Tag: Miami

Miami 2008 : The Bus Part Five “Hey Man, Thanks For Coming Through On The Broccoli”

berniebleak11 Comments

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

I don’t really resonate with the identity of “acid dealer” but for the duration of the Conference that’s what I was. The sheet of acid I had just bought needed to make enough money for me to buy another one so that I could continue to pursue my recent hobby of being a totally ridiculous acid head. In a round about way this temporary occupation would be responsible for generating the name of my future solo project.

I have always disliked the proposition that people who are about to consume psychedelic drugs should be shielded from any negative or unpleasant suggestions out of fear that it might trigger a “bad trip”. It seemed to me that the current emotional landscape of the would-be consumer’s life would be more responsible for shaping their experience than whether or not somebody said “boo”.

For this reason I had taken a mechanical pencil and drawn little sad faces, grave stones, mushroom clouds and other ominous icons on the individual doses of either a previous or later sheet. This time around the blotter was only plain white paper but I made sure to reassure any prospective buyers that they were in for a bad time. Somebody asked me if it was going to be fun:

“Fun? Fuck no! I’ve been taking this shit all weekend and I’m crying blood! This shit is negative weekend! This shit is Bleak End at Bernie’s!”

When it came out of my mouth I wouldn’t have guessed that it would become the moniker of a future singer-songwriter solo project and the source of my only version of the punk name. I just knew that it was a little pun and a clump of phonemes that I liked the heft of in the hand of my mind – like a rock that you would select for attempting to skip on water. If I had to do it over again I would maybe use the name for a song or album but not for an identity defining music thing. It’s a bit too bad-quirky and pop-culture-referencey like Break Dancing Ronald Reagan or Robin Williams On Fire.

If I could go back in time and change it I would probably go with something heavy and esoteric like Lacrimae Rerum or offensive and edgelordy like Human Shit. It’s not like I hate it or anything, it is my name after all and I already lucked out with a killer name from my family of origin. I’m just saying in the best of all possible worlds I’d probably have gone with something better.

If I’m going to be getting into ideal worlds I did always wish that somebody with a label had approached me about releasing music – or reissuing now that the whole thing has been mothballed. I never saw it first hand but I heard that some kids performed once or twice as Bleak End at Bernie’s Two so there is that thing they say about imitation and flattery and obviously there’s some truth to that. I’m human and it’s only natural to want more – out of all the drugs the brain rewards itself with when outside circumstances trigger specific emotions I’d rank validation among the most elusive.

Anyway that was a bit of a tangent: I was selling drugs at a noise music festival. I had been kind of feeling this Dickensian Besprizornye style energy in the mode of sort of leaning against a wall and impudently eating an apple and of course there was just the thing about being on the road and needing to eat to stay alive but I had been eating a lot of raw fruits and vegetables. I definitely shopped for these with an eye toward accessorizing and because I was wearing some cream colored women’s corduroys and a kind of Jordache looking sporty green top from Rainbow I ended up buying a parsnip and bunch of rapini or broccoli rabe.

For me acid very much makes me feel like an art director looking at my own life from the outside and admiring the composition and color palette. I remember climbing the ladder onto the bus’s roof with the parsnip in the back pocket of the aforementioned pants and thinking the entire ensemble looked pleasantly Fraggle Rock. The rapini became my kind of drug dealer machismo totem as I vacantly grazed on it to kind of ominously loiter as I stared right through my slightly nervous customers – kind of like a toothpick or cigarette for a central casting television show hustler character.

I’d stare off into the distance as I dug into my pocket for the drugs and casually offered bites of the cruciferous greens that the buyers universally accepted to seem “with it”. I don’t mean that I was selling drugs to my friends like this – for them I just did it normal. This was a character I was putting on for the randoms, deliberately campy and extremely self conscious.

This brings us to the pull quote. I had stepped inside of Churchill’s but not all the way in where the performances happen, I was standing near the ATM by the door and talking to Vanessa. A business casual looking guy that I had evidently sold drugs to was heading outside and leaned in close to say some generic outlaw association banter and slyly wink:

“Hey man, thanks for coming through with the broccoli!”

What I’m trying to get as is that you will sometimes hear this kind of outlaw association banter and it sounds too ridiculous to be real. Like code words and what not exist but if the swagger game is lacking you start wondering what the deal is. Tough talk surrounding something as mundane as framing a porch. Sly looks and handshakes for jobs that are legal and generate honest tax forms. This is how the broccoli bit sounded, corny really.

Most of my acid head phase was done in approximately once weekly weekend warrior mode with two major exceptions: when I rode freight trains with Alexis and Jacki to Mardi Gras I had the remains of a sheet where the doses were slightly too small to be effective. We decided to play a game where we would take one square on the hour every hour until they were gone. Most people are probably familiar with the feeling of drinking heavily while sitting down and not realizing how intoxicated you had become until suddenly trying to stand up.

This train ride was similar in that it didn’t seem like we were tripping that hard while the landscape was rushing by us at full speed but when the train would stop and side out we would suddenly realize that inanimate objects weren’t willing to sit in one place. Everything appeared to be creeping or flowing toward the train. The second binge was at this International Noise Conference. Me and Rage just continued to take it the moment it felt like the effects might be subsiding for the entire weekend.

A large part of our dynamic was that kind of art director thing: the way we looked together. A good reference point would be the famous X-Force cover where Polaris is posing on the much larger character Strong Guy. I’m certainly not muscular but I am quite tall and with a tiny woman hanging from my shoulders we looked like something out of a comic book. We started to layer and fuse our distinctive and disparate styles: she put on my leather vest and I ended up in some of her delicate lacey underthings.

I don’t remember where it came from but Rage ended up with a brightly colored toy revolver that seldom left her hand. I have a vivid memory of us wandering the back streets of Little Haiti on the dawn of the second or third day. The older men of the neighborhood were quietly playing acoustic guitars and accordions on their porches, the younger men on the corners tensed when they first noticed the gun but visibly softened upon taking in the entire picture. They offered discrete nods as we passed on by – almost imperceptible but unequivocal in the message of “we mean you no harm”.

I think I was looking for mangos and avocados. They had been everywhere in Florida but were slightly harder to find in this particular neighborhood. I ended up in a Botanica where dried fish were slowly smoldering at the threshold as an offering to the lwa. I bought some Lanman & Kemp Florida Water – a scent that would come to define the indelible stink of magic on the next few years of my life. I had read a little bit about Vodou and asked the proprietor if there might be an hounfour in the neighborhood:

“Not here. Haiti only.”

It wasn’t the kind of acid that prevents you from sleeping but the unrelenting heat of the weekend made it feel like we might as well have not been. There was a certain frantic and desperate energy to the Churchill’s parking lot that intensified it’s effects: from both the drug addled locals and the sleep deprived Conference attendees. Unrelenting sunlight on aggressively grey and medium sized jagged rocks of gravel. It felt like your head was exploding.

Somebody had rented a motel room around the corner so me and Rage drifted over to check out the scene. There was nothing relaxing about it. It was an echo of the energy of the bus, parking lot and Conference: too many people in too small of a space and the demanding auras of piles of clothing and music equipment. The fence was covered with brown anoles urgently flashing bright yellow dewlaps. Also Broke-Bus Brooke was there and there is zero chill within a ten foot radius of that person ever. She ended up harnessing that quality in a later series of deeply uncomfortable performances as Are You My Mother?”

We decided to ditch the collectivist spirit and sneak off for a bit of decadent self care: we went out to sushi. Under the soothing effects of secrecy and air conditioning we ordered a giant platter of sashimi that arrived on a bed of shaved ice. If I had been a zoo animal in those years my diet probably would have been mangoes, rapini and raw salmon. Like the scent of Florida Water these things felt refreshing and most likely restocked some of the vitamins that the constant diet of drugs had been depleting.

We returned to the chaos of the International Noise Conference.

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Southern Florida 2008 : The Bus Part Four “There’s A Quarterback In Every Huddle”

berniebleak12 Comments

Part One Part Two Part Three

Last bus chapter I was talking about South Beach but I think I need to dial back a little bit and talk about the Publix between Orlando and Miami. John Benson was the primary architect behind both bus incarnations but he wasn’t always the driver. Almost as often, for both the INC trip and the later Living Hell tour, Upper Dave was the one behind the wheel. He looked good there and had the necessary temperament for maneuvering a vehicle of it’s size: one of the reasons I thought it was hilarious when the comparably nervous and high strung Griffin from Sewn Leather started driving a miniature RV.

Anyway this would have been the reason that some of the other members of Living Hell stole a sign from Wendy’s that said “Dave’s Way” and displayed it in the tiny window usually reserved for route information.

Let’s talk about stealing: it was ordinary for the bus to attract negative police attention just for looking weird and being full of freaks but on this occasion a crime actually was committed, albeit minor. I’ve had enough experience at this point to have the shoplifting conversation before walking into a major grocery chain in mixed company on tour and I’m about to lay out the reasons.

It’s always cheese and it’s always a bigger headache for the companions of the actual shoplifter than it is for the shoplifter themselves. Cheese is a cherished food of early adulthood: high in protein and requiring no preparation it often leads to punk house arguments and creates a universal shiver of excitement when found in a dumpster because it brings life and flavor to the thing there’s always too much of: bread.

It isn’t really important who stole the cheese but because I remember let’s share a chuckle at this person’s expense anyway. It was James: then playing with Lazy Magnet and later in a band called Evil Spirits with the members of Taboo. I haven’t heard anything about James in a few years, hopefully this is just because he’s been living quietly but well and not because somebody is about to let me in on some bad news. James stole cheese from Publix and Publix called the police and the police sat us all down on the side of the bus to be detained and lectured.

There are a lot of reasons why the following encounter felt like we were an errant Kindergarten class that had wandered away from a teacher on a field trip and I’m about to list all of them. The first one was that the cops were going to try to explain elementary ethics to us as if we were toddlers and actually simply did not understand:

“How would you like it if I stole your food? You’ve got food in that bag right there, what if I just took it?”

It was disappointing that they didn’t segue from this into a complete primer on the nuances of corporate personhood. An explanation as to why Publix was the equivalent of a friend and ally when it was time to not steal food from them but would magically transform into an LLC the moment a cleaning product gave their employees cancer or a new location’s construction threatened an endangered species. Give a Publix a fish and it eats for a day…

The next reason was that this stern lecture was interrupted by a Publix employee who was bringing us jars of peanut butter and jelly, a loaf of bread and a twelve pack of root beer. She seemed to understand that we had simply missed snack time and would return to being polite members of society the minute we’d had a PBJ and nap and all of this was seriously eroding the cop’s assertion that we needed to reflect on the error of our ways.

The next reason was that the “time out” they had us sitting in was completely unfair and arbitrary. John Orlando had bought a submarine sandwich from Publix and even had the receipt to prove it. What he didn’t have was a full set of teeth to eat it with and our temporary stewards had forbidden him from going onto the bus to retrieve his partial denture. He said that he wanted to obey their rules but was hungry and he and I came up with a novel compromise. Because he couldn’t retrieve his teeth I would use my teeth to chew up bites of his sandwich for him and spit them into his mouth like a mother bird.

This is especially funny to me because I’ve now lost all of my teeth and have to wear a full set of dentures while I imagine John is probably back to a healthy complete set as he’s no doubt replaced the partial with implants by now. Anyway John got to eat his sandwich without breaking the rule about going back on board the bus but the cops really didn’t like the way he was eating it:

“Stop it! You’re making a scene!”

We all thought that detaining a bus full of weirdos and making them sit in time out in a Publix parking lot was making more of a scene but what could we say? According to the social contract it is the cops who are the arbiters of proper behavior and not the bus full of freaks. The biggest reason that the scenario felt like we were a rogue troupe of grade schoolers is that the cops were only looking for a proper authority figure among us to release us into the recognizance of:

“Look I know you say you’re all artists and everybody’s equal but there’s a quarterback in every huddle. Who’s the Alpha?”

We suggested that they throw a raw steak over our heads and waited to see which of us got it. Eventually somebody was able to call John Benson who had been briefly traveling in a separate car and his full beard and fatherly demeanor seemed to satisfy the peace officers. Maybe it was the subtle shifts in everybody’s body language the moment he arrived: they’d found the Alpha. He was given a stern warning to prevent us from straying or stealing cheese in the future and we were allowed to continue onward to Miami and the International Noise Conference.

The topic of who exactly was the Alpha ended up being discussed with much interest for the entirety of the Conference. Clearly John Benson was the bus-Alpha and Rat Bastard was both the INC and Laundry Room Squelcher-Alpha but we all felt like there was room for other Alphas. Austin from Right Arm Severed was briefly dubbed the taco-Alpha when he left the bus around two in the morning one night with the promise to buy everybody tacos but this status was revoked when he returned having only bought crack from the guy who had been trying to sell everyone a gay porn DVD.

Nobody suggested it at the time but I’d like to retroactively nominate Aaron Hibbs of Sword Heaven as the artistic Alpha of the Conference. Aaron was an almost Ned Flanders-like figure in the American Noise landscape of 2008: he oozed positivity, was good at everything he attempted and of course he had the mustache. I had first met Aaron a year or so earlier when I passed through Skylab in the romantic company of one of his exes and can report that he was nothing but cordial under the circumstances.

His main project with Mark Van Fleet was certainly among the most anticipated of the Conference combining power electronics style noise with both Industrial which would become a bit of a trend in the next few years and a solid performance gimmick which never goes out of style. On this particular year he had also brought a high concept “joke” project: Rage Against The Cage – an a-capella grunge band. Hibbs and company belted out compositions of “uh’s”, “oh-no’s” and other Vedder-isms to the amusement of everybody who was in on the joke.

I realize that this is all making me sound like a super-fan with a mouth full of dick and to some extent this is probably true, Aaron was my inspiration to get into endurance hula hooping a few years later, but I also haven’t actually listened to any of the Sword Heaven records. I really am trying to identify the most hyped creative force of the Conference regardless of my personal tastes. If I was going to talk about the single most anticipated and best received performance it would probably be Justice Yeldham’s bloody mouth-on-glass presentation but Lucas wasn’t presenting different projects every single day of the Conference.

This brings us back to the afternoon at South Beach where a good portion of the crowd was on acid and the beach front condos said “You Deserve To Live Here”. Aaron was standing in the busy intersection in front of these condos and casually tossing water balloons into the air over his shoulder. When they inevitably came back down onto fancy sport’s cars and open convertibles the angry motorists were deflated when they saw the balloons hadn’t been thrown with a specific target in mind.

Or maybe it was just that he was clearly surrounded by comrades who would have backed him up in the event of a conflict. Either way nobody said anything.

I’m not sure if the bit with the balloons was supposed to be part of the following Noumena performance but the main part was on the actual beach. I looked up the meaning of that word in anticipation of writing this piece but it’s a little hard to either explain or understand. Basically while phenomena are things that are known to exist based on our sensory perceptions noumena are that which exists independently of them. I guess you could say that unless you were actually in Miami in 2008 to see or hear the various things I am writing about for yourself all of them are noumena.

The performance centered around a hollow hemisphere made of plaster that was about six feet in diameter. I’d imagine that this performance was at least partially inspired by Matthew Barney due to the focus on body movement and athleticism. I am going to be referring to the cast plaster sculpture as the cup for the sake of brevity. Aaron floated the cup onto the ocean’s surface where he performed an assortment of handstands and other balance exercises on it’s rim. Things concluded with him crawling out of the ocean with the cup on his back like the shell of a sea turtle.

Maybe there was a sonic element to the performance centered on jazz balloon, it seems likely but I can’t remember for sure and I didn’t see a video of the set when I searched for five seconds.

Anyway a lot of people on the bus were feeling burnt out on cop interactions, especially as they were tripping on acid, and thought that the ocean might offer an avenue of escape based on the presumption that the cop is a land animal. This turned out not to be the case. I know that Capricorn is the name for sea-goat but I don’t know what you would call a sea-pig. I only know that they were there, riding jet skis and blowing whistles, and swimming toward deeper water was a bad way to try to get away from them as it was one of the behaviors they were evidently charged to prevent.

It wasn’t a sea-cop but rather a form of transitional sand-cop that saw the Noumena performance as a thing that was in need of policing. I guess you could say that I was the talk-to-cops-while-on-acid-Alpha, when the familiar question of who was in charge was posed everybody instinctually pointed to me. That was fine. I really liked talking to cops on acid in 2008.

The cop wanted to know if we would be leaving and I reassured him that we would eventually need food that wasn’t sand and water that wasn’t salt and would therefore be going somewhere else. There was something else weighing on the cop’s mind but he didn’t quite know how to put it into words. He pointed to the cup:

“And you’ll be taking your…?”

“Our cup? Yes, we like our cup. We’ll be definitely taking the cup.”

I guess I was the Alpha for this brief window of time because the cop took this cursory exchange as due diligence and proceeded to leave us alone.

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