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.”
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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.
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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.

.:. .:. .:.
Thank you to all of my paid subscribers for keeping me caffeinated!

The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to this subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you to all my readers and supporters. Your generosity means the world and helps support my universalist bohemian art life! Thanks for keeping me caffeinated and wired.
Or grab some “dada not data” merch on Redbubble.

☕️☕️☕️

​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.

In the age of science we never lost our myths. They just shape shifted into new forms. Superman is one of the mightiest myths to have been born in the twentieth century and it came from the minds of two science fiction fanatics who had met in Cleveland, Ohio.

How to begin with this? In the same way we begin our days.

Superheroes lurk in the shadows of the American psyche, and in the American psyche the shadows of the superheroes are projected at large. In the language of Carl Jung, America has been under the possession of the Superman archetype. Like him, we become weak in the presence of radioactive minerals.

In 1938 Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced the world to Superman in Action Comics #1. Three years before in 1935, Siegel and Shuster had created the comic hero, Doctor Occult, a private investigator specializing in occult detection. Strange currents swirl in the hidden recesses of the collective mind. Doctor Occult appeared in various comic anthologies over the next three years, to put in time as a supernatural sleuth, but after Superman took off and took flight, he fell into a dark obscurity only to be revived in the 1980s.

​Doctor Occult had powers such as astral projection, telekinesis, hypnosis and the ability to make people see illusions. He carried with him the Mystic Symbol of the Seven, a powerful talisman that gave him further powers as an exorcist and protection from hostile powers.

Siegel and Shuster, lauded as the creators of Superman, a household name whose reputation as the Man of Steel sends supervillains to quake in their rubber boots, are less recognized as purveyors of secret mystical forces hidden away in the seldom read pages from the golden age of comics. What secret destiny of America might have awakened if Doctor Occult had ridden into ascendancy as the preeminent superhero to take hold of generations of comic book fans?

Siegel was born on October 17, 1914, in the great city of Cleveland, Ohio. His parents were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York in 1900 escaping the rising tide of antisemitism that would surge across the Russian Empire in a series of pogroms in the following years.

Siegel was a science fiction superfan. At age fifteen, in highschool, he is credited with creating one of the first scifi fanzine called Cosmic Stories. He had written some tales and sent them into Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories whose pages of pulp had filled him with marvel. It was early days yet in his career as a writer and the rejection slips inevitably followed. Undettered he just published the stories himself.

Joe Shuster had been born in Toronto to Jewish immigrants from Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The family barley had enough funds to get by and he worked as a newspaper boy before he’d even reached the age of ten when they moved from the northern shores of Lake Ontario, to the southern side of Lake Eerie.

At Glenville High School he met Siegel and the two hit it off. It also worked out that Shuster happened to be a burgeoning illustrator while Siegel was possessed with an affliction for stringing words together into stories.

“When Joe and I first met,” Siegel had said, “it was like the right chemicals coming together.”

The two started another fanzine together, as nerds in high school are wont to do. For people who are mistreated, judged, shy and bespectacled, part of a minority, science fiction has often given rise to a superiority complex in its fans as a form of psychological compensation. Their zine was titled Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization, and they were at the head of the class.

It was in the pages of this zine that the first version of superman appeared, and at first he was not a hero, but a villain. He was bald, he was telepathic, and he was bent on world domination. You can perhaps understand why someone might want to dominate the world when all you’ve know is a life of homelessness. Such was the case of character Bill Dunn who had been tricked by a scientist into being the test subject for a new drug. The drug gave him the powers of mind control and mind reading which Dunn used to his own ends, until the powers wore off as the drug left his system anyway, leaving him once again a homeless on the street. This story, “The Reign of the Superman” was not quite a success, but the title for the character got recycled later when they needed something really sensational to break into the tough comic strip market to which the pair aspired.

After numerous twists and turns as they tried to break into the comics industry, with Doctor Occult being just one of those twists, they managed to sell the rights to their Superman creation to Detective Comics Inc., the main branch of the various companies that eventually became DC, and one of the most well known superheroes in the entire pantheon of superheroes was born. As ever with contracts and royalties, they regretted the decision to sell their creation off so cheaply for just $130 (close to $3,000 when adjusted for inflation). Even so they still got to have a hand in it and reaped further rewards on the job as writer and illustrator for the popular series.

So what of superman himself? Superman is the ultimate immigrant, coming from another planet altogether, but his main agenda is just to fit in to American society. With the birthname Ka-El and hailing from Krypton far beyond our own solar system, he came to reside in the town of Smallville, Kansas. He was taken in by farmers. He was given the name Clark Kent. He was an alien who tried to assimilate.

In the 1940s when the Superman character migrated to radio serials he got tagged with a catchphrase. He had always had patriotic feelings about his adopted country, but now he was a standard bearer for “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”

In the aftermath of World War II actor George Reeves imprinted the phrase even further into the minds of adolescent baby boomers during his reign on the television show.

After World War II the last shreds of the British Empire was in tatters. America gladly took the reigns as world superpower. Clark Kent had come from elsewhere but he was a Midwest man with superpowers of his own, powers to set evil deeds to rights and to punish evil doers. Kent wrestled with his own strengths and weaknesses. As the American empire grew it developed its own superiority complex.

Over there, on the other side of the world, the evil communists of the USSR continued to plot and espionage games of cat and mouse were played on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The fear of the bomb hung over in the form of mushroom cloud nightmares and suburban bunker escape fantasies. By the 1980s the personal computer glowed with a screen of green letters and enter button whose click by malicious hackers could send intercontinental ballistic missiles out from silos hidden in the same Midwest Kansas farmlands as superman had been raised by his elderly human parents.

By 1978 Christopher Reeve was starring in a blockbuster film. Lex Luthor, a bald ordinary man with no superpowers but supremely evil in the worlds of business of technology, has masterminded a plot to divert military missiles into the San Andreas fault to trigger massive earthquakes and destruction.

It’s up to Superman to save the day. Good and evil. The savior who fights for freedom and sees the criminal served with justice. The superhero may have once lifted the American mind up into the heights of achievement as we stewed together in a century of self assimilation, but the superhero archetype quickly overextended itself. Now it was a dark mirror of Americas own capacity to always see an enemy over the shoulder, to always look to intervene on the international stage.
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Superman II also starring Reeve’s would hit the silver screens and people lined up at the box office in 1980 to see him fight evil again. The following year Ronald Reagan would be elected president.

​For Laurie Anderson, the 1980s were just another day in America. As an artistic receiving antenna, she was one of those who was able to pick up on what was going on in the collective psychic underworld. She transformed it into a body of work whose subject matter is the broad spectrum of American life. Her feat is all the more impressive in that she managed to do leave a wide mark in the consciousness of her audience, while remaining within the experimental tradition of the United States. Her corpus has remained relatable even to those without advanced art degrees, and that is part of its power. Combining multimedia presentations, conceptual spoken word antics, rock and pop music with an acute visual sensibility has given her a general relatability, that other artists working in similar ways, such as Robert Ashley, didn’t quite achieve.

Perhaps part of her relatability is because of all the years spent steeped in the Midwest growing up.

Anderson was born in Wayne, Illinois, just on the outskirts of Chicago on June 5th, 1947 one of eight kids to Mary Louise and Arthur T. Anderson. Wayne was originally a town named Wayne Station, and was named after Mad Anthony Wayne. His legacy of ethnic cleansing and slavery lives on in the numerous places named after him, in all the monuments erected and dedicated to his genocidal war filled life. Her family later moved to Glen Ellyn, a suburb some twenty-four miles west of Chicago proper.

Anderson started playing violin at age five, and as she got older she played with the Chicago Youth Symphony when she wasn’t hanging out at the Art Institute of Chicago where she studied painting. Violin playing and the spirit of the art life formed a sturdy cornerstone for what flowed out of her afterwards.

When high school was over she went out to the west coast where she studied biology at Mills College. The Bay Area was a happening scene in those days, and it was while she was studying science that she realized she really wanted to focus on making art, a move that, strangely, would lead her back to “big science”. She crossed the country to New York where she went to Barnard College, studying art history, and then got a masters in sculpture from Columbia University by 1972.

Meanwhile in 1970 she had drawn the underground comix Balone Moccasins. The cover features a scene of the capitol building and other places in Washington D.C. under siege with flaming hurls of doo being lobbed at the building and a caption that reads “eat poo whitey.” The subtitle is “a magazine for the medieval mind.” It came out under the imprint of Half-Ass Press, run by one George DiCaprio, daddy of the actor Leo.

1972 was also the same year she did one of her early pieces of performance art. This one was called Automotive. It was a concert for car horns which she orchestrated at the Town Green in Rochester, Vermont. The sound must have been something else. Sometimes the sound of an angry traffic jam is what it takes to open up the aesthetic senses of the nation.

Anderson’s training in sculpture served her well. It led to the development of several new musical instruments and inventions. She performed Duets on Ice in 1974 in New York City. For this work she wore ice skates frozen into a block of ice. She sang and played cowboy songs on her violin while accompanied by a recording. The piece only ended when the blocks of ice melted. She toured with this piece in other cities along with some of her other repertoire.

Another piece was for the Whitney Museum in 1976 called “For Instants,” the title showing her love of word play that became very pronounced in her word-oriented routines probing the American vernacular. For this one she used an electric violin and had a film projected on her while she played.

The next year in 1977 she created one of her famous instruments, the Tape Bow Violin. For the bow, she replaced the traditional horsehair with magnetic, typically with a prerecorded phrase. In place of the normal bridge she included a tape head, the gear that makes audio tape give off its sound when the tape runs over it; in this instance, when she runs the bow across the tape head it produces the sound. She would use another iteration of this instrument in her concert film Home of the Brave where the voice of William S. Burroughs is able to be manipulated.
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Being musically minded, she started putting percussive beats into her spoken word pieces as a kind of glue to hold the compositions together. Her musical single “It’s Not the Bullet That Kills You – It’s the Hole” from 1977 was a case in point and was one of the bridges that began shifting her career towards that of an art pop recording artist, though she remains forever a multimedia and multimodal talent.

The song features harmonica, bass, violin, and hand-clapping with humorous lyrics. It was a fun experiment working with the recorded medium and she decided to do more. Some were much more experimental, such as those featured on the Women in Electronic Music compilation released by New World Records. These songs “New York Social Life” and “Time to Go”
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Recorded media is just another way of getting art out to the public, and she would reach the public in a big way with her 1981 UK hit “O Superman.” Sometimes an American artist is at first better received in lands far from home then on the land where they were born. Eight-minute songs aren’t usually in the top spots in the charts, but this one reached number two.

In the song she sings through a vocoder with a minimalist backdrop of music about planes that have been Made in America. “Neither snow nor rain nor gloom / of night shall stay these couriers from the swift / completion of their appointed rounds. / Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice. / And when justice is gone, there’s always force.”

The use of force has always been popular among empires. In the face of massive forces beyond individual control, the notion of being held in the arms of a mother seems natural. Only Anderson sings about a mom with automatic arms and electronic arms. “So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. / Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms. / In your electronic arms.”

Even now those electronic arms reach out to embrace. But are arms with hands at the end of them or the kind of arms that end in a warhead? It’s not the thermonuclear warhead that kills you, but the explosion.

The song became one of the centerpieces in a much longer work of performance art and music that she performed and recorded in 1983, the epic stage work United States Live. This became her first major magnum opus, a gesamtkunstwerk, using all the skills she had developed up to that point: her violin playing, her unique tape head violin instrument, her use of technology in the form of vocoders and speech filters to create different voice characters and personalities, her use of visual imagery and projections, all allowed Anderson to give a different take on American destiny.

It was a take that spanned two four-hour shows across two nights to tell the whole story. A story as epic as America. It was her way of putting an imaginative imprint on the nascent mind of the nation. The Reaganites of the Religious Right had their ethos, but it certainly wasn’t the only interpretation of the American spirit on offer.

​Featuring spoken word pieces, songs, song stories, and story songs, along with a live visual show, she presents topical pieces across four parts in that cover transportation and politics, money and technology, public life and private life. These four parts were further split into seventy-eight segments and the work was performed across two-nights at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Drawings, animation and text projections completed the spectacle.

The medium was the message and just as Anderson herself is a multimedia storyteller, she showed that America is so diverse, strange, weird, at once wonderful, terrifying and banal, through the skillful employment of multiple mediums simultaneously. There are many Americas and all of them can be happening at once.
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The stories contained are non-linear just like American history itself. Yes, history happens in time, but our experience of it later can be disparate: one event effecting the perception of the present in one moment, another in another. Like the continent itself the history is also vast. She was comfortable with a kind of storytelling approach that allows a person to dip and out of various experiences, just as people now dip in and out of various digital platforms and mediated spectacle.

The United States its people and its artists continued to inform her growing body of work. Her 1986 concert film and studio album/soundtrack Home of the Brave invaded peoples minds like a language virus, as communicated about communication breakdown, and the increasing ways technology mediates our experience of language. The film included an appearance from William S. Burroughs along with musical luminaries. Notions of patriotism are again question and interpolated through playful artistic concepts. Some songs from United States Live and previous recordings get recycled and given the film treatment. Her humor in upturning the norms of society is never totally cynical but remains humorous. This lighthearted playfulness present in her work is one of the keys to its success and longevity.

In 1999 she created Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, a kind of techno opera, again showcasing her talent as a multimedia artist. That she would tackle one of the great American novels shows not just her affinity for working with the core material of culture in the United States, but also a need to share its continued relevance as people struggle to find their ways in what can be a difficult but hopeful nation. Her works have always had some political edge. Her 2015 piece Habeas Corpus showedone of the harsh consequences of empire by featuring a live telepresence projection of Mohammed el Gharani. At age 14, he was one of the youngest detainees held at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp

​In 2024, she released Amelia, and album chronicling the ill fated flight of Amelia Earheart, another person whose legend now takes on archetypal dimensions in the American mind.

Like superman, Amelia was driven to fly, but she was brave, but she never came back to the home of the brave. Artists like Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and Laurie Anderson all cast their light on what it means make the United States a home.
.:. .:. .:.
I had the honor of being published in Romanticon with my essay “How to Be a Bard” that takes a look at Gary Snyder’s poem, “What You Should Know to Be a Poet” as if it were a curriculum for an aspiring bard in the Druid Revival tradition.

And if you missed the other parts of the non-linear series American Psychogeography, you can find them below:

Green Books and Great Migrations

The Sprawl
Roadrunning the M.ilitary I.ndustrial T.emplate
The New Explorations of a Geotechnician

Looking Backwards at Route 128
.:. .:. .:.
Thank you to all of my paid subscribers for keeping me caffeinated!


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☕️☕️☕️

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was a British-born Mexican artist, a surrealist painter, novelist and short story writer. and founding member of the women’s liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s. She was an esoteric explorer of the inner worlds.
 
The Carrington Event was the most intense recorded geomagnetic storm so far in our known history. It peaked on September 1st and 2nd in 1859. It was triggered by a massive solar flare and subsequent coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun. The waves of solar energy from this storm went straight into the Earth's magnetosphere in just under 18 hours, which is very fast, even for that kind of energy. The event was named after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first person to ever observe and record a solar flare. One of the effects of the Carrington event was impressive displays of Aurora Borealis across the Northern and Southern Hemisphere, the phenomenon moving far beyond its normal range. Another effect was the way it broke the early electronic communications system of the telegraph. The geomagnetically induced current from the electromagnetic field caused the telegraphs to fail, even giving shocks to some operators, and causing sparks to fly off the wires, poles and other equipment. In some cases though, messages could be sent even when the telegraphs were unplugged: there was enough juice running through the system from the geomagnetic disturbance to power the wires. It has been thought by some that if an equivalent type of mass coronal ejection occurred in our times, it would lead to the destruction of satellites, telecommunications infrastructure, and widespread power outages.

This story is set in a not-too-distant future when electrical systems are already on the fritz, black outs and brown outs common, with sunspots and solar flares very active at the peak of an intense solar cycle.
---
  
DAVE

Dave had grown bored with listening to the space weather on shortwave. It was always the same thing, over and over again. Solar storms, more solar storms, fast solar winds, X-flares, dark holes and more dark holes. It did affect the remnants of the communication grid at times, but not enough to match the newscasters overblown hype.

The weatherwoman read out her report in exaggerated tones meant to maximize hype and terrify people into staying home. Weather forecasters always thought the end was nigh. Her voice crackled through the swish and static of the shortwave. “Geomagnetic storm conditions continue to get worse over the next twelve hours, and may cause major disturbances to the Earth’s magnetic field. With storms hitting an unprecedented G7 strength, there is a high likelihood that this will cause issues with the remains of the power grid due to voltage fluctuations. If you are near electrical equipment, be careful because there is a real danger of shocks during this storm. On the plus side Aurora Borealis will be seen all the way down into the south. People who’ve headed to the beaches of Tennessee this summer to swim in the expanded Gulf of Mississippi, are likely to see extreme displays of green and mauve color. It is likely to be so strange and strong this particular storm has been dubbed the Leonora Carrington after the famous surrealist painter.”

Blah, blah, blah. He’d lived through dozens of geomagnetic storms and they didn’t much impact his day-to-day life. They hadn’t even wipe out all the satellites in orbit around the earth. Some were still working, not that regular folk got to use them ever. If it was a tornado coming his way he’d worry, but until then he was too tired to worry. As it was, he was dead tired and his fingers were sore from a marathon sole sewing session at Monty’s Mountain of Shoes where he worked in the back, rehabbing forgotten footwear back into shape for the secondhand market. He worked as part of a team of twelve others, mostly relatives of Monty’s who all liked to join in busting his balls with one wisecrack at his expense after another. The ribbing he got was almost more annoying than pricking himself in the finger with the needle over and over again.

What he really needed some more sleep, and the sun was well down with all its blasted solar radiation, so why not go to bed?

After Dave blew out his oil lamp he triple-checked to make sure it was fully doused. He’d become a little paranoid about the lamps and candles and stove ever since Edwin’s place down the road caught on fire after their Fourth of July party two years before. The fire department hadn’t been able to determine if it had been caused by fireworks or by one of his many oil lamps and candle nubs. Dave’s older friend Maxie had taken to calling him “oh-see-dee” whatever the flying lizard that meant. Something to do with checking things over and over again.

He turned off the radio, unplugged it from the battery, double checked to make sure he had unplugged it again, made sure the battery was safe, then laid down, got back up, checked the lamp, checked the battery, checked the radio, the laid back down. Maybe he was “oh-see-dee,” but if he weren’t worried he wouldn’t have been checking.
 
Then he said his prayers to the Milk Mother and tried to go to sleep, but Granny Inglebert’s coonhound was barking a baleful tune up at the hazy wisp of the crescent moon as it shone down through his cracked windows. The dog had just shut up and he had just started to dream about Amy Addison in the daisy dukes he’d seen her in late last summer when she was stringing up the beans from her garden, when the blasted dog let out another bale of mournful sound. His eyes flickered open and that’s when he saw the green midnight glow refracted through the dust-tinged pane of his busted-up window.

Aurora borealis. He’d never seen it before. Maybe that G7 geomagnetic storm really was going to be as disastrous as all the chattering yakkety-yakkers on the radio said it was going to be. Maybe it really would be a Carrington event and the entire electrical grid would become toast. Yet for as long as people had talked about the Carrington event, it hadn’t ever happened in his lifetime. Maybe it would and people would give up talking about the damn thing.

Strangely, the barking dog wasn’t a dog anymore, but a cow, mooing. If it had been a goat bleating he wouldn’t have worried. Plenty of city folk had goats after all. But a cow? That a was a bit exotic for city folk. Only those out in the burbs had cows. Then the cow was jumping over the moon and the sound of a trumpet was echoing, echoing, echoing. Soon he found himself going inside a home that was a shoe and meeting the old woman there. He was just glad she hadn’t started asking for repairs. He did not know, after all, whether he could spare any more of his sole.

MRS. INGLEBERT

Mrs. Inglebert’s day had already gone awry when the green midnight glow came and infected everything withs its dolorous echo. Now that echo rattled around inside her head and everything was looking the color of moon cheese. She wondered where her daughter Candy had been. It had been a long time since she’d seen Candy. There had been that other woman coming around to check on her who said she was Candy, but who wasn’t Candy. She was someone else. She was potentially even something else.

But maybe that was just the voice of the worm that had gotten inside of her after her husband Fred had died. Maybe it had been Candy after all. The control worm tried to steer her off course, but she couldn’t let it do so. She had to get the thing out of her somehow.

She hadn’t wanted to leave the house anyway. She hadn’t for some time. Even things like going down to the river to fish for carp didn’t give her the same kind of pleasure it had all those years ago. She used to meet her friend Amber down there and they would fish together. This was after both of their husbands had died. They’d both gone down to fish with them in the mornings, or in the evenings in the summer. The Florida Fever had taken their men away as it surged up from the swamps of the flooded south ten odd years ago, and for awhile afterwards she’d each kept up the fishing habit with Amber. Then she was taken in by her son, who lived in Cincinnati on the other side, and it became rather inconvenient for them to get together. She’d stopped going fishing and stopped doing a lot of other things after that, and most of her time was spent alone, listening to the radio.

Every now and again the woman who called herself by her daughter’s name came over to check on her, make sure she had enough food, that she was washing herself, and her clothes. This lady was very nice, she did seem concerned, she did want to help her, but she didn’t want to be helped. She wondered where her real daughter had gone off to, and why this lady called herself that. Damn impersonators, there were more of them now than ever. Now that Fred was gone, everything was different.

The green light was making her see Fred as if he was there. She heard his voice coming in off the and street down the telephone lines. She was one of the houses who still had telephone service, so she decided to pick up the phone and see if Fred was there. The black phone hung on the wall made of old thick hard plastic. It came from another time, part of the wave of repurposing she had lived through as a girl.

“Hello…” she said with a tentativeness that reminded her of what courting Fred had been like a lifetime ago.

“Hey darling, I wanted to let you know I caught a really big fish, and I got this feeling there is gonna be another one. Why don’t you get the rods and reels, and dig up some worms out of the compost, I know there’s plenty in there. Come on down to the river, and get yourself a real big big fish with me. It might be the biggest one you ever catch I promise.”

“Oh, Fred, I don’t know if I can. I need to wait here. I’m afraid of going out on the street. There is a big green light painted across the sky and it’s covering up all the stars. The moon has disappeared and I don’t know what to think of anything. There is a girl who comes to our house, and she say’s her name is Candy, but I don’t know if it is. I don’t know if it is her or if it’s the worm inside me telling me its not her. But I don’t know how it could be her. She doesn’t act like Candy used to. But maybe it is, I’m so confused.”

“There’s no worm in her darling, it’s just cause she’s taken up with that bad man. You know the one, Harvey. He isn’t any good to her. She needs to get away from him, take you with her. Get out of dodge. I think if you go down to the river and catch that fish, it’ll help you get her back on your side, get her away from that man and all the stuff he makes her do for him. Can you do that for me darling? Can you go down there and catch that fish? We can even use the worm inside you as bait, and get it out of you in the process”

“You know I can. Anything for you. If you really think it will be alright, I’ll go. I don’t know how it’s going to help, but if you say it will help, I trust you. I know you never lied to me.”

“You’ll figure out what you need to do when you get there,” he said to her. “I gotta go now.”

And then the line was clear, back to its hovering tone, and his voice could no longer be discerned from the static.

She went out to the back yard and into the outhouse, where she kept the fishing rods. They stood up nicely there. Then she got a small pot from the table she had outside where she used to work on her plants and scooped up some mud from the compost, fresh with writhing worms. Maybe it wasn’t a worm inside her daughter’s brain. Maybe it was just the voice of that man named Harvey.
 
HARVEY
 
Harvey was jolted out of sleep by a dream he was having of the stock market crashing. But day trading hadn’t started yet, it was only 1 AM. He was wondering if he could get a message down to his stock man and relay something to the main exchange in Chicago before it all fell to shit. He’d been a teenager during the second great depression and he had hated anything termed “finance” with a passion, even as he was a whiz at math. Little did he imagine he’d end up getting addicted to gambling on the horse races, moving across the river to Newport, Kentucky, and setting himself up as bookie. He didn’t know if that counted as finance.

It had proved to be a profitable pastime, even when most folk were flat fucking broke; there were always some who still found a way to place a few bets. When he’d become flush, he’d found himself looking for new things to bet on. As they country rebuilt itself, after shedding some of its excess weight in a series of semi-peaceful successions, the economy bounced back. Things weren’t what they had been before the crash. That had been a racket just as much as the one he was running. He’d just bought stock in a new analog computer company. He was hoping to pick up one of their mechanical calculators for his own personal use, until he’d had the dream of the stock market plunge. Now he saw the machines for what they were. Number eating demons.

Then he saw the light from the window, glowing green and mauve, bathing everything in his back room in the magic of the Northern Lights -maybe they should start calling it the Midwest Lights, it had come down to the area more and more often with all the geomagnetic activity. Then he felt the reassuring presence of the gun under his pillow but it was one of the only tangible things he could feel at the moment. He got up to look at the numbers in his books on the desk wear he’d left his bourbon and cigar, and they meant nothing to him anymore. The green light dissolved math. He couldn’t read the numbers. They were now nothing except a collection of squiggly lines. Where once had been the inflow and outflow of cash, glorious cash, now there was just an overflow of what could have been a sequence of randomized digits written across the page. Where there had once been the order of the mathematical realm, now there was just Dada. He suddenly felt as if he should call up Dr. Benjamin from the Covington Point Mental Hospital, maybe get his head examined. That quack psychiatrist had loved to place bets, and he’d paid him off handsomely to take in his wife Meredith when she started giving him trouble, when she started getting mouthy and threatening to go to the police. Maybe he’d eaten a bad piece of pizza down at Guidi’s-by-the-Slice. He pulled over the trash can and peperoni inflected bile poured from his mouth.

The dream was now alive and looking at him, as sweat poured down his face, manifesting out of the mauve light. Numbers swirled through the belly of a machine without rest or repose, and he laid down to sleep inside his dream, and the numbers bled out of his ear onto the pillow, in inky pools, fives, sixes, sevens. All they invoked now were alien geometries skewed at odd angles that he could only interpret as gibberish.
His on-again-off-again girlfriend Candy was looking at him in the dream whispering, waiting, hoping he would come over to comfort her. She had showed him the chart where the stock market had crashed. That much he did understand. The jagged plunge of the line. She was giving him the numbers, telling him his bank statement, trying to show him, but any time she mouthed a figure it came out as silence and he could not hear her normal, high pitched, smoky satin voice that was kind of rough from growing up hard around the tracks, the stages, all the glitz and nightlife of Newport as the few lawmen who roamed its streets looked the other way.

He’d always been a numbers man, a betting man, a booking man, and now what was he going to be that all those things, all those scratches had proven to be the inchoate ravings of a mad man?
 
CANDY
 
Candy Inglebert was absolutely sure her mother had gone insane. It wasn’t just your run old age and the head tweaking problems that came from untreated urinary tract infections. She’d dealt with that, and this wasn’t that, she’d had her mom teted down at the clinic and it wasn’t a UTI. This was certified loony bin material. Harvey had told her to call up Dr. Benjamin and have his cronies come, slap a strait jacket on her, and have her committed. That was just him being selfish, she realized, not wanting to have her have to deal with anything that might keep her away from him, under his thumb, where he wanted her to stay.

She didn’t want to get rid of her, now she wanted to get rid of him. She just needed some help taking care of her, and there wasn’t any help. As it was, she was stuck with her, for better or worse, and it was much, much worse than her marriage to Tim had been, and that was saying something. He’d been addicted to nepenthe and it had swiss cheesed his brain. She didn’t know how she was going to handle the situation.

Harvey had come on to her strong when she was having a wild night out at the Newport Supper Club. The Big Diamond Revival Band was playing all the Swing Bop classics and he’d sidled over to her. The smell of bourbon, cigars, and his strong cologne made her feel dreamy and they’d danced. She hadn’t intended on becoming the girlfriend of a bookie, it was just something that kind of happened, and he started out treating her well enough, unlike her last beau Bob, who liked to get slappy. Still, no one had been as bad as Tim.

She had just left her mom’s place, had finally gotten her settled down and was headed home. She stayed over at Harvey’s most nights, but liked to keep her efficiency above the Derby Dogs Chili parlor. It always smelled like boiled meat and chopped onions above the joint but it was a small price to pay to have moments of freedom away from mom, away from Harvey. He wanted her to get rid of the place, move in with him, but she had refused. After the latest thing he had said about her mom, she was glad she hadn’t kept up with the rent. Someone who worked for him had told her what he’d done to his wife, and that had really scared her.

She wanted to cut him out of her life, but he was much powerful than her, the mob more powerful than the cops.

 She had just turned onto her street when the telephone lines started to sizzle. Phone systems had been tricky to maintain after the Derp, but not impossible, and for the most part only worked on local exchanges, because the national system had become so fragile, on top of an electric grid in shambles. Sparks erupted off the poles, and she could hear voices emanating from the lines. It would have been one thing if what they were saying was an ordinary conversation, but it wasn’t.

She was certain the voices originated from the peculiar colors of the aurora that that blanketed the greater Cincinnati region in a green midnight glow. She didn’t know how she knew but she knew, a gut instinct that bypassed the rational mind. The conversations she heard were like the one she had with her mom and they made her shudder. Difficult conversations that bordered on the unreal.

That unreality now followed her down the street in a babel of meaningless utterance, like an evangelical falling prey to a fit of tongue speaking. The only thing missing was the froth and the spittle. A crowd of staring people had spilled out of the Anchors Away Bar. They gesticulated like little insects, their skinny little fingers made antennae that pointed up at the sky, waiting for a signal. She felt for sure those antennae were on the receiving end of something. What they were receiving, she could not be sure. Was it malevolent, benevolent, or just a temporary psychotic break? She was at least relieved that it wasn’t just her. The crowd also heard the sizzle of electric talk as it passed down the lines.

All she knew was, she wasn’t ready to go crazy just yet.
 
DR. BENJAMIN
 
At Dr. Benjamin’s madhouse the residents had gone suddenly quiet. He hadn’t even flicked anyone with Thorazine. Nobody had gone sleepy on Seraquel. It was like they had been dosed up on their own. Their incessant crooning had stopped. He didn’t like it when it got too quiet in his hospital. It felt wrong. Maybe it was the cocaine.

He hadn’t expected his little snort of cocaine to have such a deafening effect on him, he was sure that’s what it was. It had to be. He worked such long hours, he needed to get through. He thought he ought to cut back some day, but how could he when their were so may patients to see, so many experiments to run? Maybe the experiments could wait. Maybe he should spend more time at home tending to the needs of his wife and the wants of his kids.

Dr. Benjamin’s hadn’t intended for his hospital to become a prison for men who hated their wives. Yet that was what had happened, at least in part, a side effect of being too indulgent with himself, and certain habits putting him under the thumb of the town’s real bosses -the Newport mob. There really were people who were certifiably insane in his ward. There were plenty of those. Nepenthe heads who had damaged themselves so bad on drugs that they couldn’t be told apart from your natural born paranoid schizophrenic, who were also locked up.

Harvey’s wife hadn’t been the first. He was with Candy now because Dolores hadn’t been enough for him. She’d been too much in fact. When she started questioning some of the men he was associating with, when he was getting deeper into league with the Newport mob. She’d been fine with the book keeping of course, but when he’d had to knock off a few rivals she started having panic attacks. Now she was here, in permanent detention. The anxiety attacks had of course been very real. Every time an orderly came into her room, she panicked.

She was down below now. That’s where he liked to keep the most hysterical of patients. The most hysterical of them were all woman of course, though a few pansies had gone down into the third subbasement. BDSM types would have called it a dungeon, but he preferred the term “down below”. It was a kind of subconscious hell for them, but it was where they belonged. It was where he did his experiments.
 
DOLORES
 
Dolores knew she shouldn’t be where she was. That didn’t change the fact that she was there. Cast aside for some low-town hussy. She’d been good to Harvey. She’d kept her side of the marriage vows, only to end up caged and enraged.

She’d of course been faking the swallowing of her pills as long and as often as she could. The injections were harder to fake. But the orderlies hadn’t come, and neither had Dr. Benjamin, who she knew fantasized about having his way with her, she could just see it on his lecherous face, but for some reason he never acted. She guessed it had something to do with Harvey. Instructions from him, that even though he’d had her committed, she wasn’t to be touched by anyone else. He never visited except when he was in a cruel mood. Crueler mood, anyway. If she’d known as much about him as she did now when she first courted him, she would have kept her distance. He had only showed his charming side then, the side that was a big spender, the side with grand plans and ambitions. He was still ambitious, but it had taken a darker turn when he started courting power for powers sake. When he started hoarding money just to have more. When the bookkeeping changed from just a few bets with friends, to the whole block, to the whole neighborhood, to the whole town. Then, when he was rolling in the dough, he didn’t know what to do with himself, and couldn’t keep his shit together.

            When he started in on the cocaine, that’s when things really took a turn, and it exacerbated his know-it-all, can-do-it-all attitude. Downward spiral after downward spiral after that, only he thought he was going up. It was only a matter of time before it was him on the wrong side of a bullet from a gun thug.

She hadn’t kept her mouth shut about how unhappy she was either, about how she wanted him to stop. Her periodic bouts of depression didn’t help and she ended up in Dr. Benjamin’s lair of psychological sadism.

            In this dank cell, this padded room, she’d been kept in a state of uncomfortable numbness. Her mind was coated in a gauze that kept thoughts and emotions at bay, as if they were distant points of light down some sinister hall. This late evening she’d awaken from another sleep void of dreams. It was the best kind of sleep, as the dreams only tortured her, nightmares of worse times yet to come, or nightmares of a life she never got to live because she’d placed her faith in the wrong kind of man. In any one other than herself, really. The chemical suffusion that so clouded her sense of self was strangely absent. It was one kind of freedom anyway. That was when Larry the orderly came to her door.
 
LARRY
           
The place was strangely quiet, except for a voice that seemed to emanate from the green glow he caught in the sky as he made his rounds on the upper floors, cleaning up the mess of excrement and vomit caused by Dr. Benjamin’s experiments. The glow made what little electric light they had inside flicker with a ferocity he hadn’t elsewise known, it was almost dangerous, and there were myriad voices coming down the wires. “Open up all the doors”, one of them said as a commanding whisper inside his mind, “set my people free”.

At that moment Larry was seized with a fierce vitriol. He would let them free. They were just like him in a way, kicked to the curb one too many times, underdogs. And he knew for a fact many of them weren’t insane at all, especially when he compared them to some of the people he knew on the outside, the people in charge, the people running things. He remembered how Dr. Benjamin had insulted him when he caught him reading an old horror manga comic in the janitors closet where he would sometimes hide between duties. He’d picked that one up at the 9th street flea market last Saturday. Syd always had the good stuff at his table, and he hadn’t been disappointed when he’d gotten a copy of Fumitada Batoh’s much overlooked masterpiece Neverending Underworld. Benjamin called it mind rotting filth, and had told him to go scrub out the toilets, and when he was done with that, to give Ralph a coffee enema. Ralph was a patient who had been constipated, and Benjamin said Ralph couldn’t get stuck at the anal-territorial stage. Larry had grown to resent enema duty. It had seemed alright when he first got on the job, but he’d grown to realize that the doctor and his staff saw him just as much a patient as the weirdos they’d locked up. The mind games they played on him were getting to be too much, and he was going to do something about it.

This was the time to do it too, working the graveyard shift. He was surprised Dr. Benjamin was still here, but he was a sadist, and had strange experiments and relations with his patients. Most of the other orderlies were gone, and those who were there, were as weird as Dr. Benjamin. Larry now wished he’d never taken the job, but they didn’t ask too many questions asked about his past, and since he started the work, he’d been too afraid to quit. Not tonight. His last night.

            The voices told him to start at the bottom and work his way up. Get the queen bee out first. Harvey’s wife. As the spouse of someone high up in the mob, it made the most sense, or so the green glow told him. Other things had stopped making sense, and he felt an increasing dreamlike quality had been grafted onto his mind and time seemed stretched.

            Normally time was like a loop. He’d head home after work when the sun was coming up, maybe stop at Derby Dogs Chili for a couple coneys and two or three beers. They were always open early and catered to those who worked third shift, and to those who worked first who needed a drink and some sustenance in the morning. Then he’d go into his little apartment up on the third floor above Squallie’s Corner Store and Deli, feed his cat Buster half a can of sardines, he’d eat the other half, then maybe drink another beer, look at a dirty magazine, and pass out on the couch. He’d get up, flick off the bed bugs, read some horror comics for an hour or two while he drank weak coffee. He stretched it as far as he could, running water through the same grounds in his French press three or four times. It got him going and he’d stumble down the steps to hang out on the bench with the old timers and shoot the shit while he smoked a cheap cigar. He’d hung out with them more and more since his old lady Darlene walked out on him. She’d grown tired of his comic books and nudie rags, and his laziness. Without her bringing home the bread, mayo, and bacon he’d been forced to get a regular job. As much as he talked about bringing home money from his pool hustling, most of it was always spent on beer.

            He hoped Darlene was happy with that guy who owned the vegetable cart. He seemed like a decent fellow. He hated his guts of course, but he seemed upright and not the hurting type. He didn’t want to see Darlene hurt. He knew that he’d neglected her, but at least he’d taught himself to read. He wanted to be smarter. That’s why he read nudie mags and comic books.

            This time was weird. It wasn’t like his daily routine. It was all stretched out like a bit of chewed on taffy.

            Maybe Dolores herself would run off with him, he thought, as he opened the door to her cell. That’s when the sparks flew and the electric went out in the whole place. 
 
DOLORES
           
This was the moment Dolores needed to seize. She had never thought to escape from the padded, piss smelling room. Opportunity had come in an unlikely ally. Larry seemed to be caught in a trance as he fumbled the lock.

            “Quick, to the others” she whispered and so they went. Some were in straight-jackets. Others were in the straight-jacket of depression and psychiatric drugs. A few stayed behind, silent in catatonia. Others joined and soon were in the stairwell liberating the next level up. Ambling zombies had nothing on the bedraggled wards who now seethed out, eager to reach the mauve zone they could see outside the window, a land swimming with dreams.

            “What if we get caught. What if we don’t make it?”

            “What if we do?”

            This seemed to rally them, like the call of a distant bell or trumpet. A clarion was ringing from the Holy Sophia Parish a few blocks away and the sound bloomed into the fragrance of a hundred roses. The scent was intoxicating, the smell of alien worlds releasing their scent onto Earth. Then it seemed a giant bumble bee, as large and boisterous as a goat, circled down from the stars to the field of roses that glittered in the auroral light, to collect pollen for the nectar of the gods.

            Everyone could see the glow. The walls that had become translucent. One more floor of mind prisoners released, their manacles broken.
 
DR. BENJAMIN
           
This was what he had feared. Larry and Dolores were leading them, and they were all in his office. They had him in their frenzied clutch, dragging him over to a padded cell, putting him a straight-jacket. Then his pants were being pulled down. Larry had the works, he saw. The coffee enema works. The tube was up his butt, and with no lube. The caffeine hit his mind just as he thought that last snort of cocaine was wearing off.

            The jolt was not totally unpleasant. Neither was the tube. He didn’t like being the bottom, but he supposed he deserved being the bottom. All the stuff that had been locked up inside him was now leaking from his bottom and it was the memory of getting picked on in the alleyways of Covington, the memory of being made to do things he didn’t want to do, at gunpoint by his best friend Teddy, who’d they all later learned had been the one poisoning the cats. Later Teddy’s mother had been found dead, and Teddy had disappeared into the hollers, never to be heard from again.

            He missed Teddy, but now those long gone cats from the alleys meowed and prowled around him like spectral holographs waiting to have their own revenge.

            Dolores punched him in the head before dragging him down into the puddle of his own liquid shit. And he stayed there until nurse Bill Larson came in the next day and sprayed him off with the same hose he used for cold water hydrotherapy.

            Perhaps it was finally time to retire to the same dark hollers where Teddy had gone.
 
HARVEY
           
Harvey banged his head against the wall, but it didn’t help him wake up out of the nightmare. Then he heard the banging on his door. It was a male voice, one he didn’t know or recognize. One of his gun thugs should have been there to answer it, but his protection had all been drawn like deer in headlights out into the streets where many were being dazzled by the celestial lightshow and the hallucinatory effects it was having. The door swung open and there they were. His wife Dolores and some unshaved idiot with a griststache who looked like he’d just crawled out of a flophouse on River Rat Row. Dolores had a gun, and the man, Larry, he had a two-wheel dolly and a straight-jacket.

            “My friend Larry here, he wants to take you to visit your old friend, Dr. Benjamin. Then he might have something he wants to show you.”

            “Don’t do it, Dolores! I didn’t mean it! I thought he was only going to keep you for a few days, until you got better.”

            “Maybe he will only keep you for a few days until you get better. You seem kind of nuts to me!”

            “How did you know? Can you see the numbers?”

            He was staring at what looked like a grid of numerical chaos superimposed over reality, and the calculations driving it were changing all the time.

            “What numbers? I guess you really are going nuts.”

            “No, I see them too,” Larry said, his voice trembling. Larry’s vision showed the essential harmony of the universe as a divine Pythagorean equation. He saw every number as a beacon of a particular quality emanating its force out into the world. Harvey’s math had descended to a madness that wasn’t divine. It was all quantity, and for him that quantity was never enough. Even seeing it in all its vastness, made him feel like he had fallen down into the red of negative numbers, instead of the vast connection flowing between them in eternal balance as Larry had just perceived beyond the veil.

            “All you ever thought about was numbers,” Dolores said. “I don’t see what the big problem is now. Maybe now you are just a dumb broken calculator”

            She held her husband under the hammer of the gun, and got him tied up to the two-wheeler. It wasn’t easy to get him down the front steps onto the street. He fell, and then dragged him up and then kept on pushing. There were several more falls along the road, and with each one his skull rattled.
 
CANDY

            Candy was mesmerized by the light show in the sky. It looked like a scene from out of a fairy tale. The green and mauve lights dancing in the sky became pointillistic, then stretched into the clarity of blistering jewel burning with its own internal light, and transformed into a scene that looked like a group of older women and strange animal, maybe alien, beings had gathered together around a table to have some tea in a strange garden. There was a table and woman was sitting on it, and a stairway went up with another being moving towards a portal in the beyond. In another part of the sky a group of three were levitating a body above a checkerboard floor. Birds and humanimals frolicked and conversed and she could hear them, but their language was music and whispers and symbols and light.

Then it faded back, flickered out and dissolved as if were a film that had gotten overcooked by a hot projector bulb. A woman on a white rocking horse appeared from the skys green grass and was speaking right to her.
“You’re mom has gone fishing, go and be with her. Harvey is going into the old desk drawer with the other broken calculators. You won’t be seeing him again.”

 She wondered if everyone else was seeing the same thing? If they could hear it too?

But there was a peace that came from the woman on the rocking horse, and she was gifted with a memory of herself on a rocking horse as a kid with her mom, on one of those happy days when there was a shepherds pie in the oven and apples simmering in cinnamon and sugar on the stove.

She knew the old fishing spot down on the river. Her dad had spent so much time there, smoking his pipe, and she thought she could smell the scent of that amaretto and cavendish he favored drifting along the hot summer night. She followed it along.
 
MRS. INGLEBERT

            Down at the river Mrs. Inglbert was witness to a religious conversion. People were getting baptized in the mauve and green cast waters. People were dancing on the shore. It wasn’t a good scene for fishing, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to get religion. Not after the way her parents went nuts in the Church of the Mall Messiah, a prosperity-based cargo cult that taught the reopening of the malls would happen any day now. Now she believed in something, she just wasn’t sure what all it was. It was getting harder now too, now that telephone poles were talking, now that Fred was back with her so much of the time.

            She’d brought her worms from the compost. They were wriggling something fierce, squirming in the mush. One looked like the sickness that was inside her and she struck it with a hook. Perhaps she’d get that worm out of her after all. Maybe a big fish would come and gulp it up.

            Past a small driftwood fire where a few teenagers were drinking tallboys she made her way down the path under the bridge. Fred would be waiting there. She wished her daughter would come along. Maybe they could have one more night with their father, like in the old times.

DAVE

The next day the madness the world started to ebb. It had been enveloped inside some kind of psychic alien incursion. Dave thought it had emanated from a distant universe on the other side of the aurora. As the sun came up and the day progressed, there was a release of pressure, but all kinds of strangeness had happened all around according to his neighbor.

Dave wanted to find out more, so he plugged in the shortwave radio and tuned around until he found the weather channel again. He waited and waded through all the usual dreck of rising sea levels, floods, high winds, and droughts in the drying west, until the space weather lady came on the air.

“The coronal mass ejections that started just two days ago causing outbreaks of geomagnetic storms last night here on earth seem to have ripped a hole in rationality. We’ve been witnessing massive waves of dream outbreaks. Some might think all of this is fodder for fairy tales, and that’s part of the issue. Renegade psychologist and host of the Archetype Hour on our sister station, WMOO, Desmond Burke, has called it an upwelling of the collective unconscious, when things that were normally repressed resurface and come into the light. Others think that somehow, intelligences from a distant world were carried over the solar waves. Scientists have been left scratching their heads as to how this geomagnetic activity could affect people’s minds. Most scientists in fact reject there was any connection at all, saying it was just a coincidence, that this outbreak of what they call mass hysteria, coincided with the arrival of the solar storm energy on earth. At the same time, there have been numerous reports of patients breaking out from mental health institutions and psyche wards. It seems, that for some people who live with psychosis, the storms actually have had a pacifying effect. Further study is warranted. And while scientists may continue to hedge and hem and haw, regular citizens are less reticent about their peculiar experiences.

 “ ‘We know what we saw and what we have felt’ Jimmy Greenwall of the Greenwall Grocery Wagon’s Firm has said. ‘It’s going to be hard selling turnips now, knowing what they said to me.’ An urban farmer in Detroit noted ‘Some people are calling this a collective hallucination, and who knows, but if it was, it was a pretty real collective hallucination, whatever the heck that means.’ Meanwhile scientists remain worried that this event will only add to the number of people talking about dreams, taking up practical metaphysics, and believing in strange beings that exist in the non-physical realm.”

Dave was no art head, but it seemed that calling this particular storm the Leonora Carrington Event had been right after all. He was just happy that his house no longer resemebled a shoe and the cow was done jumping over the moon. He had a pile of boots to fix for a group of barge workers, and he was eager to get back to work repairing people’s soles.


--Justin Patrick Moore
 May 2024/ July 2025
Cincinnati, Ohio

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Roads in America have long symbolized the ideal of freedom. Just like the pilgrims who came here to escape religious persecution, and the pioneers who wanted to homestead their own way in life, the idea of traveling down the road to get away from one place and go to elsewhere, the notion of liberty has always traveled along with the people who take to the roads to find their way.

When the roads became paved, and when you could travel down them with speed, it added the idea of velocity to the metaphor of freedom. If you could afford a car, anyway. When cars first appeared, motoring was a novelty for the wealthy. Cars also became one of the epitomes of the Faustian machine age, rearing generations of motorheads into states of enraptured ecstasy by the spell of purring engines, enervating sensitive types with the cacophonous noise of their splutter.

As the antihuman forces of front line assembly systems riveted the steel beasts into ascendance, the price dropped to the point to where they came into the purview of the middle class, but not all the middle class. First it was just the white middle class. The oil fields had been tapped and gasoline was flowing, cheap and plentiful for a time. People looked to the car as another means of escaping enforced limitations, and eventually African-American’s of the middle class could also afford cars. Yet even when African Americans could start taking to the road in combustible vehicles, the road wasn’t always a safe place to be, especially in the years of Jim Crow.

After the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, Jim Crow was in effect in the Southern states. It was legal for Americans to be segregated by their race and the full power of the law was behind that segregation. Rules, regulations, and systemic racism had the net effect of ensnaring Black people in nets of harassment, and much worse. Human rights were denied and access to what the rest of the country thought as basic was curtailed through severe prejudice.

Yet the road still called, it beckoned as place to roam, out of the drought of oppression and into a world of verdant green where life could be enjoyed.

A man named Victor Hugo Green helped his fellow African American’s get on the road and find hospitable places, people and businesses. Green was a New Yorker through and through, born in 1892. His parents named him after the famous French author whose work championed the outcast, the poor, and the dispossessed. He was the eldest son of William H. Green and Alice (Holmes) and grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey with his two siblings. In 1913 he started working as a postman in New Jersey, but became a worldly entrepreneur, though he remained with the postal service for his entire career, even after becoming a publisher during the Harlem Renaissance where was a participant and witness the proliferation and blossoming of Black culture.

GREAT MIGRATION’S AND THE FEAR OF THE RED

The Great Migration was great because it was one of the largest movements of people finding new places to live in the recorded and remembered history of North America. Jim Crow was in effect, and it was the driver for the approximately six million Black people who left the American South for the North, the Midwest and the West. Though the boundaries of time are fuzzy, the Great Migration lasted from about 1910 until the 1970s. Even in places where segregation laws did not exist, segregation by custom was ubiquitous. Even as the laws changed during the Civil Rights era, with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the legacy and aftereffects have continued to ripple through time, and the social and economic factors driving the movement of African Americans across the country continued.

Looking at it now, the Great Migration can be seen as having had two distinct phases. As with so much else in the United States and the world, the upheaval unleased by World War I and II mark the period of the two phases. The first phase happened roughly between 1910 and 1940. In this time period Black southerners made their way to Indianapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and New York. A war always needs a body, and for this, able bodied men were sent off to be machine gun fodder in the trenches as the efforts to fight were escalated in 1917 and people got sent off to Europe. With industrial jobs vacant by those who’d gone off to kill and get killed, jobs opened up for African Americans to fill those spots.

Americas internal migrants had found better jobs after fleeing from a South mired under the oppressive Jim Crow apartheid, but other difficulties awaited. Injustice and prejudice wasn’t confined to one part of the continent and country. It is estimated that around 2 million Blacks left the south during the first phase from World War I to World War II. The social shake up to the norms wasn’t easy for people who felt their privileges were being infringed upon. The perceived threat of Communism was another cloud hanging over the minds and livelihoods of capitalist businessmen who were fine with the way things were.

The Russian Revolution was on everyone’s mind, erupting into paranoia. Politicians, government workers, and capitalists especially feared an imminent commie uprising. African-American commies they were even more afraid of; Black people were already advocating racial equality. Throwing in labor rights made the situation feel even more threatening for those with vested interests in the same-old, same-old.
​
In March 1919, President Woodrow Wilson said that “the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.” This was the opening statement of fear that exploded in yet another wave of white violence against African Americans who had relocated in the search of making a living and a better life, in the search for just a small slice of the American dream. The Red Summer of 1919 saw race riots explode across the land starting in the April, from Georgia to Maine, to South Carolina, Indiana, Texas and Arizona. Four days of mob violence formed an early peak in Washington D.C. in July, followed by more mob attacks in Norfolk, Virginia on Black veterans coming home from the war.

The Chicago riots of late July into August marked another peak. Hundreds of Black homes and businesses on the South Side of the Windy City were destroyed in the riots that followed the cruel drowning of Eugene Williams, guilty only of swimming in the wrong place. More rioting happened in Omaha, Nebraska, and from the end of September and into November of the year a massacre occurred in Elaine, Arkansas, sparked by fears of socialism as sharecroppers began the work of getting organized into a union.

Charles Hillman Brough, the governor of Arkansas, appointed a Committee of Seven, made up of good old boy businessmen to investigate the business of the Sharecropper’s Union. They came to the conclusion that it was a socialist enterprise made “for the purpose of banding negroes together for the killing of white people.” Articles about this in the newspapers stoked the flames of hatred and agitation, leading directly to further violence. All of it amounted to an anti-Black pogrom with a hefty dose of anti-communist Red Scare mixed in to whip up people into an irrational frenzy of bloodlust and belligerence.

The second phase of began as World War II brought the war industry (called elsewhere the “defense industry”) into expansion. This continued on into the 1970’s when America’s loss of morale in Vietnam put a cap on the number of jobs for war related manufacturing. In this time frame African Americans continued to move North, and further west into the major cities of California and up into the big cities of the Pacific Northwest. In just twenty odd years after World War II another 3 million Black people had migrated to these and various other points in the United States.

In the meantime, the Civil Rights era had ended Jim Crow but redlining and other systemic forms of racism were still in operation, along with usual overt kind. Neighborhoods might not have been segregated by clear and visible laws, but discrimination in housing and restrictive covenants kept many disparities in place across the United States. These scars on the collective landscape continue to reveal layers of psychohistory, and the effect of this psychogeography on the people who dwell in each area continues to be felt.

It was in this time period of the Great Migration that Victor Hugo Green’s travel book offered a roadmap for navigating such a harshly stratified society.

IN THE HARLEM GREEN

Harlem was one of the hot spot destinations of choice in the early phases of the Great Migration. Alma S. Duke had come up from Richmond, Virginia as part of that movement of people. In general, people moving up from Virginia often went to Harlem and New York City, while people moving away from Mississippi often went to Chicago. People were moving away from plenty of other places in the South as well, and there was variation, but these were two of the prevalent patterns. Alma was one who had come up from Virginia.

In 1917 she married Victor Hugo Green. The happy couple moved to Harlem to be in the happening place. They settled in the Sugar Hill community. They made it just in time for the Harlem Renaissance.

African-American music, theater, painting and visual art, and of course, literature, was going through an incredible fertile period as artists took back “the Negro” from the stereotypical tropes of whites. An identity and consciousness apart from middle class bourgeois values of the white Victorian era was crafted. The Victorian reality tunnel looked out on the world through colonialist, imperialist and racist belief systems. This renaissance of artistic activity was happening in other parts of the U.S., but the main concentration of energy was in Harlem.

At the same time as Blacks were making Harlem a hotspot of American cultural life, some were also getting on the road as people entered the middle class and had the ability and opportunity to afford a set of wheels. But the road can be harsh, and even motoring along, there were many gas stations that wouldn’t fill a tank, mechanics who wouldn’t work on a Black owned car, places that wouldn’t serve African Americans a meal. This treatment wasn’t limited to the South, as the events of the Red Summer showed (and many other events afterwards). Northerners were just as cruel and racist. It made staying put in a safe place with known elements less risky than traveling the country to visit family, especially when traversing places where White Supremacist groups were active.
​
Yet it wasn’t all hatred. African Americans businesses were also springing up, and gradually there were businesses where acceptance of everyone’s humanity was the key. Green had the idea that he could list such places in a book to help Black people get around the country and enjoy the freedom of traveling, the freedom of being free. The result was “The Negro Motorists Green Book.”

He first published his guide in 1936. The first edition was only ten pages and focused on New York City. The prevalence of “Whites Only” restaurants and “Sundown Towns” -places where African Americans weren’t welcome after dark- meant that going somewhere new was a dangerous business when violence and hostility could be expected. With a list of places where it was safe to go, new possibilities for real freedom opened up, and Green’s book came into high demand. He continued to publish new edition each year, expanding the range of cities and towns covered with each new version.

His job at the postal office was a key to this enterprise as he was able to use it for networking with other postmen and connect with Black business people along their mail routes. Once contact was made, he asked them if they’d like to advertise in the Green Book. These same businesses listed in the book then became venues where the book itself could be sold and bought. It was an underground or parallel system operating outside of the mainstream. With the book in hand African American citizens had another way of making and forming connections to people offering needed services, of finding dance halls, cafes, shops and other places that were safe. Places to just chill out and relax.

All of this nurtured community and the networking was one of the things that helped set a stage for growth of the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement in turn depended on financial independence. The Black businesses that made up the book were the foundation of success.

Of the many African Americans who used the Green Book, many did so for the purpose of earning a living. Salespeople, traveling musicians, entertainers, athletes and others who had to take to the road for work in one capacity or another were among those whose lives were made easier through the travel guide. Blacks in the middle class and above working as trained professionals in fields such as medicine, law, insurance and engineering were also looking to spend some of their income and treat their families to leisure time. Relaxation and recreation at the standard resorts was often barred from Blacks due to segregation, so as new options and opportunities became available, these got listed in the guide. Idlewild in Michigan was one of the leading resorts during the Jim Crow era and it had reached the height of its popularity by the 1960s.  

Off the back of the Green Book, Green started another enterprise in 1947. This was a Vacation Reservation Service and travel-agency, again specializing in Black owned businesses. By the end of the 1940s, his guide had gone outside the confines of the U.S., showing how to get around in places like Mexico and Bermuda. He did all this while still maintaining his day job, from which he retired in 1952. That was the same year he changed the name of his publication to the Negro Travelers’ Green Book. It wasn’t just about motoring anymore, but about experiencing life out in the world and all it had to offer.

HAVE OIL, WILL TRAVEL

Without gasoline and oil, a car is just a heap of metal and parts. These days it might just be fiberglass, metal and parts. Without a place to fill up, getting on the road means nothing. Without oil and petroleum products the American conception of roads and cars as the keys to freedom would be a dream. During the time period of the Great Migration, Shell stations had been known to refuse Black customer’s service. Not so with Esso Standard Oil, a company who became another key to the continued success of the Green Book. They had enlightened policies, and franchised gas stations to African Americans.

These days the company that was Esso is better known as ExxonMobil. The name “Esso” came from the way a person would say the letters S and O, for Standard Oil, the immediate predecessor of the company. Strange how these corporations live longer than humans, but with genealogies just as tangled.

Standard Oil was based in New Jersey and had started marketing products under the Esso brand in 1926. During those Jim Crow years, they hired Black intellectuals in a time when African Americans with higher education and training under their belt had a difficult time finding employment. In 1934 one of the people they hired was James Albert “Billboard” Jackson. He wrote a column called Jackson’s Page for Billboard, the famous music and entertainment magazine, where he wrote about Black performers in New York, Chicago, and other big cities. His column was very popular and Black newspapers in the North syndicated his work under the byline “Billboard” Jackson.

Writing about music and cultural life in the 1920s put him into direct contact with many of the greats from the Harlem Renaissance, and his work as a critic was crucial in getting their work out to a wider audience. Like Green, he was another pioneer in Black business and entrepreneurship: he was an advisor to the U.S. Department of Commerce on that very subject between 1927 and 1933. In 1934 he was asked to come and work for Esso Standard Oil Company in the role of public relations and marketing specialist, the first African American to hold that role. He also became the first African American member of the American Marketing Association in in 1940. All in all, he had worked for Esso for twenty-one years. Jackson was very active in African American fraternal groups and business associations, and was a member of some thirty-seven different voluntary groups. He had developed quite the network of influence.

While Jackson was working at Esso in the marketing division, he convinced the company to sponsor the Green Book so their Black customers could “go further with less anxiety.” By the 1940’s a little less than half of all Esso dealers were Black making this coordination effort a natural fit. 

The 1949 edition of the Green Book included the following Esso endorsement message:

“As representatives of the Esso Standard Oil Co., we are pleased to recommend the Green Book for your travel convenience. Keep one on hand each year and when you are planning your trips, let Esso Touring Service supply you with maps and complete routings, and for real 'Happy Motoring' – use Esso Products and Esso Service wherever you find the Esso sign.”

Alma Green, who had worked on the Green Book as an editor at various times continued publishing the book after her husband died on October 16, 1960. She continued to serve and publish as an editor until 1966, the last year the annual book was published.

When the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 it marked the end of legal racial segregation. Sundown towns may have been blocked legally, but racial profiling by local police and sheriff's departments, harassment by everyday racists, and other aggravations continued and continue. Driving while Black remains dangerous. The influence of that reality has left a deep mark on the psychology of collective America, and the memory of that is permeated across the land.
 
RE/SOURCES & FURTHER READING

Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance by Alvin Hall

Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin

​Overground railroad: the Green Book and the roots of Black travel in America by Candacy Taylor

Driving While Black (2015 feature film directed by Paul Sapiano)

Driving While Black (2021 Documentary directed by )

The Green Book (2018 feature film directed by Peter Farrelly)

​There is a very prevalent attitude within the culture of creativity, for those that want to make it big, a person needs to leave their smaller city or small town, and go to the big city. I guess making it big has always had the underlying assumption, also super prevalent and at large in the greater culture, that bigger is better. Big cities represent places with more opportunities for expansion in whatever field of endeavor one wishes to make it big inside. There is often more there in these places: LA, Chicago, New York City, Seattle. Some of what there is definitely more of is competition. More artists, writers, musicians, and actors of high caliber vying for their slice of the pie. More artists, writers, musicians, and actors of high caliber working as baristas and waiters and cooks. That’s no slight against the service industry. A person has got to eat and my wife and many friends and family are veterans who have served in the trenches of the restaurant biz. I’ve assisted in numerous caterings myself and spent my share of time as a dishwasher. I’m not afraid of getting dirty and wet.

The question remains, however, of why a person would want to travel to a big city to compete not only for work in the creative industries, but also for good day jobs, when they could stay in a smaller pond where there is more potential to become a bigger fish. Yet not just the kind of big fish a fisherman would like to catch from the deep, but part of a school of fish: in other words, a community. Not just a community of elite artists presenting their work to the world in galleries, at readings, and from the stage, but a community of people and beings to be embedded within and serve.

At the end of the day, art in any medium is a service. In its debased forms, it can be a service to the artist looking to glorify themselves. I won’t pretend its ever an egoless endeavor. Yet, when that becomes the sole purpose of art, for the artiste to extol their own creative ability, something essential gets lost, the act of making things that nurture and feed the creative and spiritual part of other beings.

I say other beings, because art may not even just be for humans. If St. Francis could preach to the animals, why couldn’t an artist also make a sculpture for the enjoyment of the trees, or for the birds, snakes and turtles? Why not tell a story to a bee or sing a song to the wind and sun and stars? These too are part of our community, or rather, we are part of their community.

Yet we also do want our human connections, and to be seen for what we do and are capable of doing by our fellows. There is nothing wrong in that desire to be seen, heard, known. It’s something we’ve done since time immemorial. We aspire to be like trees and have our work be around for a long time, yet even their centuries pale to the aeons of life and light given off by the stars.
​
As the 17th century English poet John Hall wrote in his poem “The Hourglass”:

(The poem was set to music by David Tibet in the above harrowing Current 93 song.)

Some of the fruits of human art are more robust than others, and the seed planted from one poem into the heart of another, can turn up and grow in some other area of life. Storytelling, poetry, song are all for the community. To grow, they need their own strong roots so as to generate future seeds.

As culture returns to a preindustrial level of homeostasis and world travel becomes less common and more adventurous, the globetrotting artist will become increasingly rare. Even those writers and musicians and actors who gain larger renown, will likely live somewhere. Sure, there will always be nomadic types and people who live in different locations at different times in their lives, but the urge to grow roots and remain in place will also loom large. An artist who is devoted to the place where they live and breathe will be a boon to the local pond where they swim.

BIG TIME CITY GLITCH

Novelist and writing guru Steven Pressfield wrote a book called Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be. In one of the blogposts that became part of his book, he contended that aspiring screenwriters and people wanting to work in the movies should move to places like Los Angeles to be around the scene where much of the work of screenwriting is done.

He wrote, “Sometimes people will write to me. ‘I want to work in the movies. Do I have to move to Los Angeles?’ Or, ‘My dream job is in fashion design. Do I need to be in Manhattan?’
The answer is yes and yes.”

It sounds logical. Yet art doesn’t always work on logic. Sometimes it works best by being counter-intuitive, so I say the answer is no and no.

I like much of what Pressfield has written to help creative people in the world, so I’m not knocking him as a whole, but I want to push back on what he says about moving to the big cities. I think that is a glitch and stops people from pursuing their dreams in the soil where they were raised. When they move away, that same soil gets depleted instead of getting enriched, while overloading and putting a strain on the place they are moving.
Louisville and Lexington, Cincinnati and Columbus are just as in need of screenwriters (or likely playwrights in deindustrial times) as anywhere else. A motivated playwright is much more likely to get a work made and produced under their own gumption away from places where there is a lot of direct competition against them.

In Stevens Point, Wisconsin the In the Pines Studio has set up their operations. Founded by Winter Williams and Matthew A. Brown, they bucked the traditional notion of centering their creative endeavors in film in California and instead focused on the Midwest. If more film students, producers, writers and directors got together to do things on their own, the allure of the big time wouldn’t be as strong. They could make it small time.

In an article titled “The Paradox of Skill” on Dying Breed, Brett McKay wrote about the role of luck in achieving dreams he gets into the idea of more opportunities being available when the pool is smaller.

“If you’re a talented videographer, don’t move to LA for a career. Talented videographers are a dime a dozen there. You’re going to be relying mostly on luck to get a break. Look for a smaller market where the pool of talent is shallower, and skill is the deciding factor. I know a talented videographer in OKC who has made a successful career for himself overseeing commercials, documentaries, and corporate videos in Oklahoma. Is it as glamorous as LA? Probably not. But he’s thriving in a career he enjoys. Also, OKC ain’t that bad. The cost of living can’t be beat, it’s got a World Champion NBA team, and a great onion burger restaurant to boot. You can always take a direct flight to LA from Will Rogers World Airport if you need a weekend of LA glitz and glamour.”

Such a business as the one described above could also be pivoted from making commercial work to making artistic during the downtime. The success of the one could pay for the possibility of the other.

The glitz of the big cities may just be glitches. I am an urban dude. I like to visit a big city. I live in a small city though, and the size is just right. People say that, in Cincinnati, there is only one degree of separation between folks, rather than the usual two degrees of separation you often hear people talk about. In a place where the social connections separating you from another person are less, it’s easier to develop a reputation (of any kind) and have an audience for your art or craft.

The struggle to gain confidence and build an audience in any art form is real. The person who seeks to do so on a global stage has a lot to overcome, many barriers and obstacles in their way. The person who wishes to perform for their friends, to make music on the porch, to read poetry at a café, to submit to a local zine or quarterly, has more of a chance to start putting themselves out there and working on their craft. There are still obstacles also the possibility of making connections.

The other thing, here too, is doing your art for the community. I think the whole thing of being very polished in performance or an art is what keeps people from doing things like this for the people in their life, but I think as a whole our society needs to embrace the way someone with a skill or talent, even if not “the best” can add to our experience together and inspiring each other to improve, and not just leave things to so-called professional entertainers and the like. In your own home town, you can make it small and still have an outsized impact.

Much good can be had by staying put. Tiny forces and small movements can make big waves.

A process of internal migration is already underway now, where people are migrating away from the bicoastal mindset of LA and NYC dominating the cultural life in the United States, with folks coming back home to the heartland, or moving to the former flyover country for the first time.

Much of that is economic. People are starting to realize they can have a cheaper life, work a decent job, and do their creative thing with more ease, less stress, and more success in places where the cost of living is lower but where the artistic life is just as vibrant.

​These aren’t slights against the big cities themselves. I have very much enjoyed my visits to Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle. If these are your local, they are your local. Then you might want to go more micro inside such big ponds and make it small in the neighborhood rather than the city at large.

​GOOD ENOUGH

Normal never was, and sometimes good enough is good enough. Going big presupposes polish. You need to have your act together and you need to make it look professional and sound professional. Again, I have nothing against being a professional. At the same time, how much potential gets stopped in its tracks, because a person witnesses the work of a virtuoso and instead of getting inspired by them, they say, “I will never be that good” instead of thinking, “if I commit to a practice, I could do that.” People feel degraded by the simulacra of big time entertainment. There is a failure to realize we can all entertain ourselves and our family and friends, same as it ever was.

I think in a large art that is because performance has become spectacle. Music was enjoyed for much of its history, socially. Sure, there were always people who were talented and reached for perfection in their art, but there were also the everyday practitioners of the art who sang for the practical enjoyment of singing and for the simple joy doing it gave them. Isn’t that good enough?

For me, this is part of the appeal of punk rock. It was focused more on the energy of the sound, and the ability for anyone with the gumption to put a band together. It is why I like the genre of vaporwave and sound collage: have the tools? Put something together with them. It doesn’t need to be perfect to be fun. It doesn’t need to be perfect for somebody else to get something out of it. It doesn’t need to be perfect for it to help you along your own path. If you stick with it, the confidence and the greater ability to do what you envision with the medium will come.

For a long time some, friends of ours held an annual Winter Solstice potluck with performance. They usually rented out a small hall in the neighborhood. People put money in a pot to cover the cost and the food was all brought in by everyone. Homebrewed beer and wine... The amazing part was the variety show.... music, skits, jokes, poetry, tap dancing and more every year, put on by the people in the extended friends group. They were about a half generation older than my wife and I... of hippie stock and really believed in the philosophy that a community could provide its own entertainment for itself.

The same is true of so many great shows I have been to in VFW halls, community spaces, and scummy basements. Conditions do not need to be ideal. It’s better to play through a shitty PA then no PA. Working outside of ideal conditions leads to grit, resolve, and strengthening of will and courage in face of obstacles.
This essay doesn’t need to be in ideal form, either, before I share it with readers. I like to revise. Sometimes I like to revise more than I like to write the new thing. It allows me to keep fiddling. With that in mind, I am resisting endless revision here. Hence, minimal polish. Unfinished ideas. There will be time circle back to all the things I intended to write in this piece and didn’t really get to, because I went on off on some tangent. That will just be fodder for the next one.

[ Josh Datko has a great essay on the grain of soul found in art when you go on and do a thing without worrying about being totally polished.]

AS THE FIELD EXPANDS, THE SCOPE OF SUCCESS MUST BE LIMITED

Being local and staying small can also relate to finding a niche and working from the freedom of the fringe.
Working in an area that is overcrowded and overhyped, the luck needed to get work out into the world becomes greater. Where there is a lot of skill and a lot of people doing great things great with that skill, something else is needed to set one apart. Part of what is needed is a bit of luck. Part of what is needed is a unique, iconoclastic flavor.

Electronic music was in the past, a specialized field of activity, a niche area of music making. Now all kinds of people have modular setups, or are just producing music on computers at home using readily available software, or even just using programs like Suno to take the song idea from their head and make it so it can be heard. In a way, this makes that kind of production a folk art in its own right, just as collage has become since Dada and Surrealism opened that practice up to the wider public and anyone with some scissors and glue. One of the things about folk art is that there isn’t as much variation between artists. It can still be really good, and the virtuosos become known and appreciated for their skill and rise to the top of their craft. Something within their ability sets them apart from all the other people singing those same songs or making those same vaporwave beats.

The same is true of poetry. As literacy has increased, the number of writers has increased. Before, there were a few stand out poets who rose to the top in every generation. Now there are dozens. It’s much easier to get to know who the “best” poets are in a local area or scene, than it is to know the “best” in the nation, because there are so many more people writing poetry and getting it published in chapbooks, online and going to readings.

This is also why a field of creativity such as contemporary poetry and electronic music is impossible to know with the breadth that a person once could know it several decades ago.

Standing out in an overcrowded field becomes part of the game. Instead of making it big, pivoting to making it small is a way to sidestep internal creative pressure. Within the boundaries and limitations imposed by working in a smaller area and at a smaller scale, new possibilities emerge.

Another way to approach the issue is to embrace microcultures. In music, microcultures can be seen as the proliferation of genres. Your band might not be the best metal band. But they might be the best blackened sludge thrashcore. You might not be the best producer of ambient music. But you might be one of the best maker of ambient-emo, or of chiptune emo, or get known for your “hardplaza” skateboard beat productions.
In the poetry world, where free verse has flourished for decades, a poet can set themselves apart by mastering a form such as the ghazal, or as Marilyn Hacker did, the sonnet, sestina and villanelles.

Radio is another area where a person can stand apart from the podcast party. The tricky there thing is getting access to a radio station, but if you have a community station in your community, that is the place to go to build the community. With so many forgettable podcasts, it’s really something special, if you are transmitting into the aether. Plus you reach more random listeners than a focused podcast might. Some of those randos might turn in to your regular listeners.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

Another reason to celebrate the local is to become a repository of local knowledge. This is what I wanted to write the most about in this essay, actually, except I went off on a rant against LA and NYC. I plan to revisit and enlarge on this theme in a separate article now that I’ve gotten some more of the bicoastal bile out of my system.

In any place, time stretches back to untold vistas, and to know even some of the history of the land and its people, and those other people, the people we call plants and animals, gives a new sense of appreciation for the land. When we stay close to the land, connected to it, do not move far away from where we are born, we begin to sense and appreciate its longer cycles within the much smaller wheels and cycles of our own lifetime.

In this way, when we listen to what the land has to say, we in turn can become speakers for the land. Our art can be embedded with materials from the place where we live, whether those materials be wood, stone, or mineral.

Those materials might be knowledge about the quarreling between two different families and the feuds that have ensued over generations. Such a tale might get turned into a novel or a ballad. The material might be a song passed on from one person working the coal barges and the riverboats of the Ohio and Mississippi, sang to another and then another. That song gets worked into a set played at a local festival or down at the bar, and in turn inspires the people who hear it to know something more of the many stories that have flowed along those rivers.

No matter where you are, it’s possible to get into a creative flow state, to make and find opportunities for a being a local artist, poet, maker.

The great philosopher Robert Anton Wilson had an experiment in one of his books. It was about perception and how we put filters on our perception and either allow information in or block it out, depending on what he called our reality tunnel, or the filters we see the world through. His experiment was to look for quarters when out and about. If the mindset of looking for quarters and finding them was adopted, the person doing the experiment tended to find more quarters than the person who didn’t bother to look at all. It can be so when we look at the place, we call our own local. From that solid ground our work as writers, poets, musicians and artists can take root and shape.

Do we see opportunities for enrichment of our art? Do we see opportunities for the way our art can enrich the community? Do we see ways we can incorporate the history and specific knowledge unique to a place into what we do, so we can become memory keepers and sharers of knowledge to those who come after us? This is just part of the work of the local artist who has made it small.

.:. .:. .:.
Thank you to all of my paid subscribers for keeping me caffeinated!

The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to this subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you to all my readers and supporters. Your generosity means the world and helps support my universalist bohemian art life! Thanks for keeping me caffeinated and wired.


☕️☕️☕️

The text below is transcribed from radio broadcast I picked up while on a recent time travel DX foray into one of the futures of northern Ohio, about the Lighthouse Coastal Academy, a school set up to train the mentat minds of Generation Q:

Calling all parental units! Calling all parental units!

We know you want the best for your kids and at Lighthouse Coastal Academy they receive the best: the best instructors and teachers gathered from all points across Eerie Lake Country. Our instructors have repeatedly received high accolades from the top educational journals and societies for providing classes as unique as the students who take them. But it is the students who really shine! The educational philosophy itself is built upon the best tenants from Waldorf-Montessoria, alongside access to the traditional instruction of many technical guilds, art and craft societies we partner with in our work-study program. The Lighthouse Coastal Academy is built around core principles of Love, Work, and Wisdom and we seek to develop the capacity for those all those who seek knowledge within our halls and walls.

The story behind the Light House Coastal Academy is one of reclamation. The town of Vermillion wanted to do something with its decaying Light House. There was also an old abandoned hotel on an adjacent property called the Captain’s Bell. Once destination spots that drew tourists to the area, the Captain’s Bell and Light House had become more of a blight for Vermillion. Town leaders decided to turn these properties into a college. The first wave of teachers and students helped fix up the places. They attended classes in rooms filled with leftover hotel furniture. Anything else they needed they built out of materials taken from the bin. It was all very much a Do It Yourself endeavor. In time the Lighthouse was restored and its lamp was relit. Since that time, the lamp of knowledge has never gone out, and it has become a beacon drawing seekers from all around the Lake Countries and beyond.

Though there are many courses and preset learning spirals available for the students to choose from, it is our evolving self-designed curriculum that remains the most popular. We realize that each student is on an individual journey, and we excel by helping them excel. Our decentralized network of mentors and teachers are there to act as guides and resources as the students flow through an ecological web of learning and knowledge. We also believe that education should never be separated from useful work in the world.

And though the lighthouse on our campus is a kind of tower, it is no ivory tower. We have seen in our history books how the college and university systems of the 21st century imploded. The causes were many, but were in part due to a tendency that privileged theory over practice. Academia had become completely unglued from teaching anything useful, and existed within its own self-referential echo chamber. Unmoored from reality, and after many scandals, financial, and otherwise, the majority of these institutions slipped into a neglect from which they never recovered. Our work-study program is an antidote to that. All of our students are required to get there hands dirty in practical jobs in positions throughout the Lake Countries.

All of our learning spirals, whether preset or self-designed, have an emphasis on interdisciplinary synthesis. No field of knowledge exists alone. One spiral of study leads to another, and as these interweave and interlace, they become a braided knot. On this knot the glass beads of learning can be slid. It is from this approach of synthesis and recombinant aesthetics that several of our students began working out methods for bringing the Glass Bead Game of Herman Hesse out of the realm of fiction and into the world of form. With these scholars early success in this matter the Lighthouse Coastal Academy has become the host of the biannual Glass Bead Game festival.

One of our students most beloved of interconnected spirals are those in the harmonic science grouping: music, astronomy, and geometry. Those who have made a thorough study in these areas have gone on to the great work of unleashing frozen music in the form of public buildings. The Akron Amphitheater was one such piece of frozen music designed by graduate Genevive Kaspel. The specific psychoacoustics within this building have been most useful for the all night sleep concerts held there used to enhance collective dreaming. Students of the art and science of radio are also known to participate in the harmonic science spiral. The voices and ideas of our students are well known throughout Eeerie country as they have full access to our campus AM, FM, and Shortwave stations, all operating under the WLCA call sign.

Speaking of communications, the communications spiral focuses on everything from radio design to broadcasting, analog internetwork analysis, and how to run and operate a successful amateur press association. Hands on learning is a must, and those interested in the textual side of things will love making their own newspapers and zines using our collection of antique movable type printers and mimeograph machines.

The natural world and local ecology of the Lake Eerie watershed are never far from our minds. Spirals focusing on bioremediation, water science, and agricultural studies -everything from permaculture, organic gardening, food forestry to urban farming and deep ecology- are available. A full course catalog and representative syllabi are available upon request.

It’s not all just hard work and study at the Lighthouse Coastal Academy. A rich tradition of sports and games permeates the air, to say nothing pranks. For those who want to get physical our Three Sided Football team is always open to anyone who wants to learn the art of goal defense. Our hiking and rowing clubs are also ever eager for new members. These only scratch the surface of clubs and societies created by our students and faculty, and we can’t even say much about those of, shall we say, a more clandestine nature!

Since our first days when the Captain’s Bell and the Lighthouse were our only buildings, we have managed to acquire further properties from the town, and have created a large library and laboratory. Your student will have access to these and all of the other amenities we have to offer. The Lighthouse Coastal Academy has brought new life back to Vermillion and the town is now filled with cafes, cabarets, music venues, clubs, and coffee houses. Many of the major and minor guilds now have a presence in Vermillion as representatives have come to be close by to the students who wish to learn from them. These guild members have opened many store fronts to distribute glasswork, woodwork, electrical circuits, spice, maps and more. Safe and walkable, Vermillion is only a short train ride away from the cities of Sandusky and Cleveland, and from these hubs other points around Lake Eerie Country, the Lake Countries as a whole, and points beyond.

Take a spiral ride with us into the realm of Love, Work and Wisdom. For more information please send us a letter, radiogram request, or for those with telephone service, call our offices at 1-888-555-CSTL, that’s 1-888-555-2785.

This message has been brought to you by the WLCA Radio League of Journeyers and by the Lake Eerie School of Retrocognition.

.:. .:. .:.
The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to this subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you to all my readers and supporters. Your generosity means the world and helps support my universalist bohemian art life! Thanks for keeping me caffeinated and wired.

☕️☕️☕️

​It’s hard enough to be a composer. Have you ever tried writing music down on paper from your head and then finding, and asking, a bunch of highly trained and skilled musicians to play the stuff you heard inside your head? The opportunities to write a symphony or chamber work were there- finding the opportunity to get it performed and played, another matter all together. It was hard enough to do this as a man. If you happened to be female, well, the opportunities were even fewer.

Electronic music offered a workaround for this. It was in part why so many composers got into the electronic music game. Sure, equipment could be scarce or expensive, but at its most basic, the tape machines, a composer could still get to work crafting their own material. It was also part of the reason many women composers in the 20th century took to electronics: it was a way to bypass the barriers to entry and just start making what they wanted. Many of these works ended up being for recorded media, as well as being intermedia.

In this post I am going to look at just one album, a compilation, and introduce some of the wonderful women composers. Consider these some of the founding mothers of electronic music in America. The album is called Women in Electronic Music 1977, but it has the prominent subtitle, New Music for Electronic & Recorded Media.

As Charles Amirkhanian wrote in the original liner notes, “The music on this album exhibits an exciting, wide-open, freewheeling approach to the medium of electronic music which has come to be typical of this genre in the late 1970s. No longer are composers obsessively concerned with the agonizing, expressionistic, and purely ‘electronic’ (synthesized) sound formulas which marked much of this music composed between the mid Fifties and the late Sixties. Instead, today we have composers willing to mix media and sonic materials in thoroughly inventive ways to achieve ends which are new-sounding, and often more engaging, than that of the ‘academic’ avant-garde.”

By combining mediums and genres, the work here is often healing, humorous, thought provoking, and at times transcendent. Megan Roberts work takes in the world of rock music, lending an entry point for listeners unused to the sometimes uncompromising sound worlds associated with experimental music. Laurie Anderson’s emphasis on poetic narrative gives listeners a net of words to latch onto in the sonic sea of miasmic bliss. Other pieces range from sinewave meditations to exploratory field recordings.
​
The entire album is a snapshot of an important and fertile time in the arts. Looking at what other women artists were doing around the same time gives something of the flavor of the era. Joanna Russ had just published her science fiction novel The Female Man in 1975. It’s a tale following the parallel lives of four women in universes parallel. Each world has different ideas and notions about gender roles and shows how those societies operate according to those roles. In 1978, Russ came out wit her short novel, We Who Are About To… Camouflaged into the typical survival story of a group of spacer astronauts colonizing a new world, is a story of what happens when long-term survival is threatened. The men think the only way to continue is to impregnate the unnamed narrator. As the tensions build, she reaches the point where she has to defend herself against rape, and kills the men, before going hungry, and ultimately (spoilers) ending her own life. A lot of critics panned the book at the time, but Samuel R. Delany, whose critical imagination is itself unparalleled, suggested in his introduction to a new edition that the book was “a damningly fine analysis of the mechanics of political and social decay,” and that “Russ suggests that the quality of life is the purpose of living, and reproduction only a reparative process to extend that quality—and not the point of life at all... only feudal societies can really believe wholly that reproduction... is life’s real point.” (Emphasis mine.) Being itself gives its own meaning to life.

​The 1970s also saw Kathy Acker’s literary rise that would culminate in the 1980s. Acker was a experimental novelist who was as transgressive in her words as was Delany. She made extensive use of her own biographical material, and sent it spinning through a centrifuge of cut-up techniques and other ways of working with words as she grappled with sexuality, trauma, language, identity, and an ever-simmering rebellion.

​In the visual arts Cindy Sherman was shaking things up with her photography, and she herself was the subject of much of those photos. Transformation was the name of the game, and she transformed herself continually, shedding her skin like a snake through the use of makeup, prosthetics, wigs, ornate costumes and elaborate sets. At the center of these transformations was the detournement of an array of female stereotypes culled from popular culture and history.

The sounds heard on this album can be thought of as a corollary to these other kind of avantgarde and artistic activity in other media, and they are all from women pioneering their own paths in the last decade before the Reaganomic nightmare unfurled.

I continue to find inspiration in the works of artists such as these. Yet there are many amazing women electronic musicians working right now. That’s why I want to tell you about this year’s Oram Awards. The awards were named after the founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram. The award exists as “a platform to elevate the work and voices of women and gender non-conforming artists innovating in sound, music and related technology.” For details on how to submit your music check out oramawards.com You will have until July 19th to get something in, and you don’t have to be any previously released music or work.

THE SPECULATIVE SPHERES OF JOHANA M. BEYER

One of the charges that gets leveled against the kind of music often made by avantgarde composers is that it is too academic. That no one outside the academy has any use for listening to such “music,” that it is all just stuff for the brain and little for the heart and emotions that music has so long sought to stir.
Music will forever stimulate the heart and music, but tastes vary, and not all music stirs people the same way. Some music was designed to stimulate the intellect, the mental body, and this is as valid as popular love ballads and dance floor hits.

Some music will forever be speculative. According to composer Phil Legard, “speculative music combines metaphysics, cosmology and acoustic science to relate harmonics and tuning to the music of the spheres, and the moral qualities which those spheres were believed to affect in men and women.” While speculative music has its origins in ancient times and millennia past, the appeal of speculative music for composers and listeners has never disappeared, even if its appeal is a minority taste.
​
Speculative music appears on this compilation album showcasing the contributions women composers have made to the ars electronica, because even in the age of the machine, musicians have never stopped turning their ears to the music of the spheres. In the opening piece on this album Johanna M. Beyer tunes into the cosmic celestial movements in the heavens above us.

It is fitting that her 1938 composition starts off the album. It is one of the first known works scored for electronic music written by a female composer.

Beyer was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1888 but emigrated to the U.S. sometime in the late 1920s or early thirties. She was a pianist but in 1934 she took the percussion class that one of the ubermensch of American experimentalism, Henry Cowell, taught at the New School for Social Research, aka, the University in Exile, aka The New School University.

The New School was a very experimental social milieu indeed. It was founded in 1919 by a group of grouch, dissatisfied intellectuals who were sick of the bulbous bureaucracy and blasted biliousness of so-called higher ed in America. Among its luminary instigators were John Dewey, Thorstein Velben, and Charles Beard. It started off as a night-school where lectures could be taken in for a modest fee. Since the New School was not in the business of handing out degrees, they were free to dispense with any kind of admission requirement. In places such as these adventurous music teachers could teach a curriculum of their own calibration.

Beyer had a very close friendship with Cowell, perhaps a romantically intimate relationship, but her life was intertwined with others reveling in the modernism of those past times. She knew John Cage, theosophist Dane Rudhyar, and the folklorist and musicologist John Seeger, his wife, the ultramodernist native Ohioan, Ruth Crawford.

Charles and Ruth had a daughter, Peggy Seeger, and some guy named Pete. Their family was significantly involved in the folk music revival. Ruth had worked closely with John and Alan Lomax, and Peggy went on to marry British folknik Ewan MacColl. In a roundabout way all of this tangential information leads us to the contribution Laurie Spiegel made on the Women in Electronic Music Album.

LAURIE SPIEGELS FOLKSY GROOVE

Spiegel was one of the key composers exploring the new frontiers of science and music at Bell Labs was Laurie Spiegel. The year was 1973, and at age twenty-eight she was already an accomplished musician with a restless curiosity when she started working with the GROOVE interactive compositional soft-ware. Having honed her skill and ability through scholarly devotion to musical practice and study, she was the kind of person who could see the creative potential in the new tools the facility was creating and make something timeless.
​
This compilation features the first movement of her Appalachian Grove, made like much of her other early electronic output at Bell Labs. The piece here is built around folk harmonies and shows how electronic music can also be folk music, parsing out themes as pastoral and rural even with the use of machines.

​Like many musicians before her, Laurie Spiegel had been fascinated by the Pythagorean dream of a music of the spheres. When she set about turning Kepler’s speculative seventeenth century composition into music, she had no idea her music would actually be traveling through the spheres. Putting forth Kepler’s third law of planetary motion, Harmonices Mundi was based on the varying speeds of orbit of the planets around the sun. He wanted to be able to hear “the celestial music that only God could hear,” as Spiegel said, continuing, “Kepler had written down his instructions but it had not been possible to actually turn it into sound at that time. But now we had the technology. So I programmed the astronomical data into the computer, told it how to play it, and it just ran.” Her realization of Johann Kepler’s Harmoni Mundi, a cut of which is featured on the Golden Record sent into outer-space on the unmanned Voyager exploratory craft.

(I have explored Spiegel’s work in further detail in my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory.)

IN THE FLUX WITH ANNEA LOCKWOOD

If all roads lead to fluxus, it should be no surprise to find those who have a connection to Fluxus on this album as well. Annea Lockwood is the one to represent. It makes sense that Fluxus would leave behind a trace of inspiration here. On this record the idea of electronic music is considered as a medium, but it is just one media among many, and many of the people documented were inspired to combine media with the electronic music. Indeed, this can be one of the effects of electronic music in general. Electronic music is a malleable medium, built up from electrons and shaping of sound waves, as such it is relatively easy to mix and combine it with other mediums. So much so, electronic sounds have become the background music of our time.

Lockwood was born in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1939, moved to England in the beginning of the sixties where she studied at the Royal College of Music, and attended the legendary Darmstadt course, and completed her studies at Cologne, stomping ground of Karlheinz Stockhausen. She took courses in electronic music with Gottfried Michael Koenig, who was at the head of the WDR Electronic Music Studio. Lockwood was very hip to what was going on back in the states, though too, and felt a kinship with the people who had put together the ONCE Festival (Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley) and those who later became the Sonic Arts Union (Mumma, Ashley, David Behrman and Alvin Lucier) as well as Pauline Oliveros.

In 1973 composer Ruth Anderson (see below) invited her to teach at Hunter College, CUNY, and so Lockwood moved to the United States. During the sixties she worked on the Glass Concerts.

During the late 1960s, Lockwood created works such as the Glass Concerts, and audio-visual performance work for amplified glass that exuded otherworldly timbres. My first introduction to her music was a recording of the A Sound Map of the Hudson River, made from extensive field recordings along different locations of that great body of water.

Perhaps her most fluxus feeling work is the series of Piano Transplants she did between 1969-82. She had been inspired by the work of cardiac surgeon Christian Barnard who pioneered the realm of heart transplants. For her work, she took broken down and disused pianos and further burned, drowned, beached and planted them in an English garden. Pianos continue to be burned around the globe as part of the adjacent Piano Burning work.

THE SIDEBAND BUTTERFLYS OF PAULINE OLIVEROS
Pauline Oliveros is another artist featured on this compilation. How could she not be? Her influence remains pervasive across the field of improvisation, electronic music and her own efforts at establishing the practice of deep listening, continues to inspire new generations of sound explorers.
As I mentioned in one of the recent pieces I wrote on her work, this piece, “Bye Bye Butterfly” was my first introduction to her work, and the creative use of sideband technique in audio, still blows me away every time I listen.

(Read my other articles on Pauline Oliveros:  A Deep Listening Starter Pack and Slowing Down, Listening Deep)

THE ELECTROACOUSTIC PUNK OF MEGAN ROBERTS

The burgeoning punk ethos of the seventies and the legacy of rock and roll gave Megan Roberts one strand of her inspiration. She married that with electroacoustics, creating an experimental work that also has a touchstone in the world of semi-popular culture.

“I Could Sit Here all Day” is full of aggressive wailing and screaming. It’s best played with the volume cranked to eleven. There is a raw, ritualistic feeling to it, just like there is to the primitive convulsions and gyrations of punk. We can see in her a parallel to that of Diamanda Galas.

Roberts was born in New York on October 12th of 1952, and then moved to California while still a baby. Decades later she was studying under Robert Ashley at Mills College in Oakland where the experimental scene was in full flux. There it was all about multimedia exploration in the realms of audio, video, dance and theater, melting into that swirling chaos, the decadent and primal rhythms of rock and rolls tribal beat.

In 1976 she had created a work using unichore- ovideoelectrobiosonics called “Suite for a Small Chamber.” What is a unichore? It is a kind of dance choreography where the body movements of the dancer are wired to electronic devices to trigger synthesizers and tape-loops. The ovideoelectrobiosonics is reference to her work combining bird and animal sounds, live audio and video feeds, along with other biological elements. “Factory” is a video she made that came out in 1976, and for this piece she utilizes the technique of strobosonic photophonos-copy. In other words, it’s a percussion piece where ultra-fast cuts from one image to another. The colors and motion map onto sound as rhythm and timbre. The work recalls the film Ballet Mecanique by Fernand Léger and the filmmaker Dudley Murphy that set the music of George Antheil into a Dadaist centrifuge.
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“I Could Sit Here All Day” is scored for birds, drums, and disembodied human voices, and is a descent into preterhuman realms of consciousness.

​SUM is a masterclass in commercial audio collage on her piece “SUM.” It is literally commercial, because its source material is made entirely from commercials. In this piece you can hear such wonderful juxtapositions as “America’s favorite snack: Geritol.” Supposedly it also mimics a speech given by Richard Nixon. This is a precursor to the willfully disdainful and humorous works of people like Wayne Butane. DUMP is another one in the same vein, both from 1970.

Points is quite different from these collage works, and is a minimalist drone piece using pure sine tones. From an electronic point of view, these are the building blocks of all sound. The person who crafts with sine tones crafts their own sonic universe, and she was such a craftswoman. She died in 2019 shortly after she approved the test pressings for an LP of her work, entitled Here. The record was put out by Arc Light Editions in February 2020.

THE VIRAL NARRATIVES OF LAURIE ANDERSON

The last two pieces on the album are from another Anderson, this time Laurie Anderson. More than anyone else on the album, she has made her imprint further into popular culture. Like David Bowie, and her late husband Lou Reed, she embraced the androgynous, and played roles in her performance art where androgyny was showcased.

​Again, she has worked across the multimedia spectrum. Born in 1947, her early artistic training started with the violin and sculpture. Her recorded work and performances have focused on the poetic power of language, electronic technology as artistic tools, and idiosyncratic use of visual imagery.
This album features two of her early pieces, “New York Social Life” and “Time to Go.”

n the 1980s she catalpulted out of the insular art worlds and into expanded public consciousness through her UK chart hitting single “O Superman,” part of her larger expansive work United States Live, though it was featured on her debut album Big Science. United States Live can be considered as her early magnum opus (others would follow). Through spoken word, animated vignettes, and performance art and strange sounds she gives her impressions about the vagaries of life life in the United States.
Thus Anderson can be seen as completing this electronic circuit of American music. Her concert film Home of the Brave would come out in 1986. Her unique voice and interpretation of the American spirit warrants further exploration and contemplation.
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Read the Rest of the New World Records and the American Experimental Tradition Series:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

In other news, our 11 year old cat Flynn was getting sick over the past two weeks and we just learned has diabetes. You really know you are living in America when even your pets get diabetes. We just got hit with a hefty vet bill, so if you have any spare change to throw into my coffee jar here here it'd be much appreciated.

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