San Jose 2121

When the archaeologists of the future (which may or may not come to pass)

Sort through the rubble and come upon

Our Barettas, Brownings, Calico M950s

Caracal 9x19mm, Parabellums and Colt Commanders

Colt Delta Elites, Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammerless

Colt Mustangs

Dan Wessons, Desert Eagles, Fort 12s, Fort-17s

FN Baby Brownings

FN 49’s, FN Grand Brownings, FP 45 Liberators

Gilsenti Model 1910s, Glock 17s, Glock 18s, Glock 19s, Glock 20s

Glock 22 through Glock 39s

Our Guncrafters and Gyrojets

Heckler & Koch HK 4s, HK 45s, MK 23’s and P7’s

Heckler and Koch VP 9s and VP 70s

High point Model JCP’s

High Standard HDMs

Jennings J 22s

JOLO JR’s

Jericho 941s

Don’t let the wall fall down on you

Kaltech P 11s and P 22s

Kimber Aegis, Kimber Custom, Kimber Eclipse

Komodo Element P1 95

Like a dragon made of iron

KRISS KARD, Lancaster, Langenhan

Lewis Automatic Pistol, Lilliput pistol

To put you in the grave

With a lily in your mouth

Llama M 82, the Luger

Mab Model A, Mab Model D

MAC 10, MAC 11, MAC mag 95

The Makarov, The Mamba Pistol, The Mars Automatic

To shoot your ass into orbit by the Red Planet

Mauser C 96

The Mitchell Alpha 45

The MP 444

The Musgrave pistol

Obregón Pistol

Pardini GT9

Pindad G2

PP 2000, PS silent pistol

QSW06,

Remington R51, Remington rider single shot

Rorbaugh R9s

Ruby pistols, Ruger Hawkeyes, Ruger LCPs

Savage model 1907, Summerlin LM4

Sig P227

Smith and Wesson Model 422s

Starfire, Star M43, Star UltraStar

Tanfoglio Force

Tec 9, Trejo pistol

Type 14 Nambu

UZI

Viper Jaws

Volkpistole

Walther P 22 and P 38

Whitney Wolverine

Zaragoza korlas

Zastava P P Zs

If there are people alive 100 years from now

They’re going to look at each other and say

Who in the ever-loving fuck were these people?

Thank God they are gone.

"San Jose 2121" audio

It's OK to Be Angry, It's Normal

 

Bands I've Taken for Granted – Neil Young & Crazy Horse

"Can you smell the horse?" asks crazed-but-still-in-control, band leader Neil in the hissing, smoldering wake of another feedback cannonball war between the guitars, bass, drums and voice of Neil. A rusted orange singing voice that careens above the wreckage like the falcon that has departed the falconer. Hearing "Rust Never Sleeps" on the family stereo in the late 70s, Crazy Horse's music sounded as the chugging engine of a battered Oldsmobile... which to me, at the time, was the sound of no-time or eternity.

I took Crazy Horse for granted because it seems as if they've always existed - their charred and bursting sounds swirling among the earliest bacteria of the planet. Coming back to hear the band years later, upon experiencing an urgent need to listen to the song "Fucking Up" earlier today, I understand that these are regular mortals playing regular instruments, but that something blindingly sparks when they play together. As all their rising and decaying sound gestures coalesce into a rumbling force approaching from over the hills.

A World In a Grain of Sand: On No "Milwaukee Sound"

My favorite/most personally important and influential Milwaukee bands off the top of my head at 4:58 PM on a Tuesday afternoon in May 2021: die kreuzen, the blowtorch, a movement, plasticland, ghostly trio, well, violent femmes, those x-cleavers, f/i, couch flambeau, voot warnings, cherry cake, ward and his troubles, atomic kroutons, mook, joker's henchmen, blue room, mcme, dummy club and bamm bamm, of course. It is striking that my relationship to these artists' music is predominantly through seeing their live shows. I never even owned music by several of these bands, but their influence and importance to me what was/is vital.

The thing that seems to unite these twenty late-80s-to-mid-90s Milwaukee bands is that none of them sounded at all like each other. In a sense, there never was a "Milwaukee sound." Marxist hard reggae/Northern Soul. Eastern Orthodox Yoko Ono vocals with rumble drums and bass. Alex Lifeson-Rush guitar voicings with soprano vocals that could crack Lake Michigan ice. Whammy bar reverb guitar with extended-technique alto sax interpreting an alternative "American songbook." Sometimes five people in the house, sometimes fifty, at Summerfest or a college show, maybe five hundred. The "Milwaukee sound" was that each artist felt free to be as idiosyncratically creative as he or she wanted to be. That was the attraction and why you would go out to see the bands. They were not mimicking and chiseling an identity to maybe "get signed," even though it was a desire. “Getting signed” was not the guiding desire, not by a long shot. Rather, the cause was urgency. Urgency of expression.

We will never precisely understand the story unspooling or know the landscape found inside the head of another person. It is mystery terrain. Perhaps that is why the art that really sticks with us through the years is that which permits the revealing of the strangeness of the person who created it. Such expression need not be limited to a local music scene. As an example, two people whose creative work, after decades, still chimes in the chambers of my soul with its unknowability are the painter Mark Rothko and Thelonious Monk. They are very well-known and were even celebrated during their lifetimes (though they both suffered enormously, financially and otherwise). What appeals to me about Monk and Rothko is similar to what was so galvanizing to me in those Milwaukee bands - a phenomenon that William Blake described as being able, "To see a World in a Grain of Sand.” By creating work that allowed for the expression of their own individual wildness and beauty, they also expressed the wildness and beauty of the world and of how living in it can make us want to scream or laugh or howl.

Them 70s Bands: Bong Store Baroque, Mayonnaise Jar Edition

Bands such as Kansas and Styx depressed me (literally, physiologically) then and now with their portentous playing, the particular way that they, especially Styx, fused classical music into pop rock and with their lyrics - which borrowed from fantastic tales of world mythology but somehow managed to make them sound boring or even kitsch. Interestingly (or not), Supertramp didn't have that effect on me. There is a brightness and a lack of excess in some of their songs that kept them from sounding morally defeating to me, as so many other bands from that era did. They did, however, suffer from what I might call "the alienation of mass scale.” It seems like they only existed as stadium rock. And I don't just mean where they performed, but that it was part of their essence – you could almost feel the music industry enveloping them, projecting them out into the public. I find that scale and that identity to be incredibly alienating.

Soft rock (not at all an oxymoron) also emerged from the detritus of the 60s and bands such as Air Supply provoke actual physiological depression in me for different reasons than the bong store baroque of the bands mentioned above. Soft rock provokes in me feelings of claustrophobia, lightheadedness, an inability to breathe properly. It mimics the feeling I used to get when my mother would take me to fabric stores, whose towering bolts I could never hope to see over when I was only about 3 feet tall. I think the feeling comes from the arrangement/production design of the songs. Everything sounds quite saturated. Add to that, the reduced tempo of the music and you begin to feel like you’re hearing the music from the inside of a full mayonnaise jar. 

Zuck and Jeff

I think the thing that most strongly indicates that we are living within very disturbed systems globally is that the worst among us rise to the positions of greatest power. Trump, Bush the Lesser, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Modi, Vladimir Putin -- these are execrable men, men who you would not trust to dog sit for you while take a weekend out of town. Yet it is them and men like them who so often run the show, in country after country.

And what about the non-political actors with great power? The common denominator between Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg is their unceasing appetite to own things and property. You’ve probably heard that JB recently bought a super-yacht that contains within it an additional yacht whose primary purpose is to serve as a landing pad for the private helicopter shuttling people between land and the mother yacht. Most of us would rather play dominoes on a card table and drink a cold beer with friends than fuck around with that kind of elaborate crap. But not Jeff. He needs a yacht that doubles as a gigantic fucking Pez dispenser.

While good old Zuck, he’s doing his best to try to buy Hawaii. Normal people like to visit islands or maybe rent or own a house on an island where they can enjoy exploring the unique terrain. Not weird rich guys. For some reason they need to own fucking islands. Now, Zuck has his work cut out for him on the island of Kuaui because Hawaii has something known as kuleana land, ancestral land meant to remain under the ownership of native Hawaiians. Nonetheless, the FB founder recently pulled off the purchase of an additional 600 acres of tropical rainforest on the island from a local “nonprofit” (?!), to add to the 800 acres he already had. A reason he gave for the purchase was to, “enhance privacy.” Needless to say, Mark is not a popular fellow in Hawaii. As of May 1, 2021, a change.org petition seeking to “vote him off of the island” had garnered one million signatures.

It is, after all, a simple dynamic: the behaviors that you reward in a culture are the behaviors that are pursued. The subtext to so many shows, movies, articles, commercials and other media in the West is that everybody basically just wants to be filthy rich. “Just admit it,” they say. “Don’t BS. You know you want a bunch of mansions and expensive shit you’ll never use. Right?!” What a joke. I don’t know anybody like that. It’s a fabrication. But the pressure to make you think you want all kinds of fancy shit is omnipresent.

The people I know, more than anything, desire the following in their lives: physical health, good family and friends, free time, a livable planet for future generations, music, kindness, pets, good food, meaning, time in nature, connection. Basic shit. Uncomplicated. But it doesn’t fit the narrative of an “economy” predicated upon endlessly consuming shit and it doesn’t fit the narrative of a country that was founded by people who were versions of Zuck and Jeff – men totally drunk with their desire to always accumulate more shit. Thing is, those pioneers and founding fathers weren’t healthy people then and folks like Zuck and Jeff aren’t healthy people now. Rather than being given power, money and influence, folks like Zuck and Jeff should be lampooned and, yes, voted off of the island.

some bands

 

when i hear some bands

I think i hear

something i was becoming

but could not become

as i burned through my tendons

bedroom-strumming

to escape flashing dim horror

acid blue ghosts at play in my head

two friends dead in maine

and ready for none of it

it singed my mind

bedroom guitar singed my arm

the road ahead shimmered

as telecasters and denim

but that gate

creaked shut

something different

is born from

how we respond

to what we find

in the forest

when the gate

creaks

shut

What Do You Wanna Be When You Grow Up? (1-minute play)

A: What do you wanna be when you grow up?

B: Cat Burglar of Music Boxes, Captain of an Anti-whaling Ship, Consultant to Pataphysicians, Biographer of Harry Partch, Professor of the Accordion, Vinho Verde Taste Tester, Apprentice to Owls, Benny Goodman Scholar, Author of Children’s Books about John Brown, Inventor of a Time Machine.

A: And why that last one?

B: So I could travel back in time and thwart Christopher Columbus before he reached “the Americas.” I would set a trap for him to fuck up his life so he would never cross the ocean. Chris was a very bad man.

A: But that would mean you probably would not exist.

B: Oh. Right. Then I would do that one last.

A: Right.

(owl block print by virginia warwick, https://crittercrittercreations.com/)