BOTTOM LEVEL

 

1. momanddad tell measachild to avoid ingestion of lead paint chips

which have been clinically proven to contain arsenic slash cyanide slash

strychnine slash lsd slash cocaine slash heroin slash smog slash and slash

or less than the daily maximum allowance of riboflavin

too late the heroes for i'd already done my share of munching and so

was rendered fuckupforlife

later on in the screaming, skinned knee schoolkid days other children

ran from me because i glowed in the dark like an aurora monster model

icing vegetation within a thirty foot radius o lookathim lookathim in my

superman suit but what was happening wasn't my incredible powers it

was gang abuse, was alien virus haunting, unshakeable

now older on my stage refusing to act my age this is me let it be

BRAIN IN A CAGE and proud red sign flickers for your loud, hoary

approval and i open my cranium spurting

jizz

blood

tears

braincake

to show you.

--APPLAUSE--

2. meanwhile, in comfy suburbianestledinnowhere, leaveittobeaverbradybunch

   man finds himself irritated by BORED meeting, comes home to ralph the

   cocker spaniel and the kids who are playing with their beav and wally dolls

   while watching the cabbage patch kids on tv. Wife has a rolling pin and is

using it to beat the dust out of the cat, three weeks dusty but at a later time

determined to be three weeks dead

“hi, honey, got my wall street journal and my beer in the fridge,” he smiles,

slipping the youngest son into the sock drawer,

“oh, i'm fine,” wife trills, windexing the toaster

with a wistful, faraway glance she dreams picturesque reveries of burying a

meat cleaver in his forehead and WOULDN'T IT BE NICE sing the beach boys

on environmentally-controlled radio

3. “hi,” i say to her sad eyes as godzilla dismounts from his holy ass

4 x 4 and caves my face in for talking to his girl

i bite him in his flabby alcoholic tit and run for pride, vaunted, exalted PRIDE

is a negligible frill in the face of self preservation

tearful in my fool beer it always ends this way

nursing my bruises i plot to neuter the evil bastard and his porcine slut

while they sleep

this last, i think, will be paramount, satisfying cruelty

getting them right where it hurts most---in the raison d'etre

proud o scarred saint i become of these wounds for they name me martyr,

carrier of a little-recognized state of mind

and when they fade i am full of chagrin

4. The convenience store spiel

   it's 7-11 and he wears a harley vest

   he leers and gags and spits and is boisterous and loud and

   unruly with his beer buddies and he talks about “lynyrd skynyrd”

   and “kickin' some faggot's ass” i try not to let him see me

   eyeing the comic books

   why?

   He's on his own mission

   he has own own fucking trajectory and it has nothing to do

   with that worm in the corner

   the blasphemy in his mind

   the flotsam barely thought or whispered

   the cardinal sin, fool, you bite back on every day

   in every aspect of this aberration you call a life:

   I AM.

5. It was a dream i had once

   it was a sunny, clear day and i was waist deep in a pool it was

   my duty on that day to keep an eye on the baby ducks

   inordinantly large body count that day bouyant they would

   be but every now and then one would forget how to swim and

   so then drown

   PAINFULLY

   duty then under circumstances saw me having to dredge

   up the bodies that had floated to the bottom of the pool and

   in the distortions of the dream the bodies had shriveled to the

   size of breakfast cereal marshmallows

   at the same time the abstract effect remained terrible and

   disturbed me profoundly because they retained the

   shape and color of ducklings

   about then i would hear the spectral burble of childhood

   enemies preparing to pelt me with rocks

   i would hear bomber squadrons droning in

   can you relate?

   Dream as recorded has no beginning and no formal ending

   it's just there, crucified in the time and the place of things

   suspended and that is all

6. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

   Playing with the ants.

   WHY?

   Don't look at me that way.

   WHY ARE YOU PLAYING WITH THE ANTS?

   Because they're more fun than people and they cause me no pain

   go away you suck you see the world through a rose colored

   vantagepoint of what OUGHT to be linear limited in scope

   deluded slash oppressive slash happy slash like all the others

   but is it real i think not people like you make me long to be

   attached to a respirator (as in DEAD)

   this is fun

   it's theraputic for me and

   who are you to play judge and jury because i choose to

   play with the ants please go away

7. i was sitting in a small, family type eatery sipping

   on a cup of bad coffee gazing out the window i saw a

   murder being committed in the distance

   a man in a tank top chased a refined looking girl out

   of a beauty salon he was screaming at her smashing her

   delicate frame against a chain link fence she objected

   and struggled, her face beat red she tried to escape but

   couldn't i felt very frightened for her

   my bovine waitress poured me more bad coffee

   stared and smiled at the carnage “my husband did that

   to me last week,” she said warmly

   “why?” i asked

   “it was valentine's day, he wanted to give me a romantic

   evening”

   “i'm afraid,” i told her, “i think we should get help, i think

   he's really going to hurt her”

   the waitress eyed me like i was a blasphemer

   “why?” she asked, “it's so obvious how in LOVE they are

   and who are you to come between two LOVERS? You

   make me sick, mister, enjoy your coffee!”

   she left me there to watch

   i became very upset and before anyone came

   to help the girl, the man killed her

8. the cowboy movie spiel

   i'm the bad guy

   yeah i'm the bad guy

   i dwell alone in the corridors of stone

   and i lurk in the shadows while you live a lie

   i'm the bad guy

   i reached behind the mirror

   and fell inside a thousand hells

   but they're inside you as well

   and i want you to see them all

   so i'm the bad guy

   crowds cheer and canonize you

   when you seize the holy grail

   and i die puking from your bullet

   laughing at a private joke because

   THEY call you humane

   sunny face you head off with your lady

   while i weasel away tail between legs

   plotting your demise while she gnaws

   on your gristle

   there goes the bad guy

   you win congressional medals and

   kiss babies for those photo ops

   but only i see the shit piled up inside you

   i'm the bad guy

   quick

   lock your doors

   get the guns out of the closet

   it's the bad guy

   here comes the bad guy

9. there is a lot of life in this city

   and much death as well

   and joy

   and sorrow

   love, we ought to go find it all, you and i

   take my hand...

   no, but no,

   but no

   we don't want to suffer the consequences of

   my having your hand, do we, now?

   i may be tempted to place it in my lap

   and so something revolting!

   --APPLAUSE--

10. ??!!SHROUD?!!!!!

    pariah shrill on the thundering hilltop

    pariah tirade and scream to the stormcloud

    overwhelmed, overtaxed by the juggernaut of circumstance

    falling, imploding, live cliffsummit in a futile, fetal sprawl

    murmuring strange litanies to the roaring, ravenous brine

    i i can't no i hurt i spike the sky the sky the ocean i oh no

    blooming i no i bug crush bug crush big looming i

    you caterwaul for order, definition

    you subdivide and subjugate

    and pariah rattling i splutter and inarticulate

    how do you define the scream of the nucleus in the

    soul's midnight?

    How can i explain OH GOD the snapcrackle of my

    circuitry?

    How do i verbalize and inventory you this?

    i i i cliff crash wave foam rage shake i no swallow no

    consume no cry run hurt night i shrink

    on a cliff too high under a sky too wide

    over a sea deep and impossible

    i've become a paralyzed golem hexed by my vision

    this is not your priority list!

    This is not your subdivision sorter!

    This is not your regimented file cabinet!

    The water is war its tendrils clash in elemental incest

    beneath that,

    calm,

    a big, new sky,

    another world

    fishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfishfish

11. life slows and stagnates congested

    red and yellow lights glare

    where are these modern gods, these heroes of the night?

    They lurk behind the churches and temples, torturing the

    meek and laughing

    i shall be hero-atheist, he who is unbelieving in the hero,

    the good man, the man of action

    for he is a lie and i am a witness

    i caught him urinating on me while i slept in the street

    he laughed and stood revealed

    the white knight's tinpot armor is soiled

    with the blood of thousands and your

    petty hopes and expectations are for nought

12. Hell street gasps, grabs

    suck

    poisonous

    vapors

    we children strove in the gas and machinery

13. i woke to the sounds of footsteps on my roof

    (and the prancing and pawing of each little hoof)

    closed my eyes and prayed for the sun

    'cause a horrible monster who walks like a MAN

and speaks like a CHILD

saunters through the rows of ranch houses and split

levels

whose inhabitants dream away in false security

to those in troubled slumber there are lights

in the stinking, charred tunnels and the only way out

might fail

but look to the end

look to the end

14. Suburban leaveittobeaver man's eyes redden

    as he scans the shopping list:

2 dozen eggs slash waffles slash 1 gallon of milk

slash bread slash cheese slash 2 cartons of cigarettes slash

2 sides of beef slash 1 tube of toothpaste slash vegetable oil

slash 1 hammer slash 1 ball of cotton slash 4 ingrids slash

4 deuces slash 5 aces slash 6 bottles of tylenol

and realizes he forgot to go shopping

he pulls up in his driveway beside the ambulance

two white-coated simians emerge from the two-car

garage carrying a stretcher sheet covering a

tiny, humanish shape

he wipes the sweat off his brow and asks tearful wife

who is waxing the cocker spaniel,

“what's for dinner, honey?”

--APPLAUSE--

Shockbox Press Chapbook #3 copyright 1991 C. F. Roberts/ Shockbox Press. 

rev. 11/20 Molotov Editions

REMEMBERING RICHARD

The City of Fayetteville has lost a giant. Richard S. Drake, former GRAPEVINE journalist and editor, founder and editor-in-chief of THE OZARK GAZETTE and long running host of Fayetteville's own ON THE AIR WITH RICHARD S. DRAKE, passed away on 3/ 4/ 19 after a period of illness.

Richard has been a part of my reality for almost a quarter of a decade...certainly not as long as he looms with more old school Fayettevillians, but at this stage in the game I reckon I can shed some of my “New Kid” sheen. I moved here from New Hampshire in early Spring of 1996. I became involved and aware of the close-knit community I adopted and eventually of the little free paper, the OZARK GAZETTE, that could be found in racks everywhere in town. It was a fun and acerbic little publication, very in touch with its grass roots base. I became aware of Community Access Television and the scene (somewhat symbiotic) they had going on----many of my friends were poets and musicians and most of them had appeared on CAT (at that time better known to most locals as “The Open Channel” since that was the name of the previous long-term contractor. I learned that the same passionate and sometimes cranky GAZETTE editor who did a column called “Street Jazz” was the guy behind “On the Air with Richard S. Drake”, and on that access show he conducted intelligent and thoughtful interviews with people of all stripes; activists, writers, historians, artists, academics, musicians and many others.

My roommate had bugged me several times at this point about the notion that we should hit the Open Channel and see what it took to become producers and learn to put out product ourselves. I had my own things distracting me at the time----I was like, “yeah, okay, maybe we can do that,” the idea pretty much remaining an abstract in the back of my brain. One day, either toward the end of 1996 or very early '97, he told me, “I went up to CAT and signed us both up for Orientation.” OKAY. I was on board while barely aware of it.

We signed up and our package covered Studio, Field and Edit classes, which still remain a crux of the curriculum today, although the technology has changed a lot. Studio Training was our first class, and I was blown away when we went in and it was revealed that The Great Man would be our trainer.

“AW, NO WAY! The guy running our classes is the Ozark Gazette guy??? I LOVE that guy!!! ” I was starstruck.

Richard not only taught us the basics of studio production, from set building to interviewing to punching a show in the studio, he gave us an overview of Public Access Television, its history both nationally and locally, and why it was there. Over the years Richard's history with Public Access and his knowledge thereof, as well as his passion for it, would be a constant source of inspiration to me. Having come out of the xerographic zine scene, I found the independent, radical aspects of Public Access very accommodating and very close to home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZOvfItiS3M&index=42&list=PL0cs_SrWxKfUXOl47_dVnqPfM7nrvNehF

       Follow this link to watch ON THE AIR featuring Film Historian Frank Scheide
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czAufQWhJh4&index=26&list=PL0cs_SrWxKfUXOl47_dVnqPfM7nrvNehF
Follow this link to watch Richard's interview with "The Last American"

   We got our Access Producer stripes and went off on our own, helping out Richard and other producers in volunteer gigs but also began forging our own path...and our path (believe it or not, it isn't like we walked into this gig with anything resembling a PLAN) wound up becoming Fayetteville's most controversial public access show. EVER.

In this capacity---and he might have, at varying junctures, been either a dedicated public volunteer, a member of the City's Telecom Board or a member of CAT's Board of Directors.....and he might not have always liked what we were doing, but he frequently found himself in the position of having to defend us, and he did so all the time, like a good First Amendment trooper.

At one point, following our perseverance after a trumped-up obscenity charge in 2003 (wherein a few journalists friendly to the City Administration at the time wrote some conveniently-timed hack jobs on us), Richard (who was writing for the Little Rock Free Press at the time) told me, “I want to do an interview with your cast. I want people to see that you're serious about what you do.”

In many ways Richard became our greatest champion, interviewing us both in print and on television. And he may have even occasionally ribbed us for our lowbrow approach, but he always stood by our right to do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyaNuuW_kRo&list=PL0cs_SrWxKfUXOl47_dVnqPfM7nrvNehF&index=10

     Follow this link to watch Richard interviewing Shannon X. Caine about Obituaries

      I found myself working with Richard on many fronts...I wrote occasionally for the Ozark Gazette, penning anything from letters to the editor to guest articles to poems. When the Gazette fell into trouble I found myself invited to brunch at Uncle Gaylord's, for a meeting of writers, supporters and other hangers-on, to brainstorm and be part of a kind of “owners' co-op” setup to save the paper. Nothing panned out and the Gazette did ultimately fold.

After illness and a coma (which Richard himself has referenced many times on multiple media platforms) Richard was anxious to start doing television again and put “On the Air” back together. He called on me, and I became his cohort, director, chief editor and Chief Cook and Bottle Washer (as I used to call myself) and he and I kept “On the Air” going.

        We faced some interesting challenges in production in the ensuing years. At one point many of the flats, backdrops and other setpieces were jettisoned by the station. Forced to improvise and evolve, we opted for more of a minimalist, "Charlie Rose" look for the show going forward.

     By the end of the oughts I was probably one of the most prolific producers at Access TV, commandeering a number of shows, including “On the Air”, our own long-running show, “The Abbey of the Lemur”, “Intellectual Property” (a questionable show featuring local political meetings), “The Caine Interviews” (another talk show that was a spin-off of TAOTL) and some random other projects, as well as assisting on my wife's show, “Mondo Pazzo”. I had spearheaded two independent film festivals. When my roommate came to me in 1997 and said, “I just enrolled us in orientation at CAT,” I never envisioned all that, even less that I would eventually find myself working in television professionally.

Throughout all of this, Richard remained a constant, providing me with guidance, a conscience and a wall to bounce ideas off of. He taught me a lot of lessons---not to preach to the choir, how one should never accept civility over victory, not to take oneself too seriously and to never condescend to my audience---to enter into any project thinking of my audience as intelligent people capable of critical thought.

A notion that won me some friends but also got me into a lot of trouble----but that's another story for another day.

Richard was a wellspring of historical knowledge, of both Public Access and its various contractors over the years, but also Fayetteville in general...he could tell you about anything from the divisive Incinerator Issue, which galvanized a lot of activists in the community but also set the tone for those activists' relationships to the local newspapers (who sneered at them as “Aginners”) . Those relationships never really changed. He could also tell you about the woman the city had hired at one point to play violin to the flowers growing on the town square at night.

He also frequently found himself in the position of playing Cassandra on the walls of Troy, screaming, “don't bring that horse in here!” Only to be listened to by no one. He shot (and I helped edit) a documentary called “The Death of the Fayetteville Open Channel”, which covered the Great Access War of the early '90's. He detailed how a rogue faction of the Open Channel's Board of directors (of which he freely owned up to being a member) broke off from the main board and wound up losing the Open Channel its contract with the City. The contract was later awarded to Access 4 Fayetteville, who would eventually be known as Community Access Television. A lot of people complained over his constant references to it, saying Richard was “living in the past”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJWuhUtQwe8

    Follow this link to watch "The Death of Fayetteville Open Channel"

 He wasn't. He was urging people not to repeat his mistakes.

It fell on deaf ears.

Fortunately, he was still with us. When a rogue CAT Board began violating its own by-laws, engaging in intimidation and harassment and trying to access personnel files they had no actual right to, Richard threw in with VIPA (The Producer's Group I was, at the time, President of) and after a long public struggle we forced a slew of resignations. Another Access War was cut short and the contractor (known today as FPTV) still exists and is flourishing, thanks in large part to Richard's efforts.

Life went on and we kept doing what we were doing. Richard on some fronts tried to embrace new media but by and large things like YouTube and Podcasting seemed to mystify and alienate him. He mourned the loss of the local newspaper, a point on which he and I agreed to disagree. What good was local journalism if its prime function was to side with regional oligarchs and degrade and demean activists and the disenfranchised? My attitude was (and still is) good riddance. Richard, however, still mourned the death of localism, such as it was.

As he got older he developed more of a curmudgeonly attitude, sometimes coming over like a grumpy old man yelling and shaking his fist at the rain---the thing about Richard, though, is there was never a time when he couldn't step outside himself and see the humor in all of this. This played into a lot of the comedy vignettes he and I put together in the later years. Sometimes the pieces had some heavy, intense meaning going on---sometimes it was just a fun story. Either way we had a ball doing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhPt1WdMeIA&t=36s

     Follow this link to watch "Richard S. Drake's DVD Commentary" (short comedy bit)

For the most part 2018 saw “On the Air” go on hiatus, with only one episode being produced as both Richard and I endured health problems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rXi66vXWGc&list=PL0cs_SrWxKfUXOl47_dVnqPfM7nrvNehF&index=48&t=1s

     Follow this link to watch "On the Air: The Willow Heights Controversy"

Right up until the end, we were trying to pull it together to start producing new shows. And I mean, right up to several days before he died. His wife, Tracy, informed my wife and I, on March 4^th, that he had passed that morning.

We were very intimidated going into last weekend---this idea of doing a televised memorial had blown up and we were all kind of swept up in it....in the end I think it went well. As daunting and discomforting as it sounded, I can't help feeling that Richard wouldn't have had it any other way.

Special Thanks to FPTV  and Tracy Reeves  Cutaia

Copyright 2019 Molotov Editions

        

THREATS AND WARNINGS

After a month where I could barely get around to refilling my meds, breathing room is in sight. This past weekend I've talked a lot about having to “reconstruct meaning” for myself, which might sound a lot larger than it should. In short I'm having to re-teach myself to write and paint after being endlessly, relentlessly hampered for a while.

“Threats and Warnings” (new-ish one on cardboard) might not be the very LAST painting in the Apocalypse Series but it might be the last major one as I draw the whole thing to a close. Two series will continue----abstracts as part of a current series called “The Random” and a new series called “Hot Garbage”. The Purgatory and Apocalypse series were more based around symbolism and mythmaking----Hot Garbage will largely be figurative art (or my permutation thereof) for its own sake. All or most of the paintings in the series will be titled, “Hot Garbage”. Stay tuned. 

DISASSOCIATION AND THE APOCALYPSE

I've always glommed onto graffiti---I like the look of it---I like the coded history of layers of vandalistic scrawlings. One sure sign that I'm about done with the Ozark Experience is that the Army Corps of Engineers have done the dumbest thing on earth by fencing off the ruins of the hotel at Monte Ne...that, to me, was possibly the last holy or sacred place left in this region. Someone asked us a while ago what we found sacred about that place, and would we find it more sacred if preservationists fixed it up. My answer was more or less “no”. I like Coin Harvey's ruin for what it's become—--a hollowed-out hulk covered with the graffiti of the ages----a witchy mecca which we've celebrated in image and noise....

In the late 50s/early 60s you have this young hood who scrawls “Vic + Shelly” on those sodden walls....15 years later his disgrace of a longhaired son is partying at the same site and maybe he draws a pot leaf and/or some slogan on the wall......a few layers of vandalism have emerged since then---maybe he can see “Vic + Shelly”, maybe he can't. He has no idea that was left by his Dad, who he can't stand.....15 to 20 years down the road our stoner has cut his hair and moved on to a corporate job....his son, who's a wannabe gangsta, has now tagged the wall.....three generations of hooliganism in layers. Boggles the mind, huh?

Being autistic, I'm naturally riveted by this stuff and I can kind of get lost in it. Urban/public art enthralls me, but I have no head for it....these days if you gave me a couple of spraycans and said, “go!” I'd have no idea what to put on a wall or why.

These days, though, a part of my autism that's become more pronounced is just an increasing inability to fit my brain into any kind of linear communication----visual or non-visual. People talk like a bunch of goddamned chattering monkeys, I get tired of hearing them talk and I get tired of hearing myself talk and I just stop talking---don't even know what to say.

That level of disassociation fits pretty beautifully into the ethos of the Apocalypse, though. Mike McAdam and I developed this weird style of sloganeering, lexicon and cartoon art with the Apocalypse Krew---we had an identity forming even before we developed musically. It was an incoherent smear of smiley faces, frowney faces, suicidal dreg figures, recurring images and phrases that would dribble off from militant ravings to primal, screaming nonsense words that mostly were comprised of bunched-together, incompatible consonants. Sometimes I sqwzaaaazzztptgh. That still makes sense to me. It really made sense to me in my early-to-mid 20s when I went around in a state of constant angst and agitation and wanted to put my fist through everything.

That level of primal disassociation makes its way into much of the Apocalypse Series, and this painting as well. The heyday of my vandalism was probably as a teen or a young adult and most of it

  revolved around whatever bands I was listening to, which devolved into arguments (on the walls) about the merits of said bands. Pretty meat-and-potatoes. Basquiats, we were not. Banksy, we were not. We were not Banos, Iz the Wiz, Dondi or Lee.

Stylistically, that's the path I follow, here and elsewhere. As the painting is based around one of our songs, snippets of the song's lyrics appear, buried and obscured in layers and layers, as if some janitor keeps painting over the bad kids' etchings----the bad kids keep building a wall of written or drawn entropy as if to tell the hypothetical janitor, “nice try----paint again, Frank!” There is no concrete crystallization of the lyrical content in the space of the painting---just layers of obscured messages, none of which you'll ever get the entirety of. As we come to the surface, you'll see quotes from the Bible (that bit from Matthew about “render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar”) accompanied by the quote from Vonnegut's fictional “Messiah”, Bokonon (“pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.”---words to live by!!!)----those are also obscured and marred. No thought completed. Or codified. Or anything.

It's a way of life. It's a way of life for more people than will probably admit to it.

MAKING IT WITCHY

Why use the Manson family as Icons?

Without condoning any of their crimes, the chaos of what they brought to the world is a deeply ingrained part of the geography of my youth. Think of them less as Icons or people to be admired---more as signposts. This is the kind of ride you're in for. It'll get ugly----it'll get bloody. There will be taboos----there will be loud, gibbering, scary madness.

Flashback to 1998 or so: My roommate and I are at a Rave. Mostly we're there to hawk our hallucinogenic videos to a DJ (which winds up being a fruitless endeavor) but we're also ripped and trying to have a good time. I had dreadlocks at the time-----some raver kid walks up to us and starts asking us, “are you peaceful hippies, or are you the other kind?” I think we were taken aback by the question----what the hell did that mean? We tried to assure him that we were “peaceful”----I don't know---maybe he was intimidated and thinking we were redneck bikers who were going to kick his ecstasy-gobbling ass. But a part of me kind of enjoys the fact that we might have been the “Other” kind of Hippie. And his worst nightmare.

At another time several of us went out on a Sunday (early evening) to a Chinese Buffet that we used to frequent back in the day....I think it was one of those lost weekends where we all got pretty blasted. We were probably all pretty bedraggled----again, I had the dreads, which were probably down to my knees by this time---one friend of mine was wearing a tie-dyed shirt, a pair of really gnarly sunglasses and a pentagram necklace---and no, I don't mean a pentacle----I mean A PENTAGRAM----upside down, evil, Satan, yadda yadda yadda. Stoner Metal bands like Queens of the Stone Age, Acid King, Fu Manchu and Monster Magnet were burgeoning at the time and it all kind of made sense to me.

The late church crowd was probably in effect (Sunday in the Ozarks, after all) but I'll tell you this: At least one table in our general vicinity cleared----they asked to be seated elsewhere. The population cleared FAST.

That turned me on.....it still kind of does, to be honest.

Our public access show, “The Abbey of the Lemur”, really played into the same impulse, of course. Dark Counterculture. Think the MC5 and the White Panthers----that was us. In the late 90s/early 2000s.

I was never a Peace, Love and Flowers guy. I mean, I am----ultimately that's what I want for everyone----flowers optional----but I've known people over the years who were of the school of “you can't get mad...anger is WRONG! Anger is BAD!” Thing about a lot of those people is, I watched them go crazy. BAD crazy. MEAN crazy. HARMFUL TO THOSE AROUND THEM crazy. And the most sanctimonious people I knew became the most horrible people I ever met.

Anger's fine....anger helps bring about justice. Anger is an energy. You want to be able to work past that anger and get yourself to a healthy, sane place....but anger, in and of itself, is a good thing to stay in touch with. Anger helps you get shit done. 

Anyway, the Apocalypse Series has about run its course. By the time our album comes out I probably will have moved past it to something new.....things will get different but the piss and vinegar remains.

THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST:

ANTHRAX-Among the Living

PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED-First Issue

PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED-Second Edition/Metal Box

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND-White Light/White Heat

copyright 2016 Molotov Editions

APOCALYPSE NOTES: EXPLODING

“Hello.....is it me you're looking for?”

---Lionel Ritchie

One thing Mike and I carped constantly about back in the early days of the Apocalypse Krew was asinine, sappy love songs. Part of it was a bad case of Serious Young Man's disease; the rest of it I'll just chalk up to the songs' fault. Yeah---I'm magnanimous like that. Whatevs. A lot of my issues were that I felt a lot of these songs were disingenuous. When Eric Carmen sings “turn the radio on for that sweet sound....make me lose control”----what the hell's he talking about? ! What, exactly is “losing control”? Is it dangerous to do while you're driving? Let's just call a duck a duck, okay? He's basically saying, “make me come”. I guess there's the list of words you can't say on the radio, but to me, it boiled down to how it's inappropriate to lay the cards on the table and just say, “hey, baby, let's fuck!” And at that point in my life I had no patience with what I saw as a very calculated, cynical form of insincerity. To me, it was the closest legitization of date rape to ever be applauded by the masses.

So we'd go 'round and 'round about our mutual disgust with stuff like that.

We were working in this hotel at the time---we were dishwashers, with occasional forays into floor cleaning and food prep....I was sweeping down the floor around the salad bar when Mike walked up to me and showed me a piece of paper....on it were the lyrics to “First Stare”.

“Chuck---check this out----I wrote a song,” he said.

The lyric on the sheet of paper started off innocently (and innocuously) enough....”I love you/ if you don't say you love me I just don't know what I'll do”...” 'Cause tonight's the night I love you/ and tonight's the night I care/ and I knew it was gonna be this way/ from our very first stare”....

 

So far, so (deliberately) mediocre.....but things got weird quick...the next lyrical passage went

(Revolting)---as if this were a musical notation----

“ AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHGGHHHH!!!!!!!

If you don't fuckin' love me I'm gonna shred you to little pieces

If you don't scream for me I'm gonna make you wish you were still alive

Bleed for me!!!!”

Yeah----we were on to some next-level shit, here, as the kids say these days....

Then came the chorus:

“EXPLODE! EXPLODE! EXPLODE! EXPLODE!”

At this point, there between the cook's line and the salad bar, I was doubled over in front of God and everybody, howling with laughter. I knew exactly what Mike was going for, and it was absolutely slaying me.

It was the antidote to every inane, patronizing top-40 romantic ballad making the rounds. And who could beat a chorus that was just repeated screams of “EXPLODE!!!!!”?

I went out and got a tee-shirt made (they used to have these stores that customized tee-shirts back in the day)----a red shirt with the word “EXPLODE” printed in Old English lettering...I still have it. It no longer fits---my wife sometimes wears it.

“First Stare” kinda nominally kicked around our repertoire for years...we never recorded a formal demo of it. We played around with a version that barely came together....my take on the song was that you'd always have this poppy intro but then it would turn into a brutal thrash metal rave-up wherein the song would basically see the various members racing each other to the end of the song while I screamed my fool brains out....

When Mike and I first started talking about recording the old stuff I expressed a lot of interest in finally recording “First Stare”---it'd be the ultimate “fuck you” to the top 40 popsters. Mike confessed to me that his vision for the song was always that there was no real song, per se---it would just be noise. That wasn't ever really my vision for the song, but we were talkin' “First Stare”, here, and I was willing to compromise.

The ideas changed as we went along. At one point, Mike sent me a bare-bones track that was intended for the “fast” part....the track was actually based on an earlier number that fell by the wayside called “Black Harvest”. “Black Harvest” was an anti-nuclear war song that was really cut out of the same cloth as “Black”---it was a moody, dark song that started off acoustic and turned into an angry rave-up. I never thought of “Black Harvest” as a backbone for “First Stare”, but hell if it didn't work.

Later on I was on the phone with Mike and he expressed the further view to me that he had ideas about the track turning into “twenty pounds of shit in a five pound bag”----he recommended “Shine” by Todd Rundgren as a big illustration of what he was talking about. Rundgren, of course, even when he was slinging chaos, was much more subtle than anything the Apocalypse Krew was doing, but I saw the parallel and it intrigued me.

Flash forward to the recording session. I finally got a picture of the monster that “First Stare” would turn into. It sat on the timeline in a multitude of layers that looked to me like a lot of the timelines I did late in the day for “The Abbey of the Lemur”. It was immense---there were layers and layers and layers of audio.

What Mike had laid down was this insane mishmash of the “Black Harvest” riff snarled up with a montage of a lot of our stranger old recorded moments----synthesizer wreckage, demented lo-fi soundscapes, spoken word snippets, me beating on a Baldwin Organ, insane jabbering and distorted racket.

“First Stare” had become a Burroughs-style cut up!!!!! I was absolutely floored. This shit was insane!

We jumped into the ballad-part. I was never sure how to tackle this and we ran through it a few times.....Mike told me after a couple of takes that he thought the best way to tackle the vocal would be just to Lou Reed the fuck out of it and bang out the most insincere delivery I could.

(And yeah, in case it just blew by you, I used “Lou Reed” as a Verb.)

Which works, since our entire genre spoof was on songs we were completely skeptical toward. As I said before, I felt as though the sappy MOR love song was the most cynical, vapid, dishonest form out there, so taking the piss felt like the way to go.

When we got past the intro, Mike told me we were going to approach the main body of the song a little differently. “I want you to do the vocal for this without the music.”

Huh?

OKAY.

So in keeping with the cut-up nature of the beast----I went into the booth and yelled the lyric minus any musical accompaniment----let the chips fall where they may. I added a few weird ad libs----passages from “Chapel of Love” and Sinatra's “All the Way”, with the same leather-lunged delivery.

I had also expressed interest in playing a guitar track quite some time beforehand. Mike asked me if I still wanted to do it. I had this thought that we wouldn't have time for that, but this was looking good----we'd knocked everything out reasonably early. He pulled out the guitar, and BAM!!! It was happening. I was hooked up top a howling sonic monster, and I just went apeshit, throwing in some whammy bar racket, some Greg Ginn fingers-caught-in-the-strings shit and, more frequently than not, long, caterwauling drones and blasts of feedback right up the Velvet Underground/”European Son” Alley.

This went on for about ten minutes....Mike, at one point, had departed to take care of one thing or another. I figured he could just throw it into the horrendous stewing pot and fade it in and out as he saw fit. I have no idea what the final result will be, but Mike's playing with a pretty insane arsenal of crap. I have no doubt it will be epic and unprecedented.

We were done at the studios at North Main Music. But one more song remained.

WE ARE THE GOON SQUAD AND WE'RE COMING TO TOWN

I've said for a number of years that most of the bad things that happen in Fayetteville are real estate driven. From the city's controversial decision to violate its own tree ordinance to the closing of the old Jefferson School to an ordinance that only allows three unrelated people to live together in one residence (making it a lot harder for low wage earners as well as the town's student population to get by) to a coloring book distributed by the city's Code Enforcement department that illustrates housing code violations with offensively stereotyped working class characters to attacks on my own public access TV show as a deterrent to “Young Executives” who might be interested in buying property there, I've seen example after example in my 20 years of living here.

Fayetteville's identity crisis with class and real estate could best be summed up with one incident: During the 2004 Mayoral debate, then-Mayor Dan Coody (who handily coasted to re-election that year) was asked what he would do for the perennially low-income south end of the town (where I, incidentally, lived at the time). He answered that it wasn't a case of “going-to-do”....” we're doing it,” he said, but it was a long-term project that wouldn't come to fruition overnight. He cited the development of the TIF (Tax Incremental Funding) district at the time--this was meant to finance the building of some hifallutin' tower/luxury hotel construct that fell through (I think it's now an ugly parking lot) and boasted of all the good it was doing. Specifically mentioned was the fact that they had gotten rid of some unsightly mobile homes and were going to build some apartments in their place that were going to be “beautiful”.

I watched the debate on TV. I wished I could have been there in person, because the question I would have liked to have lobbed in response would have been, “what happened to the people who lived in those trailers? Were they not also members of the 'Community'?”

To my knowledge, no one, other than me, ever bothered to ask that question. This guy, it should be noted, was the “Green-leaning, Liberal Good Guy” candidate....which probably defines my ongoing struggle with Fayetteville's liberal/activist community---most of them are moneyed, tenured types, and at their core, classist as hell. The Beautification Crowd are suave, educated and sophisticated, and the idea of what happens to human beings really never occurs to them.

The latest manifestation of this phenomenon recently reared its deceptively pretty head when plans were announced for a new suburb called “Willow Bend”. To quote their intentions from their own website, right up front, “the Walker Park neighborhood, located just south of downtown Fayetteville, lacks quality affordable housing “, and this development proposes, on some level, to remedy that issue.

If you're talking quality, they may have something. With the South End, you're talking lots of blighted neighborhoods and shacks....you're also talking a neighborhood Fayetteville seemed to turn a blind eye to when they shut down Jefferson School a decade ago. That, to many people, pointed up the elitism at the heart of Fayetteville City Government—-dismantling a civic focal point in a poor neighborhood as part of a gerrymandering stunt. Poor people----minorities----you know, they don't look good in Campaign Spots.

On the other hand, if you're talking Affordability, where does it balance out? I worry when the pencil pushers talk about Affordable Housing, because their version of Affordable isn't the same as my version of Affordable. I don't look good in Campaign Commercials, either....

So, when I heard about Willow Bend, my initial thoughts were, okay, which poor bastards are losing their homes because of this? And how many of them won't be able to afford to share in the New FutureTM? (And in case you were wondering, my educated guess was, “not many”....)

As it turns out, I believe the future site of Willow Bend is going to be the wooded area behind Walker Park.

Walker Park has a reputation in Fayetteville---not the nicest park in town. It's a big homeless hangout. I remember in the late 90s Food Not Bombs had a lot of big feeds out there (before the first wave of gentrification saw a lot of the Autonomist/Radical element in town vacuumed up). The Salvation Army is nearby and I know that there was a Hobo Jungle out in back of the place----there may be camps in the woods that would be the future home of Willow Bend, also----it would make sense. And it would give our town fathers an impetus to bulldoze that space for something.....well, PRETTIER. Something where real estate could be moved.

And who could object to a nice neighborhood? I couldn't---could you?

You don't have to scratch the surface of Fayetteville's squeaky clean liberal community much to get to the classists underneath. One person I knew commented on the supermarket in the Walker Park area and its shabby clientele by saying “I'm afraid of getting raped there!” (because, as we all know, there's an epidemic of rapes happening in Supermarkets.) She talked about the disgusting caliber of people who shopped there---which my wife and I were privately horrified by---I worked in that area at the time and it wasn't unusual for the two of us to to stop by that store at the end of my shift to grab a cheap breakfast ....so we most likely could have been part of that disgusting caliber of people she felt so threatened by.

Yeah, well....if there's anything I've learned, that's Fayetteville for ya.

There have been problems of late in Fayetteville's transient community; there were two stabbings in 2015----(one occurred in a homeless camp around U of A, one in Walker Park, sparking a new wave of contrived anti-homeless hysteria). So what better time to clean the place up? Can't have all those nasty po' folks runnin' around, bringing down the property values!

Here in Fayettenam, of course, we've put a lot of hype behind how we're a “Compassionate” Community. Yeah. I know all about that. I remember the “Compassion” the city showed when one particular non-profit contractor's board of directors decided it was okay to ransack its employees' personnel files, even though that was a basic FOIA no-no. I remember how activists who tried to blow the whistle on this monkey business were vilified by local journalists and city-related bloggers. I remember this because I was one of those activists. But hey----don't ever get in the way of a good PR stunt, right? “City of Compassion”---that's catchy. And I'm sure it'll sell lots of high-dollar property to well-meaning Young ExecutivesTM.

And like the idea of a good neighborhood, who could argue with it?

As a “City of Compassion”TM, we don't Guiliani the hell out of our transient population, because that would be cruel. We will, however, price them out of existence with the building of lots of pretty things, and we'll bring in lots of pretty people to buy the pretty things. You know....people who bring the property values up. Pretty people. People who look good in PR spots. People who look good in campaign commercials. And then, I'm sure we can get rid of a lot of the other run-down housing in the area. The people who actually LIVE there? Well, they have all the wrong aesthetics and they probably don't even recycle. They can find someplace else to live.

“There used to be this unsightly park full of all these panhandlers and poor people and rednecks and minorities...now, it's really pretty, though, and we're bringing people into the neighborhood who consider that an investment worth supporting. And this whole end of town is looking so much better now!”

Well, who can't get behind that? Soon we'll all be able to shop in peace.

########

 

It's been a few weeks since David Bowie shuffled off this mortal coil and I'm still surprised as to how wretched I was over that particular death. Perhaps it's that his demise came a couple of days after the release of a genuine masterpiece....most recording artists are resting on their laurels by age 40. Bowie's career had its peaks and valleys, but BLACKSTAR at age 69? Unprecedented.

I spent a good chunk of those weeks listening to good music and combing over the most recent videos for “Lazarus” and “Blackstar”, the latter of which I found spellbinding. What the hell was going on in that video, that song, and what the hell was Bowie trying to tell us????

Naturally, because everyone's supposed to be part of the IlluminatiTM, all the usual drivel about the Devil started popping up online, complete with the usual contrived psychobabble about “Pentagrams” (sorry, hacks....a book with a star on it is not a “Pentagram”), the usual Albert Pike misquotes and so on and so forth, and sadly when you look up anything occult-leaning or esoteric on the net, that will be the majority of what you find.

I was hoping to read some well-read or well-informed interpretations and eventually I found some thought-provoking stuff: kylebstiff throws around some interesting jazz about ancient astronaut theory and the Gnostic concept of Yahweh/Yaldabaoth as blind/insane god, archons feeding on the religious ecstasies of acolytes, etc.

 

And vigilant citizen built a pretty thoughtful overview of Bowie's career as an exercise in acension/descent and apotheosis.

 

I don't think there are necessarily any straightforward answers because Bowie was never a particularly straightforward guy. He probably upped the potential of the Concept Album by refusing to deal with linear storylines (find a concrete plot in ZIGGY STARDUST or OUTSIDE if you can) and I've always had a thing for mosaic-style narratives.

Being a writer and an artist (as opposed to a theologian or a soothsayer) I'm more comfortable with the grey area and the possibilities as opposed to black-and-white meanings. What really enthralled me in the run up to the release of BLACKSTAR was what conceptually, to me, almost felt like an aesthetic line poem of the man's entire body of work....of course, you get the “Major Tom” theme, which has cropped up from “Space Oddity” to “Scary Monsters” and here the man (or his remains, anyway) has literally fallen to earth (or someplace) to be venerated by this tribe of people who form a religion around it.... as stand-alones, there's some strange commonality between the promotional videos for “Ashes to Ashes” and “Fashion” (both incorporate this very cryptic, almost religious-feeling “bowing” gesture but in very different contexts) but cross-compare “Fashion” with that strange “bunny-hop” move the dancers are making and look at what the “acolyte” characters are doing in “Blackstar”....it's MORE OR LESS THE SAME MOVE. Coincidence?

Perhaps a play on culture, customs and orthodoxies? The orthodoxy of fashion and the orthodoxy of religion?

Not necessarily pinned on a linear meaning, here, but an interesting pull back when you realize the threads you may be able to connect in a much larger body of work.

RIP, Spaceman.

THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST (All Bowie all the time):

1. Blackstar (Blackstar)
2. Sue (or in a Season of Crime) (Blackstar)
3. Panic in Detroit (Aladdin Sane)
4. Five Years (Ziggy Stardust)
5. Heart's Filthy Lesson (Outside)
6. Fashion (Scary Monsters)
7. Look Back in Anger (Lodger)
8. Rosalyn (Pin Ups)
9. Future Legend/Diamond Dogs (Diamond Dogs)
10. Speed of Life (Low)
11. Sense of Doubt (Heroes)
12. Neukoln (Heroes)
13. Station to Station (Station to Station)
14. Beauty and the Beast (Heroes)
15. Memory of a Free Festival (Space Oddity)

BLOG ROULETTE

                                                                www.cfrobertsart.com

Been chewing on a number of issues lately----one thing I haven't done up to now with this blog is write on a personal level----poetry, yeah----fiction & prose, sure----art sometimes, of course----seldom in this arena have I just sat & jawed with you----so right now I'm gonna do that....

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

Seen the movie? Nah....me neither.

I could probably start at ground zero, as a writer and a friend of writers---as someone who's watched at least one generation of underappreciated scribes churn out some superior and intellectually turned-on erotica get summarily ignored and dismissed while this toe jam sells zillions.....it goes beyond that, though.

Lots of the BDSM people have gone off at length about how the book and/or movie mischaracterizes the lifestyle as romanticized abuse and codependence----basically a variation or extreme caricature of 1950s marriage. I've personally got no dog in that race, and the BDSM crowd don't need me in their peanut gallery....they have plenty of their own eloquent speakers.

I've hypothesized for years that THE STORY OF O is a parable about Codependence, Abuse and loss of identity wrapped up in a veneer of Erotica....friends and I have gone round and round about that, and of course, Pauline Reage is no longer around to speak for herself on the issue----but I think that's the line in the sand between smart erotic literature and dumb....I doubt EL James, or whatever her name is, has ever taken a moment to ponder such enigmas.

The neat thing about 50 SHADES, though, is, not since BATTLEFIELD EARTH have I witnessed a book endure so much open snarking....google yourself 50 SHADES OF GREY EXCERPTS and have a ball....

This one was my running favorite:

“His pointer finger circled my puckered love cave.  ‘Are you ready for this?’ he mewled, smirking at me like a mother hamster about to eat her three-legged young.”

He mewled? He MEWLED!!!! You know what that is, right???? That's the sound a cat makes!!!! The above hilarity had me following my better half around the apartment for weeks, making randy overtures in a voice similar to Henrietta Pussycat from the old Mister Rogers Show. “Heeey, baby....meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow!!!!” 

And then I wonder why she seems to be in such a hurry to leave the room.

I've come to find out, however, that the above chestnut may be fake---not in the book at all. And yeah, I'm crushed. Is there no actual mewling in this book? Oh, please, God----tell me there's mewling......

Of course, whether there is or not there are plenty of great, cringeworthy passages to go around....

"I don't remember reading about nipple clamps in the Bible."

Yeah, actually, I think it was in Deuteronomy somewhere.

“I suck harder and harder … Hmm … My inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves.”

I'm gonna just reiterate what I've been saying for at least a year, now, three legged hamsters or no....all my writer friends need to be out there securing book deals, 'cause if the bar's this low, there's gold in them thar hills!

Shit, maybe even I can score one....

Anybody see the Oscars this year? Nah....me neither. We've come to realize that the “Oscar Movie” is almost a subgenre unto itself and is as easily identifiable as any other.....most of them are “serious films” with opulent set design and respectable budgets.....most of them are ponderous in nature, trying to call attention to themselves as “important”. The only flick in the running I'm all that interested in seeing is “Birdman”, which sounds pretty smart and I'm a Michael Keaton fan----glad to see the guy working.

I largely dislike Award Shows and find them useless---I've noticed that whether we like them or not and whether we watch them or not, we're all compelled to talk about moments from the shows...everybody's got to weigh in on what an asshole Kanye is, and inevitably that weird NAKED LUNCH moment sinks in and we realize, “oh, no----we're TALKING ABOUT KANYE!!!!”

So I didn't watch the Oscars, but probably like everybody else, I emerged with some takeaways from our culturally-shared “Oscar Osmosis”.

ONE OF THE BIG ONES: It's always funny when someone who, objectively, is and always has been a pretty good singer, does something slightly different and everyone's jaw drops because they never realized she could sing. So, what, I guess y'all were just too mesmerized by the meat dress the whole time?

Whether you wanna cross the street for what she's selling or not is one thing, but yeah---the girl's got talent.

The larger issue that got me thinking about is the perceived opposition between talent and outre performance, and like most dichotomies it's a fake dichotomy that doesn't hold water. Outre artists always run the risk of alienating audiences but therein lies a litmus test...we're interested in those that PASS the test.

Back in the heyday of “The Abbey of the Lemur” it was a given that x number of viewers would be offended, shocked, put off, whatever. I was never interested in the people who knee-jerked and failed the test (to quote Jodorowsky; “why would you make a film for that person? They are blind!”), I was interested in the cool people who got it.

 

Another film in the Oscar mix was “American Sniper”, which has inspired a lot of passionate reactions and it's also one I'm not especially interested in seeing. I was kind of spellbound last week as the trial wound to a close and couldn't help but see it as a classic case of the Darwin Awards....I mean, what sane, intelligent person thinks it's a good idea to take a guy with PTSD to a gun range?

“Geez, Chris, what're we gonna do about the crazy guy???”

“I'm not sure, but I think he needs help....let's take him shooting!” And no disrespect meant to the dead, but....DERP!!!!!!

Okay----enough of that.

Two weeks ago (give or take) I learned that Fayetteville's PEG Cable Administrator (or whatever title it is they give to them now), Fritz Gisler, was moving on to greener pastures....I've been meaning to write about it for quite some time but am only now getting the opportunity to sit down and reflect on it.

Fritz was a polarizing figure in the Fayetteville City Government...depending on where you stood he either ushered in a new era of spic-and-span professionalism and upped the technical level of Fayetteville's Access Channels or he was complicit in ruining them. As with most things the truth was probably somewhere in the middle.

It would probably surprise a lot of people (and Fritz might be included in that) to learn that I never disliked the man. I defriended and blocked him on Facebook (something I almost never do) for Security reasons---this was 2010, in the midst of the old CAT Board's meltdown, and he was just too heavily tied into the whole thing....I had family to protect, so the cut was made.

It was a decidedly insane time in many of our lives---friends became enemies, people seemingly went crazy, the worst was brought out in a lot of people and a lot of lives were damaged...most of us moved on. Because of the arrogant, duplicitous nature of politics in general (and city government in particular)(as well as the eternal Rashumon Effect that seems pervasive in Fayetteville) some of us are resigned to the fact that we'll never know the whole story. My belief with Fritz has always been that he came into his position with a mandate....those crazy folks down at Access are always fussing, fighting and complaining....see what you can do to streamline the operation and see if you can shut up all those flaky, handwringing hippie activists down there!!!

And if that's the case, Fritz came in and did the job he was paid to do----don't hate the player---hate the game.

Some change was definitely needed at the PEG Center....whether it got what it needed or whether it just got neutered is a matter of perspective. A lot of the struggle down there was a collision of ideologies----mindsets from a corporate world versus mindsets from the activist community....tech heads versus idealogues. A Tech Head will look at a tape library and say, “is there any way we can just get rid of all these old VHS Tapes?! We could put in a whole array of state-of-the-art doohickeys along this wall!” The Idealogue's response: “Are you insane??? That's a heritage archive of this whole city! This is the story of peoples' lives, their endeavors---people who've died have been on these tapes!!!!! This is history!!!!!” They'll go round and round on these issues and they never will agree.

And so the heritage archive prevails, but it's stashed away in a prop closet where the public can't peruse it----back in the day anyone in the public could come down, comb through the library and request that any tape be aired...now the only programs the public can request are those they've produced themselves.

This is what you're left with when the Tech Heads win.

And so Public and Government Access limp along, although for the most part they just seem to be on life support....most of the time I go down there the place is all but empty. They have a lot of great new equipment that nobody seems to be using; There's a clean professionalism but no sense of community or public outreach; Using the equipment is now free if you can muddle through, what----six to eight weeks worth of classes? There seems to be a dearth of the Great Unwashed down there these days----nobody's showing up with their dog, there are less homeless and/or mentally ill and/or mentally challenged down there----so the atmosphere's nice....mostly just pretty people....when they bother to show. It's no longer “For Everybody”......is it “For Anybody”?

So....y'know.....yeah.

Fritz joined various members of VIPA at the PEG Center last time we had a meeting down there-----he seemed genuinely concerned about the way things were going and he wanted to know what we might think could be done to rekindle public interest in the place.

They could get it back----who knows? The lesson is that you don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The future is unwritten.

Good luck in your travels to come, Chief.

THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST:

THE DREAM SYNDICATE-”The Days of Wine and Roses”

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND-”The Velvet Underground and Nico”

TAME IMPALA-”Lonerism”