Tag: 9/11

San Diego 2000 The Loft intermission : “Exactly how many sex cults are we talking about?”

berniebleak6 Comments

[Part One]

The plot thickens.

When I first starting asking around in the Crash Worship group I heard an unfamiliar name in some of the comments – Zendik Farm. In the context it seemed like maybe this was another name for the apartments in an old church by Pokez where JXL and some other folks in the band’s orbit had lived. For the initiated you most likely already know what’s coming.

O oracle and miracle of modern technology I combined the relevant phrases in the search bar of the world’s foremost search engine and out comes a colorful video:

Side B is available from the same uploader

Cool, I thought, an all day festival and live album with some familiar and unfamiliar names. Crash Worship check. Night Soil Man check (a new favorite of mine that sounds a little like Comus). I was nerding out and clicking around on discogs, as one does, when I came to the name Arol Wulf. Expecting a band I next ended up on the entry for Wulf Zendik and from there an unexpected hop to a Wikipedia page.

Holy shit! Exactly how many sex cults are we talking about?

If you’re in a live band you’ve probably played at least one or two shows for either dodgy promoters or as benefits for questionable businesses. PlywoodStock seemed to be an all day festival organized in the name of old fashioned Manson family brainwashing and coercive sex trafficking. I’ve heard a handful of things about Murshid and Circle of Friends over the last few days ranging from “flirty fishing” to “high end yoga escort service” but I was not prepared for what I was about to read on Zendik Farms.

For a sleepy and moderately sized military town San Diego has more than it’s fair share of cult and commune activity, I listed a modest handful in the last installment but you can add to that tendrils of Miracle of Love, The Church of Scientology, International Society of Krishna Consciousness and even a sizable contingent from the commune I was born on: a place In Tennessee called simply The Farm. To be entirely honest some of the things I read about Zendik Farms seemed unpleasantly familiar.

Life on The Farm wasn’t always idyllic as evidenced by the major exodus in the early Eighties that included my family. I found a FAQ from a former Zendik resident that echoed many of the grievances I heard from my parents and their friend circle: poor standard of living, malnutrition, lack of education and a clear hierarchy in what was supposed to be an egalitarian community.

https://emeraldimajia.livejournal.com/149140.html

On the other hand the title of this woman’s memoir is Mating in Captivity. While there was definitely social pressure at The Farm for men and women to pair up they weren’t told who they had to sleep with or expected to endure scrutiny into their sex lives the way this woman describes at Zendik. My mother certainly didn’t have to ask permission and get examined with a speculum every time she was intimate with my father.

Both communities could be stiflingly heteronormative.

I heard of gays at The Farm either living closeted or trying to force themselves into the more expected lifestyle only to realize their true tendencies would not disappear after years of marriage and children. I don’t know if Zendik created similar experiences but Wulf’s writings seem to have been overtly homophobic in a way I never saw in Stephen Gaskin’s (founder of The Farm)

I actually wonder about the possibility of some cross pollination between the two. I had a pair of childhood playmates, sisters named Jasmine and Jade, whose mother moved them out to Jacumba around the time Zendik Farms was in the area. I’d heard something about them having troubled adult lives and wonder if they might have been drawn in by Arol Wulf’s charismatic nature.

The larger coincidence is that Zendik Farms and Circle of Friends both had property in the same small town of Boulevard. I wonder if Murshid and Wulf or Arol ever met or how such a meeting would have gone. The timelines don’t perfectly line up though – while the Zendik’s were decamping to Austin by 1991 Circle of Friends seemed to arrive from Colorado around the same time.

It seems possible that Zendik Farms could have even sold their compound to Murshid and Circle of Friends or the specific owner of the land could have shifted loyalties between the two. For now it remains an amusing hypothetical as I need to return my focus back to the Underground Music.

Chris Squire of Crash Worship, Tit Wrench, Battalion of Saints, Heroin and a million other legendary bands kindly provided the above photo and some corroborating details:

Squire’s band Lectric Rek was omitted from the live album

I might have been overstating things when I described PlywoodStock as using the participants music for sinister purposes. While visitors no doubt got the standard invitation to join this 1988 festival sounds like a mostly innocent opportunity to cut loose, drop acid and rock out far from the eyes of SDPD and Vice squads. Squire definitely cited “frying at four AM and being a WRECK” as an explanation of why his band didn’t make it to the compilation cassette.

Also performing but failing to make an impression on the keen commercial instincts of the Zendik compilationist was a band called Monsters of Rhythm.

The thing that stuck out to me immediately was the clearly diverse lineup of Daddy Long Leggs while San Diego rock was predomimantly white. I found a Reader profile where the band talked about choosing to create a mix of funk, rock, punk and metal instead of emulating the far more popular ska trend at the time. This, and the slightly earlier lifecycle, would explain why I never saw them share the stage when two-tone legends like The Specials came to play at the second SOMA near Old Town.

https://www.sandiegoreader.com/bands/daddy-long-leggs/

Members of this group combined with Pull Toys from the same festival to form Casbah legends Creedle and keyboardist Robert Walter now tours with Roger Waters lineup of Pink Floyd.

Moving along – when John Goff first sent me the links to the articles on The Loft’s impending eviction it caught my eye that the post was dated 5/5/2000. I was a bit of a sticker head in High School, cataloguing each new variant and color way of Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant stickers in a special notebook, and I remembered seeing cryptic stickers with the message “ACHTUNG 5/5/2000”.

This turned out to be an early ambient/noise/industrial project of Travis Ryan who is now best known as the vocalist of Cattle Decapitation. The name is based on a prophecy from the Mayan Calendar that the world would end on this date – possibly related to a rare alignment of the outer planets. That was especially interesting to me as I went to Palenque on 12/21/2012 for festivities around the end of the twelfth baktun of the same Calendar that was also widely prophesised to mark the end of the world.

While neither date brought about any particular apocalypse the first of them did mark the beginning of the end for The Loft. It is also interesting how numerologically significant and symmetrical both dates appear in the Gregorian Calendar as they were derived from an entirely different system.

I also thought I had seen the name on some kind of compilation CD which turned out to be In Formation: A Tribute To Throbbing Gristle which Ryan coordinated and released on his Attention Deficit Recordings label. I did have a copy of this CD and used to listen to it fairly frequently but can’t remember if it was given to me by John Goff in San Diego or by Deerhoof when we played together in Chicago.

https://www.discogs.com/master/53481-Various-In-Formation-A-Tribute-To-Throbbing-Gristle

A couple of interesting details on the artists: I was listening to a lot of Integrity that year after finding a pile of the …And For Those Who Still Fear Tomorrow records at a Maxwell Street creative reuse in Chicago. I literally couldn’t give them away to my hardcore friends at the time but I’d imagine they’d be worth a decent stack of cash if I still had them (there were like 30 on black vinyl). Anyway the point is I was listening to the TG tribute at the same time but had no idea Lockweld and Psywarfare were Integrity adjacent projects.

I also had a few Spacewürm records I’d picked up in discount bins but had no idea of the connection with Kid606 which I listened to a ton of soon after. There was no discogs in those days – I got this kind of information in bits and pieces from conversations with other encyclopedic music nerds. Thanks to the site I now know that Travis was also behind one of my favorite local bands Graveyard Whispers.

Goth was huge in San Diego at the time. I tried to go to Club Soil at the World Beat with an older friend but was denied entry because I wasn’t even 18. My mother had somehow convinced me that goths, or mods as she used the terms interchangeably, painted their faces white with a certain brand of Bag Balm she had in a crinkly old aluminum tube. There must be a kernel of truth in there somewhere but it looked and smelled ridiculous.

That was my only teenage foray into goth fashion paired with an oversized white button up and black leggings. I stood around the alley and listened to Vampire The Masquerade LARPers talk about drinking each other’s blood and witnessed the arrival of a high status scenester named Vlad dressed in Renaissance looking red velvet. I ended up drinking coffee at Denny’s then sleeping in the upstairs portion of Gelato Vero until the trolleys and buses started back up.

Anyway back to Graveyard Whispers – they were a goth parody band. I saw them at either Empire Club or Xanth depending on who owned it that year with my friend’s band Hide and go Freak. The members rode up on chopper bicycles with revving motorcycle sounds through the PA and all immediately lit clove cigarettes. As the set progressed the singer, Rozz’d “Stewart” Williams, was strapped up and hung upside down on some kind of BDSM apparatus.

I need to amend a couple of details now that clearer recollections have found their way to me from a certain horse’s mouth. The show I saw most likely predated Ryan’s involvement and the “BDSM apparatus” was simple exercise equipment. The bit was a buildup to a visual punchline of suddenly revealing ostentatiously sparkly pants under the vocalist’s somber black attire but this was either adopted later or didn’t have quite the “punch” they’d envisioned in a room full of smoke machine fog.

I’ve also learned that their were plans to do a “colonial goth” set involving George Washington (but goth – perhaps George Xymoxington?) outfits and an entrance on a rowboat. This was scrapped with the dissolution of the parent band – Upsilon Acrux. The plan seems almost prophetic with the present popularity of various goth “microgenres” such as the impressive niche Leafar Seyer and Prayers have carved out with cholo-goth.

It was a real hoot and a memory I’ve cherished often through the years. Apparently they released a tape but resellers are asking exorbitant amounts online due to Cattle Decapitation’s well deserved fame. It would be nice if somebody had one and felt like throwing the tracks up somewhere.

Back to John Goff – I thought it was strange that I never spent any time in The Way Out Sound record store if it was next door to Plasticratic. Thankfully Chris Woo came through to solve the mystery for me. According to this clipping it didn’t open until October of 1998 and I had gotten my diploma and run to Chicago then Oakland by that time.

If the quality translates you can even zoom and read this

As is common for intermissions this one will be something of a variety show. Turning back to the “No Roof Action” piece when I first learned that The Loft was at Sixth and Broadway I thought that it might be the same building as the Street Art Gallery show from that piece. It turns out I was extremely close. Here is the excerpt:

There are multiple inaccuracies here

While I pride myself on the detailed nature of my memory the reality is that like anyone else’s it is entirely fallible. I am about to reveal the identity of “Featured Artist” in detail but first I need to correct myself on two points. First he picked up the hammer in self defense rather than over a name dispute. That argument was actually over the tag name of one of his friends and verbal intimidation was more than sufficient.

Second he may or may not have hit anybody with it but he was provoked, threatened and largely outnumbered. Some goons from a rival tag crew had shown up and were trashing the gallery and attacking him. Shepard Fairey would likely remember more specifics.

RIP RAMBO

I am talking about Lance De Los Reyes who created his largest body of work as RAMBO but was writing CHIE at the time of this incident. I was recently reminded of Lance when I saw his cameo in a Safdie Brothers film coincidentally called Daddy Longlegs only to learn that he had tragically passed away.

At this early stage he made images of insect cocoons on scraps of rusted metal and other found object refuse that were displayed on the walls of Pokez before making the jump into Galleries. He had named this show Modest Behavior because Shepard had just introduced him to Modest Mouse and it was directly behind The Loft at 1027 Sixth Avenue.

2000 was the year for this

This opening was about a month after the article about The Loft’s eviction and most likely after the legendary party era there had been over for at least a year. The other artist I really remember from the opening was Grimey aka Bhagavan or “Bugs”. He was good friends with Harmony Korine and the two of them got matching hand tattoos of his trident or pitchfork tag. I thought he might have gotten his name from Circle of Friends but it turned out to be a Hare Krishna thing.

He was very inspired by Norwegian Black Metal and made an entire installation in a recessed part of the space – a darkened area with candles and an atmospheric evil sounding soundtrack. I always think about how ahead of his time he was when I see environmental works from artists like Neckface and hope he is doing well. I was tagging WORM then as a kind of metal logo with a pentagram in the O and a lower case R as a candle so I felt a bit of artistic kinship.

More on Bhagavan via Chris Woo

Me and Francois had a bit of “fame” in the moment due to our highly visible pieces on the California Theater. When Lance learned our “street” identities he was impressed enough to invite us onto the roof and generously offered a pair of desirable paint spots. The show was in the building with the big glass “SPORTS CARDS” sign but we jumped over to the next roof to get at two pieces of wall.

The bit of red wall is The Loft building

Francois’ skills were well beyond mine so he got the cream colored spot visible from Broadway for a JUMP piece while I whiffed whatever I did on the grey wall invisible from this angle. In the course of the night we quickly went from elation at the connections we were making to dismay at the possible consequences of accidentally covering somebody or any other transgression. We quickly gave up painting.

When I started working at my alma mater San Diego High in 2003 or so I picked it back up as a way to connect with my students. I swapped out paint cans for streakers and shoe polish but my bigger focus at the time was on battle rapping and it’s covered in other chapters. I must have painted once or twice with Nick Feather – another friend that we lost far too young to an epidemic that’s only getting worse.

I could have never tracked down these exact details without the hard work of Eric Elms. Eric worked on Shepard’s street team at the same time as Lance and also used to do poster art under the name ADORN. I would always laugh to see the ones with giant pictures of Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock on electric boxes as the prevailing trend in youth fashion and music of the moment was called “Spock Rock” after the boxy black haircuts.

He now does a mix of fine art, design work and the considerable overlap between the two and occasionally uses the name ELMS. You can find his work at:

https://partnersandothers.com/

I will close this intermission with some thoughts from the as-yet-unidentified admin of The Loft at Sixth & Broadway Facebook group. While it doesn’t identify 9/11 as the official end of the era it does reflect many of my own thoughts of San Diego at the time, and it’s Downtown 81 vibe, as well as the “American Underground” as a whole. This is understandable as the developers were very much present and palpable and even if you’re living under it you simply can’t see the shadow of something that’s in the future.

If you could we’d have a word like “foreshadowing” or something…

[link to next part]

Chicago 2001 : “Lust for Life”

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I have this theory about the 1990’s. The short version is that the thing that made it such a magical time to be young in America was the convenient temporal bookending of two major geopolitical events: The Fall of The Berlin Wall in 1989 and The September 11th Terrorist Attacks in 2001. You’ve got The Cold War on one side, The War on Terror on the other and a decade and change in between when it didn’t feel like we were locked into an ideological struggle for existence with a whole other side of the planet.

Maybe it’s bullshit. Everybody idealizes the time period of their own youth and you could probably find blips on the timeline enclosing every decade in history to ascribe the same significance to. The human mind loves looking for patterns – and in many cases inventing them to stave off the intellectual phobia of randomness and chaos.

Everything looks like a face.

Every number means something.

Even without a crystal ball to tell me what was around the corner it was hard not to feel like the sand was running out in at least some kind of hourglass. It wasn’t even a year since we all started “experimenting” with heroin and we’d burned our way through two housing situations most would consider dodgy to begin with.

A former grocery store with barely functioning heat and a couple pipes in the basement’s ceiling instead of a shower.

An ancient house that needed the old glass fuses every time we overloaded a circuit and where some of us slept in a former pigeon coop.

The landlord to that last place was a constantly partying alcoholic cokehead and he still took us to court to make sure he was getting rid of us.

All of us together were getting to be too much for any sane person to rent to so we started spreading ourselves out. Nick and Janice got an apartment right on the edge of the West Side, then known as the largest open air heroin market in the world. They held on to Sebastian – the cat we’d all been living with since the El Rancho days. Sebastian had belonged to the housemate everybody called Crazy Danny and had supposedly been telling him to cut himself through psychic communication.

I don’t know what became of Crazy Danny but at some point he stopped living with us and Sebastian didn’t.

Dave and Meg and Vanessa had one over to the Ukrainian Village side of what was almost the same neighborhood. I had been drifting back and forth without worrying too much about having a room anymore. Janice was at the stage where she was transferring her growing frustration with Nick’s constant appetites for crack and heroin to whoever he was doing it with so I started spending most of my time at the other spot.

I stayed in Dave’s room, the little dude, and for a little while we seemed to be in sync about how much drugs we wanted to do and when. He went to school, I had a job and neither of us had anything close to a full time habit. Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life became our go-to soundtrack and anthem for both possible decisions: the resolve to take a night off by either drinking or staying completely sober? Lust for Life. Running in from the block with tiny bags or folded up foil and grabbing our spoons and needles? Same record, same side, same song:

“Here comes Johnny Yen again…”

Pretty much everybody used the same drugs and nobody seemed too worried about it. I don’t remember any of us getting sick or even using the word addict. The closest would have been this kid Paul who used to rap under the name MC Think. I’d heard that one of his schticks had been rapping through a harmonica but he wasn’t doing any of that stuff anymore. Picture an Eminem that never made it out of the crackhead phase.

Anyway Paul didn’t live with us – he just came around from time to time.

The last time I saw him he showed up at the Ukrainian Village apartment with an old green Schwinn cruiser he’d obviously stolen. He asked me to help him sell it – either because he’d worn out his welcome at all of the bike shops or just because I looked like less of a junkie. We went to a spot in Wicker Park and one of the employees who clearly knew what was going on gave me forty bucks for it.

When we were biking back to the West Side Paul suggested that he go to the spot by himself so it would be less “sketchy”. He showed back up an hour or two later – high out of his mind with a bullshit story:

“I got jacked man! They jumped me and took all the money…”

I’m sure this seems obvious to most readers and totally my fault for “trusting a junkie” but the thing was we all did heroin and hadn’t been acting like that. At El Rancho and the Red House if people figured out that you were going to cop nearly everyone in the house would give you ten or twenty dollars and when you got home you gave everyone what they’d paid for and ordered. We treated it the exact same way as if someone was walking to a corner store.

One time I did keep John’s money instead of giving him his drugs but this was because he owed me a couple hundred dollars from when I covered his rent once and at that point he was clearly never paying me back. He still was pretty furious about it. While the concept of “blue balls” is manipulative misogynist bullshit “blue brains” is definitely a real thing: the feeling when you’re expecting to get high only to have it not work out at the last moment.

Of course Paul wasn’t really one of us and had probably only come around to rip somebody off in the first place. I wouldn’t have made the same mistake with him again but it was a moot point as he didn’t come around after that anyway. I hope he’s still alive.

At some point Nick’s mom rented an apartment for him in Boy’s Town. She either didn’t know about his relationship with Janice or wouldn’t have approved of him living so close to the drug neighborhoods but Nick didn’t want her finding out he didn’t live there. He rented it out to these hacker/raver kids but they had to get out of town over a kidnapping charge.

I think some kid ripped them off on a big MDMA deal and they had been trying to get their money back but I never heard a ton of details. I worked in Lincoln Park so I figured I might as well get an actual place and offered to move in. I paid some monthly amount directly to Nick and was supposed to avoid interacting with the building manager as he was in contact with Nick’s mom.

The very first night I moved in I had to go to work in the morning and realized I had no idea what time it was when I plugged in my alarm clock radio. I didn’t have a cell phone or wear a watch and I hadn’t even thought about it because I’d never lived alone. I searched for different radio stations and waited for one to announce the time but it just didn’t happen.

I didn’t really know the neighborhood so I walked down Broadway hoping I might run into somebody. It must have been fairly late because the street was deserted. I started looking into the windows off all the closed businesses hoping to catch sight of a clock. I got excited when I recognized an actual clock shop from across the street and rushed over.

All the different clocks were set to different times and I had no way of knowing which, if any of them, might be accurate.

I don’t know if my anxiety about the time played a role in this but I ended up waking up to realizing I’d pissed on myself. You might have read in the Fort Thunder pieces that I had issues with bed wetting that lasted into my early twenties but became increasingly sporadic toward the end. It probably fizzled out completely when I was twenty three but around the time of this story it was about once a year.

The incident in that story was mid-2000 so this 2001 incident was most likely the next time.

I hadn’t moved my clothes in with me yet and I had fallen asleep wearing my only pair of black slacks for my cafe job. After a quick shower I searched around the apartment to see if the previous tenants had left any clothing behind. I did actually find a pair of denim JNCOs but while the waist was a decent fit the length was at least a foot and a half too short for me.

I’m 6’4”.

I’m sure I looked pretty entertaining biking out in a dress shirt with wildly flared highwaters. I went to a Unique Thrift Store that wasn’t too far out of the way and bought an extra pair of work pants. Thankfully it was next to a KFC that let me change in the bathroom and I didn’t have to walk into work like this.

I left the undersized rave pants in the trash can.

Another interesting thing I noticed when first moving to the area was this mural on the side of a public school:

“STEP ON DRUGS LIKE YOU STEP ON BUGS!”

I wondered if the schools administrators realized that they were basically instructing kids to add less expensive substances to drugs for the purpose of raising profit.

My final night in the apartment started with a big tip. Papa was in the mood to show off and we cooked one of his fans a big pasta meal with tons of wine and after dinner liqueurs. This was an isolated occurrence – Trattoria Monterotondo was usually just a coffee bar and takeout spot. When the customer tried to pay Papa told him to give me a hundred dollar tip instead.

With all that cash burning a hole in my pocket it was an almost certainty that I’d be getting high but I didn’t feel like biking all the way to the West Side and I’d never gone into Cabrini Greene alone. I ran into a very sweet young prostitute walking down North Avenue dressed in a heart motif bikini with a full on cape and asked her if she could help me score drugs without having to brave the towers. She explained that those were the only places to score and she was no more excited about the risk of stepping into one than I was so I thanked her and kept walking.

I had one of the paper schedules for the needle exchange outreach van and I saw it went to a nearby neighborhood called Uptown so I figured it must be a drug saturated area. I asked a few likely looking characters until I found an older guy who was willing to bring me with him to the spot. I might have seemed overly trusting in the earlier paragraphs of this piece but that didn’t extend to people I’d never met before. He didn’t know how to get heroin so I got a bunch of crack with the intention of shooting it up back at the apartment.

I needed to break him off some anyway so we found a secluded alley and took a couple of giant blasts from his pipe. The drug made us especially gregarious or as my new friend more eloquently stated:

“Man, I’m geekin’ like a Puerto Rican!”

Somehow the topic of conversation found it’s way to our respective relationships with our fathers which, perhaps unsurprisingly, were complicated by hard drug use in each of our cases. My sister had taken it upon herself to inform my parents when she heard I’d been using heroin and they were pretty worried considering they hadn’t seen me since getting this piece of news.

I was especially offended because she had spent her early teenage years heavily using methamphetamine but I’d never ratted her out. Most people believe in certain hard drug hierarchies so while it was disappointing it wasn’t especially surprising.

As crack is cocaine that has been combined with baking soda to raise the temperature at which it vaporizes you need to dissolve it in an acid if you want to inject it. I always used lemon juice and I had one of those squeezy plastic lemons back at the apartment. The rush is identical to what you’d get if you started with powder but the taste of lemon hits your throat through your bloodstream for a little tropical twist.

I had my bass, four track and some effect pedals so I stayed up late recording what I thought was well crafted psychedelic metal made up of layered bass tracks. When I finally got a chance to listen back to it sober it sounded like an uninspired morass but that night all the bits seemed to perfectly sync together. I wanted to put it onto a project I’d been working on called “Cocaine: the mix tape”.

The highlight was an extremely convoluted mix of a song from the Enemymine record. godheadSilo was one of my favorite groups so I desperately wanted to see Mike Kunka’s next project when they came to The Casbah. I’d been going to a lot of over 21 shows in Chicago with borrowed IDs but back in my home town of San Diego every bouncer knew exactly who I was and how old I actually was.

It didn’t help that me and Francois had brought along Andy Robillard, one of the main bouncers, the last time we’d driven to Chicago. I had to wait out by the exit while Francois went inside and recorded the set for me on my Fisher Price tape recorder. At least the sound carried through the wall pretty well being all bass – the thing that really stuck with me was when they hit the first booming note one of the other bouncers ran outside clutching his stomach.

At least I got to meet and talk to the band because before the show they were hanging out a block away watching planes land like the scene in Wayne’s World. San Diego, unlike most cities, stuck it’s airport right next to downtown and The Casbah is on the edge closest to it. Mike gave me an old godheadSilo shirt they’d never been able to sell because of how big it was – the design with a pink bunny.

The live recording came out lo-fi but in the best possible way: a throbbing buzz where you can just make out the riffs and rhythms if you know the songs. The one that was most distinguishable was Coccoon Clo3, if you know the song it’s a very catchy riff, so for the mix tape I painstakingly combined it with the studio version from their debut album the ice in me. Thankfully I had the album on vinyl instead of a CD so I spent forever syncing things up so the live and clean versions dovetailed in and out of each other sometimes even fluctuating with a sustained note.

Appropriately enough “Cocaine: the mix tape” was never finished as my buzz ran out halfway through the first side. Sadly I don’t have a copy of it or the Enemymine recording or any objects whatsoever from this time in my life. Frequently moving had already whittled down my possessions but I went through a complete reset when an RV got towed in San Leandro.

After the night of my own bass recording I had to rush out the next morning to return to work and left the apartment in pretty bad shape. That wouldn’t have been a problem if I didn’t misplace my key the next day and because of the odd arrangement the only way to get another one would have been for Nick to be the one to request it. I asked him to but he dragged his ass and a little over a week later the building manager let himself in because a package for Nick had been sitting in the hallway.

When he saw needles all over the place he called Nick’s mom and Nick was in deep shit. She didn’t know about his drug use yet and he was able to (truthfully) tell her that they weren’t his but that meant revealing that he didn’t live there and rented it to other people. Nick was pretty pissed at me over the whole thing but I was already irritated with him that he hadn’t gotten me back into the place I’d payed him for when a single phone call and bus trip could have solved both our problems.

At least I got a chance to go get my stuff.

Anyway it was all feeling a bit unsustainable. I wasn’t anything close to full on strung out but things were definitely chaotic. My whole social group needed a bit of space from each other to figure shit out. Some people left drugs behind and others went deeper into addiction. Nick and Janice broke up not long afterward.

Of course I had no idea that 9/11 and my own personal tragedies accompanying it were looming on the horizon but it was obviously some kind of twilight. I wasn’t thinking about how underground music might be about to change or how the internet would fundamentally alter the face of it but these things are always clearer looking backwards. You can’t define an era until it’s already over.

In the moment I was most aware of a growing hunger for something different.

I’ve got a lust for life…

The Miss Rockaway Armada Part Eleven : “One flame for each!”

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Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

[Photo by Tod Seelie]

Living on a beach in Brooklyn, Illinois got to be isolating once nearly everybody from the project had left and there weren’t any vehicles around. It was a long bike ride to any bridge we were actually allowed to cross over to the Missouri side on. There was a train bridge right next to where we were but me and Alexis got caught by railroad bulls our second or third time using it and had to stop after that because we’d been formally warned that they’d arrest us for trespassing if they saw us on it again.

This was 2007 so although the 9/11 hysteria had died down significantly there was still a Homeland Security watchlist that the bridge was on. We’d occasionally see tanks and other military vehicles being transported across it so the extra strictness did make sense. There was actually a Homeland Security agent who would come around to complain that we weren’t gone yet but under maritime law we were a “vessel in distress” so he couldn’t do anything about it.

That particular law would be a good loophole to exploit if somebody wanted to squat next to any waterway indefinitely but that’s not what we were doing. We unironically were trying to get going down the river as soon as humanly possible. One night the line that connected us to shore was too short and a stark drop in the water level left us drastically beached. This frustrated the Agent even more:

“What if somebody came here when you weren’t around and pushed this thing back into the water?”

I guess whatever kind of Agent he was didn’t require any kind of background in engineering. We answered that we would be extremely grateful to that someone were it to happen but considering that the raft and everything on top of it weighed in around three tons we wouldn’t be holding our breath. After a while we stopped seeing him come around.

There was one guy who would sometimes give us rides or lend us his truck but the trade off was he was extremely annoying to be around. He was part of a group that dressed up in period costumes for the Lewis and Clark expedition and gave informative speeches to anyone who would listen. One day he showed me a lean to he had constructed from natural materials a little ways up the bank at an oblique angle to the raft.

The revelation that he spent an unknown number of hours essentially spying on us was one more red flag for his pile but we weren’t in any position to be selective. Sometimes Alexis would convince him to lend her his truck for a few errands and then disappear for most of the day. I’d have to babysit him as he got drunk, constantly asked rhetorical questions about when she’d be back and vaguely hinted at extracting some kind of sexual payment in exchange while being too much of a coward to just come out and say it.

On one of these afternoons a pair of Black fishermen offered me a small sturgeon that they’d caught and either didn’t have use for or was below the legal limit. Sturgeon grow to impressive sizes and always look like they are wearing funny mustaches. To prepare them for consumption you cut off the head and then squeeze the flesh out of the leathery layer of outer skin – it’s white and fatty kind of close to the texture of lobster tail meat.

For the rest of the day the Lewis and Clark guy kept making a point to talk about the fish “our African American friends gave you”. Every time he said those two words it was like they were a mysterious morsel of food that had somehow found it’s way into his mouth and he was trying to make sure he didn’t accidentally swallow it while at the same time trying even harder to disguise the fact that he found it unappetizing in the first place.

That kind of behavior was pretty normal for older white men around the Midwest – unless they were just transparently and unashamedly racist. After the railroad security recorded our IDs he had suggested that we bike into the city proper by taking an absurdly long and circuitous route that carefully avoided anything resembling a Black neighborhood.

We pretended to appreciate the advice but the neighborhood next to a train yard was actually a spot we’d already been coming to to explore an abandoned church. It had the remains of a unique kind of pipe organ where all sounds came out of the square shaped wooden structures that are often called train whistles. We each took a few of the small ones and one or two huge ones for bass tones – I felt kind of bad about stripping it but it was already incomplete and scattered and it seemed unlikely it would ever be repaired.

The other thing inside that church was a cache of treasure left by neighborhood kids who had evidently been pretending that the building was an archaeological tomb. It got pretty elaborate – most of the artifacts had been written on in a special script but they’d made sure to leave a key so we could learn it all belonged to King Shabbogabbo. They didn’t have much costume jewelry so they had covered a bunch of plastic poker chips in aluminum foil to look like coins.

I can’t even make up excuses for taking that stuff. King Shabbogabbo’s Curse is definitely on me and Harrison and we deserve it. That lesson can take a long time to learn – that when you discover something that cool there is more value in leaving it behind for future discoverers than taking it with you.

Besides the beaching situation which we could do relatively little about the most pressing order of business for The Bling was locating a larger outboard motor. Harrison found a redneck good old boy who was selling off a massive 150 HP unit. When we went to his workshop/garage he said that I looked like I have “sticky fingers” – while I pretty much never steal from associates or peers I understand that the fact that I don’t bother to hide my interest while looking at strangers’ stuff can be disconcerting.

When we first showed up he was having trouble getting the thing to start. I don’t know a ton about outboards but him and Harrison got it going with a lot of tinkering and connecting a hose while it was mounted on a transom. It was clearly a bonding moment for the two of them as they exchanged high fives and repeated variations on:

“Oh yeah, this baby’s gonna fly!”

Not the first thing that I’d expect a vehicle located on water to do but distinctions didn’t really matter. We’d never even get it started again.

After using Harrison as a pack animal to haul it on board he spray painted it gold and we turned our attentions to the matter of constructing a transom. I’ve written in another piece about our imaginary metal band of the same name and the friendly local who gave us access to his workshop of welders and torches. It’s not in a Rockaway chapter but you can read it here:

Los Angeles 2008 : “You can play all the wrong notes. Just play them on time”

Here’s a few details I left out: the weldy guy lived in a mostly empty former apartment building that had a gigantic but empty beehive in one of the upstairs closets. It reminded me of a Matthew Barney sculpture and you could still catch a tiny drip of honey from the bottom to taste it. He made biodiesel in his garage and one of the byproducts was glycerine.

He told me that he would spread it on the ground in the woods to attract the deer that were the only thing he ate and he probably hunted with a bow. He was warm-hearted, extremely helpful and kind of gave off the vibe of how serial killers are depicted in popular media – everything about him was just a little bit too fastidious and methodical.

Once we had gotten the different scrap metal components of the transom in place we went to mount the motor and accidentally dropped the entire thing into the water which is probably the main reason it didn’t work. As crazy as it is for something designed to operate so close to water to be vulnerable to being fully in it that’s how it was – something designed to operate so close to water was vulnerable to being fully in it.

It probably didn’t help matters that Harrison took the advice of some passing fishermen and tried connecting the battery with the polarities reversed. There was an audible snap and the sound of burning. Whatever wasn’t broken from it’s little dunk got good and fried then.

Alexis stepped up and also found someone online who claimed he could help. He’d be coming by after a regular work day and had a rider of sorts – we needed to have a case of Bud Light waiting. He didn’t look at the motor at all that first night but he did completely change our perspective on fires.

The weather had been turning cold and the beach offered plenty of firewood that we usually burned in a metal barrel on deck. A couple visitors commented on how a fire on board a completely wooden vessel was a recipe for disaster but nothing ever happened. I think the plywood was mostly swollen and saturated from absorbing water by this point.

Our mechanic brought along a friend and they turned their noses up at our dainty barrel and dragged over the entire trunks of several fallen trees. They arranged them into a five pointed star pattern on the beach and got a huge blaze going in the center where they all met. The idea is that you gradually slide the trees inward as more of them burn and from then on that’s exactly what we did.

Most nights the flames grew higher than the towering construction on top of The Bling. We didn’t even have to manually light it again, just stirring the coals and throwing on a couple of smaller pieces in the mornings was enough to get it going again.

The mechanics told us that they were good on a sleeping spot and cuddled up next to their bonfire in matching horse and cowboy pajamas. They had a routine going all night where they were constantly wrestling and calling each other gay before going back to spooning. It reminded me of the sleepovers I used to have with my friend Gabe Saucedo while I was still in High School.

It was pretty cute.

The next morning they were pretty much useless for figuring out anything with our motor. It seemed like the whole mechanic thing was a put on and they just wanted to see our raft, get some free beer and hang out. It was around this time that me and Alexis began to realize The Garden of Bling would never move again and only semi-ironically floated forward the idea of burning it as the only way to get Harrison to accept reality.

We left him to fuss with the clearly broken motor and turned our focus to working on the wooden parts of the body while wearing second hand wetsuits to withstand the river’s increasingly freezing temperatures. There were still some project resources like power tools around but most of them were with The Sweeps across the river.

One night we went over to grab some of them while disgustingly loaded on Sparks. It was still legal to sell alcohol and caffeine in the same beverage and nonstop consumption of both led to this intense tunnel vision I’ve never experienced on anything else. Jacki tagged along with us and was laughing derisively at the modest size of The Sweeps’ campfire. Rather than one roaring flame their pit had a scattering of smaller tongues they were futilely attempting to warm their hands over:

“Look at it! One flame for each!”

Next Chapter

Chicago 2001 : Halloween Special “Have You Been Doing Your Homework?”

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I have a whole theory about how the ‘90s in America are better understood as the period of time between Mauerfall in 1989 and the September 11th Attacks in 2001. The Cold War had been a defining part of American existence since the end of World War II and this was echoed in the Underground in a myriad of ways. When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union began to dissolve it suddenly no longer felt like half the world was enmeshed in an ideological struggle against what they perceived as our way of life. (and us against what we perceived as theirs) We went to war in Iraq but that was a small war against a small country with clearly defined borders.

Then 9/11 happened and our President dragged us into a nebulous morass called The War on Terror.

To be involved in the huge swath of counter cultures and creative communities I am loosely referring to as the Underground generally meant living in some level of opposition to the State. As a kid I was aware that Communism was the name of a thing that was supposed to be foreign and scary but I had also been born in a place called a commune that I knew my parents and their friends continued to identify with ideologically.

What I’m trying to say is that America’s Wars weren’t necessarily a thing that we in the Underground were aligned with but they were certainly a thing we were affected by. You can compare being at war with a faceless enemy half a world away to an oppressive heater or air conditioner that there were twelve years of relief from and those twelve years neatly bookended the ‘90s.

Things that had felt free and open about the world for as long as I remembered were suddenly starting to feel closed and dangerous. I caught my breath for a minute and began taking a hard look at the state that my life was in. I had dropped out of college, I was using hard drugs intravenously and some of my ideas and philosophies had just seemed to shatter the sanity of a person I cared about. It seemed like a good time to go back home to my parents and reevaluate what I wanted to do with myself.

There were some other smaller factors that still felt like they were probably worth noticing. The Chicago Police Department had just started installing robotic cameras with flashing blue lights in all of the places where I’d go to buy drugs. It wasn’t that I was worried about being caught or arrested but rather that the sudden appearance of these devices seemed to portend disturbing changes in the world at large.

I had also been participating in a paid research study about intravenous crack users through the Chicago Recovery Alliance. This sounds crazier than it is, crack is just cocaine that has been combined with baking soda so it can be smoked. Mixing it with some form of acid allows it to be dissolved and injected instead – I used lemon juice. The pH levels are hard on your veins but besides that it is indistinguishable from injecting cocaine that had never been crack in the first place. Anyway I found out after September 11th that the organization funding the research had been headquartered in the World Trade Center building and no longer existed.

It felt like another sign that the Universe had bigger plans for me than where I was and what I was doing.

There isn’t a concert or other firmly scheduled event to tell me exactly when I made a trip from Chicago to California but I know that I was in Chicago past Halloween and San Diego by Christmas. I remember packing all of my belongings into two cardboard boxes that went into the checked luggage section at the bottom of the Greyhound Bus that I boarded with another counterfeit pass. The bus would have stopped at the El Bambi Cafe in Beaver, Utah – a picturesque but overpriced little roadhouse with the titular character on its sign. One of the other passengers complained:

“El Bambi must be Mexican for The Rip-off!”

I always either put a lot of effort and energy into a Halloween costume or just throw something together at the last minute – or in special situations like this one a combination of the two. In High School I had gone as Rene Magritte paintings for two consecutive years by combining a black suit and bowler hat with a paper mask of the iconic apple and then a lesser known flying dove. Me and my friends had gone trick or treating in Mission Hills – a wealthy enclave that we assumed would net us better candy. This meant that a lot of College Professor types would gush about my costume and then question my companions about what theirs were supposed to be referencing:

“Uh…. I’m a clown sir.”

In 2001 Chicago I had been growing out my hair and allowed my beard to fill in for one of the first times. With my emaciated frame I was a dead ringer for popular depictions of Christ and decided to attempt to recreate the way He might have looked on the day of the crucifixion. I started by wrapping some dry and browned out thorny vines into an actual crown that provided me with a few small cuts around the temples that always bleed profusely belying their relative absence of severity.

I was going to need a lot more blood but thankfully somebody had already bought a Bucket of Blood or something similar that lived in Nick and Janice’s bathroom. I discovered that mixing fake blood with dirt could create fairly convincing scabs that cling to the skin well and simulated each of the Five Wounds. A filthy piece of rag that I found on the ground somewhere or just outside of an Auto Garage was just big enough to create a loin cloth that covered my genitals but did little else – exactly how I wanted it.

I started rubbing some dirt into my face and skin but decided I wanted the specific marks that would be created by impacts. I’m not sure where my visual inspiration would have come from. Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ wouldn’t be released for another three years, I would have seen The Last Temptation of Christ but He doesn’t get as beat down and filthy in that one. I’ve always dreamed of going to the weeklong Passion Play in Oberammergau but I still haven’t made it and I imagine it’s pretty low key.

I asked my friends, that would have been Andy, John, Nick and Matt probably, to start throwing rocks and dirt clods at me. Some kids from the predominantly Black neighborhood saw what was happening and decided to join in. Small kids like Preschool to maybe Second Grade at the oldest and all dressed in little puffy jackets – none of them seemed to have Halloween costumes. Their mothers laughed and started to take pictures as their children reveled in the opportunity to throw rocks at Christ. It had the desired cosmetic effect but nobody was throwing them hard enough to actually hurt me – the attention and overall anachronism of the resulting tableaux was making me giddy.

The weather in Chicago was starting to get cold but discomfort was an essential part of the costume and performance. I was kept warm by self admiration and resolve. We wanted to get on a bus to Logan Square but the bus driver didn’t want to let me board because I was barefoot and almost naked. We liked to imagine that this was actually a variation on the Christmas story of Mary and Joseph being denied lodging in Bethlehem as it continued to happen through the night. Somebody took off their suit jacket and we wrapped it around my waist and she let us on the bus.

We were going to Logan Square for the All Hallow’s Eve performances by the now defunct Redmoon Theater Company. While hunting for photographs I read that this event attracted an audience of 10,000 – it was more or less their breakout year. It was my first time seeing the giant papier-mâché puppets that would become familiar sights at protests and Mardi Gras. My costume was a hit. A lot of people wanted pictures but it was nothing like it would be today. A camera was something that somebody carried if they had planned to take pictures ahead of time – not the ubiquitous device in every single person’s pocket.

Generally speaking people would expect some kind of longer interaction if they felt that our combined costumes constituted a “theme”. Any type of religious costume like priests or angels, devils of course or costumes that generally represented sin – like a flasher with a prosthetic penis or women in the generic “sexy” costumes that had not yet come to dominate the holiday. Then something truly unexpected happened.

A young Mexican American boy saw me and his eyes lit up. I was his hero and that carried a responsibility to behave heroically. Obviously there was a bit of edgelord in my costume choice but I hadn’t done it to be shocking or offensive – mostly I had wanted it to be accurate above all else. He took my hand and his parents stood behind him smiling in implied trust:

“Oh my God! It’s You!”

“Hi! How are you?”

“I’m good!”

“That’s great! Have you been doing your homework?”

“Yes! I have!”

“I’m so proud of you! Listen to your parents and always remember that I love you!”

I didn’t have any pockets but I think one of my friends had some kind of candy. I went to hand him some but his parents politely waved it away – it’s entirely possible that whatever it was hadn’t been individually wrapped. I probably could have asked him about something a little more on topic than schoolwork but I had been kind of put on the spot. You don’t think as you’re covering yourself with blood and dirt that you will wind up as a rough equivalent of a Mall Santa but there it was – it happened exactly once.

I’ve never been a famous person or a passably attractive woman so this was one of my only experiences with having an endless stream of strangers really want my attention and validation in the course of a single night. I’m fairly extroverted and it was great fun for the first few hours but I did eventually experience a kind of “burnout”. I had used my temporary celebrity status to convince the door guy at The Double Door to let me in and was enjoying the relative anonymity of standing at the back of the crowd for a rare reunion concert by indie heroes The Frogs.

A girl in a sexy devil costume saw me from across the room and got excited and came over. She poked me with her plastic pitchfork and I recoiled and winced in a pantomime of exaggerated pain. She continued to poke me and I responded with less enthusiasm. She didn’t seem to be getting the message so I dropped to the floor and assumed the fetal position. She kept poking me:

“What is it going to take for you to understand that I don’t want to play with you?”

She looked horrified and walked away quickly in embarrassment. I’m sure I could have been nicer about it. I should have stopped being in such an interesting costume in public once I realized that I had run out of energy to offer to other people who were just trying to tell me how much they liked my costume. I had a sweater vest with a picture of a kitten on it in one of my friend’s messenger type bags and eventually I pulled it on and I wasn’t Jesus anymore – or at least not as much as I had been.

When I lived on a raft on the Mississippi River I got used to watching the big barges pass and then bracing for the wakes. Nothing much happens when it’s right next to you – it’s afterward that the waves push you up and down and against the shore. I rode one of those waves from 9/11 all the way to California and I watched things bounce up and down as it finished passing. I got to do things after this that I had never managed to pull off in these early stages. I eventually played my own tours and put my own tapes out instead of just trying to jump into other people’s vans or grab their mics to freestyle rap for a minute.

But this was the last thing I got to do in that old world and so looking back it means a lot to me. I don’t know if I realized that the play was in a whole different Act the moment I got to California but there it was. They don’t give you a program when you walk in, you just get to look back over it later. What is it she says in that Joni Mitchell song at the end of the Greenpeace documentary?

“On and on it’s always the way you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone they’ve pulled out the trees and put in a parking lot”

Chicago 2001 : 9/11 Part 1 “The Attack on America Tour”

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There have been several points in my life where I’ve met people and immediately known the moment I set eyes on them that we are going to have a major impact on each other’s lives. It’s a bit like the concept of a Karass or Granfalloon in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle – but I couldn’t say decisively which one. It has always been unequivocally mutual: me and these people might not end up wanting the exact same things at every stage of our often brief associations but we absolutely experience the same sense of gravity. It generally manifests as attraction of some nature but at its core it feels like some personification of The Universe or Fate has placed tiny statues of us on the same chessboard for some hidden purpose.

The later iterations of this phenomenon manifested in the company of specific and detailed instincts. A silent voice from somewhere deep inside me offered a general warning against allowing things to move in a romantic or sexual direction. It never really made too much of a difference as I’m not really the type to exercise caution in matters of the heart but at least I had some kind of warning that I shouldn’t expect any happy endings. This first time I was running blind and for better or worse I ended up with the only boyfriend of my life.

Jordan was soft spoken and had dark eyebrows with matching close cropped hair. There was a single mole on his face and his brown eyes looked sensitive and innocent. He was a basic type of small town indie rock boy I see all the time but I’m not sure if I did a good enough job of describing it. Think plaid flannel shirts and long silences that are made to appear thoughtful but actually represent not knowing what to say. A faint smile the moment that the warming effects of alcohol begin to take hold and smooth away some of the anxieties that keep him interacting with the world as a spectator.

I met Jordan at a house full of good looking normie skater stoner boys that went to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He had been working as a baker and wasn’t quite the same type as all of the other guys he’d been living with. He was a couple years younger than me but I didn’t think about that as much as I probably should have. I was young myself, only just twenty one for less than even a month. I looked across the room and our eyes met and then it was already too late to change anything.

I talked to him about my theory of “urban shamanism” – the idea that overdosing on cough medicine created the same kind of synergy with a modern city environment that ethnobotanical drugs presented to the mountains and forests of Stone Age level traditional cultures. He must have liked the way I made it sound because I ended up shoplifting a couple of boxes of Coricidin for us from the closest Walgreen’s. It would be my final baile with the blister packs – the mere sight of the tiny red pills would come to induce uncontrollable waves of nausea after this encounter had devolved into the resulting wreckage.

A DXM trip presents in stages. The first part is giddy with the general visual and auditory trappings of the more traditional psychedelics. We wandered into the simply named Occult Bookstore in Wicker Park and I scoured the shelves for a particular grimoire so obscure it probably didn’t even exist. At the Fireside Bowl I convinced Brian Peterson to let us spend a few minutes roaming around a concert I can’t even remember the genre of let alone who was playing.

We ended up back in Jordan’s basement room which was full of quilts and nice wooden furniture – it looked like the way I imagined the inside of Big Pink from the famous Bob Dylan record. The DXM trip was shifting into what I always referred to as the “featherweight ballerina” phase. Normally it made me feel light on my feet and somewhat otherworldly like I was living in an antique photograph. This particular time there were some unprecedented side effects.

The best way I know how to explain it is that the barriers that generally separate one human consciousness from another were suddenly and unceremoniously ripped away. Jordan and I seemed to be psychically connected and concepts like secrets, disagreements or even personal property had simply dissolved in the light of our intense and urgent newfound connection. As we stared into each other’s eyes I screamed out in frustration at a world of stories that had unforgivably neglected to explore the depths and contours of this new and unprecedented experience:

“I hate every movie ever made!”

When we were finally able to fall asleep we shared his bed but had to separate our gangly frames – any physical contact felt like an electrical shock. This might sound like the kind of thing we would want to explore or experiment with but we actually recoiled from it. We held hands when walking after that but such was the full extent of our carnal relationship. We never once kissed or otherwise pursued the sexual or even romantic side of things. Writing this now I realize it sounds like we were actually friends but we weren’t. We were together, we were a couple. I mean we were kids with no idea what was happening but I’ve been married for ten years now and for the short time that Jordan and I were entangled it fundamentally felt the same.

I didn’t have a cell phone back then, I had never been in the habit of listening to the radio and I didn’t turn on televisions. The next morning was September 11th, Jordan had left at the crack of dawn to make bread so I went over to Dave, Meg and Vanessa’s Ukrainian Village apartment to get a couple more hours of sleep before I had to be at my Italian Cafe job. I woke up and the place was empty so I decided to walk over to the house full of hardcore boys that had played against El Rancho in the Softball Game. I think they called it The Midtown Chess Club.

As I made my way up a side street the neighborhood was particularly animated. Everybody was sitting out on their stoops and balconies and calling back and forth about “when the plane hit the building” and if everybody saw it or not. I figured that one of the Die Hard movies or something similar was playing on a local network television station and people were just excited to get a break from the soaps and talk shows.

I walked into the house and a TV was just on and tuned into the news. Everywhere I went for the next couple of days a TV would be playing like that – just going over the same things over and over until the News Anchors started to look sleep deprived but they just kept going. I saw the smoking tower and that it was news and it was real and America was under attack. Aaron Hahn and Sean Rafferty and whoever else came back into the room and silently stood there and watched it with me.

Somebody was supposed to be going to College but they found out it was closed. There was this irrational fear that any public gathering of two or more people would be targeted in another attack. People thought this in every small town across America that day and we were in Chicago – one of the biggest cities. I figured that I wasn’t going to be going to work.

Jordan and I had talked about the fact that I had been intravenously using heroin and cocaine and had decided that I should stop for a while. I hadn’t been doing it every day or anything like that but it did seem like a good time for a break. Then September 11th happened and I wanted to do something – anything – that felt familiar and normal and that was getting high. I took West Chicago Avenue under the Metra tracks and when I passed the Aldi by Kedzie I was in the zone. The whole city had shut down but the corners were business as usual.

I figured that Jordan was back from work early and I went over to his house. I told him that I’d gotten high but it wasn’t a big deal or anything. The TV was on and his roommates were smoking weed and making really stupid jokes about how the smoking ruins of the buildings were actually giant smoke sessions. Jordan and I decided that we should get out of town for a few days and made plans to take a train to Holland, Michigan and visit his parents for a little while.

There was a noise show I wanted to see at The Fireside that night. Thirteen noise artists were touring together in an RV and trying to play back to back 5 minute sets in the shortest possible amount of time. It was called Phi Phenomena on Wheels. It was actually a great lineup – there were really cool sets from Ortho and oVo and Temple of Bon Matin. Jordan didn’t like the energy and went home early. I forget who was up first but I remember the first thing that was said into the microphone:

“This is the “Attack on America” Tour!”

In the constantly escalating transgressive world of Experimental Noise Music there’s no such thing as “too soon”.

Next Part Here: