BULL TONGUE Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore
80 Goddamn Good Things Of 2004
1/ ALBERT AYLER Holy Ghost box set (Revenant) As Sun Ra so aptly put it, “It’s a motherfucker, don’t ya know?” Seems quite unlikely that there will be another release with such gushing importance and pleasure, mixed so sweetly, in our lifetime or the next.
2/ Here comes BLOOD STEREO cdr (Absurd) Local Brighton UK housecleaners Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Constance (has anyone there reading this ever hired these guys? curious…) continue to amaze after years of startling da-da dropdead music as Prick Decay and Decaer Pinga. Now they are Blood Stereo and are even more deadly.
3/ MARCIA BASSETT Assembling box Because I never actually sent her my piece I’ve never seen the finished thing, but Marcia’s tribute to Flux collectivism and correspondence art sounded like the Project of the Year to me, and I bet it’s fucking boss.
4/ JOHN OLSON’s stapled skull Minneapolis summer slice. Seen a lot of fucked shit happen on stage these last few decades but seeing Olson whipping a knight’s mace over his head in sick noise frenzy only to have it shave a bit of cranio-meat and, hence, blood spoo all upon his tronix box and then keep on rockin for 40 more minutes was heavy.
5/ THURSTON MOORE nice war (flower + cream press) Political shit box rattlers in non-prose form by a puissant who swigs where most swag. What’s not to like?
6/ BILL KNOTT The Unsubsciber (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Out-of-nowhere mainstream publication of work by the poet both Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine pointed to as an aesthetic signifier to their own vision spiel back in the early ‘70s. Knott has been making and issuing self-published staple books for years, all great, and this is an easy way to cach his drift—a remarkable humorist/tragedist balance.
7/ GARY PANTER Light Show with Joshua White at Anthology Film Archives & Jimbo in Purgatory (Fantagraphics) The new Jimbo book is totally maxed-out, something like a core dump of everything Panter’s head has consumed for a while. A better Dante I don’t expect to read any time soon. And the lightshow collaboration with Fillmore veteran White (plus a variety of musicians) was a shotgun blast to every brain that saw it. Sweet!
8/ JOSHUA Life Less Lost cd (Spirit Of Orr) Joshua Burkett at one time was a dragon slayer of noise insanity with the late great Vermonster but the last few years has him journeying thru wonderful folk/acoustic passages. This latest CD is killer.
9/ JULIE DOUCET Journal (l’Association) Hilarious new novel-length, illustrated diary by this always amazing artist. Supposedly an English translation will be coming along soon, but this is a great read even if your French is perfunctory.
10/ DEVILLOCK/CHARLIE DRAHEIM 2xcs (Tone Filth) The Minneapolis/Detroit nexus of suburban gore drone gets fully realized here with Minnieapple’s own Devillock (headed by Tone Filth label honcho Justin Meyers) and Michigan street rat Draheim. Cities on flame!
11/ SAVAGE PENCIL Trip or Squeak in The Wire It has been a long time since the classic Rock & Roll Zoo strip, but Sav’s ferocious new comic strip has just been gathering strength and weirdness as it rolls along. For my money, it’s the best work he has ever done. Total crack fantasia.
12/ VALERIE WEBB & PAUL LaBRECQUE Trees, Chants & Hollers cdr This fucker is sold out and we can’t sem to get a copy even tho these two kids live next town over. Having heard these two as The Other Method as well as their participation in Sunburned Hand of The Man we know how awesome they are. this CDR must be the shit as it’s just them—anyone got one? All reports is that it is “amazing”..damn…
13/ JOHN FAHEY The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick cd (Water) Incredibly swank live Fahey sets from the Matrix in ’68 & ’69 with superb Glenn Jones liner notes and lovely packaging.
14/ BILL DWIGHT radio grapple Waking up every school morning to Bill Dwight’s almost free radio show made 2004 that much easier to bear—but he was too good and they got someone who maybe tows the line more or something.—whatever—Air America wants him—here’s hoping he returns…somewhere.
BULL TONGUE Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore
Some new and excellent small presses have been rampaging across the USA. First up is Matthew Wascovich’s SLOW TOE PUBLICATIONS, which has been hellbent on issuing stapled 8.5×11 paper poetry screeds at a rate of almost once a month. Most of these are Matthew in conjunction with one or more other writers, either vintage heavyweights from his beloved Cleveland scene or underground noise freaks. The dude has an ear for who out there may be spilling righteous verbiage, such as Elisa Ambrogio and Pete Nolan both of blasted headcase rockers Magik Markers. Anyone who’s seen that group twist and spout will know that, yeah, they must have some kind of wowsville poetry wheel just going off in their heads n’ hearts. And they do. As does Tyondai Braxton, Dylan Nyoukis, Dead C’s Bruce Russell, Charalambides/Scorces’ Christina Carter, Valerie Webber et al. Don’t expect “rock” poetry, this is all way more out there and off the tracks. Wasco hears it with the same brain that has read the primordial greatness of the long-flowing history of Cleveland’s heaviest. Peeps such as Tom Kryss, Kent Taylor and Alex Gildzen, all constituents of the famed Asphodel Bookshop, where the recently and dearly departed Jim Lowell held court and where the visionary and law-hounded poet d.a. levy burst forth. Slow Toe has been slipping out a few CDRs lately as well, mostly of Wasco’s bent brain guitar expressions either solo or in group-mode as Real Knife Head.
There is something eternally appealing about women playing punk rock, negating (as it does) the testosterone monotheism that is so synonymous in the field. A fine new entry in this area is the debut album by Chicago’s MANHANDLERS. Their self-titled LP (Criminal IQ) is more like a vicious update on late period Runaways than some others inside the genre, since they don’t shy away from flash-qua-flash, or rely on the primitivist approach favored by the post-Riot Grrrl generation. The album is just slamming, high-speed, old school punk of the early OC variety. As such it is a splendid thing. Criminal IQ have another punk winner with the eponymous LP by THE FUNCTIONAL BLACKOUTS. It has been out for a while, but it’s really a world-class destroyer in classic CA punk terms. Filled with reckless noise owing small debts to bands like Crime and the Weirdos, but powered by lotsa pumice unique unto itself.
We’ve been languishing in the strictly female scribulations of NYC’s BELLADONNA BOOKS lately. This long running series of pamphlet poetry editions has been edited by the poets Rachel Levitsky and Erica Kaufman since the mid ‘90s, and is getting close to its 100th issue. Each zine is a succinct piece by a female poet, all of whom share a common sense of adventure and active consciousness. Great writing from Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Nada Gordon, Lynne Tillman, Lisa Jarnot, Rosemarie Waldrop and so many others. So if you’re in the market for deadly nightshade, this is the place for you. An adjunct press to Belladonna is Erica Kaufman’s own BOKU BOOKS, which is just getting started releasing some good new staplebound killers. Her own the two coat syndrome and Chris Martin’s The Day Reagan Died are verily hep.
Brooklyn label The Social Registry has also released a handload of jake new wax. THE ELECTROPUTAS’ 3 LP continues their strategy of investigating Can Groove Land, then blasting it with all kindsa crude noise hand grenades. I mean, just when you’re about ready to settle back into a ‘Turtles Have Short Legs” mood, the forest starts to melt around you. Pretty cool, and then some. Damn nice, also, to have vinyl on the new HALL OF FAME album, Paradise Now. Samara, Theo and Dan continue to kick out the smoke with their fourth, giving spatial folk stylings a disturbed urban underpinning. The way they layer rondelays of slithering acoustic muzz and scarily genteel vocals is as killer as ever. It’s good to see that the time Samara spent hanging with Jackie O Motherfucker didn’t spoil her campfire ghost-spirit. Dan’s is another story. Give it a spin.
Some really nice tactile offerings have been sloughing out of Woodstock, NY by way of SHIVISTAN PRESS, which is run by the charmed beard of local cosmo-poet Shiv Mirabito. Shiv is one of those cats who somehow manages to trounce back and forth from India a few dozen times a day. How he travels we’re still trying to figure out, but it’s certainly produced some groovy results. The Woodstock community remains rich in deep literary vibes with the likes of The Fugs’ Ed Sanders, nomad spirit seducer Louise Landes Levi, right-on Janine Pommy Vega and hard lovin’ Andy Clausen, all of whom have books pub’d by Shivastan. Meta-thought warrior Ira Cohen, famous for his mylar photo LP jackets of Hendrix and John McLaughlin, has a hip book just pub’d here. Like Ira’s prescient Bardo Matrix press, whose publications are as now rarified as god’s nipple junk, these books are all manufactured in Nepal utilizing Nepalese woven paper. The heft and olfactory sublimation put you in direct line with a strange bliss-out. A good place to start may be with the Woodstock mountain poetry journal series Wildflowers, but they’re all pretty tasty.
Got a really good booklet of poems called Birthmarks & Plastics (So & So Publications) by Bill Cassidy. Know nothing about the guy, except that he seems to live in New York, and has fine-tuned himself to the music of Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard, and a lotta other really fucking good NY poets. There’s a fake sonnet, a few aphorisms, and some really striking imagist writing about being young and adrift. Cassidy’s work seems untainted by the stodgy academic bullshit that holds so many back, and his stuff is revelatory without being confessional. And that’s pretty cool. Aa (big a little a) has a very swank one-sided LP out on Narnack. It’s the first release from this Brooklyn combo, and has a very beautiful way of shifting its center in unexpected ways. The album is pressed on white vinyl, the jacket contains a passel of very righteous inserts by a buncha artists who are in (or are friendly with) the band, and the single side of music is a fat-shifting tableau of the kindsa sounds that young people should be making and enjoying in bistros from here to Kalamazoo. Having not espied them, it is not simple to discern their true nature, but what the fuck? Here they club out bite-sized hunks of neo-no, new-wave-electro-murk, disco-noise-readymades, French duck calls and a buncha other stuff. And it sounds quite pleasing!
I recently spoke with John Zerzan, the leading voice in the Anarcho-primitivist movement, at his home in Eugene, Oregon. He is the author of several renowned books on green anarchy including Elements of Refusal and Future Primitive. Zerzan is well known for his association with the Unabomber but I wanted to hear what he had to say about the current state of primitivism and where it is headed. — Anthony Alvarado
(This interview has been shortened for brevity. Particularly a long discussion on the Paleolithic age has been cut from the transcript.)
In a nutshell, what do you believe in? I associate you with anarchy and primitivism. How do you define those?
Well, the stuff is called by those terms. Green anarchy and Anarcho-primitivism. Some native friends of ours call it neo-primitivism, or anti-civilization, and there are some differences but roughly there is one common current there. And speaking of the anarchist part there’s a big split and it’s not just here it’s all over the map, between the more classical, traditional left, red anarchist . . . one of the most fundamental things is their approach is self managed production, self manage the factories – well our approach is against industrial life, against factories qua factories for several reasons: one is the suicidal course of things – we can’t just keep industrializing, so that’s obviously where the green part comes in. There is a big split. Like say Noam Chomsky is on that leftist side.
He’s an anarchist?
Well perhaps, he’s . . . I don’t know exactly what he is. He froths at the mouth when people bring this stuff up in an interview, and they do all the time now because it’s spreading I think. He just really, doesn’t get it, doesn’t like it, he won’t have any discussion about it. In other words it’s not just some sectarian squabbling it’s a very fundamental difference.
What criticism does Chomsky have as an anarchist towards green anarchy and primitivism?
Well one of the things he always brings up – and I use Chomsky as a kind of foil or reference point because so many people know who he is, and they think – well they’re all Anarchists it’s cool and so forth– he comes up with the 7 billion people thing and that’s a reality obviously. He says we are genocidists, he really get’s kind of hysterical about it.
He’s saying “Well you guys have a plan to kill 6 billion people.” ?
Exactly! And consciously not just – that would happen as a result if you went that way but , I mean it’s quite amazing! The way I would put it though, I mean I’ve been around, I’ve even been in India a couple of times in the last few years, when I look at those tower apartment block things where people have been forced off the land into cities and if and when this crashes they’re gonna be dead in a few days. They have no land. They have no . . .when the power goes off, the food spoils, they have no water . . . we’re concerned about that. If you ask me the genocidist thing is just ignoring that and plunging on as the crisis deepens in every single sphere.
So this idea of returning to a society based on primitivism, based on sustainability, critics would say well there is no way we could do this without these cataclysmic violent changes – do think that there are alternative ways of getting there from here?
It couldn’t happen overnight. And nobody’s saying that. And Chomsky knows that. Yeah, it would be a process of re-skilling people and seeing some kind of autonomy instead of just the hopelessness that we have now where everybody is dependant on systems of technology that are quite vulnerable but we just keep blindly going along.
I lived here nearly 5 years before I could meet the middle western day with anything approaching Dignity. It’s a place that lets you understand why the Bible is the way it is: Proud people cannot live here.
The land’s too flat. Ugly, sullen and big it pounds men down past humbleness. They Stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and terrible sky. In country like this there Can be no God but Jahweh.
In the mills and refineries of its south side Chicago passes its natural gas in flames Bouncing like bunsens from stacks a hundred feet high. The stench stabs at your eyeballs. The whole sky green and yellow backdrop for the skeleton steel of a bombed-out town.
Remember the movies in grammar school? The goggled men doing strong things in Showers of steel-spark? The dark screen cracking light and the furnace door opening with a Blast of orange like a sunset? Or an orange?
It was photographed by a fairy, thrilled as a girl, or a Nazi who wished there were people Behind that door (hence the remote beauty), but Sievers, whose old man spent most of his life in there, Remembers a “nigger in a red T-shirt pissing into black sand.”
It was 5 years until I could afford to recognise the ferocity. Friends helped me. Then I put some Love into my house. Finally I found some quiet lakes and a farm where they let me shoot pheasant.
Standing in the boat one night I watched the lake go absolutely flat. Smaller than raindrops, and only Here and there, the feeding rings of fish were visible 100 yards away – and the Blue Gill caught that afternoon Lifted from its northern lake like a tropical! Jewel in its ear Belly gold so bright you’d swear he had a Light in there. His colour faded with his life. A small green fish…
All things considered, it’s a gentle and undemanding planet, even here. Far gentler Here than any of a dozen other places. The trouble is always and only with what we build on top of it.
There’s nobody else to blame. You can’t fix it and you can’t make it go away. It does no good appealing To some ill-invented Thunderer Brooding over some unimaginable crag.
It’s ours. Right down to the last small hinge it all depends for its existence Only and utterly upon our sufferance.
Driving back I saw Chicago rising in its gases and I knew again that never will the Man be made to stand against this pitiless, unparallel monstrosity. It Snuffles on the beach of its Great Lake like a blind, red, rhinoceros. It’s already running us down.
You can’t fix it. You can’t make it go away. I don’t know what you’re going to do about it. But I know what I’m going to do about it. I’m just going to walk away from it. Maybe A small part of it will die if I’m not around
ONE MORE TRICKSTER GONE Late-Night Thoughts on R.L. BURNSIDE & the Indestructible Beat of the Blues By Eddie Dean
You have to meet your heroes whenever you can, so I accosted Shelby Foote a decade ago as he was leaving the men’s room at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.
The 80-year-old author of The Civil War: A Narrative, rightfully called our American Iliad, was minutes from delivering a lecture to a packed auditorium, and he was in hurry to get to the podium. I wanted to give him a story I’d written about an obscure country-music rebel named Jimmy Arnold.
Hailing from southwest Virginia, Arnold had transformed himself from a shy skinny mountain kid into a bluegrass-biker outlaw of Orson Wellesian proportions. He tattooed himself from head to foot like a Celt warrior of old (including a panther on his cheek, a lion on his forehead, and Christ on his throat) and recorded a sui generis concept album about the Lost Cause, Southern Soul, before dying at age 41 of heart failure. I figured Foote would be interested to know that Civil War buffs came in all shapes and sizes.
I didn’t want to battle the post-lecture autograph crowd, so I figured now was the time for the hand-off. He took the package graciously, and I never expected to hear from him again.
Several months later, though, came his reply, in the same dip-pen cursive scrawl that he’d written 500 words a day for more than 20 years to finish his masterpiece. He thanked me for the story and the cassette of Southern Soul I’d included, “both of which made me deeply regret not having seen him [perform] live while he was still with us. Pretty soon, I fear, we’re going to run out of people like him & we’ll be much poorer for the loss.”
His words came to my mind when I heard that R.L Burnside had died in September.
R.L. was another hero of mine, and we’re running out of people like him. He was a trickster figure right out of Southern folklore, full of mischief and uncommon mettle. His signature, “Well, well, well,” was at once bemused and menacing, an open declaration of war against easy sentimentality and crap romanticism.
R.L was a realist, and as such took it as his beholden duty to tell the truth as he saw it. The witness to disaster—his own and those around him—must do something more than simply mourn. He’s got to testify. And must not only endure, as Faulkner put it, he must prevail. R.L. had his own way of saying it: “Hanging in like a dirty shirt.” It was an art that arose out of sheer stubbornness as much as anything else. He took the shit that life threw at him and tossed it right back, again and again and again.
When I got word of R.L’s death, it hit extra hard, because Shelby Foote had died only a few weeks before. I recalled our second, (and final, exchange. I’d written a brief reply of gratitude to his thank-you note, telling him that I rated Skip James higher than Robert Johnson as the ultimate bluesman. I knew he was a Johnson fan all the way, which his post-card reply confirmed. I also threw in a mention that John Keats was my favorite poet, and he agreed, adding, “Keats is my man too, I only wish he’d lived to be nearly 80 like Robert Browning.”
Thinking of these two old lions now gone, these two neighbors (they lived just 40 miles apart, Shelby in south Memphis, and R.L in north Mississippi hill country) of a South long dead and gone, it hit me that R.L. was the Browning of the blues, a late bloomer who gained more power and force with time, that rare musician who burns brighter as the years go on.
The late writer and record producer Robert Palmer “rediscovered” R.L. in the early ‘90s and his liner notes to the Fat Possum classic, Too Bad Jim, bears repeating for its insight into R.L’s love of chaos as a philosophy of life:
“One of the most productive album sessions began on a rainy Sunday afternoon with a rapid-fire sequence of disasters. A bass literally fell apart, a drum kit broke into pieces and finally a heavy glass door fell out of its frame for no good reason and was prevented from smashing the recording board only through the timely intervention of the producer’s skull. Far from being deterred, R.L. was positively beaming. He seemed to enjoy these incidents immensely, and by the time we’d cleared away all the damage he was in an inspired mood, ready to rock.”
As good as Too Bad Jim is, A Ass Pocket of Whiskey is better. Recorded two years later with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in a rented hunting lodge, it is, among other things, the hardest-rocking album ever made by a 70-year-old. It has been described as a party record, which it is, in the same way that the Stooges’ Funhouse is a party record. Even here, instead of grandstanding and showboating like every other elderly bluesman has done at one time or another (and you can’t blame a single one), R.L. will have none of it. He is a conduit, a cosmic joker talking trash and invoking the chaos of the universe. The band doesn’t let him down.
A few years after Ass Pocket of Whiskey made R.L. a sensation on the underground rock circuit, I went to see him at his home in the hill country near Holly Springs, MS. It was early January, in between tours, and he was nursing a cold. Even so, he was cordial and full of good cheer, as he must have been with a hundred other journalists who tracked him down in his final glory years.
Inside his small brick house, a dozen or so family members and hangers-on were crowded around the TV set, watching the western Tombstone starring Kurt Russell on cable. Nobody paid any attention to either myself or R.L. as he ambled back to the kitchen to make me a drink. They had seen this interview scenario many times before, whereas movies like Tombstone held up to repeated showings.
R.L, sank into a couch in ante room off the kitchen, and I took a seat opposite. He was tired, he needed the rest.
After a while, a party of young musicians came through the front door. It was the North Mississippi All-Stars, here to pick up R.L.’s son Garry in their van. Garry was playing with them that night at a show in nearby Oxford. The bandleader, Luther Dickinson, ended up into the back room where we sat talking. He’s a young dude with long hair and a quick smile, and, when he saw R.L., his smile got bigger and he went over to say hello.
Luther seemed to sense R.L.’s fatigue, and he knelt down so he could listen better to what he was saying. All I could hear of their conversation was a lot of ‘Yes sir’s” on the part of Luther and a lot of chuckling from R.L. I am no stranger to Southern ways, and I could understand that Luther was a well-brought up young man, but this was something much more than mere respect for your elders.
It was a beautiful scene, the young acolyte at the feet of the sage, paying tribute and also gleaning the kind of sustenance that can’t be found in guitar instruction manuals. I will always remember the glow that came over R.L’s haggard face as he bantered with another of his sons, this one adopted, who will carry on his ways, to not merely endure, but to prevail: Hanging in like a dirty shirt.
Siphon Your Way to Financial Freedom by Dave Reeves
1. Pick your siphon Get a clear hose, six feet long and at least an inch in diameter. Make sure you get a thick-walled hose because you are going to have to push it all the way down the gasshole of an SUV. Hardware stores sell them for about a buck a foot. Get a five-gallon gas can while you are at it.
2. Find a target SUVs’ 40-gallon tanks are the most profitable vehicles from which to liberate gas. The sense of panic the SUV driver feels when his behemoth gets less than the normal ten miles to the gallon is an added benefit.
Try to pick a full one and don’t be deterred by silly gas tank locks which are merely cosmetic and can be turned with almost any key.
Donut shops provide great gas hunting because it’s like a law that police cars have to be all the way full all the time.
3. Sightlines Getting caught siphoning is not cool. So pull your vehicle next to the target and open up the doors to make a little room where you can do the deed unobserved. Put your gas can on the ground in between the doors. If someone eyeballs you pretend like you are changing clothes.
4. Hose pushing Push the hose down into the target tank till you think you hit the gas.
5. Start sucking Start sucking on the hose and get the gas going. If you were smart and got the clear hose you’ll see the copper-colored nectar coming and be able to get the hose out of your mouth and channel the flow into the intended receptacle. If you sleep on this step your breath will smell like west Texas for no less than three days.
6. Drain the pain away Once the siphon gets going it will flow steady and strong into your gas can.
The “Siphon Effect” can be explained with all sorts of scientifical facts about how “atmospheric pressure” maintains the vacuum you created when you sucked gas from the higher “gravitational potential energy” up in the vehicle which seeks to stabilize itself by flowing into the can on the ground, but all that bullshit obscures the fact that the “Siphon Effect” is actually just magic.
I can get five gallons in four minutes flat. That’s three bucks a minute, and you can’t make that at Walmart.
“Freeman House is a former commercial salmon fisher who has been involved with a community-based watershed restoration effort in northern California for more than 25 years. He is a co-founder of the Mattole Salmon Group and the Mattole Restoration Council. His book, Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species received the best nonfiction award from the San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for quality of prose. He lives with his family in northern California.”
That’s the biographical note for Freeman House on the Lannan Foundation website. We would add that earlier in his life, Freeman edited Innerspace, a mid-1960s independent press magazine for the nascent psychedelic community; presided over the marriage of Abbie and Anita Hoffman at Central Park on June 10, 1967; and was a member of both New York City’s Group Image and the San Francisco Diggers.
The Case For The Watershed As An Organizing Principle
by Freeman House
[I’ve rarely given a talk in circumstances more alien to my life experience. This talk was presented a roomful of county and state bureaucrats charged with implementing a five-county wetlands protection and restoration effort. The five counties were the southwestern-most part of California, stretching from Santa Barbara to San Diego, a part of the state that makes me feel like I’m in a foreign country. As if to accentuate the weirdness, the luncheon was held at Sea World, a theme park in San Diego.]
I’ve had quite a bit of time to puzzle about what qualifies me to be here. I feel a little like a visiting diplomat or more accurately, an anthropologist dropping into a whole other culture. Up in the backwoods of northern California, where I come from, we tend to think of ourselves as living in Alta California. Los Angeles and San Diego seem like another place, although they shouldn’t, considering that the voters around here determine a lot of what goes on in the state of California. Which is where I live regardless of the fact that it’s much easier for me and my comrades to think of ourselves as part of the Klamath Province.
I have worked at watershed restoration for 20 years, but in a drainage where there are no dams, and where there are still three species of a wild salmon population holding on. An eighth of the land base is managed benignly by the federal government as the King Range National Conservation Area, another eighth not so benignly by corporate timber interests, and the rest is held either in ranches or private smallholdings. It has a human population density of less than ten folks per square mile. Not too many similarities. And most of the people in this room probably know more about wetlands biology than I do.
Since it was a book I wrote that inspired the organizers to invite me and the book, Totem Salmon, is mainly about attempts to invoke a new (or rather very old) kind of community identity that lives within the constraints and opportunities of the place it finds itself, that’s what I’ll go ahead and talk about.
It could be my best credentials for being here today is the fact that I was born in Orange County. The earliest memories are of my first five years spent at my grandparents’ home in Anaheim, pre-Disneyland. Set in the middle of town, I had two acres to run in haphazardly planted to oranges and lemons and avocados, and for a long time that Edenic space was my model for paradise. Each weekend, we’d drive in my grandfather’s 1935 Buick sedan for maybe ten minutes to a local farm to buy our week’s supply of eggs and milk and vegetables. When we extended our drive to visit Aunt Florence in Pomona, we drove through 60 unbroken miles of commercial orange groves, another image of paradise. I’m revealing my age when I tell you that the air was wonderful, the light incredible.
Since then, I’ve learned something about the settlement of contemporary Anaheim. The existence of Anaheim is entirely dependent on 19th-century amateur efforts in social and physical engineering. Hard as it may be to believe when trying to find the freeway exits to Anaheim today, it was largely settled in the 1860s by polyglot groups of urban utopians who had few of the skills required for the kinds of agriculturally-based communitarian paradigms they were pursuing.
One thing was clear to all of them, however, and that was that their dreams were dependent on importing water to the arid lands they hoped would support them. One of the groups, composed mainly of German mechanics in San Francisco, collectively purchased 1,165 acres sight unseen, subdivided it into 20-acre farmsteads and appointed a certain Mr. Hansen to supervise the construction of a ditch seven miles long. That ditch diverted water from the Santa Ana River along with 450 miles of subsidiary ditches that delivered the precious water to each parcel. Thus the name of the place: Ana for the river on which their venture depended plus heim, German for home. The work was done with picks and shovels by local Mexican-Americans, and was finished in three years, during which time no one of the blue-collar workers laid eyes on their future paradise. Each of them was supporting the effort to the tune of about eight dollars a week, a considerable sum in the late 1850s.
Leminiscences James Parker on the autobiography of Mr. Kilmister
Reviewed: White Line Fever by Lemmy Kilmister with Janiss Garza (Citadel Trade) 320 pages, $14.95
When I was at an English boarding school in the Seventies, a sweatless boy among sweatless boys, all of us with scuffed shins and hard little minds, there was a brief craze for fainting. It swept through the school like some hot new type of dance. Chapel was the place for it: eight o’clock in the morning, leaky grey light, prayers humming their moth-wings, and the pale unbreakfasted boys would sigh and slump from their pews, one after another, in mild reversals of boy-energy. Low blood sugar had something to do with it—we were scandalously, I would say almost criminally underfed—but you couldn’t doubt the narcotic properties of the prayers themselves. There was this Marian chant from the 15th century which we would do from time to time: the Litany Of Loreto. A real trance-inducer. “Mystical rose!…PRAY for us…Tower of David!… PRAY for us… Tower of Ivory!… PRAY for us”—and so on, repeating and building in pounding, swaying dactyls until the brain cuts out. Years later I heard this rhythm again, in the same call-and-response measure, on a re-release of Hawkwind’s live album Space Ritual—“Time we left… (This world today!)… Brain police… (Not far behind!)… Trying to make you… (Lose your mind!)” Bastards! I smelled again stale pieties of incense, and felt a draught upon my knees as if I were in short trousers.
But this is all by the by, and only slenderly related to my theme, which is the new book White Line Fever, by Lemmy with Janiss Garza. Lemmy was of course in Hawkwind, playing his bass, and for a while he was the best thing about them—Space Ritual is dark hippy wreckage anyway, a huge crude monomanic bummer with drums dolefuly thrashing and vocals following sax following guitar following bass through riff after drug-blind riff. Quite impressive, in other words, but one wearies of the mindfuck. One wearies of Bob Calvert sneering “Sonic attack—in your dist-rict!” through metallic sinuses, the seedy psychedelic warlordism of it. Only the steady, earthy rumble of Lemmy’s bass keeps you listening. I love his sound on this record—surging, human, refusing the pull of outer space and the gnawings of paranoia. It’s not the definitive Lemmy sound, not the tremendous slobbering chordal attack he perfected in Motorhead, but it’s full of personality. In the midst of the Hawkzone, it’s comforting. Lemmy is very funny about Hawkwind in White Line Fever, about DikMik’s fit-inducing sound machines and Dave Brock’s regular delusion that he’d bitten his own tongue off, or his habit of leaning out of his car to shout “Spank! Spank! Spank!” at passing schoolgirls; “Hello girls! Spanky-spanky!” About Nik Turner—“one of those moral, self-righteous assholes, as only Virgos can be”—Lemmy is candidly bitchy, which is even better. Only prolonged night-after-night exposure to Turner’s farmyard sax-playing, his bleats and clucks and moos, could have distilled this weary disenchantment: “He was holding the saxophone and capering–he was a great caperer, Nikky.” Or (my favorite line in the whole book) “He’d get drunk as a cunt on wine.”
I’d like to know precisely how White Line Fever was written, the mechanics of authorship as it were. Behind every book like this is a very interesting sub-book, which is the story of the hack and his or her subject, and how they got it together, how long it took, and how they suffered mutually, etc. White Line Fever smells of Lemmy in his quarters, his LA apartment with the curtains drawn against the late afternoon and the walls prickling with WW2 memorabilia, and the great man filling ashtrays and bullshitting away, forgetting names, remembering dates, swirling through anecdotal loops, mumbling and thinking and chuckling. Nine-tenths of it is unmistakably Lemmy’s speaking voice, the voice of a roughened but still elegant old-school raconteur: “But back to Robbo. I’d known him for years—we met under a table at Dingwalls.” Lemmy’s memories—his Lemmories or Leminiscences—have a patchy, refracted fog-and-strobe quality, which is just as it should be. It gives them depth; early in the book we get a prismatic flash of the Beatles at the Cavern, playing odd-shaped guitars, telling jokes and “eating cheese rolls while singing” and headbutting hecklers. They sound as violent as the Marx Brothers. “Hard men,” says Lemmy, and goes on to disparage the Rolling Stones: “Fair enough, the Stones made great records, but they were always shit on stage, whereas the Beatles were the gear.” The gear! Later on we are granted a piercing glimpse of Sid Vicious, “this fucking bundle of pipe cleaners in a pair of tennis shoes,” taking on a huge Maltese bouncer. Now and again the prose turns professional, breaking into jauntily anonymous as-told-to-ese—“We only had a fortnight to record Overkill, our second album and first for Bronze. Considering our checkered recording history, however, it was a world of time for us”—but that’s just Ms. Garza doing her job, getting the facts in. By and large the Lemmy ramble flows phlegmy and untainted. “I did die once—well the band thought I had, at least. But I hadn’t. The whole thing started when we were going home from a gig in the van. This guy, John the Bog, was our driver—actually, he died, about two years after this incident, come to think of it…”
While our attention is distracted by Iraq Take time to object to some of the other wars The American empire is fighting concurrently as well, such as The war in The Philippines, the war in Columbia, The war in Korea, the war in Afghanistan, The war in Israel, the war in Pakistan, The war in Yemen, the war on Terror, The war on poverty, the war on drugs, The war on The Bill of Rights, The war on common sense itself.
The war of America against the world Can’t be about anything grander than The president’s pathology and popularity.
Not since King Lear have speakers of English been mislead By a leader so completely ‘round the bend. Power is dangerous enough in the hands of ordinary plodders. In the hands of the crazy and uneducated The danger expands exponentially.
The last time Congress declared war was 1941. 62 years later the siege mentality still rules.
The 18th century supposition behind the Separation of Powers, ie Congress shall have the power to declare war; The president shall be the commander in chief of the armed forces Presupposed that a declaration of war would precede Any armed forces to command
Since we devolved to a permanent military With the president as the commander We have perpetual war With Congress towed along like the tail of a kite.
Someday we’ll lift the siege and see The pitiful men behind the curtains pulling strings.
Consumer Imperialism
1 In 1946 the Truman Administration cobbled together policy That will guide America and the United States into a grave: Stimulate domestic consumption and search for foreign markets.
World War Two propelled Americans across the world Destroying their distinguished isolation And Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of self determination of nations, Putting Hershey Bars and atom bombs along with GI Joes Into the world word bank Along with the great American coinage, OK.
OK can mean anything from yes to you are on your own. OK, if that’s the way you want it, OK with me.
It might have been OK if they’d confined domestic consumption to The simple facts of warm clothes, adequate housing, and nutritious meals, The need for which food stamp Americans have in common with everybody else. “One third of the nation is ill fed, ill clothed, ill housed,” FDR declaimed seventy years ago. It’s still true for radically different reasons one depression later.
In 1946 the American people were hungry to forget The Great Depression With its soup lines, dust bowls and railroaded hobos As the speculated roaring of the twenties simpered out into The savage thirties whine.
The exact point in the relationship between Dying early to save the system money and Working to consume yourself to death efficiently Hasn’t quite been worked completely out to policy maker’s actuarial satisfaction.
Americans stood 19th century Maytag frugality on its head: Build it well and make it last, Darn your socks, grind your wheat, make your own soap, Do without until you can afford it, Into a plastic credit card throw away civilization Destroying the environment on the side as a Mildly regrettable cost of doing business Symbolized by the shopping cart in the trough with Wal-Mart’s predatory criminal labor and retail practices.
2 In the old days prior to 1946, except for Mexico, Louisiana, Oregon and the Indians, The United States government had confined its actual imperialism To the Roosevelt Doctrine’s annual obligatory invasion of Latin America
With a few cruel Hawaiian exceptions such as when their empire of ironic slaughter Was taken to the limit in Aguinaldo’s Philippines Led by Teddy Roosevelt’s “secret” admiration of the British Empire
Who goaded American into building a navy Sufficiently enormous eventually to make the basket catch Of the British Empire’s bases and other falling stock in the Atlantic Charter.
Post 1946 when imperialism became the way of life Colonial wars piled up in the history books alongside Syngman Rhee’s Korea, Hoh Chi Minh’s Viet Nam, Salvadore Allende’s Chile, And Saddam Hussein’s broken Babylon.
Some of the secret history rarely gets recited in public Like General Eisenhower’s perpetual overthrow by his CIA Army of Governments in Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, The Congo, Indonesia and Vietnam.
“It’s about jobs,” George Bush the 1st gesticulated nervously When asked to rationalize the Gulf War he’d goaded The allies into reestablishing the British Empire’s toehold on the oily Emirate of Kuwait.
The United States military has been under siege Real or imagined, Sometimes both; never neither, Since the bombing of Pearl Harbor– Sixty plus years of the war that never stops.
It’s what these southern kleptocrats desire Under siege like the Confederates Where they lost the battles and built the shrines The basis (es) of their military theocracy preys upon.
Semi-Colon half an asshole Powell used to claim with a straight face that The exit strategy is the most important aspect of Colonial War. There is no exit from Consumer Imperialism.
Consumer Imperialism, World War 3.1
World War 3.1 was a knife fight at 20,000 feet. Have your will up to date.
Never lose sight of the fact that the “faith based initiative” Which took out the twin towers of the World Trade Center Was carried out by trainees of the CIA once removed Unleashing a relentless wave of video military fascism.
Win the war on terrorism by training counter terrorists To terrorize other people in a war on abstract nouns. Government by sarcasm is an unfit substitute for self rule. Help wanted: somebody to shovel the horseshit off the information superhighway. . With each side referring to the other side as evil It makes one wonder if both sides are right. Evil is that which has power over you. God doesn’t take sides; that’s what makes God God. Human beings have no faith in their own story, So they drag in God as the author of Their Christian and Moslem shenanigans.
Flying hijacked commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon Was a reckless act of freedom Rather than an attack on it or democracy as claimed by the unelected President Bush who obtained office by judicial fraud, Hardly an unimpeachable spokesman for Democracy.
There was no attack on The Samuel J. Tilden New York Public Library or The Statue of Liberty. That would have been an attack on Freedom and Democracy.
The world trade towers were a symbol all right: A symbol of the Rockefeller brothers’ capacity To manipulate the public policy of the New York and New Jersey Port Authorities into Rescuing some of their down in the mouth real estate At the lower end of Manhattan.
The attack was on World Trade and Consumer Imperialism.
The design competition will create a monument to the victims. How about creating a world trade system that is fair to all participants? Now that would be an enduring monument.
War is now perpetual when it used to be punctuated by peace. America is a winner’s tragedy; freedom destroyed in a pitiful exercise to save it.
Et Tu Bruté?
There’s nothing left of Caesar except a salad and a haircut. Klipschutz
Caesar, Julius, who Killed half the able bodied of France To bring those reluctant frogs Into a Roman pond
Who bridged the Rhein near Speyer In ten short days Without an environmental impact statement Or German permission.
Comilitones, he intoned, I have crossed the Rubicon. Cut the Gordian Knot As Alexander did. Cut the umbilical cord Across his mother’s belly Up out from down under her narrow birth canal. This is the way to the Cesarean section.
Not everybody born by the knife Can grow up to be both The Queen of Bithnyia And the Emperor of Rome.
My fellow toddlers it is still Government by assassination. We can’t avoid the history of The Meiji Restoration and Eisenhower’s CIA. Brutus honey, is that you?
American presidents elected every twenty years since Lincoln In zero years to match their accomplishments Have either been assassinated or the attempt was made: Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan. Among these august dead did the living Have even half a chance?
What if Bush the younger Brought into office by black robes In the year of double zeros Would take a silver bullet To match the silver spoon He’s been porking out in The public lunch box with.
If some Shakespearean character in a play would say: “Bush should be assassinated To meet the rhythm test of history,” She’d be making an observation Not a threat.
Pity and terror are the Draino of literature According to Aristotle and Herb Ruhm. Therefor, making war on terror is an infringement On poet’s rights.
Bring me the chicken Caesar Hold the haircut.
Terror is half our stuff. What’s next, A war on pity?
The Rocket’s Red Glare
The empire can be managed to a soft landing Or it can be kicked apart By the idiots who rule it and their intended victims.
The second half of the war on Iraq Suggests the American empire will Fight colonial wars ad infinitum Until they exhaust themselves.
Knowing this doesn’t knock me out with happiness But it would save protesters a lot of time If they can agree it’s the inevitable Fate of empires Who imagine they’re immune to history While merely being ignorant of it.
Arthur Magazine 