ENTRY

This entry was "Fort Apache the Exchange", pending publication in GUERILLA GENESIS PRESS

There are days when you wake up and realize your story has surpassed its best-by date. Such was the case today with "Fort Apache the Exchange".

      God knows it's not an OLD story and usually I feel justified in peddling these things 'til they have a long, white beard. The danger, though, of doing topical/satirical SF is just that because you're dealing with specific topics and specific issues in specific times, you end up putting an expiration date on your work....which is why for the most part I prefer to deal with BROAD, UNIVERSAL politics as opposed to specific issues tied to specific time frames.

     Obviously, a chunk of this spoofs colonialism, which is a pretty broad subject that you can do a lot with. Colonialism, though, is just a bug rather than the feature.

     At the time I wrote it the TEA Party had some wheels under them and the Occupy Movement was very much on the wane. I was still trying to process my own poor associations from my five-minutes in the local version of the Occupy Movement, but that's another rant for another time. So basing it around what I saw going on as well as my own years of experience as an activist, it was my own look at the way Neoliberals (my favorite targets), elites in general and/or the people in charge of any given system view and relate to activists, protesters and/or movements.

       From my own lens, having dealt with both power structures and their friends and mouthpieces in the media, elites do not understand activists, or at the very least they make a disingenuous show of not understanding them, instead dismissing their concerns as "incoherent" or "conspiracy theories". The Aliens in "Fort Apache" are actually on the benevolent side (or at least that's how they see themselves)...of course, there's the genuine culture barrier. 

      Thing is, at this point in time this chunk of history is just water under the bridge and there's really no pressing relevance to push. I can't really justify keeping "Fort Apache" in circulation so you all get it here.

THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST:

1. WE'RE DESPERATE (Rhino L.A. Punk comp)

2. THE BOLSHOI-A Way: The Best of the Bolshoi

3. BLACK SABBATH-Vol. 4

APOCALYPSE NOTES: GOING BIG

As I wrote previously, I didn't know what Mike was going to be bringing to the table with “Black”---I was actually not even sure we'd be recording a new version, as I hadn't received a new recording through Dropbox.

With “Black”, we'd recorded two separate and distinct versions---one 4-Track cut in the late '80s and later on 8-Track in the early '90s....both had a more or less similar lyric but they were very different from one another as far as arrangement and structure went....the first was a gloomy, ominous doom rocker that's probably unlistenable considering the technology we were working with at the time...I can tell you there was a pretty good guitar solo and that shortly after the recording Mike had no idea what he'd done to get the bizarro sound he got, but it was pretty one-of-a-kind.

My template for the song as far as what I wanted to get out of it was actually the Swans' “Blind Love” from the CHILDREN OF GOD album....that's not to say that's what it wound up sounding like but think epic and unnerving----at least as epic and unnerving two guys with a 4-Track recorder and a windup toy of a drum machine were going to get....the song came to a literally-apocalyptic end with crashing chords, thundering windup toy rhythms and me on top of all the din, bellowing, “BLAAAAACK!!!! BLAAAAACK!!!!!! BLAAAAAAAACK!!!!!!” Over and over....it was tracks like this I played at Heather early on in our courtship that prompted her to crack, “aawwww----did somebody need a hug?”

And actually, yeah---I could have used a hug back at that time.

“Black II” had the added bonus of four extra tracks and it was a helluva lot better, production-wise...we were more on top of our game by then. Structurally it was probably more of what they called a “power ballad”----I loathe that term and, generally speaking, I don't have much use for the form. It starts off very quiet, with me whispering, muttering and crooning....I even do backup vocals that aren't particularly good, but they're drenched in reverb so, y'know....the desired effect. “Black II” is probably the best of our old demos and I was of the opinion that, if we wanted to cut corners we could actually stick that on the CD and no harm would be done.

As it turned out, there WAS a new cut of “Black”.

PLEASE GRANT ME THE SERENITY: RECORDING “BLACK”

“There's no sign of the morning coming; You've been left on your own”

----Ronnie James Dio

Giving the track a listen, I discovered that it essentially followed the structure of “Black II”, and that was a plus...it was a nice, Godzillian jam and Mike had totally brought the Rocket Sauce. One thing I was very taken aback by was that the original track had a fairly standard bassline....on the new version, Mike had really jazzed it up! And I mean “Jazz”, literally! Very tasty jazz-bass stylings that were almost a direct contradiction underpinning the big, moody grog-metal.

This was gonna be fun.

It was another game of “finding the arrangement”.....the structure was very similar to the old “Black II” but I was going to have to go through it a few times to learn how my ballpark rewrite was going to fit.

Much like the old recording it starts off slow, quiet and eerie and what I was singing was more or less spoken.

“ Every day the struggle to get out of bed and walk out that door is a more and more insurmountable task

I don't belong here and I never did.

I can no longer stand seeing things and people I can't deal with

I'm through---finished----through.”

Then the main riff---clean tone----kicks in.

“Lying in a pit of garbage and lies

It's a world that's run by politicians and whores

Color it all black, now, 'cause it's more than I can stand

I don't want to see it anymore”

Lyrically you could probably draw a parallel to “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones, although that song is about a guy who's mourning a dead lover and he can't get a grip on life anymore. With “Black” there's no tangible catalyst for the speaker's misery; he just can't get a grip on life, period.

I am the other planet man

I don't know what I'm doing here

I don't know what I'm here for

let me out”

And this is where the song just blows open and starts raging.

“Color my world, my world black

Decided I wanna be blind forever

Deliver me from this world of lies

I just wanna shut it out altogether

CHORUS:

COLOR MY WORLD, MY WORLD BLACK (x4)

Let it all stop, let it end now

I can't take it, I don't know how

Need someone to shut off my mind

I'd be happier if I were struck blind

Holy Pilgrim, I went hunting

I came back with a fistful of nothing

Living on this planet though I'm not of this earth

I take a look around

and see that it ain't worth shit”

Melodramatic, or WHAT? There was a whole litany in early versions of the song where the speaker lists off a laundry list of everything that's pushed him to the brink, and it goes something to the effect of “a man in a caddilac/ dead babies on my TV/ a government that doesn't care/ millions of people happier than me/EVERYTHING/YOU!!!!!”

That's right----he's blaming YOU. PERSONALLY. YOU!

Yeah----YOU, Bucko!!!!!

We had this drummer at the time---he wasn't with us all that long but he was our longest-running bandmate and we hung onto him for dear life because he had a basement we could practice in. I remember during practice one night he picked the lyric apart and goofed on it----”okay---so this guy walks down the street and he sees all this stuff going on that he doesn't like....so what does he do?! He freaks out and he yells and then he goes back home??? I don't know where that's goin'----sixties are over, man....”

Not real sure what my autistic angst had to do with the sixties.....still and all, he took me down a peg or three or five and I rode home all butt hurt over it. Mike tried to play it down a sensible middle---we needed the guy, at least at that point...he'd had experience playing out in bands, he knew music theory, and, shit, maybe we could learn from the guy.

I was very tunnelvisioned by my own ego, though, which might go as far as to say I needed a pin stuck in it. You only need to take one or two steps outside your situation to see the humor in it.

Following the template of “Black II”, though, I eschewed the laundry list in favor of ominously intoning, twice, as the song drew to a close, a line from the AA “Serenity” prayer:

“Please grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

 

This last bit is crucial----the reason it's important to the song (and to the Apocalypse Krew in general) is that it's a direct contradiction of the band's entire existence. We are classically the LEAST serene entity alive. There's not an iota of serenity in the song, or in the character's head.

With this line of the poem the Drunk (hypothetical or universal) is asking God (however you want to define “God”) to help him/her cut his/her losses and move on, and how to have the wisdom to know how to pick their battles.

The entire ethos of the Apocalypse Krew is based around an inability to accept the things you can't change...the Dreg has no idea how to pick his battles. He's hellbent on running directly into a wall.

Not the smartest way to go through life, but who hasn't gone through that at one time or another? Who hasn't failed to see a way out?

THE NEW STUFF, PART TWO:“FEAR AND HATE”

 

“The idea had been growing in my mind for some time----true force. All the King's Men cannot put it together again.”

----Travis Bickle, TAXI DRIVER

By the time I actually sat down to WRITE “Fear and Hate”, I'd realized I really painted myself into a corner with “Rise”----It was a busy lyric that followed a busy rhythm and sought to cover damn near every note of that rhythm. I wasn't going to make that same mistake with “Fear”---as frantic a number as it was I knew I was going to need to put every ounce of gusto I had into it and it would be a good idea, given the confines I was in, to let the song “breathe” a little more. And let myself breathe a little more.

I wanted to do “Fear and Hate” from the moment Mike brought it to the table....it clocks in at just over two minutes and it's both furious and abrupt. Hammering, thrashing riffs, very fast and dense, with this layered, atonal, descending chord structure on the chorus that defied anything I think I'd ever heard in straightforward rock music at that time.

Mike gave me the music template back in the '90s...the chorus was, “You gave me the look of fear and hate”. The lyric I wound up writing was couched in the paranoia and isolation I had that last year in Nashua, the year I was living alone in that slum on Pine Street. To my recollection it was another one of those crazy, busy lyrics and would be like algebra to try and tackle.

The way I finally structured “Fear and Hate” was that each individual line would take up two bars...the line itself was essentially over by the end of the first bar, but it would trail over the second, allowing more room for the vocal to breathe and for the riffs to get some naked space.

I decided it would be an anti-bullying song. Bullying has been a big issue for me and mine for years----most incidents of school or workplace violence are the result of one or another form of bullying, and such incidents are bound to continue as long as we, as a collective mass continue to turn a blind eye to the pecking order. I've done my dead best to talk distraught kids out of pulling a Columbine---but I understand the rage that motivates them.

So this was going to go out to everyone who got beaten up, threatened, raped, had their shit stolen or who was otherwise put in a corner...it was also a shot across the bough to anyone who was in the upper strata of whatever food chain----hey, buddy---you know when you do that shit? Here's how that person feels about you. Does that make you nervous? GOOD----keep feeling nervous.

It didn't rhyme. It wasn't stylish. It wasn't witty or hip. It wasn't cute, clever, politically correct or kind.

The whole thing was designed as a scream of impotent rage. One of my favorite old jokes was, Q. How did Helen Keller break her fingers? A. Screaming for help when she fell down a well.

So my aim with this lyric is it was Helen Keller breaking her fingers screaming for help.

For the first time anywhere, “Fear and Hate”.

“Why did you back me into a wall?

I was just minding my own business

back a coward into a wall

you never know what he'll do to get out

I'm afraid to wake up anymore

it's your world, I'm forced to live in it

CHORUS:

YOU GAVE ME THE LOOK OF FEAR AND HATE

This is your world, this is your toilet

I have to live with your gun in my mouth

I can't take it one more minute

you've been on top too fuckin' long

people like you should be raped by livestock

people like you should be shot in the face

CHORUS X2

I can't make it out of your cesspool

so I'm calling in the airstrike

shit can't continue as it is

people like you need your dicks cut off

now's the time for fucking justice

hurt me, motherfucker, I'll make you pay

CHORUS x 5”

Strong statement, I'll admit----not exactly coherent, either....but what right do you have to ask coherence out of someone who's trapped in a well? Or someone who's trying to tell you that your house is burning down around you?

It's the most direct line to the sense of violation that goes on in the brain of a bullying victim all the time. And I'm sure there are all those handwringing PC-types who are frightened by this level of expression, saying it encourages violence. I'd tell them that zeitgeist prevails with or without the song, so rather than look for a scapegoat, why not address the real problem? And I'm certain a few of them might say the real problem is too big. Well, maybe you're too small. Or are you PART of the problem? See, that's half the problem—--those who in some way, shape or form, benefit from the existence of a pecking order can't imagine life without it.

Well then, don't come cryin' to me....

“Fear and Hate” was going to be a rip-roaring screamer. I was prepared to put more into this than any other song we'd done so far. This was not going to sound “cool”----it wasn't going to sound “rock star” in any way, shape or form. My best reference for what I was going for is, if you listen to some really stellar hardcore, like, say, “Pride”, by Husker Du, off their great album, ZEN ARCADE, there's nothing about Bob Mould's delivery that sounds “cool”...he sounds like he's having a goddamned conniption, and I have to listen to that every fucking time---there's something so liberating about hearing this guy---and you're not listening to a “singer”, per se---just this regular guy that could be you or me, losing his shit.

There's little to no acceleration in this song---there's a drum cue and then you're in it. DEEP in it. Guitar, drums, bass, vocal, the whole blood vessel-busting enchilada, and before you've acclimated yourself to it it's rolled right over you and left you for roadkill.

I basically screamed the whole thing, spastic voice cracks and all, like a distraught stockbroker getting ready to jump off a building on Black Friday 1927. I wanted to sound like a man whose world was ending. At one point in the third verse we had to stop and do it over because, headset and all, I couldn't get my cue....I couldn't hear the music over my own screaming.

There was a bridge section where, if I'd had more time to mess with it, might have used some vocals---realistically, throughout the recording sessions there were moments where I went sparse where under more ideal circumstances I wouldn't have. But I figured giving Mike more blank canvas to have fun with wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

Mike perused the result on the timeline and assessed it as “definitely the most ferocious song in our repertoire...”

MONEY!!!!

 

THE BOUNCY ONE: “OUTSIDER”

 

“There's a man outside....he wants to come in.”

----Henry Rollins

“Outsider” was the next logical one to tackle....we were in the home stretch at this point.

If “Fear and Hate” is our most ferocious song then “Outsider” is one of our catchiest. Tement he riff is instantly memorable---it would be cool to hear a swing band play this. Mike and I have joked around a long time about doing a big band arrangement for it.

Rhythmically it bounces along in a manner similar to Cheap Trick's “Southern Girls”, with this huge, heavy boogie riff topping everything off. In approach it would be similar to “Black” or maybe “Time Bomb”----more a matter of showing off the song rather than letting loose.

There was an extraneous riff dropped from the old demo, but other than that the song hadn't changed much and it would probably fit the lyrics I had cobbled together without much of a problem.

I tried to approach the vocal with a degree of ease; when we talk about ease, it's not to be said there isn't work put into it---rather it's to say the listener shouldn't hear much labor. Much in the vein of Bukowski----the reader shouldn't have his or her attention drawn to the nuts and bolts of the effort...it should just come off as a smooth, organic whole.

“Residing in your cozy little house

unsuspecting, happy as a church mouse

I'm looking in on your measly little life

I wanna intrude on your measly little life”

The whole genesis of “Outsider” to me....did you ever see “Fatal Attraction”? Remember the scene where Glenn Close is spying on Michael Douglas and his family through their picture window, and she's so disgusted and envious of what they have that she literally vomits? That's the kind of spirit I'm going for.

It's classic American Have-Not-ism.

“Standing in the shadows and I'm looking in

standing in the shadows and I'm looking in

lurking in the peripheries and I want in

I am the Outsider

I am the Outsider

and I want in....I want in...I want in...

Laugh and yawn and take it all for granted

don't appreciate the silver spoon you were handed

you should be destroyed, you should be replaced

standing on your lawn and I'm looking at your window

I don't like what I see, I see a room full of people

happy, happy, happy

a room full of people all happy except me”

Here's the self-contradictory nature of the politically correct---x number of people are going to knee-jerk at our songs and argue that we're insensitive, or they're going to take everything out of context and say we're sexist, racist, advocate violence and so on and so forth....chances are no one's going to tell us we're anti-homeowner, though. Guess they'll conveniently miss the memo on that one.

That happens with extreme idealogues, though----with an old episode of “The Abbey of the Lemur” one of my castmates was wearing a very funny tee shirt that had a fake Coca Cola logo, except it read, “things go better with Satan”. And the local right wing bullet head who was very locked into literalistic thinking was alarmed by this. And our performer was up there cracking jokes about sacrificing children and I put a lower third up in front of her identifying her as a “local cult leader”----and this guy's complaint against us took that and ran wild with it....”this person----this cult leader....” meanwhile, in the same show we had a lower third graphic that identified me as a “local chimney sweep”. He never took me to task for that. Did he believe I was a chimney sweep? Did he just not care? I guess chimney sweeps didn't jibe with his agenda, or his sense of moral outrage. If it were me watching at home, I would've been enthralled---I would have been waiting to see if this guy would start dancing around on rooftops singing “Chim-chimeny-chim-chimeny chim-chim-cheree”....but no. Selective reasoning. Or non reasoning. But I digress. Back to the song.

“I'm knocking on your door

you don't know what's in store

it's the end of your rainbow when your wife starts screaming

you don't know what to do

and I'm staring in your window

I want in!

I want in!

I want in!

I want in!

I want you---and everything you own

You people shut me out and made my life miserable

Flaunt your happiness like a diamond ring”

A little note, here, on the humorous irrationality of the S.E. Apocalypse Krew....nobody actively shut this guy out of ANYTHING. His quarries----the homeowner and his family----probably have no idea who this nut staring in their window is. This shambling pile of crazy takes other peoples' happiness as a personal affront.

“I want to eliminate you

I want to exterminate you

I want to decimate you

I want to eradicate you

I want to reduce you

I want to subtract you from the equation

I want to erase you

I want to erase you

I want to erase you

I want to replace you”

Back in the day Mike and I thought that if we ever did the whole MTV/music video-thing “Outsider” was our first candidate as far as a video we'd like to do, and we figured it could even be done cheaply. The affluent family sit at their dining table and engage in niceties while I, as the crazy, stand at their window in a blizzard, ranting and raving....the band are behind me, all bundled up by a trashcan fire, attempting to play their instruments in the driving snow (obviously fake confetti snow). Eventually as the song hits its peak I crash in through the window, jump up on the dining room table and begin threatening the family, specifically the patriarch, whose position I'm envious of. At one point between lines I lean down, pick up a turkey leg and start noshing on it.

The last image in the video would be a family photo---the patriarch disappears and I fade in in his place. As though I'm a member of the family, replacing him as Dad/Husband/etc. Kinda similar, maybe, to Jack Nicholson appearing in an old-timey photo in the Overlook, I appear in some Olan Mills monstrosity as if I had been the patriarch of this family the entire time. The original family man is lost to the ages.

We banged “Outsider” off without a lot of excessive effort. I felt like I did alright. We were on the home stretch, now...eventually, we would leave North Main Music and hit Mike's home studio to knock out our last number, “The Candidate's a Religious Man”.....but there was one more song we had to tackle beforehand.

NEXT: EXPLODING

Novel Excerpt, HELLO, UGLY

It was a big house and it had a wide open floor and it seemed like the hole in the wall was thousands of miles away. The mouse scampered toward the hole as fast as its little legs could carry it.

It didn't look back for fear of the sight that would paralyze it, but it knew the cat was close behind. It could hear the cat's big, deadly paws booming away, hard on the floor, on either side. The cat's hot, fish-stinking breath was the only thing there was to breathe.

The mouse screamed as it felt the big paw smack into its back but as its legs went out of control it managed to scramble into the hole.

It struggled to its feet, feeling all wobbly and exhausted and moved away from the entrance and the groping paw. The mouse ran down a passage that opened up into a cavern.

There was something living there. They were rats. The mouse saw that they were similar in shape but the rats were bigger, uglier, dirtier, mean-looking. Hateful. The rats glared at the mouse. They bared their sharp, malformed, yellow teeth.

**********

jack

       the rats, the rats

jack

hm?

what happened to your face?

huh oh my face oh i had trouble in school yesterday i fell and then a bunch of kids who hated me bashed my face into a zigzag

a zigzag

yeah you know

jack your father and i are worried about you

laughing, why?

look at you look at your face jack what's wrong you go off and disappear all the time without a word to us and

and NOW we get this letter from the school that says you're failing and you don't have enough credits to graduate

jack you know you can talk to us

listen up chief you've come too far to blow it now so get your ass in gear or

what's happening to you

we're not going to let you do this to yourself, hear me boy

it isn't normal

you're gonna wreck your future if you keep going the way you're going

can't go through life this way always going off without telling anyone what kind of a chance do you think you stand being so irresponsible

goddammit jack you'd better listen up you'd better

please jack your face

GODDAMMIT ENID

can tell you've been upset i know a doctor who is very good and he

ENID

HELP you if

ENID

god jack i know it's been hard with zoe and now carol and we can help you i know you can't concentrate if you can just work WITH us

ENID SHUT THE HELL UP

what

GODDAMMIT IT'S SHIT LIKE THIS THAT GOT HIM SO FUCKED UP TO BEGIN WITH ALL THIS KID NEEDS IS SOMEONE TO TELL IT TO HIM STRAIGHT NOW IF YOU'RE NOT GONNA BE PART OF THE SOLUTION THEN ALL YOU ARE IS PART OF THE PROBLEM SO SHUT UP IF ALL YOU'RE GONNA DO IS MOAN AND WHINE AND BE ALL TOUCHY FEELY

cliff jesus

I'M THE GODDAMN MAN AROUND HERE AND SOMEONE'S GOT TO TEACH HIM TO BE A MAN ANY OBJECTIONS ENID?

you sonofabitch he isn't normal

HE'S JUST CRYIN' FOR ATTENTION IS ALL AND NOW HE'S GOT IT AND I'M THROUGH PLAYIN' PUSSY

oh god cliff

DON'T OH GOD ME

goddammit i'm going out for a walk

you do that you go for a walk enid i'll take care of everything here

i know jack

ENID

jack the things you're doing i know they're not normal and i know you need to talk to someone

ENID GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE AND STOP SCREWING THIS KID'S HEAD UP GOD DAMMIT

oh you son of a bitch

SORRY JACK YOU KNOW YOUR MOTHER SHE MEANS WELL BUT SOMETIMES SHE JUST DOESN'T UNDERSTAND US GUYS YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?

YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?

                                                                                 the rats, the rats

YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?

LISTEN CHIEF IT'S A BIG HARD WORLD AND ALL BUT YOU'RE NOT MAKIN' IT ANY BETTER ON YOURSELF NOW WE GOT A BIG PROBLEM DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GONNA BE ABLE TO PULL THINGS TOGETHER WITH YOUR GRADES SO YOU'LL BE ABLE TO GRADUATE?

sure dad

SURE? Y'KNOW IT'S IMPORTANT THAT A YOUNG MAN GET TO GRADUATE WITH ALL HIS FRIENDS AND FEEL LIKE HE'S AS GOOD AS HIS PEERS IT'LL LOOK BETTER ON YOUR PERMANENT RECORD AND YOU SHOULDN'T BLOW THAT

i won't

ARE YOU SURE FROM WHAT I'VE HEARD IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU ALREADY HAVE, SON

no i

I MEAN LOOK IT'S FUN TO BE FREE AND IRRESPONSIBLE WHEN YOU'RE A KID BUT THAT TIME IS OVER JACK AND NOW YOU'VE GOTTA FACE THE FUTURE AND THE SAD TRUTH IS THAT LIFE ISN'T ALL GOOFING OFF

i

IS THERE ANYTHING YOU CAN DO TO GET OUTTA FAILING I MEAN LOOK IF YOU WANT I'LL GO DOWN THERE AND TALK TO YOUR TEACHERS AND SEE WHAT

no dad

WHAT?

no it's okay i've already met with my teachers and we're working together to straighten it out

SO YOU'LL PASS?

yeah dad i'll pass

SO YOU'LL BE ABLE TO GRADUATE WITH EVERYONE ELSE?

uh-huh

GOOD. THAT'S GREAT JACK YOU'RE STARTING TO SHOW SIGNS OF BEING A RESPONSIBLE YOUNG MAN ALREADY WANNA GO OUT WITH YOUR OLD MAN FOR AN ICE CREAM OR ANYTHING?

no dad I can't i'll be real busy these next few days hitting those books and everything

WELL ALRIGHT YOU GO DO THAT I'M PROUD OF YOU SON

thanks dad

                                                                                the rats, the rats their teeth

Copyright 1990 C.F. Roberts/2015 Molotov Editions

WHAT I REMEMBER (1-4)

At some point in the mid '90s one experiment or exercise I did was to write four separate poems, all of which were entitled “What I Remember”.Why, I don't know. My record keeping is a little fuzzy, but from what I can tell no one ever ran these anywhere, so for better or worse you're probably seeing them here for the first time. Here they are, all four of them:

1

decried pain and

this piece of old

doddering spoonfed

lurched up and the

doctor

removed

a snapshot vague

old carousel melody

back lifetimes when

you and the haze

washed over like ether

squalled a malcontented

rage big baby

what it took

distant strains

saw pretty girls in

ribbons

and bows

skipping and leaping

over slopes in

verdant pastures---

2

you---

devolved from being

object abject w/functioning

orifices all too easy

self-destructive

prime directive

didn't have to be

didn't have to be

picture picture

lodged in stasis

you denied

ran ignorance is

bliss is blitz

rolled to see

meat exude

(lose me)

what it took

(lose you)

3

part was left

of this me

fragmented old

doddering fool

spoonfed restrained

took the buffer

hung on the

steadfast wall

looked for reason

decried pain and

the ongo hung

his head sad

prizes my entropy

4

hell give it a

name and a property

unto itself

i

go figure

it just

in a wash in a blur

frollicking they were

in meadows

green

the pollen

hung in the air

like butter

a shrill

across the room

a name at the

top of their lungs

woolen cling

smiles

denim well worn

clung hard to

a thigh shaken

trajectory

made me waver

heat that wells

shields past barriers

like a soldier

crawling

covered in dirt

she sauntered

in my direction

stood for the word

lines and curves

inquiring eye

my balance

was the

head hung

pushed

what it took i

she the fell i

black on white on

over over ribbons

sleight of hand of

mind of

took the

like ether

i abstained

ruefully

(in the corner the doctor shuffled his cards

circa mid-late 90s/copyright 2015 Molotov Editions

THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST:

FFS-FFS

THE HEARTBREAKERS-LAMF

BLACK SABBATH-Born Again (Yeah----that's right---it's the much-maligned Ian Gillan album---what the hell are you gonna do about it?)

Zoned Industrial and Then Some

Poem I wrote in 1996 or so, my last days in Nausea, New Hampshire....

THAT'S HOW THEY GETCHA

and so i'm slamming away on the
assembly line packing books in
boxes---i've got it down to a system,
now--fitting in configurations of five
like clockwork--it took me a while
to get the hang of it but here i am
slogging away for the next three
hours--wiley is falling behind after
showing me a few useful tricks and
i'm impressed by my increasing
level of success--rat in the
proletarian maze of industry,
hammering away on pointless activities run
by a clock--it gets boring, naturally,
so i turn it into a private game, exceeding
wiley's progress and as i get better and
better i'm thinking, i've gotcha, wiley,
you old fart, i've really gotcha, i'm
catching up to your slow old ass--then i
realize, hell, i'm a rube of the first order--i
fell for the game, hook, line and dead
brain cells---that's how you become
a cog in their machine;
that's how they getcha.


Wrote that while I was working for this fly-by-night temp agency that would ship us out on overnight shifts to this Book Binding plant in Westford. Mass. Not long afterwards I would move to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I spent the next 11 years working in a wheel factory. That's another story for another time.....
       In those early days in Arkansas some of my closest friends were in a band that spent a lot of time rehearsing in a storage unit. I learned a lot about noise levels and zoning laws back at that time.
That time period had a lot of influence on a short story I wrote that was recently published in THE BIRDS WE PILED LOOSELY, issue #3.....check 'em out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


https://birdspiledloosely.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/bpl-issue-three1.pdf

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

One of the nicest things the recent Holiday Season brought me was six new canvases and a box of new paints (thanks to assorted family and friends who know that enabling my artistic wrongdoings is the way to my black little heart). I'm starting off 2015 in some good, self-indulgent fashion.

 

Art addiction is a jones like any other. You have to create. When you run out of material to create with you need to improvise. When you run out of room for what you're creating, well.....it doesn't matter, because you still have to create. There are little road blocks, sure, but you need to improvise. Faced recently with a space crisis, I've spent the last several months dumpster diving for cardboard boxes that I've been makeshifting into “canvases”.

The boxes present their own kinds of problems....because they're flatter than a traditional canvas they're easier to store and they take up a lot less space. The downside is that because they're all oddly

sized, I have no idea how I'm going to frame and/or mount these things in any kind of a nice presentation.

'Nice presentation”, of course, has never been my forte. 

For the time being, anyway, I'm good on canvas and so I'm reverting back to the normal format. The Space Crisis is an ongoing issue, though-----but like I already said----with an Art Jones you create by any means necessary.

 

RANDOM CRIPCRAP:

All kinds of hype seems to be surrounding this TV mini-series called “The Slap” that's coming out soon. Saw an ad for it and it looks like shit---no huge shock, I suppose. A neighborhood and a family is divided over some guy smacking his kid.

You're joking, right?

Ooooohhhh.....what if it happened in YOUR neighborhood????

There seems to be this running paranoid delusion, mostly among people who fetishize hurting children, that if you so much as swat an errant kid on the butt, Hillary Clinton, DHS and a legion of UN Peacekeepers are going to descend on your lawn, remove your children and issue some kind of PC Smackdown. I've yet to see this scenario play out in any kind of realistic fashion, but we do seem to keep hearing stories about kids dying from what someone considers to be “good, old fashioned discipline”, and none of these folks seem to have any good responses for that.

And then I looked and saw that the crux of this miniseries is some adult slapping a kid who is NOT HIS OWN.

OH.

(Channeling Gilda Radner) That's very different. NEVER MIND.

Or maybe it's NOT that different. I don't know. I don't give a shit.

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Between blogs I heard that any/all local newspapers are officially kaput-----they had really been busted down a lot over the last few years, I guess....the Corporate Consolidation Monster just took another big bite and what's left of these papers will basically be a newsier version of the Parade section attached to the ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE.

As ever. Money talks and localism walks....media's a shambles and the streamlining from the overlords ain't helping much....of course, I have to recall some of the feuds me & mine have had over the years with local editorial staffs-----that of the NWA TIMES in particular---and think if they'd spent a little less time doing hack jobs on local activists or toadying up to local politicians and real estate interests, maybe their journalistic pedigree would be a little more robust and it would have been harder to defend killing them.

So-----sorry to hear it.....but not THAT sorry.

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THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST:

THE BUTTHOLE SURFERS-Piougheed/Widowermaker

BUTTER 08-Self-titled

HAWKWIND-Levitation

HAWKLORDS-25 Years On

ROBERT CALVERT-Hype: Songs of Tom Mahler