shotgun beta

Willie Nelson - The Complete Atlantic Sessions

Sound Team - "Movie Monster"

Public Image Limited - Metal Box reissue
(and further down, me on the recent Sublime Frequencies set)

Jose Gonzalez - Veneer + The Knife - Silent Shout

beta kills pigs, cops, vegan loaves

The legendary hardcore band, Millions of Dead Cops! No, really! At a vegan potluck!

There have been two occasions where I almost moved to Portland, Oregon; I may move here yet. It helps that every time I visit the Pacific Northwest, the weather is beatific, almost staggering in its clarity, the sky an impossible blue. This go-round, it really is staggering, as global warming makes the place resemble Texas. Today, it nears 100. Tomorrow it will touch 102. The highway sizzles, windows rolled down to let the hot asphalt winds whip across us as we ride. It evokes the classic Texas roadtrips that we used to take.

Upon arrival in Portland, we decide to visit some old Texas friends. Unable to realize their dreams of manning a deli in New York City, they now run a vegan bodega in SE Portland. Food Fight, scarcely two years on, has grown into a nexus for varying scenes, causes, and it looks like they have created a strong base for themselves, which thrills me to no end. A grocery store that stages reading and rallies while also stocking every sort of mystery non-meat you can imagine.

A recent cause involves raising funds to pay for the ever-mounting legal fees for the Shac 7, who stand to face an endless federal trial as 'terrorists.' I won't go into too much detail here, especially when you can read more about their plight here, but it realizes the horror visions of Kafka (must admit that reading W.G. Sebald's Vertigo has been putting me into a K-hole recently). For those that think that terrorists only exist beyond the borders and wear turbans, the Christian Fascists would like you to reconsider and remain silent, which only helps them crucify harmless citizens who merely posit ideas on the web. Soooo...back to the music, then.

On this day, there's a huge freak scene happening at Food Fight. We make our way through a bizarre throng of anarchists and ladies with faded facial tatts, and only inside do I realize that we are in the midst of a hot and sweaty vegan potluck. Anarchists are in muumuus and there's even a reunion show of hallowed hardcore punk band, Millions of Dead Cops!

Being a music writer, I've grown jaded with exclusive shows, but this is something else entirely. One Dave is a recovering speedfreak, while the other Dave is a recovering carb addict, baking his own brand, Dave's Killer Bread.

They may also be Bread fans, as this is an acoustic reunion show. I spy a pair of bongos, but don't see them get babbalooed. Instead, they offer whispery, quickly strummed versions of their back catalog and maybe the worst version of "Happy Birthday" ever attempted. Unplugged highlights include "Corporate Death Burger" and "Kill All the Cops." The latter is so catchy that the kids sing it in the car over and over again. It sounds better than both Mr. T Experience and Raffi, while also carrying an important message for all kids to learn.

baet simpson

My host Marshall in Eugene, Oregon informs me that it's actually Springfield I am in, and that neighboring Springfield, Oregon is actually Shelbyville. The town square does indeed bear a vague resemblance. Look to the odd pioneer statues of one Eugene Skinner, to the preserved homestead of the man that stands near the Willamette River. By the muddy banks, I fully unravel and feel the vacation kicking in; hours pass just watching the patterns that leaves make in the wind, dappling sunlight and shade across my chest as I sprawl in the soft grasses and read or else stare into the sunny sky. The grass is different in Oregon. (Uh, not that kind.) In Texas, the landscape accosts you like cops do; stickers and burrs gouge, there are sharp crenations of weeds. The blades themselves make you itch. And where there aren't mosquito swarms doing fly-bys, there is always the threat of being brutalized and burned by fire ants. Plopped down in the grass here, all feels benevolent. And I don't even need to pull out a hackey sack or digeridoo.

Staying with Marshall is mind-boggling in a way; he played such a crucial role in my development and appreciation of music when I was sixteen years old that it's hard to believe that were still in touch a decade hence. Were it not for him and his band, El Santo (who will always be my favorite group next to Nirvana), I might've never made the connection that music is actually made by people, and not these distant, untouchable entities.

Guess that is punk rock's most profound lesson. As a child growing up, you usually interact with popular music on a completely alienated, wholly untenable level: here are these peculiarly-dressed people that you will never have a chance to meet. This is what you think rebellion looks and sounds like. But it is a lie outright. You know no one that even looks like them in either your extended family or at your school, despite what the Goths and heshers may appropriate as their 'style.' These strangers make a highly-stylized music that the major label record company then sells you at the mall. I grew up listening to Poison, to G'n'R, to Beastie Boys, but no one in my realm of existence bore even a remote resemblance to these figures.

There's an early piece I wrote for Pitchfork about a lost mixtape that may hint at yet barely makes explicit just how important Marshall (and his immense record collection) was for me. Interacting with him as an aspiring guitarist and music fiend was paramount for making music a part of my everyday existence. There is a flame of gnosis to be attained or to lose to the annihilations of time, and I can think of no other person’s tastes and wide approach to listening that influenced me more in this regard.

So it's strange to be here on vacation, the iPod tucked away, with zero interest in proactively listening to music with Marshall and his family. Sure, I've been digging, thrilled to find this Eddie Kendricks record I’ve spent three years searching for as well as Goblin's OOP soundtrack for Suspiria, but I'm in no hurry to audition them now. Instead, random records plucked at recent yard sales get put on during our days together as we do chores, dress the kids, get ready for bike rides. There’s some fine bluegrass picking record called White Lightnin', a synth-heavy Tony Allen record from '84, some unpronounceable African record with a triangle player, some Mexican kiddie-pop, a schizophrenic Nitty Gritty Dirt Band record before they realized how much they loved Merle Travis, an incredible French accordion-jazz record with an R. Crumb cover, and some Thin Lizzy (okay that's my pick). The kids only want to hear one record though: Mr. T Experience. Listening to Milk Milk Lemonade and this record with a Lite Brite on the cover, seeing how neat-o the red vinyl looks as it spins, it never occurred to me that Lookout!s true record-buying contingency was in reality kindergarteners (hence the longevity of Green Day?). Now I realize this shit's way more fun than Raffi.

Eugene's other claim to notoriety is being the location for Animal House. Of course, said house has been torn down, to where only some dorm rooms remain. The best joke of the whole town though is the location of the Planned Parenthood offices: it's on the corner of 17 & High.

reality betas

In a way, I'm glad that the jewelry store isn't open when I rush over there as if to complete all my chores before my flight. My watch battery remains unfixed, my inability to either manage or be on-time has a really great excuse now, even as I try to catch a plane. What it means though is that I can no longer gauge how long we sit on the runway, how long the flight takes, much less how long my enormous layover in Denver is. Too tired to do the math when I finally arrive in Seattle, let's just presume it's been a long fucking day and by not affixing a number to it, perhaps my jetlag won't take hold.

(As life can't help but creep into the work, I realize two upcoming pieces make mention of "time," how these dissimilar artists both disavow and deny it, their music contesting such tides. A lyrical genius says (not sings, mind you): "Time will take care of itself, so just leave time alone.")

Upon landing, I somehow find my way to a Seattle restaurant that does not serve espresso at 11pm, but the sushi is killer, even if they gild the lily a little. Even though I write in up to seven cities, I've really only ever spent time in one of them. Cranking out pieces in a little green room, linking to such articles online, receiving printed checks in the mail, these places just seem like distant clips from Shangri-La or something. Now Seattle is a reality.

Being at a rock show in a new town makes me feel slightly anthropological as I look around at the new settings, the new kids and what their outfits are here. In the daylight, the town seems to really dig shows. Scores of fliers abound, everyone from Prince Paul to Buck 65 to Black Angels to Jose Gonzalez (and holy shit! there's also a flier for Love Battery) flapping along walls and lampposts. Stacks of the Stranger and Seattle Weekly are in nearly every shop doorway. Getting on the bus, I see people reading the weeklies. Perhaps because there is so much more competition for eyes as in New York, where you can also choose between New York, New Yorker, TONY, and (for the sickos out there) NY Press.

For the first time ever, I actually step inside the offices of one of my employers, the Stranger. Dig through the archives to see my words in newsprint; it has that same sort of rush as when I head to the street corner on Tuesday night to find my words in the newest Voice, despite the ink not being fresh any longer.

I'm not here so much for business, but for vacation. I spend the morning taking care of my interview so as to enjoy the sensations of being in a new city. The sky is milky with clouds to where every corner and building front stands out vividly in the skyline. Yes, Seattle is a bustling metropolis, but I notice more space between the noises now, to where once the bus rumbles past, nothing really takes its place. It's an increase of silence, a calm so hard to parse back home. Call it an unclenching on my part, even as I down as much espresso as I can at every opportunity. The only thing that occurs more often today than such sipping is overhearing references to Reality Bites and Singles.

beta from the canyon

"The Circle Game": A feature on Numero Group's Ladies from the Canyon compilation in LA Weekly

Espers - II

The Black Angels - Passover

And, should you wish to read the piece I wrote about Jackie Mittoo bumping reggae at a mall in Toronto, you can peep the Rick Ross ish of The Fader or else uh...download the rag as a podcast.

beta power

In a recent New Yorker article, Samuel Hynes recalls a line Ezra Pound says to him when they happen upon each other in a park: "It's difficult hanging on to the truth while admitting error." It stings especially so as a critic, where your opined words must remain sharp and 'right,' rigid and affixed on a page that floats about in an influx world, where perception necessarily must give and be pliant, ever-changing. I wasn't the only one underwhelmed by Cat Power's The Greatest, finding it to be too shorn of its edges. Where were the jags, the bared edges, the emotional upheavals and artistic crises that flow about her so readily, her destabilized persona suddenly a part of her presentation?

You'd have to be crazy to go see her live though, or at least a sucker for disappointment. If you know anything about her proclivity to melt and disintegrate before her fawning audience, to flub every song, to drop lines, to forget chord changes, to painfully abort the same song ten times in a row, she is already a legend. Snickers no doubt followed the sudden announcement earlier this year that she had cancelled all of her tour dates with the Memphis band due to "health issues." And even with the tour re-scheduled (which was good news for me, as my piece finally ran out in Seattle), I can't help but cop to sniggering in the audience as well. Her reputation preceding her and all that, I still couldn't turn down free tickets to her show at Town Hall.

My friend and I stood outside the doors as the band started up, downing our mixed drinks in the lobby quickly and wondering aloud why we couldn't hear Cat Power at all as the band continued to blare and throb. Only some three songs in did Chan pad across the stage barefoot to sing about how she once wanted to be "the greatest." Resigned to mortality, she flexed, showing off sculpted arms as bodily example, as living proof. That said, her voice was thin and watery compared to the belts of her backing singers, taking some three songs before the sound guy reached some sort of compromise, finally highlighting the fuzz and smoke inherent in her throat while turning down the piquant power of the ladies near the back curtain.

By that time of sonic balance, I was hooked, intoxicated by the pulse of the twelve-piece band and their deft though loose grip, all musical forms understood as they moved with her, accentuating her awkward hip shakes with a more bold and knowing shimmy and slink, which in turn emboldened her, comforted her. The group comprised everyone from pedal steel player Doug Easley and Teenie Hodges to three strings and two horns, two singers. What sounded so polished to the point of listlessness on record brightened under the stage lights. The opulence was undeniable live, and as Chan piped out midway through, she was alive as well. "Sober! Happy!" she intoned, making hand gestures and hopping about like a bunny. Or a teen girl infatuated with "Some Girls" and chicken-walking like Mick before her make-up mirror. She also continually made gestures as to a queef (not sure what to make of that).

When the band finally dissolved and disappeared during "Where is My Love?" (its heartbreaking plaint bittersweet live), Cat Power tiptoed back out in a tight white dress to melt Sandy Denny's "Who Know Where the Time Goes" into a spot-on impression of (who else) Nina Simone's own 1959 Town Hall concert (a poster announces daughter Simone's own impression is forthcoming) with "Wild is the Wind." Perhaps to prove her pianistic powers are crescent, she lets ring into the void between each note her own take on "Dreams" with Elvis's melancholic "Blue Moon" perfectly interloped, the ghost of dead American astronauts alive and a-glow inside her. She even undercuts her own prowess with an off-the-cuff version of "Hit the Road, Jack" that fizzles. The only song of the past is the last, "I Don't Blame You." So she does understand just how she makes us both doubt and believe, making us grapple with such truths and errors with her every breath.

beta meshes

In Les Blank's documentary on the torturous struggle between man and nature as captured in Herzog's filming of Fitzcaraldo, Herzog reduces the film's essence to a cast-off comment that the natives recognize in the man a kindred spirit, a white man that grasps that it's the everyday life that's the illusion; the realm of dreams is the only true world. (Or, if you're a rock critic, it's like Frank Kogan's assertion that "Elvis never stopped being a truck driver with dreams; the point is he dressed himself in the dreams, not the overalls.")
***
I've been spending time with this girl that I almost didn't realize I cared about. And then, as if waking up one day, it is the only reality. We awaken one morning to admit we've been in each other's dreams. Perhaps her greatest act is that she's even indulged me some basketball TV back at her house. I turn it on just in time to miss one of the last Spurs games of the season, catching only a post-game commentary from a player who I'm loathe to even mention: Kobe Bryant. He reiterates some wisdom that the inventor of the Triangle Offense, Tex Winter, once passed along to him:

"The game hinges on a trifle."

It's not big baskets, rebounds, blocked shots, defensive stops, but rather simple things like deflections, miscues, slipping, bad passes that alter the complexion of a game played between adults irreversibly. As we watch Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Kobe, and Kenny "The Jet" Smith interact, she mentions that the announcers don't like Kenny. She can just tell by their body language. I myself would've never noticed it.
***
Having had one of those curious moments upon spotting a copy of Maya Deren's Meshes of an Afternoon at her house, to where I cannot recall possession or place for a confused instant, I return to it when I'm back at home. I forgot how much Deren's work inspires and terrifies me to this day, new realities and dimensions unfolding in nearly every frame. My mind cannot understand how she created these films in the forties. How does she replicate the logic of dreams in such a natural manner? Up into the seventies, filmmakers (mostly male) had trouble adequately portraying a fracturing conscience, multiple perspectives, the myriad of lives possible within one body, the dissolution of linear time altogether.

Perhaps it's like that passage of Anais Nin's A Spy in the House of Love that I referenced here, wherein absorbing the reflected light of the moon, a woman becomes open to the infinite possibilities of lovers, of commingled identitites, of multiple dimensions, all a-writhe inside her:

She became certain of myriad lives within herself. Her sense of time altered. She felt acutely and with grief, the shortness of life's physical span...but Sabina, activated by the moon-rays, felt germinating in her the power to extend time in the ramifications of a myriad lives and loves, to expand the journey to infinity.

In Deren's hands, such a dream effect appears effortless: real events recapitulate and mutate, the subconscious pulling at such small matters until they are distended, profound. What seems to be normal and everyday is suddenly plunged into the reality of disorienting, enigmatic, unanswerable dreams. (Forgot to mention that Nin herself appears in Deren's "Ritual in Transfigured Time.")

Quotidian objects toggle between identities: keys are knives, are books, are mirrors. The knife is for cutting a loaf of bread, is for murder, is for the reflection of light, is for the death of self in suicide, is but a dagger of the mind. The inner-eye of Deren continually arranges, deranges, and makes explicit such dreams, its wheels within wheels.
***
Researching more of Meshes, there is some contention that it may be more the work of first husband, filmmaker Alexander Hammid. And yet his documentary past (and the placcid cat birth caught on his film "The Private Life of a Cat") suggests otherwise. As the rhythms of dreams (and the movement of dancers) become more and more Deren's focus and domain in her other works, the overall feel of the film finally feels as hers, despite Stan Brakhage's assertions to the contrary.
***
It's agonizing watching the Spurs lose, even though I seem to be winning once the TV is off and we're entwined. Just a game, she reminds me. I want to watch the Maya Deren films with her and there's a recent edition of Divine Horsemen that neither one of us has seen, my mind wonders at watching it with her. I flash to her face watching the screen, then my own eyes...but there are more pressing matters to attend to in the present.

On the subway, I catch a glimpse of a girl through glass, a girl that I tried to date right when I first met my friend. At the time, their outward similarities were curiously parallel, and yet as this girl walks into the distance, to the vanishing point (no, there's no black cloak, no mirror face), I realize that in another reality, this would be the girl I watched basketball with instead, that I opened my heart to. My world just took a slightly different bounce. The gestures between two people stack up in one instance, withdraw in another. To think it all started with just an instant of her hand alighting on my chest. How that touch has amplified beyond such an innocuous beginning, how it bounces still, the reality always uncertain.

heep see

My friend and I were truly desperate, trying to find something of value on the satellites come Saturday late night. Infomercials, heavy metal's most metallic moments with the bat blood drained from them, surely a documentary on the Clash was what we needed to feel re-invigorated. Yet the documentary on the band produced for the Documentary Channel makes the band about as boring and pasty as they could possibly be, totally PBS'd, as Frank Kogan might call it.

Okay, so when I was coming up, I kept the Rolling Stone 100 Best Albums of the 80s issue beside me at all times, trying to make my 15-year-old punk self choke down The Indestructible Beat of Soweto and Shoot Out the Lights like healthy heaping helpings of broccoli and spinach. Yet despite the hamburger 'n fries at Number One, I never gobbled down and enjoyed London Calling as much as I was told I would. (If anything, the only Clash record I find to be a guilty pleasure is Combat Rock. To this day, "Straight to Hell" gives me chills, while I randomly find myself screaming out loud, "Hey fellas, Lauren Bacall!" Still not sure what that's supposed to mean, but...)

This doc would make anyone hate the Clash though, and it only exacerbates the ridiculous notion of how important it is for white men to grip guitars and "change the world" via playing loud rock in a divebar; is there a more inane sort of legend in music? From the 'scratchy and raw' fonts to the live footage that makes them really indistinguishable from The Who to Def Leppard to Jacob's Mouse to The Arctic Monkeys to (insert angry white UK band here) or... to an outsider, it would prove impossible to explain "the revolution." Not to mention the Clash's attempts at regurgitating their love of reggae so that it clangs out as ham-fisted. Joe Strummer croaks about the brass balls it took for them to do "Police and Thieves"; lord only knows that their youthful metabolism and inability to relax (much less tighten up) make their version border on the intolerable.

It's a shame really, because the story could be important. Just that going into the details of going into the studio on such and such date and playing on a plywood stage is decidedly not. Playing gigs is not what's crucial; it's the culture and community that nurtures such fever dreams and realms of possibilities for a moment that is of interest and importance. What makes ordinary people get up on stage and explode in front of both friends and strangers? (Not sure that it has the answer, but Lipstick Traces does ponder what makes a man start fires.) Bollocks to the story of how the Clash got their drummer; it's the footage of legions of untold folks lost to time mingling and meandering about in torn clothes and jagged black eye-liner that holds our eyes this night. The story of punks interacting with Jamaican culture could be a documentary unto itself; the only titillating bit of the whole program is when the blokes talk about the graphics and iconography of these old Joe Gibbs, Mikey Dread, and Big Youth records.

We switch instead to one of those Time-Life half-hour ads, hoping to find a couple of polyester clips of Harry Chapin, Little River Band, or Billy Paul. Instead, it's the sound of soul, and while watching a clip of Otis Redding, my friend suddenly shrieks: "HOLY SHIT! Did you just see that?" Since she's got the DVR in effect, we rewind back to the footage of Otis Redding going at it with the Bar-Keys behind him. Bent forward, belting in that way of his So. That. Every. Word. Sounds. Capitalized., she pauses it so that we can see it: more than halfway down his thigh, Otis's giant manhood distends his shiny seersucker suit. We laugh uncontrollably, knowing that we'll never hear soul classics like "I've Been Loving You Two Foot Long" and "That's How Strong My Love Muscle Is" in quite the same way again.

beta on the links

Imaginational Anthem in a post-Fahey world

Matmos, Uusitalo, and Matthew Herbert
(oof, the edit decimated both the first and last graph)

Six Organs of Admittance
(at the bottom)

beta negras

Afternoons in Madrid linger with me some five years on. My belly full of odd meat gelatins (or some pork curio from the Musee de Jambon with its walls of waxed pig legs) and that treacly pull-tab wine made effervescent and poppy with fizzy water, I would move my buzz over to the Prado and plunk myself down in front of the paintings of Francisco de Goya. (Not that it's the only thing there; aside from Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" the Prado has a titillating amount of holy pictures depicting virgin teet milk squirting across otherwise normal biblical scenes). In the main collection are his most acceptable works (like "The Naked Maja" and "Third of May 1808"), rendered during his time as a favorite of the Spanish court, with sketches of bull fights and quotidian life in Spain, or else works gleaned on linoleum or lithograph. There is not yet a medium that Goya worked in that I did not find infused with humanity in every form, the flashes of beauty and brutality tucked masterfully into the actions of the everyday.

And yet nothing holds the gravity as the gallery that contains the entirety of his "penturas negras." Works rendered on the plaster walls of his 'Quinta del sordo' (Goya was deaf due to an illness) as the man neared the end of his mortal coil, I would sit in front of these untitled monstrosities for upwards of thirty minutes per panel, plunging into the void beneath the veneer of oil paint, suspended in equal parts awe, disgust, and terror at Goya's visions. Now an octogenarian, fed up and repulsed by the thin veil of society, he reveals the death that the social conspiracy always seeks to hide: faces cannot mask their skulls, landscapes are in fact purgatories and prisons, destruction of the other is the main impetus of man's life. Earlier on, Goya tempered such latent facts with buffoonery, but there's no time left for buffeting. The body is but another carcass to devour for dinner, man can only be a cannibal in the end. Chronos is hungry; it's either eat or be eaten, munchacho.

In these black paintings, Goya most readily ascends to his place as the father of modern art. Such unflinching depictions still resonate in the present. Embroiled in a fight with my best friend at the time, the paintings of fighting cats and the one of two men hacking each other apart with cudgels are disturbing and ever-relevant, an existential precursor to a Monty Python skit. These ghastly paintings are almost always tempered, edited outside of the walls though: the long wide painting of a witches' coven in almost every art book is cropped so as to leave out the immense black goat-headed idol that the huddled women orbit in devout worship, reproductions of a dog helpless in quicksand never quite captures the astounding texture of the amber backdrop.

I was wrong to think these the final looks at the beyond though, as a recent exhibit at the Fricke reveals what happened next with Goya. As Republicans took over the government, a bloody clearing out of liberals soon followed. Artists, thinkers, dissenters and opponents not butchered outright fled to France so as to avoid the bloodshed. Forced to leave 'quinta del sordo,' Goya settled in Bordeaux country, where he continued to document the darkness that swirls around the living.

The sketches here are rendered in layers of black crayon quickly and with a master's ability to shorten time with a few quick strokes. Hazy sooty clouds obliterate subjects, seeking to return to oblivion, and the white figures captured on the paper only temporarily contrast and escape their grip. These figures in an indeterminate field have hideous, demonic faces swarm around them. The crayon rubs are gone over by a finer tip, elucidating faces and features that would otherwise be hidden and occult. Even the classical painted portraits once predominant in his oeuvre are rendered with only a few dark colors. Amid such obsolescence, these faces glow, fight back, flicker brightly against the oppressive, endless night. There are sketches of sanitarium inhabitants truly beset by devils and lunacy, but even quarreling domestic couples are surrounded on all sides by demons, witches; madness can come at any moment.

There's no better medium for him by this late stage than that of blackened ivory plates, a clutch of these tiny tiles the highlight of the exhibit. A layer of sooty ink coating them, Goya employs a small brush that doubles as a razor, cutting away blackness and bullfights so as to set about re-revealing the whiteness that also resides underneath the black. Almost every face is Lon Chaney-esque. The resulting portraits epitomize his endgame, the temporal face of every man but a white skull lasting till the end of time, the captured flesh just a blackened memory.

beta built for cuban links

Since neither the landlords nor Time-Warner give a fuck who my new editors are:

AFX
Danielson and Current 93
Kiila (all the way at the bottom)
Oakley Hall
Ricardo Villalobos

oh, and I also have news pieces (on the Buddha Machine and the new Yellow Arrow project on DC punk/hardcore history) in SPIN, which the new editor finds comparable to a rilly hot (read: anorexic) chick.

harold beta

Yorick's skull to be (or not to be).

"Hey look, a signed picture of Del Close!" gets said as facetious aside in the basement of the Upright Citizen's Brigade, awaiting another brewski on a Sunday night, when the Assss Cat ensemble headed up by Amy Poehler takes its 'coke' break. Blurry-eyed already, drunk on some sort of mixed concoction called a "Mad Russian," squinting reacquaints me with one of the most hallowed man in improvised comedy, the man behind the men that laid the foundations of Second City and SNL.

Close was a student of Mike Nichols and Elaine May's comedy school and in NYC a cronie with fellow comics like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. Substances helped the spiral spin further downward and by '65 he was out West, guzzling Owsley's juicy juice with the Merry Pranksters, doing lights for the Grateful Dead, stringing speakers up in the trees. During that time, as the Dead were doing their long-form improvisations of country, folk, r&b, and feedback, Close began to experiment with long-form comedic improvisation himself, working with The Committee, the North Beach equivalent of Second City.

As the sixties died out, Close was back in Chicago, teaching comedic improv and honing a new form. It involved spontaneous creation of themes (generally from an audience suggestion to keep its players from getting any pre-conceived notions or riffs) and characters would be created, with resulting scenes playing off each other in comedic counterpoint. Phrases, images, riffs would recur, doubling with meaning with each reappearance as they unfolded over time, interconnections between disparate ideas being made as the improvisation continued, mutated, open-ended. Like any improviser, there's a quest for seeking and maintaining "truth."

Del Close dubbed such an improvisational technique 'The Harold.' "Probably my most significant contribution and it's got that stupid name."It was an affirmative style of improv, saying "Yes" to new ideas, topics, all-inclusive, neither exclusive nor reductive, always building so as to have invisible connectors revealed and made tactile out of the air between audience and performer. Drunk and buzzed from laughing the rest of the night as riffs on marinara and Russian immigration somehow twine together, I can't help but think of the open-ended improv scene that came out of Chicago in the early nineties, taking in Krautrock, musique concrete, rock, jazz, bossa nova, dub, grabbing at it all and building upwards from it. Aside from his work in comedy with the likes of Belushi and John Candy, could Close also be a secret force behind post-rock's assimilation of disparate ideas, too?

peta cemetery/ beta bonanza

In Gates of Heaven, the pill is blamed for the rising cult of pet-dom, a pacifier for unfruitful mammas. Randomly coming upon the televised feeding of a komono dragon late one night, I watch the giant lizard lash about in giddy response to the trainer's whistle, anticipating that meal of live rats forthcoming. Pavlov woulda been proud. The love between the two is tactile, the exchange queerly mutual, one less of pet-owner (or even zoo denizen-zoo employee) and between two sentient beings that perhaps don't quite understand one another but at least respect the relationship they have somehow forged in this world.

Not that we need look beyond the gates of our animal kingdom to find compatibility problems. Another late night in front of the tube brings a by turns hilarious and illuminating study of human sexes, courtesy of the BBC. A girlfriend and I snicker when they bring male and female brains out of a bucket, and laugh out loud whenever the curt voiceover mentions "female brain sex," which instantly makes appear in my mind some hot lez lobe action.

In one bizarre study of many they trot out, they test how men and women hear differently. Since men only hear with one side of their brain, they cannot process words that come out of one side of their headphones. Of course, as a music critic, I sweat for a second that maybe I'm only hearing half of the words (which may be why I detest 80% of all lyrical music) and may soon lose my jobs to the J-Hoppas and J-Shephs of the world, but since most music is made by bros anyway, there's little to worry about at the end of the day.

An underlying theme is how a rush of testoterone into the fetus determines sexuality as well as future physical capabilities (one scientist predicts the outcome of a race by only measuring the length of the male runners' ring fingers), arguably creating two vastly different creatures that only seem to speak the same language. Which is to say, I give up explaining playoff basketball to her and she stops dissussing whatever it is she is telling me (I'm kinda just ogling her and not paying attention) and we go back to petting the doggy and kitty nearby.

Errol Morris gazes upon but rarely dissects scientifically the interaction between man and animal, in how different creatures somehow co-exist and exchange across irreconcilable borders. Come Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, there is the complex interchange not just between man and beast, but also that other pet of man's, mechanical machinations (detailing also curious hybrids such as mammalian hiveminds and robots as insects). Come Fog of War, Morris stares into the visage of a number-crunching statistical machine for the Pentagon that thinks it's a human named Robert McNamara (the void stares back courtesy of the Interrotron).

Errol's interpretation of nature as interactive and personable is diametrically opposed to his friend and goader, Werner Herzog. Stuck in the Peruvian jungle in Burden of Dreams, he sneers his synonyms for nature: violent, base, miserable, a curse, all fornication and mess. Far from Germanic order, here god is just pissed, frustrated, at wit's end (hmmm, sounds vaguely like a certain auteur megalomaniac), the master's creation project abandoned in frustration. No pets to be made of the exotic birds, but rather close-ups of a dead macaw, ants devouring it as fast as their mandibles will work. In Herzog's rainforest, birds don't chirp jack, they scream bloody fuckin' murder. Who could be into recycling and earth first when the environment is but a "harmony of overwhelming and collective murder"?

What does Herzog gaze upon though that doesn't flood with red though? Even amid the whimsy of Les Blank's film, Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe (an extra on Burden of Dreams), Herzog opens the short by declaring a fatwa on western culture, a Holy War on the boob tube, railing against not just commercials, but also Bonanza! Maybe he just never ate at one with Hoss, but Herzog also considers cooking to be the only legitimate alternative to film-making. Not that you can trust a guy who eats his shoe boiled in duck fat. Give me a big juicy live rat any day.

peta

It's not the fact that I'm working on yet another chapbook that bases itself in the year of 2005 but in how birds played a part in my year (from looking for macaws in Costa Rica to the return of birds to New York to dealing with my own canary's death) and how pecked out birdseed and plucked feathers would quickly accumulate into scattered patterns on exposed papers in my room (the forthcoming collection will be called "Birdseed"), but lately I've just been reminded of pets in general. Every phone call home has carefully tucked into the home news a line or two about how my cat is getting older, slower. "She eats very little now, barely drinks water" my Mom informs me, something else tucked inside such plain-stated news.

A late night watching of Gates of Heaven drifts by barely recalled, save that I see no mention of beloved birds (not evena parrot!), but plenty cats and dogs. All my life I've had animals to care for: cats, dogs, ducks, rabbits, turtles, tree frogs, bobcats, fish, even a crab named Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is the longest period of time I've ever gone in my life without an animal to care for, but I can say that it barely registers for me now (and the house mouse doesn't quite count; he's more like a fourth roomie, the one you only see out rummaging in the kitchen well after midnight, his shit all over the place, never paying rent on time).

I still miss my bird, miss his movement in the corner of my room, miss how the drawing of the curtains first thing in the morning took on even greater significance for him than for me, the letting in of sunlight a crucial life-affirming ritual. It's distant now, so it's not that dramatic, just that the tiniest of rituals still stick like little splinters in me. Even something as simple as grabbing bunches of mescalin salad mix (a friend calls such stuff "Yuppie Chow") has been altered without him waiting for me at home. I used to always grab an extra one of those white clumped stalks of frissee lettuce, as they were my bird's favorite greens to snip at with his little canary beak. Now I shake all of them free so as to never have them weigh down the bag.

Visiting a friend of mine earlier in the week, it's difficult to adjust to the dog in his house. The doggie acts less like a backyard pet (I was never allowed to have a dog in the house so having them indoors is a bti much for me to take) and more like a petulant child, constantly demanding attention. Together they recreate those weird old lady and precious pet conversations from Gates: doggie yaps meld into the goochy-goos of his owner, creating a most bizarre dialogue. Okay, it's not that weird, as I used to whistle back at Tupac in bird-brained conversation, it's just that now there's no one for me to talk at.

zombeta

If only he'd been shot before he could form Zwan.

Zombies on the brain. Watching another zombie movie, we try to pinpoint just what it is about zombies that continue to fascinate. As a metaphor, their brains (braaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiins!) are a blank slate for whatever there is to project upon them, be it director or audience. Depending on the flick --or in the case of George Romero (looking oh so Robert Wyatt as he appears in Dawn of the Dead) which scene-- zombies represent consumer consumption, capitalism, fascism, Red China, anarchy, humanity as a virus. The first word to come to my mind is the inevitablility of them, but with their stagger, they also embody fate, the rot and obsolescence that's built-into every mortal coil. It's a reminder that the body is mere motor, the ever-humming base of all urges and hunger. But maybe zombiedom is a pure state of being, a Nirvana where no thought, no brain (braaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiin!) disturbs the calm waters of death.

Zombies can cover for slovenly make-up, impoverished costume designers, sprained or broken ankles that may take place mid-scene, and of course, it hides bad acting. Really fat zombies never have shirts; they also never have enough undead body paint in the make-up trailer for their hairy backs and bellies either. In Dawn of the Dead, we get nun zombies, Hari Krishna zombies, zombies of all decaying skin colors. Zombies rock hipster beards, lumberjack plaids, polyester, and they're all walking around in the mall, at one with the mannequins. Revealing the zombie to be an everyman, the great proletariat, maybe what entices is the fact that zombies embody true brotherhood, that anyone can be a zombie. Will be a zombie.


Evoked by the unseen primal drums that pound and open up the earth itself, its tribal base is hinted at in Fulci's Zombi, yet the zombie lovers in Paul Morrisey's Flesh for Frankenstein are technological monstrosities on the cutting edge of science (and madness). In computer security, zombies walk right through firewalls. They got the numbers. The pinnacle of absolute horror in any zombie film is when a single one is upon you, those flesh-rending chompers coated with that zombie bacteria on their maggoty blue lips. Descending from above (or else arising from the earth and floorboards), the intimacy between living and dead is finally consummated with that kiss.

beta's book

Ten plus years in the making, I have finally finished writing, editing, printing, folding, awl-punching, hand-stitching the spines, and hand-painting the peculiar shape of Texas (flat-top haircut, panhandle, fat back, third coast, and boot toe) on the cover of each and everyone of these poem chapbooks I made documenting a decade's worth of writing. From high school notebooks to the weird lysergic commune scribbles of San Antonio, from writing poems while seated at my desk in the Social Security Administration office to the strip of La Rambla that runs down Barcelona, from the farms and chicken coops of Gillett to the skyways between there and New York City, it's all in here on the finest weave of paper and card you can run your fingers over. A one-time only run of thirty, twenty are already earmarked for family and old friends, but the remainder are up for grabs here. Ten will cover price plus shipping. Those who know know how to get at me, otherwise drop a line to: a n d y b e t a (AT) g m a i l.

beta new

move it on over...