Tag: Mike Collins

Let’s start things off immediately after the hit and run driver knocked me onto my back and drove away with my Congress tape player inside their car. Fortunately my bike was undamaged but I was in too much pain to ride it. I locked it to a pole and dragged myself back to the compact laundry room I was secretly staying in.

I was bleeding from the tiny rope burn on my thumb but besides that none of my skin appeared to be broken. To go along with my recent short haircut I had adopted a uniform of a black leather jacket and a black pair of thick denim rodeo pants with metal rivets running along the sides of the legs – I hadn’t picked it in anticipation of the kind of tumble I had just taken but it absolutely helped.

I had landed directly onto the base of my spine or what is usually called the small of the back. The pain was constant but I discovered that first night that things felt slightly better if I tilted my pelvis or moved it in a small circular motion. I could have spent an hour each day just trying to roll my hips like Tracy Pew does in the live The Birthday Party footage but I realized that hula hooping would be almost ideal physical therapy.

Hula hooping was one of those things I had never learned to do as a kid – like tying my shoes, riding a bike and whistling. Before this specific injury I don’t think I had ever managed to keep a hoop up for more than thirty seconds. I had managed to rapidly teach myself how to walk on stilts and jump an unlimited number of times on a pogo stick during my twenties though. I was pretty good at all that hippy burner circusy shit. I could do that acrobatic silks thing too.

Obviously Aaron Hibbs from Sword Heaven was a big inspiration. When I first travelled to Columbus, Ohio and met him at Skylab he was in the middle of training for his attempt at the Guinness World Record for longest endurance hula hooping. He had just gotten this thing in the mail called a Stadium Pal – it was like a durable condom for the end of his penis with a tube going to a one liter pouch that affixes to the ankle.

The craziest thing about this product was that it was designed for spectators at major sports games who didn’t want to leave their seats during an important play if their beer started hitting their bladder. I can’t imagine it sold very many units to this demographic but it was perfect for watersports enthusiasts and people trying to set world records. Maybe Amazon employees who weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom bought a few.

I checked in to watch the live stream a few times when Aaron made his first attempt at the record. Emptying the bag wouldn’t have been feasible so he just pointed the end of the tube away from his ankle and stood on a fresh piece of grass sod roll to absorb the urine while hula hooping. Toward the end it started to turn yellow and smell from all the acidity and somebody threw down some bark chips to help with that situation.

The way that the record was set up Aaron was allowed to take a five minute every eight hours or so and his time ended if the hoop went above his shoulders or below his knees. There’s probably a different record for how long you can go without any breaks but he was going for the one with breaks. On his second attempt he set the world record at 74 hours and 54 minutes. I figured that if he could hoop for that long I should be able to do it for an hour or two without any problems.

I didn’t actually own a hula hoop so I started biking down to Venice Beach and borrowing one from this friendly couple that ran an oxygen bar. I don’t know if I’ll ever get another chance to mention this so one time I ran an oxygen bar at OzzFest as a promotional gig for Trojanz condoms. When I was dating the girl from Cape Cod she’d get us all these product promotion gigs.

The oxygen bar set up had been on the road for the whole tour and all the liquid in the flavored oxygen bottles had dust floating on the top nearly half a centimeter thick. I was helping attendees try it out all day and I was never even slightly tempted to try it myself. I’ve still never tried flavored oxygen. To try to stay topical with the tour they had one called Bark at the Moon that was orange mixed with peppermint.

I can’t imagine it helped them sell condoms and they probably scrapped it by the next year but that was the last year we worked it so I couldn’t say for sure.

Anyway back to the oxygen bar in Venice Beach – they rented out hula hoops but they always just let me use one because I would stand a few feet away and hoop for a solid hour and it helped attract customers. Somebody had given me some pointers about keeping the hoop moving with the smallest possible motion and how to bring it back up if it started to sink. Pretty soon I could go the whole hour without stopping or accidentally dropping it and I started to realize it was easy to walk or even run while doing it.

From the time of the accident until I flew to Chicago that Summer I became one of the Venice Beach Boardwalk people like Harry Perry the rollerblading guitar guy and the dude who pulls a wagon selling Reggae for Babies CDs. Not that I was trying to get money but because I was there every day and I started to become a familiar sight on the Boardwalk.

I started getting into a routine of biking to the beach as soon as I woke up and grabbing a dark coffee called Bitches Brew from a tiny coffee shop called Groundwork in Westminster Alley one block over. It was my year of total sobriety and churchgoing so I threw myself into exercise and constant long distance bike rides. I felt like I had unlimited energy – much like I did when I started this writing project last Autumn.

Looking back on both time periods I’m inclined to classify them as minor manic episodes.

I’d probably started my routine with rowing machines even before the bike accident. The previous Summer I had noticed that my teenage metabolism was finally starting to give out on me and Gabe Viles from Mahjongg seemed to be in exactly the kind of shape I wanted to be in so I asked him about his exercise regimen. He said he followed the “military routine” of fifty sit-ups and fifty push-ups daily.

I don’t think he was ever in the military but I started doing the exact same thing.

Whenever I toured with Generation I followed along with Rian for all of the beachbody.com workouts she was into. On the 2010 tour we did P90X and then for the early 2012 Trapped in Reality tour with Sisterfucker nearly everyone in the van was participating in the more intense Insanity!. That tour was over and done with by the time of my bike accident.

I had found a public rowing machine that used weight for resistance in a downtown park next to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. Now that I think about it I must have started before the accident because I remember using my Congress player to time out 45 minute sessions by playing one side of a c-90. After the accident I made it a point to bike downtown and do 45 minutes after my hour of hula hooping at the beach.

2012 was a lot like 2001 in that I travelled constantly and seemed to have unlimited time in a day. Barely a month after returning from a full U.S. Tour I flew back to Chicago for the final Bitchpork. My original housing plans had fallen through so I slept on the roof of the Dust Bowl.

Ah.. what the hell… I wasn’t going to get into this detail but screw it. I’d set up a couple Southern California shows earlier in the year for a touring hippy girl folk band from Chicago. I wasn’t into their music but ended up becoming essentially a male groupie when I shared my body with every female member of the band except for the main singer-songwriter.

I followed them up to San Francisco where they played a bar and crashed at a house called Bay Area 51. The aforementioned singer beat up her boyfriend and peed on a couch while I took a bath with the other three girls in a jacuzzi that turned out to be leaking. I went to bed with one I’ll call K. in Logan Duren’s room while he was out of town.

The next day I found out she was only twenty years old and in a relationship with another musician I knew socially but wasn’t especially fond of. I think there is something biological that makes men get obsessive after they sleep with much younger women. I’m not saying this to try to detract from my responsibility at all – everything I did was completely my fault.

I started bombarding her with long distance attention and trying to convince her to break up with her boyfriend to be with me instead. She blew me off at first but by the time of the tour she was single again and we were talking about visiting each other. She was out of town when we passed through Chicago and I spent the night with another girl in the band.

By the time I was flying back to Chicago we had been talking about me moving in with her and being a couple. The minute my plane landed she called me and told me she had been dating some other creep in his mid-thirties and he had just moved in with her and I would need to stay somewhere else. It seemed like appropriate karma for the way I’d been behaving and a solid reminder that I shouldn’t be pursuing girls more than a decade younger than me.

The silver lining was it all caused the original boyfriend to stop trying to help or have anything to do me. He was a performer, promoter and a bit of a social climber. He had a tit-for-tat attitude toward adding each other on shows that put me in really uncomfortable situations because I just couldn’t hang with his tunes.

SXSW was a nightmare. I had the good fortune of a few friends helping me jump slightly prestigious shows on the understanding that I was a mic and single plug, played around five minutes and they actually liked my stuff. I think I shared a bill with Grimes this way. Anyway I was in dude’s car and he was constantly rubbing my shoulders to try to get him on the same shows when he had a full band with complex setup and longer sets.

To add to the chaos his electric mandolin seemed to need resoldering before every single set.

I don’t try to make a habit out of bedding other dude’s girlfriends and K. never mentioned not being single until after everything went down. Still if I knew what effect it would have had I would have done it earlier and on purpose because I despise the feeling of anybody acting like my little bit of street cred is something I can somehow spread onto them by contact or that I’d even want to.

While I was staying at the Dust Bowl I didn’t have a hula hoop but somebody had loaned or given me a portable rowing machine. I stuck with the daily 45 minutes and by that point I had a pretty decent six pack that stuck around for two years even after I stopped exercising. Now I’m getting a belly again and topped 200 pounds for the first time ever so I really need to get back into it.

I continued on to the East Coast and when I was in Baltimore Brian from Narwhalz gave me this heavy wooden hoop that probably used to be part of the base for a Papasan chair. He recorded a video of me repeatedly jumping off of a porch and walking back up the stairs while continuously hula hooping and playfully smack talking Hibbs as if I was going to come for his record.

There was about to be a noise festival in West Virginia called Voices of the Valley. I had gone the year before with Damian Languell, Vanessa Olson, Matthew Strange and Dominick – we all got in for free by planning an improvised set as Twilight Memories of the Three Suns. The festival was at a campground with a river passing right by the stage and we decided to play in the river.

We were all sleeping in an old barn that had the springs from inside a mattress and some other pieces of scrap metal that would make good instruments laying around. I was feeling a little alienated and out of place both with the festival itself and the project I was going to be playing in – all of this was the inspiration for what I did with the Congress player.

There were a few pieces of playground equipment near the entrance including the classic style of metal merry-go-round. I assembled a group to repeat a short phrase over and over while spinning past a condenser microphone on a tape recorder:

“What am I doing here? What am I doing here?”

The motion of the spinning wheel added a bit of Doppler Effect and I recorded the same amount of the same thing onto the reverse side so that my Congress would effectively allow me to do live reverses. To complicate matters even further I had a BOSS DD-6 and battery operated amp which allowed me to reverse the reversed audio on echoes to sound clear again.

With everything planned out I took a walk a little ways upstream into the forest because I had discovered a spot where large trout liked to congregate in the shallows around sunset. I was staring directly at the fish when I heard a voice on the PA announce that Twilight Memories was starting that very minute.

The path was pretty twisty and took a while so I opted to jump directly into the water, scattering the fish, and start running downstream. Thankfully the water never got higher than my waist and when I came running into sight a couple of minutes into the set it probably looked like I’d planned it.

I’d left all of the electronics I was going to be using on a large flat rock on the water’s far edge and I got straight to playing the tape while messing with all of the Congress features and the pedal. That same mantra sped up, slowed down and echoed back and forth between it’s forward and reversed versions like a space rock ping pong game:

“What am I doing here? What am I doing heeree kniood I ma’ tuhwhat am I am I…”

I was pretty happy with how the whole thing sounded from where I was sitting combined with the metallic rhythms of springs on water, some varied percussion and a simple aquaphone made of a plastic bottle with the bottom cut off being slid up and down in the water while Damian blew into some kind of mouth piece on a hose.

I just now thought about the fact that somebody must have recorded it and indeed I found a YouTube video almost immediately. Oddly enough this video either ends before I showed up or the rock I was playing on was so far across the water it’s all but inaudible. There’s a certain humbling comfort in having what I always thought of as the defining climax of this set completely absent from the only document and it absolutely sounds great without it.

The next year I had lost the Congress, become obsessed with hula hooping and Damian had decided not to come at all. I was invited to come back and put together another improvised environmental sound set under the Twilight Memories name again although I’d never been in the band beyond that one time.

The house I’d been staying at in Baltimore was home to Mike Collins who would soon be going onto moderate musical success under the names Salvia Plath and Drugdealer. He wanted to go, didn’t have a ticket and had set up a kind of noise karaoke rig by attaching a microphone and multi effects processor to his car’s stereo system so the stars more or less aligned. Matthew and Dominick were once again along for the ride and the resident muse this time around was Renee.

We recorded a short video on the same merry-go-round that had me hula hooping in the center as it rapidly spun and improvising a monologue. This one I’ve seen many times but unfortunately Mike has set his channel to private and I haven’t been able to get in touch to get access again. It would be beyond lovely if word somehow got to him and I might be able to see the video again.

This time around we performed as a small parade that centered on the car stereo setup. I still wanted to use water so I hung an old kettle from a bamboo pole with about an inch of water inside it. I hula hooped as I walked and was able to use the hoop itself as a kind of mallet and bring the kettle into contact with it to evoke the shifting sounds created by the water changing the shape of the vibrating chamber.

I don’t know if this one got recorded or not. I have to say that it felt a bit like I was phoning it in and while the previous year’s performance had been an exciting collaboration this was little more than a thin pretext to avoid the gate charges. I had a good time and saw some great sets but the highlight of the weekend was hitchhiking to the nearest town early Sunday morning to attend a service in a small Lutheran church.

The sense of alienation I had felt the previous year was amplified, even if you can’t hear the phrase in the recording of the 2011 performance and it wasn’t part of this one at all it continued to play on an endless loop like a spinning merry-go-round inside my head:

“What am I doing here? What am I doing here? What am I doing here…”