Holy crap! I mean there’s animal cruelty and all, but wow.
Thanks to Rudy for the link.
ADDENDUM: I’m going to band camp for 10 days. It’s in the Mendocino Woodlands where there are no phones and I’m not allowed to drive out and go to the Internet cafe, so enjoy my archives … and believe you me, I’ll have some stories to tell on August 6th.
Love writes letters. Love has excellent penmanship. Love is in federal prison.
Love is the homeless guy who found my phone on the street not too long ago and returned it to me. I’ve been looking for him when the bus rolls by the convenience store where we met, but he hasn’t been there. Now I know why.
I’ve got a P.O. box, so no mail ever comes to me at my house. But a letter arrived in the post the other day. My housemate delivered it in the kitchen as I stood at the stove and made Hobo Crack. I looked at the return address.
“What’s CSP – S.Q.’?” I asked her.
“Baby,” she said. “That’s San Quentin.”
Who the hell? I know my share of ex-petty ex-criminals … but none of them are in prison right now. Are they?
It was Love. Love is in San Quentin.
Love remembered my address from when I told it to him when he said he’d deliver my phone after finding it. I thought better of this plan and met him at the convenience store. And now he knows my address. Scary, a little. But I’ve never had a pen pal, and as a friend said about all this: Maybe it’s another piece in some weird puzzle.
Hopefully he won’t mind if I reprint some of it here. He is a writer, after all.
I think I’ll go see him. I’ve never visited someone in prison before.
San Quentin? Yeesh.
July 2, 2007
7:45 p.m.
Summer … (indeed you are…),
As you continue to live the magic of life, I hope each separate contentment will make your dreams come true. I pray my letter reaches you at a period where all is well with life … and you have not lost your phone again. 
I was happy to be a part of something right and well in the quest to return your phone. Every outcome of troubles ahead may not be as rewarding, but always give your best … and learn your lessons well.
Before I continue, I hope and pray you don’t mind my writing to you from dire straights [sic], but remember most of all this unfortunate circumstance does not define who I am, what I believe, or what I will continue to achieve with life.
Just as a matter of information I like to write letters, as well as short stories and poems relative to my life experience. Currently I have 14 writings published in the book called Only the Dead Can Kill. The title is expressive of how we as human beings let or allow past negative happenings rule and/or dictate our lives, and we don’t have to. The book is currently available at Barnes and Noble, as well as on the internet (I don’t know the web-site). The auther [sic] who compiled and collected all the writings from many different poets and artists is Margo Perin (who also has another book published, on a national level, about mother-daughter relationships titled “How I Learned to Cook.”)
Please know I am accountable for my actions and I believe in paying my dues. Even though I won’t be here for a long period of time, I’d appreciate hearing from you until “I’ll see you in the ‘hood.” If you don’t have time I’ll respectfully understand. Until then, I’ve reached that area of life where I’m tired of living the collision of self-destruction and I am more than ready to commit not just to making new decisions, but rather I have decided to adhere to the truth of realistic commitment to a more rewarding life.
In the meantime, between time … please take care of yourself. Keep track of your phone and don’t make your mother worry.
In music time,
Love
July 20, 007
NorCal
Right now, just an hour and 15 minutes North of my house, the richest men on the planet are partying with a whole lot of the world’s leaders.
It’s the legendary two-week, midsummer, all-male, all-powerful campout at Bohemian Grove. Homeland Security has stepped up in the tiny towns of Guerneville and Monte Rio, where nobody ever wears a suit and tie. Clint Eastwood flew in on his private helicopter yesterday. Paranoid tweakers are running to their basements to re-tape the tin foil on the walls and send Mayday signals over ham radios.
Most years, one of the artists hired to entertain the Bohemian Club gathering plays a show in Monte Rio at the park for the Little People in town. It’s a nice annual gift from the men who run the planet to the hamlets they fly over on their way to their own square and pampered version of Burning Man.
They even immolate an owl. They call it the “Cremation of Care.” And like frat boys, this mensclub conducts all manner of bizarre rituals that are probably far less interesting than the purported daisy-chain robe party and Satanic abortions one hears about. Mainly they just chill out in the redwoods.
I know a performer who was hired to do his act for all the pasty white dudes up there a couple years back at their massive outdoor amphitheatre (featuring the second-largest pipe organ in the world). He went fishing with Henry Kissinger and smoked some of Steve Miller’s homegrown. He gave me a matchbox from the campout, glossy red, embossed simply in gold with the words “Bohemian Club.” I still have it.
Once, while dining at the Russian River Pub on River Road, I met two chefs who had flown in from four-star restaurants in other cities to cook for the guys who decide how resources are fought over and lives are lost.
They couldn’t recount any strange rituals or how-we’ll-destroy-the-world seminars, since staff is strictly sequestered from most social activity — but they did talk about the hand scan they needed to gain entry to their jobs each morning.
Hand scan, yall. How Blade Runner is that?
Earlier, they had served pancakes to our governator Arnold Schwarzenegger. Was he nice?, I asked. I dunno, the dude said. We’re not allowed to look them in the eye.
There are a few quiet protests at the gate, but no black-block demonstrations, no media infestations, no righteous liberal town meetings. Hardly even any complaining — mostly just a Zen-like resignation to the Way Things Are. Why? Well, whether because of the main crops up there (wine and weed) or the druggily pastoral landscapes, the people of West County are more laid back than a collapsed folding chair.
Folks in Northern California tend to live and let live, and to lead by example — policies the highly influential men vacationing in their area might do well to heed more often.
I mean hey, this is America. Even the people who engage in un-winnable wars with economically downtrodden countries to make money off the pain and suffering of others — and their movie-star friends — should be able to enjoy their inalienable right to relax and forget about their worries and decide which $30,000 bottle of wine they’re going to drink with dinner in peace.
Dammit. I wanna see a hand-scan machine in real life.
(goes back to business as usual)
So apparently with Flickr you have to change the @ to a &# so the link doesn’t break. And then there’s the right-click for the static IP address and … whatever, I already forgot.
Anyway, Pedal Monster. Here’s a very limited visual rundown of the weekend. Also, the years-long standoff with my digital camera is over, and I will now return to using it.
Enjoy.
Moses
the Life-Size Mousetrap
the wiener
welcome to Pedal Monster
ass clown
the Cyclofuge
Reina Terror and the Huffy Toss trophy
Monster stage (featuring Hammer Horror Classics)
bike hump
Gary’s art car
yikes
Murka
she got the bike back. Dejected, he eventually pulled his pants up
this is how it always ends.
Spent all night opening a Flickr account and now I can’t figure out how to post pictures from Pedal Monster this weekend. Yes, finally, pictures. I SAID PICTURES.
I seem to be doing everything right but now I’m going to smash my computer if I don’t walk away. Will try again tonight after the veins in my neck stop popping out.
July 16, 2007
Ace Auto
Yes, I know I’m supposed to talk about Pedal Monster. Yahoo, what a show, and what a weekend, and I’m aware I’d be a tease to hype something up for days on end and then not follow through with some sort of juicy blow-by-blow of the spectacle’s sordid events.
In fact, it’s what I used to do for a living: Be the person who wrote down everything that happened in certain events thrown by the City’s divergent subcultures, to report it back to the attendees so they could re-live things, either because they were too wasted to remember stuff in their brown-outs, or they were elsewhere in the room viewing some other life-altering razzle-dazzle while I was clawing frantically at pad, pen, and camera in front of the other one.
It was madness much of the while, trying to observe the melee I know to be of future-retrospective-style historical significance while participating in it at the same time — eventually participating enough to where I could be convinced that I was not a poser or a hanger-on. Not being the critic who just writes because they can’t do something themselves — but the critic that became the person who did. Eventually, I was swallowed up by the gravitational pull.
These days, I’m confident that I’ve accrued enough punk points to spare some leftovers to hook up any housewife with a one-way ticket to Plasmatics-ville. I have become fully “embedded” — not that I was ever a journalist anyway, as much as a person who got paid to tell people the stuff I liked or hated and why I liked or hated it.
So I always hype these events now, the ones I’m helping throw, and for some reason, I can’t bring myself follow through on the gossip reports in any substantial way. I think the Internet crutch has allowed me to feel spiritually OK about this, as most information will be out there anyway, whether I myself report it or not. With pictures, too. Also, it’s harder to divulge personal and potentially incriminatory tidbits of information about one’s best friends. Now, as a fully active member of Cyclecide — i.e., Patti Hearsted and unable to find any real time to attend events by other artists in the City I know I should be supporting — I don’t really have much to say the day after a show. Or the day after that.
As it stands now, yesterday, on the Day After Pedal Monster, after wrangling money and clipboards and costume changes and happy cycle-freak drunks until dawn, I got my first full night’s sleep and woke up at 4pm. Then I went to the Drunkyard to help strike everything, and cleaned the shaving-cream-and-flour “pie” bits from the yard, and the broken glass from the BB gun shooting range, and the whippet containers and wilted beer cans kicked behind every pallet and 50-gallon drum on our modern-day Sanford and Son fantasy-lot …
Then we crushed the other end of the car under the 2-ton bank safe under the Mousetrap’s 30-foot crane, and then the car still started after that — when we didn’t have any ether so we poured Tic Tac, the national drink of El Salvador, in the carburetor — and we rode it on idle all around Ace’s strangely-clean pavement and then smashed the windshield with sledgehammers and Texas Toothpicks. And then had more Pabst and hot dogs for dinner, naturally. And pushed my own dead-battery car out to the middle of the street so we could jump it with Mark’s car and drive me home to unpack the gypsy tinsel and all the other stuff and put away the Dead Babies’ guest beds and finally take an epsom salt bath.
Just another weekend, really. How am I supposed to be a reporter about that?
Wherein this blog provides expert advice on how to make realistic-looking, free-floating disembodied eyes for your next zombie party or prank with soup.
Courtesy of the bloody good props team over at Thrillpeddlers.
Here’s what you need:
–Condoms – preferably NOT ribbed, lubricated, reservoir tip, or thin for her pleasure. The more generic and ghetto the condoms, the better. Also: purchase clear or whitish, unless you’re going for some alien thing.
–White opaque liquid soap — not lotion or anything else. The Thrillpeddlers have experimented with all types and consistencies of mostly-white liquid, and they say this is the one.
–Nail polish: black, blue-or-brown-or-green, and red — or Sure Shot sign paint, or whatever brush-paint, really. Petroleum products disintegrate each other a lot of the time, so many types of paint will not make your eyeballs last multiple horror parties.
–Scissors (smaller is better).
and…
That’s it.
yowza
HOW TO:
Unwrap and unroll one condom. Blow air into it to separate the plastic from itself. Pump an eyeball-sized amount of liquid soap into the condom and tie it off so that it looks round. Wrap another condom around all this (don’t forget to blow) and tie that one off too.
Yes, you need both condoms — you don’t want your eyeballs breaking before you can throw them at people. Unless you do. (One Thrillpeddlers crew member experienced a singular joy at playing with her one-condom eyeball in front of an audience and having it explode in her hands and goo-drip down through her fingers.)
Cut the condom one inch below the tie-off knot, then fray the latex in an uneven style that makes the eyeball say “I got ripped out of someone’s head.”
Paint a blue, brown, or green (hazel, what have you) circle opposite the tie-off knot, and a black dot in the center of that. You know, eyeball style.
Then ya take yer red nail polish to the knot and all around it, making shaky rivulets for blood vessels. The thinner the brushes on veins and arteries, the better. My Thrillpeddlers’ gore-tech consultants like to sproing hairs from their own heads to obtain the brush-strokes fine enough for scarily realistic blood-vessel effects.
Et voila. Eyeballs that bounce, and don’t cinematically splooge apart in your hand (unless you intentionally leave off the second condom).
Soak eyeballs in cold spaghetti dishes during Halloween, or in an open container of “blood” just behind the victim’s head …
…say, when your mad-scientist mentor is teaching you just how to torture an unwitting and sexually derelict victim … and you pluck out one spherical viewing mechanism from the still-alive kidnapped whore on your operation table … bodily fluids dripping to the floor from the gurney …
And, as your dementor looks on, you study the eyeball, lick it, and then turn the cornea to make it ogle the unfortuate detainee’s other, fully-functional eye … while she screams with the terror only those about to be forcefully blinded can muster …
Yep. Eyeballs.
Thanks, Thrillpeddlers.
I ‘ve been “stripping” for a week.
Making strips of fabric, that is. Cutting cutting cutting. For days on end. The project ended up looking like some clowns got trapped in a shredder, but hopefully in a good way.
“Gypsy tinsel” is what I’ve been calling it. Although that term sounds a little hippie — and I got even more sketched when a housemate last night said I looked like I was making a Maypole … so I’ve also been referring to it “Steven Tyler’s Microphone Safety Third Delineator Tape,” or somesuch word combination.
The intent is to style Cyclecide’s pedal-powered carnival midway to look flittery and junk-circusy. Our usual ride-barricade method of CAUTION tape not only barely delineates the safety areas — it’s also made of flimsy petroleum product, and therefore quite easy for a dumb-head Weasel Knievel to bomb through it on a tallbike and get kicked in the throat by someone on the Ferris Wheel or whichever ride. But who wants to get clotheslined by repurposed denim and subsequently tangled up in a clown-clothes fabric-strip mess? Hopefully nobody.
For the strippy material, I started with some of the discarded clothing from the free box in our house — choosing bright colors and whatnot, and fashioning them into two-or-three-inch-wide, yard-long sections. Also, Rose gave me bags and bags of cuttings left over from her side-project job of making bellydancing skirts to vend at the events and conventions she attends with Ultra Gypsy and the Barbary Coast Shakedown. Plenty of glittery stuff in those bags.
The delineator “rope” on which the tatters are tied is made of the seams of jeans discarded after the Maker Faire clothing swap. So the gypsy tinsel is as strong as a Jay Broemmel weld. Hopefully it’ll look impressive once all the yards and yards AND YARDS of it are installed at Pedal Monster and the photos start rolling in.
I mean, that’s not ALL I’ve been doing to get ready for our big weekend. I’m just proud I found another Cyclecide-style DIY no-cost solution to a potentially expensive problem (i.e. we can’t afford / don’t have room to store a bunch of metal riot-barrier gates, so this will suffice). It’s light, it’s portable, and if you’re a mutant biker throwing impromptu jousts and events, it could seriously cut down on ambulance-calling time.
Rider still assumes all risk, of course.
Yeah, Cyclecide is slammed with Pedal Monster. More on that tomorrow.
For today, enjoy this Kipling poem, written in tribute to Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, who in 1895 led about 600 of his countrymen to an unsuccessful raid on the Boers in southern Africa. Just one day into it, Jameson surrendered, and got shipped back to England to be tried and convicted for failing to listen to the order not to do anything yet until he heard from his superior. The defeat was re-cast as a victory in Britain, and the Boer War soon followed. The British really wanted them diamonds in them mines …
I thought the gender-specific gut-kick at the end of the poem was maybe directed to Kipling’s actual son, and not an imperialist with an unhealthy case of hubris embroiled in an ignominious military failure, but whatevs. The rest of it makes me want to do good stuff and break ugly things and speak at high school graduations … so here it is because I gotta go to the drunkyard to help set up the rides.
kipling was a gangster. just look at that ’stache
“If”
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!
By Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936).
Calling all clowns, tw0-wheeled freaks, thrill junkies, and controlled-chaos idjits … this event is JUST FOR YOU.
Back in the days of our country’s revolution, England’s government officials tried to instate levies like the Stamp Act and the Townshend Act to rein in the colonies before they got too big for their britches. In addition to plenty of letter-writing and newspaper-promulgating and speech-giving, colonialists responded with other badass maneuvers: They sacrificed and made do with locally-produced goods. They wore homespun clothing and found substitutes for tea. They preferred to leave their houses unpainted to purchasing paint, or any other goods, floated over from the other side of the pond.
England also granted the East India Tea Company a parliament-sanctioned monopoly on importing tea to the Americas, thereby stopping up the supply of England’s favorite drug and temporarily destroying free trade in that arena. So at the world’s most famous tea party, Samuel Adams and his merry band of homeboys dressed like Mohawks, boarded the ship in the night, and dumped the offending leaves into the Boston Harbor.
These were only some of the civil-rebellion events that led up to the revolutionary war.
Samuel Adams in particular campaigned tirelessly to disabuse people of the notion that their social and political “superiors” were anything of the sort. He did all he could to make the common people aware of their own power and importance, granted both in American law and in human nature. Thus, he aimed to propel his new country-mates to organized acts of democracy and rights-standing-up-for, all the time, forever.
(One wonders why there hasn’t been an action movie made starring Bruce Willis as Samuel Adams. A real shoot-’em-up where all the historical facts are re-arranged for dramatic purposes and little tiny whale-oil lamps cause barn-levelling explosions. Hey, I’d watch it.)
i got my betsey ross clan of the cave bear deadwood hooker outfit, where’s yours?
Nowadays, the enemy is not asking for money from all the way overseas or standing around in red coats. So it might seem harder for the “little people” to do these things in the present day, to pinpoint problems and invoke rights and rabble-rouse and and constantly claim and reclaim what it means to be an American. Or maybe it IS easy to do those things, but it just feels cliche. Or like the country’s gotten too big for us to matter individually any more.
Well, the government’s gotten too big to have a heart.
So in the interest of our founders’ ideas about a non-interfering government — one which now resembles the Reichstag more than the free-wheeling DIYers of old — rejecting the capitalistic lifestyle, making do with local products, and riding bicycles more often seems like a good start.
do it for America, and to needlessly burn propane cuz it’s pretty
It’s hard to feel patriotic if you think at all for yourself. Some say George W.’s cousin was in charge of security for the World Trade Center when the towers came down, and that if you watch the video in slow motion you can see the controlled-demo squibs exploding in succession. And Building 7, the rumored HQ of lotsa bad shit, collapsed later that day — when a plane hadn’t even hit it. Whether or not that’s all true, it doesn’t make people want to wave the stars and stripes around when they live under a duplicitous, sanctimonious, authoritarian, morally bereft regime I personally wouldn’t put anything past.
Yep. America’s pretty bad ass. But if the wolves within the White House right now were the husband in a film, and the American people were the wife, the movie would be a Lifetime Channel tearjerker about domestic abuse and mental cruelty and lying to your spouse … and the audience — the world — would be begging for Farrah Fawcett to set the bed on fire.
And if any government official is reading this, leave me alone. I’m not asking anyone to do anything violent. Poor artists who like to rant can do so, because this is the United States of Kiss My Ass.
As long as we take precautions not to hurt anybody else or damage their things, we can say and write and paint and draw and sing and create and destroy and carry a poster around about whatever we want.
