I’m a lot of things?”

“Dude. Look at us.”

He seemed to think about it for a second. He lit a cigarette and handed it to me and then lit another for himself. “Fair enough.”

We kept digging, not taking a break for the cigarettes, so the smoke filled my nose as it curled up and I breathed hard. I hit something hard. It had a warm thuck to it, the sound of the shovel hitting wood.

“I think I hit the coffin,” I said.

In a moment, he’d hit it on his side. The soil deeper down was packed harder than the sand on the surface, more like a dusty clay that came out in fist-sized chunks. We dug faster than I thought either of us were capable of. In under ten minutes, we had most of the dirt off the top of the coffin.

Johnny Mo helped me dig down to the handles on the side. We tried to lift the top off. It wouldn’t budge. We dug a little deeper to get to the big center handle, but it was an odd hardware. Not like the clips on a suitcase or a guitar case. I didn’t see any way to get into the coffin.

“I think we’re fucked,” I said. “Maybe they make these with some safety contraption.”

“Now why the fuck would they do that? It’s not like people try to get out of these.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Saying what, exactly?”

“Maybe they make them so you can’t open them. I don’t know.”

Johnny Mo muttered something about not coming this far and before I could register what was happening, he slammed the shovel onto the top of the coffin several times. He got it to chip and splinter a bit, but it didn’t seem to give.

He leapt from the ground above and started jumping up and down on the top of the coffin.

“Help me,” he said.

The sky to the east warned light was only a half hour away. It seemed as good an idea as any at this point. I joined him.

“Try to stay in the middle,” he said. “It’s weaker there.”

We jumped up and down. At first, it wasn’t much different from jumping on a hardwood floor. Maybe twenty jumps in, though, I felt it start to give. We kept on. My feet ached, my bad ankle felt like it was being hit with a hammer with every jump, but I was glad I’d worn my steel-toe boots into rehab because they were the only shoes I had when I left. The rest of my stuff was scattered like buckshot all over LA County at various friends’ places.

The next time I came down, the coffin totally gave way. My leg broke through the top and I next felt something hard give and snap like a twig under my foot. I rolled my bad ankle and it knocked me off balance. I was down to the top of my thigh through the wood and I’d slipped onto my side. I felt sharp pain in my upper leg. I saw a chunk of wood as long as a ruler deeply imbedded into my thigh. My bad ankle throbbed from whatever I’d broken in the coffin. I tried to lift myself out. Splinters ripped my leg and had lodged deep in my skin and muscle above the knee. I needed Johnny Mo’s help to get out. After we’d broken a hole, we broke through the rest of the top with the shovels. I felt warm blood on my leg.

Johnny Mo had smashed through most of the wood and dirt fell inside as he frantically made his way toward where the neck and the fingers should have been.

“Hold the flashlight for me,” he said.

I aimed the beam of light to where I’d broken through the top. My blood was on the splintered wood of the coffin and for a moment I got scared about being caught but quickly realized my DNA wasn’t in any system. Fear had me thinking crazy. The only thing we could have left that were in the system were fingerprints and we were safe there with the gloves.

Underneath where I’d fallen into the coffin, I saw what I’d felt break under my foot. It was a hip bone and I’d shattered it into several pieces. I shook my head. Why this made it seem worse, I don’t know.

Johnny Mo said, “Could you please hold that light where I’m fucking looking?”

I moved it up by the skull. There didn’t seem to be any flesh left on his grandmother’s body and I was relieved. Clothes still clung to some of the bones. They looked red under the flashlight, but they could have been some other color in full light and I hoped not to find out.

“Yes!” Johnny Mo said.

Down in the coffin, he’d snapped a locket off that sat near the ribcage. He turned and, kneeling, started on the fingers. He must have put some weight on the body because I heard more bones breaking and saw him collapse face down and then push himself up. He stayed down, working one hand’s finger bones, then the other. He jumped out of the grave.

“Four pieces,” he said, smiling. “Not bad.”

“You sure they’re gold?” I said, thinking that she might have been one of those old women who wears crap-ass costume jewelry and brags about how much it’s worth. My family was positively clogged with people clinging to shit they swore was worth keeping that was junk.

“She had money,” he said. “I’m as sure as I can be right now. You want to put it back?”

“No.”

“Then why ask me if it’s real now?”

He had a point. “Because it occurred to me now.”

“Just ’cause shit occurs to you doesn’t mean you have to say it. Stop being so negative, man.”

I nodded. “Let’s get moving.”

“We have to fill this in.”

“The sun’s coming up, dude.”

He looked at me like I was a stupid kid. “We are about to pawn a shitload of old jewelry not more than twenty miles from here. I’d like to be out of this town when people see this.” He pointed to the hole in the ground.

I started shoveling the dirt and sand back into the hole. My ankle screamed with pain. My thigh was sticky with blood, which had started to get cold on my jeans. I’d need to get a look at it once we made it back to the car.

We filled the grave back up, but there was a problem. With the coffin open, more dirt went inside of it so there was still an indentation in the ground when we were done. It looked like a sinkhole.

“It’ll have to do,” Jonny Mo said.

We found out later that while we were out there somewhere, in the quiet desert night, Jack blew his head off with a shotgun. No note. But, walking out of the graveyard, we didn’t know that. We didn’t know, either, this long day and night in the desert would send us both back to rehab. Not right away. We still had a few ugly runs left in us, but Jack’s house and the night in the graveyard was a turning point in a life of turning points that sent us back to trying to get clean, hoping it was our last time.

In the next few hours, we would sell the gold at Rocky’s Pawn Shop in Yucca Valley for a stunning eight hundred dollars, which got us enough morphine for a while. A hundred and twenty 30-milligram pills—the time-release kind, but you could get around the time release and get a good dose from them. We would go to the Highway 62 Diner where, even though I was starving, I would only drink a Diet Coke because I didn’t want to screw up the high from the last OxyContin and the two morphine I’d taken. I felt so aligned with the world, like all the molecules had lined up in their infinite potential patterns to let me feel good for once, even though I knew it couldn’t last. But still, in that moment, things were peaceful and peace was one of the rarest visitors my head ever received and I wanted to savor it. I watched Johnny Mo eat while I took wood chunks and thick splinters out of my thigh with a pair of needle-nose pliers and the waitress winced while she watched me from behind the counter. I figured I’d take a shower or bath later and soak the slivers out and try to avoid an infection.

After we left the diner, we went back to Jack’s double-wide. We should have just split after the graveyard, but we had been in such a hurry to get to the pawnshop, and then the dealer, we hadn’t gone back for our stuff at Jack’s.

It was still morning, coming up toward a sunny noon and it had stayed cold. The snow had stuck to the ground and glistened on the ocotillo and smoke trees and cholla. The door was closed, but unlocked and we went in and found him in the back bedroom, sitting up in his bed with what was left of his head tilted sideways and leaning against the wall. I’d never seen a gun suicide before. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t what I saw. What I had horrifyingly expected—parts of his head and hair and brain and bone splattered behind and above him—was there. But what I hadn’t expected was the image that stayed with me for months and I guessed would for years after that morning. His left eye was moved across what was left of his face. Like it was looking at us as we entered the doorway, and then stayed looking toward the door when I was looking at him straight on. His right eye looked forward and his left sat nearly where his left ear should have been. His jaw was gone, his throat spread and open so that I saw the bone of his spinal cord from the front.

“Jesus,” Johnny Mo said. “Fuck.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was like all the words at my disposal, all the words that had clanged around in my head and fallen out of my mouth all the years I’d been alive were worthless and hollow and I might as well spit up sand as talk for all the good it could do.

Johnny Mo walked out of the bedroom. I heard him on the phone, probably calling the cops or an ambulance or whatever. It was only then, with the sound of his voice starting to come into my brain, that I realized the television was still on and it reminded me of all the car accidents I’d ever had and how it always surprised me after the accident, in the quiet of the wreckage, how the radio was always still playing.

On the floor, I looked at all the criss-cross patterns of burning cigarettes Jack had dropped over the years, waking him up, over and over and over, when all he wanted, needed, probably, was some sleep he knew he would never get again.

but that was all a few hours down the road. At dawn, before things would turn so ugly they’d scar whatever good had come of the morning, when the day still looked swollen with promise, we left the graveyard and started back toward Johnny Mo’s car.

The sun burned a faint sepia yellow as it came over the mountains. We walked back to the car with our tools, Johnny Mo getting farther and farther ahead of me as I dragged my bloody and damaged right leg behind me, wincing and sweating and seeing my breath as the weak cold light swelled slowly into the morning air.

It was a Saturday night. Mia, Tits, and I headed over to Tecate Flats in search of stimulation. When we arrived, Flaco and Rico were sitting in the main yard, listening to Dire Straits, which was odd, since I’d only ever heard Tejano playing on that boom box. They looked ridiculously happy, almost too happy.

“Que onda!” they yelled, grinning ecstatically.

“What the fuck are you guys on?” Mia asked, smiling and motioning with her hand. “And where’s mine?”

“No shit!” Tits laughed. “You guys are flyin’!”

Proprietor, photo by Jeff Spirer (click to enlarge)

Tits was an interesting character. Her most remarkable asset was both a blessing and a curse. At 13 she had the biggest knockers I’d ever seen, hence the nickname. But unlike most overly endowed women, she was quite svelte, which made her a real freak of nature. On this particular night, the mammoth bosom was stuffed into a low-cut postman’s vest she’d swiped from a mail truck earlier in the day. Rico—who had a Pablo Escobaresque penchant for pubescent girls—took one look and was smitten.

“You are in for a real treat tonight, mis amores,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Come on, hop in the Caddy.”

“Where are we goin’?” Tits asked with an angelic look on her face.

“That, mi amor, is a secret,” he said, smiling slyly.

“Well, when are we gonna be back?” she asked, putting a cigarette into her mouth. “My dad wants me home by midnight.”

“Then we shall get you home by midnight, Cinderella,” he said, lighting the cigarette.

Since Mia and I had no curfew to speak of, it didn’t matter where we were going or how long we’d be there. It could have been a weeklong cruise to the Mexican Riviera for all we cared. Our parents would have flipped and contacted the authorities after a few days, but that was beside the point.

After bidding Flaco adios, we piled into the tricked-out Biarritz and were on our way. A half hour later, we pulled into the driveway of what appeared to be an auto body shop.

“I have been wanting to bring you here,” Rico said, driving around to the rear of the building, “but needed to be certain I could trust you.”

My curiosity was piqued and running at full tilt. The first thought that popped into my head was CHOP SHOP, but I couldn’t figure out why he’d brought us there.

“Okay,” he said, quickly surveying the area, “vamos, rápido!”

We quickly got out the car and made a dash for the door, where we were greeted by two men, both decked out in garb similar to Rico’s.

“Buenas noches, Jefe,” one of them said, kissing Rico on the cheek.

The other followed suit.

After conversing in Spanish for a few minutes, Rico made the necessary introductions. Then he clapped his hands together and said, “Okay, mis amores, are you ready to party?”

“What do you mean?” Tits asked naively, batting her eyelashes.

The coy act had been going on since she’d shaken Rico’s hand, and it was all part of a well-calculated scheme. Biologically speaking, Tits was merely 13—practically a baby—but in siren years, she was pushing 30. The girl was a ruthlessly skillful operator who was only interested in what a man had to offer, and this man, quite obviously, had much to offer.

“Allow me to show you what I mean,” Rico laughed, wrapping his arm around her waist.

Without further ado, our hosts escorted us into a spacious cement-lined room that was strategically hidden on the opposite side of the building. As I walked in, I nearly croaked from shock. Inside that bunker, was a mother lode of cocaine, bag after bag after bag, from floor to ceiling—it was breathtaking.

The girls and I let out a collective gasp, which caused our hosts to burst out laughing.

“Omigod! Omigod! Omigod!” Tits exclaimed repeatedly.

“Someone fucking pinch me,” I said, gaping at the magnificent vision that sat before my eyes.

“Woooo hoooo!” Mia yelled, pinching my ass. “Let’s party, man!”

Which is precisely what we did. Unfortunately, my vivid, often paranoid imagination was lurking the entire time. The fact that Rico was obviously a major-league drug trafficker—while certainly thrilling—was a bit unnerving. I was coked-up out of my gourd, and in my mind’s eye, kept seeing graphic images of my own murder preceded by hours of rape and torture. Of course, it was only delusional nonsense that was being fueled by the drugs, but as I’d find out later, it wasn’t entirely illogical.

Around midnight, we piled back into the Caddy and headed home. Planning to make a move on Tits, Rico insisted that Mia and I be dropped off first. Much to our surprise, he gave us a fat bindle as a parting gift. And if that weren’t enough, he asked if it were enough. The guy gave new meaning to the words “chivalry” and more important, “munificence”—as we’d soon learn, when he began to feed our habits regularly and liberally, seemingly out of the “goodness” of his heart. It seemed too easy, too perfect, which it was, of course, but I’m getting ahead of myself again . . .

Mia and I thanked him profusely and got out of the car.

As we stood on the stoop of her father’s house, waving goodbye, a head popped out of the front door.

“And where have you two been?” the head asked, staring into our vastly dilated pupils.

It was Mia’s brother, Heath, who was ten years our senior. He knew we were soaring, but wasn’t sure how we’d gotten off the ground.

Mia answered with a grin and two words: “Fat Wallet.”

His eyes lit up like asteriated sapphires.

Fat Wallet was code for cocaine. Mia and Heath’s father was a diehard jazz fan, with an extensive vinyl collection that had to be worth a fortune. Whether records were spinning or the pianola was playing, the joint was always jumpin’ whenever he was around. Amid it all, Mia and I had discovered that Fats Waller was a hoot and a half when you’re high. One night, while searching for a flat surface on which to mince cocaine, Fats beckoned from the phonograph. From that moment on, whenever cocaine was snorted under that roof, he joined in. Mia dubbed the ritual “Fat Wallet.” She had a knack for paronomasia, and was also a skilled parodist. She could have given Weird Al a run for his money any day of the week.

After snorting through the eightball in record time, the three of us hopped into Heath’s truck and set out on what would prove to be a near-disastrous cocaine search.

“Okay, guys,” Heath said, pulling into a 7-11 parking lot in Garden Grove, “I’m not sure if it’s cool to bring you along, so just hang out here for a while.”

Mia and I got out of the truck, and walked around to the driver’s side window.

“How long are you going to be?” she asked.

“Ten minutes max.” And he was gone.

She and I went into the store to buy some water, and after chatting with the cashier for a spell, went back out. Seconds later, a police car pulled into the lot, and merely seconds after that, Heath’s truck appeared. The instant he caught sight of the black-and-white, he gunned it, leaving Mia and me in the lurch. My initial feeling was anger, but his reaction was perfectly understandable. He was wired to the hilt, and unlike us, if he were busted he’d go straight to County.

We watched as he sped off into the night.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Mia whispered, glancing over at the cops, “before they spot us.”

“I’m right behind you,” I whispered back. “Whatever you do, don’t turn around.”

We sauntered aimlessly along the eerily quiet boulevard until reaching a Jack in the Box restaurant.

“Detour,” she said, grabbing my arm. “We’ll lie low in here until Heath comes back.”

“How the hell is he supposed to see us if we’re sitting in Jack in the Crack?” I asked, in a slightly annoyed tone.

“It’s Itch in the Crotch,” she laughed, “and we’ll just have to be on the lookout for him.”

Once inside, we planted ourselves in a rear booth. Within seconds, a police car pulled into the parking lot. Seconds later, two patrolmen got out.

“Are those the same fucking cops from 7-11?” I said, peering out the window.

“Sure as hell looks like it,” Mia replied, glancing over at them as they walked in. “Malloy and Reed.”

“Shit,” I whispered, “they’re coming over here.”

“No they’re not,” she argued.

“Yes they are.”

They were now standing right over us, and oddly enough, did bear a resemblance to Malloy and Reed, with an extra thirty pounds of adipose tissue apiece.

“Hello, girls,” Malloy said, looking at his watch. “Kinda late for you to be out, isn’t it?”

When you enlist as a juvenile delinquent, it’s imperative that you learn how to deal with the police. Number-one rule: never, ever, under any circumstances, volunteer unsolicited information. While you should remain cooperative throughout the entire interrogation, being overly forthcoming will only make you guilty in the eyes of the law.

“We’re waiting for our ride,” Mia replied politely.

“And who’s coming to get you?” Reed asked.

“My brother.”

“When’s he supposed to be here?”

“Any minute now.”

“Alright,” Malloy said. “Just stay in here till he arrives. It’s not safe for you to be wandering these streets at night.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Mia said, smiling. “Thanks.”

They nodded and walked away.

Ten minutes later, there was still no sign of Heath.

“Maybe we should ask the cops for a ride,” Mia said, chomping on some ice.

“What if they figure out that we’re high?” I asked, obviously.

“They won’t,” she said, trying to convince not only me, but herself as well.

“How can you be so sure?”

“I can’t, but if I have to sit here for one more second, I’m going to fucking snap. I need a fix… another line… another something… anything.”

“I hear you loud and fucking clear,” I sighed. “What the hell, let’s give it a go.”

We slid out of the booth, and approached them.

“Excuse me, officers,” Mia said, after clearing her throat. “Do you think you might be able to give us a ride home?”

“Where do you live?” Malloy asked.

“Los Alamitos.”

“Out of our jurisdiction,” he said, shoving a handful of fries into his mouth. “Can’t do it.”

Unbelievable, I thought. When you actually want them to lock you up in the back of their car, they refuse.

“Are you sure you can’t make an exception just this once?” Mia asked, smiling flirtatiously.

“Nope,” he replied gruffly, shoving more fries into his mouth. “Call a cab.”

I was livid. I felt like shoving those fries up his fat ass, and couldn’t help glaring. Luckily, he couldn’t pry his piggish eyes away from the grease feast that lay before him.

“Okay,” Mia mumbled, “maybe we will.”

“Good luck,” Reed mumbled back, through a mouthful of milkshake.

“Isn’t it bizarre that they’re not harassing us?” Mia whispered, as we walked outside, entirely directionless.

“They’re too busy stuffing their fat pig faces,” I said, loud enough for them to hear. “We’d better get the hell out of here. I bet you a billion bucks that once they’re done, they’ll be on us like white on rice.”

Besides hitching a ride—which was unwise, given the area and time of night—the only option was to head back to 7-11, and hope that Heath would return at some point.

Five minutes later, there he was.

“I’m so sorry, you guys,” he said, leaning out of the window. “Those cops freaked me out.”

Mia and I got in, and fastened our seat belts.

“Don’t sweat it,” she said, smiling, “I would have done the same thing myself. So, did you get the goods, or what?”

“Uh-uh,” he said, shaking his head, “he’s tapped out till tomorrow.”

“Aww, man!” she exclaimed. “That’s a bad fucking trip!”

“I know.”

“What the fuck are we going to do?” I asked, thinking about the inevitable crash that was waiting in the wings.

“We’ll figure it out when we get home,” he said, retrieving a joint from the ashtray and handing it to me. “In the meantime, spark this baby up.”

Once back inside the safe confines of the house, we discussed our quandary at length, but couldn’t reach a solution. Until Heath broached a precariously interesting idea, that is.

“I have some morphine left over,” he said contemplatively, “but I’m not so sure I want to give it to you guys, it might kill you.”

Earlier in the year, he’d been involved in an accident that had broken both his legs. Needless to say, he suffered varying degrees of pain throughout the duration of his recovery. At the most excruciating point, he’d been prescribed liquid morphine.

“What the fuck are we waiting for?” Mia said, motioning with her hand. “Let’s do it.”

“Uh-uh,” he said emphatically, “I couldn’t live with myself if you croaked.”

“Yeah, but if you croak too,” she said, smiling slyly, “you won’t have to live with yourself.”

It was a morbid line of reasoning, but she did have a point.

I can’t tell you with any certainty what happened next, but it was strikingly similar to the phenomenon that occurs when you’re put under for surgery.

At 2:30pm the following day, I was jarred awake by a blaring clock radio. Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash” was pervading the room at full volume. I found myself lying faceup on the top bunk of a five-foot-long, child-size bunk bed, with Mia sawing wood in my face. I was unusually drowsy and hadn’t the slightest recollection of how I’d gotten there. It was extremely disconcerting. During my seven years of chemical servitude, it was the only time, no matter what I’d ingested, that I ever blacked out.

I rolled Mia aside, stumbled down the miniature wooden ladder, and switched off Bobby D, then reached up and shook my snoring bedmate until she was conscious.

“What the fuck happened?” she asked sluggishly, rubbing her eyes.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I yawned. “I’m going home. Don’t forget, you have to read The Great Gatsby by tomorrow morning.”

“Fuck!” she exclaimed. “I haven’t even opened it yet! What day is it?”

“Sunday.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Motherfucker! There’s no fucking way I can read that fucking book by tomorrow morning!” She paused for a moment and pursed her lips, which meant she was scheming. “Hey, I just thought of something.”

“And what’s that?” I asked, yawning again.

“Didn’t you read it?”

I knew exactly what she was hinting at, but I was in no storytelling mood.

“Yeah, but I’m in a fucking coma at the moment. I can’t even remember my name, never mind a book I read when I was ten.”

“Just give me a brief synopsis,” she begged, tugging on my shirt. “Come on, please? I’ll be your best friend?”

“You are my best friend,” I said, heading for the door. “Go buy the Cliffs, or better yet, rent the film, the one with Alan Ladd, if you can find it.”

She looked at me with helpless doe eyes and an adorably tragic pout. Many a sap fell victim to this little ploy, but it never worked on me, for I knew her too well. What’s more, I’d been known to use the same ploy myself.

“I need more sleep,” I yawned once more, walking out. “I’ll call you later.”

She mumbled something in French, then rolled over and resumed sawing wood.

The instant I stepped out into the blinding sunlight, I saw a trio of beaming faces waving from the garage across the street.

“Good morning, sunshine!” one of them yelled cheerfully.

It was Ganja Ron, Green Bud, and Burnout Jackson. They were neighborhood denizens and buddies of Heath’s. I think you can deduce from the nicknames what they were all about. Each was invariably stocked with the most potent marijuana around, which they thoroughly enjoyed sharing with the girls and me. Running into one of them was a real score, but all three at once? A hat trick—although I wasn’t so sure about the timing.

I forced a smile and waved back.

“You look like shit!” Ganja Ron yelled, holding up a hefty bag of weed. “Come on over, I’ve got just what the doctor ordered!”

Like an idiot, I dragged my carcass across the street.

When I entered the garage, I heard Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra playing softly on the stereo. Ganja Ron was not only hooked on drugs, but also Kraut and Prog Rock, which according to him “facilitated the journey.” Exactly where he was headed, I never knew. I doubt he knew either.

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked, laughing. “You look like you just went fifteen rounds with Marvin Hagler!”

Green Bud and Burnout Jackson were laughing too.

“It’s a looooooong story,” I replied, shaking my head. “Do yourself a favor, unless you’re in a hospital, don’t fuck with Sister Morphine.”

“Ahhhh,” they said in unison, nodding their heads.

“So,” Ganja Ron said, “you wanna get high, or what?”

“Why the hell not,” I yawned. “If I’m lucky, maybe it’ll finish me off.”

“I scored a half pound of that Golden Thai I smoked with you last month,” Burnout said, raising his bushy, overgrown eyebrows and grinning. “Remember that shit?”

“How could I forget?” I scoffed.

He was referring to a premium breed of opium-laced marijuana, which had caused me to believe that the half gallon of vanilla ice cream I was devouring was changing flavors with every bite. First it was butter pecan, then peach, then pistachio, then chocolate malted crunch, then pecan praline, etc.…

“Should we use Dr. Phibes?” Green Bud asked, pointing toward the workbench.

Dr. Phibes was a bong that Ganja Ron had built from scratch. What set it apart from other bongs was the respiratory mask attached to its body via a plastic hose. Can you see where this is going?

They took several turns apiece loading Dr. Phibes. After three rounds, I could barely stand, but continued to inhale the pungent fumes anyway. The rest is a blur. All I can remember is asking Ganja Ron for the time, and his answer verbatim: “A heckle past a frair.”

I often wonder why I remember this useless crap. I looked at him confusedly, then staggered out of the garage, crawled across the street, climbed back into the bunk bed—the bottom bunk this time—and fell into a deep slumber until the following morning.

[An excerpt from a work in progress]

So, instead I’d bike to school on the sidewalks only to come out of my Native American History class to find my tires slashed [radical motorists?] and then one day, stolen. Me and my father headed down to the police station on a Saturday morning to browse through the hundreds of recovered bikes, unable to find mine. I considered picking out a nice one and claiming “There it is!” What would have been the difference to them, to anyone? But I’m as bad a liar as my father was. That’s a lie, some will say. See what I mean? [Was my father loyal to my mother only because of his inability to lie convincingly and thus never risked having an affair?]

After that I’d either get a ride with my mom on her way to some housecleaning job in Grand Blanc [perfectly named suburb, really] or hitchhike, giving myself enough time, knowing most days I wouldn’t get picked up and I’d end up walking.

I never got picked up much on my way home either. Until one day a cool, spacy lady, with a Ziggy Stardust-type shag haircut stopped, leaned forward across the steering wheel – her perfect smile and cleavage creating a makeshift sign of the cross in my mind. She owned the Hair to the Throne beauty salon at the mall. I tried to remember Ziggy lyrics to impress her: “she could lick’em by smiling / She could leave’m to hang…” But these just seemed too suggestive, maybe they weren’t even right…

I thought of other beauty salon names: Hairport, The Mane Attraction, Hair Brained… as we rode in, but didn’t say a word lest she think I was disrespecting her career. I watched her shift gears perfectly, her perfectly tanned and contoured limbs in total sync with her Porsche. “I like a manual; I like control.” I could barely speak – beauty [especially from outer space] does that to me. She turned up her tapedeck: “… droogie don’t crash here / There’s only room for one and here she comes…” With hair, lyrics and music all totally in sync. I was hopelessly in awe.

She picked me up about twice a week, and always offered to shag my hair – for free. I always managed a smirk. “Don’t you trust me?” “Yea, but…” There was a date or something like it in here somewhere but opportunity-snuffing levels of shyness prevented any advances that might have led to drinking Blue Nun on her couch, listening to her records, staring at a framed Helmut Newton nude on her wall…

You know what I did? I changed my schedule at college so I would no longer run into her. Such is the annoying power of beauty.

My parents had moved from Upstate New York to Wisconsin to Flint, Michigan, in the space of a few years; the American dream eluding them like a quarter rolling down the street and down a sewer grate. What a coincidence, my father was a metallurgical engineer who “made” that very sewer grate and that one and – and no, I didn’t know Michael Moore or members of Grand Funk Railroad, although my brother had Mark Farner’s English teacher, so you can stop asking…

They found a provisional apartment in a cheap part of Flint, downtown, near the Buick plant, with a view over its expansive flat roof – maybe on Industrial or Stewart Ave. The apartment was a noisy, dingy hole with smokey shag carpet that had absorbed its share of suspicious bodily fluids. They lived here for 6 months as they searched for a more suitable home in an affordable suburb.

The Lion’s Den or Flintstone Bar & Grill or something, was located right under our front window. Assembly-line workers would hang out here after their shifts, all times of the day; some coming off the third shift were already drinking by 7 in the morning. There are some truisms that are true: wherever there’s demeaning labor, there’s a bar close by – usually right across the street from any factory.

I came to visit my parents from college during holidays. My father would get up at 5. I’d watch him leave the house – tie, white shirt – passing the men hanging on the corner, leaning against the mailbox, the lamppost, just starting to drink or wrapping up a bender. He worked at the General Foundry, which produced heavy metal parts – brake drums and stuff – for GM cars, mostly Buicks and Chevy Suburbans.

Late at night I couldn’t sleep so I’d stare out the window and felt like asking: “Don’t you have any place you need or want to be?” I knew they didn’t; wasted, they couldn’t even dream where they wanted to be without seeing a commercial of it first. Guys hacking and spitting, horsing around with cocked revolvers and karate moves – “From One Beer Lover To Another” [classic Stroh’s slogan]  – trying to forget the way home to wives who’d long ago given up on them and their stories. Too high, too wired, chugging beers outside, chucking the empties against a side wall under my bedroom window.

One night a bullet shot through our front window; nobody got hurt, no one found the bullet. My father called the cops who came shuffling in on their heels. They were immediately perturbed that he’d called them; it wasn’t urgent, no one had been hit – at least not in our place. Flint had a high murder rate back then, similar to Detroit’s I think, a quite hard little city and so, don’t call the cops unless its bingo, and you can produce an actual shooting victim.

I looked it up: Flint still has a high murder rate to this very day, ranked 7th among US bigger cities, only 4% of US cities are less safe than Flint. This was stuff you didn’t see in documentaries about America at that time, at least not the ones my parents had seen prior to emigrating from Amsterdam. Socialists handing out The Militant newspaper at the plant gates knew why and they didn’t mind telling me or anybody else: these images simply don’t jive with capitalist propaganda’s “roads paved with gold” – ending their sarcastic phrases with an all-knowing “HA!”

My mom, in 1961, descended our Hawthorne hovel stairs down to the luncheonette to confront the be-bopping rockabilly types – or were they bikers? – demanding they pleaz turn the jukebox down. They fooled with her, trying to dance with her to make light, you know, harmless… Ah, it’s a generation thing. And here she was [a notoriously light sleeper who can hear a gun being cocked a thousand miles away] up to her old tricks again. Heading down our stairs in her pink deja vu night gown and curlers, calling my father a lafaard [chicken]. On the street, confronting these men, pointing her finger like some half ghost – “I haf to werk in de morning!” They couldn’t believe their eyes; there they stood with gashes in their foreheads [like shimmering wounds you swear could talk], holding their paper cups filled with rotgut vodka and diet Faygo Red Pop, or crushing beer cans in their bare hands or flicking their butts at the dogs scurrying by, knocking each other’s hats off, some rough-house punches launched now and then. But suddenly you could hear the chuckles trailing off and you could hear Flint’s “quiet” – the eternal plant hum – meaning that in some way they respected her as a working-class lady or something.
By the time I came back in the spring, my family had found a home in the suburb of Burton with its winding, bird-name, dirt roads where my father announced he’d gotten me a job at the General Foundry as a fill-in and molder’s assistant. You have to understand that working in a foundry where they bribed every OSHA guy to ever come through it was dangerous to life, lung, and limb.

I rode in with my father at 5:15. The first day he gave me all the standard safety equipment he could find: earplugs, air mask, helmet, gloves, goggles. Walking onto the foundry floor that first day was like something out of “Man Who Fell To Earth” – I swear I was the only one wearing any of these recommended safety devices. And one of the only ones to ever wear any of these things, many didn’t even know this equipment was available, not that they would lower themselves to  faggot status and requisition any of it.

My father never said much but some mornings he would say something that would just hang there in the car like an aphorism propelled by flatulence. One morning he described his blue collar crew: “It’s good people forgetting how good they once were and too tired to act that way now anyway.”

The work was so hard, dangerous, suffocating, hot, and mindless but still you had to manage to keep your wits about you or die. My entire body ached for weeks like it was entering some new devolutionary [reptilian] phase. Every afternoon at 3:30 I’d take a really long shower at home noticing that the smell of hard labor in a dangerous place – the soot, the oily coal dust, the grime, the  stink, the fear – “never” really came out of your nose, pores, ears with ordinary soap. Blow your nose, it came out black. I remember staring at the white toilet paper holding my alien black snot.

By 3:45 I’d be out in my parents backyard with a book of poems; I was reading Leonard Cohen’s The Spice-Box of Earth as I sagged into the lawn chair in the sun … “Beneath my hands / your small breasts / are the upturned bellies / of breathing fallen sparrows” … drifting in and out of sleep. A kind of hypnagogic state of reverie where your dreams are still enamored of life’s possibilities, which I now remember with some fondness as some of the most satisfying moments of my life. That is how good it felt and I don’t know exactly why.

I was awakened and staring into a late afternoon sun, which was suddenly blotted out by a dark head, a pretty eclipse in the shape of Faith, our cheery neighbor girl. Robust with baby-fat arms, a cheerleader-hopeful, and a body already developed far beyond her ability to know what to do with it. You know the kind, always futzing with their bra straps and saying things like “You gotta have Faith,” without any sense of irony or self-consciousness. But, you know, you never know.

Blond, Botero-esque, tentative, crossing her legs – I’m squinting into the sun and now her eclipse – fingering her bellybutton, wondering “what do you think of this bathing suit? My mom thinks its too much.”

“There’s not too much of much there.”

“So you agree with me?”

“I guess.”

Her smile was like quicksand, it took possession of her entire face, totally transforming it – dimples, freckles, green eyes enlarged and then disappearing, before her smile took possession of you. It was summer and for Faith it wasn’t much of a vacation, having to babysit her bratty brother all alone every weekday, cooped up in the house, with a strict prohibition on friends – her parents enlisting neighbors to keep an eye on the house. Faith was all of 15 [she may have even been lying about that] and no ordinary girl and she was bursting at the seams to have me notice that. Or so I thought.

Her father was a dour guy in an Army jacket with a perpetual scowl even when he was on his beloved riding lawnmower. I only learned later how brutal he was as an ex-military whatever. Her mother was an overworked drone [accounting at Fisher Body] the dread of consumption far outstripping income weighing heavy on her former good looks. She was someone you’d have compassion for her if you didn’t know her daughter.

“My parents say they can’t afford to take us on vacation, so we’re not goin’ anywhere.”

Over the course of the summer she would regularly – every day! – invite me over to listen to records: Uriah Heep, Peter Frampton, Jojo Gunne, Todd Rundgren, Bad Company, Grand Funk – did I like them too? You can be honest without being too dismissive – I liked this and that by Todd, 1 or 2 by Grand Funk…  that is as close as a 19-year-old guy comes to tenderness.

Should I bring over Neil Young’s On The Beach, Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece? Eno, Roxy Music? Better not. If her father were to come home drunk or sober after work he’d be pissed if he found me there and he would, as I understood it, beat her. She said he liked the belt, with the buckle. She could show me. I said I believed her; no need to yank down your hot pants to show me the bruises… OK, I see and, yes, definitely dramatic and he’s definitely a shithead [she may have called him that herself more than once] …

Her brother played up his full brattiness, announcing at regular intervals that he was going to rat on her for showing her butt to me. “She shows her boobies all the time. Give her a quarter and you can see’m too. Mom says Faith’s a slut.”

“SHUT UP!” she chased him through the house, swinging her fists in the stale air. Chased him up the stairs and locked him in his room.

He chanted “Slut! Slut! Slut!” as he banged on his locked bedroom door, the walls and floor.

“He was a jerk when he was born.” Exasperation, furrowed brows. “I’m not like that. Really!”

We went downstairs to listen to her records. She sang along to Uriah Heep: “We must keep them away / Or pretty soon we’ll pay / And count the cost in sorrow…” gazing at the wall, on the edge of the couch. “That’s ‘Circle of Hands’ and if I saw them live – that’ll never happen with my prison-guard parents – I wonder if Heep’s words could help me…”
She closed the door, put the needle down on another record – JoJo Gunne. It was pretty dark and I could hear her breathing, singing along “I make love, I make love, duduhduh / But just don’t gimme none of that / Too cool for love / It might just hit you right between the eyes…”

She guided my hand over her wounds, duduhdu, like I was a marionette who, by tracing her body with my hands, could give her shape and meaning. But how all this escalated in conjunction with blood pressure, blood engorgement, pulse rate and a scandal involving exhibitionism, and blackmail is another intriguing story altogether.

Her brother had opened his bedroom window was yelling “HELP!” at the top of his lungs and started tossing stuff out – lamps, board games, puzzles, clothes, model cars, walkie talkies …

Faith had an absolute fit. Screaming, her hands flexed like a bobcat’s claws. I helped her gather the stuff off the front yard – the kid, I agreed, was a brat, definitely disturbed. We brought the stuff back into the house and upstairs because if she didn’t put his room back in order before her mom or dad got home she’d get a whipping. “Whip the slut,” I heard him say in a creepy tone of voice.

“My dad likes the belt. He’s Army. I hate Army.” She opened the closet, showed me the belt with a buckle of two rifles crossed over a Confederate flag. “The only way to make him happy is let him watch TV.” And that is what he was now doing – well, that plus yelling at the screen and pelting it with his favorite toys. Knifing a stuffed animal with a scissor. Fluff all over.

“You want lemonade? I don’t have beer.”

“No, I better go. I don’t wanna cause any problems.”

“Can we do the same thing again some other time?” She sounded so desperate. Like your arm is a lifeline.

“Why not. I’ll bring some LPs over.”

“Totally Cool!”

“I better go.”

“ OK, but remember ‘today is only yesterday’s tomorrow’.”

It was around this time I started drinking beer. I’d had beer in high school but shotgunning clandestine Genessees outside a pup tent along a trout creek and then chasing trout with your bare hands in your underwear wasn’t quite the same thing.

After a long, cold spell in relations with my father due to the complications highlighted by the generation gap, my disdain for authority and preference for an unruly haircut, his relationship to me and to the labor market slowly began to evolve. It would take another 10 or so blows – being summarily dismissed for doing his job too well, seeing the people who worked for him being treated better – to his upstanding belief in the work ethic and that quality and experience were always in due time justly rewarded… before I would eventually be proven right. He asked, “What’s so great about being white collar anyway?” There’s no dignity in being right, there is no victory when all we have left is bitter memories of the moment we began buying into the big lies told to us by men in suits. He even traded in his Green Card and became a US citizen, hoping that would further prevent his being dismissed/fired so easily. “First we have to pay for the big lies with taxes and then we pay for them again later with our dignity.”

We didn’t drink a lot together, just one or two before and/or after dinner, usually what was on sale at Meijer’s Thrifty Acres – Stroh’s, Milwaukee’s Best, Pabst, Bud, Schlitz, Heileman or sometimes something exotically “foreign” like Molson’s or Coor’s.

We’d sit in the setting sun in the backyard – you could hear the clack of dishes as my mom cleaned up – discussing, ah why not, the Maize & Blue’s Big Ten fortunes, the boldness of young women today, did women “belong” in factories? My mom now yelling at my brother to do his homework. We even improvised a tenuous version of the Stroh’s commercial we both loved where a father emotionally confronts his son asking: “Son, answer me. Do you drink beer?” The son responds tearfully: “Yes, dad, I drink beer. I’m 34 years old!” The father places his arm around his son, and simply wants to be assured that when his son drinks beer it’s Stroh’s.

I personally preferred Stroh’s, still a local beer at that time, not because of any inherent great taste, but because it was local, affordable and certainly did not taste any worse than the giants. We poured the on-sale beer into our glasses and then crushed the cans in our hands as we looked toward the horizon, an empty lot with mounds of dubious landfill dumped there. We both smelled of sweet bug spray. Few words were spoken – a little baseball or football, the foundry, the ex-murderer I work next to, shoveling off the foot of soot off the sagging foundry roof and whether this job was safe, how difficult it was getting up at 5 when I only just got to bed at 2, with Faith hearing me returning, whispering out her window: “I SEEE you! Do you want to see ME?” I could only think  about her old man, and, NO, I do not have a death wish.

There was an element of bonding, something challenging, something alchemical about discovering how far down the price scale you can go before beer becomes undrinkable. Where is your threshold, that moment of equilibrium where beer is both affordable and still tastes good. Where does affordable become cheap; where does beer slide from hops to piss; where does that delightful buzz crash dive into headache? You squat down by the cans on the bottom shelf that don’t even bear a logo and are just called BEER.

We established that the secret of a drinkable, mediocre beer is this: you must enlist your own taste buds to collaborate with imagination, speculation, a greater narrative and through some willful, although not altogether clear, alchemical formula of equal parts hope, magic, thirst, air temperature, beer temperature, and a beer’s inherent hopsly qualities plus the ingrained conviviality bred by comradely consumption of beer. And thenamong the interworkings of all of these variables, a standard, mediocre, factory-brewed beer may actually emerge as a good-tasting brew, well beyond even its own wildest advertising claims and for a few moments then you [we] are engaging in heady alchemy, making of a mediocre brew something special, something other worldly.

As someone wise or drunk or both – or was it just me? – once said: “It’s not you, it’s not the beer, it’s the story you and beer together tell.”

• Read the Entire Beer Mystic novel online
• Read Michigan host Bookbeat excerpt here
• Read Minnesota host Demon Comics excerpt here
• Read Iowa host Obsolete excerpt here
• Read Edmonton host Urban Grafitti excerpt here

]]> http://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/beer-mystic-burp-12-stroh%e2%80%99s-cans-to-the-head/feed/ 3 http://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/dont-miss-fred-frith-live-in-downtown-berkeley-this-saturday-night/ http://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/dont-miss-fred-frith-live-in-downtown-berkeley-this-saturday-night/#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2011 17:28:36 +0000 Fluffy Schwartz http://blog.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/?p=2357 I am not joking when I say that in my mind, Mr. Frith is one of the most important guitar players in the history of the instrument. For me, it goes like this, Jimi Hendrix then Fred Frith in terms of people who have expanded the sound, scope and vision of the instrument. It is not just the way Fred approaches the guitar, nor the amazing variety of recordings he has released over the years, or the deeply profound influence he has had on so many players,  It is all of that, combined with a marvelous musicality and workman like dedication to the craft of music that sets his stuff apart.

This Saturday night at 8pm, in downtown Berkeley as part of the Berkeley Arts Festival, you have a chance to see him live & in the flesh playing in duo with Cellist Theresa Wong at 8pm. If you have not had the privilege yet, you really should consider it.  As an inducement, I have included some interesting links below that might just peek your musical curiosity. See you there-Fluffy

Band: Massacre

Album: Killing Time

Song Title: Legs

Released in 1981 this album defined a new language of improvisational song structure for rock & roll.

Click here to view the embedded video.

SOLO-Recorded at “Mózg” in Bydgoszcz (Poland) on 24.06.2006.

The first time I saw Fred solo I was completely blown away. Transfixed by one human, a guitar and unlimited musical imagination.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fred Frith – A Career In Real Estate (1980),

Here is a cut from his breakout disk Gravity

Click here to view the embedded video.

Henry Cow – Living in the heart of the beast.

Very rare footage of this English avant-rock group in action….

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here he is playing solo at the Luna Cafe….

Click here to view the embedded video.

And check out this cool footage of him playing with his long time compatriots, the ROVA saxophone Quartet

Click here to view the embedded video.

For as long as I’ve been writing and publishing in Canada, the concept of a Canadian Literary Outlaw has always been something of a contradiction. Not that there hasn’t been Canadian Literary Outlaws to speak of, which, of course, there have always been. I think of those English-speaking writers who surrounded Montreal’s Contact Press in the 1950s — Louis Dudek, Raymond Souster and Irving Layton — who would went on to publish most of the important Canadian poets of the fifties and sixties, including Leonard Cohen‘s first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies, printed in 1956 while Cohen was still a student at Montreal’s McGill University. Then there were those poets surrounding the TISH journal started by George Bowering, Frank Davey, David Dawson, Jamie Reid and Fred Wah founded by student-poets at the University of British Columbia in 1961 and edited by a number of Vancouver poets until 1969. Then, of course, there is Victor Coleman, Coach House Press editor in chief between 1966 and 1975. His publications were, for me, a virtual education in Canlit.

Canada has never really lacked for outlaws, literary or otherwise. Whether the Contact Press writers, or the TISH poets, or even the literary outlaws like Victor Coleman and the writers who surrounded Coach House Press (outlaws such as bp nichol, David W. McFadden, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Artie Gold, Gerry Gilbert, or Joe Rosenblatt). They inspired and encouraged a lot of Canadian writers and poets during the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Unlike the United States, though, Canada has never had an avid history of enthusiastically promoting it’s own outlaws, either in its schools or its media — preferring instead to celebrate politicians, law enforcement (RCMP) and, of course, hockey.

It was during the 1980s, when I first became aware of the inherent contradictions between Canadian society and its emerging literary outlaws. It was the decade in which I first began to actively function as a writer, poet, micro-press publisher as well as an organizer of numerous reading series of local and national authors.

One such contradiction was illuminated for me when two authors I had invited to give readings were both eligible for sponsorship by the Canada Council Readings Program. Both had self published their own first books. Both were university graduates. Both had been widely published in magazines and anthologies. On paper, their applications were virtually identical. Still, one was chosen over the other. One thing was certain — the jury’s decision, I surmised, was based solely upon intangible qualities which works against the literary outlaw in Canada: race, gender, sexual orientation, and politics.

From then on, one thing became abundantly clear to me as a transgressive writer and publisher: though individually Canadian writers, poets, have been outlaws — as a group, say, like the Beat writers, the Black Mountain poets, the Naropa poets and, of course, the Unbearables, literary outlaws in Canada have never known the same cultural support.

It is to this backdrop that Canada’s literary outlaws and underground have clawed and scratched every inch of the way — receiving more tangible support from outside of Canada than from within. Case in point, the Rare Books Library at the University of Wisconsin at Madison purchased the entire backlist of my paper-based litzine, Urban Graffiti — while at the same time I couldn’t even give away my publications to Canadian libraries for free.

Canada’s literary underground and literary outlaws, though, do have a steadfast cheerleader who champions their cause, their publications, and their efforts. Enter Hal Niedzviecki’s Broken Pencil: A Magazine of Culture and Independent Arts, which has just celebrated it’s 52nd Issue. Read BP’s feature article, “50 People (And Places) We Love” to get an idea of the breadth and scope of literary outlaws and underground artists in Canada which have caught BP’s eye. Hal Niedzviecki is an outlaw in his own right — a modern day Northrop Frye cum Marshall McLuhan — whose literary criticism and literary theory, whose books and anthologies, are equalled only by his uncanny ability to read and measure our present-day cultural zeitgeist.

I think it can be debated that it is largely due to Canada’s profound insular nature, as well as its traditional connection between universities and small presses and magazines into which universities have traditionally supplied these very writers and editors which have produced a systemic bias, as well as a systemic environment of conformity. Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with university educated writers, editors, and publishers. I am one, myself. Over the past twenty-five years, however, I’ve noted an increasing cultural schism in Canada between the underground literary outlaws, and how seldom they are actually published by established Canadian presses (particularly university presses). Very troubling given Canada’s vibrant, courageous, and adventurous publishing past.

In Canada, if you seek the work of excellent literary outlaws, you are much more likely to find it in zines, litzines, and chapbooks (as reviewed in the pages of Broken Pencil) — not in the pages of it’s literary magazines and university-based journals.

Indeed, there was a time when literary outlaws and outsiders went into exile — be that exile in New York, London, or elsewhere. Now, the Canadian Literary Outlaw remains an exile without ever having to take a single step outside Canada’s borders.

The remedy, though, for this unusual dichotomy is this very medium through which I communicate to you now. It both removes the cultural stranglehold that has long kept the Canadian Literary Outlaw under thumb, and liberates by giving the literary outlaw the means to bypass conservative publishers and editors altogether. Never before has the Canadian underground and the Canadian Literary Outlaw been on the verge of such a renaissance.

WHAT I DID TODAY
-Michael Randall

Plunging upward from sweet oblivion into the screaming terror of a new day. Eyes open but stone blind, a beastly metallic howl issuing from somewhere inches from my head…

I have no idea where I am. I’m naked and sweating and my heart and my head are both pounding so loudly it hurts. Instinct forms a fist and hurls it at the noise. More noise: something brittle (a lamp, perhaps?) crashing to the floor. I suck in air and swing again. This time fist meets plastic and the black void goes silent.

I grope around in tangled sheets and pull myself upright. Flashing at my feet is an evil red number: 6:00 AM. Across the void, a thin vertical slit of light becomes visible and I rise and move toward it, kicking lamps and bumping into unfamiliar furniture.

I pull back the curtain and see a loading dock, a couple of dumpsters. Beyond that, a weird man-made lake. Beyond that, a large shopping mall. It starts to come to me. Hotel off the interstate, just outside D.C. Out-of-town corporate gig. I’m here to direct a video for a rising biotechnology firm.

At a western-themed restaurant in the mall the night before, the cameraman and I had gotten trapped by torrential rains from the edge of a tornado. I’d taken it as a sign from the gods to switch from beer to bourbon.

I look down to see one of the hotel maids sitting on the curb by the dumpster, eating a candy bar. She’s staring up at me intently as she chews. I almost give her a little wave when it dawns on me I’m standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling window stark naked.

It’s a pretty easy shoot, as these things go. Six interviews with various executives interspersed throughout the day. We set up in a conference room and dig in to the breakfast spread laid out for us. For corporate America, this is a fairly laid back place. But as usual, the environment puts me on edge. I always feel like an imposter, a spy behind enemy lines.

Don’t get me wrong, these were generally nice people – friendly, smart, competent – but not one of them felt like they were a part of my tribe. I was pretty sure they had all awoken that morning with at least a general notion of where they were.

Even the most obvious cultural common denominators didn’t jibe. If they wanted to talk about sports, without fail it was football and basketball. I like to watch boxing and baseball. When hungover, women’s golf.

They spent their twenties getting advanced degrees in Business and Science. I spent mine starving, heartbroken, homeless or living in squalor.

They spent their thirties getting married, having kids, buying houses. Mine were spent boozing and whoring, making poems and plays and paintings and music and movies.

They spent their forties…well, the sad part was most of these captains of industry hadn’t even hit forty yet. And here I was in their midst: fifty-two, never been married, no kids. Not even gay – that they could understand, or at least deal with. No, I was somehow suspicious, alien. We shake hands and smile at each other but the hairs were raised on all our necks. Occasionally I’d catch them looking at me with an expression that seemed to call the very purpose of my existence into question. And that was a question for which I’d never had a r satisfactory answer.

It’s not like I could tell them about the stacks of poems stuffed in file drawers, or the nights spent sending music into the ether, or the ridiculous movies that no one will ever see, or the basement in Brooklyn overflowing with paintings. That answer satisfies me even less than it would them. In the face of overwhelming indifference, failure, lack of notice or recognition or financial gain – why do I continue to jeopardize my security, to exhaust my diminishing energy, to mortgage my dwindling future, just to chase after those things that once seemed close but now recede with every passing day?

These are the kind of things I’m actually thinking about as I smile and nod and pretend to listen to this parade of biotech execs answer the questions I read off the sheet. And maybe that’s the key to the uncanny valley that separates my species, my tribe, from theirs: nowhere in their speech, their manner, their words, can I detect the slightest trace of existential anxiety or dread. On the contrary, by the polished way they drone on I can only discern supreme confidence that their answers about the future of the biotechnology market neatly and completely justify the purpose of their existence.

It all goes well enough and we wrap shortly after 4 PM. By 4:30 I’m in the back of a limo that’s hurtling through Beltway traffic trying to get me to Union Station in time to make the 6PM Metroliner to New York. Most of the drivers from this car service are bullet-headed, monosyllabic Russian immigrants, but this guy’s American, about my age. Unkempt, with coke bottle glasses. Nerdy almost to the point of creepy. There’s that weird tension – the combination of forced intimacy and master/slave dynamic that always goes with being driven in a limo. But he’s playing nice music, groovy jazz guitar, and after a minute I hazard a guess.

“This Herb Ellis?”

His eyes shoot to the rearview and I see him reappraise me from scratch.

“Good ear,” he says after a long pause.

Turns out we both had previous lives as serious guitar players. It’s a moment of tribal recognition and we both relax a bit. For the remainder of the ride we’re both happy to geek out, trading names of great guitar players like two kids with baseball cards.

I miss my train, so go downstairs to the food court and get some fried chicken. DC is really a Southern town at heart and even this off-brand fast-food chain makes better fried chicken than I’ve ever gotten in New York. The black cashier with the prison tattoo on her neck notices my double order of collard greens and flirts with me a little bit.

I catch the next train and grab a window seat on the right, mostly for the water views you get passing through Delaware. I’ve been riding this stretch of track for over thirty years and the varying roll of the Eastern Seaboard never bores me.

Not long after Baltimore, the pretty blonde in front of me gives up her seat to let an old married couple sit together. I smile politely at her manners as she settles herself in the seat beside me. She looks right through me as if my seat were vacant. It’s a look I’ve seen before. Gallery owners use it when you introduce yourself as an artist.

She’s late 30’s, maybe 40, pretty in a generic sort of way. But her legs are spectacular. Bare and subtly muscular. I pretend to search for something in my left pants pocket, just so I can stretch and lean back to get a better look.

She’s working her Blackberry while trying to open her laptop and is having trouble with the tray table. I reach over and help her. Again, nothing. I’m an empty seat. So much for her manners.

So I turn to the window and watch the urban decay of Baltimore turn to semi-rural farmland. The slanting sun paints the familiar fields and barns and streams a soft gold.

I nod off and when I awake it’s pitch black outside. As the lights inside the train come on I realize I can now study her legs at length in the reflection in the glass. As she pounds the keyboard of her laptop, her short skirt rides up even higher on those taut thighs. I’m bored, and still a bit hungover, so to amuse myself I fantasize about those thighs. The short skirt and bare legs leads me to a complicated scenario about golf, but I’m not really hungover enough to make it work. So I imagine licking those thighs, rolling the tip of my tongue slowly up the inside of them, turning them bright pink. Just then her Blackberry rings and she takes the call.

In a bad South Jersey accent, she begins reaming out what I infer is one of her employees. The sound of her voice is awful and her ball-busting isn’t helping my fantasy either. I imagine taking just the bottom half of her to bed. Or at least to the club car bathroom for a quick one. But it’s game over.

She doesn’t raise her voice; instead she calmly and mercilessly dissects this poor schmuck on the other end of the line. I imagine some 27-year-old with ADHD and a budding substance abuse problem. This goes on and on, her voice, her bad accent and her attitude like a buzz-saw in my ear. I pull out my iPod and click on some country music. Halfway through Waylon singing Broken Promised Land the battery dies. In self-defense, I take out my cell and call my girlfriend.

I have a couple days off coming up – somebody else is going to have to edit all the crap I just shot – and so Lori and I talk about going up to our place in the country. Mostly we talk about all the stuff that needs fixing — the place needs a new water heater, the lake froze during the winter and pushed the dock off its moorings. In the middle of this litany I notice Legs has hung up on her call and is, in fact, eavesdropping on mine.

When I hang up, to my surprise she suddenly wants to make conversation. She apologizes for haranguing in my ear. Turns out she’s in mergers and acquisitions and has just taken over another company. The guy she was reaming out was the founder of the company, some 60-year-old billionaire who invented something to do with credit cards, blah, blah blah.

She chatters away, mostly about the stress of buying and selling companies for obscene profits. Somewhere in there the reason for her sudden interest dawns on me. She’s overheard me talking about my “country home” and has mistaken me for a member of her tribe. The tribe of the successful, the wealthy, the business class.

This amuses the hell out of me – I’m sure she’s picturing some grand stone manse instead of our tiny crumbling fishing cottage with the rusted-out rowboat on the lawn. I almost laugh out loud at this, but instead find myself just grinning away at her like an idiot.

She flashes me a wide grin in return. Her cheeks pinken and she leans in a little closer, her voice softer and deeper. “The worst part about this business,” she says, “is that it’s so hard to find people I can relate to…”

Oh, Christ, I think. Could it really be that in her tribe an idiot grin is interpreted as a come-on? Are my skills as an imposter so good that she’s mistaken my polite nodding and grinning for an attempt at seduction? Sex with this woman would be like an inter-species breeding experiment.

Unfortunately, this thought causes me to grin even more. I’ve always been more than a little amused by the blunt animal equation of natural selection. Toned thighs = house in the country. The sheer hard-wired glandular mechanics of it makes me laugh. She laughs back. Thinks we’re really hitting it off.

We’re still nearly an hour from New York, and I briefly consider getting off in Newark just so I don’t have to keep the conversation going. But it turns out she has no problem doing most of the talking, and I, as previously stated, am a seasoned professional in the art of nodding and feigning interest.

As the train pulls into Penn Station, I’m dreading that she’s going to ask for my card, or give me hers. I climb over her to get my bag from the overhead compartment. Decide to show some manners and get her bag down for her. She reaches for it and is about to speak when her Blackberry rings again. Immediately, she begins chastising some other unfortunate CEO. A break for me.

I drop her Louis Vuitton at her feet, mouth “good luck,” and beat it out of the train, heading fast for the reassuring perimeters of my own bed, my own girlfriend’s thighs, my own tribe.

“Hello, girls,” the face’s mouth said, through a thick, unidentifiable accent.

“Hey,” Mia and I replied in unison.

“Do you need a ride somewhere?”

“Is it free?” Mia asked, smiling.

“Yes, of course!” he replied enthusiastically, unlocking the doors.  “Get in, get in!”

Once inside, he asked “Where to?”

“PCH?” Mia said, looking over at me.

“Sounds good to me,” I replied, eyeing the portable gin mill.

“Sure,” he said, glancing at us through the rearview mirror, “and help yourselves.”

“Thanks, don’t mind if we do,” Mia said, closing the privacy divider.

I turned on the stereo and cranked it up, then proceeded to mix a pair of screwdrivers, while Mia rolled a joint.

“Man, I could get used to this,” she said, breaking up a bud on the bar top.

“Tell me about it,” I agreed, stirring the drinks.

We were cruising along blissfully – savoring the joint, sipping our libations, Getz/Gilberto wafting out of the speakers – when the driver took a sudden and unexpected turn at Edwards Avenue.

“I wonder where he’s going,” Mia said, rolling down the window and peering out.

“Who fucking knows,” I said, holding in an enormous toke, “and who fucking cares.”

“Yeah, I guess it doesn’t matter,” she said, rolling up the window.  “How about making me another one of those drinks?”

“I’m all over it,” I said, exhaling and passing her the joint.

Just as I was twisting off the vodka cap, the driver made a sharp turn into a shopping center, then drove around to the back lot and parked.

“Okay, where the fuck are we, and why the fuck did he stop?” Mia asked.

“Good question,” I said, handing her the bottle. “Here, I’ll ask him.”

I opened the privacy divider, only to discover that he wasn’t there, and by the time I turned back around, he was sitting right next to me.

“Hello, girls!  Time to have some real fun!” he growled, placing his hands around my waist and pulling me toward him. “Come to papa!”

Yes, that’s what he said, verbatim.  I almost burst out laughing, but rage quickly stepped in and took over.  I didn’t want his filthy mitts anywhere near my body.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I yelled, pushing him away.

“I’m just having a little fun,” he said, with a disturbing grin that screamed RAPIST. “That’s what you want too, isn’t it?”

Before I had a chance to reply, he pounced on Mia. I impulsively reached for a bottle of Jack Daniels and cracked him across the skull as hard as I could.  The bottle didn’t break, but his head did, and there was blood trickling down his temple onto his cheek.

“I’m going to call the police! I’m going to call the police!” he screamed over and over again, placing his hand over the wound.  “I’m going to call the police and have you arrested!”

“Oh, no you’re not!” Mia yelled, reaching for a bottle of Wild Turkey and striking him again.

That one did it.  He was out cold.

“Is he dead?” I asked, shaking him gently.

“I don’t think so,” she replied in an uncertain tone.

I looked at her, then at him, then back at her. There was a piercingly silent pause, during which we engaged in a staring contest that seemed to last an eternity, as though we were trapped in a state of suspended animation.  Then, as if on cue, we simultaneously burst into a fit of hysterical cachinnation. Our predicament wasn’t remotely humorous, but we couldn’t stop.  It took several minutes for us to pull ourselves together.

“What should we do with him?” I laughed, shaking him again.

“We could strip him naked, and roll him out into the parking lot,” she suggested, giggling.

“That would be hilarious.”

“Or, we could take the limo for a little joyride?”

“Not if you’re driving,” I scoffed.

“Why not?” she said in a slightly offended tone. “What’s wrong with my driving?”

“You’re Mr. fucking Magoo behind the wheel!”

“What the fuck, man!  I have my contacts in!”

“You’re sight’s not the problem!”

“What the fuck are you implying?”

“I’ll tell you what the fuck I’m implying!  You’re the only person I know who just STOPS at a stop sign!”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do at a fucking stop sign, STOP!”

“No you’re not!  You’re supposed to look both ways to see if any cars are coming!  All you do is STOP!  You never look!  And then you floor it like Mario fucking Andretti!  One of these days, you’re going to kill someone!”

“Excuse me, but who the fuck has the driver’s license here?????  Huh?????”

“I still don’t know how you pulled that off!” I laughed.  “The guy must have had a hard-on for you, because there’s no way in hell you passed that test!”

“For your information, I did pass, and with flying col…”

The unconscious driver let out a faint groan, causing Mia and me to jump in our seats.

“Let’s vamoose,” she whispered, opening the door, “before he comes to.”

“I’m right behind you.”

As we made our way across the parking lot, a navy blue convertible Mustang pulled up beside us and stopped.

“Is everything okay?” the driver asked, giving us the once over.

I immediately wondered why he’d assumed that everything wasn’t okay.  Did we have blood spattered all over our faces?

“Why do you ask?” I replied, wiping my cheeks.

“You look very distraught.”

“No, everything isn’t okay,” Mia interjected, “our limo driver just attacked us.”

The man was visibly shocked.  “Are you serious?” he exclaimed.  “I have a car phone, should I call the police?”

Obviously out of the question for a number of reasons.

“No, that’s okay,” I said, leaning into the car, “can you give us a ride home?”

“Yeah,” Mia lied through a feigned long face, “we’ll call the cops from there.”

“Yes, I can give you a ride, but are you sure you don’t want me to call the police right now?”

“No, that’s cool,” Mia and I snapped in unison.

“We just want to go home,” she added.

“Alright,” he said, moving some items from the front seat onto the floor, “hop in.”

I rode shotgun while Mia sat in back.  The first thought that popped into my head was:  I hope he’s not a psychoperv too.  You never know, they’re all over the place.  He appeared to be harmless, but then so did the limousine driver.

“I’m Diego, by the way,” he said, smiling warmly. “And you are?”

Mia and I introduced ourselves as Pola and Schatze, respectively.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, extending his hand.

“Likewise,” I replied, shaking his hand.

“Where am I taking you?”

“Los Alamitos,” Mia replied, shaking his hand.

Once en route, Pola and I fed him a story.  Not the story, of course.  He seemed to be genuinely concerned, which confirmed that he was indeed harmless.

When we reached the south entrance of our neighborhood, Pola tapped him on the shoulder and said, “You can let us off here, Diego.”

She was a clever girl, always thinking on her feet.

“Be sure to contact the Huntington Beach Police Department right away,” he said, handing me a business card, “and please call me if you need my assistance at all.”

Pola and I thanked the Good Samaritan profusely, and waved reverently as he drove away, then walked across the street, plopped down on the curb near the house on the east corner and fell into a reverie.

“I wonder if he does drugs,” I said, after thoroughly examining the business card.  “Maybe he’ll come in handy at some point.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” she laughed. “Better hang onto that card.”

“Are you hungry?” I asked, shoving the card into my pocket.

“I could eat,” she yawned. “What are you in the mood for?”

“I don’t care,” I replied, catching her yawn.

“How about Happy Buddha?”

“Yuck! It was too greasy last time! And besides, we skipped out on the check, remember?”

“Oh yeah, I forgot,” she giggled. “Guess we won’t be going back there for a while.”

“Guess not,” I laughed.

“How about the Parasite?” she asked, pointing toward the strip mall across the street.

Would you care or dare to dine at a restaurant called the Parasite? It was actually called the Parasol.  Don’t get me wrong, the kitschy, king-sized umbrella was a treasured haunt for the area’s seniors for decades, and was viewed as a hallowed landmark by many, but apart from the delicious hot chocolate, desserts, and split pea soup, I was never crazy about the food.  Mia, however, loved the place – which was understandable, it evoked fond memories of her mother, who’d been dead for nearly five years now.

“You know how I feel about the Parasite,” I sneered.

She started to laugh. “Come on, man!  It’s not that bad!”

“You and your fucking Parasite. I need a well-balanced meal, not a hot fudge sundae and a piece of pie.”

“You’re no fun,” she pouted.

I gave her the finger.

She reciprocated.

“What day is it, Sunday?” she asked, cracking her knuckles.

“Yeah,” I replied, cracking my neck.

“I think Glass is working today,” she said, rubbing her hands together.  “He’s always good for a free meal. Maybe we should pay him a little visit? Those grilled chicken sandwiches with extra Swiss, tomato, and avocado were yummy.”

Glass was a manager at one of the strip-mall restaurants.  He was a detrimentally nice guy who we exploited no end – drugs, money, meals, rides, you name it.  I remembered those sandwiches well.  We’d devoured them after a three-day meth-induced fast.

“What are we waiting for,” I said, standing up and extending my hand.

Fast forward a few weeks…

Mia and I put the limousine mishap behind us with minimal effort. It had definitely traumatized, but chronic self-medicators are typically quite resilient.  When your brain is being anesthetized incessantly, it’s quite easy to displace items in your short-term memory, particularly the unpleasant variety.  We’d all but forgotten about it, until one evening, when my sister announced that she was going on a blind date.  When the lucky fellow arrived, Mia and I went outside to check him out, which was standard procedure for my sister’s dates. Only this time, he looked strikingly familiar, as did his car.  Then it hit us. It was Diego, the man in the Mustang.  An uncanny case of pure happenstance.  Do you know how many eligible bachelors were residing in Orange County at the time? As expected, he recognized Mia and me right away, and told my sister the whole story over dinner.  She came home early, and never went out with Diego again.

I think it’s safe to assume that the limousine driver survived the assault, and didn’t call the police.  If he had gone to the authorities, or gone west for that matter, I’m sure it would have at least made the local news.

As expected, the close call didn’t put an end to our hitchhiking…

Smog Veil Records announces Ralph Carney’s new Serious Jass Project album titled, Seriously, will street on September 27, 2011. It will be available as digipak CD, download and LP pressed on black vinyl, with eco-friendly recycled content jacket and full color two-sided insert. This collectable vinyl release is strictly limited to a single pressing of 500 pieces. You can buy either the CD or the vinyl directly from Smog Veil.

Or you can buy the mp3 download if you’re into that instant gratification sort of thing.

With one foot planted in the historical, and the other in the hysterical, Ralph Carney has spent the better part of his life plotting an utterly singular path through the musical landscape. From his earliest sonic forays at the dawn of what some might call new wave to his current perch atop the summit of what he has dubbed “serious jass,” the Ohio-bred reedman has blown up storm after storm – leaving trails of pleasure, rather than destruction in his wake.

Carney first shimmied his way into the public consciousness in the mid-‘70s as an integral part of Tin Huey – one of the edgier proponents of a Northeast Ohio scene that also spawned Devo and Pere Ubu. In the intervening years, his particular brand of twisted swing has invigorated the work of artists as varied as Tom Waits, Frank Black, The B-52’s and The Black Keys – the acclaimed duo co-founded by his nephew, Patrick Carney. But it’s on his own releases that Ralph’s true personality – a win- ning combination of rapier intellect and barroom savvy – really shines through.
That hybrid of wit, wisdom and wooziness positively explodes from the grooves of Seriously, the second album from

Carney’s Serious Jass Project – a tightly-wound aggregation made up of like-minded fringe-dwellers from his adopted Bay Area home. The disc’s dozen offerings run the gamut from hard-charging honks like Freddie Mitchell’s “Moondog Boogie” (a tune dedicated to Alan Freed, the DJ credited with coining the phrase rock ‘n’ roll) to surprisingly tender standards like “You Took Advantage of Me” (a Rodgers and Hart composition that originally appeared in the Busby Berkeley musical Present Arms.

“This project is a side of me that’s always been there, but that I haven’t shown to the general public all that much,” says Carney, who breaks out more than a dozen instruments over the course of the album. “Even way back at the beginning of my playing, I’d do these classic New Orleans things from the ‘30s and ‘40s with these old guys who remembered them from when they were new.”

The material Carney culled for this collection covers a lot of ground in terms of both time and spirit – from the dare-you-not- to-dance take on the Depression-era standard “Happy Feet” to a raunchy run through Coleman Hawkins’ “Meet Dr. Foo,” on which he rolls out the sort of rough-and-ready trumpet playing that could easily have come from an after-hours club in post- war New York City.

“A lot of this stuff was really dangerous music at the time it was created,” says Carney. “It takes a chance. You’d have guys like Jay McNeely and Lee Allen playing one note over and over in these real dives. And then on the other hand, there’s the more sophisticated stuff – the Ellington songs, which have always blown my mind.”

Be the first kid on your block to get your copy!

it was hot,
the room
was so hot
my buddy’s hearing aids
shorted out,

the poet
was hot,
the poet
was sick,
said as much,
said
“don’t touch me”
before he started reading
and he was sweating,
his shirt near the round of his belly
was damp,
his hair was wet
and combed
forward –
he sweat
even more than me,

I was painfully jealous
his father was a poet,
I imagined his father
spooning small bites of
Berryman and Koch
into his mouth
when he was a baby,

he read aloud
from his four books
about shit,
dog-food death,
he thanked another poet
for using
“dog-food death”
during a reading on Monday night,
he read about his child on his knee
and his knee
starred again
later on
when a deer-riding tic
bled the back of it
which triggered
cute, knowing,
blue-haired,
blue-plate chuckles,

when he finished,
my friend tried to introduce me,
on the shill
pushing my own shit,
but he was sick,
he had a fever,
he reminded us not to touch him
and he excused himself
out the door
in the back of the room
to a small courtyard
where I saw him standing alone,

as we walked away
from the poetry project
John pulled out his
tiny hearing aids,
looked me
straight
in the eye
and said,
“Where were
the weapons,
the women?,
that’s all I want!
Weapons and women!”

Now, one of the main things CSIC does, and something that I am very passionate about, is connecting professional composers directly with high school music programs. You got it, living composers writing new music for young players and actually meeting with them and working together on making music! The process is simple, composer writes an original piece for the student ensemble, the students rehearse with the composer, and the students perform the world premiere at an event called Commissions in Concert. All ticket sale revenue goes back to the school music programs. It’s an engaging, educational, fun and revenue-generating event for composers and schools.

The world-premiere of my piece, called MMMOG (Massive Multiplayer Musical Organized Game), is going to be held on October 27th, in Davis, CA, at the Veterans’ Memorial Theatre. and there will be another performance of the piece in Berkeley on December 15th. (Location TBA)

I graduated from BHS way back in 1982, played in the Big Band and had lots of formidable musical experiences that helped to shape my musical sensibilities over the years. I just cant tell you how wonderful it has been to come back to the school and work with these talented students. I feel like I have come full circle, home again. I feel honored to have this chance to give back in such a very meaningful way.

Now, as you can guess, There’s a lot involved in funding a project like this–so they started a KickStarter campaign to help raise some funds and awareness . Please check it out by clicking the link above, lots more info there about the other schools and composers from around the country that are involved. And then, if like me, you think that this is one of the best ways you have seen in a long time to help revitalize our music school programs, then think about making a small donation to help out.

Meanwhile, I will leave you with a few photos from todays rehearsal, enjoy & let me know what you think…..Fluffy

Lovesick Broke & Driftin’ and here is my favorite song from that album, enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

My grandfather’s family, Woodridge, New York, 1920s. Sophie, far left. Dottie, second from the left. My grandfather, Sidney, in the center.

“What do these children do without storybooks?” Naftali asked.
And Reb Zebulun replied: “They have to make do. Storybooks aren’t bread. You can live without them.”
I couldn’t live without them.” Naftali said.
—Isaac Bashevis Singer

Sophie and Dottie lived in a duplex in Brooklyn.  My grandfather’solder sisters, both former editors for the Daily Worker, they had lived alone since their husbands had passed away, puttering around their oversized house, speaking as if with one mind.  Uncle Sam, who we all called Uncle Z, was Dottie’s late husband.  He had been the kindest of men, everyone’s favorite; he sold pennants at Shea Stadium, and as a child gifted me with a plethora of Mets and Jets pennants—the old felt ones that felt so good to the touch, and which I taped to the wall over my bed.  Uncle Z was a fan of Jell-O with milk poured over the top, a strange delicacy that was always served on those rare occasions when my parents and I visited, and which I loved.  Uncle Herman, Sophie’s late husband, was a different sort; kind as well, he was more distant, and smelled of cigars—a smell I loved as a child—and always wore ayarmulke.  Even when I was little, he shook my hand like a grownup, which was both painful and a little thrilling.

By the 1980s, Sophie had long since raised her children; her son Billy, a tax attorney, had moved to Westchester and raised children of his own.  Dottie had never had children; she lived in the top half of the duplex, Sophie in the lower half, but more often than not when I visited with my grandparents they were both at Sophie’s place, having the same conversation they always had, sitting on the doily-covered couch in Sophie’s living room.  There was always a bowl with broken-up Hershey bars or kisses on the coffee table—which, stoned as I was, was the highlight of the visit for me—and a bowl of sourballs or some other hard candy.  Dottie would unwrap a sourball, and pop it in her mouth:

Dottie: I have a sour taste in my mouth.

Sophie: What sour taste?  If you wouldn’t eat so many sourballs you wouldn’t have a sour taste.

Dottie: No, I need the sourball, I have a sour taste.

And so on, ad infinitum.

Visits to Sophie and Dottie were a regular occurrence on those occasions when I had a pass from boarding school and would stay with my grandparents in Bayside for a weekend.  Saturday afternoon meant the ritual journey to Brooklyn; my grandfather would put some tools in the trunk of his Buick Regal to fix whatever plumbing or electrical problem Sophie had developed during the past week.  I’d find a way to surreptitiously get high, and we’d pile into the car.  On arrival, my grandfather would get to work with his handyman duties; I’d help him, or, preferably, raid the Hershey bowl and answer everyone’s repetitive questions about school, about my mother, about when my parents were getting back together (never, I hoped, I’d say).

Dinner was always sparse—Kraft macaroni and cheese, gefilte fish with horseradish, iceberg lettuce, and a loaf of rye bread with butter, the same menu every time.  One box of mac and cheese for the five of us, which, even with plentiful bread, always meant my grandfather and I would need a late evening turkey sandwich when we got back to Bayside.  He loved the gefilte fish, though, and especially the gelatin from the jar, which he was always served; I could barely tolerate gefilte fish, let alone the gelatin, but in the absence of anything else to eat would slather it with the horseradish and choke it down.  My grandmother, when we left, would comment on Sophie’s miserliness—the miniscule dinner, her refusal to spend money to have an actual handyman come fix things, her unwillingness to buy a new refrigerator which she needed badly.  Sophie had the money, but came from an era in which expenditures were limited to essentials; it was just that her perception of what was essential was perhaps a bit distorted.

After dinner we’d play poker, the five of us, but in a routine sort of way.  Everyone knew what the expected bet was for whatever hand they had—a nickel for a pair, a dime for two pair or three of a kind, a quarter for a better hand than that.  It wasn’t poker, really, but rather yet another weekly ritual; I would bet randomly, or bluff, just to confuse them, just because.  I would shuffle faro style, which they loved: look how he teschles the cards, they’d say, Sophie or Dottie, it didn’t matter which one, the two of them having lived together so long they were two halves of the same person—Dottie, sweet and introverted, Sophie the dominant one, smart and outspoken.

The last time I remember visiting them, when my grandparents and I arrived something was different.  In front of the duplex had been a small patch of lawn alongside the walk way—very small, really, perhaps eight feet by eight feet.  The lawn had always before been well-trimmed—Sophie and Dottie paid one of the neighborhood goyim to cut it on a biweekly basis.  I guess they had finally gotten tired of spending money on something they, in their uniquely predictable way, considered a non-essential; this time when we arrived, the lawn had been ripped out and replaced with concrete, but concrete that had been painted green.

To their unified mind, what was the difference?

Rich Dana

b: In an effort to profile the hosts of the Beer Mystic Global Pub Crawl, I’m interested in hearing about your general approach to issues concerning the environment, political activism and how they relate to things like art, writing, bohemianism, individual resistance and beer.

Your magazine is called Obsolete, and I was honored when you hosted a chapter of the Beer Mystic in the first issue. Obsolete is an ironic title. Does it refer to the print medium or to the idea of classic resistance or to the contemporary dead end of politics as usual between 2 dying Republicratic dinosaurs who keep getting massive, expensive heart transplants that, in a sense, makes it imperative that the massive investments of blackmail money from special interests keeps them artificially alive?

R: Obsolete! came out of my own simple desire to read a real underground tabloid newspaper. I miss that format. As much as I actually love technology and computers, I just don’t enjoy reading in a digital format. I figured there might be some other analog dinosaurs like myself out there.

The name comes from the Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man”  in which Burgess Meredith plays a former librarian in a 1984/Fahrenheit 451-style, anti-intellectual, totalitarian state. This was a popular theme among the 1950’s and 60’s libertarian-leaning sci-fi that I grew up on. That type of distrust in government – any government, any authority, actually – was prevalent in my youth, even in the movies. Serpico, Dirty Harry, the anti-heroes of the 70’s all fought the corruption within. The Weathermen and the Panthers were heroes. My civics teacher took us to the Cedar Rapids courthouse to see the trial of Leonard Peltier when I was a sophomore in high school. That was a formative experience. About that time punk came along.

b: “The board finds you Obsolete.” “You come to my room to prove that the state is not afraid of me. What an incredible burden that must be; to prove that the state is not afraid of an obsolete librarian like myself. Well, I’ll tell you the reason you came… I don’t fit your formulae…” In other words, can out-of-the-box progressive thinking succeed or even survive in this stultifying climate? I know my partner was called a traitor for voting Green rather than for the lesser of two evils in the hope that this lesser – Obama – will respect this hope that he might be something other than business as usual…

R: I have never been a member of a major political party, and I don’t believe in them. They both rely on the fear and/or faith of their members. I don’t do religion. Ericka [former WFMU DJ “Wildgirl”  and hot rod fanatic] ran the Nader campaign in 2000 and we still have Democrats who won’t talk to us. Honestly, I feel like soon, the whole fake representative system will become obsolete- that people will continue to ignore it more and obey it less. If we ignore it long enough, maybe it will just go away.

b: Nina was a Nader supporter. Among some – wasn’t Bush’s approval rating around 2003 around 89%!? – we were also non-patriotic [I’m not even american, so moot point] regarding the invasion of iraq. now Johnny-come-lately Dems act as if they came upon the WMD revelations themselves. To me, the Republicans are bad fucks but Obama is a bad fuck wearing a smilie mask who can beguile with his smooth lay-up. Nina now works for friends of the earth international, which early on denounced Obama’s energy plans as totally antagonistic to sustainable strategies banged out in international conferences – goodbye campaign promises.

The Netherlands has a system of about 6-8 parties repped in the equivalent of Congress. It is also relatively easy for marginal parties to at least get heard. The campaign only lasts a few months so the window of opportunity for moneyed corruption is smaller and money does not really BUY elections here. The electorate is vaguely split along left and right leaners: 3 major parties are conservative [1 of which is tea-partyish] with numerous left-leaning parties like Christian Union, D-66 [think Kennedy-style liberal dems], the Animal Rights Party [leftoid with 2 reps in Congress – Wildgirl will like them], Socialist Party [a major party] and Groen-Links [green-left].

The name of your organization or alternative persona is feral tech. Does that refer to off-the-map-out-of-the-box thinking beyond the current media-defined choices?

R: It’s a catch-all for my personal hands-on projects. I’m always looking to mine the effluvium of culture to make art, tools, energy, dwellings, vehicles. I tell people that the goal is to bring third-world technology to the first world.

b: How are you coping in Iowa as the designated bellwether of normalcy in America? Although it’s in the “middle of nowhere” that nowhere seems critical on numerous levels, not the least of which are environmental and political as in several thousand Iowans deciding on this year’s flavor of Republicrat.

R: We left New York at the onset of Gulliani-fication of the city.  Now, it’s really not that different from anywhere else in this country.

b: I think this opening up to mega-stores and chains and the mallification of NY began before Giuliani with Dinkins. But Giuliani probably embraced it as some kind of genius political move…

R: Iowa’s political significance as the so-called “first in the nation” makes it a very strange place every four years. There are days when you literally see 3 or 4 presidential candidates a day on the street.  It’s a cottage industry for a lot of small-time political hustlers in both parties.

Basically though, the rural image of Iowa is just a farce. Farming is all industrial, and the fields are just production facilities.  Only a few Iowans actually farm anymore.  Insurance is the biggest industry in the state, not farming, although they need to keep up the pastoral image in order to keep those farm subsidies flowing into corporate troughs. A few people are making advances in the “local food” movement, but the deck is definitely stacked against them. I can see a time in the near future where it will be easier to grow food in urban areas, because the countryside is just too contaminated.

b: it’s weird, its the same in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, France… This need to hang onto, this deference paid to, the illusion of bucolic farming and small farmers – there is something instinctual or religious, which leads us to float toward romantic illusions of a past that probably never really existed anyway. I seem to remember you mentioning that you had been advocating against Monsanto’s gen-tech scenarios as not good for farming and its patents on seeds that would make farmers beholden to this multi-nat like indentured servants who can never again buy back their freedom/ independence.

R: That’s true. MonSatan’s model has been to crush any competition by intentionally allowing genetic contamination to occur and then claiming ownership of anything that contains their proprietary genetics. Their plan is, apparently, to control markets in vital resources like food and water.  A while back they were buying up water rights in developing countries. This is not about competing in a free market by making a superior product. It’s about controlling life on a genetic level on up. It’s God-tripping shit.

b: There is definitely some bio-tech hubris going on. The assurances of the snake oil salesman but all good cons come to an end. Read Mother Jones recent portrayal of bold, self-assured Monsanto declaring that their products would kill insects and weeds and the rest is farmer heaven: Attack of the Monsanto Superinsects. How do you see aesthetics – anything from locally brewed beer to local resistance via alternative artistic visions – as a way to critique mass corporate, conformist culture?

R: I am a big fan of regionalism, and hope to do what I can to preserve and/or reestablish it. I moved around a lot in my younger years. I loved living in the Cass Corridor in Detroit, The Irish Channel in New Orleans and Fort Greene in Brooklyn. I loved that the food, the art, the writing, the music – they were all different and all reflected life in their place. William Gibson talks about how Bohemias are the product of cultural backwaters, where ideas and aesthetics have time to cook into a tasty stew. I don’t think that happens a lot in the era of the internet. That’s one thing I like about Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It’s just a smelly backwater industrial town, but it’s full of talented people, just doing their own damn thing.

b: We seem to have a lot of geo-psycho-historical inspiration overlap – I also grew up with posters of the Panthers, SDS books, Steal This Book, MC5, music and resistance, poetic resistance, alternative film, Weather Underground, Catch-22 and on and on. I once wrote a term paper on the plight of the Native American in Michigan and the US. Still a pretty amazing story of genocide. Are you combining aesthetic resistance to conformity / the cynical erosion of pleasure in the thrall of mass consumerism with pragmatic local solutions – recycling, grow your own, solar panels…?

R: Yeah, my money work is doing construction and installing solar equipment, renovating old buildings in efficient way, re-using salvaged materials, all that stuff. I just really like old buildings, and I don’t do well in an office environment- we aren’t independently wealthy, so I’ve always found problem-solving and working with my hands to be my marketable skills and that helps pay for my other less lucrative endeavors. It kinda seems like people might be waking up to those ideas lately. I’m not talking about “buying green”. You can’t buy “green”. A new house or car can never be truly green if there is an option to reuse an older one. I drive a 1986 army surplus Blazer that burns used fryer grease biodiesel. No hybrid car is as green as that. Ericka is working on repopulating an heirloom native peach tree that was once in every farm kitchen garden, before they were all torn out to make nicer lawns. We grow food and buy beef from the local cattleman. I just had my work boots re-soled. Fuck, even that is a radical anti-consumerist act these days.

b: Great to hear this. I think that commerce is so strong, like faith, that contrary messages just seem weird, or when not backed by ad dollars they seem suspect, because the norm is so well funded and the outlet of consumable extremes [extreme sports, mtv reality shows, binge drinking, whatever] has made buffoonish behavior a kind of new controlled nonconformity but if you are TRULY weird, like alternative thinking/living you can still easily be ostracized because you’re not playing the ironic-nonconformist game. Did you move out of NYC – wasn’t it the late 1980s, about the time I moved to Paris – to return to your roots to have an effect there?

R: Not so much. We just wanted to get the fuck out of the city. Things had really run their course in NYC for us and we had a sort of poorly formulated back-to-the-land fantasy. We got here and were faced with chemical farming contamination, government run by agri-business, and a bunch of corrupt corporate fist-puppets like Governor Tom Vilsack (who Obama named to head the USDA) to contend with. Ericka really got into politics in a big way first, running the Green Party. I tried my hand later- I actually served as a lobbyist for the Iowa Farmers Union and the Iowa Renewable Energy Association at the state capitol. What a soul sucking vortex of hell that place turned out to be.

b: Since I’m dealing with the projection of my novel Beer Mystic, a novel of beer, mysticism and cantankerous resistance to the urban plight of residents whose souls are compromised by the effects of banking machinations and the greed of landlordism but also by the omniscience of the car as invasive projectile into every aspect of our being. It also deals with the blight of light pollution – New York may be the city that never sleeps but it is also the city that never lets it denizens sleep: this leads to an almost insane wakefulness that has its effects on our abilities to logically and successfully interpret our position in our surroundings. New Yorkers [urbanites in general – of course people in the suburbs and rural areas have entirely different sets of issues] must learn a series of coping mechanisms: mass consumption is one that makes it look like life is dandy. Another is obliteration of surroundings via headphones, psychological withdrawal into obsessions, drink and drugs. Turning to beer was one way to prevent New York [in my case] from getting a total hold of my soul. Does that speak to you in any way?

R: It does to a degree, but to be honest, I was a pretty hard drinking fucker when I got to New York. Maybe that’s why I went there. Drinking always took me to a place where everything was okay-  but it was so fragile. I could never drink one beer. I had to drink enough to flip the switch, and then it was walking a tight rope to stay in the zone without falling overboard. I’ve been sober for 8 years now – so is Ericka – and it really has allowed me to clarify my ideas and do things I never could as a drinker. I miss the escape, I miss the social aspect, but not a lot else.

It was a huge part of my life in New York, though. The ritual of the afternoon 40, the evening pints of Guinness at the Alibi Club on Dekalb Ave., the smell of the paper bag around the Budweiser tallboy on a bench in Tompkins square, the taste of that first beer after 36 hours in King’s County lockup….but that’s another story. I would not be who I am without lots and lots of beer. And all of the experiences, good and bad, that came with it. Maybe I’ll have one again someday.  Not today.

b: Beer combats urban hyper-stimulation, over-caffination and over-documentation-justification…

R: Beer has a really different connotation here. There is the micro-brewed goodness and the nice head that comes with it, and all of that. Then, there is the Busch lite 18-pack drinker. The blue cans in the ditch, tossed there by the anesthetized NASCAR fan. Who can blame them?  This world is too fucked up to figure out. Why not just suck down a shitload of crappy beer and forget about it? Sleep, motherfucker. Payday is friday and the boat payment is due.

b: Its finding that fine line between taste [before it becomes snobbish branding] and getting soused [a necessary escape that is considered declassé by the new beeroisie] and perhaps drinking beer that tastes good instead of just the cheapest piss but not needing to congratulate oneself on your genius craft beer purchases with a hundred tweets and a few blog entries. Just drink it and enjoy the human interactions it creates.

R: One more thought about beer, aesthetics and regionalism: Before I quit drinking, microbrews were just finding their way into grocery stores. The big brewers were trying to market fake “premium” beers to go after the Sam Adams dollar. Still, and I don’t know about now, but I always loved the regional cheap beers. I don’t know if they still make it,  but once a year Rhinelander would sell Bock. It came in the same brown bar bottles with the same label; it just had red caps that said “Bock”. It was great, and a big treat and when it was gone it was gone, until next year. I hate having “everything all the time”. It’s the same with the internet. Nothing is special; it’s all just 1s and 0s, (and $s).

Obsolete Magazine
Beer Mystic Global Pub Crawl