I saw Obama! I saw Obama!

That’s what we in the crowd were singing as the second-line brass band played. We stood together, on the corner and on the “neutral ground” on Claiborne Ave. in front of the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School, the first educational institution (K-10th grade) to open in the Lower Ninth Ward since Katrina hit landfall.

The band played, and we danced, waiting behind the barricades for the President to emerge from his meeting with the kids, and I’m not too embarrassed to say I haven’t felt that much joy and anticipation and starstruck-ness in a crowd gathered just to see a person’s head go by in a car, like, EVER.

Obama may be more of a rock star than the Beatles ever were.

the school, where we waited for the motorcade. note the welcoming sign on the kiosk

New Orleans’ Finest were out in full force, proud and alert. (*creepy lecherous old-lady voice*) Many of them looked quite fetching in their uniforms.

copsicles numbering at least a hundred, no joke. what a roar

And then the excited screams of children and adults chanting his name. And then there he was, Mr. America:

squeeeeeEEEE!! Mr. President we loves you

The jumping, wiggling, squealing ladies standing beside us reminded me of my pre-teen self at a Bon Jovi concert:

except it means so, so much more. "Lord please keep him safe from harm," she said out loud, multiple times

And as he passed, the band played a second-line rendition of Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World.” I usually recoil at that song, but this time, I kind of cried from joy. A little… I’m still cool, right? Punk points!

sometimes it IS a wonderful world. (*I saw Obaaaaama, I saw Obaaaaama!*)

Ironically enough — naaa, SERENTYPICALLY enough — we walked back home via this intersection:

flood stop, levees fix, lower 9th rebuild. yoda talk in street signage

And then we passed this house. Expletive deleted; political sentiment remains.

(that's the squirrelly Louisiana governor who wants to be prez but won't say so)

Not that I want to sign off on a negative note. Because today, in the Lower Ninth Ward, in my new home, I feel anything but. I usually don’t talk about politics, and I know it’s all just showbiz, but I can’t deny what I feel today.

Obama comes to New Orleans today…

…hope he sees my Katrina memorial. I put it up for the 4-year anniversary of The Storm a few weeks back but it’s still there on the roof. A little melted, but there.

For the unawares, Brad Pitt has been doing for NOLA what his comely wife has been doing for Darfur: Bringing international attention to the crappiness of a situation and trying to make it better. He’s been making it right.

In the wasteland across St. Claude from me in the Lower Ninth Ward, where an entire neighborhood’s worth of houses were levelled in a tsunami, the “Brad Pitt Houses” have started to pop up like mushrooms and caused a sensation among New Orleans residents and international architectural buffs alike. Twenty-six houses have arisen, and another 200 or so are slated for construction this coming year.

Now, a mayoral campaign has started.

Soap. I sell soap...-colored art projects outlining how many houses got knocked over by the Katrina tsunami and consequently ignored by America's govt. Then I raise money for new sustainable housing and make sure it gets built, so low-income families can move back to the neighborhood they call home, except in architectural-wonder-type eco-structures. No big deal

After all, the swaggering, punched-up, sleepless, inextinguishable leader of Fight Club certainly would win a City Hall fistfight with our notoriously greasy-palmed Ray Nagin.

The view from the roof:

Close-up of friend Laura Konarczak’s “Such and Such” bag lady:

Now I’ma go see if I can get a look at our handsome president’s car! Woot.

(p.s. Brad, I’m serious)

The Four Rules of Gun Safety

And now, because I’m bored at watching a ham-fisted action movie and I can’t stand the way uneducated Hollywood douchebags throw firearms around onscreen:

The Four Rules of Gun Safety. Memorize them … or suffer the consequences.

1. ALL GUNS ARE LOADED. ALWAYS.

This HAS TO be your mindset when handling bangstix. When someone hands you a gun and tells you it’s not loaded, politely check it anyway. Negligence can be fatal.

no twirling it like a cowboy, either

2. NEVER COVER ANYTHING WITH THE MUZZLE YOU DO NOT INTEND TO DESTROY.

If you’re not willing to take a human life, never point a gun at a person, whether you think it’s loaded or not. Never point a gun in the direction of your extremities, put it in your pants, gesticulate with it in your hand while at the range, or jokingly take aim at someone’s pet. A gun sitting at rest is safe; a gun in someone’s hands is capable of being discharged.

3. NEVER PUT YOUR FINGER ON THE TRIGGER UNTIL YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY READY TO FIRE.

Rule Three is the reason most people shoot themselves or people who didn’t ask to be shot. Getting all gangster, all Scully and Mulder, like they see on TV. One of my pet peeves in life: Some arrogant and/or dumbass character on TV or in a movie with their finger on the trigger, walking around like the death-bringing object in their hand is a toy… making out with a love interest while pointing a .38 Special at their head, finger ready to go… it gets me flinchier than a horror movie.

In real life, guns make people jumpy (duh), so please, for the love of Miami Vice, hold your itchy finger straight against the side of the gun, directly above the trigger, until your sights are on the target and you are ready to fire.

4. BE SURE OF YOUR TARGET.

Be aware of your surroundings. Never assume anything. Know what it is you are about to destroy, what’s around it, and what’s behind it. Never shoot at anything you haven’t positively identified, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, PUT THE GUN DOWN AND WALK AWAY.

My 7 favorite jokes

… in which I attempt to exorcise the small collection of zingers I tell over and over again, once and for all, so that I am forced to find new ones. Anybody? Chime in.
_____

Q: What’s orange and looks good on a hippie?
A: Fire.
_____

Q: What’s the difference between a hippie and an onion?
A: Nobody cries when you cut a hippie.
_____

Q: Why does a chicken coop only have 2 doors?
A: Because if it had 4 doors it would be a chicken sedan.
_____

Q: What does a San Francisco stripper do with her asshole before she goes to work?
A: Drops him off at band practice and gives him 20 bucks.
_____

Q: What do Woody Allen and Kodak have in common?
A: They both come in a little yellow box.
_____

Q: What do Yoko Ono and Ethiopia have in common?
A: They both live off of dead beatles.
_____

Q: Why do hippies wear patchouli?
A: So blind people can hate them too.
_____

Thank you! Goodnight.

To Chris Radcliffe: Happy bachelor party weekend, you beautiful freak

How we got here

Holed up at a friend’s house in the usual avoid-reality post-festival freakout. Avoiding TV like the plague, watching stupid movies, and being enlightened by one DVD in particular: the PBS documentary Journey of Man.

I grew up soaking in Southern Baptist rhetoric, and while everyone else was busy learning evolution in junior high, I attended an evangelical Christian school where they taught us that people and dinosaurs walked the Earth at the same time … because the Bible says they did. So, for people like me who never got the full scoop, here’s a rundown of the show.

Everyone alive today is related. Think about that. It’s possible to work out the past by blood type, and the key lies in distant populations. They’ve traced it all using DNA samples and whatnot. Blood.

The Earth now holds 6 billion people. Our species only numbered 10,000 when a small band left their African homeland on a journey into an unknown, hostile world. Those people are the ones we’re related to. Evidence shows they were superhuman — resilient, strong, fast, and adaptable.

We’re all descended from the San Bushmen tribe in Namibia. We all live in grass and mud huts. We don’t give a shit about the newest coffee table. Do we?

hello, cousin

We do now. We do it, and we don’t even know why. We spread like a virus, at the tippy-tail end of the ape-to-human transformation. And here we are, shitting all over everything. The supernova of flesh and pollution, ready to transform into destruction and nothingness — or to pare back down to a manageable level. We are due for an extinction-level event, you know. Everyone says so.

Anyhoo, this migration also heralded an explosion of creativity. Ritual burial of the dead. Art in caves. Use of materials like bone. The first sensitive artist was born around this time. (Maybe he lost his girlfriend in a tragic raft-building accident and picked up a stick and started writing poetry … maybe she got mad at her tribe for telling her girls weren’t allowed on the hunt, so she fashioned a fake buffalo out of straw and mud and destroyed it with a spear …)

Every archaeological dig of that era shows a balloon of consciousness. When our first cousins left Africa, they had state-of-the-art hunting technology and a brand new language with which to communicate ideas. It used clicks. The Bushmen are still the only people in the world who click.

—–

Between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, the global ice age came. There was a sharp drop in temperature around 72,000 years ago and the sea retreated. Deserts in Africa grew, sea levels dropped, and ice appeared everywhere. Lush pasture turned to desert, and hunters who used to have easy pickins found themselves searching desperately for food. Between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago there were so few humans, plants, and animals on the planet that scientists have trouble finding any archaeological record of homo sapiens during that period.

Humanity was on the verge of extinction, and a small band of smart and daring revolutionaries decided they needed to raise the fuck up on out of there in order to survive. So they turned up in AUSTRALIA, of all places. Our next relatives on the timeline all hail from aboriginal Oz. How do they know? … The only primate species ever to have lived in Australia is homo sapiens, so another tribe of us did not evolve there from primates. We had to get there from Namibia.

But how? … We traveled onshore from Africa through India and along the coast to Australia. No evidence remains, because the route was easy — just beach, aside from only 150 miles of open ocean. It has since been buried by water.

our brothers Larry, Darryl, and Darryl
——-

Then Europeans, Asians, and Native Americans were next to appear.

Everyone else besides the Aboriginals shares a common ancestor in one man they can trace back to those of the same (or a similar) group who left Africa but went the other way — to the Middle East — 45,000 years ago.

One branch of migrants from the Middle East made its way swiftly into India. They were so successful that their numbers quickly multiplied and swamped the original coastal migration evidence.

Another group went to China, remaining in isolation, sealed in by moutains and the sea — and developing a distinct culture, language, and appearance. Two groups went to China via different routes in a pincher type movement.

But nobody lived in Europe yet, even though it was a hop skip and a jump from Ur. We took 10,000 years to reach Europe from the Middle East. Why?

Cro Magnons were the first northern Europeans, the first cavemen with an artistic side. The original cave-painters — ostensibly because they were new arrivals, and the caves became a sort of sanctuary. The paintings look like postcards of an ancient world … a journey that lasted through the beginnings of the Ice Age. They drew woolly mammoths, bison, ibex, and other creatures not found in the Middle East — so where had they been? Wherever it was, they toughened up. They took over caves where bears hibernated for the winter. The Cro-Magnons generally cut an impressive figure, towering over 6 feet tall. They arrived with African body proportions, adapted to warmer conditions, and grew long and skinny. They made clothing and housing to adapt to the colder weather …

… and then the Ice Age cut them off from the rest of the world. Their hair color changed, the shape of their noses, even their height. That’s why honkies look so different. Not enough UV rays got through to let us synthesize Vitamin D from sunshine, and we wore clothes, so our skin was forced to lighten its melanin in order to absorb more.

So why did we take 10,000 years to land in Europe? The answer to the mystery: We took a detour to central Asia. Kyrgystan. That’s how come we drew bison in the caves. The African hunters followed the grassland into central Kyrgystan before going West.

Then, 20,000 years ago, some left central Asia to migrate to the Americas over very arctic conditions during the height of the Ice Age. Some stayed along the way, and became the Chukchi (Russian nomads), the Inuit, and Eskimos. Living inside the arctic circle 15,000 years ago, these humans became shorter, with shorter appendages and fingers to keep a furnace of one’s own body heat stoked at all times under heavy animal clothing.

Thirteen thousand years ago, a group of 10-20 people made it past Alaska across the Bering Strait after the Earth heated back up. Yes, only 10-20 people. After 10,000 years of struggling through the tundra, this small band of nomadic hunters hit the jackpot with America.

In only 800 years, these nomads’ numbers swelled to where people lived all over North and South America. The Navajo are directly descended from the Chukchi.

hi, Mamaw and Poppa

—–

According to James Kunstler’s book The Long Emergency, peak oil passed in the ’70s, and as an industrial society, we are screwed. Things are about to fundamentally change, for good. Those without nearby land to grow food (and, some would argue, the firearms to protect themselves) will shortly be fucked … likely by members of the “former and aggrieved middle class” who are used to the whole give-me-convenience-or-give-me-death lifestyle. I for one have met certain members of country clubs who would probably open fire on anyone who stole their china or told them they had lost their life savings due to the machinations of their beloved ruling class.

And a recent, $24-million U.N. study says that in our short time on the planet, HUMANS (not mammals) have used up a staggering 60 percent of the world’s resources. We have altered the planet more quickly, jarringly, and irreversibly in the past 50 years than at any other comparable time in human history. And America burns through … how many percents of the world’s resources?

Blah blah blah. Boring boring boring. Everyone knows this. Right? Like Agent Smith says in The Matrix: We are a plague. So what do we do?

Nothing? Is it too late?

Why did the first San Bushpeople leave? Were they driven out, like Lucifer from Heaven and Eve from the Garden of Eden? … Did they have no choice, or did they see it coming? … Were they hungry? Were they just bored? Did they crave knowledge, or different people to make out with? Something beyond themselves and their immediate experience? … Sinners! Also: Those who enabled us to survive!

Nothing makes a body fight like the struggle for food, shelter, and breeding partners. And isn’t that when stuff starts to really happen? When you get so hungry you imagine a world beyond your everyday life, and you venture out into the unknown?

Convenience is all around us, but only when we make ourselves uncomfortable can we truly learn anything.

I don’t know about you, but all this laziness, gluttony, and solipsism is making me hungry.

when will it all go dark again?

I went down on chem trails (again)

Sept. 29, 007
Black Rock City

Sicky. Cough cough: The sound of gravel. Sweating repeatedly through the sheets as I sleep for 24 hours in a row. Shiver shiver shiver. Lung butter and nose emissions the horrifically unnatural color of a hairstylist’s polyester pants in the ‘60s.

I’m not the only one, by any means. I’ve lost my voice too so can’t really wander around and see yet if my and Russ’s intuitions are correct. But we remember this from 2002. The “monkey pox” was slightly different then — more like spewing out both ends, along with the shivering and sleeping and all — but it “feels” the same. Like they’re changing it up a little every time, just to see what happens.

It always comes when they spray the chem trails.

Everyone in the DPW got sick in 2002. Everyone — even those who never get sick. And again in a couple other cleanup years, I hear. Some go down multiple times. In 2002 we thought we’d just rapid-cycled a bug or two amongst ourselves — I mean, we live in insanely close quarters. Playa restoration for Burning Man is half labor camp and half summer camp for a bunch of hard-drinking, hard-living, forward-thinking misfits.

What freaked me out was finding in 2002 that all of Gerlach and nearby Empire had ALSO gotten sick. With the same thing.

Even on tour with Cyclecide — that’s living on a bus with a dozen dirty bike rodeo klowns for 2-3 months in a row — does “group sickness” never behave this way. Not this violently.

Before yall dismiss me, take a look at this picture and ask yourself: Is this a cloud?

Does God make Xes in the sky above a community’s head when He (of course “He,” right?) disapproves of its sinful behavior?

Do these Xes then slowly fan out to cast a disapproving glare of Heavenly sun-blocking cotton where at breakfast there was not a cloud in the sky? (Is it angel’s hair?)

This is where you say: Silly goose, you’re a paranoid survivalist freak. Commercial planes cross the Black Rock Desert all the time. With such frequency that they make humongous Xes in the sky before their con trails — relatively harmless substances the airlines dump out of their fuselages while they fly — fade away? Yep … lotsa people on their way from Sacramento to Salt Lake City. So much they criss-cross the second largest mass of flat land on Earth at least four times an hour.

Well, do they fly over this particular area of land at around 4am? All together, in FORMATION?

Let me ask you this: Don’t you think the people who control the air — that would be the people who lie to you, invade your privacy, and attack sovereign nations under false pretenses, all for their own best (monetary) interests at heart — also CONTROL THE AIR?

Chem trails don’t always have monkey pox in them. I’m not saying that. Sometimes I think they’re just cloud-seeding, and that global warming is already way worse than anyone in the government wants us to know. The best case scenario I can think of is that sometimes they release small doses of chemical-warfare liquids in order to immunize us for when everyone who hates us tries to attack. But I think that’s giving them too much credit.

My only hope is that they’re training us (part- and full-time) desert rats to morph into some sort of warrior class, resistant to disease and ready to fight when the shit hits the fan. This is a fairy tale I tell myself to counteract the fact that our current administration is only fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan because their buddies in the weapons and oil industries don’t want to lose control, don’t want to give that money to someone else, and don’t want America to turn into an anarchic, murder-happy society too close to the Mad Max series for everyone’s comfort.

Then nobody would go shopping.

—–

Yesterday, Russ and Hollis were cruising out to the hot springs when they saw a creepy, governmental-khaki, shiny-new truck with two collared-shirt dudes inside and a GIANT 20-foot antenna in the truck bed. Russ and Hollis — who are also quite aware of the unfathomably weird things that happen out here — put on their sunglasses, hoods, and game faces and sat still. The other truck, knowing they’d been spotted, pulled up and asked “Is this the way to Frog Pond?” — the same way if you’d found them broken into your house in the middle of the night and they asked “Is Mike home? Oh uh, I must have the wrong address.”

Then they accepted the directions, pulled over to Frog, didn’t go in, and quickly assed out of there and on back across the playa to the highway.

Yes, they could’ve been rocket guys or some other type of nerd. But both Russ and Hollis said that was NOT what was going on. Either those men were listening to us or they were taking readings.

Earlier that day, an enormous black military helicopter flew 40 feet above the MOOP line, across the desert floor, and back up to the airbase in Winnemucca.

Out here, you know when something doesn’t sit right. It’s not fantasy — your intuition turns up to eleven when you come to a flat space the size of Delaware with no buildings or cars or people around. You just know things, even when someone is in your face telling you the exact opposite. Ask anyone who’s ever worked setup or cleanup for Burning Man.

Intuition. Something we as humans have lost among the cacophony of modern living. Something we might should try to find ways to get back.

—–

Some locals say it’s aluminum up in there. That they’re killing us, and/or dumbing us down. I’m not sure about that … but one summed it up thusly: “The government is f**king with us. It’s like the Tuskegee Experiment all over again.”

I’m not into this sort of thing as a rule. I don’t believe many of the “conspiracy facts” my friend Jesse Wack believes. I just always want to see behind the curtain. So I look. And I see them — the chem trails — out here and back at home in the BayviewSF, and everywhere else in America I’ve been. I’ve heard the planes, seen the planes, and felt the sticky film on my van the morning after some occasions when they’ve crossed. And now I’ve personally gotten the monkey pox TWO TIMES.

Everything important I have come to believe in my time on this planet does not blindly follow people or movements or religions or books or Websites — it comes from observing and gathering empirical evidence. And maybe it is just a bug this time, but we’ll see how many people in Gerlach and Empire report to us about having the monkey pox again.

I think this is pretty important. It’s more likely to be true than not, given the other things our American government has done to its own people in the past century.

I think if you don’t think so, you should look up.

Stinkin’ Linkin crew: A pictorial

Sept. 16, 007
Bonneville to Reno

“Cars are recreational vehicles. Not just transportational. This is where cars are appreciated for what they truly are. These guys love their machines, and they respect them. I ride a bicycle every day to work so I can talk shit about cars if I want to. But when I do use cars, it’s with a great amount of respect for how much joy they can bring.” – J.T., lead mechanic / engineer, Stinkin’ Linkin crew

Mutt and J.T. wait with Andy as he lines up and gets ready to race. He got up to 162 on the second day but then spun out a little, so he had to re-prove himself in the lower speed categories again. Every other run hovered somewhere between 110-140. They didn’t want to push the car too hard, because unlike anyone else at Bonneville, they now have to drive their competition vehicle 2000 miles back home.

Andy suits up in full (hot! in the desert sun!) fire safety gear.

Every car has to purchase special racing fuel from the (smart as hell) fuel guy, and get their tank sealed and labeled.

Mutt and Zack (another integral mechanic on the Stinkin’ Linkin crew) watch as Andy gets the final go-ahead from a race official.

A page from Zack’s sketchbook. See what I mean? These dudes are touched by the hand of the Mechanical Gods.

On Saturday, the boys took a GPS speedometer out to the course and conducted their very own first annual World Tallbike Landspeed Record competition.
First place: Andy Overslaugh, representing Flanagan’s Pub, NOLA
Second place: Zack, representing Triumph of NOLA
Third place: Mutt, representing Black Label Bike Club (nowhere chapter)
Fourth place: J.T., representing Bienville Studios
Fifth place: Journalist guy from Zero to 60 Magazine, representing New York City

Before the World Tallbike Landspeed Record competition, they rolled the tallbike through the Tech Inspection tent — to the bemusement of old gearheads, who despite their years of tinkering with vehicles had never seen such a low-tech marvel of engineering before

On Friday, J.T. went through the driver’s safety course and took a run on the track himself. He gained a new-found respect for Andy’s driving abilities on the salt, which had become squirrelly and rutted and torn up after days of wear and tear. J.T. clocked in at a blistering 78 mph.

Twas quite poetic to take my own boat with two couches out on the ancient lakebed. As a fellow Royale owner once said: I don’t turn right; I turn STARBOARD.

This one’s for you, New Orleans.

Bonneville car porn pt. 2: More Salt Flats pixxx

The Stinkin’ Linkin from New Orleans

September 14, 007
Bonneville Salt Flats

After spending more than a month working for Burning Man, I am now officially unused to seeing cars without windows busted out, dents upon dents, lewd things spray-painted all over the dusty doorless body, crap covering the floors, and at least one dildo planted somewhere. It seems forever I’ve been living among the Gate and DPW’s ultra-hoopdis and stripped-down Road Warrior apocalyptomobiles. Make no mistake — to cultivate such a look is an art form. The group must continually destroy the vehicle, while adding more crap to it, to keep a rotating pattern of stylistic chaos going at all times. As Zoo Lander would say, “it’s derelicte.”

The World of Speed event at the Bonneville Salt Flats is the opposite of that. Vehicles out on the salt are the fantasy cars young future mechanics hang as posters on their walls. Styles range from roadster to Rat Rod to might-as-well-be-a-missile … with a few exceptions. There are barstool races, there is an Indian motorcycle seemingly held together with plywood … and now, there is a bombed-out, re-upped, Mad-Maxed, scary-looking spectre of a reminder of the biggest loss-of-life-and-property tragedy America has experienced.

And it goes f**king fast for a mostly-street-legal car.

That’s the thing about the Stinkin’ Linkin. Not only is the car a subtle political statement about Katrina and the nation’s neglect, it’s also a lesson in utility. To quote Chicken John (who stole the quote from someone else but I can’t remember): Those who have done so much with so little for so long are now qualified to do anything with nothing.

The ‘98 Lincoln smelled like death when they first transported it to the shop. The death of friends and friends of friends, to be precise, and the pummeling of America’s soul-city by both nature and failed government. The only “pinstriping” on this menacing flat-black ride is a red and brown stripe where the water line had risen to. Everything below that level was covered in yuck.

They may look like punks, but J.T. — before he co-conceptualized the Stinkin’ Linkin with his pal Andy — designed the Hellcat and the Wraith. (Say that to anyone super into motorcycles and watch their jaws drop.) For years, he was head designer for Confederate Motorcycles, and it’s an understatement to say he arrived on this Earth with a preternatural understanding of engineering and mechanics.

(That goes true for most everyone out here at World of Speed. As a person who thinks almost exclusively in the right brain, I’m flummoxed, and honored to watch the machine-nerds work.)

Andy owns Flanagan’s Pub, a popular watering hole in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He’s got facial tattoos and even though he tries to downplay it, I love walking behind him in the pits and seeing people’s reactions to his appearance … and then how most of them are friendly anyway. Largely because Andy’s so friendly.

Andy and J.T. with their baby

Mutt has only been beknighted with the position of Mechanic #3 because Trevor couldn’t afford it and Neal got called off to go to Iraq with the National Guard, so J.T. asked him to be the third pair of eyes on the machine out at the Salt Flats. And Mutt’s been smiling the whole time, all day long. He never does that. He’s living the dream.

He says out of all the countercultural festivals he’s ever encountered — Rainbow, Burning Man, traveling stuff etc — he’s never felt more comfortable as here in the desert with a bunch of conservative old men.

“They’re not trying to be cooler-than-thou,” he said, “or acting like what they think ‘happy’ is supposed to be. Nobody’s all, ‘Oh, you rode out here in that? That’s cute’ … or, ‘I remember when 160 was a big deal.’”

There are at least a dozen other people who comprised the Stinkin’ Linkin crew in New Orleans, and many of them have traveled here. Some of them double as a documentary team. The Flanagan’s crew are affable and polite and easygoing — i.e., Southern — and slowly but surely, they’re becoming the darlings of the race.

And they seem to be the only ones who have driven their competition vehicle 2000 miles to race at Bonneville for the first time. With a basically street-legal car. For them, this was a budgetary necessity — and largely a badge of honor. Most other cars out here are babied, even if they are “vintage.” This utilitarian maneuver was part of the goal: to make something new and better out of junk. Victory out of sorrow.

They don’t know how fast the Stinkin’ Linkin can go, because it has to jump through all these hoops before Andy can put the pedal to the metal. You’ve got to crawl before you can walk. In the trial run, Andy clocked 99, and simultaneously figured out not to switch to fifth gear at the finish line. He needed more space, and then on the longer course he clocked something in the 120 range. I think. Yesterday he got all the way up to 163 but then he spun a little (salt is hard to drive on) so he has to go back and prove himself in the lower categories once more before they can see what the Stinkin’ Linkin can really do.

Which they’re doing right now, so I gotta go. It’s never been more exciting to hear a bunch of cars idling. They’re all thoroughbred-level machines at the World of Speed — even the rescued stray.

Bonneville car porn: pixxx from the Salt Flats

Sunrise over the pits:

The beloved Stinkin’ Linkin, rescued from the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, rebuilt despite the smell by a skilled team of punk rock mechanic/engineers, and driven all the way here from New Orleans, LA:

… and some o’ the other eye candy out there:

Burning Man is the new punk (and not in a good way)

August 8, 007
SF bunker

I had no college radio growing up, no cable TV, no computers. My intake of popular culture remained so tightly regulated all the way through late high school that the only gossip I knew of punk rock had been repeated by my parents and their friends, usually after viewing some sensationalistic prime-time news special about how uncontrollable youths in California or Manhattan had grown bored with life and started to and dance angularly while bumping into each other — or to cannibalize babies, depending on the individual’s interpretation of the news story.

Also, everyone at my church thought anyone who would name their band the Dead Kennedys had to be in league with Beelzebub. Also, the handsome, rebellious older son of my mother’s teacher friend at school had been suspended for a week for writing ‘TOO DRUNK TO FUCK’ on the side of his high-top Converse shoe. That’s all I knew about punk.

lil’ angry jello… awww.

The blues is the blues. Not aggressive so much as resigned. Punk rock was the first Western music genre (well, second after Wagnerian opera) to manifest in both lyric and tone the malaise humanity has felt ever since our knuckles scraped the ground, in addition to the blind rage which inevitably lines the underside of any hypocritical, capitalistic society. Punks sang with total fucking honesty and outright aggression, just to stoke people into reacting.

They named their bands after the worst things with which humanity had blighted the earth: The Germs, the Exploited, the Murderers, VKTMS, Agent Orange, Misfits, the Damned, the Dictators, Gang Green, the Skids, the Dead Kennedys, Suicide, Television. Fear didn’t really “destroy the family” as they said — Lee Ving just shouted the words over and over (“We Destroy the Family”) to see what would happen.

He wasn’t screaming about his own apathy as much as everyone else’s. About apathy and desensitization as necessary weapons in an awful world. Along with his shit-kicking peers, Lee Ving was the town crier rudely pointing out a breach in security that needs fixing. The cartoon villian embodying evil and callousness, who forces the bystander to either do something about him or run the other way.

Suddenly, supposedly Satanic bands like KISS meant nothing. Punk’s superheroes were regular people experiencing the full spectrum of human emotion. Keep on the sunny side? No way. Reagan was in office. Too much fucked up shit was going on. Punk rock was merely saying what everybody else was thinking — so naturally, the status quo concentrated not on the social ills depicted in song, but on killing the messenger.

Now, the funny thing is, punk is a commodity. A lifeless echo of all that rage and nihilism. Sure, every three or four years I buy a piece of clothing on sale at Hot Topic too — but … well, they say that once the fashion aspect of any subculture has overcome the meaning behind it, it’s dead.

I for one predict furry legwarmers, blinky LED-light clothing, and watered-down Mad Max attire will be lining the racks at Hot Topic within the next few years…

Noooo… Kill them…

Love in prison

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

ooooo, Bohemian Grove

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)

PEDAL MONSTER – next weekend!

Calling all clowns, tw0-wheeled freaks, thrill junkies, and controlled-chaos idjits … this event is JUST FOR YOU.

O, to be punk like colonialists

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.

For the moment.

This is your brain on a legal, readily available substance

June 25, 007
Yay Area

I’m not racist against booze or anything. In fact I think it’s written somewhere in the Cyclecide Bike Rodeo bylaws that members aren’t allowed to talk smack about fermented beverages. But some friends and I were discussing public health issues over the weekend, and this topic came up.

Remember those “This Is Your Brain On Drugs” commercials with the egg and the frying pan? As stupid as they were, they kind of worked. At least on all the kids I knew growing up. Between public service announcements like that and a stiflingly restrictive Southern Baptist upbringing, we stayed pretty innocent until pretty late.

On the other hand, there is an ugly truth to alcohol that is never told in the media. Never. Why? I’d guess because unlike your local Bolivian marching powder salesman or mushroom dealer, alcohol companies buy metric shit-tons of advertising space.

Drunk-driving accidents are listed off as rote in the news, but other than that, alcohol is a land where strikingly gorgeous women in low-cut clothing flirt heavily, giggling at everything you say with straws cocked seductively in their laser-whitened teeth. Two girls for every boy.

Nobody shows the “after” picture, where the dude in the background’s got his face in the toilet and his pants around his ankles, horfing up his dinner while shitting uncontrollably on the tile floor and drunk-dialing his ex-girlfriend from college. Or one of the laser-teeth ladies blacking out and distributing messy blowjobs backstage while her cleavage-heavy companion falls off her barstool unconscious, and the security guard trying to kick her out reaches to help her and accidentally grabs her boob, and the guy who’s been trying to slurrily hit on her all night punches the security guard in the neck, and it all degenerates into a pile of broken bones and vomit.

Not that that happens every time. But I’ve been a bartender for a decade.

I’d watch the hell out of that commercial.

Starter kit for the Apocalypse

June 22, 007
SF

Sitting around talking about the Apocalypse, as we do, I once told Otto about my ongoing fantasy of packing a basic survival kit. Why have I not done that yet?, I asked. I can quote lines from Mad Max 2 and Tank Girl like any good DPW woman can, but for some reason I have not yet taken the first step at home to ensure my own survival (except the knowing-my-firearms part).

my little ponys. i pick the muscular Conan-looking one

It’s easy, Otto said — go get a camping backpack or a rolling airplane pilot’s suitcase from the thrift store, and just throw all this stuff in there and you’re basically good to go. And I got out a pen and paper and he rattled off this list to me.

He says, above all, travel light, and make sure you’re in good enough shape to walk 10 miles each day, and that you know even just a little bit about weapons. But failing that, if you’re an Indoor Kid and you meet a Karate Kid out on the move, you’d better have your gear together enough so you can trade a fresh cup of coffee for some ass-kicking backup.

So here’s Otto’s cursory list for initial survival:

——

Water and electrolytes, salt

Tea — not just for calories and minerals but for staying awake. Coffee has fewer minerals etc., so tea is better, but if you’re an addict pack some pre-packaged grounds, too

Food — Avoid dehydrated food like MREs or dried fruit because you have to add water, so if you eat it it will dehydrate you, especially if you’re in a situation where you can’t add water because a nuclear weapon has gone off. Canned foods and preserved jar foods are your best bet, and salted nuts in sealed bags (airplane nuts, not pretzels)

Mirror, for reflective surface to signal — the international SOS signal is three flashes or three fires, and this is one situation where it’s OK to build smoky fires

Knives, ax, scissors, razor blades, Leatherman (or similar multi-tool), hammer, a handful of nails (taped together so they don’t go everywhere)

Sharpening steel and flint (very very important to start fires) — hard rock and water will sharpen knives also

First aid kit

Gun and ammo (no speeches please — like Steven Colbert said, the 2nd amendment is there because it has the 1st amendment’s back)

Tent and Gore-Tex sleeping bag

Multifaceted work gloves (weather, climbing)

Bear spray or mace

Single propane stove item and iron skillet (doubles as a weapon)

Metal cup, utensils, cheesecloth or screen for straining water

Candles, matches in a waterproof case

Flashlight and batteries — batteries stored separately in case of nuclear attack or electro-magnetic pulse

At least 100 feet of thin high-tensile nylon or hemp rope — no big stuff

Fishing net

Hand-cranked radio

Rain poncho — also useful to collect water / morning dew — or heavy trash bags or tarp alternately

Sewing kit (including leather awl and thimble), leather and denim scraps for patching

A few pairs of socks (and if you’re female, contrary to what they tell you in the movies, be sure you don’t try to negotiate the Apocalypse in 5” stilettos)

Meds for your particular conditions, and any warning bracelets you should put on immediately

Compass, grid map of the local area, angle protractor (the round one, not the circle-drawing one) and grease pencil

Conversion charts, weather stuff, prevailing winds, almanac stuff

And of course a diary and pen; and some large paper and a Sharpie and tape, in case your band or circus plays somewhere after the shit hits the fan and you need to flyer.

the other three horsemen are teething, and they’re pissed

Also, did you know you can survive 21 days on just water alone? That’s what Otto says. If you can make tree bark tea, you got about 6 months. If it’s got chunky hard bark (pine and maple), it’s good, but strip bark (eucalyptus, birch) is bad. Boil it well to make sure you have enough nutrients to get you by.

Sometime next week, I’ll publish the recipe for SamX’s “Hobo Crack Tea” — made exclusively of herbs and tree bark — so you can put some o’ that in your pack too and live like a fancy hippie Marine …

Phone saved by Love

June 13, 007
Yay Area

I thought my phone was stolen.

But it wasn’t stolen. It was returned to me by a homeless man named Love.

It didn’t get taken from the taqueria when I put all the stuff in my pockets on the counter so I could sit down and eat. It fell out of my sweatshirt later on the walk back home, when I was looking through some girly shoes discarded on the side of the street in my neighborhood. I discovered the loss and re-traced my steps, of course, but by that time, Love had already spotted the phone on the sidewalk by the shoes and picked it up for safekeeping, and waited for the owner to call so he could return it.

Did I mention he’s homeless? As in, needs money really bad?

Love. My phone was returned to me by a homeless man named Love. And here I was all pissed off about how fucked up the world is. After all, someone HAD walked into our house this past weekend while there were 4 people at home and swiped my housemate’s computer from the front room. Talk about balls (or tubes).

I thought my phone was gone daddy gone, just like the computer. Or did I?

Funny thing is, I’ve been trying to play with The Force recently — “creating my own reality,” or “manifesting”, or other terms that make my friends’ eyes roll. Hell, they make my OWN eyes roll. That’s why I usually just refer to quantum physics and call it The Force.

So on the steps-retracing mission yesterday, I firmly told myself that the phone WAS on the street somewhere, not stolen, and that I would indeed find it. That the universe was not THAT fucked up. That just because I live in an economically distressed area of town, not everyone is a douchebag. Really, I was telling myself this. My phone is not gone. My phone is not gone.

Then, it seemed my phone was gone. It WAS gone. Bummed, I went home and called the phone company and suspended my service and emailed out a bulletin asking all my friends for their numbers again.

Maybe I need to have a little more faith in the universe.

Hey, but at least I only suspended my service. Something told me not to cancel it. The same something that told me not to go to the phone-store for a new phone just yet today, to do random paperwork instead, to avoid leaving the house. To call my phone one more time, if only to see if the battery had died or if there were any new messages.

That’s when Love answered.

What’s your name? I asked. Do you know whose phone this is? … Hold on a minute, he said, calm down now, don’t talk so loud, honey. Love. I’m Love. Everyone just calls me Love…

So maybe I need to have a little more faith in my faith in the universe, then.

I met Love in the 7-11 parking lot last night. The most handsome of his friends, and intimidatingly big but good-natured, he shone, with clear eyes and sparkly white teeth and a clean white shirt and pressed clean clothes. The first thing he gave me when I got out of the car was a big hug. I returned it willingly, and handed him a large to-go container of my leftover lentils and rice with chipotle, and $40, which is more than I can afford by a mile, but I wanted to brighten his day the way he brightened mine.

Oh yeah, and I’m not supposed to mention that he’s black, right? But listen up, all yall racists and don’t-even-know-you’re-racists and everybody’s-racist-cuz-we’re-conditioned-by-the-media-and-each-other-to-be-racist-readers out there: HE’S BLACK. And he’s HOMELESS. And he RETURNED MY PHONE. He lives in the Bayview, San Francisco’s most murderous ghetto, and he went out of his way to return my phone to me.

And most “religious” suburbanites I grew up around, and some people out here I know now even, would cross the street to avoid him.

Think about that the next time some college-educated white guy snags you in an online identity-theft scheme.

Was this a visitation from God?

Do I have any reason to believe that it wasn’t?

Don’t they say God is Love?

Wondertwin powers, activate…

Mark proposed to Rose!!

Imagine what the wedding’s going to be like. CRAZY.

Fashion squares

April 23, 007
Phoenix, AZ to Los Angeles, CA

Jesse Wack brushes his teeth with straight baking soda. He never drinks the tap water anywhere. He theorizes that while fluoride is marketed to the masses to strengthen teeth, it actually dumbs down and destroys the human brain. He says the FDA, a tool of the powers that be, allows destructive elements like fluoride to be placed into substances we consume all the time, to act as sort of a saltpeter for self-awareness, activism, or revolution.

(I’ve got another friend who, out of instinct at a young age, refused to drink the orange fluoride liquid they distributed at school. His brother and sister, who drank it, now sport mouthfuls of cavities, while my friend has nary a one.)

Jesse Wack also never consumes anything out of a can if he can help it, Or anything with stuff in it he can’t pronounce. He eats like a hippie even more than I do — there’s no way I can stomach snacking on dried seaweed or soy bars.

Jesse Wack wants to get all the fillings in his mouth taken out because they’re made with mercury. Same reasoning. Fillings emit toxic gases any time they’re disturbed, by chewing or brushing or talking or grinding or anything else besides sitting still. It’s all part of the big plan to keep us down — one small facet of a sinister infrastructure of strategies invented to muddle the minds of the hoi polloi and keep us focusing on the wrong elements of life on Earth, to prevent us from rising up and seeing that things could be done in entirely different and better ways.

wack attack surveys a painting I bought for $5 and thinks on how to “enhance” it

Jesse Wack is one of the original members of the Hard Times Bike Club, now the Black Label Bike Club, Minneapolis chapter. Not that he has time to ride a bike much any more. He’s isolated himself in Phoenix, in the belly of the beast, away from all his friends, in order to focus on his plans. Any time he’s not working on his paintings or making music in his studio in Phoenix or figuring out how to earn money in real estate and take over the world, he attends seminars and posts Myspace bulletins and researches conspiracy facts. Not theories, he says. Facts.

Even his own mother says he’s crazy. I don’t think so, not at all, perhaps because Jesse Wack thinks a lot like we all do — he just takes it more seriously. Or he’s able to look at the ugly truth for longer than we are without turning his head in disgust. In fact, as a hobby, he stares it down.

His paintings, while intricate and gorgeous, are hard to look at, too, like the inside of his brain. With more tiny lines than a career tweaker’s face, and bug-eyed imagery that flies in the space between Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and H. R. Geiger, Jesse’s work puts a microscope to the synapses of a mind made paranoid — no, not paranoid, just aware — by modern society.

Jesse Wack-style painting takes a LOT of time to do. His favorite paintbrush has like one bristle.

the man is worthy of holleration, no matter how yer slice it

The only place he could think of to tell me to meet him near his house in Phoenix was a strip club, because that’s what’s on the main road there, besides bail bondsmen, pawn shops, gas stations, and retail stores. To me, his neighborhood appears to be the least harrowing section of America’s fastest-growing metropolitan area — the “dangerous” “ghetto” area where Tempe and Scottsdale nudge up to Phoenix proper. As in, the only part of town that doesn’t look like it’s been nuked and paved into one gigantic super-mall in Vegas.

Phoenix is the worst city in the world. I didn’t know this, but I’ve heard it venomously spat so many times in the past couple days that it’s not hard to become convinced, sight unseen. Two hours spent looking for the phone-replacement store made it clear — wherein we actually had to brave a three-block-long mall named “FASHION SQUARE”, built like a casino so you can’t find your way out, full of sheeple in strong perfume and new-looking clothes roaming around with eyes glazed over and arms full of new purchases.

Which sent Jesse Wack and I into a paranoiac, delirious state of near-catatonia.

Makes a body want to try Prozac, you say? Naaa. That’s what most of the country’s recent young serial killers were taking at the time of their sprees. This Virginia Tech guy included, right? … Living in Phoenix, in this eerily square and too-clean city-sized mall, I ponder all the ways in which American culture encourages dehumanization, making the leap to mass murder easier for the already unstable.

Jesse Wack got lost driving us around looking for the place. WHAT IS ALL THIS SHIT?, he kept hollering incredulously. LET’S BUILD SOME MORE BUILDINGS, I shouted back, AND LET’S MAKE THEM LOOK LIKE THAT. Then I’d point to a square pile of stucco-covered puke, and we’d laugh insanely and have another two-sentence variation of the same conversation. WHO GOES IN THOSE PLACES?, I’d wail. WHAT DO THEY NEED IN THERE? … They live upstairs, he’d say calmly, in those yuppie kennels up there, and they come down to go to work at their job at the mall, and then they go home and watch TV, and they NEVER DO ANYTHING ELSE. THEY NEVER GO ANYWHERE.

In short, we were bitching like high-school goths.

Truly, though, sometimes, this world … the horror. Jesse’s own roommate is living that life, stuck on a single track between the house and the used furniture store down the street. Birth school work death. Work home TV bed work home TV bed mall golf home TV bed work TV bed. Repeat til opening fire somewhere eventually, perhaps in a crowded mall like Phoenix’s Fashion Square.

Coincidentally, one of the only other places “of note” Jesse Wack and I have ever visited together for the first time is the Mall of America outside Minneapolis. Which was the second most harrowing mall experience of my life, up until this one. At least the Mall of America had a Hooters and a video game place. Seriously, we couldn’t really breathe again until we got back to where the buildings all shrunk and got ugly in a different sort of way, and the streets were dotted with thrift shops and adult entertainment stores.

How much does it cost to get all the fillings in your teeth replaced?

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much, much better

I made it to Los Angeles from Phoenix with only two tire blowouts in Blinky’s Royale. Instead of hauling ass up to SF to join the Bike Rodeo, then, I parked outside The Brewery compound of art fags in downtown Los Angeles yesterday, to re-group and observe Johnny Amerika and Tirzah and crew build another big thing for Coachella that spews flames.

But first it was Johnny Amerika’s birthday, and they were ahead of schedule on the project, so there was much drinking, and a big art show and a party, and last night at 2am before everyone stumbled to bed they made an indoor campfire in their shop by pouring a half-inch layer of denatured alcohol into a drainless, stainless-steel “sink” appropriated from a TV commercial set. Then they sang “Happy Birthday” to Johnny, who sported no less than six pointy party hats on his head, and let him throw in the match. WHOOSH.

F*ck Katrina

April 15, 007

The Lower Ninth Ward sits segregated from the rest of New Orleans, stashed in a corner of the city like the messed up cousin everyone pretends isn’t really in the family. You’ve got to drive over a bridge and down, and take a left into the super-ghetto that snakes along the water — along the levee that holds the Mississippi River back from flooding the whole neighborhood and a good portion of the rest of the city.

While other parts of NOLA only sort of look like a second-world country, the Lower Ninth might as well be Mexico or India. There are no signs of future gentrification here — absolutely zero poor white kids will pay sub-standard rent to live in this place. I myself reside in the Bayview-Hunter’s Point area of SF, so not much scares me … but I would not put a deposit on a place here. No sir.

Since I was busy at the dirt rave in the desert in ‘04 when New Orleans first got storm-ravaged and then submerged, I only saw a few pictures and heard a few stories. No benefit of television to bring the horror home, not out there. Since rolling into NOLA, I’ve heard accounts from buddies who were here at the time of apocalypse — riding through floodwaters on tallbikes with shotguns strapped to their backs; floating around in canoes with their dogs to ogle the destruction; holing up in the Abbey bar for a three-day drunk while the rest of the city screamed in panic and shot each other over food and stabbed gas tanks with screwdrivers to siphon enough fuel for themselves to try to escape.

Those who witnessed the immediate aftermath in the Lower 9th — either visiting to witness the devastation first-hand, to scavenge through trash piles for tools and artifacts, or to work on debris-removal crews — they have decidedly darker stories. Those emergency workers who tried to help masses of migrating, newly-homeless people navigate the city streets amid skittish National Guardspeople and overworked and/or racist cops — they’ve got the darkest stories of all.

This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper — and maybe some gurgling noises.

Anyhoo, so coming up on three years later, I saw the Lower 9th with my own eyes.

Along the main road, the ratio of re-furbished houses to homes that are abandoned and completely thrashed is the opposite of the rest of the city: Hardly anyone lives here anymore. At all. We turn into the hood, and a few kids playing basketball at the only house with any life in it on the block wave at me, friendly and smiling. Maybe it has something to do with the graffiti-covered car; maybe they’re just happy to see someone who’s not dripping gold jewelry in a tour bus or an air-conditioned SUV.

The levee towers above the neighborhood, overshadowing all that lies at its base, an ever-present reminder of the dangers of trying to play ball with nature. Nature bats last. For the Lower 9th’s erstwhile residents, the subtext, of course, was this: You’re too poor to live anywhere else besides a place that’s sure to go down. Death is imminent at all times, so fuck everything.

I’ve heard stories of houses slammed upside down on top of other houses; cars sitting in trees on top of coolers and vacuum cleaners; one foundation and an empty concrete porch among the ruins with no missing / corresponding house in sight.

The part I didn’t expect, since I came to the place long after the demo crews had gone, was a flat, massive stretch of land that would remind me of a messier Crissy Field in San Francisco … except rather than all grass, there are concrete foundations. From the distance it looks like a downtrodden dog park — but it used to be entire blocks of houses, now gone. Lots overgrown with weeds, strewn with trash, forlorn and abandoned and everything terrible and oh my God the sadness. Kanye West was right. George Bush does NOT care about black people.

Look at this. FUCKING LOOK AT IT

Another friend told me of a third potential theory of what happened that fateful day. In addition to the supposition that either the levee just broke and the barge floated through it, or the barge was the thing that broke the levee … there’s also the very ugly but wouldn’t-put-it-past-this-administration chance that the National Guard BLEW THE LEVEE themselves. The Lower Ninth might well have been the sacrifice to the gods of weather … because if they flooded the Lower Ninth, then the rest of the City — the richer parts, farther away — would experience far less flooding. Only the poor people trapped on the artificially-stopped-up bank of the mighty Mississippi would die and/or lose everything.

Also, the same friend said the powers that be are currently endeavoring to eminent-domain that entire area, to prevent anyone else from moving back there — to re-purpose the land to build… who knows, probably a casino and riverwalk shopping monument to capitalism or whatever. Makes sense not to move anybody back to the L9 though, I told the friend. That place is screwed. Yes, he said — but you and I like things on the dangerous side too, and p.s., tell that to someone who’s lived in the Lower 9th their whole lives.

It’s kind of too much to take.

Of course there’s the charity outpost, in the form of one makeshift tent with hand-painted signs that read SHAME ON YOU, TOURIST, FOR DRIVING BY AND NOT STOPPING. We drove by without stopping. Inside the temporary shelter, a white man with a ponytail clutched a brochure and talked to a tableful of hippie kids with backpacks and Guatemalan clothing.

My companion sighed and rolled his eyes. ”Here comes Whitey,” he said, “to save the black people.” Good for them for trying, I said — but I wish some “liberal activists” would learn that opening a dialogue with the words ‘SHAME ON YOU’ is not the most enticing way to get people to listen to anything you have to say.

The weirdest thing I’ve seen in New Orleans since I got here: Amid the rubble and destruction and shittiness down there on the football field that used to hold blocks upon blocks of loving families and crime and chaos and joyful second-line parades and the smell of barbecue and secret Caribbean-derived religious rituals and blaring hip-hop and bouncing tricked-out cars and heart-of-the-block barbershops and corner groceries and bucketloads of SOUL … we heard the unmistakable sound of a lawnmower.

Lawnmower? Lawnmower. We drove toward the noise … sure enough, one muscular bald man in a neat white T-shirt and pressed khakis was mowing his lawn.

No house there, to go with the lawn. No houses around his lot, either. Everything else all rocky and weedy and trashy, and here was this man mowing his fucking perfectly manicured lawn. Brought the mower out in his truck to his old place and made sure that even though George Bush does not care about black people, he sure as hell wants to let everyone know he cares about himself, and his property, and his neighborhood.

I’m sure the Sissyphean nature of the task was not lost on him.

On the way back into the Bywater, I pulled into the gas station to fill up, and parked behind a bumping SUV full of attractive, good-time-having people George Bush does not care about. When I got out of the car, my ears picked out the chorus of the song they were blasting:

EVERYBODY SAY ‘FUCK KATRINA!’ (fuck Katrina)
‘FUCK KATRINA!’ (fuck Katrina)
‘FUCK KATRINA!’ (fuck Katrina)
‘FUCK KATRINA!’ (fuck Katrina) …

Well said.

(Turns out it’s a bounce song by 5th Ward Weebie. Buy it on Itunes now, if you can’t do anything else charitable…)

New Orleans crud

April 14, 007

I got the vapors.

Yes. Literally.

Fainting spells in bars where your friends work can be embarrassing. However, it’s always good when a couple just-off-duty nurses happen to be drinking at the establishment, so they can pick you up off the floor, carry you to the couch, and proceed to give you a frighteningly wide and specific range of potential diagnoses. Abject mortification can at least be tempered by the three or four good people who hover around like ladies-in-waiting for a Southern belle whose whalebone corset stays got cinched too tight.

Thankfully, the bar had a couch. When The Vapors started to come on, in a limp effort to avoid looking like the drunk girl passed out on the sofa when customers walked in, I’d staggered from the table to the bathroom — but as the nurses hustled me to a horizontal position, meters away from the bar’s windows to the street in the French Quarter, the joint’s affable bartender explained it to me thusly:

“Girl, please. This is New Orleans.” (Shrug.)

where the view is nice, no matter where y@

After the visit to the doctor’s, hypoglycemia and diabetes were ruled out. Humidity and sea-level living don’t bother me at all. Nothing to do with self-induced toxicity, either, since these days I ingest only hippie food and kombucha while the old familiar boozy devil on my left shoulder recoils in silent horror. And it’s probably not a tumor, or anemia, or internal bleeding, although apparently aspirin — specifically, BC powder and Goody powder — contain insanely high doses of blood-thinning agents that can really fuck you up.

A virus, they said. What kind of virus? The New Orleans virus, the doctor said. Well, what are the symptoms? It’s different for everybody. Some get flu-ey, some congested, some exhausted, some nauseous and pukey, some display symptoms of the common cold.

Ever since I got to Louisiana, my body’s engine has acted like it’s running low on oil — but I thought it was because of stress and whatnot. Now I find out several of the punks in the million-houseguest house where I’m staying have experienced or are experiencing a similar cruddy feeling too. Here we are in one of the most unique and soulful and breathtaking cities on the planet, but it’s hard to want to do anything but lay around and watch movies and be lightheaded.

but at least I get to ride around in this DED SLED. Seriously is it the best car ever?

We’re kind of suspicious it’s something in the tap water. Whether it’s muck left over from the storm and seeping in through broken water pipes, or something more governmental and sinister, nobody knows. Airaq told that after Katrina, when the municipal services got turned back on, every time he took a bath his eyes burned from all the chlorine they had to put in the water supply to make it potable.

The “virus” could be something in the air, too. No clue, the doctor said. Comforting, right?

Well, fuck it. Whatever it’s called and whatever causes it, I see this “virus” as a rite of passage. A vaccination to make me resistant to further poisonings on my next visits to this jolie-laide city. Now I’m ready to come back, and I haven’t even left yet.

I don’t want to leave.

I feel boring.

Whew. I need a nap.

===

Big giant important P.S.:

Here’s another fucked up thing I learned at the doctor’s. Pay close attention, especially if you enjoy the company of dirtbags, or go on tour a lot, or thrive in communal pile-of-puppies-type situations like I do.

Meningitis is coming back.

Yes, MENINGITIS. It strikes first where poor people live on top of each other. In the past few years they’ve started vaccinating college students who live in dorms. After the nice doctor figured out a little bit about my lifestyle, he became quite insistent that not only should I find a way to get the shot, I should also tell all my dirtbag friends.

You can die from this. Very quickly — as in a few hours after you begin to display the mundane symptoms (headache, chills, etc).

So if you can’t spring for a vaccination — I hear they’re expensive as shit — find the public health clinic in your area who might give it out for free. Do it now. Ain’t no fun havin’ meningitis.

X marks the spots

April 2, 2007

Sitting on the stoop at the house I’m staying in in New Orleans, I noticed some graffiti I’d spotted earlier while getting lost near the Superdome … seemed to be tagged on the front of every house in this neighborhood too. My eyes picked up on it because it looks so much like the old Hard Times Bike Club (now Black Label) logo — an “X” with the letters written in all four spaces.

Here, the “X”es have a more elaborate code than just “HTBC” or “BLBC”: it turns out they represent which of the rescue crews checked the residence after Hurricane Katrina, and whether or not there were any trapped people or dead bodies, and how many. On the street I’m staying, the bottom space of the X on all the houses directly around us (the dead body space) is blissfully empty … but I’ve heard when I go drive around the Lower 9th Ward sometime soon, right where the levee broke, I’ll see 7s and 8s and 9s in that slot as often as I’ll see nothing.

the house at st. ROCK. This is the chair where you listen to The Sword and say “how ya doin” to everybody who walks by

Also, a Yat local at the bar last night told me the reason the levee wall broke was that some folks working on a barge parked there just panicked, and got out of town and left the barge — and during a big swell in the water, the barge knocked the wall in. That’s how it happened. That’s when the water went rushing into the Lower 9th like a tsunami in a bad Japanese sci-fi and drowned housefuls of people before they even had a chance to think about whether or not they could swim.

Talk about shirking responsibility in the name of self-preservation. I’m sure there’s some other (good) reason they didn’t move the ship, but still … if that’s a true story, I’d be surprised if those barge workers haven’t offed themselves by now.

This town is not the same. It’s going to survive, and flourish again, of course, but there are little nuances of apocalypse prevalent in the Quarter / Marigny. Many street lights are broken; street signs are gone. And there are no more grocery stores in the Quarter — if you’d like crunchy California stuff like I’m used to eating, like kombucha and granola and N-Acetyl Cysteine pills (for hearing loss, liver cleanse, blood sugar regulation, radioactivity, and heavy metal poisoning — a catch-all supplement for our kind, I’d say) you’ve got to go uptown to the Wholefoods.

Interestingly, housing prices spiked after Katrina, since a good percentage of domiciles in the heart of NOLA are uninhabitable, thanks to black mold and foundations rotting and whatnot. Prices have leveled out some, and I have at least one friend who’s trying to get a loan — with no credit, no credit history, and only a paying job to his name — to buy a house down here and flip it. It can be done. Otter did it already.

It’s already blazing hot here, and hurricane season hasn’t started yet. Otherwise I’d think about it. There’s something about being surrounded by the spectre of death that makes life more vivid. (yeah, that’s cliche as hell, I know, but it feels true right now…)

Roll with the changes

Monday, March 12, 2007

“The art of rolling.”

That’s what it says on the outside of Rizla packets. Today, more than usual, it applies.

I’m suddenly going across the country in a graffiti-covered car. Right now. It’s the only car I have, and I don’t have an attorney, so please do not mention the words “fear” or “loathing” … This is a heroic and sad last-minute job-leaving road trip to be with my mother and my dying grandmother in Memphis. But I’m going to make it as fun for myself as possible.

Road trip!

the Donkey is SO ready — he’s a road dog

Call me a hippie and I’ll crack you in the teeth, but I must say: This might be it for the road trip, for all but the elite and the super-determined. The Long Emergency is here. Gasoline supply on this Earth started waning for good in the ’70s, and despite repeated attempts by our belligerent and self-serving government, the region it comes from will not stabilize. The planet is mad at us, and like a running car in a sealed garage, it doesn’t care whether we live or die. So as a fairly responsible citizen of Earth as well as a member of the Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, I feel guilty about purchasing excavated dinosaur ooze to zip around the U. S. of A. in my 2-ton coccoon. But I want to see my Nanny, and my Mamaw, and then New Orleans and other stuff after that, and I hear a plane ride costs just as much anyways. Energy-wise. I may never have the time or resources to do this again.

When the time comes … when we’re finally readying the house for vacancy, doing taxes and looking through pictures and packing away Nanny’s clothes, I’m sure Momma will call a session to re-draft our wills. If I’ve got any cash at all when I die, I’d like to allot enough to rent however many mango trees in India (like Coldplay did — bland band, good hearts) that’ll make up for all the hot energy I’ve ever consumed.

Right now I’m at my friends’ house in Playa del Rey, Los Angeles County, after taking an afternoon drive from San Francisco. Waiting for the opportune moment when the heat abates and the rush-hour traffic hasn’t yet started. Then I’ll make my way down the 405, to the 5, and over the Palm Desert, and as far into Arizona as I can get before I either grow sleepy or get pulled over for the broken taillight I patched with red duct tape out front of the Cyclecide drunkyard yesterday at 5pm.

Pray for me. Pray to Gladys, the patron saint of parking and traffic, that I can make it to Nanny’s bedside to sing “Amazing Grace” and “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” to her, in harmony with my momma, one more time before she goes to see her loving husband and the God to which she spent a lifetime in ardent and infectious devotion.

Cyclecide Mayoral Proclamation

Believe it or not, this isn’t a joke… this is an actual transcript. Spider arranged it; I wrote it; Gavin signed it. You can almost smell the hair gel on the parchment.

——–

July 10, 2006
San Francisco, California

MAYOR DECLARES JULY 22-23 TO BE “CYCLECIDE WEEKEND”
July 22-23 is Cyclecide Weekend, by Mayoral Proclamation

——–

In recognition of the Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo’s decade-long career promoting artistic exploration, cultural activism, and tireless commitment to the glorification of the bicycle, the Honorable Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco has proclaimed the weekend of July 22-23, 2006 to be “Cyclecide Weekend.”

WHEREAS in 1996, founder Jarico Reesce created the Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo in order to vaunt the bicycle as an artistic medium — to modify, to make more surreal, more useful, and/or more entertaining — and Reesce’s vision metamorphosed into a lifelong surrogate family and worldwide cultural institution;

WHEREAS the members of Cyclecide Bike Rodeo provide the planet’s only traveling bicycle-themed sideshow and pedal-powered carnival midway, and whereas they continue to make a substantial contribution to San Francisco’s unbelievably diverse and creative underground arts scene, as well as criss-crossing the country and positioning themselves in the media to represent San Francisco’s renegade do-it-yourself spirit all over the globe;

WHEREAS Cyclecide promotes the virtues of re-use, offhanded environmentalism, and “pre-cycling” by searching out cast-offs that our wonderfully disposable society throws away, and then modifying said cast-offs — both for fun and to provide examples for lessening humanity’s impact on the environment;

WHEREAS the Bike Rodeo makes bike culture entertaining and alluring for both chidren and adults — referencing the bicycle’s history as a source of populist freedom, sublime engineering principles, efficiency, and ongoing role as a worldwide ennabler of change, easy mobility, physical fitness, interactivity with one’s surroundings, and silly entertainment;

WHEREAS Cyclecide consistently and creatively does its part to promote the universal idea that life on Earth is better when adaptability trumps consumption, and when a carefully-fostered atmosphere of interactivity breeds cooperation, understanding, tolerance, and improved quality of life;

WHEREAS Cyclecide Bike Rodeo are not afraid to take risks, even in the face of insurmountable odds, extreme impracticality, and pies to the face — and whereas the Bike Rodeo will continue to put a clown nose on the visage of life, and to bravely and comically embody its motto, “2 DUM 2 DIE”; now

THEREFORE IT BE RESOLVED THAT I Gavin Newsom, Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco, do hereby proclaim the weekend of July 22-23, 2006 to be “CYCLECIDE WEEKEND.”