​IV.

They were taken down a rubbish strewn stairway in the back, as leering Caligulates jeered at them. Many of them wore the distinctive threads of their crew: tattered blue scrubs, and dirty face masks clipped over their noses and mouths, perhaps to hide the rotted and blistered orifices so often found beneath. The eruption of chemical sores and growths was common for many who stayed in the dead cities, where much wasn’t actually dead, but was going through a ragged mutation, as the sprawl was consumed and repopulated by coyotes and mountain lions, and the vagabond impresarios of the Holywood Bohemian Grove multiplied, then starved, thinking they had ended up in the wrong cryofreeze simulation.

The smell that emanated from the hall made Peppa Spray sick, and she had a strong stomach, wasn’t taken to feelings of nausea very often, but now as the Yolo’s were pushed down the paint peeled hallway her stomach started to gurgle, and not in a pleasant way. Maybe it was the rat carcasses that festered next to doorways that once led into doctor offices. Maybe it was the crunch of desiccated roach chitin that their soft leather sneaks crushed as their feet shuffled through the layers of insect debris and dirt on the plastic resin floor.

The air was oppressive. The place had not been designed with anything other than artificially cooled and artificially moved air in mind. It was so thick that with each breath Peppa and the others took, it tasted like breathing in the vapor from a waterpipe whose chamber was filled with urine and sweat, the iron taste of a girl on her moonthlies, and underneath that, a metallic tang of heavy psychiatric drugs.

A famished guard stood at the door to the holding chamber, in a place that might have been the laundry room in times past, now filled with broken machines. Jack Chrysler looked at him, defiant, even with his hands bound together. The guard tripped him as they were pushed into the fetid room, and his head slammed onto the floor, his hair trailed through the shelled crisps of dry roaches.

“That was a gnarly fall bruh,” the guard said, “best get yo ass up and into the room, we won’t have no berserkerezoids here, spesh not on y’alls first day of inpatient. I mean, you haven’t even gotten to group yet.”
Hana started to tweak. He liked to go hunting for artifacts, and this often took him on missions into abandoned buildings, but he hated feeling cooped up in them, and would never sleep in one. It wasn’t just because many of the concrete plastic buildings were unsafe, rotted, riddled with black mold and spores that left you feeling unsane if you stayed inside of them too long. It had more to do with the way their harsh geometries enclosed around his mind, the way the sky was cut off, the way rooms were separated, and the way people who lived in them were holed up, atomized from the collective life of their crew. He’d seen too many horrors filling up the old homes, the skeletons of people he’d found who ended up suffocating under the weight of their bling-bling. He started breathing funny, taking in big in-breaths that soon became jagged.
Cirona had a dazed look about her, the whirlwind of confusion. Everyone who’d been dosed by whatever strange admixture of pharmasorcerous substance was still in the process of recollection. Numbed from reality, there normal sharp senses had been dulled, feeling blunted, intuition curbed.

“This is a place of death, I can smell it,” Peppa Spray mumbled. It was one thing they all felt certain.

The Neuroleptic Caligula’s locked them in the room and left them in their humid stink. Time drifted by fast at first. As the drugs wore off adrenaline kicked in and they remained on high alert. As the chemicals released by their bodies ebbed, and the sweat of fear sank in, and with the clock of nature absent in the hole, time stretched.

For the most part they were quiet. Jayrod started tapping, as best he could with hands tied behind his back, one of the calming heartbeat rhythms drummers used to placate agitated minds on the metal table. Peppa Spray joined in with a prayer song, and everyone felt sad that Hiroko, who had always held the most medicine, wasn’t there to sing with them. She had known all the old songs and a whole litany of prayers.

Then the door creaked open and several Neuroleptic’s came. One was carrying a heavy sack of rocks over his shoulder. He walked over to Jayrod, hoisted it up as he stared him in the face, and brought the rocks down on his head, knocking him out. The guards picked up Jayrod and threw him on one of the gurneys and flicked open their switchblades and started cutting on his scalp for their trophy collection up in the display case near the offices.

Jack Chrysler, struggled and screamed, as did Cirona and Peppa Spray, but to no avail, there was nothing they could do, and the rawhide just bit deeper into their dirty wrists.

A second guardsmen pressed himself on Cirona, stroking her thick black hair as his hungry wet lips lobbed onto her ears and neck. Hana was next to her and attempted to headbutt the man to no avail. A third Caligula grabbed Hana by the neck and started to choke him

When Dr. Encephalon walked inside the room all struggle ceased. He was all scrubbed up in a greenish blue surgeon’s garb, his face mask was clean, and his long greasy hair parted straight down the middle so the pustules and protrusions lining the center of his head were visible. He clutched an antique black doctor’s bag close to his chest with both hands enclosed in sterile latex.

“What did my children bring me today?” He stepped over to Jayrod and begin to probe him. Dr. Encephalon wasn’t just the doctor, but the head doctor, the doctor of heads, the one who knew how to fix all the things that could wrong inside the brain. He considered the brain to be his particular specialty in medicine and he distributed the medicine. He was the source of all medicine. He was the source of all life, the universal panacea, here to cure the world of every last bit of blight and disease, and all the world was diseased. He was diseased.

“These Yolo’s are full of diseases aren’t they?” he asked his lackeys. When no one answered, he kicked the guard who had flung himself on Cirona in the shin with his steel tipped boots.

“Yes, yes doctor, the Yolo’s are sick bastards full of disease and they need to be cured.”

“That’s better. Tell all your friends that the operating theater will soon be open, and it’ll be grand show.”

The guard licked his lips and rubbed his hands together.

Dr. Encephalon then turned to his prisoners. “I’ll be seeing you, one by one, so if you have any goodbyes to say to your diseased brothers and sisters, now is the time, before I cure you, once and for all.”

He took his scalpel and made a jagged cut down from Chrysler’s belly button to his pelvis, and then put his finger into the wound and started to press as blood spurted out. “I think there are some things in here this gentleman certainly won’t be needing anymore. Take him up to the operating theater!”

Jack Chrysler gave Peppa Spray the look of a warrior and would not be frightened. She felt his love shine through to her in his defiant bravery. She only hoped she would be as brave when her time came. She kept her chin up and refused to let a tear fall. The Caligulates could have their bodies. They would not have their souls.

Over the next twelve hours the members of the crew were dragged off one by one to be operated on, sans anesthesia, and the faint screams could be heard as they echoed through the ductwork. Those who remained tried in vain to look for any means of escape, but there was nothing any of them could do. The guards were heavily armed, could shoot them in an instant. This wasn’t the first time the Caligulates had bound captives before, and the rough rope that tied them together could not be broken or budged by simple efforts of will. They might as well be cooked.

Each time another person was called for to be taken up to the operating theater Peppa Spray thought it was going to be her turn, until she was the only one left. Then even the guards left her alone. After all her goodbyes, and with no one else to see or hear, she finally allowed herself to cry.

V.

For a reason they could not fathom, they were keeping her alive. Perhaps their bloodlust had been satiated. Perhaps they had forgotten in their whacked out unsanity.

Several days passed in her solitary confinement and she heard echoes through the ductwork of the revelry as the Caligulate’s consumed their flesh and experimented on one another.

She could tell neither time of day nor the hour of night, and was beginning to think she had been totally forgotten. Then the door opened and an elderly woman with a tattered mask came to her and untied her ropes with whispers of escape.

“I want to help you out of here, before you end up like me,” she reached out to touch Peppa Spray who flinched, not knowing if she could believe the woman.

“I tell the truth. I was captured many years ago and turned into a slave, made to wait on these nasty peoples whims and wants for many a long year. Your only chance now is to get out of here as they sleep off the last few days of the pillage party, time they will spend in their special k-holes.”

“Clean water… I need clean water,” Peppa Spray said and the lady gave her another brittle plastic bottle filled with something almost clear.

The woman had brought cleanish clothes for Peppa Spray. They were at least an improvement over her own soiled rags.

“I’ve got a pouch for you filled more water, and some old preserves and bread I managed to hide away. As soon as it is dark I will place it in the cell, which I will leave unlocked. After that you must wait a little longer until you hear the cold silence of these halls. I will lead you part of the way, and then draw you a map for how to get out of this building, through halls no one ever goes in anymore, to leave as quietly as you can. Then you must hurry away in the direction from which you came and go back to your people”

Peppa couldn’t hold back her tears. “Come with me, we will both get out of here.”

“No, I can’t. I will be missed if I am not there when they awake from the drug orgy. I can keep them stupefied by slipping them more sedataries and other meds I’ve squirrlied away.”

The women hadn’t been taking the medication Dr. Encephalon had prescribed, and had built up a stash by only pretending to swallow.

The two held each other for a time and then the elderly woman disappeared as she locked the door behind her. As she waited it seemed that the woman who had taken pity on her would never come back. Instead of getting quieter, the noises got louder. It seemed the party in the halls above had reached a peak ferocity. Then slowly, like a downward spiral, the chaos began to wind down, and at last everything was quiet inside the SOCAL MENTAL HEALTHPLEX.

When the door opened again her friend was there with a nub of candle and a small bag. She motioned for her to come over with her hand and she was led through a maze of walls. The lady opened a hatch in the floor at the end of one hallway that led them down a small ladder and deeper underground, into the steam tunnels, disused now after many long years with no hot water or any kind of power in the building. They did not dare to look closely at any of the things that scurried past her.

She took her some ways inside the steam tunnel until it reached a T point, where she stopped after turning left.

“I can’t go any farther,” her mysterious ally said. “I need to get back before any of them rouse. Keep following this, and when you get to the end, go up the other ladder, through a pothole. Then you’ll be in the subbasement again. Once you are in that hallway just keep going the direction you are in now. That path curves some, but just keep going, don’t go into any of the other rooms or doors. It will eventually take you to another set of stairs, that will be on your right, leading up into what was once the far garage. From there you’ll see an old trail off past the fence in the brush beyond. Follow that up into the hills and don’t stop until you are with your people.”

“I won’t,” Peppa spray whispered. They hugged and then she was left alone in the dark, weak and afraid, but determined to live. She had been given good directions. No one seemed to be around. When she reached the subbasement her feet crunched on the debris of peeled paint, fallen in ceiling tiles, and general debris. For a time, she thought she got lost, and thought she heard voices, of people fucking in a darkened closet, and she hurried past before she could find out if it was real, or just her freaked out imagination.

Then she found the stairs and hauled herself up into the outdoors grateful to be breathing fresh air.

The sun was not yet up when she walked past the rusted-out cars and their dissolved plastic interiors sitting in the parking garage whose levels had shifted and fallen into each other as one tremor after another had rippled through the landscape over time. Knotted worms of rebar poked through the concrete mess, but it hadn’t fallen apart enough to stop her from getting through.

As she drifted down what seemed to be a small deer or coyote path, she stopped to take a leak behind a bush and see if there was something to chew on in the bag. Pink fingers of luminiscent cloud lit up the horizon as she trudged northeast, and then the tears started to come again.

Then she heard the first rev of a dirtbike in the distance, followed by one after another. She was certain someone had found out she was gone. She hoped her savior was okay, whatever her name happened to be. As the dirtbikes got closer, she ducked into the shadow of a blown down house that had started to melt into the scenery, and heard the Caligulates ride by on either side. Thickets of weed trees and colonizers had grown up engulfing the former suburbs but some houses yet remained. She remained hidden amidst the wreckage of a former living room until the sounds of the bikes were distant. Then she hurried on her way, going off the trail, further into thickets, until she reached one of the many places where the fissures caused by earthquakes had resulted in a small pond forming in the dip. A rusted bicycle sat on its edge, and she hoped the gear chain was intact. Her brother Hana, dear Hana, how could they do that to you Hana, had taught her to ride, and their crew maintained a small flock of bikes.

The tires were often the first things to go on a bike, and these had some dry rot. The innertubes seemed to be good, and though hardly inflated, weren’t totally empty. It would be good enough. She’d ride the bike as far as it would take her. She pedaled on the paths as much as she could, and got off and walked the bike up the steeper hills and through the places where the roots and branches of the weed trees made it too difficult. Night was closing in, and she wanted to keep going, but the fear and grief weighed her down and she prayed for the oblivion of sleep inside a thicket of weeds where she hid herself and the bike underneath a covering of dead branches and brush.

It took her all the next day to make it through the ruined burbs and leave them behind. Out here, alone, she feared she’d become food for a mountain lion or black bears, not to mention becoming prey to the roaming packs of wild dogs. She ascended a ridge, hid her bike under some brush, and climbed down into a ravine. Well dried Coyote scat was nearby and she wondered if this was a den, abandoned now that mating and raising season were over. She crawled down into it, feet first, careful to obliterate traces of her footsteps in the soft loose earth. She slept there all day, waiting for the sun to go back down so she could get back on the road, not knowing exactly where she was. She hoped she’d get her bearings enough to take her to either the Yolo or Mazatzi autumn camp. She ate a little, but her throat was dry, and it was hard to get the food down, and she barely wanted to eat, as she thought of the dead she’d left behind. Her family who would never eat again.

Several times as the sun made its way across the sky and she lay under old branches in the ravine she heard the distant motoric neigh of dirtbikes, but she did not look out, much as she wished to see what was going on. When darkness came once more, she climbed out and rode on, keeping a lookout for a place that may have water, not knowing where or whether she would ever find any. She travelled on, and on, again and at dusk found herself near a creek where she took a long drink of the water, and then found a spot to hide herself as best she may, and went back to sleep.

Peppa slept in fits on into late afternoon, slipping back and forth between disturbed visions of Dr. Encephalon as he branded his forceps inside her lover, as he pulled out organs that should have been left inside. She dreamed of being ridden over and run down by the roaming pack of Caligulates, of being dragged back into their lair only to be ripped apart just as her crew had been. She jolted awake when something nudged her side.

If I move, a knife will be thrust inside me. She thought. She tried not to move, kept her breath shallow, and bit her lip as she turned with slow care to see what the presence was. She found a skinny coyote sleeping next to her, its foot having dug into her side.

Peppa Spray got up and lifted her hands to the sky. Coyote was powerful woo among her crew and she felt for certain he had been sent to her by the great Webworker who aligned the paths of fate.

“Coyote, please show me the way back to my crew. You know these hills and the secret roads between them. Lead me back home. My lover, my brother, and all friends have been killed and I am terribly lost in this wilderness of death.”

Coyote wagged his tail and when she went to get a drink from the creek, he followed her. She drank and ate a little and gave him some of the provisions, though they were barely fit for either of them. She talked to him, and told him all that had happened and how she wanted to get back to the people she knew. The way he cocked his head and squinted his eyes showed her that he understood. She even thought he nodded his head.
He began to lead the way and she followed him on the bike until one of the tires went totally flat, gouged by a broken beer bottle that poked up through the dereliction of the broken hills. By late morning they had made it to a place where the orange groves and ganja leaves grew side by side and strong together, the abandoned fields left to their own devices, and she feasted on sweet citrus. She would have eaten of the buds but she wasn’t ready to have her mind spin the way it sometimes did when she ate the weed, and it was not hardly dry enough to smoke.

She would have stayed and slept but Coyote twitched his head, as if to say onwards, and onwards Peppa Spray went, past a farmhouse whose foundations had crumbled and whose roof lay skewered on a lonely pine. They climbed a steep hill in the back of the farm going up further into the foothills to the mountains. Coyote ran ahead, and then circled back, then circled off to the right, before leading her another way. Pepper was frightened, thinking the Coyote had sighted the Caligulates and she ran after him as fast as she could go. He led her to the top of another hill, and then, looking away along the ridge, she saw that he had led her safely past a band of subpolar bears, feeding and playing on the steep slope they had been about to ascend.

As she traveled Coyote stayed with her. When she woke and he was still there, she felt as if she could trust him. She told him all about her life and the events that had led to her going off to be with the Yolos. She asked him to keep her safe, and he did, to find her water, and he did, to find her shelter, and he did. One day she paused near a stream next to a small prairie and set traps to catch rabbits, and Coyote stayed with her as she gave thanks to the Hare spirit and replenished her body.

It was in this way, after many days, that she came to be closer to where the Mazatsis held their autumn camp near Klew Springs. The bag she had been given had long been empty, and Peppa was weak from hunger, even after the rabbit she’d eaten. Her heart was weary as were her feet, the shoes she wore barely fit for the job any longer. She found plenty of berries and some strong roots to eat next to the waters of the spring, but the roots were fibrous and the berries sour, and her stomach soon turned sore. She cleaned herself and rested her feet, and the next day plodded on, but with every movement she seemed to move slower and slower.

It was a massive effort of willpower for her to move beyond the void she felt was inside her mind. Even as she got closer to the winter camp, she felt like things were hopeless. The only thing waiting for her there was telling all her kin of the deaths of others and her own narrow escape. When she sat down too long Coyote would get up and whine at her, try to make her laugh by playing in front of her, doing whatever he could to urge her onwards. Coyote ate well, feasting on the many squirrels, chipmunks, and other small game he was able to hunt with ease. He would leave her squirrels in the evening, and though she had little will, managed to scrounge a fire and skewer the poor creatures to keep her strength up.

One day as they passed through what she thought was the final big valley before the mountains where her crew were hilled up and holed up, she told Coyote her feet were so sore she could go on no further, and fell into a delirious sleep. Yet just as on the first day they had met, she was awakened by him when he pawed at her legs, and she bolted up to hear what he was whining about. Then she heard the voices carried on the chill fir scented wind. They came closer and closer and then she heard one say, “this is the place to cross.”

Out of breath and looking like one of the wild witches of the woods, Peppa Spray scrambled out of her resting place and managed to crawl over to a large rock where she called down to them below by cold the rushing stream, yelling and waving her arms. A small group rode up to her on their horses and at first did not recognize the pale thin looking young woman before them. She pointed to Coyote who had not left her side, and told them how it was he who had guided her this far back, and she pleaded with them to be kind to the creature, not to kill him.

“Our camp is not too far away,” one of the horsemen said.

“But I am too weak to ride, please send someone back to get me.”

One of their group stayed and tended to her, giving her some jerky and clean water as twilight gathered, and before too long they came back with a stretcher to place her on.

When she saw them, she kissed Coyote on the head and nuzzled him close to her neck.

“You saved me,” she said. “It breaks my heart to know that we must part. If you came over to the other side of the river, I don’t think I’d be able to stop the dogs we have in our camp from attacking you, and there are many of them, all bred fighters. But don’t go far. Stay here, on the edges of our camp and I will come back to you on every full moon. When we move camp, we will always leave you a gift of food behind, so that you will always know how grateful I am to you.”

Coyote kenned what she said, though he whimpered as he licked her face one last time as the four strong young men with a stretcher approached. He backed away from these humans, and Peppa cried again, cried for her new friend, and her old friends who died in such cruel hate at the hands of the Caligulates.

​They placed her on the stretcher and bore her back to camp. Everyone sympathized with her and together they mourned the loss of the others. On the other side of the river Coyote serenaded them all night with his own mournful howls. But he was never forgotten, they always left him something, and she went to visit with him every full moon. And so it was that Peppa Spray founded the Coyote clan of the Yolo crew, and taught her children and grandchildren his wile ways.

​I.

Peppa Spray thought for sure she’d seen a coyote watching her and Jack Chrysler. It had been watching when they were necking, when she was sitting on the dry wooden fence that surrounded Despoblado Carnevale, her legs wrapped around his waist. Coyote had been their watching as the late fall sun dipped down below the golden mountains when she’d led him out by the trees, unrolled a woolen blanket, and enraptured him in her passion. She’d hadn’t paid much attention to coyote as they burned together, but spotted him again as she collapsed off Jack and rolled onto her back, his own fire now inside her, hers slowly ebbing in the afterglow. Bats had started to eat their fill of insects in the gloaming. The smell of wild sagebrush and sweetgrass mingled with the musk created from their heavy panting and sweat. Her moontime had just passed a day before, and she’d finally taken him inside of her, as she had wanted to before their respective crews parted ways until the next helpmeet.

Chrysler kissed Peppa Spray’s ear, pierced with silver and turquoise jewelry from the lobe up to the top. “That was fun,” he whispered, and zipped up his patchwork jeans.

“I thought so too,” she said her hand on his muscled chest.

“You don’t know how glad I was when I saw you Mazatzi roll in for Helloween” he said. “My heart was so big-big when I saw you ride into town, I don’t want to think of what happens when it’s time for you to go.”

She nodded her head. “Do you remember the night we had under the masa moon?”

“As long as I have life in my blood, I’ll never forget.”

They had met a number of times since they were kids at intercrew helpmeets, but it was at a fete for the dying Jorge Moxie when they first snuck off and imprinted themselves all over each other.

Jack nodded and she pulled on his arm, after brushing his long black hair that fell into deep of his back. They
were young, just inside the third decade of their life, and the ardor of their fire was quick to rekindle and they made love a second time, and she slept within his arms.

When they woke back up an hour later, she thought she saw coyote prowling outside the fence that encircled the small town, and it gave her a shiver.

“Let’s get back to the party,” she said.

The town square, vacant most nights of the year when the Despoblado was unoccupied, now was filled with the colors of all life, vibrant with orange firelight and blue stars who peaked out from behind mountains to cast their ancient gaze. On Helloween the place filled up with crews from all around their part of Cali who came to the dead city to pay their respects to the dead who still haunted their dreams. Helloween was the biggest fête of the year and on the last night they burned the big man, as their people had done every Helloween for countless yeas.

Several boys tended a giga sized bonfire. A group of slightly older teens were seeing who could split rounds of wood with one fell of the axe. Tables had been set up outside for the feast and a barrel of mugwort ale had been uncorked. Cups of the bitter beverage were being passed around between the crews who mingled together enjoying the success of their collaborative caza, with many beasts taken for the revelers.
Raspy Putineer walked over and smacked Chrysler on his shoulder, where there was a black inked tattoo of the spider goddess hanging by a thread from a full moon. Another tattoo of a coyote howled beneath this on his back. Chrysler was tall, two more hands over just being a six-footer, but Raspy was taller and thinner, with four hands over.

“I can’t believe the size of that buck you got,” Raspy exhaled in his whisp of a voice.

Chrysler laughed and shook his head. Raspy was a stick figure of a man, and a strong gust of wind would be enough to knock him over. Even at a feast he often forgot to eat, too caught up with the world inside his head. He had bad asthma, and couldn’t keep up in a hunt, but he had found other ways to make himself useful to the crew. Knowledge of math, coaxing decayed lectrics into life, brewing, herbs, all sang their ways to him inside his head, where he untangled them and put them to work.

“You found the box of stainless tools. Those will be useful this winter, too.” Raspy had the gift of zeroing in on hidden troves, places where preppers had stashed goods for the dark days ahead, the days they now lived. The two old friends kept talking as they trotted over to the fire where a jug was being passed around.

Cirona had come up to Peppa Spray in the meantime, but wasn’t feeling friendly. She’d pined after Chrysler herself since she first started pining at the onset of her joven years. She didn’t like it that a Mazatzi was having better luck with a Yolo than she was herself, though it was common for the two crews to intermarry, and wondered why Peppa couldn’t have gone off with a Sequi or a Frisker and left Chrysler for herself.

“I made a red pozole with some of the deer Chrysler brought back. I know he’s going to just love it,” she said, as she flipped her long black hair, dyed with strains of blue, back over her shoulder.

Here we go again, Peppa thought. Cirona had run interference on her and Chrysler the last time her crew had met up with the Yolo’s, and Peppa hated girl games.

“Did you make anything for the feast?” Cirona asked next.

“No, I didn’t. Besides, you know my brother, Hana Baishan, he’s a much better cook than I’ll ever be, he was in the kitchens representing our crew. I think he may even have a thing for you.”

She didn’t know if Hana really had a thing for her or not, but he probably did just by being a guy and all, and even in the off chance it wasn’t true, it was a way to pick on her older bro, and deflect Cirona from creeping in on her catch.

“Hana? He hasn’t even looked at me. His eyes are for Crushacola Baby.”

“No, he likes you, he really likes you. He couldn’t stop talking about how he wanted to see you again, and was hoping for another chance to swim nekkid with you at the creek like we all did when our crews met up over the summer.”

Cirona gave Peppa Spray a long hard look. Peppa wore a baggy lion pelt dress, and an oversized patchworked flannel shirt, silver chains around her neck glittered with metal trinkets. She was only a few hands above being a five-footer, and tended towards the thick end of things, except in winter when everyone thinned. In her uncharitable moments Cirona thought she looked naco, but in her heart knew she was really utsi, from the way her brownish-green eyes lit up her pearl round face, which only egged on her green feelings.

The pair walked to one of the loot tables, where all the stuff that had been found in their three-day scrounge and caza just before the fete was spread on the table amidst an array of sumptuous foods. Acorn flour flapjacks sat on a chipped and cracked platter next to a plate of nails that had been harvested from the ashes of one of the nearby burned down towns they had scrounged through, the fires evidence that the Neuroleptic Caligulas had been through before them. Cirona’s big kettle of pozole was encircled by a ring of cellphone innards. Glass bottles of various meads, beers and ciders wrestled for space next to a skillet of cornpone and lamps whose lightbulb sockets had been replaced with candles. A crawdad and trout paella with spicy ancho peppers was served up in an old satellite dish.

Cirona ladled out some pozole into a cup for Peppa. “It’s better with some of these chilies,” she said, and put a teaspoon of something on top.

Peppa wasn’t afraid. She’d gotten her common name when she recovered like a champ after getting sprayed with the juice from a water gun filled with a scorpion pepper decoction at age thirteen in a rumble with the Siliconez Missionaries. She’d always eaten picante and was a legend when it came to eating the hottest peppers, putting to shame many of the iron gutted old Mazatzis.

She took a mouthful and felt the heat receptors on her tongue go wild. Yet she chewed and swallowed, taking another bite, even as sweat already beaded up on her golden skinned brow.

“This is really good pozole,” she said, setting down the bowl next to a set of ratchets Raspy had honed his finding senses in on during the scrounge.

Hana came out of the collective mess hall building carrying a big pot. “Hey sis, you gotta try my deer menudo.” He would have been as gangly as Raspy Putineer, if not for his athletic nature. All the running, hunting and riding had made his muscular, if of a lean cut.

“When I’m done with this,” she said shoveling more of the pozole into her. There was no way she was going to let Cirona best her, but the peppers were hotter than most, and she was starting to sweat and get full.
She put the spoon down, and asked with all her calm, “What kind of peppers are these Cirona? I’m getting hints of Ghost, Reapers, and Scorpion. Did you mix all those together or are you, uh, crossbreeding them?”
“A little of both,” she said, noncommital. “I juss wanted to make sure you kept that fire lit inside you.” Then she giggled, though no one else laughed.

Peppa Spray never understood the frenemy game. Cirona played it all the time and so did some of the other cholitex, especially when it came to cojonex. It just frustrated her. As far as she knew Jack wasn’t interested in Cirona at all, so she didn’t understand why she didn’t just get over it, and get with one of the other cojonex in the crew. All of them were young and dumb, ready and randy, as the saying went and it wasn’t like they belonged to one of those pacific edge crews where there were only a few men kept as bulls while the others had been castrated.

Different crews were gathered together in clusters over by the massive fire, and each had started to play music. It was like having multiple bands playing at the same time, but all of them listening to each other, and working out different aspects of what became a collective sound. Weird Haldol picked up his accordion and started to let out a wheeze, and Jayrod Congo started tapping out a rhythm on one of his junk-metal drums. Weird was a defector from the Neuroleptic Caligulas who’d been accepted into the Yolo’s but was forced to keep his Neuroleptic name on condition of them taking him in. All the crews had dealt with their fair share of spies and double-agents coming over from other crews, trying to make things schiz by fomenting strife from inside, often with a purpose of stealing hot crew tech, or kidnapping a babymaker, whether seed spitter or gourd grower. The Caligulas were the most kyōki of the crews in the area and were not invited to Helloween. Every once in awhile a Caligulan member broke free of their yoke. Often, they were so far gone from trauma and the strange experiments carried out in their nest of decrepitude they never fully integrated into their new crew. Even the ones who did were marked as potential basket cases.

A fast tempo oompah-skronk started to be unleashed by the players around the fire, the melody line moved around in a circle from one band to another, and all kept the rhythm in a complex common time. The best dancers from each crew reveled around the fire in long multicolored dresses with flashing colors of blue, gold, and purple for one crew and red, green and silver for another, each stylized to create hallucinatory patterns as the colored cloths flickered and flashed. This effect was enhanced on those who had smoked and imbibed from the variety of perceptuals.

The party proceeded until the night grew late and the moon started to set and the prowling coyotes let out a cacophony of howls that wove into the fabric of the dwindling drone in the early hours of morning. Jack took Peppa back to his tipi and they spread out on the large pelts and enjoyed each-others company again, a bit more fumbled and frenzied now from all the drink and smoke.

In the late morning they stumbled back groggy and fuzz-headed to the fire ring where the elders had cooked big messes of scrambled eggs, heated up leftover stew, and percolated coffee traded up the coast from Guatemala on the still glowing coals. These grizzled ones had experienced many fetes and often felt a touch of pity for the hungover crewmates who crept with aching head and sour stomach out of the tipis, and the few buildings deemed inhabitable around the Despoblado.

Peppa Spray knew it was going to be a hard day. A day of parting. The partying was over after all, and everyone knew the parting came next. She’d have to go back with her brother and the other Mazatzi’s to their range of hills and mountains until the next intercrew meetup at the winter solstice.

The runny eggs on top of the pozole, minus Cirona’s wicked peppers, soothed her rotted stomach back to a semblance of normalcy. Jack Chrysler rolled a smoke from his pouch as he sat on a tree stump across from her, as his near perfect white teeth emerged from behind fat red lips and the sharp lines of his copper skin that tinted towards the red.

He lit the smoke and Peppa moved over to sit on the log close to him, and he put his arm around her shoulders, and held the cigarette up to her mouth so she could take a puff as he held it for her through his fingers. Her brother Hana walked over, with a big grin on his face.

“Look at you two. It’s like you’re meant to be together. If I was a painter, I’d set up my easel right here and extract all the colors I see blooming in the two of you and put them into a picture.”

Peppa blushed, and Jack nodded. “You want some of this smoke, brother?”

“Not yet,” and his smile brightened again as he stood and pulled his long hair back and tied it into a ponytail with a little strip of leather. “I’m still holding on to some sweet memories from last night, and I want to ride them out into the day.”

“I saw you and Cirona dancing last night,” Jack chided. Now it was time for Hana’s light gold cheeks to shift shades, turning into a pink summer rose.

Peppa squinted and smiled at the thought of her suggestion sinking into Cirona’s deep mind after she had said it, in that special way of hers, the way that made the dance of probabilities seem to skip out in her favor. “I know you may be happy, but wait until Cirona gets up, and see if she is too.”

She could see her frenemy and brothers coupling as being a one-off event, not that she was bothered by that. There were plenty of those on Helloween night when people embraced sex in the face of lady death, hoping to be vessels for the reincarnation of lost loved ones.

“After last night, I’m sure she’s happy,” Hana bragged.

More of the transaged begin to slip out of the tipis and tents, and the large boarding house and make their way to the central fire pit. Some checked the jugs for what drips of last night’s ecstasy were left to ease the mornings pain, others smoked like Jack, and many availed themselves of the kindness of the elders, and got coffee and vittles inside.

Cirona walked over and leaned her full head of curly brown hair against Hana’s lean chest. “How come you didn’t wake me?” she said to him.

“I had to go to the latrine, and on my way back I saw these two lovers.”

Maybe she was wrong about her brother and Cirona after all, Peppa Spray thought with an internal harumph.
Laughter and talk started to spread as the morning fire was built back up, now that the cooking had been done over the coals. Cirona whispered her thanks to Peppa and then talk started to turn to making preparations to leave. Neither the Yolo’s or the Mazatzi’s had a permanent presence at Despoblado Carnevale. The few intact buildings acted as their hunting lodges, and they kept them up on their periodic visits, but the place was mostly a base camp and fort for their cava trips and salvage expeditions.

As the two crews began to get started packing up their horses and the few biodiesel motorbikes and four wheelers they kept running, the four of them remained bolted in place around the fire. Hana turned to his sister, and turned to Cirona, who nodded at him.

“I’m not ready to go back with our Mazatzi’s,” he said.

Peppa’s large brown eyes started to brim with wild emotions.

“I mean, our parents have already drifted into the sunset, right sister?”

“They have,” she said, remembering the day when they’d strung her madre and padre up on top of the trees on the peak above the Mazatzi main camp for their sky burial. In time, they would all pay their respects to the vultures.

“So, I think we should go with the Yolo’s, if they’re willing to take us, and if we talk to Uncle Naiche, I know we have some work we’ll be leaving to our cousins, but I can talk to them too. And then if things go well, then Cirona and me were thinking that her and Jack could come with us after the next meet here at the solstice. What do y’all think?”

Jack squeezed Peppa. “That’s legit, totally legit.”

II.

The arrangements were made and everyone was in agreement. Cross crew circulation was not at all uncommon, for many had aunts, uncles and cousins between the crews, or in one of the other crews on the fringe, and long visits were often had at various times of the year between these family members. It linked them all together. They saw the young ones going off to live with another crew as a way of furthering their lifeways, the knowledge that would get them through to the next fete.

They packed up their kit, gave their kisses, and said their farewells until a few months hence when they’d meet again on top of the mountain at Despoblado Carnevale to light the fire for the return of the sun.

They drifted down into the canyons and followed the winding paths as their horses kicked up a white dust that colored everything opaque. They camped the first night next to the Tliish Bi Tu’e, Snakes Water, the spring where in the summer months serpents often gathered to sun themselves and feed off the grasshoppers. The night was subdued compared to the goblin mode everyone had shared in the night before. Hiroko Venusario regaled the crew with verses from the Rap of the Falling Ways, rhyming her verses of the scorched earth policies that had left Caliphonia in flames and the areas on either side of the mountains to crumble into sand as the people fled from the cities into all manner of hidey-hole.

Peppa and Chrysler made love slow again that night, steady, serious, a far cry from the fevered gropings of the day before, the passion a strong fire, but with a long fuse that kept it from erupting in a quick violent explosion. Cirona and Hana, slept in the same tipi now, their side separated by a cloth screen hung up on a line, and, as of all things, stayed up to talk late into the night.

After a time, they all went to sleep, but were soon rocked by tremulous shaking of another kind. The whole ground quaked, and they knew that Namazu the Earthshaker, the catfish god who lived beneath the ground, had awakened and was now flopping and flailing around in his anger. If they had only gone fishing in one of the Arroyo’s they might have been able to see how the catfish behaved and know the quake was on its way. But the rain season had not started, and was sparse anyway, and they had been better off filling up on game. Namazu had escaped from his cage of stone, the god of the Underworld lax in guarding him, and now he would wreak whatever havoc he could until he could be netted.

The river of earth moved without ceasing, forming cracks on the ground and uprooting the thirsty cassia trees, as the vertebrae of Namazu thrashed spitting up dry clods of dirt, making waves of grit spray against the tipi in a rain of brown dust. They huddled on the ground together, heads in between their knees, hands over their heads and waited for the shaking to stop.

After two minutes, it was over, but they waited longer before venturing out to see what damage had been done. All of them had lived through many thrashings of Namazu before. It was part of life in Caliphonia.
Most of the camp was intact. Some trees had fallen, but they had been spared any falling on them. It was agreed they would all go back to sleep, if they could, and see what awaited them in the morning. Peppa Spray tossed and turned after laying back down, even as Jack tried to hold her still, and outside the coyotes howled.
The next day better time was made, until at noonday, Strawberry Sakurai and the other scouts who had ridden ahead came back with a report that the road they normally used to return home had been destroyed in a landslide and was now all but impassable. They would have to detour. They would either go almost all the way back to the Despoblado to take a north-easterly path around the destruction, or cut across the hills now to the south-west. The only problem with going south-west was it took them closer to the outer burbs of Angeles Caidos, the fallen city, where the Neuroleptic Caligulas had made a permanent camp inside an abandoned hospital complex.

The two choices caused an immediate argument to break out in the crew. Some of the elders thought it was worth the risk of skirting the Caligulates in order to get back home sooner. There were other dangers associated with being away from their camp besides just a run in with a hostile crew, and the sooner they could get back, the better. Several of the younger members thought it was wiser to back track, even as they were hot headed enough to want to get into a fight with the Caligulates. A few argued they could take a third way, and stay mostly off any roads, but this too was dangerous, because it might lead them into the secret nest of an unknown crew. It might save them from banditos on the roads, but it might lead them into a bandito hidey hole.

The arguments were getting nowhere. It was now time for Hiroko to step in and arbitrate, for Hiroko to step in and divine. Hiroko reached into a pouch and brought out three coins. These she would toss to generate the lines from the Book of Changes to see which option would be best for their crew.

There were three paths. Which would be the best for the crew to take? She would cast one hexagram for each possible path. She tossed the coins six times and marked the lines in the dirt, while concentrating on communicating with the oracle. She got Jian, or An Impasse. This made sense considering that path was now covered in the rubble from the landslide. She concentrated on what might happen if they decided to backtrack. Here she got the lines designating Kun, Blockade. There passage that way would likewise be obstructed. With a heavy sigh she cast the oracle again and came up with Gu, Decay. Not a favorable sign. She wasn’t surprised it was decay. Going through the wasted suburbs on the outskirts of the dead city was always a risk. It was a place of pestilence. The amount of mold that blossomed in the ruins of the wrecked homes was a danger in itself.

Now they would have to decide, looking at these grim options, what to do.

The young men were almost all in favor of pushing through. Peppa Spray would have liked to backtrack, yet she didn’t want to show her feelings in front of Jack Chrysler who was eager to get on the move. It was decided they would move slowly, sending forth a band of scouts ahead of them, and everyone exercising silence and caution along the way. They readied themselves to deal with the decay they were likely to encounter and formed their caravan into as strong a defensive configuration as they were able to, and began treading their way through the weeds and rubble.

They picked their way back through the canyons and arroyos, silent, ears cocked, pulling the four wheelers in neutral from the horses, pushing the few moto-bikes, so their gnarly whir didn’t kick up dust, and at night laid down small smokeless fires, whose scent and sight was fainter, so as to draw no one to them. The next afternoon they saw evidence of a camp had been in the area as recent as a few days before, and from the way the place was trashed, it was easy to surmise it may have been the Caligulates for they had never been keen to leave no trace, and instead took pride in doing the opposite. On a trail closer to their own turf they would have camped where there had already been the markings of a previous camp, but there was something ill and off-putting about the aura of the place, a mar on the land. It wasn’t just all the filth and excrement they hadn’t bothered to cover with dirt when they were done, but something darker still, a spiritual sickness seemed to hang over the place.

Another day passed without incident and they were getting closer to where they could turn back to the northwest towards their own land, and not having had any encounters or seen anyone, they started to feel a tentative sense of confidence that the danger had passed, though Hiroko warned everyone not to let their guard down. Jack Chrysler and Hana had gone off to gather the right woods for the stealth fire, and Peppa Spray and Cirona had kicked back passing the blackberry wineskin between them and their pink lips were stained purple with the juice and their hearts had grown merry.

“Your brother, he surprises me,” Cirona said with a smile, as her jet black hair fell over her eye. “He is so thin, and spastic and heavy, I did not expect him to please me on the hearthrugs the way he has.”

“Don’t tell me too much about it, I don’t want to know,” Peppa Spray said, but she was happy her old frenemy was happy.

“I take it Chrysler is all he was rumored to be?” Cirona asked.

Before Peppa Spray could answer they heard the gunshots, then the bagpipes. Whatever playful sharing of boyfriend this and boyfriend that was about to occur was pierced by Caligulan war cries, followed by the retaliatory screams of the Yolo’s. The crack of return fire mixed with the thwwwt, thwwwt, thwwwt of arrows loosed.

The women grabbed their own weapons. Peppa Spray kept a water gun filled with ghost and scorpion peppers that had been tinctured in moonshine strapped to her belt. Cirona had a six shooter. This wasn’t the first time they’d been raided. They didn’t want it to be the last.

Their guards should have seen the enemy, but they were outfitted in deep desert camos, and the attack party had moved with stealth and silence as they tracked their prey, hardly daring to breathe, and living only on sips of water that they used to wash down the ancient medications, their holy sacraments flitted from the RX filling stations in the weary hospital the Caligula’s had turned into their home. They were psychokillers whose brains had long been touched by the black mold of dead cities, driving them to ever more tenable connections to basic sanity.

Peppa Spray and Cirona crept out of their tipi just as another round of bodies was hitting the ground. The terrible dirge was upon them, coming from a massive hoss with greasy dreadlocks, warpaint, and the chanter from the bagpipe stuck in her drooling maw. The noise was terrible and Peppa Spray unleashed a stream of her fire water into the face of the female warrior whose dissonant tones filled the air with dread and panic. It took a few seconds for the spray to hit her, but as she inhaled the fine mist, her eyes went blurry with the burn and she crumpled to the ground, the bagpipes crushed under her weight. Cirona finished the job by lodging a bullet into her head.

Peppa Spray didn’t see any of the Yolo guards in the melee that ensued. It was only later she learned that most of them had been assassinated by garrote wire and poison blow darts. Their projectile syringes laced with stashes of leftover fentanyl found in drums in the hospital basement seemed to do the trick.

It was easy then for the Caligulans to storm into the camp with machetes that would have glinted in the ragged edge of twilight if not for their rust. These they brought down to slash necks of the Yolo’s as quickly as they could after the first round of shots from their guns had been discharged.

One of their crazed warriors carried an old burlap rice bag full of rubble as his weapon, and he let out a roar of filthy ululations as he swirled the bag and slammed it into Hiroko’s head, braining her. She fell to the ground and the Caligulate warrior continued to thrash her body until it was beaten to a pulp.

Cirona shot the eye out of one and Peppa Spray blinded many others but it only seemed to double their rage. The ground seemed hungry for the blood of both crews and it drank up both without caring for who the blood belonged.

Peppa Spray swatted at her neck where she felt something sting, and then saw it wasn’t a bug, but a brittle syringe, and the field of her vision was overtaken as if someone had pulled a heavy cloak down over her head. The same happened to Cirona.

Off in the woods Jack Chrysler and Hana had been hit with the same injections, and in time the rest of the Yolo’s that hadn’t been killed were brought to the ground, bound and gagged, though some few had remained hidden and managed to escape.

III.

The Neuroleptics were gleeful as they undressed their prisoners so as to humiliate them as they woke groggily from the heavy-lidded effect of the drugs to see the Neuroleptics taking their horses, four wheelers and pilfer their belongings. Soon they were lined up to march as their captors drove their rides. A few Neuroleptic guards lit torches as the night wore on. These stank of rubber and plastic, and the deterioration of the forgotten chemicals they had soaked their burn rags in. When they tried to talk, they were smacked. When they cried, they were kicked. When Yolo’s tried to bite back, the Neuroleptic’s laughed.

As dawn unfurled its fulsome glow, they could see the outline of the dead cities and the remnants of pollution in the lingering haze that spilled out around their torpid towers of crumbling concrete and castrated rebar. The early sun transfigured the sky from the red of crucifixion to the burnt umber of the failed orange groves where the trees had died under pervasive treatments of pesticide, and shimmered into salmon and rusted purple. The remains of overground freeways shot out into the sky on their now crooked pillars of stone and ended like planks at the point of collapse. Many people had walked out and off those concrete pylons without even saying goodbye. The remains of skyscrapers pointed like angry middle fingers at the skygods whose poison rains were now to few and far between.

It was for these reasons, and the pervasive rumors of cannibalism, the endless choking trashfires, and the incohate ramblings of the degenerated crew who intermingled among themselves and rarely outmarried, except by force of slavery and raid, that the Yolo’s and Mazatzi’s tried as best they might to avoid the Neuroleptic Caligulas.

They could not understand how anyone could live in the dead city, let alone in one of the horror hospitals, where peoples inside had been carved out, sliced and diced in a form of healing; in a place where people had plastic grafted onto their face and lips injected with toxins so they could look beautiful. Sometimes Weird Haldol would tell sad stories of the goings on in the halls of the decrepit nest he had once called home. The hospital was a monsterpiece, a strostiy, as some called it, a gargantuan mess of industrial material. It was one of the last ejaculations on the landscape of the engineers and architects who had spread their concrete, steel and asphalt all across the land. This one was gaudy, a building like two maimed hands joined together, odd towers jutting out at alternating angles. The so called SOCAL MENTAL HEALTHPLEX. An asylum for the criminal unsane, bird brained, a place to hide the shattered, who could now look out as they pleased from the broken windows.

Its long shadows fell across their faces as the sun rose behind these derelict fingers who lacerated the sky with their jagged nails. Soon they were prodded into the base of one of those dirty fingers, prisoners taken from out of the open sky, into the moldering basement lair of SOCAL scum into a place where it was hard to imagine anyone was ever cured.

​Before they went inside, Peppa Spray thought she saw a coyote watching her, hiding in the brush where the parking lot used to be.

Going Silent as I head up to the holy mountain in retreat. It’s time to reflect on life and seek answers and inspiration from the divine. As I work on new material on the background I thought I would share my guide to Silent Records that came out on Igloo Magazine in the spring of 2025 for my readers here. Silent Records is the “ambient, drone, experimental, noise, glitch & beyond” label started by Kim Cascone in 1986. I’ve been a big fan of Cascone’s music for awhile, as well as the other artists he puts out on his label. I’ve also been a big fan of his writing. Cascone’s essay have appeared in lots of places, but I probably first read them in the book Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music edited by Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner. Just before the pandemic I started following Cascone’s Silent Records bandcamp site rather heavily. He used the community feature there to start a daily blog and has kept at it since at least 2019 if not before, picking up speed during the plague years. It’s been a major asset to my own thinking on culture and music, and I started digging around for his other essays. Now Silent Records has released their first book on Silent Editions and it is a collection of Cascone’s essays from 1999 to 2026. I have written a full review of Post-Digital Music for Igloo.

​As ever thanks for stopping by, and hopefully the music of Silent Records and the writings of Kim Cascone will do much to feed your creativity and imagination.

.:. .:. .:. 

Sometimes what comes in a flash unfolds over a long period of time. Such a flash came to Silent Records label founder Kim Cascone one winter night as a kid. “I remember sitting in a snowbank and looking up at the stars. I spotted the blue star in the Orion constellation and gazed at it for a long time. Suddenly I had a flash, like one of those speed-collages in a film where hundreds of events all race past in a split second. I call this ‘my download’ & have been unpacking its meaning ever since.”

One of the ways he seems to have been unpacking it is in his work as musician and composer across various genres of electronic music from the 1980s through the present. The medium of Silent Records also seems to be part of his process for decanting his download and disseminating the work of kindred artists, siphoning music out of the aether and releasing it into sleeves of sound, physical and digital.

Silent is now in its second incarnation. The first incarnation had a slow beginning with the 1985 release of the album Silence from PGR. The music could be classed as industrial, and the name came from the sign they affixed to the door of their practice space: Poison Gas Research. That part of Oakland was as rough as the music they made there, and they didn’t want to attract the attention of “dubious people.”

​The label didn’t have a name yet, but the following year saw him put out In the Shade of Fire by The Haters, the project of noise music legend GX Juppiter-Larsen, and the beginning of the use of the Silent Records name. These two early releases foreshadow the noisier end of things that Silent would start releasing again around 2017 through the present, yet noise and industrial were never the sole interests of Cascone. It wasn’t the only kind of material he wanted to make, or the only kind of material he wanted to put out into the culture.

All the same, there was a lot of energy in the world of DIY experimental music in the mid to late eighties and the issuing a split between Organum/Eddie Prevost followed in 1987. He was also active in the Colorado based Thessalonians and toured with them. The Architects Office LP was one result of this activity.
By that time Acid House was beginning to be a big thing. When the likes of Psychic TV got a hold of it, they cross fertilized that style of dance electronica with the lysergically-minded end of the industrial and experimental scenes.
​
Meanwhile in 1988, Cascone set Silent Records aside to do work in the film and television business, where he had the opportunity to work with David Lynch on Twin Peaks and Wild At Heart. Lynch’s own influence on industrial and alternative music culture can’t be underestimated, from the howling factories that formed the sound bed of Eraserhead, to his Industrial Symphony No. 1, and the electrical ambiences and sound of the wind in the trees, Lynch knew how to use sound and silence to create his distinctive vision of American surreality.

Cascone met sound editor Jay Boekelheide, most famous for his work on The Right Stuff. The way Boekelheide was able to build up heavenly sounds for the industry became an inspiration to Cascone, and a direction to move his label towards. Ambient infused musical explorations began to follow in 1990 as underground and popular culture shifted towards the energy of the rave.

Expanding the reach of electronic music ::

That’s really when Cascone started working on using Silent Records as a vehicle for expanding the reach of electronic music, amplified by his creation of the Pulse Soniq company so he could get the releases into record stores and other places where the music could find the others. Based out of San Francisco, one of North Americas epicenters of electronic dance music, Cascone was in the right place at the right time to infuse his vision into the neon glowing membranes of the enhanced collective consciousness finding its way in the techno era. He refined the label by adding three imprints that bear witness to his alchemical interests: Flask, Furnace, and Sulphur.

Flask offered, “Flask is acid, electronica and ambient. This sub-label offers music that is closely related to the main label. Spacey, trippy and fantastic rave and chill-room style aesthetics.” Furnace provided “hard industrial” for those who craved the molten rivets of that style. Sulphur was an outlet for the experimental and improvisational works.
​
All of this combined to create the quintessence, a universal panacea in the form of sublime music, the gold of the philosophers. The albums from his Heavenly Music Corporation remain essential listening, as are titles from Deeper Than Space, the Spice Barons and other artists whose signal he boosted above the noise through the labels efforts. Not to mention the great compilations including the From Here to Tranquility series. His wife Kathleen, helped mold the feel of the albums as the chief designer giving them their classic look.

Yet as the 1990s wore on Cascone turned his attention to other efforts, including time spent working as a sound designer for the company Headspace owned by Thomas Dolby. He eventually sold the label, and then moved into the emergent world of digital glitch music as exemplified in the oughts, the golden era of laptop music. Another label, Anechoic, was started at this point, named after the final Heavenly Music Corporation album, and hinting at the famous silent chamber at Bell Labs where John Cage was able to listen to the sound of his nervous system.

So that was the first version of Silent, but there was still more to unfold, to unpack from the stellar download.

Silent 2.0 ::

When the label rebooted in 2016, it underwent a miraculous transformation. Silent had gone from being the North American ambassadors of chill out and had instead turned into a purveyor of instrumental guitar music. Of the ambient variety anyway. And of the experimental, drone, dirgey, noisy end of guitar freakdom. They also went back to their original roots and started putting out music that could be considered industrial and experimental, though Cascone had never really abandoned this still anyway. And they did continue to release eclectic electronic delights that touched on the flavors produced in the nineties.
​
So, no, it wasn’t just guitar music, but Cascone had picked up his guitar again and was starting to use that in a new series of compositions to be released under his moniker as Khem One. In addition, the label has put out three compilations in the Dark Indicator series of intense, noisy, drifting, granular, spacey and distorted “collection of guitar & string drones.”

Perhaps this interest in the tension of stretched strings should not come as a surprise. One of the albums that caught my eye when I first started exploring the reboot was The Celestial Monochord, a collaboration of Cascone with Tony Conrad. The thirty-six minute piece is a recording of a live performance from back in 2002 where Cascone used Max/MSP to process the sounds Conrad was making on his homemade monochord. The title recalls Robert Fludd’s famous picture that graces the cover of the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music.

Fire, moon and star ::

As Silent continued put out new albums, they also shifted from their old logo of an alien with headphones, to a new one that relates to the “download” experience from Cascone’s childhood. It’s of a triangle with a blue star and a moon. “The upward pointing triangle is the symbol for FIRE (not physical but metaphysical fire) as used in ye olde tymes, the moon represents lunar energies (female in nature), & has always held a special place in my work (Lunar Phase, Lunadronus, etc).” The blue star referred to the one in the Orion constellation that he stared at as a kid. “So the combination of symbols for fire, moon and star seemed like it would make a good logo that Silent 2.0 should have for its new incarnation.”

The Blue Star Transmissions was another compilation released in reference to all this. On his Bandcamp Silent blog about this release Cascone wrote that, “A couple of years ago, during a period of intense ‘hypnagogic meditation,’ I had seen some of the childhood download I referred to… I have experienced brief intuitive flashes that unpacked some of the information in my download but these ‘hypnagogic flashes’ were more clear & defined. This period of meditation unpacked personal insights, it felt like a minor breakthrough, like I had climbed a ladder & found the next rung in the dark. … The Blue Star Transmissions comp on Silent came about during one intense meditation. I asked artists who I felt were kindred to contribute sound work received in a similar manner and this release is the result.”

This album features Khem One’s “Modal Gauze No. 1 – Guitar Study” that I immediately fell in love with. The plucked strings shimmer with an otherworldly frequency and create a field of calm that carries with it a pregnant intelligence. Mike Rooke’s “Mesosphere Transition” also features transcendent guitar frequencies. The other contributions are equally ethereal with Rag Dun’s “City of the Wind Kings” notable for its conjuration of abstract elemental vistas.

Later the “Modal Gauze No. 1 – guitar study” was released as a thirty-minute piece. This version is great for meditation, and something the listener can really get lost inside. It is also really good for decorating living space, ambient furniture made up of forwards and backwards playing, and mesmeric drifts that can tune a room and turn into a vehicle for extradimensional travel.
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Another Khem One release, Pollen & Fragments clocks in at 21 minutes. This sees Cascone engaging in a drone ensemble, and he is joined by other guitarists, tampura and euphonium players and other instrumentalists. The name for this work comes from a collection of writings in the tradition of philosophical romanticism by the German poet Novalis, originally published in 1798. The aphoristic texts drift across a range of subjects, showing how the Romantics, as much as they embraced the metaphysical and mystical, were still dedicated explorers of the new worlds opened up by advances in science. The dabs of pollen Khem One release into the air on this recording swirl with as much dreamlike fertility and inspiration.

​A number of other releases followed from a pool of artists dedicated to strange corners of sonic exploration. Simon Šerc’s CMBR uses data sonification to unpack the cosmic microwave background radiation, and information about it, provided by the Planck space telescope of the European Space Agency.

Vornths by Jared Sagar, sees the artist going back to electronic music basics by employing a razor blade and reel-to-reel tape machines to create a sonorous landscape of juxtaposed klangs. His Signatures and Fragments are equally abstract evocations in shorter snippets of aural abnormality.

​The duo of Dreamcloud and Pacific2131 give a dense cybernetic vision of future city noise in the long-form Clog Time.

​Nico Guerro’s Streams of Oblivion returns us to the theme of guitar music and features, “Les Paul Studio guitar, others electric prepared guitars” as part of the sound material to create a dark, magisterial and melancholic album.

​“If you like your drone guitars tuned low, played slow and on the edge of tube-death then you are in the right place,” is how the label put it for the first Dark Indicator compilation. A lot of the artists were new to me. “De-orbiting Mir” by Tovarish and “Suns Corona Hull” by Lush Worker eviscerate amplifiers even as the mine outer space for inspiration. The second iteration featured some names I was familiar with like Rhys Chatham and Kawabata Makoto, the latter of Acid Mothers Temple fame.

Khem One appears with the track “Heliodronus” calling down the sun. These albums sound good on headphones, like all of the Silent catalog, but these are great with the stereo system cranked up to make the earth shake, in place of the Marshall stacks that might otherwise do the same. The third volume features Khem One’s “Lunadronus” and contributors from “Pere Ubu, Bongripper, Kowa Axis, Wizards Warlocks Angel Dust, Pelt & more contribute some dark, sputtering distorted drones.” If you want doom, listening to these is a better use of time than doom scrolling.
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The Khem One album Threshold of Eastern Octaves came out in 2022, and this is a more subtle affair than the heavy funereal riffs splattered across the Dark Indicator series.It’s suitable for meditation and inner voyaging in a calmer way. The other records are transportive by means of a loud blast, the explosion that knocks consciousness off-center and leaves the listener reeling as they try to hold on when heading into orbit. This one shows you the way to a hatch and allows you to gently open the door and ascend to a higher octave. The touchstone of pollen is referenced again in a few of the song titles.

On his latest album as Khem One, Subtle Immobilities, Kim Cascone continues to apply Captain Beefheart’s magic formula to bring out these compositions from the other side of the portal. For those who don’t know it, Beefheart famously gave his Ten Rules for Playing Guitar that are just a touch spicier and weirder than anything you’d find in Guitar Player magazine. Beefheart gives us the knowledge that “Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you’re good, you’ll land a big one.”

Subtle Immobilities is just more evidence that Khem One has become an adept at catching the big fish. Dedicated to the late Marian Zazeela, these pieces create a dreamhouse and ornamental lightyear tracery all their own, and prove that a guitar can be much more than just a guitar.
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Happy fishing.

American Psychogeography X: KPFT vs KKK, NASA and the Candy Man Killer

Only one radio station transmitter has ever been bombed in the United States. That station was in Houston, and that station was KPFT, bombed just two months after going on the air by the Ku Klux Klan. KPFT was the fourth station in the Pacifica network, a group of listener supported community radio stations run as a grassroots non-profit organization. The network had become an essential mouthpiece for the political left in the United States starting with the original flagship station KPFA in Berkeley, California and later expanding to include stations like WBAI in New York. Along with presenting news and views from the center left to the far left, and material well outside the mainstream, radio shows on the Pacifica network had long championed experimental music and alternative culture in the arts through their programming. The fact that the network had been founded by pacifists and conscientious objectors E. John Lewis and Lewis Hill probably didn’t win the new Houston affiliate any friends with members of the KKK.

The fact that Larry Lee of the Associated Press and his fellow journalist Don Gardner from the Houston Post had grown tired and became disenchanted with the way the media in the city routinely ignored the cities simmering racial issues meant they had a built-in enemy with the KKK.

The fact was that KPFT wanted to get real, get down to earth, and talk about real things that were happening to real people. In 1970 the media was obsessed with the upcoming Apollo 13 mission. The local media in Houston was particularly focused on what was going on with NASA, the aerospace industry, and the brave astronauts who would be making another attempt at landing on the moon.

The astronauts were real of course, but they weren’t down to earth. The space program was leaving its mark on the world and American psyche with its mythos of courageous exploration. It was also leaving its physical mark on the planet in terms of the amounts of resources consumed, and changes to the landscape where they parked their infrastructure.
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In 1961 NASA had opened the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. It was an event that ushered in another wave of wealth, professionals, managers and bosses into the city. This time, instead of oil executives, it was electrical engineers, rocket scientists, and astronauts who ruled the roost. The first moon landing had been a massive success. That one small step had stoked the fires of belief in technology and progress. True believers became hyper focused on continuing these missions that were going to allow humanity to seek out bold new worlds and turn America into a space faring civilization. Plenty of poor working people, minorities and average citizens felt differently. The federal government was spending huge amounts of money to send people into outer space, while others were suffering, hungry, looking for work, trying to make ends meet in blighted neighborhoods where the scent of urban decay had already permeated the air.

​That was partly why KPFT had wanted to focus on what was happening down on earth, on the planet. They took to the airwaves on March 1st, 1970 with the Beatles anthem of positivity, “Here Comes the Sun.” No sun, no life on earth. One of their shows was a 90-minute evening news show called Life On Earth. Whatever was going on with Apollo 13 wasn’t as pressing as what was going on with the drafted soldiers sent straight from high school to the killing fields in Vietnam. It wasn’t as important as the intense segregation at work in city neighborhoods and the efforts to desegregate school. Plenty of other issues were affecting everyday people. Sending more people back to the moon seemed frivolous when so many challenges, predicaments and problems were reaching boiling points on earth.

After the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, Gil Scott Heron was wondering what the point of it all was. He was a poet, jazz musician, and writer. Expressing his experience as an African American, there didn’t seem much point. He wrote a poem in response to the landing called “Whitey on the Moon” and it also came out as recording where his recitation was accompanied by conga drums in 1970 on his debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. He laid down his lament with the following words:
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“The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey’s on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey’s on the moon
I wonder why he’s upping me?
Cause whitey’s on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week
With whitey on the moon
Taxes taking my whole damn check
Junkies making me a nervous wreck
The price of food is going up|
And as if all that shit wasn’t enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arm began to swell
And whitey’s on the moon
Was all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon?
How come I ain’t got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon
Y’know I just ‘bout had my fill
Of whitey on the moon
I think I’ll send these doctor bills
Airmail special
To whitey on the moon”

​As the price of living has gone up all across the board, poor and lower middle-class whites were wonder why so much effort was being expended to put whitey back on the moon. In the year of this writing, many were singing Heron’s song again after the recent Artemis mission. In the 1970s people were tired of getting moondoggled.

While some people were having the experience of getting bit by rats without recourse to being able to pay for a doctor, the Clear Lake was being transformed into yet another suburb in the Greater Houston conurbation. This was the home of the Space Center. With NASA in the loop other aerospace agencies, public and private, started flocking to the area, helping to diversify the economy, helping to create not just a massive highway system, but setting sight for the stars in the bid to eventually suburbs full of happy, well-adjusted nuclear families on the moon.

It wasn’t enough to have suburbs spread far and wide around the city, destroying critical wetlands, bulldozing essential forest, marring the stark beauty of the deserts with prefabricated visions of prefabricated happiness. Now America had to colonize space and put up orbital suburbs, suburbs on the moon, suburbs on mars, create new destinations for middle class vacations.

Just as the engines of war have often been the engines pushing for technological innovation, so too are the phallically focused rocket boys. In their desire for deep penetration of the womb of space, the enablers of the astronaut cowboy had to create all kinds of advanced prophylactics to protect them from the dangers of leaving earth. Along the way, some of that innovation did trickle down into the lives of the people in the form of memory foam and infrared thermometers.

KPFT was a critical voice in the earth centered conversation. What was happening to those left behind in the march towards progress was important to the people operating the station. Almost two and a half months after they went on the air on May 12, 1970, the stations transmitter was bombed by the KKK. They went off the air for three weeks before it got repaired and they could resume broadcasting. About five months later on October 6th, the stations transmitter was bombed again in the middle of airing Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” the singers satirical protest against the Vietnam War draft. This time around the damage to the station was much more extensive and KPFT was off the air for three months. When the station started broadcasting again on January 21st, 1971, Arlo Guthrie was in the studio and played his song live to commence transmissions.

The FBI didn’t do much of anything to investigate the bombing. Ditto the local police. In lieu of criminal investigators investigating crimes, Pacifica launched a media campaign to draw attention to the unsolved case. This led to the arrest of Ku Klux Klan member Jimmy Dale Hutton who was also plotting to blow up KPFA and KPFK. He was convicted in 1971, but his wasn’t the only madness swirling through the streets of Houston. Teenage boys and young men had started to go missing, but there was no coordinated investigation as to where they had gone. According to the police, they were probably just runaways, and in Texas, there was no law against running away. Only when the bodies were dug up did they have to admit a killer had been on the loose, and his prey had been young males primarily from the Houston Heights suburb which had fallen into squalor and blight.
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Houston had a serial killer problem and he went by the name Dean Corll. After his killings came to light, he was sometimes called the Candy Man. Corll worked in the family business, the Corll Candy Company started by his mom, and his talent for grooming young boys as a sexual predator started with his habit of standing outside his families candy factory, which happened to be right across the street from Helms Elementary School in Houston Heights, and give the sugary sweets away to kids. He was fond of offering kids candy, especially the boys. Corll had fitted out a room in the back of the factory with a pool table and he invited over teenage boys to play and listen to music. Corll liked cars and he had a Ford Econoline Van and Plymouth GTX muscle car. He would offer to take kids for rides in his vehicles, sometimes offering to take them to one of the beaches in the area.

​One of the kids Corll befriended was a bespectacled outsider named David Owen Brooks. He wore his hair long and wasn’t given much time of day by either of his divorced parents. His mother sent him to live with his father in the Houston Heights neighborhood. At the time Brooks was a twelve year old in the sixth grade at Helms and he was one of the people Corll gave the special praline candy. Brooks was lonely and liked the attention Corll had given him, playing pool and listening to music with him and other kids in the back room, and going on trips to the beach. Corll further groomed Brooks by giving him pocket money.

​Corll would have been around 28 when all this was happening, and two years later, when he was turning thirty, and Brooks, 14, he initiated a sexual relationship. Corll offered Brooks gifts and money in return for allowing him to give fellatio to the teenager. He soon became aware that he was just one of many teenagers who Corll paid to do oral sex.

Sometime in November of 1970, Brooks came unannounced to one of Corll’s apartments at 3300 Yorktown, just a five minute drive from the Galleria mall in normal traffic. Brooks probably wasn’t surprised to find him with naked teenagers, but he was surprised to find them strapped down to a board. Corll urged him to keep quiet. If he kept quiet, Corll would give him a big present for his sixteenth birthday coming up in February of 1971. He promised to give him a 1969 Chevrolet Corvette V8 muscle car, a promise he followed through on, and Brooks kept quiet about the assault he had seen. After the boys disappeared Corll concocted a story that he’d been paid to send the two boys to California to be photographed for a porno rag.

Later Corll admitted to Brooks that he hadn’t sold them off to child pornographers, but had actually murdered them after he was done with the rape and the torture. Knowing that Brooks was left to his own devices for the most part by his father, that he frequently had little money, he decided to offer Brooks $200 for any boy he could lure to his apartment, with the caveat that they should be kids whose families wouldn’t miss them. The down and out in Houston Heights were thus targeted, and Brooks became the older man’s accomplice in a murder spree that lasted until 1973.

The Heights had gone downhill following World War II. The writer James Conway described the area as being in 1976 a “seedy, lower-middle-class enclave with horizons limited to once-fashionable homes divided into low-rent apartments, and guarded by pickups on concrete blocks.”

It wasn’t all bad, as many of the inhabitants were just working and lower middle-class. They went to church, they tried to do right, and in the norm of the time, kids were often on their own out playing in the neighborhood, riding their bikes, running around being kids.

Those kids started going missing. In the early seventies Corll had an advantage over the teenagers and young men he brutalized. Runaways weren’t treated as missing people in Texas. Parents looking for children had no recourse, except to private investigators and their own searches. Ruanaways existed in a kind of legal gray zone and limbo. It wasn’t a crime to be a runaway in the state, and so police had little incentive to look for children. When parents reported their kids missing, instead of thinking they actually were missing, most of the time the police wrote them off as runaways. There were approximately 5,000 to 6,000 runaways a year during the time of Corll’s murders in Texas. Distraught parents felt abandoned by the police, by the federal government, and others who were supposed to have the interests of children at heart. In turn, police and government often felt that it was a family problem. And while Corll had certainly murdered some hitchhikers and runaways, many of the kids he plucked off the street were normal teens doing normal teenage things, going to the pool, hanging out, trying to sneak a beer or a joint, and got lured in with the promises of getting stoned, free booze and a place to party.

It’s hard not to wonder if the police might have looked harder if the alert to a pattern of missing kids and runaways had come from a more affluent place, such as the suburb of Clear Lake where many parents had jobs related to the space program.
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Brooks, for his part, didn’t participate in the torture and rape of the victims, or their killing. He had money, and above him a psychopath who had been subtly swaying him since their first encounter. He had been prey himself to this man, and through that manipulation had transformed into his willing accomplice. He wasn’t pulling the trigger or doing the stabbing, but he was actively luring people around his own age to their deaths.
Corll and Brooks soon picked up a third player in these sadistic activities starting in October, 1971. His name was Elmer Wayne Henley, a child of an alcoholic mother who couldn’t make ends meet. He skipped school with Brooks one day and wondered how Brooks had so much cash to run around with, when he didn’t even seem to work. Hunley worked at a gas station, and did other odd jobs. He tried to do what he could for his household because his mom couldn’t. He didn’t have running money, especially not after he gave what he had to his mom so they could eat, make rent, and her probably keeping some aside for her next bottle. Brooks introduced Henley to Corll and they all started partying together, though Henley wasn’t keen on Corll being gay, which was obvious to him. Hunley started to suspect that Brooks was getting his money from being a hustler.

​Yet Henley wanted to make more money, and he didn’t want to peddle his ass. Brooks had told him the lie that he and Corll were involved in robberies and organized theft, with initial plans to make Henley a victim. Yet the situation started to unravel, and they realized they somehow had to get him to think he was helping out on a crime job, only to kill him. Henley started hanging around in the hope of a pay off from participating in a robbery.

One day Corll and Henley were sitting in a car together at the corner of Eleventh and Heights Boulevard when the killer made a chilling remark. “You know, it’s too bad there’s not a market in people, they’re everywhere.”
He later modified his story that he Brooks were robbers, and told Henley that he was actually involved in a white slavery ring operating out of Dallas. Just like Brook’s he offered Henley $200 dollars a pop per young male. The possibility that Corll actually was involved in human trafficking outside of being a serial killer was breached by researcher Jacqueline Bynon in her two-part podcast The Candyman and the Clown.

Henley started luring young boys and teenagers into Corll’s Econoline Van or his Plymouth GTX. Where Brooks would often leave the room when the murders took place, Henley gradually started participating in the torture of the victims. Yet it all spiraled out of control, and after one last party, when Henley made the mistake of bringing a girl with him, his friend Rhonda Louise Williams, the killer threatened to kill his accomplice for having “ruined everything” by bringing a female.

To try and get out of this situation, as he and Williams begged for their lives, Henley said he would help him kill his friend. She begged him not to, and in a moment of mercy and conscience, he was able to grab Corll’s gun and shoot him.

Henley yelled “You’ve gone far enough, Dean! I can’t go on any longer ... I can’t have you kill all my friends!” The first shot hit Corll in the head, the next two in the shoulder, and the final three in his lower back and shoulder as Corll attempted to flee while he coughed up blood, tripping on the wire from a rotary telephone.

The Candy Man was dead. It was August 8th, 1973, four years to the date after the Tate and LaBianca murders had been committed by members of the Manson family.

Henley called the police, and the process of confession began. Brooks was brought in, and the pair started telling the authorities where all the bodies of the missing kids were buried. At least 28 had been murdered, and many of them had were in the ground and covered in lime at a rented boat shed in Southwest Houston. Others were at a beach on the Bolivar peninsula, at a beach in Jefferson County, and in the woodlands near a lake where the killer’s family owned a cabin.

In the aftermath of the murders suspicion fell on a possible connection between a man named John David Norman and the Candy Man. Norman would go on to accrue multiple convictions for pedophilia, child pornography and sex trafficking between 1960 and 1998. It is as sickening to think of how often he was able to get out of jail or trouble and have the chance to re-offend again across the course of his long sick life. The FBI had been tipped off about Norman a few days after Corll and had been killed and the news that a serial killer had full reign in a Houston neighborhood was hitting the media and a disgusted and sorrowful public. The tip had come in from 21-year-old Charles Brisendine, who was urged to do so by journalist Rob Shivers who worked as the Dallas correspondent for pioneering gay magazine The Advocate.

Brisendine had initially come to Dallas at the invitation of Norman’s group The Odyssey Foundation. They were operating under the cover story of being a support group for gay men. Membership in the group involved “fellows” and “sponsors.” Members would be solicited through gay magazines, small publications Norman put together himsefl, and other more direct means. The “fellows” were young men whose picture would be taken to put into pamphlets for the perusal of the “sponsors” who could then request one of the “fellows” to take home or to a hotel for a period of time before going transferred on to the next sponsor. These sponsors were willing to pay large sums of money for the service of the fellows. They were often wealthy enough to fly minors out of one state and into another.

The Odyssey Foundation made a practice of targeting male youths at Greyhound Stations. The Trailway station bus stop in Dallas was known as a hangout for runaway teens. Since there were so many runaways in the state, and since they weren’t considered missing from their families by police, it meant there was a steady supply of kids to groom. Many were already down on their luck, leaving homes where physical, sexual and verbal abuse was the norm.

When Brisendine came into Dallas, he was picked up by a sponsor who just happened to be the man who was organizing it all in the first place, John David Norman going under the unlikely alias of Alan Hitchcock. He went home with Norman and they had a one-night fling. Brisendine got creepy feelings from his sponsor pretty quick and started thinking that Norman was preying on the vulnerable to push them into prostitution. Somehow he managed to find and look through Norman’s files of the people he was pushing through the Odyssey Foundation. Several had been marked by Norman as missing persons. It chilled him when he saw the word “kill” stamped on the files of other young men.

Brisendine started to wonder if Norman was connected to the what had just hit the news that week in Houston and around the country: the Candy Man killer. The FBI and Shivers were of the opinion that the “kill” stamp Brisendine had seen on the files meant the files themselves were to be thrown in the trash, not that the fellow was someone they were going to kill. That opinion didn’t stop Dallas police from raiding Norman’s apartment to see if there was an actual connection.

Dallas police proceeded to seize voluminous booklets that had photographs and contact info for teenagers and young men. Norman also had 30,000 index cards that listed between between 50,000 and 100,000 clients across the United States.

Lt. Harold Hancock of the Dallas PD, later told the Chicago Tribune in May 1977 that many federal employees and many public bigwigs were in Norman’s list. They sent the cards to the U.S. State Department. This was confirmed by State Department Counselor Matthew Nimetz. Nimetz who also said the State Department destroyed this massive contact list. They had been looking for proof about trafficking people across borders but didn’t find “any fraud involving a passport.” The federal government clearly didn’t like what was on those index cards. It makes a person wonder just how main oil executives and NASA employees and other titans of Texas industry might have been on them, along with the names of other government sickos and their lackeys.
Norman got off easy. He was charged with marijuana possession, conspiracy to commit sodomy, and contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. He was released on bail and told to stay in the state, but he skipped out and went to the Homewood, Illinois suburb of Chicago where he remained during the same time as the John Wayne Gacy murders were taking place.
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In the Candyman and the Clown, Bynon focuses on the connection of serial killer John Wayne Gayce to child pornographer Phillip Ronald Paske. Gayce had employed Paske briefly in his construction company. In the mid-1970s Paske was also the closest person on the inside to convicted sex trafficker John David Norman and his pedophilia operation. Dean Corll made numerous references to white slavery, a market for people, and selling kids to pornographers.

Two years after the end to killings and the confessions of Brooks and Hunley the Houston Police Department found a large stash of pornographic pictures and films. Some of the boys were as young as eight years old. It was confirmed that many of these victims were from the Houston Heights neighborhood. Eleven of those appeared to have been known and identified victims of the Candy Man.

This raised again the question of whether or not Corll actually had been involved in human trafficking. The material did lead to the arrest of five people in Santa Clara, California. Corll had told Brooks he was going to send the two teenagers he had initially discovered him with to California to be photographed. Another person who was uncovered by the discovery was Roy Ames. He owned the warehouse where the material had been found. The police had previously found the name Roy Ames on a card in Corll’s wallet. Yet nothing specific could be proved, and the police dropped pursuing a direct link to the murderers. They felt that the families of his victims had suffered enough, and this is certainly true. Yet truth is often inconvenient, and the fact that those links were not pursued in an official investigation is itself suspicious when the crimes themselves were so despicable and treacherous.
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Deep in the heart of Texas.

Oil, gasoline, cars, highways, suburbs. All of it came to Houston and the state of Texas at large in a multi-decade ejaculatory gush of expansion and industrial strength decadence that marked the first big oil boom in the state, a spill that lasted from 1901 on into the 1940s.

It started on January 10, 1901 when the Lucas No. 1 well at Spindletop, near Beaumont, discharged its load in a spasm of pent-up fury. Copious amounts of oil flew one hundred feet up into the air. Workers couldn’t even get the well capped and regulate the flow until nine days later. They’d hit the jackpot and the state was forever transformed, fertilized by the crude.

​Just seven years before, when people had been drilling for water, they had discovered oil by accident at the Corsicana field in 1894. It was the precursor to what was to come.

The railroads had already laid their tracks across Texas in the latter decades of the 19th century. Speculators came in on the iron horses and established themselves on the ancient land. The land around the bay of what is now Galveston had once been the home of the Akokisa people, now believed to be gone forever, and the Karankawa tribe who almost shared the same fate.

Some of the early towns in Texas never made it either. Some just hadn’t been lucky enough to have a railroad line built near them when they were getting started. In those days there was a tendency for people to up and move their home base closer to the new railway lifelines. Texas was so big, there was plenty of room. The train service became a major boon to the ranchers, cowboys and farmers who could now ship their goods back to markets outside the state.

The plentiful stores of petroleum hidden underneath the ground, once tapped, wrought a massive tableau of change across Texas, effecting its destiny and the destiny of the nation in turn. Those who made their livings as prosperous ranchers and farmers were taken down a notch in the social hierarchy, as the prospectors, wildcatters, and oil industry men came to do a proverbial keg stand at their derricks, guzzling down the profits. They were now making more money than the meat men.

Corporate development, corporate wealth, corporate politics all came into the area once those dollar signs started popping up in their minds. Money making schemes abounded, and those schemes became incorporated. With the influx of capital small towns grew into gargantuan cities, and companies that had started off as mom-and-pop shops turned into multinational conglomerates. Fortunes were made and evens those who weren’t directly on the payroll had reason to prosper. Ample liquor and prolific prostitution came on to the scene to service money men who were working hard to get gasoline to the service stations.

As the prospect of becoming a high roller flashed inside the dollar bill part of the brain among those who were already at work in the oil industry for other firms in other parts of the country. Those who seized the opportunity quit the jobs that had given them there bread and butter to form new outfits in competition with the people who’d formerly had them on the payroll. Joseph S. Cullinan had worked as a manager for Standard Oil and had built the first modern refinery on the western side of the Mississippi River. When Spindletop started to gush he had the foresight to partner with Arnold Schlaet, a businessman from New York who put up some of the initial money to grease the wheels of economic salvation. They got some more money from former Texas governor James S. Hogg, whose surname, among whatever other qualities he had, fit him for the job. A governor named Governor Hogg is the kind of governor people are liable to elect in the state of Texas. A new company was formed and they planted themselves in Beaumont. As the company grew, they went to Houston, some 90 miles west. The company did so well that others in the oil business started flocking to the area. Houston became the center of the industry in Texas, and in many ways, in all of America. The Texas Fuel Company started by Cullinan got bought out by the Texas Company, and later renamed themselves Texaco. Janis Joplin ended up being the daughter of a Texaco engineer, and grew up in nearby Port Arthur.

Several companies could work the Spindletop well at once. Another few companies tapping into the earths natural wealth joined forces and became the Gulf Oil Corporation. They were later bought out and became Chevron. Another outfit that became known as the Humble Oil Company later became Exxon, and are now not humble at all. Shell, and what became Marathon, all got in on securing their various pipelines of plunder in Texas.

During this same period Houston exploded in population. Sam Houston had founded the city in 1836, the same year as Chicago. Just like the windy city, it had become a major railroad hub. In 1860 there were close to 6,000 inhabitants. Over a thousand of those didn’t have rights as citizens, weren’t even thought of as humans, but enslaved. Houston would go on to become the fourth most populous city in America. Between its important geographic location on Galveston and Trinity Bay, and between the spewing gushers, the population started to double, triple, quadruple, and finally quintuple.

In a lecture on the history of the city preservationist Anna Mod noted how “the idea for the city was a great center of commerce at the confluence of two bayous. This is the larger Buffalo Bayou, and then the smaller White Oak. And it was chosen because this is where a shallow draft steamship could turn around, so goods could be offloaded.” These bayous being two slow moving rivers. Spoking out from the center of the city, at that place where the rivers met, Houston had initially been organized into a series of six wards that spoked and spiraled out from the city. When the freeways came along, and they came quickly, the original pattern was diced up into disconnected bits, isolating different parts of the city from one another.

The coastal plane is flat. Expansion is easy. Wealth made the area showcase for glitz. As the population of Houston had grown rapidly in the same years as the growth of the automobile industry, and as they produced the oil necessary for the cars, Houston became a major city of motoring. The streets and grids were tailored to the car, and highways came in to allow the quick travel of the businessmen between their offices and the new suburban homes.

Houston Heights was one of the earliest planned communities in Texas. It was already in progress as neighborhood in the decade before Spindletop blew its top. Houston Heights had an advantage over the people in the denser urban core, closer to the rivers, closer to the flooding. It sat 23 feet above the city proper in elevation. The waterways were a breeding ground for mosquitoes and yellow fever outbreaks ran rampant. Those who could afford to get away, wanted to get away, and one of the burbs they moved into was the Heights. It had started as a streetcar suburb, so workers could commute back and forth. They had all their own infrastructure, parks, streets, alleys, and utilities. It was a suburban dream.
​
A sprawling suburban dream. Even as early as the 1920s traffic snarls had become a major problem in Houston. The people getting rich off the oil were buying the cars and encouraging others to buy cars. The oil industry itself had become bedfellows with the mavericks of the automotive world, stroking each other underneath the sheets of commerce. Before cars, the main use for commercial oil had been in kerosene lamps. Gasoline was too explosive, too flammable, too volatile a byproduct, and had been discarded in the commercial process of making kerosene. With cars there was finally a use for gas, and the oil barons were quick to form symbiotic partnerships with the auto world, get in league with the asphalt makers paving the planet.

Bill Schadewald of the Houston Business Journal said that Mitchell’s goal was to “entice city slickers looking for far-flung suburban quality of life.” To achieve this aim, he created The Woodlands Corporation as an extension of Mitchell Energy & Development. Corporations and the suburban vision of America had achieved another unity.

Progress and the Interstate Highway System were viewed by most Americans as going hand in hand. Trucking overtook the railways as the means of shipping goods and the highway became the arteries of the nation’s economy. It also continued to represent mobility. It was the free way, but there was always a cost. The cost for those living in Houston was how dependent on cars just living in the city made them, whether they wanted to be or not.

Interstate-45 was one of the earliest interstate highways in the system, though it doesn’t go between any states. It’s a stretch of road connecting just above Houston and down into Galveston. It’s the shortest interstate in the United States at just under 285 miles and was the first freeway in the state. Later came the beltways.

Where Boston got Route-128 as the first beltway in the nation, Houston has at least what can be considered four beltway loops going around the city, each further out, each encompassing more and more suburbs and sidereal communities. These loops, Beltway 8 and the 610 Loop, made it easier for suburbanites to go to work so they could come back home and then get in there cars again to go to malls and shopping centers where they spent the money earned at work so they could fill up their homes with consumer goods. It was all fine and dandy if you had a car, but if you didn’t drive, you were out of luck. The developers didn’t take into account that anyone might not want to drive, and with more and more people coming into Houston for oil, for aerospace, and for the other businesses that serviced the needs of each, more people came from across the country in search of their slice of the pie. The lack of public transport reinforced dependency on cars, which was good for the oil industry, and what was good for the oil industry was good for the car industry. It was like a self reinforcing beltway loop cinched around the citizens, strangling them.

The Galleria, the third largest shopping mall in the United States, catered to this car crazy populace. Car culture, malls, suburbs all became synonymous with Houston’s identity. Too bad if you were a kid. Then you had to walk around the neighborhood, ride a bike, get a ride from parents or older siblings, or sometimes even hitchhike and get into a car with strangers. Some of those strangers didn’t have good intentions for a kid.

​Houston didn’t have any zoning laws, so sprawl was often unchecked. Expansion of roads or other infrastructure bifurcated low-income and minority community. Highways were also used as a means of segregation. Following World War II, the Second Ward had been a home to many Mexican-Americans. So-called urban renewal put a portion of I-69, the spur section down in Texas, right through it, clearing several blocks and forcing thousands of people out of their homes. The highway now blocked their ease of access to downtown.

The African-American’s who made up the majority of the Third Ward also felt the effects of similar displacements when freeways put their neighborhoods on the chopping block. Over 10,000 Black Americans were displaced in this area just for roadway construction. Many of those communities now exist within the various freeway loops, creating barriers to easy freedom of movement.

Freedmen’s Town, in the Fourth Ward, was a settlement for the first free black population in Houston. That town got split in the middle when I-45 was created. In the process close to a third of the buildings destroyed.
The Fifth Ward, also home to many African American and Mexican Americans was another community cleared in the name of progress, displacing its citizens, and cutting them off from downtown.

The downtown area itself suffered significant loss in the name of car culture. By the 1980s 35% of the area was used for parking lots.

If this sounds like a congested snarl, it is and it was. The suburbs enabled each area to be seemingly self-contained. Upper middle-class and affluent communities wouldn’t have to see or come in contact with the lower middle-class, the working class, and the working poor. Staying in the burbs allowed Texans to live the illusion of progress. The blight and slums were kept from spreading to the places where the good upstanding citizens lived. The downtrodden could be further ground down. This process was in its way, an essential, if unconscious, strategy towards keeping up the morale of the visionaries of technological progress who brought the space race to Texas in the 1960s.

While they were looking to the stars, a murderer spree went unnoticed in the dark underbelly of the oil barons blight.

.:. .:. .:.
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AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY... the story so far...
​
​Tail Pipe Fumes and the Limits to Oil: American Psychogeography Part VIII

Book End the Summer: American Hauntology Part VII (Modesto, California and American Graffiti)

O Superman, Where Art Thou? American Psychogeography part VI

THE SPRAWL (AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY IV)

ROADRUNNING THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL TEMPLATE (AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY III)

​THE NEW EXPLORATIONS OF A GEOTECHNICIAN

LOOKING BACKWARDS AT ROUTE 128: FROM SAINT BOTOLPH TO THE ROAD WARRIORS (AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY I)

American Psychogeography part 8: Dynamic Systems, The OPEC Embargo and Texas Oil

​One year before American Graffiti rolled into the drive-in movie theaters of the United States to celebrate cars and cruising, and to question the futures that awaited the assembled cast of characters, a major report was issued by a top world think tank that challenged the assumptions of the cult of progress.

The Limits to Growth was the brainchild of the Club of Rome, an informal group of intellectuals, business leaders, scientists and people from the political and economic spheres who banded together to help inform authorities and power holders around the world of the various dangers, problems, and predicaments facing humanity and the Earth.

It all started when an Italian industrialist named Aurelio Peccei gave a talk in 1965 about the rapid changes in science and technology happening around the globe. Alexander King was a British scientist who had worked as a government advisor. He wanted to meet up with Peccei and the two of them talked, later convening a group of individuals from various fields to discuss the possibility of creating “A tentative framework for initiating system wide planning of world scope.” After this meeting the Club of Rome was formed, named after the city where their first gathering had been held.

From the beginning the sciences of cybernetics and systems dynamics had a major influence on the work of the Club. Peccei knew that everything was connected. Poverty and ill-health often had correlations, as did urban blight with pollution and environmental degradation, which could be seen as connected to criminal behavior. Looking at these social problems as isolated from one another would not lead to lasting solutions. He noted that “It is this generalized meta-problem (or meta-system of problems) which we have called and shall continue to call the ‘problematic’ that inheres in our situation.”

In 1970 their first paper was issued, laying out a vision for the direction of their future work. This proposal was titled “The Predicament of Mankind: Quest for Structured Responses to Growing Worldwide Complexities and Uncertainties.”

The world had become more complex, and by that very complexity, much more fragile. One way to attempt to understand it all was through math. Systems dynamics had been founded by computer engineer, management theorists and systems scientists Jay Forrester Wright who had a long and storied career at M.I.T. His work tackled the way different objects in complex systems interacted with each other dynamically. He is also remembered for his work on developing the theoretical principles behind magnetic memory storage in computers. He applied his mathematical models to business in his first book Industrial Dynamics. He started work on his second book at the urging of Boston Mayor John F. Collins, who implored him to use his mathematical models to tackle social problems.

The result was a paper he titled “Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems” that he further developed in his book Urban Dynamics that came out in 1969. It showed something that the poor and dispossessed might have been able to tell him if he’d just asked: depressed economies were the result of shortages in job opportunities in relationship to the population. Yet his model also showed something of interest: low-income housing and lower property taxes might not solve the problem, but make it worse. Other things that would make the problem worse were getting rid of homes for industry and property redevelopment in general. Now, almost sixty years later it would interesting to run his experiments again. It seems that the popular policy around these issues have proven his point.

Forrester continued to tinker with his models, eerily reminiscent of the advanced mathematical equations used by Harry Seldon in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction series Foundation, that formed the basis for what Asimov termed psychohistory: the use of math to be able to determine future events. In 1971 Forrester’s next book World Dynamics came out, and the models used in this book became a major influence on the Club of Rome’s iconic project, The Limits of Growth.

Forrester’s model became the basis for the World3 computer simulation model used by Donella and Dennis Meadows for Limits to Growth. Donella Meadows was an environmental scientist who ended up working under Forrester as a research fellow. The man who would become her husband, Dennis Meadows, was another scientist deeply invested in systems theory. Dennis Meadows had a PhD in management from MIT and became the director for the Club of Rome there between 1970 and 1972. Two other co-authors worked on the book, Jørgen Randers, originally from Norway and William W. Behrens III. Randers was another product of the MIT Sloan School of Management and Behrens was an expert in energy who went to found a renewable energy company.

For the Limits to Growth report, the Club of Rome wanted to find out the following:
1. Gain insights into the limits of our world system and the constraints it puts on human numbers and activity.

2. Identify and study the dominant elements, and their interactions, that influence the long-term behavior of world systems.

3. To warn of the likely outcome of contemporary economic and industrial policies, with a view to influencing changes to a sustainable lifestyle.

​To gain these insights they used the World3 model to analyze food system, including agriculture and making of food products, the industrial system, population, non-renewable resources, and pollution. Each of these categories was looked at as a system that interacted with the other systems. When they did the work and ran the models on these systems, they came to the general conclusion that “in the absence of significant alterations in resource utilization and environmental destruction, it is highly likely that there will be an abrupt and unmanageable decrease in both population and industrial capacity.”

​At the time people scoffed at the idea of population decline. In the seventies the general public was more worried about a population explosion. The 1973 film Soylent Green played on these fears in its masterful dystopian take on what would happen when cities became overcrowded and people underfed. At the time of this writing it is starting to become apparent that the world population of humans is a declining.
American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused show how just eager teenagers were in the sixties and seventies to get it on with each other, to seek each other out, and make out. People hadn’t counted on the fact that there would be a sex drought among Millennials and Gen Z as one contributing factor to a lack of babies being born. The idea that people might forgo the experience of making love would have been unthinkable to many in the Boomer and Gen X cohorts. It would have been unthinkable to think their children would be using computers and computerized phones to find their partners instead of meeting them on the streets, at the library, at the bus stop, at a music show or being introduced by friends. As memories of the Great Depression were forgotten, and the Silent Generation parents who’d lived through it as children ignored, the notion that people would be unable to afford homes and children was a thought ignored as often as the elders. As were the crises foreshadowed by The Limits to Growth, crises in climate and pollution that would go on to form a contribute significant anxiety to large swathes of Millenials and members of Generation Z.
Limits to Growth charted among other things the point where non-renewable resources would peak and then peter out. The geologist M. King Hubbert had already shown how oil-production follows a bell shaped curve, and that after the maximum point of global oil extraction is hit, later called peak-oil, these stores of energy would thereafter decline forever. Hubbert worked at a research center in Houston, Texas for the Shell Oil Company and was paid to figure these kinds of things out for the big wigs with the big rigs.

As a caveat to the dire scenario of world resources actually being limited and that humans might want to cut back on consumption to save something for future generations, the authors of The Limits to Growth put the following three points in the introduction, as possible ways things could go:

1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.
3. If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.

After the expansion of the economy following World War II, America was on an upward ascent driving onwards into a bright and happy future of fully automated luxury capitalism. If there was ever a problem, scientists and engineers would come along and fix it, find a solution. Yet the first inkling that the factories would not churn out more and more and more, and that the fuels that kept the whole operation going, coal and oil, might not be subject to an eternally recurring top off, hit home with a fury in 1973 when countries in the Middle East decided to turn the screws on their enemies.
​
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had put the smack down on any countries that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur war that lasted between October 6th to 25th 1973. They put the smack down on the United States. The OPEC Emargo meant that no petroleum exports were banned for the target nations. The countries involved also curbed their own oil production. This chess move precipitated the first major energy crisis faced by the United States. A time of reckoning ensued. The limits to growth were very real indeed.

One of the immediate results were the very long line of cars, all with their engines off, no idle fumes escaping into the atmosphere to fill the globe with greenhouse gases, all waiting to get whatever drop of gasoline they could.

The V8 engines that had been popular on the big bruiser cars of the American Graffiti era ate a lot of fuel. Even as shows like Happy Days, and later movies like Grease had kindled a way of nostalgia for a lost golden era in the postwar boom, drivers turned their attention to more economical vehicles such as Toyotas, Datsuns and Volkswagens. Plenty of car buffs remained, to be sure, but their muscle cars might have sat in driveways or garages until the weekend, unless they happened to be flush or already living from a silver spoon. Even for those with the means to buy gas at the more expensive prices, the gas wasn’t always there to be had.

America had its own sources of oil, with significant amounts in Texas, but by the early seventies they were already in decline. With the use of the “oil weapon” their was an immediate threat to national energy security. This precipitated a stock market crash in 1973-74. It wasn’t of the same caliber as the Great Depression but the cascading effects lasted for some years and continue to echo to the present day. It was the first oil crisis to face the world, but it would be far from the last. The oil crisis, in fact, would never again ever be over, even as the world of finance and market manipulation found ways to keep prices low.

The embargo was an opening salvo, a harbinger of the continuing mess fossil fuel would inflict across the land, to the detriment of the environmental from oil spills and practices like fracking, along with periodic bouts of economic uncertainty as the ups and downs of foreign relations dictated access to the crude. It’s a crisis that will continue to continue as the ever-dwindling flow gets slurped, good to the last drop in its final slurry.

With the ban in effect, the price of a barrel of oil quadrupled. Fuel rationings and stricter speed limits were just two immediate consequences as the government tried to grapple with the predicament. President Nixon thought a war might help things out. Just go over to the Middle East and get the stuff. The oil fields of Kuwait, Saudia Arabia, and Abu Dhabi were ripe for the plucking, if a last resort. Cooler heads and diplomacy won out, but meanwhile prices had already spiked and the average American was trying to make due.

If you happened to be in Texas though, and were an oil producer in Texas, the embargo could have been considered a boon. The next energy crisis of 1979 also played into the Texas hold’em hands of the state’s incipient oil barons. Previously they might have thought their wells were all tapped out, but now they had a reason to go back and keep on drilling for black gold, Texas tea.

Once again, the oilmen were happier than a tornado in a trailer park. Cowboys had put one major stamp on the culture of the state. The oil prospectors had put another. Texas was a big state and its big shots didn’t want to be limited. By 1976 when Dazed and Confused was set, a temporary reprieve was already underway. The OPEC Emargo had ended in 1974 and the crude had started to flow.

Refugees from the Rust Belt started pouring into Texas during the second half of the seventies and into the eighties. When the factories were closing up in the Midwest, there was still work to be found all around Houston.

The energy crisis would be revisited again in 1979 bringing even more wealth to Texas as they coaxed out the juice. So, in the meantime, why not party?
​
As the old song goes, “The oil wells / Are full of smells” deep in the dark heart of Texas.

.:. .:. .:.
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When Labor Day hits, Summer is in its final days. School is about to resume, or likely has already resumed. Getting sent back to school in the middle of August makes an atrocity out of the summer break, and it wasn’t always so. There was a time, some many decades ago now, in the sixties, seventies, and eighties when an endless summer stretched along in the days between its opening salvo when school let out the Friday before Memorial Day, and the kids and adolescents weren’t made to go back until the Tuesday morning following Labor Day.

Such a long proper summer is now a blurry memory, but it can be remembered, and one of the ways to remember it is through two films whose stories serve as fitting book ends the summer. There is only space to look at them one at a time, to see how they connect to culture at large, as well as the discontents of civilization. American Graffiti flows into Dazed and Cofused so well, they make a perfect pairing.

American Graffiti takes place over the course of a single night, Sunday, September 2, 1962. It was Labor Day weekend and after the festivities of the last weekend in summer, on the last full night of cruising on the strip, the kids at the heart of the story have to make peace with the idea that everything would be different in the morning. Relationships might end, some would be going off to college, others would be going back to school, and or for one older greaser, he would be going back to work.

Dazed and Confused also takes place over the course of a single night on the last day of school. May 28th, 1976, and the summer is spread before the teenagers in all of its glory. It’s set in a different era, but one that has been shaped by the ethos of the sixties. The main character in this film is just entering high school. Others have graduated and are just hanging about the younger crowd, like hot rodder John Milner does in American Graffiti. In the meantime there is plenty of partying to be done. Some of the characters are soul searching. Others are just searching for the next six pack and a bag of weed.

Both films are made up of episodic vignettes, monologues, dialogues, people talking. The plot is the activity of any group of teenagers and young adults. They are each slices of life that bookend what seems like an endless summer on the one hand, and the return to school, work and drudgery on the other.

American Graffiti is set in Modesto, California. Dazed and Confused takes place somewhere in Eastern Texas. Director Richad Linklater attended Huntsville Highschool growing up in the seventies, and the people he encountered in the halls inspired his characters, just as the culture of cruising and staying out all night driving around in cars during the late fifties and early sixties had made such a big impression on George Lucas.

Dazed and Confused was shot in Austin, the same place Linklater’s masterpiece of alternative street philosophy, Slacker, was filmed. American Graffiti was primarily shot in Petaluma and San Rafael, but Modesto was where Lucas had forged his drag racing memories. Both films have something of the dryness and heat of both the Texas and California landscape permeating their celluloid atmosphere.

Both films are saturated with such a strong sense of place, it is hard to ignore them. In the captured light of film they recreated these pivotal moments in each directors own coming-of-age story, and remain inseparable from the places they had lived, the people they had known. Teenage friends and pals and loves leave such deep impressions. They were able to transfer those impressions into stories that now live on in film, impressing in turn the lives and minds of so many people who have watched these movies across time. Each remain quintessential snap shots of crucial times in American life.

In American Graffiti viewers encounter a montage of story lines that showcase the way much of the boomer generation mated, met, and either stayed where they were, or moved on with their lives. It is also a homage to radio, rock and roll, and rods. Hot rods that is, and the cars and the music coming out of the radios in the cars are just as essential to the story as are the characters.

“Cruising was gone, and I felt compelled to document the whole experience and what my generation used as a way of meeting girls” Lucas explained.

Lucas considered the film a musical, but it was one where nobody had to sing. The title is a bit enigmatic, because even though the film has a gang of greasers known as The Pharaohs getting up to small time crime shenanigans, no one spray paints any walls or writes there name on anything. Lucas thought radio, and the rock and roll played over the airwaves, was America’s form of graffiti. It wasn’t scratches in the walls, but the colorful noise of tube amps and guitars, drums, and songs about summer and love that streamed into the tube amplified AM radios of the hot rods that was the way people communicated to each other. The DJ facilitated it all, a go between, who spun the right records, took call ins and dedications over the phone lines. These teen didn’t need dirty old walls. They had Wolfman Jack blasting the controls at border station XERB.

Lucas had long been fascinated with Wolfman Jack. He had even thought about making a documentary about him when he was college studying the cinematic arts, but it was one idea among many, and he didn’t follow through, but the voice of Wolfman and his appearance in the film is one of the quintessential glues making it a film of the ages.

Modesto, where the film is set and Lucas grew up, had another deep connection to rock and roll however, that made it primed to be a psychic reservoir for these modern American myths and legends. Modesto was the birthplace of rockabilly and the slap bass sound that resonated the leather clad souls of a generation of greasers, seeping into the collective American imagination.

​A brief look at what made it such a fertile place for one of the seeds of rock to be planted, can show the deep effects its geography has had on the psyche, and the roads that run through it.

Modesto, California sits in the rich farm land of the San Joaquin Valley. Once upon a time this had been the land of the Yokuts, a collective people made up of sixty-three different tribes who had been on the land anywhere from between 50,000 to 7,000 years ago. Three great rivers wound through the land making salmon fishing abundant for the many native villages tucked amid the trees and hills. Oaks were abundant and acorns were another food staple, along with elk and squirrel.

Meanwhile the Mono people lived along the upper part of Fresno County’s large rivers. In the San Joaquin Valley they were most fully established between Millerton Lake and Fullers Meadow, a thirty mile stretch, and again up further north along the Fine Gold and Willow creeks. The Mono also had places in the south along Kings river and its tributaries.

The Yokuts were, for the most part, peaceful. The valley was a paradise and their needs were met by natures simple abundance. Squabbles over resources were uncommon, though they did have to protect themselves from the big predator on the land, the grizzly bear. This Edenic existence began to erode when the Spaniards arrived in 1776 via two separate expeditions.

One of those expeditions was led by Franciscan missionary Father Francisco Garcés, who was sent into the area as a missionary when the Spanish King expelled the Jesuits. Even within the Christian faith their were turf wars and politics of zeal. Garcés was killed for his missionary efforts during an uprising of the Native Americans. He and the others who died became martyrs for the faith by the Catholic Church, and the Yokuts and Mono, for a time, held off enforced conversion.

European explorers and American trappers and gold miners were also making their way to the area, if not to convert the locals than to convert the local resources into filthy lucre. Continuing disturbances, displacements and disintegration of the original inhabitants ensued, sped up by the introduction of biologically unfamiliar diseases. It is estimated that by 1900 close to ninety percent of all the Native Americans in California were gone. The Gold Rush had mined their lands and the tree rush had left the land logged. Those Indians who remained were for the most part landless. In 1902 the Feds stepped in and created “Rancherias” these being different from Reservations, and usually had less than 300 acres.

During the late eighteen hundreds Modesto was founded at a beautiful spot in the San Joaquin Valley. The suffering and misery of the first peoples was pushed aside in favor of California dreaming. The town started as a railroad stop on the line connecting Sacramento to Los Angeles in 1870. It was founded by the Central Pacific Railroad, but wasn’t a company town. Railroad man Mark Hopkins Jr. suggested the name should come from his banker buddy William C. Ralston, capital being ever important. Yet Ralston was not quite sure he wanted the honor. Another railroad employee spoke up in Spanish and said that Ralston was a modest, humble man, modesto. Central Pacific Railroad co-founder, Charles Crocker thought Modesto was a fine name for a town, and Ralston still got honored for his modesty, and his finances.

​By 1884 the town had grown to over 1,000 residents. Tuolumne River was nearby allowing the transport of goods by combination of barge and train. Dams were put in to provide irrigation and it became vegetable producing powerhouse and bread basket. In 1900 the population had increased to 4,500 and by the time George Lucas was growing up there in the 1950s on a street named Ramona, it had reached close to 37,000.
But before Lucas had arrived on the scene, another force was at work in that small, far away corner of the galaxy. Hillbilly siblings and entertainers the Maddox Brothers and Rose had settled in the town during the Great Depression when it was as little known as Tatooine.

n 1937 KTRB had only been on the air for four years when a style that came to be known as the “Hillbilly Boogie” blasted out from its towers and into the receivers and speakers of people all across town. Those listeners might not have known they were witnessing a moment in the birth of the cool that would find a devout audience among the oil stained mechanics and white T-shirt wearing, working class misfits who would go on to become known as greasers. A defining moment for a crucial sound was transmitted through the aether, changing the trajectory of American futures forever.

The Maddox Brothers and their sister hadn’t been in town all that long before getting the chance to play their music on the air. The Maddox family found themselves a bit ahead of the Dust Bowl refugees, the Okies who fled the bitter wrath of dry drought and the deadly wind that kicked up the dirt driving people from their settled homes and on to California. Where the Okies had fled from the dust bowl in one of the many waves of internal migration North America is subject to, the Maddox family had come from the town of Boaz, Alabama. If you are going to be in a hillbilly band you might as well be from a city like Boaz, Alabama. The Biblical name, the location in Etowah County, former home of the Muscogee (Creek) tribes and then the Cherokee, the perception of southern humidity and sweat in the long summers. They had left this place for the western lands in 1933. They had fled from their harsh lives as sharecroppers after one particular flood destroyed a seasons worth of work.

They were a very musical family, and as they worked, so they sang and played. They might have left their home state behind, but they brought the hillbilly sound with them, though not quite to Beverly Hills. Out west they continued to work the land, the new land, as roving fruit and vegetable pickers. Along their way they passed through Arizona, they went up to Washington state, and settled down finally in Modesto after many dawn-to-dusk days of full hard work.

It’s one of the constants of American experience that relocation leads to a remixing of sound. The influence of something taken from one area finds a new home in another bioregion and grows into something else. The Maddox Brothers and Rose were in on the early growth of the hillbilly boogie genre. It cam from the fusion of the boogie-woogie piano style that had been making the rounds in the early twentieth century. By the 1930s the style had a reached a crescendo of popular mania, from there it started fusing into other styles, such as early country western music where it became the hillbilly boogie. The hillbilly boogie would in turn be one of the key elements for the emergence of rockabilly, and at the heart of rockabilly is the slap bass sound.

As early as that first radio appearance Fred Maddox had been using the “slap bass” technique on his upright. They were one of the many transmission points that fused the boogie woogie with the hillbilly music they had been steeped in down in Alabama. Another influence on their sound was the western swing that had just started getting popularized by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys on the 50,000 watt KVOO radio station in Tulsa, Oklahoma where they had a regular gig. But the necessary ingredient for rockabilly and that driving propulsive rhythm from the slap bass. Fred is credited as the one who started jamming his thumb down on strings and snapping them hard with his fingers for a wild propulsive sound.

As with much of the best music, sometimes it’s the people who don’t really know how to play who make the best songs. Don Maddox explains his brother Fred’s technique. “The reason he did a slap bass is because he didn’t know how to play the bass, and all he was doing was playing rhythm anyhow, but he didn’t know the notes so he’d just slap the bass for the rhythm part and everybody thought he put on a great show and thought he was the best bass player there was.”

His bass is now displayed at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. In The Blue Moon Boys: The Story of Elvis Presley’s Band by Ken Burke and Dan Griffin, they quote Fred’s widow Kitty as saying that the museum “wanted his bass because they believe he might have hit the first note of rock ‘n’ roll on it.”

Don Maddox said that “maybe we did” invent rockabilly, “but back then we didn’t call it rockabilly music. We were just straight hillbilly. But we did all kinds of songs and Fred did that rockabilly bass. It wasn’t called rockabilly bass at the time. It was just something he done.”

Kitty further recalled how her late husband had “wanted to be in the limelight. He would kick his bass and holler and ride his bass across the stage. He’d do most anything. And it was funny.”
​
Sure sounds like the kind of antics associated with rock and roll, and Modesto and the San Joaquin was where they got their start in the limelight. In 1939, they entered a hillbilly band competition at the centennial California State Fair up in Sacramento, where they played “Sally Let Your Bangs Hang Down.” It was only a hop and skip from there that they went on to play one of the storied venues in the history of country music, the 97th Street Corral in LA. Nobody called it country back then, it was just hillbilly music.

Rose Maddox said, “We were called hillbilly singers–not country–then. No, none of this country music then. People just called us hillbilly... People tell me that I was one of the first women to sing what I sang–country boogie. I guess I was. There was no rock ‘n’ roll in those early days, before 1955. Only country boogie. My brothers also played that way. We called it country then.”
​
It was an essential ingredient in the stew that become rock and roll and rockabilly. The family band became stars throughout the 1940s and 1950s with record deals on 4 Star Records and Columbia. They had disbanded in 1956, but by 1958 George Lucas was in high school and Wolfman Jack was operating from the border blaster station XERB on 1090 kHz from Rosarito Beach, Baja California in Mexico. The station was parked on a clear channel. No other stations used that frequency. The signal was so strong it could reach all across North America and into Canada on a good night. Being in Mexico, the border stations didn’t have to follow the power limits and regulations of the FCC, and as the signal bounced across the ionosphere it sparked up the minds of teenagers hungry for rock music. DJ Wolfman Jack delivered, recording his programs on tape in San Diego and Los Angeles. Those tapes were then sent down across the border and played into the ionosphere on endless summer nights.

George Lucas was a teenager during Wolfman Jacks heyday, and he had no problem picking up XERB, forming a bass line/base line soundtrack of rhythm, blues and rock and roll as he souped up hot rods and dreamed of being a race car driver.

​During World War II the rationing of consumer goods was just another fact of life. The US Government was a bit hung up on the idea of rationing gasoline. Since the first Model T Ford rolled out the plant doors in 1908, on through the 1920s and 30s, the automobile had insinuated itself into American life and consciousness. Cutting off the gas supply that made for happy motoring would be bad for national morale, but soon it wouldn’t matter. Part of Germanys strategy in the war was to aim their weaponry at oil tankers on the US East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. The military effort was the priority, and as supplies dwindled, the rationing of gas for those at home ensued. Then there was the rubber shortage, contributing to a dearth of tires. The simplest way to get by with these restrictions was to drive less. People were encouraged to take the bus and use other public transportation. Driving just for fun would have to wait.

Commercial car production hit a major stop sign after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Civilian car production halted completely between February 1942 and late 1945. Factories had shifted gears to build military tanks, jeeps, and airplanes. Civilians were issued gas coupons and stickers in an elaborate fuel rationing scheme. People were given a class depending on how essential their job was, allotting critical workers more of the petroleum juice. Others were expected to carpool. Even with such efforts, by January 1944 a major shortage had hit the nation. In California there was not much gas at all. There was none in Sacramento, just seventy-five miles north of Modesto. If there was an emergency, people just had to tough it out and make do because there wasn’t even any gas for the emergency vehicles.

After the war was over, it didn’t take long for the trend to reverse. Americans wanted to drive again, and in the 1950s they shifted gears once again, going into overdrive. People were buying cars and they wanted to cruise, to drive just for the joy of it, doing nothing at all.

Hot rodding had started in earnest when soldiers coming back from the war needed something to do. Many had mechanical skills from working on the machines of death. With various kinds of Model T and Model A Fords available they turned their attention to customizing their cars, chopping the tops down, lowering the vehicles closer to the road by the cutting the springs, and putting on big chrome pipes that made the engines crackle and roar. As their sons and nephews came of age, new motorheads wanted in on the action. These teenagers had started to multiply after horny soldiers had returned home, after all, and when they were old enough to drive, they really wanted a taste of that notional freedom.

Purses had started filling up again in the post-war boom, and people wanted to put the harsh memories of the Great Depression and war years behind them. Purse strings tended to get looser. Gas was cheap, costing anywhere between twenty and thirty cents a gallon. Of course, people only made an average of between $3,300 and $4,200 a year. But considering the restrictions of the previous decade, it was a bonanza.
​
Drive-in movies, which had first appeared in the 1930s, started to proliferate in the fifties as did drive-in burger joints and diners. Fried foods, booming jukeboxes, and cute carhop waitresses, sometimes on roller skates, lured people in to hang out and spend money, all underneath the warm glow of neon lights. These drive-in restaurants became hubs for the gearheads, racers, and car buffs who wanted to show off their machines and hang out in between rolling up and down the main streets of America.

The midcentury modern aesthetic was also at work in car design. What can now be considered classic styles were modeled on the sleek look of airplanes and fighter jets. Chrome tailfins and powerful V8 engines made going up and down the strip in one of these beasts an exciting and stylish way to spend the evenings. The V8s also caused a ruckus by encouraging the illegal past time of street drag racing.

Hot rod and car cruising culture had spread throughout the US in those years and was in full swing when George Lucas was growing up. He got hit with the bug of Kustom Kulture that had a major hot spot in Southern California. Even though Modesto was in the central valley, it wasn’t insulated from these widely embraced pastimes.

When it came time for Lucas to make American Graffiti, his homage to Wolfman Jack, border radio, cruising and rock and roll, it made sense to set the coming-of-age film to be set in his own hometown. The loose storyline uses aspects of his own life and people from his life as the basis for the characters.

​The plot of the movie follows a group of teens and some maybe slightly-older hot rodders, as they spend the evening cruising the streets of Modesto from dusk till dawn. Steve Bolander, placed by Ron Howard, meets up with his friend Curt Henderson, played by Richard Dreyfus, at Mels Drive-In, the popular spot to a grab “a double Chubby Chuck, a Mexicali Chili Barb, two orders of French fries, and two cherry Cokes,” as the bespectacled nerd character, Toad, played by Charles Martin Smith, does while trying to impress the girl Debbie, played by Candy Clark.

​Steve goes out with Curt’s sister Laurie, played by Cindy Williams, and the three of them go to the sock hop, the first dance of the year at high school. Steve and Curt have graduated and are both due to take a plane out to the east coast and go to college in the morning. As such it is Laurie and Steve’s last night together before he leaves town. He puts his foot in his mouth time after time, talking about how he thinks they’ll be better off seeing other people, while at the same time he still tries to get laid when he takes her out to one of the towns make out spots. Laurie won’t have it.

Meanwhile Curt has caught a glimpse of a blonde haired “goddess” who mouthed the words “I love you” to him from her white Ford Thunderbird. He can’t stop thinking about her for the rest of the night and contemplates staying in town. As he goes around town after they had all split up after the sock hop, he gets unwittingly dragged into a night of hijinks and shenanigans with the local hoods, a greaser gang known as the Pharaohs.

Everywhere they go, the radio is on, and Wolfman Jack howls through the aether and into their cars, playing classic sets of genuine rock, doo wop, and R&B. After Curt is able to shake loose of the Pharaohs, he makes his way to a radio station on the edge of town where he hopes to be able to put a word in with the DJ and send a message to his mystery woman. He arrives at the place and is able to get. A DJ is in the booth and lets him come hang out. He is playing tapes and on the tapes is the voice of Wolfman Jack. Curt doesn’t know if the guy at the station is Wolfman Jack or not. The DJ says he just relays things and plays the tapes, mimicking the real practice Wolman used with XERB. He says he would do his best to get his message on before the end of the night. Curt is leaving when he turns around to look into the booth and sees the DJ talking into the mic for once, and it is the voice Wolfman Jack. His appearance in the film as himself, and with his constant chatter on the radios throughout the movie, makes him the real star of the show. It was a conceit on Lucas’s part to have him broadcasting from Modesto, but it is also fitting. Some remnant of the slap bass of Fred Maddox must have charged the city because the film and its radiocentric soundtrack became another key moment in the history of rock and roll, this time reviving music, well over a decade old at that point, as part of a wave of hauntological nostalgia the movie helped usher to fruition.

Another story line involves the boldest, baddest hot rodder in town, John Milner, played by Paul Le Mat. He is looking to pick up girls as he cruises up and down the streets in his yellow, chopped down, five-window deuce coupe. Early in the film a group of girls are in a car next to him, and give him a run for his money. One of them says her sister Carol, played by Mackenzie Phillips, will ride with him. He didn’t know who Carol was, but he was happy to get a girl in the car him. She manages to get in the passenger seat before he realizes he’s been duped. She’s a talkative twelve-year old who proceeds to manipulate him and make every effort to not get out of the car. He takes on a kind of a begrudging older brother babysitter approach, but by the end of the night, she’s grown on him, and they come to a truce.

Another hot rodder who doesn’t live in Modesto has cruised over to their town to try and find Milner for a drag race. This hot head is named Bob Falfa and is played by a young Harrison Ford wearing a cowboy hat. After an evening where the characters variously try to score hard liquor, try to score sex, try to score money by robbing an arcade at a mini golf place, and otherwise just wonder up and down the streets of Modesto in their cars, causing minor trouble, pranking each other, and doing whatever they can to have a cheap thrill, they gather on the outskirts of town to watch the showdown between Milner and Falfa. By this point Laurie has ditched and dumped Steve and is in Falfa’s car, hoping to make him jealous. It works and by the next day, after a near fatal accident, all their lives had changed.
​
Lucas had his own crash that turned him away from a life as a race car driver as he had dreamed of in his own high school days. His father had given him a yellow Autobianchi Bianchina, thinking it would be safer than the motorcycle his son liked to zip around on. But soon after the car was in his possession he put a racing belt in, and got the engine and souped up for higher speeds, and started taking it out to regional races, where he was able to make some wins. One speedy night when he was making into the ranch where he grew up, a Chevy Impala broadsided him, the racing belt snapped, he flew out, and his car hit a walnut tree. The wreck beat him up pretty bad and he was rushed to the hospital while still unconscious, later waking up to bruised lungs and several broken bones. The accident didn’t dissipate his love of cars, but when he came home from the hospital, his brush with death had turned him off from becoming a race car driver.

In a piece for ABC 10 news in Sacramento, reporter Eric Escalante talked to Modesto locals about all the things George Lucas got right about their town, even though it was filmed in Petaluma, North of San Francisco. Escalante quotes publisher Chris Murphy who said that, “The people hanging out, the walking, the coming up at the lights, the drag racing when the lights turn green - all of that was a very frequent common occurrence here.”

Escalante also reports on how the use of Mel’s Drive-in burger joint in the film was a tribute to the Burges Drive-in on Highway 99, formerly U.S. 99, the 452 mile south-to-north road that runs through the central valley. Highway 99 itself is sometimes called the Main Street of California.

The Dewey Highschool name used in the film was a sit in for the real Thomas Downey Highschool that Lucas attended, and the school colors were the same, blue and white. The director snuck in numerous other references to his hometown throughout the film, including the name of the street he grew up on, Ramona Avenue. This happens when Milner tricks Carol into telling her the name of the street she lives so he can try and take her home.

There is plenty of objectionable sexism in the movie itself, portrayed in full realism with the attitudes of the time. As a work of cinematic art, it has many striking moments. It’s a dark film showing the compromises the Boomer generation would be forced to face, like any generation faced with choices. In their time there wasn’t much to do but ride the streets in the evening, guzzling gas, guzzling alcohol, and court each other. The shadow of World War II and Korea continued to hang, coated over with a veneer of consumerism. The fight against communism would draw them all into its destructive orbit, leaving none of them untouched even if they dodged the draft as Vietnam loomed.

It idolizes the past, but when it shows the pictures of the four main male characters at the end, it showed the end game of drinking and the draft, its losers, and its dodgers. The vibrant graffiti of music painting the airwaves was still remembered, but the voices of those lost linger as the credits roll. What happened to the female protagonists? Lucas didn’t bother checking in with the future of Laurie, Carol or Debbie. Did they marry and divorce? Become home makers or join in on second wave feminism and go out to find careers of there own?

The premiere of American Graffiti happened just a few months before there was another major premiere that would leave a lasting impression on the 1970s. That “premiere” was of the OPEC oil embargo, and the precipitation of a major financial crisis deeply tied to the worlds dwindling stores of ancient sunlight in the form of fossil fuel energy.

It didn’t stop people from continuing to cruise. Only now, hanging over the cars that raced down the main drags of main street America was the sense that the happy days were over. If postwar America had represented some kind of simpler time, some kind of quixotic age of innocence, the notion that the juice that kept it all running might sometime run out, hung over people’s heads like the sword of Damocles. People had gotten all hopped up and hyped up about cars from the film Lucas made, but all the idling would have to come to a stop as the needle moved ever closer towards empty.

Wolfman Jack used to sign off his stints on the radio like with the catchphrase, “baby, keep your tail-lights blinkin’, and rev your engine every chance you get, ‘cause da Wolfman is always here to fill your tank and make your head feel goooooooood. Awww-wowowow ooooooooooooooooooooo!”

As the people lined up at the gas stations, the only thing they had left to believe in was the gospel of rock and roll. The songs he played were now oldies, as the American Graffiti soundtrack went triple platinum, helping usher in a wave of nostalgia as America looked backwards at what was lost. Ron Howard had graduated from his role as Opie in America’s own small town of the mind, Mayberry, to his fumbling towards adulthood in American Graffiti, and then reprised as a high school innocent in Happy Days, never quite attaining the stature of greaser cool achieved by the Fonz. John Travolta became a teenage heartthrob in Grease giving further allure to the fading celluloid dreams of drive in movies, car races and the magic of rock and roll.
​
Hippiedom was slowly slipping away, and the harder garage rock sounds of proto-punk were starting to surface. Drugs, sex and alcohol were easy to find and all three could be used as a Quaalude of the mind to forget the fading good ole days when the USA had reigned supreme. Broken soldiers had come home from a failed war and the seventies cruised into their daze of confusion.

.:. .:. .:.
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☕️☕️☕️

Many people aspire to rise above their circumstances. In most cases it’s actually more helpful to sink below them. You might as well move in the direction of gravity. The techillionaire class think they can defy gravity, and they might for a time, but earth remains the point of origin for all of us, and she will be the final arbiter. For those of us who wish to stay in earth orbit, the gravity of our collective situation can be our friend. Those who continue to chase rocket fantasies of going to the moon and mars may just be suffering from a severe case of premature blastoffs. I think these space colonialist enterprises are rather untenable. Outer Space is a dangerous place to live and a major hail Mary isn’t likely to come from going to the stars.

Yet for all that, the desire to drive cybertrucks, crisscross the globe on jet setter vacations, get the bigger better house, eat performatively at fancy restaurants, show off designer clothes and fashion, and post about it all constantly on shallow media remains entrenched. As does the desire to gentrify a neighborhood by real estate sharks, turning profits by flipping shoddily remodeled homes, and pricing people out of the very places where they grew up. Seeing neighbors reach retirement, pay off their house, but then wonder how they will be able to afford the hike in property taxes and start to contemplate selling their house back to the real estate sharks who instigated the process and profit from it in the first place is very disconcerting.

I don’t think that means people shouldn’t aspire to better themselves; yet there has always been a difference between bettering one self and doing what you can to improve your circumstances, and the kind of social ladder climbing, and keeping up with the Jones family, whoever they are, that gets promoted by the overculture. One involves moving in the direction of personal growth and mastery, the slow but steady establishment of a healthy lifestyle by putting down strong roots, growing up sturdy shoots, and sharing the fruits of the harvest. The other is more like the game of accumulation and hoarding with the end purpose of declaring “he who has the most toys wins.”
​
Dropping out of the rat race has always been an option too. Getting left behind in the race is another thing that tends to happen, especially when a good chunk of the people doing the racing are optimizing their psychotic performance with a slew of hacks, drugs and schemes to keep their foothold on the rung above so that they have an easier time kicking down at the people on the rung below. Since that is so often the case, it seems to me that there are better things to do and other options than climbing up that ladder.

Even getting a foothold in terms of a living wage that allows a person the kind of slack necessary to put some away for rainy days is getting more difficult. For those who have been working for some time, their wages may have gone up over time, but so has everything else. For others, it’s a constant scramble and shuffling between many different jobs. Loyalty to an institution or business over the long is often gone, but the worker is not to be blamed, when the institutions and businesses haven’t upheld their own half of the loyalty.

I do think small is beautiful, but shrinkflation means the bag of chips you used to get for two bucks now costs five. I’m not sure if that is what E. F. Schumacher was talking about. One hundred bucks or so at the grocery store in the year 2001 used to fill up an entire grocery cart with juice, vegetables, beer, wine, and enough paycheck leftover to even buy some weed, go out to a couple local shows and drink it up with some friends, while still getting the bills paid. That was my lifestyle when I became a shelver at the library at age 21. I was not really bringing home a lot on my paycheck, but it went much further. Now all these years later that same amount of money will barely fill up two ripped plastic bags from Kroger. Most of the food we buy isn’t even for us, but for our lazy lay-about pets.

Speaking of pets, have you been to the vet lately? It really seems like the cost of having a pet has skyrocketed. It used to be you could just go to the vet and buy your annual doses of flea medicine without taking the pet in to be seen. Now, they have realized they can get some more money out of you by making you take the pet for an eighty-dollar checkup (minimum) so they can get that charge before selling you something that could easily have gotten without the extra visit. Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t take pets in for check-ups, especially as they age, but all the added costs and hidden fees have made it very expensive to be a responsible pet owner. And owning a pet is one of the main joys people get out of life. For people who otherwise live alone, or who have had any kind of trauma or PTSD, dogs and cats are lifelines to emotional well-being. Who hasn’t undergone some kind of trauma? Paying your dues to life with harsh experience is par for the course, but its often made harsher by the exploitative arrangements put in place by insufferable elites. I remember when there were more affordable pet clinics in the area, and they didn’t try to rip you off by making you join some shady “Care Club” plan that really just extracted money from your bank account each month without offering too many more services than you would have paid if you paid as you went for each needful service.

The same is true for certain kinds of self-care. For over a decade my wife and I took Pilates together. I really like Pilates, and we had one of the best teachers in the city (and she remains one of the best). What I write is not a criticism of her. As friends we always got a deal, for which we remain grateful. As her business took off, the price was raised here and there, but we were always appreciative of her willingness to be grandfathered on the lower price tier. Eventually as our lives changed, we decided to mix things up and join a gym for the same price the two of us were paying to do one Pilates class a week together. At the healthplex we can go as much as we want, and to be honest, the hot tub and sauna were big selling points for us. My parents go there, and some of my friends from my ham radio club too, so the place has some friendly faces we see, and we’re starting to make some other friends in that third place.

We miss the Pilates class though. All that good deep stretching and breath. There is a Pilates class offered through the gym, but it is extra on top of the membership. Pilates is great exercise, and but I don’t know why it costs as much as it does, especially for basic group mat classes. It seems to me that, if you had the space and the time as a teacher, the cost of the class could be cut by a certain amount to bring in more people. That would make up for what you lost by having less people at a higher price point, by bringing in more bodies at lower rate. Yet, if more people came in the door, the difference might not be too much, and you’d be doing a service by helping more people get healthy and stay healthy, get in touch with their bodies. This work would also contribute to preventive healthcare, which would in turn contribute to general wellbeing among many.
But for many, that is a no go if it means you have to skip going on a fancy overseas vacation, or have to drive an older used car.

The main reason the cost of Pilates and similar types of services are kept higher than they need to be is pure elitism. Pilates is generally pricier than yoga, but it appeals to a similar kind of elite mindset where the people with means can pay the money to pamper themselves with “self-care.” There is nothing in the physical movements themselves that are elite, only the way it gets marketed. Why not bring in more people to cheaper classes? This is something the Pilates teacher at the gym had talked to my wife about as well, so I know there are teachers who want to lower the cost. And they could, but the people who go to Pilates to feel smug in their self-care wouldn’t like it so much if the great unwashed started coming in to the studio to stretch out after a day of hard work.

I don’t really know how many people in whatever is left of the working classes would take Pilates anyway. I think they might if it wasn’t marked up and if it was portrayed without its elitist trappings. The physical culture enthusiast might give it a shot if it wasn’t priced above what they could afford.
​
And so, it is with many other things. Including the subscription model.

​The unmitigated greed of the techillionaires is on full display with the software subscription model. Microsoft should really be paying other people to use their products than the other way around, but I won’t get into that at the moment. Subscribing to the Office suite, or to Adobe products or the like, instead of being able to just buy a copy of the software, and keep it running for as long as you can, on machines that also you keep running for as long as you can, without upgrading with each available update, unless you want to, seems to have gone by the wayside. It serves the same function as the planned obsolescence of consumer products that are built to shit with every passing iteration.

​The same factors are of course at work on the internet as well. Paywalled subslacks keep curious readers out. I’m a writer myself, in case you haven’t noticed, and I don’t have anything against being compensated for my work, because as much as I enjoy writing, it is still work, and I have to fit this work around my bill paying job, around my marriage, family and social life. I love to write, so I am very motivated to make the time.

​I also like to share my work.

For a long time though, I was resistant to setting up my own subslack publication. I had my own website after all, sothismedias.com, but to be honest, I didn’t have many regular readers, and if I did, most of them were pretty quiet. I think had to do with the fact that it was in the now old school blog format. I do have some dedicated readers over there of course (thank you!) but without the social media aspect, I didn’t have as many readers as I could have. I haven’t ever had a facebook account, and I don’t plan on signing up for anything meta, unless its metaphysics. I was only twitter for long enough to get ADHD (really quickly) and then delete that account. Mostly I’ve hung out online in blogs, forums and listservs around topics that interest me. Sometimes on reddit. Anyway, I came over to subslack first as a reader, and had one article published I was commissioned to write by a group slack called Return. That what caused me to set up my initial account. They’re gone, but I stayed, and I admit I got a bit of an addiction to Notes in the process. That was one of the things I was wary about with social media: the addictive aspect, and I can self report that it is true here too. I started by posting links to the articles I wrote for Sothis Medias site in Notes, thinking I could parasitize the platform, but with not much traffic. At the beginning of 2026, I decided to start my own subslack and cross-post my articles to both my own website and here. I am definitely getting more engaged readers on subslack and it costs me nothing except my time and effort, whereas the website actually costs me money to run. I imagine some people in the same situation might shut down the website, but I will keep my website because if this place goes through a real enshittification, as platforms are known to do, I’ll still have my other site. Plus there are a lot of articles up there, that have never come over to subslack.

Because I have a site where there has never been a fee to read, I thought here I would never put up a paywall on subslack. I am still committed to that. As a writer I suffer from obscurity, being a needle in the haystack, a signal lost in noise, much more than I would suffer from missing out on money I couldn’t account for anyway.
Also, and to main point of this entire rant, everything is so fucking expensive. I don’t want to charge people who can’t afford to read me. I work at library, and the library has always offered free internet services for those left behind in our ladder climbing so that they can access the services that are more online, that more and more they make it hard to do without a smartphone. From the beginning I have been concerned about the subscription model of internet content. In the library you can read all kinds of material for free. The creators of things still get something from that, because the library purchases them, but I don’t know yet of libraries that purchase subslack subscriptions so their patrons can read them. They do purchase group Wall Street Journal, New York Times and other kinds of subs that can be accessed through the library gateway. What a deal! Lamestream media, being as lowly regarded as it is, means though, that often the best articles are somewhere on a place like subslack. It’s a shame when a writer won’t be discovered by a potential reader when their work is behind that wall.

My main goal in my own writing is to put out things that I enjoy writing and others will enjoy reading anyway. That there are people willing to follow me through of my own particular obsessions and quirks, is still quite amazing. Thank you all who have joined me. When I set up my subslack, I wanted to set all the prices as cheap as possible in case their were people who wanted to support my work, even though I offer it for free. I was hoping I could set the monthly price to a dollar, but the lowest it can be set is to five dollars, and so I left it at that, with a steep discount for anyone who wanted to contribute to my bohemian lifestyle by taking out a yearly subscription. Yet, just last week I saw a post from Michelle Songy of The Ritualist. She shares some of the same concerns I have about this platform and subscription model. She made a post on Notes about setting subscriptions to a dollar and got the info she needed from subslacker David J. Frost on how to actually do so. So she set up her subslack to take $1 a month and she has reported that her own paid subscription base have also really gone up.

I thought I would apply that model myself, now that I know how. (If you set the percentage to 80% on a normal $5 subscription, that brings the total to $1.)

There are plenty of writers and creators I’d like to support here on subslack, but those six-to-eight dollar a month subscriptions really do add up fast, especially when gas, food, and other bills have to be paid. With that said, I think the $1 dollar subscription model is a real win-win for everybody. I subscribed to Michelle just on the principle that she was writing about this and did it herself.
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So, sisters and brothers, can you spare a dollar? One dollar a month into my coffee coffer is only twelve bucks a year.

If I make any money doing this I can assure you that it will be spent wisely on quality coffee and the good pipe tobacco necessary to self-medicate my undiagnosed ADHD and that also help to keep the words flowing. (I don’t even smoke on a daily or weekly basis anyway… but I do drink coffee every single day, probably too much, and life is too short to brew bad beans!) It won’t go to weed. Despite what I said in my post last Wednesday, I don’t smoke pot anymore. I’d also use it to defer the cost of my website, and keep that available for searchers looking for words on the kinds of things I write about. Anything else I’d use to buy more used books, records and music, as well as recirculating it to the various subslackers I subscribe to, and musicians I support via patreon or bandcamp clubs. Maybe some new headphones, maybe maintenance on my 2002 Toyota Camry that is my daily driver. Maybe I’d subscribe to more… I certainly would if more people took up this cheaper model.

My wife works at a school and I work at a public library. We aren’t doing bad. I can assure you I have no interest in climbing the ladder in order to buy a cybertruck, nicer phones and super fancy vacations that stretch me beyond my means. I don’t so much want to rise above as I wish to sink below. So I have made the $1 tier available for those who’d like to support my work. 

Even more, I’d just like to see this model spread across subslack, which is why I am implementing it myself. Either way these will never be pay walled, as I have always intended to do, and if you want to just keep reading for free, that’s fine by me too. Thanks for valuing my work with your attention.

I guess the experiment is this… can you make more money potentially by letting in a lot more people with a very cheap ticket, then by setting an arbitrarily higher price based on peoples inflated notions of value as a writer?

​Fugazi only ever charged $5 for their shows, adjusted slightly higher in places like NYC or LA as needed. But they always made it so their fans, including the youngest who might not even be working yet, could come to their shows. Quite the opposite of the outrageous amount for going to a concert by a lamestream act today, where the point is price people out rather than to price people in. The same is sadly true even for artists in the underground, with shows anywhere from $20 to $50. 

I imagine some writers might look askance at this, as potentially devaluing the work. I’m not knocking how hard it is to make a living in this vocation. I won’t be retiring to do this full time any time soon. That’s not the goal of setting this up and sharing how to do it anyhow. My idea is to instead model a different way of doing things, and instead of trying to rise above to reach a place in a social and economic class I will never realistically fit into anyway, I will just do something else instead and to try to sink below my means and live a rich life as a bottom feeder. There’s some really good trash down here, and some even greater treasure.

The Surrealist Alternative to Capitalism and Communism

In certain areas of music writing and criticism, it has been hard to escape the influence of the late Mark Fisher. He was known for being a founding member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) along with Nick Land and Sadie Plant. His k-Punk blog in the early 200s was highly influential, and even though I didn’t read it at the time, I couldn’t escape reading about one of his favorite topics, hauntology, across the music press as it related to albums and projects from various electronic musicians and other creators. As with many other things, I came to his work late, but have found his books to be highly stimulating.
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In particular, his books Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and his other book, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures.

At the same time as I very much enjoyed reading them and found myself nodding along, I also found myself getting irritated by them and wanting to throw them across the room. Perhaps it was the depressive and melancholy aspect that haunted these books, that haunted his own life. I am very sympathetic to those suffering from depression. I’ve had many bouts myself and I know how it can color things. I am also sympathetic to how our own culture continues to suffer from unfulfilled dreams and broken promises of what was to be our future as the myth of progress is shown to really be a myth after all. Fisher was very haunted by these lost futures, the promise of modernity had been stripped bare and its discontents revealed. This was a disappointment, especially as it related to the progress of music, which he believed needed to go on with the steady appearance of new genres. Yet new genres had petered out by the end of the 20th century and had now gone into recycling mode as chronicled by his friend and musical critic colleague Simon Reynolds in his book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past.

Reynolds work on Retromania also lamented what it saw as a lack of progress among musicians willing to carve out new genres, and how record labels were making lots of money but cashing in on the nostalgia market for super deluxe reissues, and how online culture was making a huge chunk of recorded music available online, accessible with ease. Technology was being used to resurrect the ghosts of the past, instead of transporting us to some glorious artistic future. Now we have the ability to make recombinatorial art from the catalogs of the past with alacrity. Remixing, remaking and recombinig could never be so easy. Oh, the horror!

I think the past should be remixed, remade, recombined. Yet those remixtures should be infused the kind of strange imagination and force of will that brings them to life. Creativity can never be replaced by a tool, but tools can be hacked and détourned to make their use more creative, often through bending them towards failure, but none of it is a substitute for developing an imagination, and machines can’t really do such.
The remixes shouldn’t just be limited to art, literature and music, but to older technologies themselves and ways of doing things. Economic practices and theories that were never tried, tools and inventions that never made it past the patent stage.

Meanwhile, at the same time, as of this writing AI is a massive economic bubble with huge hidden costs. Those costs are causing and the cracks are letting in the light. American investor Michael Burry has also resurrected his warnings about the AI boom. His analysis found nine corporate technology giants to have accumulated around $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments. Sometime the piper of debt is going to want to get paid. Sometime the speculative bubble is going to get to large and regurgitate all over the rest of the economy in ways people probably won’t like, unless you are a barfophiliac.

People talk about nuclear as a possible energy solution, but I don’t want micro soft in charge of Three Mile Island. Just think of what a systems update could do! I’m skeptical of other corporations running nuclear power just to juice data centers. Nuclear power has always subsidized the nuclear arms industry on the one hand, and the long term impacts from mistakes… well, anyone who has read M. John Harrison’s Viriconium novels should have an inkling of the devastation and future wastelands that might occur.​

Those of us who are already committed to a downwardly mobile lifestyle will be a little more prepared for the shifts ahead. Those of us who already look to the past as a source of inspiration and guidance will find a real trash mine of valuable resources to garbage pick from. As the energy and resource base needed for recombinant machines goes by the wayside, we will have to use our own human powered abilities to perform chance operations once again. Perhaps such operations can be of assistance in creating more surreal futures.

In the meantime I am haunted by another specter that Fisher was very haunted by: the specter of capitalism.

At the same time, I am also haunted by another specter that Fisher remained hopeful for, the specter of communism. To be blunt, I think they both suck, and the fact that anticapitalists still put so much faith in Marx and communism after over a century of failure, shows a major lack of imagination.

​As the old joke goes: Is there a difference between capitalism and communism?
In theory, yes. In capitalism it is man who exploits man. In communism it is the reverse.

There are other ways of playing with archives and chance operations to create new works out of the old that don’t really on such energy intensive methods.

Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism, reverse Maragaret Thatcher’s famous dictum and screed that “There is no alternative” to free markets and capitalist ascendancy, and asked the question is there no alternative? The capitalist system is so depressing, the world seems so broken, everything is run like a business from healthcare to school, to art, that biology is no longer the bottom base line of existence, but the budget sheet. Streaming in the immersive digital cinema of the always-on simulacra has brought us into Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World of the feelies, while always-on tracking has brought us into George Orwell’s surveillance state.

Fisher laments that people don’t have the gumption anymore for embracing the alternative of socialism and communism. Yet the capitalism and communism axis remain just another binary, forever locked in opposition to what they each hate, and they will always be opposed. The only way to resolve the binary is to move away from them using trinary logic, and create a totally different economic system all together.
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The Democratic Socialists of America are at this time making a big name for themselves and getting into office. These are just the same kind of middle managers and bosses and bureaucrats who like to talk about the “workers” while at the same time mostly doing bong hits and playing video games, i.e., anything they can to avoid being a worker themselves. Whatever is left of the left can do better.

In a failing government and economic system where everyone wants to take a cut and nothing gets done, I propose getting rid of all the middle-men managers, corporate CEO’s, their lackeys and hangers on and instead opting for a system of postcorporate surrealism.

​Let’s dig in a little deeper.

Many critics of capitalism have a knee jerk reaction to its many negative issues and consequences. It’s like when somebody raised in a fundamentalist Christian church hears about the work of Aleister Crowley and becomes a born again Thelemite (something that happened to me as a teenager). Even more suspect is when people reject Christianity to become its polar opposite as Satanists, or belligerent atheists who have as much faith that there is no god as Bible thumpers do in preaching their interpretation of the one true interpretation of the Bible.

So it is with many people who have grown up inside the land mined culture of corporate capitalism. Seeing all that is wrong with it, they flip over to the other side of the spectrum and embrace various variants of Marxism, socialism, and communism. At the same time, writers like Fisher having acknowledged the collapse of the various utopian and communitarian fantasies associated with Marx and co. Yet an alternative to the failure has not been forthcoming, only the bemoaned the failure to imagine anything other alternative hence the cutting critiques in his fascinating book.

Those who would seek to change our problematic economic system are often very good at pinpointing all the things that are wrong with it, and all the damage it has caused. Some of them are also aware of and point out, the failures of those who would create a counterculture, alternate lifestyle or society, and oppose these dominating structures. Many pages and thousands and thousands and thousands of words are devoted to what is wrong. Then, for just a few pages at the end of any given book about the subject, there are small brief and tentative sketches offered as to what actual alternatives there might be.

Many of these thinkers would like to redistribute wealth and the means of production from the hands of the elite, back into the working class. Yet communism as practiced has just as often produced as wicked of outcomes for regular people as has capitalism. They both tend to allow the accumulation of power and resources into the hands of a few and leave the huddled masses to fend for the scraps. The approach is different, but many of the outcomes are the same. One definition of corporation is a “unified body of individuals” according to Merriam-Webster. The bureaucratic state that ends up consolidating power in communist countries could thus be thought of as one type of corporation.

For all the supposed freedoms in a capitalist system, these unified bodies have been given the rights of actual individuals, and tend towards the same accumulation of power, influence, and resources. Communists might use state propaganda, but capitalists will use the might of other corporate bodies, advertising agencies, to sway and control the population.

In that respect a postcorporate surrealism opposes both the capitalist and communist experiments of the recent centuries and casts its eye on actually looking to other alternatives economic possibilities. What situations might we create for new possibilities for arranging our lives, and importantly stripping the vast multinational corporations of their supposed personhood? These impersonal conglomerations should not have the same rights as an actual person, nor should they have a life span that is longer than a person, considering that they aren’t actually a person.
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Yet where to start? We are so entrenched in these systems it is often difficult to imagine alternatives, as Fisher so eloquently wrote about. Yet it is possible to imagine these things. Our imaginations just need to be stretched and exercised in ways they haven’t been in recent decades since the infiltration of the simulacra and spectacle into so many aspects of our lives. These forms of mass media curb the ability of the mind to be able to envision. They captivate our vision and dominate our vision. In the beginning the internet was a place for a more democratic exchange of ideas. A place for free speech. Yet corporations quickly leveraged its power for commerce, and each year it seems to be less of a place for quirky self-expression and exchange of knowledge and ideas between people. These opportunities still exist in dark forest pockets on the internet, small spaces on subslack, forgotten listservs and forums, but the companies that own so much of the digital real estate get to set the controls, and mine the people of data, on the popular social media networks they control. And after a day working as microserf miner slinging binary bits, we come home to another screen where are encouraged to binge watch. Sucked into these twin worlds, its no wonder those with vested interests in keeping people in their place as consumers do what they can to make these things addictive, and keep us entranced.

Pulling away from the spectacle, from the simulacra, gives a person the needed breathing space to start thinking for themselves, and perhaps to even start envisioning what else there might be beyond both capitalism and communism.

That’s what brings us to surrealism because realism hasn’t gotten us very far either. If we are going to imagine new economies, ways of relating, ways of congregating, sharing, working and living together in conviviality, we need to go as far out as we can. Strange ideas need to be encouraged. Weird artists, outsiders and visionaries need to be explored. Those on the fringe need to be looked as examples rather than ostracized. Distant ideas can also come to us from the past, either from traditional lifeways that have stood the test of time (until corporate forces did their best to wipe them out) or from art movements, borderline subcultures, and ideas that were never fully developed or taken up.

Another resource for all this material is the world of dreams. A surrealist economy is in many ways a dream economy. The gift economy is rebirthed through sharing of our nightly gifts from realms beyond the physical, the place in the liminal where mysterious encounters lead humanity back into ourselves and beyond at the same time along paths of creativity.

Part of the problem with both capitalism and communism is a shared materialistic reductionism. That is not to say we need to go back to fundamentalist religion, though certainly many are, and many more will in their search for safety and stability in a chaotic world. This leads us into the inner world, the world of the imaginal, the world of dreams. If we have failed to develop our imaginations it is much in part because we have failed to develop our inner lives. When everything is only lived on the outer, as trivial moments to fill trivial moments in time, we don’t give ourselves the break we need to hear what we are actually thinking ourselves, what isn’t coming from the influencers and talking heads, the media mouthpieces, and government spokesperson, from corporate created entertainment.

To this we can take inspiration from the surrealists, and other art movements in general, that were not afraid to tap into the subtle side of life, to look into their dreams or daydreams. If we want to envision a different way of life, we need visionaries, and eccentric freaks, misfits who aren’t afraid to be on the outside of mainstream society.
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Scientists, experts, managers, all of these people with their degrees and certificates, have become the priests of our time, the ones who say how things should be, the ones the rest of us need to listen to. They want us to get back to work, shut ourselves up, do as we are told, and don’t turn away from the screen in our hands and on the wall, to look at what might be behind the screen of our minds. It is the stifling of the spirit into materialist constraints where nothing happens until you buy something.

Instead of experts, we need to look to the weirdos, the people who didn’t fit in, who didn’t graduate, who went off on their own path, looking to find their own particular joy and groove. People who never even knew there was a box to be outside of because they were so far deep in the forest on their own.

We need alone time ourselves as well, away from other influences, so we can began to hear our own voice again, listen, dream our own dreams and reflect on what they mean.

“Go then, there are other worlds than these,” Jake Chambers said to Roland Deschain and heir to Arthur Eld as he fell into an abyss in Stephen King’s novel The Gunslinger. He did not die. He found himself in another world. It is possible to imagine something other than capitalism. It is also possible to imagine something other than socialism and communism.

​The surrealists offer many tools for bypassing logic and the rational mind all together. The multitudinous surrealist economies of the future can best be explored as we begin to open ourselves up to forces far beyond market forces. It is in those subtle realms where the questions to our supposed are waiting.

.:. .:. .:.
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☕️☕️☕️

​In late 2011, not long after I had given a talk at the Esoteric Book Conference in Seattle on the topic of “The Library Angel & It’s Oracle,” my life took an unexpected turn. My step-daughter had joined the Junior Roller Derby Girls and on Wednesday nights we started taking her to practice up the road at one of the local roller rinks. Following the practice of the junior team, there was an open co-ed practice for the two adult teams, the Cincinnati Rollergirls for the women, and the Cincinnati Battering Rams for the men. I hadn’t ever expected to start training for roller derby, but for a few years that’s what we all did.

My wife and I had done yoga together on and off since after we first met. I had gotten into yoga after attending a kundalini yoga retreat led by Yogi Bhajan and his fellow Sikh’s in the desert of New Mexico the year I graduated from high school, but that is another story. There used to be a guy in town named “Joe Yoga” and he had a class he gave in the place he lived down in the Brighton neighborhood where a lot of artists had old lofts in warehouses and the like. After class he would crack up open a big magnum of red wine and light up the spliffs. At the time, that was my kind of work out and physical culture.

We went to another yoga class together at the neighborhood recreation center on and off for a little while, but it didn’t stick. Then it transformed into Pilates at an in-home studio run by a friend of ours. That was pretty much the extent of any kind of effort to stay in shape beyond going on long walks and hikes, which I’ve always loved. That was the way things stood until we fell into the subculture of roller derby.

I had enjoyed roller skating as a kid, but my real love had been skateboarding. My wife had really loved roller skating as well. Growing up on the West Side of the city, it was standard to spend at least some time hanging out at Western Rollerama, a venue that has now gone into extinction.

During the seventies and eighties the Rollerama even had an all-night skate, where parents could drop the kids off in the evening and pick them up in the wee hours of the morning. The only rule was you couldn’t go to sleep, or they would call your folks and make you go home. Talk about a cheap all babysitter so the parents could get some action. It is for experiences such as these, that Gen X is known as being feral.
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After a few times of taking the young one to practice, my spouse started getting interested in getting on the adult derby team herself, and the practice was a fun way to add to our exercise routine. I was a decent skater myself, but the majority of my skill came more from years skateboarding, which I started doing between the fifth and sixth grade. I had become an honest to earnest skater punk by junior high when my musical world exploded beyond the confines of mainstream metal and radio friendly alternative music. I still remember rocking out to The Descendants, The Ramones, Minor Threat and other punk bands as I was turned on to the music by older skaters and punks who had befriended me. I will always be grateful for the many mixtapes that were given to me in those days.

As a skateboarder, I developed many attitude problems. One of them was the way I looked down on rollerbladers. For one thing, rollerbladers were often permitted in parks and public places where skateboarding was prohibited. The other part was simple youthful arrogance and animosity. Rollerblading never had the same cache of outlaw cool as skateboarding had, so I never gave it a try. But roller derby players didn’t use rollerblades, so I was able to let go of some of my bias.
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There was one time, when I was dating a Baptist girl while in high school, where I allowed myself to skateboard with a rollerblader. She was practicing the time-honored method of “flirt to convert” and making out with me, but always leaving me hot and bothered and then wanting me to get saved. She was into rollerblading. On one outing we went to the park and she was on her blades and I was on my board. Later that night she cut it off with me after I took her to an industrial music tinged “rave” party in my friend’s basement where we were drinking cough syrup to have a cheap dissociative trip (some call robo the poor man’s PCP) dancing crazy to Nine Inch Nails as remixed by Coil, and the loud strains of "Psalm 69" by Ministry. As the night progressed, she thought I was possessed. By a demon. But that’s another story.

[This Coil & Danny Hyde remix of NIN fuckin’ slams]

All in all, for me, roller skating had been limited to outings for other people’s birthdays and elementary school field trips where it was given as a reward for those who had good behavior and grades. I still think it is weird that they had songs like “Push It” by Salt-N-Pepa blaring out over the speakers as the soundtrack for all of us fourth and fifth graders. I guess now it is some other highly sexualized pop song.​

Yet for all that I dissed rollerblading, roller skating had gained major street cred with me in the form of roller derby. Here was an amateur sport taken up mostly be punk rock girls, degenerate hipsters, and big butch lesbians who you wouldn’t want to mess with in a street fight. In other words, this was something I could get behind and celebrate. Plus, there is something about moving around on wheels I really did love and even though it wasn’t a skateboard, moving around the rink swiftly as I could was a lot of fun. I don’t think my quads were ever as strong as they were when we were doing those open practices.
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These practice sessions formed a kind of outer court for those who wanted to try out for the Rollergirls or Battering Rams. I was asked to try out, but there is something about team sports I can’t put myself behind too easily, even though I was less cynical about this than I was about football or soccer. I liked doing the drills, but I’m not a violent person, and I didn’t relish the “contact sport” aspect of the game. If there had been any kind of organized speed skating competitions, I might have gone for that, because that was always my favorite part: moving fast.

My wife tried out for the team, but she too is a really peaceful person. Not just a pacifist, but a vegetarian of several decades, and the past number of years, a committed vegan. Hitting people and knocking them down and bashing them around just didn’t come natural to either one of us. She was still disappointed by not making the team, but in the end, I was happy about her not getting on the team, at least in terms of her health. Any of the people we practiced with who did make the team at the tryouts always ended up with a broken leg or some other serious injury not long after they started playing real matches. Those breaks and injuries could happen at practice. It’s not for wussies.

We kind of drifted away from those practices when my step-daughter graduated from high school and was no longer on the junior team. I always feel like I am outsider in any kind of scene anyway, no matter how involved I am. Such is the fate of the fringe dweller. But I also am super fascinated by any kind of subculture, so it was really interesting to be a part of it for a little while, even if I kept my spot on the edge.
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We still enjoy going to see the Rollergirls play every now and again. Since I have my druthers about the military industrial sports complex (where bombers fly over sports stadiums, and military personnel make vast displays before a game) rollerderby is an alternative. It is an amateur enterprise, and the teams on the leagues that we go see are all part of non-profit organizations. No one is making a killing doing this stuff, and they aren’t celebrating killing in far off lands with their displays before the show. They just just beat the crap out of each other and injure each other for the fun of it and because they love to skate and slam into sweaty bodies. I can get behind that. I think I could be more of a fan of group sports if it was all a little more home spun.

With all that in mind, I thought I’d write about some of my favorite movies that involve roller skating and dystopian futures.

In film and literature my wife and I have always preferred science fiction and fantasy. Finding good science fiction films has gotten harder and harder as time has gone by. Luckily some of the best films are not “good” by any kind of standard that would win them an Oscar. Most of my favorite films never have and never will win any kind of academy award. Most of them have been confined to the genre ghetto in the same way as my favorite books. Others, being budget films, have the fact that they were made on a budget going against them. Yet I’ve always prized physical effects and imagination in storytelling over flashiness and big stars. A lot can be done to tell a story on the screen and making do with what is available. CGI, now on stereoids with AI, doesn’t appeal to me visually in the same way handmade and old school editing tricks do.

We also like to scour thrift stores, second hand shops, antique stores and flea markets. The kind of place that has an antique store vibe with old wares, but a flea market mindset with cheaper prices and bit of junk is kind of our sweet spot. We managed to find two such places on our recent modest vacation, camping at Pennyrile State Park in Kentucky. Then we stayed in an airbnb cabin on Nolin Lake near Mammoth Cave as our basecamp while exploring the National Park for a few days. One was called the Village Vendor in Leitchfield, the other was the Elizabethtown Peddlers Mall. I recommend both. When I’m walking through these booths I tend to gravitate towards used books and VHS tapes.

It was while scouring the bins of VHS tapes in one booth that I stumbled across a movie from 1991 that I had never heard of before. This film was also a scifi flick and it featured rollerskating. Win-win! We will start our run down of dystopian scifi rollerskating films with this one and go backwards in time from there. These movies all fall into my favorite era of film as well the 1970s through the 1990s.
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PRAYER OF THE ROLLERBOYS (1991)

I somehow missed this film until just a few weeks ago. I don’t know if it’s available on streaming. Maybe you can rent it from Prime or see it on YouTube. Or you can hunt around and find it randomly like I did. It stars Patricia Arquette and Corey Haim. I always liked Corey Haim and Corey Feldman. Both got pretty messed up by being young celebrities. Feldman still has his life, though. Stand By Me and The Lost Boys were some of my favorite films when I was in the fifth grade.

​I had pretty much started watching horror films in grade school. Not that my parents let me, per se, but being a feral Gen X kid, I did have a lot of unsupervised time with other kids on my street growing up and some of them had VCRs (we didn’t until I was in high school) and their parents had caches of horror films and other things we shouldn’t have been watching. No one stopped us from watching things like Hellraiser or Slaughter High or Halloween, because no one was paying attention to what we were watching or what we were doing. Maybe it made my mind warped, but I think I am better for the warping. Warpage adds character to the grain of the soul, right? The same way there is more grain in a old VHS tape with bad tracking.

​For whatever reason, maybe the writing, maybe the cheese factor, Prayer of the Rollerboys never made it big, though I suppose it has a bit of a cult following. I had never heard of it before however. The plot is a good one though, and it follows classic themes.

The United States is in the dumps following “The Great Crash,” not of 2008, but some other economic bubble collapse. Hey, that’s liable to happen any time with the current real estate market and speculation on AI. Go ahead and can call me a doomer or apologist of decline, I don’t mind. (The Decline of Western Civilization by Penelope Spheeris was another favorite film when I was a teen.)

The precise reason for this particular collapse was the greed of previous generations. Cue real estate comment I just made for replay. Everything went up for grabs by foreign markets and corporations. That doesn’t sound familiar from the past several decades of neoliberal economic policy, does it?

In this reality some people just get left behind. Some try to cope by numbing themselves with drugs, and there are new designer drugs allowing an escape. One of the people left behind is Griffin, played by Haim, a skilled rollerblader who lives a straight edge lifestyle. He and his little brother Miltie live in a tent on the grounds of a junk yard run by a friendly black man who has them under his wing. Beyond that, they are on their own. Their parents are dead, presumably from giving up and giving in to a life of drugs. “Heaven’s Mist” is the latest drug and it comes from overseas further destroying life in the states. (Fentanyl, anyone?)

Drugs need pushers and the people pushing “Heaven’s Mist” happen to be a gang called the Rollerboys. You guessed it, they are all bad ass rollerbladers, cruising around a devastated Los Angeles selling drugs. Meanwhile Griffin tries to do the right thing as a pizza delivery boy. He has to carry an automatic weapon while delivering pizzas, though, things have gotten so bad.

He is out on a run one night when he sees a kid in a burning house and saves him. Turns out the guy in the house is a Rollerboy, and for saving his life the leader of the Rollerboys owes Griffin a few favors. Turns out the leader of the gang just happens to be his best friend from childhood, Gary Lee, played by Christopher Collette, who had made horror history for his role in Sleepaway Camp. The gang seems more like a cult and Lee is always talking about something they are going to do in the near future, something called “The Day of the Rope.”

The little brother starts to hang around the Rollerboys, who have a strict policy of never using the drugs they deal themselves. But Miltie doesn’t follow the policy and after just a little while of dealing the Mist, he starts using. Griffin needs to find a way to pull him out before his little brothers mind is gone.

But there are also Rollergirls hanging out with the Rollerboys. One of them is Casey (Patricia Arquette) who we soon learn is working undercover for the police. The police also tag Griffin to work undercover to bring the Rollerboys and stop the “Day of the Rope.” It turns out this is a sinister final solution cooked up by Lee as a way to solve what he thinks are the problematic elements inside of what is left of American society.

It’s not my favorite movie starring Haim or Arquette. She doesn’t really get much of a chance to shine outside the role of ingenue. To see some of her real acting chops check out Richard Linklater’s Boyhood if you haven’t already. Yet I was glad to have watched this movie, because there is something about skating through derelict warehouses while having machine guns blast away and fighting against dystopian drug lords that warms my heart. The grain on the warped VHS tape mirrors the grain of my own soul.

I probably would have thought this movie was the shit when it came out. I would have been twelve.
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SOLARBABIES (1986)

Prayer of the Rollerboys wasn’t the first to marry dark futures with roller skating speed. Solarbabies had been there, done that in 1986. This one I had seen in my misspent youth. Sunday afternoons on our local Channel 64 was the place to park the dial on the tube if you had an interest in genre flicks as I did. That’s where I first saw John Carpenter’s Christine and They Live, and it’s where I first saw Luc Besson’s epic and memorable The Big Blue, which remains a grand film. It’s also where I first saw Solarbabies. When we were all getting into roller derby I brought it home from the library to watch again.

Like the other flick this film was a theatrical bomb, but has become something of a cult classic even though it doesn’t really add up plot wise. But hey, plots are for linear types. If you are truly into postmodernist fiction and thought, a plot doesn’t matter much anyway and something like Solarbabies can be enjoyed for the derivative camp that it is; and even derivative camp is a lot better than another fucking superhero movie. I’m just going to put my cards on the table and tell you I am not really a fan of those at all.

Solarbabies can also be connected to Lost Boys by way of Jami Gertz who plays the role of Terra. Her love interest is Jason, leader of a gang of orphans who play a sport that is kind of a cross between roller hockey and lacrosse. It’s kind of funny that such poor people would be playing anything related to lacrosse, which has always been a game for rich kids. However street hockey is for the broke, and the game probably leans more towards the broke anyway.

As usual with certain types of dystopias, a paramilitary group is trying to keep the lockdown on everyone in a post-apocalyptic world with major water shortages and desertification. They are called the Eco Protectorate. They need new recruits and look to the orphans for willing members, with the help of a little indoctrination along the way.
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Meanwhile a deaf boy named Daniel from the orphan gang has retreated to a cave as a hide out. There he discovers a mysterious sentient orb. The orb turns out to actually be an alien named Bodhi who restores Daniels hearing and can make it rain indoors, solving the water problem. It’s also friendly and cute. Yet the Eco Protectorate gets wind of it, and wants it for themselves and chase after Daniel, but another kid gets it and leaves the orphanage. The rest of the gang jump in to help Daniel retrieve the ball and they all end up fleeing into the desert where they join up with a band of outlaws known as the Eco Warriors. The leader of this group turns out to be Terra’s long-lost father. I guess that explains her daddy issues.

Somehow or other a plan is conceived to use their massive skating skills and raid the Eco Protectorate where there is a giant water storage facility. They do this and somehow the alien / magic ball reappears and the water is released back to the earth. The movie is sealed with a kiss between Terra and Jason and the kids go swimming in the newly restored ocean. Happy ending for an improbable film. But if you want some escapist nostalgia, I still recommend!
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ROLLERBALL (1975)

​Here is a litimus test for you. You know you are in a dystopia when people blow up trees for fun. That’s exactly what happens in the corporatocracy portrayed in this cinematic masterpiece. The movie followed the short story “Roller Ball Murder” by William Harrison that first appeared in Esquire in September 1973. He wrote the screenplay himself.

The film was set in the future of 2018. While we may not have live televised sports where murder is condoned and expected, Harrison got the corporatocracy part right. The set up is about a captain of the Houston Rollerball team and a corporate executive who wants to cut him a deal if he will retire early live on TV. This captain Jonathan E., played by James Caan, doesn’t want to make that deal. In point of fact, he is a bit ticked off at the corporations. Another executive had absconded with his wife Ella and there wasn’t much a lowly sportsman could do. Those fucking corporate bastards!

As the exec says, “Corporate society takes care of everything. And all it asks of anyone, all it’s ever asked of anyone ever, is not to interfere with management decisions.”

We’ve heard that before. James decides to do his own research. That’s as dangerous in the imagined future as it is now. He went to the library. They are data centers after all. What he found was that all the books then stored on supercomputers had been digitized and edited to suit the views and interests of the corporations. For some reason that didn’t sit right with him either.

Later James receives a visit from his former wife and they have a chat.

James: “I’ve been thinking, Ella. Thinking a lot -- and watching. It’s like people had a choice a long time ago between having all them nice things or freedom. Of course, they chose comfort.”

Ella: “But comfort is freedom. It always has been. The whole history of civilization is a struggle against poverty and need.”
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James: “No. No -- that’s not it. That’s never been it. Them privileges just buy us off.”

The whole plot point of her being bought by an executive reminds me of another classic scifi flick from the seventies, Soylent Green, where the managers of society get to live in fancy apartments with pieces of so-called “furniture,” i.e., what amounts to sex slaves.

Thankfully, I don’t really hang out with the superyacht rock crowd, but the sickening reality of human trafficking, and those who pay for such services, begs a lot of questions.

Eventually the main character is tipped off by an old coach and friend named Cletus tips him off that the Executive Committe at the Energy corporation, where the exec worked who wanted him to retire, is afraid of him. He better be on guard. He better look over his shoulder.

The sport starts being played with ever more ultra violence, ever more rough and looser with the rules. Houston is due to play Tokyo. There are no penalties in the match and no substitutions. The corporation wants Jonathan out. Excessive brutality brings exceptional ratings and several players end up dead, killed. One could say murdered.
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Then comes the final match. In between the beginning and the end there is a scene of gleeful executives blowing up trees. Same as it ever was.

​Peter is behind the harsh noise project Bridal Creeper which you can find scattered around the internets. This is a split made with Absurd Reality.