Ghosts in my House.

Sometimes I might say to Dallas, let's invent a fake author, and say that he's a legendary ancient historical figure, and then say we found all of these writings (that we really wrote ourselves) and then people'll be like dude, that's fucked up, where'd you get this stuff?

And then I remember Ossian.

(jellz)

For the Boys

Everyone in Winston has a nickname except me.

One Version

The morning starts, always and forever, like this: Rising from a sheetless bed, covered in bunches of shirts and socks, stepping over strewn unconscious bodies and through a steamy, human smell. No one who lives here really lives here. The kitchen scum is eating every inch of counter surface, and the fruit flies thrive enough to have a burgeoning middle class. Towers of wine and whiskey bottles line the counter walls, crumbs belched from the toaster are grit between my toes. My one respite, a stainless steel holy grail--metaphorical, very physical--a screw-together stovetop espresso machine is hidden in a cupboard meant for stencils, rope and extension cord. It is the only article in the house that is both cleaned and polished regularly. I step up on my toes, I reach, I grab it. From another drawer containing a forgotten mini-cassette answering machine I produce a pound of coffee and a grinder. The beans are sent, whirring around with the edges of the turbine, chewed to pieces as they spin. The first metallic, drilling sounds of the morning reach the--now groaning--living dead, scattered over couches and sleeping bags throughout the house's first floor. Bodies shift and shiver, pillows are clung to in defense, the lolling, muggy quiet begins again as my mechanical work is finished. The finely ground substance is funneled into the small chamber, the end of a bottle of water dribbles into the bottom of the pot, just enough. I can see my reflection; baloonish, bent, on the shiny round surface of the chalice as I screw together its pieces until they click. I place it neatly on the stove, turn the gas to light, and nothing happens.


RJ's new book "Deathcamp" is out. The party at family was a blast. You should buy a copy now it's beautiful.

jams

So.

How much weight can you hold,

stomping through the bitter climes
of a barely known soul?

Sunday

RJ has a book opening at Family this sunday (aug 5). We (brother reade) and Mike Runion are playing. Why's everybody all on John Fante? Henry Miller's better on a bad day. (Quiet Nights in Clichy crushes Ask the Dust Easy.)


Shots fired.

yams

This summer

Daytime:

equal parts Yerba Mate, Fresh Squeezed Cali Oranges, Sparkling Water.


Nighttime:

Fresh Squeezed lemon juice, Very Berry, and 1 1/2 oz chilled vodka.


boom.


If you're around on sat, the barbecue in Silver lake should be fun.


james.

What you Tolkien 'bout, willis?

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had a literary group together, called "The Inklings". I'm going to re-instate it. Who wants to be down with "Tha Inklingz"?

Required summer reading for "Tha Inklingz":

The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro)
Mythologies (Barthes)
Dark is Rising (Susan Cooper)
Giovanni's Room (James Baldwin)
The White Album (Joan Didion)

and the "firestorm" of modern religious critiques, The Satanic Verses (Rushdie). Congrats to Sir Rushdie on his once-again Bachelorhood. In his honor we revisit this 600-page banger.

I been gone. I been chastized. Many things happened. I'm officially back from the dead. With a new album. PS, it's evolution summer. Mutate!

Jams F. Kennedey.

Once.

If large and open living rooms--where copious light intrudes thoughtful curtains--cry out with promises of things like "managable rent", "true love really lived", or "a simple and rewarding life"; then we hear them like sirens. How many times have we wept for these shoals? How many faces could have been ours, in a flash of excitement that stretched out into that fabled victory lap we'd imagined would be "the rest of our lives"? Who are these people who so freely feel the soil beneath their feet, or the crisp wind urging across their skin? A porch, a swing, and an hermetically sealed paradise, unshattered by everyday vulgarities.

Juicy

I don’t know what you thought about 2006. For me it was lucky. It was a year of excitement, anticipation, and getting free. I think most everyone I know has been working their ass off lately on their long-term goals, and towards the end of the year the mood was type restless and hungry for something more.

If you were there, you know what I’m talking about. If you weren’t I wish you were. The party was situated in downtown LA, in a warehouse that had been transformed into a private skate park (thanks and love to Steve Berra and Eric Koston for the spot). As people began to filter in through the small crack in the sliding steel door and crowd around the stage made of skate ramps and the tusk sound system, the tension in the room felt like gathering thunderheads. It’s difficult to explain. I normally try and remain immune from things like holiday introspection, but at eleven thirty it really felt like the future was laid out before us. When we (Brother Reade) took the stage there was already a critical mass at the jam, and people were still pushing into the space. We played a few new songs and things were really getting riled up, and at eleven fifty eight I could feel those clouds I was talking about earlier twitching in bothered anticipation. Desert Eagles was called to the stage to open a bottle of Dom P that Justin Hollar had given BR as a gift for the New Year. It was eleven fifty nine, and it was time to count.

As Desert Eagles peeled back the foil on the bottle, I thought about everything that had happened to me in the last year. Also, I thought about how I had never really imagined that things could be as good as they had gotten. I was with my closest friends and 1500 of their closest friends having what seems so far like the time of my life. We had a new lease on things, new horizons, and new ambitions to explore them. When the count began, I found myself washed of any specific expectations, but completely open and in awe of whatever might be to come. The closer we got to zero, the more the room urged for the future. The clouds trembled. Desert Eagles pushed his thumbs to the cork at the count of one, and then pushed the cork off the bottle. Then came the rain.

After that, things had proverbially popped off. Bobby and I powered through the rest of our set, then he and Desert Eagles killded it. Them Jeans? Killded it. DJ Franchise? Killded it. The night ended with tangled bodies kissing and touching, and a small handful of harmless melees. Some spectacles and some jackets were lost, and a girl cut her foot and sanitized it with champagne. Everyone got home safe. All in all, the jam was perfect, and complete. I hope your year is.

Yours,
Jamz (on behalf of Brother Reade).

Thanks to: Steve Berra, Eric Koston, Stacey, Rabbittusk, Obey/Giant, Studio no. 1, Day19, Eagles, Jeans, Franchise, Cobrasnake, and everyone who came out and crushed it.

Desert Eagles has spoken.

Devin says:

"you need to make sure there's a track on the record for each of the following scenarios:
1) girls doing their hair in the mirror before they go out
2) dude speeding on the freeway
3) college student studying
then, put some hits on, some deep stuff, and whatever else you want, maybe a super weird jam
and you've got a hit record!"



there you have it. My work is cut out for me...

till then,
yamz

The Quote Era Begins.

No hope gives me guts.

D. Boone.

Been long since Raffles

Bobby told me a story about fifteen pounds of white rice. Next time we might try lime juice for the rickets.

There was no money, just a bag of white rice, I remember that Chris came to visit and he had a powerbar, and I wanted it so badly. Then I made zines and had money. I sold a thousand everytime I got one pressed.

A powerbar? I can hardly imagine.

Mom says, 'to me, you are the moon.' But I know it's a line she stole from a pair of street hustlers in Hanoi. They were cute, so we hadn't minded being conned. In the end, we missed it when it was gone. I was thinking today, while clouds (of all things!) gathered above the mountains (i tend to make those out of hills) in Griffith Park, that there is always someone who is hungrier. I am sick, and I am tired. Of complaints, mostly.

Big Noise

First, two things:

One day i was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

Wm. Faulkner, spoken by Addie in 'As I Lay Dying'.


When the routine bites hard
And ambitions are low
And the resentment rides high
But emotions won't grow
And were changing our ways,
Taking different roads
Then love, love will tear us apart again

Ian Curtis in 'Love Will Tear us Apart'.


Honesty is a tired cliche. But I don't think that exempts any one of us from having to reckon with it. I am in Winston-Salem and most of the leaves have fallen. The roads are wet with rain, and until today there was nothing but grey in the sky. My brother and mother returned from New Orleans with cans of coffee spiced with chicory, and i'm drinking it minus the requesite hot milk. It's really not the end of the world.

I used to delight in the mundane. I thought that it was thrill enough to pluck something out of the everyday and elevate it to grace. Things being equal enough, all that should take is polish to shine. Now I don't know where I am, but have a much clearer idea of who.

My thoughts are cluttered like useless things, aimlessly arranged on a sitting room table with the appearance of chaos and mess. I utter from dead ideologies, reflecting assumptions that have fallen out of fashion and out of use. I have not won the race to the new, I am hobbled by my grip on an older order.

Style is a game that we are constantly playing with ourselves. We deafen the messages in our articulations in order to communicate as quietly as possible. In order to be receptive one must be up to the times. There is no room in this for beauty like there is no room for speech on the moon. We should take up slings against gentle suggestion, we should punish subtlety in ourselves. If we don't speak to other times, then we may not as well speak at all.

All words are fighting words. Time escapes like gas from a flask. Most of it has flown from us already.


Happy thanksgiving.

jamz.

Stray en Fuego

There is a new Pitbull record out now (I don't think it's been officially released but it's creeping around the internet), and he has put the nail in the coffin of my affinity for traditional rap. There's really nothing in it that I would ever think to do in a recording. He basically does for the party what Slayer did for hell. What else do you want me to say? Go cop El Mariel and call me in the morning (which has now been moved to 3pm).

jmz

Regarding A Different Class

I'm not saying there aren't boundaries... This is a little gratuitous, don't you think?

Briefly.

i'm eavesdropping on political coffeeshop conversation.
Dudes in prada sweaters yammering about Israel and the counter-culture.
I love LA

A Different Class

I'm struggling a bit trying to solidify some ideas in my head. Many of them involve plans and strategies I don't want to completely reveal just yet, but if you'll bear with me i feel like airing some of my internal convolutions.

I keep having imaginary conversations in my head with people that I haven't seen in a long time that I have more or less internalized as ethical and strategic mentors. Usually any new idea that I decide to execute goes through a pretty rigorous process of 'what would so-and-so think if I were explaining this to them one afternoon?'. I've come to a point in life and in what I'm doing that I have to evaluate the proper way to proceed. This conflict arises from the fact that there is something that I learned from punk that I don't deem necessary to ever discard or give up on. This is something elusive, and sometimes seems like a personal issue, other times an ethical imperative, or even an aesthetic standard. At present I wonder what my greensboro punk connects would think of 'limited colorways' or of the 'brand aspect' that, for my understanding, rap has entailed. If you've got time, i'd like to roughly sketch what underlies this problem in some suppositions (it's been a minute, things may get a bit clunky).

Rap music, by and large, is a form that is meant to be mis-understood by a large percentage of the people who come in contact with it to some degree. There are, within every kind of rap lyric, meanings which are meant to be latent until someone who possesses the right skill or information set to decode it comes along and listens. In this respect, rap music doesn't differ from any other discourse of art or design. Crypticism, subtlety and layering have always been a part of these kinds of human articulations, especially those rooted ultimately in subversion. So far, no problem right?

But rap music is special in two ways. The first is that it is the largest and most visible strain of writing/speech that holds an internal conversation: it’s the reigning meta-discourse (outside the fold of polite academic circle,s that is). It is also music that is rooted in subversion, but focuses not so much on critique as on strategies for the acquisition of wealth and status by those who do not have it (this isn’t to say that the ‘hustler’s utopia’ picture of reality that rap music paints isn’t often a pie-in-the-sky).

Consider it self-serving or naive if you wish, but I’d be willing to hazard that the rapper-as-entrepreneur does the cottage industry that punk offered in the 1970s and 1980s one better. Where (for lack of better vocabulary) the punk business leaders and their business models of these prior decades created very successful record companies, they also did many things to intentionally get between themselves and future expansion. You could say that the result of this is the phenomenon of major-label platinum artists (who are by all accounts other than image merely radio rock bands) headlining and thriving on an endorsement-dense Warped tour, year after year. After enough time, it appears that the ‘punk’ listeners will tolerate any amount of commercial saturation. Punk writ large has basically been invaded thoroughly by money.

Alright, so you’re probably thinkng, ‘what’s the big difference?’ What music if any, is more commercial than rap music? None, probably. So-called urban is one of the biggest and most lucrative markets there is. But there are different aspirations held by the artists, the fans, and the culture around the industry is very different. Rappers are trying to invade money, nevermind money indvading them. The crucial difference is encapsulated in a comparison of this point. If your culture has a built-in plan for artist driven enterpreneurship, you will be ready to cope with the money when It comes. If they are, then artists will remain in charge of the discourse (not to mention the market) for much longer and will make decisions based on this.

Now, back to where it all began. Rap music, the thriving meta-discourse and multi-million dollar industry that it is, is now a field that is ripe to create shifts in the landscape of the American media (and the world to a waning degree). This can be done if the ones arrogating themselves to positions of influence in this arena are aware of the ramifications. To quote a notable articulation of this: “If skills sold/ truth be told/ I’d probably be/ Lyrically Talib Kweli…We as rappers must decide what’s most important… I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them/ I got rich and gave back/ to me that’s the win win.” (Jay-Z, Moment of Clarity, from The Black Album).

Pair that with the injunction to ‘overcharge labels for what they did to the cold crush’ and this espousal of achievement on behalf of a greater good is a very powerful and motivating cultural technology. There are many examples of this strategy pervasive in Rap, and they all articulate something similar to the passages above. In short, rather than starting a punk label and winding up in a scenario where we are becoming successful despite ourselves, we are entreated to start a rap label and become successful in order to spite the established successful media engines. Need I spell out which strategy is more potentially successful? The former strikes me as about as futile as screaming at a wall, so that said… Let’s get it.

jamz

Married to the Game

Today it was cloudy and raining in Salt Lake City. Meghan and I enjoyed a partially diffused sunset over downtown. We ate tea with our soups and salads, and later there was sushi followed by fresh figs. We went shopping and I now own a shirt with (faux) french cuffs. We talked alot about important things like how bad the drivers are in Utah, and I was further introduced to the world of rock climbing. Later, we walked her dog in the cold air in jackets and shoes that were put on in a hurry without socks. She told me some of her more creative ideas to make money and they all sound plausible to me. Returning home, we wordlessly watched television, safe from the wind outside. I drank a glass of water and the dog sighed. Truth be told, I have spent the last few days walking in some pretty bourgeois shoes. It feels like playing a role, though It's one I could get accustomed to, It still feels way too far off to anticipate. It's really nice when things are quiet though.

Keep it Quotidian,

Jamz

makavellis on the maybach (kicks retro)

Last night. Fast Forward, No Age, and David Stone at the Smell. It was hot, packed, and you couldn't hear any of the vocals. It was living, breathing proof that music is and has never stopped moving ahead.

Walking down that alley is always a bit like crossing over into a sovereign zone. The corridor was peopled with unfamiliar young faces, with luminous new skin, and the kind of raw sensibilities that seem to predict (and create) danger. Entering I saw a few familiar faces (indexed here) that I can't ever really get enough of, and we all jammed into the front room of the club to watch David Stone's cacophonic arrangement of distorted drum machine loops and keys that were (to my surprise) well complimented by amplified and patched copper wires.

I hadn't seen No Age play yet, and I was made aware more than once that I was missing something that i'd regret not seeing soon. Brother Reade had done some shows with Wives a year or so back and I'd meant to stay up on what these guys were doing but it had somehow been escaping me. Tonight I was strapped in just beside their setup on the floor in front of the stage, directly flanking Randy's order of pedals and digital recorders. Their set commenced with blaring guitar and drums and words that were buried by the power of their instruments, but the sweat and veins in their faces communicated exactly just enough to garnish the compositions. I'm not positive, but I think that what these two are doing is quite necessary and maybe one of the best things you can see right now in LA. The energy of Wives (and punk writ large) is intact in No Age. The songwriting is developed and fermented, and the impurities of further living strengthen the message. The use of sequencers and playback is a total enhancement and never exceeds its purpose. I can only guess that a no age recording wouldn't disappoint. After the show, a large and majestic man named Bryan Ray bought me a bandana and Randy and I helped someone who'd drunk a bit too much find themselves a seat.

There is nothing I can say about fast forward that will make you understand what it means to see them. The audience was given red hoods with small eyeholes in them to wear. They were dressed in tall black pointed uniforms. They flooded the space with light. There were seven of them, one was screaming something he was reading from a sheet of paper. The others were waiting with arms folded, until he was done reading and then they all jumped off of the stage onto (not into) the crowd, and ran out the front door of the venue while the rest of us were left to listen to the end of their song, which was playing on a digital 8-track. The whole thing took four and a half minutes, and I couldn't tell you what they look or sound like. I imagine that teenage teardrops may provide photos in the next few days if you're at all curious. It was a serendipitous September 11th to say the least.

speed and volume

The circle won't be broken, by and by lord, by and by.


bobby e.

i miss home.

jamz.