Tag Archives for Survival

“Siphon Your Way to Financial Freedom” by Dave Reeves (Arthur, 2005)

Originally published in Arthur Magazine No. 17 (July 2005)

illo by Greg Cook

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.

Chambo’s Internet Activity Pages for August 28, 2009

Picture 110

• ACCIDENTAL GUNFIRE AND UNEXPECTED NUDITY: Doug Fine is a journalist who lives on a remote solar-powered ranch somewhere outside of Silver City, New Mexico. The founding of said ranch is chronicled in his sometimes corny but ultimately pretty fascinating book, Farewell, My Subaru. In the years since, Fine has remained almost entirely off-the-grid, save for the digital connectivity by which he maintains his career as a writer, as well as his blog: Dispatches from The Funky Butte Ranch. This has led him to consider how well he would do in a real grid-crash and the ensuing collapse of mainstream civilization that might soon follow in an essay called “In The Year 2049: Would I Survive A Worst-Case Scenario?” How would he mine the perimeter of his compound? Who would make his shoes? It’s especially entertaining to compare the responses of his city-dwelling pals who are all like “you’re nuts everything’s gonna be fine” and his fellow ranchers who are like “that’s a good idea about the mines.” [Dispatches from the Funky Butte Ranch]

• DO YOU EVER PLAN ON EATING OUT IN LOS ANGELES? Pulitzer-Prize winning food critic Jonathan Gold’s “99 Essential LA Restaurants” is a delightful read even if you don’t plan on dining out in Southern California anytime soon: It’s a journey from the obscure meats of Vietnamese strip mall joints to the finest haute cuisine, and as such it’s one of the best impressionistic portraits of what makes Los Angeles such a strange, delicious town. He’s known to compare tacos and noodles to different varieties of cocaine, he follows Spanish-language media in order to keep up with Mexican-American chefs and says things like this about a Korean spot out in Torrance:

We are as jingoistic about fried chicken as the next guy, and we’ve been to dives in Louisiana where the chicken was so good it made a roomful of testosterone-crazed roustabouts weep like your mother’s bridge club that time Steel Magnolias came on TV. But Korean fried chicken really is an evolutionary leap forward — steeped in a cabinet full of spices, saturated with garlic, double-fried to a shattering, thin-skinned snap dramatic enough to wake a sleeping baby in an adjoining room.

The new edition is available this week — this is gonna be the first time we pick up a hard copy of the LA Weekly since, well, Gold’s list from last year — and you can also read it online. [LA Weekly]

• ON BECOMING ONE MORE HORSE’S ASS: After 12 weird years of living in Los Angeles, California, I’m moving to Marfa, Texas early next week. Fitting that the sky above my house in Atwater Village is dominated by a massive plume of smoke rising from a forest fire in the San Gabriel Mountains; it always feels good to commence an exodus under a rain of ash. Chambo’s Internet Activity Pages shall resume upon activation of Arthur’s Marfa Station. [Bobby Bare – “One More Horse’s Ass”]

• SPEAKING OF MARFA: Yacht recorded their most recent album, See Mystery Lights, down there in West Texas. They’re giving away copies of the instrumental version over at the Free Music Archive and I am going to be playing it all weekend — along with lots and lots of Doug Sahm — while I load the moving truck. [Free Music Archive]

“IT’S COMING DOWN, BABY!”: Sir Richard Bishop interviewed by Erik Davis (from Arthur, 2007)

Originally published in Arthur No. 27 (Dec 2007)

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It’s Coming Down, Baby!
Erik Davis catches up with SIR RICHARD BISHOP—gypsy picatrix, ex-Sun City Girl and guitarist extraordinaire
Illustration by John Coulthart

Superlatives can be lame, but Richard Bishop is one of the few post-punk guitarists who came of age in the 1980s to have achieved the incendiary prowess of a true Guitar God. Though largely unknown outside the underground, Bishop plays and improvises with an uncommon and original power. He can tantalize in a myriad of styles, he has a global jukebox in his head, he can shatter the walls of sleep and chaos, and he can turn on a dime. He loves the guitar and mocks it: he plays like an absurdist and a romantic at once. He studies the occult and travels the Third World fringe and you can hear it. He plays guitar to save himself and fails in the endeavor and you can hear it. He can scare the shit out of you sometimes, and he can make you giggle and grin.

For decades Bishop played with his brother Alan and the Charlie Gocher in the Sun City Girls, where his ferocious and inventive exploration of psych-rock, punk spew, idiot jizz, Indo-Arabic fantasias, and jazzbo abstraction was often shadowed by the madcap antics, acerbic lyrics and general air of arcane weirdness that surrounded that impossible act. Gocher passed away in February this year at the age of 54, and the Girls are no more.

But over the last half decade, Bishop has also been playing and recording solo instrumental music as Sir Richard Bishop, and the effort is really starting to flower. This year SRB released two great albums. While My Guitar Gently Bleeds features three long pieces that triangulate his essential territory as an improviser: a North African arabesque, a noisy electronic nightscape, and a modal neo-raga on the tantric tip. Polytheistic Fragments is a more accessible and varied work, featuring a dozen tunes that also stretch into Americana, gypsy rag and Lennon-McCartney charm. As always, the recordings are packaged with strange and mystic images that speak to Bishop’s longtime study of esoterica.

Earlier this fall Bishop toured with labelmate Bill Callahan. I called him while he was taking a break in Seattle.

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GRANT MORRISON: "Let’s have some ‘fuck you’ positivity!"

From a new interview with Arthur No. 12 cover star GRANT MORRISON, over at Newsarama:

“In today’s world, in today’s media climate designed to foster the fear our leaders like us to feel because it makes us easier to push around… In a world where limp, wimpy men are forced to talk tough and act ‘badass’ even though we all know they’re shitting it inside… In a world where the measure of our moral strength has come to lie in the extremity of the images we’re able to look at and stomach… In a world, I’m reliably told, that’s going to the dogs, the real mischief, the real punk rock rebellion, is a snarling, ‘fuck you’ positivity and optimism. Violent optimism in the face of all evidence to the contrary is the Alpha form of outrage these days. It really freaks people out.
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“Things You Should Know About L.A. County Men’s Jail” by Dave Reeves (Arthur, 2008)

Originally published in Arthur Magazine No. 28 (March 2008)

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Illustration: Joseph Remnant

Do the Math: CITIZEN HEAR ME OUT! THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!
by Dave Reeves

There were Laws, but they were not feared. There were rules but they were not worshiped like laws and rules and cops and informants are feared and worshiped today. –Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in Elko”

If you are reading this magazine then there is a pretty good chance that you break some stupid ass law every other day. Be it dabbling in tax evasion, watering your lawn on Thursdays, smoking weed, walking your dog without a leash, or drinking two and half beers before driving home, you are overdue to beg for the non-existent mercy of some unlaid grinch posing as a judge (you know who you are, Kirkland Nyby). I’m here to tell you that being a white non-violent person with all your teeth will not be enough to save you from doing hard time for minor infractions anymore.

America has slid far past the point where a well-regulated militia would be able to relieve us of our vicious tyrants. The myriad weapons and tactics perfected over the course of our many stupid foreign wars are easily turned against the American civilian population. We are cowed behind the magic of infrared radar helicopters, electronic ball breakers, automatic weapons and a skein of surveillance cameras: the American population rendered naked to the aggression of a police state gone corporate.

I have seen the future and it is California. That which is not illegal is mandatory. If you find yourself in California, here’s what you should do:

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TRIGGER HIPPIES: Dave Reeves on sensitive weapons that even a vegetarian can use

TRIGGER HIPPIES
“Do the Math” column by Dave Reeves
originally published in Arthur No. 23 (July 2006)

Blackout. Summertime. Populace accepts that utility companies have again fried the grid for profit. Hours go by. Americans go without television, SUVs, flash-fried food. Coffee runs out. Shortages of chronic and chronic shortages. Rumor becomes news. Alcohol reserves are drunk away and the rabble seethe in the street, commiserating about how it was this very publication that printed the recipe for the diabolical bomb that left the assholes standing but killed their precious machines. [see our Q&A with Derrick Jensen from Arthur 23 – ed.]

Emergency personnel stay at home because, like that great American Bob Dylan said, “The cops don’t need you and, man, they expect the same.” The National Guard is busy on the border, the French Quarter and Iraq. Everyone is a suspect.

“There he is! I saw him reading that Arthur!” the mob yells.

And then, dear reader, you realize that when the transistors are dead, the world is run by a lower phylum of machine: the gun.

Now I’m not saying you need to get one, but you can never be too careful what with this Arthur magazine monkeying around with these new-fangled technology bombs. Of course you are scared of guns because the liberal media constantly portrays people misusing these valuable tools. The smart hipster won’t let crappy television writers’ abuse of the pistol as a modern day Deus Ex Machina divert her from the path of preparedness. Just think of a gun as one of those “Talking Sticks” at a Rainbow Family Gathering: if you have a Talking Stick, you get to say something and people have to listen, and if you don’t have one you have to shut the hell up.

Here’s a list of “sensitive weapons” that even a vegetarian could use in the near future, cribbed in these last precious moments while this computer still works. I’ve listed them in the order that they should be purchased, so that you may gradually warm to the idea of being a citizen capable of doing what it takes to keep America on course.

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