When the crisp Autumn air starts circling in the Ohio valley, and the leaves start changing, I have a tendency to dig out my folk records, specifically the ones in the notional genres of psychedelic folk, freak folk, and apocalyptic folk. It’s the place where my inner romantic and my inner goth are on good terms with my inner hillbilly who likes to retrace his roots to songs sung in the hills of Appalachia.
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Like so many others, I first got into this style of music by tracing the influences and tastes of Current 93’s David Tibet. Sometimes you find the very best things in a discount bin at a big chain record store. In this case it was Media Play and I found for three dollars a Current 93 import comp called Emblems: The Menstrual Years. It was a two-disc set and the first disc had some of their dark sound collage music from the early records like Dawn, Dogs Blood Rising and Imperium. The second half portrayed their foray into a nebulous realm where acoustic guitars met with Tibet’s enchanting and esoteric lyrics. I knew I wanted to listen to Current 93 even though I hadn't heard them before because I knew what the name referenced, and it was something important to me as a teenager and young man.

The year was 1999 (notice that three nines in the year are actually three sixes upside down -and like David Tibet I am sick sick sick of six six six). I got hooked and started collecting.  It was easy to get taken into his gnostic world of heretical Christianity. I became transfixed by his visions of the Antichrist, Noddy, and his evocations of a primeval world where Christo-Pagan themes permeated and interfused with a post-industrial and experimental sensibility.

From my obsession with the music of Current 93 itself, I soon traced back the influences and citations Tibet himself was enamored with, because I was as enamored of him and his work as he was of these influences. Chief among these was Shirley Collins, the Incredible String Band, and the singular Comus, whose song “Diana” was covered by Current 93 on their record Horsey.

I wasn’t the only one turned on by this material, and my discovery was just in time to coalesce with the freak folk boom of the oughts. Weirdos like Davendra Banhart had rediscovered the work of Vashti Bunyan, and guitar maestros like Ben Chasny and his Six Organs of Admittance project were mining the finger picked lore of American Primitive guitar cross phased with influences from the psychedelic end of the folk revival. The time was ripe to get into this music. Reissues were coming out, and new bands like Espers and Faun Fables were writing songs that bridged the tradition into another era. Every Autumn I get the urge to revisit these strains of music.

Of course, the various flavors of folk feel right to me anytime I’m in the mood, and there are a lot of great artists continuing to mine these streams, as well as adjacent territory. Folk music, in any form, is folk music because it is a living tradition. I am grateful for artists like Sally Ann Glassman and Mary Lattimore who continue to bring their traditional and metamodern sound visions to life. Here I want to take a look at three favorite albums from the British folk revival that are perfect for autumn as the wheel of the year turns. There are plenty of other albums I’d like to write about too, and I hope to bring you some more of them in the future, if not this season, than maybe next Autumn.

THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND: WEE TAM and THE BIG HUGE

We will start our journey in the year of 1968, when the Incredible String Band released their album(s) Wee Tam and the Big Huge. In Europe this was released as double LP, but in the United States they were split into two separate albums. While I love The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, this one (or two as I heard them) remain absolute favorites. Some people seem to get kind of weirded out by listening to the Incredible String Band. They think they will become some kind of crazy hippie or something. But is that a bad thing?
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The Incredible String Band was formed by Robin Williamson, Mike Heron, and Clive Palmer in Edinburgh in 1966. All of them are multi-instrumentalists, and their albums are filled with a hallucinatory variety of traditional instruments put to lysergic use. Incredible String Band used a plethora of stringed intstruments: guitar, banjo, sitar, zither, dulcimer and more. To this they added an expanded palette liable to include whistles, flutes, washboard, kazoo, harmonica, organ, and all manner of hand drums, among other oddments. Some of these were played by additional members that had come into the fold from their hippie communal lifestyle. This can be seen on the cover of Hangmans Beautiful Daughter. Current 93 made a homage to this moment on their own cover to the Earth Covers Earth album.

Mick Heron tells how it was living together. “...we were touring maybe six months of the year and by that time we all lived together, in eight cottages joined together in this place called Glen Row. When we were not on the road we were either in the studio or playing each other songs we'd written. So it came out of the experience of just being in each other's company all the time.” Songs like “You Get Brighter” recall what it must have been like in those days of free love.

In general, I prefer the songs written by Robin Williamson and sung in his high voice the best, but I do love those that Mick Heron brought to the table too. The interplay between them, and the other musicians are where this incredible fusion happens. The Incredible String Band is the sum of its parts and if they had been separated it wouldn’t have been the same. 

Songs like “Job’s Tears” and “Maya” are transcendent and transportive. Other tracks like “Ducks on a Pond” are full of poetic power and tap into the place where bards call down songs of transformation and magic. It’s got the best damn kazoo, harmonica and washboard playing on any record I ever heard. 

Robin Williamson would go on to write a book with fellow Scottish esotericist R.J. Stewart on Celtic Bards, Celtic Druids (1996). He also combined forces with another seeker in the Western Mystery Tradition, John Matthews to pen two more volumes, From the Isles of Dream: Visionary Stories and Poems of the Celtic Renaissance (1993) and The Bardic Source Book: Inspirational Legacy and Teachings of the Ancient Celts (1998). Williamson is an accomplished harpist and traditional storyteller, making the connection to the bards of old even more resonant.

Williamson also released a number of solo records. Continuing in the bardic mode, the harp became his main instrument and he became quite accomplished. Among the gems is a soundtrack he creted for a theatrical production of the Mabinogion called Music for the Mabinogi.

It should probably come as no surprise to fans of the genre that the following two entries also feature Robin Williamson and Mike Heron as guest musicians. They really are that incredible.

SHIRLEY COLLINS: THE POWER OF THE TRUE LOVE KNOT

Shirley Collins had already been recording for close to ten years when Wee Tam and the Big Huge came out. At this point she was reaching her first apogee, with further climaxes to come, followed by a long period of silence that began in the 1970s, and triumphant return starting in the 2010s egged on by the encouragement of David Tibet to return to singing.

Whereas the Incredible String Band would have you flying high on hallucinogenic wings into newly composed songs, Collins takes you down a saturnine notch into a world of false lovers, death, and murder. In other words, a large swathe of the subject matter of traditional song. This was certainly part of the appeal to me when I got my first mail-ordered Shirley Collins CD in the mail, The Power of the True Love Knot. The sadness of things which I had felt in my life, and found solace inside the music of Current 93 was present in droves. I could quite identify with mordant tones in these old but timeless songs.

The Power of the True Love Knot isn’t all weeping and tears, though much of it is. At the heart of the album was an idea Shirley had found across folk music, “the idea of true love as a power outside society's control.” These song-stories and ballads tell these stories of lovers united, torn apart, found again, the power of the knot is unbroken, just as the circle does not break. Mike Heron and Robin Williamson both make appearances on this album, as does her stalwart sister Dolly Collins who plays her custom-built pipe organ on a number of the pieces. 

Songs like "The Unquiet Grave" are perfect as we move into October and there are many ghost stories to tell and hear.

Rarely, as a music collector, am I an absolute completist. But I am with Shirley Collins. All of her albums are educations, as are her two books. The first of these books, America Over the Water was about her romance with Alan Lomax and collecting songs with him in the fields of the South. It is an absolute must read for the student of folksong.
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Speaking of R.J. Stewart who I mentioned above, he also plays plucked psaltery on the Shirley Collins song, “One Night As I Lay on My Bed,” a most incredible story of the Otherworld. 

VASHTI BUNYAN: JUST ANOTHER DIAMOND DAY

While the Incredible String Band and Shirley Collins were busy in the studios and at concert halls, another folk singer was getting started on a path that would lead to her traveling in horse drawn Romany style wagon all the way from London to the Isle of Skye 650 miles away. Her name was Vashti Bunyan and the great appeal of her music is it’s nursery rhyme and lullaby quality. While Shirley Collins may have mined the ballads at Cecil House, Bunyan was writing her own songs, but they were clearly inspired by a familiarity with fairy tales and a way of singing to keep oneself entertained while on a long journey. That is nowhere more apparent than the song “Come Wind, Come Rain” on her classic album Just Another Diamond Day.

Bunyan’s love of folk music came from a source that inspired and continues to inspire countless others: Bob Dylan. When she first heard his Freewheelin’ album at age 18 while on a trip to New York City she determined she would become a singer. She certainly has the voice and the gift. Back home in England the following year she was introduced by a friend of her mum’s to the manager of the Rolling Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham. Marianne Faithfull had just left the label he worked for and their was a space to be filled, and this became her window of opportunity. She was tasked with covering a Mick Jagger and Keith Richards song, “Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind.” Jimmy Page, ever the studio musician and helping guitar hand, even recording with eccentric freaks like Screaming Lord Sutch, was brought into add his licks. The B-Side was one of her own songs, “I Want to Be Alone.” That was 1965 and another 45 followed the next year, though both received scant attention at the time. A few other gigs and songs followed such as her masterpiece in melancholy, “Winter Is Blue,” a song I still can’t listen to all that often for fear of it setting me down into saturnine moods. It’s a fantastic number though.

In the meantime, Bunyan was working at a veterinary practice while she was trying to get a music career off the ground, when she heard about an artists community in Skye being set up by the Glaswegian bard of psychedelic folk pop, Donovan. She had just got back in touch with Robert Lewis, who became her partner and later, father of her three children. Lewis had been in art school, and it being the height of the sixties, she quit her job and they made the decision to travel to Skye the way some of her Romany relatives from her maternal grandfather’s line might have: in a wagon and pulled by a horse.  

“It was a way to escape, but with a purpose. We didn't know where we were going to be tomorrow, but it'd be somewhere down the road. What saved me was that I didn't have to think too hard about anything except wood for the fire, water for the horse. Immediate things.” Part of their inspiration was the burgeoning back to the land and appropriate technology movements. “I had wanted to go back and find out how things used to be before the internal combustion engine, without thinking how hard life could be.”

Along the way, through the experiences they had and the kind people who helped them out, they got in touch with the magical side of existence. There were trials and tribulations, but also meaningful connections and people who encouraged her to record her music.

 “I wanted to get back that feeling of childlike wonder, to remember what it was like to find the world extraordinary.”

The songs on Just Another Diamond Day transmit this kind of magic and wonder, and with their sing-song mother goose style lyrics, certainly connect the listener back to their own inner child when they knew magic was real.

​My favorite song is probably “Rainbow River” but they are all enchanting, and contribute their inherent magic to reenchant the world.

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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  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 could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

Something many people who are creators of some kind can agree on is that AI should not be taking over the jobs of artists, writers and musicians. Yet Fantasy and SciFi author Joanna Maciejewska claims she wants “AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

I want to do my own laundry and dishes so I have a reason to make art. Cleaning out the cat box and changing the litter will never be the job of a robot. I do not fantasize about a fully automated luxury capitalism communism replete with unlimited resources to cater to my whims so I can focus on the art life. While washing the dishes I find the key that solves a problem in an essay, story or poem. Cleaning up my dog poop and going to the grocery store on my own, instead of having other people delivery my food to me, are when I get captivated by an idea that I might work into a music mix for Imaginary Stations or a future sit-in on Trash Flow Radio. At my library day job, I started off as a shelver and I still don’t mind filing books on the shelves, or more often in the catalog department, unpacking the boxes of books and taking the cardboard outside to throw into our recycling dumpster. That’s when I’m dreaming of the next thing I am going to write and share. The work of my hands in so-called drudgery gives freedom to my mind.

I don’t need robots or any kind of AI to do this work for me. It is when I am doing this work that I am connected to the same or similar grinds as my fellow humans. My creative work is not so special that I have to waste valuable electrical energy having some machine, that will probably break down and need to be fixed by a specialist, to do my chores for me. I’d rather stay connected to the rhythms of the household and the rhythms of life, to the rhythms of my spouse, and our pets, and our plants than have it all taken care of for me as if I lived in some space station bubble like George Jetson, disconnected from physical reality and the biology of life.

No flying cars for me, they don’t exist anyway. No self-driving cars either. Put me in the drivers seat. I don’t want the machine to the do the driving. If someone else is going to be driving, maybe its because I’m going somewhere with family or friends, or sitting next to another citizen of the city I call my home and taking public transport. Riding the bus to work as I did for two decades until my department moved into the post-industrial hellscape sector of the city. Riding the bus, I got a lot of reading done, and time to think, jot notes down in my notebook, and write drafts. That’s a far cry from a self-contained isolated self-driving car, with no hope of interaction between the different mixes of people you get to meet on the bus. Free from distraction, free from the cares of an actually lived life.

The poet Gary Snyder reminded us in his Zen wisdom to “chop wood and carry water.” Those basic chores were part of poetry. Stephen King reminded us that “Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”

This is a useful reminder to give myself, because when I put art before life, my relationships suffer. Our microcosmic relations are the basis for the world relations in the macrocosm, and we can all see how well they are going. We aren’t so special as creators that we need to make someone else take care of things for us, whether its another human or a robot. Interdependence is good, and then we all have a chance to support each other and allow our unique gifts to flourish in community.

AI in the arts is in itself dead end direction. Some of the specific tools, such as speech synthesis, or image generation, have the potential to be used artistically, have even more potential for application in détournement and culture jamming. Meanwhile they are getting used by the corporate state to jam human culture with their sloppy seconds. The best way to detox from the overstimulation of the simulated spectacle remains to go offline and get away from the machines. This is where direct engagement with our own home economies becomes so vital. The machines have made us alienated from our own labor. Labor itself is not alienating, no matter how much Marx you’ve read. When done in the spirt of vocation, calling, and in presence, labor is as vital as the viriditas of the evergreen world. We aren’t owed a living by machines whose tendency towards entropy and rust is quicker than our own tendency to arthritis and blindness.

In the words of a meme I am a soul “driving a meat coated skeleton made from stardust.” While I grant that all of nature is animated by sparks divine, there is a difference between the LLM residing in a case of silicon coated metal. Do robo dolls have souls? No AI disempowered dishwasher will ever wash the silverware I inherited from my grandparents with the same care and memory of their lives. No AI disempowered washing machine will ever make a record like Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine. Nor will it do the same work of the sun when I hang the clothes I bought from the thrift store out on the line, and never for free. All of these machines are predicated on the burning up of ancient stored sunlight that requires the continued pillage of our mother to gain what? A few idle hours, whose leisure may be wasted on video games and television. Downtime further immersed in the spectacle is no break. Real work, the repair of our homes, the repair of our earth house hold, requires we use our hands.  

Gary Snyder reminds us again of the duty of a poet. “As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.” So lets get dirty.

Common work holds us all in common bonds and can help renew and restitch a world unraveling. Without the worn work of caring hands putting needle to thread and patching up those threadbare places, we risk losing the very weave that holds households and communities together. Let me do the common work while I share my dreams. Let me plant the seeds. There will be time to sit on the front porch with a notebook and pen in hand to also do the work of the scribe. They are not separate.   

Maciejewska emphasized in her viral X post that, “just to clarify… this post isn't about wanting an actual laundry robot. It's about wishing that AI focused on taking away those tasks we hate.”

But why should we hate those chore which we alone can infuse with the poetry of daily life?

Analog Intelligence begins at home, in doing the things that the index of influencers and the industrial-entertainment complex bemoans as beneath them. Essential skills are gathered by doing unpleasant things. Sometimes making art can be drudgery. Keeping our homes clean, our water carried to do the cooking, the wood chopped for the stove, all are ways to keep the hearth fire burning. And doing them even when we don’t feel like it gives us the grit to push through artistic obstacles when those get tough.

​And after the floor has been swept, and while the socks are being darned, and the stew is bubbling on the stove, we gather round to share our dreams and stories together. No robots required.

When the world doesn’t make sense, we find the need for crazy wisdom. Since the world never made sense, and probably never will, crazy wisdom remains an eternal remedy, a universal panacea in times when the only way to go forward is to embrace paradox. Where can the crazy wisdom be found? Sometimes you can hear it on the radio, if you happened to be tuned in to the right frequency at the right time. But some sometimes a bit of time traveling is also in order to find the stations with crazy emanations.

One purveyor of crazy wisdom over the airwaves was Wes “Scoop” Nisker, born December 22, 1942 in Norfolk, Nebraska. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Poland and he was raised in the faith of his father. Somewhere along the way he migrated to San Francisco with many of other burgeoning freakazoids who had been drawn by the allure of hippiedom to the west. At age 26, just a year after the summer of love, he got his start on the FM station KSAN.

In the sixties rock music on FM was still a rarity. AM was where you went to listen to rock and roll, and that was just the first generation of rock music, not the weird psychedelic stuff coming out of the burgeoning freak scene. Before Nisker would be able to get his Scoop, that portion of the broadcast band now allocated to FM had to get pioneered. We’ll take a brief detour into one of the ways that shook out, and how it related to Nisker.

​One of the early FM pioneers was Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue. Donahue’s radio career had started in 1949 at WTIP in Charleston, West Virginia. Then he moved to Philadelphia’s WIGB where he was on the air for nine years, only to make a sudden departure. That departure came just as WIGB was under the gun by authorities looking to uncover the payola racket afflicting the industry. It later came out that Big Daddy had been in on the take. In the meantime, he worked at WINX before heading out west for San Francisco where he’d been given the opportunity to “make a winner out of loser station” KYA by former WIGB program director Les Crane. The year was 1964.

While Big Daddy was trying to make KYA suck a little bit less, he also got involved in the racket business. Er, the record business I mean, starting a record label with another WIGB alumni Bobby Mitchell (later known as Bobby Tripp on stations in LA). Together they formed Autumn Records that had hit numbers by the likes of The Mojo Men, and none other than Sly Stone as one of their producers. Their records really started charting after they signed The Beau Brummels whose career Donahue boosted. It was a happening scene, man, and soon Big Daddy was getting his fingers into the pie of the nightclub game with his own psychedelic host spot, a place called Mothers if you can dig. Later Donahue started producing concerts as well, helping to get people moving and shaking.

By the time 1967 was underway, Donahue’s mind was getting blown by the strange sounds wafting out of the underground. AM radio didn’t want to have anything to do with that kind of high weirdness though. In response to their establishmentarian minds he wrote an influential article for Rolling Stone, titled, “AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves.” He took the Top 40 format to task, and in the wake, ended up taking over the programming of foreign language FM station KMPX. What emerged was the first free-form radio station in America. At the time nobody really paid attention to what was happening on those FM frequencies making it a perfect place for freaks to plant their flags. Big Daddy had made his move ushering in a new era and style of transmission, helping to invent what came to be known as underground radio.

KMPX was a commercial station, but during his four-hour long broadcasts of music fresh from the psychedelicized minds of hallucinating hippies, he was able to promote not just the music, but the permissive lifestyles of those who wanted to let it all hang out. It became a sensation, man.

The listenership of KMPX bloomed and boomed, probably bonged too, soon catching the interest of those in the advertising biz, as well as the record stores and head shops. Donahue’s success was copyable and the management at KSAN asked him to help shift its gears towards rock. KSAN was still a corporate outfit though, owned by the NYC corporate conglom Metromedia. They found a way to gain a listenership by appealing to the youth movement and created a distinct voice by bringing in DJs who were part of the counterculture and could spin the right records and whose political talk would jibe with the patchouli scented paisley vibes of the times.

They took chances on the airwaves that other commercial stations would be afraid to do, for fear of losing the almighty advertising dollar, such as when they opened up the phone lines for community discussion following the stabbing death of a concert goer at the Altamont rock festival in 1969. When the first volleys in the war on drugs were being thrown after President Nixon took office that same year, free speech was also being targeted. Radio stations that catered to the counterculture were seen as a threat. Then FCC commissioner Dean Burch proposed that any stations playing music that had drug-related lyrics be kept under the watchful eye of Big Brother. He wanted to ban such music entirely. All of this put DJs in a bit of a pickle. It was already hard enough playing what you wanted as a DJ if you worked for one of the more mainstream station managers. The more adventurous stations such as KMPX and KSAN chose to stand up for free speech and keep on playing what they wanted when they wanted all while delivering satirical political commentary.   

It was in this milieu that Nisker was able to make a name for himself on the airwaves, and get the scoop on his nickname in the first place. Nisker wrote songs, and he also found himself at the forefront of audio collage art. Part of his practice involved cutting up and splicing together disparate bits of music, along with interviews and sound effects to create surreal sound worlds whose humorous juxtapositions called into question the standard positions on offer in the lamestream media.

Nisker became a newsman for KSAN, migrating to KFOG later in his career. But his news was unconventional and filled with dark comedy. He’d give traffic reports where he’d say things like, “People are driving to work to earn the money to pay for the cars they're driving to work in. Back to you.”

The audiophile Steve Feinstein called him “the dean of FM rock radio newspeople,” saying further that, “since 1968 and the days of progressive pioneer KSAN, he's been crafting irreverent, satirical sound collages that present news as an ongoing drama in the theater of life. The timing and rhythm of his work brings to mind music; no wonder that two record albums have compiled his newscasts.”

He first got his nickname from Abbie Hoffman when he got the scoop on the Chicago Eight defense team, learning that they would be calling uber beatnik Allen Ginsberg to the stand for poetic testimony. Recalling the end of the conspiracy trial years later, Scoop reports that “in 1970, after the guilty verdicts in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial were announced, the San Francisco Examiner had an article saying that the rioters (in Berkeley) were listening to the KSAN news to find out where to go. And they were, of course, because we were giving them directions.”

Some of his other highlights include the time hippies were rioting in People’s Park because a parking lot was due to be constructed. He was on the air with John Lennon at the time who told Scoop to “tell them all to be peaceful.” For hippies, they sure did seem to riot a lot. The Black Panthers and Timothy Leary were among his many other illustrious and infamous guests.

As with many people in his generation, Scoop looked to the East for spiritual wisdom. In rejecting convention, the hippies also rejected a lot of things that could have given them direction that were part of the West’s wisdom traditions and rich spiritual heritage. He converted to Buddhism where he found a home for himself, in time becoming a meditation instructor, and co-editor of the Buddhist journal Inquiring Mind. He later combined his gift for comedy and stand-up with his gift for elucidating the eight-fold path. His comedy routines played up the paradoxical nature of human experience and religious experience. In this he remained true to his Jewish roots and the rich history of comedy and humor in the Judaic tradition. In a way, Scoop had become a kind of rabbi, even if not a traditional one. He was a teacher. Through his presence on the radio, and the gravitas developed through years of meditation and study of eastern scripture, and his various writings, his status as counterculture veteran and royalty, he was able to give his unique take on things all while making people think, laugh, and reflect on the commonalities that bind us together in the human condition.   

Back in 1995 when his book If You Don’t Like The News…Make Some of Your Own, whose title came from his tagline while on the air, came out, he wrote of the times that “it's obvious we can't go back to the America of the '50s, where people are moral, where there's no violence in the streets, where everybody has a nice house in the suburbs with cars and kids. That America never really existed, anyway. The whole country is on a completely different course.” The same seems true today, when so many hippies have been humbled by age and the shattering of their idealism. The world they envisioned hadn’t materialized out of the aether the way Scoops radio transmissions did. Yet there are still things that the Aquarian generation symbolized that are worthy of considering, and sometimes enacting. Their commitment to freedom of expression and speech, and their animosity towards being surveilled by their own government remain live issues. The voice of alternative media itself, embattled as it is, was a key win for all people who wish for a kind of radio that is different, that is local, that gives its DJs and programmers creative control.

Scoop thought that his generation and those who came after him were born in a transitional era. One of Scoop’s famous audio collages was when he interviewed a hippie who had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge for “spiritual advancement.” He presented that audio alongside Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” over top of The Byrds song “Eight Miles High.” Now we are in the long come-down phase from those kind of high hopes. Yet we are still in need of direction, whether it comes from the traditions of the west or the east.
Scanning the headlines today I think we could really use the crazy wisdom embodied in Scoop’s tagline: “If you don't like the news ... go out and make some of your own.”

I look forward to reading the stories created by those who are wise enough and crazy enough to go take his advice.

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This article first appeared in the Radio Enthusiast e-APA coordinated by Frederick Moe.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  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 could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

Read the other entries in my American Iconoclast's & Eccentrics series:

Harvey Pekar: Working Class Intellectual and Everyday Visionary

Gary Warne: Communiversity and the Suicide Club

Who Was Matokie Slaughter?

The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams

Fakir Musafar and Friends

Going Native In America

Weird Weather with David Wills

Running Off to Join the Circus with Jim Tully

Dwelling on the Fringe with the Hubbards

Brother Blue: The Butterfly Bard

Raymond Thundersky: The Cincinnati Construction Clown

Tiny Tim: The Goodhearted Troubadour of Popular Song

Joy Bubbles and the Church of Eternal Childhood

Ray Hicks: Bard of the Blue Ridge Mountains

On A Pilgrimage with Peace

The Long Memory of Utah Philips

The Iconoclastic Shenanigans of Henry Flynt
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Is Generation X poised to become a bridge generation between the Boomers, while holding the memories of those in the Silent generation who were our grandparents, and the Millenials, Zoomers and beyond who are our children and grandchildren? Not many people are writing about Gen X minding the generation gap. Instead they are focused on the way they think AI is going to upend life as we know it. In reality, the continuing decline of the Boomers will be much more impactful. Writer Jeff Giesea is thinking about this topic though, and he wrote a rather thoughtful piece about what he calls the Boomer reckoning, and the way the generational shift is going to affect the United States and the world at large as they slowly let go the reigns of power.

            Giesea calls this the “Boomer Paradox: boomers are holding society back, but they also are holding it together. What happens when they finally fade from the stage? Will we renew our institutions and cultural fabric, or drift into decline and unrest? How will the fiscal math even work?”

            He went on to write a lot about the resentment many of us have for the Boomers. I feel that. At the same time, like Giesea, I had a number of Boomer mentors whose role I really appreciate. There were some less savory types as well. I am a late Gen Xer, born at the end of the seventies, just before the Millenial generation. A lot of my older friends, and siblings, were more squarely in the Generation I identify with, as is my spouse. Punk rock, skateboarding, industrial music and hip-hop were all part of the stew I was influenced by, and these subcultures were born out of the hearts and minds of Gen X. Yet there were Boomers who mentored me, and their hippie music was almost as important to me, though in a different way. I had a handful of Boomer teachers who guided me and coached me in creative writing, on the one hand, and older hippies who inaugurated me into that part of the countercultural world. There was always some older hippie hanging around after all. A next-door neighbor and good friend who would get me stoned and teach me about vegetarianism, gardening, astrology and beyond. There were other older hippies hanging around the edges of the as well. Someone always knew one. Who else were you going to buy the weed and acid off of without actually going to a Grateful Dead show yourself?

            Some of these drug addled deadheads in my circle I never should have had as mentors, but such is fate, and being in a phase of low self-esteem, I let certain individuals have more influence over me than I ever should have. But then that’s one of the issues those of us in Gen X have: sometimes the people who could have been mentoring us, were off doing something else, leading us to find our own way. Right into the hands of people with questionable sense of ethics. At least, speaking for myself. I wasn’t really a latchkey kid, but so many other Gen Xers I knew were, I am sure they can relate to this.

            There were some less seedy hippies in my life as well. A few of them had resisted the psychic reterritorialization that was spawned during the post-WWII boom. While some people were making babies, government agents were thinking about how to best go about brainwashing people, and steering the hippies off course. MK Ultra and Operation CHAOS were a big part of that, and to a large degree, they succeeded in their aim. Having a counterculture so tightly woven around the use of drugs made it all the more easier to manipulate peoples minds. Have a look at Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties if you have any doubts. Though his book leaves some threads untied, it points to enough factual evidence and indirect evidence to show just how much MK Ultra and Operation CHAOS were up to their eyeballs manipulating minds, hippie minds included.  

            After the Manson murders the image of the hippie had been marred. Then the academic think tanks began a project to rebrand the more radical edge of the counterculture. Black Panthers, Weathermen, Students for a Democratic Society and Yippies all became taboo. If you wanted to make it in the world, even talking about such things became verboten. Capitalism could no longer be critiqued by the hippie generation. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, and so a large swathe of them sold out and joined the ranks. This slow dissipation of the movement happened during the seventies, at the time when E.F. Schumacher’s idea of appropriate technology was having a moment, and the appropriate tech movement itself was doing its DIY best to address the precarious energy predicament then hitting the industrialized world in an opening salvo.  

​            Doing it yourself takes a lot of discipline and effort, and eventually many of the Boomers turned their backs on their youthful ideals, joined evangelical churches, and joined instead the Reagan Revolution. America was back, for a time. But the hypercapitalist neon dayglo of the prosperous 80s and 90s that followed would soon begin to fade, culminating in not a renewed economy, but depleted energy that lead to fracking and more offshore drilling. The 2008 financial crisis caused by the burst of the housing bubble led to the busting of hope for Gen X and early Millennials as their future was further sold out to prop up the financialized system and property of the older banker Boomers who just didn’t want to let go, leading us into another boom bust cycle and our current state of polycrisis.

So yeah, there is some resentment.  
 
            Living in this kleptocratic gerentocracy has made many of us who are in Generation X weary and wary of the Boomers. Some Millenials have perhaps been even more wary. The postwar Boomer era is ending. But they are still clutching onto more than a slice of the pie until their hands go dead and cold. Yet Giesea says resentment towards Boomers is stupid.  The thing about resentment though, is that it isn’t usually a choice made in your head. It’s an emotion. Every human deserves dignity, including Boomers, but a lot of the resentment comes from the decreased standard of living younger generations have had to endure while our elders continue to hold onto property -hence things like the new round of the “housing crisis” which is really just a greed crisis.

For my own case, I’ve worked at the library my entire adult life. I started as a book shelver, and stayed in the job for typical Gen X reasons, even when it was difficult over my first decade here to get any kind of promotion. I stayed because I was working for a good cause, the free sharing of information and knowledge, and I didn’t have to work for some corporation with questionable values. It was also a perfect slacker job for a bookish person. I had access to books and a ton of music, two of my favorite forms of intellectual stimulation. I worked with many other Gen Xers who were artists, musicians, poets, potters, writers. The atmosphere made up for the lack of funds. I didn’t generally take my work home with me either, and still don’t. It’s a fantastic kind of job to have while pursuing things like doing radio shows as I did on WAIF, and putting effort into developing my skills as a writer, and working on getting published.

Over time I did get some promotions, and my ability to earn and make it in the world has gone up, but it hasn’t kept pace with the cost of living and now stagflation. My ability to help our own Millennial children is curbed. When I see them paying more money for rent than we ever paid for a mortgage, yeah, there is some resentment for the Boomers raking in the money off of these properties, and yeah some Gen Xers are doing that too. But a lot of that real estate is held in Boomer hands and accounts. How can are kids build a future when they struggle just to make rent. Having a slacker job and doing creative things on the side is less viable, because they are hustling to make it. When they are off work, they are stressed and the way out is into the digital world.

The huge wealth gap doesn’t help matters at all. Most of us are seeing the quality of life deteriorate year after year, and have to make choices over whether to take our dog to the vet or put our car in the shop. Meanwhile Boomers are going on cruises, going on big vacations, and those in the higher ranks are buying yachts, estates, shrinking what the rest of us have access to it, so yeah there might be some resentment there. It’s also why I will always despise such a genre of music as yacht rock

That being the case, Gen X can still be a bridge generation, as Giesea suggests. I just think that what that bridge looks like is going to be a lot different than he does. This is because of a fundamental difference in world view. Giesea says, “The postwar boomer era is ending just as AI and automation accelerate. Over the next two decades, these forces will reshape the world more profoundly than most of us are prepared for.” I disagree with him that AI and automation will have as big of an impact as he suggests, for the simple reason that the environmental resources needed to power AI are not adequate enough to sustain it. That doesn’t mean our would-be tech lords won’t try to pilfer as many of those resources as they can before they can’t. 

Yet a recent article in Fortune has shown that most corporations aren’t making anything on the money they have invested into the questionable tech. No doubt another economic bubble is forming around these LLMs and when it pops the tools people are putting so much unvetted faith in will disappear.

Until that happens though, we are going to see more and more people going off the rails of the crazy train, as Ted Gioia has pointed out in his recent assessment of AI and its disastrous impacts on mental health and the ability to even know what is real.           

 It should come as no surprise that Giesea and I disagree on the trajectory of the future. As founder of the Boyd Institute he comes from a place steeped in the industrial worlds preferred mythology, faith and belief in technological progress. Many of their project’s center around drones, automation and autonomy, space exploration and technology for statecraft. Their name comes from John Boyd, developer of the OODA loop, and while that seems like it could be a useful tool for strategy, it need not be employed towards technological advancement. The OODA loop could also be deployed for degrowth, frugality, and downshifting towards lower-tech tools that will be useful as the Boomers die out, and with them, their world of endless technological progress.

            This is where the bridge of Gen X will become important. We remember how things were done before the internet became as prevalent as it is now. Those of us lucky enough to have grandparents who grew up on farms, and put effort into their home economy, will be familiar with the way they pinched pennies and got things done on the cheap, produced some of the things they needed for their own household. We may also remember the way families stayed in touch by writing letters to each other. This was something I did when I met people around the country as a teen skateboarding in new cities on family vacations. I’d make a friend for a week and we’d become pen pals. That will be a useful skill to revive as the use of the internet becomes more and more questionable. As Josh Datko pointed out in a recent substack note, it is also a lot more secure from being surveilled. We also know how to make a mean mixtape.

The older Gen X crowd also helped build up the indie underground that was all based on analog networking. Many of those Gen Xers took direct inspiration from the hippies, from the underground newspapers, and certainly from the rock music itself. Many Boomers played a hand in developing their own underground networks in terms of the Rainbow Gathering, and the unique culture surrounding the Grateful Dead and the jam bands that followed, pulling in many a Gen Xer into their wake. Now that scene has meshed in some ways with that of traditional music, Americana and bluegrass.

The analog tools we have that helped build the underground worlds of skateboarding, punk rock, and hip-hop, and more niche scenes like noise, goth and industrial, are all useful to rebuild connection as digital culture continues to disintegrate.

All of these groups and their interests famously got mashed up into the ire spawning image of the millennial hipster who drew from all of them while being loyal to none of them. This itself can be a strength. Many a Gen Xer derided the hipster phenomenon as much as they resented the Boomer. Yet we can still be a bridge. If we let go some of our cynicism and the emotional armor of the perpetual skeptic, we can become mentors and mentees in turn. Every generation has a lot to give the ones who came before and after. Each have blind spots, each have skills and memories worth preserving and sharing.  

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  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 could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

​“Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.” -Lord Byron

Dear Readers,

             I hope the missive finds you well.
           
In the past the exchange of letters was a serious form of entertainment. Back when the news cycle[1] was a matter of days, weeks, and months, not hours and minutes, most days were slow news days and I imagine there was an excitement about getting a letter in the mail. It might have been enough to buoy a person for days and weeks, even more so when the letter was from a loved one who had moved far away, or from a colleague in a particular field of research and inquiry who did not live close by. The exchange of gossip or ideas was a pleasure in itself.

When a mother heard about a son’s adventures trying to make a living or a name for himself in a distant city, it brought relief to her worries, an update to his latest activities, and an idea of what life was like in San Francisco, as opposed to St. Louis, or a farm in Iowa. A father hearing from a daughter who’d moved on with her new family to make a go of it in South Dakota got to keep up with the growth of his progeny in times when travel was rare, difficult, or otherwise expensive.  Childhood friends could stay in touch and new friends from far away, met by circumstance, would become pen pals and keep each other posted on what was going on in their lives if each was amenable and of the right temperament.

Did I mention gossip? I thought I did, but maybe it’s just a rumor. The salacious spreading of rumor, suggestion, and innuendo has long been a habitual pastime among humans. The kind of letter filled with juicy tidbits about the goings-on of cousins, neighbors, coworkers, in-laws, ex-laws and outlaws was the proper place to write about what might have otherwise been improper to say out loud in the polite society of our not-so-distant past. When these letters got shared with others, they became like tabloid rags for socialites and the hangers-on at court or those who aspired to aristocratic social positions.

People never stopped entirely writing letters to each other, but due to their analog nature, they seem to have reached something of a nadir point for most folks in our society. Even the traditional Christmas letter that people used to send, updating one family on everything going on with another family over the past year, has been replaced by shallow cards, or by pics of the family with their pets. I like getting pictures and cards from my cousins and friends at the end of the year, but often times there is hardly anything in it more than a note.
Is the high school love note endangered? The people in high school now are part of a generation that has grown up with cell phones. Teen texting has replaced the teen love note, furtively folded in sweaty palms then exchanged between classes or given to a potential paramour at the bus stop.

​Would those words from Nick Cave’s great romantic ballad “Love Letter” ever be phrased for an email or a text?   

Email has been a great substitute for the letter, but it’s not the same. As a teenager in the nineties I had a lot of pen pals and people I wrote to, but it tapered off as email took over in the oughts. I’ve corresponded with a lot of wonderful people over email too, but there is something different about the medium. Avid emailers haven’t really collected their email correspondence with others in the same way people used to collect letters and print them into books. As much as I’d like to read the collected emails of Rudy Rucker, say with his friend, fellow science-fiction writer, and sometime collaborator Bruce Sterling, I’m not sure such a thing will ever happen.  Maybe I just haven’t waited long enough for it to appear or perhaps there is already something like this out there that I just don’t know about. Maybe emailers don’t want to share their collected emails. Maybe they all got deleted. Maybe no one else cares.

            Yet when I wander the stacks hunting for old books (one of the perks of working at a library), I have found volume upon volume of correspondence between various writers, artists, musicians, politicians, scientists, socialites and regular people.  When I did a subject heading search for the term “correspondence,” I found 5,724 titles for books that contain people’s printed letters to each other. To me, this says something about where we have come from as an industrial society and one of the many things we have lost: the art and pleasure of writing letters to each other.

            This would be a good thing to regain. Among myriad other benefits, in deindustrial times it may be possible for a person to make a living, or at least a bit of side money or trade, by writing letters.  In Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet of novels, a man works the trade of letter writer for hire on the streets of Barcelona. He had the calling of a poet, but poetry has never paid the bills too well (though it can happen). With his poetic imagination, he helps those who are illiterate to compose beautiful language to captivate the heart of the beloved. Prisoners who have been talented at letter writing have often gotten protection from illiterate prisoners by writing letters for them to their old ladies on the outside, at least in fiction. Considering that literacy rates are liable to go down in the dark ages to come, the ability to craft a lovely letter can be considered a potentially formidable skill.

Alyson Hagy wrote a whole deindustrial book on this topic. Her novel Scribe is set in Appalachia after a second Civil War and contagious fevers have decimated the population of the United States. Barter and trade have replaced the once mighty dollar. The main character has become known for her skills in making paper, ink, and further, writing letters. These she trades for tobacco, firewood, and the scant other things she may need. Yet, there is a danger in her ability as well. Sometimes a letter can set off unforeseen events. There is a responsibility that comes with being a scribe.

Letter writing need not be a simple two-way exchange between people. It can also form the backbone of an analog network with multiple nodes.

 There is a lot of potential for round-robin mail to come into use to keep communities and families connected. During the Great Depression, many people, even if they had phone service, didn’t like to make long distance phone calls to stay in touch, except in case of emergency. Long distance used to be pretty expensive, and if you came from a big family, as more people did in the past, chances were you’d have a lot siblings to stay in touch with on both sides of a marriage. The postal service helped fill the void. Round-robin mail was a way for families to stay in touch and it often worked by a process of addition and subtraction. Every so often a package would arrive to a family filled with letters and pictures. You’d take your old letter out of the package, write a new one, add some pictures if you had them, and send it on to the next person in the mail circle. That person would take their old letter out, and fill up a new one with the latest news, and then send it along to the next in line.

It seems to me the round-robin style sharing of letters and other ephemera could be employed just as easily by a group of close-knit friends, members of fraternities, sororities, clubs, and societies who wanted to stay in touch. This round-robin style of sharing mail is an excellent example of an old-school, analog communications network. Something similar, though operated differently, and not explicitly for family, could also be used for groups who share an affinity around writing about a certain topic, say alchemy, amateur radio, retro pulp fiction, deindustrial living skills, or green wizardry. Another way to do it would be to set up an Amateur Press Association (APA) on the topic.

Many APA’s are still going even though it is now a niche hobby. The structure of an APA should be able to weather some of the convulsions to come. At its most simple an APA is a group of people who share mail with each other in bundles. Each member writes and then photocopies, mimeographs or duplicates in some way their contribution to a mail package that is sent to a Central Mailer (not to be confused with the central scrutinizer) to collate and send back out to all of the different members of the group. Say someone sets up a Green Wizards APA and it has fifty members. Then each person who contributes to that month’s bundle needs to run off fifty copies of their how-to guide for making beeswax candles and send it in to the Central Mailer, who then collates all the individual contributions into the bundle and sends a package back to each member. Some APA’s put every person’s contribution together into a zine, but the principle is the same. Often in an APA there are yearly dues or a membership fee that goes towards covering the cost of sending out the bundles by the Central Mailer.

I have been a member of two APAs, one large and one small. The large one is the American Amateur Press Association, AAPA, established in 1936, and was a split off from the National Amateur Press Association, formed in 1876, also still in existence. The AAPA had over 120 members when I last paid my dues. The smaller APA, Freedom APA, was by invitation only. It took its name from the fact that there was no theme and members were free to contribute anything they wanted to the bundles, which went out about three times a year.

The idea of whether or not an APA is open to the public, or closed to a smaller group brings up a key point. Depending on what the goals of the organizers are, it could go either way. Many APAs have been focused around genre literature, specifically science fiction and fantasy. A number of professional writers have participated in APAs, H.P. Lovecraft being one of the most famous. I think they have a lot of potential for connecting people who would otherwise be online chatting in forums about herbalism or classical music appreciation. If started small and by invitation only, they could grow, and then when the organizers have the operation figured out and running smoothly, they can start advertising their presence and invite others in to share in the joy of exchanging the written word.

Mail Art operates in a similar way to the APAs, and developed out of the Fluxus art movement and the work of Ray Johnson and his New York School of Correspondance in the 1960s. From there its tentacles dipped into the  industrial and punk music scenes and other fringeworthy subcultures. The practice is centered around sending small pieces of art through the post. These are often collages, block prints and rubber-stamp pieces, but also other mediums. The practice still has a small but loyal cult following around the world.

Works were created and sent out to lists of people. There were many Mail Art APAs where collected collages were collated by the Central Mailer and sent to everyone on the network. Yet there were looser Mail Art networks. Each Mail Artist would develop their own address book of contacts and send pieces out to who they chose. (Even if you don’t ever get into Mail Art, keeping an address book is useful to do. I don’t really happen to know how many people in the Millennial cohort or the Z generation who have and keep address books, but if a digital gizmo dies, it’s nice to have a hard-copy backup of people’s addresses and phone numbers.)

​Zines and underground newspapers offer another way for people to get to know each other across space when the absence of heavily subsidized oil transportation and internet connections start (continue) to go on the fritz. A PO Box or return address is often included in most zines, even if it is really just a mail drop. Many zines have included classifieds of a kind. These are often people looking to make contacts for their small touring band, trade with other zinesters, or other people looking for pen pals with shared interests. 

Another reason to think about corresponding over paper instead of over email is to minimize your digital footprint. Sure, the NSA already knows everything they want to know about you, if they want to know about you. But paper letters are harder to hack. Perhaps more importantly for your mental health, it is harder for advertisers to use your paper mail to spit customized ads back at you, unless the people who want to read your letters are also skilled in the tradecraft of spies. If that’s the case, you probably have bigger problems anyway.

Even so, there are times in life when secrecy in communication is required. For instance, you may have gone out and started your own shortwave pirate radio station. Or perhaps you’ve started a clandestine political organization. In the case of shortwave pirate radio, operators often really like receiving signal reports and other feedback from listeners. They need a way to communicate that avoids giving out their location, while still giving listeners a way to get in touch. Enter the mail drop.

In order to run a mail drop you need to find someone who is absolutely trustworthy and is willing to operate a PO Box. A PO Box is used so that a home address never needs to be given out, adding another layer of privacy and protection for the mail drop operator. The PO Box is revealed to the public, in the pages of a zine or over the air on a pirate radio show, for instance, or more strictly on a need-to-know basis. Those who want to get in touch write to the PO Box. The operator collects the mail from the box and forwards it to the person it really goes to, often to another PO Box, which again adds another level of privacy and protection.

It is useful to know that operating a mail drop, on behalf of a pirate station or for any other reason, is completely legal. There is nothing illegal about sending mail by a circuitous route to others.

If you do find yourself in a situation where you are sending out secret missives, then learn  to write lightly. Spies and snoops have been known to read the pages of a notebook below the one the ink was splashed on. If you are really under surveillance from Big Brother, Little Brother, and their friends, then you should always consider that everything you write will be read. Not to induce undue paranoia.

No less a spy than Allen Dulles noted, “When the post is used it will be advisable to act through post boxes; that is to say, people who will receive mail for you and pass it on. This ought to be their only function. They should not be part of the show. They will have to be chosen for personal friendship which they have with you or with one of your agents. The explanation you give them will depend on circumstances; the letters you give them must be apparently innocent ...  A phrase, signature or embodied code will give the message. The letter ought to be concocted in such fashion as to fit in with the recipient’s social background. The writer therefore ought to be given details of the post boxes assigned to them. An insipid letter is in itself precious. If however, a signature or phrase is sufficient to convey the message, then a card with greetings will do.”
 
Learning some tradecraft will of course be useful to political dissidents, but this kind of thing might also be useful for those in minority religions if things turn ugly with the rise of the second religiosity (e.g. lynchings, mobs, burnings at the stake). General chaos, people getting canceled, and other dastardly shenanigans may be other reasons for communicating in secret.​

​If your interest in writing letters isn’t so clandestine, there are other aspects of it worthy of consideration with regards to a pleasant deindustrialized life. Consider penmanship. Mine is atrocious. Yet, it can be very fun to write in cursive, and a great joy for others to read. Practicing penmanship can be enhanced when bringing back the other kit of OG writers. I’m thinking here of the fountain pen. There is something ritualistic about writing with one. Loading the ink and cleaning the nib can prime the pump of words. Sitting down to write becomes very tactile. Typing, likewise, can be very physical and rhythmic. Letters banged out on typewriters are also fun for writer and reader.

Then consider stationery: elegant paper that has weight and texture. Something the words can gleam off of. The crafty deindustrial letter writer will probably be scheming of ways to make their own ink and paper like the character in Hagy’s book Scribe.  This would be in keeping with something ancient scribes knew how to do as part of their trade. Making ink and paper could turn into a side gig depending on how much you can make, how much other people need it, and what they would be willing to barter or buy it for. It’s certainly a worthy quill to put in one’s cap as far as skills go.
 
What will become of the world’s postal services is a good question. The United States’ postal service has been in rough shape, by various accounts, for a number of years. Whatever its exact future, it seems some kind of postal service can and will be organized in the future. It is certainly within the realm of the low-tech,and various forms of mail service have been around for hundreds of years, with ancient precedents going back to the couriers of the pharaohs of Egypt.

I guess that’s it for now. Here’s to many opportunities for putting your pen to scratching and setting those typewriter keys to clacking.

Sincerely,

Justin Patrick Moore

P.S. A slighty different version of this article appeared in an issue of the deindustrial fiction quarterly, New Maps.

RE/SOURCES:
There are numerous histories of postal services for various eras and regions of the world. I won’t list them all here, but something along those lines would be useful reading in the event the postal service needed reorganization, or for writers looking to write a postal-based deindustrial fiction story. There are also a lot of different books about how to make paper and ink, the art of fountain pens, and paeans to stationary. If this is an area of interest for you, I’m sure you’ll hunt down the ones that suit you best. Similarly, if the related pastime of stamp collecting is in your future, there are lots of titles about “the world’s most popular hobby” to get you started. For these re/sources I’ve focused on a few websites and books for APA’s, mail art, and two novels about post office workers.
 
American Amateur Press Association (AAPA). <https://www.aapainfo.org/>. Besides sharing monthly bundles of reading material, there are a lot of people involved in the AAPA who are into letterpress printing. It is a great resource for anyone who wants to get started going down that road.

Bukowski, Charles. Post Office. New York, NY.: Ecco Books, 2002, 1971. “It began as a mistake. It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damn near anybody, so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and I was hiking around in my leisure.” Aren’t those lines one of the great openings in American letters? Your mileage may vary on that, and for this novel about a gambling alcoholic who becomes a mail clerk and his sordid misadventures along the way. Even with all the antics, it does give some color to the job of mail delivery.

Gallagher, Winifred. How the Post Office Created America: A History.  New York, N.Y.: Penguin Press, 2016.
Garfield-Perry Stamp Club. “Stamp Collecting 101: Philately: The Art of Stamp Collecting.” <http://garfieldperry.org/wp/learn-philately/class-overview/> This page includes a short twelve-lesson primer on the basics of the stamp-collecting hobby.

Hinchcliff, Jennie and Wheeler, Carolee Gilligan. Good Mail Day: A Primer For Making Eye-Popping Postal Art. Beverly, Massachusetts.: Quarry Books, 2009.

Pratchett, Terry. Going Postal. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2004. Pratchett isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and I’ve only read a couple of his Discworld novels, of which this is one, but I thought I’d put it on this list as a fantasy humor alternative for those who might be put off by Bukowski’s shenanigans. This is a tail about “getting the moribund Postal Service up and running again…with literally mountains of decades-old undelivered mail clogging every nook and cranny of the broken-down post office building; and with only a few creaky old postmen and one rather unstable, pin-obsessed youth available to deliver it.”

National Amateur Press Association (NAPA) <https://amateurpress.org/> This is the oldest amateur press association in the world.

Srodes, James. “Allen Dulles’s 73 Rules of Spycraft.” Intelligencer: U.S. Journal of Intelligence Studies, Fall 2009, pp. 49–55. Available for download: <https://grugq.github.io/resources/Dulles%20on%20Tradecraft.pdf>
Welch, Chuck, editor. Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology. Calgary, Alta.: University of Calgary Press, 1995. Now out of print, but worth looking at, if you can find a copy, perhaps at a library. My institution has a copy, but it is very expensive now on the used market.

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  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. 

☕️☕️☕️ 
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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

The words bohemian and discipline aren’t two that most people normally think of as going together. One might think that self-restraint and good habits such as regular exercise and keeping a clean house get tossed out the window when embarking on the path of the bohemian. Yet it takes quite a bit of dedication to live an unconventional lifestyle. For those who have devoted themselves to literature, music and art, and to the making of it, discipline is a must for showing up on days when the muse seems distant and far away. The rigors of being downwardly mobile, of toiling away in obscurity, of working dead end or menial day and night jobs while focusing on the great work during so-called leisure hours requires devotion and willpower. And while the development of these internal powers may be free, they do not come without effort.

Discipline is necessary if one wishes to escape the laziness of the mass minded. Regular practice is required if indifference to the approval or disapproval of others is sought. To be insulated from the arrows of the philistines and illiterati care must be taken.

Resisting the simulacra of experience in favor of real experience takes guts. Doing things which no one gives permission to do means living a life that will often be outside the comfort zone.

The Do It Yourself ethic that is central to Universalist Bohemianism and Down Home Punk runs on a fuel of willpower for making things, whether it’s a cupcake side hustle, a regionally touring band, or a print or skateboard shop in your basement. Nothing gets done until you do it. No robots, no managers.

In the age of Big Spectacle perhaps the biggest use of discipline comes in the form of cutting oneself off from the deluge of streaming entertainment in favor of the drip feed of slow culture. Savoring unmediated experiences instead of bingeing on things both pointless and forgettable. The discipline to turn away from distractions and focus on things that are important to you as an individual cannot be underestimated. The only way to be sequestered outside of massive influence and the constant pull of attention is to erect an unassailable garrison around the mind and life.   

If you work as an artist discipline is a trait the muses find appealing. If they see you showing up to do your work, and you finish your work, you, as a vessel, will be refilled.

Discipline was the keyword at the collective house where Sun Ra lived with his arkestra of musicians. What to some may sound like improvised chaos, is actually the work of painstaking precision. The hours and hours of daily practice spent making music, then talking music, thinking music, back to making music, brief pause to eat, sleep irrelevant (Ra was insomniac) back to the discipline. It come from the planet Saturn after all, this honing of the blade of life at the grindstone of work.
 
Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), self described as anarchist in their organization, also had a focus on discipline. This was necessary for their other purpose of inciting individuals to get a life, live out their true desires, the ones that came from deep inside, the ones that weren’t inserted by television, church or state. Discipline and will become a foundation for living on your own terms outside ov control. As Genesis Breyer P. Orridge noted, “Thee Temple strives to end personal laziness and engender discipline.”

The word discipline is also related to the word disciple. A disciple is a person who learns from another. The disciple of bohemianism isn’t out to coerce others into acting, following and believing everything they do and say, but is someone who can act as a model and inspiration. By becoming a peer leader, they show to other humans what can be done and accomplished, given time and discipline. Those thus inspired may carry on certain aspects of a teachers work, but in true Aquarian spirit, make use of it for their own personal goals and ends, all the while further developing and braiding the cord of initiation further into the future.

As it is written in Thee Psychick Bible, “We are not seeking followers, we are seeking collaborators.” I take that as meaning those who can share and exchange vision and relate to one another on the level of imagination. This is why the artists, punk rockers, decadents, writers, poets, painters and visionaries of the past have always been an inspiration. How did they achieve what they did? Even if they are dead we can still collaborate with them in terems of learning from the echoes of their minds they left in their finished works.

A SENSE OF DISCIPLINE

There is also the matter of the word discipline as a distinct area of study. In this case there are many Bohemian Disciplines. Three main aspects of bohemian life come to mind: the discipline of reading, the discipline of listening, and the discipline of seeing. First we can think of these in their relationship to literature, music and art, major areas of engagement for the bohemian. Then we can think of the use of our senses as disciplines. The same way a body craves exercise, so to do the use of our senses in less automatic ways.

During the process of deindustrialization unfolding around us, we as humans will also have to be less automatic, run less on autopilot, and bring more intentionality into our actions.
Disciplines around the five senses can also be explored within the sphere of universalist bohemianism by developing an appreciation for good food (while elegance and refinement are all well and good, one need not be a snob about it -all the finest cuisines developed out of peasant recipes, and todays foodies would do well to remember that).

Food always involves scent, but perfumes, cologne, aromatic soaps and incense are all ways to indulge the scent of smell. 

Touch may be indulged in with your loved ones from a simple caress, to massage and lovemaking.
The idea in all of these things is to approach them with more reflection and thought -an act that requires discipline.

Developing these senses is one way towards developing an artful life.

On another level we can think of writing, painting, drawing, and music making as disciplines that all add to the quality of life when creating beauty and wonder as gifts to share with others.

Secession is available in everyday life when we secede from every day thinking. But to stay the course requires work. Supreme aloofness to the viewpoints of everyone else cannot be achieved in a day. 

There is an aspect of bohemianism that has long taught of better living through chemistry. Rimbaud was just one in a long line who recommended the derangement of the senses as a path leading to the palace of wisdom.

It’s hard to maintain balance on the road of excess.

The Decadent Movement of the 1890s has a part to play in this matter. They saw correctly that the decline (décadence) of the Roman Empire came from the erosion of its culture, which came on the heels of the moral rot that had set in and taken hold. So it is now with the decline of western civilization which the Decadent Movement foresaw with the advent of industrial society. Charles Baudelaire adopted the term decadence in counterpoise to what he saw as the banality of progress, which he rejected.

Charles Baudelaire used the word proudly to represent a rejection of what they considered banal "progress."
Baudelaire’s work represented “a preference for what is beautiful and what is exotic, an ease with surrendering to fantasy, and a maturity of skill with manipulating language.” Yet Baudelaire also had a reputation for “dissoloute” habits, frequent visits to prostitutes and brothels, a taste for hashish, laudanum and drunkenness.

This aspect may be considered, from an astrological point of view, as one of the influences of Neptune and the way it promotes both drug culture and fantasy literature.

​Yet the Decadent movement, for all its excess, saw the shape of things to come. They were early trumpeters of what can now be seen as the perversity of Western society in a state that has moved from rigor mortis to terminal decay. Distancing oneself from the man in the crowd, creating an isolation around your mind, is necessary in order to not succumb to the various forces at work in the undertow and unweaving of culture.
Joséphin Péladan thought that art and living as an aesthetic ascetic was a suitable replacement for the pleasures of decadent society. Painting, music and literature all offered a way out from what we can now call the spectacle of mass entertainment. The movement from decadent decadence to aesthetic asceticism offers a mode of discipline for the aspiring bohemian monastic.

​The primary goal of the Universalist Bohemian life is to live life as a work of art. This brings the aesthetic vision to the fore in every aspect of what a person does. This vision was epitomized by the Decadent writer, artists, and mage Josephin Péladan.  He called it kaloprosopia. Everything about a person could be subject to kaloprosopia, and it could be worked on for the entirety of a persons life, so they consciously apply themselves to living up to their full potential. It was also a way of bringing the aesthetic out of just the studio, concert hall, gallery, reading room and salons and into the world. The person who practices kaloprosopia takes exquisite care over the refinement of their personality, over their choice of clothes -but not just as a dandy or person with a personal sense of fashion, but also their very presence as a person. Kaloprosopia can get down to the minutiae of an individuals  actions: the way they move their hands when conversing, certain types of gestures, the way they walk, word choice and way of speaking. All of it is an avenue for embodiment of a singular, individualist and individualized aesthetic vision.

“The law of kaloprosopia is to manifest the exteriorization of the character one claims for oneself.” Péladan wrote in the L’art idéaliste et mystique.

The notion of developing presence pertains to the inner esoteric arts though it is not limited to them. We have all known certain people who possess and transmit a certain and particular quality that seems to be effortless on their part -an aspect of their very nature. In my mind part of this comes from the way they may be connected to things outside and beyond them, to the inner planes and their openness to experience people, places and things.

Developing this presence is a goal of the Universalist Bohemian and was likewise an aim for Péladan. Another way to look at it is by using the term self-creation.

This idea may seem narcissistic. The idea of self-creation may conjure ideas of so-called influencers. It may all seem like mere ornamentation. However, for Péladan, who had seen his country transformed by industrialism, who had seen capitalism weaken the wills of his countrymen with an increasing commercialization of all aspects of life, it was a form of resistance to an externally imposed aesthetic viewpoint and allowed the true inner aesthetic of a person to emerge.

The word kaloprosopia itself is derived from the Greek καλός (beautiful) and πρόσωπον (person). As the digital age is in the process of disintegrating and passing us by, the chance to let go of collective identities and craft a personal one is as essential as ever. Doing so without the benefit of posting images and status updates to a corporate controlled social media company will give people the opportunity to start relishing our in-person interactions.

​For Péladan the object of life was “to remake the soul that God has given him: to sculpt it into work of art.” Another way to look at it is as self-reinvention. In times of change and crisis, whether personal, familial or on the broader scale of the collective, individuals can choose to pivot, change their tactics with tact, and instead of reacting to situations, pick a measured and proper response in line with a newer set of values, information, or just based on a hunch, rolling with intuition. 

For his predecessor Baudelaire there was a “burning need to create for oneself a personal originality, bounded only by the limits of the proprieties … a kind of cult of the self.”

In America the idea of creating a cult of self has found even more fertile soil than on the embattled fields of ailing Europe. Here, individuality is an ethos and a creed. It came out of the land and seeped into the minds of the people who wrote the Constitution, and Bill of Rights and continues in our long conversation about what those things mean today. Personal freedom and the rights of the individual have long been championed by Americans of a variety of political persuasions.

When McGovCorp gets too big for its britches and the rights of the individual get trampled upon, ferment and fire start burning beneath the brows of the American imagination.

At such a time the cultivation of a beautiful person, and being a beautiful person becomes all the more relevant for what it can offer the greater good.

The alternative of self-creation lends itself to a more ugly world. When we refuse to choose for ourselves how we ought to live and be, others can step in and choose for us. The choices they make, as can be seen throughout history, are not always in the best interest of the person or the greater society. Particularly in a time of social decay and disintegration the appeal of mass mindedness and letting others do your thinking for you is great, because then you can abrogate any sense of responsibility for what happens in your life and what is seen going on around you in the world.

The tact of deliberately cultivating your presence, your appearance, and living an artful life, will in turn open up even further choices for freedom and opportunities to follow the path of your destiny. Modern society would keep us crippled in the mind. Self-confidence ebbs, depression and anxiety rue the day. Schools and workplaces mete out derogatory training so that the lowest common denominator is upheld. Rather than giving them tools and practices to help lift themselves up, sleeping dogs are let to lie, the willing are whipped, and the ability to thrive and live an excellent life for all is diminished.

To build the discipline it is necessary to get to work. The late artist Monte Cazazza, who gave us the term “industrial music for industrial people” for his friends in Throbbing Gristle has some fine words on the work it takes make an alternative culture, knowing that our own inner resistance was a big part of what needs to be overcome. In the Re/Search Industrial Culture Handbook he tells us:

​“I think that psychology is half the battle. And probably anyone can do almost anything. It's just their lack ofself-confidence, and derogatory training, that stops them. And it's a really sad fact that makes the world a much less interesting place. It's humanity's loss that this is still continuing to happen. In some ways I've been lucky, just because of certain chances. But I also capitalized on those chances when they occurred, and tried to recognize them-but actually I've decided that I didn't capitalize on them enough! You should be doing work because you want to do it. You think it's valuable and worth doing. And maybe it's just part of your personality. That's a really involved and very complicated question, and I don't really think there is one total answer; there's all these different types of answers that enter into it. And as Mark Pauline would say, ‘All work is dirty.’ It's all dirty work no matter what it is, and that's the way it is. If people don't realize that, and they are going to get into these forms of activity, they should stay out of them if they don't expect that. And they should not interfere in our work-because it's hard enough to do already. No one is writing you big checks-all along, what you've done is because you wanted to do it.”

​That’s the kind of work that takes discipline.

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  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. 

☕️☕️☕️ 
​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

​Adapting like the ailanthus
                 into the bloom of societies crack;
seeds dandelioned like Leo dandies
       to bring down the sun into the sidewalk.
Child! Don’t break your mothers back.

Cut the Lazarus lizard some slack as it slips
into the porch wall behind the boxwood;
hush the mind as the locust leaves drop
(protruding thorns like the crown of Christ)
quiet, as the poison ivy makes its potent push

to new adopted homes,
        along the jacked asphalt surface pothole pools
summer rain gleaming with illuminated gasoline
              & ditchweeds growing despite the spills
projecting a liquid lightshow of spoiled chemicals
& now gathered with Gatorade yellow piss bottles
from truckers cross country toils.

Ass hurting to a fault from long hours in the drivers seat
chasing white crosses where steeplejacks climb up with Red Bull
to the evangelical resurgent flower powered churches
from the Jesus freak hippies whose minds were blown
                                on an acid casualty gospel preached
by a minister who lurches to cultivate his mustard seeds.   

Fleeing the wreckage of the big box stores
into a megachurch with MAGA merch ladies praying
spiritual warfare against goats straying to eat the weeds
left on the roadside as if the candy wrappers were a trail of clues.

Synchronicities to be deciphered all the way to the laundromat
where the unwashed masses tumble in a speed cycle
hoping Michael the archangel will intercede as a diplomat.


It is the psychology of the adept to embrace the obstacle
inside a chalk circle they dodge the bullet on the way to the lodge,
pasting life together into a collage, held together by Mod Podge.
Bricoleurs use whatever may be found on the ground
to heal the sick and find the universal panacea
going to the middens land of empty lots
where they gather the pharmacopeia. A cornucopia
amidst refuse where the milkweeds flourish
to feed the tussock moths as much as to nourish
the sublime monarch of transformation.

See the landscape change.

​See the dead fox rot and call it decomposition.

Under the freeway overpass life blooms inside its corpse
           birthing a hundred baby flies.

So we carry on, we carry on
as the vulture takes its feast
where the purslane pokes its succulence
up from the dry bones, a vacancy sign
retains its partial flicker-fucker
and the rusted out grocery cart laments its loneliness


Far away from the corral, but still OK.



​.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  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. 

☕️☕️☕️ 
​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​
​

Michael Azerrad’s 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991, is as much a how-to manual as it is a history of hardcore, punk, independent and alternative music in America over the course of a formative decade. How-to what? While it doesn’t get into the nitty gritty behind making a ‘zine, starting a record label, going on tour, networking with venues, radio stations, and people across the country to knit together local scenes, it does showcase the people and personalities who did these things, what their motivations were, and how they went about creating their own alternative system for promoting music and culture, outside the dominant corporate system. They showed it could be done, and left their tracks behind for others to follow. Our Band Could Be Your Life is then a kind of sampler of the DIY methods employed by thirteen different bands who worked with what they had to get their message out into the world and leave their mark.

            For those fortunate enough to have access to computers, digital technology and the internet, getting work made independently out to the public has never been easier. Yet new difficulties arise with the ability to communicate and share creations at unprecedented velocities. There are so many people putting out material, sharing what they make and create, the signal to noise ratio is vastly increased. The internet has also created, with its speed, an attention economy. Because new books, records, movies and material is being released at such a pace, there is a tendency for people to sit with it less. There is also the tendency to not dig as deeply for content because so much material is directed to people through social media and streaming services. 

               Yet how long will they exist? The energy cost to run server farms, let alone AI, is sky high, and even without the limits to growth imposed on the future of the internet, people are clamoring for things they can hold in their hands and do in real life. So many of us want to get back to analog. 

            The independent network created by the bands chronicled in Azerrad’s book do still exist, as do other related scenes and networks, but in many instances the growth of the internet has caused the local  scenes to atrophy. Local and regional scenes have always formed the nodes on the backbone of the national and international network. The internet has allowed people of like mind and shared interest to congregate digitally. Locally, their tends to be more friction between people. If you don’t like someone online you can just drop them or block them. But if you are part of a group who is doing something in a place, you don’t always get along. Such friction is of course endemic to the human condition, but it also gives rise to some of the great tensions between people that can result in great artwork and positive movements. It also helps foster the ability for people who don’t always agree on everything to still work together and get along to make something do agree on happen.

            Those kind of creative tensions between people are also chronicled in Azerrad’s book, which makes it especially useful for digital natives who would rather ghost someone they don’t get along with anymore, than try to work out or resolve something, or to work together despite differences and see where the clash of energies brings something useful to fruition. Perhaps in punk music, where there tends to be an excess of aggression and energy, that kind of clashing of energy is apparent across so many bands.

            For this piece, since I am making the claim that the book can be used as a DIY manual, I will be looking at each of the bands that Azerrad writes about and try to draw some lessons. There were of course, many great bands who embody the independent ethos who we can all learn from, but I am focusing on this book, because I do think of it as a manual, and want to celebrate it and bring it to people who perhaps haven’t read it before or aren’t familiar with these groups. One of the other things I like about his book is how it centers the story on the people who were in these bands, how they came together, their motivations and various aspects of their personal lives. I’ve noticed a tendency among some music writers and critics to be critical of the other music writers who take this personal approach. As an artist and writer myself, I have always been interested in reading about the lives of other artists in any kind of creative field: what their lives were like, how they got started, what they did to get their work out to the public, and see what I can learn from them and use in my own life, or just as importantly, what I can avoid doing and where I can save myself some trouble.  All that is to say I think the historical and biographical approach to music writing is just as valid as the approach that puts an artist’s background in the background to focus on the aesthetics of their creation.

​            So grab yourself a copy of Our Band Could Be Your Life and let’s get to learning some of the skills that can stand us in good stead in the analog revolution. His book covers 13 bands, so I will be breaking down this essay into three parts. 

​BEAT HAPPENING

In looking at this book again, I started at the end and read the chapter on Beat Happening first because I was on a Beat Happening kick last month. I won’t hesitate to say they are probably one of my favorite groups covered in his book, though there are several others I’ll call favorite depending on my mood, and they can all coexist happily together.

The big idea here, for those of us interested in degrowth and downshifting to less energy intensive lifestyles, is the focus on regionalism and the very independent identity that emerged out of Olympia. That very specific Pacific Northwest identity went on to play a large role in the national and international scene with the kind of shambling lo-fi and primitive jangly rock pop that said “anybody could be a musician” that started to flower with Beat Happening and around some other groups like the Young Marble Giants in England, and The Clean in New Zealand. The lo-fi aspects and the sincere slice-of-life lyrics are features not bugs with Beat Happening. Thinking on that way helps place this kind independent punk music into the category of folk music.

Beat Happening got their start in 1982, but before that band member Calvin Johnson was swimming in underground music through the influence of KAOS-FM and Op Magazine, self-published by KAOS DJ and volunteer John Foster in the late seventies. As Azerrad writes, “At the time, the main genre of independently released music was grass roots folk, which happened to dovetail with two of the key ideas of the American independent rock movement: regionalism, as in the idea that a localized sound would both serve the tastes and needs of its community and defy the homogenizing effects of mass media; and egalitarianism, in that music didn’t need to be made by professionals as the big time entertainment business would have the public believe.” These two ideas are well embedded in the Beat Happening ethos.

The idea of the non-professional ties directly back into folk. Who are all the people playing banjos, fiddles and mandolins on the front porch? Non-professionals, but many of them were seriously accomplished as the first waves of folk music recordings, as collected by the likes of Alan Lomax, and compiled by the likes of Harry Smith, have proved.

On the other hand, virtuosity wasn’t always the point. Entertaining yourself, your family, and your friends was often the point. That meant singing songs while hanging the laundry or picking beans or doing some other chore, or playing an instrument after the work was done. Transfer that to the realities of life in a capitalist industrial society, with angry kids who don’t fit in to the rest of the system, and you have the perfect breeding ground for a new kind of folk music, namely, punk.

Folk music has always been regional. So have the sounds of independent music with each scene tending to produce a kind of specific style, even as it stays within the genre.

Calvin Johnson, Heather Lewis and Bret Lunsford hardly exhibited the kind of brutal energy that had bubbled up in other local scenes, such as the hardcore emanating out of the forgotten neighborhoods of Washington D.C. They did partake of another punk tradition forged by groups like Crass who had both male and female singers, and whose voices alternated on and between songs. Such an approach became a staple of punk that isn’t quite as common in many other genre outside of occasional duets -and folk music. With Lewis up there playing in front of people despite her shyness, she influenced the wave of feminist rock music that later came out of Olympia and Washington state in full force via Riot Grrrl movement.  

​At the same time Johnson exhibited extreme individual vision in the way he lived. Like his friend Ian Mackaye who he had met when his family briefly moved to D.C., he was straight edge at a time when the punk thing to do was get wasted. He hosted quirky pie baking parties and pajama spend the nights in place of going out and getting trashed. Their ability to wear their emotions on their sleeves led to them becoming “a major force in widening the idea of a punk rocker from a mohawked guy in a motorcycle jacket to a nerdy girl in a cardigan.”
And like many other independent bands, Beat Happening started their own label with Johnson heading up K Records, that helped them and others to live on the cheap, so they could put their energies into a creative bohemian life, all while staying dedicated to the local life where they started.

​BLACK FLAG

​Shifting back to the beginning of the book, we encounter a very different beast of a band, Black Flag. They kind of represent so many things Beat Happening are not. But that’s the beauty of the underground and of freedom itself: if you don’t like something, go off  and do your own thing, your own way with whatever tools you have at hand.

            Black Flag just hid their nerdiness anyway underneath layers of violence, chaos and copious bong hits that did nothing to mellow them out. Greg Ginn had started SST not even as a record label, but as an outgrowth of his involvement in the ham radio hobby. Total geek territory there. I mean, who gets on ham radio or listens to shortwave except total nerds? SST stood for Solid State Transistors and was a mail order business for the amateur radio gear that he made and sold. Ginn played music too, and had gravitated towards hard rock and heavy metal before the first wave of punk blew his mind. He wanted to get in on the action and he wanted to speed things up.

            Ginn was a nerd in another way too. He had a degree in economics, and his business sense put him in good stead when he decided to transform SST into an independent record label, and did it all by scratch, looking up vinyl pressing plants in the phone book, and seeing how to get everything done as cheap as they could. To that end, the band lived communally and subsisted on whatever they could scrape together. As communal living punks, they were some of the original pioneers of the punk house, a place where people live together and share expenses. In these times of exorbitant rent, which inhibits living a creative lifestyle centered on art and music, I wonder why more young people don’t band together to live in communal houses together of whatever kind, or find places to squat. These practices were what made the products coming out of the punk movement affordable to produce and share.

            But they weren’t just lazing about in their punk house. They worked hard, brutally hard. They had as much discipline as Sun Ra, and Ginn made the band practice up to eight hours a day like it was regular job. Their work paid off, not necessarily in financials, but in the way they rocked and could bring down the house with their visceral energy.

​            Black Flag toured relentlessly and they were one of the first punk bands to tour so vigorously across America, playing wherever they could. It was these forays in their van out into the wilds of the USA that helped build the network that other punk bands would then follow. They made tracks in space, wore down the path so that others could see it and go their themselves. A lot of those bands were SST bands, but because Black Flag networked so heavily across the country, other groups would call them up or ask about where to play in what towns. These venues, places like the Jockey Club in Newport, Kentucky, just across the river from downtown Cincinnati, became regional hubs that glued local scenes into place. They gave local bands places to play regularly, and touring bands a place to stop. It all helped tie the regional scenes back in to the national and international punk movement. Without the strength of a local scene, the larger regional and national scenes can’t be as easily supported. The great is in the small.

There was another Black Flag was like Beat Happening, but different. They challenged punk. Any subculture or movement will become ossified and what started out as rebellion and revolution is quick to become dogma that must not be deviated from. So when short hair became the norm in hardcore fashion, Black Flag grew their hair long. They also pushed the style of music, incorporating elements of jazz and metal into their sound, making them hard to pin down. It also helped keep what they were playing interesting to their own ears and as adventurous musically as they were on the road.

​MINUTEMEN

The Minutemen took the idea of combining musical styles and influences much further than Black Flag, and they did it in an even more economical way. The band came up out of the working class. Mike Watt and D. Boon’s fathers had both been in the navy. Watt’s father worked as a machinist for the military, and after D. Boon’s dad was discharged, he made money by installing radios in people’s cars. The pair met when Watt’s father was sent to the base in San Pedro and the family moved. Watt was walking around one day by himself in the park when D. Boon jumped out of a tree to ambush him. Boon thought Watt was one of his friends they were playing army with, but it wasn’t who he thought. None-the-less, the two quickly became inseparable and it wasn’t long before they started a cover band to play the music of their heroes such as Creedence Clearwater Revival. Later they were joined by drummer George Gurley.

Many of the original punk groups had been inspired by the hippies and had been fans of hippie music. What the punks disliked about the hippies was the way they had sold out, not necessarily their music or what they had once stood for. Now we can see the effect of that sell out at the generational level as the boomers gave up on projects such as the hippie-allied appropriate technology movement that could have changed the course of history if it hadn’t been abandoned when so many of them just decided to go corporate and get on board with Reaganomics. All these years later these gerentocrats are still holding the reins of power and trying to keep it as long as they can before passing it on, one of the issues effecting the cost of housing at the time of this writing. Understandably, many of the Gen X kids who would form the core of the independent music scene were upset with the direction the previous generation had taken after espousing such high ideals.

Minutemen took their name from two different groups, the militia from New England who fought in the American revolution, and as a lambast against them, the neo-reactionary Minutemen of the 1960’s who were stockpiling weapons in anticipation of having to fight a commie takeover. In this time of contracting wealth from the working and middle class further into the hands of an aging wealthy elite, the Minutemen have their own key revolutionary principle that we all can be learned from, how to “Jam Econo”.

The word econo was San Pedro slang for doing anything on the cheap. As a band they practiced extreme economy and frugality. This was as true of their songs that were often under the two minute mark, as it was for the way they recorded, the way the toured, for the way they tried to eke as much out of every penny as they could and stretch it far.

Some other terms from their oeuvre are also useful in todays compromised political environment. They didn’t just have lyrics, they had spiels. The spiel was a politically motivated lyrics and rants that they boiled down into their provocative short songs.

One of the things they railed against was when somebody compromised their values, like the hippies had done, to make things mersh, or commercial. This was something they wanted to avoid and did avoid. When pressed by their label to make something more widely appealing, they made an album called the Mersh Project that itself lampooned the very idea of commercial music. All of this was part of their fight against the boozh, or bourgeois. This was the biggest no-no of all for the working class band.

D. Boon was an avid reader of history and the ideas he read about informed their music just as much as the jazz, funk, and classic rock that they subverted into their own personal style of hardcore. It was a lyric from the Minutemen song “History Lesson” that the name of Azerrad’s book was taken from, and shows just how much the philosophy and music of a group can have an impact on culture.

Mike Watt boils down their philosophy. “We weren’t a lot of hot air -we almost did everything we set out to do… and in some way’s its because we kept our sights small. We’re not going to be the biggest band – we’re going to put on little shows, put out a little magazine, have a little label. We made it small enough that we could do it. And we held down jobs, paid our rent, and made a living.

​“I just hope that maybe some people will read about us and see how we weren’t manufactured. … that we were just three dudes from Pedro and that maybe they could do the same thing themselves.”

I’ll return with more lessons learned from the bands in Our Band Could Be Your Life in a future episode of Down Home Punk, right here on Sothis Medias.

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  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. 

☕️☕️☕️ 
​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

A story half-forgotten I’ll tell you just now,
of the people who lived in the Oakley Hotel;
drunkards they were, drank out of sorrow & spite
spelunking in bottles to the depths of the night.
 
They had their own bar on the first floor of the place
where they drank like dry rivers until the floor was in face;
the flowing pace was set by well drinks ribald & cheap
upstairs on rusted beds, fucking, the springs loudly creak.
 
They drank until dawn while the piano was playing
until their livers were chewed by vultures buffeting.
Some called it a flophouse, rent was paid by the day
I called it a funhouse, where I learned how to pray.
 
Some weeks we were flush with lines of cocaine
other weeks, just lushes huffing paper bags of butane.
Insane as it was, our brains never cracked on the crack
except over horse money lost to horses down at the track.
 
When money was tight you could always find sterno
or if your looks were just right film amateur porno.
No shortage of drama, melt downs like 1986 Chernobyl
when thrown into jail over that brunette named Sibyl.
 
I’m not here to quibble, I can barely recollect
but one time I got so plastered I thought to genuflect
and recount all my sins in the safety of confessional.
Until the bottle called back, & I worked it professional.
 
There were times when the cops to our humble home called
to break up the brawls and stomps that had neighbors appalled,
and another fine fellow would be hauled to the slammer
just for flying off the handle at Old Ray’s stuttered speech stammer.
 
Behind us in the factory the welders and machinists did work
three shifts of hard labor at A&R Industries with hardly a perk;
we’d just sit there and drink, when they went home or went in
it didn’t matter what: beer, wine, bourbon, whiskey or whiskey and gin.
 
Sometimes there was nothing, we’d go find Robitussin
the walls would start breathing, and I’d start a cussin'
and my liver would hurt from where that old vulture had chewed
and eventually I’d sleep after my vomit was spewed.
 
There was the time we lit fireworks on the Fourth of July,
and that crack flash whizz bang spun into my old ladies eye.
Then the ambulance came down to check out her cornea,
but it didn’t stop the cruel laughter that gave her son hernia.
 
One night came the fire from a cigarette smolder
nobody would admit who had lit the tobacco briquette
no one had heard the siren sound, over the agro punk cassette
to my friends who choked on the smoke, I call it regret
and file it away, deep in my brain, in a do-not-touch-folder.
 
AA came for some when bottoms were hit
and some said AA was a bucket of shit.
Eminent domain put an end to us at the hotel in Oakley,
wrecked down by the ball of the law, not quite baroquely.
​
In the place it once stood now suburbanites go shopping
gone is that old sawdust smell, in its place fresh blacktopping. 

--
REFLECTION:

I am attempting to do my part to make poetry gutter punk again. This one in the Underdog Anthems series is about a real place in Cincinnati that my dad used to tell me stories about, a flophouse called the Oakley hotel, it was right behind where he worked as a welder and there was always lots of drama. Later, during my first stint in AA as a teenager, my sponsor, an older punker, had lived in the Oakley Hotel. He took me and some of his other sponsees around to Oakley Hotel one time and we were talking to a lady there. I accidentally knocked down her bottle of cheap whiskey and broke it or spilled it. (Memory is fuzzy.) He then drove us to the liquor store where we got a bottle to replace what she had lost. Years later my sponsor fell off the wagon and we’d get hammered together at punk shows… We've since lost track of eachother and I haven't seen him around in a long time.

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.   I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

​

It can be a funny old life, the things that happen to you, the people that you meet. My wife Audrey and I experienced a chance encounter when we took a brief pause in the routine to visit the great city of Cleveland a few weeks ago this past June. We wanted to spend some time slowing down, walking along Lake Erie, hiking in the metroparks, and doing some urban psychogeography in their wonderful downtown, where we stayed. It was a great visit.

After a first day of visiting the lake, eating at the excellent Cleveland Vegan, and exploring the old Arcade downtown, looking at the architecture, and finding a late night pho shop, the next day was spent once again hitting the streets. There were two places on my list I really wanted to go, though Audrey would tell you there are way more and that there are always way more. She wouldn’t be wrong, and it can be hard to put up with, that drive to go see or do one more thing, after which there is always one more thing. She puts up with a lot.

​The first stop after dipping our toes back into the lake at Edgewater Park was Zubal’s Books. Harvey Pekar had been on my mind since we were in Cleveland, as it rightly should be. I knew about Zubal’s from an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, where they visited the great store, that is housed in part, in an old Twinkie factory. We made some great scores there, a great book haul. I wouldn’t have known about that store if I hadn’t seen the clip. I’m really glad we went, and made it in time for the two hour window they are open to the public. Most of their business is mail order.

One of the titles I found was by Paul Feyeraband called Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, which proposes that it is counterproductive to have a single methodology with regards to scientific practices.  It's closer to the top of my list now because it seems to me, we are witnessing the endgame of the one true science. I also found a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald called Blue Flower about Novalis, which I knew nothing about before.  It seems to me the Romantic expressions of science via Goethe and Novalis are worth investigating as another thread or way science that could have been followed. These readings ought to go well alongside Henri Bortoft’s The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way Toward A Science of Conscious Participation in Nature.

After visiting Eclectic Eccentric and the neighboring Loganberry Books, where I also nabbed some more titles, we ate Michael’s Diner right on the Rapid Transit tracks in Shaker Heights. I should have gone for the Polish Fish Boy. Then we went to the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes and walked around the protected wetland as the rain drizzled. Finally we wound up at our last stop for the day, Lake View Cemetery. This place was designed by landscape architect Adolph Strauch who designed Spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati, just a few blocks from where we live. Strauch had been inspired by the book Kosmos by Germany polymath Alexander von Humboldt who had written in it about Chinese garden cemeteries.  Kosmos can be considered part of the German Romanticist tradition in the science vein. Something was in the air.
 
After stopping at President Garfield's memorial, there was just one more thing I wanted to see in the cemetery, the Haserot Angel.

We drove up to it and after I got out of the car, a guy noticed my plates were from Hamilton County and he struck up a conversation saying he'd gone to the University of Cincinnati. He was very friendly and we had a nice conversation. He mentioned that he'd been the partner of Harvey Pekar's widow, comic writer Joyce Brabner, for fourteen years before she had died last August. He told me his name and the like, and that he'd just been visiting their gravesite (Brabner is buried next to Pekar but doesn't have a headstone yet).  His name was Lee Batdorf and he was a journalist at times. In meeting him it felt like we'd gotten a handshake from the city. If the timing of our day had been just a little off, and if I hadn't gone to that one last spot, I might not have met him. Meeting Lee Batdorf and having this encounter really charged me up and I'm very grateful for his friendliness.

When we got back home, and I got back to work at the library the next day, I put the graphic novel history "Harvey Pekar's Cleveland" on hold. When it came in, like some many other people in Harvey Pekar’s life, Lee was a character in this final work.  Zubal's books was also featured in the book. I hadn't read this one before, even though I'd read some segments of Pekar’s long running American Splendor and other works.

That was some of our Cleveland adventure. I recommend the city for anyone looking for a modest Midwest getaway. When you go, make sure you take the time to go visit Pekar and pay your respects to him by leaving a pen or pencil at him and Brabner’s grave.