Tag: Matthew Barney

Mutations – The Many Strange Faces of Hardcore Punk : Sam McPheeters 2020

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The last time I wrote about a book, when I covered Arab on Radar memoir Psychiatric Tissues by Jeff Schneider, one of my oldest friends said that he had to read over halfway through the piece before he realized it was a review. This was my fault and this time around I think I’ll drop the review pretense entirely. That doesn’t mean that I won’t be saying anything about what I thought of this book on a qualitative level, as I’d need to deliberately go out of my way to avoid doing so, but rather that I won’t be particularly going out of my way to do so either. All of this exposition might be unnecessary for my longtime readers but on the off chance anybody found this essay expecting a quick summary of the book’s virtues and a mandative statement about whether they should buy it or not this is your quick warning that these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

I first became aware of this book when I was talking to Dan St. Jacque of Landed about a legendary 1997 show where he set himself on fire and the members of FORCEFIELD used a hose to baste the audience in the exhaust fumes of an idling moped. I wasn’t at this show, my own pilgrimage to Providence and Fort Thunder happened three years later, but I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about it. The only other shows I wasn’t at that have received comparable helpings of my mental energy are Woodstock ‘99, Bob Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and The Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway where the Hell’s Angels stabbed an audience member to death – vital myths on a national scale.

There is a video on YouTube of the first ten seconds when Dan runs out on fire but as it doesn’t include him being rapidly extinguished and then doing vocals for the entire Landed set I won’t be embedding it here. I was going to try to write an entire essay about this night but I haven’t succeeded in getting anyone who was in FORCEFIELD at this show to talk to me so I’ll just unload what I have here. If I was as organized as Sam is in Mutations this could have all been a footnote but I’m not so you’ll have to either follow my muddy footprints where they take you or skip ahead.

In my personal headcanon I had built this night up to be an analogue of the murders and church arsons surrounding the early nineties Norwegian Black Metal scene – I assumed that a culture of one-up-manship regarding extreme performances had led to this singular outlier of an evening where the health of performer and audience alike became secondary to the pursuit of spectacle. According to St. Jacques they just really didn’t like the venue, a downtown space called Met Cafe, and were hoping to either get the space shut down or be blacklisted from performing there in the future.

Neither panned out and Landed was back at Met Cafe a few months later but Dan toned things down and only set off a brick of firecrackers in the crotch of his jeans. While the member of FORCEFIELD I did talk to joined some time after this show his answer seems definitive:

“…to have to answer questions as a human being went counter to the ‘narrative space’ inhabited by [FORCEFIELD]”

In retrospect I think my attempts to get anyone from the group to talk to me about this show were as unreasonable as knocking on the door of 109 Minna Street when I first moved to the Bay Area and expecting to find one of The Residents. I had already been blessed to receive a direct communique from FORCEFIELD in the form of a VHS of their videos and when I popped it into a Chicago VCR and saw a shrouded figure address the camera in a distorted alien tongue I should have accepted it for the comprehensive and conclusive Artist’s Statement it was.

Anyway Sam had been at the 1997 show, performing in Men’s Recovery Project, and does a much better job couching the events of the night in descriptive language in his book. For this reason St. Jacques sent me an image of the two page spread and as I read onwards to a description of Fort Thunder I had an unexpected reaction and became incongruously territorial over the word “warren”. I have only been seriously writing for two years and this was the first time I had seen another writer use the exact same mildly esoteric word to describe the exact same mildly esoteric thing – in this case the conjoined tunnels that comprise a rabbit colony as metaphor for the chaotic system of interconnected living spaces that made up the backend of Fort Thunder.

You can look me up on Facebook and go spelunking through my last year’s status updates to read the tantrum in real time but I quickly ascertained that Mutations was published two years before my own account and charted a surprisingly accurate shared literary roadmap (Watership Down and The Martian Chronicles) to account for two entirely distinct brains landing on this particular and precise descriptor. Then I sent Sam McPheeters a letter.

Sam is a year and a decade older than me but I am still old enough to remember when physical letters were the primary medium for communicating with people who lived in different cities than you. My first chat room was on a BBS and my first year of college netted me an .edu e-mail address but most of my friends and underground peers held fast to the hand written missive rather than immediately embracing emergent technology. I have to salute Sam for his curmudgeonly insistence on only proffering a physical address to those wishing to contact him as it’s been a long time since I stamped an envelope for a stranger and variety in daily experiences makes for a pleasant lifetime.

I probably wouldn’t have bothered with a letter at all if the only purpose was to share my internal hysterics over the word “warren” but it just so happened there was something else I wanted to ask him about. I’ve written about this before but in 2003 I was on tour with Friends Forever when they played a small festival in the courtyard of the Hollywood ArcLight cinema that was supposed to culminate in a screening of a rare original print of Penelope Spheeris’s Decline of Western Civilization 3. I heard about these things second hand as I spent the set inside the Volkswagen Type 2 operating the lights and smoke machines but apparently one of the Nerf footballs used in the band’s Killball live show struck the SNL fake news comedian Kevin Nealon, angering him, and then the screening was cancelled because some enterprising scamp had stolen the film canisters from the lobby.

Wrangler Brutes, the last of Sam McPheeters’ bands, also played this festival and as none of the people I’m still in contact with from this show remember any additional details I was banking on Sam filling some in. This stemmed from a presumption that he had a comparable obsession with underground music history, a thing I now know to be true from his book, and a similar photographic memory to my own, a thing I now know to be false. Nonetheless he did have something and while the letter was addressed to me personally I imagine he won’t mind me reproducing the following paragraph:

While I was hoping for corroborating details on the Spheeris heist his anecdote is even better and, combined with the bit I already had, makes for a moralist fable about moderately famous actors going to watch a punk history documentary but being unwilling to experience the physical reality of an actual punk show. I got excited when I saw the letters Wrbr, thinking it might be the initials of a radio station that put on the festival, but then I remembered the Mississippi River K-W radio call sign divide and realized it was merely an abbreviation for Wrangler Brutes.

It is exciting to have the exact date but I’ve discovered an odd paradox where underground shows from 1998 to 2001 generally have some form of online footprint but later shows usually do not. Typing “8/16/03 Friends Forever Wrangler Brutes” into Google only turns up this strange FAQ with questions about Quakers, clit piercings and skanking and, in a manner that feels oddly cyclical regarding the history of the written word, the complete text of Beowulf.

If you’ve read my piece on Jeff Schneider’s Psychiatric Tissues you’d know from the introduction that the book ignited in me a strong ambition to take on the task of penning a more cohesive history of turn of the millennium experimental punk or “weird DIY” music. I have to credit Schneider for facilitating this mental breakthrough as even though I’ve spent the last two years thinking about the best way to document this scene and era, it was only after reading his book that I thought of specifically focusing on bands. As long as I’m crediting him I may as well write out some of my other evolving thoughts on his memoir.

After talking to some other members of the Providence, Rhode Island experimental scene I’ve come to realize that the idea of a “townie vs art school” divide is less a concrete reality of that town’s underground and more a specific myopia on the part of Schneider himself. I may as well address another question that arises in the text – Schneider writes of a “feud” between Arab on Radar and Olympia experimental metal band The Need that was kindled by the former band drawing Hitler mustaches on the latter’s tour posters. Now that I’ve spoken to a source close to The Need I know that the offending graffiti was not the iconic fascist facial hair but rather crude representations of penises going into the two female band members’ mouths.

This revelation certainly adds perspective to the passage where Schneider ponders whether the Riot Grrl movement was based on legitimate grievances and the scene was truly sexist or every single female voice in underground music was exaggerating and the scene was not. Considering that he goes with the second option I have to wonder if he deliberately misrepresented the defacing of the posters with a less blatantly misogynist version or his own memory has distorted this detail. I’ve written in other places about the humbling power of confirmation basis to bend and reshape reality and the two conflicting anecdotes could be yet another example of this.

I’ve just started working on my own music history book and I don’t want to jinx it by revealing too many details but it should be relatively safe to list some of the things I won’t be writing about. I’ve been consciously shying away from covering genres that were especially popular in the underground music of the nineties – particularly mathrock, Emo and hardcore. When I saw the title of Sam’s book I assumed it would be a straightforward history of the experimental side of hardcore and take on bands I’d already decided to omit like The Locust, An Albatross and Cerberus Shoal.

To be completely transparent I actually breathed a small sigh of relief with the assumption that someone else was chronicling this side of “weird DIY” music as I thought it would relieve me of any sense of responsibility to do so myself. I also imagined that Mutations would explain all of the new revisionist terms that are being applied to this music like Chain and Egg, Whitebelt and Sasscore. It actually turns out that if something neither resonates with truth or beauty you don’t necessarily have to write about it and as Sam was either unaware of these newer terms or chose not to write about them due to lack of interest my own disinterest is more than adequate cause for me not to write about them myself.

It also seems like my presumption that Mutations would be essential research for my own book turned out to be incorrect and it is less of a cohesive history and more of a collection of related essays. None of this means that I am disappointed in my decision to acquire and read the book and I am grateful for the things it did choose to shine a light on: early hardcore, a historical sampling of more “arty” bands and, most importantly, what it was like to be an older and completely different person than me while interacting with underground music.

Whether this is factually true or not I have always self-identified as a person who “doesn’t care about hardcore”. The detail that my sparse discography of recorded music includes a Youth of Today cover may make the categorization suspect but in my defense I’ve never heard most of the other hardcore bands Sam writes about and the book has only inspired me to listen to Doc Dart’s post-Crucifucks output and Discharge’s Grave New World – the one deemed “unlistenable” by fans of their earlier albums for morphing into hair metal.

The main reason I keep awkwardly referring to Sam McPheeters as Sam even though we don’t really know each other is that when I first moved to Chicago all my hardcore friends would refer to other people in the scene by their last names (McPheeters et al.) as if they were all undercover spies working for the British government and, while I admire this from an aesthetic angle, I can’t seem to feel naturally included in it.

NYHC in particular is a giant blind spot for me and the only group I even ironically listen to is 25 Ta Life – beyond them it all seems like a blur of neon signs in tattoo shop windows, baseball bats, suspenders and older sunburned muscular men with raspy voices. Sam gives a great account of when Born Against, his own NYHC band, debated Sick Of It All on the radio and, as a result, became pariahs in the NYHC scene. The audio document is readily available and I will probably be listening to it before any albums by old guard NYHC bands. (unless Chain of Strength is from New York, I literally don’t know these things)

Not the complete sequence but Murphy’s Law and Agnostic Front are here

I also don’t know if Sick Of It All is in any way related to Murphy’s Law or Agnostic Front but I’ll be telling my own story that tangentially involves these two bands. Matthew Barney, best known as Bjork’s ex-husband for those who don’t follow contemporary art, included both groups in a sequence called The Order from his Cremaster 3 film. The segment shows Barney as a highlander with a smashed in face free climbing up the central ramp of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and facing five challenges intended to symbolize the five stages of Masonic Initiation.

Murphy’s Law and Agnostic Front perform special songs with Freemasonry themed lyrics in white gloves while Barney completes simple puzzles involving Masonic symbols beneath the feet of moshing fans – also outfitted in white gloves.

I probably just said a bunch of words that are extremely uninteresting to the average NYHC fan but this is the artifact of that music most interesting to me. For a brief period of time I was even financially interested – a mysterious string of consequences had deposited a large cache of The Order promotional DVDs at the Skyline Amvet’s Thrift Store and I bought them all to unload on Amazon and eBay for the going rate of thirty dollars. Not long after LaPorsha and I moved down to Tijuana and while I initially left the stack of DVDs at my mother’s house I soon carried them all over the border so subsequent sales could be dropped in a San Ysidro mailbox without adding a four hour round trip to Spring Valley on public transit.

It was a bizarre time – I was using a strange form of heroin I’ve never seen anywhere else in the world and my only sources of income were selling these obscure art DVDs and moving cartons of duty free USA Gold cigarettes in and out of Mexico for a meager profit of ten dollars a carton. I was also writing songs in Spanish and booking shows for my friends which slightly bolstered my profits when I required every band member and friends in entourage to mule an extra carton for me as we passed back into the States.

If I’m going to be completely exhaustive I did also sell marijuana chocolate chip cookies in Mexico for 50 pesos apiece and a few hard boiled eggs for 10 pesos but the first of those things was the result of accidentally crossing the border with the contraband pastries and the second one was an abject failure. The important part of the story, and one I’ve likely already written about, came when I decided to stop living in Tijuana and had to attempt to carry the Cremaster DVDs back into their country of origin. A Customs and Border Patrol agent, in black gloves this time around, saw the words “PROMOTIONAL – NOT FOR RESALE” emblazoned across the top of each jewel case and, as I didn’t have a believable explanation as to why I had these objects that didn’t include selling them for illegal profits, forced me to leave them sitting on the sidewalk in Mexico.

The most painful part of this story to me has always been that the equivalent of several hundred dollar bills was entirely wasted but for the first time I’m realizing that this conclusion may be unnecessarily pessimistic. On average Mexico is less wasteful than the United States and as a DVD is a well known unit of value any person could have done a short internet search and seen the potential profits in following in my footsteps of international traffic. In a worst case scenario the DVDs may have sat on a blanket at either the Spring Valley or Coahuila Swap Meet until a pair of eyes as informed as mine came along.

Any way there was a plausible bluff I could have potentially used to hang onto them if I’d only thought of it in time: Murphy’s Law and Agnostic Front are underground music bands and I’m the kind of person who looks like I could be in an underground music band. I should have said that I was in one of these groups, listed on the back of the jewel case, and gave the DVDs away in the process of promoting my band. It’s not entirely implausible that a Customs and Border Patrol agent would be a well informed fan of NYHC, and such an agent would have easily called my bluff, but the odds seem much higher that I would have gotten by on a thing called “outgroup homogeneity”.

This is just a fancy way of saying that while someone within the hardcore milieux could instantly tell the difference between a scrawny junkie who screams over a drum machine and a member of a foundational NYHC group, to someone outside the hardcore milieux such categorical differences would not be apparent. I certainly would have failed the most basic of trivia checks – I know the names of no members of either group but if pressed I would probably guess “Sully” which I’m hoping will be slightly amusing to the better informed based on how accurate it is or isn’t.

Anyway the main reason I bring this up is that one of the major themes of Mutations is the concepts of authenticity and ethics as they relate to hardcore but I have no idea how to classify this hypothetical situation in regards to these two values. Clearly it would be a lapse of authenticity for me to present myself as a member of either of these well respected and dues-paying bands but would doing so for the express purpose of deceiving a representative of the United States Government be acceptable? Similarly it would be a lapse in ethics to profiteer off bootleg merchandise that could plausibly divert funds away from the legitimate enterprises of either group but something tells me neither does a brisk trade in Cremaster DVDs.

Somewhere in the footnotes Sam talks about two of his friends being confronted by the members of SS Decontrol for buying bootleg copies of their out of print debut record. If I was confronted by a member of Murphy’s Law or Agnostic Front, and had succeeded in the hypothetical ruse in the previous paragraphs, would I also have some ‘splaining to do? Would pretending to be in either band be preferable to pretending to be in the other one for any plausible reason?

I’d really like to know – the specific morality of small underground scenes is an exciting topic and it’s genuinely disorienting not knowing if this particular hypothetical behavior would be classified as reprehensible, permissible or even admirable. If you are a member of Murphy’s Law or Agnostic Front and have strong opinions on this subject please reach out and let me know. I’ve added lots of details, like the fact that the profits went directly to buying heroin, to make the process as easy and unambiguous as possible.

I’m getting toward the conclusion of this piece so here’s a final thought: it was making me feel morally uncomfortable that I’m not particularly excited by the music of Born Against or Men’s Recovery Project. I’m not a huge hardcore fan so the Born Against thing wasn’t bothering me that much but I did feel especially guilty about MRP as reading about Lightning Bolt in a Load Records promotional insert in an early MRP record was the genesis of my eventual pilgrimage to Fort Thunder.

I know that I don’t consciously choose the music I am or am not excited by but the fact that I am excited by so much music that occupies similar artistic space to Men’s Recovery Project made me feel like I was maliciously doing something to not be excited by it even though I would have no reason to do so and this obviously isn’t the case. Anyway deep in the footnotes about a disastrous crowded Dystopia show at The Smell I somehow missed (I do like Dystopia) I saw one small detail that salved my conscience. Apparently Sam’s wife plays in Amps for Christ.

I only started listening to Amps for Christ this year when my friend Ben Jovi sent me some video links but their music is a thing I’m excited by, have listened to multiple times and plan to listen to again. I’m well aware that none of this makes sense: neither my crisis of conscience nor the fact that I felt relief from it from the thing I felt relief from it from. I don’t even know Sam’s wife’s name.

The only explanation I can think of stinks of disingenuous outgroup homogeneity: I’m weird.

Buy Mutations here

An especially vivid dream on the theme of vehicular gendered violence featuring people I don’t actually know.

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This dream is not from last night. I’m still lying in the bed I climbed into around 11 PM or so after a long trip into town to buy groceries and now, as a new day shuffles languidly toward the appealing diphthong in the word noon, I still haven’t managed to fall asleep. This dream is from the night before the night it was the last time it was night.

I had been planning to keep a detailed log of all the wildlife we encounter on our trips up and down our mountain with the eventual goal of using such a record for divination purposes. Unfortunately I haven’t been keeping up with it. Despite the majesty of nature that is rarely more than ten feet from me in any given moment I have an unfortunate habit of being distracted by my device.

When I am riding in a car and looking at my iPhone the internet becomes like a cup of tea where I can no longer remember if I was waiting for it to become cool or trying to finish it while it remains warm because I’m just absently sipping at it while subconsciously cradling the knowledge that I will inevitably pour out at least the last third of liquid because it simply isn’t the kind of beverage one would ever have the intention of finishing.

Of course in the internet’s case you just leave the liquid in the cup and never pour it out. It’s a bit like bottomless breadsticks or shrimp in certain family oriented chain restaurants.

This is one of the things that life is now. It’s not too bad over in the little details but it can feel daunting if you switch to the wide angle lens. Anyway I bring it up because this tendency caused me to almost miss our solitary fox sighting and the mother bear that was walking with three anxiously tethered cubs.

It’s not like I never look at all. I’ve forgotten the date part but I did commit at least one bifacial data point to memory:

“one deer down. two bats one jackrabbit up.”

Jackrabbits tend to be an “up” sighting. It could be due to time of day but it just occurred to me that the morphology of the mountain itself could amplify the sounds of a car traveling from peak to bottom but have the opposite effect when it’s bottom to peak. It’s an interesting idea and I’m sure if I put my mind to it I could come up with a better experiment than whether or not I see jackrabbits.

On the topic of jackrabbits there were three or possibly even four of them (another lookie latey I’m afraid) as we came up the mountain last night. They don’t generally strike me as gregarious creatures in this particular biome but last night they did seem kind of clustered together like office workers waiting around the parking lot after somebody pulled the fire alarm. It was steadily raining from the highway to the rabbits but soon after progressed to sleet and finally despondent snow as we rode on to our target elevation in retrograde defiance to all the cold and different kinds of water the darkened heavens had on offer.

My initial theorem for the unfamiliar behavior was that their burrows might have flooded and they were simply waiting for them to become dry again. Almost immediately I mentally slid this idea over to the “wrong” pile and didn’t bother with formulating a replacement. Even for a naturally inquisitive mind there is a solemn grace in simply not knowing.

I really should be done with rabbits and onto cars by now but this next little bit boasts a sprinkling of both so I’m not a total reprobate. Anybody that lives near jackrabbits and paved roads probably already know this but they have evolved a threat response where they run in front of anything big and loud in zig-zag lines. This works great for visual predators that may misjudge target position due to direction change and create a window for escape by overshooting.

It’s actually very similar to what they say you’re supposed to do if someone is trying to put projectiles into you at range and you would prefer for them to go into things that aren’t you. It does depart significantly, however, from the ideal suggested strategy if somebody is trying to run you over with an automobile. When you factor in that the sawtooth wavelength of the jackrabbit’s Hail Mary is approximately the width of the space between the two front tires of a car the deficiencies in this strategy leap out like they are blood traces in a suspect’s bedroom fluorescing under a black light.

Fight or flight responses are contagious in the same way that yawns are so the entire spectacle becomes very emotionally charged as every person in the vehicle instinctually rallies around the rabbit and wants it to escape. It quickly devolves into a figurative ping-pong match as the fleeing lagomorph disappears into roadside greenery, eliciting cheers of excitement, but then immediately dashes back in front of the tires, inspiring groans of frustration and fear.

Once established the pattern persists for an indeterminate number of cycles:

“YEEEEAAH!!! AAAUUUUGGGH!!! YAYYYY!!! NNNOOOO!!!! etc.”

Thankfully this has always concluded with the rabbit finally escaping to somewhere other than the road but it occurs to me that our uphill course is winding and a long straight shot might perpetuate the drama for however long the creature’s energy reserves might hold out. Also our good fortune in never having to scrape rabbit blood from our car’s body panels should not be taken to indicate that there haven’t been plenty of white knuckle moments and near misses.

Anyway I’ve landed near the basic concepts of cars and fear so this is a good spot to force the transition to this next bit. It would not be accurate to say I am “afraid of cars” but vehicular horror is a staple genre in both my nightmares and waking anxieties. Vehicular horror movies do exist in the form of Maximum Overdrive and Christine, both Stephen King adaptations, and while each film contains compelling performances by celebrated character actors I get the impression that most fans of the genre consider them duds in the Horror department.

[Author’s Note: I was incredibly wrong about Christine. I just watched it again and it is beautifully shot and paced, legitimately menacing and has the requisite ambiguity of all my favorite ghost stories. I’m almost certain it influenced Matthew Barney’s Cremaster films and River of Fundament. Finally, almost certainly by coincidence, it features the same green light as the nightmare I’m about to relate.]

I actually tend to agree. There’s nothing particularly scary to me about the concept of a homicidal car with nobody controlling it. What terrifies me is the concept of me being responsible for controlling a car in situations where lives are basically always on the line. My aversion is so intensely visceral that simply sitting in a driver’s seat and twisting the ignition to life fills me with an urgent compulsion to throw the keys out the window and run as far away from the vehicle as humanly possible.

My mother was a horrible driver. I don’t think she was called on to do very much of it on the commune or around Arkansas but once we’d relocated to the suburban sprawl of San Diego there was no getting around it. To her credit she stepped up and got me and my siblings to and from various schools and other activities without so much as a fender bender. There were certainly close calls – like the time she drove onto a freeway on-ramp but turned in the opposite direction of oncoming traffic.

My anxiety is a direct result of her anxiety. She didn’t really have the constitution for freeway driving and changing lanes at high speeds was especially stressful. From the moment I could speak she would scream frantically for me to check her lanes for her and I did not feel like I had developed to the point where I could make life or death decisions for a rapidly moving metal box.

Other toddlers love delegation of authority and the importance earned by successfully fulfilling such desired functions. That wasn’t me. I stared out the window in mute, uncomprehending horror with no clue of what I was even looking for. My silence augmented the emotional urgency:

“I gotta get left! I gotta get left! God damn it is it safe to go left?! Do you want to fucking crash!?”

The trauma of these experiences leaves me unable to drive although I have been slowly taking command of trips up the 1 – 2 mile road that winds around our mountain and is guaranteed to be virtually empty. The next step is down the mountain but I’m terrified of gravity. Public roads and freeways seem totally impossible but people learn and grow, right?

If we’re going to have a baby LaPorsha can’t drive to the hospital as her water breaks.

Anyway on to the nightmare. Rather than draw things out I’ll copy/paste the summary that I sent to the two unfamiliar artists featured in it. It is written for Maggie Dunlap specifically as I didn’t consider Ben Ditto’s appearance until several hours after writing it:

*******************************************

As in many of my dreams it started with me in the body and from the viewpoint of a character completely unlike myself.  I was a small statured vaguely androgynous girl with short red hair and glasses, dressed in a basic solid colored t-shirt and jeans and driving a cheap, anonymous Asian car like a grey Geo Metro or something.  For contrast I am a 6’4” 43 year old married man with long dyed hair, a long white beard and am terrified of driving cars and have thus never learned to do so.

I do wear glasses.  The dream took the form of an automotive themed horror or thriller movie.

As this girl I was slowly driving along the side of an industrial warehouse style building when I received a text from a number I didn’t recognize:

“Passing you now.  Follow close.  You won’t want to miss this!”

I looked out my driver’s window and saw a newer black luxury sports car with bright neon green, almost Monster Energy colored LEDs running along the bottom below the doors, encircling the license plate and in thin strips where the head and tail lights would ordinarily be.  Looking inside there were black leather seats and it was being driven by a young man in a muscle shirt with a brown goatee (the kind that encircles the mouth) and hair that was shaved on the sides with curls piled on top of his head.

He smirked back at me then pulled in front to take a right at the corner.

I felt compelled to follow him.  The street he pulled onto was split into two lanes for opposite directions and moderately busy.  As I watched he revved his engine and quickly accelerated to something like 90 mph bearing down on the much slower car in front of him.  Just as it seemed like he’d be ramming into it from behind he quickly pulled into the oncoming traffic lane, narrowly missing a car coming towards him, and pulled in front of the vehicle he’d just been tailgating then sped off.

A new text appeared on my phone:

“That was fun! See you soon!”

This is where I’m going to slightly sabotage my storytelling due to a slavish obsession with total accuracy.  The fact is that while I often remember my dreams with atypical levels of detail I can recall only the vaguest outline of the second incident.  It was also bookended by texts and involved this man driving at unsafe speeds on the same road.  Maybe he played chicken with somebody or something.  The important thing is that there were three of them.

As the third incident began it was beginning to get dark.  Once again my cell phone lit up:

“Here comes the finale! You won’t want to miss this one!”

I’d been more or less hanging out on the side of the same warehouse and he passed me, taking the same right, with the same sardonic smile.  Once again I felt compelled to follow and witness whatever mayhem he had in mind.  Once again he rapidly sped up to around 90 mph but this time he made a sudden u-turn and swerved toward the cars in the opposite lane.  The cars were tightly packed on that side and I thought for sure he’d just be slamming into one but instead he somehow popped up on his two rear wheels and was able to just barely jackknife into the half car length between two drivers on that side.

The car that was now behind him slammed on its brakes as did the car behind it.  Miraculously nobody ran into anybody else and this created just enough space for him to ease back down onto four wheels and continue moving with the traffic.  While he’d disappeared in the opposite direction the first two times this time around he drove straight back through the intersection he’d been turning right at before passing out of sight.  His final text of the dream came through:

“That’s enough for tonight!  I’ll be seeing you where you live later!”

At this point I suddenly manifested in the dream as myself, sitting in the passenger’s seat.  The red haired girl wasn’t speaking to me but I could hear her thoughts:

“Hah! He thinks he can find where I live! The jokes on him because I’ve been living in this car!”

She passed back by the warehouse moving in the opposite direction and after a couple of blocks came to the kind of small parking lot that sits between two businesses in a “historic downtown” style shopping district.  She pulled into the rearmost parking space and tilted her seat back, continuing the internal monologue:

“I’ve been sleeping in this parking lot for weeks and nobody’s discovered me or knows I’m here! He’ll never find me!”

While she was settling in to fall asleep I was frantically looking around this new setting.  The rear wall of this parking alcove was made of bricks and about two car lengths away from us without any kind of metal pole or cement divider to shield us from movement in that direction.  I felt very certain that a person who mysteriously knew both the cell phone number and real time locations of the woman driving would have no issues whatsoever locating us.

I felt trapped.  I could neither leave the car or convince my companion to drive somewhere else but with dread I pictured the obvious conclusion to this night.  After I’d succumbed to sleep as well we would both be suddenly awoken by the sudden flash of his green lights and the sound of his engine roaring to life but at that point he’d already be accelerating toward us from the brick wall with just enough space to reach a speed where our bodies would be torn apart in the moment of impact.

In this feeling of helplessness and abject terror I continued to look around the parking lot.  My female companion had pulled in parallel to the brick wall with her window facing it but when I looked out my window for the first time I saw that the lot was about 3/4 full and all the other cars were also occupied by young women.  There were two girls in the car next to us but I only focused on the driver: slightly chubby, slightly goth with a black dyed graduated bob haircut that was shaved in the back.

Her car was one of those little ones that people tend to cover in stickers – like a Fiat, modern VW beetle or a Scion or something.  It was purple.  I was able to read two stickers on the side of her door.  They were both white ovals with black text. One said MOCA and the other said Maggie Dunlap.

At that moment I woke up with the residual feelings of neurochemical panic that always accompany snapping into consciousness from a scenario of impending but unavoidable harm.  I thought your name sounded vaguely familiar so I googled it.  I do follow contemporary art which makes me feel nearly certain that I had no familiarity with your name or work whatsoever after viewing your website.

My dream is only tangentially related to some of the themes I saw briefly perusing your website, namely horror and the concept of gendered violence against female bodies, but those tenuous connections and the mysterious nature of your name appearing at all felt like sufficient reason to share it with you.  I hope you find it interesting.

*******************************************

I perused Maggie Dunlap’s internet presence while my wife still slept, noticed the vaguely similar themes surrounding gendered violence in her work and sent the e-mail before my wife even woke up. Perhaps I should explain what I mean by gendered violence: horror based around the threat of women being violently victimized by men due to the inherent power imbalance posed by sexual dimorphism and many men’s tendency to lash out violently when they feel unimportant or unwanted.

Slumber Party Massacre slasher film type stuff, horror movies and the “final girl” trope, the concept of “fridging” or killing off female characters in films specifically to fuel a male character’s revenge motivations and character arc, the list could be an essay in itself. Anyway I was surprised to see these themes in Dunlap’s work despite none of it being automobile based.

When my wife awoke I described the dream to her and she immediately wondered if the menacing male character could be internet artist Ben Ditto. Unlike Dunlap I was familiar with Ditto and the prospect seemed unlikely to me. I did a little dive in his photos though and saw a comparable build and hair color but these seemed too generic. Then I saw it: an old pic with a head full of rotini style curls; not the most common hair type.

While not 100% convinced that the dream’s antagonist was played by Ditto, it was certainly plausible, and I sent the summary to him as well. He shared it anonymously on his popular Instagram page and a few people either made tulpa jokes or questioned my veracity and motivations. The suspicion was warranted as both he and Dunlap have larger internet footprints than me but if I was going to just invent something for their attention and shares I’d like to think I could have come up with a story that wasn’t so much of a nothingburger – all things considered.

Regardless let’s move onto what it all means. In my opinion it means nothing. While I had no awareness of Dunlap, my wife follows her and we share Instagram accounts. Perhaps my eye scanned over something and unconsciously filed it away. This happened all the time with music magazines I read in High School – my eye scanned over a Lida Husik ad in 1996 and 25 or more years later I suddenly decided to pull up her music on a long drive – great stuff especially the black and white covered albums.

The world has become intensely more information saturated. My eye is scanning over much more, I still must be filing it away and probably even less conscious of it. Maybe I saw a post with her slasher/horror themed work, maybe I only saw her name or of course it could all be a pure coincidence – neither Maggie nor Dunlap are super uncommon names.

Ditto is a separate question but I’m near sure I’d never seen the distinctive curls of his natural hair. Occam’s Razor is not advisable to use as an instrument of self harm and rather than delusions of spiritual connections or extra sensory perception I will go with something on the spectrum from coincidence to light unconscious correlation to avoid covering my inner arms with nasty scars. If you want to read more in it that is both your prerogative and not my problem.

Let’s move on to dreams. In the crassest terms possible I think that dreams are the subliminal version of shit. You eat food, your body digests it and shit comes out the other end. All day long we collect sensory data and fill our minds with thoughts and ideas. When you fall into deep enough sleep your body is also processing all of this and creates a dream – almost like a feces of senses and ideas but without the putrescence created by a substance called skatole.

This doesn’t mean I think that dreams are bad or worthless and anyway plenty of people love shit – either as an area of serious scientific study or a sexual paraphilia. Dreams absolutely fascinate me as much, if not more, than memories and in certain eras of heavy depression my Dreamtime was more vital and exciting to me than my waking life.

I’m not good at lucid dreaming, I’m terrified of sleep paralysis but I have three arenas I love unconditionally about dreams:

  • Depersonalization: I am often not myself in dreams but experience them as a totally different entity altogether: a native woman thousands of years old searching for her lost immortal brother, a young near androgynous woman, a malevolent underwater monster that I never see but see from its perspective, a conflicted cop who loves his partner, Bob Dylan’s nephew, etc.
  • Dream Knowledge: This one is probably my number one favorite. In a book or movie world building has to be done through narration or dialogue. In a dream it may be the case that a dangerous monster is a room away from me, trees are intelligent walking creatures or the ocean represents a total negation of the self if it’s even looked at. I don’t need any in-dream exposition or storytelling to inform me of these things, I just know them. Exactly how I know countless things about the waking world of reality. The difference lies in my store of real world knowledge staying consistent while “dream knowledge” changes every night.
  • The Proto-City: A close second for favorite. I didn’t actually learn cardinal directions until I moved to Chicago in 1999. Without ever learning to drive or ride a bike my spatial knowledge was almost one-dimensional. I knew the memorized routes by bus or foot that would lead me to places I wanted to go to but only as a system of steps and turns based on visual landmarks. When my friend Paul visited me in Oakland he asked me what direction my house was from the BART station and I told him to just pour water on the ground and follow it as my preferred exit sloped downward toward my house. He chose the wrong exit and the water only pooled. He did find the house, slightly miffed, but I miss the feeling of a city as a group of discrete locations with no discernible layout and can not return to it due to my irreversible knowledge of North, South, East and West. Thankfully the Proto-City of my dreams features recurring locations but they constantly shift in relation to each other so I need not fear getting oriented.

Are one person’s dreams of any value to anyone else? I think they can be. In Jung’s famous Man and his Symbols he talks about how the chemist who discovered the molecular structure of benzene had a dream about Ourobouros and realized on waking he could solve his Lewis Dot Structure issue with a ringed molecule. In a far stupider example a person who falls asleep driving a car can hit another person, car or house so if the actions of sleeping people can affect the waking why shouldn’t this extend to dreams?

We are approaching the technology that can render dreams into a series of computer generated images and while this is rudimentary and concept based it can only improve. I’ve had dreams with ornate stained glass windows or elaborate articles of clothing that exceed my artistic capabilities and I could never hope to accurately reproduce.

While technology may reach the point where these designs can be reproduced by a computer in perfect detail I don’t necessarily see value in this. Stable Diffusion is getting better and better and could give me hundreds of beautiful stained glass window designs on par with whatever I’ve dreamed up at much less cost and effort. Maybe I’m underestimating the value of ideation by a genuine human mind but only time will tell.

If you didn’t decide to watch the recent Nicholas Cage thriller Dream Situation it begins with an ordinary man appearing disproportionately in the public’s dreams and ends with disruptive marketers developing a technology to invade people’s dreams with obnoxious advertisements. I interpreted the movie as a cautionary tale on hitching one’s wagon to the collective Id but I might as well address the question of pop ups and banner ads making their way into dreams.

No, I don’t think that’s possible for reasons that should be obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of the human mind and technology.

Instead I see huge potential for dreams as a content source – once the technology to turn them into videos goes through a few generations of improvement. First and foremost will come the dreams of the already famous. There is already a huge demand for content from these people’s waking lives to fuel the parasocial relationships of their fans and followers and dreams (probably prescreened to remove the overly personal or embarrassing) will represent an entirely new level of emotional intimacy.

A kind of OnlyDreams instead of OnlyFans and of course such subscriptions would bring in a lot of money. What artist wouldn’t want to make money in their sleep? Obviously many wouldn’t but if the technology is commonplace anyone who wants the revenue but values their sleeping selves privacy could just script AI videos and sell them as dreams.

I do think a decent number of ordinary people will become “dream stars” if their dreams are either especially interesting or fucked up. Once again we face the issue of pawning off scripted AI scenarios as authentic dream captures so perhaps we will have a technology to differentiate the two. This is already an issue with art hand created by waking minds but the technological questions will be more pressing as AI is already a necessary ingredient in translating dreams into videos.

I started this piece months ago so whatever the first paragraph says about time and the Maggie Dunlap/car thriller dream is inaccurate. I had that one months ago. Fortunately I can usually remember a high level of dream detail as long as I make a conscious decision to close my mind’s hand around it as I’m waking up. Here’s a bit of last night:

I was somebody whose job involved helping rapper Brooke Candy open her fan mail. I wasn’t myself – if it matters to anyone I think I was a girl with magnetic powers who used them to steal play structures for my hamsters. We were opening a package with several larger objects when we found a smaller pouch in the center wrapped in tissue paper.

At first we thought it was dried out bird and lizard legs, and were both slightly concerned and grossed out, but then I realized it was delicate versions of these made out of lampworked glass. I carefully removed all three of them from the paper and the last was green with incredibly fragile long twisting fingers. Suddenly the person who sent the package was standing beside us.

He was a young black fashionable hipster guy who had started living an isolated life as a shepherd and had brought one of his ewes and her lambs along. While the adult sheep still had regular white wool each of the lambs had been dyed a different color of the rainbow and they hung behind her in a line so it looked something like a caterpillar.

He was in town not for the concert but for a convention for people who realized their souls were rabbits. I looked around the section of the Proto-City we were in and started noticing billboards for this convention with a large rabbit logo – it was sponsored by Disney. Brooke decided to give up public life and go live with him in his rustic shepherd’s cottage.

I wondered if the isolation was a good idea which is odd, as real life me is all about isolation, but once again I wasn’t me. I was a girl with magnetic powers and pet hamsters who worked for Brooke Candy in some capacity involving helping with fan mail. Anyway this dream conveniently presents some interesting questions if it happened in the future and was captured and monetized.

Brooke Candy is a real life performing artist and Internet personality – would she get a chunk of that monetization? The glass legs appeared because I saw on Facebook that glass artist Jenine Bressner just made a pair – would she get a chunk? The sheep appeared because I finally found a complete version of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 on archive.org and watched it last night – would he get a chunk?

I ask these questions because I thought it was really intriguing to see the way that Trent Reznor set up the instrumental piece that became Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road for fair use, scale and monetization but perhaps I should be asking myself a simpler question:

Are dreams even interesting?

Los Angeles 2005 : “In case his ghost ever tries to fuck with us”

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I was looking for skunks doing handstands and found this truly bonkers BBC video of a spotted skunk taking on b-boys in two of the four elements: breaking and spraying. You’ll have to watch it yourself to see who comes out on top.

The really bizarre part was that the whole reason I was searching in the first place was because I had been in a similar struggle with many of the same tropes being employed in slightly different ways. When I first went to Chicago me and my friend Tim urinated on the side of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House. It was Tim’s idea – he said that it would render Wright’s ghost powerless if it ever tried to fuck with us.

Tim’s funny like that and group urination had been a frequent bonding activity for much of the trip. Part of this was pure necessity of course – when traveling long distances by car it’s inevitable that infrequent stops will have a shared functionality but Tim always liked to describe it as an activity in asserting dominance over often abstract concepts.

When he tackled all the driving to traverse the girthy state of Nebraska in a single sitting he metaphorized the SUV we sat inside as a bullet piercing the province’s heart as if it were a living organism. The finishing touch was a shared pee onto a field of corn near the border with the supposition that this act would banish what had been monotonous roadside imagery and conjure something more interesting to look at.

This, of course, turned out not to be the case as we next had to drive through the entire state of Iowa which is far more famous for only giving you corn to look at. In fact the waving stalks of the popular staple would never truly recede into the rear view until the moment the mighty city of Chicago announced itself upon the horizon. Seeing this sight for the very first time reminded me of the depiction of the Emerald City in the original Wizard of Oz movie.

I was going to try to do some kind of golden imagery thing with corn and urine but decided to hold off for a more appealing proposition – an almost entirely unrelated anecdote. As a child my Classical education far outstripped a more traditional one to the point that when I first encountered the term “golden shower” in print my first thought was that it was a reference to Greek Mythology.

In the story of the demigod Perseus his mother Danaë is isolated in a chamber to thwart a prophecy. Zeus appears to her as a shower of gold from the sky to father the hero. As a child with next to no sexual imagination my immediate assumption was that “golden shower” must stand for the concept of Immaculate Conception – something like “watersports” wouldn’t have registered on my radar in that context.

I had certainly urinated on and been urinated on by my friends at that point, including an epic neighborhood war when we realized we could put it into water guns, but this was always done for a different kind of gratification. Like most terrestrial vertebrates we abhorred the sensation of skin contact with the fluids of another organism and therefore did it to humiliate each other and cause anguish.

Back to architecture – I’d been a Frank Lloyd Wright fanboy since grade school and now that I was reaching an age where I could start traveling and visiting his seminal works piss became my paintbrush in an exercise that was otherwise visual tag collecting. For the thousandth time I’ve never really been one for taking photographs so in the pursuit of memories and accomplishments this forbidden act of temporary vandalism made quite the curio.

I got a few more around Chicagoland and got The Guggenheim the next time I was in New York. Unfortunately I only got the exterior in a discrete alley spot as I had not yet watched The Order sequence from Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 to be inspired by Richard Serra’s descending Vaseline or its sister ice luge scene in Jim Carrey’s Mr Popper’s Penguins. Either of these might have sparked a resolution to attempt the far riskier proposition of the central ramp.

I’d always planned to visit Falling Water and make this the jewel of my collection for obvious reasons. Perhaps some day but the sad reality is that I will never “catch ‘em all” as a good number are simply no longer standing. For example I recently picked up a hardcover book called The Riddle of MacArthur by the journalist John Gunther. I picked up a habit while homeless of reading any book encountered on the ground which often leads me to unforeseen places.

In the chapter called Tokyo Today I learned for the first time of Wright’s version of the Hotel Imperial – built in 1920 but demolished when it began to sink in 1968. The place looks mesmerizing but my best opportunity to experience it firsthand is a virtual tour on my computer or smartphone. Engaging in my peculiar hobby through this medium would neither be satisfying or particularly advisable with the future health of my oh so precious devices in mind.

After returning to California in the wake of 9/11 I was able to go to Arthur Fest in Barnsdall Art Park in 2005 to see a bunch of freak folk, doom metal and my recent favorite Beatle: Yoko Ono. The building with Earth, SunnO))) and Growing was made inaccessible by a capacity crowd with little incentive to abandon their hard fought floor space.

I found an opportunity to scale a wall into an artist area prompting my long acquaintance Ron Regé Jr., then performing in Lavender Diamond, to take me for a fellow featured performer. I watched the music from backstage and saw the moment a large amplifier toppled into the audience. Much later I would learn special guest Malefic of Xasthur had neglected due diligence when parking in Rite Aid lot and had his vehicle towed.

I did not witness this first hand but read about it after. Malefic was freaking out – pacing the parking lot on his cell phone with the posted tow provider. Someone like Stephen O’Malley thought to buy him a Dove Bar. Malefic sits on the edge of the lot and regains his composure while consuming the frozen treat. Apocryphal as it may be this story has persisted for the way it depicts a known “cult misanthropic Black Metal” icon in a far more relatable light.

After Earth played and I left the building I wanted to take the opportunity to mark the iconic Hollyhock House, but with the crowded festival setting my best chance was to slip behind some of the prodigious landscaping. I’d already started my stream when I realized it had awoken a young spotted skunk who was taking advantage of the same cover vegetation to relax – insulated from the sights and sounds of so many frightening human beings.

I’d seen the handstand display in a taxidermy diorama in a Natural History Museum somewhere so I immediately understood the threat but had already gone too far to curtail my flow and beat a hasty retreat. As the skunk inched toward me in aggression I defended myself the only way I could – by advancing my stream into its path as a warning.

We were in a classic “Mexican Standoff” or, in the jargon of the Cold War, a mutually assured destruction scenario. The skunk backed away – I never pissed on it and it never sprayed me but we effectively held each other at bay. As my bladder began to empty I was able to slowly back away then shake off and sheathe my offensive instrument before stepping back into public view.

I enjoyed the remainder of the festival with sets from Olivia Tremor Control and the headlining Ono. A crowd of protestors outside the gates harped on the myth of her destruction of The Beatles – no doubt viewing her set as performing the action thematic to this piece onto the band’s legacy. I thought no such thing, though I did think she might have announced her band, including her son Sean by name. I left with relative high spirits.

I thought I would conclude this selection with an experience from my vivid world of dreams. In the early 2000s when I returned to San Diego a group of friends including Nick Feather and Nina Amour were renting a popular party house on A Street in Golden Hill. I’ve mentioned in other places my childhood struggles with bed wetting that only abated in my early twenties. This was one of the final incidents.

I fell asleep on a deep chartreuse crushed velvet sofa and found myself in the dilapidated tiled basement bathroom of an anachronistic department store. The man at the urinal next to me was a specific midcentury caricature – pressed suit, fedora and British style horrid teeth. We began our releases in sync then subtly tilted our chins to each other in mutual challenge.

We each began walking backward while arching our streams so they might continue to reach the appropriate receptacles. Things were neck to neck, or Turkey neck to Turkey neck as it were, until the building’s floor plan guaranteed my victory. Just as I stepped into an open doorway he abruptly came against a solid wall. The sudden shock obliterated his concentration.

Suddenly his emission was not reaching the urinal but uncontrollably sputtering and flying into the air around him – soaking his clothing, shoes and the walls and floor as he futilely tried to regain his composure. I continued to back through the doorway as my own issue impossibly extended further and further to the target. When I reached the edge of the hallway I’d entered I proudly stood and concluded my now nearly twenty foot feat.

I had won!

In this feeling of elation I suddenly returned to consciousness and with a shock learned I had only succeeded in soaking my own clothing as well as my friend’s sofa. The sudden speed in which triumphant pride soured into deepest shame nearly gave me whiplash. The damage was reversible as this same vintage settee was later transferred to my family’s home upon the collective house’s dissolution and remained there for years in an odorless state.

I talk to Tim here and there but nothing like the Summer of 1998 when we were near constant collaborators in a variety of mediums. I wonder if he has outgrown such juvenile pursuits or rather if he has revisited them with renewed gusto as the father of a young son. We never compared lists of our respective marked Frank Lloyd Wright edifices and it feels entirely possible that he ended the practice with the first impulsive iteration at the Robie House.

Perhaps I’ll reach back out in the near future and learn for certain – one way or the other.

Tijuana 2014 : “Amor es Palabra”

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I caught a ride down to Tijuana with Griffin because he was going to be playing a Sewn Leather show. He said there wasn’t enough room in his tiny RV for LaPorsha but that obviously wasn’t true. I understood. He needed my undivided attention to help calm him down as he drove the RV. It wasn’t even a big big one – it was like a Dolphin, one of the ones you drop in the back of a pickup truck. But Griffin was a high strung little guy – the polar opposite of the terminally placid bearded pot bellied dudes that usually pilot vehicles of that weight class.

Every missed turn triggered a minor meltdown, let alone the whole logistics of crossing an international border, and he needed me to bounce off and redirect the nervous energy. It might not seem like it but I can be pretty Zen in the right interpersonal combinations.

The show was at a gallery called Otras Obras, another TODDPNYC joint. Todd is a bit like Jeffrey Deitch – I’m not sure if I like either of them as people or the changes they create in the art communities I am emotionally invested in but there’s no arguing with their taste. They know what’s cool a hell of a lot faster that any other curators or promoters punching in their weight class. I just don’t love watching the fights. I’m a Benny “The Jet” Urquidez type of guy – I love me an underdog.

I don’t know if it was Griffin or Todd P that got El Muertho de Tijuana on the show but I never would have moved to Tijuana if he hadn’t played that night. Balthazar is an incredible artist who should be world famous but I don’t think he can legally travel to other countries. I made the mistake of believing his goth tinged cumbia was more representative of what was happening in Tijuana’s hipster youth culture than it actually was.

My dream was to start a No-teño band – a portmanteau of No Wave and Norteño. My vision was a mariachi version of jazz influenced bands like The Contortions. In my fantasy I would immediately meet young, disenfranchised brass and bajo sexto players who were just itching to let me croon over a darker slowed down version of the oompah music they’d been raised with. The reality was that the kids were into indie rock and electronic dance music. People were friendly, welcoming and receptive enough to my increasingly-theatrical-while-musically-minimal style but writing songs in Spanish didn’t magically transform me into the flavor of the moment.

We ended up getting a cheap balcony apartment right next to Parque Teniente Guerrero where El Muertho would play almost daily for adoring crowds of working class families. His KISS style make-up and obvious unapologetic homosexuality gave him unquestionable populist appeal but he wasn’t headlining the bars and galleries I was managing to book shows at. I recorded myself playing La Bamba at a viscerally uncomfortable tempo on my mother’s piano but for most of my new songs I just pulled random instrumentals off of YouTube because I hadn’t found a band. If I had been smarter I would have taught myself guitar or keyboard and taken songs, like the one I’m about to type and translate, straight to the park:

Amor es palabra, es solo palabra

Pero Amar es trabajo

A la comida no tiene sabor

Sin una poca cebolla y ajo

Porque Estás llorando mi corazon mi vida

Este vez eres cebolla o cuchillo?

Es nuestra amor cierto como una gran cena

O solo es un bocadillo?

(Love is a word, only a word. But to love is work. Concerning food, it has no flavor without a bit of onion and garlic. Why are you crying my heart, my life? This time are you the onion or the knife? Is our love true like a grand banquet or is it only a snack?)

I was super obsessed with main stream Latin stars like José José and Juan Gabriel but unfortunately I never learned basic musicianship and I’m not much of a singer. I do still feel that writing in Spanish set off something special in me musically even if I never learned to speak it properly. Who knows? – maybe my dream No-teño band lives in the forests of Northern California and is just waiting to read these words and e-mail me.

Me and LaPorsha got into the comfortable rhythms of living on the Mexican side of the border. We lived above a water purification store where we could refill our five gallon bottles but really they were on every corner. I combed the Coahuila Flea Market for an empty propane canister for the water heater and walked ours down there to sell it when we were ready to leave. It’s an unwritten law of Mexican tenant culture that you don’t just leave it for the next person unless they are a particular friend of yours. They’re worth too much money. Once every couple months we would endure a day or two of cold showers until I heard the distinctive jingle of a passing Z Gas truck and ran the empty cylinder down to exchange it.

Our Flame-Point Siamese named Catrick made the move down with us and seemed to take to the Mexican Street Cat life right off the bat. He had already been going to parties around Los Angeles with a stylish blue leather harness from one of the souvenir shops and riding buses and trains with us. We left the window open a crack for him behind the security bars and he got used to coming and going as he pleased. Before long we had to go to Los Angeles for a little longer than usual to perform a series of pieces based on the Planets of Classical Astrology at Human Resources.

We left out lots of food and water but Catrick was pissed at us for not bringing him. There was an ancient mansion surrounded by overgrown weeds, palms and fruit trees at the center of our block – it had an old model white Cadillac sitting in its yard that Catrick must have felt drawn to because it was the same color as him. He decided to flaunt his independence by moving underneath it and sleeping in its shadow. He pretended not to hear me calling him, I knew because I saw his ears twitch, and I had to put food through the bars of the fence to lure him and quickly snatch him home. It became a ritual we would have to repeat every time we left for even a single night from then on out.

There was a family of pigeons living in the outside of the north facing stucco wall, the window looked toward the border and was covered in chicken wire so they wouldn’t move all the way in between human tenants. I watched a few dawns through that window but nearly every dusk. The only way I know how to explain it is that darkness fell differently on the Mexican side of the border – like I could look North and see the exact gradation where it shifted. Something about the way the shadows would stretch out and devour the spaces between buildings. Maybe it’s something as mundane as different styles of architecture and urban planning or maybe it was all in my head.

There was a really nice silver decal of the Seal of Solomon I had bought from Mercado Sonora in Mexico City on the glass – we left it behind when we moved and I’m sure the next tenants hated it if the realtors didn’t just peel it off themselves before showing it to anybody. On hot days the pigeons would stink through the wall and I’d worry that they were giving us little red bird mites. One of them got in one day and Catrick made a desperate NBA leap for it in the stairwell but barely brushed the tips of its feathers with his claws. I let it out and he was furious with me. The next week he dragged in a flattened one from the street as if he’d killed it and I made fun of him:

“You’re such a loser dude, everybody knows you’re not a car!”

There was a homeless guy on our block we called Jack Sparrow – he had dark skin and matted black dreads and dressed in layers of grime encrusted rags and old puffy winter jackets worn flat with age. I never saw him speak – not even to himself and never in any language. He had developed a particularly unsavory defense tactic – he would pull down his pants and thrust his filthy, unwashed ass outward while walking backwards like a crab. Everybody instinctually recoiled from it in horror; you always knew he was coming because pedestrian crowds visibly parted on the sidewalk.

One night we were walking on the side of town near the Cultural Center when a tiny striped female cat came darting from behind a book store and urgently cried for our attention. I saw her again on a walk I was taking on my own about a week later and carried her home. We called her Tabby. Of course she was pregnant. She ballooned up like a watermelon and LaPorsha tried to wake me up in excitement the night she had her kittens but I was dead to the world.

I should have woken up.

Tabby’s instincts hadn’t fully kicked in and her babies were tangled up in a mess of umbilical cords she had neglected to sever with her teeth. I was able to cut four of them free but a fifth one had been strangled to death when his writhing siblings accidentally tangled the cords around his neck. Tabby lay next to the haphazard knot of infants purring contentedly in blissful ignorance that she had just decisively fucked up the delivery. Without my intervention they would have all died or at the very least lost limbs.

I put the dead kitten in a plastic bag and walked downtown to throw it away as far from the apartment as possible. I went to Speedy’s to buy some Oxymorphone, often referred to as the Cadillac of opiates, and Smart & Final to buy some Glorias from the small batch Las Sevillanas brand. I was looking for anything that could help us feel better or at least feel shitty less conspicuously.

Catrick had been neutered young but really stepped up to the plate for the foster father role. He played with the kittens without ever getting too rough and used to sit with his paw resting on top of Tabby’s like a sweet Captain Save-a-Hoe. I gave some of the kittens names but nothing permanent – things like Isaiah and other ones from the Bible I wouldn’t even remember. It was fun for a while but the kittens got old and Tabby started acting feral again – everybody was done with everything.

Catrick climbed onto the spot where our shoulders met in the bed and pissed so it would get on both of us. He was trying to tell us he was ready to be the only cat in the house again. I put Tabby and her kittens in a box and walked to the Park to start giving them away. The first tuxedo boy went with this young guy with a Faux Hawk whose printed polo shirt showed he had one of the better-paying-than-average cell phone store jobs. The kitten dug its claws in and buried its face in his chest and he said “Vamanos” and walked off into the sunset. I think they were probably quite happy together.

I ended up by the big Cathedral where rows of faith healer’s stalls sold dried herbs, medals of the Saints and pieces of rattlesnake skin. Men who appeared to be disabled walked around wearing laminated signs advertising acupressure and miraculous touch. I was able to find what seemed like good homes for all of the kittens but everybody declined to take Tabby with them even though she was still affectionate with her offspring. Finally I just had an adult female cat in a box and that isn’t the sort of thing you can give away on the streets of Tijuana – not even outside the biggest Cathedral. I slowly walked away from the box – it’s not like she was peeking over the side and watching me. I felt bad but there wasn’t really anything else I could do – at least there was more street food on that block than the one by a bookstore I had found her on.

Perhaps just setting her on the ground so she could run off would have been more honest – and by extension more kind. There’s a lot of things I’m still figuring out.

LaPorsha had a gig where she would commute to Los Angeles to work in a BDSM Dungeon but she wasn’t guaranteed sessions, the only thing that made money, every time she made the trip and Black sex workers are just generally undervalued outside of niche situations so it was pretty much a waste of time. I made little scraps of money bringing cartons of duty free USA Gold cigarettes into Mexico then back into the United States. We only smoked them if we were desperate – we liked the Lucky Strikes with a picture of a dead rat on the box. When friends came down to play shows I would make sure that everybody muled the maximum two cartons for me in both directions. I kept them in my kitchen cabinet and made sure to never cross in either direction without moving and selling cigarettes.

We could have lived down there forever if it wasn’t for the constant police harassment. LaPorsha wouldn’t get it when she was alone because they just assumed she was Haitian but she didn’t like going anywhere alone and I got it constantly. The cops acted like dogs who are only interested in a stick the moment another dog picks it up. We walked Catrick in the park and they came up and accused us of stealing a cat. I carried an old karaoke machine down the street and they accused me of stealing that. It didn’t help that we were on drugs and all of our dreams about Tijuana having a thriving Downtown 81 style Arts scene weren’t working out anyway.

We gathered all of the stuff from our apartment and put Catrick into a carrier and walked back into the United States. I had another side hustle selling promotional copies of the The Order DVD from Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 because I had found a huge cache of them at the Amvets in Skyline Hills. I never should have brought them all into Mexico but it saved me a few bus rides when I had to cross over and drop one in the mail.

The Customs guys told me that I couldn’t have them because I was obviously selling them which was illegal and I couldn’t think of a convincing lie. They told me to go back into Mexico and come back without them and I didn’t have any friends by the border to go give them to. There was this new art space that had just popped up in the row of border storefronts. It was closed but I left them in front of it in the hope that somebody who knew what they were might find them and it wouldn’t be a complete waste.

They sold slowly over eBay and Amazon but it still felt like setting several hundred dollars on the sidewalk.

It wasn’t until I was already back in the United States that the idea hit me. I should have said that I played in either Murphy’s Law or Agnostic Front and gave the DVDs away to promote my band because both groups are referenced on the packaging.

Maybe I should explain this more for anyone who might be interested. Both of these classic NYHC bands play special songs created for the art film as Matthew Barney’s character free climbs up the sloping ramp of the Guggenheim Museum in a special section intended to symbolize the five stages of initiation into Freemasonry. The short section on the DVD was the only part of Cremaster 3 made commercially available but the full three hour film is now on archive.org.

All of the Customs Agents looked like skinheads anyway but it’s probably like 100 to 1 that they wouldn’t know I was lying. They’d have had to have been into early hardcore and known enough about both bands to realize I couldn’t possibly be even a temporary member of either one.

It doesn’t matter anyway, whatever I didn’t lose then I would just end up losing later.

Even the cat.

[photo from El Muertho de Tijuana Instagram]