Month: August 2021

As a kid, I read comics. So in the back in my head, I always waited for some sort of hero to come in and save the day, even in real life. When I was very young, I respected cops and the military; I wanted to be a secret agent, of course. But growing up, I learned that most heroes as they are depicted in comics and movies are actually fascists reinforcing police and military law, which I started to like less and less as the reality of how terrible police are became very obvious. Anymore, I don’t really read those kinds of comics anymore. All “Supercops” are bastards, too.

However, there is still a need for heroes, as is very clear from watching the news: The Sackler Family, which should all actually suffer greatly for their crimes, will never suffer in the slightest, except when The Help forgets to restock the Le Croix. All of them should do long stints in prison, for most of their lives (along with other leaders in other pharmaceutical companies), and yet that will never happen. We need some sort of justice in the world that cannot be delivered by our courts our the police.

In the ’90’s, Atom & His Package was accused of being a fascist for writing a song about sending every terrible person in the world to an island in the middle of the sea. And, he was okay with it. BECAUSE AT LEAST HE WAS TRYING TO GET RID OF AWFUL PEOPLE AND SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Now, more than ever, I keep waiting for Atom’s Avenger.

While it was be terrible to actually try and make a call to action of this kind, and certainly that would be a crime, if someone really wanted to do this country right, you would start a heroic force of toned, exercised, young activists who have the single mission of capturing and hiding all rich people on a remote island with no access to the rest of the world, where they could live Lord of The Flies style. You would be doing hard, necessary work to save our planet. But we seriously need your help and NOW, because it is already too late for the poorest people on this planet.

I sometimes think the real reason I can’t sleep at night is because I wake up and there isn’t relief from the horrors of the privileged rich people. Please, be a real hero, and take down a millionaire today.

On the plus side: I’m so used to taking rejection at this stage in my life because I’ve had a lot of practice at it. But for some reason, after all these years, it still hurts every time.

I didn’t need a dream job getting paid to podcast anyway. Who would ever want that burden?

Sigh. I need a drink.

“He would often “bless” his recording equipment with mystical invocations, blow ganja smoke onto his tapes while recording, bury unprotected tapes in the soil outside of his studio, and surround himself with burning candles and incense, whose wax and dust remnants were allowed to infest his electronic recording equipment. He would also spray tapes with a variety of fluids, including urine, blood and whisky, ostensibly to enhance their spiritual properties. Later commentators have drawn a direct relationship between the decay of Perry’s facility and the unique sounds he was able to create from his studio equipment.”
https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20210829/ARTICLE/210829572

Marla and I met just over 10 years ago. We got married six years ago. The sixth anniversary gift is Iron, to illustrate how strong the relationship is now.

I never imagined I would ever meet someone like Marla, and I never imagined she would want to marry someone like me. But over 10 years later, we’re still together, and still trying to figure out how best to do it together.

I love you dear. Everything else is awful, but you’re the one thing that isn’t. Here’s to keeping me safe and sound, all these years later.

Okay, I know you can help me on this one. It was a show on that station that doesn’t exist anymore, in the early 2000’s, with Sarah Vowell, Jewel Staite and Alyson Hannigan all working as down-and-out detectives, solving crimes and hanging out at a bar that was run by Joan Jett. Like, did I imagine this or what? It seemed so real to me…

I got tapped to do some work for a friend, a one-day thing that was well worth the higher-than-usual hourly wage. (Thanks a million, Obadiah.) And, for the first time in years and year, I put in a full eight hour day of lifting and hauling and stacking and doing it all over again for eight hours. I haven’t put in a day like this since I graduated from College, and worked for a season at Spirit Halloween. (Which, if you were wondering: is a scam, and the employees are treated like garbage, if for some reason you couldn’t figure that out from the fact that they move into the empty place at the mall that is ALWAYS doomed.)

Anyway: I’m beat. I haven’t done maual labor like this, for pay, in ages. Sore muscles have their own sore muscles.

Hopefully it’s at least 10 years before I have to do this again. Because: it’ll take that long to recover, for sure.

Now here’s a really interesting artifact. Someone in my Max Headroom Fan Group forwarded to me this tape, which contains 20 minutes (for real… I’m not kidding) of Max Headroom promotional material for Coke… with a twist. There’s a lot of improvised material, some of which probably shouldn’t have been in a commercial, and doesn’t have the feel of the polished, short, and heavily scripted commercials that we largely saw on television.

The best bit is a snippet of interviews with teenagers talking about why they like Max. The “Max Rap” and the country song by “Tex Headroom” are incredible (and very weird), but there’s a lot of strange bits in here that are bizzare. There’s also some high-quality transfers of a couple of the ads directed by Ridley Scott.

It’s a very weird tape, and as someone who has had a life-long interest in Max Headroom, to see ANYTHING I’ve never seen before is fascinating. This is great if for no other reason that we get to discover what Max’s middle name is!

This is a very cool find. Thanks Blank Matthew!

I was gifted this mysterious shoebox of cassettes the last time I visited Catatonic Studios in Eugene, and this box is something else indeed! Here’s the provenance: Colin Hix says he was in a thrift store one day, and he was chatting up someone about music as they were looking through thrift scores. The subject turns toward Negativland – as it often does – and the gent insisted that Colin take this box of tapes. He’s been sitting on them ever since, and gifted them to me after we used some of them in a jam session that is currently being mixed.

This box absolutely fascinated me. There are tape loops, cassettes of audio from documentaries, some of the Environments LPs are captured here, and there’s even an album by Palapa B2, a Eugene experimental band, mixed in with a ton of stuff that I have yet to identify. Some of these are home made loops, too, adding to the mystery. Wherever this box came from, it was used to make experimental music.

I have enough friends in Eugene, and more pointedly, there’s a very specific kind of handwriting on a lot of these labels. I have a feeling that we could figure out where these tapes came from before long. 

Regardless: these are going to be plundered relentlessly for some upcoming collage stuff that I’m itching to work on, so you’ll be hearing this stuff… in some form… soon.

Today’s project: get this chimney cleaned and inspected. What I assumed would eat a large chunk of my day took less than 30 minutes when I hired pros to do it. I learned a lot, strangers were in my house for way less time than I imagined, and I’m left with a whirlwind home-care romance that has left me much to ponder.

Unrelated: if anyone wants to buy a LOT of merch soon, I suddenly have a new drain on my income.

My first Mini-Mutations release came out three years ago on this date. The material had been recorded a year earlier, for my radio show, then edited into this presentation. It started out as a split with Red Panda Death March, but that band evolved and this came out on its own. I was gonna reveal it on my first tour that fall, but I couldn’t wait. I still have a few CDs if you want a copy.