Just a note for the faithful that if my entries to this here Wuse De Fuke blog become erratic or nonexistent over the next week or so, it's because my mare and good friend Suzy is about to foal again sometime soon. Her body's showing signs that say labor's increasingly imminent and ain't no tellin' from here on.
Might, usually does, mean several nights of checking on her every couple of hours, so if the commentary here seems like it's becoming slowly more psychotic, it's because I will be, from lack of sleep.
In the meantime, here's a tip you shouldn't forget: Never eat lying down.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Friday, May 11, 2007
Stop The Press!
This just in from the LA Times:
Zen and the art of management
By Jessica Garrison and Ted Rohrlich
A Buddhist priest is teaching L.A. Housing managers techniques such as breathing with sphincter control.
Zen and the art of management
By Jessica Garrison and Ted Rohrlich
A Buddhist priest is teaching L.A. Housing managers techniques such as breathing with sphincter control.
Terrorists In The Woodpile
Ahoy again, fellow planet denizens and those in orbit, alike. See, the thing is with these container laws they have here in Varmint these days, where there can't be an open container in the rig even if the driver is stone-cold sober, can't even be one in the trunk, really, you got to get home quick -- see, this to me is what I'd call DWI terrorism and it's a sign of how deeply the yuppies have estabished themselves in Varmint since the dark daze of the '80s when they started showing up here in strength. Thousands moved into Burlington alone and yet the population remained the same from the census of '80 til the census of '90. How's that possible if thousands moved in? Means thousands more were forced to move out. It's been putting a hurt on the never all that plentiful urban woodchuck population, rendering it endangered, at least.
They bark and bark and wring their hands over an old hipster just wants a beer on the way home from a dry and dusty day's work. And yet, if you dare to enter the health food stores and what used to be food coops, they got red wine stacked by the case, floor to ceiling. I said floor to ceiling, hoss. Now you know it ain't old hipsters or native woodchucks behaving as they traditionally have that's drinking up all of that wine, mister. Most can't even afford to look at these places, never mind find a suitable alkieholic beverage in one. See, it just ain't done. Which seems from where I stand to signal that they trust their own apparently limitless ability to drink red wine by the case without committing mayhem and mass murder but not your or my ability to drink a pint or two of ale, see. That's how it works.
So, you get this situation where the law here in what used to be Varmint forbids any kind of open bottle in the rig and also a breath test reading of only .08 that crossed means losing the license and who all knows what all more by the time the judge gets through with your ass. For a guy my size, what that translates to is if I meet two buddies down at the tavern, if we each buy a round, we're all illegal. Now, please. That shit ought to be against the law, itself. Hell, I've driven many times across this here continent with that much alcohol on board and never ran a nuke-waste-carrying truck off the highway or anything. Just minding my own business. I've done it even more times stone-cold sober because I couldn't have afforded a drink come hell or high water. Personally, I prefer the former.
One time headed west on that I-80, I hit a terrible ice storm outside Des Moines. If you drove more than eight or ten mph, you were headed for 360 land. Just creeping along. Cars off the highway on all sides. Then a truck pulling a flatbed trailer that in fact was hauling nuke waste passed me on the left. That did it. I pulled over at the next exit and slid and spun til I found the likeliest looking motel for the likes of you or me, that had a bar right next door, too. So, I stopped the rig for the night, took a shower, and headed for the bar with my guitar. I asked the bartender would he mind if I played a few for drinks. He didn't. Turned out he meant a literal few, though, and I required in those days about two fingers' worth and a beer per song. The bartender finally decided the ration of alcohol to songs was too high for comfort and put the kibosh on the whole deal. But wait! There was a guy at the bar sitting next to me, retired farmer, who got with Crispo's routine right away. Another Crispophile converted. He asked do you want to see some of Des Moines because I know other bars what would get with it and how if we was to show up on such a night. So I said, sure, let's do it. We took his wheels with him driving and proceeded to hit several other Des Moines bars that night and some parking meters, too. There. You see? The universe was once more in balance. Which it has to be of course or we're all goners. That's something the yuppie terrorists haven't realized yet.
Chuck The Mutt says if you want to keep yourself balanced, see, what you have to do is keep your keys in one pocket and your change in the other. If you have folding money, so much the better. It's lighter (always) and so doesn't disturb the balance. At least not in any amount's going to matter to the like of you or me.
You'll also note, ice storm or no ice storm, another Crispophile was made that night. That's one of the sure-fire ways of bolstering your fanbase, riding with a retired farmer through late night Des Moines in an ice storm, careening off guard rails from one gin mill to the next and ain't noone the worse for it. Keep that bottle coming, good boy; lord, I'm gettin' some dry inside.
Which is what gets me to the main point, see: In Varmint today you can't rock and roll in the bars for a living (however modest) no more. Ain't enough of them roadhouses left -- most of the ones we used to play in the long-ago '70s and even '80s aren't even there anymore. All closed up but a handful. Even the buildings are gone, now, in a lot of cases. But where there's only a handful of roadhouses in any one given time zone, that means, no way around it, that there's only a handful of gigs in any given time period, and of course, if you play those in too high a frequency per period of time, you wear out your welcome. Just the way it is. It's a law of the universe applies to you and me as much as it does to Nancy Sinatra. How many times a year you see her playing Vegas? Ok, then, point made.
Incidentally, back in the 90s, she posed for Playboy and I bought it, just to look at the pictures, and if you think her boots weren't made for walking well on into her 50s, well, then, partner, I don't have much else left to say.
And now, as Elwood has correctly observed on this here blog, they're going after Paris Hilton and handing her 90 days -- that's sixty more'n they gave that Whisky Willie -- for having a little fun. Now that just ain't right, and it is in fact a judicial overreach as Elwood put it. They always seem to be giving her some kind of shit, as they do us all, rich or poor, alike, apparently. It ain't like she's down at the tavern teasing fuzz-faced kids for beers, let's face it. If she were, we'd have a place to play for certain. Ain't a cowboy in Texas wouldn't ride a bull for .... Well, let's not get into all that.
But she's no Nancy Sinatra well on into her 50s, either, so maybe I could be off a few points, here, but not many, mister.
Dave Reisch told me last year that Lonesome Wayne is the last untamed American and he has a point, though there are a few more left. I ain't tamed, yet, for example, though they damned sure have me corralled here in Varmint, and that's a fact.
Here's the moral: If you make it illegal for people to have fun, there won't be enough places left for an honest picker to plunk. It is in fact just that simple.
Gone forever in Varmint are nights like the one where I closed up my band Hundred Proof back in the days, pre-End Of The Trail, last time Jeffrey was resident in this general zip code. So must've been '78. We called a farewell performance at a local watering hole what's still here but can't afford to pay musicians anymore because not enough people drink enough alcohol when they go out to make it worth the tavern owner's while. At that farewill performance, I'd invited all of my musician friends to come play with us. I talked the owner into cash for the band, of course, but also stipulated that anyone playing music that night was drinking for free. He squinted at me and asked, How many are you talking about? I told him there wasn't any way of knowing, really, but it would be a big band or close, and, hey, if you don't wanna have the farewell gig, here, someone else will there. A lot of people are going to be coming out, mister, and the next guy won't mind having his cash drawer full if'n you don't want to. He saw the sense in that, as people used to be able to, and we shook on it. My brother, the Other Sisco, had a fairly hefty tab going there, another historical phenomenon, now. He told the tavern owner he'd bet is tab the owner'd have the best tape he'd ever seen when he cashed out that night. So they shook on it.
Turned out there were thirteen people in the band that night, just shy of a big band what's traditionally 17, so let's call it a not quite big band. It was a goddam guitar orchestra's what it was, really.
Comes around 11:30 and two state cops walk in. The place was packed to the gills. Cars overflowing out of the parking lot and onto the shoulder of the highway in both directions. People were lit up and having a hell of a good time. Booze was flowing freely, people were smoking the hoot at will, some were even laying out white lines on the table tops.
Cops didn't once look to either side. They walked directly to the stage and one told me, Hey, a neighbor's complained because she said the music's too loud. Would you turn it down a little, please. I told him, sure, anyone can understand that. We all needs our beans and we needs our daily rest. So the cops says thanks and the both of them walk back out of the bar, again without looking to either side.
When the tavern owner ran his tape and cashed out for the night, my brother asked if he could see the tape. The owner refused but he did take John's tab and tear it up into tiny pieces tossed over his shoulder like confetti. Nuff said. Actions speak louder than words.
See, it was still a free country, then. Having fun hadn't been criminalized yet, nor my profession, either. It was our job to provide working people with a damned good time come their hard-earned weekend.
What's a crime is that if we did that today, celebration or not, the cops would have arrived with a SWAT team in full combat gear, marching like men who go "hut!" and chanting "War on drugs! War on drugs!" while beating cadence against their palms with steel-tipped riot clubs, like in *Vineland.*
And that shit just ain't right.
They bark and bark and wring their hands over an old hipster just wants a beer on the way home from a dry and dusty day's work. And yet, if you dare to enter the health food stores and what used to be food coops, they got red wine stacked by the case, floor to ceiling. I said floor to ceiling, hoss. Now you know it ain't old hipsters or native woodchucks behaving as they traditionally have that's drinking up all of that wine, mister. Most can't even afford to look at these places, never mind find a suitable alkieholic beverage in one. See, it just ain't done. Which seems from where I stand to signal that they trust their own apparently limitless ability to drink red wine by the case without committing mayhem and mass murder but not your or my ability to drink a pint or two of ale, see. That's how it works.
So, you get this situation where the law here in what used to be Varmint forbids any kind of open bottle in the rig and also a breath test reading of only .08 that crossed means losing the license and who all knows what all more by the time the judge gets through with your ass. For a guy my size, what that translates to is if I meet two buddies down at the tavern, if we each buy a round, we're all illegal. Now, please. That shit ought to be against the law, itself. Hell, I've driven many times across this here continent with that much alcohol on board and never ran a nuke-waste-carrying truck off the highway or anything. Just minding my own business. I've done it even more times stone-cold sober because I couldn't have afforded a drink come hell or high water. Personally, I prefer the former.
One time headed west on that I-80, I hit a terrible ice storm outside Des Moines. If you drove more than eight or ten mph, you were headed for 360 land. Just creeping along. Cars off the highway on all sides. Then a truck pulling a flatbed trailer that in fact was hauling nuke waste passed me on the left. That did it. I pulled over at the next exit and slid and spun til I found the likeliest looking motel for the likes of you or me, that had a bar right next door, too. So, I stopped the rig for the night, took a shower, and headed for the bar with my guitar. I asked the bartender would he mind if I played a few for drinks. He didn't. Turned out he meant a literal few, though, and I required in those days about two fingers' worth and a beer per song. The bartender finally decided the ration of alcohol to songs was too high for comfort and put the kibosh on the whole deal. But wait! There was a guy at the bar sitting next to me, retired farmer, who got with Crispo's routine right away. Another Crispophile converted. He asked do you want to see some of Des Moines because I know other bars what would get with it and how if we was to show up on such a night. So I said, sure, let's do it. We took his wheels with him driving and proceeded to hit several other Des Moines bars that night and some parking meters, too. There. You see? The universe was once more in balance. Which it has to be of course or we're all goners. That's something the yuppie terrorists haven't realized yet.
Chuck The Mutt says if you want to keep yourself balanced, see, what you have to do is keep your keys in one pocket and your change in the other. If you have folding money, so much the better. It's lighter (always) and so doesn't disturb the balance. At least not in any amount's going to matter to the like of you or me.
You'll also note, ice storm or no ice storm, another Crispophile was made that night. That's one of the sure-fire ways of bolstering your fanbase, riding with a retired farmer through late night Des Moines in an ice storm, careening off guard rails from one gin mill to the next and ain't noone the worse for it. Keep that bottle coming, good boy; lord, I'm gettin' some dry inside.
Which is what gets me to the main point, see: In Varmint today you can't rock and roll in the bars for a living (however modest) no more. Ain't enough of them roadhouses left -- most of the ones we used to play in the long-ago '70s and even '80s aren't even there anymore. All closed up but a handful. Even the buildings are gone, now, in a lot of cases. But where there's only a handful of roadhouses in any one given time zone, that means, no way around it, that there's only a handful of gigs in any given time period, and of course, if you play those in too high a frequency per period of time, you wear out your welcome. Just the way it is. It's a law of the universe applies to you and me as much as it does to Nancy Sinatra. How many times a year you see her playing Vegas? Ok, then, point made.
Incidentally, back in the 90s, she posed for Playboy and I bought it, just to look at the pictures, and if you think her boots weren't made for walking well on into her 50s, well, then, partner, I don't have much else left to say.
And now, as Elwood has correctly observed on this here blog, they're going after Paris Hilton and handing her 90 days -- that's sixty more'n they gave that Whisky Willie -- for having a little fun. Now that just ain't right, and it is in fact a judicial overreach as Elwood put it. They always seem to be giving her some kind of shit, as they do us all, rich or poor, alike, apparently. It ain't like she's down at the tavern teasing fuzz-faced kids for beers, let's face it. If she were, we'd have a place to play for certain. Ain't a cowboy in Texas wouldn't ride a bull for .... Well, let's not get into all that.
But she's no Nancy Sinatra well on into her 50s, either, so maybe I could be off a few points, here, but not many, mister.
Dave Reisch told me last year that Lonesome Wayne is the last untamed American and he has a point, though there are a few more left. I ain't tamed, yet, for example, though they damned sure have me corralled here in Varmint, and that's a fact.
Here's the moral: If you make it illegal for people to have fun, there won't be enough places left for an honest picker to plunk. It is in fact just that simple.
Gone forever in Varmint are nights like the one where I closed up my band Hundred Proof back in the days, pre-End Of The Trail, last time Jeffrey was resident in this general zip code. So must've been '78. We called a farewell performance at a local watering hole what's still here but can't afford to pay musicians anymore because not enough people drink enough alcohol when they go out to make it worth the tavern owner's while. At that farewill performance, I'd invited all of my musician friends to come play with us. I talked the owner into cash for the band, of course, but also stipulated that anyone playing music that night was drinking for free. He squinted at me and asked, How many are you talking about? I told him there wasn't any way of knowing, really, but it would be a big band or close, and, hey, if you don't wanna have the farewell gig, here, someone else will there. A lot of people are going to be coming out, mister, and the next guy won't mind having his cash drawer full if'n you don't want to. He saw the sense in that, as people used to be able to, and we shook on it. My brother, the Other Sisco, had a fairly hefty tab going there, another historical phenomenon, now. He told the tavern owner he'd bet is tab the owner'd have the best tape he'd ever seen when he cashed out that night. So they shook on it.
Turned out there were thirteen people in the band that night, just shy of a big band what's traditionally 17, so let's call it a not quite big band. It was a goddam guitar orchestra's what it was, really.
Comes around 11:30 and two state cops walk in. The place was packed to the gills. Cars overflowing out of the parking lot and onto the shoulder of the highway in both directions. People were lit up and having a hell of a good time. Booze was flowing freely, people were smoking the hoot at will, some were even laying out white lines on the table tops.
Cops didn't once look to either side. They walked directly to the stage and one told me, Hey, a neighbor's complained because she said the music's too loud. Would you turn it down a little, please. I told him, sure, anyone can understand that. We all needs our beans and we needs our daily rest. So the cops says thanks and the both of them walk back out of the bar, again without looking to either side.
When the tavern owner ran his tape and cashed out for the night, my brother asked if he could see the tape. The owner refused but he did take John's tab and tear it up into tiny pieces tossed over his shoulder like confetti. Nuff said. Actions speak louder than words.
See, it was still a free country, then. Having fun hadn't been criminalized yet, nor my profession, either. It was our job to provide working people with a damned good time come their hard-earned weekend.
What's a crime is that if we did that today, celebration or not, the cops would have arrived with a SWAT team in full combat gear, marching like men who go "hut!" and chanting "War on drugs! War on drugs!" while beating cadence against their palms with steel-tipped riot clubs, like in *Vineland.*
And that shit just ain't right.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Uplands Breakdown
This just in from pal Joe Carducci, giving us the rundown on this year's Uplands Breakdown. You don't wanna miss it:
we just had a foot of snow but we expect to have about a monthlong hole in the wyoming winter come august, what with global warming and all. the state's rolling in money and union pacific is rolling out coal trains in all directions. unfortunately its cleaner than appalachian coal, both for the warming effect and musical ambiance, but it'll have to do. we're doing a two day wyo-colo breakdown weekend this year:
Souled American, who have been recordingsince the 80s and their classic run of Rough Tradereleases (Fe/Flubber/Around the Horn/Sonny; reissued bytumult). they followed those with two albums on catamount and have been working on a new album in their home studio near charleston, illinois.
Ralph White spent the nineties with the austin, tx. legends,the bad livers, and has been playing his solo blend of traditional and original blues and contemporary african influences thru his claw hammered banjo since then.
also from austin, Spot will set down at the end of his annual summer tour promoting another new album,"spot/albert", with albert alfonso.
and The Places have been cooling out in Austin as welllately. their most recent album, "Songs for Creeps", got great notices since Amy's appearance lastyear; when one plays centennial, wyoming, the ny and la media take notice.
your breakdownpresence will be understood to constitute prior consent and synchronization license approval across all media extant and anythat may be invented heretofore thereafter by some electro-geek what hates music, for anydocu/narrative/psycho-cloud-cuckoo-land movie thing michael hurley may be taping. fugitives travelling under false identities are forwarned.
michael has a new album coming this summer on the gnomonsong label called "ancestral swamp". they say hurley artwork on its way, plus the tunes.
The Stop & Listen Boys commenced studio work at the world-famous Blasting Room after last year's Breakdown and continued in various living rooms around Wyoming and New York - the so-called "stumblebum sessions". No release date has yet revealed itself.
Michael Hurwitz debuted his second album, "Blue Coyote" (third if you count the charming Alta School Cowboy Choir "Wyoming Mountain Home" album) at last year's breakdown, "Get Your Business Straight", stands up to the classic blues and rural tunes he gives his prairie blues treatment.
the particulars:
sat/aug/25 3-9pm beartree tavern, centennial, wyoming
SOULED AMERICAN
MICHAEL HURLEY
MICHAEL HURWITZ
RALPH WHITE
STOP & LISTEN BOYS
sun/aug/26 3-9pm swing station, la porte, colorado
SOULED AMERICAN
MICHAEL HURLEY
STOP & LISTEN BOYS
SPOT
THE PLACES [The Places CD, "Songs For Creeps," made my year-end favorites list for 2006; check it out. -- Sisco]
both shows will be outdoors, weather permitting. kids admitted to both shows unless in centennial weather forces us into the bar, then 21+ there. there is 100 miles of winding two lane roads, mostly paved between centennial and la porte. the scenery is fine but keep your eyes on the road, watching for the larger critters like elk, pronghorn, deer, and hotrodding students.
SOULED AMERICAN:http://www.myspace.com/souledamericanfanpage
http://www.scaruffi.com/vol5/souledam.html
MICHAEL HURLEY: http://www.snockonews.net
http://www.gnomonsong.com/michaelhurley
MICHAEL HURWITZ: http://www.mikehurwitz.com
THE PLACES: www.highplainssigh.com
RALPH WHITE: www.ralphewhite.comtarget
SPOT: http://www.spotbooking.com
STOP & LISTEN BOYS: http://www.boulderweekly.com/archive/082301/buzzlead.html
here's the view today in centennial: http://www.themountainviewhotel.com/webCam.html
we just had a foot of snow but we expect to have about a monthlong hole in the wyoming winter come august, what with global warming and all. the state's rolling in money and union pacific is rolling out coal trains in all directions. unfortunately its cleaner than appalachian coal, both for the warming effect and musical ambiance, but it'll have to do. we're doing a two day wyo-colo breakdown weekend this year:
Souled American, who have been recordingsince the 80s and their classic run of Rough Tradereleases (Fe/Flubber/Around the Horn/Sonny; reissued bytumult). they followed those with two albums on catamount and have been working on a new album in their home studio near charleston, illinois.
Ralph White spent the nineties with the austin, tx. legends,the bad livers, and has been playing his solo blend of traditional and original blues and contemporary african influences thru his claw hammered banjo since then.
also from austin, Spot will set down at the end of his annual summer tour promoting another new album,"spot/albert", with albert alfonso.
and The Places have been cooling out in Austin as welllately. their most recent album, "Songs for Creeps", got great notices since Amy's appearance lastyear; when one plays centennial, wyoming, the ny and la media take notice.
your breakdownpresence will be understood to constitute prior consent and synchronization license approval across all media extant and anythat may be invented heretofore thereafter by some electro-geek what hates music, for anydocu/narrative/psycho-cloud-cuckoo-land movie thing michael hurley may be taping. fugitives travelling under false identities are forwarned.
michael has a new album coming this summer on the gnomonsong label called "ancestral swamp". they say hurley artwork on its way, plus the tunes.
The Stop & Listen Boys commenced studio work at the world-famous Blasting Room after last year's Breakdown and continued in various living rooms around Wyoming and New York - the so-called "stumblebum sessions". No release date has yet revealed itself.
Michael Hurwitz debuted his second album, "Blue Coyote" (third if you count the charming Alta School Cowboy Choir "Wyoming Mountain Home" album) at last year's breakdown, "Get Your Business Straight", stands up to the classic blues and rural tunes he gives his prairie blues treatment.
the particulars:
sat/aug/25 3-9pm beartree tavern, centennial, wyoming
SOULED AMERICAN
MICHAEL HURLEY
MICHAEL HURWITZ
RALPH WHITE
STOP & LISTEN BOYS
sun/aug/26 3-9pm swing station, la porte, colorado
SOULED AMERICAN
MICHAEL HURLEY
STOP & LISTEN BOYS
SPOT
THE PLACES [The Places CD, "Songs For Creeps," made my year-end favorites list for 2006; check it out. -- Sisco]
both shows will be outdoors, weather permitting. kids admitted to both shows unless in centennial weather forces us into the bar, then 21+ there. there is 100 miles of winding two lane roads, mostly paved between centennial and la porte. the scenery is fine but keep your eyes on the road, watching for the larger critters like elk, pronghorn, deer, and hotrodding students.
SOULED AMERICAN:http://www.myspace.com/souledamericanfanpage
http://www.scaruffi.com/vol5/souledam.html
MICHAEL HURLEY: http://www.snockonews.net
http://www.gnomonsong.com/michaelhurley
MICHAEL HURWITZ: http://www.mikehurwitz.com
THE PLACES: www.highplainssigh.com
RALPH WHITE: www.ralphewhite.comtarget
SPOT: http://www.spotbooking.com
STOP & LISTEN BOYS: http://www.boulderweekly.com/archive/082301/buzzlead.html
here's the view today in centennial: http://www.themountainviewhotel.com/webCam.html
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
The Mighty WJSC FM
My pal Roots, Varmint's best dj, has a great American roots music show you can hear on the web on Wednesday afternoons, 4:30 til 6:00 pm, East Coast time. You don't want to miss it.
You can tune in here:
http://www.jsc.edu/StudentLife/WJSCFM/PodcastsAndStreaming.aspx
You can tune in here:
http://www.jsc.edu/StudentLife/WJSCFM/PodcastsAndStreaming.aspx
You're Tuned In Now
Well, howdy. You tuned in again to WCRISPO, pilgrims.
Last night's listening pleasures were
Ned Rothenberg / Tony Buck / Stomu Takeishi + Tronzo -- The Fell Clutch, from 2006
Ornette Coleman -- Sound Grammar, also from last year.
Both are very good. Jon Abbey won't agree but he doesn't like jazz so a good jazz record ain't a good record, to him. So it goes.
So, many years ago, 12 or 13, maybe more, I bought the world's most indescructible boom box. Ten bucks at a lawn sale in Burlappingtongrad, Varmint. One of them cheap models with detachable speakers and the crappy set up for dubbing tapes in ultimate lo-fi. I didn't have a tape player in my rig so I figured what the hell, the boom can ride on the passenger seat. Turn it up. There's a stereo in the rig for you, mister. Ten bucks. A gift, right there, mister. Fucking thing hasn't been cared for at all, all these years. It's lived in my car trunk for years at a time, all dirt and dust covered. Kept right on workin' like that indestructible light bulb in *Gravity's Rainbow,* being hunted down by Those Who control the grid. Shit ain't allowed. For years, now, too, it's been collecting dust in the barn and kept right on working, just like used when I bought it. Ten bucks. One lousy gig's pay. So this week it finally stopped playing tapes on the "record" side. The "play" side crapped out a couple of years ago. Damned if that wasn't the most reliable boom box ever made.
So damned if it ain't a good thing I broke down and got me one of them there mp3 players. The boom's radio still works so it's still pumping out the good sounds. That digital player has 65 hours of music on it. Set on shuffle play while I'm working, there's just no telling what's coming up next. It's like having the best-ever radio station that plays nothing but music you really like, if in impossible sequences. So yesterday I had everything from James Brown's "Ain't That A Groove" to the Dave Holland Quintet to early Bill Monroe from the late 40s (my favorites) to Stax hit singles to Cooper-Moore with Hamid Drake and Assif Tsahar to Hank Williams to Sacred Steel music coming on. The hits just keep comin', cousins. I have a friend has one with a monster capacity. He says he has 18 24-hour days' worth of music on it. I was thinking, hell, with 65 hours on there I could drive from my spread here in Varmint the hell across the continent to Portland so I could go to Church, and I'd not hear a repeat track the whole damn way.
That's progress, mister. Take it to the bank. I've driven across this country wide with nought but a standard AM radio in the old '63. Made for some long days, buckaroos, behind the wheel with nothing to listen to and no reason to even turn it on until late at night when you could get the good AM bounce and tune in highpower stations out of Mexico or, another favorite pastime, the lunatic late night, call-in talk shows they had in them days. Maybe still do. I don't know. You could tune them in and listen to insomniacs from all over the country babbling sleepless gibberish, for hours. One night, I was driving east across the great salt flats of Utah on that I-80 and people were raving the whole way about them damn Vietnamese boat people the gubmint was allowing into the country after we'd just had a hellish war against 'em and so forth even more ignorant than that. Finally one dimwit announced that his family had been in this here great country for 85 years and he'd be damned if he'd welcome anymore goddammed forrinners in, especially them Vietnamese, and so on and so forth. Talkin' like 3:00 a.m. and there ain't nobody in Utah 'cept my old rig and me. The talk show guy finally interrupted and said he was an Indian and his family had been in this country for 10,000 years and he had no problem with it. I wanted to pull over and call the guy myself, just to say howdy there, pilgrim, I'm with you. I like that fish sauce and ain't any gringo over gonna make it. Bring 'em on. But there ain't anywhere to pull over on the great salt flats and I didn't have a spare dime for the phone booth anyway.
In them days when I was a rubber tramp between summertime Varmint and that part of Nevada around Dayton and Silver City where we liked to hq because of its general lawlessness and 24/7 saloons, and a whole bunch of good people and card-carryin' ZZC's to like it along with us, and runs up through northern CA and up to Portland and Washington, I had as my whole music collection in the world, a shoebox full of cassette tapes, mostly compilations made by friends or myself. I had two great ones Elwood (Michael Hurley) made for me that I still have today, also burned on to CDrs to guard against the inevitable: Every time you play a tape, you see, could be its last. We all know this even if we won't admit it to ourselves. Some of them tapes I listened to hundreds of times and never got tired of them. I still listen to them today, when I have thousands of other choices of stuff to listen to.
Just goes to show, you see. Everything depends on where you're standing and which direction you're looking. Five great compilation tapes from a buddy with impeccable taste, like Elwood, or my buddy Roots, o-or the ones I made for myself years ago in them days of '80 from Lightbourne's record collection (the best I've ever encountered apart from Elwood's own), mining the old-timey and delta blues hits, mostly -- see, they can be as good as any hundred records you're likely to encounter.
Let us then give thanks for friends and for that audio tape.
And let's all drink -- don't you never scold -- to the occasional rogue player that won't quit for so long because the corporation that made it and forgot to build in its obsolescence -- I'm so sure it was "forgotten" -- I like to believe there was an old head like me who let one go by now and then as sabotage, the indestructibles, on purpose so other old heads like himself could find themselves with a piece of quality merchandise, yessir.
Once in summer/fall '79 me and Elwood and Dave Reisch, Boozin' Susan, and their then infant daughter Emma, were all encamped at John Cassel's estate in Lost Nation Valley, in Varmint. Had the whole valley to ourselves. No rent. Luxury life could be had cheap in them days. That was when The Sensitivos were born. Elwood stuck his head in the door of the old barn where I was encamped -- there was a cold-water apartment that various hipsters through the years had created in one part of it -- and an outhouse with real stained windows from a church -- and asked did I know a good drummer he could find for a couple of gigs coming up. I said, Well, hell, Elwood, I can play drums with you. That was how it started. We didn't know yet that thousands of miles was still to come for Sensitizing.
But that spring had been a wet one for sure. Great huge ferns had sprung up at the forest edges on either side of the dirt roads we traveled on like ghosts no one wanted to see. We got to having a pastime we called aimless driving that year. I wrote a song of that title I have to revive. Just driving the dirt roads. No music on or anything. Just driving. Maybe a beer between the legs. Well, more than maybe. More like certainly.
One day we were aimless driving with the windows down and we could hear all the brooks and freshet streams as we drove by. I was thinking about them Jurassic ferns and how Portland its own self couldn't have been too much wetter than that spring had been. No one was talking, even.
Then Elwood looks over at me and says "The fuckin' water's running out of this place, Crispo."
Last night's listening pleasures were
Ned Rothenberg / Tony Buck / Stomu Takeishi + Tronzo -- The Fell Clutch, from 2006
Ornette Coleman -- Sound Grammar, also from last year.
Both are very good. Jon Abbey won't agree but he doesn't like jazz so a good jazz record ain't a good record, to him. So it goes.
So, many years ago, 12 or 13, maybe more, I bought the world's most indescructible boom box. Ten bucks at a lawn sale in Burlappingtongrad, Varmint. One of them cheap models with detachable speakers and the crappy set up for dubbing tapes in ultimate lo-fi. I didn't have a tape player in my rig so I figured what the hell, the boom can ride on the passenger seat. Turn it up. There's a stereo in the rig for you, mister. Ten bucks. A gift, right there, mister. Fucking thing hasn't been cared for at all, all these years. It's lived in my car trunk for years at a time, all dirt and dust covered. Kept right on workin' like that indestructible light bulb in *Gravity's Rainbow,* being hunted down by Those Who control the grid. Shit ain't allowed. For years, now, too, it's been collecting dust in the barn and kept right on working, just like used when I bought it. Ten bucks. One lousy gig's pay. So this week it finally stopped playing tapes on the "record" side. The "play" side crapped out a couple of years ago. Damned if that wasn't the most reliable boom box ever made.
So damned if it ain't a good thing I broke down and got me one of them there mp3 players. The boom's radio still works so it's still pumping out the good sounds. That digital player has 65 hours of music on it. Set on shuffle play while I'm working, there's just no telling what's coming up next. It's like having the best-ever radio station that plays nothing but music you really like, if in impossible sequences. So yesterday I had everything from James Brown's "Ain't That A Groove" to the Dave Holland Quintet to early Bill Monroe from the late 40s (my favorites) to Stax hit singles to Cooper-Moore with Hamid Drake and Assif Tsahar to Hank Williams to Sacred Steel music coming on. The hits just keep comin', cousins. I have a friend has one with a monster capacity. He says he has 18 24-hour days' worth of music on it. I was thinking, hell, with 65 hours on there I could drive from my spread here in Varmint the hell across the continent to Portland so I could go to Church, and I'd not hear a repeat track the whole damn way.
That's progress, mister. Take it to the bank. I've driven across this country wide with nought but a standard AM radio in the old '63. Made for some long days, buckaroos, behind the wheel with nothing to listen to and no reason to even turn it on until late at night when you could get the good AM bounce and tune in highpower stations out of Mexico or, another favorite pastime, the lunatic late night, call-in talk shows they had in them days. Maybe still do. I don't know. You could tune them in and listen to insomniacs from all over the country babbling sleepless gibberish, for hours. One night, I was driving east across the great salt flats of Utah on that I-80 and people were raving the whole way about them damn Vietnamese boat people the gubmint was allowing into the country after we'd just had a hellish war against 'em and so forth even more ignorant than that. Finally one dimwit announced that his family had been in this here great country for 85 years and he'd be damned if he'd welcome anymore goddammed forrinners in, especially them Vietnamese, and so on and so forth. Talkin' like 3:00 a.m. and there ain't nobody in Utah 'cept my old rig and me. The talk show guy finally interrupted and said he was an Indian and his family had been in this country for 10,000 years and he had no problem with it. I wanted to pull over and call the guy myself, just to say howdy there, pilgrim, I'm with you. I like that fish sauce and ain't any gringo over gonna make it. Bring 'em on. But there ain't anywhere to pull over on the great salt flats and I didn't have a spare dime for the phone booth anyway.
In them days when I was a rubber tramp between summertime Varmint and that part of Nevada around Dayton and Silver City where we liked to hq because of its general lawlessness and 24/7 saloons, and a whole bunch of good people and card-carryin' ZZC's to like it along with us, and runs up through northern CA and up to Portland and Washington, I had as my whole music collection in the world, a shoebox full of cassette tapes, mostly compilations made by friends or myself. I had two great ones Elwood (Michael Hurley) made for me that I still have today, also burned on to CDrs to guard against the inevitable: Every time you play a tape, you see, could be its last. We all know this even if we won't admit it to ourselves. Some of them tapes I listened to hundreds of times and never got tired of them. I still listen to them today, when I have thousands of other choices of stuff to listen to.
Just goes to show, you see. Everything depends on where you're standing and which direction you're looking. Five great compilation tapes from a buddy with impeccable taste, like Elwood, or my buddy Roots, o-or the ones I made for myself years ago in them days of '80 from Lightbourne's record collection (the best I've ever encountered apart from Elwood's own), mining the old-timey and delta blues hits, mostly -- see, they can be as good as any hundred records you're likely to encounter.
Let us then give thanks for friends and for that audio tape.
And let's all drink -- don't you never scold -- to the occasional rogue player that won't quit for so long because the corporation that made it and forgot to build in its obsolescence -- I'm so sure it was "forgotten" -- I like to believe there was an old head like me who let one go by now and then as sabotage, the indestructibles, on purpose so other old heads like himself could find themselves with a piece of quality merchandise, yessir.
Once in summer/fall '79 me and Elwood and Dave Reisch, Boozin' Susan, and their then infant daughter Emma, were all encamped at John Cassel's estate in Lost Nation Valley, in Varmint. Had the whole valley to ourselves. No rent. Luxury life could be had cheap in them days. That was when The Sensitivos were born. Elwood stuck his head in the door of the old barn where I was encamped -- there was a cold-water apartment that various hipsters through the years had created in one part of it -- and an outhouse with real stained windows from a church -- and asked did I know a good drummer he could find for a couple of gigs coming up. I said, Well, hell, Elwood, I can play drums with you. That was how it started. We didn't know yet that thousands of miles was still to come for Sensitizing.
But that spring had been a wet one for sure. Great huge ferns had sprung up at the forest edges on either side of the dirt roads we traveled on like ghosts no one wanted to see. We got to having a pastime we called aimless driving that year. I wrote a song of that title I have to revive. Just driving the dirt roads. No music on or anything. Just driving. Maybe a beer between the legs. Well, more than maybe. More like certainly.
One day we were aimless driving with the windows down and we could hear all the brooks and freshet streams as we drove by. I was thinking about them Jurassic ferns and how Portland its own self couldn't have been too much wetter than that spring had been. No one was talking, even.
Then Elwood looks over at me and says "The fuckin' water's running out of this place, Crispo."
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Keep On The Flip Side of Life
Ahoy, fellow travelers! Here we are again, buckaroos, with the morning chores all done with time for another raving session.
Last night I had a bebop freakout, spinning:
Miles Davis -- At The Royal Roost 1948-At Birdland 1950, 1951, 1953 (Charly)
Fats Navarro -- The Fabulous Fats Navarro, Vol 2
Dizzy Gillespie -- Professor Bop (Charly)
Charlie Parker -- In A Soulful Mood (Music Collection International)
and to break up the horn thing
Herbie Nichols -- The Art Of Herbie Nichols (Blue Note)
in the changer, set on shuffle play. Bopped til I dropped with some hootie to get out of workin' day mode, yessir. Believe it.
Before signing off for the night because I need my beans and I need my daily rest, I put on this here:
Seven Guitars, which is Disc 7 of my man Jon Abbey's great Erstwhile label's Amplify02: Balance box set, featuring Keith Rowe, Tetuzi Akiyama, Oren Ambarchi, Toshimaru Nakamura, Otomo Yoshihide, Burkhard Stangl, and Taku Sugimoto performing a 38+ minute version of Cornelius Cardew's "Treatise," followed by a half hour free improvisation. Great stuff. For those who might not know, Erstwhile is the flagship label for a kind of electro-acoustic improvisational music, that gets called eai mostly for lack of a better thing to call it. Freely improvised music featuring computers and other electronic gadgets and acoustic instruments played in far from traditional ways. It's an extreme minority taste in free music that I stumbled on by accident via a jazz friend who doesn't like jazz much anymore who led me to Abbey who, the irony isn't lost, I encountered on a jazz bulletin board I've been frequenting for years, Jazz Corner, which has been getting kind of stale lately hence this here blog. I say irony because Jon is also a regular there at Jazz Corner, though he insists that jazz is a creatively dead musical form, as does my other buddy Brian, pretty much, who frequents the same place nevertheless and also keeps a blog called Just Outside. I don't agree with them about jazz but we like a lot of other things besides jazz so who cares. Me? Nope.
Anyways, it was a boppin' night around these here parts, swinging into the late hours and then chillin' to sounds that don't swing at all on purpose, hey. No disasters. Chow was still hot and we was still not taking any incoming. Plenty of hoot. What else can a man ask for? If he's me, not much.
I dig that Tetuzi Akiyama cat's recordings. He plays free improvised acoustic guitar (mostly) but you can tell that he's heard a lot of that there delta blues that I loved since a teenager first opening up the ears to sounds beyond what now gets called garage rock like we played in my high school band but didn't know it was garage rock. We called it rock and roll. You can call it what you want; I call it messin' with the kid.
And of course Keith Rowe is a largely unacknowledged king of what used to be an electric guitar with various other gadgets tossed in to the mix including the random short wave radio broadcast. One thing that made me dig him to start, actually, because I used to listen to that short wave and marine band radio late at night as a kid, with the old tiny earphone stuck in me ears so the 'rents wouldn't know I was awake late, and up to no good, which has always been my primary ambition -- met in most ways, most people would have to say. And on them Loran C mid-watches when the chiefs and officers was long snoozin', I used to set one of our redundant radio receivers to no station so I could listen to the atmospherics. It was a lot like that guy in Thomas Pynchon's *V.* who had the crazed atmospherics mission in the Transvaal during yet another vicious war of conquest featuring white people in what had been someone else's neighborhood for many thousands of years.
But they's all masters in their own right, them cats in Seven Guitars. Check 'em out if it sounds like you'd dig it and don't if it don't, see. That's the way it works.
Not to change the subject but ...
I was remembering this morning about one time while stationed at the USCG Loran Station on Iwo Jima years ago, in '76, I had the interesting experience of learning to live with -- and watch out for -- scorpions and centipedes the size of a small, young garter snake, and they bit, too. And literally countless little gekko lizards, who remained an utter mystery. Sometimes we'd have to break out an enormous, replacement vacuum tube for our Loran C transmitter (3.5 megawatts, both air and water cooled, it was like a radio, in fact it was a radio, that you could walk into and around). The boxes would be sealed like a motherfucker against moisture for obvious reasons. Every single time we opened one, sealed or not, there would be gekko eggs in the motherfucker. I never did figure out how they did that or even why. They were everywhere, inside and outside. Harmless, but they made a continuous noise at night, like crickets do in the States, that it took a while to get used to. One time when we were smoking pot in what had been the Japanese general's hq pillbox (reinforced, bombproof concrete -- it had five or six different rooms, all with machine gun positions, interlocking in all directions so there was a continuous field of fire). Guy was a genius, really. He organized what was very arguably the strongest defense in depth, ever, in military history. Anyways, we were pretty red, four or five of us, smoking Thai (which we called Buddha), and no one was talking. Suddenly we heard what must've been a Jurassic dinosaur of a gekko go off, *GEKFUCKINGO*! At first we were all startled and then we laughed for longer than we'd laughed in a good long while. Must've been the original granddaddy gekko.
And that's the goddammit truth right there, Jocko. Believe it.
That's what you say, Sam.
I know that's what I say. I just said it. See youse on the flip side, always on the flip side, keep on the flip side of life. Yr pal, Crispo
Last night I had a bebop freakout, spinning:
Miles Davis -- At The Royal Roost 1948-At Birdland 1950, 1951, 1953 (Charly)
Fats Navarro -- The Fabulous Fats Navarro, Vol 2
Dizzy Gillespie -- Professor Bop (Charly)
Charlie Parker -- In A Soulful Mood (Music Collection International)
and to break up the horn thing
Herbie Nichols -- The Art Of Herbie Nichols (Blue Note)
in the changer, set on shuffle play. Bopped til I dropped with some hootie to get out of workin' day mode, yessir. Believe it.
Before signing off for the night because I need my beans and I need my daily rest, I put on this here:
Seven Guitars, which is Disc 7 of my man Jon Abbey's great Erstwhile label's Amplify02: Balance box set, featuring Keith Rowe, Tetuzi Akiyama, Oren Ambarchi, Toshimaru Nakamura, Otomo Yoshihide, Burkhard Stangl, and Taku Sugimoto performing a 38+ minute version of Cornelius Cardew's "Treatise," followed by a half hour free improvisation. Great stuff. For those who might not know, Erstwhile is the flagship label for a kind of electro-acoustic improvisational music, that gets called eai mostly for lack of a better thing to call it. Freely improvised music featuring computers and other electronic gadgets and acoustic instruments played in far from traditional ways. It's an extreme minority taste in free music that I stumbled on by accident via a jazz friend who doesn't like jazz much anymore who led me to Abbey who, the irony isn't lost, I encountered on a jazz bulletin board I've been frequenting for years, Jazz Corner, which has been getting kind of stale lately hence this here blog. I say irony because Jon is also a regular there at Jazz Corner, though he insists that jazz is a creatively dead musical form, as does my other buddy Brian, pretty much, who frequents the same place nevertheless and also keeps a blog called Just Outside. I don't agree with them about jazz but we like a lot of other things besides jazz so who cares. Me? Nope.
Anyways, it was a boppin' night around these here parts, swinging into the late hours and then chillin' to sounds that don't swing at all on purpose, hey. No disasters. Chow was still hot and we was still not taking any incoming. Plenty of hoot. What else can a man ask for? If he's me, not much.
I dig that Tetuzi Akiyama cat's recordings. He plays free improvised acoustic guitar (mostly) but you can tell that he's heard a lot of that there delta blues that I loved since a teenager first opening up the ears to sounds beyond what now gets called garage rock like we played in my high school band but didn't know it was garage rock. We called it rock and roll. You can call it what you want; I call it messin' with the kid.
And of course Keith Rowe is a largely unacknowledged king of what used to be an electric guitar with various other gadgets tossed in to the mix including the random short wave radio broadcast. One thing that made me dig him to start, actually, because I used to listen to that short wave and marine band radio late at night as a kid, with the old tiny earphone stuck in me ears so the 'rents wouldn't know I was awake late, and up to no good, which has always been my primary ambition -- met in most ways, most people would have to say. And on them Loran C mid-watches when the chiefs and officers was long snoozin', I used to set one of our redundant radio receivers to no station so I could listen to the atmospherics. It was a lot like that guy in Thomas Pynchon's *V.* who had the crazed atmospherics mission in the Transvaal during yet another vicious war of conquest featuring white people in what had been someone else's neighborhood for many thousands of years.
But they's all masters in their own right, them cats in Seven Guitars. Check 'em out if it sounds like you'd dig it and don't if it don't, see. That's the way it works.
Not to change the subject but ...
I was remembering this morning about one time while stationed at the USCG Loran Station on Iwo Jima years ago, in '76, I had the interesting experience of learning to live with -- and watch out for -- scorpions and centipedes the size of a small, young garter snake, and they bit, too. And literally countless little gekko lizards, who remained an utter mystery. Sometimes we'd have to break out an enormous, replacement vacuum tube for our Loran C transmitter (3.5 megawatts, both air and water cooled, it was like a radio, in fact it was a radio, that you could walk into and around). The boxes would be sealed like a motherfucker against moisture for obvious reasons. Every single time we opened one, sealed or not, there would be gekko eggs in the motherfucker. I never did figure out how they did that or even why. They were everywhere, inside and outside. Harmless, but they made a continuous noise at night, like crickets do in the States, that it took a while to get used to. One time when we were smoking pot in what had been the Japanese general's hq pillbox (reinforced, bombproof concrete -- it had five or six different rooms, all with machine gun positions, interlocking in all directions so there was a continuous field of fire). Guy was a genius, really. He organized what was very arguably the strongest defense in depth, ever, in military history. Anyways, we were pretty red, four or five of us, smoking Thai (which we called Buddha), and no one was talking. Suddenly we heard what must've been a Jurassic dinosaur of a gekko go off, *GEKFUCKINGO*! At first we were all startled and then we laughed for longer than we'd laughed in a good long while. Must've been the original granddaddy gekko.
And that's the goddammit truth right there, Jocko. Believe it.
That's what you say, Sam.
I know that's what I say. I just said it. See youse on the flip side, always on the flip side, keep on the flip side of life. Yr pal, Crispo
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