This here song is on the new, insta-classic Nobunny album First Blood, from the great Goner Records of Memphis, Tennessee. [Note: Looks like Goner is down for Gonerfest, try Midheaven instead.] It’s also the B-side to a new 7-inch from Hozac Records of Chicago, whose hype text from for this is so good/accurate that it’s pointless to write our own. Here it is:
Just as the rest of the modern world is warming up to the fuzzy pop nightmare of Nobunny’s debut LP, we’ve got the follow-up 7″ with two brand new songs that will bring back that virginal feeling “down there” and reinstate your faith in humanity. Sunshine Ramones pop run through a Kim Fowley diarrhea daydream that will have you mesmerized by it’s simplicity, and won over before the end of the chorus on the first side. Two more stone-cold classic Nobunny songs that’ll stick with you through the hard times and with laden with hooks so infectious that you’ll have to have them surgically removed from your brain.
This is a song off the brand new 10-track Hot Tropics EP from Long Beach, California’s The Growlers, a surf/bodega/cantina garage-rock band fronted by a bleached moptop (or was that a wig??) para-poet. Cool sound, intriguing lyrics, great vibe…DIG IT!
This is in Sitka. The wall is carved by Nick’s family. All Tlinkets of the Coho clan.
¡Activista! by Sonny Smith
The Lutra Canadensis
I went to Sitka (southeast Alaska), got off the plane and into the airport (bear heads, stuffed wolves, stuffed eagles), into Nick Galanin’s car (promoter of festival) and to his gallery (festival headquarters), took a brief walk to check out the venue (small French restaurant) where I’ll play solo songs (my bullshit) for an hour or so (dizzy on wine). Following this a brief gaze upwards (bald eagles, ravens), then a jaunt to the shore (through the Russian graveyard), past the local hotel (Ukrainian oil refinery worker housing), past the tasteless tourist traps (wolf pelt bras, photo-ops with stuffed bears), a feeble moment of rest from jetlag (plane tickets financed by local coke dealer), then to the harbor with memory of year before (almost knocked over on skiff by humpback whale), and rockabilly night in Haines (the local crowd never went to sleep, the bar closed at six), or what Jarred Galanin (fisherman, carpenter, musician) said when I took his Colt .45 out of the holster and asked him if this would fell a bear “save one bullet for yourself cause it’ll probably just make him mad”…
In Seward last year I ended up on a tour boat with White Magic (a band from Brooklyn). The captain of the boat nannered on in a non-stop monotone (and now to your right you will see an otter…) The 100 passengers were lulled into a catatonic gaze until we found our way to the pinnacle of the trip (an iceberg). An incandescent blue that exists nowhere else on earth. The guide asked all of us to close our eyes and focus our thoughts towards the iceberg melting. We were instructed to try and ‘make’ the iceberg crumble with our thoughts so we could spectate the grandeur of the falling ice. (Evil! Evil!). The diabolical ignorance of the tour boat captain represents the Alaskan money game in totality from corporate ‘trawlers’ (veritable genocide of the ocean floor), to the perennial blind eye of Exxon Valdez disaster residuals (Exxon never cleaned it up!), selling of water, oil, fish, game, all the way to the marketing of used tea bag Sarah Palin herself.
I’m told the land otter (Lutra Canadensis) is the trickster animal of the Tlinkets (sprawling Inuit tribe of southeast Alaska). Storied to seduce man into the woods on a camping trip say, and lead him in circles until he is disoriented and dies. Or the otter will take the form of an old friend coming to the aid of a shipwrecked fisherman, beckon him onto a boat (a mere illusion) where he falls into the water and drowns. I am told this is an obscure and seldom seen animal, but I say I witnessed thousands of land otters waddling off tourist boats (floating malls) to buy cheap reminders (canoe tchotchkes) of their great Alaskan non-adventure. Ergo land otter remains to seduce people far and wide into a spiritual drowning.
I have come here four years running and I still know next to nothing of this place. Nick put out a 7” record of mine; I am told he traded a skiff for the pressing. Nick, half-Tlinket, half-white, an artist who often appropriates the white man’s appropriation of indigenous art. Tlinkets have two clans, Ravens and Eagles. Within these are sub-clans: Whales, Toads, Slugs, Bears, Halibut… Nick is Raven. But he is an orphan, his mother is non-native and his dad is a bluesman, a Kaagwaantaan (eagle). It’s a matrilineal society (you take your mother’s clan). Ravens cannot marry Ravens. Eagles cannot marry Eagles. A rule widely respected still.
In Anchorage we played at a little club. Walking in, there was a stripper pole, but the bartenders were all unmistakably gay. Downstairs there was a hand written dress code obviously directed to hip hoppers (no sideways hats, no underwear showing). I could not make head nor tails of where this club was coming from. The club (just a theory) is a kind of default venue where anything out of the ordinary is relegated, anything non-mainstream is quarantined there; gays, blacks, small-time rock bands, hip hoppers, strippers, teenagers, us…
Jarred took us to a headwaters. The fish were jumping. A switch buried deep inside their atoms has clicked on; they will need to jump up the river to get to the fresh water. They are sometimes jumping before they even reach the climb to the fresh water. If they get to the fresh water it will diffuse into their system and they will turn grey and die. That is if they are not eaten by bears, humans, and eagles first.
With Breathe Owl Breathe, at a campground in Haines…
A bonfire on the beach in Seward. About seven or eight folks. They are talking about the trawlers, talking about the politics, talking about charter fisherman. The young people in Alaska know the game, at least the ones I’m meeting. One of them boxcar’d up here. One has become a little uneven. Spontaneously, he throws himself on the fire. He’s howling with laughter. He’s got a crazy look.
Later, a ferryboat taking our caravan to Juneau. It is raining. The man in the orange jumper suit guiding our van onto the ferry is speaking Russian.
Another time, the Mycea sail boat. I jumped in the water I couldn’t get back in. they threw a tug to save me. Why did I jump? The work of the Lutra Canadensis? The captain raised his five daughters on an island nearby…
The DJ in Juneau is having us on his show. He doesn’t know our music nor any music. He doesn’t care. He makes a joke of himself. Of everything.
We are traveling with a six-year-old named Wesley. He is Tlinket too.
Will we miss the ferry out of Haines? We are all looking for Nick’s uncle, he has disappeared with the truck, we are looking in ditches, at the jail, at his ex-girlfriends. We find him in the ferry terminal parking lot, asleep in the front seat.
There is a lady’s house we are supposed to stay at. But it’s covered in dog hair. It’s all covered in dog hair. Everything. She has lost to the pack. They rule her.
Back in Sitka I am leaving. I have fish to bring home. They only allow so much pounds on the plane so I stuff salmon in my underpants.
Hailing from Baltimore, MD, a bubbling pot that continues to churn out a rainbow fog swirl of new and exciting bands (Crazy Dreams Band, Lower Dens) as well as experimental music and new media festivals (Whartscape, Transmodern), Ami Dang seems to exude the creative energy that is pouring out of her hometown. Her upcoming full-length album (due out in December on Ehse Records), was crafted from an intersecting background of classical sitar and composition, experimental electronics and visual performance, combined with a deep love for ’90s dance beats and a fuzzy memory of megaphones blaring Indian pop songs into the streets of New Delhi.
If you’re in the area next week, catch Ami performing along with many other artists at Baltimore’s High Zero festival on September 23rd and 24th, 2010.
~~~~~Hairy Painter + Ivy Meadows DJ set~~~~~ eight lamas from drepung – invoking the spirit of kindness through sound / masaki batoh and helena espvall – until tomorrow / Arp – High Life / pearls before swine – another time / durutti column – prayer / Lower Dens – Blue & Silver / Pigeons – En Rêve (slooowed downnn arthur radio dub) / Prince Rama Of Ayodhya – Aeolian Divine / philip k dick – the divine invasion (excerpt)
I was going to write a poem I made a pie instead it took about the same amount of time of course the pie was a final draft a poem would have had some distance to go days and weeks and much crumpled paper the pie already had a talking tumbling audience among small trucks and a fire engine on the kitchen floor everybody will like this pie it will have apples and cranberries dried apricots in it many friends will say why in the world did you make only one
this does not happen with poems because of unreportable sadness I decided to settle this morning for a re- sponsive eatership I do not want to wait a week a year a generation for the right consumer to come along
REIGN IN BLOOD The secret mark that French pulp villain Fantômas left on the 20th Century
By Erik Morse
Early in 1911 popular French publishing house Fayard released the first of 32 monthly serial novels of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantômas. Subtitled ‘A Shadow on the Guillotine,’ this ultra-violent pulp tale recounted the exploits of the eponymous master villain as he reined blood and magick upon the boulevards of Paris. Pursued by police inspector, Juve, and his journalist sidekick, Jerome Fandor, Fantômas slaughters members of French high-society indiscriminately before stealing away with their wealth and, often, their very identities—in his travels between the Dordogne and Paris, Fantômas dispatches the Marquise de Langrune, her steward Dollon, Lord Beltham, Princess Sonia Danidoff, the famed actor Valgrand and a passenger liner full of travelers en route to South America. When Fantômas, alias Etienne Rambert, alias Gurn, is apprehended by Juve at Lady Beltham’s villa, he is brought to trial at the Palais de Justice, found guilty of murder and condemned to the guillotine. However with the aid of his mistress, Fantômas steals away from his Santé prison cell and fills the vacancy with an unsuspecting look-a-like who is left to the blade. When Juve discovers the ruse, he proclaims, “Curses! Fantômas has escaped! Fantômas is free! He had an innocent man executed in his place! Fantômas! I tell you, Fantômas is alive.”
Within months of its February debut, the Fantômas serial became a pop smash with the reading public, profiting no doubt from the French public’s unquenchable thirst for violence, mayhem and pulp. At 65 centimes a copy, sales for each volume reached easily into the hundreds of thousands. American poet and Fantômas enthusiast John Ashbery contends that the real success of the serial was its transcendence of class, education and sex, from “Countesses and concierges; poets and proletarians; Cubists, nascent Dadaists, soon-to-be-Surrealists. Everyone who could read, and even those who could not, shivered at posters of a masked man in impeccable evening clothes, dagger in hand, looming over Paris like a somber Gulliver, contemplating hideous misdeeds from which no citizen was safe.” Such was the popular reaction to the Fayard publication, Marcel Allain would later recall, with some hyperbole, “The adventures of Fantômas have surpassed those of the Bible.”
Nearly a hundred years later, we can see the frightening metastasis of the master of crime’s “brand”—from his beginnings amongst the Right Bank sophisticates who released him upon the world, to the marauding gangs plundering and murdering in his name, to the sacrificial cults who would congregate at the witching hour to reenact his sins. His transgressions—bold, fiendish and inexplicable—were the narratives of nightmares. Fantômas captured the imagination of his admirers and extended his influence through the artistic genealogies of Europe, leaving a catechism of excess, debauchery and violence to a brood as varied as Pablo Picasso, Andre Breton, Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille, Alain Robbe-Grillet, James Joyce, Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Desnos, Jean Marais, Alain Resnais, René Magritte, Francois Truffaut and the Mike Patton-Buzz Osbourne-Trevor Dunn-Dave Lombardo art-rock superband of the same name. In their major contributions to the century, the words and deeds of France’s supreme villain pullulate still more revolutionary achievements and still darker crimes.
Here, in this extended fait-diver, is the unedited, uncensored and untold history of the criminal of the century…
This article continues, for 9,500 more words, in Arthur No. 28 (March 2008)
I lucked into seeing a singer-songwriter-guitarist named Erin Lizardo perform a set of quietly enchanting songs last fall in a small pizzeria/coffeehouse in Chico, California, where she lives. Here’s a video she’s made since then.
Looking for Mushrooms
Director: Bruce Conner
Year: 1967
Time: 13 mins
Music: Terry Riley
Expecting a nuclear disaster, Conner moved down to Mexico in 1962, where he spent his time looking for mushrooms with Timothy Leary. Later, Conner added footage of similar hunts in Frisco and in 1997 he decided to set it against a 1968 Terry Riley soundtrack. The result is a strange combination of typical ’60s psychedelic editing with what might appear to be a road movie interested in exotic landscapes. A classic of American avant film.
So glad I’m in NY this weekend for this art opening. Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce comics in Paper Rodeo changed my life 10 years ago. Very excited to catch his first solo show in NY at The Hole. MAT BRINKMAN
PHANTASMATGORIA
SEPTEMBER 18 – OCTOBER 23 2010
OPENING: SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 18 6-9PM
THE HOLE
104 GREENE ST.
The Hole is pleased to present Mat Brinkman’s first solo show in New York! There are not enough exclamation points in existence to convey our excitement. The last time Mat showed a major work in New York was when he was part of Forcefield in the Whitney Biennial in 2002. I was a Whitney intern back then and like everyone who saw it, had my mind completely blown by that installation. I have followed Mat’s books prints and zines since then, from the epic Teratoid Heights book to his latest neon silkscreen zine by Le Dernier Cri, and got the chance to include him in a few group exhbitions like New York Minute at the MACRO in Rome and Mail Order Monsters, London at Max Wigram and Athens at Andreas Melas Presents. His work was also recently included in Portugal Arte 2010 in Lisbon, Portugal.
But now! Mat will be filling the gallery with black ink works on paper and blasting some rooms with colored light. Plus an advance previewing of selected work by various artists from a yet to be released Necro~Demonic Dungeon~Crawl~Warfare Boardgame. What will this be like? We don’t know. But pinch us because we just can’t believe we are finally getting to see some new art from this secret mega legend artist in our home city.
We will be releasing our first Hole book in conjunction with this show: a coverless mystery book in which we see a monstrous face melting, ripping off, reconstituting, tumescing and exploding. This book may do similar things to you head as well!
Arthur Magazine 