Author Archives for Jay Babcock

A Poem from Sharon Olds

Topography
by Sharon Olds

After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly form the left my
moon rising slowly form the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

'You're a dog… and I'm drunk.' – New 'Paws' by Pete Toms


Pete Toms is back with a stunning, expanded ‘PAWS‘!

ARTHUR readers experienced a nine page preview toke of ‘PAWS’ in February, but who would have seen this one coming?

The comic is essentially a horror comic about a guy that only experiences the outside world through television trying to sell an autobiographical screenplay. It has all the same themes as my other comics, how people choose identity roles, the media’s effect on memory, how we mythologize our personalities, but this one has a lot more dogs and possibly werewolves, and jokes about how creepy sitcom laugh-tracks are.

I’m doing the same stuff as always, drawing at night, using my natural jazz dancing ability to put my kids through college during the day.

We found an interview Pete did with Ecstatic Days back in November where he talks about what’s abstract and what’s real. Enjoy and follow up if you please over at Pete’s website!

About Arthur Comics
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IT'S SOLD OUT BUT IT'S UM…FINDABLE

BRAIN DONOR

“WASTED FUZZ EXCESSIVE”

BRAIN DONOR RECORDS
9918-4

Tracklisting:

Invocation: The Mead of Fimbulthul
1. GATES OF SKAGERRAK
2. DEATH BECOMES YOU
3. DYSLEXIA RULES K.O.
4. EMERGING/SHADOW OF MY CORPSE
5. FRANKENSTEIN
6. FOKKINGER SLAG/THE HANGING

WASTED FUZZ EXCESSIVE is the long awaited follow-up to Brain Donor’s 2006CE’s epic DRAIN’D BONER, this new album continuing in those dark traditions of declaimed metallic poetry, but extending further into works of epic construction and length. Driven by No Wave riffs and hoary proto-metal assaults, this Donor record burns at both ends. Here it hangs static and taut, whilst there it endures a rocket fired up its ass due to Mister E’s sudden and marvellous acceleration. The seven songs pan out across over an hour of music, and include Cope’s infamous stereo bass solo ‘Shadow of My Corpse’, previewed on his last tour. For those with a mind to listen to the far out, have it destroyed by the might of WASTED FUZZ EXCESSIVE. U-Know it makes sense … to somebody!

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The Pilgrims' beaver quest

From Russell Shorto’s review of author Nick Bunker’s Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History in today’s Sunday New York Times Book Review:

…Bunker, an Englishman devote[s] himself largely to the prehistory of the men and women who founded the colony. His book roams through archives and repositories in the British Isles. From county record offices and church account books, he teases out traces of William Brewster, William Bradford and the other principals who would later found the colony. His objective is to answer the very good question, Who were these people?

In their day the men and women we refer to as Pilgrims were called Separatists or Brownists, but what was the nature of their separation from the Puritan Protestantism that had rooted itself in England, and who was the Robert Browne who gave rise to the movement? How well known were these religious radicals? What was their role in English society? Exactly how were they persecuted? Where did they flourish? And how, one might add, could this new information alter the Pilgrims’ legacy?

…It is certainly true that religious belief—the desire not merely to purify the Church of England, as the Puritans wanted, but to break away altogether—was central to the Pilgrims. Separatism, however, was rooted not simply in the Bible. It was, Bunker shows, a form of Christianity blended “with ideas about gentility and good government, and seasoned with Greek and Roman ideals of republican virtue.”

And the Pilgrims were also businessmen. Unlike many other populist religious movements, Separatism, Bunker tells us, “was never the creed of the penniless.” Its founders were of the gentry. But what did that mean? The leaders of the American Pilgrims hailed from in and around Nottinghamshire in the East Midlands. It was a troubled land — not a place of mythic sentimentality, Bunker says, but “the old, feral England.” Unyielding forests, soggy fields, poor harvests and epidemics created a situation in which landowning gentlemen, desperate to maintain honor, could slip into debt, despair, sin, ruin. In such a vortex, Bunker argues, some people got religion and began pointing moralistic fingers at their neighbors.

The decision to flee thus had both religious and financial motivations. The Pilgrims’ voyage to America was a business venture whose backers — few of them especially religious — expected a return on their investment. And like millions after them, the Pilgrims themselves had a real-world American dream in mind, which was centered on the North American beaver. In the 1620s, a single beaver pelt fetched the same amount of money required to rent nine acres of English farmland for a year. For a time, the Pilgrims capitalized on that raw material: in the 1630s, they shipped 2,000 beaver pelts to England.

Bunker, a former investment banker, also shows the Pilgrims as pawns in a larger geopolitical game. James I despised both them and the Puritans (“very pestes in the Churche & common-weale,” he called them). The king might well have forbidden the Mayflower from sailing, but his secretary of state, Sir Robert Naunton, spoke to him on behalf of the religious radicals and their colonizing mission. “Without bases in America, England could not challenge Spanish control of the western ocean,” Bunker writes. “And without the supplies New England might provide, the Royal Navy could not put to sea. For Naunton, most likely it was all a matter of politics and naval doctrine, with Calvinism adding the impetus of zeal.” Bunker’s research reveals that the Pilgrim leaders were quite connected to events in England, and also that Separatism had a broader geographic scope than has long been thought.

…Having set himself the task of discovering who the real Pilgrims were, Bunker leaves it to others to square his findings against the Pilgrims of legend. So how do they measure up? Bunker shows them to be heartfelt Christians, but at the same time sectarians, as small-minded as any others, intent on getting their way within the petty struggles that split wattle-and-daub villages dotting the English countryside a long, long time ago. Pinned to the canvas of history by the points of so many archival records, they come across as relevant, certainly. But mythic? Not so much.

One from the Desert Files: CHRIS GOSS (2004)

Sound Methods and Weird Channels
How producer and Masters of Reality main man Chris Goss got his groove
by Jay Babcock

Originally published August 26, 2004 in the LAWeekly

Over a recent leisurely afternoon lunch at Silver Lake’s Astro Family restaurant, musician/producer Chris Goss is in muse-aloud mode.

“Music usually makes its way into the hands that want it,” he says quietly. “Eventually, if you’re meant to have it, it’ll get to you, through weird channels that you’d never expect.”

I’m catching up with Goss at an interesting point in his career. The night before, he was in Studio City, contributing work to the new Queens of the Stone Age album at the request of longtime friend Joshua Homme, with whom Goss has collaborated since taking Homme’s desert-rock teenagers Kyuss under his producer’s protective wing in 1992. (Goss was featured on last year’s Homme-supervised The Desert Sessions Volume 9 & 10 in a duet with PJ Harvey on the desolate “There Will Never Be a Better Time.”) QOTSA co-vocalist Mark Lanegan’s new solo album, Bubblegum, which Goss co-produced and performs on, is finally out. Goss just finished producing the new album from buzzed-up Britfreaks the Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, and is itching to start writing songs in a new project called Sno-Balls [eventually renamed Goon Moon—Ed.], with ex–Marilyn Manson bassist Twiggy Ramirez and Hella drummer Zach Hill. And his old band, Masters of Reality, has a new album out.

Well, in Europe, anyway. Like the last three Masters albums, Give Us Barabbas has no American distribution and is available only as an import at specialty stores on- and offline. And Barabbas, technically credited to “Masters of Reality/Chris Goss,” is not really a “new” album, it’s a collection of Goss-penned songs from the last 20 years that have gone previously unreleased in studio form. Why many of these songs are only appearing now is a long, serendipitous story involving Rick Rubin, band turnover, a grunge-choked ’90s marketplace inhospitable to the Masters’ varied classic rock sound and non-pretty-boy look, an impasse with a major record label, a “lost” album and Goss’ busy career as a producer. Cautionary and instructional as that tale may be, it is ultimately less important than the songs themselves: gems like the windswept, string-laden “The Ballad of Jody Frosty,” the campfire sing-along “I Walk Beside Your Love,” the majestic chorale “Still on the Hill,” the country-blues chantey “Bela Alef Rose,” the gorgeous epic “Jindalee Jindalie.” Any collection spanning two decades inevitably carries with it the air of biography, and Barabbas is certainly that; but it also feels like a secret monograph—a collection of timeless scrolls from a legendary Master that will be passed among acolytes and disseminated to those who are meant to hear it.

“Whatever will be, will be,” says Goss, with a smile.

Continue reading →

BACK IN STOCK FOR A LIMITED TIME: "Two Million Tongues" anthology cd curated by Plastic Crimewave (2006)

ANOTHER WAREHOUSE FIND: We’ve got 55 copies left of this sweetie and then it’s gone forever.

This beautifully sequenced, far-ranging album commemorates the second annual Plastic Crimewave-curated, Galactic Zoo Dossier/Arthur-presented “Million Tongues” festival that went down at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, November 3-6, 2005.

Track listing:

1. MOUNTAINS – “Speaking”
2. NO NECK BLUES BAND – “Pulse”
3. MIMINOKOTO – “Tokedasu”
4. TIM KINSELLA & AMY CARGILL – “Song for Josh”
5. MICHAEL CHAPMAN – “The Northern Lights”
6. JOSEPHINE FOSTER – “Wondrous Love”
7. CHRIS CONNELLY – “Pray’r”
8. PEARLS AND BRASS – “Waterfall”
9. TRAVELING BELL – “Apparitions”
10. THE SINGLEMAN AFFAIR – “Good to Be With You Again”
11. JACK ROSE – “Hey Fuck You Rag”
12. TAR PET – “Takeit Heri”
13. BIRDSHOW – “Pilz”
14. TONY CONRAD – “Bowstring 1”
15. HOTOTOGISU – “Blues for Steve K”
16. HAPTIC – “Indifference -> Building On Fire”
17. LUX – “Need Fade In + Out”
18. HARDSCRABBLE – “Sail It Away”

Track selection, art and lettering by Plastic Crimewave. Limited edition of 1,000 copies in jewelcase, released through Arthur’s “Bastet” imprint in 2005. 55 copies left and then they’re all gone!

$10 postpaid from The Arthur Store

One from the Desert Files: NOAH PURIFOY

Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (2004), with photography and art direction by W.T. Nelson…

NOAH’S ART
When artist Noah Purifoy died this past March, he left behind a remarkable desert masterwork.

by Kristine McKenna

Noah Purifoy was born in Snow Hill Alabama in 1917. By the time he died this past March in a fire at his home in Joshua Tree, California, he’d traveled many roads and re-invented himself several times.

For a Southern black man of Purifoy’s generation, being an artist wasn’t a readily available option, but Purifoy was a man of remarkable vision and patience. It wasn’t until he was 48 years old that he really got rolling as an artist, but by the time he died 38 years later he’d created a body of work of formidable power. Purifoy was a populist artist, a Surrealist, and a sculptor, and his masterpiece is a parcel of land in Joshua Tree which he landscaped with dozens of massive assemblages. Fashioned largely from scavenged materials, this dazzling environment was created without the help of assistants or interns; Purifoy was a lone wolf, and it was his joy to wake before sunrise and work in the early morning hours under an open sky, before the heat of the day settled in.

The tenth in a family of 13 children, Purifoy was the child of farmers who lived in Birmingham from 1920 until 1929, when they resettled in Cleveland. At the age of 22 Purifoy earned a teaching credential, but his teaching career was interrupted by World War II, which prompted him to enlist in the army in 1942. He was stationed in the South Pacific for three years, and after returning from the war, he earned a master’s degree in social work. He then landed a job at the Cuyahoga County Department of Social Services in Cleveland, where he worked from 1950 to 1952.

Purifoy passed through Los Angeles during the war and he’d always had a hankering to return, so in 1952 he relocated to Southern California. He spent the next two years doing social work at an L.A. county hospital, but the work didn’t suit him. In 1954 he enrolled at Chouinard Art Institute, where he earned a degree in 1956, and he spent the next eight years working in various capacities as an interior designer.

In 1964 Purifoy’s interest in civil rights led him to collaborate with musician Judson Powell and educator Sue Welch in the creation of the Watts Towers Art Center, a community outreach program in South-Central L.A. The next year he found himself in the eye of the hurricane of America’s racial conflict when the Watts riots erupted outside his door. It was at this point that Purifoy finally found his voice and sense of purpose as an artist; Purifoy scavenged three tons of material from the ashes of the Watts uprising and used them to create “66 Signs of Neon,” a massive group show of works created from the Watts’ debris that traveled to nine university galleries from 1966 through 1969.

The show was deemed an enormously successful marriage of art and social protest, but Purifoy found the politics of the art world distasteful, and in 1970 he turned his back on art altogether. Seventeen years later Purifoy’s longtime friend, artist Debbie Brewer, offered him permanent lodging on the land she owned in Joshua Tree, and it was then that Purifoy again felt the itch to make things.

I visited Purifoy at his place in Joshua Tree in August of 1995, and I remember my morning with him fondly. I arrived at sunup and we spent a few hours roaming the land, while Purifoy mused on the marvelous sculptures that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see. By 10:30 it was time to get out of the sun and we retreated to the seriously air-conditioned mobile home where Purifoy lived. He prepared lunch, which is to say, he removed nearly everything from his refrigerator, set it all on a small card table, and offered it to his guest. He was a generous and gracious host. I assembled a sandwich, he poured himself a glass of wine, and we talked for a while. These are a few things he told me.

CHILDHOOD
As a child I wasn’t conscious of racism, but I was aware something was going on. Once, when I was five, my mother was taking me to the store and there was a parade in the street. People had hoods on, and when I asked my mother what was happening she said, “That’s the Ku Klux Klan.”

I had good parents who tried to protect me from the trauma they knew I’d encounter soon enough, and they encouraged me to go to school. So in 1939 I earned a teaching credential—not because I wanted to be a teacher, but because that was the only thing accessible to me then. I majored in history and social studies but never taught either—I ended up teaching shop at a school in Montgomery, Alabama.

FROM SOCIAL WORK INTO ART
In the early ‘50s all my friends were social workers and they were horrible people. They thought they owned the earth because they doled out a few dollars to poor people, so one day I just up and quit. Later that same day I was driving and I happened to pass Chouinard Art Institute, and I dropped in and told them I wanted to enroll. This wasn’t something I’d been thinking about – I went in totally on a whim, but they admitted me because I was colored.

I was the worst student in the whole school. I refused to draw, because I felt that I had something and that if I learned to draw I’d be dead because I’d end up making oil paintings, which wasn’t what I was after. I’ve never been satisfied with little things that hang on the wall and I wanted to find my own way in art. I wasn’t making art then but I was posing as an artist. I wore a beret and spent lots of time drinking wine, eating cheese, listening to music and talking to people, and didn’t take any of it too seriously. I was seriously concerned about civil rights though, and I had a dialogue going with some people who shared my feelings about change that had to come.

THE WATTS UPRISING
I was in the middle of it but I wasn’t afraid. I thought it was great because it was overdue and it turned out to be a goldmine for me. I collected three tons of debris from the riot and began making art out of it. I was searching for my own idea and had been studying the Dada movement and how it had reversed the whole concept of art, and the debris from the riot is what finally launched me on my own course. From 1965 to ’69 I made lots of work, and I sold it as fast as I could make it. I was also reading philosophy then and was knocked out by [Martin] Heidegger and [Edmund] Husserl. I was looking for methods of problem solving because I had lots of problems, and I was able to alter my behavior because of those two philosophers. They were great thinkers who went into areas most people dare not go.

DROPPING OUT
I dropped out of the art world because I was disappointed in art. I perceived art as a tool for change, and when I started the program in Watts I saw art as a potential savior. But the dropout population there increased rather than decreased, and the art I was making started to become formulaic and too easy. I was never interested in earning a lot of money. I wanted art to be a means of answering questions like ‘what is growth?’ ‘What is change?’ Life isn’t worth living unless the individual is pushing to understand more, and art stopped being useful to me in that pursuit.

THE WORK
A lot of the stuff I use to make artwork I buy from a recycling place near here and it’s a horrendous cost—I spend a lot of money on materials. In 1994 a local paper ran a story on me, so I also get lots of calls from people who say ‘I’m cleaning out my garage. Why don’t you bring a truck over and take what you want?’

There’s no ecological message behind my use of recycled materials—I use them because that’s what’s available to me. People occasionally comment on how hard it must it must be living out in the desert by myself, but this is a breeze compared to many things I’ve been through. The most difficult period of my life was when I was a young adult. I was raised in the church and as a teenager I found myself in conflict about sex and religion. I gave up religion—and leaving the church didn’t hurt me at all.

DEATH
Sometimes I wish I had a savior because I don’t know what happens after death, but I do know I don’t believe in heaven. I recently made a series of works called ‘Desert Tombstones,’ and while I was working on them I thought a lot about death. It’s been said that if you don’t accept death as an equal part of existence you’re in for trouble somewhere down the line. I’d never given much thought to any of this because I thought I’d live forever, but I’ve come to realize that’s not the case. That may have something to do with why I push myself so hard now to finally get the work out that’s always been in me.

Noah Purifoy: http://www.noahpurifoy.com/