Tag: Generation

Alraune (Part One of Two)

berniebleak1 Comment

It’s difficult to decide exactly where to start this piece so I think I’ll cleave to tradition and lead with a specific time and place. In April of 2012 I was on the Trapped in Reality tour with Generation and Sisterfucker. I had been in contact with Jonathan Coward, best known for his R&B project Shams, about setting up our NYC show. There had been talk about a bar but it apparently fell through and we went with a last minute show at Jonathan’s Brooklyn apartment.

I can’t recall the exact chain of events that led to me adding a rapper called Drrty Pharms to the bill. We had met in Los Angeles and stayed connected over social media so most likely I either saw he was in NYC and offered or he saw I had a show that night and asked. I was a fan of his music from the very small amount of exposure I‘d had to it. I had been booking shows at a warehouse in the West Adams district of Los Angeles called McWorld and at the end of one night the proprietor of the space had a friend of his jump on the mic.

It’s important to remember that in 2012 the trend of SoundCloud Rap was just emerging and the ‘90s revival that would soon sweep over mainstream fashion was still relatively underground. My first impression of Drrty Pharms was a small statured blonde kid in wide leg JNCOs and an oversized Marilyn Manson T-shirt wearing a necklace of a Barbie Doll head with short cropped hair and drawn on makeup.

He instantly reminded me of the way my Junior High School friends in the early ‘90s had dressed and acted. After cueing up his beat from a miniature mp3 player he awkwardly stared at his feet and began rapping with perfect cadence in a voice barely above a mumble. I had to strain my ears to make out a snatch of lyrics:

“Motherfuckin’ dirty whores, what you fuck with Drrty for? I ain’t givin’ you the dick so what the fuck you flirting for?”

I took the whole thing as a self conscious parody of both the exaggerated sexual bravado found in mainstream rap music and masculine fragility wrapped in the aesthetics of Woodstock ‘99. It seemed as tongue in cheek to me as Kimya Dawson from The Moldy Peaches singing:

“Who’m I gonna stick my dick in?”

Besides that his skills in beat production, lyricism and delivery were undeniable and despite the lowered voice and downcast eyes he exuded palpable charisma.

At the NYC show he brought along a girlfriend with long blonde hair who stood directly in front of him for his entire set doing a dance move I refer to as the “groupie hip sway”. I began to notice that misogyny, including violent misogyny, seemed to play a larger role in his lyrics than I realized and distanced myself from that point on.

Here is a short video of his set that night. The recorded song riffs on a Fugee’s hit and is not especially violent. His devoted fan, presumed partner, is not visible in this shot. His mumble had marginally grown in confidence but the high point of the video is a shout of “HE SUCKS!” from the otherwise small and unresponsive crowd.

I have a copy I can embed for anybody interested:

NYC Spring of 2012

I would say this is the moment I realized Wolfe’s music/persona was not what I’d been reading it as. On the same tour I was singing and playing drums in a project called Dealbreaker that I’d best describe as an exploration of “dark masculinity”. I think I projected my own creative energies on what I’d seen of his work and made an error in doing so.

Things like the inherent threat of violence in sexual dimorphism, the predatory nature that can accompany mate pursuit and the fetishization of young male artists as “sexual outlaws” all interested me in abstract, artistic ways. In my own life I was trying my best to be open, vulnerable and above all else consensual in this arena. I think I mistook Wolfe for a kindred spirit when we were closer to opposites.

He’d passed me a SoundCloud link and trends in his album titles were eye opening. I think the big one was Beating Women to Make Beats to Beat Women to. Sure the Spacemen 3 reference was transparent but when somebody always makes the same joke is it even a joke? It seemed clear that hurting women both physically and sexually was important to him so I turned my attention away and moved on.

It wasn’t my scene and I doubted I could do much as an elder or positive influence – from what I’d read he thrived on opposition and negative attention.

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A few years later I started to notice that his social media profiles, if not his music, were building a following around New York City. This happened mostly through my now-wife LaPorsha who had several mutuals close to him or in his circle. His music productivity had stepped up with the Beta Boys collective but the bigger bump was undoubtedly his shocking and offensive posts.

He regularly tested the boundaries of what 2013-2014ish Facebook would allow with posts about grooming and abusing women, references to consumption of Child Sexual Abuse Material, guileless racial caricatures and questionable confessionals about living as a sexual submissive to men of these races. The first recorded use of the term edgelord is attributed to 2015 by Merriam-Webster and Wolfe no doubt employed this archetype to drive engagement, including hate engagement, and expand his reach.

It doesn’t mean the things he was saying about himself were either untrue or inaccurate.

By 2019 his SXSW set was featured in Vice, large outlets like GQ and Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgard (known for mining the culture of transgression in Norwegian Black Metal) used him as a model and No-Wave legend Lydia Lunch released a split record with him. It’s worth noting that other young artists, Tyler the Creator and his collective Odd Future for example, were mining similar territory as a quick path to notoriety and have since moved away from abrasive, homophobic and misogynist lyrics.

Later that year everything for Wolfe came crashing down.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/they-believe-wolfe-margolies-aka-drrty-pharms-confessed-to-rapes-in-his-rap-lyrics

The above link will give better details and clearer sources but a sting had been underway involving Wolfe sourcing heroin to fellow Columbia students – one of whom died of an overdose and opened the case through her phone records. My own feelings on the ethics of punishing drug dealers are complex but more damning was a wealth of CSAM (formerly called Child Pornography) found on his phone during an airport seizure.

More interesting is that while at least four female victims of rape and grooming by Wolfe contacted the New York DA – often with references to specific rap lyrics in his songs bragging about verifiable features of these crimes, no charges of this type were pursued. One of his accusers contacted the police department after seeing that the trial was moving forward but nobody had followed up with her – she was told there were no records of her being interviewed.

The sad reality is that defense lawyers tend to bully sexual assault victims and attempt to tear them, and their lifestyles, apart. Traumatic events are asked about in detail multiple times – looking for the slightest inconsistency or hesitation in order to throw the entire testimony into question. The DA likely viewed allowing such witnesses to testify as too much of a risk if their reports crossed their desk at all.

Ultimately locking up a rapper for the classic crime of drug conspiracy and trafficking was a slam dunk, the contraband sex material on his devices guaranteed extra charges but his female victims were evidently deemed unreliable and unworthy of taking the stand. For anyone who doesn’t know that every police precinct in America is overflowing with completed rape kits that decay on shelves untested this might sound surprising. Without extreme extenuating circumstances female victims of sexual violence fall perhaps lowest in the hierarchy of who our peace keepers believe in pursuing justice for.

Nonetheless I can’t help but feel that locking up a suburban, wealthy white kid who attended early college on drug charges feels a little too much like leaning into cliches and prejudices around his chosen music genre as opposed to seeking retribution for his victims in the truest sense.

After all, play ground myths aside, most drug buyers are eager shoppers and active participants. I would not say that about rape victims.

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With Wolfe behind bars and mentions of his name falling sharply since 2019 it would be valid to ask why am I dredging up his name and crimes at all – possibly throwing more attention his way. My reasons are twofold: first the Facebook reminder of our 2012 show sparked memories but more importantly reviewing his life and circumstances reminded me of an obscure decadent/weird fiction German novel from 1911 called Alraune.

For those readers who delight in moments where my fancies and tenuous connections twist into improbable filigrees we have arrived at the candy. From here on out shit’s getting weird. A brief synopsis and profile on author Hanns Heinz Ewers are in order before any jab at proceeding.

I knew the word Alraune from references in a Thrones album title and Castlevania games long before I read the original myself in the 1929 US translation. Ewers is a diminished, misunderstood figure in weird and decadent literature for one obvious reason – a brief formal alliance with the Nazi Party. As best as I can tell he was more Prussian nationalist than White Supremacist and many of his works show reverence for so-called “primitive cultures” of his era.

From 1901 he travelled Europe as the writer for a vaudeville troupe but hung this up due to prohibitive expenses and the heavy hands of Censors. He continued to write in many genres including his best known works: the Frank Braun trilogy of horror novels. Alraune is the centerpiece of these. The Nietzchean anti-hero Braun is generally regarded as the author’s self insert.

Ewers traveled extensively and found himself on US soil during the First World War. This led to his arrest for fomenting support for the Kaiser. Eventually he was sent back to Germany and won favor with the Nazi party for his film work and biography of theatrical propagandist Wessels. His homosexual tendencies and the proud retention by his literary stand-in of a Jewish mistress led to a quick falling out with the party and a brief ban of all his works in his homeland.

He secured a reversal and died of tuberculosis soon after. Call me a Nazi sympathizer if you must but the paucity of his works in reprint seems rather unfair in contrast to his admirer, H.P. Lovecraft, who proudly supported the Nazis in their racial extermination goals yet today sees his own works reprinted in at least 100 different complete editions and countless works set in his mythos by other writers. I also admire Lovecraft’s writing despite his deplorable politics. I thought I’d throw in for added historical and literary context that Ewers wrote on Poe and corresponded for many years with Aleister Crowley.

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That’s more than enough of Alraune’s author so let’s talk about the book and why I think it pertains to Wolfe specifically.

At its core it is a gender-bent retelling of the Frankenstein myth where genetics, Eugenics and the questions around nature vs nurture replace the original work’s reanimation of corpses. The catalyst for the story is an Alraune, or mandrake root, in the form of a gnarled human figure that falls from a wall and into the punch bowl at a bourgeois gathering.

A nearby lawyer lays out the relevant mythology: a mandrake is said to form when a murderer is hanged at a crossroads and his final seed, released from the act of breaking his neck, soaks into the fertile earth. When the leaves grow to sufficient size a witch or wizard pulls up this root. This must be done at midnight on a full moon with either cotton stuffed ears or a hapless animal set to the task. The screams of the tiny creature as it is ripped from the earth are said to bring instant death to any listener.

Once acquired the mandrake manikin is brought home, regularly bathed in wine and said to bring money into the household while rendering the masters irresistible – all at the price of unfortunate early death and eternal damnation for their immortal souls. Irregardless the talisman of the Alraune was heavily sought after and commanded high prices. The magical root is featured in several Biblical stories and especially anthropomorphic specimens are in the collections of several museums.

With the legend out of the way the novel shifts its focus to the science. The aforementioned Frank von Braun is in attendance at the party, as is an uncle of his named Doctor Jacob ten Brinken. The Doctor keeps a private laboratory for experiments including artificial insemination. Ewers no doubt believed the procedure to be unprecedented in humans but his research failed him. A Scottish surgeon completed the first documented conception by this route in 1790 while crafty midwives and other women have no doubt understood the potential for the majority of human history.

The Alraune inspires Braun to advise his uncle to attempt to recreate the magic creature in human form. Rather than a hanging the semen is collected from a convicted murderer and rapist the evening before his execution by guillotine. With his nephews’s help, and an elaborate cover story about a disinherited prince, Ten Brincken convinces a young red haired prostitute to bear the child. Her name is Alma Raune but she shortens it to Al.Raune when signing the contract.

The child, a daughter, is named Alraune ten Brincken and made the sole inheritor of the doctor’s estate at the exclusion of his nephew. Her birth is appropriately portentous – throughout a lengthy delivery she screams like an otherworldly creature and is born with the skin of her legs fused together to the knees. The mother dies from blood loss and the operating surgeon, the older doctor’s assistant, succumbs to blood poisoning after performing corrective surgery for the child’s skin condition.

The source of the infection is inferred to be a microscopic scratch inflicted upon his forearm by the infant.

The young Alraune needs a bit of time to appear sinister. An older wealthy doctor like Ten Brincken, now His Excellency through some honorary title or another, simply does not involve themselves with the care and emotional upkeep of children. Around the estate the majority of the serving staff detect some offensive pheromone or mannerism in the young girl and do only the bare minimum to keep her alive.

In the house of the Gontrams, the scene of the happy party where our anthropomorphic root creature had a sip of wine, the personification of death has been making sport and with the assistance of consumption the bony fingers have whisked away the mother and most of her sons. An older daughter lives but spends her days with a wealthy Duchess and her daughter Olga. That leaves, besides the complacent father who would be unsportsmanlike for death, the youngest son called Wölf or Wölfchen.

I was not expecting the name when I picked up this book to see how well my theories fit the text. The coincidence is not as canny as it could be – for in my allegorical reading Wolfe Margolies (Drrty Pharms) is not Wölfchen Gontram but rather Alraune ten Brincken herself. The gender-flip has flipped a second time and seems to create a more congruous twist on Frankenstein than the recent Poor Things outing – which promised a feminist reading but instead chose to trade in puerile fantasy and the male gaze…

With Wolfe as our Alraune poor Wölfchen from the original story needs an avatar in our reality. Wölfchen was Alraune’s childhood playmate and plaything. Like many male characters in the narrative she is to him like a flame to a moth and will burn his wings and cause his destruction.

I nominate for this office the girl who was doing the “groupie hip sway” at our 2012 concert on Troutman. She is never visible in the embedded video segment and I have no idea how to find her name or how things with Wolfe turned out for her. According to certain patterns, in Wolfe’s behavior and choice of victims, the smart money seems to be on “not well” but for now let’s leave her image on the “wildcard” space.

Just for this one moment, as we do in every work of horror; be it novel or cinema, let us pretend that nothing is predetermined, anything is possible and in the end we could hope for safety and happiness – instead of merely the cold comforts of revenge…

[End of Part 1 of 2 *************************]

Next time: More on Wolfe, his crimes, his life and the novel Alraune. A discussion of the themes through a social lens. The alt-right/incel pipeline and angry young men. Feminism. Accountability and who gets it, does everybody?

Read Part Two here:

Alraune (Part Two of Two)

Chicago 2010 : “I heard you had two girls on chains and you made them do anything you wanted”

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I wasn’t necessarily going to write up this whole tour but I wrote the first part last time and there’s a piece from Michigan that would come right after this one a while ago so I might as well do it all and string them together with links. Travelogue is one of those words I use when I want to bury my head in the sand from the problem that this is basically a memoir so I might as well hew closer to that for a hot minute. It sure as hell isn’t “Rock Journalism” or at least not particularly effective at pretending to be.

There was a photo from Iowa City I was hoping to use as the picture for this one where I was holding an ornate magnifying glass over one of my eyes. I just went to try to grab it from Facebook but it looks like it isn’t there anymore. I even had it as my profile picture for a minute but apparently that doesn’t make a difference if the original poster deletes it or unfriends you. The whole reason I joined Facebook in the first place was to get access to some of Joel’s photos from this tour but in the last decade he’s done both of those things: unfriended me and erased it all.

The Iowa City show was in a big warehouse and the closer we got to Chicago and Bitchpork it felt like things were accelerating like we were being pulled into its gravitational field so this was a bigger and better attended night than anything before it. I’d been hearing the name The Savage Young Taterbug for a second but this was the first time I’d actually met him. He was hanging out in Chouser’s room with Sci-Fi Sam when we pulled up.

Chouser wasn’t even Chouser yet, he was still “Jason”, but I probably met him on the cusp of the transformation. He was wearing a muscle shirt and had one of those hairstyles where it’s like a ponytail but on top of your head toward the back but he also had this big illustrated library book about the Wild Boys movement in pre-World War II Germany. By the time he’d finished digesting and synthesizing it he’d be himself.

This was the last show where the Generation set wasn’t ready yet and Rian performed solo as Baby Love. Iowa City has the same issue as a lot of college towns where women greatly outnumber men, especially in the Underground, and male creatives end up fetishized and put on a pedestal. During both of our sets [Rian was still male presenting at this time] we were more or less treated like bachelorette party strippers and got grabbed at to the point that they even ripped our clothes.

At the time I told myself that as a performer my body became temporary public property. I wrote this off as part of the implied social contract between entertainer and audience but now that I’ve had a great deal of time to process things I don’t necessarily look at it the same way. I feel like that kind of license should be explicitly stated – like in Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 piece. It wasn’t a huge issue but it wasn’t great and I’d hope our scene’s culture has evolved beyond this kind of thing.

I had a song that was intended to be a curse from this period when I was excessively careless with dark magic. I first wrote it as lyrics for a Living Hell piece but during my set at the first Mojave Rave I started recreating it as a Bleak End song. It was never directed at anything specific – more like a obscenely negative and negligent version of when they release a bunch of doves like in the UNARIUS Conclave of Light.

It had one section that went:

“This breath will fade, This bloom will wilt, This song goes on ‘til blood is spilt”

I felt like it would have more effect as both a spell and bit of stagecraft if that were actually true and the only way to do that ethically was to spill my own. I had been cutting myself every time I repeated that particular lyric with a hoof-handled knife a friend had received as a wedding gift at his Eastern European sham green card marriage but given to me when he’d realized it was cursed.

I wrote about this somewhere else but at this performance I’d gotten a little too giddy and forcefully slashed toward my own stomach. The crowd gasped and when I looked down I realized I’d severed the cord of the microphone I’d been singing into. I wondered about writing that out again but then felt like it would feel stranger to come to this exact point and not mention it – for the people who’ve read everything these bits will be like refrains in a very long song.

Joel had a lot of staging concepts he’d been planning to work into the Generation set including building some kind of oversized baby crib but with Bitchpork looming it had to be reinterpreted and pared down. What he and Rian ended up with was that they’d both hold worklights on long extension cords with very bright or colored lightbulbs and also wear leather bondage collars on long chains.

I would stand in the back wearing a grim reaper’s robe and constantly tug on the chains to pull them backwards as they were singing. The best way to refer to it was that I was their background dancer but a combination of the visually implied power dynamic and the staging for the Bleak End set meant that spectators didn’t always interpret things that way.

We were working out together every day we were on tour with a program of rotating exercises called P90X. There were five or six different ones but the really fun one was called Kenpo-X where you would kick, punch and karate chop at the air in front of you. I had the Pickells return the favor by choreographing a synchronized program of these moves for them to go through behind me while I was doing my songs.

A big part of why everything happened the way it did was that we were sharing a single performance slot at Bitchpork. I forget if this was the way things had been booked from the get-go or if either act was a late addition but with so many bands and a tight schedule it was advantageous to be able to rattle through both sets in under thirty minutes after a single sound check.

At this stage I was performing in a lacey white costume so for maximum surprise factor I’d get dressed where nobody could see me then hide this under the black robe until it was time to make the switch. It was never thought of like either act was “headlining” but having a transition where a robe and chains were quickly pulled off was just faster and made more sense than trying to put all this stuff on in the chaos and adrenaline of the big moment.

The unforeseen consequence was that a hefty chunk of the audience got confused and thought the whole thing was “my” set. I would have thought that the fact that I never touched the computer or sang into either microphone during the Generation half would have made it clear that I had no hand in creating the music – in fact we had even recorded all of my drum machine tracks onto Joel’s computer to speed things along and as he was the only one setting it up and testing levels before we all started it almost would have made more sense to view all of it as “his”.

Of course there were a lot more variables at play: I was older and had a history of living and playing in Chicago so a larger chunk of the crowd was already familiar with me as a performer. I also just take up a lot of space socially, or did back then, I had a large personality and was noticeably more extroverted than either Pickell. The big indication of what had happened was when somebody who hadn’t seen any of it approached me to talk about “my set”:

“I heard you had two girls on chains and you made them do anything you wanted!”

When I talked to Rian about this recently she mentioned how the remark feels affirming in retrospect but I think Joel was especially hit hard by the element of having something he’d been feverishly slaving over and just debuted credited to someone else. Joel is a colossal talent of a songwriter and while I need to say that his work is criminally unknown, even in the underground, I need to acknowledge his collusion as an accomplice in that crime. None of the Generation songs have been recorded and are only available in a dwindling cache of live recordings on YouTube.

For the rest of the tour we often flipped the order of our sets, sometimes did them at opposite ends of a night instead of back to back and on a couple of occasions either Bleak End or Generation didn’t play at all but the damage had already been done. Once we were back in Oakland the role of chain-puller was recast – for any subsequent performances of that Generation set it was John Benson without the black robe to ensure that nobody could even mistake the figure for me.

Nonetheless we had inadvertently birthed certain misconceptions that would cast a shadow over the second Generation tour two years later. The Trapped in Reality tour shirts only listed Sister Fucker and Generation but throughout the booking process we all talked about me and Dalton coming along and performing. Vanessa and Erin in Sister Fucker assumed that would be as part of Generation while me and the Pickells assumed it was so clear that such a collaboration had never happened and never would that nobody could actually assume that.

We had essentially been living in opposite and incompatible realities until the moment we were all in the van together. Now it had to be hastily reconciled into a single awkward reality that we all were trapped in – the tour name had been oddly prophetic. Sister Fucker would have never deliberately planned a three band tour for logistical reasons but on our end we hadn’t even planned it with Bleak End sets that are easy to squeeze in anywhere due to the plug and play nature.

Me and Dalton had created a live drums and bass project that went through a few names but landed on Dealbreaker. This name would also prove to be prophetic – by the end of the tour Dalton no longer wanted to do the project and the Pickell siblings would never collaborate again. Anyway I’m getting ahead of myself, I just wanted to show the far reaching consequences of the Bitchpork set and the confusions of author and membership it inspired.

Anyway let’s go back to Bitchpork. I somehow missed the first one even though I was in Chicago for a decent chunk of the Summer – maybe it happened the same time I was in Berlin. The second year was when it moved to Mortville and really started to blow up. It felt a lot like the 2008 International Noise Conference. Everybody was there, the creative energy of Underground America was bursting at the seams…

Actually let’s go back to just before Bitchpork. While we were driving through the cornfields between Iowa City and Chicago a song suddenly leaped out of the radio that pulled the three of us to instant attention. It started with a strumming acoustic guitar and a woman I later discovered was Rihanna singing an infectious vocal hook. Next Eminem exploded from the speakers and the two traded off building the energy and tension as high as humanly possible.

Love the Way You Lie tapped into everything each of us, in slightly different ways, loved about mainstream pop music. It completely transformed the energy in the car. The moment it ended we immediately wanted to hear it again. Then we did, then we heard it over and over again until it got to the point where we would change the station to try to get away from it only to find the exact same song playing everywhere we turned.

By the end of the tour we never wanted to hear it again.

[Michigan story here:]

Michigan 2010 : The Land of NOD Experiment “Hot Dogs and Mojitos”

Michigan 2010 : The Land of NOD Experiment “Hot Dogs and Mojitos”

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You’ll remember that at the conclusion of The Bus chapters John Benson found a cheap house online in Albion, the closest town in Michigan to where The Bus broke down, and decided to buy it. The plan was to use this house as a base of operations while working to repair The Bus using the planned engine transplant method and even to store The Bus on the property. His reasoning was sound: one generally believes that owning a house gives you the legal right to occupy it and neighborhoods where most of the houses are unoccupied and selling for a pittance on eBay won’t be subject to the vicissitudes of HOAs and the like.

Albion, in these regards, turned out to be exceptional – or at least this particular block of it did. One neighbor decided from the moment John Benson first set foot into the house that we didn’t seem like the kind of people he wanted in his neighborhood and local laws and regulations seemed to be on his side. He found a law to prevent John from being able to move The Bus onto the premises and went to work on tracking down the legal loopholes to keep us out entirely.

This was more of a war of attrition then something that happened overnight – after it became apparent The Bus wasn’t getting fixed a few different people from the extended friend network tried their hand at small town living. Jason Crumer became so frustrated with Albion that he edited the town’s Wikipedia entry to say something to the effect of “full of ignorant assholes”. That didn’t garner a ton of good will with the populace at large.

This was the larger background situation when I passed through Albion on tour with Generation and walked into the house to find a wild opossum hissing at us from inside of a cage in the center of the largest room. No one we knew was supposed to be staying there at the time so as far as we could tell there was an unknown squatter who had a penchant for keeping angry marsupials in captivity. We were feeling a little apprehensive about sticking around long enough to find out when a more innocuous explanation presented itself.

There was one person in Albion that liked having us around and wanted to help in any way he could: a punk kid named Kevin who worked at the one coffee shop. He’d been keeping an eye on the house and had noticed that the opossum had taken up residence in it. He’d borrowed a live trap from the animal shelter and we’d just happened to wander in after the animal got caught but before he’d come back to check it.

I hopped into Coffee Kev’s car for the familiar activity of “taking it for a ride” – driving the opossum far enough away that it wouldn’t find it’s way back to the house. When I was younger a mother opossum had moved her brood into my family’s garage and I helped my father capture and relocate the juveniles. I’ll never forget the way they despondently grabbed onto the bars of the cat carrier with their tiny and oddly human looking hands.

The adult from the Albion house wasn’t being as cute about it’s temporary lack of freedom – it backed into the corner of the trap and hissed every time anybody looked at it. Regardless this is my most vivid memory of Albion: driving down backroads green with tall grass and pasture, chatting with Kevin about God knows what until we decided it was far enough and watched a frightened opossum scurry off into the undergrowth.

Once we got back to the house there was barely enough time to walk upstairs and look around before the cops showed up. Apparently the problem neighbor had dug into local codes and ordinances and figured out that the house was in need of various repairs and renovations that meant it was technically illegal for anyone to stay in it until an inspection indicated the work was finished. The cops seemed embarrassed and were apologetic:

“We wish nobody had called us but unfortunately somebody did and the law is on his side.”

I don’t know what eventually happened to the house or the first bus but I’d imagine that John Benson doesn’t own anything in Albion anymore. Some friends had done some digging on the neighbor and figured out that he liked parrots and motorcycles but that’s not exactly material for the kind of blackmail that could get him off of everybody’s backs. He wasn’t going anywhere. Something to think about when considering buying a dilapidated house sight unseen in a small town you know next to nothing about.

This section of the tour wasn’t that solidly booked and we ended up accepting an opportunity that was bizarre even by noise tour standards. We were supposed to be playing on a miniature bicycle powered stage provided by a recycling themed clown troupe at a major music festival. Our friend Books had been living in Detroit and getting into the clown troupe subculture with a group she called The Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos.

I don’t know very much about The Land of NOD Experiment except that there was some kind of New Orleans connection and in 2010 it was attempting to make the jump from a smaller friends camp and jam thing to a larger festival in terms of talent and infrastructure. The headliners were Of Montreal, Eagles of Death Metal and Kool Keith performing as Dr. Octagon with DJ Q-Bert. Besides that it was Trombone Shorty, Ratty Skurvics, some other New Orleans folks and a lot of smaller names.

The tone was set the moment we met up with Books for our wristbands and went through security. On this leg of the tour we were traveling and playing with Forced Into Femininity and an older female security guard thought it would be appropriate to reach out and grope Jill’s breast while asking a question made academic by her preemptive action:

“Can I feel?”

The fact that she asked at all showed that she had some awareness of the necessity for consent but just didn’t care. Trans awareness and social visibility were in a slightly different place in 2010 but this woman’s actions were egregious even for a small town like Jackson, Michigan. She was essentially communicating that she saw Jill’s body and identity as a joke and Jill herself undeserving of even basic bodily autonomy. I can’t remember how anybody reacted but the unfamiliar and isolated setting meant that this violation didn’t exactly feel like a teachable moment.

The second thing to portend how the weekend was going to go was that it immediately started pouring rain and continued through most of the first night. The festival setting was on the edge of some wetlands but the weather effectively changed this to a stiflingly humid mosquito infested swamp. Judging by the sizes of the stages, sound systems, crowd control barriers and the high number of porta-potties the promoters must have been banking on attendance in the tens of thousands but I only saw a few hundred.

I don’t know anything about Eagles of Death Metal, I really enjoyed early Of Montreal when I was deep into the Elephant Six thing and Doctor Octagon was one of my favorite albums in High School. Still I felt the selection of headlining talent was somewhat eclectic, or I’m just going to say haphazardly thrown together, it didn’t feel especially curated. It would have been a great lineup for a free outdoor festival subsidized through grants and corporate sponsorships but with the expectation that people would be paying festival money it just wasn’t there – it felt like something was missing although I couldn’t say exactly what.

Ticket pre sales had evidently been disappointing and any hopes for a last minute rush at the gates were dissipated by the unfortunate turn in weather. Anyone that was feeling out the possibility of a festival experience but riding the fence due to the tepid selection of headliners was probably deciding on the free and dry side of that aforementioned fence.

The crowd that did actually show up seemed to be mainly what I would call “performative festival tryhards” – face paint, some showy hippy/steampunk/raver fashion and a dancing accessory designed to draw attention to themselves. Things like hula hoops that can be set on fire, those fringed suede covered sticks where you knock a third stick back and forth, djembes, megaphones and a few other things I’m forgetting – probably at least a slack line or two.

The main thing was that it felt like these exhibitionist types were hoping for throngs of festival greenhorns they could dazzle and impress with their bouncey stick prowess but of course they were the only ones there. Nobody was directly saying any of this but the body energy seemed clear that their basic need of being watched was not being met as everyone was too busy putting on their own show. The ground was turning into mud and most of the tents had become miserable, collapsed puddles.

The clowns were visibly around and with a few free beverages being passed out in cans they had their work cut out for them. There was a newly launched energy drink on the brink of failure, the ever elusive Red Bull girls and I think even an alcoholic option – but that was only in the backstage areas our wristbands gave us access to. I wasn’t on any oaths or pledges concerning abstinence but I don’t remember drinking and wouldn’t have been taking drugs. If LSD showed up the obvious instinct would be to save it for a setting where you might actually enjoy yourself.

The Generation siblings had opted to sit up all night in the talent area because people had mosquito repellant and the bugs were so bad they couldn’t sleep. Both of them were still quite innocent of certain worldly matters at this time and one of the themes of this tour was aggressive young women making constant confrontational sexual overtures. This made the Pickells extremely uncomfortable.

We were starting to hear talk that a lot of the performers were jumping ship because a) the festival was miserable to be inside of and b) the anemic ticket sales made it a practical certainty that anyone who wasn’t paid in advance was most likely not getting paid at all. This would turn into an opportunity for us. They were serving basic hotdogs on stiff buns without condiments – a sign of things to come.

The first night ended with a surprise headliner: DJ Bad Boy Bill. It was a last minute replacement for another headline act dropping out – Eagles of Death Metal. Ticket sales were low to begin with and I’d imagine a decent number of attendees took this as a pretext for demanding refunds. For some that may well have been the act they had mostly come for but for others I imagine it just presented an opportunity to pull the plug and recoup money on an experience that was not shaping up as advertised.

I vaguely remember watching this set from a classic Chicago House DJ with some degree of interest. The music was decent and the stage show included pyrotechnics and some fancy light effects. I went to try to sleep in the puddle that was my tent fairly early to prepare for whatever performing tomorrow would look like.

While hanging out backstage the previous evening we had chatted a small amount with the stage manager / sound engineer on the smallest stage and mentioned that we were there to perform. I was beginning to discuss the logistics of the miniature bike powered clown stage with Books when he caught my eye and motioned for me and Generation to come and talk to him. It turned out that even the smaller level acts were cancelling at an alarming rate out of fear of no payment and he was struggling to keep live music going on his specific stage for appearances.

Simply rolling an iPod playlist though all the missing acts would veer too close to acknowledging what this whole festival was: a complete and unmitigated disaster.

Books was disappointed when I informed her we wouldn’t be needing the bike stage but she had far more serious disappointments looming on the horizon. We decided to do the kind of Generation / Bleak End set that we had done at BitchPork but switched the orders around due to an unfortunate trend of spectators crediting the entire Generation set to me on the strength of some unconventional blocking. Forced Into Femininity wasn’t interested in playing and Jill generally wanted to get out of there as soon as humanly possible.

There wasn’t too much of a crowd but it was easily the biggest, fanciest and loudest sound system we had the opportunity to play with on the entire tour. [Note: actually probably not – we were on the main stage at Bitchpork] The unconventional music styles did seem to capture people’s attention and it was exciting just for the bizarre flex of saying we played an official stage for a mid to large size music festival – albeit a failure of one. It’s definitely more fun talking about it now than it was to actually play it.

I was actually super into Kool Keith in High School and Dr. Octagon was my favorite of his albums and personas by a wide margin. Under other circumstances I would have been excited to catch his performance but this wasn’t my first time at this kind of festival. Years earlier I had gotten an unexpected late night phone call from my older brother who turned out to be drunk at a U2 concert in some large East Coast arena. He held his cell phone up for me to hear.

After going to Coachella in 2004 I thought of the drunken U2 phone call as the perfect metaphor for everything that was disappointing and unsatisfying about the experience. Your favorite band in the world could be playing but it still just feels like listening through a cell phone held up by a drunk friend on the other side of the country. This isn’t true for something like Bitch Pork but the Festivals with white tents, beverage sponsors and colorful plastic wristbands always end up feeling this way.

It would have been cool if the Dr. Octagon set had happened a little earlier but it wasn’t even worth asking my friends to stick around for a few more hours. Through the lens of a major Festival, even a sparsely attended failed one, all of the energy that makes live music appealing is simply lost in translation.

Once we came off stage the rest of the group came and found us, Jill, Sugar Tea and Popsicle, and the sentiment was that we should leave as sleeping in a truck stop sounded more appealing than staying here. We packed up our wet tents and started the trek toward the exit when we discovered that Generation had made a profound impact on one fan specifically. A young girl dressed in a zebra miniskirt came jogging up and enthusiastically recapped her impressions of their set:

“Oh my god that was so crazy! You were like “RRURRURRU” and then you were like “reereeree”!

In her impressions she seemed to be imitating the kind of low/high screaming trade off that can be heard in Crust Metal bands like Dystopia, Wisigoth and most likely others I don’t know the names of. I am quite fond of the vocal style but it wasn’t what Generation sounded like by any stretch of the imagination. She repeated this several times with an unflagging surplus of energy as the Pickell siblings chuckled in obvious discomfort.

Her demonstration took a bit of a turn:

“Yeah!, I was so blown away I was like…”

She bent forward at the waist and let her mouth hang loosely open. One would assume this was to indicate shock but she then began to bob her head suggestively while making gagging noises. In case that wasn’t clear enough she added this last bit of commentary:

“Like, stick a dick in my mouth already, ya know?”

There was a bit more nervous and forced laughter until Rain had a sudden flash of inspiration. They had printed these tiny paper flyers with pictures of alien faces and urls for some of their videos and other online resources. Rain quickly handed her one of the tiny fliers. This seemed to throw the zebra skirt girl for a loop and she spent a couple minutes scanning and attempting to decode it. We all took the opportunity to recommence power walking toward the exit as quickly as possible.

We were clearly too far away to chase down again so instead the zebra girl gave a giant wave then cupped her hands around her mouth to scream out a final message:

“I’m gonna stick this in my pussy!!!”

With those words we had reached the gates and The Land of NOD Experiment was firmly behind us. We had escaped. We called Amanda to see if she had friends in Ann Arbor and ended up at a punk house called The Meat House that just happened to have an upcoming generator show full of fresh degradations when we attempted to play it.

I’d like to end this story with some things I didn’t witness first hand but heard through Books – the final fate of the Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos. When the festival promoters found themselves deeply in the red and needing to pick artists, workers or vendors to not pay the clowns seemed like the perfect choice. They had been gathering cans all weekend and Michigan is known across the USA for it’s relatively high beverage can redemption value of 10 cents so they wouldn’t be leaving empty handed. Still the agreement was that they would be paid 200 dollars a head for keeping the festival clean and teaching attendees about the joys of recycling.

The main promoter invited the clowns to their tent for hot dogs, mojitos and a “friendly chat”. The message was essentially that they had to fuck someone and The Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos seemed more fuckable than any other entity in this specific scenario. The clowns weren’t trying to take this sitting down but they also didn’t appear to have any options to retaliate. They could dump all the cans back out but that would just mean losing the small money to cover gas and other expenses they would be getting for following through on the recycling message they had coalesced around in the first place.

To make things especially insulting the promoter’s younger sister was tripping on acid, not wearing pants and laughing at everything the clowns said for this entire conversation. Some empty promises were made to the effect that the promoters would be continuing to fundraise and the clowns would be paid just as soon as all the more important people that were owed money were paid first – things like parking attendants, paid hula hoopers and God knows what else.

Based on the logistical clusterfuck of this initial outing it seems highly unlikely that any fund raising was successful. When I checked it’s Facebook page it seemed like they’d transitioned to smaller rabbit themed events around New Orleans. The Festival was dead. I have a feeling The Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos didn’t exactly bounce back from this either. Our tour? Our tour went on.

On to Ann Arbor and a thing called “dick time!”

New York 2010 : “Play Something Slow And Sexy”

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This is going to sound egregiously reductive, mostly because it is egregiously reductive, but all of the Russian girls I’ve met have fallen into two categories. There’s the fresh faced wide eyed with wonder perpetually innocent summer’s child type: these tend to be Yanas and Lanas. The second type are the world weary won’t get fooled again wistfully smoking a cigarette while sitting on the edge of the bed winter’s child type: I can’t remember the names of the ones I’ve met like this but I instinctively want to say Tatianas.

These are very broad generalizations based on first impressions where in most cases I didn’t get to know these women super well but it did seem to be a pattern. It certainly wasn’t a preconceived notion I started with and projected onto the Russian women that I met – it was a thing I noticed over time. I suppose it’s possible that they all roughly start as the first type and move toward the second depending on life experiences but I don’t see it that way: the type ones I’ve known didn’t seem to lead completely charmed lives and the type twos seemed like they had similar personalities as children.

It should go without saying that obviously there are many, many more types of Russian girls and women – I just haven’t met them.

As her name would suggest, Yana was one of the first type of Russian girls I described. I first met her when I went to New Orleans for Halloween in 2008. New Orleans was still a very different city from what it’s like now in that year. It had been three years since Hurricane Katrina and the Military Police, or MPs, were still handling a lot of law enforcement. The spray paint marks of the rescue workers were still fresh on the buildings in affected areas and it wasn’t uncommon to see blocks where ruined buildings vastly outnumbered those in any stage of restoration where the flood had hit hardest.

Rebuilding as a concept had not yet come to represent gentrification and displacement.

I’ve been to a handful of Mardi Gras celebrations in the city, sometimes for the entire season and sometimes for just the last few days, but this was my only New Orleans Halloween. Maybe it’s that all of the festivities are packed into a single weekend or so instead of a longer season but it definitely felt like things had a harder, darker edge. It could have something to do with the academic calendars of the surrounding colleges and universities.

Frenchmen Street in particular had a younger crowd and almost Woodstock ‘99 vibe. I remember joking at the time about how much I enjoyed seeing angry people in costumes and that if none were available it was easy enough to make some. On Frenchmen Street it didn’t require any particular intervention. A quick scan of the busiest intersection revealed a caveman with a giant plastic club screaming at his girlfriend in a blind rage and a group of Medieval princesses giving courtly waves after one of them projectile vomited from a taxi window.

A strong thread connected New Orleans and the people who had been on board The Miss Rockaway Armada in 2008 and I generally connected with and spent time with people from the project when in the city. It was Lisers who plucked Yana from a crowd and introduced her to the rest of the group. At the time she wore blocky glasses, had dark hair with severe bangs and the same infectious smile that helped me recognize her in more recent photos where the first two features are gone.

She carried the kind of large black camera that signifies somebody is trying to get serious about photography – the super youthful kind if you know what I mean by that. I want to say Minolta because that’s what they gave us is Sixth Grade Photography but in reality it was probably a Canon or Leica. I’m not the guy to take a lot of pictures or know much about cameras, hence the thing you’re reading and, at the time of writing, the hundred or so pieces like it.

I showed Yana around New Orleans a bit and brought her to Termite and Vine with the promise that it was populated with besprizornye. It’s a Soviet era word for orphaned children that supposedly lived in Dickensian underground societies – I would have learned it from a Kurt Vonnegut novel. I don’t know if anyone who lived at Termite that year was an actual orphan but the house was a hotbed of the kind of train rider and jug band informed fashion that was in a special vogue those years.

Yana and I stuck around town at least until November Fifth when Drew celebrated his birthday in a bar at the edge of the Bywater I’m going to guess doesn’t exist anymore. The night ended up being especially celebratory because Barack Obama’s first presidential victory was announced. New Orleans responded to this news with a level of general public jubilation that I didn’t see again until The Saints won the Super Bowl in 2010.

What this looked like on the ground was every person who was out in public shaking every other person they came into contact with in genuine excitement and every person that was driving a vehicle leaning on the horn and out the window to high five all of the passing pedestrians. I’m sure the city has its share of staunch Republicans and at least more than zero Colts fans but in each of these situations they must have stayed home. I certainly never saw a single human being that wasn’t over the moon about these happenings.

I think the next time I would have seen Yana was back in New Orleans for the 2009 Mardi Gras season. She had just come from Washington D.C. where she had gone to see the historic inauguration first hand. I don’t know if every Russian who learns English as a second language mispronounces certain diphthongs the same way but every time she shared this piece of information it caused every person in earshot to laugh uncontrollably.

The same pun made by a person with actual racist intent wouldn’t have been particularly funny but combined with Yana’s constant wide eyed innocence it was a winner. I have to take full accountability for my role in maneuvering to cause her to repeat this word in front of as many people as possible while leaving her in the dark about what everyone was finding funny about it. I don’t know if somebody else told her, she figured it out for herself or she was just reacting to the obvious energy that she was being made a figure of fun but she started responding with wounded indignance:

“No, Ossian!”

This is another one of those situations where I wish this was in an auditory format because none of this is going to be as funny without her actual voice or accent and the pouting expression she made. On the very slim chance that anybody didn’t get what the original joke was, it was that she was accidentally saying a word that rhymes with the one before “of fun” in the previous paragraph every time she said inauguration. It definitely helped the humor of the situation that everything about Yana was as cute as pajamas on a ladybug.

The next couple of times I saw her she was living on the edge of Williamsburg in New York City. She snuck me in to crash at a famous butoh studio she was living and studying at when I was in town around New Year’s Eve and didn’t have anywhere else to go. The next morning we were walking to the train when I happened to look down and find a mysterious baggie of white powder lying in the snow.

Yana certainly wasn’t into that and I hadn’t been using drugs much that year except for psychedelics and pharmaceuticals. This discovery wasn’t actually that far from where I had tried cocaine for the first time with the intention of it being a gateway drug at the legendary Kokie’s Place. I never really liked the drug that much if I wasn’t injecting or smoking it – without a rush the effects are nothing to write home about.

Still there’s something about found drugs that makes you feel like you have to do them and I wasn’t about to sketch out any of the people I was staying with by searching for needles or attempting to cook up freebase. I don’t know how I decided on The Cloisters as the place to get geeked out but it did feel appropriate. It definitely wasn’t for any historical significance because outside of some questionable analyses of almost certainly cross contaminated mummies it is extremely well established that the substance would have been completely unknown in the setting and era of the exhibited artifacts.

Still the cold weather, drafty flagstone walls and unicorn tapestries I’d been waiting to see my entire life seemed to pair well with whatever I was stuffing up my nose. I had been growing my fingernails out in the interest of dressing like a witch so pinky nail bumps held as much, if not more, than any key. Discreetly ducking behind interesting helmets and ornamental serving dishes to take them was an adventure in itself.

I never put it on a scale but I must have found at least a gram and I wasn’t lying when I said I really didn’t like the stuff. The whole Cloisters thing was fun but there was no way I was going to do a whole gram there. It would have been pure insanity to smuggle it onto a plane but I also couldn’t bring myself to just throw it away. I went to a lot of different cities and stayed with a lot of different people on this East Coast visit so I’m struggling to remember who I finished it off with.

I want to say that it was either a brother and sister or a male/female couple and they were kind of square. Now that I’m wracking my brain about it I realize that I may be transposing another memory about randomly finding cocaine on the ground in Oakland during the OCCUPY! protests. Maybe somebody reading this will remember me uncharacteristically offering them powdered cocaine somewhere in the North East in early January of 2010.

It doesn’t matter to the larger story, if there can even be said to be one, in the least but little details like this are among my favorite parts of this whole thing. I couldn’t make them up.

The last time I remember seeing Yana she had helped set up a show for me at a warehouse/loft space down the street from her butoh studio. This space felt like it could have existed on a show like Friends – it wasn’t decorated too differently from spaces me and my friends had lived in, with things like painted pieces of mannequins, but something about the energy was painfully generic.

The people who lived there were like hippies who are into circus aesthetics and electronic dance music – basically what I’d call burners. I don’t know if any of the kids who lived there actually went to Burning Man but they definitely seemed like they thought Burning Man was cool. There’s a lot of rave hippy types that I wrote off as burners when I first encountered them, only to discover that they were actually cooler than burners. The SPAZ, Katabatik and Mutant Fest crews immediately come to mind.

Being a burner isn’t the worst thing in the world.

This would have been on the U.S. Tour where Teen Suicide changed their name to Generation and I’m pretty sure we were traveling with Forced Into Femininity. We had been through a veritable tasting flight of artistically trying scenarios at this point: a party in Denver, Colorado where a recently arrived freight-rider freestyle rapped over Reine’s set about how much cocaine he was on; a generator show in Ann Arbor, Michigan where they said we could jump the bill but then refused to let me turn up my drum machine to even half the volume of my screaming voice without a microphone, or the ambient noise of the generator at that, in fear that the show would get broken up before the “real bands” with drummers played; a failed festival outside of Detroit where we were going to play on a bicycle powered stage with recycling themed clowns but jumped to one of the main stages because all of the big name artists were abandoning ship with the revelation that they weren’t getting paid.

Or actually I’m second guessing myself as to whether this was on that Summer tour or if it had been earlier during my January trip. I know that other people besides me were supposed to play this show and I don’t remember it being the acoustic singer-songwriter girls I was touring the North East with that January. I guess it really doesn’t matter in terms of the things that I want to say about this show.

The people who lived at this space had a somewhat unconventional idea of what agreeing to host a show means, or maybe there had been a bit of a language barrier when Yana had set it up with them. They thought it would be more like a rave and when it was nothing like a rave they insisted that the people who had been scheduled to play stop playing so that their housemate could DJ some more rave-appropriate music. It’s killing me that I can’t clearly remember who all else I was playing with but I do remember this back and forth conflict between live acts playing and the hosts just DJing building up as the night progressed.

In the course of doing Bleak End at Bernie’s I learned that I seemed to put on the best performances when the crowd, to some degree at least, liked what I was doing and I, to some degree at least, hated them. There was something like a feedback mechanism involved: nearly all of my songs were rooted in feelings of anger, disappointment and disgust and having real time stimuli that helped me tap into those feelings led to a more genuine and compelling performance.

I don’t know if it was because she saw my drum machine or just a coincidence in terms of timing but just as I was taking the stage one of the girls who lived at the venue stepped in front of me in a burlesque costume holding a hula hoop. She glanced back at me over her shoulder:

“Play something slow and sexy.”

I can’t remember which one of my songs I started with but only one of them could be said to fit those parameters and it wasn’t that one.

I gathered my hatred, cranked up the drum machine and started to scream…