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.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 