"The lines at Hyatt Guns, his shop in Charlotte, North Carolina, snaked out the door. The deep, green-walled warehouse bills itself as the largest gun shop in America, but even then Hyatt had to stretch to meet the demand. At one point, he dispatched 37 salespeople to man the cash registers. He put up velvet ropes and hired a police officer. He even put a hot dog stand outside. It was just after the Sandy Hook massacre -- and customers were lined up to buy AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, like the one the shooter Adam Lanza used." (David Heath, Elise Hansen and AJ Willingham, CNN, 12/14/2017)
Tuesday, June 29, 2021
Saturday, June 19, 2021
The Haunted Ballads of Robert Hunter
The Grateful Dead are either the most overrated band of all time or the most underrated. I go with the latter. Here is one reason why: You could hate all of their live music and what they were doing with their space jams (I don't... because Jerry Garcia is capable of improvising guitar solos that shimmer in beauty like a mountain valley encountered on a morning walk), and still rate them as brilliant based upon the song collections "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead." These are albums of 3 to 4- minute songs with tight arrangements, exquisite but not overindulgent musicianship (unlike much other music of the era), and a marriage of lyric and melody that is among the best in American popular music.
Lyricist Robert Hunter knew how to inhabit the world of the "weird, old America" (to use Greil Marcus' term) -- haunted landscapes described in country blues lyrics and other Ovid-in-America metamorphosis-style tales of the sort featured on experimental filmmaker and 78 rpm record collector Harry Smith's 1952 "Anthology of American Folk Music." Ballads that were weird in Scotland got considerably weirder in their American incarnations. Meanwhile, Delta and Piedmont blues artists were singing about the inexplicability of living in a land, the Jim Crow South, where the apartheid system made everyday living a very unstable affair, where white terror could be lurking around the next corner and the next one. These artists used the knotty irony and wry humor of African folktales and folk wisdom to evoke what felt like permanent exile.
To bring it back to Robert Hunter, the words to his song "Dire Wolf" are striking in how they deposit the listener immeditely, in the first line, into an unsettling zone that feels half-remembered and half-forgotten, half-dreamed and half-lived. The singer/narrator sits down to a game of cards against the 600-pound dire wolf who was grinning at his window. The tale the singer tells takes place in someplace called Fennario - probably a place in Scotland that was mispronounced and ended up staying that way, in the old ballad, "Pretty Peggy-o."
In the timbers of Fennario, the wolves are running round
The winter was so hard and cold, froze ten feet 'neath the ground
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
I sat down to my supper, 'twas a bottle of red whisky
I said my prayers and went to bed, that's the last they saw of me
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
When I awoke, the Dire Wolf, six hundred pounds of sin
Was grinning at my window, all I said was come on in
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
The Wolf came in, I got my cards, we sat down for a game
I cut my deck to the Queen of Spades, but the cards were all the same
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Don't murder me
In the backwash of Fennario, the black and bloody mire
The Dire Wolf collects his dues, while the boys sing 'round the fire
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Don't murder me
I beg of you don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
No no no don't murder me
I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Tuesday, June 15, 2021
More Thoughts on The Society of the Hustle
We were born into a society with a reward system that is inverted, ethically speaking. The personality types that are most heavily discouraged and censored in cultures with long-standing wisdom traditions are those that are most lavishly rewarded in this society. To me, this indicates that there is really not all that much to be done to revolutionize (thereby offering some kind of salvation) this system, in the absence of a complete abandonment of its founding system of values — a system of values that historian Morris Berman summarizes as: “the hustle.“ Under a system built around the hustle, the great objective of the individual life is wealth accumulation - generally speaking, by any means necessary. I would like to emphasize the crushing and tragic sadness that I and others experience as a direct consequence of being born into an ethically inverted culture. The value system is a type of hell that thrives upon producing other hells — hells of war, addiction, chronic mental/emotional crisis, mass species extirpation, ecological devastation, human displacement, the vanishing or at least the banishing of the sacred, the monetizing of everything possible.
And it is a society born of a glitch, an aberration. Most people are not as broken and venal as Donald Trump or Jeffrey Bezos, for example. However, as mass scale agriculture took off in the wake of the Neolithic Revolution, such sociopathic personality types made a play and started to amass power built on surplus food and wealth. The remarkable thing is that such people were successful in acculturating others into their own illness. In the case of the Americas, truly demented souls like Chris Columbus crossed the sea, but, most significantly, he and similar British marauders were able to then acculturate others into their value system. It really is a striking achievement, considering the value system assimilated by otherwise normal people is one based on the proliferation of misery – both internal and external. Maybe we will live to see the day when the other story reasserts its power and people leave behind the greatest mistake in human history.
Friday, May 28, 2021
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.
Tuesday, May 25, 2021
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.
Thursday, May 20, 2021
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.
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