A fun evening in the WAIF studios with Chuck Byrd of Aurore Press, Brian “Thrifstore Leather” Riley, radio collaborator and partner in on air crimes, Douglas, and Uncle Dan. I also read my short short story “Jerry Rigged”.
This just in from Chuck:
Yer pals at Aurore Press are once again in the house!
The Comet, actually. In Northside. You know, the OFFICIAL AP venue (thanks, Dave!).
We’ll be coming to you Saturday, September 4 beginning at 9PM with the release of our *new* chapbook–featuring 26 works in all–about everything gloriously used called 1st Hand Stories from 2nd Hand Stores.
Aurore Press Book Release
Saturday, September 4, 2010 @ 9:00PM sharp | The Comet, Northside, 4579 Hamilton Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45223
PERFORMANCES:
>”Incredibly Strange Thriftstore Music” by “On the Way to the Peak of Normal” (WAIF 88.3 FM) hosts Justin Patrick Moore and Brian “Thriftstore Leather” Riley
> Spoken word by Shawn Abnoxious, Mark Messerly, Jughead, Mark Flanigan, Justin Patrick Moore, Carolyn M. Rutter, Aurore Press editors Chuck Byrd and Betsy Young and more
> Music by Messerly & Ewing, SS-20 and Los Amigos del Jimmy D.!
FREE MUSIC!
For the first 50 people who purchase 1st Hand Stories from 2nd Hand Stores, you will receive a FREE copy of “A Jockey Club Reunion Live at the Southgate House” CD AND a SS-20 ep featuring their new song written specifically for this project, “Thrift Store!”
Aurore Press on the Radio
Aurore Press will be spending the evening at 88.3’s WAIF on the “On the Way to the Peak of Normal” program on Thursday, September 2 @ 10:00PM spinning some incredibly strange thriftstore music and talking about the new book. You can stream it live here
I’ve been gazing through this book for weeks now. It is a beautiful treasure. Read my review of it here.
I was a teenage skateboarder… I skateboarded a lot for quite awhile, on into my early twenties. It got to be too hard on me knees when I tried to pick it back up again a few years ago, but I’ll still occassionally ride one, without doing a lot of the jumping tricks.
Often I have dreams where my mode of transportation is by skateboard. In these there is always a feeling of fun and excitement (perhaps because I feel comfortable on one).
A few of my own skater associations: it’s a renegade sport. While snowboarding has made it into the olympics, skateboarding has yet too. There is a certain anti-authoritarian streak in skateboarders because we often get kicked out of places where we like to skate. It is a Do-It-Yourself activity, and fiercely independent. The exhiliration of skateboarding comes from mastering the manuveurs yourself. While there may be competitiveness among skaters, to me it was always about the thrill of riding over pavement and concrete on a board, and being able to manipulate that board at high speeds to make it do what you want, popping ollies and grinding curbs, flipping the board while you float through the air and landing back on it to keep riding.
When I fall, I get up, shake myself off, and keep going. Most of the skaters I know have sustained massive injuries -broken legs & arms, painful bruises, gouges as gravel digs into the skin, and yet when they heal they get back out and do it again. I still think like a skater and dream like one too.
I am a textually promiscuous creature. I have strings of one night stands with books, read what I want from them, and quit. If I really like what I find I may hook back up with the book for a second helping. If it is really good, I may go on to have a passionate affair with the text. Whereas in marriage I am monogamous, my booklife has led me into an open and ongoing  polyamorous engagement with the written word. The pursuit of knowledge is enlivened by the thrill of the chase.
A few recent titles are helping me make heads and tails of my voluminous readings. The first is by James Marcus Bach, son of Richard Bach (who wrote the ever popular Jonathan Livingston Seagull). His son James is a high school drop out who none the less found his place in the world as an expert in the field of computer software testing. I can relate to James on many levels. It’s a wonder I made it through the tribulations of high school. I didn’t fare much better in college, which I did drop out of, even though I attended one of the most liberal and radical academies in the United States, Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I did do a lot of learning while at Antioch, but mostly outside of class: how to use and work at a library (a primary skill that has taken me very far, praise be Herochiel), pirate radio (I’m still on the airwaves to this day, though now on an FCC sanctioned frequency), and getting my feet wet in a more or less professional recording studio; musick has always been one of my passions.
It didn’t take much longer than a year at Antioch to realize that college wasn’t for me. I knew the fields I wanted to pursue: dreams, writing, radio and musick, among others. I knew that I may have to create my own fields. I also knew that I could do a lot of learning on my own. I tended to read the things I found at the library, things I was intensely interested in, made my own notes and wrote my own essays about. Since I wasn’t doing well in the school, and hated living in the dorms, I knew I should go back home, get a job, get my own place and start working towards my dreams. Secrets of A Buccaneer Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion CAn Lead to A Lifetime of Success is a gem of a book for all free spirits who feel restricted by the shackles universities tend to throw on the imagination. Granted, at Antioch I could have leveraged the available tools to my advantage if I’d been more mature. Even so I would have put myself in horrible debt. No one should be burdened with an education whose cost is the size of a princely mortgage. Knowledge and wisdom should not come with a caveat of indentured servitude.
Lifelong learners will enjoy this book for its useful tips on self-education. I especially liked his ideas on creating a personal syllabus. James Bach also gives tips on buccaneering at work, on how to hack your way into desired professional positions, even if credentials, like a college degree, or types of work experience are lacking. I hold it to be true. In life, if something is desired enough, with feeling backed by effort, those dreamed of heights can be reached.
Another excellent book I’ve been dipping into is DIY U: Edupunks, Edupeneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education by Anaya Kamenetz. The first sections tackles problems like the one I mentioned above: the increasing cost of a college education and the disastrous effects this is having on our society. It already seems evident to me, so I skimmed over this part to the next section where she elaborates on various innovations, solutions, and models that bypass the hallowed halls of higher learning all together. While many of these solutions are in their infancy stages, it is nice to have some alternatives proposed. DIY is the future and we are living in it.
The third book in this trilogy of educational transformation is a 2006 title from O’Reilly. Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain, by Ron Hale-Evans is bursting to the brim with seventy-five exercises to set your mind on fire, and give you a little boost on the path towards becoming a Mentat Jedi. Broken down into sections on memory, information processing, clarity, math, mental fitness, and others this is a trusty little guide to keep at hand, useful in those moments when you’re feeling intellectually sluggish. Some of my favorites are “keep a dream journal”, “play board games”, “learn an artificial language”, “consume your information in chunks”, “deck yourself out”, and “stash things in nooks and crannies.” Humans learn by playing games.
I’ll be keeping these around as I continue to develop my own curriculum vitae.
After the war
they came home bleeding
holes punched into the soul,
mysterious illnesses, government silence
they left home whole
went to distant shores
mosquito jungles, dust devil deserts
were told to hunker down in rat holes
opiates passed the time between card games
and cigarettes and letters from mom,
and the fifteen year old girl picked up from Ho Chi Minh
between carting off bodies, maimed, dead, on stretchers
darting enemy fire
poisoned by our own Orange Agent
radiated by slugs made from plutonium shells
not recognizing the home they returned to
transformed, not knowing
the ghosts they’d brought back
the hungry ghosts of distant lands
clinging to vacant eyes
tormented by visions of choppers in the sky
some took to Wild Irish Rose
while others kept pace with the needle
marking tracks of who they would have been
soul now stuck in some astral swamp
camping out on the margins,
over the guard rail on the highway behind the bushes
beneath the overpass
haunted by voices
and nightmare schisms
no recourse to the plastic virtues of suburbia
without aim, drifting from vacant motel
to vagrant parking lots
telling their stories to the few who will listen
shouting on the corners, gesticulating
trying to shake off the hungry ghost
flying a sign
nearly invisible off the turnpike
becoming ever more ghost like
dying without a name
until someone checks the dog tags
buried but not gone
these rusty shells, these earth bound spectres
burning with a prayer for dawn
waiting for the inmost light
hoping for a harp to sing them sweet home
watching for a guide
a gentle hand to lead them out of night
My most recent review for Brainwashed is a meditation on the psychic qualities of noise and its capacity to produce silence, viewed through the lens of a new EP from sonic surgeon Jeff Carey.
Jerry was rigged.
His archnemesis Bing the Bison had torn the flexors and extensors connecting the digits of his left hand, as well as his pronator quadratus after a skuzzy backstreet pinball match a few asteroids over. After that he couldn’t play pinball the way he used to, but scraped along coaching the up and coming elroys, the new wannabe players, for a few dimes between shifts bussing tables at Moldavite Diner. Living from game to game, on any money he was able to pull in from bets, challenges, or tournaments, he couldn’t afford a doctor. So the muscles in his hand healed, but incorrectly.
He skimmed some old scans of even older physical therapy books and tried to get his wrists, fingers, and forearm back into shape. It was a pain. It hurt a lot. The miners who slept in the lockers next to Jerry’s complained about the whimpering sounds he made at night as he put his hand through the exercises, but the locklord was an old pinball wiz himself and ignored their bitching.
Eventually he trained his left hand to do things it had never been able to do before. The muscles had grown back differently and it was like a mutation. He’d been saving spare quarters for the day he would pull back the plunger and start playing again and when he got his confidence up he started trolling the arcades. A few people remembered him, the real pinball geeks who memorized scores going all the way back to the moon. He’d had a good record and not been gone so long that they’d forgotten his face. They kept an eye on him, and started hedging bets on him when he proved his mettle once more. Money started coming his way. He moved into a bigger locker and started eating double portions of smeat and drinking craft-brewed malt liquor. He bought a blue jumpsuit and found a nifty antique Nydeko 3000 wrist computer that he wore on his left forearm.
Then he got sick, came down with a bad case of the Retched Hector. A lot of asteroid crawlers got it in those days. Really it was just a label slapped on a bunch of symptoms, a lifestyle and environment disease. Blood pressure got wacked out due to variable gravity and from eating too much of the preserved foods treated with chemical salts so as to withstand the rigors of space travel. The atmospheric conditions of the colonies were also horrendous, stale air clouding the engineered tubes and enclosed rooms beneath the asteroids surface tended to produce leaky guts and pale lungs. Even the UV enhanced lighting wasn’t enough to stop the Vitamin D deficiency so many suffered from. Most crawlers were dosed up on high-octane rounds of supplements and vitamins. Jerry wasn’t a young man anymore, and now that he could afford to, he followed suit, changing his diet in the process. He was now eating a lot of sprout salads with flax seed oil dressing. To help ease into his new habits he opted for some elective surgery and had a small tube inserted in his middle finger. The other end came out on the top of his wrist where it connected to his Nydeko 3000. One of the spiffy things about the gizmo was that it had a built in fluid chamber. He kept his own homemade salad dressing in it (flax seed oil, apple cider vinegar, dijon mustard) so if he went out to a restaurant he could just squirt it onto the hydroponic leaves without having to eat the fake blue-cheese and high fructose nastiness they passed off as food.
By all appearances it was just another evening of flickering LED’s inside the tunnels of Gopherville, the asteroid he called home. The cosmonaut terraformers were still hacking away at the atmosphere up top, tweaking the ozone, trying to grow more bacteria in the transported dirt, and eventually plant some catalpa trees. When Jerry took the elevator forty-six floors down to Mole’s Arcade he wasn’t expecting anything unusual. A few regulars were already scouting the crowd, looking for over exacerbated fans to scam. Cyber-genetically engineered monkeys were hawking frankenfurters, all gooey with enhanced neon catsup and grainy morsels of anchovie and sauerkraut remoulade. Jerry’s stomach gurgled but he reminded himself that he couldn’t eat that junk anymore.
Then his stomach lurched when he saw Bing Bison. He’d earned his name from the horn implants grafted to his head. Ever since their last encounter he’d dreaded the prospect of running into the bully again. Yet if he was going to keep playing in the pinball circuits he knew that inevitability would one day arrive, and it had.
The way they operated the competitions was like this: each contestant had a set limit of time and a set number of those cold, shiny, little spheres. The game ended when the player ran out of the allotted time or his balls ran out. Whoever racked up the most points was the winner.
Bison scored high, in the low three millions, but Jerry knew he could whoop him. But when he stepped up to the machine, a pinball table that had a bushido theme, its fine cherry wood lacquered with a painting of a samurai stabbing a cybernetic eight-headed dragon with a flashy kitana, he found that the button for the left flipper was all gummed up. This had the reek of Bing Bison all over it. It was no use telling the referees. They doubled as bookies and were in on the take. Low dirty tricks were the norm from players who didn’t follow the wizard code.
That’s what made the difference between a wizard and a mere pinball punk.
Jerry tapped a button on his Nydeko 3000 and squirted some flax seed oil salad dressing from the tube in his middle finger around the button, lubricating it, easing up whatever foul gunk Bison had put in there. He loaded a ball in the chamber, pulled back the plunger and shot the sucker into orbit. The fingers of his left hand moved deftly, like those of a sorcerer casting a spell. Jerry played like a mad man until his time was up. He didn’t even have to use his third ball.
His score wasn’t high enough for him to take home the big pot that night, it went with Eldrich the Squid, but he outranked Bison and he felt just swell.
Jerry was back in the game.
- Justin Moore
August 5th, 2010
Cincinnati, Ohio
Image: Susanoo Slaying the Yamata-no-Orochi, 1870’s, by Toyahara Chikanobu
This story is dedicated to my wife Audrey Lynn Cobb who gifted me with one of its seed ideas.
I’ve been a member of Neato Torpedo since around 2001 or 2002. We’re an improvisational electronic group mixing humor with surrealism. Come check out our musique concrete interpretations of Michael Jackson at a benefit for Art Damage.
The following transmission from local hero John Rich has the details:
Summer shows at the Art Damage Lodge are piling up! Here’s what’s going down this weekend and early next.
August 6th and 7th- ART DAMAGE LODGE BENEFIT! Two nights of damaged covers!,
August 10th- Electro-acoustic improv-noise duo BASSHATERS (members of Ettrick, Caroliner, ex-Flying Luttenbachers)
August 11th- Cello/voice and percussion improv duo KAMAMA (Audrey Chen+Luca Marini)
Got the ACs pumping, come hang and get weird!
Scroll down for much much more information!
Friday, August 6th and Saturday, August 7th
ART DAMAGE LODGE BENEFIT
Two nights of Damaged Covers!
We asked local experimental performers to pick a band and cover or reinterpret some of their songs resulting in…
FRIDAY, AUGUST 6th
NEATO TORPEDO as MICHAEL JACKSON
– electronics and Michael Jackson. can’t go wrong
1913 FLOOD COLLECTIVE as THROBBING GRISTLE
– Dayton supergroup take on legendary Industrial pioneers
IOVAE performing STEVE REICH’s “It’s Gonna Rain”
– IOVAE takes on one of Reich’s classic early compositions
WASTELAND JAZZ UNIT performing LES RALLIZES DENUDES- “Night of the Assassins”
– Jazz dudes take on Japanese psych legends
JUNK THOUGHT as RENALDO AND THE LOAF
– Stipe Light crew take on Ralph Records weirdos
SATURDAY, AUGUST 7th
UNCLE DAVE LEWIS as ARTIE MATTHEWS
– Cincinnati/Art Damage Legend takes on ragtime jazz Cincinnatian
REALICIDE as CRASS
– digital hardcore crew in an expanded lineup take on anarcho punk legends
GORDY HORN performing THROBBING GRISTLE’s “Discipline”
– jazz weirdos take on a TG hellstorm
HEARTS OF PALM w/ NEBULA GIRL & MARK MILANO as early THE RESIDENTS
– Cincinnati supergroup take on legendary surrealist weirdos
PETE FOSCO/CHRIS ADAMS as SPACEMEN 3 playing “Suicide”
– guitar duo takes on space rock legends’ spaced out tribute song
Each night-
doors- 9pm/show-9:30pm
all ages
$5
Also just a heads up, Nebula Girl has been nice enough to make Art Damage Lodge T-shirts and hoodies for us so bring some extra dough if you wanna pick one up from her.
Also, in case you haven’t heard the Lodge building has been sold to a new owner so we are getting booted in January which means we are in the process of finding and relocating to a new building so please come show your support and help us keep things alive.
Art Damage Lodge
4120 Hamilton Ave.
3rd floor
Cincinnati, OH
45223
————————————————————————–
TUESDAY, AUGUST 10th
BASSHATERS (from San Francisco)
http://www.myspace.com/basshaters
Tony Dryer (ex-Flying Luttenbachers, Caroliner)- double bass, electronics
http://www.myspace.com/tonydryerbass
Jacob Felix Heule (member of Ettrick, Caroliner)- drum set, electronics
http://www.myspace.com/jacobfelix
Basshaters is a duo using double bass, drum set, and electronics to integrate acoustic free improv and electronic noise. Striving to match the fluidity of their textural acoustic music, electronics expand the timbral and dynamic options to new extremes. The duo seeks directness and intensity in execution; subtleties emerge from the bold statement of simple ideas.
DEVELOPER (from Dayton)
one more tba
9pm / $5 / all ages
Art Damage Lodge
4120 Hamilton Ave.
3rd floor
Cincinnati, OH
45223
————————————————————————–
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 11th
KAMAMA
http://www.myspace.com/audreychen
AUDREY CHEN (Baltimore, MD) – cello, voice, electronics
LUCA MARINI (New York, NY) – drums, percussion
—————
KAMAMA in Cherokee means both elephant and butterfly. There is no overlap in meaning other than the supposed resemblance of the long trunk and flapping ears to the proboscis and wings of that insect. This duo loosely embodies elements of this kind of disparate pairing. Chen and Marini combine the raw energies resultant from and continuously growing out of their respective histories and experiences. Since their first encounter early this year in 2010, they have been forming a new language which steadily deepens, evolves, converges and exposes their inherent similarities and striking differences. It is ecstatic music; it is contrary music; and at times they depart completely from one another as two distinct creatures, but then are drawn back into the fold of an undeniable tenderness and comprehension.
—————
AUDREY CHEN is a Chinese-American musician who was born into a family of material scientists, doctors and engineers, outside of Chicago in 1976. Parting ways with the family convention, she turned to the cello at age 8 and voice at 11. After years of classical and conservatory training in both instruments, with a resulting specialization in early and new music, she parted ways again in 2003 to begin new negotiations with sound in order to discover a more individually honest aesthetic.
Now, using the cello, voice and analog electronics, Chen’s work delves deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. A large component of her music is improvised and her approach to this is extremely personal and visceral. Her playing explores the combination and layering of a homemade analog synthesizer, preparations and traditional and extended techniques in both the voice and cello. She works to join these elements into a singular ecstatic personal language.
—————
LUCA MARINI is a German/Italian drummer who mostly grew up in France and is now based in New York. After studying jazz and improvised music at various conservatories and music colleges in Europe and North America, he developed his own language and approach to percussion while living in Berlin.
FRACTAL FRACTAL
JON LORENZ
9pm / $5 / all ages
Art Damage Lodge
4120 Hamilton Ave.
3rd floor
Cincinnati, OH
45223
————————————————————————–
UPCOMING ART DAMAGE EVENTS-
August 18th- Noveller, unFact (David Wm Sims of Jesus Lizard/Scratch Acid), Mike Shiflet, Early Tunnels @ Art Damage Lodge
August 24th- Pedestrian Deposit @ Art Damage Lodge
September 5th- Spykes @ Art Damage Lodge
September 8th- Jon Mueller @ Art Damage Lodge
As always, much more stuff in the works!
The best part of the movie “Inception” was also the shortest. It was the scene when Ariadne, the architect, takes Dom Cobb through the city she has created, when she bends the streets so that the city folds in on itself. The concept of an archictect designing dream cities holds a lot of potential. Unfortunately the dream cities of “Inception” were far less mysterious, fantastical, and imaginative as those I travel in my own dreams, or in the fiction I read.
Charles de Lint is one of my favorite writers. Recently I’ve been delving into the short stories contained in his collection “Tapping the Dream Tree”. All of these take place in his fictional North American city of Newford. Although not specified, I always imagine it to be somewhere in the North West, in Canada. Newford is a great place to hang out. It is a city where you are liable to stumble across a voodon ritual, meet up with the Crow girls to help retrieve someones lost soul, sip a pint of ale in one of the many magical music venues, go to an opening where you might meet someone who has Fairie blood, and encounter Pixies who’ve slipped out from the computer screen at a bookstore.  The girl with Fairie blood is Sophie, one of the recurring characters who appears throughout de Lint’s Newford books. Every night when she goes to sleep she enters the dream city of Mabon. It is a city she dreamed up herself, and yet it has taken on a life of its own. She has a whole other life going on in her dream city. It’s even where her boyfriend lives. Here we have the fictional city of Newford, and within it a dream city of Mabon. Dreams within dreams, and cities within cities. I love it.
Another excellent book featuring imaginative dream cities is “Palimpsest” by Catherynne M. Valente. It is a story of a sexually transmitted city. The city is reached in dreams, but only after the characters have sex with someone who has been there before. Those who have been there are marked forever by a tattoo of the city. This is how the city is transmitted.Don’t forget “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino either, as if you could.
It’s time to start mapping our own  internal cities, and bringing the energy from them into waking life. The better cities we will build on earth all have their origin in the imagination. Grown from seeds, they can be woven into the fabric of reality.
Image is “Stun City” by polymath Science Fiction writer Rudy Rucker.
