A fantastic eve/night at the big E Art show in Dumbo! Many joys had, made, traded, basted on our new legs! Hooray!
5-28-2008
by: dom maltempi
Kam Kam Valet in Key Sweat
i ran
don't kiss me like that traitor!
i joke but i joke urgently
I'm jocular but I'm returned poorly accepted
not broken
but what else to break!
freedom treat double ugggh?
I traded birthmarks with you love
you pulped our lemon
the six year lemon
skins like roads impossible not to travel
break down on
meat of yellow final resting place
a purloined void in fiery punched face
thee experiment that would end the hour between 2 and 3 in some climes
how we planned for that elapse
but what gives then?
so squeezed a leg
a counterpoise to obviate a serried draft of bitty deaths
scouring renewals of shadow flesh
in late time squiggle zest
you zested our yoking
got i like you
we sallied towards a never-getaway where well armed stories crenellated the veins in your top-hat obituary
she wrote all those songs and just two gray hairs
then the implosion
a robot yawn
We skedaddle with aplomb
from the Indian doctors with enough intuition to restore a moribund nursery of never made-it galaxies
god's broken thumb
parking ticket hats doffed at the queen of intersection guts
so spilled, and so fine with that
holding a water logged emergency prayer hot under my bottom lip
stare at me now please!
like that.. now move a little to where you want me
why were you tapping so softly on the only door that was open?
I said come in
come see me move away
wherever you move
need you knots
need them too
that rebarb every stain of some facile hope?
lets sting each other till the doves stick to the cake glass
2. Howdy was panting
a $32 dollar doll with an elastic genealogy
static freckles boring into a Penelope Winter shined neck stiff but soft
I saw him at the throwaway kitchen when darkness made hailstorm pussies out of all of us
watch old 1000 crunch tuck crouch
with raised arm of defense whimpers
step it up toughie!
I placed him at the throwaway kitchen
Mr..Him or...
three chairs, one fairly ripped
Tuesday night in an eastern place
the take-out gypsies turning our beloveds into menus with things on it no one is allowed to order any time soon
empty palace pie
my Bob Dole Tattoo revolting from my back
cruel night in Kuala L that!
panicked my blackened pinkie nail's king
still pouring Tuesday night
heavy item drop off night
suit cases afraid of their wheels
No Quebec vacation smile would ululate a scaggy mood-mouth from Dourcream's face
with my camera capturing Mr.. Dourcream
one finger typing at some altered past located in a never used antiquated lap top
but what kind of a lap!
how heavy bullshit leaf-rain treats you as high class garbage littering a poor woman's stoop
how strangers cuddle with your kin
while you try to forget which door still opens too easily
a room you cannot run from even walk-run
Mike Bassett is here! He and his violinist El Davis (no relation) got in from the UK late last week. They flew straight to Baltimore, where I just happened to be recording with one Prescott Gaylord - we all drove back to New York City together last night.
It was great to hang with Prescott again. It had been way too long. Tracking vocals was a little eerie - hearing the harmonies of Prescott and Amy Willey for the first time since we were all bandmates in Structure, more than a dozen years ago. In between takes, we snuck out for some excellent crabcakes, good locally-roasted coffee, and the best home fries I've ever had (those were at Pete's Grill, with hotcakes and grits... wow).
Plus I finally got to meet Justin Lloyd! He drove up from Annapolis to sign and number 300 copies of Michael's new record. Justin has been my right-hand man in Eschatone design for three years now, but all that work was done correspondence-style. In the same room at last, we talked about CBGB and had some coffee & muffins.
This morning, Mike, El, LB and I made a game plan for the next couple weeks over breakfast. Later today Mike and El will go uptown and trade in my busted-up old keyboard amp for a newer, smaller model that will be easier to transport; every night this week (except Wednesday - but you already know we're playing at the Living Room that night, and you're going, right?) we'll be prepping artwork for Zakka. We figured out my rig situation for the UK shows as well - I'll bring my Korg M3 module and use it with an 88-key controller El has.
I like that we'll know people in every place we visit on this tour. After eight years of living in New York City, I hate tourists and I'm loath to be one in somebody else's town. New York residents can't win with tourists; on one hand, they think of us as audioanimatronic vacationbots, here to dispense directions and helpful information whenever they need it... on the other, if we don't respond with a warm smile (even though we get the same stupid questions several times a week, usually on our way to work, because we're not here on vacation), it's because we're those rude asshole New Yorkers they've heard so much about.
Hey, Griswald family - how about I come to your town, throw garbage on your streets and stop you on your way to work so I can ask you (for the fifth time this week) where the nearest fuckin Starbucks is, and let's see how friendly you are. I think that New Yorkers are actually much nicer and more helpful than tourists deserve... we may not like you (especially not after you complain that our city is filthy and then drop your sucked-out Italian Ice cup on the sidewalk), but we always tell you what you need to know.
When I go somewhere, I'd rather just hang with local friends and do whatever they do. New Yorkers don't visit the Empire State Building. We don't take boatrides to the Statue of Liberty, or fart around Times Square. Those craps are just diversions to keep tourists out of our way so we can go to the good places and be left alone. Over the next couple weeks, I'm looking forward to going to the good places in my friends' cities, provided they are kind enough to share them with me.
Very modest list of goals for the next two weeks in the Midwest, UK and Germany:
- Eat at Waffle House, IHOP and Denny's
- See an Indians home game
- Don't get towed from the Kinko's in Columbus
- Visit a chili parlor and have a coney
- Hang with Joshkook, Aaron, Erica America, Rootstown Vinnie, Ammora and Victoria
- Walk down streets that are older than any I've ever walked on
- Enter buildings that are older than any I've ever been in
- Sneak into a castle after dark
- See the look on LB's face when she tries marmite for the first time
- Rock at least one 600-year-old pub like it hasn't been rocked in 600 fuckin years.
It's important to understand that as part of the Eschatone Secret Force to combat ennui and complicated counter-sponge fetid three month death theory (as understood by only Swiss School of Social Researc,) I found it not necessary to mention anything here. Instead (and god knows I need real sleep, a little death each night, a true renewal,)....instead, I bring you friends a little closer to a magical place called Rubadubduh Land, a fictional place like most others to be sure. Ask me about my grandchildren? No, i'm not asking that. Hope to see many of you fine husbands and wives and daughters, and comptrollers of vice at teh Eschatone Art thing... I'm really excited to go.
Thanks,
Dom
ps: sorry for shitty spelling and stuff... It's been a long weekend. German Girls..you know? Me? You? Sleeve brutes! Not that!
o----as excerpted from future work: Tales of Rubadubduh Land....(special thanks to Southern Wind Women Publications for reprint permish...thanks you guys!...)
Keep the wish spigot wrenched-closed till at least 2011. Tommy ‘Midnight Dragon’ Lee is a genie of low status living in a malt liquor palace, kept silently secure in a crack of a very dark alley. The alley is Judge Hector the Bum’s Alley. The crack is covered every season by something else, sometimes leaves, sometimes snow, sometimes the nauseating rubber boots of a bum (former bailiff) named Hector Sedge Senior. No one dare remove those boots. They may be moved. Let them wander but not leave. All the town people are familiar with this saying patted coldly into their smiling mouths.
Tommy’s mother was stripped of her pension and after-after life benefits after being convicted of cheating her territories senior executive of bonus Magolag supplements owed to him from not one but two pervious life times! Of course, Tommy ‘Midnight Dragon’ Lee suffered from this punishment in more ways then the inferiority of his status as a genie or the smarting stigma of his mother being collared as a violator of genie law. Last anyone heard she was still awaiting permission to be emitted to Rubadubduh land. This poor woman may even be floating around the Six Puddles of Slickery that encircles this portion of genie after-after life.
Magolag is a sort of genie ambrosia. A spiritually nourishing type of naturally occurring (in genie-guts) but difficult to produce chemical that first reverses psychic illnesses that beleaguer genie-kind. These illnesses may arise from general association with various difficult experiences of wish granting or long periods of isolation or other stressful pressures. Magalog is unfortunately abused among all walks of genie life. Within the last 4,500 years it has been an indefatigable source of woe for many an ambitious member of various communities who have lost site of it’s created or ostensible purpose. This rarefied substance elevates a genie to the point where they may quit the old laboring life from whatever position they may have attained, and relocate to a prized after-after life retirement community until they are called again for only special purposes.
What kind of a palace falls foundation down into the pizzling little bullshit aperture of a malt liquor 40 ounce bottle? I’ll tell you. It’s the kind of palace built on the bruised ethereal concrete of a little known slice of after-after life, or a perpetual elsewhere too misfittish to be contiguous with the other perpetual elsewhere(s). You don’t have to believe it.
One such slice is called Rubadubduh land, and a bruised place it is for those genies unfortunate enough to end up there. Rubadubduh land is a perpetual elsewhere or after-after life neighborhood of a disreputable and gloomy timbre. It is overseen by the Hybrid-prophet who generally sits in his office with listless typists staring at a map depicting various neighborhoods of afterlife color-coded by ‘level of desirability.’
Out of all the after-after life neighborhoods for genies, it is Rubadubduh land that is not even represented or given a token vote in the fairly meaningless second tier council of the Unified Genie Togetherness Club called the ‘Very General Dissembly.’ For most genies that end up in this fairly stiffening slice are those that have been traumatized by being put in a position where they had to grant a wish or series of wishes that were overpoweringly inane upon utterance. A genie has been trained in embryo to know what constitutes such as wish, and cringes first as a young thing watching so many countless hours of film as a disciplinary form of education when they have breached a particularly cherished ruled. Often, the more magically exclusive the grouping no matter how idyllically simple the background story blurs the picture, the more severe the idea of punishment crossed with its highest tower of rewarding attainment.
No leap of faith is required to believe in Rubadubduh land. It is everywhere, but it is especially where it is. You may embrace this bit of irrational metaphysical fun with the buttons of you’re thumbs, or the inner horns of you’re gobbling lucubration(s.) The palace will be described, it’s sole inhabitants’ sobriety not in question. A genie may not always be alone. There are those who know of colonies of genies who have ended up in such cracked palaces together, by happenstance, or by designed punishment.
“Now that was a fundraiser not to be forgotten Dear Leek.”
“Where to now Dear-Dear Drain?”
“Anywhere but straight ahead please. I see that petulant lampshade O’Sharkulum grinding a mint and smoking two cigarettes in front of Henrys. I thought we agreed to end that Dear-Dear crap, especially in public?”
“This alley suitable for getaway gallivants?”
“I don’t trust it Leek, dark as any story with some foppish crumb smiling you off to sleep-peace. You know this place don’t you? Why play such a fool?
The two attorneys walked through a late day in Swayzee Village all supine edgy garrulity gliding into nearest alley to avoid mint grinder two smoke dawdling O’Sharkulum who worked for those Margollie Sisters, rival firm and haters of Leek Drain and Powell. They despised the top firm in Swayzee Village. Naturally! Naturally! Toads!
Here was an alley known as Judge Hector the Bum’s Alley. The smarter tourist kiosk knackers waved folded maps of the famous places of Swayzee Village and identified the legendary alley. Uncanny things would happen, the familiar defamilerized as one walked into its sequestered space of cool fanged alley-brio. The villagers knew of a wishing bottle once filled with an intoxicating concoction that might instantly kill you, and then hunt down certain members from three generations past of your family. Though many were skeptical or thought of this legend as no more than some metaphysical whip cream on the fossilized remains of a species no one bothered to name something forbiddingly phlegmish, there still remained a cautious…sort of irrational avoidance of this alley. The bottle, may the bottle remain hidden?
“He won’t see us here Drain.”
“If he does, he might leave us alone. Mind the boots”
“The crack. I haven’t looked since I was a boy. Always something different behind the crack... Used to make enough songs about it to never need to turn on the radio again. Had a pretend summer tour with my cousin Antonio while we both visited Greece as children. Not a song was unrelated to the crack. Antonio only knew of the thing from when he visited Swayzee village. Burr to a part of ones imagination, but what a stimulating source that crack was for creativity, or something like creativity. It’s something, don’t know what. New worlds to laud or bemoan with just a glimpse of what lays concealed for no good reason that any one knows of.”
“Move away!
There was Tommy’s home revealed, tightly capped impenetrable glass, bivouac of a genie stuck since the invention of salad tongs, but grown as flaccid in spirit as one detained since the birth of the Himalayas as we now see them.
“I’m opening the damn thing. I think I must. Some men like me upon entering the fabled mid-life will buy a curvy sports car or experiment with some fabled hooker with no body on an echoless mountain, perhaps subject themselves to the short term pleasures of some exotic narcotic the effects of which have only been documented by a withering rake of a lonely salesmen, but fuck that, I’m opening this bottle.”
It's Sunday night and I'm procrastinating... I don't want to go on the elliptical machine. I really don't like it. It's set up in front of the TV and stereo, but music and video don't help to pass the time; they are external distractions when most of the discomfort of using the machine happens, unignorably, inside - the tedious push and pull of aching muscles and the unpleasant mental bargaining ya gotta do to keep from checking the counters every five seconds.
The excitement is building for our trip to Europe, but before that there's so much shit to do. I have three magazines to design before I'm in the clear, and I'll need to get all my photo and illustration assignments in for July issues because I'm returning less than a week prior to that deadline.
There's also my visit to Prescott in Baltimore next weekend; besides bringing a makeshift studio to his house, I'll have five boxes of Michael Bassett soft verges LP jackets. Justin Lloyd is driving out to sign and number them all. It just so happens that Michael is flying in to Baltimore; I'll be heading back to NYC with Mike and his violinist El.
Once we're all back in the city, we've got to get the Zakka exhibition ready. It's going to be unbelievable - we'll be showing off some upcoming album art that is just incredible. Everything, including our CD covers, will be displayed at LP jacket size. It's gonna be arts n' crafts week, printing, cutting and mounting. (We get Wednesday night off for a gig at The Living Room.)
The morning after the art show, we leave for Ohio. Honestly, I couldn't care less about "touring" as a promotional concern - I see live gigs as an excuse for me to blow off steam, reacquaint myself with some of the resonant moments of my life I've preserved in song, and visit people I miss and places I've always wanted to see. In this case, I get to hang out with a bunch of cool folks from the Collider days, go to Gold Star Chili, and catch an Indians home game.
Wow, "Hot Blooded" by Foreigner just came on the stereo. I used to love this song when I was a little kid. I liked it so much, I decided it must have been recorded by my favorite band, Kiss. According to six-year-old Jed, "Hot Blooded", "My Sharona", "Le Freak" and "Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2" were all by Kiss. Okay, I'm going on the fucking elliptical now.
Again with the questions?! Yupp, helped the last time diciding against KISS.
This time I want to know whether I should go and see the Misfits franchise tomorrow? Since I don´t even know who is in the band at the moment and they are touring with the worst of the worst supports ever (I guess that´s what you are getting from a pay to play deal) I am tempted to let this one go.
On the other hand it is around the corner and they don´t play Hamburg that often.
thorsten
P.S.: Jed, there´s no Danny´s or IHOP in Germany, unfortunately there´s not even anything close to those places. Germans like their crappy coffee with Mettbroetchen - rolls with raw spiced hamburger meat and onios. How´s that for a breakfast!
1. The Soft Verges Tour Kicking off on May 21 at The Living Room: it's Michael Bassett and me rocking two weeks of acoustic dates in New York, Ohio, the UK and Germany. The itinerary is on my MySpace page and I expect to see each and every one of you, both at shows and also at our frequent Denny's and IHOP stops along the US route (I don't know what the British and German equivalents are, but bet your ass I'm gonna find out).
2. Plastic Circles and Cardboard Squares: The Art of Eschatone Records In our short existence as a label, we've tried to make our package design as exciting as our music. Now Zakka artspace in Brooklyn presents a show of our album art to coincide with Eschatone's switch to vinyl and the release of Michael Bassett's Soft Verges LP! Featuring pieces by Brian Dewan, Justin Lloyd, Mike Allred, Hatch Show Print and yours truly - including the unveiling of Eschatone's center label design by Michael Doret. The opening reception happens on Friday, May 23 at 7pm, with a live performance by Michael Bassett and free CDs and posters for all!
3. The Cutting-Room Floor Look for it on vinyl this summer with an incredible vibrating psychedelic cover by legendary Big Five poster artist Victor Moscoso. Mr. Moscoso's work has been inspiring me and informing my design sensibility since I was 13 years old, so this is an enormous thrill for me. A limited edition signed by both Mr. Moscoso and myself (because it's my music goddammit!) will be available.
4. Shoot The Piano Player In late July, I head for Chicago to record a brand-new version of Shoot The Piano Player. Joe Abba will join me on a few songs with drums and percussion, but for the most part it's piano and vocals, cut live all the way. Why Chicago? So I can track the album to tape with Steve Albini engineering. I am so psyched.
5. The Hanslick Rebellion This summer, I become an uncle twice as both Mike and Alex have kids. I don't know if they're ready, but I sure am! In addition to these human offspring, we are also looking to expand the Rebellion family by one triple-A-side single in the fall. It won't be on CD, or vinyl, and yet it won't only be digital - with designer Arturo Vega and filmmaker Curt Goodwin, we bring you... something. Stay tuned.
6. Failing Upwards The first four songs are just about ready. I placed rough cuts of the next two, "Do You Feel All Right?" and "She Loves You (NO NO NO)", in Anton Fig's care last week. And Tchad Blake's new mix of "The Bowery Electric" is imminent. My best guess is that we'll see FU next summer. Which is not to say I won't preview a track or two in this space sometime sooner than that.
7. Zetacarnosa The Skyscape reunion album is all set to go - mixed, mastered, and adorned in beautiful cover art by Madman's Mike Allred (which you can see at the Zakka art show in all its four-color glory). It features performances and cameos by every major Skyscape player from our semi-illustrious history. It's on the Eschatone schedule for late fall.
8. The Amy Willey recordings This stuff sounds awesome. I'm off to Baltimore the weekend of May 17-18 to record the last few elements with Prescott Gaylord, who used to play guitar in Structure with AW and me.
9. More from Eschatone Look for Brian Dewan's second Humanitarium installment in early 2009. Eschatone will also be releasing Words Of Wisdom on vinyl next year, with the first-ever vinyl pressings of Brian's legendary '90s albums Brian Dewan Tells The Story and The Operating Theatre, and the material Brian originally released through They Might Be Giants' Hello Recording Club coming the following year.
10. Uh C'mon, 9 reasons to be happy is, frankly, eight more than anybody needs at one time. How about we each add our own 10th? Here's mine: I just bought an elliptical machine for the apartment.
CART
